Don't Be a Hero: A Superhero Novel (48 page)

Niobe couldn’t tell if the light-headedness was from blood loss or relief. She pulled off her mask, forced herself up into a sitting position with her good arm, and rested her head against the cool metal of a panel that had escaped the carnage.

“Gabby.” Her throat was raw and her voice came out thinner than she was expecting.

Maybe the suit could help Gabby sense sound, because the armoured behemoth turned towards Niobe immediately. Gabby knelt, her faceplate swinging aside. Christ, she was beautiful. Her eyes were as silver as the armour she wore, and her cheeks were flushed with an excitement Niobe had never seen before.

Niobe held up her injured hand. She was missing all but her forefinger, and even that looked broken. The flesh of her palm was torn and burned, most of that gone too. “I might have trouble signing from now on.”

Tears rolled freely down Gabby’s cheeks, but that only made her more beautiful. She reached out an armoured finger to Niobe’s face, but stopped short. “We need to get you to a hospital,” she said in her odd, quiet voice. In that suit, she wouldn’t be signing either. Gabby retrieved a small auto-syringe from a compartment in the suit and pressed it into Niobe’s left hand. “For the pain.”

Niobe nodded, turned off the safety, and injected herself in the thigh. A slow warmth went through her. A few moments later, the pain began to fade.

Gabby began to retract her hand, but Niobe dropped the empty syringe and grabbed the cool metal fingers. “I’m sorry. I was coming home to apologise. I didn’t understand, I thought I was protecting you, I thought I could do it all on my own, but I….” She glanced down at her blood-stained costume, then back to her hero. “I’m sorry.”

Gabby’s huge arms effortlessly swept Niobe up and pulled her close against her armoured torso. Gabby’s lips were wet from tears, but Niobe kissed her hungrily, desperately. A warmth spread through her stomach as Gabby’s teeth nipped her lower lip. Maybe it was the adrenaline, or the morphine, or just coming so close to death, but she’d never wanted anyone more. Bugger Quanta, and bugger her hand. She wanted to drag Gabby back to bed and never let her leave.

But Gabby broke the kiss and pulled back a little. There was still hurt on her face, still confusion. Niobe pressed her left hand against Gabby’s cheek and wiped the tears away. “Don’t give up on me yet. Please.”

Gabby smiled, and Niobe’s heart fluttered. She reached out with her good hand and touched a red scratch running across Gabby’s cheek. “You’re hurt.”

Gabby shook her head. “There were metas waiting for me when I went home to get the suit. They tried to take me.”

Niobe’s stomach knotted, a flash of cold anger going through her. Quanta had finally linked the photo and the name to an address.
The son of a bitch had tried to kidnap Gabby, use her against me.

“Don’t look so worried,” Gabby said, her face more alight than Niobe had seen it in years. “I got to the suit in time. And I showed them what I could do.”

Niobe stroked Gabby’s cheek and kissed her again, hard.

When they broke the kiss, Gabby gently lowered Niobe to her feet. Her thigh stung like all hell when she put weight on it; the wound had probably broken open again. Her hand was starting to go numb, which probably wasn’t a good thing. Awkwardly, she slipped her mask and goggles back on with her good hand, leaving her mouth bare so Gabby could still lip read. She found her hat by the unconscious red-suited man.

The withered pilot had somehow escaped Gabby’s rain of bullets. His laboured breathing was fast, scared. Niobe turned back to Gabby and jerked her head towards the pilot, signing as best she could while she talked.

“Can you take over for him?”

Gabby nodded, strode across the room, and lifted the skeletal man out of his seat with one hand. He didn’t resist. He didn’t look like he had enough muscle to even blink. A series of wires snaked out of the Silver Scarab’s pointer finger and found ports in the control panel. A few moments passed. Then the engines shuddered, and the airship began to bank.

“The ship will land itself just outside the city,” she said.

Niobe smiled and limped over to her. “My genius.” She ran her fingers down the armoured plates. How long had she been building this? Even in the old days, she never had anything this magnificent. “My hero. How did you find me?”

“Your gun, stupid.” She frowned and cast another concerned look at the mess of flesh that was Niobe’s hand. “At least until you got it killed. We got here as fast as we could.”

“We?”

Gabby put a hand against Niobe’s back and helped her to the shattered windows. Glass crunched under her boots and the wind threatened to take her hat as she approached the edge. The night was still dark, and the fires still burned, but she could see new flashes across the city. Coloured streaks flew through the air. Blasts of energy shot back and forth amongst the streets. Niobe’s breath caught in her throat.
It’s not possible
.

The heroes had returned.

30: How Do You Stop the Unstoppable Man?

Gloomgirl

Real name:

Niobe Ishii

Powers:

Able to transform into shadow.

Notes:

Youngest member of the Wardens. Following their disbanding, she took on a new identity as the metahuman detective Spook. Due to her complete refusal to interact with the media, she was often painted as cold and uncaring. The Carpenter refuted this in a television interview: “She’ll kill me for saying this, but she’s by far the most compassionate of all of us. She was the first to respond to the 11B monorail collapse of ’57. The train was shattered, dangerous as heck, with live electricity and falling bits of track everywhere. She went in again and again, getting the injured out first, then everyone else. And you know what she did when she got ’em all out? She went back in for a kid’s toy aeroplane. Just to stop the little guy crying. Can you believe it?”

—Notes on selected metahumans [Entry #1086]

Gabby carried Niobe and the prisoners through the ash and smoke clouding the city and set them down on the outskirts of a warzone. When she finally had solid ground under her again, Niobe’s legs could barely hold her upright. Gabby held out a metal arm to steady her, and Niobe gratefully accepted it.

