XGeneration (Book 6): Greatest Good

by Brad Magnarella

  Laughter sounded through the earpiece. “So, how’s the reunion going?”

  Scott didn’t have time to answer Techie. He aimed his visor where he’d last seen Jesse and fired a shot. His pulse hit something, but as the flour settled, Scott saw that Jesse was still standing.

  “Stubborn, isn’t he?” Techie said, obviously monitoring them through the house’s cameras.

  Have to focus, Scott thought. Have to be smart.

  He extended a leg from the pantry and waggled his foot. Jesse took the bait. Or tried to. When he reached down, he exposed his lower face. Scott unloaded. The blast caught him square on the chin.

  This time, Jesse staggered.

  Scott stood from the pantry. Before Jesse could get a defensive arm up, Scott fired again. Another solid shot to the jaw. Jesse grasped for the refrigerator. The unit teetered and went down, two-liter bottles of soda exploding from its open door. Jesse landed against the counter behind it, shuddering the entire house. Problem was, he was now blocking the elevator.

  The shed, Scott thought, scaling the refrigerator to get back to the living room. That’s where the road through the back of the Meadows leads. It’s how the Program’s cars used to come and go unseen.

  Outside the front door, he rounded the side of the house.

  “Leaving so soon?” Techie asked.

  “You wish,” Scott shot back.

  It was clear Techie had awakened Jesse by way of whatever he had installed in his head. With Techie’s help, Jesse would have then left his containment unit and cleared the area of personnel, giving Techie free reign over the command and control’s vast computing power.

  Scott wondered why he hadn’t just used one of his own computers, but then it came to him. Techie was an adrenaline junkie. Making the transfer from Champions HQ was the equivalent of making out with his rival’s girlfriend, while his rival stood in the next room. Hackers lived for opportunities like that.

  Scott pulled himself up and over the wooden fence. When the shed came into his view, he focused into the electronics of the roll-up metal door. Like the elevator, it was powered down. Scott got it back online, arriving at the door as it began to motor into the overhead space.

  He ducked inside. The shed’s sides were lined with lawn care equipment. Ahead, the wall was retracting into the floor, revealing a cement ramp that descended into cold darkness.

  A sliding glass door at the rear of the house shattered.

  “Guess you can’t keep a good man down,” Techie said.

  Gotta hurry.

  Scott activated the overhead lights. As he ran, they blinked to life along the walls of the ramp and across an underground garage. Scott broke into the open space and took a moment to orient himself.

  A quick glance behind showed Jesse’s shadow filling the mouth of the shed.

  Scott aimed himself toward a door across the garage that he thought would give him the straightest access to the computer room. He entered its electronic locking system as he ran, no time to be fearful of booby traps, and disengaged it within seconds. The door he pulled open was metal and dense. In a corridor on its other side, Scott sealed the door, taking another moment to lock it.

  He just needed to keep Jesse off him until he could stop Techie. If Jesse pounded him into the ground afterwards, fine. Hopefully, reinforcements would arrive before that happened, though.

  Server room, Server room…

  Scott zigged and zagged, studying every doorway he ran past until he was in a part of the underground facility he recognized. He broke through the conference room and out the other side. A bang rang out behind him. Jesse had just smashed in the door from the garage.

  Two doors past Kilmer’s office, Scott skidded to a stop. He could feel the cycling power of the giant servers beyond. He seized the handle, not surprised to find the magnetic lock engaged. Techie knew his time was up. Through the earpiece, the sound of typing sped up.

  Scott accessed the locking system.

  The trap that awaited him wasn’t subtle. Before Scott could pull back, though, the explosion sheared his consciousness. Not a direct hit. Not like the last time. But it was potent enough to drop him hard in the corridor.

  A mad fit of laughter burst through his ear piece.

  Scott gained his feet but his equilibrium was shot. He staggered into the opposite wall and fell.

  “Wheee!” Techie squealed.

