Dreadnought

by April Daniels

  Calamity is quiet for a moment. She sucks in a breath as if she’s about to speak, and then hesitates. The rain starts to patter down on us, and she pulls her jacket closed tighter. Something I’ve said seems to have unsettled or confused her. “For what it’s worth,” she says finally, “I think you deserve to call yourself whatever you want.”

  “Thanks.”

  The cops arrive in a swirl of flashing lights. They get out of their cars and rush around, securing the scene. Calamity and I melt back into the shadows on the rooftop and start moving out of the area.

  “We should get home and get some shuteye. Tomorrow, we’re going to take the training wheels off,” says Calamity. Her eyes are alight with excitement. “Might be you’ll feel a lot better about calling yourself Dreadnought after you help me take down Utopia.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Another note calling me to the office shows up when I’m in class. I walk through the empty halls of school with a cold runnel of dread pouring down my spine. Maybe Dad changed his mind. But stalling won’t make it better, so I walk onward. When I get to the office, my parents aren’t there. A slender man in a nice suit is standing in front of the receptionist’s desk. He turns to see me, and I get a strange sensation of déjà vu, like I’ve met him before.

  “Hello, Danny,” he says. It’s Chlorophyll, but he’s not green. Or, no, he…what?

  “Uh, hi.”

  “Come with me,” he says. When he moves, it’s like the pigment on his skin is a half second behind. As we leave the office, I notice no one else in the room was doing anything. They were only standing or sitting, staring at nothing.

  “Are they going to be okay?” I ask as we walk down the hall.

  “Of course,” he says with a smile. “Although they might start sneezing a lot later today.”

  “So what are you here for?”

  “Let’s talk in my car. It’s more private.”

  We walk quickly out of the school and into the parking lot. My head is swiveling to make sure nobody sees us, but Chlorophyll moves with supreme confidence. We get to his car, a nice blue sedan with tinted windows. He bee-beeps the locks open and we settle into the front seats. This car reeks of money. Soft dark leather, real hardwood trim, everything. Being on an established superteam is a lucrative gig.

  “So what’s this about?” I ask, voice flat.

  Chlorophyll looks embarrassed for a moment, and then says, “First, I wanted to apologize.”

  Which instantly puts me on guard. In my experience, apologies are weapons. “I’m listening.”

  “When I said it didn’t matter if you were Dreadnought or not, so long as we had your powers, that was out of line. The mantle comes with the title, and you deserved more respect than that. I’m sorry.”

  “Um. Thanks.”

  Chlorophyll nods, but stays silent.

  “So, uh…is that it? I’ve got to get back to class.”

  “No. I also came to ask you to reconsider joining the Legion. We really could use someone like you.”

  I look away from him. Being pressured is always uncomfortable for me. It means I have to stand up for myself or let myself get pushed into something, and both of those options feel horrible. It’s always a no-win scenario. “I’m not sure I really want to.”

  “Danny, this is a huge opportunity for you. You’d be coming in at the top of your field. You want to talk funding? We have expense accounts bigger than most people’s yearly pay, and that’s on top of our stipends. And it’s good work, too. Important work. We save lives. You could be doing something great, be someone that nobody else could hope to be. It’s an amazing life, and I think you’d be good at it.”

  “And what if I want to be an accountant?”

  Chlorophyll laughs, and I stare at him until he stops. “You’re serious.”

  “Not really, but still. What if I don’t want to be a superhero? I finally have a body I can stand living in. Maybe I just want to spend some time catching up on what I’ve missed.”

  “Ah,” he says delicately. “Well, there have certainly been plenty of women who have become capes. I don’t see how being one precludes the other.”

  “Well, maybe, but, anyway, I’m too young.”

  He shrugs. “You won’t be forever. You’re what, fifteen? Eighteen will come up faster than you think.”

  “So? I still can’t join right now.”

  “That doesn’t mean you can’t make any choices,” Chlorophyll says. He reaches into his jacket, pulls out an envelope, and holds it out to me. “This is a statement of intent. If you sign this, when you come of age you’ll automatically be inducted into the Legion.”

  “I’m not ready to make up my mind.”

  He holds it out for me. “You can still change it later, but this sets you up for not having any hassles down the road no matter what you choose.”

  This doesn’t feel right. There’s got to be a hook in there somewhere. “What about Graywytch?”

  Chlorophyll smiles a funny kind of smile, as if suddenly uncomfortable. “What about her?”

  After taking a deep breath, I manage to say it straight out: “If you want me, then you need to kick her off the team.”

  “I…that’s not really how things work.”

  “Okay,” I say, not taking the envelope. “Then I guess I’m not joining.”

  Chlorophyll presses his lips together for a long moment. “Danny, we need Dreadnought. The world needs Dreadnought. If someone like Mistress Malice ever shows up again, we’re the ones who have to deal with it. If people were dying, could you really just step away from that?”

  “No! I wouldn’t just—I’d want to help.” Wouldn’t I? Or maybe I’d just be too scared.

