Wearing the Cape 4: Small Town Heroes Read online

  Megaton finally turned away from Angel and Crash. “Kindrake and I managed to take out most of Balz’ spheres,” he offered. “I think.”

  I nodded, giving him credit. “And Shell and I powered up the biggest Bad Guy they’re fielding. The Brit can handle Colonel Scott and his militia now, just by himself.” Squeezing my eyes shut, I tried to rotate the tension out of my back and shoulders. “And Balz could have another crate of spheres ready to go.”

  I tried not to think too hard about the fact that the Wreckers might be one man down now, maybe permanently. I’d been rushed, and I might have killed Twist.

  Grendel flexed, popping joints. He wasn’t blaming me any more than the others, and now he shrugged massively. “Ozma should be here.”

  “Mack the Knife would have…” My brain refused to think of what Mack the Knife could have done to her before she knew he was even there. Maybe our resident sorcerous could have come another way, but she wasn’t a field cape. Grendel made a sound that told me he’d managed to complete my sentence in his head, probably with visuals.

  His voice dropped. “So what do we do?” No, no blame in his anthracite-black eyes, but no giving way either.

  “We tell Shelly to get herself and everyone else in the Institute out the back door, that we’re not keeping the Wreckers out?”

  All we could do was evacuate everyone not pinned down, wait for the Wreckers to shut down the rings and drop Littleton back into the world when they were ready to leave. That part of my dream was going to happen. If only Jacky and her boys could get in. Not to mention everything the navy base could bring—

  I stopped breathing, eyes wide, and knew what the Wreckers had come for. And I knew how to stop them from getting it.

  “Shell. Shelly.” I addressed the air. “Their target has to be in Littleton. What are the odds they came straight for the Garage, left the navy base alone?”

  Ghost-Shell popped in at my elbow. “Pretty good. If the Four Horsemen were a planned diversion, they did get us to move all but the heavy armor out of the Garage. All they had to do is leave something behind them to blow the translation system and the power plant, and that shuts the Navy out until sometime tomorrow.” Shelly nodded her agreement from the big board.

  “So the navy base has no portable translation rig?”

  “They do,” Shelly said. “But they’ve got to set it up inside the boundary line and then tune it. That takes a while.”

  “Shell? Can you send a message?”

  “Are you kidding? I’d be calling from Chicago, and they’re locked down so tight now that a call from God wouldn’t get accepted. I don’t know if it’s them doing it or Phreak’s work.”

  “Okay.” The hair on my neck was standing up and I’d gone light-headed. I tried to breathe slow, focus on keeping my feet on the floor. “So, say you’re Jacky and all this has happened. What would you do?”

  “I’d get back to the Garage, be ready to go when the gate opened again. But—”

  “And I’ll bet that Captain Lauer would do the same thing. Will, because they won’t be waiting till tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, but the Wreckers won’t open the Littleton Pocket until they’re ready to teleport over the horizon with whatever they came for! They’ll be gone!”

  “So we open the pocket first. We make my dream come true.” I straightened and crossed the room to Crash and Angel. “Crash? I need you to do another job tonight.”

  * * *

  “They’re moving,” Grendel said in my earbug even though I could see that in the virtual-screens Shell was projecting for me. “Colonel Scott’s men just reported contact with The Brit. The platoons in contact are falling back without engaging.”

  “Good.” I nodded to Tsuris. All of us except Kindrake, who had joined Shelly inside the Institute, were back out in the rain. Tsuris, Megaton, and I waited one street over from the Institute, and Shell had turned the spot into a virtual Dispatch for me, ringing me with multiple virtual screens only I could see but let me see everyone’s mask-cam views and even the network feeds the Littletone Militia had been able to cobble together. So while others stood in front, I waited at the corner of Sunnydale and Camelot.

  Two worse-omened street names were hard for me to imagine but the Wreckers had given us more time than I’d hoped for, time enough to think about street names and other things. “Tsuris, you’ve got The Brit. Remember—”

  “Don’t try and blow him away, just stop him from moving forward till it’s our turn.”

