Young Sentinels (Wearing the Cape) (Volume 3) (19 page)

The Paladins, Humanity First, all those groups are dedicated to the proposition if power corrupts then superhuman powers corrupt absolutely. Personally I don’t get it, even if there are enough supervillains out there to support their point. The way I see it, superpowers are like money — they allow people to act and act big. If superhumans want to help, great. If they want to get what they want or rule their corner of the world, not so great. It doesn’t get any more complicated than that.

Malcolm Scott, aka Megaton.

“Wahoooo! Yeeah!” The ear protectors in my new helmet let me hear my own voice as I roared into the sky.

“
Everything okay, there?
” Astra laughed on the Dispatch channel, sounding clear through the muted blast.

Andrew had finished my costume over the weekend, and he and Astra brought it to me this morning, then took me down to The Pit for my helmet. Vulcan was a skinny dude in a lab coat with a serious case of bed-hair — the kind you get when you sleep on a couch in your lab. Just looking at him I could hear his inside-voice cackling maniacally, and he’d practically jammed the helmet on my head and shouted in my earhole.

“Ear protectors and speakers,” he’d said happily. “The pick-ups in the helmet will screen out most of your blast volume while letting you hear everything else. And of course it’s wired for full Dispatch connectivity, heads-up-display on the visor, and it’ll stop a bullet. Your costume’s got a layer of my impact-weave, too. Good luck.”

And just like that, he forgot about me, going back to a disassembled whatever-it-was. Astra had said goodbye to a weirdly polite Galatea robot who stood around holding his tools, then taken me up to the load bay. I’d been wondering about leaving blast-marks with my takeoff, but she’d wrapped her arms around my waist and launched us. A couple thousand feet over Lake Michigan, she’d let go and I lit off, climbing on my own roaring column of flaring light.

“Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” The roar vibrated my bones as the gees pushed back along the vector of my blast. Saturday and Sunday had been full of careful tests measuring my blast strength and control against Variforce’s fields. Cool enough, but
this
—

“
That’s a yes?
”

“Yes! It’s — ” I made the mistake of turning too far and flipped
hard
. The world turned into a spinning roaring confusion as I flailed around with no idea where the ground was.

“
Cut it! Stop blasting!
”

I pulled the heat in. The roar stuttered, died, and then I was just falling.
And this is
so
much better. Shit shit shit shit shit!

Astra flew close and fell beside me. She smiled brightly, ignoring the fact that we were plummeting headfirst towards the lake.

“
Okay, ignore the bright sparkly water, we’ve got plenty of room until we hit. So, feet down, arms in, look up. Ready? Go.
”

I lit off again, starting low and ramping it up as I felt the push dig in. It was like — it
was
— balancing on top of a rocket as it thrust; all the force in one direction and small changes in position making big changes in attitude while fighting angular momentum.

“Got it. I’ve got it.”

“
So, what have we learned?
”

“Don’t rubberneck? Stay away from the ground?”

“
Those are good. Now keep up
.” She poured on the speed and turned us out and away from the city.

“How far are we going?”

“
At least to Canada! Watchman says to stay up until you run out of juice or get hungry!
”

We didn’t make it to lunch or Canada, but only because we didn’t fly a straight line. Astra pushed me into corkscrews, reverse burns, climbs, drop-and-pops, and every other tight trick she could think to have me try. We scared lots of birds, I spun out a
lot
, and she showed me one cool thing that just about made everything worth it. Unassisted skydiving.

Free-falling from high enough I almost needed oxygen.

“Yeeeah!”

“
I know, right?
” She fell beside me, arms wide like she wanted to embrace the world. “
I finally get why people jump out of airplanes for fun!
Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? You’d think as a species we’d be genetically programmed to absolutely hate having miles of air below us! It’s like our brains evolved for flying but our bodies had other plans
.”

“I could stay up here forever!”

“
I know. But there’s lunch and Willis’ sandwiches. And the news cameras that tracked our outbound flight. Sure you’ve got the hovering down?
Ready to meet the public?”

“I won’t go down in a flaming ball of fail. Maybe.”

She turned us back towards the city. “
So, truth or dare?
”

“Um, dare.”

“
Call your parents. Shelly tells me you haven’t talked since the first day
.”

“I can’t.”

