Thrusts of Justice (Chooseomatic Books) Read online

  You hesitate to even ask about the whales. You’re also not sure the pair of them are in any shape for a tussle, but Chuck insists, practically carrying Ocean Boy onto your jet. Even at Mach 3, it takes several hours to get back to the east coast, and by the time you’re in the air above D.C., the situation on the ground has worsened. Axemaster, the Savage Cockroach, and Jekyll and Hyde have joined the villains’ ranks, and somehow the East Coast’s abundant hero fraternity has yet to arrive on the scene.

  “C’mon, Obie!” Chuck says, throwing open a hatch in mid-flight. He has no parachute. He does look much recovered from this morning, but Ocean Boy, if anything, looks worse.

  “Um, I think he’s still a bit hung over,” you say.

  “Nah,” Chuck insists. “He has the constitution of a baleen whale. That’s just the landsickness setting in — he’ll be fine once he has the chance to dip himself back in some salt water. But maybe you’re right — you can come help me clean up these jokers, and we’ll leave Obie to fly the plane.”

  That actually sounds like an even worse idea. “Obie?” you ask gently. “Have you ever flown a jet aircraft before?”

  Chuck scoffs. “I flew this thing once, before it was even thought-controlled. It’s easy, he’ll pick it up! You know, Obie saved the entire world by himself one time. Remind me to tell you that story.”

  Battling supervillains is kind of a lifelong dream of yours, so you’d hate for the two of them to finish the job while you were still finding a spot to park the plane. And your suit has a built-in glider, so you could dive right out and be smacking heads in no time. Still, if Chuck is the experienced pilot, maybe he should be the one to stay with the jet.

  ▶ If you take Obie and leave Chuck to land the plane, click here for page 189.

  ▶ If you go with Chuck and trust Ocean Boy in the cockpit, click here for page 246.

  ▶ If you let the two of them have their fun and just land the stupid plane yourself, click here for page 5.

  75

  The Ox seems reluctant to take the road less violent, so you feed him a bunch of New Age hooey about not letting his rage define him and how punching holes in all the superheroes and corporate goons in the world won’t bring him peace. By the end of your speech you’ve even sold yourself, and he agrees that what he needs to embark on is a spiritual rampage. A rampage toward enlightenment.

  This has two unforeseen consequences. The first is that the Ox starts opening up to you about his childhood, and before long you’re lying on the couch in your apartment trying to help an 800-pound supervillain deal with body image issues. The second is that by the time the Justice Squadron tracks you down, the Ox’s rage and fury, which enabled you both to live through your last encounter with them, have been largely replaced with frailness and vulnerability.

  This time Magnifico has regrouped, bringing Gravity Bomb, Coldfront, Skyhawk, Megawatt, and at least a dozen Cosmic Guardians, apparently from every corner of the galaxy. Brain Stem is missing, but if he were there, the only thing added to the smackdown would be telepathic proof that you were absolutely crapping your pants while they beat the living snot out of you.

  And that shows up pretty well on your face, anyway.

  THE END

  76

  “I know you, Ox,” you say with all the earnestness you can muster. “You may be a brawler. You may rob some banks. And you may occasionally kill the odd corporate suit who gets pinned underneath the alien thing you’re eviscerating.” Your argument is actually getting weaker as it goes along. “But you’re not a monster. You don’t want to help aliens take over the Earth.”

  “Maybe I do,” Ox says, pondering the ramifications.

  You’d better try a different approach. “If you won’t do it for the people, do it for the stuff. What are you going to do with yourself out there in between conquering planets? There are no football games in space. No Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions. No roast beef sandwiches.”

  His brow furrows. “No drive-through restaurants at all,” he says. “Damn, Megawatt. What kind of life is that?”

  “One without you in it, buddy.” Megawatt takes a step toward the Ox, electricity arcing off his body through the space suit. “If you want to die for that junk, suit yourself. I was just trying to do you a solid, anyway.”

