Sovereign

by April Daniels

  The clouds over New Port glow with the light of the city beneath. They are cold and moist when I tear through them. I’m approaching downtown now, and slow down to only a few hundred miles per hour. Huge towers of glass and steel soar past me on either side as I slip into the canyons at speed. There’s Galatea Tower, and there’s the parking structure across the road. I bank in and cut a steep turn down to the circus of police vehicles spread out across the garage’s top floor.

  I whistle sharply as I’m about to land; cops hate it when I land near them without warning, but they’re too lazy to look up. Nobody ever really looks up. A couple of patrol officers glance my way as I come in for a landing and tap down next to them. “Where’s Detective Phạm?” I ask.

  One of them gestures with a Styrofoam cup of coffee. “In there.”

  “Thanks.” I hop the police tape and head into the center of their little encampment. One of the cops behind me radios ahead that I’m coming. Every time something big happens, the cops set up shop like they’re planning to stay there for weeks, and then a few dozen of them just stand around doing nothing until the crisis is over. Your tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen.

  A light drizzle has made everything wet and gleaming. There’s a few cruisers parked crookedly across the lines, washing everything in flickering blue and red. Command trucks and SWAT vans are circled around the central gathering. Under a big folding pavilion, they’ve set up a table with laptops and floodlights hooked up to a generator. As I approach, a plainclothes officer comes over to greet me.

  “Hi, Danny.” Detective Phạm is my liaison officer with the New Port cops. She’s in her late twenties or early thirties and is wearing a beige overcoat and a solid blue sweater. Her badge hangs off a chain like a pendant around her neck.

  “Hi, Detective. What’s up?”

  “It’s hard to tell. One of the hostages escaped and said there was a guy up there who got insulted by a waiter and went Carrie on the whole room. Now he doesn’t seem to know what to do and is sitting there, threatening to kill the hostages if we try to come in.”

  I wince. “Yikes. Any description of his powerset?”

  Detective Phạm looks back over at the senior officers. One of them nods at her. When she turns back, I don’t like the look on her face. “Look Danny, I’m sorry I called you all the way up here for nothing, but you arrived too late. The MRU is going to take this one.”

  My heart plummets. The MRU is the Metahuman Response Unit. They’re a glorified SWAT team that specializes in taking down people with superpowers. I’ve fought beside them a couple times, and I was not impressed.

  “Oh come on! I ditched the convention for this! Have they even breached yet?”

  She shakes her head. “No, but they’re just about to.”

  “So there’s time to call them off, then!”

  “The decision to go has already been made. You can watch on the monitors with us, if you’d like. If things go sideways, they might need you to back them up.”

  “I don’t want to watch,” I say, and hate how much like a whine it sounds. “I want to fight!”

  Phạm shrugs. “I’m sorry. That’s the best I can do.”

  My shoulders slump. “All right.”

  Goddammit, Doc!

  “You want some coffee?”

  No, I don’t want any freaking coffee. I want to be doing my job. But it’s not her fault Doc’s a drunk, so I suck it up and say, “Sure.”

  “It’s over there.” She indicates a table that is fairly crowded with uniforms jostling for caffeine. “Catch up with us in the command tent.”

  The coffee is watery, but hot enough.

  “So you’re Dreadnought, huh?” asks one of the uniforms as I’m trying to decide which of the creamers I want to use. Is Hazelnut Bliss enough to make this disaster worthwhile, or am I more of a Nutmeg Joy kind of girl?

  “Yep. Hey, is there any raw sugar around here?”

  “It’s over there,” he says. “What’s that like?”

  “What’s what like?” I say absently, hoping he’ll take a hint. Cops are fun to talk to sometimes. Not always. Not tonight, when I’m already in a bad mood. They have a strong us-and-them mentality that can be uncomfortable to navigate. Then there’s the weird hero worship some of them have toward us—toward capes, I mean—and the equally weird resentment that some of them harbor instead. Put that all together, and I’ve learned to take my time warming up to cops I don’t know.

  “Being Dreadnought,” he says.

