Super World

by Lawrence Ambrose

He could think of worse views to have in the final hours - or minutes - of his life.

  JAMIE'S DARE-dedicated cell buzzed. It was Mort Anderson.

  "Jamie, we have a situation," he said. "One of our 'clairvoyants' is telling us that Jay Utrecht is in trouble on the moon."

  Jamie stared dumbly at the phone. Of all the calls she might've expected from Mort, that didn't even make the list of any conceivable list. She switched it to speaker.

  "What's happening with him? Assuming the clairvoyant is right."

  "According to her, his 'containment field' or whatever you call it appears to be failing. And he's unable to leave the moon's surface. She's telling us that he doesn't know how long he has."

  "Damn it," Zach hissed at her side. "This is exactly what I was afraid of. We weren't even close to measuring all the variables in his powers."

  Jamie shook her head and spoke into the phone. "What can we do, Colonel Anderson?"

  "I'm talking to Randy Wilde. He has a couple of ideas. One, you take a deep submergence rescue vehicle to the moon and pick him up. It would have plenty of air, heat and cooling – not sure what's needed, but he thought if the journey was fast Jay's chances would be good."

  "How long would it take to be ready?"

  "In roughly thirty minutes. We already made the call to Naval Air Station North Island. They're prepping a vehicle as we speak."

  "Does he have an hour?"

  "We don't know."

  "You said he had another idea?"

  "This is a strange one, but he thinks it could work: gather a big ball of air and take it into space with you, using your telekinetics to keep it compressed near Earth atmosphere pressure."

  "Think I'll take door number one. Where is this Navy base?"

  "Just west of San Diego. Huge base in the bay. Northern end. You can't miss it. We'll have them put up a red flag or something so you can fly right to it."

  "Okay. I'm on my way."

  "One minor problem. Jay and his transponder are in a discorporate state. You won't be able to see him and we can't locate him. We can only tell you the location of his last transmission, roughly in the center of current sun-side moon face."

  Jamie rolled her eyes at Zachary. "If that's the minor problem, what's a major one?"

  "All I can say is that he'll have to materialize at some point to show himself. When he does, the receiver you'll be carrying with you should pinpoint his location, given his transponder is still functional. Or you'll see him with those eagle eyes of yours." When Jamie didn't respond, he added: "I've got nothing better for you, Commander. I suppose we can all pray the psychic's wrong."

  You have to be kidding me. She lowered the phone, gritting her teeth so hard she suspected she could flatten steel ball bearings. No choice but to stow her feelings of utter hopelessness and do her best.

  "He's a very smart dude," said Zack. "He'll know what he has to do when he sees the submersible all lit up."

  "If he does, he'll probably think it's a UFO. Maybe one of the hostile aliens. He may be afraid to materialize."

  "Maybe so. You can only do what you can do, babe."

  Jamie raised the phone. "I'll be at the base in a few minutes."

  THE PRESSURIZED Rescue Module looked to Jamie like an exotic UFO – or a bomb. Captain Milgrim didn't have a lot to tell her. He didn't anticipate the module would have any problem maintaining its integrity in space, "Though I'm no authority on space travel. But it's built to withstand enormous pressures and it's tough as hell." His one question was about heat.

  "It was designed to keep people warm in a frigid environment," he told her. "It has minimal air conditioning capability. I'm not sure about heat in space between here and the moon, but it could be an issue for your man if the module gets hot."

  Jamie wasn't sure about the heat in that region of space, either. She hoped she could get there and back fast enough to minimize heat buildup if that occurred. It would be a question of radiant versus ambient heat. She had a vague memory of the two countering each other significantly, so that heat wasn't a huge issue in space craft or the space station. Maybe she could find a path out of direct sunlight, if it came to that. Or not. On the list of near-miraculous things that needed to happen to save Jay Utrecht that barely raised her eyebrow.

  Jamie nursed the forty-foot, seven-ton submersible in the opposite direction for which it was intended as Captain Milgrim and the Reserve sailors of Undersea Rescue Command gazed up at her and shook their heads.

