Future Mage

by R H Nolan

  Herk turned slowly to look at Max with wide eyes. “What happened to you a minute ago? You kind of glowed all over.”

  “Level Five,” Max replied.

  “…Level Five?”

  “Short story is I got more powerful. I’ll tell you more later.”

  “You okay now?” the big kid asked.

  Max raised his eyebrows and glanced up at his new stats.

  HEALTH: 1400/1400 (100%)

  Core: 700/700

  Secondary: 500/500

  Nourishment: 100/100

  Sleep: 100/100

  STRENGTH: 117/117

  STAMINA: 255/255

  AGILITY:118/118

  ENHANCEMENTS: Level 5

  Energy Reserves: 0/4000

  Disintegration

  Efficiency: 24 units per cc

  Energy Blast

  Intensity: 4000

  Base Range: 60 feet

  Accuracy: 34%

  Rapidfire

  Intensity: 5 rounds of 800

  Base Range: 60 feet

  Accuracy: 28%

  Lightwave

  Intensity: 500

  Focus: 50

  Electrical Current

  Intensity: 500 volts

  Base Range: 8 feet

  Accuracy: 50%

  Energy Storm

  Intensity: 4000

  Base Range: 40 feet

  Accuracy: 20%

  Diameter of Attack: 10 feet

  SOUL POINTS: 110

  ARMOR: 120/200 (60%)

  Chest 35/100 (35%)

  Back 85/100 (85%)

  Apparently he had a new ability—Energy Storm, whatever that meant.

  Luckily he didn’t need to try it out at the moment.

  “Yeah,” Max replied. “Better than okay.”

  He looked up at the control room above the laboratory, where Saris had been before.

  The governor was gone. No one was inside the room.

  Max felt for his pack and made sure the emergent was still inside. Then he looked at the others.

  “We need to get out of here.”

  22

  Trox had entered a sort of catatonic state. All he could do was stare at his father’s body lying on the floor.

  Lyra finally managed to steer the kid toward the lab doors with her arm around his shoulder. Trox didn’t say a word.

  There was one major difference in getting out of the laboratory than in getting in: massive metal bolts had shot into place on all the doors, making them all unopenable.

  Well, for someone who couldn’t disintegrate them.

  It took Max an extra five minutes of dissolving the bolts and firing off Lightwaves to blow off the extra energy before they could make their way outside.

  Thank goodness nothing had changed in the hallway outside the lab. No alarms sounded, no guards were there to apprehend them. Nothing.

  Or maybe they were all just waiting for Max and his friends on the surface levels of the city. That was entirely possible.

  Either way, they moved as quickly as they could back through the main halls of Sub-Level 5. It felt almost too easy, and it made Max wonder what Saris had been thinking.

  What if Max and his friends hadn’t actually managed to survive so many enhanced Sandwalkers? And what if the mutants had had powers that would have allowed them to get out? Would Saris just have let the warped creatures roam through the sub-levels until everyone else was dead, too? It wasn’t like survival underground was anything new to the mutants.

  That might have been the most disturbing part of this. The Governor of Neo Angeles didn’t seem to care about any of the consequences—not for the victims of his experiments, not for Ayla, not even for the people of the city he seemed so bent on protecting.

  As for Ayla, he looked over at her as they jogged through the corridors. She looked shellshocked… out of it.

  “Are you okay?” he asked gently.

  He didn’t see how she could be. Her uncle had basically tried to murder her. He’d flicked a switch to let out a bunch of monsters, knowing full well that they would eat her alive.

  “I’m fine,” she said, her face a complete blank, and Max left it at that.

  Ayla led them to a different set of elevators in another segment of the Sub-Level Five hallways.

  “Just because they’re probably looking for us now,” she explained, though Max didn’t think any of them needed an explanation before piling into the steel box.

  That elevator ride was one of the tensest few minutes Max had experienced in a long time. Unlike the fight back in the laboratory, there wasn’t anything to do in an elevator but wait, and they had no idea what they’d be facing when those doors opened.

  Fortunately, it wasn’t much—just another man in uniform like Trevor. This one eyed them with a lot more suspicion as they stepped out of the elevator, but he didn’t say anything or try to stop them. It might have been because they moved so quickly, or because they were so determined to get out.

  Or maybe because they all had a little bit of Sandwalker guts on them.

  But Max realized it had been pointless to hope they might be forgotten, thought dead, or even allowed to escape. When they exited a different building on the other side of the city, the streets were just as busy as ever. Only now, guards canvassed the streets in pairs. Max and his friends slipped past six of them after only moving through two alleys.

  Pulling up Zryk’s map of the city, Max realized they were only moving farther away from where they needed to be.

  “Ayla,” he said softly. She leaned forward from where the five of them pressed themselves up against an alley wall. “The tunnels are on the other side of the city.”

  “I know,” she said, and her brows flickered together in a nervous frown. “Tunnels would work, but what happens when we get out into the desert? We can’t outrun them.”

  “‘We’?” Lyra asked. “Max lives out there. We live here.”

