"Home is where our story begins…" Unknown
Allen's building sat on a corner of the Talescrian sky-district, six hundred stories up on the west face, with a walkout patio that caught the afternoon light in a way that had, in his opinion, been the deciding factor in the lease.
He landed on the patio. Boots down. Door open.
"Home sweet home."
He walked in. Made it three steps into the living room and let himself fall backward onto the couch.
The couch caught him.
He exhaled. Long. Slow. The mole thing was going to be a problem. The mole thing was going to be a problem tomorrow. Right now the couch was doing its job.
Something jumped onto the desk in the corner.
Allen's head snapped up.
The thing on the desk chittered.
Allen's face broke into a grin.
"Hey. Hey, Vorg."
Vorg chittered again.
"Hey, little buddy. Did you miss me?"
Vorg was, technically, a Unopan feline of the smaller domestic breed. In practice, Vorg was what happened when the words house cat and pink lion and chicken legs were entered into an evolutionary blender and the resulting concept was rendered by an artist who had strong opinions about the number of eyes an animal should have. Which was one. Vorg had one enormous expressive eye in the center of his face. He had short fur that ran pink across the body and lightened to nearly white at the tips of his ears. He had a long tail that curled at rest like a question mark. He had, tucked underneath and only visible to close observers who had lived with a Unopan feline for long enough to have noticed, two anuses. Nobody knew why. Unopan evolutionary biologists had been arguing about it for four hundred years. Vorg had opinions on the matter, presumably, but had never expressed them.
Allen scooped him up. Vorg butted his forehead against Allen's chin.
"Yes, you did. Yes, you did miss your daddy, didn't you."
Vorg purred. Vorg's purr sounded like a small motor with a loose belt.
Allen carried him to the couch and settled back down with Vorg on his chest. Vorg immediately began kneading his shirt with the specific pointed enthusiasm of a small predator who had been left alone for three weeks and now intended to make several minutes of loud silent points about it.
"I know. I know. Long trip."
Vorg kneaded harder.
"I brought you a thing. I brought you a thing from Earth. It's in the bag. Give me a minute."
A soft clatter came from the bedroom.
Allen went still.
Vorg went still.
They both looked at the doorway.
"Vorg," Allen whispered. "Shh."
Vorg was, as it happened, already shh.
Allen sat up slowly. Set Vorg down on the couch. Stood. The door to the bedroom was open a hand's-width. There was no light coming through it. There should not have been anything moving in it, because nothing lived in his apartment except Vorg and, in a technical sense that Allen preferred not to dwell on, the mold in the corner of the shower he kept meaning to deal with.
He crossed the living room silently. Reached the doorway. Stepped through.
The blow came from his left.
He was slammed against the wall with practiced efficiency, one forearm across his throat, one hand pinning his wrist to the plaster.
Allen's response was instinct, not thought. He rotated, took the forearm with him, reversed the grip, and drove the attacker backward against the opposite wall of the bedroom with both her wrists pinned above her head.
Then he blinked.
Then he registered who he was pinning.
Then he grinned.
"Did you miss me?" said General Telia, from against the wall, breathing slightly harder than she'd been breathing five seconds ago.
"Oh," Allen said, "I missed you."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"How much?"
He considered the question seriously.
"The most. Or ten times that amount. Maybe more, even. It's hard to quantify. I might need to show you with charts. There would be several charts."
She laughed. It was low. It was hers.
"Let's see if that's true."
She wrapped her legs around his hips. Allen carried her to the bed. The bed caught them.
The bedroom door swung slowly closed behind them as tentacles appeared from telia and wrapped around Allen.
Vorg, in the living room, sat on the couch and stared at it with the specific one-eyed judgment that only Unopan felines could produce, and then, after a moment, hopped down and went to look for what Allen had brought back from Earth.
Earth. Chicago. North branch of the river.
Mark braked in mid-air.
The warehouse sat below him — a squat concrete rectangle backing onto the water, the kind of building that had made things for a living once and now made nothing but the low hum of illegal power draw. He hovered a hundred feet up and let ARIA do her work.
"Full sweep."
"Scanning."
The HUD lit up. Structural overlay. Thermal ghost. Comm scan. A slow rotating three-dimensional map of everything inside the walls.
Seven signatures.
Machine Head, standing in the middle of the shop floor. Isotope, close to Machine Head, off to his right. The Mauler Twins at a bank of consoles near the far wall. A man Mark didn't recognize in a red-and-black suit, tall, broad, standing between the twins and the door. Another man Mark also didn't recognize — Chinese, wearing a gray-and-black tactical suit, standing perfectly still against the north wall. Multi-Paul, in six overlapping copies fanned out around the room.
