Dreadnought

by April Daniels

  And yeah, I am bothered. I’m more than bothered. I’m pissed and scared and I feel lost. But I’m not shattered. Last night, I expected to wake up broken, nothing more than a torn-up, chewed-out, smaller half of what used to be a person. But I feel whole. Really, completely whole. Strip away everything: my house, my stuff, my family. Strip away the Legion, and Calamity, and my secret identity. Everything. What’s left? What’s left are the things I can count on. I have my body, my powers, and my freedom. Maybe that will be enough. It will have to be.

  For the first time in my life, I am completely in charge of myself.

  With that realization comes a misty relief that settles in the bottom of my chest. It’s over. All that shit with Mom and Dad—it’s done. My whole life has been leading up to this moment, and now there’s nothing else they can do to me. No more lies, no more pretending, no more shouting. No more pain. I’m free. Whatever else will suck about this week, I’m free.

  My phone is complaining of a low battery when I check to see if I can get a signal up here. Damn. I shut it down. Should have turned it off last night. Oh well. Take it as a lesson.

  I press the blister for the throwaway camo, and the emerald of my suit shifts and flows into the fuzzy grays and blacks. It’s best at night, but I’m going back into the city and every bit helps. If you asked me what I’m preparing for, why I’m concerned about being spotted, I wouldn’t be able to give you an answer. It just feels like the right thing to do. The smart thing. I’ve got to be smart now, and cautious, all the time. There’s nothing to fall back on anymore.

  I need a plan. First, food. My body is astounding and superhuman in all sorts of ways, but I still need to eat as much as anyone else. Once I’ve had a meal, I can see about getting my phone charged. There are some calls I need to make once I’m back in range of a cell tower. I think I can trust Valkyrja to help me, but I don’t want to go back to Legion Tower. Graywytch is there, and I’m not ready to face her again yet.

  There’s no rush to get back in town, and I’ve got plenty of thinking to do, so I get up to about five hundred feet and tool along at a leisurely hundred miles an hour. Rural Washington slips past beneath me, green and sleepy. Fields and forests are shot through with asphalt ribbons and tiny model houses. People think the world looks small when you get up high, but that’s not true. It looks huge. The horizon leaps away from you, further and further the higher you go. The world is gigantic from up here.

  About thirty miles out of town I start overflying the first suburbs of New Port. Our city is enormous, but dense, and even this close there are long stretches of forest dropped right in between, for example, a high school and a strip mall. A diner seems to call my name, but I have no idea how I’m going to pay for food. I’m not too proud to panhandle, but dressed the way I am, I don’t think I’d have any luck. The diner passes beneath me and away and I fly on, trying to come up with something. Three or four miles later, it hits me that I’ve got this backward. I shouldn’t be trying to get food and then call Valkyrja. I should call Valkyrja and she can bring me food. I feel like an idiot for taking this long to figure that out, but at least I got there before I did something stupid.

  This far into suburbia, I’m bound to be near a cell tower. I turn my phone back on, hoping I can get one quick call out before it dies. Immediately, I get text message notifications. I come to a stop in midair and scroll through them. One from Doctor Impossible and one from Valkyrja.

  Doc Impossible: danny, please come to tower. calamity is awake but wont talk to us. shes asking for you

  Valkyrja: How do you fare, young champion? I have returned from my journey, and would welcome a visit from you, should you care to give me the pleasure of your company.

  “We have gone backwards,” I mutter to myself as I pull up Valkyrja’s number for a voice call. I don’t have the charge needed to keep my phone on while I wait for a text message reply, but her phone rings once, and then I get the most ornate and formal voicemail greeting I have ever heard. Frowning, I try Doc Impossible’s number, and get a (much less flowery) voicemail message as well. Since they’re not answering their phones, the best I can do is shoot them a message and then power my phone up for a few moments every half hour or so until I get a response. I tap out quick texts to both of them saying my parents kicked me out, that I have no food or money, and I’ll be waiting for them on the roof of the main library downtown. When I try to mention that Graywytch is a doxxing asshole, the keyboard on my phone stops recognizing my inputs. With a sigh, I send the message. Maybe I can pantomime it or something.

