Stagger

1997

Three years earlier

Edward Nicolaus Rakowski was not accustomed to receiving mail. Communications? Sure. As the Legion’s resident genius and, vicariously, its digital technology manager, emails were a part of his daily life, be they internal, external, automatically generated or personally authored. He communicated via phone and video link – to his parents, mainly, but others if he needed to – and through instant message services online. He even took delivery of physical parcels too, sporadically; chemicals, materials, computer parts. All as was to be expected. But rarely actual snail mail – actual hand-written letters. Which is why he found himself staring curiously at the envelope he had received this morning, pondering something so decidedly odd.

It was addressed to him – there were typos in the name and the zip code had been written incorrectly and crossed over, but it was discernibly to him the letter was intended to go. It bore the Legion’s address – that was correct at least – and the return address identified it as being from his mother’s cousin. Which was strange. To the best of his eidetic memory, he’d never met the man.

More curious than paranoid, Ed had run the envelope through a few scans and a spectrometer looking for anthrax or explosives and the like, which of course had not been found. The Legion had a system in place for checking mail which the letter had already passed through, and for the brief, wildest second Ed wondered if maybe it wasn’t fan mail in some kind of esoteric disguise. Did he of all people have a groupie? A semi-illiterate groupie? Certainly he would’ve thought his Uncle Robert would’ve known how to spell Ed’s name properly. But he had only been with the Legion about 6 months – and while Ed did think he was settling in well, he was hardly the most exciting Acolyte. Hardly front and centre of any publicity. And IT was just not the sexiest occupation.

You never know, his inner voice shrugged; some people juggle geese.

He opened the envelope with quiet curiosity, leaning in all probability towards it being genuinely from Uncle Robert and Uncle Robert just genuinely being kind of dumb. The patchwork letter inside seemed to confirm that hypothesis – it was mostly hand-written in a kind of sloping, error-ridden scribble, but augmented with newspaper cut-outs glued on and folded over in various irregular squares. Ed’s eyes scanned the letter’s contents, silently disappointed at its mundanity. The whole thing was just nonsense – boring nonsense, the kind of ramblings of an old out-of-touch person trying desperately to be simultaneously wise, approachable and cool. Uncle Robert lurched from asking Ed how he was going, to terrible puns, to life advice, to original and distressingly poorly-metered poems. The newspaper cuttings were of job ads for – who knows, maybe for Ed to think about maybe 20 years in the future? – and then a story about a local dog that guided some children… a recipe for pierogi in Polish… a crossword puzzle?

Ed read through the whole letter, rapidly concluding that its main take-away was second-hand embarrassment. He stared glumly at the bottom of the page, where Uncle Robert had attempted to sign off with a bilingual pun that made sense in neither language, and the address and phone number below. God. It was clear he’d have to write something back. The man had clearly gone to a lot of effort; if he didn’t send some token reply his mother would never let him hear the end of it.

Ed let out a heavy sigh and moved his eyes down to his uncle’s phone number. Maybe a quick call would do. Ed was normally remise to voluntarily ring distant relatives, but if it saved having to write out an actual response to this nonsense…

Suddenly, Ed stopped. A frown twitched over his lips. He peered closer at the phone number, and then ran his gaze once more over the body of the letter. The weird clippings. The syntax and meter, the spelling errors. There was something… something odd…

And as he stared at it, in his mind’s eyes, Ed’s superhuman intellect began to rearrange the words and letters, to disassemble and reassemble the myriad pieces in a yearning, swirling pattern that spiralled around the page, yet somehow drew him in, asserted itself so compellingly that he was forced to disentangle it, to reforge the picture from the shards…

Until with a sudden rush of heat and adrenaline, Edward Rakowski saw the pieces coalesce and read the meaning in the mistakes:

Extract yourself

Discreetly

You are in mortal danger

Come alone. Come armed.

And then a series of co-ordinates.

*****

2000

Now

‘Legion, look alive.’

