Wearing the Cape 4: Small Town Heroes Page 24

  “But if they were, then the slow and methodical approach made even less sense,” he finished for me.

  “Yes. But the one thing in the Institute we couldn’t destroy or evacuate was the thing that generates the extra-reality pocket. And…”

  “And?”

  “It fit, sir. The Ascendant—the Ascendancy— they think of themselves as superior beings. Shelly called them mortal gods. Well, right now they’re hiding and gods don’t hide. The Ascendant wants his own Mount Olympus, somewhere safe he can build a temple to himself and gather his followers without interference.”

  “But you can only get into the pocket from its corresponding location in the real world. Wouldn’t that make it easy to find?”

  I took a breath, let it out. “Ozma transported my whole team here on a tornado, sir. I think, if you have the right kind of power and a beacon to help you find it, you can get from there to here from anywhere in the world. And they have Drop and Phreak.”

  “They had Phreak. Artemis took Crash and your other vampire and half my light-armored with her; they and their scratch-team caught Phreak with his full rig. The only ones we didn’t get were Drop and the speedster you so colorfully named Mack the Knife.”

  My smile hurt but I couldn’t stop. I’d known Jacky would know just what to do, better than I did.

  “I’m sure he has another name, sir.”

  “I’m sure he does.”

  More APCs came down the street, loaded with more soldiers and sailors. Sheriff Deitz and Deputy Sweet arrived in their own jeep, lights flashing, and the sheriff stopped and got out by an officer that had to be Colonel Scott. I’d never met the slight and gray-haired soldier, and he looked more like a professor than a military man, but he walked through the wreck of the field like he’d seen a million of them. He and the sheriff joined us while Angel went to talk to the soldiers handling Twist. He really needed a scar or a cigar or something to go with the black unit beret.

  I shook the colonel’s hand. “So, what happens to Littleton now?” Beyond the Institute the buildings that showed above the trees didn’t show any smoke—Tsuris had drowned every fire—but I wondered how many shops and businesses had to be rebuilt.

  He rubbed his face, looking at the closer devastation. “We finish evacuating. And we move all the Institute projects and files to the navy base. Ali says they’ve already started.”

  “But it’s over. Isn’t it?”

  “Not until we bring the pocket back,” he explained. He waved at the star-speckled sky. “You’ll notice we’re sitting open to the world right now? But we don’t know what will happen when we power up the rings again. It’s never been tried.”

  “Oh. Well—” I straightened, tested my aches and pains. “Sleep is overrated.”

  “You’re not kidding,” Shelly agreed. “I’m setting up an intravenous coffee drip down here, we’ve got to move the Oroboros’ files out of their segregated system and upload the whole thing by secure satellite uplink, and Shell can’t help at all with this— FYI, Shell processed the mask-cam footage from Jacky and Crash’s roundup of Phreak and his gear. So guess what they found? The high security flash-drive Fisher and the feds are looking for.”

  “No!” I almost laughed; it was too good.

  “Yes. It’s been wiped and Phreak’s not talking, but Shell figures it had code that he needed but had wanted to keep completely off the grid—must have really messed him up when they had to leave Chicago a bit earlier than planned last year. So that’s keeping her busy, but if you want to pick up bits of Galatea, Vulcan will be grateful. And then you could help Ali’s people load the heavy stuff.”

  From Grendel’s snort, it sounded like she’d patched him in, too.

  I looked at the colonel, captain, and sheriff. “Well gentlemen, it looks like I have my own marching orders. If you’ll excuse me?”

  I detoured to see Jacky and Crash and get Malleus back first, where I’d left it in retreat. It felt good to have it back in my hand.

  * * *

  We didn’t get the last of the Institute loads out until well past dawn, and the day’s work also involved setting up shelters for Littleton’s displaced citizenry; just because we optimistically hoped to be home by nightfall didn’t mean we could be stupid about it. I found Mr. Darvish and Atifa and was able to assure Mrs. H that Shelly and Shell were both fine.

