Nothing criminal, anyway. Shell had checked and only found his membership dues to the Foundation of Awakened Theosophy, his online purchases of The Sleeper Must Awaken and other Foundation books, and his receipt for last week’s Foundation retreat. That had been enough to get me here.
Eric reddened, his hands curling into fists. “I’m not ratting on anybody.”
I started to reach for him, thought better of it. “I don’t want you to. I want you to come with me. You don’t have to tell anyone anything, I just want you out of way. Please.”
“He can’t be— He can’t. You’re lying.”
My heart sank. Shell was right—this had been a stupid idea. I’d come here to talk to the Eric I’d know three years from now, a man who’d seen more, just like me. This wasn’t him yet, he hadn’t done anything yet to feel guilty or repentant of, but I tried the one key I’d gotten from our later talks anyway. “You don’t need to be stronger, Eric.”
“The hell I don’t. Look around you! Nobody trusts us and it’s getting worse, ever since— Since the quake. Humanity First’s always been spewing their bullshit, but now people are listening and when they come for us— I’m going to be ready.”
“You told me that, later. Why you did it. The world didn’t end, Eric. But yours did. Don’t—”
“No!” His fist hit the table, cracking its Formica laminating. That drew more looks, and Irons, a bearded dark-complexioned guy whose attitude screamed foreman, got off his stool to saunter over. Great. The Crew’s strongest Ajax.
“Is there a problem, Eric?”
“She wants me to ditch my friends.”
I shook my head. “He’s in trouble. I want him safe and out of it while it’s sorted out.”
“And you are?”
“Astra.” I reached and shook his hand, giving it the same look how strong I am squeeze. His eyebrows climbed and he looked at Eric. “A Sentinel wants you to walk away from something?”
“She can’t make me do anything.”
“No, she can’t.”
“Yes, I can.” I could get Shell to shut down his cellphone, and I could get a warrant and then hold him until the police arrived to serve it. It might not hold up in court later, and it could blow up my career, but it would keep him from warning Pellegrini before the feds could act on my information. “Sorry, but I will if I have to.”
Irons didn’t back down. “Then it looks like we have a problem.” The diner had gone quiet, and more Crew were standing up. I recognized Brace and others.
“Hope, this is a room full of Ajaxes!” Shell whispered in my ear. “Do you really want to start this?”
No, no I did not. But it looked like I might not have a choice.
Irons looked around and then back at me and I could see him calculating, adding the numbers and power class-levels, then tossing the likely consequences of winning into it.
“We’re going to settle this the Crew way,” he said loud enough that everyone else heard. “Susan, could you keep my plate warm? You two, c’mon.” He cocked his head at the side door, started moving as Eric scrambled up from his seat.
“And what’s the Crew Way?” Shell’s voice rose at the end. I followed and so did five others; two women and three men, all Crew. Shaking out my hands as I walked, I let them surround me in a moving cordon; I could always go straight up if I needed to.
Irons led us over a wooded hill behind the diner to where a small clearing sat close to the edge of the forested acres, an iced pond at one end. Stopping, everyone fell back into a looser circle. “So, what’s going on?” asked one of the women, a tall amazon built like a pillar.
“This is Astra.” Irons pointed at me. “She wants Gantry to come with her, all nice and quiet like, says he’s gonna be in trouble if he doesn’t. Gantry has politely told her to stuff it. Since I don’t want my crew messed up in a shit-show pissing contest, I’m calling this a match.”
There were nods around the circle. “Yup, sounds fair,” Brace said.
Irons looked between the two of us. “Gantry, you’re B and she’s A. Do you need a designated hitter?”
“Nope.”
“Astra, do you know the rules?”
“Coin toss for the first punch. No blocking or dodging, you take it and take your turn. Last standing wins the argument.” I shrugged when his eyebrows went up again. “Iron Jack told me about it. You guys do this for fun?”
Irons grinned. “It only works with the fast healers, can’t have injury taking you off the job.”
“An Irish knock-out fight?” Shell screeched. “This is a plan?”
