Young Sentinels (Wearing the Cape) Page 16

  Ozma, DSA Interview 54.291

  * * *

  “What’s the point of making the A-list if they don’t treat you like a star?”

  Reese had been bitching almost since we went wheels-up. He’d been impressed enough with the corporate jet the Sentinels had sent to deliver us to our new home, even if it was obviously from a rental fleet — no big “S” on the side or anything else. Then he’d tried to charm the flight attendant into opening the in-flight bar. Reese probably didn’t hear no very often, but he heard it five times in five minutes.

  Then he told her he could get her into the Mile High Club without using a plane.

  He probably would have laughed off her “Sit down and shut up,” but at that point Ozma had looked up from her magazine. Reese might be so full of it that if I poked him with a claw he’d explode and cover the cabin in brown, but he didn’t have shit for brains; he sat down and shut up.

  For five minutes, but at least he wasn’t hitting on the staff. And at least the leather couches were comfortable; I didn’t fit in the lounge chairs, but the nice attendant had assured me that the furniture would take my weight.

  “I mean, where are the girls?”

  I showed a mouthful of fangs. “I can twist your head off. They’ll really like you then.”

  Ozma opened her third magazine. “Boys. I will stop this plane.”

  Reese slouched, kicking his feet. “You’ll what, blow us to Oz?”

  She smiled without looking up again. “In due time.”

  “And they should have given us costumes.”

  I growled. “So we could what? Step out onto a red carpet? We’re not heroes yet.”

  “Hey, we — ”

  “We will be descending to make our approach to O’Hare in a few minutes. Please fasten your seat belts and make sure all drinks are in their holders.”

  “What drinks? The stupid stuck-up stewardess wouldn’t serve us any — ” The plane heeled hard. There hadn’t been a bump of turbulence until now.

  Frowning, Ozma snapped open a compact, studied it. “Hmmm.”

  “What?” Reese practically whined. “Like now’s a good time to fix your — ”

  “Hat.” She snapped the compact closed. “I didn’t bring a hat. Are you done?” She ignored him to turn to the attendant. “Would you please instruct the pilot to take us over the tower? Any altitude is fine.”

  The attendant had been listening to her headset. “Miss, we’ve been instructed to turn away from O’Hare. We’ll be getting new instructions in a moment.”

  “I’m sure. However, we are needed on the ground now. The Green Man has attacked the airport, and every hand will count.” A snap of her fingers and her scepter-wand appeared out of nowhere. It was like hearing a rifle chamber a round, and the cabin felt a lot smaller.

  “Brian? Be ready to open the door and step out. Reese?”

  He bounced out of his seat. “Oh yeah, now it’s happening. Just watch out!”

  “Just — just hold on.” The attendant made pushing motions like she could make us sit back down, and retreated to the cockpit. One hand on the door latch, I looked at Ozma. She gave me a real smile, looked past me as the attendant returned.

  “We’re going to directly overfly O’Hare at eight thousand feet. He’ll tell me when.”

  Ozma extended the smile to her. “Thank you. You will see that our luggage is delivered?”

  A wide-eyed nod. “Good luck.”

  Reese groaned. “Enough chit-chat. Let’s move!”

  I unbolted the door, holding onto the latch and frame as the cabin lost pressure. Holding onto the cockpit hatch with one hand as the plane banked around, the attendant held up the other while listening to her head set. One minute, two, and she made a fist, mouthing “Go!” over the wind. I threw myself through the door and into the open sky.

  What a great way to see Chicago.

  Astra

  “Out of the way! Coming through! Make a hole!”

  I had only gotten a few steps before realizing the blindingly obvious — then I’d turned around and pushed through the door to Toby’s room. Father Nolan had barely finished donning his stole when my announcement that the Green Man was attacking O’Hare stopped the proceedings. Dad and Mom shared one of their telepathic looks, then Dad was at the door and we both ran.