  The government of Cuba had to know about the sudden appearance of Littleton, but all we got was Mr. Black dropping by to extend the Tyrant’s offer of supplies and transportation if necessary. That, and the caravan of trucks from Guantánamo City laden with meals prepared by every café and restaurant in town and probably a lot of private kitchens, too.

  I still wasn’t sure about the Tyrant, but that showed class.

  On my second trip to the temporary camp to bring more supplies out of Littleton just in case I spotted Angel and Naked Man, in pants this time. He stood near the lunch line, his curly black hair standing out above most everyone around him. A circle of Cubans who’d unloaded their meals had gathered and I could hear the back-and-forth of a dialogue, fluent Spanish, or at least is sounded fluent to me. Angel stood nearby, eagle eyes on him and everyone in threat range. I scooted over.

  “What’s going on?”

  “He has a new audience for his message of peace and universal beinghood. It happens.”

  “I don’t understand.” And really I didn’t, even if everything going on had kept me from thinking about it until just now. “Why is he in Littleton? He seems harmless.”

  “He is, unless you try and hurt him.”

  “What happens?”

  “We don’t know. There’ve been five attempts but we haven’t found the ones who tried yet. He’s here because of the three kidnappings.”

  “Why?”

  “His message. Him. Take your pick.” Angel ‘s sharp face got a soft look that reminded me of Jacky in Holybrook Rest.

  I was wondering what that meant when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned and didn’t recognize the rough-looking Cuban standing in front of me, but Angel eyeballed him and decided he wasn’t a threat to her alien preacher while I fumbled for polite Spanish and finally gave up.

  “Yes? Can I help you?”

  He nodded respectfully and held out a letter, dropping it in my hand before I had time to think. Nodding again, he turned and disappearing into the crowd without a word.

  I stared after him, and then turned the letter over. It was a folded piece of parchment-style stationary, stamped with red wax, and I broke the seal and opened it to unfold a page filled with handwriting so fine it was nearly calligraphy.

  Dear Hope: I realize this mode of communication is a bit archaic, but I find that I loathe tweeting and texting and emailing and all the other impersonal modern forms. Since I am pressed for time I will skip over the usual pleasantries other than to say that you are looking very well, all things considered. I wanted to assure you that while the Ascendancy’s activities enabled my own, I was never a part of their plan and since your own family might have become involved I felt that you should be involved as well. I hope you will forgive my once-again intrusion into your sleep, but time was short and the detour to fly from Washington to Guantánamo by way of Chicago was worth the risk. I will say that the results were most entertaining; certainly you exceeded my expectations.

  Until next time.

  There was no signature. Turning the letter back over, I looked at the wax seal. I’d seen the stamped fox-face symbol before on a business card.

  “Is there a problem?” Angel glanced at the letter to make sure it wasn’t dangerous to her responsibility.

  “No, at least I don’t think so.”

  I called Shelly.

  “Hmm? Kind of busy here. Ali’s disappeared, and they’re desperate enough to find out what she took with her that they’ve enlisted me and Shell to shake the sacred tree that is the Institute Secure System and see what falls out. I’ve never seen such a thick non-disclosure agreement in
my life. What do you need?”

  I popped up a few feet to scan the busy crowds. Around me helicopters landed and took off, trucks unloaded and departed for the base and for Guantánamo, and…

  “Never mind. At least we don’t have to wonder about Kitsune anymore. How did he escape Veritas’ mole-hunt?”

  She didn’t ask how I knew. “I think that Kitsune can transform into someone deep enough that he’s them. If he believes it, he can answer personal questions ‘truthfully’—makes you wonder if he could ever change so completely he forgot who he was. Anyway, he left a note that we’d find the real Ali vacationing in Bermuda with a faked memory of winning a vacation to a very exclusive and isolated spiritual retreat. Got to go.”

