At least twenty feet tall, gotta be a ton or two. A wave of jeers erupted from the nomes when he tossed his iron staff aside, and a few groans from the Emirils. That died as Brian rolled his shoulders and laced his fingers to crack his knuckles in a good stretch. The tick-tock kept coming, but that didn’t surprise him; it barely had the brain to understand instructions. Under the flexing, he put some more mass on his bones but kept his muscles lean and tight. This would be about speed as much as strength.
A last twist of his head to put his long dreads back over his shoulder, and he settled himself.
Stomp. Stomp. Stomp.
As the axe rose with a smooth ratcheting of clockwork gears, he charged.
“He’s incoming!” Shell sang out. She didn’t need to—Watchman could see Rook’s approach while the other Atlas-Type was still miles away.
Atlas-Type flight depended on “virtual thrust.” Where did the thrust come from? Nowhere. But in keeping with the idea that flying was a physical activity Atlas-Type flight was as fatiguing as any physical movement. Atlas type flight—high speed, walking speed, or just hovering—was as tiring as running, walking, or standing, and while Atlas-Types seemed to have near-bottomless reserves of energy, those reserves weren’t infinite. His limits were at the forefront of his mind as he lifted over Chicago to meet Rook and watched the Los Angeles based Atlas-Type’s wing-shaped payload pod wobble as he dropped from the flight lanes to meet him.
The handoff only took minutes; Rook might have been utterly spent after his high-speed flight from L.A. to Portland to Chicago, but he held the pod steady while Watchman boarded and got himself into the pod’s flight harness. Gripping him from shoulders to thighs, it put no pressure on his not-quite-healed injuries and he’d been resting for days. “Handoff complete,” he reported as the hatch sealed behind Rook.
“Roger that,” Shell answered. “And your Air Force escort has replaced Rook’s, fully fueled and ready to follow you to New York. Anybody even thinking of trying to stop this train is getting turned into sorry paste and Daystar will meet you there for his turn. He’ll take it the rest of the way.”
“Then tell them to keep up.” Watchman leaned into it and broke the sound-barrier before his escort squadron did.
Asclepius looked at the young woman, Astra. He’d seen the news images in passing; none of that had any bearing on his task.
His own power hadn’t brought him to Brussels; he could only heal the ravages of illness, giving the body time to fight it and recover, and only for a few at a time before he drained himself to death. He didn’t cure disease with a touch and he didn’t know a single superhuman that did.
He’d come with his team. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control wasn’t headquartered in Brussels—fortunate for him and his people—and its directors had mobilized his team instantly. After the Chicago attack his own department had begun production of a bleach and NAV-CO2 foam, based on what the American CDC had used to sterilize their contaminated streets and buildings in Chicago, and they’d thrown their drug labs into mass-production of vaccines. But that was only days ago—what they’d been able to bring was already exhausted here.
They’d brought their tools of healing, they’d brought every European breakthrough capable of helping the infected. And they were going to lose, it was only a question of how many they would lose.
“You’re certain of this?” Not that he doubted her—it just seemed, as Americans said, too good to be true.
“Yes. The CDC’s labs relocated to a reality where they could control the time-differential. They’ve produced enough vaccine for Brussel’s needs and it’s coming now. Watchman’s passing it off in New York, Nike and I are flying to meet our trans-Atlantic flyer over Ireland, and we’ll have it here in a few hours. Can you be ready?”
“Can we be ready?” He folded his hands behind his back. If he didn’t hold onto something, they were going to fly away. “Come with me.” He turned and led her out the door.
“We followed your novel solution to the critical vaccine shortage,” he informed her as they walked. “We have no purely breakthrough solution quite like yours, but we began refining our own Medusa Protocol before the attack here.” Taking them through a security checkpoint, he led her into a cavernous cold room. “We came up with this.”
Astra gasped at the sight. In the near-refrigerated room, row on row of bodies lay on metal tables. Wrapped as they were in mummifying layers, not even their faces exposed, they looked like corpses.
