Sovereign

by April Daniels

  Curled tight in a ball, sobbing until my chest hurts, I miss the sound of gunfire through the thick metal walls until it’s just outside my cell. A flurry of shots, and then silence.

  The hatch opens.

  “Get up, partner,” says Calamity. “We’re leaving.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Oh God, no. Not now. She can’t see me like this, half-naked, covered in wounds, my face still wet with tears. But as much as my heart wants to be a wailing drama queen, my feet are much more sensible. I’m up and throwing on the cheap shirt they left me with before I really have time to think about it.

  As I come into the light and Calamity sees me clearly, she goes rigid. “Jesus, Danny…”

  “That bad, huh?” I ask.

  “We’re gettin’ you out of here,” snarls Calamity. Footsteps from up the hall. She whirls and fires in a single smooth motion, the blast of her six-shooter like God’s dynamite in the metal confines of the hallway. A guard in a green polo shirt goes down coughing blood, his larynx shattered by a high velocity jelly round. A submachine gun tumbles out of his hands and he makes a hissing animal noise as he writhes and thrashes on the deck.

  “I can’t fight,” I say. My cheeks are red. Fighting is what I’m for. “My powers are gone.”

  “Thought as much,” Calamity beckons for me to follow as she strides down the hallway. “Didn’t figure you were sticking around out of the joy of their company.”

  I follow close behind her. “We need to get out of here before Thunderbolt gets involved.”

  “Kinetiq’s tanglin’ with him outside,” says Calamity. “Don’t know how long they can hold ’em.”

  “Graywytch is here too.”

  “I see,” is all Calamity says. I catch up, and she turns, puts a hand on my shoulder. “No, stay behind me. I’ll take the hit.”

  Reluctantly, I hang a step back. We turn a corner and begin walking down a long hallway lined with broken, groaning bodies. What looks like every guard I’ve seen down here in the past few days is curled up and bleeding. One of them tries to grab Calamity by the ankle and she casually shoots him in the wrist. More jelly rounds, it looks like. No penetration, but they land like sledgehammers. The guy who grabbed at her has a new bulging fracture for his trouble. “Don’t step in the blood, or they’ll track us by our footprints.”

  We get to an intersection and begin climbing a flight of stairs. At the landing, she scoots around the corner with both guns out and high, clearing it before waving me up with a jerk of her chin. A few more flights of stairs, and we’re above sea level. The austere steel tunnels give way to polished glass and smoky gray carpet.

  A voice blares out over an unseen PA system. “The intruders are under Moldbug Tower and climbing out to the promenade. All tactical teams converge on their location. Continue trying new radio frequencies. If you find a clear channel, let your teammates know immediately.”

  “Tactical teams, plural,” says Calamity as we jog up the stairs. “You don’t expect to hear something like that on a resort island, that’s for damn sure.”

  “This place is amazingly screwed up,” I say, trying to keep up with the banter. Trying not to let on that, without my powers, I am absolutely terrified of the men with guns coming to kill us. We emerge from the stairwell into another corridor, this one lined with low, leather benches over dark blue carpet. Through three or four layers of glass, I can see the tile-lined plaza and promenade, and beyond that, the ocean. Calamity immediately pushes me down behind one of the benches and hits the deck next to me.

  She squeezes the throat mic around her neck. “Doc, Dreadnought’s out of gas, we’re gonna need to get picked up the hard way.” Almost as an afterthought, she reaches into her jacket and clicks a switch near her shoulder. Doctor Impossible’s voice filters out, thin and tinny from Calamity’s radio.

  “—py that. Can she walk?”

  “Yes’m, but it’s gonna be a bit of a hike to high ground. Keep your distance and we’ll call ya when we need ya.”

  “We’re not really going to climb thirty more flights of stairs, are we?” I ask.

  “I was thinking we’d take the elevator,” says Calamity. Her eyes are gleaming over her red bandanna mask. “But if you’ve got your heart set on it—”

  “I see them!” I hiss, and try to smoosh myself down harder into the carpet. We’re lying in the inner walkway of what appears to be the skeleton of a high-end strip mall. Every room here has lots of doors at the front and the back leading to the promenade or the inner corridor, but not so much side to side. Around the curve of the promenade, I spot a goon squad in dark blue tactical gear marching in loose order up the hallway. They’re maybe fifty or sixty yards distant and don’t seem to have seen us yet.

