Thunder Clap: Sifting the Ashes

Posted by natechen on October 20, 2014

Helix

“Okay, thanks.” I thumbed off the wifi phone my calls were being forwarded to and slammed it down on the table in irritation. With the exception of HiRes, a Secret Service agent who’d come in from Washington with Voorman and who jumped a little at the sudden noise, no one batted an eye.

Sanders, who had been tinkering with his tablet and updating the floor as he waited for my phone call to finish, looked up and asked, “Didn’t go well?”

“We found out why there was no answer at Keller’s house.” I paced back out onto the huge map that made up most of the floor of the room we were in. Once upon a time it had been the bullpen for field agents, now it was reserved for national emergencies. “The place has been broken into, signs of a struggle but no one home.”

“Mr. Keller and his whole family is missing?” Voorman asked.

“Thankfully, no. Roger Keller is divorced and his daughter lives with his ex.” I shrugged. “No one in the house but him. There’s a housekeeper but she doesn’t live there. The team that went to check the place talked to her. He was there just before 6 PM last night, so he must have been grabbed some time after that.”

Sanders looked slowly across the map of the country and shook his head. “This was really well coordinated. If it wasn’t such a nasty move I’d be impressed.”

Following Sanders’ line of thought wasn’t very difficult, it was laid out on the map at our feet and highlighted in red. We weren’t the only city without power. A total of five cities, one in each administrative branch of Project Sumter, had suffered a massive power outage at 10:22 PM the night before. Atlanta was dark in the South, Boston on the East Coast, Portland in the North West and San Francisco on the West Coast. With the exception of Frisco all of the cities effected tied back to Project history in some way, although Portland was the only other city with a regional office in it.

The always-perceptive Analysis department had pointed out that October 22nd was the date of our raid on Circuit’s bunker nearly two years before, making it likely the time 10:22 was intentional. No-one had bothered to suggest otherwise.

Project Sumter was at Condition One but pretty much every local, state and national government agency that touched on national defense in some way was scrambling to respond as well. In some cases the response basically boiled down to getting all their ducks in a row while they waited for the other shoe to drop but even that was better than getting caught flat footed. The real hang-up was that, until Samson and I had gotten out of the blackout zone with news that Circuit, or someone who looked a lot like him, was styling himself newly crowned dictator of the city there was no indication that this particular disaster was in our sphere of influence.

Sure, Sanders had seen a major series of power outages and immediately jumped to the conclusion that Circuit was involved and Voorman had flown out in part because he’d wanted to know for sure one way or the other – and he was a Senator for Illinois so being on the scene rather than going to one of the other attack sites just made sense – but the vast weight of the Federal Government was still getting used to the idea of talented people existing. It wasn’t used to crediting national emergencies to them yet.

Okay, hopefully as a nation we never get used to crediting national disasters to any one person or group. But Circuit’s made that an empty hope for some of us as individuals.

And that was the meeting we’d just gone through in a nutshell. The news about the other cities that had been hit was a surprise but the steps being taken to mobilize the National Guard and field other resources was about what I’d expected. In turn, nothing I’d said had really surprised anyone who was familiar with Circuit’s history.

“Has anyone else claimed responsibility for this yet?” I asked, staring moodily at the five large red dots that indicated areas of operations around the five effected cities.

“Not that we know of,” Voorman answered. “Plenty of finger pointing but so far no one’s stood up and said they did it.”

“Actually,” Sanders waved a print out he’d been handed as the meeting wrapped up. “A video just went out to major video distribution sites on the internet shortly after you landed, Senator. We’ve got a group of talents claiming they’re looking to establish an independent nation and saying their responsible. Analysis is still looking into whether this video is real or was just made using some kind of special effects as a prank but it’s probably best to act as if it was real. I’m expecting calls to start coming in from Washington about it any minute now.”

“Any ties back into Circuit’s preexisting organization?” I asked.

Sanders glanced around, some of the other people who had been in the meeting were still around but not the two he was looking for. “You’d have to ask Mossburger or Cheryl’s assistant, wherever they got off to. Analysis and Records will have to sort that out, although I’ve no idea how long it would take to turn anything up.”

“We’re behind again,” I muttered. “Something big is going down and we don’t have the pieces to figure out the big picture. We need to take a proactive move, break up his processes, and still be getting a better picture of what’s going on.”

“The National Guard is mobilizing,” Voorman said. “Elements of several units should be here by late morning. That might give us enough time and manpower to begin searching for and deactivating the EMP weapons that have been keeping people out of the city. We’re not sure if that will end the communications blackout or not.”

“It would help if we had a better idea where these things might be hidden.” Sanders ran a hand over his closely shaven scalp, droplets of perspiration in the cool air hinting at how stressed he was feeling though otherwise his relaxed attitude gave no hint that he might be nervous. “Not being able to get ahold of Keller was a bad break.”

“I’ll try and get a warrant to look at his company’s records put together and find a judge who will sign off on it. If we can get into the offices and pull the files early enough we might not even loose any time.” Something nagged at the back of my mind. “And Keller had an investment partner sometimes. Name was Cynic or something…”

“Cynic is something you are, Helix.” Voorman pointed out.

“Whatever. I’ll check the file, we may want to bring him in and see what he knows.” I pressed my palms into my eyes and yawned hard enough that my jaw cracked. “And then I’m going to grab a nap.”

“Are you going to want to go back into the city?” Sanders asked as I started towards my office. “I can arrange for a tactical team to go back in with you, if you want.”

I thought about it for a second. Deep down I knew I wanted to be out there, back in the field and hunting for Circuit. But my new job description needed to be filled and the only other person I could think of who I would trust with it was Massif, who was already out in the field. Swapping places with him now would just be counterproductive. “No. Not at the moment. But if you can get Cheryl and Teresa out of there and put a few more field agents and trained tactical people in the field it would be a good move. Field analysts, too. Movsessian is the only one out there right now.”

“Will do.”

I picked up my temporary phone off the side table and headed towards my office.

——–

The name was Sykes and he was actually at home when I called. I made arrangements to have him brought in to the Springfield office and then to interview him by video call. The warrant paperwork I turned over to the Administration office assistant and then I pulled out the collapsible cot I kept in my office and settled in for a couple of hours of sleep.

I got about forty minutes.

The frantic buzzing and beeping of my phone woke me suddenly and I banged my hand into the wall as I reached towards my dresser. Which reminded me that my dresser was in my apartment and I was in my office. Groggily I rolled over to my other side and dragged my hand across my desk, sending a bunch of paperwork, pencils and other junk falling to the ground along with the phone. I fished it off of the floor and answered it.

A few minutes later it got slammed down for the second time that day, and since we hadn’t even hit sunrise yet it probably wouldn’t be working by sunset. A string of profanity drifted up from the phone, protesting my nearly deafening the tactical team leader on the other end.

So I switched it off, pushed up off the cot and pocketed the phone, doing some swearing of my own. It only took me a few minutes to call Pritchard Mossburger, our head analyst, and ask for the files we’d built on Keller and Sykes during the Enchanter investigation then head out to find Jack and tell him to add Matthew Sykes to our list of people we needed to watch out for since he, too, had disappeared from his house in the time it took our pickup team to arrive. In all I was back in my office in about ten minutes. To my surprise, Mossburger was already there with files in hand.

For a moment I considered whether I could club him with one of the office chairs and get another hour or two’s worth of sleep before having to deal with this but gave up on the idea. A guy my size doesn’t have the leverage to swing one of those things fast enough to knock someone out.

Mossburger apparently took my silent staring as surprise rather than considering violence because he shrugged and said, “You mentioned the Waltham Towers connection during the meeting so I went ahead pulled Keller’s file. Sykes’ was right in there with it and I seemed to remember the two were connected so I pulled it at the same time.”

He handed me the two manila folders with a flourish. They weren’t particularly thick or impressive considering that they’d been a part of one of our most important ongoing investigations for nearly two years but, at the same time, the Keller Realty angle hadn’t been considered a high priority line of investigation at the time so it hadn’t gone that far. But in my groggy state getting anything out of them was out of the question. “Give me a summary?”

Mossburger grabbed a large cup of coffee off of my desk and swallowed some of it before answering. “Roger Keller is a bit of an enigma. Adopted at the age of eleven, brought up to run his adopted parents real estate and development firm. Went to Stanford, took over the business, did okay with it. Married when he was twenty six, divorced eight years later. No obvious connections to crime, ties to local politics and the governor mainly through campaign contributions. Keller Realty is a large firm in local realty but other than the Waltham Towers deal there hasn’t been anything high profile. That list of properties we found during the Enchanter case is really the only thing that makes them of any interest at all.”

“That sounds exactly like what we knew when we formed the task force to find Circuit after he disappeared.” I kneaded my knuckles into my eyes, feeling exhaustion that wasn’t entirely due to lack of sleep. “We haven’t gotten anything new since then?”

“We’ve been keeping an eye on the properties they’ve handled since then but there’s not patterns we can use to connect them with the ones on Circuit’s lists.”

“Right. I need some coffee. Tell me about Matthew Sykes on the way.” I got up from my desk and headed towards the kitchenette, Mossburger trailing along behind.

“Sykes is actually more interesting than Keller. He was also adopted, in fact he and Keller seem to have lived in the same group home for a while which is how they know each other.” Mossburger was lagging a few steps behind since he had brought the file with him and was looking through it as a reference. “Sykes Telecom was originally a local phone company that dabbled in a lot of other communications possibilities but really hit it’s stride in the ’90s when they became an ISP. The Sykes the elder started the transformation from phone line internet delivery to fiber optics shortly before he died, something Matthew continued with.”

I thought back to my meeting with Sykes a couple of years ago. He hadn’t seemed that old. “When did Sykes’ father die?”

“About ten years ago. That’s the really interesting thing.” Mossburger handed me a photo of a small airplane, one wing broken and the fuselage a bit crumpled up, sitting in the middle of a field. I handed it back and quirked my eyebrows to ask what it meant. “Matthew Sykes wanted to learn to fly and his adoptive parents indulged him. After he got his license he took his parents on a celebratory flight and something went wrong with the plane. The crash killed both parents and left Sykes a cripple.”

I stopped in the middle of pouring my coffee. “Any signs of foul play?”

“None that they could find. Sykes blamed an instrument outage followed by the engine cutting out and the black box backed him up on that. The telemetry just goes weird about a minute before the crash although the intact stuff worked again when they tested it afterwards.” Mossburger shrugged and closed the folder back up. “Ever since he’s become an almost total recluse, doesn’t really go anywhere but to his office, his house and his charities. And he never flies anymore. He was actually scheduled to be in Dallas this week for a charity drive but his wife went instead for some reason.”

Something about that sounded off but I wasn’t sure what so I asked, “Did she fly?”

“Yes. She doesn’t seem to share her husband’s dislike for it.”

Finally my brain reminded me of the fact I was looking for. “Wait. Sykes was married?”

“Not at the time of our preliminary investigation. The wedding was last June. We don’t know anything about the wife and she came into the picture late so we assumed she wasn’t a factor.”

“No, I guess by the time she entered the picture things would have been in motion for years.” I sipped my coffee for a moment and then sighed. “None of that really sounds that useful. I don’t understand why Circuit would want to abduct them…”

Mossburger held up a finger for me to wait, then dug through Sykes’ file again, finally pulling out a sheet of paper. “This is our best bet. It’s a list of places that were completely rewired with a fiber optic local network as part of their renovation by Keller Realty. Sykes Telecom did the work on each and every one of these places. Waltham Towers is on the list and we’re operating under the assumption that Circuit was trying to find places where his network of gadgets would run with optimal efficiency. Possibly there’s some kind of back door in their work that Circuit is taking advantage of and he doesn’t want them telling us about it. It’s not much to go on but it’s something.”

“I guess.” I sighed again, then a third time because the situation seemed to warrant it. For some reason this prompted Mossburger to smile. The law of conservation of a good mood required that I scowl to keep the total amusement in the room equal. “What?”

Mossburger sat down on top of the kitchenette’s small table, ignoring the chairs available, and wound up just above my eye level. “Do you ever wish you could just sink a bunch of heat, turn into a walking funeral pyre and walk through problems? No matter how well prepared he is there’s no way Circuit could stop you if you did something like that. I’ve seen the stats on the kinds of updrafts and storm winds you create when you really get hot, it’s unlikely you could get shot with anything short of light artillery, it’s like you’re standing at the center of a small tornado. Sure, there’s the whole throwing lightning bolts thing Circuit can do but when we finally reproduced it in the labs our fuse boxes all needed a good idea of where their target was to hit it and if you made a big enough of a storm he’d never know for sure where you were in it.”

I hefted myself up and sat on the counter, putting us level, and stared at my coffee for a minute. He did have a point. Although people like Samson or my grandfather seemed incredibly powerful and unstoppable it was heat sinks like me or wave makers like Amp that Project Sumter really worried about going rogue. The potential for widespread mayhem in the short period of time before we could be stopped was really a lot higher for those of us that could effect large areas or over a distance than taxmen, who were at least limited to destroying things they could touch.

And then there were matter shifts like Gearshift, who could make things more or less dense just by pushing on them a little. They’re the kind of people we still haven’t told the public everything about. One matter shift with enough enriched uranium and a death wish could do what no terror organization has ever accomplished before.

“Let me ask you a question first, Pritchard.” I looked up from my coffee and gave him a hard stare. “When we first met you came up with conspiracy theories for fun. When was the last time you did that?”

He held my gaze for a second or two then looked down at the folder in his hands. After a moment he shrugged and said, “Not since I agreed to start working here, I guess. When Mona Templeton died… well, I didn’t know her all that well but…” He looked for the right words, couldn’t find them and so ended with another shrug.

I knew the feeling. “When I was a kid, yeah I wanted to go white hot, walk through everything that got in my way and bring justice to the world. It’s still really, really tempting. And I’m not gonna lie, I have tried it once or twice. But sooner or later you’ve got to face the consequences of your fantasies. They effect real people in real ways and not always for the better. If I didn’t let that fact change the way I acted I’d be exactly like Circuit. There’s a real chance large parts of the city wouldn’t even be there anymore.”

Mossburger didn’t look up but he did nod his understanding. I hopped off the counter and clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on, Mossman, we’ve got work to do. Why don’t you call up Jack and have him get someone on watching Sykes’ wife, if he doesn’t have someone doing it already. Tell him I want to talk to her as soon as she can get here. She flies here, not back to Springfield.”

“I can do that,” he said, standing up as well. “But what are you going to be doing?”

“You reminded me of someone I need to talk to.”

I left him with that useful bit of information and scoured the building until I found Voorman and Samson in Samson’s office. I wasn’t sure if they were discussing the case or just catching up and I didn’t really care because I really wanted to talk to Voorman’s bodyguard, HiRes, who was in the hallway outside. He gave me a brief nod in acknowledgement when I arrived.

“Call your boss,” I said.

He tilted his head to one side. “Any particular reason?”

“Because outside of possibly me Darryl is the biggest expert on Circuit in the nation. And he’s hands down the person who hates Circuit the most. Last time, after the Michigan Avenue Proclamation, Circuit got away from us when we might have caught him if we coordinated.”

HiRes glowered at me. “You were dead set against Director Templeton working on that case, Helix.”

I spread my hands. “That was my mistake. And it would be a shame to repeat it. Now are you going to call him at whatever place he’s at here in town or do I have to call Washington, plow through a forest of red tape to get in touch with him and possibly miss out on a chance to do things right?”

HiRes held his glower a few seconds longer as he thought it over, then nodded slowly. “I’ll talk to him about it.”

“Good.” I turned and headed back towards my own desk and the subpoena paperwork that would sooner or later be needing my signature. “I’ll be in my office so he can call me there if he’s interested. Just tell him to make up his mind fast.”

Thunder Clap: Smash Up

Posted by natechen on October 14, 2014

Izzy

Amp leaned one shoulder against the side of the alley, eyes closed in concentration. Her head swiveled slowly back and forth as she listened to things only she could hear. I shifted impatiently as we waited, I’d grown up in the city and never seen the streets so dark before. An empty building looks a little sinister lit by streetlights as you walk by it but, in near total darkness, crouched by a looming wall and wondering what it was Amp was hearing, the city itself seemed alive and malevolent.

Maybe it was just because I knew there was more to listen for than I was used to but I found myself focusing on the soft, inconsistent breeze that blew down the alley, almost like the hissing of breath. A sudden metallic popping sound echoed down the alley. All of us except Amp jumped.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Probably a trash can or something, cooling down from the heat of the day,” Clark answered.

