Thunder Clap: Sifting the Ashes

Posted by natechen on October 20, 2014

Helix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Will do.”

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

——–

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

I got about forty minutes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Call your boss,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thunder Clap: Moving Fast

Posted by natechen on October 6, 2014

Izzy

“This is a portable GPS navigation device.” Lincoln held up a black plastic rectangle about the size of an e-reader like he was a sleazy salesman, running one hand along the bottom for dramatic effect.

“Those aren’t exactly new tech,” I said dryly. “Dad got mom one because she kept getting lost running errands.”

“Yeah, but it’s special because it’s got maps loaded on it and doesn’t need Internet access. We’re starting to run out of phones with navigation programs that use preloaded maps. We borrowed it from the roadies of one of the opening acts and they’re probably going to want it back so try and keep it away from EMPs.” He tapped a few icons with the stylus and zoomed in on a specific intersection. The end destination the GPS was pointed towards was on the northeast corner. “This is where we need to go.”

“What makes you sure?” Jane asked, looking at him rather than the maps or floor plan. “It’s a bookstore, not an electronics store or something like that.”

“Three factors. To make an EMP you either need a fairly big device consisting of an antenna and a capacitor bank or a nuclear weapon. We’re assuming Circuit went with option one, since there haven’t been any massive explosions in the city tonight. ” Lincoln held his hands a few feet apart and sketched out a box about that tall and deep but twice as long. “You could probably make an EMP with a six, maybe eight block range about so big. EMPs get exponentially weaker as you go out from the source, just like magnetic fields, so it would be more effective to have a lot of small units than one large one and allow for more precise targeting when you deployed them. But most importantly, an EMP weapon of that size could easily be hidden in the utility room of the average two-story storefront.”

“But it would have to be a building of about that size,” Clark added, picking up the line of thought. “Smaller buildings don’t usually have a connection to the power grid robust enough to recharge that kind of weapon quickly.”

“Depending on what part of town you’re in that still leaves a lot of places that could house one of these things,” I pointed out.

“But if you narrow them down by sites Keller Realty has worked on the list shortens to one location.” Clark took the stylus from Al and tapped the GPS screen a few times, leaving us looking at a zoomed out map of the neighborhood. Other than the place they’d shown us before only one other red destination dot showed on the screen. He pointed at it and said, “This is the next closest place that fits both criteria of size and Keller Realty involvement but it’s outside the six to eight block radius range of effect for the weapon we’re assuming Circuit’s using.”

Cheryl leaned back and folded her arms over her stomach, chewing her lower lip thoughtfully. “How certain are we the Keller Realty line of inquiry isn’t another false lead? We did pick up on it from files left behind, in a very conspicuous fashion, at a site Circuit had already abandoned.”

“Believe me,” Clark said, rubbing at his temple, “we had that argument more than once in the last sixteen months. What it boils down to is, these are the leads we’ve got. And the message Helix got from Circuit earlier seems to have come from Waltham Towers, which is a connection back to Keller Realty.”

“Half of cracking a case is running down all the leads,” Teresa said. “We’d be negligent if we didn’t check this out. The question is, who goes and who stays?”

“I’ll lead the team,” Al said. “Clark comes because he’s a field analyst and we keep them handy in the field for good reason. Jane and Izzy, I’d like you two to come as well. That will give us plenty of firepower if we need to tangle with thugs again, or if Circuit has some sort of guards on this place. Teresa, you’ll be in charge here and watch for Circuit causing trouble and let Helix know what we’re up to if he gets back before we do.”

Teresa grimaced, clearly not happy with being benched but apparently seeing the sense in it. “If you’re not back in ninety minutes we’ll start thinking about coming in after you.”

“Fair.” All glanced around the circle. “Anyone spot any problems in the plan?”

“I should go with you instead of Jane.”

I looked at Amp in surprise. “I thought you said you couldn’t hear as well in the city. How does your being there help?”

She gave me a scalding look. “Because even if I can’t hear I can still make noise. Shouting people into ruptured eardrums is pretty effective and I can do it from farther away than you three can punch them into submission. More importantly, I can hear security cameras running from across a street, and if Circuit can control all the electricity in a city you bet he’s found some way to keep the security measures on the buildings he’s hidden weapons in running.”

Al grunted. “Fair enough. You’ll come with us, Jane and Gearshift will back up Cheryl and Teresa here. Teresa is in charge until Helix or I get back.”

“What about me?” Lincoln asked.

Al shrugged. “You’re free to go home or stay here, since you’re not technically with the Project in an official capacity. But if you, Cheryl and Teresa could put your heads together and come up with somewhere we can move our base of operations to once this is done it would be a big help.”

Lincoln turned thoughtful. “There’s a few possibilities. I might even know of somewhere with a backup generator. Leave us the GPS and I’ll get back to you.”

Al handed him the device and said, “All yours. Let’s go, people.”

