Action Figures - Issue One: Secret Origins

by Michael Bailey

  “Easy-peasy,” Nina says, and she proves it when a Thrasher comes within range and she pitches a plume of fire across the gap, igniting the suit all along its back.

  We girl-folk, we press into the hull to avoid getting barbecued by the miniature volcano erupting from the rear of the launcher. Wish Matt had warned us about that, but I’ll forgive him because the missile does its job perfectly: there’s a flash and a boom, and Nina hoots like she’d just won the Super Bowl singlehandedly.

  “What the hell was that?” Concorde says.

  “Air support to the rescue, baby!” Nina crows.

  “We lost one of the—no, two Thrashers,” Archimedes says. The Foreman is unmoved, his mask hiding any hint of concern. “Make that three.”

  “S-sir?” one of the techies says. “Sir?”

  “I will shoot you dead if you try to run,” the Foreman says. “No one leaves this facility until I give the order. We have too much invested in this place to abandon it. Archimedes, mobilize security, code red.”

  “That only puts a dozen or so men—”

  “I am aware of that,” the Foreman says, “and so help me, if anyone questions another order or talks back instead of doing their bloody job...”

  “Last Thrasher is down,” Archimedes says. “They’re coming.”

  “Here’s the plan, so listen up because I’m only saying this once,” Concorde says. “Mindforce, there’s an open bay door on the north face, that’s where the Thrashers came from. Set down there. You’re with me and Nina; we’re going to keep Manticore busy.”

  “What about the Squad?” Mindforce says.

  “...They’re going in. Carrie, Matt, there are spare com sets in the hold, in the black case near the starboard door, I want one on each of you at all times, you understand?” We find the earpieces and slip them on. “You five go in, find Carrie’s...whatever they are, and get out. No side-trips, no heroics, in and out and gone, you got it?”

  “Copy that,” Matt says.

  Concorde chuckles. “Listen to you.”

  Matt passes out our quote-unquote costumes as Mindforce swoops around for a landing. “I’m landing with the port side toward the building,” he says, his voice crystal-clear in my ear, as though he were standing next to me. “As soon as I touch down, go. You heard Concorde, stick to your objective.”

  “And if anything gets in your way,” Nina says, “don’t hold back, because they’re not going to.”

  I’d rather not think about that.

  Game face, Carrie. It’s, as they say, go time.

  The Pelican drops, and before the wheels touch the ground we’re out and racing across the Thrashers’ hangar and maintenance bay. Two men in orange coveralls cower against a wall as we pass and don’t lift a finger to stop us.

  “Hold up,” Matt says once we exit into a wide corridor. He looks at each of us in turn and says, “Superbeast, you’re on point. If anything gets in our way, move it. Psyche, stick with Lightstorm, you’re her shield. Lightstorm, you’re our compass, tell us where we need to go. Kunoichi, you and I are watching the rear. Sound good?”

  “Sounds good,” I say, slipping Matt a smile. He’s not such a bad leader.

  “Let’s go.”

  “The Hero Squad has entered the facility,” Archimedes says, “ground level, through the hangar, heading south. They must be here for the girl’s power source.”

  “Track them,” the Foreman says. “I want half the security force placed on level four and half on level three. Tell Dr. Cane he needs to pack our prize and prepare for immediate departure.”

  Archimedes dares to ask, “And the rest of us?”

  “Sorry, Archimedes, but you’re not that important anymore. Our employer has placed top priority on those stones, at the expense of all else.” His mask shifts in such a way as to suggest he’s smiling underneath. “Once Dr. Cane is clear we’ll worry about you, so I suggest you wish him good luck and God speed.”

  The calling, the impulse, whatever you want to call it, it’s pulling me deeper into the building, compelling me to go up. “Stairs. We need to find stairs.”

  We find them easily enough. There are cameras on every landing, watching us, following us as we pass. I think we’re all tempted to smash them, but that wouldn’t hide our movement. Instead, Matt flips the bird at one. Classy.

  Floor two. Three. Four. The stairs end.

  “Here,” I say.

