Author: flintgraphics@comcast.net

As the small group stood on the now otherwise empty ice floe that Chilz was maintaining, Artemis patiently led Agent Blazer through the morning’s events from the Vanguard’s point of view, with occasional supporting commentary from Quanta, the Blue Flame, Chilz and Phantom Ace. Quanta, in particular, wanted to get right to questioning the Underhill-Hart people about what they knew and when they knew it, but catching Artemis’ gaze, he bided his time.

“Well, it seems obvious that you had no designs on the station itself, and were only trying to help once you saw that our people were being attacked,” Blazer admitted once the tale was complete. “So Underhill-Hart will not be pressing charges for trespassing at this time–”

“Excuse me?!” Quanta burst out. He had grown increasingly annoyed at the woman’s presumption of authority, and this last arrogant pronouncement was the final straw. “We are duly deputized Federal officers, and this station is in US territorial waters – we have full jurisdiction here, especially in matters that pertain to meta-human crime and alien activity, BOTH of which were present, obviously. There is no question of our trespassing.

“In fact, given that you people seem to have been guarding a facility that may have been concealing a hostile alien entity, I think it’s you who’d better start answering our questions, if you want to avoid seeing the inside of a Federal prison for colluding with a known extraterrestrial terrorist!”

That seemed to hit a nerve with Agent Blazer who glared as she opened her mouth for a hot retort. “We had no idea Ebony Night was back on Earth —”

“None of us did,” Artemis cut her off soothingly. “And I’m sure Agent Blazer will be more than willing to return the cooperation we’ve shown her, Quanta, without our further emphasizing just how shaky her company’s legal position is right now. Indeed, I imagine she’d like to be gone, with all of her people, before SHADE shows up…”

The Underhill-Hart operative looked mulish for a moment but then relaxed, her mouth twisting in a rueful grimace. “Yes, I’d rather not get tied up with the government – that’s what our lawyers are for, after all. And we really are all on the same side here… OK, I’ll tell you what I can. ”

“Thank you,” Artemis replied, before a still disgruntled Quanta could throw more fuel on the fire. “My first question is, why was Underhill-Hart out here, seemingly guarding an empty research station in the first place?”

“Something I wondered myself, prepping for this rescue mission,” Blazer replied. “I went over all the information in the company files on this job – the contract was offered 12 days ago, and the terms negotiated and accepted, over the Internet. No one at Underhill-Hart actually met face-to-face with anyone at the Aquarius Research Group, but they are a known organization, if a somewhat secretive one. Which is not an uncommon trait with our clients, actually.”

“Is it usual, though, to take contracts over the Internet, without meeting any principals in person?” Quanta asked.

“It’s not SOP, no… but it’s not unheard of, either. Exceptions are occasionally made, and as I said, many clients insist on complete discretion. As long as management can be sure they’ve identified a client as being legitimately who they say they are, and are given proper intelligence on the mission parameters, threats, and objectives, we’ve not found it to be a problem.”

“So why did this Aquarius company want their station guarded, then?” Chilz asked, at the same time subtly renewing the melting ice beneath their feet.

“We were told that a refurbishment project would be getting underway by the end of the month, and that a particularly radical element of PETA had made threats against both ARG in general and the Porpoise Mount Research Station specifically. This was backed up by documentary evidence, or so  I was told – I didn’t have time to go over everything personally this morning. Whatever the evidence was, it was enough to convince my bosses, and Agent Mariner’s team was dispatched 10 days ago to protect the faciltiy.”

Further questioning confirmed to even Quanta’s grudging satisfaction that Underhill-Hart had known nothing about the massive crystalline object that had lain under the station, nor about the concealed alien spacecraft. The timing of their hiring was suspicious, and the purpose behind it remained unclear, but there was little doubt the mercenaries were as puzzled as the heroes.

Agent Blazer showed little interest in taking custody of the defeated Changelings, but was more than willing to extend her loan to the Vanguard of the power-dampening restraints until they could deliver the prisoners to the authorities in Astoria. Quanta was grateful she couldn’t see his red face as he was forced to admit that their own devices were in various states of disassembly on a workbench in his lab.

♦  ♦  ♦  ♦

Meanwhile, Agent Mariner, Scion and Orca, having run a systematic underwater search of the area for the missing villain Washout with no luck, began to investigate the collapsed station. Realizing that the power was still functioning, Scion decided to take a look inside, both to make sure Washout wasn’t hiding amidst the wreckage and to search for any clues. While Mariner continued the external search the two Vanguard heroes swam into the twisted metal maze of the ruins…

Neither Scion’s censors nor Orca’s heightened sense of smell caught any hint of Washout, and as they searched the lights began to flicker, the power finally succumbing to the ocean. Just as Scion entered the submerged Operations Center, its floor tilted at a 70° angle, the lights went out altogether. Except, he noted in surprise, for a single computer which continued to show blinking lights and a functioning screen!

Flicking on an external searchlight, he swam up to the mysterious device and extended a finger… his nanometal armor created a connection to its USB port. Plugging in, his own systems seized control of the computer’s operating system and he began scanning it… but the intrusion must have activated a fail safe. Even as Scion began to study the code the computer began to erase itself. He downloaded what he could, but in less than a minute the computer was slagged, its own independent power flickering out as the last of the system software vanished into a sea of zeros.

♦  ♦  ♦  ♦

Once the last of the Underhill-Hart forces had departed, the sound of their helicopters fading into the east, the Vanguard prepared to return to the AzTech Pyramid. Quanta, on learning that the others had found no trace of Washout, used his post-cognition power to try and follow the villain’s trail… but this just confirmed that he’d taken off at high speed toward land. He had appeared to freeze in place when Ebony Night spoke, but had resumed his shoreward swim as soon as the alien had vanished.

Crux and Chains, both now conscious but fully restrained by the loaned power-dampening collars and wrist clamps (and in Crux’ case, a sonic gag), were loaded into the holding capsules of the Interceptor. Cassie, Chris and Paragon (as each preferred to be called) were allowed to ride in the passenger cabin, while Artemis and Phantom Ace teleported ahead and Blue Flame flew under his own power, so as to make room.

All three of the Changelings remained in various states of confusion. The teenagers retained nothing but confused fragments of memory between the time they were “taken” by Nimrod and waking up on an ice floe in the Pacific. Paragon had a somewhat more continuous sense of the last week, although it too was fragmented and dreamlike. Nonetheless, all three did their best to answer what questions they could.

Under Totem’s gentle questioning their stories unfolded: Paragon was sure that Nimrod must have realized his mission objective had been achieved and that his puppets were now prisoners, because he had cut loose all the captured Changelings. While under Nimrod’s control they had been unable to instigate even the slightest physical action under their own will. But the moment Ebony Night and the spaceship had vanished, their minds were their own again.  

“It was strange,” Paragon tried to explain. “I felt like I was shoved out of my mind, but was still in my body… only, just as a passenger. I don’t think it was like I was hypnotized… I don’t know, it’s difficult to articulate…”

“I remember walking home from school,” Chris said, nervously chewing on a finger nail. “I heard a voice… a man’s voice… in my head… then it’s all just a gray jumble. I- I seem to remember opening wormholes… a bunch of times… and faces passing through them… but nothing else until I woke up in the middle of the freakin’ ocean… and then that creepy lizard guy’s voice…”

“Yeah,” Cassie agreed. “I remember eating dinner with Bobby and Felix… then hearing some guy’s voice telling me to come outside… after that it’s just a blur… the most I got is a few flashes when I went all ghost-like… I think I remember a big rock or something falling on me… then I was sitting on the iceberg… and really freakin’ out when that hissy voice started talking!”

“I do remember you guys, a little bit,” Paragon said to the younger Changelings, both of whom seemed fascinated with him, bashful but clearly taken. “I remember you and the others… in some sort of control room or lab… something pretty high-tech… and a man in black armor. And glowing red eyes. There were rooms… like dorm rooms, I think… were we slept when we weren’t on, um, missions, or whatever…”

“Do you have any idea where this “base” was located?” Quanta asked eagerly.

“No, sorry,” Paragon replied, shrugging. “It’s all in pieces, and sorta dreamlike… and I think that he had Chris here use his wormholes whenever we entered or left the place. I don’t think I ever saw the outside at all.

“But listen, I really want to understand what’s going on and I definitely want to prevent ever being a puppet for this Nimrod character ever again… or for anyone else that might figure out how to control us Incidentals. So if there’s anything I can do, be a guinea pig for any tests, whatever – I volunteer!”

“Yeah, me too,” both teenagers piped up simultaneously, which made them both laugh for the first time since they’d been freed. Then they grinned at Paragon.

He grinned back and gave them both a thumbs-up. “Don’t worry guys, this is the Vanguard – they’ll figure out a way to stop this from ever happening again. They’ll make sure we’re free to be the heroes I know we can be!”

♦  ♦  ♦  ♦

On returning to the AzTech Pyramid, the Vanguard settled their guests into visitors quarters and their prisoners into cells before turning to several vital tasks. Scion contacted his friend Stormlord, in Portland, to inform him of the apparent return of Ebony Night, while Quanta took on the job of informing SHADE of the morning’s events. Artemis relayed the same information to Raptor at the Libery Alliance. No one was happy to hear that they might be dealing with yet another alien threat.

They also made sure all appropriate agencies and concerned parties, including the APD, knew about the new so-called Nimrod and his ability to control many, if not all, Changeling meta-humans – another bit of news that pleased no one. The task of informing Cassie’s mother and Chris’ parents that the teens were safe and unharmed was a happier one, and thanks to Phantom Ace both families were reunited just before the authorities descended on the Pyramid.

SHADE and the APD, represented by Agents Jessup and Stark and Detective Ransom  respectively, wrangled over jurisdiction while Artemis, Scion and Quanta pulled out all the stops to persuade both sides not to arrest Paragon or the teenagers. In the end Crux and Chains were taken away by SHADE, while the teens were remanded to their parents’ custody, and Paragon to the Vanguard’s supervision, until the DA could decide what, if any charges, were to be brought against them. Given their powers, especially Chris’, and the possibility of renewed mind-control, SHADE did insist that both minors be fitted with unobtrusive monitoring/power-dampening bracelets until everything could be sorted out.

Despite their willingness to help the Vanguard, neither Ghostlight nor Kid Singularity were allowed by their parents to do so. Quite adamantly not allowed. Once they had departed with their children, only Paragon was left to play  experimental rat in Scion’s lab. He and Quanta were just beginning to run some preliminary tests on their volunteer when Artemis knocked on the door and stepped in.

“John, Quanta, I’m sorry to interrupt, but it is past time that we had a serious talk with Álvaro de la Vega. I know these tests you want to run are important, but I think they will prove to be more effective, and useful, once you have some additional information. Information which I believe Álvaro is best positioned to provide. I’ve arranged a meeting with him in his office in ten minutes.”

Puzzled, but trusting that their teammate knew what she was doing, Scion and Quanta sent Paragon back to the guest quarters which had been assigned to him and followed Artemis to the elevator. The rest of the team were waiting for them, looking mystified, and they all descended to the 65th floor and de la Vega’s office.

•• •• ••

“Wow, the whole team!” de la Vega said, standing up as Trevor ushered in the heroes. “I’m guessing this is more than just a courtesy call to fill me in on this morning’s little adventure?” At Artemis’ unsmiling stare he sighed and waved off his assistant. 

“Thanks Trevor, hold all my calls and go ahead and reschedule my 16:00 meeting with the Secretary of Defense this afternoon… actually, clear my schedule for the rest of the day, I’m thinking we may be here for awhile.” Once the aide-de-camp had retreated, firmly closing the double doors behind him, Álvaro settled back into his chair behind the wide expanse of his teak, glass and steel desk. He looked thoughtfully at his guests for a moment, then sighed again.

His office was 2500 square feet of ultra-modern space, on two levels, in the southwest corner of the AzTech Pyramid. The west and south walls were unbroken expanses of his proprietary “glass,” and like the Vanguard’s Ready Room six floors above, provided expansive views of the city below, the Pacific  to the west, and the foothills and rugged peak of Mt. Defiance to the south. Chairs and sofas were arranged in various configurations around the space, but at the touch of a few buttons, several of them slid silently across the carpeted floor to arrange themselves in a casual semicircle in front of his desk. 

“Make yourselves comfortable, and let’s get this started. Artemis, this would seem to be your show… care to tell me what it’s all about?”

Motioning for her teammates to take seats, Artemis remained standing, her eyes locked on de la Vega’s. “I think you have already guessed what we are here about — Nimrod.”

Barely seated, most of the team were back on their feet, with various exclamations of shock, disbelieve or confusion. Álvaro never blinked, but a smile slowly overtook his features as Artemis waved her friends into silence. He tamped it down and broke his gaze with her, standing and coming around the desk to lean hipshot on it. He sighed for a third time, and shook his head.

“Well, I knew this was inevitable, from the moment I proposed funding the team,” he said, looking at each of the heroes in turn, ending with Artemis. “Frankly, I rather expected it sooner, given that I’m pretty sure that both you and Captain Astor, at least, have known since our first meeting, the day after the Incident. It was a good eavesdropping bug by the way, Captain… but both Raptor and I have been at this game a long time.”

JJ looked chagrined, but didn’t deny the charge. At the time he’d been a little surprised that he’d gotten away with it, so it was no great shock to learn that he really hadn’t. 

“Yes, we’ve known since that day,” he replied cooly. “I’d never heard of Nimrod, but Artemis knew a bit of the history, and we did our homework to fill in the gaps. But since Raptor and the Liberty Alliance seemed to be fine with it, we figured there was no need to make it a thing, if you wanted to keep it quiet.”

“I appreciate that discretion. But what’s changed? Why are we having this discussion today, in particular, as opposed to say last week, or six months from now?”

“Because,” Artemis said, crossing her arms, ”according to the mind-controlled Changelings, both innocent and criminal, involved in the recent attacks on ZeroPoint and an oceanic research facility, Nimrod is the mastermind behind it all… and by extension, behind the Incident itself.”

“Huh.” For the first time since they’d met him, Álvaro looked genuinely surprised… nonplussed, really, Artemis thought. If it was an act, it was a very good one. “Well, I hardly know what to say, beyond – I know for sure it wasn’t me, whoever this new “Nimrod” is.”

“So we believe,” Artemis sighed herself, finally turning and taking a seat with her teammates. A tension most of her teammates hadn’t noticed until it was gone left her body. “Else this meeting would be going rather differently.”

Álvaro arched an eyebrow and smirked. “I can only imagine. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but out of curiosity—“

“It was the launch of the Argos 7,” Scion said. “You were in the public eye, on one camera or another, for close to 24 solid hours, during which the initial attack, on the ZeroPoint headquarters, took place. And yes, I’m sure you could think of half a dozen ways you could’ve done both – I can think of at least three off the top of my head – but combined with the weight of everything else we know about you, we’re inclined to at least start with the possibility this Nimrod is an imposter.”

“Inclined,” Artemis added, “but not entirely convinced; not if we are going to keep on working together. I think it’s time for you to come clean about all of this, especially if you have any inkling of who such an imposter might be.”

“Oh, I have a very good idea who it is,” the billionaire replied, his usual insouciance momentarily slipping, replaced by a very cold look, his eyes gone suddenly hard. “And you’re right, it’s time and past time for me to let you all in on my sordid, if very exciting, past.” 

The devil-may-care de la Vega was firmly back in control of his face, and he flashed them a charming smile. Artemis’ breath caught — in that moment he reminded her very much of his great-grandfather. A man she still missed, after almost a century.

“But it’s a long story, and if I’m going to do it the justice it deserves, I’m going to need a drink. Anyone care to join me?” After a quick glance at Scion and Artemis, most of the team warily agreed. Once he’d provided everyone with their beverage of choice, de la Vega returned to lean once more against his desk, arms crossed, his expression pensive as he studied the heroes. Taking a sip of his own drink, he gave one last deep sigh and began.

“I’m going to tell you all the full story, which no living person on this planet knows — not the Secret Service agents who vetted me for my Presidential pardon, not my shrink, and not even the Liberty Alliance. Although I think a few of them suspect there’s more to me than what they know with any certainty.

“I suppose we should start at the beginning… that’s usually best, even if it’s not always obvious what constitutes the beginning. For me, I suppose my childhood…I was always a precocious, intellectually gifted child – oh please, don’t give me those looks. There’s no point in false modesty, it’s just the simple truth. I grew up an only child of successful middle-class parents, who appreciated music, education, and hard work. I graduated from high school at 16, had my doctorate in Engineering at 20. After a few years at NASA I founded my first company, Vega Electronics, at age 24.

“Everything I turned my hand to seemed to flourish, including my business. Within the first three years I’d developed two new integrated chips that were smaller, faster and packed in more memory than anything Intel or Motorola was then putting out, while also running a growing multi-million dollar business. It was an exciting, heady time, one I’d call the best if it wasn’t for my parent’s death toward the end of that period.” For a moment he seemed lost in a memory, before he shook himself and took another sip.

“Anyway, my success attracted attention, and not all of it favorable, whatever that cover article in Omni Magazine might’ve had to say to the contrary. In 1987 a Seattle-based rival, Harlan Technologies began an aggressive campaign to buy me out, and if my company had been publicly held I have no doubt they’d have tried a hostile take over. But it wasn’t and I was able to thumb my nose at them… not terribly diplomatically, I’m afraid.

“My refusal, not to mention my… let’s call it “brash” attitude… did not sit well with Roger Harlan, their founder and CEO — which I discovered when he tried to have me killed. Nothing dramatic or flashy, no exotic poisons, no gunning me down in the street, not even a “robbery gone wrong”… he just had his assassins ambush me while I was attempting to solo the West Face of Mt. Defiance. 

“If they’d just cut my ropes, hell even I would’ve believed, however briefly, that my death was accidental. But Harlan’s ego wouldn’t be satisfied unless he knew that I knew that it was him killing me; so the two assholes took the time to gloat, and deliver the old man’s message. God, they were smug… but that bit of ego gave me the opening I needed. I wasn’t in any position to stop them, but I sure as hell was going to try to take them down with me.

“And I did. All three of us plunged from that cliff face. Which, as it turned out, is what saved be from instant death.

“Of course, it also left me laying on top of two broken corpses on a slope of icy scree at 7,000 feet, with a great many broken bones and some serious internal injuries. Which I realized, once I came to, were likely just going to kill me slowly instead. Assuming hypothermia didn’t do me in first, of course. For all my proud intellect, I couldn’t think my way out of this one… I was going to die.

“I don’t know how long I lay there, drifting in and out of awareness, but the sun was low in the west when a voice spoke to me. Do you want to live? it asked. Even in the state I was in… well, sarcasm is just my default setting, I guess. No, no, I’m quite enjoying the whole dying experience, thank you very much.  There was a brief pause, and then the voice said Oh, well, in that case, I’ll just leave you to it, shall I?

“Even through the pain and delirium, right then and there I decided I liked this guy, whoever he was. Of course I want to live, I croaked. My throat was very dry by that time. Where are you? I can’t… see you… who are you? And in the answer to that last question lies a whole lot of story — but a story that is, in many ways, not entirely mine to tell.

“Well who was it?” Jonny burst out. “You don’t need to give us his whole origin story to tell us that!”

“I sort of do, actually,” Álvaro shrugged. “And we’ll get to it… we have to, if you’re going to fully understand what’s happening right now. But for the moment, I’ll just say that the voice made me an offer. It explained that it was, in essence, a disembodied intelligence. One that had been around for a very long time, in fact. The voice also pointed out that, while disembodied, he was in fact male, and could I kindly stop thinking of him as “it.”

“OK, so it – he – could read my mind. Sure, why not. I still wasn’t entirely sure that I wasn’t just hallucinating the whole conversation in my last few delirious, light-headed minutes of life. Either way, it was more entertaining than the pain, so I was willing to go with it.

“He needed a human host to give him full agency in the world, an “avatar” as he called it. He had taken many over the years, but he was currently between hosts. If I would consent to become one of these avatars, let him use my body as a host, he could heal me, completely and quickly… if not exactly instantly. I may have been delirious, but I wasn’t stupid. I had questions. 

“He answered them all, including the most important one – no, he would’t be evicting my mind from my body and taking it over. It was more of a symbiosis than a possession. But he made it clear that there might be times when he would take over, and at those times I would be a passenger in my own body, and he the driver. But mostly it would be a side-by-side thing, and on occasion it might even be just me again, alone in my head.

“I accepted.”

“Hardly a shocker, given that you’re here telling us the story.” Chuck took a swig from his beer, trying to appear nonchalant about the whole thing. He doubted he was fooling de la Vega.

“Indeed,” Álvaro tipped his own drink in acknowledgment of the point. “And however glad I am to be here now, back then I regretted it almost immediately. The pain of my savior’s healing was even worse than the pain of my fall – or rather the sudden stop at the end of it. And it lasted considerably longer.”

“How did this nameless, disembodied intelligence manage to heal such grievous injuries,” Artemis asked, genuinely curious. She’d known for quite some time that there was more to this man than he let on, but she hadn’t begun to imagine this fantastic tale.

“By jamming a small kundalini crystal onto the back of my neck. Which, before you ask, he did by means of a spider-like robot that appeared out of a rocky crevice nearby. And I assure you that freaked me out more than anything else that day — this isn’t something I advertise, but I have a terrible case of arachnophobia. If I hadn’t been completely disabled, I’d have run away, consequences be damned!

“Anyway, as I later learned, the crystal was absorbed by my flesh, and fused itself to my spine, at the base of my skull, eventually diffusing throughout my nervous system… and this gave the Hunter the access he needed. In that moment our two consciousnesses… well, they didn’t fuse; rather let us say, they truly met… I suddenly knew him in a way I’d never known anyone other than myself. And it was… overwhelming. 

“He thought of himself primarily as the Hunter, although there was a cavalcade of other names as well. And he was old… the vista of time that opened before me when his memory hit me was dizzying. It might well have overwhelmed my own mind, had he not been experienced with the technique, and distracted me by immediately beginning to heal my shattered body.

“It was a form of psionic healing which, believe me, is not the same as magic! The process was agonizing and it seemed to go on for an eternity… but in fact it was only a mater of hours. When the sun rose on the next day I was fully knit back together. Actually, I was healthier than I’d ever been, if I’m being totally honest. I was energized!

“The Hunter assured me his nasty little spider-bots would take care of the evidence of my fall, including disposing of the bodies of the two hired killers; since I had absolutely no desire to see more of those damn things, especially when they were doing whatever it might take to “dispose” of human bodies, I departed for civilization without another look back.

“And the Hunter went with me, a permanent resident in my head, very different than when he’d been just a disembodied voice… although it’s hard to describe exactly how it’s different. I suppose it was because now he was in there with me, not merely projecting in from the outside—“

“The call is coming from inside the house!” Jonny said in a loud whisper, eliciting a laugh from Chuck and Gideon and causing Álvaro to do a spit take with his rye.

“Well yes, that really does pretty much sum it up,” the billionaire laughed, setting down his drink and pulling out a handkerchief to dab at the aerosolized alcohol on his tie. “Although it turned out better than your standard horror movie, thankfully.”

“So ever since 1987, you’ve been essentially two separate people?” Artemis asked, getting up and stepping over to the bar. She’d changed her mind about that drink. “Are you saying this Hunter being is actually Nimrod, not you?”

“Well yes,” he replied as she snapped open a bottle of Nikasi Imperial Stout. “But mostly no.”

“Álvaro…” she said in a tone that made every other man in the room glad she wasn’t addressing them.

“Really, my dear, I’m not trying to be obtuse, or even clever. It’s an exquisitely complex situation currently, and there are still several twists in the story before we get there. I’ll try to be succinct, though, and we can fill in details later, once you understand the broad strokes.

