Gruefield 18 (Tarnished Sterling Omnibus)

by Robert McCarroll

  I didn't want to face their recriminations. So instead of turning towards the residential dome, I continued on to the command center. Climbing to the top, I set myself down in the comfortable chair. The feeds had been allowed to go dark. I left them that way. I was hiding from the world, though half my brain was denying it. It spewed rationalizations at the part of me that dwelled on what had happened. The memories of Xiv's blue eye, Donny's hospital bed and the haggard look of Jennifer trying to recover from her near death tumble were on a constant loop. I'd attacked them, even if I hadn't strictly been in control at the time.

  I shoved the excuses aside and wallowed in my guilt.

  It was Stephanie who found me. I'd slid into an undignified slouch in the chair and barely moved since. "Busy day?" she asked. It was unfair the way her accent melted in your ear and made you want to hear everything she said.

  "Not for me, I was pretty much a bystander." I watched as she unfolded one of the chairs and sat on it backwards. Resting her arms on the back of the chair, she looked at me. "I'm sorry I'm a screw-up," I said.

  "Now who called you that?"

  "It's been fairly obvious."

  "So you're going to sit around up here feeling sorry for yourself?"

  "After what I did..."

  "At worst it sounds like you got out-witted by someone we know to be a genius," Stephanie said. My gaze moved to the floor.

  "I should have spoken up sooner."

  "Maybe. But hindsight provides a vastly different perspective." She coughed. Whether it was real, or just to draw my attention up from the floor, I don't know. "I was also expecting to be asked to take a look at that shoulder by now."

  "I didn't want to impose."

  "Now you're just making excuses."

  "Maybe."

  "Come on. We're going down to the infirmary, and we're going to see about fixing it." I stood and tried to follow her, but Stephanie stepped behind me and put a hand between my shoulder blades to nudge me along. I guess she was worried I'd stop following.

  The infirmary was on the first floor of the command center dome. While fairly well stocked, it didn't carry any medication that required a prescription. There was no staff, and no one on the team was actually a doctor. So the facility was overkill, but it was mandated by government regulation. The most we used it for was storing a cache of Xiv's self-donated blood. I hopped on one of the exam tables.

  Since even most of the people who wear hero suits can't produce the modulated electrical signal to change the elasticity of the fabric, there was a small tab to do it for us. It was usually located at the back of the neck where the tag on a normal shirt went. Stephanie toggled it while she was slipping my sling over my head. She pulled the collar down far enough to expose my injured shoulder. Aside from some light bruises which might have been from just about anything, the shoulder looked normal. Now that I think about it, those bruises were from the car crash, not dislocating the joint.

  Having been on the receiving end of her magic more times than I could recall, I lay there and let her work. Thankfully, injuries like this didn't require a sacrifice of blood. In short order, she banished the pain from my shoulder. My arm was a bit stiff from having been in the same position for far too long, but other than that it it was back to normal. In a spurt of exuberance, I put my newly fixed arm around Stephanie's waist and pulled her onto me. She laughed and put a finger to my lips.

  "Not now, not here," she said. I let go and she hopped down. The infirmary was awfully public, since anyone with access to the base could wander in here. I fit my suit back into place as she wandered over to the door. "Now are you going to join the rest of us?" I shrugged and hopped off the table. There was really no point in hiding from the team. We headed down the hall towards the residential dome and opened the blast door.

  "Boo!" Xiv said, hanging down from above the doorway. He was wearing a white plastic skull mask, thicker than the sort you'd find at a costume shop and of a more rigid material.

  "I don't think this helps disguise you any," I said, taking the mask off him. He merely laughed and bounded off through the atrium. Before we had even crossed to the low wall marking the edge of the mess hall, I could tell something was amiss.

  "Heeeeyy..." Donny was calling in that tone younger brothers use when you're tormenting them. He was trying to remove another of the skull masks from Pam's face, but she held him at arm's length. I was somewhat surprised to see that Pam had the greater reach. Since she was by far the stronger, this made Donny's efforts fairly futile. Nora ran up and slipped one of the masks on me. I caught her wrist before she rushed off.

  "That's enough," I said. I took the skull mask off my face. "I'm guessing these are disposable spares so the original doesn't have to be risked? Give them back."

  "We were just having fun," Nora said. Pam just shrugged and handed the mask she had back to Donny. Clutching the prize protectively, he rushed over to me to get the two I had and the stash Nora carried.

  "I've been on the receiving end of your kind of fun before," I said. "I thought you'd grown out of it." Nora glared at me.

  "I leave for a couple of minutes and things get out of hand?" Stephanie asked in her serious voice. She sighed as Donny snagged the last of his spare masks from Ben.

  "Oh come on you two," Nora said. "It was harmless."

