Young Sentinels (Wearing the Cape) (Volume 3) (28 page)

I made myself cough, didn’t feel anything sharp and jabby, and didn’t taste blood. Okay. I’d had a
little
time for Bad Stuff to heal a bit before getting snatched away; maybe I wouldn’t pass out or stop breathing. My armor had protected my guts and ribs, and poking around there didn’t make me scream. Not like my left arm.

Sniffling, whining experimentation with the arm told me it wasn’t
broken
, though I might have bruised bones, and maybe pinched nerves the way my hand felt half asleep and had zero strength. I couldn’t lift it far from my waist without serious weeping. I finally pulled together the courage to stand — falling would
hurt
— and almost cried again just because nothing seemed wrong with my legs.

Okay. Okay. I needed light. Though I really wasn’t sure I
wanted
it; focusing on my pain was keeping me from freaking about where I was. I slid my feet, carefully avoiding pieces of armor, and found the source of the little bit of light in the room; a friendly moon-glow nightlight plugged into a socket on the other end of the bed. Giggling hurt my arm. The nightlight showed me the gleam of a doorknob — locked, but with a light switch beside it. I took a breath, flipped it on.

The horror. Mom would never combine oranges and tans like that. I was in a hotel room. No, no windows. And hotel doors didn’t lock from the outside. And the bed wasn’t a queen, more like a single like you had at camp. Nothing bigger would have fit; it wasn’t a closet but barely qualified as a room. A bed, a small dresser, that was it. And a bathroom door. I flipped on the bright, bright bathroom light and almost jumped to see myself in the mirror. No mask (I’d forgotten I’d lost it, not that
that
was a problem anymore), and the right side of my face, the part that felt all hot and tight, was swelling.

My cape had come off with my cuirass. I opened my collar, carefully washed my face and neck, checked my pupils for dilation (nope), and used the glass by the sink to take a drink. Then I went back and sat down on the bed. I was
so
tired, tears of denied sleep made me blink.

But what was going
on
? I’d been captured by supervillains; I was supposed to wake up strapped to a table. Or something. Compared to my first experience — not that I
ever
wanted to repeat January, the occasional memory-nightmare was bad enough — this was surreal. I almost broke into giggles again when I realized that they’d locked me in by installing a right-hand doorknob in a left-hand door; if I had the key I could have unlocked it from the inside. Someone had improvised just for broken little me.

Long minutes staring at the door failed to make it dramatically open, and I finally decided that nobody was going to appear to drag me off and Do Things to me any time soon. It was probably still night and they were sleeping, which sounded like a really, really good plan. Sleep now, dramatic interrogation later. No. I needed to stay up, check for dilation, be ready when someone opened the door.

I kept my eyes on the shiny new doorknob, started counting by threes, and got to twenty-one before my eyes closed and I slumped forward off the bed. Landing on my shoulder woke me hard. You can’t scream when you can’t breathe, and by the time I got some air, I was only crying.

Stop being a baby
. Shelly’s heartless voice.
You’ve hurt worse
.

Not fair — then all I’d been expected to do was lie there and get better.

So do that. Duh.

Okay, fine. The dresser was heavy wood, but the bed frame wasn’t and I dragged the bed painfully across the carpet and up against the door. It wouldn’t keep anyone out, but pushing it back would wake me up. Probably.
Happy now
? Anyway, it was my best shot at being awake and aware when they came through the door. And maybe I’d be rescued before morning. Please. I wiped my eyes and nose, climbed onto the bed, and carefully lay on my right side, curling up to take as small a space on the bed as possible.

I didn’t make it to twenty-one.

“There are two kinds of asymmetrical warfare: terrorism and guerilla war. Guerilla war is aimed directly at the political, military, and supporting apparatus of a state, while terrorism is aimed at the citizens of a state. The Heroic Age has tremendously weakened the ability of states to defend against both; superhuman guerillas and terrorists often cannot be detected until they strike — they do not need to acquire or build weapons and bombs.

Prof. Charles Gibbons,
The New Heroic Age
.

Blackstone let everyone sleep in, but that only meant we were awake enough to take more hits the next day. He delivered the hits in the morning briefing, opening with a news clip to let a fresh-faced, improbably chipper newslady incapable of frowning deliver the old news.