  “Right.” Shelly had been unable to identify The Brit, but if what we knew about absorptive adapters was true then pushing against the kind of wind-jet Tsuris could pull down on him would expend his stored energy reserves—so long as Tsuris didn’t feed The Brit more if he decided to just stand and take it.

  Tsuris lifted off in a blast of wind, and Megaton followed on his own blasting column of fire. Kindrake’s flight of rainbow drakes followed him; she could direct them from inside with Shelly.

  “It’ll work,” virtual-Shell said beside me. She wasn’t bothering to match her ghost-self to the environment and now her too-dry shirt read Come and take it! I wished that the soldiers deployed between the Wreckers and the Institute with Shell-Galatea, could see it. “Tsuris will slow The Brit down, Megaton and Kindrake’s pets will keep Balz’s spheres off of Tsuris while he does. But this won’t stop them.”

  “I know. But it will slow them down and save lives. How’s Grendel?” Grendel waited with Galatea, the two of them making an obvious target for Dozer and Twist when they arrived—part two of the plan to keep the casualties down.

  “He’s stoic.”

  “Really? Tell him I challenge him to Dance Dance Revolution when this is over.”

  “Now he’s laughing and Scott’s boys are looking at him funny.”

  “Hey, I might be a white girl but I have some moves. Tell him!” I hid my own smile. Stoic Grendel was a brooding troll, intimidating even to our own side, but laughing he sounded like a cheerful avalanche and was completely human no matter what he looked like. Let them look at him funny; a laughing Grendel was a morale booster.

  Balz’s sphere-swarm arrived, the explosive ones I remembered too well. In the screens I could see that the primary targets weren’t the soldiers or my team but the hard emplacements Colonel Scott had dug for his machine guns—the positions he’d evacuated trusting my plan, which meant the exploding spheres only blew apart military hardware. Still no sign of Mack the Knife, and I prayed that my gambit of keeping anyone knifeable off the ground for him to play with had kept him out of it.

  If not, Colonel Scott had a surprise for him.

  “And Dozer and Twist have arrived! Switching you over to Shelly—got to focus on Galatea!” Shell faded out from the feet up, paused with just her head. “Oh! And Colonel Scott wants to talk.”

  “We’ve laid out the welcome mat, Astra. Are you up for it?” The old soldier didn’t sound too worried, but he’d probably been doing cool-under-fire all his life even if it broke some kind of code for him to have clear targets he wasn’t shooting at.

  “We’re all improvising here, sir! Tsuris, you’re up!”

  I had no time to wonder if I was grateful that I hadn’t killed Twist or not. Tsuris dropped his focus on The Brit and brought the rain—intensified it, really, with more fish, and under the sheets of water I felt the air change. Part three. And now it was my turn. I picked up my payload and launched.

  “Hope!” Shelly broke in. “The bench team is coming but needs more time!”

  “How much more?”

  “Minutes maybe. They’re almost in position.”

  “We’ll try and give it to them, but I’m not sure who’ll be standing when they get here.” And then I was over the Institute, looking down on the sodden field of battle. The machine-gun emplacements were gone and the Institute’s doors blown open. Below me, Galatea flushed her micro-missiles at Balz’s remaining spheres and used her short-range shoulder and boot jets to close with Tw
ist. Grendel had configured his morphic form for maximum toughness, and now he pounded the ground and ignored Dozer to charge The Brit with an air-shaking roar, and that was all the time I had to see details.

  Dozer looked up just before I hit him with the truck.

  It was an old truck, solid steel body, the kind of ride that got terrible mileage but could roll a few times without coming apart or even crumpling much, and it hammered Dozer into the soaked and spongy Institute lawn. I followed it down to flip its shattered wreck aside and pounded Dozer before he could recover.

  His helmet was something new; it didn’t break and now I knew how Twist had survived, but my punch still snapped his head back—and hurt. I ignored the flash of pain in my fist to grab and throw Dozer against the closest tree with my left. The old oak shivered with the impact, bits of bark and wood flying, and he bounced back to land on hands and knees in the churned-up mud and grass.

