The rattle of the freight elevator was somehow soothing as it sank to the main level of Gruefield 18. Passing into the main hall, I looked right. The old lead-based institutional green paint had been replaced by a bright titanium white, but the pattern of pipes and conduits running the hall remained consistent. Only the bundle of bright blue Ethernet cables looked new. I wondered what kind of research they were doing in the launchers, but pushed the thought aside. Having a real research facility was better cover than a fake one, and it didn't matter much what they were working on.
I entered the residential dome a few strides behind Arch Larson. He had dark hair, glasses, and a rather punchable face. He didn't notice my presence. He was our 'technical adviser'. He wasn't actually much help in that department. He only realized I was there when he turned to see why the door hadn't closed right away.
"Oh, hey," he said, shoving a clipboard in my face. "We need a signature on some procurements your team requested." I took the clipboard from him and skimmed the forms.
"Where are we going to put a television that size, and how are you going to get it into the base?" I asked.
"The rec room," Arch said. "And we've already run it through with a mock-up. It will fit. Miss Pain alone should be able to move it in without any problem." I handed the clipboard back to him.
"I can't sign this." I moved past him towards the dining hall.
"Is there something wrong with the form? I know it's not a matter of budget, I've checked."
"I can't sign it because I've been removed from active duty. I can't sign anything."
"That's news to us," Icerazor said, looking up from the table. His left arm was in a sling to remind him that moving it would hurt his cracked ribs.
"I was coming here to tell you all," I said. I looked about the room. Ixa was leaning against the wall, looking half asleep. Icerazor was tutoring Pam in remedial college math. Being a street gang leader didn't have the most stringent requirements, and her educational background wasn't the greatest. But from what I gather the New Port Arthur Community College had lower academic standards than Leyden Academy. I reminded myself not to pick on Pam, even mentally. She was trying to better herself, and could punch me through a wall. Maybe not the reinforced concrete of the missile silo. I'd probably go splat instead. Jennifer was amusing herself with some game on her phone, and Xiv was watching over her shoulder.
"Who took you off active duty?" Ixa asked.
"The Fund shrink," I said. "I was less than cooperative, and he retaliated."
"Or you were semi-catatonic, and he doesn't think you're better," Jennifer said, not looking up.
"So what does that mean for the team?" Icerazor asked.
"It's all spelled out in the charter," I said. "I know it's thicker than that textbook, so I'm not surprised no one read it."
"You forgot the part where it's also dwarf star dense legalese," Pam said.
"Anyway, post of team lead passes to another member with a leadership endorsement on their license. In this case, there's only Ixa, so we don't have to hold an election."
"Gee, thanks," Ixa said. She pursed her lips before giving way to a frown. "Tell me it's only temporary."
"When the shrink reinstates me to normal duties, we can either leave you in the role, transition back to me, or hold another election."
"Fine," Ixa said. She glared at the clipboard Arch held out to her. "I'm not signing that. I don't want my name on any expenditures."
"Seriously?" Arch asked.
"Yes, seriously. Now, as I was going to tell the Fearless Leader before the job landed on me," Ixa said, "The board said that Subject sixteen is, quote, 'one of ours', end quote. That means we get first crack at bringing him in. I don't know how they allot bad guys, but he's only ever tangled with us, so that assessment is probably accurate."
"You get a new title and suddenly you're extra-businesslike," Icerazor said.
"We don't know how fast he heals, just that he was wounded when last spotted. The bar that wounded him came from the device he'd been working on. And it is made of an arcane alloy not available on the open market. Finding out where he got the material is our best bet for tracing him. Also, someone had to rent the space they had it in from the college. I have more contacts on the market for the strange, so I'll try to run down his supplier. Miss Pain will find out who was renting the space."
"Now?" Jennifer asked.
"Sooner rather than later."
"Stamp," Jennifer said, "You know the college better than I do, I could use a hand." Something in her voice told me she didn't want Pam spending unsupervised time with Nick. I should have been angry at the pettiness of it, but I couldn't work up the indignation. Pam, for her part, simply shrugged and packed up her work. Still, mere jealousy was better than brawling. If any of us could break this base, it was those two.
"What do you want me to do?" Xiv asked.
"I want to keep you in reserve in case someone calls for help," Ixa said. Xiv nodded, but disappointment crossed his face. Ixa saw it, but didn't say anything more. The three girls headed out and I took a seat at the table.
"Happy birthday," Nick said.
"What?"
"It's the fifteenth, isn't it?"
I let out a long sigh. "Yes."
"Got any plans?"
"Not really, I'd forgotten entirely about it."
"I may not have the kinds of connections your family does, but I do have friends in low places." Nick pulled out a couple of pieces of paper and slid them along the table towards me. They were tickets. "They're good for any of the Sludge Rats home games," he said. "They'll seat you somewhere along the sidelines."
