Wearing the Cape 4: Small Town Heroes (16 page)

The leftover wooginess turned into an icy weight in my stomach. “Because anyone who wants to attack Littleton just has to get someone inside to shut this down,” I managed. At least I could be master of the obvious.

“Yup. You saw the town burning and
vanishing
—exactly what it would do if the pocket collapsed. Littleton would find itself sitting naked beside Guantánamo Bay. Hope?”

I couldn’t believe it.

“Hope?”

I couldn’t believe it.
To End World, Break Glass. Littleton might be a small world, but still! They might as well have a switch! Or a big red button. Oh wait, they
do
have a switch, unless there’s a backup power source inside there with the rings!

“Hope! So, are you all done freaking out?”

I shook my head. “Yes?”

“Good, ‘cause you know when you pull your hair like that you look, like, twelve. Here.” Shelly took my new cell phone and dialed a number on it, hit star, handed it back. “It’s tied into Institute Security now. If anything happens here, you’ll get the memo the same time as yummy Sheriff Deitz does. I got approval from Ali and set up the other end of the link last night.”

She grinned like an urchin.

“She
 
probably just said ‘yes’ so she could explain it to the sheriff over dinner at Jemmy’s—but who cares why, right?”

“Deitz!”

“What about him?”

“I need to go. Cats. Trees.”

“You’re making no sense, but whatever. I’m going to bug Ali for whatever projects she can tell me about—maybe I can narrow down the target list. Mom says you’re coming to dinner.”

“Right!” I almost hugged her, remembered the guard. Turning away, I stood frozen. I needed to go, but the pillar mocked me. It was Red Base, the goal.
Why
hadn’t they surrounded it with more reinforced concrete and built a bunker on top?
 
I had the worst, mind-clenching feeling that if I took my eyes off it for a moment then my Kitsune-dream would come true. I left at a fast walk.

“Today’s flash-mob will be catered to by Best Wishes, as thanks to their many, many customers, and will move around town viewing performances at currently unknown locations. Be sure to find it on The Littleton Eye, which of course sees everything. Everything. So stop that.”

Littleton Radio, The Daily Hour.

It wasn’t like Sheriff Deitz was
expecting
me; he’d been really nice about it, but basically he had told me he’d call if there was a cat in a tree. But he and Deputy Sweet had to be Littleton’s first line of defense if anyone got past the Scoobies in the Garage, even if the big gun I remembered Angel carrying that night in Grand Beach didn’t seem like much beside the three tin-man teams guarding the door.

But I trusted Sheriff Deitz to keep me more in the loop than Veritas, who I hadn’t even seen since he’d dropped me at the B&B, which meant telling him why I was here. He hadn’t
asked
—probably used to people doing classified things on a need-to-know basis. But it was his town and I should have.

Walking down the street, I realized how off-balance I still was. The Thomas Kinkade America look of the town, the weird streetlamps and the high, percussive hum I kept forgetting I was hearing—the perfect Midwest weather in
Cuba
. And the Institute? If this was the movies, I’d find out that The Institute kept a secret cryogenic prison for storing uncontainable lethal breakthroughs on ice and the Bad Guys wanted to unleash all that Evil In A Can.
None
of it was normal, which didn’t help my growing feeling that its artificial perfection was under siege. Little Atifa and her…godfather?...were in danger and I didn’t know
why
. And, and…

“
What
is that humming sound I’m always hearing?” Not what I’d been planning to say when I walked through the door. Sheriff Deitz looked up.

“The echo-mapping system? It’s built into the street lamps. Full aural surface mapping of the entire town, AI-monitored in realtime. Atlas-types always hear it.”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah. That plus the mics, cameras, and the infrared imaging pretty much means we know when a sparrow falls and can positively ID the cat that took it down.”

“That’s…”

Deputy Sweet snickered from where she sat stripping and cleaning a gun at her desk. “Creepy? You think? But it’s what ‘high-security environment’ means these days. We’ve got dozens of Witness Protection subjects to keep track of, scientists to protect, spies to spy on…” She laughed at my look. “Nah, that part is handled by Navint—Naval Intelligence.”

“Hi Angel. Sorry about not saying hello.”

“That’s alright. Should we be worried that you’re loaded for bear?”

“What? Oh.” I’d forgotten I was still in armor and carrying one hundred pounds of titanium maul. “No—I’ve been to the Garage.”

Deitz kicked a seat away from his desk. “Sit. Talk to us. Coffee?”

Angel went to pour us some, her attention staying on me. In contrast to Deitz’s easy way, she always reminded me of a dark-eyed hawk. Even her smile was assessing.

“So, what’s going on?” Deitz asked after I’d stripped my mask off and taken an obligatory sip. I kept my eyes on my cup.

“How much did the DSA tell you about why I’m here?”

“Just that you’re an asset the DSA wants to exploit for a while.” He grinned at my look. “And I mean that in a nice way. Consensual. Probably mutual.”

“And why they gave me the badge?”

“Well, that just makes sense while you’re here…but there’s more to it than that, isn’t there?”

I looked over at Angel. Her smile was gone.

“I’m here because of a dream.” And I told them. I was getting pretty good at it by now. They didn’t interrupt, and I finished before my coffee got cold.

Deitz sat back when I finished, absently rubbing his long nose.

“Well, that explains just bunches of things. So, just so I have this straight, right now you’ve got a public-relations nightmare playing out in Chicago…”

I sighed glumly, realized I was fiddling with my hair and stopped. “Unmitigated. Without mitigating circumstances.
No
upside.”

“And in the middle of that, you have a dream—which you are pretty sure is a warning—that a town you’ve never heard of is going to be lit on fire, and your response is ‘I want some of
 
that’.”

“Um, pretty much?”

