Arsenal (Full Metal Superhero Book 1) Read online

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  EPILOGUE

  ARSENAL

  FULL METAL SUPERHERO: BOOK 1

  by

  Jeffery H. Haskell

  Copyright © 2017 Jeffery H. Haskell

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this work may be reproduced without the express, written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. For permission contact the author at: www.JefferyHHaskell.com

  Cover illustration and design by www.VividCovers.com

  To my wonderful wife, Rebekah, none of this would be possible without you. I love you. Also, for Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and Marvel Comics. Thank you for Peter Parker the Amazing Spider-man. You gave a lost boy the precious gift of hope.

  It’s one thing to build something and imagine using it. It’s another to actually do it.

  -From the journal of Amelia Lockheart

  Alarms scream in my ears as the ground flashes by, followed by the sky. What happened? Right, White Rhino punched me. Like an idiot, I stood there and took it. My heads up display shows my stupidity in brilliant crimson numbers. Power levels at thirty-seven percent. Kinetic shields— down. If it weren’t for those little gems I’d be in pieces all over the pavement.

  The narrow streets and tall buildings glistened in the mid-afternoon sun, reminding me I don’t have a lot of room to maneuver.

  “Epic, re-route power to thrusters and get those shields back on-line!” I didn’t need to tell him, not really, he would do it. The light over my boot and back thrusters flip from red to green. I fire them off to give me some control. The momentum lets me stabilize myself and start flying instead of falling.

  Amelia, the kinetic shields are damaged.

  A list of components and systems scroll across my vision in angry red.

  “Now isn’t the time for a shopping list. Where’s White Rhino and Vixen?” The duo had decided on robbing my little corner of Phoenix. They probably thought the limited number of capes in Arizona made it a prime target. Lucky for Maricopa county I happen to be in the testing phase of my MKI Armored Battle Suit.

  I pull up the GPS and put a pin on where they are. Using my hand stabilizers I make a gentle turn, heading back the way I came. My power cells are already recharging under the sunlight. I hit the ground feet first Epic tells me we’re at fifty-percent power. Along with my shields, Epic is my other stroke of genius. An autonomous artificial intelligence. Without him I couldn’t begin to run the armor.

  My kinetic shielding springs to life as the dynamic duo’s minions spray me with automatic weapons fire.

  I didn’t design the suit for aesthetics, but I think it’s pretty. Red and white and curvy lines with a slightly feminine look. I am a girl, I don’t want to fly around in a man suit.

  Epic shows where each bullet hits. My primary invention, the one from which makes entire suit possible, is my kinetic manipulators. Without which, thank god, I would be street pizza.

  “Charge IP cannons.” I lift my arms up and point my hands out in front of me. Vixen takes off running to the side leaving Rhino and a half dozen flunkies spread out on the street.

  The light blinks and I fire. Ionic Pulse energy blasts through the normal humans. The energy overrides the ions in their nerves preventing communications for a few seconds. Not enough to kill them but enough to drop most people. I smile as they spaz on the ground. It’s like a Taser on steroids, one which also hits with enough force to flatten a normal human.

  Vixen hits from behind, wrapping razor sharp claws around my mirrored faceplate. Sparks fly off her claws as they merely slide along the surface.

  The alloy in the suit can take it. I don’t know what her claws are made of and I don’t care. I grab her wrist and heave her over me. She flips through the air with the grace of a ballet dancer and lands twenty feet away, ready to attack.

  My proximity alarm blares. I barely have time to engage my thrusters and leap into the air when a pickup truck passes through the space I had occupied moments before. The truck crashes into the third floor of the building behind me. I wince as the glass and metal fall to the ground.

  White Rhino is thirty feet away and picking up another vehicle to throw. I didn’t know he was strong enough to do that!

  “Charge IP cannons, maximum power!” More alarms as power from my kinetic shielding are diverted to the cannons. It doesn’t matter, shields up or down, I can’t let him hit me again. I fly up, bank and come back down over the next vehicle he tosses at me. I hope all the civilians have gotten out of the way. I line up for a perfect strafing run and discharge both cannons at near point blank range. The energy blast is enormous and my HUD visibly dims as the drain hits the batteries.

  And now I know the flaw of my MKI suit.

  He shrugs off the cannons like he didn’t even feel them. They literally could take down a real rhino. It never occurred to me I would need a different weapon. Then the world spins as Rhino lands another blow. Alarms scream for a half second then go silent as my power core gives up the ghost.

  The G's are too much and I can’t hold on. Everything goes black.

  I haven’t left my lab in a few days, not since I took the beat down from the dynamic duo. The lab-slash-house has everything I need anyways. I can’t believe my shortsightedness. My arm hangs painfully in a sling bumping against my chest whenever it moves. I can’t see out of my right eye and I’m pretty sure I have a concussion. Most of these things can be explained away by ‘wheelchair accidents’. Even minor ones can sometimes be unforgiving. I would rather not explain it at all, though.

