Isaac wondered where exactly he’d gone wrong to be on the receiving end of a supervillain monologue.

  He’d not wanted to be involved with supers, not really. Just redress some of the imbalance he found in the world, where Blacktime and Glorybeam got to do whatever they wanted without any kind of consequence. The plan had been simple, even, and all he had to do was just get some information to the papers. Yet there he was, hiding in the corner of an underground storage area, surrounded by tinker technology and listening to a voice trying to recruit him for evil.

  Worse, it turned out that his own power had been used as the catalyst for the crisis. He didn’t know how Greg had managed that; the only thing that he’d lost track of before very recently was Lunar Bolt’s costume. But he didn’t doubt it for a moment, it answered only too well both how the tinker had managed to make the effect permanent and why Isaac was able to resist it so easily.

  “To join me, of course,” Greg’s voice crackled over the intercom. “It’s not an offer I extend to just anyone.” Isaac almost rolled his eyes, half-wondering if Greg had practiced the speech in front of a mirror. It was generic enough that it might have been cribbed from any of a dozen recordings or even comic books. “But if you cannot serve, than you will have to be removed.”

  “Ravdia still doesn’t know what you’re doing,” he said, toggling the comm-button to keep the link to Blacktime’s team open while Greg talked. So long as the drones weren’t attacking, Isaac had time to think and to work on trying to get out of the room he was stuck in. And while he didn’t want to tip his hand by trying to openly report the situation to Blacktime’s people, he was sure they were smart enough to understand what was going on from context.

  “Surely you’ve seen how poorly run our world is!” Greg said, clearly warming to the topic. Isaac worked a bit of plastic netting between his hands as he looked around at the racks he was hiding among, finally spotting a likely object off to the side. He slid along the wall until he could grip a wheeled wire organizer, just three shelves of joined metal painted white, but it was perfect for what he had in mind.

  “People like Glorybeam in charge, consorting with villains like Blacktime,” Greg continued, the speakers sending his voice bouncing through the storage area. “Chaos the moment that the status quo is threatened. People who deserve the most being given nothing, while useless leeches sit at the top. Things would run so much better with someone competent in charge.”

  Isaac had to hold back a laugh as he ran his fingers over the wires, pushing inertia into each one individually. He’d tried toppling a couple of the shelves in the earlier fighting, but it was all bolted to the floor and he expected everything else was similarly robust. The door even looked heavy-duty, and unless he was willing to try the elevator shaft again, he wasn’t going to get out easily. But if he took the time to build extra inertia piece by piece, as he had with the book, he might be able to overwhelm the reinforcement.

  “You think you could run the world?” He asked, morbidly curious about Greg’s megalomania. While he didn’t know Greg well, it was still a bit of a surprise. Though the more he thought about it, the more it made sense. The man had always been withdrawn, taciturn and generally grumpy. Plenty of people in Greg’s orbit were thugs, and it wasn’t much of a jump from low-level thuggery to outright supervillainy. More, Isaac knew that delusions of power were common among supervillains; a surprising number of people, given a small taste of being able to push people around instead of being pushed, decided they liked it and that all the worlds problems stemmed from them not being able to do it to everybody. That it was everyone else’s fault the world wasn’t perfect.

  “Of course I could!” Greg sounded almost affronted. “The previous Mechaniacal came close, and he only failed because he lacked the conviction to commit to it! I have no such weakness. Glorybeam was just the first — anyone who doesn’t deserve their power shall lose it. Perhaps I can even grant them to people who never managed to awaken an ability for themselves. With my genius there are no limits!”

  Isaac didn’t bother replying. That was the sort of screed that came before setting off some weapon of mass destruction just to show people he was serious. Hopefully Greg didn’t have access to anything that powerful, but if he did, it was obvious that he had to be stopped immediately. Not that Isaac thought he could do it; he was lucky that he hadn’t gotten vaporized by some high-tech raygun. What Isaac needed to do was get rid of the depowerment tech, somehow, and let the real professionals handle the rest. He could probably wreck the drone in the room, but he needed to make sure there was a path to Greg clear of any others.

