Wearing the Cape 4: Small Town Heroes (15 page)

“Whatever you would make habitual, practice it; and if you would not make a thing habitual, do not practice it, but habituate yourself to something else.”

Epictetus
(First Century AD)

My adorable alarm clock woke me again and this time I chased her laughing out of the room with expertly thrown pillows. Then I looked at the text on my flashing cellphone.
Garage 0800 hours action review.

I fell back and scrubbed my face, ran fingers through my hair.

Suck it up, Hope.
The Sentinels had always done action reviews, and they’d gotten a lot more detailed and formal since Lei Zi and Watchman—both ex-military—had joined;
of course
the Marines had them. The whiny Hope in me argued for just blowing them off.
You’re not in the local chain of command. You’re not even in waving distance.

I quashed whiny Hope, called Shelly to tell her where I’d be, and looked at my second text. It turned out to be a relayed text and two attached video-files from Shell.

“Guantánamo City fight caught on digi- cams, claimed as official Cuban-USA joint operation. Blackstone covering for you in Chicago, so good luck with that.”

The first video file (time-stamped yesterday!) showed me flying over Chicago. Since Shell said Blackstone was involved I had to guess that he was conjuring an illusion over another flyer—maybe Safire. The second video was shaky hand-cam cuts, some distant, some zoomed in close, of our fight with Brick. I had lost my hat and shades early on, and was easily recognizable to anyone who knew me.

I took a moment to scream into my spare pillow.

Quin was so going to
freak
. Blackstone would make cutting comments about “low profiles.”
Shelly
thought it was awesome and had added her own text expressing her amusement, because naturally Shell had to share the news with her “older sister” and now that Shell knew about Littleton they were texting and chatting without any need-to-know restraints.

I texted back an
Ignoring U all
and got in the shower. If I hurried I could enjoy a waffle.

Warrant Officer Clark saluted when I translated into the Garage. Did military protocol include saluting capes in “uniform?”
 
I had come in my field costume complete with armor and maul, partly for psychological support and partly to make a point; should I salute back? I’d never saluted anyone in my life except half-seriously and I settled for a nod, which seemed okay.
 
Clark took me downstairs this time, to what had to be the Garage’s armory, and I relaxed when other enlisted we passed didn’t come to unnerving attention or repeat her salute.

Optional, got it.

She stopped at a security door. It had just a number on it, but over the door frame hung a big wood plank with
The Dog House
carved and painted in black and red.

“Ma’am.” She swiped her pass, stepped aside with another salute.

“Thank you…Warrant?”

She smiled. “That’s correct, ma’am. Good luck.” On that note, she left me to my fate.

Okay
… I stepped inside, letting the door close behind me. The heavy latch closed with a
thunk
and the light over the second door turned green. Going through that one, I found the Dog House.

It looked like a locker room, equipment shop, and recreational hall. Four tin-men sat playing cards, helmets racked beside them. Their suits weren’t as massive as my Scoobies’ had been, and they carried lighter mounted ordnance. Tin-man suits for non-breakthroughs? Despite good AC and a big ceiling hatch that probably opened into the bays above us, to my supersensitive nose everything smelled of polish, gun-oil, and sweat.

Beyond them I saw my guys, gathered in a space fitted with screens and a display board and the kind of comfortable chair-and-desk setup I knew from college lecture rooms. Even Corporal Tsen was there, leaning stiffly against a desk.

“Astra!” Balini shouted, seeing me. The card game stopped as everybody looked at me, even the third group working out with weights and playing video games on the other side of the room.

I apologized and squeezed my way between the card game and weapon racks to a quiet chorus of “ma’am”s. At the desks, Lieutenant Corbin gave me a nod. “Astra. How old are you?”

“I—what? Nineteen?”

He extended his hand, and when we shook he passed me something flat and hard.

“You know what that means?” he asked the room.

“First challenge in two years!” at least half the room shouted back. The rest stomped their feet and cheered.

