Gruefield 18 (Tarnished Sterling Omnibus)

by Robert McCarroll

  Nick drove us out of the city as I packed away my gadgets. I was the only member of the team without powers, and the only member of my family without powers. Most of the time I didn't notice. It only became an issue when we fought monsters the size of jumbo jets, or criminals with powers. That's why I'd started collecting gadgets. Without them, I'd be dead by now. Especially if I hadn't stolen Omicron's gauntlet. It was more of a glove after the modifications we'd made to it - the black glove with red circuitry which I wore on my left hand. It did one thing - made force bubbles. Force bubbles strong enough to resist the bite force of a fully grown dragoness, or a car crash.

  I barely realized that we'd been T-boned before I was ejected through the side window. The phrase 'seat belts are your friends' rolled through my head as I rolled along the pavement. I rolled up the front of a BMW to end up on its windshield. It had been waiting at the red light that our impactor had run. A person without an alien implant in their brain might have passed out, but little Uth-sk wouldn't let me. I should have mentioned, the personification of the implant in my mind was a miniature version of the alien surgeon who put it there and took out my eye. I really hate little Uth-sk. Blacking out would have saved me from the pain.

  I crawled off the hood of the BMW and staggered towards the wreck, not thinking to check to see if my legs were broken. We'd been knocked clear out of our lane and into the oncoming traffic lane. The sedan that hit us, well that didn't look in too good shape either. My first thought was to check on Nick. The airbags deployed, but he looked unconscious. I found a pulse, but I wasn't sure how bad he was hurt. Stephanie had stepped out of the back door of the van. She looked dazed, but not terribly hurt. I called the Fund's emergency number. The Community Fund had been founded by Heroes back during the golden age of heroics, when masks were optional and bad guys didn't hit families. It had been a resource pool to help out those members of the community without too many connections. Its insurance function had been taken over by the BHA when that agency was founded. But by then the Fund had grown to encompass all sorts of things.

  A call to the emergency line routed an ambulance from Vanguard Hospital and summoned the nearest community member for backup. Checking in the van, I found the upper torso of the driver of the sedan poking through the side window opposite where I'd been ejected. It didn't look like she'd been wearing a seat belt either, and she hadn't been as lucky as I was. She'd been ejected from her own car and stopped by the van's crumpling seats. Her legs still lay across the twisted wreckage that was the engine compartment of her car. She was still in one piece, just halfway into the van. Her passengers fared better and still shows signs of life.

  A shadow passed over me. I looked up to see a green and gold clad, overly muscled figure whose white cape caught the breeze just enough to flutter as he sailed forward with no signs of a means of flying. Figures Jack would be the closest. Even if he was technically further away, he could pace a jetliner at cruising speeds, so getting on the scene quickly was easier for him. That was a bad habit, thinking of him as Jack even in costume. Mister Thirty-Eight was not the worst name he'd had, but hadn't quite sunk into my mind. He drifted down to street level. "What happened?"

  "From the looks of traffic, we had the green when we were passing through the intersection, and they ran into us," I said. Jack's eyes went to my glove and to Nick's sword lying in the middle of the intersection.

  "You don't look so good, let me check your pulse." He pulled Omicron's gauntlet off my hand and checked my pulse on my left wrist. I was still wearing another glove under it, my hero suit only had an opening at the neck, but it was a matched pair of plain black. Jack used checking on the victims as a cover for scooping up hero paraphernalia as subtly as he could manage it. We hadn't done anything wrong, but this was an accident with a fatality, and we were already garnering attention.

  The ambulances came howling in. Vanguard hospital wasn't the closest, but they were probably the only place in the city which could handle Nick's abnormal physiology. They were also pretty good with normal people too. With three others unconscious and bleeding, the paramedics barely gave me a glance. I was, after all, ambulatory. Though I suspected that I'd be passed out on the windshield of that BMW still if not for little Uth-sk. I sat myself down on the curb next to Stephanie.

  "They were driving the wrong way," she said.

  "What?"

  "Look at the skid marks on the road, they didn't leave any, but look where ours start." I looked at the black marks of rubber placed on the road when we'd been pushed almost sideways. We'd been hit on the passenger side, and the marks started in front of a right turn lane aimed for the driver's side. the BMW I'd ended up on had been waiting to drive straight. The nose of the van barely reached the double yellows.

  "If they didn't leave any skid marks, they never braked."

  "Or their brakes weren't working."

  "You think they veered into the oncoming lane to avoid the cars stopped for the light?"

  "Maybe," Stephanie said.

  "Given how fast they were probably going to kick the van an entire lane sideways, I don't think they could have made it past this intersection without hitting something." Looking down, I saw my phone was still in my hand. I'd been badly rattled, and not all of my thoughts were coherent at the moment. I called dad.

  "Hello," he said.

  "Dad, we got into a car accident," I said. "Someone hit Nick's van. He's on his way to the hospital and the van is totaled. Stephanie and I will need a ride in a bit."

  "Where are you?"

