[The cover shows Solar Max and Meteor being pushed aside by the new Brightsword and four shadowy figures that trail behind him. Brightsword is saying, "One side, old-timers. America has a NEW team!"] //|| //^^\\ || || .|. COHERENT COMICS UNINCORPORATED PRESENTS // || \\ || || --X--------------------------------------------- //======================= '|` ACADEMY OF SUPER-HEROES #94 // || \\ || || Billions Served Part 2 - Counterparts // || \\__// || || Copyright 2008 by Dave Van Domelen ___________________________________________________________________________ ACADEMY OF SUPER-HEROES ROLL CALL CODENAME REAL NAME POWERS ASSIGNMENT -------- --------- ------ ---------- Solar Max Jonathan Zachary Spacetime Control AMERICA "JakZak" Taylor Meteor Sarah Grant-Taylor Superspeed AMERICA Scorch Scott Handleman Pyrokinetic CANADA Green Knight Salvatore Napier Strength, Regeneration MEXICO Fury Arin Kelsey Concussion Blasts MEXICO Contact Aaron Zander Psi, Mind-over-Body DIPLOMATIC Breaker Christina Li Telekinesis DIPLOMATIC Essay Sara Ana Henderson Gadgeteer VENUS Peregryn Howard Henderson Jr. Elemental Mage VENUS Beacon George Sylvester Living Light VENUS Geode Unknown Living Crystal VENUS Lightfoot Tom Dodson Velocity Control TRANSIT ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ [July 6, 2026 - Newport News, Virginia Sector] Meteor tugged at the borrowed Marshals uniform, its heavier armor cloth a bit of a nuisance. Okay, so it wasn't really borrowed, it only felt that way. Every member of ASH had been quietly made a Marshal so that they could issue orders and be in the chain of command, so the uniform was really hers. But she'd never worn it since the fitting session. It was the role that felt borrowed, to be honest. Sure, on paper she was a Marshal. On paper, all Combine law enforcement was a single sprawling organization, from local sheriffs to the CBI all the way to ASH. In practice, it was even fairly well held-together...the seams may have been pretty obvious, but they held. But ASH was promoted so heavily as a Superhero Team separate from the Marshals that she tended to buy into her own press. Today, though, it was a handy "second hat" for purposes of mousetrapping the Rush. She and her husband were in their Marshals uniforms, helmets on, so it just looked like five Marshals waiting for five cyborgs to show up, odds even enough that the Rush would probably give in to overconfidence and stick around long enough to be truly stuck. "Are we there yet?" Marshal Hodgson sighed over the helmet comms. The helmets themselves had active sound cancellation turned on, so that no one without a comm could hear it. "Pay up, dear," Sarah smiled as she patted JakZak on the shoulder. "I wasn't the first to get impatient with the wait." "Boomer" Hodgson snickered despite himself. "Cute. Anyway, are we ever gonna be there yet? I know the CBI's pet mathemagician said there was a sixty five percent chance the Rush would hit this electronics store within the next twelve hours, but even magic is susceptible to GIGO. [Garbage In, Garbage Out - Ed.] Or false trails. I have trouble believing that these guys would be so Second Age as to leave an ego signature." Marshal Willot snorted. "They may be from the future, but they're still paragangers. And as smart as Superconductor is supposed to be, he still thinks like a 'ganger, and like someone from his own time. No, they're not carving glyphs from Rush album covers into the sites of their crimes, but once you know to look it was pretty obvious. They cover up the wrong sorts of clues, steal things that aren't valuable in our time and leave things that are." "Indeed," the fifth member of the ad hoc squad nodded. Marshal Jackson had been close friends with Hodgson at the Academy, and was well aware of the man's blind spots. "They seem to have some sort of device that prevents them from leaving any DNA traces...but the ones with human hands didn't even wear gloves, so we got fingerprints once we dumped the data from recent unsolved crimes into the Combine-wide search system. It was so low-tech they didn't even realize they should care about it." To Jackson's chagrin, the local police he worked with didn't routinely do that with something as low-tech as fingerprints, they only auto-checked *DNA* against the national database. Oh, they took fingerprints out of habit, but only checked them against local sources. Obviously, that policy had now been changed. And Sarah intended to make sure that the word got around the rest of the Combine too...this wasn't the 1980s, there was plenty of bandwidth and processing power available to let them routinely check all forensic evidence against national databases. "Of course, the vintage record store jobs were a little more obvious," JakZak noted. "Although that was originally chalked up to retro Rust Brothers looking for vinyl to scratch." "Perimeter alert," Boomer snapped to attention as the heads up displays in his heavily customized helmet flashed. "Profiler was right, they have some sort of cloak, advanced normaltech. Makes 'em hard to see in artificially-lit environments like this place's security uses, looks like it works best against the specific wavelengths put out by