The helicopter passed by to one side of them, not slowing or altering its course. Hans' fears were right; this was no scouting chopper like the last one had been. Twin booms sticking out to either side bore the unmistakable silhouettes of missiles.
"We'd better get a move on," Rachael said.
"Yeah," Hans agreed. They darted out toward the coastline. Instantly, the helicopter froze in place and pivoted to face them. "Damn it," he yelled, "They did see us! They were just waiting for us to come out into the open."
A gout of flame puffed out from the right side of the helicopter. They'd fired a missile. It would be upon them in a couple of seconds; the blast would probably blow them to shreds. Moving with a speed she wouldn't have thought possible, Rachael wrapped one arm around Hans, took one more running stride forward, and leapt into the air. She was in midair, ten meters away, when the missile impacted right where she'd been standing. She could feel the heat, but she was far enough away that the shock of the explosion only pushed her farther forward. She was hurtling toward a strip of coast riddled with stumps and strewn with old timbers. This was the old logging site, used for building material when Eternal Mankind had first moved onto the island. There was no cover to hide behind, but plenty of open flat ground for her massive feet to land on. Now, if she could just stick the landing without hurting Hans . . .
She was so focused on landing properly that she didn't notice the puff of flame from the left side of the helicopter.
The second missile impacted only a meter or two from where she touched down. This one was an anti-personnel missile; less high explosive, but a lot more shrapnel. Metal fragments slammed into her wooden torso and legs, embedding themselves and shoving her and her companion to one side. Rachael had been between the explosion and Hans, and so had borne the brunt of it. The pain was more annoying than debilitating, and every part of her wooden body still seemed to work. But Hans . . . two fragments had managed lucky hits, one on his leg and the other on his belly.
"Hans!" she yelped. She laid him down as gently as she could. He moaned in pain. There was blood seeping out around the belly wound.
"You're gonna need to go on," he croaked. "Follow the coastline south."
She shook her head. "I can't just leave you!"
"They're not after me. They'll leave me alone." He grinned. "Besides, I'm on Dockran's Island." He indicated the wound in his belly, which had already stopped bleeding. "This close to the transmitter, any injury that doesn't kill me'll be fully healed within the hour."
Rachael grinned. "Right." She glanced back up at the attack helicopter, which was angling toward her again. "Oh shoot, I'd better draw their fire away from you." She took two steps and bounded into the air again, leaping southward among the stumps and logs.
A machine gun on the helicopter opened fire while she was still in mid-air. Two bullets hit her before she could land. Both of them stung, but neither injured her any more than the shapnel had. They must be using an anti-personnel machine gun, she thought. If that had been an anti-tank machine gun, like on the A-10 Warthog, the bullets would doubtlessly have ripped right through her. She broke into a jinking run, hoping to make herself a more erratic target, but ultimately she knew that chopper had to be stopped.
A log lay on the ground less than two steps away from her, maybe three or four meters long and a little less than a foot across. Could she . . . What the heck, it was worth a try. She picked up the log, whirled on the attacking chopper, and hurled the log at it like an oversized javelin. It flew right on target and smashed into the 'copter's tail boom, severing the tail rotor from the rest of the aircraft. The helicopter spun out of control for a second or two, then rolled over sideways and plummeted toward the ground.
Get out of there! she thought, willing the pilots to save themselves. . . . But the craft smashed into the ground and engulfed itself in a fireball of unspent fuel. Gods damn it. She'd just killed one of her comrades, or maybe two.
Hans lay still, right where Rachael had left him, waiting for the pain from his wounds to subside. From his vantage point so low on the ground, he couldn't see Rachael any more, but he did see the helicopter get hit by a log and fall from the sky. Had Rachael thrown that log? Damn. He looked down at his own artificial right arm. He'd thought of his cybernetic arm as incredibly strong, but even with optimum leverage he could have barely have picked up such a huge timber, let alone thrown it. And it had traveled so fast, and so high in the air!
Rachael scanned the horizon. The skies were clear, for the moment. She took two more steps southward along the coast, then leapt forward onto a graceful arc once again. Somewhere ahead of her, she hoped, was that motor boat Hans had told her about.
"It's not looking good," Stan said to Mister Eternal. "Two missiles and a burst of machine-gun fire couldn't take down our fugitive, and we lost an attack helicopter in the process."
Glenda clicked her teeth. "I was hopeful that our heavier weapons might be able to take her out, but the ordnance that isn't designed for the antipersonnel role is tailored for either fragile aircraft or slow-moving tanks. We just didn't equip ourselves for this contingency."
Norman Dockran grunted. "We really aren't prepared for super-powered threats, are we."
Glenda closed her eyes and shook her head "no."
