One Week, One Day After the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Massif

The first time Double Helix made history he turned a couple of thousand square feet of Death Valley, Nevada to molten glass. That was during a routine set of exercise conducted when he first joined the Project. They were trying to establish a baseline for his talent. By the metrics we use he’s the strongest heat sink on record, weighing in as nearly twice as powerful as the next strongest we know of.

When he set out to show Circuit how making history was really done I got a little nervous. The man just doesn’t know the meaning of half measures.

But then, we were already making history. For the first time since the Civil War we had talents moving in teams that didn’t include oversight officers. Both Helix and Amp’s teams were pure talent. And as soon as we were away from the clearing around the chopper Samson leapt in front of the group and took off alone at a pace way beyond anything a normal human could hope to match. All the field oversight and tactical people who weren’t guarding our helicopter were in my group. In some respects I’d actually gotten the shorter end of the stick.

The guy I knew the least about was HiRes, he was supposedly invisible but I could still see him moving as clearly as I could see anything in a windy forest full of swaying trees – which isn’t that clearly, in case you were wondering. Jack and Dominic both insisted they didn’t know where he was and I was still going along with that, at least for the time being. Along with Mr. Not-So-Invisible and those two tactical leaders I had the rest of Helix’s tactical team and Agents Herrera and Sanders, giving me the Project’s foremost experts on Circuit’s history and tactics. Templeton had been forced to remain at the chopper with the other two members of my support team but Hush or Amplifier could forward his thoughts to us if we needed them.

I was sure Dom and Jack were reliable, they’d been in the Project longer than I had and I knew their records before they joined up. The rest, well, the biggest positive I knew of was that they worked with Helix. That means lots of field experience, most of it with situations teetering on the edge of disaster. But smooth running, uneventful operations? Those were a lot rarer in Helix’s casefiles. It made me a little nervous.

Of course, they’d all survived those situations, which had to mean something, right?

“You okay?” Dominic asked me, his eyes scanning back and forth as we lead our group forward. He was trailing just a half step behind me and to my left as we pushed through the thin undergrowth of southern Indiana river country.

“Circuit’s people have seen what I can do,” I said, a non sequitur that would make sense to him, if not the other people with us. A huge part, and I do mean vital, of what makes my talent effective is the fact that it comes as a surprise to people who have never encountered it before. Bullets, punches, getting hit by cars, none of it is particularly dangerous to me so long as I can keep my footing. Getting set on fire, breathing sleep gas, getting cut with a good sharp knife or just having a fire hose pointed at me, those are things that affect me just like everyone else. Most of the time I manage to wrap up tactical situations before anyone thinks of that kind of thing but this time I was walking into round three with a bunch of people who had not only seen me before but were used to the idea of talents existing and thinking of work arounds for that fact. It was making me a little nervous.

And when you put all those little cases of nerves together you got a great big helping of insecurity. I didn’t like the way things were shaping up at all and the loose dirt and random woodland detritus making the ground under my feet that much more unpredictable was just icing on the cake.

With the satellite intelligence we’d managed to gather and the cooperative efforts of a dozen of our best analysts we’d figured out which one of the three bunkers Circuit had built was likely to hold his headquarters. The general idea of my part of the operation was to cut through the woods and hit the bunker, try to take out the center of operations in case Helix or Samson’s end of things didn’t succeed or just serving as a distraction to help them on their way. It hadn’t escaped our notice that we were essentially playing Circuit’s game of parallel gambits against him but, in this case Analysis was fairly sure Circuit didn’t have the people to counter our separate moves even if he recognized our game.

According to Dom’s GPS we were most of the way to the bunker we wanted when we stopped to get our bearings at the intersection of two trails. We were almost at the end of the part of the park open to the public, most everything south of us was supposed to be undeveloped woodland. Dominic wanted to be absolutely sure of where we were before we left behind all usable landmarks, just in case Circuit decided keeping his communications grid up wasn’t worth letting us keep ours.

Dom had just confirmed that we were where he thought we were when the stern, stolid voice of Hush said, “I hear something in your area.”

After nearly a month of working with Amplifier this kind of thing didn’t bother me nearly as much as it would have before. Even Dom didn’t react much, just starting a little then asking, “Are you sure it’s not just an animal or something?”

“Trust me, animals don’t make nearly as much noise as people do, not when they’re in their native habitat.” It was hard to tell for sure but Hush sounded a little condescending as he said it, as if the inability to be quiet was a great failing on our part. “Samson has already gone inside his target and Helix’s group is nowhere near your location.”

“Got it, Hush,” I said. “We’ll deal with it. That’s what we’re here for.”

There was a moment of quiet, then, “Templeton says be careful. I’ll be listening.”

That rather creepy statement was Hush’s way of signing off. I turned to Dom and said, “Let’s take care of business.”

The National Guard had, with much reluctance, agreed to give us gear that matched our surroundings a little bit better than what Project Sumter kept on hand. Most of our work was done in the places where talents are likely to get noticed – in large towns or cities. There’s probably plenty of talented people out in the countryside, but they don’t get noticed nearly as often so we don’t know about them. So our guys, with the exception of Kesselman who was still pretty out of practice, aren’t trained for tactical situations out in the wilds. In case you were wondering, this was the National Guard’s biggest argument for why they should have handled Circuit rather than us.

