Wearing the Cape 4: Small Town Heroes Read online

  I nodded. Too bad, but we still—

  “Hey Astra, who’re your friends?”

  I turned and realized we had company. Deitz and Angel stood in the doorway, Angel with her tri-barrel over her shoulder.

  “Sheriff Deitz, Deputy Sweet, please meet Galatea, Megaton, Grendel, Crash, Kindrake, and Tsuris. The Young Sentinels. Everybody, Sheriff Deitz and Deputy Sweet, the law in town.”

  “When we’re not at war,” the sheriff corrected. “Carl is in charge of the proceedings right now, and my authority only extends to the shelters. Come in out of the rain.” Another explosion lit the night from the direction of the Institute. “And all that.”

  We trooped inside. Shelly’s face was already on the big board, and she beamed at us.

  “Hey guys, welcome to Littleton! The bang you just heard was one of the two vans, a scouting platoon lit it up but it was empty. The Wreckers—yeah, the Wreckers—are taking their own sweet time.”

  “Why?” Jamal asked. “Not that we’re complaining since we got here in time for the show.”

  I finished clipping my cape on, complete with deputy badge, and raised my hand for attention. “They think they have all night, guys. They’re all boosted by The Ascendant, and they think no help is coming. And with Drop moving them around, Balz scouting for them, and—Sheriff, they may have all of the heavy Cerberus unit, three of them anyway—they think they can handle everyone in here with them.”

  Sheriff Deitz nodded at my little summation. “And you think you guys can turn it around?”

  “We can try. But, Sheriff? I think if the fighting is focused right now, we should begin evacuating everybody who’s not shooting.”

  “Already on it. As soon as Scott’s boys nailed down the points of contact we began walking and shuttling from the shelters furthest from the action. With the night and now the rain, the Wreckers may not even know.”

  “Or care,” Shelly said from the board. “They haven’t tried attacking civilians or taking hostages—I think they think they’re the Good Guys.”

  “And Good Guys have rules.” I nodded. That fit with how my fight with Dozer had gone last year, even my stay as The Ascendant’s guest.

  “Yeah they do. Guys, they believe breakthroughs are the next step in humanity becoming ascendant beings—so they’re mortal gods but in their book that means benevolent gods. They’ll show mercy when they can, and won’t harm anyone normal who isn’t fighting them.”

  “When they’re not executing norms for killing or trying to kill us ‘ascendant beings’,” Tsuris added.

  The floor shook and the night outside lit up. Shelly looked away from her screen, turned back.

  “So here’s the deal, guys. Colonel Scott has half his troops dug in at pre-prepared points in a covering pattern around the Institute. Most of the rest are moving outside the perimeter, looking for contact so they can call in the brilliant-missiles Scott has for artillery. They’re not playing around, Hope—their nastiest pieces could kill you. But so far they’ve got no confirmed kills, and we’ve…lost a few. So let’s end this.”

  And they all looked at me.

  “Hey, Hope,” Shell ghost-whispered in my ear. “That’s your cue.”

  We can’t, can we? I looked around at everyone and my Blackstone-trained internal tactician kicked in, whispering maybe we can. For all our training, half of our team was what Rush liked to call new and shiny and Lei Ze called green—the Green Man hadn’t been a real battle so much as an unnatural disaster—and with the exceptions of Grendel, who’d been “born” in an insane horror of psychotic bystanders and twisted and rampaging breakthroughs, none had seen a battlefield. I had no idea how half of them would react to deadly, mortal, man-to-man combat.

  But… Grendel was almost unkillable if they could stop him at all. Galatea was a drone piloted by Shell, she’d brought racks of ordnance, and even getting blown up didn’t mean the end of what she could do. Tsuris and Megaton…both could work it from standoff-range and support each other. Crash was in some ways the most dangerous of all of us as long as he didn’t get stupid, and he was the most careful of us, too. Kindrake… No idea, keep her safe, let her improvise around us. So, the Young Sentinels vs. the Wreckers?

  Two unknowns to deal with, but we could win. If we can’t win we can find that out and work the edges, evacuate Littleton, maybe even keep them from completing their mission. And Shelly was in the Institute and not alone—we couldn’t not try. I felt the smile growing across my face. We were here to save Littleton.

