Miguel Veracruz looked down at the remains of the thin nylon tent. He inhaled through his nose, taking in the robust scents and unique olfactory palette of what was inside, and what had been inside. Though he couldn't see himself at that moment, he felt sure he was turning green, fur and all.
"Thats... that's not chicken," he managed to say in between suppressed urges to heave. A breeze from the darkening Pacific Ocean did little to dispel his queasiness.
"Course not," said Kris (who sometimes, such as in episode four, went by 'Nik'), the right-shoulder head of the trenchcoat-wearing man who'd brought him and his pack to the homeless encampment on the Venice Beach boardwalk, about half a mile from the _Subtler Than Light._ "This is the year twenty-twenty-three, innit? We don't got no chickens, here."
"What," said Kram, the man's left-shoulder head. "You think we're *millionaires,* Mister Cruisin' fer the Truth?"
"What?"
"'Vera,' in Latin, means 'true,'" noted Marty Steinmetz, as he delicately lifted up the torn tent with his black-furred werepanther hands to look at what little had been left inside. "And while 'cruz' correspondingly yields 'cross,' I believe Kram was attempting a bit of linguistic foolery. A phonetic play on words..."
"I got yer linguistic foolery right here," Kram snarled. The hand on his side of the body he shared with Kris indicated a place where Miguel never wanted to see foolery--or anything else--spring from.
"I'm not getting any scent I'd call reptilian," Miko Tagashi said, her silver-furred snout twitching. "Something smells like hot dogs, though."
"That's us," Kris and Kram said in unison.
"There's nothing of use in here," said Marty. "A few Bunzai pizza boxes, a blanket, and a signed eight-and-a-half-by-eleven of Neil Degrasse Tyson. There's a faint residue of something on the tent itself... maybe from a device she had on her. Only it's kind of... rubbery."
"Her mask," said Kris. "She put it on to fool you, or anyone who might be lookin' fer her. Seaborn's idea. You wanna know about her, you oughta--"
"Seaborn?" Miguel asked, rounding on the heavyset two-headed man. "*Adam* Seaborn, by any chance?"
Kris furrowed his brow. Kram rolled his eyes back into his head and started mumbling the lyrics to a sea shanty. Both hands scratched where they collectively kept their professed supply of linguistic foolery.
"Yah," Kris finally said. "That's the gent's name. Been on the 'walk e'en longer than me, and I been here ever since Dr. Pop drank from the wrong bubbling beaker and... ah... popped, leaving me an' Kram t' break outta his undergroun' lab in Burbank. Ain't that right, Kram?"
Kram continued mumbling lyrics. Kris sighed and knocked Kram's head with his own.
"Whaaat?" Kram said, as his eyes rolled back to looking outward. He frowned, seeing multiple werebeing eyes on him. "Ah, what was the question?"
Miguel had a claw-tip on his transceiver. "China, you on the line?"
After a few seconds, he heard her crackling voice. "What's up, dog?"
Miguel sighed. "I'm not a... never mind. Are you still at the park?"
"On my way in with the last of what we pulled from the Programmer's LairBnB," she answered. "Along with guests from Homeland. Lair itself is closed back up and locked down."
"Was Adam Seaborn still at the park when you left? Better yet, is he with you now?"
He waited. Marty stuffed what was left of the tent into a dufflebag. Miko held out a plastic bag that held two bottles to Kris/Kram.
"As promised for your help," she said to him, as they took the bag and both heads tried to peer inside.
"Looks like he took off," said China. "Zia says last time she saw them was just when Homeland showed up. He must've taken advantage of the new traffic and made himself scarce."
"Y'should check the *Sunken City,*" said Kram. He jumped back a bit, apparently startled by the sudden reverb in his voice. "Seaborn's always talkin' about that place. I know that raptor lady asked him about it."
"Thanks, China," said Miguel. "See you back at the STL." He gave the transceiver a slight squeeze to break the connection. "You know where this '*Sunken City*' is, either one of you?"
Kris and Kram collaborated on a shrug. "Underwater somewhere, I guess," Kram volunteered. "Never seen the place, mind. Seaborn said it was south'a here."
As he spoke, he pulled the full bottle of Macallan scotch from the bag.