  Jamie picked up speed steadily through the upper atmosphere. She felt the resistance – the effort of hauling the extra weight. It wasn't large – kind of like jogging against a stiff breeze – but it was definitely taking her longer to reach her previous transit speed. The exterior and internal lights did make it stand out nicely against the semi-blackness of space. Jay would surely see her. What he did then was anybody's guess. The receiver strapped to her chest would presumably start vibrating to signal his transponder was transmitting. Otherwise, he'd be basically invisible to her even if he did materialize unless she happened to stare straight at him.

  What the hell had he been wearing, anyway? She hoped something bright orange or red with stripes.

  The moon had expanded to party balloon size when Jamie decided to start applying the brakes. The Falcon's mass fought her, bumping up against her telekinetic field like a canoe filled with people bumping against a dock. After a fearful moment, she realized it wasn't anything she couldn't easily handle. More data for the ongoing experiment that she was.

  Now came the fun part. She zoomed in on the central part of the moon, unable to recall the name for the area, but then she doubted Jay would know, either. She imagined him approaching the moon, selecting a place for an initial landing. Why not go to the center? A place between the darker more sinister areas?

  She descended, searching a circle of lunar real estate, willing Jay to spring up waving his hands. He probably couldn't see her - just this brightly lit object dropping from the sky. He'd know that no one on Earth had space craft like this so he'd first assume it was E.T. dropping in on him. He wouldn't know it was coming to rescue him. Her previous guess that he might think it was one of the bad aliens predicted by the Object seemed even more sound on reflection. Only when he saw her would it all add up.

  She scanned the area as thoroughly and swiftly as she could. What appeared charmingly small from a hundred thousand miles away was a lot of area from fifty miles up. A human speck on a grey-white molehill. She tamped down her hopelessness once again. As Zachary had said, she could only do what she could do.

  Jamie had a strange idea. Placing the DSRV into a hover, she dragged a massive quantity of moon dirt up to her. With a fine-tuned concentration she didn't know she had, she arranged the dust particles and rock into huge letters spelling out JAMIE. Then she ignited the particles and stood back to admire her handiwork. The brightest and biggest skywriting ever, she thought. Impossible to miss if Jay was down there and still conscious.

  Holding her glowing name in place, she uprooted more dirt and arranged it into the obvious comment: NOT SEE YOU.

  Her receiver started vibrating against her chest. In the same instant, she caught something in her peripheral vision. A tiny speck of movement. She instantly honed in on it. A figure, jumping high and waving its hands. Yes!

  The glowing letters crumbled and fell. Jamie and the Falcon dived in tandem toward the figure. When they set down, Jay sat slumped on the ground, raising one hand in a weak gesture of greeting. Jamie had to remind herself to take it slow as she willed him off the ground and across the five meters to her.

  The Falcon had a small entrance chamber sealed off from the rest of the ship on its bottom, which she'd kept elevated a few feet from the surface. Air rushed out as she spun the hatch wheel and opened the outer door. She coasted with him inside. She shut the chamber and was grateful when the compartment automatically repressurized. Captain Milgram hadn't got that far with his rapid-fire instructions.

 
The several-second exposure hadn't been kind to Telly. He sprawled on the PRM's floor, gasping, his face and arms beet red. His clothing had a crispy fresh out of the dryer smell.

  "How did...you know...?"

  "A clairvoyant got your distress signal." She force a jaunty smile. "We'll be home in a few minutes."

  "Hot...in here. Hard to breathe."

  Jamie glanced at the forward control station temperature gauge: 140 degrees. Captain Milgrim hadn't been kidding when he said the submersible wasn't designed for a hot environment. But he'd only have to endure that for fifteen or so minutes. First priority was to launch this submarine toward Earth.

  They lifted off, accelerating with frustrating slowness – Jamie bringing them up to speed with one eye on Jay to gauge the g-forces, limiting the acceleration to a mild flattening of his features. She revised her fifteen-minute estimate to an hour or more at this rate. Damn. Now the heat could be a real factor, on top of his exposure trauma. She couldn't feel it, but she imagined to a normal person it was like being in a car in the summer sun with the windows rolled up.

