In a Galaxy Far, Far AwRy

Book 8: Untitled or Attitude Adjustments

Liam Gibbs

IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWRY book 8: UNTITLED or ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENTS

Copyright (c) 2021 Liam Gibbs

All rights reserved.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

As awesome as this book is, it's a work of fiction. I know, I know. We were all hoping, but it just ain't gonna be. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's freaky imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely bonkers and coincidental. In other words, sadly you can't get Schizophrenic's autograph.

ISBN 13: 978-1777139612

First printing: April 2021

{ PLOT DEVICE PUBLISHING }

Your Favorite Table of Contents

At the Front

Other Books in the Series

Book 8: Untitled or Attitude Adjustments

Chapter One: Heavy Metal Thunder

Chapter Two: Quitting Time

Chapter Three: Stupid Is as Stupid Does

Chapter Four: Some Machinery Somewhere Went Indefinable Something

Chapter Five: Not Quite Settled

Chapter Six: Future Prospects

Chapter Seven: Finger-Pointing and Blame-Throwing

Chapter Eight: What the Crock Was That?

Chapter Nine: A Very Stupid Thing to Do

Chapter Ten: Whiplash Aftereffect

Chapter Eleven: Late-Breaking News

Chapter Twelve: Life after Near Death

Chapter Thirteen: Like a Steel Spike Rammed up Your Afterburner

Chapter Fourteen: Inoperable Rescue Operation

Chapter Fifteen: A Refreshing Assault on the Brain

Chapter Sixteen: Proactive Hyperactive

Chapter Seventeen: Escape Attempt

Chapter Eighteen: Draft like a Life Raft

Chapter Nineteen: Connect the Dots

Chapter Twenty: Lambasted Youth

Chapter Twenty-One: Dive-Bomb Street Pizza

Chapter Twenty-Two: That Uneasy Feeling

Chapter Twenty-Three: Desperate Times...

Chapter Twenty-Four Separation Anxiety Amplified

Chapter Twenty-Five: Grade-School Sissy Fight

Chapter Twenty-Six: So Far, No Good

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Meeting of the Minds

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Firefight

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Psychic Backtrack and Physical Ship-Smack

Chapter Thirty: Grand Theft Autopilot

At the Back

About That Guy Whose Book You Read Once

Connect with the Series

This Isn't Even My Final Form!

The following story ain't professionally edited. I know, I know, why am I inflicting this on you?

For cool reasons.

Professional editing, covers, and the whole shebang takes money. And creating appendix material takes time. The In a Galaxy Far, Far AwRy series has been steadily seeing new releases, but they're release at the rate of one per year, while they're written at a rate of one every nine months or so. Do the math. The series will never catch up.

The author, awesome brain that he has, only ever wanted to share these stories with the world.

Money wasn't ever a goal. I know by offering these books for free—professionally packaged or not—I'll be losing money. I honestly don't care. Since releasing the books free of charge yet without the "professional" look, I've found the stress of running this whole series has gotten much manageable. This leaves me with more time to do what I set out to do: write the stories and share them.

I still attend trade shows and comic conventions and sell the books there. Each book will, eventually, be given the professional touch. But, while we're waiting, all I want to do is share these.

If you see something ain't right, or something you want to comment on, please feel free. Think of yourself as a beta-reader: a pre-reader of something unreleased. Voice your thoughts at liamgibbs@inagalaxyfarfarawry.com. Until the book gets professionally released, I consider it a work in progress.

So what you're reading here is the book without the professional touches. I've edited this book a dozen times or more, and so I believe it's as polished as I can get it. I feel comfortable letting you see it. It will one day be professionally edited. One day. But until then, know that you're reading what I believe to be as polished as I myself can get it.

Enjoy!

Or don't. I really have no control.

Available on the Author's Super-Awesome Site

This stupendous, amazing, spectacular, not-at-all-overhyped comedy/science-fiction series can be found in the following parts:

Book 1: Serial Fiction Sideshow

Book 2: Home Sweet Home Invasion

Book 3: Technophobia

Book 4: Armageddon Trigger Finger

Book 5: The Genetic Equation

Book 6: Power Tool

Book 7: The Lesser of Two Egos

Book 8: Untitled of Attitude Adjustments

Book 9: Those We Left Behind

Book 10: Metaphor for Life

Book 11: Oh, Crock, Here Comes a Meteor!

Book 12: His Kingdom Come

Book 13: A Wolf in Sheep's Armor

Book 14: Man Versus Machine Part 1 of 1

Book 15: Our New Hiring Policy

Book 16: Life like Broken Glass

Book 17: The Church of Steeple

Book 18: Blood Bunny

Book 19: Disease of Behavior

Book 20: The Paper Tiger's Yardstick

Book 21: This One Has a Dancing Gibbon

Book 22: My Brother's Captor

Book 23: Marching Orders

Book 24: To Wake the Deactivated

The Story So Far

Please visit the In a Galaxy Far, Far AwRy site for all these free e-books and more information.

Other Stuff the Author Spewed Out

Maybe check out these other things 'cause they're superfine too!

Not So Superpowered, available at tiny.cc/nssuperpowered

Three Flash Fictions, available upon request from the author

Random limericks, available in bathroom stalls

In a Galaxy Far, Far AwRy

Book 8: Untitled or Attitude Adjustments

Chapter One: Heavy Metal Thunder

January 14, 9110. 2:55 a.m. (Galactic Standard Time).

Ephraim Hemster watched the mass of quiverin' metro-peeps—he hated them metro-livin' people—huddle against the bank's long teller counter. The metro-peeps was made from meat. Every peep was. That was the amazin' thing he learnt from them peeps: them was meat, aside from them parts what got blown off in industrial-machine mishaps and haywire firecracker catastrophes. Thems parts was replaced with metal. Like Ephraim's tongue.

Fifteen minutes ago at this First Galactic Union Bank, Ephraim and his cousin–slash–brother–slash–uncle–slash–domestic attorney, Zeke, had smashed their getaway tractor through a wall and hollered a bunch o' tough words to shut these peeps up. After figurin' out how to turn off the tractor—it had started threshin' the carpet—they herded the peeps into one corner like cow pigs. Hyuk. Cow pigs tasted good because them was beef and ham at the same time.

The bank was brown. The lobby was burnt brown, the doors was poop brown, and the walls was mud brown. Chocolate brown colored the tables, carpet, and counters. The tellers' row o' brown-stained desks sat along the left side o' the lobby. To the right stood a brown booth where peeps met brown-rusted robots to discuss retirement stuff. Ahead stood a brown wall covered in framed image stills o' bank buildin's, edumacation certificates, and decorations that looked like Zeke's "Yeehaw! You Still Got Your Nose" motivational poster. The brown getaway tractor waited behind Ephraim, and behind that stood the windowed brown doors. A brown potted plant with brown dirt sat next to Ephraim where Zeke emptied his bladder and grinned off his brown teeth.

Time to put the fear o' Ephraim in these peeps. He rushed toward the huddled crowd and thrust his head at them. Some peeps gasped, some screamed, and others jerked away. Hyuk. Stupid peeps. Them looked like caged possums that science geeks was always proddin' around. Ephraim leered at one particular femme-peep. "You ready to die tonight?" He gave the peep a smile that woulda been toothy if he still had teeth.

The peep squealed and kicked away. Not to worry. Later, Ephraim would freshen his breath so's to ask this peep to the pig-wrestlin' mud ditch.

Ephraim hyuked again and drew back from the tremblin' crowd, hoistin' his weapon, a good ol' XM8 bullet-throwin' carbine. Let them big metro-peeps get a good peep at it. It glinted in the shine from that light panel what hovered over his head. "This here's my peep sticker. I use this to stick peeps like all y'all until I get what I want." He checked Zeke who, havin' finished his Zeke leak, was dumpin' money cards into a shoppin' bag. The cards fell through the hole in the bag's bottom. "And what me and my partner, Zeke—"

"We gone said use no names, Ephraim!" Zeke gaped up from the bag.

Ephraim groaned. He wasn't in the mood for Zeke's squeaks. Zeke thought he was all educated because he had that hoity-toity grade-school diploma and pink gums. Or at least pinkish. Plus he'd learnt to shave.

But maybe Zeke was smarter than the average peep. Usin' these plastic bags as masks was, after all, his idea. And the bags worked better when Ephraim and Zeke cut holes for eyes an' even better when they removed the bags before cuttin'. They'd forgotten them bags at home, but still...

"Right. No names. Okay, peeps, Zeke's goin' 'round collectin' all y'all fancy metro-peep money cards. So just drop them cards in the bag he's passin'. Don't be scared just 'cause he looks like roadkill. He won't bite unless ya smell like squirrel meat, an' most o' you don't." Hyuk. Ephraim snorted a laugh.

Zeke snorted one back. He was all smile and no thought, showin' off his remainin' lip like he was at one of them high-tootin' affairs.

Ephraim checked the clock tickin' above the front doors. The big hand pointed up, the little hand right. L o'clock. Good. He and Zeke was workin' quick and they still had nine beers left.

Which reminded Ephraim: he wasn't drunk enough yet. He grabbed a can. "Hey, Zeke, you wanna brewski?" Zeke hooted like Grandma/Cousin Jebbie after someone stepped on her middle arm. Ephraim took that hoot as a yeehaw. He tossed another can to Zeke, who caught it in the forehead.

Ephraim popped open his can—psssh—and took a thirsty swig, sloppin' up the suds. Been a while since sweet brew leaked down his chin. Hyuk. He drank, but paused when a deep warble approached and settled above the ceilin'. It sounded like some fancy air conditioner them metro-peeps used on hot days. This t'weren't no hot day, though.

His booze dribbled down his whiskers. That warble still hummed like Zeke wooin' up to an aunt.

"Hey, Zeke, what's that sound?" He checked Zeke, who passed the bag o' money cards to the last metro-peep.

"I—I think that's my foots."

"You ain't walkin'."

"Then I dunno. Sounds funny. You gonna look-see what it is?"

"Nah. If it ain't givin' away beer, I ain't carin'."

The warble persisted. Neither Ephraim nor Zeke budged. Ephraim didn't dare put his can to his mouth, though he ached to finish his beer. All the juice from the head was fizzin' out.

Zeke shrugged. Ephraim shrugged back. Maybe this was one of them metro-peep flyin' machines.

A burst of feedback squealed from above the buildin'. Then one of them metro-peep ad programs: "YOU'VE TALKED ABOUT THEM BY THE WATER COOLER. NOW LET THEM SMASH ONE OVER YOUR HEAD. THE GOOD GUYS HAVE ARRIVED!"

A thunderin' loudspeaker erupted. Ephraim leaped back an' dropped his can. The loudspeaker said, "EPHRAIM AND ZEKE HEMSTER, THIS IS FR—Is that right? Hemster? Holy hoedown hullabaloo, you're kidding me. Where's the datasheet on this mission? Are these guys brothers or cousins? Oh. They're both."

"Franchise, just read the warning."

A sigh, then that loudspeakin' metro-peep voice returned. "EPHRAIM AND ZEKE HEMSTER, THIS IS FRANCHISE OF THE GOOD GUYS. FOR TRANSGRESSIONS AGAINST THE PLANETARY UNION OF RENOVODOMUS, AGENTS POWER PLANT AND SIXTH SENSE WILL ENTER TO PLACE YOU UNDER ARREST. RAISE YOUR BLOODY, MACHINERY-CHOPPED STUMPS INTO THE AIR, AND PLEASE EXIT THE BANK. IF YOU'D LIKE ME TO REPEAT THIS WARNING IN DUELING BANJO, COME OUTSIDE AND SQUARE DANCE A JIG."

Ephraim spilled his beer for this? He ain't doin' a jig-a-lig for these beer-wastin' peeps.

Zeke's footsteps squeak-raced toward Ephraim. "Ephraim, what we gonna do? What we gonna do? Law cops is here. They's outside!" Zeke slammed into Ephraim, grabbed his shoulders, and shook him. "What we gonna do?"

"Don't get your last butt cheek in a fizzle. We gonna blast 'em." Ephraim hoisted his carbine and raised his brow. "Let's get outside and peck them law cops off."

Like alacazam, a hole shattered in one wall. A blond metro-peep swooped in, shootin' lasers like Ephraim's pappy with a tin-can flinger. "You bankists makings me miss Cosm'naut Chimp." Blondie screamed. "That comin' outs your bail money."

"What the—" Zeke mumbled before a bullet hole-punched his arm. He fell back, squealin' like a snoutless pig. Them law cops was crockin' everythin' up.

Ephraim snapped his aim up at the wrecked wall and watched—oh, no—Blondie fly into the air and shoot toward him like a skunk crossin' a sunbaked road. Ephraim stumbled aside so Blondie could zip past. Instead, Blondie aimed at Zeke. "It's time ya's makes a deposit...o' my fist!" He caught his foot on a teller desk, misdirected, and smash-landed near Zeke. "Six Sense, get in heres. Help me punch up thems bankists."

Them hostage peeps yelped and scrambled out the doors. Stupid law cops. Always messin' up Ephraim's plans. Ephraim whipped his carbine up and squinted through the aim hole. Aimin' was hard, though, since Zeke tried to clamber away before Blondie sprang up and hand-fisted Zeke's head. Blondie slowed his beatin' only when Zeke stopped strugglin'. Ephraim fixed him in the carbine's aim hole. Hyuk. Maybe them law cops ain't smart after all. "You's about to die, law cop."

"Uh. I don't think so," a small voice said from behind. Another law cop? Ephraim didn't turn. Sudden movements made them law cops twitchy. Easy, eeeaaaasssssyyyy—

Ephraim hit the floor with his elbow—didn't matter 'cause his elbow was plastimetal—and fired at the new law cop's forehead. Ephraim couldn't miss. He was grand champion four years runnin' at the Pig-Peckin' Tobacco-Spittin' Snipe-o-Palooza.

The law cop's arms darted in front o' his head and mashed his glasses. The light-bullet plinked off a can't-see wall that wasn't there before. Huh? A can't-see wall in a bank? That made as much sense as Ephraim's family tree.

Ephraim was sure that wall hadn't been there a couple o' clock ticks ago. Was this metro-peep full o' magic? Ephraim inched toward the wall and knocked on it. It pinged back. Flinchy, that one called Six Sense, unshielded his face, his jaw shakin' like Mama's gelatin mold. Other than a scorch mark where Ephraim's bullet had struck, the wall was still can't-see.

Ephraim stepped back a-howlin' and aimed his carbine and lined the sights—fired—lined—fired—lined—fired. All three bullets sparked against the wall, but nothin' pierced.

"Stupid metro-peep magic." Ephraim swung around, raised the carbine at Blondie, peered into the aim hole, and—

Flinchy screamed, "Power Plant, watch out!" Then, as if he suffered from a split personality, Flinchy said, "You bank robbers 'bout t' go down like a run-over victim under big-rig tires."

Flinchy yelped. Ephraim fired, but his bullet hit another can't-see wall. This frustrated the tar outta him. And he didn't have much tar left!

Blondie eyed Ephraim, havin' forgotten Zeke. "Tha's it." A glowin' light shone between his hands, lookin' as if it would blow Ephraim's face off. That kind of thing hurt. "I's gonna kersplode you all over." Blondie separated his hands and the light grew inside the gap. It crackled, growin' larger than a squash ball, then larger than a watermelon, then larger than Gramma's goiter.

"Power Plant, no!" Flinchy reached forward, but Blondie tilted his hands at Ephraim. A torrent gushed into Ephraim's eardrums. The ball spewed out of the laser cannon of Blondie's palms...and splashed hotly against another can't-see wall in front o' Ephraim. The light scattered into different colors. Both Ephraim and Flinchy shut their eyes and shrank away.

The spewin' stopped. Flinchy peeped an eye open and said, "Hey. Uhm. D-don't point yourself at me. Hyuk."

"Sorry," Blondie said.

Somethin' can't-see forced Ephraim's shoulders against the floor. Another can't-see thing wrapped his wrists like rope. "Hey, hey. You law cops can't come in here and take us like this. We got rights jess like alla you."

"You's underneath arrests," Blondie said.

Ephraim still couldn't see what wrapped him up like he was a roadside supper. A can't-see thing stretched across his mouth and nose, gaggin' him. He felt fuzzy and then...

Sleepy time.

* * *

"That was close," Good Guy leader Lieutenant Colonel Matross Legion said under a sigh. "For Hagen."

Good Guy field agent Burnout sat, watching the green-skinned Legion swing away from the viewscreen that displayed the bank's camera feed...and his younger brother Jeff's near-death experience. "Mark, despite Jeff being only marginally smarter than those criminals, he at least didn't die, which is about all he did right. And who taught him that horrible line about a fist deposit?"

"He learned it from an action movie," Burnout mustered through a clamped jaw. First Legion had almost killed his brother in this "training" mission. Now he flung insults at him? Burnout still felt too jittery to move. Otherwise, Legion's neck would be melting between his scorching palms. Already the arms of the chair smoldered acridly.

Legion had yesterday oh-so-diplomatically asserted that Jeff needed "usefulness training." He had suggested he receive more mission time. That idea had sounded reckless from the word "go." Jeff joining any mission with no field leader to guide him was homicidal. Only last week had he learned to eat without a bib. Sort of.

So they'd flown around in a Flagstar military transport, their mil-tran, monitoring for distress signals until one came from this bank. Legion had ordered Jeff and Hagen (Sixth Sense to the media) to stop the bank robbers. Burnout, their pilot Franchise, and Legion himself sat monitoring. Like cowards. Watching Jeff risk his life! Burnout's heart hammered staccato rhythms.

"What am I going to do with Jeff? He almost killed Hagen." Legion glowered at Burnout. "At least they're cuffing the bank robbers."

From the navigator's seat, Franchise pointed to the bank's camera feed. "Actually, Hagen is. Jeffy's making fun of the way they talk."

Burnout scowled into Legion's eyes and felt his own skin cook. "My...brother...was...shot at...Legion!" He flung forward from his seat. Legion stumbled backward onto several buttons on the pilot's computer.

"Proceeding to crash-land," the mil-tran said.

Legion addressed the haunt control, the software that translated vocal command to computer action, thus named because it made its host location seem haunted. "Control, acknowledge. Rescind order." He righted himself. "Mark, your brother was shot at...and, in the process, performed his usual put-everybody's-lives-at-risk act."

"We were hired to stop Master Asinine and his goons." Burnout referred to the Good Guys' reason for being: the arrest and dissolution of Asinine's Bad Guys. He thrust his chin toward the viewscreen on which they'd monitored the incident. "What do these backwoods rednecks have to do with that?"

"Mark, first, we lost Lowensland and his Bad Guys' whereabouts after we couldn't recover the data from the Magellan Station's destroyed equipment last month, and again when we couldn't track their station's trajectory after Kyril's attack. Second, if we find them, to stop them and not die in the process, we need to teach your brother self-control. Untrained, he's a danger. He nearly blasted a hole in our atmospheric bubble yesterday. And were you watching him out there? He almost killed Hagen. So how else can we train him? By playing his Let the Almighty Power Plant Demolish Our Headquarters game? I don't think so. The dice rolling is well planned, but the resource-trading phase takes way too long."

Burnout sprang forth and jabbed a finger at Legion like a fire poker jabbing a log. Waves of heat flapped off him, which warded off chicken-hearted Franchise. Franchise stumbled out of the navigator's seat. "W-whoa, hey, don't s-set me on fire. You're m-mad at Legion."

"He could have died down there." Burnout speared his finger at Legion again, who leaned backward over the console behind him. Under Legion's nose, the finger burst into flame. "I don't care how much training Jeff needs. He can't engage in battle alone. He might be sixteen age cycles old, but he has the mentality of a child of eight."

"But he's already screwing up at a college level. At least be proud of that." Legion stared down the shaft of Burnout's finger. "Or something."

Franchise peeked out from his chair. "I thought you said no one could ever be proud of that reckless hooligan who wasn't even fit to"—Legion frantically signaled Franchise to stop by sawing a finger across his neck. Franchise furrowed his brow—"put his head in a guillotine?"

Burnout ignored him. "He cannot mature like we can. He needs my guidance."

"Mark, I get it. You hate when he's in danger. You detest it. But, guess what? We're in the field of large-scale crime prevention. Danger comes with this job."

"You underestimated the threat again. That's the problem. That's always been the problem. He's all I've got, and he could have died out there because you couldn't assess the threat." Burnout backed away from Legion. If Jeff had even one scratch, Legion would die as slowly as Good Guy maniac Kamikaze would like to. "Control, acknowledge. Land transport inside combat zone." Burnout stomped toward the access port. "Stupid, stupid plan. Imprudent leader never considers Jeff's safety."

"Landing transport and not considering Jeff's safety," the Flagstar's haunt control said.

"Mark, calm down. And the imprudent leader is Lowensland, not me. Anyway, Jeff needs more training, and these bank robbers have Lowensland's intelligence after an extra bowl of Stupid-Os. What with needing to train Hagen as well, this mission seemed like a good opportunity to kill two birds with—" Legion stepped back from a glare from Burnout. "Scratch that. We're not killing anything here."

Burnout didn't care to listen. The Flagstar landed, so he pounded down the mil-tran's access ramp toward the bank's lobby doors. The latent-technology doors disappeared into computer memory at his approach, same as all l-tech doors did. Too bad they did, because he was itching to break something. Maybe Legion's head.

The l-doors reappearing behind him, he spotted Jeff beside a placard advertising retirement plans and hurried toward him. Jeff wore that goofy grin that never disappeared. Just like always: too joyful to dwell on a near-death experience. Sixth Sense had one bank robber wrapped in a telekinetic net. Jeff stood over the other's crumpled body.

"Hey, brotha." Jeff sprang a wave and knocked over a potted plant. He didn't notice. "Check out dis messes I made in somewheres else than our livings quarters. Wait. Zis our livings quarters? It got posters like yous gots telling me how important teamworks is."

Burnout reached his brother. He checked Jeff's back, arms, sides—the regular routine after Jeff returned from field duty or a tutoring session.

Because of the rocks Jeff tripped over when he crossed the parking lot.

"Jeff, are you hurt? Did anything hit you?"

"Name's Jeffy. Uhm, lemme think what hits me." Jeff tapped a finger on his lip. "The laundry machine, my ball o' elastics bands, uh...Mabel's walker, a deliveries truck, a bathrooms sink I rans into when's I ain't looking, a horse...a restrainings order from the gover'ment of Vesta. Then, after lunch—"

"Jeff, I mean, were you shot?"

"Oh. Uhm, lemme see. The tennis-balls machine, then Mabel's walker, then deliveries truck, then Mabel's walker again. Then, after lunch—"

Jeff was fine. Well, less beat up than usual, and at least these injuries weren't inflicted during playtime.

"You did good, big guy." Burnout ruffled Jeff's hair and bear-hugged him, blinking back a tear. "You know, you didn't have to rip a hole through the wall. You could have just come in through the doors."

"Nah, I couldn'ta."

Burnout looked over Jeff's shoulder at Sixth Sense. "Hagen, are you okay?"

More shaken than injured, Sixth Sense stiffened to attention, his pasty-white complexion and short hair splashing sweat. "Gots 'em trapped like dogs under a porch. You got purdy teef. Hyuk." His telepathy hyperability was evidently projecting the bank robbers' personalities onto him. His shaken expression returned, and he withered against a wall. Despite the mystery surrounding the new recruit, Sixth Sense was a good kid.

"Thanks for saving Jeff's life." Burnout nodded to affirm that statement.

Sixth Sense mustered a jerky nod. After a first mission, everyone felt scared. Except Kamikaze. He'd loved his first. He'd lost an arm.

Burnout picked up a discarded gun: an XM8 carbine. Modified. He could tell by the trigger assembly. He retrieved a light-bullet shell that had smashed against Sixth Sense's telekinetic wall. The bullet didn't contain liquid fluorescents. Unusual. He tipped it, spilling out a white fluid. He sniffed its shell: almond scented. This was no light-bullet. This was a cyanide bullet. Vehemence pulsed through Burnout's veins, so he spat on the unconscious bank robber. What bottom feeders. Some family trees never branched.

Loose rocks fell over. A footstep. Someone was entering the bank through Jeff's opening. Franchise often took hours to enter a calmed combat zone—or the kitchen when Jeff's mischief resulted in dish duty—so the arrival must have been Legion.

"Power Plant, you could have killed or blinded Sixth Sense." Legion said. In public, he used their media names. "Discharging that much light at someone indoors? What were you thinking?"

"Thinking of a cyborgs platypus." Jeff pouted. "Sorry."

"Sorry isn't good enough. We've been through this plenty of times: never ever point yourself at someone." Legion getting on Jeff's case. How predictable.

"Been throughs it when?"

"Just about every day with a vowel in its name."

"Leave him alone!" Burnout ignited in raging flame. He smelled burned fiber where his feet scorched the carpet. The sweat on his palms sizzled. "These bank robbers had carbines with cyanide bullets. Fred and Jed Inbred could have cut my brother into strips and, even if they hadn't, he would have been poisoned." He clomped toward Legion. "If you can't assess a situation properly, my brother goes on duty only with me and only on low-risk missions. I'd say this was high risk, wouldn't you? And all you do is yell at him."

"Burnout—"

Burnout punched Legion in the face.

Sixth Sense gasped, which shook his gawky ears.

"Did ya smush thats bug?" Jeff asked.

Legion stumbled back and put two tweezing fingers to his noseless Trioxidillian nostrils. When he removed them, a trickle of blood dripped from one. He glared at Burnout. "What's wrong with you?"

Jeff raised a hand. "He gots allergics ta bees pollen. And I allergics ta onion and liver, so no more for me."

Burnout bulldozed into Legion and slammed the Trioxidillian's head against a wall. Legion's impact suit sizzled from Burnout's touch.

"You're burning me!" Legion ducked and slid away using a combat move Burnout had never learned to counter. He sidestepped into a defensive stance. His impact suit showed charred handprints on its chest.

"My brother never leaves without my accompaniment. Understand?"

"Burnout, he almost killed Sixth Sense."

"Do you understand?" Burnout's vision filled with flame and his head blazed like a torch. He backed away and noticed that Jeff and Sixth Sense both stared speechless. Sixth Sense's glasses slipped down his nose, but he didn't notice.

Legion stumbled away over some of the broken wall. He always kept his distance from Burnout. "Yes, I understand. But understand it's his job to risk his life."

"He's all I have, and he almost got shot by a poison bullet." Burnout kicked a placard. "Because of you and your horrible judgment, I almost lost him."

Burnout released Legion but maintained a lingering glower. He stormed to the exit. "Come on, Jeff. We're taking a mass-tran home. We'll get ice cream on the way."

Jeff's face lit up. "Can we get plastics berries on it? I's love doz things." Jeff bounced toward Burnout.

"They're called gummy berries. And, no, because you don't digest shellac properly."

"Can I takes a triangle of glass likes a souvenir?" He reached for a shard of the shattered window that had been part of his pulverized wall.

