Renee: The swastika is still in use by a billion people - Hindus, Jainists, and even some Native Americans still use it. I am sure it makes for... interesting situations when Jewish people visit India and see them all over the place.
That is the Ernst Röhm. He was a gay man who was also a Nazi. Turns out that is not a good combo. They murdered him and his supporters in the Night of the Long Knives, a few years after they took power. Nazis always turn on each other in the end.
You are onto something with associating the parachute with Rook. Remember that Rook was trying to steal two nuclear bombs from a B-52 in flight. And the Atomkrieg is after two lost nuclear bombs...
Acadian: Yes, I decided to go with the factory-assigned nomenclature of interceptor for the F-4, rather than the role it was pushed into. Granted, if one chooses to identify as an Air Superiority Fighter, I will be the last one to misgender them for it!
It was originally going to be The Motor City that Hwarang referred to Detroit as. Then in a later edit I remembered the dragon, and changed it to reflect Detroit's new status.
If you go back a few weeks, Mercury did recognize January as "The Crowgirl", so he did recognize her. Thanks to everything she has been involved in, January is one of the most well known supers in the world. Even when a lot of that fame is for absolutely trite reasons, like kissing another girl on national television.
That is a good Stormcrow Doctrine. Like the Silverlight Mission Statement we ended with last week: "Everyone goes home alive."
It is only a minor victory to be sure. This particular war goes on, as we will learn in today's episode. The rest of this Book is laser focused on the Atomkrieg, and those two nuclear bombs.
Book 12.23 - Broken Arrow"My bike!" Hwarang now stomped across the exhibition space to his broken motorcycle. He threw his hands up in the air in clear frustration. "I'm not even done paying for it!"
"Don't worry, I got you bro," Mercury insisted. The powered armor hero clomped across the torn up stone floor tiles to the motorcycle. Once there he passed a hand over the rent metal of the bike. The bits and pieces that had been scattered around leaped up into the air and all snapped back into their original places within the motorcycle. Those that were broken turned to liquid and flowed back into their proper shapes. Then they turned solid once more. In the end the bike looked as pristine as it must have when it first rolled off the factory floor.
It reminded January of how Blackhawk could reshape metals with her magnetism. She had fixed a torpedo-sized hole in a Coast Guard cutter that way. It also brought back a memory of the last time she had fought neo-Nazis. That had been the National Socialist League at Motor City Pride, in downtown Detroit. One of them had been able to control metal. He had pulled it from multiple cars and created a graceless—but effective—suit of armor for himself.
She wondered if Mercury wore a suit of powered armor at all? Or could he too, simply manipulate metal to his will? In essence, he might be the power for the armor.
"Way to go train man!" Hwarang gave the armored hero a high five, then straddled his bike. He started it up with a single click. It was the same sound January's Victory Empulse made when she fired it up. More to the point, it was the same lack of sound, as the vehicle was silent except for the sound of detritus crunching under its tires. So it was definitely electric. The Korean-American leaned over and turned sharply, and coasted up to a halt beside January and Silverlight.
"It's good to meet you Stormcrow," he said. "You've been kind of an inspiration for me. What happened at Belle Isle is what made me decide to put on the cape."
"Yeah, sorry I missed that. I barely made it past Pittsburgh before it was all over." Mercury clomped back over to join them. "We usually only work here in the Mid-Atlantic states."
"I think all the capes in the world wished they could have gotten there in time. Those of us who were able to, well we just happened to be in the right place, at the right time is all." January nodded. "So are you all a team? Silverlight never mentioned that."
"No, nothing that official," Mercury shook his head. "We're more like an anarchist mutual aid network. We're all spread out. We only come together when something is too big for one of us to handle."
"So you each have a solo book, and the comics company does an occasional limited series with you all together," January laughed. "Yeah, I get it."
That brought some chuckles from the others.
"I live up in Baltimore," Hwarang explained. Then he jerked a thumb to Mercury. "The train man here is from Philadelphia. And I see Rebel Yell didn't even turn up. He's from Richmond."
"Yes, he has a habit of not doing that," Silverlight said in a low voice. January suspected that she might be fuming.
"Guy's the only one who doesn't have to work for a living," Mercury groused, "but half the time he's never around. I'm missing work to be here."