“The Hunter’s knowledge on every subject was staggering, including science and technology. My own genius had already pushed my tech to what I believed was the bleeding edge; but with his guidance I began to make leaps an order of magnitude ahead of my contemporaries… well, except for maybe Mark Sampson. Now there’s a polymath genius! Anyway, one of the first things I used my new super-tech for was to build myself a suit of powered armor — which I intended to use to see that Roger Harlan got his just desserts for trying to have me murdered.

“But first I wanted to make the bastard suffer. He’d wanted my company, so I decided that it was only fitting that he should lose his instead. My first attack was on a major Harlan Technologies manufacturing facility in Seattle. I destroyed it completely. And yes, I made sure no one was killed in the process, or even hurt… much. There were a few cuts and scrapes, but I was new at the whole business back then, so cut me some slack.

“Unfortunately, my scruples meant I lingered a bit longer than was smart, and I ended up face-to-face with Stormlord before I could make good my escape. The do-gooder was well known to be the region’s main meta-human protector in those days, so I wasn’t entirely unprepared for the encounter. Thanks to a pre-planned distraction, at just the right moment, I was able to slip away — but not before getting hung with the name Nimrod.

“I hadn’t actually given any thought to a code name — it wasn’t like I planned to hold press conferences or anything — so when Storlord demanded to know who I was, despite my planning I was taken by surprise. I suppose I could’ve played the silent, mysterious type, and said nothing… a real mystery man, like in the old days.”

Scion snorted a laugh, and Álvaro shrugged in wry agreement. “Yes, you all know me well enough to know “silent” isn’t really my style; and Captain Astor knows the pitfalls of letting the press name you. So I blurted out the first name that came to mind, which happened to be one of the names the Hunter had recently been telling me about from his long past, one that he was actually rather fond of – Nimrod.

“Which didn’t particularly please him in the moment, but done was done, and from that day onward, my armored persona became known as the “supervillain” Nimrod. For the next eighteen months Nimrod was the terror of the tech world, attacking high-tech targets, stealing plans, prototypes and resources… oddly enough, almost exclusively from companies owned by or affiliated with Harlan Technologies. But simply driving Roger Harlan out of business wasn’t my only goal —  many of my crimes were really covers to retrieve deeply buried data concerning the man’s many criminal enterprises. 

“By the time the banks were foreclosing on Harlan Technologies, the man himself was preparing to flee the country, just one step ahead of the SEC, the Washington State Attorney General, and the FBI. But as satisfying as seeing him behind bars might have been, I wanted blood — I still vividly remembered my own near death at the hands of his hired killers. And the pain, both of the fall and the healing.

“When I burst into his safe house in Tacoma, shortly before his departure for a small local airfield and the private jet which would whisk him away to some tropical country with no extradition treaty, I fully intended to kill him. After revealing to him who had orchestrated his fall, of course. I admit it, I was prepared to monologue, full-on supervillain gloating.

“But when the moment came… well, it was then that the Hunter seized control of my body for the first time. Before I could reveal myself to the sniveling bastard, much less kill him, I was shoved out of the driver’s seat, as it were. As I’d been warned that first day,  I became a mere passenger in my own head. I was furious at my impotence as the Hunter proceeded to simply truss up the old coward. Then he opened the man’s laptop, sucked out the electronic information on, and credentials giving access to, his very well hidden and very illegal off-shore accounts, and then waited until the sirens could be heard approaching. He didn’t return control of my body to me until we were home again, and I was out of the armor.

“That was not a happy time in our still-relatively-new relationship, as you can imagine. The honeymoon was definitely over. But as he pointed out,  he’d been clear about such a possibility when I’d agreed to the deal. Under some pretty significant duress, I’d snarled. But I couldn’t deny the fact, as furious as I was. Over time I came to actually be glad for his high-handed control that night, and not only because it kept my hands un-bloodied – let’s be honest, I was never all that villainous, really. My crimes were generally property crimes, and since I never killed anyone, I was never particularly high on the Liberty Alliance’s, or the government’s, most wanted lists. 

“But the real reason I was glad for his seizing control was that it demonstrated, quite starkly, that it was possible – which motivated me to learn how to defend myself against it ever happening again. It was six months before the next occasion arose — well, actually, I engineered the situation, as a test — and that time it was the Hunter who was shocked and angry, when he discovered he couldn’t just push me out of the driver’s seat again.

“Actually, he wasn’t all that angry, nor terribly shocked — for someone as old as him, there really isn’t anything new under the sun, and rare as it was, I wan’t the first host who’d been capable of resisting his domination. Joan of Arc was apparently another, and much more troublesome, example he told me of, once he calmed down.

“We eventually came to an understanding, and in the decades since we’ve had quite a fruitful partnership. He was never wild about the whole “supervillain” thing, but he had his own concerns that needed to be dealt with, and over time he came to see the utility of having a foot in the villainous camp, as it were. Plus, going up against heroes like Jetstream, Stormlord, and even on occasion the Liberty Alliance itself, was a great way to test out each new generation of my armor as it evolved and improved.

“Over time, however, as I more-or-less perfected the suit and became more involved in running my growing tech empire and related philanthropic endeavors here in Astoria, I indulged in my Nimrod persona less and less. I grew bored with it, in truth. I had also come to realize I now had too much to lose if the truth ever came out. By the late ‘90s I was more-or-less retired from the supervillain game, and the few times I did don the armor in those years, it was more likely than not to lend the heroes a hand in some dire situation.

“One of the last public appearances Nimrod made was in the fall of 2001. A Saudi terrorist had plotted to crash a series of hijacked planes into various high-profile American targets – the Empire State Building in New York, the Tesla Towers in New Atlantis, and the White House and the Pentagon in D.C. I happened to be in Washington, D.C. that September day, negotiating a defense contract with the Air Force for some new AzTech guidance systems. Even though I considered myself out of the “show” I nevertheless always travelled with the armor. 

“I was a able to bring down the plane aimed at the Pentagon safely, various Alliance members and the Sampson Family handled the planes in New York and New Atlantis, while civilians aboard the plane targeting the White House managed to overwhelm the hijackers and successfully regain control of their own plane, making an emergency landing in a Pennsylvania field. No lives lost, another evil plot foiled… it barely made a blip in the national news cycle that week.

“It did cause a brief diplomatic crisis, once it was learned the nut-jobs involved were almost all Saudi nationals, but by the time the World Series began the media and the public had lost interest in even that aspect of it. Not least because the politicians kept hemming and hawing about confronting our supposed “good friends” in the House of Saud. 

“Frankly, the whole thing pissed me off, and after a couple weeks of nothing being done, I flew to Pakistan myself, pulled the plot’s so-called mastermind out of the hidey-hole he’d bolted to and dropped him off in The Hague, to let the World Court deal with him. Which of course pissed off the American government, and put another dent in my slowly improving relationship with the Alliance – violating sovereign airspace, proper diplomatic channels, blah, blah, blah. Of course none of their hand-wringing or supposed scruples stopped them from providing, quite quickly, all the evidence The Hague needed to prosecute that Bin Laden joker and his little terror group.

“If it wasn’t for the Z’ardani Invasion the next year, right in the middle the of bastard’s trial, I have no doubt he’d have spent the rest of his miserable life in prison… as it was, he was killed while trying to escape in the confusion of the alien’s attack. Which might be called justice, if he’d been the only one killed…”

Álvaro grew silent, and his expression introspective. Caught up in his story, everyone in the room was brought up short as well, their mood turning equally somber recalling that dark time. A great many people had died in the Invasion, defending the Earth – civilians, soldiers, heroes and even villains. They were all remembered and mourned, but one death stood out before all the others. The death of Ultra, the worlds first and greatest superhero. Invulnerable, unstoppable, supremely powerful — he had somehow died closing the alien’s star gate, stopping the main alien fleet from reaching Earth to reinforce the beachhead they’d already established.

After refilling his own drink and several of the others’, Álvaro resumed his position leaning against his desk and took up his tale again. “The Invasion was the last public appearance of Nimrod… I was in New York that day, and of course I fought. Everyone did, hero or villain. My identity was finally blown during the battle, at least to several members of the Liberty Alliance. It hardly seemed to matter in those dark hours as we fought side by side. If only we’d been in New Atlantis when Ultra – well, we weren’t, and things unfolded as they did.

“In the aftermath, in recognition of my aid and the injuries I’d sustained, I was granted a Presidential pardon for the past crimes of Nimrod. When it was emphasized that my pardon covered only past crimes, I assured both the President and the Alliance that Nimrod would trouble the civil tranquility no more. Surprisingly, the Liberty Alliance, or at least Raptor and Sure-Shot, invited me to join the team, albeit with a new name and maybe a new paint job for my armor – I remember Sure-Shot suggested replacing all the black with red. I declined, of course… to the great relief of Jetstream, I’m sure. The old fart.

“And so I retired. Not that I’ve stopped tinkering with the armor, of course.” Álvaro twisted around and laid an open palm on an innocuous looking section of his desktop and said “Display.” A circular line suddenly appeared on the floor between the billionaire and his arc of seated guests, quickly isrising open. A beam of white light shot up as a glass tube rose, revealing the latest version of the Nimord battlesuit, gleaming in gold and black. 

“No need to be alarmed,” he assured his visibly tensing guests. “While I like to keep the armor up to date, just in case, my “villainous” past really is behind me, I assure you.”

“I’m prepared to believe that,” Artemis conceded. “Certainly Raptor and the Alliance seem satisfied. Not to mention the President. But this “ancient intelligence” which shares your mind and body, de la Vega, that is what is really concerning. Does the Liberty Alliance, does anyone else, know of this?”

“No one in the Alliance is aware of the Hunter, or at least of his relationship to me, and very few others outside of it. As I said, this isn’t a story I make a habit of sharing, and I trust that you will all keep it strictly between ourselves. But given what’s going on right now, we felt it was absolutely necessary to bring you into the loop.”

“We?” Scion asked sharply. “Is this Hunter here now, a part of this conversation?”

“Hmmm, not as such. I mean, he’s always only a thought away, but he is not always consciously present within my skull. Certainly when he “returns,” he will be able to access my memories of this meeting — essentially “re-live” it — but he’s not ‘here’ right now.”

“Wait a minute,” Chuck said, frowning. “You said before that he needs a body to act in the physical world, right? So if once he, um, possessed you… I mean, where does he go, if he’s not always inside you?” 

Jonny barely managed to choke back his immediate response of “phrasing!” Instead he just nodded his head in earnest agreement with the question, and tried to look serious.

“That’s a very good question,” de la Vega said, setting down his glass and pushing off his desk. “And it brings us to the second of this evening’s origin stories. It’s time for you to actually meet Nimrod, the Hunter, and to hear his tale from his own lips… so to speak. To do that, I’m going to need to take you to a place very few people have ever visited.”

“Happy Moon Landing Day!” Gideon caroled as he slid into his seat between Jonny and Chuck. “And also happy fifth anniversary of UN Moonbase Armstrong, too!”

“Old news, dude,” Jonny laughed. “After today you’ll have to add Happy Interstellar Launch Day to that list.”

“I still don’t see why Álvaro couldn’t swing us an invitation to this thing,” Chuck grumbled, handing Gideon a perfectly chilled beverage. “Or at least some of us… I know we couldn’t all leave town at the same time, but… I mean, jeez, practically the whole Liberty Alliance is there…” He gestured at the screen with his hot dog, sending flecks of ketchup and mustard flying.

Cooper, sitting in the row behind his younger teammates, looked at Meg and just shook his head, adding a slight eye-roll for emphasis. Chuck’s love of the spotlight was well known by this time, and everyone knew who he thought should be at the Mojave Spaceport, representing the Vanguard. Meg shook her head and grinned, putting a finger to his lips as he opened his mouth.

“Let it go, no teasing today,” she whispered, snuggling into him as his arm went around her shoulder. “Don’t spoil the moment.” He shrugged and grinned in return, settling back into his seat after topping off their glasses from the chilled bottle of Riesling.

The entire Vanguard, as well as most of the support staff not on monitor duty or security detail, were gathered in the group’s private theater to watch the launch of America’s, and Earth’s, first interstellar vessel. The Argos 7, crewed by the so-called “Space Family Ulysses” and piloted by Major John Eastman, wouldn’t be lifting off for the newly re-opened, alien-built, Star Gate and the jump to Alpha Centauri for another two-and-a-half hours, but no one wanted to miss even the “pre-show” events.

These consisted of technical details about the first human-built starship and video from the various phases of its construction, interviews with Elon Musk, Tom Swift IV, Álvaro de la Vega, Richard Branson, and the head of NASA, as well as canned biographies of the Ulysses family and Major Eastman.

Artemis, seated between JJ and Kyle in the back row, lifted a California roll from her plate of sushi, dipped it in the wasabi and took a bite, washing it down with warm sake. “I know this is a pivotal moment in human history, and all the possibilities this may open… but I remember watching the first moon landing, and nothing will ever match the sheer thrill of that moment, or equal the awe I felt at Armstrong’s “one small step.” In that moment I glimpsed the true greatness of the human race, of our immense potential, despite the flaws that sometimes stand in our way…”

“I was in a coma, buried at the bottom of the Atlantic, at that point,” JJ sighed, taking a long pull on his beer. “I’ve seen the recordings since, of course, and as amazing as it was to realize what we humans had accomplished, it wan’t really the same as experiencing it firsthand… not like this, for me anyway. My grandfather loved science fiction, tales of space travel and interplanetary adventure – he would be absolutely amazed if he could see this moment, and I’m just grateful to be seeing it live myself!”

Kyle shook his head and reached for another slice of his pizza. “It’s always just been history to me, a simple fact of life… I mean, I wasn’t even born when Apollo 11 landed on the moon – hell, my father was barely 19 and my mother was just 16,” he said, giving Artemis a strange look. How old was she, really? He knew she was older than she looked… certainly older than the 30 or so years she appeared to possess. But exactly how much older? He was pretty sure JJ knew, but his teammate just shrugged and diverted the conversation the few times Kyle had hinted around the subject. Maybe he should just bite the bullet, just come right out and ask her, just man up –

But before he could work up the nerve, all of their comm links started buzzing and flashing red lights, and the Dispatch Officer on duty overrode the theater’s sound system to blare “Vanguard to the Briefing Room, Priority One!”

In less than two minutes the heroes were gathered about the Round Table as Dispatch piped in security video of the shattered entrance of a fairly new-looking office building. A thin trail of smoke was trickling from the twisted metal and shattered glass of the wide doorway.

“This is the ZeroPoint corporate headquarters,” the dispatcher’s calm, professional voice  reported. “The footage comes from CCTV cameras in the parking lot, less than five minutes ago. At least five unidentified metahumans are reported to have entered the building at 16:48 PDT, but we’ve been unable to access any interior cameras.

“Given both the involvement of super-humans and ZeroPoint’s link to the Astoria Incidnet, this automatically went to the highest priority level. The APD is on the way, but will not enter the building until you’ve given the all-clear or request back-up. Possible hostage situation seems likely.”

As soon as they had absorbed what little other information Dispatch could provide, Quanta opened a portal from the Pyramid to the helipad on the roof of the ZeroPoint building, while Phantom Ace teleported himself there separately, and Artemis shadow-walking herself into the darkened main lobby of the stricken building.

The headquarters of the beleaguered ZeroPoint company was a three-story building of gray slate and dark smoked glass. Its sleek, contemporary look stood out amidst the former warehouses, factories and flop houses of the old River Docks district, even with the ongoing efforts of urban renewal and gentrification that were bringing new life to the area. The plume of thin smoke rising from its main entrance seemed a sad exclamation point to its bold cry of modernity.

From the helipad on the roof, after a quick scan revealed no activity amongst the solar panels and rather amazing number of AC units that crowded the space, Quanta, Scion and Chilz decided to risk the elevator, while the Blue Flame did a quick fly-around of the entire building. Phantom Ace teleported himself and Totem down to the shattered entrance to back up Artemis.

The music in the elevator was a bland sort of smooth jazz, making an odd counterpoint to the tension of the three heroes as they prepared to face an unknown number of hostile, super-powered criminals. The doors slid open on the third floor vestibule. The security doors directly ahead of them had been blasted out of their frames, and in the hallway beyond lurked… a skinny, rather sickly-looking kid who couldn’t have been more than 15, and a waifish goth-girl who didn’t look very much older.

At the >ding< of the opening elevator both teenagers stopped and turned to look behind them. Their eyes seemed to have a milky film over them, their expressions glazed and passive, their whole demeanor strangely affectless. Before either side could react, an alarm light began flashing in Scion’s HUD – his new Matrix Crystal Detector® had sensed a hit, somewhere within 100 feet of them!

“I think I know what they’re after,” he broadcast to the team. “I’m picking up a concentration of Incident-related Matrix Crystals somewhere in this building. We also have two possible metas on the third–”

Before he could complete the thought the skinny boy gestured toward them, and suddenly the air between the two groups warped and Scion’s gravimetric sensors went wild. All three heroes were almost yanked off their feet as something tried to pull them toward the center of the warped space. They all managed to hold their ground, however, and after a few seconds the effect vanished with an audible “pop.”

“I think the kid can create singularities,” Scion barked, scanning his suit’s telemetry. “Miniature black holes,” he added for Chilz‘ benefit. “That makes him seriously dangerous – we need to contain him quickly!”

Chilz gestured toward the pair of strange teenagers, who had turned and again started down the hallway, heads scanning from side-to-side in an eerie synchronicity. Frigid blue energy shot forth from his hands and ice began forming under the youth’s feet, quickly arcing up and over their heads to form a tunnel. Both teens staggered and slipped, the boy falling on his ass, while the girl managed to just keep her balance.

With a twisting motion of his hands the ice elemental sealed both ends of the tube, trapping the young villains in a capsule of ice two feet thick…

♦  ♦  ♦  ♦

As Artemis stepped from the shadows that obscured a corner of the spacious public lobby the first thing she noticed was the flickering of the overhead lights, their irregular, staccato flashes almost strobe-like. A thin haze of smoke filled the space, apparently from several patches of charred carpet and blasted ceiling tiles. White powdery patches indicated that someone had put out any actual fires, though the area currently seemed devoid of occupants, either employees or invaders…

A stifled groan drew her attention to the long reception desk on the raised dais jutting into the center of the room. Two people, a man and a woman, crouched fearfully behind it, a large fire extinguisher on the floor nearby. The man’s hands were red with likely second degree burns, and the woman, eyes wide with fear, moved to shield him as Artemis leapt over the desk.

“I’m one of the good guys,” the hero assured the woman. She pulled out a burn kit from her utility belt and tossed it to her. “This should help his hands, but first tell me what’s happening here.”

“Artemis!” the woman cried, relief plain in her voice. “Thank God! I thought – OK, sorry… so, we were just getting ready to close up… Mr. Drummond was letting everyone go a little early, to get home in time to catch the launch, and we’d already locked the doors… that’s when I saw a strange group of people approaching the front doors.

“There were six of them, most of them pretty strangely dressed, and I just had time to think it looked pretty damn suspicious when this skinny kid sort of gestured – and the doors just imploded!  There was glass everywhere, and then this other guy, with a cross tattoo on one side of his face, started hurling these flaming ninja-star things everywhere…

“In the confusion, with all the flames and the smoke, I- I lost track… I think some people made it past them out the front… I know some others tried to hide in their offices… most of the – the gang, I guess – head toward the elevators, but two guys, one really big, with the most dreamy – er, anyway, they, um, started ransacking the offices… people were hiding in some of them, but they didn’t seem interested in hurting anyone… they just kept demanding to know where “the canister” was… they didn’t interfere when Tom grabbed the fire extinguisher and started trying to put out the fires…”

As the woman began apply salve to her co-worker’s burns Artemis‘ comm suddenly came to life. “I think I know what they’re after,” Scion said urgently. “I’m picking up a concentration of Incident-related crystals somewhere in this building. We also have two possible metas on the third–” The transmission broke off with a grunt, and a series of odd sounds.

“Scion, are you alright?” Artemis turned and gestured at Phantom Ace and Totem, who were picking their way through the rubble of the lobby, listening to their own comms in concern. “We have six possible hostiles, not five. Are you –”

“We’re fine,” Scion’s voice cut in. “We may have an Omega-class meta up here, but maybe not, if Chilz has really contained him.”

Before Artemis could respond, the sound of gunfire erupted from beyond the doors behind the reception desk. “That’s coming from the Security Office,” Tom, the man with the burned hands said. “The really big guy went that way just before you got here… the other one went left, back towards Mr. Drummond’s office!”

With a brief nod to acknowledge the intel, Artemis signaled Totem to go left, while she moved right, speaking over her shoulder to Phantom Ace. “Get these two to safety and clear anyone else from this floor, then see who on the team needs help!” She was gone with a swirl of her cape as more shots rang out.

♦  ♦  ♦  ♦

“OK, Chillz… can you lower the temperature inside your ice tube, bring it down far enough and fast enough to incapacitate those kids?” Scion asked, eyeing the ice prison approvingly.

“Depends on how tough they are,” the elemental shrugged, focusing intently on his construct. “If they’re anywhere near baseline normal –” At that moment the goth-girl walked through the wall of ice as if it wasn’t there, her form flickering with a ghostly light. She stalked steadily towards the heroes, her blank look of apparent disinterest more unnerving than any expression of rage would have been.

“Stop right there miss,” Scion said, raising an arm cannon and targeting the strange waif with stun-bolts. “We don’t want to hurt you, so just surrender before –”

With a sound like a rifle shot, the front of the ice chamber shattered into a thousand shards. But instead of flying out to strike the heroes they seemed to move inward, shrinking into an infinitesimally small point before vanishing without a sound. At the far side of the suddenly revealed space the scrawny boy gestured and the other end vanished similarly.

Scion instantly shifted his aim and fired the volley of electro stun rounds at the boy, but gravity must still have been in flux around him due to the multiple singularities – the rounds all missed wildly. At almost the same instant Quanta formed a long block of matter over the two teens and let it drop.

The boy didn’t even look up as he turned to continue making his way down the hall, but the end of the block over him cracked and shattered, vanishing into another of his tiny black holes. The other end, however, came down on the girl, who vanished beneath its mass.

As Quanta caused the block to disintegrate back into the quantum foam whence it had come he was both relieved and dismayed to see the girl standing there as if nothing had happened. She resumed her slow walk toward them, now raising a spectral arm. A blast of greenish light flared from her hand and spread to engulf the three heroes…

♦  ♦  ♦  ♦

Artemis quickly found the Security Office, and the two guards hunkered down behind an overturned computer table, firing at a hulking figure dressed in fashionable black Under Armour sportswear, a number “01” in red on his chest. The man was busy lifting another table up as if looking for something, and as computers and monitors crashed to the floor, Artemis was momentarily taken aback – he was gorgeous!

Tall, olive skinned, wavy black hair and the body of Adonis, he fairly radiated sex-appeal – the effect only slightly marred by the slack expression and filmed-over eyes. He was shrugging off the bullets, if not without notice then at least with nothing more than an abstracted annoyance. Which made him dangerous. Artemis shook her head and pulled her attention back to the matter at hand.

“Stand down!” she commanded, using the Voice. “We know what you’re looking for, but it’s over now. You must–”

“You know where the canister is?” the man asked in a flat, affectless voice as he suddenly stopped and turned to look in her direction. “Nimrod demands you hand it over. Now.”

“Nimrod?” Momentarily taken aback at the name, Artemis barely dodged the computer “01” hurled at her head, her tuck-and-roll bringing her to her feet between the guards and the villain, eyes widening in surprise. She’d barely seen him move as he’d bent to grab his missile… if her own relaxes weren’t superhumanly fast she would never have known what killed her!

Her new shadow sticks formed in her hands and in a blindingly fast move of her own she hurled them at the Adonis’ head. He side-stepped them like they weren’t even moving. Pushing her own reflexes to the maximum, she again barely escaped the haymaker he threw.

