Caped (Book 1): The Burdens of Fate (33 page)

Chapter Ten

God Complex

Dennis Shaeffer
-

...I see a wonderful type of celestial
darkness, littered with the hopes and dreams of the universe. Their base,
Infinity Isle, existing as nothing but an eerie silhouette rising up from
horizon, as if the dark form of the Pacific had chosen to rage out against the
glittering night sky.

It was as if the world were silent and afraid
to move, even the wind gave pause during that moment. And then, in the depths
of the darkness, it appears. A small submersible, literally from nowhere,
hundreds of miles out into the Pacific.

"We got somethin' over here!" motions
Carter. "Sensors are picking something up in the water."

"Just like Edward said," utters
Thomas. "Okay folks, that's all the help we've got. The future is ours to
make."

"It's not showing on radar and the cameras
are barely picking it up," says Carter.

The craft slows to a stop just under a half
mile away, breaking the surface and bobbing up and down within the currents.

"Any signals coming from it?" Thomas
asked.

"Non... wait! It just sent...oh
fuck!"

Thirteen more ships of the same classifications
pop into existence around the island. Carter's heart racing faster than it ever
had before, afraid that this was the moment fate had chosen to call him home.

"Multiple targets in the water, we're
surrou...!"

There's a deep sluggish groan that permeates
through the area as the island slips and twists through the fabric of space,
abruptly switching places with another location entirely. The entire island
hangs on its side at an almost vertical eighty degrees, with the artificial
gravity struggling to kick in as quickly as it was needed. Michael steadies
everyone as the numerous amounts of unbolted furniture sweeps along the floor
towards the wall below. Within those same crucial moments of uncertainty and
confusion, adding to the commotion, begins echoing the faint pop and growing
thunderous roar of artillery fire.

The sea and sky spit forth hell itself. A fleet
of death over a hundred strong and bearing flags from communist countries,
dictatorships, and democracies, are amassed beneath them in the greatest naval
fleet ever assembled. All raging at the fortress in the sky. A steady
bombardment lighting up their shield in a grand mixture of fire and smoke. For
a second it holds before quickly sputtering to a halt.

One or two shells manage to break through to
the island's surface, jolting their command center; but the island's cannons
quickly lock onto all incoming projectiles.

Like fireworks in the sky the cannons fire back
and fourth at each other. Occasionally the island's shields kick back in,
allowing the cannons to pick off a ship or two, but again sputter and collapse.
Bombers flying miles above the surface drop high yield explosives onto the
island fortress and yet still she is able to defend and slowly level herself.

The moment to act is upon them. Carter is busy
manually repairing or bypassing the systems being rabidly attacked by an
aggressive virus.

Thomas, worried, and still getting hold of
himself asks Carter why the shield is failing.

"We've been infected by a virus,"
Carter replies. "I'm trying to contain it but it's spreading too fast, I'm
having trouble keeping it out of the essential systems. It's creating corrupt
duplicates of essential files and I'm having trouble locating and replacenig
them as fast as it's corrupting them."

"What if we shut down the entire
system?" asks Thomas.

"We'd fall out the sky!"

Thomas groans from an unpleasant thought which
was immediately followed by an epiphany, "But would it allow you to
destroy the virus without worry about deleting necessary systems? A full system
wipe, then you reboot off the back-up files."

"Do I need to repeat that we'd fall out
the sky?!"

Thomas, while making his way towards Michael,
gives a quick glance and nod over to Kaylie which she only half understands the
meaning of.

"Michael, you're good with water
right?" Thomas asks, to which Michael gives a confident reply. "Good,
do you think you can create a bubble around us as we fall through the ocean;
can you keep the water out?"

A little shaken in his confidence, Michael
pauses, "Around the entire island?"

"Around the entire island,"
reiterates Thomas.

Kaylie makes a quick, albeit slightly offended,
interjection about how she could keep the island up if given the chance, but
Thomas' focus remained unbroken.

There's a brief pause, broken by the impact of
another artillery shell, before Michael gives a not too confidant,
"Yes."

Thomas gives a brief exclamation of joy before
letting Kaylie know that it isn't about what she can or cannot do, but strategic
positioning. None-the-less, a free-falling island isn't something that appeals
to any present and a quick, guided, decent is much better than anything at the
hands of gravity.

The moment she gets up to go Michael
telekinetically carries her along with him out through the lobby and sets her
down once they reach the start of their grand walkway.

"Fifteen seconds, on my mark," says
Thomas. "...Mark!"

Spread before them lay a view equally horrific
as it was Amazing; missiles, cannons, rail-guns, and chemical lasers creating a
patchwork of fire and smoke that dance along the spherical shielding, with the
slowly brightening light of dawn failing to carry even the tiniest sliver of
light to the calm within.

Kaylie lifts a small section of the ground and
uses it to quickly carry herself to the edge of the island, where she sinks her
legs in, shin-deep, for a firm grip.

"...Three...Two...One...Now!!"

The wall of hellfire makes a quick leap
dangerously close before being pushed away. A deafening roar and steady rumble
overtake the area for a brief moment before Prisca clears the air.

The islands' guns have stopped and the itself
island begins to fall at an almost natural pace. Kaylie, now waist high into the
soil, also has her hands wrist-deep into the ground, and a strained look of the
utmost concentration on her face. The island slows as it nears the water,
giving Michael enough time to concentrate on repelling such a massive amount of
water while the numerous cannons still pound relentlessly against the bubble
he's erected around them. The island quickly breaks the surface of the water
and casts a massive wave that shoots out in every direction, breaking over the
bows of their ships.

The island continues its decent unimpeded by
any friction for a few more seconds before Kaylie holds it in place below the
waves.