"Yes," Hwarang murmured, "I had to cancel a lesson as well."
"Wow, that sucks. I never thought about how having a nine to five job would make doing this... thing we do... harder. What do you all do?" January frowned. Then she realized what she had just said, and how she was crossing boundaries. She held up her hands as a sign to halt. "I'm sorry, that's none of my business."
"I'm a civil engineer," Mercury said. "That's probably all I should get into though."
"I am a musician," Hwarang noted.
"Really, that slaps, I know..." January started, then stopped herself once more. She had been about to say Blackjack's name. But that was not something she was free to divulge. "I know a musician, who doesn't know that I am Stormcrow."
"Complicated isn't it?" Mercury said. "I'll tell you something kid, it doesn't get any easier, juggling lives like we do."
"We are fortunate, in that the two of us have flexible work lives," Silverlight said directly to January. "Capes who have legal empowerment are compensated by the state. So they don't need day jobs. For the rest of us though, it's not always easy balancing real life with the cape."
"Like that guy that didn't show up - Rebel Yell?" January said. "I'm guessing he's not named after the Billy Idol song, is he?"
"No, more after the War of
Southern Aggression," Silverlight observed. "He's got a habit of not showing up in cases of right wing violence, or just not at all."
"And he's the only one of you who's a cop?" January noted. "What a surprise."
"Well, as much as any of us with a badge is a cop," Silverlight said. "It's not the same. It's close, but not the same."
Now January's two remotes hovered down silently from overhead. The spherical drones came to a halt before her, and she took the first and clipped it to her belt. Before she could do the same with the second, Cray's voice was once more in her ear.
"Hold up, and I'll get a picture of you all," he said. "We can put it up in the Raven's Nest."
January then motioned for the others to all stand together with her. She smiled, and waited while the drone captured the moment. Finally the hacker gave the all-clear, and she took it and added it to her utility belt as well.
"What are those things?" Mercury asked. "You got your own cameras to take pictures of you?"
"They're drones that Gadget made. All of my team carries a few now." January explained. "They let our information specialist see what is going on. His name's Cray. He's the voice in my ear, telling me not do stupid things. Which I usually do anyway..."
"Huh, people with their drones these days." Mercury shook his head. "We should get us one of them hackers too."
"So what brings a Detroit crow to a DC super battle?" Silverlight asked.
"I came to meet with a nonprofit to see if I could help them raise money for trans folks." January said. "But I saw the party you guys were having, and decided to invite myself."
"That sounds... exactly like what I'd expect!" Hwarang laughed. Then he took a more serious tone. "You've been a real ambassador for our community. You've made me think about... well maybe being a little more open about some things."
January could not help but arch an eyebrow that a Vulcan science officer might appreciate. Hwarang's use of the phrase "our community" was unmistakable. It certainly implied a great deal, unless he simply meant the super community.
In the very least she imagined that the Korean-American was Queer in some way. A man wearing lipstick was not exactly a great signal of masculinity after all. But granted, that alone did not mean he was gay or trans either. Case in point, the hair metal bands from the 80s like Poison and Motley Crue. Likewise, thanks to the K-dramas she had seen, January knew that wearing makeup was a tradition of the historical hwarang. They had been warrior poets who kicked ass for the old Korean kingdom of Silla, and looked fabulous doing it.
The police lights that now flashed against the glass windows gave January an excuse not to reply. She looked over, and saw that the street outside was now filled with emergency vehicles. She knew from experience that they were about to be inundated with law enforcement and probably paramedics. That was a good thing. They had quite a few unconscious neo-Nazis to clean up.
Then they all turned to face those emergency responders as they flooded into the hall a few moments later, as if they had been summoned by January's thoughts. Most of them spread out and began to handcuff the unconscious terrorists. But a pair of plain clothes detectives walked over to the assembled heroes. Silverlight moved to meet them, and January followed. The other two heroes did not.
"Detectives Hall, Oates," Silverlight said to each cop in turn. "It's a pleasure, as always."
The tone in the magician's voice did not suggest sincerity. Given the sour looks on the cop's faces, January suspected that the feeling might be mutual.
"Did you have to do this inside a museum?" The first one—Hall—sighed with ill-concealed exasperation. He appeared to be in his mid-fifties, but if anything his mane of golden hair looked fuller than January's. He took off the aviator sunglasses that he wore, and stared around at the devastation.