  “Well, this”—he smacks the envelope on the gear dashboard—“is how you can help. Every day we get out of bed knowing that someone like her could turn up. We need you suited up and getting experience as fast as we can. Because when the next big one shows up, we’re not going to be ready.” As Chlorophyll speaks, his skin and hair start to fade back to green. Whatever he’s doing to make himself look normal is beginning to slip. “We’re never ready for someone like that; that’s why they’re so dangerous. And every day you spend with a cape on your shoulders is one more day of preparation we have against the next time something like that happens.”

  And, you know, it’s not like he’s talking nonsense. Nobody has quite gotten up to the level that she did, but there have been some really close calls in the last half century. It will happen again. Sooner or later, someone will take another stab at conquering the world. That’s why all the big cities still have public bomb shelters now, and why superteams with government contracts are so heavily funded.

  “I know Graywytch is being difficult,” he says quietly. “I don’t agree with what she thinks, but sometimes we’ve got to put aside our personal issues. Lives are at stake here, Danny. I know you want to do the right thing.”

  I sink deeper into the leather seat. Maybe I’m being really selfish. But when I reach for the envelope I remember the shame that dogs me whenever I think about how I can’t stand up to Dad. I pull my hand back.

  “What if I’m not good enough to be a cape?” I ask quietly. “What if I’m a coward?”

  He swallows, won’t meet my eyes. “Then, maybe you should…we need someone to be Dreadnought, so—”

  “No!” I shout, suddenly livid. “I’m not giving up the mantle! I’m not going to die for you just because you asked nicely!”

  “Danny, wait!” he says, but I’m already out the door. I slam it behind me, and it pops back open, latches blown to hell, hinges bent out of true. Screw him. Screw the Legion. I owe Dreadnought, but his friends? His friends are assholes.

  • • •

  Calamity and I both get swamped with homework, so our campaign to find and capture Utopia has to be put on hold until the weekend. Reading about Andrew Jackson’s kitchen cabinet is an intensely surreal kind of frustration when you know you should be tracki
ng down a supervillain instead. It gives me more time to practice with my powers, at least. I buy a little bouncy ball out of a vending machine at the drugstore next to school and spend about an hour each night bouncing it around my room and watching the patterns of its momentum and impacts in the lattice. A few times I try to grab the strings of their momentum, the way I did with the airliner, but I can’t quite get it to work. Maybe they’re too small, or moving too fast, or maybe it was just a fluke and I won’t be able to do it again.

  Finally, we both get ahead enough in our work that we’re able to spend a few hours caping. Calamity taps on my window at the agreed hour, and I’m already wearing the suit. She beckons me to follow her. After days of rain, the weather is clear tonight, leaving the sky black and the ground dark. We slip a ways down the alley and find a dumpster to hide behind before we talk.

  “I’ve been doing some bookwork.” Calamity clicks on a small flashlight with a red filter and holds out a sheaf of papers. “This here is all that’s publicly known about Utopia.”

  It’s a detailed dossier on Utopia. Every known sighting, every known associate, even a section on estimated capabilities and rumors. It’s not a long article. “Where did you get this?”

  “There’s a wiki for everything if you know the right passwords. Anyhow, the main thing to know is that as far as anyone can tell she’s only been active since 2011, and for most of that time, she mainly provided hypertech support to larger jobs organized by more established villains. That’s the rumor, anyway. She’s all but anonymous most of the time.” As Calamity narrates, I skim through the important parts of the printout. There’s a photo of her, in surprisingly high resolution. Utopia is not a tall woman, maybe five and a half feet if she stands up real straight. Her body is made of plastic and steel. Her torso is wrapped in a faceted corset that rises to meet two thick slabs of flat armor over her chest. Her legs aren’t quite human—not like they’ve got a second joint or anything, but their proportions are all wrong, longer than they should be and bulging around the calves. Her fiber-optic hair is short and dark in a pageboy cut, and arms that are obviously robotic but designed to look mostly human.

  Her list of known crimes is relatively short and sweet. She seems picky about what kind of work she takes. “What about this job last year?”

  “The NASA lab raid?” Calamity steps close beside me to see where I’m pointing.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s the only time she’s known to have worked solo until she rode into New Port and shot Dreadnought.”

  “What was the lab researching?”

  “They were mighty curious about some chunks of that asteroid Northern Union stopped last year.” Northern Union is the international team that covers North America, and the Legion Pacifica provided a lot of the NU’s muscle before Dreadnought died. For all intents and purposes, sometimes the Legion was Northern Union. “She made off with all the samples, but nobody really understands why she’d want ’em.”

  “Do you know what she was doing on the day she killed Dreadnought?” I ask. The memories come back sharp and hard. The guilt follows.

  “I am not possessed of any firm notions, no,” says Calamity. “The news says the place she hit was a software development shop. Their website says they do medical-grade software, but nobody answered the phone when I called. Probably still closed for repairs.”

  “If Utopia does hypertech, why is she bothering with a baseline shop?”