  Peering out around the corner, he hurled the netting at the large drone, the plastic mesh flipping through the air more like a metal grate. The extra inertia meant that air resistance didn’t do its job to spread it out, but he couldn’t focus on the results. Instead he turned and grabbed the organizer cart, ducking slightly to shield himself behind it and dashing headlong at the door. The plastic casters made a rumbling, growling noise as the cart refused to bump from slight irregularities in the cheap wheels, but the floor refused to give as well, leaving all that energy to shake and shiver through the structure.

  A few energy bolts hit his cart, some splashing off and one causing it to sag alarmingly, but he made it to the door at full tilt. The collision was an unholy noise of protesting metal, groans as the door deformed around the cart and pings from hinge-pins and bolts shearing off and ricocheting around. Then a deafening crash as the heavy, vault-style door was flung into the hall behind, crushing a few drones in the process but revealing a veritable wall of the things further out. Isaac skidded to a halt, certain that the cart wouldn’t be enough for that, however reinforced.

  “Heck,” he said again, coming to a halt.

  “If you’re quite done,” Greg said, sounding considerably more testy than he had been before.

  “Ravdia knows when she is outmatched,” Isaac said, lifting his hands. Not that he needed a weapon to do damage, but at the same time he wasn’t going to out-fight that much machinery. If anything, he was extraordinarily lucky that Greg didn’t just decide to shoot him down right there. But then, it sounded like Greg wanted access to his power, so maybe some machinery was a price the tinker was willing to pay.

  Regardless, better to let Greg think he was surrendering and break out later when there weren’t so many guns pointed his way. Besides, the layout he could see was a long corridor with rooms; there was no way he could ensure that all the traps and defenses were down unless he wrecked his way from one end of the subterranean lair to the other. And he just didn’t have the power for that. At least the resistance training and his exercises at Justice for Hire had paid off, as he wasn’t exhausted by the past few minutes of intensity.

  “Come along, then,” Greg said, the drones rearranging themselves around him in a synchronized movement that was disturbing on a visceral level. One of them spat out some kind of sticky rope that wrapped around his wrists, binding them together and pulling them behind his back. That wasn’t great, but Isaac started applying his power to it, hoping to mess up the chemistry involved. In theory, whatever chemical reaction was involved with the sticky binding should slow down if he gave its molecules enough inertia — a potential application he’d considered even as far back as working in the hospital, but never found a need to try.

  He allowed the drones to herd him along the corridor, glad that the veil hid the fact that he was keeping a close eye on each of the rooms — and likely, the comm-pin was recording as well. He knew how small Cayleb could make cameras, and while each tinker had a specialty, he couldn’t discount the chance that Blacktime’s communications were robust. Each of the doors was labeled in a tasteful script, silver writing on a bronze plaque, which definitely wasn’t Greg’s work. Storage Room A-1, on the other side of the elevator. Power Room A, Maintenance Access A-Junction on the facing side of the corridor.

  It bespoke a fairly large facility, at least two wings full of Mechaniacal’s creations, and nobody had the slightest idea it was there despite its proximity to the surface. Isaac had no idea how the old tinker had managed that, but after today it wasn’t going to be secret anymore. The question was how the hell he was going to get out of it intact.

  The drones escorted him to a turn in the hallway, a T-junction where he swung a right and stopped at a visible energy field, projected by little crystalline bubbles embedded the ceiling. He could barely see fine, shining gears turning within those bubbles, a soft ticking noise like being in a room full of watches filling the hall. Beneath his feet, he could feel the faintest of tremors, hinting at something larger just out of sight.

  With a soft hum, the energy field deactivated, and Isaac stepped through as the door beyond – labeled Control – opened. He’d been expecting some kind of big room with a huge display, but instead it was no larger than a regular office, and cramped with machines both intact and not. Half-assembled projects littered the floor and covered seats, while Greg himself was ensconced behind a massive metal desk that wrapped around in a semicircle, covered with cogs, axles, and more of those crystalline projectors. All of it was moving, which struck Isaac as a massive safety hazard, but he wasn’t the tinker.

  It was probably meant to make Greg look imposing, the maestro at his instrument, but it was hard to find a scruffy beanpole imposing. Besides which, he’d seen Greg bawling his eyes out on the playground, and it was difficult to shake that particular memory even if it was almost two decades ago. He was escorted past the piles of unfinished machinery to a spot just beyond the reach of Greg, where several drones hastily cleared the floor of a random assortment of parts. It ended up being just far enough around to one side that the vague fuzz projected from the desk resolved into surveillance footage. From the overhead perspective on one screen, the damage Isaac had done to the storage room seemed pretty insignificant.

