The Good Fight Read online

  “You’ll take care of them? Everyone?”

  “Pinky-swear. Acceleration good, Mesosphere coming up.”

  Nearly 100 miles up, it was getting easier. Lots easier. “Watchman?”

  “Astra? What’s your status?” He sounded like he was asking how an oh-so-routine exercise was going.

  “I’m good and you don’t need to break the air for me anymore.” It was mostly true. “How much more speed have you got?”

  “A bit. Okay, separating.” I clenched my fists and braced as his feet drew away above me. Ten feet. Twenty. Thirty, and suddenly I was making my own bow wave in the thin air.

  “Speed dropping,” Shelly observed.

  “I’ve got it.” Things went fuzzy as I metaphorically leaned in and pushed.

  “Speed steady. Climbing.”

  I focused on Watchman, willing his shrinking dot to stay in sight. “Time to target range?” I gasped.

  “Two minutes to effective Gungnir range, three to optimal range. Remember that summer we— Crap on a cracker! The target has separated! The target has separated!”

  The red triangle at the top of the cone split into five red pips, all flashing. Confusion filled the communications links before Shelly shut it all out.

  “Multiple warheads? Why didn’t anyone say?”

  “It’s not! The missile has a single, one megaton warhead. The robots have been changing it, but they couldn’t have split the bomb!”

  “Decoys?”

  “Have to be,” she agreed, a little calmer. “Five of us, five of them—it’s adapting.”

  “Yippy. So now it’s a shell game.” This was not happening.

  Blackstone entered the Dispatch link again. “Astra, Watchman, vector independently. The Navy is uploading new targeting solutions to your Gungnirs, we’re putting two on each.”

  “Copy, independent vector,” Watchman confirmed and I hastily echoed him. On my helmet screen one of the red pips flashed green and I turned to move it to the center of my cone. Below me the Earth was turning into a ball, lit along half its curve by distant sunset. All systems still green—good thing since we’d never actually space-tested them.

  Okay. Two Gungnirs per “missile.” We could still do this.

  “Targeting range in thirty seconds,” Blackstone reported. “Confirm lock and readiness.” The designation Omega Four flashed on my helmet screen as we went down the roll.

  “Omega One, Argonaut standing by.”

  “Omega Two, ArcLight standing by.”

  “Omega Three, Watchman standing by.”

  “Omega Four, Astra standing by.” I fought and conquered the insane urge to add May the Force be with you.

  “Omega Five, Rook standing by.”

  “Launch in ten, nine, eight, seven, six—hold launch! Target proliferation!” My heart dropped into my stomach as the flashing pip in my target-sights split again into five more. Which meant…

  “Twenty-five confirmed targets, image and pattern analysis indeterminate,” Shelly broke in, tearing into the new data like only she could. “Greater than 40% confidence is impossible to achieve.”

  * * *

  Hurtling into space at hypersonic speeds is not the time or place to lose focus. I listened to the silence as Shelly, the super-intelligent quantum ghost of my BFF, Blackstone, our team leader and intelligence analyst, and what had to be dozens of military wonks on the other end of my radio link came up with nothing. Ten Gungnirs, twenty-five targets, at least 50 million lives riding on worse odds than a coin toss. We couldn’t rely on luck—

  Oh yes, we could. “Shelly, is Seven back in Dispatch?”

  “Yeah. So?” She sounded distracted—probably taking over every CPU available to help her fight some kind of targeting solution out of the data.

  “Tell him to look at the screen and pick a number!”

  “Are you kidding? His luck only works when it affects him personally!”

  “If he guesses wrong and we lose half the country he’ll never forgive himself—how could it get more personal?”

  Silence, then “He says twelve, but we’re not linked into the Gungnir’s targeting telemetry and the Navy’s not going to hand it to us.”

  “Can you hack it?”

  “Maybe, but Gungnirs are sub-kiloton nukes and once they’re unlocked they’re set to go off if tampering is detected. You’re tough, but not that tough.”

  “How long till target reaches ideal EMP position?”

  “Less than two minutes.”

  “Do they have any other ideas?” Please let somebody have an idea.

