Repercussions (Wearing the Cape Book 8)

by Marion G. Harmon

  Dead silence filled the room, amplifying the tinkle as bits of metal-frame doorway hit the floor. Grendel opened his hand and let the warped steel door clang at his feet, tossing his piece of paper down in front of them. The smile he gave the packed room bared enough teeth to warn off a shark. “State of emergency, general warrant, you’re all under arrest.”

  “You’re on, my dear.” Blackstone put his hand to the small of Astra’s back and gave her a gentle push—an unneeded encouragement as she stepped briskly forward to mount the short steps to the platform and stand behind the podium. Camera-flash rose and died as she stood patiently waiting for order to return. Following Quin’s instructions, she’d abandoned her armor for her formal skirted outfit. Beautiful and unthreatening, makeup and mask hiding her remaining bruises and scrapes, she was the picture of a young superhero.

  “Hello, everyone.” A pause, a smile but not too wide. Serious but confident. “You’ve heard from the mayor and the director. Regarding the Sentinels’ part in this, in the last few hours we’ve served more than a dozen general warrants, all non-fatally.” Pause again for everyone’s surprise. “You’re all aware of the Sentinels’ longstanding resistance to serving general warrants—particularly the provision of the warrants that allows anyone to serve them, with the named persons to be brought in dead or alive. We agreed to cooperate with the warrant court on the condition that the warrants not be made public until we and our chosen agents had time to serve them ourselves. We were also deputized under the current state of emergency to serve detainment warrants on persons expected to resist coming in for testing and treatment. We’ve done so with few injuries, and the named persons of all warrants are now in at least temporary custody. Thanks to the warning provided by Rush—”

  She stopped and Blackstone gripped his cane, willing her to continue. “Thanks to Rush, we have time. Many infected and suspected infected are already quarantined, and over the next five hours all of Chicago’s capes and first responders have been tasked with safely conducting all citizens who know or suspect themselves to be exposed, who can’t bring themselves in without help, in for testing and treatment. The Sentinels will guarantee their safety. Questions? Please remember that time is what we’re fighting now and keep them to the point.”

  A babble of voices rose as hands shot up, hushed when Astra pointed. “Marie?”

  The cable journalist lowered her hand. “What about due process rights?”

  “Under the state of emergency, due process doesn’t come into play. Please keep in mind that although warrants were served these were not arrests. No person detained for testing and treatment is being charged with anything. In several cases, the District Attorney’s office has already waived several cases of potential assault by persons resisting detainment. Again, we are not acting as law enforcement here, but for public safety in the face of a clear and present danger. Next. Raoul?”

  Blackstone’s knuckles whitened. Why did she have to pick one of the city’s most vocal anti-cape reporters?

  “Dr. Clemens didn’t describe the actual Medusa Protocol, and the name sounds hella-ominous. Why the secrecy?”

  “Thank you, Raoul, that’s a good question. The answer is that there is no single, universal, Medusa Protocol. The protocol developed from the rise of breakthrough powers, and the existence of select superhumans whose powers allow them to ‘freeze’ targets completely, down to the cellular level, without harm. The CDC realized that, in situations where they’re facing a disease without an available treatment, they could use those powers to save lives by suspending victims in temporary states of complete biostasis until they could get the treatment to them. But each application of the protocol has different limits and conditions, because each application is based on the breakthrough power used. And we are under attack.”

  The A-word muted the room. “Remember that the intent of this biological attack was for us to be blindsided, for the city, for all of us, barely beginning to recover from the attack two days ago, to experience a wave of brutal attacks, thousands of our citizens turning on each other, many of them using powers. Men and women attacking and even killing their coworkers, friends, partners, children. Many attacks would have been with fists and improvised weapons since the virus’s victims would be in a state of violent rage not conducive to planning. But many victims would already have been armed. Police officers. Armed citizens. Breakthroughs armed with their powers. The attack would have drowned us in blood.”

  She paused to steady her voice and let it sink in.

