Category Archives: Water Fall

Heat Wave’s direct sequel. If you haven’t read Heat Wave, it might be a good idea to start there.

Water Fall: Shaking Earth

Posted by natechen on

Five Weeks, One Day Before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Massif

Jane Hammer certainly lived up to her name. I can process all kinds of movement but, even though I’d been warned, I wasn’t ready for just how fast she moved. It took her all of two seconds from the time she hit the ground to run a loop around me and get to the van, which rolled onto its side to the tune of screaming metal. I cursed and turned to start back towards her but I needn’t have bothered.

She came back my way even faster than she’d left and when we collided the force was more than the ground under my feet could safely handle. The parking lot was fairly worn down concrete and under that there was only gravel fill, I know because a great deal of it sprayed in the air when a chunk of paving about five feet around pulled loose and tilted up, sliding a few feet to the right in the process. It had taken the force of Jane’s hit but ruined my footing in the process.

At least I had known what to expect and managed to keep my balance. Jane, who had used a fairly straightforward shoulder slam that probably would have smashed a normal man’s ribs into kindling, hadn’t expected me to stay standing or for her to wind up stopped, much less for the ground to move under her feet. She slipped and went down on all fours.

Even though I knew it wouldn’t work training prompted me to try and kick her closer hand out from under her. The force from the kick vanished as soon as we made contact and her appearance changed subtly. According to Voorman, vector traps don’t move force, they store it and can release it later, although the amount of force they’re holding drains away over time. So I’d basically just handed her a free kick. She retaliated by punching me in the thigh and letting the extra force spring back out at the same time, which hurt about as much as the evil eye she was giving me as she swung.

Trading punches was going to go nowhere fast, neither one of us could really hurt the other that way. So I grabbed her wrist and shoulder before she could recover from her punch, pulling her off balanced and into a hip throw that dropped her to the ground. When we stayed in direct contact the whole time her talent was basically useless, while mine still ensured that I never lost my footing. I’m not sure why that is but that’s the kind of thing we leave to the scientists. While wushu doesn’t have a whole lot of wrestling in it, it does still include some basic throws and pins to go with all its other moves. Against a complete amateur, which Jane obviously was, that’s more than enough.

Or so the theory went. But I hadn’t even gotten her fully locked into a pin when she started kicking her feet against the ground. To my amazement her appearance started to warp slightly, like it had when she’d absorbed my kick, and even glimmer around the edges. Somehow kicking against the ground was letting her build up force. By the third kick I realized what was going on and shifted to try and pin her feet as well. After fumbling for a couple of seconds I only managed to get one of them.

Jane’s next kick after that hit the ground with enough force to rock the loose pavement we were on. The next after that actually shoved it a half a foot sideways. This was getting bad. If she managed to knock us airborne all my advantages would vanish – in fact, she’d be way ahead of me, since vector traps don’t need their feet on the ground to be quasi-invulnerable.

So I let go, timing it so it happened a split second before her next kick. With nothing to push against Jane wound up flipping herself over and skidding along the ground a good ten feet. I winced. Even if she didn’t feel the impact with the pavement she’d still get scrapes and limbs would still get yanked out of socket. For all that, she still got to her feet before I could get to her. I might have the advantage in durability, since Voorman said traps could only absorb one vector at a time and had to use it before they could grab another, while I could shunt hits into the ground all day. But Jane had far more mobility than I could ever hope for. At least I did have time to get off the broken pavement before Jane came back for more.

In fact, she backed up several steps, moving with a weird rocking motion of the feet and storing up a little more force with each step she took. Now that I had a clear look at it I remembered something Voorman had said about the principle of action producing equal and opposite reaction and Jane’s talent, but I hadn’t really understood it. Looking at it now, it seemed that every time her foot hit the ground she absorbed the impact and released it on her next step, making each step gradually a bit stronger than the last. I wondered absently if that took training or if it was instinctive.

Jane wasn’t distracted by such things. She was focused on taking me down and I was more than happy to let her try. Even with just a few seconds to study her it was clear to me that she had never had any kind of formal hand to hand combat training. All she was doing was building up a head of steam and slamming into her target with all the force she’d accumulated. And the fact is, that would probably be enough for eighty to ninety percent of the people she would fight.

But wushu isn’t just fighting hand to hand, it’s reading the flow and pattern of movement, anticipating it and countering it. While Jane’s movements were bigger and more powerful than anything I’ve seen from something that didn’t have a six cylinder engine in it they were actually very simple and easy to analyze. And while they might be too fast for an untalented man with my level of discipline to follow I could see her coming in ways she probably wasn’t expecting. The files suggested vector shifts and vector traps perceive the world a lot differently, so she probably didn’t realize that the way she manipulated momentum caused her to light up like a Christmas tree.

To my eye the average person is surrounded a dull red haze that gets lost in the gray static of ambient motion once they’re more than twenty feet away from me. A running person may work their way up to yellow and be visible thirty feet away – forty if they’re really fast. But Jane burned white hot and I could probably spot what she was doing from the other end of a football field.

The more force Jane put behind her movements the easier they were to track and anticipate. I almost felt guilty at how easy it was to toss her back to the ground when she came around for another hit. This time instead of letting her go flying I kept ahold of her and bled her momentum out into the ground. I also made it a point to grab her by the leg and wrestler her into a lock that would break it if she tried to power her way out again. “Give it up, Jane!”

“What?” There was a note of confusion in her voice and I belatedly remembered that, unless Project Sumter had actually had her in custody at some point she wouldn’t know what her codename was.

“Never mind.” I sighed in exasperation. At least her friends had stopped shooting at me once she came into the picture. “Are you going to give or not?”

In response she started drumming her hands on the ground. “If you try and move you’re just going to break your leg. Believe me, you won’t be breaking mine.”

She exhaled deeply, a lot like sifu would when “centering the chi”, and there was a confusing flurry of motion. She kicked against my leg lock and I held steady, not moving, but she managed to press herself down into the pavement with enough force to crack it again. For a split second I lost my footing and couldn’t keep her in the join lock; then suddenly Jane was free and bouncing a good ten feet in the air. She didn’t land on her feet but I don’t think that really bothered her much.

And this time she didn’t come back around for another pass, this time she just kept running away. I swore and then yelled, as loud as I could, “Amplifier! Jane’s running for the alley on the east side of the building!”

A second later I heard Amp’s voice, at normal levels, saying, “We’ve got it.”

I suppressed a shudder. If she was still where she started the operation she was a block and a half away, coordinating communications for-

The fast retreating point of light that Jane made as she retreated into the distance suddenly vanished in a weird pulsing of the air. I’m not sure normal people could have spotted it but I sure could.

“What happened?” I demanded.

“Just hit her with a little noise, one of the things I picked up in the past few weeks” Amp replied, still throwing her voice. I knew that she’d been having occasional meetings with another wave maker, who’s codename hadn’t been shared with me, to help them understand how she did her little ventriloquist trick over long distances. Apparently she’d picked up a few new tricks in the process.

“Is she still going to be a problem?”

“Don’t think so.” There was a pause, then, “Yeah, Dominic says they’re spraying her down with some of that riot foam stuff now. Voorman said that would be enough to hold her.”

“Good.” I turned back to the building, dusting myself off as I went. “Let’s see if I’m needed inside.”

——–

As it turned out, I wasn’t. Helix’s team had come through the front door and locked down the concessions part of the office as soon as the shooting started and the rest of the building had been cleared by the state police by the time I could actually get to it and get inside. After about five minutes of fast and furious work the raid was all over but the clean-up and analysis. This after nearly a weak of intensive planning.

My life in a nutshell.

All the work paid off, though, as the police got plenty of charges to press against the arms dealers and we got – well, we didn’t get the van in pristine condition since Jane had it hard enough to completely roll it once, but the body of the vehicle was mostly intact and hopefully analysis could get something out of it. On top of that, no one got seriously hurt other than the officer who was in the van when Jane rolled it. Even he got away with nothing more than a few sprains and a broken leg. Not bad given all the shooting that went on.

After asking around a bit I managed to track down Helix and our analyst team in what appeared to be the office of the accountant in charge of the operation. As with most criminal operations focusing on making money, most of the relevant evidence was probably going to be found there.

The small room was pretty cramped since Helix was there with Agent Herrera, his field analyst, who I’d heard being called Mossman, my field analyst, Auburn Reinke, and a youngish kid who I didn’t recognize but assumed to be Samson’s field analyst.

I’d passed a vending machine in the hallway, presumably one of the cover company’s offerings, and it appeared that Auburn had bought some popcorn out of it, which she was now trying to convince Helix to pop for her.

“It’s important,” she was saying, “to have something that crunches when you’re doing mathmatical analysis.”

“Then you should have bought some potato chips.” Helix put his hands on his hips, an action that would be totally lost on someone like Auburn, who suffered from Asperger’s syndrome and couldn’t process body language much better than I could read facial expressions. “I’m not a microwave.”

“Potato chips are only for decoding messages.” Auburn’s tone suggested that everyone should know that.

“Just pop the popcorn,” I said, sidling up behind the skinny kid, who was shuffling papers back and forth with Mossman so that they made weird patterns. “She’ll never get off your back if you don’t.”

Helix sighed and took the bag of popcorn. Then he pushed past his supervisor and out the door. I glanced at Herrera. “Where’s he going?”

“I think there’s a microwave in the lounge a couple of doors back,” she said with a hint of amusement in her voice. “I don’t know as he can regulate temperatures enough to pop a bag of popcorn without burning through the bag.”

“Auburn, did you look over the records here already?” I asked.

“She glanced at them,” the skinny kid started to say, “but-”

“Yeah, I’ve seen them.” Auburn sat down in the room’s only chair and slouched there. She didn’t understand body language or facial expressions and she didn’t use them, which actually made it easier for me to understand her, since I’ve always been bad at seeing them. “They get guns from drugs and sell them back to drug people. Waste of money for the druggers, but makes these guys money. The van was already theirs.”

There was a moment of silence as the room processed that. While I’m sure Helix and Samson had competent analysts, Auburn was an honest to goodness getman, in the same mold as the original. The Man From Gettysburg had been a single-minded, relentless genius who set out to destroy both sides of a conflict that killed all three of his sons. He nearly killed both Corporal Sumter and Shenandoah more than once and stopping him eventually required the assistance of Fog of War, who supposedly brought a plan crafted by Robert E. Lee himself. Even then the original getman only got caught and hung because he was over seventy. He claimed to have thought of a way out of the trap set for him but lacked the strength to carry it out.

And Auburn? She may have suffered from a weird way of looking at the world, and had an even harder time making herself understood, but she also had a photographic memory and incredible reasoning skills. Sometimes I wonder if she’s not as dangerous as the original getman simply because she hasn’t, or can’t, experience the same kind of traumas as he did.

To avoid thinking about such cheery subjects I asked, “If you had all that figured out, why did you want popcorn?”

“Wanted to double check.”

Of course. Self esteem was not one of her strong points.

“I see,” the skinny kid said. “There’s no record of purchase for the van anywhere in the last month of records. But I don’t know why that makes her say they already had the van…”

“Because all this stuff came up ‘with drugs’, which means from Mexico,” Helix’s analyst replied, the papers in his hands ignored as he stared off into space. “It had to come up through Texas and the south. This place is part of a network based in the south – remember, the write-up on the two talents here came from our southern offices.”

“Yeah, I remember,” the kid said. “What’s significant about that?”

For once, I was following the analyst’s logic. “It’s significant because Circuit always works in such a way as to minimize Helix’s impact on his operations. The South’s Senior Special Liaison hates him, won’t let him operate in his jurisdiction. If Circuit wanted to set up a money-making operation, or just start assembling material for that overthrow of the government he’s supposedly plotting, what better place to do it than the one part of the country his archrival isn’t allowed to work in?”

“Oh…” The sound of the light dawning for the kid. “So when he winds up with a van he can’t or doesn’t want to repair instead of abandoning it he arranges to sell it through a satellite operation.”

I frowned at that. When the kid put it that way, the whole theory suddenly sounded wrong. “Didn’t Voorman or Samson say something about Circuit having enough armor plating to manufacture replacement parts? Why wouldn’t he want to repair the van?”

“Because he didn’t just build one van.” Helix tossed Auburn the popped back of popcorn as he walked back into the room, “He’s got several. There’s this whole story behind it, it’s got to do with auto plant closings in Detroit and one of the most absurd cons I’ve ever heard of, but we’re pretty sure he’s got half a dozen of the things, maybe as many as ten. For that guy, anything worth doing is worth doing on a grand scale. He may not have gotten his hands on enough plating to build all of them and have resources left over for spare parts.”

“You’re sure about that?” The kid asked.

“Reasonably. That’s the conclusion Mona came to. You can ask her-” Helix caught himself and sighed, running a hand over his face. “Never mind. There’s a write up about it somewhere, I’m sure. It was never proved, but it was as likely as not. That’s how we knew what VINs we should look for when checking out the van here.”

“What’s important,” Herrera said, putting a comforting hand on Helix’s shoulder, “is that we have a potential lead into Circuit’s organization on a scale we’ve never had before. I want all this sorted and boxed and back at the offices by this time tomorrow. The more people we have looking at this, the better.”

Helix nudged the skinny kid with his elbow. “Movsesian, I want you and Darryl to sit down and-”

“He resigned,” Auburn said. Helix stared at her silently and for once she took the cue and went on. “The day after you left for Omaha he handed in his resignation and left town. I haven’t heard where he went. Agent Philmore is interim head of Analysis, Clark could talk to him-”

“He’s never worked any of Circuit’s cases,” Helix snapped. There was no doubt he was pissed. Not at the kid, Movsesian, or Auburn but still angry above and beyond his grumpy norm. “Try Lightning Cage’s old field analyst, Williams. Go over all the accounting stuff here, see if it matches what he’s done in the past and if you can trace it back to any of his past operations. I’ll give you the name of a contact in the CIA, tell them to see if they can get it back to Morocco. This time we’re blowing the lid off his whole damn network.”

I reached out to give Helix’s shoulder a squeeze, thought better of it, and settled for saying, “Take it easy, big guy. He’s finally made a serious mistake. We’ve never caught anyone from his organization in a position to talk to us before, never caught any talents that worked for him. Definitely never found this much evidence in one place before. It’s only a matter of time before we get him.”

“Assuming that this organization is actually part of Circuit’s. That’s not proven yet,” Mossman said.

“Duly noted.” Helix sighed and cracked his knuckles, then slumped against the wall and shook his head. “I almost hope it’s not. Circuit wouldn’t be this careless if he didn’t have something big in the works. It’s a race now. If we win, we catch him.”

“And what happens if he wins?” Herrera asked.

“I don’t know,” Helix said. “But it’ll keep me awake at night. That’s for sure.”

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Water Fall: Echoes and Avalanches

Posted by natechen on

Five Weeks, One Day Before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Massif

It takes a lot of hard, boring work and careful fact checking before cops can go from getting a tip to getting a warrant. Life for those of us working for Project Sumter is complicated by the fact that we are not technically a law enforcement agency (what we are, technically speaking, is pretty vague). If we want to raid a place or make an arrest we actually have to coordinate the operation with some branch of government that can legally do those things. On my team, most of that work is usually handled by Harriet or Dominic Screeton, my tactical team leader, so I spent the most of the time between getting sifu’s tip and the resulting sting working with Amplifier on various parts of her application process.

Mostly it was the formal address to the Senate Committee, which is one of the two big hurdles every talent joining the Project has to face. But once Dominic started talking about the kind of operation we were looking at I decided I also wanted to bring her along on that. The field stress test is the other big hurdle we all have to go through and the sooner Amp took her first crack at it the better it would be for all of us.

Most of Dominic’s law enforcement contacts are with the state police, which turned out to be fortuitous since they were already aware of the group that had wound up with Circuit’s damaged van. They seemed to be some kind of low grade arms dealers, mostly working with drug dealers and the like. I’m not sure how they planned to market an armored delivery van, other than possibly as a way to ensure drug shipments never got hijacked. Regardless, they apparently couldn’t find a buyer as easily as they thought.

The operation was shaping up to be a kind of sting. We’d give the State Police an excuse to crack down on the operation by suggesting they serve a warrant that accused them of accessory to assault. After all, the van had been last used by Circuit, who had merrily shot at Agent Samson at least eight times in the course of his escape from the Diversy Street incident. Now these guys were trying to sell it rather than turning it in as evidence of a crime. Even if we couldn’t make the original charges stick with what we found when we raided their place the State Police were bound to find something else they could charge the arms dealers with once they’d searched the building. The police could close down the death merchants, we’d get our van. Wins all around.

If this sounds like a lot of carefully cultivated self interest, well, welcome to my world. Helix sometimes wonders if keeping all our secrets is worth the time we waste on this kind of thing. I just try not to worry about it too much.

