“Can you remotely connect to their computer?”
I’ve been trying. They have a very effective DMZ. I’ll need physical contact.
“That’s the plan.”
California’s official team HQ is a ten-story ode to modern architecture. Shiny mirror-like windows, curving walls and lots of round corners dominate the surface. The roof is our best bet, with its open-air helipad and elevator.
“Once we pop up to land on the roof we’re likely going to be on their sensors. Bear that in mind.”
Affirmative.
“Here we go.” The building rushes up at me, the city behind reflecting off its windows. I kill the jets as we pass the eighth floor and let momentum carry the remaining distance to land on the helipad with a crunch. I’ve taken two steps when a rush of air and a familiar blur materializes in front of me.
I’ve only ever met him once, but even if Kate didn’t hate this guy I wouldn’t like him. Maybe if he didn’t have overly tanned skin with shoulder length stark white hair I wouldn’t think he was a douche, but with his cocksure grin, I just want to punch him in the face.
“Arsenal. The rest of the team is on the way. We were alerted to your presence the moment you landed. Surrender and we’ll go easy on you,” he says with swagger.
“You do know I just single-handedly whooped the Brigade and sent them packing with their tail between their legs, right?”
His costume is a ridiculous green and brown leotard that looks more designed to show off his physique then actually protect him.
“The Brigade is all for show. We’re the real deal.” He slaps his hands together. A wall of force erupts from him passing harmlessly over me. When the air disturbance ends there are three of him standing shoulder to shoulder. Well, two standing, one floating a foot off the ground.
Bear in mind our only less-than-lethal option is the IP Cannons.
“I’m warning you guys, I don’t have a lot of options here. There’s a lunatic with mind control powers and he’s trying to take over the world. All I need is five minutes access to the Portland base and I can find out who he is.”
“What? So you can blow up Portland like you did Phoenix?” The flying one asks.
“Fine, be that way.” I hold my hands out, palms up, and he hesitates. The sandpaper staccato of my cannons rips through the air. The speedster vanishes and the strong one leaps into the blast to take it. He twitches and drops to one knee, but doesn’t go down.
Even if we proceed to lethal options it is likely they will delay us long enough for the rest of the team to arrive.
Flying-guy zooms up into the sky at incredible speeds. He has to have a certain level of invulnerability to pull that kinds of g.
“If we plugged into their buildings network could you use that to activate the quantum teleporter?”
Do you even need to ask?
“Call Kate,” I say as I take to the skies. The jig is up so I cut stealth mode bringing full power to the shields. Triple Threat clearly trains hard. He works as a team, trying to contain me. Speedy hurls about a thousand marbles at me, constantly keeping the barrage up from a hundred different angles to distract me. Flyboy has a cudgel made of durable stuff. He zooms in close, swinging for the fences each time. The second I stop moving Strongman throws a hundred pound weight at me with the force of a bullet.
Connecting.
I let out a double blast, narrow beam at maximum power. Strongman drops like a stone this time, the second weight he was about to throw at me rolls aside like a discarded beach ball.
“Amelia?”
“Kate, I’m sorry I dragged you into this,” I say as I spin to put my arm up and ward off the cudgel.
“You didn’t drag me into anything, this was already happening. I’m sorry about Phoenix, I wish I—”
“Listen, no time for that right now. I’m trying to break into the Portland underground. I’m in LA and I could use some help getting in.”
There’s a moment of silence and I wonder for a second if I misjudged her. Maybe this was one step too far for someone who’d played by the Rules her whole life. Even if the Rules were a lie made up by evil people.
“I need thirty seconds. Please don’t be high up when I come in.”
“You got it,” I say. Thank God. Even with everything I’ve invented I’m just one person. Unless I want to start killing innocent people, I can’t do this alone.
“Epic, ETA on the rest of their team?”
LAX ATC has their hoverbikes two minutes out. However, that could change.
“As soon as Kate arrives, full ECM.” I land next to the door, switch to widespread and go to full auto on the cannons. The air fills with their roar as the energy creates a cone of ion pulses. It isn’t as effective when I use them this way, the ions in the air become saturated and it sets up a sort of temporary field. As long as I keep the energy pouring in, it is almost like a stun shield.
“Epic, full power to the kinetic shields, I want a dispersal field to shield Kate.”
Got it.
