Omega Night (Wearing the Cape) Read Free

of Alaska, Hawaii, and parts of Texas and Florida outside the zone, we’ll all be in the crapper together. Full and immediate international aid might save a few more million here and there, that is all.
     
    “Which brings us to the Gungnir Program. Everyone in this room has been approved for this program. In the case of all Crisis Aid and Intervention superheroes, approval includes executive approval by your state governors for full participation. If you’ll all turn to page twenty-six in your binders, we’ll review the installations…”
     
    I turned the pages, and groaned. Spacesuit, armored harness and missile racks. Yippy. Marketing is going to make a new action-figure out of this the day it declassifies .
     
    Not that I minded too much—it was just that bitching with my inside-voice over the military accessories helped me ignore my imagination’s attempt to paint a picture of what might happen. I had a good imagination, but we were just talking about a precaution, right? Like a fire extinguisher in your kitchen or a gun in your nightstand you never use.
     
    Right?
     
    ----

    “ You just went transonic! ” Shelly called as the air went white around me, condensed water vapor marking the shockwave of broken air. I’d just broken my personal best speed, flying straight up in Watchman’s wake. “Now leaving the troposphere! ”
     
    “What’s the missile status?” I felt like I was going to pass out, but it was getting easier as the air thinned. Which was good—we were higher than jets flew and still had a long way to go.
     
    “ The launched missile is a Trident II; its unmodified top speed is 6,000 meters per second—13,000 miles an hour. But it’s already into its third stage and will burn through it in less than a minute. After that it will be ballistic and slowing ‘cause of Earth’s gravity, but we’ll be accelerating all the way .”
     
    “If I can keep this up,” I gasped. “Will we get close enough for Gungnir ?”
     
    “ Maybe. They’re initiating Blackout Protocol, just in case .”
     
    Looking down, I could see Chicago’s lights winking out below me in huge patches as power grids shut down to protect their transformers from EMP insult. The Emergency Broadcast System would be sending the alert by radio, television stations, even phone texts: get off the road, get out of elevators, get down, get safe . All airplane takeoffs were being canceled, along with any landings that would take more than three minutes; any airplanes caught in the air would be turning away from urban areas. If the worst happened and they went down, they’d go down in open fields, killing no one but their passengers and crews.
     
    It won’t happen .
     
    Our vapor halo thinned with the atmosphere as we passed through weather balloon territory and the horizon began to curve. Higher than I’d ever been.
     
    “ Watchman, Astra ,” Blackstone broke in. “ We have just received word from 2 nd Fleet.   The missile capture and launch was made by The Overlord. A Navy superSEAL team located his current base on Culebra—part of the Puerto Rico island chain. They got him, but it looks like the robot module was part of his contingency plan .”
     
    “ Got him? ” Watchman asked.
     
    “ He’s dead . The fight ended with a crater an hour ago .”
     
    Great. Scratch one Verne-type supervillain terrorist, but now he couldn’t abort the detonation. At least now we knew what the Navy had been doing down there, like that helped. The knot in my gut, there since the second Rush put his hand on my shoulder, wound tighter. I’d only just turned nineteen—what was I doing in a race to save the world?
     
    “Shelly?” I whispered, voice sounding unnatural in the close helmet.
     
    “ Yeah? ”
     
    “Mom and Dad?”
     
    “ Your Dad can take care of himself, but Rush promises to get them to the Dome if we don’t make this. Do you want to talk to them? ”
     
    Yes. “No. They’ll worry anyway, but if I call