“Or something’s rummaging around in it,” Al suggested. “Anything yet, Amp?”

She didn’t answer so I took the opportunity to ask Al about something that had been bothering me for the last few minutes. “Didn’t she say the acoustics in the city aren’t right for this kind of thing?”

“I can’t here clearly over long distances,” she said, annoyed. “The streets are like canyons, they make echoes that muddle words up. But I can hear across one street fine. Now shut up, all of you.”

We did as instructed. There were a few seconds while Amp just listened, then finally she said, “There’s three cameras on the front of the building, one stationary at the main entrance, two at the corners with a five second interval panning from one side to the other. And I think there’s someone inside the building, although the noise is coming from the top floor.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem, utility rooms are always on the first floor when they’re not in the basement so they’re easier to hook up to the grid,” Clark said.

“Except they could see us coming across the street and, if it is some kind of guard posted by Circuit or whatever sick mind knocked the power out, they might have reinforcements they could call in.” Al tapped Amp on the shoulder and, once he had her attention, motioned for us to move further back into the alley. “Clark, how likely is it that Circuit would bother to guard these locations?”

“Honestly? Not terribly.” He was quiet a second and I caught flickers of movement that may have been him counting things on his fingers. “He has to have at least forty or fifty of these things in town, maybe a little more, maybe a lot. It’s hard to say, since we don’t have a clear picture what the radius of effect on his EMP weapons is, or, for that matter, whether that’s even a primary part of his strategy. Remember, Helix didn’t know how he’d taken out the thugs he found. If he has armed response teams ‘protecting the city’ like he’s said his goal is then he’s fielding a lot of personnel already and they’ll have a hard time also guarding these installations.”

“And if he’s not dealing with looters using hired guns he’s not protecting his toys with them either,” Amp finished. “Nasty situation.”

Actually, from the way they described it the solution seemed pretty obvious to me. “Why don’t I just throw you all onto the roof here, then across the street to the roof of the store? Whoever’s down there probably isn’t expecting us to come in from the air and-”

“Okay, wait.” Amp cut me off with an emphatic wave of the hand. “Maybe you and Massif can survive that but Clark and I are squishy, remember? Regular people and most talents cannot survive a direct shotgun blast.”

“Neither can I,” I said patiently. “The way this goes down is, I toss Massif up to the roof, he breaks his fall and catches the two of you when I toss you up.”

There was a grunt of comprehension of Clark. “Vector shifts can transfer momentum from one object to another. If Massif does catch us he can literally break our fall by moving the momentum from us to the building at his feet. The key being his actually catching us. Have the two of you actually practiced this before?”

“It’s not actually been a priority so far,” Massif said, “since she was theoretically a couple of months away from testing for field work. It’s not that complicated a maneuver if the precision is there but, no offense, Izzy, based on the way you tossed that planter at Lincoln’s place the fine control isn’t there yet. Plus there’s the added complication of doing it in the dark. If we were just trying to get up on a roof I might say try it but going across the street? I’d rather not. Other suggestions?”

“Actually, I think that idea can work,” Clark said, “And it does have the plus side of giving us an angle of attack Circuit might not be expecting. Although I can’t remember if there was a rooftop entrance or not…”

“We’re not tearing out a skylight just so we can get in the building,” Al said. There was a moment of quiet, I think he was waiting to see if anyone else had ideas, then he sighed and said, “Okay, I was hoping someone else might have a better idea but I guess not. I did come with a plan, it’s just a little risky. Lincoln’s family knows the owner of this shop – I think they know every small business and franchise owner in the state – and they use the same security provider. He has a master key for most of their security doors.”

“Why?” Amp asked.

Al laughed. “If I knew that there’s a real chance someone would be in jail and we wouldn’t have them now.”

My eyes widened a little. “What, is he a part of the Triad or something?”

“So here’s what we’re going to do.” Al handed a huge ring of keys to me, ignoring my question, and said, “Izzy, you take these, Clark, you’re with me, Amp-”

“Don’t tell me. I’m the communications relay.”

“And long range artillery,” Clark added quickly.

Al didn’t let the byplay slow him down too much. “Speaking of weaponry, Clark, you’ll need to leave the tire iron here.”

“You’re still carrying that?”

“Like I said, Izzy, I don’t have-”

“Tire iron. On the ground please.” Al waited until the soft ting of metal told him Clark had done as told. “If there are no other interruptions? Good. This is what we do…”

——–

So my plan wasn’t really all that far off from what we wound up doing. I did wind up jumping from rooftop to rooftop, which I’d never done before and is not nearly as cool as you think it is. Okay, it’s pretty cool when you can see where you’re going and don’t have to worry about where you’re going to land or if there’s anything there to trip over or if you’re going to smash your face into something on landing. But trying to sick a landing in the middle of the night, during a power outage, after jumping over a street that looks more like a river of ink is not fun.

I managed to make the landing in spite of not being able to see anything although I did wind up having to use the break fall technique Al’s always praising as the basis of superpowered hand to hand combat. Apparently we spend a lot more of our time getting thrown around than we do blocking or throwing punches. Still, I was over on the roof of the bookstore with no problems other than a few scratches and a racing heart.

At a glance I couldn’t see any security cameras along the back side of the store. It was a short drop from up there to ground below. Now under normal circumstances there would have been plenty of light to see by and unlock the back door of the building with. There was a carriage light above the door and a street lamp in the small parking area behind me. But with the city still out of power I was reduced to pulling out my cell phone and using the dim glow from it’s screen to help me figure out what I was doing as I fumbled to unlock the door.

The building had a fairly standard security setup. The door was a standard lock and deadbolt assembly, but once you were past that you had to enter a security code into a control panel near the door or alarms of some kind went off. Except, of course, that there was no electricity for any of that stuff to run on and a bookstore does not exactly have the budget for a backup generator like the concert venue did.

It was kind of scary how dependent on electricity I was finding life in the city to be. As I let myself into the back of the shop I started to wonder how safe my mother and two little sisters were at home. No one had a clear idea how far the outage extended but from the sound of things most of the city was in the affected area and we certainly didn’t live out in the suburbs.

Worries about family were quickly squashed by the sound of pounding on the front door of the shop. That would be Al and Clark, providing a distraction for me by walking brazenly up to the door and knocking. I let the door swing closed behind me and stumbled through the back of the store. The checkout counter was to my right, stacks of books ran off to my left and in front was a shapeless gloom that the glow from my phone didn’t illuminate far enough to show anything.

According to Clark and Lincoln’s fuzzy memories of the building layout the utility room was behind the counter. I crept quickly up to the counter and, rather than look for a way behind it, just climbed over. There was a door in the corner behind it although it was locked and the key I had didn’t open it. I was fumbling through the keyring, hoping one of them might unlock the door, when Al pounded on the door again and a deep voice like James Earl Jones boomed out saying, “This is the police! Open up!”

I hadn’t known Amp could do that with her voice.

To my surprise we actually got an answer. A couple of gunshots cracked from the second floor and I heard a surprised yelp from out front. Without thinking I dropped the keys, threw my arms over my head and jumped.

Breaking through the floor or a wall is no more fun than jumping over a street. Mostly it’s just a sudden, sharp pain in your forearms. Even concentrating on pushing up and out like papa taught me to the pain of impact was pretty harsh. Almost as bad was the knowledge that somewhere back at the regional office stacks of paperwork was spontaneously printing and collating itself for the inevitable after action, property damage and expense reports. Worse was realizing that I had again overshot the mark and smashing into the roof of the building – from the inside this time – after going clear through the second story in spite of the fact that crashing through the floor really slowed me down.

Fortunately I’d put a bit of an angle into my jump so, although the impact stunned me a bit, I didn’t fall straight back down to the ground floor but instead landed in a heap on the second floor. Winded, I staggered to my feet, absently brushing debris off of my arms and shoulders as I tried to get my bearings.

Up on the second floor was most of the café part of the establishment so sight lines were a lot better. Also, there was just enough light filtering in the windows that I could actually see vague shapes like tables, chairs and a man leaning against an open window frame. I couldn’t see his face but from his posture it looked like he’s just turned around in surprise. “Drop the gun,” I croaked, my voice not really big on the talking thing at the moment. “And put your hands in the air.”

After a second’s hesitation the silhouette bent down and I heard a soft thunk, then it straightened back up with it’s hands over it’s head.

“Muey impressive,” Amp said, her normal voice drifting in through the window. “Massif says good work, bring the shooter downstairs and let us in. Might as well figure out who this guy is while we look for EMP weapons.”

“Right,” I said.

“Right what?” A nervous sounding male voice asked. Apparently Amp had directed her voice so only I could hear it.

“Never mind. Come with me, sir, and we’ll go for a little walk. We need to have a little talk with some nice people.”

For some reason, that idea didn’t seem to appeal to him much.

——–

As it turned out the store’s owner had stayed behind to lock up and guard the shop against looters once the power had gone out. I’m not sure why he thought that was necessary, bookstores aren’t exactly the kinds of places that get looted in survival situations. Maybe he’d just never seen The Day After Tomorrow. Not that I blame him.

Anyway, he hadn’t hit anything other than ground and Al managed to get him calmed down and assured him that we weren’t interested in dragging him off to jail, mainly since he was still under the impression we were local police when we were actually Federal agents. Saying you’re the police when you’re not, even if you are still technically law enforcers, is the kind of thing papa used to do but is now against the rules so we didn’t want him realizing we’d lied to him and possibly spreading word about it.

He was even nice enough to unlock his utility room for us and let us rummage around in it. After about fifteen minutes of rummaging around by the light of a small flashlight the owner had produced, stubbing toes and clunking heads, Clark finally found a metal box in the drab olive color power companies seem to favor tucked in a corner underneath the water hookups. It was locked but Al gave me the okay to break the latch and open it up.

Clark took one glance inside and whispered, “Jackpot.”

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Thunder Clap: Bad Company, Stranger Characters

Posted by natechen on September 22, 2014

The straps holding him into his wheelchair were very sturdy. Nothing short of a chainsaw would be getting him out of the chair until they were removed. The wheels were firmly locked in place by the clamps in the floor of the van. Matthew Sykes leaned back in the chair and did his best to get comfortable. At the very least, that was one thing wheelchairs had in their favor – they were intended for people who spent a long time in them.

The stress ate at him for a while, inevitable considering his circumstances, but mostly he worried about his wife and whether she’d met her guards or made her flight rather than his immediate circumstances. He’d never been the worrying kind, business wasn’t kind to those who couldn’t have confidence in their decisions, but the situation he was in was unique, and not directly a result of his own decisions. But even with all the stress he was under, certain facts, like being woken up very early, were inescapable. As the van roared to life and started towards it’s destination a gentle sloshing sound from one side of the van slowly lulled him to sleep.

Sykes woke to the sound of a low flying jet coming in through the back door, currently open to allow the big man from earlier and a new friend of his to wrestle a second wheelchair into the back of the van. It took only a few minutes for them to clamp it in place and tumble out the back. They were silent during the whole process and Sykes saw little point in talking to them.

And the van’s new occupant was doing plenty of talking for everyone, laughing and joking about the wild living of young people these days. He sounded almost like a stereotype of a ninety year old man, his voice gone a little high and wheezy, and he was speaking with an odd rhythm that suggested he was a little short of breath. Sure enough, as the men who’d brought him in moved away Sykes could see that there was an oxygen tank attached to his chair and tubes running up to his nose.

The man’s obvious infirmities didn’t seem to have handicapped his voice or good humor, though. Once he was in place and the back door was closed again, leaving them alone in the relative darkness of the early hour, the old man turned to Sykes, a glint on his glasses the only sign of the motion, and said, “Well, son, what brings you here this time of night? Most respectable men are still asleep right now.”

“I couldn’t really say,” Sykes said, rubbing absently at gritty eyes. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Oh, six thirty, I would guess,” was the answer. “I’m surprised you don’t know. Didn’t you fly in?”

“No,” Sykes answered quickly and decisively. After a moment’s uncomfortable silence he added, “I tried learning to fly once. I don’t trust myself on planes now.”

The old man gave a huff that might have been a laugh. “That why a man your age is in that chair? It doesn’t suit to run from the things that weakened you.”

“I’ve lost four parents in this life, to suicide, drugs and airplanes.” Sykes shrugged, more uncomfortable by the moment. “It’s a short enough list of things to avoid, and not likely to get any longer.”

Another awkward silence. “Sorry, son. That was rude of me. I think I’m loosing my touch.”

“No worries,” Sykes said, the ghost of a smile on his face. “I’ve made my peace long ago.”

“Still, it begs the question,” the old man said. “If you didn’t fly in, and I didn’t, why are we at an airport?”

“I don’t think we’re going to learn that any time soon.” Sykes looked his companion over again. It was hard to tell in the light but he really didn’t look like anything other than an infirm old man. “Speaking of obvious questions, what brings you here?”

The gleam of the old man’s smile was back. “Me? Old Stillwater just couldn’t pass on the chance to get back in the field. If I don’t keep my hand in the game I’ll keel over and die. What about you?”

“I suppose…” Sykes trailed off and tried his best to sort through the possible answers to that question. “I suppose I’m paying for my sins.”

“As good a reason as any. Poor choices or poor friends?”

Sykes chuckled ruefully. “You can’t have the second without the first. But in my case, I think it was mostly bad friends.”

“Poor choices are easier to straighten out, poor friends tend to fight back,” Stillwater said. “My sympathies. Had a few friends that didn’t get on with reason in my time.”

“Just a few? I’d think a man your age would have had more friends than that.”

The old man laughed. “Okay, more than a few. But only a few that really went off course. Maybe it’s not as bad as it seems – it isn’t always.”

“No,” Sykes said softly. “I’m pretty sure it’s bad.”

“You’ll just have to be better then.”

Sykes narrowed his eyes, trying to make out the old man’s expression in the dim light of the van. He didn’t sound insincere. “What do you expect me to do under these circumstances?”

“For starters you can get your mind on the problem.” Not insincere but definitely annoyed. “I know you got a life outside this van, but I served on ships full of guys that had lives outside the hull. When you spend your whole shift on the sonar, listening for the Kraut U-boats coming for you, there’s nothing you can do but listen and think. So you learn to plan ahead and good. Who do you talk to as soon as you hear the screws in the water? How fast can helm be notified of incoming torpedoes? What do you need to do to light a fire under whatever needs burning?”

“You must have been a real terror to your ratings.” Sykes shook his head. “Still, you do have a point. What-”

The back doors of the van swung open again, cutting off his next question. “Alright, it looks like everyone is here.” There were two new people at the back of the van. The speaker had a smooth, cultured voice and the clean, elegant cut of his suit could be made out beyond the harsh glare of parking lot lighting behind him. “I was caught a bit unawares and I do apologize. However, now that everyone is here I suppose we can set things in motion.”

He turned to the other new person, a tall, African-American woman who looked like she’d fit better in a Greek myth than modern America. Her long, tan vest covered a shapely figure from shoulder to knee and her charcoal clothes were accessorized with paracord and a host of indistinct but dangerous looking equipment. The man handed her a slip of paper and said, “If you’d care to get behind the wheel, this is a list of your destinations. I’ve already spoken to the rest, they know where they’re going and where to get off. Your instructions are on the next page. Don’t read them until you reach your final destination.”

The woman took the papers hesitantly. “What about you?”

“As always, I have my own business to attend to. You take care of yours and this will all end as planned.” The well dressed man clapped his hands together and said, “I suppose we should get on our way. Good luck and stay out of trouble. At least, until it’s time for you to cause it. Then you can do as you like.”

The two men from earlier climbed into the back of the van and pulled the doors closed behind them, then found seats on some crates strapped into the back corners of the van. There were no real chairs, although the brief illumination while the doors were open was enough to see that something had been bolted along one side of the van at some point. A half a dozen tanks about the size of fire extinguishers strapped down along the opposite side was the source of the sloshing sound heard when the vehicle was in motion.

While one of the two men was the man who’d come to Sykes’ door earlier in the day, the other was a strange, nondescript man with brown hair and an athletic build. Sykes frowned. “Who are you?”

Stillwater answered. “That’s my tactical agent. It’s been a while since I did field work, but when talents came out of the woodwork a while ago Sumter thought I should have someone to keep me out of trouble.”

“You mean this doesn’t qualify?” Sykes asked, incredulous.

“This is the definition of trouble,” the brown haired man answered. “But it’s also the biggest chance a guy like me gets. Chief Stillwater wasn’t the only one who couldn’t pass on the chance.” He broke into a grin. “We’re on our way to catch the biggest criminal Project Sumter has ever let get away.”

