Recursion Read online

  Ozma instantly knew I’d figured it out and I wasn’t happy about the answer. Thanking her for her help, I finished my tea and extended an invitation to see the Dome. Hopefully I wouldn’t still be here by their senior year, but the me who belonged here would have a good start with the Princess of Oz. Business done, we headed back to the Chicago CAI booth in the gym.

  Which was still packed. Jack Frost, SaFire, and K-Strike stood at the booth talking in the middle of a crowd of maybe thirty students. A few of which were flying, floating, or levitating a bit to see better. The rest of the gym rumbled with a hundred conversations spread around the United States Armed Services booths, Boeing Space’s tall rocket-themed booth, the Hollywood cluster, the DSA and US Marshals Service booths, and a dozen or so other superhuman association and services booths.

  SaFire spotted us first and waved us over, the group of students parting to give us room, and I fell into a Q and A session signing some autographs and responding to comments about my new costume (the consensus being the two-piece shorts and top outfit was “totally retro cape-chic”). Nobody asked about politics or Atlas—everyone seemed much more interested in talking about CAI requirements and asking for stories of what it was really like. I relaxed into the long afternoon.

  “Hope.” Shell appeared beside me, a nice trick without overlapping anyone. “The Dome just went silent.”

  I looked up from the Career Day program I’d been signing, handed it back with a smile, and put my hand to my earbud.

  “Silent?”

  “Yeah, silent. I was in the middle of an update when I lost the Dispatch connection.”

  I stepped behind Eric and Black Powder. “Have you tried direct lines? Blackstone?”

  “Yup. Even the landlines are down.”

  I looked around. Two hours had gone by since our arrival back at the gym. K-Strike and SaFire had gone off somewhere, Brandon and Alecia had spent the time running about as happy go-fors, and the crowd had thinned only a little.

  I lowered my voice. “Everything I ever said about staying away from the city systems? Forget it. Tell me about the closest active cameras or spotter mics, see if the CPD system and lines are open. Paint me a map.”

  Her eyes unfocused, and a moment later she had a virtual street-map of Chicago in front of me, covered with fields and clusters of lights representing live networks. The Dome sat in a circle of darkness that covered half the surrounding park. A chill formed in my gut. “Not even police radios?”

  “Do you see any, there? No.” I heard the rising panic in her voice; a place where she’d maintained a virtual telepresence for months had suddenly disappeared from her networked reality. The chill turned to ice as everything came together in my head. The Ascendant meant the Wreckers, the Wreckers meant Phreak, and Phreak doing a complete signals blackout of the Dome meant—

  “Alert the CPD, local DSA, every Chicago Guardians team. Emergency Code Zulu, Zulu, Zulu. Attack imminent or in progress. Do what you have to but link me to the others here, outside the Dispatch net, and get me every real-time image of the Dome you can—hack satellites if you have to. Got it?”

  She vanished and I tapped my earbud. “Open channel, this is Astra. The Dome is under attack! Form on me, second floor main building science wing!” Dropping my hand, I stepped back into the open and looked around at the crowd. “I’m sorry, everyone, but something’s come up. Excuse us, please?”

  The plea was superfluous; Black Powder had tensed for action on hearing my whispered Zulu, Zulu, Zulu, and he moved forward with Eric following his lead yelling “Make a hole, people!” Brandon, If-Man, and Alecia scrambled to keep up.

  We met SaFire flying K-Strike up the stairs, and Ozma’s door swung open as we cleared the corner to her hall. “You friend called us,” Grendel said. He was already bulking up for a fight. “What’s going on?”

  “Attack on the Dome!” I gasped. “And we’re half an hour away. Ozma, I know you can do mirror-travel. Or maybe Travel Dust? Can you get us there now? I think it’s the Ascendant, the villain who killed Grendel’s family!”

  She nodded. “Where do you need to be?”

  “Shell?”

  She reappeared. “No sign of outside movement, as close as I can see. Still no connections.”

  “The Residence Level is the most secure. My room?”

  Ozma opened her cabinet and pulled out her royal scepter before striding over to her hall of maps and mirrors. “A mirror, then. Your bathroom mirror? Do you have something that spends a lot of time there?”

  I ripped off my mask and wig, pulling a hair-pin from behind my ear. “This has tons of family in a jar on my counter.”

