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Urban Renewal

- 24-29 -

 
by Erin Halfelven
Art by Heather Rose Brown

 
"What the heck is going on there?" Candace asked.

Todd carefully negotiated through the crowd that had spilled off the sidewalk and onto the street. "It's the Farmer's Market, looks like a riot. Maybe the vineyard owners and the hop growers came to blows?"

Candace laughed. The growth of vineyards east of Marshalldale since the 1970s had been bitterly resented by the local hop farmers. But both groups were still hugely outnumbered by the apple growers in the larger Wenatchee area. A local cartoonist had drawn a prizefight between boxers labeled "beer industry" and "wine industry" while a large audience drank from cups marked "cider".

A block later, Todd suddenly pulled to the curb. "Donk says that's him." He pointed at a man jogging across the street in front of him.

"The guy in the torn clothes who's bleeding from his hair?"

Todd got out, used Z9's covert ops moves to disable LeJeune and tossed him into the back of the SUV all without the surrounding crowd really getting an idea of what had happened. Candace got into the back to tie the crooked cop up while Todd drove on toward the bridge over the Columbia and Marshalldale.

* * *

From the roof of a hangar Catclaw missed a leap for the landing gear of the jetcopter. "Son of a Comet!" he cursed as he fell between a baggage tram and a tow truck. Picking himself up off the pavement and straightening his left wrist, he muttered, "Just because it heals doesn't mean it don't hurt."

Sensing that Leo had survived the forty-foot fall, Lady Karma continued to concentrate on weaving a net of worries and distraction out of the stray thoughts she could capture from Spartako. Little enough and probably useless, this just wasn't her sort of fight.

The cyborg seemed intent on escaping to the east, accelerating now toward the Knight whose voice boomed out. "This cannon can cut the blades off your vehicle in 1/20th of a second. Give up and land that thing."

Spartako replied on several radio frequencies at once. "I have my own thermonuclear device. Back-off, Space Junk!"

Sensing the approaching cusp, Kendra threw her net before the cyborg got out of range.

* * *

"He must be two hunnert feet in the air, Billy," said Tessie. "How close can you get me to him?" In the condensed temporal bubble of Blueblazes force field, they seemed to have plenty of time to discuss it.

Billy considered for some infinitesimal of real time. "At this speed, I can jump pretty high." He hadn't crossed the Mach 2 barrier with Tessie in his arms, fearing even greater turbulence than he'd faced at Mach 1. Mach 2 was the one that had killed a lot of good pilots, but Mach 1.95 was still more than the speed of a rifle bullet on target. "I can get you close enough to touch him, I think. But you're going to have to help me with the landing."

They said nothing about taking the risk. Neither of them had ever planned on dying any other way, and Urban had already died once. Tessie kissed her rag doll and whispered, "Let's do it."

* * *

Todd and Candace bypassed Airport Way, taking the road that led to the East Wenatchee Valley where the cyborg jetcopter and robot Knight faced off over a field of dairy cattle. Their black and red masks perched atop their heads, the Munsons looked very grim. Candace had the buzz gun they had salvaged from the mountain in her lap.

"Donk says just point and shoot?" she asked.

"Yeah. It's like a big shotgun, rocket-propelled sabot full of darts and needles. The sight reads the distance to the target and sets when to burst the shoe for maximum effect."

"Nasty."

"Yeah."

"Probably useless against that thing."

"Yeah."

"We going to be in time to do anything at all?"

Todd didn't answer for a moment. "Domino says that if we're lucky, I'll be there in time to see him die. They're preparing a welcome party."

Candace grinned. "Save some cake for me if I don't make it."

They reached across the seat with their free hands and touched fingers.

"Is Tessie safe?" Candace asked.

"I don't know," said Todd.

* * *

Spartako's targets were approaching again. And he'd maneuvered and managed the situation so that he had no reasonable hope of escape. His programming would now allow him to self-destruct to complete his mission. He'd tried this earlier but Blueblazes and the younger target had escaped. This time he would not fail.

