Star Harbor Nights

"That was Bast's motorcycle!" Amy cried. Moments later, another dark shape zipped by, this one going down the center of the proper lane. "And Thoth's!"

"I don't know about Thoth, but I don't think that was Bast behind the handlebars," Echo said. She started up the engine and shifted the Hex Kittens' van into gear. "I hope you're rested up enough, because we can't wait any longer."

"...suggest you surrender," Geppetto's voice said over the P.A.

Allison didn't have an immediate response, other than repressing a gulp and tightening her kinetic field around her. She had been expecting something like this... maybe not exactly an army of goons in full-head masks shaped like devils, hangmen, alligators, and old Mr. Punch himself... characters from a grotesque children's morality play... but something like it, nonetheless. She had also been expecting a handful of mentally controlled superheroes, included among them one Ms. Athena Wisdom, who possessed half the powers of two of the mightiest heroes who'd ever lived.

She had been expecting it, but actually seeing it was a bit overwhelming.

"I..." Allison began. It was a good, neutral opening... she couldn't stall for long, but given that her backup was supersonic, she figured every syllable would help.

She didn't even have to figure out what her second word would be before a mighty rush of wind rose up behind her and she was no longer standing alone. She had been expecting Beau and Ford, the Brothers Thunder... but even better, it was Minerva.

The silver woman? Allison thought at her.

Being dealt with, Minerva beamed back. She was not a telepath, but her mind was unusually clear and strong. The non-verbal communication came through in a minute fraction of the time it would have taken to speak it. I'll handle my sister... that just leaves you with... uh... the rest of them.

No worries, Allison replied. We're not in this alone.

As if her thought had been a summons, there came a huge crash from up near the front entrance. Beau and Ford LeChamp had plowed through a garage-style door at super speed, shattering the metal to pieces. Dandy Binder was with them.

"...suggest you surrender," Allison said. There had only been the briefest of pauses between her words.

Great start, Minerva thought. Now if only I can draw Athena to me, we might have a...

She needn't have worried, though. Athena... or whoever was controlling her... had fixated on her from the moment she appeared on the scene. Before Minerva could finish her thought, the flying heroine dive-bombed into her, barreling her back out the door and out of telepathic range in the blink of an eye.

"The Wisdom woman is neutralized," Bedlam reported in the control room. "I suggest we reiterate the demand for surrender, now that we've taken their biggest piece off the board."

"No need," Geppetto said. "The rest are nothing, and we still hold our trump cards, if things go badly."

"But, sir..."

"General, I was under the impression you were spoiling for a fight," Geppetto said coldly. "Was I wrong?"

"Arrogance..." Drosselmeier said softly.

"What was that, 'old friend'?" Geppetto asked, whirling around.

"You have always said that if your goals were achieved, violent conflict would no longer be necessary," Drosselmeier said very calmly. "Why now, when your goal is within your reach, do you prolong the battle?"

"Because," the former Fascist said, his eyes wild, "this time I'm winning. Bedlam, get down to the communication center and relieve C.C.... he wanted a chance to get in on the action, and I believe you're more qualified to coordinate the battle, anyway."

"Yes, sir!"

When Minerva and Athena vanished, time seemed to dilate... a single instant stretching out towards infinity, then snapping back to the regular rate of passage with alarming speed. Several of the masked thugs opened fire at once, in Allison's direction. She zoomed up at an angle to avoid what she could, but her telekinetic field absorbed the impact of several rounds. She could tell from the "feel" that they were low velocity, low density... like police riot rounds. If she tried to block too many of them, it would surely exhaust her, but even if she dropped her shields completely they were unlikely to kill her.

Dandy strode forward, waving her big arms in front of her as if she were shooing away flies. The rubber bullets zipped all around her, but none hit her, and then she was among the henchmen, wrenching guns out of hands and breaking them, and smashing the eyepieces of the mask-like helmets. Once she was fully engaged, she couldn't keep up her blocking magic, but she shrugged off several hits and one point blank burst with little more than a startled grunt and the first vestiges of lion's fur sprouting on her face. It was a testament to her reaction time under pressure that she was in the thick of things before the speedsters, but they caught up quickly, adopting her tactic of disabling and disarming as many as possible instead of focusing on one individual foe.

Then, Dandy knocked aside a pair of henchmen with devil's heads and found herself looking up into the face of Bertha. If she had been short like Dandy, they would have had about the same profile... but Bertha was immense, and all of it was muscle. Dandy lunged forward, shoving with both hands to knock the strongwoman off her feet... but it was like trying to tackle a brick wall.

That was when the van with Amy and Echo in it came barreling through the door Beau and Ford had "opened." Echo didn't run anybody down, but relied on the bad guys to get themselves out of the way.

