"Okay, too bad we couldn't get any lower with the ducts, but we're still in luck," Jen mused as she and Cinderblock crept around a corner on the building's warren-like third floor. "They must not have enough guys for proper security. And if they don't have anyone watching the stairs... crap."

She pulled back, motioning Cinderblock to do the same. He did, but not before taking a quick glance and spotting the same problem Jen had: one of the commandos at the end of the T-hallway, standing beside the door marked FIRE STAIRS.

"Okay," Jen murmured, "on to Plan D." She checked the pockets and pouches of her stolen vest, eventually selecting a couple of small, cylindrical grenades. "This'll work if we time it right." She crept to the edge of the corner, one grenade ready in her right hand, the other in her left.

"When I throw this," she said, "you beat it around the corner to the left. I'll be right behind you. Got it?"

Cinderblock nodded. "Got it."

Jen held his gaze for a moment, then turned and peeked around the corner. Then, with all the strength she could muster, she hurled the grenade in her right hand down the T-hallway to the right. A tactical entry flashbang, it went off halfway up the hall with an earsplitting noise and a brilliant flash of white light. The commando by the door instantly whirled and took a few steps in that direction, swinging his submachinegun to bear. Cinderblock lunged around the corner and ran for it in the opposite direction, behind the agent's back. Jen waited a beat, threw the grenade in her left, and then followed Cinderblock as a billowing cloud of black smoke erupted to surround the operative. By the time he got his wits about him and made his way back out of the cloud, the hallway behind him was empty again.

"Control, this is 3-9-3," he said into his tac radio. "I've got an incursion of some kind up on 3, Sector 4. I didn't get eyes on the intruder, but someone's down here throwing flashbangs and smoke. We may be compromised. Believe they're trying to make their way down."

"Roger, 3-9-3, remain at your post," the voice of the commanding Gunslinger replied crisply. "2-6-9, investigate and intercept."

Down the hall and around the corner, Jen and Cinderblock crouched behind a half-height cubicle divider, catching their breath.

"Think he saw us?" Cinderblock asked.

"No. He'd have shot us," Jen replied. "He knows something's up, though. We have to find a back way to the lobby. I wish I had a floorplan of this damned building. This is what I get for not preparing for contingencies." She was about to say something more, but then froze and held up a hand. She'd just heard the cheery ding! of an elevator in the distance, and now someone was approaching up the hallway, but there was more than just the sound of boots on carpet. This one was accompanied by a strange sort of low humming noise, like an old-fashioned radio warming up. Jen felt goosebumps rising on her arms. She knew that sound - and was suddenly aware of how meager their cover really was.

"Stay down," she whispered to Cinderblock - but he glanced up and caught a glimpse of the person approaching.

"It's just one guy," he murmured. "He hasn't even got a machinegun. I can take him."

So saying, he triggered the change to his slate-haired, muscle-bound form, raised himself up like a runner on the starting blocks, and sprang.

"Cinderblock, WAIT - " Jen said, but it was too late. Cinderblock had broken cover and was making straight for the Malta op, who spotted him instantly and paused, his body language evincing surprise.

Surprise, but not trepidation. Without hesitating, he drew a strange-looking rifle-like device from his back, leveled it, and fired. Instead of launching a projectile, this device emitted a beam of blue-white light that struck Cinderblock full in the chest, splashing off the bold C on his costume in a brilliant spray of sparks. Cinderblock checked for an instant, realized it wasn't doing him any physical harm, and kept charging.

This was a mistake.

Three strides later, he faltered, blinking in confusion, as he suddenly realized that his limbs felt like lead. A wave of utter exhaustion swept over him, causing him to stumble -

- and then, to his horror, he reverted back to his normal form. He looked down at his hands in astonishment, then back up at the Malta Sapper.

Who had put away his Bio-Emergy Feedback Inducer and drawn a plain, old, ordinary .40-caliber pistol. Useless against most supers. More than enough to make a very fatal hole in a suddenly un-super teenage boy.

"Bad move, kid," he said.

