Soon I Will Be Invincible (17 page)

Jeff Burgess, who became Naga, a vigilante-cum-mercenary. He wears a cheap suit, eyes moving with a fighter’s twitchiness. Rarity, tall, with curly hair, bright eyes, and a glassy, confident smile, who went to Africa on a Fulbright and found the mystical Gemstone Nefalis, and touched it. And Mechria, a freshman when I was a senior—I see her again bent over the lathe in metal shop, her wide, froggy face always grinning over something.

I knew so many of them, then and later, but we’re all changed now, utterly, by industrial accidents, wild talents, gods. We’ve become psychics and knife throwers, rogues and religious fanatics and clowns, and criminals. They wouldn’t recognize me now, even if they remembered me. Even if I wanted them to.

When I think about it, I guess CoreFire must have had a story, too, something better than that a smug, popular jock accidentally became a smug, popular superhero. No one could possibly be as boring as he seemed.

At the end of the service a line forms leading to a makeshift shrine. I join it in good order, and leave my wreath with the rest.

I’m threading my way out when Lily finds me.

“Hello, Lily.” The crowd is flowing around us. People are noticing Lily, of course, but no one looks twice at me.

“You’re looking well.”

“Thanks.” I don’t want to think about this. It’s not as if they were even together that long.

People are leaving. I can see Blackwolf starting to look for her. Any second now, he’s going to see us, and all hell is going to break loose.

“Listen, I’m sorry….”

“It’s okay.”

“I’m…”

“It’s okay, Jonathan. Go.”

I never really had a girlfriend before that, or afterward, obviously. We met around the time of the Legion of Evil fiasco that Mentiac had put together, which had seemed like such a good idea at the time. For a few months, the concept had been making its way through a grapevine made up of prison-yard gossip, chitchat over the transfer of stolen goods, low-voiced exchanges in seedy underworld dives, stray psychical transmissions…. The idea was attractive; you get sick of seven-onone battles that always turn bad, of getting the upper hand, just to have some teenage monkey wonder steal the keys to the weapons locker.

I met the original villain team once, the Delinquent Five, when they traveled to the present day to learn the future of their villainy. Their methods were hopelessly outdated, but in their day, they were geniuses! The Sinister Servant of Atlantis! The Diabolical Duplicate Sun! Their schemes are legend now, if only for their scope, their vision, the outlandish expense. It humbles even my own undertakings. But they came here seeking aid from their future selves, the selves they assumed would be wealthy and powerful, rulers of nations. When they found the world still ruled by governments and policed by heroes, they departed in silence, humbled. Maybe that was the beginning of the end for them.

Mentiac was semilegendary in the world of crime. A rogue supercomputer from the 1960s, built by a prescient trio of graduate students whose work went a little too far ahead of the curve. Mentiac got away from them, legend had it, suborned a forklift, and made his way into the labyrinthine sewer system underneath Chicago. He put down roots, and has been growing ever since, stealthily manipulating criminal affairs through phone lines. There’s a miniature cult of hackers and hardware enthusiasts that buy him cooling fans and RAM.

Both Lily and I were contacted—I received a phone call over an extremely private line, Mentiac’s circa 1977 speech synthesizer quacking out the time and place for our meeting. It was held in rented office space in a downtown L.A. high rise. It was a curious concatenation of the obscure powers of the world, a dozen maniacs, menaces, and underworld bosses, standing, sitting, or perching on bits and pieces of office furniture left over from a defunct talent agency. Of course nothing was agreed on, not even who had the right to speak first. No one bothered to offer a name. Two of them turned out to have the same villain epithet (“the Infamous…”), and violence threatened to break out. Mentiac’s managerial skills were far from adequate, and the afternoon wound down as one crime lord after another stormed out.

