11 [ G series ] Meanwhile, back at the ranch...
I rose on a pillar of force to meet up with my Apex armor on its way down, leaping forward as I let the force construct vanish behind me, I stretched my arms and legs outwards as the suit wrapped itself around me. As soon as the last latch snapped shut and the suit pressurized I enveloped myself in an invisibility field that blocked out most of the spectrum of light while still letting in a limited bandwidth of electromagnetic signals.
Such as the ones that lit up the interior of my mask with images from my drones showing Lucy’s ranch partially in flames, and a firefight taking place in front of her home between people in armored yellow jumpsuits and my sister’s heavily armed staff.
And, to my surprise, my brother in law who was right in the middle of the fight stalking around on extended digitigrade mechanical legs that put his height up above the Aim agent he was grabbing by the top of his head with the extended fingers of his artificial arm before tossing the man into another group of the beekeeper lookalikes pouring out of newly arrived van.
I could see that all four of his artificial limbs were connected by a harness fitted around his torso so that he could coordinate their motions without hurting himself with their motorized strength as he sent the AIM agent flying away. At the same time, he was also blocking a burst of flame with a gravity pulse emitting from a panel along the forearm of his opposite artificial arm, just before returning a beam of plasma from the palm of his hand at a guy in brown and yellow armor with a gigantic mechanical scopion tail who had shot the flames from the center of a claw on the end of his arm.
Wow Ker, I guess you’re not just the president of Kerwin Prosthetics, but you’re also a customer.
Boosting my speed with lines of force extending forward to push against my palms even as the directed gravity drive and the plasma jets on the bottom of my boots were sending me forward as fast as I could go, I still only arrived in time to see my sister as she began to unleash her wrath.
Two planes of force rose at angles under the portions of the driveway to each side of the newly arrived vans in front of the house and then pressed the slabs of cement together against the vehicles with the sound of crumpling metal.
A few of the people that had still been inside the vans managed to almost get out of them before getting trapped inside, their arms waving around franticly from between the edges of the two slabs before going still as they pressed in hard.
They had been warned that it was now an unwise choice to be the bad guys around here. I had made it clear that was a rule.
It was on TV and everything.
Alright, there was no possibility that Mary had been inside any of those vans, Lucy would have checked, so where was she? Pulling up short of the battlefield, I closed my eyes to focus on where I sensed the cosmic rays all around me.
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Only to feel something pushing them all away from the area, from a spot centered on where I could see dust being softly pushed away from the spot where my invisible sister just had to be standing. I guess we can’t be the only ones able to detect cosmic rays, so if Lucy is blocking anyone from detecting someone else with our powerset instead of looking for her daughter, Mary must already be safe.
Closer up now, I could see that the guy in the armor had some sort of scorpion thing going on with both the tail, and a multi-legged logo in yellow on the brown carapace covering his chest and that he had Ker pinned in place with blasts of some sort of weaponized entropic energy shooting from the tip of the tail which he was using to slowly erode my brother in law’s shield emitter even as Scorpion guy was stomping over at him.
Scorpion guy also seemed to be pretty pleased with himself as he stalked forward at Ker, right up until I pushed a good sized stone right in front of his lead foot sending the man into a full faceplant onto the ground.
After all, Lucy seemed to be covering up her powers by mimicking some sort of earth mover, so I decided that I might as well keep up the theme by digging into the ground and pulling it away in two directions to sink the scorpion themed guy into the ground before pushing the soil back to bury him shoulder deep with only his head above ground.
Of course, dirt wouldn’t hold someone in a power suit down for long, but it did cover up the invisible clamp I had placed around him that was keeping him from even wiggling around while he was held in place.
With a quick look around, and seeing the remaining AIM agents being hurled upward in bursts of exploding dirt, my brother in law stepped up to the buried man and kicked him under the chin sending his helmet flying away.
Aiming the glowing end of the plasma emitter in the palm of his weaponized prosthetic arm at the guy’s face, Ker’s expression turned from anger to confusion. “You’re not Gargan? Who the hell are you and what do you want with my daughter?”
A rather thin faced young woman, no more than a teen, her head bathed in sweat under a hood covered in sensors glared up at him. “Chief Scientist Lamarr. My branch of AIM needs to be rebuilt, and I want young minds to do it. You and your wife are both too smart not to have a genius for a kid, and we want her. You owe AIM Korman, and I’m here to collect.”
She twisted her head around and swore, “How the hell are you keeping me pinned down with dirt!”
A panel of force appeared next to my brother in law’s ear and began to vibrate. His eyes twitched as he nodded his head the slightest amount. “Nanobots, my wife saturated the grounds of the entire ranch with them.” His artificial limbs began to fold back up as his harness pulled back below panels that snapped shut until his limbs once again appeared as entirely normal arms and legs. “She’s had our AI running them while she got Mary away to our panic room, but as soon as she takes them over directly… Ah. There they go.”
Ribbons of force began to almost gently worm their way beneath mine, and then carry streams of dirt into the gaps of the girl’s armor before slowly starting to form bands of force to tear the armor away from the person inside it.
I removed my own force fields to give my sister room to work as the Scorpion armor was pryed off in showers of damp soil and seemingly pushed away by clumps of soil off to all sides of the front garden.
The various members of my sister’s staff soon began to emerge from cover, fully equipped with conventional arms and body armor worn over their staff uniforms. They set to securing and applying first aid to the various unconscious and groaning people in yellow uniforms.
The panel next to Kev’s ear continued to vibrate carrying Lucy’s instructions to him. A trick I was going to have to pick up.
Looking down at the girl as she struggled to dig her way out of the dirt, he held out his right hand to her.
“Why don’t we talk inside? Perhaps it’s time to renew some old bonds. After all, Mary needs peers her own age and intelligence to learn and play with. And you won’t be the last ones to come after her.”