Sighing, he released the valves on his helmet. He’d try again, but first he needed to gather himself. On his last search, his concentration had fragmented into images of Janis and Tyler—yet again.
Pulling his helmet free, he set it upside down on the desk. With a small towel, he mopped his face dry, then went to work on the inside of his headgear. During planning, Agent Steel had said her munitions experts could have the explosives defused within thirty minutes, but Scott didn’t know whether she’d meant under normal conditions or a full blown sandstorm.
Either way, they were depending on him.
Before replacing his helmet, Scott studied the LED display and the array of illuminated towers that had been set with charges. All right, if I was a wireless detonator, where would I want to be? he thought. What would be my optimal location? Somewhere in close proximity to the explosives, certainly… Scott noted the crude semi-circular arrangement of the towers.
Outside, something roared. Scott spun toward the door, heart in his throat. The sound had started out low and guttural, but now it was building until Scott had no doubt what he was hearing.
An explosion.
Jamming his helmet over his head, he activated the microphone. “This is Team Two, does anyone copy?” He waited a moment, listening to the squiggles in his earpiece. “This is Team Two, does anyone copy?”
Janis, can you hear me?
Scott closed his eyes and focused toward the towers depicted on the LED display. He inspected the charges that webbed their bases, drawing himself around the electrical components that would receive and act on a detonation signal. They were all intact … save for on the final tower.
Whoever’s controlling the detonator just leveled it.
He imagined the tower erupting in flames, like the transformer he had blown in Mr. Shine’s neighborhood—only the tower in question was infinitely larger. Scott thought of the two men tasked with defusion at that site. They would have been incinerated in an instant.
Outside, the still-exploding tower roared above the sound of the sandstorm. Scott’s stomach churned as he imagined the tower spewing sulfur dioxide, the acid Agent Steel had warned her men about. An acid that could eat through anything. And with the storm’s winds to swirl it around…
Janis, please answer me!
He waited an agonizing minute, but no response came. He started toward the door, then stopped and looked back at the LED display. Should he keep looking for the detonator or go out in search of the others?
31
It had begun with a flash. By the time Janis turned with the others, a rumbling tower of black-orange flames was shooting high above the complex, billowing through night and storm. It reminded Janis of the dreams she’d so often had, of nuclear explosions, of incineration and death.
Like an afterimage, she felt two of Agent Steel’s bomb team present in her thoughts one moment and gone the next. She squeezed her eyes closed. Two lifetimes, blown to nothing.
“Get to cover!” Agent Steel ordered.
Janis and the team veered from their destination, losing themselves in a copse of tall fracturing towers. The roar of sand and fire seemed to follow them. When they stopped, Janis noticed smoke rising from the back of Jesse’s suit. Something stung her throat, like a beginning case of strep.
“That tower’s spewing acid,” Agent Steel shouted. “Janis, can you—?”
“I’m on it,” Janis cut in.
With a thought, she shaped the space around them into a V-shaped shield. The wind rushing toward them became cleaved, sand and acid passing harmlessly to either side.
Janis pointed. “That explosion, was it…?”
“Intentional,” Agent Steel responded coldly. “My men don’t make mistakes.”
Janis scanned the area with her mind. The effort to do so while holding the poisonous winds at bay spawned a knife-like pain in the center of her head. She was pushing her limits. When Scott’s voice echoed into her awareness, asking if she were all right, she was unable to respond.
Feedback screeched through the complex’s loudspeaker system, bouncing off the steel buildings. Janis thought it was a result of her efforts, until the clamorous feedback was followed by a voice.
“CONSIDER THAT LITTLE EXPLOSION A WARNING,” a man said. Janis recognized the accent as Russian. “WE HAVE MANY MORE BOMBS, AND WE WILL BLOW THEM ONE BY ONE UNTIL YOU LEAVE. WE KNOW WHERE YOU ARE. WE SEE YOU HIDING. IF YOU ARE NOT OUTSIDE THE PERIMETER IN TEN MINUTES, ANOTHER BOMB WILL DETONATE. YOU CANNOT DEFEAT US.”
All visors turned toward Agent Steel.
“So is that it?” Creed asked. “We gonna duck and run?”
“No,” she replied. “Each team has an assignment. We’re trusting them to do theirs, just as they’re trusting us to do ours. Our target is the engineering complex, one hundred twenty meters that way. Let’s move.”
Janis thought about Scott. She wondered to what extent the misunderstanding with Tyler was interfering with his ability to do his job. If only she’d been more damned forthcoming…
“Won’t they be expecting us now?” Tyler asked.
“Absolutely,” Agent Steel said. “Which means this is no longer a stealth campaign. We’ll be entering full battle mode. Be prepared to hit the enemy with everything you have.”
Creed giggled as his finger blades extended. “Music to my ears, big momma. Music to my ears.”
Scott listened to the final words echo off—“YOU CANNOT DEFEAT US”—his grip tight around the door handle. He eased the door open a crack. Sand beat its way inside, blinding his visor. His lips wrinkled back from a terrible taste, like someone had passed gas in his face.
He sealed the door and staggered backward. “Dammit!”
