ISSUE 7: THE BATTLE OF BROCKTON BAY
Lieutenant Joseph “Jojo” Johnson hated the night shift at Alpha station. It was just ten hours of watching screens and listening to perimeter check-ins every 20 minutes. Sure, running shifts at the PRT station that maintained the forcefield bridge that connected the city of Brockton Bay to the Protectorate base in the bay looked good on paper, but anyone with more than a day of PRT service would look at the posting and see it for what it was: grunt work for the new officer. Made worse by him only being given a skeleton crew of four, including himself, because of personnel shifts the week before.
He sighed and checked the latest round of check-ins. Private Smith on the north, no change. Corporal Reynolds on the west, no change. Corporal Peters on the south, no report. He reached for his radio.
“Peters, you there? You missed check-in.”
Static.
“Peters, report!”
Static. Johnson tried Plan B.
“Reynolds, can I get you to check on Peters? She missed her check-in.”
“Sure thing, boss, you think she’s just on another unscheduled break?”
“I hope so, but you know how these things go, it’s my ass in the fire if something goes wrong.”
“When you write up the report, are you going to mention you keep talking about your ass to your subordinates?”
“Reynolds, how’d you like to be guarding latrines?”
“Point made, boss, I’m on my way.”
After a few minutes of silence during which Johnson tried to distract himself by staring at the readouts for the forcefield bridge to the Rig, all green. Reynolds’ voice came over the radio.
“Boss, put us on lockdown. Now.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I found Peters, her throat’s been cut.”
“Understood. All hands, return to base.” A feeling of dread calm came over Johnson as he reached for the direct line to PRT HQ. He never saw the shadow pull itself off of the wall behind him, and the last thing he heard was a wet thunk as he hit the floor.
Citizen Shade – it was still odd for Sophia to think of herself with that name instead of Shadow Stalker – looked at her handiwork. According to the read Citizen Adept had given, the only PRT trooper left in the facility should be the lone man patrolling the northern perimeter, and he’d be dealt with momentarily by the leader of this little strike force. Citizen Shade touched the headset in her ear.
“Pure, this is Shade. If you’re done, the building’s ours. Send in Volatile.”
“Understood, he’s on his way now.”
After a few minutes of waiting, Citizen Volatile walked into the command room. Instead of bothering Shade with questions, he moved straight to the workstation of the now deceased Lieutenant Johnson.
“We’re in luck,” he said after a few moments of studying the screen. “This guy left the workstation unlocked and with full privileges.”
“What does that mean, dumbass?” Shade hadn’t liked dealing with Volatile even before they had ended up on the same team, the winning team, together, but Dawn was right, he had power, he wasn’t prey.
“It means we can do things the easy way.” Volatile pressed a few keys on the computer and the lights throughout the building all went dead.
“What the fuck just happened?”
“The easy way,” said someone said from behind Shade. She had her knife out and moving only to stop at the last moment when she realised it was Citizen Adept. He smiled shakily as he stared down at the knife. “This way, the troopers on the Rig can’t reestablish the bridge remotely. No need for anything drastic at all!”
“Good job,” said Citizen Pure over the radio, “But we’re still going to follow the plan.”
Shade grinned. “You might want to look away from the window.”
As she spoke, a lance of light shot from Citizen Pure, flying above the building, straight into Bridge Generator Station Beta on the Rig. The night was painted briefly in orange as the explosion faded away.
The Battle of Brockton Bay had begun.
[hr]
It had been coincidence that kept Director Emily Piggot at her desk until the early hours of the morning, but it was experience that made her take a second look at the information in front of her.
“And this is accurate?” she asked.
“Yes, Ma’am,” said Armsmaster, who was currently stranded on the Rig, from a screen on her desk. “Reports indicate the bridge went down just before the explosion at Station Beta, and remote observation shows Purity maintaining position above Station Alpha. We’ve brought in helicopters to try and evacuate, only for Purity to shoot them out of the air once they’re loaded. Unfortunately, our active Protectorate members are here as well, so without calling in the Wards, the help we can offer right now is limited, at best.”
“Understood. Keep working on a way to get here alive, and keep me updated.” Piggot flicked off the image of Armsmaster and turned to Force Commander Pyke, standing at ease in front of her. “Who do we have on duty right now?”
