41. from "Victory", chapter 19

“Amelia can’t see the future, my Empress. No one can.”

The Empress laughed as she dipped her hand into the cool fountain. “Of course, my slave, I know!” The water dangled through her fingers. “She can’t see specifics.”

Domino would rather die than let the Empress see how the title slave rankled her. Technically she was a free agent, but the mistress of New Eleuthera was learning that meant nothing now.

Hours later, Elisabeth Mercedes Petra learned her own assumed title meant nothing against her retained humanity. “Giving,” the Empress panted at the foot of her not-quite-there throne, “BIRTH was not this tough!”

“You have a child?” The voice of Warlord, the unexpected father of Elisabeth Mercedes Petra in another world, came from the mist. He bent down to tend the fallen Empress, either not understanding or not believing who she said she was.

“Kei,” she corrected herself, “father, I was told it wouldn’t,” she grunted and held her belly, “hurt so much!”

“Doctor!” Warlord flipped his head and yelled into the mist in full armor. “Let me see what I can do.” He reached through her toga, but there was no body beneath.

“Where,” Warlord bit back as the physicians came toward him. An instant later, they and Warlord were propelled from the Empress lay. Another instant later, Warlord noted from the corner of his eye a flash of hair and fur that smoothed itself into perfect skin and bone before his proclaimed daughter’s robe shimmered onto her.

“What was that?” Warlord wasn’t often speechless when he chose to speak, and rarely without some explanation – he had Gadgetmaster’s genius without his intuition. The dressed surgical personnel put hands on his shoulder epaulets with just enough force to indicate they could have ruined him without touching their sovereign. Keiji Inoue picked this battle not to fight.

As he strode through the double doors and let them swing behind him, he grumbled at the sight of the tall, hard-on-the-eyes alien attending the surgical theater from outside.

“Meatball surgery,” Warlord muttered at his view of their waving like they’d had too much to drink. “But why?”

“Despite She-who-rules’ power,” one rather shaky, Esperian tried to tell him through awkward mandibles, “She still bears Human form. That body must be tended to for,”

The alien – no, Warlord in a lighter armor corrected himself, Esperian – noticed him pause by his mandibles remaining still. “Must be tended to?”

“So She-who-rules is in health.”

“She has,” he slapped the transparent partition separating him from the surgical routine, “the powers of a god and can’t heal herself?”

“She cannot, because She knows not what ails her.” Then the Esperian’s face turned to stone.

Fiery rain poured on the Superstars and their hangers-on and made Daniel Gallatin crankier that usual. Just when he thought he could retract his extension-made canopy over them, he had to angle it to bridge a gap the non-fliers could cross without the ground collapsing on which the ends rested.

“How much,” Reginald wheezed through the rain at one point under Gadgetmaster’s improvised tarp, “more of this?”

“As much as there is,” he replied. “We’re the good guys, remember?”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” The telepath reminisced, “Darn it, Dave would’ve commandeered transport or Emma would have seen how far away,”

“Who’re they?”

“From Lifeline,” he turned to Beacon who’d asked him, “my earth’s version of … no, my Earth’s better counterparts to you bozos!” Touchstone may have said his last word if Gadgetmaster had cared to listen to him as he scouted ahead and Blaze kept the worst of the deluge from above off them.

“You don’t like us much, do you?” That came from Cadmus who with Transwarp was plowing the leafy overhangs that should have kept them hidden from pursuers.

“It’s not a question of liking you,”

“Maybe it is,” Transwarp cut in before her husband Mariner could alight and cut Reginald Berkeley up. Touchstone turned on her in his own grief-tinged hostility.

“Ah, how I miss the gang … I can almost ‘hear’ their dying thoughts on Annorax.” Touchstone counted off and didn’t notice the rain. “Olivia, the climate-controlled Oasis … Emma, our Traveller … damn, I’d forgotten.”

“Forgotten?” Beacon kept her force field over her and Touchstone’s head while the others of their pack hurdled by them. “Get this, pal,” she turned on him, “Daniel and I have had to be heroes longer than most of these,” she waved to take in their surroundings, “people have been alive! You think we haven’t wanted – after we got married, you think I didn’t BEG – Daniel to hang up those things? Mirrorimage got blown up,” she heaved, “Tony got smashed,” and without realizing it she batted him with a projection from her field, “Shasta got killed by someone pretending to be him!”

Touchstone brushed his side with his hand as Beacon continued her tirade, “We’ve all lost people to villains, aliens, and lunatics! Bound’s dead from getting whacked into a tree, Salamander tripped on a gas main, Guillaume … well, he was apparently never Guillaume to start with – yes, Danny told me!”

“I bet.”

“If I didn’t know we needed everybody here alert and thinking, I’d wipe that smug look off your face!”

“You’ve got that right,” Gadgetmaster returned to the startled arguers alongside Blaze hovering above ground to his right, “but nobody does that until we’re done here.”

“And when’s that?”

Beacon’s husband said nothing but just looked up. Where the rain had pelted them with pile driver force, now the skies were clear. Beneath them, when they caught up to their companions, Beacon and Touchstone saw the sprawling metropolis striding the Congo River, the site of the soon-coming Olympics and the point of many fates.

“Will you look at that?” Beacon gasped.

