Carthago delenda est.
tags: superhero
The Devastator Mark 12 is, without a doubt, the greatest manned weapons platform in the world. I said that about the previous eleven iterations, and each time I found a way to surpass myself. It is my life’s work, all of my brains and strength poured into one impossible machine. In any way that matters, DaxCorp exists to secure the raw materials and facilities I need to maintain it. With it, I can fly into space, sink to the bottom of the ocean, rob banks, crush armies, overthrow governments.
Over the years, I’ve continued to refine it. No more modular, either/or weapon packages that I have to decide on, pre-flight; the new adaptive weapon system instantly responds to my thoughts, constructing micromissiles or lasers or mass drivers as necessary. No more bulky coolant systems, bleeding off energy from propulsion and weapons; now, the suit dumps that waste heat straight into a pocket dimension I tore from the mind of a would-be god. The suit is no longer powered by a fusion reactor—no longer the power of a star, but its negation, a miniature black hole that took me six attempts to capture and forced me to bootstrap the planet’s entire space-based economy in the process.
Frankly, the weakest part of the system is me. There’s no autopilot, no guidance, no automation save for the thermodynamics-violating-pocket-dimension-heatsink. Even targeting is still slaved to my thoughts. This is by design. The Mark 12 isn’t about winning. The Mark 12 is about me winning, my thoughts and my actions made flesh, made real. My will, manifest; my armored fist at the throat of the world.
There still needs to be a human element at play, a controlling force.
It’s what makes us different—what makes me different—from her.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
She descends through the hall’s ruined roof, radiant, heroic. I don’t need to look up to see this; among her many superpowers, the most obnoxious is her eye for presentation—always flush with victory, always framed by the rays of the sun.
I can feel her hanging in the air, waiting, watching. The skin on the back of my neck begins to crawl, itchy against the fabric of my battlesuit’s underarmor. I act as if I am oblivious, concentrating on the hole the laser is boring, refusing to darken my visor against the glare until the last moment, when I turn around and snap, “Well, let’s get on with it.”
Captain Star, paragon of Bay City, doesn’t reply. She hovers above me, effortlessly, not deigning to break her silence—a hawk floating on the breeze, peering down on her prey. Only her hair moves, wafted by whatever damnable magics keep her afloat and give her powers.
All of that destructive potential just waiting to turn to violence, yet contained and controlled. Still. At peace in her certitude and her pride.
I loathe it. My grimace is invisible behind my visor, but she can see the fingers of my powersuit curl into fists.
Finally, she frowns. “Why?”
“Because everyone else is elsewhere,” I glibly reply, the suit’s exterior vox masking my voice but perfectly capturing my smirk. And it’s true: the dimensional incursion that has torn open the business district is taking the entire League to contain, and I’m taking advantage of the chaos. All that radiation and earthshaking has necessitated that the sensors that monitor the League’s vault of confiscated superweaponry be disabled, so I’ve broken in to help myself; weapons this powerful don’t belong in a museum.
“I don’t…” the superheroine starts, and her face slips into a look of disappointment. “I don’t mean that. Why… this? Why aren’t you out there, helping us?”
We have had this conversation before, almost every time we’ve clashed. She’s never seen my face, but she can tell from my armor that I have resources, that whoever I am, I command power and I possess skill. For my part, I’ve never determined if she was born human, or if she’s always been an alien—but whatever her past, she’s either unable to grasp the human condition, or she is simply so naive that she is unable to fathom the idea of not helping others. So she judges me, a lord on high in possession of ultimate power, looking down on the struggle of her lessers.
What she doesn’t know—what she can’t know—is that I am out there, in my own way. It’s DaxCorp satellites beaming telemetry to the first responders, including the League. It’s DaxCorp employees ushering civilians out of the disaster area. It’s DaxCorp who will rebuild this city.
But that’s not really me. It’s just a front, a show, the necessary lie that allows me to equip a quintrillion dollar battlesuit and punch upstart demigods in the face.
I am here and not there because I want to be here.
