Recursion

by Marion G. Harmon

  New members? When had that happened?

  I’d learned last fall that the Sentinels ran on briefings. There was the morning Day Briefing. The after-action briefings. The media briefings. The intelligence briefings. As tight as Blackstone ran things only major briefings took more than twenty minutes, but he assigned prep-work and homework. Only training took up more of my time. This would be the first welcoming meeting since we’d brought Jacky on, and that one had been a bit informal since she’d fought beside us already.

  “So, who are they?” I really hadn’t been paying attention to anything, focused on keeping my head down and fighting through the black cloud that had just seemed to choke me until a week ago.

  Blackstone held the elevator door for me. “That would be telling.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Then don’t tell. It’s not like it’ll be an invisible white rabbit or something.”

  He chuckled. “No, I couldn’t get Harvey. You remain the only one on the team with an invisible friend.”

  “Shell!” I burst out laughing. She’d appeared beside him wearing a coat-and-tails tux like his and a pair of long twitching bunny ears. He smiled indulgently, eyes following mine and understanding without seeing.

  “I’m glad she’s here.”

  Which was still a wonder and a relief to me, considering the security implications he had to deal with. Shell faded out when the doors opened, starting from the feet up until her ears vanished. Laconic Bob waved us past his desk and, always the gentleman, Blackstone let me precede him into the Assembly Room.

  Blackstone and I were obviously the last ones to arrive, and the room held more of us than it had since Whittier Base.

  Chakra sat beside Blackstone’s empty chair, and the chair on the other side—the one that had been Atlas’s—was taken by an Asian woman in a dark leather bodysuit. The Harlequin and Rush sat in their usual spots; Rush had gotten back a couple of weeks ago, sporting a new Verne-tech prosthetic hand and fully cleared by the DSA of his involvement with the Dark Anarchist.

  Outside of our circle and Veritas’ investigating team, nobody knew about his getting recruited by DA’s network. Blackstone assured me Rush had been recruited by Euphoria thinking he’d been on the side of the angels, but I still found it hard to forgive him. Him grabbing the Teatime Anarchist had still led to my capture and brief torture. And to me killing two people, up close and bloody; I could still feel the crunch of Volt’s chest caving in under my punch, see the life leave his face. With a lot of the horror of those January days, that image had started to fade into sepia. (Again, since last week. I really was going to have to ask Chakra what she’d done for me. Would it last, or was it the psychic equivalent of antidepressants? A band-aid for now?)

  I shook it off. The other recently emptied seats were also occupied. Riptide sat on Rush’s right, looking uncomfortable in a new leather duster coat. He gave me a cocky smile and I waved back, happy to see him. Beside him a lean man in a badly creased lab coat, hair all ratty black locks, slumped in his seat. Eyes on his epad, he paid no attention to the room. Beside him sat—

  “Seven!” I darted for the empty chair beside him and stopped before I pulled it out, realizing I’d just rudely ignored the girl—young woman really—who’d be on my other side. I guessed her to be twenty, or not much older than that. A redhead like Shell but at least half Asian, she looked up at me with bright almond eyes, smiling as I hesitated.

  “Hi, Astra. I’m glad to finally meet you.”

  “Oh—thank you. And you, too.” I sat down and inclined towards her, shaking her hand. “I’d ask, but I think Blackstone wants to introduce everyone?” I tried to place her smell. I still had the crime scene in my sense-memory, but whatever scent she wore, subtle enough I was sure no one without super-duper senses could smell it, was chasing that memory out. It wasn’t a perfume I knew, and oddly, it made me relax.

  Blackstone took his own seat and began. “Thank you for waiting, everyone, I see that Willis kept everybody topped up.” An arm from my left silently deposited a porcelain cup on its saucer beside my hand and I looked up to smile thanks at the Dome’s major-domo as the heavenly smell of his coffee filled my nose. I turned my attention back to the head of the table as Blackstone looked us all over. He smiled at what he saw.

  “This is an important day for the team. Astra has at last been cleared for field duty, and has already taken her first turn with assisting Superhuman Crimes. She acquitted herself admirably.” He stopped for the applause while I blushed. So I hadn’t lost my lunch at the scene. Yay.

