Action Figures - Issue Three: Pasts Imperfect (11 page)

She doesn’t finish the
sentence. She doesn’t need to.

“Ever since then, he’s been
on my case about everything I do and everyone I spend time with, and lecturing
me about morality, and trying to drag me to church,” she says, “and he’s been
so angry — all the time, at
everything
. I think he’s really angry at me.
Because I’m a freak.”

I pull Sara close as she
breaks down crying, and I promise her no matter how bad things get at home,
she’ll always have me, always, “and it’ll take a whole hell of a lot more than
your dad to change that. I’m always going to be here for you.”

Instead of taking comfort,
Sara says, “Yeah, and then he’ll think — never mind.” A faint, strained smile
peeks out from under her hood. “Thanks.”

“Do you want to stay here tonight?
Sounds to me like you could use a break from your dad,” I suggest, but Sara
dismisses the offer immediately.

“Wouldn’t solve anything.
Probably make it worse,” she says, standing. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I reach out to give her a
goodbye hug, but she turns her back to me and walks away, leaving me standing
there in the lingering psychic fog of her misery.

Sara’s mood is no sunnier
the next morning when she shows up on my doorstep a few minutes after five. I ask
her how things went when she got back home, but she brushes off the question.
It’s an effort on my part not to pry, but if she wanted to talk about it, she
would. Sometimes you have to let a person stew.

The sun is little more than
a hint on the horizon when we head into town, where we make a stop at the
Coffee Experience for a takeout breakfast of coffee and muffins. Jill questions
our unusually early visit, which we explain away as a case of synchronized
insomnia, and boy doesn’t that suck since we had the day off from school, ha
ha, oh well, what’re you going to do?

Catherine Hannaford, the
Protectorate’s receptionist, greets us at the team’s innocuous-looking Main
Street office. “Good morning, ladies,” she says. Her smile fades as she turns
to Sara and places a hand on her shoulder. “Sara, are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Sara says. She
sells the lie well enough to slip it by a normal person (and she isn’t
radiating emotion like she was last night), but Catherine is also a psionic, so
she has the same built-in lie detector Sara has.

“No, you’re miserable,”
Catherine says. “Are you up for this mission?”

“Oh, so you’re not asking
because you care or anything,” Sara says.

“I do care, but I also care
about your teammates, and mine,” Catherine says, firmly but without any heat.
“If you’re compromised in any way, even a little, it endangers everyone. I’m
sure you don’t want that. Do you?”

Sara shakes her head. “No.
And I’m not going to.”

Catherine, after a moment,
nods. “All right, then. Let’s get you to HQ.”

Shockingly, Sara and I are
the last of the Squad to arrive. We walk into the conference room to find Matt,
Stuart, and Missy already there and already in costume.

“Fashionable lateness is not
acceptable when we’re on a mission,” Matt says.

“We were told to be ready to
go by six,” I say. “It’s not yet six.”

“No, it’s five-fifty, and
you still have to gear up.”

Have I mentioned that I hate
it when Matt is right?

We rob him of any further
victory with a frantic quick-change, and by oh-five-fifty-eight, we’re good to
go. At oh-five-fifty-nine, Concorde enters.

“All right, Squad. Let’s
go,” he says.

We follow Concorde down to
the landing pad at the rear of the building, where the Pelican sits waiting.
Its maglev system hums at us, low and soft. Mindforce gives us a small salute
from the cockpit.

“Any word from Astrid?”
Concorde says to Nina Nitro, who sits on the edge of the Pelican’s passenger
bay, idly snapping her fingers. Each snap creates a tiny fireball that pops
like a camera flash. Over the lower half of her face, Nina wears a red bandana,
on which she’s drawn in white paint a crazy, crooked grin. I suspect there’s a
matching grin underneath that bandana.

“Negative. Radio silence
from our resident sorceress,” Nina says. “Told you.”

“So much for wanting to get
more involved with the team,” Concorde gripes.