I ignored her. “So, I win and he comes with me?”
“And if he wins, he walks away. Do whatever you have to after that, but here you let him go.”
I looked where Eric stood warming up for the fight, shaking his own fists out and bouncing on his toes. “Okay.” Taking off my shades, I tossed them to the side.
“Move, everyone.” Irons motioned and the others backed off, widening the circle and leaving Eric and I in the middle. “Lash, you do it,” he said to the amazon.
She got out a quarter. “Astra’s heads.” It spun high and she snatched it out of the air, looked. “Heads.”
“This is insane,” Shell declared. I suppressed a giddy laugh. Shell just wasn’t entering into the spirit of it and she was right. My eyes on Eric as I settled into a wide-footed stance, it amazed me how little I cared.
“Ready?” Irons asked us both.
“Yes.” “Yup.”
“Then anytime.”
This wasn’t a boxing match and we didn’t start circling. This was a brutal, basic competition between who could hit the hardest. Eric braced and I stepped in and swung, no hesitation.
I’d expected him to move with my swing but instead he ducked into it and the punch meant for his jaw hit his temple. He more than doubled my weight but leaning into it with my flight power overcame the mass difference; pain exploded in my fist as he went flying, almost bouncing out of the circle. A couple of guys whistled. Awww Babyyy I like my coffee strong and blonde and in little classy cups! Lash applauded. I just held my breath.
He got up. Not fast, but he got up. Shell groaned. “This is going to suck.”
“You think?” I whispered. But I’d just seen what I needed to get a warrant that would hold up. A hit that solid should have been a knock-out; he shouldn’t have been able to get up at all. Pellegrini had already given him a taste of power that hadn’t worn off yet, and if I had to I could swear under oath he’d been boosted. Coupled with my intel on Pellegrini, that statement would be enough.
I said a quick prayer that I wouldn’t have to as he walked back to the center.
“My turn. Give up?”
“That’s usually my line.” Breathing deep, I settled myself. The hard part would be not going with my training and trying to dodge.
“Right.” He swung so fast it still caught me off-balance and my world flashed, an invisible firework exploding behind my eyes. I barely felt the bounce. Vision returning, I looked up at sky and bare branches, then Shell’s face.
“Get up! You’re making us look bad!”
I found the earth first, frozen as the pond and now scraped into my jeans, jacket, and wig. Levering myself to my feet, I spat dirt and blood. Nobody else had moved in the count or two I’d been out, and nobody moved now as I returned to the center.
Wiping my mouth, I spat again and grinned. “Same question.”
Then the big steel dragon came over the hill.
Chapter Nine
“‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’ A statement that’s never been true, anywhere, ever.”
Astra
* * *
“You’ve got to be kidding me!”
Atlas would have laughed. The two big rules he’d taught me were to use my mobility and never focus too much on the fight in front of me; super-duper senses didn’t do much good if I didn’t pay attention to them. I’d heard the semi stop on the road, heard the echoing clangs of its door
s opening, and why would a big-rig stop out here? Why would a big-rig unload out here?
“Shell, tell Dispatch it’s Tin Man!” There was no way I wouldn’t recognize the articulated monstrosity stomping down through the wooded hill towards us, its serpentine Chinese-dragon body crushing trees it couldn’t just slip between.
Irons watched it come. “What the hell is that?”
“Watch out for its shot!” I called, leaping into the air as it cleared the trees. The boom of its mouth-mounted gun punctuated my warning, but it had tracked on me as I jinked and I felt the smack of air as its first shot missed me by inches.
That decided Irons. “Get it, Crew!”
Then Flash Mob crested the hill, dozens of duplicate sociopaths in full field armor firing down at us as they came.
“Brace!” Irons called out. “Make a wall!” The ground erupted in a curving arc between most of the Crew and the hill, Brace pulling frozen earth up to create a solid barrier stiffened by his will. His people covered, Irons jumped.
