Soon I Will Be Invincible (10 page)

We land in a vacant lot a few blocks away. I can already sense the others getting into character. Damsel briefs us on the way over, mostly for my benefit.

“In and out. Don’t start anything we can’t finish.”

“These guys are mostly wannabes,” Blackwolf adds, checking the fit of his gloves.

“Ohmigod, I totally used to go here,” Lily whispers in my ear, starting to giggle.

Two massive bouncers are watching the door, but at a glare from Damsel they step aside. Inside, the room goes quiet right away. In the past few days, it’s been easy to forget that Damsel’s a worldwide celebrity, especially among this kind of crowd. It’s dark inside, but of course that’s no obstacle to me. I’m already getting traces of radiation, a couple of different particle emissions, maybe even a whiff of sulfur.

Damsel steps into a cleared space under one of the overhead lights. I have to admit she exudes a sense of confidence and authority better than any force field. Years of being untouchable, godlike, and the daughter of one of the most powerful men on Earth. She wears that costume like a uniform, not a disguise. You can just tell her mom’s a princess.

“Take it easy. Nothing to worry about. We’re just here for a drink.” Her voice carries to the end of the room. She has a celebrity’s easy smile, but she gives the room a good hard stare. Everyone knows about CoreFire. There’s a second reaction when Lily steps into the light, a faint hiss that comes from nowhere. Someone over by the pool tables whispers, “Judas.”

There must be forty or fifty people in here, way too many to keep track of. A big man with tattoos covering one side of his face gets the idea of stepping into my path.

“Hey, girly-bot,” he grunts, or something like it. He scans funny, enhanced, of course.

And of course they would key on me as the unknown, the one they can intimidate. It’s a familiar moment, familiar to my old self in bone-deep memories of being five and a half feet tall, overweight, a dishwater blonde, the least noticeable person in any room. I slap him, hard, backhanded; the sound is like a handful of heavy ball bearings thrown against a wall. He stumbles back into his chair and I step forward to finish it.

A few people get to their feet, and I’m suddenly conscious of the weak points in my armor plate. I look around for a pillar, anything, to put my back to. A clawed hand falls on my shoulder.

“Easy, Fatale. Any real powers here?” Feral’s voice brings me back to reality. We’re the superheroes here; they’re the criminal element, a cowardly and superstitious lot. And I’ve got teammates.

I throw my senses open; the room goes white and green in my left eye, with gashes of pink and violet energy spikes. I feel my hard drive spin up as all the faces in the room are fed through a facial recognition program I got off a contact in law enforcement.

Half a dozen names come up in the metahuman database. One is Psychic Prime, one of Doctor Impossible’s old colleagues. I spot him in a corner booth and give him a hard look. He’s wearing a powder blue jumpsuit, uniform of whatever far-future training academy he claims to have gone through, and with his bald, domed skull, he looks like an out-of-work
Star Trek
extra. He can’t be stupid enough to make a move on us. He holds up his hands, one of them with a drink in it, and toasts me in mock surrender.

The rest of us fan out through the crowd, looking for our man. No one’s having a conversation anymore. They seem almost cowed by the reputation of a legendary team. Feral wades through the crowd, looking down from an ogre’s height, nodding to the occasional contact. Lily is putting a brave face on things, but she hangs back by the exit doors. This has the potential to turn nasty for her.

There’s a scuffle at the far side of the room, somebody pleading. It’s Rainbow Triumph bullying a disheveled man in a purple velvet jacket; he has the look of a hippie who’s fallen into shady company. She gets his lapel in a quick under-and-up move and lifts him one-handed. She’s doing it like in the movies, holding him off the ground, arm extended, smiling like an evil schoolgirl. I’ve picked up and thrown a lot of people, and you don’t do it that way, even if you’re strong—you use your hips, your shoulders. She hoists him higher, and I can hear the sound of cable twanging inside her. I’ve seen a lot worse, but somehow watching this makes me ill. She’s so thin, I think she’s less human than I am.

