Soon I Will Be Invincible (24 page)

The heroes are on their way here in a supersonic jet, and I’m staking everything on a magic hammer. The Pharaoh would have enjoyed that, but frankly, it ticks me off just a little.

Professionally speaking, it’s no way to work, staking one’s plan on an object that occasionally whispers secrets no rational person can accept. Truthfully, it goes against everything I stand for.

My world is a sphere of rock that circles an orb of nuclear fire, and science and I are setting our backs against it, and it will move. That much is clear. In my island fortress, I keep an elephant tusk,
32,000
years old, incised with a few scratches marking the phases of the Moon, made by the hand of a Paleolithic supergenius, the progenitor of that universe and my distant forebear. He, or she, knew something of what I am about to do. Maybe she dreamed of it.

And so even if I’m forced to admit that science isn’t all there is, I don’t like it. Every couple of years, another one gets unearthed, one of the old things that’s come down to us out of the forgotten past. A gem or a rod, or a magic shoe. Out of Troy or Atlantis or Lemuria, or the dark forest between here and Grandmother’s, something that doesn’t play by the rules.

I don’t know if finding Durandal or Aladdin’s lamp makes those stories true, or if the stories just attached themselves to the objects. The objects themselves get handed on so many times that they lose their significance, become just tools. Once upon a time, they meant royalty or holiness to somebody, a priest or hero of ancient times, but after all this time, they’re just an old joke. But the power—that stays around.

All I can conclude is that the deep past is a strange place. These things are found and lost again, and when you find one, your life changes forever, like the Pharaoh’s did.

I think again about Mister Mystic’s laugh, and what the Baron said, before I left, as the shadows lengthened in his suburban kitchen and SUVs wound home through the darkening streets. Years ago, a boy found an ancient magic hammer and learned the word that would change him into something invincible, a king or emperor. A pharaoh. A nonsense story, a fairy tale, but now I hold it in my hands.

It was dark by the time he finished. At the end, the Baron whispered the word itself in my ear.

“It won’t work,” I said.

“Maybe not. But it might do something.”

I put my foot on his windowsill, but he stopped me again.

“Doctor Impossible?” His voice was scarcely more than a croak.

“What is it?”

“Do it, boy. Beat them hollow.”

Now the superheroes are coming over the horizon. My instruments picked them up an hour ago. Drumming my fingers on the golden railing of a balcony, the highest tower of my fortress, I watch. They’re flying in a
V
formation, low across a tropical sea as smooth as glass.

Two hours ago, I hijacked four major communications satellites to issue my proclamation of universal sovereignty. In effect, I conquered the world. Wearing my old robes, sitting on a refurbished throne, it might have been the glory days. No one could see the blast marks on the wall just outside of camera range. Now I just need to make my proclamation stick.

The mirror array seems to be working. The signal loss is as near zero as it’s possible to be. Once I had it in my hands, it was easy to copy, but only Laserator’s work could have reflected so truly, golden, perfect. He got a rotten deal.

Overhead, the Moon is full. I had to wait until it passed directly overhead. The Moon itself is a kind of mirror, a very dull one. I peer into the reflector, and two and three-fifths seconds later, my image reaches the Moon, enormously magnified. Then I put the laughing fat man in his place, Dollface’s tiny creation. At a touch, his eyes will light up and his chin will move up and down, and the Moon will grow heavier. At my direction, the Earth will be pulled gently off of its course, nudged outward from the Sun. The math is hard, but it’s just math; Baron Ether did it years ago. As the Earth grows colder, my power becomes apparent, and the nations submit.

This isn’t the first plan I’ve had, or the tenth. I would have been in Brooklyn with Lily if things had worked out. And I know how this must look—the hidden fortress, the helmet, the cape, the army of robots. I’m smart—ungodly so, to tell the truth—and the question still surfaces. When they ask me, I don’t know what I’ll say. What could I have been thinking? How did I end up on the side of the monsters?

Camera twelve shows them touching down, Damsel and Elphin descending to touch the ground as softly as angels in a Renaissance painting. The others emerge from the landing vehicle, Blackwolf performing a neat little combat roll out of the cockpit. He wears a full-body stealth costume, grays and blacks, and it’s like the Peterson class reunion none of us went to. I brace myself for Lily to follow him out, but she doesn’t.