——–

Helix

Grandpa used to tell me that the only one who hated piggy back rides more than he did was whoever he was giving one to. After crossing the city on Samson’s back all was clear.

We crashed down on the helicopter pad after about half an hour of jumping from rooftop to rooftop. Samson insisted that the whole heroes run on rooftops was a legitimate thing since anyone who could move at thirty miles an hour on foot didn’t have the reflexes to avoid pedestrians at street level but still wouldn’t go fast enough to avoid vehicle traffic. I took his word for it, mainly because when he tried to explain it to me he slowed down and I wanted to get off his back as soon as possible.

As I was shaking my legs out and hoping desperately to get them bending in the right ways again Jack and a team of guards pour out onto the roof of the building. In unison Jack and I said, “What are you doing here?”

Jack glanced at Samson, looked at the way I was standing, and shook his head. “Never mind. I think I figured it out. You need to clear the pad, chopper’s coming in.”

In point of fact that should have been immediately obvious since the sound of the approaching helicopter could already be heard approaching. Samson and I hustled off of the pad and over towards the door to the stairway. There was a short wait as the chopper came down over the building, maneuvered into position and lowered itself down.

I was tempted to ask Jack who it was who felt he needed to show up in a helicopter, rather than flying in to the airport and taking a car but I felt I had a pretty good idea. And, given the problems we’d run into on our way here, I thought I had an idea why taking a car might not have been a viable option.

Samson’s mind was apparently running along the same lines as mine. As the chopper settled to a rest and the blades began to slow he asked, “Have you or any of the emergency responders in the city tried sending units into the parts of the city without power?”

“First vehicles went out from police dispatch almost three hours ago, maybe ten minutes after the power went out. They stalled out two blocks outside the effected area.” Jack shrugged helplessly. “The police have a few units on bicycles in there, there’s a hospital with a working backup generator and landlines that’s in touch with it’s opposites out here and they tell us ambulances are still running, at least so long as they don’t try to cross from a part of the city with power to one without, or vice versa. But that’s about all that’s in there right now. Sanders is trying to assemble a team that can get into the city on foot but he’s operating on the assumption this is Circuit’s handywork and that he wouldn’t leave any holes in his defenses we could sneak a vehicle in through.”

While it was the obvious conclusion to reach, I was worried that everyone I knew seemed to have automatically assumed Circuit was behind the attack. It sure was his style but instantly focusing on him could blind us to other possibilities that might open useful lines of thought, even if our terrorist was Circuit and not someone using his name as a smokescreen.

Still. “That was a good thought,” I said. “Someone claiming to be Circuit did contact me while we were in the effected part of the city. Says he’s taking over, stay out of his way, you get the picture. But something about all this bugs me. I just can’t put my finger on it.”

“Well hold on to that thought,” Jack said. “There’s a meeting in about ten minutes for all senior personnel.”

“Go-go Project Sumter,” I muttered. “Meetings are our idea of action.”

Jack grinned. “Let me know how that goes.”

“What, you’re not going to be there?” He started to make a comeback and hesitated for just a second. Jack had recently been moved up to field agent training supervisor, a senior position, which he had no doubt just remembered.

“Remind me why I wanted to be a senior manager again?”

“Don’t look at me, I don’t worry about that kind of thing anymore.” A short, rotund figure was climbing out of the helicopter onto the landing pad. “Although I have a feeling Senator Voorman has a better idea about regretting career changes than us.”

As his old field supervisor and security escort made their way off the landing pad Samson rushed forward and wrapped him in a giant hug. Jack watched the greeting then shook his head. “How are those two friends? Makes no sense to me. Voorman’s never been anything but administrator – a good, sure, but still. He only got elected because you and Samson got behind him and pushed. Office pool gives him twelve to one odds of surviving reelection.”

“He’s full of surprises,” I said. “Didn’t expect to see him here, that’s for sure.”

“Wonder why he’s here.”

I turned and started for the stairs. “We’ll find out at the meeting. Gonna try and get the rundown from Sanders before we start – and there’s someone we need to bring in on this case pronto.”

“Who’s that?” Jack asked.

“Mister Roger Keller.”

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Thunder Clap: A Brief Cooldown

Posted by natechen on September 29, 2014

Helix

The city streets were oddly empty, even for the time of night. It was well after midnight when Samson and I set out from the venue and struck across town. I’d been expecting less traffic, given the power outage and the hour of the night, and we did pass a another car going the opposite direction every thirty seconds or so, but for the size of the city that struck me as far too few.

I thought about mentioning it to Samson but he was staring out the window. I could tell he was still a little hot under the collar – figuratively, not literally – but I wasn’t sure how to broach the topic. Even after working together for nearly two years, I didn’t know the man well. Samson worked with rehabilitating talents guilty of minor offenses. I leaned more towards catching the ones with delusions of grandeur with a small helping of policy advising on the side.

That didn’t mean I didn’t know what his problem was.

