Adapted from and Inspired by the adventure “Yippee-Ki-Yay, Nova City!”
from Nick Shepley / Arclands Online
The team had been contacted over the internet by a previous client of theirs, and a friend of Annie’s – Motherboard (also known as Dr Ross before her apparent ‘accidental death’ several years before). The message was cryptic, merely asking them to accept an invitation to a party when it arrived, as a favour to her.
A few minutes later Dispatch sent through a non-urgent request for the team to attend a ‘relaunch’ event in a weeks’ time. The glass-covered banquet hall at the top of The Tower, the largest, tallest building in Wessex built by Sir Damien Dalton, had been remodelled with additional anti-Meta defences (including a full suite of power dampeners and neutralisers) to prevent a repeat of the previous Meta-villain invasion and the team were invited to the official reopening.
The team didn’t fancy their powers being dampened though, if experience was anything to go by, the equipment shouldn’t fully affect Akira’s mystical abilities or Banshee’s, though it made phasing difficult. Whether it would affect Celestus’s newly acquired Star Knight-related powers were an unknown element; after all, the Terrans technical skills were quite impressive.
X-Ray had to wonder about the relationship between Dalton and Labyrinth. Could this be a trap? “We’ve had some shenanigans with him previously, haven’t we? Should we risk it?”
Reluctantly everyone agreed they should attend.
On the night the blizzard outside was blinding, a wall of white noise and wind. But inside the air was still, warm, and smelt faintly of ozone and expensive cologne. They had expected a corporate stiff to greet them. Instead, they were welcomed personally by Sir Damien Dalton who was talking to Alexander Helmes, the CEO of SpartaCorp about Helmes’ recent acquisition of KessKorp.*
On seeing the team, Dalton turned towards them and offered his hand. His grip was firm.
“I was worried the snow would ground you. Tonight isn’t just a relaunch party. It’s a statement. I want the good and powerful of Wessex to know that my Defenders aren’t the only team in town,” gesturing to a Sentinel drone (identical, Celestus noted, to those deployed by Dreadnought and Labyrinth) flying past the window and the team of Meta’s, his primary Defenders team, gathered outside in the snow.
“Tonight though, you’re off the clock. Relax. Drink my very expensive champagne. You’ve earned it.”
KessKorp was a weapons manufacturer specialising in reverse engineering Ziru Sirkan and other alien technology and had a reputation for supplying to anyone who could pay. They had had a run-in with the team previously when they had kidnapped Motherboard. Ross, was confined to a life support unit, her mental processing were able to be augmented beyond normal human parameters. When she needed “hands” in the physical world, she relied on something or some people known only as the Cybertribe, or by hacking into an available piece of networked technology and controlling it remotely using one of her multiple cyber avatars.
She (and her cyber avatars) had been rescued by the Balance and the Caledonian Protectorate some time ago, resulting in the company facing criminal charges and closing as a result. It seemed it had now been ‘acquired’ by Helmes.
When the team had later visited Switzerland they had discovered that the eight men and two women on the Labys Board of Directors included Sir Damian Dalton, Victoria Pryde and Alexander Helmes, the CEO of SpartaCorp – though the others had addressed him as Mordecai.
It had made them wonder if this meant that Mordecai Holmz, the secretive, never seen head of Leonidas Industries, might be the same person as Alexander Helmes?
It did make some sort of sense given that both companies were supposedly in competition and the monopolies commission would never ever agree to the companies working together, not least because both companies often competed against each other for contracts. If true, it did confirm that many of the large military contracts they were competing for were fixed between them.
* See Episode 80 – Jailhouse Shock & Episode 81 – Your City are Belong to Us
Back in the here and now, Dalton escorted the team into a private lift. It rose silently, opening onto the Executive Mezzanine—a floating glass box suspended above the Banquet Hall. To the Southern side of the tower, beside the banquet hall beneath the replaced security glass roof, was an Atrium running from that floor all the way down to the ground floor lobby. There was a small, open balcony above a large spinning sculptural installation and its restraining spars.
The transition was jarring. The noise of the party—the jazz, the laughter, the clinking glasses were instantly cut off by military-grade acoustic dampening as they entered. Up here, the silence was absolute.
The suite was a masterpiece of minimalist wealth. The floor consisted of polarised glass, allowing them to walk directly over the party happening forty feet below. It felt like walking on air. In the centre of the room, a holographic table glowed softly, displaying a rotating blueprint of a building – a retrofitted warehouse in the Shambles according to the display. Sir Damien walked over to the wet bar and poured himself a glass of sparkling water. He looked at the holographic building, then back at them.
The ‘party host’ mask dropped, replaced by something more serious. “You’re wondering why you’re here,” he said, gesturing to the hologram. “I want to offer a grant to a team that isn’t one of my own.” He tapped the table. The hologram expanded, showing bedrooms, a training facility, and a hangar. “This is the Sanctuary Project,” he explained. “The UK has enough vigilantes, unaccountable people in masks hitting muggers in alleys. What we don’t have is an institution.” He looked at each of them in turn. “I’ve been watching you. You don’t just fight; you mitigate damage, you think about the fallout. That is rare.”
