Action Figures - Issue One: Secret Origins (35 page)

“Hard to do...when I’m dead,” I growl.

“Well, now, that all depends on you. I wasn’t told to kill you, so you play nice and maybe you get to leave here alive. Your powers. Where did they come from?”

Manticore gets defiant silence for an answer. The blade bites into my flesh and that’s when the fear hits.

“AAH! An alien! I got them from an alien!” I expect him to call me out as a liar and stick me again. I wouldn’t believe me either, honestly, but Manticore says, “Go on.”

“I found a dying alien. He gave me his powers. He put something in my hands.”

Manticore grabs my hand, presses his thumb into my palm, feeling around. “Hm. Looks like we’re in business. Good news for you. Mostly. Like I said, you’re a brave girl. You’ll have to be brave for just a little longer,” he says, touching the point of his blade to the palm—

Oh God no no don’t please don’t do it no
please no NO
—

THIRTY-FIVE

I’m floating in a sea of black, a place beyond space and time, my body weightless. The void surrounds me like a burial shroud, warm and silent and final.

The darkness begins to recede, like a night sky yielding to the dawn. A sound sneaks into my ears—a voice, I think, far-away and garbled. Someone’s saying my name.

My vision clears. Mindforce is hovering over me. “Carrie,” he says, giving me a weak, worried smile. “How are you? Do you need something for the pain?”

Pain? What pain? What is he—?

I scream as I try to push myself into a sitting position. I fall back, my hands on fire. I bring them up to my face and they’re wrapped—
mummified
in gauze and medical tape. I try to flex my fingers but they won’t respond.

Sara appears next to me. “Don’t try to move,” she says.

“What...where?”

“You’re on the Pelican.” She tells me I hit my panic button (I did?) and Concorde tracked my signal
to Thompson Island, one of the half-dozen or so islands off the coast of Boston. When he found me he called in Nina and Mindforce, who, against Concorde’s wishes, called the Squad in.

“Carrie,” Mindforce says. “Who attacked you?”

“Manticore. It was Manticore.”

Concorde curses so much I’m stunned the air doesn’t turn black. Sara squeezes my shoulder, a gesture meant to comfort that feels instead like a taunt:
hey, check me out with my fully functional hands
.

“They’re still after us,” Matt says.

“No,” I say. “He was after me specifically. He wanted—he said someone sent him to take the source of my powers.”

“Your powers are gone?”

“God, Matt, that doesn’t matter now,” Sara snaps. “Oh! Carrie, I didn’t mean it doesn’t matter...”

“I know what you meant.”

“Can we get them back? Your powers?” Missy says.

Concorde jumps in before I can reply. “No.”

“What do you mean, no? There has to be some way to track Manticore,” Matt says.

“There isn’t. There’s nothing to trace—no trail from his propulsion system, no radio or broadband signal, no transponder...”

“He doesn’t have a transponder? So how does he fly around without anyone noticing? Carrie can’t go up for five minutes without showing up on the Air National Guard’s radar.”

“His suit is stealth-enabled.”

“It is? I’ve read a lot about Manticore and I’ve never seen anything about him having stealth tech,”
Matt says. “Is that a fact? Or is that just your personal theory?”

“How else would he be able to—”

“A dummy transponder. Something that makes him look like a civilian aircraft on air control systems. Don’t tell me Manticore isn’t smart enough to rig something like that.”

Concorde snorts irritably. “For sake of argument, let’s say that’s the case,” he says. “We still have no way of tracking him because we don’t know what his dummy signal looks like.”

“Maybe we do,” I say. Sara helps me sit up. “I was in the air, I don’t know, around eight-thirty this morning? I would have shown up on Stafford’s radar, right?”

Matt gets where I’m going. “You would have shown up as a bogey. Concorde, call the base,” he says, “ask them if they had a second hit in Kingsport’s airspace at the same time.”

Concorde makes the call. I’d cross my fingers if I could.

“Colonel Coffin, this is Concorde. I have a situation and I need some info on activity in Kingsport airspace, around oh-eight-thirty hours today. Uh-huh. Right.” His head snaps upright. “Wait, say that again. Colonel, feed that data to the Pelican, immediately, please.”

Concorde said
please
. My admiration of Colonel Coffin triples.