  Maybe I’ll need to grow up and go to Legion Tower in person, but I’m hoping that won’t be necessary. I’m not sure what I’ll do if I see Graywytch again, but I think there’s a real possibility I might try to pulverize her on sight. There’s something else, too. The Tower is their ground, and now that I’m on my own, I feel reluctant to go anywhere that’s not neutral territory.

  I slip the phone back into the little pocket on my belt, snap the flap shut, and boost for speed toward downtown New Port. The city’s outer districts snap by beneath me, and I peel into a circling dive around an office tower to come at the library. The looming neo-Gothic building seems somehow even more imposing and fortresslike from the air when you can see how both of its wings spread and then double back on themselves.

  The roof is surprisingly steep and made of slate, with blisters of windows and stonework erupting like barnacles. At the center of the building, the roof levels off and there’s a shallow depression with access hatches and air conditioners tucked away from the sight of the street. I find a heating duct that’s reasonably clean of pigeon crap and get comfortable.

  This may take a while. My stomach growls. The minutes begin to slide by, and I try not to think too hard about the pizza Doc Impossible still owes me. But that leads me to think about how I’m not thinking about the pizza, which inevitably returns to the pizza itself, and so I start trying to figure out how I’m going to get my school supplies from the house so I can go back to school tomorrow. I’ve still got another year before I can test out, and until that happens I’d like to avoid tanking my GPA.

  At first I don’t recognize the sound over the noise of the city. Engines running, tires hissing, and the faint suggestion of human voices wafting up from the ground level. But then it comes again. Deeper. Louder. I stand up and cock my head, trying to figure out which direction it’s coming from. Again the noise floats over the city, and I think I hear the sound of human voices hitch for a moment as people start to notice.

  Explosions.

  Big ones.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Gnarled fingers of black smoke curl like some enormous claw rising from the train yards. In the eastern part of New Port, a few miles from the shore of Puget Sound, sits Grand Union Station, where row after row of train platforms wait for passengers to board. But a mile south of that there is an industrial rail junction that makes Grand Union Station look like a model train set. Cargo trains load there, on braided lines of rails that split and split again until dozens of miles of track lie next to each other in the space of a single stadium-sized loading port. An entire freeway off-ramp is dedicated to the cargo truck traffic that comes to load and unload the thousands of boxcars that roll and click through the junction every day. It’s here the fires are burning.

  Hundreds of boxcars crowd the lines, and a double handful of engines sit puttering diesel fumes into the air. And there, in the center of the crowded rail yard, a twisted battlefield. Trains have been derailed. An engine is set up on its nose, leaning against the crumpled side of a boxcar next to it. A liquid storage tank on one of the cars has burst open. Everything within thirty yards is coated in some kind of sticky, burning substance that gives off coal-black smoke. Other cars add more smoke to the air, with their cargoes burning crimson, howling for more oxygen. Flat cars, stock cars, boxcars, and more are all scattered and twisted and stamped flat in places. A path of destruction fifty feet wide meanders wes
tward from the disaster’s epicenter toward the edge of the yard. People are dodging among the broken trains and twisted track, running and screaming and shouting into radios.

  From fifty feet up, the smoke stings my eyes and nose. I’m trying to get a sense of where the greatest need is, but it’s so hard to see what’s going on. Everything is chaos. There—a clump of rail workers huddling against an overturned boxcar. A pool of flaming liquid is seeping across the ground toward them, and they’re penned against the wreckage. I drop from the sky and they look at me like I’m an angel.

  “Get clear of the car!” I shout as I slip my fingers into a gap between the crumpled side of the train car and the ground. It’s heavy, damn heavy. My fingers strain and my legs shake, but I get it up to waist height. With one convulsive heave, I hoist it up past my belt line and reset my hands to get it over my head. Metal screams and bends, and the car starts to slip out of my grasp, sliding away from me and back down to the ground. I take a desperate step forward to get under it, and then another, my hands walking inches-deep divots in the side of the car until I’ve got it mostly balanced over my head on shaking arms.