  “Best-guess target selection from multiplication vectors.”

  So, no. “Do it.” If she failed, I’d never have time to know.

  “Hope…”

  “Here we come to save the day, right?” That got a snicker; it had been our catchphrase back when we were playing Power Chick and Awesome Girl, before she’d died and I had my breakthrough. Before it had all gotten serious.

  “Working on it—the Navy just lost its telemetry link. Sad malfunction…”

  I turned into my new vector, lining up with the new green pip, and felt bad for all the guys on the ground watching what had looked like a straightforward cape-assisted intercept turn into to a complete FUBAR with nothing they could do about it. I was just an exhausted spectator too, pushing on and watching the Sun “rise” on my right as our height caught us up with the sunset. We were high into the thermosphere now, where the air was so thin I didn’t feel the drag at all and refracted sunlight didn’t wash out the stars anymore—much higher and they could wave at us from the Space Shuttle as we blew by faster than I’d ever flown.

  Blackstone was back. “Stand by. Entering launch range in five, four, three, two, one—” Above me I saw the flares of Watchman’s Gungnirs as their missile drives lit in the silence, burning away to close the distance on his two selected targets. The others were far enough away that even with my super-duper vision their burns looked like dim sparks against the fringe of blue horizon.

  “Astra, Navy tracking shows your Gungnirs have failed to launch. Status?”

  “I’m okay.” So far. “Still closing with targets.”

  “Break away, Astra. Repeat, break away. You will be in the hot-zone.”

  “Understood.” I shot past Watchman as he decelerated—breaking as hard as he could to put distance between himself and his missiles—and closed my helmet’s blast shield to fly on instruments.

  “Astra, you’re not breaking.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Hope, break away now! Dear God—”

  “Brace yourself,” Shelly sang. I assumed the position. Arms straight ahead, fists together, back arched, head tucked, ready to dive into the cosmos. Watchman’s Gungnirs fired.

  Gungnir had been Odin’s spear, a god’s weapon that struck and killed whatever it was thrown at. The military was still at least a generation away from true nuclear bomb-pumped lasers, but one of their resident Verne-types had lovingly crafted the superscience modifications that made them real enough for us. The original sub-kiloton nuclear warheads were from Cold War infantry weapons—meant to be anti-infantry area weapons fired by tripod mounted recoilless rifles from a couple of kilometers distance (and how crazy was that?). They’d been remounted on missiles behind their “lens generators”—the Verne-tech gadgets that projected force field bottles that lensed and focused most of the bomb’s energy into a death ray gamma laser with an effective kill range of forty kilometers. Interaction with the force field bottles turned the rest of the liberated energy into photons and kinetic energy.

  Yup—a blast front in space. It was like punching through a wall.

  When my link came back Shelly was babbling. “Hope! Hope! Are you there?”

  “I’m here, Shelly. Still on target.” Was I? Yes. “Suit ruptured but functional, helmet pressure steady.” Our suits used mechanical pressure instead of air pressure to protect us from inflating in the near-vacuum and allow us to breathe (think b
ody-wrapping heavy elastic bands), so I wasn’t losing air. So long as my helmet stayed intact… “Did they get it?”

  “No,” she said disgustedly. “None of the Navy solutions targeted number twelve. It reaches optimal EMP range in forty-seven seconds.”

  “Have you finished retargeting?”

  “Targeted and locked, but we’ll be firing from spitting range! You can’t—” I popped the covers on the manual triggers in my fists and punched them before I could think. The twin launches slammed me back and I turned the kick into a spin that put my boots ahead of my helmet, curled up and wrapped my arms around my head.

  “Fire, Shell!”

  This was going to hurt.

  Would have been nice to finish my pizza.

  But everyone will be okay.

  Michael, defender of man, stand with us in the day of battle. St. Jude, giver of hope, be with us in our desperate hour. St. Christopher, bearer of burdens, lift us when we fall!

  So much closer, this time the impossible blast front smacked into me like a windshield meeting a bug. The wave of energetic photons seared me, light like knives, and the kinetic blast-front flattened and spun me, a hit to every inch of my body. I heard things break, saw stars inside my helmet, and realized I was laughing.

