Hero

by Robert J. Crane

  “La la la la LA LAAAAAA,” I sang, belting the opening bars of the Star-Spangled Banner, probably horribly off key because I couldn’t hear a damned thing at this point, then slipped back inside the Humvee. I don’t know why, but I was feeling incredibly patriotic just then. Maybe because the Mk 19 was an American weapon, mounted on the Humvee, which was—once upon a time—the most American of cars ever made. The keys were in the ignition, and my work here was pretty much done, so I started her up and rolled forward, taking a gentle turn toward the street and checking the gas gauge.

  Nearly full. Perfect. In a vehicle this size and with its gas mileage, that meant I’d be able to go about five miles or so before topping off the tank.

  Kidding. Sort of.

  I came to a rolling stop at the curb and honked the horn. People were fleeing madly in all directions, but they damned sure made a hole for the Humvee, and I signaled my turn (because if I can do it in the middle of a war zone in the second world, you assholes can do it in Philly, or whatever hell hole you’re driving in) and then went right, alternately tapping the gas pedal and the brakes as I saw openings.

  It took a block or two to break loose of the crowd, at which point normal traffic operations resumed. My hearing hadn’t quite returned, though, and I was experiencing that water-in-the-ear sensation as I tooled along an avenue that was lined with shops and trees that looked like it had been torn right out of the VISIT REVELEN tourist brochures.

  I probably looked like I was just ambling along, but as usual, I did have a plan. I was still operating on objective 1) destroy the Revelen Army’s 1st Division, after all, and the next stage of doing that was in this direction. Driving like a normal person was intentional, because nothing would have stuck out in Bredoccia right now like a Humvee taking corners and ripping up the thoroughfares like a bat out of hell.

  Wait. No. Never mind. The army was alerted, so driving like that was expected. I stepped on the gas and watched the speedometer go from 30 to 60 in seconds, and I even heard the engine rev a little through my near-total hearing loss. Good thing I had meta healing; it’d probably return to normal in a matter of hours.

  “Ohhhhh say can you seeeee—because I can’t hearrrrrr—” I kept singing, trying to gauge the level of my current deafness. It wasn’t total, but it was significant.

  “By the dawn’s early lighhhhhht,” a voice came back from the radio.

  I nearly put the Humvee through the front window of a lady’s wear store in shock. Silver lining: I might have been able to find a bra that provided some support, because this prison one I had on didn’t seem to have underwire and for some reason Hades had decided not to stock that particular garment type for me.

  “Damn you, Cassidy!” I swerved back onto the road. “What the hell?”

  “What?” Her voice sounded a little watery, probably from the hearing loss. My head was aching a little, too. “I’ve been watching you work. Figured I’d chime in now that you’ve decided to wage that war on the Revelen government I was longing for.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m waging a war on this mercenary army division and General Krall,” I said, signaling my turn, again, because I’m not a savage. “The status of my familial relationship here is still TBD, okay? I’m not going after Hades.” I white-knuckled the wheel. “Yet.”

  “I know, I know, but I can afford to be patient as you lay your vengeance upon these people,” she said. “You’ll come around. And then you’ll devastate everything they care about. Because that’s the Sienna way.”

  “What? No, it’s n—oh, who am I kidding, that’s totally my way.” I sighed.

  “There’s a regimental HQ a block away,” Cassidy said. “That where you’re heading.”

  “Mmmmmaybe,” I said, being a little coy. “Why?”

  “What’s your endgame here, Sienna? If you’re not aiming to take out Hades?”

  “Find Krall, drive this Humvee up her ass, and unload the grenade launcher until she’s internally exploded into oblivion,” I said. “It’s a simple plan.”

  “Yeah, but she’s not at the regimental HQ.”

  “I know this.”

  “Then why are you going there?” Cassidy asked. “There’s about a hundred soldiers there on high alert. And, oh by the way, Arche is searching for you using the city’s camera system, and I’m having a hell of a time keeping her out. It won’t last long, and pretty soon she’ll be all over you like James Gunn on a pedophile joke.”

