Chapter Four
“The most common occurrence when two parahumans meet is a fight, ostensibly blamed on ‘mistaken identities.’ It’s a form of establishing dominance like one might find in any other type of social situation. The second most common occurrence is mutual attraction. If parahumans are truly genetic mutants they could conceivably be a separate race from mankind. And like any other race, they must propagate or risk extinction.”
- Dr. Lane Devereaux, Larry King Live, March 4, 1993
January, 2004
Denver, Colorado
Just Cause Headquarters
“Just breathe into the tube,” said the balding man named Harris.
Sally blew into the glass tube that emerged from his device. The machine emitted clicks as it processed information and spat out a credit card a minute later. “What is it?”
“Genetic key,” said Harris. “It’s the best security we have. Your genetic code is imprinted upon the badge. It’ll only work if it has contact with your living skin. If someone else tries to use your card, it raises an alarm in the Command Center. Can’t be too careful these days.”
Sally picked up her new badge and looked it over. It identified her as a Just Cause intern. “What if I lose it?”
“Come back here and we’ll retest your code. If it matches, we’ll just issue you a new card. If it doesn’t, well, it’s probably not really you so it becomes our problem, not yours. You don’t have an evil twin, do you?”
“No. I’m an only child.”
“Good.” He handed her a box from inside a cabinet. “Here’s your duty gear.”
She examined the items in the box as Harris inventoried them for her. “Walkie-talkie satellite PC phone . . . these are state-of-the-art, but we replace them every six months whether they need it or not, the way they keep improving the technology. These babies work anywhere in the world as long as you’re not deep underground or underwater.”
“Cool.”
He pointed out the uniform and clothing requisition form. “Just fill in your sizes now. The tailor will get your costume specs later. Our in-house shop will handle all your costume needs from here on out.” Next, he held up a Just Cause Visa card. “This is for emergencies only. No shopping sprees. You swipe it anywhere, you gotta fill out an expense report.” Finally, he showed her the gear and equipment requisition form and said, “I’ll approve damn near anything. How the hell do I know what you really need?”
“I need a Top Fuel dragster. You know, for training.” The whirlwind of being accepted onto Just Cause, even as an intern, had made Sally feel cocky and special. Every hero who had ever interned with the team wound up on the roster. Many of them filled out the ranks of the Just Cause Second Team, which had its headquarters in Virginia, but a few, like Mastiff and Forcestar, had been selected onto the main team. Sally hoped for that to be her eventual assignment.
“Yeah, right.” He escorted her from his office down a hallway and up a flight of stairs to the dormitory. “The whole team’s on this floor. Promotes unity or something. All I know is that it’s a lot like my college dorm, only louder and with more muscle tone.” He chuckled. “Everybody gets a suite. Bedroom, closet, living area, full bath, and kitchenette. Most of ‘em eat in the cafeteria, probably because they’re too busy being superheroes to cook a decent meal.” Listening to Harris was like being assaulted by a verbal machine gun, thought Sally. “You get regular laundry service and cleaning, just like in a hotel. Here we are, then.”
He stopped at a door that had Mustang Sally stenciled on it. He motioned to her to use her badge. She pulled it out and slid it through the reader. The door unlocked and she swung it open. The suite seemed cavernous to her after her shared dorm room at the Academy. It was like an entire apartment. Her luggage sat in the middle of the living area, waiting to be unpacked. The room had decent carpet, a soft couch, a stocked entertainment center, and a computer desk. Off to one side she could see the kitchenette with a small refrigerator, microwave, coffee pot, and hot plate. A small table with two chairs was tucked against the wall. On the other side, she discovered the bedroom with a queen-size bed, a walk-in closet, and a nice bathroom. The entire suite had a faint mulberry scent, as if the housekeepers had sprayed the carpeting with it.
“Whaddya think?” Harris asked her after she’d had a few moments to check out the place.
“It’s nice,” she said. “It’s huge. All this just for me?”
“Yeah. Just you. You need anything, hit star-eleven on the phone. I’m out. I got a thing to do.” He headed down the hall, punching keys on his phone.
Sally left her luggage for the moment and kicked her shoes off. She scrunched her toes through the deep pile of the carpet, which felt comfortable and soft enough to sleep upon. She moved into the bedroom and lifted the shade so she could look out across the grounds.
The Just Cause compound consisted of four main buildings. Besides the dormitory, there was the training center, the Command Center, and the hangar/motor pool. The countryside around the facility was mostly dry grassland with an occasional stunted tree. Although she couldn’t see it from this side of the building, she knew the Hero Academy was less than a mile away.
