Starfall Page 14

  “Then you’re pretty much the Terry Markham I remember.” He rubbed at his own eyes, then forced a smile. “Can you tell me about her? Your new sister, I mean.”

  I nodded solemnly, but it took a moment to make myself speak.

  “Her name is Whisper,” I began, “and you would have loved her. I met her when I was breaking into another supervillain’s lair…”

  “On your world,” Bobby asked when Professor Paradigm had wandered off to videoconference with a peer in Switzerland to confirm the data I provided regarding quantum tunneling effects upon artificially-created sub-dimensions, “do you still have any of your brother’s old comics? ‘The Adventures of Strongboy and Doctor Fid’, I mean.”

  “Of course.”

  “Could you tell me about them?”

  “A moment.” I used my neural tap to consult with the supplies in my ship-board fabrication units; I had more than enough biological raw materials to construct paper pulp and crayon wax. “I’ll replicate copies for you; they’ll be ready in about an hour.”

  The reproductions would actually be completed sooner, but it would take time for any of my limited-supply of drones to escape from the interdimensional tank unseen and to fly the papers to the Paragons’ headquarters.

  “Really?” Bobby grinned, and for a moment I could see a hint of the dimples he’d had as a child. “Thank you. That’s amazing. I’ve missed them.”

  I tilted my head, curiously. “What happened to your copies?”

  The alternate-dimension analog of my little brother looked embarrassed. “I burned them. After Bronze, I didn’t want anything to do with superheroes for a while.”

  “Understandable.” For a moment, rage roared hot enough to make blood boil…but I took a slow breath and forced myself calm. “Obviously, you eventually changed your mind.”

  “Yeah, well.” He shrugged. “Eventually, I realized I still had heroes who inspired me.”

  “Valiant?” I asked. When my own Bobby had been young, Valiant had been his second-favorite.

  “My big brother.”

  “Doctor Fid?” Professor Paradigm interrupted; Bobby and I had been engrossed in conversation, comparing our memories of distant childhoods. “I think I’ve figured out how to implement your solution.”

  I turned to look at Bobby, apologetic, but he just chuckled and gently shoved me towards the Paragons’ leader.

  “Go,” he said simply. “Save our little sister!”

  I wasn’t his Terry, and he wasn’t my Bobby…but I still felt a fierce grin beginning to form. The Mk 39 responded to my silent call, wrapping itself around me as I followed Professor Paradigm towards his laboratory once more.

  10

  Dawnstar and Professor Paradigm helped ease any bureaucratic red tape that might have interfered with access to my vehicle, but in the end it was only one hero who travelled to see me off.

  “Good luck,” Bobby said simply from behind the Advocate’s cowl.

  There was more to be said…entire libraries’ worth of thoughts and emotions that I wanted to express! But I didn’t have the words, so I just nodded gratefully and closed the armored transdimensional transport’s hatch.

  And then I was gone.

  In the moment between existences, I struggled under the weight of distant shapes, watched the curve of a citrus scent, and tasted slivers of vibrant music. Every interdimensional transition had been indescribably different; there were no words, no means to classify or categorize the experience. Sensations flooded forth from a place where time didn’t exist, leaving only barely remembered echoes as the crackling hum of interdimensional energies faded.

  I felt it in my bones: this was home.

  (Superheroes lead remarkably odd lives, and accidental cross-universe jaunts are rare but not unheard of; in their duty logs, the alternate dimensions to which they traveled were always given simple but memorable names as shorthand. The Arrowverse, Earth Bet, the Teraverse…For my own records, I decided to label the first universe to which I travelled the Knightsverse, as it represented the point from which the Brooklyn Knights had originated. The second would be Eden, and the last could only be the Bobbyverse.)

  There was much to be done. The mathematical models that the Bobbyverse incarnation of Professor Paradigm and I had created were a quantum leap forward, but the sensor array necessary to locate Whisper’s disembodied spirit would still take a few hours of manufacturing time.

