Glenn answered, “She’s still at work.”
Ah, she must’ve been patrolling then. Not a big surprise with the deadline ending today.
Janna said loudly, “Hi, Mr. Mason.”
Glenn’s voice replied, “Hello, Janna. Dinner in fifteen.”
I nodded even if he couldn’t see me, and said, “Room.”
We both headed upstairs to my room and took a load off. I let out a deep breath, and I stared at the ceiling for a moment. Janna joined me, laying on her back a few feet away, both of us with our legs hanging off the side of the bed.
Janna asked, “Second thoughts?”
I shook my head, “Trying to relax, it was a lot today. You?”
We hadn’t really had the chance to talk about any of it, being busy with the class all day, and too many people around us we didn’t know during lunchtime.
Janna shook her head too, “It was a bit darker than I expected, but they were stressing worst case scenarios to chase people off. I bet the class will have a few empty seats tomorrow. Sure, the worst could happen, but I don’t expect it to. I’m very hard to hit, and you have those shields. Do you think we’ll get on the city super team?”
“No doubt about it,” I said confidently.
Janna frowned, “Maybe you, but all I have is my speed and toughness. There’ll be a lot of competition for slots, and they aren’t endless.”
I nodded, “We’ll just knock off the competition,” then broke down in giggles because I couldn’t keep a straight face.
Janna shook her head, “I’ve always wanted to protect people. There aren’t that many of us women that take that route.”
I nodded, like most dangerous jobs it was predominantly men that were willing to make the necessary sacrifices and take those risks, but that didn’t make the women who chose that path any less effective or dedicated. Superpowers evened that playing field in the case of superheroes, but it was still mostly men that volunteered, a little higher than three out of four. I couldn’t imagine doing anything differently though.
I also felt guilty, because I knew if the city took a pass on us then we had a fallback hero team to join, but I was determined that it not be necessary. Point being, Janna had no such fallback comfort, since I couldn’t tell her unless it became necessary.
I was also scared she’d be pissed if or when she found out. It wasn’t my secret to tell, not really, but would she see it that way?
“I imagine Stacey will get a slot too. Is it worth saving people if we have to work with her?”
Janna giggled, “That’s terrible.”
I grinned, “Little bit. But that’s just life, we won’t like everyone we work with. I also feel guilty just saying this, but it’s a brutal truth. There’ll be more open slots this year than usual, given three of the city’s superheroes just died, and like it or not more will die before that psychopath is put down. It feels selfish that benefits our ambitions to be superheroes, but it is what it is. It also puts the risk in perspective, but I don’t have any doubts. We’ll make a kick ass team, if they even let us be one.”
Janna tilted her head, then asked, “You don’t think they will?”
I shrugged, “They’ll probably team us up with someone that has more experience first, while we go through training to teach us how to team up with everyone on the roster, as well as larger groups. As for the psychopath, they’ll probably let us team up for that, since we know each other, already work well together, and won twice at the mall. I hope once we’re trained up that they’ll let us team up for patrols and such.”
Janna said, “You’d just slow me down, anyway.”
I smirked, “Patrols aren’t exactly as fast as we can go. You realize if we volunteer there’s a good chance we’ll have to take lives. They’ll be enemy combatants to our militia-ness.”
Janna snickered, “Militia-ness? I don’t think that’s a word.”
“It totally should be. I’ll call Oxford later.”
Janna sighed, obviously not all that thrilled with the idea either, “I know, but I can take them down pretty safely in a split second.”
“What if you knock them out, and they’re teleported out, only to be rearmed and sent elsewhere? If it’s a real battle, a war for our future, we might have to unless they surrender and disarm of course. I hope it’s not necessary, but it might be.”
It was disturbing. I was sort of used to the idea that the occasional psychopath supervillain would need to be taken down permanently to protect others. To save even one life would make it worth it. Even most of those I could take in because my power-set was a defender one and I’d be able to afford to take more risks that way than most, since I could protect innocents with my power. A luxury Death’s Mistress didn’t have. But in a war, as a militia of supers and not as superheroes at all, it’d be… different.
Janna sighed, “I’ll do what I have to, to protect you, me, and the city. Our families and our future. I won’t like it and it won’t be fun, but if it comes down to them or us, right and wrong, people die in war. Terrorists killing innocents to drive their agenda deserve what they get. Only if we have to.”
I couldn’t disagree, we’d do what we had to.
I echoed her sentiment, “Only if we have to.”
My mother had her trial by fire, and this one was mine. I couldn’t do it alone, no one could. Supers weren’t gods, but I believed I could make a big difference by stepping up. Especially with Janna fighting beside me. There was a part of me that was frustrated by it though. I’ll never understand the mindset of people willing to kill so many to satisfy their ambition.
Our conversation moved on at that point to less dire things.
Janna asked, “So, did you notice that Jake couldn’t keep his eyes off you all day?”
“The electricity super?” I asked innocently.
I had noticed, and Jake was hot, but I wasn’t going to admit it.
She snorted, “Yes, that one.”
I shrugged, “Nope.”
