“No can do, sorry. The Governor is in wall-to-wall meetings until we leave. FBI, Homeland, DMHA, the whole bit. There’s some kind of international conference going on and we’re here until the very end. We’re scheduled to catch a flight back at seven. Late dinner tonight?”
“Of course, see you then.”
He looks like he wants to say something but then doesn’t. Instead, he smiles and kills the feed.
The rest of the trip I go over what we have so far. Cat-7 is the public face of the Cabal. They probably launder money for them too. If I had to guess, whoever the telepath is will most likely be the true mastermind. Which means no leaving my lab if I’m not in armor. Who knows what he needs to control me. It could be proximity or touch, just about anything.
If only I had a name. With that, I could wrap this all up. No more looking over my shoulder, and I’d have my parents back for real. Just one little name.
The flight doesn’t take long. The sun takes a slow dive behind me as we cross the New York state line. The school is up north, far away from any major city… well, far away for the East Coast. I don’t know how these people stand being so smooshed together.
We’re coming up on the school. I’ve notified their dispatch. Headmistress Mrudani Mistry will be meeting our arrival.
I land just outside the grounds. I imagine they have some kind of air defense and there’s no point in setting it off. The moment my feet touch ground a pop of displaced air sounds next to me and Kate walks by as if she were there all along. She’s dressed as Domino, mask and all.
The main gate is manned by a single guard whose startled expression has me laughing in my suit. He opens the door to the booth, hand on his sidearm before his eyes go wide.
“Kate?”
“Perry!” She squeals running over to him and throwing her arms around the guard. Now that I have a second I realize he’s much older than I thought, at least in his fifties. He’s a big man with salt and pepper hair. His uniform is well-kept and he wears it well, despite the spare tire around his waist.
“What are you doing here? We haven’t seen you in ages.”
She casts her eyes down at the ground, “Sorry Perry. Things in Arizona have been hopping. I really do miss you and the rest of the staff.”
He shakes his head, pulling her into another hug, “There there, no worries dear. It’s our nature in life. You were a true joy to have around, this school is lesser for your absence. Let me get the gate and I’ll walk you to the lobby.”
The old gate whirs open and we slip through. Kate chats with him as we make our way up the road. It isn’t long to the main building, just long enough for me to scan the grounds. Security is high, lots of cameras, motion sensors, walls and other electronic snoopers. Not a lot of people, though. Maybe it’s just because it’s early evening?
Perry opens the main door and ushers us in. The lobby feels like an old house more than a school. Couches and sofas are scattered throughout the room, lots of windows shower us in fading natural light.
“I was sorry to hear about Mr. Kana,” she tells the guard. He stiffens for a second before patting her hand.
“Me too. Well, I’ve got to get back to the gate. Don’t stay away so long next time.”
“Of course, it was good to see you.”
He closes the door behind him leaving us in the room.
“Feel anything out of the ordinary?” I ask her. She glances around the room, her eyes lingering on every couch, every painting.
“I don’t know if it is just I’ve been gone for so long, or what, but something feels off.”
“You can defend yourself, right? From,” I twirl my fingers in the air next to my head.
She smirks, “Yes, I can. I may not be a telepath but I don’t need to be for defense. A strong mind is a strong mind.”
A faux wooden panel opens and a slim woman in a black suit jacket and skirt walks out. She has her hair in a bun, thick-rimmed black glasses adorn her dark-skinned face. She reminds me of every teacher I’ve ever had. Not that I had many.
“Ms. Petrenelli, a pleasure to have one of our Alumni back with us.” She shakes Kate’s hand with a warm smile and then turns to me, “I’m afraid I haven’t had the pleasure?”
“I’m Arsenal,” I say holding out my armored palm. An awkward shake later and we’re walking through the door to her office.
“What brings a former pupil here, Ms. Petrenelli?”
Kate sits in front of the large desk but the chairs are too small for me. I end up standing behind her. The office is nice, faux leather furniture, lots of bookshelf space. The pictures on the walls look like former pupils, whole classes of them. Fifty or sixty years worth of students. Epic scans them all, identifying Kate for me. I can’t believe the girl in the photo is the same person before me. The girl looks hollow. Dressed in clothes far too large for her. With dark makeup and a hood pulled tight around her face.
“I would like to get in touch with Mr. Kana’s family, to pay my respects,” Kate tells the headmistress.
I ignore their conversation as I focus on my HUD. “Epic?” I flip through my active sensors. “Is it me or is there hardly anyone here?” I’d thought as much walking up the drive but now that we’re in the building I can’t detect more than a dozen people.
He takes over, switching between modes and adjusting settings to be as sensitive as possible. After a moment my HUD returns to normal.
There are twelve people on the grounds. They have beds for ten times that. Based on location and patterns I would say almost all of those people are employees. As far as I can tell, they have no students. Which isn’t what their public database says.
“Well, that isn’t right. I was hoping to avoid this but… oh well, hack their computer. Let’s get everything we can.”
Working. Their firewall is remarkably primitive and—
“What?”
