“We’re moving on my count,” came Agent Steel’s voice in her earpiece.
Janis started and shifted her focus from Jesse to the room they were about to breach.
Agent Steel began her whispered count: “Three … two…”
“Wait,” Janis said.
“What is it?” Steel asked impatiently.
“The Soviets. They’re … gone.”
Janis heard a metal door being thrown open and sensed that Agent Steel had entered. Janis waited for the sound of gunfire, but the room remained silent. Janis cracked her own door, then pushed it all the way open. She performed another scan of the room. The two dozen Soviets who had been inside moments before, including the Artificials, were nowhere to be felt.
The vast room housed large desks, each one holding computers, telephones, microphones, shelves of manuals. A computer screen took up the entire north wall, where numbers and schematics flashed.
“Is anyone in here?” Agent Steel called.
One by one, heads began to poke up from behind the desks, several in red-checked headdresses. A whispered murmur went up. “Americans?” a few of them asked each other. After several more whispered exchanges, it was decided.
“Americans!”
They stood and began stumbling toward Steel and her men. Steel responded by raising her gun.
“No, no,” Janis cried, “they’re the Saudi engineers!”
Steel nodded but only lowered her barrel an inch—as much out of caution, Janis guessed, as to avoid being hugged. Across the room, Tyler and Creed had entered and were taking in the scene in confusion, their helmets turning this way and that. Telepathically, Janis explained the situation.
“Where did they go?” Agent Steel asked the Saudis.
“There, there!” They pointed in the direction of the computer screen.
One of the older engineers stepped forward and straightened his glasses. “There is an emergency escape behind one of the panels,” he explained. “It goes beneath the facility, all the way to a garage and helipad. Only a couple of minutes ago they fled through it. They must have heard you coming.”
“The escape route wasn’t in the facility plans provided us,” Steel muttered.
“We are saved!” a young man shouted.
But Janis wasn’t ready to affirm his declaration. She edged toward Agent Steel while feeling toward the mass of escapees. From the mind of one of the Russian soldiers, she picked up something.
“They were ordered out,” Janis said.
Agent Steel’s second in command stepped up beside them. “The bomb squad must have defused the remaining charges,” he said. “When we gained the facility, they realized they were outgunned. And without their explosives to fall back on…”
Agent Steel appeared unconvinced. “We need to leave.”
At that moment, the malevolent voice boomed over the facility speakers. “YOU WERE WARNED,” it said. “AND NOW YOU WILL PAY THE PRICE—WITH YOUR LIVES.”
The Saudi’s began to murmur.
Understanding exploded in Janis’s head.
A trap. We were lead right into a frigging trap.
Using her abilities, she pulled everyone into a huddle—Saudis, Champions, Agent Steel and her men—and formed a womb-like sphere around them. She pushed as much energy into it as she could, the sensation of a knife’s blade cleaving her brain, threatening her psychic circuit breakers. Beyond the pain, she became aware that Jesse wasn’t with them, wasn’t shielded, wasn’t even in the room.
Janis closed her eyes, and prayed.
Minutes earlier
Scott’s temples pounded as he staggered through the firestorm, struggling to keep the display in his visor in focus. His chest ached. He allowed himself another sip of air. That was before he remembered the oxygen in his suit was long gone. He fought back a violent cough.
If he was reading the display right, he had forty meters to go. On a clear day, that might have been fine, but he was presently wading through Dante’s sixth circle. He screwed up his eyes. Through the blackness on all sides, fiery towers loomed like demonic sentries.
With his next step, Scott’s legs began to shake.
C’mon, he urged himself. Just forty more meters. That’s like … like strolling down the hill to…
He cleared sand from his visor with a forearm and, like a dream, observed a sunlit road descending ahead of him. He raised his head. The familiar road ended at a cul-de-sac. With his gaze, Scott traced the driveway that arced from the road, around a cabbage palm, to Janis’s front porch.
Smiling, Scott sped his pace, excitement jittering inside him like movie popcorn. He wasn’t sure if they would be exploring the woods that day, or maybe venturing up to the Grove to climb the oak tree.