“Well, Ma’am, with all due respect, it’s 0230. We only have two squads ready for deployment from PRTHQ, and a rapid recon squad ready to deploy from auxiliary site 7.”
“Get the recon squad to Station Alpha, and find out exactly who we’re dealing with besides Purity, and call in as many squads to HQ as you can. I want them ready for deployment as soon as possible.”
“Yes Ma’am!” Pyke saluted, turned sharply on his heel, and left the office.
Pigott sighed and rubbed her temples, then turned to the other person in the room. “What is it, Brooks?”
“You know this is a trap, right?” he asked.
“Of course it’s a damn trap!” snapped Piggot. “What I want to know is why didn’t we have any warning about it from our local visitor from the future?”
“Why d’you think the bridge stations were on minimum crew? Just enough people there that it didn’t seem suspicious.”
“I don’t like you, Brooks. I don’t like that you’re able to do whatever you want with no oversight, and I don’t like that you’re throwing away the lives of my people without even so much as a ‘by your leave’!”
For a moment, Brooks didn’t say anything. Then he shook his head in resignation.
“Emily, if you could go back to Ellisburg and stop Nilbog, would you do it?”
“In an instant.”
“And if doin’ so meant you had to lie to your team and personally order them to their deaths?”
Piggot hesitated, then answered. “I still would. My team is dead anyway. At least this way they won’t have died for nothing.”
“Just so,” Brooks nodded. “I don’t like this any more than you, but there’re things bigger and worse than Nilbog or Dawn out there. And if we can’t stop 'em? We’re all dead anyway.”
“Fine, whatever,” said Piggot. “You have your crusade and letting this attack on my city happen is all part of ending it. I don’t like it and I don’t like you. But thanks to your Beckett Protocol protections, I also can’t stop you. So instead, you and I aren’t leaving this room until you tell me what Dawn is planning with this trap, and how we counter it.”
“You understand that me tellin’ you how everything goes won’t work, right? I know what happened when Maria and I scouted this timeline, and me givin’ you the strategies you used then would be a bit of a paradox. Havin’ too many of those at once ain’t good for a local spacetime.”
“Then you tell me what’s likely to happen. Who Dawn has and what they can do, and we’ll come up with our own strategies without you. Is that paradox-free enough for you?”
“Frankly, no. Even just givin’ you that much has more than a whiff of bootstrappin’ about it.” Brooks grinned a little and tipped his hat. “But if you don’t tell anyone, then neither will I.”
[hr]
Seven IFVs leaving the deployment garage. Standard load is one full squad per vehicle. Seven squads fits with the number of personnel entering over the past hour. Probably all they could get at this time of day. Official loadout for a PRT squad is 2,247 pounds of gear and trooper combined. None of those trucks are riding very low….
Lisa cut herself off there. Knowing too much could be dangerous around Dawn. One glance was enough to figure that out. It rankled, but survival came first.
“Citizen Insight,” said the woman herself from behind Lisa. “What can you tell me?”
“Seven trucks, seven squads, boss,” Lisa smiled. “They’re headed east, so Station Alpha and Pure’s team.”
“Excellent. Citizen Push’s momentum fields will stop more from arriving here?”
“Should, do, yeah. Assuming he’s sober enough to have put them up right.”
“He knows the consequences if he hasn’t. What about Citizen Blackout?”
“It’ll take about a minute, but he’ll be able to cover the whole building. That won’t stop anything from getting through before he’s done though, or any wired connections either. And even if the team at the transfer station takes out the power, they’ve got generators on-site.”
“But you know where these generators are, don’t you?”
Lisa nodded and pointed to a spot near the garage exit.
“Then I will coordinate with Citizen Blackout and our teams at the transfer station and phone exchange. We will strike simultaneously.”
Lisa nodded.
“Insight…” mused Dawn, looking at her. “To look at anything and know everything about it. What is that be like?”
“More often than not it’s a headache, not worth it. I don’t need to know what everyone I look at had for breakfast.”
“And what did you learn when you look at me, I wonder?”
