Trainee Superhero (Book Three) (4 page)

“What’s stopping me from just flying away
now?” I ask.

“Would you?” asks
Second Best
. She
sounds a little anxious.

“Of course not, but surely people consider
it.”

“We still control your collar,”
Second
Best
reminds me, “and I can shut your suit down from here. Plus
Never Lies
has been following, just in case.”

“I thought you said I’m a flying tank!”

“I can still take you,” says
Never
Lies
over my radio.

I can’t see her, but I have no doubt that
she’s around. My helmet goes
tick-tick-tick
.

“You have all your weapons locked on me,
don’t you?” I ask.

“I do.”

She sounds smug.

“One of those weapons is a special
shield-piercing cannon designed to bring people like me down, isn’t
it?”

“It is.”

“Good thing you won’t need it, then.”

“Yeah… about that…”

A beam of light hits me right in the head and
I fall out of the sky, tumbling. I catch myself just above the
ground.

“Shields at 80%. And also, ouch.”

“80%? That’s impressive. Nice recovery,
too.”

“Thanks, but my head is buzzing like there’s
a swarm of bees in this suit with me. Please don’t do that again.
Can we go get some lunch now?”

“You wish. We still have work to do, so stop
whining and power up that rainbow-cannon.”

Three hours later I’m lying in the sun in the
operators’ area, exhausted.
Never Lies
kicks me in the
leg.

“Get up, trainee, we have things to talk
about.”

I wonder if she’s going to shoot me again;
she really seemed to enjoy it. She leads me to the cafeteria and
sits me down at a table. Chef brings over three pieces of cake.

“We’ve been thinking,” she says, “and we’ve
come to the conclusion that you need a partner. It’s pretty common
practice for trainee to get paired up; it makes you easier to
handle and gives you a better chance on the battlefield. Anyway,
his name is
Grey Three
.”

The door opens and Tenchi walks in. We stare
at each other in dumbstruck surprise.

“You two have complementary skills,”
continues
Never Lies
, “and we thought you would work well
together. You two look like you’ve seen a ghost, is there a
problem?”

She almost cracks a smile, but then turns
away.

Tenchi grabs me in a bear hug and squeezes
the life out of me. We high five, we bump fists, we laugh. This is
the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

“Powers?” asks Tenchi.

“Shields and lasers, mostly. I can pretty
much hit everything I want,” I say, “so I really clean up at range.
What about you?”

“Blades, and the bigger the better. They call
it tino-kinetics or something, I don’t know.”

“Oh, that’s cool!” I say.

That’s way better than being a flying
tank.

“I can’t fly very well,” Tenchi says to make
me feel better, “I have to close my eyes. Is this cake for me?

Chef brings us more coffee and cake; he’s in
an excellent mood, and doesn’t mind us intruding on his space.

“That… is… delicious,” says Tenchi around a
mouthful of cake.

I don’t answer; I’m too busy eating.

“What are you doing here?” he asks me.

“Back home…
The General
arrived-”

“-just in time to save you, what a champ!”
Tenchi interrupts enthusiastically.

“Turns out he is Stace’s Dad. He was not
pleased to see me and his daughter in the middle of a saucer
attack, so he tried to kill-”

“-tried to kill you? What a saucerhat!”

Tenchi’s admiration of
The General
disappears even more quickly than mine did. Tenchi doesn’t seem at
all surprised that a superhero could be so dangerous to the people
he is supposed to protect. I guess he has also seen behind the
façade.

“What about you?” I ask.

“I was in training for a while. They seemed
to be in a rush to get us finished. I was top of my class, so they
promoted me early. I had a few missions, and everything was going
well enough-”

“-what? How? I nearly died on my first
missions!”

“I just did what the voices on my radio told
me,” he says, giving me a very odd look.

“I didn’t get voices, I just got shot. I
would have
killed
for voices!” I say.

“Well… it turned out that no one else was
hearing anything on their radios, so people thought I was pretty
weird.”

