by Lucas Flint
Epilogue 2
Cadmus Smith followed Shade down into the lowest basement of the Facility. Shade walked before him upright and with a rigid back, almost like she was marching, which Cadmus appreciated, because it showed that her time in the military had not gone to waste.
Cadmus probably should have been back in his office in Washington, talking with President Plutarch and the military about the rebuilding of San Francisco, reading reports by his G-Men agents out in the field about the current state of the world, and other important duties that belonged to him as the Director of the Department of Superpowered and Extraterrestrial Beings.
But Cadmus had had this particular meeting on his calendar since last week, when Shade and Mr. Apollo returned to the Facility with both a report of what had happened and a ‘guest,’ for want of a better term, they had managed to remove from Hero Island without the NHA or INJ noticing.
It was that ‘guest’ that Cadmus was going to see today.
The lowest levels of the Facility were the most secretive; in fact, they were so secret that only Cadmus, Shade, and the top scientists even knew they existed. In that sense, they were like the lower levels of the INJ base known as the Cavern, except that these levels were not even on the Facility’s main blueprints.
And for good reason. There were … things down here that Cadmus had determined should not be known to the rest of the world or even to the rest of the G-Men. Magical artifacts, alien technology, and many other mysterious and odd things could be found down here, things Cadmus’s scientists studied in an attempt to understand. Even Cadmus didn’t know everything down here, though he could hear the growls and strange mutterings of some creatures as he and Shade passed locked door after locked door.
But there was one thing Cadmus knew was down here for sure and he was going to see it, even if only briefly, before he had to return to his main duties upholding and protecting the interests of the United States of America.
At the very end of the hall, Shade stopped in front of a huge, thick concrete door that was reinforced with steel locks. Cadmus reached out with his mind and felt another mind on the other side, but this mind was inhuman, almost completely unlike the mind of nearly every other human being on the planet. And yet he could understand the pain and anger in it, even if it didn’t use words he understood.
“Here we are, Director,” said Shade, gesturing at the door. “This is where we’re keeping him. I can’t let you in, since the scientists said he shouldn’t be disturbed due to his severe injuries, but I can let you see him through this slit.”
Shade gestured at the closed slit in the door that was at Cadmus’s eye level. Cadmus walked up to it and pushed the slit open, peering into the dimly lit room on the other side to see for himself the person—if one could call this creature that—that he had come to see.
It was a pitiful-looking thing. Much of its skin had been burned or even melted off, made even more pitiful by the fact that its armor had been removed, though bits of its armor had melted with what remained of its flesh. Its skin, Cadmus had been told, had been blue once, but what little remained of it was a burned black. And it was missing its legs entirely, while its arm cannon had been smashed shut by something huge and heavy.
That this thing was alive at all was a miracle, given that it had survived a huge crash and being crushed by a gigantic statue. But then, the Pokacu had always been said to be extremely resilient to the point of neigh invulnerability, so perhaps Cadmus shouldn’t have been surprised. It didn’t even need any medicine, though it had sedatives flowing into its body anyway to keep it asleep, even though there was no way it could escape on its own even if it was awake.
Cadmus closed the slit and looked at Shade. “Have the scientists discovered anything about this creature yet?”
“Nothing we didn’t already know about the Pokacu,” Shade replied. “He can speak surprisingly good English, though, and when we found him, he was muttering something about ‘avenging the Mother World’ or whatever.”
“Interesting,” said Cadmus. “Very interesting. I’m glad I got to see him in person, even if he is currently unconscious and barely clinging to life. Have Rogers keep sending me updates about this creature as he studies it.”
“Yes, sir,” said Shade. “Do you want to go back to the surface now?”
“Yes,” said Cadmus. “I’ve seen what I want to see, but I will likely be back in a month or so, once he is better, because I have a lot of questions about the Mother World that I would like answered.”
“Sure, boss,” said Shade. “Follow me.”
Shade walked by Cadmus and he followed her, but now he was lost in thought, thinking about what the capture of this creature would mean for the United States.
The United States wasn’t the only country in the world to have Pokacu of its own. Since the destruction of those mother ships, nearly every First World country—and more than a few developing ones—had Pokacu corpses to study, dozens and dozens of them if the number of crew on board the NHA’s mother ship was indicative of the average crew size of your typical mother ship. No doubt Russia, China, and the others were all busily trying to unlock the secrets of these aliens, to strengthen their own militaries and increase their own dominance over the globe and, perhaps, the universe itself.
But the United States, as always, was going to be one step ahead of everyone else. Because, while the other countries of the world had only corpses to study and dissect, the United States was the only country in the world with a live Pokacu specimen in its possession.
And since this particular Pokacu was Commander Graleex, Commander of the Pokacu Army, that meant that he likely knew all sorts of things about the Pokacu species and the Mother World that the others did not. And Cadmus was going to extract every last secret from Graleex’s brain, whether the alien wanted him to or not.
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Continued in The Superhero’s Vision, now available here!
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About the Author
Lucas Flint is the pen name that Timothy L. Cerepaka writes superhero novels under. You can find out more by visiting his website here.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Title Page
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Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Epilogue 1
Epilogue 2
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About the Author
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