CITY OF HEROES - LIBERTY SERVER'S
The SOLUS Foundation
Excerpt from
Estephan R. Zaffarona's Second Lives
"Chapter 5 -
Captain Superior"
“Fall back!”
A leather-clad scrapper spun 360 degrees
and planted the side of his foot into the side of a Rikti trooper’s head.
The invader crumpled, his armored body dropping on top of a growing pile
of similarly armored bodies. Whipping his sweat-soaked ponytail back
off his shoulder, he gaped up at the smoke-filled sky. “J. H. Christ, look
at the size of that ship! Damned Rikti are like fuckin’ ants.”
Penthouse turned toward the scrapper, her
long black and gold cape whirling around her, momentarily concealing her
shapely thighs. “Billy, cut the color commentary. I said, ‘Fall back!’”
Despite scanty attire reminiscent of her code-name, Penthouse was obviously
use to giving commands. Judging from their immediate response, the
rest of the SOLUS Collective
was use to taking them.
Captain
Superior listened to his second-in- command with half an ear as he
hovered a foot off the ground, awash in a swirl of downdraft dust and faltering
lavender auras. Though he was doing his best not to show it to the
team, he didn’t know how much longer his energy would hold. And if
he was tiring, he knew that the other five had to be well past exhausted.
Unfortunately, the next wave of fifty or
so Rikti invaders that were trying to push their way up the battle-scarred
slope toward the six heroes didn’t particularly care, nor did the pilot
of the giant Rikti warship that had just dropped from the clouds less than
a quarter mile away.
He put a fist through the face-mask of
an invader that had come a step too close. For the first time in
is career, Captain Superior took no small pleasure in the blow. Once
he was certain his adversary was down, he clapped his hands together.
The concussion scattered the dozen or so Rikti that remained of the most
recent wave of attackers like bowling pins. He sucked in a long breath
and, taking advantage of the brief lull, shouted back to his small team,
“Penthouse. . . Billy. . . belay that! Everyone, regroup on me!”
Captain Superior looked at the approaching
ship, balancing the new, airborne threat against the one presented by the
advancing ground troops. He’d assumed the Commander’s mantle two
weeks earlier, after their leader and the majority of the rest of the Collective
were killed during a Rikti attacked on their headquarters. He and
the other five surviving members had been at war ever since, as had the
rest of the dwindling Paragon City hero coalition and other heroes around
the globe.
“On my mark – “He pointed at Penthouse,
his only remaining controller. “Penthouse, do the best you can with
that battle squad. Billy, get ready to take out their Communications
Officer. Commissioner G, we need shields. Blastion, lend support
to the coalition heroes moving on the ship. Get them to concentrate
on the power core. Empathy. . .” He paused, hesitant to split
the Collective’s only couple. She and Energy Blastion were his closest
friends, and the war wasn’t going well. If either of them died. .
.
But it was war. “Empathy, stay with
Commissioner G, and keep Billy up. Don’t worry about me”
Just as Captain Superior was about to give
the word, Billy Bad Boy turned to him, panting like a winded laborador.
“Cap, this is nuts! Even if we off these dickweeds, we don’t stand
a chance against that thing. Penthouse is right, we gotta pull back.”
Cap cut his flight and dropped hard to
the ground just in time to intercept a Rikti blast intended for the feisty
scrapper. The bubbling green bolt of energy staggered him backward
a half step. It would have dropped Billy. For a brief second
a green haze of a different kind surrounded him. His body tingled
with healing energies he hadn’t needed in half a decade. Days of
battle had weakened them all. He smiled quickly at Empathy then noticed
that all their eyes were on him.
He pointed up at a buzz of brightly-colored
flying forms near the top of the skyscraper behind them. “Pull back to
where, Billy? We’re all that stands between the Rikti and those heroes
trying to evacuate that skyscraper.”
The scrapper glanced past Captain Superior
to the top of the looming forty-six story building, then back at the big
tanker. Even as they nodded silently to each other in understanding,
the others moved into ready positions. “Sorry, Cap, my bad.”
Captain Superior smiled warmly at his team
and hit the air. “It’s an honor working with all of you.” He
hovered along the ground until he was beside Billy then scanned the closing
Rikti troops. “Has everyone got their targets?” He didn’t wait
for a reply. He knew they did.
“Now!”
