Gruefield 18 (Tarnished Sterling Omnibus)

by Robert McCarroll

  I ran through the tests again. The numbers all came out in the same ball park.

  "Question for you," Rinaldi said. "Are you running the laps or flying the laps?"

  "Running," I said.

  "How about you try flying them."

  "The few times I've managed to fly have been purely by accident," I said. "I don't know how."

  Rinaldi stood there in silence for a few moments. "Think back to those moments and try to recreate what you did. Since you have flown, you have to be able to do so again."

  "Thanks," I said, my sarcasm not well-disguised. I ran my mind through the panic-scrambled memories of the previous times I'd parted from the Earth. Launching myself forward, I struck the wall before I realized it was time to turn. The loud snap was not an encouraging sound.

  "Are you all right?"

  "Better than your wall," I said. "I cracked the cement board."

  "That's okay. How about, you give yourself more space and try it again?" Rinaldi asked.

  I made my way to a corner of the chamber and faced the opposite. With the hardware in the center of the room, I focused on the upper corner at the far side. I launched myself towards it and tried to stop short of actually hitting something. I came to a halt over the middle of the room. I soon landed atop the equipment I'd been trying not to hit.

  "This is a bit embarrassing," I said, rolling off my head and standing up.

  "How hurt are you?"

  "I'm not," I said. "All I've wounded is my pride."

  "All right. We've picked up a fairly high velocity, and that was with you trying to stop," Rinaldi said. "You definitely need to practice."

  "If I do, will that lower my premiums?"

  "You currently turn into a living projectile that can shrug off colliding with cement board," Pekkanen said. "Proving you can control it, that will mitigate your individualized risk."

  "I'll take that as a yes," I said. As the tests went on, it became apparent that visible light was what shut down the shadow effects. Ultraviolet and infrared had no effect on the shadow. It was almost anticlimactic how little change we actually detected. My strength didn't change, even though I could take more of a hit. The ability to see in the dark was nice, but I already had better than that from my artificial eye. I didn't mention the claws of shadowstuff. I'd seen them tear through psychic constructs, but the more destructive potential I had, the higher my new premiums were going to be.

  Part of my mind laughed at the rationalization of why I didn't want to test them. The Community Fund covered my premiums, since I couldn't afford even a fraction of them before, when I had no powers. The whole process of being examined and measured was making me uncomfortable, and the more I told them about, the more tests I'd be put through. I kept my hands balled up in fists as much as I could and hoped no one noticed the claws. I didn't want to know if I could claw through stone or steel, it all seemed horribly bestial. It came from the same part of me that didn't care how fast I could fly. That part of me didn't want to admit that I'd manifested, that I was no longer the normal one. Was I ever the normal one?

  "So, in short," Horton was saying, "Your weakness is a flashlight."

  "Normal flashlights don't put out the brightness required to deprive him of his abilities," Rinaldi said. "A halogen floodlight, maybe, but not a flashlight." The BHA bureaucrats tucked their notes away, and we headed out of the building.

  The day didn't look up when I went through the mail. I took the bad news up to Leyden Heights. Before this past year, I had rarely headed up to the wealthy neighborhood, but after a school year at Leyden Academy, the trip had become fairly mundane. I wasn't headed to school, I was headed to Jack's place. I did get changed into civilian clothes first. Jack Fowler might be Travis Colfax's godfather, but he's not supposed to know Shadowdemon. Factor in the fact that he had a codename too, and my head started to hurt with regards to who was supposed to know what about whom. Jack lived in the penthouse of one of the towers his family owned. The concierge wasn't happy to see me, but he recognized 'the kid with the eyepatch' as an authorized guest.

  Other people cleaned Jack's place for him, so it ended up looking like a photo spread from some home and garden magazine, lifeless, artificial and sterile. The living room was beige and white, with a glass coffee table, tan couch, and pale wood TV stand. Jack was a big guy, barrel-chested and usually the tallest person in any given room. His brother had a far more ordinary build, being closer to my height. It was only the second time I'd met Brett Fowler, but his expression didn't try to hide his disdain. "What are you doing here?" Brett asked, not rising from the chair.

  "I came to see Jack," I said. "Last I knew, this was still his place."

  "You waltz in unannounced--"

  "Brett," Jack said. "I told Travis it was okay to just drop in whenever. Don't get mad at him for taking me at my word."

  "If I'm interrupting something, I can leave," I said.

  "Oh, no, we're just discussing the future of Fowler Heavy Industries, it's not like it's anything important," Brett said. I didn't let his sarcasm phase me.