Especially when I had to worry about getting Amplifier through a crash course in field work, which is what we spent the rest of our time working on. When Helix first stumbled across her, Amp was working with a couple of friends, trying her hand at vigilante work. They’d been smarter than most, investing in body armor and some basic communication gear, but Amp proved to be woefully untrained in the use of firearms and teamwork, and she was still far below the basic conditioning threshold we like our agents to have. On the other hand, we weren’t planning to just throw her on the front lines and by the time we had all our paperwork squared away Harriet and Dominic agreed she was readyish for the field.

I walked into the briefing early that morning with a cup of coffee in one hand and a copy of the files we had on the arms dealers in the other. It wasn’t a big time operation but there was enough money and people behind it that we could be looking at some serious opposition and I wanted to be sure exactly what we might be dealing with before we went in. While bullets don’t pose much danger to me, just about anything chemical works just fine and I can be stunned by a flash bang same as anyone else.

I was looking over the speculation on whether the folks we were about to tangle with had any – the state police were fairly sure they didn’t – so at first I didn’t notice the slight change in the air when I entered the briefing room. After all  this file wasn’t in Harriet’s special 24-point font, so I had to hold it pretty close just to read it properly. With the paper practically plastered to my face there wasn’t that much of the room around me visible so it took a few seconds for it to register; but the way things are moving around me always clicks sooner or later.

“Helix?” Once the papers were out of the way I could see that yes, he was in fact sitting at the table. Well, not exactly sitting, more like slumped in a chair with his head resting on his arms.

“Hi, Massif,” he said, voice muffled. He lifted one hand and waved it in a vaguely welcoming way. “What brings you here?”

“I have a morning briefing.” I dropped the papers onto the table and took another sip of coffee. “What brings you here?”

Helix raised his head to look at me. Even though his talent being present made it easier to see through the fog of random movement in the air I couldn’t read much in his expression beyond general exhaustion. “I have a morning briefing, too. Someone must have goofed up.” He fumbled in his coat pocket for his phone and eventually found it. “I am not in the mood for this…”

“I would never have guessed. You only look like you’ve been run over by a truck.”

He snorted out something like a laugh as he thumbed buttons on his phone. “Just flew back into town last night. Musta put in a hundred hours in the last five days. Jet lagged, cranky, in the wrong briefing room.”

I shook my head and focused on finishing my coffee. When Helix gets in a mood like that it’s best to stay out of his way. “Wait.” I paused with my coffee halfway to my lips. “You went out of town? Why?”

“Circuit hijacked some army trucks. There’s a write-up about it coming.” He lifted his phone to his ear and waited a second or two. “Teresa? What room is our briefing supposed to be in?” A pause and then, “That’s what I thought.”

He hung up without saying any thing else and looked back at me. “I think you’re in the wrong place.”

“Who?” We both looked over at the door, where a familiar, vertigo inducing knot of impossible was walking in.

“Hey, Sam,” Helix said, putting his head back down on his arms. “Don’t tell me they triple booked this room or something.”

“Not that I’ve heard.” Agent Samson took a seat at the table. He hadn’t brought anything with him but he still seemed to take up half the table. I unconsciously inched a few steps away. “How’s things coming with the van follow-up?”

“Well actually-”

“Helix!” Amplifier practically bounced into the room. Helix jerked upright, sending his own cup of coffee teetering across the table. Samson caught it before tipped over entirely. Sadly he couldn’t also grab Helix before he tipped out of his chair when Amp wrapped him in a bear hug so I had to grab them both before our senior talent got sidelined with broken ribs or something.

Have I ever mentioned that Helix has serious ideas about personal space? I think it has something to do with the way he can only affect temperature in the area immediately around him; and I’m not sure if he just doesn’t like other people’s body heat being there, messing with stuff or if he’s worried about someone getting hurt. Regardless, he wormed out of Amp’s hug in record time. As he started to straighten out his suit he said, “Good morning, Amplifier. What brought that on?”

“You’ve barely said ‘hi’ for the last two weeks!” She protested. “Where have you been?”

“Out of town.” He took his coffee back from Samson and sucked down about half of it. “What is going on here? Don’t tell me there’s supposed to be four meetings in one room.”

“Amp’s getting ready for her field stress test,” I said quickly, trying to get a sense of where all this was going. Helix was right, it didn’t really make a whole lot of sense for us all to be here at the same time. “She’s actually supposed to sit in on my briefing. What are you here for?”

“Dunno.” He tossed off the last of his coffee and looked at the empty cup glumly. “Teresa just called me up this morning and told me we had a meeting here.” He glanced at Samson. “Pastor? What brings you here? Something to do with your media notoriety?”

The big man sighed. I’d heard about his appearance on television and I was still trying to get over the idea of Project Sumter’s personnel being interviewed on the news, but I had to admit it did seem like a good angle for a missing persons case to take. It’s just that we so rarely investigate those and. when we do, there are other considerations to take into account.

Like secrecy.

The two actually don’t work that well together. We’d probably have left the Elizabeth Dawson case alone if it hadn’t been for her father and the fact that pretty much everyone was sure Circuit had something to do with it. But our point agent on that case didn’t really look happy with the notoriety his part had brought him. “We’re probably going to have to pull a team of analysts together to go over all the tips that newscast has provided but no, that’s not why I’m here this morning. We’re here because Massif’s team has finally tracked down one of the leads we handed off to them.”

“Well, yeah,” I said, waving at Amplifier with the files I’d just been reading. “That’s why we’re here. But what about you two?”

“It’s going to be a joint operation,” Voorman announced. We all, except for maybe Samson, turned in surprise. I’d been expecting Harriet to be leading this briefing. Helix had no doubt anticipated having Agent Herrera leading his briefing. But Voorman closed the conference room door behind him and locked it, so he obviously wasn’t expecting anyone else. “In case you are wondering, I’ll be briefing you talented people, Agent Herrera is in charge of field analysts and Agent Verger is going to be coordinating the tactical teams.”

Helix threw me a glance, something I caught more as a quick movement then a meeting of the eyes. He asked, “A joint operation?”

Amplifier cleared her throat. “I take it that doesn’t happen very often?”

“It hasn’t happened in over seventy years,” Helix said. “Not since Project Sumter was part of the war effort. Getting the tactical support and complicating factors of various talents to work together smoothly is very difficult. I’m not sure this is a good idea, Voorman.”

“We’ve been considering some revisions to normal procedures over the last few weeks,” he said. “And by we, I mean certain Senior Liaisons and the Senate committee. They’ve decided this is a good test case.”

That got an inaudible grumble from Helix. At least, I couldn’t make it out and I don’t think Voorman did, but from the way Amp snickered it probably wasn’t very nice. “Sir, with all due respect, why this one?” I asked. “The write up from the state police suggest there’s only twenty or so of these guys, and there’s no reason to expect all of them to be there at any given time. I think between us and the police we can handle this.”

“And I would agree with you. Except we received these from the South two days ago.” He set a pair of files on the desktop and pulled glossies out of them. At first he made to put them up on the whiteboard that dominated one wall in the room then he caught himself and handed them to me, apparently remembering I wouldn’t be able to see them otherwise just in time.

I squinted at the pictures as Voorman went on. “These two people are known criminals with unusual talents. The man is Static Shock, a fuse box, and the woman is Jane Hammer, a vector trap.”

“Vector trap?” Helix sounded as confused as I was. “What’s a vector trap?”

“You don’t know?” Amplifier asked, incredulous.

“There’s sixty-two known talents and some are rarer than others,” Helix said defensively. “I can’t have met or heard stories about them all.”

“I’ve never heard of vector traps either,” I said, passing the photos back to Voorman.

He put them up on the board as he said, “I’ll be covering the capabilities of both of talents, as not everyone here has heard them before.” I knew he was referring to Amplifier there, since I was pretty sure the rest of us were familiar with Circuit’s abilities. “But Agent Massif, I hope you took special note of Jane Hammer. We’re expecting you to act as a counter to her abilities.”

“Right.” Just as soon as I knew what those were I could get started. Unfortunately, Jane had looked pretty unremarkable – a brunette woman in ratty jeans and jacket that were either very old or very expensive. “I don’t suppose we’ve got any kind of way for me to pick her out of the crowd?”

Voorman pulled a chair out from the table and sat down, loosing very little of height in the process. “From what I hear she’ll be almost as distinctive as Agent Samson here, at least in your eyes. Her rap sheet says she’s also six feet tall, so that should help the rest of you identify her out.”

“Lovely,” Helix muttered.

“But all this is just in the event that the situation deteriorates,” Samson added. “I’ll be praying that things don’t go that far. They might choose to simply surrender once we make ourselves known. Assuming these two are even there.”

“How often does that happen?” Amplifier asked.

“Sometimes,” Helix said, voice grim. “But not often enough.”

——–

A weapons ring would be the perfect kind of thing to run out of an abandoned warehouse, or at least that’s what you’d think, right? So of course this particular group decided to hunker down in the back of an office complex. As nearly as we could tell the front half of the building was devoted to a legitimate business that managed vending machines. The constant in and out of concessions served as a cover for moving the other, more exotic wares that were sold out of the back.

The building all this happened in was a large, L-shaped three story structure. From the blueprints on file at city hall, most of the storage space in the structure was on the ground floor in the short part of the L. There was a small loading dock there with enough space to hold a half a dozen regular vehicles or a couple of semis at a time. We figured that was where the van we wanted would be kept.

Now since the van was merchandise the dealers had been looking to sell the state police had decided the easiest way to handle things was to pose as a group of people interested in buying the it. The police had handled that side of things through their own channels but, at our insistence, they’d agreed to pair me with the man that went to check out the vehicle. The rest of the Project people on hand would hang back with the police team and wait for our signal to sweep in and round up anyone we managed to catch on site once we’d confirmed that yes, this was the vehicle we’d come for. If it wasn’t our warrants would start to look a lot flimsier in court.

And yes, if we want to maintain good relations with the police that is something we have to think about.

What really struck me as funny about all this was that buying what was basically a small APC from a back alley arms dealer turned out to be a lot like buying any other used car. The dealer rep who brought the van out to the parking lot for us to look at spent most of his time talking, detailing the van’s gas mileage, it’s good condition, it’s spacious interior (which looked like it had been made that spacious when a cut-rate chop shop ripped all the innards out in one hour’s time) and, of course, the bulletproof plating. In turn, the undercover cop who was handling most of the deal pushed for a lower price and asked to take the van for a test drive, a cover so we could check the VIN. If it wasn’t the right van our warrant wasn’t valid.

And me? I wound up standing around and looking tough, which is fine since I’m a pretty big guy, at least vertically. The important part here was to make sure my temporary partner didn’t get hurt, there were only the two of us and if things got hot it would be a minute or two before the rest of our teams got there. So when he climbed into the van to check the VIN I moved so that my body blocked most of the door.

The rep and his two bodyguards were just starting to get curious about what the cop could be doing when he reached out and tapped me on the shoulder. I nodded back to him and he slammed the van door closed. One of the guards took a step forward to protest but I shoved a palm to his chest and brought him up short. With my other hand I pulled out a badge and said, “Gentlemen, you’re under arrest for accessory to the crime of assault.”

Dealer rep and his other bodyguard exchanged a look and the rep said, “You’re serious?”

“You have the right to remain-”

The bodyguard pulled a pistol of some kind and shot me before I could get any further and I assumed that pretty much ended any possibility of reading them their rights, or their coming peaceably for that matter. The rep had already turned towards the building and started yelling “Five-Oh!” when I took the other bodyguard, who had tried to back away when his partner started shooting, by the wrist and threw him to the ground.

The guy with the gun just stared at me for a second, then fired three more times. He only hit me twice and I felt more than saw the spikes of momentum bleed out of the bullets, through my body and down into the pavement at my feet once they made contact with my skin. Since the guard I had thrown probably had a gun too I kept hold of his wrist and used my position of superior leverage to quickly wrench his arm out of socket with a disturbing popping noise.

With his dominate arm out of service I figured I could focus on the other two, who were now staring at me like I was… well, what I was. Some kind of freak.

They bolted for the building as soon as I took one careful, measured step towards them. Unfortunately, since keeping at least one foot on the ground is a survival skill for me I had to keep that pace and let them get a good ways ahead of me. I’m told the slow, deliberate approach can be very unnerving to watch but I’ll tell you this, it’s frustrating to do. Not only did the other two guys get back to the building way ahead of me, at least two other people started shooting at me from the windows. I knew I couldn’t get hurt by it but they were ruining a perfectly good shirt and it was obnoxious. Plus the bullets were hot and they burned when they got stuck under my clothes.

I did my best to brush them out as I went but quickly wound up with bigger concerns on my hands. I’d covered about half the distance between the van and the building when something dropped off the roof and hit the ground, becoming a very bright knot of momentum that rocketed towards me like a cheetah after it’s prey.

The vector trap had arrived.

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Water Fall: Loose Wires

Posted by natechen on

Five Weeks, Three Days Before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Circuit

I climbed out of the back of the van, wiping my hands on a rag. Davis was a couple of steps behind me. “The tweaks to the maglev relays are good, but if we add in your new toy it’s going to necessitate rewiring the whole vehicle. Again.” He tossed his own rag back into the van without bothering to look where it landed. “I’m not saying that it’s a bad move, but it might be easier if we just pulled out the computer and communication gear from them. That would solve most of the load issues.”

“That’s fine.” I tucked my own rag into the back pocket of my coveralls. “I’m not entirely sure we’re going to be able to keep these vans after the operation. It’s best we leave as little nonessential equipment on them as possible.”

“And it helps us with another problem.” Wallace, my mechanic, was still poking around in the back of the vehicle. “I’m not sure that thing you want us to install would fit with everything else you want to bring along. If we take all the IT stuff out that should help with the crowding some. Even so, it’s going to be a tight squeeze. Are you sure we need it?”

“It’s an EMP-countermeasure, Wally,” Davis said in exasperation. “If they want to keep using any of the electronic gear after clearing the perimeter they’re going to need it.”

“And after all the trouble I went to get it, I’d hate to leave it behind,” I added. “How soon can we start duplicating it?”

“The lab has a preliminary knock off ready for testing,” Davis said. “If you want we can-”

“Excuse me, sir.” Simeon carefully picked his way through the garage. “Do you have a moment?”

I sighed. There was always something and we were getting ready for out biggest job yet, but the constant interruptions were beginning to wear on my patience. “Yes, Simeon. What is it?”

“New development on the news, sir. I thought you’d want to know.” He offered me a tablet. “I don’t know to what extent it will affect your current plans, but fore the long term it may be relevant.”

Wallace took Davis by the arm and gently pulled him away saying, “We’ll get started pulling all that computer gear out of the vans.”

“The auxiliary vans, Wallace,” I said absently. “Not the good vans. We’ve lost one of those already, we’re going to need all the mileage we can get out of the others.”

“You got it, boss.”

I acknowledged Wallace with a grunt, most of my attention on the tablet Simeon had just handed me. It was cued up to a news clip. The reporter was interviewing a familiar face.

Pastor Manuel Rodriguez looked a lot different from when I’d first met him. Then, he’d been dressed more like a janitor than a man of the cloth, his short sleeves revealing tattoos that would have been at home in any ghetto or barrio in the city. But for this interview he was wearing a conservative suit and tie that wouldn’t have been out of place on an office worker or a Sumter agent.

Neither appearance hinted at what truly made him dangerous: The way he sided with the establishment and backed it with inexplicable physical strength. I had personally witnessed him throwing a desk that must have weighed at least a hundred pounds two city blocks. He’d then ripped the back door off of one of my armored vans one handed.

Actually, in terms of total destructive potential nothing he’s done holds a candle to someone like Helix, who can melt concrete if he wants to, but he’s also inhumanly fast and, unlike Helix, who’s powers take some time to get going and are kind of unwieldy, Rodriguez is contained and fast. On top of that, I have no idea how his talent works. I was not happy to see him on the news and I was even less happy once he started talking to the reporter.

“I’ve spent the last twenty years working with the misguided youth of the city,” he said. “When I was young I made my share of bad decisions. Whether it’s dealing drugs, getting into fights or running away from home, many young people act out simply because they’ve never seen a better example. As a pastor, it’s my job to present the example of Jesus Christ as that better alternative. But when-”

“If you just wanted me to know about Rodriguez, I kind of guessed he would wind up in this sooner or later,” I said to Simeon. “If someone with his background and talents wasn’t involved with Project Sumter somehow I’d have been very surprised.”

“That’s not it, sir,” Simeon said, directing my attention back to the video feet. “Look, it’s coming up now.”

The reporter had asked the pastor something during that brief exchange. Now the video showed a series of pictures as Rodriguez’s voice answered. The first half dozen or so were of Hangman – or rather, Elizabeth Dawson – over the last year or so of her college career. “The Senator spent quite a bit of time here in town last month and it’s not unreasonable to assume his daughter might have come down here to visit him as a surprise.”

