The wind stopped as suddenly as it had started. But before Red Band completed his parabola, Scott was there to meet him with a right cross. The punch caught him solidly on the chin. Red Band crashed into the chairs on which the Champions had been held captive.
“And stay down,” Scott said.
Tyler stood, looking from Red Band to where the wind had originated.
A familiar figure strode toward him. It was the young woman who, moments before, had drawn oxygen from the mercenaries’ helmets to impair their reflexes. The young woman who had created the hurricane-force winds that had prevented Red Band’s escape.
Tyler ran forward, meeting the real Erin halfway. Her stunning brown eyes narrowed in concern. Tyler had almost forgotten about his split lips until she touched the lower one with a thumb.
“I’m all right,” he assured her, taking her hand.
“Yeah, I’m more worried about the ones who did this to you,” she said, looking around at the smoking sprawl of men.
Tyler coughed out a laugh. They both turned toward the front of the stage where Reginald had reverted to his natural form and Scott was shaking out the hand used to deliver the knockout blow to Red Band.
“Is that all of them?” Scott righted his glasses and peered around.
“Yeah, but we’ve got a much bigger problem,” Janis said as Agent Steel’s men poured into the auditorium. Some went to the downed mercenaries while others took up positions around the students. One spoke through a megaphone, explaining that they were with law enforcement and needed the students to remain seated and calm; a team of counselors would be arriving shortly. Of course the only treatment they’d receive, Tyler thought, was memory erasure.
“What problem?” Scott asked, moving up beside Janis.
Before Janis could answer, Director Kilmer separated from Steel’s men and came running up the steps to the stage.
“Let’s go, gang,” he said, panting for air. “We’ve got a missile strike to stop.”
7
Two hours later
Scott grasped the fabric belt that criss-crossed his chest and craned his neck forward to peer outside the plate-sized window. Not an easy maneuver. The supersonic jet was traveling at Mach 2, easy. Cords of muscles stood from his neck, as though his head were bench pressing a loaded bar.
At last, his head separated from the seatback to the extent he could strain his eyes to the distant landscape below. Past scarves of cirrus clouds, the terrain had gone from mountainous and green to craggy-white and barren. They were hurtling north through Canada, their destination, an island shy of the Arctic Circle. Janis had intuited the information, Director Kilmer asking several times if she was certain—absolutely certain. She’d insisted she was: one missile, seventy-one degrees latitude, one hundred eleven longitude, give or take.
Scott’s head fell back to the seat and settled into the cushioned impression. He rolled his head toward the seat beside him. Janis’s eyes were closed but the skin between her eyebrows folded slightly, telling Scott she wasn’t asleep. She was concentrating, gathering her powers.
Though Scott hadn’t said so, he shared some of Kilmer’s questions. Why would the Soviet Union target a barren wasteland with no apparent strategic importance? Was it a missile gone off course? And why only one missile?
But he remained silent. Voicing such questions wouldn’t help Janis.
Reginald had remained behind to delay the launch by impersonating Red Band’s voice through the satellite phone. “We’re waiting on one more Champion,” he kept reporting. They hoped the Soviet leadership would remain ignorant of the ruse until the team was in position. But Scott wasn’t sure what he, Tyler, or Erin could do in the face of a twenty-ton missile plummeting at ten thousand miles per hour. Only Janis had the power to stop something like that.
When the jet dipped, Janis opened her eyes. For a moment, her dark irises seemed to hold galaxies, recalling to Scott’s mind what she had said about her powers the week before. When she blinked, the celestial effect vanished. She looked over and shaped her lips into an uncertain smile.
We’re descending, Scott said. He felt the force against his body relenting. The U.S. government had a research outpost with an airstrip near the target site. That’s where the team would stage.
Good, because Reginald’s gig is up, Janis replied. The Soviets suspect their team has been taken out.
They do? Scott asked in alarm. So, the launch…?
He watched the information spread over her face.
It’s happening now, she said.
As in now now?
Scott did the math. The ICBMs took about a half hour from launch to impact. In fact, the blast door at one of the U.S. missile sites was said to have a picture of a Viper-II on a Dominos Pizza box. The message around it read: “WORLD-WIDE DELIVERY IN 30 MINUTES OR LESS OR YOUR NEXT ONE FREE.”
Scott stopped himself.
No, that assumed a latitudinal course between the U.S.S.R. and United States. But for a target so far north, the missile would launch over the Arctic Circle. That meant about half the distance.
Beside him Janis nodded grimly.
Fifteen minutes to impact, she said.
At the research outpost, the Champions poured from the plane. Scott could feel the cold of the pavement through his soles. He lingered, torn between Kilmer and his teammates, who were rushing toward the facility with its below-ground bunker, and his girlfriend, striding down the airstrip against a biting late-spring wind.
U.S. satellites and ground radar hadn’t picked up the missile, but there had been visual confirmation from a pair of scrambled jet fighters. Janis had been right. Before disembarking, she had convinced Kilmer to take the remaining Champions to safety. She would face the missile alone. If she was unable to stop it, she would shield herself from the blast and radiation.
