Wearing the Cape 4: Small Town Heroes (26 page)

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.

“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.

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 Twist. 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.