Free Omega Night (Wearing the Cape) by Marion G. Harmon

Omega Night
    by
    Marion G. Harmon

     
    The world turned into a stop-motion movie set in the middle of Julie’s punch line, which meant the hand on my shoulder wasn’t Megan’s or Annabeth’s . “We have to go now , Astra,” Rush said when I twisted to look up from my chair. I dropped my pizza slice and it froze halfway to my plate. Rush was in full costume, his red and white racer’s jumpsuit and helmet, but the unserious smirk that usually showed below the edge of his eye-covering visor was missing.
     
    “Bike’s outside.” His grip slid down to my arm when I stood up, and he led me away from my friends, through the frozen crowd, out the door half-opened by a guy for his date, into the cool night and up the stairs to the street.
     
    “What’s happening?” I focused on not bumping into anybody—not that I could hurt them in their time-frozen state. It had to be bad, real bad if Rush didn’t even have time to text me and let me get away to the lady’s room. I tried not to think what it was going to look like to a room full of diners, mostly students, when I disappeared from our table. The Bees were going to be pissed—between my patrols and new training schedule, this had been the first night in two weeks that I could go out with them.
     
    We hit the street outside the Pizza Cellar and headed for his custom made motorbike at a jog. Speedsters only ran everywhere in the comics; being able to accelerate their own personal time didn’t mean they wanted to run for miles. He focused on our mounting up together, never losing physical contact so I could stay in hypertime with him, waited till I’d settled behind him, arms around his waist, and got us on the road before answering.
     
    “Blackstone flashed an Omega Code to my epad ,” he said finally, and grunted when my grip tightened. “I listened to the flash-download on the way here. Somebody’s launched a missile. A big, bad, nuclear one. Can you let me breathe, A?”
     
    “Sorry!” I loosened my grip as we wove through frozen traffic. All I wanted to do was turn around and get my friends somewhere safe, but where was that ?
     
    ----

    Instead I listened to the gut-churning download as we road through time-frozen streets, headed for the Dome. Less than fifteen minutes earlier an unidentified module full of Verne-tech robots had clamped itself to the side of one of our navy’s nuclear submarines. The robot swarm burned its way in, ignored the crew to hack the sub’s computer systems, attached itself to one of the sub’s ballistic missiles, and launched it. The sub crew had managed to radio word of the attack before the takeover was complete, so the U.S. military had the missile on radar when it broke the surface of the Caribbean.
     
    Close range interceptors from a nearby carrier fleet had failed to knock it down. What was a nuclear sub doing patrolling in the Caribbean? And a fleet just happened to be in range? What was going on down there? Were they protecting Puerto Rico? Keeping an eye on Cuba? (It was a rogue state and sanctuary for supervillains .)
     
    Regardless, the nuclear warhead-armed missile was flying faster than its specs allowed, and it was mutating as it headed for space. Nobody thought it was aimed at the Moon and the military had activated Operation Omega.
     
    The Pizza Cellar sat just off the University of Chicago campus, so the long ride between seconds from there to the Dome gave me plenty of time to freak out over the details before Rush bumped us up off of Michigan Avenue to park the bike on the pedestrian avenue in the middle of all the frozen after-dinner strollers. Living in Rush’s world never failed to give me the wiggins , but this time I barely noticed.
     
    “Your turn, A,” he said, raising his hands over his head. I reached up to grab hold so we gripped each other’s wrists and lifted off, flying us up and over the Dome to drop through the open load bay doors.   We touched down and the doors lurched into