Hero

by Robert J. Crane

  “I was briefed on the construction of the Cube,” Foreman said, and I saw the anvil coming, and knew that Bilson had no chance of dodging. “Do you know the layout of that particular facility?”

  “Uh, no—” Bilson said.

  “We need to go to commercial break,” Chris said. “We—”

  “It’s very simple, and I’ll leave you with this,” Foreman said. “Up top are the holding facilities—jail facilities—for accused criminals who have not yet been convicted of a crime and are awaiting trial. Beneath are the long-term prison facilities. Sienna Nealon, four days after arriving at the Cube, according to the official story that’s being shouted out on every channel right now, including yours, Chris—four days after arriving at the Cube, Sienna Nealon started a riot in the prison facilities.” Foreman leaned in. “Tell me … if she hadn’t been convicted … what was she doing in the long-term prison section of the Cube?”

  “And we’re going to have to leave it there for now,” Chris said, smiling weakly. “Thank you, Mr. Bilson, Senator … for an … informative segment. Up next …”

  “Thank you, Senator,” I muttered as the screen faded to a commercial. It was nice to know that at least one person back home, other than my brother and my friends, still thought I was innocent. And worth … well, at least the basic human considerations.

  The phone on the desk chirped. “Sienna,” came Hades’s clipped voice. “Report to the Situation Room immediately.” His voice was tight. “We have another situation.” He paused. “That … came out lamer than I intended. But we do have a problem.”

  “What now?” I asked, rolling off the bed and counting on the speakerphone to catch my words as I got up.

  “Our border radar stations have detected a drone inbound from the west,” Hades said. “It would appear that your enemies in America have failed to heed our first warning.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  When I walked into the Situation Room, General Krall was already speaking to Hades and Lethe, everyone grouped around the map table as she talked low in the guttural local language.

  As soon as he saw me approach, Hades snapped his fingers. “In English, please, General Krall. For the benefit of the crown princess.”

  “Not getting used to that title anytime soon,” I said as I stepped next to Lethe at the table. Her shoulders moved slightly as she let out a small snort.

  “You have earned it,” Hades said, giving me a nod, then turning back to the table. “General Krall … please. Go on.”

  Krall’s eyes found me with a predatory look that I didn’t much care for. “The Americans have some small forces in Poland, not significant enough in combat strength by themselves to do anything. Heavier reinforcements await in Germany. Almost 35,000 US troops are stationed there. Air wings, full armored cavalry battalions … everything a conventional US invading force might need is there. But they will not be able to stage a full invasion of this sort for several weeks.”

  “Why not?” Hades asked.

  “Logistics,” Lethe murmured.

  “Correct. For this reason, a full-scale invasion is impossible in the short term,” Krall said. “In general, the Americans prefer a more limited war these days, leaning heavily on special forces to attack key points, and keep from engaging well-matched forces on the field.” She snapped her back straight and clicked her heels together. “And our tanks are a closer match to theirs than any they faced in the War on Terror. Furthermore, should they wish to prosecute an air war, they will find our new defenses more than equal to the task.”

  “Excellent,” Hades said, putting his hands behind him. “Speaking of.” And he nodded to the table.

  Krall must have taken that as a sign and interpreted it accordingly. “Our radar stations have picked up an MQ-9A Reaper Drone. We believe it launched from Poland,” and she traced her finger along a route marked by a line that rolled across Belarusian territory toward us. “Now … we may deal with it as you so choose.”

  “Decisions, decisions,” Hades said. “Shall we make it a show of conventional force? Or truly display the power we have at our fingertips?”

  “We should show them everything we have,” Lethe said, a bit archly. “Leave them in no doubt how much hell we can bring to bear if we so desire.”

  “Restraint seems the more prudent course,” Krall said, still at attention. “Conventional means would show them, clearly, that they cannot operate their air power over our territory, and it will cost them only the lesson of a drone. Then, should they come at us with more force, we will have a surprise waiting.”

