Blackjack Wayward

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I didn’t get a formal introduction to his team, which Superdynamic called “Battle.” When I asked him why he hadn’t thought of something catchier, he just pursed his lips and shrugged, saying “Not enough time to get fancy.”

Moe was the big black guy and Ruby was the redhead with the impossible tits. The Shaolin girl was called Focus, and the Olympic copycat was a nephew of the original, but he had changed his superhero name to Ricochet, to account for his speed-and-bounce powers. He tore off his headgear once we were inside, revealing himself to be Asian. I didn’t know the original was Asian as well. The other young guy clanked around the cockpit with the heavy lower body armor, sitting uncomfortably in a chair modified to fit him. He was tall and lean, bare-chested with long, flowing blond hair, like a surfer and an anime medieval knight had crashed into each other. The sword he had was enormous, but he wielded it as if it were a toothpick, resting it in a special cradle beside his station. Battle’s final member was Mirage, who still wore the long, flowing white robes and the hood that he used to conceal his features. He was also Asian, though his skin was darker, his almond eyes more pronounced, as if he was Malaysian or Indonesian, whereas Ricochet had the paler skin denoting a Korean or Japanese background. Mirage and I locked eyes only once, as we boarded, and his seething anger was impossible to hide.

Sitting up front in the cockpit of Superdynamic’s state-of-the-art jet upset the balance of things with the rest of the group. Ruby was the usual co-pilot, and when I took her spot at his request, she took the big black guy’s spot behind Super and everyone shifted back, making Focus stand in the back.

“You built this?” I asked, staring at the flashy holographic console that was alive with activity. It was more like a spaceship than a normal Earth-bound plane.

He looked at me, almost insulted, as if this was a toy he had made in his off time, barely worthy of taking credit for.

As we sliced through the air beyond Mach 4, I could help but wonder how similar Superdynamic and I were. I suppose if my powers had never developed, I probably would have built myself a super suit like he did, though I had to admit, his engineering skills and his design skill far surpassed mine.

“This looks different than the one you had in Hashima,” I said, trying to make conversation. He’d been particular about sitting me up front, and it couldn’t just be to keep an eye on me.

“I upgraded,” he said manipulating the holo-controls with the ease of a concert pianist. It was obvious he didn’t want to talk with me, I just couldn’t help myself.

“Can’t you fly with the suit?”

He flashed me another one of his contemptuous glares. “This is faster. More comfortable than a pair of rocket boots.”

I shrugged. “It wasn’t too bad.”

“You did, what, ten thousand miles in those boots? Puts a lot of wear and tear on you.”

That was an interesting thing for him to say. They were tracking me; somehow they had been tracking me. Had they put something in my body at Utopia? Or was there something in the machinery I used to make the boots?

“How’d you track me?”

“Think he’s still buggered,” Ruby snickered.

I looked back at her, hoping she’d divulge what the hell she was talking about, but instead, I caught Focus staring at me. She was young, not even twenty, and pretty.

“You’re the billion dollar man,” Ruby said. “Billion dollars, U.S., for you. Dead or alive.”

She laughed, knowing from my expression that I had no idea what she was talking about.

“You don’t check the internet?” she said. “There’s a billion dollar reward in escrow for the man that brings you in. It’s been online for over two weeks. Along with a GPS locator tag somewhere in the middle of Northwest Australia.”

Zundergrub had put a bounty on my head? That was silly. The man wanted to see me suffer, to see me die. Not hear of my death, but to be there, to take part, to ensure I was witness to his genius, and once I had seen him destroy humanity, to kill me and be done with it.

“Yo, boss,” Moe said, taking off a headset and turning from his work station. “I got nothing with the Revolution and Global isn’t responding either.”

“Try Francie,” Superdynamic suggested.

“Nah, man. I did and nothing.”

“Francie is their agent,” Ruby said, filling me in. “To the Revolution, that is.”

I knew who they were and what they were about, but I had no idea what they had to do with tracking me.

“They were the ones tracking me?”

Superdynamic flashed me a confused look and Ruby laughed again.

“Damn, boy,” Moe said. “This shit ain’t all about you.”

“No one was tracking you,” Superdynamic shot in. “We received a message with your flight telemetry.”

“What?”

