Just a hundred yards off the deck I let go, curl my legs up, and give him a kick with everything I’ve got, right in the small of the back. Red Steel hits the island at Mach 5 and is instantly hidden by a huge explosion of dust and gravel that pings off me like shrapnel.
After the howling winds of reentry, the sudden quiet is almost disorienting. There is only the lapping of the waves and pattering of falling pebbles.
My leg sends shooting pain up my pelvis when I gently touch down, and I let it curl gently. My back is screaming, pulled muscles and torn ligaments stabbing at me no matter which way I turn or hold my weight. My face and chest sting where his eye lasers gouged me again and again. Two of my fingers are broken quite badly, a throbbing pinch at the end of my hand, but the six hairline fractures I’ve got elsewhere sort of balance them out. The goggles Doc made for me are gone, probably blown off in that last, desperate charge. And I’m weary. Oh God, I’m so tired. Everything is heavy; even my arms hang like weights at my side.
I should get in there and finish this. Standing around is foolish, but I can barely keep myself vertical, much less muster up the gall to go look for more trouble.
The sky is the deep purple of late evening, the western horizon still pale with the sun. Above us and far to the east, a new constellation of shooting stars marks the Hubble’s final passing. The moon is out, and is nearly full. It really is a beautiful night. I’m glad I got to live long enough to see it.
The ocean breeze tugs the cloud of rock dust away, and at the center of a shallow crater, Red Steel is stirring, struggling to shove himself to his feet.
“Stay down, old man!” I shout at him. “Stay down, or I will do things to you that you will not come back from!”
He doesn’t listen. Too stubborn, or too professional, it’s hard to say. When Red Steel gets to his feet, I give him a few moments to come to his senses and surrender. He doesn’t. Damnit. We close for the last time, and in the instant before impact, I think I see him smile through his burned and twisted lips. But then my fist snaps his head back in an uppercut that takes him twelve feet straight up. He hits the ground like a bag of wet dirt, and when I’m literally standing over him with my boot pressed down on his windpipe, he finally, finally passes out.
My own will gives out a few moments later, and I collapse to my knees with a squeak of pain. For a moment I feel a clammy chill under my supersuit, and I’m sure I’m going to barf. Taking slow lungfuls of cool, salty air helps the feeling pass, but now I’m trembling with fatigue. Of course I never expected fighting Red Steel to be easy, but holy shit. This guy has no quit in him.
The giggles start low in my chest, and there’s an absurdity to them, some sense of inappropriateness that makes me clap my hands across my mouth to stifle them. Oh my God, I just beat up Red Steel! Calamity is going to freak out when I tell her. I collapse laughing, aching, riven with burns and tender spots. The shaking of my laughter hurts, and that only makes it funnier. Every little stab of pain is another reminder of the pure, simple joy of being alive.
As the laughter fades, my mind refocuses on the more pressing issues. I’ve still got to take those satellites out. I don’t think Garrison has more than one orbital-capable mercenary on staff, or he’d have sent both of them to be sure of the job. If I can rest up for a few minutes, I might be able to get back up there and take out the rest of the satellites, or at least some of them. I activate my sat-phone and dial Doc. A few moments later, the interface section on my forearm turns red and says NO SIGNAL—CHECK ANTENNA. A quick diagnostic tells me that my satellite phone has been knocked out, and with it my ability to get orbital telemetry from Doc. Without telemetry, there’s no way I can finish the job before my body gives out. To be honest, it’s mostly a relief to have a solid excuse to abandon the mission. Time to get my ass back to New Port.
Which raises an interesting question: just where the hell am I, anyhow? We were passing over New Port when Doc started firing, but our momentum would have carried us considerably further west. The sun has just barely set. We’re in the middle of the ocean, but I think I saw a few other low, gravely islands around here when we were coming down. Um, the Aleutians? Man, I hope the Aleutians. The alternative is some islands way, way down near Hawaii, and that’s a much longer suborbital flight.
