Supernova: Premiere Issue

[imaginarystories]

She'd never expected to actually fight anyone. Or anything.

Segmented tentacles and grabbers slid around her, struggling to find a grip. A metal pincer closed tight over her cape and yanked hard, trying to drag Laurel out from under the robot's body. Ignoring it Laurel punched up into the robot, through its steel shell. Her fist hit something hard inside the saucer-shaped machine, something that buckled and lifted as her punch plowed through the robot's machine-guts.

Metal screamed as it ruptured. The robot stalled, underbelly tentacles dropping loose around Laurel.

Shoving the robot aside revealed the sky and another machine above her. A metal cylinder, bent and broken. Laurel braced herself, waiting for a new attack. After an instant of watching the complex cylinder she realized it wasn't a missile or drone. The robot's power turbine. Launched clean through the robot's body by the force of her blow.

Did I hit it too hard? Laurel wondered as she watched the turbine fly through the grey sky. The turbine, trailing smoke, arced up and over, tumbling as its rise turned into a fall.

Laurel realized its fall was taking it towards a nearby police car, parked lengthwise across the industrial road. The cops, watching from behind the car, realized the same thing and ran.

A bit too hard, maybe, Laurel decided. The turbine came down fast onto the hood of the police car, the hard smash almost inaudible over the sound of fire and safety alarms. Well, I'll know better for next time.

 

The robot she'd just smashed now burned yellow, flames hissing and roaring with an almost electrical sound. Thermite. Or possibly thermate, judging by the acrid stench of burning sulphur. There were two more robots nearby, designed in that sickening-familiar raygun gothic style, all saucer-shaped with segmented legs and chrome grabbers, all burning. Laurel ignored the molten sparks spitting out from the nearest wreck, the spattering droplets sticking to her deep red cape and blue tights.

Short as it had been, Laurel's first fight as an actual real "superhero" had caused a lot of damage. Three robots burning with metal fires, a nearby fuel truck leaking fuel through a hole in its tank, a warehouse with an entire side scorched by a stray particle beam, the road pocked with blast marks, a wrecked police car...

Ignoring the urge to calculate just how much the damage would cost, Laurel put the fires as her first priority. She pushed energy into her body, speeding herself past human limits. Around her the world slowed, the fires dancing and sparking like flowers opening up to the dawn. Fire alarms dropped in pitch to nearly inaudible rumbles. More importantly the leak from the small fuelling truck seemed to stop entirely, it's spread slowed to an imperceptible trickle.

Carefully jogging over to the loading dock of a nearby factory, Laurel went in search of fire extinguishers or something to block the fuel's spread. This part of the Novasector specialized in manufacturing small batches of boutique electronics, so Laurel was fairly sure there would be metal-fire extinguishers nearby.

Super-speed is boring, Laurel complained to herself. From her perspective a quick jog took her over to the factory, where she hopped into the open loading gate and spotted a couple of workers in protective gear, slowly dragging their feet as they edged towards a pair of wall-mounted bright yellow fire extinguishers. Taking care not to nudge the workers, Laurel jogged past them and grabbed the metal-fire extinguishers from their mounts. Then she jogged back to the burning robots. All at a gentle pace that seemed to take a good minute or two.

To anyone watching Laurel would be a blur moving at nearly 300 kilometres an hour. If she'd accidentally bumped one of those workers, her roughly 50 kilograms of mass would have hit with enough force to shatter bones.

In the past few seconds the fuel leak had trickled about twenty to thirty centimetres, creeping closer to a smouldering robot. Laurel started there, putting down one of the extinguishers to work with the other. She blasted grey-white powder from the extinguisher into the broken machine, covering the molten "ashed" metal, and then around the robot to cover any hot metal that might have sprayed out.

Extinguisher powder and smoke from the fires mingled into a thick haze around her legs. The smell of scorched metal and electronics stung Laurel's nostrils. And on top of all that was the scent of kerosene on concrete.

By now the fuel truck had stopped leaking. A stray cannon round from one of the robots had ripped a hole through the tank just over halfway up its side. Now the fuel still in the tank rested below that level. The fuel on the ground was still spreading, but that was a problem for industrial cleanup. Laurel's problem was to make sure the metal fires and fuel didn't come into contact.

The other fires were easy to control. Keeping her speed and reflexes at about thirty times faster than human meant the chore seemed to drag on for a few minutes, but to an observer moving at normal speeds it would have all been over in seconds. A quick search of another nearby workshop turned up a pile of sandbags. Laurel loaded those onto a wooden palette and carried them pack to the fuel spill, hefting the palette and sandbags over her head.

Don't need to speed through this, Laurel decided. She slowed to normal speeds as she worked, piling a row of sandbags to stop the spreading fuel. By now it was a thin puddle, spreading more slowly than before. Building the sandbag wall was easy work and it let Laurel take a look around the scene.

No more fires that she could see, a couple of alarms had been shut off, and there were workers peeking out from behind doorways or forklifts or other bits of cover. No sign of injuries, no cries for help. And the cops were on their way back, followed by a group of firefighters. How Laurel had managed to not notice the big fire engine at the end of the road was beyond her, but there it was.

Time to get out of Dodge. With the sandbag barrier finished, Laurel gave the approaching police a jaunty wave and crouched slightly, preparing for a jump that would take her out of their reach. She had just enough time to see their expressions turn to shock, and then heard car brakes —

Green metal slammed into her side, smashing Laurel to the ground. Brakes screamed as something dragged her under, grinding her into the sandbags. The screech of brakes and tires stopped. Laurel reached up and grabbed — A wheel axle?