He pushes past everyone and ducks into the cockpit. I can’t make out what else he’s saying.

“Concorde?” Mindforce says.

“Stafford had one bogey and one target that
came up as a civilian aircraft,” Concorde says. “They both dropped off the radar at the same time, over Thompson Island. About ten minutes later, the civilian craft popped back up, tracked north for two miles, then vanished again. The signal vanished right over Castle Island.”

“Take us there! Manticore has to be there.” I jump off the table and promptly fall into Sara’s arms.

Graceful.

“Get her back on the table,” Concorde says. “You’re not going anywhere. You’re in no shape to—”

“This is my fight too.”

“Not anymore it isn’t.”

“I’m going.”

“You’re not. And neither are the rest of you,” Concorde says, a commanding finger sweeping past each of the Hero Squad in turn before swinging back around to me. “We’re dropping you here. We’ll be back for you, just—”

“I’m not asking for your permission!”

“And I’m not giving it.”

“Manticore stole my powers!”

“Best thing that could have happened to you.”

I feel the scream rising. “Everyone out. Now.”

Mindforce wants to stay and referee but Nina, bless her, she knows better. She touches a control panel and the side of the Pelican opens like a mini-van door. Everyone files out. Nina closes Concorde in with me.

“Why are you doing this?” I slide off the table and will myself to stay upright without wobbling, without falling over. Dammit, I will face this man standing. “Tell me. Tell me what the hell your problem is with us. Since day one you’ve been riding us and
yelling at us and treating us like crap and not once—
not once
have you ever actually talked to us like we’re people. Well, you’re going to talk to me now and you’re going to tell me what we did to piss you off. What is it? You scared of competition? Are you jealous we have real super-powers and you’re nothing but a hired goon in a fancy suit some rich guy gave to you? Come on, tell me! Tell me why you hate us so much!”

Concorde reacts as if I’d slapped him.

“What? You think I—I don’t—” Concorde turns away, paces in a slow circle around the Pelican. He stops, slides up his helmet’s dark outer visor. “I don’t hate you, Carrie. I don’t hate any of you.”

The eyes, as Granddad likes to say, they always tell the truth. He really doesn’t.

“...I’m terrified for you.”

He’s what?

With a drawn-out sigh, he says, “You’re not the first teenage super-heroes, you know. There have been others. Quite a few, in my time. Some of them, they managed to survive to become adults. They’re in the minority.”

He lets this sink in.

“I don’t know you that well, but I don’t need to know you to see how much potential you have, potential you’ll never realize if you get yourself killed doing this. I’ve buried children, Carrie,” he says, his voice catching. “I do not want to bury another. Ever.”

I’ve killed children before. You can ask your buddy Concorde about that.

Did Concorde know the super-hero Manticore killed? Did he witness it? Maybe he failed to save the kid?

It doesn’t matter. The details, they don’t matter. This whole time, in his own ham-fisted way, Concorde was trying to save us from ourselves. Yeah, he was pushy and a little self-righteous and a huge pain in the butt, but he had our best interests at heart. It’s almost parental, really, but “I’m not your child, Concorde. It’s not your responsibility to try to save my life.”

“And it’s not your responsibility to save anyone else’s life,” Concorde says.

“No, it’s not,” I say, “but it’s what I’m choosing to do. I have the power to help people—”

“Not anymore you don’t.”

My hands, I can’t stop them from trembling. He’s right. I don’t have super-powers anymore. I’m a normal girl again.

It doesn’t matter.

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll find a way. This,” I say, thrusting my hands in Concorde’s face, “isn’t going to stop me. You’re not going to stop me. I’m a super-hero now and nothing you can do will change that. Powers or no, I will find a way.”

“Yeah,” Concorde says. “I believe you would.”

THIRTY-SIX

“They don’t look all that remarkable,” the Foreman says, pressing his face close to the metal tray, upon which rest two small objects resembling pieces of polished cat’s eye. Wet blobs of blackish-red lurk beneath them like gruesome shadows.

“You wanted the source of her power, those are them,” Manticore says. “Don’t give me a hard time if they’re not living up to your expectations.”

“I was merely commenting.”

“I’d love to hear what the boys at the Baltimore lab have to say about them,” Dr. Cane says, resisting the urge to touch them. “Do they generate the energy themselves? Channel it from some primary source?”