“O’Hare airport remains closed today. Flights are being diverted to Chicago Midway and even Bolinbrooke’s Clow. Some airliners are refusing to risk their planes in Chicago, and tourism and business has been severely impacted. Many Chicagoans who can afford to take a vacation are doing so. The full impact of the Green Man’s campaign has yet to be determined, and will entirely depend upon how quickly and definitively he can be neutralized as a threat to this city.

He froze the image, and from her smile, you’d have thought she was talking about the unseasonal but nice warm spell.
Supervillain terrorist strikes again, economy impacted
,
when are the heroes going to do something about it?
Blackstone, at least, looked like he hadn’t slept in a week trying to answer that question. Deep lines carved his face and shadowed his eyes, but the look he swept around the table burned. I found myself sitting straighter.

“Beginning with yesterday morning, congratulations to everyone here, especially our newest members. Without Megaton and Tsuris’ help holding the line — ” he gave us a stiff nod “ — the attack would certainly have reached the terminals. Grendel also performed well without any backup, and of course Ozma played a key role in shutting down the attack. Which we will return to later.”

A click brought up a new scene, this one a riot outside an office front.

“With the Green Man attack dominating the news cycle, the first story about Astra’s brother, Toby Corrigan, didn’t hit the media until yesterday evening. Unfortunately, it got out on social networks a good deal earlier. A flash-protest by Astra fans outside the Honorable Representative Shankman’s campaign office started around four, and one or more of Mr. Shankman’s campaign security detail got rough with the protesters. Although the police are still sorting out who stepped over the line first, the protest turned into a riot that broke all the office windows and sent several participants to the hospital. None of Shankman’s campaign staff were injured.”

Click
. Sign-wavers outside a construction business.

“On the topic of protests, news has gotten out that Dozer is indeed Eric Ludlow, Gantry, a member of the Crew. Indeed, after last night’s fight and arrest, it was inevitable. Only police protection is keeping Humanity First protesters from picketing the Tollway repair site where the Crew is working to reopen the road as quickly as possible. They are settling for picketing the Crew’s business property.”

“So,” Rush quipped, “half the city’s protesting and the other half is leaving town?”

“It would seem so. And of course, with much of the CPD’s manpower being reserved for the next Green Man attack, goon vs. villain activity is spiking. And now, Astra.”

Click
. The room darkened for better viewing, and a drone’s eye-view image of last night’s battlefield came up, a digital clock in the lower corner counting up. The side of one of the buildings exploded outward, camera tracking on Astra and Dozer as they skidded across the parking lot. I wasn’t the only one who winced. Watchman came down on Dozer, and from there the footage was a series of fast-motion hits and screen freezes with digital notations; an analyst’s godlike after-action dissection of the brutal fight. It ended with a frozen shot of a prone Dozer.

“Astra and Watchman successfully completed their part of the operation,” Blackstone reported needlessly. “Then Astra saw this man in the crowd.”

The picture switched to a white, staring face caught in what looked like a mask-cam shot. The image split to show the same guy, the clearer image a shot of the hostage taken by Twist in the Daley Center attack.

Reese and Brian looked blank, Ozma thoughtful, but everyone else...Rush whistled. Seven started swearing.

“Detective Fisher has been studying our hypothetical teleporter’s MO. Based on the methods of entry and exit used in the courtroom and precinct attacks, he has concluded that Drop must be touching his targets, and may only teleport himself and others away — he cannot bring targets to him.

“Thus, in the Daley Center attack, he teleported himself and the Wreckers to the hall behind the courtroom, then went around and inserted himself in the audience section before the attack commenced. Attacking the precinct, it now appears likely that he teleported the Wreckers from a van on the street into the cell, and they returned to the van for their getaway.

“Last night, Astra spotted him and made a grievous tactical error. She tried to capture him, knowing that he could teleport others besides himself. The image on the left is a shot of her target from Rush’s helmet-cam in the moment before Astra grabbed him. Quite obviously, Astra was not able to handle what she found at the other end.”

Astra couldn’t handle —
She’d buried Seif-al-Din, taken down a
godzilla
, we’d just watched her and Watchman finish a far from one-sided beat-down on an absolute combat-monster.

“Do we know anything, yet?” Watchman asked. He hadn’t said a word until now, and kept flexing his fists like he wanted to meet whatever Astra couldn’t handle. Everyone looked at Blackstone, but I looked at Shelly.

