Wearing the Cape

by Marion G. Harmon

  Shelly and I had played at being superheroes, but we'd never imagined last stands or suicide missions; they just didn't exist in the shiny world of heroes. Shelly disappeared, but my earbug remained active to guide me with its chimes. She could have hacked it and shut it down so I couldn't find Reno, so at least she wasn't trying to stop us. I'd make it up to her later, somehow.

  "Artemis?"

  "Still here."

  "Like you're getting off now. I have a plan. Sort of."

  "Bonus. Share with me."

  "If their powers are the same then we can take DA if we have surprise. When we get to the old field, can you find some shadow and mist inside the building? If you can find him first, then knock him out or grab onto him and call for me, we can actually capture him."

  "Isn't that a little optimistic?"

  "No—I'm hoping he's not there."

  Not true; I wanted to catch the monster, but the odds of that were slim to Don't Even Think About It.

  "If all we're facing is Rush you can mist behind him and take him out with a single elaser shot. I don't care how fast he is, he can't fight what he doesn't see coming. If we can stun and restrain him then we collect him and the Anarchist and we're out of there."

  "Good plan since we're a cavalry of two. And if there's reinforcements?"

  "If you don't think we can handle what you find then we get out if we can. We find another way."

  The weather changed as we flew north and east. As high as we were, we were still in the troposphere so the clouds weren't far below. Then we hit a vast wall of cumulonimbus clouds (flight training had increased my vocabulary). The towering giants marched across our flight-path with banners of lightning. We flew into the storm, our visibility dropping to just a couple hundred yards.

  "Shelly," I called, and she was back. "How does it look on the ground?"

  Her eyes unfocused for a second. "The Weather Bureau reports a January snow storm moving through from the west, the worst of the year so far. Wind speeds are over sixty and there are visibility warnings."

  A lucky break. Maybe, just maybe, we could get in without them seeing us coming. If DA hadn't already taken a let's-see-what-happens trip. So, was he paranoid or complacent? We'll see.

  "Shell?" I whispered. "Whatever happens, I'm glad you're back."

  Then we dropped out of the clouds.

  Visibility didn't get much better. Light levels were low, even the infrared spectrum blocked by the sideways-flying snow and hail. I slowed, still descending, and swung wide of our unseen target. Coming around to the northeast, I matched speed with the wind and headed in. So far so good.

  Not good enough; a flying man emerged from the storm ahead of us, bundled up in jeans, boots, and a heavy coat with a fur-lined Eskimo-style hood.

  I rolled right and dove, all Ajax' warnings coming back to me. Always assume unknown threats can deal with you. Make him reveal himself. Don't make it easy.

  Something crackled by over my head and the small hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

  "Shit!" Artemis yelled. "What was that?"

  "I don't know but it's electrical!" I kept my eye to my left, saw the next one coming in—a glowing, crackling sphere. I turned and climbed hard.

  "Ball lightning!" I shouted. "That's an electrokinetic!"

  The flyer disappeared below us in the swirling snow. I tried to remember everything I could from Baldwin's Guide. An electrokinetic with enough power to create ball lightning usually had complete control over it. The strength of the ball depended on the electrical charge directly generated by the electrokinetic or drawn from surrounding electrical fields.

  We were directly beneath an electrically active snowstorm. This is so not good.

  I continued my circle, heart racing. Every nerve screamed at me to bug out, but we were both nearly blind and I could probably see a little further than he could. If I saw him first next time...

  I realized my mistake as three balls came screaming in from different directions. Lots of electrokinetics could sense electrical fields, and we had just dropped down from a positively charged zone, carrying an electrical charge he could see.

  The blast from the first ball blew Artemis off my back as my teeth tried to come out of my head. The second blast smacked me like a cosmic mallet. I felt every muscle in my body try to pull away from my bones. The world turned red and black as I fell, Shelly screaming in my ears, and when the third hit I felt nothing beyond a hard jolt. I didn't feel my meeting with the ground.

  Chapter Forty Four

  There's a reason for superteams. The paper-scissors-rock nature of superpowers means that nobody, no matter how tough, can defend against every possible kind of attack; if you've got no support when your rock meet another guy's paper, you're toast—so bring someone with scissors along.

  Astra, Notes From A Life

  * * *

  Waking up, I felt like someone had slapped me with an anvil. All over.

  I lay on a steel cot in a dimly lit cement cell, the only light provided by a florescent bulb imbedded in the ceiling and shielded by thick glass. The narrow cell had a steel door with a shuttered peephole in it and a larger shuttered hatch at the bottom. A toilet, the kind of one-piece toilet and wash basin you see in pictures of prison cells, sat in a corner and there was a drain in the floor.

  Captured. I'd been captured.

  When I tried to move I met resistance. Looking down at myself I found wide steel cuffs on my wrists and ankles. They weren't attached to anything, but when I swung myself into a sitting position I had to push hard. They were a less fancy (less advanced?) version of the restraints the Anarchist used on me that first night. Someone had removed my mask with my earbug, along with my boots and gloves.