“Izzy is as ready for field work as anyone ever is, Samson,” was what I finally settled on saying as we turned onto the highway and I became less concerned with watching side streets. Given how quiet it was I glanced away from the road long enough to try and read the other man but he was still staring out the window. “Massif is there and he’s got almost as much field experience as I do. She’s gotten way more practical training than any of us ever did, since she can do it out in the open and crosstrain with the police. She’ll be-”

“Helix,when you have kids of your own, you’re going to be very embarrassed about this conversation.”

I gave him a confused look but he was still staring out at the streets. “Is this the voice of experience talking?”

Samson gave a rueful laugh and finally turned away from the window. “It sure is. The tactical chief I had the year before I retired was worried about his son joining the police and I told him that he’d probably be safer there than working with us.”

“Were you right?” I asked, aware that the odds pretty much went the other way.

“His son has been shot at twice and probably stared down a dozen knives but he’s only been hospitalized for bruises and cuts from fistfights, so he’s been blessed more than most.” Samson shrugged. “I guess men with an overdeveloped sense of responsibility shouldn’t be surprised when our children follow in our footsteps.”

“Grandpa Wake would say you can’t ever have too much responsibility so long as it’s used in the right way.”

There was a short, comfortable silence in the car, then Samson asked, “Why did your grandpa retire, Helix? I always wondered, back when I joined. It would have been nice to have him there in person to learn from for a while, not just the first few days.”

I glanced at him in surprise. “You met Grandpa?”

He nodded. “Back when I was a troublemaker, not a peacemaker, Project Sumter brought me in and the Sergeant was there to keep an eye on me until Michael was confident I wouldn’t cause any further problems. He was a frightening man, in his own way.”

“What, did he lose his temper and break something?”

“Age makes a difference for us, Helix. It’s not like we’re actually limited by this.” He slapped a hand to his forty inch waist. There was a slight shockwave, he had enough of a gut for that, but I knew that most of it was muscle. There was a theory around that taxmen actually stored their borrowed entropy in muscle and that was why they could pack it on so easily compared to most. Samson laughed and added, “I met this one ex-K-”

He stopped abruptly and shook his head. “Never mind. What I’m trying to say is, these days cellphones, cars and light bulbs alone put out more power than a taxman could hope to use in a lifetime. There wasn’t as much technology when I was a stupid kid but there was more than enough that I could throw a bus at the agents who came to pick me up. Imagine my surprise when I met a man who I was sure could throw that same bus into orbit.”

“Orbit?” I looked away from the road longer than was strictly safe. We didn’t crash only because there wasn’t much on the road to crash into.

“You didn’t realize?” Samson asked, honestly curious.

“What he could or could not do with public transportation wasn’t something Grandpa talked about a lot,” I said dryly. “He didn’t say much to me about what he thought he could do, just what he’d done.” A shrug. “He never said why he left Project Sumter but I always felt he and Grandma didn’t like staying there when it had no clear goal. I’m sure he would have come back had war ever broken out with the Soviet Union but the idea of just sitting on standby didn’t sit well with him. Grandpa Wake’s a man of action, even if all that action boils down to is working on the tractor.”

“That’s not surprising, I suppose,” Samson said, leaning back in his seat a bit and letting his eyes droop most of the way closed. “I left for much the same reason. Project Sumter was doing too much cracking down and not enough reaching out. Many young talents just needed help controlling themselves and awareness of the dangers. Instead we tried to scare them into not doing anything at all.”

“The Cold War wasn’t healthy for anyone. We started researching some really freaky things back then. When I’d been with the Project three years I was cleared to read up on the Harvest research.” I cracked my knuckles absently against the steering wheel, watching for the exit we wanted. “Grandma would have thrown a fit if she’d known what they’d done with her ideas.”

“Her ideas?” When I didn’t answer, he needled me a little more. “I never heard of any line of research codenamed Harvest. What did it have to do with your grandmother?”

I shrugged. “During the war she came up with the idea of creating a large scale mild low pressure zone to influence the weather and make it easier for the bomber streams to fly on ’round the clock bombing missions. That’s why her codename is Clear Skies.”

Samson nodded. “I’d heard stories about that.”

“Harvest was research into doing the opposite. I think the name was chosen since it was kinder than the alternative.”

There was a moment of silence, then I heard a sharp intake of breath. “You mean reap. As in reaping the whirlwind. They wanted to make bad weather instead of good weather?”

“Bingo.”

“Why?”

Another shrug. “Making storm systems on demand would be a great way to interfere with spy satellites, slow the progress of armies in the field, even cause artificial droughts and famines if you really felt mean. The ultimate goal was to make artificial tornadoes, although they never even built a theoretical model for that.”

Samson sat up straight again at the mention of tornadoes. “How much of the rest can we do?”