"They're the losingist team in the Midwest, if not the country."
"They have to live down to their name somehow."
"Thanks."
I wish Nick hadn't brought up the whole birthday issue. I'd have been able to go through the rest of the day in blissful ignorance. It wasn't the day that was the problem, but with Dad planning the festivities, well, that wasn't exactly his forte. It was not terribly uncommon for Donny and I to end up with the same event covering both of us, since he was born a mere fifty-one weeks after I was. Just knowing it was a codename event in Sterling Towers said it all. I should expect something closer to a business conference than a real celebration.
Dad was in his usual red and gold. Nora had her light purple 'Blue Streak' outfit with it's black censor box over the mouth. She had an odd sense of humor. But Donny had picked up his new outfit. It was clear he was wearing a tuxedo jacket and slacks over a standard hero suit. The bow tie looked like a pre-tied breakaway collar. He carried a silver headed walking stick and wore a white domino mask. Being two hundred years old, and made for the first Baron Mortis, the skull mask that would be passed on later probably wasn't going to fit perfectly. I had no doubt he planned to keep the domino mask on under it as a precaution. Ixa did the same thing, for pretty much the same reasons.
"I have to admit, I had doubts you could pull it off," Nora said. Donny just smiled his wide, toothy grin. We picked up Xiv and Cupric in the lobby of Sterling Towers. I was about to ask why Ben was there, but the analytical part of my mind rattled off reasons. Nora's boyfriend, my teammate, and, officially at least, my sidekick. After the original Cupric died, someone had to sign the paperwork. His green outfit was covered in copper tracery that helped channel the electricity he generated to his fingertips. He'd swapped the original full face mask for Cupric's domino mask.
The bulk of the lobby was one giant security checkpoint, but we were able to swipe through the Fund Members line and avoid most of the hassle. Well, the guards did harass us about why Donny didn't match his file image. I got the impression they were only doing it to avoid being called out for letting it slide.
Sterling Towers was a trio of buildings connected
by a network of skywalks with a memorial plaza on the roof of the lobby that spilled over to where the foundations of a forth building would have sat. There never was a forth building, but the design was meant to remind people of those who'd been lost in the line of duty. We took the elevator up tower three. It emerged from the lobby to climb the outside of the building.
The sun was starting to sag in the sky, glimmering off the iridescent waves of the 'rainbow river'. It turned the white paint of the Shining Future Arch a gold-red. They'd originally intended the weight of the bridge to be borne by the impressive middle arch. When construction was almost complete, one of the civil engineers discovered a flaw in the original math. They ended up building two suspension towers to hold up the arch that held up the road deck. It ended up with the highest tower height to span length ratio of any bridge in the world. The rush job made it too easy to get to the tops of the towers, leading to its status as a favored spot for suicides. There was talk of building yet another bridge to link New Port Arthur to the new developments in Gruefield.
"You're awfully quiet," Ben said. Apparently he'd missed the part where I'd gotten sent to the doctor over being non-responsive. Ruminating on the city wasn't nearly as bad.
"Don't have anything to say," I said. On the thirty first floor, the elevator doors opened. A neatly lettered hand-written sign read 'Special Event : Room 31-304'. It said a lot about the community. Even within our headquarters we were circumspect about the most banal of things. Staring at the sign, I paused. Something about the format of the room number clicked in the back of my mind. The rest of the group took a few strides past before noticing I'd stopped.
"Something the matter?" Dad asked.
"Where is tower zero?" I asked.
"What are you talking about?" Donny asked. I pointed to the sign.
"The room number format. Floor, tower, room. When Stamp joined the team I met her in lab nineteen zero forty-six. Where is tower zero?"
"Are you sure you didn't just misinterpret the format?" Donny asked.
"Tower zero is in a parallel demiplane constructed to minimize the collateral damage should anything catastrophic occur with the materials stored there," Dad said. "We don't have the resources to construct another."
"Wait, there really is a tower zero?" Ben asked.
"Why the big secret?" Nora asked.
"No secret," Dad said, "It just never came up. It's used for storage of incredibly dangerous artifacts, and work of a sensitive nature." He looked at the incredulous stares some of us were giving him. I'm not sure what my expression was. "You have two magic users on your team, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the fund would make use of every resource available. Even the non-technological ones."
"You remembered a room number from almost a year ago?" Ben asked.
"Some details just stick," I said.
"Can we get going?" Donny asked. "We have a party to get to." I took one more look at the sign before we set off. I honestly couldn't think of what would be a more appropriate label. We proceeded down a hallway with green carpets and plain white walls. We found a pair of plain wooden doors bearing the appropriate room number. Nora was first through. No surprise there.