I kept staring at Lily. She stood with her back to a line of windows facing west, the L.A. skyline behind her, blue sky shading into gray and brown at the horizon. The colors deepened as the afternoon wore on and the light grew orange and purple. It warped and rippled as it came through her face and body. I’d heard of her, of course, mostly a bank robber, pound for pound one of the strongest out there.

I could never tell when she was looking at me. Her eyes are like the rest of her body, clear glass marbles, featureless as a statue’s. I once pointed out that she should be blind. Transparent eyes shouldn’t work; an optic nerve needs to reflect light. She made a rude noise.

There’s a photograph of her charging a line of Paris cops, punching her way out of a bank robbery. A blue-and-red défense de stationner sign shows, distorted, through her midsection. She’s in motion; her right arm is a little blurry, just starting to swing. You can see the police beginning to give way at the spot she’s aiming for. She was never that careful—she didn’t have to be.

The last of the Napoleons of Crime had left, and we were alone, the room darkening into shadow. It seemed natural to have a drink, once we found a place that would serve us. So the Legion never materialized as such, although a few of the robots later came back as the Machine Intelligence Coalition, which I guess still has its asteroid somewhere. And I met Lily.

We had dinner that one night at the fortress. We ate in the main control room, inside the long arc of the command console. Electricity swirled overhead from the big generators I’d put in—it was my last doomsday device but one. I lit candles anyway, and everything glinted with the unaccustomed warm illumination. The robots cooked us a sumptuous meal; afterward, I programmed them to do this funny dance I had thought of, and we almost fell out of our chairs laughing.

Lily and I had a whole plan put together. I could outthink anyone they could throw at me, create byzantine schemes, and craft devices beyond imagining. She was all but unbeatable in a straight fight. She seemed to want it as much as I did.

I was deep in hiding when I heard about her and CoreFire. It was in the papers, how they’d been seen coming out of one of the hero-style bars in London, England being one of the countries where, it turns out, she’s still legal. They’d been together a few weeks. He had always had a kind of loner, hero-on-the-edge appeal, and I guess that was part of it. And maybe it was her way of getting out of it, coming in from the cold. There was no mention of me; no reason why there should be.

I guess she got bored with me. Some nights on the island, it’s beautiful—tropical constellations, jungle sounds, and luminous fish. But when it’s five in the morning in the hideout and you can’t sleep, and CNN’s stuck on another economic summit, well, that’s another feeling. You’re blacked out and can’t work because some hero team is trolling the South Seas, the heat is unbearable, and it’s an hour until dawn, the slow tropical sunrise over the lagoon, and you’re thinking about how far you are from home, and that this whole thing was maybe not such a brilliant idea after all, but there’s nothing you can do about it now.

My style of work takes a lot of preparation. I build things and test them out. I have to order parts, or cast them myself. I have to pull allnighters to debug my robots’ pathfinding routines before an invasion. It isn’t that interesting to other people.

I leave just as the trucks begin arriving. They’re burying him in a nuclear-waste facility, I’m afraid, taking no chances. No one understood what kept him going all those years, what exactly was inside of him. Something might become unstable, burst underground. You can’t put that class of object in Arlington National Cemetery.

I wonder who did do it, if it wasn’t me. I pick my way down Amsterdam, among the mourners, walking faster now, until I’m lost among the thousands there, lost among people who can’t fly or teleport or turn to water, just going their way, until I could be one of them. She’ll tell them I’d been there. She’s in that world now, and I suppose I understand. Those are her new friends. They could come after me, I guess, but it doesn’t matter—I’m good at escapes. Maybe into the sewers, like the old days. It doesn’t matter. You keep going. You keep trying to take over the world.

CHAPTER TWELVE

SAVE THE WORLD

         He’s gone. We’ve lost Earth’s strongest, fastest, and probably just its best superhero. The man who defined the term, practically. The funeral is odd, surreal. I sit in the VIP section, feeling like an impostor in my New Champions outfit, a version of the same uniform he used to wear. People who really knew him cried; I just sit there, feeling like a tourist. In the pictures they clutch, CoreFire is still smiling his boyish smile, the man who never expected this, not in a million years.

