Wearing the Cape 4: Small Town Heroes Read online

  “I have the best friend in the whole world, even if she is stupid sometimes. Okay, a lot of the time, but mostly about herself. And she’s too serious, thinks she’s responsible for the world, and is always getting into trouble. But that’s what friends are for.”

  Shelly Boyar-Hardt, Confessions of a Former Ghost.

  * * *

  Apparently nobody at the Institute did anything besides stream the news from Powers TV. Half the people I passed in the lobby and halls either carefully didn’t look at me or gave me smiles, winks, or “Good job!” in passing. It was like I’d suddenly developed an adult Team Astra! fan club, and the few scowls I got—because not everyone’s a fan of superheroes—were actually refreshing. I decided that before I “came to work” tomorrow I was going to get a new civilian wardrobe.

  “Hail the conquering hero!” Shelly greeted me when I stepped into the Oroboros’ not-so-secret lair. General Rajabhushan gave me the nod and no comment as we passed through to Shelly’s office, but he and Doctor Hall had been at the breakfast table when I’d come down and inhaled my waffle and coffee; they already knew about yesterday and how I felt about it.

  Shelly waited until we were in her office to poke me in the ribs.

  “Hey! Ticklish!”

  “All one piece? Nothing broken, ribs okay this time?”

  “Yes!” Stiff, sore, tender, and if not for my ability to heal, probably unable to move without whimpering (how did I not remember Brick kicking me at least five times?), but okay.

  “Great! So, business!” She passed me a display epad, threw herself into her chair. “Since you didn’t come around yesterday, I did a lot of organizing, research, boring analyst-type stuff.”

  My lips twitched helplessly as she grabbed her own pad. “So let’s go over the likely suspects for the Great Littleton Fire!”

  “Terrorists?”

  “That’s what I thought first, but there are problems. Look.”

  She fiddled with her pad and mine brightened with a list, a couple dozen terrorist organizations. I recognized Deep Green and the Ring, and they were the only two in bold.

  “Most terrorist organizations are regional; they survive because of their imbedded networks, and it is virtually impossible for them to project attacks against ‘hard targets’ outside of their regions.”

  I nodded. I’d been doing a lot of catching up on politics, conflicts, international everything since the Whittier Base Attack showed me how naïve I was about the world. Terrorism 101 was invisibility—if you lost that, if you couldn’t blend into your host population, you were finished unless you were somewhere your enemies couldn’t get to you with their superior firepower.

  “And that is really the reason for the Ring; it’s a coalition of terrorist groups that work together to support operations outside their regions. It was my number one suspect, but look.”

  She opened a file and a list of names scrolled down. Dozens of names, but a majority of them either in red or green.

  “The green names belong to superhuman Ring terrorists who have been captured. The red names are Ring terrorists who have been killed. Not all of the ones we know about were captured or killed in the Whittier Base Attack, but they lost practically all of their known heavy hitters there and haven’t engaged in significant joint operations since.”

  “So what about their parts?”

  “Their parts are rebuilding, but still regional. Here.” Three names popped up: the Undying Caliphate, One Land, and Free Mexico.

  “Free Mexico’s territory is closest, and it’s still awash in money from the drug cartels. Mexico’s northern provinces are almost completely under cartel control, at least outside of strategic towns controlled by the Federales. The Reform Government in Mexico City has actually managed to purge itself of most of its corrupt officials, initiate liberal reforms, and hold three rounds of safe and fair elections; but there’s enough bad blood with the north that Free Mexico is still popular there.

  “CIA analysts believe Free Mexico is actually avoiding conflict with the US; they’re downplaying their Aztlan rhetoric—their claims to the territory we took from Mexico ages ago—and playing up the Mexican Government’s older civil-rights abuses. The CIA thinks that Free Mexico has changed tactics and is trying to build international pressure for Mexico to recognize the secessionist provinces as a new state. So they’re acting as little like a terrorist organization as possible, especially abroad.”

