by Zack Archer
The space was narrow, but exceedingly long. The far end of the room was filled with rows of what I thought were mannequins, stone tablets, and blocks of translucent gel. The portion closest to us contained an arsenal of weaponry hanging from hooks on the walls, everything from the mundane to the exotic. “We’ve been stockpiling goodies for several days,” Liberty said.
I strolled between the racks, admiring stuff I’d only seen in movies, and others I’d only witnessed online when I was involved in several MMORPG games. All of the weapons were uniquely styled and shaped, but I made out what appeared to be machine-pistols, assault shotguns, ammunition, grenades with glass cones, and a cylindrical mini-grenade launcher. I looked over at Kaptain Khaos who grabbed a grenade launcher and a bandolier of oversized shells with red tips. I pointed at the launcher. “And here I was thinking that given your feats you wouldn’t need weapons.”
Kaptain Khaos slid two of the shells into the launcher and grinned. “You’re right. Each of us has our unique abilities.” He set the launcher down and flicked his wrist, causing the room to shake gently. “For instance, I can cause small tremors.”
“I can do this,” Liberty said, pulling around her two swords.
“Holding up a sword is a feat?” I asked.
She smirked. “Is it when you can do this to it.”
The swords were whipped back and forth, glowing, humming like a struck guitar string and then the blades were smothered in a crackling white light.
Liberty spun and angled the swords, bringing them down in a slashing motion as—
WHOMP!
Bolts of white light flew from the tips of the blades, atomizing the mannequins at the back of the room.
Lyric blew smoke from the end of the blades and popped her puppets on top of them like sword-koozies. Then she turned and unleashed a sound from the darkest corners of her mouth that nearly shattered my eardrums, a sonic note that vaporized the translucent blocks of gel. “I can bring the noise when I want to,” she said. “Sonic bullets.”
Atlas removed the glove on his right hand to reveal that it was oversized and made of what looked like polished granite. There were strange symbols etched on the stone. Atlas threw a punch that caused his arm to stretch like friggin’ Plastic Man. I shit you not, the big man’s arm extended thirty feet, allowing him to smash all of the stone tablets at the back of the room to bits. I blinked, and his fist snapped back into place. “Talk to the hand,” Atlas said, slipping the glove back on.
And then there was one.
Splinter.
He was grinning like a fool. “All eyes on me, huh?” he said.
“What’s your feat?” I asked. “Sucking down carbon dioxide?”
Splinter snickered, then violently snapped his wrist as—
A flurry of four-inch splinters leaped from his hand, embedding themselves in the side wall. Then he withdrew another splinter from the tip of his right index finger and used it to carve a trench in the palm of his hand. A thick, syrupy substance welled up, and Splinter flung this against the splinters in the wall which began to melt.
“Weaponized sap,” Splinter said. “More corrosive than acid.”
I made a mental note. Don’t fuck with the Shadow Catchers. Ever.
Atlas gestured to the weapons on the walls. “What some of us have found is that while natural abilities are good, natural abilities plus weapons are… better.”
There was a burst of laughter as some of the Shadow Catchers began gathering up weapons. I saw Lyric grab two glass grenades filled with an amber liquid in a backpack.
“They’re called Chernips,” she said. “Filled with the tears of dead Archons. Guaranteed to incinerate any unlucky person or thing we come upon in the Empty Quarter.”
She snapped the grenades onto her skintight suit.
“How are you able to move in that thing?” I asked, pointing at her suit.
“Atlas says the shorter and tighter our outfits are, the better we fight,” she replied.
“You can’t argue with science,” Atlas said with a wink.
I swiveled to see Splinter, who by this time had donned a T-shirt that said “Got Wood?” hefting a cylindrical grenade launcher. “We call it the Pez Dispenser.”
Kaptain Khaos plucked up a tiny gun that looked barely larger than his hand. “That thing looks like a pea shooter,” I said.
