The Empowered, page 86
She gave a little headshake. “Always doing things the hard way. Let’s do it together.”
I’d let my anger at Alex’s ordering me make me stupid. We each grabbed an end, hauled the next box onto the jack.
We stacked all four, two by two. Even lifting them together took effort. Keisha and I were both sweating by the time we’d finished.
I glanced at the gun racks. No Empowered would have those, so this had to be a support facility, only Support tended to use stunners, too. This place seemed more and more like an outlaw base. I shook my head. No time for those worries.
“What else?” Keisha asked, wiping a hand across her forehead.
“Jumpsuits. He said bring six. He even gave me sizes.”
We looked around. On the back wall was a big locker. “Wardrobe,” it said in gold letters.
Keisha and I glanced at each other, shrugged.
The door was at one end of the locker, on the long side. I opened the door. There was a button on a cable. I froze. My eyes widened. “Shit,” I whispered.
“What is it?” Keisha asked behind me. I stepped over so she could see.
“Damn,” she whispered.
I nodded. Inside, on a dry-cleaner-style railing hung jumpsuits. Blue jumpsuits. Hero Council jump suits with the gold HC logo.
My mouth was suddenly very dry. I licked my lips.
Hero Council jumpsuits were closely guarded. Never supposed to be held outside of an official Hero Council facility. We used to talk about that back in the Renegades, when I was in Special Corrections, and later, in the Scourge.
It came back to me in a jolt of memory. One other time I’d found Hero Council blue jumpsuits. It had been at another secret facility, this one on the Oregon coast. One of Ellis Biologics hidden labs. A jumpsuit sized for a giant.
What was Alex doing knowing about a hangar with a locker filled with prohibited Hero Council jumpsuits?
“Shit,” Keisha murmured, over and over. “Shit, shit, shit.” She stepped back.
I gave her a hard look. “Alex says we need them.”
She shook her head. “I’m not touching those things!” Her eyes pleaded with me. “You know the penalty for having those if you aren’t in the Hero Council?”
“Prison?”
“No, death. They kill you if they catch you even carrying one of those.”
“Come on, Keisha, that’s bull.”
She crossed her arms. “No, it’s true. We were warned about that.”
“By who?” I demanded.
“Mutter, before you joined his cell.”
“You take the word of a sociopathic murderer nutcase? He was a lying sack of shit.”
“Yes, but he wasn’t lying about this, Mat.” She shifted uneasily. “Besides, this is just plain crazy.”
I lifted the sleeve of one. It was the real deal: super-lightweight material, made of some kind of ultra-tech material. Keisha was right. Death or no death for wearing one, this was crazy. It was way too elaborate and weird for Support. I shivered. I let go of the sleeve and stepped close to Keisha.
“This is wrong,” I whispered.
“You think?” she hissed. “Alex isn’t acting like Alex.”
I nodded. “Things have been off since he came back from going after to Harris.”
A cold feeling settled in the pit of my stomach.
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
I thought for a moment. Goldin said RAMPART needed to be shut down. That hadn’t changed. Trust in yourself. Sprig’s words ran through my head.
“We go through with it,” I said. “We do what we came to do.”
Keisha lifted her chin. “I’m not putting one on.”
“I hate the idea, too, but we have to if we are going to pull this off.” I clenched my jaw.
“I’m not going to bullshit you,” I whispered. “This is a hell of a frying pan we are in.”
“You got that right.”
I pulled a jumpsuit my size, and then another, for Alex, and cycled the rack, looking for others. I had to make two trips to the pallet jack.
Finally, I had six piled on the pallet jack.
A ghostly figure appeared next to me. One of Ella’s projections. But I could see through her. She was dressed in Ella’s favorite costume: the old school gray catsuit and black mask. She tried to say something, but nothing came out. Her mouth twisted in a silent scream and she vanished.
I yelled. “Ella!”
Keisha snapped her head around. “What, what is it?”
