by wildbow
Colin rubbed his chin, where his beard traced the edges of his jaw, nodded.
“If she doesn’t agree to giving away either of the two, and you really should play hardball on that, you can offer Clockblocker. He graduates this summer, anyways, and I’d say he’s got enough friends and contacts here that he might apply to come back to Brockton Bay to join our Protectorate when he turns eighteen. Best case scenario for us, and it’s not like Boston or New York need more capes.”
Colin sighed, “You’re better at this than I ever was.”
Hannah wasn’t sure how to respond. Colin had his strengths, but he was right.
He went on, “Congratulations.” He picked up the second folder and held it out to her.
“What?” She took it, opened it.
“There’s a change to our team, too, according to Piggot and the rest of the oversight. You’ve been promoted. Within the next two weeks, this building and this team will be transferred to your command.”
She stood there, paging through the folder of paperwork, stunned. “Where are you going?”
“Chicago.”
Hannah broke into a smile, “Chicago! That’s fantastic! A bigger city, a bigger team! Where’s Myrddin being moved?”
“He stays in Chicago.”
Hannah shook her head, “But…” she trailed off.
The hard look on Colin’s face was telling enough.
“I’m so sorry,” she spoke.
“It’s the politics,” Colin spoke, leaning back, “I’m good at this. Better than most, if you don’t mind me boasting. Everything I bring to the table, I worked my ass off for. But when it comes to shaking hands, managing people, navigating the bureaucracy… I’m not good at it, won’t ever be. Because of that, I’m getting demoted, and I can probably give up on ever being in charge of another team.”
“I’m sorry. I know how much you wanted—”
“It’s fine,” he said, but it was clear in the curtness and hardness of his tone that it wasn’t. He turned away and touched his keyboard. In the darkness of the room, his face briefly reflected the blue light of the screen. His brow furrowed.
“Dragon. That program you gave me, predicting the patterns of class S threats, remember it? I made a few modifications, to see if I couldn’t catch any highlights, I’m running a dozen of them concurrently. One, I called HS203. I want you to look directly at this. I’ve put it behind some pretty heavy security, but if you wait a second, I’ll—”
“I’m already looking over it,” Dragon interrupted. “I see what you did. Linking my data to atmospheric shifts. I think I see it.”
Hannah walked around the desk and leaned over Colin’s shoulder to see the screen. A map of the east coast was superimposed with a rainbow hued cloud. “This doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“Nothing’s truly random,” Colin explained, his voice tight, “Any data shows a pattern eventually, if you dig deep enough. Dragon started work on an early warning system for the Endbringers, to see if we can’t anticipate where they’ll strike next, prepare to some degree. We know there’s some rules they follow, though we don’t know why. They come one at a time, months apart, rarely hitting the same area twice in a short span of time. We know they’re drawn to areas where they perceive vulnerability, where they think they can cause the most damage. Nuclear reactors, the Birdcage, places recently hit by natural disasters…”
He clicked the mouse, and the image zoomed in on a section of the coastline.
“…Or ongoing conflict,” Hannah finished for him, her eyes widening. “The ABB, Empire Eighty-Eight, the fighting here? It’s coming here? Now?”
Colin didn’t have a reply for her. “Dragon? Brockton Bay falls within the predicted zone, and the city is on the list of locations that rate high enough on the sensitivity or negative media scale. Add my data, the correlations between abrupt microshifts in temperature, air pressure and—”
“The data is good.” Dragon’s voice, synthesized to mask the most telling details about her identity, held no trace of doubt.
“Good enough to call for help?”
“Good enough.”
Colin moved quickly, spinning in his chair to reach a small console. He opened a glass panel and flipped a switch. Air raid sirens immediately began their ominous whine.
“Dragon, I’ll contact Piggot and the Protectorate teams. You get hold of everyone else that matters. You know who’s most needed.”
“Already on it.”
