“Would you want a nuclear reactor in the same building with you if you could get some distance?”
“Right. Gooood point. Have I told you this is insane?”
“You screamed it.” Really, the man was imperturbable. “Ah.” The brown around them lightened and fell away as they walked out of the frozen edge of the impact cloud, picking their way along.
“You know,” she grumbled, “I always assumed speeding would feel—speedier?”
“The movies make it look cooler. There it is.” He steered them slightly left and she saw it—a flat stretch of concrete and metal she’d been assured was an old missile silo. “You remember what to do?”
“Lock myself and the whole structure, wait for someone to come get me.”
“Check. Boring, I know.” He gave her a grin. “I’m going to drop us out of hypertime before you do. Why take a chance on our powers interacting unpredictably?”
She laughed, hoping it was a joke. “Yeah—I mean no, that would definitely be of the bad.” They stopped beside the silo’s concrete lip.
“I’m going to let go now, do your thing when the world moves again.”
“Right. Right.” She bit her lip.
“You’ll be fine. Ready?” He let go at her nod. Sound came back and the settling edge of the dirt cloud swept down on them as her fingers touched cool concrete and she locked.
“The power is down!”
The knot that had tied itself into Hope’s gut with Shell’s announcement of the Tokyo blackout unclenched as she gripped Joyeuse tight. No GZSs, no virus-bombs, no wave of villains would descend on another city. “Sif’s done it! Move, move, move, move!”
Swarms of drones rose from the shattered jet as Shell threw whole crates of them out to saturate the zone and give her data. The first probing missiles arcing out from two of her three Galatea shells. A whirlwind of sleeting icy snow rushed ahead of Hope as Malmsturm left his body in the forward Safe Hold with Kindrake and Ozma to fly into battle. Kindrake’s now-gargantuan dragon loomed, roaring to shake the earth and air.
Hope had expected all this but still hung above it, stunned.
“We’ve found a breach!” Shell called in their ears. “Artemis and Sifu are in!”
“Remember the plan!” Hope dropped to the ground beside Grendel, Eric, and her dad. Eric and Iron Jack looked like walking armories with the loadouts Shelly had assigned to them. Morrigan was already gone from sight, flying to the attack in crow-form with Kukkuu bounding after her.
“Find and take out the magnetobridge projectors,” Grendel said. “We know.”
“Right, follow the drones,” Hope confirmed needlessly, and then clamped her mouth shut on everything else she wanted to say. Shelly’s plan had been to use the three Galatea’s for the “recon-in-force” mission—Hope had had to point out that even with all the precautions they took Shell might still get jammed by the base’s electronic counter measures. Running on their own AIs, the Galateas probably wouldn’t get very far in the chaotic multi-threat environment.
“We’ve got resistance!” Shell let them know as the chatter of automatic fire drifted down the hill.
“Go,” she forced herself to say.
Grendel set off without looking back, both Eric and her dad giving her a nod before turning up the hill and bounding away after him with the kind of long low strides only superhumans strong enough to make gravity look optional could perform. Hope rose into the air again. Until contact with her target was confirmed, she was the primary reserve and had to hold back. “Remember the plan,” Shell echoed teasingly in her ear.
“Shut up.”
“Come and die!” Malmsturm whirled his great axes like batons, swinging right and left as he breathed killing frost upon the murderers before him before twisting into blinding sleet to sweep into the next bay. Fittingly the battle-crow followed him, ravening among the soldiers with her lightning spear. The blood-covered warrior might be a little thing beside him, but her war-screams threw fear like a weapon to unman her foes before she even reached them.
“Come and die!” Bullets stung and the heavier punch of something heavy-caliber and hardened sent him back into sleet to sweep down on a knot of soldiers brave or stupid enough to make a stand at the hatch before him. And flames found and seared him, pain beyond bearing burning through him to send him crashing to the floor. “Pyrokinetic!” The cybergirl yelled in his ear. “Hellix or Hot-Shot, fall back!”
