No Dress Rehearsal
Stability Girl wasn’t used to traveling by car. When you had a gravity-defying suit of armor and your girlfriend was a robot bird lady, you tended to fly. They’d flown to California — on a plane — just the day before, and spent most of that night zooming around the Los Angeles skyline, taking in the balmy summer and the novels sights of a big, beautiful city. They’d come a long way from Buffalo. They were here because they’d both been poached by superhero teams, one big, one small. SG was on the small one, surprising no one.
They pulled up to Marion Childress’s mansion. The millionaire genius inventor philanthropist superhero was creating a new organization that he said he would change the world. Stability Girl had been one of his recruits. They’d worked together on a team in New York. Somehow, she’d impressed him.
Standing outside the car in her gear, SG leaned into the driver’s side window. “I wish you could come with me,” she said.
Orthona, her girlfriend, reached out a hand, blue-gray metallic skin delicate and gentle on her face. “You don’t need me there, Sara,” she said. “You’re more than capable of all this. Show them what I see everyday.”
Stability Girl clutched her hand, barely feeling it under chunky gloves. “I might only speak when spoken to.”
“That’s okay, for today. It’ll get easier. It did in New York, didn’t it?” she said.
“You were there,” SG said.
“I’m still here,” Orthona said, and dabbed at Stability Girl’s chin with two fingers. “I’ll see you tonight.” She blew her a kiss. Stability Girl waved. Some of the girly romance stuff didn’t come naturally to her yet.
She waddled up to the door, thinking it would be rude to hover. She was directed where to go by a member of the household staff and lead into a room with one other person. She wore a green bodysuit and a gold, vaguely insectoid helmet.
“Oh, hi,” Stability Girl said. “I’m. Um. Hi.”
“You’re part of this squad, I’m assuming,” the other person said. Looking closer, the helmet reminded SG of a bee or hornet.
“Yeah. I’m Stability Girl,” she said. She almost went for a handshake, thought better of it, and waved her hand up closer to her head in a vague salute. She looked like an idiot, she thought. The other woman seemed to agree, as her body language slumped.
“Oh,” she said. Way too much silence followed. “I go by Honeybee.”
“Right…” SG said. She decided not to speak until spoken to like she’d planned. Mercifully, the moment was broken when they were escorted into another room by the same staff person from earlier.
* * *
“This isn’t a strikeforce or a military team. This is a group of people with extraordinary abilities who are going to use them for the greater good, in every field, in every way. It’s a machine, to fix the world,” Marion Childress said, gesturing wildly. His hands were a gunmetal gray, the mechanical joints visible on the advanced prosthetic that he’d had designed himself. He was standing in front of a wall full of framed newspapers and other mementos of the past.
“All of this?” Marion said, waving at the high wall. “This is what we have to learn from. We know how to avoid so many potential mistakes and do this right. It’s not about offensive capability, or power. It’s about community.
We’re going to have medical teams on the street for emergencies. We’ll have contacts in law enforcement, government, academia, business. Like I said, it’s a machine. We already have the parts. They just need to be put together.”
“We’re the parts?” said a voice from Stability Girl’s left, sitting next to her on a designer couch.
“Yes, Osiris,” Marion said. “Don’t think of it as something demeaning. We’re like gears and cogs and springs, in society’s machine. It’s not a bad thing. It’s beautiful. We’re taking ourselves and building something better. It’s… what I’ve always done.” He looked at his own hands.
Osiris Penn, who had asked the question, looked serene and distant upon receiving his answer. His expression didn’t change much no matter what the topic of conversation was, so Stability Girl had been studying it for subtle variations. The other two people in the room wore masks and helmets that covered their entire faces, so she had clung to an actual face like a life raft. It was difficult enough on the best of days to determine what people were thinking from their expressions or body language. This was playing on hard mode.
“Okay, so why me? You guys are all, well…”
“A bunch of tech freaks?” suggested the Recluse, the masked young man to her right. It seemed accurate, given the array of equipment he’d brought with him and insisted stay by his side during even the preliminary part of the meeting.
“Yeah, Recluse,” Osiris said. “Technology isn’t really my area.” He snapped his fingers and a floating ember of green fire appeared for a second before he pressed his thumb and forefinger around it.
“That’s exactly the reason. Recluse, Stability Girl, and Honeybee are all technology users and tinkerers, like me. Your powers are something harder to explain,” Childress said.
“Magic?” Osiris suggested.