It all seemed very alien to her. Even though she’d spent the past three years at the Academy, and become very familiar with the surrounding area, she felt like it might as well have been in a different state; or on a different planet. She sat on the edge of the couch, and wondered what to do next. What was an intern even supposed to do?
A knock sounded at the door.
Sally went to the door, opened it, and looked up . . . up . . . up into his face and all of a sudden she was fifteen again and crushing on Jason Tibbets. He was as tall as Juice with a muscular, athletic build. His straight, straw-colored hair fell from the top of his head to float around his jaw line and cover his ears. Blond stubble dotted his chin and his blue eyes sparkled with amusement. His t-shirt read Property of Just Cause—XXXL and his sweatpants were so cavernous that Sally could have fit her entire body into one leg.
“Hi, you must be Salena. I’m Jason. Juice asked me to give you the tour since I’m off-duty today.” He had a mild Southern drawl that Sally could tell would put just about anybody at ease. No wonder Juice had detailed him to the task of orienting her. Surely it wasn’t just because he was gorgeous.
She realized she was still staring open-mouthed up at him. “Ulp.” Sally’s tongue had stuck to the roof of her mouth.
“Do you, uh, want to, uh, put on some shoes or anything?” His demeanor changed to uncertainty as he tried to interpret Sally’s lack of vocal coherency.
“Shoes? Oh, uh, yeah. Let me change my clothes real quick. It’ll be real quick because I’m a speedster and I do everything quick. Well, not everything. I mean, uh, I’ll be just a minute.” She slammed the door in his face before she babbled any more and spun around to fixate on her bags, still unopened in the middle of the floor. In a blur of motion she grabbed the one with most of her clothes and yanked the zipper open. A minor hurricane of fabric ensued as she dug through her wardrobe to find the perfect outfit. Even at super-speed, she had a difficult time deciding on a blouse.
She popped a button off her dress shirt in her hurry; she’d find it later. She didn’t want to appear too formal for Jason, but didn’t want him to think she was trying to impress him too much either. She settled on a sleeveless pink hoodie, low-rise jeans and high-tops without socks, and then dashed into the bathroom to check herself. Her hair was in disarray after her frantic clothes change. She fussed with it, but then realized it would take more time to fix it than she felt she had, so she plaited it into a single French braid and coiled the braid up into a ballet bun.
Clothes were scattered all over her suite as if a tornado had tossed them. She couldn’t let Jason see it, so she cracked open the door, slipped out as fast as she could, and slammed it shut. “Okay, I’m ready.”
She made extra effort not to act like a moonstruck teen while Jason
showed her around the dormitory. The recreation room had multiple entertainment centers and game systems. The big-screen TV was state-of- -the-art high definition, and the stereo looked big and expensive. Besides the electronic entertainment, there was a pool table, air hockey, foosball, and a couple of old-fashioned pinball machines. Off in one corner sat a terminal with a large flatscreen monitor.
“Juice said you spent some time hanging around with the Lucky Seven.” Jason slouched against the back of a couch. Sally envied his ability to seem so comfortable in his own skin. “Why’d you do that instead of coming here first?”
“I was only seventeen when I graduated from the Academy. We tried to pull strings with Homeland Security—me, my mom . . . even Vice Principal Stone wrote a letter to the Director on my behalf—but they wouldn’t budge on the age requirement.”
“I see.”
“So there I was, six months away from turning eighteen with nothing to do and nowhere to go. I was going crazy staying at home with my mom, because we don’t get along so well. I was actually looking through the Want Ads, thinking maybe I could just get a regular job or something.”
“A regular job?” Jason sounded stunned. “But you’re a parahuman, and an Academy graduate. You’d be wasting yourself punching a clock somewhere.”
“I was thinking about being a pizza delivery girl,” said Sally. “Except without the car. Your pizza guaranteed anywhere in Phoenix in eight minutes or it’s free.”
Jason burst out laughing. “That’s awesome. I’d have called you every day. I mean, uh . . .” His face reddened a bit around the edges. “Because I love pizza.”
“Anyway,” said Sally, “that’s when Spark called me and invited me to come hang out with the ‘Seven until I turned eighteen. So I did.”
“No pizza?”
“No, no pizza.”
“Man, I’d love a pizza about now.” Jason rubbed his belly like a hungry toddler and made Sally giggle. “But then I couldn’t show you around the rest of HQ. You want to see the rest?”
“Yes, please.”
The Command Center fascinated Sally. It was the central hub of many Homeland Security operations, with one section dedicated to monitoring parahuman activities around the nation. Huge banks of monitoring stations and supercomputers fed data to a giant multicolored map of the United States with various marks and lights detailed. The background color of the map was yellow to signify the nationwide threat level of Elevated.
