Action Figures - Issue One: Secret Origins (18 page)

“Yes, wouldn’t want to dilly-dally in getting us into our cells, would we? Why am I part of this? I didn’t do anything!” Manfred says, appealing to the line of uniformed men sitting across from him. “He was the one controlling that battlesuit!”

“I was wondering when you’d get around to throwing me under the bus,” Archimedes says.

“Don’t try to guilt me. I’m not the one who threatened innocent lives and wrecked half of Kingsport.”

“I would like to state for the official record, Mr. Fresch, that my current condition is a direct result of an act of assault conducted by Mr. Manfred here on this
body approximately—”

“Whoa whoa whoa, slow down, fellas,” Fresch says. “I’m not taking any formal statements yet, and I’d be very remiss if I did not advise you that any spontaneous utterances could—I’m sorry, hold on.”

Fresch dips into a pocket inside his suit coat to silence the jaunty electronic tune.

“That’s a nice smartphone you have there,” Archimedes says.

“What? Oh, thanks,” Fresch says, giving his clients the briefest of peeks at the device. “Where was I?” he says, but the words are smothered by a boom that tears through the mobile prison cell like cannon fire. The vehicle lurches, buffeting its occupants about. Archimedes feels the transport lose momentum and glide to a stop.

One of the guards, a burly man with no discernible neck, gets to his feet and presses his face to a small steel grate separating the cab from the cargo area. “Chase?” he says into the gray smoke filling the cab. “Payne? Hey! Hey!”

“What’s going on?” Fresch says. “What happened?”

Another guard touches a finger to the earpiece of his radio headset. “Byrne dispatch, come in, this is transport two,” he says, “forty-five minutes out of Protectorate HQ...”

“Weapons hot!” burly no-neck says, weapon safeties snapping off in response. “Two and two, Burke, Delgado, take the left! Go! Go!”

The guards spill out the back over Fresch’s protests, weapons poised, but none of them get off a single shot.

They twitch and dance to a deadly tune Archimedes instantly identifies. He’s heard it before. He’s played it before, on a hulking armored instrument of destruction.

Forty-five minutes out of Kingsport, the guard said. Well outside the range of its bandwidth-rich atmosphere, but not outside a major cell phone carrier’s robust 4G network.

Ashe Semler was not the most physical of men, and Archimedes, technically, has never been physical, but his kick is nevertheless straight and true and drives Fresch’s skull straight back into the transport’s unforgiving wall. He pitches over face-first, barely conscious, the phone tumbling from his jacket.

“What?” Manfred says, his panic-stricken brain unable to form a complete question. “What?”

“If this doesn’t work,” Archimedes says, his fingers flying, “I want you to know: no hard feelings.”

Manfred turns ashen, his eyes wide and fixed on something over Archimedes’ shoulder.

“You.” The voice is flat, cold, artificial. “Out. Slowly.”

“Hello...Manticore, is it?”

“I said out,” Manticore says, his tail whining dangerously.

Accepting the indignity of the situation for the moment, Archimedes backs out on hands and knees until he slips over the rear bumper and is standing face-to-face with his liberator—or his new captor, if he has overestimated his own brilliance. He gasps despite himself; he had not seen his assailant the last time except in a single fleeting glimpse, and he now sees that Manticore is every bit the monster he pretends to be.

“I see you brought back-up,” Archimedes says.

“Not my choice. My employer insisted on sending these goons along,” Manticore says in acknowledgement of the four Thrashers looming large over his shoulder. “You know how much that burns me? My reputation took a big hit thanks to you and those punk kid friends of yours...”

“Believe me,” Archimedes says, somewhat emboldened as the embers of a grudge kindle in his chest, “they’re no friends of mine.”

“Shut it, freak. Point is, I don’t like being shown up. Lucky for you, my orders are to bring you in alive.”

“Oh? Am I so important?”

“Someone thinks so,” Manticore says, giving Archimedes an appraising once-over. “Frankly? I don’t see what’s so special about you.”