He gestured towards the holographic building, “The grant covers the deed to this facility, a five-year operating budget, and a legal retainer. No strings. You wouldn’t be working for me, you will be working for and across the whole of the UK, and I’ll continue to fund you as you expand across the country.
There will be no corporate oversight, I’ll just continue to pay the light bills. What do you say? Ready to become the start of an independent, superhero network of teams?”
X-Ray spurted out, “Sounds like a bribe. What’s in it for you?” He wondered if this was going to get Labyrinth off their backs?
“Insurance.” Dalton replied, “When the next alien attack or near-extinction event hits, I want to know there’s a first line of defence that isn’t on a government or corporate leash.”
Banshee was suspicious. “So we’d have full control over who is accepted into this network? No interference?”
“Yes.”
“So, what you’re offering us is what? Premises and money with no interference or corporate oversight?” Dalton smiled and nodded then checked his watch—an analogue piece, rare tech these days. He sighed, buttoning his tuxedo jacket. “Duty calls,” he said, adjusting his cuff links. “I have to go down and give the opening toast. The Board gets nervous if I’m not visible.”
He walked over to the private lift doors and paused before pressing the button. “Don’t make your minds up yet. Take ten minutes. Look over the proposal. Drink the expensive scotch — God knows the board members won’t appreciate it. I’ll come back up after the speech, and we can discuss this further then.”
He flashed his winning smile one last time. “And please… don’t break the furniture. It’s imported.” The doors hissed open, he stepped in and adjusted his jacket before reaching over and pressing a button on the control panel. The lift door shut, magnetic locks engaged. The team were left alone.
Banshee relaxed and morphed back into Mary. She walked over to the drinks table glancing at the Holo-Table as she did so. She couldn’t help noticing that the “Sanctuary” was designed with heavy containment cells. Not only was it illegal for civilians like them to imprison people, given the scale of the security was Dalton expecting them to catch monsters? Imprison Gods?
X-Ray was more concerned that this building was located in the centre of the now decimated Shambles district. A location that had only recently experienced an explosive clearance, seemingly in readiness for this so-called Sanctuary Project as well as replacing the now demolished slums with up-market housing!
Mary continued walking over to the bar and glanced at what was available; there was champagne, mineral water and a bottle containing an 80-year-old single malt. She opened the whisky bottle and poured herself a generous portion of the good stuff. Turning and raising her glass, she exclaimed, “Well, this is very good ‘Scotch’, so I’m not making any promises about not breaking the furniture for a start.”
Everyone else was looking down through the glass floor.
From this height, the people below looked like ants in tuxedos and ball gowns. They saw Dalton enter next to a giant kinetic sculpture, shaking hands and heading for the stage.
Then, movement off to one side caught their eye. On the far west wall, the service sector lift doors slid open. These were not the polished guest lifts, these were the heavy, grey freight lifts used for bringing in catering equipment. However, no catering staff came out. Instead, a squad of twelve armoured figures, wearing matte-white tactical armour that blended perfectly with the marble pillars, spilt out into the shadows behind the stage. They moved with practiced liquid efficiency.
One of them raised her hand and the guest lifts locked down. It seemed as though they were the only people in the building who saw them arrive. The transition from “Gala” to “Hostage Scene” seemed to happen in slow motion. Because they were behind soundproof glass, they could look down and see the nightmare begin before they heard a whisper of it. They were looking down through the floor at a silent movie.
X-Ray muttered, “they look a bit like Imperial stormtroopers from up here.”
Below, seemingly unaware of the armed intrusion, Sir Damien stepped up to the crystal podium. He tapped the microphone, and smiled, raising a hand to quiet the room. The crowd turned toward him, a sea of black ties and glittering jewellery. They looked relaxed. They clearly felt safe.
Behind the crowd, the twelve soldiers in winter-white tactical armour moved into the room in a perfect fan formation, their weapons raised – compact, suppressed submachine guns.
The team looked at each other for a second as X-Ray and Celestus exchanged worried looks; they’d been told that the building had been fitted with power-suppressing technology. They didn’t feel any different, but they needed to know for sure. X-Ray held up his fist and a smile slowly crossed his face as it began to glow. On the other side of the room Celestus rose a couple of feet off the ground and hovered. It seems the suppression tech was either not working at this time or didn’t currently affect them, at least within this part of the tower. Celestus needed to check his Star Knight ‘gifts’ also still worked and was happy to discover that his psi-blade ability was equally unaffected, for now anyway. Down below the infiltrators were aiming their weapons high above their heads.
They watched in horror. There was no sense in banging on the glass or shouting; the acoustic dampening that Dalton had bragged about earlier appeared to be working perfectly, unlike the threatened meta-dampeners.
Looking down it was clear that the soldiers weren’t shooting to kill, yet. They were shooting out the communications. One soldier fired three precise shots into the ceiling, shattering the Wi-Fi nodes and the internal sensor array.
A heavy magnetic lock engaged with a hiss that sounded like a sealed airlock. A holographic text scrolled across the door panel in red block letters:
LOCKDOWN LEVEL 5. REMAIN IN PLACE. AUTHORITIES HAVE BEEN NOTIFIED. (ESTIMATED RESPONSE TIME: 10 MINUTES)
Suddenly Celestus fell to the floor, his power of flight seemingly nullified. Whatever they have done when they’ve fired at the nodes appeared to have activated the anti-meta inhibitors. X-Ray’s hand had also stopped glowing.
