And that meant lobbing and hitting softballs, apparently.
Scott took a focusing breath and tossed his next pitch toward the center of the strike zone. Janis rotated her entire body into the swing, cracking the ball off overhead. Scott wheeled, shading his brow, and watched the ball arc over the Grove’s giant oak tree and bounce into the street.
“I’d call that a homer,” he said.
When he turned back around, Janis was beside him, balls dropping inside the bag by way of a telekinetic funnel. Even these simple demonstrations of her powers never ceased to impress him.
“Nice pitch,” she said.
“Guess it depends on whose team I’m on.”
She rose onto her tiptoes and kissed him. “You’re on mine. And don’t forget it.”
The effort to smile only deepened Scott’s sorrow. “Gabriella stopped by my house this morning, to say goodbye and drop off some things. Was that Mrs. Fern’s car I heard leaving yours?” He already knew the answer. Their trainers were all being sent back into the world. Gabriella had a job lined up with IBM, while Mrs. Fern would go back to teaching English, he guessed.
“It was,” Janis said, “and she’s retiring, actually.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Director Kilmer left, too.”
“He did?” Something like betrayal lanced Scott’s stomach.
“Last night. Don’t take it personally. He didn’t tell me—or anyone, as far as I know. He’s been reassigned to another agency. The timing wasn’t his choice. In fact, it was probably intentional.”
“So who’s in charge?”
Janis looked at him wryly. “Take a wild guess.”
“Steel? Wow, she has more lives with this program than a cat.”
“Tell me about it.”
Scott took the bag of balls from Janis and slung it over his shoulder, then paused to look around. So much had happened up here. His confrontations with Jesse and Creed; his night with Janis on the swings; their first battle against the Scale. Though the memories were a mix of good and bad, he felt a strange nostalgia for them all. He caught himself rubbing his forearm where the bone had healed crookedly.
Janis took his hand and laced their fingers. “Weird to think of this becoming a normal neighborhood again,” she said as they walked toward the street, their joined hands swinging lightly. To anyone who didn’t know them, they would have looked like a typical teenaged couple.
“Supposed to be finished in August,” Scott said.
Work on the neighborhood had already begun. At the same time the fire-damaged homes were being repaired, sections of the below-ground complex were being excavated and dismantled. Barricades at the entrance to the neighborhood read LOCAL TRAFFIC ONLY—probably the same barricades Reginald had seen fifteen years earlier, when the underworld was being built.
Scott had pled with Kilmer that they and their families be allowed to stay. But there were to be no fingerprints left on the neighborhood, Kilmer had replied. Anyway, it was out of his hands. President’s orders.
Scott stopped and turned toward Janis. “You know, in the last few days we’ve talked about everything except what’s going to happen to us.”
Janis glanced down and began tapping the metal bat against the curb.
“Is there something you’re … I don’t know, sensing?” He almost said “not telling me,” but he didn’t want to sound accusatory.
Janis sighed lightly. “It’s complicated, Scott. Part of the reason I wanted this break was to allow my intuition to operate without conscious intrusion. Especially now that we’re cut off from official information. There’s a lot of noise between the present and future, a lot I can’t make sense of. Until something … happens, I can’t say what’s going to happen, if that makes sense.”
It did suddenly. What needed to happen was what Scott had been contemplating after discovering a disk among the items Gabriella had returned to him that morning. He’d been guarding those thoughts from Janis, but obviously not well enough.
“You’re waiting for me to make my decision.”
She looked at him intently. “It has to be yours, though.”
He swallowed as he straightened. “I’ve decided.”
Janis dropped the bat and hugged him to her. Scott released the bag of balls. He felt her energy again, the incomprehensible enormity of it. For a moment, the energy conjoined them into a single entity. His mind flashed to the cover of issue #137 of the X-Men, the one Janis had given him as a Christmas gift two years before: Scott Summers and Jean Grey fighting for all the marbles. Could their own story have been written any other way? Scott hugged Janis tightly.
Of course not.
She spoke in his ear. “Then it’s time we met with the rest of the team.”
39
Later that day
“Where are we going, exactly?” Shockwave asked.
Janis, who was leading, pushed a branch away from her face. She had sent out the call at noon. All had shown up, save Reginald. She sensed he was off on other business, but didn’t pry further.
“We’re almost there,” she called over her shoulder.
She and Scott led them deeper into the woods—their woods, she still thought of them, though Jesse and Tyler had spent time back here as well. In fact, they were approaching the site of the fort Creed and Jesse had trashed, though she could hardly hold that against them anymore.
At the creek side, Janis scrambled down to the water’s edge and faced the creek bank. Set back beneath a tangle of roots, she made out a rusted metal door. It was where Mr. Leonard had once hidden himself and, if Janis had read Director Kilmer correctly, was the subject of a major hint he had dropped at their final meeting: “The emergency bunkers will be the last to go.”
In other words, Janis thought, if you need a staging area, that’s where you want to meet.
