Isolation
Page 14
I’d barely taken note of all this before I got a taste of what my father was experiencing. One moment, everything was fine; the next, it was as though a giant vacuum cleaner had gotten turned on and pointed in my direction.
Months earlier, I’d had the sublime experience of almost getting sucked into a black hole. That was exactly what this felt like, and I found myself being inexorably pulled in the same direction as my father.
I became insubstantial, and the suction immediately ceased. Looking at Alpha Prime, I saw that he had righted himself and was attempting to fly away. However, much like Buzz, he wasn’t going anywhere. In fact, he was slowly being pulled backwards.
Reaching out telepathically, I said,
Our timing wasn’t quite perfect – Alpha Prime did zoom forward for a few feet before coming to a halt – but it worked. Like me, he was now free of the mini-black hole (or whatever it was).
So that I wouldn’t be zipping around my father like an annoying fly, I shifted back to normal speed as well. As soon as I did, I heard the screech of torn metal along with the sound of glass shattering as a number of the nearby display cases were forcefully and powerfully wrenched in the direction of the dark circle, slamming into the wall where it was located. There they stayed, pinned to the wall as if they’d been glued there.
Seeing that, I understood that the dark node wasn’t a black hole, per se, as nothing actually got sucked into it. It was, however, some sort of gravity well – and a powerful one at that. Alpha Prime and I had apparently been the closest things to it, as it had seemingly affected us before anything else. In practically no time, however, I saw everything within its sphere of influence swiftly getting drawn in. Fortunately, it seemed to have a very limited range – otherwise, everything in the room would have been pulled towards it.
As with me, the sound of the display cases being ripped away had drawn Alpha Prime’s attention momentarily. Almost in unison, we both turned back to Mouse, who spared us a quick glance but otherwise ignored us.
I tried again, without success, and then a third time with the same result. Obviously, Mouse was somehow negating my ability to teleport him. A moment later, he looked at me, raised his hand in a quick salute, and then vanished.
Chapter 32
It took about an hour before any type of debrief occurred. Electra and I spent the bulk of that time waiting in the conference room, with her playfully admonishing me for leaving her behind once we got to the Vault.
“You could have carried me,” she said on more than one occasion. “Scooped me up in your arms and such.”
My reply was always along the lines of, “Be serious. We both know you’re not the type of girl who likes being scooped up in that scenario. Plus, you were right behind us, and only missed Mouse by, like, fifteen seconds.”
In short, we basically engaged in an hour of playful banter, with Electra – who was sitting next to me – occasionally taking my hand. I was initially surprised by her doing so, but decided to just enjoy the moment rather than quiz her about her actions and what she was thinking.
Eventually, Alpha Prime came in – accompanied by Luna and Buzz – and the serious look on his face immediately set the tone for the discussion that followed.
“Okay, here’s what we’ve got,” my father began, as he, Luna, and Buzz took seats across from us. “The initial attack in the Combat Arena was probably a diversion – something to draw our attention. Then, while we were preoccupied with the aftermath of that, Mouse slipped into the Vault.”
“Makes sense,” Electra said. “We wouldn’t be expecting him back after he’d just put in an appearance.”
“No, it only makes half-sense,” I argued. “I agree that we wouldn’t be expecting him again so soon, but the Vault and Combat Arena are in close proximity. If he wanted a diversion so that he could sneak into the former, he’d have done it at the other end of HQ. Instead, he did it practically next door. I mean, Luna and the others only got there about a minute after the rest of us.”
“You’re right,” Alpha Prime conceded, “but as Electra noted before, Mouse isn’t himself right now. It may not be possible to rationalize his actions.”
“Or maybe we just can’t see the rationale,” I countered.
“Are you kidding?” Luna interjected. “Your buddy attacked us two times today in succession, and you even had a ringside seat for one of them. What’s it going to take for you to pull your head out and accept what the rest of us already know? Mouse has gone off the rails.”
“What I can’t accept is how quickly all of you turn on one of your own,” I shot back. “But not just any other colleague – your leader.”
“Ex-leader,” Buzz corrected. “Especially after what he pulled today in the Vault.”