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Thunder Clap: Shocking Claims

Posted by natechen on September 15, 2014

Helix

“Your city?” Not for the first time Circuit managed to shock me with his audacity. “Does the city know that? I think they might have other ideas.”

Circuit laughed. “Cities have never had any real choice in who owns them, Helix. You know that. They are in the hands of those who can manipulate them properly, and in this day and age that’s me. Consider this a courtesy call.”

I looked down at the line of unconscious people at my feet, then back up at the camera. “What courtesy exactly am I supposed to be expecting? Because so far it’s not looking inviting.”

“Yes, I am glad you are the one who found them. It saves the trouble of having some hapless passerby try and run you down – or worse, having the police do it.” He steepled his fingers and cocked his hat slightly so I could make out a single eye gleaming at me from underneath the brim. “This is my notice to you that this city is now under my protection.”

“Your… protection?” I glanced at Teresa, hoping she had some better idea what was going on. She just gave me a blank looked, followed by a shrug that suggested that I was the expert on Circuit’s thought processes and I should figure it out for myself. So I said, “How does knocking out the city’s power grid count as protection, again? Or is this a kind of racketeering scheme? The city pays you or no power?”

“Nonsense. I’m talking about the kind of protection you can’t provide.” Circuit spun around to face the windows and gestured out the window at the city below him. “Do you really think anyone’s ever done an adequate job of protecting all that? The police? The FBI? You? Of course not.”

I did my best to keep a smile from my face. “And your knocking out half of the city’s power grid-”

“Three quarters,” he corrected.

“Three quarters,” I said, the humor of the situation quickly draining away. “Your robbing three quarters of the city of it’s power is protecting the people of the city how?”

“Robbing?” Circuit turned his chair just enough to glance back at me. His face wasn’t visible but his tone told me it was his turn to be amused. “No one is entitled to electricity. It’s a convenience only, and one I’m sure people will willingly give up for safety, just like they’ve put up with airport security and End User License Agreements. So long as their precious lives aren’t disrupted, what do they care if they really have freedom? I’m building a world of safety – the world they want. What does it matter if the lights come on when they flip a switch?”

“So who does make that decision? You?” I shook my head sadly. “You’re unbelievably smart, Circuit. I’ll give you that. But even with your talent for reading electric potentials there’s no way you can monitor an entire city’s worth of electricity use – and that’s before we even talk about trying to protect the city.” I put enough emphasis on the word protect to make it clear I thought he was doing the opposite.

“And yet right here in front of you is the evidence to the contrary. It’s just a small start, I’ll admit. But if you were to take the time to look around,” another gesture at the cityscape, ” I’m sure you’d find this little achievement repeated over and over again. All it takes is enough successes like this and soon, surprisingly soon, you’ve created a city where no one would dare step out of line.”

I snorted. “That’s reassuring. So what’s the courtesy call about, again?”

Circuit spun and leaned forward to loom over the camera. Although I got a clearer look at his face it still wasn’t enough to make out much of it. Enough to give me a strange feeling in my gut, though. I was having a lot of those lately. “The call is to warn you to leave well enough alone, Helix. This is now my city, under my protection. I won’t tolerate you or anyone else trying to do my job here, anymore than you tolerate vigilantes in your territory, interfering with your job. It’s time for you to step down and let a real expert do the job.”

“You realize that, even though you do have a lot of experience working with criminals, you still kind of count as one yourself?” I folded my arms and added as an afterthought, “Or a vigilante. Or both.”

“History will prove which of our opinions is right, I think.” Circuit leaned back in his chair and pointed a finger at me. “I’ve given you fair warning. Leave or face the consequences.”

He twitched his finger once, like he was pushing an invisible button, and the TV switched off. I glanced back at Teresa and we quickly stepped off to one side of the display window, huddling up with Gearshift, who was quickly tapping the screen of his smartphone.

“How much did you record?” I asked in a soft voice, sure that Circuit could still eavesdrop on us even if we couldn’t see him.

“I didn’t get the first ten seconds or so,” he said. “And I had a bad angle so I don’t know how much of the visuals are going to be of use. But we’ve got all the audio.”

I gave him a slap on the back. “Well done. Lets-”

The screen of his phone suddenly went dark. We all stared at it for a few seconds then Teresa dug her phone out of a pocket as I felt a headache coming on. A second later Teresa said, “I think we’ve been EMPed.”

Gearshift cursed viciously. From the look of the case and the cleanliness of the screen I was guessing it was a new phone. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Most insurance policies consider destruction by malicious terrorist adequate reason for replacement.”

“I guess.” He stared at it for a second then shook his head. “Fastest I’ve ever had one of these turn into a paperweight, though.”

“Hang on to it,” Teresa said, matching actions to words by putting her own back in her pocket. “There’s a chance Forensics can recover some of the data on it.”

I pulled a hand across my face, trying to wipe away all the exhaustion I was suddenly feeling. When I could see again my eye fell on the unconscious people at the base of the window. “Okay, let’s head back to the venue. We need to let everyone else know the score and figure out what we’re doing next. And find someone to grab these poor saps off the street before Circuit remembers to come back and grab them.”

The three of us set off across the city at a fast pace, doing our best to remain alert. I’ll confess to being more than a little distracted, though, with my brain spending a lot more time trying to work out Circuit’s angle this time around than paying attention to what was going on around me. Teresa slowed down a step or two for some reason, I have to confess I’m not sure why, and I nearly ran into her. She glanced back at me and frowned. “You’re making your ‘Circuit is bugging me again’ face, Helix.”

“I don’t have a ‘Circuit is bugging me again’ face. That would be a stupid face to have.” I looked at Gearshift. “I don’t have make that kind of face, do I?”

He held up his hands. “Don’t look at me. This is our first time working together, am I right?”

That was enough for me. “See? The man says I don’t have that kind of face. He would have noticed it by now.”

“He is noticing it, right now,” Teresa said with a laugh. “He’s just scared to admit it.”

“Scared? Of what?”

She shook her head. “Forget it, you’re just trying to change the subject now. Seriously, Helix. What’s wrong? Aside from the obvious.”

I cracked my knuckles absently, trying to figure out what to say next since she’d cut off the easy comeback. “It just doesn’t sit right.”

“What doesn’t?” Gearshift asked.

“Him calling me out.”

“But he did that during the Enchanter business back when I first joined,” Teresa pointed out. “That was another case of him trying to do our job to make a point.”

That was exactly what was bothering me. He had called us out before taking a direct hand in the Enchanter case. “Maybe. But last time the point of contacting us was to give us the chance to work together. Why call us now? He can’t possibly expect us to back off.”

“He does have a weird idea of fair play,” she answered. “Maybe he just feels he has to, in order for things to be done right.”

“Could be. But I’d have expected him to do it before hand, to make his eventual move that much more impressive when it looked like we were powerless to stop it.” I hesitated, a new thought occurring to me. “That’s what’s wrong.”

Teresa and Gearshift both gave me quizzical looks. “What?”

“Wheels within wheels.” I could tell they didn’t get it but instead of explaining I picked up my pace. “Come on. We need to get those looters picked up and back to the venue. I need to talk to an analyst…”

——–

Izzy

“Why does she have a tire iron?” Helix stormed through the backstage area, voice booming much louder than you’d expect for such a small guy. He was talking about Jane, who for some reason still had the tire iron she’d picked up at the shopping plaza in one hand.

“We had a little trouble, Helix,” Al said, getting up from the small cluster of people sitting by the back wall of the venue. “There-”

“No tire irons,” Helix said. “Loose it somewhere.”

Jane and I exchanged a bewildered look but while we were at it Amp gently slipped the tire iron from Jane’s hand and passed it to Clark Movsessian, her drummer, and Clark made it disappear almost like it was magic. Al watched the whole thing impassively and, once the show was over, said, “Done. Want to share what the big issue is?”

“Where are Cheryl and Samson?” Helix asked instead.

“Cheryl was missing when we got back,” Amp answered. “Samson went to try and find her. I heard them talking with the manager a few minutes ago. I think it has something to do with the generator not being enough to keep the full air conditioning system going – you of all people must have noticed how hot it’s getting out there. People in the crowd are going to start passing out soon.”

“Great. Just what I need today.” Helix slumped down onto one of the boxes we’d been using as seats and leaned his head against the wall. “Terrorists are taking over the city while we’re waving tire irons around and letting people pass out.”

Al sat down on the floor next to Helix and said, “So you’ve confirmed the outage was caused maliciously.”

Helix nodded. “I just talked to someone claiming to be Open Circuit, and in complete control of the city. He’s got a nice little view to go with it. He not only spotted us moving around but managed to EMP bomb us and he’s taking out looters and leaving them on doorsteps like he thinks he’s a stork or something.”

“Circuit’s back and he’s worried about a tire iron?” Jane whispered to me.

“Little things. He needs to have the little things because sometimes that’s all he can get,” I whispered back, echoing something my mother had said to me many times.

“Why do you say ‘claiming to be’?” Gearshift asked. “I didn’t see anything to make me think it’s not him.”

Clark shook his head. “If Circuit’s existence was still classified it I’d say that’s enough to assume it’s him. But there were copycats for months after we cracked his last operation. There’s a chance whoever you saw is another one, although if his is he’s doing a lot better job of it than anyone else who tried. Circuit plays big and wiping out the city’s power grid is the closest anyone’s ever come to his level of ambition.”

“Not wiped out – taken over,” Helix clarified. He went over the whole conversation his group had just had with Circuit for us. “And there’s another thing you haven’t considered, Movsessian,” he said when he was done.

“What’s that?” Clark was a field analyst and considering things was his job. He looked a little miffed at the idea that he wasn’t doing it.

“He could be a decoy Circuit set up to distract us. Circuit never directly does whatever it is he wants to do, he’s always juggling multiple things at once – this could just be another gambit to distract us while he does something else. Whatever that is.” Helix pushed away from the wall and pressed his palms into his eye sockets for a moment, then shook his head. “No point tying ourselves into knots over it, though. Amp, I want to talk to the manager. Can you ask him to come over here with Cheryl and Samson?”

She nodded and backed a step or two away from the group, lips moving but not making any sound we could hear. Helix slapped his hands to his knees and gripped them like he was looking for something stable to hang on to. “We’ve got work to do, ladies and gentlemen. For starters, Circuit has a headquarters in the city. Someplace high up, with a view of the lakefront and no similarly high buildings between it and the lake. Teresa, Gearshift, did either of you-”

“Waltham Towers.” Clark said it with such certainty that Helix stopped midrant for a full two seconds.

“I agree,” Lincoln said, piping up from his spot by the wall. “Waltham Towers is the skyscraper closest to the lake. I’ve been in most of the big ones one time or another and you can see the Towers from all of them, most of them have at least one other big building visible from them.”

Helix scratched his head. “Well that’s kind of useful, except we can’t be sure the image we saw was taken from the public observation area of the building, or that it didn’t come from one of the big buildings that didn’t have an observation deck or some such.”

“No. It’s definitely Waltham Towers.” Clark smiled. “You know how the property changed hands about four years ago because the last owners were in trouble financially?”

“How about I take your word for it and you get to the point?” Helix suggested.

“Three guesses who was middleman and did the accompanying remodeling.”

Helix’s eyes narrowed. “Keller Real Estate and Development.” It wasn’t a question. “That must have been a big deal for them.”

“The biggest they ever closed,” Clark confirmed. “It’s not one of the properties we had a special interest in from earlier investigations but when Circuit disappeared we pulled a complete list of everything Keller Realty has worked on and that was at the top of the list.”

“Okay, that is a pretty strong case for that being the center of operations. And if it’s true, it’s another reason to suspect Circuit and not someone else.” Helix looked at Amplifier. “Are they coming?”

“They’ll be here in a minute.”

“Good. That leaves three little things to take care of. Or one big thing, depending on how you look at it.” Helix pulled himself to his feet and dusted his hands off. “Gearshift. Jane. Isabella. You three aren’t cleared for field work yet but we need people on the ground right now and you’re close enough that I’m willing to give you a pass. But I’m not forcing you – if you want to cut out now it won’t look bad on your record. So. Field promotion to active field agent or bow out and wait for another day?”

Jane answered immediately. “No time like the present. I’ve got a bone or two to pick with my ex-boss anyway.”

“I’ve cleared everything but my wall diving certificate anyway,” Gearshift said with a grin. “So long as I don’t try to run straight through a skyscraper we should be okay.”

“So long as you don’t get cocky,” Helix said with a smirk. Then he looked at me. “What about you, Izzy? You’re the youngest here and honestly, from a PR angle, I don’t like the idea of someone under twenty-one out on this.”

“To say nothing of what her father might say?” Papa asked, looming out of the backstage shadows to tower behind Helix.

Helix didn’t even glance back at him. “She’s an adult and I started field work when I was even younger. I’d be something of a hypocrite if I didn’t give her the chance – and that’s something you’re not very enthusiastic about, isn’t it?”

Papa just grunted and looked at me.

Which kind of put me on the spot. I knew my father didn’t want me running around with a supervillain on the loose. On the other hand, I didn’t want to be left out when Jane and Al were risking their necks. But more than anything I hated the thought that someone was willing to cause all this mayhem just to try and prove a point – if this was what it took the point wasn’t worth arguing.

“Don’t let anyone twist your arm into it,” Helix said, sensing my indecision. “If you don’t want to do it you’ll just be a liability.”

I took a deep breath and said, “What if I just want to knock Circuit into the next time zone?”

Helix smirked. “Then you’ll have to get in line. I filed my NBH-186 years ago, that means I get first dibs. Now all three of you need to raise your right hands.” He waited until we did. “You going to do all you can to drag Circuit in and throw him in jail?”

Gearshift said, “Yes.”

Jane and I exchanged an uncertain look and did the same.

“Great. By the powers vested in me, etcetera, etcetera, you’re field agents. Put your hands down, this isn’t an elementary school.”

“Huh.” Gearshift looked at Amp. “That felt kind of anticlimactic.”

“That was pretty ceremonial,” she said with a smirk. “When he made me an acting field agent, last time Circuit went wild, I only got one etcetera.”

“There was only one of you at the time.” Helix waved papa and Cheryl into the circle. “Now listen up, people. Circuit’s one step ahead of us – again. That’s fine. We always have been and we’ve gotten better at winning from there every single time. Here’s what we’re going to do this time.”

Thunder Clap: Shake Up

Posted by natechen on September 8, 2014

Izzy

I really should stop listening when people tell me something is worth a shot. And by people, I mean Jane. She has this idea that just because I’ve never used my ability to smash anything for kicks I’m repressed. I don’t understand why she seems to think smashing things is going to be such a productive route to solving so many problems.

But let me back up here. We went to visit Al’s friend, Lincoln He, who is the nephew of Al’s wushu instructor, as a part of our patrol. That meant going into the outskirts of Chinatown.

Now I have nothing against Chinatown or the He family but I swear it has the highest concentration of shops per city block anywhere in the U.S. They come in individual stores, strip malls and quaint little plazas with fancy Oriental gates, and in every other possible arrangement you can think of short of actual shopping malls. A surprising number of these storekeepers live on top of or behind their shops but most of the newer shopping centers have done away with that old time convention.

Lincoln He doesn’t live in one of those newer shopping centers.

He lives on a little plaza with oriental looking storefronts facing in on a nice courtyard with waist high red pots and planters holding live plants and bushes, a worn wooden railing marking a walkway around the outside and, at least at the time we arrived, a half a dozen people poking through the stores with crowbars. That last part was not a typical feature of the shopping center, which I guessed from the way Al reacted when he saw them.

We had six people with weapons, mostly crowbars or baseball bats with one tire iron mixed in to switch things up a bit. They were all male, which wasn’t really surprising, and they were in the process of trying to pry through one of those folding metal security doors at the front of a shop when we walked into the courtyard. Other than a little vandalism that ruined perfectly good trees I didn’t see an signs of long term harm done yet.

“Hey!” Al called, reaching into his back pocket for his ID, “Put down you weapons and step away from the door.”

“Who’s that?” I heard one of the thugs ask his friends. The general consensus was that they didn’t know and they didn’t care. In their defense, the three of us were all dressed in T-shirts and jeans or, in Jane’s case, cargo pants so we didn’t exactly look intimidating.

At least, until thug number one stepped up to give Al a shove and wound up coming to an almost comical dead stop as Al diverted the force of the push into the ground at his feet. Thug one started to back off a step, maybe to bring his baseball bat into play, but Al turned the move into a takedown, rolling his opponent back while tripping him with one foot and letting him slam flat on his back with an added shove’s worth of momentum.