  She plucked it from my hand and used it to trace invisible lines in the air before her biggest mirror. Our reflections disappeared and we stared at darkness, then the mirror shattered.

  “Great,” Black Powder muttered. “Magical area denial.”

  Right. The Ascendancy had those kinds of resources—when Future-Me had gotten accidentally kidnapped, Ozma hadn’t been able to directly locate me because of it. For a wild moment I thought about whipping out my Castle of Doors keycard and trying to see if Erica Free would make a deal. But rolling up her sleeves, Ozma stepped to the next mirror. “Astra, do you know something close? Something with unique properties?”

  “No . . . yes! The Bean—I mean Cloud Gate! It’s just north of the Dome!”

  “Show me.”

  “Shell—”

  An epad on one of Ozma’s benches powered up, unlocked, and opened a picture of Chicago’s Millennium Park landmark at evening. It really did look like a huge, curved, chrome bean, dropped from giant-land to sit in the park reflecting the lit buildings and darkening sky. Ozma took one look at it and smiled evilly. “That will most certainly do.”

  A minute later we were looking at a distorted image of the park and the Dome through falling snow. When Ozma touched the mirror it rippled, like she’d touched the surface of a pond.

  “Right.” I looked around at everyone. “SaFire, lift Gantry and take the main doors. I’ve got Grendel. Frost, K-Strike, Black Powder, follow SaFire in as fast as you can.”

  I lifted just enough to get my customary two-hand hold on Brian's thick wrists, he got a return grip, and Ozma waved me through the mirror. My previous not-so-great experiences with mirror-travel didn't even slow me down. "Right behind you," SaFire confirmed through my earbud as we burst through the rippling membrane into falling snow. I wondered how long our patched Dispatch link would last.

  Then a tiny fairy dragon streaked past my shoulder with a yelled “Myst! No!”

  "Shell! What the heck?"

  “They’re following! If-Man, Brandon, Alecia, right behind Ozma!”

  I didn’t have time for this. “Get Ozma on a phone! Tell her to keep those kids by the Bean!”

  “On it! Her dolls have come too, I’ve got everyone on an across-the-street security camera!”

  That would have to be good enough—the Dome was already under us. “What’s your plan?” SaFire yelled, our earbuds dead again.

  “Take the Atrium! Flight-bay for me, make it up from there!”

  “Right! Stay safe!”

  “Safe isn't the point! Speed and weight is the point until we know what's going on inside!”

  I let go of Grendel and landed beside him by the flight bay hatch. It stayed closed and that was okay—popping the panel hiding the isolated-circuit entry latch, I keyed in the code, twisted the handle, and grabbed Grendel again as he leaped through the opening hatch.

  No internal alarms, no security response, only dim emergency lights—which didn’t mean Phreak couldn’t see us if he’d taken control of Dome systems. But the hatch to the shaft up from Dispatch opened without any problem and then we were dropping into darkness. The hatch at the bottom wasn’t armored and I kicked it off its frame.

  And met a storm of stinging bullets and an armor-piercing round.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Atlas-Types aren’t quite
as strong and tough as Ajax-Types. We make up for it with speed and mobility. In almost any fight the best tactic is to move and keep moving; they can’t hurt what they can’t hit. That’s the speedster’s tactic too, they just move a lot faster.

  Calvin Trevor, US Marshal Training Officer

  * * *

  The round struck me square in the sternum and threw me back to bounce off the wall of the shaft. “Go!” I managed to gasp with most of the air driven from my lunges as Grendel charged past me with a roar. The second AP round missed us both to punch into the shaft wall above my head. A giant steel spider squatted in the center of the red-lit, smoke filled room, its twin barrels pointed right at me. Armored Flash Mobs swarmed around the shattered dispatch stations, and I recognized the black-clad figure floating over it all.

  Villain-X, A Class Atlas-Type, former-Sergeant Jason Leavitt of the US Army. To me he’d been a masked bad guy, then cold eyes in a sneering face, then a burned-up corpse.

  Grendel ignored all the Flash Mobs to leap upon the scuttling war-spider—Tin Man’s puppet du jour I assumed. I launched at Villain-X, barely saw his swing as he swatted me out of the air. Shaking my head to clear my vision, I found myself buried in a dispatch station.

