Tag Archives: serialization

Thunder Clap: Grinding Out Some Answers

Posted by natechen on

Helix

I had to send Teresa out of the room. It wasn’t fun for any of us but she’d been a close friend of Elizabeth Dawson before her disappearance and essentially a protégé of former Senator Brahms Dawson. There was no way she could approach this impartially and she knew it, even if she didn’t want to admit it at first. I think the argument about it would have taken longer if Sanders hadn’t come down to check in on the interview and found out what was going on. He pulled rank and Teresa finally caved.

Which left Jack and I to interview a woman who had been missing for almost two years and was last seen with my archenemy.

We took a moment to get settled into our chairs and I opened with the obvious question. “Matthew Sykes is Open Circuit. Yes or no.”

“Yes.” Elizabeth nodded but didn’t add anything after that. On closer examination she really did look like she was under stress, she’d always been a bit of a cute girl in the pictures I’d seen, bright eyes and an open expression, but the woman here now looked tired, mouth drawn and creases around her eyes.

“How is that possible?” Jack asked. “Your husband has been a cripple ever since his plane crash.”

“Which was four months before Circuit tampered in the Lethal Injection case. Kind of serendipitous.” She gave a wan smile. “Not that he lost his adoptive parents, but he did need a few surgeries to get full use of his legs back. I’m given to understand it’s not that hard to find a doctor and therapist willing to lie about how successful their treatments have been for the right price. It let him put on a false front. There’s actually a rule for supervillains out there, you know. Fake a weakness other than your real weakness.”

“How very like him.” I rubbed at my forehead, feeling like an idiot. “And we were even in the same room during the Michigan Avenue fiasco. He never needed that stupid chair.”

“Not until you broke the Chainfall dam. He got caught downstream and…” Elizabeth trailed off but my imagination provided some unpleasant pictures. I didn’t feel bad about it, exactly, but it was strange to know that I’d come so close to ending things with Circuit and never even known it.

“So he’s wheelchair bound for real now,” I said, to cover the weird feeling that gave me. “I’m assuming that’s why he dropped out of sight for so long. What brought him back?”

Elizabeth Sykes’ expression changed from strained to bitter. “Someone stole his life’s work.”

——–

Izzy

It was hard to tell who was more surprised at Mr. Sykes – Clark, Stillwater and I or the guy who’d just come out of the elevator. The one person who didn’t look surprised was the guy with the exterminator’s tank, who calmly stepped up beside Mr. Sykes’ wheelchair, pumped the hose he was holding like it was a shotgun and blasted the flunkies of the fake Circuit with some kind of dark, black gunk.

From the way the two men staggered and clawed at it the liquid was obviously really sticky at both men wound up plastered to the side of the hall. Fake Circuit jumped back into the elevator shaft and wavered there for a moment before shooting upwards. And then Sykes – or Circuit, or whatever -went after him.

I felt like I’d already seen enough crazy in the last thirty seconds to last a lifetime but the sight of Sykes’ wheelchair tipping over the edge was apparently what it took to spur me into action because I was pushing past exterminator and into the elevator doorway. Even as my brain was focused on getting there as fast as possible my eyes were telling me Sykes wasn’t falling he was floating. He stayed there just long enough to drop something over the side of his wheelchair before shooting up after the other guy. Clark was yelling at me to stop and Sykes’ partner grabbed me by the sleeve to try and pull me back but I was looking up the shaft and I could make out the silhouettes of both men still going up the shaft above me. I bent my knees and jumped.

In all honesty, there’s no limit to how far I can jump if I have good footing. It’s just that eventually, if you want to jump so far, there’s no footing good enough. But the basements of a skyscraper are tough, overengineered to the point of absurdity. A ten floor jump was no problem at all. As an added bonus, the flashbang Sykes had dropped on his way up went off as I was about halfway through my jump, the split second of illumination enough to blind anyone looking at it but, since it was below me and I was looking up, provided me with a fairly clear picture of where everything above me was.

I snagged the back of Sykes’ weird wheelchair and kicked off the side of the shaft, smashing through the doors and half of a wall as we tumbled out onto the seventh floor.

We lay there, coughing and wheezing amid the dust and rubble for a second or two, then Sykes asked, “Can I ask you something?”

“What?” I asked after spitting out another lungful of drywall.

“Why do you never get hurt smashing through things but then wear body armor when you deploy to the field?” His head peeked up over the armrest of his chair to glance at me. “Well, current circumstances excepted.”

I hauled myself to my feet and set his chair upright. The restraints on his chair made sure he didn’t fall out, which explained what they were for. At least, sort of. I wasn’t sure if he expected to flip upside down while whizzing through elevator shafts or what. Maybe they were there in case he came to a sudden stop. “I have a better question. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

His expression hardened. “Long story short, there were some guys who used to work for me and when I retired they apparently decided there was no need to shut down my projects just because I was gone.”

“But-”

“Look.” He took my arm in a surprisingly firm grip. “Agent Rodriguez. I’ll confess to being an unrepentant villain. My goal was always to take over this city and make an example of it. By and large, I did not care who got hurt in the process and a lot of people did, in fact, get hurt and there’s a reckoning for that fast approaching. Stillwater’s taking me in as soon as this is over – although I’m not sure he realized it was me he was taking in. But right now there’s three people that need finding and taking down before they slip out of here and cause more trouble.”

I gently pried his fingers off of my arm. “And why should I believe you?”

He smirked in a way that made it hard for me to decide whether I wanted to punch him or just get out of his way. “Because I’ve never lied about what I wanted before and I’m certainly not about to start for a nineteen year old girl on her first field mission. Should you really be so far away from your tactical team?”

“I don’t have a tactical team. I got gassed and slapped in exploding leg irons by some thug who looks like he’s never met a snack machine he didn’t buy out.” I settled on folding my arms over my chest and positioning myself so I could watch both Sykes and the elevator shaft. “What about you? Were you planning on taking all these guys by yourself?”

“Well, I have made arrangements to have reinforcements show up in due time. Your arrival moved my plans up.” He scowled. “I hadn’t realized you got here without a full team. We may have made our move too early.”

I laughed. “You don’t really do the whole talking things over with other people very much, do you?”

His expression turned rueful. “I’ll confess that’s not really a big part of scheming evil. That’s why I had to give scheming up when I got married.”

“That sounds really familiar.”

“You have no tactical support at all? Not even Agent Movsessian?”

“Clark’s specialty is field analysis. He’s not useless in the field but he’s definitely not James Bond, either.” I hesitated as the sound of something bouncing down the elevator shaft echoed eerily in the hallway. “Maybe we should move somewhere else?”

“No. That,” he pointed at the open door a few feet away, “is one of only four maglev equipped elevator shafts in the building. I don’t know who Davis found to take my place at the heart of Thunderbird but if we’re going to match their maneuverability we need to control at least one of them.”

“We’re not matching them.” I reached down and took hold of one of his wheelchair’s armrests. “Listen, I may not have a whole lot of field experience but I do know one thing. When you wind up stuck without your team in the middle of a bad situation you look to break off and regroup as soon as possible. You don’t stake out territory and throw down with the other guys. You said you have reinforcements coming.”

Sykes gave me a smirk. “Trying to decide whether that’s a good thing or not?”

