Denise showed up at 6:55 a.m., landing on my “lawn” in an honest to god flying police car.
“Holy shit!” I said, bounding up to it. “We get a real squad car?”
“We get the oldest, shittiest most run-down police car in the garage, but yeah, we got one. It should be retired, but they give this one to mages because they figure if the engine dies, we can just levitate down.”
Denise sniffed me and made her mouth into a straight line as I crawled in the car.
“What?” I said. “I took a shower. I even used the last of Dad’s Old Spice!”
The car lifted itself into the sky and took off at a leisurely pace. We had time to kill before the office opened, so Denise took us in a big circle, letting me identify landmarks and enjoy the view before we landed on the roof.
“So, what are we starting with?” I asked. “Do you have any animal control stuff?”
“We’re starting with paperwork, new guy. You’re finally getting a real job.”
“Oh yeah, we get paid for this and everything! How much do I get?”
“Almost nothing, but there’s usually overtime. On paper we’re full time, forty-eight hours a week. Twelve hours a day, four days a week, with a floating day off that we will never actually get to take. Say goodbye to your weekends, by the way. You’re gonna be working every Saturday for the rest of your life.”
“Full time? I thought you were just part time while you worked at the shop.”
“I’m full time while I’m training you. That was Harrison’s condition. If I wanted to bring you in, I had to train you, and I had to pick up the badge again.”
“Denise, you came back to Bluestar for me? I thought you hated this job?”
“I do. But you’re gonna love it. I’m training you to replace me, so I can feel better about walking away.”
“Shit, you made a real sacrifice for me. I didn’t realize.” I swiveled the chair around to face her. “Thank you. It means a lot.”
“You deserve a chance, and the city needs you. The city needs you bad. More than you know. Bluestar 7 has lost two members this year. They lost their strong guy, Oleg the Bear, in January, and Daniel Carter just took a leave of absence, so they need a strong guy and a mage. Perfect fit for you, if I can get you off your training wheels fast enough.
“Carter’s gone? Shit! He’s the guy I really wanted to meet!”
“We’re going to HQ to do your paperwork, but you’re not gonna meet anybody. And even if you see somebody famous, you really don’t want any of them to see you with me.”
“Yeah, did you really get kicked off the team?”
“Oh yeah. Jade Katt put her boot so far up my ass I had to mail it back to her a week later.”
“What did you do?”
Denise sighed. “I had sex with… somebody I shouldn’t have. It was a convention thing. Tim, I don’t usually share this kind of thing, but if we’re going to be working together… I used to drink, okay? I used to drink a lot. I started drinking when I was underage. Way underage.
“But when you’re the famous daughter of a famous mom, you can get pretty much anything you want, and when guys started to see how much ‘fun’ I was when I was drunk… For a while there I was pulling shifts at the hospital every day and drinking myself unconscious every night.
“Then I started going on trips on the superhero convention circuit, and… I don’t know how to explain convention rules to you. Let’s just say a lot of people who are usually faithful to their partners end up breaking their rules at conventions…”
“Shit,” Denise stopped herself. “I really didn’t want to start with this story, but you need to know why everybody in that building hates me. I got drunk at a convention and decided I wanted to try girls. And the girl I wanted to try happened to be Jade’s steady girlfriend. I wanted to see if I could steal a girl from a superhero, and I did. Then word got around, Jade whooped my ass, and two days later I was back at the potion shop with an adjunct badge.”
“Wait, you lost a super fight?”
“Hell yes, I lost. I was completely in the wrong. I didn’t even try to cast. And even if I hadn’t been taking my medicine, if Jade really wanted to take me out, she would have me on the ground before I could get a spell off. I could probably beat her if I already had stuff going, but a surprise attack? She would wipe the floor with me. She did wipe the floor with me, and I honestly had it coming. Most of the team members that saw that fight are still there, and most of them still hate me.”
“And Tim,” she said, like she wasn’t sure if she wanted to say this part. “Could you trust me on one thing in there? When the offer comes up to sell your media rights to VBC, say no. You can always change your mind later, but for now, say no, until we can talk about it.”
* * *
Bluestar 7 headquarters had been an old Boston police station in the 1920s, refurbished a dozen times, but it still managed to look shabby, dirty, and cramped. Every trip to the bathroom was an adventure, because you never really knew if the toilet would flush, and you never knew when a sink handle would come off in your hand.
The best thing about headquarters was how close it was to my apartment, easy walking distance just a couple blocks over.
The exterior of Berkeley Street headquarters was a weathered white brick rectangle. It had gotten some of its dignity back, since the old external air conditioners had been replaced with modern cooling fields, but the interior restoration still looked kind of sloppy and half-assed. Another restoration project that had been abandoned after the Bump.