Bertha swung a fist at Dandy. Dandy raised her arm to block, and though her mystical protection stopped her from feeling the weight and impact of the blow, she still went flying, hitting the side door of the van.

Echo jumped out and ran to her.

"Bertha's strength isn't actually physical," she explained, having studied the powers of all the other American Hero contestants extensively. "It's more that she can selectively ignore the laws of motion. Can you throw me at her?"

"I... yeah."

"Do it," Echo said.

Dandy picked Echo up, raised her over her head, and chucked her at Bertha like a spear. Echo kept her hands out in front of her, and the instant they made contact with the large woman she "grabbed" at the power field that surrounded her. Her mind went to work with it instantly. Her effective mass... and therefore her momentum... increased, while she negated the effects of the impact on herself. Bertha shuddered from the force of the hit. Before she could react, Echo had her feet on the ground and her arms around the woman's waist. She heaved, ignoring such trifling matters as leverage and equal and opposite reactions, and threw her straight upwards.

"Nefertiri Nephthys Ibis, you get your ass off this roof and back on that motorcycle this instant!" Griffin hissed as loudly as he dared.

"Or what, Grif?" Tira retorted at her older brother. "I'm already grounded."

"For breaking into a museum... this is much worse."

"Yeah, stealing a diamond is okay but trying to help stop the bad guys is a capital crime," she said, rolling her eyes. "Now quit grousing and help me look for a way in."

"We are not going in there," Griffin said. "We're going home. We should be back well before Mother and Father... the logs will show that we took their bikes out, but we'll just say that you tried to sneak out and I stopped you before you got anywhere."

"You? Lying?" Tira said, gasping in affected shock.

"For your benefit," Griffin said hotly. "Now, come on." He held out his hand to her. "It isn't as though you're just going to find an entrance..."

He stumbled back as the corrugated metal roof erupted outwards beneath his feet, the large and decidedly un-aerodynamic form of Bertha shooting skyward like a cannonball.

"Wanna make any more predictions, smart guy?" Tira smirked.

"Just one... you're going home, even if I have to drag you there."

"Bring it on, brother dear."

Several streams of riot rounds converged on Echo, but they bounced off her skin without effect. She ignored the henchmen and looked around the room for the other female Hero contestant, Flex. She wasn't looking for long... Flex--or rather, whoever was controlling Flex--had sought her out.

Echo reviewed what she knew about the athletic mutant. Where Bertha's superstrength came from weird physics, Flex's was mostly biological. Her skeleton was ultra-strong and ultra-light, and her muscles were like industrial strength rubber bands. Not only was she was able to exert more force with them than another person of her relatively slight build, she was also able to "wind them up", storing energy to be released in an explosive display like leaping over a chasm or punching through a wall. When they'd competed on television, Flex's biology had given her a bit of an edge, as it took longer for Echo's power to copy physiological adaptations than it did an intangible aura.

However, Flex's controller was probably just thinking "I'm really strong, she's really strong"... and while Echo would have difficulty dealing with Flex on her own, Bertha's power trumped Flex's. Flex came at her, jabbing with her hands like they were spears. It seemed like she was making use of her martial arts knowledge, but in a rote fashion... the controller was selecting individual moves like they were menu options, to be executed with precision but with no overall sense of rhythm or style. Echo caught her by the wrist and flung her into a mass of the masked henchmen.

"Remember, these guys have powers but they don't necessarily know how to use them," Echo shouted for the benefit of all her teammates.

"You wanna try explaining that to him?" Ford said. She looked up to see him in a running battle... literally... with Slam. The person controlling Slam was using his powers to their maximum effectiveness, something the surfer jock never did. With his feet planted on the ground, he was sliding around at a speed comparable to that of the speedsters' under the combat conditions, throwing off buzz saw-like disruptor blasts from his hands.

"He's copying my moves!" Echo said. She charged at him. Slam threw some kinetic waves at her. Bertha's power allowed her to plow right through them, but it did nothing to help Echo catch up to him, especially as he was able to zip vertically along walls and support columns as well as on the floor.

"Don't worry, I'm on him," Allison called, mentally as well as physically to make sure she was heard. She'd been darting around over the battlefield, trying to keep herself a moving target. Normally, sustained flying with rapid changes in direction were tiring, but the psi-active mesh in her faux leather armor let her shift course completely with the tiniest shift in thought. She'd tried reaching out with her mind to wrench some of the guns away or melt them, but every time she'd stopped to focus long enough to do so, she's found herself taking more hits.

Now, though, Slam's zig-zagging had carried him up a wall not too far from her. She dove at him, wrapping him tight in invisible telekinetic energy. She gathered her strength within her, building up an electrokinetic charge in her hands, which she passed directly into him, reaching out and searching for the tiny bit of metal she knew she'd find at the base of the skull.

