You think? Whatever else he may have been, he didn't sound like a lazy coomer thirsty for validation of his gender feels.
I was picturing him as the "middle-aged guy who troons out to escape scrutiny for being a shit dude" type. But probably more of an early Chris type, yeah.
Anyway, let's get this chapter out of the way. Remember when I said the unofficial theme song for the
Nemesis portion of the thread was
Power Rangers Zeo? Well, for this chapter, it's:
Yeah, we're going to space. In a halfway decent book, that's usually quite exciting. Sadly, though, this is an action heavy chapter written by April Daniels, so, this will probably not be my most in depth or interesting post. Apologies in advance.
“What’s the word, Codex?” asks Calamity as we walk up. Well, I’m walking. She moseys.
Charlie puts his finger on one passage and flips through a few more pages in another book. “Aaaahhh…hold on…yeah, yeah, it’s safe to start knocking his satellites out of the sky.”
“Are you sure?” asks Doc.
He taps one of the books he’s been flipping through, a leather-bound volume with handwritten pages. “Yes. We snagged her current project book—that’s the notebook she uses to keep her project’s details straight—and none of these incantations leave room for booby traps, which would have to be baked into the main spell to avoid having them interfere with each other. If the satellites do have defenses, they won’t be magical, I can say that much.”
Some people who watched too many Dan Olsen videos will say it's a fallacy to call a magic system "overly convenient" for enabling the plot, because by definition, all magic in fiction is written to accommodate the plot. However, it's still bad writing when it's obvious that you're writing the magic to be convenient for the
main character. "Oh nah, the laws of magic, carved into the very stratum of eternity, dictate that Greywytch couldn't have possibly rigged the satellites to turn Danny into a frog if he gets too close. That's just science."
It's the same reasoning as Myra not replacing her door ASAP after a crazed troon smashed it down and threatened to kill her, or not changing Doc's access codes after she literally shot all of their friends. You can't even say Myra didn't bother with protective spells because she doesn't care about Garrison's plans, but as we later find out, they're important to her own goals as well.
“Cool!” I say. “Let’s do it!”
Doc and I put our heads together and calculate a flight plan. By the time everything’s settled, it’s on toward dusk. Like I mentioned earlier, orbital flight is really complicated, so I need to wait for a launch window before I take off. Stars start to prick out of the gauzy purple sky, and the countdown timer displaying on my wrist just passed two minutes and dropping.
Space-Kiwis, help me out here, would "launch windows" matter for a human capable of self-propelled flight?
The door opens and out comes Doc Impossible. With effort, I keep my face neutral. I don’t need another lecture about how terrible I am right before I risk my life to save the world.
Shut the fuck up, Danny. Doc gives him some telemetry goggles and it's time to go.
The launch window timer hits zero, and with a last wave goodbye, I push off from the ground. The industrial lot falls away, the city falls away, the state falls away. When I’m high enough, my suit vibrates in my ankles to tell me I’m above the noise ordinance ceiling, and I really kick into it hard. Sonic booms string out behind me, wisps of condensation slithering across my shoulders, down my back, until I’m dragging long, white contrails in the sky with my boots. Time to take a deep breath. I won’t get another for the next five hours if this mission goes right.
If Danny can last at least five hours on a single deep breath, why not bring some supplemental oxygen? A few tiny tanks clipped onto his belt could extend his operational time for dozens of hours if need be.
I’m coming up on it from the retrograde position—essentially, I’m chasing it down from behind—which is the safe way to approach something else in orbit. Otherwise you get closing speeds in the dozens of thousands of miles per hour, and my reaction times are only barely superhuman, certainly not enough to avoid disaster at those kinds of speeds. It’s not just satellites, either, but bits of space debris that travel along with them, old bolts and splinters of metal and even things like cans of paint and lost blankets. They all hit like cannon shells and the last time I ran into one of those on an orbital jump it snapped my arm like a dry branch.
I feel like Daniels really wanted to avoid accusations of Danny being "OP" and went so far in the other direction that Dreadnought comes across kind of mid. Which would be fine if he wasn't meant to be the ultimate world hero.
There’s the satellite, up ahead of me now. Only fifty miles out, a pale gray dot slightly more defined than the other pale dots up here. My goggles automatically wrap it in glowing brackets and zoom in a picture-in-picture window to verify that it’s the one I’m going after.
It’s pretty big—think slightly smaller than a city bus, with the usual solar arrays unfolded and pointed at the sun, a cylinder for the main body, some antennas hanging off it, all very normal.