“Okay…”

“Anyway, the little voices kept me alive. On
my last mission they kept telling me to come towards where I found
you. I did what they said, so that was good, but my commanders did
not like me doing my own thing.”

“So they sent you here?”

“Well... I also punched my boss, which might
have something to do with my reassignment.”

I wince; punching a superhero is never a good
idea, not even if you
are
a superhero. Technically it’s an
act of treason and punishable by death.

“Why did you hit him?”

“We were at a club… he was getting handsy
with a girl who wasn’t enjoying it. One thing led to another, and
now I’m here. It’s better this way, anyway. Partners, just like we
planned!”

“I’m glad you’re here, man,” I say.

“Me, too. They told me that you’ve been
breaking the record for time spent in the sick bay. What’s up with
that?”

“Go hard or go home… you know how I am. I
just want to be good at this.”

Tenchi nods.

“And now I’m here, and we are going to be the
greatest team who ever lived. Right?”

Right. The legend of
Grey
and
Red
starts today.

“Look at my tat-a-gotchi!” I say.

Tenchi is impressed; his own tat-a-gotchi is
big red shrew that moves so quickly across his arm that I can’t
keep track of it.

“Cool,” we say in unison.

Never Lies
walks back in.

“If you are done with the cake, perhaps you
would like to join me in saving the world?” she says
sarcastically.

Tenchi rolls his eyes and whispers “WTF” to
me, but I shrug.

“She’s right, as always,” I say, “it’s time
to save the world. Again.”

“Stand against the saucers and the world
stands with you.”

-Superhero Corps official propaganda.

“It’s just the four of us versus the hostile
universe, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

-
Cold Comet
, journal entry read out at
Dark Fire
’s trial.

We land on a cliff overlooking the ocean.

There are six of us, including Tenchi. He’s
armed with the enormous sword that
Talented Brat
said no one
was strong enough to wield. Tenchi needs both hands to keep it off
the ground, but he seems to be okay. There isn’t anything
suspicious that we can see, so
Never Lies
calls up
Talented Brat
.

“No saucer,” she says.

“I’m getting some big readings… real big.
There’s something in the ocean.”

He almost sounds nervous.

“Real big,” adds
Second Best
calmly,
“we’ll be on the lookout.”

“Copy. We can see nothing so far,” says
Never Lies
.

We spread out and start scouting the cliff.
Tenchi and I are a team, which makes us both happy. Tenchi doesn’t
fly, but runs through the air on discs of light that form below his
feet and hang in the air behind him so that his path is illuminated
by bright footsteps. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s not
fast, but it does look cool.

“Showy,” says
Never Lies
.

“I have to close my eyes,” Tenchi admits to
me when we are a little further away.

I smile; it’s good to know that he has an
Achilles’ heel.

“See anything?” I ask.

“No, but can you hear that whispering on the
radio? One single voice, getting closer.” I can’t hear anything,
and Tenchi’s talk of little voices is frankly a bit weird.

“I’m high above the cliffs,” says
Never
Lies
over the radio, “nothing to see.”

Our radio starts to crackle.

“There!” says Tenchi, point out at the
horizon.

I can’t see anything except water, clouds and
boats.

“Mmm… this is going to be a difficult one,”
murmurs
Extremely Dangerous
over the radio.

“Gather on me,” says
Never Lies
curtly.

She drops out of the sky and lands beside
me.

I still can’t see anything out there except a
small fishing boat.

“I don’t see anything,” says
Born
Lucky
.

My proximity alarm starts ringing slowly,
with seconds between each ‘
bang
’.

“Prox alarm,” I say.

Then I see it: a line of black fins cutting
through the water, trailing long spikes like huge antennae. The
fins brush past the fishing boat, rolling it in their wake. They
are still many miles off shore, but I estimate the fins are several
stories high.

“I see it now,” says
One Trick
unnecessarily, “and it looks mighty big.”