Scott sprinted to catch up to her, ignoring the shouts behind him. When he pulled even, the fur ruff around the hood of Janis’s parka hid her face. He could feel her focus on the target site more than twenty miles away, her concentration so total, she didn’t notice him.
“I’m going with you,” he said.
“Scott, no. If I fail, there’s the blast and fallout…”
“Which you can shield me from.”
“You’ll be safer underground.”
“I’ll assume the risk.”
Scott was struck by the absurd idea that only six or seven years earlier, their argument would have consisted of which Atari cartridge to pop in next—Combat or Missile Command—not whether he could tag along as she attempted to stop an actual missile. The air around them warmed with her power. Beneath the wind’s steady roar, he picked up a resonant hum.
Janis stopped suddenly and stretched an arm forward.
In the distance, Scott saw it—a dark projectile plummeting to Earth. He looked from the object to Janis and back, struggling for a way to help. Already knowing it would be futile, he pulled his helmet over his head and tried tapping into the missile’s electronics. But the missile was too distant.
He needed a medium.
A grunt from Janis made him twist toward her. She was half crouched now, her face knotted in concentration, arm trembling. In the distance, the rocket wobbled but continued to fall.
It’s coming too fast, she gasped.
The last time she had stopped a missile it had been turning in space. As a function of mass times velocity, the forces she was dealing with now were a crap-ton greater.
A thought came to Scott. Can you link me to it?
She picked up on his idea, and in the next moment Scott felt himself hurtling through a super-charged tunnel. His consciousness landed inside the rocket and spread through its electronics like a virus. Locating the central computer, he pored over its software. The deployment and sequencing commands had already executed. Blowing the system wouldn’t do much good, especially with the megaton payload the U.S. suspected the missile was carrying.
If he could delink the detonator
s from that payload…
Anything? Janis asked, her voice a bundle of urgency.
But there was no link to a payload. How did that make sense?
Scott staggered as his consciousness retracted from the missile and slammed back into his body. Janis was on her knees now, both arms extended like a devotee in fervent prayer. They were almost out of time, and she had dispersed his channel in order to put everything into her telekinesis. Just above the horizon, the missile flipped from side to side.
Then it jetted up.
You-you’ve done it! Scott thought. You’ve redirected it!
But through their rapport, Scott could feel the enormous energies Janis was having to channel, threatening her psychic circuit breakers. With an anguished cry, she collapsed onto her side.
Their rapport blinked out.
Scott fell to a knee and gripped Janis’s shoulder. Out, but breathing. He raised his eyes to the missile. Some sort of guiding system was righting it, turning it back toward Earth.
No.
Seconds later, the missile disappeared beyond the craggy horizon line.
Scott covered Janis with his body and hugged her head. Behind clenched eyelids, he awaited the inevitable flash and boom.
8
Champions command and control
The next day
12:33 p.m.
“The technicians completed their analysis of the missile this morning,” Kilmer announced to the assembled team. “According to their report, it wasn’t armed. No warhead, no explosive material.”
Scott had suggested as much—he’d found no detonator—but Janis still couldn’t believe it. “Why would the Soviets fire a dud?” she asked.
“A test,” Kilmer replied. “They wanted to see whether they could get a launch past our satellite systems and ground-based sensors. They had enough intel on the Champions to know you were the only ones who could thwart the test—or any future missile launches. We’ve been able to glean as much from the mercenaries.” As their director went back over yesterday’s hostage situation, Janis’s thoughts remained stuck on those chilling words: or any future missile launches.
She had detected the test missile, sure. She had even forecast where it was going to strike. But despite her growing capacity to channel and manipulate astral energy, she hadn’t been able to stop it. One moment she was on the head-splitting verge of redirecting the missile back into space, in the next, she was coming to in Scott’s embrace, the ground cold and hard beneath her.
She had exceeded her capacity. The circuit breakers had tripped. And that had been for one missile, singular. What would have happened in the face of one hundred missiles? One thousand?
And all of them armed.
Janis glanced around at her teammates. The original team was present, save the late Creed Bast—whose biting remarks she still caught herself missing—and Jesse, who remained in assessment and re-education. But they had gained two new members: Erin, who could manifest certain weather elements through her control of atmospheric pressure; and, of course, Reginald, shapeshifter and member of the last generation of Champions.
Janis had been surprised to find Shockwave and Minion present at the meeting, too, former members of the Scale whom the Champions had battled back in January. Their real names were Diego Delgado and Theresa Peppers, Kilmer introducing them at the start of the meeting. As the next phase of their rehabilitation, they were being considered provisional inductees.
Fine by Janis. They could use all the help they could get.
But still…
“If that was a test launch,” Tyler was asking, apparently on the same page as Janis, “what’s the real thing going to look like?”
“Let’s back up for a minute,” Kilmer said, hands gripping the padded back of his chair. “General Dementyev’s brutality has led to a rash of defections in recent months. One of the defectors is a missile engineer. He managed to escape a Soviet jail and get himself and his family to an American embassy in Belarus. This engineer believes the test is connected to a black box project code named the Dead Hand. He explained that the Dead Hand was originally a computer-automated system meant to launch a nuclear counterstrike in the event an American first strike wiped out the Soviet leadership. A reserve retaliatory measure, in other words.”
