Gruefield 18 (Tarnished Sterling Omnibus)

by Robert McCarroll

  "So what are we going to do?" Ben asked.

  "You guys continue your current lines of inquiry. I'll track this shadow down." Dad stalked out of the room, his expression sending a shiver down my spine. For the first time in my life, I understood why people were terrified of him.

  "Why would Hypershadow hole up in the Bricks?" I asked.

  "It suits him," Donny said. "It's poorly lit. The occupancy rate is only seventy percent. People keep their heads down, and don't go out at night. Finding an abandoned building to operate out of is child's play. And it doesn't cost anything."

  "Is that all you're going on?"

  "No," Ben said. "We asked around about odd activity, and the clues seem to point to someone new operating in the area."

  "Do you have a suspect location?"

  "We were on our way to check it out when..." he gestured towards Donny.

  "You heard what Dad said," Donny said. "Keep up the investigation. Call in some backup and check it out."

  "Mister Thirty-Eight is practically an honorary member of the team, and he's a known shadow repellant," Nora said. I held out my phone to her. "He's your godfather. You make the call."

  "Fine." I dialed.

  "What time is it?" Jack asked groggily.

  "Late," I said. "We had another shadow attack, and Nora wants to use you as shadow repellant while we check out some leads on unrelated cases."

  "Is anyone hurt?"

  "Donny got a bit banged up, but the others don't look all that much worse for wear."

  "How bad is a bit?"

  "Held for observation. Just in case."

  "Okay, where do you want to meet me?"

  "How about May's Diner?"

  "I don't think May will appreciate me showing up again."

  "You paid for the table, didn't you?"

  "Yes."

  "You can always wait outside if you're uncomfortable. You'll probably beat us there."

  "That's just 'cause you two are slowpokes," Nora said.

  Jack didn't hear her and said, "All right. I'll be there."

  Luckily for Jack, May had given herself the night off and left the diner in the care of her niece. Once we'd met up, we left the oasis of chrome and light, heading for 6th and D. Ben pointed at the Northeast Corner where a four story brick building stood. The windows were covered with plywood. On the first floor, there was a mess of spray paint from layers and layers of graffiti. It had once been an apartment building with a few storefronts on the ground floor. From outward appearances, no one had used it since before I was born. Nora ran a quick lap around the building.

  "There's an unboarded third floor window in the back," she said. I nodded as we crossed the street. It didn't help, as no one was paying me any attention. In the back alley, the old, rotten litter was pushed up against the base of the building, leaving a relatively clear walkway down the middle. Nora pointed up at the patch of darkness high on the wall. As Jack flew up to take a peek inside, my thoughts went back to my dream. Rolling the possibilities around in my head, the only thing I came back to was Omicron's device. It couldn't be a coincidence, could it?

  Jack tapped my shoulder. "Are you headed up, or should I carry you?" I fired my line up at the window and scrambled up the wall. While it looked like I was running along the wall, it was more accurate to say I was fighting to avoid being dragged along the surface. Physics can be a harsh master, and the friction from scraping along brick and old plywood wasn't exactly healthy. I tumbled through the hole in the wall to find most of the group waiting for me. The creak of the aged floorboards didn't bode well.

  "Gone comatose again on us?" Nora asked.

  "No," I said. My eye adjusted to the light levels inside the darkened building, casting a gray pallor over the molding drywall and gaping voids that exposed rotting joists. "It's dark in here."

  "Thank you, captain obvious," Nora said.

  "Am I the only one with nightvision gear?"

  "No," Nora said, tapping her temple, "But we haven't found a model that Cupric won't fry." Ben cast Nora a look, and she patted him on the cheek. "I mean that in the nicest possible way."

  "Thirty-Eight?" I asked.

  "I usually bring a flashlight," Jack said.

  "Okay, let's split up - flashlight group and nightvision group. We look for signs of recent occupation. Keep in constant contact," I said. They nodded. Nora and I headed off to the left as Ben sparked up an electrical arc between his hands to illuminate his immediate area. It was a trick I hadn't seen him pull before. Jack seemed satisfied with the illumination, and didn't even reach for his own light as they headed in the opposite direction. The floor looked and felt too weak to put much stress on. I looked for nails. Specifically, lines of them which indicated beams under the floorboards. Even given the state of decay of the rest of the structure, the beams should be stronger than the span in between.

  "You look like your checking for traps, little brother," Nora said. "What are you afraid of?" In one of those moments of serendipity, the sound of splintering wood came from the other side of the building.

  "Damn rotten wood," Ben muttered over the comm.

  "That," I said.

  "You guys okay?" Nora asked.

  "Fine," Ben said. "But we're about to make more noise to free my foot from this floor." I ignored the splintering sounds as Jack tore out chunks to release Ben.

