The Infinite League Page 9

  In front of a room full of strangers, my sister and my little boy, I fell apart in an embarrassing display of overwhelming tears. His voice was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard.

  When I returned to the gymnasium several minutes later, Colonel Bridge and Dr. Progeriat had been joined by DeathTek. They were in deep discussion, but they stopped their conversation and cast their eyes my way when I walked into the room.

  I was still shuddering from the emotional release of talking to my child after nearly a week of isolation, and I could tell it was a huge relief for him to see me, too. I hated lying to both my sister and my son, but these people weren’t giving me much choice. I had to relay some fabricated story about how I was suspected of killing a government official, and how I wasn’t allowed to come home until the investigation was over.

  They didn’t have to let me speak to them, I realized that. As a matter of fact, they actually gave me a generous fifteen minutes to talk to Ann-Marie and Caleb. My sister assured me that she would take care of Caleb until this whole situation was resolved, and she said she didn’t believe for a moment that I had done what they told her I had been charged of.

  She said she didn’t believe it. The look on her face told me a different story. It was a horrible feeling, considering all the things she didn’t really know and all the things I couldn’t tell her. And the conversation was over far too quickly.

  “You were able to speak to your family?” asked Colonel Bridge.

  I nodded blankly, approaching them slowly. “Thank you for that.”

  “If you do your job, it won’t be the last time you see them,” the colonel promised.

  “How are the gauntlets feeling this morning?” asked the doctor, taking my wrists into his hands. “Any signs of tenderness, feelings of nausea, blood in the urine?”

  “Not really,” I said quickly, flinching at the thought of the morbid side effects that could have happened. “Was there supposed to be?”

  “We know very little about the true nature of these gauntlets,” he explained. “Did an ancient Aztec god really imbue them with divine energy? Was it an alien artifact found by those early peoples, and they simply attributed it to their own mythological deities? Why have they shown an attraction to no more than twenty people in the world, including you and Andromeda, and ignored the rest of the human population?”

  “Are you expecting me to know the answer?”

  “No one knows the answer,” Dr. Progeriat continued. “Artifacts like this tend to defy conventional science. But it’s clear they’ve bonded to you, and this makes you more useful to us than rotting away in a prison somewhere.”

  “Major Baltrin would have been useful here,” Colonel Bridge mentioned regretfully. “He knew more about paranormal technology and alien reverse engineering than anyone we have on staff now.”

  “The hell with that guy. We’re better off without him,” DeathTek snapped. “His negativity was becoming a hindrance to this entire team.”

  “Who’s Major Baltrin?” I asked casually. I was starting to sense that people were forgetting I was in the room. They all seemed surprised to hear me talking, as if they hadn’t meant to be speaking about the subject in front of me.

  “Baltrin was on the staff here at the compound,” said the colonel. “He developed a lot of the weapons that the team are currently using. He was actually one of the original designers of DeathTek’s armor.”

  “He and the Ambassador had a difference of opinion on how this team should be run,” Dr. Progeriat explained. “It was mutually agreed that he sever his ties to the team.”

  “He was a bleeding heart conservative pussy,” DeathTek elaborated, banging his metallic fists together.

  “He’s still a friend of mine,” Colonel Bridge said angrily, facing the much larger super-hero. “We replaced Andromeda, it wouldn’t be too hard to replace you, too. Or maybe you’d like to try to live outside that armor of yours for a bit?”

  There was a tense moment between the two men, and I actually thought one of them was going to throw a punch at each other. But Dr. Progeriat stepped between them, bringing a little calm into the moment.

  “None of this is pertinent to the task at hand,” he said quietly. “DeathTek, let’s get back to work here. She needs to work on her OPT.”

  “What is that?” I asked, eager to break the tension in the room.

  “Offensive / Precision Training,” DeathTek told me, turning away from the colonel. “I want you to take position in the center of the gym, and hover at an altitude of four feet off the ground.”