“All right, sleepyhead, I’m getting you to a hospital,” I tell Red Steel. His breath whistles through his charred nostrils, which is the only way I know he’s not dead. Man, he’s ugly right now. Do not ever reenter the atmosphere face-first. It’s super bad for you.
Hoisting him over my shoulder is far harder than it should be. I’ve carried an airliner, and this man, who can’t be more than three hundred pounds, feels heavier than that. Through pain and fatigue that leaves me shaking on the ground and wobbling in the air, I somehow manage to get us airborne.
Red Steel doesn’t have a healing factor, not really. It’s a well-known strategic weakness of his that if he gets injured he’ll heal perfectly, but only as quickly as a regular metabolism can work. After the battle against Mistress Malice in 1961, he was out of action for three years while he regrew his legs. With him in the hospital for the next few weeks, I can probably operate freely in orbit. And if Garrison finds someone else to send up against me, I’ll knock them down too. Bring it, dickhole. I can beat you.
But, you know, maybe give me a few days to rest up. It’s only fair.
A few dozen miles out to sea I spot the running lights of a fishing trawler. Definitely the Aleutians in that case. They shout with alarm as I come down on the main deck and drop Steel on top of the fish-gutting table.
“Do you guys speak English?” I ask them. Oh, sure, they’re probably Anglophone Canadians or Americans, but I’ve learned not to make assumptions when I’m in the middle of an ocean.
“What’s going on?” shouts a man who I take to be the captain.
“I’m Dreadnought,” I say. “This man needs medical attention, and I need a look at your charts. Get the Coast Guard on the radio for a medevac, and then show me to your maps.”
And they hop to it. It’s amazing how much the sight of the supersuit gets people to cooperate. Even after months of working with the public, it’s still a little weird to me that I can just tell people what to do, and nine times in ten they won’t even question me. Being Dreadnought is more than wearing the cape, more than having my powers. I’ve got a heritage now. There’s something about the blue and the white that makes people see me as something more than an oddly strong girl who is barely old enough to drive. At first it was cool, but now it’s almost kind of scary. Every time I talk to a member of the public in uniform, the size of my responsibilities comes home to me.
I limp up to the bridge with the captain. He lets me look at his maps, points out where we are, and I do a rough calculation in my head. Plotting great circle paths is not exactly an intuitive operation, but spend enough time in the air and you can at least start to rough them out. The trick, of course, will be holding to the course without a GPS to guide me—my nav computer used the same antenna as my satellite phone.
“Okay, this will work,” I say to myself. The captain has been hovering around while I study his maps. I give him my best interview smile. “Do you have any aspirin? I am in an incredible amount of pain.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
I’m a few miles out from New Port when the cell phone antenna—a different system than my satellite antenna—sniffs a signal and tells my suit to rumble with a blizzard of incoming texts. Five from Doc, three from Cecilia, three from Detective Phạm, and one from Calamity.
The text from Calamity is the newest one, and when I pop it open, all it says is Take care, partner. They’re gunning for us now.
Which is not the most comforting thing I’ve ever read. The next in line is from Cecilia: Danny, do not meet with the police. Come to my office immediately.
You ever feel your sphincter tighten up all on its own? Yeah.
One from Detective Phạm is up next: D
readnought, we need to talk. Meet me on the roof.
At the edge of panic, I flick through my texts until I slam into one from Cecilia that says plainly what’s going on: When you get this, come to my office immediately. The NPPD has a warrant for your arrest for the murder of Vincent Trauth, your parents’ lawyer.
I hang in the air over Puget Sound, stunned into silence. There are things you never expect to deal with, that you never expect to happen to you. Even after getting superpowers and becoming a celebrity and all the other stuff, there’s some foothold on normalcy you try to keep. Nobody ever expects to get framed for murder.
With a shaking finger, I flick through the rest of the texts. Here’s one from Doc: Dreadnought, if you’re not dead, get back to the safehouse. They’re counterattacking.
