Wearing the Cape 4: Small Town Heroes

by Marion G. Harmon

  “It can be, ma’am. Not fatal, but if something comes in on top of you then you get displaced pretty hard. You’re here to use the phone? Right through those doors.”

  I thanked him and went. Another sailor—Warrant Officer Clark according to her insignia and patch—waited at the door and I guessed the US Marshals only dealt with incoming security. She greeted me with a “Right this way,” and led me down a wide windowless hall. Despite the air conditioning, the humidity and the seacoast smell they couldn’t completely scrub out told me I was definitely back in Cuba.

  “Security already has your biometric information, ma’am.” She stopped in front of a heavy door and palmed the lock. “You’ll be able to use any booth phone and computer. All calls are monitored. Anything you choose to upload will be scanned, as will anything you download. You can take cleared files back with you on the provided flash drives.”

  “Is this really the only way to call out?”

  “For texting and email we have the repeater service between the pocket and the world. Scanned for content of course, but you barely notice the lag even if you know about it. Here you go, ma’am.”

  The room she’d led me into was one long bay with another door at the other end. Booths ran along each wall, twenty to a side. Sliding doors gave privacy to anyone in a booth, with a light over the frame telling you which were occupied. Only six were in use now.

  Clark palmed the terminal in the closest empty booth and closed the door on me with a polite “Use the door at the far end when you’re finished.” I listened to the sound of her retreating footsteps, barely more audible than the murmurs of the other callers. Without my super-duper hearing I wouldn’t have heard them at all.

  Okay then.

  The Dome dispatcher who answered recognized my voice and code and forwarded me instantly. One ring…

  “Hope! Where are you?”

  “Brigadoon.”

  “What? Oh. Oh that’s bad.” Shell’s mom hadn’t been into all things Broadway and Hollywood Musical like my mom was, but she’d probably looked it up on Wikipedia and read the whole entry between her “What?” and her “Oh.”

  “Sorry.” It really was a bad joke, but I couldn’t keep the giggle in as the knot of anxiety in my gut loosened. “I’m staying a few streets over from the water tower. You’re here, too. It’s all classified.”

  “Shut the front door!”

  But she didn’t sound shocked. “Shell…”

  “Okay, I knew about her government job and that she was ‘out of range’. She made me swear not to pry and we worked up five unbreakable texting codes to make sure the DSA wasn’t just using the job as bait to lock her up somewhere and empty her head or examine her side of our neural link—we were careful.”

  “So you’re linked now?” And here I’d been worried that Shelly wasn’t joining us through Shell in our cyber-neural link because the two of them had issues. Instead she was good to go, just blocked by her secretly living in another universe.

  No, I wasn’t upset about being left in the dark at all.

  Shell didn’t give me time to brood. “Like psychic twins whenever she’s not ‘covered’—I just hadn’t known she was where we were looking for, what are the odds? So what’s going on out there? I haven’t been able to reach you since the plane—which, considering you’re with Shelly is, well, duh.”

  “It looks like I’m here until the fire starts or we stop the threat. Tell everybody I’m sorry? I’m sure Blackstone already knows, but… What’s happening? Should I be here? I wish—” I wished Jacky was here. Or Blackstone. Nobody else was as good at the twisty kind of thinking that the situation screamed for—although it looked like Shelly might be learning it.

  “Everything’s happening.” I could hear the laugh in her voice. “And nothing you could do about it even if you were here.”

  “Powerteam?”

  “Uhuh. Legal Eagle got a court order against them and they’ve taken down the edited preview video, but it’s still all over the net. Pirated. You know.”

  Unfortunately I did. Hardcore cape-watchers everywhere would have copied the files. They would enjoy eternal life in personal computers and on international servers beyond the reach of any court orders.

  “So we’ve gone ahead and cut our own little home movie from the Dispatch footage.” Her voice cranked up to gleeful. “The download demand almost crashed our server.”

  “Oh. Oh boy.” I covered my eyes, not sure whether to laugh or cry.