Jen didn't consciously think about what she was doing. Had she done so, she would have realized that it was suicide. She didn't even have any superpowers, and she was charging headlong into battle against a man who had just defeated someone who did.

She didn't think about that, though. All her attention, the full power of her remarkable intellect, was going into assessing her environment, identifying her assets, and figuring out how she was going to win.

The Sapper spotted the new threat and, judging it more immediate than the stunned, depowered kid in slate-colored spandex, shifted his aim. Jen hurled down a second smoke grenade, this one filling the corridor with a thick grey mist. The Sapper lost a half-second switching his tactical goggles to thermographic mode - just as Jen expected him to do.

Ducking off her direct course, Jen threw off his aim, making him put a bullet in the wall, and, without slackening speed, tore the bright red fire extinguisher off the corridor wall next to him. Swinging it to bear, she yanked out the safety pin, squeezed the trigger grip, and prayed the building's maintenance staff was good about keeping the extinguishers charged.

It was. The grey mist was suddenly split with a billowing cloud of white, spurting with a roar from the cone of the extinguisher. The Sapper recoiled, cursing, as his thermo goggles abruptly went featureless blue. Jen caught a lucky break, too: He was just on the point of inhaling when she blasted him, and carbon dioxide doesn't breathe very well. The Sapper staggered, coughing violently.

Filled with fury, the aches and pains of her long climb down the ducts washed away by adrenaline, Jen reared the extinguisher back and slammed the flat butt of the cylinder into the side of the man's head. The impact snapped the chin strap on his helmet and catapulted the composite armor shell clean off his head. He reeled, dropping his sidearm, and Jen hit him again, then again, finally swinging the cylinder low and bringing it up under his chin with a great hollow WHOP. The Sapper went up and over backward, crashing down on his back.

Cinderblock heard all this rather than saw it, thanks to the smoke, and for a moment he thought the man in black tactical gear had surely defeated his new friend - defeated her, and would now be coming to finish him off.

Instead, the mist cleared to show him Jen standing, panting for breath, over the flat and motionless form of the Sapper. She stayed where she was for a moment, collecting herself, then dropped the extingusher and grabbed the Sapper by his harness.

"I can't - I can't power up," Cinderblock said, his voice cracking with fright, as Jen quickly but methodically stripped the Sapper of his equipment. "I'm so tired. I can barely move. What did that guy do to me?"

"They're called Sappers," Jen said without looking up from her work. "The weapon they carry dampens superpowers somehow, I'm not sure of the exact principle. It's a temporary effect. You'll be fine in a little while." She shrugged into the strange-looking backpack she'd taken from the Sapper, made sure the straps were snug, and then tore the side access panel off his feedback inducer to bare the glowing blue innards.

"What are you going to do?" Cinderblock asked as Jen started adjusting the innards of the device.

"Well," Jen replied in a semi-distracted voice, "these guys don't have superpowers, so this thing won't be much help as is, but... aaahhh, excellent. It works by producing a phased plasma stream that - well, never mind." She smiled darkly as she kept working. "Point is, if I screw around with the guts of it a little, I can make it do something a lot more interesting."

"2-6-9, report," said the radio clipped to the unconscious Sapper's battle dress, making Cinderblock jump. A few seconds went by, and then the voice said again, in a more urgent tone, "2-6-9, report."

Jen considered for a second. Then, with her dark smile widening a little, she unclipped the microphone, popped the faceplate off, made a couple of adjustments, and then thumbed the push-to-talk key and intoned gleefully, "Now I have a jet pack. Ho ho ho."

Then, before the man on the other end could respond, she switched the base unit off, turned it over, and started dismantling it.

"Uh... won't he know who you are now?" Cinderblock asked hesitantly.

"Nah. If I did the mods to the mic right, I sounded like Darth Vader. And if I did them wrong I sounded like Elmo." She shrugged. "Either way he's in the dark." After a few more seconds, which involved putting the bits of the radio she's removed into the feedback inducer, Jen seemed satisfied with her modifications. She adjusted a couple more components and watched with that same not-entirely-nice grin as the device's humming deepened to a snarl and the bluish glow shifted to a dangerous-looking orange.

