No, the music was Shelly.
My new and lively sense of the ridiculous only got livelier as we moved out. It was four in the morning, less than three hours until sunrise, and the gear-drop had included a service van left parked outside, backed up so that we could board without seeing the driver or the driver seeing us. Blindspot joined the driver, Crash would meet us there, and the rest of us loaded into the back of the empty van.
The van wasn’t rigged for anything but passengers; benches and safety belts secured us comfortably against the sides, with room beneath our benches for gear we couldn’t hold. Resting my head against the van wall, I watched everyone and tried to look cool, calm, and serious. Which was hard since I was again trying not to giggle.
We looked like an elite supersoldier strike force from some action movie. Especially with Grendel (his outfit made him look like someone had wrapped him in heavy-duty spandex bands from neck to feet, covered with a layer of armor-supporting web harness like Shelly’s. When he put his helmet on nobody would be able to see any skin at all—he’d look just like any other Mister Universe built Ajax-Type. Across from me, Kitsune had changed his face again; now square jawed and practically Nordic, with a decorative scar running down the left side of his face, he could be a hardcore Paragon-Type mercenary. Beside me, Shelly had her head back and eyes closed. In her powered armor and weapons rig, she looked like our artillery expert.
The Spoilers. God help us.
Shelly opened her eyes. “Stage One is go. I’ve got a drone out at the Awakening Center, triggering their grounds alarm and staying out of sight. They’ve had three ‘false alarms’ and an automatic call from their security company, and they’re expecting a van. That’ll be us, since the company van has been redirected to the rendezvous. I’ve tapped their landline and local cell tower, and am monitoring their calls. So far nothing to anyone else.”
I nodded. “Tell Blindspot and Rush we’re good for the rendezvous. Their service person is taken care of?”
“Yup. He’ll be waiting for us.”
I nodded again and closed my eyes. Since The Plan was rolling on rails now, half my job was to look confident and not do anything worrying until it went off the rails. I could tell when we hit the freeway, and fifteen minutes later we got back off of it and then pulled into a parking lot. Crash opened the van before I could unbuckle.
“Security van secure, ma’am!” He mock-saluted me as I climbed out. The Apex Security van was waiting for us, and our driver had turned and backed us so that he couldn’t see it or us as we got out. Crash had used the sandman pack on the Apex serviceman; she sat slumped behind the wheel of her van. I motioned to Kitsune.
“How long will it take you to get ready?”
He straightened the sleeper up, winked at me. “Five minutes, ten if you wouldn’t want her husband to be suspicious.”
“Five. Shelly?”
“On it, boss.” Finishing her walk around the Apex Security van, she turned back to ours and waved her hand. Our ride turned white and the AS logo unfurled itself on the side. “Can I paint, or can I paint?”
“Chameleon-layer finish?”
“Oh yeah.”
I found myself watching the sky in the direction of Chicago. Variforce’s glowing fields weren’t at all subtle at night, and nowhere to be seen.
“I’m listening in on Dispatch,” Shelly said softly beside me. “Figured it was a good risk, for this.”
“What are they doing?”
“They aren’t doing anything but staying ready to move. The CPD and DSA still have no clue how you got out, but they think it was a security system hack to take down the hard cell’s barriers and a teleporter to get you out.”
“They haven’t spotted Kitsune’s work?”
“They know about the substitution—they just don’t think you walked out with ‘Agent Grace’.”
So they weren’t looking for a suspicious taxi, probably weren’t looking at traffic at all. I relaxed a little. We might get away with two impossible jobs in one night.
“All done.” Kitsune came up to stand beside us. She was a stocky brunette with a weathered and freckle-covered face. Her costume had morphed into company coveralls, and she’d acquired our sleeper’s tool belt and equipment box. She shook my hand. “Charlene Waters, nice to meet you and let’s go—I’ve got kids to get up and get to school.”