  Scott lolled his head toward the server room. The door fell in and out of focus. He concentrated and managed to access the system again. The trap had been crude, hastily assembled. Scott was betting Techie hadn’t armed the system with a second one. Techie was expecting him to go straight for the servers, which would be mined to the teeth.

  The heavy door clunked open.

  Scott’s assessment had been correct.

  His earpiece vibrated with sputtering, but Scott could hear the same sound through the door now—as well as more frantic typing. Scott rose to his feet and lurched toward the room. His equilibrium held this time.

  He was raising an arm to push the door wide when a giant fist broke against his helmet. The laser inside his visor shattered, and Scott was knocked through the air like a My Buddy doll. He landed back first and skidded down the corridor.

  “Geez,” Techie told someone in exasperation. “What took you so long?”

  Scott blinked his eyes. The helmet had absorbed a good deal of the blow, thank God, but without his visor he was blind and defenseless. The corridor that stretched ahead of him was a pale blur.

  He started crawling its length when a hand closed around his neck, crunching his cervical bones. Pain exploded down his arms and legs as he was lifted up. He didn’t realize his helmet had been cracked open until it fell away like two halves of a hazelnut shell.

  The ear piece was still intact, unfortunately.

  “Aw, so close and yet so pathetic,” Techie said. “I guess the lesson here is never tussle with the big boys.”

  The blur of Jesse’s squat face rounded into view. The fingers clenching Scott’s neck tensed. Except for the tears leaking from his eyes, Scott could feel very little. That was bad.

  He had one chance.

  He focused into the electronic implant in Jesse’s head. There would be no time to figure it out, no putting Jesse back to sleep. Plain and simple, he would have to blow the crap out of it.

  He slipped inside and navigated its conductors. At the place where the implant drew power from Jesse’s brain cells, Scott watched the orb in his fading vision shift from red to orange.

  No hesitation, he thought.

  When the orb verged on the white release point, Scott did exactly that—hesitated.

  Blowing the device would mean killing Jesse. He could tell himself he was doing it for a greater good, but did that make him any better than the Scale? Scott’s oxygen-starved brain began to distort his senses.

  Maybe there was a compromise.

  Scott backed off, allowing the orb to return to orange. He had to get it just right. Too much power and Jesse was history. Too little, and the same would be true of him.

  At the boundary between orange and red, Scott released the energy. A charge shot throughout the implant. Jesse’s hand squeezed tighter, his thumb cracking something in Scott’s throat, before jerking open.

  Scott fell to the ground, head clearing, sensation burning back into his arms and legs. Jesse lurched forward and backward, his empty gaze never leaving Scott’s. At last, he toppled sideways into the wall and slid to the floor. A loud snore freight-trained through his nostrils and then burst from his lips.

  The jolt had been just enough to scramble the device.

  When Scott tried to vocalize a “Yes!” something hard caught in his throat, and the sound came out pained and ragged. The taste of blood slicked over his palate. He gained his feet and pushed open the door to the server room. Without his visor or glasses, the space was a smear of blinking lights. But he could see well enough to tell that the desk facing the main console wa
s vacant.

  He looked around at the other stations, all of them empty, too.

  Techie had done it again. Like at the old man’s farmhouse, he had accessed the server remotely. He had toyed with Scott from a distance. Scott pulled the transceiver from his ear and spiked it against the floor.

  But wait a second, he thought as the components skittered off.

  When he’d opened the magnetic door earlier, he had heard Techie inside.

  Something darted from the shadow behind the door. Scott turned his head just as a slap landed across his face.

  He skipped back in surprise and squinted his attacker into partial focus. The person was short and thin with a sweep of tired brown hair. His smudged-in eyes were bright with excitement, though.

  “Wait,” Scott said, holding his stinging cheek, trying to make sense of what was happening. “Wayne?”

  “Guess you’re not the only one with superpowers, huh?”