Beyond the base operating system and the usual things you would expect to find, their computers are blank. No files, no data. Just as they were out of the box. We would need access to a data port for me to find anything deeper.
“Excuse me?” I interrupt, raising my hand. “I need to use the little girl's room…”
Kate raises one delicate eyebrow at me before the headmistress answers, “Out the door, down the hall, third door on the right. Now, Ms. Petrenelli, I’m afraid I can’t divulge information—”
I lose track of the conversation when the door closes behind me.
“Okay, I don’t really need the bathroom. Do a magnetic scan and find me the hardline.”
A wireframe outline of the room replaces my visuals as Epic searches out magnetic fields.
There is an ethernet port underneath the front desk.
The desk is empty, no notepads, no telephone, only a computer terminal with one of the useless computers set up to look like it’s functional. Kneeling down, I see the port. I don’t have time for fancy. The drywall crumbles as I grab the faceplate, crush it and pull. The suit comes into direct contact with the wire, giving us access.
I’m in. The network server is offline. However, they didn’t unplug it. Powering on…
“Take your time. I don’t look conspicuous at all crouched under a desk.”
The servers are wiped. I don’t think they degaussed or deleted the hard drives more than a few times. Copying sectors now.
Kate’s muffled voice comes through the wall, she’d have to be damn near screaming for me to hear. I can’t make out what she’s saying but I can certainly tell she’s upset. This close to the floor I notice something I didn’t coming in. There’s a fine layer of dust covering the ground. No one has stood or sat behind this desk in a very long time.
“Any time now…”
There are only a few hundred gigabytes of data. Ten more seconds. Done. I can work on putting the sectors back together after we leave, but Amelia?
“Yeah?
They haven’t admitted a new student since Mr. Kana’s death.
�
�Maybe they can’t find a strong enough telepath to ride shepherd on the kids?”
Their public record shows them admitting over a hundred empaths and at least twenty telepaths in the intervening years. I can find no internal records of them living here.
“What the hell?”
This stinks to high heaven. A school for mental powers with no students? If a telepath is behind all my problems... Is Mr. Kana really dead? Could he be behind it all, somehow faked his death? That doesn’t make sense, though. He died five years ago. My parents went missing long before then.
The door slides open as I walk back in. Kate is standing, leaning over the desk with her finger in Mrs. Mistry’s face.
Contaminated atmo detected, switching to internals.
She must really have the juice amped up. They’re both screaming at each other. I’ve never seen Kate so angry.
“You know damn well no mugger killed him. What is the school hiding?”
“I’m afraid you’ve exceeded your welcome, Domino. Take your guest and leave.”
Yeah, that isn’t going to happen.
“Where are all the students?” I ask.
Kate turns to look at me then her eyes unfocus the way they do when she’s doing her thing.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Mrs. Mistry replies.
Kate’s head snaps around, “You’re lying. You can’t lie to me. Where are all the students?”
The headmistress opens her mouth to reply then stops, abruptly sitting.
“Why aren’t there any students on campus?” Kate demands.
“More importantly, why have you publicly admitted students for the last five years, but none of them are here? Where did they all go?” I ask.
She looks back and forth between the two of us. I can see in her eyes she’s afraid. I’m no empath but I know what fear looks like, I’ve seen it on my own face enough times.
“Listen, you have to understand,” she says, patting down her jacket before reaching over to her desk and opening a drawer, “There isn’t a lot I can do. I have no—”
She pulls out a large black semi-automatic pistol, places the barrel to her head, and pulls the trigger.
The explosion is deafening in the small room. My audio synthesizers protect me but Kate is left holding her ears. Glass shatters above us followed by a scream and then a person plummets past her office window to land on the sidewalk.
There are gunshots and other sounds of chaos on the campus. I’m not sure what is going on.
“Kate, everyone on campus is committing suicide, we have to leave!”
Her eyes go wide, “Perry?” She runs to the window and vanishes. Her friend, right. If everyone here is programmed to kill themselves if too many questions are asked, then I can only imagine what comes next.
The State Police are en route. I just picked up their signal. A Parker alert has been issued for the school. Two superhumans are rampaging, killing the staff. The Nightwatch is also on the way, ETA three minutes. I think this is a setup, Amelia. Whoever is behind this was waiting for us.
The Nightwatch? New York’s super team. If California’s team is a joke then they are the exact opposite. We can’t tangle with them and something tells me we won’t get the chance to explain our side of the situation.
“Epic, Ghost Protocol, wipe everything down.”
Two things happen. A canister of aerosolized bleach explodes from my shoulder compartment wiping out any trace Kate was ever here. Then, Epic does his best to wipe all the camera feeds and any other electronic evidence of our visit.
Once outside, I survey the massacre. I only find three bodies, but my thermal readings aren’t promising. Kate appears next to me, holding an unconscious Perry. He’s bleeding from a grievous head wound. It looks like the bullet creased his skull. She must’ve gotten to him at the last possible second.
“When I took the gun away he started pounding his head against a brick wall. Who would do this?”
“The same person who took my parents. Can you get him to Seattle? Admit him to the hospital? I get the feeling when he wakes up he will just keep trying.”