At that moment Phantom Ace popped in. “Everyone on this floor is clear – whoa!” He went insubstantial just in time as a massive fist flashed through his head. “Hey, what the hell! Eddie, er, Paragon?! What are you doing, dude?”

“You know this man?” Artemis asked, hurling another set of shadow sticks at her momentarily distracted opponent. Although they hit, they had little effect except to draw his attention back to her.

“Yeah, he’s that guy I teamed up with a couple weeks ago,” Phantom Ace said, flitting in to be distracting again. “I filed a report about it. He’s an Incident-boy, had pretty much everything about him increased to the peak of human ability – honestly, I think more than a bit beyond peak, from what I’ve seen. Strength, speed, toughness, intellect – when I introduced him to Meg, for an interview, she said he sounded like a virtual paragon of perfection. He really liked the sound of that (although I convinced him to drop the perfection part), so he’s Paragon now.”

“I thought you reported that he wanted to be a hero,” Artemis said, aiming a kick to Paragon’s solar plexus, which he blocked with frustrating ease, although he in turn failed to grab her.

“He does, or did, or… I don’t know, he was stopping a robbery when we met, he seemed pretty sincere…”

“OK, get these guards to safety, then check in on Totem and let the rest of the team know that some, if not all, of these “villains” may be being mind controlled.”

“But what about you?” Ace asked, even as he popped in behind the two security guards and grabbed them each by a shoulder.

“I can take care of myself if I don’t have bystanders to worry about,” Artemis replied grimly, taking out the last light in the room with a thrown stapler and plunging them all into near-darkness. “Besides,” she continued with a slight smile as the Blue Flame suddenly appeared in the doorway behind Paragon, “my other back-up is here.”

With a grin Phantom Ace vanished along with the two very relieved-looking guards.

♦  ♦  ♦  ♦

Totem was beginning to think this hydrokinetic might be a tougher nut to crack than he appeared at first glance. He was a wiry kid in his early twenties, with longish dirty-blond hair, dressed in thrift-store chic in shades of blue, white and gray. The vacant expression and glazed eyes that made him look like a real washout had led the shaman to wonder if he was on drugs. If so, the Sleeping Mists should be particularly effective…

Unfortunately, even though the green mists had slowed him momentarily in his single-minded ransacking of Mr. Drummond’s office (the man himself had fled gratefully when Totem had arrived), Washout had appeared to shake the drowsiness off in seconds. He’d then turned on the hero and begun to pull the water out of his body, slowly but steadily dehydrating and weakening him…

A mystic blast had broken that attack, but Washout’s next move had been to encase Totem’s head in a sphere of water, one he couldn’t escape no matter how he moved. He was just beginning to think he was going to have to summon Orca when Phantom Ace popped into the room.

“Oooh, a hydrokinetic,” his teammate laughed, taking in the situation at a glance. Totem glared at him through the bubble of water… his breath was getting a trifle short…

“Blue Flame would be the obvious choice, but he’s sorta busy… ah, I have an idea!” Phantom Ace grabbed Totem’s arm and they both vanished with a faint “pop” of displaced air. The water bubble lost its form and splashed to the floor, soaking the plush carpet. A moment later Phantom Ace was back, with Chilz in tow.

“Water dude, meet ice dude. Ice dude, meet raw material.” With that the teleporter was gone, and Chilz began to grin…

♦  ♦  ♦  ♦

Phantom Ace’s next stop was the second floor, since if there were six of these Incident zombies, and two were on the ground floor, and two were on the third floor, then logically the remaining two must be… ah, yes, there they were!

A very attractive redheaded woman, wearing low-slung black leather pants and a very tight red Lycra top, was using several highly animated chains, glowing a sullen red, to hurl desks and credenzas aside in the large “bullpen” area that occupied most of this floor. An equally good-looking and very buff Eurasian dude, dressed in equally tight leathers of black & orange and sporting an ornate cross tattoo on the left side of his face, was busy summoning up throwing crosses of reddish-orange plasma and blasting open the doors of the offices that lined the area.

Unlike the others on their “team,” these two seemed more than willing to cause injury to innocent bystanders in their quest for the mysterious canister. There were maybe 20 people Ace could see, cowering behind desks or in offices, and several of them were either burned, battered, or both. His incipient good humor vanished as he began teleporting people to the emergency room at St. Eligus Hospital, the closest medical facility.

After he’d removed the last injured office worker, Phantom Ace popped back in to find that Chains and Hot Cross (as he’d come to think of them) just outside the largest office on the floor, that of the CEO. The executive was crouched behind his large, solid desk, a mixture of fear and rage on his middle-aged features, as Chains‘ namesake weapons lashed out to shatter the glass wall and doors of his office.

“Nimrod says you would know where the canister is if anyone would,” the redhead said it in the same flat, affectless way that all these assholes spoke. She and her partner moved in on the helpless man, glass crunching under their boots. “Tell us and live… don’t make Crux burn you, old man.”

Damn, thought Phantom Ace, I really liked Hot Cross… or maybe Hot Cross Buns… nah, too sexual… oh well, can’t call ’em all.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” the executive growled, his voice only slightly shaky. “What canister? We have a lot of–” He was cut off as Crux raised his hands, the air around them rippling with heat from which two throwing crosses of plasma coalesced.

Back to work, PA thought as he flicked into existence behind the now defiantly standing man. “You may be mind controlled,” he snarled at the two invaders as he grabbed the executive’s shoulder, “but I think you’re probably both real assholes even when you’re yourselves.”

Crux’s plasma crosses seared through the empty space where the two men had stood, melting twin holes in the floor-to-cieling window beyond. Neither villain reacted to the escape of their prey, simply turning away to resume their search. Then they paused; as one, they turned their gazes upward toward the same section of ceiling…

♦  ♦  ♦  ♦

On the third floor the battle continued to see-saw between Scion, Quanta and Totem and Kid Singularity and Ghostlight in a seemingly endless stalemate. Ghostlight kept blasting the heroes with some sort of terror/nightmare effect, which only impacted Quanta, and that mildly, while Kid Singularity lobbed miniature black holes at them. Scion’s armor easily withstood the intense gravitic forces, but Totem and Quanta found themselves increasingly battered and bruised.

On the other hand, the heroes managed to keep the zombie intruders from progressing further into the building in their search for the canister of alleged matrix crystals. While Quanta’s attempts to encase them in quantum-matter shells only led to the Kid shattering them and Ghostlight simply passing through them, they at least forced them to react. Totem had better luck with his mystic bindings, which seemed able to restrain the girl, if not Kid Singularity. And while Scion’s barrages of bullets and stun rounds didn’t take them out, they too slowed the kids down and distracted them.

The hallway the Changelings were attempting to move down was lined on either side by walls of smoked glass. On one side they looked into a brightly-lit high-tech electronics/energy lab; on the other into a dim shadows of a server farm. For a minute or two the walls stood up to the shifting gravity spikes and fusillades of armor-piercing ammunition, but eventually they both shattered, eliminating the narrow containment that had been the Vanguard’s greatest advantage.

Kid Singularity, dodging a quantum-matter blast, ducked into the lab, gesturing at its back wall with one hand, and at Totem with the other. Pinprick black holes simultaneously blew out the wall and dazed Totem, the latter having the added effect of freeing Ghostlight from her mystic bindings. Scion pulled up just before unleashing another fusillade at the Kid – the lab was dotted with several large, spherical containers of liquid nitrogen, helium and hydrogen, as well as two engineers hunkered down behind an overturned lab bench in the corner of the room.

“I have located the canister, Nimrod,” Kid Singularity said, apparently to thin air, as he moved toward the opening he’d made. The room beyond appeared, through the dust and now-flickering lights, to be a storage room of some sort. Quanta encased the youth in another column of silvery matter, this time making it as tight to his opponent’s form as possible… and was gratified when the Kid didn’t immediately break out.

“Maybe without room to gesture he can’t –” Quanta started to say when the floor near the imprisoned villain suddenly cracked, then shattered, and finally exploded upward in a gout of cement, whipping chains and glowing plasma. Plasma which engulfed a nearby spherical container…

“Shit!” yelled Scion. “That’s hydrogen! It’s gonna–”

Everything vanished in a ball of orange-white flame.

♦  ♦  ♦  ♦

Downstairs, Chilz, Blue Flame and Artemis were deadlocked in their own battles. Paragon seemed just as strong, fast and enduring as Artemis. Her only advantage was perhaps a little more agility, which kept her in the fight but didn’t stop her from taking a few nasty blows along the way. He seemed to have no trouble dodging Blue Flame’s plasma blast, and the few that did hit didn’t seem to phase him much. She suspected that if he was in full control of his mind they’d be in real trouble…

“Damn, this guy is fast – and tough!” Blue Flame groused, momentarily forced to pull back from attacking to absorb the fires his own flames had started. “Of course, I can’t really let loose indoors like this…”

Chilz, meanwhile, was finding Washout to be more trouble than he’d expected. While he could freeze the villain’s summoned water, and was unaffected himself by his drowning bubbles, he found his own efforts to encase his foe in ice were Sisyphean at best. The hydrokinetic seemed able to sublimate his ice almost as fast as he could summon it. And when the hydrokinetic turned that power on Chilz himself, the hero could feel his body begin to evaporate away. Of course he reformed it even as it sublimated, but it left them each apparently unable to take down the other.

Both fights had moved from the back offices into the larger open area of the lobby, now fortunately empty of innocent bystanders. From the corner of her eye Artemis could see that her teammate was having no more luck than she was, and realized it might be time to stop banging their heads against the same walls… the Blue Flame was the obvious choice to pit against a hydrokinetic, and Chilz should be able to mitigate Paragon’s strength and speed with a nice thick shell of ice…

“Chilz!” she called out, hurling her shadow sticks at Paragon to disrupt his own charge at her and give herself an opening to disengage. “Switch targets!”

The ice elemental hurled a volley of ice spikes at Washout, causing the villain to stagger back as he dissipated them; but before he could fully disengage and turn his attention to Paragon a tremendous blast shook the building, almost knocking them all off their feet, with the exception of the airborne Blue Flame. It had come from above them, and as Artemis tried to raise her teammates on the comms both villains’ heads turned as one to look upward.

They then turned their backs on the heroes and began walking toward the remains of the front door. Before either Artemis or Chilz could react, a vortex of swirling white energy appeared in front of the ruined doors, growing from a pinpoint to a circle three meters across in an instant. Blue Flame hurled a plasma blast at the zombified criminals, but Washout threw up a massive wall of water behind them – the resultant explosion of steam obscured everything for a moment, and when it had dissipated both villains and vortex were gone…

♦  ♦  ♦  ♦

Quanta had seen what was coming at the same instant as Scion, and had thrown up a quantum shield between the blast and himself and Totem. The shield cracked and buckled, but it saved them from the worst of the concussive force and heat. Scion had leapt to crouch over the two engineers, adding to the inadequate shielding of the lab bench. Extending his bioelectric field to cover them all, he’d managed to divert some of the heat and energy… but it was mainly the fact that the blast was fairly directional, and at 90° to them, that allowed the two men to survive… if unconscious and slightly singed.

In the immediate aftermath of the explosion Chains had lifted herself and Crux up through the hole they’d blasted, rising like some humanoid daddy longlegs through the smoke, dust and flames. At Kid Singularity’s gesture, Chains used one of her eponymous artifacts to lift a meter-tall, very high-tech looking canister from where if had lain concealed in a corner behind several crates…

Scion was torn, but his first duty was to get the injured men out of the damaged and still burning lab. The ceiling shifted slightly, with an ominous creak, as he lifted both men and rose into the air – Quanta created braces to keep the helipad, AC units and solar panels from collapsing in on them all.

Only Totem was free to try and stop the villains, but his spells had so far proven only marginally effective – with a reluctant grimace he summoned Raven. As soon as his form had stabilized Raven had attempted to mind control first one, then another of the criminals. But there was something strange about their minds, something he’d never seen in all his millennia of existence. It was as if their minds were… slippery… coated, in his own mind’s eye, with a rainbow-like, almost liquid, substance that prevented him from gaining a grip… his mental “fingers” kept sliding off…

As Scion flew the injured engineers out the gaping hole the explosion had blown in the exterior wall and down to the ambulances that were just pulling up, Kid Singularity gestured once again. A glowing vortex of swirling white energy suddenly appeared in front of him, and before either Raven or Quanta could act the four villains and the canister vanished into it. The vortex itself collapsed an instant later, leaving the Vanguard alone in the smoking ruins of the ZeroPoint building.

♦  ♦  ♦  ♦

Scion pulled Artemis aside as the authorities began sifting through the rubble, before they met with the APD, letting his helmet melt away. Seeing his worried look, she knew what his concern was, and forestalled him.

“Yess, I know – the name Nimrod came up, apparently as the guiding force behind this attack. But let’s not jump to conclusions, John, there may well be an explanation. For now I’m willing to trust my instincts on this, and the Alliance’s.”

“OK, I don’t disagree, especially given the events in New Mexico today. The almost continual media coverage of everyone and every minute makes for a pretty damn good alibi. But I think it may be time to have that talk, and soon.”

“Indeed,” Artemis sighed. “Soon.”

They turned to greet Detective Ransom and begin the debriefing on the morning’s mess.

♦  ♦  ♦  ♦

It was a dispirited and cranky Vanguard that debriefed later that evening, once the battle site had been secured and turned over to SHADE, APD and the hazmat teams. The heroes had arrived back at the AzTech Pyramid at 19:35, about 15 minutes too late to catch the historic launch of the Argos 7. Now, an hour later, they were gathered about the Round Table watching video of their fight on the central holo-display. Beyond the windows the sun was sinking into bands of intense red, orange and purple.

“At the end there,” Scion said, freezing the action captured on his rear exterior camera and pointing to the mysterious vortex, “my sensors show that Kid Singularity actually opened an Einstein-Rosen bridge – a true wormhole!”

“Which is incredible,” said Quanta, staring hungrily at the data readouts on his own screen. “My quantum tunneling is completely different, as is Phantom Ace’s teleportation… and I don’t even pretend to understand how Artemis‘ cloak works, except that it’s not like this. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of any individual who can manipulate forces at this level, except the Paladins. And they do it using those high-tech bracers they wear.

“Given what this kid was doing with those microscopic singularities… if he’s capable of creating larger ones, now or as he get older, he could easily be the most dangerous meta on Earth. It’s not impossible to imagine he could, in fact, destroy the entire planet!”

“Shit, you mean like that Romulan dude did to Vulcan in the Star Trek reboot?” Jonny asked, looking shocked. “I mean, that was a kind of black hole, right?”

“Yes, and that’s unfortunately exactly what could happen, if he were to generate a large enough singularity – or lost control of one of them, or couldn’t shut it down…” Quanta frowned at the data stream, and trailed off as he focused on the numbers.

“I suggest we forward this information as Priority One to both SHADE and the Liberty Alliance,” Artemis sighed, rubbing the bridge of her nose. She seldom got headaches, but she could feel one building now. “Whoever this “Nimrod” proves to actually be, everyone needs to know what kind of power they control… and that they may have a canister full of the Incident-related matrix crystals.”

Given Raven’s description of the “shape” of the minds of the controlled, they had all agreed that it was unlikely to be Cerebral doing the manipulating. And once they’d confirmed that all of the attackers had indeed been Changelings (Artemis disliked the pejorative slang term Incidentals, and discouraged its use by the team), the working theory was that they were being controlled via the crystals in their systems.

“Gideon recognized Paragon,” Artemis went on, “real name Eddie Ritter, former grocery store bag-boy at Fred Myers and would-be hero; I recognized the so-called Ghostlight – she’s Cassandra Hartwal, a runaway I was looking for on the day of the Incident. I finally found her two weeks ago, in the Undercity, and while I couldn’t convince her to go home, I had no sense from her that she was criminally inclined. Nor does she have a juvenile record.”

“On the other hand,” Scion picked up the thread,” the APD files on Jimi Francona, aka Crux, indicate that he was a two-bit thug for hire prior to his transformation – greedy, cold-blooded and dangerous even without powers. Chains, civilian name Ally Hendricks, also has a troubled past, suffering from a serious rage disorder. Medications can control it, but she seems to be off them at the moment… or maybe it’s just the mind control. Kurt Lister, aka Washout, is a college drop-out, and while he has no criminal record he is, by all accounts, unmotivated, narcissistic and just generally an all-around asshole.

“Finally there is Kid Singularity. He appears to be one Chris Terazzo, 14 years old and a freshman at Grant High School. He is the youngest Incident Changeling discovered yet. A bright but emotionally underdeveloped teen according to his school counselor… it’s unclear what his motivations might be, when free of mind-control. Given his power level I just pray that he can be reached, assuming we can free his mind…”

“Damn, does that mean I could be controlled?” Jonny asked nervously. “I mean, we think I was affected by them…”

“Yes,” Scion said soothingly. “But remember, Jonny, we determined very quickly after the Incident that you burned out the crystal that was inside you the first time you turned to plasma. And before you ask, Chuck, I’ll remind you that we’ve never found any indication that the Incident is what changed you – no matrix crystal energy, no shard… just a very disturbing coincidence.

“It’s possible other Changelings might be similarly protected, like Jonny. Or maybe one has to be in proximity to this Nimrod and/or some specific technology to get “taken over.” Or maybe a strong enough mind is capable of resisting the effect. Too many variables and not enough data to make any definitive conclusions, at this point, I’m afraid.”

“And more to the immediate point,” Artemis said after the silence began to stretch, “all of these people have gone missing in the last  seven to ten days. My contacts say Cassie vanished five days after I spoke to her – I’ve checked with her mother and she hasn’t returned home. The Terazzo boy disappeared nine days ago, apparently on his way home from school… the last any of these six people were publicly seen, until today, was a week ago.”

“No doubt taken by this “Nimrod” using whatever mind-control power he or she possesses,” Quanta added. “Our priority right now should be to find this person – and more importantly the canister. If it truly contains matrix crystals, it could be used to cause another disaster like the Incident – and create a potential army of new meta-humans. A real army, if they can all be controlled like these people seem to be.”

“Fortunately, I may have a lead on that,” Scion said, holding up a thin silvery band that looked like nothing so much as a metallic Live Strong wrist band. “I’ve been studying this little item we found in the wreckage of the third floor at ZeroPoint, and I’m pretty sure it’s how “Nimrod’s” crew was tracking the canister.

“One of them, Ghostlight if I had to guess, lost this during the fight, and if I can reverse engineer it and combine it with my own crystal-sensing tech, we might be able to track them, in turn. “Nimrod’s” sensors must be longer-range than mine, if they knew to look at ZeroPoint to begin with… so, if we’re done here, I’m heading to my lab to work on this.”

Quanta, reluctantly pulled from his analysis of Kid Singularity’s powers, agreed to come along, and the others all dispersed to their own pursuits.

♦  ♦  ♦  ♦

It took JJ less than 36 hours, with Kyle’s help and calling in a few Air Force favors to gain access to a military spy satellite, to increase the strength and range of his matrix crystal radiation sensors. Running a modified tachyon pulse through the satellite’s own sensor array he was able to boost the signal to the point of being able to scan a circle almost 200 kilometers in radius.

At 09:07 on the second day after the debacle at ZeroPoint, the satellite’s orbit brought it into position to cover Astoria, and JJ powered up his sensors. By 09:45 the Vanguard were heading west over the Pacific Ocean in the Interceptor.

“At this point I can only narrow it down to a circle about a kilometer wide,” Scion said from the pilot’s seat, his sensor telemetry being relayed to the screens at his teammate’s seats. “But the only thing within that circle is the Porpoise Mount Marine Research Platform.”

“What do we know about it?” Artemis asked.

“Built about twenty years ago by a company called Diogenes Searchlight, it’s currently owned by the Aquarius Research Group. It’s main purpose has apparently always been marine mammal research, and it’s location atop an undersea mount is supposedly rich in such sea life. Particularly schools of porpoises.”

“Don’t porpoises come in pods?” Jonny asked , looking bright-eyed and innocent.

“In the brief time I had to pull up background before we headed out,” Quanta said hastily, before Scion could respond, “I have to say the facility doesn’t seem to have accomplished much… less than half a dozen scientific papers mention it, and in only two of those did it seem that researchers actually worked from the platform. It’s currently unoccupied and preparing to undergo a long-overdue refurbishment, apparently.”

“In my time in the Air Force we would occasionally do fly-bys as part of our training and routine coastal patrols,” Scion added. “It’s really the only landmark 15 klicks out at sea, and I don’t recall it ever seeming very busy… not that I paid it much attention back in the day.”

“Scion,” interrupted Chilz. “I’ve intercepted a distress call on a proprietary high-band frequency.” Having a ham radio license and an interest in all things related, Chilz had become the group’s de facto communications officer in the field. “It’s coming from Porpoise Mount… an Underhill-Hart security team… they say they’re under attack from six unidentified meta-humans… they’re calling for company reinforcements…”

At that moment the research platform was coming into view, growing from a smudge on the horizon to almost full size in seconds. Scion brought them in low, sending up rooster tails of water behind them, before pulling up to do a tight circle around the station. Flashes of gunfire could be seen, and small figures clearly engaged in fighting. They recognized the Nimrod-controlled metas from the other day, and the distinctive black and silver uniforms of Underhill-Hart security personnel.

“I count six Underhill-Hart employees down,” Artemis called, studying the video feed from the external cameras. “At least 18 still standing.”

“Chilz, if you can get through on their channel, let the Underhill-Hart forces know were here to help,” Scion ordered as he set the Interceptor down on the station’s helipad. “I’ve dealt with them in the past – they’re professionals, but they can be prickly about their perceived jurisdiction.”

As soon as the aircraft had settled the Vanguard was out the hatch and into the battle. Scion took to the air with Totem and Quanta, dropping them both on the roof of the main building overlooking the fight, while Chilz ice-ramped over the superstructure, the Blue Flame flying beside him. Artemis shadow-stepped into the dimness beneath the central portion of the main building, while Phantom Ace teleported straight into the heart of the fray.

Their arrival seemed to take the mind-controlled villains by surprise. Artemis managed to stagger Paragon, who was ripping up decking and hurling it at three Underhill-Hart operatives. Totem cast his Sleeping Mists spell over several of the villains, but focused its power mainly on Kid Singularity, who staggered and collapsed to one knee, swaying drunkenly. Scion sent a barrage of electro-bolts at Chains, who was threatening two Underhill-Hart operatives, and sent her flying 15 feet sideways to slam into the metal frame of a support tower. The Blue Flame’s burst of dazzling light was very pretty.

Already staggered by Artemis‘ and Totem’s attacks, both Kid Singularity and Paragon were ill prepared to avoid the mass of quantum matter that Quanta suddenly dropped on them – the kid somehow managed to dodge most of the construct, but even a glancing blow was enough to send him sprawling, dazed. Paragon was not so lucky, and he went down hard, battered into unconsciousness.

Chilz confronted Crux as the villain tried to fry an Underhill-Hart fighter, but his attempt at an ice encasement was turned to steam by several plasma crosses, one of which actually hit the hero, melting part of his left arm and sending him reeling. The aborted attack did give the Underhill-Hart soldier, a tough looking blond woman, an opening, however. The pulse from her blaster caught Crux in the side, spinning him around and dropping him, if only momentarily.

Ghostlight, who seemed to have been staying around the perimeter of the fight, suddenly moved forward and glared at Scion hovering 30 feet above her. Her eyes glowed green, and suddenly the hero felt a wave of mild anxiety wash over him, an amorphous sense of dread… but strangely dim and diluted. A benefit of his armor’s natural resistance to psionic, he realized, as his bioelectric blast missed Chains, who was pulling herself up from where he’d send her flying, allowing the villain to use her chains to begin climbing the support column like a spider.