  "You only say that because you never had to put up with it," I said. I let go of her wrist. Thankfully she didn't try to resume her torment of Donny.

  "Look at the kind of welcome I get," Donny said. "Do you welcome all your new teammates like this?"

  "No," Jennifer said. "Sometimes it's weeks of cruel nicknames."

  "Or kneeing them until they puke blood," Pam said.

  "That's an exaggeration. I only kneed him once!"

  "I take it the board signed off on your membership?" I asked.

  "Yeah," Donny said. "I don't think hazing should be a tradition here."

  "It's not. Those were teething pains. You're our first new member since formation." Pam raised a hand. "Trainees don't count. And besides, our charter hadn't been fully approved yet."

  "How long do I have to stay a trainee? I'm the oldest member of the team."

  "Two years," I said. "Since you already passed sixteen the minimum age doesn't come into play. It's law not policy." Pam folded her arms but didn't argue the point. Donny dumped his armload of masks back into a cardboard box. "Have you picked a room yet?"

  "He picked the empty one on the girls' side," Nora said.

  "My choices were by the stairs or by the stairs," Donny said. "So I went with the one closer to the library."

  "We have a library?" Jennifer asked. I pointed to one of the doors out of the mess hall. The plaque next to it read 'Library'. "Huh. I should probably take a better look around one of these days."

  Part 22

  Donny seemed rather inclined to shrug off the revelations regarding the shadow attacks with a flippant remark that we'd gotten into worse fights before. In particular he mentioned when he broke his arm when he was eight. He seemed to remember it differently than I did. There were only so many bedrooms in the house, and Jeremy was getting too old to stay in our parents' room. They'd moved a bunk bed into my room and were setting up to move Jeremy into Donny's room. We got into a fight over who got which bunk. A fight I'd been winning until Donny bent the wooden frame of the bed to dump me off and ended up bringing the whole thing down. He broke his arm in the collapse. When the nurse at the hospital asked Dad what happened, our immediate reaction had been to point our fingers at each other and cry 'he started it'. I still remember Dad's exasperated sigh and the nurse scribbling something on her clipboard. We ended up with two normal beds and almost no floorspace in our room.

  I wondered if I needed someone to be mad at me to justify my guilt and hiding away from the team. They s
eemed to have put the blame for the whole matter on Omicron. It pissed me right off. I irrationally raged at them for not being angrier at me as my analytical voice lectured about culpability and intent. The back corner of my mind laughed at me. A mocking, heartless laughter. I shook the thought out of my head, but it merely tumbled back to the shadows.

  "PCN," I said. It was so out of context to the banter going on around the table that I got a few odd looks. Those nearer the other end ignored me.

  "The crappy news station?" Jennifer asked.

  "Dekker said the Morlocks have a safe house at the old PCN station on First. Has anyone checked it out?"

  "Uh, no," Donny said. "He told us and Icerazor, and we've been a bit busy. Besides wouldn't Serar have warned them that the site was compromised?"

  "If they were using it, there could be some indication of where they went, or what they're up to. We should see if we can find it."

  "Did it occur to you that they might be on the run?"

  "No." Before Donny got a smug look on his face, I continued. "Because these people have explosives, automatic weapons, explosive weapons and a willingness to use them. I can't afford to assume they've been sent scurrying if they decide to go on the offensive instead."

  "You can't afford it? These guys have really done a number on your head." He ignored my narrowed gaze. "Listen to your tone and what you're saying for a moment."

  "That doesn't make me wrong."

  "You are, however, on limited duty for that very reason," Stephanie whispered. I sighed. I wasn't going to be able to make it through the weekend at this rate. She raised the volume of her voice to be audible to the rest of the table. "There are some other things we need to catch up on. In addition to whether or not we want to house Irvin Keyes..."

  "I need more time to think about it," Pam said.

  "Okay, no problem," Stephanie said, moving on, "I have information on the whereabouts of the Rothbart Amulet."

  "You do?" Donny asked.

  "While I was looking for Subject Sixteen's supplier of arcane alloys, I stumbled onto word that someone is trying to sell the amulet."

  "Someone?"

  "Either Hypershadow or his fence," Stephanie said. "Since it's not worth all that much as a piece of jewelry, they had to look for buyers in the market for magical talismans. I took the liberty of setting up a meet as a potential buyer. That was before I knew Jennifer was out of commission."

  "Yeah, I should practice working without a focus so this crap doesn't happen again," Jennifer said. "So what's the plan then?"

  "We don't have assurances that Hypershadow will even personally be at the meet. A fence makes more sense. Just in case, however, we should be prepared."

  "Speed and teleportation," Pam said. "Does this guy have anything else?"

  "Not that we're aware of," Donny said.

  "Have you got Photovolt on board?" Pam asked.