Malmsturm groaned, coming to his knees as Morrigan swept past him, her powerful spear exploding with crawling discharge to clear the way. “I hear you, girl.” There was valor and then also stupidity and fire was his great enemy. “Where to?”
“Forward—Morrigan took Hot-Shot down! Armored troops up ahead!”
“Good enough! They will feel the grind-storm!”
“We’re encountering actual soldiers,” Shell told Hope. “I’m running unit patches, it looks like these are PMC soldiers—Russian Federation soldiers ‘on leave’ and contracted out.”
Hope’s blood ran cold. “So the Russian Federation is on board with this?”
“Shelly doesn’t think so—she thinks at most it’s a rogue operation, someone in their military or government who’s decided this is the best way to weaken the RF’s geopolitical enemies. This is good.”
“How can it be good?”
“They’re better armed than we thought they’d be, but with rogue RF military personnel mixed into this there’s no way the RF government is going to protest too hard—we’re cleaning their house. Also, first blood on one of the Detroit Supermax escapees, Hot-Shot’s down and we’ve got—crap.”
“Crap? Where’s the crap?”
“Beatdown and Fastball just found Iron Jack and Breaker and Bone are about to hit the others.”
“Shit!” Iron Jack swore from the spider-cracked wall his iron body had just gotten knocked into. The missile frame on his back had fired before he’d been able to react to the crazy-fast blur coming in. The anti-personnel flechettes sprayed outward, a pained shout in his ear telling him at least one had hit his attacker. He spun as he rose to his feet—not nearly fast enough to avoid the next kick that pushed him back into the wall. Hard kicks—not normal human strength, which meant the speedster was tougher than human and that meant he needed . . . “Sparkle, Shell!” He closed his eyes tight as the flashbangs in his loadout popped up and went off in a roll.
“Left!”
At her yell he opened his eyes and lunged left, reaching, and caught the stunned speedster. “Beatdown!” Shell tagged his attacker. “He’s boosted, but not more than B Class just don’t let him go!”
Iron Jack snarled. Beatdown—the tough Ajax-Speedster bastard had gone to Detroit for multiple murders, all of his victims helpless against even a D Class speeding brick. Getting an armlock he fell on the psychopath, adding a waist hold before the speedster could recover his equilibrium, and held on as he turned into a dervish.
It was like riding a demented bull—Beatdown threw their negligible weights across the room, battering them off concrete pillars and armored vehicles as he tried to find some kind of leverage to break free. Iron Jack’s loadout frames took the beating, bending and shattering as they flipped and spun their way through the subterranean garage space while he tried to twist Beatdown’s head off.
When a mini-tahk beside them blew up, he realized the insane tumble was a good thing. “Shell! The fight’s right here!”
“The fight’s everywhere!”
The concrete floor jumped as something cooked off and washed him in heat and flames.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“In conventional combat situations, while some surprise may be achievable once close fighting has begun, both sides generally become aware of the capabilities of their enemies fairly quickly. Any subsequent surprises are come from underestimating degrees of ability, not their nature. In fast-moving superhuman combat, until all opponents are identified the potential for tactical surprise remains as powers are di
splayed. Tactical superiority goes as much to the side able to identify the other’s capabilities first and match powers against powers accordingly, often in direct contravention of actual power superiority.”
US Military Manual of Modern Arms and Tactics.
Grendel found the Green Man—Ceres—whatever—or at least her green zombie selves. The garage he punched his way into was nothing but wall-to-wall node cages filled with them, packed in like eggs in cartons. Two long rows of box cages, all of them on wheeled platforms. “Oh, that’s smart,” Shell said in his ear. “See down on the other end? That’s the magnetobridge projector. Looks like it drives right down the center aisle and the node cages roll in to sit right on top for the launch, one right after another. Bet the whole room empties in less than five minutes.”
That made his next move easy—smash the projector, let the sleeping zombies rot.
Eric Ludlow piled through the broken door behind him. Personally Grendel wondered what Shelly had been thinking, springing the ex-Wrecker and Ascendancy villain to join the fight, but the guy was ex-military and knew how to use his stuff. They’d split from Iron Jack two bays back, looking for what they’d just found. “Tell Hope’s dad we’ve found it.”
