Blackjack Villain (67 page)

“You see, as soon as it is engaged, they will know I have returned, and respond with desperation. I’m mad, or so they believe, and this is another hair-brained scheme to destroy the world. Little do they know that all my efforts have led to this. Some of my plans have been quite drastic, I admit. Like when Nostromo and I attempted to hurl the Earth’s moon at Callisto over a decade ago.”

He put his hand on Nostromo’s shoulder.

“Or the time we stole the Soviet Union’s entire nuclear arsenal to design a bomb to destroy the alien altogether. Sadly, that came at a time when detente was at its height, and...well...things got quite complicated.

“But today we rid ourselves of a threat so potent, that it forgoes the usual good versus evil concepts that we have been so unfairly painted with for so long. Again I thank you for your help, and for your trust.”

Baron Blitzkrieg looked around, the explanation sufficient to others, but he still had questions.

“I understand the threat, old friend. But our role here is, as of yet, undefined.”

“It’s simple. You will hold them back. You will buy me time to fully engage the device.”

“So we’re fodder,” complained UVee, though from behind the re-breather of his black armored mask, he was more a drone than an embodied voice.

“Hardly,” Retcon shot back. “Without you, fighting the good fight, they would be upon me in no time. And while it would take quite a few to put me down, the device, I fear, is not so sturdy.”

“I don’t like it,” snapped Nexus, Uvee’s Beta Blast team mate. Nexus wore tight spandex over a formidable athletic frame, but what was most noticeable about him was the raw power flowing around his form, a red anima banner that glowed bright even in full daylight.

“If it’s not to your agreement, then we’ll part ways, and that will be that,” Retcon said, crossing his arms.

“What guarantee do we have that the device will work?” Psionicler said. He was a mastermind, almost to Dr. Retcon’s level, but a sadist, and borderline psychotic. His costume was an anachronistic shout out to decades past and ill-fitting, far too tight bright red and white leather, with his famed ‘confabulator goggles” from which his powers flowed.

“It will work, my friend. My word should more than suffice,” he said, but it didn’t, at least not with the majority of Beta Blast, who eyed each other, as if communicating telepathically, and decided as a whole.

“We’re not satisfied,” UVee said, spokesperson for the group, and they took off into the air, almost in unison and sped off.

“Retcon’s word is enough for me,” said a voice in the distance, coming from a slowly approaching swath of raw black energy. When it was closer, within the energy, the figure of Apostle became visible.

He was a tall black man, bald, with imposing eyebrows and a trimmed Van Dyke marring his otherwise shaven face. Apostle was one of the Original Seven, companion to Nostromo, Retcon and Lady Jayne. Only three of the originals were missing; Valiant was long dead, as was more recently Ed Watters by his own hand. Where Global was, no one knew, nor dared to ask. He was the youngest and most effervescent of them, always approachable, always a helping hand, where Valiant was a more distant and aloof hero, Global was the most beloved of the Original Seven.

But Apostle was a heavy hitter, more powerful than a thousand other supers. He emanated an aura of power, deadly to any creature daring enough to approach him. He was also a master of darkness, wielding the shadows themselves as constructs and weapons. Apostle was as close to omnipotent as a human could become, and now he stood beside us.

“Vernon!” Retcon shouted, and walked up to Apostle, who’s aura diminished, almost disappearing altogether, revealing him to be a tall, muscled black man, aged unlike the others and perhaps in his early sixties. He was in prime physical fitness, though, even for a man his age, and what passed for a smile came across his otherwise stern face.

Retcon embraced his old friend. “I was worried you wouldn’t be able to come.”

“You called, brother, and I came.”

Retcon turned to us, overwhelmed with the joy of the reunion, unabashed with the tears that welled at the corners of his eyes.