He turned to Hannah, and their eyes met briefly. Much was communicated between them in that moment, and she wasn’t sure she liked what she saw in his eyes.
A glimmer of hope?
“Miss Militia. Recruit the locals. And we need a place to gather.”
She swallowed her concerns. “Yes sir!”
Extermination 8.1
The crush of bodies was a tide that Tattletale and I had to push through. There were a thousand or more scared people in our immediate area, surging against and around us. Even our costumes didn’t give people much pause or reason to give us space. Thoughtless in their panic, the crowd was guided only by the barricades of policemen and police cars that had been established at the intersections to guide the masses to the shelters.
Everybody had been informed, in the pamphlets that came in the mail and in schools, about emergency procedures. There were multi-level shelters spaced around the city, enough for people to hunker down in for a few hours. They’d all been told that they could bring our larger pets if the animals could be trusted to behave. They could bring only necessary medical supplies and what they could have on their person. People weren’t allowed to use their cars, unless they were in one of the areas on the periphery of town. Too easy for there to be an accident in the panic and hurry, leaving everyone else stuck in a traffic jam when disaster arrived.
But people were stupid. A chronic condition of our society, that so many people somehow thought they were special, the exception to the rule. In this panicked crowd, every rule was being broken. There were people with luggage on wheels, one kid carrying a lizard in a glass cage. People were pushing and shoving, shouting and swearing. Pets were reacting to the ambient stress with barks and snarls, dashing around and getting others tripped or tangled up in leashes. Tattletale and I passed two cars that were even making their way forward in the midst of stampede, inch by inch, honking their horns the entire time. Between the air raid sirens and the honking horns, I couldn’t make out the words people were shouting. I could barely think.
We reached a trio of police officers, who had used their cars and yellow tape to cordon off two sides of an intersection. I could see the eyes on the officer nearest me widen in recognition. He was about to say something, but the officer next to him put a hand on his shoulder, reached in the window of the police car. He pushed pieces of paper into each of our hands.
I glanced over it, found what I needed, and gave him a curt nod. Tattletale grabbed my hand and pulled me away.
The paper, labelled at the top with the words ‘Parahuman Response’, contained a picture of our destination in black and white and directions on how to get there. It wasn’t far—the area which divided the Docks and Downtown, a short distance east from the mall where Brian and I had gone.
The closer we got to our destination, the more the crowd thinned out. We saw another crowd moving toward a different shelter as we got close, but we could avoid that by detouring around that particular set of streets.
As we got close enough for me to wonder what direction to take, I saw the streak of smoke as an huge armored suit plunged down from the sky, just a block away. It was clue enough for Tattletale to pull me forward to follow it. Reaching the end of the street, we saw our destination on the other side of a nearly empty four lane road.
The building was fairly nondescript. Six stories tall, it featured dark brown brick and dark tinted windows, and sat alone on a grassy hill. A nearly empty parking lot sat between us and the building, and a stretch of beach sat on the far end. People in P
RT uniforms stood guard around the parking lot and entrance, and four of the five vehicles in the parking lot were PRT vans, with turret-mounted hoses and armored exteriors. As good an indication as any that this was the meeting place.
Past the hill and to the left was Dragon, in a mechanical suit that was as large as two PRT vans put together, four legged, with what looked like a single jet engine on top, still smoking from her recent flight. On either side of the engine or oversized jetpack or whatever it was, were two shoulder-mounted missile launchers, each pre-loaded with four missiles longer than I was tall. She was facing the water, unmoving, like a gargoyle standing guard.
I saw what she was watching. A stormcloud in the distance. It hung over the water with an opaque curtain of rain descending down from it. It was gradually getting closer.
As we approached the parking lot, a squad of PRT officers blocked our way. I felt a moment’s trepidation. Were any of these the same people we’d attacked at the Protectorate’s fundraiser? I couldn’t tell, with their helmets and tinted faceguards covering their faces.