"What now?" Miko asked, as she stepped away from the two-headed vagrant.
"Back to the STL," said Miguel. "Get word to Apples and Moon Moon to meet us there. We need to talk with Cendra and Esteban about next steps."
"Good luck!" Kris told them, as he opened the bottle and poured it on his head, and then Kram's, and then spashed it around vigorously under his trenchcoat.
"I hate to think of what he's going to do with the other bottle," said Marty.
Kram chuckled while gazing at the bottle's label, which read 'Ipecac.' "That's for when we're rollerbladin' and doin' shots on the pier later. Y'oughta come by!"
Miguel, Marty, and Miko hustled away without further reply.
***
SUBTLER THAN LIGHT
Episode 7
[Hidden Hearts, Part Seven]
"Even a Stopped Clock"
by
Gary W. Olson
"I fool myself to sleep and dream
Nobody's here, no one but me
So cool, you're hardly there
Why can't this be killing you?"
- Goldfrapp,
"Lovely Head"
***
The hazy red-tinged sun was just kissing the sea when Johnny Clark heard the clicking of claws on the metallic deck of the _Subtler Than Light._ He didn't turn, his gaze fixed on the horizon. It had been a long day of furious action interspersed with galloping bafflement and epic waiting around, and a brilliant Ventura Beach sunset was one of the few good things to come out of it.
The clicking grew closer. Johnny shifted the camera in his hands to the crook of his left arm, knowing what would come next.
A scrape. A shadow.
He stepped quickly to his left and held out his free right hand, palm up.
"Ooof!" Camila Veracruz ooofed, as she landed stomach-first on said palm. She flailed for a second, then pushed up, pulling her legs in so she'd land on the hand with her furry clawed feet.
"So close," said Johnny, giving the nine-year-old light-brown-furred werewolf girl a quick smirk before flicking his hand upward. Ready for this, Camila pushed off to her left, so that she next landed on Johnny's shoulders.
"How do you always know?" Camila asked, as she peered over his head upside down at him. "I was super quiet this time!"
"I've babysat you enough that I know your click-clack on these decks," Johnny replied. "Especially your 'I'm bored, so let's see if I can sneak up on Johnny' variation."
Camila leaped from his shoulders to the _Subtler Than Light's_ railing, then frowned at him.
"I'm not a baby!" she insisted.
"Excuse me... *wolfgirl-sat.*"
"Better. A little."
"How long did your mom ground you for?"
"Rest of this week," Camila said, as she did cartwheels along the railing, roughly sixty feet above the crowded Venice Beach boardwalk, her light brown tail flowing in her wake. Johnny stilled his instinctive alarm, knowing her balance, skill, and dexterity were good even for her kind. "But she wasn't upset. Not really. I think seeing who wrote that book surprised her. She was still looking at it when I left."
Johnny nodded. He'd heard about it from Dr. Gigawatt, who Cendra Seconds had called up from his inner chamber of Hollow Earth Conspiracies and Yarn Abuse to get his opinion. Gigawatt had had a lot of thoughts about it, ones he'd unloaded on Johnny after Cendra refused to let him take the book back to the science lab he shared with Bhossi and Cla'rabhelle for analysis and scanning. Johnny, who was sure he'd heard all of it before--at least much like it, hours earlier when he'd talked Gigawatt down from a Tesla Coil in the science labs--quickly tuned the Doc's ravings out, though he'd caught phrases like 'interior sea,' 'source of the nectar,' and 'I forgot I'd stuck my gum there.' He was patient with Gigawatt, but a lot of that patience had to do with knowing when to just let him get whatever was in his system out.
"Has anyone found that dinosaur lady yet?"
"Afraid not," said Johnny, giving the setting sun one more long look before returning his attention to his camera. "Your dad and some of his pack are investigating where that Kris-or-Nik/Kram guy said he'd seen her hiding, with the homeless up the 'walk a half mile or so."
"Hmph," said Camila, as she flipped to the deck. "Esteban's been out all day looking, too, when he's not keeping an eye on his secret agent boyfriend and those monkeys..."
"Pretty sure he'd add an emphatic 'ex' to that."
"Ex-monkeys?" Camila said, looking momentarily puzzled before shrugging. "Anyway, I saw them all leave like twenty minutes ago, and Este and Coco followed, after making me promise to stay put."