And two other things.
Two seven-foot armored feline-humanoid figures standing side-by-side at the center of the space, silver collars at their throats and heavy plasma cannons harnessed across their backs. Both watching the door. Both perfectly still. Both, per the biometric scan, alive.
Mark's stomach did the thing it did.
"It seems," ARIA said, "as though Machine Head has been expecting you. He has produced two copies of the being you designated Battle Beast."
"Yeah."
"No signs of a secondary trap in the surrounding block."
"It doesn't need one. This is the trap."
Immortal came to a stop beside him.
Mark heard him arrive. Didn't turn.
Immortal glanced sideways at him. There was something in it — the specific annoyance of a man who had spent the last forty-five seconds pushing himself to keep up with someone half his age, and who had, somewhere in that forty-five seconds, arrived at an uncomfortable question about the sparring session he'd insisted on four months ago.
Was invincible still holding back?
Immortal did not ask the question aloud. Mark was not sure he was going to like the answer if it came out.
He put his hand on Mark's shoulder instead.
"You should have waited for the team."
Mark turned. Looked at the hand.
Looked at Immortal.
"Sorry, what?"
Immortal's face twitched. He hated being ignored.
"Never mind what I said. We have a situation."
Mark tapped the side of his helmet. The HUD in his visor pushed a duplicate feed up to Immortal's line of sight, an in-suit hologram that only Immortal could see.
"Machine Head's inside. Mauler Twins. Multi-Paul. Two guys I don't have on file — one's a big red-and-black-suited type, the other's harder to read, gray-and-black tactical."
"Should not be a problem," Immortal said. "I have dealt with the twins before. Light work."
He started floating forward.
Mark put his arm across Immortal's chest.
"It's not the twins."
Immortal stopped.
"It's not Multi-Paul, and it's not either of the guys we don't recognize. Those are all manageable."
"Then what."
Mark held up his gauntlet. A second holo bloomed above his palm — the recorded footage from the Milano's onboard cameras, four months old, timestamped and geotagged to a rooftop in New York where a very large orange-and-white armored cat-thing had, done more damage to Mark's body than everything Nolan had ever done to him combined.
Immortal watched the footage.
His face did not, at first, change. Immortal's face didn't often change. He had a hundred and fifty years of practice not letting it.
By the end of the loop, it had changed.
"That's not native."
"No."
"What is it."
"His name is Battle Beast. He's from a galactic-tier warrior species. He was on Earth as a — I don't know what. A tourist. A collector. He likes fighting strong people. I met him on a rooftop in Manhattan four months ago lured him away to the desert and he nearly put me on a T-shirt."
"And Machine Head has —"
"Two of him. Cloned. With collars around their necks that I'm pretty sure are puppet-control rigs the twins reverse-engineered off GDAs old schematics."
Immortal exhaled slowly through his nose. The exhale was, from Immortal, roughly equivalent to another man's swearing for a full minute.
"Rudy," Mark said, on the comm.
"I have the feed," Rudy said. "The team is watching."
Inside the Milano
moving at speed across the Chicago skyline, the Guardians stood in a loose cluster around the tactical display in the ship's main bay.
The gravity field in the bay held them upright against the ship's acceleration without any of them having to think about it — one of the small comforts Robot had built into the design when Mark had contracted the ship out to him for interior finishing. On the display, Mark's helmet feed showed the warehouse from above, and beside it, the four-month-old rooftop footage played on a loop.
The team watched Battle Beast do to Mark, in that footage, what Battle Beast had done to Mark.
Nobody spoke for a moment.
Then Bulletproof.
"You are telling me. That the same kitty cat. Who nearly put Invincible on a T-shirt. Has been cloned. And is now sitting in that warehouse."
"Two of him," Mark's voice said, through the ship speakers.
"We are so fucked," said Rex.
He pulled a pen and a small folded piece of paper from a pouch on his belt. He unfolded the paper. He clicked the pen.
"What are you doing," Thunderbolt said.
"Writing my will."
"Rex."
"I'm leaving my hover disc to you. Try not to break it."
"Rex."
"You're getting the disc and my staff, actually. Because I like you the most. Don't fucking tell anybody."
"Rex, stop making Shapesmith nervous."