The Kaptain pressed a button on the side of the gun which caused the barrel to biomechanically reconfigure until it was twelve inches long and twelve inches wide. “Never judge a book by its cover,” the Kaptain said, holding the gun up. “Meet the Hellmouth.”
“Cool gun.”
“Every soldier needs one.”
“Why do they call you ‘Kaptain’ by the way?”
Kaptain Khaos stashed the Hellmouth in a side holster attached to his singlet. “‘Cause ‘General Khaos’ just sounded a little over the top, you know what I’m saying?”
Aurora cast an eye in my direction. “You need a change of clothes, Quincy.”
This was true because, considering all that had happened, I was still wearing my Phythia uniform. She held up a silver singlet and a small black mask.
“What are those?” I asked.
“A nanosuit and mask infused with Akash. Nearly indestructible.”
“I’m not really a singlet and mask kinda guy.”
Aurora smirked. “You’ll learn that they’re your best friend. The only question is what size you are.”
Without warning, Lyric reached back and grabbed my dick. “He’s an extra-large,” she said with a snicker.
I blushed and swatted her hand away as Aurora tossed me the nanosuit and mask, along with a small rucksack which I used to secure the suit and mask.
“Okay, the easy part’s done, people,” Atlas said. “Now comes the hard stuff.” Atlas pointed at me. “It’s time for you to start training.”
14
Weapons stowed, I followed Atlas and the others through a side door in the armory and down a ramp that ended at a drop-off.
I moved up to the edge of the drop-off and peered down into what looked like a titanic metal cylinder that led to a bottomless pit.
Hands shoved me, and I pitched forward, screaming my head off—
Only to come to a stop.
I was in a weightless free-fall and yet I was shocked to find that I wasn’t falling to my death.
Instead, I was crouched in mid-air as if I was surfing, held aloft by a powerful updraft of air that cycloned vertically up from the bottom of the pit.
I was on one of the nearly invisible walkways that Aurora had mentioned before, part of the Black Chamber system, the ones formed from compressed air. Even though I was terrified to look down, I did, spotting enormous grates way down below through which the air flowed.
It felt for a moment like I was on one of those old bounce houses that you used to enjoy at carnivals when you were a kid. The sensation was the same, and it took me several seconds to get my bearings. I found that I could easily maintain my balance by lowering my arms and fanning my hands out.
Slowly I spun around to see the others pointing and smiling at me.
“Ever been on one of our walkways before, kid?” Splinter asked.
I shook my head.
“Then you just popped your cherry,” he continued. “Question is: did you crap your pants?”
He cackled as the others leaped onto the invisible pathway, everyone heading across the gap to another catwalk that was lit by neon lights.
As we moved, Splinter handed me several brown nutrient and protein-dense cubes, “Macro Cubes,” he called them, that he said were the primary source of food on the planet. Given everything that I’d been through, I was starving, so I popped the cubes in my mouth and nearly vomited. They tasted like wet sawdust.
“You’ll get used to them,” Splinter said. “Each cube contains a full spectrum of protein and other nutrients. Basically, the equivalent of a chicken dinner with vegetables from your world.”
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“How do you guys know so much about Earth?”
Splinter grinned. “Each one of us does a ‘mission’ to the planets that support mammalian organisms. The missions can last upwards of two, sometimes three months or more. We become familiar with your culture.”
“By doing what?”
“Observing for the most part.”
“Although some jackasses like Splinter have been known to get into trouble,” Liberty said, overhearing the conversation.
Splinter laughed and pointed at his New England Patriots hat. “I spent some time in Boston for my mission. Helluva city.”
I nodded, even though I’d only been there once. In the middle of the winter. And it sucked big time.
“Remember when the government shut football down?” he asked.
I did. Remembering the gut-wrenching time that the league was dismantled as a result of brain-trauma legislation and lawsuits. The owners had come up with what they thought was a nifty idea to replace players with robots, but that didn’t work. Turns out, people don’t want to see machines kicking the crap out of each other.