Below, Dalton appeared to freeze mid-sentence. He looked as though he had spotted the movement in the back of the room. For a heartbeat, he looked as though he might run. He looked in the direction of the guest lifts, then looked at the crowd of people between him and the gunmen, people he had invited and he straightened his jacket.
He stepped off the podium, placing himself deliberately between the gunmen and the nearest group of guests. He held up his hands, palms open and says something out loud to the crowd of frightened guests. A soldier stepped forward – the leader, apparently. She struck him across the face with the butt of her rifle and he went down.
The crowd flinched as one organism. A woman, her mouth opens in terror, apparently screaming in a silent cry. In the chaos a champagne tower got knocked over, crashing silently to the floor.
Just as panic began to ripple through the crowd, the buildings’ automated security reacted. “ALERT,” a synthetic voice announced in their suite, cool and detached. “SECURITY BREACH DETECTED. INITIATING PRIVACY PROTOCOL.”
It happened instantly. The glass floor beneath their feet – their only view into the room below – flickered. In a split second the transparent glass had turned a solid, opaque matte grey. The view of the party had vanished, they were staring down at a grey slab floor.
Simultaneously, heavy blast shutters slammed down over the panoramic windows of the suite with a deafening CLANG-CLANG-CLANG. Their view of the city had disappeared as the suite was plunged into darkness, lit only by the angry red pulse of the emergency strip-lighting along the floor.
Now that they were blind, the silence of the suite was broken. The building’s audio dampeners had failed or been overridden. They could hear it now, the THUMP-THUMP-THUMP, the rhythmic, dry coughing of suppressed automatic fire but was it into the crowd or equipment?
The private lift Dalton used moments ago was locked down on the ballroom floor. The panel was dead. No lights. No power.
Celestus rushed over to the lift and tried to use his meta-enhanced strength to pull the doors open. After a few seconds and a major physical effort, he succeeded, only to stare down a seemingly empty lift shaft. Without flight there was no way to leave using that route.
The suite was pitch black. The only light came from the red emergency strip at the base of the walls. They were blind, but they weren’t deaf. Through the floor, they could hear the muffled, terrified crowd below, punctuated by the heavy boots of the soldiers securing the perimeter. They needed eyes on the target.
Mary immediately changed back into Banshee and tried to phase through the floor only to collapse, holding her head and moaning. Her attempt to phase had caused intense psychic feedback. Thankfully she had tried to phase alone and was not carrying anyone else as that could have been fatal for any ‘passengers’.
Thankfully Akira’s teleportal power was mystical in origin and as such should be unaffected by the power disruption. However, if he was to ‘port down to the floor below he had no way now to confirm that someone wasn’t occupying the same spacial location – last thing he wanted was to discover half a guest fall in from the other side if the portal collapsed.
However rendered blind where they were, opening a portal to the ballroom seemed their best option. But first they needed to be invisible and thankfully Banshee could manage to extend that ability to others. Akira’s invisibility used the same mystical source as his teleportation ritual, and he was unable to maintain both together.
It was time to crash the party. As a group all holding onto Banshee Akira manifested a portal. As they stepped through they could see that the ‘stormtroopers’ guns were pointed at the now whimpering and utterly terrified hostages.
The room had been transformed; the warm lighting was gone, replaced by harsh emergency lights. The guests were huddled in the centre of the room, surrounded by the armed guards.
However, their eyes were drawn to the main guest lift doors. The air there was warping, like a heat haze in winter. Four figures appeared out of the haze. They moved differently than the soldiers, they moved like they owned the room.
First out was a giant figure easily two and a half metres tall, and he looked like a walking boulder.
Next out was a female figure composed of blue energy. She didn’t walk, she flickered, zipping from one side of the room to the other in jagged blue streaks, checking the perimeter faster than the eye could follow. The carpet singed where she paused.
Behind was a wraith-like figure wrapped in shifting, smoke-like wrappings. On seeing her Banshee’s Ban Sidhe began to scream in her mind.
The boss man entered last. His feet didn’t touch the floor, floating a few inches above it, the tails of his coat drifting in a wind that didn’t exist. He wore a helmet with a single vertical slit. He glided toward the centre of the room, toward Dalton, who was on his knees, bleeding from a cut lip. The floating man gestured and Dalton found himself lifted bodily into the air – no hands, just local gravity reversed – until he was eye-level with the floating villain.
Alarm bells rang in X-Ray’s mind as he realised that for some reason the four of them appeared to be unaffected by the suppression technology.
Behind them, they could hear the sound of the kinetic sculpture spinning, and the terrifying sound of two hundred people screaming in unison, suddenly silenced by a voice amplified over the PA system. “Down. Everyone down. If you run, you bleed. Any attempt at heroics and others WILL die as a result.”
The man in the visor spoke, “Mr. Dalton,” he said, his voice calm, unamplified it still projected clearly throughout the room. “I apologise for the theatrics. But you have something in your vault that doesn’t belong in this dimension. We are here to liberate it.”