“One of Ella’s projections, but she couldn’t materialize entirely.”
My heart pounded. My skin had gone ice cold. It was happening again.
“She having trouble again?”
I nodded. “I thought she’d gotten past that.”
Ella’s projections didn’t phase in like a ghost, they popped in. One minute not there, the next there. “Something’s blocking her projections, again,” I said, my voice low.
Keisha looked around. “How?”
“I’m not sure. Can’t be a nullification field, we’d be on the ground puking our guts out.” I’d worn nullification cuffs for five years in Special Corrections. Much easier and safer than projecting a field. “A power?”
* * *
Her eyes widened. “That’s a nasty thought. Who and how?”
“Thing is, there’s just the three of us here.” I hadn’t felt the tingling of another Empowered. Another piece of weirdness. I forced myself to move. “We’ve got a mission to do.”
I imagined my mother, inside her amber cocoon thing, not aging, plugged in somehow to RAMPART and the power it controlled. I looked at Keisha. She’d been with me since the beginning.
“Together, whether we like it or not,” I quipped, trying to lighten the mood.
“Always,” she said, looking at me warmly. Then her face tightened. “Someone’s got to ride your ass,” she said, mock grousing.
I hugged her. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Side-by-side we pushed the pallet jack up the ramp.
As we reached the cargo bay the engines whined to life. A deep rumble, like the grinding of boulders, sounded outside. The plane shook from the force, even as it vibrated from the engines starting up. My teeth rattled.
The ramp retracted from the ground, and the rear doors began closing. We pushed the pallet jack over to where there was an open spot with straps attached to the floor and anchored it.
“Damn, but your man Alex is in a fucking hurry,” Keisha groused.
I couldn’t argue with that.
Except I wondered if he really was my Alex any longer.
20
Alex didn’t waste any time. “Strap yourselves in on the side-saddle seats,” he called over the intercom.
He must have meant the seats lining the wall below the stairs.
“Fuck that,” I muttered. I sprinted up the stairs, boots clanging on the steps, taking them two at a time.
“The man said strap ourselves in,” Keisha called from below.
“Then strap yourself in!” I shouted over my shoulder. I yanked the glass door open and charged through the observation room and down the corridor to the cockpit. The door slid open automatically as I reached it.
Alex worked the controls from the pilot chair.
I sat at the co-pilot’s seat, strapped myself in.
I gave him a hard look, but he kept his gaze out the window. The plane rose, engines cycling up. I craned my neck. The roof had pulled back, revealing a huge shaft eighty feet high and wide enough for the plane’s wingspan.
“That’s a reservoir’s worth of space,” I said. “A whole lot of work to hide one plane.” There had to be easier ways to hide aircraft, too. The pile of bucks it must have cost to build this place made me cringe. Even more to keep it secret.
“It was worth it,” Alex said, sounding like he’d been involved in the building. But the hangar’s tech was way older than either of us.
Then there were the prohibited Hero Council jumpsuits. Again, having racks of them seemed impossible, even for Support, given that they were prohibited to anyone not in the Hero Council. But, I kept my mouth shut and let Alex concentrate on flying.
We cleared the ground. A screen between Alex and I flicked to show the ground, and the earth moving to close again. The entire meadow slid back into place. Incredible that someone would go to that much trouble. The meadow grass whimpered in my head.
The sun shone down on us.
Alex operated the plane crisply, confidently. He wore an arrogant smile. “Nothing like piloting again,” he said.
Goldin had told me Empowered had huge egos. Alex, because he was Alex, didn’t, certainly not about his power. But this Alex was very different. He wasn’t the man I’d fallen in love with. He wasn’t like Alex at all.
I fought to keep calm, to not shudder.
I stared at him long enough that he glanced over, eyebrow raised, a hint of suspicion in his face. I couldn’t let on that I knew. I had to see this mission through. When we were done, I was going to find out who this really was, and what had happened to my Alex, come hell or high water.
“You said this was a stealth aircraft, but we’re painted black and it’s broad daylight.”
