Authors: Robert J. Crane
I held back from answering immediately with the cheap snark. I held back the good snark, too, in hopes that age would make it better. It was a battle just to control my emotions, not to throw an easy witticism at him, something appropriate for me but not for anyone who had a brain or an appreciation for civil conversation. “I—”
His phone beeped and he didn’t even hesitate to interrupt our conversation. “Go.” He put it on speakerphone, even. What a dick.
“Sir,” came the clear tone of his assistant, whom I hadn’t even seen when I came in, “NASA has sent us a FLASH emergency brief—”
“What is it?” Phillips asked.
His assistant skipped a couple lines, undeterred. “There’s a meteor the size of a Metrolink bus on course for Lake Michigan at the moment, due for splashdown in about twenty minutes. It’s projected to impact twenty miles off Chicago.”
Phillips blinked, still calm as all hell. “And?”
His assistant paused, leaving hissing dead air. “They’re wondering if we can do anything about it.”
Phillips gave me that dead-eyed stare. “Can we do anything about that?”
I seethed inside, months of bitterness writhing like a fiery snake in my belly, waiting to come out with a hiss and a pop of flame. “We? Probably not? Me? Maybe, but I’m suspended.” I threw that out there, just wanting to see what he’d say.
“Yes, you are,” he said with a light shrug, and at that moment I realized that if the end of the world was stampeding toward us right now, he’d still be citing regulation and procedure to the moment of impact. “But what are you going to do about it?”
I wanted to burn him to death right there and leave a charred, blackened corpse behind, but I didn’t. I just looked at him with enough fury that if I had said Gavrikov’s name in my head right then, spontaneous combustion would have occurred.
Kill him
, Wolfe whispered, not for the first time in the last few weeks.
You should totally do that
, Kappler agreed.
It would be so satisfying
, Bjorn added.
“Shut up,” I whispered, and Phillips’s eyebrows drew up in slight surprise. I stared at him, seething.
“Sir?” his assistant’s voice came again. “Nineteen minutes to impact, and NASA is wondering if we can help.” Phillips stared at me, I stared at Phillips, and it was a game of chicken for the ages. “Sir?” his assistant’s voice came again.
I blinked first. I summoned up Wolfe’s power as I blew out the window, contenting myself with going to supersonic speeds about six feet away from him, knowing the shockwave would probably knock him flat on his ass as I hauled my own to Chicago at top speed.
Timing is everything, they say, and by “they,” I mean some jackass who never had to stop a meteor from destroying Chicago while they were trying to chase down the person who blew up their brother. Here in the real world, though, that was exactly what I had to do, and I did it in the manner of my generation, griping mentally about my ordeal the entire time.
“I can’t just kill Andrew Phillips,” I said, not even close to audible as the force of air rushing past my face mushed my cheeks like the sweet and plump aunt I’d never had. Mine was a psycho, full stop, and any pinching of cheeks on her part would probably have been the kind that would break skin.
Could
, Wolfe said, saying the same shit he’d been spouting for weeks now.
Should
.
It would not be difficult
, Bjorn said.
You have done it to others for less.
“What?” I almost dropped out of the sky from outrage at that one. How dare the crazed Nordic psycho impugn my reputation. “No, I haven’t!”
Rick
, Zack said tentatively. He wasn’t on their side by any means and had regularly proven himself the not-devil’s advocate in these ceaseless debates that the six numb-no-skulls in my head were having constantly nowadays. The Primus of Omega.
“That was different,” I snapped, the wind pressure on my cheeks probably resulting in it sounding like “wah wah wiffwent!” Whatever. They were in my head, they knew what I was saying. I wouldn’t even have been talking out loud, but such was the measure of the “had enough of this shit” lines in the graduated cylinder of my patience that it was simply overflowing at this point.
Friendly fire
, Roberto Bastian suggested.
Sometimes a butterbars gets out of line, is going to get the squad killed—
“Naw hewah!” I said, meaning, “Not helping!”
Far be it from me to suggest anything that would actually benefit you
, Eve Kappler said,
but this man is a disaster for the agency.