The psychic command raced out amongst the assembled as inside the underground city Natalia Baroque and Wally Cykes joined hands and linked together the Legion’s minds. Viktor Mentok felt it reach out and felt himself become a part of it, and for the first time in over a decade there were voices in his head beside his own. He felt a rush of heat as it surged through him, the connection, the power. Do you want to know our secret weapon, he’d asked the children during their first covert meeting. Do you want to know the Legion’s true strength? Union. Coordination. That’s why Caitlin was at every battle. That’s why the Legion was so dominant. She wasn’t just our heart – she was our Mind.

On the screen in front of them Heydrich buckled, and for a second it seemed like he was going to fall. Then the Black Death raised a bloody snarl, and once more disappeared into the Earth.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

“L19,” called Edward Rakowski, standing besides Mentok at the command console, his own hands racing through holographic data, “F24. K8.”

A shorthand list of power combinations the pair had prepared earlier. A simple division of duties – Mentok ordered, Rakowski predicted. The boy’s pace of analysis was blistering. He was an excellent spotter.

‘Optical blasts,’ Mentok ordered through Cykes and Baroque, commands racing at the speed of thought, ‘Chase the mole.’ Through the Siegfrieds’ eyes he watched a young Acolyte blast down a blinding stream of green energy, zig-zagging across the ground, melting stone, chasing a moving figure whose position the sensors continued to relay and track. Viktor once more flicked off and prepared to re‑position the hammer.

“B9. G22.”

‘Pixus’, Mentok thought, and a second later the Black Death’s hands erupted from the Earth beneath the laser‑eyed Acolyte’s feet. But his hands met empty air – the boy had already disappeared in a blur. At a thought, the suits of armour around the battlefield repositioned, protecting those nearby as the neutralisers struggled to get a bead.

“A12. R4.”

The Black Death shifted into superspeed and beside him Viktor heard the other genius swear, his eyes suddenly struggling to follow. Mentok suffered no such impediment – his mind burned with Scarlett fire and churned through commands faster than any speedster. His right hand rose and all around the battlefield the holographic emitters readjusted, throwing up false images of people nearby. The blackened blur diverted, momentarily off balance, then erupted with another electromagnetic pulse. The holograms blurred and wavered – but in that brief second of hesitation Siegfried 64 closed the gap and lunged, its metal hands latching on and holding the empath in place.

‘Keep outside range Giselle.’ Cykes.

‘Copy.’ Pixus.

‘Will, grab James, if he stumbles again prepare to redeploy.’ Baroque.

“A9. C13.”

S64, use Fireball.

The four of them watched as the metal armour attached to Heydrich glowed red and exploded, but not before the pale man’s body shimmered and two copies stumbled back, scrabbling across the rock as their counterpart died in flames. The replicas’ eyes flashed and twin beams of their own burning lasers shot out into the air, cutting a swathe through the floating drones.

“A3. A3.”

“Pizdets,” Mentok swore. His mind raced, trying desperately to pull the Disruptance bots back into position, trying desperately to prevent-

Pop.

“Lost visual!” Rakowski cried out loud.

Obviously, Mentok snarled internally, but he kept fear and frustration from leaking into the connection. ‘Evacuate,’ he ordered, ‘Impending strike, impending strike.’

“A2,” the boy predicted, and he was absolutely right.

Above the burning plain, through the hole Mjolnir had punched in the ozone, a shadow rapidly descended. Something round and glowing plummeted towards the Earth, gaining rapidly the kinetic energy of a thermonuclear bomb. A satellite? A meteorite? Heydrich’s own hardened form? It didn’t matter. Orbital bombardment was a scenario they had prepared for.

‘Evacuate, take cover, everyone, now!’

The Legion’s speedsters blurred. Instinctively Mentok traced their pattern in his mind’s eye, seeing who they would and wouldn’t get to, calculating the missile’s velocity, connecting a thousand points of data in the time it took most men to remember their own age. The Siegfrieds rocketed across the battlefield, enfolding stragglers in protective embraces as forcefields blossomed within the soldiers’ ranks.