Alex chuckled, a deep rumble that made my skin crawl, sounding nothing like the man I loved. “This aircraft’s surface is coated to have an extremely low radar profile, that of a large bird,” he said, sounding like the cat that had caught the canary. “The heat output is baffled, so the aircraft’s heat signature is minimized. And the surface coating is mutable.”
“What?” I asked.
He looked at me and winked. “It changes.” He pressed a button on the console in front of him. The plane’s nose changed color, lightening until it was a sky blue, close in color to the actual sky itself.
“When your jet is powered by a nuclear reactor, you might as well use the extra energy,” he said, sounding very much like it had been his brilliant idea. Another sign this wasn’t the Alex I knew.
I tried to look astonished at the plane blending in with the blue sky. “That does take the cake.” I couldn’t tip the bastard off that I suspected he wasn’t who he seemed.
“It’s more than that, it’s stunningly impressive.” The cat was on his second canary of the day. If I’d needed any more proof that this wasn’t Alex, this was it—Alex was never smug.
I folded my arms and looked out the windscreen. We flew up into a bank of clouds, the nose of the plane turning cloud white. There was one possibility, but everyone, including Goldin, said it was impossible. But the man who looked exactly like Alex, sitting in the pilot’s seat next to me, arrogant as all hell, sounding and acting so different from the man I loved, that said it was possible.
“You’re very quiet,” Alex said, glancing at me.
The smug smile played around the corner of his lips. I raised an eyebrow.
“Sorry,” he said after a moment. “I’m just needling you.”
Time passed. There was a display screen below the console, between us. It showed what looked like a radar map.
“How long until Africa?” I asked.
Alex kept his gaze on the instrumentation around him. I noticed text scrolling on the screen off to his left. He was in communication with someone. I couldn’t see the letters from this angle, other than they looked English.
“About ten hours.”
“Who are you talking with?” I asked.
He looked uneasy. “Just some contacts—the people we’ll be meeting with in Nigeria.”
Obi had been from Nigeria. The earth-moving Empowered who had died at Emerald Green in the Rockies. Felt like a million years ago.
I unbuckled my straps. “I’m going to go check on Keisha.”
I left the cockpit and stalked down the corridor, looking at the decking. Anger bubbled up inside me. I couldn’t hold it back. That thing in the cockpit, I wanted to kill it, and I couldn’t, not then, not until we finished this thing, and he told me what had happened to Alex. Then, we’d see.
The thing that mattered now was getting to RAMPART. If his “friends” and reinforcements could help us do that, I would wait.
Keisha was asleep in her side-saddle chair, eyes closed, snoring softly.
I hated to wake her, but I wanted to talk with her so badly.
I knelt down beside her, reached out. She twitched but didn’t wake up. I pulled my hand back. I couldn’t wake her up. She needed her rest.
I explored the rest of the jet. It really was as big as an airliner. There were offices, a lab, three rooms with four bunks in each, another room that had a huge king size bed, which seemed weird. That one had its own private bathroom with a huge shower and tub big enough for someone over eight feet tall. There were giant-sized Hero Council blue jumpsuits on a rack in the closet.
Everyone said Titan was dead, killed in Paris. Goldin had said Titan could mimic powers.
My chest tightened. What if the impossible were possible, what if someone had possessed the ability to change their form? What if Titan discovered this? The king of egos among the egotistical, the man on the outs with the Hero Council, who the Secrecy Faction kept in the dark, what if he had shapeshifted? Simon said Harris had been killed. He’d also said that the Harris he knew had been an asshole, not the cringing, worried man that had showed up at our camp, desperate, wanting only to help. That desperate, eager to help Empowered made me feel for him, accept him, trust him.
The swaggering giant of the Hero Council playacting as a rogue Empowered. What if Titan had gotten information, finally, on the Dark-Net and RAMPART? He could see the building disasters hitting the world. He was on the outs with the Hero Council.