  “The worst of that is averted, now. But whoever attacked the city and left us a plague then sent agents to destroy our means of fighting it, of saving not just the victims of virus-induced violence but the infected themselves. That won’t happen again, and that means keeping our new means of countering this attack and saving everybody secret for as long as necessary. Next question?”

  “She’s got them,” Shell whispered in Blackstone’s earbud. “I’m watching real-time texts and Dispatch is lighting up with all the calls for pickup.”

  He sighed. “It’ll cost her.”

  “Maybe. If it does, she’s willing.”

  “Too willing.” He forced his grip on his cane’s silver lion-head to relax before his fingers cramped. “Tell Dr. Clemens it’s in her court now. We won’t be able to round up or talk in everybody in time, so she needs to make the call on how long we can wait before everyone who does come in becomes untreatable. Then it’s Ozma’s turn. God help us.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Omega Watch Alert/Update: Asset Power Chick would like to thank all participating agencies and is announcing a downgrade of the current Omega Event Alert to Event Possible “unless something screwy happens, but it looks like we’ve got this.” She would also like to thank everyone who took part in Big Sister, and says “I’ve got my eyes on you, and you know who I mean.”

  DSA Alert 215-87562

  “It’s falling apart, Dad,” Hope said, just above a whisper.

  “I think this looks like winning.”

  Watching the last of the infected entering the center, Astra held Malleus tight. What they could bring together of the team waited with Ozma on the raised platform at the center of what was, once a year, Metrocon’s main expo floor.

  It was the largest open space in the Chicago Sports Center outside the arena. Now there were no milling cape-fans, no booths and tables, no spectacle—just the temporary platform surrounded by thousands of ranked folding chairs interspersed with scattered water and snack stations. Most of the chairs were full. A screened section held the sleeping forms of the infected breakthroughs, fresh sandman patches slapped on them.

  Ozma, Blackstone, Riptide, Seven, Grendel, Kindrake, The Harlequin, Artemis, her dad—still in Iron Jack form and a living metal golem until he’d finished his appointed task of helping the CDC decontaminate Chicago’s biological hot zones—they all stood around her on the platform, her father closest. (Well, they stood around Ozma and Dr. Clemens.) Everyone else was either performing duties or still in recovery, but Ozma had insisted on the presence of whoever they could muster for this.

  The over six thousand suspected and confirmed infected watching them now didn’t know what ‘this’ was yet.

  “We’ve got this.” She kept her voice low. “But the governor still isn’t releasing any of us to help with the flooding or the blackouts everywhere else. We still don’t know who did this—” She couldn’t tell her own father everything she knew through Shell and Shelly, not about the Gungnirs, not about Defensenet’s identification of at least the Big Bad who’d smacked her. Having a higher security clearance truly sucked. And they’d just shown the world that, with Shell as Big Sister, they could find and lay hands on anybody. Call it whatever they wanted, the Sentinels had coordinated the single largest mass-arrest and detention since World War Two.

  Mostly polite arrests, but still, and . . .

  “And Ozma—” She glanced aside at the waiting princess. “This isn’t goin
g to be good.”

  “Why?” Hope had gotten used to reading her dad’s Iron Jack face and now he had the protective parental-unit look and despite her jitters she almost rolled her eyes. It had started with Jacky, and since then her parents had added Jamal, Grendel, and Ozma to the Corrigan “family.” All three of them had no other family or only distant family, and all but Jacky had been minors (even Ozma at least officially) when they came into John and Ann-Marie Corrigan’s orbit.

  “She’s . . . Shell? Connect us?”

  “Got it! Mask-mic to earbud!”

  “She told me the story,” Hope sub-vocalized and her father nodded, tapping his ear. “She got the Magic Belt from the Nome King, though it didn’t exactly happen the way Baum told it. The Nome King’s a sadist. He kept a huge suite of rooms full of table ornaments in his subterranean palace. Brick-a-brack. Tchotchkes. Objects d’art. Most of it was stuff collected as tribute from his craftsmen, but maybe a twentieth of it was victims transformed by the Magic Belt.” She almost laughed at her dad’s look.

