Second door on the left. There is increased activity that would suggest the base is on alert.
“The door is locked,” she says taking a step back. Epic highlights the frame showing me all the connection points. The door is made of reinforced steel with magnetic locks that fail secure. Cutting the power would just result in a more secure door. That’s okay, I can cut other things.
“If we fry it, the clamps will slam shut. Gimmie a sec and we’ll do this the old fashion way. Watch our backs.”
I reach behind and pull the sword. I could use the particle beam but there’s no telling what kind of damage I would do to the system behind it and I need their network intact. Legs spread wide for balance, I swing the blade over my head with both hands. As it hits the apex, Epic triggers the kinetic emitters to increase the weight for more force on the downswing. The blade sparks and screeches its way through the entire left side. I slide it out and heft it up for the next swing.
The pop-pop-pop of Domino’s guns fills the hall as I slash through the other side of the door. A swift kick and it flies off the hinges, crashing into the floor with a rolling clang.
“I need two minutes. Here take this.” I slam the blade three inches into the floor behind Kate. She’s about three times as strong as a normal person so she should be able to wield it no problem.
“I’ll keep it handy for close encounters, now go. Times wasting.”
I stalk into the office, Epic’s wireframe overlay pinpoints exactly where I need to go. This late at night no one is around, thank goodness. I’m doing my very best to not kill. Without any way of knowing who’s mind-controlled it would be just too big of a gamble.
The console I need is beeping happily to itself when I rip out the network cable. Lines of code appear on the HUD as Epic hacks their system.
“Regular security… nothing to worry… about so far.” Each pause in Kate’s speech is punctuated by a grunt or a crunch as she teleports around punching and kicking.
Accessing. This network is connected to the shadow network. Engaging active intrusion protocols.
A roar of automatic fire lights up the hall outside and I take half a step before I remember I can’t help her. She rolls through the door, spins, and lays back down on the floor with just her two guns parallel to the ground as she opens fire. Both slides lock back and in one swift motion she ejects the magazines and loads the next ones before locking them forward with a thunk.
“How long? They’re sending heavy units, external body armor, that sort of thing.”
Thirty seconds to breach… I do not know how long to download Shai-Hulud.
“Another minute, maybe?”
She grins, “You got it.” Her form vanishes as she pops out of existence. I hear a scream followed by a string of curses. No gunfire but from the screech of metal I’d say she made use of my sword.
I am in. Shai-Hulud is downloading. I’m sifting the data and… Amelia, you need to see this.
A picture of a boy pops on screen, he couldn’t be but seventeen.
This is Harald Ericsson. He fought in WWI. He founded Category-7 just after WWII in the wake of the uproar over the SS use of super-people as weapons of war.
“Right, we know this. It was the outrage to the Nazis use of super-people as weapons that started the registration list.”
Another picture pops up, a headline from the New York Times The Country Morns the Passing. It shows the funeral for Mr. Ericsson.
“Epic, what’s your point? He’s been dead since 1950.”
I only noticed this because we programmed Shai-Hulud to look for patterns, right? You and I always assumed the CEO of Cat-7 was behind it but we could not ever find any evidence. That is because he is not behind it.
Frustrating, but not unexpected. I mean if I were running an evil corporation I wouldn’t be the CEO either, too obvious.
However, a search of their financial statements over the years shows this.
A hundred pay stubs, checking accounts, petty cash withdrawals, deeds, and other paperwork pop on-screen. The very last one is dated fifteen years ago.
“What happened fifteen years ago?”
“Arsenal, it’s getting busy out here, we need to go!” Kate yells.
“Crap, how much do we have?”
Enough.
“Have Shai-Hulud dump it all on the Internet. Everything he can before they stop him.”
Affirmative.
Domino appears beside me and spins with her back to my chest folding in tight as she can.
“What—”
The walls explode around me and I feel the overpressure even through the suit. The kinetic shields drop to eighty-seven percent. Thankfully, Kate was close enough for them to protect her.
“Time to go,” she says as she clamps the sword in place. With a hand on each of my shoulders, she closes her eyes and the world vanishes.
55
Where are we?”
Of all the places she could have taken us, this was the last place I expected. I can’t take my eyes off the Eiffel Tower standing tall in the distance. We must be in a high-rise somewhere south of town. I can see the sun moderately high to the East… my body clock isn’t ready to go from middle of the night to the next day.
“Don’t you have like six degrees? I would think it obvious…”
I shake my head, “I don’t have any… and you know what I mean. I’m saying, what is this place?”
Kate unbuckles her holsters, slings, and various knives and tosses them on the brown leather sectional seated comfortably in the sunken living room. I still haven’t moved from the spot we appeared at.
“You remember how my powers work? Line of sight teleportation unless I have an empathic link to lock on to, right?”
I nod. “Oh my God, do you have a secret boyfriend?”
She shakes her head and a shadow of a frown crosses her full lips before she slips back into ‘happy Kate’. “Not at the moment, no. However, I earned quite a bit of money before I joined the Diamondbacks and since… well, the pay isn’t bad and like I said, the toy line keeps me flush. I maintain this as my home away from home.” She looks around the modest apartment with its leather furniture and paintings on the wall.