As the others arrived beside her, she turned to Scott, who was already pulling his picking wallet from a back pocket. Following a bit of prodding, he unlocked the door and pushed it open. A light blinked on to reveal a short corridor, opening into a larger room. Janis followed Scott. The others filed in behind her, Jesse grunting as he stooped and shuffled his way down the corridor.
The main room of the bunker was box-shaped, with one wall taken up by a computer console and a bank of monitors. Opposite the monitors was a green vinyl couch, while a third wall, between two corridors, featured a small metal desk with a row of what looked like procedure manuals. Janis looked up at a ceiling of thick concrete. Many years earlier, she, Scott, and Tyler had discovered the top side of the same ceiling, near their just-completed fort.
Using his abilities, Scott accessed the system. The monitors blinked on, showing various parts of the neighborhood, including a bird’s-eye shot of the woods over their bunker.
“I thought the surveillance infrastructure was gone,” Erin said.
“For the command and control center it is,” Scott answered. “The bunkers were designed to run independently of the command system, in the event it was ever taken out.”
“This place is good sized,” Shockwave remarked as he returned from exploring the back rooms. “It has bunks, weapons, ammo, a huge closet of rations—even a closet with battle suits. A team could live for weeks down here.”
“That’s partly why I wanted us to meet here,” Janis said.
Shockwave cocked a thick eyebrow as he lowered himself onto the arm of the couch, where Minion, Erin, and Tyler were already sitting.
“Director Kilmer was reassigned last night,” Janis announced. “He’s no longer in the neighborhood. Our trainers left, too, along with most of the agents. What agents remain are overseeing the dismantling of Fort Oakwood.” As one of them once called it, she thought. A wave of sorrow for Mr. Leonard swam up in her.
“So, it’s done,” Shockwave said.
“But it doesn’t have to be,” Janis answered.
Minion’s smooth brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“There’s
still our abilities and what we know,” she said. “What we know is this. Prince Khoggi made his money transfer to the Soviets, which has given them the ability to cloak their entire nuclear arsenal. That, in turn, will enable them to launch an undetected first strike.”
“But I thought Khoggi’s whole game was balancing,” Tyler said.
“It was,” Janis answered. “And we were pawns in that game. But this may have to do with the ‘new phase’ in his strategy that Reginald mentioned. What that new phase is, we still don’t know.”
“How do we know the Soviets won’t just use the cloaking technology as leverage?” Jesse asked, his voice a deep rumble. He had lowered himself to the edge of a cement alcove near the corridor they’d entered by. “How do we know they’ll launch a first strike?”
“Because their leader is bat-shit crazy,” Janis said bluntly. “I’ve picked up wiggles of it here and there. He’s determined to obliterate our hemisphere and claim the rest of the world as his own.”
“I thought we had nuclear-armed subs and B-52s,” Shockwave said in a tone that bordered on professorial, “so if we were ever taken by surprise, we would still have a means to retaliate.”
“But who’s giving them the attack order if our entire leadership has been wiped out?” Janis asked. Shockwave hesitated before conceding her point with a tight nod. “The thing is, our leaders are convinced General Dementyev will never go that far,” she continued. “Hence … well, hence the end of the Champions Program.”
“But it’s still up to us,” Tyler said, seeing where she was going.
Janis nodded. “Something Kilmer said in the beginning, the first time he sat us down as a group, always stuck with me. He said, though the free world doesn’t know it, they look to us for hope. As resistant as I was to the Program at first, that resonated. And still does.”
Around the room, heads nodded in agreement.
“I’m not trying to force you into anything,” she insisted. “We were given a choice to become Champions. Now we have a choice to remain Champions, for one final mission. The one that counts.”
“But Diego and I are scheduled for relocation this week,” Minion said.
Janis gestured around the bunker. “You would have everything you need here.”
Minion bit her lower lip, eyes large with worry, as she looked to her boyfriend. Shockwave’s stern gaze remained on Janis.
“Tell us about the mission,” he said.
“That’s Mr. Spruel’s department.” She turned to Scott, who had popped a disk into the computer console and was pecking away, tongue fixed in the corner of his mouth. A moment later, the bank of monitors became a collective screen, showing what looked like the blueprint for a huge silo.
“When Gabriella stopped by this morning to tell me goodbye,” Scott said, rotating from the console, “she returned a few odds and ends I’d left in the training room. Among them was a disk. It had my name on it—in what looked like my writing—but I didn’t recognize it. When I popped the disk into my computer, I found this. It seems Director Kilmer left us something.”
“What are we looking at?” Erin asked, her eyes narrowing toward the screen.
“The plans for the Dead Hand Project,” Scott said. “Kilmer told us a bit about it. Originally designed as a deterrent system to automate a nuclear counterstrike in the event a U.S. attack took out their high command, General Dementyev had it redesigned as a first-strike system.”
“But why?” Erin asked.
“To remove human empathy from the equation,” Scott answered. “Were Dementyev to simply order a first strike, the Soviet duty officers could consider the horrifying implications and get cold feet. With the Dead Hand, those same missiles are deployed by a computer and are impossible to recall. All it requires is a single launch command. A command Dementyev controls.”
