Here it comes, Harmon said.
“Greaaaaaat,” I said, and something touched me right on the midsection, like a poke in the belly. Sharp but short, I looked down, an uneasy feeling at whatever it was. “The hell?”
The pain of the gravel in my back lessened in a second, one of the grains seeming to grow into a boulder and shoving me upright as I shrank, again, down to tiny size. The pain in my abdomen grew more pronounced as I got smaller, the lump manifesting as a human figure, feet on in my stomach.
I lit up and he jumped back, yelping to avoid being burned as I covered myself in a jumpsuit of fire. The sudden addition of flame and the fact that my body had shrunk to his size let me see him, finally, for who he was, even as he stared at me, a perfect standoff.
“Greg Vansen, you dickweed,” I said, suddenly resolved to at least kill his ass before I checked out, “this is all your fault.”
“I had absolutely nothing to do with this,” he said, looking around frantically, “and in fact …” he looked greatly disquieted as he stared around himself, looking at the flaming ruin of the lumberyards, “… I came here to save you.”
I stared at him, he stared at me, and only thing I could think of was: “… Say what?”
49.
Greg
“What are you even doing here?” Sienna asked before she even gave him a chance to clarify his last remarks.
“I told you,” Greg said, burning slightly, and not from the flames around him. He hated being asked the same question more than once. “I’m here to save you.”
She thrust a finger out at him. “Save me? Your pal Sam is the one who damned near killed me here. And you yourself dropped a nuclear bomb on me less than twenty-four hours ago. I ought to skin you and offer it to a microbe as a coat.”
“As much as that might scratch your charitable itch,” Greg said, looking at the pile of burning lumber to his left uneasily, “that would leave you trapped here with a rather sizable police force trying to find you so they can kill you.”
“And that differs from what I’m dealing with now how?” She looked weary enough that he wondered if she’d even be able to walk or fly, though her ensemble of a flaming toga hinted that she was perhaps not utterly exhausted.
“I can get you out of here.” He pointed to a small thing circling slowly around them, the size of a bee.
She peered at it, squinting. “Is … is that your Concorde?”
“On auto-pilot, yes,” Greg said. “We’ll need to shrink down, then I’ll grow it and get us out of here—”
She looked around for a moment, seeming to weigh her options. “Yeah. All right, fine. I accept your temporary truce. Get me out of here in miniature or whatever, because I need a damned nap post haste.”
“Fine,” Greg said, reaching out and touching her on the arm. “Come here,” he said, and he concentrated.
It wasn’t using his powers that taxed him; it was shrinking while guiding them on the appropriate trajectory to end up on top of the Concorde as it slowly orbited, the size of a buzzing insect to them, already shrunken, and thus microscopic to anyone else. He held her securely on the arm, and she let him guide her, flesh extinguished so he could grip her with his gloved hand.
She stared at the leather encased fingers he wrapped around her upper arm. “Good call, bringing the gloves.”
“Preparation,” Greg said simply as he landed them expertly on the top of the Concorde, then shrank them between the plates on a top hatch, then grew them again once inside.
His feet thumped down on the carpeted interior of the Concorde inside the passenger cabin, and he immediately turned to sprint toward the cockpit. Leaving the Concorde circling in the middle of such dangerous environs went against all his instincts, and he swiftly flipped off the autopilot, taking the controls again, and sending the plane skyward.
“How did you find me?” Sienna asked, plopping down in the co-pilot’s seat without even asking, her skin appearing wherever she touched the seat, her flame leotard pulling back to avoid setting the seat on fire.
Greg eyed her, swallowing his irritation at her bare flesh on his seat. Better than burning them up, he supposed. “It was fairly obvious where you would go next. You’d already visited Jon and Theo, after all. Chase was the next logical step.”
“Yeah, but how’d you find me in the middle of a flaming lumberyard?” she said.
He shrugged. “That thing you did earlier, when you crashed my Comanche … it felt like that.”
“Hmph,” she said as he pushed the throttle to maximum and the Concorde started to climb. “Like a voice in your head, telling you what to do?”
“More subtle than that,” Greg said. “Smaller, perhaps … I don’t know how to describe it. There are some leftover blankets from this plane’s days in passenger service in the back if you want to cover yourself. I don’t think I have any clothes that would fit you on the plane.” He did back at home, or ones that could be modified to fit her, but here – well, transporting a naked woman that wasn't his wife was not a contingency he had ever prepared for.
She looked him over. “I dunno, Greg. You look about my size.”
He turned his attention forward, irritation rolling over him. “You might want to strap in. And mind the seatbelts.”
“We can’t leave yet,” Sienna said, tensing, pushing herself out of the seat. “We have to save Friday.”
He couldn’t help it, he took his eyes off the instruments and stared at her, dumbstruck. “… Why would you want to save Friday?”
“Because it’s the best day of the week, duh,” she quipped right back. “You know I’m talking about the guy you’re trying to k—”
“Of course I picked that up,” he said, flushing in annoyance. “I meant … why are you bothering to save him?”
“Because I have to save him,” she said, looking straight ahead again. “Why are you saving me?”