  I wanted to learn more about who this Baltrin character was, but it was clear enough that he wasn’t up for discussion. I tucked the name into the back of my memory; I’d ask again later. For now, I cooperated with DeathTek’s request. They let me speak to my family so I was somehow feeling a bit more cooperative now.

  Levitating off of the ground was the first step, I was told. By the time I made my first public appearance, they were expecting me to fly. Or at least, give a good impression that I could fly as well as Andromeda could. I closed my eyes, concentrated once again, and found myself rising a few inches off of the ground.

  Not touching the ground was surprisingly easy, as simple as dipping your toes into the water at the beach. But it got harder the higher I tried to lift myself, like treading further into the ocean. Perhaps I feared that I would never come down again, or I would come down too hard. Perhaps all of the logical centers of my brain were screaming to me that what I was doing was impossible, so quit trying to show off. So like every authority figure I’ve ever known, I tried to ignore those voices in my head. I continued to concentrate, and I managed to rise to a height of two feet now.

  “That’s as high as you can go?” His disapproving voice sounded all the more annoying behind that electronic filter. I wish I could have seen his face, but only that immobile skull icon painted on his helmet stared back at me.

  “I’ve only been at this for a few days,” I complained. “If I’m gonna be your partner, you’re gonna have to cut me some slack.”

  “You haven’t been accepted yet,” Dr. Progeriat warned me. “The decision of how we’re going to deal with you rest solely on your ability to adapt to the gauntlets.”

  Yes. That’s exactly the sort of reassuring stress I needed to keep my mind on the job. I tried to ignore the old man, and put my mind back to the job at hand. I lifted a few inches higher, but that’s where I stopped.

  “I can go higher, but I’m afraid I’m going to fall if I try.”

  “It’ll do for now,” the old man nodded. “DeathTek, please take your place, and position the target.”

  “Okay, youngster, let’s see what you can do,” he invited me as he took position in the center of the gymnasium. Of all the heroes who lived here, DeathTek was the toughest one to get a read on. His voice was buried under a deep layer of electronic filtering, making it impossible to even guess the race or gender of the person sealed inside that armored shell. But even though his facial features were hidden, I couldn’t help but feel he was smiling at me.

  Even with the pads on the floor, I could still hear the solid weight of his heavy footsteps echo through the gym as he walked. Even without all of the extra armor and shoulder-mounted weapons he’s known for carrying, he looked as if he must have weight over five hundred pounds. The design of his armor was nothing short of brilliant. So sturdy and formidable looking, yet he was walking around with the agility of a young acrobat.

  So when this walking tank strolled into the middle of the room holding a small red balloon, the unexpected and incongruous nature made me smirk.

  “Something funny about balloons?”

  “Oh, no sir,” I replied with as serious a voice as I could manage, accompanied by a firm salute. I tried but failed to keep from smiling.

  “The gauntlets give you two powers,” he continued, holding the balloon out from his body and above his head. “The first is flight, and the other is your ability to
turn your hands into flamethrowers.”

  I knew that, of course, but I hadn’t had much luck in generating fire from my fingertips like I’ve seen the real Andromeda do on television. I got frustrated with a series of rather intrusive tests yesterday, and I wanted to set fire to the entire room, but I only succeeded in raising the temperature in the room ten degrees.

  “I’m not sure I can pull off that particular trick just yet.”

  “We’ll find out for sure,” the armored man promised. “When you’ve mastered your power, you should be able to project a razor-thin stream of fire, almost like a laser. The wider you increase the diameter of your attack, the less substance it’ll have.”

  “Not a word of that made any sort of sense to me,” I advised him.

  “It’s not rocket science,” growled the colonel. “Think of it like a shower faucet. When it’s a tight stream, it hits you with more power. When you widen the cone, it spreads out less water over a great area. It’s the same with your fire.”

  “I could do without the condescending tone,” I advised him, struggling to remain hovering in the air.

  “We just want you to practice sending precise, focused shots,” DeathTek explained, holding the balloon higher. “If you don’t have control you could accidentally hurt innocent people. Now try to pop this balloon without actually hitting me with any of your fire, and without falling.”