Archimedes allows a smile. “Because I can do this,” he says as four railguns power up and take aim at Manticore’s back.

“What the hell? What do you idiots think you’re doing?” Manticore barks, rounding on his giant companions.

“It’s not me!” one of the pilots says. “Something’s overridden my controls!”

“Mine too!” the other three say in sequence.

Manticore turns to interrogate his quarry, only to find him gone—running for cover as the Thrashers unleash a lethal steel rain. The war machines tear into the mercenary and he cries out in shock more than in pain, but as he falls to a knee, the assault driving him to the ground, he knows his armor cannot repel the assault indefinitely. His wings flare and the microjet that propels his suit roars to life, hurling him skyward. The
guns follow his course, spitting death until he is far out of range.

“One fewer thing to worry about,” Archimedes says, returning to admire his new toys.

“Buddy-boy, I don’t know what you’ve done to our suits,” one of the pilots says in his best macho growl, “but you best undo it, or else.”

There’s a delay after Archimedes sends his command into the air via his stolen smartphone, but he achieves the desired effect: the chasses pop of their own accord, exposing their dumbfounded, slack-faced pilots.

“How did you—?”

“Same way I do this,” Archimedes says, ordering each suit to raise its gun arm on its exposed neighbor. “Now. Who is in charge here?”

“...You are.”

“That’s right,” Archimedes says. “I am.”

EIGHTEEN

There are certain things that a typical high school student never wants to hear.
The principal wants to see you
is near the top of that list, followed by
I expect to see you in detention after school
,
I’d like to speak to you after class
, and my personal least favorite,
I know you can do better than this
.

But the number one announcement no high school student ever wants to hear: “Attention, all students. Code Red. Repeat, Code Red. This is not a drill. Until further notice, the entire school is in lockdown.”

I’m in the girls’ room when Mr. Dent comes over the P.A. system to drop that little bombshell (ooh, that may have been a poor choice of words). We had Code Reds at my old high school and drilled them as often as evacuations for fire alarms, so I know the procedures inside and out: if you’re in a classroom, stay there; if you’re in a hallway, immediately enter the nearest classroom; if you’re in a public area such as a bathroom, the gym, the auditorium, or the cafeteria, follow the instructions of the nearest staff member or, if no staff member is available, remain where you are and, if possible, lock all doors and do not open them for any
thing until a school official gives the official all-clear. Above all, stay off your cell phones in order to keep emergency lines open.

Of course, the bathroom has no lock on the door so I’m left to hunker down in a stall. Real dignified. Worse, I’m blind and deaf in here.

Sara?

Carrie, where are you?

In a bathroom on the second floor. Any idea what’s happening?

No, but something funny is going on. I’m in the computer lab and we completely lost Internet access a couple minutes ago.

Open up the mental chat room. Let’s see if anyone else has any news.

We’re open. Guys?

Hey,
Matt says.
Anyone know what’s going on?

Not a clue,
Stuart says,
but Angus Parr is taking bets you’re roaming the halls with a machine gun.

God, what a tool.

Guys!
Missy says, toeing the line between urgency and complete panic.
I’m in the library and I looked out the window and there’s another one of those big mech suit things standing right in front of the school!

Holy crap, the Thrasher?

Yeah, except I don’t think it’s the same one we fought because there’s no big hole in the chest!

We thought there might be other Thrashers out there somewhere and I guess this proves the theory, but
What is it doing here?

It can’t be Archimedes again,
Matt says.
Concorde said he was getting sent to Byrne today.

Byrne?

Byrne Penitentiary and Detention Center. It’s an uber-high-security prison for superhumans out near Worcester. Before Concorde kicked us out of HQ yesterday I overheard him say something to Mindforce about shipping Archimedes out there.

So who’s in the suit this time?
Sara says.

Better question,
Matt says,
is why is it here?

It’s here for us,
I say.
It has to be.

What do we do?
Missy says, and that, as my granddad likes to say, is the $64,000 question.

We call the Protectorate,
I say, and I brace for Matt’s rebuttal.