  I stepped forward. “It’s over, Eric! You don’t have to do this!”

  I couldn’t see his face, and his answer was his charge. He hit me like a speeding semi-truck, slamming into me and carrying us both through the wall behind me and into the Institute lobby in an explosion of bricks and mortar. My head rang and the world grayed out. When I tried to push him away he grabbed an arm to hold me in place and hammer me. My head rang again and this time I bit my tongue, then I got in a curl-and-kick to throw him away from me. My flying missile-drive threw us both back out onto the lawn in another explosion of wall. We both tumbled, but I made it to my feet first.

  “Eric! Stop!” My fist ached, my right shoulder ached, the side of my head throbbed hotly and my vision wobbled. I spat blood. Beyond us, The Brit grappled with Grendel and Galatea had lost an arm to Twist. Flashes above us and flying pieces of sphere coming down with the rain told me Megaton and Kindrake were keeping Balz’s arsenal away from us. Barely.

  “Hold on—still coming!” Shelly gasped in my ear, sounding like she’d been fighting as hard as me. “Phreak is into the Institute system—we’ve lost ground floor access! Ali’s evacuating the techs!”

  The world lit up, and not because I’d been punched again—to my left a line of flash-bang mines spiked into the campus lawn lit off in a string, which meant Mack the Knife had finally tried to mix into it. The military wasn’t stupid; they’d developed area denial measures set to the hyper-fast movements of speedsters years ago—Balz had used a variant of it on Rush last year, and Colonel Scott had unpacked their own supply the moment I’d told him we had a hostile one on the ground.

  I forced myself to focus on the fight in front of me; I didn’t see an unconscious body which meant Mack had escaped back into hypertime, but he wasn’t our problem now.

  Dozer charged again but this time his feet slipped, digging divots out of the wet lawn, and I met him with an overhead elbow-drive into his back. He spread-eagled into the lawn, rolled, and pushed up to catch me beneath the edge of my armor. I folded around his driving shoulder, and his arms wrapped around my legs, kept me from flipping over off his back. He threw me down and swung, and I barely managed to roll my head out of the direct line of his punch as my head rang again. This time I flew, taking us both and with no sense of direction other than away. Dozer let go to fall.

  I let him, trying to breathe and recover. Eric was soaking up my hits, taking it in return for the chance to work me, going for a knockout over a win-by-decision, and I didn’t know how many more hits I could take. I twisted my head to each shoulder, testing my spine and my equilibrium while Dozer climbed back to his feet. He began backing away, toward the Institute. Message clear: you have to stop me.

  I dove.

  “Spheres!” Shell yelled. I twisted but my world flashed into light and disappeared. I felt the hit as I crashed.

  I didn’t—quite—black out, and endless hours of fight-training with Watchman turned my crash into a graceless roll that kept rolling for the crucial distance I needed to recover enough of myself to know what was going on again. No more spheres followed me, but looking up from the ground I blinked and saw Dozer coming on like a runaway train. His fingers brushed my foot as my leap into the air threw me beyond his reach. Breathing to slow my racing heart, I took the crucial moment to get my bearings, feel the battle. Galatea was down, in pieces like she’d forced Twist to literally tear her apart to keep her off him once her micro-missile batteries were exhausted. Grendel and The Brit staggered and rolled across the scarred and pitted field, locked in a take-no-prisoners wrestling match as The Brit hammered away with a fist or elbow when he could. He kept trying to escape as Grendel wrapped him in limb-locks.

  “Shelly, is Phreak getting through?”

  “He’s seizing systems, but Shell and I are gestalting—keeping him out of the core and away from the Interdiction Field controls for now!”

  Okay, maybe Shell had just abandoned Galatea to focus on their fight to shut Phreak out—if he got to those controls then Drop could ‘port straight in and they’d be on top of their goal. “Maybe—”

  Dozer ignored me now to charge for the destroyed doors of the Institute.