  “You see how useless it is to try and oppose me,” Greg said, sweeping his hand across the desk as if Isaac was supposed to be impressed by it. Though he probably would have been impressed a few weeks ago, or if he thought that all the machinery humming and ticking away was actually Greg’s. Instead, it was obvious that only the newest and crudest of works were by Greg’s hand, and all the slick, smooth, stylish machinery was Mechaniacal’s work. Something that made him appreciate how much of a terror the old tinker must have been, as opposed to the knockoff copy in front of him.

  “Ravdia wonders if you believe the same for — all of Star Central,” Isaac said, changing what he was going to say halfway through. Mentioning Blacktime would be a mistake and potentially tip off Greg to the heavies waiting in the wings. Although clearly they were content just to wait until an opportunity presented itself. Not surprising; he’d gone in with far too little planning, to the point where Captain Multiples would have had some scathing comments, but under the circumstances there wasn’t a way to plot things out more thoroughly.

  Greg was too much of a menace to leave alone.

  “Star Central,” Greg scoffed. “Without Glorybeam, what do they even have? A bunch of second-rate supers with no imagination. What matters is power, and anything short of absolute power is meaningless.”

  Isaac grimaced. In a way, Greg was right. It was clear that while Glorybeam didn’t do all the work herself, the sovereign-class power served as the cornerstone of the entire edifice. Faced with someone like Lunar Bolt or Stop Motion, someone might think they could outsmart the super, or just get lucky. When it came to overwhelming power, that kind of attitude withered and died.

  “You may not know it, but I’m one of the Lost Generation,” Greg said, clearly glad to have the chance to air his grievances. Isaac had to wonder if he’d been practicing these speeches just for today, or was simply happy to have a captive audience. “I’ve seen what leaving Star Central and that type in power brings. They have failed their charge, and must be replaced.”

  “Perhaps that is so,” Isaac admitted carefully. The damnable thing was, Greg’s offer was tempting. It spoke to exactly what Isaac had been doing — trying to hold the people at the top accountable. Blacktime was right there, and the only person who could possibly threaten him was Greg with the depowerment ray. For a few moments Isaac considered warning Greg about it, trying to get him to go after Blacktime, and then dealing with Greg himself afterward.

  But he couldn’t. It was a terrible idea, tempting as it was. Blacktime could certainly just eradicate the area with overwhelming power, and Isaac was sure that one of the supers the villain had with him was there specifically for that reason. Besides, there was no guarantee that Isaac could incapacitate Greg afterward — and while Isaac had no problem with tricking bad people, he was pretty sure Blacktime had a lot more experience with betrayal than Isaac did. As a passing whim, it sounded good, but in reality he was pretty sure it’d make things worse if he tried.

  Instead, Isaac tried to keep Greg talking. The more time he had to think, to study the room and figure out a way to deal with the defenses, the more likely it was he could actually do something. Some of them were automated, yes, but judging by the complicated control interface Greg was manually directing most of the drones. Clearly, Greg was being incredibly egotistical by bringing Isaac into the control room, but the guy seemed to be have completely bought into the theory of his own superiority.

  “But Ravdia wonders why you decided to attack a foster care center instead of Star Central,” Isaac continued, latching onto the only topic that sprang to mind. Even as he said it, he realized it was probably a mistake, but of all the things Greg had done that one had stuck in his mind as the most pointlessly malevolent. Even beyond targeting Chains and Smokeshow.

  “Now, why would that possibly matter?” Greg said, peering at Isaac, which was exactly the sort of response Isaac dreaded. “No, wait. That was you, wasn’t it?” The tinker spun back to his control console, fingers playing over a mechanical keyboard with twice as many keys as a normal one, and a dozen levers, dials, and switches besides. From the angle Isaac had, he could barely see footage of the foster care from somewhere in the air. A replay of the fight when he was Lou.

  The projectors added on indecipherable symbols, highlighting aspects of the footage as it played forward and backward at double or triple speed. Isaac had seen some of that kind of thing when watching Cayleb work, a tinker’s peculiar power letting them process certain types of information at a scale that boggled the mind. But it also came with a kind of hyperfocus, a narrowing of attention to their particular goal.