  Wayne removed his headset, one that contained a modulator to deepen his voice. Bouncing on the balls of his sloppy tennis shoes, he stiffened his upraised hands like a karate master.

  “What in the…” A painful rack of coughing hit Scott. “…hell are you doing?”

  “What does it look like? Out hacking your sorry ass.”

  “I don’t believe this,” Scott muttered.

  As Wayne prepared another slap attack, Scott stepped in and landed a straight right to his mustache. Wayne’s legs buckled and he dropped to the ground. Scott took another step forward, but his friend and rival was out cold.

  Shaking his head, Scott wheeled toward the console. He’d get the story later.

  He was almost to the glowing screen when a cadre of footsteps pounded down the corridor. They slowed outside the room, and Scott imagined Dutch and his men looking over Jesse’s snoring body.

  “Are you all right?” Dutch called.

  “Fine,” Scott answered, pausing to gag on more blood. “Take care of those guys. I’ve got the computer.”

  While they went to work on Jesse, Scott brought his nose to the screen and scanned the lines of commands and responses. The transfer had made its way along a chain of various accounts, it looked like. But had it reached its destination? If not for the high likelihood that Wayne had mined the computer system, Scott could have slipped inside and found out.

  Instead, it was back to Hacking 101.

  With a series of commands, he drilled down to the root level and into a hidden log. The transactions were all there, all processing. Like water in rising riverbeds, they were threatening to spill their banks, pour into the Russian account. Not there yet, but really flipping close.

  He began punching in commands to retract the funds, to get them flowing the other direction.

  No dice.

  He then tried to halt the flow, but that wasn’t happening either.

  A desperate sweat broke over Scott’s face as the first U.S. dollars hit the Russian account. Did he risk going into the system? Did he make the potentially lethal bet that he could outmaneuver the mines?

  Then something occurred to him.

  To cover the Scale’s tracks, Wayne would have to destroy the master log that the transactions were running off of. The one right in front of him. Scott searched until he located a backdoor. He punched in the command he hoped would prematurely detonate the log, wipe away the transactions.

  A short line of text appeared on the screen.

  > Abort? Y/N

  “Yes, yes, yes!” Scott cried, jamming the Y key.

  > Password?

  “No, no, no!”

  Scott racked his brain, his eyes darting back and forth. On the kind of configuration he was dealing with, it would be a six-character code. That would take way too long to hack. And guessing would give him an approximately one in five-hundred-million chance of success.

  The dollar flow into the Russian account accelerated, thousands turning into tens of thousands.

  Have to stop thinking like Techie and start thinking like Wayne…

  A particular word came to him all at once, and he pecked it out.

  > a-s-s-w-a-d

  He slammed the Enter key. The screen paused before scrolling out a final line of text.

  Scott sat down hard in the chair.

  They had done it.

  > Aborted

  The Champions had stopped the Scale.

  A pair of hands landed on his shoulders. Scott squinted around to find Kilmer standing over him, reading past his head. He couldn’t tell for sure, but he thought he saw tears standing in his director’s eyes.

  Kilmer squeezed his shoulders warmly. “Helluva job, Champion. Helluva job.”

  “Thanks,” Scott replied hoarsely. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

  “Techie locked us in one of the containment cells, but we’re fine. You don’t look so good, though.”

  He was sure he didn’t. He coughed and swallowed another rag of blood.

  “Let’s get you treated,” Kilmer said, then paused to look around. “And how about Janis?”

  Scott shot to his feet.

  Janis.

  44

  When Scott emerged from the house, he found Tyler and the new girl, Erin, helping Margaret from the back of one of the police cruisers. He ran up, scanning the tinted windows of the other cars.

  “Is Janis or Reginald with you?” he called, each word feeling like a punch in his throat.

  Tyler shook his head. “We thought we’d find them back here.”

  Frantic, Scott focused into the rapport again. Janis, can you hear me?

  Still no answer.

  Scott reached the cruiser he’d come to the house in and landed in the driver’s seat. The key was still in the ignition. He fired up the engine. But before he could throw the car into gear, the passenger door opened.