  "Forty first and C."

  "I'll see you shortly." I didn't have to say come in civilian guise, a shorthand I'd picked up years ago when talking to him over the phone was that references made to civilian identities meant we were out of costume. Code names meant in-costume. It only became a problem in mixed company. Flying over to us, Jack continued the charade of not knowing me. While Jack Fowler was my godfather, Mister Thirty-Eight had no public connection to me. Jack set our packs and the laptop bag next to us. He'd carefully packed and closed them so that the evidence of our alter egos wasn't visible. A member of the crowd we'd picked up headed over to where we were.

  "Mister Thirty-Eight, Ida Miles from the New Port Arthur Evening Herald-"

  "No comment," Jack said.

  "You put that kid in a coma weeks ago, and he still hasn't woken up. How can you-"

  "No. Comment." Jack flew off before he flew off the handle. It had been an accident. An opaque psychic construct had been rampaging through a neighborhood, and there was no evidence that the construct's creator had been inside of it when Jack fought the thing. When it shattered, enough force from Jack's last punch got conveyed to the guy's head to give him some form of intercranial hematoma. I don't remember which type, but they'd had to drill a hole in his skull to drain the blood from around the brain. Under the circumstances, I don't know what he could have done differently.

  "About this collision," Ida Miles said.

  "No comment," Stephanie and I said almost in unison. Ms. Miles took it in stride. She was somewhere in her forties, dressed in a light gray suit. My guess was, she'd been in the business long enough not to be terribly put off by uncooperative witnesses at this point. Some people wanted their day in the limelight, others would rather not have the public scrutiny over something like this. Unfortunately, I'd already had a day in the limelight when I got away from Uth-sk.

  "I know you, you're Travis Colfax," Ms. Miles said. "Do you have any thoughts on the Morlock Society's continued operation in New Port Arthur?"

  "No," I said. Being famous for being abducted due to a mistaken impression that I was rich wasn't all that much fun, but since my celebrity was fading, journalists didn't press the matter past the first no. Ms. Miles didn't prove to be any different. It was her job to find a story, and 'car accident, one fatality' wasn't all that remarkable on
its own. As her eye went over the scene, I could almost see her trying to put together the best way to phrase the tale to get the most readers. I think the Evening Herald was more than half online these days, but kept the old name for its veneer of respectability. Not that I had much respect for journalists. Over-glorified gossips, the lot of them.

  Having freed the still living people from the wreck, the ambulances raced away to get them medical attention. "This certainly ruined a good day," Stephanie said. I tried not to blather something trite like 'she had the worst day of all' about the driver of the other car. It was hard to find the right thing to say when someone just died. The police arrived after the paramedics left. They'd have arrived sooner if I'd called emergency services instead of the Fund. But then this stupid accident would have outed three members of the team to the public, potentially compromising the identity of the rest of the team and my whole family. I don't know how my classmates would react to finding out 'Jinx' Colfax was actually Shadowdemon.

  With the traffic nightmare we created, Dad had to park a few blocks away and walk over. We had a family resemblance, though he was leaner, and he had salt and pepper hair that was starting to lean more towards the salt. He was dressed in shirtsleeves and a tie, looking more like an accountant than the chief enforcer of the community code. Then again, Lenny Colfax was a good guy, Razordemon was a bit of a nightmare. "You guys all right?" he asked.

  It was nightfall by the time we got out of there. The police tended to take dead bodies rather seriously, especially once we pointed out the fact that there was no sign the other car had been able to brake. When we finally piled into dad's car and started off, I once again found myself cursing little Uth-sk. I was tired, so tired. All I wanted was to sleep. That dark green, white-clad, orange-gloved, six-limbed ribbon wouldn't let me. I should have killed the original Uth-sk when I had the chance. I shook that thought out of my head almost immediately. Heroes don't kill, that was rule number one. Not even the surgeon who'd just operated on them without anesthetic.

  Stephanie was asleep in the back seat, and I slumped against the window as Dad pulled the car away from the curb. Without asking, Dad drove us on the route we'd been taking. Up over the Shining Future Arch - a bridge that was the suicide capital of New Port Arthur. Then we took a left down state route fourteen. When the Gruefield Missile Base was operational, state fourteen was the only public road between it and the river. The 'Gruefield Highway' was growing in importance now that they'd shut down the missile base and developers were building on the land. Of the twenty four launch facilities the base once held, only Gruefield Eighteen hasn't been demolished. While it no longer had any capacity to launch missiles and bore a lot of Transformational Network Technologies Research signs, the structure was mostly intact. We'd taken out the asbestos and the lead paint though.

  Dad swiped through the front gate and drove to the surface garage. In the dim glow of early evening, my real eye had trouble seeing much. My memory filled in the acres of neatly trimmed grass and patches of concrete. It might cost a pretty penny to have someone mow the entire plot, but I'd used the cover of tall grass to sneak into facilities before. That, and it made the place look more professional. The old hanger was gone, replaced by a new steel prefab building. We had no aircraft, and the helipad next to it went unused, but it was handy for storage. The garage was original to the base and had been refurbished. My original estimate of two million had been low, but we hadn't broken the five million I'd figured for new construction. The Fund still regarded it as a bargain.

