FBI Agents Daubert, Lewis, Jeffries, and Keeley. Keeley was introduced as a deputy, which I thought made him senior to Daubert even though the latter was still calling the shots in the meeting.
Effitech contractors Michaels and Cordon. It was clear from the earlier exchange that Michaels’ role was a mouthpiece for Effitech while Cordon would manage the actual work.
Peregrine, USST. The only other super in the room. One of the more powerful members of any US Super Team.
Delphic, independent contractor with both the FBI and USST. Peregrine’s involvement was a curveball that might make my own status ambiguous; I needed to confirm who I was reporting to and who was paying me.
The setup concerned me for a few reasons, but the biggest reason was that no one had actually asked me to get involved. I’m sure the Feds at least saw this as an emergency; I could understand why they hadn’t thought to ask me. But it meant I didn’t know what exactly I was being asked to do. Three years ago I would have said this was obvious – identify the bad guy, track down his current location. But as many interactions had taught me, today’s discussion on Vivi being just one example, there’s often more regarding what they want and how they want it.
I had occasionally entertained making a formal application for Super Team status. There were plenty that would have me; I was one of the most regularly called upon non-member supers in the States. But my independence afforded me a lot of slack about how I reported and what I left out – not to mention any presumed illegalities in how I acquired my intelligence – that would be steadily eroded if I were on a team. I would be expected to divulge my methods, to give regular reports on my actions, and even submit to records requests. Not something I could allow.
One of the major drawbacks of my current approach was the perception of Delphic by both the public and team-affiliated supers. There was substantial ambivalence about the use of superheroes in the US to begin with, and many of the efforts to assuage people’s concerns were predicated on the controls exercised on the Super Teams – the very controls I was seeking to avoid. So, although the majority of press and coverage was still favorable, there were sizable veins of suspicion that had to be acknowledged and handled.
There was a momentary pause around the table before Daubert nodded to Keeley. The deputy dialed a number on the teleconference console. It was answered on the first ring.
“This is Heathcote,” a strong feminine voice echoed across the line.
A short silence before she answered: “Ah, yes, the conference, good. Let me sign in here…” a second feed joined the first on my screens.
Brigitte Heathcote’s severe suit would not have looked out of place in the conference room, although her gender and brown skin would have at least broke the demographic monotony. Our viewpoint looked awkwardly up at her and in poor resolution, likely a laptop or mobile device. Although the angle put most of her surroundings out of view, a cloth barrier into a larger space implied she was in some sort of cubicle. A background murmur was picked up by her mic, which again indicated an open office environment. Her demeanor was stony but harshly alert.
Peregrine nodded, seemingly placated. Heathcote continued, “Although we won’t have official tasks for the supers… outside the two we specifically requested” (me and Spinner, apparently, although this was the first I had heard of it) “…I’ll make sure you’re known to have clearance for the extent of this operation. Codename Caduceus.” That drew an eyebrow-raise from several of us. I had decided after previous run-ins with government naming practices that there were no particularly good codenames, just less terrible ones.
As I finished my comment, I saw Lewis’s posture crumple. Only in retrospect did I realize that, since Jeffries had begun the briefing on Lamarck, Lewis had been consciously keeping a blank expression. He looked both frustrated and worried now.
“Disgusting mercenaries.” This was from Peregrine, said at a volume enough lower than his normal projected tone that it could charitably have been intended to be kept to his person, but nonetheless plenty loud enough for everyone to hear. The insult turned my stomach, but the meeting continued as if it hadn’t been said.
The reactions I saw from others in the room were not positive; it seemed others shared Peregrine’s attitudes about ‘mercenary supers’ even if they were more tactful about sharing them. Heathcote, at least, seemed neutral if a little disinterested in the exchange. But the knot in my stomach was tightening – I didn’t like the way this made me look to people whose respect I genuinely wanted.
People had started to relax, but Peregrine wasn’t done. His eyes pierced me through the camera lens. “Five million,” he practically shouted. Everyone else looked perplexed. “How much of your processing power does that buy, Delphic? Five million dollars.” He swept his hand over the table like he was brushing away irrelevant chaffe.
