"What—" He tried to pull back, and, I'm sure, jump out of time. But I was bigger than a breadbox. When the freeze foam set I released his wrist and searched him, relieving him of his zap-gun and the other items in his coat pockets.
Through all that he didn't say a word. Finished, I stooped down and retrieved the picture he'd dropped.
"Now," I said, handing it back to him. "Tell me about that picture." My voice shook.
He looked at me like I'd morphed into the nightmare I'd fought on Michigan Avenue, then at the picture, the camera-shot of him and the Brotherhood's lawyers. He went pale.
"Hope," he said. "This isn't what it—"
"Is it you?"
"No, and yes—"
"People died in that riot and you set it up! Like people died in the bombing. Innocent people, and if you did one you did the other so convince me my eyes are lying or I'm taking you in!"
He was silent for a long moment. I tried to control my breathing.
"Do you remember the story of Schrodinger's Cat?"
I blinked. "What?"
"Existing in a state of superposition until someone opens the box? In a way it's two cats, one alive the other dead?"
"Yes?"
"I'm the only physical time traveler I'm aware of, and I'd have noticed anyone else. But I'm Schrodinger's Cat. My breakthrough created two of me, in an ongoing state of superposition. His 'privileged present' is a microsecond behind mine. It's all very quantum."
"You're saying that he's not you, he's your evil twin?"
"No, he's me, too. Just the me that came from a different choice."
"How is that possible? He blows people up! Or you do!"
"We're connected because we're the same person. Just bisected temporally. I always know when he's close in time, operating in the present, and he can feel me too. If one of us dies our states will become too divergent, the superposition will collapse, and I'm pretty sure we'll both be dead. Do you remember what I told you about my trip to the future? The totalitarian future I set out to change?"
"Yes."
"That was a lie. I've been much further. The farthest we traveled together was 2102, and the farthest I've been able to travel since has been around 2150. After that the probabilities expand too far for any one future to be sufficiently 'likely' for me to lock onto—it took me years of practice to be able to get that far, and its variants are where most of my gadgets come from."
"This isn't helping."
He talked faster.
"We both saw the future, and we saw a good one—by the end of the twenty-first century the world is a pretty amazing place. But we studied the future history too. The human race goes through a lot of pain getting there, and we thought we saw ways we could make it easier. Introduce future technology earlier, alert politicians to the kind of diplomatic errors that led to megadeath events like WWII, I'm sure you can see what I mean.
"Have you ever had an argument with someone where you could have gone either way, and you went the way you did because the other guy argued against it? I argued for gradual mitigation. He argued for direct intervention. We fought, and went our separate ways.
"Artemis' electrolasers? The freeze foam you just used? Spinoffs of patents I mined from the future. In some areas—especially medical science—technology is now ten years ahead of where it would have been, and the divergence is accelerating.
"But then why—"
"Because the future shifted radically. While I'd been exploring the far future he'd been exploiting next year, making long-shot investments he knew would pay out quick to build up millions. He used his wealth to assemble an organization, used blackmail from scandals that would have come out in the future to gain influence. He redirected the evolution of politics in this country till he'd got us on track for the possible future police state he was working toward. The story about the first bombing? My first attempt to track him from one of his direct interventions."
"Why does he want a police state?"
"Because he doesn't want the next few decades to hurt as much. And if he gets his way they won't. But it won't be a free future."
He looked sad.
"Since our split, both of us have grown more extreme in the lengths we'll go to in order to achieve our particular goals for humanity. I created the Teatime Anarchist in my first bid to 'take back the future' and he subverted the symbol. I knew the first time he used a bomb in my name that he'd gone too far to turn back, no matter the cost. So I've been mining the future and planning the end game I described to you. This has to stop."
He held the picture out to me. "Sorry about the riot."
I took it. "What was he trying to accomplish?"
"By shutting down the gangs, you made a strong statement for local enforcement and did a lot to weaken the supervillain subculture. You helped people—voters especially—sleep easier. He tried to change that by engineering the riot to undo your victory. Scared people are more likely to embrace extreme measures."
Now he smiled. "But you brought Artemis aboard, and she discovered the critical evidence needed to put the conspiracy together. Tracking down Psijack and re-arresting most of Chicago's current crop of supervillains, you reversed his win. You saved the day."
"That's not why I—is that what you meant about my standing in the way of his plans for the future?"
"No. At least not specifically. Let's say that you're a catalyst for changes, some much bigger than this. Since Christmas was two days ago I assume you and Atlas have grown closer?"
I blushed hotly. "How—oh. Future history?"
He nodded. "Atlas has been burning out. It happens to policemen who spend their career in a rough precinct; the abrasion the soul takes from dealing with bad people, the little compromises year after year. Before the change that brought you as Astra into the timeline he was becoming more and more ruthless. It wasn't going to end well."