  “Better to cut the problem off before it starts,” Lethe said.

  “Better to have something in reserve that they cannot counter,” Krall said.

  Hades put a hand on his chin, and looked at me. “Well?”

  I blinked at him. “Well … what?”

  “Surely you have an opinion, Your Highness?” Hades asked, a smile curling his lips.

  “Uh, well … I don’t know Gondry that well,” I said, “but Harmon suggested he was what you’d call smart-dumb. Academically brilliant in his area of expertise. Crazy articulate, able to work a crowd, connect with people. But probably well out of his depth in this military stuff since he pretty much hates the military.” I shrugged. “I’m not sure how he’s going to react here. You bat his drone out of the sky with a missile? I guess that’s business as usual. Or a little unusual, but still within normal parameters. You do something else? Something he doesn’t expect? Something that escalates things …?” I blew air out slowly. “If he’s in over his head already … I don’t imagine he’s going to react favorably to that.”

  “Your reasoning is sound,” Hades said. “And Gondry is perhaps unpredictable. A more measured approach to his attempts to escalate seem prudent.” He nodded at Krall. “Use a missile to take down his drone. We will keep Aleksy’s powers in reserve should Gondry decide to … up the stakes.”

  I cocked an eyebrow at that. Suddenly it was a lot clearer to me what Hades had in mind—deploying Aleksy’s metal-controlling powers to …

  “Holy hell,” I said.

  Lethe nodded, once, stiffly. “Holy hell, indeed, if it comes to that.”

  “Can he …?” I asked.

  “Should it be necessary,” Hades said, with a glint of triumph in his eye, “Aleksy could clear the skies all the way to our borders, at least. The United States Navy and Air Force will find no comfort here. Anything the size of a drone or larger will be easily swept from the air.”

  I didn’t quite gulp, but I felt like it. The US relied on air power in its missions, probably more heavily than anyone else. Air support for ground forces, missiles to soften targets and take out troublemakers from hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

  With that option off the table … the US response was going to be considerably narrowed.

  “Wait a second,” I said, a troubling thought occurring. “If Aleksy can sweep the skies of all planes and drones and … ICBMs …” I threw that last one in there because intercontinental ballistic missiles were waaaay bigger than drones.

  Lethe’s face was like stone, but her eyes …

  Man.

  Her eyes gave away the game, and she turned away from me.

  “Yes?” Hades asked. He didn’t realize what I’d just figured out.

  “What the hell do you need nukes for if you can sweep theirs out of the sky?” I asked.

  “A precaution, only,” Hades said, a little too quickly. “A feint, if you will. One that Gondry and the Americans can see. Unlike Aleksy.”

  “Dude, Grandpa,” I said, “you knock a couple planes out of the sky with Aleksy’s skills, it’s going to become rapidly obvious what you have on offer. You pull their nukes down, it’s even more obvious. Why—”

  “Not now,” Hades said, waving a hand in front of me.

  “What the—do you think that’s going to mute me or something?” I asked. “Because, ask anybody who knows, the mute button did not come factory insta
lled on me.”

  “I believe I could find it if you want me to, Your Majesty,” General Krall said, slipping back over to the table and watching me closely.

  “That will not be necessary,” Hades said, looking rather pointedly at Krall. “The drone—”

  “The missile is already on its way,” Krall said, then went right back to looking at me like a snake at a mouse.

  I looked down at the table. Sure enough, there was a radar contact winging its way across the map toward the place where the drone was lazily moving over the Revelen landscape. I tried to imagine its operator, wherever they were—some air force base stateside—thinking their drone was pretty much invisible.

  The missile met the drone a moment later on the screen, and with a circular rippling on the digital display, both vanished.

  “Explosion,” Krall said, glancing at the table. “Drone destroyed.”

  “Was it over an inhabited area?” Lethe asked.

  “No,” Krall said with a shake of her head. “We took it over the mountains. I have already sent a recovery team to retrieve it for study.”

  “Excellent,” Hades said. “Now … what is their next move?”

