The funny thing was that I had a plan for this. Scream Eagle wasn’t the first person I’d ever met with the ability to control technology. The first person I’d met was Carlos, the son of a super in the SoCal Defenders unit.

I’d tested my armor design with him at one point to see how hard it would be to defend against it. It turned out to be pretty hard in fact, but I’d at least developed strategies to fight against it.

What he was doing now was looking for something he could control. Once he found it, he’d discover what it was connected to, try the controllable elements of that, and move on down the tree.

My counterstrategy went like this: turn off as much as possible for a predetermined amount of time and leave no way to turn it back on until the (mechanical) timer passed that point.

With a sequence of taps against the palms of my gloves, I turned off the suit’s nanobot repair technology, the anti-gravity, almost all the functions of my HUD, my ability to launch and control my bots, and too many systems to list.

In the end, I didn’t have much more than the 1940s Rocket suit.

Scream Eagle jerked his head back as if I’d punched him.

It would have been nice to imagine that cutting off access might hurt him permanently, but I wasn’t holding my breath. Carlos had just moved on to trying other avenues of attack.

There wouldn’t be many. As of that moment, I had to control everything with the buttons in the palms of the suit’s gloves and the controls in the mouthguard that I manipulated with my tongue. All of those were mechanical.

As of that moment, the only piece of electronic equipment with the potential to be remotely controlled was my implant, and I couldn’t turn it off. I could only hope the Xiniti had included protections that would work.

Hoping to inflict another random bit of important damage, I kept the sonics on him, narrowcasting the signal from each weapon to avoid hitting anyone else while also improving my chances of causing real problems. Ordinarily, I’d have been seeing reports in my HUD of how the sonics were doing at finding resonant frequencies, but now, I had to rely on audible cues from the sonics themselves.

The good news is that I was getting those cues.

The sonics’ pitch took on a whine, indicating that the sonics had found a frequency that responded.

I only had a moment to wonder if Scream Eagle could tell on his end before I got a confirmation. Scream Eagle screamed and attacked me with everything he had. By everything, I meant, he ran for me, firing his bullets even though the aiming mechanism didn’t work.

At the same time, gleaming blades extended from each finger. He intended to use them on me when he reached me.

Along with that, he made a connection to my implant and attacked it with his powers. I knew this because the implant notified me, “External attack. Defenses  engaged, including ‘brain barrier’.”

I did not know what that was and did not query the implant. The last thing I needed was a giant infodump into my brain in addition to everything else.

I kept the sonics aimed toward him, figuring that anything that made him pull out all the stops had to be a good thing.

I had to reconsider that idea milliseconds later when I felt a tingling in my legs, which seemed like the kind of thing that a “brain barrier” should be keeping out. I tried to adjust my left leg, and it felt sluggish, as if my brain’s commands weren’t reaching the limb as quickly as usual.

I could still adjust my arms and correct my aim as he ran toward me, but I wondered how long it would be before that would become spotty.

Two more of Scream Eagle’s bullets hit my armor, and this time I nearly fell over. Worse, he was now almost to me.

I tried to adjust my arms, both to keep Scream Eagle within the sonics’ blast and also to keep the sword between us, and found that my arms were not responding as quickly as they should be, either.

The one ray of hope came in the form of a wisp of smoke I thought I saw escape the assembly Scream Eagle’s wings extended from on his back.

Even so, I found myself on the verge of asking my implant to download its defenses to my brain so I could direct them myself. I squelched the urge. I had too many other things to worry about. I concentrated on aiming the sonics, the sword, and controlling my own body, hoping the implant’s automated defenses included a counterattack.

As if the universe felt it needed to throw another layer of chaos on top of everything else, Art and Zola ran out from the far side of the room divider, moving fast enough that I heard a series of whip cracks that I assumed had to be small sonic booms.

Haley ran after them, unable to keep up. Sydney fired missiles at them, but had to stop because only a few small leaps put them within a few feet of me and Jody–not to mention Daniel and Dayton.

My implant informed me, “Attacks analyzed. Neutralization and counterattack in process.”