I have to admit, watching our agents fan out along the side of the path in a rather clumsy fashion, I kind of saw where they were coming from. Still, it was our case and we had the experience. It was time to prove we were the best people for the job.

As soon as Dominic signaled that everyone was in position I walked out into the center of the crossroads, planted my feet, clasped my hands across my back and said, “May I have your attention, please. I am Special Agent Aluchinskii Massif of Project Sumter. This is a raid to apprehend the known terrorist and traitor calling himself Open Circuit, wanted in connection with the recent attack on Michigan Avenue, the death of an agent of the Federal Government and numerous other charges. If you surrender now and offer to testify you will be shown leniency during prosecution.”

There as a moment’s pause then I heard Hush, sounding about as amused as I’d ever heard him, saying, “They think you’re high and they’re daring each other to shoot you.”

Reports suggested Circuit had both hardened mercenaries and more run of the mill criminals working for him. I was guessing these were the latter. Just to make sure all the bases were covered I said, “If you resort to force we will respond in kind.”

Then they really did shoot me.

It was a pretty good shot, hit me just below the left collar bone and bounced off the vest I was wearing. Normally I wouldn’t have bothered with the bulky thing but footing was bad enough out in amongst nature that I didn’t want to be caught without one if I lost my footing. This time it wasn’t necessary as the bullet came to a total stop as soon as it touched me, all it’s forward momentum bleeding into the ground at my feet. I sighed and started forward at my usual deliberate pace.

One genius, who probably thought he was some kind of stone cold killer, came up out of the trees on the far side of the road, carefully squeezing off shots from his semiautomatic as he walked towards me. No doubt he though that since I was playing it cool and doing the impressive slow walking thing he had to do the same or loose face. Of course, he didn’t realize I was kind of bulletproof and he wasn’t. Not until one of his shots caught me square in the cheek and tumbled off without leaving anything worse than a light red mark, and that because the bullet was hot and not because of the force of the shot.

That was enough for him to realize he was tangling with something he didn’t understand but by then it was too late. He was close enough for me to reach out and grab his outstretched gun hand, twist his arm until the joints locked, then pull him off balance and straight into my knee. He doubled over and dropped to the ground, I kept hold of his arm only long enough to pull the gun from it before I let him go. Disassembling a pistol only takes a few seconds if you know what you’re doing and as long as you keep the gun barrel the rest of the pieces are useless but you have no chance of hurting yourself with a misfire or later giving up a weapon to your enemy. By the time that was done the other members of my hapless victim’s group were cursing loudly and had started shooting at me for real. I went to pay them a little visit.

I managed to drop another one with a quick grab and elbow combo, then grabbed a third by his leg, flipped him onto his back and wrenched his ankle until it made unhealthy sounds. That looked to be half of the little group out of commission but by that point they’d figured out that, just like a mummy in a bad horror movie, I couldn’t move much faster than a very deliberate walk and all they had to do was hustle a little bit faster than me stay out of reach. On the other hand, their bullets weren’t really doing much besides make me angry.

Of course all that attention on me kept them from noticing Jack’s group slipping around behind them and cutting them off. It was three on three and I meant to pitch in – not that I doubted Jack’s team but you can never be too certain in these kinds of situations. Problem was when I went to take the next step towards them I found my feet were stuck to the ground. I flashed back to the robbery at the Allen County Library at the same moment a hand landed on the back of my collar.

I twisted and hooked arms with my assailant, keeping her from throwing me to the ground. I couldn’t move my feet but that was less of a problem for someone with my training than it might have been for others. I dropped my hips and twisted, aiming to bring Grappler forward enough to hip check her to the ground. But somewhere in the process the arm I was holding became very slippery and I lost my grip. I heard, rather than saw, her staggering back a few steps. Then I heard someone yelling, “Grappler! Get back to the dam!”

At the same time I saw Dom and Teresa, who had flanked my other side to try and catch the guards in a pincer, moving up through the brush and exchanging gunfire with a new group somewhere in the distance. Grappler turned and bolted, her trail of movement quickly getting lost in the brush. I looked down at my feet, still stuck to the ground by the abused laws of friction, and tried to pull them free. After a couple of minutes effort Dominic joined me and said, “If you give it about fifteen minutes it should wear off.”

“I don’t know if we have that kind of time,” I said.

“Look on the bright side,” he replied. “At least she didn’t manage to lay you out flat on the ground.”

“I’m not sure we can afford to keep going,” Teresa added. “We’ve got six suspects in custody here. We can’t watch them and safely follow another squad of that size with the number of people we have on hand.”

“They said they were headed towards the dam,” I said.

She shifted and put her hands on her hips, a thoughtful pose for her. Then she shook her head and said, “Helix can look after himself.”

I just grunted and started investigating how big a patch of ground around me had been transformed to work like flypaper, thinking I might just take my shoes off and jump clear of the affected area. I’d determined that it was only a couple of feet wide and had just reached for my shoelaces when there was an impossibly loud cracking noise, followed by a sound like the waves on a distant beach. I glanced up, even though there was nothing to see. “Hush? Amp? What just happened?”