He only knew his best friend was waiting for him.
At her driveway, he broke into a run, sneakers slapping over the black asphalt. He took the steps in two leaps, marveling at how athletic his legs felt. Those knobby twigs usually did everything but what he wanted them to do. Through one of the small windows in the door, he caught a flash of red hair. The door opened, and she stepped out to meet him.
Her freckled face broke into a sunny smile. Hey, Scott.
Hi, Jan—
He slammed into something and collapsed onto his back. The vision ended. He squinted around, his hell slipping back by toxic degrees.
He pressed a hand to his chest. God, I hurt.
Beneath his drooping eyelids, he focused on the display inside his visor. He was out of oxygen, out of chances. But he needed to see how close he’d come. The distance indicator sharpened long enough to reveal that his locator had gone screwy, zeroed out. Probably when he’d run full tilt into…
Scott raised his head.
…into a door to the monitoring station.
Hope surged inside him, but his limbs felt like bags of sand. He managed to stand, immediately falling against a door bar.
Please don’t be locked.
The bar yielded to his weight. The door yawned inward, dropping him onto a cement floor, and closed behind him. Scott switched his suit to atmospheric air. The air was slightly tainted, but there was oxygen. Oxygen! His lungs hauled it inside him, heaving out the dead carbon dioxide.
His gaze roamed the square-shaped room that held an elevator and a flight of stairs.
Even if he’d had the strength to make it up a dozen flights, he didn’t have the time. He crawled to the elevator doors. The grinding of the elevator mechanism would no doubt alert the man on the top level, the man controlling the detonator, but Scott couldn’t worry about that now.
He just had to reach him.
The doors slid open, and Scott pulled himself inside, hit the button for the top floor. His head was beginning to clear, his muscles to tingle back to life. He rose to a knee and switched his visor to weapon mode.
Just like we practice everyday, he thought.
Outside, the man’s voice broadcast again. “YOU WERE WARNED, AND NOW YOU WILL PAY THE PRICE—WITH YOUR LIVES.”
Shit, I’m too late.
The elevator eased to a stop. As the door opened, he found himself facing the silhouette of a man. In the space of a second, the man waxed into full view, leading with a gun.
But Scott had already released his blast. The red beam fragmented from the acid damage, but its brunt caught the man in the chest. He was launched against a huge window that looked out over the light-studded facility. The gun fell away as reinforced plastic cracked around him.
Scott was gathering energy to fire again when he recognized the staggering man.
It was Mr. Shine and he was clutching the detonator.
Jesse pounded down two flights of metal stairs and into a cement corridor that reminded him of the ones beneath Oakwood. He couldn’t see the Soviet team, but he could hear their echoing footfalls ahead, where the corridor dimmed to darkness. They had a pretty good lead on him.
Jesse lumbered into a run, counting on his long strides to make up the dist
ance. His breaths boomed inside his helmet, inducing a kind of claustrophobia. With a pair of fingers, he popped the helmet like a bottle cap and let it fall to the floor. The passing air washed over his sweat-soaked head. He tugged off his gloves.
He felt better than he had in a long time, he thought as he adjusted his headband. He felt free.
Two hundred meters later, the corridor opened into a large garage, reinforced with cement pillars. Off to Jesse’s right, truck engines rumbled to life. He rounded a pillar and spotted a line of transport vehicles moving his way, low beams throwing shadows up around him.
Jesse leaned his arm against the pillar to catch his breath. He’d made it in time.
When the first vehicle drew almost even with him, Jesse stepped from the pillar—and charged. He caught the vehicle low, behind the front axel. Metal crunched against his lowered shoulder. Tires screamed.
Using his legs, Jesse pistoned upward. The vehicle clanged onto its side and barreled into another pillar.
Jesse turned to face the second vehicle. It had begun to brake, but now its engine roared. The headlights switched to high beams, blinding him. Jesse staggered but managed to catch the front of the truck beneath its grill. The soles of his boots skidded backward. With a primal scream, he twisted his trunk and heaved.