"Not a good idea," Burnout said. The brothers left.

Chapter Two: Quitting Time

Legion sat in his office with his cheek resting against his hand, his elbow against a desk awash with datasheets, personal knickknacks, and his lunch. He'd cleared only a small square of the desk so he could use the desktop unit beneath the mess. Not that he used it much except to lose at the computer's Solitaire 7000 game.

He couldn't keep track of his Good Guys. So much shuffling of manpower had happened in the past month. Due to cowardice, Franchise had been reassigned from field duty to navigation. Power Plant had been reassigned from diversionary tactics to demolitions, then to kitchen duty, then, after he destroyed the dishwashers, back to diversionary tactics, then to security intelligence—don't ask—and then to...well, everywhere else. Kamikaze had been made a field agent as well as a pilot, then was reassigned from flight duty until Legion thought having him away from Good Guy headquarters Station One was safer than having him here. Between him and Momentum's new cooking classes, Legion felt like exploding. That wannabe chef used too much jalapeno juice. It was an ingredient, not a dipping sauce.

Add to that having to deal with Bad Guy leader Lowensland, the only person in the universe who could call himself the media name Master Asinine. And Burnout? That anger management reject knew no restraint. If Power Plant were reassigned, Burnout wanted to approve. And if he objected, he objected by frying something. Last time, he had fried Reef's eyebrows. Collateral damage?

The haunt control chimed in. "Entity Burnout has arrived. I'm sure you'll want to take out fire insurance with Up in Smoke LLC."

Legion's door slid aside. He'd forgotten to lock it. Locking it prevented an irate Burnout from barging in, singeing the air, stomping toward Legion with flames hopping from his arms, and slamming a fist on his datasheet-covered desk. Like now.

"We need to talk." Burnout loomed over the desk. Legion jumped in his seat. He recognized the anger in Burnout's irises, watched them flare their usual red.

Legion prayed, No talking now. Please, Alaphus, not now.

"Now."

Ugh.

Legion inhaled sharply. "Yeah, sure. I'm assuming this involves you and your brother." His hands were damp. He couldn't steady his voice. For no reason except to keep from looking fidgety, he rubbed the back of his neck. "Before we start, can I hide behind something fireproof? Maybe an underwater titanium fortress?"

Burnout's eyes darkened to phoenix crimson. "I want my brother to have less rotation in field duty."

Legion also wanted that. Fewer law suits that way. "I can't do that."

"Why not? You keep saying he gives you plenty of reason."

"Oh, plenty. And plenty and plenty." Legion paused to breathe. "And plenty and plenty and—Well, a lot of plenty."

Burnout mashed his hands on the datasheets that covered Legion's desk before he curled them into loose fists as if deciding whether to hit Legion or strangle him. Legion's preference was for whichever felt less painful.

Burnout's lit hands melted the datasheets underneath them. They crackled and cried out with electronic whimpers. Legion's lunch sat close enough to catch fire. "Before you light up my desk, could you sit and put your hands in your lap?"

Burnout complied slowly, grudgingly.

"Mark, are you familiar with the Phininni Incident?"

"Is that one of the incidents they wanted to rename the Abends Incident?"

"Maybe. I lost track after the sixth renaming request. Anyway, a military sniper named Heregi Phininni—not to be confused with pasta—became extremely proficient at his job. He hit anything he aimed at, whether in rain, in snow, in bull rushes. Legends say he could hit things undetectable under a microscope...such as Lowensland's thoughts if they took form. He was a valuable asset.

"His superiors ordered him on every single mission. He hadn't had away time in months. Exhaustion took its toll. Phininni suffered sleep deprivation, hallucinated things, couldn't keep food down. He snapped. Instead of shooting his target, one day he shot everyone in his platoon. No rotation system was in place to force his superiors to give him leave. Immediately, a law passed to prevent that from repeating."

Legion wrung the arm of his chair. "Since I reassigned Franchise to navigation, we have only ten field agents. I can't afford to remove anyone else, especially when you consider Lowensland had eleven media-named Bad Guys on our last count, not including his red-shirted generics or cookie dough golems." Those generics, the low-level grunts of the Bad Guy army. "Jeff has to remain active—though, trust me, I can manage without him reenacting Wile E. Coyote's holding-an-anvil-in-midair gag with our transports, intentionally or unintentionally. I have to give everyone equal rotation. What could I say if your brother were sitting at home making his flypaper soufflé—please remind him flypaper is inedible—but everyone else is suffering from exhaustion? I'm with you. Sometimes the law sucks, especially when it involves your brother and atomic devices. But we have to follow it."

Burnout pounded the desk again. "So trade Franchise's and Jeff's positions."

"I can't because Franchise is frightened of everything, and we've run out of Scooby Snacks."

"Then how can you keep my brother from overwhelming risk?"

"Mark, cut me some slack here." Legion spread his hands. "He's a field agent. There is no way to keep him from overwhelming risk. It took long enough to get him off his work strike. So excuse me for trying to train him despite his almost killing Sixth Sense. When will you realize how often and how big he messes up? When he gets you killed? And am I actually standing up to you?" Well, he was standing, though his stomach and its contents gurgled at that. "Mark, it's his job to engage in bad situations. Incidentally, it isn't his job to create them, so keep him off the coffee. Are you aware his record is four hundred cups? Or at least his bladder's?"

"That's not good enough!" Burnout catapulted from his chair and kicked Legion's desk. He'd grown more furious since waking from a coma prompted from extreme injury in an away mission. His response to everything now was to fry it. Burnout's fingers relit in a flame that danced up his arms, revealing charred bones underneath. May Alaphus help anyone in his line of fire.

Burnout loomed closer, perhaps to scare Legion or to ruin more of his lunch. Legion wished he wouldn't. The bologna sandwich was already a write-off. Too bad. He liked bologna.

"We quit," Burnout said.

Legion wore a crash-test dummy's gawk. "What?"

"We quit. Find yourself someone else."

"You can't quit. Where will you go? Back on the street? Your brother holds jobs as well as Lowensland holds a thought." Legion watched Burnout clomp toward his office door. Was he even listening? "Jeff is a burden. Dangerous and destructive. I—"

Burnout stopped. His fist curled, and waves of heat revealed his arm bones under the flames. He said over his shoulder, "A burden? Dangerous and destructive?"

"He said so himself. In fact, he tried to change his media name to Dangerous Destructive. And each month he comes up with a new variation. Good thing the workers at the identity bureau have no sense of humor."

Burnout looked ready to roast Legion...but held back. He uncurled his fist and stomped away. When Legion's office door didn't slide aside quickly enough, he wrenched it open, forcing it to expel a titanium shriek.

His trail left heated footprints. Legion's chair had a charred butt-print that smelled like sunbaked leather. Handprints littered Legion's desk like a child's finger painting. A scorch mark marred the door where Burnout had forced it open. And Legion's bologna sandwich was charcoal. Off to the vending machines.

Now the Good Guys employed two fewer agents. Well, good. Legion no longer needed to tolerate Power Plant's relentless atomic horseplay. But would this mean he had to reinstate Franchise? The goading flagellator wasn't up to that level of persuasion.

He banged his head against his desk and rolled it back and forth over some of the surviving datasheets. Where would he find replacement field agents? How would he explain this to IP? Was charcoaled bologna edible? His stomach rumbled.

Shut up, stomach.

Chapter Three: Stupid Is as Stupid Does

"Plaster, stop. You're botching everything up!" Bad Guy leader Master Asinine screamed at the Being Dastardly Room's primary viewscreen, at what it depicted. In the distant city of New Haven on the planet Gaia, Bad Guy heavyweight Plaster stood in a room that housed the Great Stellin Fusion Station's master power core, blocking a backdrop of peeling white laser-paint, a poster ad for Forever Young youth cream, and a starship-sized garage door. All this displayed on the viewscreen.

"Botchin' everything up? How?" Plaster stiffened and huffed. His constantly-dripping-constantly-replenishing skin dripped. And replenished.

"Sir, actually, he's doing fine." Asinine's second-in-command, Lieutenant IQ 23, propped his feet on the footrest that extended out of Asinine's reclining La-Z-Throne. The footrest would have extended out of its side if Asinine had designed the throne, but their scientist Brick claimed legs couldn't bend sideways. So why could the legs of Asinine's action figures bend sideways? And shouldn't IQ 23 be preparing Asinine a pot of macaroni and cheese right now?

"No, he isn't, Lieutenant. He's only showing off his botch-up-ness. If you only saw things from up here." Unlike IQ 23, Master Asinine wasn't sitting. He was climbing. Climbing like a conqueror on his lime-green-carpeted step exercise machine at a speed of—well, he never figured out these preposterous measurement systems from the mute Virillian race, but one of the digits resembled the intergalactic symbol for pancakes.

A Virillian and Asinine's personal bodyguard, Braindead, was crouched beside the stepping machine. With tireless arms and an even more tireless body odor, he cranked the squeaky lever on the stepping machine's side. He often stopped to rub his shoulder or catch his breath, which caused Asinine to stagger because, of course, warnings were beyond Mr. Silence.

"I should never have sent you," Asinine said to Plaster. The stepping machine jilted when Braindead scratched his side, but Asinine recovered. "But our power situation is that dire. Did you realize that, since you left, we drained Station Zilcho's remaining power reserves? That's right. All the double-A batteries."

The power cores energizing Station Zilcho, the Bad Guys' space station headquarters, had last month detonated in a battle with the Good Guys. Since then, Station Zilcho had been on reserve power—and losing it fast. Master Asinine should never have messed with Luzimoss. Now he was dead, and Station Zilcho's power core was ruined. And without any stabilizers, the station was still hurtling out of control into parts of space unknown.

So Asinine planned to drain every ounce of energy from that fusion station, leaving their power cores weightless enough to simply cart off. Brick had tried to explain to him the illogic of that plan, but, after sleeping through a few of his explanations, Asinine still couldn't understand what illogic was. So he countered Brick's illogic with more illogic: he stuck out his tongue. Afterward, Brick said he would resign to watching Asinine learn the hard way. Whatever that meant.

So Asinine ordered Plaster and a team of halfwits—because half was all the wit the Bad Guys could afford—to hurry to the Great Stellin Fusion Station to steal its power. Simplicity itself. A clincher, really. After stealing this power, the Bad Guys could take the offensive against the Good Guys. This plan was as surefire as ridding the universe of the dodo bird. And he was so very close to that.

On the viewscreen, Plaster was ready to plug a siphon into the master power core. He'd already connected the siphon's other end to a Warbird mil-tran's two-ton monster battery. Much like stealing the broadcast channels that showed assassin taxidermy, stealing electricity cost less than buying it. And with so many expensive birthdays this month! But, after all, Asinine did celebrate twenty of his own.

But Plaster was screwing everything up. Asinine clicked his tongue. "Plaster, have you even checked for Energon cubes?"

"Energon cubes ain't real."

"They are so real!" Asinine leaped at the viewscreen but crashed against the stepping machine's guardrail. Lieutenant IQ 23 pounced off the throne and grabbed him before he careened off. Asinine eased off the guardrail, shook IQ 23's hands away, and resumed climbing. "Simply ask at the front desk if they have any to steal. A few of my galactic-domination books outline procedures for this. Must I explain everything?"

"Explain everythin'? You haven't explained anythin'. You sent us to Gaia. You got Ice Cream Headache rain-dancin' on the roof. Scapegoat is here so we can blame someone in case we're caught. An' I'm talkin' to you on this vid-gabber, hookin' up the Warbird to this power core wit' an alligator cable. What'd ya call this alligator-clippin' thing? Holy Moly Great Caesar's Ghost Power Siphon? Well, it ain't holy, it ain't moly, it ain't gr—Ya get the point. It's a pair o' jumper cables." Plaster glared through the viewscreen at Asinine, his salmon-colored skull face making him look embarrassed. That was absurd, though. Plaster wouldn't feel embarrassed even in a mooning contest. Unless he'd lost.

The viewscreen flickered, buzzed, but stayed active unlike the haunt control, which had nearly died yesterday. The station's batteries were dying fast. "You see that? Our last viewscreen is failing. That power cell is dead and things are shutting down as quickly as Scapegoat's brain cells in a spelling bee. So what were we arguing over? Oh, yeah. Plaster, you've been urinating in my flowerbed again, and I told you to urinate only in my lawnmower—"

"Sir," Lieutenant IQ 23 said, "we were talking about galactic-domination books. You've been urinating in your flowerbed again."

"Right. Plaster, the pretty pictures in these books detail things precisely. Look, don't argue with me. Just blame Scapegoat."

"In point of actuality, Mr. Asinine, he toils with adroit proficiency." Brick stepped forward with an adobe-on-carpet grate. Oh, the shag carpeting and its lime greenness! When the stone-skinned Brick spewed his propaganda, the needle on the Making-Sense-o-Graph didn't budge, even at the highest setting. Couldn't his arrogant enunciation ever take a vacation? Holy piss, he was an explosion of monotony. Ka-blah-blah!

The lab-coat-wearing tower of yada yada consulted a gadget in his brownstone hand, his rocky fingers clasped around the gadget and scratching its screen. "As what this instrument bespeaks, Plaster is effectuating the handicraft with plenteous—"

Master Asinine fit a hand over his forehead and stopped climbing like a conqueror. Braindead stopped pumping. "Brick, jabber that sentence in stupid-speak. No one wants to hear your reason for getting laughed at in Abracadabra English."

Brick paused, his eyes and lips twitching as if he'd blown a gasket. Finally, he said, "As what this instrument bespeaks, Plaster is—"

"Oh, for crock. Okay, Plaster, this'll shut Brick up: as usual, ignore my illogic. You're doing everything well despite botching it all up. But if something explodes, that's simply me being right." Asinine snatched up his nearby glass of orange juice and lifted the straw to his lips. He slurped. Ugh. Flat. The fly ice cubes had completely dissolved.

The viewscreen flicker-buzzed again. Since the power cell had died yesterday, they'd sputtered hourly. Two-headed Schizophrenic was pedaling the power-generating bicycle as per Asinine's orders, but around ten he'd blacked out, causing a power burp. What a wimp. It still didn't stop Schizophrenic's left head, Lefty, from calling Asinine a stupidaholic in an unconscious stupor.

"Hurry up. The lights are dying and I'm sca—uh, Braindead's scared of the dark. And I stole his Cosmonaut Chimp nightlight. I mean, he doesn't have a Cosmonaut Chimp nightlight for me to steal. I'm not scared of the dark or other toxic substances. Braindead, shiver in fear of the dark." Braindead shivered.

Plaster fired a curt look and thumbed the power core behind him. "Jumper cables ain't able t' handle the juice comin' outta this. You'll kill whoever hooks it up."

"That's why you're there."

Plaster rolled his eyes. "Good. I won't have to put up with these idiots or your new Heartthrobs Five album no more. Just let me an' the crew finish our job so we can do somethin' productive. Like hollowin' out Scapegoat's skull."

Plaster stepped clear of the viewscreen, unblocking the Warbird behind him. But...wait. Something was scrawled on its side. Hey! "Okay, who laser-painted 'Master Asinine Sucks' on the Warbird?"

Lieutenant IQ 23 leaned toward the viewscreen for a better look. "Probably Master Asinine Sucks, sir."

"Howdy," the Bad Guys' recently promoted agent, Master Asinine Sucks, said in his usual slack-lipped drawl. His boots clomped on the hard floor when he bounded in front of the viewscreen. His goofy, whiskered grin yeehawed at Asinine. He tipped his ten-gallon hat at them. Cowboys. Sheesh.

Realization jumpstarted Master Asinine Sucks's expression. "Oh. The message. Just brandin' things. You know, Scapegoat asked for an autograph, and who am I to refuse a fan?" His sentence ended in a chuckle and a mutter. "Idiot."

Grar! Master Asinine didn't suck except when he hooked up the vacuum attachments to his helmet.

"We're just siphonin' out the last of that energy accordin' to your moronic plan," Master Asinine Sucks said.

"Good. Not about the moronic part. That's bad. In fact, calling me a moronic is now tantamount to swearing, and, Master Asinine Sucks, you will pay accordingly. Lieutenant, prep the swear jar. But good about the siphoning part."

Brick stepped forward, ready to ramble. No. Big words would ensue. Asinine snatched at the earplugs that sat on an end table. His fingers grazed the spongy things. They rolled off the table and underneath a couch. No! Now Asinine would be subject to a sentence three times its normal size. Asinine now understood why Lefty referred to Brick as Blabberwocky.

"I presage you, quartet, to exercise vigilance in not exhausting all the power apparatus's resources. If its resources should be wholly ingurgitated, you shall unquestionably beckon others' invidious cognizance of your enterprise. You will assuredly alert the aegis of the premises."

The lights gasped again. Asinine snarled over the hum of...of...Well, he couldn't name every humming contraption on Station Zilcho, but whatever it was, it died for a heartbeat. Maybe Schizophrenic had dismounted the bike. But he wasn't scheduled for a bathroom break until tomorrow.

"Look, Station Zilcho's batteries are running dry, and Schizophrenic may soon need to eat. More important, I haven't yet saved my game of Zombie Ninja Nazi Frolic. So hook it up already."

Master Asinine Sucks gave a friendly, one-finger wave. "Gotcha." Then, in a lower voice, "Serves ya right for not installin' a backup power core."

"I'm turnin' on the juice," Plaster hollered from inside the Warbird. "This might kill Scapegoat. Keep your fingers crossed."

Something sparked. Clapped. A ball of flame snarled out of the Warbird, followed by billowing smoke. Like a god belching, a monumental cannonade of sound exploded. Chunks of metal vomited from the Warbird's open port. The viewscreen signal died with a flood of static.

"Excellent. Everything is following sort of almost approximately according to plan." Asinine leaped off the stepping machine and slammed into Brick's coliseum chest. "Brick, stop being so gigantically in the way." He maneuvered around Brick to begin his monologue pacing. "Things with the power heist are going splendidly...aside from Plaster being in charge of this vital mission...and Scapegoat accompanying him...and us having acquired an agent from Kyril's gang who, immediately after he was promoted from being a generic, media-named himself Master Asinine Sucks. Why couldn't he have kept his original media name, Everyone Except Master Asinine Sucks but Especially Mechanism? No matter. Soon that electricity will be ours as long as those rejects don't attract attention."

"Oh, speaking of attracting attention, sir, I forgot to tell you your shipment of bacon has arrived."

"Excellent. Tonight, we dine...like carnosaurs!"

* * *

Whoa. The ka-blam the power siphon walloped out was either a second or an hour ago—time got freakin' hard to measure when comin' to consciousness—but it still crockin' thundered an' clapped in his ears.

After bein' thrown across the room and smackin' wetly into a wall, splatterin' a layer o' melty skin all over, Plaster thought this might cap off his list o' days that sucked. This latest energy plan definitely topped the stupid list.

Don't attract no attention? Forget it. Plaster peered out the garage door, wishin' Bad Guy snob Mechanism'd stop convincin' Asinine that plans like this were good ideas...and wishin' Asinine wasn't no gullible idiot.

The power core's gears screamed in dyin' agony like so many o' Plaster's hopes and dreams. The alligator clips still hung to their power links, but them cables had disintegrated into thick trails o' dust. The power core was now a charred jumble o' machinery. That thing wouldn't generate nothin' no more.

Plaster couldn't believe this. "Okay, who's fault is this?"

"I blame that varmint Scapegoat," Master Asinine Sucks said, "because he's as big an idiot as Asinine is."

Chapter Four: Some Machinery Somewhere Went Indefinably Something

Huh? Trioxidillian Hessoss Wantion, watchdog at the Great Stellin Fusion Station, sat at his computer in the station's monitoring room. He studied his computer's viewscreen, his jaw agape, a mouthful of lunch spilling from it. On the viewscreen below the tickertape of this month's advertisements, the aftermath of an explosion fogged the computer feed. The viewscreen should have shown Clyde, the fusion station's master power core. Instead, it showed an ashen haze clouding the feed. Now Clyde's gears ground together in metal anguish.

"Sir?" Hessoss stroked a finger along his green antennae. Not that he needed to alert his superior since the station's power had died and plunged the room into emergency-lit maroon. Clyde had failed. Behind him, the other watchdogs babbled.

His boss, a Terran named Viktor Kaspar, blubbered over. And Hessoss meant blubbered. Kaspar was an overweight eyesore whose stomach rippled with every step like waves in a pond. In the office pool, the highest guess had his weight at three hundred pounds. Suitable for low-orbit gravity.

Kaspar's bald head glistened in the maroon of the room like an angry number-three billiard ball. His insufferable breath reeked as if something had died in his oversized stomach. Maybe something had. Hessoss witnessed the junk Kaspar usually ate.

"What is it, Wantion?" Kaspar reached Hessoss's computer. Not yet rebooted, the camera feed to Clyde's room still showed a blank, empty stare.

"Sir, something just went dead. It was Clyde. Clyde died."

"Clyde died?"

"Yes, sir. I'm accessing the camera feed, but it's rebooting slowly."

"It's rebooting slowly? Rebooting should take only a few seconds. Let's send some technicians in to kick-start Clyde. Obviously a lot of angry citizens, including my wife, will want him alive as soon as possible. It's awards night on the broadcaster, you know. If Clyde's not up tonight, I'm sleeping on the couch."

"I don't think it's smart to send technicians in there yet." Hessoss turned to Kaspar. Kaspar's breath smelled extra spicy today, making Hessoss's eyes water. "I think I caught someone fiddling around with Clyde. Criminally fiddling."

"Criminally fiddling? Let's find out what this guy's up to."

The viewscreen flickered, and the feed from Clyde's room wiped across it. Hessoss leaned closer. "Ah, that's better. Now we'll find out what's happening."

"Find out what's happening? Good."

The feed took a few seconds to focus—the machinery was old—but soon Hessoss's viewscreen cast the unmistakable image of foul play. Clyde hadn't simply shut down. He exploded. Clyde hadn't died.

Clyde was murdered.

A figure stomped across Clyde's room and shook his head as if to wake from a stupor. Three other figures stood shakily. One picked his nose. Were those...They were! "Sir, I think we should call Intergalactic Protection."

"Inter—"

"Yes, Intergalactic Protection."

Chapter Five: Not Quite Settled

During the heist, Hagen Rupp had almost wet himself. Those bank robbers had intended to shoot him. Really shoot him! He'd read that from their minds more easily than he'd smelled their underarms. Whether either bank robber could form a coherent thought (neither could), they'd planned to "make an industrial accident out of him, hyuk."

Hagen shook so uncontrollably from the heist that he separated his teeth to stop them from chattering to pieces. His dentist wouldn't have been impressed.

Hagen didn't need to look to navigate across his carpeted living quarters. His eidetic memory told him where everything was. He weaved around the bed that sat angled from the wall, through the chaotic mess of boxes—whose combination of belongings he precisely knew—that he hadn't yet unpacked. Those boxes blocked the bathroom because the moverbots thought he wouldn't need to use the facilities. He wanted to take a shower but felt wary about using his telekinesis to levitate over the mess. Cracking his head open on the bathroom ceiling wasn't fun for anyone but Kamikaze.

Hagen was the Good Guys' newest recruit Sixth Sense. He felt like the newest recruit, and his teammates' thoughts reminded him of that. His inexperience in battlefield simulations often forced them to look after him even though he'd memorized the handbook from reading it once. And during his first actual mission, he'd felt like puking. He couldn't even suck properly.

Blessed with a hyperability that manifested as both telepathy and telekinesis, Hagen was a mind-reading mind-mover. His telepathy worked involuntarily. He couldn't shut it off. Hostile thoughts gave him migraine headaches, and people's strong emotions and dominant characteristics took control of him like a puppeteer. And around children? Their crying resulted in Hagen's mimicry mind-reading, which led to pant-wetting outbursts. Worse than spouting Power Plant's pearls of wisdom such as "go down like a run-over victim under big-rigs tires." Or however that went.

Why Legion had recruited him, he was uncertain. Months ago, Hagen had saved a child from a burning house, not able to see through the suffocating miasma but remembering the exact layout of the smoke-choked rooms, down to the cracks in the walls, from having visited once before. Legion had heard the news reports, decided the Good Guys had too little "mental power," and enlisted Hagen last month. Add to the Good Guys' roster one more new recruit.

Oops. He needed to learn to refer to himself as Sixth Sense. Legion said it would train him to use media names in battle to hide identities.

Sixth Sense pushed his Coke-bottle glasses up his nose. He removed his finger, and those glasses slipped back down. They were only for show, anyway. After he'd discovered his hyperability, he saw by releasing telekinetic ripples like radar. Without the depth perception his hyperability gave him, he was likely to bang into walls until his precise brain memorized them.

Actually, he still banged into walls. Habitually. He was a klutz.

"Incoming audio connection from entity Legion. Remember to sign up for yoga classes at Yoganomics. This week they're giving three hundred classes for the price of two hundred ninety-nine." Holy geez! Sixth Sense came from the underprivileged farms of Epsilon Eridani b and had no experience with haunt controls. Those things always blurted messages without warning.

"Uh. Let's see. Control, acknowledge. A little affection for the connection."

"Cannot compute." Click.

That'd teach Sixth Sense to learn computers from Smithereens.

"Incoming audio connec—Connection forced." Oh. Okay. Sure. Invasive, but that worked, too.

"Hagen?" the public address speaker near the ceiling said. Legion. Sixth Sense read his leader's mind from even his voice: in five minutes, report to—

"Sixth Sense, if you're climbing out of the bathroom again, be careful to fly low. Anyway, please report to transport B-Reaper. We received a call from IP themselves. Apparently the Bad Guys are leeching power from a fusion station, which itself isn't bad. But Letchtech's president lives in its grid and, since they're IP's main sponsor, every available Good Guy is being forced in. Even me. This is high profile. We've got to suit up and be in flight in five minutes. The haunt control is putting up a green guidance line on the floor for you to find your way."

Sixth Sense's ribs felt as if they tightly squeezed his lungs. Nervously, he scratched the back of his buzz-cut hair. Another mission. So soon after the previous one. "Y-yeah. Okay. Sure. I'll be there."

"Great. Five minutes."

Got it. Okay. Be there in five minutes. Was Kamikaze piloting? Sixth Sense would never grow accustomed to having five minutes left to live.

The connection ended with another click. Sixth Sense twice breathed deeply. He could do this. Of course he could. The mission might not even be a combat mission. Okay. Besides, he might go.

Hey, that could be true. Sixth Sense leaped at his suitcase. With his head buried in a frantic search through luggage, he threw aside unimportant knickknacks. The knickknacks landed near previously thrown paddy whacks and give-a-dog-a-bones. His head emerged and he held, like a precious ornament on a royal pillow, a tiny computer memory chip encased in a titanium-alloy container. A red light flashed under a clear plastic lid. He slipped the container into a hip pouch and darted to the door. And banged into the wall.

Transport B-Reaper. Wasn't that the one with the engine that flooded?