Well, except that at one end is a huge crystal dome, sort of like the giant golf ball building at Disney World, and inside sits what appears to be a miniature Stonehenge. There’s even what looks like real grass turf along the bottom of the dome. The stones are all deeply carved with geometric patterns and they seem to catch the light reflecting off Earth, channeling it into gleaming lines of blue power swirling from pattern to pattern, stone to stone.
Kind of a neat image, I won't lie.
Right, that’s the one. With a last burst of acceleration I bring myself up close and set up to push this thing out of orbit. The eastern US is passing below me now, a yellow field of stars blanketing the ground, right up to where it stops in a hard line at the Atlantic Ocean. The plan is to push the satellite down with a short, sharp deceleration that will burn most of it up in the atmosphere and drop the rest in the ocean. Then I’ll hopscotch all over low orbit doing the same thing again and again until Garrison’s entire fleet is knocked out.
The skin of the satellite is cold, so cold I can feel it through my gloves, so cold it’s uncomfortable even for me to touch it. The way orbital mechanics work means that best place to do this from is the “front” of the satellite, where I can kill its speed while pushing it down at the same time. Unfortunately, this is also the hardest place to push it from. This thing is so heavy and it’s moving so fast that it’s going to take every pound of thrust I’ve got to drop its speed fast enough to hit the mark I need to hit to get it on a steep enough path to burn up properly. That’s without directly channeling its momentum through my own pattern in the lattice, of course. I’ve gotten a lot better at that sort of thing since I shattered my ribs trying to catch an airliner, but the amount of momentum that satellite carries is a step or five above something as minor as a falling jet. I think I’ll skip the broken ribs today and stick to shoving for now.
One of the supposed advantages of a first-person POV is that it's more intimate and visceral than, say, third-person. As though trying to disprove this, Daniels narrates physically struggling against a huge satellite hurtling around the Earth thousands of miles per hour like it's a YouTube tutorial for cleaning your keyboard. He's clearly trying very hard to be accurate to orbital mechanics and the like, but it feels like wasted effort when it's not interesting to read.
For the first few moments, it’s like pressing up against a granite cliff. This thing is moving and I can’t feel any change in velocity whatsoever. Crap, this plan might need to go in stages if they’re all going to be this hard.
As if sensing my thoughts, my HUD turns green and a chibi illustration of Doc pops up in my field of view; she’s got a huge anime smile and a word bubble floating above her head that says, “Atta girl! You can do it! Fuck that shit up!”
Okay, maybe I need to cut Doc some slack.
"On the one hand, she calls me out for my murderous urges. On the other hand, she acts like a cringe zoomer."
Now the momentum is dropping enough that I can sense the difference in the lattice and then a few moments later, with my hands. The whole satellite begins to twist under my palms and sink away from me as Earth’s gravity brings it down for a big, burning hug. I stay with it long enough to give it a nice hard boost into the atmosphere, and then squirt back up to a stable orbit of my own.
Garrison’s satellite is dropping more and more vertically now, twirling away like I dropped it down a well. In a matter of moments I’ve skimmed far past it, my own orbit carrying me thousands of yards further along. I turn away and start the flight to my next waypoint. Multibillion-dollar acts of vandalism are not how I thought I’d save the world this month, but being a superhero is a weird gig sometimes.
This seems like a lot more effort than say, breaking through the dome and smashing those stones. Also, way less likely to be the inciting incident of
Dead Like Me.
It’s a tough threading-of-the-needle involving a change of altitude and a course correction that has to happen within a thirty-second window, but I manage to put the satellite down in the North Sea before turning and climbing hard to where another satellite will be passing south over Europe at about the time that I am scheduled to arrive. The plan is to keep hopping from orbit to orbit this way, and knock out Garrison’s entire network before he’s got time to launch a counterattack. Fighting in space is stupidly dangerous for a list of reasons that would take all day to explain.
I get as far as Germany before I have to start fighting in space.
Dreadnought vs Mecha-Merkhel!
For the first few moments of the fight, I’m more confused than anything else. How the hell am I getting hit? Who is hitting me?
Then I bite down and arrest my spin, turning with my hands up just in time to block another scything kick, and there’s Red Steel, his rust-colored silk Cossack shirt rippling oddly with his momentum in the vacuum of space.
We catch eyes with each other, and I break out in a huge grin. Red has made his way as a mercenary since the Soviet Union fell apart. Garrison must have hired him to defend his satellites. Which means that I get to fight Red Steel, the greatest hero the Russians ever came up with.
Excellent.