“There are forty duty stations,” Jason said. “Some people think monitor duty is you hanging out here by yourself trying to keep tabs on the entire world and stuff. Actually, you hardly make any decisions at all when you’re on duty. That’s up to Homeland Security. The only reason you’re even in here at all is to provide a parahuman perspective on anything that the brass wants to know about, whatever that means. Nothing’s ever happened when I was on duty. I’m not really sure what I’d do if it did. I’m better at hitting stuff.”
“So what so you do when you’re here?” Sally asked.
“Surf the Net, mostly.” He gave her that grin which made her insides turn to water. “Eric’s in the hot seat right now. You want to meet him?”
Sally nodded. They ascended a short stairwell to the dais, where a few screens summarized all the data from various monitoring stations. Four people sat at their stations on the central platform. Jason introduced her to Forcestar, part of the Just Cause team. He was Asian-American, in his mid-twenties, and spoke in quiet, pleasant tones. “I’m Eric Lu. Pleased to meet you, Mustang Sally,” he said.
“Please, just Sally’s fine,” she said.
He smiled. “Of course. Welcome to Just Cause.”
“Thanks. You guys are all really nice.”
“I’m guessing that you haven’t met Doublecharge yet.”
“No. Isn’t she nice too?”
Eric glanced around to see if anyone else was listening in, then spoke in a hushed voice. “She’s kind of a cast-iron bitch.”
Sally’s eyes widened in surprise. “Oh!”
Jason laughed. “Catch you later, dude. We’ve got a tour to finish.”
“Is she really that bad?” Sally asked Eric.
He shifted his body and Sally realized that instead of sitting in the chair, he was actually floating a few inches above it. “I’d say for you to keep off her bad side, except I’m not sure she’s got a good one.”
“Wow. So you’re not one big happy family?”
“Sure we are. Only a bit dysfunctional at times.” Eric looked past Sally’s shoulder. “Whoops. Looks like I’m getting the stink-eye. Time to get back to work.” He clicked on his mouse and Sally saw a game of solitaire displayed on his screen.
She glanced behind her to see a military officer regarding them from his own duty station with a disapproving glare. “Sorry to have interrupted your duty.”
Eric waved them off. “It’s fine. Nice to get a break in the nonstop action, you know? Nice to meet you, Sally.”
“Nice to meet you too.” Sally followed Jason toward the exit. “He’s nice. And I don’t care if Doublecharge isn’t. I’m glad to be here.”
“I’m glad you’re here too. Everybody else here is all, you know, old and stuff.”
“How often do you get monitor duty?” Sally asked Jason as they left the Command Center.
“Twice a week for twelve hours at a time,” he said. “Same as everyone else on the team.”
“How often does something happen?”
“Oh, things happen all the time, but mostly it’s stuff that doesn’t require Just Cause intervention. They don’t call us out for normal street crimes or run-of-the-mill emergencies. It’s got to be something major.” He showed her the main conference room, which was all shiny black plastic and chrome. “You want to see the hangar and motor pool?”
Sally shrugged. “I guess.”
“We could skip it. We’ve got a supersonic jet and a bunch of vans and that’s Dully McDullsville.” He grinned at her. “I’ll bet you want to see the Bunker, though.”
“The Bunker?”
“It’s what we call the Combat Training Facility. Nobody else has anything even remotely like it.”
“I can’t wait!” Sally clapped her hands together. She’d been excited to see it ever since she’d first heard about it. She’d hoped there might be a tour during her time in the Hero Academy, but the CTF was off-limits to everyone except Just Cause personnel because of the dangerous and experimental technology contained within its walls.
The CTF was the largest part of the Just Cause complex, but it didn’t seem that way at first because it was mostly underground. The main level consisted of the locker rooms, gymnasium, sauna, and the pool. They rode the elevator down to the main training floor. Sally had seen the hour-long special on the Discovery Channel, but had never actually been on the training floor in spite of her mother’s connections to the team.
Jason recounted the salient points of the Bunker’s development. Fifteen years ago, a pair of techno- -logically minded heroes had put their heads together and developed the basis for a fully flexible training facility for parahumans. The key points were that it had to be configurable into different settings, sturdy enough so heroes could use their powers at normal levels, and self-contained so harmful powers couldn’t exit the facility. The Architect, a minor-league parahuman with the ability to reshape earth, stone, and metal, collaborated with Particle, an engineer who could shrink to molecular size. By studying the Architect’s powers on a subatomic level, Particle developed a molecule-sized robot to duplicate them.
They built a machine to churn out billions of the nanobots. After fifteen years, there were enough nanobots to function effectively on a macroscopic scale. Construction began on the training chamber itself, using the nanobots as the primary workers.