fluorescents." "Remember, all we need to do is get them into position over the reinforced section of floor," Solar Max cautioned. "I don't want a running firefight taking out big chunks of the store's inventory if I can avoid it." "What, did they start docking your pay?" Willot chuckled. "Not everyone can play vigilante and hide from the consequences of their collateral damage," Sarah shot back, instantly regretting it. Leaving aside the fact that Beth didn't deserve the dig, they did *not* need to be going into a fight with bad blood brewing over a stupid comment. "Cut it, they're here. And I think they've figured out someone's waiting for them," Jackson pointed out. As the only local Marshal, he still had overall command of the operation on paper, despite the fact pretty much everyone outranked him in general terms. But he'd used that nominal authority to insist on taking the dangerous job. Point. The young man once nicknamed "Dervish" stepped out into the light. "Members of the Rush, you're under arrest for crimes against the North American Combine." The other four then stepped out to flank him, holding up heavy rifles with armor-piercing ammunition. They were pretty sure it'd pierce even Mongo's plating, if they had to actually use the things. "I suppose it's time to go back on tour," Superconductor sighed. "You should have brought more than five Marshals, though, if you hoped to actually capture us. And don't try to bluff that there's more in the wings, I know there aren't. As it is, we'll just beat on you until we get bored, like last time, and then leave." "And maybe do more than beat you up," Chain Lightning leered at Beth, electricity starting to arc along his forearms. "I bet we could really make the sparks fly." "Permission to be disgusted?" Beth asked silently over the comm. "Granted," Solar Max and Alaric Jackson chorused. "At the rate you're going," Jackson added on external speakers, "you'll get back to your own time the old fashioned way...rotting away in prison the whole time." "Perhaps," Superconductor conceded, "but you'll be rotting in a grave long before that. Have some fun, boys, I'll take care of the shopping list," he waved the other four cyborgs forward. "Wait for it," Boomer muttered, watching an overlay of the building's schematics as the members of the Rush leapt into the fray. "Now!" A shocked expression flashed on Superconductor's face as he was suddenly pushed into the midst of his compatriots by Meteor, who had the job of making sure there were no stragglers. This was followed by a satisfying CLANK as Solar Max locally increased gravity by a factor of about fifty. The store was in a building that had once held heavy machinery, and that section of the floor was reinforced to handle extra weight...although from the looks of things it'd still need some repair work when they were done. Sensitive components shattered under their own weight, and Chain Lightning grunted as power arced internally, shutting down his particle blasters. Superconductor tried desperately to find a way to redirect the energy, but whoever had been supplying him with additional tech hadn't expanded his energy control to gravity. Hand and Fist simply collapsed in the middle of attempting to combine. Mongo kept coming, if only barely. "Hold that pose," Boomer smiled, pointing a device of his own creation at the hulking cyborg. "Smile for the pretty birdy!" "Where's the birdy?" Mongo blinked, confused. "Flying around your head in a minute," Boomer replied, then activated the disruptor. Not much good against a moving target, it shorted out enough systems after about ten seconds that Mongo finally dropped. "Very...clever..." Superconductor gasped. "I'd hoped not to reveal our bonus track yet, but I suppose I must...." With that, the five vanished in a faint burst of cyan light. "Well, they certainly picked an appropriate day for vanishing mysteriously," Boomer opined, referring to the day twenty-eight years previously when most of the population of the planet had disappeared. "Tacky, Mike," Willot sighed. For her part, Sarah just wished she could say this was the worst July 6th she'd had, but it wasn't even close. * * * * [July 7, 2026 - Somewhere on Venus] "It's a pity Squadron died," Petra shot a glance at Daggermoth, "he would have been particularly useful in implementing the plan Goldmind's come up with." "We couldn't have trusted him," Daggermoth countered. "He was too attached to the meat. I heard him talking to himself when he thought he was alone in the master's throneroom, thought that being trapped in Rebus's damnable cat's cradle meant I was deaf and blind. As far as he was concerned, all true life was merely puppets, like his own false bodies. I think he seriously believed he could eventually take control of even mighty Doublecross. I did us all a favor by destroying him. Besides," she held up a hand, in which an orange butterfly manifested, "he's not the only one who can create independent lightforms." "Yes," hummed Goldmind from his nested crystal sphere, "but Squadron's bodies have human intelligence, rather than insect intelligence. I can slave the hive to my thoughts, but it creates more vulnerability in the matrix. Or, rather, it leaves me