Gruefield 18 (Tarnished Sterling Omnibus)

by Robert McCarroll

  "I've been meaning to ask," Donny said, "What's with the goggles on your forehead?"

  "What? They come in handy."

  "Do you even use them?"

  "... Not really," I said. "They became a part of my image, so I keep them around." Part of my image during my worst days, and a long string of failures. I drove that thought from my mind. "When we hit the top floor, we have to be careful and find out what's going on before engaging. I know the shooting has already started..."

  "You've only been a team lead for a year and you're bossing me around?"

  "You're still a sidekick"

  "I didn't want to make two trips to the BHA, I was going to file for my class three when I decided what to do about Baron Mortis' offer." Before I could make my next comment, a thunderous boom followed by the sound of rushing air filled my ears. The elevator car lurched and the lights went dead. We fell about half a yard before jolting to a stop. My artificial eye adjusted to the loss of light almost immediately. Seeing Donny looking about quite in the dark, I handed him the goggles from my forehead. "Thanks," he muttered.

  "That did not sound good," I said.

  "Thank you, captain obvious. Can you get the ceiling door open?"

  "Those aren't really built to be opened from the inside."

  "Screw it," Donny said. With a series of sharp popping sounds, the wooden panels pulled free from the glue holding them to the walls. Ramming upward, they smashed open the access hatch. Creaking and groaning, the wooden panels twisted into a crude ladder up the side of the elevator car.

  "You know, your liability premiums would be lower if you didn't do things like that." I paused, noticing raindrops falling into the car. Moving under the open access hatch, I looked up. High above was merely the roiling clouds of the thunderstorm, lit by the occasional flash of lightning. "Where did the roof go?" Clamoring up the ladder, I stood on the rain slicked top of the elevator. Picking up the thick cable jumbled atop the car, I traced it to the end. The insulated steel braid was warped as if recently melted, and still quite warm.

  "Shouldn't this thing have dropped down the shaft?" Donny asked, kneeling next to where I was gawping at the damaged cable.

  "If the lift starts to fall too fast, safety brakes kick in and stop it. Otis invented the first ones back in the nineteenth century," I said. The rain was rapidly turning the muck and filth on top of the elevator car into a slippery mess, and on three sides was empty hoistway plunging at least twenty floors into the building's core. Rather than stick around until we got into trouble, I slapped the manual release on the nearest door, pushing it open with my hands. I crawled up and helped Donny into the hallway. We made a bit of a mess of the carpet with the grease and filth we'd picked up, but compared to the missing top of the building, it seemed hardly significant.

  Oblong pools of light from emergency lamps marked an ominous contrast to the bland, inoffensive architecture of the hotel. Leading the way, I headed to the stairwell and climbed. Only a few floors up, I ran out of steps. A mud of light ash and concrete grit coated everything as the building just stopped. Pulling open a charred, twisted door, I stepped into what should have been another bland hallway. Missing its ceiling, caked in streaks of ashen mud and blackened by an unseen firestorm, the hall was instead a mockery of the lower level. Donny wiped the soot from one of the room numbers. It read '2803'. Two floors of the building were simply gone. Well, not completely, a few gnarled and twisted steel beams reached upwards from the ruin, trying to hold up the missing pieces of the hotel.

  "Look around and see if we can find any survivors," I said.

  "That seems unlikely." Even through the rumbling of distant thunder, it was obvious that someone other than Donny had answered. I turned towards the speaker. He stood atop the charred and twisted remnant of a support column, the bent steel still hissing with steam where the rain struck it. His boots were buckled around the lower legs of a pair of pants sporting more pockets than I had in normal clothes. A long leather duster fought against the wind, fluttering as it whipped past. Shiny brass buttons held the duster closed behind the heavy leather straps and shiny buckles that tied him to the rig on his back. From where I stood, I couldn't get a good look at the rig proper, just shiny brass, bronze and steel leaking an ominous green aura that crackled with viridian static. The most visible components were the two bronze control arms running forward at elbow height. His gloved hands rested easily on the deceptively simple sticks mounted at the ends of the arms. A gold ring bearing the letter 'A' sat slightly askew on his middle finger.

  A red scarf trailed out over the high collar of his coat, merrily dancing with the winds. A pair of brass goggles with green lenses covered his eyes, and his short black hair waved with the wind. An egregiously long handlebar mustache fluttered from his upper lip. He had a weak chin. The most striking detail that I'd almost overlooked was the fact that he was completely dry.

  "Who, pray tell, are you?" I asked. Donny shot me a sidelong glance, implying that I should recognize the man on sight. The man in the duster and metal rig smirked, a gesture almost lost behind his fluttering mustache.

  "The name, or rather, codename, is Arclight." He swept an arm across his waist and gave a mock bow, limited by the bulk strapped to his back. "Shadowdemon was it? My apologies for dropping in on your turf unannounced, I was not quite sure where this deal was going down until they finally met."