The dragon’s second shot caught him at the top of his arc, blowing him out of the sky. “Boss!” Eric yelled and charged, ignoring the storm of bullets as I climbed for height, arcing to put the dragon between me and the Crew. “They’re going to get massacred down there!” Shell protested.
“I’m working on it!” Curving around I dropped hard. Flash Mob might have brought a few heavy pieces to the fight, but the dragon’s sabot-round shot was the only thing that could hurt the toughest of us. As it reared up to angle its mouth-canon down at Eric I hit it feet-first where its skull joined its neck.
The heavy joint held, but the shock of the hit drove its head down to fire into the ground with an eruption of earth—an explosion matched by the blasts tearing into Brace’s wall.
Okay, maybe Flash Mob was a threat—they were a lot more heavily armed than they’d been when I’d fought them—but I still needed to take the big gun first.
Eric reached the dragon and latched onto its right foreleg, ripping into the joints. I left him to it, grabbing onto the thing’s eye-ridges to swing around and give a solid kick to its gun. I couldn’t tell if the barrel bent, but I felt it move in its mounting before the metal beast twisted its head and smashed me to the ground under its massive skull.
I was getting really tired of eating dirt.
“Astra!” Eric smacked the thing hard as I gasped for air, shaken by the slam. The dragon head rang above me with his hit as I pushed against it. It started to lift—and blew up.
I’d bent the barrel, yay, me.
Ears ringing, I shrugged off what was left of it to climb to my feet. “Eric, drop the shooters—they’re all dupes!” I barely heard myself, but thought I should get it out there just in case he was holding back. He didn’t hold back when a cluster of Flash Mobs turned their fire on us—grabbing a big chunk of dragon skull, he threw it into them to send them flying or ducking for cover. I threw me, then found myself swinging away almost shoulder to shoulder with Lash—either someone had tossed her or she’d moved fast on her own.
“Who are these guys?” she yelled as she mowed down four with a piece of tree trunk swung like a baseball bat.
“We haven’t been introduced yet!” Right? I pulled off the helmet-mask of my closest attacker to be sure. Yep, Flash Mob. He laughed and shot me in the face with his sidearm, kept laughing when I threw him into a tree. Around me, the ones we “killed” or just badly broke popped like soap bubbles.
Then Rush dropped out of hypertime to enter the mix, his cycle skidding to a sideways stop at the top of the hill. Seven dismounted from behind him and drew his guns to begin methodically banging away as Rush disappeared. Every shot hit joints or chinks in a Flash Mob’s field armor. I looked around. The rest of the Crew had all joined the chaotic melee in the trees, some with improvised weapons like Lash’s, others sticking to fists as Brace threw earth at any dupes out of swinging range.
And then all of them popped, even the ones still shooting. We stood alone on a churned-up hillside, one tree burning brightly in the gathering dusk.
I sighed when Rush blurred to a stop beside me. “Find Irons. He took a big hit.”
“Ma’am!” Our team jokester saluted and blurred away again.
* * *
Irons had taken a full-frontal shot with the kind of anti-armor sabot round that had cracked my ribs when Tin Man came after Future Me during the Villains Inc. insanity. All it had done was knock the wind out of the big Crew foreman, and now he walked the torn-up hill with Blackstone while they talked. Blackstone looked completely out of place, but didn’t act like he cared about dirt on his Italian loafers or what tree branches might do to his satin tux.
“What do you think they’re doing?” SaFire asked. She’d been the Atlas-Type on the patrol roster since I’d been taken off it again, and had dropped in ready to fight or help only minutes after the shooting stopped. Crackerjack EMT that she was, she had no real work to do here; a couple of Crew had been banged up, but nothing that Ajaxes couldn’t just walk off, or so they said. Being Tough Enough was a big part of their code. Rush delivered Blackstone before SaFire and I had finished sweeping the area. My biggest fear had been for the diner, but Tin Man and Flash Mob had completely ignored it. There was no sign of the big-rig that had delivered Tin Man’s dragon.