  If you’re going to run in the hall, a hospital is a good place to do it: they’re used to staff moving at less than sedate speeds at times and they gave us room — a good thing since Dad wasn’t as maneuverable as me and took up a lot more space. Bursting through the lobby doors, I locked forearm-holds with Dad and got into the air. He changed as we lifted above the hospital wing, popping buttons, shredding seams, and gaining a few hundred pounds as he changed to the living metal that was Iron Jack. I adjusted my grip and flew fast.

  Every flier in the city was in the air, lots of them carrying passengers like me and I spotted Safire carrying Jack Frost, and Blue Fire flew with Wisteria. All of us converging on O’Hare.

  “Lei Zi, Watchman, Variforce, Riptide, and Megaton are right behind you!” Shelly reported.

  “Megaton?”

  “Mal! I’m stuck at the precinct, but I’ll co-pilot him, no sweat!” Great — a flying cannon guided by a teen robot who didn’t want to be left out of the action.

  “Shell...”

  “Hey, I recorded all his testing sessions — I know what he can do within a millimeter! I won’t let him toast anybody!”

  I shut up and focused on getting us there.

  O’Hare is big. It’s the fifth-busiest international airport in North America, with tens of thousands of travelers a day, and even with every speedster and flyer on deck there was no possible way to clear everyone out of the way. Like last time, the green wave had started at a water source; this time Lake O’Hare, a concrete-sided lake that was really just a rainwater basin. The green included trees, but mostly looked like some kind of creeping vine, growing and moving nearly as fast as a person could sprint on open runway.

  “Drop me!” Dad yelled from where he dangled below me. “Get the planes!”

  Right. Below us the spread flowed north, toward the main terminals, and between the green and the buildings a half-dozen airbuses waited along the runway approaches to take off. I looked around. Above us, the closed airspace looked clear except for one big jet that had been making its final approach and was red-lining its turbines and clawing back into the sky. I dropped Dad. In his Iron Jack form, Dad was as tough as an A Class Ajax-type — he bounced and rolled to his feet, headed for the planes. The day of the Event, Atlas had flown up from O’Hare to catch planes dropping out of the sky, or really to help them to dead-stick landings. I wasn’t that strong, but I yelled for Safire.

  “Hey, girl! You want to double up?”

  “Front and back?”

  “Absolutely! Love the casual look!”

  She dropped Jack Frost off and landed in front of me. And for today’s crisis, Safire will be kinkily fashionable in a pink-and-purple flamed latex catsuit... We dove under the first plane in line, looking for the hardpoints. She put her shoulders under the forward fuselage, right behind the landing gear, and I did the same between the middle gear. It says a lot about our world that they highlight the flight-assist hardpoints with yellow squares now. She lifted first and I followed, taking most of the weight as we flew the airbus across the field to the west side., A ground security guy there was already opening gates in the perimeter fencing to let passengers debark by emergency ramp and escape onto York Street.

  And let emergency vehicles in.

  The racing creepers got to the third plane before we did, but Dad ripped ropes of tangling super-kudzu runners away from the landing gear as we lifted. Jack Frost flash-froze wide sweeps of the stuff that tried to get past him while tarmac cracked and heaved around new trees climbing for the sun. Watchman flew the other planes to safety while the others attacked the green flowing towards the terminals. Megaton blew apart new trees and cleared
whole strips of green, but this time the tide front stretched around us, throwing new arms of advance between our defenses even as more capes arrived. There was no Dispatch chatter, no strategy as we dug in. I grabbed a service truck and pushed it across the runways at the edge of the green, scrapping new growth away, but it came back faster.

  “Reinforcements!” Shell sang out. “Sort of.”

  Grendel

  Since I could pretty much fall from orbit and walk out of the crater, I’d drilled in free-falling at Hillwood; now I spun so I could see the jet as Ozma jumped after me. Reese jumped last — actually stepping out to close and latch the door behind him before flying after us.

  Golden hair whipping around her face, Ozma was laughing, so at least she was having fun. I angled belly down for maximum air resistance and decided our pilot was pretty good; he’d really put us right over the airport and the green wave attacking it. No need to angle our descent — a rock would have hit the top of the tower.