“Okay, Moe,” Super continued, ignoring me, “Search the database for Francie’s private cell phone. If that doesn’t work, nothing will.”

“Gotcha.”

“Wait a minute, what message are you talking about? I didn’t send you anything.”

He shrugged, “We got an email with your telemetry. Show it to him, Ruby.”

She turned to her flight station and banged away at the keyboard and mouse.

“I’m putting it on your console,” the redhead said, and my computer screen flashed to life with a text document that was intended for Superdynamic himself. It was just a string of numbers, and it took me a second to ascertain that they were in fact the list of vectors from my flight path across the planet from earlier today. It was precise to the meter, as if I were rigged with a military-grade GPS and the data was uplinked on the fly to this file. I was rusty on my longitudes and latitudes, but the flight path had a time sink and I could easily find my stopover in Lagos, and several other crash landings while I was learning to fly. Interestingly, the whole thing came online somewhere over the Indian Ocean, nearer to the Malaysian archipelago, as if for the whole trip from northern Australia to Malaysia I had been offline. That was probably due to my being over water and too far away from land and a decent cell signal. That’s how this file had been put together. The obvious gaps were over large bodies of water, though the trajectories were easy to discern.

“I must have some tracking system from Utopia,” I said. “Maybe something Zundergrub put on me.”

“No,” Superdynamic said. “I’ve seen the security vids from Utopia. They didn’t put anything on you.”

“Yeah,” Moe shot in. “I was wondering, how’d you get that dude Razor on Zundergrub’s team? I mean, you were knocked out and shit.”

I looked back, “It was a coincidence.”

“Yeah,” he said, unconvinced.

“Did he make it out?”

“F*ck if I know,” he said. “It all goes to shit real fast.”

“We mostly followed your escape out on the vids,” Superdynamic added. “They stole a Russian Akula submarine from Severomosk, which had attached to it a deep diving DSV. That’s how they made it down there and got out. I don’t know what happened to your friend, but I know he wasn’t left behind.”

I shook my head, overcome with the shame of leaving Razor. Deluded as he may have been, he saved my life and I’d just abandoned him.

“I got Francie,” Moe said to Superdynamic; then to Francie he said, “You gotta speak up honey,” before patching it to the intercom on pilot’s console.

“Francie!” Superdynamic yelled. “You hear me?”

“Superdynamic?” From the bad connection it was clear she was in the middle of a large crowd, somewhere outdoors.

“Yeah,” he shouted. “It’s me. I need to talk to someone, Francie. I can’t get a hold of anyone.”

Francie’s audio was muffled for a moment, and you could barely hear her say, “Excuse me,” to someone.

“Super, something’s happened,” she said, her voice breaking into sobs.

“Francie, I need to get a hold of them. I need to know what’s going on.”

I looked back at Moe and shrugged “what’s going on?” to him, wondering who the hell Francie was and why she was so important.

He raised an eyebrow and tapped a few keys on his keyboard to the headline of the Washington Post: “The End of America?” The photo accompanying the caption was reminiscent of the images of the fall of Saigon, with bodies littering the streets in front of the Capitol and an overturned tank.

“You don’t watch the news, motherf*cker? Some f*cked up shit’s going down. Buncha supers are missing, shitload is dead.”

He tabbed to a different page, this one an online blog, where the headline was “Washington Under Siege” in as big a point type as could fit on the large monitor.

“It’s like Somalia down there.”

Moe switched to an image archive and swapped through more war images, but these were clearly in our nation’s capital. He paused on a long-range photo, probably taken from a helicopter, showing dozens of fires dotting the skyline of the capital, military helicopters moving in tactical formations over the city, and in the foreground, a series of hundred foot-tall mechanized robots duking it out with a mechanized column of tanks and APCs.

“Anyone even gets close to D.C., we just lose contact with. Some bad shit’s going down.”

“Keep it down back there,” Superdynamic snapped. “Say again?”

“I said, I don’t know where they are, Super!” Francie shouted. “I lost touch with them when our building came down,” Francie said, and coughed.

“Wait a minute, slow down.”

“The whole building, it just came down.”

“Is New York under attack, too?”

She sobbed again, overwhelmed with emotion.

“Francie, honey, I need you to focus.”