  "Shelly?" Nothing. I drove down the panic that rose in my throat. And the remorse.

  Artemis was dead, and it was my fault. I'd taken her into a fight in the daytime several hundred feet up. She couldn't safely mist outside in the daylight, and when she hit the ground any rupture of her daysuit would have been fatal.

  How could I have been so stupid?

  I was able to step, slowly, over to the basin. I washed my face while I tried to think.

  It had to have been a trap from the beginning. Either that or they'd found out we were coming and decided to lie in wait for us instead of bugging out. Someone at the base? Or maybe they'd tapped into the Sentinels' communications system. Could Rush have deliberately kept his helmet, with its GPS tracker? No, he'd erased my memory—he couldn't have counted on my getting it back. Probably Dark A simply popped into the future and saw us arrive. So what now?

  My mind ran in circles, partly to keep from thinking about Artemis; I'd come apart if I did. I sat back down on the bunk.

  One thing was certain; I wasn't at the old airfield. They'd have assumed we left some kind of backup, some kind of if-we-don't-come-back-here's-where-we-went message. And we had: Shelly.

  So here wasn't there, and there’d be no cavalry coming. I was on my own. How could I have ever thought that we could beat a time traveler? I wanted to curl up and cry so badly my eyes ached and my throat closed, but the cell had to be monitored and pride helped me lock it down.

  * * *

  What seemed like hours went by, and then I heard the shutter slide open. A pair of eyes peered at me through the door, and a ferret of a man opened it. Nearly as small as me, he had a sharp face and long nose under narrow ice-blue eyes. His short black hair showed a deep widow's peak.

  He scowled at me.

  "Cool one, ain't you?" he said. "You won't be. Come here."

  I stood up, but didn't step away from the cot.

  His scowl—the default setting of his face—turned into a leer. He came inside and closed the door.

  "Now see, this is my place and I don't care who you were out in the world, you'll do anything I say. Anything. Scream all you like."

  He shoved his hand into my chest and grabbed my heart.

  I shrieked until my air was gone and I
couldn't breathe to scream as every nerve in my chest was peeled and set on fire. I fell to my knees when he let go.

  Sobbing, I gasped for breath and tried not to pass out. His hand had passed through me like a phantom or hologram. He patted my cheek and I flinched.

  "Good girl," he said. "You should be afraid. Now get up, the boss wants to talk to you."

  I climbed to my feet, following him out of the cell and down a short hall. There were three other doors like mine, but they were all open; apparently I was his only guest at the moment. He stepped right through the closed steel door at the end of the hall like it wasn't there, opening it for me; it had no latch on the hallway side.

  The door opened into a larger room, and my breath caught when I saw its occupants. The Teatime Anarchist sat at a metal table, wearing the same cuffs I wore. Rush stood behind him, beside Euphoria. Volt stood to one side—obviously the electrokinetic who brought me down. And the Dark Anarchist sat there too. He looked just like his twin, though his hair was shorter and he wore a modern and stylish gray three-piece business suit. He didn't look as tired as my Anarchist, whose eyes widened when he saw me.

  "Astra," he said. "Dear God."

  "Hello Astra," said the other one, turning in his chair. He frowned at my jailer, who stood so close behind me I could feel his body heat. "Your host here is Ripper, and you know everyone else. Would you care for a seat?"

  "No, but thank you for asking." I said reflexively, trying to keep my shaking out of my voice.

  His gray eyes darkened, but he nodded.

  "I am sorry about your accommodations, and about Artemis. And I would very much like to know how you recovered your memory and tracked Rush?"

  Mom had taught me it was rude not to answer a direct question, but this time I was okay with it.

  "Artemis is dead?" Rush blurted. Volt barked a laugh.

  I nodded, my eyes prickling. "She was with me when Volt hit us, and we were more than a thousand feet up."

  "Damn it." He glared at Volt. "She was spooky, but I liked her."

  Volt ignored him. "They had to have let someone know their plans," he said to Dark A. "Are you sure we're safe here?"

  "Relax Mr. Andrews," DA said. "Ripper made this place out of a fallout shelter built by a very paranoid man. Even the old entrance is sealed so that, as you've seen, only he can escort visitors in or out. And I've added a few touches. It is completely undetectable."

  "It had better be."

  Interest penetrated my despair as I observed Volt's arms-folded, closed stance; he didn't like not being the leading man in the room. How had DA bought him? Rush looked even more uncomfortable, but Euphoria, resting a hand on his arm, looked cool as ice. Mom's first rule of social encounters: watch for the relationships. The two alphas in the room were DA and Euphoria.

  I licked my lips. "May I have a drink of water?"