  Jamie located some bottled water in a small wall compartment filled with medical supplies. Unfortunately, it was even hotter than the interior of the DSRV. She returned her focus to their flight, continuing to push the acceleration as much as she dared while reminding herself she'd need to allow time to safely decelerate at the end.

  "Thank you," Jay said in a raspy whisper.

  "No problem. I'm just glad I found you."

  "Clever...message."

  "I'd be great at parties."

  The Earth expanded with exasperating slowness compared to her solo flight home. Should she start decelerating? Without a handy orbital mechanics calculator she'd have to play it by ear. She turned to Jay. She'd been trying not to look at him too much because he was obviously suffering and she could do nothing about it except get him home.

  "How are you feeling?" she asked.

  "Like...sat on beach too long...without sunscreen."

  Jamie made herself chuckle. "That's kind of how you look."

  "Thought you were E.T."

  "That's how I'm starting to feel."

  "If don't make it...tell Tildie..."

  "You're going to make it. Terry's waiting for you. But tell her what?" Jamie could've sworn he was blushing through his boiled-lobster skin, which would be some feat.

  "She's the best."

  Jamie turned away, toward the blue orb filling the forward windows. The center – and bane? - of their existence.

  "Yes, she is. But you'll need to tell her yourself."

  Chapter 20

  THE BRUCE. R. THOMPSON Court House and Federal Building collapsed in its own foot print 10 days after the AAF occupation had begun, three days after the occupiers had disappeared, and one day before the building was set to open for business. Primarily the business of augment registration.

  The AAF took credit for the demolition and promised that every registration site in the country would, in the fullness of time, suffer the same fate. The demolition had occurred in the middle of the night, and the nightshift employees had been warned away, so there were no casualties.

  Despite every law enforcement agency in the country investigating the occupation, information on the occupiers was scant and only eight arrests had been made. Nine law enforcement officers, including two Team 2 DARE agents, had been killed in the course of serving arrest warrants. The Augments For Freedom was officially designated a "domestic terrorist organization" and membership carried a mandatory twenty year prison sentence under the Augmented Americans Registration and Regulation Act. Members of the group, and anyone found materially supporting the organization, were to be tried as enemy combatants in a military court under the Patriot Acts.

  Registrations at official building sites and the AugmentRegistration.Gov website had dwindled to half its previous trend before the occupation and destruction of the Reno courthouse. Bomb threats were a regular feature at public registration sites. The media and government agencies vilified the AAF and other resistance groups on a daily basis.

  "But we know differently, don't we?" Thomas Mayes chuckled, slapping down a copy of the Washington Post and grinning at the men at the dinner table around him. "They don't speak for the men and women in the street, or for the freedom-loving citizens of this country."

  Thomas Mayes' ghetto accent, long, bristly afro, and prison goatee were gone, replaced by a clean-shaven, short-haired, scholarly, and well-spoken individual. His signature angry glare had turned studious and reflective behind lightly tinted granny glasses, and his railings against white privilege had been traded for impassioned pleas for freedom and righteous indignation against "the runaway state." Steven had suggested that phrase along with most of his other changes. But Thomas had gotten into the spirit of his rebirth as Trevor Washington, de facto leader of the AAF, and no longer needed constant subtle prodding by Steven to stay in character. Hell, he was starting to half-believe he was a spiritual descendent of the founding fathers despite their slave-owning ways.

  Now he was surrounded by the most powerful augments in the organization, both physically and in terms of AAF leadership. Harry Farwell might not be able to move mountains like James Boulder, but he was a loyal and deadly son of a bitch who could kill just about anyone cleanly with a single thought, and in his dematerialized state was, as far as he and anyone else knew, indestructible. He was looking forward to the day when Harry had a shot at the Blond Bitch.