I nose over and head downtown at a couple hundred miles an hour, calling Doc Impossible as I go. Her phone goes directly to voicemail. The black waters of Puget Sound give way to the glass towers of downtown. I call Calamity next, and she picks up on the second ring.
“Glad to hear you’re still with us, partner,” says Calamity. Her voice is oddly muffled, and there’s a lot of background noise. But through the noise, I can hear the grin in her voice. “You and the commie have a nice playdate? Things have gotten busy since you were gone.”
“He’s down. Have you heard anything from Doc? I can’t get through to her.”
“Not since I left to—” She cuts off abruptly, and one note of the background noise rises above the rest: the high, hard whine of her roadbike, the monster-engined crotch rocket she uses when she’s in costume. After an audible grunt and a sharp reduction of engine noise, Calamity continues “—run an errand for her. But I’m a mite bit distracted at the moment, haven’t been keeping up with the niceties.”
“What’s going on?” I’ve slowed way, way down as I enter the gleaming canyons of the city core.
“You know all those warrants the cops had out for my arrest?” asks Calamity. Far below me, on one of the main traffic arteries, I spot her riding her bike flat out up the wrong side of a six-lane boulevard. What appears to be every police car in the city streams after her, sirens wailing. “It seems they’ve decided to make an issue of them.”
My guts turn to water. “I’m coming to get you,” I say as I throw myself into a dive.
“No!” she says sharply, and I stop myself. “Danny, I was wrong. Dreadnought can’t fight cops. People need to believe in you. I’ll be fine, you hear?”
With a screeching of tires I can hear from thirty stories up, Calamity swings her bike into a hard, curving stop in the middle of an intersection. The cops have sprung an ambush on her and are penning her in on all sides, cruisers strewn across traffic, doors open, guns out.
They’re pointing guns.
At my Calamity.
“I will not let them take you,” I say. One of cops shouts at her to surrender over a bullhorn.
“That’s real sweet, sailor,” she says, her voice touched with affection. “But I can’t let you do that. Run along now, and I’ll catch up when I can.” She reaches behind her to pour something across her back tire.
“Calamity—”
“Gotta go, partner. See you at the watering hole.”
Calamity cranks her engine and cuts a burning doughnut on the asphalt. Billowing white clouds of smoke erupt from where her tire licks the road, far more than any normal friction would cause. A cotton-thick cloud smothers the intersection in a matter of moments. Cops begin firing into the cloud, cracking pistols and booming shotguns. The urge to dive in and protect her writhes and bites in my chest. A moment later her bike bursts free of the smoke, tipped up on her back wheel and streaming fingers of white behind her. She slams it through the just-too-narrow gap between two cruisers, then bolts across the street and down the concrete stairs of a subway tunnel.
My suit tells me the call has been dropped. The smoke drifts and clears from the intersection. At least three cops are laid out on the ground, writhing and clutching at brand new bullet holes.
Good.
I hope it hurts.
Before any of them look up and see me, I flit away into the night. We very carefully kept the location of our new safehouse secret from the cops. They knew there was a big explosion out there earlier in the year, but it was only after they finished the paperwork that Doc moved in and took over. At the time I thought Doc was being paranoid, but she was right. We can’t trust them. Not really.
My suit isn’t so damaged it can’t still color shift, so I set it to a nighttime camo pattern. I haven’t used it much since I stopped wearing throwaways, but right now, the last thing I need is to be spotted by a police helicopter. A few button presses later, I’m a black-on-black smudge headed quickly out of town.
Several miles from the safehouse, I pass a pair of trucks from the utility company parked on the shoulder of the road and a half-dozen men standing around a blown-out transformer. A big flatbed truck with a crane on the front is rumbling up the road with a new transformer strapped to its back. If they figure out where the huge load spike came from, our secret lair might not be secret for very long. I purse my lips and press on. There’s nothing we can do about that right now.
Nobody is waiting for me when I get back to the safehouse. I touch down and immediately regret it as every broken bone and torn muscle I’d forgotten about in the initial shock and excitement remind me of their complaints. A strangled scream leaks through my lips before I can fight it down. The entrance stairwell is dark except for the night lighting as I wobble-float myself down the stairs and into the underground hangar.