“A combination of hypothermia, a hydrogen sulfide gas mix, and a Verne-tech drug—” he grimaced at that last admission “—true suspended animation. No pulse. No brain activity. Their tissues consume no oxygen. The virus cannot advance. We’re suspending the non-essential infected while treating the essential infected with the limited vaccine we have on hand, but even with this it’s still a matter of not enough resources to go around.”
“How long—” Astra swallowed. He understood her feeling; the cold rooms had been mordantly labeled The Morgue. “How long can you keep them this way?”
“Human trials on this procedure have only just begun. It was designed for suspending individuals in emergency situations in space with no life-support until help could arrive, cases where you have a choice between a risk or certain death. So we don’t know, although animal subjects have been suspended up to nine days with no ill effects. The revival protocol appears to be the sticky part. So the answer is, yes.”
He held back laughter but it was hard and he rested a hand on one of the cold metal tables for support as the crushing weight that had laid on him for days lifted away. “Yes, we can be ready. We will be ready. They will live. They will all live.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Crystal Thompson. Eddy Long. Carla Banks. Ruy Moreno. Elena Pasunin. Imre Mester. Jonathan Freize. Richard Chen. Adam Clerides. Wyome Franklin. As Chicagoans come forward the list of people personally saved by Rush grows. Many were crime victims. Many were medical emergencies saved by the super-speed arrival of a paramedic on the back of Rush’s bike. A great many were bystanders sped away from fatal proximity to superhuman fights. A decade of service. Hundreds of names. Each with a story. Each bringing a light to the service. When the Sentinels gather to honor their friend, it will be a very, very bright night.”
Terry Reinhold, City Watch.
“So it’s Ceres?” Kelly asked incredulously.
Shelly started giggling. The coffee was hitting her sense of humor again on top of her light-headedness from knowing Operation Healing Flight was a go—a relief shared by everyone around the table. Even Dr. Humphries chuckled when he realized he’d just echoed his previous expostulation.
She got herself in hand after a few last snorts. “This time, yes, it’s who it looks like. The first thing Shell did after seeing the video was hack bank records and go over all of her electronic and media footprint.” She waved at the screen. It showed an image of the Hollywood Knights, a marketing poster for Hard Thrill, the last Hollywood Knights movie that included both Seven and Ceres. Ceres, in elegant green bodysuit and sitting regally on what looked like a giant and sprouting seed, was the focus of their attention.
“Ceres retired from the team last year, but she was out of the public eye during the Green Man attacks on Chicago two years ago. She left the country six months ago, and is reportedly enjoying a quiet retreat in the Amazon. She’s not, Shell checked.”
“So what does it mean for our assessment, exactly?” General Arun cut to the chase.
“Vivian?” Shelly looked at Dr. Ash.
“For starters, Ceres has always been an environmental advocate, strongly in favor of population control. She’s occasionally expressed frustration at all governments, not just the US or her native Greece, failure to ‘act on the threat of total environmental collapse.”
Arun stroked his beard. “So you believe she got tired of preaching and decided on direct action?”
“She must have come into contact
with the Foundation for Awakened Theosophy in her celebrity circles. He obviously recognized her frustration and recruited her by promising her the power needed to achieve her goals.”
“So she created a second identity, the Green Man,” Kelly mused. “If the Green Man’s powers are just hers magnified, how did nobody see it?”
Shelly changed the image to the leafy leering “face” of the Green Man, juxtaposed it with one of Ceres’ publicity stills. “Ceres is publicly a pacifist. And going from this to that? Forget the art, the Green Man’s electronic ‘voice’ pitched masculine. I looked into it—all the speculation and research into figuring out who the Green Man was, assumed he’d been a man. Even though nobody’d ever actually seen ‘him.’”