  DA nodded to Ripper, who reluctantly pulled a bottle from the minifridge by the computer station, handing it to me before taking up his too-close position behind me again. He wanted me to be aware of him, and I fought down a creeping shiver as I carefully opened the bottle and took a drink.

  DA's attention remained on his twin the entire time, as if they were carrying on an unspoken conversation.

  "You just killed nearly 50,000 people to make a political point." The Anarchist said. "I won't do it."

  Rush paled. Hadn't he known?

  "A hundred times that many would have died of the SB virus by the end of the decade, just in America," Dark A countered matter-of-factly. "And they'd have died a lot harder. You'll give me your network—it's the only way you can save Astra."

  I opened my mouth and he turned his attention to me.

  "You were going to say 'don't do it?' Do you really know what this fight is about?"

  "He told me you were trying to turn America into a police state," I said.

  "Accurate enough. Did he say why?"

  I shook my head. "He only said things were going to get rough."

  "That's one way of putting it. The two of us were able to travel as far as 2100 together. Do you know what the total population was? Less than two billion. Over three fourths of humanity will die of war, famine, plagues, terrorist attacks with WMDs. By mid-century most existing nations will collapse or fragment. Think of it as World War Three, the Black Plague, and the Great Depression, all at the same time. And the 'happy ending' to the century is just the most probable future; it could have been, might still be, much worse. Studying the future history we found lots of close calls."

  He gave me a smile. "That's what I'm fighting. I'm maneuvering to establish a strong national government that will be the foundation for a united western hegemony. One that will attack before it is attacked, one that will impose peace and order on an insane world that is preparing to tear itself apart."

  "By any means necessary?"

  "By any means necessary." He agreed. "Imagine if you could go back in time and kill the leaders of the Nazi Party before the burning of the Reichstag, before Kristallnacht, before the war and the death camps. If you could do it, and didn't, wouldn't you share responsibility for the Holocaust?"

  I shook my head. "No."

  "And why not?"

  I realized I was shaking with rage.

  "I don't give a rat's ass what happens years from now—you're a murdering bastard and I hope there's a special hell just for you! I dug out the bodies of babies and you want me to agree with you? You're a bug-nuts maniac, personally responsible for the death of Mr. Waters' boy, for all other the people you've killed trying to make a better future! You killed the munchkin!"

  He accepted it calmly, like I'd just told him his tie was crooked, and turned back to his twin.

  "You see? She's completely in your camp. I'd wipe her memory of the past day—assuming I can, it doesn't appear to take—but the network you've set up would pull her back into events. Sooner or later she'd have to go down, and the later I do it the worse the result will be. I can keep you on ice, but if I can't control or neutralize your organization I have to destroy it—starting with her. You have no one but yourself to blame for this."

  The Anarchist rested his hands on the table and looked at his twin, and the fingers of his right hand twisted strangely. My heart jumped and began to race. Suddenly I wasn't scared anymore. I knew what he was telling me, and one way or another it would all be over in a moment.

  "It was the terrorist leader in Pakistan, wasn't it?" he said softly. "You thought if you could take him out it would prevent the attack—like killing Hitler in 1916. When it didn't you took out his lieutenants. When that didn't work you took out the government officials whose cooperation allowed them to set up their operations. And now you've come too far—any deaths are acceptable if they prevent more death in the future."

  While he talked, he carefully didn't look at me as I curled the fingers of my left hand in one by one. Four, three, two, one—

  I dropped my water bottle. Ripper looked down when it bounced messily on the cement floor, and I thrust my head back, hard. His forehead caved in like a crushed egg.

  I did the four-finger twist the Anarchist had told me would activate the beacon, and screamed as a nova bloomed in my guts. My restraints flashed a visual flare of my agony before going dead and the computer monitor beside me exploded as I lunged, the cuffs irrelevant weights. I grabbed DA's wrist before he could begin to react.

  In my agony I was beyond being careful, and he went white with an anguished shriek as his bones ground together. I held on; he wasn't going anywhere.

  Volt recovered from his shock, lunging forward with a snarl to grab my shoulder and I wasn't recovered enough to duck. His hand crackled and burned and the world flared as I shook, but he didn't have the storm to draw on and with my grip on his boss he couldn't throw the kind of power that would knock me out again anyway. Even so my vision grayed and sparkled and I felt my heart jump and twitch as he focused the current in a path through my chest and down my leg—he could cook me slo
wly despite my incredible resilience. If he didn't stop my heart first.

  So I stepped into his grip and punched him.

  I hit him from my center, fist straight, in perfect form as Ajax taught me. He didn't so much fall back as cave in, my fist shattering his sternum and pushing it through his heart into his backbone, snapping it like dry twigs.

  Flicking bits of red bone from my hand I stepped over him as he fell, dragging the still-shrieking Anarchist with me. Euphoria raised her hand and started her buzz. As all my pains went far away and my world began to float I snapped the disk from my belt buckle and threw it, shattering her temple in a splash of blood. She went down without a sound.