  Arclight. The name rang a bell, but the visage before me was unfamiliar. He was one of the All-Star Elementals, though one of their lower-key members rather than a headliner. That information did not make me any less on edge given what Donny had said about the team. "What happened here?" I asked.

  "An arms deal gone bad. When shooting broke out, one of the parties involved decided the best way to erase the evidence of their crimes was to set off a variable yield plasma charge. Unless you have someone who can reconstruct ash, you're not going to find the bodies." Most people might have taken that last comment as sarcasm. Inside the hero community, you never know what might turn up. The rain, however, was washing a lot of that ash away. "If not, I'll bring in some of our people from the west coast. We have a postcognitive who makes a pretty good tracker."

  "You think someone made it out of here?" I gestured toward the ruin around me.

  "There's not a lot of overlap between arms dealers and suicide bombers." He finally looked me in the eye, though I couldn't see his through the lenses of his goggles. "There isn't much for you to do here. I'll talk to the police when they arrive. You might want to check in with whoever's coordinating at the hospital fire, they might be able to use another pair of hands over there."

  I rankled at being brushed off, wanted to argue with him simply for telling me what to do. But really, what grounds did I have to argue from? I had no proof that anything other than what he'd claimed had gone down. All of the evidence had been flash-fried by a variable yield plasma charge, a rather unusual piece of hardware used for specialized demolitions in environments unsuited to traditional explosives. It was expensive, finicky and unreliable when compared to C4 under normal circumstances. Why would anyone bother? Except, unlike C4, which unleashed kinetic energy, a plasma charge superheated everything, vaporizing it instead of pulverizing it.

  A horrible suspicion crept into my mind. Had Arclight set the charge? It seemed a tad extreme to leap from 'a bit bent' to 'vaporizing the top floors of a downtown hotel'. I hoped it was only my suspicious mind seeing things that might not be there. The Elementals were still heroes after all.

  By the time we descended from the 28th floor and drove to Vanguard, the fires were out. Things had generally calmed down, and the only sign of the original misfortune was the ring of emergency vehicles flashing their lights and a black char on the north wing. We had to show our BHA cards to pass the cordon, and for once, the police didn't hassle us over it. I did understand the rationale behind it
- you didn't want cosplayers waltzing into crime scenes.

  Vanguard hospital was huge. Seven floors above ground, four below, with a footprint that covered several acres of land for the foundation alone, plus the parking garages and peripheral lots. It was painted a gleaming antiseptic white with bands of decorative brick marking the transitions between segments of the building. It was too familiar to me, as I'd been a patient there far more often than I cared. On a normal night, the building was comforting, exuding confidence that seemed to say 'you made it here alive, we'll keep you that way.' With the black char up its face, it looked like the hospital itself had been wounded and was begging for help.

  I found Dad in the thick of the controlled chaos, dressed in his red and gold costume, handing out orders to anyone who looked like they didn't have a purpose. "You're late," he said as we approached.

  "There was a bit of a mess at the hotel."

  "We're transferring stable patients to other hospitals. Some of them are in custody and need an escort. Find Thirty-Eight by the garage, he'll give you more instructions." As we started to walk off, Dad put his arm in front of Donny. "Find your sister and help her out in the south wing." Donny nodded, handing my goggles back to me before we split up. Jack was not hard to find, Jack was never hard to find. Even without his green and white costume he was a massive, barrel-chested man who stood at least half a head taller than everyone around him. He smiled at my approach.

  "You missed most of the action. We're cleaning things up here."

  "Tale of my night," I said. "Where do you need me?" Jack pointed to an ambulance where a red-headed EMT was loading a gurney into the back.

  "Guarding him is just formality," Jack said, a pained look crossing his eyes. "He's still in a coma." From that expression alone, I knew the patient was Irvin Keyes. I nodded and jogged over to the ambulance. As I climbed into the ambulance, the EMT shot me a foul look. I noticed that the soul patch hanging from his chin was a very pale blond despite the color of his hair, and he was wearing blue colored contacts. Colored contacts were not that hard to spot when you knew what to look for. They put the color on the outside of the cornea instead of behind the lens where it belonged. I dismissed these observations. A lot of EMTs were volunteers, and the only cosmetic modifications that were against policy were piercings that might snag on safety gear. And that was only for practical reasons.

  The EMT climbed in and closed the back door. "Let's go," he called. The driver set off. I looked down at Irvin. He had narrow, almost gaunt, sallow features with ripples of color from faded bruises mottling his complexion. Tubes hung from his mouth and nose, currently detached from whatever life support equipment they would be hooked into. He breathed slow, labored breaths. His hair was shorn short, barely a quarter inch long. I wasn't sure if it was brown or black.

  The sting of a needle jabbing into the side of my neck drew my attention back to the EMT. He sank the plunger on the syringe before my fist snapped across his face. Whatever soporific cocktail had been in that needle had mini-Uth-sk in a frenzy trying to keep my mind from shutting down. Ominously, despite the adrenalin streaming into my veins, I felt my heartbeat slowing and my breaths becoming harder to pull.