She doesn’t wait for a response; a moment later, my ears pop with the sudden displacement of air as she accelerates forward, initiating the fight. To the untrained eye, it is as if she teleports, right into punching range. But my eyes are trained, modified, empowered by my knowledge and will; micro-pistons and titanium fibers are already moving, accelerating my block upward, a gauntlet catching her haymaker and knocking it away.
She swings with the other arm, coming up under my block, aiming to land a strike on the laminar plates that run along the side of my torso. That was the weak point of the Mark 11, and a vulnerability I’ve already fixed. But she knows this, and she knows that I know that she knows this. She’s poking, forcing me reveal how I’ve pushed myself since we last fought.
I let the punch land, delighting in the feel of the kinetic energy dissipating through my armor, rendered inert. Then I return the favor, twisting a rocket-powered boot into her side.
She disengages, reassessing the situation. I see the light in her eyes shift, and I despise myself for the moment of vulnerability and nakedness I feel as she looks at me with her x-ray vision.
And then her brow furrows. “You’ve laced the armor with lead.”
I smile, delighting at her surprise.
She slips forward, changing tactics, coming in for a grapple. I grab her back, thrilling, watching as my heads-up display tells me what percentage of her maximum observed strength she’s using. 70 percent. 80. 95. 103. 105.
Her face is grim, a hair’s breadth from my occluded faceplate. What is she thinking? Does it frustrate her that she can see only her own reflection in that black? Does she wish she could look me in the eye?
I wonder how she would react if she learned the League’s foremost public ally was actually me—that Delenda Dax and Doctor Devastator were identities wielded by same person, that the first identity is a set of armor as real and strong as the battlesuit of the second. I wonder if she actually suspects who I am.
My breath is coming faster, my powersuit-supplemented strength beginning to strain. But I can see her blue eyes beginning to glow, and her hands are radiating a ghastly aura; I realize that she’s digging deep into her reserves, too, and I feel renewed.
One of the hands clasped around my powersuit’s biceps sends a blast of energy into me, and my suit’s systems are momentarily scrambled. Again, she disengages. In anger, I lash out with a micromissile barrage, goading her to escalate the fight.
She is unfazed. “Lead lacing, but no increased brittleness. How’d you manage it?”
For a moment, I almost take the bait. I want to answer her, to tell the one person who noticed about my achievement, about how many dollars and prototypes and nights of work it took to make, to tell my enemy how I slaved away at creating an alloy that was impregnable to her x-ray powers but did not sacrifice strength. I—
I don’t get the chance. The wall beside us explodes, and Nemesis appears.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Every year, the League of Heroes releases a tongue-in-cheek ranking of the year’s “greatest” supervillains. To my great ire—or perhaps relief—Doctor Devastator has never placed higher than #7; my cutting-edge powersuit is “trying too hard,” my plans are always “half-baked.” This doesn’t irk me, much; Bay City Times has named business-suit-wearing, CEO-me “Most Eligible Bachelorette” six years running. We, heroes and villains alike, all have a little fun with The List, just a little bit.
The one villain that has never appeared on the League’s List, that my newspapers never write about, that the members of the Cabal only whisper of, is Nemesis.
Nemesis is the one thing that we all wished didn’t exist. There are no jokes to make about Nemesis, no pithy quips or half-ironic insults. Nemesis breaks the unspoken rules of the game. It’s unclear that Nemesis understands that there is a game, or at least a context, that there are things to win and things to lose. When Nemesis decides to show up, people die. Nemesis is as if the spite and anger of a baleful god had been made flesh and cast to earth to punish the just and the unjust. It’s the one natural disaster that the League can’t handle and that the Cabal can’t exploit.
None of us know what Nemesis is. It isn’t even real, not in the way we think about reality: my satellites can’t detect it, the League’s soothsayers can’t find it. It just isn’t, and then it is, tearing apart whatever or whoever is in front of it. It seems drawn to violence and bloodshed, the spoiler that arrives to interrupt other people’s fights. It is a mass of muscle and gray-silver chitin, impervious to every mortal and celestial weapon known to man and beyond, soaked in the blood of a thousand victories.