as a single point of failure, rather than distributing the load across multiple minds capable of handling it. As dim as our departed comrade may have been compared to me...or to most anyone you might meet...his cognitive matrix was adequate to the task. He merely underutilized it." "At worst, we could have killed him once we had enough of his bodies to make the reaction self-sustaining," Whiteout noted. "Or do I misunderstand the nature of the plan?" Goldmind wobbled, which was as close as he could get to shaking his head. "No, you have the nub of it. At some point along the way, Squadron would have become surplus to our needs." "But Daggermoth's right about his untrustworthiness," Petra pointed out before the orange photonic could make the connection Goldmind was alluding to, that she might eventually be "surplus" as well. "And he WAS dim. Dim enough that he might have decided we were surplus to *his* needs before we could safely dispose of him. So I suppose Daggermoth's colonies will have to serve the purpose." "Speaking of people we need to safely dispose of," Whiteout ran a hand over the back of the invisibly crouching form of Oblivion, "when do we deal with Chiaroscuro? He's obviously just using us for his own ends, and he's already as much as proclaimed himself the Photonic Messiah. He's not Doublecross, though, and never will be, so at some point he's going to get in our way, just as I'm sure we'll get in his." Petra chuckled. "Sometimes I forget you used to be Derek Radner's number one fan, Whiteout. Then you throw out something like that and remind me how you used to try to be him. Trust me, I know he intends to dispose of us. All of us," she patted her still-flat belly for emphasis. "I don't think he's really worried about a paradox anymore at this point. But I've gotten a strong impression that our current plan lines up with his interests well enough that we can wait until it succeeds...or fails...on its own merits before turning our attention to the matter of backstabbing...." * * * * [July 12, 2026 - Savannah, Georgia Sector] "I'm BORED," Chain Lightning groused. "This backup hideout smells like a cat pissed all over it, I've already played all my games five times, and I actually got desperate enough to try to have a *conversation* with Mongo this morning!" "If you succeed, see if you can convince Mongo to stop feeding the strays. A large number of cats *have* pissed all over this place," Superconductor countered. "That's why our olfactories..." Hand started to say. "...have off-switches," Fist finished. "But I like kitties!" Mongo protested. "I don't even smoosh 'em anymore when I pet 'em," he added, somewhat guiltily. "Okay, now we *are* having a conversation with Mongo," Chain Lightning sighed. "Can I please go out? At least get something to eat besides delivery crap from the three places willing to send guys out to this flooded out part of town?" "Nuh-uh," Hand shook his head. "We tried ta tell yinz..." "...the cops know what they're doin'," Fist finished. Superconductor nodded. "Clearly, we got overconfident. This may be practically the dark ages as far as cybernetics are concerned, but the police still have working brains. And if their computers are slow and pathetic, they can still find what they're looking for if they've figured out what it is. Now that they're on our tail, we have to avoid leaving any clues that would let the authorities know to even look for us in Savannah. And we're too conspicuous in general. Even with the optical cloaks." "Can't our sugar momma get us some disguises?" Chain Lightning suggested. "I mean, I doubt she goes around all the time looking like a china doll, and that little daemon of hers is a hologram, so she's got to have access to holodisguises." Superconducted nodded. "I thought of that, but one of the annoying things about this cell structure is that I have to wait for her to contact me, not the other way around. And I suspect she knows all about our problems and is simply amused..." Suddenly, a section of the warehouse's wall was torn away, letting in the late afternoon sunlight! "Surrender to the all-new, all-different Freedom Alliance!" a faintly digital voice boomed. "Who the fardlesnap are you?" Chain Lightning demanded, firing a bolt from his built-in particle cannons into the dust cloud and striking the speaker. "Kzzzk! That tickles!" was the only response. "We're not ready for another fight," Superconductor hissed. "Bugging out now, everyone!" The dust started to settle. "Why're we still here?" Mongo asked, more curious than confused. "You want we should leg it, you mean?" At this point, five figures stepped confidently into the gap in the wall, a pair of hovering drones zooming ahead of them and seeking hiding places in the corners. "You can't escape American justice, cyborgs!" proclaimed the lead figure, who wore red, white and blue armor emblazoned with a downward- pointing crimson sword. "The Freedom Alliance, led by the latest heir to the Brightsword legacy, is here to bring you in," the original speaker noted. He seemed to be clad in powered armor fashioned after that of a gladiator. Or, rather, elements of several different gladiatorial styles, mashed together. "And I'm the