  "As long as mother holds sixty-seven percent, it's not as if we can actually change the course of the company," Jack said.

  Brett sighed. "Fine. Whatever."

  "What brings you uptown?"

  I handed Jack the letter I had. "I figured you had a better chance of knowing a good real estate lawyer than I did."

  Jack skimmed the letter. "They want to demolish the riverfront property?"

  "Apparently that talk about building a third bridge isn't just talk. They figure twenty-first street is a good place to put it, being halfway between First and Forty-First. That puts a bridge pylon right through my roof."

  "Did they even put in an offer to buy the place?" Jack asked.

  "No, the skipped straight to eminent domain. They're stealing it from me."

  "Riverfront property on Twenty-First isn't worth shit," Brett said. "It would cost more to fight this than the land is even worth."

  "That's not the point," I said. "The point is, it's mine, and we just put that building up last year." Okay, Jack put the building up last year. I have a hard time covering the property taxes on the plot. But that didn't invalidate what I said to Brett.

  "It's not going to be yours once they finish proceedings and cut a check," Brett said.

  "They're not going to come close to what it would take for me to voluntarily leave."

  "They don't have to," Brett said. "The law only says they have to compensate at market value, which is whatever their appraisers say it is. You don't get to say no."

  "The law is wrong."

  "The court upheld eminent domain for private development. They're sure as hell not going to block it when it's for a bridge."

  I turned back to Jack. "That's why I came to get your help."

  "Do they have a plan for the bridge yet? Or are they just acquiring the land along the river in preparation?" Jack asked.

  "I don't know. Everything I do know for sure is in that letter," I said.

  "Count me out," Brett said, standing up and headed for the door. "You can fight city hall on your own."

  After the door closed a thought crossed my brain. "Brett's your younger brother, right?" I asked. "You're thirty-six. Fae's his daughter and she is my age. How old was Brett when she was born?"

  "Seventeen," Jack said.

  "Anyway, can you help with the hideout?" I asked.

  "We'll have to look into the particulars and see if there is anything to do."

  "Who in their right mind would give someone the ability to seize land and decide how much they're going to pay for it?"

  "I think that legislature gave themselves that ability."

  "That's just absurd!" I said. "That's my land. You gave it to me."

>   "Look, I get it. And I'll look into it. Just calm down."

  I nodded. "All right. The twisted part about all this is that I didn't feel all that attached to the place until they up and declared they were taking it away."

  "That almost hurts."

  "Sorry. I didn't mean it that way."

  Part 3

  Despite my agitation, there wasn't much for me to do about the hideout. These sorts of things moved with the speed of bureaucracy. Being suspended, the next few days were spent doing more or less nothing. School was out, and I had a shortage of hobbies. When Stephanie called, I hoped it would be a social one. Instead, it was in her role as Ixa, and just relaying a message that I'd been summoned to Sterling Towers to have a chat with the Fund Board. The election was coming up, and the current board was cleaning up as much of their pending business as possible so as to not burden the incoming group. I just happened to be on the list of problems to be sorted out I guess. Sterling towers was a set of three skyscrapers in a pattern that implied the existence of a missing fourth tower. Each looked like a shard of silver tied to the others by skywalks. For whatever fool reason, the elevators ran up the sides of the buildings. I have a bit of a problem with heights, and kept as close to the door as I could without looking like a fool.

  The three board members who met me in their conference room were the ones I was least familiar with. The only name I could put to one of them was Miriam, for the woman on my left. The Community tended to elect retired heroes, and these three were no exception. None of them were younger than fifty, and sixty seemed a more reasonable lower bound. Only the Japanese man showed signs of a hair color other than white or silver, and there wasn't much of that mixed in. The guy in the middle had probably been the lantern-jawed archetype back in the day. The bone structure was still there, but he'd lost most of the muscle mass.

  "Shadowdemon," he said. "Well, uh, we've met but we've not been properly introduced. I'm Rex Holdt, and I still don't know why I've been saddled with this job."

  "Stop whining," Miriam said. "Your term's almost up anyway."

  "We're not here to talk about your suspension, not primarily," Rex said. "Now normally we'd let Edgars do the talking since he's more of a 'people person,' but he's gone and taken a leave of absence. Barring that, we'd have turned it over to the expert on the matter at hand, but in this case that'd be Neutrino. And the old cuss went and left the country on us. Now Miriam doesn't like to talk about things she's not an expert in, and Mister Saito prefers to listen, so I'm stuck with the job."

  "I don't think he cares, Rex," Miriam said.

  "All right. Lets get straight to the point," Rex said. "How would you like to go to Mars?"