  “Here we come to save the daaaaay!”

  “Astra.” Blackstone’s voice sounded thin, reedy. “Your helmet telemetry shows a leak; are you able to breathe?”

  I nodded, still giggling at being alive. “Affirmative. Stand by.”

  Doing an airflow check, I found the leak in the pressure ring where my helmet met what was left of my suit. Foam and a patch sealed it and I raised the blast shield so I could see out again, still giddy with relief. I hurt in ways even my fight-training didn’t manage, but nothing was broken (I knew what that felt like). Not bad considering I’d thought I might be explaining myself to Saint Peter now; The Rock might not have considered my setting off a superscience-warped nuclear bomb at close range any different than suicide.

  Sixteen red pips remained on the screen with our five green triangles, so we’d got Seven’s pick. Please, God… “How long—”

  “The remaining targets are reaching optimal EMP range…now,” Blackstone said.

  Nothing. No flash. No storm of gamma rays plunging for the atmosphere to hit Earth’s electromagnetic field and shower my home in a power-killing wave of free electrons.

  “Yes!” Shelly shouted. She opened the link so I could hear the cheering of everyone up here and on the ground as the remaining decoys continued their flight into space.

  “Blackstone…”

  I could hear him smile. “The Navy does not have direct feed to our links, my dear. So far as they’re concerned, officially you did a manual launch on your own cognizance and against my orders when remote targeting failed. We’ll never know which target was the actual warhead.”

  I laughed before I could stop myself. Yeah, right. Seven got lucky again, and all was right with the world. I spotted Watchman far below me, a tiny black silhouette against the bowed rim of sunlit blue. Turning for home, I smiled as the lights below us began to come back on, patches springing up and multiplying as the undamaged power grids began to come online. World saved, for now.

  Rush could get me back to the Pizza Cellar, and my slice would still be warm.

  Back to Table of Contents

  Zephyr: Phase Zero

  Warren Hately

  Warren Hately lives with his five children in Margaret River, Western Australia, where he works as a journalist, sub-editor and single dad. Previously, he has been a freelance travel writer, photographer and academic. He holds a doctorate in English and Comparative Literature for his dissertation The Discourse of Conflict, which reworked post-Foucauldian semiotics to examine the predominance of language-like models in the resolution of conflict (with the case study of the 1981 prison conflict in Northern Ireland). Warren also has an English with First Class Honors in post-structuralist theory and cultural studies specialising in the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault.

  Zephyr is an ongoing serial that has been favorably compared to Watchmen and similar classics. Like the comic books to which it owes a debt, Zephyr is episodic with an open narrative.

  It's 2012 on the eastern seaboard of the United States. The place is Atlantic City: a sweeping longitudinal metropolis rebuilt following widespread devastation in 1984. Superhumans are not only real, they're human. All too human, as Nietzsche would say.

  Zephyr is an alt.superhero adventure influenced by postliterary writing and Sturgeon's law. The style is cynical, cinematic and systematically against standard expectations of the genre. Imagine if Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho was about costumed vigilantes rather than stockbrokers and you have half the idea.

  Zephyr tells the story of a major, if somewhat jaded superhero in an alternate universe where New York City has been abandoned and the Beatles were a superhero team. Zephyr is a regular guy, but with powers, and it's easy to wonder if his life might have been better without them as supervillains and other problems that only superhumans can deal with derail his efforts handling life.

  Warren is on Twitter as @wereviking. Learn more on the Zephyr website.

  * * *

  RADIO CHATTER PUTS about six dozen police on the corner of Grand Central Avenue outside the Olympia Bank, but its the gunshots on my fly-by that get my attention. From this altitude, the weapons sound like a breakfast cereal preparing for gurgitation—and from what I can glean as I swoop down like a red-and-white falcon from high above, they’re about as effective as throwing that breakfast against the bank walls.