“Unclench, boss-man, we got
this,” Nina says. “Milk run. Easy-peasy.”

“Aaaaaand we’re jinxed,” I
say.

“Fine by me. I’m up for a
good scrap.”

“I’m not. I want a smooth
run with no problems and no hiccups,” Concorde says. “Squad, Nina is in charge
on your end. Don’t give her a hard time.”

“You heard the man, kiddies.
All aboard,” Nina says.

A minute later we’re all
airborne, Concorde and I taking the lead.

“ETA ten minutes,” Concorde
says over the comm system. “Stick close, Mindforce, we’re behind schedule.”

“Copy that,” Mindforce says.

“Behind schedule already?
Unacceptable. Ten points from Gryffindor,” Nina says.

“If we’re late, will
Concorde put us on secret probation?” Matt says.

“Double secret probation.”

“Harsh.”

“I can hear you, you know,”
Concorde says. “God, this is going to be a long day. Lightstorm, channel zero.”

The private line? Wonder
what’s up. “Lightstorm is go on zero.”

“I read your report. Very
thorough.”

“Thanks. Hope it helped.”

“Not really, but that’s not
on you. I’m hoping the feds will turn up something more useful.”

“The feds?”

“The illegal possession of
nuclear material is a federal offense. The FBI got wind of what happened in
Sturbridge and now they’re all over it, but investigations like this take time.
I don’t have time. I need to know how my tech is getting out of my facility
now
.”

“Getting out of your — wait,
what? I thought Belcher got them from — I don’t know, from whoever made them for
the Thrashers, or for Manticore’s suit.”

Manticore. Jeez, I can’t
even say his name aloud without my throat going dry.

“I almost wish that were the
case.” Concorde sighs. “Years ago, six micro-cells, the first run
mass-manufactured by my company, disappeared from the facility. I suspected
industrial espionage at first. Two months after the theft, Manticore made his
first appearance.”

Manticore was only the first
super-villain to show up wearing a high-tech, nuclear micro-cell-powered
battlesuit, Concorde says. Many others followed, and Concorde made it his
mission to personally take them down (which, as it happened, led to his
reputation as one of the nation’s all-time top super-heroes). What he quickly
learned was that none of the battlesuits were using his micro-cells; they were
powered by, for lack of a better term, bootleg versions — micro-cells based on
his original designs. Whoever took that initial batch replicated the tech to
sell to wannabe super-villains. Concorde says they all bought their micro-cells
through a variety of black marketeers, but he’s never been able to track down
the supplier.

This time around, it was
easy to trace Belcher’s micro-cells back to their source. “All micro-cells
produced by Bose Industries have electronic tags built into their casings, just
in case something like this ever happened again,” Concorde says. “Belcher’s
micro-cells were tagged.”

“He bought them from someone
inside your company?” I say.

“Not directly, no. He told
the police he bought them from an online black market.”

“Are you serious? He got the
things on an underground eBay?”

“Basically.” Concorde tells
me the feds shut down the site and are in the process of hunting down whoever
ran it, but it could be weeks, maybe months before the investigation uncovers who
in the company is acting as the supplier. Understandably, Concorde isn’t
feeling that patient. “I spent the entire weekend personally sifting through
our production and shipping records for every nuclear micro-cell we’ve ever
made, and every single unit is accounted for.”

“And yet,” I say. “If I can
help in any way...”

“You can’t. This is my
problem to deal with,” he says, ending the conversation by switching back to
the public channel. “Byrne, this is Concorde, en route for prisoner transport
detail, ETA two minutes.”

“Concorde, this is Byrne
control, we copy,” replies a rich, microphone-pleasing voice with the faintest
of Southern twangs. “Landing pad’s clear for your detail, the warden will meet
you there, over.”

“Copy that.”