  “Yup. Can’t say that it makes you look, you know, on top of things, but it definitely shows who started it!”

  “That’s…” That was alright, actually. I could live with looking stupid if it helped get the team off the hook. “Right. So okay, maybe it’s best I’m not there.”

  “Definitely. And the whole assault thing with Litner? The sleaze got some great shots of us looking shocked and pissed off, and yeah the tabloids are running with it. But!” she kept going over my groan, “Between the Bee’s testimony and the valet attendant that saw it all, you’re solid. And do you think he’s going to go after Annabeth for assault? Yeah, right.”

  Right indeed. All she’d have to do was sit in the witness stand and cry and any jury would spontaneously award her a million dollars. And probably rush out of the jury box to lynch Litner—there wouldn’t be anything left for Dane to finish. And was it wrong that just thinking about that made me feel better?

  “And what about the Bees? How are they?” How is Julie?

  “Yeah… Julie’s…” I knew that tone.

  “What did you say to her?”

  “Hey, I went and saw her like you asked! Okay, I might have told her how pissed you were that they’d kept you out of the loop. Hope?”

  Banging my head against the side of the booth didn’t help at all.

  “Really? What part of that is ‘Tell her everything’s alright?’ Okay— That’s…that’ll do. I’ll text later. I’ve got to go, okay?”

  “Okay. Give me my best. Love you.”

  “Always. Take care of everybody.”

  We hung up and I sat for a moment to catch my breath, proud that I’d managed to keep from asking how Brian was doing with Kindrake. It really was all good news. Really. And the Navy would be able to get the dent out of the booth wall. Five breaths later I dialed again. One ring, two…

  “Yes?”

  “Hello, Mom?”

  * * *

  “Ma’am? If you could come with me?”

  Stepping out of the booth, I hadn’t expected to find Warrant Officer Clark waiting for me.

  “Is there a problem?” My talk with Mom had been…fun. Like always, she had been bravely supportive of what I was doing, and like always I was left feeling wrung out, an awful, awful person for risking myself and making my parents worry. I couldn’t handle any more problems right now.

  “No ma’am, but the station CO would like to talk to you.”

  She took me through the far door, but instead of following the green line labeled “Littleton” she led me through guarded doors down a side hall and up a secure elevator. An armored receptionist waved us through an armored door, into what had to be the Garage’s security center. The far wall was floor-to-ceiling glass, looking over the bay Veritas and I had departed from yesterday. Three stations of screens monitored the Garage and its traffic. Clark brought me to two white-uniformed naval officers standing behind an elevated desk by the windows, and saluted.

  “Sir. Hope Corrigan, sir.”

  “Thank you, Warrant,” the officer wearing commander’s bars returned the salute. “Dismissed.”

  She spun around and marched off, leaving her CO to look me over. He did, and the way his mouth tightened screamed that he didn’t like what he saw. “Ms. Corrigan. Thank you for coming upstairs.” He offered me his hand and we shook. “Commander Steven Rosack, station CO. I guard the door.”

  That explained the patch with the three-headed hound on his shoulder. Of course Cerberus guarded the door.
>
  “What can I do for you, commander?”

  “We’ll see. This is Captain Lauer.” The second officer stood too far away to shake hands, but he nodded. His sharp, weathered face was deeply creased didn’t look as old as his white hair. I guessed he spent as much time as he could outdoors.

  “Ma’am.” His gravelly voice sounded as wind-worn as he looked. “The Navy would like to ask a favor.” And he wasn’t happy about that, not at all. He waved me over to a screen.

  “Do you recognize this man?”

  The picture showed a big man, beefy, bald, scars on his face. His beaten, irregular features said he’d fought hard more than once and not had bones reset when he healed. None of it went with the Hawaiian shirt.

  “No… Should I?”

  “He’s Ernest Winman. You might know him better as ‘Brick.’”

  A bolt of icy shock ran through me, shaking me from head to toe. “Oh. I didn’t recognize him.” I never would without the gargoyle leer on his face the night he’d almost gotten me. Burned into my brain, it was the only way I’d ever remember him. “He’s in Detroit Supermax.” Please let him be in Detroit.