  “I have faith in your abilities to keep her off my back, Cassidy,” I said. “You’re smart like that.”

  “Flattery will not make my hacking skills level up to the point where I can defeat a concerted attack from someone who can literally manipulate digital information at its most basic level. Holding her back would be an impossibility. The best I can do is co-exist with her in this space—for a little while, and maybe keep her busy putting out fires elsewhere.”

  “I’m sure you’ll do extra well at that,” I said, taking my last turn. The regimental HQ was ahead in an empty block that had apparently been demolished some time back in anticipation of building some sort of governmental center that hadn’t come to pass yet. I brought the Humvee to a stop in the middle of the road and unclicked my seat belt, hopping into the rear and opening up an ammo can. “Now if you’ll excuse me … I need to reload.”

  “Why would I need to excuse you for that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t even know how you’re hearing me right now, honestly.” I pulled out a massive belt of 40mm grenade ammo and joined it to the one that was already fed into the Mk 19. With care, I started to re-stack it into the box mounted on the side of the launcher so it would feed easily. “Is there a microphone in here?”

  “Someone left their cell phone under the seat,” she said. “You might consider taking it with you so I can talk to you after you inevitably have to flee on foot.”

  “Pffffft,” I scoffed. “What makes you think I’m going to have to flee on foot?”

  “You’re about to attack an army’s regimental HQ with a vehicle-mounted grenade launcher. You’re going to call down the thunder—all the thunder—on your damned head. They’re going to blow up your Humvee, and if you hadn’t shown a particular talent for avoiding certain death, I’d say don’t bother taking the phone because—duh, dead. But since you seem to be well-nigh unkillable at the moment, take the damned phone, Sienna, so we can coordinate after your truck gets blown all to hell.”

  I was done loading the Mk 19, so I slid back into the driver’s seat and slid my hand across the floor until I found it. “Yes, Big Sister.” I dropped the cell phone into my front pocket. “You know, this is really validating all my fears about how cell phones are actually wiretaps designed to listen to everything we do.”

  “You’ll be glad later, when you try to figure something out on your own and can’t. Because I’ll be there.”

  “Yeah, you’re like Siri,” I said, “except more annoying and judgy.”

  “You’re the one about to attack an army camp head-on. Crazy much?”

  “Crazy much,” I agreed. “Crazy always. And in this case—crazy mad.” I checked the AK-74 that was still slung at my side, hanging into the gap where a center console would be in a car.

  “Just keep in mind that those soldiers are all metas, so they’ll be moving a lot quicker than—”

  “I just killed a whole boatload of them back there, did you not see?” I waved a hand in the rearview. “I know what I’m dealing with, okay? I get it. Everyone here’s a meta. Their beyond-human powers are understood.”

  “It’s called a level playing field, Sienna,” Cassidy said, softening just a hair. “And there are over a hundred of them. I just wanted to make sure you know what you’re getting into. Because a hundred metas with guns? It’s a lot to deal with.”

  I stomped on the gas pedal. I could hear the squealing tires faintly, and off I went, peeling out as I headed for the army camp.

  “So am I.”

&nb
sp; CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

  Passerini

  “… Not sure how it’s going to turn out, but we’ve entered negotiations with the Russian president himself,” SecState Ngo said, voice crackling over the secure phone line. “Preliminaries look good. He requested the meeting, which is a plus given they cut off all communication with us … what? Two, three days ago?” She laughed weakly at the other end of the line. “I’m starting to lose count of the days, Bruno.”

  “Copy that,” Passerini said, rubbing his eyes. He held the phone to his ear, figuring that a conversation with the Secretary of State wasn’t the sort of thing he wanted to broadcast to the whole Situation Room, if they were listening. Graves was the only one within earshot of his side of the conversation, and the colonel was looking down at his console, tinkering with the screens. Passerini shot a look up at the farthest right display; Graves had switched to some sort of security feed with a Humvee rolling across the screen.