Damsel gives them a pep talk before they split up. The parabolic microphones catch a little of it.

“You’re all professionals. You’re all heroes. I know we don’t have CoreFire, but you know what? Doctor Impossible is just a scientist. These guys always lose it in the end.”

At least now I know what they think of me. “Lose it in the end”? Nice. At the control console, I grin at her and shake my head. He who laughs last laughs longest, and I happen to have a really good laugh.

They split up to take me on, but the cameras track them—Rainbow Triumph heads off into the jungle, while Damsel and Elphin take to the air. Blackwolf skulks off through the wreckage of my airstrip, and the cyborg heads in the other direction. Mister Mystic walks into shadow and just fades away. Something shimmers on camera nine; then it’s gone. A secret weapon?

I start pressing buttons and the console lights up, flashing mostly red, with spots of green. They couldn’t destroy everything last time, and I’ve had about forty-eight hours to walk around making repairs—traps, robots, sensors.

It won’t stop all of them, but it doesn’t have to. I finger the hammer, heavy and satisfying in my hand. I want to say the word and test it, but I don’t know how much of its power is left. I had a little time to inspect it—it’s damaged but not dead. Some of what the Pharaoh had is still in there, whether it’s the power of Ra or Mickey Mouse; it used to work for him, so maybe it will work for me.

It’s time to go and face them. To prepare them, as we say in the trade, a proper reception. Welcome to my island, assholes.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

AND NOW FOR THOSE MEDDLING CHILDREN

         “Um, did we win?”

My dear “Champions.” Welcome. By the time you hear this, I will have taken over the world. Please do not be alarmed.

This is not a good sign. I hear speaker hiss, and Doctor Impossible’s now-familiar voice comes to us with plenty of reverb. It’s a recording.

My ears are ringing. I think a shrapnel fragment must have bounced off one of my cranial plates. My artificial skin has that fried feeling like after a grenade detonates nearby, but I can’t remember when that was. My left knee joint is frozen. I’m leaning against a metal wall in a room somewhere, and I’m trying to put the whole situation together again, but I’m dazed and my RAM is patchy. I’m having a cyborg moment.

There’s a diagnosis and repair routine that I do, which they drilled me on every day during rehabilitation. I’m not a technician—there’s no way I’m going to understand my body—so they gave me a long checklist. It starts with the head. The hard drives check themselves; I just have to check the tubing and the cameras and whatnot, which means getting inside.

On reflex, I turn to the wall to hide how the faceplate swings out, and you can see how deeply the metal impinges into my skull. There’s a cavity where the fan is, the size of a golf ball, and you don’t want to think about what came out to make room for it.

“Yeah. Lucky he was totally unprepared.” Rainbow’s voice.

“Is Fatale awake yet?” Blackwolf’s.

“Still booting up.” Rainbow again, dull-voiced.

“I heard that,” I say. “What happened?”

I must be the last one to wake up. Seven separate cells, ringing the perimeter of a circular room cut into the rock. About fifteen feet of rock separates each cell. The last one—intended for Lily, presumably—is empty. At least we can see one another. There’s a public-address system, over which Doctor Impossible is making an interminable victory speech. It’s too far away to smash.

Each of our cells is different. Mine is fenced in front with ordinary bars, but when I walk up to touch them, there’s something, a lock in my software, that stops me. My arms and legs seize up, there’s a queasy moment when I seem to be trying to step out of my own armor, and I nearly fall before the gyros right me. I couldn’t walk through it if my life depended on it, which, ha ha, ironically it does.

I congratulate you on your usual fine showing. However, as you must by now have realized, none can defeat the might of Doctor Impossible. By means of a scheme so brilliant only I could have devised it, I have taken control of our planet’s orbit.

“Has anybody got their communicator still?” Rainbow’s voice again. Silence as everybody checks. “Jesus.”

It all began so well, eighteen hours ago. Feral was still in the hospital, but Rainbow Triumph was there, itching to come along for once. Her mood was infectious. We’d piled into the jumpjet, fired up and armed to the teeth, everyone with their own reasons for wanting to smash something big and delicate. No more vague conspiracies, no more poking around in bars and prisons and magic shops. Even without CoreFire, we were the greatest heroes in the world. All we needed was a fair fight.