  Reese caught me and Ozma in twin updrafts before we free-fell too far, and took us in. I was impressed — he had to be twisting air into tornado speeds to even slow me down. I shifted into armor mode, skin thickening and knotting into plates. I knew Reese — he’d drop me from as high as he thought he could just for kicks as soon as he had me over a spot where I wasn’t going to happen to any capes or bystanders.

  And he did, maybe five hundred feet above the tarmac and naturally over the green. I smacked down into a runway, not that it wasn’t already cracked into pieces and buried under green — new trees and what looked like mutant kudzu, kudzu that crawled faster than I could run when I wasn’t configured for speed.

  Thanks, Reese. Absorbing my armor to run faster and extruding longer claws, I headed north for the terminal — the only landmark I could see above the trees — ripping up vines that tried to eat my feet with each step.

  A fresh-faced blonde kid missing her cape landed beside me. “Glad you could make it, but can I give you a lift? Seriously, we don’t have time to for you to cut your way out!” Standing there ignoring the vines, she had to lean back to see higher than my pecs.

  “Sure — hey!” Grabbing my right wrist in both hands — they barely got all the way around — she lifted off hard and threw us straight at the tower.

  Past the tower, close enough I could have reached out and given it a swipe as we arced over the main building and down to the screaming, stampeding crowd.

  “We can’t help them empty the connected planes and concourses faster,” she explained as we flew. “But we need to clear the bottlenecks outside! Keep anyone from trying to drive out of here! Push any stopped cars out of the road so people can get away to the north!”

  She dropped me on top of my first job — an abandoned airport shuttle stuck in a jam of taxies so wide people were crawling over them. Normally I scare people if I happen to them suddenly, but nobody paid me a second glance as I scrambled down off the shuttle. My biggest problem was where to move it to that wouldn’t put people under it, and finally I just tipped it off the road, crushing parking meters. Then I started sliding and stacking taxies, clearing openings for people to run through, trying to get a feel for the place.

  The terminal building was huge. It stretched around a massive multi-level parking lot, and had a hotel smack in the middle. Escapees from the terminal building had to flee along the stacked arrival and departure roads. Finished with the bottleneck, I started dissuading drivers actually trying to drive out of the airport through the crowd — reaching through windows and ripping keys out as necessary, then shoving them off to the side. Chicago taxi drivers are tough, and stupid. One of them turned out to be carrying and shot me in the face, but that just meant I wasn’t polite and squeezed his pistol into a paperweight before moving on.

  I didn’t wonder what was happening to the others — I had my own little corner of screaming chaos.

  Megaton

  “Left! Fifteen degrees!”

  I couldn’t see around my blasts as they scraped advancing trees and vine away from the tarmac, couldn’t hear shouted directions over the roar, so Galatea guided me using other capes’ mask-cams.

  “Walk it left five degrees!”

  Were we winning? I had no idea. We’d kept my part clear, kept the planes parked and hooked up to the nearest concourse from getting buried in green and pushed over by upthrusting trees, and on my right some guy had dropped out of the sky to literally blow away aggressive green with tornado-speed winds.

  “And how are we doing, Megaton?” Blackstone queried. Unbelievably, I was actually getting tired — a really weird feeling, not muscle fatigue, more like I’d been running too hard and not getting enough oxygen to my brain.

  “I’m not sure, sir, but I may be getting down to fumes!”

  “Your suit telemetry does indicate some levels of distress,” he returned. “Lei Zi has tasked Rush with your extraction should you be unable to continue or break contact.”

  “Check, roger, acknowledged, whatever I should freaking say, sir.”

  “Traditionally, a ‘Copy, Rush tasked with extraction’ is appropriate, but we’re a little loose here, my boy. Hold as long as you feel you can, then call for relief.”

  “Good to know!” I tried deep breathing, couldn’t tell if it helped, but the choice was easy. Stand your ground until you can’t stand. You owe a life, so save a life. If this was my down payment, then Rush was going to have to carry me out of here.