  “Would they be a viable state?”

  “No. More like an elective kleptocracy. Every real northern leader left is owned by the cartels. A lot of them are bought off, but the cartels also fund elections and buy votes to replace uncooperative officeholders with their own people. They’re also perfectly happy to kill a politician’s whole family if he won’t play ball and he’s too popular to replace electively. It’s like the Chicago Mob during the Prohibition, but lots worse.”

  She frowned unhappily. “We’re staying out of it, too. Other than helping Mexico strengthen its military and closing the border to weapons smuggling, there isn’t anything we can really do without invading northern Mexico ourselves. Like that will happen.”

  Neither of us mentioned the more militant outcomes for the US in the Future Files—where that would happen.

  “Okay, so what about the other two?”

  “The Undying Caliphate is a bit more likely, but they lost as many heavies at Whittier Base as the others. Losing Seif-al-Din—again–was a huge blow. Of the three they’re the only ones ideologically dedicated to our destruction, but they have much closer targets of opportunity. Turkey. Egypt. Israel. Byzantium.”

  “Oh.”

  “Uhuh.”

  That one I understood: Byzantium—the formerly-Turkish territory on the west side of the Bosporus with the renamed Constaninople as its capital—was always in the news, the best and smartest thing America had done in decades or our worst act of imperialism ever, depending on your politics. Just its existence under the boot heel of Crusader Occupiers was a huge propaganda and recruiting tool for the Islamic-nationalist terrorist organization, but they still couldn’t do much about it. And if they didn’t do something soon, then the influx of persecuted Christians and Muslim “heretics” like Mr. Darvish’ Sufis immigrating from all over the Middle East meant Byzantium would be lost to them forever.

  So the UC had a strong reason to focus on Constantinople, to “liberate it” or destroy it; the Whittier Base Attack had been an attempt to weaken us enough to let them do just that. It had cost us a lot but it had cost them a lot more, and Shelly was right—a repeat visit to US assets over here just wasn’t that likely in the near future. It still cost us too much.

  Shelly gave me time to process that, scowling ferociously at her notes.

  I refocused on my pad. “What about One Land? Brick went missing in action in China, and the Dragon Armor—”

  She was shaking her head.

  “Yesterday has put One Land at the top of my list from the Big Three, but…” She shrugged. “One Land may not be a problem much longer. It’s bankrolled by Beijing and used as a means of asymmetrical warfare against the new Chinese states and our US and League troops there—the Whittier Base attack has been its only operation outside of Asia. And it’s looking like the Kyoto Talks are moving in the right direction; most of the key Chinese states are ready to sign on for a new confederacy with its own unified government.” She chewed her lip.

  “Beijing is internationally isolated and almost as bad off as North Korea used to be before Unification. The oracles who judge this kind of thing predict the dissolution of Beijing’s ruling communist party within a year and the new government signing on with the other states.”

  Which the Big Book of Contingent Prophesy predicted with high confidence. I sighed.“It’s good to see some things are still on track.”

  “Yup, and that will mean One Land wins, just not quite the way they wanted. With a few holdouts like Hong Kong and Manchuria, the Chinese will have a unified nat
ion-state again. But right now One Land is focused on local warlords, hoping to bring as much neighboring non-state territory as it can under its control before reunification. They haven’t even focused on US and League targets in China much in the last year; they’re just not interested in us right now.”

  “But who’s left?”

  “Not Deep Green. Much as I’d like them to be the Bad Guys here, this just isn’t their kind of gig. Sure they inspired the Green Man last year, but something with the potential for mass civilian casualties? That’s not really how they roll.”

  “Who else is there?”

  “In the super-terrorist business? Potentially it’s still anybody. Realistically? Nobody who isn’t so far out in left field we’ll never see them coming by watching the horizon. We’ve been thinking about it wrong.”

  I huffed. “Okay, so enlighten me.”