"Okay," she said, closing the access panel and standing up. "Stay here. You've already cheated death once today; don't get greedy."

"What about you?"

Jen shouldered her newly modified weapon. "I'll be playing a hunch. If you get enough strength back, head for the roof like I told you before. Okay?"

"Okay. ... Jen?"

"Yeah?"

"Sorry I didn't listen to you before," Cinderblock said with a wan half-smile.

Jen smiled slightly in return, but it wasn't the nasty smile she'd had before.

"Don't sweat it, kid. I've worked with way dumber help'n you."

Only part of Jen's plan was based on a hunch. The other half was based on an observed fact: This building had an atrium-style lobby. Jen had noticed that it reached up to the third floor when she came in, and now she found herself looking down over the balustrade to the inlaid marble floor below. There she saw that the rest of her hunch was on the money, too. The bomb was behind the reception desk, where, if it had as much explosive as she guessed from its size, the blast would cut through the building's central spine, where the elevator column was located, and bring the whole place crashing down.

There were two things that prevented her from just swooping down and taking the thing out. They were both wearing black tac gear, and they were both looking around the lobby with the furtive body language of men on edge. The loss of contact with two members of their squad obviously had them keyed up. Jen would have to be careful.

She knelt behind the balustrade, dug into the top pocket of her captured flak vest, and found a small stick of black camouflage paint. Unscrewing it, she drew a basic domino mask on her face. She wasn't sure why she was going to the trouble of doing that, but it seemed somehow appropriate.

Okay, she told herself. You're all alone with no backup, a captured flight pack, and a cobbled-together weapon that may not even work. You've got to get down there, take out those two military-trained killers, defuse the biggest goddamn bomb you've ever seen, and hope you can get that done and get out to find help before the rest of them swarm you.

No problem.

She stood up, gathered herself, climbed up onto the balustrade, and stepped off.

The Sapper flight pack was surprisingly smooth. She'd never used one before, but in these close quarters, it compared quite favorably to the Sky Raiders' rather unwieldy Raptor Packs, to say nothing of those goofy jet sled things favored by the Gold Brickers. With her experience with both of the latter, plus her lost, beloved jet boots, Jen quickly mastered the Sapper pack, getting it fully under control before either of the operatives down on the ground floor spotted her.

They never look up, she remarked to herself with grim satisfaction before diving on the one furthest from the bomb, leveling her jury-rigged weapon, and firing.

Instead of the stream of cold tuned plasma the normal feedback inducers fired, the one Jen had modified spat a bolt of... well, fire, more or less. Caught completely off-guard, the Malta Tac Op nearest the exit suddenly found himself engulfed in flames. Jen had to hand it to him: He was tough and well-trained. He didn't thrash, didn't make a sound - just spun in place, trying to figure out where the attack had come from. She vectored sideways and pumped another blast into him. This time he seemed to freak a little, flailing his arms. Then he slumped - not burned to death, his advanced combat gear would see to that, but knocked out by the heat and the sudden removal of all the oxygen from his immediate vicinity.

Before the other completely grasped what was happening, Jen darted across and blasted him as well. He had a little better situational awareness; ignoring the flames licking at his uniform, he pulled a grenade from his belt and threw it at her. Jen partially dodged, avoiding the explosion and shrapnel, but the concussion threw her for a bit of a loop, making her tumble almost completely end-for-end in mid-air. That gave the second Tac Op time to swing his submachinegun into position and let loose a burst.

Jen gritted her teeth and suppressed a yelp of pain as the combat vest she'd taken from the Engineer stopped the bullets, but not without transmitting a feeling very like getting hit in the chest with a sledgehammer. Snarling, she raised her modified feedback inducer and let him have it again, then again. The third shot was probably not necessary - he was already going down as she fired it.

Wincing, she let herself drop to the marble floor and turned her attention to the bomb -

- and felt her heart sinking, for standing between her and it was an operative in the same gear as the others... except for his bulky field jacket, his strange-looking high-tech backpack, and his cowboy hat.

Arms folded, the Gunslinger regarded her with eyes like chips of glacier ice.

