Sovereign

by April Daniels

  “Danny!” she calls out from somewhere off to my right. “Over here!” I slip between several heated conversations and make my way over to her.

  “This is bad,” she says.

  “Yeah, I know. I don’t think we’re in danger right now, though.”

  Her brow crinkles in confusion. “What are you talking about?”

  “The—” I stop myself before I say Nemesis. “The…metahuman population?”

  “No, I mean he just squashed our announcement.”

  “What announce—oh. Right.” That Big News we had planned for so carefully? It’s nothing now. Tiny. I came down here to tell people that the New Port City Council is willing to sign three new municipal hero contracts as a stopgap measure to protect the city and its surrounding suburbs until we can figure out what the hell’s going to happen with the Legion now that it’s basically a hollow shell under Graywytch’s control.

  Today was going to be the beginning of my backdoor coup. With three other heroes at my back, we would form an ad-hoc superteam to replace the Legion, and by the time I was old enough to be a member we’d have a track record strong enough to contest ownership of the Legion and all its assets on behalf of Doctor Impossible and…well, it seemed really interesting and exciting when we were scheming behind the scenes to set it up, but now it’s all just so much inside baseball.

  “Look, that doesn’t really matter right now,” I say. “I think something very bad is going to happen soon.”

  Cecilia frowns. “What is it?” One of the things I like about her is that she doesn’t pretend the paperwork half of caping is the important one.

  “I’m not sure. I need to talk to Doc about this. Can you stay here and call me if it looks like they’re going to get the meeting back in order?”

  “Sure,” she says. As I turn to leave, she puts a hand on my shoulder. “Danny, how big is this?”

  “I don’t know yet. Big.”

  • • •

  It takes just a few minutes to zip through the hotel to the suites we rented. The rooms are great: deep, plush carpet, dark wood everywhere, the works. Doc Impossible is sprawled out on the couch, flipping through the on-demand options on the plasma screen and swirling the ice cube around in her lowball glass of whiskey. The track lighting in the room is set to a soft dim glow.

  “Hey, kiddo,” she says, without looking up when I shut the door behind me. Her voice is very careful, overly precise. “You make your big play?”

  “Doc, sober up, we’ve got a problem.”

  “Eh? Something go wrong?” Doc raises the remote and kills the picture on the screen. The lights begin to rise automatically.

  “Sort of. What can you tell me about Professor Gothic?”

  “He’s a crank of the highest order,” she says approvingly. Doc Impossible sits up and sets her drink aside. “He does excellent, idiosyncratic work.”

  “He knows about the Nemesis.” I take a seat in one of the plush armchairs near the coffee table.

  She looks at me sharply. “He said that?”

  “No, not exactly, but he said everything up to that.” I tell her about his announcement, and about our little conversation during the chaos afterward. “He was only giving them half the truth. He said he didn’t know what the common cause to superpowers is, but it has to be the Nemesis.”

  “Well, hold on, does it?” she asks. Doc crosses the room to the minibar and slides her half-finished whiskey into a tiny refrigerator. She pulls a bottle of water out and twists it open. I’m glad I caught her before she’d gone too far, or she might have been soggy for the rest of the convention. She might be an android, but she’s a really human android, and I’ve come to learn that that means really human problems too. “Utopia said there was a large mass of exotic matter coming our way, that it did something with quantum observer effects, and that it would be dangerous. That’s all she said about it. It doesn’t mean it’s been the cause of metahumans and magic and hypertech and all the rest.”

  “No, Doc, I mean I called it the Nemesis, and he knew what I was talking about. If that was just her pet name for it—”

  “How would he know?” Doc finishes for me, suddenly thoughtful. She takes a swig of water. “Mom was always…weirdly social. Maybe she had some aliases online, talked this over with other hypertech developers?”

  I shrug. “Maybe. When I tried to ask Gothic about it, he didn’t want to talk here. He said it was too dangerous.”

  “Dangerous, why?”