“None of it.” I said it with real satisfaction. I wouldn’t stop being a heat sink for anything but I didn’t like the idea that someone could make a desert just because they hated the rain and chased it off whenever it came near. “Even the most basic weather manipulating formulas they came up with never worked in practice. Too many variables, or something. Research was stopped almost forty years ago, although there are one or two people out there who periodically suggest starting it again.”

“I suppose you could use that kind of ability to end droughts as easily as cause them,” Samson mused. “Or pull hurricanes into landfall in the least damaging place possible.”

“I’m not saying there aren’t good uses for the idea,” I said quickly. “I just don’t think the Project Sumter I used to work for was prepared to use the ideas in good ways. I hate to admit it but some of what Circuit’s forced us to do has been for the better. Any transparency at all would have been an improvement and he sure forced a lot of it on us. But his methods are a- What’s that?”

Coming around a curve in the highway I could see at least half a dozen vehicles stopped in odd positions across the highway. Almost as soon as I saw them the steering wheel went stiff and unresponsive under my hands and I stopped talking to focus on keeping the vehicle under control. The dashboard was dark and the engine wasn’t running. Samson jerked forward in his seat, scanning in all directions in case there was a surprise waiting for us somewhere out there, and asked, “What happened? EMP?”

“I think so.” The car kept going under the influence of momentum but I stepped on the brakes and aimed for the side of the road. “Looks like Circuit’s been working on cutting off the highways as a way to get around.”

“It certainly explains why we’ve seen so few cars out,” Samson agreed.

“On the bright side that means he wasn’t deliberately targeting us this time, probably just hitting every car that comes past. No doubt using satellites to spot them, although I wonder how the EMP is being delivered.”

Once I got the car mostly out of the road I put it in park, we climbed out and Samson picked up the car and moved it so that there was no chance of some other out of control driver crashing into it. I could see a few people who had been milling about the other stalled cars gawking at us but ignored them. Not having to keep a low profile all the time was nice in more ways than one.

With the car out of the way Samson dusted off his hands and said, “Are you really sure you want to do this?”

“Well, it’s not going to be fun for either of us from what I understand.” I started limbering up my legs a bit as I spoke. “But if we don’t do it then we’ve kind of defeated the point of your coming along with me, instead of staying with the others at the convert venue.”

He sighed and carefully lowered himself down onto one knee, wincing slightly in the process. “You’d better climb up, then.”

A few seconds later I was up on his back and we left the gawkers and Circuit’s impromptu roadblock far behind.

——–

Izzy

“So do we just sit here and keep an eye on things or do we wait for Helix to give new marching orders?” Jane and I were out on the street with Clark, watching the last of the audience from the evening’s abbreviated concert go trickling out the doors.

“Right now Circuit – or whoever – knows where we are,” Clark said, absently twirling the tire iron that Jane had recently brought in around by the socket. “Staying here doesn’t gain us anything, not even doubt about what we might be doing. This was a well publicized concert. Odds are good we’re under surveillance by Circuit already.”

“Creepy,” I muttered.

“I know, right?” Jane sighed. “So we’re just amusing Mr. Voyeur if we hang around here.”

“That’s a great way to put it.” Meaning it wasn’t.

“Sorry, Izzy, I call it like it is.” Jane folded her arms and proceeded to lavish a death glare on the surrounding skyline. “We need to get out there and figure out to undo whatever he did.”

“It would be easiest to just go to his tower and drag him out for a good spanking,” I said. “If your house is covered in webs the fastest way to deal with it is to kill the spider.”

Clark slung his tire iron over one shoulder and shook his head. “Not to brag but I’ve done field work for a year or so now and, in my experience, the oldschool field agents got where they are because they showed a good deal of caution. We may need to go after Circuit and shut down his operation but we’re supposed to do that while trying to minimize the impact he has on the general populace. And minimizing impact means we need to know what impact Circuit is trying to make and how he’s making it.”

“Yeah?” Jane planted hands on hips and gave him a skeptical look. “Speaking of the General Public, I thought we weren’t supposed to be waving tire irons in the air around them?”

“Is that so?” He made a show of looking around the street, which was now pretty much empty. “It’s a good thing they can’t see me, then, isn’t it?”

Jane was obviously winding up for some kind of retort, she would keep going like this all night if we let her, so I stepped in and said, “Well, Massif is in charge of our half of the show so why don’t we go and see what he wants to do now? Maybe he and Lincoln have thought of a good place we can move to, so at least we’ll be out from under Circuit’s eyes.”

“I still think he ought to give me the tire iron back,” Jane sulked.

“Clark doesn’t have a sidearm with him or any kind of talent,” I said, trying to be reasonable. “I think we can stray from what’s normally advisable a little bit.”

“I’m glad one of them sees reason,” Clark said under his breath.

“I heard that!” Jane snapped.

I managed to get the two of them out of the street and back inside without incident. Almost as soon as we were back in the lobby Amp’s disembodied voice said, “Good timing. Get backstage, Massif is rounding up the team.”