Shapesmith was in the corner of the bay. Shapesmith had, in the last thirty seconds, begun to lose structural coherence around the boots — his default humanoid form was slowly melting downward from the ankles in a way that suggested his emotional regulation had left the building. He was, technically, still shaped like a person. Barely.
"I am fine," Shapesmith said, in a voice that indicated he was not fine.
"Excuse me if I'm the only one on this ship who's prepared for the possibility of dying today," Rex said.
He balled up the paper and threw it into a corner.
"Fine. I take it back. I'm not leaving you the staff."
"Rudy," Mark's voice cut through the comm. "I have a plan. Immortal and I are going in first."
"ETA one minute, Invincible," Rudy said.
Rudy walked to the center of the bay. The gravity of the ship kept his organic body steady on the deck plates. He clasped his hands behind his back.
"Team. Listen."
Every head turned.
"On landing. Blue Rush, Duplikate, Shapesmith, Rex — perimeter and evacuation. Two-block radius, minimum. Move everyone. Do not engage until the surrounding blocks are clear."
"Da," said Blue Rush.
Rex flipped him a lazy salute.
"Shrinking Ray. On the ground, small profile, into the warehouse through the loading bay seam. I want you looking for the source samples — anything the twins were using to grow the clones from. Blood, tissue, cellular medium, take what you can carry. Machine Head is cocky enough that he may have left the source stock on-site."
"On it," Shrinking Ray said.
"Bulletproof. Powerplex. Monster Girl. Black Samson. You are standby. Do not engage unless I call for you. Based on twelve months of tactical work with Invincible, I project that he will attempt to separate the clones from each other and from Machine Head's non-Beast assets. When that happens, we split the clones — three heavy hitters per target, one containment. Bulletproof and Powerplex on one clone. Monster Girl and Black Samson on the other. I will float as tactical coordinator."
"You didn't assign me," Thunderbolt said.
"You are with the perimeter team. Your discharge can chain across the crowd if any of the civilians go into cardiac arrest during the evacuation. Blue Rush is the only member who can outrun a heart attack, and he cannot restart one."
Thunderbolt shrugged. "Fair."
"When we land," Amanda said, "we are going to crush them."
She half-transformed her right hand — the fingers thickening, the skin banding green — and pounded her fist once into her opposite palm. The impact made a soft whumph.
"Yeah!" Thunderbolt threw up a hand. Amanda fist-bumped it.
"Da," Blue Rush said again, because Blue Rush's contribution to any team pep moment was a single da delivered with the specific Russian fatalism that had, over months, become one of the load-bearing morale beams of the entire operation.
"Invincible has a plan," Black Samson said. He walked to the center of the bay beside Rudy. His seismic gloves were faintly humming at his knuckles. "And he is stronger than he was the last time this cat put hands on him. We are also stronger than we were. We are the Guardians of the Globe."
"We are the Guardians of the Globe," Amanda agreed.
"We are the Guardians of the fucking Globe," Shapesmith echoed, in the small quiet voice of a man trying very hard to talk himself into it. His boots were, slowly, reforming.
The Milano began to descend.
Below them, through the ship's forward window, a warehouse on the north side of the river was, at that exact moment, coming apart at the seams — because the loading bay door had just exited it at high velocity, followed by a very large man in a red-and-black suit, and behind them both, floating in the air above the destroyed doorway, Immortal.
Black Samson looked up.
"Looks like the party's already started."
He turned to the team.
"Guardians, GO."
One minute earlier.
Mark had touched down in front of the warehouse loading bay.
Immortal touched down beside him.
Mark had considered, for exactly half a second, the possibility of doing this quietly.
He discarded the possibility.
He raised his fist. He knocked, three times, on the loading bay door. It was a courteous knock. It was the specific knock a person might use if they were dropping off a package, or checking whether a neighbor was home, or otherwise announcing themselves in a way that did not indicate any particular urgency.
On the third knock, the door left the wall. The door left the hinges, which was more difficult, because the hinges were rated for freight but it left them, and it sailed inward across the shop floor in a spinning slab of corrugated metal aimed directly at Machine Head's position.
Two plasma bolts hit it in mid-flight.
The Mauler Twins, at their console bank, had reacted with the precision of men who had been expecting exactly this shot. The door disintegrated in mid-air. Shrapnel rained across the warehouse floor.
Mark stepped through the empty doorway.
Immortal stepped through beside him.
Machine Head stood in the center of the warehouse with his arms spread wide.