  “Go,” I laughed. It was all I could do. “See you soon.” I hung up and landed. There was still a lot to be done.

  * * *

  The last evacuees of Littleton were the eight militia members killed defending their town from the Wreckers.

  All work stopped as the base chaplains and Littleton ministers conducted a very brief service before Naval Intelligence claimed their bodies; NavInt would provide cover stories for their deaths before sending them home to loved ones who would believe they died anywhere but here. I prayed with the Navy chaplains, and then got back to work.

  The sky was dark when the Institute carefully repowered the Borromean rings and I and everyone else watched Littleton fade from sight. The crowd cheered, and then all we could do was wait.

  Fortunately we didn’t wait long; the Garage’s translation system hadn’t been damaged by the Wreckers on their way through. Balini had gotten Phreak access to the system, which had allowed him to translate them through and then wreck the Garage’s computer system and power grid behind them. The Navy had finally let Shell help, at least with that, and with an installed generator and backup system from the base she was able to retune the translation system to the Littleton Pocket in minutes. An hour of testing and exploring later, they concluded the Littleton Pocket was stable as it had ever been and began shuttling us in.

  I said goodbye to my Scoobies. Balini had knocked them out at the beginning of the night with aerosolized sandman packs in the Dog House before he opened the Garage to the Wreckers, and Corbin got tight-jawed just asking about my fight with him. When they found out what happened to my challenge coin, Corbin gave me his own. It earned him a surprise hug. He was an Ajax—he could take it.

  Jacky and I got back to Holybrook Rest well after midnight. She’d seen off her boys from New Orleans first and the rest of the team stayed at the naval base overnight. Mr. Darvish got back before we did, and had prepared a late dinner-board for his guests to refresh themselves with as they trickled in. We snacked and took turns with the shower before turning in, and I dropped into dreamless sleep.

  Dreamless for a while, anyway.

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  “It's the action, not the fruit of the action, that's important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there'll be any fruit. But that doesn't mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.”

  Mahatma Gandhi

  * * *

  I stood in a crystal gazebo someone had perched on top of an enormous white gasbag. The taut inflated surface sloped out and away beneath the little structure to disappear into the sea of clouds surrounding the great white balloon. Through the gazebo’s crystal-clear roof, the stars overhead shone bright where the weirdly blue and white-banded full moon didn’t wash them out with its light. The night air wasn’t as cold as it should have been for as high as we seemed to be, making me wonder about air-impermeable force fields. Suspended in a shallow oil-filled chalice, a single flame added warm gold to the silver-blue moonlight to illuminate the open chamber.

  I wasn’t dreaming, but I wasn’t awake either. All the horror movies had it wrong—in dreams you either don’t question anything, no matter how weird, or you know that you are dreaming. I wasn’t panicking: no racing heart, no rushing adrenaline to make me hyper-aware and gear me up for fight-or-flight action. But I wasn’t where I should have been, with no idea how I got there.

  At least I was wearing the indestructables I’d gone to sleep in, a good thing since I wasn’t alone.

  “Do you like it?” The lady sitting on the throne—if you made thrones out of floating stone blocks covered in mother of pearl—spoke reverently, as if we sat in church.

  “Yes.” I sighed happily. “It’s my favorite place.”

  “True.” Somehow she knew I meant the clouds and stars. “Although you aren’t often up here in company, and you certainly haven’t visited as a guest in a cloudhome.”

  “Cloudhome?”

  “Well, a virtual recreation, anyway. It was my favorite place.”

  The lady beside me wore a high-necked white bodysuit tight as a second skin. It did nothing to hide her lean form and elegant limbs although it covered her from her toes to her fingertips. Over it she wore a loose white caftan dress so gauzy it almost wasn’t there. The exposed skin of her hands and face was a rich, light and unblemished chocolate and her perfect skin and high cheek-bones would make a New York supermodel cry, but her perfection wasn’t at all cold; warm brown eyes, framed by a high forehead and thick black hair pulled back tight to fan into a proud mane, reflected merriment.