While three men were clearing concrete
and steel away from the body, a forth dropped to a knee beside the still
form and pressed a couple of fingertips against the side of his thick neck.
The demolition foreman looked down at
his kneeling co-worker. “Jack, what in Hell’s name are you doing?
This stiff’s been buried under this rubble for three years.”
Jack shifted his fingertips slightly.
“Maybe so, but the other body’s have all been nothin’ but bones and rags.
This is just weird.” A moment later his eyes widened. “Mary,
mother of Jesus, he’s got a pulse!”
“What do you mean, ‘He’s got a pulse?’
He can’t have a pulse! It’s been since the damned Rikti War. . .”
The burly foreman hip-bumped his subordinate out of the way. There
was something vaguely familiar about the tattered black and gold rags that
hung from the big body at his feet, besides the fact that it was the fourth
shredded uniform like it they’d found – albeit the only one not mixed with
crushed bones. He knelt and pressed his fingers down onto the big
man’s neck.
“Well, I’ll be switched. . .”
He pressed harder, double-checking, then whirled to his feet and yelled
at Jack. “De Ridder, don’t just stand there lookin’ like a wart,
get on the horn and call in an evac unit. This sumbitch is still
alive!”
Captain Superior hastily wiped the trickling
moisture from his nostril with the back of his hand and spun on two more
Rikti. Just as he was about to throw another punch, the crimson color
gleaming across his knuckles caught his eye. Sweat would have been
bad enough, but blood – he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his
own blood. He swiped his knuckles across the black of his uniform
in the same motion as he picked up an unconscious Rikti and hefted it over
his head. He hurled the armored body, driving four invaders backward
into the rest of them a half-second after their rifles fired. He
raked the enemy with deadly blast of red heat from his eyes. Three
more blasts spattered across his chest. The fourth glanced past his
arm.
Billy Bad Boy crumpled behind him.
Cap looked up at the skyscraper.
The colored swarm of heroes was finally gone. Kicking another warrior
in the face, he snatched the unconscious scrapper by the collar and sprung
into the air. “Fall back!” Commissioner G psy-lanced a Rikti
at the same time as he threw an arm around the staggering Penthouse’s waist.
Cap swooped in behind them, taking another half dozen emerald green rifle
blasts to the back. At the same time, a massive ball of the same
green energy crackled just past his head, all but blinding him as it struck
the skyscraper in an explosion of brick and concrete. The Rikti cruiser
was in range.
He looked back at the ship. It was
spitting a deadly rain of energy at the heroes that flew in broken circles
beneath it. The cloud of colored bodies blasting at the bottom of
the ship was much thinner than before. One, clad in Collective colors,
was moving with blazing speed from the juggernaught toward them, rushing
to Empathy’s defense. As the speeding blaster moved away from the
huge ship, Cap saw the green glow building down the firing tube of the
massive Rikti cannon. Blastion didn’t. Captain Superior dropped
Billy and leapt into the air. “Blastion, behind. . .”
Another ball of brilliant green energy
spat from the Rikti ship’s cannon. From somewhere behind him, Captain
Superior heard Empathy’s anguished cry. Energy Blastion was all but
vaporized in front of his wife’s eyes – in front of all their eyes – and
he hadn’t even been the intended target. They had been. Cap
dove forward, his arms spread. He hit G, Penthhouse, and Empathy
across their shoulders, trying to knock them clear of the blast that had
already claimed Empathy’s husband. Agony swallowed his arm as the
azure ball devoured it, Commissioner G and Penthouse. Brick and concrete
exploded in his face as the energy sphere smashed into the base of the
skyscraper.
Fighting off shock, he realized that his
right arm was gone, but he only needed his left to throw Empathy’s body
over his shoulder. He spun on another ominous crackling sound, then
dove for the ground just as a third Rikti ball of death smashed into the
building.
While he sheltered the woman beneath him
from the falling debris, he heard the stomach-churning rumble. He
started to roll, but her soft voice stopped him. “Cap, tell Brandon
we loved him.”
For a moment Captain Superior thought fondly
of Empathy’s child. He pulled the dying woman tighter. “You can tell
him yourself, Nicole. Just give me a second to. . .”
It was at that moment that Empathy kissed
Captain Superior lightly on the cheek, and the forty-six story building
began falling from the sky.
“Captain Superior, can you hear me?”