  Calamity sees them as I point them out, then cranes her neck to look the other way. “From behind too. Looks like they’re further away.” I can’t make out what she’s indicating, but I’ll take her word for it. “Stay here.”

  Calamity rolls away and slips down a cross-corridor, then around a corner toward the team coming in from the front, and out of sight. A moment later, I lose sight of the goons as they get to the part of the curve where the shop walls block my view. I scrunch down behind the bench as much as I can and watch the curving corridor ahead. It’s going to be okay. She’s coming back.

  An hour passes. Then a week. The team comes around the bend and immediately spots me. The one in front points and shouts. They all aim their submachine guns at me and start double-timing it toward me. I keen with terror and start scrabbling backwards on hands and knees. They enter a corridor intersection—

  A flashbang skids and tumbles across the carpet just before—

  Calamity’s grapnel fires, whizzes past a hand’s breadth above head level and—

  —and then she’s among them. A whirl of fists, boots, and point-blank gunfire engulfs the team. Wherever they’re shooting, she has just left. Wherever she shoots, her rounds land hits. Calamity’s cable wraps twice around a goon’s neck and hauls him in close to her just in time to be her human shield, a burst of friendly fire shattering his armor and leaving him a groaning heap. Her toe catches another behind the knee and puts him down kneeling where she shoots him in the back of the helmet. Bullets tear up the back of Calamity’s jacket, digging deep into the armor beneath. She stumbles into a roll, comes up firing as another flash grenade whites out my vision.

  Thumping, crunching, the slap of fist on flesh. More gunfire.

  The green fog fades in time for me to see her shoot her grapnel directly into the face of one trooper, then whip it around like a flail and break another’s jaw. A third climbs back to his feet and draws a knife. Half a second later he finds its planted hilt-deep under his own kneecap. As she’s spinning away to shoot his partner, Calamity kicks backwards and lands a solid boot on the handle, and he goes down screaming. Only two remain on their feet now. She grabs one in her hand and choke-slams him through a bench. The other is hobbling away as fast as he can, shouting for backup into his radio and drawing his pistol for one last, desperate stand. A jelly round shatters his ankle, and another punches the handgun from his grip.

  Just like that, five hard men are on the ground bleeding and stifling their cries of pain.

  “Dreadnought, let’s go!” Calamity shouts, and I’m so stunned she has to shout again before I get up and dash after her. Behind us, I can hear pounding feet and jostling gear as the other team sprints toward the sound of gunfire. We run past the team she tore up, and it’s hard not to slow down and stare. One part horror, one part awe, three parts insecurity.

  Calamity doesn’t need real powers. She’s perched at the very upper bound of human ability.

  Right now, so am I. My body is still the way it became in the moments after Dreadnought gave me the mantle. Still as fit and strong and flexible as the entire US Olympic team put together. As bendy as a gymnast, as enduring as a runner, as strong as a heavyweight lifter. There are not enough hours in the day to train a n
ormal body up to the level she and I are at.

  The difference is, she’s a badass on top of it.

  But me? I can only lean into my powers. Take those away, and basic rent-a-goons can smoke me every time. No wonder she barely talks to me anymore.

  I grimace and try to shake the bullshit out of my head. Falling apart can come later, when people aren’t shooting at me. Head down, my bare feet are slapping the hard carpet as we sprint along the corridor.

  Spiderweb cracks smash across a window to my left. The team behind us sees us around the bend and is firing through an open door.

  “Keep going!” shouts Calamity over her shoulder. I get an arm up to the side of my head to protect my face, and we push through the storm of glass splinters. Stinging little cuts sprout all over me.

  We get far enough around the bend to disappear behind another empty building, one that looks like it will be a restaurant when it is complete. We reach the end of the corridor and explode into the open area between two of the towers. The PA is shouting our location, bringing more goons down on us. It’s just after dawn, the sun only now starting its climb up the watery blue sky. Cold ocean air pulls and snaps at us.

