[This story occurs between Chapter 36 and 38 of The Maker’s Ark. The latest chapter of The Maker’s Ark is here, and links to some of my other work are here. Updates are posted irregularly–theoretically every two weeks, a schedule I still aspire to return to someday.]

Flicker was seeing blue.

It brought back memories. Strobe-like images, vivid and unwanted.

Now she was back on the Bonneville Salt Flats, killing the Xelian fleet.

The Xelians themselves hadn’t mattered–the battlecomp-directed ships were the foes. They were the only entities fast enough to harm her. And they had. A chunk of Flicker’s leg was gone from a hit by a petawatt laser.

But she could hit them too, and did. Again and again, with ion pulses that started as rocks and iron shot. She aimed with the help of her visor–green crosshairs pulsing through the blue haze in her eyes. Then threw rocks up through shockwave-cleared holes in the air. Enough hits in the right pattern could bring down those damned shields and they’d die. She’d learned their secret. How they stopped so many 0.15c rocks without vaporizing the ships inside.

They stretched into little pockets around each hit, reflecting almost everything long enough for the temperature to spike above 100 billion kelvins. Most of each rock’s energy was dissipated by photodisintegration, exotic particles, and a sudden flood of neutrinos–which then escaped in all directions, unperturbed by intervening force fields and mass. As they did from the cores of supernovae.

Which was why she needed to throw five million rocks instead of five thousand. She had always been throwing, always would throw. It was hard to remember anything else. Knowing about the neutrinos brought cold comfort, a comfort of relative cold–the part of Earth in line of sight to the fleet was just getting lightly cooked under a dull red sky rather than burnt to a crisp by a fire a hundred times more intense than the sun.

The Xelian fleet had gotten the Volunteer and Doc and Stella, but they hadn’t stopped Flicker. Now they were finally almost all gone, only a dozen ships left, and they were dying and dying–

“Flicker? You there?”

Flicker blinked and returned to the present. "Yeah,“ she said.

She’d awoken from her early-morning nightmare with a real need to talk to a friend, and limited options. They were at an old safe spot, an overgrown set of tailings piles from a now-closed mine. Flicker had dressed ‘mild hazard casual’; a second-line visor, shorts and a black t-shirt with a radiation trefoil, all of which were slightly radioactive from previous use. The Skystone necklace was a new addition.

"Flashback?” asked Armadillo.

“Yeah,” said Flicker. "But to the fleet battle, not the accident.“

Armadillo nodded and put her radiation detector back in its protective case with careful and precise movements. She looked like a bipedal snapping turtle with banded armor instead of a shell–an eight-foot-tall, four-foot-wide kaiju. She took her name from her favorite tactic of curling up in midair before smashing into foes and obstacles like an organic cannonball. Many assumed from her appearance that she had to be clumsy or slow-witted. She was neither. Her funny and informative anecdotes had helped Flicker learn the fine art of leaving things unbroken in a too-fragile world.

"Well, I can’t tell what’s going on inside, but what’s getting out isn’t too bad for a nearby human. Sit close to someone for an hour, you’ll give 'em half a millisievert at most.”

“Thanks,” said Flicker. "I’m still pretty fuzzy. I wanted a double check by someone I knew was radiation resistant. It would probably be worse, but the Skystone seems to be stopping a lot. It affects radiation going out as well as in, but I’m not sure how much. Golden Valkyrie didn’t tell me, Doc didn’t know, and I haven’t had a chance to characterize it very well yet.“

Armadillo grinned. "Glad to help. The radiation profile was pretty strange, though. How did you manage to get so much potassium-40 and carbon-14? Normal levels of carbon-14 would barely be detectable. Carbon dating would probably show you as negative a hundred thousand years old or something.”

“Priorities,” said Flicker. "Both of those are naturally occuring and regular metabolism can cycle them, so I didn’t make any special effort yesterday. And I had lots of both left over from the fleet battle. I pretty much hosed carbon dating then anyway–that put more carbon-14 into the air than every atomic test. The potassium is hard for me to burn because the half-life is more than a billion years–I can drop everything by a factor of ten billion and still hardly touch it in a day. But it’s more a chemical imbalance threat to me than anything else, for the same reason.“

"Does your 'burning’ work the same way as Doc’s isotope burner?”

“Not really. It’s magic for physicists–it makes decay more probable, dropping the half-life of most isotopes by about the same factor. I just have to be careful to repair the damage as it comes and not fry anyone nearby. I don’t have to use the pool by the Tree, but it makes things easier.”

“Handy. Well, you might set off some alarms, but you don’t have to completely avoid your friends.”

