School for Sidekicks (31 page)

“Oh. Well. That. Yeah, see, I
told
you that no conversation that starts with ‘we need to talk' goes well. And this is just another example of … Bittersharp, really? When I linked with it, the name tasted more like smokystrong to me, but I guess I can see bittersharp, too. I don't … Wait, it offered to play you my memories?”

“Yes. It said you asked a lot of the same questions I did.”

“Did you? Go into my memories, that is.” His voice came out very small.

Something about the way he said that burned a lot of my anger away, and the idea of looking into Foxman's mind, even at one remove, suddenly seemed like the worst kind of violation. “No. I didn't.” And then, because I felt strangely ashamed of myself, “I didn't have time, but I probably would have if I had. I'm, uh, sorry.”

He took a deep breath. “Don't be. I went into Backflash's memories without a second thought—I haven't got a lot of room to judge. So, you know about the aliens coming to kill us then.”

“Yes, a bit. But I had to get out before bittersharp finished explaining things, and a lot of what the computer showed me didn't really make sense. There's still so much that I need to know.”

“Tell me what you've got and I'll see what details I can fill in.”

When I finished relating what had happened to me, Rand sighed, got up from the table and began to pace. “I didn't actually get much further than you did before Backflash caught me.”

“Caught you? I thought—”

“What? That my session with bittersharp was official?” He laughed, and not in a pleasant way. “No, Backflash doesn't want anyone else getting near her magic alien oracle. I used one of the M-Day celebrations as cover to break into bittersharp's vault. I'd have gotten away with it, too, if Backflash hadn't spotted me sneaking into the back of the memorial and then checked the logs to see when I arrived on Deimos.”

“Wait, I thought you said she caught you
during
your interface?”

“She travels in time, Evan. She found out what I'd done and jumped back as far as she dared. That kept me from getting more than an hour with bittersharp.”

“I'm confused. If she can jump back in time nearly two hundred years to deliver the Hero Bomb, why couldn't she jump back far enough to stop you completely?”

“It's
very
dangerous for her to go more than about half an hour. I didn't know it then, but I hacked the daylights out of OSIRIS's computers to find out more later. She's a fixed time-space wave-function and”—he paused—“no, forget that. Understanding it involves a lot of math you haven't learned. Suffice to say that jumping back far enough to block me completely would have posed significant risks to timeline stability.”

“All right.” I was actually a little relieved when he didn't go into the details. Despite what my parents do for a living, math isn't my best subject. “If you didn't have that long—”

“Do I really know much more than you? Probably. I already had a lot of information I'd pried loose from OSIRIS's secure servers, so I knew what questions to ask. I've also learned more since.”

“And?”

“And we aren't alone in the universe. There are quite a few aliens out there. Most don't care about us, but the Kith'ara don't like competition. They destroyed the home world of bittersharp's people and nearly wiped out the entire species. After that, bittersharp's people dedicated themselves to fighting the Kith'ara. But they are few in number and not powerful militarily, so they've spent their resources building bases like the one on Deimos in as many developing solar systems as possible. They want to give people like us a fighting chance.”

“Aliens … wow!” I mean, bittersharp was an alien creation, but somehow the idea didn't seem real until I heard it from a real person. It was awesome and scary and almost too big to get my head around. “What else do we know about them?”

“Not a lot. Backflash has been careful not to let information get out of OSIRIS's backrooms. She doesn't trust the Web, possibly because the Kith'ara will use it against us, or
did
use it, or … I hate time travel.”

“Is Backflash a hero or a villain?” I asked, suddenly. “I mean, she set off the Hero Bomb, but—”

“I don't know, Evan.” He closed his eyes and clenched his fists hard enough to turn the knuckles white. “I really don't. I'm not sure those terms mean anything where she's concerned. She is directly responsible for more than half a million deaths, including my father's. But she did it to save the planet.”

“Bittersharp said that we were like gladiators…”

“Yeah, they've set things up in a way that pushes nearly as many young metas into turning Hood as becoming Masks because they want us at one another's throats. Backflash believes—and the government agrees—that we need to have as many powerful metas as possible when the Kith'ara arrive, or
if
they arrive. Backflash coming back through time destabilizes the timeline in a way that means those sorts of
ifs
and
whens
aren't really clear anymore. Did I mention how much I hate time travel?”

He shook his head. “Never mind. The important bit is combat. OSIRIS believes we need lots of practice with our powers or the Kith'ara will walk right over us. They set up the entire system to give us live combat practice against the toughest enemies around—each other. That's why metamax cells practically come with a revolving door. Hoods in prison aren't putting a fighting edge on us or them.”

“Oh.” It made a horrible sort of sense. “What about the hero beam?” I asked. “Why are we so much weaker than your generation?”

“You know about the beam, too? Did you get it out of bittersharp?”

“No, I figured it out on my own.”

“You're one smart kid. I'll say that for you.” He took a deep breath. “That's my fault, actually.”

“Your fault?” I asked “How?”

“I built the hero beam. Backflash recruited me for the effort very early on, long before I accessed bittersharp and we had our falling-out. She told me OSIRIS had uncovered some of the secrets of the Hero Bomb, but not everything. The government needed some way to harness the technology without killing ninety-eight percent of the people it touched.”

Rand closed his eyes and I could see that talking about this hurt him. “She lied and told me we didn't know who had detonated the bomb but that we didn't dare let someone else have a monopoly on that kind of power. She said my powers made me perfect for the job.” He snorted bitterly. “Too bad she was wrong.”

“Wrong? How? I mean, you did build the hero beam, right?”

“Sort of. It doesn't work the way it's supposed to, and that's my fault. Well, and Backflash's for not anticipating all the new powers people would develop. You see, she thought I was a technopath—which I am—but that's not all. I'm technokinetic as well, and that's a power that didn't exist in her future.”