  “C’mon, you never read that story? If the Nome King had a prisoner, he’d give the victim a choice—slavery in the mines or a chance to go into his display rooms and touch an object. If they chose a transformed victim, the victim would return to their living form and both would be free. If not, the Nome King had a new trophy in his collection. Ozma and all of her companions but one were forced to choose and transformed. She swore she’d never use the Magic Belt like that.”

  Her dad frowned. “But she has. Many times.”

  “Only in self-defense or to protect others. And never for long and not like—”

  “Everybody’s in,” Shell announced. “We’re ready.”

  The noise of six thousand people, some of them children Astra’d had interesting conversations with while Kindrake’s drakes entertained, had been a background to their surreptitious conversation. That hadn’t changed, but Ozma put her hand to her mouth and whispered “Lim tim tak!”

  And all noise ceased.

  And Ozma wobbled, fair skin as pale as death.

  “Jacky!” Hope shouted unnecessarily as her BF grabbed the sagging girl’s elbow. Ozma’s head dipped forward like she was going to retch and something fell from her mouth to bounce and roll on the platform, ignored as they all took in the room. Every formerly occupied chair was filled by a tchotchke, an object d’art, a piece of brick-a-brack shaped in gold and silver, glass, crystal, china, jade, and marble. There were vases, boxes, figurines of people and animals, platters, bowls, mosaics of rainbow colors.

  “That’s it?” The exclamation of disbelief came from Dr. Clemens. “No explanation? No ‘This is going to be strange but you’ll be alright?’”

  “No, Dr. Clemens, I wasn’t going to tell a crowd of six thousand worried people I was going to turn them into ornaments and pack them all away in a cave. Astra?” She looked down and Hope realized what she’d spit out—a blue pearl?—had rolled up against her foot. She picked it up and slipped it in one of the hidden pockets in her costume skirt, and Ozma nodded.

  Hope didn’t hear the signal from Shell but the hall doors opened again, a tide of box-carrying Platoons rushing in from every direction.

  “But how did you even do that?” The doctor had obviously been expecting a much more protracted and dramatic procedure. For that matter, so had Hope.

  Ozma straightened and Hope realized her near-collapse hadn’t been from something like magic exhaustion. “The Magic Belt is best thought of as a capacitor, doctor. Similarly, the Blue Pearl is a signal amplifier, magnifying the power of anyone holding it in their mouth. And enchantment is always easier when its conditions are laid out ritually beforehand. I spent much of the day defining the target of this enchantment as everyone in this chamber not on the platform. Excuse me.”

  She turned to face a Platoon mounting the platform, carrying what Hope realized was a handful of little green plastic soldiers. Hope clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle the laugh—of course all the transformed Platoons in the room looked like each other. Ozma touched each, and they stopped being toy soldiers with the same stop-motion photography suddenness Hope remembered from Ozma’s own transformation in Japan. There really should be a flash or shimmer, or some other Hollywoody effect.

  “Ma’am?” One of them sorta-saluted.

  “How long to gather everyone, Agent?”

  “We’ve got enough boxes and foam, ma’am, twenty minutes tops. Our rides are in the parking lot, then a couple of hours from the airport to Portland.”

  “Thank you. The director and I will be ready.”

  The Platoons moved off with their weird effortless synchronicity. Dr. Clemens watched them go and shook her head. “Where are we going?”

  “I have a device made by the Wizard,” Ozma told her. “It allows me to rapidly and repeatedly access a linked location in Oz from a terrestrial location in Portland. The transformations will not last more than a few hours in this far less magical place, so Platoon and other agents have uncovered it for us and we will be making the cave in Oz our base. You’ll be following with your own lab and technicians to prepare the new vaccines there. In the words of your president, we’re ‘deploying forward’ into my home country.”

  She actually smiled, though Hope didn’t like the edge on it at all. “Don’t worry, doctor. We’ll give everyone nice shelves. They’ll be quite content being what they are until they’re not, and I’ll have plenty of time to distill enough crystalized Water of Oblivion for everyone. They won’t remember a thing.”