Celestus wasn’t willing to wait and watch any longer. He pulled free from Banshee’s grip, becoming fully visible and rushed the nearest guards even as he called forth his psi-blade and ‘stabbed’ the first soldier that tried to intercept him, causing him to collapse, completely drained of strength. Celestus smiled, his new abilities appeared to be unaffected by the dampeners.
Meanwhile, X-Ray was trying to see if he could attune himself to the electromagnetic spectrum again. Despite the pain he was able to feel the energy surrounding him and realised the entire building was now completely isolated. As though in response everyone was suddenly deafened by a loud and constant clanging sound as alarms went off throughout the building as every floor locked down.
A gleeful Celestus suddenly shouted out “Flash!” A second later he unleashed an intense flare of blinding light from his chest even as his team members closed their eyes and turned away. The room was filled with screams as everyone was apparently temporarily rendered blind. Whether those powered individuals that they’d seen were affected by it or not was another matter.
Unfortunately one side effect of his assault was for the armed guards to instinctively respond in the only way they knew how – machine gun fire erupted throughout the room as several of them fired, their trigger fingers reacting before their brains. At least one of the guests failed to fall to the floor fast enough and was hit by a bullet fired blindly.
Celestus charged the next nearest soldier and cut into his psyche with his psi-blade, draining him also of his strength. He collapsed, his gun falling to the ground beside him.
The guy that looked like a walking human-shaped boulder, charged towards him (and the others still invisible who were standing behind him), grabbing a heavy marble bust of Napoleon from a nearby plinth – probably weighing 30 kilogrammes – as he did so and crushed it into dust, before blowing the powder into the crowded hostages coating everyone, including the invisible team thereby revealing their silhouettes. Seeing the results he smiled as he punched out at Celestus with his massive fist.
Alexander Helmes was standing in the crowd, glass still in hand waiting calmly. He did not look worried.
Stepping forward, Akira unleashed a series of mystical blasts starting with the latest arrival, their boss man who was still holding Dalton in the air. He struggled against the invisible grip holding him. Dalton was trying to appear brave, but was clearly terrified.
The blast hit the man floating behind Dalton, but he appeared to shrug off the blast, though he immediately repositioned Dalton’s body so that he was now between Akira and himself.
“You’re insane, Vector” Dalton choked out. “The Vault is bio-locked. You can’t open it.”
“We don’t need to open it,” Vector replied smoothly. “We just need the encryption key to transmit the data out.”
Meanwhile, Akira had targeted the wraith-like female and unleashed a second energy bolt at her, only to discover she was in some form of insubstantial state as the energy blast passed straight through her and almost hit one of the guards standing behind her, who was trying to remove his helmet.
His next bolt hit the granite mountain of a man but failed to do any visible damage beyond making him even angrier, though he did appear to be struggling slightly. Not waiting to see if it had slowed him down, Akira targeted the last of the four and was rewarded when he hit her square on the chest causing her to collapse to the ground.
The man mountain responded by swinging his massive fist at the nearest target, Celestus who managed to dodge the blow.
Behind him Celestus saw Vector lower Dalton to the ground, but kept him pinned. He turned to a shrouded figure – one they hadn’t noticed previously because he had been standing perfectly still in the shadow of a pillar and nodded. The figure stepped back and vanished into the shadows.
Before he could respond, Celestus was attacked by the blue female of the group who had regained her feet and had some sort of insubstantial lightning blade phased out of her hand. He dodged again and tried to fly up only to struggle and twist so the ‘blade’ failed to connect as she zipped past him straight at a dust-covered X-Ray!
X-Ray had less than a second to respond as he had been trying to work out whether he should be attending to the wounded female who had been shot, or take on the villains. He sighed in relief when he saw one of the other guests crawl over and, groping with his now blood covered hands, found the victim and was muttering something about being a surgeon and applying a tourniquet to the wound using his belt.
The female rushed in and tried to stab him as he remembered too late that he hadn’t yet erected his personal force field! The stake-like projection skimmed past his ribs giving him the equivalent of a static shock but thankfully caused him no real injury.
The other female attacker unleashed an energy attack at Banshee. Surprisingly, it connected with her insubstantial form leaving her dazed by the attack. She responded with a terrorising scream that enveloped all three of Vector’s powered, even as Akira tried to cage them with a force cage.
It didn’t help that the guests were beginning to regain their sight and were screaming and trying to get to their feet and run towards the lifts – only to discover they’d been locked down.
It meant that the guards’ eyesight was also returning to normal and as a result, were starting to threaten the guests, rounding them up and herding them back towards the giant spinning sculpture.
The Grand Atrium was a hundred and forty-storey high cylinder of air, dominated by The Cartographer. It was designed as a kinetic sculpture—three massive, interlocking rings of brushed aluminium and light, rotating gracefully around a magnetic core.
That only left the surgeon and his patient still on the dance floor as he tried to patch the wound. A calm voice was heard emanating from Vector, “Stop, or we will be forced to kill the hostages, starting with the good Samaritan and his patient here…” pointing at the pair of them.
Akira tried to focus on disarming the remaining ten gunmen by floating the guns out of their hands, but there were too many individual targets spread over too much space for him to be able to achieve such a task.