"I have to admit," he said in a soft, menacing voice, "I was expecting someone a little more... polished."

Jen fought down a spike of fear - these guys were tough enough with her old six-robot army backing her up, never mind all alone with an improvised flame cannon that could conk out at any second - and leveled her weapon.

"I'm not going to let you blow up this building," she said.

The Gunslinger eyed her. "I don't see where you have a choice," he said. His eyes flicked away from her at the same time that she felt a strange vibration in the soles of her Doc Martens. Spinning, she saw the hulking form of a Hercules-class Titan, one of the Malta's 12-foot-tall, heavily armored enforcer robots, looming up behind her...

... and smiled.

Holding up a hand, she barked, "Останови! Отвергную - Большая Патриотическая Война!"

The Titan paused as if considering her words for a moment... and then shut down, settling down on its suspension and locking into place as if prepared for transport.

The Gunslinger's eyes widened, even his arctic cool cracked by what he'd just seen.

"What th - What did you do?"

Jen allowed a faint smirk onto her face.

"That's what you get for stealing your robot technology from the Soviets," she said.

The Gunslinger gazed at her for a second, then nodded, his eyes - the only part of his face visible between hat and mask - taking on an air of satisfaction.

"It'll be an honor to kill you myself," he said.

Not quite the reaction I was hoping for, Jen mused ruefully as she jumped behind the deactivated Titan. The Gunslinger's first effort smacked harmlessly against the robot's armor. Jen quickly clambered up the back of the Titan, yanked open an access panel, and hoped she could quickly make sense of what she found inside.

Just as she'd expected, it was all very familiar-looking indeed. A few seconds' work with the miniature screwgun she'd taken from the Engineer, a couple of crosspatched circuits, and the Titan rumbled back to life - then pivoted and locked onto the Gunslinger.

That cracked his composure but good - he actually cursed as the Titan fired a swarm of missiles at him. With lightning reaction speed, the Gunslinger activated his teleport pack, blinking out of harm's way as the missiles exploded and set the far corner of the lobby on fire. Jen jumped down from the back of the Titan and prepared to get clear.

The Gunslinger materialized between her and the building exit, already shoving a new round into his high-tech revolver sidearm; he snapped the cylinder shut and sidearmed the weapon, blasting the floor just in front of Jen with an explosive round. She tried to trigger her flight pack, but an instant too late - the blast caught her and flung her backward to crash heavily into one of the columns that held up the lobby ceiling. She rebounded and fell to hands and knees, shaking her head to clear it. By the time she looked up, the Gunslinger was standing over her, thumbing another bullet into the top chamber of his sidearm.

The Titan took advantage of its target's distraction to fire its plasma blaster, but its aim was off; the blast clipped the top of the Gunslinger's teleport pack, not damaging the equipment itself but shearing away part of the armor. The Gunslinger turned, his hands a blur, instantly switching to an armor-piercing round. Jen shook off her disorientation, got her feet under her, and ducked past the back of the Gunslinger, reaching up as she did so to reach into the rent on his teleport pack's armor and grab one of the internal component. Before he could react to that, the Titan fired again, this time hitting him full in the chest and hurling him across the lobby.

Jen ran as hard as she could to the other end, reaching the bomb before the Gunslinger could recover his wits. Jamming more armor-piercing ammunition into his revolver, he fanned the hammer and unloaded a punishing fusillade that sent the Hercules-class Titan reeling in a hail of sparks. The robot tried to regroup and counterattack, but the Gunslinger's bullets had found vital components. The robot twitched, smoked, and then fell on its back.

By the time the Gunslinger finished reloading, Jen had a hand on the timing device atop the bomb's 55-gallon-drum main charge container.

"If you shoot me," she said, "I might pull the wrong wire - and I know you guys aren't suicide bombers."

The Gunslinger took a step toward her, snarling, "You're going to regret this so much."

"You'll never get over here before I can disarm this thing," she said. As he reached for the controls on his belt, she hesitated, timing her response to hairsbreadth precision, then said, "And I wouldn't try teleporting if I were you."

