“Are you Hardy’s new boy toy?”
Jade Katt snuck up on me, which I guess I should have expected. I was in the awesome automated break room, fascinated by vending machines smart enough to cook a fresh burger, when Jade padded in and made me jump, not asking the question until she was literally in my ear.
She looked like somebody had tried to turn a sportscar into a female shape, small and sleek, like a swimmer or a dancer. You could tell she had done ballet by the way she moved, and you could tell she had done gymnastics by the way she fought.
Not formal gymnastics where everything was clean and precise, but street gymnastics where she did parkour through buildings and stuff.
Naively, I thought our mutual love of jumping on rooftops might make us friends. It did not.
“No ma’am,” I answered. “Just stuck in the friend zone right now, hoping to make boy toy by Christmas.”
Jade smiled a little but did not laugh. “Tower kid’s got jokes.”
“Tower kid? I am not a tower kid. Last time I was there, they didn’t even let me inside!”
“You were sponsored by Coleridge, and that makes you a tower kid. You gonna give me a history lesson about when Bluestar 7 was cool, and Arthur Walton did all our work for us? You gonna whip out a spellbook and a pointy hat and show us how it’s done?”
“Yeah, I don’t know who got up your ass, but it wasn’t me. I respect you guys, and I respect what you do. I’m here to learn.”
“Well, you better start by getting some sleep. We don’t just get to ride around with pretty witches all day. We do real work here. This is a night run, so briefing starts at midnight.”
* * *
I spent eight hours staring at the bottom of a top bunk, trying to sleep, before catching a priority shuttle to VBC Tower to meet three members of Bluestar 7 in a big shiny briefing room. The telepath apparently didn’t go on missions like this.
Randall pulled up a series of floorplans and mugshots and started talking at 23:59. He pulled up a photo of a fifty-something man in a baseball cap with a big belly and a thick black beard. All these old guys were conspiracy nuts who refused to use blockers, so they all got pretty big, and they all grew really thick beards to make up for the fact that they were going bald.
“This is Peter Barrett. He runs a terror cell linked to the Last Americans. They want to make corporations illegal and fix everything with voting or some shit. The DMA calls them right wing, but half of them are crypto-commies who want to turn everything over to an AI based on Trotsky. I guess they’ll fight it out between them if they win.
“Barrett was a senior engineer with HDI. He was a model employee for ten years, until he got keys to everything, then he took off with a couple billion in classified hardware.
“These guys have a weird code of honor where they won’t kill cops, but they killed the last two DMA agents who went after them. Used some kind of energy gun to destabilize their armor, stripped them down to their underwear, and shot them with a .45.
“They don’t kill women, either, but when a female agent tried to track them, they hacked her personnel file and released twenty gigs of her doing porn in college. Still not sure what they were trying to accomplish with that.
“Anyway, these guys stole so many Panthers, beam weapons, and humanoid robots, they’ve been upgraded to Metahuman Threat Equivalent, so we’re allowed to use powers to take them down.
“Last pair of agents we sent in treated these guys like a joke and got executed, so don’t judge them by their propaganda. These guys are dangerous, and you can expect them to use deadly force. Do not underestimate these guys because of how they look. They know their limits so they’re gonna cheat. Expect force fields, booby traps, automated sentries, and stealth robots.
“They do most of their assembly work at night, so we’re going to hit their warehouse at 2 a.m. and see how many we can get in one sweep.
“Phil has rigged shit to disrupt their technology and see through their stealth tech, so he’ll be tactical lead on the ground. Tower kid, you’re with Jade.”
I started to say, “I’m not a—” but Jade cut me off. “New guy does computer stuff; I think he should start with Phil.”
“Phil’s gonna be busy. The whole team is there to run interference until he can set up his EMP thing.”
“Wait,” I really did speak up now. “If he does an EMP, won’t that wipe out all our tech, too?”
“I’ve created a directional EMP that can selectively…” Phil began.
“Yeah,” Randall interrupted. “Phil figured all that out, it’ll be fine. Any questions? Good. Everybody on the roof in ten.”
I had a hundred questions, but there had been no discernable pause between “Any questions” and “Good” so I figured our team leader did not actually want questions.
