from "Victory", chapter three

[The complete novel, by the internal chronology of my Progeny Cycle series the fifth in the series, will be out July 2 this year, just sixty-nine days out! I have work to do … so by my son's seventh birthday you'll be able to buy the earliest occurring book Litany and my work-in-progress Rivalry on CreateSpace, Progeny and Legacy on AuthorHouse, and at last Victory on CreateSpace, as well as other online book retailers.

So the order of what's happening in the books is Litany, Rivalry, Progeny, Legacy, Victory. You can buy Litany, Progeny, and Legacy NOW by the way (“Rivalry” is due to be released the same time as “Victory” and most of the characters in these stories excerpted below are super-powered heroes and villains on the run after an alien invasion of Earth made possible by the Empress enjoying godlike power …]

Enjoy your day, David

“Tell me where she is,” Generis raged at the resistance fighter she’d pinned against the crumbling Diego Garcia wall, “or you’re a French fry!”

Dormouse stammered under her withering gaze, “Are you crazy? After we got here, Zenia just took off!” Since late August, it had taken the assembled heroes and others weeks on a makeshift raft to get to the site of this U.S. base.

Mariner zoomed in on the impromptu interrogation, “Gen, let him go. No one’s that scared and lies.”

“Okay,” she agreed with some reluctance as her hand resumed its human shape and size. “I have got,”

“Issues,” Dormouse muttered as he brushed perceived dust off his patchwork coat. Generis turned to him with crackling eyes to discourage any other words.

“Kenneth William Galbraith,” Beacon raged as she entered the dilapidated hangar bay in an airman’s coveralls with a blue towel draped on her shoulders, “we have not got time for your bull!” The expiration of the U.S. lease on the base eight years before had done nothing to improve its appearance. But the super humans who had arrived and the Ilois who kept squatting rights here after the armed forces left maintained a sign language-negotiated understanding between them.

“Don’t look for us,” their leader formed and Mariner translated, “and we won’t look for you.”

Beacon and Generis with their teams decided they could live with that. While the listening stations left after the United States vacated the base were fine-tuned thanks to Gadgetmaster’s wife and the growing-on-her Miss Twirl, memories cane to a boil.

Like most fights, this one started for trivial reasons. Melody Thomason was talking to herself, “Birdbrain needs himself a real woman.”

“What do you know?” Cindy Gallatin sputtered under her and her force field’s strain as she reconfigured a circuit board.

With the end of her baton doubling as a welding torch, Miss Twirl replied, “This thing with Zenia running off ... it’s a turf war.” She tossed her hair back and elaborated, “The Golden Lady claims the baby’s hers, and Zenia claims it’s hers. I don’t need the wisdom of Solomon to tell her what to do.”

“Really?” Beacon said half-seriously. “And what exactly would you do?”

“Forget the kid and start again.” A spark from the circuit board punctuated her leer as she languidly stretched her limbs. “Now give me thirty minutes with the flying Dutchman,”

“Englishman,” Beacon corrected her.

“And I’ll help him forget about Zenia and her disappearing act too,” Miss Twirl leered.

In what she thought was too low a voice for Melody to hear, Beacon said, “Over my dead body. Aren’t you a little young for him?”

“Hah! Since when has that stopped a man?”

Cindy cracked her knuckles and lowered her force field enough for her softened gaze to fall fully on Miss Twirl as she laughed off Beacon’s doubts as old-fashioned scruples. Melody caught the intent behind Cindy’s eyes three seconds before she was pushed back into a corrugated metal wall by an invisible blunt force.

“Let’s see you laugh that off,” Beacon stared down at Miss Twirl as she tried to raise herself against the pressure the former’s energy field exerted on her body.

Defiance flared across Miss Twirl’s face as she snarled, “You’ve gotta be kidding me.” She looked over where her baton lay against the board she’d been repairing. “You think without that baton I’m helpless?” To prove her point, the baton stretched and speared Beacon’s shoulder through her force field to weaken her concentration. Beacon clutched her shoulder as Miss Twirl tumbled past her and retrieved her offensive weapon. “With it, Miss Twirl is the cat’s pajamas!”

“Not in this lifetime,” Beacon bit her lip and forced her field to buckle the panel they had both been fixing. “Where are you, you little troll?”

“Sticks and stones may break my bones,” Miss Twirl taunted as she whirled her baton and sent one of its business ends crackling with electricity toward the ceiling over Beacon’s head. The already dangling panel came loose and bounced off Beacon’s field to the floor with a clatter. The eighteen-year-old gingerly stepped back and held out her hand to retrieve the baton coming toward her. “Hey, old lady. I’m over here!”

“Where?” Beacon turned and shot her force field toward where she thought she heard Miss Twirl’s voice come from, but she flipped toward the opening door and just avoided the brawn of Cadmus.

“What’s going on ... oh nuts!” Cadmus slapped Miss Twirl’s booted feet from his face and might have knocked her flat if she hadn’t been turning from him. His attempts to grab the malcontent in midair were frustrated by Beacon’s force field between the strongman and the athlete.

“Back off, big guy,” Beacon hissed with a younger rage. “Thomason’s had this coming to her for months!” Beacon faced her as Generis came behind Cadmus and considered leaping between the antagonists. The giant raised his hand to his old commander in Europa.

“Genevieve,” Cadmus called her to get her attention, “they’re grown-ups. I say let them blow off some steam.”

Generis’ eyes crackled as she faced up to him, “ ‘Blowing off steam’ could destroy this place. You know how the Superstars get throwing their weight around.”