She sighed the most aggrieved sigh in the history of grounded werewolf girls.
"Mom's busy, Erin's busy, Doc's busy, Trice and Hector are busy charging the Lathe back up, Bhossi an' Cla'rabhelle're busy looking at that tractor thing that lady, Bonnie, brought back, everybody else's either out there or going out there, and I'm stuck here."
"Are China, Shelby, and Zia back yet?" Johnny absently asked as he felt along the edge of the camera's casing.
Camila shrugged. "They weren't there when I left the lab. What are you doing with your camera?"
"Trying to figure out why it's not playing back like I want it to," he answered. "I was filming some stuff for my 'Lair Flippers' web series this morning when the bomb went off here, and set its drone-flight controls to follow Este when we were fighting the Hawaiian-shirt-wearing Demon Monkeys. See, with the help of the Doc and some tech lying around Bhossi's lab that they'll never miss, I set it up so I could lock it on someone I had in focus, and the propellers on the rig it was embedded in should've kept up with him. It turned up with the first shipment of stuff China sent from the park just an hour ago, no rig, and the case all jammed up with something. I'm hoping it caught something in Este's first battle with the Programmer that might help somehow..."
On not hearing any follow-up noises, not even a yawn, Johnny looked up and saw Camila was no longer on the railing. A glance over the side revealed no excitement, so he turned to look along the deck, just in time to see five people step away from the holes they'd passed through by the STL's suspension lift. Camila was running toward them at speed.
One of the five, China Moroboshi, was gesturing animatedly toward the section of the deck that had, just that morning, been a large and twisted hole, though thanks to the STL's day-shift maintenance crew and the Lathe of Heaving, no damage was currently evident. The second, a severe-looking, middle-aged woman in a black blouse and trousers, holding a book close to her side as she surveyed the deck. Her gaze lingered on him a moment, though he couldn't figure out why.
The third, a short, salt-and-pepper-haired, vaguely Belgian man in a polo shirt and cargo shorts, had stopped walking, gotten down on one knee with the help of his cane, and had his free arm swung out in anticipation of Camila jumping at him.
"Uncle Manny!" Camila squealed, as the man embraced her.
The fourth and fifth figures, both pale, non-descript, three-piece-suit-wearing, and with hands to their earpieces, watched without comment. Secret Service, Johnny realized. Though they hadn't reacted on Camila's charge--likely because they'd seen her before--they watched her carefully.
Something was strange about their faces. They were stiff, almost wax-mask-like. He thought he heard clicking sounds coming from beneath their facial surfaces.
"There's my favorite grand-niece," said Manny Seconds, hugging Camila with his free arm, a smile flexing his rugged face. She scratched his more-grey-than-black goatee and giggled.
"Did you hear about what happened today?" she asked. "There were these monkeys and they blew up a bomb down in the Root, only a dinosaur lady got to what they were trying to get first and she fooled them and stole it and *I* followed her and got to see them fight these other monkeys in suits, and her feathers turned into lasers and shot Johnny, but then Mom showed up outside the window as a dragon, so--"
"I heard, I heard," Manny assured her. He looked up at Johnny. "Hey, J! You okay now?"
"Yeah," said Johnny, as he lowered his camera and walked over. The Secret Service agents watched him silently and carefully as well, even as their clicks turned to chitters. "It was weird. I was shocked something broke my skin and hurt me like that."
"What's the Doc think about that?"
"Erin or Giuseppe?" Johnny asked.
Manny leaned on his cane to regain a standing position. His hand shook a little, something Johnny didn't remember seeing the last time he'd been around his dad's old CalForce teammate. "Giuseppe," Manny clarified. "Erin's a great doctor, but anything that can hurt the son of Mighty Guy and Meltdown calls for some outside-the-skull hypothesizing. And Dr. Gigawatt's pretty outta his skull these days, or was last time I was here."
"He and the Mu'Kaos are studying the blood sample of mine they took before Bonnie magicked me back to full health."
"Heliumized neutrinos," said the middle-aged woman. "Like I was telling Chalandra earlier. I'd bet your security clearance on it."
"Hi, lady," said Camila. "You smell familiar."