Michael's attention grow and wanes as he put
greater focus into stabilizing the bubble, undulating like a water mattress as
the few remaining torpedoes make impact, rising and falling like deep breaths
as he pushes against the pressures of the deep.

"Six more seconds!" screams Carter
over the radio.

The lights are the first to kick back on,
followed shortly by the anti-gravity generator and moments later by the shield.

Michael, only slightly winded, gives a great
sigh of relief before letting gravity take care of his decent.

"The offensive plan gentlemen?" asks
Prisca. "I can assure you they have one."

Carter, who has already returned to browsing
through lines of code replies with a snarky, "Not my department,"
followed by an almost casual, "The ships are gone...no planes
either."

Thomas is stumped but still thinking, and his
solutions come quickly. "Laurie, get ready," he says. "I'm
sending you out."

Laurie stands erect in a confused manner,
probably due to the fact that he can't fly and isn't really that strong of a
swimmer. He is effectively useless.

"Here we go!" hollers an enthusiastic
Carter.

The island began to rise almost as fast as it
fell, breaking the surface to a tranquil Atlantic sunrise. It doesn't last.

Through the calm comes the distinguished
crackle and pop of thunder as a godly bolt of lightening strikes down through
the morning clouds from the heavens above. As if Zeus himself had chosen to
intervene. It impacts the shield with such force the entire island shakes; but
it holds.

A circular hole with a thin blue glow around
the rim forms just outside the shielding, and another one on the inside.
Through it comes another bolt of lightening, bypassing the shield and directly
impacting an artillery gun, digging through the structure of the island and
bursting out the other side. Only a momentary pause before then another, and
then another.

Dark shadows fall from the sky through other
circular portals and onto the island, followed by one covered in streams of
electricity arching chaotically around his body. As he passes through the
portal this display of chaos engulfs the area into a whirling storm. Domes of
electricity swirl around a small army of masked figures. Intimidating ice
crystals forming on the body of one, another levitating, another stretching and
flexing like some giant mass of putty, and some simply standing in their
regular deceitfully human forms; all while Michael struggles to maintain a
protective bubble around Kaylie and himself.

Thomas reaches down through the clutter while
Laurie rushes through the opening of the temple, stampeding into the raging
lightening storm; the arcs attracted to him like a magnet, leaching onto his
skin but they're nothing more than spider webs to him.

Laurie charges onward until a glowing portal
forms, sweeping horizontally across the ground with incredible speed, bumping
into Laurie. It knocks him into a spin, erasing him from the landscape and
redeposit’s him several feet in the air from another stagnant portal facing
down, where he's ejected at staggering speed and slams head first into the
ground. He pops back up to his feet almost immediately only to be slammed down
again by an unseen force. The ground beneath him sinks in and a thin ray of
energy quickly strikes him while he's down. Laurie freezes as if stuck in the
moment.

A small portal, the size of a quarter,
momentarily opens behind Michael and through it streaks another thin, green,
ray of energy. Same result: Frozen. Two seconds later and it's the same with
Kaylie.

Prisca instinctively rushes to their aid.

"You go out there and you'll get
electrocuted," quips Thomas, stopping her in her tracks. "Or worse.
You can't handle that." He takes a moment to think, his mind racing
through a million scenarios, "...But I can."

He places his hand on the table and types in a
quick code which promptly slides out a hidden drawer. He pulls from it a stark
white trench coat littered in no particular fashion with a pattern of light
gray symbols, hieroglyphs, and various Asian characters; once he slips it on
the gray patterns start glowing a light neon blue. As he proceeds towards the
exit he looks to Ivan who's positioned next to Carter and Kaylie's mother.
"We're officially onto Plan B."

"Wait a second!" yells Prisca,
"There's a Plan B? What the hell was Plan A?!"

Thomas walks out into the main lobby area,
entering the ever encroaching web of electricity which is slowly eating away at
the already ailing building. He's mumbling an incantation quietly to himself
which causes the web to retreat as he approaches. As he walks out onto the main
plaza the web continues inching back, almost as if in fear; even as the black
armored figure appears to will them to attack.

A glowing portal races towards Thomas with the
same speed it engulfed Laurie, except it shatters in a brilliant array of
colors the moment it nears him. The thin green ray fails to make contact as
well. Thomas boldly marches on.
This small group of people,
now surrounding the bodies of Laurie, Kaylie, and Michael; holding their
unconscious bodies in a threatening display of force.

Thomas stops, surrounded. His hands raised in
the universal gesture of surrender. He lowers them.

"Sleep," he says, in soft
authoritative whisper that carries throughout the entire area. The group
immediately drops, all of them except the man standing as their leader. His
confidant posture doesn't change.

"So you're the a
lpha team
,
huh?" Thomas says, staring directly at the single remaining soldier.
"I believe there's been a misunderstanding. Let's talk."

And that's where the interesting stuff ends, at
least for that. Like I've said before, you've gotta know how to tell a story
well.

Jump ahead a couple hours, and a few thousand
miles away. My old buddies are within the middle of the Mojave
Desert where Luis and Raphael prepare for their first strike. The
clear sky present above gives a clear view of our celestial cousins. Luis, his
arms forward, forms a swirling ball of fire; dark orange at first, only to grow
larger and brighter. It suddenly shrinks and he repeats the process until a
white-hot ball of fire burns before him. The ground has melted into a pool of
magma. This, while he considers himself to be "containing" the heat.
Far off to his side, Raphael speaks to him through the radio; dressed in that
shiny foil-like heat resistant suit common to volcanologist and stupid thrill
seeking tourists. "You've got three seconds to aim and take the shot, you
got that?"