  Since the government built it, there was no elevator from the garage to the base proper. So I had to wake Stephanie before retrieving our bags from the trunk. We hiked the short distance to the neat little office block they'd built over the entrance bunker. It was a simple, glass fronted building housing a few banks of cubicles, a handful of offices and some conference rooms. It was not too unlike the office Nora worked in,except for being rectangular and situated at ground level. The TNT Research employees had gone home for the night, so we took the front door instead of the side entrance. It didn't really matter since we had to go through the same security over the main bunker. Every bruise I'd collected during the day was complaining, so I called the freight elevator. There was a staircase, but I wasn't in the mood to torture myself.

  The freight elevator had been given a fresh coat of paint, but the buttons were clearly from the sixties. There was great positive feedback when you pushed them, but the contrast to the sleek modern frontage was rather striking. As the elevator sank into the ground, I flipped my eye patch up onto my forehead. Everyone down in the base knew the patch was just for show anyway. The once institutional green walls had been stripped of the old paint and refurbished in a titanium white, with colored lines leading people towards the various components of the facility. Actually, at the base of the elevator there were only two. One marked 'Eight Beta' and one for 'Research Labs'. TNT Research wasn't a fake company, they were doing real work in two of the three launchers and their associated equipment bays. What they were doing was a mystery to me.

  We followed the 'Eight Beta' line to a security door. It was an old blast door refitted with new lock controls. Gruefield Eighteen was meant to survive anything short of a direct hit from a nuclear weapon, even though it had been part of the nation's first strike arsenal. Another mistake I'd made in my proposal was thinking there was only one actual 'silo' in the Gruefield Eighteen facility. There were three in a cluster. They were all physically connected to the same control center and counted as a single unit in the organizational chart. That cross-facility tunnel was the longest in the base, and the poor sods at TNT had parked a rack of bikes by its mouth to make the trek easier. I didn't think it long enough to warrant that treatment.

  We turned our backs to the tunnel and headed towards the residential facilities. The blueprints showed an underground dome with a three story building inside, but the lack of windows meant no one ever saw the dome proper. Except when performing maintenance on the seismic isolators. Formerly the barracks and offices for the base crew, the residential dome had seen a serious overhaul. It could no longer house as many people, but it was significantly more comfortable. We only had one kitchen by the mess hall, but the sleeping quarters were carved up into a series of little apartments. They weren't big apartments, but they were private. The entryway at the first and second floors had been opened up to create a communal plaza. Archways and columns covered the steel posts and girders that held the second and third floors. It was still a respectably open space. The third floor was too small to break up in the same manner.

  At the back of the atrium, separated by a wall that only went halfway up, was the mess hall. The team sat around the main table, looking at our sullen and battered expressions. Jennifer was in my seat at the head of the table. She pushed her blond hair behind her ear and leaned forward.

  "Nick already called to say he wouldn't make it for dinner," she said. "Something about having a t-bone for lunch."

  "We got hit by a sedan on the way back from 722 Walker," I said. "It struck perpendicular to the side. You know, a t-bone collision."

  "I've never heard it called that before. I figured it was some sort of bad joke given what he normally eats."

  "So how was everyone else's day?"

  "We were on call because you forgot to say the hostage situation was cleared up," Jennifer said.

  Part 4

  While I wasn't able to sleep, my body still needed to rest, so I still had a bed, and I generally used it only until my limbs stopped feeling tired. During the school year I used the time to study. It's not really cheating since I was actively working to learn the subject matter. I just happened to have an eye that could serve as a computer monitor and more hours in the day than most people. I did occasionally worry about the day when someone managed to hack my optic nerve, but I still had a biological eye in my head. Though I don't think I'll ever
forgive Uth-sk for what he did, I've learned to cope with the aftermath.

  Since school was out for the summer, I was filtering through the information we'd collected during the day. The serial number of a suspiciously expensive gun, the Morlock Society still active a year after their catalyst was defeated, a police captain overly eager to see us depart the scene. Then there was Dekker, the one that got away. Something told me that Dekker wasn't his real name, more likely it was a handle. The odds of the Morlocks' decker being named Dekker were too slim for my tastes. I had to take a look around his computer for clues.

  I crawled out of bed, got dressed and headed up to my office. Aside from the trophy room and the vault, the third floor of the residential area held offices. I was the only one who'd claimed one, sitting across from the trophy room. Being able to look up and see the tattered black lab coat of Doctor Omicron told me that I didn't always fail. It had no gadgets in it and was too battered from our fight to be worn, so it hung from a silver mannequin as a reminder of the mess that forged the team. A couple of large red buttons still hung from it. I'd done all right at 722 Walker, I shouldn't let the crash diminish that. Powering up Dekker's laptop, I thanked my earlier foresight at disabling his password.