  “We’re out of time! Wherever the bench-team is—”

  They arrived in bounds that brought them through the screen of rain and trees, three big and beautiful armored Scoobies firing as they came, yes! Rockets and sabotted tracer rounds reached out to touch Dozer with flaming trails and darts of light, shredding his armor and throwing him across the mud-soaked field. Drones dropped from the sky to light up the scattered clusters of spheres still in the air in a brief aerial massacre.

  Then the surviving spheres dropped, pilotless and dead. The Master of Ceremonies condensed from the air, dropping down out of barely-there mist to land on The Brit and bite into him like a monstrous leech. The big guy screamed once, high-pitched and cut short, and went limp. I spun in place, looking for a target, but Twist was raising his hands. Dozer had finally got smart or he’d been knocked out; either way he stayed down.

  “Shell? Shelly?”

  “Phreak’s down—Jacky’s team got him and they’re not getting in!”

  And just like that it was over. It was over and we’d won.

  We’d won.

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  “Sometimes winning just means you’re the ones left to bury your dead, other times it’s more than that, but whatever else winning means, it means you go on.”

  Astra, Notes From a Life.

  * * *

  The rain shut off like someone had turned a faucet, that someone being Tsuris since for the last few minutes the only rain falling had been supplied by the lake. I looked up and realized that the stars over Cuba were different than the stars over the pocket universe that had contained Littleton.

  “They never guessed!” Shell/Shelly laughed in echo of each other. “Tsuris’ lake-storm covered our drop back into the real world—they didn’t even notice the hotter air!”

  And that had been the biggest gamble; if the Wreckers had noticed we cut power to the Borromean rings and collapsed the extra-reality pocket ourselves, they could have hit the Institute sooner or fallen back to Drop and ‘ported away before the bench-team arrived. Because of course the “bench team”—Jacky, MC, the Scoobies and the rest—had been waiting for us, especially once Crash had crossed the boundary back into the world and told them our plan.

  I laughed, still spinning. “Are you two going to unlink? Because you sound really weird together.” I felt something shift in the back of my head, like unfusing the quantum-link gestalt the two of them had made changed a balance I felt through my own link.

  Virtual-Shell appeared beside me, back in my head again. “That was weird from the inside, too.”

  “No kidding,” Shelly seconded through my earbug. “We’ll have to think about it separately when we have time, but right now Captain Lauer wants to see you.”

  * * *

  The captain had to come to me; I headed for Grendel where he stood over the comatose Brit with MC. MC looked wired, the b
ig vampire almost vibrated in place and I had to wonder what kind of kick went with The Brit’s blood in his powered up state. Grendel just looked half-beaten, his nose smashed, mouth bloody, one long fang snapped off and his scalp torn to pour blood into his eyes.

  Through my whole desperate fight with Dozer, he’d just hung onto The Brit and taken it, letting the villain expend power with every hit and clinch; now his injuries had stopped bleeding and his changeable body was already healing. He stood and watched The Brit while Scott’s boys applied shackles and sandman packs.

  I reached up to touch his swollen jaw. “Sorry.”

  “It’ll heal.” He popped the broken fang out, tossed it away. “You?”

  Me? My body was one big ache, and with the adrenaline high draining away I didn’t want to think for at least a day. If I could arrange to stay away from home for a couple of days so my superhuman constitution had time to take care of the deep bruises before my parents saw them, I would be very, very happy.

  “It’ll heal?”

  He smiled, wide and toothy. “Yeah. Good job.”

  “Astra?” Captain Lauer dismounted from an armored personnel carrier and stepped carefully across the deeply torn and pitted lawn to join us.

  “Good evening, sir.”

  “Is it?” He looked at the holes in the Institute. “How did you figure out their target was the Littleton Pocket itself?”

  “It’s the only thing that made sense, sir. Shelly said they couldn’t get to any of the Institute projects before we could destroy them, and they were just letting all of Littleton’s residents evacuate without trying to stop anybody so they couldn’t have come here after somebody. Unless they were inside the Institute, but—”