The four remaining members of Generation X flew up the side of the mountain just in time to find Paige sitting next to Recall on the hillside. Paige waved frantically as she saw them.
They swept closer. Angelo was hanging under Monet, his hands clasped in hers. He shouted, “Welcome back, amigol” “Never mind us,” shouted Paige. “Chill and Pound have Espeth.”
“Where?” said Ev. “We didn’t see them coming in.”
Recall didn’t hesitate. “A hundred and ten yards that way,” he pointed.
“Giddy-up,” said Jubilee, who was riding on Ev’s back.
Ev banked into a turn and swept under the tree canopy in the direction she had indicated.
Monet and Angelo were right there with them. “Drop me,” Angelo yelled, “just before we get there, maybe thirty feet out.”
“Put you down?” asked Monet.
“Don’t even slow down, just drop me!”
“It’s your funeral,” she said.
They came on the pair and their struggling captive just where Recall had predicted. On cue, Monet opened her hands, and Angelo fell. Then, the skin on his hands and feet snapped out, and Angelo was gliding, like a tree-frog Ev had once seen on a nature special. He wasn’t gliding very well, mind you, but it seemed to be okay, since he used Dog Pound to break his fall.
Ev swept past the two Hounds, both to drop off Jubilee at a ,safe distance, and to provide a distraction for Monet, who slipped in behind him to attack Chill.
He put Jubes down a few yards away, and when he turned back, Monet was standing on the ground, squaring off hand-to-hand with Chill. Angelo had Pound all wrapped up in his skin so that he couldn’t see, and the robot dogs circled them, seemingly unsure what to do. Monet rabbit-punched with enough force to knock over a small tree, but Chill ducked under it, reached out and put his hands against her side.
Monet just stopped. Frost formed all over her, and a breath escaped from her lips, instantly turning to fog, condensing snow out of the air. She fell to the ground, not like a statue, but more like a side of half-thawed beef. “That—hurt,” she gasped.
Ev saw Chill turn towards him. Ordinarily he was a confident guy, but he was up against somebody who had stopped both Monet and Jono without breaking a sweat. “Hoo, boy,” he heard himself say.
Sharpe pounded the console in frustration. They’d lost one of his hounds. This shouldn’t have happened! But there was still one last fail-safe available to him.
Paige ran up the hill after Recall. The powered armor still gave him a speed advantage, even over her. “I should have had one of them fly me,” he said, “I can get them back. I know it!” Paige lifted her head. If Recall was right, and she had no doubt of it, they shouldn’t be far ahead.
Then he suddenly fell to his knees, so abruptly that she nearly tripped over him. She ran back. “What’s wrong?” “They cut the power to my armor. Stuff is heavy.”
“Can you get it off?”
“No time. Help me up the hill.”
Chill was just about to do something nasty when a swarm of plasma fireworks swept around Ev and started exploding between the two of them. Ev jumped for cover, just as a beam of shimmering cold swept past him.
The cyber-hounds seemed to regain their composure, and one of them leaped toward Jubilee. Ev jumped in-between, the robot beast locking its jaws down on his arm. Fortunately, he was still synched with Monet, so he wasn’t hurt. Then he saw a second one closing on them. It was going to get complicated.
He was so intent that he didn’t see Chill until he was practically within touching distance. And if Chill touched him— “Three-dog-night!” It was Recall’s voice.
Ev turned to see him just down the slope, his weight sagged heavily against Paige.
“Listen to me,” Recall continued. “Circus peanuts!”
Three-dog-night had an intense memory of sweet marshmallow and metallic artificial orange flavor. Like a jeweler’s chisel striking the one flaw in a perfect diamond, something in his mind shattered. He remembered cellophane that crackled under his fingertips, green and stringy Easter grass, a splintery basket full of jelly beans, his mother’s smiling face.
Chill gasped like a swimmer breaking the surface.
He was back!
* • •
“Three-dog-night is already maxed on EMP gain,” yelled Happersen. “They’re taking off his helmet. We’ve lost him for good.”
