Free Omega by Robert J. Crane

with some subtlety, and a chopper hovering over a suburban neighborhood with people deploying out of it on zip-lines doesn’t exactly fit the bill. You’ll take a van; it fits the mission profile better.”
    I grimaced. “How long of a drive is it to Des Moines?”
    “Four, maybe four and a half hours?”
    “Dammit,” I said, and my hand came up to massage my eyebrows. “This is bad.”
    “What now?” Ariadne said, her voice rising with alarm. “What is it?”
    “I’m going to be stuck in a confined space with Clary for the whole drive.”

 
    6.
     
    “...and that’s why I left Nebraska,” came the droning, cornpone voice of Clyde Clary. Scott was driving and Kat was riding next to him, her face suffused with boredom. Reed and I were seated in captain’s chairs directly behind them and Clary was in the back in a massive rotating chair that was anchored to the floor in front of a computer console. It was all kind of sci-fi, or FBI, but I didn’t really care. I was so annoyed and bored by Clary’s stupid stories that I was ready to reach forward and yank the wheel out of Scott’s hands so I could put us into the ditch and end all of our suffering. I had mentally checked out of Clary’s stories throughout the whole ride, until they all blended together. The parts I remembered involved a grain silo, three heifers and an old Cadillac. For all I knew, they were all from the same story.
    “We’re almost there,” Scott said with a note of hope. “GPS says it’s off the next exit.”
    “Thank God,” said Kat and Reed in perfect harmony. I was thinking it.
    “You know, this reminds me of this one time when—”
    “Hey, Clary,” Scott said, raising his voice to talk over Clyde. “Can you do me a favor and start booting up the computer?”
    “Yeah, sure,” Clary said, and after a moment, he spoke again. “Say, you weren’t telling me to boot up the computer because you’re sick of hearing me tell stories, are you? Because I figured none of you were talking because you thought they were interesting.”
    “If you could just go ahead and start it up—” Scott began.
    “You really didn’t think that, didn’t you?” Clary said, and I could hear the rising disbelief. “Y’all are assholes. At least when Bastian and Parks want me to shut up, they come out and say it.”
    “Shut up, Clary,” Reed said, his arms folded in front of him.
    “Hey, you can’t talk to me like that, Alpha dog.”
    “Sure I can, Beta dog,” Reed said. “Pretty sure I just did, in fact. What are you so pissed about? You told me to come out and say it, so I did.”
    “Yeah, like an hour late.”
    “More like four hours,” Scott said from the driver’s seat.
    I feltClary seething behind me as Scott took us off the exit ramp and into a neighborhood that didn’t look that different from the one I had lived in back in Minneapolis; tall oaks jutting skyward around us, red leaves falling and clogging the gutters, filling the channels on both sides of the street. The houses were older but not in bad shape, for the most part. Some were stucco, some siding, with the occasional brick facade just to break up the monotony. The lawns were all beginning to turn brown, the cool weather leeching the lively green from them as a signal that vitality and warmth were retreating for the season.
    Older cars were parallel parked at the sides of the streets. The houses were built high off the road on either side of us. They had no front yards to speak of; instead a concrete terrace came four feet above the sidewalk, with a staircase in front of each house that led up to front porches. The whole place had the feel of a valley, with the houses overlooking the street.
    “Omega put a safe house here?” Kat idly mused from the front seat. “Why?”
    “If they’re recruiting metas like the Directorate,” Reed said, “it helps to have operations all over the map. That way, say a meta in Sioux Falls manifests and you get wind of it, you