Just Cause Universe 2: The Archmage (3 page)

She shut off the water, dried herself, and dressed in a short-sleeved hoodie and shorts. She slipped out of Jason’s room barefoot and with her hair still dripping, and headed up the hall to her own quarters. She paused by Sondra’s door and considered whether to knock, but Jack had just come off monitor duty and they were probably occupied with one another. Jack and Sondra, known respectively as Crackerjack and Desert Eagle in parahuman circles, were her two best friends.

She let herself into her quarters and wrinkled her nose at the slight stuffiness. Just Cause members rated their own private suites as nice as any in an upscale hotel, but the windows weren’t designed to open except in an emergency. She hadn’t known this and had set off a general alarm the first time she propped hers open. Team commander Juice had been very nice about the whole thing, but dropped a thinly-veiled suggestion that perhaps as the newest member of the team she might
read
her book of rules and regulations. All she’d wanted was to feel the spring breeze and to air out her suite.

She slipped on her knobby-soled trainers, grabbed her costume goggles, and headed for the nearest exit. Most people took showers
after
they ran, but Sally wouldn’t be working hard enough to even break a sweat. She mostly just did it to dry her hair. A couple of laps around the Just Cause compound at a nice, easy sixty miles per hour would take about as long as fighting with a blow dryer, plus she’d get a tan.

She slipped the goggles over her eyes as she stepped onto the pavement outside the dormitory and took off. Cool air blew against her bare legs and helped wake her up a bit more. She needed to do anything she could to wake up. Between Control Center shifts, training, public relations, volunteering, and the occasional date with Jason, it felt like she never got enough sleep. And when the need arose, Just Cause heroes responded no matter where they were, or how much sleep they’d had.

Sally kept well inside the perimeter fence for her morning jog. She had once thought the locals in Denver would be used to parahumans with Just Cause Headquarters and the Hero Academy both in the metro area, and had gone to run along a bike path. Then some morning commuter caught a glimpse of Sally as she ran twice as fast as traffic, spilled his coffee, and rear-ended the car in front of him. They all had a good laugh about it at a subsequent staff meeting.

When it happened a second time, it wasn’t nearly as funny and Juice called her into his office for an explanation. Since then, she tried to be a lot more careful about using her powers out of uniform and off-duty. It seemed she’d spent more time
in
Juice’s office than out of it ever since becoming a full-time member of the team. She wondered if everyone new got into as much trouble as it seemed she had.

She reached her first marker, near the northwest corner of the compound property, and turned to the east to run toward the morning sun. The heat on her face reminded her of Phoenix, where she’d grown up. Her hair streamed behind her like a blonde flag and flapped itself dry. Speed beckoned to her with its tempting call, but the winter had been mild and the spring dry, and most of the land on which the Just Compound sat was covered with prairie grasses and weeds. If she stepped carelessly on a stone and it glanced off something the wrong way, it could spark and ignite a grassfire. Over time, she’d worn a clean track from her daily runs, but kept her speed down just to be safe.

Her phone beeped from its clip on the back of her shorts. She sighed and skidded to a stop in the dust. Never
really
off-duty. “Sally, go ahead.”

“
Good morning, beautiful
,” replied Jason’s voice. “
Enjoying your run?
”

“Well, I was until you interrupted me. You couldn’t have waited another ten minutes?”

“
Hey, you’re a speedster. I figured you’d be done already
.” He laughed.

“Liar,” said Sally as she bent down and touched her toes to keep herself limber. “You’re probably watching me from the satellite feed right now.”

“
Uh, no I’m not,
” stuttered Jason, and she grinned with the knowledge she’d caught him.

“Oh, good. What’s on your mind, sweetie?”

“
Juice asked if you could stop by his office when you’re done this morning
.”

“Am I in trouble?” she asked. Going to see the boss during downtime usually meant a reprimand of some sort.

“
No, he said he wanted to ask you about a couple paras you might know
.”

“And his fingers are broken so he couldn’t call me himself?” She turned to walk back toward the headquarters building, some five miles away from her current location. She could have covered the distance in seconds, but she wouldn’t be able to talk and run at the same time, and she didn’t mind making Juice wait so she could keep talking to Jason.