  “Sorry, I just realized I called you ‘Bruno,’” Ngo said. “I—”

  “It’s fine, ma’am,” Passerini said, shaking his head. She couldn’t see it. “We’re in the foxhole now. No point standing on formality.”

  “Well … you can call me Lisa, then.”

  “Yes, ma—Lisa.” That did not come easily, but it felt like the appropriate thing to say in the moment.

  “So, Russia.” Ngo sounded like she wanted to change the subject away from this awkward moment as much as he did. “A couple of interesting details I already forwarded to CIA: President Fedorov has an American advisor now. The ambassador didn’t catch the full name—African-American fellow, started with a Z, introduced himself as a doctor—”

  “Doctor Zollers?” Graves asked, mumbling to himself just loud enough for Passerini to pick it up and frown. The colonel must have been talking to himself. No way could he hear the discussion on the phone, and certainly not Ngo’s part of it.

  “—but the ambassador forgot his name, he said. Just couldn’t recall it. Anyhow, the Russians look ready to back away from their Revelen allies. They’re already walking back their alert status and are standing down their military. I’m waiting on confirmation, but … if true … this is a good sign.”

  “Yeah, it is,” Passerini said. “Not that I’d want to go to war with Revelen on their own, now that they’re nuclear-armed, but having Russia in their back pocket was a lot more daunting.”

  “How many nukes does Revelen have?” Ngo asked.

  “Twelve ICBMs,” Passerini said. “Enough to do some significant damage if they were of a mind to. Each has six MIRVs that can detach and hit regional targets. Each MIRV has a city-killer bomb on it. So their maximum capability is to flatten the core of seventy-two American cities. Less if they decide to concentrate fire on one metro—”

  “What … what does that mean?”

  Passerini took a breath, then let it out slowly. This was not the sort of information he relished imparting. “Well, take New York for example. If they wanted to be thorough, they’d target each borough with at least a MIRV each. Which means an entire missile and probably two would be tasked just to New York and its outlying areas—Long Island, Greenwich, Westchester County. DC would warrant at least two, on the low end, because you’d want to nail hardened structures like the Pentagon with a direct hit, their own dedicated warhead.” Passerini felt a little churn in his gut, and not just from describing his own annihilation.

  Bruno Passerini had always hated nukes. They were a brutal, indiscriminate weapon that made the already savage nature of war just that much more wholly destructive. The thought of someone firing one …

  Well, it made him sick to his stomach.

  “My God,” Ngo breathed.

  “It’s a real bear,” Passerini said, mitigating his language somewhat for the benefit of the SecState. “In my perfect world, we’d destroy the damned things and never build another, but … I’m not a big fan of asymmetrical warfare when it’s being deployed against me, so … they stay on the TO&E.”

  “Would we fire back?” Ngo asked. “If Revelen launched on us?”

  Passerini thought about it. “My gut? I don’t think the president would do it, no.”

  “Wow. That’s … I don’t know how to take that.”

  “I doubt that it would matter, in any case,” Passerini said. “It looks like Revelen has a meta at their border that’s keeping out our drones. If they can do that, it’s not a stretch to imagine they could knock our warplanes and nukes out of the sky—or worse, turn them back on us.”

  “Can they … can they really do that?” Ngo asked. “The metahumans?”

  “I don’t know their capability,” Passerini said, “which is a little vexing considering we’ve known metas have been around for a lot longer than the government previously admitted. It’s straining my credulity to think that someone hasn’t assembled a capabilities list somewhere. I mean, I’ve had my people do some preliminary work solely with what we know, but … we don’t have much to work with.”

  “But you have metas on your staff, don’t you?”

  “We have one,” Passerini said. And Chalke damned near lost us that one, he did not bother to say. It still burned him that the FBI Director had gone and co-opted his single metahuman asset and got him arrested and imprisoned.

  “That’s … not much,” Ngo said.