Banshee resubstantialised herself and called the others over their commdots. “I think we should negotiate. They’ve got prisoners, making this a hostage situation first and foremost. It’s a bit lively. I think we should try asking what they are after, you know?”
Before any of the others could respond, X-Ray fired off an energy blast at the Wraith female aimed at her head. The tight beam blast hit and sizzled her brain causing her to momentarily collapse.
In response the guards began to push a number of the now-terrified guests in the direction of the sculpture and the open shaft all the way down to the lobby, so many floors below.
Akira raised his hands and shouted at the armoured figure still holding Dalton in the air in front of him, “Okay let’s talk. What do you want? What are you after?”
Vector didn’t reply to Akira directly, instead he addressed his floating victim, “Mr. Dalton, again may I apologise for the theatrics. You have acquired a fragment of a Terminus dimensional navigation device. Tell us how to access it or face the dire consequences…”
Dalton struggled against the invisible grip holding him in the air. He was trying to appear brave, but it was clear that he was actually pretty terrified. “ you’re insane,” he choked out. “The vault is bio-locked, you can’t open it.”
“We don’t need to open it,” Vector replied, “we just need the encryption code, so we can transmit the data out.”
Suddenly Dalton was pulled from his grip as a force cage formed around him and dragged him across the room only for the Stone Mountain of a man to grab the energy bubble and toss it across the room in the direction of the sculpture. Akira was forced to dematerialise his cage in order to stop him falling over the edge by turning it into a wall instead.
Dalton ended up sprawled beside the guard rail with the crush of about 30 of the guests that they’d started to separate from the rest a minute or two earlier. Six of the ten guns were focused on them, laser sights painting red lethal ‘dots’ on their heads and chests as a reminder that they would be disposed of first if there was any more resistance.
The device, or whatever it was that they were seeking, X-Ray was coming to the opinion that he was tempted to think that if it doesn’t belong here, why not let them have it. It was no skin of their nose, surely?
Celebrus had a feeling they weren’t from here, so could they be from the Imperium or border worlds? He tried using his total recall to see if there was anything he’d seen or read that matched these intruders, the remaining ten guards or mercenaries he dismissed as simply hired guns. His mind drew a blank to matching faces or even matching known humanoid species.
Banshee and Akira had a momentary revelation; the four of them might be Terminus soldiers left behind when the dimensional gate between the two dimensions collapsed. Terminus had gathered hundreds of powered ‘knights’ from the multitude of parallel Earths they’d conquered previously and manipulated their loyalty so they now served the omniversal Emperor Omega. If they were a group of interdimensional reavers that had been left behind when the war ended, were they somehow trying to send a signal ‘home’ to the Dyson sphere that was Terminus hoping they would be rescued? Unlikely to happen given they had personally destroyed the Directory with all the para-dimensional coordinates to other dimensions before they had escaped home themselves.
They looked around as the man of stone started to increase in size and mass only to bound across the room and land in the central ring of the spinning sculpture even as the mercenaries started to force Dalton and the guests they’d separated from the crowd to clamber over the guard rail and grab hold of the sculpture’s outer ring.
Akira had spotted Helmes’s uncharacteristic calm and wondered if he had something to do with the current situation. In response, he cast an illusion to make all the guests, male and female, young and old, resemble Helmes down to the clothes, leaving everyone; mercs and guests alike, bewildered as to what was going on.
The real Helmes was caught by surprise, so much so that he dropped his champagne flute.
Suddenly Vector gestured and one of those clutching the outer ring instead of at a string of pearls, was lifted and cast into the inner ring, the action shattered Akira’s illusion to reveal that it was Dalton that had been so targeted.
The massive kinetic sculpture began to wobble.
They suddenly picked up a signal over their Commdots. It was not a broadcast; it was a tight beam transmission. Static hissed, then cleared. Someone had hacked into the intruders’ communication system and patched their commdots into the previously encrypted channel. It was something only Annie – or Motherboard? – was capable of doing.
Vector’s Voice: “Status, Tecton. I am seeing fluctuations in the mag-field.”
Tecton’s (the stone giant’s) Voice: “The sculpture is unstable. The hostages are panicking. Your plan will result in too much weight on the outer ring.”
Vector: “They are irrelevant. We need the encryption key from Dalton. If he doesn’t talk in two minutes… lighten the load.”
Tecton: “Copy. Dropping the outer ring on your mark.”
‘The Cartographer’ – that massive spinning kinetic sculpture in the Atrium wasn’t just a modern example of art, it weighed hundreds of tonnes. It was suspended over the void by four magnetic struts. A massively enlarged Tecton was standing on the central ring. Thirty hostages were hanging on to the Outer Ring. If he “lightened the load,” they weren’t planning to shoot them. He was going to snap the strut and drop thirty people, and the sculpture, down the shaft all the way to the lobby.
Tecton lashed out with his fists smashing the magnetic stabilisers. The rings were no longer rotating; they were listing violently to the left, hanging by a single groaning strut.
On the Outer Ring, thirty hostages in formal wear clung to the safety rails. They started to scream once more as the sculpture tilted. The leaning angle was getting steep—about 30 degrees. If they let go, they would slide off and fall. Below them was nothing, just a hundred and forty-storey drop to the marble floor of the lobby, which looked like a postage stamp from there.