Dr. Rasmussen piped in, "It should be pretty hard for her to leave the island, though. The cyberwood she's made of is denser than ironwood. If she tries to swim, she'll probably sink and drown. Which means she'd need to find a boat, or an aircraft with a willing pilot, if she wants to escape."
Norman exhaled deeply — something he rarely did since ridding himself of the need to breathe. "So one option would be to wait until she commandiers a boat, then attack the boat from the air. Possible, but if we lose sight of her and can't find her again before she embarks, we'll have to search." He looked at Glenda. "And unless I miss my guess, our scouting aircraft and search teams are pretty scarce."
"That's an accurate description," Stan said.
Glenda shot Stan a dirty look. "I have to make tradeoffs when deciding what equipment to procure and what the Perpetual Army can skip over, you know. It's not like we're a real nation with a real national budget yet."
Norman held up a hand. "I want better odds of success. And to that end, we have one more card we can play."
Stan furrowed his brow in confusion, then his eyes opened wide in alarm.
Norman said, "Send out Nova."
"About half the fire suppression crews are in place, Lieutenant."
Lieutenant Ericson snorted. "It'll have to do. We're on a tight timetable. All right, Sergeant, open the door — but don't stand in front of it."
The Sergeant nodded, and positioned himself to the left side of the beefy metal door. The rest of the squad stood even farther to the left. The word "DANGER" was etched directly into the metal; there were no other signs on the door. In fact, there were no other signs anywhere on the metal walls of this entire corridor. The Sergeant took a deep, centering breath, called out "Opening!," turned the handle, and yanked the Danger Door open.
An alarm instantly sounded, and from out of the newly open door there sprang a doorway-shaped shaft of intense red light. It filled the space in front of the door, shining full force onto the opposite metal wall of the hallway 3 meters distant. It thrummed with a dangerous low-bass roar, and it fairly gushed with heat. Lt. Ericson, the Sergeant, and the three squad members closest to the open door shielded their faces with their hands to block out the radiant heat.
"Nova!" Ericson called out. "You are needed! An intruder must be neutralized. We're clearing a path to the west for you outside. Don't show the intruder any mercy!"
The shaft of red light began to widen, as though its light source were getting closer. Lieutenant Ericson called out "Move it! Move it! Double time!" and took the lead, running away down the long corridor as fast as he could. The squad fell into step and jogged right behind him, putting as much distance between themselves and the open door as they could. Behind them, the hot red light expanded until, at last, it filled the corridor out to a distance of over thirty meters. There, it ended in a surface ever-so-slightly curved, as though it were a corridor-sized slice of an enormous red lightball. As the squad burst through the exit at the end of the corridor, over their shoulders, they could just barely make out, from deep within the red inferno, the dim silhouette of a person emerging from the Danger Door.
That was Nova. His own body emanated the scorching red light in all directions. Always. No one, himself included, had ever figured out how to turn it off. He himself was immune to heat, of course, or else he would've burnt himself to a cinder long ago. Norman Dockran didn't talk about Nova much. No one knew whether Nova been genetically engineered, or cybernetically engineered — or if Mister Eternal had just found him like this. Maybe Nova could have talked about it, if anyone could have heard him from thirty-six meters inside his rumbling fireball. After so many endless days cooped up in the one room on the island that could withstand his heat, no one could be sure he hadn't forgotten how to talk at all.
He started walking toward the open exit at the end of the corridor, slow enough that the soldiers who were still visible could get away. And when the coast looked clear, he upped his pace to a jog. The shining red curtain reached the exit and jogged forward, in step with Nova, out into the open air. Grass, gum wrappers, and cigarette butts lying on the ground burst into flame the instant the red light touched them, turning into shriveled cinders and then ash piles less than a second later. Crews armed with fire extinguishers stood a safe distance to either side, ready to put out anything touched by his fireball that still lay burning afterward. The red shaft of light became a red wedge, and finally flowered outward thirty-six meters in all directions as the dimly-visible man in the middle emerged into daylight. The ball of light and heat he was at the center of stretched as high as it did to either side. In all likelihood, were Nova to have become airborne somehow, it would extend as far below him as well.
Lieutenant Ericson, standing to one side, pointed down the wide dirt road ahead of Nova. "The intruder is that way!" he called out. "Collateral damage is authorized!"
Nova could have nodded, it was hard to say — but then his jogging pace resumed and he made his way down the road. The full seventy-meter-wide ball of red light engulfing him was now visible. The road was wide, but not that wide. The edges of his red hemisphere caught the trees, bushes, and grass lining the road. Behind him, as the remains of said trees, bushes, and grass emerged from his inferno, they were all either completely incinerated or still on fire. Fire extinguisher crews did their best to put out the latter, jogging along a safe distance behind the red fireball.
Nova was coming for the wooden cyborg.
Here is Nova's character sheet for 5th
edition Champions™.
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