"Do I?" the woman asked, seeming taken aback. "I'm sure we've never met... oh, my manners. I'm Karina Selanova. Secretary of Defense Selanova if you're media."
Camila considered this, then gave Manny a sniff.
"Your scent is on him," she said, matter-of-factly. "Why is that?"
Karina raised an eyebrow. Manny merely laughed. Johnny noted the look they gave one another.
"Camila," said China, lifting the girl onto her shoulder. "Shouldn't you be in your quarters smacking a cup against some bars and shouting 'Attica!'"
Camila gave China a blank look.
"A movie before your time," China said. "Never mind. I'm going to meet up with Zia and Shelby in the science lab and see if they have anything new I can tell Cendra. Want to go with me?"
"Sure!" Camila cheerfully answered, dropping down to the deck. "It's Tony's dinner time. You ever see him devour a lab-grown influencer clone? It's super gross!"
"We'll be in Cendra's office," said Manny. "Not for long, though." He gestured at the book Karina was carrying. "If what's in Chal's book is right, we've got until midnight."
"For what?" Johnny asked, as China and Camila headed for the lift circles.
"There's something Shadebeam brought up this afternoon to Erin and Bonnie that Cendra flagged in her call to Chalandra an hour ago," Manny noted. "The reason I took a 'copter out from Los Requemados instead of waiting for when Chal could come with..." He paused, looking out at the setting sun. "Sorry, J, but we gotta get in and talk with her now."
Manny's cane-hand trembled again. Johnny wanted to ask if Manny was all right, but knew now was not the time.
Johnny watched them walk as quickly as Manny could toward the STL's bridge. He looked at the camera in his hand, and fought off the impulse to dash it against the deck, or heave it in the direction of the setting sun.
"You can't save everyone," a new voice from almost directly behind him said.
Johnny yelped, spun, and nearly fell down. His hearing was good, but the person who'd snuck up on him had been absolutely *silent.*
Or, more likely, she'd flown down from the darkening sky to the east.
"You seen Galaxy Hunter around?" Psywave asked.
"Thats... that's not chicken," he managed to say in between suppressed urges to heave. A breeze from the darkening Pacific Ocean did little to dispel his queasiness.
"Course not," said Kris (who sometimes, such as in episode four, went by 'Nik'), the right-shoulder head of the trenchcoat-wearing man who'd brought him and his pack to the homeless encampment on the Venice Beach boardwalk, about half a mile from the _Subtler Than Light._ "This is the year twenty-twenty-three, innit? We don't got no chickens, here."
"What," said Kram, the man's left-shoulder head. "You think we're *millionaires,* Mister Cruisin' fer the Truth?"
"What?"
"'Vera,' in Latin, means 'true,'" noted Marty Steinmetz, as he delicately lifted up the torn tent with his black-furred werepanther hands to look at what little had been left inside. "And while 'cruz' correspondingly yields 'cross,' I believe Kram was attempting a bit of linguistic foolery. A phonetic play on words..."
"I got yer linguistic foolery right here," Kram snarled. The hand on his side of the body he shared with Kris indicated a place where Miguel never wanted to see foolery--or anything else--spring from.
"I'm not getting any scent I'd call reptilian," Miko Tagashi said, her silver-furred snout twitching. "Something smells like hot dogs, though."
"That's us," Kris and Kram said in unison.
"There's nothing of use in here," said Marty. "A few Bunzai pizza boxes, a blanket, and a signed eight-and-a-half-by-eleven of Neil Degrasse Tyson. There's a faint residue of something on the tent itself... maybe from a device she had on her. Only it's kind of... rubbery."
"Her mask," said Kris. "She put it on to fool you, or anyone who might be lookin' fer her. Seaborn's idea. You wanna know about her, you oughta--"
"Seaborn?" Miguel asked, rounding on the heavyset two-headed man. "*Adam* Seaborn, by any chance?"
Kris furrowed his brow. Kram rolled his eyes back into his head and started mumbling the lyrics to a sea shanty. Both hands scratched where they collectively kept their professed supply of linguistic foolery.
"Yah," Kris finally said. "That's the gent's name. Been on the 'walk e'en longer than me, and I been here ever since Dr. Pop drank from the wrong bubbling beaker and... ah... popped, leaving me an' Kram t' break outta his undergroun' lab in Burbank. Ain't that right, Kram?"