  Isaac flexed his wrists, testing the sticky binding rope and found it still hadn’t solidified. Tacky, but not fully hardened. At the same time he worked his mouth, gathering saliva and focusing on it to invest extra inertia in it and it alone. The spray bottles had shown him just how dangerous high-inertia liquid could be, and with the veil still in place nobody could tell what he was up to.

  Thinking of the veil made him realize he almost did something incredibly stupid, and hastily pulled the inertia out of his costume. He couldn’t target the veil specifically without touching it, but that was fine. Either this would work, or it wouldn’t matter. Taking a long, slow breath, Isaac spat.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Saliva tore through the veil and arced out to hammer into the desk. It wasn’t moving particularly fast, but that hardly mattered — speed helped, but it was more about the insistence the liquid had on continuing forward. Cluttered as the desk was, he couldn’t help but hit working machinery; denting gears, dislodging axles, cracking glass. Most importantly, a few flecks hit what he was actually aiming at and popped dozens of keys off the mechanical keyboard, deforming the delicate armatures.

  “You!” Greg shrieked, whirling as Isaac flexed his arms, trying to give them as much momentum as he could so the inertia could do its work. The not-quite-adhered sticky ropes unstuck from each other with a sound somewhere between a rip and a squelch, and Isaac flung them at the drones hovering just behind him.

  “Controls damaged, move now,” Isaac said aloud, keeping it brief so he didn’t waste whatever window of time he’d gained. Once again he thought about how Justice for Hire actually had proper code phrases and comms protocol, wishing in passing for that sort of expertise as he dove away from the drones guarding him. A pair of energy bolts dug grooves through his armor, despite what investment he’d managed to put back into it. The foam and plastic hissed and popped, dangerously hot against his hip and shoulders — painful, but better than being cut in half.

  “It doesn’t matter how useful your talent is,” Greg growled, fumbling at the damaged console. “I can extract it from your corpse!”

  That was the only threat he got out before Blacktime and his squad appeared. Isaac managed to glimpse their entry; a ball of blue light flashing in through the door before it broke and revealed the assailants. The only difference was that this time Blacktime was holding a Deep Kingdoms knife; a long, jagged crystaltech blade of incredible complexity that fairly radiated menace.

  Greg sneered at Blacktime, but unlike with Isaac didn’t bother monologuing. Instead, he slapped a small button on the end of the desk. For a moment nothing happened, and Blacktime rushed forward with his knife.

  Then everything went to hell.

  An explosion suddenly ripped through the control room, some wave of concussive light that picked Isaac up and smashed him through the nearest wall. He had flashbacks to being kicked by Lunar Bolt as metal deformed around him, squealing and groaning as Isaac’s world blurred for a moment. He found himself bouncing off another metal wall, not even leaving a dent as he dropped down, the wind knocked out of him. Spots danced in front of his eyes as he struggled to take a breath, his body aching and feeling out of joint, while off to his right a car-sized cylinder of incomprehensible machinery encased in steel grating spooled up with a whine.

  “You think you can take me down?” Greg’s voice crackled from loudspeakers, edged with hysteria. “I am Mechaniacal! The greatest talent of humanity!” Through the hole that Isaac had ripped in the wall, he caught a glimpse of Blacktime’s knife clashing against a glowing energy field. Something that Greg really should have activated before bringing Isaac in, but fortunately had been too egotistical to bother.

  An unspeakable sound of mechanical grinding and shifting nearly deafened Isaac as walls and floors began to move, unfolding on massive hydraulic rams to reveal ever more complicated clockwork. Even the wall Isaac had been punched through slide aside, groaning and squealing as deformed metal was forced into place. Fortunately for him, the floor where he’d landed didn’t move, only a panel off to one side, but the man-sized pillbox turret that popped out of it certainly didn’t feel like fortune.

  “It is my role – no, my duty – to rule! The world is filled with sloth and incompetence, and needs a firm hand to guide it!”

  Greg continued to rant over the loudspeakers as Isaac lurched forward, still gasping for breath, and slapped his hand against the turret before it could target and fire. Unlike with most things, he started pulling inertia out, yanking it away from the internals and whatever projectiles the thing might spit out. The mechanical hum jumped upward in pitch, out of his range of hearing as the thing rotated in fits and starts. A stream of darts hissed out in a blurred line, hitting his armor and dropping straight down without even a sensation of impact.