Everyone but Vivian looked dumbstruck, and Vivian chuckled. “Despite their depictions in entertainment, in real life, most supervillains are men, just as most violent criminals are men. Also, most revolutionaries.”
“We don’t know when she developed this new use of her powers,” Shelly picked back up. “That brings us back to our assessment of the group. I think its driving force is Karl Langer.”
Dr. Hall looked disbelieving. “The neo-Nazi skinhead? He’s a thug.”
“Yes, but he’s always been an ambitious thug. In every potential history he ever survived in, he climbed the evil-doer ladder. In the ones where he settled into a nice right-hand man position, he lasted a good long time. In a couple of them he tried for the kingpin position, and in one of them he succeeded. Check out the Western Mandarin possibilities.”
General Arun nodded, eyes narrow. “Go on.”
“His consistent pattern is to level up. He’s an Ajax-Type, tough but slow. So he gets Verne-Tech armor to make himself even tougher and more mobile. We know from Kitsune that this Mikaboshi thing, whatever it ultimately is, has attached itself to him. And it’s a corruptor. It magnifies negative emotion. In someone good, it weakens them. In someone already gone to the bad . . .”
Kelly sputtered. “It’s like he’s got the One Ring?”
“And it’s infecting his already-evil fellowship too, yeah. Or turning them into Nazgul? But whatever, the point is look who we’re dealing with, here. The Green Man already thought mankind was a fever to be kept down to keep the world from burning up. Some people can hold a mental balance in their head, where they see the value of human lives while thinking too many lives destroys the value of life for everyone. But psychologically it’s too easy to slip from fearing what overpopulation can do to hating humanity as a species. The Ascendant, he already values only one kind of human, the superhuman. If billions of unawakened die in the process of bringing about the Ascension, omelets, eggs. The survivors will thank him.”
“And exposure to the Mikaboshi has strengthened their manias,” Arun followed her.
“Yes. The Teatime Anarchist told me once, ‘It’s possible to love mankind poorly and we can do great harm in ignorance, but there are limits. But for someone who hates mankind, there are no limits.’
Leiman sat forward. “So we have the motives for The Green Man and The Ascendant, human depopulation and breakthrough-triggering chaos respectively. What about Langer? What does he get out of crashing civilization?”
“He eliminates the competition.”
“How?” The general’s raised eyebrows expressed the puzzlement of the whole table.
“I know what you’re thinking, but look. He probably thinks Dr. Pellegrini’s insane—but the vast majority of breakthroughs aren’t that strong, comparatively. With his Verne-Tech augments and the Mikaboshi strengthening him, he’s got to be Ultra-Class himself even without Pellagrini. He probably thinks he can win a superhuman war for supremacy. But only a superhuman war.”
The bushy eyebrows of confusion dropped. “I see.”
“I don’t,” Kelly sniped. “Please enlighten us.”
Arun held up a finger. “Look at some of the weapons deployed in the attacks—and therefore swept from the board. The Gungnirs, the KEWS, both were in part designed as ultimate anti-superhuman weapons.” He sighed. “The truth is, human technology, especially Verne-assisted, is capable of creating weapons potent against any kind of breakthrough imaginable.”
“Bingo.” Shelly smiled savagely. “The greatest threat to a would-be superhuman King of the World isn’t other superhumans, it’s humanity.”
“So knock humanity from the Information Age to the Middle Ages,” Kelly growled. “Help the genocidal environmentalist and crazy cult-leader, they both want massive die off as an end or a means anyway.”
“You got it. They don’t want to conquer, not yet. They want to wreck. They’re terrorists going after the infrastructure of our global civilization’s economic house of cards. But they’ve messed up.”
“How?”
“They messed with Hope. Hope’s my bestie, and I’m her huckleberry. Once we wrap up Operation Healing Flight, they’re going down. Shell’s already making calls!”
Sylvia answered her cell without looking at the number, swearing as she fumbled with it while making sure her hood stayed down. The rookie cop standing beside her watched her a little worriedly, and she stepped away towards the back of the Quickie-Mart as she got the cell up by her ear without exposing her face. “Hello?”