  David’s station—there were bobblehead figures scattered everywhere. So was David’s blood.

  No. Oh no.

  I looked into David’s unseeing eyes, forced myself to move as Villain-X dropped to smash the spot where I’d been thrown. He laughed as I barely avoided his lunging kick, cracking my elbow on the base of his skull without even rocking him. “Running, Astra?” he snarled. “We’ve just started!”

  “He’s been boosted!” Shell yelled.

  “Well, yeah!” He wasn’t burning up in my infrared sight this time so it wasn’t Hecate’s work. Pellegrini, it had to be Pellegrini.

  I was so hosed.

  A tuck and jump got the big war-spider between me and Villain-X—both Grendel and I completely ignoring the Flash Mobs lighting up the room as we worked our own fights. Villain-X dropped on me, drove me to the floor between stations but my reaching hand found a ripped-off steel spider leg. I whipped it in his face and it cracked into useless bits, barely moving his head.

  “Nice shot!” he laughed as he grabbed my arm, pulled me in to get his fingers around my neck and squeeze. “Spunky!”

  My world went gray and I hoped he didn’t expect me to respond to his sneery condescension. Then I was on the floor by the closed Dispatch doors, gasping and dizzy, as Grendel tried to rip his head off.

  Can’t beat him, can’t beat him, can’t beat him. I stared around but nothing remotely weaponizable presented itself. Without thinking I reached for my belt-buckle throwing disk, bounced it off his head where he stood, his back to me as he beat on Grendel. It should have cracked his skull, but at least it got his attention. He dropped Grendel, turned—

  And I had a weapon. I braced myself against the doors. “Spunky? Really? And who dresses you? Supervillain Black was so last-year!”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about!” He launched and I fell back, keycard in my fingers, to throw the doors open. I dropped and pushed as He flew over my head into a room that didn’t belong there, high ceilings and gray stone. He kept going but I’d braced and now I grabbed the doors and pulled. They stayed on their frames, barely, and shut on their shattered lock as I kicked the keycard away, counted breaths, and held the doors shut. “Move, move, move!” Shell screamed in my ear, shocking me out of my immobility. I let go to fly straight up as another AP round blew the doors into pieces, scattering them into the empty Dome hallway beyond as I turned back to the fight.

  I let Grendel work on the war-spider as I mowed down laughing Flash Mobs. They were always laughing, and I was getting sick of it. A couple of them tried to tag me with frag grenades as I ripped their rifles away—stun grenades would have slowed me down more with their assault on my senses. Running out of bug-nuts crazy shooters, I turned to find Grendel busy gutting Tin Man’s war-spider. He’d twisted both of its barrels into useless junk, and a tiny fairy dragon flew around his head making gleeful growly chirps.

  “Shell? Still blacked out?”

  “Yeah, but we’ve got Guardians and CPD converging on the Dome. SaFire and Eric went in the front and nothing’s come out but fleeing bystanders. Black Powder, Jack Frost, K-Strike, and If-Man are almost to the doors.”

  “Right.” An explosion echoed down the hall. “So they’re busy. This can’t be all.” I resolutely didn’t step away from Grendel as he got himself together, unhunching and pulling his claws and fangs in.

  Then anguish flooded my brain, dropping me to my knees. Chakra. No no no nonono—

  “Grendel! They’re in the Base Level!” I flew to the elevator—open, shaft dark—and dropped into it, trusting Grendel to follow.

  The elevator car below me had already been cracked wide, the door to the Base Level lobby jammed open. The emergency-lit lobby was a flooded slaughterhouse, the lobby station a smoking, bullet-riddled crater, Laconic Bob, Willis, and three more security-armored Bobs lying holed or in pieces, blood mixing with the water and seeping around broken bits of shiny spheres.

  Chakra’s cry nearly drowned my thoughts, but I didn’t hear any fighting. I stopped, dropping to the floor.

  “Anybody! It’s Astra! IS ANYBODY HERE?”

  “Astra! Back here!”

  I raced down the flooded hall, found the source of the call past the Assembly Room’s shattered doors; The Harlequin, Chakra, Lei Zi, Riptide, Blackstone, Rush. Rush lay on the ground, still but breathing, his legs bound in tourniquets.