Washout summoned a massive wave that rose up through the deck grates to inundate both the man he’d been fighting when the Vanguard had arrived and Phantom Ace. The Underhill-Hart operative, a tall, fit-looking man with a blond crew-cut was dressed in a blue-and-black mottled wetsuit, the name “Mariner” on his breast, and seemed to be in charge. He also seemed relatively unfazed by the wall of water that engulfed him… Phantom Ace was briefly dazed at the sudden impact, before phasing himself through the water.

And so the battle went for several minutes… Artemis making good use of her new Shadow Whip; Phantom Ace phasing Washout down to the lower deck of the platform; Scion easily shaking off Ghostlight’s Evil Eye and blasting at Kid Singularity to try and keep him dazed and off balance, with the Blue Flame adding his own power to that effort; Totem again attempting to put their enemies to sleep, however ineffectively; and Chilz throwing up ice walls to protect the Underhill-Hart people; they in turn used the cover he provided to more effectively snipe at the bad guys.

Quanta attempted to encase Chains in a tight shell as she, going after Totem, swung from the south support tower toward the main building – but her glowing links burst it even as it formed around her. Totem’s Baleful Bindings were more effective at holding Ghostlight, although not, unfortunately, before she’d managed to fill Quanta’s head with horrible visions of his greatest fears.

For a moment Quanta was paralyzed by the visions of the world discovering his secret shame… the accusations, the contempt, his accomplishments stripped from him… but he’d come a long way in the past two months, and with a tremendous effort of will he shoved the fears aside, at the same time sending the most powerful quantum matter blast he’d ever generated at Chains.

She was just lashing out at Totem when the blast caught her in the back, sending her flying into the forward support tower, cracking several of the steel struts and stunning her. Unfortunately her whipping chains managed to catch Totem a glancing blow to the head, stunning him as well and knocking him off his feet.

Equally unfortunately, at the same moment Kid Singularity, although continually battered and knocked around by barrage after barrage of energy blasts, armor-piercing rounds and plasma bolts, managed to get off one of his signature mini-blackholes. It was aimed at Scion, but missed the armored hero by several yards, instead flying past him to hit the forward support tower just below the hole Chains had made in it.

With a grinding shriek of metal tortured beyond endurance, the tower began to buckle. The entire platform shuddered and began to tilt… Quanta, who had turned his attention to encasing a reviving but still groggy Paragon, turned back even as he was almost knocked from his feet. He sent strands of quantum matter racing up the bending, twisting struts, and the collapse slowed, then stopped.

“I can reinforce this enough to stabilize the platform,” he called over the team comm-link. “But I don’t dare try to lift it back to level – the tower is too badly damaged. We need to–”

At that moment the Interceptor, which had been slowly grinding along the helipad decking, slid into the safety rails… which held it for a moment, before slowly beginning to buckle. Scion hurriedly called up the remote systems on his armor’s HUD, and fired the VTOL thrusters. The aircraft rose, tearing free of the railing, and with a relieved sigh he set it to hovering a dozen yards off the damaged research platform.

The fighting had halted when the collapse had begun, and before the conflict could resume a voice rang out over the rig’s loudspeakers. It was the man in the mottled blue-and-black wetsuit, and his tone was assured, un-panicked, and forceful.

“This is Agent Mariner of Underhill-Hart Security. We need to evacuate this facility while we can. I call on all hostiles who–”

Before he could finish the sentence the entire platform jerked and shuddered like it had been kicked, knocking almost everyone not airborne off their feet. With a groan the other two support towers began to twist, and the silvery material of Quanta’s reinforcements on the first cracked and splintered with sounds like rifle shots. The shaking slowed, then intensified in waves of increasing frequency, and the angle of the deck increased steadily.

“Vanguard!” Scion barked both over the comms and his PA system. “We need to get EVERYONE off this station, NOW!”

Phantom Ace instantly began teleporting the unconscious Underhill-Hart personnel into the Interceptor, while Chilz began forming ice slides down to the water were he created a large ice floe for the conscious operatives. Scion airlifted the subdued metas, Crux, Kid Singularity, Ghostlight and Paragon, to a second, smaller floe his teammate created. Chains, although fairly beat up, was still mobile… but on consideration, decided she probably couldn’t swim the 15 kilometers back to shore. Her glowing chains faded back into tattoos on her arms, legs and torso as she allowed Artemis to bind her. Of Washout there was no sign…

In minutes everyone was off the rapidly disintegrating and sinking research station. The waters beneath Porpoise Mount were only 60 feet deep, it being set on the top of an undersea mountain, so even after it had finished settling one corner of the station remained above the waves, sticking up at an incongruously jaunty angle. But the debris hadn’t even stopped raining down when a massive bubble of water began to rise next to the ruins.

As a chunk of shimmering, rainbow crystal at least 50 feet across and 20 feet in diameter rose from the churning waters, mud, sand, and rocks pouring off it. As it rose higher, a massive spacecraft, clearly alien in origin, wavered into existence above it. The previously cloaked vessel seemed to pulse with a strange, electric blue light. Hovering in the air next to it was a man.

Not a man, exactly, the Vanguard quickly realized, although certainly male – his reptilian-like skin was as jet black as his form fitting costume, the only bits of color his golden slit-irised eyes and bands of a smokey gray translucent, glass-like material on his forearms. A black “light” was radiating from his hands, entwining the huge crystal mass and pulling it up toward him.

As all the humans stared, transfixed, a large portal along the underside of the spacecraft irised open, and the figure guided the immense crystal shard within. Before anyone could react, the ship sealed itself again and began to rise, faster and faster, into the cloudless blue sky. The hovering figure remained, turning to stare down at the humans below. After a moment, it spoke.

“Attention, primitive sentients!” It’s voice was deep, resonate, and strangely musical, with a slight hint of sibilance. “You have been interfering in matters far beyond your limited ability to comprehend. You will cease this interference immediately. You cannot stop what was set in motion long ago. Although long delayed, my patron is at last in a position to save this foolish world from itself.

“He will permit no further distractions, and your misguided attempts to control or hinder the changes he must make to this world are futile! Continue to interfere, and you will discover the consequences to be dire, both for you and for this planet; cease these distractions and you may all yet survive. You cannot hope to stop what is coming. Ignore this warning at your peril; there will be no others.”

With that he shot upward, easily catching up to the ship, which began to shimmer as he disappeared within, energy building up… In seconds a wave of intense blue-white light flashed out, temporarily blinding everyone below. In the seconds it took for their sight to return the ship was gone.

Scion, standing atop the Interceptor, let his helmet retract and turned to stare at Agent Mariner, next to him. The Underhill-Hart operative looked as stunned he felt.

“Well, that can’t be good,” the agent said, shaking his head in concern…

Scion projected the map from his wrist comp onto the wall of the conference room as the tracker Phantom Ace had planted pinpointed the precise location of the military cargo container the E.V.A.L. team had stolen. A blinking red dot appeared over the Cascade Salmon Wholesale Company facility on the northern edge of Chinatown.

“Looks to be closer to the Willis Avenue side of the property,” Scion muttered as he zoomed in and called up the city’s file copy of the building’s blueprints, overlaying the two images. “Yes, it appears to be in the loading bay at the rear of the facility. That part of the building is one story… the processing area to the south is two stories… all brick construction, built in 1962, retrofitted and reinforced for earthquake safety in 1997. The plant takes up the whole block between Willis and Scacajawea Avenues and Huber and Kern Streets.”

“As it happens, I’m familiar with the company,” Artemis said. “It is owned, through a series of shell companies, by Lucky Dragon Imports – the public, legitimate face of the White Tiger Society. But I never found any connection to the illicit side of their business, beyond the fact that Chin Zhia, the head of the triad and better known as the Kirin, seemed to take a personal interest in the business. She made visits to the facility on a frequent, if  irregular, basis… I always assumed it was just a matter of keeping up the appearance that she was a simple, and influential, local entrepreneur… but now I wonder if there was more to it…”

“Interesting,” Quanta said, motioning for Scion to give them a 3D view of the building. “But why would E.V.A.L. operatives be bringing their loot to a White Tiger Society facility? I know they were both part of the Cabal, but with that alliance having fallen apart in the last two months… could this be a sign that the factions are trying to rebuild the damn Cabal?”

“Possibly,” Artemis said, frowning. “But the stress lines between the criminal factions have been building for years – a process that I’ve done my part to encourage, in fact – and between the internal strife within the Society caused by the recent stroke Chin Zhia suffered, and the external chaos of the influx of uncontrolled meta-humans, I don’t see reconciliation as very likely. It’s more reasonable to assume this is a ploy of E.V.A.L., either against the Society, using us as pawns…”

“…Or a trap for us,” Scion finished the thought. “Or pitting us and the Society against each other, so E.V.A.L. has an easier time taking on the winner. But whatever the truth is, Álvaro remains in imminent danger and this is our only lead. So we go in, of course… but we keep our eyes open and our guard up, knowing it’s likely a trap.”

After a brief discussion on strategy and tactics Quanta opened a quantum tunnel between the Shane Company conference room and the roof of the Cascade Salmon Wholesaler’s loading bay…

♦  ♦  ♦  ♦  ♦

Once the Vanguard was through the quantum tunnel, Eagle took to the air to scan the area. He quickly reported nothing out of the ordinary for early evening, mid-week, in a commercial/industrial area… and only a single private car, a beat-up red Chevy, in the company lot. Artemis teleported from the shadows of the roof into a dim corner of the loading bay, while Phantom Ace simply drifted down through the roof itself. The others flew or jumped down to the loading dock, to enter via the rolling bay doors when PA opened them from within. Oddly quite doors, Chilz thought as he stepped cautiously inside… maybe somebody didn’t want to draw attention when these doors were used…?

The large area of the loading bay was dimly lit and, aside from the stolen cargo container, mostly empty. Only a few stacks of pallets and other industry detritus competed with the smell of fish for attention… a competition the smell won handily. After a careful reconnoiter of the room Scion pulled open the container’s door and stepped in to retrieve his tracker.

Stepping back out, he turned to the left. “This is the direction Dominator and the others went,” he said, scanning the corner of the room carefully. There was no obvious exit from the dead-end corner, with the angled container blocking off the area and the narrow glass-block windows near the 15′ high ceiling both un-openable and, even if they could be opened, too narrow to fit any but the most slender person through.

Closing his eyes, Scion extended his electromagnetic sense, and in the dark of his mind’s eye the electrical grid that ran through the building’s walls became visible to him… pulsing strands of blue-white light limned every wire, plug and light fixture around him. He opened his eyes and the hallucinatory lights remained, overlaying the visible walls, ceiling and floor.

“I think I’ve got it,” he called out after a moment’s study. “A power line comes out from a juncture box in that wall to a faint square in the floor… here!” He tapped his foot on a section of the concrete surface indistinguishable from any other bit.

Kneeling, he ran his hand along a square invisible to the others, sending a pulse of bioelectric energy into the mechanism he sensed below… with a faint hiss, like the breaking of a seal, a crack appeared in the concrete, defining a square about six feet across. There was a thunk as the section of flooring dropped down six inches, then slid back and out of sight, revealing a flight of metal stairs descending into dimness.

“Well, I suppose we’ve just announced ourselves to our enemies,” Eagle sniffed derisively as he hung in the air above them.

“Maybe,” Scion said with a shrug. “But I didn’t sense a pulse of outward energy, and I’d expect to if an alarm had been tripped. And I can tell there are no cameras in here… but nonetheless I suspect you’re right, they almost certainly know we’re coming.”

“Speaking of which,” said Artemis to the Avian Avatar, “shouldn’t you revert to your Totem persona now?” She gestured at his enormous wings. “Not a great advantage underground, really…”

“But my strength may be,” Eagle replied haughtily. “Even if we don’t find room for me to fly… which we may, of course… I know what’s best for me.” He drifted upward, effectively ending the discussion, but as he did she sensed an unexpected hesitation in him, a crack in his usual air of arrogance and studied indifference… with a start she realized that he was uncomfortable about the idea of going below ground!

Blue Flame caught her eye as she turned away, shaking his head and shrugging in their teammate’s direction. He had reverted to human form himself, in preparation for the descent into who-knew-how-cramped a space. “Claustrophobic?” he mouthed silently to her, and she shrugged in return. Who knew, but this was no time to dig into it. If he did panic down below he’d probably just revert to Totem anyway…

Scion led the way down, with Eagle reluctantly bringing up the rear. The metal stairs proved to be a series of switchbacks that descended about 60′ before ending at  the start of a long corridor. The concrete floor was damp but not slippery, and the old brick walls, obviously dating back a century or more, dripped with moisture. The bricks arced overhead to form a vaulted 6′ ceiling, along which were strung dim red lights every ten feet or so. Chilz was forced to bend and shuffle along awkwardly, but decided that was better than reverting to human while walking into a likely ambush.

Eagle muttered darkly as he was forced to contort himself even more awkwardly, and somewhat painfully, to avoid scraping his wings along the bricks of the tunnel. But still he refused to change back to Totem… Artemis, just ahead of him in the line, frowned thoughtfully…

Fortunately, the narrow corridor ended after only 50′ or so… unfortunately, it ended in a blank brick wall. Glaringly out of place, on the left side of the passageway stood a burnished metal pillar with a very high-tech biometric scanner set atop it. The unit’s hand-pad glowed faintly red, other lights blinking in green and amber along the side. The implication of a door was obvious, but no amount of searching turned up anything but solid walls and, Phantom Ace assured the group, solid dirt and rock beyond them, at least as far as he could safely go.

“Definitely a biometric key,” Quanta mused, examining the device alongside Scion. “So it must open something. At this point I’m theorizing it will be some sort of teleportation gate. Maybe we can jury-rig a bypass…”

“Possibly,” agreed Scion. “But I may have a better solution.” He held up his right hand and the metal of his gauntlet began to flow and change. In seconds his fingers and palm were lined with glowing white lines, and the tip of his index finger opened in a tiny maw.

“I built this biometric bypass gizmo awhile back,” he explained as he ran his finger a few centimeters over the face of the hand print reader. “It works best if I can shake hands with someone authorized to use the scanner, of course, or at least get some skin contact, but in pinch I can vacuum up skin cells from the plate, like so…” The tip of his finger irised closed as he finished sweeping the face of the pad. “Then my systems analyze the genetic structure while I wirelessly hack into the device… there we go… a little scan-and-compare to find the palm print that matches the DNA… and… voila!”

He placed his glowing, gloved hand on the pad, which scanned up and back down… and then turned green with a cheerful >beep<. Almost instantly a glowing magenta shimmer appeared in the air in front of the dead-end wall. A shimmer identical to the one ´Álvaro de la Vega had walked through two hours earlier.

“Good call,” Scion said, giving Quanta a thumbs-up. “So, anyone taking bets on what we’re facing on the other side… the center of the sun? The bottom of the Pacific? A wood chipper in Fargo?”

“Well, I can’t be sure about that last one,” Quanta laughed. “But my own quantum-attuned senses tell me this portal is two-way, which means it doesn’t open into either of your other two suggestions… nor into vacuum. It’s definitely on Earth, and with breathable air at about the same barometric pressure as here, on the other side… unfortunately that’s all I can be sure of…”

“Well, in for a penny, in for a pound, as my mother probably never said in her life,” Phantom Ace shrugged. “We knew we were gonna face this point somewhere down the line, no sense hesitating now!” With that he slipped through his two teammates and stepped into the portal.

“Goddamn it kid,” Scion growled in exasperation. “That doesn’t’t mean we couldn’t take a minute to plan!” Shaking his head, he stepped through the portal as well, and the others quickly followed suit. Each was prepared to walk into a fire zone, their offensive powers prepped and on a hair trigger…

Eagle was the last one through, electricity arcing between the talons on his hand, prepared for anything – except seeing the others milling about in a much wider, much more high-tech corridor, which stretched ahead into dimness.

“Well, this is anti-climactic,” he said as he stood up straight and spread his wings. The 12-foot ceiling and 20-foot-wide dimensions of this corridor obviously pleased him better than the other had, and he sounded almost friendly.

“No doubt lulling us into a false sense of security,” Chilz said getting a chuckle from Blue Flame and Phantom Ace.

“No doubt,” agreed Scion dryly. “Maybe this time we could stay in formation, mmm?”

Phantom Ace shrugged and took his place behind Chilz as the group set off down the corridor, but he looked only mildly embarrassed and not at all repentant. Ahead of them Scion turned his head to speak to Quanta, immediately behind him. “Does all of this seem vaguely familiar to you?”

“Yes,” Quanta replied quietly. “I was noticing it too… it looks very much like the secure areas of our own headquarters, doesn’t it?”

“An earlier generation of work from the same architect maybe?”

“Maybe… or it could be a matter of form following function, and the same architecture teacher. We’ll have to ask Álvaro about it once we have him back,” Quanta replied. Scion nodded, and picked up his pace.

After 50 feet the corridor narrowed to only ten feet wide, although the ceiling remained at a 12-foot height. Another 35 feet brought them to a set of shiny metal doors and another biometric hand scanner. Scion placed his hand on it, using the previous settings in his bypass device, and the doors slid open with a sibilant hiss.

The space beyond was large – an 80′ x 80′ room, with large rounded alcoves at each corner. The ceiling was 20′ high along the edges of the room, arching into a dome 50′ high at the center of the space. Partial domes in each alcove merged into the larger one, with indirect lighting coming from recessed panels along the top of the walls. A variety of high-tech machinery and numerous video panels, currently all dark, lined the walls, while the floor was a fine shimmering silver mesh, inset with several areas of gray metal plates.

In the center of the room was an octagonal table of burled maple with high-tech trim. Four ornate chairs of carved black wood, almost thrones really, were set at four of the table’s opposing faces, each padded in luxurious cushions of a different color –red, green, blue and yellow. Smaller chairs of the same wood but less ornately carved, sat at the faces between the thrones, cushioned in dark gray.

At the north face of the table, in the blue chair, sat Álvaro de la Vega. He was not obviously restrained, but he didn’t even blink as the Vanguard stepped into the room, just stared blankly ahead. As the heroes moved toward him, and fully into the room, the doors behind them hissed suddenly shut and an almost subsonic hum, more felt than heard, filled the air.

The heroes were prepared for a fight, but there was nothing and no one to fight… they slowly lowered hands and weapons. Scion, the closest, took a single step towards de la Vega, but stopped at the sudden gasps of horror from his companions. He turned to see them staring beyond him, apparently at the empty space in the air over the table.

He turned back to the table, but could see nothing deserving of such riveted attention. Swiveling his gaze back toward Artemis, who seemed to be frowning intently over his shoulder, as if listening to something very intently, he keyed his comms unit to her channel. “Artemis, what the hell is–”

She cut him off with a sharp hand gesture, and briefly glanced at him to mouth the word “wait” before turning her attention back to the empty air. Puzzled, but trusting his teammate, Scion turned back to study the spot that seemed to so fascinate his companions… and waited.

To the rest of the Vanguard the air over the table was most definitely NOT empty. As soon as the doors had slid shut a floating apparition had appeared over the table – a gigantic, pulsating, glowing translucent brain, half a dozen pink tendrils writhing from where a spine should be. A voice spoke in strong, arrogant tones that compelled attention… the same voice they’d heard just before the assault on the AzTech Pyramid a few hours earlier…

“For years, Astoria was ruled from this room… the Hub of our Cabal. It was from here that the most powerful people Astoria has never known created a city in our own image – a city with no heroes, a city whose people never knew they were ruled by the strong – by the so-called “villains” of the world! 

“We’ll help you launder your loot!” the Cabal said. “Rob Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, New Atlantis… then put your costume aside and live safely here in Astoria!” Criminals finally had a place where they could hide out between jobs, build homes for their families, and live like kings without a second thought, never having to worry about SHADE or some damn “hero” knocking on their door!

And frankly, it wasn’t just the criminals who benefited from this system – for decades Astoria had the lowest crime rate per capita in the country, and the Cabal was directly responsible for that! But now it’s all fallen apart. The Kirin incapacitated, other members of the Cabal losing their hunger for power – like it was all just too much work! And then came the last straw – the damn Incident. It introduced too much chaos into the system, a system already stressed by internal rivalries… and now everything has collapsed.

But adding insult to injury, in all the chaos de la Vega thought he could just step in to claim Astoria’s future for his own, could shape the destiny of the city by creating a team of so-called heroes to send the “criminals” packing! But he was not the only one who saw opportunity in disaster… Cerebral is still here, and I still command E.V.A.L.!

We rise up now to show the world just what a city without heroes can truly be. Where once we ruled from the shadows, now we will rule openly! We will train the new metas of the Incident who join us, the derisively named Incidentals, to use their powers however they like, and to take whatever they want. When the world sees how badly we crush de la Vega’s Vanguard, no one will ever dare put on a mask again, and the citizens of Astoria will become our hostages – the other do-gooders of the world will quickly realize the cost in innocent lives of opposing us would be astronomical… and then this city will belong entirely to us, our haven once more!

 Incidentals, prove your worth to E.V.A.L. and our glorious future! Destroy de la Vega and his heroes! Then Cerebral will show you the true path to ruling Astoria!”

As the words faded from their minds a wider set of doors on the opposite side of the room slid open to reveal Dominator, CyberKnight, Dark Condor,  Shou Tzin, Shadowson and three new villains – a tiny man, no more than three feet tall, clad in red, including a red bandana on his head, gangsta style, who seemed to be made entirely of organic metal; a woman whose body not only appeared to be made of solid, golden energy, but consisted of three humanoid forms joined at the shoulders, each body in a different Indian sari, and with three heads looking in three directions; and lastly, a tall older man with flowing white hair and glowing eyes, dressed like a scary re-enactor from Plimoth Plantation, right down to the large-brimmed black hat… although the massive war hammer he carried didn’t seem quite period, Quanta thought…

The villains leapt into the room and began heading for the heroes at speed, the doors slamming shut behind them. As Scion braced for the onslaught, Artemis spoke in his ear, fast and precise. “I gather you didn’t see or hear that apparition of Cerebral that appeared over the table. Tedious story short, he intends to kill us all so gruesomely that it will be a deterrent to others, then take over the city, using its people as permanent hostages to keep other heroes and the government at bay.

“Don’t know why you didn’t see or hear him, but I’m assuming it’s your armor – I know you’re not likely to take any of it off in battle, but just in case – don’t! You may be our ace in the hole!”

Unfortunately, there was no time to respond, for at that moment hard-points in the four alcove corners of the room suddenly opened up, weapons ratcheting out and targeting the heroes. Scion took to the air just as a coil launcher sent ribbons of twisting black metal at him… but zigged when he should have zagged. The metal bands encircled and immobilized him, constricting around him like high-tech swaddling and bringing him crashing back down, a dark mummy writhing on the floor.

Similar bands shot out from the other alcoves, enveloping Blue Flame, Chilz and Quanta, immobilizing them in seconds. But their bondage didn’t last long… Quanta managed to partially avoid his bands, and it took only seconds for him to free himself completely.

It took the others only a few seconds longer to do the same – Chilz froze his bonds solid, then flexed, shattering them like glass, while the Blue Flame poured on the heat, briefly turning the metal to molten slag before vaporizing it completely. Scion took a deep breath, then flexed with all his considerable strength, snapping the metal bands and sending them flying in all directions.

Leading the villains with his speed, Dark Condor reached the heroes first, swooping down on Phantom Ace, his talons extended for a disembowling blow – only to flash harmlessly through the suddenly intangible hero. But PA realized how close it had actually been – he’d barely had time to change, the bird-man was that fast! And man, did that guy stink – the whiff of carrion about him was stronger in the enclosed room than it had been out of doors…

Quanta, still on one knee after throwing off the metal bands, gestured and a massive block of quantum matter formed in the air above the center of the villainous pack. But as it fell, Dominator blew it in two with a rocket barrage, while the Pilgrim dude with the hammer smashed one side of the remains into dust and CyberKnight used a plasma blast from her lance to shatter the other… the few chunks that rained down on the metal midget didn’t seem to bother him, or even slow him down!

