It's middle of the off week, and I decided on another installment of Sidekick Carl to wrap up the cliffhanger. As usual, here's the first and previous installments, and how about a link for the Big Red (Robotech) Guy?
Constructor carried Carl in his arms as they emerged from the burning building. It was clear that Carl was grievously wounded. A tear in his suit ran from the neck gasket to the hip. The edges rippled as the nanites struggled to make repairs, but every time the rip started to close, it came open again. “We did it,” Carl said. “We won. We beat Baskiliskus.”
“Yes,” Constructor said.
“We beat him, for now. We need to get you help.”
Carl shook his head. “No,
it’s… too late. Besides, you have… a new partner now.” Constructor looked to
their companion, a clean-shaven man dressed as he was, complete with a silvery
construction helmet. “Constructor… meet Constructor.” And the music swelled…
until a ricochet destroyed the TV set.
* * *
Agent John Carter rushed toward the convention center, leading a team that had accompanied him to investigate a possible sniper five blocks away. “Talk to me, Lauren,” he said. “What’s happening, and how did we miss it?”
The voice that answered was his wife, who had volunteered to mingle as an invited wedding guest. “We have a superhuman Class 5 or higher, possibly cybernetically based, armed with an advanced plasma weapon,” she said. “The subject made a strong-arm entry, probably after coming down from the roof. We have Heavy teams coming from the south end.”
“Why didn’t we have a Heavy
team at the other end?” Carter fumed.
“Because somebody said
only a lunatic would come from the north end, and somebody else agreed with
her! And we weren’t wrong!”
“Yeah,” Carter said, “that was my fault.” As he spoke, the west side of the convention center came into view. He and his team quickly found cover. “What’s the casualty count?”
“No fatalities… yet,”
Lauren said somberly. “Big Red’s down, if you can believe that. Captain Thunder
took a hit, too. There’s more that are hurt. Badly. We need a med team, John.
Quick.” After a moment’s pause, she added, “I love you.”
* * *
Inside the chapel door,
now blocked by a blast shield, Dana finally turned to Carl and spoke. “Is this
someone else you know?”
Carl just shook his head. “I don’t know… well, I’m not sure,” he said. “Law of averages, really, it would be somebody from the old days. I can think of one, except I wasn’t even there. I just heard about it, after.”
He looked around. There
were at least a dozen others in the chapel, including the prime minister of
Bessarabia and his guards. His gaze turned toward the stained-glass window. On
examination, it was abnormally narrow, barely wider than his own chest. All the
other windows were little more than slits. If you looked through any of them,
the view would be cloudy or distorted. If you pointed advanced sensors at one,
the readings would be a hopeless jumble, and you would probably set off an
alarm. “Whoever’s out there, he would have looked at the window first. Or she,
I wondered, and if it’s who I think, so did Constructor. It could have worked,
if you didn’t care about hitting anyone else…” He dived to one side as a plasma
bolt came through the window.
* * *
The would-be assassin stood amid a scene of chaos and devastation. Flame retardants poured down from the ceiling, adding to a dingy mist that already shrouded the room. Tables lay smashed and smoldering. Guards lay wounded, mostly groaning. Captain Thunder still twitched, with Audrey’s kits gathered keening at his side. A Latin man cursed bilingually from his hover chair. Audrey herself peered out from under her table, growling and occasionally hissing. Her red-pelted mate crouched beside her. Her other mate lay to one side of the chapel door, half his torso seemingly one smoldering wound. That he had a torso at all might have been owed to the remnants of a serving tray almost as large as he was, clutched in one hand. In all likelihood, he owed more to the state of the assassin’s weapon, which had gone from launching fist-sized bolts of plasma to wobbling clouds of gas and sparks. That, in turn, could be accounted for by the sparks and occasional puffs of vaporized fluid that came from a hose that connected the assassin’s weapon to some kind of backpack.
The assassin’s head turned toward a single kit mere feet away, cowering inside a dropped salad bowl. Audrey snarled. The attacker instead leveled a forearm at an emboldened agent and fired one of several visible pods. It launched a spray of tiny, evidently non-lethal darts which sent him sprawling, thrashing and cursing too violently to be fatally wounded.