“If you’re really planning to turn yourself in to Stillwater then they’ve got to be people he wouldn’t have a problem with. So I probably wouldn’t mind them either.” I didn’t mention I was also thinking of what Al had occasionally called the Helix Factor, Circuit’s tendency to assume and plan for Helix’s interference in his operations. It wouldn’t surprise me if Circuit had somehow tipped Helix to what was about to go down and was just waiting for him to show up. What Sykes – or Circuit or whatever – was planning to do after that was what was really bothering me. “So how about this. We’ll sit tight here and knock out anyone who tries to come down this way. But otherwise, we wait until Project Sumter catches up with us here. That shouldn’t take too long.”

“If you want to wait, that’s your decision. But I’m not in custody yet and I’m not turning myself in to you.” He nodded towards the elevator. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a great deal of work still to do.”

I grabbed the other armrest on his chair and braced myself, looming over him with my most threatening look. “Stay put, Mr. Sykes.”

He laughed. He actually laughed. I’d just grabbed him out of the air and smashed him through a door and he laughed at me. “I’m sorry, Agent Rodriguez. It’s not personal. I don’t doubt your capacity for harm. But your father once tore half a reinforced bunker apart around me. He’s much better at intimidating people than you.” Circuit leaned back in his chair and let himself smile. My scalp tingled and I couldn’t tell if he was generating static somehow or if it was pure nerves. “For that matter, Helix once turned one of my facilities in Arizona into a six inch deep glass covered hole in the ground. There wasn’t even wreckage to recover. Do you really think a girl who can’t even legally drink yet is going to keep me from doing what I want?”

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Thunder Clap: Hit Bottom

Posted by natechen on

Izzy

Life is all about plans changing. Still, going from “get down the stairs, smash stuff and get gone before you get shot” to “run around and get shot at as a distraction” is a pretty extreme change.

“There’s four stairwells open,” the mysterious Agent Stillwater told us. “Closest is around the second left.”

“Got it.” I leapt down the hall, leaving Clark to catch up, and did a quick glance around the corner. The way was clear so I signaled Clark to come forward and headed to the stairs. We’d been doing this for the last ten minutes, trying to buy time for whatever Stillwater’s team was doing, baiting Circuit’s guard forces from floor to floor to keep them from paying too much attention to the lower floors. I wasn’t quite sure what he was up to but he’d known an access code that Clark recognized – field analysts have this huge list of codes they’re expected to memorize and apparently the old man knew one really high up the list.

And so, a mad dash through the tower was the order of the day. We’d been looping back and fourth through the building, going down floor by floor and attracting as much attention as we could without getting shot. Agent Stillwater hadn’t told us what his game was although, to be fair, he was kind of busy just directing us through the building and keeping a listening ear on our pursuers. At some point he’d done the math and figured out there were probably only fifteen or twenty guards on our tails, not enough to watch all twelve stairwells in the building effectively, so we were doing our best to stay a step ahead. But they were herding us into one corner of the building and it was getting harder.

Worse, we’d come down at least ten floors and were somewhere around the fortieth floor now. At some point Circuit’s people could start coming up at us.

I gave the stairwell a quick check, although so far Stillwater hadn’t been wrong about a stairwell being empty, and waited for Clark to catch up. He was starting to get really winded, he probably did some PT but we’d covered a lot of ground. I don’t have a good grip on this kind of thing but I’d guess anyone would be tired after all that. As he skidded to a stop I knelt down and picked him up in a piggyback carry. Odd, perhaps, but it’s the safest way to jump while carrying someone and we weren’t actually using the stairs just sort of falling past them from one landing to the next.

Clark started to slip off my back as I reached for the door but Stillwater chose that moment to break in and say, “Agent Rodriguez?”

“Call me Izzy,” I said by reflex.

He ignored me and went straight on. “We’re ready for you now. You and Agent Movsessian can come down to us now. We’re in the third subbasement.”

Clark groaned and climbed back on. I took a deep breath, did my best to ignore my stinging feet, which had decided to start getting their feeling back two floors ago, and got ready for the next jump.

We wound our way down the stairs for a good fifty to sixty seconds, the way lit only by the dim light of emergency exit signs. I’d briefly considered asking if we could just knock out the building’s generator and hamstring Circuit that way but Stillwater, whoever he was, didn’t seem to be in the mood to consider other ideas and there wasn’t that much time to talk. Besides, given what I’d heard about him, odds were Circuit wasn’t actually running off of the building’s power grid. Finally we arrived at the subbasement in question, and for those of you wondering a subbasement is what they call anything below the first basement in a building. So we were basically three floors underground and isn’t that just something to make you feel great about yourself?

Stillwater’s voice led us through the basement hallways and over to one of the two elevator banks that led down to the subbasement. Finally we wound up in a small utility room beside the elevator shaft with two men in wheelchairs, a nondescript white man who could have put on a jumpsuit and passed for a janitor anywhere and a black guy who would pass for a basketball or football coach most places if not for the tank he wore on his back that made him look more like an exterminator.

In wheelchair number one there was an old man, hunched to the point his head was almost resting on his chest, who I guessed was Stillwater. The other man had a head like a pool ball, shaved clean and smooth, and looked vaguely familiar.

Clark placed him before I did. “Matthew Sykes?”

He looked up from a laptop he’d been engrossed in. Lit by the screen, Sykes was easier to make out than most of the people in the room and the first thing I wanted to ask was why he was strapped in to his chair with something that looked like a cross between the restraint bar on a roller coaster and a rappelling rig. Thick, padded straps covered his shoulders and fastened to a bar that was tightened down over his waist. It looked like the laptop was connected to a pannel in the wall, at a guess I’d say it was a router of some sort. A wan, distracted smile changed his rather unremarkable face to something almost inviting and I suspected he’d be a fun guy to hang out with under other circumstances. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your names?”

“Clark Movsessian.” He twitched a thumb at me. “Isabel Rodriguez. We work with Project Sumter and can I ask what you’re doing down here?”

“Expert consulting,” Stillwater said.

“But what’s he consulting on?” I asked.

Sykes tapped the side of his laptop. “The network those guys are running on was built by my company and I did a lot of the basic setup work on it in my younger days.” He hit a few keys. “And now it’s gone.”

“Gone?” Clark hurried over and looked at whatever Sykes had just done. “Are you sure? They can’t get access back?”

“Not without coming down here and asking us to share,” Sykes said.

“Oh.” I looked back out into the dark hallways we’d just come through. “I guess that’s what we’re here for?”

“We could always use more hands.”

Stillwater spoke at the same moment Sykes said, “What do you mean?”

The two men shared a confused glance. Stillwater quickly said, “Mr. Sykes, perhaps my tactical man and I should take it from here? I may be old but this isn’t-” Stillwater paused and tilted his head in a way much like Amp did when she heard something odd. “Someone’s coming down the elevator shaft. I can hear them talking.”

“How?” Clark asked. “Elevators shouldn’t be on the backup circuit.”

“They’re not in the elevator, just the shaft,” Sykes replied, setting his laptop on the ground nearby. With the quiet whir of an electric motor his chair rolled out the door and towards the elevator entrance. The rest of us hurried to keep up.

——–

Helix

Jack met Teresa and I as we headed towards the interview rooms. “She just got here with Mr. Sykes’ secretary,” he said without preamble. “No trouble on their way over from the airport.”

“Have you seen her yet?” I asked.

“Nope. Guards said she seemed collected but nervous.” He shrugged. “Sounds like a tough lady but no idea if that means she was involved or not. That’s her.”

Jack pointed to a average sized brunette, seated with her back to us, in one of the nicer interview rooms. A snappily dressed man in his mid to late forties sat to her left, a hand resting lightly on one shoulder in a caring but somewhat distant way. He had salt-and-pepper hair and beard and an intelligent set to his features. I was guessing that was the secretary.