Laurel had a lot of practice in not breaking things. Confused, she hesitated. This looked like the underbelly of a car, not another robot. And obviously Laurel wasn't hurt. Just annoyed, with sand in her hair and under her cape collar, and maybe in her ear. She heard muffled yelling, a woman's voice, and a car door opening.

Pushing gently, Laurel raised the car a bit above herself. Above her she heard someone yelp in surprise. Lying on her back, dragged half over her sandbag barrier, Laurel carefully wormed her way out from under the car. Sand from the ruptured bags worked its way further down her collar. Once she was out she lowered the car slowly, more or less. With her arm stretched out like that she had to let the car drop the last couple of centimetres.

Shaking sand out of her short blue-black hair, Laurel stood and took in the scene. A green electric sedan, that's what had hit her. The driver's door was open, and next to the car sat a woman with pale golden-tan skin and blue eyes. The woman rubbed her butt and swore.

The woman looked familiar to Laurel. "Are you injured?" Asked Laurel.

"No," she answered, shaky. Her voice put the final piece together for Laurel. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine, Ms Bly." Superhero voice, Laurel reminded herself. Let her original Langlois accent show just a bit, smooth away the soft vibralto she normally spoke in. "You should be more careful. You've wrecked your car."

"It's not mine," Elsie Bly replied. "Why would I own a car? I don't even have a licence."

The journalist Elsie Bly stood, still rubbing her hip and ass. Laurel braced herself, either to be recognized or for the inevitable comment.

"Oh hey," said Bly. "You're tiny."

Like most other originalius humans in this century, Elsie Bly was significantly taller than Laurel. Actually Bly was a bit taller than most women, probably about 170cm and skinny.

"Elsie Bly, Nova City TopPod News," she said. And then, "How did you know my name?"

"I've seen your work, Ms Bly." And you were harassing my sister asking questions about Cai. "I'm afraid I don't have time to talk to the media right now — "

Case in point, the cops who were finally making their way around the back of the car.

"I'll arrange a press conference later today," Laurel said as she hopped back a couple of metres, out of reach of the cops. "Until then, take more care when you steal someone's car."

Laurel jumped, pushing lightly. The wind blew sand out of her hair as she lifted up into the overcast Fall sky, sixty metres above the streets of Nova City. When her jump started to arc downwards she pushed a bit of energy out of the soles of her her feet. The resulting pion beams rocketed her up above the lingering smoke from the battle, up and above the city, and away from the police and media.

She'd never expected to actually fight anyone. All in all, she thought it had gone pretty well.

 

---

 

The pion beam flared bright enough to be seen across probably half the city, flashing blue-white against the grey sky. Laurel Jordan flew above Nova City, the first time she had allowed herself to do so, visible now to everyone.

Deciding to be seen, Laurel threw a couple of somersaults into her first public flight, firing beams of energy as reaction control thrusts. Time to enjoy herself, after successfully stopping a major robbery. Well, stopping 3/5ths of a major robbery. Two robots had gotten away.

Five robots built in a painfully familiar style, flying saucers on robot legs with top mounted cannons. Like something out of the old art Cai loved. But as Laurel accelerated up along the central block of King Tower, wind blasting her hair back, she decided not to worry about any of that for now.

Cutting thrust she let herself drop out of the hazy October sky towards Nova City's Downtown. The office buildings and apartments grew quickly, the details of their rounded concrete shapes and glass and chrome facades becoming clear. Laurel aimed for Christmas Street, on the northwest edge of Downtown. Most of the buildings here were new like the rest of Nova City, retro-styled Streamline Moderne architecture blended with Midcentury-Populuxe notes. More importantly, a few were older historical buildings built before construction began on Nova City. The underground infrastructure around them was old, complicated, and useful to someone who didn't want to be seen.

The problem with rocketing around on beams of energy was that it couldn't be called subtle. Disappearing from the public eye and slipping back into her own life would take work. Work, and months of carefully mapping the infrastructure of Nova City. Laurel dropped into a space between three buildings and started making her way down into the city's underside.

Down an access hatch into a concrete corridor, through an old metal door, up and over a disused crawlspace... Here, old industrial drainage buried ten metres under the road. There, an unused utilities tunnel built for future expansion. The old and new infrastructure of Nova City created gaps, where Laurel slid through unseen.

Finally she came out into a storm drain above the central pond in Onguiaahra Park. Her gym bag was still there, wedged into a corner three metres above the bottom of the drain. While mostly dry, the storm drain was still a damp cave. Laurel changed quickly, pulling on her cold workout clothes and shivering dramatically as she packed her superhero gear. While the cold couldn't harm her, she had never liked being chilly.

Oh well. Time to stop kvetching and get to her first class of the day. A quick gluon-boson pulse changed the transparency of the coating on her hair, hiding her natural blue under a platinum blond layer. Laurel let a trickle of power flow into her optic nerves and out as a pulse of transluminal radiation. That radiation bounced off the surroundings and back into her charged optic nerves, forming a density map of the surrounding region. Closing her eyes to concentrate, Laurel sorted through the 360 degree scan and tried to make sense of it. Like trying to read a 3d map made of layers of glowing glass, from the inside...

There probably wasn't anything larger than a squirrel around. Laurel stepped out of the storm drain and into the feeble sun. A quick glance around showed her that she'd been right, and there were no people along the paths. Too early and too chilly for many people to want to hang out by a pond.

Laurel vega-jened Selestin hadn't even had a chance to introduce herself to the world. Now Laurel Jordan pulled her phone from the pocket of her hoodie to see what the world had made of her.