Greg froze, open-mouthed. “… I don’t know,” he finally said. “Your friend, Bruce … his contract was cancelled, at least for me. And I never had one on you.”
“There’s a difference between not killing us and going out of your way to save us,” she said, not letting up from staring at him.
Greg felt his cheeks flaming as he held tight to the controls. Couldn’t she see he was flying a plane? There was no time for silly questions right now.
Though … that, perhaps, was not a silly question. “Because,” he said at last, wrestling a little with the stick as he went for altitude and grew the plane a little to make it easier, goosing it up to the size of a handheld model, “… it felt right.”
“Weird,” she said mockingly. “Friday—Bruce—whatever—he ended up in the woods over there.” She gestured in front of them. “Keep low to avoid the storm of bullets flying around.”
“Roger wilco,” Greg said, shrinking the plane slightly. Taking a bullet at their size would mean complete devastation followed by a probable crash at extremely high velocity. He guided the Concorde through a cloud, speeding it up slightly as the embers of fire floated through the air in front of them, and they emerged out the other side shrunken down again. It was a game, shrinking and growing objects, one that Greg had learned to play masterfully throughout his career, always trying to time it to coincide with when people weren’t looking. That was how one cultivated a reputation as a magician, after all.
“Over there,” Sienna said as they broke out of the black smoke. Trees were down ahead, snapped cleanly at the top, something having plowed through them on its way back to the earth.
The Concorde carried them through the woods, Greg growing it just a little now that they were clear of the lumberyard and the seemingly endless volley of bullets therein. He leaned forward and looked past Sienna; the police perimeter was well back, and he watched a few black-clad figures trying to shuffle by beneath them, completely unaware that their quarry was slipping by overhead, no larger than a bird to them.
“I’m taking us down,” Greg said, bringing
the plane down in a slow spiral toward the earth. “I’ll shrink and go to autopilot. Then I can step out and retrieve him.”
“How the hell do you do that?” Sienna asked. “You can’t fly …”
“I just step out and grow, so the fall becomes a step,” Greg said, matter-of-factly. “Then shrink when I reach him, reduce him along with me, then grow enough to jump to the plane—”
“Sounds complicated,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“It’s easy once you practice,” he said. “Like any complex process, practice makes—”
“Yeah, just go do what you need to do,” she said. “I guess I’ll wait here and … stare out the front window as we go in very tiny circles.”
“Have fun with that,” Greg said and shrank as he leapt for the seam at the front window. He passed through and grew again a second later, once he was clear of the Concorde, taking care not to grow larger than the flight path of the miniaturized plane. That was half the difficulty; staying conscious of small objects that you needed as they moved around a battlefield, and also making sure that any other combatants didn’t run into them. It was for this reason he seldom put anything like the Concorde on autopilot when stepping out. Usually he preferred to land first and place the plane back in its protective case in his pocket before engaging in any sort of fighting.
But, this was a different sort of scenario, and he’d certainly practiced to make sure that he was ready for it.
Greg grew to roughly a foot in height and landed on Friday’s leg, prompting a mild grunt. He then shrank again, and took Friday with him, shrinking the man down to the point where he fit in the palm of Greg’s hand. Greg himself was ant-sized, which made Friday at his current volume somewhat smaller than a grain of sand. “All right,” he said, talking to the insensate figure in his palm as he pulled a small cartridge out of his pocket and expanded it. It was a carrier he’d designed to carry human beings in small form in his pocket, complete with a very tiny oxygen recirculation system with a backup, as well as heavily padded sides to protect against the inevitable bumping that came from being so small and carried on a larger person. “In you go,” he said as he tipped Friday inside and shrank the whole thing back down again, slipping it into his breast pocket and clipping it there, the whole thing now no longer than a pen.
“Well, Greg,” came a drawling, familiar voice from behind him, “I’d ask you what you’re doing there, but I think we both know.” He spun to find Sam standing there, taller than him as almost ever, regarding him with a dangerous look.
“I’d ask you what you’re doing here as well, but we also know, don’t we?” Greg stood up straight and subtly applied a few inches of height. It probably wasn’t subtle to Sam, but being smaller than Sam always made Greg uncomfortable. “You took up my contract with McGarry.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t botched it so darned badly …” Sam shook his head. “I have to thank you, though. McGarry pays real well. I’ve been trying to get into his good graces for years and he’s kept me on the outside. Guess you’ve been his fair-haired boy for so long he’s gotten real used to having a smart, fully-capable Atlas at his fingertips for wetwork, because the minute he was done with you he whistled me right up.”
“Imagine how disappointed he’ll be to learn you’re not that capable,” Greg sniped.
“I may not be quite as fancy as you,” Sam said with a grin to mask that hostility burning in his eyes, “but I know how to get a job done. Like I know, for example, that by smashing your pocket I’m going to win the day.”
“But you’ll have a hell of a time proving it,” Greg said. “And it seems to me you’ve also had a head start violating the same terms of the contract that got me fired—you shrank Sienna Nealon and left her that way. McGarry led me to understand that killing her was a very definite no-no.”