Things turned hectic after that.

For the first few seconds of the fight my contributions consisted of taking one of the other would-be looters and turning his crowbar into a set of impromptu handcuffs. That took the fight out of him and gave me enough time to get my bearings – a lot happens in a fight in just a few seconds but, at the same time, if I’d accidentally broken the man’s wrists while tying him up because I wasn’t paying attention I’d have been in all kinds of trouble with Al. Not to mention Helix.

Stunned boy was back on his feet but leaning on his bat for the moment. Al was going three on one with most of the remaining thugs while Jane was holding the tire iron and gleefully stomping on her opponent’s toes to keep him off balance. Since none of the thugs were using bladed weapons, which could actually hurt Al since cutting and whacking apparently aren’t the same thing from a physics standpoint, I grabbed Jane’s dance partner by the belt and dropped low, using leverage to swing him around into an underhanded toss into thug one, who was still disoriented and went back down flailing and shouting under his partner in crime.

At that point it should have just been mopping up except it turned out our friends had friends. Friends with guns.

Another three guys, each with some kind of handgun, chose that moment to come running into the plaza, shouting in an attempt to figure out what was wrong and clearly demonstrating why one of the first things you learn to do in just about any kind of tactical training program is communicate clearly. I had no idea what they were actually saying but guns are a problem for just about everyone. Even Al couldn’t move around freely under steady gunfire.

Jane saw them too and came up with a solution first. She pointed to one of the large planters, about eight feet long and two wide, and said, “Stack and shove!”

“Can you tank the recoil?” I asked.

“It’s worth a shot!”

——–

Okay it’s time for a quick explanation of how my talent works. Papa and I are taxmen, a name that was coined because we supposedly levy a tax on entropy. In a nutshell everything you do takes energy and most of that energy is wasted as entropy. When a taxman like me is around we take a small portion of that energy and store it for later use. The name is genderally pejorative because it was coined in the late 1920s.

Now that idea sounds really simple in principle because it is. Dr. Higgins, one of the guys Project Sumter has been been working with to build a better picture of how talents work, has this huge mathematic equation that lets you figure out exactly how much energy we steal in a given situation but we never use it. You see, we can sense that waste.

Don’t ask how I can sense an abstract law of physics at work. I spent an hour trying to explain it to Dr. Higgins and we both wound up confused. That’s how it usually works when somebody tries to explain their talent to someone who doesn’t share it.

What’s important here is that we know when entropy is happening, we feel it as it makes us stronger and we know how much power we have from it to use. What we don’t do is project it like it’s some kind of mystical energy or a forcefield or something. We exploit loopholes in physics, we don’t break them. I can punch a car and fling it across a parking lot but only if I can somehow brace myself against that equal and opposite reaction people like to talk about in Einstein voices. Otherwise the car just rocks on its suspension and I fly back into whatever’s behind me.

This is a big part of the reason why Massif is my combat instructor. Wushu is a martial art that’s largely about positioning the self to best direct force and he has taught me more ways to effectively use my talent in the last year than papa learned in nearly ten years working for the Project. What he hadn’t let me do is apply any of that knowledge. I don’t have a feel for my strength yet, as he puts it. and so he’d been leery about my trying anything he’d taught me on someone who was less than moderately indestructible.

But Jane is part of a moderately indestructible group of people and working together as much as we had in the past year we’d discovered that her ability to trap incoming force let her brace me when I really needed to move something.

——–

The planter was way to heavy for me to do anything but maybe pick it up and throw it. Problem was that would keep me stuck in one place long enough I was likely to get shot in the process. So instead Jane and I lined up one side of the planter, Jane bracing me as I gave the planter a hard shove. Since she’s a vector trap, Jane was able to take all that equal and opposite reaction and store it for later use. I got a really solid shove on the planter and it went towards the guys with guns like I wanted.

Unfortunately, as Al says, I don’t know my own strength. I’d never done something like that before.

I way overshot the mark. Instead of sliding the planter along the ground and clipping the newcomers with it; the thing rolled over once and flipped up a good fifteen feet in the air, scattering dirt and plants across the courtyard in a bizarre reversal of rain. The three new guys threw their hands over their heads as the cloud of dirt and plants fell on them, one was taken out by a small bush landing on his head the other two dropped their guns as they wiped furiously at their eyes and spat dirt from their mouths. The planter crashed to the ground behind them and rolled straight over the decorative gate, sending it careening into the street beyond in splinters.

Behind me, Jane stumbled and fell back on the ground, the pavement beneath her shattering as she lost her grip on the forces she’d just absorbed and it went careening through the ground as she landed. Clearly she hadn’t been as ready to handle the recoil as she’d thought.

The two thugs left fighting with Al saw all that and decided that dropping their weapons like they’d been told was the better part of valor. As for our unarmed combat instructor, he let the thug he’d been grappling with out of the hold he’d been in and shoved him away with a sigh. Then he folded his arm behind his back and surveyed the scene, trying to look harsh but a small smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

That was when we heard Lincoln yelling from across the courtyard, “What are you kids doing on my lawn?”

——–

Helix

We’d just about reached the halfway point of our look around town when we spotted the bodies.

I confess to having the stupid thought, about two minutes before we stumbled on them, that we were going to have a really simple time of it. Everything had been going so well.

Gearshift looked like a natural for field work – he paid attention, he pointed out anything he thought looked odd right down to the unmarked white van we passed a few blocks from the concert venue – which Teresa photographed with her phone in case we needed to run the plates – and he kept his mouth shut the rest of the time. I remembered him as a headstrong, stubborn kind of a guy from our first meeting a couple of years back but I guess field training had steadied him some.

Of course a fog bank like him could easily kill himself if he did something stupid like trying to walk through the load bearing wall of a building and causing it to fall on himself. It was a sobering revelation and news to most of the living ones we found.

There weren’t even that many people out on the streets. Most of the city seemed to have settled in to wait out the power outage. It wasn’t that we didn’t see people, there were a fair number out on the porches or decks of the houses we passed, but they didn’t seem interested in going anywhere.

But several blocks on the houses gave way to an apartment building and beyond that a small strip mall. There was a drug store, a grocery, a hole in the wall restaurant and an electronics store advertising cheap smartphones. There were nine people lined up under the big window of the electronics shop, all seated with their back to the building, heads propped up on their knees and with hands seemingly at their sides. The store window behind them was broken.

One of the best parts of weird experiences is that, even when your job is dealing with them, they’re still new and exciting every time.

This is also one of the worst parts about them.

A glance at Teresa confirmed she was thinking along the same lines as I was. Gearshift just waited for me to give him a signal. After a moment’s thought I didn’t see anything for it but to wave them forward.

We spread out a bit so we’d have room to move if we needed to and Teresa produced a sidearm from a holster at the small of her back, hidden under her loose fitting shirt. Gearshift looked a bit surprised to see it but he shouldn’t have. I’d come to realize that her battered, thrift store purchased T-shirt and cargo shorts, both of which looked like they came out of the men’s section, were just another expression of a deep seated pragmatism that came from a childhood spent living at or near the poverty line. That pragmatism didn’t let her spend more than a few dollars on clothes unless she had to and it didn’t let her walk around the city with herself or her friends unprotected.

In this case, though, we didn’t really need much protecting. There was some stray glass on the ground but the eight men and one woman we found weren’t really that much of a threat. They were all unconscious with their hands handcuffed behind their backs. A couple of crowbars and a baseball bat lying on the ground or leaning against the broken windowsill gave a pretty clear picture of why those people had come there.

I gave one of the sleeping men a poke with my toe, just to see what would happen. He didn’t even groan. I had to lean in close enough to hear him breathing before I was sure he was alive. A glance through what was left of the window confirmed that there wasn’t anyone on that side of it and it didn’t look like anything had been taken. Teresa stood on the other end of the line of people, giving her a better view of the interior of the shop through the window. “It doesn’t look like there’s anyone there,” she reported after a moment. “What do you think happened?”

“Looks like vigilantes,” Gearshift said with contempt I found ironic, given that’s what he’d been when we first met. He trotted up to the wall, his feet sending tiny ripples through the sidewalk as his density increased to the point where matter around him was nearly a liquid in comparison. He gave me a look and jerked his head at the wall. Did I want him to go through it and get a better look inside?

I was about to make my answer when the TV in the store window switched on and said, “I’m very flattered to hear that you think so, Agent Gearshift.”

Teresa snapped her gun up and trained it on the TV while Gearshift just jerked back from the wall like it had burned him. I held still. There was no way the man on the screen was anywhere near close enough for my moving to matter, one way or another. Either we were already in a trap or we weren’t.

The TV showed a slightly grainy view of a man sitting in a leather desk chair in front of a row of floor to ceiling windows that gave a stunning view of the city. Most of the visible skyline was dark but I could make out the lights of civilization out in the suburbs and the more remote patches of the Lake Michigan shoreline. The man in the chair concealed his face with a fedora pulled low over a long scarf, wound around his face like a mask. He was dressed in a pinstripe vest and pants, a plain white dress shirt and a mess of wires and reinforced electronic gear that spilled off his belt and vambraces onto the chair he was seated in and most of the visible floor around him.

A closer look at the TV let me spot a small camera attached to one of the corners and pointed at us. I narrowed my eyes and addressed it, not the screen. “Hello, Circuit.”

“Double Helix.” The man leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over his stomach. “It has been far to long. Welcome to my city.”

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Thunder Clap: Burning Questions

Posted by natechen on September 1, 2014

Helix

The room was total blackness but the one bright spot, so to speak, was that Sumter had an agent on the scene who didn’t need the electricity on to make herself heard. Almost as soon as the lights went out Amp was saying, “Sorry about that, people. Some kind of glitch, probably. Give us a few seconds and I’m sure the backup generator will kick in.”

The last word was barely out of her mouth when sure enough dim emergency lights flicked on around the hall and you could see your hand in front of your face again. I’m sure there were exit signs and the like on the same loop that had been on the whole time but when you’re only five foot three and in a crowd it can be hard to tell these things.

People in the crowd were milling and muttering – really, talking pretty loudly since it was a rock concert and eardrums were probably numb by now – but I’d spotted something during the two or three seconds of blackout that bothered me. The hair on the back of my neck was starting to prickle with that weird kind of sixth sense that I never believed in until I started doing law enforcement work. The feeling that there was something out in the world that was very, very wrong and was about to drop in my lap. “Samson!”

I looked around but there was a lot of noise and no sign of the strong man at the moment so I doubted he’d heard me. Teresa gave me a curious look and tried to say something over the crowd noise, gave up, then pointed off to my right. I glanced over and saw Isabella Rodriguez about ten feet over, watching the crowd around her a little nervously. Massif and Cheryl were there, too. Between the dark, the noise and the general confusion I figured it was faster to push our way over to them and set out to do so. In the end it still took almost two minutes of shoving and grunting to make it over to them.

“Crazy night, Helix,” Massif said, adjusting his position slightly. He was keeping his back to the stage at the moment, blocking the ladies from most of the press of the crowd. We were pretty far back so there wasn’t that much of a crowd, not like the front, and there was only one of him so I had might doubts about how effective he was being, but I didn’t see any reason to say anything about it.

So instead I said, “Crazy’s a good word for it. Izzy, I need to know if you can handle something for me.”

“Me?” Izzy’s voice came out as a squeak, which was funny since she was the second biggest person there. Not that she’s overweight or anything but, just like her dad, she’s got a broad build and really looks like she could be an Olympic athlete of some sort, provided the Olympics didn’t pass the ban on talents they had been discussing when I last heard. In terms of weight she’s probably just a little over average for her nearly six foot height, and that just because taxmen like her pack on a lot of muscle mass, even if it has nothing to do with how their ability works.

“You. I just need to know if you think you’re capable of something. See that catwalk?” I pointed up about two stories over our head where the lighting rig for the venue was. “I want to know if you think you can jump up there and run to the windows, take a look outside.”

Cheryl waved her had to get my attention over the crowd noise. “Sorry if I’m just the out of the loop office assistant here,” she said once I nodded at her. “But couldn’t we just go outside?”

“Not doing that is the point of the exercise,” I confirmed, turning my attention back to Izzy. “Can you make the jump? More importantly, can you stick the landing if you go up there? You might survive landing on someone if you fell but I don’t think they would.”

“No, that would probably be bad,” she agreed. “But I think I could make it. Want to give me some idea what I’m looking for out there?”

“I want to know if the whole block is out of power or if it’s just us. And keep your head down, we may be under surveillance. Amp?”

There was a moment of silence as I waited for our wave maker to answer and our little group spent most of it staring at me like I’d grown a new head. Finally, Teresa said, “Which are you expecting to find?”

“Either one’s bad,” I said, “but looking out the windows when the power was out I didn’t see any ambient light. That’s not good. This is one of the biggest cities in America. The streets never get that dark. Amp?”

“Just a second Helix.” Amp’s voice was being thrown, via another useful application of her talent, from where she stood on the side of the stage, standing with the rest of her band and some of the stage crew. “Staff might want me to make an announcement.”

“Wait.” I held up a hand to stall Massif and Izzy, who were starting to look over the scaffolding for a good landing point. After all that time working covertly, and with virtual superpowers to boot, I tended to overlook obvious solutions. “Amp, does the staff know what caused the power outage?”

“Checking.” I rocked back and forth on my feet as I impatiently waited for the answer. “Okay, the stage manager says they looked out the loading dock and at least this street is down, from the looks of things possibly the entire block.”

I nodded even though there was no way Amp could pick me out of the crowd. “Tell him we’d like to keep the people in here for a while, if that’s okay with them, then find Samson and have him meet us back stage. Bring Movsessian and Gearshift with you.”

Massif shot me a look and motioned toward the stage entrance, asking if he should start towards it. I nodded and the big man started half walking, half swimming through the crowd with slow and deliberate steps and gentle sweeping motions of his arms. The rest of us fell in behind him, taking advantage of the trail he’d broken as best we could.

As we made our way slowly through the crowd Teresa leaned down distractingly close and asked, “So why was that important to know? And why did you want the people kept here?”

“Just… precautions.”

“Right.” She was quiet for a second but didn’t back away. “You know, these concerts are not exactly unpublicized. If someone wanted to cause Project Sumter trouble this would be a really easy way to do it. I’m kind of surprised they don’t have more security.”

“We didn’t want to paint a target on it.” I started to shrug, then stopped when I nearly clipped her in the jaw. “Besides, so far no one’s broken any of the old rules from before we were outed. Why start now?”

“Because criminals are always breaking rules, so what’s one more? Because maybe they just hadn’t found the right time to?” She hesitated a moment, as if afraid to give voice to what we both knew we were thinking. “Because no one’s heard from Open Circuit in two years and as far as anyone knows he still hates our guts.”

“Hate is probably the wrong word for it. I’m not sure what it is Circuit feels about us. Contempt, maybe. But otherwise, yes, all those reasons had occurred to me.” The old rules were all common sense stuff, at least for anyone who actually knew how the game was played. The glass cannon rule, for example, basically meant that since almost all talents are just as easy to kill as most people, but many of our abilities can be used to kill someone fairly easily so if we set our minds to it we could kill ourselves off pretty quickly. So by unspoken agreement talents had avoided killing each other, or anyone else, with our abilities directly.

Another rule was, much like agents in the Cold War, we didn’t attack each other when we were “off the job” at home or just out on the town. In part that was to help maintain secrecy but also it was just another way to try and avoid a bloodbath. But, for someone like Circuit who ultimately aimed for governmental overthrow, that particular motivation might not have as much force.

When he had set out to make the world at large aware of our existence by going on a spree of increasingly violent robberies across the Midwest, ending in a secretly constructed bunker hidden in a state park where he’d been doing something we’d never quite figured out. Where before he’d scrupulously followed all the unwritten rules during those couple of months he and the surprisingly well equipped criminal organization following him had pulled no punches and left more than a few people maimed or dead. Why should the other rules have any more hold on him?

We’d smashed his center of operations for his last gambit but he’d escaped and evaded all attempts at detection. It was more than time for him to show up again and the fact that he’d been gone so long had me more than a little spooked.

And I was not only the agent who had spent the most time working to apprehend Circuit. I was also the leader of the taskforce that was technically supposed to be working at bringing him in, making me a natural target for him for a number of reasons personal and professional. But we’d had no leads on that front in almost six months and no useful leads in over a year. A part of me had thought he might be gone for good.

One could dream, anyways.

“Do you think this could be him?” Teresa asked.