"Ahhh," he said. His voice was in the sing-song register today. "Invincible. Immortal. A pleasure to meet you both in person."
The two Battle Beast clones flanked him on either side. Their eyes tracked Mark and Immortal across the room in the exact synchronized motion of two predators sharing a hunt.
"Do you see something you like, Invincible?"
Machine Head gestured, palm up, at the clones. They growled — both of them, in unison, the same low chest-resonance that Mark remembered from the desert.
"Machine Head," Immortal said. "Do you have any idea what you have done."
"Why, yes, my Immortal cuck. I have simply given myself the advantage that any crime lord in this fucking city would love to have. Muscle without payroll." He beamed. "And you, my very old friend, are going to be the first to die at the hands of the clones that gave Invincible here a run for his fucking money."
He turned to walk toward the back of the warehouse.
"Kill them."
His voice dropped on the last two words and in the same instant, a green flare of light bloomed at his feet, and Isotope was there, and Isotope's hand closed on Machine Head's arm, and both of them were gone.
The green flare left an afterimage on Mark's retinas.
"With pleasure," said the man in the red-and-black suit.
He was already growing.
The growth was smooth. He did not swell so much as he unfolded — his frame expanding along every axis at once, the suit's fabric scaling with him in a way that suggested it had been engineered for exactly this, the plated armor across his chest and shoulders sliding into new configurations as the space between them widened. Six feet became ten. Ten became twenty. Twenty became forty. He hit seventy and stopped, and by then his head was scraping the warehouse ceiling and the concrete beneath his boots had cracked into a starburst under his weight.
He was looking at Immortal.
Immortal was looking back at him with the expression of a man who had, in his hundred and fifty years, fought approximately every category of opponent this planet could produce and had never quite stopped being irritated by the ones who thought size was going to be enough.
The giant threw a punch.
Immortal crossed his arms in front of his face.
The punch caught him in the crossed forearms, drove him through the north wall of the warehouse, across the intervening loading yard, through the chain-link fence, and into the street beyond. The giant came through the wall after him at a run, cratering the loading yard with every step, and dropped onto Immortal in a downward slam that hammered him into the asphalt with the force of a small building falling.
Immortal took it.
Then Immortal shoved.
The giant went upward a full body-length off the ground and Immortal came off the asphalt with him, hit atmosphere, rotated in the air, and delivered an uppercut into the underside of the giant's jaw that snapped the seventy-foot head backward and lifted the seventy-foot body into a lazy arc that ended against the fourth story of the building across the street.
Behind him, at the entrance to the warehouse loading yard, the Milano set down.
The ramp opened.
The Guardians came out.
Mark, meanwhile, had already moved.
He hit the two Battle Beast clones at Mach speed.
Both hands. Two faces palmed.
He did not slow down.
He plowed through the back wall of the warehouse through the concrete, through the rebar, through the ancient industrial insulation, through the loading dock on the water side, through the seawall, and out over the surface of Lake Michigan with a Battle Beast clone in each hand and the momentum of black jet.
The Mauler Twins, in the middle of the warehouse, were still recovering from the impact when the back wall exited the building. Both of them, along with three of the six overlapping Multi-Pauls, were slammed against the front wall by the pressure wave of Mark's exit.
"Argh —"
"Owwww —"
"You fucking —"
Multi-Paul, in his other three copies, was already on his feet and running for the equipment rack against the west wall and three of him thrown against a wall was, generously, half a bad day.
The Chinese man in the gray-and-black suit had not moved.
He had watched Machine Head disappear. He had watched the size-shifter go through the wall with Immortal. He had watched Mark exit the building with two clones under his arms. His expression had not changed, and his posture had not changed.
Then he reached up. He touched an earpiece.
He said one word into it.
Then he moved.
Toward the west wall toward the equipment rack the running Multi-Paul's were converging on and his motion, once he began it, was fast enough that the 1 on his chest was, for a moment, the only stable thing in the sudden blur of his displacement.
Above Lake Michigan,
At roughly the point where the shoreline dropped off into the deeper water and no civilian craft usually went, Mark released both clones.
They tumbled through the air.
Both recovered mid-fall.
Both leveled off, hovered, turned, and looked at him.
The collars at their throats were glowing.
Mark hovered at twenty feet above the water. The triangle on his chest pulsed once, brightening to full operational load. The visor slash across his helmet ran the width of his face in a hard clean red line.
"ARIA," he said. "Get me a solid read on the collar. If those things drop, do they die or do they think for themselves?"