“We know anything about that guy?” I asked.

Jack shook his head. “Didn’t even get his name. Apparently he was waiting for Mrs. Sykes at the airport and she wanted him to come along. No idea if there’s anything beyond casual acquaintance between the two.”

I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and popped my knuckles. “Okay. Let’s go see what we can see.”

Secretary guy stood up as soon as the three of us stepped into the room, automatically taking a half step to put himself between us and his employer’s wife. Mrs. Sykes turned at the same moment and for a brief moment she seemed familiar to me before the secretary distracted me by talking. “Good morning gentlemen, ma’am,” he said, nodding to each of us in turn. “I’m the office manager for the Sykes Telecom home office. Simeon-”

“My God.” Teresa brushed past both of us and grabbed Mrs. Sykes by the shoulders. “Elizabeth?”

Simeon cleared his throat, looking a little uncomfortable, and continued on. “I am Simeon Delacroix and this is Elizabeth Dawson Sykes.”

Which was why she looked familiar. We’d never met but I’d seen her picture many times. I looked up at Jack. “I think we have a problem here.”

——–

Izzy

The elevator door slid open without that usual ding. And I guess that makes sense, the thing that dings is probably in the elevator cab not the door, right? Putting one on every floor would be a lot more expensive than just putting one in the elevator cab. Dumb thing to be thinking about at the time, but it’s what went through my mind.

Sykes came to a stop in front of the elevator as the doors started to slide open. With the exit sign above the stairwell nearby providing the only bright source of illumination in the hall I couldn’t make out much. Just the blocky shape of Sykes’ wheelchair, which now that I thought about it looked way overbuilt. The frame seemed to go all the way down to the floor and extended over the wheels several inches. And it was solid, like someone had put a golf cart engine under the seat. Or a couple of car batteries, since that made more sense.

But the really wild thing? When the elevator doors opened there were three guys in the shaft and they were flying. Clark whistled softly when he saw that. “Maglev elevator shafts. This place really did have a lot of nonstandard work done when it was renovated.”

The first man in line stepped out of the shaft, squaring off against Sykes as the other two came out behind him and three more dropped into view. The leader wore a dark suit, fedora and a black cloth around the lower half of his face hiding his features and expression. But his tone of voice was pure contempt. “Who are you people?”

For just a second the tableau held and I felt the hair on the back of my neck standing on end. Then Sykes slammed his fist down on the armrest of his wheelchair and the men still in the elevator shaft dropped like puppets with their strings cut. I got a brief glimpse of another batch of three going past the open door while Sykes snapped, “I’m Open Circuit, that’s who I am. You are in my tower, stealing my plans and even ripping off the way I dressed. So tell me something, young man. Who are you?”

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Thunder Clap: Break Out

Posted by natechen on

Izzy

I finally managed to squeeze my hands out of the shackles and carefully set them to one side on the floor. Then it was back to the hole in the wall to glance in on Clark. “Alright, I’m out. From the way you were moving around I’m guessing they didn’t bother to tie you up?”

“Just took away all the furniture and jammed the door somehow. If you’re ready to move then so am I. What’s the plan?”

“We need to get out of here.” I drummed my fingers on the wall for a moment. “And if possible, we need to try and wreck whatever system Circuit is using to keep in touch with the outside world. If we can blind him he’s crippled. He was tampering with all those development projects to build a network we couldn’t tamper with, right?”

“That’s a good guess.”

“So where would the connection to that network be?”

Clark thought about it for a few seconds. “Well, in a building of this size it’s going to be somewhere in the basement or subbasements. Probably not down too low, Sykes Telecom wouldn’t have wanted to run too much extra cable through the ground to wind up lower down so I’d guess somewhere in the first basement. Mind you, I have no idea what floor we’re on now.”

“Wonderful. Just a sec.” I crawled over to the door, still careful of my stinging feet, and gave it a once over. It was a wood or faux wood thing that looked hefty enough that it might be useful as something to throw, if I could find enough space to heft it, but probably wouldn’t stop bullets. Assuming I could even rip it off it’s frame without shattering it into something useless. I went back to the wall and asked, “How tall is this building again?”

“Eighty-six stories. Give or take.”

I squeezed the bridge of my nose between the palms of my hands. “And Circuit was pretty far up in the video Helix saw.”

“That’s what he said, yeah.” Clark gave me a worried look through the hole in the wall. “Why? What are you thinking?”

“We could just go straight down from here,” I said, glancing down at the floor before remembering he probably couldn’t follow the action.

Fortunately he caught the idea. “We might, although I’m not going to try and guess what that might do to the building overall. Smashing through eighty floors just to get to the basement doesn’t strike me as the smartest idea if we want the building to keep standing. On the other hand, we might only need to go down a few.”

“Right. The guys who were in here a little while ago seemed like they were overworked. Probably short on people. There’s no way they fill this whole building.” Which reminded me. I waited for a moment, listening to see if there were any signs of life coming from outside. But all was quiet. “I don’t suppose you memorized floor layouts for this place, or anything?”

“No. But Waltham Towers doesn’t have a large footprint, as skyscrapers go. It shouldn’t take us too long to find stairs or an elevator shaft. The real question is did they rig the building in any way? My gut says yes, just because Circuit seems to rig just about everything. If he hasn’t it’s probably a red herring or a trap of some other kind.” Clark thought for a moment. “Five floors. That should put us outside their reach and give me enough time to check over whatever route down we discover before we commit to it. Think you can get us that far?”

That was a stupid question and I answered it by sticking my hands into the hole in the wall, pushing outward a few inches until I touched the joists on either side of it, and said, “Stand back and get ready to move.”

He stood back and got.

One thing you never appreciate about being a human demolition charge until you do it is how dusty the job is. After the first experience or two you either learn to hold your breath really, really well or you get used to coughing and puking everywhere. Tearing through the wall was easy but the bigger mess, drywall pours out huge clouds of dust everywhere and it didn’t settle fast. That meant holding my breath as I stepped into Clark’s room and dropped an elbow on the floor. Under normal circumstances we were supposed to discuss strategy before pulling a forced exit (entry?) like that but the longer we sat around in enemy hands the greater the chance that someone would stumble on us and we’d be in deep.

Breaking through floor is generally less of a mess than walls, it’s mostly insulation, wiring and supports, nothing as powdery as drywall.

The problem is, while I’m pretty muscular my cardio is kind of weak. It comes from not really having to exert much to do anything. While Al’s been working on correcting that in training we haven’t made as much progress as he’d like. And with my feet still in pain and a long night already under my belt I wasn’t exactly in top form to begin with.

So I botched my landing. After coming in through the ceiling I landed in a pile of debris and went down flat, wheezing in a lungful of dust and coughing spastically. I caught a glimpse of a big room, later I’d learn we’d come down in a reception area on the floor below where a singe guard was on station. He couldn’t have gotten a good glimpse of what was going on since one of the light fixtures broke free and went swinging unpredictably through the room on its wiring and casting weird shadows all over the place. The light had just slowed enough that guard man was okay with getting close to see what had happened when Clark dropped through the hole and onto his back, putting him to sleep with a quick follow-up kick.

I didn’t see any of that personally but the dusty footprints on his shirt and sneaker shaped bruise already forming on the guard’s head when I got clear of the wreckage gave me a pretty clear idea of what happened. Clark was frisking him and had already taken his pistol and a spare magazine and was in the process of freeing something else from the man’s waistband. He looked more like the street thugs we’d been seeing all night than the trained paramilitary people that Circuit had used during the Michigan Avenue Proclamation and later at the Chain O’ Rivers state park.