The island looked the same, the same ruined base, but now sprinkled with a few functioning lights. He’d started things up again, underground where the heroes hadn’t reached all the way in last time.

We split up to take him, the classic approach. The last I saw of them, Blackwolf was firing a grappling-hook gun with perfect accuracy, preparing to scale the outer cliff, with Rainbow Triumph following up the line. Damsel tore the cover off an accessway, and Elphin flitted off down the main hallway. Mystic vanished as I watched, flashing his enigmatic grin. Left alone, I waded into a sewage tunnel to find a way up through the septic system. It wasn’t hard—most of Doctor Impossible’s traps are pretty transparent to my vision—trapdoors, lasers, shifting walls all show up clearly marked when you look with the right frequencies.

The place was enormous. After about an hour and a half, I heard the sounds of what could only be the decisive battle. I sprinted through one metal gallery, then another, until I found the central control room. We had him cornered, and it was all over. He’s only a technician, after all. He looks like he weighs 120 pounds.

I took a film of the last battle as it happened, taped out of my left eye. I run it back, reliving the moment—as I came into the hall, I could see the battle unfolding about 150 feet away. The Champions had cleared a circle in a swarming army of cybernetic minions, and they were throwing down with the Doctor. I was the last to arrive. And I could see right away that I was the world’s last hope.

I stopped for maybe three seconds to watch. Damsel was closing in on the Doctor, looking quite simply like the wrath of God. Whatever my feelings about her, I never quite considered what it would be like to have her angry at me. Watching the tape, I saw Blackwolf dodge a first and then a second energy blast, twisting his body, banking on sheer athletic ability. Mister Mystic was whispering alien syllables, his low and resonant voice carrying through the chamber.

And the Doctor beat them. It was barely even a fight. Rainbow went down before I could even power all the way up and start my sprint. It reminds me of nothing so much as footage of CoreFire dispatching some helpless nobody.

Doctor Impossible looked happy. No, he looked like he was having the best day of his entire life. He had a new weapon, a hammer held in his left hand; Mister Mystic conjured an eerie walking shadow, but it shattered like glass when the hammer touched it. Bullets, punches, bolts of energy—nothing could touch him, and he seemed a hundred times as strong. By the time I got there he was using its handle to pin Damsel against the wall by her neck, holding her off the ground like a naughty puppy.

Blackwolf looked genuinely shocked, angrier than I’d ever seen him. He managed a fancy duck and roll that carried him past the blaster fire and almost to Doctor Impossible himself, who then clubbed him to the ground one-handed with the butt of a ray gun, not even seeming to think about it. The blaster was in his right hand; he spun it in his fingers, then sprayed shot after shot at Elphin, who dodged madly, faster than a hummingbird, her cutie-pie face drawn with concentration.

He let Damsel drop, choked out, then managed to grab Elphin’s spear just behind the blade. That’s my cue, I remember thinking.

The room blurred as I accelerated to my top speed, pounding across the cavernous room, dodging robotic minions like a broken-field runner. Everyone else slowed down as all my systems kicked up to their highest level. I ducked a cybernetic ogre’s swinging steel fists and bulled straight through a crowd of smaller scrimmagers with a sound like a refrigerator dropped from a crane. Chips of metal, plastic, and glass sprayed from the impact, but I didn’t slow. A proximity alarm beeped and I reached one arm back to shred a diving drone helicopter with depleted-uranium slugs—no rubber bullets this time. For good or ill, this is what I was made for. The next generation of warfare.

Sixty feet away, and Elphin had lost her spear, the last heavy hitter still standing. I knocked Impossible’s last defender to the floor, stepped over Blackwolf’s prone form, and made ready to settle this for good. Elphin had fallen to her knees, stunned by a right cross; he yanked her off the ground. She was fading.

I was thirty feet away, then fifteen. Even Elphin stopped to watch when she saw me, mesmerized by this oncoming disaster. I was coming for my maker. Tactical computer sized up the fight, estimated a five-second outcome. Half a dozen bone-breaking combat scenarios scrolled across my onboard display. I cracked my knuckles theatrically.