"Insufficient data to determine independent behavioral baseline for cloned subjects."
"Great."
"Recommendation: neutralize the collars only when the primary combatants are contained."
"Yeah."
The two clones smiled at him. Two identical smiles.
Mark cracked his knuckles inside the gauntlets. The nanites shifted around the movement.
"All right, kitties. Let's see what you learned."
Both clones lunged.
Chicago. West side. Wilkins family kitchen.
"I told you," her mother said, "everything is fine."
Eve pushed the mug of tea across the table.
"Mom. You don't sound fine."
"I'm fine, Sam."
"Are you and dad fighting again?"
"No. Nothing like that."
Her mother was looking at the tea. At the wall. At the small ceramic bird on the windowsill above the sink. At anywhere but Eve's face.
Eve exhaled.
"Well, then what."
Her mother didn't answer.
Eve reached across the table and closed her hand around her mother's hand.
"Mom. It's me. You can talk to me. I'll put on more tea. We can just sit and talk. Okay?"
She squeezed once. Let go. Stood. Walked to the fridge.
She opened it.
The fridge was empty.
Not almost empty. Not down-to-the-basics empty. Empty. Two condiment bottles in the door. A carton of milk with a date on it Eve knew was old without needing to check. A single wilted head of lettuce in the drawer, and behind it, nothing.
Eve turned. Her mother was watching her.
"Mom."
"Things have been a little tight lately, honey. But we're fine. Really."
"Mom, why didn't you say something."
"Because —"
"You know I can help."
"Samantha, don't —"
Eve raised her hand.
Pink energy flickered across her palm.
She'd been doing this since she was fourteen. Molecular reorganization. It was, on paper, the most powerful piece of the toolkit she'd inherited from whatever scientific accident had made her and it was, in practice, the piece she'd used the least, because the world she'd grown up in had made her ashamed of it.
She reorganized the air inside the fridge.
Groceries filled every shelf. Fresh vegetables. Bread. A rotisserie chicken. Two dozen eggs. A block of the specific sharp cheddar her mother had liked since Eve had been eight. Milk that was, based on the date printed on its side, from a farm in Wisconsin that had bottled it yesterday morning.
Her mother's face did a complicated thing.
"Samantha. Please. Turn it back."
"Mom —"
"Turn it back before your father gets home."
Eve stared at her.
"Why. What's going on."
Behind her, the front door opened.
The front door closed.
Eve turned.
Her father Adam Wilkins, forty-eight years old, six-foot-one, shoulders like a man who had spent thirty years lifting things for a living walked into the kitchen wearing a Burger Mart uniform.
Orange polo. Black slacks. Name tag. A visor cap in his hand.
"Samantha?"
Eve stared.
"Dad. What are you doing in a Burger Mart shirt."
Adam set the cap on the counter. His scalp was bare under it.
"It's called an honest day's work."
"But the furniture store. Dad, you've worked at the furniture store for twenty years."
"Until you people turned the Chicago corporate office into a pile of rubble."
He said it while pointing, once, with the hand that had been rubbing his wrist a small stab of the index finger in her direction, aimed at her chest, delivered and withdrawn before she could react to it.
"Ugh. God. Why didn't you tell me?"
"Maybe you should have asked. Instead of flying off to God knows where doing God knows what."
Eve set her jaw.
"All right. Well. I'm here now. Okay? You don't have to work some minimum-wage job like you're a teenager. I can give you and mom whatever you want. Literally and figuratively. My salary as a Guardian pays for that."
"I have provided for this family," Adam said, "longer than you've been alive."
"Dad —"
Eve pulled her phone out of her pocket. She opened the banking app. She typed a number. She hit send.
Her mother's phone chimed on the counter.
"There. Two hundred thousand. That should carry you a while."
"Take it back."
"Dad, come on. Don't be —"
"Take it back."
His voice had risen.
Her mother closed her eyes.
Eve's phone buzzed.
She looked at it.
Guardians alert. Priority. Chicago. Machine Head situation escalating. Full team requested.
She exhaled.
"I have to go."
Adam did not respond.
"I'll be back to visit in a few days. To check in."
She walked toward the back door.
"And don't send me back that money."
She looked back once.
Her mother had her hands over her face.
Her father was standing where he had been standing, rubbing his right wrist with his left hand, staring at the kitchen counter as if the counter had personally insulted him.
Eve stepped out onto the back lawn.
She took to the sky.
Behind her, on the small kitchen table, the mug of tea she had poured her mother was still steaming.