  The turret seemed to conclude that he wasn’t worth the effort, and rotated to aim through the now-open wall at Blacktime’s people, and Isaac let it. They were fighting more of the automated defenses, and without Isaac dialing their punch down to nothing, projectiles of both matter and energy were bouncing around and tearing through things. Not every surface was vulnerable to the ricochets; the pattern of torn and intact metal gave the impression of some big artifice that had been papered over with a weaker cladding, hints of some mind-boggling construct.

  “It’s not my fault you can’t see my vision! Can’t understand the grand workings of my design! You’re the ones making me do this!”

  He only had a glimpse of the battle – Blacktime’s temporally-accelerated knife sparking against the energy shield, bowler hat’s blue flicking about and blocking bolts and bullets, Mangonel slinging his electrical balls, and the skeletal guy just pointing ominously – before another explosion blinded him. This time Isaac could feel debris pelting his armor, and he groped around in the direction of the grating-clad cylinder, figuring that would be at least a bit of a shelter from a super-fight gone suddenly out of control.

  Another crash, and the sound of sirens poured down from above. Isaac blinked, finally managing a rasping breath, and saw between the spots dancing in his eyes that most of the ceiling was gone, exposing a hazy blue sky with dozens of hovering figures. Supers.

  “Keep following the evacuation paths!” A half-familiar voice boomed out; Captain Bulk’s stentorian bellow echoing from above. “Star Central is handling the situation!”

  “Heck,” Isaac groaned, wheezing and coughing as he scrambled to his feet. He’d honestly thought that Blacktime could go in, neutralize Greg, and that’d be it. Now Isaac had turned the entire thing into a massive battle right underneath people’s houses, and that hurt more than the fresh burn wounds across his back. It seemed that every single thing he’d tried had wound up with consequences far beyond what he wanted, and that made it his responsibility.

  “If you can’t see my genius then it’s not my fault that you have to be destroyed! You’re the ones that caused this! You’re the ones who ignored me! You can only blame yourselves for what you’ve made me do!”

  The actual mechanics of the fight were too overwhelming. Isaac’s power didn’t include any superhuman perception, so all he could garner from it was a chaotic swirl of supers – both hero and villain – and Mechaniacal technology. It spoke to the absolute superiority of the ancient supervillain that the original bones of the hidden base resisted the mess of crisscrossing powers.

  Bolts in colors from blue to green to plaid bounced back and forth in the still-changing rooms of Mechaniacal’s old base. People in costumes swooped back and forth while enormous spheres, much larger than even the suppressor sphere, emerged from below. The mechanical ticking and whirring grew ever-louder, and it occurred to Isaac that while he wasn’t going to have more luck than any of the seriously powerful supers in damaging the original clockwork, he could still affect it.

  He reached out to slap a palm against the grating encasing the generator – or whatever it was – next to him, focusing as hard as he could to siphon inertia out of it. He didn’t know how clockwork functioned, exactly, but he was pretty sure sucking out any ability to hold force would be bad. Worse, possibly, than too much, and the latter might result in over-inertia’d mechanical components exploding everywhere.

  “The world will be better with me in charge! As Mechaniacal I will — what!? Who dares?”

  The pitch of the machine immediately went up to ear-hurting range, a pain somewhere deep inside his head rather than properly heard, interrupting Greg’s monologue. Something encouraging, when to Isaac’s mind everything was chaos. A deeply, furiously purple energy blast screamed past his shelter, splashing into the far wall and leaving scorch marks on the otherwise invulnerable metal almost exactly where he’d fetched up after the first explosion.

  “Depowerer!” Captain Bulk’s voice punched through the incredible noise of the melee. A bubble of blue light burst around Isaac, and suddenly Blacktime was there, with the rest of the universe rendered in red-tinted slow motion.

  “Take care of the depower drone,” Blacktime said in that resonant voice, booming through the bubble of sped-up time. If the supervillain hadn’t been worried about the potential of getting tagged by Greg’s depowerment ray, he probably could have frozen the area and not even worried about what had turned into a brawl, albeit one where the heroes and villains were on the same side. Isaac wasn’t sure if Blacktime could freeze everyone now, with all the different powers at play, but the pseudo-speedster powers were impressive enough.