  Sadly, there were other chores that would need to be attended to first.

  A thought was all that was required to activate my tank’s forcefield. A fraction of a second later, my own world’s incarnation of Valiant barreled into the invisible shield at around four times the speed of sound; he ricocheted off its surface and was deflected into the ground, gouging a ten-foot-wide chasm out of the earth. The Earth’s mightiest hero was stunned, but that wouldn’t last long.

  My time off-universe had been well spent, and I’d had sufficient time to improve the accuracy of my cross-dimensional travel. The Bobbyverse had been left from that foreign world’s version of California, and my vessel had successfully returned only a few miles from one of my hidden laboratories in upstate New York. There was a teleportation platform located there, as well as an underground hangar where I’d expected to hide my tank.

  That latter aspect seemed unlikely, now—there was no possible way that the treaded vehicle could outrun Valiant, and it seemed annoyingly likely that other heroes were en route—but the teleportation platform could still be used as a means to escape. I didn’t need to beat the heroes; I didn’t even need to fight them! All I truly needed to do was return to my lair and begin construction of the sensor array necessary to locate Whisper’s disembodied spirit.

  Except that I’d warned the Red Ghost. I’d warned Blueshift! The heroes had reacted with predictable thick-skulled recalcitrance. Time in Eden and with Bobby had dulled my rage, but the realization that these heroes were here in an attempt to prevent Whisper’s rescue—even unknowingly—caused my blood to boil. It seemed that—in the future—I would need to express myself more forcefully in order to ensure that my meaning was understood.

  A reflexive mental switch triggered a cocktail of adrenaline and psychoactive combat drugs to be released into my system, and I found myself grinning even as I constructed a plan: I’d sneak away from the tank and continue to pilot it remotely so that the heroes would not recognize my absence. After I’d caused enough havoc to make them wary, I’d initiate the vehicle’s self-destruct code.

  Sorting through the wreckage would have taken hours; by the time that they’d confirmed the tank had been empty, I would have been long gone. Another tarnished success for the battered heroes, and another thrilling escape that added to the legend of Doctor Fid. The afternoon’s overriding goal might have been to make a safe exit, but this was my universe. Here, Doctor Fid wasn’t a savior, wasn’t a peaceful explorer or seeker of knowledge. Here, Doctor Fid was violence incarnate! The brightly-clad superpowered busybodies would need to work for their ‘victory’.

  (Even though I now had the knowledge to build a new and better interdimensional transport, I had to admit that I was annoyed by the necessity. If nothing else, I would mourn the loss of the tea set still present in the emergency supplies.)

  Valiant arose from the deep furrow of earth and stone in which he’d been buried, shaking away great clods of dirt and debris, and he looked up just in time to see the battletank’s main cannon focus upon him. A roar of plasma took him in the face, driving Valiant back into a deep puddle of flash-melted dirt and stone. The hero suffered no lasting damage, but the massive fireball did succeed in raising my spirits. I fired a few more blasts purely for entertainment purposes.

  The smoke and glare also granted me the opportunity to implement my scheme; I darted through the tank’s silently-opened escape hatch and shot into the brush. Sensor readings confirmed that another shuttle was rocketing towards the conflict, and—given that the Mk 39 had taken damage during the co
urse of my alternate-dimension adventures—my stealth field was operating at less than full capacity; soaring in the open sky would be ill-advised. Instead, I shot into the forest and used the foliage as cover while my tank continued to pour energy blasts upon the groggy hero.

  “I intend no harm to you or yours.” Doctor Fid’s artificial voice thundered from the tank’s external speakers. “Stand down and let me pass!”

  “Intentions don’t matter this time.” The mightiest hero on at least two worlds had regained his bearings and leapt into the sky, dodging cannon fire and flitting around the tank while looking for an opportunity to counterattack. “You’ve gone too far, and you need to be stopped.”

  That…made little sense; something must have changed during my time away. I could think of only one looming possibility that would have inspired such ire and used my neural tap to quickly hack a California hospital’s records.

