Wearing the Cape 4: Small Town Heroes (10 page)

I was lucky they’d even let me
in
.

We turned a corner and drove down a street that ended in open gates, brick pillars topped by an ironwork arch. The plaque declared the redbrick and white trim buildings beyond to be the Harper Institute. The main building we parked in front of wasn’t that big, only three stories, but with more buildings behind it. It looked like a tiny but very elite university.

We got out and reached I back for my bag.

“Leave it.” Veritas squinted at the building in the late afternoon sun.

“Unofficially? You’re the gun in the nightstand, the fire extinguisher in the car trunk. Officially? You’re here to consult with the Oroboros Research Group.”

“The what now?”

“The Oroboros Research Group. Your Teatime Anarchist adventures exposed you to future knowledge, which means you’re aware of their field of research. Besides, you know another member of the group already. C’mon, let’s get you introduced.”

I stumbled and almost took a chunk out of the curb with my foot.
What?

“I have a vampire for a friend and another who’s a computer AI and her twin. I’ve talked to time-travelers and been to space. Now I’ve been to a town that isn’t there. How strange can the world get? Oh let me count the ways.”

From the journal of Hope Corrigan.

The inside didn’t match the outside, but the chrome and smart-screen glass entry hall was the least interesting thing about it; the most interesting thing was the lady who greeted me. She was a cat.

Well, not a
cat
, not even a smiling Cheshire Cat, more an anime cat-girl except that the Japanese fashion for anthromorphs was big-eyed and cutesy. This lady was what would happen if you took one of the performers from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s most successful musical and put her in a business suit: a corporate Jellicle Cat.

“Good morning, Astra.” She shook my hand without hesitation. “I’m Director Althea Shaw. Call me Ali.” Her slightly inhuman features made it hard to tell if she was happy to see me, but despite her welcome her voice sounded flat. Opening the folder in her other hand, she handed me a gold security pass to hang around my neck.

Veritas abandoned me to her care with a parting “Astra.” I blinked, watching him walk away until Ali cleared her throat. She led me to the elevator bay, a row of glass-sided tubes next to an open well in the center of the entry hall. We rode the elevator cab down three floors; through the glass I could see that each floor opened to the well with hallways branching off in a starburst pattern.

“We stacked the complex deep instead of high to preserve the small town feel outside,” she explained when I looked down and tried to count the levels below us. “Twelve stories deep, most of the facility is underground.”

“How long has it been here?”

“Seven years. It started with the labs, but expanded for data storage and then for the think-tanks and research groups. We almost held the Omega Operation briefings here—we did design and build the Gungnir Platform in-house.”

That got my attention. “Was that
safe
?” The anti-missile Gungnirs I’d helped deliver to target in last year’s attempted Electro-Magnetic-Pulse attack—a near save the public still knew nothing about—had been
nuclear-bomb pumped
gamma lasers. Small nukes, but still nukes.

“Safe enough; we tested them elsewhere. Right this way.” She took me down a wide glass-walled hall. Everyone we passed gave her a nod
 
and me a look but left us alone. Stretches of the walls were frosted, but others were clear and looked into conference rooms and offices.

“While you’re here you will be working with a select research team,” she explained as we walked. “You have a great deal in common and I think you’ll like them; they have a secret handshake and you even get to spit.”

Turning us down a smaller side hall, she ushered me into a conference room with an island of standing desks surrounded by large smart-glass screens. The room wasn’t small, but the five people already in it filled it nicely—one of them the
last
person I’d have expected to see here.

Standing together as a group when we came through the door, they’d obviously been told I was coming. Ali introduced them as the Oroboros Research Group: the dark, uniformed man with handlebar mustaches was General Arun Rajabhushan, the thin, bearded European man wearing a scholar’s jacket with padded elbows was Doctor Leiman Hall, the large blonde woman in the blue suit was Doctor Vivian Ash, and the deeply black and completely bald man in the sport coat and sweater was Doctor Kelly Humphries.