“Could you back up a couple of steps?” I asked. “Technopath? Technokinetic?”

“Sure. Denmother, bring up my armor on a test rack.”

A moment later, the Foxman suit rolled into the kitchen on a little platform.

Rand tapped the chest plate. “Being able to build this is what makes me a technopath. I can
hear
machines, all machines, in my mind. When I pick up a blender, say, or a pistol, I can instantly see everything about how it works and how it … wants to be better.” He angrily waved a hand in the air. “That's not quite right. Machines don't
actually
want anything, but for me, they feel like they do, like they
want
to be perfected. Combine that with a natural aptitude for design and it makes me one of the best inventors in the world.”

“So, why don't you sound happy about it? And what's technokinesis?”

“My curse. Or my real power. Depends on how you look at it. The technology in this suit doesn't make me a Mask, though I thought it did once upon a time. I was going to show all those metahuman masters of the universe what a normal human with a little bit of good old American know-how could do. I would fight crime by night and build a company on the tech I used to do it by day. Billionaire, genius, Mask, entrepreneur. That was my plan. There was only one tiny little problem.

“
That
was the real reason I lost Foxhammer Industries.” The words were just spilling out of him, like a dam had broken and he couldn't stop himself. “I thought I was a technological genius and not just another silly meta—well, actually I am a technological genius, just not as much of one as I thought. Or, in the way I thought, because … technokinesis. You see, every bit of tech in this armor works anywhere, but it only works together
on
me, and it only performs at optimum capability
for
me.

“My supercapacitors are the best in the world under normal circumstances, but when
I
run the tests they operate at seven hundred and fifty percent the efficiency of what anyone else gets. The electrokinetic artificial muscles operate at over two thousand percent efficiency if I'm wearing them. The rockets will propel an article the size of this suit with no problem, but no one else can get them to fly in a straight line. The computer controls, the stopping power of the armor, even the reflectivity of the paint—it all comes together for me but not for anyone else. And that's because genius is only thirty-two point five-seven-two-eight percent of the equation—I calculated it once.”

Now I saw it. “So when you built the hero beam for Backflash—”

“Exactly.” He smashed a fist into the chest piece of his battle suit. “When I wasn't the one operating it, the beam was only thirty-two point five-seven-two-eight percent as efficient as it was supposed to be. And that means that unless I'm sitting at the controls, you only get about a third of the powers you might otherwise. Which, has its pluses actually. The machine kills one in four test subjects when I operate it. More, if they've fully completed puberty—don't ask me why. When it operates without me the fatality rate drops to less than one in a hundred.”

“But won't that leave us too weak to fight the Kith'ara? Why didn't Backflash try to make it better?”

“Because she wants you weak, at least to start with. It makes you easier to control and train, and it forces you to learn to work together. Look at how you got into the vault. None of you could have broken in alone like I did—well, except maybe Burnish if she didn't mind making a lot of noise. You were forced to work together, to form a team, like an army unit. Backflash and OSIRIS want you all doing things that way. Not like the mavericks of my generation. She felt we were ‘too individualistic and too emotionally scarred by the half-million deaths that gave us birth.'”

Rand's entire body stiffened when he quoted Backflash, and something like hate flashed in his eyes.

“There's more though,” I said. “Isn't there? Something else about us being weaker.” Then I remembered Mike telling me why they never used the memory ray on metas, how it could amp up our powers, or, kill us. “Oh, the memory ray.”

“Exactly. A very brief application will usually increase powers. Longer exposure grants more powers, or changes them.”

“Or blows us up like human bombs.”

“Possibly, yes. Even a short dose isn't safe. The death rate climbs back up. One in eight, or higher.” He rubbed his temples. “God, I wish I could have a real drink.”

I had another flash of understanding. “It was bittersharp.”

“What?” he asked.

“When you learned about the aliens, and what Backflash was doing.
That's
why you started drinking.”

“No. Learning that the woman I was working for had murdered my father really hurt me. But that wasn't what turned me into an alcoholic. That was Captain Commanding. You see, our beloved
Captain
knew about the Hero Bomb all along. Backflash let him in on the secret almost from day one. He knew it all and he never told me. He thought it was worth it. Not because Backflash was here to save the world, mind you. No, he thought it was worth it to create him.

“I found out when Backflash caught me in the vault—she brought him along as back up. I confronted him later. When he explained how he felt about the bomb I wanted to kill him. I wanted to kill him sooooo bad. I could have, too. I've got a special gun I built just for that.”

“Why didn't you?” I asked. “Kill him, I mean?” I was horrified and fascinated.

“Because he wasn't wrong. Neither was Backflash. The aliens are out there, and they're probably coming to Earth. Even if we win, they're going to kill millions. And Captain-freaking-Commanding is one of the best weapons we have. If I kill him, I'm killing every single person he might otherwise have saved. Likewise, Backflash. I can't do anything to stop her, not unless I want to build an annex to the trophy room to give me enough wall space for all those extra names.”

Rand hid his face in his hands then. I put one hand on his shoulder because I thought he might be crying and I didn't know what else to do. I had been so angry when I came in, and now … now I didn't even know what I felt.

 

23

M-Day

There's something about school lunch. No matter how horribly your week is going, a trayful of gray glop can bring you down even further.

“What is this stuff?” I spooned up a glob and let it fall back onto my plate.

“Kith'aran goulash maybe?” replied Speedslick.

“Good one,” said NightHowl.

Blurshift chuckled. Emberdown rolled her eyes. Blindmark pretended like he didn't know why he was sitting with us, which is to say, he acted like he always did. The odd one out was Burnish. She looked like she had a rash and she didn't know how to get rid of it.