“I’m sure the tech monkeys will be happy to talk shop with you when they’re all done,” the Foreman says. “Manticore, if you would.”

“If I would what? Hey, pal, you hired me to bring you your fancy marbles, not hump them halfway down the coast. Do it yourself. Or call FedEx.”

The Foreman sighs. “How much?”

“Five.”

“For a simple courier job?”

“Yeah, because I don’t do simple courier jobs. Consider it the cost of insulting me.”

“I wouldn’t let him go yet,” Archimedes says, his voice drifting over the facility’s PA system. “We might need him here.”

“Why?” the Foreman says. “What’s happening?”

“We have visitors.”

At some point in the past, according to Nina, a lifelong Boston girl, Castle Island (actually a peninsula, go figure) was the site of Fort Independence. Originally built in the 17th Century and rebuilt many times since, it was last active in World War II and fell into disuse, and then disrepair, and then to rubble. She has no sense of when it was purchased and turned into commercial property, or why anyone would want to build anything on a dinky little spit of land that could get wiped out by the next hurricane, but from our current perspective, the building below looks like someone sank a decent amount of cash into it.

“Appears innocent enough,” Mindforce says, echoing my thought.

“If you ignore the fact it has no signs or company logos anywhere,” Concorde says. Mindforce is thoughtfully relaying his transmissions into the Pelican so we can all share in the moment. “I can’t find anything on this place. It doesn’t even show up on Google Maps.”

“Yeah, that’s not funny at all,” Matt says.

“They’re in there,” I say without thinking about it.

Mindforce twists around in his seat. “What?”

“They’re in there. The source of my powers, I...I
know they’re in there, somewhere. I can feel them,” I say. I can’t explain it further but this isn’t wishful thinking on my part. This sensation, whatever it is, it’s very real.

“What do we do now?” Nina asks. “Rattle their cage a little, see if they respond?”

“We can’t do that,” Mindforce says. “If we charge in and it is a legitimate business...”

“Well? Is it?”

Mindforce concentrates for a moment. “There are people in there...”

“Calm down,” the Foreman says. “This building uses the same type of psychic bafflers you have in your helmet. If Mindforce scans us he’ll get nothing but vague readings.”

“And you think the fact one of the most powerful psionics on the planet can’t read anyone’s mind won’t make him suspicious?” Manticore says. He takes in the flickering mosaic that is Archimedes’ wall of monitors, which shows the sky above the facility from a dozen different angles, and looks for a telltale glint of silver slipping in and out of the frames: Concorde cruising the island’s perimeter. “One of you better make a call, because I guarantee you Concorde is coming up with a plan of attack.”

“Let him. As long as we don’t do anything overtly suspicious, he has no cause to—what happened to that camera?”

Archimedes scowls at the black rectangle amidst the sea of color. “The signal’s gone.”

“Then get it back.”

“The signal’s gone because the camera’s gone.”

A second monitor winks out.

“They’re on to you,” Manticore says.

“If we’re wrong about this place, Concorde, you’re paying to replace these things,” Mindforce says, crushing a third camera with a thought.

“He can afford it,” Nina says.

I’ll file that comment away for later analysis, but for now we need to stay focused on Concorde’s plan to turn the heat up. He noticed the place was covered in cameras, some of them mounted on poles extending out from the roof and aimed at the sky—funny placement for security cameras for an allegedly mundane office building. Mindforce is disabling them one by one, blinding whoever is inside watching us.

Mindforce crumples the last camera and sets the Pelican back to hovering at the edge of the island. It’s a staring contest now. We need them to blink first.

We wait.

“We can wait them out,” the Foreman insists.

“Until they do what? We’re blind and deaf,” Archimedes says, his palms slick with sweat.

“And they’re in the dark. They won’t make a move until we do, therefore,
we don’t make a move
.”

“Scramble your fancy battlesuits and send them out with me,” Manticore says. “That transport of theirs isn’t packing. The Thrashers can take that, I’ll take care of Concorde. I’ll even cap him for free.”

“You make one move against my orders and you can kiss your paycheck for this mission goodbye,” the Foreman says. “In fact, you do anything without my say-so, I’ll have Archimedes here drain every last one
of your accounts.”