I blinked. “Shelly…”
“Got it covered, boss.” A van door opened, and Shelly moved us all to the other side as our driver got out and came around. A few minutes of movement, and the company van door slammed. We watched it back up and pull out of the parking lot. “He’ll take Sleeping Beauty home, park in her driveway and administer the wake-up when we call. She’ll be bright-eyed and bushy tailed five minutes after he’s gone. She might be too busy with her company and police report to get her kids to school, though.”
“So let’s go. Sooner begun, sooner done.” Charlene handed me her belt and box, pulled her company cap low on her head, and headed around to the front of the van.
I stared after her. “I’m never going to get used to that.” Blindspot joined us in back this time.
Another five minutes on the freeway headed north, another five minutes of surface streets, and we came to a full stop. “Charlene” opened the tiny window separating the cab from the back of the van so we could hear as she talked into a gate speaker, and Blindspot had the other three of us leave our benches to stack up behind him. Shell showed us how to fold down the bench-backs with their safety straps so it looked like a van with empty drawers and racks. Clever.
We braced ourselves awkwardly as the van lurched back into motion, and watched the gates close behind us through the rear windows. A turn up a long drive and Charlene stopped us again, getting out this time. The rear door opened and she collected her tool-belt and box as a guy in a blue security uniform looked at the inside of the van.
And of course didn’t see us.
“So what’s the problem, tonight?” She hitched up her belt and closed the doors.
“Twitchy system,” I heard him answer as they walked away. “Went off again just before you got here, and we’ve got to go out and check every time.” Another door opened and closed.
“Stage One complete,” Shelly announced needlessly as we all sat down again. “Now we just wait until she jacks me in.” She passed out water bottles. “Hydrate. There may be a lot of yelling soon.”
I hated waiting, and chugged water to cover it.
Which didn’t fool Shelly. “Worried?”
“I don’t like not being where it could go bad. Kitsune isn’t bulletproof.” And we’re flying blind and don’t know what kind of detection powers they might be using.
“Do we sneak, much? Back home?”
Now Grendel and Blindspot were listening. “Not really. We’re more the ‘kick in the wall and serve the warrant on the supervillain’ kind of team, when we’re not doing public appearances and emergency response stuff. Which is most of what we do. That and train, a lot.”
Blindspot looked dubious. “I’m not exactly a wall-kicker kind of breakthrough.”
“You have your moments.”
That led to a brief discussion of home. I didn’t tell Blindspot that back there his codename was Megaton and he blew stuff up. I did tell him his parents were divorced and his mom and sister lived on the west coast. I didn’t tell Grendel that he’d already missed a shot at the Ascendant; he didn’t need any more motivation. I tried not to ask Shelly how long it had been, and then I didn’t have to.
“We’re up,” she reported. “Kitsune has jacked me in, and I’ve sweet-talked their security system into playing for our team. Let’s go, people.”
“Helmets on,” I called out, only just keeping the relief out of my words. Blindspot opened the van doors and we piled out behind him. Shelly took the lead at the service door, and I could hear the electronic locks disengaging as she pulled the latch.
I went over the blueprints in my mi
nd as we marched down the service hallway, stopped us at the stairwell doors. “Brian—Grendel—”
“I know. Nobody gets past.”
“Right. Blindspot?” He nervously hitched his belt with its holstered elaser.
“Join Kitsune in security. Don’t let anyone mousetrap us in there. If you can’t immediately take whoever comes through the door, give Kitsune a big hug and walk her out of there.”
“What about the guard with her now?”
“Handled,” Shell said. “We’re down to three on-sight risks.” She unlocked and opened the stairwell door and we headed down the concrete well.
Just feet from our goal I was winding tight again; all senses alert, above the echo of our descending steps I could hear the hum of a light getting ready to die, the skitter of a few roaches below reacting to the vibration of our feet on the concrete stairs. The place needed an exterminator. At the bottom of the stairwell and through another security door the way branched, a service tunnel made close by the power and water lines running along the opposite wall. We went left and there was the steel door with its expected lockpad.
I watched the approaches, listened for anything on our team link, tried not to pay any attention to what Shelly did behind me.
