Repercussions (Wearing the Cape Book 8)

by Marion G. Harmon

  The last thing Hope saw was an impossibly close sunrise behind the looming hulk that filled her darkening world, but the heat drove the cold away.

  Chapter Three

  “Although both Atlas and Ajax-Types are most noted for their superhuman strength and toughness, their amazing recuperative powers are just as valuable, if not more so. Most human beings, powered and unpowered, rarely heal fully from significant injuries—thus the relatively short professional careers of athletes in high-impact sports and soldiers regularly serving in hot combat zones. Injuries often require lengthy rehabilitation and severe injuries may end an athlete or soldier’s ability to perform their core tasks. Atlas and Ajax-Types, on the other hand, seem to operate almost on a walk-it-off level of injury performance; most injuries that don’t immediately kill them will slow them down only briefly, and most can be fully recovered from with no lingering disability. This makes even C and D Classes of these types tremendously valuable in military service; long experience sharpens skills with no tradeoffs in loss of ability.”

  US Armed Forces Recruiting Brief: 1-48.

  “She’s awake,” Shell said.

  Hope opened her eyes to hospital lights, white LEDs that burned her eyes and stabbed her brain. She closed them but couldn’t block out the hospital smells that assaulted her nose or the hospital sounds filtering into the room. Is it rush hour out there?

  “Hey, you.”

  Opening her eyes again she squinted, hissing as the stabbing deepened to a pulsing heat radiating across the left side of her face. Shell’s smiling face swam into view. “Hey, you,” her BF repeated. “Lights too bright? Hold on.” Everything dimmed. Even the sounds and smells faded. “Better?”

  The stabbing pain faded a bit too, though she could barely see out of her left eye and everything on that side felt hot and tight. “Yes. Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. One of the perks of being able to manipulate your sensory input. Don’t want to mask any symptoms, but I can turn it down a little.” A cool hand settled on her arm—Shell present physically, in another of her Galatea-Shell shells. “How are you feeling?”

  That was a good question. Or a bad one? Anyway, Hope knew the drill. She wiggled things. “I’m pretty sure I have toes?” Everything that didn’t throb felt thick, wrapped up, far away. “It’s all there, right? Vulcan’s not going to have to fix me up with new parts?”

  Shell’s fake smile twisted. “Would that be a problem?”

  “Not really.” Hope smiled herself, to show Shell she shouldn’t worry. “Rush says he does good work.”

  “Okay. . . . Describe your emotional state.”

  She blinked slowly. “Um, okay? Tired?” Was that an emotional state? She should ask Dr. Mendell. “Is that the right answer?”

  “It’ll do,” her BF said. “Now, what’s the last thing you remember?”

  “I . . . you got water all over me. Not fair. I have a concussion. Don’t I? Why aren’t you a doctor asking me what year it is?”

  “Since you’re not going to die, they’re all a bit busy. What year is it?”

  “Ha, ha. Ha. How bad is it?”

  “Pretty bad. Shattered Zygomatic bone—that’s your cheekbone—cracked frontal and parietal bones. He just about crushed your skull. The doc had to pop your eye back.”

  “Ewww, really?”

  “Really.” Shell’s smile got more natural. “You’re tracking pretty good now. What’s the first thing I said?”

  “ . . . She’s awake?”

  “And your short-term memory’s coming back. I think she’s here to stay, Mrs. C.”

  “Mom?” Hope blinked, stiffly rotated her head. Her mom sat by the bed, opposite Shell and on Hope’s good side. She looked as pale as Jacky and went paler when Hope smiled. “Hi, Mom. Jacky’d look like you in a few years if vampires aged at all. Hey, do daywalkers age?”

  Shell sighed. “Okay, she’s not completely here, yet. This is the first time you’ve been consistently coherent. Remember anything after the beach?”

  Hope considered, but the warmth on her thigh was distracting. Her moving hand encountered fur and she carefully looked down to see a sleeping seven-tailed fox curled on the hospital bed beside her. “Did he get shot again? He only does this when he’s hurt.”