  “I don’t know. He acted like there were blackcapes in the crowd just waiting to hear him say the wrong thing. He’s coming to New Port in a few days so we can talk in private.”

  Doc looks thoughtful. “He might be paranoid. It’s a known job risk in the super science racket.”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “I didn’t say that.” She holds up a hand. “If Gothic thinks there’s something to this, then it’s worth hearing him out. I’ll ping him online and ask him to send me some files.”

  A weird sense of disappointment washes over me, and I lean back in the chair. For nine months I’ve been worrying about the Nemesis, trying to learn anything I can about it. All I’ve been able to find were some references to a hypothetical planet, an undiscovered member of the solar system on a super long elliptical orbit, passing through the inner system only once every few thousand years. I’d started to let myself believe it was nothing, and now suddenly it’s back and it’s real and other people see it too, but all I get to do about it is just…wait and see. Wait and see if Gothic is a crank. Wait and see if the Nemesis is real. Wait and see if Utopia was right about the doom that’s coming for all of us.

  “Thanks,” I say. “I guess that’s it for now.”

  “Cheer up, kiddo,” says Doc Impossible, smiling brightly. “You never know, it might still be the apocalypse after all.”

  “That makes me feel so much better.”

  “Always happy to help. You wanna grab something to eat?”

  “No, I should probably head back down there,” I say, standing up. “They might be getting the meeting back in order soon. I just wanted…well, I thought you should know about this.”

  Doc nods, and then after a moment she asks, “Are you going to be okay?”

  “Yeah,” I say, with a weird sense that I’d rather not be answering that question. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Danny, every time Utopia comes up in conversation, there’s a change in you. You get tense.” Doc’s voice is gentle. “It’s not okay, what she did to you. That kind of thing leaves a mark. It’s normal for it to leave a mark.”

  And I really don’t know what to say to that. I feel uncomfortably exposed, like that trick I do with everyone else where I stop being Danny and start being Dreadnought won’t work on her. She knows me too well.

  “Well, this isn’t really about her, so I don’t think it’s going to be a problem,” I say carefully.

  “It doesn’t have to be directly about her. It could still dig up a lot of things for you. I just want to know you’re going to be okay.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I say.

  “Okay.” Doc nods. She looks like she’s going to say something else when the part of the suit over my forearm vibrates and my earbud sounds a ringtone.

  The hidden screen on my forearm blooms to life, a glossy color display showing the photo of my police liaison officer, Detective Phạm. I tap the answer button, and the suit dims and fades back to its normal matte blue.

  “Hi, Detective. Something up?”

  “Sorry to call you on your week off, but Graywytch isn’t answering her phone. We need you back here right away. Somebody is tearing up downtown with his superpowers and he’s taken hostages.”

  Chapter Five

  I’m moving before Detective Phạm is done talking. “On my way.” I cut the signal. “Doc, are you good to plot an orbital hop back to New Port?” I ask as I cross to the suite’s door.

  “Yeah, I’m okay, get going.” She’s
moving to her tablet and flicking open the orbital calculator. “Should have it ready in two minutes.”

  “Tell NORAD I’m on my way; I don’t want them trying to shoot me down.”

  “Will do. Go get ’em, kid,” she says. That last part I hear through my earbud because I’m already in the hall and blasting down to the emergency stairs.

  “Oh, and tell Cecilia I won’t be able to make it back to the meeting, and she should make the announcement herself.” I’m zipping down the emergency stairs in a tight spiral, flight after flight flashing past. “See if you can get her to talk to Kinetiq about getting one of those contracts, would you?”

  “You need me to drop off your dry cleaning too?”

  I almost snap the doors off their hinges as I come out into the lobby and boost for speed. A few other fliers juke out of my way and shout angrily at my back, but by that time I’m in the hangar, and a few moments later I’m under open sky and pushing hard for altitude. Earth falls away from me like somebody dropped it, and soon the moisture in my eyebrows freezes. I take a last deep breath and hold it. It’s the last air I’m going to get for the next twenty minutes or so.