I looked at the disk in my hand. It was a burnished steel medal, at least twice the weight of a silver dollar, but with no hole for the ribbon. One side showed the Scooby-Cerberus on the team’s armor patches, this one howling, growling, and chomping into what looked like a zombie—it had three heads, it could do it all. The other side showed the stylized symbol of
Ajax’s
old Greek-style helmet, over a Latin motto.
Quis exire canes?

“Um, ‘Who let the dogs out’?”

“Our team challenge coin, ma’am. Corporal Stein, what are the rules of a challenge?”

“Sir, when a challenger presents his coin then all other team members must also present their coins! Any team member who does not present his coin must buy drinks for the rest of the team! If all other team members present their coins, then the challenger must buy drinks for the rest of the team, sir!”

“Thank you, Stein. And being Ajaxes, ma’am,
we
drink from kegs. We’re honored to have a Sentinel who knew our namesake hold our coin.” He grinned. “Even if you won’t be legal to challenge for two years unless we do it off-base, and they won’t let us go bar crawling in Guantánamo for some reason.”

Looking at the coin, tracing Ajax’s crest, I swallowed and had to blink suddenly wet eyes.
 
Corbin understood; his grin faded, but stayed a smile. “He was a Heroes Without Borders cape abroad, ma’am, and not a soldier, but he lived and died a warrior.”

“Attention!”

The shout came from the door and Captain Lauer’s aide, and everybody but me snapped to attention until the captain waved them back down.

“Take it easy, gentlemen. I am only here to observe. Lieutenant Corbin?”

“Sir.” The rest of the team settled into chairs facing their lieutenant. I followed their lead, slipping my new coin into the hidden pocket in my armor and setting Malleus on the floor beside me. Captain Lauer took a chair behind us.

Corbin grabbed a remote and clicked it, bringing the big center screen to life. It showed a split-screen view, on the left four boxes showing the view from their helmet cameras and a fifth blank box, on the right a drones-eye view with green icons showing our positions relative to the road and city streets. A second later all the faintly visible bystanders in camera range lit up with their own red icons. Brick’s icon flashed in yellow.

“Settle down guys, questions and comments later. Enjoy the show.”

A digital clock on the bottom started up as the images unfroze and the chatter began.
The team piling out of the truck and taking positions to cover a zone. My ride into town seen from overhead, my half of my conversation with Shell. The approach, the grab, the too-short flight dropping us still in town. Brick exploding into his dragon armor. Panicked chatter from the team, Corbin shouting “Go go go!” My short flight, shoot-down and brutal kicking—I
didn’t
remember Brick kicking me so many times—my second flight and the second hit shredding my civvies.

I tore my eyes from
my
box—the fifth screen had lit up with what had to be an insane civilian cameraman’s footage of my kicking from Brick— to watch the overhead icons of the team closing, spreading and shifting to make sure their fire lines didn’t reach into town. The fifth camera filmed my reversing course. When we all met on Brick’s position my box went mostly dark again—the cameraman trying to get footage while ducking behind a fuzzy shape that might have been a low wall. My gut clenched seeing Brick punch into Tsen, winced at
my
final grapple with Brick even though from a distance it didn’t look nearly so bad as it had been.

The video ran another couple of minutes, covering their restraining Brick and our getting him and Corporal Tsen loaded, then it was done and I realized that my heart was pounding in my chest. I closed my eyes and tried deep-breathing.

Lieutenant Corbin led a round of comments and observations, focusing on fire-lines, response time, and commended Balini and Stein for
not
shooting me when I jumped Brick (reviewing the video, I’d come breathtakingly close to taking friendly fire). The lieutenant offered to run some drills with me if I was here long enough.

“Any other comments?” he finished.

I raised my hand and he nodded.

“I dropped the ball, yesterday.”
Nobody
had mentioned my dropping Brick short of their chosen engagement zone.

“What happened?”

“I intended to get a headlock from behind where he couldn’t get any leverage, but he… He grabbed me first and scared me.” I flushed hotly. “So I caught his wrist and lifted him by it instead and I didn’t have control. He pulled himself up to grab me and— I panicked and dropped him. Sorry.”

He nodded again.