“Mmm… I don’t like that terminology, if I’m being honest with you, but it’ll do for the moment. A scientific phenomenon I- we don’t understand yet,” said Childress. “The point is, I need different perspectives. If I staffed every team with people just like me, we’d make the same mistakes I would make on my own. That defeats the purpose of a team. I need parts of various forms and designs to ensure success. I’m still finalizing the placements, of course, but there’ll be no team with a homogenous selection of operatives. You see…”
Stability Girl tuned out, looking at the wall behind him. She noticed that part of it, on the left, consisted mainly of memorabilia of his own career. Framed magazine articles with headlines like “Super Science Teen Designs Own Prosthetics” and “Childress Mechanical Donates to Veteran’s Fund.” That made sense. What she found surprising was the unflattering stories, preserved with just as much care. “Whiz Kid Mutilated Himself To Sell Tech To Military” read one.
On the far left was some more recent news. “Superteam ‘The Project’ in Uproar as Mitchum and Childress Split” said one. She had to squint before she realized she was actually in the photo that accompanied the article. That realization made her wanted to sink into the couch and disappear. The Project was the East Coast team co-founded by Childress and David Mitchum, who went by “Infantryman.” Stability Girl and her girlfriend, Orthona (code name: Metalwing) had fought alongside them for a few years. David and Marion fell in love, and then they fell out of it. Sometimes, mommies and daddies don’t get along, but it’s not your fault, kids.
It was nice while it lasted. There was an opposites attract sort of vibe to their relationship. David was a Black community activist who served in Vietnam, defected from the military to act as a rogue operative, before disappearing into another dimension and emerging twenty years later having barely aged. Marion was a rich white kid from Connecticut. He was a “disruptor” before anyone used that term, who had “arranged” to lose his own arm in order to test out the prosthetics he’d designed and built on himself, when he was just a teenager. Odds are, no one would have ever found out if he hadn’t done it a second time, on the other arm. Now, both arms, shoulders, his spine and large portions of his hips were fully mechanical. They were modular, too, and when he was in the field as the Engine, he fitted himself into a mechanical combat suit that plugged directly into the specially designed ports built into his body.
“So are there any questions? Honeybee?” Marion said, and Stability Girl realized she hadn’t been listening for a while. She wouldn’t know what to ask, so she let her potential future teammate do the talking. As if that was different from any other situation. “Quiet” was the way almost everyone described her.
Honeybee was silent, but some mechanical activity seemed to be happening behind her helmet. It was high-tech equipment, but more smoothly integrated and efficiently designed than her own suit or the heavy-duty tinkertoys that Recluse carried. Her voice came out with a slight electronic tinge.
“My only question is when do we start?” she said. “You have the ideas, clearly, and now the personnel. Why wait?”
“Well, I had a few thoughts on what sort of mission we might want to go on for our first outing. You see, I want heroes to be active, not just reactive, not only engaging when a crisis hits—“
“We should go downtown. Street crime may be down, but on a hot summer day there’s always some kind of incident, wouldn’t you say?” Honeybee said. “Call it a feeling… We should really get going.”
* * *
She had one hell of a feeling. We were only downtown a few minutes when the clouds cleared and a flaming silver frisbee came burning through the atmosphere. The alien ship — were we really going to call it a “flying saucer” ? — wasn’t a completely unprecedented event. The earth was used to strange visitors from other planets. We were on the precipice of being members of a genuine interstellar community of aliens, assuming no one got blown to pieces first.
It was rare, though, for Stability Girl to actually witness the moment when an ordinary day turns into a disaster. The ship didn’t exactly “strike first” but of course that all depends on your point of view, doesn’t it? Police helicopters swooped by to demand it leave the airspace. Jets would have come by shortly if there hadn’t been superheroes on the scene ready to engage. Of course, Marion couldn’t resist. He flew right up to it, and Honeybee followed.
The ship fired off a rainbow thunderstorm of beam weapons. Red fired in straight lines and green and blue arced like lightning, blasting away randomly at buildings, the police helicopters, and anything else in the vicinity. Marion flew through the energy storm shooting out gunports and laser lenses. The bottom of the ship’s hull opened up and a rack of spine-finned missiles lowered down before firing. SG tensed, preparing to fly right at it and try to shoot it down, when she saw it lassoed by a yellow glow. On the other end was Honeybee, dragging the missile like a sack of laundry.
“Whoa…” she said.
“Right? How the hell does she do that?” Osiris said, over their communication system. Honeybee spun around a few times, building up momentum until her yellow beam suddenly disappeared and the missile flew off before crashing into the ship.
“Holy cow!” Recluse said. “This isn’t a competition, right? I don’t think I can beat that!”
Beams from the ship were already damaging buildings below, and Stability Girl didn’t need to be given instructions in a situation like this. She immediately buzzed down close to the street and pulled a man, a civilian, out the window of a damaged building. He ran off, thanking her with his back turned. A busted, smoking fire hydrant spewed water like a geyser one street over. She floated to it and pulled out a slim gray device that looked like a pistol but fired an energy beam. It was a guess that it would be hot enough to temporarily weld the hydrant shut, but it worked, for now.