  "Professor Paradigm will live," I intoned through the tank's speakers, grateful for the modulation that struck relief from my tone; this dimension's incarnation of Professor Paradigm may have attacked without cause and withheld information relevant to Whisper's rescue, but another world's Paradigm had been far more reasonable. "And the stroke obviously didn't affect his intellect."

  The only way that Valiant could have attacked so quickly after my arrival is if the heroes had been waiting for me; my world's Paradigm must have studied Blueshift's technology and thus learned how to triangulate interdimensional rifts.

  "He's paralyzed!" Valiant countered angrily, slamming into the tank's forcefield with enough force that the entire vehicle was driven down almost a foot into the ground. "He was retired, and you tracked him down and put him in a wheelchair."

  Maintaining a conversation over the din was difficult so I ceased fire. "I approached peacefully...Professor Paradigm attacked me, unprovoked."

  "That may be true," Valiant replied uncertainly, his attack faltering; by his body language, I guessed that the bedridden Professor had failed to relay that tidbit of information. "But even so, he was helpless when you finally struck him. I've watched the video."

  "He attacked me," I explained again through the tank's speakers. "And I'm Doctor Fid. Retaliation was required."

  "Yeah," the hero sighed, and the disappointment in his voice was palpable. "And that's why Doctor Fid has to be stopped."

  The massive hero renewed his assault on the battletank's shields and--from more than a mile away--I continued bantering and operating the vehicle from a distance. The forcefields would hold long enough for the shuttle-full of other heroes (presumably, Titan's "task force") to arrive. Less than two days prior, I had fought the Knightsverse version of Valiant to a standstill and torn three Legion battlecarriers from the sky; compared to that, managing so simple a subterfuge was child’s play.

  And that's when the forest attacked.

  Regrowth must have volunteered to join Titan's task force and--though her shuttle was still miles away--had detected my armor's passage through the brush. I'd fought against her in urban and suburban regions and thought that I'd known what to expect; her ability to control plantlife was powerful, but I'd never considered her as great a threat as her husband (the Red Ghost) or the Boston Guardians' leader, Titan.

  Here, in the dense and untouched forests of the Adirondack foothills, Regrowth was a goddess.

  It wasn't one tree that reached for me, nor was it a handful of vines that reached to entwine one arm. It was the world exploding into motion, countless tons of supernaturally-enhanced wood and bark shifting in harmony, reinforcing each other, twisting and groaning and crackling with force.

  Even automated reflexes had no time to react before I was slammed repeatedly into a stone outcropping; the pressure was too great, and the Mk 39's already damaged orichalcum chest plate buckled under the strain. A warning message blared into my consciousness that my inertial displacement field had failed.

  “…wait…” I whispered, but my voice was so weak that it barely reached my own ears.

  The Earth rose up to meet me…and I was shocked into awareness in a fresh clone body, a thousand miles away and leagues beneath the ocean’s surface.

  Well.

  That was unfortunate.

  The End of Doctor Fid

  By Taylor Harrison, KNN

  (KNN) — Yesterday afternoon, the notorious criminal known as Doctor Fid was slain as he attempted to evade arrest. The villain’s two-and-a-half-decades long reign of terror came to an ignominious end in upstate New York, twelve miles south-west of Lake Placid. Titan, long-time foe of Doctor Fid and leader of the task-force that had been charged with apprehending the fearsome supervillain, had this to say:

  “This outcome is never ideal. It had been my hope that my team would have been able to bring Doctor Fid to justice; instead, I can only pray that Doctor Fid’s many victims can finally gain closure. One of the most dangerous men in all of history is no longer a threat to the public.”

  The mighty Valiant had been the first on the scene, confronting Doctor Fid by himself until reinforcements could arrive. According to multiple witnesses, the battle turned more than twelve acres of untouched forest into a scarred warzone.