  “You’ve got no offense,” Tyler said as he climbed in.

  He was right, Scott realized. He hadn’t replaced his helmet, which meant he was half blind, as well.

  “All right, buckle up.”

  Scott gunned the cruiser up over the curb. The rear wheels spewed grass and dirt before catching hold and shooting them toward the wooden fence to the backyard. Planks snapped and clattered over the windshield. Scott fought with the steering until the wheels climbed onto the back drive. The cruiser broke through a second section of wooden fencing and plunged into the woods.

  “This way will be faster,” Scott said.

  The white blur of the cement levee flashed through the trees ahead. Janis had said something about a gate. Scott focused into the levee’s electronics, found the switch he was looking for, and powered it on. As the cruiser rounded a turn and descended on the levee, a metal gate retracted into the cement.

  Scott punched the gas. The end of the still-opening gate raked the passenger side door, throwing sparks.

  “Hey, uh, sure you’re all right to drive?” Tyler asked.

  Scott didn’t answer. His entire focus was on the task at hand: getting to Janis.

  Beyond the levee, the cruiser bounced onto a dirt road that emerged onto the back of another property owned by the Program. Scott sped down a quarter-mile driveway and skidded out onto Glen Springs Road. The neighborhood behind the Grove would have to be the next one, he thought.

  It came up fast. Scott cranked the wheel hard, plowing over the development’s landscaped entranceway.

  He still had the house location on file from when Janis had sent it to him telepathically. He pushed the cruiser to sixty, shooting deeper into the neighborhood, squinting at the upcoming streets.

  “There,” Tyler said, pointing.

  Scott spun from asphalt onto a dirt road. The house appeared quickly. A couple of men, who looked like hired thugs, saw the approaching cruiser and staggered off into the woods.

  At the front of the house, Scott left the cruiser running. He and Tyler jumped out. By the time Scott circled the front of the car, he saw that Tyler had stopped at the bottom of the front porch steps. Energ
y glowed around his fists.

  “What is it?” Scott asked.

  But now he saw, too. The shadow of a figure was approaching the front door. Using a foot, the figure pulled the door open the rest of the way and emerged onto the porch. Only Reginald wasn’t alone. He was carrying someone. Even in his half-blind state, Scott recognized the spill of red hair.

  “Janis!” he shouted.

  He smelled the blood before he saw it. In her hair, over her face. He swept several matted strands from her closed eyes. One of her brows was cut, the skin beneath her eyes dark with bruising. Scott cupped her cheeks in his hands.

  “What happened?”

  “She’ll be all right,” Reginald said softly. “Just give her time.”

  Scott looked up, past the blood-spotted towel wrapping the man’s neck, and into his blue eyes. Scott moved his arms beneath Janis until Reginald—or the person pretending to be Reginald—relinquished her.

  “Who are you?” Scott demanded, stepping back.

  “Well, I can only be one of two people: the real McCoy or his sister. Of course, either way I would claim to be the first. In my case, though, it’s true. It’s also true that my sister is dead.”

  The electricity around Tyler’s fists grew louder.

  “What was the last thing you said to me before you left?” Scott asked as a test.

  The shifter moved his gaze down to Janis, then back up to Scott. “Said I’d get her to you safe.”

  Scott started to nod before realizing Reginald’s sister could have overheard their exchange through Titan’s transceiver. The shifter must have seen the fresh mistrust on his face.

  “There’s a body upstairs. You can see for yourself.”

  “I’ll go,” Tyler said. “Show me,” he said to the shifter.

  The shifter nodded and turned.

  “Be careful,” Scott called after Tyler.

  As they disappeared through the front door, Scott gazed down on Janis. She was warm in his embrace and breathing. Both positives. He found a bloodless area on her forehead and pressed his lips to it.

  Janis, he whispered.

  No response came, though a gentle force seemed to take his call and tuck it away.