The room extended through into the floor above, with a balcony along the exterior wall. A discreet stairway connected the balcony to this floor. The sight of the floor to ceiling windows beyond made me nervous. I reminded myself that they were truly one-way. From the outside, Sterling Towers looked like gleaming pillars of silver. The two layers of armored glass and the vacuum gap between them only made the building more secure against entry and eavesdropping. This was a fortress disguised as an office building.
On the wall opposite the balcony was a gallery of photographs. I didn't recognize most of them. As they were grouped by five year sets, I guessed that they were the previous Community Fund Board members. The most recent group included two faces that were represented in the assembled crowd. I personally wouldn't have invited either Neutrino or Torquespiral. I couldn't help but compare what they looked like now to the younger pair I'd seen when hooked into the imager.
Neutrino's only difference was a loss of muscle mass. He remained in his hero attire. His face and hair hadn't changed an iota. The man was in his nineties but easily looked younger than his former sidekick. Having never bothered to maintain a secret identity, Berthold Edgars had retired from active service when the bad guys started targeting families. He'd put on weight around his middle, and his toupee still failed to convincingly substitute for his absent hair. He wore a plain gray suit. His cane was a warped piece of wood that almost made a corkscrew.
A grin drew across Torquespiral's face and he welcomed us warmly. Xiv gave him a hug. I scanned the crowd for people I recognized. Among those I did not expect, I spied Arch Larson chatting up Omegaburn. Omegaburn was quite literally a fiery redhead in an orange and yellow flame pattern suit. I don't know her that well, she worked mostly out of the southeast of the country. I still had no idea why Arch was invited. In the far corner of the room, staring out at the bridge, I almost overlooked a familiar sigil. His cape only came down to the middle of his back, and bore a solid square inside a hollow diamond. He never did tell me if it meant anything. Wolfjack still dressed in yellow, rust brown and gray. It looked hideous. I'd trained alongside him a couple of times when Dad had been forced to leave town on business. He had to be old enough to have moved on to a Class three license by now. It didn't look like he was any less antisocial now than he was then. Why had he bothered to show up?
I walked over to where Wolfjack was standing, somewhat surprised to see he was now taller than me. How long had it been since we'd last met? I can't say we'd ever really met. The only visible part of the person inside the costume was what little showed through the yellow, wedge-shaped lenses of his goggles. He glanced in my direction.
"I remember you being taller," Wolfjack said.
"And I remember you being less glum."
"I made the mistake of looking myself up online."
"There's a reason you should never do that."
"My Hero Watchers entry is three lines long - and they got my powers wrong." Wolfjack sighed. "They said I can fly."
"In their defense, falling up looks a lot like flight."
He made a noncommittal grunt of some sort. "They have a whole book on you."
"I'm sure that's an exaggeration," I said.
"Not by much."
Silence fell and our conversation died there. I wandered off to try to disappear in the room. Leaving was pretty much out of the question. Going unnoticed as the purported guest of honor wasn't easy. Donny appeared to be reveling in the attention. He was welcome to it. There wasn't anyone I really wanted to talk to. Though, the more I thought about it, the more I realized I had no idea who I'd have invited.
Nora's hand landed on my shoulder. I almost threw her, but caught myself before doing anything more than tensing up. "I got a question for you, as our resident expert on the charter."
"You mean the only person who read it?"
"Either way, when a certain someone and I go off to college at the start of the academic year - what happens?"
"Your status changes to inactive with regards to the team. We either operate with a reduced roster or propose new recruits to the board for approval."
"How anticlimactic," Nora said.
Part 10
The problem with gift givers is that often they end up feeling that in order to be generous what they give has to be valuable to the giver. When your social circle includes families way above your wealth level, this makes April an awful month. Not because they're giving gifts in April, but because the IRS comes looking for the taxes due on what had been given previously. My little hideout that Jack organized last year forced me to borrow money to pay off the tax man. And then the city had come along and asked about the pr
operty taxes based on a gratuitously inflated assessment. I can't afford to be the recipient of that kind of generosity again.
Fortunately, it seemed that Dad got out the message to not bankrupt us with generosity. This did leave a lot of people fairly clueless. I told myself I didn't care, but parts of me were disappointed. I gagged those voices and pretended to be happy despite the crushing boredom grinding through my skull. Soon I can just say 'no more parties' and not have to go through any more of this. But Dad wanted to be a dad again, even if just for the one day. It didn't hurt to let him have that much.
One box that showed up skeeved me right out. It was wrapped in black paper and tied with red ribbon. The box was two inches cube and looked like a miniature caricature of a gift. The bold, strong, blocky handwriting was familiar enough, even if it didn't spell out who it had come from. "How did Doctor Omicron know it was my birthday, and why is he sending me a present from his prison cell?" The question silenced the room fairly quickly. Those who knew who I was talking about exchanged uncomfortable glances. Those who didn't, picked up the cues readily enough.
Gruefield 18 (Tarnished Sterling Omnibus) Page 73