The air outside was so thick with sulfur dioxide, the smell would be the least of his problems. That acid would burn through his suit long before he could locate the other Champions. Scott found a sliver of hope in the speaker’s message. If he was ordering them out, the Champions could presumably move under their own power, which meant they were all right. They might even be returning his way.
But then he recalled that Agent Steel was leading them. So, no, they wouldn’t be backtracking.
He returned to the LED display. Once more, he noted the crude semicircle of stabilizing towers. With the tap of a finger, he highlighted a building in their center. A readout below identified it as a monitoring station.
“Fifty-two meters tall,” he read aloud. “Hmm … That would definitely give the detonating device a clean signal.”
Scott trained his gaze on an outlet in a wall beside the desk. A second later, he was inside. He descended to a main cable and sped across the complex until he had his building. Up he shot, zagging this way and that, fuses blowing in his wake. He blasted out of each outlet on the top floors, seeking, feeling. His trainer, Gabriella, called the technique “going to the source.”
And then…
Hell yeah!
He found the detonator’s signature. The device was simple, the circuit board it housed so small that Scott had missed it on his earlier global scans. He began to concentrate into it.
Whoever’s holding that thing is in for a nasty little surprise, Scott thought, already picturing it blowing apart. From a distance, he felt the lower half of his face swell into a huge smile. He was back in his element, back to doing what he did best. The red point in his mind’s eye grew.
But before it could attain the familiar shape of an orb, the point wavered like a candle’s flame and went out.
Well, lovely.
Scott had been afraid that might happen. Lacking a direct connection to the device, he was taking a leap from a power outlet. But across the open air, his powers were attenuating. By the time they reached the detonator, they were too weak to concentrate, too weak to blow anything.
Which meant the detonator was still operable.
Scott concentrated a second time, his temples aching with strain, but he couldn’t gather enough energy at the target. With a choke of air, h
e returned to himself.
The man said ten minutes…
He was angling his eyes toward the time display inside his visor when a second tower erupted.
Scott staggered to his feet.
Two more of Steel’s men gone. Oil production at Al Karak crippled by another ten percent.
God, Janis, would you please tell me you’re okay? Would you please tell me what’s going on?
No response, except for the activation of the outdoor loudspeakers.
“LIKE FOOLS, YOU PERSIST,” said the cruel voice. “THIS TIME WE WILL GIVE YOU FIVE MINUTES. DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND? YOU CANNOT DEFEAT US.”
Scott sagged against the doorframe. He listened to the toxic storm outside as it whipped around the oil reservoir in which he was trapped. He imagined the metal plating beading with corrosive acid.
We’re losing, he thought dimly. The Champions are really losing.
And you’re their leader.
The second thought had come unbidden, in a voice he’d always associated with Scott Summers of the X-Men. Old issues flipped through his mind. Issues where Cyclops had to lead despite all kinds of hardships: believing Jean Grey loved someone else, or worse, believing her dead. And by Cyclops’s steadfast leadership, the X-Men had prevailed. Time and again.
Scott set his jaw and straightened from the doorframe.
If he couldn’t access the detonator through his abilities, he would have to take it out in person.
He would ford the storm.
Janis and the others reached the engineering center just as the second tower erupted. A rush of heat and poison blew against Janis’s telekinetic shield, but she didn’t look back. None of them did.
At the front door of the facility, Tyler liquefied the lock with an electric blast. Janis telepathically scanned the space beyond the door and gave an all clear signal. Their path to the facility itself had been free of Soviet agents, which had not surprised Janis—after all, the air would be just as toxic to them.
But she hadn’t expected this, an arrival sans ambush.
The team pushed their way inside, their synthetic soles silent over the tiled floor. Jesse managed to close the doors quietly, sealing out the roar of storm and fire. In a shower of white sparks, Tyler soldered the doors to one another and their frames so no air could leak through.
The team spread apart, Agent Steel in the lead, her giant carbine drawn, Janis and Tyler flanking her. Janis stretched her mind throughout the facility until, one by one, the Soviet Agents lit up like beacons.
I’ve got good news and bad news, she informed the rest of her teammates. The good news is they’re clustered together, in the engineering room. The bad news is it’s not going to be the free-for-all Creed was hoping for. There are innocent Saudis inside, the engineers. A dozen of them.
Steel gave a hand sign: How many enemies?
About twice that. Janis tested her power’s limits, probing for the weakest mind. It turned out to belong to a Russian soldier, his nerves as taut as bow strings. Using his senses, she peered around the large control room. Two of them look like speed demons, Janis said, like the one we dealt with outside. Four are really frigging big—and ugly. And there’s another Artificial. I don’t have a clean line on him, but he doesn’t look like the others. He has tanks on his back.
Janis’s head ached in warning and she withdrew her consciousness from the soldier.
“Do you remember the Halpike Maneuver from training?” Agent Steel asked in a low whisper.
Helmeted heads began to nod.
“Let’s proceed, then.”
Using his teeth, Scott ripped away another length of duct tape. He had found the tape while rummaging in the back of the storage room. He’d also found a large roll of tarpaper, which he had promptly begun tearing into strips. Now he took a final strip, rolled it around the last exposed section of suit on his right calf, and taped the strip in place.