* * *
The bad guys were holed up in an ancient brick warehouse in Charlestown. For guys who were supposed to be using stealth tech, they were not particularly subtle about what they were doing.
We could see flickering blue-white light through the windows, as they did some kind of fancy arc welding inside. I thought maybe we had the drop on them when a robot panther jumped on my back and started shooting in all directions at point blank range.
I had collected figurines of HDI Panthers when I was a kid, the infamous stealth robots that had won the African War for us in ‘45, but I had never expected to have one standing on top of me, shooting a tiny stream of energized bullets at my team.
I threw the bot off me and tried to get in the way, so the bullets would bounce off my wards instead of digging into my teammates.
Everybody else was wearing that skin-tight nano stuff, but I was the only one who would be considered bulletproof. I got myself around behind the robot and grabbed one of its side-mounted guns in each hand, bending the barrels until it stopped shooting, and tried to go at me with energy claws.
Those first few seconds were scary as hell, but I had done my job. The robot was attacking me instead of my team, and now I just had to hold it off until they could kill it.
Phil fired his electro pulse whatever and the big robot cat went dead, along with my optics, my ear filaments, and my radio.
I tapped my ear and whispered, “Hey, I can’t hear anybody…” as three more cats jumped off the roof and landed between us.
Randall took one out with a grenade filled with sticky fire stuff, while Jade took off running and made one chase her, looping back around to give Randall a clear shot.
I grabbed the third one to keep it off Phil, and he fired another electro pulse at it, making my lenses light up before everything went dead again.
We were headed around to make entry from the back when a garage door rolled up, revealing half a dozen humanoid robots, carrying a comical collection of historic firearms. I recognized them from what I saw in Veazey’s truck bed. Three kinds of old ARs, two AKs, and one robot with some kind of crazy plasma gun that only worked for a minute before it sparked and went dead.
I jumped in and started smashing robots left and right, trusting my wards to keep me bulletproof. That turned out to be a bit optimistic. I could deflect the 5.56 easily enough, but those big left bruises on me head to toe.
We made entry into the warehouse and Jade started jumping around, leaping on a collection of fat old men in baseball caps who were scrambling to pull out their sidearms.
Most of them had been caught in the middle of welding or dismantling shit, so it took them a minute to realize they were under attack. Jade wrapped them in adaptive nano net stuff while Phil used his EMP thing to neutralize their robots.
A few of them got shots off, but Jade was really good at dodging bullets, just by observing body language, and predicting when a guy was going to shoot.
She ducked and weaved and threaded her way through a storm of .45 and 9mm bullets, while I charged in and tried to draw their fire onto me.
She got the last guy wrapped up on the ground, while Randall went around melting down robot parts with some kind of plasma flamethrower.
Then I noticed another fat guy in a ballcap, jumping through an upstairs window in grav boots. Nobody else had seen him, and my radio was dead, so I levitated myself up and chased after him, launching myself out the window, struggling to keep up as this guy bounced from roof to roof like a big round Captain Cobalt, maintaining a comfortable lead as I tried to navigate an unfamiliar skyline.
I could have overtaken him easily enough if I had been chasing him in my home territory, but I didn’t know the roofs here, and he clearly did.
I lost him around a corner, and ended up half a mile behind, panting for breath, as I watched him soar away in a hovering pickup truck.
The team was putting the last of the redneck terrorists in a floating DMA detention vehicle when I got back.
I walked up to Randall and said, “Sorry, he got away. All these guys look the same, but I think it was Barrett.”
“Just get your ass in the car,” Randall said. I knew he would be pissed that I lost Barrett, but he seemed to be even madder than I was expecting.
* * *
My car took me straight back to VBC Tower while the others dropped their bad guys off at an old MADOC facility, so I ended up alone in the briefing room, waiting for an hour until they got back.
I stood up as my sweaty, angry teammates filed in and tried to look humble. I knew I had let the leader escape, but I really had done pretty well with the Panthers and the robot firing squad, so I didn’t think I would be in that much trouble.
I was expecting the good parts of my performance to balance out the bad, so I was completely unprepared when Jade Katt swept in the door at high speed and slapped the shit out of me in front of everybody, rocking my head back until I almost fell on my ass.