  Calamity squeezes her throat mic again. “Doc, we’re out of the building, can you come get us at the northern marina?”

  A window-shaking detonation erupts in the air above us. I can just make out Kinetiq and Thunderbolt flitting around each other, the air a boil of energy blasts. Thunderbolt throws more lightning; Kinetiq bounces it off their shields and lashes back with an emerald laser.

  “No can do.” Doc’s voice crackles tinny over the radio. “Getting that low is suicide right now. I’ve got MANPADS painting me from the tower roofs and—shit!”

  Like it sometimes does during a crisis, my brain fixates on a piece of semi-relevant trivia: MANPAD is an acronym that stands for Man-Portable Air Defense—shoulder-mounted missiles, basically. Usually I can snap out of it, but right now my mind feels like it’s made of glue. I start to wonder where they got these, how much they must have cost. A lot, I’m sure.

  Doc’s tilt-engine comes screaming across the sky, a stub-nosed aircraft with pivoting wings and howling jet engines. It twists and weaves in midair as fingers of white smoke leap from the towers to chase her. Double-handfuls of crimson flares leap from the jet’s tail, and the wings pivot with the engines so the whole thing backflips over the missiles.

  “Get up to a roof right now!” shouts Doc over the radio. “We can’t last long up here!”

  I grab Calamity by the shoulder, a sudden fear crashing through my stupor and bringing me back to the present. “Tell her to watch out for Panzer!”

  Calamity’s eyes bug. “They’ve got a tank?”

  “No, Princess Panzer, she’s Garrison’s daughter and she’s super dangerous.” In my mind, I can see her summoning a dozen or more heavy gun emplacements and tearing Doc’s jet into shredded aluminum litter.

  “Oh, then I think we’d have seen her by now,” says Calamity, turning to run again. I’m right behind her. “She’s probably on the mainland with her father.”

  “How’d you know he would be gone?”

  “Simple! I burned his biggest house down so he’d go inspect the damage.” She cranes her neck to look up at the towers looming above us. “Well. Second biggest, anyhow.”

  Bullets start to snap past us. Calamity reaches into her coat and tosses a grenade high in the air; it bursts into a cloud of purple smoke that covers us until we get into the base of the next tower over.

  Something is confusing me. After a few dozen yards it hits me. If Garrison isn’t here, how come I don’t have my powers back? My fingers start playing over the steel collar around my neck, not for the first time. Maybe there’s something in this that’s still muting me.

  We come to a skidding halt in front of the lobby elevators and wait a tense few moments for a car to arrive. Bullets start slamming into the wall around us as we scramble inside. Calamity hits the door close button while I cower in the corner and try not to piss myself with terror when a bullet hole appears in the floor a hand’s breadth from me. As the door shuts, Calamity’s left ring finger, the one on her prosthetic hand, clacks open. There’s a key in there that fits the firefighter’s keyhole in the control panel. She cranks the lock over to manual operation and sets us to rise to the top floor.

  “That should keep them from overriding it remotely,” she says. “But I want to be ready in case these things ain’t running normal software.” She laces her fingers together to make a step. “Up you go. Get the hatch open.”

  I put a foot—torn and bloody from running through broken glass—in her hand, and Calamity boosts me to the ceiling panels. The panel comes undone easily and slides out of the way. There’s an access hatch that I crank open and then pull myself out of. The elevator shaft is surprisingly warm, a dark vertical tunnel of creaking, quarking cables and gusting breezes. Calamity grabs my hand when I reach back down for her, and this at least I can do without issue, because even I can’t screw up lifting someone straight up out of a hole.

  “Almost there, partner,” says Calamity as we sit back from the hatch. She squeezes her mic. “Doc, can you hear me?”

  “I’m a little busy,” Doc replies.

  “We’re coming up the northernmost tower. See you on the roof in a minute or two.”

  “I’ll be—Kinetiq, get him off me!”

  And then Kinetiq’s reply, “Break hard right!”

  Listening to them fight and helpless to get out there myself, I clench up and begin to shiver. If any of them die because I was stupid enough to get captured, I don’t think I’ll be able to live with myself.