Kram continued mumbling lyrics. Kris sighed and knocked Kram's head with his own.
"Whaaat?" Kram said, as his eyes rolled back to looking outward. He frowned, seeing multiple werebeing eyes on him. "Ah, what was the question?"
Miguel had a claw-tip on his transceiver. "China, you on the line?"
After a few seconds, he heard her crackling voice. "What's up, dog?"
Miguel sighed. "I'm not a... never mind. Are you still at the park?"
"On my way in with the last of what we pulled from the Programmer's LairBnB," she answered. "Along with guests from Homeland. Lair itself is closed back up and locked down."
"Was Adam Seaborn still at the park when you left? Better yet, is he with you now?"
He waited. Marty stuffed what was left of the tent into a dufflebag. Miko held out a plastic bag that held two bottles to Kris/Kram.
"As promised for your help," she said to him, as they took the bag and both heads tried to peer inside.
"Looks like he took off," said China. "Zia says last time she saw them was just when Homeland showed up. He must've taken advantage of the new traffic and made himself scarce."
"Y'should check the *Sunken City,*" said Kram. He jumped back a bit, apparently startled by the sudden reverb in his voice. "Seaborn's always talkin' about that place. I know that raptor lady asked him about it."
"Thanks, China," said Miguel. "See you back at the STL." He gave the transceiver a slight squeeze to break the connection. "You know where this '*Sunken City*' is, either one of you?"
Kris and Kram collaborated on a shrug. "Underwater somewhere, I guess," Kram volunteered. "Never seen the place, mind. Seaborn said it was south'a here."
As he spoke, he pulled the full bottle of Macallan scotch from the bag.
"What now?" Miko asked, as she stepped away from the two-headed vagrant.
"Back to the STL," said Miguel. "Get word to Apples and Moon Moon to meet us there. We need to talk with Cendra and Esteban about next steps."
"Good luck!" Kris told them, as he opened the bottle and poured it on his head, and then Kram's, and then spashed it around vigorously under his trenchcoat.
"I hate to think of what he's going to do with the other bottle," said Marty.
Kram chuckled while gazing at the bottle's label, which read 'Ipecac.' "That's for when we're rollerbladin' and doin' shots on the pier later. Y'oughta come by!"
Miguel, Marty, and Miko hustled away without further reply.
***
SUBTLER THAN LIGHT
Episode 7
[Hidden Hearts, Part Seven]
"Even a Stopped Clock"
by
Gary W. Olson
"I fool myself to sleep and dream
Nobody's here, no one but me
So cool, you're hardly there
Why can't this be killing you?"
- Goldfrapp,
"Lovely Head"
***
The hazy red-tinged sun was just kissing the sea when Johnny Clark heard the clicking of claws on the metallic deck of the _Subtler Than Light._ He didn't turn, his gaze fixed on the horizon. It had been a long day of furious action interspersed with galloping bafflement and epic waiting around, and a brilliant Ventura Beach sunset was one of the few good things to come out of it.
The clicking grew closer. Johnny shifted the camera in his hands to the crook of his left arm, knowing what would come next.
A scrape. A shadow.
He stepped quickly to his left and held out his free right hand, palm up.
"Ooof!" Camila Veracruz ooofed, as she landed stomach-first on said palm. She flailed for a second, then pushed up, pulling her legs in so she'd land on the hand with her furry clawed feet.
"So close," said Johnny, giving the nine-year-old light-brown-furred werewolf girl a quick smirk before flicking his hand upward. Ready for this, Camila pushed off to her left, so that she next landed on Johnny's shoulders.
"How do you always know?" Camila asked, as she peered over his head upside down at him. "I was super quiet this time!"
"I've babysat you enough that I know your click-clack on these decks," Johnny replied. "Especially your 'I'm bored, so let's see if I can sneak up on Johnny' variation."
Camila leaped from his shoulders to the _Subtler Than Light's_ railing, then frowned at him.
"I'm not a baby!" she insisted.
"Excuse me... *wolfgirl-sat.*"
"Better. A little."
"How long did your mom ground you for?"