Chapter Six: Future Prospects

"How comes we ain't goes on this mission?" Power Plant sat on his bed, watching Burnout thunder across their living quarters. He flapped his shirt to relieve himself of the heat his brother produced. "I wants to follows the greens line."

From his bedside table, Burnout grabbed his pillbox of tooth cleaners. He flung it at his suitcase. Following this came the light panel above his bedside table, then the clock on his bedside table. If the bedside table followed, Power Plant would have to duck.

They had heard Legion's mission call seep through the wall from Franchise's living quarters next door. After that, Franchise had thudded his head against the wall: "No, no, no, sick of missions, stay home, be safe." In fact, the thudding sounded as if Franchise had used his self-duplicating hyperability to bang his head even more.

Heads banging against walls. Power Plant laughed. He'd heard that was like talking with him.

Power Plant stood and asked again, "Mark, how comes we ain't goes? We's agents and now we ain't goes. What if they's stops for free T-shirts? I like T-shirts. I like free T-shirts. I like bananas pudding."

Burnout's features softened, and the heat his anger produced lifted like a playhouse curtain. "I'm sorry, buddy. We're no longer Good Guys. It's complicated, Jeff. Legion said some not-so-nice things. You're not a burd—" He sighed. "You're just...Jeff."

"I's just Jeffy. But, Mark, we's Good Guys. We's don't runs away. We's helps people." Why couldn't Mark see that? Maybe he was wearing Kamikaze's piloting blindfold.

"When we joined the Good Guys, I stipulated you would see only minimal danger and only when I'm around. But Legion has failed to properly assess threats. You're often unarmed in combat. He throws you headfirst into any and every mission without preparing you. I'm not about to let him wage his little war at your expense."

"My expense isn't be no funs. Headfirst is funner. An' funnier."

"With each mission, Legion places you in increasing danger."

"No, wit' each missions, he places me in increasings cool. And increasings chances to ka-blow stuffs up. Last weekend's exploding oils drum was fierce."

"We'll find something else. I promise." Mark plopped onto his bed. Its springs grunted. "Don't know what, but...we'll find something. And Jeff...without this job, we can't afford ninja fantasy camp. I had to cancel it. I'm sorry, buddy. I know you were looking forward to it."

Power Plant almost fell over. What? No more camp? "But...but ninjas fancy camp the best camp." His words must have registered with the haunt control. An ad for ninja fantasy camp shimmered onto the wall. "See? Haunty agrees!"

Mark snapped his fingers. He had an idea? An idea about bringing ninja fantasy camp back? His ideas came more quickly than Power Plant's. And they didn't hurt. Or blow up in his face. "I can ask Mickey if he can give us our construction jobs back. He always said we were his best welders."

"Yeah, but he also says we was his best clocks radios. I screams like a radio, but I ain't no clock." Asking Mickey for their jobs would fly like an arrow. Wait. Arrows actually flew. Fly like a...like something that couldn't fly. What couldn't fly?

Mark sprang at his suitcase and grabbed his gabber. He plugged it into his ear. "I should call him. What was his calltag?"

Fly like a rock. Wait. Rocks flew through windows.

"But we helps people now. Besides, after we quittings on Mickey last time, he look mighty crocked." Fly like Power Plant with his security blanket flapping in his face. Yeah, that worked.

Mark's pep deflated. "You're right. He looked pretty mad. You could tell because he sweated more than usual."

"But Mark, we's Good Guys. We's help people."

Mark looked solemnly at Power Plant. "Not anymore we don't."

"That sucks 'cause they's gonna stops for free T-shirts. I just knows it."

Chapter Seven: Finger-Pointing and Blame-Throwing

Plaster waited for Asinine to stop complainin' long enough to think. For once. Schizophrenic namin' Asinine as Haphazard Gene Pool of the Year didn't allow him no braggin' rights. He still bragged.

Plaster paced around and twisted his gabber's mouthpiece closer. No use wastin' Ice Cream Headache's vid-gabber batteries on this conversation. "Asi—" Plaster tried to interject into Asinine's yammerin'. "Asini—A—Asini—Hey, is that a shiny object? No, it ain't, but lemme talk now that ya distracted. I held my tongue wit' you long enough, but you're really startin' to mack me off."

"But mackin' you off is the only thing he's good at," Master Asinine Sucks said.

Plaster waved Master Asinine Sucks off with a smack to the face an' continued beratin' Asinine. "I know why Schizo an' Mechanism don't respect ya. If it weren't for ya bein' my best bet for comin' out on the winnin' end of this crime war and that your ultimate-couponin' parties are boss, I woulda left. Now here's what for: it ain't our fault the power core blew up. It was your idiot plan. Oh, it wasn't? Who's fault? Zat right?" Plaster tossed a look over his shoulder. "Well, Scapegoat, ain't today your grand parade o' idiocies!"

The power core was vaporized. It clapped in discharge. Its bottom was peeled outward and its shrapnel was lodged all over them walls and ceilin'. In the far corner, a misshapen slice of freakin' metal pierced the door of a closet. Leavin' holes and cracks along its length, debris had stripped the ceilin', which looked ready to crumble.

Plaster wanted to dart outta the garage door and fling his gabber at oncoming traffic. Impossible 'cause, aside from stupidity, nothin' nearby was oncoming. Plus he had more smack to talk. Now, back to Asinine's nonsensical nonsense. "Anyway, what the piss was with sendin' us here with bad equipment and worse leadership? Oh, no, don't pin this on me. I'm what? I'm fired? Ya can't fire me. I'm rehired, and I'm takin' over your job and gettin' your share o' the plunderin's. No, I ain't serious."

From across the room, Master Asinine Sucks cleared his throat. Plaster had his back facin' the cowboy wannabe. Good. No use lookin' at him. Master Asinine Sucks said, "Hey, Plaster, pass on a message. 'Asinine, ignorance is bliss, so I don't know what you're so stressed about.'"

Plaster stopped pacin'. "You got that? Oh. Okay." He yelled at Master Asinine Sucks, "He says, 'I know you are but what am I?'"

Slender Ice Cream Headache approached. Her arctic aura an' long, black hair brushed Plaster, causin' a shiver. Plaster tried to shoo her away, but she insisted on stayin'. She shoved the vid-gabber under Plaster's nose an' breathed wintry condensation vapor what reeked like frozen fish. Not the good kind but the high-society kind Mechanism liked.

"Hang up. Somebody's hailing us." Ice Cream Headache breathed icily.

"But Asinine just got coherent. Oh. Wait. No. He went back."

Plaster read the message that scrolled up the vid-gabber's display: "Incoming connection from Great Stellin Fusion Station. Receive a free vacation when upgrading to Letchtech's wireless gold package." This repeated several times.

The plump nosepicker, Scapegoat, passed by, his hands twiddlin' in the air. He muttered some mind-bogglin' sentence, "Hailing someone hang us up, yes yes." Wow. Why did Master Asinine keep this hunchback and his scrambled-egg speech around?

"Scapegoat, stay on the other end o' the room and think about, just once, sayin' stuff properly." Plaster pinched his gabber's mouthpiece and bent it toward his mouth. He hoped his head would recover from Asinine's cluck-cluckin'. "I gotta call ya back. Gabber, acknowledge. Cut connection."

The gabber's mouthpiece and earpiece retracted. Plaster snatched the vid-gabber from Ice Cream Headache and pounded its display with a skin-sloppy finger. The repeatin' message switched to an image of a cue-balled smooth-head. His layered chins hid behind several o' them vid-gabber icons: VOLUME UP, VOLUME DOWN, DISCONNECT, ZOOM IN, ZOOM OUT, an' TRANSLATE TO ESPERANTO.

"Hello"—the smooth-head said, causin' his jowls to flap. Still, in comparison to Multipurpose's girth, this guy looked like a marathon runner—"Bad Guys."

Great. They'd been identified. This mission was not one o' history's biggest successes. That position was reserved for the red-letter day when Asinine either came up wit' a reasonable plan or passed a pilot's test.

Plaster snapped his fingers at Ice Cream Headache and Master Asinine Sucks, then motioned to the door: get ready, 'cause authorities was comin'. He snapped at Scapegoat: face the wall and stop smellin'. And pull that finger outta your nose.

"Hello," Plaster said, the word leavin' a bad taste. Usually he substituted "hello" with "get outta my way-o." Note to self: he owed this guy one insult. "What ya want?"

"What do I want? I want to know what you think you're up to."

"Comin' up wit' a decent alibi."

Master Asinine Sucks stuck his head over Plaster's shoulder. "Yeah, that'll convince him." Plaster palmed his face back.

"Coming up with a decent alibi?" Baldie McFatty said. Maybe Plaster should translate this to Esperanto. "I don't buy it. Who exactly are you?"

Plaster had trouble hearin' this guy over the grindin' of his own teeth. "You think I'm stupid? I ain't. You know we're the Bad Guys. You're stallin'."

"We're stalling? You'd better come up with something better than that."

Holy piss. "How'd you get this line, anyway?"

"How did we get—"

"Okay, enough wit' the Q-an'-Q session. Come up with an original thought."

"Come up with an original thought? No. You destroyed the station that provides power to most of the city of New Haven. Come out, or we'll be forced to act with prejudice. Our androids-at-arms have you surrounded."

Androids-at-arms? Yikes. Plaster had fought one before and hadn't come outta the confrontation pretty...relatively speaking. Best security robots money could buy.

Plaster squished a finger over the DISCONNECT icon. "They got androids-at-arms waitin' for us."

Scapegoat's eyes widened like he was figurin' out how to muddle his sentences more. "Arms-at-androids? Kill them us we—"

"Those things will tear us in half. Or worse, thirds." Ice Cream Headache inched away from the door. Wintry vapor breathed thinly outta her nostrils. "What do we do?"

Plaster dropped Ice Cream Headache's vid-gabber. "Uhm...uh...uh...We run!"

He darted for the door. It slid open but not quick enough. He banged his shoulder against its frame and bulldozed the door aside to squeeze through. He raced into the hall, hearin' Ice Cream Headache and Master Asinine Sucks barrel out behind him. Scapegoat waddled behind, lookin' as if he were still ponderin' how to muddle more sentences.

"Hold up a second, pard'ners." Master Asinine Sucks skidded to a halt. "We can't leave the transport. Our wallets are inside."

Plaster thought again for a second. "Uhm...uh...uh...We run back!"

Plaster bolted past Ice Cream Headache. Words slithered outta the icy Bad Guy's mouth, "You guys brought your wallets? You don't need them if we're stopping for free T-shirts."

His hands over his ten-gallon hat, Master Asinine Sucks led the race back into the power-core room, his fist-sized belt buckle janglin' at his side.

Ice Cream Headache's vid-gabber beeped. Where had Plaster left it? Ah, where it belonged: underfoot. He scooped it up and checked the messages it spewed. If this was another spam explainin' how to score a RecStation, he'd screa—Wait. The newest RecStation did come with the most recent quality-control chip.

With luck, this was another spam explainin' how to score a RecStation. "Incoming connection from Great Stellin Fusion Station." Crock.

He pressed the MESSAGE icon. Baldie McFatty uglied the screen again. If he rephrased one more statement as a question, Plaster'd crush this vid-gabber against that shiny head. "Okay, now what?"

"Now want?"

Plaster wanted to bellow at the ceilin'.

Baldie McFatty smiled. "I want you to know that, if you look out the garage, you'll see the Good Guys flying in to nab you miscreants."

Plaster scanned the cloudless sky outside. No approachin' starship. He disconnected the vid-gabber again. To return the vid-gabber to Ice Cream Headache, he tossed it at her. He didn't warn his frosty teammate or the vid-gabber wouldn'ta slammed into her temple. If he warned his teammates every time he threw somethin' at them, they wouldn't be so funny to watch.

Plaster needed a plan. All that stood in the hundred-odd-foot-tall area was the Warbird, the dilapidated and burned power core what reeked like hair, and a gigantic, sixty-foot latent-technology rack o' shelves that covered the entire back wall an' held huge tools.

He eyed the Warbird. If he knew citywide destruction—and he knew citywide destruction—them fore lasers was packin' about twenty times their normal capacity thanks to the electricity overload they still held. When fired, they'd act like electrical cannons. They'd provide only one shot, 'cause them lasers'd peel apart, but they'd freakin' vaporize them unsuspectin' Good Guys.

"Scapegoat, power up the transport, an' aim it at the garage door. If the transport looks like it'll explode, lick it."

Chapter Eight: What the Crock Was That?

Legion stood. He trod from B-Reaper's passenger deck to the cockpit deck where the fearless and insane Kamikaze piloted, feasted on a bucket of spicy chicken wings, and worsened the quality of the air with each Cajun-spiced belch. Franchise navigated the starship that flew the Good Guys to the Great Stellin Fusion Station. Beside him, the age-ripened Mabel slept.

Lately, Franchise hadn't acted like a cockroach scurrying away from light. Well, except when danger presented itself. Okay, so he was the same coward as before. Even so, Legion felt good about having reassigned the self-multiplier to navigator, though he wished that self-multiplier would warn Kamikaze about sharp turns. Legion often heard a metallic grind when B-Reaper whipped around buildings during city flights.

He checked the mission briefing on the monitor in front of Franchise. Nothing had changed. The briefing still listed four Bad Guys at the station: Plaster, Ice Cream Headache, Scapegoat, and an unknown, new fourth. To carry out this operation, Lowensland had chosen four of the most inept oafs this side of himself. Unless that fourth member was a brain surgeon/rocket scientist, this was not a talented bunch.

Even better, Legion had shed that loose cannon Power Plant and his short-fused brother. Alaphus had smiled on the Good Guys today. Without worrying about them and with the lack of talent among these Bad Guys, this mission would be too easy.

The Fireball mil-tran approached the fusion station and now Legion got a naked-eye view of it. Wait. What was peeking out the master power core's garage? The Fireball neared, so Legion squinted across the parking lot. Something in the garage pivoted to face them. A...a...Warbird. Didn't the report mention the Bad Guys were siphoning power into a Warbird? Why? Lowensland's schemes used to be awful but never this completely bonkers.

The Warbird's fore lasers crackled and glowered at them like a panther's predatory eyes. Legion thought to issue the shields-up command to Franchise. He opened his mouth...then added two and two: siphoned energy from a fusion station plus a glowing pair of fore lasers equaled something in the neighborhood of fourteen thousand kilovolts. No shields would protect against this equation. Someone had bought Kamikaze an early Boxing Day present.

Legion's calm melted out of his gut. He gripped the back of Franchise's chair. "Kamikaze, swerve left and down."

"Why?" Kamikaze asked. He puckered Cajun spices from his fingertips.

"Because I'd like to live!"

Kamikaze brightened up, his odd sense of death and pain exciting him. "A chance to die? Where?"

A bolt of crackling electricity clawed at the Fireball. Legion thought they'd avoided it, but a howling explosion near the left tail-wing and a warning klaxon in the navigation computer alerted him they'd been struck. Badly. They were plummeting. Mabel didn't bother to wake up, but she did wrench out a snore.

"Change direction now!" Legion dived at the computer bank.

Kamikaze nodded in disappointment. His helmet's unfastened chinstraps slapped his temples. "Now, that's not really you. That's just the saying-stupid-stuff talking."

Legion slammed a fist over the pilot seat's inertia-field button and shoved Kamikaze aside. Kamikaze jarred a shoulder against the floor and squeaked giddily. Legion grabbed the flight stick and—Was he sitting on a chicken wing? Yes, he was!

Legion jerked the flight stick up and left. He grabbed the brake stick and elbowed the inertia-field button. Hardened air gripped him into the seat but left his arms free.

"Transport on crash course," the Fireball's haunt control said. "If you veer to the right, you can crash into Heavy Electronics, where they're practically giving the store away. But they're not."

"Legion, what are you doing?" An eyebrowless Reef sat forward.

"Keeping Kamikaze from making crop-circle art with our entrails."

"But crop circles and entrails go together like steak and eggs," Kamikaze said. And, thanks to imagery, there went another of Legion's favorite meals.

"Let me concentrate. If that Warbird has another blast stored up, it'll vaporize us."

"Vaporization?" Kamikaze pumped an arm. He loved exercising his hyperability of self-resurrection. "This'll kill me so good I'll come back to life so I can die again from excitement!"

Legion pulled the brake stick to extend the air flaps and uncover the lift spoilers. B-Reaper jerked back. Its speed plummeted from two hundred knots to thirty point something, slamming Kamikaze off the floor and into the windshield. With a slimy crack, Kamikaze's head flopped against his shoulder. The Good Guy pilot cheered before he smashed face-first into the navigation computer and splashed it with blood.

Another snap pecked at the ear-shredding clamor. Robot Car Alarm joined the noisy uproar with its own infuriating alarm, its voice box a collection of sirens. "Someone shove Car Alarm out the access port!" Legion yelled. Several hands shot up in offer.

Kamikaze's body rolled off the navigation computer. His nose had dug into his bloodied face. His lips were minced. His helmet fell away. Dead. The way he wanted to go. No, really. He'd mentioned so yesterday.

The Fireball lurched. Legion couldn't slow its descent. It struck the parking lot, peeled against the asphalt, squashed a parking sign. It rebounded up. The warning klaxon stopped. Car Alarm didn't.

The Fireball's diagnostic computer. What did it report? The left tail-wing assembly, parts of the landing gear, the underside winglets: all missing. To the list, Legion added Kamikaze's forehead. The right tail-wing dangled, not because of the crash but because of Franchise's last attempt at parallel parking.

"Strap in!" Legion screamed, though he was unsure anyone heard his voice over the wrenching of metal and...Was that—"Car Alarm, shut up!" Car Alarm didn't obey. Car Alarm never obeyed.

The fusion station, meters ahead. The Fireball descended. Legion steered it upward to lessen the impact. Futile. The starship struck the frame of the fusion station's garage, flattened its right forewing and tail-wing. The left forewing snapped off. Wingless. The Fireball now lay at the mercy of aerodynamics. Fat lot of good its wings had done so far.

The station's garage raged toward them. B-Reaper bulldozed through and crashed apart the station's garage-door mural, an advertisement for Bull's-Eye Paintball. The hood crunched through the ceiling, peeled layers of metal, shattered two stories into one. B-Reaper struck the Bad Guys' Warbird. It bucked off the Warbird's cockpit, concaved its windshield. The Warbird slammed back. It hammered into a wall, chewing the bricks open. The Fireball smacked into the ground. Its antijostle mechanism tried hard to protect its passengers. Oh, how it failed miserably.

Legion applied the brakes. The Fireball spun in a one-eighty. It crunched into the wall across from the destroyed garage door.

Then rest.

Thank Alaphus for rest.

Legion grabbed his dangling Alaphan necklace. He rubbed a fingernail over the bullet hole and prayed for both safety and Kamikaze's quick recovery so Legion could kill that nut-job again.

Almost as an anticlimax, something slapped the Fireball's nose cone and reeled off. Legion pressed his seat's inertia-field button and stood. Aside from Kamikaze and Car Alarm, everyone looked fine. Franchise's eyes were two ample circles that blinked only once. Reef and Harrier looked shaken—in fact, Reef's limbs positively trembled though he tried hard to hide it—but were moving. Pincushion's cybernetic knee had suffered a dent and now sneaked a peek through his ebony flesh. The always comatose Null sat in oblivion, which was unfortunately normal. Momentum and Smithereens teetered to their feet. Sixth Sense looked sickly green, ready to vomit. Wait. No. No longer only ready.

Awake now, Mabel creaked past on her walker. "Keep it down, you young who's-its with your loud music and your late-night partying."

Of all the Good Guys, Car Alarm had suffered the most damage. Good. Legion didn't want to hear its commentary on today's mishap. The robot had slammed into the Fireball's thruster casing and its upper half now connected to its bottom half by only stringy wires. With its remaining arm, it dragged itself forward. The other arm had torn off, now lost. Oh, wait. There it was, in Kamikaze's gut.

"Is everyone—" A screech of metal. Legion snapped away from a rail that gouged through the ceiling, punctured the light panels, and knifed through the floor. Light disappeared as quickly as Lowensland's intelligence.

Something bulky hit the nose cone, denting it but not penetrating. Another, and another, and another in a hailstorm of flotsam. Something cracked into the windshield. Something else must have gouged the thruster assembly outside, because the internal casing split open, popped through the floor, and clubbed the feather-winged Harrier's forehead.

A heavy slab of shadowed something split the ceiling. Another slab hammered the first down farther so it resembled the single tooth of a gargantuan baby, and wouldn't that be a soundbite for the news broadcasts?

Legion rechecked the diagnostic computer. B-Reaper's nose cone had stopped immediately inside the caved-in garage door. Only it and the starship's windshield remained uncovered. The starship's detainment deck had been crushed, and its body was buried underneath twenty-six tons of metal and stone. Oh, and a bird's nest.

In the darkness, Legion saw nothing. The only light came from a single light panel outside B-Reaper, but it provided little visibility.

"I really have to teach Kamikaze not to swerve at lightning," Legion said.

Momentum's voice sprayed out of the cosmos of darkness. "What the crock was that?" He slammed a fist into a wall at superspeed. He was of the Fleeson alien race, and all their members did everything at superspeed. "Has anyone ever bothered to verify Kamikaze's pilot's license? I mean, really looked into it?"

Legion clapped to get everyone's attention. "Out of your seats." Almost everyone complied. Franchise remained in the navigator's seat, hands gripped around his chest. Legion took his shoulders, shook him—"Jacob, wake up and stand. Jacob!"—then slapped him.

Franchise finally gawked up at him. He began hypnotically cracking his sheet-white knuckles. Same old, same old.

"Jacob, get out of your seat."

"Y-y-yeah. Out. Okay." Slowly, Franchise's hand crept for the seat's inertia-field button. He delicately swabbed his finger against the button and collapsed into Legion's arms. Legion hoisted him back onto the seat—

—but a metal rod pierced the Fireball's ceiling. It slid into Franchise's skull, out his chin, and through his arched stomach. His jaw dropped, frozen. The rod pinned the corpse to the seat. Blood splattered Legion, who spilled back, still clutching Franchise's hand. But...Franchise spilled forward with him? Franchise tumbled against Legion and clutched wildly for something to break his fall. The pilot's seat broke his forehead's fall. Good enough.

Franchise was alive. Legion blinked the sweat from his eyes. In the navigator's chair sat a skewered duplicate. Franchise looked at his duplicate and hyperventilated. "My. My. Clone. My clone. H-he's. D-dead. He's. Dead. He's dead. He's dead. He's dead he's dead he's—"

"Don't look at him." Legion forced Franchise to turn away. "Don't look."

Franchise still stammered his unfinished sentence, gaping at Legion and Reef, who hurried forward and draped a medical blanket over the clone.

Again, calm. Springs creaked. Legion blinked, hearing not even a breath. He bit back a sardonic laugh and remembered an earlier thought: this mission was supposed to be easy. Right. As easy as plucking someone's nose hairs without getting a face full of snot, a simile he'd picked up from Power Plant.

Legion prayed, Alaphus, if You help me out of this one, I'll get out of the next one myself. "Is everyone okay?"

"I stubbed my toe," someone said, though the voice sounded too strained to be recognized. "Or worse. Wait. Nine...ten. No, they're all there. So whose is this?" Legion considered that good news.

"Next time we hire a pilot, hire one without issues!" Reef kicked away a shard of metal. He would have looked angrier without the penned eyebrows. "From now on, stop Kamikaze from flying straight into the giant electricity cannon's sights."

"Duly noted." With a laser pen he found, Legion scrawled that note across Kamikaze's forehead. Charred flesh stank in the air. "Try ignoring that command."

Reef flung a piece of scrap at Kamikaze's corpse. "Good. Kamikaze's auto-resurrection hyperability isn't an excuse to have the rest of us chopped up into bite-sized bits."

"And what's your hyperability?" Momentum threw a hefty piece of scrap at Reef. Reef deflected it with an arm—Kamikaze's—but Momentum thundered toward him. Reef had never divulged his hyperability, and his personnel file said it was classified. Momentum fumed his anger about this. "Can it get us out of here? Plan to show us what it is? Quit holding out!"

Momentum lunged at Reef and cracked a fist across his face. Smithereens and Harrier pried them apart. Momentum thrust an indicting finger forward, grappling against Harrier's taloned fingers. "Use your pissing hyperability for once! Do you even have one?"

"Control your blooming emotions." Harrier locked eyes with Momentum. "Now."

Except for his impact suit, Pincushion was invisible in the darkness, chocolate skin blending in like a chameleon's defense mechanism. "Guys, be careful what you're doing. Actions have consequences." His deep voice boomed quietly, as if he spoke inside a bank vault. He tried to prop himself against a wall but misjudged and, in his insomniac stupor, tripped. His spikes slid through a compromised piece of the transport's body metal. He worked to dislodge himself. "This mission nosedived into the 'absolutely crocked' category really, really quickly."

"Hey, uh, boss buddy." Smithereens's salt-and-pepper mustache bobbed around with his words, his orange bomber jacket muted in the lack of light. He was the Good Guys demolitions expert, a bomb enthusiast. "Eh, should we, you think, pull that Car Alarm arm out of Kamikaze's stomach? Allow buddy to resurrect?"

"Not yet." Legion snorted back a nosebleed. "I could use the break."

* * *

Sixth Sense dived for the titanium container he'd left in the tool cabinet. Leaving the container under Kamikaze's stomach-mounted, rainy-day speargun was a bad idea. He ought to stop taking Power Plant's suggestions.

He pounced, skidded along the floor—oh, no, oh, no, please be okay—and banged against the cabinet. Unable to see in the darkness, he felt for the cabinet's handle and, when he found it, yanked at it. No, it wouldn't open. Something must have mangled the door's mechanism.

No no no no no. The chip couldn't be damaged. No no no no.

Sixth Sense concentrated tensely. Everyone's stray thoughts, projected into his mind, hindered his concentration. He wished Reef wouldn't dwell angrily on kicking Kamikaze's ribs or, since the crash, rib.

He wrapped telekinetic fingers around the door and yanked it open. His arm shot in and fumbled around to find the titanium container. He pulled it out—no, the container was dented. If the computer memory chip inside was broken, Sixth Sense would kill Kamikaze. Maybe not. Kamikaze would enjoy it. Why was there never an easy solution with that guy?

Sixth Sense rested his head against the cabinet and breathed deeply. Like a red accent in the starship's darkness, the chip's light blinked. It remained undamaged.

Chapter Nine: A Very Stupid Thing to Do

Plaster shook off the rubble what had fell on him. All umpteen tons of it.

Blastin' that starship was easily his stupidest move yet. He had narrowly avoided it when it bashed through the room. If only Scapegoat's garbled speech was so easily avoided.

He stood and assessed the ruins. There slumped Master Asinine Sucks against some rubble, downed by a piece o' stuff. He was alive, but Plaster wouldn't let that ruin his day. Where was Scapegoat and Ice Cream Headache? Scapegoat could mangle sentences all the way t' Hunchback Hell for all Plaster cared, but Ice Cream Headache owed him a necklace o' shrunken heads.