Miss Twirl stopped dancing around Beacon’s field projections long enough to turn her wrath on Generis and Cadmus. Beacon held position as Melody Thomason regaled them, “What do you know?” With the business end of her baton pointed at them, she yelled, “It’s the ‘Superstars’ throwing their weight around that caused this mess.” Beacon gasped and Miss Twirl continued, “You can call me a lot of things, but don’t ever call me a,” she spat like a curse, “Superstar.”

Beacon took advantage of Miss Twirl’s reflective moment to use her field to pin her against a wall and knock the baton out of her hand. With more venom than she intended, Cindy Gallatin began, “Don’t even think about calling yourself that. Miss Twirl was my friend.”

“And like most of your friends,” the prone object of her scorn posed, “you cut and left her behind in Wellington, huh?”

“What?” Generis and Cadmus turned and asked each other silently.

“She told me how after the War broke out, you and Gadget became Army regulars and didn’t even bother checking that flight she was on for survivors. The red white and blue gave her a better deal, but she tried to get hold of you. You weren’t even listening?”

Beacon mentally flexed and retracted her force field. “Jessica’s alive?”

“Who?” Generis and Cadmus turned and asked each other in mime.

“Not for long. She tried getting in touch with you guys when you came to the Cape to settle Blazer’s hash,” Miss Twirl sprang to her feet and referred to the following year, “but you looked past her like she wasn’t even there. After the emergency measures taken when the Treaty was signed and with greenheads,” the derogatory slang for Uniforce troopers, “all over the place, Jessie thought ... Jessie thought it was better to stay out of sight.”

“How do you know her?”

Melody almost choked to get the next words out. “You know how you have that one teacher in school that changes your life?” She wrung her hands in each other as she reflected, “That’s who Miss Wick was in fourth grade at Springfield Elementary. She saw me; I wasn’t the brightest kid, I wasn’t from the nicest home, but I was pretty strong. She started at a competition one day to say, ‘That reminds me of Gadget’ and caught herself when the principal came up to her.”

“WHO?” Generis and Cadmus’ curiosity was at the breaking point.

“Jessica Wickerlane, the Miss Twirl that I knew when I was on Gadget’s team,” Beacon euphemistically referred to the Superstars.

“We don’t know how to reach him or Touchstone anyway,” Generis responded, “so that means you guys are on Beacon’s team.”

“Not me, lady,” the Miss Twirl before them grunted with a new confidence as she inched toward her baton. “Seems like all you super-zeroes care about is the pecking order. You’re not gonna peck on me!” Cadmus saw her just before she reached the baton and broke its end against a wall to make the world go white.

There was no vantage point from which the whole of Diego Garcia could be seen. However, Zenia Sinclair-Coleridge was depressed enough to look into the ocean lapping the beach and see the depths. In a dull one-piece she’d also bought at Ngee Ann City, Zenia shivered even though there was no biting wind.

Before she caught the jets’ whine and teleported away, a form shot down and lifted the woman also known as Transwarp high into the air. The action on Transwarp’s body caused her cheeks to recede and her own fatigue to evaporate as she pounded on the armor of her husband Mariner. He seemed to hide everything beneath his outer shell ... until he wanted to show himself.

Zenia couldn’t be heard as her abductor shot into the air, but her burning look made intent clear as crystal. Just when the exhausted teleporter thought she couldn’t take any more, her abductor stopped in midair.

She heaved just as Mariner supplied an oxygen mask to her nose and mouth from his shoulder epaulets. “Are you ... crazy? I’m free ... freezing up here!” Without thinking where she was, Zenia tried to push herself away from her husband.

Keith Coleridge squawked through his own mask, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Keith’s wife looked around her and nearly intercepted a flock of gulls approaching the humans in the air.

Zenia screamed, “Why bring me here?” The shrill pitch made Mariner wince for a moment.

“I wanted to talk, and I find the air here clears up a lot of things.” Mariner toned down and elicited his wife’s concern. “Since you got back from the Empress, you’ve been cutting yourself off from everyone.”

Zenia pouted with surprise. “Keith, she took our baby!” Reflexively, the teleporter caressed her now-empty womb. “Our baby ... and I saw that psycho laugh and couldn’t do anything.” She forced back a tear and first noticed the bruises on her fists from pounding Mariner’s armor. She sniffed from the rich air and pled, “Take me down,” with a finality that indicated he’d better do it five minutes before.

“I want to make a point, Zee.” Without losing his grip on her, Mariner took in the entire subtropical view with its midday sun. “From a mile up, everything looks different. Mom,” he referred to the British heroine Albatross, “would do this when the people on the ground, some of them on her side, ticked her off.” They were moving slightly out of land range as Mariner elaborated, “Mom wanted to fly like a bird ... so much that sometimes she forgot she wasn’t one.”

His slowed tone prompted Mariner’s wife to reach toward his faceplate. “So you put on this suit to get away too?”

“It was Mom’s design after the Tea Party cannibalized her old one. This is more heavy duty,” he noted the tarnish from their recent altercation en route to Diego Garcia, “but for casual maneuvers, it’s overcompensating.”

“I’m no mechanic,” Zenia admitted. “What’s your point?”

“After we got word that Gadgetmaster had come back, the Boudicca League needed every available man and woman and all the equipment it could lay its hands on. We headed to the States, and I had to make this suit I’m wearing, the Albatross Mark III, worked at powered-down levels.” As Keith Coleridge alighted on the beach with his precious cargo, Zenia got to look around her in a different way. As Mariner raised his faceplate by mental command, his wife’s face lost not an iota in the transition.

“It only works because I do.”