Mechanical-Arm Spider #80
The Space Hog broke atmosphere and Star City announced itself with smoke.
Lobo throttled back and let the bike drift on its repulsors, hanging two thousand feet above the urban grid while he read the damage.
The fires were mostly east and south, some of them dying down to the grey-white column stage and some of them still properly orange, and the pattern of them had a specific shape -- not the radial spread of a disaster working outward from one point but the sequential signature of something that had moved through, touched this, skipped that, turned a corner and touched something else. He'd seen cities hit by metahumans before. He'd hit a few himself. He recognized the grammar of it.
The Spider was here, alright.
He pulled the Dreamstone from the chest pocket of his jacket and held it up against the sky. The red light in it moved the way it always moved -- restless, patterned, pressing at the surface from inside like something that understood it was being looked at. Death had held it in her palm like it weighed nothing, which it did and didn't depending on what you knew about what it contained. Lobo had been careful with it in the way he was careful with things worth serious money -- not gentle exactly, just deliberate about not losing it.
He turned it once and put it back.
One million credits. Guaranteed resurrection. One selection from her personal collection -- and he still hadn't decided what he wanted from there, which meant the job needed to get done so he could take his time with the browsing.
Below him, a curl of smoke was still rising from a block that had been burning hotter than its neighbors, and he was lining up a descent angle when the sound reached him.
It hit him at altitude, which should not have been possible. He felt it before he heard it -- the repulsors on the Space Hog stuttering for exactly one second as the frequency moved through the bike's systems, and then the sound itself arriving, a sustained resonance that came up through the seat and the handlebars and his own skeleton simultaneously. His back teeth pressed together on reflex. The mirrors on the handlebars were vibrating at a rate that made them useless.
He looked south, toward the source of it.
The sound had already peaked and was fading by the time it reached him, which meant the origin was a long way down and a long way south, and whatever had produced it had produced it at a volume that could travel two thousand feet of altitude and still move the mirrors on his bike. Lobo had heard a lot of things across a lot of worlds and he had a working catalog of what each category of sound meant in terms of what you'd find if you followed it back.
That one meant someone who could do serious damage was doing serious damage.
He grinned around the cigar, bit down, and opened the throttle.
Where there was smoke, there was fire. Where there was a sound that could rattle a Space Hog at altitude, there was something worth finding. And whatever had been in the middle of all this burning had been in the middle of it for hours -- recent, active, still drawing attention. The Spider would be at the center of it, because that was where things that needed catching always were, and Lobo had been doing this long enough that he didn't need a tracker or a data feed or any of Death's supplemental intelligence.
He just needed the direction.
He had the direction.
He pointed the Space Hog south and let the repulsors open up, and the city grid rose toward him as he dropped.
🕸️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕸️
The Canary Cry had gone through the cracked partition like it wasn't there.
Jake had felt it coming -- felt Sleeper pull back across his entire torso in the fraction of a second before it hit, the symbiote concentrating behind him, covering the disc, abandoning the arm. The sound hit everything else in the room at full volume and the cracked glass finished breaking, and the equipment bench along the east wall came off its mounts, and Dr. Chen went sideways into the wall with her arm up to protect her head and stayed down.
The mechanical arm had gone dark. All of it at once -- the palm frozen again at its half-open position, the fingers stopping mid-motion, the interface filaments going cold where they'd been warm for the last seven minutes. He could feel the absence of it the same way you could feel a held breath after it collapsed -- the nerve cluster at his elbow reaching for something that had stopped answering.
Oliver was already through the broken partition, bow up, the second shaft nocked and aimed at the center of Jake's throat.
Canary was two steps behind him, and she had stopped looking at Oliver. She was looking at Jake's back, at the place where the disc sat under Sleeper's coverage, and her expression was doing something that had nothing in it of the morning's chemical warmth.
Jake turned to face them.
He pulled the disc from Sleeper and looked at the bow and then at Canary and let the situation speak for itself. "Careful," he said. His voice came out level, which was the right register for what he was communicating. "What you do next could be what makes you truly lose this."
He held the record before him.
Oliver's draw didn't shift.
"Whatever the Cry hits from here," Jake said, "hits the disc. Same for whatever's on that second shaft." His eyes moved to Canary. Her hands were tight at her sides, and she was looking at his chest with an intensity that was pressing outward from someplace the pheromones hadn't reached as thoroughly as the rest of her. "You've still got it," he said to her. "That hasn't changed yet."