  “Ravdia will—” Isaac started, but didn’t get any further as Blacktime’s black-clad hand clamped around his wrist with strength far above human normal, and half-led, half-dragged him in sped-up time, along the hall to where one of the drones was hovering in the air, a shimmer showing it was beginning the power-up process. Isaac didn’t need any prompting to start for it, but something actually launched him off the ground, back into the realm of ordinary time.

  He landed on the drone, fingers scrabbling at the smooth surface as he felt the by-now familiar sensation of the suppressor pushing against him. Isaac levied his talent against it, pulling away all the inertia he could find as he increased his own, the thing vibrating under his grip as it wound up for the shot. It swiveled, aiming at Blacktime, and sputtered with a failed, inertia-less bolt. Supers in the path of the rippled distortion faltered as powers visibly hiccupped, but it only lasted a fraction of a second.

  “Good job!” Captain Bulk’s booming voice sounded right next to him, the towering super reaching out and grabbing the drone with a hand the size of Isaac’s body. Isaac himself dropped down, scrambling away as Bulk simply crushed the thing. Blacktime had, unfortunately, dumped Isaac in a big open room full of turrets, drones, and supers, putting him in a crossfire that Isaac definitely wasn’t prepared for. His power-enhanced armor was okay, but he’d already seen it did practically nothing against real weaponry.

  “You fools! That is merely one of many tools in Mechaniacal’s arsenal! There is nothing you can do—”

  Another detonation from somewhere drowned out the rest of Greg’s sentence, the shockwave sending Isaac tumbling across the metal floor to fetch up against one of the indelible walls. He saw a doorway not far away and scrambled through it, trying to get out of the blast radius of some of the powers being employed in the close combat of super versus machine. There, the humming and clicking of the innumerable gears and escapements heralded another one of the caged generators, and Ravdia suddenly knew a way to break the current stalemate.

  Isaac reached out, feeling weirdly out of place as he pulled inertia from the clockwork. It rattled and whined under his fingertips, unable to function properly without the expected feedback, and the subtle sounds of everything else changed around him, unbalanced in ways he couldn’t quite comprehend but could definitely feel.

  “Impossible! My technology is perfectly balanced! Even if you could destroy something it shouldn’t…!”

  Ravdia ducked by reflex as a fist-sized projectile whizzed past, ricocheting off the walls before deflecting up through a hole in the ceiling. The brawl reminded Isaac of the time when he was at the convention center, only more extreme, a complete chaos that he couldn’t follow and would smash him flat if he got in the way. He kept low to the ground as he ducked through the next doorway, looking for another bit of machinery in hopes that, if Ravdia messed with enough of it, it’d ruin the defenses. It’d been maybe a minute since the brawl started and already Isaac could see ruined buildings through the holes in the ceiling.

  While he didn’t see anything obvious, a tremble under his feet made him stop and drop flat. Only from that perspective did he see a seam that didn’t fit with the rest of the sleek construction, some last-minute alteration made by Greg. He scrambled over and pressed his hands to it, feeling something rumbling just beneath the surface. If it was mechanical it was all connected, so by way of experimentation he pushed inertia in and then took it out, as fast as he could manage despite having to take his attention off the chaos of the surrounding fight. Something to make the steady motion stutter, throw off whatever it was supposed to be doing.

  He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams as the machinery beneath his feet let out a groan, and then tore through the so-far unmarked floor and wall as something slipped and errant gears pried open a massive hole stretching all the way to the console. Once again he was sent sprawling, toppling down into the newly-formed opening with the shrapnel embedded in his armor shrieking as they scraped across the subfloor. He came to a halt among a confusion of panels, catching himself on the vibrating metal as, through the rent in the ceiling, he saw Greg, and Blacktime, just as the shimmering shield that protected the former from the latter flickered and failed.

  Blacktime struck.

  Isaac had been in a few super-fights, and seen some others, but even with Justice for Hire the violence had been constrained, limited to be purposefully non-lethal. Blacktime had no such compunctions and with a brief blur the crystaltech knife flashed. Greg gurgled, shockingly red blood spurting over the machinery from the sudden wounds as Blacktime vanished from sight. Isaac’s stomach lurched, and he had to swallow bile as Greg slumped to the floor, but Ravdia was satisfied that evil had been paid its due.