The first floor was nice, though. Old fashioned wooden desks, wooden floor, ceiling fans, and things that still looked like old-fashioned desk lamps, even if they were running on long-life power crystals now.
The desks looked like they should have had grizzled police sergeants behind them, but they were empty, and they looked like they had been empty for a long time.
The rooms and hallways were impossibly small by modern standards, made for a generation of humans who were a foot shorter and about fifty pounds lighter than modern men. Even I had to duck and pull my arms in a bit, and I was still considered kind of small for my age.
There weren’t many superheroes left hanging around this old superhero HQ, but the Bluestar umbrella corporation was still required to maintain the building, and ostensibly provide food, clothing, and shelter for every hero on the local payroll, even if they were living in luxury suites provided by their corporate sponsors now.
This left a small army of porters, gardeners, and maintenance guys maintaining a big, old building with almost nobody in it. A group of mostly forgotten employees employed by a corporation that provided none of the usual corporate perks, since the Bluestar program was a collective effort that ran on “donations” from every company in the council – donations that seemed to get smaller every year, even as the payouts for sponsorships and media rights got bigger.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
* * *
The members of Bluestar 7 were national celebrities, some more than others.
Their leader was a metahuman gun guy named Randall, but he wasn’t much of a celebrity, because his powers weren’t flashy, and he never talked. Not just refused interviews, but like, never talked. He walked around in full body armor and a black mask and whenever anybody tried to talk to him, he just walked away.
So, what’s the difference between a gun guy and a metahuman gun guy? A human gun guy might be able to shoot a quarter from a mile away. A metahuman gun guy can turn it into two dimes and a nickel.
Metahuman gun guys had enhanced agility that mainly showed up in their reflexes, balance, and depth perception. Some of them were acrobats, but most of them were just insanely good with their hands. Inhumanly fast at shooting and reloading, with an innate sense of where a gun was pointed and how their targets were moving at all times.
Randall could shoot you from behind his back without looking. Most of them just used fancy custom pistols, but Randall had a massive collection of rifles, rocket launchers, grenades, and flamethrowers that he could conjure out of nowhere in the middle of a battle.
Most of the time he walked around looking unarmed, counting on his powers to summon whatever he needed in the blink of an eye.
The most famous member of the team was Jade Katt, a Japanese catgirl who wore a skin-tight green bodysuit and cut people up with energy claws. Catgirl was a power set that referred to any female with enhanced agility. Most of them were super sexy and played it up for ratings.
Jade was actually pretty tame compared to most of them. She stripped down to a bikini for the mandatory Bluestar swim calendar, but she never did nude stuff, and would show up to formal events in these amazing traditional dresses.
She even dressed up for normal dinner dates and was strangely formal in her posture and body language, even if she did cuss like a sailor and date girls.
Daniel Carter was probably the most famous after Jade. Daniel was the magical equivalent of a one-trick pony, a mage who only cast one spell, until people thought he was just a savant, although Carter was also good at martial arts and reading auras.
He had been more of an action guy in his 20s, but now that he was pushing 40, he was more of a wizard detective, counting on his magic hands to do the fighting he couldn’t do with his physical hands and feet anymore.
His power was a pair of disembodied hands that looked like they were made of water or crystal. Carter was incredibly flexible and coordinated, but he only had normal human strength, until he got one of those magic hands on you and flung your ass across the room. He could make them smaller to do fine detail work or make them huge to stop vehicles or block bullets.
Daniel had been really cool to me and Judy after my first terrifying demon encounter at the museum, and I had spent hours learning to copy one of his martial arts moves, a move that had saved my ass during the final fight with Baalphezar.
Daniel was a Christian, even to the point of wearing a silver cross in public, and he had the most badass origin story. People said he grew up in a monastery and learned martial arts from angels.
But Daniel had taken a leave of absence a month before my big fight, leaving a gaping hole in a team that was already short-handed. I probably owed my whole presence on the team to him.
The fourth member was a Chinese guy named Paul Zhang, a telekinetic chess prodigy who was rumored to be a mind reader. Mind reading was technically illegal, of course, but the DMA was not particularly concerned with the word “legal.”
He was an acerbic smartass who also avoided interviews, since any encounter with the press turned into a shouting match about invasions of privacy and cheating at chess.
The last guy had the weirdest powers. Philip Bower was a technical savant who could make a laser gun out of toothpicks and a stick of gum. He had a weird talent for making gadgets to solve problems, gadgets that turned into useless junk whenever anybody else tried to use them.
* * *
I was really hoping to meet them at Bluestar HQ, but there was literally no one there when I walked in to take my tests. I followed a holographic tour guide back to an office full of wall-mounted machines and watched a bunch of orientation videos that repeated what Harrison told me.