“Honestly don’t know. But I don’t believe in coincidence and we are right here in the middle of the problem.” I glanced back at her. “What do you think?”

“I was hoping you had a clear idea,” she admitted. “He’s been almost half your career.”

There really wasn’t anything more to say after that.

Amplifier started making another announcement just as we got to the stage door. By the time we’d wrestled our way the last few feet and gotten backstage she was almost done and had rejoined the band and what I presumed to be the stage manager off in the wings by the loading dock. Everyone but Samson was backstage by that point, giving me a roster of myself, Teresa, Massif, Amplifier, Movsessian and eventually Samson to work with in terms of trained field agents plus Gearshift, Izzy and Cheryl as people who knew a fair bit about the job but didn’t have certification. And then there was Jane Hammer, technically a criminal on probation and something of a wild card.

“Okay, here’s the way I see things,” I said, gathering my little circle of agents around me like a football coach. “The power’s out in at least part of the city and it’s not because of weather. Temperature outside is even so we’re not going to have much wind or rain. That leaves some kind of glitch at the level of regional knocking out power to the grid or a deliberate attack on the power system. The first is kind of bad, the second is terrible. Anyone have anything to add?”

Movsessian, the good little junior field analyst that he is, immediately jumped in. “The first thing I thought of when the power failed is bad weather so I tried to pull up my weather app but my phone has no signal. Neither does any other phone we could scare up back stage.”

I frowned and pulled my own cellphone out. It wasn’t a smart phone but it worked fine under most circumstances. But this wasn’t one of them. Just like everyone else’s, my phone was searching for service. I pushed the phone back into my pocket, that sinking feeling I’d had for the last ten minutes suddenly getting much worse. “Useful information. Of course that could just mean the outage is a lot more widespread than I’d thought, and the towers have lost power too…”

“Isn’t there usually a backup power supply for things like that?” Cheryl asked.

“As a rule of thumb, yes,” Movsessian replied. “And cell networks are very decentralized, so it would be a lot harder to knock out a whole chunk of it than for the power grid.”

“Or this could just be a local outage cause by secondary complications from the power outage,” Teresa said. “But I think we’re straying from the point.”

“Right. Well and good.” I held up my hands and tried to get them to refocus. “What’s our biggest problem right now?”

“Looters,” Samson said, joining our circle. “Somebody, somewhere is going to see this as a chance to get free stuff off of stores with no power and bad security.”

I nodded. “My concern exactly. So we’re going to go out, we’re going to stomp on some ruffians right proper and scout out around here for a couple of city blocks, learn what we can about the situation and head back here. Any of you know this neighborhood well?”

“I grew up a few blocks from here,” Massif said immediately. “Also, Lincoln He lives six blocks away. He knows every building on ever street within a mile of his family place. Could be useful.”

“Okay. Samson, Massif and I will each head up a team. We go out, we look around, we deal with any looting we find in the most controlled way possible.” Teresa made a sound a halfway between laugh and choke. I ignored it. “Massif goes and gets Lincoln so we have another person who knows the territory well on hand. We come back here and compare notes. Amp, with no phones-”

“I can’t play relay across more than a city block, Helix,” she said, shaking her head. “The buildings and the concrete ruin the acoustics. It’s just not going to work. Sorry.”

“Then we go without, I guess.” I didn’t like being out of touch but there was only so much we could do with the situation and I really needed a better feel for the situation than we could get by staying at the venue, especially with no cellphones to work with. “Our teams are Samson with Amplifier and Movsessian, Massif with Jane and Izzy and I’ll go with Teresa and Gearshift. Cheryl, hold the fort and, in the off chance any kind of cops or Project agents show up identify yourself and try to keep them here. If you can’t at least tell them we’re coming back here and try to get all the information you can out of them, what’s going on, what the scale of the problem is, what the responders are doing about it. Questions?”

There were none. “Then let’s get to it. Be back here in no more than ninety minutes, preferably an hour.”

——-

There weren’t any questions but that’s not the same thing as there being no objections. I knew there was at least one of those and I also knew that Samson was enough of a pro not to protest my team assignments in front of the others. He came and found me as we broke up after a cramped, uncomfortable few minutes around Movsessian’s phone, which apparently still had access to maps even if it didn’t have service, plotting out what ground each of our small teams would cover.

“I know what you want to say,” I said, ignoring the instinct to cower in front of the much, much larger man. Not for the first time I wondered how our old regional manager, known at the time as the Senior Special Liaison, had dealt with Samson all those years considering he was an even shorter man than I was. With a good eight inches and at least ninety pounds on me, Samson could loom like a hurricane over Florida. But grandpa had been just as unusually strong and a touch taller to boot. Besides, Samson was far more level headed than most lawmen you worked with in my line of work, myself included. He was only physically intimidating and I’d gotten over that long ago. “You don’t like the way the teams are set up and you want to go with your daughter.”

“That’s right,” Samson said. It looked like there was more trying to force it’s way out but he managed to wait and hear what I had to say, which I appreciated.

“No.” He was starting to loose the war against whatever he wanted to say so I hurried on. “First, I need an experienced field agent to lead each of these teams. Al is the Training Agent for both Jane and Izzy. He knows their capabilities best, they’ve worked with him most. And besides it’s bad form for me to assign them to someone else when he’s right there. I don’t have enough people to work with here to cut anyone else loose for his team. Not to say anything about how having your daughter on your team could impair your judgement and endanger you, her, whoever else would be on your team and the civilians around you.”

Samson worked his jaw around slowly and then rubbed his hand across his mouth, unconsciously mussing up then smoothing out his neatly trimmed moustache. “I just want my daughter to be safe.”

“I understand.” Actually, I didn’t but we at the Project have worked very hard to develop better people skills since we became a publicly acknowledged arm of the government and sometimes that means faking empathy. “But if I could ask, why did you let her sign up for field work when her actually doing it makes you so nervous?”

“I didn’t want her to but when they work together she and her mother can be quite persuasive.”

I put a hand on his arm. His shoulder might have been more comforting but I’m sure the image of me on my tiptoes would have been counter productive. “Look, Al Massif is the best there is when it comes to keeping people safe. You just look after yourself, okay? There’s always a chance this is just a colossal screw-up by the utilities people.”

Samson gave me a biting look. “Helix, men of faith believe because of their faith bears fruit in their lives, not because someone spins them fairy tales.”

“Well, it was worth a shot…”

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Thunder Clap: Hot Beats

Posted by natechen on August 25, 2014

Helix

This is how a typical disaster starts at the Project Sumter offices. First, I get back in town from another trip to DC. While checking my e-mail it becomes clear that it’s been a slow week and it might be a good time to try and catch up on some of that business that’s been on the back burner as I run around the Midwest region supervising stuff and consulting with the Senate Committee on new regulations for talented people in the workplace. So I decide I’m going to try and ask Teresa out. Again.

Cue disaster.

My pal Jack Howell, once my tactical team leader and good natured butt of a lot of rhyming jokes, leaned into my office doorway and rapped on the doorframe. “The Senior Talent in today?”

“I hate that title and can’t believe they made it official,” I said, reminding Jack that I would continue to ignore him until he called me something sensible.

“It could be worse,” Jack said, ignoring my hint. “You could be the Talent Agent. Or the Senior Talent Agent.”

I kept reading my e-mail. It’s amazing how much builds up in just three or four days.

Finally Jack sighed and said, “Sanders has something he wants you to handle, Helix.”

“Is it a good something or a bad something?” I asked, selecting a batch of files and hitting delete. “With Sanders I never know what to expect.”

“Amp’s band is doing one of those PR concerts again tonight, Sanders wants you to go and put a face on it.”

“Amp’s got a face already and most people think it’s better than mine.” Ever since we’d officially gone public a couple of years ago the Project had been scrambling to put what the relations experts called a “positive face” on us. Being a secretive government branch with minimal accountability to the public at large usually being considered a strike against you. Amplifier’s garage band, a group we had initially wanted her to pull out of, had proven really useful in that regard and she was starting to grow a really enthusiastic fanbase. I wasn’t really sure why they kept sending other agents to her events when there were already two talents in the group and everyone there was more interested in them than us. “Still, if that’s what he wants maybe Al Massif would-”

“He’s already going,” Jack said with a grin. “Taking Cheryl, from what I understand, but it sounds like that’s a lot closer to being a date than official business.”

I drummed my fingers on my desk for a moment, trying to think up a new dodge. To buy time I said, “Are those two officially dating now? Or is he still holding out for a yes from Amp?”

“I keep my mind off that kind of thing, Helix. Nothing good comes of meddling.” He waved a pair of tickets at me. “All I know is Sanders wants somebody with more than three years experience at that concert as the public face and that means you, Massif or Broadband. Further meaning either you have to talk a near-septuagenarian into going to a rock concert, make Massif change his plans or go yourself.”

I massaged my temples. “Jack, remind me again why I hated never being promoted beyond Special Agent?”

“You hated the low pay, lack of benefits and being ignored whenever you had a good idea.”

“What exactly have I got now that I didn’t then?”

“Good benefits.”

“Right.” I sat back in my chair and held out my hand for the tickets. “Does that make you my sidekick for the evening?”

“Not me, boss,” Jack said, holding his hands up in a ‘no way’ gesture. “I got plans with the better half. But you know…”

He trailed of and I waited for him to finish. Except he was clearly waiting for me to prompt him and enjoying every minute. So I did. “No, I don’t know. Enlighten me.”

“Well, I hear Herrera doesn’t have any plans for the evening.”

“Oh?” I stared at the tickets for a moment, then back and Jack. “Exactly ow many people were involved in this little conspiracy of yours, Agent Howell?”

Jack did his best innocent look, which is surprisingly good for someone who spends a lot of his time looking like a blonde grizzly bear. “Not sure what you mean, Helix. Concert’s in two hours so if you want a hot date rather than the alternative you better get moving!”

He ducked out the door and hurried away before I could say anything else. With little else to do I picked up my phone and started dialing.

——–

Izzy

One of the weirdest things about having most of your social circle be people you work with is, when someone who technically outranks you invites you to go somewhere, you’re never sure if it’s a suggestion or an order. While Teresa Herrera is more like the older sister I don’t have – by virtue of being the oldest – the fact that she’s worked with my father and might also kinda sorta be dating my boss makes the chain of command less than entirely clear.

Of course, papa seemed to think it was a good idea and he’s the expert on that part of the business, so Jane and I agreed to go along.

Another weird part of my social circle is the superpowers. My papa is half strongman, half preacher, so it’s no wonder Project Sumter called him Samson back in the day when real names were something that happened to other people. My friend Jane is some kind of ex-supervillain, or as dad would insist we call her, a reformed talent. Personally, I think she’s just filled out a little bit since dad took her on as part of Project Sumter’s new parole system last year. She may be a year older than me but she sure doesn’t have sense, if you know what I mean.

Case in point. Ever since papa introduced them, Jane and Amp have been best buddies. Sure, Amplifier has a cool job and a nice apartment but she’s always seemed kind of aimless to me. Still, that’s probably part of the appeal, Jane doesn’t like people getting too close and Amp’s certainly not the clingy type. So what I’m trying to say is, Jane’s a good person for hanging out with but I’m not sure I would’ve relied on her in a pinch.

Amplifier and Jane Hammer are a funny picture and I’m surprised the tabloids haven’t spent more time chasing them when they go out to parties. One’s tall, lanky and thin, the other is short, blonde and cute. They make quite the pair. That night they agreed to meet up early at the concert venue and spent half their time back stage tormenting the roadies and the other half checking on the equipment. I don’t know anything about sound stuff so I couldn’t tell which was which but I’m pretty sure they only had the speakers rearranged because they like watching the guys on the stage crew move them around. Like the name implies Amplifier has the ability to boost sound and make herself heard under just about any kind of circumstances and part of her gimmick is that she sings without a mic. As far as I know she didn’t usually take an interest in the stage setup. And Jane was definitely flirting with one of the crew in-between whispering with Amp.

For my part, I was hanging out with papa by the stage door. “I’m still not clear on how this all is good publicity for Project Sumter.”

“Basically, we show we’re here and doing things the community likes.” Papa shrugged. “I know it doesn’t sound exciting but it’s the foundation of any outreach.”

“I guess. Why did you want to be here?”

He gave me a knowing smile. “Because I knew Jane would want to go and it was better to invite myself along than leave you to running around on your own. Did you not want to come?”

It was my turn to shrug. “Amp’s brand of music isn’t my thing. Jane was going and I thought maybe I’d tag along – just didn’t think it was your reason, too.”

“Don’t all kids your age listen to punk?”

I laughed. “Sure, because you have to on the bus at the very least. But that doesn’t mean you have to like it. I mean sure, it’s got a beat but you can’t really dance to it.

“That’s basically my problem with it, too.”

I jumped and spun around. “Sifu! Hi.”

This brings the weirdness of my life full circle. My hand to hand combat instructor – and how many college freshman can say they have one of those – had just popped up beside me. Built like GI Joe, born in the Polish part of town, trained in Chinese martial arts since the age of six and semi indestructible, Aluchinskii Massif is quite possibly the quintessential American superhero. On top of all that he’s polite, considerate, thoughtful and tonight he was accompanied by a busty redhead. Most of my time around him has involved getting swept off my feet in a very literal sense.

He is apologetic about it, though.

“Hello, Isabella,” he said with a smile. Then he nodded to papa and said, “Samson.”

And there’s the problem in a nutshell. To me, Al Massif may be very nearly perfect but to him, I’m just part of the job. If papa’s ever noticed that byplay he’s never said anything; then again he’s not dense either. But just like he usually did he held out his hand for a quick shake and said, “Hello, Massif. You look well. What brings you out here tonight?”

“To be honest, I’m really not sure.” He glanced at the woman with him. “Cheryl and Jack have some kind of bet going with Sanders and I’m apparently helping them win it.”

“Technically Jack made the bet,” Cheryl said. “I’m just conspiring with him.”

“That’s a lot of work for a bet,” papa said, waggling his eyebrows. “What are the stakes?”

“He didn’t say what they were, actually.” Cheryl shrugged. “Or what they were betting about. I’m not sure I want to know what those two are up to, to be honest.”

“Um.” The other three turned to look at me.

Al shifted a hand behind his back, as if he was using it to push his already upright posture even straighter. Jane calls this “the sifu pose” and says he does it whenever he’s trying to decide whether to be professional or not. Like when he’s putting us through a drill and is doing his best not to bawl us out for bad form. Except this time he just asked, “Um what?”

The correct answer was that Jack and Sanders had a standing bet over whether Helix would ask Teresa out before the end of the year but, once again, this is not exactly the kind of thing you can just up and say about somebody who is kind-of sort-of your boss.

And if you’re wondering how I can be unclear who my boss is, exactly, then you’ve obviously never worked in a government office that’s undergone a recent structural overhaul. I think, technically, Helix is the supervisor for all fifty or so field trained talents in the Midwest and the other dozen that are going through training, myself included, and that’s enough for me to want to stay as far away from poking my nose in his personal life as possible. The man’s scary when he’s mad.

So I played Obvious Excuse Number One and said, “I think I’d better check on Jane before she gets herself kicked out for hassling the staff.”

“If you see Helix tell him I want a quick word with him sometime tonight,” papa said. “No hurry, though.”

“Right.” So the real reason he came with us was work, probably something related to the parolees he’s in charge of. Not surprising, that kind of job doesn’t exactly keep regular hours. I headed off to try and find Jane and hoped I hadn’t made myself look like too much of a dork.

Amp and Jane weren’t back stage anymore so I figured they’d probably headed around to the bar out on the floor. Jane’s two years older than me, Amp’s three, and both can drink legally, so I wasn’t really worried about that. Neither one tends to get drunk and being at the bar put distance between them and the stage crew, so that was a plus. I never actually got to the bar, though, because as I went out into the hall I caught sight of Teresa and Helix coming in the main entrance.

Since I didn’t want to forget to pass on papa’s message before I forgot I cut through the growing crowd and met the two of them about two thirds of the way.

Teresa looked glad to see me there and, after a brief scowl, so did Helix. I had a hunch I knew what that was about but again, not about to pry. Then Teresa pinned me down with questions about life – school, testing for my field qualifications, family, stuff like that – and before I knew it the show was starting.

A Broken Sword show isn’t a whole lot different than any other, so if you’ve been to see a band in your life you know what happened. There were warm up acts, words from management, breaks to hit the restrooms and the occasional grabby drunk that event security dealt with quickly and quietly. It’s hard to keep track of everyone in crowds like that and I found and lost track of my papa, Jane, Teresa and Helix and Al and Cheryl a couple of times each. And that was all before Amp and crew took the stage.