  “Aw, crap,” Ox says. “This is the part where I get my ass kicked.”

  “What? You can take him! You’ve beaten him before, right?”

  “Naw. He does this thing where he turns all into energy, and then you can’t even touch him. But he gets his freaky ghost hands inside your body and blasts you right in the brain. I’ll tell you what, I never really feel pain anymore, but that crap hurts like a sonofabitch.”

  Little spiral hatches open in the hangar bay walls, and Cosmic Guardians start flying through them. “You should have taken the deal,” Megawatt says. “Have you seen these things? They can fly at the speed of light. They put you in cryogenic sleep for long trips. The suits have their own freakin’ brains, which are way smarter than you or me. Smarter than the computer that runs this whole ship.”

  Their own brains? That gives you an idea. Back on Earth your goo seeped into the battle armor and you seemed to be reading its thoughts. If you try that again, maybe you could mind-meld with it and take control of one of the suits. It’s a long shot, but you’re quickly running out of options.

  Come to think of it, you could also try your plan on the spaceship’s computer. According to Douchebag, it’s less advanced than the battlesuits are.

  ▶ If you attempt to reprogram a Cosmic Guardian to turn on its compatriots, click here for page 144.

  ▶ If you try your mind-mojo on the ship itself, click here for page 299.

  78

  “I knew you had it in you,” Moretti says, handing you a small metal cylinder with a button on one end. “This is the trigger for our emergency backup satellite weapon. Last time we apprehended the Ox, we implanted a targeting beacon, so in the worst case scenario all you have to do is push the button and stand back — a giant beam of light from the sky will take care of the rest.”

  They haven’t even shown you where the bathrooms are yet, but suddenly you’re in charge of the orbital death lasers? Moretti seems to sense your hesitation. “It’s the only thing we have powerful enough to neutralize him, and it’s only to be used as a last resort,” he says. “We’d much rather take him alive.”

  Migraine asks you to open your visor and then leaps at you, shrinking to the size of a Snickers bar in midair and landing right inside your helmet. It’s disconcerting. You know those people who stand way too close while they talk? A tiny man is literally leaning on your face, and you thank your lucky stars that at least his uniform shrank along with him.

  Wait a minute — shrinking powers? “You’re Minuteman, aren’t you? Weren’t you a supervillain back in the ’70s?”

  “It was mi-NUTE-man,” he says. His tiny voice is comically high-pitched, and if he weren’t inches from your eardrum you wouldn’t be able to hear it at all. “As in, really small? Jesus, why does nobody get that?” It does make more sense, now that you think about it.

  “Migraine works for us now,” Moretti says. “He’s proven himself time and time again — you can trust him to have your back.” He tells you that the Ox is heading east on I-80 in a white van, and beams the details into your visor’s display. With your creepy face-passenger onboard, you launch into the sky on an intercept course. Admittedly, so far that’s the entirety of your plan. “So how did you take this guy down the last time?”

  The old man cracks his little knuckles. “I shrank down to the size of a dust mote, hopped in his circulatory system, and put him to sleep,” he squeaks. “There are a hundred ways to kill a man from the inside, but taking him alive is a pain in the ass. If we get him good and angry, I can overload his adrenal gland, and he’ll pass out. I’ll need some time, though, so you’ll have to keep the big sonafibitch agitated while I do my thing.”

  The
Ox beat you into a pulp earlier without breaking a sweat. You don’t even want to picture him agitated. “Any other options?”

  “Orbital death lasers. Oh, and there’s also power dampening tech, but it takes up a whole room. It’s not something we can carry into the field.”

  The Ox may be stronger than you are, but you’re guessing you can outsmart him. “If we trick him into coming with us, could we zap his powers once we get him back to the base?”

  “I suppose. If you want to try sweet-talking him, knock yourself out. Better decide quick, though — white van, straight ahead.”

  ▶ If you try using cunning to lure the Ox back to headquarters, click here for page 228.

