Chapter 12
The Gang's All Here
Ezra and Gal made their way through the museum. He hadn't come this way the night before. The lack of general chaos was a dead giveaway.
They reached the superhero exhibit. It had actually been cleaned up nicely, everything set back in place, although a few pedestals were still missing their cases. Gal opened the door to the phone booth nestled in the back corner of the room and stepped inside, gesturing for Ezra to join her. With the door closed, it was a rather tight fit. Ezra found himself bumping against Gal every time he tried to adjust his positioning, mumbling, “Sorry, oh, I didn't mean to... sorry.”
She wiggled against him a little then gave him a wicked smile that heated his cheeks. Taking the phone off of the receiver, she dialed a short sequence of numbers. It rang once before a low voice on the other end crackled through, “Operator.”
“Alice and one white rabbit, looking for a hole,” Gal responded. The booth was suddenly suffused with light as they were scanned, then the room changed as a portal formed and Ezra found himself back in the Guild of Sundry headquarters. Mr. Blair walked into the room just as they departed the wormhole platform.
“Ah, Mr. Hawkins, good to see you again.” He motioned for Ezra to join him as turned back to the door. “Come with me, please.”
They walked down the stairs to the second level and headed down the hallway, Gal prowling behind them. This place really did look quite a bit less sinister than it had the night before, with all of the lights on. The occasional uniformed person stopped and saluted Mr. Blair as they passed.
“I'll give you a brief run-down of what's going to happen here Ezra. We have contacts in the outside world who alert us to any trouble with elementalists they may hear about it, usually by placing a colored flag at a prearranged location for our spotters to find. The flags denote the type of trouble they are having. Red for fire, brown for earth, yellow for lightning, blue for water and white for air. When a flag is spotted, we dispatch a team for a meet-and-greet with the local contact to find out a bit more precisely what is going on. Teams consist of three members each. That team then either takes immediate action or comes back here for the necessary equipment and additional assistance.”
They were walking at a rather sedate pace, just passing room 226.
“Now, most of our recruits are like Miss Doe here.” Blair gestured back to the girl, and she batted her eyes up at Ezra. “They tend to come from grunt families. People who don't really get along well in Sanctuary, who have an unhealthy fascination with sports or acting or music, will often find their way to us. The kind of people that your Miss O'Donnell probably keeps you well away from. They make up our combat teams, specializing in infiltration and the quick, dirty fights that go along with some of the more potent elementalists in the world.” Ezra remembered the effortless way Gal had handled him the night before, and suddenly didn't feel so bad about it.
“The other kind of people who come to us are people like you. People who have, at the very least, a solid background in science. Some get fed up with the life of a Legacy and run away to join the Guild of Sundry. Some are disinherited children of Legacy families, usually because they didn't live up to expectations. Some are grunts who have earned black marks for stealing or rediscovering one of the Legacy secrets. Some, like you, are cursed with entirely too much curiosity and stumble across something they shouldn't know. These are the people who make up our research teams. They usually go into relatively stable situations and take a lighter approach to the problem. I'm not going to lie to you here; there is always a considerable amount of risk involved in going outside. Our research teams just tend to mitigate it.”
They stopped in front of the door marked 242. The door Ezra had come out of a lifetime ago.
“Ah, here we are. Your team is in this room. They've been out of the action for a few weeks now, after a mission that went bad. They are professionals, and both have been in this game since their teens. They'll take care of you. We need you to fix the wormhole generator that you unlinked from our network, then you will go through with them and rendezvous with the contact.”
Ezra gulped. He hadn't expected this so soon. Maybe a few months of training, learning to be a smooth-talking killing machine first. Gal squeezed his arm and gave him a reassuring grin. “You'll do great.”
Well, he couldn't exactly back down now. He nodded to Blair and reached out to open the door.
Inside, two young people, maybe a year or two older than Ezra, leaned up against the wall, chatting quietly. Both glanced over at him as he stepped into the room, their conversation stilled. The door slid shut behind him, ushering in complete silence. Suddenly, he didn't feel quite so confident.
“Uh, hi, I'm Ezra Hawkins.”
The young woman was his height, maybe a little taller. Short blonde, almost white hair was pulled back into a spiky tail, leaving her high-cheek-boned face free of any dangling strands. She looked him over with eyes the color of the sky on a cold, clear day. Ezra imagined that she would be pretty in a sharp, harsh kind of way. That is, if she wasn't scowling ferociously at him. “We're being held up here because of the little stunt you pulled yesterday,” she snapped at him. “Work now, talk later.”
The room's other occupant was a stocky, dark-skinned young man. His powerful arms strained against the fabric of his shirt. He rubbed a hand through his very short black hair that complemented his flint black eyes as he gave the girl a reproachful look. “What Sarah meant to say was welcome to the team. Hi, I'm Matthew Matanane, Mat to friends.” He shot Ezra an easy smile. “If I may make one suggestion, you look pretty horribly dressed for, well, anything. They let you take that shirt off the press before you put on, or just seal it shut around you?”
Ezra smiled, liking Mat already. “Sealed,” he said, loosening the ridiculous button-down shirt and pulling the access panel from the base of the wormhole generator. “But I don't think it goes on any other way.” He glanced over the system settings, frowning. Apparently throwing a wormhole to an active port locked that location in as the only acceptable destination. Making a mental note to check his formulas to see if he could allow for a bit more flexibility in the future, Ezra pulled up a private interface and began manually opening the generator up.
“You know, I could get you a twenty percent increase in efficiency with that power grid over how it's set up now.” Mat was looking over his shoulder into the inner workings of the machine.