Never Lies
pulls a flare out of a
pocket, lights it and throws it. Green smoke billows into the
air.

“Yes. Okay.
Born Lucky
and his squad
are on their way,” she says.

She looks unsure of herself for the first
time since I’ve met her, but I don’t blame her.

“Won’t be long now,” she says.

I know things are looking bad when
Never
Lies
tries to be comforting.

I check my weapons and shields; the black
fins get closer. Whatever’s underneath them is moving fast. I start
to see a massive oval shape beneath the water as smaller fins burst
the out of the waves.

“Turn your proximity alarms off;” says
Never Lies
evenly, “we don’t want to get deafened.
Day
and
Trick
to flank left,
Red Five
and
Grey Three
flank right.
Dangerous
and I will draw its
fire here. Set?”

“Call me
Simon Smith
,” whispers
Extremely Dangerous
.

“Set,” say the rest of us. I start charging
up my color cannon.

An enormous head emerges from the water, a
nightmare shape of protruding turrets and eyes set amongst multiple
beaks and maws. Behind that rise massive shoulders and a back wider
than an aircraft carrier’s deck. This thing looks like someone took
Godzilla and the army sent to stop Godzilla and rolled them into
one creature, then added the turrets from a world war two
battleship for good measure.

“Whoah,” I say, “that’s a monster and a
half.”

“Cut the chatter,
Red Five
,” snaps
Never Lies
.

The monster beaches itself with powerful
strokes of its tail and then stands on twelve massive legs than end
in bulbous feet. Each foot could crush a tank. Turrets pop up along
its back, huge arrays of long barrels and odd round discs that
might be microwave beams. Water gushes from its body, raining down
on the sand. The creature opens its many eyes and looks from side
to side as if not yet ready to move to land. It sways under the
weight of its own body.

“Surely that thing’s too big to walk,” says
Bad Day
.

It should be, yet it takes a step forward
with a thud that we can feel on the cliff. The lines of enormous
scales on the thing’s back flip open to reveal rows and rows of
missiles.

“Change of plan, we need to get under it, low
and fast,” yells
Never Lies
.

I don’t want to get under this thing, but
I’ve learnt better than to question
Never Lies
. I start
moving. Tenchi keeps pace, but he isn’t happy.

“Why are we trying to get under this thing?”
he demands.

The creature yawns with massive teeth, then
banks of missiles open along its shoulders.

“Faster!” I say, and grab Tenchi, dragging
him forward.

Streams of lasers cut up the sand around us,
and we dodge as best we can. The creature yawns again, and missiles
rise in their thousands like clouds of death. There are so many
that they blot out the sun and leave us in darkness.

“At least we’re fighting in the shade!” I
joke, but I don’t think anyone hears me.

The missiles start to fall, but we are under
the beast before its weapons find us. They hit the ground around
the cliff where we had been standing, leveling the rock and soil
into nothing. We would have died if we had stayed out there;
Never Lies
had been right, as usual.

“We’re not safe yet,” she says, pointing
upwards.

Huge panels have opened in the creature’s
belly and hundreds of creatures drop. I see the familiar shapes of
enemies I’ve faced before, but also new creatures like a
multi-legged crab-thing that lands next to Tenchi. He cuts it in
half with a single blow of his enormous sword.

My cannon starts vibrating: the end is a ball
of bright green light. I launch it towards the beast’s nearest leg,
but it hits without making much of a mark.

“That’s not good!” I say.

Tenchi rips through a pair of triclops and I
cut down a squadron of strange glowing insects that form a triangle
in the air. It's chaos down here:
Bad Day
blurs past leaving
burning shells of aliens behind him.
One Trick
has a huge
axe in one hand and a silver blaster in the other. She spins and
shoots, dodges and dives as she goes head to head with the
nightmare child of a dinosaur and a fighter jet. The creature
almost gets her, but she spins past it, knocking it back with her
axe. Creatures close around her, but
Bad Day
appears from
nowhere and teleports her out of danger with only a second to
spare.