  Astra

  We weren’t going to make it.

  Dispatch and airport security reported that the concourses were mostly clear, but there was always somebody — lost and panicked kids, injured passengers, some of them possibly trampled, and others not so mobile. And the terminals were full of choke-points: escalators, stairways, gates, any narrow pass, with thousands trying to push through like their lives depended on it. Even with all the capes not holding the line pouring into the buildings, it would take time we didn’t have.

  I dropped another battered bystander by the aid station getting set up around the O’Hare Airport Rescue building. A scratch-team of workers was getting the big runway-scraping bulldozers into gear; they were built for pushing heavy snow, but their drivers were going to try and back up the capes. Another team was laying a berm of foam as a perimeter; when the green broke past us, they were going to use it to channel a lit up fuel-spill for a firewall. Maybe it would work.

  “Astra, status?” Lei Zi broke in. Without my mask-cam, I was a wandering wildcard even if Dispatch could track my location by my earbug.

  “Dropping passengers, going back into the terminal!”

  “Scratch that — retrieve Ozma at my position and get her to Blue Fire!”

  What? What? “Retrieve Ozma and deliver her to Blue Fire, got it. Galatea?”

  “They’re south of the west concourses, Blue Fire is in the middle on Megaton’s right!” She hardly had to tell me; flying back over the terminals, I spotted Lei Zi by the cracking, jumping field of supercharged Saint Elmo’s Fire that danced along the edge of green in front of her as she drew from the nearby power station to fight her arc of the front.

  Ozma stood by Lei Zi, watching with interest. For a teenager with a wand, she was the furthest thing from a Magical Girl I could imagine, dressed in casual Lands’ End pants, buttoned blouse, even a scarf. The wide white and sparkling belt was interesting, and of course the wand was the princess’s signature scepter — maybe twenty inches of achingly artistic etched gold that forked into a smooth Y towards the end. The cradle of the Y framed her classic Z-inside-an-O, the crest of her royal house.

  She smiled a perfect smile when I landed. “You’re my ride?” If it hadn’t been for four years exposed to Annabeth, I’d have cried from sheer physical envy. She thrust her wand through her belt, held out her hands like she’d done this before. I smooth-lifted and then we were over the green starting to break through Variforce’ waning fields and Megaton’s blasted zone to Blue Fire’s end of the fight.

&nbs
p; Blue Fire ruled her zone, her cold blue flames licking out in auric spikes to freeze the attacking green and turn it to dust. She shivered, swaying with fatigue, but nothing made it past her searching flames. Ozma didn’t blink at Blue’s blue-tattooed skin and brief outfit. I wasn’t sure what to say — what was planned — but they were both ready.

  “How big a flare do you need?” Blue gasped, already clued in.

  Ozma pulled her wand. “Can you put a ring around me?” I scooted out of the way, fast, as Blue threw a flare of aura out to twist around her.

  “Perfect!” Ozma laughed and began chanting in Latin. It sounded almost like a limerick, and she reached out at the end of each line to touch her wand to the dancing flames.

  “OMG,” Shelly whispered in my ear — she had to be watching from Blue’s mask-cam. Every touch of Ozma’s wand broke a tongue of blue flame free from the fire ring to dance around her. Each dancing flame grew, stretched, went from blue fire to a burning blue fireman complete with flaming axe. She kept chanting as more and more burning firemen sprang free to dance the widening circle, once twice, three times and then spin away to race up and down the front of the green tide.

  “OMG,” Shell repeated. I nodded, pretty stunned myself. Blue looked ready to die of shock, aura stuttering before she got it back under control. I lost count of burning firemen somewhere after thirty but they kept coming, reminding me of Mickey Mouse’s broom army in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I could almost hear the music as they rushed away to hack and freeze vines and trees — literally — in their tracks.

  “Thoughts?” Blackstone gently broke in to ask.

  I found myself laughing helplessly. “I’m glad she’s ours?” Please, let her be ours.

  “Indeed, one hopes so.”

  Episode Three

  Chapter Nineteen: Grendel