The thing about Broken Sword, what I think is why Sumter likes to use them to generate good press, is that they’ve been together since before talents came out and they’ve functioned as a group the whole time. On top of Amp one of the guitarists, codename Gearshift, is a talent and has worked with the Project on and off. There’s apparently some kind of special certifications he needs to finish with before he can get full field licensing – something to do with his talent and architecture – and he’s taking his time getting through college while he works on them. Beyond those two out of the five being talents, Clark Movsessian on the drums moonlights as an analyst for the Project.

All in all, it’s a great PR to show that we’ve had groups working together both in and out of the field to make art, or at least something like it, and protecting the citizenry from evil. Or something. At least I’m sure it’s a nice contrast to the way most people usually see shadowy government organizations and helps play down the fact that, until two years ago, what half the band did was not only unheralded but was actually illegal to talk about.

So Amp was doing her Hello Midwest bit, introducing the band and doing trick with the crowd noise like making it swell to stadium levels or pushing it down to whispers, stuff that’s pretty cool to experience and, I’m told, very hard to actually do. Whether or not that’s true, the audience usually loves it and tonight was no exception. Amp was leading into the band’s first song of the night when the lights and most of the sound suddenly died and the hall disappeared in total darkness. I didn’t know it but it was the start of a very, very long day.

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Thunder Clap: Rude Awakening

Posted by natechen on August 18, 2014

Matthew Sykes snapped awake, aware of three things almost at once. His wife was not in bed with him. But then, she was at one of those charity networking things, out of town for the weekend. He’d gone himself in the past but this year he just hadn’t had the energy the trip. Rather than back out his wife had offered to go in his place. Sykes found he missed her being there even though she’d only been gone a day.

The sky was still dark out, which surprised him. It was mid summer and the sun rose early. He was not the type to sleep restlessly so waking up before the dawn was not a usual part of his life. Then again, there was that vaguely musical jackhammer sound that might be what had woken him. A moment’s groggy though placed the noise.

His phone was ringing.

Not the public line, which didn’t even have a receiver in the bedroom and mostly went straight to voicemail, so his secretary could screen the messages, nor the direct line to the office of Sykes Telecommunications, the tristate company he remained sole owner and operator of. It was his private line, the one only a small handful of people knew the number for. To make sure it stayed that way he changed the number every six months, something he’d done only three weeks ago. Anyone calling that line was important enough to warrant a little lost sleep.

Sykes sat up in bed and fumbled for his glasses and phone. Once he was fully equipped he checked the number on the screen. It wasn’t familiar but it was in state. That could just mean someone was calling him from an unfamiliar location. Or it could be his number had wound up with someone he’d rather it didn’t. No way to find out but answer it, so he slid his finger across the touchscreen and said, “Matthew Sykes. What can I do for you?”

“Good morning, Mr. Sykes. I’m sorry to-”

“No amount of apologizing is going to make me less tired but it might bore me into drifting off again,” Sykes said, using the grousing to buy time to try and place the voice. It sounded familiar he wasn’t having any luck putting it to a name or face. “Just tell me who you are and what this is about and I’ll decide if I’m letting it go then.”

“Very generous of you,” the voice said dryly. “My name is Alan Dunn, although you might be more familiar with the code name Double Helix, which the media still likes to use.”

“Yes! I’ve seen you in the papers.” Sykes struggled around until he was sitting up in bed. “Is this about the Enchanter business? I heard he was trying to have his sentence overturned again and my office was contacted by the Project about the threat we received from him a few years ago.”

“Actually, no. I think if the Enchanter case was a problem we would have waited until office hours to try and contact you.” Helix sounded apologetic and more than a little tired himself. “You may not remember this but we actually met in person shortly after the Enchanter’s arson spree. I was operating under a pseudonym at the time, so that’s probably a part of it. We were following up some properties that you and Mr. Roger Keller had been investing in.”

“Oh yes!” Sykes scratched absently at the stubble on his chin as he thought. “Hoffman, wasn’t it?”

“That’s the one. Mr. Sykes, are you at home right now?”

“Yes, I am. Why do you ask?”

There was a muffled sound on the other end of the line, like someone was talking with one hand over the receiver, then Helix was back. “We’re sending someone over to pick you up. I’d like you to come in to our regional office… or at least somewhere close by. We’re still working on that part.”

“I’d be happy to, Agent Dunn, but I can drive myself, condition not withstanding.” Sykes slapped one of his useless legs and said, “There’ve been cripples longer than there’ve been cars, you know.”

“Yes, I didn’t mean to imply anything about your ability to get around. Mr. Sykes, I suspect you just woke up and haven’t watched the news yet so I’ll give you a condensed version. The Waltham Towers, one of the buildings you and Mr. Keller collaborated on, has been taken over by insurgents. We believe they somehow influenced the remodeling of the structure and have been planning this move for years, if not longer. We’re hoping you can give us some insight into what was done during the time the property was in the possession of Keller Development and Restoration.”

“Well we did redo the LAN and some of the infotech in most of the remodeling jobs we’ve done but…” Sykes shrugged, although Helix couldn’t see it. “Really, Roger could tell you more about the details. I’m not even sure I remember which building Waltham Towers was.”

“We’ve tried to contact Mr. Keller but haven’t been able to. And his house has been broken into.” There was something that sounded a lot like someone on the other end of the line being slapped for having a big mouth. Then, “That’s why we’re sending a team to pick you up. They have this number and will call you when they arrive. Do not answer your door until they do. If someone tries to gain entrance to your house before our agents arrive contact me immediately at this number.”

“That… sounds like good advice, Agent Dunn. Thank you for notifying me.”

“Stay safe, Mr. Sykes. I hope to see you when you get here.”

Sumter’s agent hung up without waiting for a goodbye but Sykes supposed he was busy enough that the rudeness could be forgiven. The businessman stared at his phone for a moment, putting together a new morning to-do list. First things first. He called the office and left a message letting them know he wouldn’t be in. Then he made a few other phone calls to make sure things would run smoothly. Then he levered himself out of bed and into his wheelchair.

Before his parents had died TV had been a kind of family vice. They would all gather around and watch it while eating dinner, laughing at whatever silliness was on that night and generally enjoying not having to work at getting along for an hour or so. But after prescription drugs wore out one parent and depression another, and he wound up in the group home, fighting over the TV had turned into a game only the older, meaner kids could win. Then the Sykes had taken him back out of there, and they didn’t believe in TV. In time, Matthew had become a convert in most respects.

Of course, anyone who didn’t share his upbringing might have more broadminded views. Like his wife. In the time they’d been together Sykes hadn’t quite managed to wean her of the habit just yet and so the only TV in the house was in her office, and that was where Sykes headed. Of course, as the owner of a multistate telecommunications company he was aware that there was news available on the Internet. But in odd ways he was a traditionalist and the one exception to his no TV policy was the news. Usually he watched it over lunch on the office lounge TV, mostly because he liked the local broadcast anchors. But at 4:30 in the morning, cable news would have to do.

“…insurgent organization has not identified itself,” the cable anchor was saying as the TV switched on. “But the spokesman who has been seen in the videos being posted has identified himself as Open Circuit. Project Sumter, the Federal Government’s agency dealing with unusually talented individuals, has confirmed that this is the same identity used by the man who first revealed the existence of the Project and unusual talents nearly two years ago. They have not said whether they believe this to be the same man or not. So far, neither Open Circuit or other members of his organization have made demands…”

Sykes muted the TV and fumbled for his phone, then made a few more phone calls, including one to a private security firm and another to his wife, telling her that the bodyguards were on their way. With that taken care of he copied down the URL for the videos the anchor had mentioned and started watching them. He’d only gotten through two and just started a third, mostly boring declarations of dominance and moral superiority and the like, when the doorbell rang. Sykes quickly rolled himself out of his office and to the front door, which he yanked open. “It took you long enough.”

The huge African American man on the other side of the door just smiled. It wasn’t a very comforting expression.

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Morocco

Posted by natechen on August 4, 2014

“You see bodies that have been shot in the head every day?” Agent Sandusky asked.

Special Agent Double Helix grunted a negative, examining the man who had been left dead in the back alleys of Casablanca. There was a rather large, gruesome hole in his primary thinking organ but otherwise he didn’t look too out of place for a large Moroccan city – Westernized clothing over Mediterranean features that could have been anywhere between thirty and fifty. If not for the blood and the head wound no one would have looked at him twice.

“I ask because most people are at least a little put off by this kind of injury,” Sandusky said, his attention more on Helix than the body the two were standing by. “And I was under the impression that you people didn’t deal with crime much directly.”

“More than twenty percent of our case load is accidental deaths,” Helix replied, carefully lifting the corpse enough to see if there was anything underneath it. “Poking at accident victims to determine if what happened to them was caused by an unusual ability or not and then covering it up if it was. I had this one guy who got himself crushed under a house when he tried to walk through the loadbearing section of a wall. That was gruesome. Why do your people think this particular murder has anything to do with Circuit?”

Sandusky finally knelt down by Circuit but his attention was still more on the other living man than the dead one. “Not much, really. We were kind of hoping you might be able to tie the two together for us.”

Helix grimaced but didn’t look up, instead beginning to rifle through the dead man’s pockets. “Agent Sandusky, I know there are a lot of stories about the CIA and the way they operate and I’m sure that 99% of them aren’t true. The same goes for us – for example, real supervillains don’t give their employees easily recognizable calling cards. I’m guessing you know this already, so you have to have some reason for dragging us out to stare at this particular corpse.”

“We got an anonymous tip saying that this one was probably related to our case.”

Now Helix did look up. “How many different cases does the CIA have open here?” A half second pause, then, “And do you even call them cases?”

“We generally call them ‘files’ and we have three open in Morocco right now, two that involve Casablanca.” Sandusky shrugged, his southern drawl becoming a little more pronounced with annoyance. “This got sent to me because our other case is a single person who’s under 24-hour surveillance. Also, this guy is a known arms dealer and we’re trying to crack an ironmonger’s ring that in Morocco somewhere.”

“Well, telling us to drop by and have a look at his handywork is consistent with Circuit’s style so I can’t fault you there. Just keep in mind that he has his own reasons for wanting us out here.” Helix pulled out a wallet and a set of keys and a wallet from the man’s inner jacket pocket. “Can your boys can track down where this guy came from using this?”

“It might take a little while, but sure.” Sandusky took the offered items and stood back up, heading towards the mouth of the alley where additional CIA agents waited.

“Hey, Sandusky.” Once the other man looked back over his shoulder Helix asked, “What do we do with him?”

“Leave it to the locals.” Sandusky said, unconcerned. “They’ll round up the usual suspects.”

Helix nodded, left the body on the ground and followed.

——–

As it turned out the key unlocked the door to an apartment belonging to the dead man. Of course, even with the door unlocked the body in the hallway made getting it open difficult. And with Helix, Sandusky and the three other agents on Sandusky’s team all crammed into the hallway with the new corpse it was kind of crowded. They still managed to get the door shut again. No point alarming the neighbors, after all.

“Looks like a couple of pistol shots to the chest when he opened the door,” Sandusky said. With the body flat on it’s back and a pair of powder burns plain as day on his chest the comment was a lot like stating the obvious.

“Bad friends.” Helix shook his head and got to his feet. The apartment was a simple two room plus bath affair, with all three rooms opening up off of the short hallway where the body lay. It only took a quick inspection to determine which was the bathroom, which the bedroom and which served as everything else.

There was a spare metal desk with a fancy looking wooden chair in front of it in the bedroom and Helix was about to start ransacking the desk when Sandusky tapped him on the shoulder. “Not to keep harping on this but you do know this Circuit fellow a lot better than anyone else. Do either of these kills look like his kind of a job?”

“This kind of violence isn’t consistent with Circuit, period,” Helix answered. “I can count on my ten fingers the number of bullets we’ve seen him fire before. When he has he’s been a decent shot, but really it’s not how he’s solved problems in the past.”

“My boys think the one we found in the street was taken down by a rifle, not a pistol.”

“Not his style at all.” Helix frowned as he thought it over. “Look, everything we’ve seen in the past suggests that he favors stealth and well laid plans over flash or brawn. His ability to circumvent most conventional forms of electronic surveillance along with a surprisingly good knowledge of modern security measures kind of circumvents the need for most direct confrontations so we’ve never really gotten a good read on how he might go about killing someone off. If anything, I’d say the number of bodies we’ve encountered along the way is the biggest sign I’ve seen that we’re not dealing with Circuit.”

Sandusky made an unhappy sound in the back of his throat. “That’s something, I guess. Not useful, but something. Let me know if you find anything better in there.”

With that, Sandusky left him to search the desk and, with nothing better to do, Helix pulled open the drawers and got to work. Most of it was junk, the kind of random restaurant fliers and newspapers you might expect. One drawer was locked and Helix hollered for someone with lockpicks. Melting the latch was an option but not one he wanted to use if the desk’s former owner happened to have left a loaded handgun in there. To say nothing of some of the other things he’d found in desks over the years.

One of the other CIA people poked his head through the door with a cheery, “You yelled?”

“Got a lock I need picked.” He gestured at the drawer in question.

“Sure thing, Supes,” he said with a grin, moving towards the desk. The guy was a younger looking fellow, probably not too long out of whatever training school he’d come from, and he seemed to think working with a genuine superpowered person was cool. Helix was sure the feeling would fade with time. And probably not a whole lot of it at that.

Helix got up and moved out of his way, thinking he might search the bed, when Sandusky poked his head back in the room. “What’s up?”

“I just needed the locksmith,” Helix said in annoyance. “Not the whole team. At least not yet.”

“Well let us know if you find anything.”

Helix was looking over his shoulder to make a retort when he saw it. In fact, he’d probably seen it when he first came into the room and just dismissed it. There was a folding chair peeking out from behind the door.

“Wait.” Sandusky stopped, halfway turned around in the doorframe.

Helix swapped places with the other agent again but instead of opening the desk drawer he grabbed the wooden chair and tossed it on the bed so he could look at the bottom of the seat. There was an envelope taped there with “Double Helix” written on it in a neat hand. Helix sighed. “Okay, Agent Sandusky, I’m now pretty sure Circuit is behind this in some way, shape or form.”

Sandusky came back into the room and studied the chair for a minute. “Okay, I’ll bite. How did you know there was a note there?”

“Like I said, because Circuit is involved.” Helix waved his hand at the chair. “I make furniture as… a hobby, I guess?”

“Strange hobby.”

“And I sell it through a dealer who lists it on the Internet. Somehow Circuit found this out and bought a couple of sets of chairs. We find them in hideaways he’s set up all over the country.” Helix shrugged. “I think it’s some kind of mockery, although really I appreciate the extra cash. Just try not to think about where it comes from.”

“Wait, that’s one of your chairs?”

“No, the style’s all wrong and I doubt he’d pay to ship one to Africa just to poke fun at me. But it’s where I’d put my maker’s mark if I had built it so it’s where I’d check if I wanted to be sure it wasn’t one I’d made and forgotten about or something. So it’s a part of the chair I’d be sure to look at.” Helix reached out to take the envelope but Sandusky grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him back.

“Hold on.” Sandusky nodded at the envelope. “If that’s been left there for us to find we should make sure there’s no nasty surprises in it.” He turned and looked back towards the main room of the apartment. “Ramone!”

Helix furrowed his brow in confusion. “What’s he going to do? Sniff it for bombs?”

“Don’t question Ramone!” Sandusky and the other agent said in unison.

“All right!” Helix leaned back against the desk and settled in to wait for Ramone to do whatever it was he did. “And I thought I was from the weird government office…”

——–

It took a lot more than a quick check by the bomb sniffing human to move on to the next step. The envelope proved to contain a satellite photo of a small house out a ways in the desert, along with a note that just listed latitude and longitude. But before they could move on to investigating that the rest of the apartment had to be turned over and put back and the crime scene called in to the local authorities. No new and exciting leads turned up so the next few hours were spent frantically trying to figure out who owned the building and what might be waiting for them there.

Turned out the building was owned by a known gun runner and that meant just about anything could be out there.

So they went in prepped for anything. Helix didn’t know what a bunch of CIA agents who were supposed to be operating under the radar were doing with the rough equivalent of a full set of SWAT gear in their basement but under the circumstances he wasn’t going to complain. Of course, they didn’t have a vest in his size. No one ever did and all his custom ordered ones were back in the states. So he wound up going on the raid without body armor.