The army of miniscule devices built a meter-thick lattice of structurally-perfect walls from the surrounding bedrock. The finished material was hard as diamond with an energy-absorption
index of close to one hundred percent. By loading a programmed scenario into the nanobot control computer, the nanobots could now transform a pool of raw materials in the training room into any configuration. Urban settings were common for training purposes, but Just Cause taught its members to work effectively in every imaginable setting from underwater caverns to rocky cliffs to open plains.
“What keeps them from flying out through the entrances or down the drains or anything?” Sally asked.
“I don’t know for sure. Something technical.”
“Probably a force field of some kind or a signal barrier. Something cool like that.”
“You know about this stuff?” Jason goggled at her.
“No, but I’m kind of a sci-fi nerd. Books, movies, you name it.”
“That’s cool.”
Sally wondered if Jason’s comment was just his way of brushing off her admission of nerd-dom or if he actually thought it was cool. Being superheroes was like living inside of a great science fiction or fantasy story.
The elevator doors opened to the observation bay and Jason led Sally over to the large bank of windows. “They’re actually diamond, not glass,” he said with pride, “the most expensive windows in the world.” The observation deck overlooked a space big as a domed football stadium. Bright arc lights illuminated a floor covered with the partially-finished renderings of buildings, cars, and pedestrians. It looked like a child’s clay modeling project. Sally watched as one building’s walls flattened and took on the aspect of brick. It was like watching an ice sculpture melt, but in reverse.
“Looks like we’re having an urban session next,” said Jason. “I like those the best.”
“Why?” asked Sally.
He blushed. “I like having so many cars and stuff to throw around, even though we’re not supposed to because of our insurance and all that.”
“Insurance?”
“Sure. There’s a lot of collateral damage in real parahuman combat. The government has to pay out damages. That’s why we’re supposed to try to limit combat to open areas away from structures and civilians. It just doesn’t always work out that way.”
Sally remembered all the damage from the fight between Destroyer and the Lucky Seven in the Convention Center in Chicago. She’d never given any thought about the aftermath until now. She wondered how many millions of dollars in damage their battle had cost. “What about private teams?”
“I don’t know. They probably have to have some kind of liability insurance, but I’m no expert on it. You should ask Juice if you’re really curious.”
Sally shrugged. “I’m not, really. I was just wondering.”
Jason introduced her to the technicians who monitored the training room’s transformation and asked how long it would take to complete. They told him it should be ready to go within seventy-two hours.
“I like to try and find out,” said Jason. “If Juice doesn’t schedule a training session, it means we’re going to have an emergency drill coming up and I don’t want to go in completely blind.”
“Doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose of the drill?”
He paused as he considered her statement. “Well, yeah, I guess so. But I promise you, we all do it. There’s no such thing as too much information when you’re going to have your butt on the line.”
He showed her the other areas on the training floor: the emergency medical room, the weight room, which had machines for both normal and enhanced-strength team members. “How much can you lift?” Sally asked. Jason shrugged. “About four tons on a good day.”
They returned to the surface. The pale winter sun hung low over the mountains to the west. A cold wind blew across the quadrangle. Sally shivered and her teeth started to chatter when Jason opened the door.
“Yuck,” he said. “We’ll take the tunnel. I don’t really feel it or anything, but I hate cold weather.”
“Me too,” said Sally. “I’m from Arizona. I’m at my best when it’s really hot.”
“I know what you mean,” said Jason. “I’m a Georgia boy myself. Nice place if you don’t mind a little humidity. Do you want to go get a hot chocolate or something from the cafeteria?”
Sally’s heart fluttered. Now that the tour was over, he seemed much less confident and more human, more approachable. “That sounds great.”
As they strolled down the underground tunnel toward the cafeteria, their phones beeped to announce incoming text messages. They each pulled them out to look.
Dinner tonight in Main Conference Room. Full Dress. 1900 hrs. Juice.
“What’s that mean?” Sally asked as Jason held open the cafeteria door for her.
“He’s probably going to introduce you to everyone. Full Dress means in costume. We don’t normally dress out here in headquarters unless there’s a tour coming through or something.” Sally caught Jason’s eyes wandering up and down her slight figure.
His attention made her feel odd, like she understood at last what people meant by butterflies in one’s stomach. She wished he wouldn’t stare, but she also wished she had more of a figure to show off to him. If anyone in the past had ever looked at her that way, she’d never noticed. She was too busy studying and training at the Academy to pay much attention to the socializing that went on between the students. She knew she wasn’t any good at it, which felt every bit as humiliating in its own way as it had been to lose Destroyer. She felt her ears burn. “How about that hot chocolate?”