You know, it's interesting to ponder what it must be to go from fighting for a communist regime to working for a group who fancy themselves the literal new aristocracy. Was Red Steel ever an ideological communist, or was he always as cynical and venal (or if you prefer, pragmatic) as the Soviet Union's rulers? What were his relationships with the other Dreadnoughts like? These questions are all much more interesting than troon shit or tepid YA romance, and so will go ignored.
And that instant of recognition is over, and now we’re in a faster, harder fight than I’ve ever been in before. If he’s got any doubts whatsoever about accepting a contract on a kid, he left them back on Earth.
Honestly, at this point, killing Danny is probably like Mike Moran snapping Johnny Bates's neck.
Punch meets counter-punch, kick meets pivot and riposte. It’s a complicated, nasty little fight, a hectic, dizzying swirl of dodges and counters as we each jockey for a superior position.
Described like Danny is telling us about his summer vacation.
We’ve both got an extra weak spot in this fight—the solar plexus. One good hit there will evacuate all the air from our lungs, and whoever loses their breath first will have to disengage and get back into the atmosphere as fast as they can.
Again,
land value tax supplemental oxygen would solve this.
And because we’re in space, there’s nothing to inhibit our movement in any direction. No ground, no buildings, hell, not even any clouds to hide in. Without the air to slow us down we accelerate faster and turn harder. And all of this is happening in perfect silence. You don’t think of fights as quiet, but they’re often just a bunch of grunts and slaps and thuds. This is even less than that.
A dead silent space-fight should be eerie as all hell. Sound is pretty difficult to convey in pure-prose, but this isn't even a heroic failure.
This isn’t working. He’s got a reach advantage on me. Well, they almost always have a reach advantage on me, but usually I can mitigate it with speed or durability or pure, unfiltered aggression. Not here. Not with him. Everything I can do, he can match. Everything he can do, I scramble to keep up with. It doesn’t even seem like he’s getting worn down; he’s just got this focused look on his face like I’m a puzzle and he only needs to figure out how to unlock me. Time to change things up. Instead of turning to head back into the fight, I use the momentum he’s given me to boost hard away from him. Red Steel tosses my torn cape aside (Dude, not cool! That thing cost more than most people’s cars! You could at least tuck it in your belt so I can get it back after I’m done kicking your ass.) and powers after me.
It doesn't help that Daniels can't even drop the "quirky voice" shit even during a life-or-death battle for the fate of the world. The cape was a heat-shield, so now Danny can't reenter the atmosphere at speed without burning up, so retreat isn't an option.
Even now that I know he’s here, Red Steel is barely a presence in the lattice. He’s more like an absence than anything else.
...Okay, now I really want to know what Red Steel's deal is. Is he some kind of anti-Dreadnought, neither alive nor dead?
I have to actually twist and look down between my legs, and yeah, he’s still with me, about a hundred yards back and crawling to close the distance. With these few seconds of peace in the middle of the fight, my body is starting to report on how much pain it’s in. My lips are stiff with frozen blood.
I'm not an expert in space by any means, but wouldn't blood boil away in a vacuum?
No. Stop. Think positive, and get angry. He brought the fight to me, so I get to bring it back twice as hard. We’re evenly matched. Well, except for a few things, like how he’s faster and stronger and tougher and more experienced and all but invisible to my sixth sense. I mean other than that, it’s a total coin flip.
Shit, no wonder the other Dreadnoughts always took this guy seriously.
So, barring the Stupid Latice Tricks only Danny ever bothered using, Red Steel is basically better than Dreadnought in every way. That feels like it would've tilted geopolitics a bit. Or maybe Danny's just the shittiest Dreadnought ever. Actually, that seems pretty plausible.
Fighting harder than him isn’t a great option. I need to fight smarter. I can beat him. I know I can. Garrison’s satellites are in a pretty low orbit, well below most other spacecraft. My plan, such as it is, is to drag Red Steel higher, into the zone where satellites are more common.
And then Kessler syndrome brings down satellite communication for years to come?
More satellites mean more space debris. And I’m betting my life on the hope that he can’t see those little flying chunks of death as well as I can. I’ve turned west. We’re flying anterograde, directly into the oncoming swarm of satellites and debris.
Bring him over New Port, texts Doc. I’ll shoot him down with an anti-orbital cannon.
You have one of those?
Not yet. Gimme ten minutes, she replies.
You'd think that would've come in handy when we were planning this mission.
In the lattice, I see a burning corona of momentum behind what looks like an astronaut’s hand tool. It’s coming right—
—it snaps by me as I desperately pivot out of the way.
I'm going to pretend it was thrown by an extremely based crewman on the ISS.
I squeeze my eyes shut and blot out everything but the lattice. There’s no room for fear; I’ve got to focus on pushing my perceptions as far out ahead of me as I can. Swirling currents of radiation skitter and dance off the Van Allen belt high above us.