* * *

Lady Karma summoned a wind to keep her close enough to the psychic net she had cast to keep it powered. At worst it might slowdown Spartako's reactions a fraction of a second, at best it might cause him to make the wrong decision at a critical moment.

Catclaw pursued her on foot, limping at first. "I didn't know she could fly!" he grumbled.

* * *

Penny powered up the Knight's atomic cannon. Maybe she really could slice the rotors of the jetcopter and force a crash. Maybe she could do this without having to kill anyone, even a half-mechanical cyborg assassin.

Nate's voice in her mind said, "Star Troopers, ETA twelve minutes, now. Centurion, Sky Bolt and two guys in powered armor."

"Too little, too late. I'm here now." She tightened a mental finger on the virtual trigger of the cannon, the boot jets already programmed to balance the thrust. Nothing behind her to be damaged. Draw down her aim on the point of rotation. Squeeze.

* * *

Candace fired from the window of the SUV, the sabot set for bursting at 330 yards. She aimed for the point behind the first window, where Dr. Domino had told her she would do the most damage.

* * *

Summoning all her remaining will, Kendra sent a psychic lance at the Cyborg. The turbulence of a sonic boom knocked her off the crest of the wind she'd been riding and she fell toward the ground, almost unconscious from her effort.

* * *

A burning lance of nuclear flame sliced the rotors from the jetcopter.

Needles and darts from a bursting sabot ripped a hole in the side of the cyborg vehicle, revealing the tanklike inner-capsule holding what remained of Spartako's body.

Now thought Spartako, sensing the approach of his window of opportunity. Now. Something glitched in his programming....

* * *

Billy and Tessie raced down the river, under the bridge, past the airport in less time than it takes to turn a page. Billy chose his path carefully, picking a ridge to run along to get him closer to Spartako. The jetcopter dropped a bit, it's rotors gone. A hole opened in the fuselage, still a hundred and fifty feet up.

"I'll jump, you do your thing," said Billy.

"Right," said Tess.

Billy leaped from the top of the ridge, a human-sized ballistic missile now. At the top of his arc the falling cyborg aircraft loomed over him. He extended his arms with Tessie between his hands, trying to get her as close to the rip in the plane as possible. Billy's forcefield kept time slowed to geological scale.

Tessie stretched out, her small hand reaching into the hole. She tapped on the metal of the case holding Spartako.

"Jinx!" she said. "You're it!"

* * *

For Spartako, the world seemed to just go away.

Boosted in some mysterious way by Billy's forcefield and reinforced by Kendra's spell in some other way, Tessie's power seemed to extend into the atomic domain, increasing some quantum analog of friction -- entropy perhaps. In the capsule containing the remains of a man once called Wyatt Helmstrong; one arm, part of a spine, a neck and most of a skull containing a heavily wired brain; in that capsule, interactions of moving particles slowed to nothing -- and stopped.

For Spartako, the effect seemed no different than what he expected. Sudden darkness, silence, timelessness and unconsciousness look a lot like a point 0,0,0 nuclear explosion from the inside.

* * *

Billy's arc continued and he pulled Tess close to him as they fell away from the inert jetcopter. Both of their forcefields had been used up, time flowed normally now for them, decelerated only by adrenaline effects. Or for Billy, at least, the effort had left Tess too exhausted, mentally and physically, to do more than whimper.

One hundred fifty feet below them a vineyard waited, basically a rocky field covered at this time of year with sharp sticks pointing upward. Wrapping himself completely around Tess, Billy tried desperately to re-ignite his forcefield. He needed a spark of energy, electricity, flame, ionized plasma, something.

He thought of Hades in the Disney movie, checking to see if his hair had gone out and smiled grimly. Even with his forcefield on they would only make a big splash in the vines. Tess on the other hand....

"Tessie, honey, wake up," he murmured. "Urban? Hank? Therese Marie Munson! Wake up!"

"I'm awake," she whispered. The wind around them, the wind made by their fall, began to grab at their clothing and exposed flesh. "I don't know if I can..."

Still over a hundred feet up, their fall slowed, changed angle. They began to tumble, their clothing tearing.