"Rest of this week," Camila said, as she did cartwheels along the railing, roughly sixty feet above the crowded Venice Beach boardwalk, her light brown tail flowing in her wake. Johnny stilled his instinctive alarm, knowing her balance, skill, and dexterity were good even for her kind. "But she wasn't upset. Not really. I think seeing who wrote that book surprised her. She was still looking at it when I left."
Johnny nodded. He'd heard about it from Dr. Gigawatt, who Cendra Seconds had called up from his inner chamber of Hollow Earth Conspiracies and Yarn Abuse to get his opinion. Gigawatt had had a lot of thoughts about it, ones he'd unloaded on Johnny after Cendra refused to let him take the book back to the science lab he shared with Bhossi and Cla'rabhelle for analysis and scanning. Johnny, who was sure he'd heard all of it before--at least much like it, hours earlier when he'd talked Gigawatt down from a Tesla Coil in the science labs--quickly tuned the Doc's ravings out, though he'd caught phrases like 'interior sea,' 'source of the nectar,' and 'I forgot I'd stuck my gum there.' He was patient with Gigawatt, but a lot of that patience had to do with knowing when to just let him get whatever was in his system out.
"Has anyone found that dinosaur lady yet?"
"Afraid not," said Johnny, giving the setting sun one more long look before returning his attention to his camera. "Your dad and some of his pack are investigating where that Kris-or-Nik/Kram guy said he'd seen her hiding, with the homeless up the 'walk a half mile or so."
"Hmph," said Camila, as she flipped to the deck. "Esteban's been out all day looking, too, when he's not keeping an eye on his secret agent boyfriend and those monkeys..."
"Pretty sure he'd add an emphatic 'ex' to that."
"Ex-monkeys?" Camila said, looking momentarily puzzled before shrugging. "Anyway, I saw them all leave like twenty minutes ago, and Este and Coco followed, after making me promise to stay put."
She sighed the most aggrieved sigh in the history of grounded werewolf girls.
"Mom's busy, Erin's busy, Doc's busy, Trice and Hector are busy charging the Lathe back up, Bhossi an' Cla'rabhelle're busy looking at that tractor thing that lady, Bonnie, brought back, everybody else's either out there or going out there, and I'm stuck here."
"Are China, Shelby, and Zia back yet?" Johnny absently asked as he felt along the edge of the camera's casing.
Camila shrugged. "They weren't there when I left the lab. What are you doing with your camera?"
"Trying to figure out why it's not playing back like I want it to," he answered. "I was filming some stuff for my 'Lair Flippers' web series this morning when the bomb went off here, and set its drone-flight controls to follow Este when we were fighting the Hawaiian-shirt-wearing Demon Monkeys. See, with the help of the Doc and some tech lying around Bhossi's lab that they'll never miss, I set it up so I could lock it on someone I had in focus, and the propellers on the rig it was embedded in should've kept up with him. It turned up with the first shipment of stuff China sent from the park just an hour ago, no rig, and the case all jammed up with something. I'm hoping it caught something in Este's first battle with the Programmer that might help somehow..."
On not hearing any follow-up noises, not even a yawn, Johnny looked up and saw Camila was no longer on the railing. A glance over the side revealed no excitement, so he turned to look along the deck, just in time to see five people step away from the holes they'd passed through by the STL's suspension lift. Camila was running toward them at speed.
One of the five, China Moroboshi, was gesturing animatedly toward the section of the deck that had, just that morning, been a large and twisted hole, though thanks to the STL's day-shift maintenance crew and the Lathe of Heaving, no damage was currently evident. The second, a severe-looking, middle-aged woman in a black blouse and trousers, holding a book close to her side as she surveyed the deck. Her gaze lingered on him a moment, though he couldn't figure out why.
The third, a short, salt-and-pepper-haired, vaguely Belgian man in a polo shirt and cargo shorts, had stopped walking, gotten down on one knee with the help of his cane, and had his free arm swung out in anticipation of Camila jumping at him.
"Uncle Manny!" Camila squealed, as the man embraced her.
The fourth and fifth figures, both pale, non-descript, three-piece-suit-wearing, and with hands to their earpieces, watched without comment. Secret Service, Johnny realized. Though they hadn't reacted on Camila's charge--likely because they'd seen her before--they watched her carefully.