“Good call. Want me to come back for you?”
“No, I’ll fly back. I need some time to think anyway. Meet you back home.”
She nods and vanishes.
Thirty seconds.
“Stealth mode, lock up and lift off.”
51
I have Epic put us on a ballistic course back to Phoenix. I need time to think so we keep it just above Mach Two. According to the clock, it will take a little under an hour and a half to get home. That’s fine with me. There’s so much to process I don’t even know where to begin. Not to mention the fact that I’m exhausted.
Either someone has been killing telepaths and empaths or making them disappear, one or the other. Knowing our enemy is one, gives me a couple of theories about what has happened to the missing students. Right at the top is competition. Maybe when a telepath is strong enough they can sense others? The way Kate sparred with Sam Sykes, her powers were stronger so she won.
Why maintain the school then? Why not just have… well, I’m stupid.
“Epic, search for everyone who has publicly gone to the school since Mr. Kana’s death. Are they anywhere else?”
Negative. Once they go to the school their public record vanishes. Amelia, upon further research I’m not sure anyone telepath would have sufficient strength for this. Even if he or she were capable of remote control… There were hundreds of students. Each with family and friends. None of them have ever been reported missing or so much as a 911 call made. This would require many telepaths to perform this level of alteration.
“You’re saying we’re not dealing with one rogue telepath but several… great. How many would it take to do this efficiently?”
At least twenty. All F4 or F5. With a high probability that there are more than that.
“Are there that many on record?”
Negative. As Kate said, there are not many F5 telepaths. Mr. Kana was one, Mariposa of the Brigade is another. There are four others in the entire world. A half dozen F4s and thirty-one F3s.
“I don’t suppose it’s possible that almost the entire world’s population of telepaths are in some kind of secret society? We already know whoever’s masterminding this wants world domination. And according to Pythia, that’s exactly what they will get.”
The Oracle said she saw two futures. One where we cause the end and one that is despotism and slavery. While one telepath could conceivably hold the world together, a group of them could do it easily. While there is most certainly one person in charge it would appear that we are—
“We’re fighting an army, great.”
It would seem so.
“An army of telepaths who control one of the largest companies in the world, have their hands in multiple supervillains and are bent on world domination. This isn’t 1938, Epic. Who wants to control the world anymore?”
I do not have enough data to suggest motive.
“Me neither,” I sigh.
The lights of Kansas City pass below. The interactive map pings the halfway point.
“Okay, I’m going to try and sleep, wake me up when we need to start our approach.”
Closing my eyes I try to push out all the terrible visions of the future. Pythia said there wasn’t a future if I continued my crusade, as she called it. Not that humanity would be hurt, but simply had no future. This is the stuff of nightmares and sleep doesn’t come.
Five minutes out. I am contacting Phoenix ATC for clearance. Carlos left you a message that he has returned home and will see you tomorrow. Luke is waiting for you at HQ with dinner. Kate made it to Seattle safe and sound. She is staying there for a day to make sure her friend is okay. ATC has given us clearance, follow the yellow brick road.
A yellow path highlights on my HUD with speed and maneuvering directions, when to slow down, and when to turn. The thrusters cut and gravity takes over with the occasional assist from
my stabilizers. No need to fight momentum when wind resistance and friction do the work for me.
Once I’m down under three hundred feet I use direct thrust and slow down even more. Phoenix flashes under me in a colorful chorus of lights and sounds. I’m not a huge fan of going out in the city at night. From this high up, though, it’s breathtaking.
Coming up on—Amelia—we have guests. I am sorry I did not see them sooner, they must have been jamming.
My HUD clears of the ATC directions and shows the HQ. On the other side of the parking lot is a familiar looking VTOL. The Brigade loiters around beneath the wing while Captain Freedom and Luke speak a few feet away. Epic tags everyone with identifiers.
Freedom, the hockey-mask-wearing super soldier. Torque, forcefield generation. Comanche, directed energy beams. Mariposa… flight and telepathy. Behemoth, invulnerability, and strength.
A hundred feet out I spot their escort, six bipedal robots painted with army camo, each with a plasma gun for an arm.
That would answer the question on Mariposa. We should assume the Brigade is under the control of our antagonist and act accordingly.
“Roger that, buddy. However, I don’t want to see the team get hurt… let’s see what is what. Just to be on the safe side let’s put ECM to max.”
I land hard a few feet from Luke, sending up a plume of dust. Mr. Perfect, Fleet, and Glacier are in costume and hanging back, which speaks volumes for this visit.
I glance at Mariposa, she’s fluttering around by the aircraft behind her team, she doesn’t take her eyes off me while I walk toward Freedom.
Our Faraday cage is catching interference.
The metallic ink on the outside of the armor glitters like diamonds in a spotlight. So much for this being a friendly visit.
“Captain Freedom, good to see you again,” I say coming to a halt next to Luke. My boyfriend doesn’t look happy. He flashes a worried glance at me as I speak.
“Arsenal, I’m afraid we’re going to need you to come with us. Please take off the armor and…”
Full Metal Superhero Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 27