Dreadnought: Chapters 1–5

The space between the mall and the ramp is deserted and strewn with ancient litter.

Sometimes when I see myself in a mirror I get a little jolt, a little splash of fear sluicing down my spine.

He wants me to be strong and boisterous and popular. It’s bad enough I’m quiet and like to be alone, bad enough I don’t like sports even after he forced me to join the football team, bad enough I couldn’t care less about cars.

Another explosion rips through the building, blasts the top three floors to glass shrapnel, and like a stunned yokel I just sit there and stare.

Dreadnought. Mightier than a battleship, faster than a jet, and so on.

I scuttle out of our hiding space and dash to my backpack.

If there’s one good thing to come out of being conscripted into the football team, it’s that I was carrying a water bottle today.

Under a long brown riding jacket, her torso is wrapped in custom Kevlar, and her mottled gray cargo pants are crimped in at the knees by hard plastic kneepads.

Now that I’ve had time to think about it, a possible explanation has occurred to me. One I almost don’t dare hope to be true. It almost feels presumptuous to think about.

Forty years before that strange encounter over Germany, the British had built a warship that revolutionized naval warfare. HMS Dreadnought was faster, stronger, and tougher than anything else afloat. Overnight, it made every other battleship in the world obsolete.

After the war was over, when the alliance between the Western powers and the Soviets began to break down, everyone in Washington assumed the twin superiorities of American nuclear power and American supermen would be enough to force the Soviets to capitulate to any demand the Allies wished to make.

That lovely notion, along with a dozen city blocks of downtown Berlin, was demolished during Red Steel’s debut bout against Dreadnought.

Dreadnought wasn’t just unprecedented, he was the harbinger of a new wave of metahumans more potent than anything that had come before.

Dreadnought wasn’t just unprecedented, he was the harbinger of a new wave of metahumans more potent than anything that had come before.

For a short while it seemed like a major new player took the stage every month or so. All efforts to find the source of this new glut of powerful metahumans failed.

Atomic radiation, ancient curses, exotic chemistry, eldritch magic—the variety of origin stories was as broad as the variety of people they happened to.

For an eerie six months it looked like she would win, her floating citadel appearing without warning over major cities to collect tribute and declarations of surrender before disappearing just as quickly.

“Don’t you worry.” He draws himself up, as tall and proud as he can, like he’s about to be magnanimous.

I am suddenly filled with contempt. It takes an effort of will not to peel him off me, and I shiver with disgust. I don’t care what he says. I don’t care what he wants. I don’t care what he thinks.

As ecstatic as I am about what’s happened, someone had to die for it to be possible.

I don’t like thinking about that, because it reminds me that I’m a horrible person. It’s disconcerting to realize Dad is right about how selfish I am.

With an almost guilty jolt, I realize I look a lot like these pictures. Maybe not so...developed, but pretty close. There’s a weird moment of dissonance as I process that.

“Don’t be flippant with me, son,” he says, staring straight ahead.

An infinite lattice of matter and energy, of thought and form. It spreads across the universe—it is the universe. I imagine it like a fine mesh net, searingly bright with coiled potential, and all the things in life little more than tangles in the light. The lattice gets twisted up into the shape of water and trees and people and music.

The armored figure is floating on whining jets that vent from his back and feet. Of course I recognize him, he’s Carapace.

“This is contingent upon good behavior, of course.” There’s something in his tone that’s hard to read through the mechanical filtering, but it sort of sounds like he thinks good behavior will be a problem for me.

“You would be a provisional member,” says Valkyrja as if he hadn’t spoken.

“You would be welcome in our halls and at our tables, but we would assign you no duties, nor grant you a stipend.”

Experiments failed when universities tried to replicate them, functioning devices sometimes contradicted known laws of physics, et cetera, et cetera, and so now they’re mainly a community unto themselves, studiously ignored by mainstream science, which tends to mutter and grumble every time the “speculative technology” is mentioned.

Everywhere I look there is glass and steel, with displays and readouts projected against floor-to-ceiling windows. The floor glows softly white. You’d think it would feel sterile and maybe a little cold, but everything is colorful, inviting.

Somewhere, there are speakers filtering ambient electronica through the air, gentle rising and falling tunes to comfort you even as you forget they’re there.

“You built a robot to walk your dog?”
“No, I built it to test a new colloquial speech voice interface. Putting it on poop patrol was just a bonus. This way.”

The room’s walls become frosted and nearly opaque for privacy.

An aperture opens in the chamber’s ceiling, and a thin hose drops down.

But it is also irradiated, and strychnine permeates the body’s tissues very quickly.

And I start pantomiming out some eldritch horror leaping out from my chest, claws hooked, teeth bared.

Her fingers dig into my knees a little more than I’d expect of merely human hands, and I lean away from her sudden vehemence.

You feel like you’re a girl, you live it, it’s part of you? Then you’re a girl. That’s the end of it, no quibbling. You’re as real a girl as anyone.

Look, that stuff cleared out my entire digestive tract in a few minutes.

I’m not super thrilled about the cowl. It feels constricting around my neck—not that it’s hard to breathe or move, but it’s there, and kinda bugging me.