He felt a headache what pulsed hotter. Oh, well. If he'd stayed with Scapegoat, the headache woulda swelled into a migraine. This was cuttin' his losses.

Plaster tapped his gabber, but the mouthpiece an' earpiece didn't extend. Instead, the gabber said, "No connection found." Stupid gabber.

He shook the debris from his head. That didn't dislodge the metal shrapnel, though. He'd pull that outta his skull later. Right now it made a cool Mohawk. And if he pulled it down, he could check his reflection.

He limped toward Master Asinine Sucks, trailin' squishy footprints in his path. He contemplated whether to wake the huckster wit' a kick. The benefit o' leavin' him unconscious was that Plaster wouldn't have to tolerate no cowboy articulation. The downside was that Plaster couldn't kick him.

Cons won, because if the twang got too ridiculous, Plaster would kick him back into unconsciousness. In that way, people was like toggle switches. He booted Master Asinine Sucks in the ribs. He laughed, watchin' the huckster flail like a startled cat. Man, that was so fulfillin'. Plaster wished it hadn't worked so quickly.

Master Asinine Sucks leaped against a wall o' rubble, madly searchin' for whatever had struck him. The thin wool of his vest was no longer burgundy but filthy brown. He spotted Plaster and calmed. Odd since people usually spotted Plaster and shrieked, especially when he smiled his yellow-toothed smile.

"Wow, pardner. I was havin' an especially vivid dream of my day not completely suckin'." Master Asinine Sucks put a hand to his head an' winced. "Whoa. Anyone get the license number of the starship that bulled through here?"

"Yeah. MX-B-Reaper," Plaster said.

"Much like you, that was a joke." His hand still at his bleached hair, he felt around. "Aw, drat. I lost my hat."

Plaster shouldered past him and grabbed some debris lyin' against a wall. "Help me get rid o' this cack." Screw Scapegoat and Ice Cream Headache. Plaster needed out. He wasn't about to waste time findin' the others. 'Sides, the only good reason for findin' Scapegoat was findin' him in pain. Heh. Maybe he could toggle Scapegoat awake.

Master Asinine Sucks checked Plaster's head. "Nice accessory, by the way."

Chapter Ten: Whiplash Aftereffect

Legion surveyed the devastation that was their ride home. Was. He was sure a part of Kamikaze regretted putting everyone's lives in danger and destroying public property. Another part of Kamikaze lay over there on the floor.

He coughed. His throat felt dry and prickly. That still felt better than the cold sensation in his mouth or a conversation with Lowensland. He tested the air again, smelling a strange flavor. Was that...copper? Why did he smell copper? And why was he coughing?

And where was Lowensland when Legion needed someone to yell at?

Chapter Eleven: Late-Breaking News

Power Plant grabbed his box of cake dust and dumped its contents into his mouth. He probably shouldn't have, because now cake dust spread over his face. Heh. He loved cake dust.

He peered into the box with one eye and shook around the remains of the powder. The box still contained some on its sides and a finger dab at the bottom. Cake dust dropped on his face—Oy-oy-oy, it went up his nose. He dropped the box, wiped his nostrils, and sprayed out a sneeze. Man, that stung fiercely.

Power Plant sat at a dining table in the mess hall and waited for Mark to finish packing. He had wanted to pack only his Jimi Hendrix Monsters of Rock jammies and a pair of socks. Easy enough, but Mark insisted he pack more sets of clothes. So he packed one. If he packed more than that, he wouldn't be able to wear his Jimi jammies every day.

Only one robot was still active in the closed mess hall. Did the other robots need rest? With movements that echoed squeakily in the otherwise tomblike silence, the janitorbot mopped up the grease from a bucket Power Plant had overturned when searching for junk food.

The janitorbot had looked surly when Power Plant asked it to prepare some smashed-up potatoes and red meat surprise. It instead gave him this box of cake dust. Not a bad substitute since the kitchen often served stuff that tasted like used adult diapers.

He scanned the lonely mess hall. Nobody to noogie. He turned to Franchise...and realized Franchise wasn't there. But Franchise was always there to share a meal of cake dust. Oh, well. All the more potent the sugar high for him.

No. Sugar highs were always more potent with friends. Power Plant's heart sank.

Power Plant looked up at a viewscreen, which floated near the ceiling and broadcasted some dull ad between news stories. He regularly watched the news. Something was fascinating about seeing himself on broadcast. He was watching specifically for today's bank mishap. He always funned up an otherwise drab news show.

The Letchtech logo remained in one corner of the viewscreen after the news broadcast concluded its ten-minute commercial break. Ooh, the news showed a wreckage. Maybe he'd triggered it. What had he caused today that resulted in wreckage? He couldn't be expected to remember everything he blew up.

Making the viewscreen louder would help. But how? It hung way out of reach. Power Plant hated when breakable stuff hung out of reach. Legion kept the flammable stuff out of reach, too. What was next, the funnable stuff?

He found the janitorbot still mopping the floor. "Hey, we cans volumes up the viewscreen?" The janitorbot responded by shaking a fist at him.

Okay. Attitudebot could watch him crank up the volume on his own. Power Plant leaped onto the table and flew at the viewscreen. The janitorbot threw down its mop, fuming over the scorch mark with which Power Plant had marred the table. That'd teach it to give him sassitude.

Power Plant smacked into the viewscreen and bounced off. He jabbed the volume icon and, on a cushion of air as a seat, hovered in a resting position.

The news report wasn't about financial stocks, so Power Plant wouldn't have to stick a finger against an electricity panel for boredom relief. What was this report about?

Oh, freaking no.

* * *

A voice approached, though it sounded muffled. Mark crooked an eyebrow and listened. "—mk, mk, mk, mrk, mrk, mrk, mark, mark, Mark, Mark, Mark, Mark, Mark, MARK, MARK—" The voice barreled into his and Jeff's living quarters and bounded into him with Jeff attached.

Mark caught Jeff before they spilled onto the floor. "Jeff, what's wrong?"

Jeff grabbed Mark's shoulders and shook him like a paint mixer. "Jakey a'n' Legion an' Kamikaze an' Reef an' the fuzzy dices on the Fireball—"

Mark took Jeff by the shoulders to ease him. Sometimes that was the only way he'd settle. And was that cake mix all over his face? "Jeff, calm down and tell me: what did you destroy in the kitchen or wherever else we could be liable for?"

"I...I ates in there." Jeff stepped back and began dramatizing whatever calamity had occurred. He bounced into one corner of the room and then clawed at another. "Oh, man, it be horrendous. No reds meat. Then these rocket mens shown up and blasternated everythings, and I, like, haveta go ballistics on stuffs like bam-bam-bam and they flew arounds on rockets skateboards but—"

"Jeff, that didn't happen."

Jeff stopped and wore that ponderous look Mark wished he would wear more often. It meant he was thinking. "Prob'ly maybe not."

"Well, what did happen?"

Jeff erupted again. "It's all went like...like...oh, man...like..." A downward-sloped hand shot into the air and crashed into his other palm to cause a finger explosion. His blue eyes focused on Mark and the color leaked from his face. "Everything all kablooie! I don'ts mean kablooie. I mean kablooieeee. An' I didn't does it this time, 'kay?"

Mark took Jeff's shoulders again and guided him to sit on his bed. If this failed to calm him, Mark would force him to don his overexcitement helmet. "Jeff, first of all—Jeff, you need to calm down. First of all, explain something to me. What's the difference between a kablooie and a kablooie?"

"Okay, so it like this, okay? Okay. Okay?" Jeff's hand became a transport that sliced through the air between Mark and him. "Good Guys flyings inta this place and they smash stuffs"—Jeff clapped the transport hand on a ground hand—"and somethings asploded all over the place and nows they gots buried underneaths a mess o' building. Now the building kinda look crazy like my underwears drawer. Thoughts I caused the crash but couldn't checks my mess-ups journal."

Mark's jaws pressed together. The Good Guys had gotten themselves into trouble. He pushed out a growl. Legion's fault, no doubt, so let that warmonger bail them out. He folded one of Jeff's shirts and jammed it into a suitcase. "Good for the Good Guys."

"Buts we gots ta helps somehow!" Jeff spun Mark around to face the door and leaped ahead of him. The door slid open and Jeff stepped into the archway. He turned back and waited for Mark like a puppy expecting a walk. "Now! They's be in lotsa troubles. 'Member that times I eated maples syrup with my regular syrup? It's insane like dat. C'mon, let's gets all Power Planted and Burnouted up."

Mark shut his eyes and felt his heat rise. Had Legion put Jeff up to this? Mark inhaled to calm down. "No." He opened his eyes. "We won't be helping them."

Jeff's jaw dropped. His lower lip quivered. His arm, which he'd propped against the doorframe, slid off. His expression lost spirit. "Why come?"

"Because I can't let you risk your life unnecessarily, Jeff. You can't accompany the Good Guys whenever they get themselves into trouble anymore."

"But...but then Bad Guys wins. And...and we's Power Plant and Bur—"

"Don't use those names." Mark couldn't look at his brother's disheartened face. He averted his eyes. "I'm sorry, but we can't help them."

"But we's Good Guys." Jeff's voice dropped to a desperate whimper. "We's help people."

Mark's eyes misted. Jeff couldn't comprehend his reasoning, but he would no longer risk his brother's life. "Not anymore."

For a moment, Jeff stood quietly still. He managed a sharp sob.

Then he stomped off.

Chapter Twelve: Life after Near Death

Franchise still couldn't stand. He'd never before felt this terrified...except when Kamikaze drove. When the ground had rushed at the Fireball, Franchise had immobilized. Then that steel rod plunged through...through...

And seeing Kamikaze dead. Not as if Franchise had never seen Kamikaze dead, just not when his death wasn't a suicide. Stranger things had never happened.

Momentum was bandaging Harrier's head, still bullet-staring Reef down. Apparently the thruster casing had walloped Harrier hard. That suited Franchise. He was in no mood for Harrier's accent.

Franchise wasn't really here, right? No. He was watching this on a viewscreen. He'd had enough of starship crashes. He'd like someone else to have a turn, maybe the con artist who'd sold him his life insurance and told him he didn't need crash-landing benefits.

"Jacob," he heard from far away, a mere echo. The voice wasn't speaking to him because he was elsewhere. He watched Mabel on her walker, inching past his personal viewscreen. The voice repeated, "Jacob." He sensed a hand shaking his shoulder, though that was impossible because the hand was millions of galaxies away, and the voice repeated louder—"Jacob"—and Franchise was at Station One—"Jacob"—because staying there felt safer than being here and the shaking grew harder—"Jacob!"

Ouch.

That yell hurt. Where were Jeffy's scream-plugs when he needed them?

Franchise looked up. Oh. He was here. Momentum, recognizable by his silhouette, had shaken him here. Harrier now leaned against a wall, drowsy.

"Hhhhhi." Franchise hadn't realized how unusually dry his throat felt. To wet it, he swallowed. This produced a feeling like glass scraping his gullet. He tasted something weird in the air.

"You okay?" Momentum asked. "You look too calm."

"Y-yeah, s-sure. C-calm as a lake in a sunrise." Right. He felt about as calm as a gut-shot rhino. Shouldn't this part of life be a spectator sport?

"Not bleeding anywhere?" Momentum said and shook. Why the fear? He was a field agent. Shouldn't he be used to things exploding? Just last week Master Asinine had shot him with that Randomly Does Whatever It Feels Like gun. And, at the time, it had randomly felt like exploding.

"N-not b-bleeding." Franchise stood, supporting himself on an overturned seat. If he passed out, would that be okay with everyone? "Just f-freaked out."

"We need your help."

What? How could he help? With Jeffy gone, Franchise ranked as the team's new head of screwing up. He'd won by four votes. Momentum had nominated him.

"We can't open the access port. It'll take a bunch of your multiples to open it so Smith can set some explosives up to blow our way through the rubble. He's going to blow something up even if it won't help." Momentum shrugged. "It won't."

"Wait. Why not break open the windshield? It's not covered." A surprise cough needled his throat. His eyes felt dry, too. Was he getting sick?

"The windshield was built to withstand the climate of space. The access port was built to do the same, but it was also built to open. Except when we need it to."

"Okay. Open the port. Yeah. I can do that." No, he couldn't, though he'd rather try that than have Smithereens disturb this calm.

"Thanks." In a blur of motion, Momentum sped away.

Franchise checked who had regained consciousness. Only Kamikaze and Car Alarm hadn't. If he were awake, though, he'd be deliberately botching tracheotomies whether anybody needed one or not.

Franchise wobbled toward the access port. He choked on the coppery air. Now...how could he open this thing? Make duplicates? The first of his duplicates was usually the one that loved defecating in public, so that wouldn't help. Was the defecator the dead one? The image of that spear impaling that dead duplicate bullied into his head. His whole life, he'd tried to avoid seeing himself dead. That was how he'd landed navigation duty: he was too scared to put himself in danger. Now...to create a duplicate? To see a reflection of his dead one? His stomach heaved, and he buckled with an abdominal-crunching tension. No. No duplicates.

If Legion hadn't macked off Burnout, Power Plant would have come and blasted open the port. And the glove compartment. And the engine block. And the wing assembly. And anyone within spitting distance. And anyone outside of spitting distance.

Chapter Thirteen: Like a Steel Spike Rammed up Your Afterburner

Ice Cream Headache convulsed awake. She would have jumped to her feet if not for that slab of rock that pinned down her arm. She shook the sleep from her head. She hated waking up enough at home. Why did she have to wake up inside the worst disaster since her last date?

She heaved the slab—a fallen scrap of the roof—off her arm and slid aside. She stood and studied her injury. Tightening her muscle caused no pain. Her impact suit must have already injected painkillers.

She reached into her pouch to grab her vid-gabber, but it was missing. It had fallen out during the crash. Calling for help was out of the question.

She coughed. It wasn't a hacking cough, but it grated her throat. In the air and on her tongue, she tasted copper. Odd, but no odder than anyone who worked with a two-headed Terran or a scientist covered in brick. Or someone covered in molasses, which Asinine had worn last week.

She studied her surroundings. She was still in the same room as the crash landing, but now she stood sixty feet aboveground on the top shelf of a gargantuan shelving rack. She felt like a flea crawling on a giant's tool shack. The ceiling hung maybe twenty feet above. On the floor, spread over a toppled air conditioner, Scapegoat lay unconscious.

Though most of the light panels had smashed, one still permeated the room with dim luminescence. Because it had floated down to help improve the bad lighting, Ice Cream Headache distinguished the room's landmark characteristics: the blown power core, a destroyed and blocked l-door, and a damaged storage locker. She checked behind herself—Yikes. Across the east side of the room sat the Fireball starship. This landmark made the others look intact. Much like how Ice Cream Headache's skull would like to feel.

The shelf on which Ice Cream Headache stood almost touched the Fireball's nose cone. The gap between it and the nose cone spanned only a few feet, easily jumpable. Ice Cream Headache sneaked across the shelf. She avoided the equipment still sitting in her way: a dusty conduit apparatus, a few electricity charge readers, and other stuff she couldn't identify, one of which she just stubbed her toe on. Ow.

Good. The noise hadn't stirred Scapegoat. Ice Cream Headache didn't feel like talking to the hunchback. Even so, creeping around silently could be tough. She tiptoed across the shelf, paying special attention to avoid noisy things she might trip over—

Kchang-clang!

...

—such as that aluminum panel.

She looked down at a rousing Scapegoat. Scapegoat put a hand to his head and released a seeping groan that, though only one elongated syllable, still sounded grammatically incorrect. Ice Cream Headache kicked away the aluminum panel. It struck the wall and clanged to rest. Thanks a lot, panel.

Below, Scapegoat stood. He supported himself against the bottom shelf of the rack. "Oh, hurt head train crash like skull in smashed." Ice Cream Headache felt a hot pain in her temple, too. Had she popped a blood vessel from listening to that sentence?

Ice Cream Headache froze. In this darkness, maybe Scapegoat couldn't find her. Like the eyesight of thundermammals, the eyesight of subservient cronies relied on movement. Well, Scapegoat looked about as fit as a thundermammal. So, if Ice Cream Headache moved, she'd be spotted. And if Scapegoat spotted her, she'd have to converse with him. And, if she believed Asinine, conversing with Scapegoat would make her brain explode.

Scapegoat checked the area, his expression dazed. As usual. He gazed up and found Ice Cream Headache, whose sensations melted like butter in a mushroom cloud. Crap. Spotted.

Scapegoat smiled. "Master, yes yes. Alive you be glad others Scapegoat are where, yes yes?" As if Ice Cream Headache could understand that sentence.

Ice Cream Headache faked a toothy grin she hoped Scapegoat couldn't see through. She forced a hand up in an unenthused wave. Wherever Plaster and Master Asinine Sucks had landed, Ice Cream Headache hoped they were happy, because she got the short end of the splitting-up stick.

"Hey, Scapegoat," Ice Cream Headache said. A breath of condensation vapor lingered in the air. "I have a job for you. You stand over there in that far, far corner and face that wall. It looks as if it might topple over, so I need you to keep watch and, most important, don't say a single word. Otherwise, the wall will jump out and kill you."

"Definitely wall don't Scapegoat want down falling kill jump me life, yes yes," Scapegoat mélanged. He toddled to the wall and brushed its broken surface with his fingers. "Fall don't wall down, no no. Bad that definitely be would thing, yes yes," he said as if to himself, though Ice Cream Headache was never sure.

Ice Cream Headache aimed herself at the Fireball that had battered through the room like a caffeinated bull. She stepped back, sprinted forward, leaped, and slammed onto the hood. To keep from falling, she grabbed its dents.

She hugged the tip of the nose cone like roadkill splattered on pavement. Despite a knee that lanced in pain, she hoisted herself up toward the windshield. The jump must have aggravated her knee. She jumped to the next foothold and grabbed another dent, this one shaped as if fitted for her fingers. In this way, she spidered upward and soon grabbed the bottom edge of the windshield. Still better than spending time with Schizophrenic.

She peered through the windshield. The diagnostic viewscreens that usually stretched across a Fireball's windshield during flight had been disabled. Ice Cream Headache had an unobstructed, if darkened, view of the Good Guys.

Those detestable Good Guys. They had caused this situation.

Ice Cream Headache pounded on the windshield. A couple of wandering Good Guys stopped. One was Legion. Oh, yes. Their leader. He'd drop first.

Ice Cream Headache breathed a frosty cloud and waved maliciously. She'd give them an ice cream headache so painful they'd wish it came with chocolate sprinkles.

* * *

Legion stared at the figure spread across the Fireball's windshield with feet propped against the nose cone's dents. Ice Cream Headache. An edgy twitch shot Legion's spine, and not because Ice Cream Headache had written "U FREEZE NOW" on the frost she breathed over the windshield. Maybe it was the frowny face she drew.

Legion mustered a strangled whimper, and a coughing fit sandpapered his throat. He'd been carrying a sheet of thruster shielding, which he dropped on his foot. Ow. What would happen next might cause as much pain.

"If anybody needs to use the bathroom, now's the time."

His brain burst in agony! He buckled into a ball and slammed his head back to strike the sheet of thruster shielding he'd dropped. A snarl rumbled from his stomach and exploded into a full-blown roar.

Leigon prayed, Alaphus, I'm going to have to renege on getting out of the next one on my own.

Chapter Fourteen: Inoperable Rescue Operation

"—and like wazooms and the starship hit this huges blast o' zap and hit the ground and all bouncy all overs and crashed and crashed and crashed again and ninjas fancy camp was gones and like starship stayed still and I hads no reds meat and they's all in it and nows we's gots to do a rescues thing and you 'member that time ya lets me flew that transport? Like that but not as wreckaged." Power Plant panted sharply from having jabbered five or six sentences in about half a second. "Ya follow?"

Good Guy computer expert Ace Spandex blinked, swearing his eyelids plinked when he did. He still had no idea what Motormouth had said. For the first half, he'd thought Power Plant was reciting a mad lib.

His eyes strayed to the wall of his living quarters on which he'd hung his James Brown poster. He resumed smack-chewing his bubblegum. Something more perplexing confused him. "Jeff, is that cake mix on your face?"

"We's gots to do the rescues stuff now!" Power Plant bounded at Ace Spandex and grabbed his shirt collar. The menorah hanging against the wall rattled.

"Hold on. I literally just got back from my vacation." Ace Spandex pried his collar free and tried to straighten it. It hadn't straightened since its last ironing, but at least it hadn't been mangled. Until now. Good job, Power Plant.

Okay, the rescue stuff. And one day, he might understand the difference between a kablooie and a kablooie. First, he needed to know one thing: everything. "Start over from where you burst in, tripped over my bedside table, and spewed whatever you were spewing about. And this time, leave out the part where you made explosion sounds and sprayed everything with saliva."

"Here's why hows things gones there 'cause things wacky fierce." This should be good since it was starting exactly like before.

Power Plant leaped onto Ace Spandex's bed. Here was where he'd mimic the crash he had mentioned. But must he actually crash? The previous time, he'd spread mucus on the carpet. Maybe this wouldn't seem as confusing as when he tried to explain it by tracking mud on the ceiling.

"Okay-okay-okay-okay." Ace Spandex lifted a palm to Power Plant before the method actor performed another hyperactive nosedive. "Please get off my bed. You're wearing boots."

Power Plant hopped off but tripped over the pillow. He tumbled to the floor and smeared a dirt stain on the carpet. At least that hid the mucus stain.

Power Plant's eyes transfixed on something across the room. "Ooh. Zat the new Cosmonaut Chimp comics book on the datasheet?"

"Jeff, please use a little more attention and a little less deficit disorder," Ace Spandex said. Power Plant banged into his wall. "Make that deficit hyperactive disorder."

"Okay, so's, likes, the Good Guys crash inta this places where it asploded."

Ace Spandex could possibly piece that sentence together. "Well, then," he said, "we need a transport." A clump of dirt fell from the ceiling onto his cheek. "And a mop."

Chapter Fifteen: A Refreshing Assault on the Brain

Legion recovered from Ice Cream Headache's first attack. He gagged but survived the assault with his lunch still in his belly, which was more than he could say for whomever had regurgitated the goo his palm now slipped on.

Through the windshield, Ice Cream Headache screamed, "Take more of this!" She hunched over and spurted a series of coughs that sounded like someone slit her throat from the inside.

Franchise gripped at his skull. "Holy monkeys, someone stop her!" His sentence came out chortled.

Smithereens wrapped his arms around his head and crumbled overtop Mabel. "Buddy-eh-buddy-eh-buddy-eh-buddy..."

Ice Cream Headache was rotating her attack, a strategy Lowensland couldn't have taught her since it worked. Before Legion's turn came again, he had to act.

From the corner of B-Reaper erupted a voice unrecognizable in its throes of suffering. "This headache hurts so good, like a refreshing treat of pure evil!"

Legion couldn't take the anguish any—Huh? Like a refreshing treat of pure evil?

He searched for a weapon—a cannon, a laser, anything—to strike through the windshield at Ice Cream Headache. In the muted light from the light panel outside, nothing revealed itself. The weapons sat in a locker in the back of B-Reaper. Unfortunately, a boulder had squashed the locker. Legion found only a twisted iron bar.

Eh, why not? He wobbled to his feet, grabbed the bar, and flung it. Ice Cream Headache jittered back a step from the bar that bounced off the windshield and clattered to the floor. About as useful as dinner at Space Cow.

Legion shrugged at Ice Cream Headache.

He exploded in agony, driven to the floor by a frigid ring squeezing his forehead. Spittle drooled from his mouth in a hoarse roar. He deserved this pain. That bar attack was pathetic.

His cheek pressed against cold metal and his teeth chattering, he recovered. Over him, Sixth Sense reeled frighteningly to protect a small container that held a computer chip. Reef tumbled into him, but he leaped back and snatched the container away.

Why couldn't Ice Cream Headache's attacks affect Sixth Sense? And, seriously, whose goo was on Legion's palm?

"Sixth Sense, do somethi—" Another subzero attack carved into Legion's brain. His back arched so much his vertebrae risked snapping. That attack tasted like mint chocolate, up until now his favorite flavor.

"Sixth Sense." Momentum collapsed to the floor. "Whatever Legion wants you to do, stop the pain. At any cost—Yeargh, why must it feel so sweet?"

Legion opened his eyes to see Franchise slip on a plank of metal in an attempt to escape the attacks. Sixth Sense dodged Franchise's slip by telekinetically flinging himself back. He yanked the container away, his face cast in contempt. Good Guys tossed themselves around him in a squall of bodies. His contempt became venom. He marched through the squall. Venom became a raging, gritty visage.

Legion stabilized himself against a wall and watched confusion play over Ice Cream Headache. Obviously focused on her approaching adversary, her eyebrows knotted once, twice, three times, each knot an attack she thrust at Sixth Sense. Sixth Sense withstood, only lurching in steps that became more determined, that pounded harder.

Sixth Sense stopped. "Never again threaten this memory chip," he said with such acid that Ice Cream Headache stopped her attacks, just watched.

A tiny hole pierced the windshield—chink—and Ice Cream Headache arced backward, thrust away by an invisible attack. She struck the wall across from the nose cone and slid down until she flopped against the top shelf of that enormous shelving rack.

Sixth Sense didn't even watch her land. He spluttered and turned to the Fireball's jammed door. His cheek twitched, and the door crumpled into a ball to uncover a barrier of rocky debris. The hinges bounced away with isolated plinks somehow audible over the shriek of tangling metal and requests to drop Ice Cream Headache into a black hole.

Sixth Sense swung away, his titanium container clutched protectively. "The door's open. Smithereens can plant his bombs." He stomped to the back of the starship.

Chapter Sixteen: Proactive Hyperactive

Ace Spandex entered the Fireball he'd signed out, B-Prowler. Its lights flashed on. Immediately, he was slammed against the doorframe. His cheek folded over the frame, and the bubblegum he chewed pressed a molding of his teeth. Power Plant bounded in past him.

Ace didn't know why he was agreeing to this trip when he still had to fix the haunt control's ad program. No one had made progress since he'd left on his vacation. Yet he and Power Plant had, moments ago, signed out this Fireball. Without authorization. Ace had fiddled with the sign-out robot's programming. It took "coercion" and a lot of yanking off its head and stuffing the head into a drawer. Easiest debugging Ace Spandex had ever done. He'd register for anger therapy later.

"Now we's takes care of business, ain't us?" Power Plant bounced over the back of the pilot's seat and landed against its pleather cushion. Like a snake springing at prey, he began jabbing random buttons on the pilot's computer. Ace Spandex should stop him. Power Plant only minutes ago had mentioned his favorite buttons were those with explosion icons. Yeah, Ace Spandex really should stop him.

Power Plant stabbed another button, and out extended a whirring disc reader from a slot next to the control panel. "You know these cups holders now is play discs."

Ace Spandex threw himself across the control panel. "When you board a transport, why is your first inclination to kill all its passengers? This may be why Mark never lets you drive. Or cook."

"He letted me cooks."

"He let you boil water once. You blacked out an entire city grid."