She giggled, “Liar, he’s hot.”
“Really, I hadn’t noticed. But I did notice Thad eyeing you more than once today.”
It wasn’t really lying, if she could see right through me.
We talked for a little while longer, about boys, clothes, and far more pleasant things than death and horror before heading down for dinner. It was important to keep perspective, protecting others was a calling, but we wanted to do that to make things safer and more secure, to live our lives. It was important to keep an eye on why we were doing it, what was worth fighting for, and living our normal lives.
It was midmorning the second day of classes when the enemy made their move. The first attack had merely been an expression of his resolve. That he was willing to go to any lengths to see his vision of homo-sapiens rising back to the top and regaining their future, over supers. It’d also been a threat, to show his follow up demands had teeth.
It’d also been monstrous.
I’d been expecting something like the mall, perhaps on a larger scale with a lot more teams of two killing indiscriminately. Perhaps with teleports to escape the supers closing in on them and then being redeployed.
All that happened that horrible day, and not just in Excelsior city, but in Washington DC and several other major cities. The psychopath had an army that numbered in the high hundreds, and he’d sent over a hundred people to eight different cities. That meant fifty teams of two, and there weren’t even close to fifty superheroes in the city, much less fifty teams of them.
What I hadn’t expected was the rest of it. But at the moment I knew none of that, and I’m getting ahead of the story again. Let me back up a bit.
We were in the middle of an exercise. It was me, Janna, Thad, and Stacey who was being if not nice, at least professional if in an arrogant way. Our tasks were to answer questions and play out scenarios, not just taking into account the rules of engagement, but also taking into account the four sets of powers we had as a team.
The instructor had brok
en us up into three teams of four, since on the second day four of the sixteen had decided not to come back.
Including the hot Jake to my disappointment, and I’d crossed him off my list so to speak. It wasn’t all that surprising, no one wanted to do the walk of cowardly shame out of the building yesterday when they learned the true stakes and were invited to leave. So they’d just finished out the day and never came back. Human nature and pride.
The air raid sirens went off, as well as everyone’s phone watch alerted. Phone watches were something most people had now, most of them with holographic projectors built in. The air raid sirens were to get people off the streets during an attack and into a shelter, where the expected enemy would have less convenient targets out on the street. Of course, the city was jampacked with traffic, and other things that made it impossible to fully desert the streets fast enough, but it helped. It also told us it was time to step up, for those supers that would take the risk and act as a militia.
Carmine instructed, “Those that are willing to volunteer can leave, those that don’t can stay if you want, but the class will be suspended during the fight. We will reschedule the day’s activities if the emergence lasts long enough to warrant it. You will be expected back in your seats when the crisis is passed, assuming it does so during the school’s hours.”
My heart started to race as we got up and filed out, while I contacted the city heroes’ A.I. with the number we’d been given. The city A.I.’s name was Harmony.
“This is Wynn Carlson, and my partner is Janna Eckles.”
Janna echoed me a moment later, as she connected as well.
Thad and Stacey were also teaming up, and we wished them luck. Stacey may have been an entitled and stuck-up bitch who liked to proverbially ground the competition under her bootheel, but in the end we were on the same side and she fought with the angels.
Thad was a cute guy, our age and about five foot eleven with a medium build. He had blond hair and brown eyes, with a baby face and a natural confidence that brought to mind trouble, and generous lips and big hands. He had flight, strength, and toughness. He also had accelerated healing that was impressive even for a super, so he’d recover from all but mortal wounds in a few moments instead minutes or hours.
Harmony was female like Prisma, but her voice was far more serious and professional than the quirky A.I. that watched over my mother and her team.
Harmony said, “Understood. I’m familiar with both your powers from the mall incident last week which makes this easier. Head toward downtown. I’m putting the destination on your map application. There are currently fifty-three threat pairs in the city.”
I looked up from my watch and took off into the sky, following Janna easily enough over such a long distance. I could reach Mach six after all, and she could only run just under the speed of sound. Of course, that made her much faster over the short haul, like within a city block, or especially when crossing a room.
Regardless, I almost stopped in shock at what happened next, and my heart stuttered in my chest as I flew toward the city and downtown.
A city that suddenly had three small mushroom clouds expanding over it. They didn’t just have guns this time, they’d brought bombs. The only good thing, if there could be a good thing, was that there was no deadly radiation at all in a dimensional energy bomb. Only those at ground zero, in the concussive heat blast area, and from falling debris would be killed. Three of them had been set off in the city.
“Where?” I choked out.
There was no answer, and to my shock when I looked down the watch was no longer active. Understanding struck a moment later, that insane bastard had just blown up superhero headquarters. He’d taken out not just not a bunch of off duty superheroes trying to relax before the attack started, but the superheroes’ A.I. too. Harmony was gone, or at the very least offline.
What the hell did we do now?
“Connect me with Janna and Prisma!” I ordered, as I hit the button on the watch.
I said, “Prisma, Janna’s on the line, Harmony has been taken out, or offline. Three locations have been bombed and wiped out by dimensional bombs.”