  "I found a stairwell," I said. "I'm going to check on the lower levels." Peering through the open doorway, I sighed. Then I coughed from the moldy air. Sagging, spotted sheet rock hung from the ceiling, draped in strips of ancient wallpaper like unraveling bandages. Half the risers were cracked, and maybe a quarter were missing entirely. The only sign that there'd once been a railing were the open sores in the wall where its moorings had torn free. I descended the center beam, keeping my weight off the weakened risers, or worse, the aged and sagging drywall of the ceiling below. All that passed through my mind was the image of plunging through the broken stairs, turning the mold impregnated gypsum below into a toxic cloud. I shook the image from my mind, even as it added plunging through the stairs below this one to the vivid picture.

  "This doesn't look like a place someone would willingly hole up," Nora said. She hadn't yet risked the stairs, not trusting the center beam to hold both of us.

  "It's even worse without a face mask," I said, stepping off the bottom of the stairs. The floor here looked less badly damaged than the third, though the ceiling sagged as ominously as that on the stairs. Even as I made that assessment, Nora appeared beside me.

  "Maybe we should take our potential trainees here," Nora said. "Give them the authentic Hero experience."

  "I had that same thought the last time I was crawling up a sewer pipe," I said. "The lower levels look more stable, but the staircase is a mess."

  "You might want to put a separator between those thoughts," Ben said. "For a moment I thought you were suggesting we try to get in from the sewers."

  "Sorry about that. Abandon the third floor, I don't think anyone's using it." I headed off down the hall. Here the walls were relatively intact, and there was enough structure to tell where the four apartments were on this floor. A cursory search showed no evidence of anything but rats and roaches inside. As I returned to the stairwell, Ben and Jack were completing their descent. It appeared that Jack decided it would be safer to carry Ben and glide down than risk the stairwell collapsing on them. The stairs down to the first floor were less badly damaged than those higher up, but massive patches of black mold marred the walls. In some places it was so thick that the layer of undisturbed spores hung like fuzz on fleece. "Try not to breathe," I said, making my way down.

  "What does he mean by - Oh dear God."

  The door at the bottom of the stairs was intact and closed. It creaked badly as I opened i
t. The puffs of mold spores it sent swirling through space were distinctly unwelcome. My lungs protested against the breath I was holding for far too long, but I knew I'd retch if I inhaled now. My eyes were watering and my lungs burned as I stepped away from the stairwell. The unwelcome, stale stench of overly damp wood accompanied my first breath.

  "This place is just wrong," Ben said as he stepped up beside me.

  "You're sure there was activity in this building?" Nora asked. "They weren't just playing a trick on you?"

  "This place is a public health hazard," Jack said.

  Something caught my eye - brown. More specifically, a line of color along the base of a door. "Turn off your lights," I said.

  "What?"

  "Just do it." Perplexed, they complied. I approached the line of brown and opened the door, letting the dim illumination spill out from behind it. "I'd call that a sign of activity," I whispered. I extended a fiber optic probe and peered behind the door, though I should have guessed what I'd find from its location. There was a staircase going down to the basement. Near the bottom, hanging from the ceiling was a bare incandescent bulb, glowing dimly. Someone had sprayed down the walls in fungicide, leaving the mold quite dead, though the walls were hopelessly stained. If this was Hypershadow's hideout, he was probably in the basement.

  I descended the stairs, the others not far behind me. The door at the bottom was locked, but that wasn't much of a barrier to me. As I slipped the fiber optic probe under the door, I realized we didn't really have a plan for what to do if we stumbled onto our teleporting speedster thief.

  The room I spied through the probe had concrete walls. The white paint was peeling badly. In places, the outer layer of concrete had spalled off, exposing a grid of rust stained reinforcing bars and cracked cement. Off by the left wall was cot on which lay a figure. His back was to us, though he shuddered every few seconds. Along the back wall was a weapon rack loaded with a distressing number of automatic weapons. On the right was a table with a lonely computer on it.

  "Single subject, left side, on a cot," I whispered. The others nodded as I retracted the probe and eased the door open.

  Trying to seize the guy on the cot proved to be a very bad idea. I've been shocked by quite a few electrical sources in my time. Everything from a cattle prod to a jolt from Ben. This was worse. I cried out as my spasming muscles were unable to release their grip on the young man's arm. Ben pried me off and pushed me away from the prone figure. I fell back and curled into a fetal position, coughing and sputtering. My eye blinked 'Rebooting' at me.

  Bleary, Dekker rolled over and looked at me. His pupils glowed electric blue, and his now purple irises were no longer round, instead favoring forked lightning bolts into the field of bright red capillaries. He blinked in confusion. "Help me," he pleaded.

  Dekker looked like he hadn't had anything to eat or drink since I'd been freed from the Imager. Periodic spasms shook him as the energies he'd absorbed still wracked his frame. He was too weak and dehydrated to even stand under his own power. Ben was able to help him sit up, but no one else was willing to risk contact, lest they take a shock like the one I'd received. As my eye finally finished its diagnostic and determined nothing was broken, I was able to stand myself.