Flicker pressed her lips together and didn’t say anything.

“Hey, now. Journeyman is alive and recovering. I checked with DASI right after I got off the phone with you. He’ll be okay.”

“I’m not,” said Flicker. "I’m still messed up pretty bad. I just had to stop fixing things to sleep–and the nightmares interrupted that.“

"Messed up physically or mentally?”

“Both. My hand isn’t even close to better, and I’m seeing blue.”

“Seeing blue?”

“It’s this… pain of a radiation biology thing.” Flicker frowned. "How to explain…“

Armadillo snorted and grinned again. "Flicker, I was coping with messy radiation biology before your father was born. Try me.”

“Yeah, sorry. It’s a faint haze of Cherenkov radiation in my eyes. The problem is, it doesn’t stop when I close them and darkness makes it worse, because it’s coming from inside the eyeballs. This bout is from the radioisotopes that I haven’t been able to burn yet, because I didn’t have a breathing mask with me at the pool, so I couldn’t do much above my neck without irradiating Yiskah–and she wouldn’t leave. It’s hard to ignore when I try to sleep because my eyes adjust. And it’s triggering PTSD flashbacks from the fleet battle.”

“Hoo boy,” said Armadillo. "I’ve seen that. The Volunteer has, too. Seeing blue is a nice name for it, will it bother you if I use it?“

"No. A cool name is something positive. Not…”

Flicker trailed off and looked down.

“Flicker?” asked Armadillo after a time. "Where are you at? You want me to call anyone else?“

"I…” Flicker looked up again. "I’m not currently a hazard to myself or others. And I’m not about to run away to a dark cave again. But I’m right on the edge of not being able to talk coherently. About not-physics, I mean. I can talk about physics in my sleep.“

"I’m not okay.” She waved her hand. "But I’m never okay. Not human okay. I never have been. I probably never will be. All I can hope for is to be ready for the next thing, and to be able to pretend I’m okay for little bits at a time, while staying aware enough people are still safe. Donner calls it being 'human compatible’.“

"That’s one way to put it,” said Armadillo. "What can I do to help?“

Flicker stared at a fringe of reeds growing partway up one of the piles. A red-winged blackbird perched on one, proclaiming his territory to the spring sky.

"Right now I’m not ready for the next thing,” she said, “which should probably be finishing off my excess radioactivity. And it’s hard to be compatible when you’re radioactive. So I’m not even going to try to pretend. But being outside helps. Sound helps, if I can hold still. The voice of a friend.”

She looked over at Armadillo bleakly. "Tell me stories? Dark humor, maybe? The kind health physicists tell when they’re drunk? You must know some good ones.“

"A few,” said Armadillo. "But I have another idea. When Golden Valkyrie left, she didn’t give you any guarantee she’d be back, right?“

"No. She didn’t.”

“Okay. Ignore for a minute the bit where she might not come back because the world has ended. Are you bothered personally?”

“No sh–” said Flicker. She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. The ghostly blue flickering was still there. "Sorry. Yeah, it bugs me.“

"Then there are a few stories I can share with you. I worked with your mother a lot, and we got along pretty well. I picked up some things I don’t think she told anyone else on Earth, not even Doc. Some of it is dark humor, but it’s family dark humor. Interested?”

“Um… Yeah.”

“Then let’s move over to the east side of the pile, where I’m parked.” Armadillo grinned. "I brought chairs and drinks. And I don’t think you’ve seen my new ride yet.“

*****

Flicker had to smile when she saw the vehicle. "It’s painted to look like you!” she said. "Was it a Xelian military transport?“

"Yeah,” said Armadillo. "They used it for field redeployment of suited infantry and artillery. Extravagant, but it can carry things–like me–on the outside and drop them without stopping. That’s what the gripper assembly is for. Stella gave it to me, and DASI supervises the autopilot. Gives me a lot more range when I’m on my own. Which is a lot lately, with both the Volunteer and Golden Valkyrie gone.“

"Did you paint it?”

“Nah, that was a couple of the Builders that are working at Jetgirl’s shop. The first two are training some others, and they’re as happy as hot rodders getting to work on a real sweet car. One of them was good at heraldry, so she designed the paint job. I talked to her a bit, she’s a fine craftswoman.”

“Heraldry? You mean like costumes?”

Another grin. "Think of it as visual IFF. You could tell the flyer was mine just by looking at it. Very handy–if I come tearing in for a fast drop, I want people thinking 'Here comes Armadillo!’ Not 'Ahhh! Alien invasion!’“

"Oh. Yeah.”

