Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Epilogue
Appendix: The Post-Event World
The New Heroic Age
And All the Wide World
People & Places
Wearing the Cape: Repercussions
by Marion G. Harmon
Copyright© 2019 by Marion G. Harmon
Additional characters created by David Bird, Zachary Haley, W.H. Hartmann, Otso Pajunen,
John F. Meehan, Dennis Buse.
Cover by Kasia Slupecka
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
Chapter One
“Justice, justice you shall pursue!” (Deut. 16:20)
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art long and dry.”
Shelly snorted, slapping a hand to her mouth before a full-blown laugh could escape and sink her. If Shell had been virtually present in the conference room instead of just whispering in her ear, she’d have glared at her quantum-twin. Instead she turned the snort into a cough and supported her cover by taking a sip from her water bottle.
Not that she fooled anyone around the table—her fellow Ouroboros all felt the soporific power of Dr. Hall’s “summations.” Usually she stayed awake by subvocalizing moves in a verbal chess game with Shell, but today wistful daydreaming of fun with the team on Littleton’s beach made even focusing on chess moves impossible.
“In short,” Dr. Hall concluded way too late, “with three years since the final ‘future-history’ update from the Teatime Anarchist, the emergent property of causation has reduced our predictive abilities to close to parity with that of other think-tanks that have no access to our library of formerly likely potential futures.”
“The Big Book of Contingent Prophecy has pretty much passed its expiration date,” Shell interpreted needlessly. Shelly’s last sip nearly came out her nose.
On her right General Rajabhushan politely ignored her coughing fit. “We’re still ahead of the game with our future-actors watchlist,” he pointed out, Vivian and Kelly nodding their agreement.
“Yes, and no,” Leiman launched smoothly into his next point as Shell blew a raspberry only Shelly heard. “We’ve observed that breakthrough triggers are hugely contingent. Most post-California Quake breakthroughs our future-histories recorded have not been experiencing those triggers and breaking through as they previously would have. A very few have experienced different triggers, with the same or divergent results, but most post-quake breakthroughs have been new superhumans not seen in our future-histories. Since most threat vectors of our time come from superhumans and organizations that make use of them, this means that fresh threats are increasingly unanticipated as our future-actors watchlist also loses its predictiveness. We’re still able to better read constellations of events and predict repercussions, but—”
Shelly nearly jumped out of her seat when the alarm went off and the conference room’s lights went red.
The alarm tone meant Urgently Bad News-Feed Crap Coming In, very different from the Incoming Threat Prepare for Immediate Institute Lockdown alarm, and she got a few be-cool points back by not joining in the four-expert stampede from the conference room to their group workroom. “Shell, what’s happened?” she asked as she followed in the wake of her senior Ouroboros.
Her quantum-twin wasn’t allowed anywhere near the Ouroboros Group’s data systems, but she had her own newsfeeds and now she appeared beside her, wearing beach shorts and a printed top that read Life’s a Beach and Then You Die. Shelly almost returned her twin’s earlier raspberry; Shell’d made her virtual image a copy of the gynoid drone-body she was wearing down at the beach—a twenty-one-year old version of them, one that actually looked their mutual chronological age. Experientially only eighteen due to the three-year gap between her death and “awakening,” Shelly’d been a living, breathing, maturing girl for only sixteen of those years and she was so ready to be done with her protracted teens. She’d look old enough to drink by the time she was twenty-five but Shell, more than half a year younger than her experientially due to her downtime as a backup, could just virtually age herself out of their teens or pilot a more mature looking drone-body.
She liked to rub it in, but not now. “Somebody just blew a huge hole in the Grand Coulee Dam,” she said. “No idea how, yet, but video-feed of the attack hit the internet right behind the government alert.”
“Bystanders? Tourists?” The rest of the group ignored her, by now totally used to Shelly interacting with her invisible quantum-twin.
“They’re not the source. The video’s too steady and pointed in just the right direction, and it’s a new account.”
“So, totally planned. Crap.” The Grand Coulee Dam was one of the country’s largest designated infrastructure-security targets. It didn’t just generate nearly seven megawatts of power for the state of Washington, it provided irrigation for more than half a million acres of agricultural production in the Pacific Northwest.
And it wasn’t on any of the Ouroboros’ prospective target lists. Shelly’d held out a small hope the explosion was from a new, disastrously manifesting, breakthrough.
In the operations room, she barely looked at the screens the rest grouped in front of; she’d grown taller than Vivian in the past year but she still couldn’t see over any of the men’s shoulders and Shell was feeding her a virtual heads-up display of data anyway. The signal boost her twin got now meant that translating from the Real World into the extrareality pocket that was Littleton barely slowed her down.