“We’re in.” She pulled the door open and took us through a second, inside door. And we were, in fact, in; in the white room with its power and phone lines, blocky boxes on the walls, and beautiful, beautiful, computer station and caged server stack.
Really, if I wasn’t so relieved I’d be disappointed; somehow I’d thought that it would be more physically secure.
Shelly looked over the stack, then took a finger-sized jack from her belt, plugged it into a USB port, and completely froze for the space of four heartbeats.
“Okay, good news and bad news.”
“Good news.”
“I can do it. Give me eight minutes and I can copy the entire drive. The bad news is you might have to work for those minutes. Any use of the system triggers a query with an outside key; if the use is not cleared first by the key, then it triggers the thermite. I can disable the thermite trigger first, but it’s in constant handshake-mode through the server with an outside link and I have no idea what will happen when I disable it. Best guess, an alarm somewhere else is going to go off. So, plan?”
“Why can’t we just disable the trigger, rip the server out, and go?”
“It’s got its own internal capacitor; we disconnect and it will discharge. I have no idea how much data we’ll lose.”
“Okay.” We had three threats left in the building, and no idea if they’d get a Kill On Sight order from elsewhere the moment we pushed the button—they should be taken care of first, but again no idea if they could see us coming and sound their own alarms. Damn it. “Kill the trigger, kill the landlines, kill the local cell tower if you can, and copy that drive.”
“Just did one and two, can’t do three, working on four. Countdown!”
I put my hand to my helmet by reflex. “All Spoilers, this is it. We have begun copy and have triggered an external alarm. Be prepared for on-site action and possible visitors. We will extract in eight minutes.”
Eight minutes. What’s eight minutes. Just four hundred and eighty seconds. How much could the Ascendancy bring down on us in eight minutes?
They have a teleporter somewhere.
“The on-site staff is moving!” Kitsune sang in my ear from security. Yoshi’s voice—the body he was most comfortable with in a fight?
“Someone just tripped a security program,” Shelly informed me. “All exterior and interior doors are unlocked now.”
“Well…”
“You so want to swear right now, don’t you?”
I swallowed a hysterical giggle. “Grendel, retreat to the top of the stairs, hold the door closed.” The thing was steel, fireproof and probably bulletproof. Anything that got through it would be able to survive rough handling by Brian. “Blindspot, get friendly with Kitsune. Anyone enters security, it’s your call to engage or leave. It’s also your call to yell for extraction.” Bright side, all the doors being unlocked left an open road for Crash. “Shelly, time?”
“Faster than I thought, just under six minutes.”
The floor rocked, and a horrible thought almost choked me.
“Shelly, can they cut power to the server from outside?”
“No— Crap on a cracker! There’s a junction box out in the tunnel. If they blow that then we’re dead in here and the capacitor goes!”
“Are you kidding me?” I almost ripped the useless doors off their frames getting out. And then I went blind.
“Shell, build me a view!” Helmet-cam feed, blueprints, echo location and GPS, whatever sources Shelly was using, she threw up a virtual overlay that gave me a real-time neon map through our neural link. One man, racing up the tunnel from whatever access stairs he’d come from. By his silhouette, he carried an assault rifle.
“Just so you know,” she observed, “your optic nerves just stopped working.”
“You think! Talk about a blind spot!” He opened fire and I got between him and the junction box, arms up to shield my helmet. It took him five squeezed shots to realize that I a.) wasn’t falling down and b.) could obviously see him. I took a step, and he ran. “Kitsune! Anyone else down here with us?”
“No!”
I launched myself down the tunnel, flattened the guy against the wall where it turned a corner and crushed his gun.
“You’re a neuralkinetic? Unblind me, please. Now.”
“I can’t! Optical paralysis! It’ll wear off!”
“Fine.” I pulled a sandman pack, slapped it on him, and counted to three. He sagged and I checked his pulse and respiration before lowering him to the concrete floor.
I should have taken him back with me but a room full of thermite, even rendered ‘safe’, probably wasn’t the best place for him to sleep it off.
The floor shook again.