“That makes for a nice segue,” Alpha Prime chimed in. “Let’s talk about what happened in the Vault.”
“So what do we know?” asked Electra.
“On the surface, it’s pretty straightforward,” my father stated. “Mouse broke in, the guards tried to detain him, and he knocked them out with some kind of concussion grenade.”
“But that’s not the explosion we heard,” I offered, making it more of a statement than a question.
“No,” Alpha Prime agreed. “That was Mouse trying to blow up Buzz.”
We all looked at the speedster, who stated, “I was first on the scene – happened to be nearby and heard the concussion grenade go off. Acoustics aren’t great in some parts of HQ, so it took a minute of running around and checking out various areas before I got to the place where it had detonated.”
“The rear room of the Vault,” Electra surmised.
Buzz nodded. “Yeah, and Mouse was at the back wall when I got there. I went straight at him, then noticed some kind of explosion starting to go off ahead of me. I was able to avoid it, but the place was apparently booby-trapped.”
I took in Buzz’s statement without comment. As a speedster, he wouldn’t have had any problem sidestepping a bomb that was going off. From his perspective, the explosion would have occurred in slow motion and would have been easy to dodge.
“I could tell the explosion wasn’t going to be massive,” Buzz continued, “so I just went around it. That said, it did make a lot of noise and shook the place, although it didn’t do much damage. Anyway, in trying to bypass it, I hit some liquid that was on the floor and lost my footing – ended up banging into the wall. Whatever it was, it was super-slippery. I had trouble just getting back on my feet, and then I couldn’t get any traction. I ended up just running in place. I wasn’t able to get to Mouse no matter how hard I tried, even though he was just a few feet away.”
“So how’d you get unstuck, so to speak?” inquired Electra.
“A few minutes after Mouse left, the liquid just evaporated,” Buzz answered. “I wish I knew what it was, because I’d definitely like to avoid it from now on.”
“Frictionless grease,” I said. Everyone turned to me with expectant looks, so I went on. “Buzz stepped in frictionless grease.”
Luna gave me a confused look. “What’s that?”
“I won’t explain it as well as Mouse,” I confessed, “b
ut friction is the force between two objects that keeps them from slipping and sliding away from each other when they’re in contact. It’s friction between your feet and the ground that allows you to walk or run – or even stand up.”
“And frictionless grease, as the name implies, removes friction,” my father concluded. “That explains what happened to Buzz.”
“So that’s something that Mouse invented?” asked Electra.
“I don’t know,” I admitted with a shrug. “The concept has been around for a while and Mouse discussed it during one of my physics lessons, but I wasn’t aware he’d done anything with it.”
“What about this other thing that you guys had to deal with?” asked Luna. “The localized black hole.”
“It was a gravity well, created by this,” remarked Alpha Prime as he placed a small silver ball on the table. “It has a limited range, but it’s very powerful. I’m not even sure I would have been able to break away from it, if not for Jim.”
“Wow,” muttered Electra. “How’d you deactivate it?”
“We didn’t,” my father admitted. “Just like the frictionless grease evaporated, it just sort of turned off after Mouse left.”
“Or Mouse turned them off,” I added, “since he didn’t need them anymore.”
Alpha Prime’s eyes narrowed as he looked at me. “After we got away from the gravity well, I told you to make me solid again, but you said it was a bad idea. In fact, you didn’t make me substantial until after Mouse was gone. What was that about?”
“The gravity well seemed to trigger after we came into the room,” I answered.
“A booby trap,” Electra concluded. “Similar to what Buzz experienced.”
“Yeah,” I stated with a nod, “and I figured there’d be more of them.”
“Well, it turns out you were right,” Alpha Prime stated. “We did a sweep of the Vault after Mouse left and found two more of the gravity-balls. They didn’t turn on when we located them, so presumably they only trigger when Mouse is present.”
“So once he departed, all his snares went dormant,” Luna noted.
“Apparently,” Alpha Prime concurred, then looked at me. “But I think this really highlights how important it is to have you be part of this search effort, Jim. You know how Mouse thinks, what he’s likely to do, and so on. I’m not sure anyone else would have considered Mouse setting that many traps in the Vault.”