With a sound like a muffled thunderclap, a half dozen people appeared in the center of the empty lot. When I saw who they were, I was awestruck. That wasn’t hyperbole or whatever, I was using the word awestruck in the original, zero-embellishment sense of the word.
Alexandria stood at the head of the crowd that had just arrived. Her head turned from one side to the other as she surveyed her new surroundings, the long, straight black hair that spilled from the back of her helmet sweeping from one side to the other. She was everything that made you think ‘superheroine’; athletic, tall, muscular, but still feminine. Her costume was black and light gray, with an image of a tower in the center of her chest, and she featured a wide, heavy cape that flowed over her shoulders and draped onto the ground beside and behind her. Alexandria.
Her team—people I recognized but couldn’t necessarily name—followed behind her in a loose formation. Only one man in a blue and black uniform and cap stayed behind in the middle of the parking lot. He looked around for a few moments, then disappeared with a crack and a whoosh, smaller than the one that had brought the entire group there.
Tattletale and I circled around the parking lot, to avoid getting in the way of any incoming teleporters. We were nearly to the door when we heard another group arrive behind us, the same way Alexandria had come. Teenagers, this time. I couldn’t place them, but the brighter colors of their costumes led me to suspect they were heroes. The man who’d teleported them in said something I couldn’t make out over the the wailing air raid sirens, and they quickly set to marching in our direction.
Leading them out of the parking lot was a shirtless, muscled boy with metal skin, eyes and hair and a strange texture to his shoulders and spine. Among other things, I noticed the tines of a fork sticking out near his neck, and what might have been the wires of a chain link fence half melted into his opposite shoulder. But where that strange half-melted-metal texture didn’t cover him, his metal body was exceedingly detailed and refined. His ‘skin’ was a dusky dark gray metal with the slightest of swirls of lighter metals in it, and his ‘adonis’ musculature was perfectly etched out in the metal, with silver lines tracing his muscle definition like veins of metal in raw ore. His eyes, too, were silver, and two lines ran from the corners of them down his cheekbones and to the sides of his jaw.
He clapped one heavy hand down on my shoulder as he passed me and offered me a tight smile.
It seemed we were allies, at least for the time being.
Tattletale and I followed his group into the building.
Folding chairs had been set into rows and columns in the center of the lobby, facing a trio of widescreen television sets, which in turn were backed by a series of large windows overlooking the beach. Through the windows, we had the perfect view of the looming storm.
As daunting as the approaching clouds were, what drew my attention was the crowd. There were people filling the lobby. Only a few were local.
Empire Eighty-Eight was here, at the back corner of the room. I saw Hookwolf there, half covered in a layer of his metal hooks and barbs. I didn’t see Cricket or Stormtiger. He glared at Tattletale and I.
The Travelers were all present, I noted, the only other local team of villains to show. Faultline’s crew was absent, and I couldn’t help but note that Coil wasn’t around. He wasn’t a front lines kind of guy, but he’d at least supplied his soldiers for the ABB situation.
The local heroes were present in force. I wasn’t surprised—skipping this fight, as a hero, let alone a team of heroes, would be unforgivable to the public. Aegis was talking with the metal skinned boy who’d arrived at the same time as Tattletale and I. A large group of fifteen or so other teenagers were gathered and talking amongst themselves. There was some joking, the occasional laughter, but it felt forced, strained. False bravado. I was assuming they were all Wards, from at least three different cities.
The kids from New Wave were near the Wards—Glory Girl, Panacea, Laserdream and Shielder—but they weren’t really joining in with the conversation the Wards were having. I could see Glory Girl and Gallant standing together; she was holding his hand. Panacea was sitting backwards on a chair just beside where Glory Girl stood, her arms folded over the chair back, chin resting on her wrists. She glared at the two of us, though the look was mainly directed at Tattletale. Near Panacea, the adults of New Wave had pulled the folding chairs into a rough circle so they could sit while they talked in a bit of a huddle.
