Chapter 9: Missile Man

I was moving just below the speed of sound, ripping through a feathery washboard layer of clouds that rested a thousand feet above a denser, more complete layer of cloud cover. The full moon above me light up everything below me, lining every edge in silver fire and dipping the world in a patina of aloof coolness. Inside my suit, I was grinning like the Cheshire cat.

"All right, that cloud to your right is a bad guy. Give him a blast," came Serenity's voice through the comm.

I rotated on my central axis slightly, lining the front of my suit up with the right side of my line of flight and flicked out an arm, my battle suit covered hand clenched into a fist and triggered a blast with a gravitic repulsor beam. My wrist and fist were wrapped in an envelope of pale green light for just a second before the beam flicked out to spear the nearby cloud, punching a hole through it.

"Good," came the observation from Serenity. She was in Wing with Becka somewhere above and behind me. "Uh oh, bad guy on your tail, watch out."

A blast of white flashed past me. She was firing at me from Wing! I banked hard right, into the space where the white beam had just passed and hit the jets, plummeting a thousand feet in a few seconds. Another beam of light speared past me to my left, and then, without pause, another beam passed in front of me. I banked right again and then rolled left and down. Another shot, further away this time. I curled into a ball, did a forward roll in mid-air, rotating a half turn as I did, and shot back up at full power, going for the stars, punching through the sound barrier as I did.

"Excellent!" Came Serenity's voice. I could hear Becka laughing in the background. That was a good sign. "That's enough for now, lets head home."

"Sounds good," I agreed, throttling back my speed and flattening out my line of flight until I was headed back down in a shallow dive.

While I was getting out of the suit and cleaned up, Serenity gave Becka a quick tour of the Fortresses' living quarters. I took a quick shower and threw on a t-shirt and some cotton gym shorts and a pair of sandals. I didn't want to get dressed completely until I'd had a chance to cool down from the shower. When I found them, they were whipping up a late night snack of BLT sandwiches and chocolate chip cookies.

"So what do you think?" I asked after I'd gotten my kiss from Becka.

"I think that its a good thing I didn't know about Serenity before this. I'd have been so jealous, but she tells me other than the usual ogling of her ah ... attributes, there's been nothing but business between you too."

"Well, I'll admit to drooling a little at first, I am a heterosexual male after all, but I'd like to think we've at least approached friendship by now," I said with a pout.

"We are that," Serenity said with a laugh, "at least as much as I can be and still be a mentor to you in this process."

"I'm glad you're not jealous," I whispered, kissing her ear.

"Hard to be now," Becka said evilly. "Serenity let me know about her mind reading ability, and tells me that she can guarantee that you are mad, mad, mad in love with me."

I looked over at Serenity, a scowl starting to form on my face.

"And she with you," was all she said.

The next couple of weeks were interesting, to say the least. Becka became a part of the Iron Man team immediately, fascinated by the remote monitoring equipment, and spent endless hours with Serenity learning to use the diagnostic and monitoring tools that were a part of the whole setup. When I expressed some concern to Serenity that she might be biting off more than she could chew, she told me not to worry about it.

"I've given her a little boost in the memory and comprehension areas, just like I did for you when we started this."

I stared at her for a long time, and it was a hard stare.

"What?" she answered with a snicker. "You didn't think these mental powers were only good for peeking into people's thoughts did you? Of course I did a little tweaking."

"I should have guessed that," I admitted. "But I thought I had just finally found something I had a natural affinity for."

"Well you do, dummy," Serenity snorted. "Why the hell else would I pick you? That doesn't mean I couldn't maximize what you already had going for you, did it? You and Becka are very much alike in those areas as well, so it was easy to make sure she was able to keep up with you."

"More like making sure I could keep up with her," I muttered.

"Maybe," Serenity laughed. That was the end of that conversation, though I think Becka may have had a similar conversation with Serenity later.

-oOo-

Kansas City was a bit conflicted about its identity. It tried hard to be a cosmopolitan center of forward thinking, progressive opportunity, but it was a rail and cattle center at its roots, and so the people in and around it were a mix of modern city dwellers and rural country folk. As a center of commerce, it drew its share of bad guys, and today, it was a relatively low-level thug who called himself The Missile Man. Like the mind-controlled Trey Young's Lord Steel, he usually rented himself out to more serious bad guys who wanted to send a message. This message apparently involved the rail yards on the east side of town, as Missile Man was busy blasting pieces of it to bits with his missiles.