“We have the whole center on lockdown,” Lauren called out from what remained of a security perimeter facing the chapel door. “Surrender now, and you won’t be harmed.” As she spoke, the assassin turned again, to see the 12-foot-tall battle mech known as Big Red sit up in the outdoor dining area. A coating of melted glass dropped from the sensor array that could be considered his face. There was an almost musical metallic sound as he raised a bright orange scimitar six feet long.
Another man emerged, not
tall but stocky and very muscular. His hair was brown, and his eyes were a
piercing blue. The slender women named Dana Shelton followed close behind. At
his appearance, the assassin’s head cocked attentively. “You had your shot,” he
said authoritatively. “It might have worked; that’s luck of the draw. Now, you
can shoot it out here, or take your chances outside. But you aren’t getting
through that door.”
In answer, the assassin finally slung the weapon. At a twitch of a gloved hand, a glowing upper breastplate dropped to the floor. It broke apart on impact, and set the carpet ablaze. The backpack came off in one hand. The attacker held it up as an unmistakable warning, given more urgency by a visible fluid leak and an assortment of flashing warning lights. Lauren and the agents backed up. That was when a blurred shape literally sent the attacker flying.
All eyes turned to the blur, which resolved itself into the Latin in the hover chair. He held up the backpack, gripped with a bulky metal gauntlet that covered his forearm. “Soy Hombre Acero,” he said through gritted teeth. “Puedo hacer, tonto.”
That was when Audrey
rushed to her mate’s side. “You idiot!” she snarled, her words barely
recognizable. “You took a plasma ball for Sidekick Carl!!!”
* * *
The bolt hit the chapel ceiling, confirming that the shooter was outside. The window was almost 6 feet off the ground, low enough to look through but too high to leap or vault through, assuming, of course, that the assassin’s abilities were on the level of a human. Carl and Dana huddled together at the sound of metallic scraping. They both looked up in relief as a form did appear in the window. “It was this way or through a wall,” John Carter said. Behind him, Big Red loped past, headed north. “Come through, quickly.”
With Carl’s help, Dana vaulted through the window, carrying her shoes in one hand. “Get to your RV, the path is clear,” John Carter said. As Carl followed, he added, “Get to her, then drive.” Carl only shook his head.
Agent Carter and his team cautiously rounded the corner to the north end. Outside the atrium entrance, at least a dozen agents surrounded the assassin. The intruder was bound in several heavy nets. For good measure, Big Red was applying the force of his right foot, or half of it. Some might have assumed the massive damage was from the battle, but Carl knew it from of old. The mech had never given an account of it in his limited communications, and forensic examination confirmed only that it had been made by something with teeth. Beyond the circle, med teams were evacuating the wounded. He followed a hyperbaric pod that held Audrey’s mate, with Audrey crouched on top. Her eyes met his for a piercing moment before the pod disappeared into the hold of a quad-fan hopper.
Lauren turned as her husband approached. “We secured the subject as best we could,” she said. She tensed but did not comment as Carl passed her. “The Heavies laid down the nets when a command to remove the helmet was refused. I talked them out of taking it off. We might have a tentative ID, but then I’m guessing he can tell you about that…”
Carl took one look, albeit a long one, and nodded. “Borgus,” he said. “Appeared about 12 years ago, got on the map for retiring the fourth Hombre Acero. Ran into a few other supers and one of the Raven’s crews over the next 8 months. Disappeared after fighting Constructor to a draw. Most people figured it was an out-of-towner who went home. Constructor wasn’t so sure.”
The helmeted head turned
as he drew nearer and knelt. There was no sign of anxiety, nor any further
effort to escape. “What do you think?” John Carter said. “Can we take that helmet
off?”
“I wouldn’t,” Carl said. “It
might kill her.” He rose and turned to walk away.
“Then who is `she’?” Carter
called out irritably.
“I don’t know `who’, but
I’m pretty sure `what’,” Carl said. “It’s another patient of Dr. Hydro’s.” And
with that, he did walk away.
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