“Circuit must be at the bottom of the barrel,” I said.

“Maybe.” Clark glanced at the gun. “But it’s not like he didn’t have the tools to hurt us.” Then he hefted his other prize. “And this.”

I rolled my eyes. “Your tire iron.”

He grinned. “My tire iron.”

“Just get ready to drop again.”

He collected the sidearm and down we went.

The next three floors were empty, in fact that guard Clark KOed was probably the outer edge of security in the building. But that didn’t mean we were out of the woods. When he failed to report in Circuit’s people would come looking to see what was wrong and it wouldn’t take them long to figure it out. But we hit kind of a snag when we got to the stairs since Clark didn’t want to go down them.

“Just give me a few seconds,” he said, carefully looking over the doorframe. “If this thing is rigged it will be faster to know about it ahead of time.”

After about fifteen seconds of time wasted he finally decided the doorway was safe and we pushed it open with a desk I grabbed out of a nearby office. Well, more like I threw the desk at the door from about twenty feet away. Nothing exploded or shot out of the stairwell at us so he ruled it safe to go in.

In, mind you, not down.

“Stairs and elevators are part of the skeleton of a building.” He rand his hand absently along the stairwell wall. “The major utility wiring runs alongside them. If we can cut it off here we can cut Circuit’s headquarters off. No electricity or Internet will go a long way to blinding him and helping us retake the city.”

“Do you know where the cables are?” I asked, looking around at the blank walls. “And can I rip them out without hurting the building?”

“Oh, a few holes in the wall shouldn’t be that big a deal,” Clark said. “But we don’t want to cause too many or hit anything loadbearing. It won’t drop the whole building but it probably won’t be great for us.”

“Perhaps I could offer an alternative.”

I froze, quickly examining my surroundings even as my brain told me the voice I was hearing was exactly like Amp’s. Which is to say, it had that weird distant quality and no visible source, it sounded much like a tired old man doing the talking.

Clark recovered first. “Can I ask who’s talking here?”

“I’m Special Agent Stillwater of Project Sumter,” the voice answered. “I heard you break into the stairwell just now and you don’t sound like you’re here to ruin our plans. Which is what you’re very close to doing right now. So, again, might I suggest an alternative?”

Clark and I shared a quick glance then I asked, “What did you have in mind?”

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Thunder Clap: Hot Foot

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Helix

We were up to our elbows in status updates, police reports, 9-1-1 transcripts and dispatcher traffic, trying to put together a coherent picture of what had been happening in the city for the last eight to ten hours, when one of our dispatchers came in and tapped me on the shoulder.

“Is this important?” I demanded. There were at least a dozen things that I needed to be doing at the moment and if he was about to hand me another one it had better be worth it.

“We just heard from Agent Massif and his team in the city center.” The dispatcher – I couldn’t remember his name – kept his voice so low I barely made out what he was saying.

I huddled in closer and matched his tone. “What happened?”

“Agents Clark Movsessian and Isabella Rodriguez disappeared about fifteen minutes ago. Agent Massif said they found something like tear gas canisters in the area they were headed to when they were last seen.”

So yes, it was important. If we hadn’t already been at our highest state of alert that would have put us there. “Right. Listen, do you know Agent Samson? Miguel Rodriguez?”

His eyes got a little wider. “Yeah. I’ve seen him before.”

“Go find him. He was up here a couple of minutes ago but I think he went somewhere with Senator Voorman. Check Samson’s office first, if he’s not there go door to door until you find him. And when you do.” I tapped myself in the chest. “Come get me. No sidetracking, don’t tell him what happened. Got it?”

He nodded quickly and hurried off. I turned back to my reports, reminding myself that I was younger than Izzy the first time I went out in the field. She had training and more power than a freight train. The biggest problem would be convincing her dad not to tear down the city looking for her.

——–

Izzy

I woke up groggy, head throbbing and dry-mouthed. And sore all over, it felt like I’d been rolled down a couple of flights of stairs while I was out. Sitting up wasn’t hard although it made me very woozy. I was in a featureless room that had probably been an office of some sort before all the furniture was cleared out. There were still visible marks in the carpet where a desk and chairs had been in recent past. Someone had drilled a hole in the wall and a chain came out of it.

I traced the chain and realized, in a weird, detached kind of a way, that it ended at my ankles, which were held together by a set of manacles with a bar between them. The chain attached to the bar through a heavy ring. I lay back down on my back and gave a sharp kick, snapping the bar in half easily.

My ears popped, there was a vague sense of the air being thick and heavy all of a sudden, there was a sharp bang I more felt than heard and searing pain ignited at my feet for just a second before I passed back out again.

——–

Helix

“She’s what?” Samson was talking to me but his whole body was winding up like a spring, getting ready to tear straight through the wall and anything else that might come between him and his daughter.

“Not with Massif anymore,” I said, as if that thin layer of obfuscation made it better. “Now calm down, Rodriguez. It’s not guaranteed that Circuit grabbed her or anything. She could just be running down a lead with Clark. You know, underground or somewhere else where they might not have noticed that communications or power were back.”

Samson’s mind, which had obviously been drifting from the conversation at hand out through the city streets towards wherever Izzy had wandered to, snapped back to me. For the first time since I’d met him I saw what Manuel Rodriguez looked like when he was really, truly angry. I understand that side of him used to show itself a lot more frequently back in the day and I felt a brief twinge of pity for the people who had to deal with him back then.

Both the crooks and his boss.

“You don’t honestly expect me to believe they’re just poking around in the sewers do you?” He snapped.

“No. I expect you to keep your mind on a realistic assessment of the situation. Isabella is a field agent dealing with Open Circuit and there are rules about how that game is played.” I ticked points on my fingers. “She’s more useful alive than dead and Circuit’s not above using hostages so he’ll prefer her alive. She represents law and order, something Circuit claims to value as well so he can’t do much to her without harming the image he’s trying to establish. And she can crush a car with her bare hands, so there’s only so much Circuit can do to keep her restrained outside of using Movsessian as leverage against her. In all likelihood he’s just loaded them onto a truck and shipped them towards the city limits so they present the fewest complications.”

“Assuming it is Circuit,” Samson said darkly. “Even you’re not sure it is.”

“Assuming that, yes.” I sighed. “Look, I’m not saying you can’t go out there. I just want you to understand that you need to do it by the book. Contact Massif, meet up with his team and work out from her last known location until you find a promising lead and report back. Don’t go tearing through the city hunting down thugs and juggling them like bowling pins until they tell you what you want to know.”

“I only did that once.”

I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him down to my level, which was a fair distance, and dropped my voice to a whisper. “Look, I’m not going to claim to understand your feelings because I don’t. But if you go off half-cocked and do something stupid, here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to let you tear apart the city in whatever way your personal demons tell you is best, because there’s no one here who could stop you. Then, when you find your daughter and she’s fine, because I still have every confidence that she will come out just fine, I’ll arrest you. And then I’ll throw you in a jail cell for twenty to life. Do we understand each other?”

Samson gave me a hard look, then nodded slowly. “Yes. And thank you, Helix.”

“Good. Now stop wasting our time, get out of this building and do something useful.” As he started to straighten up I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back down and added, “Something useful, Samson.”

“I get it.” No sooner was it said than he was gone, out of the office and down the hall in the blink of an eye.