  Captain Lauer’s expression told me he wasn’t.

  “He’s in Guantánamo City,” he said, eyes still measuring me. “And he’s our problem now.”

  “Why isn’t he in Detroit? Sorry.” I closed my own eyes, breathed, opened them. Lauer obviously didn’t like my reaction, neither of them did; I knew the look—they didn’t want me here, didn’t want to have to be talking to me, and the part of me not focused on Brick wondered why. Was it because I was a cape, because I looked so young, or because I was a civilian?

  Lauer started to say something, stopped, continued with a sigh.

  “The Whittier Base Attack cost us too many heavies, and left us—especially the Army—scrambling to provide supersoldiers for all of our areas of responsibility. Winman was one of many superhuman convicts offered commutation in return for military service. The Army gave him a new name and put him on a first-in squad.”

  He rubbed his jaw, frowning hard. “The file Army Intelligence sent over shows he served ten months in China helping to punch out local warlords, and then his squad got hammered hard on an operation so screwed up by bad intel that there were only two survivors. The Army thought Winman was dead but unrecoverable. Since Guantánamo City isn’t Hell, they were obviously wrong.”

  “Obviously,” I echoed, but my heart wasn’t in it. I kept looking back at the screen. “What do you need me to do?”

  The captain’s jaw actually clenched, grinding on words he didn’t want to say.

  “We need you to help recover him, ma’am. We have a consulate in Guantánamo City, and a few minutes ago they got a phone call from the provincial governor’s office telling us Winman is there. The picture you see is the attached CIA station minder’s confirmation. The Cuban government wants Winman off of Cuban soil, and they want him off now. They are willing to give us time to extract him, but not much time. If they have to do it themselves, they’ll make the arrest and deportation public. That won’t look good.”

  Despite the situation I almost laughed at the understatement. I’d been around Blackstone and The Harlequin long enough to know what the headlines would look like: American Invasion? Cuba captures US military criminal!

  “It will look even worse if Winman doesn’t go down easy and creates civilian casualties,” Lauer continued. “And we don’t have a supersoldier unit that can get here in the window they’ve given us.”

  “What assets do you have?” I tried to sound like Watchman—a Sentinel now but still the supersoldier’s soldier.

  He looked at Commander Rosack.

  “We have three armored infantry squads on base, ma’am,” the commander said. “Two light, one heavy, with one always buttoned up and ready to go. Our heavy would ordinarily be enough to take Winman out, but not without civilian casualties in an urban engagement.”

  Just the thought made me wince; a straight-up firefight with even a B Class Ajax Type in the middle of a populated area would be…bad.

  “So you’d like me to get him out of the city?” You can take him, Hope. You’ve done it before.

  Captain Lauer nodded unwillingly. “We can send the squad for support. If you can get him clear of civilian involvement, they can finish the job.”

  He didn’t exactly stress the if, but it was implied and more than anything else shouted how much he didn’t like the situation. He didn’t want me in this, and he was looking at a potential disaster because his bosses weren’t giving him time, forcing him to work with an asset he didn’t trust. Lei Zi called these kinds of situations “unforced risks,” strategy driven by politics, and hated them.

  I exhaled. “Okay. I can do that. I’ll need to change—”

  “Not for this mission.” Lauer shrugged. “I’m sorry, but having an identifiable American cape engage on foreign soil without even being in the country officially would be…almost as bad.”

  I looked down at my civvies. No armor?

  “I understand.” I preferred to bring my full kit to a fight but I trained to fight with less. Tough as he was, Brick was a B Class. I’d beat him twice before and I would have backup. How hard can it be?

  Chapter Twelve

  “We’re not soldiers, at least we shouldn’t be. I’ve got nothing against soldiers, fine men and women. But they’re trained first and foremost to break things and kill people, follow orders that tell them when to do that. Superheroes are all about protecting and helping people, though we can kill people and break things when the need arises. Different priorities, which doesn’t mean we don’t work together sometimes.”