At least, that was the suspicion. They could’ve been small one kiloton nuclear mushroom clouds, and most of the city was the walking dead, but I kind of doubted it. The only ones that could live through that would be quickened supers, which were the people that psychotic asshole wanted to take down. It would also, ironically, cause a whole lot of supers in generation one to quicken. The ones that were caught outside the immediate death zone, and would slowly die from radiation poisoning.
That’s the reason I doubted it, because just the fact it wasn’t sane wouldn’t have stopped that psychopath from doing it. It was the making more supers part that would make him reject the plan.
Prisma said, “Confirmed, the same has happened in nine other cities. Superhero headquarters, the town hall where the mayors run the city from, except in D.C. where they destroyed the White House, and the congressional buildings. All cities hit were state capitals except of course, D.C. I suspect he means to force this through on fear alone. The president is unharmed, since he and his family were moved to the bunker this morning in anticipation of this attack.
“I’m routing you to the nearest attacking pair, as they’re scattered all around the city. As far as I can tell most of the city’s heroes except those already patrolling were killed on site. Perhaps fortunately, they were patrolling heavily today, and I’ve managed to contact the six remaining pairs that are still alive which is three times the amount of usual patrols. Hopefully, they’ll listen to me with Harmony offline. I’m also in contact with Death’s Mistress and the rest of her team.”
I held back a sigh of relief, that they weren’t killed in any of the explosions, and I so owed Prisma for thinking to mention it. It would make Janna wonder too much, if I’d croaked out the desperate question that’d been stuck in my throat. After all, why would I care so much about Death’s Mistress?
Secondly, I felt guilty for feeling that relief my mother was alive, because six remaining city hero teams meant the other eighteen had died, thirty-six superheroes dead in a split second as that bomb went off.
Only a crazy person would want the job. Or me, because clearly, I was sane.
I asked, “Can you re-route that number, so all the volunteer supers in the militia can help?”
She said, “Already done, as well as a hundred other details we don’t have time to discuss.”
Right, no time to chat. I just had to assume she knew what she was doing. A.I.s didn’t normally let things slip through the cracks, after all.
A new location came up on my watch, and also my contact’s HUD which was much more convenient and included a flight path to it on my HUD. I entered the city at Mach one, right behind Janna, and shielded her then, before we reached the trouble. My heart pounded in my chest, and I don’t think I ever felt so much anger before. I knew I’d never felt a desire to kill before, but I did then.
All of those bastards needed to die. They were all monsters, and they were both going to kill thousands indiscriminately as we’d suspected, but they’d also had specific and strategic targets.
This wasn’t like a war, this was a war, and those… really bad words, were going to die.
Janna hadn’t spoken at all but given the horror of what we just witnessed and heard, she proved her determination and thoughts on the matter in the next few seconds.
I flew around the corner, a split second behind her, to see her standing over two dead bodies with crushed and broken guns laying on the sidewalk next to them. No mercy, no chance, no hesitation in her stance. They were all mass murderers, and god only knew how many they’d already killed with those bombs alone. I had no doubt in that moment they deserved it.
Janna’s voice was so cold it snapped me out of my angry rage at what that monster and his people had done. The concern for my best friend’s mental state trumping it for the moment.
“Where
to now?”
There wasn’t anything I could do about Janna’s sudden cold and lethal vibe, since we didn’t exactly have time for a heart to heart. There were only six city superhero pairs, as well as three more for my mother’s team. Me and Janna, Thad and Stacey. That was only eleven pairs, so we needed to take out at least five teams each. Of course, I hoped there were a lot more pairs I didn’t know about. There were thousands of supers in the city, that may or may not step up and answer the militia call. Granted, probably only a few hundred that were powerful enough to assist.
Prisma said, “Thirty first and Main.”
“How many teams are there?” I asked as we rocketed in that direction, it was only a quarter mile away.
Prisma said, “Currently twenty-two, but few teams are as effective as yours. The groups are human normal, and very vulnerable to a speedster. Several of the enemy teams escaped the first sweep through teleportation because the team’s powers just aren’t fast enough to close.”
Or my mother, who they wouldn’t see coming before she took their lives. I pushed that out of my head as my throat closed up. She’d been a hero for a long time, and she knew what she was doing. It was just that she had zero defense against their weapons. Not a unique thing for her to overcome though, I reminded myself. Point being, I couldn’t let my worry for her mess with my own focus.
It was also enough groups to stop this mess if we all stopped two, some of us three, groups. But it didn’t sound like it was going to be that easy if they kept escaping and redeploying. I didn’t even want to think about the death toll, which had to be in the thousands by now.
Still, it was also depressing from a certain point of view. There should have been far more super groups than enemy teams, if everyone with offensive powers in the city had stepped up. I reminded myself not everyone felt the calling, nor could everyone fight through the fear that I felt in that moment. The fear that said I should go home and hide under my bed.
Fear was normal and sane, it was doing it anyway that was the hard part. It was doing it anyway with a clear mind that made someone a superhero.
Lady Aegis: Origins of Supers: Book Two Page 7