She'd just made contact with what felt like some kind of unfamiliar barrier when Slam's controller "flexed" his kinetic energy field outward, shattering her grip on him and causing her mind to briefly buckle. She shook it off, and zoomed away, leaving several dozen rubber bullets pinging off the wall where she had been.

"They've got some kind of insulation around the chips now!" she reported. "I can probably get through it with enough time, but not while..."

The rest of her message became an involuntary shriek as she dodged more gunfire.

"What we need is speed and electricity," she cried. "Thunderhead!"

"You got it," Beau said. He rushed Slam, only to be repelled and knocked off his feet by a vibe-blast.

"Your concussive power's kinetic, too, right?" Echo called to Ford.

"Yeah," he said, zipping over to her. "But it doesn't really..."

"Forget what you think it doesn't do," Echo said. She clapped a hand on his bicep, grabbing his power signature. "We'll come at Slam at angles, throwing a wedge of kinetic energy in front of us. It'll cut through his waves like the prow of a ship, and then your brother can rush up the center and juice him."

"You catch that?" Ford asked Beau.

"Yeah, but usually..."

"Forget usually," Echo said. "Just follow my lead."

She rushed away a short distance, then piled on the speed in Slam's direction, throwing Ford's trademark "thunderclaps" in front of her while he did the same. Slam aimed an arm in each of their directions, but his blast was diminished when spread over a wider area, and as Echo had surmised, their own shockwaves cut through it easily.

Beau charged forward in their wake, building up his electrical field to its maximum level and running around in back of the deeply tanned mutant to deliver the charge to his neck. He lacked Allison's level of fine control, but he was still able to guide the charge in order to find and fry the tiny foreign circuit, and not Slam's frequently-maligned brain. There was an audible pop, a puff of acrid smoke burst out through a pinhole wound, and Slam collapsed to the ground.

"One down," Beau said smugly.

"Do Flex quick," Echo suggested. "You should be able to just run up behind her, but don't get cocky... she can whip around on a dime. And remember, Bertha's not necessarily out of the fight... I tossed her pretty high, but no fall will hurt her... and Holly... has anybody seen him?"

"He was here when I came in," Allison said, looking around. It would be useless to cast out with her mind... the controlled were effectively blank to her. "He disappeared when the fight started."

"Lovely," Echo said. "If we're lucky his controller hasn't figured out how to control someone moving at the speed of light and he's stranded by the moon or something."

"And if we're not?" Ford asked, running down a line of henchmen to keep their fire off Beau as he went--successfully--after Flex.

"Then he's hanging around, invisible and intangible, ready to slice us to pieces."

"Give me a break... he's made out of light," Beau said, as Flex fell at his feet.

"So's a laser," Allison said. The diamond-shaped spot where such a weapon had scarred her at the start of the adventure tingled in reminder. "On the subject of missing players, though... where's Amphie?"

"She's..." Echo said, looking towards the van and suddenly realizing Amy hadn't got out behind her. She saw that the back doors, which still faced in the general direction of the wrecked garage door, had been popped open.

Amphitrite popped her trident out, its stinger-end clanging loudly against the roof. That got the attention of the teenagers who had been grappling with each other, wrestling dangerously close to the jagged hole left by Bertha's passage. They stopped rolling around... not releasing their death grips on each other... and stared.

"Just what do you think you are doing here?" she asked them.

"She snuck out," Griffin said.

"I'm talking to both of you," Amy said. "The only thing you accomplish by following her is putting two children in harm's way instead of one."

"I'm hardly a child," Griffin protested.

"Neither am I!"

"Hardly a child is still a child," Amy said. "Now, you two are going home and there's nothing you can say to change that."

"I'm here, I'm queer, but that's got almost nothing to do with how much ass I'm about to kick," Lily announced, charging into the fray, her face still tiger-like, her claws slashing at guns and helmeted heads left and right.

"Where the hell have you been?" Dandy cried.

"Some of us don't have the blurry-with-speed-running-thing," Lily said.

"That's another on their side," Drosselmeier said. "Perhaps we should be using one of our aces?"

"One more fighter's hardly going to turn the tide," Geppetto said.

"Nothing, huh?" Tira said, still pinned by her brother, right beside the jagged hole. "Bummer."

She lurched to the left, flipping herself and her sibling over the edge. Amy's stomach dropped as abruptly as they fell from her sight, though she quickly recovered her wits enough to leap, feet-first, after them.

The two young would-be heroes separated as they fell, both getting their feet under them. They touched down rather heavily, considering it was better than a three story drop to the floor, but they were their mother's children... they sustained no real injury from the fall. It was a testament to their inexperience or Amy's own fluid grace that she landed better than they did.

"Amy!" Allison cried.

