The Machinist Part One: Malevolence Read online

  PKOW!

  An orange bolt of energy slammed against Rampart’s chest, singeing his armor. Unperturbed, the invulnerable flying juggernaut slammed his fists through the ribcage of the villain who had launched the attack. Blood, bone shrapnel, and chunks of lung splattered on the pavement below. Rampart sped a few blocks north through the air.

  High above the city’s skyline, the beautiful Italian superwoman called Stormsoul raised her arms as bullets and bolts of power tore through her costume’s left shoulder and right legging--but ricocheted impotently off of her body. Dark clouds swirled above her and exploded into a staccato lightshow of electricity. Arcs struck the numerous flying meta-villains weaving around her.

  She smiled and shouted in her native Italian. “Tu è piaciuta?”

  The charred bodies of her attackers plummeted from the sky.

  A tall hero in the armor of a medieval knight seemed unaware of the gore raining down on him from above. He slashed his broadsword through the waists of a handful of Network soldiers. They screamed as their intestines slipped out and sloshed around, each of them kneeling in agony and clutching their guts. He decapitated all three opponents with another swipe of his weapon.

  Down the block, a Network captain shouted, “Switch to armor-piercing!”

  Magazines clicked into machine guns in the hands of the enemy soldiers. The troopers took aim and pulled the triggers of their weapons. The knight collapsed in a hail of bullets and blood streaked out of the holes in his plate mail armor. He gasped, “Grail… Arthur… save m--”

  A purple and yellow streak flashed by, simultaneously disarming the soldiers and carrying the knight away. White lilies sprouted where the warrior’s blood had fallen on the blacktop.

  Rampart hovered in the air overhead, and let loose a series of energy blasts from his fists at the now-unarmed crowd of Network troops. They scattered and retreated. He reached down to his belt and tapped the Titans of Liberty logo on its buckle. It buzzed, activating a communication channel.

  “Sprint,” the leader of the heroes stated. “What’s the story with that B-Lister?”

  “Thisknightguy? Ithinkheshealing—shitholdon.” There was the sound of an explosion. “Droppinghimathospitalanywayberightback.”

  “All right. Round up the walking wounded assholes, too.” Rampart fired a bolt of energy at an enemy flier, but missed. Another voice crackled over the communication channel. It was Night Owl.

  “What? There’s just too many, man—we got sanctioned anyway—Hawke said--”

  “I know that, but this is just too insane,” the leader of the Titans of Liberty sighed. This team, the best of the best that the world’s superheroes had to offer--had fought against seemingly impossible odds before, always rallying from near-defeat time and time again. But what they faced today was like nothing any of them had ever seen before. “Wrap it up and converge on the Square, people.”

  Bullets bounced off of Rampart’s legs, breaking his reverie. He spun in the air, and descended to the source of the shots faster than the human eye could follow.

  ***

  McHenry knew his time was limited. The protocol he had found merely delayed the trophy room’s detonation; he needed to get out, to get back to the surface—but he was wearing nothing but the honeycomb bodysuit he wore under his armor to wick away sweat and regulate his temperature. It was as good as being naked if he managed to get out into the warzone.

  He wondered if his armor had survived the explosions outside, and sent out a test ping. There was no response from any of his equipment. He stood up and scanned the room. On the far side of it, he saw something he could use and dashed over to it.

  It was a humanoid robot, entirely disabled. The power cores were missing from its back, and a wad of ragged cables sprung out from the stump that should’ve held its head. He looked down at the information card displayed at the defunct android’s feet and read it aloud with a grin.

  “Automaton of Professor Nemesis, 2007.”

  McHenry had frequently compared notes with Professor Nemesis over lunch in the mess hall at Blackiron. He knew him as Dave. The two men’s designs were similar enough that McHenry knew he could salvage something useful from the robot.

  He yanked the right hand off of the thing, and sat down on the floor, wedging the component between his knees. With his good hand, he fiddled with the nodes and cables, pulled out some pieces, and then plunked it firmly onto the stump at the end of his right arm. His new hand stuck out a little unevenly—the wrist of the thing was connected to his own wrist--making his arm about an inch longer than it should have been.