  As if it was as easy as that. I pointed my hands at the balloon, focusing on the impossible feat they were asking of me, and tried to will streams of burning energy into existence. I was able to fly, after all. Well, hover awkwardly. Maybe I could do this, too.

  I focused harder, I curled my fingertips, and I put on my rage face. I actually saw my fingertips begin to glow like the embers at the tip of a cigarette. Something was happening, but nothing I’d call a super power.

  “Some time before you hit menopause,” I heard Colonel Bridge grunt.

  I’m not sure if it was his intention to provoke a reaction, but it seemed to work. I intended to tell him to kiss my ass. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure that’s what I said. But he didn’t hear the comment.

  My words had been buried over the deafening noise of a circle of fire exploding from my hands for five agonizingly long seconds. The circumference of what spiraled away from my fingers was about the diameter of a tire, and it blazed across the room and into DeathTek. According to what they were telling me, it should have been an invisible wave of gentle heat.

  Instead, it incinerated the balloon, knocked DeathTek backwards and on his metallic ass, and set off a series of loud klaxons and automated water sprinklers throughout the gym.

  By the time I had hit the ground with an undignified splat, the soldiers were already around me with guns drawn. I kept my hands raised, praying that my facial expression conveyed the legitimate message that this was all purely unintentional.

  Please God, don’t let me have killed another one!

  9

  Suiting up

  Wednesday, May 7 – 3:00 p.m.

  “If I can fly, then why do I have to do all this damn running?”

  It was twenty-four hours later. I’d been on the treadmill for thirty minutes now, which isn’t normally enough to make me winded. But the temperature in the small room I’d been forced to work out in was flooded with a miserable wave of heat, and the incline of the machine had been steadily rising for the last several minutes.

  “What’s wrong, Emily,” smiled the colonel. “Can’t handle the heat?”

  “I’m sweating my tits off,” I growled, while trying to ignore the burning in my calves that I hadn’t felt since the police academy. “You’re just trying to punish me, aren’t you?”

  “First, you need to increase your physical stamina. You’re competent in hand-to-hand combat, but some of the people you may be coming into conflict with are going to test you to your unknown limits.”

  I had thought this was a temporary task, until they could either figure out how to break it to the world that Andromeda had died, or until they could find someone else more suited to impersonating her. But I was starting to feel like my whole life had been shanghaied.

  “Secondly, your midsection happens to be slightly larger than Andromeda,” Dr. Progeriat pointed out as he watched my vitals pulse and glow on an unflatteringly large screen on the wall. “I’d prefer you to lose at least ten pounds before you make any public appearances.”

  That might be the first time since ninth grade that someone called me fat. I liked the old man just a little bit less now.

  “And finally, you’re lucky you didn’t roast DeathTek alive,” the colonel concluded. “His nanoweave armor and proactive shield generators kept him from getting fried, despite your best efforts to turn him into a piece of armored bacon. So yeah, punishing you is pretty much just gravy for me.”

  That’s sweet. They’re having a contest to see who can piss me off the most. As usual, the colonel seems to be pulling ahead in the race.

  “The uniform won’t be an issue,” decided Dr. Progeriat. “She’s a little bustier than Natalie was, but we can just attribute that to a new push-up sports bra if reporters start asking. In fact, we should look into substantiating that with an endorsement deal. I’m sure there’s a few lingerie companies that would love to get in bed with us on this.”

  “What about the face?”

  “They have a similar jawline, Colonel Bridge,” he said, while bringing up a split-screen comparison of her face and my face on one of the other monitors. “The eyes are slightly different, and the hair color is not quite right.”

  “She wears those goggles with the frosted opaque outer layer,” the colonel nodded. “No should be able to tell the difference. I’d rather not use a wig, that’s just asking for trouble.”

  “We’ll have the stylist match the hair. We’ll lop a few more inches off and match the hair color, no one should be the wiser.”