General Rajabhushan gave me a warm smile. The rest of their responses to our introduction were mixed, but I paid barely enough attention not to be rude; the
fifth
team-member
couldn’t possibly be here and it was all I could do to keep from screaming, from grabbing onto her and flying us out of here, up the open well, through the entry hall’s skylight, and
out
.

The fifth Oroboros was Shelly.

“She’s all yours,” Director Shaw informed everyone. “Send her back to me when you’re done.” She turned and walked out.
Huh?

Behind everyone else’s back, Shelly grinned wide enough to break her face. I had to tear my eyes away from her to focus on the general, and I couldn’t have formed a coherent statement to save my life but Mom’s social training saved me.

“It’s a pleasure to meet all of you.” Okay, not exactly a clever response, but better than babbling. The old general’s eyes crinkled, like he saw right through me and knew just how badly I was boggled.

“The pleasure is mutual. I understand that you are not certain how long your stay will be?”

Pull it together, Hope
. “No, I’m sorry, but I don’t.”

He nodded. “Of course. You are far too valuable out in the world. Then we shall treat you as a new adjunct, and take as much advantage of your experience as time permits. We should start, I think, with an explanation of our purpose. Doctor Hall?”

The scholar cleared his throat, dropping into lecture mode.

“Long before the Event, physicists considered time travel to be possible in theory while offering no solution to the problem of causality—the principle that causes must precede effects. How can ‘after’, which depends upon ‘before’, have any effect upon ‘before’?

He watched me for objections or confusion, went on. “The problem of causality is not limited to time travel; visions of the future, precognitive awareness, prophecy, all violate causality. If a psychic foresees a disaster, and that disaster is then prevented, since it did not happen what did the psychic see?

“Although of course the scientific community still takes an interest in the question, the Event rendered the whole argument moot. The apparent paradox of future-knowledge is beside the point; breakthrough psychics and mystics have made future-knowledge very real.”

Dr. Hall’s pedantic drone reminded me of every tenured University of Chicago professor, but everyone kept quiet for it. Having pronounced the reality of foreknowledge, he even stopped to give me a moment to raise my hand. I didn’t.

“The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency quietly set up the Oroboros Research Group the year of the Event, under the direction of the Department of Defense. DARPA brought together a team of scientists, statisticians, behavioral psychologists, economists, historians, and a collection of the first confirmed precognitive ‘psychics.’ Their emphasis was national security but their first question was simply, ‘Can a foreseen future event be changed?’ Or is future-knowledge itself causative? Are we doomed by our foreknowledge, as in the Greek tale of King Oedipus?

“The answer to that question was a resounding No. Foreseen futures can be changed and psychic and mystic visions are warnings, not unalterable prophecies which fulfill themselves.

“The second question the team asked was, ‘Can we learn enough about foreseen events to guide policy?’ The answer is ‘sometimes’. The Kayle Administration’s international policy benefited tremendously from Oroboros Research Group projection papers. Oroboros’ prediction of the collapse of China based on extrapolations from three precognitive episodes led to President Kayle’s Pacific Initiative and the creation of the alliance system that became the League of Democratic States.”

He paused again for any questions from the class. Inside I was…not panicking, exactly, but working hard not to wig out. This was one of the Big Secrets. Maybe the biggest.

I hadn’t followed politics much, before my breakthrough.
Now
I knew that a lot of people had wondered how President Kayle—before the Event a political party player with zero interest in international politics—had managed to guide not just
us
but pretty much the western world and half of Asia through the blowup and mess that followed the Event. Half the nations that came through it intact owed it to the alliance web he’d seemed to spin up out of nothing but pure will, an uncanny sense of timing, and the ability to always seem to guess right. President Infallible.

Most of the conspiracy theorists out there believed that Director Kayle was a secret breakthrough. Instead he’d had the Oroboros.

“Who knows?”

“Excuse me?” Obviously not the question he’d been expecting from me.

“Who knows about the Oroboros and what you do?”

