by John Jr. Yeo
That’s when I realized that something was wrong. It wasn’t anxiety or nerves, something really was happening to me! My vision was becoming fuzzy, and I was losing control of my ability to fly. I was slowly starting to drop from the sky, as if I were sinking in a river.
Then, from the distance, something was speeding towards me like a missile. It was a man, with a golden cape gleaming behind him, and burning red eyes.
“Don’t do this—“ I started to plead, but the words hadn’t even left my mouth before he collided into my chest like a speeding car.
His inertia carried us about a mile away from my sister’s house, and we landed in a desolate scrap yard. My body slammed into a junked car and I fell to my knees, while my attacker landed with an elegant grace a few feet in front of me.
As I tried to catch my breath, I took a good look at the man who knocked me out of the sky. He was familiar, but he was looking at me like a complete stranger. This must be what the criminals and the killers felt when the Ambassador set his sights on them. His face was vacant, cold and cruel.
Either this was a seriously unhinged clone, or the masters had sent him to bring me home. I also realized that the implant in the back of my neck was doing exactly as I feared by immobilizing me with severe vertigo.
He grabbed me, picked me up without flinching, and slammed me on the ground again.
He looked empty and soulless, as if he had come to kill me. Out of pure defense, I hit him in the chest with as much firepower as I could command. It burned him, and I could see that he was in pain, but he still kept coming.
“Hey! Can we talk about this please?”
One punch to the jaw was the only answer I got, and then everything went cold and black.
19
Infiltration and Sabotage
Sunday, June 2 – 7:45 p.m.
When I woke up, my vision was fuzzy and my head felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. There were three medical officers fussing over the beeping monitors next to me, and a new bag of fluids were being pumped into my body. My lips were dry, my eyes were sore, and all I was feeling was hate and anger.
“You’re lucky the Ambassador found you,” one of the medics was telling me. “The toxin obviously was still in your system, you passed out while flying.”
“You’re very fortunate that you were close to the ground at the time,” Dr. Progeriat added with a smug expression. “You aren’t bulletproof. Any higher up, and we would be recovering your corpse from a sidewalk.
I started to say something hostile, but I could barely open my mouth. Between the device they had implanted in my neck and Ambassador’s sucker punch to the eye, I was down for the count.
I knew as well as Dr. Progeriat did that Slither’s toxins had been flushed from my system the night before. It was just a cover story to explain why I returned in such rough shape. The good doctor didn’t tell the medics that he had triggered the trap implanted under my skin, just before the Ambassador beat the hell out of me.
“I’ve performed two complete deep bioscans of her system,” the lead medic informed Dr. Progeriat. “All of Slither’s toxins should be flushed now. She’ll be fine after another night’s rest, and that bruising around the eye should heal in a few days.”
“Thank you, gentlemen,” he nodded coldly, never taking his eyes off of me. “That will be all for now.”
“Submission is outside. She asked to speak to Andromeda,” the lead medic mentioned.
“Tell her our girl needs to rest,” he replied, never taking his eyes off of me. “She can come back in a few hours. Andromeda and I have matters to discuss.”
The medical team left the room, leaving me alone with the old man. I wanted to set the bastard on fire, but I was no threat to anyone right now.
“Did I fail to explain the rules of our very fair arrangement to you?”
“I just wanted to see my boy, for Christ’s sake,” I whispered angrily. “He thinks I’m a terrorist. He doesn’t even want to talk to me. I can’t do this anymore!”
“You nearly destroyed this team when Andromeda died,” he reminded me, stamping his cane on the ground. “If you don’t hold up your end of the bargain, I’ll find someone else to wear those gauntlets.”
“They’re bonded to me,” I reminded him. “You’re stuck with me, man. I don’t know how you talked the Ambassador into tackling me like that…but if you ever do what you did me to me today, I’ll—“
He scowled at me, and tapped his watch with an angry flick of his bony fingers. I felt that same sickening wave of dizziness hit me again, rendering me helpless and sick. But this time, I felt a tinge of agonizing pressure in my head, worse than any migraine I’d ever experienced. My arms felt so heavy that I couldn’t touch my throbbing temples. It only lasted a few seconds, but it was enough to make me break into a sweating lump of skin.
It was enough to convince me that he didn’t want to hear me talk right now.
“By now, you must know that the Ambassador does what I tell him to do. Every time we clone him, his memories can be programmed with certain key words and phrases and instructions. The alien technology that he brought to Earth gives us such broad control over what his clones will say and do, and my job is to make sure that he continues to serve the good of this country. Without the government’s financial backing, we wouldn’t be able to keep the Ambassador alive. Can you imagine the amount of money that other countries would pay to have a superhuman warrior in their ranks? If you bring this team down, this technology might end up in the hands of any one of many countries desperate to acquire it. North Korea. Russia. Habindaque. Is that what you want, Emily?”
“No.” It didn’t give him the right to make me his slave, but I agreed with everything else he was saying. I couldn’t imagine someone like an Ambassador who could be programmed to be in the hands of a foreign government. It also sounded vaguely like a threat. Was he really willing to sell this technology to other countries should the government shut us down? I was starting to realize just how over my head this entire situation was.