  ▶ If you go with Migraine’s plan and rely on your proven ability to take a truly spectacular beating, click here for page 163.

  80

  Well, you do have a brain-controlled supercomputer built into your evening wear. Who knows — maybe this will be incredibly easy. Locate Nightwatchman, you think.

  A map of downtown Cleveland appears on your screen with a red dot in the middle. That makes sense, since he couldn’t have travelled far in the past ten minutes. Zoom in, you think, watching as the map gets larger and more detailed. Okay, that should be the alley where you found the dumpster. Zoom in again.

  Oh, crap. HE’S IN THE ROOM WITH YOU.

  You just about have a heart attack on the spot, until you realize that the dot on the map represents you. Dumbass. You try several commands to indicate that you’re looking for the real Nightwatchman, or the previous Nightwatchman, but get no results. It looks like you’re going to have to do this the hard way after all. Fortunately, you excel at mind-numbing research.

  You start sifting through digital files, and find a list of safehouses. Apparently the little underground nook you stumbled upon isn’t unique — he has upwards of a hundred such hidden grottoes in cities all over the globe. Wow — whoever Nightwatchman is, the guy must be absurdly wealthy. Is it possible that he stores a costume in each of these safehouses for emergencies? Maybe the fancy equipment you’ve claimed as your own is simply a spare uniform.

  The Philadelphia location has a little asterisk by it. Some sort of home base, perhaps? That might be a good place to start your search. As you continue digging, you find that some of the other files are peppered with asterisks as well. On the list of Crexidyne superhumans, every name is marked except one: Rockjockey, a bruiser of a villain who can fuse mineral matter to his own body to augment his mass.

  Is Nightwatchman investigating the names on the list and checking them off as he goes? If so, perhaps you can head him off at the pass. The more you think about it, though, the less you like the idea. All superheroes have arch-nemeses, but Nightwatchman’s rogue’s gallery is a particularly psychotic and obsessive bunch. Rockjockey has tangled with him several times in the past, so if you plan on confronting that thug, you’d better be prepared to deal with whatever personal grudge or blood vendetta he happens to be nursing.

  Rockjockey shows up as a blip on your GPS and, like nearly everything superhero-related, he’s in New York City. New York and Philadelphia are each seven to eight hours from Cleveland by car — either way, you’d better get moving.

  ▶ If you track down Rockjockey in New York, click here for page 142.

  ▶ If you’d rather avoid psychotic supervillains for now and check out the Philadelphia safehouse instead, click here for page 184.

  82

  You command the wreckage of the alien battlesuit to change course, and it responds by shuddering violently and crashing into the ship about midpoint, splattering you against the hull. Fortunately, splattering is no longer a concern. You collect yourself and work your way toward the rear exhaust ports in a kind of rapid, slithering wave. The ship is massive, though, and by the time you get there, the terraforming machines are about to be launched. There’s no time to lose! There appear to be two separate engines, but you hope that blowing up one will do the trick. You hurl, squeeze, and seep your way into the bowels of the ship. Within minutes, you hit paydirt.

  The starboard-side power source turns out to be a ball of blue plasma hovering weightlessly in the center of a perfectly round room. You pause for just a moment, and your life starts to pass before your eyes, but you cut it short. Nothing you’ve ever done or could ever possibly do holds a candle to this. Willing yourself into the hardest possible consistency, you form a sphere around the glowing blue mass.

  And then you squeeze.

  The engine, as they say, goes nuclear. You’ve done it! The resulting explosion atomizes the ship and all of its inhabitants. Including, of course, you. Technically, you aren’t dead, just spread very, very thin. Granted, every particle of you is hurtling out on a different trajectory into the emptiness of space, so the chances of ever reassembling to the point of consciousness is astronomically thin.

  All in all, it’s a hell of a way to go.

  THE END

  83

  You manage to lift the Ox by his armpits and fly him back to the mountain base. You’re scared you might accidentally drop him, but he assures you that he’s tough enough to survive the fall, and actually seems to enjoy the ride. While in flight, you contact Moretti through the earpiece in your helmet and quietly explain your plan. He beams you a schematic of the base’s layout.