  "What's going on?" the driver called back. His voice struck a chord, I'd heard it somewhere before. On a radio - Dekker. The EMT's elbow slammed into my face with more force than I thought the lithe little man capable of. I slammed into the back door of the ambulance, spitting blood.

  "Shut up and drive," the EMT spat.

  "Morlocks," I coughed, fighting to force my lungs to draw breath.

  "You are a stubborn bastard," the EMT said, driving a fist into my solar plexus and forcing what little breath I'd drawn back out of my lungs.

  "What?" Dekker asked.

  "Not you," the EMT said. My diaphragm refused to answer me and spots swam in front of my left eye. That wasn't the only unresponsive muscle in my body as my arms refused to do more than sway feebly as I tried to punch the EMT. My knees gave out and I bounced off the foot of the gurney. I managed to hold on to the rail and tried to force myself to stand.

  "Huh, enough sedative to kill a horse and you're still not down yet? How long does this stuff take?" He casually browsed the side of an open box. "Doesn't say. Maybe another dose will help it along." He opened another syringe from the ambulance's stores and drew another full load from the vial. "This stuff is usually metered out by the half-milliliter, here's five CCs."

  I tried to wrap myself in a force bubble, but the glove cried out that there was not enough room. Indeed, the bubble would have cut through Irvin's knees at its usual diameter. Staggering against the back door, I struggled to raise an arm to fend off the EMT. It was obvious my drugged flopping wasn't going to do it. What I did next, I should have never contemplated, let alone acted upon. I fired the line launcher. Shooting out with enough force to carry the grip plate and line at least fifteen stories straight up, it caught the EMT in the gut and threw him through the windshield of the ambulance. Dekker slammed on the brakes to keep from running him over.

  "Now I'm pissed," the EMT said, pulling himself out from under the engine block and up to the hole he'd made in the windscreen. Somehow, he looked unscathed save for rips and scuffs on his uniform. His right eye was blinking reflexively, trying to cast off the dislodged contact lens. The lens fell away, revealing a golden iris with a cross-shaped pupil. I'd only seen eyes like that twice before, and one of the owners was safely under lock and key. Unless there were other dragon clones running around, that meant only one thing.

  I tried to utter the words 'Subject Sixteen', but I was still unable to inhale, and my left eye was all but blind from hypoxia. He dropped back into the ambulance, spitting the word "Drive" at Dekker before advancing into the passenger bay. He looked at the syringe in his hand. The needle was bent, and the grip reflex had expelled the drugs all over the floor when he'd been knocked out of the vehicle. He tossed it into the sharps bin with a shrug. "You don't look like you're in good shape right now anyway," Subject Sixteen said. He tugged on the cable, still firmly attached to his middle. It looked as though that 'grievous bodily harm' warning only applied to people with normal physiologies.

  I sank to the floor, my knees once again refusing to lock in the upright position.

  "There's got to be a control to release this cable somewhere," Subject Sixteen said, poking about the line launcher. He found the manual trigger, releasing the grip plate from him and spooling in the line. He dropped my arm and watched as I slid to my side at the back of the ambulance, my left eye unseeing, my right staring pointedly at the locked wheel of the gurney. I couldn't spare a thought for my inability to breathe as my mind was preoccupied by the fact that my heart had stopped.

  "Is he dead?"

  "What part of 'drive' don't you understand?"

  Part 7

  "Holy shit, he's not dead!" Dekker exclaimed as I drew in a ragged, painful breath. "But... but..."

  "Enough of that," Subject Sixteen said.

  "How? He had no pulse for an hour and a half. An Hour and a Half!"

  "He's a costumed hero, what makes you think he's anything like normal people?"

  "But..."

  "Less than a year ago, I saw him mangled beyond repair, yet he's already back in fighting form. Him not dying from a massive overdose of sedative isn't all that surprising."

  "So why drag him here?" a third voice cut in.

  "You know how the imager keeps burning out the focusing brain?" There was a pause which held what I assumed to be gestures from Subject Sixteen's accomplices. "Well, here's a brain that isn't so easily burnt out."

  "Will it work?" the third voice asked. "I mean, he's bound to try to mess with our results." My thoughts were still on Dekker's proclamation of an hour and a half. I don't have any powers, having my heart stopped for that long should have been fatal. I should
be lying on a slab in the morgue, not... where was I anyway? I pried my eyes open and got a good view of a concrete ceiling. A multicolored mosaic of light played across the dull gray surface. I glanced to either side. Intermixed with a jumbled array of jerry rigged electronic hardware were brass stands holding phials of glowing fluids or sophisticated crystal constructs. The sigils carved into the metal framework looked like something out of a proper grimoire.

  "That can be overcome with a geas of neutrality," Subject Sixteen said. "Forcing him to report truthfully for as long as he's interfaced with the machine."

  "How does a one year old dragon know so much, anyway?" I asked.

  "Dragon?" Dekker asked in confusion. Subject Sixteen circled around to where I could see him. He'd discarded the other colored contact, but still bore the face with the mismatched hair.