As for Quanta, the red-suited man, and the pilot, Gabby tossed them into a pile against the wall. She’d produced a black fabric that turned into a box that resembled a coffin when she ran an electric charge through it. It’d keep Quanta from absorbing any light if he woke up and her disabler device failed.

Flashes of energy and lightning crackled in the air above Niobe. She stood in the middle of a four-way intersection, each road blocked off by a makeshift barricade of ruined cars and bits of crumbled masonry. She spotted a knot of people huddled along the side of one barricade, facing down Kent Street. The light from two huge spotlights stung her eyes, and the rifle fire made her ears ring. She could make out brightly costumed figures through the smoke as well, but through the blinding light she couldn’t resolve the details.

“Gimme a minute,” Niobe said. She slumped down with her back against the wall of an office building and fished out her miniature first aid kit from her belt. It wasn’t made for injuries like this, but it would have to hold until she could get someone to look at it.

The Silver Scarab settled protectively in front of her while Niobe worked, weapons trained in the direction of the fight. Niobe slid a knife under what remained of her glove and started to slice it away. The bits that were burned into her flesh stung like all buggery when she tried to peel them out, so she gritted her teeth and cut around them. It was hard going with her left hand, but she managed it. The hand itself was a write-off. Maybe she could get Gabby to build her a robotic claw.

She unscrewed a bottle of rubbing alcohol, braced herself, and poured it over her hand. Fire screamed through her skin. She screwed up her eyes and bit her lip to keep from crying out, but a strangled grunt still left her throat, and her eyes prickled with tears. When the pain finally faded enough for her to move again, she got some gauze and bandages out of her kit and awkwardly wrapped the mangled mess as best she could with her left hand and her teeth. With another strip of bandage, she fashioned herself a crude sling. It sure as hell wasn’t pretty, but it might keep her from bleeding out.

She tapped Gabby’s armour to get her attention. “Do you have water?”

Gabby produced a plastic bottle from a compartment in her chest and handed it to her. Niobe washed the taste of blood and smoke out of her mouth, spat, and then guzzled the rest.

“All right.” She readjusted her mask and struggled to her feet. The thigh wound would have to wait. “Let’s do this.”

Gabby hauled the prisoners on her shoulders, and Niobe walked. Her hand didn’t jar so bad with every step now. She glanced back once and saw Quanta’s airship making a slow turn away from the city. Then the smoke covered it, and it was gone.

She turned back to the group firing over the barricade and stopped. “You?”

Senior Sergeant Wallace fired another three shots from his L1A1 and then took a look at her. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Uh, trying to get myself killed, I guess,” she said, holding up her hand.

He glanced at it and grunted, then fired off another couple of shots as a streak of purple energy crashed into the barricade.

Niobe looked around at the rest of the group. A couple of coppers—not Met Div, just regulars—were shooting as well. But what drew her eye was the greens and reds and blues of the others there. She dredged some of the names up from her memory. Negabeast. Ballista was there too, firing a dozen bolts at a time from her huge crossbow. Brightlance, shooting beams of brilliant blue from his hands. She recalled the last time she’d seen him in that yellow bodysuit and red cape, when the man was too broken to help them get the McClellan baby back. It seemed so long ago. But now here he was, fighting for the city. Had he kept a signaller all these years, waiting?

There were others she didn’t recognise, younger metas. A girl in a pale blue bodysuit who couldn’t be older than fifteen hovered a few feet above the ground. Every time she flicked her wrist, a piece of building masonry took on a blue glow and flew through the air towards the supercriminals taking cover down the street. And overhead, a pair of fliers with matching purple uniforms streaked past, whirling chains in hand.

“How…?” Niobe couldn’t believe what she was seeing. “How are they here?”

Wallace slammed another magazine into his rifle and pulled back the slide. “I called them.” He leaned over the bonnet of the ruined car and fired. “Goddamn typical. Bloody superheroes never could take the fucking initiative.” He reached into his pocket and tossed her something. “You can have this back.”

She caught the Carpenter’s signaller and turned it over in her hand. It had worked. How had so many of them responded? Two days ago these metas cowered in the Old City like rats. But now there was something new in their faces. Or rather, something old. What the hell had Wallace promised them?

“What about civilians?” she asked when the booms of Wallace’s rifle took a break.

He jerked his head towards the hotel on the corner. Shadows moved inside the darkened doorway.

“We got a couple hundred rounded up there,” Wallace said. “And I’ve got every copper who can still walk getting people to safety. A few metas are helping too,” he added grudgingly. “Probably another thousand got out of the city before the shit hit. I don’t have a clue how many are hiding in their homes. Or dead. But the shelters, they got hit worst.”

Underground, Neo-Auckland was dotted with bomb shelters, she knew, built in the days when everyone feared another nuke.

“I was watching from the rooftops,” she said. “Quanta’s people seemed more interested in causing havoc than trying to cut their way into concrete bunkers. What happened?”

“What the fuck do you think happened?” Wallace pointed into the sky. “Your boy.”

The controls for her goggles were on the wrong side of her face, so upping the magnification was awkward. But once she did, she couldn’t miss Sam. Her heart dropped into her gut. The strings still left his hands, so dense now it looked like he was floating on a grey, pulsing mountain. And in a loose sphere around him were the floating civilians that had become his shield.

“He got into the shelters?” Then she figured it out. “Omegaman’s phasing power.”

“We figured the shelters would at least slow him down. But he walked straight through the walls and took everyone at once. All we did was save him some travel time.”

“Bloody hell,” she said. “Mind control? He’s making the civilians fight?”

“I’m afraid not.” The voice came from behind her, but she knew it immediately. She turned to regard the Blind Man’s dark, lined face. He was the only meta present not in a costume, unless you counted the carved walking stick he leaned on. “It’s worse than that.”