  McHenry’s internal systems recognized the added extremity when he powered it on and flexed his new fingers. Getting data from five fully articulated digits instead of the three claws of his usual prosthesis was a fascinating sensation. He turned back to the robot and reached inside its chest to pull out a long strand of cable he knew he’d need in order to interface with the base’s surviving security devices. He ran an end of the wire up the sleeve of his bodysuit and plugged it into the socket at the back of his neck.

  He surveyed the room once again. There were a number of “mystical” weapons on display. He scoffed and raced around the room. He came across a wall of various armor pieces and picked out pieces that seemed the most compatible with his own technology. A matching glove and chestplate painted silver. Black boots with antigravity plates in their soles.

  McHenry passed over a piece with a small laser array over the right shoulder, and a few spikes on the left one. It was a dull, gunmetal gray. He stopped, contemplated for a moment, and grabbed it. It fit snugly over the chest armor he’d found—and it didn’t hurt that the coloring almost matched this hodge-podge armor he’d cobbled together. The targeting system for the lasers was wireless, and he was able to synchronize with it effortlessly.

  He went back to Professor Nemesis’ robot and pulled out a few short strands of wire, then connected the boots’ control circuitry to the nodes on his legs. He sent the command to make him rise a few inches off the floor, and he found himself rapidly propelled three feet off of it. That was when he saw the most useful thing in the room: A short-range teleportation belt, black.

  He snatched another length of cable out of the now-gutted robot, quickly recalibrated the control system for the hover-boots—a simple matter of converting the controls from U.S. to metric—and whizzed over to the belt, snatching it and clipping it on. He connected the cable to a jack on the belt, stuffed the cable under his new chest armor, and clicked it into another data node on his chest. A new icon appeared in his head’s-up display, a little star. He focused it in the air above him, and blinked.

  Everything tasted purple for a second, and his vision returned: He was now hovering above the spot he’d stood before. It worked.

  McHenry checked the countdown clock on the room’s self-destruct protocol. He had less than a minute left. He hovered over to the weapons on display one last time, and shook his head. There was nothing there that appealed to him, but he snatched up a plasma pistol anyway and checked its charge. It beeped cheerfully. He tucked it into the belt and prayed it didn’t have a hair trigger.

  There was a row of mannequins wearing the costumes of Titans who had fallen in the line of duty over the decades. McHenry snatched the black cowl off of one of them and pulled it over his head. It left only his eyes visible.

  He made his way out of the room, sealing the door behind him with a few seconds to spare. The ground shook again as the room burst into flames behind the impenetrable doors.

  McHenry took stock of his situation. The detonation would cover the evidence of his theft, and with any luck the Titans and Baron Brass would believe McHenry had perished in the conflagration anyway. He didn’t particularly care what the heroes did as long as they thought he was dead and gone. If he got out of this mess in one piece, he already had a new identity waiting for him to step into and lay low for a while.

  But Baron Brass, the so-called Master? Tha
t was a different story.

  The old man had used and manipulated McHenry after subverting his work—and then he insulted him and tried to kill him. That would not stand.

  All the Machinist had ever strived for was to be recognized by the world for his technical genius—and that fossil had had the gall to try and take over the world using McHenry’s creations, then sweep him under the rug? No.

  “No.” McHenry said aloud, his voice muffled a little under the new mask. “That bastard is going to pay.”

  Using a combination of the short range teleportation effect and his new anti-gravity boots, the freshly geared-up villain made his way through the corridors and elevator shafts of the heroes’ ruined headquarters. When McHenry emerged ten minutes later--from behind a hidden door in the base of one of the stone lions at the Public Library--he sighed with relief.

  He knew that whenever anyone in the villain world had big news, they unquestionably set up shop in Times Square. He only needed to head north about seven blocks.

  The hunt was on.