Voorman gave me an assessing look from where he sat in Samson’s desk chair. He’d watched without saying anything since I’d informed Samson of what had happened. “That was a very generous approach to the situation, Helix. I’m not sure I would have handled it that way.”

“I lied, you know. I do kind of understand how he feels.”

Voorman tilted his head in a curious fashion. “How so?”

“I want to get out of here and do something useful, too.” I left Voorman to think about that as I headed back to my office to see if maybe, just maybe, there was something productive to be done there.

——–

Izzy

“That was stupid, Davis. Incredibly stupid.”

People arguing. Great way to wake up. My ankles felt like they were on fire and things were numb from there down. I tore my eyes open and looked around. Same room, except for the scorched, pitted floor on the other side of the room.

“What did you want me to do? We’re out of spare hands and I wasn’t expecting her to just rip right out and try and tear this place apart.”

My ankles had been dressed with some thick gauze pads and I wasn’t sure what else. Bare toes stuck out beneath them – and I was really glad for that – but I couldn’t feel them. Whether anesthetic was involved or it was a result of nerve damage I couldn’t tell.

“Listen, Davis, that girl can’t even drink legally yet. She’s going to be spooked and edgy. And you’ve seen the profiles we hacked out of the Project – she can smash us both to a bloody pulp. What were you going to do if the manacles were faulty or something?”

I was sitting with my back propped in a corner, hands in a similar manacle set to what had been on my ankles before right down to the wire running into the wall. I did notice that it was a new hole in a different place. Unfortunately I wasn’t sure if that was significant.

“That would have been your fault, since you built-”

“You would have been dead, Davis, since you weren’t watching her like you were supposed to so there would have been nobody to put her back under if she got out!”

The voices were coming through the door to the room I was in. I cleared my throat once and they went quiet, which I took as an invitation. “Hello? If you’re done yelling at each other can I have a turn?”

There was a moment of total quiet then the door to the room swung open and two men came in. On my left was a squarish man, not more than five foot five but nearly that wide, with a heavy jaw and a five o’clock shadow. The other guy wasn’t much taller but he looked totally normal except for eyes that never quite seemed to focused on anything. When the square man spoke his voice told me he was Davis.

“Looks like you’ve come around.” He squatted down, an operation that didn’t really seem to make him much shorter since what height he had was in his torso, and pointed at my feet. “You’re lucky you still have those, you know. The shaped charge in those cuffs should have been enough to take your feet off. I’m not sure why it didn’t but we upped the charge in the cuffs you’re wearing now and your wrists aren’t quite so thick so maybe they’ll work this time, hm?”

I glared at him with the confidence born of pain and sleep deprivation. “You’re lucky you stopped where you did. I really just need to touch you to do the pulping thing.” To my satisfaction my toes wiggled when I told them to, coming withing a few inches of his closer leg.

Normal guy grabbed Davis by the collar and proceeded to do some weird kind of maneuver where he crouched down while also pulling Davis to his feet. “I’ll play good cop.”

“That’s a laugh,” Davis said as he backed away a step.

“Listen,” normal guy said, ignoring his partner. “I didn’t want you getting hurt and I’m sorry it happened. My friend here was supposed to keep an eye on you and warn you about that when you woke up.”

“I was getting a cup of coffee,” Davis grumbled. “We’ve been up all night.”

“Join the club,” I said, wiggling back into the corner just a bit to try and get away from them, trying to cover for it by straightening up a bit. “Maybe next time you guys can cook up a master plan that doesn’t involve drinking a gallon of coffee. It’s healthier for you.”

“Look, miss, I just need you to know we’re not planning to hurt you in any way.” He pointed at the manacles. “Those are just insurance to make sure you hold still. There’s a current running through them tied to the detonator. Don’t break the chain or the manacles and it won’t blow your hands off. We’re hoping to trade you for some concessions from Project Sumter soon, so-”

“You haven’t met my boss, have you?”

He grimaced in a way that told me he’d at least heard of Helix’s legendary obstinacy. “So just sit tight, okay? I’m sorry about your feet.”

“Look, if you guys think it’s going to be that simple you’ve got a new thing coming.” I wracked my brains for something more to say, there’s a whole course on negotiating in all circumstances but I was having a hard time remembering anything from it. In fact, I was pretty sure nothing I’d said so far matched what that class had taught.

“Come on, good cop.” Davis grabbed the other guy and hauled him to his feet. “The big guy is going to be waiting for us. Let’s see if we can actually scare up a guard now and get back to him.”

The two of them left before I could say anything else and I didn’t want to leave them with some stupid parting line so I held my tongue. Once they were gone I slumped back into the corner and let my head thump lightly against the wall, trying to figure out what my next move should be. As I sat there a soft thump from the other side of the wall interrupted my thoughts.

I was about to write it off as something being moved in the next room over when Clark’s voice, very muffled, came through the thin drywall. “Izzy? Is that you?”

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Thunder Clap: Dropping The Ball

Posted by natechen on

Helix

When I first met Darryl Templeton he was in his early thirties, single and ambitious. A lot like most people would describe me now. We worked together off and on, Darryl first working as field analyst and then field oversight on my team. Pretty much every kind of work Project Sumter did at the time we handled. Everything from cover-ups, introducing newly discovered talents to the rules of the game and heavy investigative work to serious archive updating and scientific research got handed off to our team. When we worked in the Midwest he ran into Mona Walters and was smitten. He fell in love, got married and gave up field work.

I saw him less after that. He moved up into the administrative side of Analysis. The next time we ran into each other he had gray hair coming in and he was asking me to look after his wife when she tried her hand at field work. When he was in a car wreck I took some time off to check in on him during his recovery.We stayed good friends even though we didn’t see each other regularly.

Until his wife was killed in the field. While on my team.

Now Darryl’s almost a stranger to me. When HiRes got him on the phone I barely even recognized his voice, rough and scratchy instead of level and confident as I remembered. But in person the differences were even worse. He hobbled on a cane, his hair was gray on white and worst of all he didn’t grin when he saw me anymore. I’d avoided him since our brief collaboration after the Michigan Avenue Proclamation just because looking at him reminded me that a fundamental part of my world had shifted out of place and not been replaced yet. The first thing I noticed when he walked into my office was that his face had new lines on it, creases at the corners of his mouth and eyes that made it look like he was perpetually frowning and sleepy.

He lowered himself slowly into one of the guest chairs and finally managed a smile for me, though it was tired and grim. “Congratulations, Helix. You finally rated your own office. I knew you’d have one as soon as I heard the courts had ordered Project Sumter to stop withholding promotions from talented agents.”

My return smile wasn’t really any better than his. “Look who’s talking. You went out and found a whole office full of talents to supervise. Is it any easier than riding herd on the analysts?”

“You have no idea. Project Sumter analysts are the only kind of people I know that get exponentially more difficult to deal with when you have more of them. Talents pale in comparison.” A little of the animation I remembered from the old Darryl came back, his eyebrows waggling in a way that meant he was joking – but it was funny because it was true.

I didn’t laugh because the joke wasn’t that funny but I did manage a more heartfelt smile. It lasted half a second before I remembered what we needed to talk about. “Darryl, I need to talk to you about…”

My voice trailed off because I wasn’t really sure now to describe what I wanted to talk about. But Darryl hadn’t been head of Analysis four years for nothing. “You want to talk about Circuit and what’s happening around the country right now.”