Lisa swallowed and composed herself for a moment. “I learned that stealing ATM codes was a waste of my abilities. That you’ll do whatever it takes to whoever it takes to see your vision come to fruition. I learned which side was going to win, and I joined it.”
Dawn studied Lisa for a moment, then laughed. It should have been cold, but it was as heartfelt as any Lisa had ever heard, and that only made it worse. Someone willing to go as far as Lisa knew Dawn had shouldn’t be able to sound so… human.
“Just so, Insight, just so.” Dawn smiled. “If you were my daughter, I would have no complaints. Prepare yourself. Today we show this world what the future looks like.” She began to glow and took to the air, moving into position to strike at the PRT emergency generators.
Lisa looked after her and reached for her radio, her hand brushing against a small pouch she had been told not to open until she knew it was needed. It was time to get things started.
[hr]
Force Commander Pyke looked over his assembled troopers and sighed. Even conservative estimates had put Dawn’s little cult of personality at two dozen capes of mid to high threat levels and, loathe as he was to admit it, his sixty men would be hard pressed to deal with that many without Protectorate support. Still, they had the advantage of familiar terrain, a defensible position, and unexpected numbers on their side. So with luck, maybe half his men would make it out on their own two feet by the time was done.
As he positioned his troops throughout the building to cover as many angles as he could, Pyke noticed a lone figure leaning against the back wall of the main lobby. Closer inspection revealed it to be Jim Brooks, the consultant who’d been running around reassigning personnel and generally shitting up anything resembling a decent deployment structure. It was Brooks’ fault that Pyke didn’t even have his full complement of troops, seeing as he sent seemingly random members of Pyke’s command on enforced leave in Boston. Pyke approached him.
“All due respect, sir,” Pyke said in his best “dealing with civilians” voice, “But non-combatants need to be away from this area. We’re expecting Dawn’s forces to attack at any moment.”
“Y’ ever notice how whenever someone says ‘all due respect’, they really mean ‘no respect at all’?” asked Brooks as he fiddled with a small silver box.
“Can’t say I have, sir,” said Pyke, who had meant exactly that. “But you do need to be out of the area. I can’t be–” Pyke was cut off as the building went dark. He reached for his radio. “Report, now!”
“All power and outside comms just cut out, Sir. Backup generators aren’t responding and we can’t see out the windows either.”
Pyke had to reach back to his days in the Marines before he found words that he felt could properly express how he was feeling. They’d been played, badly. Beside him Pyke heard Brooks push himself away from the wall with a grunt.
“I s’ppose that’s my cue.”
“Cue?”
“Yeah, the tricky part ‘bout tachyon comms is makin’ sure the message don’t get where it’s goin’ before it needed to be sent. ‘Course I can edge up to a paradox, that’s easy, but outright violatin’ causality like that can lead to some major damage. Wouldn’t do to send the whole buildin’ outside of space n’ time after all.”
“Brooks, what the actual hell are you talking about?”
“You’re about to get some reinforcements.” There was a click, presumably from the box Brooks had been holding, and then Pyke found himself shielding his eyes as space twisted open in front of him in a blinding light. A figure stepped out.
“Force Commander Pyke?” asked Alexandria as shapes Pyke realised were the rest of the Triumvirate, the Protectorate ENE, and some capes from further afield, plus a crowd of other figures in the comforting bulk of PRT rapid response armor, stepped out behind her. “We’re here to help.”
[hr]
Recently, materials scientists have discovered a particular arrangement of carbon nanotubes that, when applied to a surface, absorbs 99.96% of visible light, rendering the surface as close to perfectly black as modern physics allows. When the human eye sees this shade of black, called Vantablack, it renders it as something akin to a featureless hole in space.
The PRT building looked like that now. All detail swallowed up in the ultimate silhouette. Even in the darkened streets, all power gone thanks to Dawn’s team taking out the nearby transfer station, the colorless void that was the building stood out.
Dawn approached Citizen Blackout, still shaking from exerting himself in a way he never had before.
“You’ve done well, Blackout,” she said as she put a glowing hand on his shoulder. The darkness boiling off him evaporated from around her touch and Blackout stood up straighter, reinvigorated and no longer shaking.
“Thank you, Ma’am,” he said, “I’ve never had to cover anything this big before. It’s good to know I can.”