He chuckled, leaning way back. “What a totally cape thing to do.”

“What would you do?”

“What
will
we do. We’re going to prepare the town,
deputy
.”

Preparation didn’t involve a lot of the steps I would have recognized.

“Look,” Deitz said after I’d spent five minutes trying to absorb what the big screen on the wall was telling me. “The security situation in Littleton is a bit…different. Think of it like being tucked away in the world’s most impregnable fortress.
Nobody
is coming at us over the walls. They can only come in through the gate, and the drawbridge is
up
.”

I nodded, watching him flip through grid maps on the screen that had looked like an innocent white-board. He was right; someone trying to fight their way in wouldn’t just have to capture the Garage, they would have to gain control of the “translation” equipment that flashed us into Littleton.

He followed my thought. “Yeah, anybody who wants in has to already have access. You can bet that in a frontal assault the Navy will let us know what’s happening outside and then blow the crap out of the bridge. We’ve got enough stored food for months if they have to rebuild the whole Garage, but I’ll bet my last paycheck that they have a backup system stored far far away that they can fly in and rig up once they beat back an attack.”

“No bet.” Sweet finished assembling her gun, holstered it.

“And we’re not looking at a stealthy insertion over the wall, either. Littleton is its own little extrareality world, and we can count the known breakthroughs capable of any kind of extrareality travel on one hand.” Deitz stayed focused on the board. “Since they’re not getting in through the door, if they
can
get in then it’s the same as a teleport drop. Anybody popping in from outside will set off every alarm we’ve got when echo-location maps something that just wasn’t there a second ago.”

Now
the Orwellian Panopticon security system made sense. “What about inside buildings? Doesn’t surface-mapping stop at the walls?”

“Air pressure sensors. Any sudden arrivals displace several cubic feet of air…”

I nodded. We had those at the Dome; any teleporter popping in would find himself painted and isolated in less than a second. Then Shell would taunt him until we swept him up—she might clean up personally using a Galatea.

“So what are you looking for?” He hadn’t taken his eyes off the board.

“Just running a grid check. We want everything green before we start drills—it’s been long enough since the last ones.”

“Drills?”

“The Institute is responsible for its own security. We have the rest of the town.”

Behind me, a voice I knew said “And what are you going to do with the rest of the town?”

I spun in my seat, almost fell out of it.
Jacky
stood just inside the rail separating the “office” from the visitor’s area—and how she’d managed to enter without the street door making a sound was one of life’s mysteries.

“Jacky!” I couldn’t keep the huge grin from spreading across my face.

Her
smile showed fang. “What part of ‘don’t say anything to anyone’ wasn’t clear?”

“There wasn’t
time
.”

“There never is.”

“Ma’am, can we help you?” Sheriff Deitz didn’t sound at all put out, but Jacky kept her eyes on Deputy Sweet—who had her service pistol out and pointed at my friend. It took me a moment to realize what that meant.

“You
snuck in
? Into
Littleton
?”

“And into this office. I got in last night and you have conveniently accessible storage space, Sheriff.”

I closed my eyes. At least Jacky wasn’t in uniform; showing up as
Artemis
, all black leather and guns, would probably have had Angel shooting already. Not that my pale dark fiend of the night didn’t look scary enough in shorts and a beach top—she’d probably look scary in nothing but folded arms and a stare.

Deitz still hadn’t moved from in front of the board but his hand fell to his belt, inches from his own gun.
 
“So trespassing goes without saying, which on US Navy property is espionage. Are you turning yourself in? Just asking.” My super-duper hearing picked up the clicks and latches as doors and windows sealed themselves. “And how did you get in?”

He wasn’t asking about the office, but
I
knew. Not the little details but the biggest one, and I almost laughed. “Your mist form! The transition to solid isn’t instantaneous, so it didn’t trigger the alarms.”

“Smart girl.” Her smile got thinner. “Smarter than the government—and they’ve hosted vampires here a couple of times. I hitched a ride with some grocery pallets, Sheriff. It was easy. But I’ve been here before, I know the territory.”

He nodded. “I can see that. Angel.”

Deputy Sweet holstered her gun.

“So you’re not an in-house test?” He smiled wryly. “I ask only because it will be easier to fix if somebody gave you permission to make a run at us.”

“Sorry.” She didn’t sound it. “I’ve got the security clearance but not the permission slip.”

“Then we’ll sort it out later. And you’re here because…”

“Because of Princess Sunshine here.”

“Hey!”

She ignored me. “She thinks someone is going to light up this town and I want to be here for the festivities.”

The sheriff coughed, trying real hard not to laugh. “Well, not that that’s not…admirable, but this sort of thing usually requires an invitation.”

“Like I ever wait for those.” Now she just sounded bored. “Check with the DSA and tell me if I need to move my things into one of your cells.”

Jacky got more than one appreciative look walking down Main Street; her Evil Snow White, sunlight-never-touches-my skin goth look was a hit, and somehow Shell had gotten her to pack one of her printed tops or slipped it into her bag:
Bite Me
, red on black.

“Jacky, how could you! They could have—”

She smirked. “The DSA thinks I’m a valuable asset in the vamp community, the only blood-sucker not delusional enough to believe she’s really a vampire. Worst case they’ll tell me to get out of town, but they won’t. The department is full of cowboys. They’ll make
bets
.”

I couldn’t think of a thing to say to that, but we were almost back to Holybrook Rest. Sheriff Deitz had given us homework, procedures to get to know while he got approvals for us, and sent us on our way for the day. Now Jacky stopped and looked at the cute B&B, too picturesque for words in the afternoon shade of a dappled oak, then glared at me.

I smiled innocently. “What, you never stayed here?”

“Are there any talking animals?”

“No, but my alarm clock giggles. C’mon, they have great coffee.”