  “She fills a hole in our shared patrol roster, and gives us added fast-response capability with our current ‘Mirth Watch’. Additionally, as you can all see we’re filling some other holes today.” His smile slipped into seriousness. “We can never truly replace our losses, but we fill our ranks and continue on. So. Most of you know each other, but I’ll do the introductions like a proper host. Beside me—” he nodded to the Asian woman on his left “—is Lei Zi. Her codename means Mother of Storms in Mandarin, which I’m told is mythically appropriate. She is an A Class Electrokinetic, which provides us with more firepower. More importantly, she has come to be the team’s new field leader. I know she’ll impress us all with her experience and professionalism.”

  She returned his smile, directing a cool but open gaze to the rest of the table. “Thank you.”

  “All of us old hands know Seven,” Blackstone nodded across at him as a laugh went around the table. “He’s decided to take a break from making movies on the coast to bring some luck to the team. And Riptide—” he turned to the now ex street-villain “—has sufficiently completed his CAI certification to officially join our ranks. I’m sure we’ll find his hydro-powers very useful here by the Great Lakes.”

  I gave the bald and tattooed man an even wider smile. If I’d been Shell I’d have given him a wink and thumbs-up, but I at least caught his eye and he relaxed a little in his seat. Riptide might look the epitome of a street-tough villain who’d gotten prosperous enough to get fancy with his fashion, but I’d seen his soft gooey center in southern California and here; he’d do great with us.

  “Riptide,” Blackstone addressed him directly, “I’m throwing you upon Quin’s mercies for the next little while. Team training is important, but she’s going to be doing a full PR job on you. A lot of that will be reminding people that you stood with us at Whittier Base. You’ve been on our team since L.A.” The man relaxed even more, nodding back. Score one for Blackstone.

  “We have also been lucky to acquire the services and residency of Vulcan.”

  Under our focused attention, the guy in the lab coat looked up from his epad. “Hello.”

  “Vulcan is an A Class Verne-Type, who specializes in physical fabrication. He supplied Rush with his new cybernetic hand, and we’ve bribed him with facilities here and the opportunity to tackle interesting challenges and examine any ‘prizes’ we find on other Vernes we may need to deal with.”

  Another laugh went around the table, but Vulcan’s attention had already dropped back to his pad.

  “And last, but certainly not least, we have a loaner from the Japanese government. An exchange-hero, if you will. This is Kitsune, a shapeshifter and a scamp.”

  A shapeshifter? I blinked as Blackstone smiled at the girl beside me. Everyone else had been brought in to add field strength or logistics support for the team, so what would a shapeshifter be doing with us? I could see the thought on a couple of other faces around the table.

  “What does ‘Kitsune’ mean?” Rush asked.

  She smiled at everyone, placing her hands on the table. “Kitsune means fox-spirit. And I think you’ll find I’m very useful.” In a blink a fox sat on the table in front of her chair. A large white fox with seven tails.

  “Holy crap,” Shell whispered in my ear.

  Chapter Two

  Second only to the Event itself, the Big One was the single biggest society-changing event in early 21st Century US history. Befor
e the Big One smashed southern California, we’d been mostly trusting of our breakthroughs. Sure, there were bad ones, but the good guys seemed totally up to the job of keeping them in check. Then Temblor proved that all it took was one supervillain with the right power in the wrong place to bring suffering and hardship to millions. After that, we looked at our breakthroughs differently—even the good ones.

  Astra, Notes from a Life.

  * * *

  “Seven’s fans are going to be shipping them as soon as they see her,” Shell laughed, virtually sprawled out on my sheets. “Not going to happen, Seven doesn’t play where he works.”

  “He could get serious about her.” I stepped out of the bathroom, still toweling my hair dry in preparation for bed.

  The meeting had ended without the one on one matches that had marked my own get-to-know-us welcome to the Sentinels. Obviously, Blackstone didn’t feel the need for the same lesson; the newcomers weren’t new, not to their powers. Instead he moved on to how Riptide would be coordinating with the Coast Guard and other action items, finishing before we could violate his twenty-minute rule. After that we got to enjoy the tasty spread Willis had prepared for the occasion.