A disaster in addition to constantly stepping all over your former girlfriend, you mean to say
, I said, silently this time.
I could almost see Kappler’s cheeks flush in my head.
Fine. You figured me out. But he’s far more of a pain in your ass and a credible threat to you than that Russian woman you dropped out of the sky a few months ago
.
I couldn’t argue with that, so I didn’t.
I cannot. Kill. The head. Of my agency
. When did I become the voice of reason and tolerance and kindasorta nonviolence?
Then again, compared to some of these people in my head, I was almost like Gandhi.
It would almost certainly lead back to you
, Aleksandr Gavrikov agreed.
Gone are the days when she had unlimited discretion to mop up these problems—
The hell, Gavrikov?
I thought at him.
It’s true,
he said with what would have been a shrug, if he hadn’t been disembodied.
The time was that the curtains were pulled, when a metahuman could conduct their life as they were meant to, free from oversight and criticism over every little thing.
I could feel Bjorn and Wolfe nodding along with him. Well, not nodding, but … whatever, agreeing.
We were gods. Now you are people, and subject to the laws of man.
I am no man
, I said, clearly channeling the spirit of Miranda Otto.
You’re not exactly a Shieldmaiden of Rohan, either, though
, Zack offered helpfully, getting my reference immediately. He should have; he was the one who introduced me to the
Lord of the Rings
movies.
And Gav’s got a point.
How many years exactly into their forced incarceration in my brain had my ex started calling nutball flame-warrior Aleksandr Gavrikov “Gav”?
There’s watchful eyes aplenty, now. She can’t just assert her will, go after these people like she would have before—
I didn’t know if I should feel insulted by the implication that I was some sort of hanging-on-the-edge-by-my-fingernails psychotic waiting to snap before, but it bothered me a little. It was a thread that had run through my life since the day Zack had died, a piece of my past. I’d killed people, and I’d not really been that shy about it in some cases. Part of me even questioned where the line was at this point, whether I’d moved it over time. I knew which dead bodies I felt guilty about and which ones I didn’t, though, and the ones I felt guilty about were the ones farthest back in the past, the ones where I’d responded to Wolfe’s suggestion more strongly than I should have, or maybe just let him push me slightly in the direction he wanted me to go.
—
all I’m saying is that she’s changed
, Zack said
Hunters never change
, Wolfe said.
Always seeking their prey.
Revenge doesn’t exactly go out of style
, Kappler added.
When someone challenges you as she’s been challenged, to show weakness is to invite further challenge.
She’s the apex predator on this planet
, Bjorn said.
Without fear, she’s simply the largest target—
—
trouble could come knocking any time
, Bastian said,
and now they’re actively interfering with her doing her duty—
This, ladies and gentlemen, is why I took a shot of chloridamide a few days ago that nearly killed a lot of people. It had been like this since even before the suspension, a constant argument over direction. I raised my eyes to look at the horizon and they burned at the wind blasting my lids back. The human body wasn’t really meant to fly this fast without a plane around it. There were g-forces I had to account for, I had to be careful of how I positioned my neck (I’d broken it one time by accelerating too fast without Wolfe’s power at my immediate disposal—that had almost resulted in death), I had to not look straight into the wind for too long, I had to maintain a lower altitude, to keep Wolfe front and center the whole time so as to keep my circulatory system from—
It was a lot to remember. As I looked into the sunrise and saw a trail of fire coming down at an angle from the sky, I realized that this was maybe not going to be the easiest job I’d ever done.
“I need to think while I’m doing this,” I said, speaking aloud to make sure everyone knew I was serious. The argument quieted, blissfully, though only for now, I was sure. I pulled everyone to the front of my mind, making sure there was agreement, and then I zoomed at the chunk of falling rock that was heading down fast, passing the gleaming towers of Chicago as I went to save the city from a tsunami that they didn’t even know was coming.
Being somewhat pressed for time, I had to come up with a strategy to stop a giant segment of flaming, falling rock on the fly. While this may sound to an idiot as simple as, I dunno, getting underneath it and catching it, I was (probably) not an idiot and saw a few issues with that strategy.