Anyone who thought that obviously didn’t know them very well, but then it did sound well enough to the general public. “Over the years I’ve gotten to know a lot of people in the community,” Rodriguez continued. “And when kids drop off the radar for whatever reason and worry their families there are people I talk to. I’ve found that people are more willing to speak to a leader in the church than the police. In this case, they were also willing look through pictures.”

I sucked in a breath as the pictures changed from Hangman as a graduate in cap and gown to pictures of her in Millennium Park. She wasn’t actually the focus of them, it looked like she’d just wound up in the background of a picture or two, but it was definitely her. In the first she was seated by an artificial stream, kicking her feet in the water. “You can see Ms. Dawson here, in Millennium Park, the day her disappearance was reported, that’s a day and a half after she was last seen by anyone who knew her.”

The next picture was timestamped a bit later in the day. I mentally cursed digital cameras and their wealth of useful information. There were some days it felt like technology companies were deliberately trying to make my job harder. “In one of the photos shared with us you can see Ms. Dawson speaking with an unidentified man in a suit. Investigators are beginning to-”

I paused the playback and looked up at Simeon. “How complete of a description do they have?”

“Not a very good one, sir,” Simeon hastened to assure me. “You were only photographed from the back and that’s not your natural hair, so all they really have is your build. But they know someone was with Ms. Dawson shortly before she disappeared.”

“Not that they didn’t suspect that already,” I muttered. “But now they can definitively prove it. Was there anything else of importance? Other than the fact that Rodriguez is involved with this somehow.”

“Somehow?” Simeon quirked his eyebrows. “You don’t think he’s directly connected with Project Sumter?”

“Oh, sure. He has to be.” I shrugged and handed the tablet back to Simeon. If there had been something else I knew he would have brought it up immediately instead of asking about Rodriguez. “But the fact that he can be about it so publicly is annoying and unexpected. As is the fact that he’d be working on Hangman’s case rather than mine.”

“To answer you directly,” Simeon said, tucking the tablet under his arm, “no, there’s nothing else of note in this news broadcast. But I thought you would like to know all the same.”

I rubbed my chin absently, trying to focus my thoughts. “We need to get the media’s focus on something else.”

“That would be convenient,” Simeon agreed. “I don’t suppose you have a way to do that on hand?”

“In fact, I have a few thoughts on how we might do just that. Let me try and decide how to best implement them.” I refocused on the present. “If that’s all, I should really-”

“With all due respect, sir, it’s not quite.” Simeon hesitated for a minute, which was surprising enough, then he took the tablet, turned it over in his hands and then firmly clamped them behind his back. “Sir, this may not be any of my business but have you spoken to Miss Dawson since you returned from your trip out west?”

After all the fidgeting I had expected something a little more significant than that. “Not since the after the fact analysis. I’ve been quite busy. My other persona had an appearance to make, the EMP-countermeasure needs-”

“Yes, sir, I’m aware of your schedule.” He didn’t outright say he had written it but it was implied in his tone. “But… Sir, do you remember what you said to me when you first hired me?”

“I was going to give you the biggest administrative challenge you’d ever faced?”

That got the ghost of a smile on Simeon’s typically serene face. “After that.”

I sighed. One of the reasons I rely on Simeon as much as I do is because I know he makes up for many of my weaknesses while also understanding me well enough to function as a proxy in most situations. Unfortunately he has this mysterious compulsion to try and fix my failings in his spare time. I’ve learned to suffer through it as part of the price of keeping his most excellent services.

And that means playing along with him when he wants me to. “You’re better at judging people than I am.”

“And as such, I am in charge of managing your staff.”

I glanced around the garage and sighed. “Perhaps we should move to my office for this conversation.”

“If you prefer,” Simeon said.

“I do.” The garage was on the ground level of the compound and my office was on the second floor so I headed towards the stairs on the far wall, Simeon walking beside me.

“Sir, I know it’s not your habit to overanalyze the history of your employees unless you think it has a direct bearing on your plans.”

He paused like he was expecting a response; but it was a very cryptic statement and I climbed half the flight of stairs before saying, “Okay, I don’t quite follow you. I know that, outside of Davis and maybe you, none of us are exactly ordinary. But what does that have to do with Hangman?”

Simeon nodded, like that was about the response he’d been expecting. “Sir, you are aware that her father’s stance on unusually gifted individuals is very… strict.”

“If you’re saying that her father is an idiot who believes natural talent, of any kind, is an offense of some kind then yes, I’m familiar with Senator Dawson’s stance.” I shrugged. “He takes the nature versus nurture conflict too seriously. If he really believes all we need to do to build the perfect society is crush human nature under a system of education that acknowledges no differences between people he’s crazy.”

“Maybe. But his insanity has had serious repercussions on his only child. After all, Miss Dawson demonstrated exceptional talent for mathematics and programing from a young age, an ability her father actively discouraged her from pursuing. Am I correct?”

I nodded, fishing around for the set of keys that would let me into the office and records part of the complex. With my abilities, electronic locks seem more like a liability that a properly built set of mechanical locks. “She had to teach herself, which only made her better at what she does, in my opinion.” I slipped the two keys into the door’s locks, one at waist height one at shoulder height, turned them and opened the door into the antechamber. “So on the whole, not a bad exchange.”

“Except she had to do it with no affirmation from her father. Children who have lacked a meaningful father figure in their lives have a tendency to seek a surrogate.”

I paused with the keys half out of the locks. “What, you mean me?”

“Well…” He shrugged, a distinctly uncharacteristic thing for him to do. “That’s the most immediate result of it, yes. But more than that, you told me she had ‘bought in’ to your ambitions.”

“In the long term, as she understands them, yes.” We were still in the open platform over the workshop and garage so I stepped into the antechamber and motioned Simeon in after me, then closed the door. Something made me keep my voice down despite the fact that we were alone in the small chamber, with the only exits being my office, the server room and back out into the main part of the complex. “I haven’t explained Operation Chainfall to her yet. Or the Thunderclap Gambit.”

“To say nothing of Thunderbird?”

“To say nothing of that.” I shrugged. “She is a very, very good analyst. She might have guessed at what Chainfall aims to do. Possibly even Thunderclap.”

SImeon nodded. “I guessed as much, so I can only assume you did as well, and find it to be acceptable. Are you going to tell her about Thunderbird?”

“Of course not. It’s not relevant.” I scowled. Hangman hadn’t been exactly thrilled when I’d held back information on our last jaunt but surely she understood I couldn’t tell her everything. I didn’t mind if she figured things out on her own, independently drawn conclusions aren’t nearly the liability my spelling things out could be. And I don’t like spreading deliberate disinformation among my own people, it cuts down on trust and makes running an efficient operation harder. “What does this have to do with Hangman?”

“You and Miss Dawson had significant disagreements about operational parameters after your first joint field effort, did you not?”

I rubbed my forehead for a minute, willing myself to be patient. For some reason I was getting fed up with Simeon’s roundabout approach. Normally he didn’t upset me at all. We had the best working dynamic of any two people in my organization. It could only be because I was getting so close to my endgame. “Okay. Yes, you’re right. She was impulsive, and it could have blown the whole operation if she got caught outside of the van. I don’t think she’s ready for field work yet, but that’s not her fault. She doesn’t have the experience Grappler and I have, or the upbringing Heavy did. We’ll just-”

“You’re missing the point, sir.” Simeon drummed his fingers absently on the side of the tablet he held. “You see, based on the… extreme measures Miss Dawson took to engineer a meeting with you, the way she’s behaved since you met, the time she’s spent in planning and analysis with you…”

I frowned. “You think she wasn’t sincere when she said she was joining for the cause?” Suddenly I stood straight as a new idea leapt into my mind fully formed. “Do you think she’s trying to get a picture of Thunderbird? Turn it over to her father and prove herself somehow?”

“No.” Simeon said it quickly and firmly. “No, I think she was entirely truthful about joining so that all people of talent could find the freedom to use their talents. From the time we’ve spent together it seems that’s all she’s ever wanted to do. You’ve given her that opportunity and you value her contributions. Not only that, you encourage them and try to help her be better at them.”

“So she’s loyal.”

“Loyal is not the word I would use, sir.”

I stared blankly at Simeon. He was waiting to be prompted again. “What word would you use, Mr. Delacroix?”

“I…” His mouth was open for a moment, then he closed it and cleared his throat before trying again. “Understand, I thought her behavior was odd at first. But I didn’t understand it until… Well, something was said to me that suggested it. Once I came to study the problem from that perspective it made more sense.”

“What perspective, Simeon?”

“Love, sir.” He sighed. “I believe that, at the very least, Miss Dawson has a very strong crush on you. Maybe her feelings are more mature than that, but I can’t say for sure right now.”

“What…” My voice trailed off as my brain tried to assimilate that idea. “Simeon, I’m at least fifteen years older than she is.”

“Thirteen years, two months actually.” He shrugged again and the motion made me dizzy. Or maybe it was just my head spinning. “Sir, in my experience that doesn’t matter as much as you might think. Especially to the kind of young woman who gets caught up in a romantic cause like the crusade you’re on.”

“Simeon, I’m trying to conquer North America, not save the world. What kind of woman-” I caught myself. As Simeon had just pointed out, he’s better at reading these kinds of situations than I am. Best to assume he was at least partially correct. “Fine. But, Simeon…” I shook my head. “That just means Thunderbird is…”

“Yes, I know.” He sighed and put a hand on my shoulder. I stiffened. “Sir, forgive me but I’m about to be very blunt and very personal.”

I stared at him a moment, wondering if I should just electrocute him and make a run for it. I’ve made more impulsive decisions. But they were all a long time ago, when Thunderbird was still a vague idea in the back of my head, not an endgame that was only months away. “Go ahead, Simeon.”

He nodded and seemed to gather himself up for the final push. “Sir, I’m telling you this mostly because you need to start taking it into account. If I’m right then yes, Miss Dawson is going to hate the ideas underpinning Thunderbird. But more than that, she’s going to actively try to insert herself into your plans. To get your attention and win your favor, regardless of what she knows.”

I nodded. “Yes, I can see that. And not speaking to her for several days after our last argument just because I have been busy is not going to be acceptable to her.”

“Agreed. But I’m sure you can find a way to deal with any fallout from that quickly enough. Assuming Miss Dawson hasn’t taken the initiative on that as well.” Simeon leaned a little closer and dropped his voice down to a murmur. “What I wanted to say is… I think you might need her.”

“Of course,” I said, baffled. “I’ve been relying on her data-”

“No, sir,” Simeon said, cutting me off. “As you’ve just said, your goal is to conquer a continent. Your reasons for doing it aren’t even all that selfish. But they’re still not something many are going to understand. One of the few who will has come and found you, and might even be interested in more than just helping out.”

He took his hand off my shoulder and stepped back, resuming a more normal tone. “I’ve seen you take on challenges and stress that would break a dozen lesser men, but even you must have some limits. And not even I really understand your motivations. If you want to see this through, a companion who does ‘get it’ is something you’re going to need. If you’ll excuse me for saying so, you should think about it.”

Having said his piece Simeon gave me a slight nod of the head and let himself back out. I didn’t really acknowledge him leaving, in fact I didn’t surface from my thoughts until a few minutes later. The whole idea just seemed so preposterous. I didn’t have time to think about romance, much less a romance as preposterous as wooing a woman a decade my junior.

In fact, without Simeon’s calm presence there to reinforce the idea it was starting to look truly absurd. But he might be right about the father figure idea. I did need to go and talk to Hangman, let her know I still valued her abilities in spite of her impulsive decisions in the field. I nodded to myself. I would do it right after checking a few things in my office.

So I unlocked my office door and let myself in to find Hangman sitting behind my desk, her feet up on the writing surface, fiddling with her laptop. 

“Hi, Circuit,” she said, putting her feet down as soon as she saw me come through the door. Then she fished her earbuds out and I mentally breathed a sigh of relief. At least she probably hadn’t overheard the conversation out in the antechamber. “I wanted to talk to you.”

I felt a moment of sudden awkwardness, Simeon’s words still fresh in my mind. So instead of demanding to know how she had gotten into a locked office to which she didn’t have a key, or why she thought I would have time for her with all the other things on my plate or any of a dozen other potentially relevant questions, all I managed was, “Oh?”

She looked back down at her laptop. “I’ve been sorting back through all the jobs you, Grappler and Heavy have done in the last year.”

“Yes?” Another part of the far-flung Chainfall plan which she hadn’t been told about. Apparently she was still trying to run down the various elements of that on her own. “What about them?”

“Three bank jobs by you, focusing on electronic sabotage, five heists by Grappler where authorities are still trying to figure out how a catburgler could have climbed in and out without leaving traces – which she doesn’t leave, of course – and one massive water system shutdown by Heavy Water.” She glanced up from her laptop. “At least, I’m assuming that taking place at the same time as the warehouse raid where you picked up those superconductors in Memphis wasn’t a coincidence. The cause of the water company’s difficulties was never officially found.”

“Because turning normal water, even sewage water, to gelatin without the addition of any chemicals isn’t the kind of thing Project Sumter likes getting around.”

She set her laptop to one side of the desk so she could lean on it and give me a mischievous look. “And then there was the Stillwater job just a few days ago, where Grappler actually went in to steal equipment and didn’t bother shutting down any of the cameras in the security system. Sure, it was a smalltime company with small time security, but still. Circuit, why does it look like you’re deliberately doing jobs in ways only people with your unique talents could do?”

“Because I have talented staff?”

“But you never did that in the past. Just in the last year or so.”

I crossed to the desk and rested my hands on it’s top, scowling down at her. “Hangman, why are you here?”

She ignored my attempt at intimidation. “Circuit, you’re trying to end the Masquerade. Trying to tell the world talents exist. And you’re doing it wrong.”

The scowl grew deeper. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, no one’s going to care about robbing banks or warehouses unless they own them. If you want the public to know you exist then you’re not stealing the right stuff. You need to get creative. Send a message. Trust me, I might have hated studying journalism but one thing I’ll always remember is the importance of having a point to a story and getting it across by any means necessary. You want to deal with Project Sumter, built on Lincoln’s Law and dedicated to keeping talents a secret? You don’t steal money, superconductors or sound equipment.” She turned her laptop so I could see the screen. “You steal this.”

As I read the information on the screen I didn’t follow what she was saying. At least, not at first. But then the pieces began to fall into place and I felt a manic grin sneaking it’s way across my face. By the time I was done I could see what she wanted me to do, so I looked her in the eye and said the first three words that came to mind.

“That is brilliant.”

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Water Fall: Hot Air

Posted by natechen on

Six Weeks Before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Helix

I set my keys down on the end table in the hallway and went into the living room, taking a seat in the chair. Darryl shifted a bit on the sofa so we were looking more or less across at one another. Or at least, we could look right at each other if we wanted to, we avoided it at first. I cracked my knuckles, working the joints long past the point where there was any tension left in them, and finally found the courage to ask, “What brings you to my place tonight, Darryl?”

If my showing no surprise at finding him was bothering Darryl, he didn’t show it. Didn’t show much of anything, really, just carefully set his cane on the floor and leaned it against the sofa. Darryl is in charge of the regional Analysis office, and the job was high stress before he lost his wife. After all, it involves managing nearly sixty people with genius level intelligence and an unusually good ability to make connections between seemingly unrelated facts. They’re smart, they know it and yet sometimes their connections to reality are tenuous at best.

The last time I’d seen him before Mona died, he’d taken to using the cane and his hair and beard were starting to go gray around the edges. He was getting close to fifty, which wasn’t all that old, but if he always looked a little older than he was I chalked that up to the car accident he was in a few years ago and the stress of his job. Now the only color in his hair was gray and it seemed to be loosing the battle against the white rushing in; even sitting I could tell he was developing a stoop.

But the physical changes weren’t what bothered me most. He clearly had no idea what he should say. This is the man who started planning his wife’s birthday party three months in advance, had a gift sign-up sheet and made sure the new lamp and sofa she was getting were color coordinated. Darryl lives to plan things out in advance. But he’d shown up to talk to me with nothing in mind. He was falling apart before my eyes and I hated to see it.

“I’m sorry I didn’t stay longer at the funeral,” I blurted out, trying desperately to fill the silence. “I just spent a lot of time with people who rubbed me the wrong way and after the-”

“It’s all right,” Darryl said, finding his voice at last. “I really wasn’t that excited about talking to most of them, either.”

And that was pretty much all there was to say about that. “How are you do-”

“That’s a stupid question, and you know it.” He had me there. Obviously he wasn’t doing very well, and we were both smart enough to know it. I just couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Helix, I’m not here for platitudes.”