  Hank Mueller might look like a fucking bald-headed rat, but he was as strong as any twenty of them. Selma Adams was as fine as Hank was ugly, with exceptionally strong and razor-sharp telekinetics mixed with telescopic vision: she could blow out your eyeballs two miles away. She could also make parts of your body do things that no girl had ever done to him before. As luck would have it, she had a Shaquille O'Neal-sized crush on him. Just went to prove you didn't have to die to feel the Prophet's blessing here on Earth.

  Arnold Marlin's telekinetics weren’t quite on par with Boulder's but unlike the white supremacist Nazi turned fake black power advocate, Marlin was a brother with half a brain and laser-beam projecting eyes to boot. Joseph Tan was a grizzled old Asian dude who had been second in command to Damon Walsh. Thomas thought he might be Chinese, or maybe Japanese or Korean, but definitely from one of those slant-eyed countries where people were all fucking inscrutable. Damn smart, though, and he had a hypnotic effect on people that Thomas wondered might not be too far from his own. Everyone fucking loved the guy. Hell, even he loved the guy. And he normally didn't love either guys or Orientals. Kind of made you wonder.

  He was surrounded by the people who would help him rule the world, Thomas thought. His most loyal friends, Tyler and Steven, on either side of him, his new and powerful supporters on the other.

  "The severity of their penalties reflects the severity of their fear," Joseph Tan was saying with his permanently amused smile. "It tells us that we are doing something right."

  "An excellent point, Joseph," said Thomas, adjusting his granny glasses to an even more scholarly angle on his nose. "If we continue down this path perhaps we can goad the fascist fools into doing something even more severe?"

  Everyone around the table smiled and nodded.

  "How's the DIE infiltration program coming?" asked Arnold Marlin.

  Thomas turned to Steven, who had been overseeing the program, making the selections, and staying discreetly in touch with their people.

  "We have a foothold within the organization," said Steven.

  They waited for him to elaborate, but no one seemed surprised when he didn't. Everyone at the table was accustomed to Steven's cryptic ways. In private, Steven had advocated a policy of "less specifics known, the better" and more compartmentalization of knowledge in the group. It was hard to argue against that, since people who'd been captured had already surrendered much of what the feds knew about them, which fortunately didn't seem to be all that much.

  The discus
sion continued with planned attacks against registration centers and AugmentRegistration.gov. Steven and his personal team had crippled the site on numerous occasions, and probably could compromise it fatally at any time, but Steven assured him it was far more damaging to injure the site just often and destructively enough to make people incredibly frustrated but not give up on it altogether. The Morgan Admin's constant assurances that the website's issues would be fixed any day now made him look like an incompetent, untrustworthy fool.

  The meeting adjourned with four different registration buildings targeted for future missions. The next meeting would focus on their recruitment program. It was critical, Steven said, to grow the organization as much as possible by direct recruitment and by causing situations which would encourage people to join. Governments weren't the only ones who could make good use of false flag operations.

  Tyler and Steven stayed behind as the others left the room – Selma with a smoky backward glance that promised good times later. Thomas got up and stretched his legs, strolling to the bay window overlooking the swimming pool and terrace below that were part of their twenty-acre, 18,000 square foot palatial estate in Summerlin, West Las Vegas. He'd wanted digs befitting his stature, and Steven had surprised him by okaying it. "Pretending to be one of the elite will further our ends," he'd said. When that had drawn a blank look from Thomas, he'd added: "The contacts we make with the rich and powerful will be of considerable utility in fulfilling our goals. It is nearly impossible to achieve political or financial success without alliances among and backing from the elite."

  Thomas often didn't understand Steven, but in this case it made sense. The strategy Steven was outlining involved him being basically a "triple agent": a black Muslim pretending to be a conservative Christian man of the people while also pretending to be an up and coming member of the "big boys' club," as his dad had always called it. His father had once made Thomas watch a video of George Carlin as proof that some white men "got it." "It's a big club," said the old white comedian, "and you ain't in it." Not bad for an old droopy-assed white fool trying to be Richard Pryor, a true comedic genius.