  ***

  As prematurely-freed convicts appeared throughout the city and Manhattan’s native super villain population pushed northwest through lines of overwhelmed cops and vigilantes, the mastermind himself finally made his appearance.

  Underneath the big screen in Times Square, the largest purple teleportation gate appeared. Flanked by a vanguard of Network soldiers armed with weapons ranging from mundane automatic weapons to exotic plasma rifles, Baron Brass strode with pride and purpose into the City That Never Sleeps. He raised his arms in victory as bullets fired from the guns of frantic police officers bounced off of his armor. His soldiers swarmed around him and liquefied their master’s attempted assailants in a hail of energy bolts and gunfire.

  A half-dozen floating metallic orbs the size of melons came through the teleportation gate and swirled around him before the gate sputtered out of existence. As he stomped over the hood of an abandoned minivan, the metal of the vehicle strained under the weight of his brass armor. Standing atop the derelict vehicle, he turned to face the nearest of the floating balls. Its lens-eye drifted in and out of focus for a moment before settling on an aperture size.

  Above and behind the conquering mastermind, the image of a polar bear drinking a soda sizzled and blinked out on the jumbotron. It was replaced just as suddenly by an extreme close up of Baron Brass’ skull-shaped mask. The shadow of his crimson hood seemed to deepen the eye sockets of the articulated facial covering so only small dots of red light emanated from each of them.

  All across the city, the state, and the world, any television or computer screen still in operation switched to that same image of menace. His heavy English voice boomed from every functional speaker system in the Square.

  “Gentle peons,” Brass’ articulated jaw piece moved with his words. “I have returned to remake this ungrateful planet in my image.”

  His crimson cloak fluttered gently in the breeze as his enforcers took potshots at any hero stupid enough to try to interrupt their leader’s monologue. He arrogantly took no notice.

  “I have waited decades for this moment. I have moved you around like pieces on a chessboard--in a game you never even knew you were playing.” He chuckled, letting out a light cough. “By this time tomorrow every coin and bill in the world will bear my face, my name.”

  The image on the screens changed to a wide shot of the square, centered on Brass. He gesticulated wildly as he spoke. “Any nation that defies me will be in flames. I challenge your leaders to try to regain control of their nuclear arsenals. I challenge your greatest heroes to struggle against the weight of my armies.”

  He paused and the world seemed to pause with him.

  “You will all fail.” He cackled. “You will all fall to your knees before me. And those who do not?”

  The camera switched back to the one nearest Brass’ face. Even through the modulated electronic distortion provided by his mask, his voice took on a more sinister tone.

  “You will all die.”

  ***

  Despite having a vague idea of how vast Baron Brass’ Network was, McHenry was surprised by the quantity of opponents standing between him and his goal. The gauntlet he had to face started even earlier than he’d expected.

  He had only just engaged the hoverboots and begun drifting upwards when his defensive systems blared red in his vision. He felt the machine kick in and take over his nervous system, jolting his head and neck to the right. Six bullets fluttered past him in slow-motion, each one passing through where his brain had been not a millisecond before. He remained in slow-motion mode as his vision went to thermal view. A bright yellow outline formed around a Network soldier, followed by a translucent box asking, \LETHAL | NONLETHAL. He glanced right and selected the second one; little crosshair icons hovered over the trooper’s elbow, shoulder, and knees.

  As the soldier raised his gun to fire a second volley, McHenry’s perception of time sped up. The laser array mounted to his shoulder fired off four little bolts of green energy, striking his attacker precisely as his HUD had targeted. The man flew backwards as his rifle was knocked from his hands.

  McHenry smiled to himself. The humiliation of the past two days had forced him to pull himself together. Kicking ass and taking names, he chided himself. But it was true, even with unfamiliar equipment.

  “Where’s Brass?” He demanded, hovering down towards his stricken assailant. He already knew, but he needed confirmation. The soldier reached down to the holster on his hip, releasing a pained groan as he forced his scorched arm to function. McHenry blinked and engaged the short-range teleporter. The soldier pulled out a pistol, pointed it upwards with his wrist, and took a shot. The bullet whizzed through where McHenry had been.