It hits me… Kate has a life. Other than being Domino and the teams PR manager. She has a life, she does things. Things like this. Things I’ve denied myself during my crusade. A hollow pit forms in my stomach and I badly want the armor off.
Amelia, I am detecting abnormal readings on your vitals… are you okay?
“Yes—no… I don’t know.” I stumble over to the couch, hoping it is sturdy enough to take me and I sink into it. I’d kill for a Coke right about now. I don’t think I’ve ever been this exhausted in my life.
Kate slips out of the room for a moment and I use her absence to think. I can’t worry about might-have-been. There is only the here-and-now. Focus Amelia!
Right. Cat-7 as a front. The Cabal. Mind control conspiracy. End of the world. Sobering thoughts indeed.
Kate comes back in cradling the largest, fattest cat I have ever seen. Not that I’ve seen a lot of them. She has short blue fur and a fluffy tail that swishes back and forth as she rubs between her ears.
“This is Tigress. Until I met you she was my best friend, weren’t you girl?” She rubs her face into the cat’s neck while she speaks.
“Your powers work on animals?”
“One-way they do. I can read her emotions but since I mostly use pheromones and contact chemicals to alter people’s states, nothing I can do makes her happy or sad. She just loves me like I love her.”
“Kate, you’re the most popular person I know. If we were in high school you’d be the prom queen. How am I your only friend?”
She smiles and not for the first time I see sorrow behind her eyes.
“Amelia, for a smart person you can be pretty dense.”
So I keep telling myself. Quantum physics is easier than figuring out people. Kate has everything I’ve heard of
people wanting. Great body, admiration, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say anything bad about her or her alter ego. She’s smart, sexy, I could go on. I’m just happy to be her friend and…
“Bingo,” she says doing that thing where she answers my emotions and not my words.
“Wait, I still don’t get it.”
“How many guy friends do you think I have?”
“Tons, I imagine,” I say.
She shakes her head as she puts down Tigress who proceeds to wraps herself around Kate’s legs and purr like a cell phone on vibrate.
“Other than Luke and Pierre? None. Tony is nice and I hope he and I can be friends but he has to acclimate to my pheromones first… until then I try to keep my distance. Any other guy I might want to be friends with I have to be very careful.” She flops down on the couch next to me with a sigh. “Even if I didn’t have powers, guys always take any sign of interest as sexual interest. That’s just the way they’re wired. Of course, there are always exceptions. For instance, the way you and Carlos are.”
I nod, “But I’m safe, right? He knows we can’t have a relationship because of… things… so it is safe to be friends with me.”
She smiles, “Yep. I’m never safe, I’m always ‘available’,” she puts air quotes over it. “Then there’s the girls. I irritate the hell out of most women. Either from my pheromones or because whenever I’m with a group of people I’m always the center of attention. I can’t hang out with anyone who’s married.” She shakes her head, half-smiling half-sighing as she rubs her eyes. “I had a good friend once. She got married and I was her bridesmaid. This was… six years ago? I’d been out of the Academy for two years and working for the…” she looks alarmed for a moment and then shakes her head, “I guess it doesn’t matter now. I worked for the CIA after brain school but before the Diamondbacks.”
“Wow, cool. I had no idea.”
“It was a secret. Doesn’t really matter now that we’re wanted fugitives. Anyway, I’m at this wedding and I had a little too much to drink and every guy there is hitting on me… including her brand new husband.” She falls back on the couch rubbing her hands down her face with a long sigh.
“That was the last time I had a friend I could just hang out with and talk too until you came along.”
I trigger the faceplate so she can see my face, “What makes me so special?”
“I have no idea. You’re not jealous of me, you don’t begrudge me, you just accept me. I guess that makes you an awesome person.”
“Maybe, but I’m an awesome person in a suit of armor since we left for New York and it’s getting ripe in here.”
“Can you take it off?”
“Not without my lab or my mobile. But that’s roaming the streets of Phoenix.”
A tone beeps letting me know Epic has something for me. Kate has a huge TV in one corner and it has the ‘smart TV’ logo. Epic wirelessly connects displaying his words for us both.
I have finished my analysis of the data and I think I have discovered what is going on. Though, you might find it improbable to believe.
I glance at Kate, who is wearing the same expression as me. After the last twenty-four hours, that seems unlikely. A vast array of images pops up on the screen. Nine men, each in their late twenties, early thirties. From black and white photos that are obviously old to color, pre-digital camera images. All the photos line up on the left side and the financial statements show one by one on the right.
What do you see?”
“These men have all worked for Cat-7 since their founding. The first one, Harald Ericsson, the guy in the black and white photo with the military cap, that’s him, right? The others, I have no idea,” Kate shrugs.
This is all data Shai-Hulud gathered while embedded.
“Shai-Hulud?” Kate asks.
“You know, Dune? Tell me you’ve read Dune…”
“God, Amelia, is everything sci-fi with you?”
“I’m wearing a suit of armor that allows me to fly while talking to my best friend the empath teleporter…”
She concedes, “Fair point. Go on.”