  Okay, so we’re not going to take the hint after all. Time for a bland reply and then I’ll go hang out in the command tent where people don’t shove awkward small talk at me. “Oh. It’s cool. I get to—”

  The distant crackle of gunfire drifts down from the top of the tower across the street. Everyone stops and looks up.

  Detective Phạm breaks away from the group of senior officers in the command tent.

  “Dreadnought!” she shouts. “Get up there!”

  Chapter Six

  “Hold this,” I say to the uniform next to me, and push my coffee cup into his hands. The next instant I’m in the air and approaching the sound barrier.

  The top floor of Galatea Tower is a swanky restaurant with floor-to-ceiling windows that shatter nice and dramatically when I punch through them. This used to be a nice place for overpriced dinners. Dim lighting, white tablecloths, real silver in the silverware. Now it features scorch marks on the carpet, dozens of screaming hostages, and a SWAT team having a firefight with a supervillain. Not really a place I’d recommend for the ambiance.

  The main entrance to the dining room has been frozen over completely. A quick peek in the lattice tells me that the cops are trapped on the other side, several of them partially frozen into the wall, and they are frantically trying to chip their way out with utility knives. More cops in black tactical gear have burst in from a kitchen entrance, but are pinned down behind a pair of heavy, overturned tables. Their rifles bark and snap across the room, and everywhere hostages are pinning themselves to the ground, screaming.

  And there in the center of the room is the bad guy, a man in his thirties who’s dressed like he was one of the guests. His tie is undone and his jacket hangs loose. His sleeves are charred and fraying near the cuffs, and there are scorch marks all around him. He’s got his hands spread out in front of him, blasting winds filled with ice and sleet to rebuild a crumbling ice bullet shield in front of him.

  Almost immediately I start taking hits from an assault rifle, cracking pops of pain across my chest and neck. Irritating, but not damaging.

  “Check your fire, dumbass!” I shout, getting up into the air to draw any further fire up away from the hostages. This is what I don’t like about fighting near cops; even their “elite” officers probably haven’t been in a real battle before, and that means that some of them tend to ride the edge of panic every time things get really serious. The officer shooting at me finally lets up on the trigger, adjusts his aim, and starts blasting away at the ice wall the bad guy is putting up.

  The vil looks at me, eyes wide, swings one arm over, and his hand glows hot yellow just before—

  The SWAT team all run out of ammo at the same time.

  There’s a moment of silence, and then the cops are all scrambling for pistols or spare magazines.

  The vil throws a bolt of fire at some hostages, splashes a puddle of liquid flame all around them. They shriek and try to back away, but the flames have them penned in. The fire is closing in on them, and they reach out for me with pleading hands. I snap across the room, catch hold of two people’s wrists, and hoist them up out of the noose of fire, then shout to the others, “Grab my ankles!”

  Their landing isn’t very pretty or comfortable, but I don’t have time to worry about the little things. Once this group of hostages is safe, I whirl on the bad guy, ready to fight.

  In the time it’s taken me to rescue the hostages, he’s hit the cops’ position with heavy ice. I can hear
one of them shouting into his radio for backup, and a few more are trying to chip away at the ice around them with knives. Some of them are entirely encased, and have maybe a few minutes to live.

  “Wait!” says the vil as I close in on him. His eyes are wild and desperate. “Look, my name is John Crenshaw; I have a lot of really important friends. We don’t need to fight. You can understand, right? We’re better than these people! Just let me go. Nobody important has been hurt, right?”

  He says this while standing a few yards from the charred remains of the waiter he killed.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I demand, pointing at the corpse.

  His face twists with frustration. “I’m too important to go down for this! I was trying to get them to understand, but they’re too far gone. The cathedral has infected us. Even these people, who are supposed to be the cream—”

  “Shut up.”

  Between one heartbeat and the next I cross the space between us, grab him by his collar and his belt, and throw him a good thirty feet out the broken window. He leaves the building like he’s been shot out of a cannon, and I’m already over by the frozen cops, smashing the ice to wet chunks with a few quick punches. The cops who’d been completely frozen in take deep, convulsive breaths and begin coughing and vomiting. Then I’m out the window after the bad guy to try to keep him from becoming street pizza.