Vector gestured again and Dalton flew across into Tecton’s outstretched hand. His size and density was so high that the metal plating beneath his boots was buckling. He held Dalton by the throat, dangling him over the central hole of the sculpture.
Tecton laughed as he explained to his victim, “I don’t have Vector’s patience, Dalton. I’m heavy. And this art project is fragile.” He stomped his foot and the entire structure shuddered. A bolt the size of a fist popped loose and plummeted into the dark.
“The encryption key. Or I let go. And then I jump… and the whole thing comes down with me.” He shouted at Dalton as he dropped him onto the central ring.
Tecton stamped his foot down again, and the whole sculpture shuddered as it tilted another five degrees. Banshee realised they couldn’t risk another assault on it as some the guests were already hanging on by their fingertips as it was. She dropped her invisibility and flew straight at Tecton and grabbing hold of his wrist turned them both insubstantial. The mercs raised their rifles as X-Ray reached out with his gravitic abilities and forced himself to make their armour and weapons excessively heavy. He had a choice to make as the combined weight of the guests and the sculpture was more than he could manage, and then there was the issue of the insubstantial Tecton who was trying (so far unsuccessfully) to throw off Banshee.
Even without him, it seemed likely that the whole thing, guests and all, were destined to drop.
Then a new voice broke into their comms channel. It overrode everyone else. It was loud, crisp, and dripping with unearned confidence. “Unknown assets in the Tower, this is Commander Ross, Dalton Tactical Command. We have the perimeter secured. Stand down and prepare for breach. Cutting all power in twenty seconds, nineteen…”
Their CommDots then received an override mechanised voice message apparently from Motherboard who appeared to have hacked in to the buildings internal systems, flagging a critical warning immediately.
“WARNING: KINETIC STRUCTURE INTEGRITY. POWER SOURCE: MAIN GRID A. BACKUP GENERATOR: NONE. FAILSAFE: MAGNETIC CLAMPS (REQUIRES POWER).”
The giant floating rings weren’t held up by steel cables, they were held up by electromagnets. The team had mere seconds to explain this to a man who wasn’t listening.
Akira screamed into his Commdot; “Ross, don’t turn off the power, because we’ve got the situation in hand. Our intel says that hostages will be killed if you cut the power! Give us a chance to save them!”
Ross: “We are initiating the ‘Blackout Protocol’ to blind the hostiles’ night-vision and disable their electronic locks. Cutting the main grid in five… four…”
Motherboard interrupted with a message to Ross: “You cut the power, thirty people will fall to their deaths!”
Ross replied, “Our intel says the hostiles are using the grid to decrypt the vault. We have to pull the plug. You’re too emotional, vigilante. Let the professionals work. Cutting power now! You’re welcome.”
The surrounding light died, the only light left was the terrified strobe of muzzle flashes but what they did have was their full meta powers back as the suppression fields collapsed. The low, powerful hum of the magnetic field—a sound they hadn’t even noticed until it was gone—cut out. For one second, there was absolute silence.
Then, gravity took over. The Cartographer dropped. It wasn’t a slow slide. It was in freefall before the emergency mechanical brakes engaged – rusty, unused callipers slamming into the rails. The screech of metal on metal was deafening, sending sparks cascading down the shaft, like fireworks.
The power was out, the magnetic hum was gone. The screaming had stopped, replaced by the groaning of metal.
X-Ray focused all of his gravi-kinesis on keeping the sculpture steady while Akira used his theurgical-kinesis to gather and pull the hostages (and Dalton) back into the room. By the time the remaining ten mercs had realised they were no longer pinned down and had got to their feet the hostages had been flown across the room by Akira to safety.
Everyone was looking at The Cartographer. X-Ray had stopped the rotation. For the last half hour, those central rings had been spinning so fast they looked like solid chrome. Now, they were still. As the centrifugal force died, the central sphere of the sculpture slid open like a camera iris. It glowed with a colour that hurt to look at – a violet that seemed to be behind their eyes, not in front of them.
Even without the hostages weight the sculpture was too heavy for X-Ray to hold as the emergency brakes shattered, and it began a controlled descent to the lobby and Ross’s gathered assault team a hundred and forty storeys below. It crashed with dignity, only really freefalling the last twenty metres. They elected to leave Ross to find out for himself that there were no bodies amongst the wreckage though Banshee elected to stop wrestling with the oversized Tecton and let him regain his physical presence by flying away, leaving her opponent to freefall down to the lobby after the sculpture.
Surprisingly, going by the screams of pain emanating up from the crash site he survived the encounter with the ground!
What remained behind was a rainbow breach into another reality, a rip in the fabric of space and parallel universes. Floating in its centre was a jagged, shifting fracture in reality, about the size of a human heart. It was a fragment of a Terminus dimensional gate creating and maintaining a paraversal breach opening; a bridge.
Vector’s Voice boomed from the darkness. “Clever Damien. You told us it was in the vault. You tried to make us chase a phantom while you kept the prize spinning in front of us in plain sight.”
A beam of light from a hovering drone hit the exposed Shard inside the fracture.
Vector continued, “Your tactical team have done what you refused to do, they stopped the spinning. Ghostframe… take it.”