“I was one of the first ones to play with the Throwbacks,” Splinter said.
My eyes widened at the mention of the Throwbacks, a highly-illegal, underground football league that developed after the sport was banned. Teams were comprised of veteran players and walk-ons, and games were played at midnight in literally underground spaces, streamed online via the Darknet and whatnot. It only lasted three years before it was shut down, but it was full-contact, bust you in your snot-locker kinda ball. People, including me, loved it.
“No shit,” I replied. “You played for Boston?”
He nodded. “Balled my ass off with Tom Brady’s grandson. Played safety and a little DB.”
“That’s ‘cause they didn’t think you were white with that skin of yours,” Kaptain Khaos said with a smirk. The men exchanged a few mock punches.
“And then he mucked it all up by shooting a bunch of splinters at the ball when the other team was kicking a field goal,” Liberty added.
Splinter shrugged. “I only know how to play the game at one speed, baby. Full throttle.”
Lyric looked over. “So, the bottom line is, anytime you hear about weird things happening back on Earth, it’s a safe bet that one of our kind might’ve been involved.”
Atlas held up a hand to silence Lyric and swapped looks with me. “The only reason any of us make mistakes is a lack of focus. You’ll see the truth in that, Quincy, the more you train.”
“Train? I thought I already had these super unique powers,” I replied. “I thought I had my magnoreception feat or whatever it’s called.”
“You do have innate abilities. You’re like the edge of a knife, Quincy. But knives work best when they’re sharp.”
We walked, and Atlas explained how and why a certain level of training was necessary. Then he went into the history of the Shadow Catchers and how they had functioned as a kind of Secret Service detail for Greylock before his untimely demise.
Atlas said they’d been off duty when a fleet-footed Morningstar named the Speed Freak had helped detonate a blackout bomb that knocked out the power (and lights) in Fiasco Heights for sixteen minutes.
During those sixteen minutes, two things happened: Big Dread was busted out of a prison cell and two Morningstars, an invisible Phantasm and another villain named Threshold, who specialized in sucking the oxygen out of small spaces, crept into Greylock’s quarters and murdered him.
Greylock’s death had turned the city upside down, and it was only after capturing and interrogating a minor assassin nicknamed Fait Accompli two days earlier, that the Shadow Catchers had discovered that the villains planned to steal the Light Breaker. The scariest thing was that nobody seemed to know how long it would be until Big Dread and his posse came gunning for us.
We continued our tour of the underground world, passing what Atlas said were vast indoor aeroponic farms where plants and trees were grown without soil through constant aeration, their roots sprayed with a nutrient mist.
Striding past the farms, we strolled over a catwalk that provided a glimpse of a long, gloomy tunnel heavy with human-sized drones, including some that were operating inside exosuits enabling them to carry enormous objects. I’d seen similar bots used in factories back on Earth, the bastards that had taken away so many jobs, but these were larger and more sophisticated.
“Those are the Weaver,” Aurora said. “The machines built several generations ago by the Elementals to mine the Akash, the crust from neutron stars.”
“Our planet has been blessed with deposits scattered aboveground and beyond the outskirts of the Upperworld near the Tanglewood,” Atlas said. “The dead forest that rings the city, the place where much of the rebellion was waged.”
“How come you guys don’t do the work?”
“Only machines work,” Splinter said. “This is basically just a pleasure planet now.”
“Sounds a lot like home,” I remarked. “Almost everybody sits around on their ass collecting a check.”
“Getting soft,” Kaptain Khaos added.
Atlas nodded. “When everyone’s super, you tend to lose your edge, your motivation. Our fellow city-dwellers have gotten used to the good life, to the way things have always been. In a way, they’re like those farm creatures from your planet, Quincy.”
“Sheep,” I muttered, which brought a smile to Atlas’s lips.