He’d faked his own death, became Harris, and joined my little band of Empowered and Imbued. He must have gotten intel somehow on us, so, he knew me.
I clenched my jaw. Then Harris started acting weird, changing, Goldin had said. But what if that were his mimic power acting up, perhaps because of all the strangeness from the Dark-Net and in the chambers beneath the mound in Ireland?
I stood there in the bedroom with the king-sized bed and the rack of blue jumpsuits big enough for Titan.
That was Titan, in Alex’s form piloting this plane. Running this operation. He must have been behind building the hidden underground hangar in British Columbia. My jaw tightened. What had he done with Alex? I closed my eyes. I desperately wanted to confront Titan, but I had to play this smart. Couldn’t tip my hand. Not now.
I went below again, tiptoeing past the still-sleeping Keisha to a big dura-steel hatch with a radiation symbol on it and the words “CAUTION: NUCLEAR REACTOR”. Not something you want to see while inside a flying airplane. Or a grounded one for that matter.
My legs trembled. I wasn’t going in there if I could avoid it.
I wandered across the cargo bay.
So, the plan was to stop in Nigeria, pick up a load of Titan’s secret pals plus minions, then head to Antarctica, and bluff our way inside an ice mountain and get into RAMPART control. Then we’d turn everything off. There was a Dark-Net node close by RAMPART control, but it had to be under heavy guard.
This was feeling very much like a one-way mission. I glanced across the bay at the side saddle chairs where Keisha slept. They looked hard. No better than the corner behind me. I sat down, back against the wall, beside a crate strapped to the deck, and rested my chin on my knees.
The jet shuddered. Must have hit turbulence. I staggered, fighting to stay upright. The crates, pallet jack, and dune buggy all groaned in their straps but stayed put.
“Helps if you have something to hang on to.” Ella whispered.
I whipped around so fast I almost fell over.
Her projection perched on a crate, arms holding onto straps. She was dressed in pantaloons and a loose blouse, with a turban and veil. Princess Hero.
“You made it,” I said.
“Something kept me from reaching you in that hangar,” she said. “It hurt like hell when I couldn’t get through.” She brightened. “But I’m here now.”
I moved to sit beside her.
The plane shuddered again, harder.
Keisha jerked awake, looked around frantically.
I waved at her. She nodded but stayed put.
“I don’t have much time,” Ella said. “Something is shielding this plane against powers. I managed to reach you only with Sprig’s help.”
“You know her?”
Ella’s projection nodded. “She visited our camp in the outback. She helped us move.”
They’d moved again. And I wasn’t there to help them. And somehow Sprig had gotten out of the freaking Fairy Road to help them get onto the freaking Fairy Road.
I swallowed. “Where are you guys now?”
She gazed at me calmly, her eyes narrowing slightly. “I can’t tell you that, Mat.”
My fingers tightened on the straps. “Why not!” My voice was a sharp whisper.
“We can’t read who you are with,” she said.
“You have a locator.”
She nodded. “Yes. A powerful one.” She put a hand on my arm. The projection’s fingers squeezed gently. “We have to help you, somehow.”
I bit my lip. “RAMPART control is shielded. The Dark-Net node near there has to be monitored. Anyone coming through would be killed.”
“We can’t just—"
She vanished.
I put my head in my hands. Never cry, I always told myself. Never let anyone see you be weak.
I didn’t care right then.
The plane shuddered harder, then dropped like an elevator. I grabbed the straps.
Keisha sat in her chair, eyes squeezed shut.
The plane kept dropping, faster.
“We’re diving to avoid the worst of a storm.” Titan’s voice boomed over the intercom, echoing in the cargo hold.
“Thanks for telling us,” I muttered.
The shuddering eased, and the plane leveled out.
“Things should be stable by now,” Titan said.
I let go of the straps and stumbled across the bay to Keisha. I swallowed. I had to keep my mouth shut about Titan, or else she might try and kill him, and that would stop our mission.