  “That had struck me as eccentric as well.”

  But wait. Doctor Impossible and Carapace use baseline tech in their project. Doc said they were trying to make the technology generalizable. “Maybe she’s trying to look for a way to bridge the gap between her hypertech and baseline tech, for some reason,” I say.

  “Possible. Difficult, though.”

  “Let’s go check it out.”

  “Can’t. I tried,” says Calamity. “They had an entire floor, and the elevator to that part of the building is locked off.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of using the elevator.”

  • • •

  The shattered windows are gaping holes in the building’s side. The shredded ribbons of the blinds wave gently in the night breeze. Calamity is rigid under my hands. I’m carrying her by her armpits, and since we left the ground she hasn’t stopped praying under her breath. We glide into the building and I gently set her down before touching down next to her.

  “There,” I say. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  “Maybe we can find another way down.” Sarah is not doing the old-timey voice right now.

  Shattered glass cracks under our feet. Calamity clicks her flashlight on again and plays the red beam across the room. There’s burnt-out office furniture and smashed computers everywhere. Everything within six feet of the windows is still damp from the rain.

  “What are we looking for?” I ask.

  “This was your brilliant notion,” says Calamity. “You tell me.”

  “Um. Well, let’s see what she was doing up here.”

  Deeper into the building, past shattered cubicles and blasted walls, we start seeing evidence of workshops and laboratories. The rubble is inches thick on the ground, but in the few clear spots we can see sooty linoleum on the floor. The twisted mass of something that might have once been an MRI machine lies broken on the ground.

  My heart sinks. I don’t know what I expected. Maybe a big flashing sign saying THIS WAY TO THE CLUES. But I owe Dreadnought so much. Even if I’m not good enough to make good on the debt, I’ve got to try.

  “Look here,” says Calamity, as she pulls something from the rubble. It’s a complicated tangle of wires that are studded throughout a piece of cloth.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know, but there’s about ten of them here in this little chasm.” The way two broken walls lean against each other has created a sort of cave from which Calamity pulled the…thingy thing. She unfolds the cloth entirely, and it appears to be a skullcap of some kind. “Was that an MRI machine in that last room?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Then between this and that I think we can make a leap and say these fellas were interested in brains.”

  The facts loom over me, incomprehensible and yet somehow urgent. It feels like getting hit with a final exam I haven’t studied for. “So first she knocks over a lab studying bits of an asteroid, and then she hits a place doing neurology research. How does that make sense?”

  Calamity shrugs. “Maybe she’s got attention deficit disorder?”

  On a hunch I take a look at the lattice around here, and the bottom falls out of my stomach. “Calamity, something’s wrong here.”

  A revolver is in her hand almost before I’m finished speaking. “What is it?”

  “The lattice…it’s been torn.”

  “What in hell is that supposed to mean?” asks Calamity, tension unwinding from her shoulders.

  “I mean…I can sort of see the back side of reality, like it’s a net of light, and everything is just a tangle in the lattice. It’s where I get my powers. I’ve never seen the end of a thread before but now…” But now there’s a big tear, right across the floor. The ends seem frayed, and they leak sparks of heat and potential. They wiggle and squirm. Nausea begins to swell in my stomach, horror like cold grease settling in every tissue of my body. If I step a few feet to the side, I can get a different angle on it, and I see that it’s a laser-straight line starting near the middle of the building and shooting out the window, where it eventually fades away in the distance. Another rent in the lattice sweeps across the room, chest high, a broad slash in the fabric of the world. “Before he died, Dreadnought said Utopia had some kind of new weapon. I think…I think it’s a gun that unmakes reality.”

  “Oh. Well. That’s new.”

  • • •

  It takes me a few minutes to settle myself enough to fly us back down to Calamity’s bike. I can’t get the image of those shredded reality strings out of my head
. It’s wrong for something like that to be possible. It’s wrong in a way I can’t describe to someone who hasn’t worn the mantle. Everyone is better off not knowing. I wish I didn’t have to know.

  “We need to tell the Legion about this.”

  “Screw the Legion.” Calamity takes off her hat and stows it in an aerodynamic storage container bolted to the back of her bike. “Utopia is ours.”

  “Calamity, this is serious.” I need to make her understand. This is way bigger than we thought it would be. “That gun of hers is a crime against reality. They’re looking for her too, and if they find her they need to know what they’re going up against.”

  “I thought they didn’t want you to be caping in throwaway colors,” she says.

  “Yeah, well. Crap.” I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe I should tell them anyway, and—no. No, that’s a bad idea. Saving the jetliner is one thing, but Magma specifically told me not to do any kind of investigation. If they knew I was caping behind their backs, they wouldn’t trust me anymore. They’d know that I’m not good enough for my powers. That I don’t deserve them. Graywytch would turn them all against me.

  “They know to be careful. She killed Dreadnought, so they won’t take any chances.” She puts her helmet on and straddles her bike. “We’ll run it from our end, and they’ll take it from theirs.”