"The mayor's going to have a fit over this one, I just know it," he grumbled.
"Talk to them." Silverlight nodded over to the neo-Nazis. Officers were now bent over them, and began to strip them of their force field generators and other meta-tech items. So too their entirely ordinary weapons as well.
"What were they after?" Oates asked. He was the dark to Hall's light, with a head of thick, curly black hair and a mustache. The pair looked like they might have walked straight out of a buddy cop show from the 80s. "Was this some kind of demonstration?"
"They seemed to be interested in that parachute over there." January gestured to the life-saving gear in question, which now lay casually discarded on the floor. It was surrounded by the glass broken from the display case that had once held it.
"Detectives, this is-" Silverlight began.
"We know..." Oates cut her off in a low tone. "The whole damn world has seen her on TV."
January was not sure if he had a problem with her or not. Given that she was publically trans, lesbian, and a woman, there were plenty of reasons for why someone in his profession would feel that way. Right now she did not really care. She could already tell that he and his partner were superfluous at best. If there was going to be any follow up to this, it would be done by her and the others.
January smiled in spite of herself. It seemed that some of Blood Raven had rubbed off on her after all.
Glass crunched under her boots as January turned from the detectives and walked to the parachute. It was plain, green, and faded. She did not know much about parachutes, but this seemed old, like something from the 50s or 60s. She looked over at the broken signage that had flanked the shattered display case. She used the toes of her boots to poke a few pieces of the display back together, until she was able to read most of it.
"What is it?" Silverlight stepped up beside her, and the two police detectives trailed close behind.
"It says this chute is from a B-52 that crashed in 1961, call sign
Keep 19." January noted. "It was part of a Broken Arrow incident, whatever that is."
"It's when the government loses a nuke," Mercury observed. January glanced back, to see that now he and Hwarang had moved up to meet them.
"Loses?" January wondered. "How do you
lose nuclear bombs? Do they just fall between the couch cushions?"
"Oh, they find plenty of ways," Mercury grumbled. "It happens a lot more than you want to know."
"Stormcrow, you better put me on speaker," Cray said in her ear. January tapped on Sága's screen, and a moment later his voice came out loud and clear for all to hear.
"I know this case," the hacker explained. "It's infamous. The bomber was part of a program the Air Force once had to keep planes armed with nuclear bombs in the air around the clock, just in case the Russkies tried to launch a sneak attack. They eventually stopped doing it, because they lost too many planes—and nukes—from accidents and mechanical failures. This one disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean with two nuclear bombs onboard. They radioed a distress call as they went down, saying that they were under attack. But they never said by who or what, and the call abruptly stopped in mid-transmission."
"It says here that the plane was never found." Silverlight stared down at the information display at their feet. "But some wreckage did float to the surface, like part of the tail and one wing, and this same parachute."
"Yeah, a rescue attempt was launched, but the crew was never located, nor the plane," Cray said. "The Navy tried to search the seabed. But the technology for that wasn't very good back then. It's still not great today. We know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the ocean floor. They weren't even sure where it went down to begin with. It was like looking for a grain of sand in the Sahara. Eventually they had to give up. The crew is all presumed dead, at the bottom of the sea."
"The nukes didn't show up later, and no terrorist group took credit for it. Some people thought it was the Russians, and that maybe they stole the nukes to reverse engineer them. But if so, they kept it so secret that it didn't even come out when the Soviet Union dissolved, and the Kremlin's old files were finally unsealed. I don't buy that though. They didn't hesitate to shoot down our planes if we got too close to their borders. But this was over the North Atlantic. The Soviets wouldn't have had fighters that could have even reached
Keep 19. Not they wouldn't have needed to steal any of our nukes. They had plenty of their own that were much bigger. This is about the same time they made the Tsar Bomba after all. In any case, the general belief is that whoever attacked them either bugged out when things got hot, or went down with the B-52."
"So why was the Atomkrieg interested in aviation history?" Silverlight wondered. "Aside from their name of course?"