“Stupid grandstanding son of a bitch!” she screamed at me. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
“What?” I threw my hands up, ready to block in case she tried to hit me again. “I’m sorry he got away! It’s not my home neighborhood, I don’t know the rooftops yet!”
“The rooftops!” Jade surged forward again like the word had enraged her, but Randall came up behind her and grabbed her hand before she could slap me again.
“Jade!” he shouted. “Go home and calm the fuck down. I’ll deal with the new guy.”
Jade stormed out and left me alone with my team leader.
“What?” I said helplessly. “What did I do?”
“You left your post, kid. You abandoned your team in the middle of a fight.”
“What? Hell no! I didn’t abandon anybody. I was the only one who saw Barrett! The guy we went there to catch! He flew out the window and I ran after him! He got away from me, but shit, I did my best!”
“You didn’t catch him because you were doing the wrong job. You know what happened twenty seconds after you ran after him? A heavy assault bot rolled out of the back room and opened up on us. Your team took fire because you were not where you were supposed to be.”
“But…” I stammered, desperate to defend myself.
Randall pulled up his POV and I got to watch as a giant bulky assault bot rolled out on ancient rubber treads and unloaded heavy rounds at my team, forcing them to scatter. Most of the bullets bounced off their nano stuff, but maybe still hard enough to break the skin.
Randall froze the video and said, “You see that hole there, right in front of the bad guy? That hole is where you’re supposed to be, soaking up fire for us. That hole is where I told you to stand, on the radio you couldn’t hear because you let it get knocked out by EMP.”
Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
“Let it get knocked out? What the hell was I supposed to do against an EMP! I even warned you guys about this in the briefing before it happened!”
“Official Bluestar gear is EMP shielded. You went deaf and blind because you were trying to run custom shit in the field. So, you weren’t where you were supposed to be because you were wearing the wrong gear, and you didn’t understand your job. And now I’ve got three members of my team getting treated for blunt trauma that you should have been there to soak up.”
I flushed red, got in his face and yelled, “But…!”
Randall was quite a bit taller than me, and I had come off way more aggressive than I intended. He towered over me and looked down, making it clear just how quickly he could put me on my ass. “You gonna argue with me?”
“No!” I shouted. “No, sir! I just… Before you showed me this, I thought I was doing pretty good.”
“So, if you see it, why are you yelling?”
“I’m yelling because you’re right and I’m wrong and I don’t like being fucking wrong!”
That got a smile out of him, and we both backed off. “I’m sorry,” I said, softening my tone. “I don’t know what I’m doing yet, but don’t give up on me. I’ll figure this out. I’ll do whatever it takes to figure this out.”
Randall smiled for real this time. “Holy shit, I think I just met a superhero. Come in early tomorrow, I’ll show you some video. Pack up and go to bed. We’ll go over it in the morning. Good job with the Panthers and the bipeds, but I need you to replace your optics and filaments first thing in the morning.”
I nodded, took an elevator to the roof, and slept in my bunk at HQ. I should have gone home to Lydia, but I was feeling angry and stupid and pissed at myself. If I brought this home to Lydia she would try and fix it, and I didn’t want to fix it yet.
I came in early the next morning and found Randall in the conference room. He pulled up isometric video of one of Bluestar 7’s old fights. “You see this monster here?”
The giant dinosaur thing was hard to miss. I nodded and said, “Yes.”
“You see this big guy in front here? This is Oleg the Bear. You see how Oleg is right in this monster’s face, rabbit punching the shit out of it?”
I nodded.
“Now,” he zoomed the view out. “Where am I?”
“You’re over on his left, shooting the monster in the side.”
“Where’s Phil?”
“He’s on the right side, doing the same thing.”
“I’m on the left flank, Phil’s on the right flank, but notice, we’re not exactly across from each other, so if our bullets go through the monster, we don’t accidentally shoot each other like it’s a fucking cartoon. This is called complementary fields of fire, and it’s one of the most important things to keep straight in a fight, especially when we’re moving.”
I nodded again.
“Where’s Jade?” Randall asked.
“I can’t see her.”
“You can’t see Jade, because she’s up here.” He panned the camera around again until I saw Jade, perched in a tree over the monster’s head.
“Where’s Paul?” I asked.