"Super powerful waters cooking," Power Plant said. Blinking lights responded to his finger-jabbing. He took that as encouragement and tried pressing more buttons, but Ace Spandex blocked him.

"This button got a reds 'lectrics picture." Power Plant lunged for the button that controlled the magnet beam. Ace Spandex swept his hand away. Though decrepit, the magnet beam would later come in handy. No way would he let Power Plant destroy it at a single touch.

"Ooh, gots to spices this starship up." Power Plant reached into a pocket. His hand emerged, holding an air freshener that he suctioned to the windshield above where Ace Spandex would sit.

Ace Spandex stepped back and put a hand over his nose. "Gross. Jeff, is that freshener from Station One's pool?"

"Yeah, and in theres it work reals good. Smell nice?"

"It's chlorine scented." Ace Spandex smoothed out his hair and replaced his baseball cap. If Power Plant was going to fly B-Prowler like a tactical missile, Ace Spandex would get off at the first truck stop.

"Please step back before you kill us." Ace Spandex pulled Power Plant from the pilot's chair. "How about I fly the starship? You start the important work of getting as far away from everything as possible." He blew a bubble from his gum. It popped, so he tongued the pink debris back into his mouth.

"Far away from alls them controls?"

"Yeah." Ace Spandex pointed across B-Prowler's deck. "Over there. Where nothing blinks, chatters, or hurls us into solid objects. Your math skills may be subpar—"

"Five plus five is two fives."

"—but even you know two crashed transports is worse than one, especially if the second transport is the rescue transport. And, just so you know, that program from flight class is not called Crash Simulator."

Power Plant inched past the still-open access port into the passenger deck. He crossed the port...and the emptiness in it erased.

A stern-faced Burnout filled the emptiness.

"Hey, brutha Mark." Jeff jumped with delight. Burnout fired him an expression that said he was grounded. "It's good yous be overs in here 'cause you can help. We's Good Guys, so we's help people. We's help our friends!"

Ace Spandex stiffened. He felt awash in a cold tingle. His mouth bobbed, unprepared to speak a sentence his head hadn't yet formulated. "Mark...uh...we were—"

"You were leaving to rescue the others," Burnout finished. He made that sentence sound easy to say. Ace Spandex attributed that ease to Burnout's preoccupation with wanting to burn him alive in a funeral pyre.

Ace Spandex wiped the sweat on his forehead and rubbed his scarred eyebrow. "Yes. We were." He held his breath.

Burnout scowled from Ace Spandex to Power Plant and back to Ace Spandex. His teeth ground together, audible from across the room as clearly as heavy static over silence. "If Jeff is intent on helping, you'll need me."

Ace Spandex's rigid body relaxed. "How did you know?"

"You think I'm oblivious to what's happening?" Burnout stepped onto the flight deck. "When Jeff didn't return to our quarters, I checked the hangar bays first. There are records of you guys entering. If Jeff is that intent on helping, I can't stop him. But if he's helping, I'm the only one who can keep him from flying B-Prowler into a solid object."

"Good." Ace Spandex still wasn't sure if he should breathe, but he did shakily. "I like not veering into solid objects."

"I don'ts. And name's Jeffy."

Burnout was already at the controls, surveying their settings. Ace Spandex sidled up and checked him. "Really, why are you letting us help?"

"Because"—Burnout kept his eyes on the settings. His hands skittered over the controls as if sensing them—"they're my friends, too." He sniffed the air. "Why does it smell like a pool in here?"

Chapter Seventeen: Escape Attempt

Legion climbed onto the Fireball's dashboard and poked a finger into the tiny hole Sixth Sense had punched through the windshield. About the size of Lowensland's brain leakage.

To examine the hole closely, Legion shined a light rod at it. Perfectly circular. He would swear it was a manufacturer's feature if not for the cracks that danced from its rim. He never knew Sixth Sense could punch a hole through something. Legion could use him to shoot those pigeons off the flowerbeds at Station One. And who had brought pigeons onto the space station, anyway?

Others recovered by now, their coughs resuming. Some leaned on upturned chairs or twisted metal. Some grunted to their feet. Mabel climbed up her walker.

Legion rubbed his irritated eyes. A stomach-throbbing cough burst from deep inside, raining sprinkles over his fist. A cheese grater sensation raked his throat. He inspected his fingers. Something glistened, so he angled the light rod at it. Blood. A shockwave rippled down his body. He sniffed the air. The coppery odor was stronger. Ammonium perchlorate? But ammonium perchlorate couldn't cause bleeding coughs. Something else was tainting the air. Chemicals from the fusion station's equipment.

Oh, no. As if crashing hadn't ruined his day, that copper odorant seeping into B-Reaper's cabin was toxic. Legion slammed a foot into a dislodged oxygen scrubber. The air was tainted and killing them, much like Smithereens's addiction to nail bombs. The more they breathed, the more they poisoned themselves.

He still preferred the air's taste over Momentum's kumquat gelatin.

Because of Sixth Sense's hole, the starship's airtight cabin had been compromised. Yet still the coppery odor grew. That meant this section of the building was as airtight as Lowensland's logic wasn't. The building's haunt control had sealed the other areas to keep the leaking chemicals from poisoning other sections. The rubble had probably sealed the garage door. Great. In a few hours, this air would be unbreathable. And he and his Good Guys were trapped in this starship. Legion wanted to slap Kamikaze. Twice. No, three times. No, fou...Well, who was counting?

But the hole in the windshield presented an interesting opportunity. "I just had a crazy idea," he said.

From the back: "Buddy, are we going to try my bleeding-from-the-inside piñata charge?"

"I just had a comparatively sane, safe, and inexplosive idea."

Sixth Sense strolled past, so Legion climbed off the dashboard. He tapped Sixth Sense's shoulder. Sixth Sense turned around, still cradling his titanium container as if it held the secret to eternal youth. Legion dismissed the container. It wasn't the only secret Sixth Sense kept. Something about his background didn't add up. Leaving his farm to travel? Yeah, right. But that was a story for another time. "Hagen, how did you crack that hole in the windshield? Oh, and my mom still wants your tuna casserole recipe."

Sixth Sense looked confused, as if the hole was so commonplace it wasn't noteworthy. "Oh. Uhm. The hole. Right. That happens whenever something's in the way." Legion must have looked confused—or maybe the new recruit read his mind—because Sixth Sense elaborated. "Okay. See. My telekinesis needs an unobstructed straight line. When I move something, a stem of telekinesis comes out through pores on my forehead and takes hold of that thing. The stem shot through the windshield because it was between me and Ice Cream Headache. And now you're thinking of nailing Kamikaze to the windshield."

"I'm thinking of nailing Kamikaze to a lot of things."

Legion still couldn't understand Sixth Sense's explanation, so the slender agent reworded it. "Right. Okay. Uhm. I don't simply conjure telekinesis out of thin air. It literally comes out of my head."

"If only more good things came out of more people's heads. Can you punch a few more holes in the windshield?"

"Sure. Fine. I...guess so. Why do you need me? Isn't Smith going to blow a hole through the rubble that's covering the access port?"

"Smith blows holes through more than what he intends to. And I plan to leave life with the same holes I entered it with."

His voice rising from the access port, Smithereens held in the air a red-tipped detonator. "Eh, everyone, you might want to find a four-inch-thick titanium wall to hide behind or else prepare for a stinger in your zinger, because this one's a surefire kicker up your licker. I hope you all brought your Smith-at-work helmets."

Legion rubbed a burning eye and regarded Sixth Sense. "And we don't have any four-inch-thick titanium walls. Smith, you don't need an extra bundle of napalm taped to the bomb. Because I said so, that's why."

Chapter Eighteen: Draft like a Life Raft

Plaster threw aside another boulder from the debris what lined the outer wall, not carin' if Master Asinine Sucks stood in the way. Which was exactly where he stood. Plaster knew 'cause, after every thrown boulder, the hick jerked back and yelped like a puppy. Hurlin' boulders at him was entertaining. Plaster made his own fun.

That copper in the air burned his nostrils, so they needed outta here. Quickly. Wit' viscous hands from his meltin'-replenishin' skin, Plaster lifted another boulder. In the gap it left, he couldn't see no sunlight. In fact, the only light came from the panel hoverin' above his head so closely he could grab it.

He threw aside the boulder, aimin' for Master Asinine Sucks's inflamed eyes, which stood out more than his red outfit. "Hey!" Master Asinine Sucks flinched back to avoid the stone that crunched into the ruined concrete floor. Plaster silently chided himself. Missed again.

He threw another—"hey"—and another one—"hey"—and an enormous one—"hey!" His aim today was bad. Musta given out when he smacked his shoulder dodgin' the Good Guys' short bus. His muscles was tight.

"Quit tossin' boulders at me." Master Asinine Sucks coughed wetly. Somethin' splattered from his mouth. Plaster never knew the redneck was a spit cougher. "You doin' that on purpose?"

"Yeah. Why wouldn't I?"

The hick shifted his backside and muttered, "Might change my media name to Plaster Sucks." He sniffled, wiped his nose, and scrutinized what came out.

Plaster ignored the comment. What else should he do with that bumpkin? Far more urgent things needed accomplishin' than beatin' up Honcho Hoedown: escapin', breathin' fresh air, and then beatin' up Honcho Hoedown. And takin' a leak. Right now, he couldn't figure out which was more urgent.

A burnin' sensation accompanied the air's copper smell wit' each breath. The same sensation seared his eyes. This heist, all 'cause o' their space station's blown power core.

Plaster stood, watchin' Master Asinine Sucks sit idly. Death by asphyxiation seemed pleasant when compared to that cowboy's company. Some help he was. His usefulness matched the usefulness o' the discarded chocolate in the corner and—Hey, free chocolate. He grabbed it and popped it into his mouth. Tasted like dust.

Master Asinine Sucks staggered a step closer, sufferin' a limp. His fingers brushed a smooth segment o' fallen ceiling that had broken in three places. Was he dustin' for fingerprints? Or drawin' hieroglyphics? Or doin' whatever else Plaster thought of to make him seem stupider?

"What ya up to?" Plaster asked. He spat out a thick stream of phlegm. And could he taste blood?

Master Asinine Sucks's fingers skimmed over another slab but paused at a tiny gap between two stones. "I think I feel a draft."

"Is it comin' outta your ears?"

"Congrats. That sounded like you put thought into something. No, it's coming from outside, ya melting wax statue."

Plaster grabbed a gigantic stone to shut Master Asinine Sucks—

Wait. A draft? He marched to Master Asinine Sucks and slammed him aside. He stuck his nose over the gap and sniffed the air that whistled through. Chalky dust. Thin aluminum pipe. Granite. No copper. A definite draft. It smelled like a sunny breeze.

Plaster energized. "I'll throw these slabs outta the way." He tried to dislodge a boulder to drop it on Master Asinine Sucks's head. "You stand to the left where my aim is strongest."

Chapter Nineteen: Connect the Dots

Sixth Sense watched Legion cover his mouth with a fist and cough up blood. He chugged more up his throat and spat it out. Sixth Sense read the concern on his mind. Smithereens's fascination with the Elvis-shaped sweat stain on Legion's back didn't help.

Legion had earlier cancelled Smithereens's bomb party. Now Sixth Sense was to force open an exit through their windshield. Legion laser-penned one last dot on the windshield's Duraglass to mark that exit. He climbed off the dashboard and faced Sixth Sense. "Ready?"

Sixth Sense shivered. Aim at the red marks. Why not simply toss up a whiskey flask attached to a magnetic detonator? Wait, no. He hated when his telepathy jumbled Smithereens's and Reef's thoughts.

Sixth Sense felt everyone's eyes crawl over him. Even Car Alarm's and Kamikaze's blank stares rubbed his back, their remains still in the corner. And Kamikaze was festering. Who knew corpses smelled like Momentum's cooking?

The air was filling with poison. Everybody was dying. And, with all the Good Guys in this death trap, the Bad Guys would conquer the galaxy unopposed. Sixth Sense didn't need a science degree to know. He simply read Legion's thoughts. And he didn't even have to try: those thoughts screamed like tortured souls. The copper scent, the coughing fits, and the nosebleeds also gave away the lingering poison. Especially when someone coughed blood over his arm.

Sixth Sense felt like a stage performer. And, right now, he was one. He didn't need to see everyone watching him. He felt their eyes in his mind, heard their doubts as if spoken aloud. And, worse yet, Kamikaze's corpse just farted.

Momentum cocked his head to discern the marks in the darkness. "When you connect the dots...they make a pony." He spat up a bloody hack.

"Be serious," Legion said. "It's a kitten." He checked Sixth Sense, whose breathing stopped when everyone's eyes chafed across him. "Sixth Sense, just aim at the marks. And, Smithereens, stop whining about the rising cost of blam fluid."

"Right. Okay. What if I miss?" Sixth Sense coughed the words out. He swept a metal plank aside with a foot. "I've never, uh, done this before."

"Missing the mark is what the Good Guys are all about. Power Plant could teach a class on it. That is, if he had the attention span to plan one."

"He is planning one." Franchise raised a hand. "He signed me up for next semester."

"Okay. Sure. Gotcha. Aim anywhere." Sixth Sense slid his titanium container into its zipper pouch, sealed the pouch with an extra yank, and reached into another pouch for his asthma inhaler. He puffed his inhaler twice and returned it, ruing that his father had always disallowed having a DNA reset to remove the asthma. He had almost disallowed the inhaler, though Sixth Sense's near-death experience had changed his mind. His eidetic memory recalled everything word for word.

All eyes on him. Ooooh-kay. This would have been easier if Kamikaze hadn't let go a posthumous rip. At least Sixth Sense wasn't fighting. Physically, he was a match for nobody. He wore clothes a size too large, not to be comfortable but to conceal his gauntness. He hoped no one noticed.

Sixth Sense overheard Legion's thoughts: good thing Power Plant wasn't here to mess this up. Legion held a grudge like a vice. Why was he so angry at Power Plant? Oh, right. The thing at the bank.

Sixth Sense leaned forward. He concentrated through watering eyes. He focused, deeply focused, focused on something in the distance and tried to move it. Not hard. Simply focused—

Chink.

Chink? Was that a good chink or a bad chink? He checked the windshield. All eyes and thoughts drew to it like magnets. Sixth Sense had hit a dot. A good chink! Elation broke his sternness. The mood in the room lightened, and thoughts escalated from nervousness to gladness. The tension in his head, as tight as a noose, loosened.

"This calls for a celebration. Several drinks all around." Whoops. Sixth Sense blushed. Reef's alcoholic influence again.

Legion climbed up the dashboard and poked a finger into the hole Sixth Sense had punched. A perfect circle, exactly like the last one. Legion didn't need to tell him.

Legion climbed down. He smiled. "Good. Try again."

Sixth Sense concentrated. It took less effort this time, though negative thoughts tightened around his brain again. A collective nervousness in the room gave him headaches. And his father had told him to never take headache relievers.

Sixth Sense gathered from Legion's thoughts that this was better than Power Plant blasting through this windshield with death and destruction. On the other hand, he interjected with his own thoughts, by now Power Plant would have death-and-destructioned their way out and done it with pleasure.

Sixth Sense's headache grew. This would take a long time.

Chapter Twenty: Lambasted Youth

Ace Spandex jerked aside when Power Plant leaped at the Fireball's navigation computer. "Woo-hoo!" His forehead banged against a low-hanging monitor. He dropped but sprang back up. "Zat it, zat the place, zat it, no, that my fingerprint, zat it?"

Could Power Plant not tell which building the Fireball had crashed into? Maybe the only building on the site, the building with the starship-sized hole ruining its side?

Power Plant bounced toward the windshield and began hopping when the fusion station trickled into view. "C'n we use dentists drills to get in?"

"What have I told you about listening to Kamikaze?" Burnout said from the navigator's seat. He bent over the navigation computer, probably to harp on Ace Spandex's piloting skills. His head tapped the chlorine air freshener. "Is this from our swimming pool?"

Ace Spandex noted the unmistakable path the previous Fireball had taken. Wings and machinery drew the Fireball's trail across the field. It had bounced off the parking lot, sliced a long line in the asphalt, rebounded off the side of that garage door, collapsed the door, and ripped its wings apart. It had probably hit a few supports inside, which may have brought the building down around it.

"Hey, check out them ants like they waitings for us downs there." Power Plant jammed his face against the windshield and eyeballed the crowd below. "I never gots waited for from insects. My pee smell like I takings a leak."

"Jeff, you're smearing nose prints on the windshield," Ace Spandex said.

Power Plant's ants were actually reporters swarming the field. The Fireball approached, so they kept their distance only enough to avoid being flattened. Their hovering air mikes were braver and shot forward like poised stingers. The reporters' screaming questions—muffled voices through B-Prowler's walls—were aimed right at him.

Two med-trans waited for victims nearby. Medical teams had landed their med-trans near the rubble that had been a building. Law-trans sat nearby with cops keeping onlookers from the disaster site.

"Hey, I's gonna replaces my hands by robot hands. That way, I can attaches stuff to my fingers. Like a screwdrivers finger, a cans-opener finger, a potatoes-peeler finger—"

"Jeff—" Burnout said.

"—a nose-picks finger, a hitchhike finger, a nails-clipper finger—"

"Jeff, not now."

"—a lollipops finger, a thimble finger, a scissorin' finger, a sporks finger, a radio-antennas finger, a cab-hailings finger, a—"

"Jeff, you've passed ten."

Jeff stopped. He repeated his list in a whisper.

"Just trust me."

Ace Spandex tapped a few buttons to angle the Fireball's descent. The computer beeped in response. The AI-pilot settled B-Prowler toward the ground, and Ace Spandex stood and marched past the passenger deck. He reached the power control console in the rear and slid it open to reveal a display that showed two columns of icons. He tapped the MAGNET BEAM icon.

"What are you doing?" Burnout asked, approaching from behind. On the trip to Gaia, he hadn't said much aside from that one sentence. He'd kept vigil over every move Ace Spandex made, like a jail warden supervising a high-profile convict.

"He's doings like some wickeds air move thing with the starship, right?" Power Plant leaped from the windshield and scurried toward Ace Spandex. "We gonna flip triple-barreled doubles flips in the airs! Then we comes down and smack into the ground likes we's so awesome and...I don't wants to smack into the ground. That's whats they did." Power Plant directed his attention back to the building. "Let's eats our way in."

"So what are you doing?" Burnout looked at Ace Spandex.

A whir from the engine room awoke. The Fireball shifted its weight and rotated so its back faced the building.

"Powering up the magnet beam," Ace Spandex said to Burnout. B-Prowler shifted. "We won't save anyone unless we yank out those rocks. The magnet beam's power cell is faulty, but I think we can grab a few boulders before it dies." He tapped one last icon, then marched to the beam's computer.

The Fireball stopped rotating. The windshield showed a horizon of peaceful fields, a road in the distance, and lines of gouged asphalt that starship wreckage littered as though it were a redneck's front lawn. Tranquil.

B-Reaper had flattened a sign into the ground. Power Plant read it carefully. And, wow, he pronounced all the words correctly. "'We...are not...responsible...for lost or...stolen articles.' Well, good things we ain't bringed none."

Ace Spandex traversed the flight deck to the magnet beam's computer. Burnout followed. Why must he keep following? It wasn't as if Ace Spandex had killed Power Plant yet, though if the younger Abends kept jabbing buttons...

"Hey, can I blows something up?"

"Tomorrow." Burnout leaned over the magnet beam's computer. He straightened his back and fixed Ace Spandex with a bullet stare. Heat simmered through his impact suit with the scent of singed neoprene. "You won't pull a rock avalanche over our heads, will you?"

Ace Spandex twiddled his fingers nervously. "You standing right behind me makes me want to pull those boulders over me like a bedsheet and hide for days. All this after I wet myself."

Power Plant leaped at Ace Spandex again. "We gonna flip triple-barreled doubles flip—You look likes we already wents through this."

"No flip of any multiplication." Ace Spandex refrained from telling Burnout what orifice to shove the magnet beam up. That would prompt him to shove it up Ace Spandex's same orifice. Some things got lost in communication. Instead he said, "Look, Mark, you'll have to trust me."

"There's only one person I trust and that's Jeff—"

"Name's Jeffy."

"—even though he insists his name is Jeffy. If you don't mind, I'd like to keep him from getting crushed underneath ten or twenty tons of rock. So"—his bullet stare felt like a grinding power drill that burrowed into Ace Spandex's eyes—"what are you doing?"

"Can we sells Aaron's face?"

"You already tried last week, and you didn't even ask me first." Ace Spandex lifted his eyes to Burnout. "If you're worried I'll somehow put your brother in danger, know that I'm trying hard not to, but it's difficult when he can't focus on anything but double-triple-quintuple dentist-drill flips. Half the time his motivation for getting down to work is that it affords him the chance to steal Sugar Bear's Sugar Crisp. He's right now singing the jingle."

That didn't soften Burnout. This time he gritted his teeth and asked, "What are you doing? And, Jeff, please wipe the cake mix off your face before the media sees you."

Ace Spandex gulped. "I have to presume that—"

"Can't makes presume." Power Plant nodded no. "When ya makes presume, ya make a pr...a..." He trailed off, his eyes glazing. "Well, somehow somebody be a pre."

Ace Spandex said, "I have to presume that our friends are still trapped inside their Fireball and, therefore, still alive. Our magnet beam is old and its power cell is older. It guzzles power, so we have to work quickly. I'll aim it at one of the boulders near the bottom. I'll yank that boulder out and hope the other boulders fall away so we have an opening. The question is...will the power cell last long enough?"

"I'm thinks instead we shoulds sells Aaron's face. And my maths homework."

Chapter Twenty-One: Dive-Bomb Street Pizza

"Smith, remember, only a little...whatever you called it."

"Zinger flinger."

"Right. No one needs their zingers flingered. I mean, 'flung.' Neither."

Legion dogged Smithereens, who had busily assembled a Holy Freaking Loss of Limb Shatter Bomb. The name didn't instill confidence. Neither did the bomb's emblem of an arm with an X through it. This bomb was definitely something to keep away from children. And Power Plant. And Smithereens.

"Relax, eh, buddy. This one'll be a real glass pizzazz." A drizzling cough exploded from Smithereens's mouth. Bloody trails shimmered down his nostrils. Things had worsened from spitting blood to leaking blood out of noses. Legion couldn't swallow without feeling as if an apple corer were peeling the insides of his neck.

Legion held a shaky finger in the air. "'Glass pizzazz' is the opposite of what I'd like to hear." Smithereens was liable to kill everyone in an attempt to save them, and Legion couldn't talk sense into him. Sometimes not even Smithereens could talk sense into Smithereens.

Smithereens stood tall enough to reach the windshield without climbing the dashboard. He licked the crude bomb's suction cup and smacked it onto the Duraglass in the middle of Sixth Sense's hole-punched pony (it was really a kitten). "This one's only a dirt tosser, buddy. Not a sniper picker or a smack attack, eh. A small blam."

"So why did you spend forty minutes positioning your camera?"

"Eh, I just like to capture my fondest memories."

Legion stepped back and rubbed the chemical sting from his eyes. "Your previous fondest memory was of unlocking a lobby door by destroying the entire lobby. Your photo album is filled with exploded public property."

Smithereens shrugged. "I overachieve." Before Legion could protest, the bomb expert stepped off the windshield. "Okay, buddies, time to be scarce. This one's a malady for the calamity, a mixer for the fixer, but that doesn't mean you won't get waste in the face or glass in the a—" He sneezed through the next word.

He knelt beside Sixth Sense, who sat on the pilot's chair with one hand burying his forehead and one holding his titanium container. "Psychic buddy, you okay to put up a telekinetic bubble as a shield?"

Sixth Sense kept his head buried, groaning from an obvious headache. "No. Uhm. Yikes. I don't think I could maintain it. Too many nervous thoughts from everyone. I think I'm hungover."

"Drink lots of fluids, buddy." Smithereens put a hand on his shoulder and gently shook him. That maddened Sixth Sense's headache. He winced. "And remember to duck when the disaster splits the hits, eh."

Legion felt too rattled to protest. Where was that four-inch-thick titanium wall Smithereens had suggested? He scrambled behind a sheet of steel that Momentum and Harrier held up. He squeezed his eyes shut and awaited the countdown. "Please, Alaphus, let this not end up like one of Smithereens's in-one-ear-and-out-the-other shrapnel dares."

"Okay, buddies, on three," Smithereens said. Had everyone heard that warning? Increased hacking fits made hearing difficult. Smithereens had better not rip everyone apart. He'd better not destroy the flight deck.

Smithereens slithered underneath a hollowed thruster shell that had speared into the passenger deck. "Eh, one...eh, two..." He wrenched a single sob. Must he be so melodramatic? "Eh, three."

Explosion! Most of the clamor erupted from the bomb, but some ruptured from the shattering windshield. Legion covered his head despite Harrier's wings poking his side.

The clamor died. Legion stuck his head out and saw Smithereens's bomb littered along the dashboard and peeled into clawed shrapnel. It hissed smoke. A gap in the shape defined by the telekinetic holes had shattered. To his surprise, no one's skull had.

Legion climbed onto the dashboard and clambered through the gap onto the nose cone. He tested his balance. Good enough. He kicked away some debris.

Now that he was here, he smelled dust mixed with the copper odor. He gauged the devastation. The Fireball had demolished the ceiling. The Fireball's ceiling now occupied the top level of what had become a crude mezzanine. Impressive. Only this crash and several of Lowensland's toys could cause such devastation.

Reef followed Legion onto the nose cone and whistled at the damage. "I bet if Kamikaze had kept driving, he'd have plowed straight through the building before losing an arm and the rest of my respect."

"Here's the two-ton globe." Momentum grunted at lifting Car Alarm's robotic halves through the windshield. He expected Legion to take the halves. Instead, Legion let Car Alarm roll down the nose cone and clatter sixty feet to the distant floor. No one cared.

The others climbed onto the nose cone. Legion ventured down the curved hood as far as possible without losing his balance. He checked the littered ground. Harrier could fly some Good Guys down, but his wings would quickly tire and that bandage on his head was slipping over an eye. In pain or not, Sixth Sense needed to help.

"It smells like a septic subterfuge out here." Reef pinched his nose.

On the dashboard, Smithereens's bomb still sizzled. It glowed orange and—Legion felt something whiz by his ear. A tiny aftereffect, a bullet of shrapnel. The bomb hadn't been completely spent.

"Legion?" Reef blurted a cough that sprayed his hand with red.

Another ping bulleted past Legion's head. He slipped, banged his chin on the nose cone, and rolled down the steep curvature. "Reef, you're going to need to catch me."

He slid, slowly at first, then faster...faster...oh, no...faster—faster—faster-faster-fasterfasterfaster—

He had one shot, though not a good one. He pressed a hand along the nose cone to catch a groove. He felt, hoping to—Yes! He snagged one and curled his fingers into it. With one arm and both legs dangling, he hung there. He tried climbing, but he couldn't drape a leg up against the nose cone's curvature. Reef's pounding footsteps approached.