  The city spreads out beneath us as we fall, canyons of black glass and distant yellow lights. The cold wind tugs at my hair, and I am alive. The only thing I don’t like about being a superhero is that this kind of thing doesn’t happen every day.

  There he is, jacket snapping in the wind as he falls. I power down to catch up to him, but he twists in the air and starts throwing lances of fire at me. I loop out of the way and shout down to him. “Stop shooting, you idiot! I’m trying to save you!”

  Maybe Crenshaw shouts something back. I can’t hear it over the wind. A bolt of ice slams into my chest, cold and heavy, but I shatter it off me with a ripple of my shoulders. We’ve sailed completely over the road and are coming down in a major construction site just next to the parking structure all the cops are camped out on. We’re running out of space before he hits the ground, and the closer I get, the harder it is to dodge his attacks. I might just need to take it on the chin here in a few moments…

  But then he just twists in midair again, points his hands down, and starts shooting fire and wind from his palms like a pair of jet engines. He lands in an enormous white cloud of dust and steam, and I frown, disappointed. I like catching people while they fall. It’s fun.

  The construction yard is bathed in harsh floodlights. Half-poured columns of rebar and concrete reach up like fingers from the foundation pit. Where the ground isn’t fresh cement, it’s a gritty, yellow-brown mud that’s been packed down hard by hundreds of workers and dozens of vehicles.

  I slam down a dozen yards from him, look into the lattice to see through the clouds to check if he made it in one piece. He has, and a few moments later I’m dodging streams of fire and ice. I dart in and hit him in the solar plexus with an open-palm strike. He goes skidding across the ground as he hacks and wheezes and tries to reinflate his collapsed lungs. In the past year, I’ve gotten pretty good at pulling my punches. That one was pretty gentle, somewhere between a heavyweight boxer and a mule’s hind leg. Most people will decide it’s time to give up when I hit them with something like that. But not Crenshaw. No, he’s too important to give up, I guess, and he comes out of the cloud throwing fire and ice with both hands.

  Excellent.

  His aim is better when he’s on the ground, and I find out that his fire is hot enough to sting and the ice hits hard. But the way his ribs crack when I send him sprawling out in the mud makes me think this will be a quick fight. That’s kind of disappointing, to be honest.

  During my first real battle, I was hesitant. I was reluctant to go full power on the bad guys. The idea of hurting people was repulsive to me. That is not a problem I have anymore. Sometime in the last half-year or so I became the kind of person who can snap bones and rip tendons and feel nothing but satisfaction. But people don’t like to think about that kind of thing, about how the person they depend on to fight their battles for them might actually like it, so I don’t talk about it too much. Which is fine. After being in the closet for seven years, keeping my mouth shut about how much I like fighting is easy.

  “You’re just like them, you…you peasant!” says Crenshaw as he rolls over and gets his arms under him.

  “Give up, dude. This isn’t going to end well for you.” I wish he had a durability power. He’s so fragile; this will be over before I really get to cut loose.

  He comes to his feet with a lot of wincing and straining, and then out of the goddamn blue throws a freaking lightning bolt at me. It hits like Zeus’ backhand. My whole nervous system lights up with agony, my muscles locked and straining. I’d be screaming but my lungs aren’t working, and my heart is trying to turn itself inside out. The pain passes, and I’m falling to my knees, then my stomach. Shit. Nobody told me he had electricity powers. Stupid, Danny. Real stupid.

  Crenshaw laughs, relief mixed with triumph. “You don’t like that, do you, bitch?” he calls, and then he hits me with another bolt.

  This time I do scream, long and loud as my back arches and my arms clench up. I’m not actually invincible, just really tough, and I’m not equally tough to all things. Electricity hits me almost as hard as a baseline human. My suit is doing its best to insulate me from the worst, but I still feel little electric knives sawing at all my nerves. The electricity passes, and my eyes aren’t synced anymore, a pair of worlds dancing a wobbly waltz as I try to bring things into focus.

  This is an embarrassing way to die, I think, just as the flash grenade lands between us.