“Fast-response capes up and down the coast are scrambling to get there now,” Shell supplied. “Washington State doesn’t have a lot of local capes.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.” So much for getting to the beach. Shell was there now, multi-tasking quantum-ghost computer AI that she was, but she’d be here analyzing probabilities and repercussions for hours as the facts came in and—
“Hoover Dam just went,” Shell said flatly, and Shelly’s blood turned to ice. Hoover Dam, outside Las Vegas, Nevada. Her brain kicked into overdrive “General, Hoover Dam’s hit. Get everyone off all hydroelectric dams in the US. Mossyrock Dam, Chief Joseph Dam, Glen Canyon Dam—”
His fingers flew over his station keyboard. “Department of Homeland Security confirms, civil emergency alerts sent, downstream evacuations ordered. Reasoning?”
She took her eyes off the second video-file Shell was playing just for her. “One is an accident or act of terrorism, two is a bigger statement and who knows how loud the statement’s going to get? Arch and gravity dams are the most vulnerable to one-shot hits.”
“Suspects? Nobody in any potential future used this angle of attack before.”
&nb
sp; Tell me what I don’t know. “No idea, boss, but a coordinated infrastructure attack, if that’s what this is, rules out a lot of maybes.” She kept her focus off the spinning meter ratcheting up the number of estimated dead in the corner of her virtual display. When she’d been Shell, a future-tech quantum-computer AI, she’d had no real adrenal response and could always mute her simulated one; now she missed that useful ability—horrified panic wasn’t helpful.
Who do we know that can do this? And this absolutely ended Hope’s vacation. Dammit.
It was a horrible, heartless thought, but her BF deserved some downtime; between secretly saving the country from a Meteor of Death, Annabeth and Dane’s wedding, and the never-ending training and publicity grind that was just being Astra, she deserved every carefree second on the beach she could—
“The Mossyrock and Glen Canyon dams just went,” Shell sang out. “Evacuation of the dams was only—” She disappeared.
“ . . . Shell? Shell!” Hearing only silence in her head she rushed to her console, ignoring the stares of her fellow Ouroboros as she typed furiously. A password and query of signal security status buried one nightmare and dropped her into another. “General, I’ve lost Shell, that means quantum interdiction. The interdiction isn’t on Littleton, it’s on Chicago, the city’s being targeted!”
Cool brown eyes stared into her wide green ones for seconds, then the old military man turned away to bark into his console mic as Shelly headed for the door.
“Ms. Hardt!” Dr. Leiman called. “Where are you going?”
“Hope! My team!”
“If there is an unfolding attack they can hardly get from the beach to Chicago in time to do anything!”
“You couldn’t possibly be more wrong! Call Hope, tell her I’m coming!” The door slid closed behind her as she bolted up the hall to the open inner well and took the emergency stairs up, three at a time, calling ahead to Ed. The institute’s head of security didn’t ask why, and sprinting through the lobby Shelly found one of his minions waiting for her outside. Lake Peppas was two minutes away. One minute if they didn’t stop between the institute parking lot and the sand.
Brian kept his scowl in place without pointing it directly at the object of his anger, the quisling officer in Emerald City greens talking to their host. The Weary Traveler’s common room had been warm and inviting when he’d sat down in the corner by the stairs and propped his pack and staff against the wall. Now that he might need to fight his way out, it wasn’t so much.
Ozma had left him there with their things to attend to “female business” upstairs—female business being the idiot girl in one of the inn’s guest rooms. She’d been caught on the road by labor pains and stout Master Gwelf, their harried host, had almost wept with relief when Ozma and Brian had arrived and he’d seen her broad-brimmed pointy witch’s hat. They were still dusty from the road, but when Ozma heard that the last local witch had departed a year ago, she’d frowned disapprovingly and left Brian with a kiss on the cheek to go upstairs and see to the Quadling girl and her child.
That had left Brian in the common room to down mugs of heather ale and look intimidating for any locals who might carry word to those who’d want to know. The job wasn’t hard since with his hulking form, gray skin, and fanged mouth, Brian looked like nothing so much as a Quadling troll. Nome-occupied Quadling Country had gotten pretty lawless, but even on the open road Ozma’s pointy hat and his huge iron staff (held in his huge troll fist) were enough to warn away all but the most bravely ambitious bandits. The small but well-armed troop of Ozian soldiers that had just entered the inn might be braver, and with their spears and guns they could probably take down a troll.
Brian was a lot more dangerous than any troll, but he might have to teach them that the hard way. And if I do, our cover’s blown to shit.
Taking care not to change the shape of his ears, he sharpened his hearing and focused on blocking out masking audial frequencies, a skill built up from hours of mind-numbing training. Gotcha.
“What’s he saying?” Shell asked, licking white drops off her whiskers. In Oz the sight of a cat elegantly polishing off a bowl of cream while talking to its tablemate didn’t turn any heads at all.
“Quiet,” he growled softly. And how the hell could an artificial intelligence that lived in a secret CPU somewhere be the soul of an animal that wasn’t wired for quantum-wifi or whatever it was? When he’d made the mistake of asking, Ozma had simply replied “Possession is nine-tenths of the law,” and Hope had fallen out of her chair laughing.
“What’s he saying?”
He put his hand on Shell’s tiny head, rubbing behind her ears with thumb and finger as she reflexively closed her eyes and purred. It was a cat body, after all. “He’s asking about new and recent travelers. Finish your cream, we may be running.”