“Thank you for that. I would say ‘No harm no foul,’ but it got pretty close there—much closer than it should have. We don’t do sorry here—we suck it up and fix it. We can add some grappling practice to the drills. Anything else?”

There wasn’t, and the review broke up. I looked around; usually if I didn’t have a task this was the point where I headed to the chapel to light a candle or two and thank Mary of the Pagans or go to my rooms for homework. Sometimes it was really homework; most of the time it was mental breathing space to burn off my nerves and rebalance. I
really
needed to rebalance.

“Astra?” Captain Lauer stood behind me.

“Sir?”

His lips thinned and then he smiled.
 
“Good job. Is there anything we can do for you?”

“I’d really like to know why Brick was here,” I said without thinking. “And I’d like to see him.”

The captain’s eyebrows rose. “We have him at the base. I don’t know how much, if anything, we’ll be able to share, but I’ll see about visiting. Anything else?”

Maybe he’ll talk to me.
But it wasn’t likely they’d accept that. “No, I’m good. I should get back to Littleton.”

He looked at me, but I didn’t know what else he was waiting for and he finally stood aside.

“Well then, you’d best be about it. Good day, Astra.”

Warrant Officer Clark got me back to the bay where I flashed back to Littleton, still wondering what that had been about.

“I have the best friend in the whole world, even if she is stupid sometimes. Okay, a lot of the time, but mostly about herself. And she’s too serious, thinks she’s responsible for the world, and is always getting into trouble. But that’s what friends are for.”

Shelly Boyar-Hardt,
Confessions of a Former Ghost
.

Apparently nobody at the Institute did anything besides stream the news from Powers TV. Half the people I passed in the lobby and halls either carefully
didn’t
look at me or gave me smiles, winks, or “Good job!” in passing. It was like I’d suddenly developed an adult Team Astra! fan club, and the few scowls I got—because not everyone’s a fan of superheroes—were actually
refreshing
. I decided that before I “came to work” tomorrow I was going to get a new civilian wardrobe.

“Hail the conquering hero!” Shelly greeted me when I stepped into the Oroboros’ not-so-secret lair. General Rajabhushan gave me the nod and no comment as we passed through to Shelly’s office, but he and Doctor Hall had been at the breakfast table when I’d come down and inhaled my waffle and coffee; they already knew about yesterday and how I felt about it.

Shelly waited until we were in her office to poke me in the ribs.

“Hey! Ticklish!”

“All one piece? Nothing broken, ribs okay this time?”

“Yes!” Stiff, sore, tender, and if not for my ability to
heal
, probably unable to move without whimpering (how did I not remember Brick kicking me at least
five times
?), but okay.

“Great! So, business!” She passed me a display epad, threw herself into her chair. “Since you didn’t come around yesterday, I did a lot of organizing, research, boring analyst-type stuff.”

My lips twitched helplessly as she grabbed her own pad. “So let’s go over the likely suspects for the Great Littleton Fire!”

“Terrorists?”

“That’s what I thought first, but there are problems. Look.”

She fiddled with her pad and mine brightened with a list, a couple dozen terrorist organizations. I recognized Deep Green and the Ring, and they were the only two in bold.

“Most terrorist organizations are regional; they survive because of their imbedded networks, and it is virtually impossible for them to project attacks against ‘hard targets’ outside of their regions.”

I nodded. I’d been doing a
lot
of catching up on politics, conflicts, international
everything
since the Whittier Base Attack showed me how naïve I was about the world. Terrorism 101 was invisibility—if you lost that, if you couldn’t blend into your host population, you were finished unless you were somewhere your enemies couldn’t get to you with their superior firepower.

“And that is really the reason for the Ring; it’s a coalition of terrorist groups that work together to support operations outside their regions. It was my number one suspect, but look.”

She opened a file and a list of names scrolled down. Dozens of names, but a majority of them either in red or green.

“The green names belong to superhuman Ring terrorists who have been captured. The red names are Ring terrorists who have been killed. Not all of the ones we know about were captured or killed in the Whittier Base Attack, but they lost practically
all
of their known heavy hitters there and haven’t engaged in significant joint operations since.”

“So what about their parts?”