  "I take it this isn't the guy we were expecting?" Jack asked.

  "He is one we've been looking for. This is Dekker."

  "So the activity was Morlocks?" Nora asked.

  "Can I have some water?" Dekker asked.

  "We don't normally carry that around the city," Nora said.

  "Please," Dekker said. "If you help me, I can help you, just don't let the police know you've found me."

  "Why not?" Jack asked, indignant.

  "Victor has a contact on the police force. I don't know who, but if he finds out, you won't be able to get anything from me."

  "We need to keep this quiet," I said. Dekker fell over as another spasm rolled through him. "And sneak mister Dekker into Vanguard."

  "You're going to take his word for it?" Jack asked.

  "No, but it fits a pattern of evidence we've been seeing lately. Everything from the guns to the jailbreak. Not impossible without someone on the inside, but a lot easier with one."

  Nora nodded in silent agreement. Jack pursed his lips but relented.

  "How did you get here?" Ben asked, sitting Dekker back up again.

  "Steam tunnels. They run all the way from the campus to the fourth street steam plant and under this building."

  "The same way you escaped 722 Walker," I said. Dekker glanced at me and nodded. The blue pools of light shed from his eyes were about the size of my palm at this distance, and mostly drowned out by the light in the room. Only the drastic movement from his nodding brought them to my attention. I ignored them. "Thirty-eight, I think it would be best if we opened one of the entrances on the first floor. We'll also need a truck to move this arsenal to a more secure location. I don't want to be responsible for one of the local gangs stumbling onto it." Dekker spasmed again, but remained upright.

  I left Ben to keep an eye on Dekker and looked around the basement. It looked like a supply cache, not set up for long term inhabitation. Since Morlocks were members of the general population, they simply returned to their civilian lives as long as they remained anonymous. Stockpiles like this one had to be for gearing up to go on a mission. There was evidence aplenty, each item a potential lead in of itself.

  I saw a lot of picking through little details in my future. Mini-Uth-sk laughed in my brain.

  Part 16

  Morning came with annoying alacrity. It was Thursday, a week ago, the Morlocks had taken hostages at 722 Walker. I was slumped in a chair near the end of the mess hall table. I waved off a few ill-timed jokes about me being catatonic again. It was just old-fashioned physical exhaustion. Xiv hung over the railing of the balcony on the second floor. In the process of opening up the mess hall into the second floor, the walls around the sleeping quarters had been taken out. The original plan had been to put the walls back in, but someone had decided to leave them out. The only thing the balcony did was give people a good view of the mess hall and the entryway from their sleeping quarters. Most of us anyway. I'd picked a room behind the stairs to the third floor. It let me wander around the base in the dead of night without bothering anyone.

  Seeing my expression change, Xiv wandered down the wall and over to where I sat. He gave me a quizzical look. "It's nothing you did," I said. I woke my wrist computer and logged into the base's network. I queried the door logs for the past two days. I did not like what I saw. I was distracted from the implications by Ixa's arrival. Closing the screen, I sat up. I gave Ixa a smile and she was courteous enough to return it. "What brings you to the base so early?" We reserved her a room, but Ixa never slept here.

  "Business," Ixa said. "It's a bit of a mess in town at the moment. I'm sure you've noticed."

  I lost my smile. Her biting tone was never a good portent. Fortunately, Xiv interrupted the silence before it got awkward. "I got caught up!" he said. "Can I help out?"

  "Let me take a look at that eye," Ixa said. Xiv turned his face to give her a better view. The swelling had gone, leaving just discoloration. "All right, you can tag along with someone today. Let's figure out what everyone's doing before I decide who, okay?" Xiv nodded. Ixa tousled his hair and sat down.

  Jennifer's voice came from behind me. "You know, your habit of cooking breakfast has sort of spoiled us. I was kind of expecting it."

  "I can't be the only one around here who knows how to cook," I said. Well, Xiv didn't, and Pam showed she didn't. Nora certainly can't handle anything outside the microwave. Nick had little incentive to learn. Ben seemed to avoid the kitchen on purpose. Could Jennifer or Stephanie? I don't know.

  "I nominate fearless leader for the role of team cook," Jennifer said. Ixa waved the su
ggestion off dismissively. Slowly, the rest of the team filtered in. Before we started to review what we knew or recently discovered, Arch Larson sheepishly entered the mess hall. He had the expression of a man ascending the steps to the gallows. It silenced the already muted chatter and drew attention to him. Attention he clearly dreaded. Steeling himself, Arch stood up, but words seemed to fail him.

  "Something the matter?" I asked.

  "Yes... No..." Arch said. "I mean... I have something to confess." The puzzled looks he got caused Arch to visibly tense up. "Perhaps confess isn't the right word. What I mean to say is that, after working here and learning more than a few personal identities from among the team, it seems inconsiderate to keep this a secret from you guys."