“Glade to see that thing isn’t just for show, Hexenhammer,” Dominator laughed. “Can’t wait to see what it does to some of these squishy bitches!”

At that instant a blast of Arctic air engulfed the criminals, courtesy of Chilz, standing tall amidst shattered remnants of his own bands. Unfortunately it had no effect, and Hexenhammer raised his weapon, turning the wintry fury back on the hero.

Reabsorbing the redirected attack, Chilz barely had time to brace himself as Dominator launched a barrage of mini-rockets at him. He took the blasts full on the chest, but it did little more than star his ice form… as he stepped out of the cloud of smoke his foes could see that the cracks had already begun to fuse together and disappear.

Leaping over the table, Shadowson gestured towards his enemies, and a wave of darkness seemed to roll off him. At the same time Artemis‘ cloak billowed around her, almost like a thing alive, and suddenly Nightblades‘ darkness turned translucent… within seconds it was gone altogether.

Artemis had no time to appreciate her countering of the assassin’s attempt to blind her friends, however, as CyberKnight launched a plasma blast from her lance directly at her. Artemis rolled neatly away from the attack, and coming up in crouch hurled her fully charged escrima sticks at Shadowson, who dodged them both in turn.

Phantom Ace, passing through Dark Condor’s futile attacks, raced to Álvaro de la Vega’s side. Becoming tangible, he grabbed the billionaire’s shoulder and prepared to teleport. Not being sure where they were, the best he could hope for was the corridor they’d arrive in, but at least it would get the man out of immediate harm’s way…

Gideon screamed as his attempt to teleport was blocked, its energies hurled back at him two-fold. He collapsed to the floor, rolling partway under the table near Álvaro’s feet, as merciful darkness swallowed the pain and his mind.

Taking to the air once free of his bonds, Scion attempted to blanket the room with his electronics-nullifying pulse… but found that something seemed to be blocking the effect, along with his external communications and GPS tracking.

From above, Eagle could see that both the little metal man and the ominous-looking Hexenhammer seemed to be bearing down on Chilz… well, maybe he could even up the odds a bit… but something about that old man gave him a premonitory chill… and made him want to stay away from him.

Stooping instead on the tiny metal man, Eagle fully intended to grasp him by the shoulders and lift him into the air – but the diminutive villain was shockingly heavy, and his talons had a hard time finding purchase, >screeeing< off the shiny surface before the man, barely slowing down, backhanded him away!

“Sorry Wings, Anvil ain’t the kinda guy that lets just anybody pick him up,” the little guy laughed. “And anyway, you sure ain’t my type!”

Before Eagle could renew his attack the room’s wall-mounted weapons fired a second salvo, this time utilizing blue-green lasers. Eagle was forced to pull up and use his wings to deflect the energy away from his more vulnerable flesh. The beams from the other weapons simply flashed through Blue Flame with no effect, and bounced harmlessly off Scion’s armor.

Only Quanta, a blast to the back knocking him forward, took any damage. His quantum shell quickly healed the steaming gouge, however, just in time for him to face an attack from above as Dark Condor’s talons raked across his torso. But unlike the lasers the talons proved completely ineffective, and the winged psychopath barely managed to dodge the hero’s return blast of high-velocity buckyballs.

“Your minutes are counting down, Vanguard!” crowed the mental voice of Cerebral, echoing in every mind in the room save Scion’s. “And my cameras are recording every angle – the whole world will soon witness your pathetic failures… and well deserved executions!”

Seemingly encouraged by her leader’s words, the glowing three-bodied, three-headed woman looked up at Blue Flame and snarled “Feel the true flame of the Trinity, freak!” She lifted two of her six arms and hurled a blast of yellow-white plasma at the hero. As the stream hit him, however, it seemed to turn blue and then vanish into his own form.

“Wow, kettle, meet pot… but thanks for the recharge, lady – umm, ladies,” the Blue Flame laughed. “I’ve barely started, though, so no need to top off the tank! Now, let’s see if we can’t put your energy to better use!”

With that he turned a stream of his own super-heated plasma on the nearest weapon hard point, hoping to slag it before it could recharge for its next attack. Unfortunately some sort of deflection screen seemed to turn the blast, and a harmless section of nearby wall was charred instead.

Trinity was momentarily distracted by the need to evade a stream of armor-piercing slugs sent at her from Scion’s arm guns. Her triple body moved with surprising grace, and she rose into the air herself as she avoided the attack, her form glowing more brightly.

Phantom Ace was groggily pulling himself up from the floor, leaning heavily on the table, when he suddenly found himself face-to-face with the colorfully garbed Chinese martial artist Shou Tzin. The man’s sword flashed out and once again Phantom Ace barely made the transition to intangible before the blade passed through his stomach.

“Geeze, dude, you coulda killed me!” he complained, diving through the startled villain and rolling away. The man frowned, but shrugged off the brief encounter and turned again to seek his true target…

Chilz, meanwhile, had seen the same danger headed his way that Eagle had, and took his own action to deal with it. A gesture from one hand formed a ramp of ice directly in the path of the charging Anvil… the truncated villain’s feet slid out from under him and he slammed down on his ass, his momentum carrying him forward at a tremendous speed.

Chilz raised his other hand and the still-forming ramp banked up away from himself – straight into the running form of Hexenhammer. The metal mini-man slammed feet-first into his erstwhile ally like a cannon ball, sending the older man flying backward as they both crashed to the floor in a tangle of arms and legs.

“That outta look good on your home video, ya Big Butt-Head,” Chilz chuckled.

Unfortunately, neither villain seemed to have been more than slightly dazed by the impact, and Hexenhammer rolled the smaller man off him with barely a grunt. “Get thee in my way again, abomination, and thou shalt feel the power of mine hammer for thineself!” he snarled as he regained his feet.

Anvil just laughed and picked himself up, readjusting the red bandana on his gleaming head. “Sure Gramps, like that toy of yours could make a dent in me! Ha, dream on!”

Before their confrontation had a chance to escalate into something interesting, however, Dominator launched another missile barrage at Quanta. The explosions knocked the silvery hero back, momentarily dazing him, and the shockwave rattled Chilz, Scion and Blue Flame, but did them no harm. Dark Condor, on the other hand, was also caught in the blast. He crashed to the floor, stunned.

Dominator’s attack did, however, distract Scion just enough that he took a full power plasma blast in the back from CyberKnight’s lance, which sent him slamming into a wall, rattling his brains a bit.

Shadowson, meanwhile, had  finally closed with Artemis and swung a savage blow at her midriff with his mystic sword. She ducked and rolled, cloak billowing around her, deftly avoiding his blow while putting herself in position to scoop up her escrima sticks.

Flicking them to full shock mode, Artemis whirled and lashed out, high and low, at Shadowson. He twisted gracefully away from the one and efficiently blocked the other with his blade, blue electricity snaking up its length to dissipate harmlessly in the hilt.

“I have heard of you, Artemis,” he said quietly, the smile plain in his voice despite the black scarf over his lower face. “I admit, one of several reasons I took this trip to your dreary little city was in the hope that we might cross paths… I was disappointed that you failed to find me earlier today at the jail… and our encounter at the museum was so brief… but here we are now, with the rest of your life to enjoy. Once you are dead, just imagine what I might accomplish with both Blade and Cloak in my possession?”

“I’ve heard of you , too,” Artemis replied as they circled warily, each looking for an opening. “And you’ve made a mistake in seeking me out. While I have no desire to possess both artifacts, I am certain that it’s time the Shadow Blade returns to Shambhala, to await a more worthy master. I plan to see that that happens as soon as possible, and if it’s over your dead body… well, sometimes life just gives you that cherry on top.”

Whatever answer the Phoenix Moon Triad’s assassin might have made was drowned out by a deafening crack of thunder as Eagle sent a lightning bolt into Dominator. The armored felon managed to get a shield up in time to absorb most of the blast, although it did force him momentarily to the floor.

Before Eagle could follow up the room’s weapons system finished recharging, and this time it was flame-throwers that lashed out. Two of them focused on each of the flying heroes – Eagle jinked and dove, narrowly avoiding both the flaming streams aimed at him.

Scion, on the other hand, managed to avoid the first attack, but the second stream of superheated liquid struck him in the head. Momentarily blinded, his systems struggled to bleed off the heat – he had designed his armor more to keep him warm, under the sea or in the upper atmosphere, than to deal with extreme heat. Perhaps an oversight he should remedy, assuming he survived…

Cerebral’s laugh again rang out on the psychic plane. “The mighty Scion, brought low by mere fire! How embarrassed your famous family will be to watch your pitiful antics!” Scion, of course, was the only one in the room who couldn’t hear him, and his silence and apparent indifference to the taunts seemed to enrage the psychic kingpin.

But before he could continue his tirade Quanta dropped another mass, this time onto Cerebral’s glowing apparition as well as Dominator and Hexenhammer. The latter swung his hammer up and shattered the block, but several large pieces plunged into the image of Cerebral… and to Quanta’s surprise elicited a grunt of pain! So, some sort of psychic feedback must be occurring… interesting…

At that same moment Trinity released a massive burst of radiation in the direction of Chilz, Artemis, Blue Flame and Quanta, none of whom seemed phased by it. All three faces of the glowing creature frowned in annoyance. Her shimmering force shields easily blocked the hail of razor sharp ice that Chilz blasted at her in return, but his attack did distract her from the Blue Flame.

His blue-white stream of superheated plasma blew through her shields on the side away from the ice attack, and staggered her. Scion took that moment to send a bolt of bioelectric energy into the same spot, clearly stunning the woman… women… whatever.

Scion had been ready to take the fight to CyberKnight, but that radiation blast had worried him – his onboard Geiger counter had redlined for a second, and if she could pour out that much lethal radiation… well, he was safe enough in his armor, and he doubted it would have much effect on Blue Flame or Quanta. But he was less certain about Chilz or Eagle… their powers might protect them, but then again they might not… and Phantom Ace was likely the most vulnerable. Better to take this threat out quickly.

Artemis, meanwhile, found her stalemate withShadowson broken when Shou Tzin joined the attack. Sweeping low under his blade, she avoided the Chinese fighter’s attack while blockingShadowson’s attempt to decapitate her. As Dark Condor swooped in to pile on and try his luck at disemboweling her, Artemis easily ducuked under his talons, grabbed one of his wings, and used his own momentum to swing him around, smashing him into her other two opponents…

Anvil had taken the various distractions of the general melee to switch targets, and now he attempted to “bowling ball” Quanta, much as the giant ice dude had forced him to do to that old creeper Hexenhammer. He wondered if he could crack the silvery dude’s shell with one hit… and what he’d find inside if he did. But fast as he was, Quanta was faster, and the hero neatly sidestepped at the last second. Anvil’s momentum, and a blast of silvery matter to the ass, carried him past and straight into the nearest wall.

Meanwhile, Eagle was suddenly finding himself in some trouble… Dominator had opened up on him with a hail of machine gun fire, which he’d easily dodged. But in doing so he’d flown directly into the electrified net that CyberKnight had launched at him.

The 50,000 volts only momentarily stunned him, and that was enough to allow the net to contract around him, pinning his arms and wings, hindering his ability to fly and leaving him vulnerable – a fact which Hexenhammer took swift advantage of, swinging his hammer in an underhanded arc that smashed into Eagle’s jaw and sent him flying back to crash to the floor.

Eagle struggled to remain conscious, disbelief warring with anger… and real fear. This close to it, he could sense the malevolent life in the weapon the old man wielded, and its hatred for all things magical or supernatural… as well as its ability to destroy magic! He flexed his muscles, shredding the net, and his out-flung wings momentarily knocked back the dangerous old witch hunter and his murderous hammer.

But before Eagle could take to the air again, and try to put some distance between himself and them, the room’s weapons cycled for the fourth time, and two Taser cannons locked on to him. Already weakened and dazed, this time the electricity coursing through him nearly broke several bones as his body spasmed uncontrollably and he slid down into the darkness… this was so unfair, his last thought wailed…

Chilz and Scion, both focused on the threat of Trinity, took the other two taser blasts to their backs. Chilz had never felt that much electricity before, and was momentarily stunned as it rippled through his ice form. Scion, of course, was unaffected in his armor, but the attack did leave him open to a brain-rattling roundhouse punch to the head from a suddenly resurgent Trinity.

Phantom Ace, who was finally recovering from his forcibly aborted attempt to teleport, saw Eagle go down, and the scary old dude standing over him, hammer raised for a killing blow – damn, he was too far away, he didn’t dare teleport, and the swirling three-way fight between Artemis, Shadowson and Shou Tzin was between him and his endangered teammate…

In a flash he suddenly saw one chance… as the old man hesitated, taken aback at the sight of Eagle shifting back into the human form of Totem, Phantom Ace leaped into the fray between the three martial artists, interposing himself between Shadowson and Artemis and drawing the assassin’s attention momentarily to himself.

Backing away under the ninja’s flashing blade, Phantom Ace gauged his moment, and then made a feint, going intangible at the same instant. The vicious swing of the blade meant to gut him instead took Hexenhammer in the lower back, staggering him and knocking him away from the prone figure of Totem.

Dark Condor, finally seeing an opponent he could dominate (that is, one who was unconscious), swooped down, prepared to rend the shaman’s flesh and feast! But a sudden stream of tiny silver balls took him hard in the gut and he was hurled halfway across the room, to come crashing down to the floor.

Quanta, having also seen the danger Totem was in, had launched a triple quantum matter blast at the three enemies closest to his fallen teammate. His primary target had been that psychotic freak of a bird man, and he was gratified to see the disgusting self-proclaimed cannibal sprawled out in a tangle of limbs and feathers.

He’d have hit Hexenhammer, too, if the villain hadn’t staggered back at just the wrong moment, hit by his own “friendly” fire. And sadly, CyberKnight wasn’t even a close call – she managed to easily dodge up and over the stream of buckyballs.

“Not this time, Quanta!” she said grimly, and immediately dove down at him. In an unexpected move, she used her lance to sweep Quanta’s feet out from under him, at the same moment Dominator let loose a double blast from his Force Cannons, pile-driving the hero into the floor and dazing him.

Artemis, meanwhile, had been distracted for just an instant by the sudden appearance of Phantom Ace in the middle of her fight, and while he did manage to draw off Shadowson, at least for a moment, the distraction also allowed Shou Tzin to finally land a blow.

It was only a gash on her thigh, but first blood to him. It’s an ill wind that blows no good, however… rather than go defensive, she rolled forward and went for a grab. It was clearly unexpected, and for an instant she had the man… but with a supple twist and a drop, Shou Tzin broke away before she could consolidate the hold.

Chilz laid down another sheet of ice in front of both Trinity and Anvil, the latter seeming determined to head-butt the ice elemental. And indeed, the appeal of taking down the biggest guy in the room was strong in the little metal man! Unlike his tripartite teammate, who managed, barely,  to keep her footing on the suddenly treacherous floor, Anvil looked like a cartoon character, pinwheeling wildly before going down, hard, on his face again. A string of muttered curses turned the air blue as he attempted to scramble back to his feet, to little success…

Overhead, the Blue Flame plasma-blasted Trinity again, trying to keep her off balance and on the defensive, although his power seems to affect her as little as hers did him… but between the fire and ice, she did seem distracted!

At that point the room’s automated defenses fired up once again, cycling back to the coil launchers. Chilz and Blue Flame, still focused on their two immediate foes, were again wrapped in the black metal coils, while Scion managed to dodge them this time. A dazed Quanta, struggling back to his feet after being double-teamed by Dominator and CyberKnight, was not so lucky, and found himself bound tightly.

“Struggle all you want, Vanguard” Cerebral taunted the heroes once again, his psychic tendrils whipping about in excited agitation, like the tail of a cat preparing to pounce. “It just makes my inevitable victory all the sweeter! Hexenhammer, finish off the shaman  – now!”

The witch hunter looked momentarily mulish, apparently not wild about taking orders from the image of a disembodied brain, even if it’s what he would’ve done anyway. Nonetheless, he strode forward to loom over the still unconscious form of Totem, raising his hammer high… and Phantom Ace dove through his body from behind, reaching out to grasp the hammer and turn it as intangible as himself.

“What sorcery be this?” the old guy bellowed, outraged at such a liberty being taken with him. “Be ye ghost or warlock, thou shall not long keep me from mine own weapon, forged by my will alone and loyal unto me forever!”

With a feral grin he gestured at the hammer, and to Phantom Aces’ shock it ripped itself from his hand, although they were both still intangible. The weapon flew to its master… who had no trouble grasping its once-more-solid haft.

Phantom Ace leaped forward then, to put an intangible hand through the bastard’s chest and squeeze his little black heart – and was knocked aside like a rag doll by a savage backhand blow that sent him across the table and almost into Álvaro de la Vega’s lap. Shaking his head to clear it, he sank through the table just as the hammer >swooshed< through the space where his head had been.

Hexenhammer, momentarily diverted from his previous victim, stalked after his new prey as the boy scrabbled away, fear in his eyes… yes it was always good to see the fear in the eyes of monsters and witches… even after all these centuries, he hadn’t grown tired of that look…

Totem came slowly up from the darkness, and it took him a second to remember where he was  – and what that bastard Eagle had done! It was unprecedented, as far as he knew – an Avatar refusing to give way to its human host!

Of course, he had been the one to break the covenant first, by summoning Eagle twice within a 24-hour period… something he hadn’t’t even thought possible. But still – he shook his head as he climbed to his feet. This was not the time nor place to worry about it. Clearly his friends needed him, even if he dared not summon any of the other Avatars right now.

Focusing on his personal magic, Totem raised his hands and murmured the ancient incantation that summoned the Sleeping Mists… and the gentle green rain began to drift down over the battle. Unfortunately only three of the villains where affected by the spell, and those only partially. Armor, metal body, other magics, or just plain luck insulated the others from the effects…

Across the room Trinity suddenly staggered, her eyes growing wide and then half closing as she fell to her six knees. Although she swayed, and her three sets of eyelids drooped, she never fully lost consciousness… her three heads kept shaking in sequence, trying to throw off the spell…

Hexenhammer shook his own head violently as he felt the drowsiness overcome him… he gripped his hammer tightly and muttered what sounded like a prayer. A flash of violet light flared out from the hammer, and the green mist around him vanish with a malevolent >hisss<.

Dark Condor, just getting back into the air after his last beatdown, was also staggered by a sudden feeling of weariness… but after a moment he snapped his head back and seemed to throw off the siren call of sleep. He snarled in rage then, as he realized what had almost happened… and who had done it!

Shrieking in fury, he swooped down at Totem, but before the shaman could summon up a mystic shield a stream of quantum matter blasted the winged monster sideways, to crash to floor once again dazed.

The other two prongs of Quanta’s three-pronged attack had mixed results – Hexenhammer managed to deflect the stream of buckyballs with his weapon, but CyberKnight was caught unawares, the blast taking her in the head, stunning her, and knocking her from the air to collapse with a metallic crash to the floor.

“How about this time, CyberKnight?” he called out, grinning. He was beginning to get a handle on these multi-pronged attacks…

As the dazed CyberKnight scrambled to retrieve her dropped lance, Dominator walked a stream of machine gun fire across Quanta’s torso, but the hero had been ready for it, and his thickened and reinforced shell defeated the attack easily. Obviously still woozy, CyberKnight whipped her lance up and with a grunt of pain fired off a blast of plasma at Quanta. The shot missed him entirely – but did strike Shadowson, in the middle of his latest attack on Artemis.

At the last second some preternatural sense seemed to warn him, however, and the assassin was able to turn his attack away from Artemis, instead deflecting the plasma beam with his blade. This gave Artemis an opening, and she scored a hit on her other opponent, Shou Tzin, momentarily dazing him.

Meanwhile, Anvil’s futile attempts to ram into Chilz continued to send him slipping and sliding around on the iced-over floor, while the Blue Flame continued to blast Trinity with plasma, forcing her to throw up shields again and again… which allowed Scion to attack from one of her other sides.

While there was no way to really sneak up on Trinity, with three sets of eyes giving her a pretty much 360° field of vision, she didn’t seem able to focus her attention very effectively on more than one front. So Scion’s strafing run along her second side forced her to divert some energy and attention from the plasma attack to block the armor-piercing rounds… and left her third side open to a sudden dive and grab…

As his armored hand closed on Trinity’s shoulder Scion let loose his strongest bioelectric charge. She screamed as the energy surged into her, and her three bodies suddenly spasmed, flickered… and vanished! In their place a rather ordinary young woman in street cloths collapsed to the floor, unconscious.

As Scion formed a neural dampener from his armor and attached it to the back of the woman’s neck, assuring she wouldn’t be rejoining the fight any time soon, the room’s automated weapons completed their charge cycle and let loose with the flame throwers again. They missed all their targets this time, except the Blue Flame, who simply absorbed them without even noticing.

“Time to do something about those damn automated weapons.” Scion muttered to himself. Still crouching over his subdued foe he began to scan the flow of electricity within the walls around him…

Losing one of his pawns seemed to have shut up Cerebral, at least momentarily, and everyone appreciate the respite from his inane taunts… even his own operatives, apparently. After a moment of tense silence, however, he turned his ire on Dark Condor, who had retreated to the highest point in the room, apparently having had enough with the beat downs…

With Trinity out, Chilz created a column of ice beneath the flailing Anvil, raising the pint-sized firecracker 30 feet into the air, while Blue Flame swooped in to grab him. Unfortunately he missed as Anvil, apparently unafraid of heights, ducked and leapt off the pillar – aiming himself at Chilz like an iron meteorite. The little metal man struck the ice elemental squarely in the chest, sending a starburst of cracks radiating across his torso and knocking him on his ass.

Across the room Totem, still a bit dazed, cast another spell, attempting to bring down CyberKnight with his Bitter Lash, but she seemed to have regained at least some of her own senses, and narrowly dodged the glowing tendril of mystic energy.

At the same time she managed to bring her lance back up, and this time she didn’t miss Quanta, knocking him back and to the floor. Shaking his head to clear it, Quanta in return attempted another block drop on CyberKnight, but Hexenhammer, abandoning his fight with Phantom Ace and headed toward his original target, Chilz, swung his hammer in passing and shattered the block to dust.

There were a great many power lines running through the walls of the Hub, but it took only a moment for Scion to trace the lines running from the weapons hard points to… yes! There! A seemingly blank section of wall, behind which lay a control panel…

No doubt there was some elegant way to gain access to the hidden panel, but there wasn’t time to finesse it – Scion simply dug his fingers into the wall and tore the section away. It took only a few seconds more to interface with the electronics and… interesting, the programing was very similar to that in their own Danger Room, if less robust… older maybe? In any case, it was a piece of cake to make a few tweaks to the targeting parameters…

A moment later the rooms weapons discharged again, but this time it was Dominator who was ensnared in the black metal coils from two launchers. Caught entirely flat-footed, the mercenary was wrapped up with his arms pinned so effectively that, unable to control his flight, he slammed head-first into the floor.

Hexenhammer simply batted the coils away with his hammer, growling in annoyance as he moved to confront Chilz‘, who was just climbing to his feet, his fractured chest healing back into solid ice.

Shou Tzin, while managing to dodge the coils aimed at him, was forced to abort his attack on Artemis, allowing her to deflect Shadowson‘s slash with an escrima stick. Taking advantage of the distraction, in a sudden flurry of blows she staggered Shou Tzin, then whirled to catch the Shadow Blade between her sticks – a sharp twist, and she ripped it away from Shadowson, sending the weapon spinning across the room. She stored away the look of shock in his eyes to take out and treasure at her leisure…

Suddenly Cerebral was much less amused by it all. Realizing that Scion had perhaps just turned the tide, the criminal mastermind vented his fury on the armored hero. “I’ll turn your mind into a soup of disconnected neurons, you sanctimonious fool!” he mentally roared. Phantom Ace and Totem both gasped as a blast of searing psychic energy lanced out from the floating brain, striking Scion full in the back of the head!