Once Jane and I got over near heart attacks – I’ll never get used to the way she does that – I asked, “What’s he planning on?”

“Well the idea is that he’ll tell us the details once we’re all there so neither of us goes hoarse with all the talking.” The sarcasm came through loud and clear, Amp’s got one of the most expressive voices I’ve ever heard. But that just made it easier to hear the contained excitement behind the sarcasm too. “From the sounds of it, though, we’re going to go out and beat Circuit like he’s a redheaded step-child.”

“Alright!” Jane punched a fist in the air and gave Clark a triumphant look. “That sounds like my kind of plan!”

Clark nodded resignedly. “It sounds like someone’s in for a world of hurt. Let’s just hope it’s not us.”

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Thunder Clap: Shocking Claims

Posted by natechen on September 15, 2014

Helix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Three quarters,” he corrected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Scared? Of what?”

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

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

“What doesn’t?” Gearshift asked.

“Him calling me out.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

——–

Izzy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They’ll be here in a minute.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Papa just grunted and looked at me.

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

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

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

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

Gearshift said, “Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

Thunder Clap: Shake Up

Posted by natechen on September 8, 2014

Izzy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things turned hectic after that.

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

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

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

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

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

“Can you tank the recoil?” I asked.

“It’s worth a shot!”

——–

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

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

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

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

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

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

——–

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

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

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

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

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

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

——–

Helix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is also one of the worst parts about them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Thunder Clap: Burning Questions

Posted by natechen on September 1, 2014

Helix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Just… precautions.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One could dream, anyways.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

——-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, it was worth a shot…”

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Thunder Clap: Hot Beats

Posted by natechen on August 25, 2014

Helix

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

Cue disaster.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Good benefits.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

——–

Izzy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I jumped and spun around. “Sifu! Hi.”

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

He is apologetic about it, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fiction Index

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Morocco

Posted by natechen on August 4, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

——–

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well let us know if you find anything.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Strange hobby.”

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

“Wait, that’s one of your chairs?”

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

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

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

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

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

——–

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

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

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

Not that anyone wound up needing it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So these are the last of them.”

“That we know of,” Sandusky added.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

——–

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

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

“It’s how I demolish things.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fiction Index

Original Art: Hydroelectric

Posted by natechen on June 4, 2014

Been playing around with the pen and ink again! This time around I employ the artist’s right to tinker with things to make a better picture – the astute viewer will note that the picture below is not remotely like anything that happens in Water Fall, although it’s meant to encapsulate the raid on Chainfall in a single image.

Circuit at top left. From left to right along the bottom we have Frostburn, Helix, Coldsnap, Samson and Massif.

I played around some more with the water and I’m more satisfied with it than I was when I did last time it came up. I still feel the white/black/gray balance is a bit off here and the “trees” in the top right don’t look quite right. Bob Ross made it look so easy…

But art is never perfect and that goes for the visuals as well as the written word.

Memorial to a Saint

Posted by natechen on May 26, 2014

(Author’s Note: I had originally intended to take a week off after finishing Water Fall to get the summer schedule knocked into place, finalize some ideas and share with you my plans. Long story short, this was supposed to be a post announcing another series of short stories in-between Water Fall and Thunder Clap. Then I remembered that today is Memorial Day and decided it would be more fitting to have this post today, take next week as the week off and continue from there. So today, a Project Sumter short story. Next week, the summer schedule.)

For the first month and a half the Charleston office of Project Sumter had been one of the busiest places in the city, possibly in the state. But after a solid eight weeks of dominating the news cycles the existence of what the public had quickly dubbed superheroes but the government insisted on calling talented individuals had started to feel more blasé and less exciting. First superhuman stories didn’t make it above the fold anymore. Then talented people got relegated to the second page.

Freelance journalists like Addison Michaels weren’t happy about that, but they were learning to accept the changing realities. If nothing else a journalist knew how to be flexible.

That didn’t mean she didn’t find herself trudging down the street from the bus stop, hoping that this time there might be a worthwhile story hanging around the reception area. Sure Lawrence the receptionist left a lot to be desired, with his constant lisp and poor grasp of manners, but he was a hold over from the days when discouraging the public was the way things were supposed to work, not a deviation from expectations. And while Lawrence could be rude he did know everything that was going on around the office – and thus, he had a good grasp on what was up with talents all across the country. If there was a story to be had, he’d know it.

At least, so her thoughts had run as she came around the corner and started towards the steps up to the office building where Sumter Headquarters was located.

Then she saw the car.

Well, not so much the car, that was a fairly nondescript black sedan, the kind of thing people had been associating with secret government work since long before people knew about Project Sumter. It was more who was getting out of it that mattered. He was, as she had heard so many people say in print, on the radio and on the morning news, shorter than you expected when you met him in person.