  McHenry was suddenly on the ground, next to the Network trooper, kicking the gun from the man’s hand. He reached down to grab the soldier by the throat with his new prosthesis squeezing with light pressure as he lifted the man off the ground.

  “Where. Is. Brass.” McHenry hissed through his mask. It wasn’t a question.

  “T-Times Sq—“ the soldier started to say, but McHenry put more pressure on the man’s carotid artery, knocking him out. That was all he needed. He dropped the unconscious soldier and took to the air again.

  He got a little more than two blocks north when the word “INCOMING” flashed in his vision. Again, the machine took over, this time disengaging the boots from flight mode. McHenry dropped to the pavement and crouched on one knee as a huge chunk of blacktop twirled overhead and crashed into a storefront. The neon “OPEN” sign exploded and two dozen bottles of soda burst like fireworks.

  McHenry pivoted, grabbed at the wimpy little plasma pistol he had pilfered, and took aim. He fired off two blasts of yellow electricity before the gun beeped sadly and ran out of juice. The bolts of energy splashed like water balloons against their target—a towering hulk in the shape of a man, but made entirely of rock. McHenry swore under his breath, recognizing the monstrosity as fellow Blackiron resident, Marlon Jones. Or Stoneskin, as the man liked to be called when he was working.

  “Knew we find some heroes tryna sneak up on the boss down here!” Stoneskin shouted. McHenry thought to himself that the expression “gravelly voice” was insufficient to describe the way the words sounded coming out of the giant’s cracked, granite lips.

  “I’m no hero,” McHenry muttered, glaring. “I just want your boss.”

  “No hero, huh? Well you ain’t got one of these,” Stoneskin replied, lifting up one arm to reveal a little high-tech bracelet around his wrist. He pointed at it with his other hand. “If you ain’t with us, then you just dead.”

  Half a dozen Network troopers poured out of a teleportation gate behind the stone man, flanking around him defensively. As they took aim at McHenry with their weapons, McHenry felt heat on his back. A pair of fireballs the size of beachballs rocketed past both of his shoulders and exploded against Stoneskin. The impervious stone man was unaffected but
yelped anyway: “Muthafucka!”

  The soldiers around him were not so fortunate, and screamed in agony as the inferno around them fused their fingers to their weapons and their faces blackened, peeling off. They were still burning as they collapsed to the ground, charred and dead.

  “Look out, buddy!” Someone shouted. Another two fireballs streaked towards Stoneskin, and McHenry dodged them. His head’s-up display calculated their trajectory and he turned to look up and behind himself. A red-haired young man in black, red, and orange armor hovered twenty feet above him, surrounded by an aura of flame. He yelled again, “Back it up! Big blast coming!”

  McHenry teleported another dozen yards away as his unexpected assistant clasped his wrists together, hands outspread. A wall of flame manifested in front of the young man and rolled with great speed towards the stone-skinned brute.

  “Kaboosh!” yelled the hero, emulating the sound his attack made as it went off.

  Stoneskin laughed as the wave struck the ground and an inferno raged around him. “I can take the heat, bitch! Can you take the shock?”

  McHenry could only watch as the rock monster clapped his hands together, generating a wave of compressed air that knocked the flying hero back a few feet and sent him spinning. The ginger do-gooder yelled down to McHenry, blood streaming from his nose. “Dude! Do something!”

  Before he could think it through, McHenry hovered up a few feet off the ground and targeted what his system’s best guess were Stoneskin’s weak points. His laser bolts were ineffectual. McHenry teleported upwards, hovered a few feet next to the hero and pointed down at Stoneskin. He had a plan, but he needed the hero’s help--and he hated it. But neither of them was a match for their mutual foe.

  “He can take the heat,” McHenry shouted. “But the street can’t! Look!”

  The blacktop beneath Stoneskin’s feet looked as if it had just been resurfaced. It was somewhere just between solid and molten. McHenry continued. “Heat it up more, melt it. I’ll concuss it some, the ground will give and he’ll fall in!”