Celestus used the distraction to manifest his psi-blade and charge at the female they’d nicknamed Wraith. She tried to dodge, but the psychic blade made contact, and she became solid, something she only fully realised when Celestus followed it up with a tap to her head, knocking her to her feet and leaving her semi-conscious.
Before he could rush the other one, the “Auxiliary Power” kicked in. It didn’t power the lights or the lifts, it apparently powered only the Research Interface located in the balcony above the shaft. A laser grid projected from the central console, connected directly to the Shard. The air around the Shard began to crystallise before floating up towards the roof.
The jagged violet fracture pulsed. It didn’t explode; it inverted. Gravity in the centre of the room flipped. Debris, glass, and both the shard and the Hard-Light Bridge shot instantly upwards, smashing through the glass ceiling of the atrium, punching a hole in the roof. The noise died down. The only sound was the wind howling through the shattered glass ceiling above and the distant sirens of police cars in the street below.
The self-repairing glass tried to reform but something, presumably the Shard, held the hole in the ceiling open allowing the blizzard outside in.
The mercs, unsure what to do now, elected to abandon their mission and backed away to the emergency stairs fleeing. Masks and chest plates removed, it was clear that beneath the armour they were wearing tuxedos (even their female leader). It looked as though it had been their intension to escape by mingling with the fleeing guests. Their original plan foiled, they ran for the emergency stairs and headed down, hoping they would be able to fool Ross’s men long enough to escape.
Dalton was leaning against a pillar, clutching his ribs, his tuxedo ruined. He looked up at the hole in the ceiling where the snow was falling in. Through the hole, they could see a thick beam of violet light shooting through the storm into the clouds.
“The dish,” Dalton whispered. “They’re going to the Transmission Array.” He looked at them, his eyes hard. “If they broadcast that map… they aren’t just opening a door. They’re breaking the lock on our reality. You have to stop them.”
They looked up at the breach in the ceiling. The snow wasn’t falling down any more, in the centre of the shaft, the snow was now falling up. It was time to finish this.
Celestus looked at the hole in the roof, at the floating object in the sky and muttered, “That wouldn’t be what these guys are here for, would it?”
Before anyone could reply the female composed of blue energy had zapped across and tried to blast Celestus who managed to dodge, more by chance than skill. In response, he manifested his psi-blade, striking out at her as she ran past him and leapt into the air below the hole only to start to float up through the hole and the glass roof, caught in the gravity stream.
Over their Commdots they could still hear the intercepted transmission from the others as the hacker called Ghostframe relayed, “Handshake confirmed. Downloading the trajectory map. 0%… 5%…”
The battlefield had changed. It was no longer a stand-off; it was a scramble to complete whatever they were doing or stop the signal from being sent.
Vector was shielding the hacker Ghostframe who was by the console on the balcony above. “Get the data, Ghost. I’ll squash the bugs.” He slammed his fists together, creating a shockwave that shook the building.
Ghostframe’s Voice: “Data envelope secure. The Shard is destabilising. You must ascend to the Array for broadcast.”
Vector, Voltage, and the hacker Ghostframe jumped into the shaft and were pulled up with it, riding the gravity stream like an lift of light. They were escaping to the roof.
Above, the violet display had changed to a rainbow of energy revealing a distant city, whose horizons curved upwards. It was as though the Northern Lights had given birth to a rainbow bridge.
X-Ray immediately projected an energy barrier between them and the shard as the three escapees stepped on to the roof and rushed to a satellite array, and began adjusting the antennae so it now faced the shard. Despite the blizzard and powerful winds trying to blow everyone off the glass roof, it was clear that the Balance had to try to stop them, even if they weren’t totally sure why.
Celestus exclaimed, “I’d just let them go, but we don’t know what the consequences of that might be.” He then jumped into the gravity stream and followed them onto the roof.
One of the guests hadn’t been fast enough in fleeing and was also caught up in the gravity flow. She was pulled up into the sky, forcing Celestus to have to catch her before the storm blew her over the side, away from the reversed gravity stream and into freefall down the side of the Tower.
Voltage and Vector tried to grab her as well, but Celestus was faster. Akira was able to force cage her and push her back inside the building to relative safety.
The others now joined Celestus on the windblown roof with Banshee insubstantial once more, so the winds didn’t affect her. She could see a man adjusting the satellite disk array. In response, she unleashed a destructive wail in the direction of the array but couldn’t be sure, thanks to the storm and reduced visibility, if she’d done any real damage.
Akira meanwhile was levitating and focused on casting the Airts of Ahgrazul spell to view the winding paths between worlds. He muttered the words, steadied his mind in readiness as his hands weaved the pattern to open the way. He relied on X-Ray and Celestus to handle Vector and Voltage on their own.
He wanted to find the path whilst blocking the signal. But first he had to stop the hacker from completing his transmission and, surprisingly, the send device was in this dimension, in a server room in the basement of the Tower! He opened a portal directly to it and simply pulled the plug on the server controlling the transmission though he had a feeling he was too late, the transmission had already been sent.
Returning to the roof, as the Airts spell dissipated, Akira shouted over at the hacker, “GO! Unless you want to be sent to the dream dimension and spend the rest of eternity howling in insufferable madness, you better stop what you’re doing and run away NOW!!!”