And it is here to kill us.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Captain Star shoves me, hard, knocking me out of the way so she can block Nemesis’ downswing with her crossed forearms. The ground splinters under her feet as she absorbs the impact, her body stronger than the stone she stands on. She drops one hand, weakening the block for a chance to blast a surge of energy into the monster’s exposed face—an obvious move, one that Nemesis swats away. The blast goes wide, its energy scarring the vault door.
I clench my jaw, furious with the realization that in an instant, Star has cut deeper into the metal than my gear had ever managed. This is a mistake; I’m distracted, still not yet mentally prepared for a life-and-death fight. My suit’s collision klaxon shrills for the briefest of moments before Star slams into me, thrown across the room by a poorly-blocked blow.
My instincts kick in, saving us both. The suit’s servos seize and relax in response to my thoughts, steadying us as my sabatons dig up the floor, making a purchase. Star returns the favor by pushing off of me an instant later, blasting across the room to land a flying punch. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction: the force of her launch knocks me further back, further out of the fight. My suit screams in protest as it collides with the far wall, warning glyphs flashing damage across every system except—thankfully—reactor containment.
So it is from a distance, and unable to immediately respond, that I watch Nemesis take hold of the vault’s door and, with what appears to be the mildest of exertions, begin to pull the metal free. Star sees her chance; she steps in close and begins to pummel the monster’s hide with a series of strikes, her fists radiating more and more power as she does. The abomination bellows in anger, and for a moment I think it might actually be hurt.
But I’m wrong. With a final sickening squeal, the vault’s door comes off, and Nemesis uses the momentum to twist the twelve-ton slab of diamond-hardened carbon fiber into the superheroine, knocking her away.
And then it casually brings the vault door down on her. The door is so large, so ponderous, it’s difficult to gauge just how hard it hits. With the first strike, Star actually braces, and the metal imperceptibly bends around her block. But Nemesis is a cudgel, in both mind and action, and cudgels do one thing very well. By the third strike, she’s on her knees; by the sixth, and in as many seconds, she’s being ground into the fractured marble and concrete of the League’s inlaid floor.
Nemesis tosses its improvised weapon away, free to wrap a claw around the fallen heroine’s throat and hoist her into the air. She struggles against the hold, weakly, fingers grasping at talons the size of her fist. The ghoul headbutts her this time, the noise of it muffled to my still-ringing ears. It throws her to the ground next, so hard that she bounces up into its kick, a bestial foot mercilessly punting her into the wall. She’s unconscious before she lands, collapsing into a pile like a rag doll, like a marionette without strings.
Despite myself, I gasp.
I’ve seen Star incandescent with fury. I’ve seen Star incandescent with the plasma of a literal star, wreathed in flame. I’ve seen her disappointed and confused and, once, I even saw her smile.
But I’ve never seen her bleed.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
When I was younger—when I was poorer, before I was obligated to let drivers chauffeur genius-philanthropist-CEO-playgirl-me around, before I donned the Mark 1—I drove myself. There was a part of my daily commute that I always looked forward to, a merge between two highways that took me along a sweeping curve of asphalt and concrete.
The human body is… deceptive, communicating feelings and sensations that aren’t real. When you take a curve at high speed, there’s an instinct to accelerate into the curve. The centrifugal forces pull at you, teasing you with the promise of self-destruction. Of self-actualization. The promise that you could just keep going, that you could lean into that power more, that there is something just beyond the curve and the embankment. That if you would just commit, you could fly and never stop.
My body lies to me again, a feeling like fury welling up inside.
It shouldn’t. I have what I want: Captain Star is down, the vault is open. Nemesis is focused on its prey. I could just steal. I could just leave.
I draw its attention with a fusillade of weapons fire, every adaptive weapon hardpoint firing a different kind of munition. Lasers, missiles, mass driver rounds, fucking shuriken stars, all of them impact against its hide. Its head whips around, and it immediately leaps toward me.
I keep firing, even as Nemesis grabs at me. It’s faster than Star, unspeakably stronger, and the suit’s armor immediately crumbles in its claws.
But it’s too late. I am ejecting, letting the hollow suit distract it for one precious moment.
And that moment draws out, longer…
… looonger…
… loooooooonger.
Time… stops. That’s what happens when you suddenly find yourself on the event horizon of an uncontained black hole. Nemesis has breached the reactor core.