"They are led by a guy calling himself Bismarck," Cray explained. "His real name is Kaleb Harris. He lived out in Idaho, and it appears he was radicalized by Ruby Ridge. He lived just one county over, and went to watch during the siege, along with a lot of other people. He got indoctrinated by right wing propaganda afterward, joined the militia movement, and tried to make a fertilizer bomb to blow up an FBI building. Apparently he read about it in the Turner Diaries. But the only thing he blew up was himself."
"So an even less competent Tim McVeigh," Mercury sighed.
"He got out of prison four years ago and disappeared." The hacker said. "He reappeared a few years later as Bismarck. No one knows who chromed him up with the cyberware. But he didn't even try to hide his identity. He formed the Atomkrieg, and has been pushing a white supremacist accelerationist agenda. Their goal is to start an apocalyptic race war that will destroy the United States, so that a fascist white ethnostate can take its place."
Mercury said nothing. But the tortured groan of bent steel spoke volumes as his fingers tightened into fists.
Detective Oates whistled. "A couple of nuclear bombs could do a lot of destroying." he noted grimly.
"So how does this parachute help him with that?" January said. "He was doing something with it, scanning it somehow. He was creating a map. I saw a hologram of it. It showed the Atlantic."
"What I have on Bismarck's abilities is that he's a cyborg," Cray said. "He's a telekinetic. From what we just saw he can absorb energy too, and can convert it to other forms and emit it back. Zero Point and Stinger tangled with him once, and they think that he does all this by manipulating quantum fields."
"He's a meta-human too," January noted. "I saw it in his aura."
"How can you tell that?" Mercury asked.
"I had good teachers," January glanced over to Silverlight, and smiled. Then she looked back down to Sága's screen. "So could he have used this quantum stuff to create a map of where that parachute was in say, 1961?"
"Yes, yes he could have." Silverlight interjected before the hacker could answer.
The detectives cursed in unison. Hall pulled out his phone and walked away. Oates began to fidget noticeably.
"So he could be headed to get the bombs right now?" January thought.
"Maybe," Cray said. "But he's going to need a submersible to get them. It's on the bottom of the ocean. Even for meta-humans, that's not an easy place to reach. Or he'll need some kind of tech or powers to survive the crushing depth, breathe the water, and not freeze to death. And he'll need a ship to store the bombs in afterward. Unless he can carry them both with his telekinesis and fly across the ocean at the same time."
With that Detective Oates pulled out his phone too. He began by telling someone that they needed to shut down all shipping in Chesapeake Bay, and possibly the entire East Coast. Then he too walked out of earshot.
"Did you get a good look at that map?" Hwarang asked.
"Not really, it was too quick," January shook her head. "Cray, what about my body cams?"
"Way ahead of you," the hacker replied. "Here it is."
Sága's screen filled with the video in question. It was taken by January's forward-facing helmet camera. The quality was good, but it shook with every motion of her head. It was enough to reveal that Bismarck's map was indeed of the North Atlantic. But exactly where was not clear. Cray slowed it to a single frame at a time. But even so the exact spot that his scan indicated was hidden behind the cyborg's shoulder.
"You have cameras in your suit?" Hwarang asked, clearly surprised by that revelation.
"Yeah," January replied. "Like the drones, they let Cray see what is going on. He saves the video. It helps when we create our after action reports, and make dossiers on our opposition."
"Clever girl," Mercury nodded. "It's like watching the tape after a football game."
"But it is still not good enough," Hwarang frowned. "Is there some magic way to reconstruct the missing video?"
That seemed impossible to January. But what she did not know about magic could fill the Atlantic. So she did not say anything.
Silverlight however, seemed to mull that over. She massaged her white marble chin with her thumb and forefinger. Then she bent down and picked up the parachute.
"Remember your magical theory Stormcrow; the Law of Contagion. Things that have been in contact remain in contact, even after they have been physically separated. This was part of Keep 19. It will lead us right back to it."
"Then let's get going," January said.
"Do you want me to get the rest of the team?" Cray asked. "I haven't yet, because you're so far away."
"If we are all out here, then there won't be anyone to cover it if something happens back home." January shook her head. "Besides, I think we can handle it."
"We have a sister who has an affinity for the sea," Silverlight observed. "Can you contact her? In the meantime I'll arrange us transport to meet her in the North Atlantic."
"You have a boat?" Hwarang asked.
"No, something better," Silverlight said, "a friend in the Pentagon."
* * *