Champion City

All the Power in the World Chapter 1

The first one he lifted and hurled up and over his own head. The man crashed somewhere behind Powerhouse, but he ignored him. Instead, he threw himself forward. His shoulder smashed in to another man. That man dropped as his two compatriots raised their AK-47s and opened fire. The bullets caught Powerhouse in the chest and legs. They felt like little more than bee stings as he advanced.

The two gunmen looked more and more panicked as he approached. He grabbed each gun by the barrels and twisted them down and back around towards their users. The man to Powerhouse’s left turned to run. Powerhouse smiled as he grabbed the other man by the neck. He lifted the gunman off the ground with ease and tossed him towards his fleeing ally. They crashed together in a tangle of broken bones.

Two more men emerged from behind their boss at the end of the room. Powerhouse recognized them as Bruiser and Crusher, a.k.a. the Old Schoolers, two metahuman miscreants. He recognized them from the research Elana had gathered for him. He also knew they didn’t stand a chance against him. Powerhouse charged forward to meet the strong men. He smashed in to them with a double clothesline and both dropped to the ground. He stomped down on Bruiser’s leg and heard the bone snap. Bruiser cried out in pain.

Crusher smashed both hands down on the back of Powerhouse’s neck. Powerhouse staggered forward a step before turning to face the Old Schooler. He came around with a roundhouse punch. It caught Crusher right in the jaw, and the big man went down. Powerhouse dropped on top of the metahuman criminal and pummeled him again and again until he stopped moving, either unconscious or dead.

Powerhouse looked around at his handy work. The mangled bodies of Mister X’s top goons lay moving all around him. Six months of searching, questioning, and head-cracking had finally brought him face to face with Federation’s crimelord.

Powerhouse grinned at Mister X across the room. He cracked his knuckles as he started towards the elusive crime figure. X’s billowing cloak and opaque helmet revealed nothing to Powerhouse, but he imagined the look of panic on the crime boss’s face. It disappointed him a little. He liked to see the faces of his vctims as he pummeled them in to the ground.

His future, his celebrity, his very life seemed to fade away as he reached X. This was the moment that would take him from the new metahero in town to celebrity god. X would go down tonight, and Federation would be free from his criminal tyranny.

Free for his taking.

*****

April 1957

Doctor Bertram Gehirn spared a moment to glance across the room at Bridgette Asch. It had taken the lanky scientist a moment to recognize her. He remembered her from various Schuzstaffel reports back during the war, but today was the first time he had ever found himself in the same room with her. She sent a demure smile back his way. He would have thought her nothing more than an aging debutante if he didn’t already know she was once one of Hitler’s top assassins. He’d heard she died in the final days of the war, but like so many others, she must have only faked her death to avoid the war crimes tribunals. Unlike himself, she didn’t have the scientific know how to be brought over as a genetic scientist, but perhaps her knowledge of propaganda and killing technique had brought her in to the OSS or CIA. For whatever reason, she sat across from him in the waiting area.

He let out a long sigh and once again looked around the small, sparsely decorated room. A man of his intellect should not be forced to waste his time idling away in a room filled only with generic flowers and out dated issues of Life magazine. He didn’t care how important his potential financier might be, in another few minutes he would get up and return to the tiny lab he had purchased after finally leaving the government’s genetic program the previous year.

The office door opened and a young woman stepped in to the waiting room. Her hair was pulled back in to an even tighter, more severe bun than the one Asch wore. She made only glancing eye contact with her guests as she spoke. “Dr. Gehirn, Ms. Asch, Mr. Tuffman will see you both now.”

Gehirn glanced over at Asch and caught her eye as they both rose from their seats. She raised an eyebrow and he shrugged back at her. Obviously she knew as little about this meeting as he did. They followed the woman out of the room and down a narrow hallway. At the far end of the hall, just past the receptionist’s large desk, one of a pair of double doors stood open. Gehirn caught a glimpse of Randolph Theodore Huffman as the receptionist ushered them in.

The third richest man in the world looked up from his putter and fake green as they came in to the room. He smiled as he saw his two guests. “Welcome, both of you,” he said. “I’ve been looking forward to this meeting for quite some time.”