“So as long as the United States doesn’t fire first, we’re safe, right?” Scott asked hopefully.
“The Dead Hand’s original intent was to automate a counterstrike. According to the engineer, Dementyev is having the Project retrofitted. He wants it to be able to launch an undetected first strike.”
“Jeepers,” Minion whispered.
“How worried should we be?” Janis asked.
“There have been lapses in our early warning system in the last couple of years,” Kilmer replied. “We believe the U.S.S.R. was hacking into our system, but they could never access the backup programs that acted as fail-safes. The outages, though brief, became warnings in themselves. Remnants from the test missile suggest the Soviets have switched strategies to a cloaking system.”
“A cloaking system?” Scott echoed skeptically. “They have like forty thousand missiles. Installing that kind of system on their entire arsenal would cost a fortune, wouldn’t it?”
“U.S. intelligence is saying the same. They think Dementyev’s plan was to point out the single-missile launch as evidence he could strike U.S. soil at any time. Then he would use the scare to negotiate the return of Eastern Europe to the Soviet sphere. Restore the former détente.”
“But you see it differently,” Janis said, not liking at all what she was hearing or feeling.
“The Soviet Union is bankrupt,” Kilmer said. “But whoever was behind the Scale has the ability to shift vast sums of money. He tried giving the Soviet Union an injection once before. He may try again.”
“But what’s in it for him?” Scott asked. “I mean, the nuclear fallout wouldn’t stop at the U.S. borders. The whole world would be poisoned, to the point, even, of becoming uninhabitable, right?”
“The Scale kingpin may not know Dementyev’s ultimate intent,” Kilmer said. “He may think he’s helping to restore the balance of powers and with it a lucrative arm’s race—one he’s no doubt profiting from. But what the kingpin and even our people seem to be underestimating is General Dementyev’s ambitions. He isn’t thinking self-preservation. He’s thinking world domination, however short lived. I fear his reason is that far gone.”
Janis shuddered as she picked up a psychic tickling in her head, like phantom worms squiggling through her brain matter. “Have you made your case to the president?” she asked.
“Reagan is deferring to his advisors for now,” he replied with a weary breath, “but he promises vigilance. He has a team monitoring the banking networks and financial markets for unusual activity. The Scale kingpin may know this, which may also explain why he’s yet to act.”
“But it’s only a matter of time,” Scott said. “With all due respect to the U.S. government, I was able to hack into one of their most secure systems before I even really knew what I was doing.”
Kilmer held up a finger. “The president has also given us a green light to hunt down the kingpin.”
Gazes that had begun to wander returned to Director Kilmer, everyone coming to the same understanding: this wasn’t just a debriefing but the beginning of another mission. Before yesterday’s hostage-taking, Janis had begun to wonder whether they would ever be called to action again.
Same here, Scott said in her thoughts. And something tells me this is going to be the mother of them all.
Janis was afraid he was right.
“We’re going to start with the defense companies,” Kilmer went on, “Viper Industries, in particular. It’s the company that has profited the most from the Cold War, and so the one most interested in seeing the contest continue in perpetuity. Agent Steel and I will meet with their officers. Reginald and Margaret, we’re going to fly you up to Viper’s main offices in Arlington, Virgi
nia for inside work. Reginald will be posing as an equipment maintenance contractor, and we’ve arranged an interview for you, Margaret, in their accounting department.”
Janis glanced over at her sister, whose face had already stiffened into a pout. She’d had ambitions of getting ahead at the university that summer and was registered for a full load of courses.
“Scott and Janis will use our computers to exploit any electronic access they can find.” Kilmer faced Janis now. “I understand your powers had an amplifying effect on Scott’s yesterday?”
Janis nodded, recalling how she had acted as a conduit between her boyfriend and the missile’s electronics.
“That could be helpful. We’ll get into the specifics of the operation following our general meeting.” Kilmer turned and addressed himself to Tyler, Erin, Diego, and Theresa. “The rest of you will remain on standby. We hope we won’t have need for you, but the situation could change.”
“If you’re holding Theresa and me back over lingering concerns regarding our allegiances,” Diego said, “I urge you to reconsider. We understand the stakes. We’re here to help any way we can.”
Diego was thin and dark skinned, his mousse-slick hair styled into a rakish peak. Though the angles of his thick eyebrows suggested aggression, he spoke with surprising softness. Beside him, Theresa nodded earnestly, her own face chubby and pink-cheeked, blond pigtails bobbing over large shoulders. To Janis, the former Scale members seemed too nice to have summoned the murderous quakes, blasts, and earthen creatures only a few months earlier.
“Believe me,” Kilmer said in response, “we’ll welcome any assistance we may need.”
Janis nodded in agreement. She had performed a thorough mind scan on both at the start of the meeting. They’d been manipulated into joining the Scale the year before, the Witch using her powers to keep them loyal. Following four months of rehabilitation, they seemed their former selves again.
XGeneration 7: Dead Hand (XGeneration Series) Page 5