Young Sentinels (Wearing the Cape)

by Marion G. Harmon

  “Megaton,” Astra finally came back. “Galatea says your tests haven’t found your limits yet but the numbers look good. But — ”

  “But I can’t get myself there while I’m pulling up the juice, and it’s going to have to be one big bang. You’ll have to drop me on it.”

  “Yes. You don’t have to do this.”

  “This is our freaking town — I’m sick of the Green Man’s shit and he doesn’t get to play here anymore.”

  “... Galatea will deliver you to the target, Megaton, and drop on your word. Good luck.”

  My helmet ear-guards and my own blasting kept me from hearing Galatea until she was right on top of me. She cut her boot jets, landing like a cat (and I really had to learn how to do that).

  “Ready?” she shouted, hands out. I looked back at the Dome to check the doors were sealed, stopped blasting, and we locked arms. She launched, and I found myself flying backwards over the waves of green as she took us to the harbor.

  “You know that you’re completely insane, right?”

  “Really?” I worked on not letting go — my gloves helped me grip her silver chrome arms — and started pulling juice. How much could I pull and store? “I’d be in class right now except for this green freak, so just drop me when I say when and bug out.”

  As we swung out over the harbor I remembered the bus, the sick feeling that made me want to beat my head against a wall to stop the memories, to do anything to make it not happen. Mom hanging up on me, leaving Dad and me because I might hurt Sydney. The Green Man had wrecked my family and I poured on the hate, feeling the hot pressure build until it burned like nuclear fire under my skin and I clenched my teeth with the strain of holding it in. More.

  Below us the boats against the harbor wall were tilted crazy angles beneath strangling green climbers, blackened and scarred by Galatea’s attempt, and the still steaming water rolled with thick slime. The green screaming face looking up at me had to be my imagination, but it worked for me. Galatea brought us in low, which was a mistake — a vine shot up to grab my ankle and she almost torched me when our sudden stop jerked her around. Now it was paying attention to us? Too late, sucker.

  “Get out now!” I yelled, and now she was the crazy one — she held on.

  “When you’re ready, unless you can breathe pea soup!”

  The climbing vine thickened, squeezing like a python. Now? Now? The vine wrapped around my waist, pulling us down while Galatea tried to cook it with her rocket exhaust without flaming me. It started burning, but instead of letting go it twisted upward, climbing my arms, and locked us together.

  Oh, shit.

  She looked down at me, a smile quirking her shiny blue robot face. “Now?”

  “Now. Payback’s a bitch.”

  She cut her rockets and we dropped into the soup.

  Astra

  “Shelly!” I screamed when they fell. In the thinning steam cloud, she’d placed them perfectly; they dropped into the middle of the bay, the center of the Green Man’s cauldron of life.

  Megaton exploded, a flash that lit the room and whited out the screens. I blinked repeatedly, eyes full of after-image. This time the green went berserk, thrashing against the Dome.

  “The doors are buckling,” Sykes reported from the atrium.

  “The CPD has fired the overpasses,” David said without looking up from his screen.

  “Is the park clear?” I whispered.

  “Crash says yes.”

  “Dispatch, Safire. Safire, we are feeding you GPS tracking on Megaton’s helmet. Please retrieve Megaton from Monroe Bay soonest, he may need medical attention.”

  “Get Megaton, on it. Astra, what the hell was that?”

  “Megaton. Hurry, please. David? Green Man status? Expansion rate?”

  “Zero.”

  “What?”

  “Zero. That last crush was it. It didn’t cross the tracks or break across the overpasses. Big Red’s fire wall held.”

  “Thermal on the harbor?”

  “Cooling fast — half the water in the harbor got turned to steam and it’s getting refilled with cold Lake Michigan water.” He wasn’t exaggerating; the cleared screens showed half the harbor wall was just gone. What bits of boat I could see were on fire, and rising smoke and steam was obscuring drone visuals completely. And all the thermals were headed down as heat dissipated.

  I blinked, sat down before I fell. “Is this a win?”

  “This is a win. I’m sending Crash for Galatea. She has an internal GPS unit and transmitter in her skull, and we’re pinging it. Location only, no response. Would you believe she’s in the middle of Buckingham Fountain?”