  “Epic, play it again please.”

  Are you sure? He prints out on my laptop screen. I sigh. “Yes, I need to know how to fix this.” I have the suit up on a specially made rig that supports each piece and provides power to them individually. If I hadn’t hacked the power box attached to the house I could only imagine what my bill would be.

  The good news is, physically, the suit is mostly fine. The core frame is forged of titanium bonded with tungsten carbide a mixture of my own design, that as far as I know, isn’t possible for anyone else. I don’t lightly throw around the word indestructible, but yeah, it is. The suit held up spectacularly. With a few added additions, like one more power cell for whatever weapon I come up with to stop people like Rhino, it will be fine. My biggest obstacle to a new weapon system is the limit of my current power cells. I just don’t have anywhere to put another one.

  The Ion Pulse Cannons work great against normals. It didn’t occ
ur to me a super like Rhino would shrug it off.

  I glance over at the news as one of the correspondents starts talking about what happened.

  “Mute,” I tell it. I don’t want to hear how a new armored hero had her ass handed to her in three different languages. The good news is, the government spook from the Department of Metahuman Affairs said, ‘no comment’ and my regional team of state-sponsored heroes, the Diamondbacks, aren’t saying anything either.

  I don’t think they would have fared much better. Rhino is unbelievably strong. The public database has him listed as an F4. Which explains why he could toss a truck at me without breaking a sweat. I spend a few minutes programming a link for Epic to download the database and compare it to news stories worldwide. The next time I go into a fight I want to know what my opponents are capable of.

  I’m still annoyed about them escaping. His last punch sent me a mile away. By the time I returned they were long gone. At least they hadn’t gotten away with very much money.

  As I’m tinkering I notice the Diamondbacks are on screen Investigating the scene of the robbery along with the police. Their leader, Major Force is moving some of the rubble of the vehicles like it was made of paper.

  I’m glad there isn’t an APB out for me because the suit and I aren’t ready. I pull up a hologram of the internal workings and look for a way to route more power to the shields without blowing—

  A pebble hits my window. I try to ignore it, but it is followed by another one.

  “Amelia,” I hear from outside. I sigh and roll myself over to the window. Carlos waves from below, grinning like an idiot. Fortunately for me, he’s the only one who knows my secret. We’ve been friends since I moved into the neighborhood, four years ago after I finally achieved emancipation from my uncle. Carlos was the only kid who would come talk to the girl in the wheelchair. I think I can trust him, besides if he was going to betray me he would have a while ago.

  I open the window and stare down at him. My brow furrowed, “I’m busy, come back later.”

  “Holy hell, what happened to you?”

  “You didn’t see the news?” I say.

  “That was you?”

  I nod. “Now, go away, I have work to do.”

  “Come on, bring me up and let me hang out. My brothers family is over and my house is way crowded.” His older brother has a wife and four kids. Carlos’ parents had a decent spread on their children if I recall Juan is about forty. Carlos, like me, is twenty. He should be in college or working, instead, he spends his nights playing guitar and his days sleeping. That is when he isn’t over here watching my flat screen TV and drinking my Cokes.

  “Fine, I’ll buzz you in,” I tell him. I live and work on the second floor. I had it seriously customized, including having the front door run on magnetics, allowing me to open and close it from up here. I hate having to go up and down stairs. Even with a lift, it’s a pain in my rear end.

  He looks disappointed. I know what he wants but I’m not doing it. The sun is still up and I can’t risk anyone seeing him float up into my workshop.

  I remodeled the entire second floor to be three rooms, a workshop, my sleeping slash entertainment room, and a large bathroom designed specifically for me. On top of all of the comfort modifications, I added thermal resistant paint, a Faraday cage, and reinforced the walls with enough carbon steel it would take a tank round to punch through them.

  I hear him knock downstairs and I wave my hand at Epic to have him open the front door. A few seconds later he is in the room rummaging through my mini fridge for Cokes.

  “I don’t understand why you don’t patent this stuff and retire. You could make a mint, set yourself up at Encanto Park, have a driver, live the life of a rock star.” That would appeal to him. I can’t help but grin.

  The process by which I bind the alloys together would net me millions, maybe billions, but money isn’t my plan. I do need some for my research, but my goals are much further afield than mere dollars.

  “I need to get this right and then I will think about all of that,” I wave my hand, dismissing the idea. He’s never asked how I could afford everything I have. I think he is under the impression I inherited the house or something. I don’t have the heart to tell him I sold an inertia absorbing energy oscillator to Lockheed when I was fifteen. It’s how I afforded the house and the lawyer to emancipate myself from Uncle Inezo.