  “What if burning down Littleton isn’t the point? What if it’s collateral damage from a different mission? Littleton is a safe haven for lots of people wanted by very bad people out in the world. The Institute is home to lots of top-secret projects. So, what if a person or secret is the target?”

  The sinking feeling in my stomach was horribly familiar.

  “If that’s true, how will we figure out who?”

  “We might not be able to. But your dream gives us a clue about how. If it’s the truth, of course.” She dropped her pad on her desk. “C’mon—you have to see something.”

  * * *

  Shelly took me back upstairs to the chrome and glass entry hall. Leading me around the other side of the open well, she pulled me behind a smart-screen array to an unobtrusive guard station.

  “Hi Bob! Can I show Astra the rings?”

  The very familiar guard gave her a nod and she stepped up beside a chrome plated pillar next to his station to pop a bio-lock sealed hatch, whispering unnecessarily all the while.

  “First thing when I got here, they had me review the Institute’s security system—next best thing to having Shell do it. I still run checks, so I have access. Look.”

  Behind the hatch was a glass panel, clear but so thick its clarity meant it couldn’t be glass. Behind that was…

  “What is that?”

  The pillar was hollow, an armored shell around… something. It looked like someone had suspended three rotating steel rings in a magnetic field. They twisted around inside each other without touching the bottom or sides of the chamber, nothing visibly holding them up. The rings, shiny and slick-looking as liquid mercury, nested in each other and spun around a common center—but didn’t. As they rotated around their center, my eyes kept insisting they couldn’t be doing that.

  “They’re Borromean rings,” Shelly explained, like giving them a name made them any less weird. “The smallest spins inside the radius of the middle ring but outside the radius of the largest ring. Each is larger than the ring that spins outside it, smaller than the ring that spins inside it.”

  “How is that even possible?” Staring at them too long did funny things to my brain. When I looked away every perpendicular line around me became something else, twisting to a vanishing point that was close without changing anything at all.

  “It’s not. And it’s the source of the extrareality pocket that is Littleton.”

  I blinked and everything settled. The transient weirdness reminded me of the inside-out way the world had looked last year when Shelly and I had watched Doctor Cornelius accidentally conjure a thing so wrong it still gave me the willies to think about it.

  “Magic?”

  “Nope, but definitely Clarke’s Law stuff; superscience so super that you can’t tell it from magic without drippy candles and a pentagram.”

  I was grateful when Shelly closed the hatch. Nothing should do that.

  “If that’s what creates the pocket… What happens if someone stops them? Or cuts power to the magnetic field?”

  She grinned. “And that’s the zillion dollar question. DARPA scientists say that the pocket will collapse and everyone and everything brought into the pocket will just drop out of it, merge back into the real world. Like you do when you cross the pocket’s boundary.”

  “That’s not so bad.”

  “Nope, but they don’t know what will happen when you start it up again. Will the pocket our mad-boy Verne created to go fishing in come back, or will we get something else? Can we restart it at all? That’s why they didn’t just shut it down and move it onto American soil when they found it. It’s too valuable to risk.”

  “Can’t they move it while it’s on?”

  “Tried. The thing is the center of its little universe, so nothing in its universe can move it—just like you can’t pick yourself up by your own feet. Well, why I can’t. That’s why they built the Institute around it instead of burying it at the bottom of the lake. They’d have shielded it more if they could.”

  The leftover wooginess turned into an icy weight in my stomach. “Because anyone who wants to attack Littleton just has to get someone inside to shut this down,” I managed. At least I could be master of the obvious.

  “Yup. You saw the town burning and vanishing—exactly what it would do if the pocket collapsed. Littleton would find itself sitting naked beside Guantánamo Bay. Hope?”

  I couldn’t believe it.

  “Hope?”

  I couldn’t believe it. To End World, Break Glass. Littleton might be a small world, but still! They might as well have a switch! Or a big red button. Oh wait, they do have a switch, unless there’s a backup power source inside there with the rings!

  “Hope! So, are you all done freaking out?”