"Reef, I think Smithereens's bomb shot me." Blood dripped down his skin-covered ear. "Yeah, Smithereens's bomb shot me." His hand was slipping. "And my hand is slipping." Two fingers slid out of the groove. Down to two and a thumb now. He tried to wiggle the fingers back in but couldn't grip anything. He felt around desperately for something else to grab—under the nose cone, over the nose cone, anywhere.

Reef dived onto the nose cone, causing a reverberation, and reached for Legion's hand. His reach wasn't long enough. Coated in sweat, another of Legion's fingers slipped out. Now only one finger and his thumb remained. Maybe he could jam the slipped fingers back in. Scratch that. Now he was falling. And praying. A whole lot of praying.

And screaming.

* * *

Harrier kicked aside a joist that had split down the middle. He rushed toward the nose cone's blooming edge and dived. Wind skirted through the feathers on his head. He squeezed his wings against his body, pressed his limbs together, straightened his back, and plunged like an arrow. This would end either very well or very blooming bloody. Very well got his vote.

Meters below, Legion plummeted, invisible in the darkness except for his flailing, shadow-black limbs. Harrier spurned the use of emotion but, in this case, it proved good. Panic kept a body nonaerodynamic. And Legion was panicking like a daft cat on fire.

Harrier disregarded a tickling cough that grew in his throat. He suppressed the fear and confusion that fought for his control. He ignored that he was saving the life of the man who would—what had Luzimoss said?—sell out and join the Bad Guys, who would take something very dear from Harrier. Closer, closer, clooooser. He smelled Legion's acrid sweat, which reminded him that he hated being downwind.

Blurry objects zipped past sickeningly, and he reached out. In this mad dive-bomb, he discerned only the blooming ground speeding at him from sixty feet below. Harrier knew the distance. He was skilled at determining distances in falls. It was a skill he seldom bragged about, especially if he wound up very bloody.

His fingers reached out, stretching though not far enough. His talons scraped Legion's ankle—the ground was forty feet away—he grazed Legion's toes—thirty feet—he grabbed Legion's foot and spread his wings—no room for error—twenty feet—veered into an upswing, bloody well flapped, flapped—muscles felt hot—positioned himself upright—fifteen feet—swung up but not too quickly or he'd tear off Legion's leg—ten feet, eight feet—slow down, slow down—six feet, four, two—his toe's talons gouged the concrete and snapped off. Without those talons, at least Power Plant would no longer blooming think of him as Deadly Bird Man.

His feet rolled away underneath him. He dropped Legion like a fumbled football after a bad pass. His head struck the floor, but he kept careening, unable to stop until he banged into Car Alarm's chassis. Despite his attempt to quell his emotion, his body quaked uncontrollably. Kamikaze would become his new stress-relief toy for this.

Legion grunted when his cheek slapped the concrete. Better his cheek slap it than his spine fold like an accordion. Harrier collapsed, puffing from smoldering lungs. He released a spasm of coughs that splashed blood with every blistering sputter. He rested his head and stretched his wings. One wing scraped against Car Alarm's karked remnants. The other wing brushed against a wooden walkway next to the concrete where splinters grazed his feathers and muscles. Control over the situation had been preserved.

"Th-th-than—" Legion exhaled, though it came out in a gush. Harrier understood his thick lisp. He allowed himself to feel happy that he and Legion hadn't become body lasagna, though he didn't feel happy that he'd have to put up with Kamikaze whining about it on the bleeding way home.

Legion rolled over and, to those on the Fireball, hollered, "Sixth Sense, you're the only one who can fly d—Harrier, look out!"

The split joist from the nose cone knifed Harrier's wing—kebabed the humerus below the shoulder, drove into the wood. A phantom meat grinder gripped him. Crimson anguish spilled from a scream. Blimey! "Legion-Legion-Legion-remove-it-remove-it." He slammed a fist into the concrete, tossing dizziness speckled his vision, he vomited a thick stream of saliva and a slimy ham-and-jelly sandwich that shouldn't have stayed down, anyway, because Momentum had prepared it. Those Fleesons paired weird foods.

"Legion." The word trickled out of a framework of teeth and a dry mouth. He felt his color fade as if it were tangible and seeping into the walkway with his blood. He tried to flex his wing but couldn't. The bone felt karked, his muscles likely shredded to baby food. To crock with controlling his rubbish emotion. For getting them into this situation, that toss-pot Kamikaze would die. No. Wait. Kamikaze would live very, very long.

Legion pounced up and gripped the joist. He could only lever it forward, tearing a wider hole in Harrier's wing. A million bee stings gored the blinking wound. Harrier coughed through the pain. "Please relate to Smithereens the importance of letting a snicker ticker drop onto my head."

Chapter Twenty-Two: That Uneasy Feeling

Ace Spandex put his head in his hands. "What I need is one of Smith's snicker tickers dropped onto my head."

"I's finds one." Power Plant dashed off.

Ace Spandex chewed his bubblegum and tapped his gabber to sever communication with the relief workers outside their starship. The relief workers welcomed the Good Guys' help because med-trans lacked magnet beams, and no service-trans were arriving soon.

He tapped an icon on the magnet beam's computer. A dramatic whir rose from the engine. With Burnout's glare stalking his every move, his every finger-press, he wanted to reverse time and stay home, drink soda, and eat cheese curls. Or be wearing something fireproof, because certain people scorched the air to hand-on-the-stove intensity, but he wasn't going to name names.

Okay, it was Burnout.

In only moments, the engine's whir dropped to a soft hum. Ace Spandex knew the equipment so well he could time its activation based on the whir's pitch.

He tapped a couple more buttons to adjust the magnet beam's weber level. He tapped the weber up two more notches, then rethought and knocked it down one. Pulling out too much debris at once might be unsafe. He faced the building and wiped his clammy hands onto his pants.

Burnout's eyes still stalked Ace Spandex, so Ace Spandex's words came out in chatter. "The magnet beam's powered up." He poised a finger over the beam's console. Burnout, of course, vultured over his shoulder. Oh, good. Ace Spandex needed the added pressure.

Burnout leaned in. "Remind me how this magnet beam attracts concrete."

With his finger still poised, Ace Spandex said, "We're not pulling concrete, only the iron bars in it that make it resistant to anything short of a runaway B-Reaper and its suicidal pilot. Apparently the architects hadn't counted on that wrecking-ball disaster." Ace Spandex lowered his finger over the ACTIVATE icon. "May I?"

Burnout mulled this over a second before nodding.

Ace Spandex pressed the icon. B-Prowler lurched when a magnetic field shot out with a heavy chirrup. Though the field was shielded in most directions, the shielding didn't stop the magnet beam from attracting whatever lay in its conical ray such as that detached engine pipe Power Plant said looked like a "neato javelin."

Power Plant returned to the cockpit and must have sensed Ace Spandex's discomfort. "Why so nervous 'bout doings magnets waves from the starship? They so cools."

The squealing of metal skewered the air. Lampposts bowed, benches leaned, transports tilted with groans. "If I miscalculate anything, your neato javelin is liable to pierce our windshield. And you remember what happened the last time you caused that."

"Lossa fun happen!" Power Plant pounced at the magnet beam's computer, but Ace Spandex hurdled in front of him.

"No," Ace Spandex said. "Please don't kill us today."

"Tomorrows then?"

"Why don't you finish your baggie of Cheerios?" Burnout said.

"Too much essential nutrients an' herbs an' spices."

Ace Spandex faced the computer. He turned a dial to narrow and focus the beam. This caused a boulder to rotate toward them in jerks. The boulder grumbled when its iron bars faced them. Then another twitch, and the boulder jerked away from the wreckage. The rest of the debris rumbled angrily, shifting to fill the void the removed boulder left. Ace Spandex hoped starting from the bottom of the rubble wasn't a mistake. But what was one mistake on top of today's thousands?

The boulder gunned out of the debris and raced toward them.

"Ace, it's coming at us," Burnout said. He stood his ground. "Ace? Shut the magnet beam off." He grabbed Power Plant and spun around, smothering his little brother against his body as if that would stop a sixty-mile-an-hour boulder.

The boulder struck a force field that extended only a couple of meters in front of B-Prowler's nose cone. Even without the force field, B-Prowler was built well enough to protect them since meteor showers hit harder than flung boulders. Unless Power Plant flung those boulders. But he wouldn't say that or else Burnout would fling them using Ace Spandex's teeth.

Ace Spandex chuckled, watching Burnout uncurl. He loved showing the magnet beam to the uninitiated. What he didn't love was Burnout slapping the back of his head.

Ace Spandex tapped a button and the magnet beam dropped the boulder. He tapped that same button to reactivate the magnet beam. Now for the next boulder.

Crock. An avalanche was erasing the gap. Ace Spandex kicked the computer's side panel. Gravity sucked. Sucked, sucked, sucked, sucked, su—Hey, he made a pun.

Chapter Twenty-Three: Desperate Times...

Legion cringed while Harrier grunted, bellowed, pounded the wooden walkway with his heels, clawed at the joist with sloppy hands. The winged agent gritted his teeth. He stamped a fist against a chunk of stone, cutting shreds in his fingers though he ignored the cuts. A whimper seeped out of his pressed lips.

"Harrier, calm down. We'll"—Legion coughed through his sentence but recovered—"get you out."

"Bl-bloody well-l h-how?"

"Well, I yelled up to the others, and everyone but Mabel is looking for the first aid kit. Mabel is asleep again." He shrugged. "That'll help, right?"

He wiped his wet nostrils...when something rumbled. It wasn't his stomach, though he hadn't eaten much since Burnout had charred his bologna sandwich to coal. He hated rumbles. They usually proved detrimental.

Legion coughed. His chest prickled and his muscles ached from gagging. Saliva speckled his hand. No, not saliva. More blood. Something else inside him had ruptured. The air thickened with chemicals. It seeped out like Lowensland's angry hisses after a lost thumb war.

Only feet away, something bashed into the ground. Legion sprang away from a piece of B-Reaper's engine block. It flattened Car Alarm's body. The brain assembly popped out and spun to a rest next to Legion's arm. The soda cans in Car Alarm's belly were crushed, now spraying fizz all over Legion's face.

Legion moved out of the fountain. He picked up Car Alarm's brain and examined it. Lights still blinking, switches still firing, electricity still flowing (he put his shocked finger in his mouth—ow). Car Alarm still functioned. Legion deposited the brain into an equipment pouch on his belt. Later, he might have to throw it at someone.

He hadn't before noticed—perhaps because everything was dark—but something swung underneath the nose cone. He thought at first Kamikaze had returned to life and was celebrating by hanging himself off the Fireball, but that was impossible: no cheering.

The thing above hung from wires as thin as cobwebs. An errant shard of light reflected off the nose cone's belly, revealing the thing's details. The rest of the engine block had torn through the Fireball. It might still drop. Things dropping on heads weren't good. At any size. That explained Kamikaze's childhood.

"Harrier," Legion said, the engine dangling distantly above. He uncovered Harrier's eye where the bandage had slipped. "Harrier, we have to unpin your wing. This can't wait." He silently pleaded with Alaphus. Was He even watching anymore?

Harrier uttered a groan that came from somewhere in the pit of his stomach. His nose vomited blood. Legion didn't care where blood spurted out, as long as it missed his impact suit. It didn't.

Something snapped with the sound of a dry twig. The engine plummeted—and jerked against the wires that still held it. Legion swallowed his heart back into his stomach. No matter how many wires suspended the engine, they wouldn't hold for long. Times like this reminded him of a want ad he'd thought of listing: "For sale: life. Five moolahs or best offer. If you can tolerate would-be dictators and ingrown toenails, it's yours. Buyer beware."

"Harrier, if we don't move you, something unpleasant is going to squash you."

"Another numpty p-piece of Car Alarm?"

"Not that kind of unpleasant, but you're thinking along the right lines."

Another snap. The engine dropped. It jerked against its web of wires, but that web was straining. Much like whenever Power Plant ingested an entire bag of sugar, not much time remained before impact.

Legion grabbed the joist and tried to yank it out, but it had cleaved right through the walkway. He had accomplished only tearing a bigger hole into Harrier's muscle. The sweat that coated his hands made it impossible to pull the joist straight out.

Another crack, a strained creak...and a final snap. The engine's web had severed. The engine plummeted toward them like a bomb. Kamikaze would have been pleased.

Something above them, on B-Reaper's underbelly, sang cheerfully, "This head-crushing blow comes to you from Doris's Flowers. Sweet as the morning sun." That worked? Out of the entire starship, only an advertisement in the engine block worked?

A foot-long shard of metal lay nearby. No. Don't even—

Wind whistled through holes in the engine, its details defining as it dropped. No choice. Legion removed the shirt of his impact suit, now wearing just a simple undershirt, and grabbed the shard of metal. He squatted next to Harrier, whose eyes fluttered with the caress of unconsciousness.

Legion whispered Harrier's name. Harrier didn't respond, so he slapped the winged agent's cheek. "Harrier, do you hear that whistling? If we don't move you, you'll be crushed." He showed Harrier the shard of metal, which glinted evilly in the light. This would feel like a manicure from a hungry lion.

Harrier bit his lower lip and nodded silently. Legion showed Harrier his shirt. "Bite down on this. Try not to get blood on—Oh, forget it. Bon appétit."

"Take something dear. Someone told me this bleeding day would come," Harrier said. His jaw clamped down on the shirt so hard that red bled into his cheeks.

"Never listen to your mother." Legion knelt at Harrier's back. "I'm sorry." He held the metal aloft as he would a hatchet, sent a quick prayer to Alaphus, who had chosen the worst time to go on vacation...

...and hacked-hacked-hacked the pinned wing off. The walkway beneath split with the final ravenous thrust of metal. Harrier managed only a muffled cry. Blood spurted from the wound in heartthrobs. Legion leaped up and grabbed Harrier's hands. He yanked him out of the way—the engine hammer-smashed the ground and crushed the joist and annihilated Harrier's severed wing and battered through the walkway where Harrier had lain.

Legion removed his undershirt and tore two shreds from it. He wrapped one shred over the wound. He used the other like a tourniquet to bind the first shred against the wing's stub and staunch its blood flow.

Legion was unclear when Harrier had lost consciousness.

Chapter Twenty-Four: Separation Anxiety Amplified

Mark was surprised. After the avalanche had stopped, Ace Spandex had reopened the hole. The rocks now spilled outward in a shallow hill. The magnet beam had lost power—it ate it as voraciously as Bad Guy glutton Appetite ate anything—and the hole looked about as stable as a house of cards inside a circle of fans. Sand fell around the hole's cracks whenever a breeze trickled past.

Jeff and Mark exited B-Prowler and smelled the ozone scent it had left after it landed. Jeff dashed down the access ramp. Mark didn't understand why he didn't fly under his hyperability. Maybe that hadn't occurred to his little brother.

Through a maze of reporters, Jeff dodged toward the rubble. No! The rubble was still too precarious for his horseplay. Mark leaped off the access ramp and flew at him. He landed on the lawn, scorching a small circle of grass, and grabbed Jeff's arm. Before Jeff crossed through the police line, Mark pulled his baby brother toward him.

"Jeff, stay away from that hole. I know you think it looks cool, but it isn't a portal into another dimension." How often had Mark talked Jeff away from a dark hole by telling him it opened into the Dimension of Feces? That still hadn't worked until Jeff learned what feces meant.

"But, Mark, we ain't knows when them dimensions portals they opens up. I's hearing screams from there." Insistently, he pointed at the hole that looked like a hungry maw in the melee of destruction, its girder teeth waiting to devour him away from Mark.

"We gots to saves our friends. 'Member, we's Good Guys. We's help people," he said over the onrushing reporters' questions that attacked him and Mark. "I means, you's help people. I blows 'em alls up." He beamed at that.

Mark found Jeff's eyes. He detected a sense of responsibility, of purpose. For the first time in Mark's life, he saw that Jeff had found confidence and value. Fine. Legion had done something right: he'd given Jeff a sense of self-worth. But one right didn't fix all of Legion's wrongs.

Mark set his jaw. Why did Jeff still think they were Good Guys? "Jeff, you can't risk your life anymore. It's no longer our job to clean up Legion's mistakes."

"But we's even weared our Power Plant and Burnout outfits."

"Only to hide our identities. There's no sense leaving the Good Guys just to be identified here."

The reporters rushed forward. With a hand still holding Jeff's arm, Mark guided him behind the police line where they could talk without having to punch someone. The police let them pass, recognizing them not from their status as former Good Guys but from the thundermammal gladiatorial battles Jeff routinely organized.

From behind the police line, a reporter hollered, "Power Plant, WCRF News. Will you be signing autographs after you cause this rescue attempt to go horribly awry?"

"I likes makings stuff go horribly a'right," Jeff said to the reporter.

Mark blocked Jeff from the reporter with his body. "No, he won't be signing autographs after he causes this rescue attempt to go horri—I mean, after this rescue attempt."

Jeff looked confused as if not understanding why Mark held him back. He whimpered and pointed at the hole. He desperately tried to wrestle his arm free but soon stopped struggling.

Mark hesitantly released his arm. "We don't know how steady the structure is inside. If you must help, I'll go in first to determine the stability. I don't want you going in until I say it's safe. No, making it safe doesn't mean administering your special brand of clown justice."

"It safe. I can sees there's a handrails. An' no choking plazas."

"Choking hazards." Mark turned to Ace Spandex, who was crossing the police line. "I'll need five minutes to grab some gear. Can you stabilize that hole? Ace?"

Ace Spandex wasn't listening. His face stretched in horror. "Jeff!" He darted at the rubble.

Mark whirled around, thunder in his breast. Jeff had ascended the rubble and now extended his foot into the hole. "Jeff, don't go looking for the Dimension of Feces!"

"I don't smells the citizens of Feces," Jeff said, studying the hole, "which is good, 'cause they's smells like sh—"

"Jeff!" The strain of screaming stung Mark's throat. He roared into flight toward his little brother. The hole's edges teetered inward. "Jeff, get out!"

Jeff ducked through the hole. He tripped and grasped at a stone for stability, grabbing one from the opening. It loosened and—no, no—the hole was caving in. Like crushing hands, its walls clapped together. Darkness devoured Jeff.

Mark scrambled up the debris to find an opening. He couldn't. He pounded his fists on the rocks. "Jeff!" He repeated his scream and again and closed his eyes from the strain of shouting but shouted again, again, again, why wouldn't his brother respond? "Jeff!"

"Mark, looks like my halfs of ours livings quarters in here. 'Cept this be cleaner."

Jeff? Mark peered through a walnut-sized hole. The light sparkled against one of his brother's eyes. "Jeff!" He clawed at the rocks but nothing gave.

"Name's Jeffy."

Ace Spandex reached the hole, slipped on loose debris.

Mark stared into his brother's eye. "Jeff, stay right there. We're going to open another hole and get you out. Just back away. And don't eat anything off the ground."

"Too late." Jeff coughed. "Man, lots o' dirts in here. Dirty dirts. And stinks in here likes a robot fart. Like when ya sticks light-bullets in your nose holes."

Ace Spandex tried to jiggle out a piece of sheet metal, but it wouldn't budge. Mark slapped a hand over his chest. "Ace, activate the magnet beam now. We need to open another hole."

Ace Spandex wore deep regret. He shook his head.

"Ace, go open another hole or, so help me, I'll open one with your skull. Now." Mark tightened a fist.

Ace Spandex backed away and tripped over uneven rubble. A rock tapped down the hill. "I want to use the magnet beam, but there's no more power. It's sucked dry. And my skull's not good at making holes."

"Mark, me, I cans do this. I finds 'em." Jeff backed away from the hole. His eye disappeared into darkness. He hacked a loud cough that reverberated through Mark's heart, then audibly tumbled down a landslide of wreckage.

Mark scrabbled at the rocks, his words strangled. "Jeff, no. Please, please, please stay there. We're putting together a plan involving opening a hole with Ace's skull."

"Hey!" Ace Spandex chew-snapped his gum once. "I argued against that plan. And rather persuasively, I thought."

Mark's tear ducts opened like burst dams. He tried to pry some rubble away, but that only chafed the skin on his fingertips. "Jeff, p-please don't leave."

Jeff's eye reappeared. "But they's needs my help. Airs tastes weird here, like licking tires scum. Or my aluminum loaf." He coughed. "Like in my tutoring, where'n they teach 'bout carbons fluoride building up, and I fall 'sleep 'cause it boring. Ya's can'ts breathe in here for long. They needs my helps or they gonna die. We's Good Guys, Mark."

Mark pounded his fists against the rocks. He clenched them around severed steel rods that felt like prison bars. But he knew Jeff had to do this. If Mark denied his little brother the chance to help, Jeff would forever resent him. He couldn't stand that. No matter what, Jeff would never leave his friends. "You're a Good Guy, Jeff." A sob escaped him. "You help people."

He saw the smile in Jeff's eye. "Don't worry, big brotha. I's hold my breaths the whole time." He backed away from the hole, now gone, possibly forever.

Mark felt the need to tell him something: "Jeff, don't hold your breath." Jeff's record was three minutes before blacking out.

"I's be careful." Jeff slipped on something. "Ow."

Chapter Twenty-Five: Grade-School Sissy Fight

Master Asinine Sucks dislodged another rock from that there hootenanny o' boulders, trying not to exacerbate his kinked-up leg or his wheezing. Sweaty, he looked at Plaster, who lay comfortable as a horse by a stream in a carpet he used as a hammock, which he draped over a chaos o' wreckage. A jagged rock poked that there slime bucket in the keister, but he didn't mind none. Instead, he used it to scratch the crack. That sight belonged in the Something Master Asinine Sucks Would Prefer Not to See pile.

That city slicker held a datasheet, flipping through a book called How to Operate and Care for Your New Power Core. At least the datasheet's glow emitted a soft light, which provided more help than Plaster. Had he and Master Asinine Sucks switched boulder removal shifts?

"Little help, cowpoke?" Master Asinine Sucks wiped his bleeding nose.

"You're already gettin' as little help from me as possible." Plaster, the stupid varmint, licked his finger and tapped the datasheet's NEXT PAGE icon. Enlightenment perked an eyebrow. "So that's what we forgot. Didn't switch the freakin' power core ta unshielded output. An' we ain't aimed it at Scapegoat neither."

Why wouldn't that globule Plaster, ugly as a mud fence that he was, help? Crock. Master Asinine Sucks huffed and grabbed an arrowhead-shaped rock and flung it at Plaster. The rock jabbed Plaster's ear and embedded itself.

"You freakin' freak!" Plaster whipped aside the datasheet and launched to his feet. He thundered toward Master Asinine Sucks, rumbling the rocks around him, mad as a hornet.

Oh, geez. Throwing that rock was a fool move. Master Asinine Sucks limped back a step and tripped over a broken girder when he put too much weight on his bum leg.

Fit ta be tied, Plaster loomed over him with them bloodshot eyes, grabbed his collar in one angry fist, and yanked him up. "You'll never, ever throw anythin' at me again. Unless it's food." Plaster yanked the rock outta his goldarned ear, releasing a spongy squish and a single spurt o' blood. He clenched the rock and prepared to slash.

Master Asinine Sucks didn't know what to do. Hung off Plaster's fist, struggled ta gain footing though Plaster kept kicking aside his legs, looked thisaway, thataway, wanted to skedaddle over yonder, wanted to do something, anything.

Oh, mama, oh, mama. He...he...slapped Plaster's cheek.

...

Plaster eased a gentle hand to his face. Master Asinine Sucks watched with horror and bafflement. "Ya...ya slapped me?" He almost let go o' Master Asinine Sucks but instead retightened his hold on the collar. "What is this, a kindergarten schoolyard?" Plaster pulled back his other fist and tightened his lips around them there teeth.

"Sorry, pardner, don't hit me, I didn't mean nothin' by it, no way, no how." Master Asinine Sucks steeled himself for a wallop that would ram his nose straight inta his skull. Plaster's fist loosened...and he returned the slap.

Glitter lit Master Asinine Sucks's vision like fireflies by the flame. No fair. Dagnabbit, that stoved way more than his own slap. "Ya slapped me back?"

Plaster dropped him. A dislodged brick poked his back, but he managed to stop from slamming onto an upturned bar by leaping aside. "Ya confused me! I ain't never been slapped before, an' these man-fists have only two settings: pulverize an' pulverize you."

Plaster shoved Master Asinine Sucks aside and started tossin' away them there huge chunks of debris. Some of them chunks almost crushed Master Asinine Sucks, but he dodged on over behind an overturned rack. He hacked again and felt blood splatter his upheld arm. Goldarnit.

One chunk o' rubble sailed dangerously close to his head, but he risked a look-see when the room brightened. What he saw kicked his heart up. Plaster, that city fella, had dug a hole wide enough to crawl through! Master Asinine Sucks stumbled to his feet. His leg yipped him with electric pain. He needed medical doctorin' because his leg felt like a victim of Asinine's planning.

Plaster hunkered down on all fours and scuttled out. Not a pretty sight. His backside was as ugly as the front. Master Asinine Sucks limped over the rack but stopped when a twisted T-bar caught up his foot and sent him bumblin' off his feet between two shelves. He sprang up, slid toward the hole, and scurried through.

Daylight! A sky, a field o' green yonder, a mess o' starship parts. Color. The air intoxicated him. He smelled a nearby lake, foliage, and, fortunately, not Plaster's body odor. His throat stopped its ticklin'. His windpipe widened up. His eyes adjusted to the sun's how-do-ya-do...

...and his ears caught a nearby conversation. To tell Plaster's ta clam up, he held up a hand. Plaster slapped the hand aside.

Master Asinine Sucks's ears adjusted to sounds that didn't echo off every corner of that there destroyed room inside. The nearby conversation sounded like a babble shoot-out. Who was speakin'? He shrugged at Plaster. Plaster didn't shrug back. Plaster was an unresponsive mudsill.

Master Asinine Sucks kept low. Quiet like mice, he and Plaster snuck around the crumbling building...and he stiffened up. Media. Med-trans. Law-trans. A Good Guy starship-sized transport, big and mean lookin' as a ripe old bronco. With Good Guys. A pair of them city slickers. Burnout and that Ace Spunky guy.

Plaster marched across the field, his chest puffed forward, rippin' for a fight. Master Asinine Sucks puffed his chest, too, but somehow it looked stupid.

Sigh. He didn't have the energy for this or for the preplanned snappy repartee.

Chapter Twenty-Six: So Far, No Good

Legion assessed his weakening group, all now on the ground. Sixth Sense had levitated everybody down in four trips: Franchise and Reef, Mabel, Null and Smithereens, and finally Pincushion and Momentum. A total of four hundred eight feet of travel, half of it up. Reef had dropped Kamikaze's body. Kamikaze would have wanted it that way.

Sixth Sense's head throbbed. Franchise was petrified into a stiff mannequin body. Car Alarm was destroyed. Kamikaze was still dead. Car Alarm was destroyed. Harrier remained unconscious. Car Alarm was destroyed. And Legion had this nasty itch in his ankle that, no matter how much he scratched, just...kept...persisting.