  In the meantime, I started a trust for my poor Uncle. It pays for his counseling and for a sponsor to encourage him to go to his AA meetings. He has no idea. He’s not a bad fellow, but he isn’t my mom and dad. He was just the only relative who would take in a six-year-old with a broken back. Maybe he did it for the check, maybe not, I don’t know. At least he took me in, the rest of my family sure didn’t.

  The money I made off the deal left me with a little over twenty million. It wasn’t hard to create a company, I call it Mars Tech Global, a lofty-sounding name. Technically I am the sole person on the payroll. I’m also the CEO. I use the company to order my parts and then route them to my house. It’s all very complicated, but it works, mostly because of Epic. Of course, I put him to work on trading algorithms and he’s busy making me money from the money I have. Money may not be the goal, but it certainly makes things easier.

  “But how do you afford all this stuff? This place looks like you robbed a computer store from the future.”

  I smile. “Just because I won’t sell the suit doesn’t mean I won’t sell anything. Hand me that scanner will you?” He passes it to me and I run it over the suit one more time. Even a microfracture could prove fatal. The suit has to have full structural integrity to work at peak efficiency.

  “So,” he says as he pops open a Coke. “What went wrong?” He gestures to the screens showing my fight with White Rhino.

  “I made one weapon and thought it would cover every eventuality. It didn’t,” I say with a sigh. I need another weapon on the suit, but how do I get past the power requirements? I can maybe add one more power cell, making the total three, but even then I don’t know if it will be enough to mount another system. As it is I have about four hours of light activity, two of moderate, and thirty minutes of sustained combat. Adding the extra cell would only give me maybe twenty percent to those figures. Assuming I can even figure out how to add it.

  “Amelia, take a break, the suit isn’t going anywhere.” He turns on the Xbox and fires up our favorite game. “Besides, I need some payback for the other night.”

  I let out an exaggerated sigh. He’s right, the armor isn’t going anywhere and trying to fix things on a tired, beat-up brain isn’t going to help.

  “Oh come on, Carlos, you think you can take me? Pshh, not on your best day could you ever come close to me on my worst day.”

  “It’s on girl. It’s on like Donkey Kong.”

  I push my wheels over next to him and pick up my own controller. I have a custom one with my name on it, as does he. The game is exciting and pretty quick I lose myself in our verbal sparring.

  “No wonder you lost your fight, you can’t hit for crap,” he jostles me in the shoulder.

  Then I headshot him. He goes still for a second before he mutters dammit. I will give him this, in our mixed culture down here, guys do not take well to losing to girls, especially the macho guys. Carlos though, he lets it roll off him like water off a duck’s back.

  “Okay, niña, round two.”

  I envy him. My mom was a first generation immigrant from Columbia. She and dad met while they were in school and they hit it off. However, I never really learned her culture or language before…

  Carlos blasts me and my avatar goes flying. The game spins around in the death slow motion allowing me to see my rise and fall in perfect detail.

  While we’re waiting for the next match to load he leans back. “Your super Tasers didn’t work against him, huh? Too bad, you can’t shoot him with a rocket or something. Of course, he’s built like a tank so that probably wouldn’t help.”


  I close my eyes and try not to sound too sarcastic. “You think?”

  “He’s not like you, though, right? I mean he has to punch you or throw something at you… what if you could just,” he snapped his fingers, “make him float away?”

  My mouth opens with a retort that is immediately forgotten, and I stop cold.

  I’m an idiot.

  “Why didn’t you come over earlier?” I tell him.

  Carlos shrugs. “I have to time my moments of genius for maximum effect.”

  He isn’t wrong. I can build a grenade launcher and use my pods as a ranged weapon. I rub my hands together. It will take a little work, but I think it will be awesome.

  The grenade launcher is pure genius. By collecting small amounts of my exhaust as I fly, I’m able to put a pod, or anything similar in weight and size, almost three hundred feet away. Now I can arm it with any combination of weapons. I had to add a few pieces of telemetry to Epic’s algorithms and now he can account for any weather condition when I’m firing. Not that Phoenix is ever anything other than hot and dry.

  This high up my power cells recharge as fast as I expend them. I can also see the city of Phoenix laid out before me like a big gray lake nestled in between mountain ranges.

  Carlos certainly wasn’t wrong. If it was money I wanted, I could make a fortune selling all my tech. It’s not though. I want my parents back. I shuffle those thoughts away, they’re painful and I don’t want to deal with them right now.

  “Epic, show me news and/or footage. Keywords ‘crime in progress’ ‘powers’ ‘Rhino or Vixen.”

  The list of searches flies by. Epic knows to filter out the useless garbage and also the things erroneously marked with today's date. Two things pop up. One’s an amusement park and the other is a bank.

  “Why an amusement park?” I ask my AI. The possibilities pop on screen. It’s a long weekend, the parks will have a larger till than normal. The police response time would be slower as well. I think on it for a second. The other article is the police increasing bank security around National One, the largest bank in Phoenix. If I were Rhino, I would go for the park.