Ezra frowned up at him. “Really?” He checked the part, picking out a small Legacy mark of two L's embossed clearly on the side. “This one's a standard Lan Legacy unit.”
Mat shrugged. “I landed here by discovering a more efficient way to route power through their conduits. The Lan family said it was something they'd already come up with and just weren't ready to release it yet. Said I stole it. I got myself a black mark for not backing down, and ended up here.”
“Wow, I heard they played rough, but that's pretty bad.”
“Bad things happen.” It sounded like a mantra. “And yeah, twenty percent, at least.”
Ezra grinned and disconnected the power grid, handing it to the big man with a little bow. “Personally, if someone comes up with a better wormhole, and I'd like to meet them. You know, learn about it, find out how they're thinking, maybe come up with something cool of my own.”
The girl, Sarah, snorted. “We can't all be the mighty Hawkins family.”
Ezra glanced over at her as he rebooted the relay system. “And what's your story? Sarah, right? You have a last name to go with that?”
She gave him a wintry smile. “Hughes.”
Ah, now the animosity made sense. The Hughes Legacy had been responsible for the materials used in the creation of the space elevator and much of the space station itself. Super strong, light solids were their specialty, but the space elevator had been their crowning glory. For years they had been the unrivaled masters of building and travel, government contracts for expansion and
upkeep lining their pockets and filling their coffers. They were what all of the other Legacy houses aspired to be. That is, until the Hawkins family rendered the space elevator obsolete with faster than light travel. The Hughes family's prestige and profits had plummeted as they were forced to pander their solids to less notable enterprises. They hadn't exactly fallen on hard times, but they had fallen, and everyone knew that Ezra's family was to blame.
“So,” Ezra continued carefully as he accepted the upgraded power grid from Mat and put it in place, “Why are you here, Miss Hughes?”
Sarah's eyes darted away and she wrapped her arms around herself. “I don't see any reason to talk about it. I'm here, so are you. We have a job to do, so let's get it done.”
Ezra started up the systems diagnostics and was pleased to see that Mat had indeed increased the output of the power grid by twenty three percent without significantly impacting the heat generation of the unit. “Okay,” he said, “all set. So, um... what do we do now?”
“First,” Mat said, opening up a large container and pulling out what looked like home-spun clothes, “we suit up. Yeah... these should fit you.” He tossed a shirt and pants to Ezra along with some lightweight, skintight body armor. He and Sarah began stripping out of their uniforms. Ezra looked around in a mild panic.
“We're all teammates here, Hawkins,” the woman smirked at him, “no room for modesty.”
Ezra sighed and began changing his clothes as well, eyes fixed on the floor. It's not that he didn't get out. Well, okay, that was what it was, but still, some decency, or at least a little warning, would have been nice.
“We'll be making contact with a local by the name of John Culbert. He makes cider.” Sarah's voice carried a hint of amusement that Ezra hoped wasn't aimed at him. “Eight hours ago he placed a white flag alerting us to the presence of a hostile wind-scarred in the area.”
“Wind-scarred?” Ezra asked glancing back to find Sarah at least mostly decent, adjusting her shoes. “What does that mean?”
Sarah gave Mat a look, lifting her eyebrows. “Wind-scarred is the name that elementalists who can control the wind have taken in the outside world. All of them, every single one, is covered in elaborate patterns of scars. They wear them like badges of honor.”
Ezra's brow furrowed at that. He opened his mouth to speak, “Why–”
“Before you ask,” Mat interjected, donning a wide-brimmed hat, “we don't know why they have the scars. It could be some ritual thing. It could be a symbol of status or denote a hierarchy among them. It could have something to do with whatever mutation gives them their powers. What we do know is that the scars themselves are practically invulnerable. You can't break them, you can't cut them. Bullets will bounce off. That is, if the wind-scarred lets the bullet reach him in the first place. Can't really count on projectile weapons against a powerful scarred...” He tossed Ezra a belt with a large knife on it, strapping an honest-to-god sword on his own hip and tucking a pistol into a well-concealed shoulder rig. “But it's best to be prepared for anything, just in case.”
“We've never seen a wind-scarred this far north,” Sarah chimed in as she checked an assault rifle. “It's a little remote for any wind-scarred we've run into. Not much to steal.” She nodded to herself and slung the gun over her shoulder, then deftly strapped a pair of wicked looking knives to her belt for good measure. Ezra swallowed and put on the belt Mat had thrown him.
“The village of Arborlen – that's where we're headed – is generally pretty low key. Last time we went in for a fire-kissed who had been harassing the local women. Slipped him a knockout pill and let him wake up naked in the forest. Apparently they never saw him again after that.” Mat grinned as he recounted the tale. “The nearest wormhole is well-hidden and within walking distance of the town. Chances are, we'll just go in, take a look around, and come back out for more help or better equipment.” He put a strip of something that changed color to match his skin-tone behind his ear, along his the top of his jawbone and held one out to Ezra. Confused, Ezra followed Mat's example, and suddenly heard Mat's voice saying, “Test, test, one, two, three.” A slight movement in Mat's jaw was the only indication he was speaking at all.
“Two way simultaneous communication between all three of us,” Mat said out loud, grinning at Ezra's confused look. “We hear what you hear, even if it's sub-vocal.”
“But, the neural net...” Ezra began.
“No net out there, newbie.” Mat slapped him on the shoulder as he walked past.
Ezra nodded, looking down at his outlandish outfit. Well, he figured, if you're going out, may as well wear something out-landish.
He stepped over to stand with his new teammates next to the generator platform. “Okay then,” Sarah said, a wolfish smile on her face, “let's go get the bad guys.”