“Just us, Super. They hit us, and took out the Revolution building. I’m standing across Times Square, four blocks down. The whole thing came down. I was at lunch with my boyfriend ... and ... oh my God....”

“Okay, okay. Look, we’re just about to base,” Superdynamic said, then paused, his mouth literally dropping as he looked ahead. I followed his gaze and saw the same horror he did. Superdynamic’s base, a lighthouse facility on a small island just south of Bermuda, was toppled over and in flames.

We hovered a few hundred feet over the wrecked base, the whine of the engines and the heavy winds piercing through the open underbelly of Superdynamic’s plane. The pilot himself had flown out to take a look, taking the other flyers in tow and leaving me with the Shaolin girl.

She stood beside the gaping maw at the rear of the plane, headset on, monitoring the others below, her hand ready on a computer console.

“Do we know who did this?”

Focus looked up at me with an expression so placid and emotionless that it shocked me at first.

“I think that’s what they’re trying to ascertain,” she said, her language slightly stilted by Korean or Japanese influence. “The defenses were formidable, as is whatever overcame them.”

“So this whole thing in D.C. is for real?”

She looked back out the docking bay. “The end of civilization, Mr. Blackjack.”

That took me by surprise. What the hell was she talking about, what were they all talking about? This had to be the dream. It was all so salacious and grand, like Drovani’s civil war back in Shard World, huge and undefinable, with the possibility of heroism thrown in.

But the cold air howled through the bay, stinging at my skin, and the taste and smell of the sea breeze was unmistakable. I had to stop doubting myself and trust what I was seeing.

“Makes me wish I had stayed in that dream prison,” I said, a feeble attempt at a joke.

Focus actually smiled. “For all your faults, I don’t think any person deserves that kind of fate.”

“It’s not that nice,” I admitted.

She looked back, ready to argue the semantics and logic of what I had said, but instead she just shook her head and decided to keep it to herself. I, for some reason, decided to explain.

“I don’t know if you know how it works,” I started. “It’s not a prison. It’s like a facilitation of your desires,” I said, and she flashed me a curious, disapproving look. “Well, it’s not that. Not JUST that. It’s as if your every need or desire were made possible for you, or...at least it seems like these things are at your fingertips...and....”

I shook my head.

“I think I understand.”

I laughed. “I’m not sure I do.”

“Perhaps that was the whole point of the exercise,” she said.

“You think they’d go through all that trouble for a bad guy? Easier to just toss me into a pool of lava and be done with it.”

“I think the point of it, Mr. Blackjack, is to behave toward you in a humane and compassionate form, regardless of your crimes or transgressions. Perhaps that is the lesson. No matter what you’ve done, however horrible, we’re going not going to lose ourselves, and while you may have to spend “hard time” put away, even that won’t be inhumane.”

“I guess,” I said, looking around at the cockpit, which was empty; the autopilot kept us steady and level. “How long was I away?”

Focus swallowed hard, answering without looking at me, “Fourteen months, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Jesus,” I muttered.

“They’re coming back,” she said, moving back from the bay, using her arms to herd me back toward the cockpit.

“They just threw away the key, didn’t they?”

Focus cocked her head, studying me for a moment, but before she could say anything, Superdynamic flew into the ship, followed by the rest of his crew, slamming the hatch closed and strolling forward toward the cockpit. His rage was a palpable thing.

“Sonofabitch,” he spat, sitting in the pilot’s seat.

I looked at Moe and Ruby, who were wet from the rain, but Moe just shook his head, as if to say they hadn’t found anything. Ruby moved past me to her spot beside the pilot, and everyone else took their seats. This time I was the odd man out.

“Everyone strap in,” Superdynamic said.

Moe shook his head as Superdynamic maneuvered the ship on a hard bank.

“The whole place is gone,” Moe said, shaking his head. “Down to the foundations. And everyone’s dead.”

Focus shook her head.

“Who could have done it?”

Ruby shrugged, “Someone big.”

Before I could start narrowing down the list, Superdynamic snapped at me to open up a spare seat in the back and put the safety belt on.

“What now?” I asked him as I split the simple seat from the wall and sat down.

“That was our forward outpost,” he said, throwing the throttle wide open. The high speed pressed me back against the seat. “We’re headed back to our home base.”