  “Go! Get out of here!” I shout. I count heads as the rail workers slip past me, making sure all five are clear before I let it come smashing down.

  “You guys okay?”

  “Yeah, but I heard gunfire over there,” says one of them, pointing deep into the heart of the destruction.

  Gunfire? The hell? I get up in the air fast, looking around for where the destruction began. A man is at the epicenter; he looks like he’s in his forties. He wears a blue jumpsuit with a black bulletproof vest over it. In big yellow letters the word TREASURY is stamped across his back. His rifle is lying on the ground next to him, and he’s down in the gravel and the mud, trying to shift a twisted lump of steel off the leg of one of his coworkers, another man, somewhat younger, also dressed in overalls and armor.

  I land next to them and grunt out a greeting as I slip my fingers under the black and twisted steel. It’s pretty light, only a thousand pounds or so. The treasury guard looks at me in surprise for a half second, and then quickly pulls his partner free.

  “What’s going on?” I ask him, as he bends over his friend’s leg to inspect the damage. The guy who was trapped is clenched tight with pain. His leg isn’t ever going to be the same again. “People say there was gunfire.”

  “They robbed the cash train,” says the older one absently. “Dammit. Bill, this break is pretty bad; we gotta get you out of here.”

  “What’s a cash train?”

  “Look, kid, if you want to help, check on the other side of this wreckage,” he says, looking up. “I think some of my guys went down over there.”

  “Tell me what happened,” I say, getting a little frustrated. If I don’t know what is going on, there’s not much I can do to help. That’s obvious, right?

  He looks at me with his lips pressed tight for a moment. I don’t budge, so he finally says, “It was five guys in big suits, hypertech stuff.” He says this and my blood freezes in place. Utopia has started whatever she’s planning. We were supposed to have another week. “They knew we were running a few carloads of old bills out to the treasury incinerator to get taken out of circulation. That’s supposed to be secret, but they were waiting inside some boxcars for us. We stopped to refuel and that’s when they hit us, made off with about a half billion dollars. Now, if we’re done with show and tell, could you maybe go see if my people are dead or not?”

  “Right.” My voice doesn’t shake with the terror that’s coursing through me, which is a small blessing. “Back soon.”

  I don’t find anybody else. Either they’re smashed flat under hundreds of tons of steel, or they’re making a trip the long way around to regroup with their boss. I make a low, slow pass by him to shout the info down, and then I light out for the edge of the rail yard. This can’t be all that Utopia was planning. This is bigger than a robbery. It has to be. Dreadnought dead and Calamity maimed, just for some money? I won’t believe that’s true. I’ve got to warn people.

  Fire trucks and police cars are starting to nose onto the train tracks, and at the loading dock I find a harried police lieutenant in the middle of a throng of officers, who are using the hood of a police car as a table for a map. I’m a little ways out from them, and a few feet in the air, so they haven’t noticed me yet. I need to warn them, but something holds me back. The treasury guard’s reaction has me shaken. What am I even doing here? What if I’m just in the way?

  Another explosion ripples out in the distance. The cops go silent for a moment, and then the fear sets in. I can sense the moment when they realize the devastation hasn’t ended. It’s just getting started. Over their radios I hear the panic building. The entire police radio net is a snarl of conflicting reports and pinched voices. It sounds like there’s a whole army out there, but nobody can agree on what it looks like. Again and again and again the only thing that is consistent in the reports is that the police desperately need Legion backup.

  And they’re not getting any.

  The cops need help. They need something that will put them in control again, give them a way to see how they’re going to do their jobs. They don’t need some kid nobody’s heard of or has any reason to trust. Right now I’m just some loser in throwaway colors. I look at the inside of my left wrist, where the color blisters stand out. With a trembling hand, I put my thumb on the one that sets the suit to Dreadnought’s colors, and I push it in until it clicks. The camo pattern swirls and fades away to solid dark blue and clean, glittering white.

  My feet tap down on the cement, and as I approach the knot of police, some start to take notice. One by one they stop speaking and step aside until the lieutenant looks up, confused. They’re all staring at me, and I start to think maybe this was a big mistake.