‘Impact in 5… 4… 3… 2… 1…’

BOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMM

A blinding flash, a rumbling. The walls of the very cavern around them shook. And in the centre of the valley, a wall of force and dust rose up and exploded outwards, blanketing the windswept plains in a wave of fire and death.

Mentok left the lesser genius to search for minds they had lost.

“Fifteen wounded. No casualties.”

“Excellent,” muttered Mentok. His next command had already gone out. The 76 remaining Siegfrieds, those not damaged to inoperability by the bombardment, discharged their human wards coughing into the whirling dust storm and reformed, ready to react. Through their eyes Mentok watched a dozen bands of electronic vision and relayed the artificial sight telepathically through to the Legion on the ground.

‘Be ready,’ he told them. He didn’t need to hear Rakowski calling the number to predict that next would come the Black Death’s attempted slaughter, obscured beneath thundering noise and rolling dust.

“Nothing on scanners.”

“I see that,” Mentok snarled. Where are you; where are you, you Mudak pig. Come on.

Nothing.

The seconds seemed like lifetimes.

Wait. Something pinged on a distant network – an alert from a flight tower outside Rio De Janeiro. Something falling. Something fast.

Damn it!

‘I need every telekinetic in Brazil-’ but even as the thought went out he knew it would be fruitless. He hadn’t warned them. He hadn’t warned anyone. He had gambled ignorance against surprise.

Another distant ping over London. Over Madrid.

‘Legion,’ he ordered, trying not to spread his spiralling panic, ‘Prepare mass teleportation. Prepare for rescue operations. The Black Death is bombing cities.’

Connected as he was to their minds, he felt the terror ripple throughout the assembled Acolytes. Throughout the children. Despair and panic. They were all so young.

“He’s trying to divide us,” Rakowski murmured.

“It wouldn’t be a saying if it wasn’t effective,” Mentok scowled. He had already triggered an evacuation override order in each of the threatened cities – commands for telekinetics to push back the descending projectiles, for speedsters to evacuate the impact site. He prayed they would be heeded in time.

*

“FORM UP!” yelled James Conrad. His enormous hands waved crimson-gold Acolytes through the blinding haze, the billowing smoke and dust. Through the cloud, he saw Giselle rushing to bring the armies’ neutralisers together, their hands shaking, their faces pale. The last one blurred into place and in their centre Will began shouting instructions, ordering a human chain-link, arms out and on the person in front. There was a gust of wind and the soldiers vanished – the last thing James saw was Herd’s face scrunched up and struggling with the jump.

Giselle reappeared alongside him. “Where are we going?” she asked. Her chest rose and fell beneath her armour, but she didn’t shrink – didn’t show any of the raw fear they were all feeling. Beads of sweat dripped beneath her Perspex face mask.

“Wherever’s impacted. Whoever doesn’t get clear in time. Maybe multiple. Don’t know. Imagine we’ll get a-”

Schlick.

Suddenly, Giselle’s head exploded. There was a flash of psychic pain – and then he felt her mind go dark.

“NO!” James screamed; and suddenly there were cries everywhere, pain everywhere, as all around him Acolytes started falling beneath a rain of whistling death that hurtled jagged from the sky.

*

“NO!” Cykes screamed. Mentok didn’t need to read the scans to feel it – feel the sudden death reverberating through the psychic link. His electronic eyes swung desperately, the Siegfrieds moving, throwing themselves between the Legion and the threat, the- rain, shrapnel rain, sharpened pieces of metal fired like bullets from the atmosphere, indiscriminate, he-

Furiously he readjusted, recalibrating the suits’ field of vision, but it took precious moments to triangulate- precious seconds to pinpoint-

“There!” Rakowski shouted, flecks flying from his lips, tears pouring from his eyes, “THERE!”

Half a mile up. Invisible to the naked eye. Floating in the centre of a metal ring, which broke and sliced and shattered and continue to shoot downwards as they watched. Mentok’s mouth hardened. There was nothing for it.

He raised his wrist.

“Deploy the Cure.”