He immediately stopped, put his hands up and ran for the nearest access hatch and headed down the stairs.
Vector and Voltage stopped fighting and floated up into the air, but it didn’t look as though they were planning to go through the energy portal. Instead, they appeared to be waiting – for someone or something.
Celestus wondered if they were expecting a battle fleet to materialise on this side of the bridge and if so, would X-Rays’ barrier be powerful enough to stop it?
Meanwhile, Banshee had pulled out and extended her Bo Staff and had elected to try to stop Voltage from fleeing. She discovered to her surprise that Voltage was no longer formed of insubstantial energy as the first attack made physical contact with her ribs.
She considered turning her and the staff insubstantial and then materialising it when it was inside her, but really it was Vector she really wanted to punish for his callous decision to risk the hostages lives. Unfortunately this woman stood between them and appeared unwilling to step aside.
Banshee hit out time after time, only for Voltage to physically block each blow using her lightning speed and, despite multiple bruises, she smiled. ‘Crazy bitch’ thought Banshee who couldn’t help admiring her determination to protect Vector.
Meanwhile, X-Ray tried to maintain the barrier and blast away at Vector who was clearly tougher than he looked. Enough! X-Ray spun round and dropped his barrier before unleashing the strongest electromagnetic outburst he could manage directly at the shard.
The violet beam didn’t just stop; it whipped wildly, slicing through the clouds like a lightsabre before vanishing. The hole in the sky slammed shut with a sound like a thunderclap then the object gave out the brightest outburst of violet radiation that lit up the sky for miles then fell onto the glass roof of the tower, its energy spent at least for the moment. The light show and rainbow bridge vanished.
Surprisingly, at least to the Balance, Vector, and Voltage seemed to not be perturbed by the outcome as a V-shaped craft decloaked above them, hovering menacingly in the sky. A beam of light lanced the dark and brooding sky and enveloped both of them before pulling them straight into the belly of the craft, but not before Celestus flew straight at Voltage and ‘stabbed’ her with his psi-blade.
While this was occurring Akira was pleading with the Three in One that was the holy trinity of the Modrossus to allow him to see what thoughts were in Vector’s mind. He clutched at the medallion around his neck as he felt his mind blend with the fleeing figure.
++ He was abandoned, left behind after the Terminus invasion failed. He and his cronies managed to get together. He was aware that there was no way they could get a signal back to Terminus except through the… But he had now given Terminus the location, the trans-dimensional coordinates to this Earth. ++
As they got closer to the ships’ hatch, Vector shouted down. “This isn’t a victory, it’s a delay. Enjoy your days; they will be the last quiet ones you’ll ever know. It is done. The marker is placed. They know where we are now.” He looked at the team with what seemed to be genuine pity. “Prepare yourselves. Omega is coming.”
Vector looked down at them one last time. As though in reply, the semi-conscious body of Wraith smashed through the glass ceiling and proceeded to follow the other two into the belly of the beast. Then the unmarked craft zoomed away at a speed that even exceeded Celestus’s; accelerating straight up and reaching Mach 10 in a heartbeat, smashing the remaining windows of the Tower with its sonic boom.
They were currently alone on the roof, wind was just wind again, the snow was just snow. The smashed and shattered windows and glass panels were struggling to try to repair themselves. Meanwhile everyone inside was freezing. The Array was wrecked, and they were bruised, battered, and freezing, but the sky was finally closed.
Akira floated down and cautiously gathered the apparently spent fragment intending to deposit it with the Artefact Research Centre rather than return it to Dalton. Going by the noise below not only was an injured Tacton in the custody of A.E.G.I.S. but Ross’s tactical team have finally breached the doors – about half an hour too late. They or the Police had either finally managed to climb all those stairs or had figured out how to activate the lifts again and had finally reached the ballroom level.
They were swarming the building, shouting orders, looking busy. Dalton was sitting by a pillar, a paramedic checking his ribs. He saw them approach and waved the medic away before standing up, wincing.
“They got away,” he said. It was not a question. “But the signal?” he asked.
“Something was transmitted, we don’t know for sure how much information was sent.”
“Get some rest, I have a feeling that things are going to be busy. And the Sanctuary Project? Have you reached a decision?”
X-Ray replied, “If we do this… You stump up the money, we do it our way.”
“That was what was on the table.”
“Then in principle yes but on our terms, and we want to know more before we sign anything…” If nothing else, they needed to discuss this with their current patron, Dalton’s estranged daughter Bethany and her legal team.
Outside, the snow had stopped. The clouds had parted, revealing a clear, cold Starfield. Somewhere up there, Vector was watching. But for tonight? they had survived.
Next day Frankie informed the team that they were trending on social media but not in a good way. There were thousands of posts (initially posted by bots) claiming that the team had faked the attack to make themselves look good and bury a series of expose’s and negative stories about the team that had been threatened to be leaked before they were obliterated. There were no such new reports, but their very absence was fuelling a thousand conspiracy theories as to what was supposedly ‘missing’; each one worse than the previous rumour.
A.E.G.I.S. – Authority for Enforcement, Gaols and Intervention Services
Superhero Adventures, UK Style 