“
He seemed pretty busy. Bustled through the Command Center and barely even said hello. I suppose maybe he thought you’d rather talk to me than him?
”

Sally laughed. “I might. Anything on your mind, Jase?”

“
Not really. Just grumpy about monitor duty on opposite hours of you
.”

“I could always start sleeping really late.”

Now it was Jason’s turn to laugh. “
More than you already do, you mean? I think you’d sleep for twenty hours a day if you could
.”

“Yes, please,” chuckled Sally. “It’s my metabolism. Super-speed is a rough power to use. It really wears you out.”

“
Nice try, babe. I almost bought that
.”

“Yeah, pretty convincing, wasn’t it? I almost believed it myself. Oh!” She caught her foot on a rock which protruded from the ground. Her lightning-fast reflexes saved her from a tumble. She caught her phone before it hit the ground. Like most Just Cause equipment, the phones were made from pretty durable construction, but they still had the unfortunate luck to always land on a fracture point.

“
Are you all right?
”

“Yeah, I just tripped. Hang on.” Sally checked around to see which rock was the offending culprit. It had to be the odd-shaped dirty gray one. She blinked at it. It didn’t look like a rock; it looked more like the end of a bone sticking out of the ground. Curious, she crouched down for a closer examination.

It had to be a leg bone because of the ball-shaped knob on one end. She wondered if it was from one of the deer that ran wild across the territory. She looked around and found a sturdy stick and scratched away the hard dirt around the bone. After a few minutes of rapid scraping, she had the bone exhumed. The shape looked familiar; she didn’t think it was from a deer any longer. She held it up against her own leg for comparison. It matched in length. “Hey, Jason?”

“
Yeah?
”

“See if Jack’s busy or if he wants to play amateur archaeologist with me. I think I’ve found a dead person.
Really
dead. Like maybe for decades.”

“
You found a body?
”

“No, not a body. Just a bone, but I think it’s human. You’d better mark this spot on the map for reference.”

“
I’m buzzing Jack now
,” said Jason. Sally scratched around in the dirt a little more.

“
Sally?
” Jack’s voice came over the phone. “
What’s this about you finding a body?
”

“I didn’t find a
body
, I found a
bone
.” Her stick uncovered what she thought was a tibia and fibula. “Make that
bones
.”

“
Well don’t disturb them. It could be a crime scene
.”

Sally looked at the stick in her hand with sudden guilt. “Uh, okay.”

“
Let me get some gear together and I’ll be right out. Mind if Sondra comes along?
”

“Of course not.”

Ten minutes later, Sally heard the sound of an engine and saw Jack ride an ATV up over a hillock. His brown hair, starting to gray at the temples, flopped in the breeze behind his yellow-tinted tactical glasses. Sally could see his grin the second he came into view. She must have interrupted paperwork or some other thankless misery with her find. Sondra wheeled overhead with her large brown wings spread wide. The full-blooded Apache woman wore cutoff jean shorts and a string bikini top, one of the few things that she could wear easily over the huge brown and white wings that sprouted from her muscular back. She fluttered lightly to the ground and flexed her primary feathers before she tucked her wings against her back. Sally hugged them both.

“Hey, now… people are going to talk.” Jack sounded pleased. He opened the tool box strapped to the rack of the ATV and rummaged through a haphazard lot of tools. “I didn’t know what all I’d need, so I grabbed everything,” he said.

Sondra examined the bone Sally had unearthed. “Well, I don’t think this is a crime scene. Or if it is, it’s only of anecdotal interest. This is really old.”

“We can take a sample back to the lab guys and let them carbon date them.” Jack staked out the site. Since he was invulnerable to physical harm, he just held the stakes on top and hit his hand with the hammer, which made both Sondra and Sally cringe and wince.

“I hate it when you do stuff like that,” grouched Sondra as she looked away.

Jack grinned. “I know. You suppose this is like an Indian burial ground or something? Maybe we’re going to get swamped by angry ghosts.
You moved the gravestones but you didn’t move the bodies!
” Jack whisper-screamed the last, a quote from the movie
Poltergeist
. He was a movie buff, and tended to spout off lines at opportune moments.