“Never could fool you.” I cracked my knuckles absently on the desktop as I marshalled my thoughts. Training told me to start on easy ground. “I know Circuit has been your number one concern for a while. Did the Secret Service have any idea something was going to happen?”

For a moment Darryl studied his hands, resting on top of his cane. In the past he’d always been the kind to look you in the eye when telling you… pretty much anything. I wondered when that had changed. “We knew something was going to happen. Lots of buzz going about something building up in Toronto. But nothing to indicate it was a US concern and not a Canadian one. And no sign that it was my office’s concern at all. In fact, most of the Secret Service thinks this is a NSA or FBI matter, not something for our agency at all.”

“But you’re here.” I folded my hands together and pressed them down on the desk to keep from fidgeting. “You must think this is connected to Circuit.”

His head snapped up, a bit of the old fire in his eyes. “Of course. But right now the Secret Service is not inclined to agree with me.”

My eyes narrowed just a bit. “Darryl, are you even supposed to be here right now?”

“Personally?”

Again, I’ve known Darryl a long time. That one word was enough for me to guess what his excuse was. “No one said you could come here but no one said you couldn’t. And HiRes is here to guard Voorman so you just tagged along as support. Is that it?”

“Close enough for government work.”

“Right.” I leaned back in my chair. “So what do you think Circuit is up to?”

He spread his hands helplessly. “How should I know? Are you sure it’s even him out here?”

“No, of course not!” I thumped my desk for emphasis. “I talked to him over video conferencing and even now I’m not sure it was the same guy who built a hydroelectric power plant in a state park. He just didn’t feel right. You’re the analyst, Darryl, you’re supposed to work these things out.”

Darryl put his elbows down on my desk and pressed his fingers into his temples. “How I wish it was that simple these days, Helix. I’m more administrator than analyst these days – other people handle that for me, now.  I just hand out assignments during my office hours.” He sat back up and waved his hand dismissively. “I’ve worked on the case on my own time, of course, but like I said, no one had any clue this was coming down the pike.”

“You mean you had no idea what was going on and you came anyway? You have no plan?” I was out of my seat and waving my hands in the air like a windmill waiting for Quixote but I didn’t care at that moment. “What is wrong with you Darryl?”

He didn’t get up as fast as I did but he was just as upset. “Because as soon as I heard what happened I knew he’d be involved somehow, and it would be here. Everything he’s done that matters, everything he’s done since he killed Mona, it’s happened here. This is where I need to be.”

That was simultaneously the stupidest thing I’d ever heard and something that made total sense. Rather than call him on it I slumped back into my chair and said, “Did you at least come with backup? Please tell me you’re not here on your own.”

“HiRes has Hush with him.”

“Creepy guy who never talks?” Darryl nodded a yes. “Who else?”

“Frostburn and Coldsnap are here in town, but not here in the building. They were useful last time, breaking the hydroelectric plant. I thought we might need them again.” Darryl shrugged and sat back down, too. “Although I guess a hydroelectric plant in the river would be more noticeable out here than his last one.”

I stared at him a moment, trying to figure any possible angle he might have on this. I knew he wanted Circuit in taken down – wanted him gone bad – but it really sounded like he’d been caught as flatfooted as the rest of us. Just to be sure I asked, “So what do we do now?”

“You’re in that chair,” he pointed at the furniture in question, “so that means it’s you’re call. Only person in this office ranked higher than you is Bob Sanders and I think he’ll agree with pretty much anything you suggest.”

I put my head down in my hands. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

Jack yanked the door to my office, bringing my head up with it like they were attached with a string. “Somebody got power back to the city, Helix. Sanders wants you on the floor pronto. Time to find out what’s been going on while the lights were out.”

“Come on, Darryl.” I was out from behind the desk before he was out of his chair. “If I’m really in charge of this fiasco then I want your eyes on it, too.”

“Gladly.”

——–

Izzy

We were back out on the streets around daybreak. I was feeling fine although the world was starting to turn a little fuzzy around the edges. While I’d  told Clark the truth about not getting tired this was also my first time out on the streets, facing people with guns and maniacs who wanted to take over the world, or at least the city. I was stressed and starting to feel it. The rest of the team looked even more frazzled around the edges when we piled out of Lincoln’s apartment and into the predawn gloom.

After about half an hour of debate Teresa had decided that the best plan would be to try and fry Circuit’s wonderful EMP weapons through the ground. It hadn’t taken long for Amp to find a frequency that would destroy the coolant pump in the weapons without doing much damage to anything else the real question had been how she could deliver it without wrecking half the windows on a block. To make a long story short, Clark and Lincoln had worked out where major electrical circuits ran and they were hoping Amp could amplify sound down them for a city block or two, causing the cooling systems in any of the weapons in the radius to malfunction and short out the whole unit.

It wasn’t a great plan but it was what we had and it worked in no small part because the electricity was out and there wasn’t an noise from the power grid itself to contend with, so if power came back on we’d be right back where we started. Worse, we had to go underground to hit the major electrical stations where Clark thought the plan would work best. That meant going into the sewers.

At least, Al, Teresa and Amp did, Lincoln  and Jane stayed at street level to serve as lookout and Clark and I went ahead to scout out the next point of entrance. Which basically meant finding a manhole cover about six blocks away.

“I could have handled this myself,” Clark said, carefully looking up and down the street while tapping his tire iron slowly against his thigh. I’d lost track of what happened to that thing for a bit but apparently he hadn’t.

“The scouting part or moving the manhole cover?” I leaned out from the side of the building we were hunkered down by, looking up rather than out. “Do you want me on the roof?”

He glanced back at me. “Right. I keep forgetting you can do that.”

“Not your fault. Most people aren’t trained on taxmen tactics. Do you want me up top or not?”

He jerked a quick nod and went back to checking out the street. I stepped out into the middle of the alley and did a quick assessment of the angles then jumped.

It was just a quick flexing of the knees, bend them a little then straighten back out. Most of the strength of the jump came from wherever it is taxmen keep all that power we store, all the muscle we build up is either a place to store it or just a camouflage built up over the years, not the actual source of the power we get to throw around. Personally, I try not to think too much about how it works and just enjoy the results.

Building jumping, either on top of or over, is something I’ve done a fair amount of. Project Sumter actually has an obstacle course for it about an hour outside the city limits and it’s something I’m good at and really enjoy. The rush of air as you go up is only matched by the brief feeling of weightlessness when you hit apogee. Trust me, it’s fun every single time.

Except for the one time that someone switches a floodlight on right in front of your face while you’re on the way up.

After spending most of the night by emergency light or moonlight I wasn’t prepared for the sudden brightness and for the second time in twelve hours I blew my landing and tumbled across the rough concrete roof. I clambered back to my feet, hands and shoulder aching, blinking furiously to try and see what was going on around me. I could dimly see that the world around me had gone from a deep gloom to a dull gray and the air was full of dozens of half-heard sounds that I’d never noticed until the power outage silenced them.

“Damn it, what was that?”

And someone was cursing, there was that, too.

Training, according to Al the heart and soul of police work, kicked in and I shouted, “Federal agent! Who’s there?”

I immediately felt foolish because the man on the roof with me said, “What? Wait, I can’t see anything. You got a badge?”

And of course, I didn’t because I hadn’t been an official federal agent the night before. Not that it would matter since we both seemed to be blinded by the sudden illumination around us. But since the building I’d been jumping up on, another shop of some kind, had been ringed with floodlights for security and I’d basically been looking right at them I figured he’d get his eyes back first and notice I looked a lot like a teenaged girl who’d somehow wandered onto the roof.