  Hope decided that Willis and Shell had outdone themselves preparing the main residence-level lounge. Willis had laid out a spread of pizza, slammers, chicken wings, and a rainbow of beers from sours to stouts to an apple-infused ale Willis promised was Rush’s favorite. The nearly wall-to-wall TV showed a running loop of Rush news-footage going back to video of him as Scott Baker, Colorado State football star—where his capacity for amazing bursts of speed on the field (and penchant for jumping the gun and incurring at least one rushing foul per game) had earned him the nickname The Rush. The sports footage included his career-ending breakthrough going for a sack in the last seconds of the Colorado vs. Arkansas game. From there forward it was news clips, with a running infobar at the bottom showing Rush’s official year-to-year save stats courtesy of Powers TV’s Cape Hall of Fame recordkeepers. Shell’d included all his great moments, along with every juicy public scandal.

  Nobody objected—they triggered laughter every time they came up on the loop. Even Kindrake, visibly uncomfortable as the newbie in the room, laughed until she cried.

  And with what felt like the longest day of Hope’s life behind them, they all needed to laugh.

  “Ozma, Grendel and all the Platoons in the world just disappeared into Oz with enough firepower to start a war,” Shell whispered in her ear and Hope nodded. Cat-Shell was with them again, along with Nox and Nix. Ozma had been confident that with Grendel, the Platoons, and Kret (whose services she’d apparently retained by bribing her with the promise of exposure to a whole new culture’s art styles), they’d be able to hold the Ruby Cave behind the Great Waterfall forever. Or at least long enough for enough new doses of the anti-rabies protocol to be manufactured to save everyone.

  Plus, Ozma had sounded pretty certain that Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkel Emmanuel Ambrose Diggs, the Wizard, would be joining them there. Apparently because the Question Box had said so. With a limerick cryptically hinting Hope should hold onto the Blue Pearl. . . .

  “—thumb wrestling!” Crash laughed.

  “What?” Hope blinked.

  “He taught me to skip to ten seconds-per-second without bringing what I was touching by thumb wrestling! Sifu couldn’t believe it.” The youngest Young Sentinel had insisted on being there, and Chakra had seconded him. Her eyes were dark whenever she looked at the TV screen, but her saving Crash helped.

  She’d told Hope the Reaper had missed Crash by hours or less, that Rush had been too f
ar down the slope but Crash had been at the top and just begun his slide. Even so, Hope didn’t think Chakra would forgive herself for letting go, for letting Rush go to hold on to the boy, anytime soon. Now she and Dr. Beth kept an eye on all their wounded in the room: a recovering Crash, still strapped-up Watchman, even Megaton in a mobile bed. Only Variforce wasn’t there.

  At least now we know he’s not going to die.

  “He was the best speedster I’ve worked with,” Lei-Zi observed. “His discipline issues aside.” She launched into a story that somehow involved the world’s most startled turtle, but Hope got distracted by a sudden left-field thought. “Willis?”

  “Ma’am.” Their ninja major-domo came equipped with his own earbud, but somehow he’d arranged to be right behind her again.

  “Can you hear your—your other selves? All the Platoons in Oz?”

  “Of course, ma’am. And things are going smoothly, so do not be concerned.” As always, putting Willis’ English butler personae in the context of his being an un-uniformed Platoon always made Hope’s lips twitch. Willis, and his domestic-service doubles in Restormel with the Hollywood Knights and who knew how many other Crisis Aid and Intervention teams, looked and acted so much the opposite of the soldier’s soldier every Platoon seemed to embody it was impossible to believe they were the same “person.” Which, she supposed, was the whole point.

  Willis capped Lei-Zi’s story by benignly commenting that Fred the Turtle was quite happy with his adoptive family—Sifu’s family—living his days patrolling the reservist speedster’s Chinese garden, and the drinking and storytelling continued. Even the underage Young Sentinels got to try Rush’s favorites, rendered non-alcoholic by Ozma-provided Sobriety Drops. Their teammate’s funeral was a week away, to be part of the mass-funeral for all who died in the attack, but with no idea what the coming days held, Blackstone had decided that their first evening with Rush gone would be the wake.