  Crash knew the look, and pumped his fist. I heard a “Yes!” from Tsuris, an almost sub-sonic growl from Grendel.

  “Give me a moment, guys.” Staring at the board, which Phreak still kept mostly dark, I looked blankly at the overlayed streets while my thoughts raced.

  “Three points—we need to find the Wreckers, we need to keep our own side from shooting at us as we move, and we need to identify and counter two unknowns. Once we have a target I can lift Grendel. Crash can speed in. Kindrake, I’m sorry but Terraflore is too big and…he’s too big a target. Can you divide him into your flight of drakes? Crash can get you and them around if he’s got a bike. You two are a team for the rest of the night. Sheriff? Do you have a handy motorcycle?”

  “Take mine,” Angel offered. “It’s a Yamaha ultra-light—I’ve driven it around most of Cuba.” She fished in her desk for her keys, looked back at us. “What? A girl has to have a hobby.”

  I blinked away the image of Angel driving from town to town, bar to bar. She probably had drinking songs about her now.

  “Okay, we’ll coordinate with Colonel Scott first, get the likely contact points. Crash will scout on the bike and tell us where the Wreckers are, we’ll go in as I said. Shelly? Can you and Galatea coordinate to act as Dispatch for this? We need threat-recognition as we go, especially for the unknown two or three we’re dealing with.”

  The sheriff started talking to the colonel. Angel took Crash out to show him her bike. Everyone else pretty much relaxed, taking the whole thing like the prep meeting for a hot-range exercise. All except for Kindrake, who looked more than a little lost. Watching her with Grendel, I knew he didn’t see it; he was in his zone, his body changing as muscles bulked and adjusted themselves for the coming fight.

  He looked up at me. “I want Dozer.” A troll staking out his fight. The biggest, of course, Eric. Mr. Ludlow.

  “You can have him.” I crossed my arms, looked away and caught Kindrake’s eye where she leaned against Angel’s desk. I had no idea why Kindrake was here, but I could only be grateful. And now she’s your job too, so suck it up little girl.

  Tilting my head at the coffee machine got a nod from her and she joined me. I wasn’t Jacky—don’t think about Jacky—but the Littleton Sheriff’s Office kept a decent cupboard and the pot was fresh; I poured and made mine while she decided what to put in hers, turned to lean against the counter beside me and watch the room. I turned my head so she could see my smile. “Are you okay?”

  “Sure.” She shrugged. “I just— I’m CAI certified, but that was mostly search-and-rescue, emergency support, stuff like that. You guys…”

  “Yeah. We mostly do emergency response, too, but the Sentinels are a fighting team. And the Young Sentinels are, too, or we will be once we’re all old enough to qualify. Half of us have a few more months.”

  “How can you fight here?”

  “I don’t think the American Superhero Association is going to hear what happens here, do you? And we’re a little out of their jurisdiction.” I leaned in closer, bumped her shoulder. The goth-girl was older than me, taller too, just like everyone else, but I felt like the big sister. “Stick with Crash, you’ll be alright.”

  “Thanks.” She watched me for a moment while I sipped, then paid attention to her own cup. “That’s not—” She blew on her coffee, looked back at me. “Why are you fighting here? I mean, it’s not your town—from what I get, it’s a place that’s not even here, so nobody will ever know
.”

  I looked at her, and didn’t even have the words.

  “Astra?” Sheriff Deitz got my attention, stepped over to the board.

  “Stick with Crash,” I repeated softly. Straightening I gave her shoulder a light squeeze and crossed the room without looking at anybody, feeling like a complete fake.

  “Scott thinks they’re somewhere here,” the sheriff said when I joined him. He pointed to a block of houses with deep backyards close to the Institute. “They keep making and breaking contact in the streets around this block, and he thinks that Drop is sending the Wreckers out, making hard contact, then jumping out and picking them up. Which we think he can do as long as he has relative coordinates to his arrival zone.”

  “And he’s getting that here from Balz’s spheres.”

  “Yup.”

  “Confirmed threats?”

  “Just the ones you’ve told us about. Dozer, Balz, and Twist, and they’re bad enough when they drop right on a platoon. No contact with the two unknowns and no sign of any more of our own Cerberus team.”