His name is Terrapin, and he swears he doesn’t know anything. I, for one, believe him. He’s a low-level exotic arms dealer with minor energy emission powers. The crowd’s looking on, growing restless. There’s only so much humiliation they’re going to take before things get ugly. Most of these people had nothing personal against CoreFire. Who would, really? Only Doctor Impossible seemed to have that persistent grudge.

We head for the exit, the crowd slowly parting for us, and when we get to the doors, Blackwolf stops and turns again.

“Anyone here sees Doctor Impossible, anyone knows where he is, get in touch, if you know what’s good for you.”

There’s an answering murmur now in the crowd. Someone yells out, “You’ll never get him.”

“Come on. We’re done here.” Damsel gestures us out.

I go last. I’m almost out when someone tries to break a beer bottle across the back of my skull. A stupid idea anyway—the metal plating is an inch thick. There’s a built-in reflex that stops things like that, so my first warning is feeling my body twist into action, my left arm coming up automatically to block the bottle and seize the arm in a submission hold, while my right is already raised, ready to strike and shatter ribs, to punch through armor plate.

But as it turns out, my attacker isn’t even strong for a human. Lily’s cool fingers close on my wrist just in time to stop me from killing Psychic Prime.

On a cobbled street in Irkutsk, the snow settles on my chassis and melts—it’s getting colder. I’m on a rooftop, crouching on tar paper and gravel. Lily kneels next to me, apparently oblivious to the weather.

Psychic Prime talked—it didn’t take much. Someone hired him and Nick Napalm to steal the diamond, a two-bit Russian smuggler, a middleman. But who was the middleman working for? Lily and I have been sent here to find out. The others are off on what I assume are more important errands. I’m feeling a little nervous about screwing this up, and I wish Lily talked more. She doesn’t seem nervous at all.

“You ever been to Russia before?” Lame, but I’m trying. She’s supposed to be a teammate, after all. I’m used to working alone.

“I guess. I was all over, back then. You know.”

“I was here a few times. Maybe more. The NSA didn’t always tell me where I was.”

A pause.

“Did you, um, really grow up in the future?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, it’s a long story.”

The three targets are in a bar across the street. I’m holding a recoilless rifle jacked into my weapons system; the camera on the gun sight goes right into my video feed. I get a pale green light-enhanced image of cobbled streets, and past the other rooftops the silhouette of a cathedral. Awareness.exe is on, tagging the world’s heat sources, metals, and fast movers, chattering away. Cars are fountains of information, driver bios and state-by-state itineraries. Power cables run like ley lines through the park.

In infrared, the three people coming out of the bar read like a bonfire on the cold night. A woman and two men, her breath steaming in the display like she’s breathing smoke and fire. I aim the rifle and zoom in, just to see. I can hear them laughing and talking in the quiet night, oddly far off; their magnified image looks close enough to touch. A little box on one side of the screen is spewing numbers and text—distance, wind speed, and the computer’s broken-English translation of their drunken conversation.

A shot rings out; it’s what I’ve been waiting for, intrigue at the far fringe of Doctor Impossible’s supply chain. Maybe they worked out that Psychic Prime talked to us. One of the men staggers, but the other half of my new brain is already crunching numbers, running its own little Zapruder film and drawing a straight line up to a window in the building opposite.

“Wait here.” I hand Lily the rifle.

I sprint down the fire escape and across the street, and a few minutes later I’m standing in front of a metal door. I brace and kick it in, my fighting form motion-captured off old Bruce Lee footage, Hong Kong perfection transposed into steel. I’m throwing a side kick from the summer of
1972,
pure digitally recorded magic, every time. The door splinters at the lock and slams open.

The sniper was set up in someone’s living room, a high rise on the west side of the street. There was a space cleared between the house plants and a coffee table, with a tripod among the dust bunnies and bits of old Lego. A row of clips was laid out on the hardwood floor. He knelt and smoked their cigarettes while he waited for the shot. I’m through the door and across the room before he can get the barrel around. It’s pure science fiction, a blaster rifle, Buck Rogers fins and a curving, ornate shoulder stock in red and gold. Doctor Impossible might as well have written his name on it.