“Paul doesn’t come to monster fights. We use him for other stuff. Now, watch what happens when I start this playing again. Notice where Oleg is, and notice the fact that Oleg is not moving. Oleg is staying right where he’s supposed to be, controlling that monster, so the rest of us can array around him and do our thing.
“He does not have to beat that thing to death all by himself, although sometimes he did. All he has to do is keep it busy, while the rest of us do this.”
He advanced the video again and I watched the whole team close on the monster as a single unit, Phil and Randall pumping bullets in it from left and right flanks, Jade jumping on its head stabbing it with green energy claws, and Oleg shifting his stance left and right to grab the monster and keep it from getting away. In a few seconds, the big reptile was dead.
“Now, what would have happened in that fight,” Randall continued, “if Oleg had decided to take a bathroom break while the rest of us were working around him?”
I nodded again.
“That’s your job, kid. You’re the new Oleg. You’re the anchor. Your job is to stand in front of us, and keep those bad guys focused on you, so we can shoot all around you. But if you don’t know where to stand, we don’t know where to stand, and everything just goes to shit. Phil and I might even end up shooting each other, if we get those fields of fire wrong. Get it?”
“I think so.”
“Good, I’ve set up half a dozen more videos of different fights. You watch what Oleg does, try to start thinking like him, and then report to Jade when your shift starts.”
“Oh shit, do I have to keep working with Jade? She fucking hates me.”
“Jade has no patience for people who fuck up their jobs, but Hardy says you’re good with people, and I’m not your fucking school counselor. You got a problem with Jade, solve it, because you’re with her for at least the next week.”
* * *
I found Jade Katt in the training room, working out with a streamlined catgirl version of my old training robot. I watched her jump around and dodge it for a few minutes, and realized I was kind of mesmerized, admiring her, in a way that was starting to make me uncomfortable. Why am I always fascinated by the ones who hate me?
She sat down to drink some water, and I came up beside her. She wasn’t even sweating.
“I just wanted to say I’m sorry for yesterday,” I began. “I’ve been watching videos all morning and I think I get it now.”
“Oh well, if you’ve watched some videos, I’m sure everything will be great.”
And then I lost my temper, flaring a little touch of magic in my eyes. “Fine! You want me to be better, make me better! Don’t just sit there and roll your eyes at me! Don’t show me a video, don’t draw me a diagram, just tell me, in plain English, what I did wrong and what I was supposed to do.”
“Your problem is, you’ve had too many fights working alone, and you’ve spent the last couple months with a partner who made you lazy. Hardy is really good with bad partners, because she’s used to working with her mom. And since it was her mom, she doesn’t know how to complain when her partner fucks up.
“Whatever happens, she just adapts to you, and she’s so good at it, you don’t even realize she’s adapting. But you’re not working with Hardy anymore. You’re working with a team that has to coordinate every damn thing we do. You can’t just go bouncing off to do whatever the fuck you want in the middle of a fight.”
“I didn’t mean to run off. I thought I was helping, going to get the guy we were sent there to get.”
“Well, there’s your first problem. It’s never just about one guy. It’s about disrupting the operation and getting dangerous hardware off the street.
“This was not a goddamn supervillain; this was one angry engineer working with half a dozen other angry engineers. Now it’s just him, alone, with no HQ, no resources, and most of his tech has been confiscated. Yeah, he’s running around loose, but with as much as we took from him yesterday, all he can really do now is hold up a liquor store.”
I nodded again.
“Just do your job and stop worrying about everybody else. We’re teammates, we’re professionals, and if you see one of us fucking up our job, like I fucked up mine by not spotting him? You don’t jump in and start doing my job for me, you get on the fucking radio and say, ‘Jade, this big motherfucker is jumping out the window!’”
“Yeah, but my radio…”
“Your radio didn’t work because you thought your off-spec military shit was better than our old, out-dated superhero shit. But that old superhero shit was built different, to handle different situations, situations that your average grunt in the middle of a desert will never have to worry about. Have those optics popped out of your eyes in a fight yet?”
“How did you— Yeah, actually, yeah, they did.”
“Because they’re not made for somebody jumping around and punching shit as hard as we punch shit. You know how many sets of interface gear I went through before I found something that would stay in? No matter what angle I was hanging?”