Dawn nodded and, having seen to her citizen, took to the air, a glowing beacon in the darkness.
“Citizens!” she called, and all eyes turned toward her. "Tonight we take back this city from the ones who have wrongly stolen it! It is the right of the powerful to–”
At that moment, Dawn was interrupted by a crash from the colorless void that was the front of the PRT building. She turned to look, and was nearly knocked out of the air by a caped figure in black rocketing past her, before it turned to the east and flew away faster than the eye could follow. Half a moment later she dodged a burst of something that flew out of the blackness. It impacted a building behind her, and the building turned inside out.
“Inversion,” came a voice from all around her, “Nasty stuff. I wonder if it’s Manton-limited.” A man in a glowing green cloak floated into the street, then rose to Dawn’s height. She could feel the grin on his face, even behind his mask. Below them, figures poured into the street. “Alexandria and the PRT for your teams around town," said the man. "Legend, and the ENE for your capes here. Hi, I’m Eidolon, and you’re under arrest.”
[hr]
Jim Brooks had seen superhero fights before. He’d seen teams of heroes fighting villains, waves of minions overrunning positions, and more than once, hordes of monsters assaulting civilians.
Not once had he seen a fight like this. The local Protectorate heroes worked well together, as befitted a team led by a man as obsessed with efficiency as Armsmaster was, but there was only so much the seven of them could do against the scores Dawn had brought. Quantity has a quality all its own, after all. Fortunately, Legend, flitting around above the battle proper, and Miss Militia, perched on a crenelation across the street from Jim, were providing some much-needed fire support, taking out potential threats before they could escalate.
A woman in a black-spotted outfit jumped into combat with Armsmaster at the same time as a huge, four-legged monster shoved Assault into a wall as it charged across the field, paying no attention to who it was knocking out of the way. A flash of blue zigzagged its way across the field and slammed into the beast, instantly coating it in a block of ice; one of Legend’s freeze lasers.
The woman fighting Armsmaster, meanwhile, was dodging every hit he threw at her, even as he avoided hers. Without Armsmaster to lead the ground fight, even as Legend fought for air superiority, the Protectorate would quickly be overwhelmed. Jim took careful aim with his pistol, and let loose a rapid six shots, which came nowhere near the two combatants and instead struck the ice-covered dog monster, still sliding to a halt, and changed its course just enough.
Armsmaster saw it first, but rather than jump away, he pressed the attack all the harder. His opponent never took a hit, but she also couldn’t get any of her own in. Instead she stepped back to try and catch her breath. Or she tried to. Instead of the clear space she was expecting, there was a solid mass of ice and dog behind her. To her credit, she only stumbled for a moment, but that moment was all Armsmaster needed to end the fight.
A crash of concrete and glass drew Jim’s attention up and away from the street. Twenty stories up Eidolon and Dawn flew against each other, her halo of light fuzzing around the edges whenever it came too close to Eidolon. Jim had never gotten info on what Eidolon was doing up there, but it was keeping Dawn out of the fight, and that’s what was important for now.
The two battles, in the air and on the ground, continued this way for some time. Neither side gaining an advantage for long enough to leverage it into something decisive before the other side undercut them and gained an advantage of their own. A fighting stalemate that couldn’t last. Eventually someone would misstep, and that would be the beginning of the end.
It was then that the sirens sounded. The battle slowly stopped as everyone realised what that meant, the blackness recessed from the front of the PRT building and the street stood in utter silence until Legend’s voice boomed out.
“It’s Leviathan,” he said grimly, the whole street hanging on his every word, “At Gibraltar. Volunteers, gather… around Armsmaster. Transport to the battle will arrive–”
A flash of gold cut Legend off and threw him to the ground, where he landed with a hard crack of pavement. A moment later, another figure in a long cloak fell hard next to him and crumpled. Eidolon.
Dawn floated to a stop above the heads of the crowd, glowing brightly. The troops under her command began to stand up straighter and look at their opponents with a renewed vigor.
“The old ways are dead!” proclaimed Dawn, voice echoing louder than Legend’s had, “If those under attack by Leviathan cannot save themselves, then they do not deserve to be saved by you! Now, my Citizens of the Sun, you will fight! And you will win!”