“No?” I had a feeling I knew what he was there for but I didn’t want to ask.

“No.” Darryl pulled his gaze away from his cane so he could look me in the eyes. It was like staring into a blast furnace. Trust me, I’ve done it. “I need you to do me a favor.”

That was what I’d been afraid of. “Darryl…”

“Let me do something, Helix.” There was a weird tone to his voice. It was like conviction, except darker. The only time I’d heard anything remotely like it; it had been coming from Circuit. “Let me help catch him. Let me back in the field!”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” I saw the indignation building up in his eyes and realized that had been a poor choice of words. I hurried to try and smooth things over. “Look at yourself, Darryl, you’re just not physically fit for that kind of work any more.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Darryl snapped, thumping his cane on the floor. “We’re short on field analysts and most of them are too mentally unstable to cut it out there. Voorman’s willing to give me a chance if we can get the Senate Committee to make an exception and let me into this investigation.”

“Well I’m not!” I slammed a hand down on the armrest of the chair and swore. “You’re in no condition to go out into the field. It doesn’t matter if you’re physically or mentally unable to keep up, you’re a liability either way!”

“Helix, there’s no one in the Project who’s been an analyst for Circuit’s cases longer than I have!”

I sighed. “That’s got nothing to do with it, Darryl. In the field-”

“I need to do something.”Darryl got up with a sudden jerk and I followed as he teetered unsteadily, as if he didn’t know what to do now that he was upright. He got his cane on the floor before I had to catch him, but it was a near thing. “You can’t sideline me on this. It was my wife-”

“Do not use Mona as an excuse,” I snapped. “You just want to get even. We’ve both been in this business long enough to know how that works out.”

For just a second I thought I was about to get hit with Darryl’s cane, and I might even have deserved it, but he managed to stop the motion before it was more than a spasm of his arm. “I am not trying to excuse anything,” he said in a dangerous tone, voice little more than a whisper. “I am going to find that man. And I am going to bring him to justice.”

I ran a hand over my face, wondering when the day would be over. This could have gone a lot better if I wasn’t so tired from the last few days. Weeks. Years, really. “Go home, Darryl. I know that Frostburn and Coldspike came by with a new boss who was offering you a job. If their boss wants to get some fresh faced kids killed working with you, that’s his call. I’m not doing it. If you were half the man I thought you were, you wouldn’t want to do it either.”

 “Fine.” There was an ocean of meaning in that one word. I couldn’t meet his eyes so I stared away and into the kitchen. I heard his cane tapping on the floor, then the sound of the door closing behind him. I glanced at my watch and realized I’d managed to ruin a friendship in less than five minutes.

——–

After Darryl left I found I couldn’t sit still. I tried to cook up some salmon for dinner and wound up fumbling with the vacuum sealed packaging on it for five minutes until I accidentally melted it into a semi-toxic mess in a moment of frustration. After glaring at it for a second like the fish was somehow to blame I tossed the whole mess in the garbage and changed out of my suit and into a comfortable set of sweats, grabbed the key to my workshop off the key rack in the closet and headed downstairs intending to burn off as much frustration as I could with hammer and power tools.

Unfortunately a much more convenient target showed itself before I could get out of the building.

I took the stairs down to the lobby instead of riding the elevator. It was only four flights and driving mad is never a good idea so I figured the exercise could only help. Maybe if I’d taken the elevator I would have missed Teresa on her way up, and maybe that would have been for the better. As it was, I nearly ran her down as I stalked through the small ground floor lobby of my building.

Apparently my mood at the moment was close enough to normal that she didn’t immediately tumble to the fact something was up, because as I stalked past she cheerfully waved at me with the folder she was holding. “Helix! Good timing.”

Now it goes without saying that anyone who deals with criminals and information control on a regular basis develops a certain amount of professional paranoia as a matter of survival. And we at Project Sumter have more than most. So it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that I felt like I’d walked into a set up. It sure seemed like Teresa was confirming it when she said, “I brought the paperwork for the-”

And I couldn’t stand it anymore. At the word paperwork I grabbed the folder so fast I could still see the afterimage of me grabbing while I was throwing it into the trashcan by the elevator. Yes, it was incredibly therapeutic.

Judging by Teresa’s slack-jawed expression it was also not what she was expecting.

“What is this, Teresa?” There weren’t any other people in the lobby at that exact moment but longstanding force of habit kept me from raising my voice. I settled for crowding her a lot closer than I would usually get to someone who knows what I can do and using the harshest tone I could manage when talking in a whisper. “Darryl makes sense, and even Sanders, but what the hell are you doing sticking your nose in this?”

“What? Sanders wasn’t-”

I lashed out to the side, smashing my fist into the frame of the elevator door and sending a spike of pain lancing up my arm. “Don’t tell me he didn’t put you up to this. Who else-” A new, even worse idea occurred to me. “Is this some kind of stupid political play? Is Dawson trying to get Darryl fired or disgraced or something?”

“Is Brahms-” Teresa shook her head, confusion giving way to frustration. “Look, I don’t know what the deal is between you and Senator Dawson, but he’s not in the business of playing games with what he thinks is important. And that includes Project Sumter.”

“Then tell me what’s going on here!” I jabbed a finger at her accusingly. “What good can it possibly do to drag a grieving man out into the meat grinder? Circuit’s ruined hundreds of people’s lives in his crazy attempt to do whatever it is he thinks he’s doing. Darryl’s got enough to deal with trying to put himself back together he can’t possibly do any good coping with a megalomaniac on top of that.”

Suddenly the whole mess was more than I could take and I found myself walking away, back towards the stairs, without realizing I’d decided to storm out. You’re really not supposed to walk out on your supervisor like that but by the same token once you’re mad enough to actually do it the supervisor is supposed to let you go cool you head for a bit, kind of as a matter of courtesy. It’s an unwritten rule.

Teresa apparently never read the unwritten rulebook, because I’d barely gone five steps when I heard her heels clacking on the floor behind me.

If there’s one downside of being a short guy – okay, one downside of being a short guy that’s particularly important in times like these – it’s that you can’t do a good job of glowering at anyone who’s taller than you. You also can’t really loom over them or do a good job of growling out threats. So when you’re mad and you need to prove it to someone exploding is pretty much the only option you have.

I skidded to a stop and whirled around, shouting, “The answer is no! I don’t care who asks, or why! I’m not going to sign off on Darryl going out in the field again. He’s a wreck and he’s going to get himself killed. Don’t ask me to give the okay on burying him next to his wife! It’s not worth it-”

“Helix, shut up,” Teresa said, grabbing my arms by the elbows as I flailed them aimlessly in the air. “You’re sinking.”

More than the fact that she managed to grab me by my elbows, which can’t have been an easy shot, or what she was saying what really got my attention was her tone of voice. She wasn’t yelling, wasn’t hissing under her breath, wasn’t even using a lecturing tone like I might get in a dressing down from Voorman or Sanders. It was an even, pleasant, almost banal kind of a voice, like you might use when discussing the weather. Or highly classified government secrets while in a very public place. It was out of place enough to get my attention.

And as soon as she had it I realized she was right. The air around my hands was shimmering like a blacktop driveway on a hot day in July. I’d subconsciously formed a small heat sink, not even hot enough to boil water but still enough that someone might notice if I leaned on a wall and made the paint bubble or something. It was also why she’d grabbed me at my elbows, rather than my wrists. I exhaled slowly and did my best to loosen up. The heat around me relaxed and trickled back to its normal placement.

“Helix,” Teresa said, speaking quietly and making sure she had my attention before she went on. “I’m not here to talk to you about Darryl. I’m not entirely sure what you’re talking about there, although I can guess.”

“You’re not.” I stared at her for a moment, trying to get a read on her expression and finding I was way too wound up to pull it off. “Why are you here, then?”

She let go of my arms and took a step back, straightening her suit out with quick, practiced gestures that disguised the way she quickly glanced around to make sure we were still alone. Once she was sure we were she said, “Three days ago a military convoy in Nebraska was robbed by a flying man.”

“That’s not possible,” I said, then immediately wanted to kick myself. Most people would say that about heat sinks like me.

“That’s what the Inland West office said, too. But in the process of interviewing the guards it turns out he could also make lightning arc from light fixtures into people.” She raised an eyebrow. “It’s a bit different, but still sounds familiar, am I right?”

It was a bit different from what I’d experienced on Diversy Street a few weeks ago, at least in scale, but she was right. It did sound a lot like Circuit. “When are we going out to look?”

“Hold up.” She put a hand on my shoulder and lowered her voice. “Are you sure you’re ready for this? We can send someone else if we really have to. It’s basically just a postmortem at this point, Circuit’s long gone.”

I nodded slowly. “I’m good, Teresa.”

“Helix.” Her eyes flicked away for a moment and she took a deep breath. “Look, I know a few things about survivor’s guilt. You know about my dad. And he…”

He was her only family, before he ran into a serial killer. I’d always assumed her job was part of a search for closure. Now I wondered if it was something more. “Yeah, I know. This isn’t the first time I’ve lost a fellow agent, Teresa. I was closer to Mona than most. But I’ve dealt with this before.”

She slid her hands down until she was holding mine, a surprisingly trusting gesture given what had just happened, then looked back up at me and I saw a glimpse of raw pain in her eyes. “It wasn’t your fault.”

I wasn’t sure which of us she was talking to. For a second we stood there, looking like we were sharing some sort of intimate moment, feeling like a mess. Then I realized something. “Teresa, did I just throw the file on that hijacking into the trash?”

“What? Oh, yeah, you did.”

I stepped away and quickly fished it out after hitting the elevator call button. For some reason I felt too drained to go back up to my apartment by stair. “Okay, let me grab my go bag and I’ll be right back down with you.”

“Helix. You’re sure you’re fine?”

The question was asked with all her usual polite calm. So I nodded and said, “Sure.”

After all, if she could lie about her feelings, so could I.

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Water Fall: Cold Leads

Posted by natechen on

Six Weeks Before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Helix

After four days we were almost done. Circuit had left information on nearly a hundred different pieces of property among the papers we’d recovered from his warehouse a few weeks ago. But so far digging into the real estate agents and owners of those properties hadn’t turned anything up. The last stop we were making was also the most significant.  Keller Development held almost a third of the properties on Circuit’s list and of those, the firm had acquired more than half in the last six months.  All things considered Analysis felt that they had the best chance of being a front, patsy or even co-conspirator in whatever Circuit was doing.

It had also taken longest to get an appointment with them, although that didn’t mean much either way as they were also the largest firm we’d been dealing with. In addition to it’s multiple commercial and residential real estate holdings, Keller’s also owned a medium sized stretch of waterfront, the marina there was where the firm’s founders had gotten their start. While he had few holdings outside the county the owner, Roger Keller, was still something of a political force in the city. Project Sumter was an agency of the national government but that didn’t mean we didn’t like to maintain good local relations as well, so asking questions without drawing heat was going to be a priority. I was planning on letting Teresa do most of the talking.

Provided, of course, she could stay awake for the interview. She’d slept through almost the entire drive to the Keller offices, and I was hoping the hour of rest would help her keep her mind clear. We had nothing so far and I was hoping that things would be different by the time we were done.

Even so, I hesitated to wake her up after putting the car into park and switching off the engine. She’d proven a remarkably sharp, aggressive and reliable supervisor in the time I’d worked with her but I knew she was what she was because she also came with baggage. While I have something most people would consider a superpower I don’t have much in the way of emotional trauma to go with it. Sure, some people might say I have a chip on my shoulder but I suspect that has more to do with being short and scrawny than anything else.

On the other hand, Teresa had set out to get the job she had in part as a way to cope. Not doing it, or doing it badly, would probably be worse for her in the long run than loosing a little sleep. I nudged her gently. “Teresa. We’re here.”

Asleep she looked remarkably peaceful but as soon as she snapped awake layers of stress started to roll down over her face, followed by the fine tuned professionalism that kept the old troubles in and new ones out.  It was kind of sad to watch, really. “Good. We’re here,” she said, rubbing grit from her eyes. I glanced away, Teresa always stretches after sitting for a while and it’s the kind of thing that leads red blooded guys to stare in ways that would get me smacked by my dad and chewed out by my mom. “Where are we?”

Okay, so there was a crack in the usual professional façade. “Last place on the list of real estate developers.” I grabbed the stack of folders in the back seat and flipped through them until I found the right one. “You feeling okay there, boss?”

“Just tired.” She took the folder from me and got out of the car.

I followed suit after putting the other folders back. “Do you remember which one that is?”

“Uh…”

I stopped, more than a little surprised. This wasn’t just a crack in the façade, this was starting to look like a full blown break. I turned and looked at her over the top of my old, beat up Ford Escort. “Look, Teresa, I know you’re old friends with Senator Dawson and his family. His daughter was your friend, got you this job, helped you live the dream. But if you stay up all night kibitzing on the investigation into her disappearance you’re going to be too tired to learn anything that will help with her case; to say nothing of the one you’re actually assigned to.”

A flicker of irritation passed under her mask of propriety, another troubling crack in her usual aura of competence. “Helix-”

“I’m serious. We need your A game here.” I shrugged. “I’m not going to say no one I’ve known in the Project has ever taken on extra curricular investigations, because that would make me a liar. But you can’t let it interfere with your assignments.”

She sighed. “Okay, fine. Your advice is appreciated.”

“Good.” I pushed off the car and headed for the building, a tall, well built place with a bunch of architectural flourishes like columns and shaped blocks which probably have technical terms of some sort. Me, I didn’t know them but I could tell it was a fancy place.

But local development firms, even fairly prosperous ones, didn’t need an entire building like that for their offices. They did take up the whole top floor, though. As we waited for the elevator in the lobby Teresa said, “So I didn’t read the brief on this place. Bring me up to speed.”

“Sure.” I took the folder and flipped it open to the most relevant statistics as we stepped into the elevator and Teresa punched in our destination. “Keller owns a large number of the properties we’re looking into, most of the commercial buildings and at least half of the smaller rental properties. They don’t deal in private real estate, so none of the houses on the list have-”

“Wait.” I glanced up from the file to find Teresa looking a bit like a deer in the headlights. “These are the Keller Development offices?”

“Yes…” I flipped the folder back closed slowly. “This is probably the most important interview in the batch and anything significant learned here is just going to wind up in our laps anyway. I figured we might as well do the legwork ourselves and kept it for us when handing out assignments.”

Teresa sighed and rubbed a thumb along the bridge of her nose. “Helix, I know you looked into my background when I first joined up.”

I could feel myself blushing a little. “Look, that was-”

“I’m not complaining because it was entirely justified given the circumstances,” she said, ignoring me completely. “But I’m surprised you didn’t come up with the names Keller, Sykes and Oldfather.”

With a sinking feeling I started to suspect where this conversation was going. The elevator opened with a cheerful ding and I instinctively stuck out a hand to keep the door from closing as I said, “I’ve heard of Roger Keller before. Who hasn’t, around here? But Sykes and Oldfather are mysteries to me.”

“You must have done a really roundabout job investigating, then.” She shook her head and stepped out into the lobby. “I can understand not knowing Kevin Oldfather, but Matthew Sykes? You’ve really never heard of him?”

“Can’t say as I have.”

“Then you are in luck.” I turned and found a middle aged man in a wheel chair making his way across the lobby towards us. While Keller Development’s lobby was full of low benches and potted plants that should have made maneuvering across the floor a challenge for him; he handled the obstacles with something approaching grace and all the while kept his face turned towards the two of us. The face in question had a sleepy, relaxed look. “I’ve heard of Matthew Sykes,” he added, in case we had been wondering. “Few know more about him than me, in fact, seeing as I am him.”

Teresa made a funny squeaking sound that I did my best to cover for. “Quite a coincidence, Mr. Sykes,” I said, nudging Herrera in the hope that she would calm down a bit. “Do you work for Mr. Keller, or are you an associate?”

“Work for-” He laughed, the chair rolling to a stop.

“Mr. Sykes is the owner of Sykes Telecommunications, Hel-” Teresa caught herself before she used my codename in public and smoothly turned it into something else. “He owns one of the largest fiber optic networks in the state, among other things.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, I hadn’t heard your name before.”

“Not a problem, really,” Sykes said, wheeling himself the last few feet over to us. He was wearing a light gray suit and matching tie that looked expensive enough but, by contrast, his wheelchair was a very basic metal and fabric thing. Not what I would have expected from a well moneyed business man. At the very least I would have expected something self propelled, although from the looks of his hands and upper body Matthew Sykes was benefiting from the exercise. “STC is primarily based in Springfield. We’ve been expanding in this area over the last several years but we’re hardly a household name yet. Which makes me wonder how it is that you’ve heard of me, young lady.”

Teresa glanced down at her hands quickly, composed herself, although I’m not sure Sykes noticed the difference between flustered and normal, and said, “I was sponsored by the Oldfather Fund when I was seventeen. One of the first, actually.”