I sit in front with the team, but I’ve never felt less like one of them. They’ve seen CoreFire shrug off surface-to-air missiles, dive unprotected into lava. You just didn’t worry about CoreFire. You counted on him to make it through, to soak up damage the rest of the team couldn’t handle.

It’s a part of their lives I can’t touch, and it makes my full membership feel like a joke. I think they broke up after Titan partly because they couldn’t stand losing anyone else. Then losing him to Doctor Impossible, who they’d beaten before, who they thought was evil but at least a known quantity, that just makes it worse.

It hits them all differently. Blackwolf sulks, silently angrier than I’ve ever seen him. Elphin goes fairy-solemn, the closest to stillness I’ve seen in her. Feral is unreadable, but he smells of liquor. Damsel recedes even further into her lonely-leader mask.

I leave as soon as I can, brushing through the mass of reporters to one of our hired cars. A few shout my name, hoping for a picture; a couple even pronounce it right.

The day after the funeral, the old guard arrives to give us a briefing. Stormcloud and Regina, the surviving members of the Super Squadron, Damsel’s father and stepmother. It’s 11:31 a.m. by the digital clock that never stops blinking inside my left eye. There’s probably a way to turn it off, but that knowledge vanished with the rest of the Protheon Corporation.

Blackwolf bristled when the call came in. These guys are supposed to be letting us run things our way now. Damsel speaks privately with him for a few minutes when he arrives, but her response to Regina is visibly cool. I don’t know what happened to Damsel’s real mom, but it doesn’t look like the stepmom was much of a replacement.

It’s practically a state occasion. I’ve never seen the Super Squadron up close before. Damsel and Blackwolf are famous, but these people
invented
us. Stormcloud hovers motionless, toes slightly pointed, resting solidly in air, as if encased in glass. A lot of people don’t know how to hold themselves when they’re flying; their legs just go everywhere. I don’t know how it works—there is no ground effect that I can see, no radiation, nothing. Regina is another thing entirely—like an animated chess piece, she hefts the Scepter of Elfland, the weapon that can vanquish any mortal foe, if the stories can be believed.

We sit around the
U
-shaped conference table while Stormcloud glares out from the center, sometimes turning to gesture at the display screens. He has almost no perceptible body language, only a wave of the hand here and there to reinforce a point he’s making. His hair is white; and his costume is a white-and-silver leotard with a simple blue-and-yellow logo on his chest, a diamond inside a circle, which must mean something profound to the cosmic types he runs with.

Regina stands next to him in full regalia, feet on the floor but radiating a queenly authority. Damsel’s distaste is almost palpable. I wonder if Regina wore that crown around the house.

Super Squadron members don’t often come out in public. Stormcloud spends most of his time outside the solar system. Once, they had the monumental quality of the large-scale scientific projects of the period, like fission reactors and Saturn V rockets. Like the Cold War–era science that spawned them, they’ve gone into eclipse.

World War II saw the first public superheroes, government-engineered and packaged by a U.S. Army agency sifting tens of thousands of recruits for certain qualities. There were rumors of men pulled out of their boot camp into special programs. They adapted to peacetime life as crime fighters and government spokesmen.

But Pandora’s box had been opened. World War II jump-started a dozen new technologies and set off the widespread ransacking of the Old World. People changed. Some of them were servicemen, the outcome of super-soldier programs on both sides. A few stranger and more terrible things came out of the devastation of Europe and the Far East, things formed in that crucible or driven from hiding as whole cities were flattened and populations relocated.

There hadn’t been anything like the Super Squadron before. Pharaoh, the first one, an archaeologist turned crusader. Lightwave, an energy being, barely human after being translated into radiant information. Stormcloud, the all-American athlete turned living tornado, and Regina, mystic powerhouse. Go-Man, the fastest man alive, and Paragon the Living Flame. They were hastily repackaged as an all-American team, and sent out to defend the American way of life.