The battle resumed, but worse than before. Without Eidolon keep Dawn busy, or Legend offering pinpoint fire support, the Protectorate was losing. Badly.
Jim sighed as his arm began to shift and reconfigure. “So much for doin’ this the local’s way. Time to end this.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Assault from the Protectorate comm unit Jim had commandeered to keep tabs on the battle, “She’s defeated two-thirds of the Triumvirate! How do you expect to win?”
“Simple.” Jim pointed his arm at the sky. “I cheat.” A flare of green light flew into the air from Brook’s arm, casting the entire street in eerie shadow for a moment until it faded. Once the light was gone, nothing happened for a moment. Then Dawn twitched once, twice, and fell to the ground into a pool of darkness.
[hr]
Lisa saw the flare go up and instantly knew what she had to do.
“Alec,” she said into her radio, “Brian, it’s go time.”
From where she sat, three floors up on a fire escape on a building a few hundred feet back from the main fighting, Lisa had a clear view of Dawn, who had spent the last month with her personal parahuman advisors and brutes in close proximity. Not enough time for Alec to gain full control, not since they were being subtle, but more than enough for him to get a solid read on her nervous system. Including how her powers worked.
Lisa saw Dawn twitch once, and she slid down the fire escape. She reached the ground just in time to see Dawn twitch again. She ran to the crowd, and reached the edge just as Dawn landed and the street was flooded with darkness. Lisa had only walked forward a few steps when a hand landed on her shoulder and pulled her a big to the right.
“Don’t trip,” said Brian, Citizen Blackout, no, with this betrayal of Dawn, he was probably back to Grue. “She’s this way.”
With Grue to guide her, it was a short walk to a clearing in the darkness where Dawn lay glowing softly and twitching, with Alec standing beside her, sweating. She caught sight of Lisa and glowed brighter, only for the glow to sputter and fade.
Looking at Dawn like this, Lisa knew what had to happen next. She reached into the pouch she was carrying, and pulled out a hypodermic injector filled with a glowing blue-white liquid. She shouldn’t have said anything, but some things in the multiverse run true, even to their own detriment. Lisa crouched next to Dawn and looked her in the eye. She let her power off its lead and opened her mouth.
“You say you’re the future of humanity but you can’t even stand up, can you? You say you’re superior because you have power that others don’t, but it’s less than a candle here." Lisa smiled as new facts flooded her brain. One final barb before the end. "You say you’ll lead the world to a new order, but even your own daughter left you after you tried to kill her for the crime of being ‘merely human’. Goodnight, Dawn Cohen. You are not special here.”
With that, Lisa placed the injector against Dawn’s neck, and triggered it. A quiet click and the liquid inside flowed into Dawn, and she stopped struggling, and closed her eyes.
“Clear the street, Brian, Brooks’ stuff worked.” Lisa smiled. “We’re heroes.”
[hr]
The aftermath was short and to the point. Some of Dawn’s army escaped in the confusion as Legend and Eidolon recovered and led volunteers to Gibraltar, only to find that Leviathan had left before they arrived.
Never before had there been a violation of the unwritten rules this flagrant, and it was therefore notable that only two capes ended up being sent to the Birdcage. Brad Meadows, better known as Hookwolf, and Dawn herself. Most of the new Citizens of the Sun who remained went to low-security prisons or vanished, only for suspiciously similar heroes to join the Protectorate somewhere across the country.
It was only after watching the live feed from Dragon of the two of them, Dawn still drugged to the gills with Brooks’ future toxin, being sealed into the most secure location on the planet that Armsmaster sat himself down in front of his log recorder. He took a deep breath and activated the device.
“Colin, the first thing you need to know is that the man in front of you, Jim Brooks, is telling you the truth…"
Author note:
IT LIVES!
Wow, this took… some time to finish didn’t it? I blame a) life, b) my inability to write decent action scenes to save my life and c) my brain deciding that it didn’t want to write. At all. Out of spite, probably. Anyway, thanks as always to @silverpower for encouragement and making sure I didn’t commit any excessively egregious errors, and to you (yes you!) for remembering this story exists and reading it. Comments are always appreciated