  Stuart pushes the door open. The explosion fills the stairwell, echoing off the brickwork, stabbing our ears. Fire washes over Stuart, spills off onto the carpeted floor, setting it ablaze. The echo fades out and is replaced by the rattle of gunfire. Bullets ricochet off Stuart’s skin. A few bounce a second time off Sara’s shield.

  “What’s the call, coach?” Stuart says. He makes a gagging sound and spits out a bullet he caught, by dumb luck, in his mouth. “Yugh. Gross.”

  “Flatten ‘em!”

  Stuart, grinning, goes forth to flatten.

  “Matt! I mean—oh, I mean Matt!” Missy says. “Behind us!”

  Matt and Missy dive out of the way. A spray of gunfire chews up the wall where they’d been standing a moment before. A half-dozen men in black body armor advance on us from below, the two in front emptying their machine guns. Sara’s shield protects us, but we’re pinned—at least until Stuart clears the hall.

  Matt tells us to get ready. He pulls out from his coat a slender black canister. He pulls a wire pin free and chucks it over the shield. It falls into the center of the soldiers.

  “Down! Cover your ears!” Matt grabs Sara and pulls her to the floor. I follow his lead.

  A high-pitched bang contributes to our morning of hearing damage, but we get off light; the soldiers scream and moan and sway on their feet like people getting off the wildest ride at the carnival.

  Missy doesn’t wait for an order. She launches herself over the railing and tears into the soldiers like a buzzsaw, all fists and feet. At the top of their game they might be able to take her, but dazed and disoriented? No way. Six men down and hey, the hallway is quiet.

  Stuart leans into view. His clothes hang off him in tatters. “I miss anything?”

  “Nothing worth mentioning,” Matt says.

  “Dude, why are you yelling?”

  “Flash-bang grenade in close quarters. Not my best idea.”

  “It worked,” Sara says.

  “What’d you say?” Missy shouts.

  We step over the half-dozen forms scattered across the floor like downed tenpins and into some kind of lab-slash-medical bay. The feeling that drew me here, it’s gone.

  No, not gone; moved. It’s somewhere beneath my feet.

  “There,” I say, pointing at the floor. “Below us.”

  “What, it’s moving?” Matt says. “Superbeast. Shortcut, downstairs.”

  Stuart interprets shortcut as punch a big hole in the floor. He drops down into a main corridor, Missy right behind him. “I see him!”

  “Get him!”

  Him, whoever he is, is well and truly gotten by the time Matt, Sara, and I reach the third floor; Stuart has him pinned up against a panoramic plate glass window with one finger (show-off) but judging by the raw terror on the man’s face you’d think Stuart was about to make a gelding of him. I guess that depends on what happens next.

  “You have something that belongs to me,” I say. His eyes drop to the pocket of his lab coat. Matt removes a small rectangular case like you might keep your glasses in. Maybe it’s my imagination (or maybe the blood loss is finally catching up to me), but the case seems to be humming.

  I open it. Inside, nestled in a thick padded lining, are two stones a shade of swirling, scintillating yellow I’ve never seen before. My fingers don’t want to work but I make them. I lift the stones out and, through a supreme effort of will, close my fists around them.

  They vibrate in my hands, grow warm, then hot, impossibly hot, like miniature suns, their radiance spreading up my arms, consuming my body. My bandages fall awa
y as burning embers. Every inch of me sings. Every inch of me is on fire.

  I’ve been screaming the whole time.

  The world snaps back into focus.

  Carrie? Sara says.

  No.

  Lightstorm.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  “Lightstorm? Lightstorm? Come in! What’s happening, are you all right?”

  Concorde is frantic—understandable, I guess, what with all the agonized shrieking on my part. “I’m here. I’m okay. We’re coming out.”

  “Do it fast,” Concorde says.

  “Guys, clear out now,” Mindforce says. “Manticore is making a run for it and that’s never a good sign.”

  Oh hell no. There is no way, no way I’m letting that monster escape.

  “Go on. I’ll be back,” I say right before I blow out the window and leap out, thinking as I clear the frame Maybe I should have checked to make sure my powers are fully functional again.

  No worries: they are.

  Good. Because I owe Manticore some pain.

