Wearing the Cape 4: Small Town Heroes Page 16

  “The fields are one-way mirrors,” Balini said, but I could see that none of the prisoners had reacted to our arrival. The guards had no excuse, but they didn’t look up either. I turned around. The field had reformed behind us, translucent on this side; the guards hadn’t needed cameras to see us coming down the hall.

  “Is the dome a weapon mount?” Jacky asked.

  “Good call. Its field can pulse to allow the synchronized guns to fire out but not let anything in. Very nice.”

  I nodded absently, sure there were lots of other weapons and security measures we couldn’t see. This was the kind of superhuman-containment stuff that Atlas and Blackstone and the other founding Sentinels had refused to allow the government to build into the Dome.

  Balini steered us to a room to the left of our entryway—a small lounge where we found Veritas waiting, as well as Lieutenant Corbin and Captain Lauer. Fatigue lines I hadn’t noticed at the action review had deepened, and I guessed that he hasn’t slept much last night and hadn’t napped today.

  “Astra, Artemis,” Veritas greeted us, back to his deadpan public manner. “Glad you could make it.”

  Jacky just smiled, one of the few people I knew who could out-cool him.

  “Astra.” Captain Lauer nodded.

  “Sir. Thank you for letting us come over.”

  “We’ve already got everything he’ll say without amnesty, which is nothing, and we’re sending for a telepath who will be here tomorrow. Will you be alright doing it alone?”

  “Yes.” Not what I’d been expecting at all, and I felt Jacky shift beside me. “Is there anything you don’t want me to say?”

  “No. At this point I don’t believe anything you might say will make him less cooperative.”

  “Okay.” I took a breath. “Where is he?”

  Where turned out to be in the next room. Brick waited for me past one more force field gate, manacled to an anchored table with shackles that weighed more than I did fully loaded. At Captain Lauer’ signal they cut the field, and the bite of harsh soap and chemicals in my nose told me they’d thoroughly deloused him. One step, and the silver field went back up behind me.

  “Heeey!” Brick’s battered face broke into a smile wide enough to show chipped and uneven teeth. He shifted and winced; his orange prison suit had been cut to accommodate a brace on his left elbow. A sling-brace immobilized his whole right arm. “I was hoping to see you again!”

  I forced myself to step forward again, set down my maul, and take the seat opposite him. And sat. Now that I was here, I had no idea how to start. My eyes went to his manacled wrists where they rested on the table, and I saw red skin above them.

  “What happened there?”

  He looked down, pulled on his shackles. “Those? They used a laser to remove my dragon tattoos. No tats, no more instant armor and toys. No problem—the Army will fix me up again.”

  “They will?”

  “Sure! Haven’t killed anybody since going AWOL, and they need rough guys like me.” He shifted, winced again. “They’ll just stick a tracker in my gut next time, maybe a bomb, maybe get a brain-twister to plant an order in my head—but hey, I cooperate and I’m back out of stockade.”

  I reached out without thinking, touched the angry red flesh and flinched back. He was already healing the way Ajax-Types did—on a normal person they’d be at least a week old—but even with soft bandages between cuffs and skin it still had to hurt to be manacled.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Huh? Girl, you think that hurt?”

  “No— I mean, sorry about the shoulder. I didn’t need to do that after I got you down and broke your arm.”

  His forehead creased into a network of wrinkles, then he barked a laugh. “Hey, it was a good fight! You win, you get your licks in. You’ve gotten better since Chicago, so have I, maybe next time I’ll last longer.”

  “But—” I stopped. The distance across the table was an entire world. I licked dry lips. “Why do you do it?”

  “What, fight? I’m good at it. It’s my good time. Girl like you, you’d never understand. Doesn’t mean I won’t enjoy the next time.”

  What did I say to that? See you then? All the other questions I wanted to ask, who, why, had already been asked and not answered. My social brain took over.