  “Wait — ”

  “Hey,A,I’vegotShellyandshe’samess. Vulcanshowedmehowto detachherhead inanemergency andI’mbringingherin.”

  I couldn’t breathe, like someone had kicked me in the gut. Not Shell, not Shelly too. God couldn’t be that unfair.

  “Affirmative, Crash,” I heard David say. “Vulcan will be waiting for you.” He took off his headset, swiveled to face me. “Astra, everybody’s where they should be and doing what they should be doing if the Green Man wakes up, but looking at the crater Megaton left, I’d say he’s compost. And I can reach you in the Pit.”

  “But — ”

  “Quote: ‘The Sentinel on watch may, on discretion, maintain oversight from anywhere in the Dome.’ End damn quote.”

  I stared back at him, dizzy with the need to get to Shelly.

  “Get out of here, Hope. We’ve got this.”

  I swallowed. “Please give Superintendent Redmond my compliments.”

  And I ran.

  * * *

  I hated the Pit, just being down there made my skin crawl, but I skidded through the door and into Vulcan’s main lab. Crash had come and gone before I got there, and only Vulcan and Galatea 1.0 stood at his bench, examining a sphere with bits of skull-plate sticking to it.

  She’s modular. She’s modular. As long as her brain is fine, she’ll live.

  “Vulcan?” He looked up. He always looked like he’d forgotten to feed himself, and now his thin face was pinched.

  “Astra. It’s all over? Crash didn’t say.”

  “Yes. Shelly?”

  “Her sphere is intact, but damaged.” He shook his head, disgustedly shoving away a bundle of cable leads. “She’s on independent power right now, her internal battery, but all of her input/output and power connections are gone, a combination of heat and feedback. With all sensory input cut ... she doesn’t know what happened or what’s happening.”

  “You can replace the connections, right?”

  “Not in time. Not soon enough to recharge the damaged battery. The polymorphic neural net that supports Shelly’s mind isn’t just a collection of molecule-sized physical circuits — it’s a carefully balanced field, really. The power that feeds the neural net has to be uninterrupted and modulated down to micro-current levels to sustain the field balance. When the battery dies...”

  “Can’t you get her out of there?”

  He ran long fingers through his nest of flyaway hair.

  “Download a copy of her current field configuration? No. Not without cracking the sphere open completely, which will collapse the field. Her neural net will return to a blank slate. Once I fix her battery and bring back power, we can restore her from her sleeping quantum-mirror self copy, but since she can’t mirror her neural-net the way she did her original meat-brain, she hasn’t been able to do ‘backups.’ She’ll be the Shelly of last spring, when she first transferred herself into Galatea.”

  I wiped my cheeks, nodded. “Okay. Okay. Thank you. I’ll need the lab to myself for a bit. Please.”

  “Okay,” he echoed me. He wasn’t good with human stuff, and his face twitched through a couple of aborted replies. “I’ll leave Gal,” he finally said. I waited for the doors to seal behind him before I sank to the floor by the bench.

  “Are you well?” Galatea 1.0 asked politely.

  I nod
ded; if I didn’t, she’d call Dr. Beth. “She’s dying.”

  “Vulcan is correct: she can be rebuilt.”

  But she won’t remember our fight with Villains Inc. Or Annabeth’s and Dane’s engagement party, or her friendly crush on Jamal, or her reunion with her mom. Or today. She’ll be Shelly 3.0, not the Shell who just saved the city.

  That Shell would be dead.

  No. Not again. I pulled myself to my feet.

  “Dispatch, Ozma’s lab please. Nix? I’m down in the Pit, and I need you to bring me the Wishing Pill now.”

  “Really? Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  While I waited, I carefully cleaned the scorched bits of wreck from Shelly’s sphere. Was she dreaming in there? Waiting patiently in the silent black for input leads to restore her senses? Counting against an internal clock and watching her power die? She couldn’t know I had to wipe tears off her chromed shell.

  The doors slid open and Nix buzzed in. She clutched the marble-sized silver pill in her tiny hands, and flying close she dropped it in my open palm.

  “Thank you.”