In fact Alan Dunn, or Special Agent Double Helix as many people still insisted on calling him, was barely tall enough to see over the roof of the car he stood beside. But that wasn’t what really mattered to Addison. What mattered was that, next to Special Agent Samson, he was probably the most famous talent in the country. That wasn’t saying much at the moment, but the news that he was in town had to be worth something to someone.

She hustled down the street to the curb as he swung the door shut calling, “Excuse me? Agent Dunn?”

For a split second Addison thought she saw Helix’ shoulder slump forward but, almost as soon as it registered he was turning, drawing himself up straight and smiling. If the smile looked forced and his posture was a little more wooden than you’d expect she tried to be understanding, not for the first time reminding herself that these people didn’t expect the press any more than a freelance journalist expected respect, especially from those with steady employment.

“Good morning,” Helix said, taking a few steps away from the curb to meet her. “What can I do for you, ma’am?”

“Hi, I’m Addison Michaels.” She held out her hand for a handshake. “I’m a freelance writer.”

After a split second’s hesitation he accepted the shake saying, “I guessed as much. I’m sorry, Miss Michaels, I’m not actually here in any kind of formal capacity so I don’t really have anything to say at the moment.”

“No, that’s fine Agent Dunn – do you prefer Agent Dunn or Double Helix?”

“I haven’t answered to Alan Dunn for years, outside of tax purposes.” He offered an eloquent shrug. “Most people call me-”

“Helix! Is that girl a friend of yours?”

Sometime during their brief conversation a huge man with sparse white hair and a face like Ayers Rock had managed to slip in behind Helix and open the sedan’s back door. Now he was carefully helping a small woman in a flower print dress out of the back seat. Helix addressed his next words to her. “Grandma, this is Miss Addison Michaels. We’ve just met.”

“Oh. Have we?” Helix’ grandmother turned to stare at her with an eerily blank expression. A flicker of something passed behind her pale blue eyes and she turned to the white haired man and said in a poorly modulated whisper, “Introduce us, dear. We’ve just met this girl and she seems nice.”

It was a little like having her own grandmother visit her church before she passed away and Addison did her best to hide a wince of sympathy. For his part, the woman’s husband made no indication that he found anything wrong with what she said. He just nodded to his wife and said to Addison, “I’m Sergeant Wake. This is my wife, Clear Skies.”

A shiver passed up Addison’s back. Unless she had misunderstood something, Lawrence said these two were founding members of Project Sumter. “What brings you two to Charleston, if I may ask?”

“Charleston?” Clear Skies looked at Helix in horror. “Are we in Charleston, Helix? Daniel won’t like that.”

“Sunshine.”

Clear Skies looked up at her husband. “Don’t ‘sunshine’ me, you two have never gotten along and I know you promised him you’d avoid each other after the war.”

“Sunshine,” Wake said, his voice gentle as baby, his face showing all its years. “Daniel’s been dead for sixteen years. He had a bad heart, you know.”

“Oh.” Her face fell. “I’d forgotten.”

Suddenly Addison felt like an intruder. In many ways that was the job of the press, to intrude on behalf of the public, to keep those in the public eye honest. But these two had never been in the public eye and they’d stopped doing things worth public attention a long time ago. “You know,” she started to say, “maybe I should-”

“There weren’t imbedded reporters with our group, you know,” Wake said, straightening up again. “I never really missed them then, but these days. Well, there’s one story I always thought more people should hear.”

“Grandpa-”

“Don’t ‘grandpa’ me! It’s high time.”

Addison suppressed a smile, wondering if Wake even realized he’d mimicked his wife’s phraseology and town of voice exactly. “I’d love to hear your story, Sergeant Wake.”

Wake offered her his other arm and, after a moment’s hesitation she rested her hand in the crook of his elbow and they started towards the building at a pace clearly aimed at letting Clear Skies keep up with the rest of the group. Ever dozen steps or so, Wake would check on his wife out of the corner of his eye in a way that was really kind of cute. As they made their way leisurely towards the building Wake began.

———

Wake

I only knew him as Saint Elmo, he was this wiry little Italian guy with a mouth so foul you’d never believe the first part of his code name. Back then, Project Sumter was officially a part of the War Department and we were all in the war effort. And back then there was a real important word in front of Air Force – Army. They weren’t different services. So me and Elmo, we’d known each other since back in basic. But the eggheads up in Project High Command, which is what they called it back then, had Ideas about how they were gonna be using his talents. So after basic he shipped out to flight school and I went on to infantry training.

We found each other again in England. That’s a story all in itself. Point was, by the time we flew out over Europe in late September, 1944, we were old pals, me and Elmo. He was the mechanic on the plane that took me out on jumps. Then I’d catch a boat back and we’d do the whole thing again.

But this was something special. It was the last time I’d jump, although we didn’t know it at the time.