Soon they were both seated comfortably, Armadillo in her custom portable chair–most human furniture was not designed to cope with someone who weighed a metric ton.

“Now I can give you an apology I’ve wanted to for a while,” she said. "I was pretty damn sure who your parents were for a long time before you found out.“

"Golden Valkyrie told you?”

“Not directly. But it was clear from the way she talked around some things–and she once asked me not to speculate 'before the time is ripe’. I knew what that meant.”

Flicker thought about that for bit. "Was that like how pre-Lost Years superheroes handled family stuff back when secret identities still sort-of worked?“

"Yeah. Most of the smart ones, anyway.”

“Then you don’t have to apologize. She invoked a protocol and you respected it. And she’d have known you would or she wouldn’t have told you–she’s a Seer and Chooser.”

“I could tell how much not knowing bothered you, though. So I’m sorry.”

“Fair,” said Flicker. "Accepted.“

"Okay. Let’s see,” said Armadillo. "You always like people to start at the beginning. Did the Volunteer ever tell you much about superhero projection?“

"A little. I’m not very good at it. Most kinds require holding still for longer than I want to. It’s interesting to watch though–Nighthaunt is really good at it.”

“He is. There are some quieter forms of it that I found particularly handy. Learned them from the Volunteer back in… Gosh, must have been the fifties? The simplest one is 'On Duty’. Makes any nearby trouble more likely to head for you than anywhere else. Nobody really knows why it works, but it does.”

“Yeah, I saw that in the Database statistics when I was first studying superhero crisis response data, and I always wondered. Journeyman told me he thinks it’s because there are all these little magicians casting NIMBY spells, and other people doing similar stuff, but everything has to happen somewhere, so how about over there where that superhero is standing? It seems to be stronger in cities, because of the higher population density.”

“Eh, I’m not sure it’s stronger. More trouble starts in cities, too. And it’s safer if you can manage it somewhere isolated. Heck, I’ve done it here–that’s why the top of that pile is missing.” Armadillo pointed at a truncated tailings cone to the south. "Punched out a bunch of giant locusts there back in the eighties. It does seem easier to pull off in cities, I’ll give you that.“

"Yeah, it’s hard to untangle the biases.” Flicker yawned. "Sorry, I’m still tired, I just can’t sleep.“

"No worries.” Armadillo grinned. "And if you do nod off in a comfy chair during story time, well, that’s one problem solved, isn’t it?“

"True. But I’d still like to hear about Golden Valkyrie.”

“Right. Anyway, about twenty years ago, I was out in the country, On Duty, when I saw this flying woman with a spear headed for me. Things were a little unsettled. This was the middle of the Lost Years, a lot of people had already died, and I was the only heavy-hitter free. The Volunteer was off helping with a hurricane and Doc was out of touch. So I was a bit wary. But she wanted to talk, so I just waved, and she landed.”

Armadillo smiled. "Another thing I learned–when you’re On Duty, you don’t just attract stuff that wants to fight. You can get visitors from who knows where that are lost or have questions. That’s how the Volunteer met Sealord. And it was a good thing that the Volunteer is always ready to talk first, because Sealord was plenty mad, with reason. So I had that on my mind, too. Anyway, I asked her if she was lost, and she said 'not anymore’. She looked a lot like one of your Choosers–she didn’t have her armor yet–except kind of off.“

"Off how?” asked Flicker.

“I knew she was some kind of shapeshifter or mimic, because there were parts of 'human’ she could manage, and others that really needed work. The way she talked… Some of it was like she was reading a script, but the rest of the time she had to pause and hunt for words, like she was consulting an invisible phrasebook.”

Flicker frowned. "There was no reliable record of Golden Valkyrie in the main Database until fourteen years ago, except for the month after she first met Doc–and he hid that. This would have been even earlier. And I looked thoroughly.“

"A lot less got recorded twenty years ago. And her Sight could help her stay hidden in 'unreliable’ reports if she wanted–and she did.”

“But… Um. Okay. What did she want?”

“It took a bit for me to figure out, because she had language trouble with past, present and future. Seer stuff, but it was hard to follow at first. She finally got across one reason she was on Earth–something important was out of place. I told her the person she probably needed to talk to was Doc Future, and started to explain who he was, and she cut me off and said he was the thing that was out of place.

"That worried me a bit. Because Doc was gone, had been for a week, and no one knew where to. His Database was just telling folks he was on an 'important mission’.”

“Wait,” said Flicker. "Was this when he was helping Zirjack? And she couldn’t tell?“

"Yup, and apparently not. She did wonder if he was off getting his 'chariot’, which I found very interesting in hindsight after Doc came back with a flying car.”