Something was strange about their faces. They were stiff, almost wax-mask-like. He thought he heard clicking sounds coming from beneath their facial surfaces.
"There's my favorite grand-niece," said Manny Seconds, hugging Camila with his free arm, a smile flexing his rugged face. She scratched his more-grey-than-black goatee and giggled.
"Did you hear about what happened today?" she asked. "There were these monkeys and they blew up a bomb down in the Root, only a dinosaur lady got to what they were trying to get first and she fooled them and stole it and *I* followed her and got to see them fight these other monkeys in suits, and her feathers turned into lasers and shot Johnny, but then Mom showed up outside the window as a dragon, so--"
"I heard, I heard," Manny assured her. He looked up at Johnny. "Hey, J! You okay now?"
"Yeah," said Johnny, as he lowered his camera and walked over. The Secret Service agents watched him silently and carefully as well, even as their clicks turned to chitters. "It was weird. I was shocked something broke my skin and hurt me like that."
"What's the Doc think about that?"
"Erin or Giuseppe?" Johnny asked.
Manny leaned on his cane to regain a standing position. His hand shook a little, something Johnny didn't remember seeing the last time he'd been around his dad's old CalForce teammate. "Giuseppe," Manny clarified. "Erin's a great doctor, but anything that can hurt the son of Mighty Guy and Meltdown calls for some outside-the-skull hypothesizing. And Dr. Gigawatt's pretty outta his skull these days, or was last time I was here."
"He and the Mu'Kaos are studying the blood sample of mine they took before Bonnie magicked me back to full health."
"Heliumized neutrinos," said the middle-aged woman. "Like I was telling Chalandra earlier. I'd bet your security clearance on it."
"Hi, lady," said Camila. "You smell familiar."
"Do I?" the woman asked, seeming taken aback. "I'm sure we've never met... oh, my manners. I'm Karina Selanova. Secretary of Defense Selanova if you're media."
Camila considered this, then gave Manny a sniff.
"Your scent is on him," she said, matter-of-factly. "Why is that?"
Karina raised an eyebrow. Manny merely laughed. Johnny noted the look they gave one another.
"Camila," said China, lifting the girl onto her shoulder. "Shouldn't you be in your quarters smacking a cup against some bars and shouting 'Attica!'"
Camila gave China a blank look.
"A movie before your time," China said. "Never mind. I'm going to meet up with Zia and Shelby in the science lab and see if they have anything new I can tell Cendra. Want to go with me?"
"Sure!" Camila cheerfully answered, dropping down to the deck. "It's Tony's dinner time. You ever see him devour a lab-grown influencer clone? It's super gross!"
"We'll be in Cendra's office," said Manny. "Not for long, though." He gestured at the book Karina was carrying. "If what's in Chal's book is right, we've got until midnight."
"For what?" Johnny asked, as China and Camila headed for the lift circles.
"There's something Shadebeam brought up this afternoon to Erin and Bonnie that Cendra flagged in her call to Chalandra an hour ago," Manny noted. "The reason I took a 'copter out from Los Requemados instead of waiting for when Chal could come with..." He paused, looking out at the setting sun. "Sorry, J, but we gotta get in and talk with her now."
Manny's cane-hand trembled again. Johnny wanted to ask if Manny was all right, but knew now was not the time.
Johnny watched them walk as quickly as Manny could toward the STL's bridge. He looked at the camera in his hand, and fought off the impulse to dash it against the deck, or heave it in the direction of the setting sun.
"You can't save everyone," a new voice from almost directly behind him said.
Johnny yelped, spun, and nearly fell down. His hearing was good, but the person who'd snuck up on him had been absolutely *silent.*
Or, more likely, she'd flown down from the darkening sky to the east.
"You seen Galaxy Hunter around?" Psywave asked.
(continued in part two, following...)
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Subtler Than Light #7 (c) 2024 by Gary W. Olson. All Rights Reserved.
Gary W. Olson LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/gwox
Superguy/Sfstory LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/superguysfstory
Subtler Than Light #7 (c) 2024 by Gary W. Olson. All Rights Reserved.
Gary W. Olson LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/gwox
Superguy/Sfstory LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/superguysfstory