Sharpe cursed under his breath. “Shut it down, the armor power, the amplifier. Just shut it down.” He felt his lunch wash in like a breaker in the back of his throat. “We’ve got to activate the inner defenses. Launch the defense drones.” He looked up. “Where’s Namik?” He spun around. “Where’s Namik?”
Namik sat at her desk, watching the progress indicator on her computer screen. In a few moments, all the data from Project Foxhole would be in her possession. Time for the final step.
She lifted a hidden panel on her desktop and pressed her palm against the panel there. It scanned her handprint, then a small display flashed insert key. Sh? reached up and snapped the chain around her neck, carefully taking from it the decorative pewter sword that she always wore there. She inserted the blade of the sword into a slot in the panel. Tiny magnets aligned with sensors in the slot, timed destruct activated, the display read. Below it, a timer began counting down the sequence.
She smiled as she stood up and prepared to leave. It wouldn’t all happen at once, of course. First Sharpe would lose his precious Hounds. For good.
“Top Dog,” yelled Recall, “Tabasco sauce!”
Red, so like candy, metallic green band around the top like Christmas wrap, the little bottle so tempting. Tiny hands grasping, his tongue licking the crusty scarlet lump on the top of the bottle. Searing agony, his own cries of fear and pain. Strong hands guiding him, his grandfather’s brown eyes as he pressed the cold, quenching carton of milk against his lips—As though someone had pulled a loose piece of yam on a knitted sweater, his memories began to unravel.
“Awk!” Pound thrashed, like someone waking from a nightmare.
Happersen looked up and made eye contact with Bouille. They both knew things were going horribly wrong. Namik was gone. Sharpe was gone. They’d lost the last Hound. He shut down the armor and amplifier controls with a sigh. “Shut down the cyber-hounds,” he instructed Bouille.
Then his screen went blank. All his screens went blank.
He looked up at Bouille. Her eyes were wide. She punched frantically at her controls. “Yours too?”
He got up and ran from console to console. Everything was dead.
Then the disaster alarms sounded.
Sharpe held his service automatic to Namik’s head with the cold,efficiency of a trained killer. “What have you done?”
Despite the cold gun metal pressed against her skin, Namik laughed. “It can’t be stopped, Sharpe. This whole place is going down like a house of cards. Your bosses don’t care about you, and frankly, neither do I. Get out while you still can.”
He lowered the gun and turned to the hidden panel in her desk. His fingers traced over it, trying to figure it out. She managed a single step away from the wall before he snapped the gun’s aim back on her. “Turn it off,” he said.
“I can’t,” she said coolly. “Shoot me if you want, but I’m the only one who can activate the security drones to cover our escape.” His aim wavered slightly. “Your Hounds are gone, Sharpe. Dead. That was part of the plan. But you don’t have to be.” '
Chill and Recall were already out of their now powerless armor, stripped down to the tights they wore underneath. With Angelo’s help, the bottom half of his armor slipped off the still groggy Dog Pound’s legs.
Recall bent down and picked up Pound’s discarded helmet, looking at it. “Alas, poor Top Dog, I knew him well.” Then his eyes went wide and he threw the helmet down. “Get away from the armor,” he yelled, “all of you!”
Angelo and Ev grabbed Pound, half-lifting, half dragging him away from his armor. Everyone
else scrambled as well. Recall stopped eight or ten yards away and crouched warily. The others fell in behind him. Pound managed to get his feet under him, and he noticed for the first time that the cyberhounds were now trotting along behind like obedient pets.
Then the armor exploded. Every disarticulated bit of it was blown into powder. Pound choked, coughed. “That could have been us!"
Paige stared at Recall. “How did you know?”
He shrugged. “I said that for a minute there, it was like I knew everything that ever happened, and everything that ever would happen. I’m still getting little flashes of it.” A strange expression crossed his face. “I wonder what ‘cosmic awareness’ means?”
There was a rumble, growing in intensity, as though a stampede were approaching. “It means,” said Angelo, “that we’re done for if we don’t get moving.” He pointed up-hill. Through the trees they could see a profusion of moving metal, man-sized, crab-like robots, blue arcs of electricity crackling between their shock-prod claws.