“I see. That would be what, eight, nine years ago?” Sykes turned thoughtful, his gaze went off into the distance as he absently drummed his fingers on the arm of his wheelchair. “Seventeen is unusually old, even for us. What’s your name, if I could ask?”

“Teresa Herrera.” She hesitated, then added, “Before, it was Ortiz.”

“You forgot ‘Senior Special Agent’,” I said, moving slightly so I could see the two of them at once and displaying my ID. Like most such cards carried by Sumter agents it placed us with the government agency we were currently working with. I’ve had as many as two dozen in a year before. “We’re with the FBI. Care to clue me in to what we’re talking about?”

“Relax.” I caught Teresa giving my ID a quick glance to remember what my current identity was. Hopefully she’d mention it out loud, I wasn’t really sure what it was at the moment either. “It’s most likely not directly relevant to this case.”

Sykes laughed again. “I would hope not. The Oldfather Fund is a charity, Agent…” He squinted at my badge for a second when I didn’t supply my own name. “Agent Hoffman. We help people finance adoptions.”

“There’s… a need for that?”

“It’s very expensive, sometimes.” Sykes shrugged. “Frequently more so than having a child in a state of the art hospital. But we specialize in helping people who are interested in adopting a child with more challenging circumstances.”

“Challenging?” I glanced at Teresa. Her birth father had been killed by a talent codenamed Lethal Injection, a serial killer who used his control over the viscosity of liquids in strange and disturbing ways.

But Teresa seemed to guess what I was thinking and shook her head slightly. “Once children are past the age of five or six their odds of getting adopted drop dramatically. Anyone older than ten is virtually guaranteed to remain in the system until they reach adulthood.”

Which didn’t sound like a great way to grow up but didn’t directly tie the Oldfather Fund back to the case. It also didn’t sound like a the Oldfather fund specifically dealt with children who had had some kind of a brush with talented people. “I see. And Mr. Keller is a member of this fund?”

“Sure.” Sykes leaned back in his wheelchair causing the material to creak slightly. I realized that it wasn’t quite the barebones package I had thought it was – it wasn’t made of metal and canvas it was made of metal and leather. I wondered absently if it was a custom job or if you could just order them out of a magazine somewhere.

Sykes went on, unaware of my moment of distraction. “Kevin Oldfather interviewed Roger and I while writing a book on older children and the foster system. We were two of the rare adoptees over the age of ten.”

“What Matthew forgets to mention is that we were chosen as much to keep the family business in the family as anything.” If Sykes didn’t look much like a high powered business man in his simple suit and wheelchair, the new guy did. His slicked black hair and neatly trimmed goatee clearly said he had enough money not to care what people thought about him, while the suit he wore, which probably cost more than I made in a year, reminded people he could still be in touch with fashion if he wanted to. There was a sort of vague slickness to him that set my teeth on edge. He had a cold look on his face at first, but then he glanced at Sykes and smiled slightly, which helped a little. “Hello Matthew. Legs doing any better?”

“I can’t complain, Roger,” Sykes replied, his own smile transforming him from sleepily interested to fully engaged. I couldn’t tell if it was a practiced skill or just part of who he was. “The doctors tell me there’s another surgery that might give me more mobility back in the knees, probably let me walk again in another couple of years, but I’m not sure I want to go through another recovery right now.”

“Best to take it easy.” The smile, faint though it was, vanished and Roger Keller turned to give Teresa and I his full attention. “Well, to business. My secretary told me my two o’clock and two thirty appointments were out here chatting, so I guess that makes you the two from the FBI.”

“Actually, Mr. Keller, I didn’t realize we’d be interviewing you today,” Teresa said. “As I was just telling Mr. Sykes, I was sponsored by the Oldfather Fund when I was younger and I’m not sure-”

“You must have been one of the very first.” Keller tapped his chin absently. “Is this one of those conflict of interest things? Am I suspected of something?”

“We were just hoping you could help us by providing us with some information about some properties that came up in the course of an investigation,” I said, tapping my folder with one hand.

“Well, that shouldn’t be very difficult then, should it?” Keller asked. “I’ll tell you what I can about properties we’ve developed for ourselves, but our work for other clients will have to remain confidential.”

“It might be better if I came back with another-”

“Look, I’m a busy man.” Keller turned and started across the lobby. “I don’t know when I’ll be able to work you into my schedule again so if you have questions to ask, let’s get to them, shall we?”

I glanced at Teresa, who shrugged and said, “At this point it is mostly just fact finding. It probably can’t hurt anything if I’m there.”

“Well, good luck,” Sykes said, backing his wheelchair up a few paces to give us an unobstructed path. “And don’t mind Roger. He’s all bark and no bite, I’m sure he’ll cooperate as best he can.”

“Thank you, Mr. Sykes.” I wondered what had brought him here. It felt like there was something that I wasn’t quite getting but I figured I could always ask Teresa about it later. As we hurried after Keller I quietly asked, “Are you sure you’re okay with this?”

“You were right. We do need to find out whatever Keller knows, and we don’t have time to wait for whenever we can make another appointment.” She shrugged. “Nothing for it but to see what he can tell us.”

——–

As it turned out, it wasn’t much. The buildings were a mashup of places Keller Development had invested in and places clients had asked them to redevelop on their behalf. In the short half hour we had all we really managed to do was get Keller’s promise to send us the details that had led his people to purchase those properties his firm held independently. He emphatically refused to ask his clients if he could share any of their information with us. In the end, if there was some kind of grand scheme to Keller’s work in the city, we left his office with no clue of what it might be. Analysis could sort out the data he gave us, but Teresa and I were fresh out of angles to follow up on.

So we went back to our office and wrote up the necessary reports, then went our separate ways.

My apartment is not really a place where I get to spend a whole lot of time. Even on my days off I don’t really stay there much, I have a workshop elsewhere in town where I much prefer to be. Basically, I just use it as a place to store changes of clothes. It’s kind of lonely, really.

Even so, when I get back there I take a few basic precautions. For example, before I unlock the door I check to make sure the room is at an even temperature. While I don’t have infrared vision or anything I can “feel” the temperature of my surroundings rising into cold spots or sinking into hot spots. An empty room is on an even level, because the whole place is literally at room temperature. However, today there was a slight depression in one corner of my apartment. Someone had dropped by to pay me a visit.

I checked the lock but it showed no signs of being picked or forced. There are a few people who have spare keys to my place, because being a lone wolf really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. At the very least, if I ever locked myself out it was cheaper to drive over to Jack’s place and pick up the spare than pay the fee to have the building supervisor open the door for me. But I had a feeling it wasn’t my tactical team leader that was waiting for me. There were two spare keys and I’d lent the other one out a month ago, to help with the planning for a birthday party.

With a sinking feeling I let myself into the apartment and looked into the small living room. Darryl Templeton was there, sitting on the sofa, turning his cane in his hands slowly. He looked up from his cane when he heard the door open, did his best to force a smile. “Hello, Helix. Looks like you had another long day. Sorry to bother you, but do you have a minute for an old friend?”

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Water Fall: Live Wires

Posted by natechen on

Six Weeks, Three Days Before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation

Circuit

My life would have been a lot easier if the soldiers had decided to do something stereotypical and stupid, like using their rifles. However, real soldiers get warned about things like ricochets and so they came after me with knives instead of shooting up the inside of an armored tin can so I was forced to deal with them without the benefit of stupidity.

On the bright side, a magnetic can was an environment that I was practically born to work in.

There was a light in the center of the vehicle, just behind the soldiers who were coming at me, but a cursory examination, which was all I had time for, revealed no other places I could hijack current from the APC’s battery. I had exactly two seconds to figure out how I wanted to get to it. There wasn’t time for anything fancy and the fact that we were still in a moving vehicle cut down on my options, too. So I kept it simple and fired up the magnetic boots and vambraces again, using them to grab onto the side of the vehicle and throw myself towards the ceiling.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get both arms in good contact with the ceiling and I wound up swinging sloppily from one arm. But it was enough of a surprise to the guards that none of them managed to get their knives around and stick me before I crashed into the one on the right and sent us both to the floor. I was getting quite used to seeing the floor of the APC and it wasn’t exactly an experience I recommend. At least the guards weren’t wearing body armor, which made it a lost easier to drop an elbow into the soldier’s gut before shoving him under his companion’s feet and scrambling back and to my feet.

The other two guards stumbled just enough to give me time to get up without interference. In the process I grabbed a small device from my belt, a miniaturized version of the lightening funnel I’d used against Helix just a couple of weeks ago. The principle was simple. Using a precisely balanced set of magnetic fields I could change the balance of magnetic potentials over a much greater range than any other fusebox I’d heard of before. While the one I was holding wasn’t nearly strong enough to arc lightning out of storm clouds it was more than enough to let me hijack the APC’s electrical systems and arc them through people and into the floor of what was essentially a large metal box.

I reached up to the light fixture and switched it on. A second later there was a sizzle of ozone, a quiet pop and the other two guards dropped to the floor. Just to be sure they wouldn’t be any more trouble I gave all three a quick kick to the head, fairly certain that would keep them quiet. Then I switched the lightening funnel back off and I slipped it back into my belt. With my other hand I smashed the light fixture, throwing the compartment into darkness and siphoning much of the vehicle’s battery charge into my harness.

That gave me more than three quarter’s charge, enough to risk switching the maglev harness back on and feeling around. Unfortunately the weird, slippery feeling that I’d felt just before it went screwy was still there, which meant I couldn’t count on it for an escape if I needed one. Since there was no point wasting charge I switched the harness back off and cranked the volume of my headset back to conversational levels. “Hangman, something’s gone wrong with the maglev rig.”

“I tried to tell you earlier,” Hangman yelled in my ear. “You’re too low!”

“Stop yelling!” I yelled. “I turned you back up. What do you mean I’m too low?”

“The highway’s dipped too low,” Hangman said, her voice back at a manageable volume. “There’s only one maglev relay that’s low enough down for you to push on. That means-”

“Yes, I follow the theory, thank you.” Getting aloft using maglev relies on making a three point triangle. Magnets can only push directly away from each other, so if there aren’t two of them to balance your maglev array against you just wind up sliding along the path of least resistance – which usually means bouncing awkwardly along the ground getting lots of fun new bruises. But this was even worse, instead of pushing myself up with the relays they were now positioned so that I was a between two of them, and the weird slippery feeling from before was the repelling force of the maglev relays pushing against each other – and me. Until I could get some more altitude I was grounded.

“Okay back there, Donner?” That question came from the APC’s driver, who was looking back over his shoulder. I realized that draining the vehicle’s batter had also fried something important and the vehicle was stopped, probably totally inoperable. When he realized I wasn’t one of his buddies his expression changed from concern to hostility. “What the-”

I grabbed the first handy thing, which happened to be a shoulder bag sitting on one of the benches, and swung it around into the driver’s face. He went down, the rest of his sentence lost in the whump of the bag making contact. It sounded like there was something fairly weighty in there but I didn’t have time to wonder about what it might be.

Now apparently a man mysteriously landing on top of a vehicle in your convoy is not a valid reason for the Army to circle the wagons but one of said vehicles stopping unexpectedly is, because that’s exactly what the rest of the convoy proceeded to do. It didn’t take quite as long as fully subduing the driver so I had a few seconds to get the lay of the land. “What are they talking about, Hangman?”

“Why your APC is stopping. Why they’re not getting any response over the satlink. What they’re going to do when they find out who’s responsible for sending things so far south. Not very pleasant talk, that last bit.” There was some kind of strange background noise mixed in with Hangman’s voice. “I don’t suppose you could have your driver call them off?”

I finished dragging the soldier in question out of his chair and laying him none-to-gently on the floor. “I’m afraid he’s a bit indisposed.”

“I figured.”

“Hangman, are you moving?” I straightened up and looked out the front window of the APC. The lights of the rest of the convoy were getting close, blocking off the highway. Absently, I wondered how soon we could expect to start backing up traffic. I was actually rather surprised there weren’t a few civilian cars out there already. “I’m not ready for extraction yet.”

“No, you’re not. You’re in the middle of what you’re new friends would call a Charlie Foxtrot, when they’re in polite company, and it’s time we changed plans.” There was a squealing sound that sounded a lot like tires spinning on pavement, then, “I can be there in two minutes.”

“That’s-”

“You can’t solo this one, Circuit,” she insisted. “You don’t have time to keep those soldiers jumping and grab the goods. All eyes are going to be on you, so I’ll make the grab.”

“They’re going to see you coming.”

“You’re in the middle of a highway. It may be 2 AM local time but you’re still going to be ankle deep in cars in just a few minutes.”

“Corporal Donner,” a voice called from outside the APC. “I want all your men out of there now!”

“Fine. We’ll do it your way, but keep your head down and don’t get hurt. You have the lot number we’re looking for?”

“‘Course.”

“Good.” I grabbed the step that swung down from the APC’s topside hatch. “And Hangman? We’re going to talk about this after we’re done here.”

“Of that I had no doubt.”

I vaulted myself up and clambered onto the top of APC. Since the silhouette of a man in a fedora and suit is much different from that of a soldier, even when he’s not in full battle dress, I got a lot of attention quickly.

“Up top!” One of the soldiers shouted.

That was my cue to leave. With a quick mental command I switched the maglev harness back on then bent my knees, ignoring the popping noise because I wasn’t that old, and jumped. Then I pushed as hard as I could against the closest maglev relay, sending myself slipping sideways across the highway and into the grass in the median. Of course, since I started a good ten or twelve feet off the pavement and the median was much lower than that, my meeting with the ground was fairly abrupt. Even with padded body armor and my best fall breaking techniques I was pretty winded but the scattered gunfire from the highway told me I really need to get moving. I’d probably just surprised the soldiers into shooting just then but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t be making very deliberate attempts to punch me full of holes in the near future.

So I pushed up and scrambled along the side of the road in a crouch. The only light was coming from the vehicles in the convoy and any other cars that had come along and gotten stuck behind them. In the wild crisscross of high beams it couldn’t be easy to see anything out in the dark. Unless one of them had infrared goggles or something, and wouldn’t that be just my luck?

Fortunately the arrival of civilian vehicles gave whoever was in charge of the convoy something to think about besides finding the guy in the hat and beating him until he admitted to being a terrorist. There was a lot of yelling going on up there but I did my best to ignore it. Hangman might think she could get ahold of the package we were there to pick up by herself but she apparently didn’t know how big it was – one way or another I was going to have to be there to help out. Might as well start looking for the thing myself.

My luck held as I scuttled along the pavement and over to the nearest truck, no one spotted me even though it felt like the whole world could hear my feet scraping on the pavement.

Magnetic boots are not exactly built for stealth.

Any hope of getting in and out without being observed was now long gone, so I felt no regret at slicing through the canvas and into the bed of the truck. I clambered in, produced a small penlight from my belt and took a quick look around. Thankfully the box I was looking for was fairly large, at least four feet long, and the boxes in the truck weren’t large enough for that. I wasn’t sure what all I was looking at but I was pretty sure it wasn’t what I was after.

The next truck in line was similarly devoid of my objective but I hit pay dirt in the third. The box was strapped to the truck bed and the rest of the vehicle was empty. I couldn’t see the whole identification number on the box but I really didn’t need to. If this wasn’t what I was after I would eat my hat. I was about to climb into the truck bed when I heard boots coming around the side of the truck. I slipped down the side of the vehicle and moved as quickly as I could, although it still wasn’t all that quiet.

The soldier came around the side of the truck before I could get up to the corner; so unfortunately he had enough time to shout “Hey!” before I could slap him with the taser. Then it was up into the truck bed. I threw my suit jacket off then fumbled the maglev harness off and looped it over the four corners of the box and switched it on. Voices were yelling outside the truck as I slashed the box free of the truck bed and sheathed my knife.

“Hangman,” I whispered. “Are you here yet?”

“Out of the van, sneaking along the side of the highway.” Her answering whisper was almost lost in the background noise of a idling cars.

“Well get back in the van,” I hissed. “I found the package and we’re ready to go, but the van needs to be running, with you leaning on the brakes, in order for this to work.”

“Wha-”

“The van has a relay built in, Hangman.” My voice was rising and I took a moment to throttle it back down to a whisper. “It comes on when the motor is running. I need the van running but stationary if I’m going to maglev this piece of junk out of the truck bed and into the van.”

Hangman cursed and I heard quiet scrabbling noises over the headset. Then one of the convoy guards poked his head through the canvas truck cover and I got distracted.

