Centurion Six: Issue #1, Part 6

Our Story So Far:

Captains Blaine “Centurion Six” Winters and Jacob “Zulu” Mbeke of the New York State National Guard Enhanced Forces Division (EFD) are called out to consult on a multiple homicide in the south Bronx.  The case seems like routine “skrag” gang violence until our heroes are attacked by some kind of killer cyborg robot-monkey mounting a highly advanced stealth/security system and a small-caliber machine pistol.

Meanwhile, teenaged ultra-human club girl Rebecca Rodriguez uses her Telekinesis to sneak out for a night on the town in Upper West Side Manhattan.  She meets up with her friends, uses her Empathy to talk their way into Pacha, and then parties like there’s no tomorrow. Having lost control of her powers, she then wanders drunkenly out into the streets of Manhattan at three in the morning.

Author's Notes: Sorry for the short piece this week.  It's vacation, and I've taken a break from work of all kinds this week. 

As always, to read the story from the beginning click the Centurion Six keyword down below.

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The streets of New York were empty at three in the morning, and Blaine made good time on his ride back to the Upper West Side.  He’d stopped at an Inwood convenience store to clean out the worst of his wounds, slap a compression bandage on the hole in his chest, and throw on a clean white tee shirt, but he knew he still looked like a mess.  The docs at the EFD had once measured his “invulnerability” and determined that his skin was about as tough as cured leather and that his underlying musculature had about the same consistency as oak.  As it happened, Blaine reflected, that was enough to save him from a few indirect explosions and some small caliber machine-pistol fire.  It was not, however, proof against a super-stealth robot-monkey-thing wielding very sharp tempered steel knives. 

Still, Blaine thought, his wounds could wait.  Ditto for why a super-stealth robot-monkey-thing was even involved in what had appeared to be a simple gangland homicide case.  The technology involved in that thing’s appearance was impressive—and more than a little scary—but perhaps not quite as scary as the fact that the evidence suggested that Blaine’s one-time friend Jason King might be involved in whatever-the-Hell was really going on back in the South Bronx.  If Jason was really involved, that was bad news.  Very bad news.  Especially if he’d started killing people.

But all of that could wait.  First Blaine had to find Rebecca—Jailbait—before she got into God knew what kind of trouble in some big city club at three in the morning.  And just as importantly, before Rebecca’s dad Colonel Joachim Rodriguez, callsign Águila—yes the Eagle, that Eagle—found out that Blaine’s team had again let his precious daughter sneak out while the Colonel himself was away on some super hush-hush high priority mission with the EFD’s foreign services branch.  Because after that happened, Rebecca’s dad was likely to kick Blaine’s ass up between his ears.  Add in the disaster with the South Bronx homicide case—one dead cop, two massive explosions resulting in the utter destruction of all evidence at the crime scene, and the fact that Blaine and his team had let the super-stealth robot-monkey-thing get away on top of everything else—and frankly Blaine wasn’t sure that his career would survive if in addition to all of that Rebecca also managed to get herself into some kind of trouble downtown, too.

Blaine gunned the throttle on his bike, and the lights of the City sped by.  He was almost to the club where Mainframe had said Rebecca had gone, but somehow he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was already too late.

The problem was that Rebecca, like most of Blaine’s friends, was an ultra-human.  She was, in fact, an incredibly powerful ultra-human, one whose gifts were so extreme that she often had trouble controlling them.  And she liked to party.  Hence her callsign, Jailbait.  It was hard enough keeping a girl like that out of trouble in the Mundie world.  Give that same girl a set of super-powers-on-overdrive that she could barely control, and suddenly keeping her out of trouble became a virtual impossibility.

Bottom line, Blaine needed to find her ASAP.  Where Jailbait was concerned, a lot could happen in a very short amount of time.