It’s a long flight home in the jumpjet. It’s a plush high-tech affair, a prototype from one of Blackwolf’s aerospace start-ups that never went into full production. Lily settles in companionably next to me, while Feral takes a whole row to snooze, his feet dangling in the aisle. Mister Mystic studies a leather-bound book, seat belt fastidiously in place. Blackwolf and Damsel sit up front as pilot and copilot, neither one speaking.

Damsel knows where we’re going now. She was there exactly two years before. Strapped in by the window, I think about how it must have been for them on Titan, the alien army surging around them, tens of thousands of aliens, each one bred to be the perfect warrior. Galatea gave her life for them, glowing like a star. When they got back to Earth, nothing could ever be the same.

CHAPTER SEVEN

ENEMY OF MY ENEMY

         I find my uniform in a safe-deposit box, left there under an assumed name. When I finally settled on this identity, I had two dozen suits made, to my own design. This one has been waiting since
1987,
and the metallic fabric is cool and clean after its long rest in the dark. Back in my apartment, I spread the pieces out on the bed. Red for the zeta effect, gold for, well, gold. Red tights—trousers won’t do, unfortunately. I have thin legs, but the cape compensates. Red gloves, armored and weighted along the fingers, finned along the outer edge like a 1950s rocket ship.

The crested red helmet is made of lightweight alloys and foam rubber, and inlaid with a dozen cybernetic systems, command and control. The tunic has red-and-gold trim and is woven from a material of my own invention, flameproof, waterproof, bulletproof, soundproof, proof against acid and cosmic rays, and gamma and zeta radiation. I settle it onto my head, and feel myself stand a little straighter.

The cape is pure melodrama, a coup de théâtre, useless in a fight but indispensable in making an entrance, worth minutes of tedious oration. No one who sees that broad crimson swath billowing behind me as I step through the breach I’ve made in their perimeter is going to ask too many silly questions. A simple half mask is enough to keep my identity from public knowledge and fold me into the public persona.

In street clothes I’d just be a criminal. Which I am, of course, but in the costume I’m something more. I wear the flag of a country that never existed and the uniform of its glorious army, spreading forth the dominion of the invincible empire of me. Doctor Impossible.

Once upon a time, in the days of Baron Ether and Doctor Mind, villains conducted their business amid a delicious combination of glamour and danger. A fiendishly clever and unscrupulous fellow could seek out swanky secret clubs in the heart of London, and glittering Chicago speakeasies full of jazz and tuxedoes, where Mephistophelian men and icily beautiful women conducted their scandalous intrigues. That was before everything went computerized, before they froze our assets and tracked our fingerprints in global databases.

But for some kinds of information, there’s only one place to go. I put on a pair of ridiculous sunglasses and take a late-afternoon Greyhound bus out into rural Pennsylvania. I’m alone and untouchable. Every hero in the world would love to collar me, and they haven’t got a clue. For just an hour or so, it feels good to be a gangster. Back at the motel, my Power Staff is taking shape—Nick Napalm got the job done.

According to my informants I’m looking for a half-built shopping mall, abandoned now, the kind of place where suburban teenagers smoke pot and throw rocks at bottles. This is where we meet one another, and like them, we’re always half-listening for police sirens or the sonic boom of a hero’s approach. This one has been running about three weeks, so it’s due to shut down in a week or two—the heroes will find out from some wannabe on the fringes of the scene. They’ll crash in and pick up a few stragglers, but by then there’s always a new place to meet up.

Word always spreads, and we meet to trade stories of our latest exploits, triumphs, and narrow escapes. There’s always something to pass on—who’s in jail and who got out, the inside story on this week’s costumed crusader. We get to see new faces, or just masks, after weeks or months in the laboratory or asteroid or submarine. People get drunk, hook up, I suppose. We share the mordant humor of our kind. It’s as much camaraderie as we get.

In better days, I would arrive in a radar-invisible helicopter, purring in silent and nuclear-powered, the envy of the underworld. Tonight, I’m on foot. I get off the bus at a Roy Rogers and hike four miles down the highway, my costume in a duffel bag. This could really fix things for me, I realize. There are things I need, which I can’t trust Psychic Prime to find. If I can get a line on where Laserator or Dollface is, or even the Pharaoh, that could tip things my way. I’ve let myself become too much of a loner. I need a cabal, a syndicate, a posse of some kind. The proverbial criminal fraternity.