But at least Car Alarm was destroyed.

Inside a small room, they had taken shelter because the chemical build-up didn't smell as coppery here, though this equipment storeroom reeked of gasoline and, yes, urine. Why must every dingy room smell like urine?

A light panel that provided no light hovered above, lopsided. Despite the darkness, Legion had searched for something with which to blast a hole through the ceiling. He wanted to ventilate this tainted air and escape. Nothing. And Kamikaze wasn't breaking down any walls. Maybe they needed to fling him harder.

Legion's nostrils leaked constantly. Every fourth breath rasped out a cough that spurted blood. Every two seconds brought another cough or retch from one of the Good Guys. And the tightness in Legion's chest caused his skull to throb.

Before coming down, Smithereens had grabbed some equipment from the Fireball and had fashioned a welding torch. He was cauterizing Harrier's severed wing.

And Car Alarm was destroyed. Maybe Legion enjoyed that a bit much.

Legion would give anything for someone to blast through the walls. Smithereens's bombs were liable to shake the ceiling down, whether Smithereens liked it or not. And he'd like it.

Legion lurched forward and gagged. Liquid vomited out and streamed to the ground. He checked it. Flecks dripped from his chin. Vomiting now. If they didn't leave this place in the next half hour or so, they'd die.

At least Car Alarm was destroyed.

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Meeting of the Minds

Ice Cream Headache hadn't plummeted sixty feet to the ground. Lucky. She'd instead fallen on the shelving rack on which she'd awoken the first time. Her spine ached from smacking into the wall behind her, and a diagnostic tool poked her shoulder.

Had she died? No. If she'd had, Scapegoat wouldn't be on the ground picking his nose and offering up the results to her as if he were sacrificing to a god.

Ice Cream Headache felt like an insect on a bookshelf. Eventually, she'd have to climb down from here. But how? By jumping into Scapegoat's waiting arms? That would be awkward, especially with dried snot freckling those fingers.

She wiped a finger across her wet nostrils and examined it. Blood. Oh, no. Not only were her coughs bleeding and her eyes burning, but now her nostrils bled. She blamed Scapegoat.

She felt a bump on her head. She was careful to step lightly since she'd developed a thriving migraine that felt as intense as the ones she developed when trying to figure out the rules to football.

She peered across at the Fireball, which now seemed lifeless. She tried to see inside it, but the darkness made that impossible. The Fireball was barren: reaching out to freeze someone's brain, she sensed no thoughts. This felt exactly like attacking a drove of pigs. (She did the oddest things for a little ham in her sandwich.)

Something trickled from her nostril to her upper lip. It plinked onto the rack on which she stood. She wiped her hand over her mouth. More blood. The source of that copper stench must have caused it.

She wiped her hand on her impact suit and squinted at the ground. Was Scapegoat still watching that wall? Yes, he was. What a smelly simpleton.

Feet scuffed the floor. Someone else had entered. The stranger, with hair so bright it starkly contrasted with the darkness, approached Scapegoat. Was that the kid who, not long ago, had beaten Plaster and her? The diabolical one?

The kid chirped words that sounded like something translated from Scapegoat's conversation. "Hey, ya know where's thems Good Guys be at?"

In her mind, she imagined Mechanism, her new master, saying, "The two foremost experts on grammar, mangling together at long last. This conversation shall progress as sensibly as a shredded datasheet." At least she'd likely never have to see Mechanism again.

With a brain freeze, Ice Cream Headache could easily take the kid down. He seemed less diabolical since crashing that transport into Station Zilcho in October. But she wanted to find out if Scapegoat could do anything to add one more screwed up "triumph" to her day. She blamed the hunchback for the crashed starship...somehow. It was his fault, right? Could he do better than causing it to smash through a fusion station? What with the day so far, probably.

That chirpy kid moved underneath the light panel near Scapegoat. Though the kid's hair was easily spotted, Ice Cream Headache saw only Scapegoat's blurry form in the fizzling glow of the light panel. She sensed their brainwaves, felt prey for her brain freezes more clearly than she saw them with her inflamed eyes. Funny. When she searched for brainwaves, Scapegoat made only a blip.

Scapegoat said something, and the kid replied with something else Ice Cream Headache couldn't understand. Was Scapegoat revealing Bad Guy secrets? He spewed them out whenever anyone asked how his day was going. In fact, that was how Master Asinine's mucho destructo por favor plan had been blown.

The kid needed to be silenced. So would Scapegoat, but Ice Cream Headache would save him for last. She'd start with the kid.

Ice Cream Headache was going to adore silencing the kid.

* * *

"Hey, I'm talkings to ya." Power Plant limped toward the guy facing the wall. Was he brushing his fingers along it? Was he staring at it? Was he talking to it? Power Plant talked to strange inanimate objects—light fixtures, pylons, Franchise—but never a wall. A wall didn't even have a PhD. They were so stupid, shy people held them up at parties.

Power Plant didn't want to hear the hunchback converse with stuff, so he tapped him on the shoulder. The hunchback lolled around with a drunken sway. "What want watching wall you disturb no."

Was that a question? A statement? A sentence? Power Plant answered as menacingly as possible. "Hi." His gawky smile showed he meant business.

His world blanked with cold agony! The fringes of his sight whitewashed for a moment, and he thought he'd gone blind. Wait, no, false alarm. He'd only shut his eyes.

He buckled and slammed against the ground. Something in his head rattled, probably those marbles Legion told him were loose. He tasted butterscotch in his head. That ice-cream-headachy woman must have hid somewhere. She didn't offer the treats her media name implied. That sucked because right now Power Plant could go for something tasty.

Something above him creaked, reverberated like thin sheet metal buckling under pressure. Through strained vision, he spotted a shadow change footing on a shelf above. And he somehow knew the attack emanated from there, frigidly agonizing and not in the least bit Neapolitan flavored.

He slammed a knee against a rock, which opened a gash along his leg. Instinct told him to clutch his skull, but he aimed his trembling hands up and released a thin laser beam. Something clanged, and sparks lit one of the rack's aluminum struts. He had missed Ice Cream Headache but had sliced the strut about twenty feet from the ground.

The strut folded under the weight of the megaton apparatuses piled on it. The rack at first leaned forward casually...

* * *

...then it bowed as if to touch its toes.

Oh, no! Equipment slid down its steepening slope. Ice Cream Headache dodged a voltage adaptor and grabbed the back of the shelf, which quickly became the top when the rack buckled.

Grabbing onto the back of the shelf didn't save her from careening toward the Fireball. She'd soon smack against the nose cone. Hard. She slid off the shelf and aimed for the kid. That would make the fall worth it.

One shelf sliced through the already compromised roof of the Fireball. Another shattered the remains of their hole-ridden windshield. Ice Cream Headache slapped onto the nose cone and rolled down its curvature until she struck the side of the rack. Her hip slammed on...well, it didn't really matter what. Wowzers.

She chose this point to lose consciousness again.

* * *

Power Plant recovered, his head feeling as if it had been bathed in nitrogen. He stood with swimming thoughts. He staggered to the left, and the gash in his hip poked into something sharp. He coughed and felt a splash on his chin. The hunchback coughed, as well. Blood spurted from his nostrils.

"Good Guy you are, yes yes," Scapegoat mangle-spoke. Power Plant had met him on some occasions and had understood him on no occasions. For all Power Plant knew, this goon had just spouted scientific formulae.

Power Plant glared at Scapegoat to look threatening, but that was hard since Scapegoat was too stupid to threaten. "Whatevers ya meant rights now, can it be that you gots me some soup? My cake dust didn't fills me all up."

Scapegoat reared back a fist, his inflamed eyes the color of blood. That must have been his hunchback-activation color.

Power Plant held an open palm to Scapegoat's forehead. Scapegoat tried to push against the palm, swinging exaggeratedly. His guttural roar grew louder. That roar was probably the only thing he'd ever spoken in the proper order because it was one word.

Scapegoat struggled against Power Plant's grip. This forehead trick worked well in cartoons, but in real life it looked even funnier.

Power Plant switched palms. "Where the Good Guys be? I ain't gonna asks again."

Scapegoat stopped swinging. "Where Good Guys some gone else, yes yes."

Power Plant removed his hand and stepped aside. Scapegoat fell forward and kicked up a puff of dust from the floor. What had this scatter-mouth said? "Okay, mebbe I will asks again."

Scapegoat lurched to his feet. "Good Guys not anywhere going." Anger laced his voice. He swung out, but Power Plant lifted a forearm and blocked the thrust. He stepped forward and chopped Scapegoat's neck twice. Scapegoat crumbled onto a roll of discarded curtains. He was out.

For some reason, Power Plant blamed this situation on him. He blamed Scapegoat for a lot of things. Something about him was like a blame magnet. In fact, weren't the grades on Power Plant's latest report card his fault? What a jerk.

Power Plant noticed—he squinted in the darkness—a small side room. That looked like the only place his friends could hide...unless they hid underneath any of the dozens of piles of debris. Power Plant checked underneath a slab of stone. Not there. Underneath another slab. Nope. Maybe that one.

Why must Legion keep saying he wanted to crawl under a rock but never did?

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Firefight

Plaster marched across the lawn. Feelin' nothin' for the last few hours but concrete, stone, and slivers o' wood that stabbed his heels made his march across the soft, cool grass feel exquisite—

Ow. He lifted his heel and plucked out...Oh, for freak's sake, what imbecile left broken glass lyin' around? Probably a piece o' Legion's jaw.

A reporter noticed Plaster and screamed. Plaster shut her up by pluggin' her mouth with his fist. A perfect fit. He tromped halfway across the field before the Good Guy twerp wit' the baseball cap noticed him. Too late. Before Twerp could gasp like a girl, Plaster broke into a run and slammed the blade of his arm into Twerp's gullet. Twerp fell, sputterin' a wad of bubblegum at Plaster's knee and clutchin' his windpipe.

Plaster marched over Twerp's chest. One o' Twerp's hands zipped to his ribs to cushion a few bones that snapped under Plaster's four-hunnert-pound stride. Air mikes and cameras grabbed footage o' this with whirring lenses that captured Plaster's hijinks. Plaster angled his action side forward.

"How's about that, ya mongrel?" Master Asinine Sucks scurried up behind Plaster and began kickin' Twerp in the hip like a dorky sidekick. Way to be too little too late.

That was when another Good Guy noticed Plaster. Burnout. His fiery red hair and crimson eyes made him an easy target. Though meatier than his junior brother, he'd still drop as easy as Twerp. An' with more of a whimper.

"If it isn't the building blocks of stupidity," Burnout said, glowerin' at Plaster.

"It isn't." Plaster threw a thumb behind himself. "He's bringin' up the rear."

A flurry o' cops rushed toward the battle. "Keep that crowd back!" one boomed. "And let them know Fluorident comes in six new flavors including chutney!"

The cops was smart enough to maintain their distance, holdin' the crowd away and advertisin' Fluorident's disgustin' new tastes. Good. Now Plaster and Burnout had enough space to hold their high school parking lot soiree. Plaster loved brawl banquets almost as much as he loved punch parties.

Burnout thrust into the air, his body burstin' with flame. His charred skeletal appearance reminded Plaster of himself immediately followin' the experiment that had made him the ladies' stud he now was and that everyone else now wasn't. Burnout remained barely outta reach, as if goadin' Plaster to attack.

Plaster was happy to oblige. "Come down here, pansy. I wanna kick your crock."

"If you've harmed my brother in any way in that fusion station, so help me..."

"I'll spread Junior's skin over my bed ta replace my bedwettin' sheets and..." Oh, crock. "Did ya hear that?"

"You'll do what?" Burnout said. Good. He hadn't.

Burnout shoved his hands forward, his intensifyin' flames further definin' the skeleton underneath. Fire seethed from his open palms. They curled toward Plaster and soaked him in a squall.

The squall subsided. Burnout pulled his hands back and closed them into fists. Plaster stood and examined himself. His body roared like an inferno. Cozy.

"Stupid punk." Alit, Plaster scratched out a chuckle and advanced toward Burnout. His footsteps left brushfires in the grass. He reached Burnout, grabbed the Good Guy's ankle, and swung the milksop against their milksop Fireball's front landin' trestle.

Burnout dropped, outta breath. Plaster examined the trestle. Its rubber linin' caught Burnout's blaze. It leaked a flame that flickered in the breeze and stank like ragin' rubber. Now it really was a fireball. Plaster enjoyed settin' things on fire as much as he enjoyed settin' bigger things on fire.

Speakin' o' which, the field looked a lot nicer now. Both his and Burnout's movements marked it in flames like footsteps on a dance choreography mat.

The Fireball's gear had dented and snapped a joint. With any luck, so had Burnout. Plaster grabbed Burnout's shoulder, dug his burnin' fingertips in, and lifted him. Still stunned from slammin' into the leg, Burnout didn't notice Plaster's fist bludgeoning his face.

Burnout snapped outta his stupor. He blocked the next clout with a forearm. Punched Plaster's nose. Plaster dropped him, stumbled back, rubbed his nose, and masked it from the acrid odor o' burned grass. He sneezed. His snot sizzled in his flames, which bumped fire up a notch on the coolness scale.

Plaster uncovered his nose and tightened both arms. He sprinted forward. Angled his shoulders and fists into a batterin' ram. Burnout ducked, rolled underneath, tripped Plaster. Well, he tried, but that pansy move failed to even slow him. What a little leaguer.

Plaster bit down on his upper lip. "Let's finish this quick. I got idiot leaders ta yell at. Plus that, Asinine's planned a game o' Tortured Good Guy Prisoners o' War Say the Darnedest Things, and I'd like ya to participate."

Burnout spread his hands away from his body. With that gesture, the surroundin' fires on the field died until only spots of ash remained, ribbons o' smoke tricklin' inta the sky. Plaster's flames died with 'em. Huh. He'd have to ask for a recharge.

Plaster balled a fist. "Kid, stick t' your colorin' books. Your fire can't do jack ta me, an' you obviously ain't my match in a brawl. Ya got the muscles, but ya got the same sissy strength as your junior brother. So how you plan ta finish this?"

Burnout thrust his hands forward. He smirked, the first time Plaster ever seen him crack that pitiless glower. "Like this."

Flames stormed from Burnout's hands so furious the air pressure slammed Plaster backward. The inferno stole his breath like stiflin' mugginess under a swelterin' desert sun.

Plaster's head split a tree stump in two, which hurt as much as bein' polite.

* * *

The hickster kept kicking Ace Spandex's side, but Ace Spandex had had enough. Despite the pain that electrified his broken ribs, he leaped up and plowed a fist into the hickster's forehead.

Ace Spandex had had no combat training, but he was confident the hickster's combat training matched Scapegoat's language skills, judging from this hickster's sloppy attacks.

The hickster recovered and landed an uppercut on Ace Spandex's chin. Ace Spandex aimed low and, before the hickster readied himself, smashed his fist into his solar plexus. The hickster collapsed and leaked a moan. Ace Spandex hunched, his ribs now clattering for pain relief. If not for the painkillers in his impact suit, he'd be out.

Burnout approached from behind and glared at the Bad Guy. "Never hit the solar plexus." He slammed a boot into the hickster's solar plexus, anyway. "Opponents often give that annoying moan that just never shuts up." Another kick to the solar plexus.

Ace Spandex wrinkled his nose and retrieved his baseball cap. He held his side, wincing. "Do they often take a dump in their pants, too?"

"When caught off guard." Burnout leaned over, whacked a fist across the hickster's face, and placed two fingers above his shoulder blade. The hickster gasped into unconsciousness.

"That should shut him up. It won't help the stench, though."

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Psychic Backtrack and Physical Ship-Smack

Legion stood, his legs creaking. He thought of Lowensland, that murdering scum, and how his scheme had put them in this situation. He clutched his viciously throbbing side and coughed a violent hack that sprayed his shirt, now retrieved from Harrier's mouth, with blood. Oh, good. His impact suit now had more stains. He was working on a bloody picture of a pony, but it looked more like a kitten.

Sixth Sense hadn't taken long to awaken. Before he finally stood, he'd roused and shouted something about beating Kamikaze to within an inch of his life but not quite to death, simply to tease him. Reef's influence? The pounding in Sixth Sense's head made the telepath cringe. He now sat shivering in the corner of the room.

In the darkness, Legion couldn't see much except the wall-sized poster ad for Pavlov's Dog Food. The only light, an orange glow that barely rinsed part of the room, came from Smithereens's improvised welding torch. Why must their only light source be named Mount Saint Eruptoid's Hitch for the Critch Roman Candle?

Legion approached Sixth Sense, who sat on a stack of pressboard panels. Far from the others, he and Sixth Sense had some privacy. With any luck, Reef wouldn't project wishes for drunken benders when they talked.

"You okay?" Legion sat beside Sixth Sense.

Sixth Sense clenched his stomach as if he'd double over in anguish. Something in his gut had probably ruptured. "Yeah. Sure. Uh. Sort of. I can block out the pain, but everyone's negative thoughts are pounding my head. Reef's alcohol obsession is dragging across my mind like a streamer. I never thought I'd want to swim in a pool of whiskey." He wiped his bloody nose and clutched his stomach. "I hate whiskey."

"Your asthma okay?"

In response, Sixth Sense held up his Wheeze EZ asthma inhaler between two fingers. He put it back in its pouch, a line of blood threading down his knuckles from where he'd wiped his nose.

His eyes drooped. His cheeks sank. "We're going to die down here, aren't we?"

Legion couldn't hide the bleakness in his voice. "Comically, everybody but Kamikaze." Well sugarcoated.

"Great. And if we die, there will be no more Good Guys. And Lowensland takes this galaxy unimpeded." Sixth Sense flung a tiny piece of debris. "Everyone will be defenseless. And you let everyone come?"

"Not my choice. The brass at IP made the call. They forced it."

"So. Uhm. You let them put everyone in danger like this?"

Legion blinked his dry eyes. "I had a friend named Sopher once. He died because I wasn't prepared. There was a time I vowed never to let another person die. I actually ordered the first set of Good Guys to hide because of that. I've since realized how irresponsible that is in this line of work. I came to terms with that fact in the first year of leading. On our first mission, if we hadn't acted, if I'd ordered them to hide, a lot of innocent people would have died. Lowensland would have taken over the galaxy right there. So I may feel a lot of regret right now, but I ordered us to do what had to be done."

Legion shuffled his feet, scraping the dust and a dead cockroach. Sixth Sense's memory chip blinked inside his pouch. Why was it so important? Legion had never seen one encased in titanium. Titanium existed to transport military hardware or Momentum's seltzer pancakes, not someone's Scare Clown's Twisted Tales collection.

"I don't like Scare Clown's Twisted Tales," Sixth Sense said. "No one should." Good. Sixth Sense had respected Legion's strict No Liking Stupid Things policy.

Reading stray thoughts, though? Legion needed to stop thinking so often. Power Plant made it look easy. To Power Plant's credit, though, he'd finally learned to use an airlock properly: don spacesuit and then exit.

"It's not military hardware, either." Sixth Sense's shadow looked at Legion. The source of his crippling pain evaporated. "It's...just vital." He studied the floor. "And, yes, I mind you asking."

Legion wasn't even aware he had thought that. Eerie. But he disapproved of secrets among his soldiers. Keeping secrets could get them killed. "It's just that—"

"My secret is a safety infraction. I know, I know. But what about Reef keeping secret what his hyperability is? Isn't that a safety infraction?"

Legion picked up a sliver of wood and tapped it against the floor. "I'm still trying to crack that one. Let's deal with one secret at a time."

Sixth Sense gulped nervously. As if his next sentence would blemish a royal family's history, he said, "Fine. Okay. Uhm." He winced, buckling sharply to vomit, but held on. He unfolded. "Is there any way to stop Reef from fantasizing about whiskey baths?"

"Get him to think about rum baths. Sixth Sense, what forced you to leave your family's farm? I—"

"I hear it. Gotcha. You need to hear the real story."

"Okay, that saying-what-I'm-thinking-before-I-say-it thing really spooks me."

"Sorry. I can tell. I can always—"

"You can always tell." Legion smiled, tossing away his sliver of wood. "One point for me."

Sixth Sense's mood lightened. Legion didn't need telepathy to figure that out.

Sixth Sense said, "Okay. Right. Oh, boy. The memory chip and my family's farm." He unzipped his pouch and pulled out the titanium box. The chip's red light blinked in the darkness. "This is why I left the farm." Legion opened his mouth to suggest a fast-forward to avoid hearing Sixth Sense's entire life story, but Sixth Sense said, "No, you won't hear my entire life st—" Apologetically, he smiled in the flicker of Smithereens's Roman candle—may it never explode, Alaphus, amen—and said, "Sorry. Anyway, uhm, we lived next door to the Urgs, four eccentric brothers who constantly produced strange explosions on their property, causing our thundermammals to stampede around all night. And next door on a farming planet is a long way away."

"Was one of the brothers Jeff?"

Sixth Sense hacked a cough and buckled. He spat blood out of a grimace, winced, and straightened out. "Anyway, one day my father went to talk to them about the noise. After an hour, he returned, burst in, grabbed his coat, and told my mother and me to pack. He'd destroyed something but didn't say what. I remember it exactly, from the beads of sweat on my dad's face to his exact words.

"We were leaving immediately and we'd return later for the livestock. He didn't have to tell me why. His thoughts screamed like Franchise at anything that moves."

"Your dad's thoughts scream like a schoolgirl?"

"We grabbed the next shuttle to the closest commercial area on Gaia. Immediately, my father barged into a data-transfer shop. He demanded to have information extracted from his brain. Understand my dad. He's a fourth-generation Berrorite, set against anything as unnatural as cold medicine. I mean...in this age, I still have asthma. Asthma! That's how set against a data transfer he was. It was number two on his list of things he didn't tolerate."

Knives of agony stabbed Legion's ribs. He waited for the agony to abate, then wiped his nostrils of blood. The chemicals were eating at him inside. The room had squelched the tainted air, but it still seeped in. Everything still smelled like copper. "What was number one?"

"Artichoke soup. Anyway, to extract data from his brain was a big deal. He had no time to specify exactly what he wanted recorded, so the clerk grabbed everything." He held up the titanium container. His voice thick, he wiped a tear. "This chip holds my dad's entire memories. He made this in case something happened to him. We weren't rich, so the high cost of storing this stuff...You have no idea."

"Expensive? I have some idea." In his head, Legion combined Power Plant and Kamikaze into one gigantic litigation ball.

"We hid in a motel, and he left me with the chip. He was going to meet someone who could sneak us off world quickly and told us not to leave until he called. For days, we waited. Finally, my mom left to look for him and never returned." Sixth Sense sighed, but it looked more like he waited for a stab of pain to subside. "I later learned the Urgs had killed them both.

"I left the next day. The chip was the only proof of the Urgs' secret. I always sensed the Urgs coming, so they found me only once, but that gave them the chance to beam a computer virus. When I next use this chip, the virus will corrupt the data. I agreed to join the Good Guys to keep this memory chip protected and to get the data off before it's corrupted. I need Ace Spandex's computer talents. I'm worried, though. The only computer talent he uses is smashing them."

"He calls it 'firm discipline.' Sixth Sense, what's on the memory chip? What did your dad find out?"

"Okay. Sure. Uhm." Sixth Sense looked at Legion in the orange glow of the light. "What if I said the chip held the secret to evolution? The proof or disproof of Alaphus? The answer to how the universe began? The chance to stop death before it happens? The ability to sidestep medical dead ends? The—Why am I in one freaking piece?" Sixth Sense smacked himself across the face but won a struggle against a second blow.

Legion waited a beat before he asked, "Kamikaze came back to life?"

"And he's already whining about it. Oh, wait. He killed himself again."

Someone must have yanked Car Alarm's arm out, and Kamikaze had probably knifed it back in somewhere else. Legion needed to take that arm away. It was not sanitary enough for suicide. But one thing at a time. "Sixth Sense, your chip. Please say it holds embarrassing photos of your childhood birthday parties."

"That, too." Sixth Sense eyed him timidly with red around his irises. "It holds the secrets to time travel. And the Urgs killed my parents to keep those secrets. Because, for all the good it can achieve, the Urgs intended it for evil, for self-gain. I have to keep it away from them. My dad saw everything of theirs—plans, experiments, results. He destroyed it. The only copy is now stored on this chip, and I can't even access it."

"Wowww." Legion exhaled. "Why couldn't it have been Scare Clown?"

Apologetically, Sixth Sense said, "I, uh, have the bovine episode of How Things Produce Waste."

"That doesn't help."

Sixth Sense whipped to his feet. "Freakings stuck pigs, this place look likes my brain in drugs!" He regained control and, panting, said, "Rescue has arrived."

Something obliterated the door, peeling it off its hinges and spraying it everywhere. The doorframe skidded into a wall, tilted, and collapsed to the floor.

"Woohoo!" Power Plant kicked a sliver of the door that had remained. "Blowings open that door's the best twos seconds of my lifes."

"Sorry. 'Rescue' was a bad word," Sixth Sense said. "I'm a mind reader, not a thesaurus."

* * *

Power Plant limped into the equipment storeroom. He spat blood and blew more from his nose before it plugged up his nostrils. He hadn't realized until entering, but a shard of the door had scored his side.

Franchise and Smithereens reached him first, but Legion thundered to the front of the growing audience. Power Plant hoped he wouldn't ask anything that would lead to Legion kicking him off the team. Wait. His brother had said they'd quit already. He smiled. Okay, Legion, fire away.

"I's thought you kiddings when's ya talks about bricks walls an' conversations with me, but I watched some guy doings it outsides." He sniffed that metallic stench again and wrinkled his nose. "Who cut the metal cheese? Smell like the inside of a gun barrel."

Legion looked unsure about whether to strike Power Plant or run for cover. Power Plant would advise him to run for cover. That was more fun: everyone would get to hear Legion's lovely screaming voice.

He pushed Power Plant toward the destroyed door. "No. Not you. You've risked enough lives for one day with your stunt earlier. You and your brother quit. We can't afford you screwing this up more than it's already screwed up. How did you even get in here?"

"Like for usual. I blast 'em holes through stuffs, and there was, like, no doorbell."

Legion winced, clutching his side, but choked words through the pain. "Stay out of the way." He winced harder. "If we make it home, your brother will, once again, try to flash-fry me."

"You don'ts have ta waits till home. My brother's outside. He can flush-fry you here." Power Plant's gut stabbed him as if someone had stripped off his stomach lining.

Legion shook his head, his nostrils flaring. "Just lead us to where you came in." He swung Power Plant around and prodded him out of the storage room. "Then get out of the—"

"Legion, this isn't his fault," Reef snapped. "For once."

Legion's rage melted. His stare loosened. "You're right. Jeff, I'm sorry. I'm just tense. Please lead the way...as strange as that sounds."

Power Plant nodded. "My way's all caveds in and stuff. We gots ta finds a new door out. Did'ja know ninjas fancy camp got cancels up? That's sucks."