And then, in that same infinite instant, the suit’s one automated system kicks in. The thermodynamics-violating-pocket-dimension-heatsink activates and, detecting a spike of radiation, shunts the entire goddamn black hole out of our universe and into somewhere else, taking Nemesis with it.
Just like that, it’s over. All that’s left is an afterimage of a hole in reality—and me, shorn of my armor, but victorious.
It tastes like defeat. I am alone, naked save a jumpsuit, standing in the ruins of the League’s headquarters. At my feet is a bloodied demigod, a woman that I have spent years trying to kill. The weapons I so desperately wanted to steal are laid bare, impossibly out of reach. Outside, the people of this city are gathering, waiting to see who emerges from the melee.
I laugh at the sudden anticlimax of my victory, tension and strain making the noise indistinguishable from a sob.
I lean over Star, taking in her twisted body, the shallow rise and fall of her chest. I think about wrapping my hands around her throat, about ending this, about many things. I am again on the curve, on the edge of another event horizon. The moment stretches out.
And then I laugh, a real laugh that echoes off the empty walls of this broken place.
I know what I have to do.
I pull her to her feet.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
I make my way to the penthouse. It is inside the evacuation zone at the heart of the city; at this point, I don’t care and no one cares to stop me. For what it is worth, the dimensional incursion is apparently ending, the forces of some alien world beaten and Bay City saved. My staff is sending me executive reports—this many lives saved, this many lives displaced, this many lives that will need to rebuild—and my Board is more selfishly reporting they are still alive.
None of that really matters. It’s all window dressing, all the calm before the storm.
I stare into space for a while. Then I shower and change into a negligee. If Star wakes and decides I need to be arrested, she and the League will have to take me from here in my underwear.
On cue, a sound like thunder cracks outside, and I step onto the balcony.
She’s floating just beyond the balustrade, still wearing her tattered uniform, still covered in grime and blood. She must have flown here the moment she regained consciousness. Her fists are clenched so tight they are pale, and her mouth is twisted in almost incoherent rage.
“You,” she begins, her voice tinged with a murderous intent. I have never seen her this angry, and in the twilight, her cobalt eyes burn the hottest blue.
“You,” she begins again, as if wrenching the word out of the darkest place within. “You fucking traitor. You’re Devastator.”
I shrug, mildly amused that I finally get to hear the vaunted superheroine curse.
“And you killed it.”
For some damnable reason, I decide to fallback on affected nonchalance. “You’ll have to be more specific,” I gloat. “I’ve killed—”
And then I’m not talking; I’m not even there. She’s grabbed me, running me bodily through the hardened exterior of the penthouse, slamming me into the doubly reinforced walls that surround the loft’s panic room. The only thing that saves my life are the subcutaneous repulsors I grafted onto my body for an occasion such as this, running along my back and legs.
If she’s relieved she didn’t hurt me, Star doesn’t show it. She’s pinned me against the cracked wall, her feet hovering slightly off the ground, giving her the height she needs to fully loom over me. “Why?” she growls, her voice the muffled howl of a breaking storm, her breath hot on my skin.
She doesn’t want to know the how, the thing I did that couldn’t be done. She needs to know the why, the unthinkable question, the thing I did that I shouldn’t have done, the act that her worldview says is more impossible than people flying and immortals dying.
I saved her.
“Because I could,” I lie. “Because I could, and you couldn’t.”
I lick my lips, delighting in her discomfort, watching as her lack of control robs her of her poise and her power. This is the closest I’ve allowed anyone in years, and it’s worth it, to see her struggle and lose. Even here, trapped under her, there’s nothing Star can do to hurt me. She—
—she kisses me.
Part of me recognizes that this is cheating, that she is breaking the rules, that my most hated foe doesn’t just get to knock her way into my house and put her lips on mine.
To my disgust, that is not the part of me that reacts.
I am kissing her back, forcefully, angrily. My body lies to me again, a feeling like fury welling up inside. I twist my hands into her hair; at some point I bite her neck, hard. I throw her, or she throws me, it’s not clear—we are thrown through the kitchenette, marble and drawers and hidden holstered rayguns splintering under the assault. A repulsor misfires and knocks her into the refrigerator; she yelps and charges back into the fray. Her shoulder accidentally connects with my jaw, and I see stars for a moment as I tumble into the remains of a bookshelf, first editions softening my fall.