  “Well, he’s useful if we can get him in position in time,” Passerini said, checking his watch. They might just make it, assuming the president didn’t land on him and try to reverse every move he was making. A sudden, uncomfortable silence had fallen over the Situation Room, and Passerini looked around. All eyes were on the monitors.

  He looked up at the screens again, and—boy, that was a surprise.

  That Humvee video Graves had put up had turned into something else entirely. There was no sound, but it was prompting an awful silence because of what was happening onscreen.

  “That is … a hell of a thing,” some lieutenant colonel opined from the planning table.

  “I think that might just be the woman of my dreams,” a brigadier general from the Marine Corps said, watching with some serious enthusiasm.

  “Get in line, boys,” Graves said, “she’s mine.”

  Passerini laughed. He could respect the sentiment because on the screen …

  Sienna Nealon was firing an Mk 19 Humvee mounted grenade launcher into a Revelen army camp, and …

  Damn. That was a hell of a show. And a hell of a lady.

  “Bruno? You there?” Ngo asked.

  “Yeah, I’m here,” Passerini said. “Just watching Ms. Nealon put the hurt on these Revelen bastards. Kinda having a hard time figuring out who to root for in this.”

  “Don’t let the president hear you equivocate,” Ngo said with a trill of amusement. “I doubt he’d be pleased to hear you cheering for public enemy number one.”

  “Well, I find it very difficult to back the side that’s got a bunch of nukes pointed at us,” Passerini said, “over the All-American girl that’s ripping them about eighty new holes.” She landed a shot on a fuel bunker and it went up with a glorious fireball. The whole Situation Room erupted in spontaneous applause.

  “She’s a criminal, Bruno.”

  “Well, it’s like watching The Dirty Dozen,” Passerini said, “except it’s more like The Dirty One. I mean, she keeps this pace up, I might not have to send in a single soldier to resolve this mess. Which would be fine by me.”

  “I wouldn’t go laying any money down on that,” Ngo said.

  “Sir … call incoming from the White House,” Graves said.

  “I gotta let you go,” Passerini said, and sure enough, the phone chirped a second later. “It’s the Commander-in-Chief.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” Ngo said, and then a click.

  “Mr. Secretary,” President Gondry’s voice sounded sharp, like he’d gone and stuck his fingers—or something more delicate—in a bear trap.

  “Mr. President,” Passerini said, br
acing himself.

  “I want you to reverse my previous order,” Gondry said, and boy did it sound like he was building to a full head of steam, “and bring us up to DEFCON 2. Move everything you have into position.” There was a pause as Gondry sucked in a breath and Passerini couldn’t bring himself to, “Sienna Nealon is alive, and we are going to war with Revelen.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

  Sienna

  I couldn’t hear myself sing but I was belting out a rendition of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” as I blazed away with the Mk 19 on the army encampment, which was less an encampment and more like a day headquarters and staging ground for about a hundred of Revelen’s least-fine merc dregs. I did not offer them any warning to speak of, instead rolling up into the middle of the T-intersection in front of their HQ and opening fire on their trailers, vehicles and tents.

  The results were grim … and yet hilarious since I had deemed these men bastards worthy of death. Bodies were flying everywhere, limbs lay scattered on the ground. If I had a conscience for scum-sucking mercs, I would have maybe stopped and taken a real serious assessment of where I was in life that I was killing a hundred human lives from this earth without giving a single damn about it.

  Hell, I was singing as I did it. “Like roaches with the lights coming on!” I shouted with perverse glee as I caught one of the mercs running and turned him into a splatter with my shot.

  But then, I was also blessed with the knowledge that these particular men were of the rape-and-pillage variety, the kind who viewed military service as their path to personal glory. They served their own whims, and their whims were sick, because they were looking for a way to kill human beings within the bounds of law. Mostly.

  Me? I was totally not like that, and definitely did not have any uncomfortable, belly-churning thoughts that I might be hating on these guys so hard because I saw something in them that I despised in myself.