Seven Wonders

by Christopher, Adam

  She turned over again and watched the mini-fleet of superheroes streaking home. Next to her, sharing the life-support bubble, Detective Joe Milano had his hands behind his head, looking for all the world like he was sunbathing on one of San Ventura's famous beaches. Away to their left, Aurora blazed red, from the waist down a miniature comet, his arms outstretched as he streamlined himself for re-entry. The Dragon Star's cloak billowed and her wide hood rippled in… Sam had no idea what. It was a vacuum, as close to perfect as to make no odds. She supposed the fabric was caught in eddies of invisible energy streaming out from the powerstaff held at the perpendicular in front of her. Two further white tendrils coned out from each end of the device, providing transportation shields and a supportive atmosphere for Bluebell, who was escorting Conroy and Blackbird. Beside them, Sand Cat was in her animal form, the translucent blue shape running, pounding on nothing but space as they headed towards the Earth, leaving a wide blue wake behind her.

  Joe shifted onto an elbow and pointed.

  "It's starting."

  Sam watched as the leading edge of the wide, black silhouette she knew was the meteor cloud began to flare white and transform into the annual fireworks display that was the famous Draconids.

  Sam decided that flying through space beat the hell out of the teleport, although the journey would take several minutes rather than be instantaneous. But there was no telling what systems had been affected by SMART's shutdown of the moonbase, and which systems were fully operational after Blackbird had got the power back online. Teleport was too big a risk.

  So flying it was. And they were running ahead of the meteor shower. There was time to spare.

  The Earth loomed large and Aurora sped off to take point. Linear came in close to the bubble shared by Sam and Joe and reached out his hand to touch the wall near Sam's.

  He smiled, then fitted his facemask with one hand.

  "Sit back and enjoy the ride!" he said, but separated by a couple of feet of space, Sam couldn't hear a thing.

  Houston, we are cleared for re-entry.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Gillespie hadn't slept for what felt like forever. In reality it was more like thirty hours. It wasn't like he hadn't done it before; it came with the job as police were fond of saying, and the job was his decision, but it wasn't a common occurrence and maybe he wasn't as young as he thought he was. Any job that required continuous overtime or out of work hours just showed, according to this police captain, that they were understaffed. And true enough, the SVPD, like every single police department in the country, probably the world (except maybe North Korea) fought a continuous battle for adequate funding and resources. But really, they got by. They had the Seven Wonders, after all, and the federal government considered the city to be a shining example of the future, of good housekeeping and of the rule of law and justice.

  Yup. Uh-huh.

  Gillespie considered this as he drank his fourth straight robot coffee. He'd stopped tasting the metallic sharpness of the black liquid that was supposed to be a double espresso after his second, but over the brim of the paper cup he regarded the hopelessly optimistic, Photoshopped image of an antique coffee pot and steaming cups on an elegant tray that adorned the dirty front of the machine with deep suspicion. True enough, the department was a 24/7 operation and while SuperCrime was closed up, the station was full of life downstairs and the canteen ran twenty-four hours. But the chief didn't feel like taking a walk. He wanted to be right there when Detectives Millar and Milano returned. He'd rehearsed the dressing-down he planned to give them over and over in his head.

  Gillespie blinked furiously, realizing that his overtired mind was starting to drift. He slugged back another hot mouthful and began the too-long walk back to his office.

  Sam's chair was empty, and on her desk her phone flashed an angry red in the dim light. Joe's phone on the desk next to Sam's remained dark. Gillespie sighed, deciding not to clear another batch of messages. When his detectives had vanished, he'd soon given up trying to reach either of them on their cells, but he'd started answering her phone to see if it was her (although why Sam would call her own desk, he really had no idea). Sick of jotting down illegible messages on Post-it notes, he flicked her line to voicemail.