  She nodded, wide eyed, and flew back to perch on a free-standing drill or scope or widget that couldn’t do anything useful right now.

  The bigger the wish, the bigger the test, Ozma had said. Fixing a broken bone? Not much. Moving from one place to another? Probably even less. A chest full of gold? More, but probably manageable. Restoring a shattered, scattered body? Who knew? Ozma couldn’t do it.

  She didn’t have Shell.

  I swallowed the pill.

  As big as it was, I almost choked but managed to force it down and it sat, cold in my stomach. I closed my eyes. Shelly alive. Shelly kicking the playground bully for me. Shelly laughing after skinning her knee doing a stupid somersault off a tree. Shelly planning our evening excursion to The Fortress to see the superheroes party. Shelly poring over superhero costume sketches, playing with Gray, yelling at Toby for being a jerk. I wished for Shelly as the cold pill in my stomach warmed, heated, turned to fire, turned to lightning, turned to boiling fusion that radiated up through my chest, out through my arms and legs. I wished for Shelly as my eyeballs boiled and my skin caught fire. I wished for Shelly as I screamed. I wished for Shelly.

  “Hope? Hope, stop it!” Someone shook me, and I opened eyes I couldn’t believe I still had. My throat burned, absolutely raw, and I wanted to vomit endlessly.

  Nix crouched on my chest, crying, the widget she’d perched on a smashed wreck against the far wall. Except for my throat, the unbelievable pain was gone like a nightmare — I’d shattered my cast, but my shoulder felt like my fight with Dozer had happened weeks ago. Vulcan stared down at me. Of course, he wouldn’t have left the Pit. He didn’t let go until my frozen lungs unlocked and my stomach unclenched so I could inhale. I couldn’t believe he’d had the nerve to come back in and grab me; strength back, I could have taken his head off without realizing it thrashing around.

  I wanted to cry with Nix. My powers were back, but it hadn’t worked. I hadn’t been strong enough. Shelly was —

  “Hope?”

  Vulcan yelped as I sat up so fast I knocked him on his ass. Nix tumbled into my lap.

  Shelly sat on the edge of the work table, wearing a blue denim miniskirt and white t-shirt with sparkly blue print that read I killed myself origin chasing and all I got was this stupid t-shirt. She swiped strands of wild red hair away from her face, stopped, grabbed her left hand in her right and squeezed her palm, eyes widening. Her head twisted around as if she was searching for something invisible, whipped back to me.

  “Hope? Oh my God, Hope, what did you do?”

  Chapter Thirty Three: Megaton

  The moment of empowerment instantiated by a breakthrough presents the new superhuman with an immediate existential crisis, and this crisis remains long after the purely physical crisis which triggered the breakthrough is past. Granted life by her gift, small or great, how will she use what she has been given? Why does she have it? This “Why?” is a theological question for some, but atheists face it as well — indeed, the question is simply a more urgent form of the defining human question.

  Dr. Alice Mendel, Breakthroughs and the Crisis of Being.

  * * *

  It’s a good thing I’m more rugged and durable than I used to be — as it is I pretty much violated any warranty that might have been issued with my powers. Don’t boil water you’re swimming in had to be at the top of any list of Things Not To Do, but my natural heat resistance plus what Andrew built into my costume kept me from cooking; so instead I almost drowned before Safire fished me out.

  My explosion hadn’t been all heat; I’d thrown out enough concussive force to turn the boats left in Monroe Harbor into toothpicks and light them on fire. Safire flew me back to the Dome over the overgrown wreckage of Grant Park, and I didn’t see any green moving — good thing since I was so emptied out I probably couldn’t have pulled up a fart, forget about blastworthy action. The Green Man hadn’t got past the CPD’s fireline to Michigan Avenue, but everything from the lake shore to the line lay buried in green trees and vines — they’d climbed halfway up the Dome and the Atlas Memorial was just gone.

  “Cleanup will be a complete bitch,” Safire laughed, looking down. She held me in her arms like a baby and the woman did not wear push-ups; I felt like I was being smothered in latex-packed marshmallows.

  Say something, you moron.

  “Not my job, really.”