  A perfect eyebrow arched.

  “Are you trying to guess where I’m from?”

  “I suppose I am.”

  “Will you be alarmed when I tell you I’m from the year 2152, Common Era?”

  “Are you really?”

  “My quantum soul certainly is. I was born much earlier, and the Moon wasn’t blue then. Do I look like a centenarian?”

  “Um, no?” She sat easily, straight and regal as a queen, with fewer lines in her warm skin than a teenager.

  “The wonders of future medicine. I am—or I was—the Western Warden of the Confraternal Unity, a political block of the Twenty-Second Century. To be more precise, I had a turn at it. You may call me…Jenia. Yes, the first name I chose for myself. This was my home, rather modest by future standards except in its location. I am gratified that you like my little shrine, but shall we go inside?”

  Going inside meant standing still as the floor of the shrine sank, taking us down through the cloudhome’s gasbag.

  “So what did you do to the Moon?” I asked as we sank.

  “We added air and water, increased its size and mass, widened its orbit, and sped up its rotation.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “Carefully.”

  Right… It finally occurred to me to try and get Shell’s attention, but a sub-vocalized call got nothing. Since the quantum-signaling our neural link relied on wasn’t being blocked by Guantánamo’s security anymore, that probably meant I wasn’t signaling at all and strengthened the asleep-but-not-dreaming hypothesis. And yet still not panicking, which was amazing since it meant that yet someone else had access to my head.

  Our open-sided elevator finished its descent, dropping us into a wide but low-ceilinged room with curving walls of floor-to-ceiling bay windows. The Spartan white room held no furniture or decorations, although outlines on the floor hinted that stuff should be there, and with everything I wanted to ask the question that came out of my mouth was, “What happened to interior decorating in the future?”

  Her smile turned whimsical. “It went virtual. Here is what it sometimes looks like through an accepting neural link.”

  Between one blink and the next the room turned into a fairyland. The walls and ceiling disappeared so that we stood in a forest glade of wild grass and flowers. One large but sculpted tree, hung with dim lanterns, stood alone in the glade with us. Fireflies danced above the grass.

  “Okay, that’s just…wow.”

  “It is much easier to redecorate, and to update your wardrobe, when you have a blank canvas to work with, don
’t you think?” My hostess’s white gown had burst into glowing rainbow colors patterned with jewels in a style I’d never seen before but looked vaguely Celtic. Her “throne” stayed white.

  “Ma’am—”

  “Call me Jenia. Or Mistress Jenia if you must be formal. Master and mistress returned as polite modes of address around 2070. They denote mastery of a skill or some other achievement.”

  “Really?” I couldn’t help it. “What if you’re gender-neutral?”

  “Mister, of course.” She clapped her hands and laughed at my expression. “This is so much fun! I could boggle you all night, but we really must become serious. I have invaded your sleep to meet you. Well, for you to meet me.”

  A seat, looking like the same mother-of-pearl but smaller than her throne, rose out of the grass. I tested it, and although it looked hard as stone a field wrapped around it shaped itself to my weight.

  “You don’t seem too impressed by me,” she observed.

  “I’ve sort of gotten used to Ozma?”

  She laughed again. “Certainly her throne is more real than mine, now. So let us proceed. The night is old and there are things that you need to know. I, like your neural-linked companion Shelly, am a quantum-ghost. Unlike her I am a ghost from a potential future that now will never be—at least not in quite the same way. The Teatime Anarchist collected me along with his nest of records on his final trip, before the day that he and his darker brother died.

  “As you can guess now, I am speaking to you the same way that young Shelly does, only more completely.” She paused kindly to let me wrap my head around all that.

  “Was it a good future?”

  She smiled. “I thought so, although the years arriving to it were certainly a hard road. I hope we can make them easier. The first thing I must tell you…” her smile widened, “is the final secret of the Oroboros.”