The kinetic emitters reconfigure to their wedge shape with a hundred percent of the power facing forward to deflect the projectiles to the side. Flying-guy comes in hard and hits the stun field. Ionic energy zaps him out of the air like a bug. The speedy one is all that is left, he plays it safe and just throws a thousand marbles a second. What makes it through the stun field simply falls flat as it hits the kinetic field.
There’s a pop behind me and Domino has arrived. She’s in costume mask and all, wearing more weapons than I’ve ever seen her carry.
“Get the door,” I yell over my shoulder.
ECM to full. Broad-spectrum jamming has commenced.
I check the load out on my HUD. No ‘nades, but I have one EMP, two IR smoke canisters, flares, and all my lethals.
“Doors open.”
“Pop smoke.”
The cannister ejects from my bulky shoulders, exploding in a shower of purple smoke. I let up on the cannons and back in behind Kate. Once I’m through, I slide the door shut and spot weld it with a half second stream from my Particle Beam.
“What now?”
“You’ve been here before, where’s their entrance?”
“This way,” she says. Domino leaps down the stairs four at a time then crossing the stairwell, bouncing from one landing to the next, her feet never touching the stairs as she leapfrogs back and forth. Lucky for me the stairs are far enough apart that I can lower myself down the center by using enough thrust to slow the fall down to just ten feet per second.
The bottom floor comes up fast and the second I touch down Kate pops in front of me, mid-stride toward the elevator. By the time I catch up she has the control panel off and the wiring exposed.
“Can Epic override it?”
“He did before.” I reach in and grab a fistful of wires. No time for finesse.
Accessing restricted controls. The teleporter in Portland is online and connected. I’ve written a sub-routine to override their local controls.
In the elevator I go, Kate tries to crowd in behind me but I hold up my arm in place.
“Listen, right now you’re just wanted on suspicion. Those morons won’t be able to stick anything to you. If you come down you’re done for. You’ll be lucky just to go to jail.”
She shakes her head, “Regardless of if the government says I can or can’t, this is what I do, Arsenal. This is my job and I’m good at it. I stop the bad guys. Now, quit wasting time.”
She vanishes and reappears behind me pressing the ‘restricted access’ button that leads to the underground. The doors slide silently shut and the elevator hums as it descends.
“You know, at our trial, I’m gonna say I tried to stop you but you went crazy and forced me with your weird mind powers,” I say.
“That’s okay, I’ll turn states evidence and sing like a bird. I have a wonderful singing voice.”
I laugh, “I bet you do. Thank you, Kate.” I don’t look at her, I focus on the readings
on the HUD. In case anything happened though, I needed her to know.
“Of course, what are besties for?”
The elevator shudders for a second and there is that odd sense of displacement that comes with quantum relocation.
“Here we go,” I say as the doors open.
The doors open to reveal the exact same scene I had when Luke brought me down here for breakfast. I don’t know why it’s disturbing. I guess my mind insists the doors should have opened in a different location. What if another lift had come at the same time? What would happen if two elevators tried to occupy the same space?
“Earth to Arsenal, come in?” Kate says, tapping me on the shoulder as she passes by.
“Right. Epic, which way?”
I’m scanning the walls now. The nearest access point is in the offices used by the staff. Take the hallway off the east side of the restaurant.
Arms up to fire off the IP cannons at a seconds notice I march forward. Kate draws two slick black pistols holding them in front of her with her wrists crossed for stability.
“Where’d you learn to use a gun?”
“My dad was big into shooting; he’d even made the Army handgun team. We used to go the range together all the time,” she says.
“He sounds cool.”
“Sometimes, I think I appreciate him more now than I ever did as a kid. It’s hard when you can read everyone’s emotions. People often feel one thing and say another. At first it feels like a lie, but as I matured I realized the difference between those two things says more about a person than their words.”
A late night restaurant crew walks right in from the service entrance. Two of them freeze but the third turns and high tails it back the way she came.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Domino warns them with a wave of her pistol as we walk by. They both throw their arms up. I don’t see the third and we don’t have time to look for her.
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 and shows me all the connection points. The door is made of reinforced steel with magnetic locks that fail secure.
“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 overlay of wiring pinpointing 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 don’t 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’m 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 superpeople 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 couldn’t ever find any evidence. That is because he isn’t 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!”
“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 its place. With a hand on each of my shoulders, she closes her eyes and the world vanishes.
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 it, 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 an empathic link to them, 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 a home away from home.” She looks around the modest apartment with its leather furniture and paintings on t
he 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’m 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. Short blue fur and a fluffy tail that swishes back and forth as she rubs between the 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 his 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 the 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?”
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