The huge front tires left the ground, then slammed down. The vehicle bounced past Jesse, toppling as it struck a wall. He could hear the human cargo inside knock violently about, then go still.
Jesse peered around. The final two vehicles had pulled to a stop. Rear doors banged open. Soldiers in olive-green uniforms and red berets began spilling out, aiming sonic blasters. They shouted in a language he couldn’t understand. A high pitched whistling sounded, and Jesse developed a splitting migraine.
He staggered around the pillar where the first vehicle lay on its side. The front windshield was smashed and bloodied. Sinking his fingers through the glass, Jesse pried the truck from the pillar. Then, keeping the truck between himself and the soldiers, he began to push. Metal whined over the smooth concrete as Jesse’s legs churned harder and faster.
He gave it a shove.
Cries rang out as the spinning truck plowed through the soldiers. Several of them somersaulted over the vehicle and landed in sprawls, guns cracking and tumbling across the floor.
The high pitched noise cut out. Jesse could see straight again. The garage around him was a confusion of bodies and smashed vehicles, their headlights shooting cross-eyed through a slow drift of smoke. Moans sounded. Someone hacked wetly.
Serves ’em right, Jesse thought. Trying to pull that business on us.
He had put it together before the others. The Soviets pulling back to the engineering room, their retreat down the escape corridor, the voice over the loudspeaker system promising the Champions’ doom. It had been a trap. All the time, it had been a dirty trap. And that hadn’t sat well with Jesse’s sense of fairness. Not one bit. The facility had been wired with explosives, he concluded. Though he wondered now why they hadn’t gone off.
And who was the one who told us to come to the oil facility in the first place?
From the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of movement. Something struck his right temple. Two more shots landed against his jaw. Tucking his chin, Jesse traced the movement with his eyes.
Now.
Grunting, he threw out his right arm. The back of his fist smashed into the quick’s head. The Artificial spun several times, then fell to the ground, spilling bolts as he went. Jesse had never thought much of Gus’s speed and agility drills, but they clearly had their use. He’d never thought much of the Soviet’s Artificial program, either. That much hadn’t changed.
Jesse dusted off his hands. “Anyone else?” he called.
As though in answer, the truck Jesse had plowed into the soldiers began to rock and groan. In a burst of sparks, it shot toward him. Jesse squatted and angled his body, deflecting the vehicle with a lowered shoulder. It careened off to his left. In the sudden space ahead, three Artificials lumbered toward him, mechanical components whirring in the joints of their armor-plated bodies.
“You must be the brutes,” Jesse said.
“I order you to surrender,” the lead one boomed in a thick accent.
Jesse held out his arms.
The Artificial’s ocular implant clicked as it looked from Jesse’s face down to his wrists. He turned to his companions, who had come up to either side of him, then faced Jesse again.
“Surrender,” he repeated.
“What’s it look like I’m doing, genius?”
The Artificial’s hands clamped around Jesse’s wrists.
“Got a nice grip there, big boy?” Jesse asked. “Is it solid enough?”
With a quick twist of his arms, Jesse got his hands around the Artificial’s wrists. The Artificial tried to pull away, but Jesse had him, fingers biting into the metal plating. Jesse grinned up at him.
“Surrender this.”
He swung the Artificial around, smashing him into the brute to his left.
Jesse turned in time to see the incoming fist of the third brute. Ducking, he drove a punch into his abdominal armor. He landed another punch, a left hook to his shoulder. Blood leaked from where metal plating met skin. Jesse’s third punch, a straight right, nearly took the brute’s head off. The brute staggered drunkenly, the gears in his neck clicking and snapping.
“It’s why I could never get too worked up about you guys,” Jesse said, breathing hard. “You’re made of machine parts, and machine parts are always breaking. Just ask my old man.”