I could pull people out of car wrecks and use magic for first aid, but I was absolutely not allowed to fight crime. I was allowed to use my powers to defend myself, but I was not allowed to use force on any normal human unless they tried to kill me first.
I pressed my thumb to a confirmation pad after each video and stepped into some kind of scanning chamber that confirmed I was healthy enough to serve.
I sat down and did my employment paperwork, deeply uncomfortable while a bunch of Bluestar machines took my fingerprints, scanned my eyeballs, clipped off a bit of my hair, and even poked my finger to get a drop of blood.
Anybody who wanted to use powers in public had to get screened like this, which is why nobody used hero names anymore. Well, that and the media rights. That was the first rule the corps put in place to keep heroes in line. If you wanted to make money off your super fights, you had to register with your real name.
The pay scale for a working superhero looked like a joke compared to my old Innovex paychecks. I had been making six figures a year by the time I turned twenty-two, but the company didn’t provide anything for free, so rent, food, utilities, and clothing all came out of my pocket.
Bluestar Resources paid a fraction of that in discretionary income, but I also had access to a distro allowance that let me grab shirts, socks, boots, and badass uniform pants with lots of pockets. They even sold Bluestar branded toothpaste, laced with nano stuff that was supposed to repair your teeth.
I immediately tried to get a bulletproof jacket in Bluestar blue, but those had to be issued by your supervisor. And of course, they wouldn’t let me buy a gun.
They even had milspec computing stuff, made in ancient form factors like pads and laptops, but the processors were a joke, barely G6, and I didn’t realize how good my black box optics were until I saw the clunky shit they had at Bluestar distro.
I could even use my allowance for “food,” but the food was all energy drinks and energy bars – disgusting sugary crap in twenty flavors that all tasted the same. I wondered how many young heroes were living on fancy-wrapped sawdust candy and vitamin pills.
I could even sleep in the “barracks,” a pathetic set of rooms with bunk beds that would let you sleep in HQ between shifts. Useful for heroes that had to commute and be available for shifts ‘round the clock during emergencies.
External rent had to come out of your own pocket, and that meant more than half my monthly income would be gone immediately, unless I gave up my apartment.
This was the standard for low-end corporate jobs these days. Salaries were typically split in half, with companies taking half of it to pay for bare bones food, clothing, and shelter that nobody ever used, while most people used the other half on private rent, restaurants, and a couple sets of designer clothes.
High-end corporate jobs let you use the reserved half of your salary at boutique company stores that would sell fancy clothes, gourmet food, and interface gear approved by your employer, so most people who worked for the same company ended up dressing the same, buying the same six or seven basic outfits you could buy with your allowance.
Most people just wore uniforms, while the executives tended to dress in the same dark suits, accentuated with ties and pocket squares embossed with their company logo.
I used to mock people who seemed proud to wear marks of corporate slavery, but I had just purchased half a dozen t-shirts embossed with the Bluestar logo, five minutes after I got access to the company store.
Anybody could buy a Bluestar shirt that marked them as a fan, but now I had access to the official shirts that would let everybody know I was an off-duty superhero, if I was vain enough to wear one to the grocery store.
The Bluestar company was technically a nonprofit umbrella organization financed by corporate donations and run by the DMA, but everybody knew the real bosses were the corporate sponsors who owned everybody’s media rights.
Bluestar 2 in New York was sponsored by HDI. Bluestar 3 in Chicago was sponsored by GAC, and my own team, Bluestar 7 in Boston, was sponsored by a media company called VBC. Its full name was Vanderhoff Broadcasting Company, and it had been around since the early days of radio.
Now it was just VBC, since everybody had switched to three letters, and it was considered lame to use the full name of a company in polite conversation.
The blue dragon logo of VBC popped up as soon as I finished my government registration, offering me a convenient place to sell my soul and give VBC my media rights, complete with grand promises of how much money I could make, once video of my fights and rescues started generating revenue.
I would immediately get a new allowance and access to the distro in VBC Tower, a collection of luxury boutiques that sold gourmet food and designer clothes. I could even move into the tower and get a tiny luxury apartment on one of the top floors, with emergency access to the launch pad, in case I needed to catch a squad car on the roof.
All the other team members lived there, within a couple doors of each other, so only scrubs and support staff slept in the barracks. The big names didn’t even come to HQ anymore, unless they were required for active duty.
It would have been so easy to hit that button. I could pack my stuff in an hour, move into a luxury cube six hundred feet in the air, and eat in a four-star restaurant tonight without paying a dime.
A blue cartoon dragon wrapped his tail around the ACCEPT button and winked at me while I stared at it. Then I carefully hit the tiny red decline button and watched the glowing plastic badge on my chest change from PROVISIONAL to ADJUNCT TRAINEE.