  “Best guess? More drones or a plane,” Krall said. “Depending on how cautious they wish to be in proceeding.”

  “We will shoot these down conventionally as well,” Hades said. “Hold Aleksy in reserve as long as possible.” He held a finger up. “We must make them realize that they are in for no easy fight, and after a time, Gondry will retreat to save face rather than lose thousands in a war.”

  “I hope you are right, my liege,” Krall said, and snapped her heels together again as she bowed.

  “Apprise me of any further developments,” Hades said, moving a hand to his chest and rubbing at his scar. “I will be in my quarters.” He looked at me, then Lethe. “Would you ladies care to join me? I should like to clear the air about a thing or two.”

  “Sure,” I said, as Hades turned to leave, Lethe only a few steps behind. With one look back at General Krall, I followed, exiting through the thick steel double doors to the Situation Room, wondering what my great-grandfather would have to tell me now.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Reed

  “We’ll be reaching Revelen airspace in a few hours,” Greg Vansen’s voice crackled over the speakers wired through the shrunken house that rested beneath the seat of his modified SR-71. It was a pretty neat way to travel supersonic, nearly invisible to radar under normal means and even more invisible when Greg took the plane to smaller sizes.

  The air smelled funny, though, probably because the shrunken house required its own atmospheric system to maintain pressure in the face of an unpressurized cabin. There were no windows, and the door was sealed with a heavy steel and rubberized pressure skirt. It didn’t exactly comply with safety FAA regulations, a fact I was sure was not lost on a smart guy like Greg.

  “Does traveling like this get to you, too?” Scott Byerly asked, quiet voice punctuating the silence of the upstairs lounge. The miniature house was pretty large, lots of living room style spaces on the “ground” floor, a dozen or so bedrooms upstairs. “The lack of windows, I mean?” Scott asked, nodding at the blank wall.

  “It’s safer,” I said, jarred out of my own thoughts enough to realize that Scott must have joined me in here a while ago. I’d probably noticed him at the time, but I’d gotten caught up in … well, worrying about Sienna … and hadn’t so much as said a word to him. “Windows are the weakest point on a plane. Much less chance of emergency depressurization in a uniform, sealed hull design. One of the major manufacturers was looking at that a few years ago, switching to digital windows, screens on the walls instead of actual ones.”

  “But …?” Scott asked. “Why didn’t they do it?”

  “‘Yet,’” I said. “Why didn’t they do it yet. Because structural integrity isn’t the only safety concern. They were afraid people would go nuts without windows. That’s the short answer. I’m sure they’re still trying to figure out a way to make it happen, though.”

  Scott looked around at the blank walls. Greg hadn’t even bothered to hang a poster, which was … par for Greg, actually. “Is it driving you nuts, too?” he asked.

  “Not seeing the sky? Yeah,” I said. “Remember what my power is?”

  Scott smiled. “I suppose it must be annoying to let someone else carry you through the air. I know it would be for me if I was traveling by submarine.”

  “Yeah, it’s … vexing,” I said. The thought of Isabella leaning over to kiss me before I’d parted ways with her sprang to mind, unbidden. “Hardly the worst thing we’re dealing with right now, though.”

  Scott looked toward the archway that separated our little beige-walled lounge from a hallway lined with doors to bedrooms, most of which were unoccupied. Not seeing anyone lingering there, he turned back to me. “I’d never have said it in front of the others, but … Gravity kinda had a point, you know.”

  “No, she didn’t,” I said. And when he started to open his mouth to object, I said, “No. She didn’t have a point … at least not for everybody. She had a point for her, which was that being involved in Sienna’s problems all the time was messing with her life. That isn’t true for everyone.”

  Scott raised an eyebrow. “You don’t think our lives got a little messed up when Rose came after us and we had to go into hiding?”