“Their parts are rebuilding, but still regional. Here.” Three names popped up: the Undying Caliphate, One Land, and Free Mexico.

“Free Mexico’s territory is closest, and it’s still awash in money from the drug cartels. Mexico’s northern provinces are almost completely under cartel control, at least outside of strategic towns controlled by the Federales. The Reform Government in Mexico City has actually managed to purge itself of most of its corrupt officials, initiate liberal reforms, and hold three rounds of safe and fair elections; but there’s enough bad blood with the north that Free Mexico is still popular there.

“CIA analysts believe Free Mexico is actually avoiding conflict with the US; they’re downplaying their Aztlan rhetoric—their claims to the territory we took from Mexico ages ago—and playing up the Mexican Government’s older civil-rights abuses. The CIA thinks that Free Mexico has changed tactics and is trying to build international pressure for Mexico to recognize the secessionist provinces as a new state. So they’re acting as little like a terrorist organization as possible,
especially
abroad.”

“Would they be a viable state?”

“
No
. More like an elective kleptocracy. Every real northern leader left is owned by the cartels. A lot of them are bought off, but the cartels also fund elections and buy votes to replace uncooperative
 
officeholders with their own people. They’re also perfectly happy to kill a politician’s whole family if he won’t play ball and he’s too popular to replace electively. It’s like the Chicago Mob during the Prohibition, but
lots
worse.”

She frowned unhappily. “We’re staying out of it, too. Other than helping Mexico strengthen its military and closing the border to weapons smuggling, there isn’t anything we can really do without invading northern Mexico ourselves. Like
that
will happen.”

Neither of us mentioned the more militant outcomes for the US in the Future Files—where that
would
happen.

“Okay, so what about the other two?”

“The Undying Caliphate is a bit more likely, but they lost as many heavies at Whittier Base as the others. Losing Seif-al-Din—again–was a huge blow. Of the three they’re the only ones ideologically dedicated to our destruction, but they have
much
closer targets of opportunity. Turkey. Egypt. Israel. Byzantium.”

“Oh.”

“Uhuh.”

That
one I understood: Byzantium—the formerly-Turkish territory on the west side of the Bosporus with the renamed Constaninople as its capital—was always in the news, the best and smartest thing America had done in decades or our worst act of imperialism
ever
, depending on your politics. Just its existence under the boot heel of Crusader Occupiers was a huge propaganda and recruiting tool for the Islamic-nationalist terrorist organization, but they still couldn’t
do
much about it. And if they didn’t do something soon, then
 
the influx of persecuted Christians and Muslim “heretics” like Mr. Darvish’ Sufis immigrating from all over the Middle East meant Byzantium would be lost to them forever.

So the UC had a strong reason to focus on Constantinople, to “liberate it” or destroy it; the Whittier Base Attack had been an attempt to weaken us enough to let them do just that. It had cost us a
lot
but it had cost them a lot more, and Shelly was right—a repeat visit to US assets over here just wasn’t that likely in the near future. It still cost us too much
.

Shelly gave me time to process that, scowling ferociously at her notes.

I refocused on my pad. “What about One Land? Brick went missing in action in China, and the Dragon Armor—”

She was shaking her head.

“Yesterday has put One Land at the top of my list from the Big Three, but…” She shrugged. “One Land may not be a problem much longer. It’s bankrolled by Beijing and used as a means of asymmetrical warfare against the new Chinese states and our US and League troops there—the Whittier Base attack has been its
only
operation outside of Asia. And it’s looking like the Kyoto Talks are moving in the right direction; most of the key Chinese states are ready to sign on for a new confederacy with its own unified government.” She chewed her lip.

“Beijing is internationally isolated and almost as bad off as North Korea used to be before Unification. The oracles who judge this kind of thing predict the dissolution of Beijing’s ruling communist party within a year and the new government signing on with the other states.”

Which the Big Book of Contingent Prophesy predicted with high confidence. I sighed.“It’s good to see some things are still on track.”