“The Ambassador exhausted himself bringing you in,” he said angrily. “You put up quite a fight.”
“That’s okay, I’m sure you put another one in the oven,” I snorted. “This is inhuman, how you keep cloning him every time he dies!”
“The source DNA is weak, but we do what we can to keep hope alive. It’s what I expect of you as well.”
“Fine. Can you please quit hitting me with whatever you’re hitting me with now?”
“If you can start behaving yourself and following my rules, there will be no further punishments,” he said in a cold tone. “We can always remove those gauntlets and send you to the trial that your sister thinks you’re awaiting. I hope I’ve made myself clear, Emmeline.”
“Yeah, I get it. Don’t have a stroke, old man.”
“And on another front, I must insist that you touch base with either myself or Colonel Bridge before you go flying off to apprehend a private citizen.”
“You gotta be kidding me,” I groaned. “Christopher Whitfield is filming and distributing child pornography. This is the kind of shit you guys really need to be fighting.”
“Christopher Whitfield is a financier assisting the money laundering for terrorists within this country, and he is an informant for the government,” he explained. “He’s been promised protection from prosecution and harassment in exchange for his cooperation.”
“You can not be seriously telling me that you’re going to let him continue doing what he’s doing to children just because he’s useful to you as an informant? There are lines you don’t cross, man!”
“I know it seems very complicated, but if you would just---“
“Is this why you sent Andromeda and Necromancer after me when I stole the computer from Samuel Fleckmore? Was I getting too close to one of your assets, so you ordered them to scare me off?”
“If it will shut you up, I will relay this information to Colonel Bridge, and he will relay thi
s information to Whitfield’s handlers,” he said after a careful pause. “If he’s doing what you say he’s doing, I’ll let you personally drag him to jail kicking and screaming if you want. But he’s an asset right now, and if he thinks we’re going to revoke his immunity, he might go underground. We’ll lose valuable information, and he’ll go unpunished.”
From what I know about the costumed heroes, they primarily concern themselves with enhanced criminals, natural disasters or threats too large for trained police and military personnel to handle alone. Someone like Christopher Whitfield needed to be made an example of, but this wasn’t a pressing concern for super-heroes. I was about to ask him to explain why the base leader for a team of costumed super-heroes was concerned about protecting a financier with ties to pornography and money laundering, when all the alarm lights in the base began to flash. The monitors in the room blinked and fluttered, and then they came back on.
“Oh, what fresh hell is this?” he snarled.
From my spot in the bed, I saw a man suddenly materialize out of thin air! He was standing at the foot of my bed, and then I noticed that identical copies of the same man was lining the hallway outside of the medical wing. As it turned out, the same man appeared in nearly every occupied room in the whole base. It was the same man, using the Dome’s hologram technology to appear everywhere at once. It was the man I had seen on my first day here, the same man I saw Submission and Necromancer speaking to. It was Major John Baltrin, the former base commander of the Infinite League. The man accused of hacking into the computers and sabotaging the efforts of the Infinite League.
There was no doubt now, he had definitely hacked into the computers. Still, I wasn’t convinced he was the bad guy. There was something deeper going on here, and I didn’t want to make any stupid moves until I knew what it was.
The old doctor angrily stamped his cane on the ground and screamed at the hologram. “Baltrin! What’s the meaning of this?”
“Hello Kordan, wherever you are,” said Baltrin. His image was being protected everywhere throughout the base, so the image that I was looking at probably wasn’t seeing us. “Old friend, the time has come at last to bring this madness to an end. It’s time to put a stop to this before you make a mistake that you’ll never be able to repair.”
Tapping his watch again, Dr. Progeriat began belting orders to one of the techs on the other end of the line. “Isolate the signal, we’re under attack!”
“For the rest of you back at the base, it’s time for you to ask one big question,” Baltrin continued with a smile. “Who do you trust?”
Then the hologram blinked off, and the main lights snapped back on as if nothing had happened.
I rose from the bed, and began sliding my jeans on, ignoring the withering stares that Dr. Progeriat was giving me.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“We’re under attack, aren’t we? I thought you might need me to put the cape on.”
“Whatever is going on is an internal issue, we’ll handle it right here.” He sounded impatient, but still in control. He tapped another button on his watch, and began barking orders into it. “Give me a SitRep.”
“Sir, this is Captain Quincy,” replied Eric’s voice through the speakers. He sounded nervous and hesitant, as if he had news he didn’t want to report. “You’d….you’d better get down to Farmville right away. We have a serious problem.”
Dr. Progeriat went pale for a moment as he absorbed the news. When the color went back to his face, I saw a man who looked like he’d been backed into a corner and the only option left was to fight.
“Put your cape on,” he decided. “Then meet me in the Genome Lab with the rest of the team.”
Twenty minutes later, I entered the door that was simply labeled the Genome Laboratory, known around the base as “Farmville.” The doctor had made it clear that the room was off limits to me. But when I approached the lab’s door, an armed guard allowed me pass by with an urgent wave of his hands.