Armadillo grinned. "Anyway, I couldn’t help her with that, but I could help her with some other stuff, which sounded like just the sort of things someone smart but really alien would want to know about Earth before setting up a superhero secret identity. I had it backwards, though; being a superhero was her secret identity, sort of. We talked a lot after that and worked together, and it was obvious to me what was going on the month or so she was with Doc.“

"Did she need help learning how to pass for a human?”

“Well, yes. She needed help learning how to pass for a mammal.”

“Oh.” Flicker managed a weak smile. "Yeah. Sealord had that problem, too, when he first started using his human form. And the Database had records of a few conversations she had with Sealord. He seemed to get stuff about her that others didn’t. Which would fit with…“

She looked down. "Okay, this is really personal. But I’m afraid I might not get to talk to her again, and she warned me that I’ll probably have a brother and a sister show up looking for me at some point, and I am so not ready to think about family that might expect me to answer questions like 'What are we?’ when I don’t know, and–” She looked back up. "Why are you smiling?“

"You don’t have to make excuses. This is family talk. Of course it’s personal.”

“Point. But she said she got advice from 'a human’ and I think maybe the human was you.”

“It was. She mimicked the first human-looking person she ever saw, and apparently picked up some of her memories and skills, too. But while she had many admirable qualities, the woman she mimicked didn’t have children and didn’t want them. So–”

“Who did she mimic?”

Armadillo looked surprised. "You haven’t already figured that out? It–“

Flicker sped up and used the virtual keyboard in her visor. "DASI?” she sent. “Spin up my adaptive local information model. I’m trying to avoid a privacy block here.”

“Activated,” replied DASI.

“Assume Golden Valkyrie mimicked a Chooser and kept her appearance. Rank order the candidates by probability.”

“Osk, 97%. Another Chooser who previously mimicked Osk, 2%. Other possibilities negligible.”

Flicker thought about how carefully Osk had chosen her words, when they had talked after her Japan trip. She slowed back down, to the familiar feeling of social embarrassment.

“Osk?” she said. "No wonder she was mad at Golden Valkyrie. Yiskah and Sam both mentioned it. But Osk wouldn’t get upset without a good reason. That’s a good reason. And I’m terrible at seeing family resemblances.“

"No worries,” said Armadillo. "You missed out on a lot of childhood practice. Anyway, Golden Valkyrie wanted advice on human motherhood. Preferably from a superhero. Her Sight could give her the general idea, but she still needed messy details. Fortunately, her Sight could also find her someone to ask about them. Like me.“

Flicker sighed. "Now I’m worried about your privacy, because you’re marked as 'family off-limits’ in the Database, and the old superhero privacy customs require making social inferences in ways I’m really bad at. And when I asked Jetgirl if you have children, she told me you have grandchildren.”

“Family is a flexible concept. You didn’t find any record of this until I decided it was time to tell you, right? Jetgirl knew what she was doing. We weren’t sure who you’d find time to talk to first. Worrying about family is reasonable, but you’re a grown-up now.” Armadillo grinned again. "You can worry along with the rest of us.“

"Does she know one of your grandchildren? Am I allowed to ask about that?”

“She’s my great-granddaughter. Her mother is my eldest granddaughter. Which had a little bit to do with why Jetgirl was allowed to fly around in a jetpack doing superhero things at thirteen.”

Flicker sped up to think about that. She’d made so many assumptions, from limited data. So many wrong assumptions. She slowed back down, head still spinning. "Oh,“ she said.

Armadillo looked at her sympathetically. "We knew how family was a touchy subject for you. Jetgirl told you I had grandchildren because she didn’t want to go into details; all of my children are dead now–cancer, auto accident, and old age.”

“Old age. That’s…” Flicker trailed off.

“They call it 'death by natural causes’ now, because coroners aren’t supposed to call it 'old age’ any more, but that’s what it was. He had a full life. I don’t make a point of my age, but my accident was in 1947–I know that’s in the Database. I wasn’t going to have any more kids after that. Not that I was likely to. I was already in my thirties, and my husband died in World War II.” She smiled. "Mutagor’s serum worked on me, but it was a near thing, and I didn’t have much to lose–I was dying of radiation poisoning. It killed him when he tried it. So even if the formula hadn’t been lost, I wouldn’t have wanted my children to try it. I was very lucky.“

Armadillo studied the blackbird, who was still chirping away. "What happened to my youngest bothers me more. He was so bright-eyed and enthusiastic back when he started, investigating crime and mischief of all sorts as a reporter. And using his alarm watch to call the Volunteer for help when he got into more trouble than he could handle, which was all the damn time. He got more cynical as he got older, but he never stopped digging into things to help people. He was a reckless driver, though, and eventually that killed him.”