  Atlas, Chicago News interview about the China War.

  * * *

  It had to be the first time I’d ever been driven to a mission. The only thing I asked for before they loaded me with their team was a strip of carbon-fiber tape—I doubled it over and turned it into a damage-resistant bandage cover for Ozma’s lace ring. The truck they loaded us into looked like a beat up vintage produce truck; the recent change to free market capitalism hadn’t yet replaced Cuba’s decades-old fleet of work vehicles and anything newer than the 60s or 70s would at least be noticed.

  The truck didn’t match its contents; I’d never ridden with more dangerous looking cargo. The heavy marine “tin-man” squad looked ready for anything and I wouldn’t want to be downrange from them for anything. Their bulky suits—fully articulated ceramic battle armor—looked capable of stopping anything less than heavy artillery and had to weigh at least 500 pounds without the weapon mounts racked onto them; which meant they had to be supported by powered exoskeletons although I couldn’t hear the servo-motors.

  Their Cerberus Watch decal patches, cartoony three-headed grinning and slobbering Scooby Doos, didn’t match them; with their helmets off, their heads looked ridiculously small peeking out of their armor shells but they also looked totally comfortable wearing all that metal and potential death.

  And they kept calling me “ma’am,” even the lieutenant who outranked my state militia commission.

  “You ever danced with a team like ours, ma’am?” Lance Corporal Balini asked. Beside him, Lance Corporal Tsen leaned in to hear over the engine and road. They both looked young enough to need fake IDs to drink.

  “I’ve worked with a US Marshals fireteam?” Of course the team had all been duplicate Platoons, Bobs in cutting-edge SWAT armor.

  He shook his head. “Then you haven’t danced, ma’am. Don’t worry—we know the steps.” Our ride bumped over a particularly deep pothole, shaking us about, and started to slow. “When Charlie dances, we bring the foxtrot! We—”

  “Button it, people,” Lieutenant Corbin interrupted.

  Lieutenant Corbin looked like a computer geek who’d bought a tennis club membership and gone crazy; thin-faced but seriously tanned, short blond hair bleached by the sun, most of the time he focused on data streaming across his glasscam shades. Beside him his secon
d, Corporal Stein, focused on everything in the zone of engagement, not talking, eyes moving as if he could see through the sides of our ride.

  The truck stopped and we listened to our driver talking in Spanish. None of the team as much as twitched when two Cuban soldiers came around the back of the truck to look at us. One of them shot a question at Lieutenant Corbin, who answered fluently. Papers were passed, including an ID with my face on it and an official-looking stamped page. The soldiers read carefully and snapped pics of everything with their smartphones, and the one doing the talking pointed at me and asked another question. Whatever the lieutenant said, I didn’t hear “Astra” or “Hope Corrigan.”

  And whatever the soldiers thought of the tiny blonde girl and her hulking tin-men escorts, they returned our papers and waved us on. Our ride rumbled into gear and we drove through the checkpoint, the yellow gate dropping behind us.

  “Welcome to Cuba,” Balini quipped. “The weather today will be hot and dry. And tomorrow. And the day after that. Did you bring your sunscreen?”

  “No,” I laughed. He wasn’t joking about dry. Out the back of the truck, I could see cactuses—not really what I expected for Cuba. “Where are the palm trees?”

  “Guantánamo Province is surrounded by mountains and mostly in a rain shadow. North coast? Rainforests. Down here? Not so much. These days Hollywood uses it for desert location shots for low-budget cowboy movies.”

  “Done playing tour guide, Ball?” Lieutenant Corbin puffed a flavored e-cig, blowing a cloud of nicotine and mint. “Or do you want to tell her about the pretty birds?”

  “All done, sir.”

  “Wonderful. Ma’am, here’s the mission. Our eyes have Winman enjoying the view in the middle of town. We want him out of town where there’s room to bring it to him without blowing shit up. Civilian casualties are not an option in a fight we’re picking ourselves, so we need you to move him.”