  Her BF laughed, looking sidelong at her mom. “He takes up more of the bed, normally, right? Yeah, but your mom told us to look for him, said he headed for the sound of the guns.”

  “That doesn’t sound like him.” Hope ran fingers through his fur. Her fox’s approach to fights was to not be there for them. Smart fox. “Um. Kitsune’s supposed to be in Japan. Mom, why would he . . . Shell? Why are all the doctors busy? What happened?”

  “You don’t want to know about Kitsune’s arrangement? I figured it out when I reconnected. He’s been paying an ex-Secret Service guy to pose as a private accountant, watch over your mom from down the hall in her building. When you’re not in town Kitsune swaps places with the guy.”

  Her brow furrowed. “He’s spying on Mom?”

  “More like covertly bodyguarding her. And I’m adding ‘muted emotional response’ to your symptoms list.” Shell hesitated, visibly came to a decision. “Okay, I’m going to tell you a little of what’s happened, and you’re going to stay right here. With your mom. And I swear to God that if you even try and get up I’m cutting off your vision. The doc said it’s a bad idea for you to move at all until your thick head has more time to return to metabolic homeostasis.”

  “What does that even mean?” Hope sighed.

  “It means your brain got hammered inside your skull and everything in there’s fragile. Capillaries and cells bruised and leaking bad stuff and until it’s healed a bit an 8-year-old with a hammer could finish the job with another hit. You’re not going to put any stress on it even if you could get out of that bed—which you’re not going to try since your balance is one of the last things to really come back in a concussion and falling on the floor or flying into the wall will do that 8-year-old’s job for her. Get it?”

  Hope winced at the flood of words, eyes on her mom’s masklike face. “Got it. Not going anywhere.”

  “Damn right. Besides, you look scary as hell. Puffy, purple, not reassuring at all.” Shell came around where Hope could see her again. “So, okay. Somebody hit us with a coordinated attack—no, not moving!” Her scowl disappeared into pitch black. “Are you going to behave?”

  Hope lay back, blinked away tears of pain. “ . . . yes?”

  “Good.” Shell let the light back in. “Your emotional response is improving, anyway, just, don’t be stupid. Please? Attacks, plural. Coordinated infrastructure attacks across the country. Then someone dropped a quantum-interdiction field on Chicago. You know, like the one that kept me from linking with you in Japan?”

  “They targeted you?”

  Her eyes unfocused as she tracked something besides Hope. “I . . . don’t think so? They’d have had to know what I am and my physical location, which is a deep dark secret. And it was simultaneous with a total signals blackout. A TDS attack on the city’s Dispatch and first-responder hubs, wider jamming attacks on cell towers. The Sentinels were reduced to a single open channel with sucky range—not that I knew any of that until the interference ended.”

  “Okay.” Hope tried to picture it all. It helped to imagine she was in one of Blackstone’s threat-assessment briefings, but her eyes stayed on her mom, reassuring her that she was there and alright. “Then?”

  “The quantum-interdiction told Shelly that something was going down, and between that and Ozma’s danger warning triggering, you got the whole junior team back to town for the Big Event. Not that you got from there to here instantaneously—things were pretty underway when you arrived. I’m going to show you a picture now. This guy is gone, okay? The fight’s over. Ready?” She projected a virtual screen for her, a picture of a looming figure in dark armor. “Anything?”

  “No, I—” Pain lanced through Hope’s skull. “—an
d loud they sang and loud they sang they sang to wake the dead!”

  “Breathe! Do Chakra exercises!” In Hope’s clearing vision a wide-eyed Shell looked like she was ready to call for help, and she realized she was emitting a breathless scream. Sucking in air, she did Chakra’s centering exercises until the pain faded from mind-numbing to just nearly blinding. Awareness coming back, she realized her mom—smart enough to not grip her hand—had laid both hands on her arm. She’d barely noticed.

  The weird zombies. The mini-tanks. The smoke and explosions. Him. How could she have forgotten? “All the doctors are busy? How many dead? Is everyone— Is everyone else alright?”

  “Variforce is critically injured. The last round of bombs caught him with his fields out of position. Riptide and Watchman are injured too. Megaton is . . . hurt, but stable. He’ll make it.”