“The leaders of the nations making up the League,” General Rajabhushan answered for him. “The US President, the prime ministers of India, Australia, Japan, Great Britain, and the other parliamentary states. They agree to have their memories of the group’s true nature removed when they leave office. The same deal applies to members of the group itself, with a few exceptions. In Littleton, only the Institute Director knows what we really do.”

He chuckled, eyes crinkling in wry amusement.

“Wheels within wheels. Even here, to everyone outside the inner circle the Oroboros Research Group is just a think-tank of historians, economists, analysts, and political scientists dedicated to organizing intelligence data and pooling their expertise to write projection papers for the League’s leadership. We have our own segregated system and security measures.”

“So you keep your…precognitives?...here in Littleton?”

“No. Our psychic resources are scattered. Some are publicly known psis, but most aren’t.
 
Here
we keep something much more valuable.”

And this was it. I could tell by the way the others inhaled almost in unison. Even Shelly had an odd look on her face.

“Ms. Corrigan, do you believe in the possibility of time travel?”

…

Really? I mean,
really
? The big secret of the secret-handshake-and-spit Oroboros Research Group was the
Future Files
? If it wasn’t for Shelly begging me with her eyes not to say anything, I’d have asked if I was being
punked
.

Mom would have been proud; I managed to keep all of that off my face—Social Face was good for
so
much more than just hiding boredom at society parties. My “Wow, really?” response to the next revelation, that the Teatime Anarchist (publicly America’s most wanted terrorist before his confirmed death), had been a time traveler was a piece of art. I held it together while Doctor Hall rambled through an explanation of the massive file of multiple-choice future histories the Anarchist had left behind and told me all about the reconfiguring of the Littleton Cell of Oroboros to analyze and data-mine it.

It wasn’t even the same Big Book of Contingent Prophecy that the Anarchist had entrusted to Shelly and me—it couldn’t be, since they’d been working with it for over a year, before Shelly and I had finally turned it over to Blackstone to pass on. Which was a no brainer that made me want to face-palm;
of course
the Anarchist wouldn’t have entrusted something so valuable just to two teenage girls.

I managed to keep it together and not melt with relief when the general passed me over to Shelly for “task orientation.” Shelly solemnly ushered me out of the conference room and into a tiny office—her office, judging from the pictures. I was in half of them.

She closed the door, took two skipping steps, and threw her arms around me.

“Eeeee! This is fantastic! They told me you were coming! Where are you staying? Isn’t this the best?
So
good!”

I managed to return the hug, mind spinning.

“Shelly,
how
?”

She pulled away, still almost dancing. “They waited till I’d spent two months going crazy in Springfield before they recruited me. So? What do you think?” She posed. Hair as close to my shade as it was possible to naturally get and pulled back in a tail, dressed in office pants and suit—even sensible slip-on shoes—she looked like a peppy teen intern.

“But
why
?” And when would I be able to manage more than two words?

She stopped bouncing, tapped her head. “The Future Files, duh. That, and my other post-death brain mods. Hope? You okay? Do you want to sit down?”

I nodded and dropped onto a little half-couch that crowded the wall under all the pictures.

“What are you
doing
here?”

“I said. They recruited me.”

“But you were out of it!” I fought to keep my rising voice down. “You were back with your
mom
, back in school! Why would you... Shelly, you promised me no more tall buildings.”

Her smile dimmed.

“That’s not—that’s not fair. It’s not like I’m in the field, this is probably the safest place on the planet. And Mom’s here. David, too. They always need good administrators.”

They’d even brought in Mr. Hardt? I shook my head. “What about high school? Couldn’t you—”

“Finish? Hang around for three years sitting in class learning stuff I already know?
You
liked school. I always thought it was a waste of a perfectly good day. Besides, they’ve got one here; I get three hours a day, art, PE, and lunch. Math? Science? I’m pre-loaded for biochem and biophysics degrees—I could
teach
the high school stuff. In my
sleep
.”

“And you like it here?” She’d complained about
Springfield
—I couldn’t imagine her happy in Littleton, population five thousand. And in a lab?