Chapter 90

in the cavern, Net was quick to begin filling me in on the flurry of activity. He had calls to and from a myriad of phones. It was chilling to see that the call that immediately followed the house phone was one to Paco Serna, followed by one to Ya Ya Marchiria. I was equally as relieved to see that Ya Ya called Paco as soon as his call from Roberto ended. He was still being the loyal soldier.

I almost felt bad about my intention to kill him, but I had killed loyal soldiers before, and they had not perpetrated the deaths of my parents.

I put the suit on, checked its energy levels and decided to top it off. The rush left me giddy and excited, but Harley stepped up as usual and took charge until I recovered.

As Net read calls aloud and updated us with police traffic, I finally had to ask Bud something.

"Bud, it seems like an awfully unnatural coincidence, me winding up so closely associated with the family of the man behind my parent's murders."

"I realize that," Bud said after a moment. "If we had indeed arranged this somehow, I would lie very convincingly and tell you we had nothing to do with it, but we did indeed have nothing to do with it."

"I would really like to believe that."

"I know we promised you a chance to get revenge against your parent's killers, we did not know the specifics of this gang's situation, nor of Roberto Montoya's involvement with them until you yourself revealed it."

"That makes the coincidence seem all the more incredible, doesn't it?" I laughed derisively.

"I grant you that, yes. But it is true nonetheless. A great deal of what has made you and Harley into Cobalt seems to defy logic and chance. Of course we chose you for a reason, and of course we expected you to succeed, but the manner in which you have arrived at this point has surprised us all. If there is more than coincidence at work here, it is not of our manufacture."

I decided to take him at his word. There wasn't much I could do about it if it was a lie anyway, and to be honest, it was the sort of thing I half expected to happen in a superhero's life. At least that was how things worked in the comic books.

By the time ten o'clock rolled around, I was beyond eager to get this done. Bug had begun detecting increased activity at the warehouse hours earlier. By the time I was hovering silently over the building at ten, there were a dozen gang armed gang members inside and four outside.

"We've got a car coming," Net relayed to us. We got a brief closeup view of a beat up Toyota Tercel pulling onto the warehouse property. It stopped long enough for one of the men to approach it. He pulled a cell phone out of a pocket.

"We've got an incoming call on Serna's phone," Net told us.

"He's here boss," Net relayed.

"Have him drive in," the second Net translated voice said. As he said this, the warehouse doors began to open. The car drove in.

We switched to the feed from Bug as the warehouse doors began rattling shut. We watched Roberto Montoya get out of the car, a woman on his arm. The woman was obviously strung out, as she had to hang on to Montoya to walk. Bug's close up of her explained a lot.

"Damn, except for her height, she's a dead ringer for Kelli," Harley thought aloud.

"Your observation is accurate," Bud agreed.

"Shit, that kind of explains a few things, in a sick, twisted sort of way, doesn't it?" I said.

Indeed it did. Roberto had a thing for his cousin, and some inadequacy issues, that I knew for sure. He was also an amoral prick. I wonder what he held over Paco Serna that kept him loyal all these years.

"Okay, decision time," Bud said. Do we just call the police and let them know he's here, or do we do something a little more personal?"

"That's a rhetorical question, isn't it Bud?" I asked. "We could have done that from the safety of the cavern and left this entirely in their hands. There's no other reason to be here than to take some personal action."

"So this is your moment of revenge?" he asked.

"You promised me that," I reminded him.

"We did," he agreed.

"I'm holding you to that promise then," I growled. "I'll do the regular superhero routine after this, but this one is just for me."

"Would your parents approve?" he played the only card left in his hand. I laughed.

"No, but then if I'd have had a chance to tell them what I'd been doing in Uncle Sam's service all these years, they wouldn't have approved of that either."

"Very well," he said at last. "What will we do first?"

"The first thing is taking out the four outside men. They're so worried about covering all the possibilities, they've stopped maintaining visual contact with each other. I should be able to take them out one at a time."

"How?"

"I want to try a new trick," I growled.

"A new trick?" Bud and Harley asked together. Harley was surprised he didn't know what I intended.

"Watch," I told them.

When I'd worked on building bulletproof shields out of atmospheric nitrogen, it had occurred to me that I could encapsulate something in a bubble of it, or failing that, a dome. Then it had made me wonder what would happen to the air inside that dome if I suddenly compressed the dome without letting any of the air escape, or so rapidly at least, that the air didn't have time to escape? Compressed air heats up, for one thing. The increased atmospheric pressure would not be kind to anything inside of it either.

Doing the reverse, making a small bubble around them and expanding it without letting additional air in would do the reverse, rapidly cooling the air molecules and decreasing the air pressure. For scuba divers, a rapid decrease in pressure would cause the bends, otherwise known as nitrogen narcosis. I wasn't sure if it would do the same in these kinds of conditions, but at the rate I envisioned it happening, something else would happen, something called explosive decompression.