We arc toward the ground,
and I get my first look at the infamous Byrne Penitentiary and Detention
Center, the New England region’s supermax prison for superhuman offenders. I
did a little reading about Byrne and learned that, in addition to its unique
clientele, it’s an unusual prison in that it holds inmates at the federal,
state, and district levels; superhuman offenders aren’t so common that there’s
a need for separate prisons for each level of criminal (thank God for that), so
Byrne multi-tasks. A tall, cylindrical building serves as a central hub. The
southern face is open to a courtyard and a sprawling parking lot almost as
large as the prison itself. Three smaller buildings sit to the north, east, and
west, none of them visibly attached to the central structure. These, as I recall,
are the prisoner housing units: one for federal-level offenders, one for people
who’d normally go to a state penitentiary, and one that holds people awaiting
trial (like Archimedes) and convicts who would normally serve out their
sentence in a county correctional facility. A dense forest surrounds the
compound, and a tall, razor wire-topped wall surrounds that. I don’t know jack
about prisons, but this place looks as solid and as inescapable as any.

The landing pad sits off the
east wing, well away from the complex. As Concorde and I touch down, an
African-American man steps out of a black Humvee. He’s a little smaller than
the car. He must shop for suits at the same place as Joe Quentin. He strides
out to meet us and extends a hand.

“Concorde,” he says, his
voice as deep and resonant as the Pelican’s maglev system.

“Good morning, warden,”
Concorde says, shaking his hand. “Warden Pearce, this is Lightstorm of the Hero
Squad. Lightstorm, Harlan Pearce, warden of Byrne Penitentiary.”

“Lightstorm,” Pearce says.
My hand vanishes in his. Heck, my entire
head
could fit inside that
catcher’s mitt.

“Warden, sir,” I say with
the utmost respect. Powers or no, I think this guy could take me.

“The prisoners have been
prepped for transport,” Pearce says, and he doesn’t have to raise his voice to
be heard over the Pelican as it lands behind us. “I’ve doubled the guard
detail.”

“Mm, good call. I don’t
anticipate any trouble...”

“But why take chances?”

“Exactly.”

The Pelican touches down
long enough to drop off Mindforce, then, with Nina at the stick, lifts off to
set up shop at the courthouse. After the warden and Mindforce exchange brief
niceties, we climb into the Hummer for the short ride to the prison. The
interior is set up like a limo, with front- and rear-facing seats in the back
half of the vehicle. I sit on the rear-facing seat with Concorde and Mindforce,
Pearce gets the other seat all to himself.

We hop out at the main
entrance, where a half-dozen guards stand at attention. They’re in black
fatigues and full body armor, and each of them totes an automatic rifle
equipped with a laser sight. Flash-bang grenades dangle from their belts, and I
count two pistols on each guard: one under the arm, one at the hip. I’m
starting to feel unnecessary; these bad boys are ready for a war.

“Captain,” Pearce says to no
one specific, “call it in.”

One of the men taps an
earpiece. “Control, Captain Dekes calling it in. Send out the hearse.”

“The hearse” is the prisoner
transport, the hybrid offspring of a small school bus and an armored car. It
backs up to the entrance and rear double doors swing open to reveal another six
guards, all of them armed to the teeth. They pile out to join their comrades,
forming an intimidating gauntlet between the prison and the transport.

“The hearse is in place,
control,” Dekes says. “Bring out the prisoners.”

One by one, three people in
neon orange jumpsuits file out of the prison, shackled head and foot; thick
steel cuffs encircle their wrists and ankles, heavy cables rather than chains
link the shackles together, and they all wear what appear to be steel collars.
Each prisoner is more shocking than the last.

The first person out the
door is Archimedes, and my God, does he look rough. His skin has grown tight
and pale, giving him an unsettlingly skeletal appearance, and his hair has
grown wild to form a scraggly mane. He doesn’t look up from the ground as he
shuffles toward the hearse. Captivity has not been his friend; he’s
demoralized, defeated, and a good sneeze would knock him over — and yet, the
sight of him fills me with cold dread.