“Doc,” I call out as I cross the vast space. The particle cannon she was mounting to the front of the tilt-engine has been pulled off the aircraft, gutted, thrown back together, and pointed up at where the sky would be when the bay doors are open. At her bank of screens and computers, all three of Doc’s bodies are typing inhumanly fast on various keyboards.
“Are you okay?” one of them asks without looking up.
“Give me some morphix and a couple of days to rest up and I’ll be good as new,” I reply. Morphix is a pretty common hypertech painkiller. All the fun of opioids without the addiction risk. With today’s fight pushing me over the big Five-Zero in the How Many Bones Has Danny Broken This Year tally, I have become very fond of the stuff. “What’s going on?”
“About two minutes after I finished with the supporting fire, I got hit from all sides by some pretty badass hackers,” says one of the Docs. “I’m holding them off for now, but it’s only a matter of time until they’ve got my physical location, so we’re abandoning the safehouse. There’s an improvised landing area out near Mount Rainier we’ll use for the time being.”
Charlie and Kinetiq emerge from the server rack area with carts loaded full of computer equipment and are wheeling them over to a staging area near the tilt-engine. “Dreadnought, you wanna give us a hand with this stuff?” says Kinetiq.
“Can’t,” I say and have the presence of mind to avoid shaking my head. “Gotta shoot up with pain killers and then go get arrested for murder.”
“Wait, what?” says Charlie.
“I’m being framed, and I’m almost certain Cecilia is going to insist I surrender so we can get it cleared up in court.” The medical bay has yet to be packed up, so I float over to the supply cabinets and start gingerly digging around for a hypospray.
“So you’re just going to give up?” asks Kinetiq. They sound almost offended.
“Of course not,” I say as I push aside some cartons of broad-spectrum antibiotics in search of a bottle of don’t-call-it-morphine. “But I’m not going to clear my name by running.”
“You’re not going to clear your name in front of a crooked court, either.”
“We don’t know they’re crooked.”
“Yes you do. First of all, every American court is crooked, and second of all, this one must be especially crooked if you’re going up for murder just coincidentally at the same time
you pick a fight with a supervillain.”
The little blue bottle I’ve been looking for finally comes into view, and I snap it into a hypospray with a grunt of triumph. A little bit of cold on my neck as I pull the trigger, and the morphix is pushed through my skin as an aerosol spray. The trick now is to keep from injuring myself even worse until my healing factor can take over.
“I don’t run from fights, Kinetiq,” I say as the pain gives way to a cool, soothing release. “Not ever.”
“It’s not a fight, it’s a scam,” says Kinetiq with vehemence, and oh wow, they’re worried for me. Even with everything that’s going wrong, even with the nagging fear that Calamity will get killed or captured, I find myself smiling.
One of the Docs pushes away from her computer and walks over. “We can talk for a moment. What happened up there? Are you okay?”
I slip behind a privacy screen to swap my damaged supersuit for a replacement, and while I’m doing that I tell them briefly about what happened in orbit. Even through the morphix, the kind of contortions necessary to change out of a skin-tight bodyglove are energetically unpleasant, but with Doc’s help I eventually get there. Doc sets about with the bandages, splints, and so on, and the new suit gets a surface tension adjustment to fit over all the medicinal crust I tend to pick up after a big fight.
“Did you know that Red Steel has eye lasers?” I ask Doc.
Doc shakes her head. “No, he doesn’t.”
“He does now,” I say. “They might have gotten Phase Two off the ground after all. Or maybe Phase One works on people who already have powers.”
Doc frowns. “So what you’re saying is we face a potentially unlimited number of superpowered mercenaries.”
“Not unlimited,” says Charlie. Doc looks at him hopefully, but he continues, “I mean, there’s only seven billion people on the planet, and probably not even 1% of them would be willing to be mercenaries so…”
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