“SG, are you okay?” asked Marion over her headset radio, integrated into her helmet. Her helmet, like the rest of her armor, was chunky and homemade, built atop the bones of an alien artifact. She always told herself she’d done what anyone would do in her situation, but it wasn’t true. Most people, upon finding dangerous, unfamiliar alien technology, do not build suits of armor and become superheroes.
“Yeah, I’m good,” she said. “I can’t do anything up top, are they—?”
“We’re figuring it out. It’s a lot to deal with,” Marion said. “We might need to call in some backup…”
Stability Girl hovered around searching for more people when her headset buzzed again.
“I think you should probably fly up and get a look at this, SG!” said Recluse. When she did, she saw the saucer disgorge a swarm of flying robots that looked like spherical buzzsaws from the same area where the missile had emerged. Self-defense system, Stability Girl assumed.
“Looks like a self-defense system, SG!” said Recluse over their comms. “You don’t mind dancing with me, do ya?”
“Uhh, no problem!” she said. He was nice, but she wasn’t good at riffing on his jokes. Hopefully that was okay. She floated somewhere close to the path of the buzzsaw balls and started firing off some low-impact blasts. She didn’t know if they were drones or what and hoped she could just disable, rather than destroy, them.
She shot one twice with her energy gun and it spun off from its trajectory. Her visor gave her a real-time estimate of their location. Maybe if she shot one at the exact right angle, she could “force” it in one direction, and line up with it as she kicked off a building with her antigrav boots. If she timed it just right, she could “catch” it with her tractor glove, holding it in a static energy field. Once properly disabled, she could deposit it in a safe location.
She could do that, under perfect conditions, and if there were only one coming at a time. Instead, there were dozens streaming forward, singing with spinning saws. She loved the way she thought, the way she strategized, planned, and theorized. But theory often crashed headfirst into practice.
She was still figuring out what she could actually do when Recluse came crawling up, four robot arms gripping a wall. They’d unfolded from the heavy backpack of machinery he was sitting next to before, now strapped to his body. He hoisted himself up on the roof and immediately began to bat away the razor-bots as they approached. Once he figured out the rhythm, he was able to transfer them from one of the top two arms and down to the other two where he ripped them in half. Theory, meet practice.
He looked down at the remnants of one. “They’re just machines, SG. It’s like a skeet shoot. Pull!” he said. She sort of understood the reference, and his encouragement got her mind operating on instinct. She fired one long energy beam at one until it burst like a grape and a debris shower fell to the sidewalk.
“Oh, geez, I hope everyone is out of the way…” she said.
“You can lure ‘em wherever you want. Actually, why don’t we collab? I’ll toss ‘em your way—“
Stability Girl smiled. “Oh! And I’ll shoot!” she said. Recluse batted one toward her and she shot it out of the sky. It exploded right over the roof on her side of the street.
“Keep moving! Maybe we can take care of this swarm!” he said. The torrent of them seemed to be lightening up. She could see the “tail” in the distance.
“Right! I’ll do my best!” Stability Girl said, and soared. She used both guns, firing just long enough to disable the bots when Recluse knocked them into her sights. Then, she’d shoot them again when they were close to the ground, letting the debris harmlessly drop. This, she could do. Her aim was true.
Engine came in over the comms. “OK, gang, I’ve called in the reinforcements. The big guys are on their way,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind working with your better half, SG.”
Recluse turned to her, expression inscrutable behind the mask and goggles. “Your better half?” he said.
“Yeah. Well, all the Seven Swords, I bet,” she said, keeping her pride quiet. What she hid in her voice was clear on her face.
Engine came through on the comms again. “Honeybee and I are headed down. Any of the drones or whatever else, we’ll do. SG and Recluse, join Osiris on search and rescue!” he said. Stability Girl and Recluse only had to nod to each other. They started with the nearest buildings and went in to clear them floor by floor.
On the sidewalk, she saw Recluse carrying four people and a dog. She could barely manage two adults and one child, one on her back and one hoist in the tractor glove, the baby under her other arm.
“Hey, lightweight,” he said. “You did really good.”
A bright green signal flare shined from the end of the street.
“Hey, buddy brigade! Bring ‘em this way! I got emergency services lined up and ready to take people,” Osiris said.
Stability Girl thought about the hours they’d spent at Project headquarters waiting for something to happen. The paperwork, the research, the designing and updating of equipment. It had been, in many ways, her first “real job.” When they did spring into action, it was a major event. What were the odds of getting this kind of incident on their first day? Hell, not even their actual first day, just a try-out?
Her thought process was interrupted by what sounded like a thunderclap, but she knew after a moment was actually a sonic boom. Instinctively, she looked up, and saw a person-shaped red-and-gold blur stop directly in front of the alien ship. For the first time since she’d been in LA, she’d seen a celebrity. Helios had arrived. Behind him were six other figures, and she instantly picked out the blue and red silhouette of her girl.