“Awww, I just shrank her for a spell,” Sam said. “She found her own way out, so I don’t know what you’re squawking about. Seemed fine to me.”
“She was about to get killed by the government agents swarming over this place,” Greg said, “but sure, I suppose. ‘Fine’ has many subjective meanings.”
“I’m about to lose patience with you,” Sam said. “You lost the contract. Why are you here grabbing that boy and helping that girl? This ain’t your dogfight, Greg, unless you’re taking on hard luck cases out of the charity of your heart now … and I think we both know you ain’t got a heart.”
“Whereas we both know you don’t have a brain,” Greg stung back, leaping and growing as Sam reached for him. Greg had in his mind the direction the Concorde had been traveling and the rough speed in relation to the size. As he shrank, he found that indeed, he had been right on target, and landed on the body of the plane with a thump before sliding down and shrinking once more, entering through the gap between the airplane body and the passenger door, returning to his normal size a fraction of a second later.
Sienna Nealon looked back down the aisle at him as he landed. “That is a neat, if slightly creepy, trick.”
“You should see what I do for an encore,” he said, unclipping the storage unit containing Friday and offering it to her as he slid back into his seat and fastened the restraints. “You might want to hold on.”
“Why?” She took the cylinder. “Are we about to—hey, is that Sam?”
“Yes.” He took the Concorde off autopilot and pushed the throttle down. He was likely to need the additional speed very, very soon.
“I think he’s—is that a Stinger missile in his hands?” Nealon’s face was pressed up against the glass like she was suctioned to it.
“Almost certainly. Let me know when he fires.” Greg took the stick and started to climb, pressing for altitude as he traded speed for it. He couldn’t quite go supersonic at this size, but that would shortly become irrelevant.
“I see a launch bloom,” Nealon said. “He’s gotta be—I think he’s a little bigger than us … the stinger is streaking toward our engine—”
“Yes, that’s what it does,” Greg said.
“Uh, okay,” Nealon said. “So … what are you going to do about it?”
“Something impressive,” Greg said, already tweaking things more to his liking.
He grew the Concorde, first to the point where it was the size of a model airplane, much, much larger than the insect-size it had been a moment earlier. With the added size transferring to added thrust, it cleared the trees in seconds. That done, he grew it even larger, back to the size of a normal plane and even slightly beyond.
The Concorde blew out of the area as it broke the sound barrier, leaving the clearing—and the airborne Stinger—far, far behind it. The forest receded into a green path that Greg couldn’t see within a couple seconds, even standing up and trying to look back. They were thousands of feet in the sky seconds later, and he started to reduce the size of the Concorde to prevent tracking shortly thereafter.
“That … was … yeah, whoa,” Sienna said, looking back. “How big did you make the Concorde just now? Because it seemed huge.”
“I grew the Concorde—and us—to roughly four times normal size,” Greg said. “It was a precaution.”
She was studying him carefully, putting it together. “Because of the government agents.”
“Because of their bullets,” Greg corrected. “They could have, after all, put a considerable number of holes in the airframe. Increasing the size of the Concorde also increased the scale of the thrust, which allowed for a fast getaway and less time for them to aim at us, albeit at the cost of a larger target for those seconds we were within their range.”
“But their bullets wouldn’t do nearly as much damage to us or the plane at four times normal size,” she said. “Because that’d make me … like … twenty feet tall. A 9mm bullet would be like a pinprick.”
“Exactly,” Greg said.
“Huh,” she settled back in her seat. “So … what do we do now?” Her unease showed clearly on her face, in the way her lips were a stiff line once she
finished speaking.
“We’ll need to change planes soon,” he said. “An abandoned road will do. I have an airframe I’ve modified to look like a Predator drone. Hopefully that will allow us to blend into the background noise as they put up every kind of airplane they’ve got in an effort to hunt you down.”
“Yeah,” she said quietly. “Seems like I’ve really called down the thunder this time.” Her face flickered into irritation. “Thanks for that, by the way.”
He stayed stiff at the controls. “If you’re waiting for me to apologize for not actually killing you or doing you much in the way of actual harm, and then saving your life afterwards … you could be waiting quite a while. If you don’t like me, you may also feel free to step out at any time and take your little friend with you.” He waved a hand at the cylinder she still clutched in her hand.
Sienna stared down at the cylinder. “He’s really in this?” She lifted it up like she was going to give it a shake.
“I wouldn’t do that if you like him alive,” Greg said. “It’s padded, but he’s minuscule, and you have metahuman strength. Turning it into a centrifuge will have predictable results on his flesh and bone.”
“I guess I’ve got to handle him with kid gloves, then,” she said, holding the cylinder daintily. “So … what else is new?”
“What’s new is I just saved your life,” Greg said, shrinking the Concorde as he spied a country lane in the distance. It was paved, and would do nicely for a landing strip. He could feel her glare burning into the side of his head. “And that … is very, very new … at least to me.”
50.
Sienna
Riding along with Greg Vansen was a trip, and I mean that in the sense of the word that is very literal—we were riding, in a shrunken plane, across the country—and also in the way that everything was extremely, exceptionally weird.
Small Things (Out of the Box Book 14) Page 26