I can’t tell you about Operation Garden Grow, it’s still pretty scary stuff. I think about it, sometimes, but rarely on purpose. As I say, I can’t tell you what we were going to do or why high command thought Operation Market Garden would be a good time to do it. This story is about Elmo, so it’s more about getting there than what we did there. So it really starts when our modified B-24 was over the English Channel, me getting settled for another longish trip to Deutschland and trying to stay out of everyone’s way. Wasn’t that hard just yet, since most of the crew doesn’t do much until something unusual happens.

Now Elmo’s crew did these kinds of delivery runs all over, I wasn’t the only talented person running around doing stupid things behind enemy lines and there weren’t that many crews that could be spared to ferry them around. So he saw a lot more of the war than I did, all things considered, and he knew people who could find things, and on the cheap. So when Elmo sat down beside me and handed me a small box I knew it was going to be good.

I’m not real great at describing but she’s still wearing that ring, so you can see it if you want. Nice, ain’t it?

So I ask him, “How much?”

And he tells me, “For you, Sarge, at cost. Three hundred dollars.”

Now that wasn’t just cheap that was downright thievery. Three hundred dollars back then was a lot more than it is now but still. That ring was easily worth five hundred and I said so.

“I picked it up in Cairo from one of the British boys who came through Casablanca,” he says. Gives me the hand wave. “Everyone out there was selling jewelry to try and get out of town before the war. It’s still pretty cheap.”

So I said, “Okay.” And I promised to pay the man once I got back, so long as I did.

We shook on it and Elmo hands me the ring, says, “Now be there to pay up or I’ll make a liar out of you.”

And I give him a glare and say, “I ain’t never been a liar, Saint Elmo, and if you was a real saint you’d be able to see the honesty in my eyes.”

“The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it?” He tells me, and crosses himself all pious like. Sometimes I wish he’d said anything else. And that I’d done something other than laugh at him.

There we are, two guys not quite twenty five, maybe over water, maybe finally over land, flying away without a care in the world when the Messerschmitts show up. Suddenly things get crazy. Flying into combat in a bomber ain’t like the movies. You don’t zoom around much, there’s no rolling or flipping. Usually the flight commander just tells you there’s incoming and you strap down. Then you listen to the guns going off until somebody’s plane quits working and crashes or the other guys decide to go home. When you’re the bomber’s actual payload you don’t even get to see what’s going on.

I’ll spare you what it was like. I don’t know why you kids like the kinds of movies you watch, the kinds of books you read. The whole point of that war was so you wouldn’t have to live all that but you still try anyways. But enough soapboxing. This is about Elmo.

I’d never seen him do anything unusual on any of our flights before. There were guys who were supposed to be able to mess up German radar just by sitting there and frowning, I always figured Elmo was one of them. Useful trick to have up your sleeve but not so great when they already know where you are. Turns out Elmo did his job once we were found, something that hadn’t happened on my last three trips into Europe.

So I’m strapped in down in the hold, Elmo’s up in the middle, ready to deal with problems, the gun crews are pounding away. Maybe we get hit some, maybe we don’t I honestly don’t remember. Maybe that lasts five, ten minutes, maybe it’s an hour. Hard to say.

Finally the flight commander yells from up in the cockpit, “Saints and ministers of grace preserve us!”

That’s Shakespeare, by the way.

So a second after he yells that I see Elmo go rushing past with a weird looking box under one arm. I figure if Elmo’s doing it then it must be Project business so I unstrap and try to get up to him without getting shot or falling over. And I made it most of the way, too, Liberators aren’t that big after all. But as I got to the point where I’d first seen him I happened to look out the window and said a few things that’d shame my mother.

Then, since it’s the kind of thing pilots like to know, I yelled up to the flight commander, “The wing’s on fire!”

“Relax.” Captain Benet, who was my supervising officer, caught up to me and started dragging me back to my seat. “It’ll be fine. Haven’t you ever stopped to wonder what it is Elmo does on these flights?”

“Radar, right?” Because what else would he be doing, know what I mean?

But the captain just snorts and says, “Do you even know what Saint Elmo’s fire is?”

“A… camping thing?”

“It’s a weird thing static causes around planes in flight or the tops of old sailing ships. It looks like fire but it doesn’t burn” He shoved me toward my seat and, since I trusted the guy, I let myself be sat down. “Elmo’s got a gizmo that lets him make the stuff pretty much whenever he wants. I’m guessing they’ve got him making it now. Which means-”

The plane suddenly dove down and I was fumbling to get strapped back in.

“-we’re going to be playing the wounded bird any time now,” Captain finished.

The floor remained tilted at a really uncomfortable angle for a while. And I mean at least a weak, possibly longer. Then the bombardier stuck his head into the bay and said, “There’s one plane that won’t break off. I think the rest left to play with the bomber streams, but if this last guy rides us to the deck he’s gonna nail us when we try and pull up.”

“Can’t your gunners peel him off us?” Captain asks.

“They’re trying. But you may have to jump out early.”