Scion turned away from the hijacked control panel and picked up Anvil, who seemed determined to have another go at Chilz, even though (or maybe because) he’d turned to face the much scarier threat of Hexenhammer bearing down on him…

Although it was hard to read expression from a giant floating brain, the villain seemed utterly taken aback at Scion’s complete obliviousness to his most powerful attack… for a moment his spectral tentacles hung limp in shock…

Totem took that moment to cast a spell of Baleful Bindings on the psychic manifestation, in the hope that the magic might be able to bind the psionic energy. But Cerebral seemed as oblivious to the glowing bands as Scion had been to his own attack.

Anvil, meanwhile, struggling in Scion’s grip managed to land a solid kick to the hero’s groin – and while it didn’t do any real damage, it was startling enough to force Scion to drop him. He hit the floor with a boom, but before he could launch another attack he was bathed in plasma from the Blue Flame. His red costume instantly charred and then vaporized, but he himself seemed unfazed, even as his body began to glow red…

“Ha! You ain’t got what it takes to melt me, flyboy,” he crowed. “But let’s see if your ice buddy there can take the heat!”

Chilz heard the threat, but couldn’t spare the time to look behind him – Hexenhammer was batting aside his barrage of piercing ice shards as he charged forward. With a demented laugh the villain raised his hammer over his head and brought it down in in a blow intended to shatter the icy monstrosity’s head into a thousand shards…

Chilz stopped the blow dead, halfway through its arc, catching the head of the weapon in both hands. The palms of his hand starred and splintered, and cracks raced down the length of his arms, but he held the hammer still for a moment before yanking it out of Hammerhexen’s grip, to the old man’s fury.

Before he could react and call the weapon back, a blast of quantum matter struck him in the side, knocking him away and momentarily dazing him. At the same time CyberKnight dodged a second stream of silvery matter, and hurled a plasma blast from her lance back at Quanta, who threw up a shield against which the energy splashed harmlessly.

Dominator was still on the floor, struggling to break his bonds and cursing a blue streak, when the room’s weapons recharged and cycled to their next attack – Taser cannons.

Anvil, caught mid-rush in his move on Chilz, was bathed in sparking blue electricity and his mouth opened in a silent scream as he went down, spasming into unconsciousness. Hexenhammer, focused on summoning his weapon back to his hand, never saw the bolt that struck him in the head, sending him, too, down into darkness.

Shou Tzin, still dazed from Artemis‘ last strike, managed to twist away from the Taser assault… but in so doing ran straight into her next attack. A double hit, to head and solar plexus, and he dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.

Shadowson took advantage of this distraction to retrieve his sword, and surveying the situation in the room at that moment, decided the party was over. Even as Artemis turned to focus her full attention on him, the black-clad assassin was vanishing through the doorway he’d opened behind him.

Dark Condor, already having had enough of the fight, took his teammate’s departure as the sign that it was every man for himself, and in steep dive he angled for the door, momentarily, but effectively, blocking Artemis as she made to pursue her foe. Even as his wings brushed the edges of the doorway, the panels began to slide shut…

CyberKnight, dodging another blast from Quanta, caught sight of her fleeing companions, and grimaced in disgust. As Scion lined up a shot on her from his arm guns she hit a button on her wrist guard and the air around her rippled as she faded from sight. From the sounds and the rush of air past her, Artemis was certain the villainess made it out just before the doors closed.

Cerebral was enraged at the defection of his minions, but he wasn’t done yet. “You may have defeated my feckless minions, Vanguard, and won the battle – but I still win the war! Not as photogenically as I’d hoped, perhaps, but your death’s will still serve the purpose I intended! Enjoy your very pyrrhic victory, fools!” With that his floating avatar vanished like a soap bubble.

Scion, of course, neither heard nor saw any of it, and with CyberKnight’s escape he had turned to wrenching off Dominator’s helmet… and almost his head, too, the way the mercenary went on about it. But without the command-and-control circuitry in the helmet he was locked in his armor as effectively as any prison, even without the metal coils.

As soon as Cerebral’s visible manifestation had disappeared Álvaro blinked and slowly shook his head, as if waking from a deep sleep. Suddenly, his eyes flew open wide and he leapt up. “We have to get to the power core – that bastard has set it to overload, and we’ve got minutes, at the most, before it turns a chunk of Desdemona Island into radioactive slag!”

“Desdemona Island?” Artemis asked, having secured Shou Tzin. “How do you know we’re under Desdemona Island?”

“Cerebral mentioned it while taunting me, but that’s really not the point right now,” Álvaro growled in exasperation. “Time is of the essence…” feeling around the underside of the table in front of the chair he’d just vacated, he smiled tightly at the sound of a click. “We need to move, heroes!”

A section of flooring between the table and the north wall began to sink, then slide silently into a recessed pocket, revealing a spiral metal staircase beneath. “Scion, Quanta, follow me,” Álvaro barked, and headed down the stairs at a run. The two heroes glanced at each other, shrugged, and followed their sponsor down into the bowels of the Cabal’s lair.

Which turned out to be a circular room about 40 feet across. Its centerpiece was a crystalline column of pulsing blue-white energy that rose from the floor almost to the 12-foot-high slightly domed ceiling. A console of brushed metal sporting variously glowing buttons, most of them flashing red, surrounded the column. Other computer stations lined the wall of the room, all but one of them dark and apparently shut down.

Álvaro immediately headed to the central console, and began checking readouts, Scion and Quanta on either side. “Thank god, I think we’re in time,” the billionaire sighed in relief. “I think we can abort the process if we…” There followed a detailed discussion, heavy on physics, between de la Vega and Quanta.

Scion, seeing the other two had the situation well in hand, moved over to the other consoles on the perimeter of the room. Powering up one of the dead terminals he found that whatever data the room’s computers might once have held, it had all been erased and, he strongly suspected, well scrubbed.

The sole exception was the active terminal. On closer examination Scion slowly began to grin… this computer held the backup to the video cameras throughout the Cabal’s Hub and its annexes. Cameras that had captured the whole fight, from the moment the Vanguard has entered the Cascade Salmon Wholesaler’s loading bay to Álvaro opening the secret door to this room…

No doubt the live feed had been broadcast to a remote E.V.A.L. facility for editing into a nice propaganda piece about the death of the Vanguard, but the original video files had been erased, probably when Cerebral triggered the power core overload. He either hadn’t known about what appeared to be an automatic back-up, or he hadn’t cared, assuming the files would be destroyed along with the Hub itself.

With an outright laugh Scion plugged his armor into the terminal and began a flash download of  all the data into a carefully isolated drive unconnected to his onboard system (who knew what nasty viruses the former masters of the Hub might’ve left for unauthorized visitors). This was going to make an excellent PR piece for the good guys… and give E.V.A.L. a very public black eye in the process.

While their teammates defused the explosive problem below, the rest of the Vanguard finished mopping up in the Hub itself. Chilz managed to pry open the doors through which the remnant of the E.V.A.L. “team” had retreated, while Artemis and Phantom Ace finished securing and neutralizing the prisoners.

“I’ll scout ahead,” Blue Flame called out, zipping past his icy friend as soon as the doors were wide enough.

“Damn it, wait!” called out Artemis as she finished hog-tying Shou Tzin. “We should all go together –” but he was gone before she could finish the sentence. With a sigh she motioned the others to follow their impetuous teammate…

In the end, all they found were a series of dead-end corridors with burned out teleportal control panels at their terminus’. And returning to the main corridor with the teleport back to the fish facility, they found that it, too, was a fused mass of useless electronics.

“The teleportation interference is gone,” Phantom Ace noted. “But without knowing exactly where we are I don’t dare teleport out.”

“I could get to any number of places,” Artemis said. “But I can only take one other with me, so evacuating all of us, and our prisoners, would prove… time consuming. But I doubt that that will be necessary. No sane person would build a facility like this, accessible only via teleportation, without an emergency escape route in case the technology fails. The Cabal are criminals, but they were never insane.

“What do you think, Álvaro?” she asked, turning to their benefactor, who had returned with Scion and Quanta, having averted the overload of the power core.

“Me?” Álvaro replied, looking surprised. “Well, I suppose you’re right. Certainly I would never build a facility without emergency exits… after all, that would be illegal. And while I doubt the Cabal are much concerned with local building codes, as you say, they aren’t crazy – and as criminal masterminds, quite adept at contingency planning. Or so I would imagine.”

With Scion’s electro-magnetic sense it didn’t take long to discover the concealed emergency exit – a narrow circular tube, lined with very solid rungs, that went up for over 200 feet and exited into a maintenance shed in the SW corner of Cathedral Park. Scion flew up the shaft, avoiding any booby traps the ladder might hold, and once it he’d opened the top hatch it was a only matter of minutes before Phantom Ace had everyone evacuated and the prisoners laid out on the grass.

Within five minutes SHADE support vehicles and prisoner transport wagons were dropping out of the sky, It was only a few minutes after that that the APD was there setting up police lines. Two minutes after that the TV news crews began to arrive… A hundred feet to the east, traffic whirred by on the elevated Lewis & Clark Interstate Bridge and made an eye-catching backdrop for the dramatic impromptu press conference Álvaro somehow roped the Vanguard, SHADE and the APD into…

It was not much past 21:00, early evening on a beautiful summer day, the embers of a spectacular sunset just fading from the sky, and everyone was exhausted. Unfortunately, between initial debriefing with both SHADE and the APD, Álvaro’s press conference, and helping to secure the Cabal’s Hub, it was well after midnight before the Vanguard made it back to the Pyramid and were able to collapse into their various beds.

It had been a long day, and no one had the energy to even think about trying to make it home…

As Meg Halcyon and Totem strolled out from the odd, yet strangely charming little museum dedicated to Álvaro de la Vega they suddenly found themselves frozen in their tracks. A voice seemed to echo in their heads, and apparently in the heads of every one of the more than 1000 people milling about in the AzTech Pyramid’s massive atrium, celebrating AzTech’s 25th anniversary and the opening of the Pyramid.

“Astoria does NOT belong to Álvaro de la Vega!” the voice declared… male, cold, and very, very confidant… to the point of arrogance. “No, it belongs to E.V.A.L., and our reign begins – NOW!”

As suddenly as it came, the voice was gone and they could move again, but at the same instant two other things happened – a tremendous boom shook the building, shattering the massive glass canopy over the seven story high atrium; and on the small stage near the spectacular indoor waterfall a shimmering portal opened in the air. Despite his efforts to twist out of their grips, de la Vega was dragged forward by his two body guards, towards the portal. The instant they shoved him through it, the portal winked out of existence, and the two men suddenly staggered, looking confused and uncertain.

Few people in the crowd had much time to notice the billionaire’s disappearance, however, as half of them were screaming and running for the exits, while the other half seemed rooted in place, staring up in horror as a mass of lethal glass shards sleeted toward them. A handful of people reacted reflexively, from the Mayor and her Chief of Staff, to Dr. John Quest and his husband Hadji Singh, to several quick thinking wait staff – and, of course, the Vanguard.

On the west side of the atrium, almost under the mezzanine where many food cart vendors had set up serving stations, Phantom Ace was the first to react – almost before the glass began to fall he teleported into the thick of the crowd and grabbed the two nearest people he could reach – they in turn were pressed against dozens of others as the crowd surged towards the exits. Stretching his power to the utmost, he teleported them all.

Almost 30 people suddenly found themselves outside on the grass of Defiance Plaza, and before they’d had time to really absorb the fact, Phantom Ace was gone, reappearing in the heart of the crowd to grab another batch of civilians…

Almost as soon as Phantom Ace had vanished from beside him, Chilz began throwing up a curving barrier of ice an inch thick. It arced up over the heads of the crowd for 30 feet in either direction, and shards and panes of ice could be heard shattering to pieces beyond the translucent shield, sliding harmlessly down its sides to the floor.

Blue Flame leapt into the air as Chilz’ ice shield began to form, soaring out over the crowd beyond. Stretching his own power in a way he had never tried before, he essentially hurled himself outward in every direction at once. The effect was a brilliant cloud of blue plasma that vaporized every piece of glass that fell into it. Almost instantly he snapped back into his human-shaped containment field – but it had been enough. Most of the falling glass in the western portion of the atrium was suddenly nothing more than a cloud of disassociated atoms.

Totem, several dozen yards south of his teammates, practically sprained his brain summoning up the Avatar of Eagle, faster than he had believed possible. Before his body had even finished fully changing he had wrapped one wing over Meg, pulling her to this side for protection, and was calling up the winds… a shield of whirling air spread out over the crowd for 12 yards in every direction, catching up the falling glass and smashing the pieces against one another again and again, turning them to sparkling dust.

In the eastern half of the atrium Quanta had immediately thrown up one of the largest quantum matter constructs he’d ever attempted, outside of training and experimentation sessions. Anchoring its corners to the floor and arcing it up over the crowd, the silvery shield had screened the crowd in the eastern half of the Atrium from the lethal rain, the glass shattering to harmless pieces and sliding to the floor with minimal impact.

Whatever force had shattered de la Vega’s supposedly super-tough ceramic-glass composite seemed to have hit directly above the center of the atrium, and the debris there was more a hail of relatively harmless pellets than a storm of razor sharp death. Nonetheless, Scion hurled his tangle field as high and as wide as he could and, overcharging it to the limits of his armor, vaporizing a portion of the falling debris.

Artemis, recognizing the danger of a panicked, tightly packed crowd, had leapt up to the podium where de la Vega’s confused bodyguards were still staring at the spot where he’d vanished. Seizing the microphone, her commanding yet soothing words quickly calmed the crowd, and with the immediate danger obviously under control people began to get a grip on themselves again. The uninjured quickly turned to help those who had been cut by falling glass or trampled in the rush for the doors, and AzTech security quickly moved in to take over the cleanup.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Once the immediate danger was over the Vanguard regrouped near the now abandoned stage, with Meg Halcyon trying to be unobtrusive nearby. But before they could even begin to investigate their patron’s disappearance, everyone’s comm link began sounding the priority alarm. Scion called up the holographic display on his armor’s wrist comp and the face of Evelyn Court, their swing shift dispatcher, appeared in the air before them.

“I don’t know what’s going on, Captain Astor, but it’s suddenly crazy up here. Aside from whatever that boom was that shook the building a minute ago, we’ve got three Priority Alpha emergencies coming in.” Her face vanished and a map of the city core area appeared in its place. Three flashing red circles pinpointed the urgent distress calls.

“The first one is from the Diamond District – half a dozen alarms went off simultaneously, at all the high-end jewelry and gem business in the area. APD has been dispatched, and reports are still coming in, but meta-human involvement seems certain. That one is just half a mile south of us.

“The second call came in less than thirty seconds after the first –a silent alarm from the Pacific Museum of Art. I’ve had one of our people trying to contact the museum, but we’re not getting any response. Tonight is Wednesday, so the museum is open until 21:00, and they usually have a pretty good turnout. Again, APD is on their way, but they request the Vanguard’s presence as well. The museum is 3.5 miles from the Pyramid.

“The third call is from Fort Stevens, and may be the most urgent – a military convoy  was escorting a large truck carrying a prototype weapon system from Sovereign Industries to the Fort for a major demonstration tomorrow. Not long after it left the Sovereign facility communications were suddenly lost, with only a single garbled transmission that suggests a meta-human ambush. The colonel who called seemed very concerned that the weapon system not fall into, um, ‘unauthorized hands.’ The last known position of the convoy is a little over three miles away.”

The Vanguard stared at one another in surprise… given the announcement that they had just made here, it seemed obvious that E.V.A.L. was behind this. But to split the team or not to split the team, that was the question. Scion was all for tackling the military crisis first, that seeming the most vital in terms of potential long-term danger, and argued that the other two might just be distractions from the main event.

“Actually, they could all be distractions,” Quanta interjected. He had been using his temporal abilities, his post-cognition as he thought of it, to “play back” the last few minutes, scanning for any clue as to what had caused the destruction and, more importantly, the disappearance of Álvaro de la Vega. “Distractions designed to prevent us from going after Álvaro, in fact.”

“Yeah, and Álvaro sure didn’t go willingly,” Phantom Ace offered. “And I don’t think those two body guards were acting on their own, either. I was looking right at Álvaro when they grabbed him, and it was just for a split second, but it sure seemed like they were fighting their own actions, at least at first.”

“I was much closer,” Artemis said, “and I got no such sense from the guards. They seemed to drag him very deliberately into the portal.” She paused, frowning. “But of course the ceiling was coming down just then, too…”

“You know, I always thought it was odd he didn’t seem freaked out that day in his office when those E.V.A.L. guys attacked,” said Blue Flame. “And he said he had contacts with them, to stay out of each others business supposedly.. but maybe…”

“Actually, I think Phantom Ace may be right,” Quanta interrupted. “I’ve been going over the last few minutes, looking for some clue, and I definitely agree that Álvaro’s men were trying to resist some outside influence. Which makes finding him a priority I’d say.”

“Have you found anything that would help us do that?” Scion asked.

“Well, no, to be honest. Nothing on any spectrum I can see, no hidden metas or tech within range, no trail at all… ”

“Then I think we should focus on these three attacks,” Scion replied. “Starting with the military convoy. Since we have no other leads, perhaps we’ll learn something if we can stop this crime spree and capture some E.V.A.L. operatives.”

“If we had some way of going after de la Vega, I’d argue with you,” Artemis sighed. “But we don’t, so you may be right that this is our best chance of finding him. However, I don’t think we should focus on a single attack. The museum has a significant number of people present, and could easily turn into a hostage situation… or worse. I would agree that the Diamond District problem is the least important, though, if we’re going to triage the situation…”

“Are you not the one who was recently telling Totem that one should never split the party?” Eagle asked haughtily.

Artemis shrugged. “Needs must, when the devil drives, as my… an old friend… used to say.” Eagle looked confused, but didn’t press the point.

It was quickly agreed that Scion and Eagle would fly to the convoy attack, with the latter carrying Artemis and Chilz, while Quanta would tunnel himself and Blue Flame to the museum. Phantom Ace was dispatched to reconnoiter the Diamond District and report to the other teams via the comm links, then join whichever group seemed most in need of his skill set.

♦  ♦  ♦  ♦

The military convoy had been attacked on the Aurora Freeway, just where the interstate was most constricted, and deepest, in Prospector’s Gulch, the shallow ravine that split Coxcomb Hill. Three military jeeps, a half-track and a semi cab were in various states of partial or total destruction, and traffic was already backed up for a mile in each direction when the heroes touched down.

Army Colonel Roberto Estevan quickly filled them in. Amazingly, despite some serious injuries, no one had been killed when Dominator, CyberKnight and an unidentified winged humanoid had come swooping down from the west and blasted the convoy. With the sun behind them it had been difficult to target the villains, and it was over in seconds.

A “flock” of Dominator’s Air Cavalry, of a heavier class than the Vanguard had seen earlier in the day at the city jail, had swarmed over the cargo container, blasted it free of the semi, attached magnetic grapplers and lifted it into the air. The three villains had provided suppressing fire while this was going on, and had taken off after the purloined container as soon as it had gained sufficient height and distance.

“They disappeared to the west, into the sun, less than two minutes ago,” Colonel Estevan growled, pointing in that direction. “Flying fairly low and rather slow. That’s about the only good thing I can say about this fiasco, Captain Astor – that armored shitheel Greer seemed really pissed off at how heavy the armored container was – his damn drones seemed to have trouble lifting it, and they were clearly moving a lot slower than he wanted.”

“Well, maybe his intelligence wan’t quite what he thought it was,” Scion said thoughtfully. “Let’s see if we can’t make his evening even worse.”

“Damn straight!” the colonel agreed with a grim smile. “Give the bastards hell, Vanguard, and thank you all… Godspeed!”

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

It only took the heroes a little more than a minute to catch up with the flying crime scene, the eight drones laboring to move their prize through the evening sky only 150 feet or so above the rooftops. Dominator flew 50 feet above the stolen container, with the unknown winged man flying ahead of it and CyberKnight equidistant behind. Ten men rode atop the container, all in dark green paramilitary-looking uniforms, while five additional, smaller Air Cavalry drones continuously circled it.

Scion had led them around a bit, to come at the criminals from the side and above, rather than from directly behind or ahead. At a hundred feet from the enemy they still hadn’t been spotted, and Artemis tapped Eagle’s leg. He let go and her cloak spread out, catching the wind as she glided silently forward toward the container. She never failed to find this sort of flying exhilarating…

Domnator caught sight of her just as she pulled her cloak in and dropped towards the container – his arm canon roared, but she ducked and rolled, deftly avoiding the blast. She came up in a fighting crouch, and her escrima sticks lashed out, dispatching two minions in quick succession. One plunged screaming over the side, but was caught by one of the circling drones, which lowered him to the nearest rooftop before gliding back into its place guarding the container; the other man collapsed unconscious to the deck, his hand weapon skittering away and over the side. No drone rushed to save it…

Eagle swooped in close behind Artemis, dropping Chilz near her then stooping on one of the Air Cavalry units. His talons raked the drone, scoring its side, but before he could get a solid grip a machine gun blast from Dominator threw him back. A barrage of pulsed energy from the hand weapons of several minions flashed around Eagle as he veered off, one landing a solid hit on his side – a hit he actually felt!

The unknown winged humanoid went high, then dove down to launch a screaming attack on Scion. “I shall peel you from your can, interloper, and then Dark Condor shall feast on your entrails!” This dramatic pronouncement was somewhat blunted by the fact that his long, razor-sharp talons, on both hands and feet, didn’t even leave a mark as they >skreeeeed< along the hero’s armor.

Unfortunately, CyberKnight used her companion’s futile attack to launch a plasma blast at Scion from behind, and he certainly felt that! Momentarily spinning out of control, he knew he was going to have bruises in the morning…

He quickly regained control, however, and before CyberKnight could recharge for another attack, Scion flicked an eye at a certain control on his HUD, triggering a little something he’d been working on for the past several weeks… a nullification pulse flashed out from his armor, and every piece of electronic equipment in a 30-foot radius that was not his own suddenly lost power.

Unfortunately, his own systems were still recovering from that damn plasma blast, and the nullification pulse was only a fraction of what it should have been – CyberKnight staggered momentarily, but her systems were clearly heavily shielded. Of the drones in range only the nearest one went dark and started to fall. Still attached by it magnetic grappler, the dead unit dropped down to swing wildly below the container.

The pulse blasters of the E.V.A.L. minions, however, were less well shielded, and they all suddenly turned into nothing more useful, as a weapon, than a thrown rock. Momentarily nonplussed by their weapons’ failure, each man quickly slapped a button on his vest. An almost subsonic hum began, and when one of them slugged Chilz in the stomach, it was with a force at least five times stronger than that which the man should have been able to generate. It starred the hero’s ice form, momentarily, but failed to even move him.

Chilz backhanded the man into one of his companions, putting both men down, then turned to send a powerful blast of Arctic air at the nearest drone. Pulling water from the air, he encased the machine in a cocoon of solid ice, and in seconds it had gone dark, falling from the sky to join its crippled sibling, swinging like a pendulum below the container.

The platform lurched as the remaining drones strove to compensate for their lost companions and the suddenly shifting torque forces, the whine from their engines shifting up an octave. This caused the minion swinging at Artemis to stumble, and she shifted him through her momentum gate with practiced ease. She clubbed him into unconsciousness as two more minions attacked, but this time the lurching of the container threw her own balance off – one of the powered punches hit her in the ribs, while the second one clipped her head, dazing her… they moved in for the kill…

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Eagle, looping around and coming in for another attack on the drones, was forced to dodge a barrage of energy blasts from Dominator’s arm cannons. The villain continued the barrage as the winged hero swept back up, walking the blasts into Chilz‘ back. The energy staggered the ice elemental, causing his attack on a second drone to fail, but doing no real damage to his ice form as it cracked and starred, then almost instantly healed.