As the 1960s took off and their powers matured, they became larger than life. These were men picked for loyalty, men without a lot of imagination, but they couldn’t help but be changed by the things they’d seen. You could see it in their faces. Laughing sorcerers from kaleidoscopic dimensions, seductive alien princesses, far-future civilizations…their training was eroding. They seemed eternal, archetypal, cosmic. It was like watching the Beatles go from
Revolver
to
Let It Be.
They were seen less and less in public; by
1976,
nothing less than a full-scale threat to reality could draw them out.

Seeing Stormcloud is just another reminder of how far down the power scale I really am. He’s impervious to any scan I can perform, his body registering solid white to X rays, like a black hole or a force field. Nothing I carry could even scratch him. The best efforts of twentieth-century biotechnology are nothing to him, mere cleverness, a gadget, gewgaw, half woman, half cuckoo clock. He’s practically a god.

Behind him, Doctor Impossible’s face looks down at us from three view screens, a close-up shot that must have been taken during one of his public tirades, his dark hair swept up and back.

“You’ve really done it this time. Wherever Doctor Impossible is, he’s a menace to everyone and everything on this planet.”

He goes on and on in his immaculate news anchor’s baritone, citing patterns of attack, points of origin. Blackwolf talks back to him a few times, defending our efforts, and there’s something a little gallant about it—this must be worst for Damsel. Lily slouches next to me in the back, arms crossed. Stormcloud doesn’t look at her at all.

The room strobes and shimmers as I slide my vision up and down the spectra. In the higher spectra Stormcloud gives contradictory readings, ultradense but radiating energy, coruscating, celestial.

Outside, the sky shifts from black to a brilliant white, banded with red and blue.

I look around the room, and for the first time I notice something: Lily isn’t truly transparent to all wavelengths of light. I know lasers go through her, and even microwaves, but my sensory range is very wide. No one’s paying attention to me, so I scroll up and up into the higher bands until she stands out, opaque and solid, like anyone else.

I’m one of the only people who’s ever gotten a good look at her face. With her transparent features, she’s a glittering, half-seen menace. But in my altered vision, she’s actually a rather ordinary, not unpleasant-looking woman, with a pretty, roundish face. I take a picture and save it.

When the lecture’s done, we file out. Damsel heads to the roof, Blackwolf to the gym. We’ve all got some thinking to do. If we’re going to be a real team at all.

It’s 12:19 a.m. at the Champions Building, but I guess superheroes are supposed to stay up late. It’s resident members only, plus Mister Mystic, who is favoring us with his absurdly dignified presence; apparently, he keeps odd hours as well. It’s not a real meeting; everyone just ended up in the kitchen and started talking.

And this is how I pictured it, you know, a few brave souls staying awake to rescue the world from disaster. The overhead lights make the room look warmer. Lily and I are on stools; Mystic stands. Damsel’s perched on the counter eating ramen noodles, talking fast. It’s close in here; the steam from Damsel’s noodles condenses down the side of Lily’s arm. Lily’s opened a bottle of wine.

“God, that was grueling.” Blackwolf balances one of the steak knives on the end of his finger before testing it for throwing balance.

Damsel shrugs. “At least you don’t get it at Christmas.”

“He always hated me. He’s a powers snob.”

“Let it go, hon.”

“Do you think he’s right?” I ask.

“If he is, what can we do about it? He’s too good at losing himself. He’s out there somewhere, probably half a kilometer underground. Laughing his freaky laugh. Talking to his robots.”

Feral looks up. “This was a revenge scenario. Villains aren’t that complicated.”

“I disagree.” Damsel waves her chopsticks expansively. “He hasn’t been sitting still. He’s clearing the ground for something.”