  I don’t know what I’m doing up this early except to say I haven’t slept yet, and the prospect of heading home to toddler ground zero doesn’t really appeal, but I can’t offer any excuse for the wannabe bank robbers. It’s fucking early. The tired cliché of bank robbing itself notwithstanding, my mood is not leavened by the nascent sunrise embossing the twinkling lights of the myriad police and tactical armoured vehicles corralled outside the bulky, neo-Gothic monstrosity of the bank, itself like some vast stone cathedral to the gods of homo œconomicus, or perhaps more like a spaceship as envisaged by early medieval Christians preparing to wing all their earthly concerns into the heavenly vault above.

  Even the cops look tired, many of them probably nearing the end of night shift and having more than just the danger to life and limb to hold against the ne’er-do-wells inside the Olympia. As I land, blood-red cape swirling around my left arm and making me flick it off with a flourish of minor irritation that’s becoming increasingly common these days, I note the pock-marked walls of the bank and its shattered front turnstile, the rear end of a black four-wheel drive jutting out at such an angle it suggests the vehicle wasn’t so much ram-raided into the lobby as thrown.

  The closest cops lift their eyes from behind the vehicles they’re using as a barricade, more than one or two lingering over my red-and-white bodysuit and domino mask, faces caught in rictuses somewhere between disdain, bemusement and tired relief. A senior cop I recognise from a bridge fire earlier in the year scurries down the side of his cruiser carrying a shotgun in the crook of his arm, motioning me down into cover with him despite my nonplussed expression, no immediate obvious signs of return fire from the bandits over yonder.

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  “Get down here before someone shoots you,” Washington hisses.

  “Let ‘em try,” I say with a shrug that probably only underscores my twenty-two years, irksome as that fact alone seems to be to most the cops, super powers just an added insult.

  Before I can ask whether anyone is actually shooting back, the broken-ended four-wheel drive lurches backwards out of the gaping vagina dentata of the lobby and comes crashing madly into the street, cops behind the nearest cover abandoning their posts in record time as the cartwheeling vehicle clips the first cruiser and bounces off the roof of another with all the ensuing detonation of glass and crunching
of metal you’d expect. Almost drowned out by this cacophony is a dire lowing from inside the bank, but I am distracted by the wind whipping up around us as I look up to see an FBI chopper descending for a spot a hundred yards further up the block.

  “Who’s in there?” I yell at Washington over the white noise.

  “We don’t know,” the cop replies. “There’s a bunch of ‘em. Big guy, dirty hair, hammers for hands. Some other guys with spiffy tech.”

  “Did you just use them term ‘spiffy’?”

  “It’s stuff we haven’t seen before,” the cop says. “Nothing you can get on the street.”

  I take this in, looking past him to where the first suits are disembarking from the FBI chopper, Parahuman Affairs crest like mechanical scabies on its black shell.

  “OK, time to show these guys how it’s done,” I say and angle back on the bank.

  “The Feebs are here,” Washington says, and just looks at me, then slowly clues in to the echoes of what he’s just said and shrugs as well.

  “OK,” he says. “Good luck.”

  * * *

  I BUST A move sweeping low across the asphalt and in through the devastated lobby now open to the elements, unfazed by the dim lighting within.

  I practically collide with the first of the bank robbers, a guy dressed in bright green mechanical armour with a helmet that is probably meant to suggest an insect carapace, ant-like antennae protruding from what I guess you’d call the forehead. Some kind of weapon’s cradled in his arms, a shiny silver coil connecting it to a plug beneath one armpit. Unhindered by knowing any better, I grab the gun before the goon can react and wrench it from its socket, then club him with it across the exposed jaw.

  “Ant-man’s down,” I snigger and rest my foot atop his unconscious shell as my eyes pretty much totally fail to acclimatise to the dark.

  Some kind of energy weapon discharges close by and it’s more by freakish luck than any fast reflexes that I drop back and let the particle stream whistle past me and out the door. The flash illuminates another one of these armoured guys, except his get-up is cornflower blue. I respond with a discharge of my own and I hope the guy’s suit is insulated, because there’s not much holding back when I’ve got the moral imperative on my side. The guy gives a shriek, feet rooted to the spot as I imagine his eyes rolling up inside his head under that awkward helm, just his jaw and mouth visible as he bites his tongue and drops to his knees and buckles sideways at about the same moment I dismiss him from my gaze and sweep deeper into the bank.