Not that anyone wound up needing it.

The house was empty, save for the dead. Sandusky walked through the largest of its for rooms, staring at the carnage in unvarnished horror. “This is incredible.”

“That’s one word for it,” Helix said, moving over to the outside wall and examining the hand shaped burn mark near the power outlet there. “We passed a generator on the way in here, right? I’m betting it’s right on the other side of this wall. Circuit stood here and pulled current straight out of the generator and threw it at those two guys.”

Sandusky lightly prodded one with the toe of his shoe, staring at the large round burn that went through the front of his shirt and part of his chest. “I’m amazed he got enough voltage to do that.”

“Electricity kills based on amperage, not voltage. And fuseboxes can boost both with their talent, within limits.” Helix followed a second burn mark, long and thin, along the wall to the third corpse. “Looks like this guy was leaning on the wall here and Circuit just upped the current enough to jump the wire and into him.”

“And the forth guy, over by the door?” Sandusky gestured back at the last man in the room, who had clearly been shot and not electrocuted. “He was shot from inside. Did Circuit have another man with him?”

“Possible, but my guess is Circuit did that himself, too. Arms dealers aren’t the trusting type, I’m not sure they’d have let Circuit into their building if he had anyone else with him. Circuit does have a few known associates but I think he just shot that guy while frying the others with the generator. You can have someone go check on it but he probably overheated it in the process. My guess is it’s junk.” Helix turned away from the bodies and started towards the house’s small kitchen. ” Which reminds me. I should probably demolish this building before we leave, the evidence of a fusebox at work is pretty clear and Project Sumter doesn’t like leaving that kind of thing laying around, even when we’re technically off our turf.”

“Suit yourself. You’ve got some autonomy on this run, just let us check the house over before you do… whatever it is you’re planning to do.”

“Sure. Do we know how many people were in this ring? Are they all accounted for yet?”

“Still two missing, but our electronic surveillance team reports that there’s now a price on their heads, as of five hours ago.” Sandusky shook his head and followed Helix. “Odds are they weren’t here when all this went down. Especially since I’d say these bodies are a little over a day old, based on the smell and beginnings of decay. Why put a bounty on them if you killed them eighteen hours ago?”

“So these are the last of them.”

“That we know of,” Sandusky added.

“Right.” Helix shook his head as he poked through the kitchen, which looked like any typical kitchen might. “I don’t get this, Sandusky. It looks almost like a purge, but I can’t figure out why Circuit would care. He’s never purged his organization back in the states, at least that we can tell.”

“Maybe the greater distance resulted in them getting more out of hand.” Sandusky leaned in the doorway to the kitchen. “Maybe they spread into arms dealing from some other line of business?”

“No, he’s dealt in guns and drugs back home. He only robs banks or other large financial institutions but he’s got no problem dealing general violence or escape.” Helix drummed his fingers on the countertop. “Our analysts say he likes crimes he can see as victimless. Banks are insured. Drug users can be said to opt into their habits and essentially destroy themselves. Guns bought illegally are almost always used to kill other criminals.”

“That’s not as true here,” Sandusky said. “There’s all kinds of civilians caught up in the tribal fighting in Africa. To say nothing of the terrorist groups.”

“Maybe that’s it,” Helix replied. giving up on finding anything meaningful in the kitchen. “He doesn’t seem like the type to care for terrorists. He’s the kind of crook that thrives on picking the fat from a well functioning society. If their activities destabilized his home he might stop them. Even violently.”

“Well, it’s an angle we could look at, anyway,” Sandusky said, heading back into the main room. “Although there’s so many ways that could go and so little in the way of aboveboard bookkeeping done here that we may never know for sure. With all this taken care of, to an extent, do you think Circuit is likely to stick around or-”

“Boss?” Ramone and one of the other agents stepped into the main room, a shovel dangling limply in Ramone’s hand. Both were unusually pale and grim looking. “We found something out back you might want to see.”

——–

Sandusky helped pull Helix back into the jeep and slam the door closed. The wind was starting to die down and the temperature in the desert had already returned to normal but there was still plenty of sand and air whipping by at ghastly speeds. The house was gone. In it’s place was a serene expanse of glass nearly two hundred feet from one side to the other. A tendril of glass stretched from the larger patch out towards the CIA’s vehicles, quickly petering out into small individual patches that shrunk down to a size eight shoe before disappearing entirely. Although Sandusky saw it as just as much evidence for superhumans at work as the house itself Helix assured him the glass would either break up in the wind or be buried by the sand within a couple of days. Still.

“Was that really necessary?” Sandusky asked as Helix beat loose sand out of his clothes and hair.

“It’s how I demolish things.”

“I see.” Sandusky glanced in the back seat, where even his previously-enthusiastic lock expert was leaning slightly away from Helix, making no effort to hide newfound nerves. “It’s a pretty tomb, anyway.”

“Prettier than some of them deserve.” Helix yanked his tie off and cleaned some more sand out from under his collar. “How did that happen, Sandusky?”

“I don’t know! I’m not God, Helix, I can’t answer all your questions.” The CIA man shook his head. “Look, you think Circuit’s out of the country now, right?”

“He’s always had a hasty exit lined up in the past.”

“Then he’s not a part of our case anymore. You’ve cleaned up the evidence of your super secret talented people and the arms ring we were trying to shut down is now shut down.” Sandusky shrugged philosophically, gesturing back to the former house where six small stones sat in a neat line just beyond the glass. “That is not our problem.”

Helix snapped bolt upright in his seat. “Not our problem? Sandusky-”

“Stop,” Sandusky hissed, jabbing Helix in the chest. “You sit back and listen for a second. I get that you’re not a novice and you’ve got plenty of experience in your field. But your department has never been geopolitics. This doesn’t impact homeland security so it’s out of our purview.”

“What about the security of their homes?” Helix demanded.

“Again, not God.” Sandusky started the vehicle and yanked the gearshift into the drive position with more force than was strictly necessary. “Families starve or parents neglect all the time. That’s why there’s child soldiers and… places like this. I can’t stop it all and its not my job to do it. It’s not yours, either. I appreciate what you’ve done out here, but your share is done. There’s nothing more you can do about it.”

There was a long silence as they drove back to Casablanca, Helix staring out at the desert and brooding. Finally Sandusky sighed and said, “What’s bothering you?”

Helix finally turned away from the window and said, “He did something about it.”

“He also caused it in the first place. Cleaning up your own messes makes you normal, not a saint.” Sandusky shrugged. “Try and figure it out if you must but my advice is don’t let it drive you crazy. You yourself said he’s an opportunist feeding off the fat of society. What are the odds you’ll have to deal with Circuit playing the good guy again?”

Fiction Index

A Doyen in the Hand

Posted by natechen on July 28, 2014

(Sorry this post is so late, and very long. More about this in the notes at the end.)

They say you never forget your first love. For Dmitri, he’d first seen his when he was eight and had gone to Court for the very first time. For one reason or another his minder had decided to bring him through the Terra Front, rather than by portal. Honestly, he couldn’t remember the reason and it really wasn’t important. Because the very first time he set foot through the shallowing and found himself in the pillared concourse, the six sides of the building each an arcade looking over the vista of another world, the high ceiling peaking in half twilight above his head and glimmering not with stars but the faint light of magic and order and all other thoughts had left his head.

With the Throneworlds extending on one side of every Front and five other worlds of the empire on each of the remaining sides it felt like you could literally set out from the center of one Front and go anywhere the human mind could conceive of in a matter of a moment’s walk. Even after months among the wealth and riches of the Court he’d still found his mind drifting back to that first moment stepping into the Fourth Front. Now he was in a different place but feeling the same thing.

Here was a scene big enough that even a man at the beginning of adulthood reverted to childhood wonder whenever he saw it.

There were plenty of reasons to stay there, in the center of what seemed like unbridled possibilities, whenever he had to return to the Throneworlds. Mons didn’t need his input to do his share of the work and the immense power of his title made people uncomfortable. And there was no way to spend more than five minutes on the Throneworlds without someone wondering where you were. Officials had to answer such questions truthfully, which inevitably led to questions and all kinds of attention and… well, it was better to stay there. The Terra Fronts weren’t used for much anymore, with the convenience and economy of portals having removed much of their commercial and military utility. Really, their only practical use was their original purpose.

And Terra Eternal hadn’t invaded anywhere in nearly a century.

So they served as a sort of private means of transport from world to world for high level officials, of which Dmitir was one of the very highest. It was one of the few privileges he had that he truly enjoyed. At least, most of the time.

“Doyen Dmitri Dostoyevsky. May all your paths run smooth and peacefully.”

Suppressing a grimace, Dmitri turned to face the man who administered this particular Front. “Palatinus Alvin y-Santos. I greet you on behalf of myself and my brothers, and my father and his brothers.”

The two men bowed slightly to each other, hands spread at waist height with palms facing each other, as was proper in court circles. The only similar thing between the two was their insincere smiles. Skinny, save for a surprisingly plump gut, bald and constantly a little sweaty looking, Alvin y-Santos had always struck Dmitri as something of a grotesque. But maybe that was just because Alvin also had the vaguely predatory air he’d always hated about people at court – like a scavenger waiting to snag an easy meal once something died.

Dmitri absently smoothed his own hair back and out of his eyes, as if to be on the lookout for trouble, as he said, “To what do I owe the honor of this visit, y-Santos?”

“Why, I’ve just come to bid you welcome here, as you are always, my doyen,” Alvin answered, his smile stretching further across his face.

“Thank you,” Dmitri said, dry as dirt. “Your courtesy is always the highlight of my visit.”

Alvin made a show of glancing around. “I see that the Blade of ben-Gideon is not with you today. Is it time for a new Blade already?”

“I’m sure we’ll have at least one or two more assignments together before his year is up,” Dmitri said. Honestly, he wasn’t looking forward to having a new team of three assigned to him but it was one of the few parts of his job that he had no control over. “Indeed?” Alvin asked, oblivious to the other man’s thoughts. “I had heard that his replacements had already been selected.”

That brought all of Dmitri’s attention to the matter at hand. “And how is that? No one outside of those offered the position should know the members of a Doyen’s Blade.”

“And undoubtedly it is so,” Alvin said with a smile less forced and less pleasant than normal. Dmitri didn’t miss the implication. Someone Alvin knew had been offered the job.

“Then it is well,” Dmitri answered, even though it wasn’t. Someone had been talking when they shouldn’t have. “No doubt you will find some productive use for the good fortune you have found.”

“I was wondering if might ask you for a favor…” And there it was.

Alvin y-Santos was an infamous politicker and every time Dmitri had met him he’d asked for some small thing or another. As a rule Dmitri hadn’t agreed to any of it, thinking that it was better not to give any ground to the scheming man, but he had come to dread the requests. Doyen only served for ten years and after all the power and authority was gone, one thing that was supposed to keep them from running rampant was the reality of having to deal with some of the powerful people you’d angered in your position over the years.

Of course, this meant people like Alvin were always trying to curry favors from the local doyen in exchange for help and shelter down the road. Which brought them right back to the matter at hand. “No favors, y-Santos. You should know me well enough by this point.”

“It is nothing of importance,” Alvin was quick to say. “I just hoped you could convey my greetings to the new administrator of the Eighth Front. She has only come to it in the last week or two and, being a busy man, I haven’t had time to go myself.”

Dmitri stared at the other man for a long, uncomprehending moment, then said, “Y-Santos, you run the Seventh Front. It’s a five minute walk from the Eighth.”

“Regardless,” Alvin began, “I haven’t had the time-”

“Unfortunately we’re not going to the Eighth Front any time soon,” Mons said, coming down the concourse from the Throneworlds side of the Front. He was moving quickly, doubtless aware that Dmitri wanted Alvin far away as fast as possible, but his normally authoritative three-fold voice was muffled by the mask he wore. Most Souls of One wore them to hide their identical faces, something Dmitri found more unsettling than the sight of three – or even five or six – identical people moving in perfect synchronization, but Dmitri had encouraged Mons to stop wearing it over the last year, with some success. Now it was back and he wasn’t sure why.

“In point of fact,” Mons continued, his voice dropping to more normal conversation levels as he got closer to them, “we’re going to the Second Front next, and we may be there for some time. You’d best deliver your greetings yourself.”

“The Second Front?” Dmitri and Alvin asked, for once in sync on something.

“Indeed.” Even with his face hidden Dmitri could tell Mons was smiling. “We’re going off the beaten path for a while. A suitably grand task for our last outing together, don’t you think?”

——–

“Doyen Arianna Kahlenbeck?”

Terra Eternal’s only current female doyen paused in the middle of her latest case summary, surprised to find there was someone in the vacant office she’d borrowed. As was her want she hadn’t really told anyone she was commandeering it, just sort of set up camp there for the duration of her stay on world, so anyone finding it in the first place was a sizable achievement. And this fellow, well, his just getting into the building must have taken a lot of effort.

He wasn’t wearing the steel blue of the architects, nor the bronze of the cartographers or the white of the channelers. In fact, he wore a weathered brown coat, pleated pants of a lighter shade of the same color and a white garment that looked almost like a robe in place of a shirt. He had long, sandy hair and thin, sensitive looking hands that were reaching into his coat to pull out a small brown envelope. He looked nothing if not out of place.

“I’m Doyen Kahlenbeck,” Arianna said, setting her pen aside and leaning back in her chair. If this fellow wanted to eschew ceremony she’d go along with him, at least to a certain extent. “Who are you?”

“You’re handling the Venger Bar-Luzon case, correct?” The man asked, ignoring her question.

Arianna decided to continue the trend and parried that question with yet another. “Who?”

The man froze for a second, envelope not quite free from in his jacket, a comically quizzical look frozen on his face. “You’re not looking for Venger Bar-Luzon?”

Arianna leaned forward. “I wasn’t before. Should I be?”

“Just to be sure…” He glanced around the room once. “This is Terra Rasa, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Arianna said slowly, waiting for some sign that all this was going somewhere.

But the man just shoved his envelope back into his coat and fished around for a second before pulling out a long scroll that he partially unrolled and looked over, muttering, “I’m not sure this scenario was covered…”

Patience now exhausted, Arianna got to her feet and braced her hands on the borrowed desk. “Look here, you, I don’t know what your game is but you’re wasting my time and I don’t appreciate it.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, his attention still on the scroll he was reading over. “I was told you handle most problems that creep up here on Terra Rasa but I guess they handed this one off to one of the other doyen. Not sure which one, though. At least there’s only four others to deal with.”

The cavalier way of ignoring her was so out of place she couldn’t really do much besides blink in surprise. Which was exactly how long it took the man to vanish from the room.

Arianna looked around the room once, a weird and very uncomfortable feeling working its way down the back of her spine. She went to the door and yanked it open, startling the members of her Blade as they kept watch in the hallway. She glanced at Lambert, the regulus, and said, “Did you see anyone come in here recently?”

“No, my doyen,” he answered immediately. “Did you need someone specific?”

“Nevermind.” She thought it over for a minute. “Do you know the name Venger Bar-Luzen?”

“No, my doyen. Does it have anything to do with the trade dispute we’re working on?”

She thought it over for a moment. “I really don’t know. But I’d love it if you found out.”

Lambert nodded immediately. “Of course, my doyen.”

——–

“Terra Rasa is the perfect place for Bar-Luzon to hide if you ask me,” Dmitri said, absently cutting his meat into manageable chunks while keeping an eye out on the dining hall around them. He didn’t like staying in a public house but there hadn’t been room for four people in the local channeler barracks and he didn’t want to divide his forces on this job.

“I really don’t follow your logic on this one, my doyen,” Mons said, talking with only one voice so the other two could eat.

For a brief second Dmitri envied his friend. The local food was unusual but tasty and Mons had gone all out, getting three different meals to experience. But that wasn’t why they were there. “It’s a good hiding spot because it’s the first Terra we found with not native population. Everyone here is an immigrant, so while there’s something like a local culture it’s not a very strong one yet and outsiders won’t stand out as much. By the same token, it’s been settled long enough for there to be a few large cities to blend into. He could be anywhere.”

“Do you want me to send to the local architects and see if the local patrols have heard anything?” Mons asked. “Try and recruit some honest to goodness lawmen?”

“I’m not sure.” Dmitri stared down at the chunks of tangy meat and green vegetables on his plate, trying to work out how he should approach the problem. “Leading a manhunt isn’t what they prepare you for, you know. We’re supposed to hammer out jurisdictional conflicts or settle internal disputes, not find rogue agents.”

Mons just grunted and continued to eat. For a while that was all either men did.