“They have no idea what’s going to happen if the Morningstars acquire the Light Breaker,” Atlas said. “They don’t know how close they are to losing everything.”
Atlas bent and retrieved a piece of dark, heavy stone-like material that he lobbed to me. “That’s Akash by the way. The Weaver remove and refine it, and then our traders sell a version of it to other worlds. It’s similar to rare earth minerals on your planet like yttrium and europium in that there’s a limited amount and high demand. Other worlds use it in a variety of applications. It’s our only export, and it keeps the lights on and the sheep warm and happy.”
I dropped the Akash on the ground. “It’s in your nanosuits, right?”
Aurora nodded. “We’re not the only ones who have it, unfortunately.”
“The bad guys got their hands on some,” Lyric said.
Liberty scrunched her nose. “We’re basically all wearing the same bullet-proof vests.”
“Which is the reason Quincy needs to acquaint himself with our adversaries.”
“The entire lineup,” Splinter said.
Kaptain Khaos slapped his palms together with such force that he caused a small tremor. “All of them black-hat motherfuckers!”
My eyes found his. “How many are there?”
“More than enough,” he replied. “But there are gonna be significantly less of ‘em if they try to fuck with us.”
They soldiered down the catwalk, and I watched them go, wondering what in the holy hell I’d gotten myself involved in.
15
Some fifteen minutes later, we crept along several pathways and eventually entered a chamber carved into the bedrock that was protected by a thick, olive-colored door. There were stores of food inside, water, several beds, and small stacks of other items, including a cluster of sticks propped against one wall with thick, round pads attached to the ends.
Aurora withdrew her metascreen and tossed it against one wall where it attached itself, and then unfolded several times until it had formed a kind of flatscreen that was six feet long by six feet tall. Images appeared on the screen, faces of hardened men and women in various poses.
“You need to stay here and familiarize yourself with the enemy, Quincy,” Atlas said.
“You need to know them better than you know yourself,” Liberty said.
Atlas pointed at Lyric. “She’ll be your trainer.”
Lyric smiled, and I fought the urge to sneak a peek at her short, stacked frame. I considered myself a pretty progressive dude, but I was still a dude. I mean, I
wish I could tell you that I wasn’t continually eyeballing the ladies, but whether it was because of biology, evolution, or some learned behavior, I had to constantly suppress a desire to scope Lyric, Liberty, and Aurora.
“While you’re training, the rest of us will make ready for what’s to come,” Atlas said.
The big man marched forward and laid a hand on my wrist. “Whatever you do, do not unnecessarily expose yourself to prying eyes, Quincy. Do you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“It’s likely you’ve been observed, but as long as you continue to remain out of sight, we retain a modicum of surprise.”
“I totally understand, Atlas.”
Atlas smiled and signaled to the others who exited the room. The door closed and Lyric turned to me.
We were all alone.
She didn’t say anything, she just sashayed over and moved around me in a circle as I dropped my rucksack to the ground.
“How do you do it?” she asked.
“Do what?”
“Don’t give me that,” she replied, grinning. “I’ve seen what you can do. I know that you killed Damnation Man and I saw you pass the test before. How do you conjure up that energy?”
“I guess it’s like Atlas said, girlie.” I replied, grinning like an idiot. “I’m a badass.”
She threw a punch with the palm of her hand that connected with my forehead, sending me tumbling to the ground. I couldn’t believe what she’d done! After all the winks and her grabbing my junk, I thought there was something between us.
“What the fuck was that?!” I shouted.
She glared at me. “Badasses don’t get knocked down that easily. And don’t ever call me ‘girlie.’”
I muscled myself up, and she took another swipe at me.
This time I ducked under her punch and began bobbing and weaving.
“Oh, I think someone’s feeling a little threatened by someone else.”
“You’re also not as good as you think,” she growled. “For one, you can’t control your powers. You’re prone to…premature electro-fractions.”