  Blackstone lay, head in Chakra’s lap. He wasn’t breathing, not at all. No. I dropped to my knees, hand falling on his arm, feeling the warmth of his body beneath his pristine silk shirt. Chakra’s anguished eyes met mine, breaking my denial.

  Blackstone was dead.

  * * *

  I pushed my feelings far, far away. The Base Level clear, Lei Zi ordered me back upstairs to the Public Operations Level where more Flash Mobs were a target of my pain.

  “Shell! Keep out any responders not bullet-proof!” The Ascendant had to have boosted Flash Mob’s power, they swarmed the Public Level outside of Dispatch, all of them armed for efficient and indiscriminate murder.

  They weren’t holding the level, though—I could hear sonic cracks from the Atrium as K-Strike telekinetically fired steel marbles into them, and deeper, spaced bangs from Black Powder servicing targets. Throwing myself into the roaming Flash Mob squads, I cleared the adjoining hall and threw myself into squads pouring auto-fire and grenades in the other direction. Crashes beyond marked SaFire and Eric’s progress as, smashing through them with Grendel behind me, I hit the museum to find Jack Frost and If-Man taking down the last Flash Mobs there.

  “Go left!” I yelled, and turned right into the access-hallways to look for surviving bystanders.

  The fight turned into a race against death as we smashed through any chokepoints Flash Mobs tried to put up. If-Man whipped through them like an animated figure made of rubber bands. Myst, Alecia’s little fairy dragon, dropped onto bunches of them with a stunning sparkly-rainbow attack that looked like something out of a Saturday-morning cartoon. Both barely kept ahead of us as we fought desperately to overrun the Flash Mobs before they killed every bystander in the place.

  I’d decided long ago that Flash Mob was certifiably insane and tonight he proved it. His flood of “dupes” had all the self-preservation instincts of lemmings, fighting with mad, cackling joy even as we splashed them on the walls and floors. Their blood disappeared with them as they died and faded, leaving only the riddled, broken bodies of their victims. They laughed, or screamed, but never asked for mercy as we killed them in the fluorescent gloom of emergency lights. I almost wept with relief when Shell cleared the effects of Phreak’s attack out of the Dome’s systems and fight-chatter filled my earbud as she seized control of the cameras to direct our fight.

  The last Flash
Mob died and popped into nothing minutes later.

  * * *

  I called Ozma, Brandon, and Alecia in after Shell had confirmed the Dome and park clear. I’d expected to find them blue with the cold but Alecia had conjured another friend from her sketchpad, a burning fire-fairy named Tinder who’d kept them toasty warm. Dad arrived as Iron Jack with the Guardians capes and CPD units. He was very surprised to see me since I was supposed to be a few hundred miles south of the Dome right now. Together, we began the heartbreaking work of gathering the survivors, bringing out the unharmed, triaging the wounded with the help of arriving EMTs, and moving the not-critically injured to the Atrium. SaFire and I made multiple flights to waiting trauma centers.

  “What happened?” I asked Shell only after I dropped my last trauma-flight passenger and headed back to the Dome. Rubbing my cheek—itchy where a bullet had carved a jagged chunk from my mask—I realized that the hand I’d used was bloody. Stripping off my gloves I left them where they fell.

  “I don’t know yet, not everything.” Shell appeared beside me, for the first time I could remember not wearing a “message” t-shirt. There were no words for this. I was a zombie, myself.

  “The Dome’s got a bunch of secondary systems, like the one you used to get in through the flight bay, and Phreak couldn’t get to those. The autonomous systems show it started with the signals blackout and a group-teleport drop into Dispatch—Tin Man’s big spider-robot, Flash Mob, some of the others you’ve told us about. None of our team were upstairs and the attackers cleared Dispatch and split into three groups. Dispatch, the public spaces, and downstairs.”

  “What happened downstairs?”

  “We’re still sorting out the power-sets and faces. The telekinetic you named Balz? His spheres took down Rush. A microbot swarm got Blackstone. Some kind of nerve-agent, he was dying on his feet. But he managed to pull the team together here, all but Vulcan down in The Pit. Riptide and Lei Zi were able to flood and electrify the swarm and floating spheres. A couple of the attackers didn’t engage directly, and they all teleported out when you hit Dispatch upstairs.”