I was right and I was wrong. Only as the sparks in my vision began to fade did it occur to me that whoever it was on the roof with me, he didn’t have any better reason to be up there than I did. Looking back it should have been obvious that he trouble, but I was flash blinded and shaken from my bad landing so I didn’t really tumble to the fact that something was wrong until something clanked at my feet and started hissing. My vision was clear enough by that point that I could look down and see a cloud of gas already up to my knees and rising quickly.

A glance up told me the guy who’d thrown it was about ten feet away and his head looked weird. I took a single long step, closer to a jump than anything, and as I slid to a stop next to him I realized it wasn’t his head, he was just wearing a gas mask. I probably wanted one of those for myself and his was the only one handy. But when I snatched at it I misjudged my grip strength and wound up crushing the eye goggles in one hand rather than just grabbing it and pulling it off his face. He staggered back with a yelp, dropping a second smoke bomb or whatever it was he’d thrown at me in the process.

It wasn’t safe to stay up there with nothing to protect me from whatever fumes he was throwing around. A quick jump to my right sent me over the edge of the building and down into the street below. I landed as lightly as possible and looked around. There were two other people in the street, closing in on the alley where I’d left Clark. I rushed over to it much faster than any normal person only to find myself in the middle of another cloud of gas.

Yeah, outrunning our ability to keep track of our surroundings is a major taxman weakness.

I had enough time to figure out that it wasn’t smoke in those bombs before a weird sense of dislocation, of numbness hit me and I pitched forward on my knees. I had just enough time to make out Clark, lying face down on the ground, before the world faded away.

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Thunder Clap: Break it to Pieces

Posted by natechen on

Izzy

It only took two minutes of watching over Clark’s shoulder for him to stop what he was doing, look up from the box containing Circuit’s amazing EMP superweapon and say, “You’re not helping.”

“Sorry.” I came around the table, sat down on in a chair and put my bottle of water down on the floor. The table in Lincoln He’s kitchenette was scattered with pieces of casing from the gizmo we’d found in the bookstore. It had taken a while to get back to the concert venue on foot, consult with the stage manager and Lincoln, and finally decide to move most of our people out of the venue and to Lincoln’s apartment via a rather roundabout route. Cheryl was staying there to direct new Sumter resources that might come to join us but otherwise we were all crammed into Lincoln’s small one bedroom apartment.

Soft sounds of snoring came from the cramped living room just outside the low wall dividing it from the eating area. Massif, Gearshift and Lincoln had bedded down out there after practically forcing Teresa and Amplifier to take a nap in the bedroom. Chivalry wasn’t dead out there but it was having to work awfully hard to express itself.

Clark had started disassembling the box almost as soon as we’d gotten settled again, pulling out small canisters, a clear plastic or plexiglass box half the size of my head containing coils of wire I guessed was an electromagnet and parts that did who knew what, with no sign of nodding off. I wasn’t sure where he had gotten the tools from, my guess was they were Lincoln’s since he worked in IT when he wasn’t moonlighting as Massif’s man on the street or whatever ti was they did together. Clark moved with confidence, unlike most of us had when we finally dragged ourselves into the apartments, his hands rock steady and working fast. Other than his brief moment of annoyance when I started kibitzing I don’t think he’d stopped working on the thing since he’d walked in the apartment door and sat down at the table.

“Aren’t you tired?” I asked. Given how quickly the rest of the crew had hit the sack I’d have expected him to do the same.

“This is the middle of the day for me. I’m working third shift at headquarters right now so I’m always awake this time of night.” He went back to tinkering with something in the box. A long, thin black hose connected it to the electromagnet container. “What about you? Training is done during the day and you weren’t a field agent until tonight so I’d assume that’s most of what you did.”

“Believe it or not, not getting tired is one of the perks of being a taxman.” I poked at the hose. “What’s this for? There’s no wires connecting it to the magnet itself, just the box, so it’s not a power cable.”

Clark looked at me strangely and said, “No, the power hookup is on the bottom. I think this,” he tapped the thing he was working on in the box, “pumped some kind of coolant to keep the thing at an even temperature. Those,” he pointed at the canisters he’d already taken out, “look like a six or eight month supply. You don’t sleep at all?”

“Well, I don’t get physically tired.” I tapped the side of my head. “This still needs time to unwind, do all the subconscious things the brain does when you’re asleep. But if I need to I can skip a night or two here and there without major problems. Slightly slower reflexes, some fine motor control lost.”

“Not that that’s a huge loss,” Clark muttered, finally detaching the pump and pulling it out of the box to look at more closely.

“Not that big a loss,” I admitted. “I generally make a point to hit the sack before short temper and annoyance become an issue.”

Clark opened his mouth for a moment, hesitated like he was thinking better of it, and finally settled on saying, “I’ll keep that in mind.”

I waved it off. “Just finishing my thought, nothing against you. I spent most of my life trying to find the lowest possible setting for my talent. I still don’t really have an idea what the upper end of it looks like.” That was enough of that. Time for a subtle subject change. “Why does that thing need coolant? Does firing off the EMP cause it to overheat or something?”

“Best guess? It’s only an EMP part of the time. The rest of the time it just creates a low level magnetic field.” Clark pointed at the coil of wire with a small screwdriver. “Even if it operated at a very low strength that would show up on the electricity bill. Unless that’s a superconducting wire. The resistance on those is so low they practically need no power at all to keep running. So they probably did it to keep the owner from noticing that there was something in his building eating through electricity like there’s no tomorrow.”

“What you just said told me nothing about why it needs to be cold.”

Clark shrugged. “Most superconductors only superconduct when they’re cold. It’s complicated and I don’t really have the physics or electronics background to understand it, I just know it’s so. If they are using the superconductor to keep the electric bill down they need to keep it cool all the time.”

“Great.” I flopped back in my chair. “Does knowing this actually help us in any way?”

“Not really. I mean, if we’d known about it six months ago we might have started running down leads on where Circuit might have gotten all this stuff. It’s liquid nitrogen cooled and this,” Clark tapped on the box holding the electromagnet, “is actually two layers deep and I’d guess there’s a near vacuum environment between the layers. Circuit’s done that with his gadgets before as a countermeasure against Helix but there’s got to be so many of them out there that they were built by a third party. And it’s probably a custom job, that’s not an every day piece of equipment. I can’t think of a single practical application for it outside of messing with heat sinks.”

“You’re dodging the question.” I waved my had at the mess of junk scattered on the table in front of us. “Circuit’s shut down the city using these things. There’s got to be some way to counter it.”

“Actually, he hasn’t.” He waved his hand at the stuff on the table. “Magnet, capacitors sufficient to keep it firing, coolant to keep it superconducting, simple hookup to a fiber optic network fast enough to let the thing react nearly real time. But nothing here lets him disrupt the power grid. That must have happened at the regional level. Knocking these things out will probably let vehicles through again, it’s probably hooked up to the surveillance system so it will probably blind them. But we’re not getting power or cellphones back, not by taking these out.”

After everything that had happened so far it was weird that hearing that was what made me the most disappointed. I rested my head on top of the magnet case and exhaled deeply. The sound of Clark poking around with the coolant pump went on for another ten seconds or so then he stopped. “Don’t you have to wave your hands in the air before you lay on hands?”

“I’m not praying, I’m being frustrated.”

“Frustrated?” Clark sounded like he wasn’t sure if he should laugh or not. “I didn’t think frustration was a part of your religion.”

