Much like in the control room, the second floor mostly stayed together. Spots of concrete fell and the nearest section of floor simply bent downward toward us, giving us a view of storage rooms.
A file cabinet slid sideways, and fell into the room, landing on the melted remains of the cloning tanks.
It would have been great if that had been the end of it.
It wasn’t, but it looked like it for a second.
Cassie lowered the gun. “Let’s get out of here.”
The fan increased its power by the second.
The whirring noise came from deeper in the building—possibly pulling it directly outside. That meant instead of being something that Rook’s people had done, it might be ours.
Instead of drifting away, the smoke streamed toward the smashed door, pulled by the fan, but behind it came cold air from outside.
A glance upward showed that the section of the room’s ceiling that had reached up to the roof now opened to the sky. Izzy had taken it completely off.
If she hadn’t taken it off, the part she did remove included the middle.
Anyway, it was pretty impressive. I wouldn’t have been able to do it in the Rocket armor.
Beyond a brief sense of awe, I didn’t think about it much then. I had other things to worry about.
An alarm went off. Continue reading Breaking & Entering: Part 10
Casting a last look at the dead people on the floor, I ran.
Only a few steps of the Rocket suit took me away from the scene, and that was good. I didn’t want to look at them.
They’d probably died when I broke the barrier between the core and the rest of the base.
Still, even if out of sight wasn’t really out of mind, they were at least out of sight.
Unfortunately, the next room was worse. Continue reading Breaking & Entering: Part 9
I wasn’t worried about the communicators’ encryption. I’d only put them together last spring. It wasn’t as if they were old League technology that everyone had analyzed thirty years ago.
Maybe I should have been worried more. The communicators were based on the roachbots, and Grandpa had designed the first versions of the roachbots in the 1950’s as mobile bugging devices.
I’d updated them substantially over the past year though. Grandpa’s design survived only in the most general terms.
All the details of the current systems were mine.
Of course, the communicators still connected to the League’s old alert system. That might be a vulnerability.
As always, Jefferson Street was a zoo. It probably had the most fast food restaurants and chain stores of any street in the city. At ten or eleven at night, the traffic became bearable—it wasn’t bumper to bumper anymore.
I brought the van to a stop on the other side of the road from the one with Lakeside Lounge–four lanes worth of cars and semi-trucks away.
We were next to a Subway, a shoe store, and Grand Lake Marina Supplies. That last store took up most of the space. Even though the store had closed, the lights were still on, and I could look in at speed boats, engines, water-skis and other gear.
“Yeah?” Vaughn looked mildly annoyed. “Cassie’s right. That is messed up. Remember that lecture of Mr. Beacham’s? The one where he compared supers to some kind of medieval warrior class?”
Everybody in our high school knew about that lecture. I’d felt that it had been over-hyped at the time.
It seemed more insightful now. Continue reading Being Watched: Part 3
“Great,” Cassie said, “Is he a Nazi too?”
“Dunno,” I said, and tapped away at the computer, heading for the Feds’ supers database.
Vaughn said, “Aren’t you the guy who knows this stuff? You’re on the Double V forums all the time.”
“Well, yeah, but I don’t know everything. The Nine keep a low profile. Everybody knows they do stuff because sometimes they take credit for things, but they employ supers, and they’re an organization. So when supers show up, you never know if it’s one of the higher ups or some mid-level guy.”
I watched as our system passed our key, and then got an encrypted response from the other server. When it verified that it came from the Feds, we could assume that we’d logged into the real server instead of some impostor.
A little later, I’d searched out the Nine’s entry. I displayed it on HQ’s twenty foot tall screen. Continue reading Being Watched: Part 2
On Monday night, Vaughn, Cassie, and I sat together in “Criminology 101.” We weren’t alone. Julie and Shannon were with us.
We sat in a darkened room, looked up at the screen, and watched the professor talk. This would have been normal for a distance learning class except for a few details. First, we were sitting in League HQ. We could have been sitting in a room at the University, but then we’d have been sitting together with Sean, Dayton, and Jody.
It would have been a little awkward for all of us in a variety of different ways. Awkward for me, because Sean and I didn’t get along especially well. Awkward for Cassie and Vaughn, because they were friends of mine and knew Sean. Awkward for Julie and Shannon, because they had been on a team with Sean. Continue reading Being Watched: Part 1
Lightning hit the leader again, and while his body shook, the paralysis gun dropped out of his hand, falling to the roof with a clunk.
Part of me hoped it still worked by the the time I could move. I planned to grab it. A more practical side of my mind hoped it had been destroyed in the first lightning strike.
Near me, Cassie stood up, entering the edges of the helmet’s peripheral vision. She didn’t waste any time. Once she was on her feet, she ran straight at the leader as he bent over to grab the gun.
He didn’t get up easily. He pushed himself up one hand at a time, swaying as he made it up on two legs.
Taking an experimental step, he spied something on the roof, and bent over to get it—the automatic pistol. When he came up the second time, he seemed stronger. He stood up normally.
Quickly, he pointed the gun past me—probably at Vaughn.
This time the wind came up as a roaring, howling blast that drew the man into the air, and threw him off the building. Continue reading Settling In: Part 4