  “Doctor Fid was a complicated man,” said Valiant. “There is no question that he was violent, and at times frighteningly vindictive, but he also went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that innocent bystanders were never harmed by our battles. He saved the world. He saved the city of Boston. He even volunteered to rescue children after that earthquake in Chile. There was a part of him, I think, that didn’t want to be a monster anymore.”

  Despite Valiant’s legendary strength, in the end it wasn’t he who put a final end to the threat that was Doctor Fid.

  “He saved my life once,” said a visibly shaken Regrowth. Her husband and team-mate was present, resting a comforting hand on her shoulder. “He had a strange sense of humor but I genuinely believed he was trying to turn things around. Something happened after the Skullface incident, though, and he was getting out of control…I wanted to stop him, to help him. I didn’t want this.”

  It has been rumored that an uneasy peace had been brokered between the Northeast’s most powerful superhero team and the world’s most feared villain. If so, that implies that other heroes, too, believed that Doctor Fid could be trusted to uphold his end of the treaty. Due to technical difficulties, the leadership of the New York Shield were unable to offer any commentary.

  Other heroes were less conflicted.

  “Fid hurt a lot of my friends,” said Boston-native Veridian. “I’m glad I got there in time to watch his body burn. I’m going to sleep better tonight than I have in a long while.”

  A bloodthirsty sentiment, perhaps, but one that is shared by thousands of commentators on online forums where news of Doctor Fid’s demise was met with celebration.

  Un-named sources claim that the task force was able to locate the powered-armor wearing criminal using technology provided by Doctor Fid’s most recent victim: the bedridden but undefeated Professor Paradigm.

  “I’m glad that he’s dead,” the fabled inventor commented to a local reporter, “but this was also a tragedy. Doctor Fid may have been a twisted horror, but he was also possessed of a once-in-a-generation mind. If his genius could have been put to productive use, who knows what might have been accomplished?”

  The identity of the man within the iconic star-field armor is currently unknown; after the wearer’s death, the armor self-destructed, and the body was too badly damaged for even DNA identification. The investigation continues, with Professor Paradigm leading the charge to find any records that might be used to recreate any of Doctor Fid’s technological marvels.

  The Mk 39 had been my sole remaining functional armor. With its loss, I could not put on Fid’s skin even if I wished. For the first time in decades, the comfort and safety of my faceless shell was lost to me. I should have started production, should have focused upon studying the previous versions’ flaws and improvin
g upon past designs. I should have been plotting, determining how best to take advantage of the public’s certainty that Doctor Fid was no more.

  There were many things I should have been doing but in the end I did none of them, because none of them mattered.

  I’d built the sensor array. I’d run my tests and I’d triple-checked my results.

  And then I’d collapsed to the floor and sobbed until even my newborn artificially-enhanced chest ached from the effort of it.

  If my sister’s spirit had been floating free of a body—free of any server farm—the sensor array would have found her. All it would have taken would have been a properly-adjusted modification to my akashic transfer device to return her home. But the sensor found nothing. I was too late.

  Whisper was gone.

  11

  Time accumulated.

  The passing moments flowed like tar; they had weight, bowing my shoulders and crushing the breath from my lungs.

  Eventually, minutes congealed into hours.

  As though shocked by lightning, I was filled with the sudden certainty that my house was in need of cleaning. Despite how pre-occupied I’d been over the last three months, I hadn’t allowed the property to decay…but the estate certainly wasn’t ready for company. There would need to be a ceremony, and people would visit afterwards. The property needed to be made presentable.

  After the car accident, Bobby and I had wandered our childhood home like lost lambs, too wrapped up in our own pain to really be aware of what was going on around us. Our Dad’s lawyer had taken care of the arrangements; he’d been a family friend, one of my father’s fishing buddies. Others had come; I didn’t know most of them; they were my Dad’s friends, my Mom’s friends, people they knew from work or the community.

  Some brought food, others bore only sympathy. The visitors were significantly older than Bobby or me and they’d been more experienced with loss. They told stories that tore at my soul to listen to, they offered trite advice, and they asked well-meaning questions about our future that I had no answers for.