“Yup, and that will mean One Land wins, just not quite the way they wanted. With a few holdouts like Hong Kong and Manchuria, the Chinese will have a unified nation-state again. But right now One Land is focused on local warlords, hoping to bring as much neighboring non-state territory as it can under its control before reunification. They haven’t even focused on US and League targets in
China
much in the last year; they’re just not interested in us right now.”

“But who’s left?”

“Not Deep Green. Much as I’d like them to be the Bad Guys here, this just isn’t their kind of gig. Sure they inspired the Green Man last year, but something with the potential for mass civilian casualties? That’s not really how they roll.”

“Who else
is
there?”

“In the super-terrorist business? Potentially it’s still anybody. Realistically? Nobody who isn’t so far out in left field we’ll never see them coming by watching the horizon. We’ve been thinking about it wrong.”

I huffed. “Okay, so enlighten me.”

“What if burning down Littleton isn’t the
point
? What if it’s collateral damage from a different mission? Littleton is a safe haven for lots of people wanted by very bad people out in the world. The Institute is home to lots of top-secret projects. So, what if a person or secret is the target?”

The sinking feeling in my stomach was horribly familiar.

“If that’s true, how will we figure out who?”

“We might not be able to. But your dream gives us a clue about
how
. If it’s the truth, of course.” She dropped her pad on her desk. “C’mon—you have to see something.”

Shelly took me back upstairs to the chrome and glass entry hall. Leading me around the other side of the open well, she pulled me behind a smart-screen array to an unobtrusive guard station.

“Hi Bob! Can I show Astra the rings?”

The
very
familiar guard gave her a nod and she stepped up beside a chrome plated pillar next to his station to pop a bio-lock sealed hatch, whispering unnecessarily all the while.

“First thing when I got here, they had me review the Institute’s security system—next best thing to having Shell do it. I still run checks, so I have access. Look.”

Behind the hatch was a glass panel, clear but so thick its clarity meant it couldn’t be glass. Behind
that
was…

“What
is
that?”

The pillar was hollow, an armored shell around… something. It
looked
like someone had suspended three rotating steel rings in a magnetic field. They twisted around inside each other without touching the bottom or sides of the chamber, nothing visibly holding them up. The rings, shiny and slick-looking as liquid mercury, nested in each other and spun around a common center—but didn’t. As they rotated around their center, my eyes kept insisting they couldn’t be
doing
that.

“They’re Borromean rings,” Shelly explained, like giving them a name made them any less weird. “The smallest spins inside the radius of the middle ring but outside the radius of the largest ring. Each is larger than the ring that spins outside it, smaller than the ring that spins inside it.”

“How is that even possible?” Staring at them too long did funny things to my brain. When I looked away every perpendicular line around me became something else, twisting to a vanishing point that was
close
without changing anything at all.

“It’s not. And it’s the source of the extrareality pocket that is Littleton.”

I blinked and everything settled. The transient weirdness reminded me of the inside-out way the world had looked last year when Shelly and I had watched Doctor Cornelius accidentally conjure a thing so
wrong
it still gave me the willies to think about it.

“Magic?”

“Nope, but definitely Clarke’s Law stuff; superscience so super that you can’t tell it from magic without drippy candles and a pentagram.”

I was grateful when Shelly closed the hatch.
Nothing
should do that.

“If that’s what creates the pocket… What happens if someone stops them? Or cuts power to the magnetic field?”

She grinned. “And that’s the zillion dollar question. DARPA scientists say that the pocket will collapse and everyone and everything brought into the pocket will just drop out of it, merge back into the real world. Like you do when you cross the pocket’s boundary.”

“That’s not so bad.”

“Nope, but they
don’t
know what will happen when you start it up again. Will the pocket our mad-boy Verne created to go fishing in come back, or will we get something else? Can we restart it at all? That’s why they didn’t just shut it down and move it onto American soil when they found it. It’s too valuable to risk.”

“Can’t they move it while it’s on?”

“Tried. The thing is the center of its little universe, so nothing in its universe can move it—just like you can’t pick yourself up by your own feet. Well, why
I
can’t. That’s why they built the Institute around it instead of burying it at the bottom of the lake. They’d have shielded it more if they could.”