“My point is,” Jade continued. “You don’t go on the roof. I go on the roof. Stop trying to out catgirl the catgirl, jumping around like a fucking jackrabbit on roofs you don’t know. I may not know every roof in the city, but I’ve jumped on every kind of roof there is, and I know how to land and take shortcuts. You don’t! So next time we get a runner, you call me, and you stay right the fuck where you are, ready to soak up bullets for the guys on the ground.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I really am listening.”
“You want a chance to make it up to me? Get a nap and meet me on the roof when it gets dark. I’ve got a lead on Barrett. It’ll just be the two of us, since our heavy hitters are reinforcing Bluestar Chicago tonight, but he’s just one guy, and we should be able to take him, if you really can do your job.”
* * *
I climbed in the car with Jade and listened to weirdly catchy J-Pop with her as we snuck up on an unincorporated residential neighborhood, supposedly abandoned after it was destroyed by a bunch of things crawling out of a sewer.
“Barrett’s kid used to live here,” Jade explained, “before he got run out, and we think he set it up as a safe house for his dad. Phil tracked Barrett’s phone to the outskirts here, so there’s a good chance he’s still here. Just be ready for more robots, and if he points some crazy ass energy cannon at you, do not assume your wards can tank it!”
We landed in the driveway and Jade said, “Garage first.”
I forced the garage door open and was immediately drowning in heavy caliber bullets, as another assault bot opened up on me. This one didn’t have treads anymore, so it was rigged to be a turret, set to annihilate anybody dumb enough to open this door.
My wards could tank assault rifle ammo well enough, but this was a fucking heavy machinegun. It was pounding my chest like a goddamn snare drum, and it was using up my magic reserves so fast, there was a good chance I would run out of magic before that thing ran out of bullets.
I didn’t have Denise there to charge me up anymore, but I could feel another presence in the back of my head, looking through my eyes from fifty miles away. I gave a little tug on an invisible golden cord at my back, and Lydia’s power rushed into me like a sunrise on Christmas morning.
My own power surged with my confidence and my aura turned gold. I leapt forward and punched the bot as hard as I could, spinning its body around until the bullets started plowing into the side of the garage. I gave it another good kick and it finally stopped. The barrel made a useless whining noise as it spun down.
Lydia’s voice was instantly in my head. “Timothy, are you injured?”
“Nope,” I thought back, only half-lying. “But I think that little boost just saved my ass. Thank you, Lydia.”
Lydia managed to nod through a telepathic link, and I turned back to Jade, just as my optics lit up with a big red warning that said EXPLOSIVES DETECTED.
Some kind of demolition subroutine in my lenses analyzed the bomb and started counting down. If I had been with Denise, I would have thrown myself on top of her, but Jade was almost as good at dodging shit as Lydia. Tackling her would make her more likely to get hurt, not less. So instead of diving back to save her, I ran forward and tackled the robot, absorbing the force of the explosion, and all the shrapnel that had been stuffed into its chest.
I absorbed most of the debris, and Jade jumped clear of the rest. I got back to my feet, coughed a little smoke out of my throat, and scanned the garage for more threats.
I may have been using slightly more primitive optics now, but I still had Jeeves running a full sensor suite on my hip. My lenses looked right through the wall and outlined the figure of a bulky man in his underwear, crawling out the second story window, dressed in nothing but grav boots and a red ballcap.
I yelled “Barrett’s on the roof!” and Jade launched herself up like she had been shot out of a cannon. I couldn’t see them through the garage wall, but my lenses painted the outlines as the two shapes converged. Jade swiped her claws twice through his grav boots and stood there as Barrett bounced off the roof and landed on his own lawn.
He was dazed, and a little battered, but not seriously injured. Jade gave me a high five as she slapped cuffs on him and told me to put him in the car.
Barrett hadn’t bothered to put on pants or a shirt before he launched himself out the window, but he was still wearing his bright red ballcap.
He seemed to acknowledge me for the first time as I stuffed him in the car. “You think you’re a hero, but you’re just a pawn. Your whole society is run by demons!”
“Yeah, I know. Just watch your head.”
* * *
Jade and I spent the next day in the training room, as she taught me Catgirl 101, mostly how to get between her and big shit, when to duck, and how to stay out of her way.