“I can do that,” I say, “but Captain Benet’s gonna splatter something fierce if he bails at this height.”

“Thanks for your concern,” he says, real dry like. Then he thinks for a second. “Jump now.”

“What?” The bombardier and I ask together.

“Fighters can turn sharper than bombers, so they dive longer too, and pilots like to attack from above because it’s easier to hit from that angle. Jump now and hop back up to take out Fritz as his plane comes in for the kill. We’ll circle back and I’ll jump once we get some altitude back.”

There ain’t anyone who sees the really stupid stuff coming. Particularly when it involves people jumping five or six stories straight up and tearing apart a fighter plane with their hands, though that’s not actually how it happened. The thing I remember the most is bailing out of a plane going well over a hundred miles an hour and pushing out, against the ground, as hard as I could as I came down. I hit hard and jumped a couple of times, like my dad and granddad taught me. Flailing around on the way down I caught a small tree, about as big around as my leg, with an arm and knocked it over, which gave me an idea. Rather than go up after the ME myself I sent the tree up instead.

Getting the leverage for that kind of throw is tricky – I had to wrap an arm around an even bigger tree in order to brace myself and get the thing started on it’s way, then I spun it around a bit to gain momentum. By the time I had that done I was sure that I’d lost my chance to hit the plane but all told it only took a few seconds.

I don’t think I need to tell you that flinging trees at incoming fighters is not something they cover in basic. Or even advanced training. I was pretty much on my own. So I gauged the angle as best I could and let the tree fly as the ME-109 got close.

Of course, I missed.

But the funny thing about a tree flying over your head at forty miles an hour is people tend to duck. It’s pure reflex. So when my tree sailed over his canopy I guess I can’t really blame him for swerving to avoid it. Unfortunately that messed up his attempt to pull out of his dive and he lost control, smashing into the ground seconds later. I winced and took a moment to shake myself out, then found a tree that looked like it could hold me and climbed it.

It took a few seconds for our flight crew to come back around and drop off Captain Benet. I knew when they did because for a few seconds the wings lit up with streamers of fire for just a second and I could see his chute backlit by them as he came down. That was the last I ever saw of Saint Elmo and his crew. I never paid him the three hundred dollars I owed him, because I made it back and he didn’t. Always felt like that made me a liar. And I never even knew his name. I came here today to fix that.

——–

Addison and Helix stopped by the door as Wake and Clear Skies headed out into the small courtyard at the center of the Sumter office complex. Maybe twenty gravestones dotted the grass. There was another pair of men there, one aged enough to need a walker, the other somewhere between Helix and his grandfather. As Helix’ grandparents made their way across the cemetery it quickly became clear they were headed towards the same grave the other two were standing at. In fact, the older of the two men there waved the younger away.

“Who is that?” Addison asked.

“Chief Stillwater,” Helix said, leaning against the side of the building as he watched. “Elmo flew grandpa in. Stillwater hauled him out. Grandma made sure the weather was good for the trip. It was a self contained team.”

“Until they lost Saint Elmo.”

“That was part of it.” But Helix didn’t elaborate on what else might have changed.

Rather than possibly alienate her subject Addison decided to accept a change in subject. “What did Wake mean when he said he came here today to fix something?”

“This is kind of like our Arlington Cemetery here,” Helix said, gesturing around at the gravestones. “Most of the talents killed in World War Two are buried here, those we could find remains of. But even here, their lives aren’t – weren’t – remembered with real names. Not until last month, when mandatory codenames were officially abolished.”

“So they can finally find out who he was. But… don’t take this the wrong way, but does that make a difference?”

Helix gave her a sideways look. “I heard a lot of grandpa’s stories when I was younger. He thought I needed to know what I was signing up for if I joined Project Sumter, so he didn’t spare me much and he didn’t worry about whether I had clearance to know what he told me. But he never told me that story.”

She nodded. “I’m honored.”

“No.” He scowled. “Well, yes. You were. But you were also practice. If I know my grandpa, and I do, he’s not going to stop with just a name. Elmo had family. Possibly kids, definitely younger brothers and sisters. He’ll find them, if he can. And then he’ll tell the story again. He’ll tell it to any of them that will listen, until he’s gone and it stops being his story and it becomes their story.”

“Not quite.” Addison leaned back against the wall next to Helix and watched the three old soldiers standing quietly by the grave, and said, “It’s history.”

A hint of a smile passed unnoticed and Helix said, “I suppose it is, at that.”

Fiction Index

Nate Chen Publications

Project Sumter and Other Stories

Tag Archives: Helix

Thunder Clap: Sifting the Ashes

Thunder Clap: Moving Fast

Thunder Clap: A Brief Cooldown

Thunder Clap: Shocking Claims

Thunder Clap: Shake Up

Thunder Clap: Burning Questions

Thunder Clap: Hot Beats

Morocco

Original Art: Hydroelectric

Memorial to a Saint

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