Gehirn wondered why he had waited so long if Tuffman wanted this meeting so much. He put the thought aside as Tuffman placed his putter in to a mount on the wall beside his desk and sat down.

“I very much appreciate both of you coming,” Tuffman said. “I believe I have a proposal that will make both of you very, very happy.

“Dr. Gehirn, I have called you here because you are one of the world’s foremost scholars on genetics. My aides say you know more about genetics than the entire genebomb research team combined. I don’t know if that’s true, but you are most definitely the man I’m looking for. Many of your experiments seem geared towards metagene experimentation. I refer specifically to a series of experiments you conducted in 1943, a Project Ubermensch.”

Gehirn couldn’t keep his eyes from widening in surprise. He’d thought all knowledge of Project Ubermensch lost. Not even his overseers for the past ten years had known of it. All but a few of his own personal files had been destroyed shortly after the end of the year when Hitler himself had condemned the project as a waste of time and money.

“I worked on Ubermensch,” Gehirn said, “but the entire project proved to be an entire waste. We spent months trying to make it work, but no matter what we did, none of our experiments could survive more than a week. By the time one tore apart its own incubator from the inside, we already knew we were in a trouble. After that…” Gehirn scratched his nose and glanced between Tuffman and Bridgette. “Admittedly, I had a few theories of my own on how to prevent the cellular degradation, but the project died before I ever had a chance to bring them to fruition.”

Tuffman waggled a finger as he leaned across the desk. “And that’s why you are here, my good doctor! I believe that with your concepts and today’s medical breakthroughs, that the time is right! With proper funding, we will be able to replicate and perfect the project. And this time, meet with a glowing success!”

“And you will be able to created your own personal metahuman army,” Gehirn said.

Tuffman nodded. “Perhaps. Or new medicines, new health care techniques, a new era for humanity. If we succeed in this, anything could be possible!”

Bridgette, having sat and listened patiently up to this point, leaned forward in her seat. “All of this is well and good, Mr. Tuffman, but why am I here?” Gehirn was taken aback by her unaccented English. Even after ten years in the country, he couldn’t speak it nearly so well. Tuffman seemed not to notice.

Tuffman took in her question for a moment before smiling broadly. “Your purpose here is two-fold, Ms. Asch. First, I will need the highest level of security for the good doctor’s experiments. Your knowledge of espionage, especially security technology and how to break it, make you an ideal choice.”

“And the other reason?”

“I’m glad you asked, Bridgette. Oh, may I call you Bridgette?”

She nodded.

“Genetic material, Bridgette. As unique and perfect of a physical specimen as yourself will be ideal to provide half of the genetic makeup for Dr. Gehirn’s tests.”

Bridgette rose from her seat. She grabbed Tuffman’s shirt collar and pulled him in close to her. “You wish to breed me like a common animal?”

Tuffman pulled away from her. “Please, Bridgette. Please calm down.” Tuffman walked around his desk. Bridgette followed him with her eyes as he walked around behind her. Coming up beside her, he laid his hand on her shoulder.

“I do wish for you to provide the female half of the DNA for our experiments, but I intend to give you as many rights as possible. You will have full right of refusal on any of your breeding partners. And I will make it well worth your while financially.” Tuffman turned towards Gehirn. “For both of you.”

Tuffman walked back behind his desk and reached under it. When he stood, he held two briefcases. He placed them down on the desk in front of Gehirn and Bridgette.

“Please have a look for yourself,” he said.

Gehirn knew what he would find inside. He looked at the rows of twenty dollar American bills inside, all neatly bound in groups of five hundred. The money didn’t really matter he would have reopened the research with only the promise of funding. Bridgette gasped to his side as she opened her open case.

Tuffman laughed at her surprise. “One million dollars, in cash, for each of you,” he said. “And this is only your sign-on bonus if you choose to work on my project. I will give you both a stipend of fifty thousand dollars on top of it for every month of the project, plus another million dollar bonus upon our first success.”

Tuffman looked back and forth between Gehirn and Bridgette and back again. “Do you accept my terms?”

They both blurted out yes almost instantly. Gehirn joined Tuffman in a broad grin. He couldn’t wait for his research to begin again.