It’s almost dark when I get there. I change outside in the bushes, getting ready for my entrance. The mall’s developers went bankrupt a few years ago and work just stopped. It’s mostly beams and plastic sheeting, but there are a few sections of functional ceiling. They’ve set up a makeshift bar, just planks on cinder blocks, and a cloaking device to keep any passing heroes in the dark, and a big light pole in what was going to be the lobby. It has the makeshift look of a movie set, or a campground. There’s a gas-powered generator running the lights and a boom box playing Thelonious Monk.

I step through a slit in the plastic sheeting and into the light. It’s going strong tonight, thirty or forty of us milling around, the usual assortment of half-brilliant, half-unlucky types sitting in twos and threes. A man made of rock. Something like a demon-woman, horns and a tail. A man clad in metal armor, holding an ax; a pale blue man, translucent. Half a dozen others in bright-colored leotards, some with golden or red auras, or glowing eyes, some displaying symbols of skulls, lightning bolts, animals. Losers and geniuses and Olympic-class athletes, with nothing much in common except the preference above all else to reign in his or her personal hell. And that feeling of menace, that vibe that tells you, somehow, these aren’t the heroes.

A few people look up, then pretend not to see me. I hear whispering. My face feels hot. I wish I’d gotten my Power Staff together in time for this. I hear somebody mention the Pharaoh, and a burst of laughter, and it occurs to me that I never particularly fit in at these gatherings. When I was on top of the game, when I was a world power, I didn’t bother with this scene. People came to me when summoned, or they read about me in the newspaper.

I’ve forgotten what it’s like out here with the smaller operators, people like the Pharaoh or the Quizzler, cutting deals for a few grains of plutonium or a high-tech crossbow. I’m not a natural mixer. And there’s the difference in education. I look around more carefully. Villains fight villains, too.

“Doctor Impossible! Hey, Doc!”

A familiar red costume waves to me. He’s sitting at the bar with a few guys I don’t know, but I know Bloodstryke from the Thailand days. He’s basically okay, for a guy whose armor drinks blood.

“Bloodstryke. Long time.”

“Doctor Impossible, everybody.”

They nod, three of them in masks—falcon mask, plain domino, and a full-face helmet with glowing eyes. No one seems to feel like giving his name.

“I heard you put Phenom in the hospital.” This from the domino mask. He wears a blond goatee and has muscles like a martial artist. Behind the mask, his eyes have a watery quality. Psychic?

“Just part of the job.”

“Not like fighting the Super Squadron, was it? Bet you miss that blimp.”

“It worked, didn’t it?” No one ever lets me forget that thing.

The mask guy speaks up. “You know Damsel just did a press conference? They want you to give yourself up.”

“Idiots.”

“They want you for CoreFire’s disappearance. They got hold of Nick and those guys out in Russia. Word has it you’re a marked man.” The helmet muffles his voice slightly, like he could use a few more airholes in there.

“Born that way,” I reply, rote villain bravado, but they laugh and make a ritual toast. Like the rest of them, I was born in a suburban hospital, a healthy and not particularly fated baby.

“Any of you seen Laserator lately?” I ask casually enough. I wonder if I should tell them I don’t know where CoreFire is. Maybe it’s better if they think I took him out.

“Harvard, right? Guy had tenure, lucky bastard. One grad seminar in the—” the helmet guy starts to say, but suddenly my four tablemates seem to flinch, cringing away from me, and something jars me half out of my seat, spilling my drink. It feels like a pickup truck backing into my chair.

“Hey.” A deep voice, electronically filtered. I can feel cold coming off the metal behind me. Suddenly I’m alone at this end of the bar.

“Who dares?” I demand, rising from my seat. You have to let people know who they’re dealing with.

Kosmic Klaw dares. He was a Ukrainian mercenary until he found the Klaw armor in a wrecked spacecraft. It’s about eleven feet tall, black iron, but one arm is hugely swollen, a great scythelike claw like a fiddler crab’s.

“Damsel just trash the Kosmicar. She say she look for CoreFire. Say she look for you.” He stands over me, half-crouched, the claw resting on the tile in front of him.