I started to type a reply, but he continued quickly, “We all know you’re used to making a hundred thousand or more for a few hours’ work. Five million is still more than even you pull in a month.” He was growing even louder as he spit his words at me, and he rose with inhuman swiftness. He turned to Keeley. “I’ll have the money wired to you as soon as I get to New York. Make sure the merc gets it.” Between two frames of the streaming video, he moved from his seat to the door and opened it. “See you in Ottawa, Delphic.” The slam of the door against its frame was loud even through the room mic.
This reaction was not wholly out of character for Peregrine, but it was quite a bit more severe and dramatic than I had expected. I had worked with him on USST missions at least a half dozen times, and while he had always looked down his nose at my contributions and addressed himself to HQ rather than speaking with me directly, I had interpreted his feelings as mild annoyance rather than outright contempt. He’d certainly never thrown my payroll arrangements in my face before or anything similarly crass.
I briefly reviewed what I knew of the A-list super. 24-year-old Robert Smiles lived alone in a large estate within commuter distance of the Capitol, where he worked as an intern for the Representative from Ohio’s 9th Congressional District (the Congresswoman was herself a retired USST member). A little digging revealed that it was unlikely Robert Smiles existed even five years ago – it appeared that whomever Peregrine was before this, it was more convenient to the DoJ to give him a clean identity.
Peregrine’s reputation within the super community was as a powerful, dedicated hero with a hair trigger and no interest in self-reflection or nuance. His flight power was the third fastest on record at over 500 mph, and he had the most potent defensive feature that had yet been measured: upon colliding with an object while in flight, all of Peregrine’s momentum would transfer to the object, leaving Peregrine stationary and unharmed. This meant that Peregrine could repeatedly create and then impart a significant impulse to anything he could touch.
The issue was, diverting malfunctioning airplanes and dive-bombing criminals at high speeds seemed to be all that interested the guy. He consistently put in long hours with USST and, even when off-duty, seemed to spend more time in his suit surveilling the Eastern US from above than he spent fleshing out his civilian life. It would not have surprised me if the other Super Team members were the only people he would consider close friends.
I realized that, as personal as his outburst might have seemed, Peregrine was probably reacting more to the loss of Lamarck than to anything actually having to do with me. I made a note to try to put us on better footing when the opportunity presented.
“… can move ahead with that, today, if that fits your requirements, mister Delphic?” Heathcote looked expectantly at the camera as I moved out of my reverie, realizing I had missed a good three minutes of back-and-forth between the inspector and Daubert.
The inspector relied heavily on her written notes as she provided us their most current findings and conclusions. I was expecting to have access to the file she was reading from, but I made my own notes anyway.
Lamarck had been hit by a three-round burst of 5.56 caliber shells, almost certainly fired from a gas-powered rifle – illegal for civilian possession on either side of the border, but readily available to military operations and on the black market. The angle of impact implied a vantage from the roof of any of the four buildings closest to the intersection on the opposite block from the corner where the supers were standing.
Velo’s rescue actions were irrelevant as Lamarck was killed essentially instantly when the bullets atomized about half of his brain matter, although considering Lamarck’s known ability to quickly heal himself and others, it was not surprising that Velo might have thought otherwise.
The autopsy had to be delayed several hours, because the corpse’s tissues refused to stay separated and quickly healed over each incision that was made. At about the eight-hour mark, the effect had diminished enough to allow a full post mortem. The autopsy confirmed the documentary evidence and preliminary conclusions.
Initial canvassing recovered 73 videos of the area over the relevant period, but none included the roofs of any of the four buildings, or any suspicious egress from the area.
There were no plausible claims of responsibility from known criminal or terrorist organizations, although plenty of the latter were celebrating the “blow against American imperialism.” Monitored channels showed no traffic spikes leading up to the attack.
It was clearly a hard admission for her to make, but from the way she said it I had the impression she was repeating a malediction she had already pronounced earlier in the day. I doubted it made it any easier.