Lily says quietly, “If it’s him, he’s doing something new. He has to be. Otherwise, he couldn’t have…you know.”

“This is ridiculous. He’s an evil genius. We’re not going to second-guess him. Remember the space monster? No one saw that thing coming. Remember the fungus army?”

“He is indeed a most puissant foe. He seeks power, does he not? Land and serfs.” Elphin perches on the counter like an oversized cockatoo. Silence falls.

“Elphin, what exactly do you think Doctor Impossible is?” Blackwolf asks.

“A magician? A villainous king, or…Fine. I do not know.”

“There’s gonna be a theme. Frogs. Hats. I don’t know.”

Lily raises a hand. “I hate to be the one to say this, but there’s still no proof Doctor Impossible is involved.”

Blackwolf stands. “This wasn’t some purse snatcher; this takes genius.” Lily’s on her feet, and Blackwolf is, too, that knife suddenly back in his hand in a fancy three-fingered grip.

“Well, um, he was in jail the whole time. How do you explain that?” I jump in, not wanting to be part of a Lily-Blackwolf throw-down, not in the kitchen anyway.

“He might have left a trap for CoreFire,” Damsel observes. “That’s not out of character, is it?”

“And CoreFire just, you know, walked right into it?” Lily’s pacing now.

“Well, he wasn’t exactly Doctor Mind,” Damsel says, and almost manages a smile. “But you still haven’t told us how he did it.”

“All right,” I say. “Let’s assume we’re him, just for a minute. How would we do it? Take down CoreFire.” I steal a look at Blackwolf. If anyone has an answer for this, it’s him.

Blackwolf’s almost too eager to tackle this one. “The autopsy gave us nothing, right? I had half the powered community in to scan it. We went over X rays, microscopic traces, iridium—nothing.”

Damsel starts ticking off options. “You couldn’t burn him. You couldn’t crush him, cut him. He was too tough. I could have taken him down. Maybe.”

“I did it once.” Blackwolf says it quietly. It’s not a boast.

“And you’re lucky you have an alibi.”

“What about the Enderri?” I ask.

“They don’t come into this system. If they do, we know about it.”

“What if he’s hiding in the past? Killing our grandparents?” Feral muses, staring at the ceiling.

“We should be so lucky,” Blackwolf mutters.

Damsel snorts. “Time travel makes me throw up,” she notes.

“Everything makes you throw up,” Blackwolf says, getting to his feet. “No, Impossible would want it face-to-face. He’s nothing if not predictable. Besides, that wouldn’t leave a body. I saw Jason’s, and there was no mark. Nothing. CoreFire’s the toughest thing this side of a black hole. It’s provable.”

“Well actually, I have some bad news for you on that score.”

“Psychics? Something with his mind?” I’m trying to treat this like a murder, any murder.

“The guy was immune,” Feral says. At least they’re taking me seriously.

“But he managed it,” Blackwolf goes on. “He did the impossible.”

“And now with CoreFire out of the way, he’s going for the whole thing.”

Blackwolf’s looking at me, holding my gaze. “I know the science as well as anyone. He’s trying to solve conventionally impossible problems by unconventional means. What does that point to?”

Then he glances sideways toward the corner by the sink. Mister Mystic steeples his hands. He’s been standing there this whole time, watching us and listening, waiting for us to get this far.

“You know what it means.”

Even though it’s late when we break up, I can’t sleep. Blackwolf and Mister Mystic and Damsel and Elphin talked for an hour about magical artifacts, demons from other planes, demigods they have fought or had drinks with.

In the end, we made a list on a napkin. There are only so many items lying around that give the level of magical kick we’re talking about and can still be carried around: Durandal, the Nightstar, Fortuna’s Eye, the Flux Emerald, the Scepter of Elfland. The ones so powerful that with the right eyes, you can see them from orbit. What you’d have to have to kill CoreFire. We thought we knew where they were, but one of them must have gotten loose.