  I shook my head. “Yes?”

  “Good, ‘cause you know when you pull your hair like that you look, like, twelve. Here.” Shelly took my new cell phone and dialed a number on it, hit star, handed it back. “It’s tied into Institute Security now. If anything happens here, you’ll get the memo the same time as yummy Sheriff Deitz does. I got approval from Ali and set up the other end of the link last night.”

  She grinned like an urchin.

  “She probably just said ‘yes’ so she could explain it to the sheriff over dinner at Jemmy’s—but who cares why, right?”

  “Deitz!”

  “What about him?”

  “I need to go. Cats. Trees.”

  “You’re making no sense, but whatever. I’m going to bug Ali for whatever projects she can tell me about—maybe I can narrow down the target list. Mom says you’re coming to dinner.”

  “Right!” I almost hugged her, remembered the guard. Turning away, I stood frozen. I needed to go, but the pillar mocked me. It was Red Base, the goal. Why hadn’t they surrounded it with more reinforced concrete and built a bunker on top? I had the worst, mind-clenching feeling that if I took my eyes off it for a moment then my Kitsune-dream would come true. I left at a fast walk.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Today’s flash-mob will be catered to by Best Wishes, as thanks to their many, many customers, and will move around town viewing performances at currently unknown locations. Be sure to find it on The Littleton Eye, which of course sees everything. Everything. So stop that.”

  Littleton Radio, The Daily Hour.

  * * *

  It wasn’t like Sheriff Deitz was expecting me; he’d been really nice about it, but basically he had told me he’d call if there was a cat in a tree. But he and Deputy Sweet had to be Littleton’s first line of defense if anyone got past the Scoobies in the Garage, even if the big gun I remembered Angel carrying that night in Grand Beach didn’t seem like much beside the three tin-man teams guarding the door.

  But I trusted Sheriff Deitz to keep me more in the loop than Veritas, who I hadn’t even seen since he’d dropped me at the B&B, which meant telling him why I was here. He hadn’t asked—probably used to people doing classified things on a need-to-know basis. But it was his town and I should have.

  Walking down the street, I realized how off-balance I still was. The Thomas Kinkade Am
erica look of the town, the weird streetlamps and the high, percussive hum I kept forgetting I was hearing—the perfect Midwest weather in Cuba. And the Institute? If this was the movies, I’d find out that The Institute kept a secret cryogenic prison for storing uncontainable lethal breakthroughs on ice and the Bad Guys wanted to unleash all that Evil In A Can. None of it was normal, which didn’t help my growing feeling that its artificial perfection was under siege. Little Atifa and her…godfather?...were in danger and I didn’t know why. And, and…

  “What is that humming sound I’m always hearing?” Not what I’d been planning to say when I walked through the door. Sheriff Deitz looked up.

  “The echo-mapping system? It’s built into the street lamps. Full aural surface mapping of the entire town, AI-monitored in realtime. Atlas-types always hear it.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yeah. That plus the mics, cameras, and the infrared imaging pretty much means we know when a sparrow falls and can positively ID the cat that took it down.”

  “That’s…”

  Deputy Sweet snickered from where she sat stripping and cleaning a gun at her desk. “Creepy? You think? But it’s what ‘high-security environment’ means these days. We’ve got dozens of Witness Protection subjects to keep track of, scientists to protect, spies to spy on…” She laughed at my look. “Nah, that part is handled by Navint—Naval Intelligence.”

  “Hi Angel. Sorry about not saying hello.”

  “That’s alright. Should we be worried that you’re loaded for bear?”

  “What? Oh.” I’d forgotten I was still in armor and carrying one hundred pounds of titanium maul. “No—I’ve been to the Garage.”

  Deitz kicked a seat away from his desk. “Sit. Talk to us. Coffee?”

  Angel went to pour us some, her attention staying on me. In contrast to Deitz’s easy way, she always reminded me of a dark-eyed hawk. Even her smile was assessing.