  The elevator slows and comes to a halt. Calamity and I both look up; we’re at least fifteen floors short of the top.

  “I guess they had an override after all,” she says as she reaches into her jacket. “See if you can get that door open,” she says, nodding at the shaft doors a couple yards above us.

  I scramble up the access ladder and lean out to try and catch the seam with my fingers.

  The elevator doors beneath us open with a ding, and a burst of automatic fire rakes the back wall of the empty car. Calamity pulls the pin on a silver canister with a white stripe painted around the base.

  “Heads up for Willy Pete!” she calls before she tosses it through the hatch. The canister bounces off the back wall and rolls out of the car and into the hallway. There’s a flat bang, and then some white smoke pours up out of the hatch.

  “You—you didn’t just drop white phosphorous on those guys, did you?” I ask, aghast. White phosphorus is evil, evil stuff. Sticks to flesh, burns down to the bone, and dousing it with water only makes it worse. I knew she was hardcore, but damn.

  Calamity is stepping away from the hatch and laughing. “Hell no, it’s just a glue grenade. Betcha they shit their pants, though.” From the amount of dejected profanity wafting up with the last of the detonation fumes, that’s probably a good guess. Calamity pulls another canister out from inside her jacket. This one is marked with a big red ‘CS’ on the side. “Last party favor. Hold your breath.”

  We get the doors open and scramble out of the shaft as the first burning hints of tear gas waft out of the elevator to taint the air. We let the doors shut behind us as the first round of coughing and choking really gets going.

  Through the windows, we can see a glass and steel sky bridge linking this tower to the next one. Calamity points, and we start jogging toward it.

  “Doc, change of plan,” she says. “We’re coming up on the eastern tower instead.”

  “Just make it fast,” says Doc.

  “But the scenic route is so pretty this time of year,” says Calamity absently. As we’re running she’s digging deep into a pocket and pulling out handfuls of what look like cybernetic cockroaches. She scatters them behind us, and they disperse into corners, climb through ventilation grates, and disappear.

  “This is all my fault.” I say.


  “What? No.” Calamity scowls. “Any bad guy who gets hurt today has only himself to blame. It’s just tear gas; they’ll be fine.”

  We reach the bridge and start sprinting across it. Halfway across, another group of tactical goons comes around a corner and spots us across twenty yards of open hallway. No cover, nowhere to run.

  My heart seems to stop as the world turns to glassy silence.

  Something kicks me in the back of the ankle. I go down.

  A bullet snaps through where my head would have been.

  The rustle of cloth, the jitter of holsters clearing to my right.

  More bullets bite holes in the air. Muzzles flicking pale orange.

  The window next to me cracks, a streak of white in the corner of my eye.

  My scalp goes numb, and then hot.

  The report of Calamity’s six shooters isn’t something I hear, it’s something I feel.

  Impacts tear into the men down the hall. Visors shatter, weapons spin out of hands. They break and scramble, patting themselves down for wounds as they get out of the line of fire.

  Calamity’s pistols click dry, and the world snaps back into motion with a rush. She is breathing very quickly, her face pale, eyes wide.

  “They’ll figure out I’m shootin’ jelly in a moment,” mutters Calamity. “Can’t hurt them right at this range.”

  Behind us, faint but clear nonetheless, we both hear an elevator ding open.

  Calamity holsters one of her pistols and squeezes her throat mic. She shakes the other pistol’s cylinder open and lets the brass tinkle to the ground. “Doc. We’re pinned down in the sky bridge.”

  “Understood. Can you open a window?”

  Calamity slaps the cylinder of her pistol shut on a fresh load of bullets. “Sure thing.”

  “Right. I’m coming to you, low and slow. Be ready.”

  Doc’s tilt-engine banks hard into a looping dive towards us. Calamity steps back from the wall and unloads her gun into the window. It cracks into a square of white spiderwebs. With a solid kick, the whole panel, at least ten feet wide, peels off and falls down to the plaza below. Goons to the front and rear of us are starting to peek around the corner, getting ready to rush us from both sides.