  “Nope,” she agreed cheerfully. “It’s the Crew’s, and I can help, and Watchman and Astra — when her powers come back, poor kid. Lake Shore and Columbus are forestland now, but this is nothing like the Big One last January...there we go!” The roof opened over the Dome’s launch bay and she dropped us in, through the bay, and down the shaft to Dispatch. We popped out onto the Dispatch floor under the big screens, and she swung me to my feet.

  “Here you go, sugar! Gotta go clear some traffic, it’s nuts. And congrats.”

  “Huh?” Real smart, but I was talking to myself — she was already gone, leaving me dripping on the carpet. So, what now? Congrats? That’s when the clapping started. David stood up from behind his console and put his hands together hard as I stared around, and one by one every dispatcher, at every station, rose until the whole room had joined his applause.

  What?

  Grendel

  How can you tell if a doll is dead? Lack of a pulse? I tucked Nox back under my vest and turned myself around, but the fight was over out in the equipment bay. Groaning orange suits lay all around and there were no spheres left in the air. The place smelled of ozone, probably from Lei Zi; the rest of the team had to have hit the scrum like an avalanche after I bulldozed through.

  Lei Zi didn’t even ask what was behind door number one, or wasn’t anymore; Chakra had to be whispering into her brain like she had with me. She just tasked me with looming while they zip-tied or Sandman-drugged or otherwise restrained all the orange suits still moving. Moving carefully; I growled a few times, flying on frustrated adrenaline and ready to play, but nobody in orange moved too energetically. A few minutes into the cleanup at least half the orange suits, the skinny bald clones, freaking disappeared and nobody else blinked. I wasn’t going to open my mouth to ask.

  Then the red flashing lights died and our Dispatch connections came back.

  “We can stand down, everyone,” Blackstone reported. “The DSA team has been able to wrest control of the prison security system from Phreak, and between ourselves and the Detroit Guardians, we hold the prison. Good job, everybody.”

  I dialed my fangs back as hatches opened and guards who’d been locked out of the blocks by the hijacked system flooded in. Good job, my ass. The Bad Guys had been bugging out when we got here — if I’d gone right for Drop first... But I hadn’t seen him, had I?

  And what did Pellegrini want with kids? At least Nox had tagged the son of a bitch — there’d been blood all over the little razor he’d pulled, and I hoped
he’d scarred the mass-murdering bastard. I’d consider it a promise of things to come, monster to maker, and if Nox woke up I was going to buy him a harem of dolls. Or not, but I owed the little psycho a debt, and —

  Across the room, Lei Zi clapped her hands for everyone’s attention. Three words, The Green Man, and we were headed out as fast as we came in.

  Astra

  I’d never seen Dr. Beth not smiling before, even if it was only the “everything will be fine” smile the best doctors kept for scared patients. He wasn’t smiling now.

  Shelly kept closing her eyes, blinking, biting and licking her lips, feeling her arms and shifting her position on the examination table. Tremors shook her body every few minutes. Dr. Beth had cleared everyone else out of the infirmary, but for all she noticed me I might as well not have been there. Her hand was cold when I took it, and she jumped when he gently peeled a sensor from her shoulder.

  “Well, Shelly, Hope has continued her custom of bringing me people who are suddenly breathing.” He watched her like she was the deepest mystery he’d ever seen. She probably was.

  “Twice isn’t a custom,” I protested weakly when Shell didn’t say anything. I was starting to get scared.

  “Perhaps, but I eagerly await the next occasion. Shelly, you are a perfectly healthy sixteen-year-old girl. I take it this is not welcome?”

  “I can’t see,” she whispered, blinking. “I can’t hear anything.”

  “That’s not — ” I started, but Dr. Beth snapped his fingers beside her head. She flinched.

  “I imagine you feel you can’t,” he said kindly. “Your robot eyes could see into the infrared spectrum, like Hope’s. And you could hear into the ultrasonic range. And all your links are gone, yes?” He tapped his forehead.

  She nodded.

  “And the rest?”

  She slipped her hand from mine to hug herself. “I’m naked. I feel everything.” A tear tracked down her face. “I’m stuck and I — ” A convulsive breath brought another tremor. Dr. Beth nodded.