  “Are you having trouble getting through to the Legion, too?” My voice sounds like it’s coming from someone else.

  “They’re not answering our calls,” he says. That’s unheard of. The Legion is always ready to defend New Port; everybody knows that.

  “Mine, too. There are some guards from the treasury department back there in the rail yard,” I say, sounding much more confident than I feel. “They need an ambulance, and they also said that five guys with hypertech made off with a half billion dollars. Your men shouldn’t approach them.”

  “This is our town, kid. We don’t let people bust it up.” The gathered cops give a murmur of agreement. Brave, but, wow. Just…just amazingly stupid. Have they not seen what those guys did to the rail yard that’s, like, right over there?

  “They’ll be in my way,” I say evenly.

  Staring down a cop turns out to be a lot harder than I thought it would, but after a long moment the lieutenant nods and gives a few terse orders into his radio. Nothing ironclad, no call to retreat or anything, but he tells them they should give the capes room to work. I notice he doesn’t use the word that’s hanging in the air.

  “Get everyone to the shelters, and keep trying to get through to the Legion.” I turn and step away to get space to take off. “Tell them Dreadnought wants backup downtown.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Air raid sirens rise in wailing crescendos over the city. Like all big cities since Mistress Malice’s war for world conquest, New Port has bomb shelters everywhere for people to hide in if a supervillain attacks. But not everybody can always get to a shelter, and it’s been over ten years since anyone had to use them in this town. A lot of people might have forgotten what they’re supposed to do when the sirens go off.

  From five hundred feet it’s easy to trace the path the thieves are taking. I just have to follow the wreckage and the burning cars. They must be hauling ass to have covered so much ground so fast. They’re headed straight for downtown.

  As the trail of devastation reaches the city core, it begins to meander through the canyons of stone and steel and glass. The damage is the worst at intersections. Burned-out ca
rs and flipped trucks litter the road. There are shot-out windows and burning buildings. I see the first bodies there, lying sprawled out in puddles of blood, shockingly red in some places, so dark they’re almost black in others. A few cars are trying to turn around and escape the city, but it’s gridlock. Most people have abandoned their vehicles and fled on foot. A lot of them are still out on the street, running in confusion or walking around dazed. Some are trying to help the injured, and at some of the buildings marked with the discreet symbol of a bomb shelter, a few are holding the doors open and shouting for everyone to come inside.

  The news choppers are all orbiting the downtown core, each jockeying to get the best angle on whatever is happening. I can tell the exact moment one of them spots me, because the nose-mounted camera turret on one of them snaps over to track me, and a few moments later three other choppers are banking hard to get pictures of me. Uh, great. No, really. Whose dumb idea was it to wear Dreadnought’s colors, anyhow?

  The sounds of violence are more distinct now. The burping roar of machine guns echoes around corners. Explosions, and the flat hissing sizzles of rockets. I’m close now, but it’s hard to tell where the noise is coming from. The sounds bounce off the buildings until it sounds like they’re now to my left, then to my rear, now to my front. I round a corner, and I’m almost surprised to find the source of the noise. As I see them, my breath catches in my throat.

  When the guard said they had hypertech suits, I thought he meant, like, armor and maybe fancy guns. These things are walking tanks. If I stood next to one, I might be chest-high to its kneecap. The roughly humanoid machines are piled with thick slabs of armor, but they are not ponderous. They bound forward like grasshoppers on screaming jets of fire. They bristle with weapons. Cannons, machine guns, racks of missiles and rockets, and the short, stubby housings of high-powered lasers. None of them are alike, differing in shape, size, and armament. Each is a different color: green, blue, yellow, and red. Two of them have hands ending in stubby-fingered claws, and between them they carry an entire boxcar. It is dented and smudged with soot, but it’s holding up well enough for them to leap forward fifty feet at a time on pillars of smoke and flame. The other two are out-riding, leaping ahead and behind, to the left and the right, switching up and keeping vigilant at all quarters. Some of Utopia’s thefts suddenly make sense. She was stocking up to build herself an army.