  “There was smoke rising all over the city. Who else?”

  “You’ve been out of it for a few hours, they’re still triaging and every emergency room and trauma center is full. Two, maybe close to three thousand dead, at least five times that many wounded, mostly gunshot and shrapnel injuries.”

  “Show me the city, Shell.”

  Shell gave her a hard look, nodded, and the image changed to an aerial view of Chicago. “Not all the fires are out but they’re controlled. The attack focused on five zones, with peripheral hits at the start to short-stop the initial police response. A lot of the dead are police officers and other first-responders, but the attacks were multi-staged to suck in and take down capes. We’ve lost almost a third of the city’s CAI heroes.”

  It just got worse and worse. Hope closed her eyes. “Dad?”

  “Your father’s fine, sweetheart,” her mom whispered, squeezing her arm. “So is Toby, and Josh and his family.”

  Shell nodded. “The zones were actually pretty concentrated, the fighting was over in less than half an hour, start to finish. Your dad was way out of position on a building project, and by the time he got to the closest fight it was mostly over.”

  “Okay.” Hope breathed carefully, applying Chakra’s calming techniques. If nothing else, it added to whatever Shell was doing to mute the hot pulsing in her head. “Okay, I’ll be good.”

  “You’d better. Now I’m going to leave you guys alone and find something to do with this Galatea shell. I will be keeping an eye on you.”

  Hope watched her go, rolled her head back to smile for her mom. “So, you get to be my monitor?” She didn’t get a smile back.

  “Dr. Beth told me your head-trauma wasn’t this bad when you broke everything else using your body as a missile at Whittier Base.” The hand on Hope’s arm squeezed. “I’m not taking my eyes off my little girl. You could have died, sweetheart.”

  Hope pulled her other arm over her chest to lay her hand over her mom’s. “I’m sorry.”

  “I know.” She sighed and sat in silence for a long minute.

  Hope was happy with that, her own thoughts still all over the place and circling in a brain that obviously wasn’t firing with all neurons yet.

  “Would it have been too hard, for you?” her mom asked suddenly. “Going to school, working at the Foundation? Building that fashion empire with Julie and Megan and Annabeth? Couldn’t you have been safe?”

  It actually hurt to laugh. “I would have loved all of that, Mom.” She carefully squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry I’ll never be safe.”

  Her mom sighed. “Well, I do consider us lucky. That day with the Ashland Bombing— Other parents buried their children, and we just have to worry about our super daughter. And we’re so proud of you, even when we wish you wouldn’t give us so many reasons to be.” She wiped wet eyes, looked down at the sleeping Kitsune. “So, to talk about happier things, now that you’re not busy, will you finally explain about your fiancé?”

  Hope giggled. “Husband, Mom.” And that still weirded her out.

  “Fiancé dear, until a proper and public wedding. You come home from a mission you can’t talk about and introduce us to someone we’ve known as a supervillain thief, who you used to think was an eighty-year-old man?”

  Laughing still hurt. “Well, that’s what we thought. Not that it matters when you’re a shapeshifter.” She stroked what she could reach of Kitsune’s fan of tails. “Officially and in their super-secret files, Defensenet says Kitsune broke through a few years ago as a college student at the University of Tokyo. So he’s not really that much older than me. His real name isn’t Yoshi Miyamoto, but it’s his legal name, now.”

  “And is that the truth? He’s told your father and I that he’s a seven hundred year old fox-spirit.”

  “What’s the truth? Is Ozma really the princess of Oz, or is she a delusional breakthrough who created an entire extrareality realm for her story?”

  “So our future son-in-law is either twenty-something or a septingentarian?”

  “Um, yes?”

  Her mom smiled at that, almost a real one. “We expect both of you for dinner on Sunday, regardless.”

  Hope rolled her eyes, painfully. “Yes, Mom.” The laughter chased the dark away, if only for a moment. She needed that; returning clarity meant that despite the detached and floaty feel that still edged everything her mind was working well enough that she could listen to the sounds outside and visualize. Parks and parking lots being used for triage, hotel sheets and trash bags used to decently cover the dead until the living had been seen to. Families grieving or desperate for news. Los Angeles all over again. She held her mother’s hand and brushed Kitsune’s tails and tried to just be.