She looked back and smiled. "At least you got to meet him. When Golden Valkyrie hinted to me that it was time for someone to be found, I knew who to call. Didn’t take him too long, and he knew to call the Volunteer and Doc when he found you.“

Flicker felt her eyes filling with tears. "Your son was Gumshoe?!”

“Determination runs in my family.” A gentler smile. "My family of choice, too. I could tell just how hard you worked to learn to talk understandably, when you were speeding up and slowing down all the time.“

Flicker blinked a few times. "Well, yeah. I had no hope of making it out of the uncanny valley without that. But I’m still not very… Normal people don’t have to avoid their friends because they’re radioactive. Again.”

“Sometimes they do,” said Armadillo. "Like, say, if they’re having internal radiation therapy for cancer. And it was years after my accident before I could visit my kids. The radioactivity at first, and then it was a long time before the doctors were confident enough I wouldn’t be a biohazard to blood relatives. This was still the fifties. So they had to finish growing up without me.“

She waved a hand. "It hurt, on both sides, but what can you do? It did prepare me for the Lost Years–and let me help your mother, who had the same problem. And you.”

“Oh,” said Flicker, as she thought about the implications. "Thank you. But she’s a lot farther from human than I think you realize. She doesn’t even live completely in three spatial dimensions. And neither do I.“

Flicker held up her injured hand, which looked healed, and wiggled the fingers, sending sensory tingles through unseen paths. "My 'shell’, Skybreaker, can’t possibly connect to my human body in just the dimensions we see. Doc proved that. But he wasn’t willing to experiment to find out exactly how it worked, because it was too dangerous. We didn’t know enough and there was no safe way to find out. So how did my mother get me inside it in the first place? Before I was born, even? She had to be able to see and affect it somehow.”

“We did discuss that a bit,” said Armadillo. "Have you ever heard of a critter called an anglerfish?“

Flicker’s eyes widened. "She used that analogy with you, too?”

“We talked about it before she even met Doc. Seems the part of her that everyone sees, the part that can shapeshift and mimic a human body, is like the lure of an anglerfish. And the rest of her body is somewhere else. Not in our three dimensions, as you put it, or at least not the same part of them. That part wasn’t clear to me.”

“Me neither,” said Flicker. "But she uses her lure, her human body, to interact with our world. And to hunt, like an anglerfish.“

Armadillo grinned. "She used it to attract a mate, too. Did she mention that bit of anglerfish biology?”

“…yes. I’m still not handling it very well,” said Flicker. "Wait. If you told her about Doc when you first met, why didn’t you warn him?“

"I did. Didn’t seem to bother him. He was a lot less uptight when he came back from his trip.”

Flicker squeezed her eyes shut, involuntarily remembering Doc’s words: “At least she what? Looked human? I knew what kind of being I was letting in before I opened the door the first time–I was neither ignorant nor beguiled. Reckless, I’ll grant.”

“Oh,” she said. "Well that’s… nice, I guess. But you know what really bothers me? I asked Golden Valkyrie if I was like that, or would become like that, and she said 'not in any great way, anytime soon’, which was not a no. I wasn’t able to deal with anything more until I processed. I was planning on asking her later, and now she’s gone.“

"Eh. I put on forty pounds a year for decades. Complicated a lot of things, and I didn’t know when, or even if, it would slow down. But it did. So I can give you advice on changes.”

“I imagine clothes were a problem,” said Flicker. Then she yawned despite herself. The nightmare panic was wearing off.

“Oh, clothes were just the start,” said Armadillo, grinning again. "Why I remember…“

Armadillo’s voice was soothing, as was the wind and sunlight and the blackbird. Flicker closed her eyes for just a moment…

She woke up, startled, from a vaguely pleasant dream. She sped up to check alerts–everything was green. But the time–it was afternoon.

"Augh,” she said. Her mouth was dry and sticky.

Armadillo looked up from her handcomp–it looked like she had been reading a book. "Did you have a nice nap?“ she asked.

"Yes, but I’m late! I missed–”

“I warned everybody. They all said to let you sleep. Without exception.”

“Okay, but– Okay, thanks for the talk, and everything, and the family stuff, and I’ll want to talk more sometime but there’s things I really have to do, like getting rid of some more radioactivity before I go talk to Journeyman–I’m way late for that–and–”

“No problem,” said Armadillo. She waved a hand in farewell.

As Flicker sped away, she looked up. The flashes in her eyes were still there, but they didn’t bother her as much.

The sky was blue, too.