“I’m sorry, Klaw.” I spread my arms. “That’s just terrible.”

I peer upward, but there isn’t much of a face to look at, just the three tiny LEDs mounted on the front of his helmet. It’s hard to tell what he’s thinking. They say he sleeps in the armor.

“Bounty pretty good, I hear. Maybe I turn you in myself.”

“Are you threatening me, Klaw?” I summon all the villainous hauteur I have available, staring up at where I hope his camera is. I can feel heads turning, eager for some mayhem. This is getting out of hand.

“Oh, I not afraid of you, Doctor Impossible. You want go to jail again? Or maybe I just crush you here, what you think of that?”

In an instant, he’s got me in that stupid claw of his. The iron is cold, pinning my arms. The crowd forms a circle around us.

“You dare touch me? A man of science?” I wish I were enough of one to know what to do now, to figure the angles with my arms pinned to my sides. Close-up, the iron is pitted and scarred, and I wonder how old it is. I push a little, but it’s no contest, and now everyone can see me wriggling, helpless. My hand is inches away from my utility belt, but my fingers can barely brush it. One EMP charge would settle this.

Bloodstryke tries to step in. “Come on, Klaw…”

Klaw hoists me higher. “You smart. You think you smarter than…Klaw?”

Laughter. Someone shouts, “Do him! Do it for Psychic Prime!”

“Shut up!” I turn and scream at them. “I’ll crush you, too! All of you!” God damn it.

My feet are dangling six feet off the ground, and my cape is getting engine oil on it. Finally, he makes a decision and tosses me to the far end of the bar, where I sprawl in a pile of plastic garbage bags. Everyone’s laughing now, and I hear a little applause.

“Doctor Impossible, everybody! He here all week!”

I manage a petulant little flourish with the cape and walk off, legs shaking a little.

It’s a long walk back to the Greyhound stop, but no one thinks to offer me a ride. I change out of my costume in the bushes outside. Out here under the stars, it’s very quiet. Overhead, the new moon is just a thin sliver; I can see the whole solar system turning like a merry-go-round, or a ticking clock. Time’s running out.

Baron Ether is old. He lost an eye fighting Paragon, and replaced it with a mechanical device of his own construction. Whatever gave him his original superpowers has mostly faded, except in the elongated shape of his skull and a coal-like glow behind his remaining eye. He’s an old man—no one really knows how old—and he’s been a villain a long, long time. He started out robbing railroads. He fought Victorian adventurers and American whiz kids, wore a mustache and carried a trick cane whose jeweled head bulged with concealed gadgetry.

In the late 1940s, he came to America and founded the first League of Evil. He fought the Super Squadron long before I did, even cruised the timestream and fought the SS three thousand centuries from now. One time, he threw in with his own alternate-dimensional self to steal a fortune in gold, only to cheat his double out of the proceeds. Classic.

In the fifties, he blazed a trail of infamy. He did it all, robbed the Freedom Force of their memory, swapped bodies with them, cloned himself. Lost one set of powers and gained another, was set adrift in time and spent six years in the Cretaceous before building his own time machine. He came back from that one twenty years younger, a side effect of the chronon particles.

In the sixties, he reinvented himself again as a Mephistophelian master of illusion, and stayed out of prison for a while. As recently as
1978,
they thought they’d seen the last of him, when a stolen space shuttle disappeared into the void, outbound from the plane of the ecliptic at a perilous angle. But a year later he returned, only to be defeated again in the waning days of the Carter presidency. But he never lost his panache—by the end, he was using hardware with gears and brass fittings against mutants with fusion-powered hardware.

I should have gone to him first. We’ve only met a few times, but I guess I consider him a kind of mentor or a kindred spirit. To be honest, I patterned my costume on his. He’s a gentleman, a genius, not like those small-timers out at the mall. I guess I made a mistake, thinking they were worth my time. The Baron is the real thing. If anyone can help me, it’s him.

He lives by himself in a Gothic house in New Haven. When they caught him for the last time, they let him stay at home, in deference to his seniority. He just can’t leave, ever. His old foe the Mechanist is spending his retirement years seeing that he doesn’t.