I caught a glimpse of the Cabal soldier and Prentkos gaining altitude and then hitting the top of the arc and beginning to drop. He’d been traveling the same way the strongest of the Cabal’s soldiers always had—jumping half a mile or more at a time.
It made me regret that we couldn’t cover the entire city with spybots. I placed the ones we had near roads where you could run at hundreds of miles per hour on outskirts and located them thicker near my parents’ house—with the effect that this guy could avoid notice until he got close purely by accident.
At the same time that I blasted toward him, I pulled my arm back as if I planned to punch him. Even if I couldn’t move as quickly as he could or fully take advantage of the speeds that I could now observe, I could pull the arm back as I might if I had no special tricks and then fire off killbots as I closed with him.
The speed of my punches was limited by my body, but firing off the killbots was done at the speed of thought plus electronics interfacing with alien technology in my brain.
I didn’t know who’d figured out how to dissolve my goo, but knowing that this was connected to the Nine, my first thought was Rook. The guy seemed to have weird hero worship of my grandfather going despite being an example of everything my grandfather stood against.
I wouldn’t have put it past him to make a point of figuring out how to dissolve the glue after the last times we’d fought him. Cassie had disintegrated his leg. In the fight before that, I’d exploded his hand. He had every reason to hate both of us—except he’d been weirdly admiring both times we’d met. Continue reading Enforcers: Part 3→
Giving myself as much speed as I could while still having a hope of stopping close to my house, I asked myself what the best way to handle this was. Coming to the conclusion that the best place to fight the guy was far enough away from my house that he couldn’t burst inside before I could react, I checked his position.
He was still heading toward my parents’ house. If he traveled at the same speed, he’d run through a park a few blocks away—which struck me as a better option for fighting him than the other options: home, an elementary school’s playground, or a church parking lot. Continue reading Enforcers: Part 2→
The next day I found myself in the last place I wanted to be when almost everyone I knew was in danger—work.
Chris and I had rented an old, one-story building in an industrial neighborhood in Grand Lake that consisted of old factories, dirt parking lots, a railway, and weeds. I didn’t know when the building we were renting had been built, but it had last been renovated in the 1960s. Made of red brick, dark windows, and a flat, slanted roof, its only sign of life was a small sign above the door that said, “Cannon & Klein Engineering.” Continue reading Enforcers: Part 1→
Haley’s lip curled, “Then I think you need to get out of here and let us discuss it. You know that we’re not the whole League. Some of us who aren’t here are going to need a minute to talk about this.”
“Some of us who are here will too,” Cassie’s hand brushed her gun.
Adam glanced down at it, his face hidden in the shadows, but his mouth seemed to tighten, jerking into a smile, “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“We might want to consider it,” Daniel said, looking around the group.
I knew what that meant. His loose sense of possible futures included better ones if we allied with this guy. Of course, even knowing that, Daniel would admit that inevitably in an infinity of futures, Adam would betray us in an infinite number.
But a smaller infinity, Daniel thought at me, and the sense I’m getting is that even if he does we’ll be better off than if we never allied with him.Continue reading Distractions: Part 10→
They left. Major Justice grunted as he stood up and grabbed a powdered donut. The sugar puffed into the air, leaving white spots on his fatigues.
South Beach Surfer turned toward Cassie and I as she followed Major Justice out, “You’ll regret this. Remember later that we tried to talk you out of it.”
I thought back to yesterday and what happened to Ana and Colette. Implanted commands might have unexpected side effects.Is Kals confident she can get to us if something goes wrong?
We’re only upstairs, Daniel thought back at me. Kals says she’ll contact you via implant with the words.
Cassie smirked, “Are you saying that you think the first Captain Commando was a quiet, subtle guy? Because that’s not how I remember him. I remember him as the kind of guy who’d go after the Nine and not give a damn what happened because they’re a danger. He’d be smart about it, but direct and he wouldn’t wait for permission.”
Major Justice’s thin lips tightened and for the first time, I thought about how much of his face his helmet showed—almost all of it by way of a transparent faceplate. I pegged him as being in his late 50s, maybe early 60s, from his white hair, and lined face. Continue reading Distractions: Part 7→
The Legion of Nothing: A Series of Online Superhero Novels (Updates Monday and Thursday)