  “What do we do with this guy?” Stuart says.

  “Let me go, please,” Cane says. “I’m no one important. I run the sick bay is all—I give out aspirin and band-aids!”

  “And occasionally sneak crazy-powerful alien weaponry out of the building,” Matt points out.

  “I was only following orders.”

  “Seriously? You’re going with that?”

  “He’s upstairs,” Cane says. “The man who runs the facility, he’s upstairs, with Archimedes.”

  “Where is he?”

  “One floor up, look for a set of heavy double doors, they’re in there.”

  “We need to go,” Sara prods.

  “Change of plans.”

  “Dude, Concorde will crap a brick,” Stuart says.

  “Mindforce will crap a brick,” Sara says.

  “Do we really want to let Archimedes slip away again? I sure don’t, not if I want to ever get a good night’s sleep again.” Matt says.

  “Huh?”

  “Minotaur didn’t find us all on his own. You really think he just happened to run into us in the middle of the city?”

  “He’s right,” Cane says. “Archimedes, he tracked you. He can track you wherever you go.”

  “You shut up,” Stuart says, poking Cane in the belly hard enough to knock the breath out of him. “But he’s right. As long as Archie’s on the loose he can find us anywhere, yeah?”

  “I say we get him,” Missy says. “I know we’re disobeying orders but we had no idea Archimedes was here but now we know he is we can get him and send him back to Byrne because I don’t want to be scared anymore.”

  “What she said.”

  Matt looks to Sara. Hesitantly, she nods.

  “Run,” Matt tells Cane. “And if you’re smart, you’ll run right to the Protectorate.”

  “Why,” Cane wheezes, clutching his chest as though warding off a heart attack, “would I do that?”

  “Because you just ratted out your boss, and something tells me he’s not a forgiving kind of guy.”

  Cane’s sudden pallor stands as a silent confirmation of that hunch.

  Stuart leads the charge, plunging headlong through the sealed doors to Archimedes’ chamber. Six men and women leap from their chairs and cower behind their terminals, but not the man in black, who points a damning finger at the Squad. “MATTHEW STEIGER!”

  They freeze. Archimedes, his forehead shiny with flop-sweat, rolls out of his seat and takes his place behind the Foreman.

  “Sara Danvers. Melissa Hamill. Stuart Lumley.” As he says their name in turn, the wall of monitors conjures images of their student IDs, their Facebook pages, their parents’ drivers’ licenses. Tax records, mortgage documents, bank statements, phone bills, electric bills, gas bills, water bills—their entire lives and the lives of their families literally flash before their eyes.

  “We know everything about you,” the Foreman says, gesturing in presentation like a game show hostess showing off a grand prize sports car. “Here’s what’s going to happen, kids. You’re going to get out of our way and let us leave, or Archimedes will erase everything. Your lives, your parents’ lives, gone. In this day and age, that’s as good as a death sentence.”

  Matt swallows air; his mouth has gone desertdry. “No way.”

  “Don’t screw with us, Matt,” Archimedes taunts. “You make one wrong move and all that? I make it all go away before you can blink. You think you can move faster than the speed of thought?”

  Archimedes corkscrews through the air, his data cable ripping free of his interface crown and swinging back to slap the Foreman in the mask.

  “I can,” Sara says.

  “Hmph. Right. Contingency plan, then,” the unflappable Foreman says. He raises a hand, which cradles a small black box. “This is a dead man’s switch. If I release this switch, it instantly detonates the C-4 laced throughout this building’s infrastructure.”

  “Now we know you’re bluffing,” Matt says. “You blow the building, you’ll die too.”

  “I’m prepared to make that sacrifice,” the Foreman says. “Your friends in the Protectorate would no doubt find a lot of very interesting things here. I’m not about to let any of it fall into their hands—and a good captain always goes down with the ship.”

  “And you expect us to let you go?”

  “I do. And once I’m well clear I will detonate the C-4. That should take about ten minutes.”

  “How do we know you won’t set it off early?”

  The Foreman shrugs. “You don’t. But you don’t have much of a choice now, do you?”

  Sara, Matt says, is he for real?