  “Okay.” Please God, let Balini have been the only traitor. We just couldn’t face the Wreckers and three more hard-trained Scoobies working together. “Crash, your turn. Do not drop out of hypertime anywhere near the area—go through and come back. Remember what Balz did to Rush last year.”

  “Yes, boss.” He pulled on his red racer’s helmet and was gone through the open door. And then he was back. We never heard the bike. “The general’s right. They’re in back of one of the homes, operating out of a big van. I saw three, Balz’s spheres all over, but couldn’t see in the van. He can move the whole thing if he wants, right?”

  I thought of the big steel platform with the “pilot’s chair” I’d seen last year. “We think so. Okay people, let’s go.”

  * * *

  The rain had mostly stopped but now it picked up again, this time covering the whole town. It couldn’t all be Tsuris, and Shelly guessed that his brief but intense shower had convinced the pocket reality’s own weather system that it was time to water the grass. I asked Tsuris if he could bring up some more lake water to thicken the rain as we went in, and he acted like I was asking him if he knew how to walk. Or maybe crawl.

  We launched when the water fell in sheets with a light scattering of fish. I could barely see Tsuris’ blue and gray form less than thirty feet from me, and behind him Megaton’s flare almost disappeared in the curtains of rain. One thing we had absolutely changed from my dreams was the whole town was not going up in flames; even the most enthusiastic fires below us were giving up and calling it a night.

  Dangling from my grip, Grendel waited patiently for me to drop him and Shell thoughtfully provided a red targeting pip for the van and Dozer; without it even I couldn’t have seen them through the rain and the screen of tree branches.

  “You realize that you two look ridiculous,” Shell commented from her view through Galatea behind us. “Like a hummingbird airlifting a cat—it’s just wrong.”

  And like always, she’d forced a laugh out of me when I needed it. “Just because you can’t. Okay everyone, three, two, one, go!”

  I dove and released my one-hand grip on Grendel’s wrist. Falling through the rain, he dropped through the aerial perimeter of guardian spheres below us for a perfect driveway-cracking landing between the van and his target. Down the street beyond Balz’ perimeter, Crash dropped out of hypertime with Kindrake, and her flight of tiny drakes clinging to them like bats exploded upward to attack the lower spheres. Megaton opened up on the higher ones with precise blasts while Tsuris focused the rain into a reverse-waterspout over the van and yard and Galatea hovered, ready to flush missile racks.

  The armor-clad figure Shell had virtual-labeled Dozer charged Grendel according to plan and I dropped to land on the other side of the van as they crashed together. My super-duper vision picked up two glowing human heat sources inside. Step one: destroy the Wrecker’s mobility by taking out Drop. I punched a hole in the van, dropped my maul, grabbed with both hands and ripped the hole into one I could get through.

  Neither occupant was Drop or anyone else I knew, but I’d brought enough sandman packs. “You’re under—” The boot to my face landed harder than a normal could have kicked, not hard enough to hurt more than surprise but I still stumbled back. The unarmored guy climbed out through the hole to meet me, laughing.

  “Astra, luv! Me and the gents were wondering when you’d show up. I was thinkin’ you’d got trapped outside and I’d come all this way for bugger-all.”

  He stepped down and planted his feet wide, not paying any attention to the roaring and shaking battle on the other side of the van or the rain soaking his cargo pants and leather jacket. A fitted black mask covered his whole head to hide everything but his eyes, which wrinkled over the smile I couldn’t see as he opened his arms and gave the universal curling come and get it gesture with both hands. I’d never seen him before—or at least heard that voice—but he looked awfully happy to see me.

  “So c’mon luv, give us a kiss. Take your best shot.”

  “Hope, he thinks he can take you!”

  “Really? ‘Cause I wasn’t getting that at all!” Shell wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t know, but there was no time. His companion in the van could engage any second, and the longer I took here the more likely Dozer and Twist could double-team Grendel or the rest could get away. I swung.

  For a horrible second I thought I’d killed him; he flew away from me, the force of my hit lifting and throwing him across the drive and through the tall picket fence into the next yard. I flew after and found him picking himself up, laughing again.