Other than Ericsson all of this was scrubbed from public databases. Twelve years ago an advance virus filtered through every computer in the world destroying select data… it did so quietly. The data it destroyed is about people. Telepaths who attended the academy, mostly. Along with eight of these nine men. There are no public records of them.
“Who are they then?” I ask.
Each one is an F5 telepath who attended the academy before joining Cat-7.
“That’s not possible, Epic,” Kate says jerking upright as she spoke. Her feet carry her around the room as she slides her finger through long black hair. “You don’t just disappear as an F5 anything… let alone a telepath. Who are these men?”
The question is not ‘who are these men?’ Kate. But, who is this man?
The financial statements unfold lining up next to the pic of the person they’re for. Circles highlight their signatures, flashing as Epic compares each one until a composite of all the signatures forms. No matter what letters are used, every name is written by the same hand.
“That would mean he’s been around for a hundred years?” she asks, mouth staying open and I can’t say mine isn’t either.
Probably older since I was able to find a signature in London of one Harald Ericsson arriving to fight in WWI. However, a comparison of a photograph of him before WWI and after founding Cat-7 shows he is not the same person. Whoever this man is, he is capable of switching hosts, targets telepaths, and has a large team of mind-controlled scientists hiding his existence while he fortifies his hold on the world.
“That’s why he wanted the armor. The damn robots.”
“How so?” Right, she didn’t see them.
“They have these security robots with plasma weapons. They’re very advanced but just steel, titanium, carbon fiber, and plastic. All alloys derivative of modern science. Luke, without getting mad, could probably beat one to a pulp.”
“But, if they were made of a certain super-genius’ armored battle suit though,” Kate finishes for me, “They would be nigh indestructible.”
“He’s making an army capable of defeating whatever supers he can’t convert,” I say.
And he is killing any telepath that does not join him. I believe Mr. Kana was going to be his next host. Something must have gone wrong and he was forced to kill him.
“Okay, the next question is… what do we do now?” Kate asks. My heart drops. I know who and what we’re up against, but I have no idea how to defeat him.
“First things first, I need to go back to Phoenix and get out of this armor for a while. Can we do that?”
A genuine smile spreads across her lips, “Air Kate is on the job. Let me grab a few things and I’ll have you back in the Copper State in no time.”
56
How did you do all of this?” Kate asks as I wheel out of the small RV-like bathroom installed in the back of the semi-rig.
“I didn’t, Epic did.”
“He doesn’t have any hands.”
Laughing, I wheel over to the mini fridge and pop the tab on a Coke. The cold soda feels good going down. It doesn’t hurt that I’ve had eight hours sleep and a solid meal.
“You’d be amazed what you can order over the Internet.”
It’s been sixteen hours since we raided Cat-7 and the news is going crazy. Shai-Hulud dumped virtually everything about them. Including a memo to make sure state teams were mishandled to allow for organic disasters to happen. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it in writing. The way Cat-7 treated the Diamondbacks in the past totally makes sense now. Luke is going to be so relieved. I thought it was just Arizona, but it’s everyone. The more the state teams screwed up the more Cat-7 would hire lobbyist and grassroots movements to put more of the teams in direct control of the big company by saying ‘the States can’t handle the responsibility’. I’m guessing Ericsson, or whatever name he goes by n
ow, hoped to bring them all under his influence for his takeover bid. Well, that’s going up in flames now.
The TV switches to a live broadcast of the FBI and DMHA agents raiding their New York corporate HQ. Not just any agents either, ones with superpowers. If they try anything… I guess Ericsson doesn’t have as much pull in the government as I thought he did. Or at least not openly.
“Wow, talk about history in the making. Cat-7 founded the state militias. They’re the whole reason the super teams are organized and now,” Kate snaps her fingers, “they’re gone.”
“Ask yourself this: are we better off because of them? Or have they been holding back the super teams since the beginning?”
“Good point.”
“This is all great and all, but it still brings us no closer to Ericsson. If he’s the telepath who altered my parents then he’s the only one who can undo it.”
“I know you want that, but there is the possibility it can’t be undone, you know this, right?” Kate asks.
I shake my head and wave the thought away, “I’m not ready to accept it as a possibility, not yet. Otherwise, what’s the point of continuing? No, I need to find him, Kate. I was hoping something in all these records would point to him but so far, no such luck.”
Epic scoured both Cat-7’s servers and the Cabals and nothing gave us a central location or secret HQ. I opened up the files on my tablet and started browsing, glancing really, hoping my subconscious would trigger on something. The TV flashes through a few different stories, the raid on the underground bases, the Department of Corrections arresting everyone in the UltraMax while cheering inmates watch. On live TV the President orders the Brigade to turn themselves in at ADX Florence in Colorado. The military equivalent to North Dakota’s UltraMax. Not surprisingly, Behemoth and Mariposa have disappeared. How many are in it because they’re mind-controlled and how many because they are with this guy? At first I thought everyone would have to be mind-controlled but clearly, people are evil.
“Do you think they can clear our names now?” Kate asks as we watch.
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