  “You think that matters anymore?” Herk asked. His tone was surprisingly gentle considering how much their reality had changed in the last 30 minutes. “Saris didn’t just set those things loose on Max. He left all his scientists and all of us down there to die. Even Ayla. There’s no way I’m staying in this city anymore.”

  Max glanced at Ayla, who looked almost as catatonic now as Trox. Lyra just looked depressed.

  No one else said anything, so Max finally spoke up. “If we’re not headed for the tunnels, then where are we going?”

  “The gates,” Ayla said. “I’ve seen the guards keep a few skiffs there. We’d only need… well, we’d need two.”

  “Five of us on two two-person skiffs?” Herk sighed.

  “I don’t need a skiff,” Max said. “Skates.”

  The others looked down at his repulsor skates. He kicked one out, though he guessed that didn’t exactly prove he could move as fast as any skiff. He would just have to show them.

  “The city mainframe has probably already alerted every single guard,” Ayla added. “My—Governor Saris will have at least put a message through the system. So we have to be careful. And fast.”

  She swallowed hard and looked like she was on the verge of tears. He couldn’t imagine what she was feeling right now after being abandoned like that by her own uncle.

  “I’m ready when you are,” he said, hoping it would give her a little confidence. They could worry later about what had happened down in the laboratory.

  “Okay.” Ayla nodded, poked her head out around the corner of the alley, and nodded. “Let’s go.”

  She walked right out into the street like nothing was out of the ordinary. Max found himself more than impressed by how well she kept herself together, knowing the guards were looking for them.

  Considering he’d already tried to kill them by Sandwalkers, who knew what Saris would do to them if they were caught?

  He tried not to think about the makeshift energy chamber and the insane Peacewinds.

  The group followed Ayla, weaving amongst clu
eless Dwellers, hovering trailers, and a few smaller, robotic things skittering along the ground. Max had no idea what they were, but one of them stopped by his foot.

  In the next second, a whole drove of them came bursting through the city streets—tiny things the size of Max’s big toe that looked like spiders. Then a shout rang out from the crowded section of the street beside them.

  “Stop!”

  “Run!” Ayla shouted, already following her own advice. They did.

  She was taking them right toward the huge city wall, but until they got the gates open—which Max didn’t even know existed—and onto the skiffs, they were really cutting it close.

  Max spotted at least six more guards all running toward them now, pushing Dwellers out of the way and raising their weapons.

  Max activated his skates, ready now to at least try holding the guards back so the others could get out. He’d fought Dweller guards before, and compared to what he’d just been through in the labs, they really didn’t have anything he was frightened of.

  He saw the skiffs now, resting in a row of four just below a narrow archway of the city’s outer wall. Ayla reached the first one, crouching down to turn it on just before a guard fired his blaster. Two blazing red shots pummeled the wall behind her, and Ayla’s head jerked up, her mouth open in surprise.

  “Keep going!” Max shouted at the others, then spun around on his skates and bent quickly to disintegrate the ground.

  When he rose, he figured it was better to use the rapidfire energy blast. He really didn’t want to kill any guards; he didn’t even want to hurt them. But either they were with Saris entirely, or they’d been fed some lie convincing enough to make them open fire on a bunch of kids.

  Of course, judging by how they’d tried to kill Max just a couple of days ago, they didn’t have any compunctions about killing Scavenger kids. But now they were willing to execute Dweller kids, and that was a whole different level.

  His first round of rapidfire sprayed across the ground in front of the guards’ feet. They stopped abruptly to avoid the yellow blasts of energy, then all of them raised their weapons and aimed at Max.

  “Stop right there!” one of them shouted.

  “Ayla?” Max called.

  “I can’t get the gate to open!” she shouted back. She was standing at a control panel built into the wall, partially shielded by the skiffs in front of it.

  At the same time, another four guards rounded the corner of the closest building. Two of them fired shots at Ayla, Lyra, Herk, and Trox behind the skiffs.

  That’s when Max lost it.

  These guards were supposed to protect people, not try to kill them.

  With the second half of energy reserves he still had left, he tested out his new Energy Storm ability.

  As soon as the thought occurred to him, a patterned grid of bright yellow flashed in his vision. Max focused on the four guards firing their weapons and realized the grid was a targeting system.

  In the next second, his glowing hand unleashed something that looked like his energy blasts but definitely didn’t act like it.

  The swirling energy hurtled toward the guards and burst into dozens of tiny fragments, peppering them with blast after blast.

  One of the guards screamed when he caught a smaller bolt in the face, but it didn’t kill him.

  The others took cover behind the building again, and Max turned his focus onto the other six guards who’d chased them here. Half of them had lifted thin plastic shields, which wouldn’t protect them much. Max skated backward until he’d reached the wall beside the skiffs. He disintegrated as much as he could and held onto the energy just a little longer, hoping the guards wouldn’t make him use it.

  “I think my uncle changed the access codes!” Ayla said, her voice rising in panic. I can’t get it to open!”

  Max’s mind raced. “What about Trox’s card?”

  “What?”

  “His dad’s ID card—does Trox still have it?”