The hardest part was not punching the training robot, so I could get used to standing there, letting other people do the damage.
Jade couldn’t do magic, so her claws were some kind of supercharged force field things, glowing green to match her outfit. I thought all Bluestar heroes were supposed to wear Bluestar blue, but Phil was the only one who did.
Randall wore his black nanoweave thing, Jade wore a dark green catsuit, and Paul wore a black jacket over whatever normal dress shirt he wanted to wear that day. The jacket was armored, but he had it cut to look like a normal sport coat, unless you knew what to look for.
“Hey Jade,” I said, growing a little more comfortable with her after we’d spent the day training together. “So, where did Daniel go? What was important enough to take him off the team?”
“Said he was going back home for a while, some kind of family business.”
“Are you guys close? Does he talk about how he learned magic and stuff? Did he really train at a monastery and learn from angels?”
Jade smiled and gave me a side-eye. “You’re really into him, huh? Danny doesn’t talk about that kind of stuff, even with me. I thought Christians were supposed to go out of their way to convert people who asked questions about God, but he won’t even talk about it. Just said he could get me a Bible if I really wanted one, but said I would have to read it myself, and make up my own mind about what it means.”
“I’m surprised Bluestar lets an open Christian fight on a public team, even if he is discreet about it.”
“You can thank Vanderhoff for that. Our benevolent corporate sponsor picked Daniel up after his own home team turned him down. Danny is from Colorado, but Bluestar Denver didn’t want him. I think their magic guy is an atheist. VBC heard about it and made him an offer, and he’s been with us ever since.”
“What’s the story on Vanderhoff? I don’t want to sound like I trust him, but I gave him a suggestion for taking care of staff at HQ, and he did it the next day. Seemed like a good guy.”
“Elton Vanderhoff is kind of like Tamerlane and some of these other billionaire CEOs. He doesn’t care if he’s a good person, but he wants to be a good king. That’s really how these guys see themselves. They want to be kings, and kings take care of their peasants. He sees his employees as his property, and these guys judge each other based on how well they care for their property.
“It used to be about money, about making profit and watching all the little green lines go up, but now it’s about power. They don’t compete to see who can make the most money, they compete to see who can accumulate the most influence, and the council is rigged to reward rulers who keep their employees happy.
“Vanderhoff wouldn’t spit to put out an unaffiliated peasant if he was on fire, but the way he treats his own peasants, if he loses too many employees to another company, his council voting shares will go down, and he’ll get crowded out by some other media baron who has more people.
“He’s not a good guy, but he’s not a bad one, and in a world like this, anybody who’s not aggressively bad might as well be good.”
* * *
I wanted to ask her what happened to Oleg, but Denise had told me to never do that, and I didn’t feel close enough to risk it with Jade after just one good day.
I did end up making pretty good friends with Jade, after we spent a solid week training and fighting together. We went on a couple more team-ups, tracking down more of Barret’s red hat terrorists, and we had a few small-scale monster fights, responding to calls about corrupted animals, possessed by evil spirits around town.
You’d think a corrupted deer wouldn’t be that big a deal, until you let your guard down and a three-hundred-pound buck kicks you into an old mailbox. Superheroes or not, we had to call in help for the black bear.
I kept trying to tell Jade this was the necromancer again, but she said I was making a classic newbie mistake, assuming every call we went on was connected to some supervillain mastermind.
She said for young heroes who had spent too much time watching TV, the hardest thing to accept was the fact that most stuff just happened, and a lot of things that looked like patterns turned out to be nothing.
Jade was no replacement for Denise, but she was pretty cool, and I found myself bragging to Lydia about her, as I pulled up some of her videos in my living room.
I noticed Lydia cocking an eyebrow at me and gestured at Jade on the screen. “Tell you what, Lydia. Denise is still off limits, but if you can get that one in our bed, I will do whatever you want.”
Lydia looked from me to Jade and back again before crossing her arms. “You don’t want her; you just want to see if I can do it!”
I laughed, unable to keep a straight face. “Yeah, I really do. But even if you got her, it wouldn’t be much fun for me. You both have enhanced agility, so even if I got to watch, you guys would be going so fast, I couldn’t even jerk off. I’d just have to stand there and clap.”