Shit, not only do we have Red Steel to deal with, now all the advertising mascots are going to come to life!
There, a screw—
And as it’s passing, I grab its momentum and pull it through my pattern. A hot buzzing behind my navel, like some cosmic string is being tugged through my guts, the heated crunch of my left ring finger breaking, and I’ve dragged it off its course and shot it right at that haunting void behind me.
Random thought, did Daniels rip off "using his power break's the hero's bones" thing from
My Hero Academia?
A half-second later I open my eyes to glance behind me, and Red Steel is twisting in the night, one hand clamped onto his shoulder where the screw hit him.
Okay, yeah, so this is a game plan.
Then he shoots me with his friggin’ eye lasers, and why the hell does he have eye lasers, that wasn’t in his file!
Scalding emerald beams rake my chest and arm, my suit instantly going black and crinkled wherever they land. The pain is hot and instant, and I have to bite down on a scream that would have lost me all my air. His eyes glitter with emerald energy again, and I bank left before rolling right.
So, Garrison can not only turn regular people into supers whenever he wants, he can also give new powers to people who already have them. Why did he need the Plot Inciting Orb again? I guess Red Steel could've had laser-vision all along and somehow kept it under his hat for seventy years, but that's the implication, right? Garrison paid him in eye-beams?
Ready to fire, texts Doc. I look down, and we’re passing over the Northwest, the lights of New Port halfway between me and the curve of the horizon.
He’s the one behind me, I tap back.
Doc’s reply is a glittering cobalt beam that geysers up from the outskirts of New Port and turns the night pale with the intensity of its power. Half the metropolitan area gutters and goes dark by sections as rolling brownouts claim most of Washington state.
Thanks, Doc, now you've delayed Thorne Melcher's bottom-surgery
again! While the blast burns Red something fierce, he's still up and fighting.
Wait. There, ahead of my flight path, just at the very edge of my lattice perception and coming up fast. It’s huge, dark, and entirely cold. It’s been dead since a Nemesis fragment killed it two years ago. The largest single piece of space debris in history, a navigational hazard so massive NASA considered a mission just to pull it safely out of orbit.
The Hubble Space Telescope.
I always suspected Danny would end up following in Zapp Brannigan's footsteps. Or Zapp would follow in Danny's--whatever. Doc fires another blast to distract Red while Danny uses the lattice to throw the entire fucking space telescope at him.
It’s like no sensation I’ve felt before. The hot, buzzing thrum of power is more energy than I’ve ever channeled, and at these speeds, it’s not simply a difference of scale, it feels like a phase change between ice and water, between water and steam, between steam and plasma, but all of that compressed into a single still moment. For a moment, just a moment, I’m back where I was on that day I changed. I can see everywhere. I understand everything. Life is beautiful. We are all beautiful, all one, all linked in a joyous harmony. Even as I’m realizing it, the epiphany is fading.
"Maybe it is okay for a boy--wait, look at whole my boobies bounce in free-fall!"
Red Steel encounters the Hubble Space Telescope the way a baseball encounters a home run derby. The telescope disintegrates into flayed sheets of aluminum and a huge constellation of shattered glass. Red goes spinning away, completely out of control and shooting towards Earth.
Spider-Punk: It's a metaphor for communism.
When I catch up with Red Steel he’s still whirling in all three directions, and still he somehow feels me coming and greets me with an emerald blast. My chest, neck, face light up with pain and then impact. I punch him like an angry god, the kind of punch that would shatter windows for a dozen yards in every direction if we were down on Earth. Again, and again. He gives me one on the chin, and I knock aside the follow up. My left leg is stiff with pain, but I wrap it around his neck and use my other ankle to lock it down so I’ve got him pinned. His eyes start glowing, and I clap my hands over his face just as he fires. My palms light up with scalding agony, but what hurts for me is torture for him, his whole body convulsing as the energy is reflected back into his skull.
We’re falling now, our orbital momentum almost completely wasted. This is it, no turning back now, so I shove aside my fatigue, shake off the pain, and burn away our altitude as fast as I can. His hands come up to claw at me, to punch my wounded thigh, to try and peel me off him. The initiative is mine now, and if I lose it I die, so I ignore my broken fingers, switch to open palm strikes, and rain punishment down on him.
Wouldn't it be fucked if the eye-beam energy melted his brains? I mean, it'd be one combat-fatality I couldn't really hold against Danny, but still.
You took my cape. You took my heat shield.
That’s okay.
I have you.