  I can’t tell, Sara says. His mind’s shielded somehow; I can’t read him at all.

  The switch thing, can you, I don’t know, keep his hand closed?

  I don’t have that kind of control, Sara says, cursing herself. More likely I’d knock it out of his hand.

  Matt sidesteps away from the exit, cueing the others to do the same. The techs shove each other out of the way for the right to leave first.

  The Foreman, in a final show of his power, of his contempt, strolls out, waving goodbye with his free hand.

  “Enjoy the win while you can. As they say, this is only the battle,” he says. “We still have a whole war ahead of us.”

  As I climb I catch sight of two dots in the distance skirting the cloud cover. One of them hurls thunder, the other trails lightning in its wake. I close in. My hands itch. My head throbs. I’m pushing too hard too soon. I keep pushing.

  Concorde shoots me a look. I await his standard scornful greeting.

  “Help me take this bastard down,” he says.

  “Absolutely.”

  We split off, swoop around until we’re flanking Manticore and then let him have it, sound and fury from the left, light and rage from the right. We bank hard, trading positions, strafing Manticore as we pass. His wings fold back and he not so much dodges as plummets out of the way. Concorde and I swing around, shadowing him, trying to dismantle him in a lethal crossfire, but damn is he slick. We can’t touch him.

  Manticore soars low over the ocean, weaving and bobbing around our joint assault, then power-climbs. Concorde drops an F-bomb in my ear. “He’s heading toward the city!”

  “So? He can’t lose us in the—”

  “He’s not trying to lose us! We have to stop him, now!”

  Something bad’s happening. This isn’t a grudge match anymore. Concorde fires recklessly, desperately.

  Castle Island slides past us on our left as we hurtle down the throat of Boston Harbor. Manticore reaches the North End and stays low, skimming the rooftops to rob us of a clear shot. We pass South Station, North Station, the science museum. The skyscrapers fall behind us and we’re over, I don’t know, Cambridge, maybe? The buildings are all much shorter, more historical in appearance.

  Manticore dips over a public park, almost kissing the ground, and then rockets away. His tail d
etaches, pinwheeling through the air.

  “NO!”

  “Concorde?” Concorde lands, scoops up the tail, blasts off back toward the ocean. “What are you doing? Manticore’s escaping!”

  “Doesn’t matter! He’s set the nuclear microcell in his tail to overload!”

  “Overload? Like—”

  “Like in two minutes everything within a twomile radius gets vaporized!”

  Oh my God. “Can you get it out of the city before it blows?”

  “...I have to.”

  I don’t like that answer. “Will you be able to get clear?” This time there’s no answer. I like that even less.

  I can still catch Manticore. Catch him? Hell, without his main weapon he’s easy prey. I can take him down.

  Or...

  There’s no choice.

  I’m moving so fast Concorde is a speck in my proverbial rear-view mirror by the time he realizes I’ve snatched the tail away from him. He orders me to stop, let him take care of it.

  “I’m faster than you. I have a better chance of getting it far enough out to sea.” Not that I have unshakable confidence I can get out of the blast zone afterwards, but if either one of us has to make the sacrifice, better me than him.

  I’m not trying to be noble, it’s just a fact. Concorde is arrogant, abrasive, patronizing, stubborn, and one of the best super-heroes around. The world needs him a lot more than it needs me.

  For the record: this is not my teary farewell speech. I plan to live for a good long time.

  “Twenty seconds,” Concorde says. The transmission is weak, cracking with static. There’s nothing around but a churning floor of blue—as far as the eye can see, no hint of land.

  I apologize in advance to Greenpeace for what I am about to do.

  I let go and pause long enough to watch the tail tumble end over end and drop into the ocean with a faint splash.

  Zero to sonic boom in less time than it takes to blink.

  “Ten seconds.”

  The sky turns retina-scorching white for a heartbeat and, as quickly, fades to a warm gold. A wall of blistering hot air—the shockwave—hits a second later, followed by a high-pitched pop and a rumbling roar unlike anything I’ve ever heard in my life, like the largest thunderstorm in the history of the world is rising up from the darkest depths of Hell to slap me out of the sky.