  The wind roars in my ears, a rumbling pressure builds at my forehead, pushes, and then I snap through the sound barrier. Higher and faster, the clouds falling away below me like a cotton ball carpet. My sleeve vibrates at me again, and I tap it to open the telemetry Doc sent me. I push my arms through the wind up in front of me and make a diamond with my fingers. Between them a hologram flickers to life. Glowing emerald squares are projected in front of me, hollow and strung out in a line. They’re gates marking the optimal flight path for an orbital injection. I correct my angle a little bit to start passing through the gates, and as I zip through each one, my suit squeezes me gently to let me know I’m on the right course. I drop my arms beside me and push like hell.

  I really don’t know how fast my top speed is. I’ve never gotten there. What I do know is that within about fifteen thousand feet of sea level, I can only get up to Mach 3 or so. Past that, the wind resistance is too much, and I’m simply not strong enough to batter my way through. If I want to go faster I need to get higher. The thinner the air, the faster I go. And to go really fast, I need to get up to where there is no air at all.

  The pressure on my arms and face seems to drop gradually, and then all of a sudden I’m up in sub-orbit. The silence is perfect. The world vast below me, stretching out almost unimaginably far all around me. It’s fuzzy blue at the edges, and way off near the horizon, the sun is distant and searingly bright. Below me, the world curves away.

  Earth is almost heartbreakingly beautiful from up here. It’s home. It’s everything. I wish everyone had a chance to see it like this.

  I give myself a few moments to enjoy the view, and then I put on a fresh burst of speed and pass through ten thousand miles per hour like it was nothing at all.

  I bring the gate diagram up again to make sure I’m on course. The trouble with orbital jumps is that they’re not nearly as simple as they seem. It isn’t just go up and come down. The Coriolis effect means coming down where I want to isn’t as trivial as pointing myself in the right direction. I could just try to follow the coastline up South America, past Mexico and into the United States, but it would be tricky, and if I made a mistake it would cost so much time to correct it that it might almost defeat the point of coming up here in the first place. I don’t know how the other Dreadnoughts got along without orbital calculators and satellite navigation.

  For a good fifteen minutes I glide silently over Earth, splitting my time between checking my telemetry and scanning ahead in the lattice. In the past nine months I’ve gotten a lot better at reading the lattice, the tangled net of light that hangs behind reality. I’m better at seeing through walls now, and I can scan almost fifty miles ahead of me if there’s no atmosphere in the way to clutter up the view. That’s important, because even for me it would be a little uncomfortable to slam into a low-flying satellite at twenty-six thousand miles an hour.

  The navigation gates are turning amber now, and in the distance they fade toward red, my signal to begin slowing down for reentry. A feral grin stretches across my face, and I can feel my body begin to come alive with anticipation.

  Being a superhero means a lot of things. It means I’m a public figure. It means that most of the people around me don’t consider me one of them. It means learning to keep my head together when everything is falling apart. It means living life at the edge of death. These are things that everyone knows about, things everyone thinks they understand. But there’s another truth to it, one I’ve learned not to speak about too loudly. People don’t want to hear it, not from Dreadnought, at least. Because here’s the truth of the matter, here’s what my job really means:

  I beat people up for money.

  And I love it. God help me, but I love it more than breathing. To be honest, I’d do it for free. Hell, I’d pay to do this. When I get into a serious fight, it is almost always the high point of my week. There’s no bullshit in combat, no convenient fictions and easy lies. Open battle is the most honest relationship you can have with somebody. They want to do something bad. I want to stop them. Whoever is stronger gets what they want. So far, I’m always the one who wins. The bad guys keep getting surprised by that. They know I’m Dreadnought, of course, and they know I’m strong. But I don’t think any of them ever expected that I could reach down into me and pull out the kind of rage that I hit them with. They see this cute little blond girl and think I don’t have it in me to hurt them. Very quickly, they learn better. When I’m in a really good fight, the anger explodes out of me. The battle joy takes me, and it’s the best feeling in the world. It is right. It is necessary. When I’m fighting, everything is perfect.