Finally, she’s on top of me, only the remnants of our uniforms between us. She is… perfect, painfully so, unblemished to an unreal degree. I think I am jealous. I watch the light in her eyes shift as she sees my body for the first time—the scars of her victories over me played out across my skin, but also the implants and engrams I have grafted on to my flesh to interface with the battlesuit, the choices I have made to be more than perfect.
We stare at each other, waiting, a moment of clarity in our madness.
“Well,” I eventually scowl back, “let’s get on with it.”
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
A body is just a powersuit; both are weapons of war forged from the elements of dead stars. At the least, I must now command my body as one, seeing as the Mark 12 is gone. So it is with an iron hand at the controls that I walk into the press conference, refusing to limp.
I do wear the bruises like a badge of honor, though, victory marks over two implacable foes.
The less easily explained bite marks, I have hidden with concealer.
I don’t know what Star is going to do; I haven’t seen her since our… fight. Frankly, I don’t know what I am going to do. On some level, I am bereft—the embodiment of my strength gone, my secret identity compromised.
But with the incursion fading into memory, the world wants to know about Delenda Dax pulling Captain Star from the rubble. What was the genius-philanthropist-CEO-playgirl doing at the League’s headquarters? Is she actually a superhero? Is she actually a supervillain?
Only Star knows the truth. She might have told the League, but they haven’t arrived at my office, weapons drawn and powers glowing. They’ve not seized control of my corporate empire. They’ve not imprisoned me on their space station.
I don’t know what Star is going to do. I keep thinking about it, worrying away at the question in my mind. She has to do something, right? She can’t just leave it, can she? Anything would be better than this edging expectation, this—
I stand behind the podium, about to speak, when my ears pop. And suddenly it isn’t my press conference any longer, it’s hers.
She’s beside me, shoulder to shoulder, not looking at me. “Many of you have questions about what happened earlier this week, at the headquarters of the League of Heroes. And to assuage your curiosity, Ms. Dax was about to reveal corporate secrets that she ought not to.”
Was I? My teeth are clenched tight; I can’t imagine anything coming out of them. I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. I don’t even know what is going to happen next.
“Here is what I can tell you: during the dimensional incursion, Nemesis—” a murmur goes up “—appeared within the League’s headquarters. He breached our strongest defenses and… and when I tried to stop him, he almost killed me.” This admission astounds the audience back into silence. “It was at this moment that Ms. Dax, using technologies and techniques known only to herself and her corporation, intervened. She not only saved my life, she also did the impossible: she defeated Nemesis.”
Remarkably, this is all technically true. The conference erupts into questions, questions I don’t hear over the pounding blood in my ears. I don’t know what I say, I don’t know how I get out of there. All I remember is Star shaking my hand, her fingers wrapping around my wrist, the perfect match for a hidden bruise, as if trying to communicate something to me. What—pity? Triumph? Appreciation?
I don’t know. All I know is that this is the absolute worst outcome. Delenda Dax is supposed to be just an empty suit, a star of the meaningless news. She has money, not power. She crashes cars and sleeps around; she doesn’t defeat immortal beings.
To my dismay, I realize that my own newspapers will have to acknowledge my goddamn heroism; even downplaying it will make me seem coy. The League… they’re going to unintentionally humiliate me by making Delenda Dax an honorary member of the League. Then they’ll try to make me a real hero.
And behind it all will be Star, knowing, watching, judging, making me be there instead of here.
I realize that Star thinks she’s helping, that she’s decided to keep my secret, that this is her way of thanking me for her life. And I know that she knows she’s actually hurting me, that she’s binding me with social strictures and obligation and trust.
When I get back to the office—the penthouse is still in ruins—I stare into space for a while. Then I shower and change into a pair of mechanics coveralls.
She knows who I am now. But I know her now, too. I’ve seen her bleed. I’ve seen her die, a little.
I know what I have to do.
I start work on the Mark 13.