Two weeks earlier, they’d found him
buried in the rubble of the Levitz Building. Putting together the
pieces that helped identify him was easy enough, and the hospital’s Chief-of
Staff called her. Sarah Lexis was widely considered the best meta-physiologist
in the world. Her most recent case, a centuries-old Norse man that
was frozen by some “god” or the other, had provided her most recent notoriety.
The revival of one of the Alpha Team would make that one seem pale.
It had taken her the better part of
a week to determine that his strange physiology was a result of a unique
combination of solar and geo-thermal energy. Paragon City’s location
over a relatively shallow magma pool had likely been the reason he’d survived
being buried for three years. Developing an energy cocktail of ultra-violet
and infrared radiations in a variety of bandwidths had been child’s play.
She could have almost used a tanning bed – if her theory was right.
“Captain, please squeeze my hand if
you can hear me.” She glanced over at the electroencephalogram.
The technician sighed. “No change,
doctor. All our instruments indicate that he’s conscious. He
should be reacting. This doesn’t make any sense.”
A baritone voice with a British-sounding
accent interrupted the female tech. “Maybe you’re looking in the
wrong place.”
Lexis and the technician both turned
toward the door, and the voice. The doctor raised a brow. “Excuse
me?”
The newcomer wore a pair of faded Levi
jeans and a black Fleetwood Mac concert t-shirt. He glanced around the
hospital room then stepped over to look at the spiking lines on the monitor.
“Maybe he just doesn’t want to revive.”
He brushed the tech aside and adjusted
a dial, then looked over his sunglasses back at the monitor as if he owned
the place. “My guess is that you’ve all assumed he’s comatose and
have been talking like he’s not even here.” By now he knows his friends
in The SOLUS Collective are all dead, his arm is gone, his power will take
years to recover, and life as he knew it before the Rikti war should have
ended during that battle three years ago.” He bent over the unconscious
hero’s face, thumbed open an eyelid, and looked into the blank staring
eye.
After a half-second, he stood back up
and handed the doctor a business card. “What reason have you given
him to answer you, Doctor Lexis?”
While Dr. Lexis looked at the card,
the stranger dropped a photograph on top of the comatose Captain Superior
then reached for his chart. The tech’s face screwed into an angry
frown and she reached out to snatch the chart from the man’s closing fingers.
“Look, I don’t know who you are, but. . .”
Dr. Lexis lightly grabbed her tech’s
arm. “It’s o.k., Diane, he comes with credentials, if not a leash.”
She frowned at the man. “You have my attention, Dr. Gand. If
you want to keep it, you’d best remember this is my lab”
Before he could reply, she snatched
the photograph from Captain Superior’s chest.. She looked at the
young man in the photograph. He was dressed in a utilitarian blended
green and blue jumper, blue leather wrapped boots and gloves, and slim,
dark blue goggles. Aside from the fact that his hair and goatee were
also green, he looked rather non-descript. She held the photograph
back toward the other doctor. “Games are your specialty, Dr. Gand.
Why don’t you save the psychology for your high-dollar patients and just
tell me why this picture should mean diddly to me.”
Dr. Gand gave the woman a patronizing
smile and left the picture in her hand. “I’d think it would be apparent
from my being here why this picture should mean. . . diddly. . . to you.”
He reached over and tapped the photograph. “Unless you’d prefer dancing
naked in hopes of bringing our unconscious hero around, that young man,
Dr. Lexis, is your cure.”
“Fly me, Uncle Cap, fly me!”
Captain Superior smiled down at the six-year
old that danced around him like a dervish. Instead of granting the
child’s enthusiastic request, the big man scooped the boy up and tossed
him up onto his shoulders as if the boy were weightless. “You know
the rules, Brandon. No flying, even when we’re not in ‘people clothes,’
but I’ll let you ride up there as long as your mommy and daddy say it’s
o.k.”
The boy’s mother laughed, and his father
tickled him on the ribs. “Stay up there as long as you like.
Uncle Cap’s so tall it’s just like flying.”
Brandon squirmed away from his father’s
digging fingers and then waved his hands around, moving his body from side
to side as if he were flying. “Yeah, there’s nobody in the world
as tall as Uncle Cap!”
Nicole Moore hooked her arm through her
husband’s and leaned her head on his shoulder. “Oh, I don’t know,
The Back Alley Brawler’s pretty big.”