  "I'm missing something," I said.

  "Do you remember back in the eighties?"

  "No," I said.

  "He's seventeen, he wasn't born yet, Rex," Miriam said.

  "Way to make me feel old. Anyway, there were these aliens, the Oot-... Yute..."

  "Uta'la'tek'li," I said. Actually it was Uta|la||tek|li, but I couldn't make the clicking noises required to say it properly.

  "Yeah, those were the guys. We really have to come up with an easier name for them."

  "Get back to the point, Rex," Miriam said.

  "Well, they were trying to scam us out of the mineral rights to the solar system. You see, they were signatories to a treaty regarding indigenous species which says they have to get the permission of the locals to mine even uninhabited rocks in their system of origin. They were so confident they could con us out of the rights to the uninhabited bodies that they started fabricating mining equipment before they even made contact. We got tipped to their schemes and properly told them to piss off. Well, they left. They also didn't take the equipment they'd constructed because it cost more to ship it home than it was worth."

  "I see."

  "Now for the longest time, we thought all this stuff was off, just sitting there collecting dust so to speak."

  "I take it it's not?" I asked.

  "At the very least, the automated mining station they left on Mars has been running since the eighties. We didn't realize it until recently."

  "That doesn't sound like a major issue in of itself," I said.

  "Well, just this week the thing has started screaming for manual intervention. It's run into something the computer can't handle and it wants instructions. Now, these 'Uta guys' ain't coming back, so we've got to go look into it."

  "If I'm not mistaken, isn't Mars at it's furthest from Earth during odd-numbered years?" I asked. "And it takes weeks on an even-numbered year to get there."

  "All true, at least when you're talking about conventional rocketry."

  "Okay, so there's more to the story," I said.

  "One of the bits we snagged when these guys left was a gate endpoint. We've been trying to make the damn thing work since the eighties. You see, you need two endpoints or it won't do anything. We've been trying to make our own down in those missile silos you got at Gruefield Eighteen. While we haven't gotten ours working yet, the endpoint at the mining station on Mars got switched on. The computer wants someone to tell it what to do, so it's opened the door."

  "I understand so far," I said. "But I'm having a hard time making the jump to where you want me to go along."

  "Well, since we've spent thirty years failing to understand one piece of tech, we sorta called on our allies among the Scya for help. They've agreed to send someone who can deal with the Uta tech, but their 'mission specialist' requested that you come along."

  "This mission specialist doesn't happen to be the same guy who turned up at the Pickman's Crossing General Store a few days ago, does he?"

  "That's him," Rex said. "Scya can be socially awkward around humans, it takes a while for them to get used to dealing with us. This guy's the bottom of the totem pole over there, so he's not all that accustomed to dealing with us. We need their help to get this done right in any reasonable amount of time, so we're asking you to go along and help the alien get along. So we're back to that first question, how would you like to go to Mars?"

  "That's the kind of offer you can't say no to," I said.

  "Now, we haven't finished picking out the team that will be going. But the key objectives will be to gain control of that mining station, make sure that gate endpoint stays on, and find out what freaked out that computer."

  "I will do my best."

  The prospect of heading to Mars drove a lot of other things from my mind and I spent the rest of the day on my laptop reading up on the place. The color pictures from the seventy-eight landing were not that good. The batch of film was bad, and half the shots were unusable. The problem was, flying there had been so expensive that the will to go back had faded. Effort had shifted to inexpensive ways of getting to orbit. Of course, government doesn't do inexpensive well.

  I had gotten so wrapped up in it that I didn't notice Donny arrive at the house. He had a bad habit of not knocking on the door to my room. I guess it was a leftover from when we were younger and shared a room. He had on a red T-shirt and black slacks. A rolled paper tube was tucked under his arm. He knocked on the corner of my desk.

  "What?" I asked.

  "Are you hiding?" Donny asked.

  "Yes," I lied. "What do you want?"

  "Aren't you supposed to cook dinner?"

  "Just because I had a habit of doing so, it doesn't mean I'm required to."

  "Weren't you made team chef?" Donny asked.

  "This is the house, not the base."

  "So who's going to do it?"

  "You could try," I said.

  "I'd burn the house down!"

  "Is there anything else?"

  Donny smirked, and unrolled the paper. It was a poster. At the bottom were the words "Baron Mortis." Eight figures in black were lined
up in a diagonal row. Their outfits were a variation on either a suit or tuxedo. All wore a skull-faced mask without a lower jaw. Each had a Roman numeral below their feet with a set of dates. The eighth was Donny, but most people wouldn't recognize him.

  "I got a new poster," he said.