They turned down-slope only to find themselves looking into a line of charging Genogoths, extending as far as they could see in either direction.
And they were in the middle.
Sharpe charged down the corridor towards the control room, but he met Happersen, Bouille, and the other technicians halfway there.
“Everything’s dead,” said Happersen between gasping breaths, “some kind of virus wiped the entire system.”
“I know,” growled Shaipe, “Namik was a plant. There’s a self-destruct timer running. Get everybody to the hangar bay for evacuation.”
Happersen looked at him. “Where are you going?”
Sharpe looked at the spiral staircase at the end of the hall. “Up to the anti-aircraft missile battery. I had to let Namik go to cover our escape, but I’m hoping she might have missed a few loose ends. She’s not getting away with my data.”
Paige had read somewhere that when caught in the middle, it’s best to pick a side.
That was the easy part. Generation X and the liberated Mutant Musketeers simply waited for the Genogoth charge, then joined in as it swept past them. It was a furious battle, close-up and hand-to-pincer. It smelled like blood and ozone, sweat and fear.
Paige had considered it a given that her teammates would give a good accounting of themselves in the fight, and they did, but what surprised her was the ferocity and resourcefulness of the Musketeers. They might have lost their mega-power-enhancements, but they’d gained a new confidence and determination she’d never seen before.
Chill iced over sensors, shorted out shock-prods with condensed moisture, and formed slush under his feet to instantly slide himself away from danger. Though he’d lost his ability to command all animals, Pound still had the cyber-hounds, which now behaved more like loyal hunting dogs than vicious killers. And Recall—he’d picked up a riot baton from a fallen Genogoth and was dashing in among the robots, always seeming to find the one path between their flailing limbs, always striking the one place where his simple weapon could do the most damage.
But the robots came without number, and the Genogoth charge had stalled. Paige paused among the chaos, waited for Recall to pass near, and grabbed his arm. “Recall,” she yelled over the din, “find us a way into this place.”
He nodded and closed his eyes for a moment. He frowned and opened them again. “There isn’t one.”
“What?”
“Not now, not without a big can-opener of some kind.
Everything is sealed up tight from the inside. Unless you have a way to blow off the front door, we’re out of luck.” He closed his eyes again for a moment, then opened them, wide. “Paige, there are going to be lots of ways in real soon now, but it won’t do us any good. This place is going to self-destruct! We’ve got to get Jono and Catfish out of there!”
Paige ducked under the arm of a damaged robot and buried her fist wrist deep in its optical sensor. It twitched and fell. “You just said,” she hardly missed a beat, “there was no way in.” She blinked. “No, you said unless we could think of a way to blow open the front door.”
Paige activated the radio in her ear. “Black, this is Paige Guthrie. Answer me.”
“I’m busy,” he said.
She shoved aside another robot crab, and it staggered down the slope, only to have Monet and Ev tear it in half, “So am I. Listen, Black, pull your people back. The base is going to self-destruct.”
“How do you know?”
She looked at Recall. “I just know, that’s all. Pull them back. Listen, do you have explosives here, lots of them?” “Yes,” he said.
“We’re going to blow the front gate. It’s the only hope Jono and Catfish have,”
“There are turrets,” he said, “we have no way of setting the charges. In an hour there will be armor-piercing missiles here.” “Too late,” she said. “Have them down on the main road, just beyond defensive range, ten minutes top.”
Silence.
“Do it!”
“Ten minutes,” said Black, the skepticism in his voice obvious as he broke the connection.
Paige signaled Monet over, “Go get the Xabago and drive it down to the main mountain road. I’ll round up the team and meet you there in ten minutes.”
Monet looked at her, puzzled. “We’re leaving?”
“No,” she said, “we’re going to invite ourselves in,”
• • •
With a squadron of defense drones standing guard, the Foxhole’s hangar doors opened just long enough for the helicopter to slip put. Namik didn’t know how to fly the sleek black machine, but the automatic piloting system made it unnecessary. She simply punched the map coordinates of her rendezvous point into the system and pressed the “go” button. The computer would take care of the rest.
