Eric Stever - Non Metallic

Bob-Ten waited for Sertain to pick up the gun, waited for the last beat. But it didn’t come.

Sertain drew up to his full height, then gestured to a figure in a far window above Bob-Ten. “And let me guess. The Heroine-6 isn’t for you, is it?”

Bob-Ten understood. “Of course not,” he said. “The drugs are for a friend.”

“The Heroine-6 isn’t working as well,” Mentissa said after a marathon session. On the wall of the old school basement where they hid, she had sketched the hierarchy of the Optonians, and was marking how far up she was on the ladder.

“And I can’t eat this shit anymore,” Mentissa said, kicking a half empty tub of Spam. “It’s burning a hole through my stomach.”

“I’ve been looking,” Bob-Ten mumbled. He glanced at a chalkboard where she had drawn a realistic representation of the Memorial bridge. That again, he thought.

Mentissa insisted he stay with her every time she went down the path. The stash of Heroine-6 was half gone after one week, though he had traded Sertain for a month’s supply. The first time, Mentissa’s writhing and groaning kept him on edge, ready to help. But hours of it left him feeling alone and useless. Sometimes she was asleep for an entire day.

“Have you been able to take-over any pilots?” Bob-Ten asked. Hopes of one silver nuclear reaction danced in his head.

Mentissa shook her head, frowned, then crossed something out. “Pilots are shielded from me, some sort of hybrid protection against psychic energy. But I did get a mechanic, a-” she pointed at another chain of boxes, drawn near the supply closet “A Little, an engineer or something. Fixes the ships.”

Bob-Ten repeated what he knew, to fill the time. “The human guards report to Grists and sometimes to Waifs. Waifs are dead-ends, their minds are too different. Grist-Charlie lives near the Screech Mill. That’s where we got a Wavey at the Warehouse, and now the Little.”

Mentissa nodded. Next to each name she had drawn a crude approximation of what the creatures looked like. The Little looked like a ball of fur with seven curious hands. The Waifs were flowing gauzy figures, their heads impossibly elongated, even in the drawing. Mentissa had scribbled in their glow with white chalk.

“And its not a Screech Mill really, I think it’s a strip club,” Mentissa said.

Bob-Ten laughed, maybe for the first time since they’d started. The thing about being the sidekick was you weren’t needed most of the time, unless it was to lighten the mood.

“Most of them don’t wear enough to strip,” he said. “It’s all metallic wrist bands and scales, or stripes of fur. What do they do, put clothes on?”

“They simulate,” Mentissa said, wrinkling her nose. “Besides, now that we know they are lonely we can use that. And there’s something else, the Optonians do this all the time. They take over planets one after another, and always the same way. They seek out the power centers and then subvert them for their own use. Just like the Spanish Conquistadores in the New World. Do you know what ‘Optonian’ means?”

Bob-Ten shrugged. “Do I care what it means?”

“The Little I embodied wasn’t always a repairman, he was a prince. Optonian means ‘The Taken’. He spends most of his time thinking about his cousin-wife. I quite like him actually, he’s bright.”

“Then he knows how to fight them,” Bob-Ten said. He was thinking of bombs again. Magic computer viruses crashing the Khaganate’s ship. Optonians uprising against the master of masters. But there were so many levels.

Mentissa looked away from her drawings, flicked him a smile. “All we need to do is hyperbolize our transthrusters from one-thousand of our largest ships, overloading them in conjunction with the tidal push . That would disrupt the Khaganate’s master program which manages the…” she squinted her eyes “… the MacPherson Complexity. The Little is sure that would work. And no, I have no idea what it means.”

Bob-Ten snorted. “So you’re saying there’s a chance.”

“I’m saying that hindsight is 20-20, or to be more exact ‘hindsight is optimal at some unknown unit of measurement for whatever sense organ is used to interpret light’. In the case of the Wavey, it uses its tongue.”

“I wonder what Spam tastes like on the visible spectrum,” Bob-Ten asked.

Mentissa laughed, but shut her mouth quickly as if surprised. “Moist,” she said.

“So we know some of the Optonians are slaves, or at least captives,” Bob-Ten said. “And we know they’re bored enough here to do what most bored soldiers do. What about a race-war? The different groups must still hate each other from previous invasions.”

Mentissa shook her head. “They all hate each other. But you and I hate each other, or did before. Now we work together.” She took in a sharp breath. “Have you thought about the bridges?”

Bob-Ten froze. He had to be careful here. She was still an evil-genius. Still able to work on parallel tracks.

“I know it’s ironic,” Mentissa said. She kept her voice neutral. “But the Little thought about it too, something about tidal forces, and the religious symbolism of bridges. You said yourself that considering the Optonians have flying ships they sure spend a lot of effort protecting those bridges.”

“Mentissa, you know I can’t believe you.”

“Then you can believe them,” Mentissa said. Her eyes did not leave his.

“I captured you on a bridge,” Bob-Ten said. His voice echoed off the school basement walls. “My brother and I stopped you from destroying it. Did you think I forgot? Bridges is your thing.”

“Everybody has a thing,” Mentissa said. “With so many heroes crammed into one city, everybody has to have a thing. Otherwise you’d never get any press, never get a power base. You will never amount to anything unless you have a calling card that people can identify with.”

“I won’t destroy them,” Bob-Ten said. “People need them still. Humans use them.”

“Then sit and wait while the hero does the work,” Mentissa said. She reached for the needle, and lay down on the futon pad.

Bob-Ten stared at the ground. “I’ll look into it,” he said finally. “But I’m not destroying anything.”

“It’s the only way to find out,” Mentissa said.

Bob-Ten did not see the cold smile on her lips as he walked out of the room.

Bob-Ten leaned against the spalling concrete wall, and swung the binoculars to his eyes. The Lago City Memorial Bridge had been crawling with Optonians, but what he was seeing now made no sense. Even this small bridge spanning the canal near the steelyards in Industrial Valley had heavy protection: Ten Armored Wheelers, and a legion or more of Optonians guards, Waifs by the looks of the soft glow they gave off when gathered in formation. And there in the center of the bridge was the same nest of wires, thick as his arm, all leading to a low-slung rectangular machine that flashed its red warning light every few seconds. Blinkity-blink. Blinkity-blink.

The first rule of being a superhero, even a lower-rung hero like Bob-Ten, is that if your enemy wants it protected, you go after it. You might not get to it, but you’ll shake them up, delay their plans. That’s a tactical victory at least. Anything that blinks is usually a good target for smashing. And that light was like a siren’s song for Bob-Ten.

Blinkity-Blink. But Bob-Ten had the strength of six men, not six-thousand. That legion of guards would stop him, even if he could get past the long range guns of the Armored Wheelers.

Bob-Ten stood up, thinking one of his patented mad-rushes was called for here. A determined gait, a wild look in his eye, and a dozen minutes of extreme violence; that was Bob-Ten’s calling card. But something stopped his usual approach. He dropped the binoculars from his eyes, and slid back behind the cover of the concrete wall.