  “—and loud they sang and loud they sang they sang to wake the dead!”

  Chapter Four

  NATIONAL SECURITY ACTION MEMORANDUM 372

  To: The Vice President, The Secretary of State, The Secretary of Defense, The Secretary of Superhuman Affairs, The Secretary of Homeland Security, The Director of the National Intelligence, The Director of Central Intelligence, The Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, The US Attorney General, The US Department of Health and Human Services, Speaker of the House, Senate Majority Leader.

  Subject: Declaration of Emergency

  Pursuant to the immediate crisis and Declaration of Emergency, I have taken the following immediate steps. 1) Placed the US Military on high alert, directing the securing of similar strategic infrastructure targets. 2) Authorized the activation of such units as is anticipated will be needed from the Individual Ready Reserve. 3) Directed FEMA to immediately mobilize in anticipation of official requests by the governors of the afflicted states.

  I will be formally requesting that Congress declare a National State of Emergency, allowing suspension of the Posse Comitatus Act so that the Army and Air Force may operate freely on US soil for the duration of the emergency. State governments are of course fully empowered to wage defensive war in the case of invasion when federal forces cannot be mustered swiftly enough.

  Further measures taken as we gain intelligence on the nature of the enemy or in response to subsequent attacks will be coordinated through the above persons.

  From: Jennifer Touches Cloud, President of the United States.

  Shelly heard the general’s grunt of approval and smiled when Shell popped a virtual screen up so she could read the President’s memorandum. She especially liked Touches Clouds’ dig about the state governments being “fully empowered to wage defensive war.” The military didn’t need that reminder, but Congress probably did—and they’d hear it first from the Speaker and Majority Leader before POTUS made her official, diplomatic, and public request. Smart.

  Waiting with Shelly back at the Institute, cat-Shell had known the instant the quantum-interdiction on Chicago had lifted when her reestablished link updated her. She’d arched and hissed, echoing the unleashed and violently multi-tasking Shell. A fast virtual-briefing through Shelly’s own link had brought her up to date—and rendered her effectively useless for anything requiring thought until Chakra’d let them know that Hope would live.

 
The mask-cam image of Hope, crumpled on the street with only Variforce’s golden fields between her and death, had been purest nightmare-fuel.

  Shelly’d more than made up for it in the hours since, and she was ready when the general cleared his throat to summon all the Ouroboros’ attention. None of them left their workstations, but all eyes turned to him.

  “Very well, everyone. What do we know, and how do we know it? What can the Ouroboros tell the world about what is happening in it? Dr. Hall?”

  The gangly scholar adjusted his glasses. “The weapons used on the dams were Gungnirs, general. They were ours, in fact they were all we had left in our arsenal. Although Gungnirs have never been fired against terrestrial targets previously, they were used tactically in several potential futures, and the damage signatures we have from the Teatime Anarchist’s files match.” He brought up a picture of a sleek, lethal-looking missile on the big screen.

  Shelly was very familiar with that missile.

  “A Gungnir is a Verne-tech nuclear bomb-pumped graser,” he continued, “a sub-kiloton nuclear warhead mated to a forcefield bottle and lensing aperture. The detonated bomb powers the field for the micro-second needed to lens a significant percentage of its energy output into a focused gamma-ray laser. The rest of the output is converted mostly into a ‘kinetic energy shockwave’, even in space. Verne-tech physics isn’t real physics.”

  “And you’re confident these were responsible?”

  “Yes. The one field deployment of the Gungnirs in our actual history, a high orbit and extreme range antimissile operation, showed the shockwave effect to be too strong for any conceivable surface deployments. Subsequent redesign strengthened the bottle and lens fields of the remaining handful of Gungnirs to put more power into the graser and diminish the shockwave significantly, but the military decided against producing any more of them. They were deemed too underpowered for most strategic uses, too overpowered for most tactical uses.”