"Give it back." Her voice came out wrong -- too flat, too compressed, the way a voice sounded when the speaker was working against something in their own chest. "Give it back to me."
He didn't answer that. He turned instead to Chen, who had gotten herself to a sitting position against the east wall, one hand braced on the floor, the other held close to her body where she'd taken the impact. "What's left," he said.
She looked up at him. Then at the arm. Then she said, "The failsafe is still embedded. I didn't get to it."
"Forget the failsafe." He crossed to her in two steps. "What do I need to get the arm working?"
She looked at the arm, at the interface point, and her eyes moved to the rack of compound vials on the overturned carrier unit -- most of them scattered, two still in their housing. One green. She nodded toward it. "The nerve signal isn't crossing the interface cleanly under stress. The Kobra-Venom compound -- modified strain, what we've been running in the subjects -- it'll accelerate the nerve-to-interface communication rate. Force the link to complete instead of waiting for calibration." She paused. "It won't be comfortable."
He had the vial out of the housing before she finished the sentence, disc held tightly under his elbow.
The syringe was already loaded -- prepared for the subjects, the dosage pre-measured. He found the injection point at his shoulder, where the arm's upper mounting ran along his left side to the shoulder joint, the additional support structure that had been part of the engineering design and had dug into his shoulder blade for the last two hours. He pressed the needle in and pushed the plunger.
The effect was not subtle.
The nerve cluster at his elbow fired all at once, a sustained cramp that moved from the interface point outward through the arm in a wave, and the arm's palm snapped shut and then open and then shut again, the mechanical fingers working through the motion three times before they slowed to something controlled. The elbow joint rotated to a position it hadn't reached before. He moved the forearm through a slow arc -- up, out, back to neutral -- and felt the interface reading him for the first time as a continuous signal instead of interrupted noise.
The Kobra-Venom had found his bloodstream. He could feel that separately -- a warmth moving through his chest and up through his neck that was more than the arm, the compound doing what it did, the familiar push of his endurance ceiling lifting past where it had been sitting since the Canary Cry at the intersection. Again. The green vial again.
Oliver hadn't lowered the bow.
"He won't give it back." The archer said between clenched teeth.
Canary's mouth opened, about to protest, please, or threatened. Jake stopped her.
"He's right." Jake said, holding out the record before him. "I won't. Can't afford to."
"GIVE ME BACK MY MOTHER'S RECORD!" she screamed.
"Redeem."
The record came apart in his hands -- black firelight, absorbed, gone in the space of two seconds. The time bank updated at the edge of his vision and he let the number sit there without looking at it directly, because looking at it would require him to look at where the record had been.
"No!"
Jake didn't get to register the expression on Canary's face.
The arrow came through the gap at his left side -- he moved and it passed by his shoulder.
Jake raised the mechanical arm, palm forward, and let the fingers extend fully. The blue charge at the discharge port flickered -- attempted, fell short, flickered again. He held the arm steady and waited, and on the third flicker it caught and held, and the charge built past the threshold and he released it. Oliver was already out of the way. The blast opened a section of the wall that rained dust across the broken room.
Then he directed the arm's intention somewhere else.
The web fluid moved through the shoulder mounting, through the arm's internal channel, and out through the aperture where the discharge port sat -- slower than his right wrist, the pressure lower, the strand thinner, but it caught the wall twelve feet away and held. He pulled against it and the connection was real.
Oliver released the second shaft.
The web from the mechanical arm caught it two feet out, the strand closing around the shaft and yanking it sideways into the floor where the explosive tip detonated against the epoxy and the concussion pushed Jake's weight sideways without moving his feet.
Oliver reached for a third shaft and Canary was already moving and Jake crossed the room in three steps, firing a line from his right wrist at her throat -- not a wrap, a push, the web hitting her collar and snapping her backward two steps so her footing broke. She recovered faster than he'd modeled.
He got inside the recovery and put a palm into her sternum and she went down to one knee and he was already past her, already at Oliver, already reaching for the bow.
Oliver snapped it.
A sharp motion, both hands, the recurve breaking at the grip in a crack that filled the room, and he looked up at Jake from two feet away with both halves in his hands and something in his eyes that was not quite a smile but was adjacent to one.
Jake stood there with his hand still reaching.
Then he let out a short exhale that was punctuated with disappointment. "You didn't walk in here with that bow just to ruin the ending."