  How could I argue with that? “I’m not saying our lives didn’t take a hit from the Rose thing. I’m saying that saving Sienna hasn’t been an ‘all the time’ proposition for us, Scott. Remember back in January when she came and fought the guy in Minneapolis who kicked all of our asses? At a pretty decent amount of personal risk to her, I might add. Or how she literally ended up in prison to help Angel and Miranda not a week ago?” I had clenched a fist without even realizing it. “You make sacrifices for the people you care about.”

  “Okay,” Scott said. “But what about people like Chase and Veronika? You can’t tell me you’re going to keep dragging them into these kinds of things.” He leaned across the table toward me. “They’re not like us. They’ve got a casual relationship to Sienna. We’ve been there since the beginning. They haven’t.”

  “Where’s this coming from, man?” I asked. “Are you getting sick of sallying forth to save the day?”

  “Please, don’t ever accuse me of sallying again,” Scott said with a smile, “but … no. I’m trying to think of our co-workers here. You’ve got everyone on this, ignoring the fact that there’s a metahuman prison riot that took place not twenty minutes from our office that some of us could be working—”

  “This is the single biggest injustice—”

  “Facing someone we care about right now,” Scott said. “Hey, man … you and I both got caught up in Harmon’s net. We know what happened to Sienna. How she got screwed in all this. And it sucks. No doubt. But you can’t keep dragging your entire agency into trying to make up for your guilt at getting brainwashed into the same op that screwed up her life.”

  “Watch me,” I whispered.

  Scott settled back. “Well. Maybe that makes two of us, then.”

  I raised an eyebrow at him. “But you just argued—”

  “That you shouldn’t be using everyone for it,” Scott said, settling back in his seat. “I’m in this for the long haul. Sienna and I? We settled our, uh … issues … a while ago. All that’s left now is the loyalty between two people who have been through the foothills of hell together more times than I can count.”

  “When have you been through the foothills of hell with her?” I almost smiled.

  “This one time we fell out of a plane in Iowa,” Scott said with a smile. “I saved her, and she had to kinda help me over to the road. That was like the foothills of hell.”

  “Iowa doesn’t have hills.”

  “What are you boys going on about in here?” Kat appeared at the stairs, sliding in under the archway. Her ever-present phone was … not present, whic
h meant, presumably, we had no Wi-Fi. “I could hear the arguing down the stairs.”

  “Then you oughta know what we were going on about,” I said.

  “Something about hell and Iowa, or maybe that was the same thing,” Kat said, sliding in next to Scott, her green eyes bright.

  “We were talking about old loyalties,” Scott said, staring across the table at me. “How ours to Sienna are thicker than some of the new folks. How maybe we should stop dragging everybody else into these things and just settle ’em ourselves.”

  “Still don’t agree,” I said.

  Scott’s eyes wavered. “Lose one of these people in a fight to save her and you’ll change your tune.”

  “If you decide to cull things down,” Kat said, her tone … so different from usual Kat, “you let me know.”

  “So you can bail with the rest?” I asked.

  Her perfectly sculpted eyebrows arched in a harsh right angle above her nose. “No, dumbass. Because I’d still be in. We’ve been with her since the start. Remember, outside Eagle River?”

  “That Omega facility?” I felt the trace of a smile. “Where we rescued Andromeda.”

  “And I got bushwhacked by Sierra,” Kat said, putting her head back against the diner-style headrest. “Good times. Not.” She put her hands on the table, and I noticed her nails were not as perfectly manicured as they usually were. “Seriously, though … I’d still be in.”

  “So would I,” Scott said.

  “Well, I’m in for infinity more times,” I said. “Hell, infinity plus one. She’s the only family I have left. And …” I lowered my gaze to the table. “… She’s alone in all this.”

  “No, she’s not,” Kat said, and she sounded so certain. When we both looked at her, she shrugged. “She’s got Harry.”

  “Graves?” Scott asked, frowning. “You think?”

  “I don’t think their relationship survived the prison thing,” I said.

  “Oh, no.” Kat shook her head. “Trust me. I saw it in his eyes. He’s with her all the way.”