“All Spoilers, who’s knocking?”
“Mine,” Grendel came back, a roar in his voice.
“Need a hand?”
His No was a primal scream and this time when the floor shook concrete dust drifted from the tunnel ceiling. “Great camera angle,” Shelly quipped. “I am so keeping a copy of that.”
I walked back to the junction box. “Stay on task, Shell.”
“At this point I could make you a cake and do your taxes, the drag is on the server end. Damn slow 21st Century tech—Hope! Teleports!”
I flew back into the room.
Three somebody’s had joined Shelly—one close to Grendel-size and two more reasonably male adult proportioned—and I couldn’t see anything but their outlines but Shelly’s virtual-tags froze my blood: Dozer, Drop, Doctor Pellegrini. What the hell was Pellegrini doing here? And then it didn’t matter; Drop and the Ascendant looked unsteady on their feet—I remembered that DSA briefs suggested Drop’s jumps took it out of people—but Dozer turned and took two steps before I cleared the inner door. Sweeping Shelly aside to bounce hard off the wall, he crushed the server stack and the steel cage that housed it.
No.
I didn’t slow down; I’d already unbuckled my pouch full of sandman packs, and now I leaped forward to slap one on Drop, catching him right in the neck with it. He vanished in a space-twisting blur before it could finish the job but I was already turning—
Dozer caught me in the side.
Managing to let myself go with his hit, I bounced off the other wall but stayed on my feet. My head rang and my virtual-vision got weird before coming back more clear; he’d damaged my helmet feeds but Shelly was in the same room to live-stream it for me.
I put Dozer between me and Pellegrini, took off my helmet. “Eric, please don’t. You don’t want to do this.”
Eric Ludlow, Gantry, Dozer—war veteran, supervillain, the first superhuman I’d ever fought (briefly, he’d been drunk), looked just like I remembered except the hay-colored hair he’d cut military-short a
gain. He wasn’t wearing anything but an extra-large pair of jeans—obviously they’d mobilized fast. And now he stood there, literally stunned.
“Eric, it’s okay.” I lowered my hands. “You can stop now.” Really? Why? Because back home he seemed to not like fighting you? I desperately tried to remember what Blackstone had said about him; that my sympathetic arrest of the guy had maybe helped him sober up, get straight, at least before he’d meet and been recruited by another Ascendancy member during the cleanup of the Big One. Blackstone had suggested I might have leverage. How much leverage did I have here, where I’d died?
Hearing Shelly rise, I took another two steps to put her behind me. “Really, Eric. I know it’s been tough. You’ve done things you—you didn’t want to do. But you don’t want to fight me, do you?”
“You’re dead.”
“Yes, but not where I come from. I fought you there, too. You made me fight you.” And you gave me a beating I still remember. “I asked you to stop, before more people got hurt. Aren’t you tired of it, Eric?”
“Don’t listen to her, Eric!” Pellegrini finally decided to open his mouth. What the hell did he think he was doing, coming here himself?
“You attacked a town there, Eric.” I kept my voice low. “A whole town full of people who’d done nothing to anyone. And you’re going to do that here.” As soon as the Ascendant decides that he wants his own pocket-reality. “I asked you to stop, and then I made you stop. I’ll stop you here, but I don’t want to have to. Don’t hurt anyone else, Eric. Please.”
“Hope—” Shelly whispered behind me but I didn’t take my eyes off him. I didn’t look at the shattered server. If I did I might be sick. Chest heaving, fists flexing, Eric stared back. I didn’t move. Eric didn’t move.
But the room wasn’t that big, and my steps to put myself between Eric and Shelly had moved me off-side; with my focus on Eric I didn’t move fast enough when Pellegrini lunged. “Hah!” He brushed my instinctively up-thrust arm and I staggered back as my senses shattered.
This time I hadn’t been half-concussed. This time I managed to keep reality from going away even as I fell to a knee, feeling like a puppet whose strings had been cut. I’d been de-powered. Again.
Wearing the Cape 6: Team-Ups and Crossovers Page 26