  A flutter of cloth, a whine of spooling cable. Someone grabs me by the cape and hauls me up and away just as the grenade goes off with a flat bang. We swing to the lip of a half-finished second floor. I land on the naked cement in a heap, and a pair of boots clops down next to me. The girl they belong to wears cargo pants crimped in at the knees with pads, and her torso is encased in black tactical gear under a long, brown riding coat. And, of course, she’s wearing a gray cowboy hat.

  “All right, partner,” says Calamity. The cable she swung us up here on finishes rewinding back up into her left hand. There’s a hypertech rocket/grapnel at the end that disappears into her palm with a metallic click. “Tap out. I’ve got it from here.”

  “The hell you do,” I say, pushing myself to my feet. “I’m going to kick this guy’s ass.”

  Calamity rounds on me, eyes narrow over her bandanna. “You ain’t got no business squaring off with someone packing lightning powers! Not when I’m around to do it instead.”

  “This isn’t your job, Calamity.”

  “Then I must wonder whose it is, ’cause you sure as hell weren’t doing it!” she snaps. “This should be over by now.”

  Frustration knots up inside me. It’s been like this between us for months. I don’t know why. Calamity took some time off for physical therapy after the big battle last year, and then when she came back it was like we were strangers again. Now I only see her when we run into each other on a job.

  “Look, would you just—”

  “Get down!” shouts Calamity, and she tackles me to the cement as another bolt of lightning fries the night over our heads.

  There’s a lip of concrete where a wall rises up a few feet to meet a future window, and we take cover behind it. Fire blooms and roars around us, and lightning splits the sky with a cracking bang.

  “We’ll fight later!” shouts Calamity over the noise. “You go right, I go left!”

  “Got it!” I say, more relieved for her to be giving orders again than I want her to know. The way things used to be. The way I wish they still were.

  She pulls another flash grenade out of her jacket and tosses it over the concrete. “Go on the bang!�
��

  The grenade bangs, and we go.

  Chapter Seven

  Calamity’s revolvers bark loud and low as she sprints along one side of the unfinished second floor. Even she’s not good enough to score hits while running flat out, but she kicks up dust around Crenshaw and keeps him busy. I’m moving the other way to try to circle around and pin him between us. Fireballs bloom, and lightning cracks and thunders. I’m varying my speed, zigging and zagging, and between the two of us, Calamity and I manage to keep him distracted and frantic enough not to land any more hits. But we can’t go on like this forever; we’ve got to take him down. And the first cape dumb enough to try to finish the deal is going to eat shit in a big way.

  Stupid, Danny, really stupid. I should have finished him off when I had the chance. A couple quick hits to his upper arms to break the bones, and he wouldn’t be able to even lift his hands, much less throw lightning at me. Maybe take out his legs too, just to be sure. I mean, yeah, sure, that all sounds really brutal…

  And it is, I guess. But that’s how these things work. You can’t just handcuff a supervillain and expect him to go quietly. Unless I put him down hard, the moment my back is turned he’ll be barbecuing cops and making a break for freedom. Of course, now we’ve lost our easy chance to end this quick because I like to play with my food. Hey, it seemed like a fun idea at the time. It always seems like a fun idea at the time.

  “All right, we’ve pincered him,” says Calamity through my earbud radio. “Any ideas?”

  I skid to a stop behind a cement column and tuck in behind it. “Yes! Switch up to hollow points and blow his goddamn knees off!”

  “Not happening. Too much bacon around here. Can you find something to throw at him?”

  “Uh, stand by—” My eyes land on some stacked bags of cement lying under a tarp. “Get ready to rush him. He’s going to be down in a moment.”

  I heft a fifty-pound bag of cement, step out of cover, and fling it at him like the world’s heaviest Frisbee. As it goes, I reach out into the lattice for the strings of its momentum, catch and tweak them to guide the bag in for an accurate hit. Crenshaw sees it coming and hits it with a bolt of lighting. The bag bursts open just in time for him to get hit with fifty pounds of loose, powdered cement. Not the Mack truck knockout I was hoping for, but still enough to send him ass-over-end.