The first two brutes staggered to their feet, one of them still babbling about surrendering. With the heels of his palms, Jesse shoved them back down. He smashed the gears that powered their legs. Then he went vehicle to vehicle, tearing off doors and peering inside. All he found were more ruined Artificials and a whole lot of battered soldiers. To make sure they couldn’t pose a threat anymore, he snapped their weapons like kindling.
He selected the least-damaged soldier of the bunch and lifted him by the front of a Kevlar vest.
“Hey, sleepy,” Jesse said.
The soldier’s eyes blinked open.
“Where’s the other one?” Jesse asked. “The one with the tanks?”
He remembered what Janis had said earlier about a weird-looking Artificial with tanks on his back.
The soldier shook his head, his face trembling in fear and confusion.
“Tank man,” Jesse said, jabbing a thumb at his own back. “Where’d he go?”
The soldier’s eyes sharpened with some understanding. He pointed past Jesse, toward the corridor they had all entered the garage by.
“He’s back there?”
Jesse didn’t wait for the soldier’s response before dropping him to the floor. Maybe that was the trap, he thought. Not bombs, but that Artificial and whatever he’s got in those tanks of his.
He broke into a pounding run.
“So, is that it?” a deep voice called from behind. “Just gonna leave your mess for someone else to clean up?”
Jesse stopped and rounded his body. The huge figure was striding across the carnage from an open door on the garage’s far side. He cracked his knuckles as he came, the snaps as loud as pistol shots.
Jesse stared at the smoke pluming from his mouth.
“Yeah, sorry I’m late,” the man guffawed. “The weather out there…”
The anger that had been worming around Jesse’s gut bloomed into a full-fledged blaze. With a roar, he charged, both arms outstretched. Henry Tillman took his cigar from his lips and pitched it off to the side. Beyond the thinning smoke, his jaw hardened into a grin.
33
“Wait!” Mr. Shine called.
Scott didn’t have time to make sense of what Mr. Shine was doing here. The man was clutching the detonator. That was enough. Scott concentrated into another blast, this one catching his yardman in the shoulder.
Mr. Shine spun in a half circle, but he
held fast to the detonator.
“You destroy this thing, and it’ll send out a final signal,” Mr. Shine gasped, tucking it to his stomach. “Every last explosive will be detonated, including the one where your friends are. They’ll die, Scott.”
Scott paused, the energy he’d built up inside the laser pulsing red. The last shot had torn Mr. Shine’s work shirt, and beneath the flap, Scott could make out some kind of armored suit.
No wonder he’s standing up to my blasts.
Scott’s gaze moved down Mr. Shine’s shoulder to his wrist. If he concentrated his next shot there, he might be able to knock the detonator from his grasp. But could he concentrate the shot? The acid had tainted the visor. His shots were dispersing all over the place. And if Mr. Shine was telling the truth … if a stray beam struck the detonator…
“Set it down,” Scott said. “There, on the desk.”
Mr. Shine regarded him with blue eyes. He was his younger self, the version Mr. Shine had revealed at his house. His real self.
But now Scott wondered. As a shape shifter, the man could look like anyone. Scott noted the microphone on the desk. Was this the person who had been broadcasting those warnings? Maybe he wasn’t a Champion at all, but … a Russian?
“Set it down, I said.”
Mr. Shine leaned far enough forward to place the device on the desk. It was the size and shape of a Dictaphone. Scott scanned it quickly in his mind.
The man had been telling the truth. A second, smaller circuit board was monitoring for loss of power, waiting to trigger a detonate signal. Scott disabled the circuit board with a thought. He did the same to the main board, rendering the detonator inoperable.
I don’t know if you can hear me, he thought toward Janis, but the detonator is toast.
“Come around the desk and kneel on the floor,” Scott said.
“I could,” Mr. Shine replied. “Or you could come to my side, see for yourself what’s going on.”
“I’m not playing.”
“Neither am I.”
Though Mr. Shine could no doubt see the laser gleaming on Scott’s helmet, his eyes didn’t flinch. He moved back to make room for Scott. Scott hesitated, then stepped to one side of the desk.
XGeneration (Book 4): Pressure Drop Page 23