“
C’mon. You
must
honor the Dare — if you don’t then Shell and I will play horrible horrible tricks on you until you’re afraid to open a door or even use the bathroom. You’ll be hiding in bushes and your life will be a living hell. Breaking the Dare is baaad
.”

When I didn’t laugh, she sighed.

“
Okay, here’s why. I know all about contingent futures and stuff like that. Anything,
anything
, can happen, and someday your dad’s going to stroke out doing an all-nighter at the office. Tax attorneying is high-stress stuff. Or your mom’s going to catch a nasty bacteria from all that raw natural food she eats, and you’re going to be standing at their grave hating yourself because you didn’t forgive them. Or it’ll be the other way around and we’ll be wearing black and handing them a folded flag — since Sentinels are state militia members, you’ll rate one — and they’ll be devastated because they never made up with you, told you how much they were sorry. Or you’ll take a chance years and years from now, you’ll talk, all will be forgiven, and you’ll kick yourself for not doing it a zillion years ago. Or
— ”

“Stop. I’ll call them, just — Just leave it alone.” All the fun was gone, and I swallowed around the block in my throat.

“My parents are Humanity First activists.” In my peripheral vision, I saw her
look
at me. “Not really — they just go to their meetings and read their stuff and donate — but they believe all that crap. They think I’m freaking dangerous, and they want me out of the house and away from my sister.”

That shut her up, and I got a quiet minute with only the roar and wind. Not that it was anybody’s freaking business, but I could live through another shouting fight with Dad. And maybe he’d reconsider. Maybe the Pope wasn’t Catholic.

“So, my turn. Truth or dare.”

“
...truth.”
I could practically hear the flaming mortification in her voice, but she didn’t take it back or try and apologize, which kicked her up a notch in my book. “
Last time I said ‘dare’ I was ten and Shelly made me decorate my hair with wet gourmet lollypops and take a picture.
”

“Seriously?”

“
Seriously. I was almost crying for the awful waste. I
loved
those, especially the strawberry and cream ones
.
So, truth” —
she paused, touched her earbug
— “and you’ll get a while to think about it
.” She cranked up the speed. “
I’ve got a call to go see some Paladins.
”

Chicago came in sight over the flat, sparkling plane of the lake and she took us lower, closer to the water so we flashed over the tops of late-season sailboats and yachts as the still-early sun threw our shadows ahead of us. I managed to come to a credible hover over the load bay, but panicked and cut off when my blast column started to singe the floor, barely missing Galatea. I dropped the last ten feet, awkwardly, but Astra didn’t laugh as she helped me up. Neither did Galatea. She looked locked and loaded with enough boom to fight a war.

“We’ll have to work on that. Takeoffs might need an acrobatic toss to get you high enough for safe ignition.”

“A what?”

“Later. Gotta fly!” She grabbed her maul and Galatea’s harness handle and was back out through the bay doors. I just stood there. What did I do now?

“
Mr. Scott
,” Blackstone said in my ear through the Dispatch link. “
If you would be so good as to join me in the City Room
.”

This time only Blackstone remained with the Dispatch staff to watch the screens.

“Did you have a good morning, Mr. Scott? And have you chosen a codename yet? You should hurry.”

“Huh? I mean, sure,. Andrew had one, I think...”

He nodded, eyes on the screens. “Megaton. His instincts are good. Do you like it?”

I shrugged. “Sure. What’s going on?” The main board showed a drone’s-eye view of a building in a business park, surrounded by glowing icons.

“Detective Fisher is leading a joint CPD-DSA team to serve warrants for the arrest of the president of the local Paladins chapter and four of his associates. The warrants arise from a discovered link between the Artist’s Café shooter and the chapter, with strong evidence that someone there passed him information and ordered the attempted hit on you.

“Since the suspects are not superhumans and are not likely to employ superhumans, Detective Fisher would normally not require our help. However, we are talking about the Paladins, and one of their rogue action-arms struck Astra with an anti-tank missile last spring. The good detective doesn’t want to take chances and we need to get them into police custody quickly, specifically, into the protection of the closest CPD hardcells.”

“Why?”

“Because, Mr. Scott, the press has already speculated on a Paladin link to the café shooter, and a police standoff at their offices will only confirm it. Need I remind you that the last two people with a high public profile for directly attacking superhumans are now dead?”

“Oh. That’s not good.”

“Indeed. Galatea may get to try out her new teleport-interdiction module.”