Save for his head and boots, he was completely covered.
“It’s not perfect,” he muttered, holding his helmet’s visor up like a mirror, “but coupled with the suit’s emergency oxygen, it should protect me till I can reach that monitoring station.”
Outside, another tower exploded.
With the same efficiency with which he’d bound his suit, Scott stifled his emotions. He had to remain calm, had to think clearly.
He wound what remained of the duct tape around the joints of his arms and legs. Then he drew his helmet over his head and locked it in place.
At the door, he seized the handle and drew it open. The force with which sand and smoke blasted his visor stole his breath. He gave a command for the display to direct him to the monitoring station. With a second command, he activated the suit’s oxygen at its lowest output.
Taking thin sips, he plunged into the storm. The winds shoved him like ocean waves, but he kept his footing.
He drew resolve from the image of Steel’s men operating inside their bomb tents, working to defuse the charges while knowing theirs could be the next to blow. They were counting on him, just as Agent Steel and the Champions were counting on him. Just as Janis, no matter her allegiance in love, was counting on him. And he’d be damned if he was going to disappoint any of them.
With a bound forearm to his visor, he staggered forward.
Scott, are you all right?
Janis’s voice.
I’m fine. He maintained as even, as professional a mental voice as he could, even as relief discharged throughout him. I found the detonator but couldn’t destroy it. It’s on the top floor of a monitoring station. I’m headed there now. Where are you and the others?
We reached the engineering facility, she answered. We’re inside.
More relief blasted through him at the thought that she and the rest of the team were insulated from the toxic maelstrom, that they were safe from the bombs dotting their landscape.
And the enemy? he asked.
We’re … we’re preparing … engage them. Her voice faded in and out, as though they were losing their signal. I won’t be able to keep this line open much longer … had to know that you were safe, though. I would never forgive myself if … Scott, what you saw earlier…
It’s all right, he interrupted. Stay focused on the mission.
A silence followed, during which Scott thought she had cut out.
I love you, she said.
The words, the sincerity of them, threatened to topple the wall he had erected. Arms and legs churning through the storm, he struggled for a response. His view through the visor was a chaos of sand and bubbling streaks of acid, but the display showed he was halfway to his target.
He’d make it, he told himself. But if he didn’t, he wanted Janis to know something.
I lo— he began.
The explosion blew him off his feet. He landed hard, blinded by an afterimage of white plasma. He patted his hands around his helmet and valves. No ruptures. He dragged himself from the new inferno, from the heat washing over him. A strip of tarpaper trailed from his arm. He paused long enough to relocate a piece of tape from his elbow to seal the breach.
Behind cover, he paused to catch his breath.
You still there, Janis?
She wasn’t.
Using his abilities, Scott scanned the towers again. Four blown. Six remained. He focused on the arrangement of active explosives, trying to detect how close Steel’s men were to defusing them. Too hard to determine. He reached throughout the facility to ensure those were the only bombs that remained, that, in his prior state of emotional grief, he hadn’t missed others.
What’s this?
He honed in on a new signature and felt the blood drain from his face.
No…
He had missed one. And judging by the wiring, the charge was massive. By Scott’s estimation, it held enough explosive to blow the entire engineering complex into the lower stratosphere.
Janis, can you hear me? Janis?!
He imagined her and the others converging on the
engineering room at that moment.
“Get out!” he yelled into his microphone. “The facility is wired—do you read me?—the facility is set to blow! Get out immediately!” The answering garble of static told him his warning wasn’t getting through.
Scott staggered into a run, using the display inside his visor to orient himself. If he didn’t reach the detonator in time, the next explosion wouldn’t be a tower. His teammates … his friends … the only girl he had ever loved … they would all be decimated. And he would never forgive himself.
He’d gone five meters when a red light began flashing inside his helmet.
His suit was out of oxygen.
32
Janis stood with Jesse outside the east entrance to the main engineering room. Any second, Agent Steel would lead her men through the room’s front entrance, drawing Soviet fire. In a pincher move, the Champions would enter next, she and Tyler hitting the enemy from opposite sides, while Creed used his super speed to remove the Saudi engineers to safety.
As in most of their training sessions, Jesse would play wrecking ball.
Janis peered up at him as they waited. He was having to stoop to keep his helmet from touching the ceiling. His knuckles brushed the floor. He’d been awfully quiet this trip, Janis realized. Quieter than usual.
When he caught her watching him, he shifted in his giant boots. Suspicion flared in Janis’s head.
She had been wary ever since he claimed someone had called him with crucial information on the Soviets. But now she recalled the time he’d gone missing and how her attempts to contact him had run into some sort of man-made interference. She recalled the night Creed had accosted her at the bonfire: Loretta said he left, mumbling something about maybe never seeing her again. Something’s going down, man. Something bad.
Maybe Creed was right. Maybe something bad was going down.
And maybe if she hadn’t been so caught up in her guilt over the Scott-Janis-Tyler triangle, alarms would have gone off in her head a lot sooner. She slipped into his mind.
XGeneration (Book 4): Pressure Drop Page 22