“He’s not as big as Uncle Cap, and Ms.
Liberty’s not as pretty as you, and none of them make pretty blue fireworks
like daddy, and. . .”
“Just keep the kid on your shoulders,
big guy. As long as you do that and the pretty little lady gives
us her purse, no one will get hurt.”
The three adults turned in unison.
Three knives, a pistol, and a shotgun greeted them. The five Hellions
hanging on to the weapons were incidental.
Eric Moore rolled his eyes. “I’m
not believing this. You guys don’t get out much, do you?”
The shotgun-wielding “Fallen” tilted the
sawed-off barrel toward Blastion’s gut. The two pistoleers aimed
at the faces of their other two victims. “We get out enough to know
that, even if you don’t mind bullet holes. . .” He swung the shotgun up
and popped the bill of Brandon’s ‘Statesman’s Star’ ballcap, knocking the
hat from the boy’s head. “. . .you wouldn’t want anything happening
to junior, here. Now, hand over the purse, lady!”
“You leave my mommy alone, Horn Man!”
The gang leader laughed, followed quickly
by his four flunkies. “Oh, and who are you, little man?” He
glanced up at Brandon’s green hair, as if noticing it for the first time.
“Statesman’s little green-haired buddy?”
Brandon’s eyes began to glow an azure blue.
His mother was the only one of the three plain-clothes heroes that saw.
Her surprised gasp was counterpoint to a couple of mumbled cursed from
the goons.
“No, I’m Uncle Cap’s little buddy, and
my hair is from my mommy, and this. . .” By then, they’d all noticed the
blue glow around his hands. “. . .is from my daddy!” A thin
blue bolt of energy shot from the child’s fingers. The bolt temporarily
blinded the scruffy gang leader who stumbled back into another would-be
robber. Although tide-turning distractions usually came as a result
on some other hero doing his job, none of the three heroes present wasted
time marveling at the reason behind this one.
Captain Superior tossed the child straight
up into the air just as the shotgun discharged. He was already in
the air by the time the pullets bounced off his calves. Turning his
back to the fray, he caught the gasping boy by the armpits and pulled him
tightly to his chest. Once Brandon was safe in his arms, Cap turned
on the speed, twisting into an Immelman loop at about fifty feet, hoping
there was still something left for Brandon to see.
In the fifteen seconds that had passed
since the boy’s surprising display, Eric and Nicole had already downed
four of the five gang members, and the Fallen was staggering. His
horned cap hung lopsided on his head. Cap hovered about thirty feet from
the pavement, watching as the combination of a power punch and a radiation
blast dropped the last would-be robber. By the time he could hover
back to the ground, all five of the gangsters were fading away, teleported
to the Paragon City lock-up.
Cap set Brandon lightly on the asphalt,
chuckling to himself as the boy ran full-tilt, arms outstretched, to his
parents.
“Wow! That was awesome! Mom
and Dad, y’all are the greatest. . .” He paused for a breath and
grinned. “. . .and I helped, didn’t I mom! And I got to fly!
Let’s go find more. I wanna be a hero just like you and dad and Uncle
Cap!”
“Uncle Cap?”
The young hero ran his fingers backward
through his green hair and looked over at the two doctors. When he
saw them both nod back toward the unconscious hero, he turned back, closing
his fingers lightly around a big bicep.
“Uncle Cap, it’s me. Brandon.
Guess what? I’m a hero now. Just like mom, and dad, and. .
. and you. They call me ‘Empathy’s
Child.’ I thought mom would. . .” The young green and blue clothed
hero suddenly stopped, choking back a sob. He ignored the single
tear that ran down his cheek. “. . .I thought mom would like that.
I. . . I miss them, Uncle Cap. I miss them so much. And
I miss you. . . It’s been hard, Uncle Cap. . .” Brandon stopped
again, wiping away the steady flow that now ran from his eyes.
“Empathy’s Child, is it? Yes, she
would have liked that very much.”
Thick fingers wrapped around Brandon’s
arm as he struggled to focus through the tears. Captain Superior's
eyes were open, and a soft smile slowly spread his lips.
“She told me to tell you they love you,
you know. . .”
(Experience this story in mission
arcs #227331 and 241496 - "The Consequences of War" - in City of Heroes!
For the official story of the First Rikti War, check out "Paragon
City: Alien Invasion" at cityofheroes.com!) |