  “Self-destruct initiated.” A voice that sounded like Greg’s but very much wasn’t announced through the speakers, calm and measured, and the machinery started up again. The shield that had protected the tinker popped into existence again, this time around the control console, as the machinery around Isaac sprang to life. His fingers scrabbled at tilting metal as petal-like sections swiveled downward and he slid, nearly inertialess, bouncing off of pipes and conduits into the heart of the base. He landed just after a chunk of metal, finding himself at the bottom of a pit lined with machinery of terrible and dreadful purpose. Glowing crystal tubes, rotating clockwork, and pumping pistons combined into some mechanism of great evil, of utter savagery and indifferent destruction, so very different than the sleek lines of the machinery above.

  “What the hell am I doing here?” Isaac groaned. He really didn’t like super-combat; it felt like everything was completely out of his control, and he was just a pinball careening at the whims of others. He’d literally been thrown from place to place in the fight above, as if he needed any more convincing to stay out of such things. “If I get out of here alive, I’m never fighting again,” he muttered to himself, even if Ravdia knew that wasn’t true, looking around the pit as the sound and vibration continued to rise.

  Far above, he could see the control console and its shield through the hole he’d torn earlier, and the figures of supers still fighting with the remnant drones flashed by the narrow aperture. Below his feet, something that looked like a tremendous lens began to glow, nearly throwing him to the ground as it rotated, physically wound by all the clockwork surrounding him. It didn’t take much brains to know it was the destruction mechanism, some kind of superweapon that might well blow the whole block.

  Star Central might be able to take care of it, but he didn’t know if they would. Nobody was willing to use wide-area superpowers with the depowerers still a possibility, and there was that energy shield besides. Regardless, he was the one sitting right on top of it and it didn’t matter what Star Central could do if he was still at ground zero.

  He marshalled his power, squatting down to press his palms against the vibrating floor to try the same trick as before. Pull out inertia, push it back in. Rob it of any real force, then give it extra, trying to break something by messing with it — to no avail. Whatever it was made of seemed to be sterner stuff than the clockwork up above.

  “Okay, how about…” If he couldn’t stop it from going off, he might be able to adjust what it did. He ducked under rotating cogs, the closeness of such indifferent, crushing machinery making him shudder, slapping his hands against the metal of the outer shaft and pouring inertia into it. If it was already incredibly tough, then adding to it ought to help contain the blast, focus it up and into the sky, away from all the houses and buildings around. Which only left him, but Ravdia had the solution for that.

  Back when Isaac had gotten into the fight with Brawn-dude, he’d gotten flung into the air by a superpower. With no physical inertia, Isaac ought to be able to survive the shockwave and acceleration from even a block-leveling blast — but Ravdia wasn’t confident about the heat and energy. The only way to protect against that was metaphorical, ontological inertia, the kind that true artifacts had and which made them impervious, and Ravdia called on every scrap of focus and willpower to invest in that hope. Then to finalize the plan, searched through the chunks of the ultra-tough structural metal about, fallen from up above, until finding one large enough to crouch on.

  Ravdia dragged it out to the center, finding it even heavier than it looked, and hunkered down on it, arms and legs drawn in before divesting personal inertia and reversing the process for the impromptu shield. The rising hum of the surrounding machinery had already reached a fever pitch, energy shields and mechanisms far above stilled, and only a second or so after Ravdia was in position the world erupted in white.

  There was a brief disorienting tug, the metal underneath starting to glow red, then suddenly everything was sky. The rushing air caught the veil first, ripping it and the hat away, then swept Ravdia off the chunk of floor, which immediately vanished into the distance. The escape left Ravdia several hundred feet up, pinwheeling away from the fountain of light pouring up from below. Without inertia, simple air resistance kicked in and gravity pulled Ravdia into a long, slow fall. From so far above the neighborhood seemed largely intact, the energy contained to that one column and the destruction limited to a few buildings.

  Ravdia’s heart pounded and head ached, bruises and burns were everywhere, but it was done. As supers zipped around the blast site, Ravdia angled toward the nearest building and prepared to land. Mission complete.

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