"I—you're saying I..."
"Re-inspired him, I suppose. Became the voice of his earlier idealism. There is no certainty to this, but you've changed his path wherever it may lead in the future."
"Because of Christmas?"
"No, because of the fight you had in October. And Christmas. And later. A man must be worthy of the woman he loves, after all. His autobiography is fascinating."
"I don't want to know!"
But I did. Badly. What would Christmas lead to? The Anarchist could tell me, or at least he could tell me what would likely happen. Just thinking about what I wanted to happen made me flush to my toes. But I'd been distracted, and the time had come for part two.
He paled when I picked up my cell phone.
"I'm not calling to take you in," I said. "But I was wrong before to simply trust you—I don't have the right to trust you without some kind of proof."
I pointed the phone at him. "So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to make a call on speaker. You are going to keep quiet while I talk. Then I'm going to ask you three questions, which you will answer yes or no. Got it?"
He nodded, watching me carefully.
I hit speed dial and got two rings, then a calm, even voice.
"Hello?" He'd been waiting for my call.
"Good evening, Veritas, and thank you for agreeing to this."
"I'm happy to be of service."
"Okay then, I'm here with my guest. Are you ready?"
A dry laugh. "Of course. You may proceed."
I took a breath and stepped close, holding the phone up so Veritas could hear us on the speaker setting."
Are you responsible for any of the bombings claimed by the Teatime Anarchist?"
He looked at the phone in my hand, then focused on me.
"No."
"Are you responsible for the Freakzone Riot?"
"No."
"Is everything else you told me tonight true?"
"Yes."
"Veritas?"
"All three statements are true. Am I ever going to hear what this is about?"
"Probably not. I'm sorr
y."
"As I warned you before, I will have to file a report of this interview. You are confident that this will create no troubles for you down the road?"
"Since I just interviewed an innocent man, I don't see how it could."
He laughed again. "A point. Until next time, then."
"Thank you. And happy New Year."
"The same." He hung up.
The Anarchist shook his head.
"Veritas?"
"The man who sees all lies." I shut the phone and sighed, relieved beyond words. "I won't apologize for tricking you. I wanted to trust you but I couldn't. Not with people dying."
He considered me for another moment, and nodded. He even smiled a little.
"I understand. But I think it's time for me to go. You can always place another personal."
"Yes, but will you come?"
The smile widened. "Oh yes."
The freeze foam ruined the carpet.
Chapter Thirty Three
Natural disasters are the place where Atlas-types really shine. Not in prevention; this isn't the comics and we can't stop forest fires, tidal waves, and tornadoes with our breath like Superman. But getting in fast when speed and strength counts means victims saved. For someone like me there's no personal danger involved—I'm tougher than anything nature can dish out—but it's still the hardest part of my job. No matter how fast we respond, we can't save everybody.
Astra, Notes from a Life
* * *
"All Sentinels to the Assembly Room! All Sentinels to the Assembly Room!"
The raw urgency of the call lifted me out of my chair, Artemis right behind me. I'd hoped staying away until New Year's would give me enough time to calm down and regain some cool on the subject of a certain beloved man, but Artemis had taken one look at me New Year's morning and delivered her promised "I told you so." The call caught us over one of her creations.
We beat everyone but Atlas. He gave me a look that lasted less than a second on his otherwise frozen face as he continued to listen to his earbug. The rest piled in behind us, Rush, ironically, the last to arrive.
He waited till we were all at the table to speak.
"Five minutes ago an earthquake hit southern California, and it's the Big One folks. Reports are still coming in and FEMA is activating all superhuman reserve assets as they get clearance from the state governors, but we're moving now. Nimbus, you're reporting to the Hollywood Knights since you can be there in seconds. Get coordinates from the City Room and go find Rook—he'll plug you into their response plan. Go."
Nimbus nodded and flashed away.
"The rest of you grab your mission kits; they're prepping our jet at O'Hare. The CAI Disaster List and reserve Sentinels will be right behind us. Five minutes, people. Go."
We got. Five minutes later we met at the roof bay and those of us who could fly carried those who couldn't. Artemis wore her daysuit, but she couldn't safely turn to mist in daylight.
We don't have a team jet, despite what the TV series says. We operate out of Chicago much, so instead we contract with a private jet company; they get a nice fee to make sure that one of the jets in their fleet is always available, able to be stocked and fueled in minutes. Ten minutes after arriving at O'Hare we were wheels-up and headed for LA.
But Atlas and I arrived far ahead of the jet.
I've been clocked at 640 miles per hour, but as Dr. Beth had said, humans aren't naturally streamlined for aerodynamics, At that speed I spend a lot of my energy just fighting the air. Atlas wanted us there faster, so he took us up above 15,000 feet where the air was thin.
