School for Sidekicks (28 page)

I didn't know what was going on, but I had a nasty feeling there was a bigger pattern to it all. Between Spartanicus and Backflash and the dark side of Deimos I was piling up too many mysteries. It made my bones itch. Especially Backflash's claim to have come from the future.

What happened between her and the Mark IX seemed so farfetched that I doubted Speedslick and the others would believe me even if I told them about it. I couldn't tell my parents—they'd never believe me, and if they
did
and found out I'd died twice … Well, I couldn't even imagine how badly that would go without breaking out in shivers.

I went back down to the range a couple of times. It's surprising how much better blowing things up can make you feel. Almost as good as punching out a bad guy. Thinking about that made me want to go out on patrol, Foxman or no, and I did climb into the Foxmobile and start the engine a couple of times. But I kept coming back to the things Backflash had said about me being a problem, and then I'd turn the car off again.

If I could have talked to Rand about it all, I might have felt better, but he still hadn't returned by the time I was supposed to head back to the AMO. I did a bunch of searching around on the Web for timeshifting and even had Denmother help me out, but we didn't come up with anything that wasn't either obvious fiction or totally crazy. And then my time was up and I had to go back to Mars.

I wish I didn't have to go back to Mars yet
. Now, there's another thought I never expected to have.

*   *   *

Mike met me at the gate when I arrived.

“I hear you cut out of your afternoon classes on Friday,” he said. “Why don't you come back to my office so we can have a little talk.”

His voice was as gentle as ever, but it was one of those questions that didn't allow for any answer other than yes.

“Of course, Mike.”

I pasted on a smile and fell in beside him, all the while racking my brain for what I ought to tell him about skipping class.

He led me along a different path than the one I normally used to get to his office, going up one of the steeper ramps that ran through the maintenance areas and avoiding most of the classrooms. That took us along the hallway that held the demonstration chambers—moderate-size soundproof rooms with one armor-glass wall. Mostly they were used by the upperclassmen to try out and show off new techniques for the teachers without having to go all the way down to the battle simulators. Students also signed them out as practice spaces.

At this time on Sunday, they were mostly empty, though we did see one room where a brute and a bouncer were trying out some team maneuvers. Brutes are your basic high-strength, high-durability sluggers, like Burnish in steel mode. Bouncers are a bit more unusual. In this case it was a kid from the class in front of ours. His handle was Rebounder, and he basically turned into a human tennis ball when he activated his powers.

As we passed, the brute, Ogre-X, or something like that, picked up Rebounder—grabbing on to one of the grips built into his battle suit for that express purpose—and threw him at one of the Hood targets along the back wall.
Whap!

Then, when Rebounder bounced back, Ogre-X would smack him like a handball to send him down field again. And again, and once more. With each target down, they picked up speed, until, after the fifth bounce back, Ogre-X just got out of the way and let Rebounder ping-pong around the room. By the time he came to rest he'd taken out all the remaining back wall targets as well as half a dozen more that had popped up elsewhere. I had paused to watch, and I kind of wanted to see what they'd try next, but Mike raised an eyebrow at me and I moved on.

I still didn't know what to tell him about skipping out on Friday, and somehow I didn't think that the truth was a great idea in this case.
Yeah, so I died. Twice. And then I flipped out.
But, much to my surprise, the first thing out of Mike's mouth when we got back to his office had nothing to do with my missed classes.

Instead, he asked, “How did things go with Foxman this weekend?”

“I didn't mean to skip … Wait, what?”

“Foxman. How did things go?”

“Fine, it was all fine,” I told him. “I thought you wanted to talk to me about skipping class?” I am never going to make sense of adults.

“Not really. I wanted to make you sweat a bit about skipping class. I'm pretty sure the walk up here managed that better than any lecture I could come up with. No, the main reason I wanted to have a talk with you was to see how the weekend went with Rand. So, what happened?”