With computers on her mind, she pulled out the palmtop from her coat pocket. Though it looked like a store-bought model, it was actually an advanced technology prototype, with more than enough storage to house all of Project Foxhole’s data. It wouldn’t hurt to check it before she turned it over to her contact. She flipped up the screen and turned it on. The screen glowed, then a cartoon skeleton danced onto the screen, followed by another, and another. They danced apd chattered like monkeys in a zoo. They seemed to be laughing at her. Then the words “Styx it to you!” appeared on the screen and the computer froze.
She was still trying to figure out what had happened when an alarm buzzer sounded and a red light started flashing on the dash. The label under it read, radar lock. What did that—? Then, with horrible realization, she pressed her nose against the cold Plexiglas of the helicopter’s side window. A black dot streaked up towards her from the distant Foxhole, climbing on a trail of smoke.
The computer slipped from her fingers, but the missile hit before it could reach the cabin floor.
Given that they were sitting among four-hundred pounds of plastic explosives, the distant detonation caused everyone to jump. Paige swore that she saw Styx’s beard turn one shade grayer.
The Genogoths’ demolition person staggered out of the Xabago. “What was that?” she asked. “It is unbecoming of a Genogoth to wet themselves.”
Black stared at the sky of the mountain, where a spreading
cloud of smoke could be seen. “Surface-to-air missile,” he said, “radar guided. Probably a surplus variant of the Soviet OSA-AK.” ~
Monet walked by, carrying one last box of explosives. “You know a lot about missiles,” she said, “do you read Aviation Week too?” She disappeared into the Xabago without waiting for an answer.
Angelo slid up next to Paige. “Let me get this straight,” he said, “we’re going to ram the Xabago into the gate at full speed and blow it wide open, right?”
“Right,” she said. “The Xabago’s on its last legs anyway.” He cleared his throat. “So, who’s going to drive this thing?”
“Me,” she said.
“Good,” he said. “I thought this was all some elaborate way to get rid of
me after I put salt in the sugar-bowl last month.”
Paige glanced at him. “That was you?” She smiled slightly. “No, I’m just going to slip into something more indestructible—” She “husked” to reveal a dull, silver-gray metal. She tapped her fist experimentally against her stomach. “Does that look like adamantium to you? I’m not real sure of the molecular structure.”
“You’re asking me?”
“It’ll have to do.”
The demolition woman emerged from the Xabago again with a switch in her hand connected to the Xabago with a wire. “Radio’s off, everybody. I don’t want this to go off prematurely when I arm it.” They all complied, and once she’d verified it, she flipped the switch to one side. She offered it to Paige. “Flip it the other way, and boom. Good luck.”
Paige climbed past her and into the Xabago's driver’s seat. Jubilee jumped up by the side window. “Come back safe, hick,” she called.
Angelo stood at attention and saluted. “Xabago, we will miss ye.”
Paige waved and turned the key, having flashbacks of what always happened when you started a car in a mobster movie. The Xabago groaned once, twice, then nothing. She cursed and pounded the steering wheel. “Not now!”
The door opened and somebody climbed in next to her. It was Monet. “I’ll push,” she said, “you drive.”
“You sure?” said Paige.
Monet scowled. “Don’t test me,” she said.
On his way to the hangar bay to meet the others, Sharpe found himself passing the holding cell where the two mutant prisoners had been left. He looked at them, the fish-man and the thing-without-a-face, the latter with an inhibitor collar locked around his neck. The fish man looked at him fearfully from the comer of the cell’s single bunk, the other one stood, angry and defiant. He smiled. Small satisfaction, but it didn’t matter, they’d both be as dead as Namik soon enough.
- J'his one ’sfor you, Havok.
Paige fought to keep them on the road as Monet accelerated them like a rocket-sled. Monet was down near the floor, pushing against the same solid spot she’d identified earlier in the trip. Paige could see the massive concrete portal and the two huge iron doors ahead. Hidden turrets on either side of the door had popped up and were firing at them, but they didn’t seem programmed to expect such a fast-moving target on the narrow road. One shell passed cleanly through the rear quarter of the Xabago, but the others missed.
Generation X - Genogoths Page 21