Billy whispered something in Tess's ear. She nodded, her cheek moving against his chest.

* * *

Staggered by the sonic boom, Catclaw caught Lady Karma before stumbling and falling to his knees on the edge of the asphalt. "Craptastic!" he growled but the blood of monsters in his veins had already regrown the skin he'd just lost. "There's a reason I picked Paine for my new last name," he said.

"I know," said Kendra. He sat her own her feet and she looked up at the drama still unfolding. If the cyborg was already dead she could help him on his way. She opened her senses and reached out.

* * *

Seeing Billy and Tess appear out of the blazing blue arc from nowhere shocked Penny. Automatically, she dived forward to try to catch them before remembering that her descent from orbit and firing the atomic cannon would have heated her armor to red-hot if she'd been constructed of anything so mundane as steel. Even her recuperative magnetic cooling wouldn't lower her outer layers below three or four hundred degrees before she reached the falling heroes--if she could get there in time.

At least their momentum has carried them out from under the aircraft, it won't fall on them, she thought.

Nate's voice reached her from Skytower. "Laser the boy, re-ignite his forcefield."

She did that, aiming for what looked like in her sensors the hottest spot, shining a tiny focussed heat beam on Billy's shoulder armor. Then she redirected all cooling fluids to her arms and shed the outer, hottest layer of her own armor. "Talk about blowing hot and cold," she said to Skytower.

He chuckled. "Don't forget to stow the cannon before you try to catch them."

"Done." The big golden robot arced across the sky, still not certain she would be in time. Bright outer plates flaked off her, shedding heat as quickly as possible.

* * *

Todd turned the engine off and leaped from the still rolling SUV.

"Tess!" screamed Candace. She pulled the red mask from her face and threw down the buzz gun. "Tessie!"

Death Masque reached toward the cyborg with his power. Too far away, he thought. Almost a quarter mile. Oh, Tess, what's it going to be like to have you inside me? If I can reach you....

* * *

"Ignition!" shouted Billy. Blue flames, the visible side-effect of his time-bending forcefield, burst out from his shoulder armor where Tess had concentrated her friction power and Penny had provided a laser spark. Tess switched her waning powers to simply thickening the air around them.

Their fall slowed. Billy had practiced falling from heights many times and with turbulent rapid scissor kicks managed to guide them toward the now-only-toasty warm outstretched palms of the giant robot.

"Got you," said Penny in the bass growl of the Nuclear Knight.

Tess's eight-year-old body, reserves all used-up, collapsed into unconsciousness at the announcement of their safety.

The hulk of the cyborg jetcopter crashed into the vineyard below them, wings tearing off, boom-like tail section breaking in half. The armor glass of the unused cockpit shattered and the heavy plastic fuel bladders in the tanks burst flooding the crash site with jet fuel that quickly caught fire from hot pieces of engine debris.

A column of greasy black smoke rose and was quickly blown into a ring by the first of several vapor explosions. For a moment it looked as if a nuclear explosion had occurred after all.

Penny opened the passenger shelf on the front of the Knight's body, letting Billy slip inside the narrow compartment, still holding Tess, who in turn still clasped her ever-more-raggedy dolly. The big robot then bent its path toward the airport where Lady Karma and other first aid could surely be found.

Smoke and flames rose behind them: Spartako's funeral pyre.

* * *

Seeing that the kids would be safe, Lady Karma reached out for the spirit of death and dying she sensed, a hungry spirit of longing and weariness. "You may go home," she told it. "Ride the wheel again or find your own peace. Goodbye, goodbye, I tell you three times, goodbye to this entangling life, you wounded souls."

Her eyes popped open. Souls?

"Man," said Leo beside her watching the burning wreckage, "What a candle!"

* * *

At the far edge of the airport, past some warehouses and untidy commercial buildings, near an empty SUV with both doors open, Candace Munson knelt on the ground holding her husband's head in her lap. "She's safe, Todd, she's safe! Wake up, honey!" She'd pulled off both their masks when she'd seen him collapse after watching Tess's rescue.

Todd's eyes fluttered, half-open. "They're gone," he whispered.