  It’s time to make my descent. I nose down and adjust my path to follow the gates into New Port, still hundreds of miles ahead of me. It’s just a matter of ballistics now, so I’m not putting any effort into accelerating. The first wisps of atmosphere begin to whisper past me, almost imperceptibly gentle. It’s time to get into position. There are two ways I can reenter the atmosphere: under power, where I use my flight powers to slow me down so I don’t burn up, and free falling, where I slam into the atmosphere at full speed and bear the brunt of its fury. The second way is faster, but dangerous. Even I can’t be exposed to those kinds of temperatures for long before I start to get seriously burned.

  I flip onto my back, my legs stretched out in front of me. Crossing one boot over the other helps me keep them together during the turbulence that’s going to start here in a few moments. That’s important because I’ve got to stay stable; if I begin to tumble, then things will get very bad, very fast. I reach behind me and pull my cape up around the back of my head and neck. As the first glowing streams of plasma begin to gather at my heels and slide up the back of my legs, I tuck my chin down against my chest and cross my arms. My cape is fluttering up behind me, cupped against the back of my head by the atmosphere, which is just now finding its voice. The sky roars at me, dragon’s breath hot and bright all around me. In a matter of seconds, I’m uncomfortably hot. My suit is spreading the heat out evenly, dissipating it as much as it can. I’ve got to keep my arms crossed in front of me and my fingers out of the plasma, or I might lose them.

  I think of the fight waiting for me on the other end of this Hell, and my smile grows. The pressure pummels my legs and back. Falling to Earth at Mach 25 in a bathtub of fire, I begin to laugh. Other girls my age worry about midterms and prom dates. Those poor, ignorant children. They will never get to feel this amazing. Some people get superpowers and pretend they don’t have them. They hide from their power. They throw it all away just so they can be normal. Idiots. Cowards. Who the fuck wants to be normal when you can be this instead?

  The plasma rips away from me, and now I’m falling through the night sky, wind howling at my back. I flip over and point my head down. Down in Antarctica it looked like late afternoon, but up here it�
��s been dark for hours.

  Something’s wrong. I can’t see the I-5 corridor. The West Coast of the US is a pretty simple place—almost all the major cities are on Interstate 5. Most of the minor ones too. That’s extra true in the Northwest, which doesn’t have the big coastal cities of California. What that means is there should be a big ribbon of light right below me, millions of white and amber lights marking out civilization. But there’s nothing; it’s only flat, black nothing. After a brief moment of confusion I realize I’m over Pacific Ocean. Looking over to my right, way off the in the distance, I spot the lights of the coast. I bank hard against the stiff wind and start pushing for new acceleration to change my course.

  Goddamnit, Doc. The Coriolis effect is a thing. I should have calculated the plot myself, even if it did take me ten minutes. I’m bound to lose more on this correction than I would have if I’d stopped to make sure my navigator wasn’t drunk. She’d looked sober. Sober enough. Shit.

  My turn is a wide, looping thing as I try to husband the remaining fragments of velocity from my orbital insertion. Coming down from space gives me way more momentum than I can normally get, and I’m going to need every spare joule of it to get to New Port on time. My forearm starts buzzing and my suit sounds a warning tone in my earpiece, telling me I’m off course. I silence the alarms and push for more speed. It’s all going to be over by the time I get there. People might be getting hurt. Come on, come on…

  The Pacific Coast slides toward me, the horizon an abrupt end to the vast, black ocean below me. My chest unwinds a bit, a few portions of my anxiety torn away by the wind. I can do this, bad course or not. I can do this. My nerves are singing with anticipation as I tap out a text message to Detective Phạm on my wrist screen. I’m a few minutes out. Where are the hostages being kept?

  Almost instantly, she replies Galatea Tower, top floor. Command post is in the parking garage opposite.