The Gunslinger's finger had already pressed the button. He looked up sharply as the pack on his back began audibly powering up - to see Jen grinning wickedly at him and holding up a small electronic widget in the hand that wasn't on the bomb.

"This is your Heisenberg compensator," she said. "Who knows where you'll end up without it?"

"Wha - NOOOOOOOO!" the Gunslinger cried, and then, in a harsh burst of blue light, he vanished.

Jen let out the breath she'd unconsciously been holding, sagging slightly as the adrenaline drained away, and shoved the compensator in her pocket, then turned to see about disabling the bomb.

Another Malta Tac Op stood in front of the elevator, his assault rifle aimed square at her head.

"Nice job taking out Starlight Black 1-3-1," he said. "I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen it myself. You've got potential, kid." Still keeping the rifle trained on her with his right hand, he took his left off the forend and drew his stun gun from his belt. "We can use you."

"The hell you can!" a voice boomed from above. Startled, the op looked up - just in time for about 300 pounds of mutant teenager to slam into him from the top of the atrium, smashing him to the floor so hard he made a crater. His tac gear saved him from a messy death, but he wasn't going to be making any more threats - or eating any hard foods - for a while.

Cinderblock got to his feet, dusting off his hands, and grinned.

"Aren't you glad I didn't listen to you this time?" he asked.

Jen returned the grin, reached to the bomb, and pulled off the green wire.

Ms. Liberty, Detective Murwell, and a detachment of Longbow troops and power-armored Paragon Police Department special weapons officers arrived within two minutes of Jen's call, made on a cell phone she'd managed to piece back together from the last Tac Op's top pocket. They cleared the building of the remaining Malta and secured the ones Jen and Cinderblock had left tied up on the upper floors.

The two teenagers, tired and sore but pleased with their day's work, stood off to the side and watched the proceedings. Members of the department's post-incident cleanup crew were removing the remains of the Titan and securing the bomb while Murwell and the armored PPD officers led the ambulatory Malta operatives out, hands on their heads.

"You won't get anything out of us," one of them snarled.

"If I want anything from you, creep, you'll be the first to know," Murwell replied in his flat, metallic voice.

"Hey, Jen?" Cinderblock asked.

"Yeah."

"How did you know how to hack that robot?"

Jen smiled. "My dad invented it," he said.

"... Seriously?"

"It's part of that long story I was telling you about earlier. My father used to design military robots for the Soviets, ages ago. Way before my time. He defected in the early '80s. I've always figured the Malta based the Titans on equipment they swiped during the fall of the USSR. Looks like I was right." Tossing the Gunslinger's Heisenberg compensator in the air and catching it again, she added airly, "That ought to make an interesting report for someone at Longbow to read... "

Just then Anders Selzer arrived in the lobby, escorted by Ms. Liberty and looking rumpled and out of sorts but unharmed.

"... still not sure what they were after, but all of our information systems seem to be intact," Selzer was saying. "Of course, we'll be getting a team of experts in from Washington to sweep the facility from top to bottom before we resume operations. In the meantime, our workload will be distributed among the city's other four field offices."

"Good," Ms. Liberty said. "You can never be too careful with the Malta Group." She and Selzer walked across the lobby, pausing in front of Jen and Cinderblock. "And these are the two who saved the day, I understand," she said with a grin.

"Jen saved the day," Cinderblock said modestly. "I just helped."

"'Jen'? Not much of a hero name," said Ms. Liberty with a questioning look.

"My application was denied," Jen said, shrugging.

Ms. Liberty's eyebrows went up. "Was it now," she said, looking at Selzer.

"Er... well, under the circumstances, perhaps we might... re-examine the particulars," the bureaucrat said.

"I think," Ms. Liberty said, "that might be a very good idea." Smiling at Jen again, she said, "Given any thought to what your hero name will be?"

Jen considered for a second - she hadn't, really - and then grinned as the day's events and a friend's nom de guerre came together in her mind.

"I think I'll call myself the Torch of Victory," she said.

"Operation Starlight Black"
A City of Heroes story by Benjamin D. Hutchins
Linguistic assist by Dave Lieberman
© 2008 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited
City of Heroes © NC Interactive