  “It was…” too weird for words. “Good to speak to you, Brick.” I collected Malleus and stood. “I hope you’re wrists are better soon.” And I never see you again. I turned to signal the captain.

  “Hey!” I turned back. Brick sat thinking, brow wrinkled, and then a grin stretched his face. He shrugged again, ignoring the pain.

  “Call me Ernest. And you might want to go back to that bar tomorrow night and look for a guy with a white hat and a blue flower on him. He was going to give me a job, but hey, it could be fun for you.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “There are three types of supersoldiers: soldiers who achieved their breakthroughs under the rigors of basic training or tailored stress-programs; civilian superhumans who couldn’t pass up the huge recruiting bonus, excellent pay, and lifelong benefits; and the parolees. The military recruits from federal and state prisons, because it can’t get enough of the first two types. Parolees’ benefits are different, as are their missions and often their rules of engagement. Some of them finish their parole tours and move into the regular ranks, others return to civilian life. Many of them don’t survive to finish their tours.”

  US Senate Military Briefing Extract.

  * * *

  “Well that was interesting.” Veritas came as close to a real smile as he ever did. The captain’s eyebrows were still halfway to his hairline. “And it wasn’t a joke. He really thinks a drink at the bar would be interesting.” He looked at me and his eyes sparkled. “If you’re game I can arrange it.”

  “No, you can’t.” The captain wasn’t protesting, he just said it like it was so. He looked around the lounge at the rest of us, back at me. “Astra, thank you for that. Now would you care to speak with me in my office?”

  Jacky snorted and I almost saluted; I knew an order when I heard one. She pulled out her cell. “You guys do that, I need to make a call.”

  “Corporal Balini, show her a room. Astra?”

  I left with the captain. Five minutes and three security checkpoints later he ushered me into his office, closing the door behind us.

  “Well that was interesting. Not an original thought, but true. Water?”

  “Thank you. Captain Lauer—”

  “Call me Frank.” He took off his uniform hat to sit and stretch out in the visitor’s chair across from me. His office didn’t have a single picture or knickknack. Seeing me look around, he nodded. “I’m here on assignment, too. Your assignment, actually.”

  “My assignment?”

  “The one you made for yourself, anyway. To stop bad things from happening. The difference is, my focus is on the Institute and the base. Yours is on the town.” He held up a hand. “And I understand. You get intel that it’s going to be a hot time in the old town tonight, you come. You’re a goddam hero. Well, I’ve seen towns burn before, and I’ll see more. I’m tasked with assessing and responding to the threat to our research facilities, here and in Littleton, and our base holding facility which just happens to hold some of the most dangerous enemies the civilized world has ever seen. We lose control of them, or we lose our projects, we might just lose the long war.

  “And of course there’s the conference—Washington has tasked me with giving the go or no-go on it. If our most secure facility isn’t as secure as we thought, the conference will need to be scrapped and we have less than three days to decide.”

  He took a sip of water and leaned forward, not in my face but close and not looking away.

  “But. The only intel we have on a threat is you. Your warning. If I say ‘go’, half the projects will shut down and fly away, and we’ll lose months, years, not to mention losing a meeting a year in the planning. So I have to believe
that there is a credible threat first, but Veritas has been shaking the trees and beating the grass at the Institute for two days and he’s got nothing. An army of accountants and computer specialists have crawled through every resident’s bank-account, travel history, sex life, checked every firewall and security system. They’ve got nothing, and I’m coming up with bupkis on the military side, in a place where the only way in is for someone inside the walls to open the gate to the enemy.”

  He sat back.

  “So, go or no-go? Based on a dream sent by an international criminal known for complicated games, the kind where other people take the hits?” Fixed on me, his eyes glinted in the overhead lights. “I don’t know, I really don’t. But then comes ‘Brick.’”

  He put his bottle down.