“Sylvia?” Steve’s voice came back, barely audible over the storm outside, loud words inside, and her own rushing blood.
She covered her mouth to whisper. “Bad, bad time!” Even if her slowing heart picked up again at his voice. “I just thwarted evil out of costume.”
“What happened?” She had to give her DSA “handler” kudos for staying professional, even if he could sound a little more concerned.
“I’m at the Quickie-Mart. A couple of morons tried to rob it—don’t they know there’s no crime in Maine?”
“What did you do? Are you compromised?”
“Isn’t that a spy word? I’m not outed. I was in the back so I put my hoodie up, texted it in, and got where I could see into the parking lot before locking the whole building.” She smiled a little, wondering as always what went through the would-be-robber’s heads as they and everyone and everything around them locked solid.
DSA researchers had never been able to figure out why, when everything Sylvia—Sif—locked appeared to freeze all the way down to the subatomic level, consciousness and at least visual awareness of the world outside the lock remained. Like that was the impossible part of her narrow but practically cosmic power.
“It was that easy?”
“Pretty much.” She wasn’t going to tell Steve that when Portland’s finest had finally rocked up and deployed outside she’d unlocked everything and then thrown a chili-bottle at the head of the punk by the cash register before locking herself back up. She hadn’t even felt the bullets ricocheting off her locked self and then the boys were on top of them. Unlocking again she’d called out her codename and flashed her Portland Protectors ID. (They’d known she’d be in there, but they’d have been looking for a masked and black-and-red costumed lady with Rapunzel-length blonde hair.)
Lucky for her, her hoodie covered every strand of her short dark hair.
Now she just needed to finish and leave without someone getting a cell-phone pic of her face; they’d help her leave discretely—anything to keep the officially secret identity of the Portland Protectors’ team-leader an actual public secret.
Steve read her mind and his voice dropped into concern. “I’ll call the chief, make sure their crime-scene people take care of any video properly. They really don’t want you outed.”
“Thanks.” She meant that sincerely. As her DSA “handler,” Steve had often told her she could use her powers to much wider benefit if she’d just leave Portland. But Maine was where her family was and she loved them, even if she had to keep the fact she was a breakthrough secret from them. Steve understood family even if he didn’t agree with her (and him being so understanding and supportive didn’t help her moderate her feelings towards him much). “So what�
�s going on?”
“I’m bringing in a third party, hold on a sec.”
“Steve—” She bit off her words when she heard the electronic pause. “Am I speaking to Sif, of the Portland Protectors?” a very young voice spoke in her ear.
“Um, yes?”
“Good. This is Power Chick.” A laugh. “No you’ve never heard of me—I don’t exist and it’s my super-secret codename with the DSA and other government-types who’re cleared to know it at all. I’m calling you this way because your country needs you but can’t ask you directly. The guys that hit us in Chicago and, well, pretty much all over? We’re going after them. It’s legit, but can’t be done the usual ways, and we need your unique power. Will you help? There’ll be some risk but it’s not a suicide mission, and we’ll get you back to Maine before anyone knows you’re gone. You’ll have never left, if you want it that way.”
Sylvia stared at her phone and brought it back to her ear, swallowing. “Steve?” Her heartrate was definitely up again.
“She’s legit, Sif. This came down from the Director’s office, I spoke to him first. He said it came from Rainmaker.” Rainmaker—the DSA’s codename for President Touches Clouds and that explained Agent Steve’s not-quite deadpan delivery.
“I can’t give either of you more than that until you sign some stuff, but are you in?” Power Chick sounded amused. “You can always bail, we can’t draft you, but if you want to at least see where this goes then you need to get to the airport right now. I can brief both of you when you’re wheels-up. Yes, Steve can come as far as our op base.”
Repercussions (Wearing the Cape Book 8) Page 21