“Doctor Impossible,” I growled. “This ends now.”

He looked up from his work as I started my leap, left ankle pivoting as my hips cranked around, ready to deliver a digitally calibrated, fusion-powered titanium-alloy side kick like the crack of doom.

At the last instant, his gaze flicked up to me and he saw me distinctly for the first time. He was still holding Elphin off the floor left-handed, but he found just a moment to pluck an oblong piece of plastic off his belt and point it at me. In playback, it looks like the little black remote you get with your car keys. He pressed the button and it was over. My little home movie ends in an extreme close-up of the laboratory’s scarred marble floor. He’s a professional. He knew exactly who I was and how I worked, and unlike me he came prepared. He took me down in less than a second, frozen like the Tin Woodman in the rain.

My first act will be to demand the surrender of all the governments of Earth, via the United Nations Security Council. You have no alternative. Legal details of this process can be found on my web site.

Across from me, Elphin sits in her own special cell, a low stone platform three feet on each side, her arms hugging her knees. Apart from the platform, the room is cold iron. A wooden cross hangs on each wall, the door, floor, and ceiling. Her spear is outside, propped against the wall with Damsel’s swords. She looks around without speaking, her huge eyes all pupil.

“What’s the plan? Does anyone have a plan?” I ask.

Blackwolf shushes me, points at the walls. Listening devices.

But at this point, I don’t care much. I glare at him. “I thought you said we could beat him!”

He shrugs. “This was way outside the usual parameters. It may not have been him, you know. Could’ve been a shape changer.”

“No metamorphs. I saw hard skeleton in there. It was him.”

“He is no warrior,” whispers Elphin, sullen. Another quarter heard from.

A deep thrumming comes through the rock, engines turning in the depths. Would he actually throw us into the Sun? How crazy is he, exactly? And how exactly do we get out of this one?

Two doors down from me, Mister Mystic is bound and gagged. Beyond him is the empty cell, fitted with reinforced manacles.

Whatever those machines are doing, they’re running at a fever pitch. Damsel is sleeping on the floor, curled up in a corner, bathing in the amber lamplight. Rainbow Triumph stares straight ahead, not moving. Every few minutes, she swallows, as if trying to get rid of a nasty taste in her mouth.

“Anyone hear from Lily?” I ask, breaking the silence.

Blackwolf shrugs awkwardly. “Not since her little walkout. Not unless you have. I put her up on the usual lists, but you know how she is. Just about invisible when she wants to be.”

“Great,” Rainbow chimes in. “And who asked her to join, again?”

Blackwolf’s neck is in a simple collar welded to the wall. No lock to pick, or chain to break. He can’t even sit down. It’s like Doctor Impossible’s making fun of his lack of powers. Any of the rest of us could have broken it in a second.

“Who said ‘split up’? Was that my idea?”

Blackwolf strains at the collar for a second, then gives up. “That’s it. Now I’ll never avenge my brother and sister. Fuck!”

Not moving, Damsel looks up. “Give it a rest, Marc. We’re all in the same boat here.”

“That’s fine, Damsel. You rested now? You want to break us out of here?”

She doesn’t answer.

Rainbow takes something from a pouch at her neck and eats it.

“What? It’s my meds. I need them every twelve hours. Basically in seventy-two hours I’ll be dead, if anyone cares.”

Silence reigns. We must be way under the ruined laboratory by now. I can hear the ocean, faintly.

Across the hall from me, Elphin still isn’t moving off of her little platform.

“What are you looking at?” She must have caught me looking. But I have to ask.

“Well…why doesn’t Elphin do it?”

“She’s a fairy.” Even Blackwolf sounds a bit on edge.

“I cannot break the bars, Fatale. These symbols restrain me, nor can I touch cold iron. I’ll never fulfill Titania’s mission.”

“What mission? What was it? Why didn’t you go ahead and do it, if you’ve really been around for centuries?”

“It isn’t time yet. And I’m not…I’m not entirely sure what it is.”

“So those crosses are really holding you back? What about a Buddha, or a Star of David? Would that bother you as much?”