"Here's what we're going to do," he said. "You can't go much faster than the jet, but we need to be there now. So you're going to hang onto me."
He pointed at his ankles. "Grab on and aim like you're doing target practice."
I did, and felt my arms try to come off at the shoulders as we broke the sound barrier. The Prandtl-Glauer singularity, the compressed sphere of cloud vapor that rode the shockwave of our passage, wrapped around us as we flew. I could only hold on—if I lost my grip and slipped out of the zone Atlas' speed created I'd tumble out of the sky, smacked by unbroken air at more than twice the velocity I could deal with. Later I learned we broke mach two.
Even then it took us an hour to reach LA. Dispatch streamed an info-dump over my earbug on the way; seismic stations were reporting in so we had a sketch of the unfolding disaster.
California sat on the San Andreas Fault, a major fault line in the Pacific's Ring of Fire, and Californians often joked about the coming Big One. Well, it came. Horribly worse, it hadn't just come, it had been triggered. The slip in the fault had been kicked off by an "imposed shock-event." Fancy talk for someone did this. Their best guess was a beyond- A-class terrakinetic.
Dispatch relayed the timeline of the event with clinical detachment as we flew.
At 6:23 am Pacific Time seismic stations caught the "earth-shock," followed by the first rupture in the fault near Bombay Beach, north of the Salton Sea. The rupture traveled north along the fault at two miles per second, past LA and Lancaster, nearly reaching Bakersfield. The quake peaked at 9.0 on the Richter Scale—an order of magnitude stronger than anything California had been expecting or planning for, and the released tectonic tension snapping along the fault slid the ground on both sides more than a hundred feet.
Dispatch put it into perspective. The earthquake that leveled and burned most of San Francisco in 1906 weighed in at 8.0. It pounded the City By The Bay with 1,000 megatons, one gigaton, of ground-shaking force. (The largest nuclear bomb ever tested delivered about 50 megatons, so imagine firing off 20 of those firecrackers underground.) This one released 32 gigatons of force, thirty-two times more force than the San Francisco Earthquake. California is full of fault lines, and the rupture of the San Andreas Fault triggered quakes the length of the state and as far inland as Las Vegas; fortunately, the secondary quakes didn't rise above the level of cracking pavement and breaking windows. San Francisco came through almost undamaged.
As we flew, Dispatch sorted and passed damage reported by the nationwide response system. The high amplitude ground waves radiating out from the fault had flattened Palm Springs; the walls of the Coachella Valley, directing the waves, turned its sediment basin into bouncing jello and hardly a building remained standing. San Diego, San Bernardino, Anaheim, LA, and other cities built on sedimentary plains got pounded nearly as hard. Earthquake preparedness is a big thing in California, and its buildings, bridges, and roads had been designed to take a lot, but they hadn't been designed to take this.
To make the situation worse, the San Andreas Fault was a strike-slip fault; the 100 feet or so of lateral slippage created a disaster in itself, severing interstate freeways 10, 15, and 5 along with the Pacific Rail lines. It cut water conveyance tunnels, pipes, aqueducts, power transmission towers, even telecommunications cables. Water, power, transportation, the lifeblood of cities, no longer flowed.
And the broken cities burned.
An old college buddy of Dad's teaches at USD and just about every spring we escape to sunny San Diego, so I’d visited the land of palm trees, backyard pools, and endless beaches. Paradise on Earth.
Flying into LA, it looked more like Paradise Lost.
We went subsonic on LA's outskirts. Falling buildings had reduced downtown LA to rubble. Beneath winter storm-clouds, fires burned in its shattered core and smoke climbed out of a cloud of dust that covered everything for miles in the chill morning light. It was the Ashland overpass taken to the next level of awfulness.
The one piece of good fortune in the disaster was its timing; on New Year's morning the 200,000 commuters that normally drove into LA to work mostly stayed home with their families. But lots of high-rise apartments hadn't made it through the quake, and aftershocks threatened the surviving towers. Fallen overpasses, burst pipes, fractured pavement, and downed power lines blocked the roads.
We'd have been at a loss where to begin, but FEMA's Urban
Search and Rescue Division directed us through Dispatch to the LA Children's Hospital on Sunset and Hollywood. Its taller wing had come down along with parts of the medical centers next to it, and emergency workers reported fire.
Landing by the fallen building, we found a hydrokinetic villain who frantically introduced himself as Riptide. Around him water condensed from nothing into twin spouts that cascaded through the wreckage in waves. As hospital workers and volunteers cleared around him, he fought to smother the fire without drowning anyone trapped beneath it, keeping it away from the 40-bed Newborn and Infant Critical Care unit.
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