“He’s busy and I’m sending him help. Get it done.”
“Right.” Grendel loped down the aisle, ignoring the quiet GZSs—even if they got animated they were tight as sardines in their cages, they’d hardly be a problem. All he had to do was wreck the projector and—
“Incoming!” Eric shouted at his back and the rip of the Ajax-Type’s rotary minigun filled the air. Breaker and Bone, well shit. The seven-foot hulk lurched from between node cages in his own battle armor, taking the hits of Vulcan-jacketed 7.6 mm rounds in the chest and barely slowing. Bone ducked around him, moving fast and ignoring any hits sparking off his white-plated body.
Jacked, boosted, whatever— “Bone’s mine!”
Grendel changed as he charged, bones in his shoulders, neck, and head adding density and thickness, skin lumping and ridging while his fangs receded. Head and shoulders down, he hit Bone with twice the mass he’d begun his charge with, throwing them both into one of the cages. He kept changing as he grabbed onto Bone’s bone-plates with sharp nails and spun, leveraging from beneath to throw the hulking villain up, spinning through the air. More minigun rounds ripped the air, ringing off metal surfaces, and Grendel hoped Eric had decided to take out the projector first.
Because this was going to be a brutal slog.
Iron Jack tightened his hold like a python squeezing the life out of a pig, helping Beatdown along in his efforts to carry them across the garage floor, bouncing off Russian mini-tanks and service equipment and narrowly missing two more explosions. Even boosted the young psychopath wasn’t A Class, but his combination of speed and strength nearly shook him off more times than he could count before he managed to shift his hold and really choke. He squeezed harder, something gave, and then Beatdown was a ragdoll. Dizzy as he was, John didn’t notice they’d stopped their crazy-cat bouncing until equilibrium returned.
And what was happening around him? Hell, always focus on the speedster—the rest of the world can take care of itself. If his iron body had needed to breathe, he’d have been sucking air like a bellows. Just to be safe he slapped an elephant-strength Sandman Patch on the bastard.
And the mini-tahk beside them exploded, enveloping them with flames and shrapnel. What the hell?
“Hellix and Sleek are in the house!” Shell yelled. “Backup’s coming!”
Great—a pyrokinetic and an untouchable. At least that explained the explosions—the pyro was cooking off gas tanks. “Backup for who?”
“Kukkuuuu, runkku!” The kinetically accelerated Finnish hero shot past his head, a pink-and-black clad blur, to smack into somebody beyond his vision.
“For you! Do you want to know what she said?”
“I got the gist!”
“She’ll take care of them! Get the projector platforms before you get more company! We found the Green Man!”
Hope would have thought that nothing could be scarier than a hundred-ton dragon breathing fire—And wow that Blue Pearl really works—until the whole hill decided to fight it. The impact crater in its side looked like an open wound, but the wound wasn’t the entire hill and now unshattered trees along its crown moved in a wave familiar even after nearly two years. Branches reached, new growth burst down the hillside and around splintered trunks. Trees torn from the earth re-rooted and righted and a startled dragon reared up to find vines and branches thicker than Hope’s arms shooting up to bind it.
“Shit! The whole hill is Ceres’ turf!”
“You think?” Hope dropped to smash at the thickest green bindings winding their way up the dragon’s massive legs. “Stay with the jet—don’t let the Green Man breach the Safe Hold!”
“Um, Hope? She’s got more than just the hill.” Shell’s voice was flat enough Hope knew she had to be burying her emotions in a sub-routine. “The whole forest is rippling—I’d say she’s been here awhile.”
“Six months!” Hope’s heart sank. “At least six months boosted by Pellegrini—how do we know she hasn’t been coming here since her attack on Chicago? She could be in every piece of green for miles.” She smashed another woody creeper. She couldn’t slice them—Why couldn’t Michael have given me a flaming sword—it’s traditional!—but when she pulped a reacher between Joyeuse and Terraflore’s rainbow scales it lost strength along its whole length. The Blue Pearl had to be making Kindrake’s dragon as tough as stone.