  Ayla’s eyes went wide, and she turned back around to Trox and said something. Seconds later she had the plastic card in her hand, slapped it against the scanner on the control panel—

  An electric motor kicked in, and the metal gate in front of them began to lift slowly.

  The guards took that as an invitation to open fire. Blaster shots pelted the skiffs—with Max’s friends on them—and seared over their heads.

  Max lifted his glowing hand and thought about his new Level-5 power Energy Storm.

  Storms came from the sky, didn’t they? Time to find out if his could.

  He centered the yellow targeting grid on the half-dozen guards firing away at them, then launched a ball of energy into the air and hoped his aim was good enough.

  The energy burst into fragments right above the guards’ heads and rained down on them, eliciting cries of alarm and pain.

  The guards swung their guns up toward the sky to find… nothing.

  That gave Ayla and others the time they needed to get into the skiffs.

  The low hum of the electric engines rose behind Max.

  “Leave the card on the ground, but keep going!” he shouted. “I’ll be right behind you!”

  He couldn’t have been more grateful for the fact that Ayla listened and did exactly as he said.

  She tossed the ID card on the ground, then the first skiff with her and Lyra aboard took off through the wall before the gate was fully open. Herk and Trox were in the second, and Herk flew it after her.

  Meanwhile, Max stood against the wall, disintegrating and sending Rapidfire shots at the guards. He still didn’t want to hurt them more than he had to; he just didn’t want them to follow him or his friends.

  But the guards were apparently hellbent on killing him.

  When Max disintegrated again, one of the guards leapt toward him and aimed his energy blaster at Max’s head.

  Purely out of reaction, Max brought his hand up and shot an energy blast before the guard could squeeze off a shot.

  With his new Level-5 strength, though, that one energy blast sent the guard to the ground. To his horror, Max saw the man’s two dim orbs of spirit energy lift from the body. His stomach sank.

  But there was no time to waste. Max activated a light wave to blind the rest of the guards, then grabbed the ID card again and slapped it against the scanner.

  A blip of light flashed over the ID card, and he pushed the ‘CLOSE’ button that appeared on the glass console.

  The giant metal gate stopped, the engine whined, and then the door reversed course and began to move down.

  Max activated his skates and raced through it to the other side.

  The guards tried to follow, but he took cover on the other side of the massive wall and began to disintegrate and shoot Rapidfire at them as quickly as he could.

  Once the gate was all the way down, Max tried one last ploy. It was a longshot, but hopefully it would work.

  There was a glass console on this side of the wall, as well.

  Max placed his hand on the glass and began to disintegrate.

  The guards must have activated the gate on the other side, because the motor kicked in and the wall began to rise an inch at a time.

  Max’s glowing fingers dissolved a fist-sized hole in the glass console, and he plunged his hand through the electronic guts, disintegrating as he went.

  Then he let off all his accumulated energy in enormous electrical charge.

  BTZZZZT!

  Sparks exploded from the panel and everywhere along the length of the gate.

  Suddenly the whine of the electric motor stopped, and the gate ground to a halt, only a few inches above the ground.

  Max grinned. He didn’t figure they would get that open anytime soon.

  Pulling his goggles back up over his eyes, Max spun around on his repulsor skates and took off after the two skiffs spewing up waves of dust in their wake. Ayla obviously had no idea where anything was in the Wastelands, and she was driving the skiff at full speed in
the wrong direction. Max knew exactly where they needed to go, and he raced after his new friends.

  23

  Thank goodness Ayla wasn’t an experienced pilot, and that the skiffs had been weighed down by two passengers, or he never would have been able to catch up to her.

  She didn’t hear Max until he’d grabbed the side of her racing skiff and shouted her name. Her face was almost completely white, even despite the raging heat of the sweltering sun overhead.

  Ayla looked at him with wide eyes, then brought the skiff to a jerky stop right there in the middle of nowhere.

  “Are they coming?” she asked frantically.

  “Not yet,” Max said, nodding at Herk when the kid pulled the second skiff alongside Ayla’s. “I’m going to take us to a safe place, but it’s over there.”

  He pointed to the southeast, towards the tunnel and the pod into Zryk’s starship. Ayla had taken them almost due north.

  “Just follow me from here,” Max said, then took off in the right direction.

  They had to get to the alien pod, that much was certain. But he didn’t want to give away its location when the guards showed up. Out here in the Wastelands, with nothing but desert for miles and miles, the only thing remotely easy to find was the city fortress and the wreckage of the spaceships. But the skiffs would stick out like a sore thumb for anyone looking.

  As their caravan traveled across the dunes, Max weighed out the pros and cons of taking the skiffs right to the pods and getting underground quickly, or leaving the skiffs far away and spending more time aboveground on foot, easily visible and open to attack. He finally decided on a compromise.

  He directed the kids over to the pod entrance, then had Herk, Lyra, and Trox get off their skiffs and wait.

  Lyra eyed the pod nervously. “Is this the Bug’s ship?”

  Max almost smiled. It would have been a pretty small ship. “No, just an entrance to it.”

  “Nothing’s coming up out of there, is it?”

  “No, not without me here,” Max said as he climbed into Herk’s empty skiff. “How do you control this thing?”