  I’d found myself in a conversational three-way with Seven and Kitsune. He’d set out to charm both of us, and a charming Seven was pretty irresistible (his blond ex-boy band looks and guileless interest had certainly made me a bit weak kneed before I’d realized I was all-in for Atlas). Not as weak kneed as Seven’s old teammate Baldur had—his pure male perfection had caused a few near riots among female fans—but any girl Seven took a friendly interest in couldn’t help but warm under it.

  Kitsune hadn’t. Not that she hadn’t noticed, or been insulted. She’d just been . . . amused, her gaze sliding to mine as she lightly flirted back at him.

  Shell rolled over, frowning thoughtfully. She’d changed for bed already, following our evolving custom of treating the evening like our old sleepovers until it was time for me to turn out the lights. “Do you think so? He’s known for avoiding anything close to serious—they fall for him too easy, and then it gets messy.”

  “Call me a hopeful romantic.” I absently ran fingers through my damp hair. I needed to get it cut soon, before it started getting awkward under my uniform wig.

  “You—” she reached over her head to poke my bare leg and I felt it through my neural link, “—just think that everyone should be matched up. Like it’s unnatural not to be.”

  I dropped to the bed. “Just because Dad and Mom make it hard to imagine anything else.”

  “True, that.” She propped herself up on an elbow. “Your parents are such a team it’s scary.”

  And they were. The only crack in their unified front I’d ever seen, over my decision to wear the cape, had smoothed over while I’d been healing. Even the media revelation of my “affair” with Atlas hadn’t divided them. Though if he’d survived . . .

  We were going to be a team, too.

  “Look at us,” Shell said when I didn’t respond. “Lying in bed talking about boys. Feels so high school.”

  “So let’s talk about someone else.” I grabbed my pillow, beat it into shape. “What do you think of Rei?” Kitsune had offered that up as a non-codename name. No last name, which made me wonder if she was one of those breakthroughs who chose not just a superhero identity but a whole new civilian identity as well.

  “Is she Rei?” Shell weirdly followed my thoughts. “Since she can go human-to-fox, is she even a she? She could be a big guy named Steve.”

  I threw my spare pillow through her, groaned as she rolled her eyes.

  “Oh, ow, got me right in the pixels,” she snarked. “Would have been a good head-shot, but still dumb. Just saying, that’s probably not her real face. If her powers are straight from Japanese myths, she could be more a fox who pretends to be human. Gender optional, wouldn’t matter who she’d been before her breakthrough.”

  “So what do you—” The Dispatch alarm shrilled and I fumbled for my earbud. Dispatch rattled my teeth the instant I switched it on. “Superhuman altercation, corner of Grand and Ashland! Go!”

  “On it!” From somewhere I’d recently gotten the idea of speed-dressing drills, and that meant always keeping a complete outfit laid out and all unzipped. I was dressed, zipped, and moving out in thirty seconds, tugging on my mask as I listened to the Dispatch brief.

  “Superhuman of unknown class, tentative identification Projector-Type, in an altercation with a crowd of civilians. 9-1-1 reports blows exchanged, shots fired.”

  “Who else is on it?” I flew down the hall and through the Dispatch-opened exit hatch. The reason most of the doors in the Dome could whoosh open Star Trek-style was to clear the way for flyers and speedsters to exit quickly in response to a situation—the same principle as a firehouse’s firepole.

  “Rush has been tasked with disarming any brandishing civilians or removing them from direct contact.”

  “Confirmed, Rush and I have the scene.” I exited the outer hatch and climbed into the sky. That left me to deal with the projector. Throwing an Atlas or Ajax-Type at a projector of unknown character and strength was standard operating procedure—we could probably handle it. “Blackstone?”

  “Yes, my dear?”

  “Can Chakra engage the scene through me or Rush? Her presence may be helpful if the crowd flashes over into panic.”

  “An excellent idea.” He sounded pleased and surprised. “You’ll also encounter SaFire. She’s on duty tonight.”