  “It’s interesting that you have a history with him, but the superhuman world isn’t so big it’s unbelievable. But is he a probe? A decoy? A Trojan Horse? Or a coincidence? Guantánamo City’s airport is a gateway to the Gulf and the Caribbean. And then there’s you.”

  “Me?” My throat had gone dry.

  “You. My first instinct after getting the background was to send you right back to Chicago just to remove a piece from the board that this Kitsune put there.”

  “You can’t.” My mouth was dry.

  “I could have. I still can. The US Navy holds seniority in the base and town. Kayle would have to go to the Chief of Naval Operations to trump my authority, and Ricky would tell him to pound sand.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “Doesn’t mean I won’t. I sent you out with the Garage team when Brick popped up, and I wasn’t too impressed. You made a rookie mistake for your opening move, pulled it out in the end by luck. I don’t like luck. And there’s the discrepancy between your report and the video record. You don’t remember half your fight.”

  “Why—” I hadn’t come here expecting to get attacked, and he gave me a moment to think. Finally remembering I held a water bottle, I took a sip too extend the moment and wet my throat.

  “So you think I’m unreliable?”

  “I wondered.” He kept his eyes on me. “I understand you do full-contact fight training?”

  I nodded.

  “Then you’ve been trained to ‘play through the pain.’ You were utterly focused on the next thing you could do, so the hits you took first weren’t important enough for your brain to file away.”

  He played with his own bottle. “Combat-amnesia is actually pretty common. In extreme cases whole sequences of events are blocked, and not just traumatic ones. You’ve probably experienced it before—actions in combat that took longer than they seemed to, or happened more quickly than you remember. It’s simply that you’ve never had as big a contradiction between memory and reality caught on camera. Do you remember anything else that didn’t look the same when you watched in the review?”

  “I… Yes! Lance Corporal Tsen…”

  “Go on.”

  “When Brick hit him— I remember his breastplate just, just completely caving in, right through his chest. It would have killed him, wouldn’t it? Ajax-type or not.”

  “Very likely. You’ve seen that kind of hit before? It’s what you feared most when you saw him take the hit, and your mind manufactured a completely illusory memory. You’ve heard the cliché, ‘Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?’” His mouth creased in a humorless smile. “In the stress of combat our eyes do often lie—or at least our minds play tricks with what our eyes tell us. At this point, even a telepath walking through the memory with you couldn’t tell us the story the video showed.”

  “So, it’s normal? I’m okay?”

  “Probably. That’s why I brought you out to watch you with Brick. If it was deeper, if he was a source of trauma for you, you’d have showed it in there and I could send you home.” He took another sip, laughed. “Did not expect to get more intel from it.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  He smiled crookedly. “Keep my own assets in position. Do you want to go have fun?”

  * * *

  “No, we’re not. Not until dark.” Jacky stated it as a simple fact. She’d still been on her call when the sailor escorting me showed me into the empty conference room they’d given her, and she barely heard me out before stepping on my plan to go now. “We’ll have to rain-check dinner.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll still get to dress up.”

  “Are you two always like this?” The voice on the other end of her cellphone dripped warm Nola honey, all masculine amusement at our girl-talk.

  “No.” Her glare should have melted her cell.

  “Jacky, are you sure? And who’s that? Do I get to meet him?”

  “Yes.” She scanned the walls of the conference room we’d been given for privacy, and I could just see her thinking. The Navy had to be listening, if not on the line then to the room—but whatever she didn’t say now, she wasn’t going to keep them in the dark for long.

  She decided, and relaxed. “That’s Darren. He confirmed your White Hat and you’ll meet him tonight. I thought we might need backup so I stopped in New Orleans on the way and brought some friends. You’ll meet them, too.”

  Oooh, I practically hallucinated Shell’s—or Shelly’s—response to that tidbit. I opened my mouth, closed it because even if the Navy knew she’d still be uncomfortable confirming that she’d brought vampire backup—the only thing it could be if we had to wait till night.