Option one was to shoot him, but if you don’t want to be killing a cop before you’re ready to deal with all the cops in the county then you really don’t want to be killing a soldier unless you’re ready to deal with, at a minimum, whole infantry divisions. Option two was to close the distance and go with the tasers in my gloves. But I didn’t have the element of surprise this time so my chances of coming out of that in good condition were much, much smaller and I needed to stay near the harness to make it work anyways. So I went with option three and slipped out one of the two magnesium flares I kept on my belt, closed my eyes and lit it with a snap of the wrist.

I’d packed them with the idea that Hangman might have to move the van and the come find me later. The flares were to make the finding part easier. Well, she’d moved the van but we were close enough that finding me shouldn’t pose any problem, and it would be a shame to let a perfectly good flare go to waste. From the pained noise the soldier made when his night adjusted eyes were blinded by the brilliant glare, it had definitely been put to good use.

The flare wasn’t much use now so I threw it down and grabbed hold of the box and nudged the maglev harness to life. For a few nerve-wracking seconds there was no sign of the van’s maglev relay, then it sprang to life. There wasn’t anything to do but hope that Hangman had already set the brake, flip polarity on the harness and push it to life.

With polarities reversed the harness was no longer repelled by the maglev relay, but rather attracted towards it. Although the combined weight of the package and myself was nearly three times what the harness had been carrying before; I figured I could afford to turn the power up since the battery only had to get us a few hundred feet to the van. So I pushed as hard as I could and spared a little attention to make sure nothing important shorted out from the extra current load. And I did my best to hang on, twenty miles an hour is pretty fast when all you have to hang on to is an improvised set of straps on a large wooden box.

Of course, the van wasn’t parked directly behind the truck so I actually wound up sliding across the truck bed and into the canvas on the side – not the side I’d cut through on my way in, either. But as soon as I got my knife free and started cutting the force of the box pushing against the canvas tore things the rest of the way and the box and I went flipping over the side of the truck. For a moment I thought the box would land on top of me and that would be the end of it, but we wound up rotating just enough that the edge of the box caught on the pavement and it flipped one more time, sliding across the pavement with me on the top and not the bottom, accompanied by the surprised profanity of half a dozen soldiers.

For the second time in five minutes surprise was on my side, none of the guards managed to react in time to make a grab for me or the box and then I was beyond them and skidding through the cars that had come up on the stopped convoy and gotten stuck there. There were only ten or so civilian vehicles there and the soldiers had thankfully been in the process of clearing them off the highway, otherwise my trip could have come to an abrupt end against some hapless family’s Toyota, doing no good for them or me. Then the van loomed up, the back doors already open, and I flipped the polarity of the harness back around, letting up on the pressure on the maglev system some, so that the magnets repelled again and acted as brakes. The box slowed, tilting precariously up on one side. I hopped off and, at the last second, killed the maglev harness entirely and put my shoulder behind the box and pushed it. That, along with the last of the momentum from our mad rush out of the truck, was enough for it tip over into the back of the van. I gave it a good, hard push and got it the rest of the way into the van, then jumped up and swung the doors closed behind me. Not a moment too soon, either, as the guards were already starting to take shots at us.

But with the doors closed and all the armor in the vehicle’s chassis between us and them they weren’t really a threat anymore. I clambered over the box and into the front seat, saying, “Drive!”

Hangman wordlessly floored the gas and we took off down the highway against traffic. The vehicles I take with me on jobs are hardly stock vans, however, and between four wheel drive and upgraded suspension crossing a grass maridian like you find on the typical divided highway is no big deal. We were driving with traffic soon enough.

I noticed as I was settling in that the front windshield had taken a bullet, leaving a small impact crater in the bullet resistant glass. It wasn’t until Hangman fished the spent round out of her lap and tossed it in the back with shaking hands that I realized it was on the inside and not the outside.

I studied her carefully. She was pale, but seemed to be in possession of her faculties. “Are you alright?”

“Sure.” She spared a glance away from the road. “When were you going to tell me the package was so big we had to lift it by maglev?”

“When it became relevant,” I said testily.

“We have a bit of a drive before we can switch to a less conspicuous vehicle,” she said, matching my tone. “Maybe we can talk about that.”

“No.” I stood up and climbed into the back. “We’re going to keep all our attention on the road so that no one can sneak up on us. But believe me, we will talk about that, and a number of other things, once we’re out of the field.”

The promise followed us all the way back to base. A part of me would have almost prefered another disaster to deal with instead.

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Water Fall: Shock and Awe

Posted by natechen on

Six Weeks, Three Days Before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Circuit

It was dark. Not just middle of the night dark, but honest to goodness, clouds in front of the moon and not a light on the side of the road dark. You wouldn’t think there was a part of America where there are no lights on the side of the road, but the fact is that in many of the more remote parts of the country no one bothers with them.

Nebraska certainly counts as remote.

However, roads with no lights on them at all are not the kind of thing used by the U.S. Army. No, on this particular night the lightlessness of the road had nothing to do with age or infrastructure and everything to do with yours truly. The clouds over the moon were coincidental, but handy.

I was drifting along the side of the road at about twenty miles an hour. Some work with the maglev relays the day before had let me push the top speed back up to something that wasn’t quite as embarrassing as the jogging pace we’d had when testing things. Still, things got touchy if I tried to move much faster than twenty miles an hour, so ambushing a convoy moving at highway speeds was going to be tricky.

I mentally flicked my headset active. “Any sign of their calling for help?”

“No,” Hangman said, her voice sounding unusually tense. “So far they’ve just been grumbling about the maintenance the highway gets. Wait.” A moment’s pause. “Okay, somebody just floated the idea.”

“Have you found their satellite uplink?”

“It’s cracked and being monitored.” A hint of exasperation replaced some of the tension in her voice. “There’s a trojan in there that will let me shut off the feed at any point without tripping any automatic alarms. But Circuit, you know as well as I do that there’s no accounting for human eyes. If someone notices that the convoy hasn’t checked in in a while it could be even more of a problem than their complaining about the lights along the road being out.”

“Believe it or not, that has occurred to me. I’m more worried about what will happen once they start reporting flying men landing on the trucks. The Army has a notoriously slow response time, it’s part of being a huge bureaucratic institution. But if Project Sumter is listening and has someone nearby we could be in trouble before we can successfully cover our tracks.” I narrowed my eyes as headlights appeared in the distance. “I have visual.”

“They still haven’t touched their satellite uplink,” Hangman said. “Do you want me to cut it now, or wait?”

“Cut it now.” I eased up slightly, letting myself drift down so I was closer to the road. There was a bigger chance I would be spotted but the fact is keeping the maglev system working required constant pressure from my talent. It’s a lot like keeping a muscle flexed for a long period of time, you can do it easily enough with the right conditioning but it’s still tiring. The plan didn’t call for a lot of talent use once I was in, but it was best to be cautious and keep as much of it available as I could.

“The satlink is cut,” Hangman said. “Just out of curiosity, what are your countermeasures for their cellphones?”

“Bureaucracy again.” I said, trying not to stare into the headlights and ruin my night vision. It was difficult, since I needed to keep an eye on the vehicles and in the near total darkness the light could be almost hypnotic. “If they’re calling over an unsecured line they’ll need to run through a whole identification routine and it will take them time to get up the chain of command. If anything, it will slow their response time even more.”

“Point.” A moment’s silence. “Okay, they’re satellite link is now cut. Home base is getting a false signal.”

The headlights were getting larger and larger. “I’m getting ready to go down. This could be loud, and I’m going to need my concentration. I’m turning down the volume on the headset so if you have something to say be sure it’s nice and loud.”

“Or I could…” Hangman’s voice faded beneath the noise of rushing air.

The manifest we’d intercepted said there should be half a dozen vehicles in the convoy  I was planning to ambush. Unfortunately which vehicle the piece of equipment I wanted was supposed to be in hadn’t been clear. Worse, since I was after an electronic component, I couldn’t risk disabling the convoy with an electromagnetic pulse, as that had a chance of damaging it. I’d known all this before I came out and had cooked up a number of different ways to try and slow down the convoy so I could get on board one of its vehicles without injuring myself.

Unfortunately only one of those schemes had actually been practical.

It involved another piece of brilliant Davis engineering, a motorized cable and winch that I had strapped over one shoulder. It contained three hundred feet of light weight line that could easily support five hundred pounds of weight. The weighted magnetic grapple at one end could be fired via electromagnets at a speed of about sixty miles an hour. In theory, all I had to do was get it attached to a vehicle and let the crank slowly bring me up to speed and then along side the truck.

But, as any well trained sniper will tell you, it’s always best to hit the last person in a line first. If you start at the front, the people behind him will notice what’s happening. The same principle applies to sticking a grappling hook into an Army convoy. I would only have one chance to snag the last truck in line. That wasn’t my favorite part of the plan.

Drifting along the side of the road at twenty miles an hour it looked even less appealing. Even though some work with the maglev harness earlier had made it more comfortable, and even though I’d practiced this while moving at different speeds and under different conditions out at the base camp I had in Wisconsin, I was still not entirely confident that I could hit on my first try.

There was a back up option, of course, in the form of a roadblock a few miles down the road at the limits of my maglev range. But not only would it take time for me to catch up to the convoy if they got past, the roadblock would put them on alert. I wasn’t really ready for a confrontation with the armed forces just yet, it would be much better if I could do this quietly.

The convoy passed below me, looking deceptively sedate. From that far up a speed difference of forty miles an hour didn’t look like much but as I dropped closer and closer to the convoy things started to happen fast.

Forty miles an hour is a big speed difference, and the first three vehicles were past before I even had the winch lined up. I got a brief glance of an APC and a couple of covered trucks as they went by and then I was lining up my shot. Unfortunately, firing a grappling hook at a moving vehicle mostly consist of pointing it in the right direction and hoping for good luck. While I could possibly recall the grapple using the magnets built into it there was only a slim chance that I could do it before the convoy was out of reach.

So there was nothing to do but suck in a deep breath, drop a few more feet until I was about a dozen feet off the pavement and just as far to the left of the oncoming vehicles, and trigger the launcher.

There was a troubling moment of uncertainty, then the grapple clanged into something important on the last vehicle in line and I was suddenly being dragged along like the world’s strangest parasailer. To be precise, the winch was still letting out line but giving some resistance, so I was picking up speed gradually, instead of having my arms ripped out of their sockets. It wasn’t fun, but it sure beat the alternative. Still, the jolt managed to send a twinge of pain shooting through my recently dislocated right shoulder. I grit my teeth and focused on the motor in the winch, reversing it so it began cranking the line in and dragging me closer to the vehicle I’d snagged.

Unfortunately, the vehicle in question was another APC. It looked like the convoy consisted of four trucks sandwiched between two of the armor carriers, which was sensible from a security standpoint but made my life more difficult. The equipment I was after was most likely in one of the trucks, which meant I’d have to work my way forward. Worse, the APCs probably had a bunch of cramped, bored guards in them, people who would probably notice and take violent offense to my hopping from truck to truck and rummaging through the contents.

I was trying to work out some way to deal with that without bringing the whole convoy down on my head when the winch pulled me down to within a half a dozen feet of the APC’s roof and something suddenly changed. For lack of a better term the magnetic forces keeping me aloft suddenly wobbled and turned slippery; then I was falling, not in freefall but actually shooting downwards towards the vehicle below. I had just enough time to toss the winch aside and throw my hands up to catch myself before I crashed into the armored surface of the APC.

The first thing I did was kill the maglev harness. Getting it up and working again would be much easier than trying to get Hangman to shut down and reboot the entire relay system. Since that was no more work than a quick nudge of talent in the right direction I was able to do it before I even started collecting my wits.

The second thing to do was shake the stars out of my vision and begin collecting said wits.

Ideally, that would have been the end of the things I had to do, at least for the next minute or two. Unfortunately, life and ideals have longstanding  issues with one another. That is how I wound up face down and in pain on top of a moving APC in the first place.

So instead of getting a few minutes to recover, I got an overly-clever guard poking his head through the hatch a few feet away, probably wondering what all the banging was.

I should have tried to kick the hatch down on his head, or just kicked him myself. Unfortunately I was still flat on my stomach and doing my best to get my breath back, so soldier boy had enough time to notice me and yell something to his buddies down in the truck. While that was bad, in that it put the entire load of soldiers on notice, it also gave me enough time to get my breath back.

Even with the main part of the maglev harness off, my standard rig included magnetic boots and vambraces. So the next thing to do was check the charge in the batteries in my rig. There was still enough charge for about fifteen minutes of constant use, which would be enough if I avoided using my taser. On the other hand, the average truck has a battery that should have enough charge to refill about a third of my reserves.

Since things were, as the fellows in the APC below me might say, already FUBAR I decided to burn the charge and plan on topping off from a couple of the vehicles in the convoy. Roadblock or no, I suspected we’d be stopped soon enough.

Which shows how little I understood military strategy. Looking back at it, I suspect the boys in the convoy were expecting an ambush and resolved to push on as much as possible in an attempt to avoid it. These were soldiers, after all, not security guards, they had different priorities. So the APC kept going and the guard started to haul up his sidearm.

Now engaging on in wild struggles on top of a moving vehicle is actually on the list of things that aspiring villains should actively avoid, but in my defense I hadn’t meant for any fighting to happen at this point. Actually, there wouldn’t have been any fighting at all if I could have had my way. But again, that would be an ideal situation and those are in chronically short supply.

Fortunately I was magnetically attached to the top of the APC and that reduced the chances that I would go airborne unexpectedly. Unfortunately, I’d have to release those magnets in order to get in reach of the guard. There was a heart-stopping moment when my hands slipped free from the APC’s roof then I grabbed the edge of the hatch and dove down in, grabbing the guard’s belt to act as break.

There was a moment of tangled limbs and grunts, then we collapsed onto the floor of vehicle in a heap. Almost without thinking I dug my hands into the guard’s guts and emptied my taser. He spasmed once and went still.

I gave the guard a shove and rolled to my feet. Three disgruntled soldiers were recovering from shock and getting ready for me just a few feet away. I gave a half-hearted smile and tugged my hat brim down a bit farther. “Good evening, boys. Sorry to drop in unexpectedly. I don’t suppose you’d believe I was just looking for the restroom?”

One of the soldiers gave me a sidelong glance, but other than that they gave no sign of stopping to chat. I sighed. “Yeah, that line never works anyway. Let’s dance.”

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Water Fall: Pointed Questions

Posted by natechen on

Six Weeks, Four Days before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation 

Massif

Helix likes to complain about how Project Sumter has procedures for everything. He once joked that he thought we had to file paperwork just to get a bathroom break while we were in the field. On the other hand, I think that just shows how much of Helix’s life has been eaten up by the Project. Apparently, his grandparents have been telling him stories about Project work since he was seven or eight and it progressed until working for Project Sumter was the only career path he could conceive of.

So what Helix doesn’t seem to realize is that all of life is full of procedures. The only difference is the paperwork is a lot less intense outside of our office.

“I should have asked earlier,” I murmured to Amplifier as we followed Sifu up the stairs. “Can you handle green tea? He’s going to serve it to us and it’s rude to turn it down.”

She gave me a quick grin. “Handle it? I was practically raised swimming in the stuff.”

“All the caffeine would go a long way to explaining your personality,” Harriet said from a few steps behind us. She didn’t seem to be having trouble with the stairs but she did sound a little winded. With a conscious effort I made myself stop monitoring my boss’s physical condition. She was getting up there, sure, but she was still cleared for field work and I wasn’t doing anyone any favors by second guessing her. That kind of distraction could be dangerous in field work.

While my sifu doesn’t have talent in the same way that Amp and I do, he does live a life that’s not that different from ours. Teaching wushu and dealing with talents are some things he does, but it’s not what he does for a living.

Sifu also owns a small store in Chinatown, one of those tourist trap kinds of places that sells a bunch of authenticly made in China bric-a-brac, but that’s not what he really does either. It’s run by a selection of people from his family, mostly nieces and nephews, and his oldest daughter. No, Giancarlo He is an acupuncturist, which means he gets paid to stick needles into people to help relieve their aches and pains. There are a surprising number of people who think this is a good idea and some of them have a surprising amount of disposable income, so he does fairly well for himself.

The top floor of the building where the store is located also serves as his home and office. It’s cramped, but I’ve never one heard him talk about moving out. We turned left at the top of the stairs and Sifu let us into the small treatment room. It consisted of an polished walnut desk with an equally classy chair, a long wooden table with a stack of cushions on one side and a two other chairs. A cabinet in one corner held all the acupuncture stuff and on top of it sat a tea pot and four cups. Sifu busied himself with the teapot immediately, I took a seat on the edge of the table and the ladies took the two treatment chairs.

“Why do you call him Little Mountain?”

Sifu chuckled at Amp’s question. “Because he is as stubborn and unmovable as a lump of rock.” He quickly placed three cups of tea on the table for us and kept one for himself, settling into his office chair with a sigh and keeping an eye on her the whole time. “You do not look like someone that Little Mountain has brought to me to learn wushu.”