It only took a few minutes for the alien ship to be disabled and placed safely in the concrete bed of the Los Angeles River, just a few blocks away. It took a few hours to get the buildings cleared and get the first responders in place and start the cleanup process. That’s what real superheroes were like, she thought.
By the time they were done, a quarantine zone had been set up to try and contain alien technology or anything else that the alien ship had brought with it. Good luck with that, Stability Girl thought. Still, Marion loved to play by the rules in times like this, so they would be here for a while. She floated up to one of the cleared buildings to get a good look at the action. When she got up there, she saw Honeybee, intently punching buttons on her wrist computer.
“Hey! You had some great instincts back there, um, Honeybee,” Stability Girl said, remembering that saying people’s names usually helped to create connections. “I’d be meaning to ask you, where’d you get that name anyway, I mean, your helmet is sort of bee-like, but—“
“What? Oh, it’s. A code name. Honeybee Restless. That was my code name for— you know what? It doesn’t matter. I might change it,” she said.
“Oh, really? To what?” Stability Girl said.
“I’ll let you know when I decide,” she said.
“Oh, okay,” Stability Girl said, then blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “My girlfriend helped fight those guys!”
“Really? Who?” Honeybee said.
Stability Girl honestly assumed everyone knew. She was the much-less famous half of the pair. “Oh, um. Orthona. Well, you know her as Metalwing. We moved out here together, you know, to do this whole team thing… she’s on the Seven Swords, not—”
“Transit,” Honeybee said.
Stability Girl furrowed her brow. “What?”
“That’s the name of the-- uh, Marion said, that’s one of the names he was considering for the team. The Transit System. Because we move people from point A to point B, I guess,” Honeybee said, shifting on her feet.
“Huh. I didn’t know he had a name picked out… he didn’t tell me. Or maybe I zoned out,” Stability Girl said, quietly. “Say, by the way, I wanted to ask you how some of your tech works. Those gravity beams you were using were so cool! I’ve never seen that. How did you develop it? I have this tractor thing in my glove but it barely works, and drains the battery real fast… your’s is so, I dunno, futuristic!”
“What, you think I couldn’t make it on my own?” Honeybee said. Her mask didn’t move, but SG could have sworn the antennae-like protrusions twitched slightly.
“No, I didn’t mean that, it’s just really advanced for one person to make, so—“
“You know something? This isn’t a great time for this conversation. I have some stuff to do here, so…”
Honeybee said. Stability Girl’s face got hot and she flinched. Hurt feelings were like dreams: sometimes the best thing was to forget them.
“Um, I’m sorry. I was just hoping we could… never mind,” she said. “I think we have to debrief with some army guys or something.”
“I’ll be there. You don’t need to babysit me,” Honeybee said.
“Why are you talking to me like that?” Stability Girl said. Who cared, at this point. The awkwardness wasn’t important. They’d just done something incredible, and this was the conversation? “I was trying to compliment you. Maybe I’m not so impressive, but I helped today, too. I want to be teammates who can work together. Obviously you have good instincts and abilities! You don’t need to act superior… even if you are.”
Honeybee didn’t move for a moment, and SG was ready to give up. Now she’d put her stupid little earnest heart out to get stomped. Why bother?
“I’m… sorry,” Honeybee said, stopping a spiral. “I’m not used to how people talk in this era—. Um. How people talk here.”
Stability Girl tried to square what that meant, but couldn’t, and just accepted the apology. “OK. Can we try to be… teammates? We don’t have to be friends.”
“Why do you do this? Heroing, or whatever you call it. I’m just curious,” Honeybee said.
“To help people. What other reason would there be?” SG said.
“Some people do it to be famous, or get rich. Or… maybe so the world will remember them.”
“Nobody lives forever, and nobody is remembered forever. Even Helios, there’ll be a time when he’s gone, and no one remembers. I think, anyway,” Stability Girl said, looking down at the increasing hubbub by the incapacitated saucer. Some of the first responders were posing for selfies with the heroes on the outskirts of it.
“That’s a good answer,” Honeybee said. “I want to apologize again for being so rude. It’s… cultural. Sometime, I think I’ll be able to explain it. Until then, I’ll try and do better.”
Stability Girl felt that answer in her chest, in a good way. “I have a way to start that, if you’re okay with it,” she said.
“Hit me with it,” Honeybee said.
“My name is Sara,” Stability Girl said. “What’s yours?”
“Sybill. My name… is Sybill,” Honeybee said.
“Nice to meet you, Sybill. Again,” Stability Girl said. Her round face was covered in bloody wounds and scratches from the fighting, and sweat was pooling down her neck from under her heavy helmet. She smiled while she floated back down to Earth.
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