"I didn't," Oliver said.
His hand went to his quiver and came out with something that wasn't a shaft -- compact, cylindrical, the engineering of it recognizably different from the arrow casings. He threw it and moved simultaneously -- toward Canary, low, his hand already reaching to pull her clear.
She was already up.
She ducked under his arm without looking at him and drove herself at Jake, both hands going for his throat, knee rising -- and Oliver pulled up short with nothing in his hands and the cylinder already in the air.
"Dinah--"
She didn't hear him. Or heard him and didn't care.
Jake had cleared three feet before Canary hit him right as the cylinder hit the floor.
No setup, no angle, just her throwing herself at his left side with both hands going for his throat and her knee already rising. He caught her wrist with the mechanical arm and she bit down on the joint hard enough to find the seam between plating and pushed her thumb into it, and when that didn't work she headbutted him.
He stumbled. She came with him.
The cylinder detonated.
The blast was concentrated, not wide -- purpose-built, the kind of payload that Oliver had clearly been saving for exactly this kind of target. It hit Jake from below with enough force to drive him into the ceiling and Sleeper surged across every inch of him simultaneously, hardening, taking the pressure wave and the heat and the shrapnel pattern in the fraction of a second before full contact.
And then Sleeper began to dissolve.
Not retreat -- dissolve. The black material thinning from the outside in, burning away in slow sections that peeled from his arms first and then his chest, the symbiote pulling back into his body at the shoulder joints and disappearing, the coverage shrinking, the classic suit underneath appearing in patches that widened until there was nothing left. Jake hit the floor on one knee and stayed there for a second with his hands on the epoxy and no symbiote and the ringing in his skull from the ceiling impact cycling down.
He rose.
Oliver was across the room, one hand on the wall, the blast radius having put him there. His eyes moved to Jake -- to the suit, to the absence of Sleeper -- and held.
Something was moving near Jake's feet.
Canary.
She'd been between him and the floor when the blast hit. He'd felt her there -- had put himself over her on the way down without deciding to, the same way the body moves before the mind catches up. She was face-down on the epoxy, jacket scorched across the back. Her chest was moving.
Jake reached down and turned her over with the mechanical arm and straightened.
He looked at Oliver.
Then he grabbed her by the neck and lifted her up. Her hands found his forearm and her legs kicked weakly, the fight still in her but not enough of it.
"Stop." Oliver stepped forward, hands up. "Stop. You just saved her -- you put yourself between her and--"
Jake looked at him. Then he lowered her, slightly, enough that Oliver stopped moving.
"The explosion you almost killed her with," Jake said.
"That's not--"
"Not what you intended." He let that sit for a second. "I'm familiar with that."
Oliver said nothing.
"Doesn't change the fact that you almost blew up your own friend." Jake's grip tightened on her neck and she made a sound low in her throat, her fingers still working at his forearm. "I didn't save her. I stopped her from dying by your hands -- because that would've been a waste." He looked at Oliver steadily. "She's better dying by my hand if she can get me a step closer to getting my friend back."
His eyes moved to the dissolved absence where Sleeper had been.
The ceiling came apart.
The entire north section folded inward and outward simultaneously, the Space Hog coming through nose-first with the repulsors screaming and Lobo's chain already out, the links catching the internal support strut and taking most of the remaining wall with them. Ceiling tiles, rebar, insulation -- everything coming down across a radius that emptied every surface the blast hadn't already cleared.
The Space Hog settled in the wreckage, engine cycling to an idle, and Lobo sat in the saddle with the cigar clamped in the corner of his mouth and one forearm on the handlebars and took his time looking at the room.
The broken partition. An unarmed Green Arrow. And the Spider standing in the middle of it holding an unconscious woman off the ground by her neck with a mechanical arm.
"Hnh." Lobo bit down on the cigar and looked around the room with the particular appreciation of someone arriving at an aftermath they wish they'd been part of. His eyes settled on Jake -- on the mechanical arm, the unconscious woman dangling from it.
"Hm. Spider, yeah?" He scratched his chin. "Looks like I walked in on somethin'." A beat, genuinely considering it. "Should probably wait for ya to wrap up."
He looked at Oliver. At Canary. Back at Jake.
"Nah." He swung the chain out in a slow, lazy arc, the links catching the room's light. "I been waitin' since fraggin' last night. Whatever this is -- it'll keep."
~MimicLord
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