  "Not yet," Stephanie said.

  "Has anyone even seen him since he unmasked himself?" A few glances around the table and the ongoing silence answered her question.

  "We still have his contact information," Stephanie said. "I'll find where he went."

  "We're back to the question of neutralizing his speed," Jennifer said. "No offense, but Blue isn't exactly a powerhouse. If he's there and he bolts, it becomes a fight on his terms. First thing I was taught was you never let the bad guys dictate the terms of the fight if you can avoid it."

  "Other than pointing out what we already know," I said. "Does anyone have any ideas?" Silence fell over the mess hall again.

  "This is going to turn out badly, isn't it?" Ben asked.

  "How much would it cost to just buy the thing and let them go?" Donny asked. Disbelieving gazes turned on him. "If we can't reliably capture the guy, and we're more or less on damage control, wouldn't the least destructive option be to pay him off?"

  "I can just see the board's reaction to a purchase request to buy stolen goods," I said. "Wasn't that Nick's idea anyway?"

  "Where do you think I got it?"

  "It does, however go outside the pale of responsible behavior," Stephanie said. "Paying off a criminal to cover up the actions of another team..."

  "I'm the last person to advocate covering up for the Elementals," Donny said. "But, which is worse - paying off Hypershadow, or failing to return the amulet to its rightful owners?"

  "You speak as if those are our only options," Jennifer said.

  "Present another one then."

  "We don't have the money to buy it," Stephanie said. "We're talking seven figures. Nobody with that kind of cash on hand is going to back that plan."

  "What makes this thing so valuable?" Pam asked.

  "Because the magics used to create it have not been rediscovered since they were lost," Stephanie said. "As such, it represents an almost unique ability."

  "Seven figures sounds cheap then."

  "It's also stolen. That depresses the resale value."

  "So basically it's got a sale price on par or greater than the cost of this base," I said. "Buying it back is not an option."

  "That puts us back to square one. How do we approach this?" The silence came back.

  "Crap," Ben said, summing up the general consensus.

  I spent the night perusing sidekick applicants while everyone else got to sleep. I flagged a few more potential candidates, trying not to seethe. I hadn't felt this frustrated over Mini-Uth-sk's proddings since the early weeks after the implant had been forced into my skull. To have sleep dangled in front of me as a sick joke... it made me want to hurt somebody. I suppressed that feeling and shoved it back to the dark reaches of my mind. It was getting crowded back there. Feeling sorry or angry wasn't going to help any. Running off without a team member present was likely to get me booted back off active duty. As Doctor Lindenbaum had made painfully clear, there wasn't that much left in my life.

  "I need a hobby," I said. As I was the only person in my darkened room, there was no response. There was plenty of ambient light for my fake eye to enhance and show me the bare walls. Aside from a closet of clothes and toiletries in the bathroom, it would be easy to mistake the space for a guest room. Stephanie's room had more books than our woefully understocked library. Jennifer's was a shrine to herself, plastered in Fund publicity posters. Nick's kind of resembled a storage room with boxes of powdered beef blood and custom protein mix. But even he had put a few personal mementoes on the shelves. My room at the hideout was equally sparse, the one at the house too. The house. Why didn't I think of it as home? Because home had been pulled down by Michelangelo.

  I asked my eye for the time. Three in the morning. Who was up? Maybe Jack, he favored night patrols. Dad had become more of a daytime guy as he'd taken on the compliance officer role. I really didn't have anything worth bothering them with anyway. I crawled out of bed and put on ordinary street clothes. Part of my mind called it 'dressing as Travis' as if it were just another mask. My shoulders slumped as the analytical part of my mind agreed with that hurtful voice. Pocketing my eye patch, I shambled downstairs.

  The rec room was behind the kitchen. Most of the time, it was an abstract thing, a door I looked at but never saw. That door sat open, with a dim glow spilling out of it. I stepped over and looked inside. The room ran along the back wall of the residential dome. The inside of the curve had shelves for recreational options not yet acquired. At the far end was a pool table with neither cues nor balls, ringed in folding chairs. The near end had an open space with a handwritten sign that read 'Suggestions for this space' over an open cardboard box. The middle had three couches in beige microfiber around a painfully small television. The set was the source of the light.

  Ben glanced in my direction but returned to his slouched position. I sat down on one of the other couches. The movie on the set appeared to
be 'Ranger Roy's Last Ride', a film from the tail end of Roy Byrd's career. known mostly for being stunningly bad.

  "I muted it so I wouldn't disturb anyone," Ben said.

  "I didn't even know anyone was up," I said.

  "Just run of the mill insomnia," Ben said. I bit back a couple of less than polite comments about my own condition. None of it was Ben's fault, so there was no point in making him feel bad. I changed the subject instead.