  Of course, Gillespie knew where they were. They'd been kidnapped by the goddamn superheroes. Gone, zap!, blinking out of existence just as the smoke was clearing at Moore–Reppion Plaza, leaving their captain and the uniforms to clear the crowds and coordinate paramedics and traffic.

  Gillespie shuddered at the memory, then thought he needed to stop drinking the robot coffee and start thinking about going home. He'd been shaken by the events of the last two days, and as he remembered the scene at the plaza he felt his heart begin to pound. It wasn't the superhero/supervillain smackdown, the wrecked buildings, the tornup road, even the injured – killed – bystanders. He'd seen that before, dozens of times. The whole police department had, every staff member from the top down. It was part of living in San Ventura, that wonderful shining jewel of the West Coast.

  But it was the way the Seven Wonders had stopped, frozen, when the Cowl − the new Cowl − had dropped from the sky and not got up. The way they'd gathered so fast, quickly – too quickly – abandoning people in the crowd who were hurt and who needed help and the beautiful, concerned face of Bluebell to reassure them and the cocky manner of the speedster to cheer them. The way Linear swore and Aurora stood, apart from the rest. Hesitating. The look on Aurora's face. The emotionless, all-powerful leader of the Seven Wonders, defender of San Ventura, icon and idol to millions.

  Fear. And perhaps worse than that, uncertainty. If Aurora didn't know what to do next, then heaven help us.

  Gillespie reached his office just as his own phone rang. He slumped into his chair and picked up the receiver as he swiveled to the dark window behind him. A split-second spit of white crossed the sky. A meteor shower. The meteor shower, which meant…

  "Gillespie."

  "Dispatch, sir. We've got trouble up on Melville Rise. Officers request assistance."

  Gillespie sighed, then took a slow breath. It happened every year. A hot summer's night and the annual free lightshow. Mix in teenagers and alcohol and the big, open, wide roads on the hills above the city, and you had a street party turning to riot.

  Still, it wasn't like he had anything else to do, other than not going home and waiting for his two detectives to rematerialize and explain what the hell was going on. Gillespie smiled. Yeah, like she'll teleport straight into her office chair and start filing a report. And it wasn't a job for SuperCrime anyway… but he knew by the end of the night damn near the whole police force would be called out to assist.

  "Call everyone in. I'll join you myself."

  Gillespie dropped the phone back on its cradle, finished his coffee, and headed out.

  Less than an hour later, Gillespie ran a finger over the roof of the patrol car. It came back smudged with black: a slippery, moveable residue, something like printer toner. He looked up at the night sky as the meteor shower drew a thousand trails of superhot gases across it. This was a big one, that was for sure. Unusually large, maybe a record breaker. Gillespie wiped his finger on a trouser leg, but the dust from the car was difficult to shift. Looking around the gaggle of cars parked at odd angles nearby, he saw the vaguely translucent sheen adhering to them all. What, was the dust falling from the sky? The incinerated remains of meteor rock? Gillespie shook his head, and frowned. He wasn't entirely sure meteor showers worked like that, but in a town like San Ventura he'd learned to live with the strange and unusual. He half-wondered if the vanished superheroes had any thing to do with it, but was distracted from his thoughts as a uniformed officer pushed an only slightly uncooperative young man in a sleeveless basketball shirt against the hood of the car. The officer shouted something in his ear, but Gillespie couldn't pick out her words, not over the sounds of the crowds and the music. He sighed, and hands-in-pockets, turned to view the carnage.
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br />   Actually, the uniforms were handling it, and a part of Gillespie felt it was a total waste of his time being there, that inner, automatic part of him that just insisted he did his eight and got out the gate. He sighed again, his breath tasting of stale coffee, and wished he could muster up some enthusiasm. He guessed he was supposed to be setting an example; the vigilant captain out on the scene.

