“Both,” Daniel said. “It’s the first place I imagined trying knowing that Bouman is now part of this mess, but then I directed my prescience at what would happen if we go there. I’m feeling the potential for things to go very badly or very well. Because the potential is so extreme, I’m thinking that it has to be the center of everything. We’ve just got to go in knowing there are no guarantees.”
“Or at least going in with as much information as we can,” I said. “I’d think that would improve our chances.” Continue reading Courtesy: Part 14→
“For right now,” Vaughn said, “I’ll be happy to keep everyone here in the air and uninfected—extra bonus if I can also help the city, but I’m not holding my breath there.”
Sean’s name blinked, “I’d be holding my breath if I didn’t know I just fall unconscious. Do you guys have more of your suits?”
“I don’t know if they’ll work for you,” I said. “I designed them to resist electromagnetism, but any suit on you will be at ground zero all the time. We might have a suit that doesn’t use nanotech back at base. There’s probably a way to get it out safely. Nanotech suits should work for everyone else if we have enough.
A year ago, I might have taken what Guardian said as a criticism or threat, but now I saw it for what it was—he didn’t want to destroy the city even though it made a lot of sense.
Looking over at Daniel as he flew next to me, I tried to give Guardian what he wanted, “Well, first of all, you know what’s under the League’s base and in our storage rooms. Blasting the city won’t destroy all of it and the rest will be available to anyone who comes by. Continue reading Courtesy: Part 12→
The pressure in my head increased. It wasn’t unbearable or even painful, but it felt like it filled my head.
Over the comm, I asked, “Is anyone else feeling this?”
Everyone seemed to say yes at once with Kals’ voice rising above the rest to say, “It reminds me of an Abominator psi-bomb. I caught the edge of one once when the Ascendancy put down a rebellion we were involved in.”
Could the mushroom zombies replace Arete’s missing parts or access his memory? The latter option would represent a major security leak both for the Defenders and the Nine.
It didn’t seem likely, but if it was possible, I didn’t like it. From what I’d seen of it, even acting collectively the zombies weren’t very smart, but if they could integrate Arete in, maybe they could be. Plus, what if they could reproduce his powers in the mushroom zombies?
We needed to end this, but we’d have to figure out where to hit it. We’d destroyed the “brain.” We’d need to figure out where the backup was or if it could operate as some kind of swarm without a center. Continue reading Courtesy: Part 9→
The tendrils died at an alarming rate. Even though Hal downplayed the effectiveness of the anti-personnel lasers, he could fire off multiple beams at multiple targets. They wouldn’t have been effective against the mushroom central brain he’d destroyed, but against these tendrils it was good enough.
The tendrils sizzled and stopped moving. Somewhere in the back of my brain, the part that distantly remembered breakfast, I wondered if these were edible mushrooms and hoped they weren’t psychedelic.
By the time I did notice that Gifford, Hunter, and other members of Major Justice’s team as well as Shifter were sinking toward the ground, they were shouting at Gifford who was staring off into space.
Was he too tired or had one of the mushroom tendrils gotten lucky and hit him? Either way they were dropping into range of not only the tendrils’ shots (which might not get through the wind), but also the clouds of spores that puffed outward whenever the shots hit something. Continue reading Courtesy: Part 6→
“You really think it’ll be easy to get him to call it off for today? From what I’ve seen so far, it was a challenge to even get him to admit we were in the earliest stages of a zombie apocalypse,” I used my HUD to take a quick look to see where we were with that.
There weren’t any nearby at all—not even among the trees. I’d adjusted the suit’s sensors to detect them and set the implant to watch for movement.
At this point, Vaughn had stopped hitting them with lightning and Amy hovered above the forest, staring downward, doubtless trying to detect them with magic much as I was with technology. Continue reading Roll the Dice: Part 18→
Among the figures flying along with South Beach Surfer were two women curled up as if somersaulting through the air. I knew them instantly—Ina and Leena, the Human Cannonballs.
They were from Mime’s team, a group with a Circus theme. I’d never done the necessary research to know if someone just liked circuses or if they’d been circus performers cursed (or blessed) with thematically appropriate powers.