The Protectorate was present, and it wasn’t just the locals, but the big guns. Armsmaster, standing a little taller and looking more confident than I’d seen before, with not one but two halberds connected to his back, was having a quiet conversation with Miss Militia and Legend. It took me a second to absorb that picture. That was the head of the Protectorate, the leader of the largest team of capes in the world. What’s more, he was right in front of me, having a conversation with someone I’d talked to. Ridiculous as that sounded, it affected me.
Legend sported a skintight blue costume with a design in white that fell somewhere between flame and electricity in style. He had a perfect physique—one I didn’t mind giving a second glance-over—a strong jaw and wavy brown hair. If Alexandria was the flying bruiser that just about every other flying bruiser strove to match up to, then Legend was at the head of the pack when it came to being flying artillery. His firepower was on par with Purity’s, if not outright surpassing her, and he was far, far more versatile.
Knowing I’d seen two members of the leading three figures of the Protectorate, I looked for the third. I glanced past Myrddin, from Chicago, with his brown burlap robe and wooden staff, Chevalier, in gleaming silver and gold armor, carrying his cannonblade, and Bastion, who had earned a great deal of bad press, lately. Someone used a cell phone to catch Bastion using the word ‘spic’ several times as he yelled at a kid who only wanted to take his picture. He was studiously ignoring Kaiser, who was standing nearby, staring at him, taunting him without speaking or doing anything.
It was only at the back corner of the room that I found the third member of the Protectorate’s triumvirate.
Eidolon stood behind one of the large television sets, staring out the window. He wore a blue-green skintight suit that expanded into a voluminous hood, cape and sleeves that draped over his hands. The interior of the hood and sleeves wasn’t shadowy, but illuminated with a soft green light.
Debating the relative strengths of various capes was common enough, in the schoolyard and elsewhere. If Alexandria and Legend fought, who would win? Would Boston’s Protectorate win against Brockton Bay’s team? What if you removed Boston’s weakest members until the sides were even in number?
When the question inevitably got to who was the strongest, the ‘big five’ were generally ruled out, in the sense of ‘well, yeah, but besides them’. Scion got counted as a part of that group because the powers he did have were head and shoulders above just about everyone els
e’s. Eidolon was almost the opposite, because he had every power, though he could only hold on to a handful at a time. Then there were the Endbringers, because they mandated situations like this, where even Scion or Eidolon plus multiple teams of capes weren’t necessarily enough.
Sure, some loyal people might argue that Legend was better than Eidolon, or maybe even some other cape like Dragon or Alexandria. Generally speaking, though? Eidolon was a top dog.
I looked away from Eidolon, to check out the rest of the crowd. There were a few other unofficial teams of heroes, including Haven, the Christian team from the bible belt, and two teams with corporate sponsorship that were being very careful to not interact with one another. Some sort of bitter rivalry, there.
A scattered few independent heroes and villains were around as well. Few I could name. I saw a girl dressed up like an old fashioned doll. Parian. She was local, and she wasn’t hero or villain. A rogue, who only used her powers for business or entertainment. She could sometimes be seen doing some promotion for a store downtown, giving life to some massive stuffed animal or a store mascot. She’d done an interview in a magazine I’d read back before I had powers, and I knew she was a fashion student, though she wasn’t revealing just who she was until after she was more established. She looked as though she were trapped in a conversation with a curly haired, dimple-cheeked villainess that looked no older than eight, who wore a frock that was maybe from the same period as Parian’s. The pseudo-child was Bambina, if I was remembering right.
Parian was rescued by one of the out-of-town Wards, a girl in a skintight costume with a visor covering her eyes, nose and ears, with a quiver of what looked like giant needles and a massive crossbow. The Ward said something to Bambina, who scowled and managed to look cute while doing it. Then the heroine ushered Parian over to where she’d been talking with Shadow Stalker. What in the world could that group talk about? I might not have been alone in thinking that—Shadow Stalker seemed unimpressed with the new addition to their group, judging by her body language.