Shades of Gray by Jackie Kessler Page A

Valerie ruined it by joining Team Alpha. She had never felt odd until she’d transferred to New Chicago. Now she felt nothing but, all day, every day.
    The comm in her Corp hover pinged. It was an automated alert, sent out when one of the Squadron spotted a high-priority target.
    Valerie flicked on her speaker. “Ops, Vixen.”
    “Go, Vixen.”
    Valerie breathed a silent sigh of relief that Crush was working Ops today. The Earth power had landed in a wheelchair after Demolition Man had brought a building down on him, but he at least didn’t treat Valerie as a second-class citizen.
    “I got a ping. Something up in my sector?”
    “Hold on.” Keys clicked. Valerie watched the faceless gray city slide by under her feet. “Yup,” Crush came back. “Looks like your boy Luster just engaged Professor Neutron.”
    The WANTED file popped on her screen. Neville Marsh, a.k.a. Professor Neutron. A physicist who’d lost his wife in a supercollider accident; unstable; able to alter atomic structure. He’d created a small black hole outside Des Moines, and now was on Corp’s Most Wanted list. Ironically, he’d eschewed hero training and gone to work for them in R&D before his nervous breakdown. That had apparently not worked out so well.
    And of course Luster had been the one to find him. Of course.
    “Got it.” Valerie sighed. “Guess I’m the cavalry.”
    “Luster can handle it,” Crush said. “You go bag yourself a nice mugger or two, make the price we pay to keep the hovers fueled worth it.”
    “Squadron regs state that backup must be given priority one when confronting a supervillain,” Vixen snapped.
    “You know they’ll just freeze you out more if you save their asses,” Crush said quietly.
    Valerie flipped over to GPS, locking on Luster’s beacon. “Like I’m here to make friends. Vixen out.”
    The hover banked as she took it off autopilot, and she dove deep into a maze of half-built warehouses, their rusting girders long abandoned. Wreck City, this place was called, and it wasn’t a stretch to see why.
    She spotted Luster’s white uniform and piloted down to join him. Lester Bradford turned at the sound of her hover, a smile playing around his face. It was a fine face, made for vids, with just enough insouciance in the smile to hint at danger. Luster had the total package—black hair, snapping eyes, heroic height, and a smile that could blind you if you weren’t careful.
    He was a package, all right—a package that, as far as Valerie could see, was full of crap. Bradford’s smiles for the vids were fake as Cupida’s breasts.
    “You’ve got Neutron?” she said without any finessing. Luster thought of her just like the others—second-class all the way. Just because he wasn’t overtly hostile … and looked like a 3-D film star …
    “And a fine hello to you too.” Bradford hadn’t dropped his accent for Branding, and it worked in his favor, in a big way. “My, my—they let you out alone already? Someone upstairs thinks highly of you.”
    “More like they all think I’m a joke.” Valerie bit back a curse. She’d said too much.
    Lester grinned at her. “Do they? What’s so terribly amusing about you? The fact that you can twist my head off bare-handed, or the fact that with your body, I’d probably enjoy it?”
    Valerie felt her eyebrows fly up of their own accord. He had cornered a supervillain … and he was flirting with her?
    “I guess your mouth is the quickest thing on you,” she shot back. He wasn’t going to throw her off-balance and laugh about it with the Shadow boys later.
    “Oh, by far,” Luster agreed.
    Valerie hadn’t expected him to agree, and now she was off-balance despite everything. Damn it all. “Are we going after Neutron or not?”
    Luster shrugged. “I could, I suppose. Flash a few Yuletide lights, give all reporters on the scene an orgasm. Or you could do it.”
    Valerie choked, “Me? You called it in. It’s your collar. Protocol states the