  “SaFire on scene, understood.” So Dispatch was being cautious—SaFire was an Atlas-Type too, which meant she could handle most things as well as I could, but she was mostly trained as a medical first-responder. Also there was a significant difference between B and A Class when it came to the hits we could take.

  The arc of my flight took me most of the way there while Blackstone talked and I dropped into the scene, whispering “Shell? Give me room?”

  She popped in beside me, still in her sleep-shorts, smile wide and thumbs up. “No distractions, got it.” And she was gone.

  I touched down on Grand, on a stretch of the street not in the best neighborhood. It looked like they’d opened the boarded-up building across the street from St. Columbkille’s for a rally. The closest streetlights were out, not that the dark hindered me—I could still read the event posters and gang tags on the lampposts. SaFire waited for me in the street, keeping her eyes on the building. Her purple hair and strappy neon purple-pink bodysuit didn’t go with the huge EMT bag slung over her shoulder.

  “Hi, Astra.” She smiled at me though her forehead remained creased with concentration. “No shooting now, Rush just went in to recon—” She caught Rush as he came crashing through the boarded-up business front windows. Still speeding, he turned in the air so her catch was an easy hook as he flew by us.

  “Somekindofpushingforce!”

  “Slow down!” She let go of him. “What kind of force?”

  I wanted to know, too. What could catch Rush while speeding?

  He dropped fully into Realtime, flexing his taser gloves like he wanted a second try at someone. “Don’t know. He’s got everyone and everything pushed up against the meeting room walls. Folding chairs, the podium, all of it. I went for a quick takedown and hit whatever field he’s projecting.”

  “It’s gravity,” Shell whispered in my ear. “Look at the windows.” Where the plyboards over the windows had been removed by Rush’s passing, the edges of dangling broken glass hung outward at an angle. “And Rush wasn’t hit by a one-shot burst of force that blew him through the window—he’d be in pieces. He fell. He was accelerating. We’re looking at a gravikinetic.”

  I went cold and felt my palms start to sweat. “Sir,” I repeated for Blackstone. “I think we’re dealing with a gravikinetic! Strong enough to repel Rush. Sir, the building—”

  “Understood. Can you see him?”

  Good question, obviously for both me and SaFire. The streetlights weren’t the
only lights out. It looked like a localized blackout now, with no light inside the old building, but my super-duper vision showed me a roomful of human shapes shining in the infrared end of the light spectrum. Along with one small spot of heat that lay away from everyone. I assumed that had to be a hot gun barrel. “Yes sir. Only one person is standing inside.” Beside me, SaFire nodded agreement.

  “That’s him,” Rush confirmed. “There’s already people hurt in there—I could try and rush again, but . . .”

  “You’d be trying to run straight up at him against a gravity field of possibly multiple gees, understood. Did he appear open to talking?”

  “He was just yelling at everyone when I dropped in, boss.”

  He still was, and it wasn’t pretty. This could go south fast. I swallowed. “Sir, I need to do a hard extraction. If the building . . .”

  Buildings were built to stand against only one vector of gravity, down. The situation Rush described, and we could see, meant the gravikinetic was projecting an area-field with himself as the center. If down was suddenly all directions outward from him, and it got any stronger, walls were going to buckle and . . . the rules of engagement in a civilian environment echoed in my head. Do not escalate. Stop any escalation. Neutralize civilian risks as quickly as possible.

  Blackstone’s hesitation didn’t last—he was probably seeing the same awful vision I was. “Go. Try and be gentle, but don’t sacrifice speed. Rush, SaFire, when she goes in—”

  “Get everyone out, got it boss.” Rush grinned. “With you, Little A. Power and speed, fists and feet.”

  “Right. Okay.” I took a steadying breath, tried to see what I could in the darkness behind my target, flew up and back to get some room, and accelerated.

  From the broken windows to my target inside was less than thirty feet, and I barely felt the push of his field as I “tackled” him in a spinning grapple that put me ahead of him, still accelerating. My up-arcing flight took us across the open ground floor room and out through the back wall as his bones cracked under my hit, more breaking where I couldn’t completely shield him going through the wall. We climbed into the sky. “Stand down! Stand down!” I practically screamed in his ear, with absolutely no effect on his struggles.