"Yes, and look what the cat dragged in," Amy said ruefully. The three of them scattered as they came under fire, but immediately picked up the rhythm of the fight, Griffin disabling foes with mathematical precision, Tira fighting with considerable more flare, and Amy wielding the fabulous trident as if it were an extension of her body.

"On second thought, let's move C.C. in," Geppetto said.

"Greetings, mortals," C.C. called from above the fray, decked out in his converted retro video game gear. The name's C.C.... short for 'Cheat Code'," he announced. He hit a series of buttons on his glove's control pad, and a translucent white-blue shell sprang up around his body. "For example, I just initiated... God Mode."

"I hope you picked up some extra lives, too," Beau said, zooming across the battlefield to the metal staircase and onto the platform where C.C. stood. His own energy field... a crackling electrical build up... flared brightly as he pounded on the shield encasing the villain, but neither the physical force of the blow or the energy discharge affected him in the slightest.

"Beau, look out!" Ford cried as, with painful slowness and utter disdain for the hero who was pounding about his torso, C.C. drew his light gun and fired it. There was a flash, and Beauregard LeChamp went sailing clear across the room to collide with the wall.

"That force field makes him untouchable," Echo said. "If I could just get my hands on Slam, maybe I can disrupt it like I did Manhandler's constriction field..."

"Worry about your libido some other time," Lily said, appearing beside her. She sprang up to the catwalk in a single bound. "This one's all me."

C.C. whirled and fired, but the orange-furred catwoman was twisting aside before he even squeezed the trigger.

"Do I have lousy hit detection, or do you just suck?" she asked, closing the distance between him while avoiding more blasts.

"It doesn't matter, I've got infinite ammo," he said.

"Should have gone with extra time," Lily retorted, swiping at the gun. Just as with Beau, he didn't try to block or avoid the blow... though unlike Beau's fists, Lily's tiger claws passed through his force field and sliced the barrel of the gun cleanly into four pieces.

C.C.'s eyes went wide as she hooked the tips of her claws through his shirt and lifted him off the ground.

"I'm not much of a video gamer, myself," she said casually, throwing him backwards several yards on the walkway. She strolled after him quite casually. "Ever since they made those controllers that vibrate when you get hit... well, suddenly I was dying every chance I got."

"Get away from me, you furry freak!" he cried, crawling and groping his way backwards away from her.

"Oh, you shouldn't have said the 'f-word'," Lily said, a savage glint in her eyes. She raised a clawed hand, then retracted the claws and balled it into a fist.

"Remind me never to call your sister a freak," Echo called to Dandy, wincing at the savage beating which ensued.

"Uh, that's not the word she's objecting to," Dandy said, still continuing her tactic of taking as many of the ordinary henchmen out of the fight as she could.

"And now for a little meme I like to call 'All your face are belong...'" Lily said, holding him by the throat with one hand and popping out the claws on the other one.

"Enough, Lily!" Dandy shouted, her voice ringing loud and clear above the fray.

"Oh, fine," Lily said, and cuffed him a good one on the head instead. He slumped backwards, unconscious, and Lily leapt down off the walkway to join the melee below.

"I think it's time we left for a more secure location," Geppetto said evenly, watching the monitors. The majority of the soldiers had been put down, disarmed, or both. C.C.'s modified equipment had been promising, but they'd lacked intel on the tiger woman's abilities. They still had one more superhuman under their control, but he was part of their contingency plan.

"Now you come to your senses," Drosselmeier said.

"Oh, don't be such an old woman," Geppetto said, shutting down the computer system and typing in a sequence of numbers. "Once we're safely away, Bedlam issues the ultimatum, the noble heroes act like noble heroes, and our men mop up."

"I notice that your confidence does not prevent you from wiping our files," Drosselmeier said, picking up his old bowler hat as he headed towards the exit.

"Like you said, no sense being arrogant," Geppetto said, turning away from the screens. He saw Drosselmeier standing in front of the open door, staring at a wiry, muscular man in a tight black sleeveless shirt. There were ugly scars up and down the length of his arms, straight as surgical incisions but clearly made with no regard for aesthetics.

Geppetto knew those scars, although they had blown up as the skin beneath them had grown. He knew the shape of the face which peered out from behind the muffler-like mask the man wore. Most of all, he knew the eyes... though they were markedly different from the last time he'd seen that face.

Then, the eyes had lacked the steely glint, the iron resolve which he saw in them now... but which he recognized nonetheless, as it was the one feature he'd seen in his own face every time he looked in the mirror over the decades.

Drosselmeier uttered an oath in German.

"Hello, murderer," Garrote said to him. His cybernetic tendril shot out, looped itself around Drosselmeier's neck, constricted, and retracted in a blink of an eye. The aged German's head slid off his shoulders, moments before his entire body collapsed.

Garrote didn't watch the man fall. His eyes were on Geppetto.

"Hello, father."