I picked up my head enough to look him in they eye. “My religion doesn’t have things that are a part or aren’t a part. It just has help for people with problems. Right now my biggest problem was that we just got shot at, smashed a guys floor and got a box full of highly suspicious junk. And all that work was for nothing. This doesn’t frustrate you?”

“Well,” Clark heaved a sigh and pulled the pump out of the box. “There is one bright side.”

“What’s that?”

He tipped the pump on one side and tapped the power hookup. “Give me fifteen minutes and I’m sure I can jurryrig this into something we can plug into the outlet. Then we can run it long enough for Amp to see if it has a frequency that will break it. Almost all motors do, they shake in a specific way when they’re on and if we can amplify that enough with a sympathetic frequency and break it like an egg.”

“Sounds good.” I carefully pushed myself up to my feet and started towards the back room. “Let’s get to it.”

He put a hand on my arm as I went by. “Better wait. You might be able to go forever but Amp needs her sleep. I’ll wake her in a few hours – if you don’t do it right her yelling at you about it will be that last thing you hear.”

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Thunder Clap: Simple Problems are the Hardest

Posted by natechen on

There was a brief period before they arrived when Sykes could see the sun grow from a dim glow through the windows at the back of the van to a bright, almost painful light. Like Stillwater, Sykes napped off and on through the course of the drive so he still wasn’t sure how long it took but by the time they arrived the sun was high overhead. At that point the two of them were taken out of the back of the van and into a building.

He’d never been a fan of the monolithic construction that made up so much of modern cities. Except for his time in the group home he’d always lived on the outskirts of cities, able to enjoy the nearby conveniences of a large metropolitan area without having to sacrifice green grass in the yard or open skylines. But big buildings had always struck him as ridiculous things, too large to be used practically or safely disposed of when they inevitably aged and needed to be replaced. Naturally he wound up stuck in the basement of one, in a cramped room with no light, to spend even more time waiting.

This time at least he wasn’t entirely alone.

Although the room was small – not quite a coffin but very close to a mausoleum – Stillwater was positioned somewhere nearby and his voice would come echoing down through the ceiling from time to time, asking how he was doing or just making small talk. Which wasn’t so say Sykes didn’t spend a lot of time thinking. Or dreaming.

After snapping awake at an unexpected sound for the fourth or fifth time since he’d been left in the dark Stillwater asked, “Are you alright down there?”

Sykes grunted, resettling himself in his chair as he got his bearings again. “Just feeling my age.”

There was a period of silence before Stillwater answered, laughter still tinging his voice. “If you’re looking for sympathy you’re in the wrong place, son.”

“Not really.” Sykes smiled to himself, that probably had sounded very stupid to someone who had served in the Second World war. “Brain’s just moving slow right now. Spoke without thinking. Any chance I’ll actually get to do something soon?”

“They’re working on the hook-ups right now. I could check in with them if you want?”

“No.” Sykes shook his head from long conditioning although he was still technically alone. “It’s not that important. If you can stand the waiting I can.”

“That’s the spirit. Don’t let your elders show you up. It’s embarrassing.” Stillwater’s tone turned from cheery to inquisitive. “I’ve been wondering for a while. The guy in charge said you’re supposed to hack the network. Can you really do that?”

“Yes and no.” Sykes tapped the laptop he’d been given, waiting for whatever the others were doing to to connect it to the building’s LAN to be finished. “This system I’ve got here doesn’t have the processing power to go head to head with much of anything a dedicated hacker has – and the guy you’re after is definitely a dedicated hacker. But our network has backdoors for maintenance work that let us bypass the machines hooked into the network and shutdown parts of the system at any time.”

“Or all of the system at once?”

“We never thought we’d have to do that. The whole network shouldn’t need maintenance at once.” Sykes rubbed his thumb absently along the side of the laptop. Sykes Telecom was a big company these days and a lot of its infrastructure was state of the art. Switching a large portion of it off would require more than just activating a few backdoors. That could get him into the system but it was very unlikely he could actually run a standard shutdown on any one part of the network before the people at the center of things caught what he was doing and countered the move.

“Well, if you cut the problem off at the head then that should be the end of it,” Stillwater said, oblivious to Sykes’ line of thought. “Shutting down the building would cut him off from the rest of his machines, right?”

“Possibly. Unless he’s got a fallback location set up somewhere else he can tap into our network. Smart hackers have backups and anyone who got this far is definitely smart. You were right the first time. The whole system has to go.” Sykes opened the computer and started booting it up. Now that he was talking about the problem he realized he was going to need a few tools to tinker with the network that didn’t come built in to the maintenance programs running on the servers. Best to have them on hand when he went in, rather than improvising them on the fly. “It’s not impossible to shut the whole system down once piece at a time but, again, that takes time. The longer we spend on this the more time our friend upstairs has to figure out what we’re doing and counter it by backhacking us. Or just paying us a personal visit.”

For the first time Sykes actually heard a sound other than talking from Stillwater, a gentled humming sound. There wasn’t a clear tune so Sykes assumed the other man was just thinking to himself. Finally Stillwater said, “We sure don’t want the man himself showing up. I don’t know much about Open Circuit myself but all I’ve heard suggests he’s very much a loose cannon. We can deal with him, but not when he’s got a whole city’s worth of gizmos at his fingertips. Can you shut everything down from here without pulling him down on us?”

“It’s going to be bad for the bottom line but yeah, I think I can pull it off.” Sykes checked through the software loaded on the laptop, finding most of what he would need fairly quickly. He’d just have to improvise the rest. “If you don’t mind my asking, Stillwater, why did you come along if you can’t deal with that guy yourself? I’m not complaining about your being here but it strikes me as a little weird. And I get that you want to do your part and all that but what, exactly, is your part? You’re not what I was expecting.”

“Yeah, most people expect big, good looking guys like that Aluchisnkii guy.” Stillwater chuckled. “Wave makers like me usually work as communications or stealth people when we work with the Project. I did a lot with sonar research for the Navy, too, in my day although different people do most of that now. I think that’s why that fancy guy in charge picked me out for this little project – I can’t be taken out by that EMP stuff. Plus my file isn’t classified any more. It’s not exactly public knowledge but a lot of other government branches know about me than used to and whoever planned this operation knew they’d need an actual Project agent to make a legal arrest so that’s clearly what they’re aiming for. ”

Sykes hesitated mid keystroke, resulting in his having to delete a lot of meaningless repeated letters. “You mean you don’t even know what branch of the government brought you on here?”

“Well I suspect the Secret Service, since the man leading their talent countermeasures group is… it’s a long story. But there was a very small window of opportunity to join this operation and frankly I jumped at the chance. Hold on.” Stillwater was quiet for almost two minutes. “Alright, they’ve got a splice into the building network set up. Someone should be down with you in a few minutes.”

Sykes typed faster.

Even moving at an increased speed he had just started compiling his new code when his favorite person of the group, the man who’d taken him from his house less than ten hours ago, arrived with coil of network cable under one arm. Sykes held out his hand for it wordlessly.

The big man handed it over and said, “It’s all on you now. Work your magic.”

And work he did.

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Thunder Clap: Smash Up

Posted by natechen on

Izzy

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

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

“What was that?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why?” Amp asked.

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

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

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

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

“And long range artillery,” Clark added quickly.

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

“You’re still carrying that?”

“Like I said, Izzy, I don’t have-”

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

——–

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Right,” I said.

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

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

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

——–

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

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

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

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

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Thunder Clap: Moving Fast

Posted by natechen on

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

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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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