As Eagle jinked and dodged the laser blasts from several free-flying drones, he was suddenly stooped upon by the Dark Condor… who certainly did seem to love the sound of his own voice. “Rumor says you are a god, winged fool! I hope it is so, for I have never feasted on the flesh of a god before, and I relish the opportunity!”

His big talk was once again undercut by his actually performance – Eagle easily, gracefully turned his attack aside, buffeting the apparently cannibalistic avian into a sudden downward spiral. “Whatever I may be, mortal, you shall certainly never know,” he sniffed in a mixture of disdain and disgust.

At that moment Phantom Ace suddenly popped onto the container not far from Artemis. He had reported to her and Scion about the situation in the Diamond District, and she had suggested he join them, filling him in on the situation in the air even as she regained the upper hand and battered the two minions who had landed hits on her into unconsciousness.

Now he reached out and grasped one of the cables by which the Air Cavalry was carrying the cargo container and turned it insubstantial. Instantly the drone that had been attached to it lurched upward, suddenly free of its burden. Spinning wildly, trying to regain control, the rogue unit slammed into one its circling siblings, and both drones exploded into fiery debris that rained down on the roof below them…

Which happened to be the roof of the 27-story main tower of the Isobel Dixon Memorial Hospital. Now down three units, the struggling Air Cavalry were dropping toward the roof, and seconds latter the cargo container came to rest with a crunch on the hospital’s large helipad. The drones let the lines go slack as they went into hover mode, their generators humming as they began to build power for the next leg of their flight…

As Eagle swooped down for another pass at the recovering drones CyberKnight aimed her netcaster at him, hoping to entangle him in its electrified strands and bring him down; but Scion, soaring up behind her, fresh from spraying fire retardant over the burning debris on the roof, strafed her with armor-piercing rounds. She managed to avoid most of the fusillade, but in doing so her own attack went wide, missing her winged target completely.

As Chilz hit Dominator with another Arctic blast, which he shrugged off as usual, the group channel of the Vanguard’s comm link suddenly blared to life.

“This is Quanta, the situation at the museum has turned serious, we need help now!”

♦  ♦  ♦  ♦

Quanta and Blue Flame stepped out of the shimmering quantum tunnel across the street from the Pacific Museum of Art, in the shadow of one of the great old oak trees that lined the Park Blocks. The three story wall of glass that was the museum’s western face reflected the evening sun, but the heroes could see in sufficiently to tell that, in the enormous Main Gallery at least, there were a lot of bodies on the floor… and a handful of figures could be seen moving about, apparently looting the display cases. One of them bulked alarmingly large…

The main feature of the museum, both a part of its architecture as well as  a permanent art installation, was the Wall, and its companion, the Switchback. Opposite the glass face of the museum, at the back of the Main Gallery, the Wall dived the western and eastern halves of the museum. A massive out-thrusting of the earth’s bones, the floor-to-ceiling black basalt wall sloped backwards as it rose, and the Switchback wound back and forth up its face, an eight-foot wide ramp cut from the living rock.

On the ground floor, then again halfway up the face, and finally at the top, north and south archways off of the Switchback opened into the smaller galleries at the “back” of the museum – Native and Northwestern Art in the northern ground floor gallery, Special Exhibits and Glass & Textiles in the southern gallery; the Chin Zhia Asian Art Collection to the north on the second floor, with the American and Architectural Arts gallery to the south; and the Classical & European Art gallery on the north side of the top floor, with the Modern and Graphic Arts in the southern gallery.

Quanta momentarily considered a grand entrance straight through the great glass face of the museum, but realized it might be best to minimize property damage where they could… and there weren’t likely to be many such opportunities in the next few minutes…

Deciding that the most obvious point of entry was the best, the two heroes went in through the main doors, on the north side. Blue Flame immediately went high, emitting a dazzling burst of white light, to try and dazzle and blind their foes in the Main Gallery. This certainly alerted every criminal in the museum to the fact that the heroes had arrived, but it sadly did little to hinder them.  Hi-tech goggles on the minions shielded their eyes from the burst, and Gator’s nictating eyelids did the same for him.

The human-alligator Incidental had been at the end of the Main Gallery opposite the entrance, but as soon as the dazzling light faded he began to race down the aisle at the foot of the Wall. For such a tall, massive creature, he moved surprisingly quickly…

Quanta, who knew the museum’s layout intimately from many enjoyable visits in the past, realized the thieves would almost certainly be moving their ill-gotten loot out via the main loading bay, which opened off the south end of the Main Gallery. And sure enough, through the many display cases between he could see two dark-green clad figures guarding the doors into the bay…

With a smile, he formed a block of quantum matter over their heads, and let it drop… the men tried to dodge at the last second, but the block knocked them senseless, hurling them away from the doors as it settled into place across the opening. No further artwork would be getting out that way, not unless they had someone who could move ten tons!

As he congratulated himself over this clever end run, a shaky figure stepped out from behind a nearby display case and fired a pulse blaster at Quanta, almost point blank. The shot went wide, however, smashing into the gift shop behind him. As the hero raised a hand to take out the shooter a black-clad figure seemed to flow from the shadows behind him, a shining black blade already swinging. Quanta barely had time to turn to face this new threat before the sword cut across his abdomen. The power of the blow pushed him back a step, but the blade did no more than etch a groove across his quantum shell, with a sound like metal on stone. The gash immediately began to fill, and in an instant it was gone.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

A few yards away the Blue Flame, still hovering twenty feet up, sent a stream of plasma at the charging Gator. Moving with shocking agility, the behemoth dodged most of the blast, his tough hide seeming to have no trouble absorbing what heat did wash over him… and he never even slowed down.

Smashing the nearest display case, Gator grabbed the first heavy projectile to hand – a Remington bronze called “The Wicked Pony.” After a brief, regretful glance he hurled it with all his strength at the flaming man above him.

Blue Flame barely had time to register what the monster was doing, but in that split second he knew that while the bronze statue couldn’t hurt him, he would destroy it instantly if it touched him. Almost without conscious thought he flipped the switch in the back of his mind and turned human a fraction of a second before the bronze struck his chest, slamming him into the wall of the gift shop… as he blacked out he just had time to reflexively hug the statue to him as he slid to floor…

His fugue must have lasted only a few seconds, because Jonny came to with Gator looming less than two yards away. “Nice catch, kid,” the mutant rumbled… did he actually seem impressed? “Glad you saved the statue, I always did really like that one.”

Before Jonny could pull himself together enough to respond, Gator was suddenly knocked backward by a stream of silvery balls that ricocheted off the floor and smashed up into his protruding jaw, snapping his head back, and seeming to actually daze him…

Quanta was judiciously pleased with the results of his first attempt at a move he’d been practicing for some time – targeting multiple enemies with his quantum matter blasts. The ninja guy had been staggered, hurled back into the shadows, while a minion had been taken out of the fight completely… and he was gratified to see that he had calculated that ricochet into Gator’s jaw perfectly!

But as he turned to search for ninja guy, suddenly everything grew slightly hazy and dark in Quanta’s vision… he shook his head, and things cleared back up quickly. It was obvious to him then that whatever the effect was, it was rolling off ninja guy in dark waves… but waves that now appeared translucent to the hero’s eyes…

The Blue Flame took Gator’s momentary distraction to set down the Remington and reignite himself. Forming his flaming katana, he soared up over the monstrous figure. The behemoth blocked his attacks at every turn, but seemed frustrated to realize he couldn’t really take the attack to his opponent – his tough hide might resist heat and even flaming blades, to some extent, but he knew if he actually got his claws on that incandescent form, he’d regret it.

At that moment another figure leapt out of the shadows on the Switchback above them, silver flashes flying from his hand toward the Blue Flame. Gator took the opportunity, with the hero distracted by this new threat, to break contact and slip off between display cases…

“Feel the razor wrath of Shou Tzin, Western dog!” the mystery man cried as the shuriken he’d hurled struck the Blue Fame in throat, chest and groin – and vaporized instantly. “Really, dude?” the young hero yelled, after a brief instant staring from his crotch to the man dressed in a somewhat garish martial arts ensemble. “Not cool!” The man looked rather surprised himself, and barely dodged the jet of hot plasma hurled at him…

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Quanta, meanwhile, was peering into the dimness around him looking for ninja guy, who had vanished again into the shadows… his mind sifted rapidly through the evidence, and he quickly concluded that the villain’s powers must work something like those Artemis possessed –

But before he could pursue that line of thought, never mind develop a strategy to counter it, Gator crashed through a display case behind him. Grabbing him in a powerful bear hug, the muscles in the massive arms squeezed, and enormous jaws, lined with hundreds of razor sharp teeth, snapped down where Quanta’s neck met his shoulder!

The teeth grated on his quantum shell, unable to pierce it… but the pressure of those jaws was tremendous, and the shell began to crack… time seemed to slow to a crawl… he was finding it hard to breathe… hairline fractures were racing up his chest… In desperation he focused on the nanocarbon material protecting him, and instantly sharp, 6″ spikes drove outward and into his attacker.

Both arms and jaws released him suddenly, and Gator stumbled back with a roar of pain and rage. The molecularly sharp spikes had penetrated his unbelievably tough hide, if only barely, but it was the spikes in the softer tissues of his mouth that had really hurt the reptilian mutant.

Quanta staggered forward, gasping for breathe and desperately repairing and thickening his protective shell… looking up, all around him he saw not just the roaring, furious Gator, but ninja guy, suddenly stepping out from the shadows again; Blue Flame engaged with some Asian martial artist; and half a dozen E.V.A.L. minions closing in…

Heart racing, something he was not used to, he triggered his comm link while simultaneously calculating ballistic trajectories in his head… “This is Quanta, the situation at the museum has turned serious, we need help now!” he said urgently… and released seven streams of buckyballs toward their massed enemies…

♦  ♦  ♦  ♦

Back on the Dixon Memorial helipad, three of the remaining four free-flying drones had taken the place of the incapacitated carrier drones, protected as they did so by covering fire from Dominator and CyberKnight. As they snapped their own magnetic grappling hooks onto the cargo container, the recharging hum from the resting drones suddenly changed pitch… they were getting ready to take off again…

Eagle, who had just summoned the lightning to blast the annoying Dark Condor out of the sky, immediately sensed what was happening. As the singed villain spiraled away, panicked, smoking feathers trailing behind him, Eagle stooped on the end of the container hanging over the outside edge of the helipad, unfazed by Dominator’s machine gun fire and easily dodging a plasma blast from CyberKnight…

Talons grasped the end of the cargo container and Eagle’s mighty wings gave one tremendous flap… the container pivoted up with him as he rose… when it was high enough he gave a powerful heave… and it flipped over on its long axis, crashing down over the edge of the helipad and onto the roof. It came to rest upside down, canted at an angle against the crumpled edge of the helipad.

The Air Cavalry drones, engines straining, were taken over with the container, slamming into the roof, tangling themselves in their own cables, and several of them exploded into shrapnel. The few E.V.A.L. minions who had survived Artemis’ and Chilz‘ attacks tried to leap from the tumbling container, but most ended up either unconscious on the helipad or roof, or with broken bones… and some both.

Artemis vaulted gracefully free of the tumbling container, landing in a perfect three-point crouch on the helipad, her cloak settling around her like a shroud. She raised a hand to her ear, as if listening, nodded once, and turned to melt into the shadows. Chilz also leaped away from the toppling container, to come down somewhat less gracefully on the roof. Phantom Ace simply vanished…

…appearing in the shadow of the overturned container. As he peered up at the still solidly sealed container Phantom Ace had a sudden realization – he could no longer sense the energy field that had been playing along his nerves, like distant nails on a chalkboard, ever since he’d arrived. The same energy field that had been keeping him from teleporting into the container was gone… he vanished again with a ripple and a faint “pop”…

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

For a moment everyone on or above the hospital roof paused in sheer shock at the audacity of Eagle’s move. Chilz was the first to break the silence. “Well, I guess this time the bird did the flipping, eh Dominator old buddy?” The armored villain seemed momentarily at a loss for words.

Eagle himself hovered in the air over his handiwork, surveying it with a look of smug satisfaction on his face. Which may be why he failed to see CyberKnight taking aim with her lance – a plasma bolt slammed into his chest, sending him flailing backward, stunned, spiraling downward out of sight over the building’s edge.

“You bastards!” Dominator screamed in fury as he finally found his voice. “You’ll pay for this, all of you! And I’m gonna start by peeling you out of that tinfoil armor, Scion – hell, my elderly grandma could probably rip up that stupid halloween costume of yours!”

“Maybe,” Scion said. “But if she did, at least I could fix it myself… unlike you and that outdated, third rate Army surplus crap you stole, Greer.” With that he flicked on the nullification pulse again… this time at full power and close range.

The remaining drones flickered and then went dark and silent… as did Dominator. Hovering ten feet over the helipad when the pulse hit, his voice cut off in mid-tirade and he seemed to freeze before plummeting down to crash onto the metal grating. He tottered back and forth for a moment, before crashing forward onto his face with a resounding clang.

CyberKnight, who had been at the edge of the nullification field, had felt the flicker in her own cybernetic systems and had hastily retreated to the far edge of the roof, coming down to a soft landing, just in case. Her electronics suffered no more than a few seconds of instability before returning to full functionality… but damn, she’d have to be careful about getting close to that bastard Scion again…

Scion ignored CyberKnight for the moment, listening to the report Phantom Ace was delivering via comm link about the contents of the container. “It seems like everything’s OK – jumbled all to hell, but it’s all in really heavy-duty cases, so I doubt anything’s broken. The weapon system is in like two dozen different pieces, some not too big, some huge.. altogether it must weigh a couple tons.”

“OK, Ace, this is what I want you to do…” Scion began.

A moment later Scion called out to his remaining teammates over his external speakers, rather than through the comm link. “OK, we’re clearly needed more urgently at the museum. Artemis and Phantom Ace have gone ahead, but we need to follow as quickly as possible.

“Thanks to Eagle, this situation is secure enough, but just to be sure – Chilz, I want you to ice over that container, really anchor it to the roof and helipad.” He turned to Eagle, who had recovered from the plasma attack and was again hovering over the scene, looking less smug and eyeing the distant CyberKnight malevolently.

“When Chilz is done, pick him up and get yourselves over to the museum ASAP. CyberKnight and the creepy bird guy, assuming he comes back, won’t be able to do anything before the military arrives in force… and Dominator’s armor won’t be coming back online anytime soon.” That wasn’t true of course, the nullifier only lasted a short time, and the military wouldn’t be coming until he called them… but the enemy didn’t need to know any of that.

“I’m heading to the museum now,” he concluded. “I’ll see you there soon.” With that he launched himself upward and was out of sight in an instant.

Chilz immediately began icing down the overturned cargo container, doing the same to Dreadnought in the process, just for good measure. The asshole had managed to regain his feet and was clearly struggling to reboot his very heavy armor… Chilz figured every little delay was all to the good, whatever Scion said about how long his nullifier would last.

CyberKnight, on seeing Scion vanish into the evening sky, cooly considered her next move. She’d love to blast that icy bastard into shards, but with that Eagle still around – no way she could count on Dark Condor to keep him occupied, he was clearly outclassed. Not that she hadn’t enjoyed seeing her “ally” get a beatdown, he gave her the creeps…

No, the best thing to do was wait until the cocky, overconfident fools left. Then she would see what she could do about getting Greer’s armor functioning again. He’d already summoned more of his Air Cavalry drones, before that EMP blast, and they’d be here in less than two minutes. It shouldn’t take much longer for her plasma blasts to free the container… they might yet salvage this cluster-fuck of a mission, thanks to the idiotic “heroes” splitting their team…

♦  ♦  ♦  ♦

Chagrin would have been clear on Quanta’s face, had anyone been able to really make out his features beneath his shell… his seven simultaneous attacks had turned out to be a bust. True, he’d succeeded in keeping Gator off balance, but he’d entirely missed ninja guy, martial arts guy, and three of the four minions he’d targeted. The one minion he had hit had barely been dazed, much less put down. How had he miscalculated those ricochets so badly? He’d done as many in the Danger Room, during training… but of course you couldn’t really simulate the adrenaline and roiling emotional state of field combat. Note to self, work on an AI simulation to address this. Assuming I survive, of course…

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Artemis appeared silently in the shadows of the entry archway to the Native and Northwestern Art gallery. A few yards in front of her Blue Flame seemed to be actually enjoying a sword fight with some sort of Chinese martial artist. She mentally rolled her eyes – the boy did love his martial arts movies, and was positively entranced by the romance of the sword, so it was hardly surprising that he would indulge his fantasies when the opportunity arose. However inappropriate it might be under the circumstances…

When his opponent had his back to her, in the shifting moves of the fight, Artemis hurled her escrima sticks at him, hoping to end this foolishness quickly. To her shock, the man turned just enough to avoid the thrown weapons, knocking them aside with his blade without missing a beat in his dance with Blue Flame. Who was this warrior?!

She had barely finished the thought before the man had whirled around to launch an attack on her. He was uncannily fast and assured, and it was only her own immortal reflexes and 150 years of fighting skill that allowed her to leap back enough to avoid a slash which would’ve disemboweled her!

It was those same preternatural senses, and the affinity for the shadows granted her by her cloak, that allowed Artemis to almost simultaneously avoid the attack that ninja guy launched at her back from the shadows – she felt his blade tug at her cloak, but the arcane garment seemed to tangle the weapon long enough for her to spin away…

…and right into a blaster pulse from one of the E.V.A.L. minions rushing down the Switchback. The energy beam struck her a glancing blow to the head, momentarily dazing her… the cloak absorbed much of the energy, fortunately, and being what it was, it was itself undamaged by either blast or blade

Even seeing stars she recognized the blade which the black-clad ninja wielded as he rushed at her – it was the Blade of Shadow, which meant this must be the infamous assassin Shadowson. She rolled away from his attack, angling herself to scoop up her escrima sticks from the floor, then blocking his next blow with them and sending a powerful kick toward his stomach. He dodged, and in his moves she recognized the the training of the Masters in hidden Shambhala. This could prove to be a very interesting fight…

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Scion was glad he’d decided to do a quick fly-by of the museum, rather than rushing straight in, as he noted the large truck backed up to the loading bay at the southwest corner of the building. From the street it would have been screened by the museum’s landscaping and a row of tall arborvitae, but from the air it…

Two men had just hopped down from the loading dock  and were climbing into the cab when Scion dropped down in front of them in his own classic three-point landing, shattering the pavement around him and sending a cloud of dust swirling up. He slowly stood up and looked at the men behind the glass, his blank metallic faceplate and glowing eye lenses as intimidating as any glare.

Recovering quickly from his surprise the man behind the wheel suddenly gunned the engine and the truck lurched forward to run the hero down. Scion braced himself and leaned in to take the impact as the truck slammed into him… the vehicle jerked to a complete stop and both men inside flew forward, hard. They hadn’t built enough momentum to actually come through the windshield, but the driver did get a bloody nose hitting the steering wheel and both were dazed.

Both men drew pulse blasters and fired thought the windshield, turning the glass into a shower of molten beads – one blast flew off into the evening, striking a car parked on the street 60 feet away and setting off its alarm, but the other struck the hero straight in the face. Momentarily blinded while his optic sensors reset, Scion took the moment to trigger his nullifier field once again.

He’d considered simply punching through the engine block and pulling it out the front of the truck, but really he preferred the more elegant solution when it was an option. Both minions fired their weapons at him again, but the driver’s was as dead as the truck and the second man’s weapon merely emitted a feeble pulse of light before sputtering out.

Leaping up to the hood of the truck Scion reached in and pulled both men out through the shattered, melted windshield, bashed their heads together, and let their limp bodies fall to the pavement…

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Inside the museum, the Blue Flame had renewed his flaming katana attacks on Shou Tzin once Shadowson drew off Artemis, and actually managed to daze the villain… which came as something of a shock to both of them.

Quanta, meanwhile, watched the battle raging through the Main Gallery with a calculating eye, dodging Gator and (most) pulse blasts, while running the possibilities through his head. If he could only…

The same shaky minion who had fired at and missed him several times already once again failed to land his shot, instead hitting the rampaging Gator in the back of the head. As the monstrous villain turned his fury on the poor, terrified minion Quanta launched another quantum matter attack – he missed the raging behemoth, but took out the minion, which he figured probably saved the man’s life.

As Gator turned back toward him Quanta again dodged his attack, his mind only half on this immediate opponent, waiting, watching… the martial artist continued to dance around in an almost balletic display with Blue Flame… Shadowson and Artemis were locked in a fight that shifted around the gallery, from shadow to shadow… everyone twisting and turning to avoid the pulses of ruby energy that filled the air as the E.V.A.L. minions continued to dart from cover to cover, tightening their circle…

Suddenly, Shadowson was behind him, slashing out from the shadows with his sword once again… but still unable to do more than score Quanta’s protective shell. With a hiss of frustration, the ninja vanished once more into the shadows. And if Quanta’s analysis of his movements in the fight so far was correct, he would appear… there!

This was the moment he’d been watching for –the configuration of friends and enemies that would let him take out the most bad guys at once and do minimal further damage to the museum’s priceless treasures. He formed a large disk of dense matter in the air and let it drop…

Gator took the brunt of the massive construct, and collapsed instantly into unconsciousness, as did three of the remaining minions… Shou Tzin, already dazed from a plasma bolt that had melted his blade, stumbled back and caught the edge of the disc, going down as well. And Shadowson  – No! The ninja-assassin threw himself flat and teleported at the last second! Cursing under his breath Quanta let his construct evaporate before it crushed the unconscious villains or the artifacts scattered around them.

Shadowson didn’t appear anywhere he could see, and with Artemis taking out the last few minions, it appeared that the battle was over… the ninja had no doubt recognized the fact, and had made his own escape, leaving his lackeys to their fates. No honor among thieves indeed…

A moment later Scion burst through the doors from the loading dock, Quanta having let the construct blocking them fade away as well. He was prepared for battle, but on seeing that his teammates had everything in hand, he relaxed.

“I just saw a guy in black,” he said, joining Quanta near the main entrance as the lights of the arriving APD and ambulances began to make garish patterns of red and blue around them. “He must’ve been hiding in the shadows when I took out their escape vehicle… just as I noticed him he stepped into the back of the truck. I got to him as he was picking up some sort of jade vase, or jar, but before I could grab him he’d stepped back into the shadows was was just… gone.”

“That would be Shadowson, the assassin we discussed earlier today,” Artemis said, coming up as he finished his story. “Like me, he commands the ability to travel through shadows, although his means of doing so seems to be… different… than mine. And he certainly wields the legendary Blade of Shadows, there is no longer any doubt of that.”

“Hrrm,” grunted Quanta, shaking his head. “So if he’d killed me with that damn thing it would’ve been your fault, for not taking it when you had the chance! I mean, how could he even mark my nanocarbon shell? Even the finest steel should just slide across it!”

“The blade is mystical in its origins,” Artemis shrugged. “It is said that it can cut through any metal, so I suppose we should be grateful your shell is not metallic in nature, yes?”

“Ugh, magic,” Quanta sighed, frowning. “I don’t really–”

But before he could expand on his thoughts on the subject, Phantom Ace suddenly appeared before the group, a big grin on his face. “Did everything go as we discussed?” Scion asked.

“Yep!” his young teammate replied. “We’re in the pipe, five by five.”

“Good. And now that the rest of the team is here,” Scion continued, glancing out the windows as Eagle dropped Chilz and then landed beside him, “I suggest we head to the Diamond District – hopefully there’s still time to stop that group as well. Can you open a tunnel Quanta?”