“This will make things much, much easier,” he announced. “If you and Jayne can cover the Northern quarter,” Retcon began, pacing back toward us while Apostle kept his distance protecting us from his deathly aura, “and if Ricky can handle the South, then Baron Blitzkrieg can take West and my new friends can handle the East,” he finished, pointing in the cardinal directions from the central hub where his building lay. In each of the directions was an approach between the ruined factories and apartment buildings that remained on Hashima Island.

In fact, I could see the logic behind it; they would see us as obvious targets, rather than the Retcon building itself, which was relatively disguised amongst Hashima’s native structures. We would garner the attention of anyone who responded, and hopefully delay them long enough for the Telluric device to start functioning.

“I have a question,” I said, wandering aloud. “Once you activate it, they will come straight for the building, straight for the device itself. How do we keep them away?”

Dr. Retcon smiled.

“By then, things will be too far along to stop, I wager. The walls of the Telluric chamber are twelve feet thick of concrete and steel. Each one of you will have a door open to you. These doors are even thicker than the walls, and when closed, will be magnetically sealed. Once things are dire, we will close the doors, and finish the procedure inside the chamber before-”

“How long will it take to engage the device?” Mr. Servo asked, only his head human, the rest a cyborg construction ridiculously larger than his head in proportion.

“The device will be operational in a few minutes. What will take some time, perhaps as much as an hour is for the Telluric emissions to circumnavigate the planet via the ionosphere,” Retcon answered. “But first we have to raise the island.” He turned to Nostromo.

“I guess this is where I come in.”

Nostromo opened his arms, radiating purple energy from his body. We all stepped back as the energy coalesced, formed, and extended outward in two massive tentacles. These two tendrils soared high and back around, splitting and spreading into a web of raw power that encompassed the whole island.

“Hang on to something,” Retcon said, giggling uncontrollably.

And then Nostromo plucked the island out of the water, and raised it into the sky.

* * *

Don’t ask me how he sheared the top of an island in seas that were 10,000 feet deep. Whether his powers bored into the rock, tearing it apart or did he unscrew the top off like a coke bottle cap.

I have no idea how his incredible powers worked, and since there was nothing visible, nothing other than Nostromo himself, standing there with his arms crossed with a stupid shit-eating grin, then there’s no way for me to theorize how he did it.

I mean, I couldn’t even see what was happening below, none of us could. The island simply shook, like under the effects of a minor earthquake, causing havoc amongst the dilapidated buildings, and bringing several down altogether.

But from where we stood, the quake had only a slight effect, for ten or fifteen seconds. Nostromo’s expression changed only once, when he closed his eyes and furrowed his brow, giving it one final ‘heave to,’ and finally ripping the island from its foundation to the sea bottom.

The sound was horrible, like a chorus of grinding metal and concrete as the buildings swayed from side to side. Structures released decades of dust and soot, raising a cloud of the stuff that followed us as we freed from the earth and sea and slowly rose in the air.

Nostromo opened his eyes again, and pursed his lips, the hard part over, but he strained a bit as the island gained altitude, slowly at first then faster and faster.

I was unaware of the others, amazed as I was at what we were experiencing, but I took a moment to look around and saw everyone in awe. Apogee mouthed, “Amazing”, and Cool Hand was muttering something under his breath that I think was “this is so cool,” over and over like some sort of prayer.

Only Baron Blitzkrieg was unimpressed, or at least made an effort to appear that way, with one arched eyebrow, as if he was witnessing something disturbing or unpleasant, and an otherwise scowl marring his face. I’d never met the man, nor seen a good picture of him, so it was possible that was his ‘holy crap that’s so awesome!’ facial expression.

Apostle’s eyes were closed, his arms crossed across his massive chest, as if he was helping the process, and perhaps he was, but the swath of darkness that he exuded had returned, and he kept himself well distant of the rest of us.

Lady Jayne had a proud smile on her face, like an approving mother, but there was also a sense of arrogance from her posture and demeanor, as if the display of power by one of her contemporaries would cow us mere mortals. Other than the Baron’s diffidence, it did.