With one hand I hold his head in place, and with the other I throw a punch that comes all the way up from the root of my spine. His eyes, now milky with cataracts, roll up in his head, and for just an instant, Red Steel goes limp. An instant is all I need to unhook my ankles, roll him between my thighs, and get his arms twisted up behind him in a lock. He squirms and bucks, tries to turn this against me. Too late. Far too late. Clawing for every ounce of speed I can, we head down, down into the atmosphere.
Orange and red whispers grow to flickers. Flickers grow to torches. The silence of space gives way to the roar of reentry. We enter a tunnel of fire that drags behind us for miles. With one last spasm he tries to get away from me, and I can feel his flight pushing against mine, trying to shove him in any direction, anywhere that will get him away from the pain, but I’ve got momentum and gravity to add to my own strength, and it’s no use. His resistance shudders, collapses. He goes limp in my arms, his legs kicking and jerking against the howling plasma.
Man, I would've given this chapter so many points if Danny had used Red Steel as an orbital surfboard. The two of them land on a small island in the Pacific.
The ocean breeze tugs the cloud of rock dust away, and at the center of a shallow crater, Red Steel is stirring, struggling to shove himself to his feet.
“Stay down, old man!” I shout at him. “Stay down, or I will do things to you that you will not come back from!”
He doesn’t listen. Too stubborn, or too professional, it’s hard to say. When Red Steel gets to his feet, I give him a few moments to come to his senses and surrender. He doesn’t. Damnit. We close for the last time, and in the instant before impact, I think I see him smile through his burned and twisted lips. But then my fist snaps his head back in an uppercut that takes him twelve feet straight up. He hits the ground like a bag of wet dirt, and when I’m literally standing over him with my boot pressed down on his windpipe, he finally, finally passes out.
Poor Red Steel. Dude went from fighting some of the greatest superheroes who ever lived to
Danny Tozer.
The giggles start low in my chest, and there’s an absurdity to them, some sense of inappropriateness that makes me clap my hands across my mouth to stifle them. Oh my God, I just beat up Red Steel! Calamity is going to freak out when I tell her. I collapse laughing, aching, riven with burns and tender spots. The shaking of my laughter hurts, and that only makes it funnier. Every little stab of pain is another reminder of the pure, simple joy of being alive.
Great, now he's
cackling. Are we sure Red Steel wasn't up there to try and save the world from Danny?
As the laughter fades, my mind refocuses on the more pressing issues. I’ve still got to take those satellites out. I don’t think Garrison has more than one orbital-capable mercenary on staff, or he’d have sent both of them to be sure of the job.
He can manufacture super-people!
“All right, sleepyhead, I’m getting you to a hospital,” I tell Red Steel. His breath whistles through his charred nostrils, which is the only way I know he’s not dead. Man, he’s ugly right now. Do not ever reenter the atmosphere face-first. It’s super bad for you.
Hoisting him over my shoulder is far harder than it should be. I’ve carried an airliner, and this man, who can’t be more than three hundred pounds, feels heavier than that. Through pain and fatigue that leaves me shaking on the ground and wobbling in the air, I somehow manage to get us airborne.
So, Red Steel is nearly invisible in the lattice, and apparently much denser than he should rightly be. Is he some kind of golem?
Red Steel doesn’t have a healing factor, not really. It’s a well-known strategic weakness of his that if he gets injured he’ll heal perfectly, but only as quickly as a regular metabolism can work. After the battle against Mistress Malice in 1961, he was out of action for three years while he regrew his legs. With him in the hospital for the next few weeks, I can probably operate freely in orbit.
Pretty sure that's still a healing-factor. Is Daniels like those poor detrans kids who think their tits will grow back if they're off T long enough?
A few dozen miles out to sea I spot the running lights of a fishing trawler. Definitely the Aleutians in that case. They shout with alarm as I come down on the main deck and drop Steel on top of the fish-gutting table.
“Do you guys speak English?” I ask them. Oh, sure, they’re probably Anglophone Canadians or Americans, but I’ve learned not to make assumptions when I’m in the middle of an ocean.
I assume Danny learned this disposing of witnesses.
I limp up to the bridge with the captain. He lets me look at his maps, points out where we are, and I do a rough calculation in my head. Plotting great circle paths is not exactly an intuitive operation, but spend enough time in the air and you can at least start to rough them out. The trick, of course, will be holding to the course without a GPS to guide me—my nav computer used the same antenna as my satellite phone.
“Okay, this will work,” I say to myself. The captain has been hovering around while I study his maps. I give him my best interview smile. “Do you have any aspirin? I am in an incredible amount of pain.”
Well, at least there's that.
and I have a few observations...