Inside, most of the team was there, and they all had their uniforms on. Necromancer stuck to the shadows, furiously scrolling through lines and lines of code on one of the computers. DeathTek had attached a wire from the surveillance system to his helmet, flickering through footage moving too fast for me to make any sense of.
Two of Colonel Bridge’s soldiers were being treated by the medical staff for what looked like massive bruises on their heads. They’d been attacked, but there didn’t seem to be any obvious damage to the lab.
In the middle of the room, floating in a vat of thick pink goo, was what looked like a teen-aged boy. His skin was rippling and pulsing, but the body was otherwise still. I wouldn’t have known what to make of this science-fiction nightmare a few weeks ago, but I could tell that this was a clone of the Ambassador, slowly being grown to replace the last one.
Submission joined me right away, and placed a hand on my shoulder.
“Who do you trust?” I repeated to her quietly. I knew that she’d been talking to Baltrin, even if the others didn’t.
“Maybe at the end of the day, you’ll have an answer to that,” she responded cryptically. Then she put a discrete finger to her lips and shushed me before anyone heard us talking. As it turned out, Dr. Progeriat was too distracted to notice us. I stayed silent, and listened to everything that was happening.
“Replacement G42 hasn’t been corrupted,” Eric replied with a sigh of relief. “He’s still progressing under normal parameters, and he’ll be ready to be activated in a few hours.”
“I believe the guards are going to be fine,” reported the medics. “Mild concussions received from blunt attacks to the temples, but it could have been much more severe. Whoever did this to them could have easily killed them.”
“There are only three entrances to this base, and every one of them has multiple layers of security protecting it,” Dr. Progeriat shouted. “We even have screens to detect all known enhanced powers. You can’t even teleport into the base without us knowing it. Who did this?”
“The Ambassador and Andromeda were the last people who entered the base,” Necromancer reminded him. “As you know, both of them have been incapacitated since then.”
“As soon as there’s a security breach like this, the place goes on lockdown,” said Submission. “Whoever did this is still here.”
“I’ve just swept ever frame of footage over the last hour,” DeathTek announced. “There’s no surveillance in this room during the time of the attack. Someone killed the cameras prior to attacking the guards.”
“Baltrin was taunting us,” Progeriat decided. “He helped design this base, and he knows our security measures. He has people on the inside.”
I finally had to join the conversation, and ask the obvious question. “But why leave a message and just knock out a few guards? You don’t cut the cameras and knock out a few guards unless you were trying to hide something! Nothing was stolen, right?”
“He wasn’t trying to steal anything,” Dr. Progeriat said with a defeated bow of his head. “He’s drained the Chronal Dampening Array.”
Before I could ask what that meant, a new round of beeping noises filled the air. DeathTek, who was closest to the panel making the beeps, moved towards it and read the alert on the screen. “Incoming call from the Colonel. He wants a report.”
“Yes, of course,” Dr. Progeriat replied, straightening his tie. “Put him through.”
One of the overhead projectors that seemed to be placed in every room in the base lit up, and a clear holographic image of Colonel Bridge suddenly appeared in the middle of the room. I was still amazed at the stunning clarity of the hologram. Back in the infirmary, where the light was dim, Baltrin looked real, as if he was right in front of me. But here in the bright lights and flashing sirens in the Genome Lab, there was a visible transparency to the image. It was obvious here, under the illumination, that this was just a hologram.
“It’s the lithium tachyons that are housed inside the Chronal Da
mpening Array,” Progeriat growled. “Someone drained them, Colonel. They were drained while Baltrin was hacking into our communication system.”
“How long will it take to recharge?” the colonel demanded.
“You can’t recharge lithium tachyons! Once they’re exposed to air, they begin to destabilize.” Progeriat snapped. “It’s been drained down to two percent of its capacity.”
I saw a few technicians hovering around the object that I had seen a few days ago when I last wandered into the Genome Lab. It was the machine that looked like a car part. Dr. Progeriat had warned the lab rats not to expose the power source, or it would have set off a bomb or something. This couldn’t have been an accident, right?
“So this was an attempt to destroy the Dome?” I asked.
“Whoever did this wasn’t trying to kill us,” Progeriat said, sounding very sure of himself. “If they wanted to do that, they would have left the lithium tachyons exposed to the open air. Eventually, when they completely destabilized, there would have been a massive explosion. But whoever did this re-contained the tachyon particles in its casing just before it detonated, and put it back where they found it.”
I raised my hand like a confused teen in high school. I hated being constantly two steps behind everyone else. “Can I ask a question? I mean, other than having no idea what lithium tachyons are…if this stuff is so dangerous, why are we keeping a weapon like this in the lab?”
“The Chronal Dampening Array isn’t a weapon,” Dr. Progeriat told me. “It’s a piece of alien technology from the Ambassador’s home planet. The lithium tachyons are fourth dimensional particles that are farmed using equipment that this planet doesn’t have. It can alter the flow of time in the device’s immediate area. It allows us to grow a replacement of the Ambassador from fetal stage to adult stage in just a few hours.”
“After the current Ambassador finishes gestating, there’s only enough power to rapidly age one more clone,” DeathTek advised us. “After that, the lithium tachyons inside it will be totally spent.”