Giant hunk of rock that’s hotter than hell courtesy of the resistance of the atmosphere to its extremely fast descent hits one hundred and … uh … something … pound girl who’s either floating still or flying toward it. I didn’t know the specific velocity of the meteor and it didn’t matter for my purposes, because I could figure out how it was going to end—either in me going SPLAT or it breaking into smaller pieces and wreaking some other form of havoc as its component parts spun off course. I tried to imagine how the press would react to a Buick-sized piece of meteor I smashed hitting the John Hancock tower. “Hey, but I saved the city from a flood!” I would protest.
SIENNA NEALON MURDERS A THOUSAND INNOCENT CHICAGOANS AND PROBABLY AT LEAST SIX DOZEN PUPPIES WHILE ENCOURAGING TEENAGE SMOKING, is how the headline would read. Buzzfeed would add me to their
Which historical mass murderer are you?
quiz.
The SPLAT might be better.
I suspected I might maybe be able to survive the impact if I ran into it. I had survived contact with a plane before, with jumping out of a plane before, with—well, hell, a lot of impacts that shouldn’t have been possible. But none of those objects had been flaming from entry into a resistant atmosphere, which brought me to problem two—how hot was this thing burning, anyway?
Being neither a physicist nor a math-magician, these were also questions I could not answer.
All I had was a layman’s knowledge of the problem at hand and an expert’s knowledge of all the different ways the press would try to screw me if I messed up even slightly. Now that NASA had asked for help and, presumably, Phillips had let them know I was on the case, I had successfully worked my way into a damned if you do, shagged rectally with a pointy object if you don’t position. I did not enjoy it, but this was my life of late. Couldn’t stand up for falling down, couldn’t succeed for being pushed down to failure, and couldn’t make a good impression for all these people trying to make me a pariah.
I tried not to wonder how many of these assholes were actually in Chicago as I streaked toward the incoming meteor. I thought about the innocent people who were just going about their day on the shores of Lake Michigan, looking up into the sky as they—I dunno, walked their children and dogs and pet ferrets while discussing all the charity work they were going to do today.
I flew over Lake Michigan lower than I probably needed to, making a wake in the water behind me. It was kind of soothing, and I decided that I should be allowed to indulge myself a little before I went to confront a flaming meteor. Meteorite? Hell if I knew. FIERY DEATH. That’s what it was.
I swallowed and looked skyward, and once I found it, I shot into the air on an intercept course. I estimated I had about two minutes to impact, which, hey, was not a ton of time to figure out how to do something I’d never actually done before. “Invulnerable skin would have been real useful right now,” I muttered as I felt the sting of the air in my eyes and across my flesh. There was no looking down now. “Superman’s got it easy.”
There was a reluctant chorus of agreement in my head. I could tell they all wanted to resume their fight. It was like walking into a party where nobody was speaking. You just feel the tension in the air. I shot into the sky toward the falling star, fully aware that there was no camera watching me now, not at this distance from the actual city. Time to be an unsung hero—again.
I shot wide past the meteor, giving it enough berth that I didn’t get caught in its wash, letting it blow past as I used Gavrikov to absorb some heat as it streaked by. I’d already flipped and was chasing it by the time it got a hundred feet past me, and was doing my level best to match speed as it streaked toward the lake below. It was a hell of a lot bigger than a metro bus, closer probably in size to two Abrahms tanks welded to each other.
I pulled heat as fast as I could, absorbing the meteor’s contrail as I caught up and flew past the leading edge of the damned thing. It was fairly oblong and I overshot it by a few feet per second and then slowed, my hands extended to “catch” it as best I could catch a multi-ton object streaking through the atmosphere. I looked down and saw nothing but water coming up fast.
“This is what heroes do,” I muttered to myself like there was some sort of consolation in those words as I started to apply the brakes, the torsional forces working across my entire body, tensing me enough that I felt like I was about to have a full-body stroke. My palms and arms got the worst of it, if there was such a thing as the worst of it, and I was forced to unlock my elbows in order to take some of the tension off of them. I kept the meteor from crashing right into my neck and killing me, but it still thumped me good when it ended up on my shoulders.