Before answering Amp paused to take a sip of her tea. “This is good,” she murmured, setting her cup back down and leaning back in her chair with a look I was beginning to realize was anticipation. She actually enjoyed chatting up all the weird people she was meeting, which was a good thing for her chances of working in the field. “I’m not here to learn wushu. In fact, Agent Massif said he really shouldn’t be teaching me. Apparently you wouldn’t  like it.”

Sifu turned to look at me and took a sip of his tea. I did the same through sheer habit, you’re supposed to follow your sifu’s lead on everything when you’re a student and I’d never forgotten it. Of course, I don’t like green tea, so I found myself grimacing at the taste as I set the cup aside. “It’s not traditional to choose your own first student,” I said. “But mostly it’s because you’d start developing a bunch of habits that won’t necessarily mesh well with the training Project Sumter has waiting for you down the line.”

“Unfortunately, to them you will be an agent and not a person,” Sifu said. “Your training will be tailored to their needs, not yours.”

“Or you could say that we’re focusing on giving you skills that you can use to serve the public, rather than skills for self defense and personal improvement,” Harriet said, taking a tranquil sip from her own teacup. That kind of verbal sparring, like the tea or Sifu’s perpetually dour attitude, were just part of the standard procedure for a visit. But they didn’t seem to be making the best impression on Amplifier, so I decided to break with protocol and try to get to the point.

“Sifu, we’re not here to talk about wushu or differences in training doctrine.” I took another gulp of tea in an effort to make up for breaking with pattern. It sounds weird, I know, but that’s the give and take on these visits. “We really just want to find out about a couple of people in the community.”

Sifu sighed and looked into his tea. Being a teacher of any kind comes with a lot of responsibility for someone in Chinese society. In the small, rural villages where his parents grew up a sifu would probably be a part of his student’s entire life, a sort of third parent. By that measure, I’d qualify as a really bad child, since I never call, write or see him in person unless it’s to ask a question. I know it’s a purely cultural thing and you can’t go around bending over backwards to accommodate all the different expectations you encounter in life. But Sifu’s still really good at making me feel guilty about it.

“What is it you want to know?”

“Two things.” I shifted my feet, partly to try and get more comfortable on the edge of the table, partly to try and shake off the nagging sensation of guilt. “First, do you know of any place where a person with unique talents could get his car worked on? Specialty modifications to cut down the chance a fusebox is going to blow out his radio, for example.”

Sifu leaned back in his chair, fingers absently tapping on the sides of his teacup. “There hasn’t been anyone like that local in three or four years. The last fellow was called Wally the Wrench, or somesuch. He actually lived in your part of town.” By which Sifu meant the Polish neighborhood. “He apparently got a job offer somewhere else, though, so now the closest person I know of who does that kind of work is across the state line, in Gary.”

Harriet made a note of that, then said, “Do you know of any others? It’s probably worth following up on them all.”

Sifu set aside his tea and fished around in his desk until he found an old-fashioned Rolodex and started flipping through it. “I know of at least eight, from Texas to the East Coast. Do you want them all?”

“That many?” Amplifier asked in surprise.

Sifu gave her a quick smile. “I know a few people here and there.”

“Well, that’s just it,” she said. “Why are there even that many people in that line of work?”

“They probably don’t do work for talents that often,” I said with a shrug. “But once you do it, even if it’s just once or twice, your name gets passed around. Some of these people have probably gone years between jobs for talented people.”

Sifu grunted, copying the information from his Rolodex onto a sheet of paper. “Just as you say. There are probably a hundred people in the country who meet the criteria you asked about. Eight is not that large a number. It is strange that the only one here would get a job elsewhere. I never though of mechanics as the type to move around a lot.”

“Yeah, that is-” I stopped as a thought hit me. I knew it showed because Harriet and Amp both turned to look at me, but I didn’t want to mention too much about the case in front of Sifu – one of the reasons I keep my distance from him is that he’s really not supposed to know a lot about what I do and I’m not certain I could keep myself from asking him for advice constantly if I did hang around him a lot. But I’d just remembered what Samson said about Circuit possibly having a whole set of replacement parts for his armored van and couldn’t help wondering why he wouldn’t get a personal mechanic, too. It fit with the kind of thoroughness that we, or at least Helix, had insisted was a basic part of his personality at yesterday’s meeting. “Sifu, do you know if Wally left any kind of contact information behind when he moved out?”

He glanced up from his Rolodex. “Of course. I made it a point to ask, since keeping track of those things is what I do.”

“Where did he say he was going?”

“Overseas.” Sifu shrugged. “As I said, very strange. Perhaps he got a government contract?”

“Maybe.” I glanced at Harriet, who waved her hand slightly to show she was following my line of thought. Helix had been tapped by the CIA for some kind of job in Africa two years ago. Rumor was Circuit had been involved. “Give us Wally’s last known contact info too, please. It might be worth following up.”

“Very well.”

I finished my tea and made another face. The others could get away with just drinking a little, as a former student I knew I had to drink it all. “Anyway, you ready for the second thing I wanted to ask about?”

“The day I cannot write and answer your simple questions is the day they pour my ashes into an urn, Little Mountain.” Sifu waved a hand for me to continue.

“Right. Do you know anything about a contact like you who goes by Hangman?”

“Hangman?” Sifu laughed. “Of course I do. I’m surprised you even have to ask about him. You people should know about Hangman already. He is quite famous in our circles.”

“You’ve met?” Harriet asked.

“No, we haven’t. I don’t think anyone has met Hangman, he’s quite the recluse. He knows a lot and I don’t think he came by the information in a legitimate way. In fact, I’ve heard some things I’ve never heard about gifted people before in the last year or so, and if you trace the rumors back far enough they always seem to come from Hangman.” He handed me the sheet of paper he’d written the contact information for Wally and the other mechanics on. “Mind you, that doesn’t mean Hangman’s information is correct. I haven’t passed any of it on myself.”

“We appreciate that,” I said, tucking away the paper. “How do we go about meeting this Hangman if we were interested in talking to him?”

Sifu shrugged. “As far as I know, you don’t. He’s an information broker, and people who deal in secrets have a tendency to die with them, eventually. Hangman has tried to prevent an untimely death by conducting all his deals over the Internet. I’ve never heard of anyone who’s met him in person.”

“Have you ever dealt with him directly?” Amplifier asked. “Even knowing how to find him over the Net could be useful.”

“I haven’t, but my nephew Lincoln has.”

That made sense. Lincoln He was the family network administrator, he spent a lot of his time making sure the technology that ran the family businesses was functional, but he’d also started studying wushu with me when I was twelve. In another ten years, if I was still around, I would probably be dealing with him instead of Sifu. “I’ll get in touch with Lincoln, see if he can tell us anything more.”

“That won’t get you far, Little Mountain,” Sifu said, a note of regret in his voice. “Hangman wasn’t unwise in taking all the precautions he did, but they don’t seem to have helped as much as he hoped. From the sound of things, no one has heard from him in-” Sifu paused to glance at something on his desk, “-almost a month. Lincoln mentioned it to me the last time he was through to check on the computer wiring.”

Presumably Sifu was referring to the network routers or something. Since it didn’t really matter I ignored it. “We’ll get in touch anyway, in case Analysis can do something with what he knows.”

“If they do, let him know,” Sifu said. “He’s been quite worried, and I don’t think he’s the only one. While Hangman never said much about how he knew what he knew, he was very fair in making sure people heard it and he’d gotten to be quite popular.”

“We’ll let you know if we find out anything,” Harriet assured him. “But honestly, finding the van armored like an APC that disappeared week and a half ago is probably a higher priority than finding an information broker who disappeared a month ago.”

Sifu perked up a bit. “What’s that? You’re looking for a full sized van fitted with military grade armor?”

“That’s right,” I said slowly. “What about it?”

“I was contacted a week ago by someone trying to find a buyer for such a vehicle.” Sifu pulled out a drawer of his desk and picked through it. “I told them I was in the business of passing on wisdom, not taking commissions. But he did leave me a contact method. Would you be interested?”

I snatched the offered piece of paper out of his hand and laughed. “Sifu, you’re priceless.”

“Why didn’t you mention that before?” Amplifier asked.

Sifu chuckled. “Young lady, mark this well and it will only be a matter of time before you surpass Little Mountain, at least as a detective. He never mastered the lesson, it seems.”

“What lesson?”

“To understand something you must begin by asking the right questions.”

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Water Fall: High Voltage

Posted by natechen on

Six Weeks, Four Days before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation

Circuit

“The obsession some people have with human flight mystifies me.”

“Circuit.” Hangman’s voice came distant and a little scratchy over the modified Bluetooth headset I was wearing. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of heights.”

“Try something for me. Ask ten people at random what superpower they’d want to have and at least half of them will tell you flight.” I looked down the side of the stone outcropping I was standing on and down into a shallow gorge carved by a creek that only existed during rainstorms. “I think people assume it’s freeing to be able to fly. Do you think it ever occurs to them that flight is little more than a constant, life or death battle against gravity? One wrong move and you’re just a mark on the pavement.”

“Much like the rest of life.”

“True. And to be fair, they never think of life in those terms, either. Yet more proof that the average American suffers some kind of brain damage at some point in their life, a troubling trend that I’ll assign someone to study as soon as I’ve achieved unquestioned authority.” I ignored the muffled snort from Hangman and backed up from the edge of the ridge a few steps. “Regardless, I suppose we have no choice this time around. Are all the connections ready to go?”

There was a moment of silence, then, “Everything looks green. Tell me, how were you planning to test all this by yourself?”

“I was actually planning to bring Davis along. This whole system is his baby and he’s been dying to find a practical testing ground for it.” I glanced towards the east, where the van Hangman was in had been parked. She couldn’t see me from there, of course, but some instincts are hard to suppress. “But since you volunteered I kept him at the Chainfall site. He’s not happy about it, but it’s a more efficient use of personnel.”

“You keep mentioning the Chainfall site…”

“Yes, I do.” I left it at that. “Review. How long do we have set aside for this test?”

“Twenty minutes, maximum, so that no one will notice the current drain.” There was a moment’s pause. “Twelve would be optimum, allowing for the most possible testing with the least chance of detection.”

“Excellent.” I took a deep breath and readied myself for the jump. “Activate the maglev system, please.”

“Maglev is active.”

As Hangman said it I felt the harness I wore tighten slightly and it suddenly felt like I was about forty pounds lighter. I pushed slightly against the electromagnets in my harness and the power cranked up. My feet bobbed off the ground a half inch and I grimaced. “We have buoyancy. How do things look?”

“Eighty percent green,” Hangman replied. “Some circuits in the yellow, two leaning towards orange. At what point am I supposed to become worried, again?”

“Let me know when we’re in the orange, and where,” I replied. “Red means we’re borderline failing, and I want to avoid those spots until I can overhaul it.”

“We’re orange at relays 12 and 27. You’re good everywhere else.”

I quickly ran through where the bad connections were in my head and plotted out a route that would avoid them. Then I grit my teeth and dashed towards the ridge. There was a moment of primal fear as I went over the edge and pushed out along the magnetic fields covering the ground below, forcing more power into the electromagnets we’d spent the last few days installing. As the power increased my own harness produced fields of the same polarity. The opposing fields pushed me back upwards and over the ground at a fast run.

It was a lot like what a rubber ball must feel like when it’s thrown along the floor. I grunted in discomfort.

“Something wrong?” Hangman now sounded like she was trying not to laugh.

“Are you watching this somehow?”

“External camera with a telephoto lens,” she said in amusement. “Very graceful, Circuit.”

“Thank you,” I said, trying and failing to keep discomfort out of my voice. “I’m sure this gets easier with practice.”

“I’m sure.”

And it did, although only slowly. I estimated that I’d only be able to get through two thirds of the relays I’d set out before we needed to shut down, even pushing the system as hard as I could I wasn’t getting much above fifteen miles an hour. Davis had assured me that I would get at least thirty, but prototypes are just prototypes. There was time to make tweaks if I could find any that were practical while we were still in the field.

After about five minutes of fiddling I was confident enough to start talking again. “Anything new I need to know about?”

“A few more yellow connections,” Hangman said. Her amusement was gone and she was all business again. “Nothing beyond that.”

I swept over the highway, twenty feet below, keeping an eye out for headlights. Reports of a flying man over the interstate probably wouldn’t be considered credible, but it’s best to be cautious. “I’ve been thinking about what you said.”

A brief pause. “Which part of it?”

“Organization.” I tweaked the potentials a bit and dropped down to below tree level, slowing my speed and practicing fine control. Not pancaking into a tree trunk was great for my concentration. It just wasn’t focused on the subject at hand.  “Never planned to have you on hand, been trying to work you in.”

“That?” She laughed. “Well, of course you wouldn’t have counted on that. I didn’t know about it until a few months ago.”

I threw my hands up and slammed into the side of a birch tree, bending it out of my way with a grunt. Once I was clear and my ears stopped ringing I said, “No?”

“I’d thought about it for a while,” she said. “But I didn’t work out a way to make it happen until a few months ago. And even then, I wasn’t sure it would work. There were a lot of variables. We’re approaching the nine minute mark.”

“Noted.” Trying to maneuver through the trees was feeling more and more like a fools errand so I eliminated permutations of my plan that called on approaching under cover of the forest and pushed my way back above the treetops. “Let’s return to the original subject.”

“Organization,” Hangman said without hesitation.

“Specifically your place in mine,” I said, angling my way back towards the ridge I’d come from by a different route. “My first instinct would be to observe you for a time to see exactly what your strengths are.”

“Except you’ve employed me as an informant for two years, so you should know that very well,” she said. “That means the next logical step would be to give me tasks of increasing sensitivity in an effort to gauge how trustworthy I am.”

“Irrelevant. You already know enough that your trustworthiness is academic.” I bobbed back and forth in an attempt to get a better handle on precision maneuvering but the system still felt very sluggish and the harness dug into uncomfortable places so I gave up on it. Some tweaking was still needed apparently. “You’re here now and I have to deal with you. That’s at least half the reason you’re here in the first place.”

“Friends close and enemies closer?”

“And the unknown closest of all,” I added, powering down my harness and coming to a stop on the top of the ridge. “Power down the system and meet me at relay 27. You might as well learn how to strip down and overhaul these things, in case we need it tomorrow.”

“On my way.”

——–

“Okay, we’re close now. Are you going to get to the point now, or do I have to sit in your lap or something?”

I gave Hangman an irate glare over the connection board we were currently up to our elbows in. “Are you paying any attention to the theory here?”

She gave an exasperated huff. “Yes. Magnetic fields, when they overlap it creates something like an electric circuit which you manipulate to create a maglev effect all quite genius.”

“Also not my invention,” I felt compelled to point out. “This was cooked up by my head engineer-”

“Maximillian Davis, yes.” Hangman crinkled her nose. “What kind of name is Maximillian, anyways? Were his parents touched in the head?”

“Possibly. As I’ve never met them I couldn’t say for sure.” I stopped rummaging around in the innards of the maglev point and leaned on the edge of the machine, which was basically a waist high reinforced plastic box. “Okay, I’ve obviously managed to bore you. Or, at the very least, chosen to focus on the less interesting but more important details.”

Hangman mimicked my pose and smiled slightly. “They’re usually about the same thing.”

“Then let’s talk about you for a minute.”

“That is one of the subjects I find most interesting.” She leaned closer until we were practically nose to nose and whispered, “What do you want to know?”

I felt almost cross-eyed looking at her so I straightened up, putting a little space back between us, and spread my hands. “I plan on expanding my organization soon. And not just a small expansion, either. I’m looking at a large scale adjustment in personnel and scope of operations. I can’t take the same amount of time and care in vetting new additions to my roster as I have in the past.”

Hangman straightened with an annoyed look on her face. “So you want me to come up with some kind of mass background check system for you?”

“Why?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. “Do you have a problem with that? Feel it’s beneath your skills?”

“No!” She struggled for a moment with whatever was bothering her, then sighed. “Okay, fine. I’ll get started on a rough protocol tonight straight off. When do you want to see a final draft?”

“By the time we get back from this little job.” She looked a bit taken aback by that so I said, “You were the one who pointed out we’re in the big leagues now. We’re facing Project Sumter, a branch of the U.S. Federal Government. There’s a lot of ground to make up if we’re going to compete.”

“And you plan to do this through strength of numbers?” She shook her head. “I have to confess, Circuit, I am a little surprised. And disappointed.”

“The numbers are necessary, but not the key,” I said in a soothing tone. “Another key aspect of this gambit is information security, so I’m afraid I can’t say much more than that.”

She shrugged and leaned back over the open top of the maglev relay. “I have to admit, I knew it wasn’t all glamour and high adventure but this isn’t exactly what I expected.”