Globally Linked Advanced Digital Intelligence, 8th Revision...but you can call me Gladiator!" "Screw this," Chain Lightning snarled. "Mongo, back door!" With that, he launched another barrage of lightning. A man in bronze and olive green armor stepped in the way of the attack, which was absorbed by his armor like water into a sponge. "Please, give me more of your false lightning...my suit feeds on it as well as the true thing," he raised a hand and fired a beam of brilliant blue light back at Chain Lightning, nearly severing the cyborg's left arm. "Let's hear it for Gauntlet," Gladiator said, sounding like a sportscaster. "He's a whole lot of no fun at parties, but handy in a firefight...or a lightningfight!" Meanwhile, the other two members of the Freedom Alliance had taken advantage of the distraction to work around to the sides of the warehouse. Neither wore heavy armor like the other three, but they did wear full bodysuits of material that suggested at least some protective value in the way it moved. One was a woman in red with a black hourglass motif, the other a man in bright green and gold with a sort of W pattern. "That looked like it hurt," Mongo observed. "Oh, right...back door!" He took off at a run towards the only side of the warehouse not currently covered by heroes, intent on crashing through the wall. But a tendril of energy lashed out from the fingertips of the red-clad woman and caused the hulking cyborg to trip with a crash that scattered the crates that the Rush had been using as furniture. "The lovely Red Widow sure knows how to make a man fall for her, right folks?" Gladiator kept up the color commentary. "You'd almost forget she used to be a member of one of the notorious paragangs of New York!" "Hey, that's Ghostclaw!" Hand realized. "And I think we're on Candid Camera," Fist replied. "Eyes front, boys," the man in green chided as he did a handspring using one shoulder of each as supports. As he landed, they found themselves starting to drift into the air. "He's attached some sort of antigravity limpets," Superconductor shouted, looking like a trapped animal. Things were going so badly so quickly that he didn't really know what to do...Presto had always been the one to make the decisions in a fight. "Can't quite..." Hand struggled to grab the device and crush it. "...reach 'em!" Fist finished. "Let's hear it for Weapons Master, the only 'true' legacy in our little group! Chuck Morse Junior...he hates being called Junior, though!" Gladiator smirked, the faceplate of his armor folding up in an eerie approximation of a smile. "Now it's my turn!" the smile widened into a manic grin as panels in his chest flipped open, revealing a missile rack. "Thumbs down!" "Christ!" Red Widow spat as she ran for cover. "Don't take the Lord's name in...oh, damn!" Gauntlet shifted gears as he realized that the guidance on the missile cluster had gone awry and at least one of the projectiles was turning around and heading for him. "Can I file a bug report?" Weapons Master grinned as he made an antigrav-assisted leap to grab hold of one of the camera drones and ride it out a window as the drone's controller saw which way the wind (and the shrapnel) was blowing. "Weapons safe! Weapons safe!" Brightsword shouted as a few of the missiles impacted on his armor, battering it but leaving him relatively unharmed. "Override accepted," Gladiator replied, flatly. Almost sulkily. In any case, the missile barrage stopped, although it was possible that Gladiator was simply out of ammo. "At least all the badguys seem to be out," Brightsword sighed. "Do you think we can fix this in editing?" * * * * [July 12, 2026 - St. Louis, Missouri Sector] "I trust this was a satisfactory public debut?" the holographic figure asked. It was vaguely humanoid, a flickering shadow that emerged from a small tablet that Sam Walters held in his palm. To anyone else, it looked like he was reading a handcomp, the hologram was only visible from his angle. "It'll do. Fortunately, the Rush really weren't ready for a serious fight, or we might have had trouble. The team still needs time to gel, I suppose...patriotic zeal will only take you so far. And the only two on the team with real fighting experience aren't exactly team players," Walters replied. "Well, that's to be expected, when you're working with the people that neither ASH nor the Marshals wanted," the shadow shrugged. "Although I do like the secondary 'redemption' theme your PR people have worked into the team, on top of the primary patriotism one. Very modern, and a good contrast to most of ASH...although it'll make it hard to attack them for their own failures." "Making a virtue of necessity," Walters shrugged. "Strictly speaking, Cole and Mendez are on work-release, and I had to make that information publically available. At least the power-taps in the Gauntlet armor are keeping Cole from drifting off into delusion-land, and Mendez is following orders and keeping her energy tendrils blunt. McGee's problems are too high profile to quash, although we're playing that more as an excess of patriotism and less as a lack of self-restraint. And Gladiator's reverse-engineered from an evil robot from the future, it won't take long