  Once you arrive, you set the Ox down and raise one arm up in the air, firing the widest-range, lowest-intensity burst you can muster from your gauntlet — it’s basically not much more than a flash of blue light. “That gravitronic pulse should knock out their security systems and most of their personnel,” you say, breaking out in a full run. “Quick! We only have ten minutes before everything comes back online!”

  Once inside the wide-open front gates, you find workers strewn about all over the place, feigning unconsciousness as instructed. Your ruse works like a charm. Soon you’re in front of the power-dampening chamber in an adjoining room with a full-length mirror along one wall like an interrogation room on a cop show. Subtle.

  “The remote control armor shutdown thing is right through this door!” you say.

  “Cool. Have at it. I’m gonna go see how much I can bust up this place before everyone wakes up.”

  “Wait — I might need some help in there.”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  “No!” You didn’t count on this. “Just help me out, and then we’ll trash the place together.”

  He narrows his eyes. “Why do you want me in there so bad?”

  “I don’t! It’s just… I mean, it’s a remote control armor shutdown thing.”

  “In fact, why do you need me at all if you have some magic laser beam that opens all the doors and knocks everyone out?” He pauses. “You think I’m stupid, don’t you?”

  Um, kind of? At least, you did. “I don’t think you wanna be my new partner at all,” he continues. “I think you were sent by—” He glances at the mirror, then quickly punches his huge fist through it, yanking out a startled Agent Moretti by the face from the room behind it.

  “This guy,” he finishes.

  “Migraine!” you shout into your earpiece. “Plan B! If you can hear me, initiate plan B!”

  “Plan B is death lasers now,” Migraine replies, his voice coming both from the earpiece and from directly behind you. “I vacated the target as soon as we got back on base — those power dampeners would make a huge freakin’ mess if they caught me still inside there.”

  You grab the trigger to the emergency satellite weapon from a compartment in your chest plate. If you use it to fry the Ox, though, Moretti is getting fricasseed along with him.

  Migraine senses your hesitation. “Moretti’s a dead man, anyway! If the big guy goes on a rampage, he’ll kill us all. Push the button!”

  Miscellaneous agents are scrambling to their feet, giving a wide berth to the hulking villain holding their boss in the air with one hand. Moretti tries to yell something, but his voice is muffled by the Ox’s grasp on his head. “Mmmph grff
f nnnnggg!” he says.

  Was that “Pull the trigger?” Or maybe “Don’t pull the trigger?” What should you do?

  ▶ If you push the button and bring pulsating, high-intensity optical death from above, click here for page 283.

  ▶ If you don’t push it, and try to save the lives of the entire military installation in a way that doesn’t sacrifice Agent Moretti in the process, click here for page 308.

  86

  If forced to choose between a pissed-off old superhero and the guy who might actually know how to build a spaceship, you have to go with the latter. Magnifica gives you a look that makes you shake in your poorly-fitted boots, then turns and flies away.

  Conrad and Tinker start debating outer-space propulsion methods, reinforcing the hull, and repurposing a life support system from the old Liberty Sub, which Nancy has lying around for parts. Then Conrad uses his powers to contort hunks of machinery into whatever shapes he needs, creating complex systems out of little more than scrap metal. Between them they make short work of the retrofit, and announce the craft ready to launch in under an hour.

  “I’ll need to fly this bucket of bolts myself,” Conrad says. “Most of it won’t even function properly without my powers pushing and pulling on it.”

  “And I suppose you’ll need me to fix stuff when various systems inevitably fail,” Tinker sighs.

  This isn’t giving you much confidence. The jet shakes like crazy while breaking atmosphere, but soon you’re cruising high above the planet. Tinker picks up an energy source so massive it must be the alien mothership. “We’ve only got enough power for two or three shots,” he says. “So make them count.”