I laughed. “The mundanely of large scale data mining doesn’t appeal to you?”

“No. Well, yes, but not what I was talking about, exactly.” She looked back up from the connections we’d been testing for the last ten minutes. “It’s just… you do so much of your own legwork. Carting these gizmos around, positioning them yourself, leeching electricity off obscure public grids…”

“It’s more like a shoestring budget, basement office operation, isn’t it?” I asked ruefully.

She wrinkled her nose. “Not exactly what I was going to say, but…”

“You’re not wrong.” I went back to testing my share of the connections. “But when you joined up you told me I needed you because you were a true believer, not someone like Simeon or Heavy, who are just in it because they want a paycheck and maybe, possibly think I’m an alright guy, too. Well, if you really think this is worthwhile the shabby beginnings won’t bother you that much. So are you going to do this or not?”

Hangman sighed. “Right. One crazy gizmo, fully functional, coming up.”

“Maybe that’s part of your problem,” I said with the hint of a smile. “This isn’t just any crazy gizmo. It’s both a lever, and a place to stand.” The smile grew until it was all teeth and malice. “And with them, we shake the world.”

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Water Fall: Cold Greetings

Posted by natechen on

Six weeks, Five days before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation

Helix

We never did go to Condition One.

By all rights the fact that Circuit had killed Mona should have brought the full resources of Project Sumter to bear on the task of finding him and locking him in a fully insulated, nonmagnetic cell lit by candles. At least, such was my first instinct, and probably that of every other field agent we had.

But the reality is never so clear cut. There was just too much going in the nation and the world to take all of our resources and throw them at a single problem. That didn’t mean finding Circuit wasn’t a priority. And for the Midwest Branch, the place where things had gone bad, it was priority one. We didn’t pull every talent we had off their assignments and send them after Circuit. For example, Pastor Manuel Rodriguez, also known as Agent Samson, was looking for Senator Dawson’s daughter, a case we believed was related, but officially had nothing to do with Circuit.

But the other fourteen talents working out of the Midwest office were all called in and given a summary of Circuit’s recent activities, his know goals including those he stated when he contacted us directly a few weeks ago and those we’ve inferred from his activities, and all leads pertaining to his whereabouts, which was a very short list. Then we were all given assignments and sent back out.

Teresa and I, and Massif and Verger, pretty much kept doing the things we’d already been working on. We’d juggled this case back and forth for a few weeks already and the meeting would probably have been a complete waste of time for us if we hadn’t been the ones doing most of the presenting. Everyone else got assigned lower priority legwork to spend time on between other duties.With that thrilling morning out of the way I headed back to my desk to grab some lunch and start putting together a priority list for the various real estate dealers and developers we needed to interview.

Trouble was waiting for me.

It came in the form of two tall, cool blondes who were sitting on my desk and chatting animatedly. Their backs were to me as I approached across the floor so I slapped the presentation notes I was carrying down on my desk to get their attention. They turned inwards and glared back at me, asking in unison, “Yes?”

I ignored their eerily similar faces and said, “Hello, Frostburn. Hello, Coldsnap. Get off my desk.”

The twins looked at each other and shared a secretive smile. Frostburn, the older of the two, said, “He never changes, does he?”

“Every once and a while he gets another gray hair,” Coldsnap said. They looked back at me. “Hello, Helix.”

I crossed my arms and glared at them, which was not as easy as it had been when I was taller than they were. “You two aren’t even cleared to be in here. Thought you’d have headed home after the funeral.”

The girls finally got off my desk and faced me, their matching charcoal slacks and professional blouses making them look a good deal like actual members of the office staff, much like Cheryl O’Hara, our acting Records chief. I could also see that they had guest passes clipped on, like we give out to Senators and their staff on the rare occasions when they come for a visit. Coldsnap folded her arms across her chest, Frostburn rested her palms on the edge of my desk.

I’d known these girls for nearly a decade, ever since I talked Darryl into getting them placed with my grandparents after we rescued them from some sort of demented, Neo-Nazi breeding program. They were digging their heels in, getting ready for an argument. A part of me really, really wished they’d waited until after I got lunch. I slipped into my chair and did my best not to tap my fingers impatiently. “Okay, I get it. This is a big deal. What’s going on? I’m still trying to convince people you’re a trustworthy-”

“It’s not about a job,” Frostburn said, shaking her head.

“We’ve got a job now,” Coldsnap added, running it along just behind her sister’s sentence so it felt like they were talking as a unit, rather than separate people. “And not one in fashion retail, anymore.”

“I thought you liked that job,” I said, raising my eyebrows. It hadn’t really challenged them, but at least they knew the trends and didn’t find it boring. They’d wanted to do more, but their history created even more difficulties with the Oversight Committee than mine did. “Never mind. If it’s not about a job, why are you here?”

“Darryl,” Frostburn said, tilting her chin up and triggering a rapid fire cascaded of talk I knew all to well.

Coldsnap picked up the train of thought immediately. “He needs to do something, anything to keep his mind occupied.”

“There’s only one case of any importance right now, and we both know it,” Frostburn added. “The guy who killed his wife.”

“Hey, now,” I said, trying to stop them before they built up a head of steam. “You’re not supposed to-”

“Besides, Darryl probably isn’t going to want to work anything else,” Coldsnap said, running right over me. I should have known better than to try and interrupt them – if I’d known them as well as I do now when they got their codenames I’d have pushed to lump them together as Avalanche. “He wants to get Circuit.”

“Ask him to be on your team,” Frostburn finished. “He needs it.”

I looked at the two of them for a moment, trying to figure out their angle. They’d known Darryl just as long as they’d known me but we’d both been careful not to talk too much about our work when we’d seen them, which admittedly wasn’t that often in  the last few years. For that matter, even my grandparents, Sergeant Wake and Clear Skies, had shown a little more care in what they told them after the mess my joining the Project had turned into.

So how had they known about Circuit? “You two got a job.” I swiveled in my chair a little as I thought it over, looking at each one out of the corner of my eye. “Who gave you a job?”

They exchanged a guilty glance I’d seen a hundred times before.

“Does it matter?” Coldsnap asked, pouting a little.

“Yes.” I wasn’t buying, even if Coldsnap was really good at selling it.

Frostburn sighed. “You’re not cleared to know that.”

“I’m not cleared to know that.” I stared at first one, then the other until they broke eye contact. “Me. I have clearance up to Top Secret. There are something like a hundred and fifty codewords I’m cleared to pull from Records – including yours – and I’m not cleared to know who your employer is?”

They flinched and Coldsnap nodded. I realized my voice had risen and pulled it down to a more normal level. “Well, after seventy five years dealing talents ourselves I suppose we’re overdue for another government agency sticking it’s fingers in the pie.”

Coldsnap goggled at me. “You missed the fact that my sister had a crush on you for three years but you figured that out five minutes?”

Frostburn’s pale skin lit up like a flare and she slapped her sister’s arm so hard heads turned. “You were not-”

“And now they’re going to try and poach Darryl off of us by offering him a job where he can chase Open Circuit.” I opted to steer well clear of that other can of worms Coldsnap had just opened. “I’m guessing you’re coming here to tell me about this is not part of the recruiting plan?”

“No,” Frostburn mumbled, no longer making eye contact.

“We’re here to prove our group has a different perspective on how to deal with talented problems,” Coldsnap said, rubbing her arm. “To Darryl, not any of your agents. We’re not poaching actual talents. We kind of need experienced supervisors more than talents right now, and Darryl certainly qualifies. But honestly, Frostburn and I would rather Darryl stay here where someone like you, with a level head-” I heard a muffled laugh from the direction of Massif’s desk but we all ignored it, “-and plenty of experience, was with him rather than our team, which is new and… untested.”

“Makes sense.” I sighed and shoved my chair back from the desk, crashing into Bergstrum’s a second later. Sometimes there’s not as much room as I’d like out on the floor. “That was a good thought, girls. I appreciate knowing what you’ve just told me.”

Coldsnap perked up a bit. “Then you’ll do-”

“No.” Shocked them both for the second time in ten minutes, a personal best. “It’s not my decision, it’s Project policy. It’s good sense. And it’s for the best. I’m not pushing against this one. If some other branch of the Government wants to give him a job I’ll do what I can to keep him here. We certainly wouldn’t be the same without him. But that’s all I can do, girls. Sorry.”

A final look passed between them, another one I recognized well. They’d decided to give up on it. “If that’s the way you feel, Helix.” Frostburn put a hand on her sister’s shoulder and pulled her away. “But if you have to mention that there’s a new game in town…”

“I’ve been keeping secrets longer than you two have been alive. Don’t tell me how to do my job.” I spread my hands. “No one asks how I learn these things anymore, anyways.”

The door to the room swung open and an unfamiliar man with dark brown hair and the mother of all scowls on his face came in, a talent known as Lightning Cage following just a step behind. I smiled a little and said, “Tell Grandma and Grandpa hello for me when you get home.”

They nodded gratefully and started across the room to meet up with Cage and his sourfaced companion. They probably weren’t going home, but that was the kind of thing I was going to have to pretend I didn’t know, at least for a little bit.

“Friends of yours?” Massif asked, sliding his chair down a couple of desks to come to a rest behind Teresa’s.

“Old friends of the family,” I said.

He nodded. “Your talent?”

“Something similar.” The twins were cold spikes. While I pushed down and created places where heat could pool, spikes push upwards and heat flows out of the area, creating incredibly cold temperatures. Project Sumter had originally considered them separate abilities but it had been proven that people could do both. Most just had a natural inclination to one or the other. I knew that Massif could see some sign of what I did with his unusual vision, it made sense that he’d see something from Frostburn and Coldsnap, too.

He grunted and looked after the twins as they left. “Trying to get them a job?”

“Why, you interested in them?” I asked, drumming my fingers absently. “Professionally or personally? Neither one has had a date since Grandpa tore the tires straight off-”

“Neither one,” Massif said quickly. “Just curious if that was why I’ve still got your last trainee.”

“Oh.” Come to think of it, Amplifier had been assigned to Massif, hadn’t she? “How’s that going?”

He shrugged. “She’s a handful. But in a lot of ways it’s better than field work, so I guess I shouldn’t complain. I’m taking her out to meet with some people in the community tomorrow.”

“Well, if you need any advice with her field stress test…”

“I’m not a natural sadist like you,” Massif said. “But I’ll figure something out. The Watch is trolling for good incidents for me. What about you? They’re enough like you I assume you’ve got a fabulous idea for their stress test already picked out.”

I glanced over to where the twins were chatting with Cage and whoever the dour looking fellow was with him. They really were a lot different from when we’d first found them in a house with the corpse of a man they’d accidentally turned into an ice sculpture. Even if they could be cleared to work with the Project, they’d probably be required to undergo a “real” stress test to measure how much they’d changed. Frankly, that didn’t seem fair. “They’ve had all the testing they need for one lifetime.”

“They pass or fail?” Massif asked.

I shrugged. “Depends on who you ask.”

——–

Massif

I was still thinking about Helix and his strange friends the next day when Harriet and I picked up Amplifier and headed out towards Chinatown. The field stress test is something of a rite of passage and Helix is famous for being tough on the people he runs through it. Of the eleven talents who’ve had the unique pleasure of entering the Project with Helix as their sponsor, ten had to undergo the stress test more than once. Four had to go through it three or more times.

I got it the second time around and frankly I have no idea how anyone finds the courage for a third try.

But it looked like I was going to be sponsoring talent for Amplifier through all the really tricky portions of her application to Project Sumter and that meant, among other things, representing her to the Senate Oversight Committee, vetting her first oversight agent and putting her through a field stress test of my own design, with the decision over whether she passed or failed ultimately falling to me. Helix had been really dodgy about whether he planned to take back over and do the rest the day before, so I was guessing it was all on me. I’d done it once before, but I’ll admit that Amplifier brought a whole different dynamic to things.

“So you actually know a kung fu master?” She asked, doing her best to lean forward and make eye contact from the back seat.

“Not gung fu,” I said. “Wushu. Gung fu is like excellence, or a level of accomplishment. That’s why the old, badly translated movies would give you phrases like, ‘You don’t have enough gung fu.’ They were literally saying, ‘You’re not accomplished enough to take me on.'”

“Whatever.” She shook her head in frustration. “You know a wushu master, then.”

“Giancarlo He-sifu, to be exact,” I said. “He spotted me when I was eight and realized I had a talent. It took him a while to convince my parents studying wushu would help me with the problems that talent gave me, but I wound up learning from him eventually.”

“Giancarlo He?” I could hear disbelief in every syllable. “What kind of a code name is that?”

“It’s not,” Harriet said, whipping the car through traffic with dizzying speed. Even if the Project said she was getting too old for field work I don’t think most drivers in town would agree with them. “To the best of our knowledge, Giancarlo He is not a talent. He can just recognize them when he sees them.”

“What?” Amplifier held her hands up in a horrible imitation of a wushu stance. “Because he has mystic training?”

“That’s entirely possible,” Harriet said with a shrug. “Look at Chinese myths and culture. Superhuman people have been a part of their lore since before the Roman Empire was pulling itself up by the Greeks. Of course there’s going to be more awareness of talents built into their culture, not all those legends can pure fairy tale. And talents like Al’s both lend themselves to martial arts and require unique work arounds for people who want to survive fighting them. Wushu is a combat sport now, but it comes from a long and fairly mystical fighting tradition where talented individuals would be viewed as natural born prodigies and respected, not freaks to be feared. So of course wushu masters can spot talents.”

“That’s not to say there aren’t talents in the He family,” I added. “In fact, I think there’s a couple. But talents are weird – even the most common ones can skip whole generations sometimes. There’s nothing solid proving they’re actually genetic, and not dependent on some sort of weird environmental factor.”

“The evidence is split,” Harriet said. “Helix gets his code name because he comes from a long running family of talents. But the talent on his grandfather’s side only turned up ever other generation, while his grandmother’s side sometimes produced two or three talents a generation. When they married, their kids had no talents, then Helix popped up with his maternal grandmother’s ability. No sign of talent on the father’s side of the family. At the same time, we’ve found a pair of identical twins with the exact same talent, right down to how well they can use it. It’s strange.”

“Maybe the twins just encountered something weird at the same time?” Amplifier asked.

“No.” Harriet shook her head. “These twins were weird. A talented pedigree, just like Helix, and they were kept separate until their talents became clear at the age of six. A lot of questionable stuff went on there, but it’s a powerful argument for talents from genetics. I think it would settle things in most people’s minds if it weren’t for all the contrary cases.”

I glanced at Harriet but she was just a blur, like usual. I was wondering if that thought had been prompted by the twins who visited Helix yesterday, and if they were the same pair. But it didn’t seem like the best time to ask. “Anyway. The point is, you can’t just look at someone’s parents and guess if they’re a talent, any more than you can guess if they’re good at math.”

“It’s a clue but not confirmation,” Amp said.

“Exactly.” Harriet parked the car and we piled out. “There’s a lot of rules in the Project that protect talents, almost as many as there are to protect other people from them. One of the ones for the protection of talents says we can’t investigate people who we think have talents, only public incidents where we think a talent was used.”

“That sounds fair,” Amp replied.

“So if you really don’t want the Project to open a file on you all you have to do is avoid using your talent in public,” I said, leading the way into a small import shop and absently smoothing my shirt as I crossed the threshold, just like I’d been doing since I’d been eight. “But people like He-sifu will still find you, whether because of their training or family or whatever. And some of them act as a support network, helping curious people get answers about their talents without endangering themselves or others, getting new talents up to speed on the rules and generally keeping us all in touch with each other.”

“Little groups like the ones you started in are common enough,” Harriet said. “But knowing Mr. He and the people he can introduce you to will help you a lot more in the long run, if you plan to do this job for any length of time.”

Amplifier smiled, becoming insufferably cute. “I’ll just have to turn on the charm, then.”

“You’ll have an easier time of it than me,” I muttered.

“What’s that?”

“Is that one of my ungrateful students?” The voice came, rich and strong, from the stairs at the back of the store. The old, wooden planks creaked as Sifu made his way down them, saying, “It’s high time you came to see me again. It’s the least you could do, since you will never be bothered to pass on my teachings.”

I heaved a sigh and bowed properly from the waist. “Hello, Sifu.”

Sifu came to a stop at the bottom of the stairs. Although he only came up to my collarbone now he still felt like he towered over the whole room. Every movement screamed control and dignity, and his physique made him look much younger than his fifty years. Even with my shortsightedness I still felt like I could see him as clear as day, standing with one arm behind his back and his other hand poised to lecture. “Well. Little Mountain. You have come with more questions I suppose. Not to ask me for students, so you can finally do your duty to your sifu?”

“Just questions, Sifu.”

He studied me for a moment and then turned and started back up the stairs. “Come along then. Let me make the world clearer for you again, Little Mountain.”

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