Scott swiveled back toward the console and fast-tapped a key. On the monitors, the plans for the silo zoomed in to a lower level. “This is where the Dead Hand’s main computer is located. Deep underground, safe from missile attack. It takes up the entire floor, as you can see. The silo also houses the command missile, here.” He tapped another key repeatedly so that the image shifted toward a slender container the height of the silo. “When the order is given, this is the missile that gets launched. Armed with a UHF repeater, it flies the length of the Soviet Union, broadcasting launch commands to every last nuclear missile silo.”
“Massive, automated launch,” Erin said quietly.
“And you’re proposing, what exactly?” Shockwave asked Scott. “That we take it out?”
“The computer, yes.” When Scott’s eyes touched on Janis’s, a wave of fear and admiration moved through her. This was the decision he had come to. “If I can get close enough, I can hack into it. Make it so that when the missile launches it will broadcast disabling commands instead. Take their entire arsenal offline.”
Shockwave raised his eyes to the monitors. “Where is this place?”
“About a hundred miles southwest of Moscow.”
“So, halfway around the world,” Shockwave said, “in the middle of enemy territory, in a bunker that’s going to be fortified to the teeth. For now let’s ignore the question of how you’re going to get there. How are you going to get close?”
“That’s where I would need you.” Scott tapped the keyboard to zoom out. “There are woods five hundred meters east of the site. You covered that distance to get into Oakwood last January. If you can deliver me here,” he said, indicating the lower level of the silo, “to the other side of this wall, I can access the computer without detection. The hack would only take a few minutes.”
Shockwave brought the fingers of a hand to his chin in thought. “Who else is going?” he asked at last.
“Me,” Janis said.
Scott shook his head.
Janis stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“We’re going to need you here,” he said. “In case something goes wrong.”
“If you think I can block an arsenal of nuclear warheads…” She stopped to laugh in disbelief. “In case you’ve forgotten, only two weeks ago I failed at stopping a single unarmed missile—”
“Which was already plummeting to Earth,” Scott interrupted.
“Scott, that’s not the—”
“I’ve felt your power,” he said, standing. “If I do fail, for some reason. You’re our next best hope. And you won’t be alone.” He turned to the couch. “Erin and Tyler will remain, as well. Your abilities work over distances, and in your case, Erin, over large areas. We might need them.”
“I’m going, too,” Minion said.
“No you’re not,” Shockwave told her. “If I’m hearing Scott right, this is going to be a stealth mission. I’m not sure your ability to summon massive, plodding creatures helps us there.”
Minion’s normally-pleasant demeanor changed suddenly, her soft cheeks balling into hard apples. “But you’re going to need muscle, darn it!”
“They’ve got muscle.”
Janis turned with the others to find Jesse stepping forward.
“Are you sure, big guy?” Scott asked. “I need to be frank with everyone—you too, Shockwave.” Janis watched his eyes meet her own again. “There’s no guarantee we’re going to make it back.”
“I’m sure,” Jesse answered. “Think I owe you for an arm or two.”
“I’m sure, as well,” Shockwave said.
Scott, I can help, Janis said in his head.
I know, he answered. But if something were to happen, there would be nothing between the U.S. and those missiles. We need to do this together, and that means working separately.
Janis relented—for the moment, anyway.
Scott cleared his throat and turned back to the console. “You brought up the question of transportation a few minutes ago. There was another program on the disk—a linkup to a communication system. I don’t think its inclusion with the Dead Hand schematic was an accident.”
As
Scott typed, the monitor displays changed from the silo back to the live feeds of the neighborhood. Janis peered over his shoulder, where he was accessing the program he’d spoken of. A moment later, the rapid tones of dialing sounded. Following two long beeps, the console signaled a connection.
“Who are you ringing?” Erin asked.
“We’ll know in a minute,” Scott said, typing again:
> REQUEST TRANSPORT
After a pause, a response appeared:
> DESTINATION?
Scott looked around, brows raised as though to say here it goes.
> RUSSIA
A moment later, another response:
> REQUEST PENDING…
40
After several minutes of staring at the same request-pending message, uncertainty began creeping into Scott’s mind. Just who was he communicating with. He closed his eyes and slipped into the connection. The signal shot here and there before linking to a secure server.
One of ours? he wondered.
“Um, Scott,” Janis said. “We’ve got company.”
He opened his eyes to find her studying the monitors. On the screen that showed the woods above the bunker, a black-clad figure was crossing the feed. The figure was followed by two men in battle gear.
“Great,” Tyler muttered. “Agent Steel’s come to roust us.”
Scott sighed. Here they would have had everything they needed: food, lodging, a computer and modem—though he guessed it was the last that had alerted Steel to their presence. He looked down at the console again, but the same pending message continued to display.
Moments later, pounding shook the metal door.
Everyone who hadn’t been standing rose cautiously, eyes large in the dimly-lit space. Electricity popped around Tyler’s fists. A force moved through the room: Shockwave drawing power to himself.
“I’m jamming the lock,” Janis said.
XGeneration 7: Dead Hand (XGeneration Series) Page 21