Dr. Retcon was also smiling, but his expression was one of exuberant joy, and he hugged his daughter and spoke to her softly. This was the culmination of decades of work for him, and he was enjoying the whole of it, overwhelmed that it had even become possible.

He had created a portal to another world, perhaps another dimension, and found thousands of alien civilizations. That alone was one of the greatest achievements in human history, dwarfing the works of all other scientists combined. But the revelation of the existence of the Lightbringers, and their horrible planet destroying ritual had put all of us at risk, and since he had made that discovery, Retcon had worked to save us from his terrible mistake. Years of failed plans, battling with the world’s governments to get them to see beyond his terrible powers, and ultimately incarceration for being too dangerous for all of us, and now his work was finally bearing fruit.

Retcon was happier that morning than any man had a right to, and he plopped a cigar in his mouth (though he never did light it), only removing it to sing to his daughter, a nighttime lullaby I can only imagine he sung when he would put her to sleep. She dug her head into his shoulder and closed her arms, safe in her father’s arms.

Yet beyond, at the edge of the island, was now formed a precipice and below the cerulean orb slowly fell away from us as we rose into the atmosphere. One of the questions that troubled me about Retcon’s plan was how he intended to properly channel something like Tesla’s Telluric energy so high into the ionosphere in order for it to form the shield. This form of energy by its very nature would disperse too easily, as it had gravimetric properties and would be challenged to escape earth’s gravitational pull. This is why I suppose Tesla had originally proposed the idea as a city defense platform, as opposed to what Retcon had turned it into. It was too hard to spread the shield properly, as the Telluric energy would slowly cascade back down to the earth.

But Retcon had figured out a clever way to do it. Instead of building some sort of delivery system, or series of repeater towers, he would use the magnetically charged properties of the earth’s ionosphere to contain the Telluric energy, thus forming the interplanetary shield. I bet Tesla himself wouldn’t have come up with something so clever, something so simple.

The problem still remained; how to transport or transmit the raw energy from a generator placed on the surface of the earth, up to the ionosphere, so many miles up into the atmosphere. Instead of building some elaborate contraption to do the part, Retcon had Nostromo lift the island there.

And now we rose in the air, one island with a few dozen believers, and a desperate plan to save the world.

Chapter 26

Retcon never explained how we had ample oxygen in and around the island, despite being high in the stratosphere, and I never bothered to ask. We could breathe, and it was as warm as it had been earlier in the morning, before Nostromo had shown us his god-like powers.

The island floated over the Earth like a satellite, like a second Moon, and from our vantage point the edge of the seawall lead to a chasmic fall to the surface of the planet, some 6 miles below.

I thought of Pulsewave then, probably because I expected to fall myself, knocked off the island by one of the great heroes of Earth. Perhaps Superdynamic or Epic, come to take their revenge for their televised humiliation in New York. Maybe another super, a young powerful fellow, looking to make a name, by knocking me to my death. “I killed Blackjack,” he would say and his fans would rejoice. Or it could be one of the great silent heroes. Great demigods whose powers dwarfed all others save the Original Seven, like Lord Mighty, Dominus or Paladin. Supers so powerful they only showed their faces when Earth itself was in danger, when the planet as a whole needed a protector. They were silent guardians, stowed away in their lairs and fortresses, watching, much like Nostromo, for danger that threatened us all. A carjacker, or bank robber, or even a small war wouldn’t arouse their attention.

But this would.

And they would be coming.

I understood Doctor Retcon’s defense plan, even though he had explained it as something island-wide. The first responders would arrive on our makeshift fortress, tour the place and find the defenders in the respective corners of our makeshift ring. They would see Apostle and Lady Jayne covering one side, and Nostromo on the diametric opposite, and decide against the impossible odds. On another side they would see Baron Blitzkrieg and his Dogs of War, a formidable bunch, who could easily swarm a solo hero, and even overpower a super team.