“Duck!”
Hope didn’t ask, dropping to the ground and flying away—the right move as Terraflore decided to turn some of his dragonfire on himself. Flames chased Hope as it worked outward from there. “Shell, we’re running out of strategic depth! Where’s our target?”
And where’s Langer?
Jacky dropped out of mist five doors and one level away from the fighting. With the takedown of the powerplant, emergency lights cast the halls in twilight that helped hide her presence in the close air of the depot’s halls. Shell had provided a hypothetical map based on Cold War schematics of the RF base plus her interpolations of what the magnetobridge setup would require.
“Shell? I’m here.”
“Ri—sp—lk.”
Okeydokey, then. Signal strength had gotten patchy past the storage bays.
Jacky checked out the bare concrete hallway. If Robotica’s right, then Dr. Kreiski’s workshop should be right about . . . here. Guns in her hands, she listened at the nearest door but couldn’t hear movement on the other side of the metal thing. Which didn’t mean anything—her senses were more-than-human but not up to Hope’s “super-duper senses” level and the doors were thick. A low hum made itself felt more than heard, though, a machine. What still has power?
Jacky slipped back into mist and then through the cracks in the doorframe to see . . .
Bingo. The mist put a filter on her senses, but though she’d never met the woman and her hair was shorter than her pictures, the woman was Dr. Kreiski. The other occupants of the room were two men she didn’t recognize and Dr. Pelligrini the Freaking Ascendant.
And the humming came from a wide platform with a tall cage on top, an active magnetobridge. Dammit. She rose out of mist, filling her hands with her twin Vulcans—dialed for human-scale unpowered targets and that was fine. “Nobody move. Dr. Kreiski, we’re here to take you to safety.” She smirked at the looks of horror all around—in her hooded black she was at her best in the dim light, and the big black guns in her fists only helped.
Not all of them stayed frozen, though. “Artemis.” The Ascendant turned carefully to fully face her. “It’s been awhile, although I suppose you could say we’ve never really met. Is Astra well?”
“No thanks to your buddy.” Jacky kept her vision wide, twitching one Vulcan when one of the other two men moved a little too much for her liking. Both of them wore military fatigues but seemed to be unarm
ed, and they showed great respect for the twin threats aimed at them. So, not likely superhumans. “Grendel’s around here somewhere, too—I’m sure he’ll be happy to introduce himself. What happened? Did you decide Drop didn’t let you pop around enough?”
“He proved less reliable than I had wished, and too limited even with my assistance. However, finding people to study him led me to our dear Dr. Kreiski. If one keeps moving forward, no experience is wasted.”
“You should write fortune cookies. Dr. Kreiski, you can shut down the platform. None of them will stop you.” Her steady Vulcans insured they wouldn’t and the scientist moved to her left. “Grendel promised not to kill you, Pellegrini, at least if you don’t endanger anybody. Personally I’m not in favor of taking chances, but apparently hundreds of thousands of people want closure too, and I get that.”
“You’re wrong, you know.” The man didn’t sound like her error was that important to him, just a matter of being factually incorrect. “They’ll thank us, eventually, those that remain. When the choice is between survival and extinction, no measure taken to secure survival is evil. Only necessary, however unpleasant.”
“And of course you’ll guide the survivors into a glorious, superhuman-led utopia.”
“You disagree, of course. But we will lead them. In any case, you won’t be there to debate it.”
What— Jacky reacted to the sound of the opening drawer too slowly, the loud bangs echoing off the concrete walls a unity with the blows to her side and neck. Shock spun her sideways, and then a hand touched her face under her half-mask and she sagged to her knees, choking on blood.
“As I said,” Pellegrini chuckled above her. “You won’t be there to debate it. You see, our dear doctor agrees with me.” The sound of a Vulcan clattering to the floor startled her out of her fascination with the monster in her tunneling vision.
Neither will you. She flicked the Vulcan in her left fist to full auto and squeezed.
Repercussions (Wearing the Cape Book 8) Page 25