  “Got it.” Darren said. “So what do you need, sweetheart?”

  “Hope and I are going to go change and get our party stuff together,” she said, ignoring me as I mouthed sweetheart? “We’ll meet you at the hotel where all of you can get your curiosity out of your system, then we’ll all go dancing. And don’t worry, we have a ride.”

  She cut the connection before he could say anything else, glared at me. “What?”

  “Are you sure about missing dinner? ‘Cause Mrs. B— Mrs. H makes a great pot roast. To die for, not that you want to do that again. Hey, you could bring Darren…” Yes I was being evil, but it was too much fun and I needed a little.

  “Are you finished?”

  “I suppose. Wait— Yes. Shelly is going to yell at you, though.”

  “I can live with that.” She barely gave me time to grab Malleus before she was out the door. I flew us back to the Garage and Littleton, getting us back just in time to hear the wailing sirens.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “The important thing to remember in a crisis is not to panic. But since you’re going to panic anyway, the most important thing is to have a menu of responses you know so well that you can take the immediate steps while your brain isn’t giving you 100%. If you picked the wrong response, at least you’re moving and that makes you harder to hit.”

  Astra

  * * *

  Now? My heart raced, skipping a beat when my special cellphone shrilled and buzzed. Jacky put a hand on my shoulder, ready to grab on as I flew.

  “Astra!” It was Sheriff Deitz. “Drop Artemis at the B&B and get high. I want eyes, and you’re safe under three hundred feet. Move!” I launched from our entry point, flying low over the hill and under the tree line into town and through the streets. Jacky dropped off my back outside Holybrook Rest and I spared one thought for Mr. Darvish and the cherub before going vertical.

  I didn’t have Shell to give me a virtual-marker reading of feet-above-ground, but I’d gotten pretty good at eyeballing distance and I stopped to hover at maybe two hundred and fifty feet. Every hooded streetlamp in town wailed below me, the light-domes that topped them flashing red or green. In the streets marked by green-strobing lampposts, people raced out of buildings and houses. Some jogged away down the streets, others jumped into cars.

  I spun in a slow one-eighty, looking for the danger, spun again. I couldn’t see anything, but at least nobody was panicking; on some streets the cars moved along slowly, picking up pedestrians as they went. Pa
rents guided children—at the school they wound from the building to the buses in a tight two-by-two chain. In other streets the cars didn’t stop but I saw the runners were aiming for marked shelters. At the ends of the town not blocked by the lake, I could see that everybody was headed for a couple of gated bus parks; obviously they’d load and drive across the bubble’s boundary line when full-up or told to scram.

  “I’ve got nothing up here!” I yelled into my cell. “What am I looking for?”

  “If you don’t see threats, move over the red zones.” Angel this time. “If it goes green, move on. If you see any threats or someone takes a shot at you, report. Any threatened residents, use your discretion.”

  “Got it.” I stayed high, moving directly over the largest red zone then curving outward from there when my super-duper vision failed to spot anybody moving in a way that screamed threat. Threats failed to arrive from above as well, but I made a mental grid and stuck to it.

  Scan, turn, scan, move on. Nobody tried to shoot at me, nothing moved outside of a few residents caught in the open and scrambling for shelters. One by one the red zones went green, marked by eruptions of residents exiting buildings and joining the orderly exodus. Maybe five minutes after the alarms sounded, the last zone went green with no threats in sight.

  The sirens cut off, the green lights went steady.

  “Stand down, Astra,” Angel said. “Drill’s over.”

  * * *

  “That was a drill?”

  “Yup.” Deitz watched the replay on his big board, symbols in the grid scrolling numbers I didn’t understand. “Pretty good one, too. We haven’t done a full-town drill in a while.”

  “And you’re not going to do one again!” Director Althea Shaw was practically hissing, glaring at Deitz from the side of the board set for video-conference. Stepping past the rail brought me into her field of vision and she turned her attention to me.