The robot-girl was starting to seriously worry me. I knew her unfocused stare meant she was tapping the Internet plus every accessible or hackable signal source around — the way she’d hit every security camera on Michigan Avenue the day I’d been shot at. But she’d only taken a second, then; now she’d just sat through the entire show without blinking or responding to anyone around her.

She’d explained to me that she had completely downloaded herself into her current “prosthetic body,” that she wasn’t piloting it remotely because she didn’t live somewhere else or online — her brain was in there, protected inside a titanium-alloy sphere in her skull — but she was
wired
. Now all she’d say was she was “searching,” and she stayed that way until the rest of the team returned to base and we all went back to bed. She stayed that way now.

Blackstone looked her way too, shook his head.

“No. We do know now that it wasn’t a planned grab, but what this means from their side remains pure conjecture. We don’t know our enemy or their motives, and so can only guess at their methods or what they will do with her now that they have her.

“Eric Ludlow, Dozer, has invoked his Miranda Rights and is not giving us anything. Ozma,” he acknowledged the sun-haired goddess listening politely, “has reported that she cannot locate Astra using her mirrors. As I said last night, we are doing everything we can. We do have leads. Astra personally turned my attention to a group that may be behind the Wreckers, or at least a potential link to them. We are calling in
all
our resources, including some that we cannot field officially. That is
my
responsibility, however. The focus of this
team
must be elsewhere.”

Ignoring the round of protests, he brought up the Green Man’s leaf-face icon.

“The city may be coming apart, but the Guardian teams can handle the goon-on-villain action and, if need be, support the CPD in the case of further riots. This team must be ready for the next attack. Again, regarding yesterday,” he nodded to The Harlequin, “Quin believes that our new members couldn’t have made a better entrance, publicity-wise. Now when we make the formal announcement, the public will have already seen all of you in action.

“But although yesterday’s action can only be considered a success in the sense that we managed to prevent a high number of casualties, the attack has yielded us a great deal of information. We now have a much better understanding of our enemy.”

You could have heard a pin drop as the Green Man symbol changed to a drone’s-eye view of O’Hare.

“The first and most obvious commonality between the two attacks is the source: both attacks originated from a contained body of water: Potowatomi Lake and Lake O’Hare. Also, both attacks were aimed at transport centers — and ecologically, air transport is the most fuel-intensive and therefore most polluting method of transport there is. The second observation gives us a good idea of the Green Man’s targeting priorities, but we will not assume that he intends to restrict himself to such targets. The first observation provided our entry-point into understanding his nature.”

The picture changed again, this time to a thermal imaging shot of the airport. The clock in the corner of the frame unfroze and began fast-forwarding.

“This footage was recorded by a patrol drone that caught the start of the attack. You will observe the bottom right corner of the picture.”

The spot marked Lake O’Hare looked indistinguishably blue against the surrounding field, then a point of green appeared and spread to cover the lake. The green shifted to yellow, to orange, and finally to red before exploding outward, red at the edges, orange to yellow to green towards the center, but the lake stayed angry red. The red front of the attack met high energy opposition around the terminals (tagged for the heroes, including me), and we all watched as the lines stabilized, fluctuated, began to break towards the terminals and then died in a line spreading from the position marked by tags for Blue Fire and Ozma. Finally, the red heat-signature of the lake dropped to orange and continued to move back down the scale.

Blackstone froze the picture.

“The thermal recording of the attack confirms Chakra’s observations. She was able to psychically monitor the attack almost from its beginning. Chakra?”

She smiled back at him, turned her head to look at us. “The attack is not directed by the Green Man,” she said softly. “The attack
is
the Green Man. It is best to think of the trees and plants he grows and controls as the cells of his body. The lake at the center, which investigators have found choked into a steaming soup of algae and water plants afterwards, is his heart, the source of his power.”

Nobody said “What the hell?” or “You’re kidding.” They didn’t even blink. Riptide actually laughed.

“So next time we drop a load of Agent Orange in the water and that’s it?”

“Possibly a more thermal attack,” Blackstone corrected. “Although conclusions are preliminary, DSA researchers believe that chemical attacks would be ineffective against such robust growth. And of course we don’t want to poison the ground we’re fighting on.”

There were nods and suggestions around the table, a group of costumed people considering ways and means of attacking a plant-mind, which was just
weird
. Jamal saw my expression and flashed a quick
welcome to the game
smile.

“Hopefully,” Blackstone concluded, “we have a little while to prepare before the Green Man forces us to test conclusions again. In the meantime — ”