Finally, Dmitri said, “Did you know him?”

“Venger Bar-Luzon?” The question was such a transparent play for time that Dmitri ignored it and just waited for Mons to answer. Which he did, eventually. “Even if we weren’t from different generations there’s a lot of differences in how you train Souls of One dependent on how many you have. Groups of three, five and six all go through different programs.”

“And a group of twelve probably requires a custom built curriculum.”

Mons laughed, almost spraying soup all over the table. “A Hex of One is bad enough. But doubling that to a Parliament? Surely you’re joking.”

“We grew up together,” Dmitri said softly, poking at his food and surprised to find he had little appetite. “Mons, I’ll tell you a secret. I know you Souls of One aren’t really one person, no matter how much you project that idea or even believe it yourselves. I can tell you apart.”

He jabbed at the Mons all the way to his left. “Like you. Whenever just one of you talks, you’re the one who does it. You can switch up your gear as much as you like, you can even fool people who have known you casually for a long time. But I see through you. You’re more like closely knit brothers who have been taught to coordinate telepathically than a single person.”

Mons fidgeted for a second before asking, “Is this all going somewhere?”

“I was just wondering if maybe we got this job because of you. Could you do what he did?”

Mons just stared off in three different directions for a moment, none of his pairs of eyes really focused on anything. Finally he said, “I don’t think any one of us could run off and abandon the others, no. In fact, I met a Hand of One once. It only had four in it.”

Dmitri suppressed a snort. “A Hand is five people, Mons. By definition.”

“But a Soul of One is a person who has been born the same on multiple worlds,” Mons pointed out, his attention back in the present. “If one of them dies you cannot simply send out for a replacement. No such person exists.”

Dmitri paused mid chew, the implications of that beginning to dawn on him. “What happened to that Hand, Mons?”

“It ceased to exist. When one of them died they ceased to be a whole person, Dmitri. It happened a lot in the early days, when Souls of One were a new thing that no one really understood. These days it happens less, in part because they warn us of the danger and try to prepare us to work around it.” Mon shook his head. “But to just cut out four fifths of your mind and walk away from it? I can’t imagine a sane person who would do that.”

Dmitri drummed his fingers on the table top for a minute, figuring that out. “So you think we’re looking for a madman?”

“I think it’s certainly a possibility.”

“Well. At least it’s a place to start.” After that the rest of the meal passed in silence. But it wasn’t the comfortable sort.

——–

The viewing crystal gave only a fair idea of what a person looked like, on par with a poor quality photocapture but without even a third dimension to give it depth. Still, Arianna could tell enough of the expression of the man on the other end to know he was telling the truth. That wasn’t a good thing, though.

“You’re telling me you have no idea where the Hand of Venger Bar-Luzon is?”

“No, my doyen,” the man said, an undercurrent of panic in his voice suggesting he knew how bad this situation was. “Uh… one of him went missing a month and a half ago. We haven’t been able to locate him anywhere on Terra Indissolute. We’ve started looking for him elsewhere but… there have been difficulties. We even filed a request with the Office of the Doyen two weeks back. The rest of the Hand went into seclusion until he returned. When you first contacted us we summoned him but… he wasn’t there.”

“You filed a request with the office?” That interested her. Maybe she was talking to the wrong people. “Thank you for your time, Palatinus.”

“Of course, my-” She tapped the top of the crystal and it went dark and silent before he could finish. Tracking down who Bar-Luzon was had been the work of three days and Arianna had a feeling she didn’t have a lot of time left for niceties. Too many people had no idea what was going on, herself included. It made her nervous…

——–

The file clerks Dmitri had met generally fell into one of two categories: Those eager to impress you and move on to a better job or those who loved their files and thought of others pawing through them as some kind of sacrilege. The local law architect clerk fell into the later category. Clerk – Dmitri thought of it as his name and didn’t think the man would mind – had insisted on an entire orientation tour, a not-so-brief overview of the filing system and a lecture on the importance of not misplacing valuable files.

After all that Clerk had finally accepted his request to search the records personally only when Dmitri hinted that he was willing and able to demote the other man all the way down to dustman if things didn’t hurry along. Hopefully Mons was fairing better finding a patrol squad who could put them in contact with the local snitches and rumor mongers.

“These are the vagrancy files and associated records,” Clerk said, stopping by a rather large scroll rack. “Most recent files on the top, older files towards the bottom. You can read them at that table over there.”

“Thank you,” Dmitri said, dismissing him with a gesture. “You’ve been most helpful.”

Oblivious to the sarcasm in Dmitri’s voice, Clerk nodded and headed back towards his desk at the front of the room. Dmitri started pawing through the files. Anything older than a couple of weeks wasn’t of interest to him so most of what he needed was on the top shelf. He collected a handful of the older ones and headed to the table.

Vagrancy reports were not exciting reading but it was important and he managed to plow through five or six of them in the next hour. He was deep into his seventh file, a much more interesting tale of a homeless man who seemed to know the back alleys much better than the local patrols and never quite got caught when they went to grab him, when a voice asked him, “Doyen Dostoyevsky? On the Bar-Luzon case?”

“That’s me,” Dmitri said, attention still mostly on the scroll he was reading.

“Fourth time’s the charm,” the voice said. A hand placed a brown envelope on the table next to him.

“Thank you.” He looked up to see who had brought the message but there was no one there.

——–

“…And that’s why we chose to give the matter to Doyen Dostoyevsky.”

Arianna rubbed her hands together absently, studying the older man in the viewing crystal for any clue what he thought of all this. As usual, his expression gave away nothing. “Well that does sound like a mess, Director Rand. But looking at the description and photocaptures you’ve provided Bar-Luzon isn’t the man who visited me last week. Do you have any idea who he was?”

“No.” Director Rand was the man who picked and chose what problems warranted the attention of the Doyen and which would simply have to languish in bureaucratic limbo until someone found a good solution to them. As a former doyen himself, Rand understood the stakes and frustrations of the job, and he did his best to keep the doyen abreast of situations that might be relevant to their jobs. The years of hard work showed on his face, never more so than when he was frustrated like he was just then. “I do know that at least one other doyen has run into someone matching that description. Doyen Tan reported meeting a similar man asking the same question two days ago. I think it’s time I tried talking to the others.”

“Lovely. Best of luck with that.” Doyen had a lot of autonomy in their jobs. They weren’t required to check in with their central office until they finished an assignment. That made keeping track of them hard and Arianna didn’t envy Rand the task of trying to find the other two. Of course, Dostoyevsky was apparently somewhere on Terra Rasa. But that was still a whole world to search. “I’ll tell you what, Director Rand, why don’t I see if I can help you find Doyen Dostoyevsky while you try and track down the other two?”

“I would appreciate that, Doyen Kahlenbeck.”

——–

The address was a small building, well appointed, located on the far eastern side of Petrograd, near the river. It looked more like a former bakery than a hideout. What was certain was that Dmitri would probably not have found it even had he searched the architect files for months. The only way he could have begun to suspect Venger Bar-Luzon was there was the note he had gotten. That in itself was suspicious.

Mons was setting up a cordon outside the building with a hand’s worth of the local architects, all that they’d been able to gather on short notice, while Dmitri headed in to confirm whether this was, in fact, the hiding place of a runaway Soul of One or just some bizarre joke.

In complete defiance of his expectations Dmitri had his answer almost as soon as he stepped through the door.

Venger Bar-Luzon was sitting at a table in the middle of the large room that took up much of the ground floor. A counter, probably for merchandise back when the building was still a shop, ran along the left wall and a bunch of other tables and chairs were stacked on the right. Venger stood up at the table and offered a formal bow. “I greet you, my doyen. I am Venger Bar-Luzon. May all your paths run smooth and peacefully.”

As his greeting implied, Venger wore the bronze robes of a cartographer, a specialist in Locke’s methods of travelling across worlds and the horizon. That was a problem in itself. Travelling worlds required huge amounts of magic and cartographer robes were mostly just cleverly disguised wells of magic reserves. With the right matrices to channel it through even an untrained combatant could be dangerous. Dmitri decided to play it safe until he had a better idea what Venger’s game was. So he fell back on formality. “I am Dmitri Dostoyevsky, Doyen of Terra Eternal. I greet you on behalf of myself and my brothers and my father and his brothers.”

Venger’s eyes widened ever so slightly. “I wasn’t aware that the Throneworlds had appointed a seventh son of a seventh son as doyen.”

Dmitri laughed in response, a short, sharp bark of pure surprise. “Of all the times for that greeting to be recognized it would be now. Only one in a hundred people even know what that means. I’m impressed, Bar-Luzon.”

“And I’m in trouble.” Venger slammed his hand down on the table, a spell matrix that Dmitri hadn’t been able to see from his angle suddenly lit up at the same time Venger yelled, “Abort! Siphon to dexter!”

The next ninety seconds went by in a blur. Dmitri snapped to his left, which was Venger’s right, just in time to see three heads popping up over the lip of the counter. Three pairs of hands were already setting a syphon, a powerful magic draining matrix, with the opening of the V shape pointed towards him. It was more than enough to drain the average magic supply of a person down to nothing in a minute but then, Dmitri was no average person so that wasn’t what bothered him. He didn’t have time to work out what was bothering him because he was too busy lunging towards the table, hands scything counter to Venger’s matrix, activating the most logical countermatrix he was carrying. That was his biggest mistake, in hindsight.

Just because Venger wore the robes of a cartographer didn’t mean he didn’t know anything about combat. Dmitri had just walked into a trap and it sprang out from under the tables and chairs along the right hand wall in the form of six young girls who caught him in a flexible glassweb matrix, a spell that bent like spiderweb when you pressed against it and, if you weren’t careful, would tear you to ribbons with its scything slivers of magic.

Dmitri managed to pull back from the glassweb before it cut him. His own spell, a simple bulwark matrix intended to slam Venger into the wall behind him and halt his mischief, wouldn’t do much of anything against a glassweb, except maybe get cut to pieces. So he changed tactics and, not even bothering to recapture the magic he’d put into building his bulwark already, set his own syphon.

How effective a spell matrix is was depended on a lot of factors. How well magic meshed with the material the matrix was made out of, how much energy was pumped into it and whether or not the magic energy would burn out the materials the matrix was built out of. There was more to it than that, but those were the essentials.

Most spell matrices were built out of metal, since it was easy to mold into the necessary shapes and readily available. But the human body was a kind of spell matrix itself, containing many of the basic shapes and patterns that magic clung to. Most people were a less effective matrix for magic than metal.

But then, most people were not the seventh son of a seventh son.

Most people could not rip apart a glassweb matrix just by forming a syphon with one hand, much less syphon down the transparent wall of energy a bulwark consisted of, even if it was half formed. Dmitri managed all that and had the presence of mind to pull out his core tap with his free hand, cranking it all the way open and releasing the full force of its magic on the room. The glowing rectangle and triangles glyph that represented the Eternal Throne snapped into existence above it and raw magic flooded the room, snapping against the magic sails in Dmitri’s and Venger’s clothes, energizing a half a dozen spell matrices that had been hidden around the room and probably blowing out ever other spell matrix in the neighborhood that wasn’t combat rated.

Three things happened at once. First, Dmitri realized what had bothered him a moment before. Both the ambush from behind the counter and the one from in the tables had been executed by children. And not just any children, but children with identical features moving with a familiar kind of eerie synchronization. They were moving as two different Souls of One, not nine separate people.

Second, with a strobe of light and a gut-wrenching twist the full Hand of Venger Bar-Luzon teleported into the room. Already they were preparing an escape spell. It was a canny move, since doyen relied on the Throneworlds for transport – one of the few checks on their power was a prohibition against carrying teleportation or horizon crossing matrices.

Third, one of the six girls bit him on the wrist and he dropped his core tap. Then another kicked it across the room towards Venger. Unfortunately for her it a loose board in the floor and skittered towards the tables along the wall rather than to Venger himself.

For a second Dmitri stood paralyzed. Venger’s matrix already encompassed most of the room, with four of the six girls and the three boys already caught in its turns. But the girl who had bitten him was scrambling after the core tap and Dmitri couldn’t run the risk that she’d grab it and the whole group would still get away. Rather than break Venger’s teleportation matrix he dropped a bulwark in front of the girl and dove past her, coming up with the core tap just as the teleportation matrix finished and the whole group vanished.

——–

Arianna looked up at the younger man. She’d never been very good with ages but she was guessing Doyen Dostoyevsky couldn’t be more than twenty – and she seriously doubted he was that. It showed in a lot of ways but the biggest was how much trouble he was having hiding his dejection. He’d let Bar-Luzon get away and caused some serious damage to the neighborhood in the process. Now, to top it off, he was apologizing to the doyen who’s territory he was intruding on. She could tell how much each and every one of those facts ate at him.

It would have been cute if the situation wasn’t so serious.

“I’m starting to think that this was a trap of some sort,” Dmitri was saying. “I think he meant to lure you to that empty shop with his note then steal your core tap.”

“That would fit with his pattern in the last few weeks,” Arianna admitted. “He’s kidnapped at least two Souls of One in training, from what you saw, but when the folks on Indissolute went looking for him they found at least six trainee Souls missing. Three blades, a hand and two hexes.”

Dmitri whistled. “That’s a lot of potential, right there. Even if its not fully trained. Add in a core tap as a power source and you could cause some real damage. We should try and-”

“No.” That came from both Lambert and Dmitri’s Blade of One.

“This is no longer the kind of thing that falls under the Doyen’s purview,” Lambert continued. “Theft of strategic resources and everything else that goes with it is squarely the responsibility of the channelers and the Throne of Vesuvius. We’ll file a report with them and let them handle it.”

Dmitri gave Arianna a sympathetic look. “New blade?”

“We’ve been together a month,” she confirmed.

“I sympathize. Mons is swapping out after this job.” He glanced at his blade. “But first, I really think following Bar-Luzon is a part of my mandate. Just because I didn’t catch him here on Terra Rasa doesn’t mean I shouldn’t follow him.”

“But following him gives him another chance to steal your core tap,” the blade replied. “And this time he’ll be prepared to deal with someone of your abilities. No. We’re done here. Regulus Lambert is correct. Leave this to the Vesuvians. It’s time to report back to the Director.”

Arianna smiled inwardly. All doyen had to be a little bit idealistic to do what they did. But as time wore on it was easy to loose the enthusiasm one started off with. Hopefully Dmitri wouldn’t loose his. “You’ve got a good blade right now, Doyen Dostoyevsky. Listen to him, even if it’s for the last time.”

Dmitri sighed and nodded. “I suppose I should.”

“Do you know who your replacement is?” She asked.

“I don’t.”

“I do,” Mons said, then hurried through the rest before he could be cut off. “At least who the blade’s regulus is, since you’re not getting a Blade of One again. You should know too, so you can start thinking of how to deal with him. His name is Oscar y-Santos.”

Once again with comical straightforwardness Dmitri’s expression morphed from annoyance at Mons, to shock, to resigned acceptance. “Of course it is. That’s just the perfect end to the perfect day, isn’t it?”

Fiction Index

(Okay, so this post is really late. A few weeks ago I was on vacation and ever since I’ve gotten back I’ve been helping out as a replacement in a theater production with some friends. Between going to rehearsals and frantically memorizing my lines, most all of my free time has been shot and I haven’t been able to write much. I’m lagging behind where I want to be and I don’t want to rush things.

I delayed this post because this story marks a turning point in the development of Dmitri’s character, as well as the things that are going on in this fiction setting as a whole and I wanted to do it right. I think I mostly succeeded in that. Next week we go back to Project Sumter for another short story. After that I had originally planned to plunge straight into Thunder Clap, the third and final book in the story arc I’ve been working on.

The thing is, I’ve not done some of the outlining I wanted to do and I’m planning a vacation with family the weekend of August 11th. So the new plan is to take a week between “Moroccan Heat”, next week’s short story and Thunder Clap, so that I can try and get my feet under me again. It’s my hope that all other content on the blog will go forward as planned, so the 11th will be the only blank spot in the calendar. Life is a mess and plans, they will be achanging. Thanks for your understanding.

Nate)

Nate Chen Publications

Project Sumter and Other Stories

Category Archives: Fiction

Thunder Clap: Sifting the Ashes

Thunder Clap: Smash Up

Thunder Clap: Bad Company, Stranger Characters

Thunder Clap: Shocking Claims

Thunder Clap: Shake Up

Thunder Clap: Burning Questions

Thunder Clap: Hot Beats

Thunder Clap: Rude Awakening

Morocco

A Doyen in the Hand

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