“Last I checked, dear, we were still calling ourselves Native Americans,” said Sondra as she shook out her raven-black hair and punched him in the shoulder.

“I’m speaking with forked tongue, you know,” said Jack, and laughed. “Check this out. Subsurface radar set.” He held it up with all the fervor of a kid showing off a new toy. He fiddled with the set for several minutes after he hooked it to his laptop and ran what looked like a high-tech ping pong paddle across the ground.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” asked Sally.

“
Back off, man. I’m a scientist,
” retorted Jack.

“
Ghostbusters
,” said Sally. “You quote that movie all the time.”

“Good lines in that one.” He ran the colorful images through filter after filter on the laptop. “Far as I can tell, there’s all or most of a body down there.”

“I could have just dug for awhile and told you the same thing,” Sally grumbled.

“But this is much more fun,” said Jack.

Sondra sighed. “Boys and their toys. So should we exhume it?”

Jack shrugged. “I don’t see why not. At the very least, it makes for an interesting scientific find. At the most, it could be enough of a mystery to be a refreshing change from the everyday drudgery of our dull and wasted lives.” He pulled a couple of shovels and a pick from the back of the ATV and passed them out.

“What’s with him? He’s acting like Mr. Discovery Channel.” Sally raised an eyebrow at Jack as he attacked the dirt with fervor.

“He’s been frustrated,” said Sondra. “All his investigations into that German guy who was working with Destroyer in Guatemala turned up nothing. He needs something to take his mind off all the dead ends.”

Four months ago, Just Cause and several other allied teams had faced off against the deadly villain Destroyer and an army of artificially-created parahumans. Destroyer had been plaguing Just Cause since the late Seventies and showed no signs of slowing down as he reached middle age. His silent partner in the parahuman-creation operation in Guatemala had been a mysterious German man known only as Heinrich Kaiser. Both Just Cause and the CIA had launched independent investigations of the man, but nobody had turned up any information on him. Jack had taken the investigation very personally because Destroyer and Kaiser had killed two Just Cause members, tortured another, and nearly killed Sally as well.

The two women watched Jack work for awhile, then shrugged and began to help. Sally could work much faster than either of the other two, but she had to be careful not to dig so quickly that she threw away small bone fragments. Jack had Sally switch from a shovel to a brush and she dusted away loose dirt from the bones. They uncovered a pelvis, then vertebrae and ribs. “Indiana Jones makes archaeology seem a lot more exciting,” she said, fussing with the brush.

“Hollywood makes
everything
seem a lot more exciting
,” said Jack. “Maybe we can find some Nazis to shoot at us while we’re digging. Uh oh.” He knelt down and picked something out of the rib cage. “Looks like this answers some of our questions.” Sondra and Sally crowded in to see what he held: a triangular piece of stone worked into a sharp blade.

“Is that an arrowhead?” asked Sally.

“Yes.” He turned the stone around in his hand. “See the edges? How they’ve been sharpened?”

Sally nodded.

“Well, it’s definitely foul play,” Jack continued. “But this is one heck of a cold case. I guess we can leave this one for the historians to solve.” He sighed and looked a little glum.

Sondra stepped over to him and ruffled his curly hair. “Hey, it was fun for a few minutes at any rate. Come on back. I’ll make coffee.”

Jack made a face. “Thanks, love, but no thanks. I’ve
had
your coffee.”

Sally laughed.

“Oh well,” he grumbled. “Sally, you want a lift back to headquarters?” He jammed his shovel into the ground.

“No, I’m going to finish my run first. Then Juice wants to see me so I ought to at least clean up. I’m a mess.” Dust and dirt caked her sweatshirt, arms, and legs—and probably her face, too—from her rapid digging. Sondra stuck her shovel into the ground like Jack, but when she did so they heard the unmistakable
clink
of metal on metal. The heroes looked at each other in surprise.

“I suppose… a little more digging wouldn’t hurt?” asked Sally.

“Sure. Maybe it’s an old six-shooter or something. That would be cool.” Jack retrieved his shovel and they started the excavation anew.