  But drunk teenagers weren't exactly what he'd signed up for when he joined the SVPD. The assembled crowd on Melville Rise was bigger than most years, numbers swollen by the notable awesomeness of the meteor display. This high on the hill there were only a few houses: big ones that could barely be seen at the end of long drives and gargantuan football field-sized front lawns. But they were the houses that really counted, at least as far as the residents were concerned. And, it had to be said, once the outer fences were scaled, the wide open ranges of soft, level grass formed the perfect staging areas for alcoholfuelled punch-ups. Gillespie wondered – not for the first time – whether this was another bad influence of the superheroes, with all the angry, testosterone-fuelled young men of the city being taught that their problems could be solved with a fist-fight, or whether all towns in the US had a problem and he just had a need for San Ventura to feel special. He shook his head. Of course they did. San Ventura was special, but not that special.

  A group of six girls sat silently along the curb. Gillespie couldn't tell whether they were trying to stay out of the way, or had been told to stay out of the way, or were just happy to sit and watch their boyfriends push and shove at the gathering police. With only a handful of houses, street lighting was fairly sparsely spaced along the roadway, so most of the light came from the half-dozen police cars and wagons parked in the road and the nearest driveways.

  The captain strolled up past the girls, keeping his eyes on their reactions. One noticed him, and nudged her friend, who looked up and did the same to the next girl, a domino effect of glance, nudge and snicker. Gillespie sighed a third time, and decided to take his mind off the night, off the absence of Sam and Joe and the superheroes by lending a hand to the officers managing the increasingly rowdy crowd. He smiled, and adjusted his stab-proof vest.

  There was a hot whoosh, like a large firework. Gillespie ducked instinctively, feeling heat crawl up the nape of his neck. His nose filled with a sharp, earthy scent. Fights and fireworks? Like the natural beauty of the meteor shower wasn't enough for these punks.

  "Sir!" A short female uniformed officer was running towards him as he turned to meet her. He couldn't quite recognize her face in the half-light, but then there was a second rocket sound and she was lit up for a second by a bright, moving white light, revealing her identity as Catherine March, one of the precinct sergeants.

  A third whoosh, accompanied by a bang that sounded very much like a small sonic boom.

  "What the fuck was that? Is Linear back?" Gillespie was surprised he'd been startled so much by the flash and bang, but looking up into the sky, he saw the meteor shower intensifying, the shooting stars leaving thicker, brighter trails. The shower was getting lower.

  A shot of adrenaline punched through Gillespie's chest. That was bad, wasn't it? Since when did meteor showers get so big and scary? Was it going to be dangerous? Another whoosh. This time, followed by a delayed echo, a muted thud that was unmistakable: something had impacted the ground, maybe a few miles away from the hill. There was another thud, another flash of white light. The air felt hot, although whether this was due to the meteor shower, or his increasing anxiety, Gillespie couldn't tell.

  Even the kids on the street had paused, their attention wavering from an impending police-monitored punch-up between rival jocks from two local school football teams to the light show above. A few hooted as meteors streaked low and fast, while others stood silent, necks craned upwards. A lot of the police had joined them; Sergeant March quickly reminded them of their duty.

  Impact thuds came more frequently now, and were louder. Gillespie gave an order to disperse the crowd from a purely safety point of view, but thirty seconds after he said it, the first meteor hit their immediate vicinity. The sound was shockingly loud as it punctured the roof of the garage of the house nearest. At this, the group jumped in collective fright, a few of the teenagers – male and female alike – shrieking in surprise. And then they started to run.

  Gillespie ducked to one side as panicked teenagers began filing between the bottleneck formed by the patrol cars and vans, Sergeant March in the middle trying to organize her troops. More meteor impacts now, hitting the road, the dark, empty grass of the hill above, even a patrol car. Its rear windshield shattered and the whole vehicle bounced on its suspension, throwing the blue and red siren lights over the retreating partygoers.

  More blue and red light caught Gillespie in the face, brighter somehow. He raised an arm reflexively to shield his eyes, then realized the light was not coming from the car. Another whoosh, and he looked up.