Power Plant led them to the spot through which he'd entered. They passed Scapegoat's catatonic body. The only movement the Bad Guy made was tranquil breathing. Power Plant had given him and the I Scream a Headache woman sound thrashings. He'd done awesome stuff. He usually doled out only one sound thrashing before destroying a city block. Today, he'd managed two, a new record. He'd have to call the broadcast stations. They'd want to update the public alert levels.

Power Plant spotted the caved-in hole through which he'd entered. He clambered up the rocky rubble but lost his footing and grazed his knee. He tried again, this time making it. He felt around with his fingertips. There. An uneven part didn't match the rest of the rubble. He'd entered through there.

"There's wheres I cames through."

"Are you sure? Don't screw this up, Jeff."

Reef coughed and wiped blood on his side. "Legion, let him perform his monkey routine. You've used up all of yours."

"What difference can he make?"

"Are you kidding me? We have the greatest destructive power ever known: a hyperactive laser cannon with the brain of a chipmunk."

* * *

Reef wiped his nose so he'd stop smelling blood. The copper odor intensified, but he ignored it. "Jeff, you're the only one who can open us a hole. We just have to find you a weak spot to blast through. Your entry is too unsteady, so we can't go through there."

"Okay. Where's to blast?" Power Plant said, depressing sections of collapsed wall.

"Not everywhere," Legion snapped. "Don't bring this building down around us."

"I won't brings it down. Now, if ya don'ts mind, I gots a building to brings down around us."

Reef shot Legion a glare. "Legion, he's still safer than the guy you interviewed who transfers his nature's urges onto any victim of his choosing." He stepped forward. Time to pull his weight today. He stumbled up the landslide and hoisted himself next to Power Plant. Would love a drink right about now. "Jeff, let me help. Architecture used to be a...hobby. I know a thing or two about stress points. Blasting just anywhere is liable to kill us."

"We ain't s'posed to blasts through stuffs randomly?"

"Blasting through stuff randomly is bad. Remember the petting zoo?"

"That's why I disagrees. Blasting through stuff's funny."

Reef dragged his fingertips along the cracked wall. He felt the coarse stone, searched the haphazard remains for weaknesses. He pictured the stress points, the damaged parts of the wall, the crumbling holes, all as patches of light. All the danger areas. Power Plant's head lit as brightly as a supernova.

Pain flared in his side, but he fought the impulse to crumble. Behind him crackled a recital of soaked hacking that sounded like a beast-metal concert except displaying more talent. His hands scratched the wall in a sweeping S, but nothing felt right. "I have a feeling we're not—"

He stopped on a weak slice of granite. He pressed against it, and a segment of wall shifted. He followed it upward—aha. The segment extended to the ceiling. Perfect.

"Jeff." He pointed, stepped back, and stumbled over a rock. He motioned for Power Plant to follow. Must Power Plant intentionally stumble exactly as Reef had? "Blast that part of the ceiling. And wipe your face. You have cake mix on it."

* * *

Legion stepped aside when Reef backed away from Power Plant, who focused deeply, raised his hands, and blasted a hole through the ceiling. The ceiling burst outward in a smash-clatter and a rainfall of adobe clumps. "Smacked that ceiling."

Wait. Something from under the Fireball's nose cone shifted, groaned. A remaining chunk of the engine block. It hung for a second and—

Whatever had held it snapped. The machinery plummeted, grew closer, larger.

Legion fought the agony that sliced through his stomach. "Jeff, look out!"

"Hey, you ain't more the boss o' me, ya boss o' me. Ya can'ts—"

Legion slammed into Power Plant. The two careened backward, Legion twisting his body. They smacked onto the floor and felt the wind of the mammoth engine block hammer down where Power Plant had stood.

Power Plant rolled off Legion and wobbled to his feet. Legion stood as well. Their eyes studied the fallen chunk as if it would sprout legs.

"That ain't somethings I should ask to do again, right? But...can we stills do it again?"

* * *

Moments ago, Burnout—no, just Mark now—and Ace Spandex had returned to B-Prowler to find out if its weapons systems could blow open the building. Then an explosion had pulverized part of the building's roof and pelted the field with dirt and stone. Mark had rushed out of B-Prowler, shielding his eyes, though one still caught a clump of clay. He removed the clay.

The crowd of reporters had scrambled for shelter inside their news-trans. But now, after the rainfall of rubble stopped, they oozed out of their hiding spots.

Mark pounded toward the landslide of debris that had ingested his brother. He slammed through the blanket of media maggots. And he didn't use "maggot" offhandedly. They reminded him of bugs writhing off each other in search of rancid meat for food. Their air mikes swarmed in Mark's face. Mark reached out and closed a fist around one. Media maggots angered Mark more than anybody else. And he worked with Kamikaze.

One reporter stuffed an air mike in Mark's face. "Burnout, Access Junkie Live here. How do you feel about your brother being crushed alive?"

Mark wanted to palm her face. "He's not dead yet, you glop of human waste." He was still alive...right?

"Burnout, WXPN here. Have you plans to bring together a new team of Good Guys to mess things up?"

"Burnout, can you flex for a photo shoot for Teens Will Buy Anything magazine?"

"Burnout, if you were a pair of pants, what kind of pants would you be?"

"Burnout, rub my feet."

Mark took flight and soared onto what had been the roof but now looked like concrete mulch and smelled like dusted charcoal. He landed a safe distance from the hole out of which the explosion had spewed.

Crock, the air wafting out reeked like Car Alarm's mouthwash. Did that robot use mouthwash? It certainly didn't use a muzzle.

* * *

When Power Plant had blasted the ceiling, it hadn't collapsed. Legion allowed himself to feel astonished. Power Plant had blasted something with enough self-control not to bring everything down over their heads. And also without assuming his Caffeine Man persona.

Legion put a hand on Power Plant's shoulder. "Good work, Jeff."

"I's only does good work." Power Plant sprouted an exaggerated smile. "And I also blows a lotsa stuff up." Right. Whatever thought made Power Plant happy...besides thoughts of obliterating public property.

Slung over Momentum's shoulders, the dead Kamikaze looked pale even in the sunlight that spilled through the hole about a hundred feet overhead. Momentum hacked up a wash of blood. His coughs were giving way to more vomiting. He had spat out streams of food mixed into blood. "Can I pull this arm out of Kamikaze so he comes back to life? He's attracting flies."

Legion suppressed a dry gag. "Not until he's a safe distance from anything that moves." He spotted Sixth Sense. "Can you levitate us out?"

"Whoa. Yikes. Okay. I can make a couple of trips." He rubbed his temples and sipped air. In here, that was how everyone breathed. "My head is still pounding, but maybe I can ignore it."

"Good. Carry out Franchise—once he stops practicing victory high fives as if he helped—Reef, Null, Pincushion, and Smithereens. Jeff can carry Harrier, Kamikaze, Momentum, Mabel, and me. And hurry. I don't want Kamikaze to wake up and throw anyone into a meter maid."

"Hey, wait!" Power Plant flailed his hands to gain Legion's attention. His flailing almost speared Reef's eye. He pointed at something behind Legion. "What 'bout him?" He pointed up at the Fireball's ramshackle nose cone. "And her."

Legion examined where Power Plant had pointed: an unconscious body lay on the crumpled shelving rack, blood dripping from the mouth and nostrils. Ice Cream Headache. And on the ground, an inert Scapegoat, a finger in his nose up to the knuckle.

"What about them?" Legion coughed. Something in his windpipe howled painfully. "They caused this mess. Leave them."

"B-but...we's Good Guys." Power Plant's lip trembled. "W-we's help people."

Legion rechecked Scapegoat, then Power Plant. In the sunbeam, something glimmered on the young boy's cheek.

Legion's heart dived into his stomach. Shamefully, he looked away, not at Scapegoat, not at Power Plant, not at anybody. He was a scholar of Alaphus, not a tyrant. He should act like one. A scholar, that is. "Sixth Sense, grab Scapegoat. Be careful of encrusted snot. Power Plant, grab Ice Cream Headache from the nose cone. She's not actually ice cream, so don't lick her."

Legion caught his necklace's cross and brought it to his eye. The dip of the bullet hole in the cross glinted in the sunlight. Maybe Power Plant was useful for something after all. All right, all right. I get it, Legion prayed. And...thanks for the reminder.

"This girl's ain't taste like ice cream!"

"Jeff, what did I—" Long day already. Go with it. "Just lick through the chocolaty coating."

* * *

Mark bolted upright at the squeal of the Fireball's public address system turning on. "What's happening up there?" Ace Spandex asked through the loudspeaker.

From the crowd of onlookers, another voice pierced the babble of sound with a microphone. "Burnout, WNGG here with a question: yeah, what's happening up there?"

Mark hurried to the roof's edge. He put his hands to his mouth to funnel a yell to Ace Spandex. He wished he'd brought a gabber. "A hole blasted through the roof. I think it was my brother. After that, nothing."

Mark returned to the hole that wafted copper out. An acidic copper. Way too acrid, it burned his nostrils and smelled like Momentum's attempts at shepherd's pie.

From the hole, voices rose. Jeff's? No. Someone else's. Mark leaped into the air and hovered above jagged stone. His boot scraped against a bar that jutted up.

Smithereens's head emerged...then his torso. He grabbed the roof with a forearm and pulled Harrier's unconscious form out. His...one-winged...form out? Smithereens looked grimy. His nostrils leaked lines of blood down his upper lip. Vomit speckled his dirty chin and mustache. His eyes were reddened. He spat blood onto the roof. Had he deployed his silverware grenade?

Mark's breath caught in his throat. His heartbeat quickened with jolted beats. "Smith, is my brother with you?"

"Eh, he's the one holding me up, buddy. Mind giving me a hand?"

Mark grabbed fistfuls of Smithereens's collar and helped him out. He called down the hole, "Jeff!" Only the top of Jeff's blond head showed in the dim sunlight that Mark overshadowed.

"Hey, Mark. I's be out in a sec. Right now, I's makings more trips, bring out mores of our friends. I's be outside soon 'cause out there the airs don't burns my nose. Hey, I a shuttles bus."

Before Mark could stop him, Jeff's hair disappeared. Smithereens collapsed onto the roof, so Mark dragged Harrier away from the hole, shocked to find a stump where this morning a wing had been.

Jeff reappeared. He held up Kamikaze's broken body. Mark's heat flared, and he gritted his teeth. He grabbed the body only because that would get Jeff out sooner. He felt vindicated to see Car Alarm's arm impaling Kamikaze's black-clothed chest.

Jeff disappeared again but returned with Mabel, then Momentum, and then...Ice Cream Headache? What the piss? Mark and Smithereens helped Momentum out, then grabbed the Bad Guy.

"Jeff, do you realize you're saving the enemy? Has Franchise been playing with your head again?"

"They's prisoners. They's can finish my homeworks. And, yeah, he has."

Mark staggered away from the hole. His hand found its way to his shocked face. Now he knew what he hadn't before, why Legion kept risking Jeff's life, why Jeff kept insisting on helping. Mark looked the Good Guys over. The coppery air, the bloody noses, the vomit-smeared faces. If Jeff hadn't risked his life, everyone would have died. Jeff had saved people. Despite what everyone said about him, he had saved people.

Jeff emerged. Mark yanked him out and held him. He squeezed his brother in a vicelike hug as if afraid he'd fall back into the hole, swallowed in darkness and copper-tinged oxygen forever. "You're safe."

"No, I still dangerous." Jeff wrung out those strangled words. "Okay, ya don't have squeeze me to dead. Legion saves my lifes only ten minutes ago. He push me outta the way of a falling huge piece of stuff. Almost killed hisself doing it."

Mark pulled back but still held his brother. "He saved your life?"

"Uh-huh. So I don'ts needja going killings it to death."

Mark lowered Jeff gently to the ground, fighting tears that nevertheless streamed out. He rushed to the roof's edge and funneled his yell. "Ace, they're coming out! They're coming out and they're bringing the Bad Guys!" He paused a beat. "Don't ask."

On the ground, the reporters collectively gasped. Clapping and whistling ensued, though Mark knew they'd cut that from the broadcast footage to make this scene look as mournful as the funeral of anyone other than Kamikaze.

Mark scrambled back to the hole and reached out to whomever emerged next. Franchise's head appeared with a face as dirty as Smithereens's. His hand screened his eyes. "Holy amok sunlight. I think I'm blind." He inhaled deeply, euphoria on the face that he wiped dry of blood. "Untainted air, how I longed for thee."

"Tell me I don't have to haul out any of your duplicates." Mark grabbed Franchise's sweaty shoulders and hoisted him out of the hole. Null came next. Both Mark and Franchise dragged him out. Then Scapegoat. A second Bad Guy? Reef followed, climbed out of the hole, and rolled onto his stomach. He grabbed Pincushion's hand. Franchise grabbed the other. They hauled Pincushion out, his bone-spikes scraping the concrete and his dented knee screeching.

"Hey, brother, watch for the spikes," Pincushion said. His voice, as deep as the basement of a voice mansion, was no less booming outside than in.

"Hey." Franchise wobbled to the roof's edge. "Those tread marks in the field look like the artwork Jeffy scorches into the grass with our transports. Except this time with grace."

"Franchise, HPAN News here. Now that you're alive, tell our viewers about Scolart's everything-must-go sale. Only twenty thousand miles east of Space Cow off Interspace Seventy-One."

"Power Plant, WNBX here. Clean that cake mix off your face."

The hole sprouted a set of green antennae that followed into a bloody and wincing Trioxidillian face. Legion. He looked like a mess. Blood splotched his face more than any of the others. In several places, his impact suit was tattered, as if it had met with a shredder or Asinine's submarine sandwich cannon.

Vomited food painted his lips. Momentum's cheese-and-onion melon that now smelled like curdled milk. Mark recoiled but not from the melon.

Legion tried to lift himself onto the roof, but he slipped into the hole up to his shoulders. Sweat dripped from his brow. Sixth Sense levitated out past him and collapsed a few feet away. "Untainted air, how I longed for thee." He blinked as if realizing what he'd just declared. "Franchise came through here already, didn't he?"

Legion's hand shot out for Mark. "Mark, help!" His other hand grabbed the zigzagging rim of the hole. His spent muscles struggled to support him. With both hands, he clutched the hole's edge, peering up. Mark wanted a grenade. A gift for Legion.

Mark ruminated over holding out a hand or a fist, offering a grip or a kick. Forget Legion's one redeeming act of saving Jeff. Legion was a military bedlamite that had, on several occasions, jeopardized Jeff's life by undershooting the threat of danger. Because of Legion, Jeff had been inadequately prepared, shot at and shot, cut, involved in crashes, and worse. And no one could forget the hot pie-filling incident.

Mark checked the others. They rested along the roof's edge. Nobody was watching. Mark raised a foot over Legion's head. Legion stopped grunting, stopped struggling, the boot's grooves legible in his bloodshot eyes. Everyone would think Legion had fallen.

No. Mark couldn't. For as often as Legion had endangered Power Plant without properly preparing him, he'd given Power Plant the chance to accomplish much good. Mark lowered his foot, knelt, and offered a hand. Legion's face changed, now more confused. He looked unsure of which instinct to trust: the one that would allow Mark to help him or the one that thought Mark would grab his hand and cause him to combust.

Save the aggression for that reporter from WNBX.

Legion took the offered hand. Mark lifted him out and set him on the roof. He collapsed with his back on the surf of rubble and his legs dangling into the hole. Mark lay next to him. Both panted in unison. Wow, Trioxidillians were heavy.

Mark watched clouds drift past. "So you saved Jeff's life," he said, though he was unsure Legion heard him over the panting.

He had. The sentence registered in his face. "He mentioned that?"

"He did."

"Jeff is a living person. I had to."

"But you were the field leader. You know better than anyone that risking your life puts everyone else's in danger. So it's not as simple as that. You said he was useless and destructive, a screw-up. But you saved him." Mark finally asked, "Why?"

Legion shrugged. "I like that screw-up."

* * *

Plaster woke up, eyes sizzlin' from the bright light. He squeezed them shut but reopened them a tiny crack until they grew accustomed.

Where was he? He tried to stand, tried to spread his arms. They was bound behind him. Beside him, Master Asinine Sucks slouched unconsciously, attached to the wall by a full-body straitjacket. So was he. Oh, great. He hated these things. They squeezed so tight they lowered his freakin' sperm count.

He checked around. Oh, man. He was in the detainment deck o' that Good Guy Fireball. It didn't reek like sweat-stained dog poop like he'd imagined, but why'd it smell like chlorine?

On legs bound together into a mermaid's tail o' tight cloth, he lifted himself, angled his heels against the wall, pressed, shoved away, snapped somethin' apart, felt somethin' give, kicked Master Asinine Sucks in the jaw, shoved harder—

The restrainer ring pinnin' him to the wall popped off with a plink. Did the idiotic Good Guys expect to never restrain anyone with augmented strength?

Plaster stretched, and the straitjacket fell away, releasin' his limbs. Disconnected from the computer chip inside the restrainer ring, the cloth trappin' him fell like a second skin sheddin' away. They'd normally retract into the ring, but Plaster had shown that ring who was boss.

Plaster silently opened the door an' checked the cockpit deck. A single Good Guy twerped around the Fireball: the Twerp. He sat in the pilot's chair, facin' away and nursin' his broken ribs. He had no weapon, not even a joy buzzer. Plaster grabbed the peeled restrainer ring and straightened it into a shiv/backscratcher. Ooh, that felt good, right on the shoulder blade.

He snuck across the passenger deck, his eyes focused on Twerp, who preoccupied hisself with somethin' on the pilot's computer. Good.

Now, only three feet behind Twerp, he ignored stealth because the gas in his bowels had to go somewhere, an' it wasn't stayin' put. He bounded forward, brought the shiv up, snatched Twerp's hair back, and pressed the shiv against his neck.

"I need a getaway," Plaster said. "Drive this starship...then die."

Twerp swallowed, his Adam's apple scrapin' against the shiv. Along his neck, a red mark appeared. "Don't you mean, 'drive this starship or die'?"

"No."

* * *

Mark—no, Burnout again...maybe—landed on the grass, wilting two foot-shaped patches into the green. He set Franchise down. The ride would have been easier if last week Franchise hadn't gobbled up an entire box of snack cakes.

Both Power Plant and Sixth Sense looked exhausted, so Burnout alone carried everyone to the ground. Everyone's pain had subsided, and their nostrils no longer flowed like faucets in a horror movie. Whatever symptoms they'd displayed were quickly disappearing.

He arrowed back to the roof but accidentally slashed his foot along a slab of concrete and slammed into jagged shards of rock. With the media cameras rolling. Yeah. Great.

He limped to Sixth Sense, who stood isolated near the roof's edge. Only he, Legion, and Momentum needed to be dropped off. Not literally, despite the awakened Kamikaze cheering, "Push them off!"

"No!" Burnout turned his back to Kamikaze but reared around again. "And shut up!"

Sixth Sense still clutched his titanium case. His other hand massaged his forehead. He had complained of a returning headache and now inched around as if balancing a book on his skull.

Burnout approached him. "Should I wait before carrying you to the ground?"

Before answering, Sixth Sense winced. "Sure. Okay. Uhm. Now that Kamikaze's conscious, don't drop me no matter how much his thoughts make me beg."

Burnout nodded and started toward Momentum. Sixth Sense's empty hand shot out to grab his arm. Their eyes locked. Sixth Sense removed his other hand from his forehead as if his headache had suddenly disappeared.

"If you had shoved Legion in, I'd have known." Their eyes remained resolutely fixed. "Be careful around mind readers."

Burnout opened his mouth to say something but found himself wordless. Sixth Sense withdrew his hand. He sat gently and his hand fluttered back to his head.

"Hey, Sixth Sense!" Kamikaze hopped around the grass. "I know several ways to relieve that tension!"

Something close by choked to life. On the ground. Burnout twisted toward the sound. Ace Spandex was powering up the Fireball. Why? Landing on the roof would put the building out of its misery. Maybe Ace Spandex had a score to settle with the cave-in.

The Fireball rose unsteadily. Its rear bobbed, but its thrusters maintained a vertical rise until it leveled at about five feet and thrust forward. But it didn't keep an approach speed. It accelerated.

"Ace, what are you doing?" Burnout rushed to the roof's edge. "Ace, stop!"

"Ace, stop!" Kamikaze pouted as if something were terribly wrong. "Stop, go back, speed up, and come straight at me."

The Fireball shot toward the building. Reporters and cops dodged out of its way. It dipped close to the ground before swooping up. Burnout judged its trajectory, anticipating its course across the devastated rooftop. It charged straight toward Legion.

Burnout leaped into flight and rocketed forward. He scooped up Legion by the underarms, shot up, tried to dodge the Fireball—

The Fireball's windshield slammed into them. Burnout rolled over it, smelling plastic-metal-exhaust. He careened off the roof and spun in the air. Had he blacked out? He couldn't tell, but he had accidentally released Legion. He was dropping, spinning, plunging. Grass and sky whipped past his vision. Green grass, blue sky, green grass Pincushion's brown impact suit grass-sky-grass-sky. He caught himself in the air, recalibrated, and floated down.

Burnout searched the sky for Legion. There. Legion plummeted, hit his back against the roof's edge with a crack as audible as a bread stick snapping. Legion smacked into the parking lot asphalt.

Burnout landed on the roof, shaken and unable to stand. He gawked at Legion. Legion's lower left arm was bent underneath its upper half, folded in a way it shouldn't since he wasn't one of Jeff's action figures. His back was twisted into an L-shape. His right leg had splayed out, and a bone split the skin above the meat of his thigh. His shirt drooped as if his ribs had collapsed over his right lung.

Sixth Sense rushed up beside Burnout. "He's alive," Sixth Sense said, having forgotten his headache. "Hurry. I can barely read his thoughts. As an FYI, they're all muttering, 'Ouch.'"

Burnout yelled down, "Someone get one of the med-trans!"

"Already dones," Jeff said. "Wait. Ya says med-tran or pizza-tran?"

Chapter Thirty: Grand Theft Autopilot

Plaster watched Master Asinine Sucks tap a few buttons on the navigation console of the stolen Fireball. The cowboy twanged along with the tune played on whatever they called this hickster station. Rootin' Tootin' FM? Crock, he hated that cowboy-hat-totin', hick-accent-butcherin' bumpkin. Plaster had no pilot skills, so Master Asinine Sucks piloted, and so he chose the music. Master Asinine Sucks sucked.

The hickster attempted to high-pitch a drawled note. He failed. Plaster shielded his eyes 'cause he stood too close to glass. He'd deliver a shut-up slap if that note continued in a moment. Or regardless.

"Just fly the stupid starship!" Plaster yelled to overpower the noise blastin' from Master Asinine Sucks and them banjo-playin' backwoodsmen on the broadcast. "I ain't in need of a freakin' serenade." Why had Master Asinine included this cowboy doofus in the Bad Guy Sunday choir?

"I am flyin', partner," Master Asinine Sucks sass-twanged, partly in tune to the music, only he couldn't carry no tune. He waved a hand in front o' his nose. "Do the Good Guys shop at pool supply centers?"

"Look, since we're already movin', I can strap ya back in that straitjacket an' stick this thing on automatic." Plaster indicated the detainment deck's door.

Lookin' like he realized he'd left the iron on at home, Master Asinine Sucks let his last note twang to a hollow "eep." Good.

Plaster checked the passenger deck. Twerp's body still leaked blood all over the carpet, the shiv stickin' outta his throat. Hey, he'd refused to pilot the starship. His loss, Plaster's gain.

THE END

NEXT BOOK:

Appetite wins Best in Show at the pet fair.

About That Guy Whose Book You Read Once

Liam Gibbs knew he was destined to write at age four, when he authored a breathtaking account of a cow who ate grass. The bovine saga failed to catch the public's eye but earned the budding author parental acclaim. Since those early times, he's gone on to write the novella Not So Superpowered and humorous articles for various magazines.

A twenty-year veteran of the brutal world of hand-to-hand comic book fandom, Gibbs cut his teenage teeth on titles such as Spider-Man, X-Men, New Warriors, and other Marvel comics.

Gibbs graduated college with a degree in professional writing, which included classes on fiction writing and story structure. He lives on the balmy shores of Ottawa, Canada, where he relaxes by watching staggeringly awful horror and science fiction movies. A health and fitness nut, he shoots lasers from his eyes, uses the word exclusive incorrectly, and once wrestled an exclusive brontosaurus. True story.

That one time I was deep in thought and—Hey, is that ketchup on the ceiling?

Sick of seeing no character art on the IAGFFA web site? So is the author.

But professional art costs money. Help out by donating at http://tiny.cc/iagffa_donate.

The author wants to give you free stuff! For free even!

Join the In a Galaxy Far, Far AwRy army and get an exclusive, free story you can't find anywhere else...just for signing up! How? Mosey on over to tiny.cc/iagffa_army for all the details.

How awesome is that?

For updates and to make sure I'm not eating potato chips for dinner, do yourself a favor and check this series out online. It's the right thing to do.

Get news on it at inagalaxyfarfarawRy.com

Keep tabs on it at tiny.cc/iagffa_facebook

Follow it at tiny.cc/iagffa_twitter

Study up on it at tiny.cc/iagffa_linkedin

Communicate via homing pigeon at chirp-twiddle-twoo or whatever pigeons say.

Table of Contents

Your Favorite Table of Contents

Available on the Author's Super-Awesome Site

Chapter One: Heavy Metal Thunder

Chapter Two: Quitting Time

Chapter Three: Stupid Is as Stupid Does

Chapter Four: Some Machinery Somewhere Went Indefinably Something

Chapter Five: Not Quite Settled

Chapter Six: Future Prospects

Chapter Seven: Finger-Pointing and Blame-Throwing

Chapter Eight: What the Crock Was That?

Chapter Nine: A Very Stupid Thing to Do

Chapter Ten: Whiplash Aftereffect

Chapter Eleven: Late-Breaking News

Chapter Twelve: Life after Near Death

Chapter Thirteen: Like a Steel Spike Rammed up Your Afterburner

Chapter Fourteen: Inoperable Rescue Operation

Chapter Fifteen: A Refreshing Assault on the Brain

Chapter Sixteen: Proactive Hyperactive

Chapter Seventeen: Escape Attempt

Chapter Eighteen: Draft like a Life Raft

Chapter Nineteen: Connect the Dots

Chapter Twenty: Lambasted Youth

Chapter Twenty-One: Dive-Bomb Street Pizza

Chapter Twenty-Two: That Uneasy Feeling

Chapter Twenty-Three: Desperate Times...

Chapter Twenty-Four: Separation Anxiety Amplified

Chapter Twenty-Five: Grade-School Sissy Fight

Chapter Twenty-Six: So Far, No Good

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Meeting of the Minds

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Firefight

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Psychic Backtrack and Physical Ship-Smack

Chapter Thirty: Grand Theft Autopilot

About That Guy Whose Book You Read Once