I paused and tried to think of what I could say that wouldn't come back to bite me later. “I mostly just hung around the Den. Rand was pretty much checked out this weekend.”

“But he didn't get drunk?”

“Not that I'm aware of, no. I can't tell you what he does when I'm not with him, but I've never seen him drink anything but MaskerAde.”

Mike looked relieved. “I'm glad to hear that. I hoped it would go like that, but I didn't have a lot of faith. Not given how he gets about his birthday. Maybe he's finally starting to recover from whatever broke him back in the day.”

“What do you mean, ‘broke him'?”

“I don't think … no, he's your Mask, you deserve to know what I can tell you. I don't know why his birthday's such a hard day for him, but it is. But it's not actually his worst. That's Metamorphosis Day—which is only six weeks from now. This might be the first time in years he makes it from one to the other sober. I very much hope so. Rand was a great man once upon a time, and a friend of mine. I would love to see him get back on his feet for real.”

“Do you know what—” I was still trying to figure out exactly what I wanted to ask, when Mike cut in.

“What turned him into a drunk? I'm not sure. Rand always drank pretty heavily. He was a work-hard, party-hard kind of guy. But it was never a problem for him till right after the M-Day memorial service here in '97.”

“Memorial service?” I'd been meaning to learn more about that ever since I'd heard it mentioned in class. But other more important problems had been occupying my time and my mind.

“You know about the M-Day Mystery.” It wasn't a question.

Everybody knew that meta activity went dark for a day on the anniversary of the Hero Bomb, and that both Masks and Hoods mostly vanished at that time, but I nodded anyway.

“Have you read the chapter on it in the AMO handbook?” I looked at my feet and Mike sighed. “No, of course you haven't. The school didn't get properly started until about five years after the Hero Bomb, but this facility opened on M-Day '89 with a memorial service for the fallen. It was the very first anniversary of our collective Metamorphosis, and all of us were invited, Mask and Hood alike.”

I said something that had been bothering me ever since I first heard it. “Having the Hoods here seems wrong somehow.”

“I was surprised myself. I wasn't much older than you are now at that point, and the idea of standing side by side with my enemies didn't sit well. But Backflash can be very convincing when she wants to be, and she insisted that we put aside our rivalries for one day.”

“How did they get this place open that quickly? I mean, it's huge and … Mars.”

“I honestly have no idea, but it must have involved the work of a number of the most powerful metas, including some of the Black Masks.”

“Black Masks?” That was a new one on me.

“Government spooks, metas who work for OSIRIS and never revealed themselves to the world. I don't know how many of them there are, but I know they exist.”

“Wait, I'm losing the thread here, what does all this have to do with Foxman?” I asked.

“I don't know for sure. All I know is that he missed most of the '97 ceremony, slipping into the back very late. I doubt many people noticed, but I'd arrived a little late myself. So I was tucked in right beside the door. Rand looked pretty shook up when he came in. Afterward, I saw Backflash back him into a corner, and she didn't look very happy about whatever she had to say to him. That was the last time I saw Rand fully sober before this year.”

“I wonder what happened?”

Mike shrugged. “I don't know, Evan. I don't know.”

It was obvious he didn't have anything more to say at that point, so I pushed my chair back, and said, “Thanks for telling me.”

“Least I could do.”

As I headed for the door, he picked up a mandolin that had been lying on the desk. The last thing I heard on my way out into the hall was him beginning to sing a song that started out “Rocket ship, rocket ship, carry me away.” There was something terribly mournful about it, or maybe that was just my current mood.

Burnish was leaning against the wall outside my dorm room when I got there. “Need to talk to you, Quick. Got a minute?”

“Sure, what's up?”

“Follow me.” She led me to the nearest of the surface domes. “I'm pretty sure there's no surveillance here. Well, not beyond the tracers OSIRIS puts in our uniforms.”

“Tracers in our uniforms?”