  “Is that your best? Your stonking great beasty back there could slap me harder! I could be in London right now, good-timing it on the pull and the piss, so c’mon and give it to me, luv!”

  I swung again and then again into his unresisting mass, realized Shell was yelling “Try something else!” in my ear. Screaming my own frustration as he laughed, I fell back and pulled a sandman pack from my belt. He wiped a drop of blood from his lip, looked at it and at the pack.

  “Oh no, luv. Now it’s my turn.” He charged with the speed of someone who didn’t even notice their own body weight. This time I braced—a big mistake.

  My world lit as I took the full hit he shouldn’t have been able to deliver if the kick before had been his limit. It felt like I’d been hit by Boomer again. Braced, I didn’t fly far before sliding—fetching up against the van where we’d started. I shook my head, desperate to clear my vision, and he lit up as Galatea’s flushed missile swarm slammed into him. He walked out of the fireball, still laughing.

  “Shell!” I stared, panting. “He’s getting bigger!” His cargo pants had hung loose before, and now his clothes—which hadn’t been blown off—stretched tight over growing muscle. I scrambled to my feet, retrieving Malleus only to hold it uselessly.

  “He’s adaptive—a force absorber! Get Shelly to ID him!”

  “How are you going to stop him?”

  “Crash! Get Cr—”

  The eye-twisting blur that came in from my left wasn’t Crash’s red and white, it was black, and then Crash twisted into sight as two speedsters whirled across the yard.

  They’d counted on us. Or on the Sentinels.

  And surviving spheres were dropping close, pulling in to the center where the fight was.

  “Get Crash out! Now! Crash—Kindrake!” I didn’t have time to think about the disaster the situation had turned into. Smashing the van’s engine block with a back-swing in passing, I ignored the one I’d dubbed The Brit to get to Grendel—tangled with Twist’s cables while Dozer pounded him or tried to.

  I landed on Dozer with a two-handed downswing into his armored back that hammered him to the ground. ”We’re out!” Not waiting see if Grendel understood, I threw Malleus hard and when Twist went down with Malleus in his armored chest I grabbed Grendel and leaped for sky, The Brit still laughing behind me.

&nbs
p; Chapter Twenty Seven

  “If the fight goes against you, unless you’re standing on ground you have to protect or with people you can’t leave, you get the hell out. Standing your ground when you can’t win and don’t have to is for dead heroes.”

  Atlas

  * * *

  Angel patched the nasty cut high on Crash’s neck, while I stood by the big board and called myself every bad name I could think of.

  Crash dubbed the new speedster Mack the Knife, and he had the right; hundreds of hours sparring and practicing Bagau katas in Sifu’s school had turned the panicked kid I remembered from the night at Puccini’s last year into an opponent the other speedster—a nasty knife-fighter according to Crash—hadn’t been expecting at all. He’d managed to back the guy off until Galatea had started targeting him with computer-guided auto-bursts. Then he’d gotten himself and Kindrake out of there, and now we were all back in the Sheriff’s Office, dripping and dispirited while Sheriff Deitz watched the door and talked to Colonel Scott.

  I’d lost track of missions, and if Crash had gone down then Mack the Knife could have gotten to Kindrake before she’d known he was coming. And the way that The Brit had been hulking out, the sandman-packs Crash had brought might not have even worked.

  “Do you think they’re new Wreckers?” Megaton had his helmet off, and he kept rubbing his face and looking over at Angel and Crash.

  “No.” I sighed. “I think they’re more mercenaries. Like the Three Horsemen. They’re…hard.”

  Shell had shown me Crash’s helmet-cam replay of his encounter with Mack the Knife, and just watching had shaken me again. The Brit might talk like a happily sociopathic brawler, but he wasn’t Brick; he’d been controlled, known exactly what he was doing at every step. And Mack the Knife… Crash’s fancy martial-arts moves hadn’t set him back more than a second and he’d still come horribly close to slicing an artery. Crash thought Mack had avoided his suit since he couldn’t tell how armored it was, and the image of blood flying from the sweeping cut below his chin was going to stay with me. Crash had managed a countering disarm then stiff-punched the guy in the solar plexus and bugged out as instructed while Mack was half paralyzed and then running from Galatea.