As cops and paramedics flooded the museum to take away the thieves and tend to the drugged patrons and staff, respectively, Quanta consulted briefly with Phantom Ace, to get the lay of the land as he’d last seen it, and then opened a quantum tunnel…

♦  ♦  ♦  ♦

The quantum tunnel opened onto the southern portion of Diamond Square, which, as Phantom Ace had indicated remained clear. As the team stepped through they could see that Seismic had raised another of his signature mounds of earth and shattered pavement on the northwest corner of the square, the rubble no doubt surrounding another escape tunnel into the Undercity.

The villain himself stood atop the highest part of the mound, exhorting his minions in his odd accent to hurry, and demanding to know if anyone had yet found the Stephano Emerald. His haranguing cut off abruptly as the heroes emerged onto the grass below him. The setting sun had dropped below the surrounding buildings by now, but it stilll shone directly down Amethyst Avenue, dramatically silhouetting the villain.

Before he could react, Artemis had launched her fully charged escrima sticks at him. The massive earth mover didn’t even try to block them, he simply let them bounce off him, the electrical charge apparently grounding itself in his stone-skined body.

Eagle immediately took to the air and, hovering over Seismic, brought his wings together to release his devastating Thunderclap attack. The blast of air and noise buffeted the massive figure, but did little more than ruffle parts of his vaguely Aztec-looking costume.

Blue Flame’s blast of plasma did as little to stop the villain’s laughter as Scion’s fusillade of armor-piercing bullets. “Is that the best you little “heroes” have,” he guffawed. “Fly away and save yourselves from embarrassment!” He then raised  a large, booted foot and slammed it down hard.

The ground rippled out around him as seismic waves tore up the turf and street, shattered the fountain in the center of the Square, and knocked Artemis onto her ass. Chillz and Quanta managed to keep their feet, barely, but the glass in the windows of the high-end jewelry and gem stores around them cracked and splintered.

It was Quanta who finally managed to wipe the smirk of Seismic‘s face by dropping a ton of quantum matter onto his head. He was forced to form it closer to his target than he’d have liked, to prevent the man from vibrating it apart, so it didn’t have the full force of gravity behind it… but it was enough to bring Seismic to his knees, clearly stunned, and to take out two of his minions who had been trying to escape into the crater.

Before anyone could follow up on this, however, the ground under the heroes erupted in a tremendous explosion as the gas main under the Square suddenly ruptured and ignited – Epiphany Jones’ signature move. Artemis, who was just climbing back to her feet, was hurled into the air, crashing down amidst the rubble of the fountain, semi-conscious. Chilz was hurled in the opposite direction, slamming down face first onto the pavement 15 feet away, his ice form cracking and partially melted.

Quanta, who was the least effected by the blast, staggered to his feet, scanning the area – yes, there she was, in front of the Tom Shane Company, next to the Columbia River Gallery. Damn, how could such a gorgeous woman be so bat-shit crazy? He called up what little the Vanguard knew about Epiphany Jones on his wrist comp, his quantum shell flowing away from the device. To his relief, she didn’t seem to have any special movement abilities…

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Blue Flame had turned his attention from Seismic to Jones‘ inexplicable boyfriend, Oblivion, when the man had stepped out from the ruined doors of the five-story building that held the NW Gemological Institute as well as the Astoria Diamond Exchange, two minions with bags of loot at his side.

Where his girlfriend managed to pull off the the Goth-Dark Alice-Steampunk look beautifully (and she’d added a little Clockwork Orange this time around, Jonny had noticed), Oblivion just looked like a dufus in his purple crushed velvet waistcoat, golden vest, and purple top hat, even with some cool-looking steampunk accessories… What does she see in this douche bag?

The wave of blue plasma that he sent at the wanna-be villain proved particularly satisfying to the Blue Flame, for while it didn’t take him down, it did blast the hat off his head and make him dodge and roll, mussing up his precious costume. Jonny grinned at the stream of invective as Captain Oblivious scrambled to his feet and looked at the charred remains of his top hat… his minions, as they dashed for the escape crater, couldn’t suppress their own smirks…

It might be easy to laugh at Morris Klein and his pretensions, Scion thought as he flew in low and fast toward the criminal, while he was still busy mourning the ruins of his hat, but it would be a mistake to underestimate the threat he posed. That glowing blue hand of his seemed able to disintegrate any matter it touched – better to take him down hard and fast, if they could. A high speed punch to the jaw should –

Oblivion whirled around at the last second, neatly avoiding the armored fist aimed at his face, and his glowing hand reached to grab his foe. Scion pulled up hard, barely escaping that deadly grasp, cursing under his breath. Damn, that idiot was fast!

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

While all this was going on Eagle swooped down to grab the stunned Seismic in his talons, lifting his massive form into the air. This ploy hadn’t worked out too well this morning, but Totem and Chilz had had an interesting discussion during the clean-up at the jail… they just hadn’t thought they’d get a chance to try it out so soon.

As Eagle soared higher and higher with the still woozy criminal, Chilz focused on freezing the water that was flooding the grassy area at the heart of Diamond Square. A continuous stream of it flowed from the burst mains, so he had a lot to work with… within a minute a frozen disc 20 feet across and over a foot thick lay atop a third of the little park’s grass. He looked up and grinned as he saw his teammate soaring ever higher…

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

E.VA.L. minions began pouring out of the surrounding stores, loaded with black nylon bags bulging with loot. Dodging the superpowered battles around them, they tried to maneuver their way to the escape crater…

Watching from the roof of the NW Gemological Institute building Phantom Ace saw two of the thieves make it up the side of the crater and begin sliding down the inside slope toward freedom. His teammates being distracted with their own battles, he supposed he’d better take care of this himself…

Teleporting down into escape tunnel, Phantom Ace was waiting for the two minions as they scrambled to what they thought was safety. They pulled up short in surprise at the grinning man in front of them… shocked looks turned to snarls and they tried to bull right through him. Ace went insubstantial, and they did indeed go through him, but not quite as they’d expected.

He reached for both men, and while the one on his left jerked away, the one on his right was suddenly as insubstantial as the hero, who slugged him into unconsciousness. Phantom Ace turned to go after the first man, but before he could move the minion vanished into a shimmering pink portal a few yards down the tunnel.

It had been behind Phantom Ace, and he hadn’t noticed it, much to his chagrin. And it looked just like the one that Álvaro de la Vega had walked through less than an hour ago! He dove for the opening, but it winked out of existence before he was halfway there. Damn! He’d better let the others know –

Suddenly the light in the tunnel, coming from the opening Seismic had made to the surface, turned dim, then vanished altogether. Pulling a small but powerful hand light from his pocket, Ace saw that the tunnel was now blocked by an amorphous plug of silvery substance –  ah, it was some of Quanta’s magical mystery matter.

He wondered if his teammate had known he was down here before he decided to plug the hole… probably not. And not that it really mattered, of course. He stooped to grab the collar of the unconscious minion and the handle of the black nylon bag, and teleported…

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

A minute earlier Quanta, too, had seen the pair of E.V.A.L. thieves make their escape down the crater. He couldn’t stop those two, but he’d be damned if any more where going to scurry down their little rat hole! Another pair had just reached the mounded dirt, and Quanta grinned… time to try something new…

It was a relatively small block of quantum matter he dropped on the pair, easily taking them out. But it was on the wrong side of the earthen mound, and he wanted to plug that hole… so instead of allowing the matter to dissolve before it could crush his victims, Quanta caused it to become liquid. It flowed over the unconscious men, up the short slope of the crater, and then poured down into the hole, seeming to gather mass and volume as it did.

In seconds the hole and the bottom of the crater were filled with a solid plug of silvery matter. Seismic might be able to shatter it, of course, or Oblivion disintegrate it… and he shuddered to think what Epiphany Jones might do. But none of their merely-human minions stood a chance of getting through that barrier. And the bosses had their hands full right now anyway, especially Seismic…

___________________________________________

Epiphany Jones stared in disbelief as that creepy human-bird creature pulled the boss into the air. She hadn’t thought anything could move his massive frame if he didn’t want to be moved… and yet that winged freak was doing it like Seismic was made of plastic!

“A pity that winged freak hasn’t been getting his potassium lately,” she muttered gleefully, “and so his leg muscles are suddenly cramping up something fierce!”

She grinned as she saw the freak jerk to a stop and suddenly scream in pain… and yes, his claws released their grip on the boss! Of course that meant he was now plummeting to the earth from several hundred feet up, but she knew that for him that was like diving into a pool of water…

Her face suddenly slackened in shock as she saw her leader frantically trying to turn himself so that he wasn’t falling head first, gesturing wildly… he slammed into the ground with a sound that shattered the few remaining intact windows around the Square and almost knocked her off her feet.

No, not the ground she saw… it was a thick disc of solid ice! It had fractured into a hundred pieces on impact, but it had done its job, preventing Seismic from opening a hole in the ground for him to escape into… and she’d been the one to… shit! Well, maybe she wouldn’t mention that little fact to him. Assuming he was still alive, of course…

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Once he had the ice disc solidly in place, Chilz turned his Arctic freeze onto Oblivion, who seemed annoyingly unfazed by it… although he was decidedly not unfazed a moment later when his erstwhile leader suddenly slammed into that ice disc like a comet.

The impact knocked the doofus off his feet, and as he scrambled up again he was visably furious. “This means nothing, you bourgeois tools! You can never defeat E.V.A.L., never! Strike down one, and two more rise to–”

He was forced to dive aside as Eagle, leg cramps fading, brought his wings together in a Thunderflap that send a wall of air at him. The villain dodged the powerful gust, but rolled straight into a plasma blast from the Blue Flame. He staggered to his knees, stunned and definitely singed.

“I think you’re thinking of Hydra,” Blue Flame called cheerily from 20 feet above him. “Which, by the way, is from a comic book, not real life.”

“And throwing around bourgeois?” Scion added, launching a tangle field at the dazed villain. “That’s rich, coming from someone robbing jewelry stores.”

The constricting coils hit Oblivion, but before they could discharge Epiphany’s voice could be heard yelling, “A pity you forgot to charge that net, Scion!” And with that her lover shrugged off the dead filaments.

Damn, that woman was dangerous! As he turned to send some bullets her way, however, Scion saw Artemis stealthily approaching the villainess from behind and held his fire… unfortunately, Oblivion saw her too, and he didn’t hold his tongue. “Behind you, love!”

Epiphany whirled at the warning, and just slipped from Artemis‘ grasp, losing her derby hat in the process. At that moment Quanta dropped a block on her, but she saw it coming and screamed “It has a flaw, straight down the middle!” The block cracked in two, the pieces falling to either side of her.

Chilz again tried to freeze Oblivion, but the man just seemed to shrug off the intense cold somehow, and this time he rushed the elemental hero. The aggressive move surprised Chilz, and before he could move Oblivion’s glowing blue hand slammed into his stomach.

Chilz had never really felt pain in his ice form – pressure, sure, and cracks and fractures felt odd, but not painful. Now a searing pain radiated out from where his body was disintegrating into nothingness! He managed to stagger back, away from the destroying touch, before he collapsed and darkness crashed down….

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Helping her boyfriend escape Scion almost cost Epiphany her own freedom, as she narrowly avoided Artemis once again. She needed to get this scary bitch off her back long enough to think… “That cornice piece is loose, a pity it fell and crushed Artemis!” A large chunk of masonry from the Shane Company building plummeted down, but to Epiphany’s shock Artemis somehow avoided it! But that never happens! How–

The “pop” behind her warned her just in time to avoid the punch that Phantom Ace threw at her head. She dodged left as he drew back for a second punch, but it was a feint! Suddenly Artemis had her in a choke hold… she couldn’t speak… her hands clawed at the steely arm around her neck… everything began to go black… No! She was too… powerful… to be…

Artemis felt the young woman go limp in her grasp, and lowered her to the ground. She quickly zip-tied her wrists and ankles, and then pulled a rather high-tech gag from a pouch on her belt. She fitted the device into Epiphany’s mouth and tightened the strap around the back of her head.

“I’m not going to ask why you have a ball gag on you,” Phantom Ace said innocently as she stood up, ostentatiously not looking at the bound and gagged women at their feet. “Nope, not gonna say a thing…”

“Oh grow up, boy,” Artemis snapped, rolling her eyes. “This isn’t the time for your puerile humor.” And looking back at the center of the Square, he suddenly realized she was right!

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Oblivion stood over the unconscious body of… what was his name? Oh yes, “Chilz.” What a stupid name! And he didn’t even bother with a costume. Ha! He’d be doing the asshole a favor when he disintegrated him, the unimaginative lout. He hesitated for a second… or was the “hero” already dead? Any normal person would be, with that much of their torso missing, and he didn’t seem to be breathing… but was he breathing before? Did he even need to breathe?

“Oh fuck it,” he said with a shrug. “Better safe than sorry.”

But as he started to bend down, his glowing left hand reaching for Chilz‘ head, he heard a sound… a small sound, from fifty feet away… but it was the sound of the love of his life in distress…

Whipping around he quickly spotted Nora, in the clutches of that freaky shadow bitch. She was choking the life out of her! Even as he raced toward her, all other thoughts driven from his mind, his lover collapsed to the ground, and the heartless wench began trussing her up like a turkey. The gag was the last indignity, and he saw red… he was going to disintegrate them all, they’d pay for this, and he wouldn’t make it fast, either…

Gouts of blue plasma and streams of bullets rained down around him, and he jinked and twisted to avoid them, never taking his eyes off Nora. Nothing else mattered… he sensed a shadow above him and rolled to the left, narrowly missing being crushed by a massive block of… something… no time to figure it out… he dodged another…

And then he saw that stupid Hello Kitty kid reach down and take Nora by the arms… and with a “pop” and a freaky wrinkle in space they were both gone. He came to a ragged stop. “Noooooo!” he screamed, falling to his knees. Without Nora none of it meant anything. He almost welcomed the darkness that took him when a plasma blast finally hit him square in the back…

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Chilz came to slowly… the pain was gone, but he felt very strange… he tried to sit up, but he seemed unbalanced somehow. Looking down he saw that half his torso, from just below his ribs (well, where his ribs should be, if he had possessed any) to his hip, was just… gone. He started to freak out then, and almost fainted.

A moment of deep breaths (not that he had lungs, or needed to breath, but habit, you know) got him back in control. OK, Chuck this obviously isn’t fatal, at least not immediately. Of course if I turned back to myself like this… he’d have turned pale at the thought if he wasn’t already a translucent green.

He needed to fix this before he turned back… how? He’d repaired lesser damage easily enough, pulling moisture from the air… this was gonna take more than ambient moisture, ha! He looked around and saw a large shard of ice from the disc he’d created earlier, for Eagle… not enough to fill the void, but…

He reached for the shard, and touching it, he immediately sensed all the ice around him. He willed himself into the ice and then he… traveled. Suddenly he was one with all the ice, it was like he was everywhere the ice was, all at the same time… he focused on the largest contiguous mass of ice and willed himself there…

Chilz rose up from the edge of the shattered ice disc, flowing up like some frozen genie, his body whole once again. The strange feeling was gone, and he felt like himself. Or at least like this version of himself always felt… he ran a hand over his stomach, and suddenly felt a chill that had nothing to do with temperature. This had been so close… too close…

The sounds of battle drew him out of his inward trance, and he realized his friends might still need his help… he looked around, puzzled at what was bothering him… Oh, yeah, were was Seismic? He’d seen him crash to earth, just as he and Totem had theorized he would, and he wasn’t battling the others, so where…

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Three kilometers up and climbing, Seismic had finally had enough. He scrabbled feebly at his captor’s leg. “Enough,” he croaked. “Enough… I… sur-surrender…” his teeth were beginning to chatter. He had never been so cold… and it was getting hard to breath… this creature was insane…

Eagle had snatched up the semi-conscious villain while the others battled the lesser foes, and carried him straight up at his top speed… which was very fast indeed. There would be no dropping this time, only the frigid air of the upper atmosphere until the prey’s fight was gone…

The cold did not bother him, of course, but he suspected his prey, a native of magma-heated subterranean realms, would be bothered by it very much indeed. Eagle was limited in how high he could ultimately go, given his own need to breathe, but if it came to it he suspected he could last longer than the prey.

But it seemed they would not have to find out who would last longer – surrender was given, and victory was his! As it always was, he thought smugly, for was he not the Lord of the Upper Airs, and Master of the Seven Winds? The greatest of the Great Beasts?

Looking down, he could see that his mortal host’s teammates were battling the blue-handed fop… and faring badly. Well, perhaps he could catch two fish with one talon… he folded his wings and began to dive earthward, his prey screaming behind him and clutching at his legs…

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Phantom Ace returned to his teammates and reported that Epiphany Jones was safely behind bars, and several layers of power dampeners, downtown. He also produced what looked like a large, cumbersome iron mitt.

“The SHADE techs swear it’ll contain Oblivion’s power,” he explained. “But I brought a neural dampener just in case. I figured better safe than sorry with this douche-nozzle.”

“Very elegantly put,”Artemis said dryly as she fitted the device around their prisoner’s head, while Scion examined the mitt before affixing it to the lethal extremity. “And very well reasoned, I’m compelled to add.”

Gideon hoped that meant the crack about the ball gag might be forgotten. Well, not forgotten, not with Artemis, but maybe forgiven?

“What the hell is that sound?” Chilz asked, looking around.

“That!” said Quanta, pointing up.

Coming down at them like a meteor was Eagle, with Seismic flailing behind, clutched in his talons. The sound was the whistling shriek of air around them, like that of a falling bomb, and the villain’s terrified shriek. At the last second the mighty wings spread and Eagle pulled up with a clap like thunder – leaving Seismic to slam into the ground. Momentum carried his limp form forward, grinding through asphalt to come to a stop half inside the now-shattered storefront of the Shane Company.

“How many times must we explain to him about unnecessary property damage?” Scion muttered under his breath. Quanta and Artemis just shook their heads, and turned to the job of securing the most definitely unconscious, if not actually comatose, villain.

“I had planned to slam him into the foppish one with the deadly hand,” Eagle said, landing next to the group. “But when I saw you had somehow managed to subdue him without my aid, I decide to make sure the massive one’s surrender held, once he was back on solid ground.”

“Ah, yes, well… that would probably have been quite effective,” Scion agreed with a sigh. “Assuming you didn’t take any of us out at the same time.”

“Unlikely, Captain,” Eagle sniffed. “I have excellent eyesight, incomparable relfexes, and unparalleled aim.”

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

With their big guns taken down so thoroughly, Quanta’s plug neutralizing their subterranean escape route, and the police blocking every other avenue of flight, the majority of the remaining E.V.A.L. foot soldiers decided surrender was their best option. Only two decided to “fight to the bitter end,” which had subsequently come, both quickly and painfully… for them.

Within 30 minutes the APD had the scene secured, and the two heavies were being loaded into special transport vehicles, the minions already having been whisked off to jail. CSI and the Feds had arrived, and were beginning to go over everything with a fine tooth comb.

Most of the stolen gemstones and jewelry were recovered, although it was obvious that some of the minions had escaped with fully loaded bags before the Vanguard had arrived. How many, and with what exactly would no doubt take the experts days to figure out, but at least one goal of the raid had been stymied. The fabled Stephano Emerald, the largest emerald in the world and generally considered priceless, was found in the bag Phantom Ace had taken from the minion in the escape tunnel.

“Well, if I could only stop one, I guess I picked the right one,… but I wonder why Seismic was so hot for this particular stone?” he wondered, holding it up so the light of the setting sun shone through it, turning his face a brilliant green. The police forensic  investigator, who was standing by with an evidence bag, a chain-of-custody-form, and two representatives from the NW Gemological Institute, looked nervous and jittery, and didn’t relax until the hero had dropped the stone into the bag and signed the form.

“Beyond it being one of the most valuable bits of rock on the planet?” said Chilz with a shrug. “Who knows? Maybe the police will get it out of him  during interrogation.”

“I bet they don’t get much out him,” said Blue Flame, adjusting his mask now that he was in human form again. “He seems too tough even in shackles… maybe they should give him to Eagle to interrogate.” They all chuckled at that, then looked over a bit nervously at the avian avatar, who was standing alone and staring into the sunset without blinking.

“Why hasn’t he turned back into Totem?” Chilz wondered. “He usually does once the action is over…”

“A good question,” said Scion, joining the three, Artemis and Quanta flanking him. “But it can wait. Right now I think it’s time we checked in on our old friends Dominator and CyberKnight.”

While the other two looked puzzled, Phantom Ace just grinned. “It was their idea,” he explained, gesturing at Scion and Artemis. “Once I was able to get inside the container, after Big Bird there flipped it and shorted out the jamming field, I reported back to Scion. He conferenced in Artemis and we agreed that I would ‘port all the pieces of the weapon system back to the armory in the Pyramid, one-by-one.

“Then I planted one of Scion’s special trackers, which I took from his lab, inside the now empty container. I placed it with a good line of sight down the length of the container,” he added in an aside to Scion. “We should have a perfect front row seat once they get the doors open.”

“Well, let’s see if that’s true,” JJ said, as his helmet flowed away from his face and merged into the rest of his armor. The others followed him into the ruined Shane Company store, and found an intact conference room at the back. Once they were sufficiently private Scion touched his wrist comp and projected an image on the wall. It was very dark, only a few sparks of red, amber or green relieving the gloom.

“My special tracker, besides working on an isolated frequency that should be very hard to detect, contains a miniaturized camera and omni directional microphone,” Scion explained. “This is the view of the inside of the stolen cargo container. It’s been recording ever since Phantom Ace planted it. Let’s fast forward…”

If not for the time stamp in the corner of the image, it would have been difficult to tell that the video wasn’t a still image, in the unchanging dark. Then, just a few minutes shy of catching up to real time, a crack of light appeared in the center of the screen and Scion slowed the playback.

The doors at the far end of the cargo container swung open to reveal Dominator and CyberKnight standing just outside, a dozen minions gathered behind them. The former had his helmet off, which meant the heroes got to enjoy the full effect of the changing expressions that flowed across Gerald Greer’s face as he took in the empty space before him: blank incomprehension, slow puzzlement, dawning realization, and finally stroke-inducing rage. CyberKnight’s reaction was harder to gauge, with half her face hidden by her own helmet, but a thinning of the lips and tightening of the jaw… the resolution on this camera really was amazing… suggested she was not happy either.

It was  mainly a non-stop string of profanities that accompanied Greer into the container as he stormed around making sure it wasn’t all some sort of illusion. Everyone listening, except perhaps for Artemis, learned at least a couple of new words in those few minutes. Finally the man wound down, coming to a stop at the doors and slamming a fist into the side of the container.

“It must’ve been that damn Hello Kitty ghost kid,” he said at last. “I should’ve noticed he was missing after that motherfucking bird-man flipped this thing.”

“Most likely it was the Phantom Ace,” agreed CyberKnight neutrally. “Could’ve been Artemis, I suppose, since they both supposedly took off for the museum right after. But the boss doesn’t think her teleportation is that strong, not for the bigger pieces anyway. But really, at this point what does it matter who did it? They won, we lost. No point in getting yourself in a lather over it.”

Greer looked like he wanted very badly to punch his associate in the face, but she just tilted her head slightly and looked at him, as if daring him to try. After a few tense seconds he again punched the wall, then shoved past her and out of the container.

“C’mon,” he said gruffly as he turned out of view of the camera. “We’ve got a little while before we gotta explain this shit show to the boss. He wants us all there at de la Vega’s “trial,” so we got that long at least…” his voiced faded as he passed out range of the mic.

“We kemo sabe?” CyberKnight puffed a quiet laugh as she turned to follow. “This whole clusterfuck is on you, you dimwitted oaf, and everyone knows it. Maybe once de la Vega is found guilty we can have two executions…”

With that she was gone, and the minions swung the container doors shut, plunging the camera back into darkness.

‘Well,” Quanta sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “The day may be almost over, but it looks like we’ve got a long night ahead of us yet…”