She nodded and gave me that thin-lipped you're-an-idiot-Quick look that I was coming to think of as her default expression where it came to me.

“So, I've been nosing around the entrance to Backflash's lab since we talked last. I tried to slip in through the wiring, but there's some kind of block or shielding at the interface where it goes past the door, and I haven't been able to find any other way into the far side of the base. I'm not sure what's going on over there, but I think I want to find out, and the only way to do that is opening the vault.”

“Does that mean you're going to help us get in?”

“If I had any choice about it, no. But I can't do this alone, I need Blurshift and Emberdown, and probably NightHowl to actually crack the door—the security's an absolute bear. Blindmark and Speedslick can play lookout.”

“I notice a conspicuous absence on that list.”

“Not my fault you're useless. But I know I can't get the others without putting up with you, so it looks like you get to come along for the ride.”

I ignored the jibe. “When?”

Burnish looked thoughtful. “I need to talk with the others and get some more info. Tuesday maybe?”

“Wish we could do it sooner.” If I was going to do this, I wanted to get it over with before my nerve broke.

“Get some real powers and maybe we can speed things up.”

 

21

Safecrackers Inc.

“You ready for this, Quick?” The look Burnish gave me told me she was pretty sure the answer was no.

“Whenever you are,” I replied.

“Then, let's get to it.”

NightHowl, Emberdown, and Blurshift were already in place by the vault door. Blindmark waited at the fork where this section of tunnel met the rest of the system. Speedslick was at his side, ready to dash down and warn us if anyone headed our way. It was almost midnight Tuesday, well past the time students were supposed to be out in the halls.

“Everybody know what they're doing?” I asked.

Four nods said we were go for liftoff or whatever you wanted to call it. Burnish put a hand on the box housing the vault's biometric entry system. As she did so, her color slowly shifted from dull steel to bright copper.

“I'm going to slip into the wiring now, so that I can spoof the feeds,” she said. Bright purple plasma danced along the surface of her skin as her arm sank into the box. “And … got it, I think. That should block the channel until we get the keys nailed down, though I do have to say it stings a bit.”

Emberdown stepped forward then, holding her hand just above the retina scanner. “Flashing the system in three—two—one—” Bright lights shot from her fingertips to cascade across the reader, rapidly cycling through all the colors of visible light.

Burnish's face took on a look of intense concentration. “No. No. No. There! Back up.”

“This one?” Emberdown's color show narrowed to a deep violet.

“That's the one. NightHowl, you're up.”

The leather-jacketed girl leaned down over the voice recognition mic. Opening her mouth, she let out a high, warbling keen that slowly cycled lower and lower.

“That's the first one,” said Burnish after a moment. “Feels like we need three more … and there's another. No. No.” She grimaced and bit her lip in a way that suggested the contact hurt more than she was admitting. “Down a touch … there! Now, one more—got it! Can you do those four again without hitting the other notes?”

NightHowl rolled her eyes. “No, of course not. You're the only person in the whole school who has any real control over her powers. The rest of us are just second-raters who got lucky somehow.”

Burnish's lips went extra thin, and I thought for a moment we were going to have a fight on our hands, but then she just nodded. “Okay, point taken. Maybe I even deserved that.”

“D'yah think?” said NightHowl, but Emberdown put a hand on her shoulder and she subsided.

Meanwhile, Blurshift had stepped up to the hand reader. As they placed their palm against the plate, the constant steady shifting that normally rippled through their body slowed and became more deliberate. They became a she, with an appearance similar to, but not quite the same as, Backflash.

“It helps me get the hands right if I do the whole body,” she said, answering the question I hadn't asked.

“That's really close,” said Burnish. “I think the hand needs to be thinner and darker. Maybe longer fingers, too.” No sooner had she said so than Blurshift changed to fit her request. “Yes, that's the right shape. We're really close.”

“You do understand that I can't do the actual fingerprints without copies and time to practice, right?” asked Blurshift.