"No, no," said Candace. "The big mecha saved them! They're okay, Tess and the boy, they're okay."

He tried to sit up and she helped him. "I saw that," he said. "Then I reached for the mind still in the wreckage and something sucked all the others out of me." He looked at her, a small if worried smile playing with his expression. "They're gone, all the ghosts that haunted me are gone."

* * *

Z9 lead the way. "The sky is full of stars," he called back to the others.

"That's nuts. It's daylight," said Donk.

"The sky is the world, the stars are souls," said Miss Glamour. She followed Z9 out of the confined space somewhere below Todd Munson's consciousness.

"Our best choice for optimal results is to swim up to the sky and become a star," said Dr. Domino.

"After you, you freakin' poet-pansy," said Donk.

Dr. Domino also left.

"Well, I ain't stayin' here alone, wait up you guys," said Donk and he left, too.

A woman's voice called to them, "Goodbye, goodbye, I tell you three times, God-be-with-you, goodbye."

* * *

Z9 burst out of darkness into a room with maps and charts on the wall and a view out the window that he recognized as Torino, Italia. A handsome middle-aged woman wearing stylish but severe make-up smiled at him. "Zetanove! Alejandro, it's been years. How are you?"

The room looked as it had always looked, though its location had changed from time to time: Bristol, England; Quang-dong, China; Archangel, Russia; Montevideo, Uruguay, Tel Aviv, Israel. The view out the window might change but not the furnishings or the woman.

"I'm dead, I think," said Z9. "And you?"

"Benissimo. Well, your last assignment did not work out so well, did it? I'm sorry."

"No worries, camerata mia. But I hear the Cold War is over."

"Ah, well, yes. But the conflict between good and evil goes on and the world still needs warriors in that gray area between, unflinching humanites like yourself. Are you ready to accept a new assignment?"

"I believe so, though I may be a little rusty with some of my weapons and tactics."

She made a mark on a piece of paper. "Have you ever trained with a pom-pon?"

* * *

Miss Glamour walked until darkness became a corridor and a curtain. She pushed aside the night-colored cloth and found a dressing room. Several girls in different stages of undress busied themselves putting on various costumes.

"Sam!" one of them exclaimed. "Sam Terry, we're on in five minutes and you're dressed like that?"

Someone else threw her a costume and she began to get undressed, musing that it all seemed so strangely familiar, too uniquely mundane, such a common miracle. How odd that her costume appeared to be nudity. Naked as the day she was born, she left the dressing room and entered her new life, stage center.

* * *

Dr. Domino swam upward into the light.

"John," said the light.

"Yes," said John Domingues.

"Have you found out what you wanted to know?"

John thought about it. "Not everything."

The light danced a chuckling dance. "No one knows everything, John. Do you think you know enough?"

"I don't think there can be enough to know to satisfy me," he said.

"And that is the end of knowledge, the beginning of wisdom," said the light. "Come, you are done with learning, now you must teach."

And John Domingues entered into the light.

* * *

The darkness knew his name. "Donk," it said.

"That's me," said Paul Doncaster.

"You have lied, cheated, stolen and killed. What have you done to redeem yourself?" the darkness asked.

"Well, I felt bad about most of that," Donk said.

"That's true and it's worth something, but unshed tears cannot balance blood, deceit, violence and hate."

"Hey! I never hated anyone! Sometimes it was just business and sometimes I was just drunk. But I never hurt no one because of no hate I had on."

"And you never did." The darkness spoke as if it had found a diamond tiara in a sewage tank. "You were kind to the weak, brave when frightened, loyal according to your own codes, generous whether you had much or nothing. Your virtues cancel out your crimes in the eternal scale."

"Huh?"

"You could go either way, Donk." The darkness had become an even gray field under a featureless gray sky. "Into the light or back into the darkness, forever." The voice now came from an enormous silver-black figure standing on the horizon.

Paul would have licked his lips if he'd had any. "I get to choose?"

"No. You are here, in limbo, until someone comes to claim you. The deeds you have done in life will work out to their ends, and one day tip the balance."