And yet there was a decent chance that I could break this case within the next hour. So, rather than contact Sergeant Waterford immediately, I closed my eyes and rose above Detroit.
I didn’t View Canada much, and currently didn’t have any scenes kept close enough in memory that were a better starting point for Ottawa than right here in my home city. So I pulled out and up, up and out, until my View was at the edge of being obscured by haze in the wet atmosphere. I moved east over the Great Lakes, using obvious landmarks and occasionally zooming in enough to see major roads and cities, until I zeroed in directly on Canada’s capitol.
Finding Ottawa Hospital’s Civic campus was short work. The intersection in question was open to regular traffic now and suffered a steady trickle of pedestrians. By the time my rewind had reached mid-morning, there was an active crime scene with a taped outline on the concrete and several people with badges inside a cordoned area.
Other than a couple of black-and-whites roaming the area, little appeared to happen during the previous night. By the time I had hit and passed sundown, the scene was crawling with both uniformed and suited personnel… and a few costumed heroes. The latter appeared to be mostly talking among themselves and to the uniforms, while the suits took photographs and moved around a lot. At some point Inspector Heathcote herself came and went.
Finally the crowds collected in their uncanny reverse motions, and I saw the masked speedster in black and red deliver the warm corpse of Lamarck back to the intersection. His body lurched upright as large bloody craters disappeared from his face and skull.
I let the scene run until the instant when the first bullet hit his temple. With my attention fully on that one piece of metal, I slowly reversed the scene, tracing its trajectory to the source. The bullet’s high speed meant that it travelled several seconds in the smallest window of time I could isolate. The bullet looked like an impossibly thin rod of dull metal; as I willed the scene to reverse, it approached the roof second back from the corner building across the street. It was barely an arm’s length away from the building when it disappeared.
I crawled my View forward and back repeatedly to confirm it, and watched the smeared image of the bullet appear out of thin air each time, only about half the length in the first instant as it attained when I moved the time further forward. I circled my View around to directly behind it; the cross section where the back half was absent appeared completely black, as though none of the daylight otherwise reflecting off the projectile could reach it.
Soon I had identified the second and third shots that had been reported in the burst. The other bullets followed similar but non-identical trajectories to the first, and each image was sliced at a point in midair at the same distance from the building roof. The spacing was consistent with a select-fire burst.
Moving my View to the roof itself, I saw significant movement in the gravel that covered the flat surface. Over the next hour, I shifted in space and time all around the roof, but other than smaller shifts in gravel both before and after the attack, I found nothing. The access hatch leading from the roof into the building never opened; no individuals suddenly appeared or disappeared in the vicinity.
My hope of a quick resolution to this case vanished as thoroughly as the signs of movement on the roof just minutes after the attack. But at least I could give the RCMP a real lead.
The assassin was a super with a flawless invisibility power. And even though that meant there was no quick way to identify the perpetrator, at least it left us with a defined list of suspects.
Returning to the present, I pulled up the number for Sergeant Waterford. No reason to leave her waiting any longer. We had work to do.
You misspell Ottawa as Ottowa several times, though not every time.
‘I slowly reverse’ should be ‘I slowly reversed’, I think.
It’s a good read, this is the first time typos threw me out of the story (the Ottawa/Ottowa thing) and I’m nine chapters in.
I believe I’ve found and corrected all the misspellings of Ottawa throughout the chapters. Thanks for mentioning.
Hmm, he was able to capture exact moment the sniper bullet intersected invisibility bubble, but his maximum resolution is 8-12 ms (83-125 fps). Bullet traveled at least five meters between ‘frames’, he’s incredibly lucky to able to catch that moment.
Bullet velocity should be in the 3000 ft/s range, yes?
I think I may have messed up the math on this one, because you’re right. The bullet would travel 24 feet over 8 ms.
I either need to adjust my numbers or rewrite the View description.
I wonder if 0.8-1.2 ms would still make the Chapter 2 speedster’s velocities believable?