How long did labor take? Hours? A day?
Shell flicked her tongue over her whiskers again, scrubbed with a paw and licked it. “Yeah, like a full stomach will help . . . Uh oh.”
Brian tightened up. “What?” The officer was still talking to their host, and his men hadn’t looked towards them again.
“Not them. Look down.”
He did. “Well, shit.” He’d leaned his tall pack against the wall by their table, one of its many pockets open so he could see her majesty’s Danger Glass. They always had to be able to see it or feel it, and on the road it sat under the top flap where Shell could feel it under her perch. Looking at it now, he had to force his shoulders down and stop his claws and teeth from growing.
He’d helped Ozma make the damn thing before they left. She’d filled the crystal sphere with a few drops of water from Lake Michigan, rain runoff from the Dome, and cloud vapor she’d had Hope collect, all mixed in with a breeze from a bright summer day. Crazy Oz magic, it didn’t predict the weather like a real old-time storm glass was supposed to do. It predicted danger, danger back home in Chicago. If the blue of its sky darkened and clouded, danger loomed. What the hell does a red sky full of lightning mean? He could practically feel the static charge coming off the thing. “Get Ozma. Now.”
Shell nonchalantly jumped down from the table and sauntered up the stairs while Brian kept his eye on the soldiers. None of them looked his way, but the officer, a young lieutenant, finished his questions and crossed the crowded room to their table. Silence followed him like an invisible shroud as the inn’s patrons bent their ears or tried to be invisible.
“Good day, Master . . .”
“Benagain.” Brian gave him a nod.
“Good day, Master Benagain.” The man emphasized the Ben properly, obviously working to attach such a proper old Emeril name to a Quadling troll (Ozma had told Brian it was like naming a Black kid Aethelred). At least the name and the embroidered patterns of Brian’s vest and tunic sleeves—the princess had been quite firm about the fancy stuff—marked him as a civilized troll and not some back-hills barbarian. “Lieutenant Borgan, at your service.” He touched the brim of his polished helmet. “Master Berimore tells me you’re traveling south?”
“My wife and I, yes.” He kept his hands below the table and away from his iron staff. Whatever his fancified clothes said, his oiled dreadlocks marked him as a troll proud of his strength and ready to defend his honor.
“Travel is getting dangerous, especially away from the high road.”
Brian shrugged. “The yellow brick one is risky, too.”
The lieutenant nodded reluctantly. “The Royal Army is spread thin. Since measures taken after the attack on the Tick-Tock Works, desperate people haunt the hills.”
“And not a local tinker or hedge-witch to be found from the Cascades to the Great Sandy Waste.” Brian’s ears twitched as the high wail of a healthy new pair of lungs echoed down the stairs. The lieutenant looked past him and swallowed. He chuckled.
He couldn’t get over the average Ozian’s fear of babies. But fair was fair, he still had a hard time wrapping his head around the way reproduction worked in Ozma’s f
airyland where almost nobody died of old age. Elders could live for centuries, her majesty had told him, until they eventually either heard a call to wander or just got tired of life and slept a lot until they didn’t wake up. And if the population level was where it should be (and who knew how the Land of Oz knew where that balance was) parents didn’t mature beyond a healthy young middle-age and kids just didn’t grow up either. Some of them didn’t leave their teen years for centuries, some of them never hit puberty, and childbirths only matched the incredibly low death rates. It was just one more crazy thing about Oz.
But Mombi and the Nome King’s conquest had killed a lot of people and Quadling Country’s low-boil resistance was killing more, which meant suddenly lots of kids were growing up and lots of women were having babies in a society that didn’t normally see that many of them at a time. And the paranoid co-rulers of Oz were imprisoning all the witches or chasing them into hiding. Also all the wizards, tinkers, mechanics, anyone with knowledge and powers that could threaten them and whose loyalties were the least bit questioned, but the witches with their magic and midwifery skills were especially missed.
Lieutenant Borgan brought his gaze back to Brian. “Your wife, Mistress . . . Pennigal? Is upstairs?”
Brian put his hands on the table. Big, clawed, troll hands. “And from the sounds, will soon be down.”
The man hooked a finger in the strap of his brimmed and peaked helmet. The thing looked like a shiny steel hat to Brian, something old Spanish conquistadors would wear. “Good. That is very good. And where are you—”
Footsteps on the stairs turned Brian’s head and his fists clenched, nails digging curls of wood from the table. Shit.
Ozma descended the stairs in all her glory, Shell at her heels. Though she still wore her Quadling outfit—red vest, embroidered white tunic, and matching short bloomers Brian liked to make fun of—she’d changed her willow wand back into her royal scepter and her flame-red hair back to its golden locks. Her golden wire crown wasn’t needed at all; any Ozian would recognize the perfect face minted in profile on their pre-conquest coins. She ignored the lieutenant to look to their host, frozen like the rest of the room.
Repercussions (Wearing the Cape Book 8) Page 1