She’s right,
he says.
Let them handle Thrasher. We’re stuck inside anyway, so we’ll play defense on this one.

I want to hug the boy.

Sara, I’m clear, give me the Protectorate’s number; I’ll make the call.
She psi-mails me the number, but I never punch it in because my phone is showing no reception at all. I check my Internet connection and the 4G is dead too. How is that—wait, Sara said the computer lab was totally off line too. Is the Thrasher suit doing this?

Or, maybe, its controller?

I step out of bathroom and almost slam into Mr. Dent. He jumps back with a startled curse. “Carrie, what are you doing out here?”

“I was in the restroom when the Code Red went off. I’m sorry,” I say, channeling Missy to sell my fake fear, “I was all alone in there and I started to freak out and I know I’m not supposed to leave and—”

“It’s okay, Carrie, it’s okay, we should be safe, as long as we stay inside.

“
Should be
safe? What’s wrong? What’s going on?”

Mr. Dent looks at the cell phone in his hand with a resentful grimace. It’s a school-issued model all the teachers and staff have. They come with the walkie-talkie feature that makes that wicked annoying chirping noise. “No one can get an outside line,” he says.

“You mean you can’t call the police?” He shakes his head. “So what do we do?”

“Stay inside. That’s all we can do for now. They don’t seem to be doing anything, so maybe someone driving by the school will—” An expression I can’t place appears and, as quickly, disappears, and he gives me a smile I’m sure is meant to be reassuring. “Get back to your class, okay?”

“Won’t the door be locked?”

“Nuts, you’re right. Go back into the bathroom. It’s not ideal, I know...”

“No, it’s okay. If you think I’ll be safe there.”

He gives me a pat on the shoulder and off he goes.

And off I go.
Did you guys hear all that?
I say, racing toward the nearest stairwell.

A total communications blackout?
Matt says.
No way that’s a coincidence.

Dude,
Stuart says,
did Mr. Dent say “they”? Like, as in, more than one?

Yeah, I caught that too. Hold on.

There’s a door marked ROOFTOP ACCESS—AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY at the top of the spiraling staircase. It’s locked but a quick zap takes care of that, and one more flight of stairs takes me onto the roof. The high school stretches off in every direction and I can’t see squat from here, so I pick a direction at random and, as I reach the edge, crouch low. I peer out
over the back parking lot near the woods, and sure enough, there’s a Thrasher standing there, identical to the one we smoked the other day.

I think we’re surrounded,
I say.

You need to get out of here,
Matt says.
Get to Protectorate HQ. Get Concorde.

I’m about to do just that, but when I power up I realize the flaw in this plan: I’m a human signal flare. Archimedes would have to be totally blind to miss me taking off, and there’s no way I could bring back help before he turns the school into Swiss cheese.

My cell phone goes off and I almost yelp in surprise. I drop flat and fumble with the thing, desperate to silence it. It’s a text message, from an unknown sender. How’d that get through?

Oh.

SEND ME THE HERO SQUAD.

Guys?

Did you get the text too?
Matt says.
Everyone in the classroom got it.

Same here,
Missy says.
Everyone’s phone went off all at once, like the last time.

It is Archimedes. I don’t know how, but that doesn’t matter. He’s here and he’s got I don’t know how many nuclear-powered battlesuits surrounding the school—a school filled with kids who were never a part of this fight, but now they’re all very literally in the crossfire. He’s playing the waiting game for now, but his patience will run out eventually, and we can’t count on help arriving in time—not the police, not the Protectorate.

We have to do something.

It’s all on us,
I say.

You mean it’s all on you,
Matt says.
We’re stuck in here with everyone else.

And there are problems number one and two: I need to get the team out because I sure can’t take on multiple Thrashers by my lonesome, but more importantly, we need to get the kids and the staff clear.

Then what? We barely beat one Thrasher suit and that was by pure luck. We had no clue what we were up against...but this time we do. That may be our only advantage.

I have an idea,
I say, because calling what I have in mind a plan might be too charitable, but the others, they’re on-board and ready to go.