for the nets to figure out his design specs. Morse doesn't quite fit the redemption theme, but the fact that his father didn't marry his mother can be milked for something. Actually, he worries me a little, since his record looks a little too faked, especially since the original Weapons Master probably had access to the kind of people who could work up documentation. My people are guessing that 'Chuck Morse Junior' isn't even related to Chuck Morse Sr., we're talking a quake adoptee or something." The shadow nodded. "We have also done our homework on your team. Do be warned, for the most part they are *exactly* what they seem to be, for good or ill." "Which would be a refreshing change," Walters frowned. "I still don't know who you are, and I don't buy that you're in this purely out of ideological grounds. You've provided technology and information, but the devil always wants his due." "As does the daemon," chuckled the figure. "Let's just say I represent parties that dislike the increasing move towards a one-world government, and would like people to have an alternative icon to look up to. A strong America means, at least in the short run, a weak Combine and a weak United World. In the long run, our goals may diverge if it looks like America will simply supplant the UW as a single world government, but you'll just have to decide for yourself when it's time to try to break off our relationship." With that, the hologram bowed and vanished, leaving Walters to wonder if he'd already passed the point where it was too late to disentangle himself from these people? * * * * [July 12, 2026 - Savannah, Georgia Sector] Sueprconductor awoke to the distinct sensation of pins and needles, and realized someone was attempting to remove his cybernetic arms! "No! Get away!" he panicked, trying in vain to lash out at the technician who was standing over him. Then the world vanished, and reformed around him. He was in another mostly-abandoned warehouse, somewhere else on the Atlantic coast. Slowly looking around, he saw the unconscious and partially-dismantled forms of his bandmates. "Whatever was blocking the teleporter isn't anymore," he mused aloud, directing self-repair routines to reconnect what the technician had dismantled. "Convenient. And suspicious. I think we might be getting used as an opening act while being told we're the main event...." ============================================================================ Next Issue: ASH meets the Freedom Alliance! Superconductor acts on his suspicions! And the Light Brigade moves closer to whatever their grand plan is, in ASH #95, "Test for Echo"! ============================================================================ Author's Notes: Sarah's worst July 6th would probably have been in 2023, when she (along with the rest of ASH and STRAFE) failed to stop the atomic destruction of Beijing, in ASH #7. Poor Rush. They got jobbed twice in one issue. At least they survived...2020s-era paragangers tend to die when this sort of thing happens to them. There's a reason why the "dead" and "paragang" tags are seen together so often on the ASH Wiki (http://ash.wikidot.com). GLADI-8R is based on a Boomer. Yes, the Bubblegum Crisis robots. In the original ASH campaign, the Boomers came back from an alternate future and caused a fair amount of trouble. They even specialized their bodies to fight superheroes, including models based on gladiators. Max and Dex inhabited two such bodies at one point. I still haven't decided what, if anything, they called themselves in this particular version of ASH, since they can't be Boomers anymore. Ghostclaw had a brief appearance in Capstone #1. When I was casting about for "legacy" characters I decided I wanted the new Red Widow to be a former paraganger who'd cleaned up her act, and while searching the ASH Wiki I stumbled across Ghostclaw, whose powers were perfect for the role. Her real name was not revealed in Capstone, but she has a last name now. Yes, Gauntlet is Joshua Jeremiah Cole, father of Chris Kelsey and major villain during the late teens issues of ASH. I'm not really giving away any secrets to say he'll be the biggest source of friction between ASH and the new Freedom Alliance. Brightsword III got his intro last issue, but here's what he looks like: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/ASH/gallery/brightsword3.JPG Finally, the new Weapons Master. If you've been reading ASH stories faithfully, I really don't need to say anything about him, eh? If you haven't been, I'll likely clear things up in-story soon enough. ============================================================================ For all the back issues, plus additional background information, art, and more, go to http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/ASH ! To discuss this issue or any others, either just hit "followup" to this post, or check out our Yahoo discussion group, which can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ash_stories/ ! There's also a LiveJournal interest group for ASH, check it out at http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int=academy+of+super-heroes ============================================================================