"This guy has several different kind of missile attacks," Wing's voice said through my suit comm. "He's got a low powered 'swarmer' missile that he fires of in groups of thirty to fifty, a more powerful missile he calls a 'streaker' that can easily blow a car to bits. His most powerful missile is the 'Boomer', as he calls it. This one can take out houses and small buildings."

"Should I be worried about any of them?" I asked. I was flying at top speed, with Wing shadowing me at the edge of the atmosphere, and about ready to drop down into the Kansas City area from my cruising altitude.

"Even the boomer shouldn't get through your shielding, but the concussive force could be dangerous. I'd avoid direct contact with that one, and try not to let too many of the streakers get to you either, but the swarmer missiles you can ignore."

The pyrotechnics issuing from the freight yards made it very easy to pick a place to land, and I managed to do it pretty much unobserved, since everyone in the area had already made a hasty exit looking for someplace to hang out that was missile free.

With all the gravitic enhancements the suit had, I could walk or run quietly, if I was of a mind to, but the sound and feel of the impact from my suit's tonnage clomping along the ground was a nice calling card, I thought, and it would probably set the mood for the coming confrontation. I thought that it was chilling enough an effect that I was boosting it somewhat to make the impact more so. I ran alongside a rail spur, with some cattle pens to my right and the whistling sputter and flare of missiles coming from in front of me. I kept myself away from the tracks and the grade under it as much as possible. No sense creating more work for the yard's crew than I had to.

When I finally laid eyes on Missile Man, I was surprised at how small he seemed. I guess I was making the adjustment to thinking of myself as the size of the suit automatically now. I had been fighting Iron Man sized opponents in my head, as well as in the simulator back at the fortress, so even a six foot plus specimen like Missile Man seemed small. He was surrounded by a cloud of what I assumed were the 'swarmer' missiles, and I wondered if they served as a defensive screen. If he hadn't felt or heard my approach, he certainly saw me now, and with a wave of a hand, a missile came streaking my way. Was this one of the streakers, or a boomer?

I might have thought Wing could monitor my thoughts like Serenity, because right then her voice came over the comm, "Streaker!"

'Okay then', I thought to myself, and with the missile upon me, I had just enough time to slap my hands together like I was swatting a fly. The missile exploded on the impact and my hands bounced apart slightly, but were unharmed otherwise. "Ooh, that tickles," I said out loud.

"Who are you?" Missile Man asked.

Oh yea, I'd been waiting for that!

"You can call me..." I threw in the dramatic pause, just like I knew had to be in the super-hero manual, before upping the volume and concluding with, "Iron Man!"

I could have hoped for a few more witnesses, maybe some cheering fans or at least a brass band, but I didn't have time to dwell on that thought, the next missile was definitely big, and it screamed as it flew my direction. 'Let's see if these things are guided, ' I muttered to myself, and launched myself skyward, keeping an eye on the missile itself as I did. I let it follow me up until we were both a safe couple of thousand feet above the ground before rotating back and firing a repulsor at it. Missile met repulsor beam with a very satisfying boom, as the missile exploded beneath me with quite a bit of force.

I let myself finish the roll I'd begun and kicked in the 'jets', rocketing back towards my opponent at just below the speed of sound. I fired another repulsor blast, but from this distance, Missile Man had time to react and rolled to his left and came up firing. Three streaker missiles, it looked like. I fired a blast from each hand and took out two of them, but they were coming too fast, and I didn't have time to do more than juke slightly in mid-flight in an attempt to avoid the third one. The juke wasn't enough and the missile hit me in the back of my lower left leg.

SPRANG!!!!

The noise as the suit and the shielding above it absorbed the blast was painful! The anti-grav drive unit suffered from a momentarily power drain as power was temporarily diverted to the shields, and I dropped out of my flight path. Without any intervention on my part the suit caught itself after dropping a few feet and began correcting for it. In the meantime, I'd recovered enough to see that three more streakers were coming fast.