  “Really?” I replied impatiently. “Haven’t you already butchered my hair enough?”

  “Let’s go into cool down,” the colonel decided. “You can take it down, doctor.”

  Dr. Progeriat nodded, and adjusted the knobs on the treadmill again. The pace thankfully began to slow, and the punishing incline lowered. I reduced my pace to a fast walk as I entered a slow-down period, but I kept my stare focused on his dark eyes.

  “Ms. Watts, you’ve been offered amnesty for the ridiculously severe crimes you’ve committed,” the colonel reminded me. “You’ve agreed to impersonate the super-hero Andromeda for a period of no less than one year. This implies that you’ve also agreed to take any necessary steps to effectively pass yourself off as said individual. Cutting off your damn hair is the least of your concerns.”

  “You’ll need to study her speaking patterns, her walks and mannerisms, and any other quirks and attributes that the general public are aware of,” said the doctor.

  “Dr. Progeriat has worked with Andromeda since the beginning,” the colonel continued. “He’ll help you perfect your cover.”

  “According to our records, you spent some time working undercover in different assignments in the Philadelphia Police Department,” the doctor noted. “This really shouldn’t be any different.”

  “Except for the fact that I need to fly and shoot burning fireballs from my hands,” I pointed out.

  “Without incinerating your teammates,” the colonel reminded me. “Now, let’s hit the weights while I give you a crash course of the DSA.”

  I never thought I’d actually get sick of exercising. It used to be the highlight of my morning, other than seeing my son’s smile. “It seems like with these powers, I’d be best suited for ranged attacks away from any combatants. Not sure why we’re working on upper body strength.”

  “There are a few criminals with enhanced abilities who happen to be fireproof,” Dr. Progeriat explained. “If you run up against them, you might actually have to get your knuckles bloody. Some potentially good heroes have died because of an
overreliance on one power.”

  Well, if anything, I’d be in the best shape of my life after all this was over. I parked myself on a bench and grabbed a couple of fifteen-pound weights and started a series of reps while the colonel continued his lecture.

  “So, what do you know about the DSA?”

  “I know it’s the Department of Superhuman Activities, but I know as much about you guys as I do about the CIA. It’s totally over my pay grade. I was a beat cop.”

  “The Infinite League has been around for fifteen years now, but the DSA didn’t organize until ten years ago,” said Dr. Progeriat. “At that time, we moved from our former home in St. Louis to this private base in D.C.”

  “So the government runs this place?” I asked as I continued to curl my weights.

  “This base is a gift from the government to the Infinite League,” Colonel Bridge explained. “It’s staffed by a mix of personal trainers, armorers, weapons technicians, and a detachment of soldiers to provide additional security.”

  “Most of the lesser known teams of heroes out there aren’t well financed,” the doctor explained. “They’re lucky to have a headquarters in a small storage locker with a police scanner. But because of our prestige and the number of Alpha and Beta Enhanced heroes on staff, the government keeps us well funded with equipment and manpower. We’ll occasionally send our team out to help with a domestic crisis when asked, but we’re autonomous from Uncle Sam. The Ambassador is in charge here.”

  “You know, I’m honestly a little fuzzy on when Sparks stopped being illegal vigilantes and started becoming government sanctioned agents,” I admitted.

  “I thought you were a police officer?” Colonel Bridge said mockingly.

  “I worked robberies and homicides on a very local level,” I reminded him. “Cut me some slack, alright?”

  “But you did learn about this in criminal science courses, didn’t you? Who was the first super-hero?”

  “Wasn’t it Ambassador?”

  “Let me give you a history lesson,” the colonel said with strained patience. “About twenty-five years ago, when you were still in elementary school, an out-of-work actor in New York City happened to be wearing a cheap Halloween superhero costume, and he happened to foil a convenience store robbery one night. He was an overnight sensation, and this was decades before the world was conquered by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. His career didn’t last too long, but it opened the door to dozens of people wearing fancy costumes and trying to make the world a better place.”