"Oh, shit." He couldn't imagine anything he'd started in life having a good ending. "What can I do now?"

"I can spin the wheel for you," offered the Lord of Limbo.

"You do that," said Paul. "Can I double my bet?"

"You wish to learn more virtue through more opportunity to sin?"

"Uh, yeah."

"Very well, double or nothing, Paul-Doncaster-who-was."

The wheel spun, sucking Donk into a new life.

* * *

Epilog

The scene at the airport bustled with Centurion's duplicates, Blue Star Troops in armor, and various local, state and national authorities. Sky Bolt wanted to take LeJeune in as material witness in an overcrime case while the FBI and DEA held that they had prior jurisdiction in the venue of corruption, money laundering, kidnapping and drug smuggling.

"What drug?" said Sky Bolt. The fin on his tall blue helmet had seldom looked more shark-like as he grinned toothily down at the other federal agents.

"We haven't made that determination yet," said the DEA man.

"Oh bullshit, you know it was jooce, which makes it overcrime since metahuman blood is the only known source for hypradine."

* * *

The argument continued while The Last Centurion called a meeting of his partners. Nate as Skytower, coordinated the telepresence of absent members while Len made a few proposals.

"You know I've never liked having the group named after me, I'm proposing that we change our official designation to The Urban Commandos or maybe just The Commandos, in honor of Hank," he said.

Daedalos pointed out that "commando" is a collective noun, like battalion, and doesn't really need to be plural but the resolution passed unanimously anyway.

"Next item," said Len, "new members. Kendra has nominated Todd Munson for probationary status and Leonard Paine as associate member. Also, Tess Munson is to be re-enlisted as a reserve member. Any discussion?"

"Codenames?" asked Daedalos, who liked to keep all the records straight.

"Paine is using Catclaw, Munson probably won't want to use Death Masque if the feds let him switch sides and I'm not sure about Tessie," Len admitted.

"I've got an idea for Tessie," said Billy.

* * *

Don Turpen, Senior Star Trooper present, opened his faceplate to get a better look at the information panel the FBI forensic technician held up. "So Spartako isn't dead?" They both glanced at the still steaming hulk of the shattered jetcopter buried in the vineyard.

"Well he's not exactly alive either," Agent June McAtkins said. A lot of FBI agents hated the official federal superteam members but McAtkins thought Turpen more than a little cute -- and she'd seen him out of armor plenty of times.

Don waggled his Groucho-like moustache at her. "An undead cyborg monster assassin? Comets and catfish, but I hate it when one of those shows up."

FBI agents seldom giggle, McAtkins reminded herself.

* * *

Billy's residual blazing forcefield on the top of his head lit the darkened room with an eerie blue glow. Keeping a bit of his flame going made it easier to expand it during an emergency and looking like his hair was on fire had a certain coolness he liked. It beat carrying a Bic lighter in his pocket.

He sat on the edge of the kid-sized deskchair and looked at the sleeping little girl. Exhausted by her adventures, Tessie slept deeply, cuddling her ragged-and-stained dolly in her arms, two fingers of her right hand resting on her lower lip.

He sat quietly for some time just watching her; unusual behavior for the Man in Motion.

He thought about Hank Herbert, whom he'd known for years and whose spirit now inhabited the tiny sleeping warrior in front of him. He thought about Johnny Bellows, the brother he hadn't seen in six years who would now be ten years old -- and still a captive of Dr. Meridien. For Johnny's sake, he hadn't told anyone of the Man Who Would Not See the Sun Again and his strange penchant for kidnapping the children of metahumans--but that would change now.

Besides warning of Spartako's assasination and kidnap attempt, Johnny's brief call from the Dubai airport had included the news that he'd worked out his own escape plan. Win or lose, the boy would soon be free of Dr. Meridien leaving big brother Gilbert, alias Billy Blueblazes, free to pursue the man who would not see the sun.

"Maybe you can meet my brother someday, punkin," Billy whispered. "Good night, Jinx." He kissed a fingertip and placed it gently on the sleeping girl's forehead before leaving the room.