I was less sure of the effects of the second option, so I was going with the first. If nothing else, the effort should render the victim unconscious.

I started with the gang 'soldier' at the far back corner. There was a high fence around the property, but there were also no lights here. It would be a good avenue for undetected entrance to the property perhaps, but I wonder who they thought might come that way? It didn't matter. They never imagined it would be me. Cobalt, rather. I needed to think of myself that way while I was doing this.

My first target, the lazy bastard, was leaning his entire back against the building. That was annoying. My intended method wouldn't work unless I separated him from the wall. I had to go with option three.

I wrapped his head in a 'mask' of solid nitrogen and held it there, and held him still as well by getting a telekinetic grip on his clothes, unable to scream, unable to move, and unable to breath, he was soon unconscious.

Target two, on the other side of the warehouse was being a little more vigilant, and thus he became the first person to experience Cobalt's 'dome of death'. I seriously underestimated the effects of the sudden compression I applied. It almost squished him like a bug. He was a seriously bloody mess, and leaking more from every orifice when I left him.

Target's three and four, in the intervening time, had abandoned their posts, more or less, and were standing next to an old junked pickup truck near the front of the property, sharing a smoke. The way they were sharing it, I didn't think it was tobacco they were smoking either. In any case, it made bagging them easy, and though I eased up on the 'dome of death' effect considerably, they were still dead when I was done. I could see blood coming out of their ears and their noses, but they weren't the bloody bundle that target number two had been.

"Okay, that was nasty," Harley said when he felt it was safe to 'speak'.

"It was quite gruesome," Bud concurred.

"I'm feeling kind of nasty and gruesome tonight," I said. "How shall we do this? Big and bold or quiet and mysterious?"

"I'd prefer quiet and mysterious," Bud said. I felt Harley's silent laughter. He knew where this was going.

"No, I think its time for some Big and Bold," I said. "I think it's time for Cobalt to really show up."

"Okay," Bud said with sad resignation.

"Power up," I called, activating the exoskeleton.

"You're not going to punch your way in are you?" Bud asked excitedly. "You could hurt your hand."

"Nope," I said, "But it's going to look like I did."

I stepped up to the big garage door that Roberto had so recently driven through, wound up a fist and drive it forward. I had already grabbed a large chunk of steel molecules within the door itself, and as my first approached it, Pushed those molecules forward at 'tree-exploding' speed. The door exploded inward, sending shrapnel everywhere, with most of the door flying over everyone and everything to crash into the back wall of the building. The entire place shook with the force of it and the steel scaffolding leading up to the upstairs office rang like a bell.

"I think you got Bug's attention," Net said dryly. "She's demanding instructions."

She? I wonder when Bug became a she?

The blast had stunned everyone in the building momentarily, but it didn't take long for someone to start shooting. The suit outlined the shooter for me. I grabbed the gun he was holding first and ripped it out of his hands. I told the steel molecules that made up most of it to separate, and the gun mostly just seemed to dissolve into dust, leaving some non-steel parts behind. By the time I'd done this, more shots were hitting me.

"Well boys, the suit does seem to be bulletproof, as advertised." I said. "Lets see if these guys read comic books."

"This is Cobalt," I said, letting the suit amplify and transform my words into that superhero voice.
"Drop you weapons and put your hands in the air!"

All that did was generate more gunfire in my direction. I grabbed every gun I could find except for one, and yanked them into the air. I pushed them all together in the middle of the warehouse with such force they fused together into a warm glowing lump. This caused some of the ammunition to be set off.

"Oops," I joked to Bud.

The exploding garage doors appeared to have taken care of a few of the inside crew already, as there had only been eight people shooting at me. I picked them all up by their clothes and threw them with force against the nearest wall, causing them serious damage, and putting them out of the fight, if not out of life.

With the soldiers taken care of, I headed for the upper office. "Show me Bug's last update from there," I asked. The display blipped into view with the familiar figure of Roberto Montoya and his Kelli clone cowering behind a desk and Ya Ya Marchiria and almost forgotten Manuel Pulido both brandishing weapons.

"Door or window?" I asked the boys.

"Door?" Bud answered.

"Window?" Harley offered at the same time.

"Hmm ... window it is," I said.

I grabbed a little of the steel shrapnel laying around from the door and sent it, scatter-shot, through the side window of the office. I followed the inward spray of glass and steel, coming to ground on the floor in the middle of the office.

"Roberto Montoya," the suit yelled for me. "Surrender now!"

Bugs last update had been a little inaccurate. Roberto and the woman were no longer behind the far desk. They were in the corner by the door. I stepped towards them and Roberto, the worthless little shit, threw the woman at me!

I caught her, as she stumbled towards me, what else could I do? She had a straight razor in her hand and she tried to cut me with it, but the blade skidded of the Impervilon skin of the suit, uselessly. I yanked it out of her hand with a little telekinesis, my hands being otherwise occupied holding her up.