  This shooting star was different. It was smaller and perhaps higher than the most recent low-entry space rocks. But it was a brilliant red. Behind it, a wider cone of bright blue light followed in a similar trajectory. Obscured by the glow of these colored trails, a series of softer, thin lines.

  Gillespie swore, as much in relief as anything. He'd seen those colored contrails before. Blue and red and mysterious – the Seven Wonders were involved with the meteor shower somehow, and were heading towards the city at high altitude.

  Gillespie shouted at March, and she shouted back, but neither could understand what the other had said. That didn't matter. Gillespie swung into his car, Kojak flickering on top, and flicked on the siren as he forced his slow way through the crowd and down the hill road, back towards the lights of San Ventura.

  The Earth spun 25,000 miles below him. The Living Dark that had once been Tony, the Justiciar, locked himself into geosynchronous orbit and kept the city of San Ventura directly beneath him. The Draconid meteor shower from here was an unbelievable spectacle, a chain of brilliant white lights, woven into a rectangular strip, trailing off from the black of space into the Earth's atmosphere, where they flared red and orange and streaked as the rocks were vaporized by re-entry friction.

  But the Living Dark did not notice, did not register the splendor of it. Arms outstretched, he tapped into the magnetosphere of the Earth, tweaking the parameters here and there, curling the normally innocuous belt of space rocks down a gravity well he'd placed over Southern California.

  The Living Dark smiled. As the moon rose from the Earth's sharp blue horizon, there, at the edge, tiny insignificant points of light skipped the atmosphere under the meteor shower, leaving a bright red and blue trail. The superhero protectors of San Ventura were returning to the Earth.

  The Living Dark was pleased. The Thuban would be pleased, and would reward him. He would collect the power core and dispose of the heroes and detain the Thuban fugitive that dared to name herself after her home system.

  The Living Dark waited, measuring the trajectory of the Seven Wonders. Then he swept in, down towards the Earth, leaving nothing but a trail of ultimate blackness behind him, through which not even the brightest star could be seen.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  "Where are we?"

  Conroy couldn't see. The constant, strobe-like flash of meteors above them, combined with the orange spurts on the ground as the meteors hit the soft earth, was enough to render him almost completely night-blind. He blinked, trying to keep one arm over his face and his eyes trained on the dark grass at his feet, but it was little use. Oh, what he'd do for image intensifiers, augmented optical processors, a full heads-up display with adaptive AI. Exactly what the inside of Blackbird's mask provided. Hell, what he'd do to get just a fraction of his powers back. Then he might have been of some use. Unlike now, at the mercy of the falling space rock and the red and orange smear across his retinas.

  "Somewhere near North Beach." Conroy saw Linear's silver boots vibrate into solidity in his limited, downturned
line of sight. As soon as they'd touched down, the speedster had taken off on a reconnaissance trip, probably covering several dozen miles in every direction. He'd been gone two seconds. The mess of lights in the night reflected over Linear's boots, before a red glow pushed the other colors out. Conroy screwed his eyes tight again, angry thoughts crossing his mind as he attempted to will his eyes into the correct adjustment. He opened his eyes and risked looking around.

  Aurora stood right in front of him, next to Linear. Behind, Bluebell (blonde hair immaculate), Sand Cat (in her human form), the detectives (blondie with a bad case of bed-hair and the tough guy looking around all serious and nodding like he knew what on Earth to do next) and Jeannie (orange prison jumpsuit almost glowing in the dark) were lit by soft blue light cast from the Dragon Star's powerstaff as she projected a shield over the top of them. Beyond the shield, they seemed to be standing in what could have been a golf course, all softly rolling knolls, dotted with handsome trees here and there. Of course. The hills above the city – right in Conroy's old neighborhood. His mansion, swapped for an isolated private island in the Caribbean with a difficult Qatari sheikh after six weeks of painful negotiation, was a stone's throw away. And below, the Cowl's Lair. He laughed. The relics of a past life.