I followed her gaze. “Getting the story straight . . . hah!” Bending, I retrieved my shades, miraculously untrampled unlike the rest of me. My wig with its securing pins and Alice band had miraculously stayed on through it all. I wiped the lenses and put them on. “I’m pretty sure I’m not even here, all this is some villains leaning on some non-cape breakthroughs who didn’t want to join their team. Or something.”
“Or something.”
The way she said it made me look up. She wore a more serious expression than I was used to seeing on her at any scene that didn’t have bodies on the ground. Her mouth twisted, like she was trying to figure out what to say, and I suddenly realized what conversation this was going to be.
“We didn’t get a chance to really talk, last night,” she said.
“Nope.” Last night seemed forever ago, but it was another change—SaFire and Future Me hadn’t met for another month or so, when we’d both done the crime-scene thing with Fisher. “That was a good job, last night.”
“Thanks, you too.” She inhaled. “Look, I’ve been wanting to talk to you since the newsies blew up the whole you-and-Atlas thing. But, this is awkward . . .”
I laughed, I actually laughed. “What, because you hooked up with my hunny-bunny?”
“Who told—?” Her mouth dropped open and I laughed harder.
“Oh, oh, that hurts.” Okay, so getting smacked to the ground by several tons of dragon-head had bruised me a bit. “Sorry, but your face—” I snickered, wiped my eyes. “I’m going through a thing. Somebody dumped the next three years’ worth of memories into my head, and I remember this conversation.” Boy, did I ever. “Boinked. You boinked my hunny-bunny, back before last year. Your words. That’s what you were going to get around to saying, right?”
“Well, yeah.” She blinked, still stunned, and I snickered again.
“You were going to tell me how the whole me-and-Atlas scandal would eventually go away. And you were going to tell me about the superhuman hookup scene. ‘With most people, you’ve got to be careful.’” I deepened my voice to match hers and wagged my finger. “‘If you really want to let yourself swing for the bleachers, there’s a limited pool of talent that can pitch or catch in our league.’ My gosh, all the mixed baseball metaphors!”
She’d actually gone a lot further than that; parts of it were burned into my brain. “Girls like us, we’ve got to stick to the safe parts of the Kama Sutra, know what I mean?” Just remembering the conversation still made me blush, but SaFire’s wide eyes crinkled, the corner of her mouth twitching.
“That sounds like me. Three years? Really?”
I nodded. “I don’t know how long they’ll stick. Tell y
ou what, I’ll make a note so if I forget all this, I’ll know to look you up and ask about hunny-bunny.” It had been a horrifically embarrassing conversation, but I’d needed to hear a lot of it and she’d needed to tell me.
“Sure.” She looked me over. “And this is what you’re going to be in three years?”
“Maybe.” I shrugged. “Still trying to figure that out.” I looked up the hill. Now that I’d basically set fire to my professionalism with my totally unauthorized mission, who knew where I’d be in three years? How bad is this going to be? The post-fight adrenaline high was only now wearing off.
“Astra!” Blackstone called. I did a quick flying jump to land up the hill by his side.
“You’re out of uniform.”
“Yes, sir. It’s in my car.”
“Irons tells me that you were . . .” his mouth quirked, “negotiating, to bring Eric into protective custody.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then it’s fortunate that Mr. Irons has agreed to bring him to the Dome to help us sort this all out.” This, his waving hand indicated, was the attack-shattered hillside. “He assures me that his people here will tell police and the news teams, when they arrive, that they’d stepped outside to settle an argument and were then inexplicably attacked. Since you haven’t explained it to us, yet, I think that’s an accurate summation?”
I nodded almost spastically, nearly melting in relief. “Yes, it is.”
“Good. Now, I suggest that you get your car away from here before everyone else arrives. We’ll meet you back home.”
* * *
News of the “brawl” spread fast, but had to compete for airtime and clicks with Mirth—who struck while half of our team was “out of position” south of town. Of course we got blamed for that, not that we could have stopped him—again his heist team got in and out fast, were gone before Dispatch knew about it and could send in any Guardians or Sentinels available.
Not a bank this time—a very high-end jeweler’s. Millions in gems taken.
Recursion Page 8
