They both jumped at once, both of them aiming in my direction, no doubt guessing that if they could take me out, they could grab Master Martian or Daniel. Also, I was between Daniel and them.
Only as one hit me did I come up with the obvious, alternate possibility—that if one of them hit me, the other might be free to go after Daniel when he got past me.
How I managed to avoid dropping the SUV when the first one hit, I still don’t know. I understand it on the level of technology in that Grandpa had designed the suit to absorb damage and I’d expanded it with tech inspired by the jet’s inertial dampers, but I’m still amazed that I had the presence of mind to hang on as the Cabal soldier hit the suit’s chest, knocking the SUV and me backward. Continue reading Old Friends & Enemies: Part 14→
I wasn’t aiming the majority of goobots at her—just one. I’d aimed the rest at the other Cabal soldiers in the balcony and they worked, kind of.
As the lasers burned through the woman’s costume and into her body, one hitting her thigh and the other her torso, the goobots exploded into sticky gray stuff, hitting her as well as the two men next to her.
She collapsed into the balcony, held up by the goobots’ goo, and I stopped burning her with lasers. At the same time, the two Cabal soldiers were trying to avoid the goobots. One of them succeeded, jumping off the balcony in my direction, pulling a few bricks along with his foot—the one spot that did get hit with goo. Continue reading Old Friends & Enemies: Part 12→
I jumped out first with Yoselin following after me. We landed on the balcony and didn’t even have to smash through the balcony’s sliding door. Daniel slid both the screen door and the glass door open. Even though we’d opted to turn on our telepathy and teleportation blockers for the initial assault, Daniel’s telekinesis worked perfectly.
Thanks to the stream, I could see Master Martian’s eyes widen and his antenna shoot straight from his head as he pushed himself, stumbled, and then flew off the couch. Continue reading Old Friends & Enemies: Part 9→
Telling the jet to throw the streams on screens in the passenger area so that people without implants could see them too, I announced, “This looks bad. At least one of these people is one of the True and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more. We should probably assume that, actually. The big question is if they have backup and how close it is.”
I flipped through the various accessible video streams that Hal’s friend (I guess?) had made available. There were more than I would have predicted, but most of them were either through laptops or security cameras that computers could access. Continue reading Old Friends & Enemies: Part 8→
Slumping into her seat, Tara shook her head before turning to look around at the group, “I’m sorry. I need to get out of True headspace for a little while. It’s exhausting to look at the world that way even though I know we need it. We need to find Master Martian first, though, and from what I was seeing, we need to find him today. When the Dominators know we met with Bullet, they’ll go after Master Martian and maybe after the woman too.”
We followed Stephanie down the hall toward the exit while she asked us questions that pointedly weren’t about what we were doing here. Except for her hint, they didn’t make any other reference to the last time we’d been together either. I followed her lead, answering her questions and choosing not to go in directions that might make her listeners suspicious.
As we reached the room we’d first entered—the one with the big TV and the two long couches facing it—she stopped, “I heard about what Cassie’s been doing—organizing multi-team training sessions at your property in the U.P. I think you’ll find plenty of people here who will be interested in working out with you. Personally, I think you’ll want to be careful about who you invite. Some people around here hold grudges. You know how that is.”
It might not be fair to either Gifford or Hunter, but I’d never particularly liked either of them. Gifford and Gordon came from a legacy hero family, the kind that lived in private compounds and didn’t interact much with normal people. Hunter’s mother was a legacy superhero,celebrity, and superhero stage mom (from what I’d seen).
She had a reality TV show about her life in Hollywood called, “Diva!” To judge from the online commercials, Hunter and Gifford appeared sometimes.
Also, and here’s where the unfairness came in, Gifford was interested in Haley. It hadn’t caused problems because she wasn’t interested in him, but it didn’t make me like him more. Continue reading Old Friends & Enemies: Part 4→
Bullet stopped wiping his face, “Who was she really? Do you know?”
“No,” Daniel continued to watch him, “we were hoping you might know. We’re guessing she’s one of the Dominators.”
Looking over at Daniel, Bullet stuffed his handkerchief back in his pants pocket, “I’m going to kill her.”
“You don’t know where she is,” Tara said, her voice level and controlled. “You haven’t seen her since and you haven’t been looking because she controlled you so completely that you never tried. What makes you think that you could?” Continue reading Old Friends & Enemies: Part 3→
This wasn’t a good time to ask. Or, thinking about it some more, it struck me that it might be. I could save asking about Adam until the end, just before Tara brought up something if she was going to do that. If he kicked us out at that point, we wouldn’t lose anything.
It might not be the best way to look at it, but it was at least practical. Plus, I felt confident that Tara thought the same way.
Bullet frowned, either at the hint of an accent in her voice or because he had no idea who Yoselin was. Maybe both. He didn’t linger on it, though, opening the door for all of us.
We stepped into one side of the big windowed room we’d seen from the outside. It extended into the second story with a walkway going around the edges and another extending across to the other side. While the architect might have intended it to be a living room, I could see hints of another purpose in the layout.
Two long couches and a few freestanding chairs pointed in a rough “V” shape toward the large TV at the front of the room. It could pass as the briefing room of a large team. Noting the number of gaming consoles and controllers on top of the coffee table in front of the TV, I had to bet that it was a younger team. Continue reading Old Friends & Enemies: Part 1→
The Legion of Nothing: A Series of Online Superhero Novels (Updates Monday and Thursday)