“Yeah,” her husband punctuated as Blaze crept behind them. “Seen one city, seen them all.”

“Oh?” Zenia interjected with Mariner behind her. “I’m betting security there is tighter than,” she fought for a suitably contemptible metaphor, “well, tighter than you can imagine!”

“Which is why we’re walking in,” Gadgetmaster said as he bent down and took some soil that he let pour through his hand. Then his extension shot past Mariner’s right shoulder and nearly shoved Touchstone on his backside to reach Cadmus. It stretched to Cadmus and just hung there stiffly.

“What,” Cadmus said as Generis was charging up in her energy form, “is the big idea of that?” The techno-organic giant reached out and touched the smooth, micro-riveted surface of Gadgetmaster’s extension without flinching.

“It’s not pointing at him,” he stated as his eyes widened, “but past him.” He looked down at his wrist display. “Three humans, armed.”

“Honey, disappear!” Mariner cried as he shot into the air. Transwarp did so as Blaze rose on heated air and Beacon spread her force field among the land-bound heroes. What greeted them was less than reassuring.

“Move and you’re dead!” It sounded like someone who tried to hide that he was Spanish, but a lilt gave him away … soon the jungle gave up four camouflage-covered soldiers striding toward them and armed to the teeth. Two women and two men, one of the former whom Gadgetmaster recalled seeing a long time ago. She barked, “Now lift up your hands!”

The hero replied, “But if we do that, we have to move,” and he was cut off by a recoil that knocked him to the ground.

“DANNY!” Beacon and Blaze screamed as they tried to move toward him but were stopped by the tallest man they’d ever seen, taller than even Bound had been.

The fliers and land-bound heroes couldn’t believe their eyes. In fact, looking directly at the man ahead of them was painful, but as behind them was a long drop, Mariner took initiative and from the air was shot down in the next instant by a camouflage-painted man with a tow-guided missile launcher mounted on his shoulder. If screeching Mariner didn’t fall just right, he’d be paste.

Gadgetmaster and Cadmus thought as one as the latter leaped and took several shots for doing so. That is, he would have if Iris hadn’t sent her rainbow to absorb them in. Beacon caught her in an energy field of her own as she stepped from rainbow’s end and into the line but not the source of fire.

“Out of my way,” Generis grumbled and brushed her fellow Europans aside to grab the field Iris was in.

“Wait!” Gadgetmaster called out as Blaze found their attackers and saw Generis advancing on Iris’ confinement. “You’re gonna blow,”

Shots rang out and Gadgetmaster fell to the ground again.

“That. Is. A. Big. Mistake.” Beacon turned around of hearing his cry.

“Nuts,” Miss Twirl spat, “we’re not maneuvering very well on this cliff!”

“Don’t have to,” the reappeared Transwarp cried out with a smaller version of their visible antagonist in tow. “I think he’ll tell them to stop. Reg,” she brandished her captive in the telepath’s face, “convince him!”

“Please, you don’t have to,” and what he would have said next was lost in a static of blanked eyes and frozen men. “We-are-here-to-meet-Musa-with-you.”

“By shooting at us? Yeah, that’ll convince me.” Melody Thomason folded her arms and held her baton at the captive’s neck.

“He’s right, you idiots!” A woman in an oversized fig leaf stepped out of the jungle’s end. “Team Eden’s worked with Musa since the Council of Emirs went crazy after the War.”

“Ah, Eve,” Gadgetmaster propped himself with his extensions and retracted them once he stood on his feet, “you just don’t know how to be subtle, do you?”

“Subtlety don’t feed the bulldog, Gadget-man.” The tall man shimmered and faded from sight as the speaker, a former sheik named Adam, came unarmed to face the assembled heroes. “And I see you’re hanging out with some new peeps,”

“No, no, don’t tell me,” the small man called Cain said as he put his forefinger to his head, “Ricochet I remember. Oh wait, you’re Beacon now.” Pointing out the others with his gaze after Miss Twirl had put her baton away at Transwarp’s behest, Cain identified those women, then Cadmus, Generis, Image, Iris, Touchstone, Dormouse, and Blaze. Gadgetmaster, it seems, everyone knew. “And some of us live to regret it.”

“Where’d Abel go?” Gadgetmaster referred to the tall man.

“Dead. Seth took his job, because there always had to be four – enough to replace,” Cain sneered, “our elders.”

“I’m sure this is very interesting,” Beacon retracted her field around Iris before Generis could blow it and her ward up, “but what’s Musa, whoever he is, got to do with this?”

“Musa’s ONLY the man to turn to if you want to get anything done or find out anything happening in central Africa.” Cain strung out, “Actually, you guys have met his family. Bound’s his son,”

“And Deirdre’s his daughter.” Gadgetmaster made a point of relating that before Cain the braggart omnipath could. Even more than Touchstone, Cain proved why telepathy in any dose was annoying and he was even more nonchalant about it. That’s why he got to “handle” Abel (and now Seth, apparently) and keep his mental talents from spilling onto everyone around him.

“And he’s,” Adam pointed out, “down there.” The valley opened on ants among men and women driving, walking, and otherwise migrating toward the center of the world, for all intents and purposes, in these final weeks of May.

 

© 2014 David Alvin