“That brings up another question,” I said. “What was he doing in there?”
There was a quick exchange of glances between my father, Buzz, and Luna. Obviously my question touched on something of import.
“As you know,” Alpha Prime finally said, “the Vault houses a lot of weapons that we’ve collected over the years.”
Electra nodded. “Yeah, we saw the display cases that hold some of them.”
“Well, yes and no,” my father said, waffling a hand from side to side. “The stuff in the display cases is, for one reason or another, completely defective. They’ll never work again. They pose no risk, and we really just keep them out for those occasions when we have distinguished visitors.”
“So they’re just conversation pieces,” I summed up. “Things you can show off when some bigwig – say, a government bureaucrat – drops by. You make him feel important by showing him an area that’s off-limits to almost everyone, but they really don’t get to see anything that’s worth the price of admission.”
“Now you get it,” Luna chimed in.
“Okay,” said Electra, nodding her head. “So where do you keep the good liquor?”
“The walls,” I interjected, reflecting back on what I’d seen Mouse doing in the Vault. “They serve as some kind of additional storage system, like rolling stacks in a library.”
“Very good,” my father said with a smile. “The walls, the floor, the ceiling…everything. That’s where we keep the stuff that’s still worrisome.”
“Behind walls and stuff?” Electra intoned skeptically. “Sounds kind of flimsy, even if they are inside a vault.”
“You probably didn’t get a good look at it,” Buzz commented, “but the walls, floor, and ceiling are even thicker than the blast doors at the Vault’s entrance. Trust me, anything we put there is safe.”
“And we also have a few offsite storage facilities,” Luna added, giving Alpha Prime a knowing look.
I understood without asking that she was referring to my father’s hidden retreat, which was where a number of destructive devices were stored. I had never been there – didn’t even know where it was – but it didn’t seem relevant at the moment.
“So now we get to the nitty-gritty,” I remarked. “Mouse was at one of the wall storage sections. So the question is, what did he take?”
Once again, the three adults in the room spent a moment looking at each other. It gave the impression that the answer wasn’t going to be palatable, and it wasn’t.
“We’re not sure,” Alpha Prime finally confessed.
I gave him an incredulous stare. “What do you mean, you’re not sure? Don’t you guys keep an inventory list or something along those lines?”
“Of course we do,” my father replied. “We’ve got a state-of-the-art system to keep track of stuff like that. But I’ll give you three guesses who designed it, and you won’t need two of them.”
“Mouse,” I said flatly.
“Yes,” Luna confirmed. “Our index, catalog, and itemization process for weapons and such is his baby.”
“So what’s the problem?” Electra asked.
“Apparently during his little house call, Mouse scrambled the inventory system,” Buzz answered.
“In essence, you don’t know what you have anymore,” I concluded.
“That’s true to some extent,” Alpha Prime concurred. “But the real issue is that we don’t know what he took.”
“Well, what can the stuff in there do?” I asked.
“Everything up to and including destroying the world,” Buzz said. “Not to mention just taking it over.”
“Well, good thing that’s not on Mouse’s list,” Electra said.
Once again, the adult League members were silent, as if they weren’t sure how to respond.
“Oh, come on,” I droned. “You can’t believe that Mouse is planning to take over the world.”
Buzz shrugged. “He’s joked once or twice about how much easier things would be if he just took charge. It’s something all of us occasionally kid each other about. But now that he’s off his rocker, who knows?”
“More importantly,” Luna added, “why take something that can only be used for global domination if that’s not your intent?”
“But nobody knows what he took,” I reminded them. “Or if he took anything at all.”
“We’ve got people working on it,” my father assured me. “They’ll figure it out. And there’s also a little bit of a silver lining.”
“Which is what?” I asked dubiously.
“The devices in the Vault that can actually do harm are all disassembled,” Alpha Prime stated. “They’re in pieces that aren’t kept together. So, at best, Mouse got one component of some device, but it won’t do him any good without the rest.”
“Mouse is a genius,” I reminded them. “If he’s got a device that’s missing a component, he can just build it.”
“If he’s got the resources,” Luna chimed it. “But I don’t think that’s the case. I think he’s alone and isolated, without a lot of assets.”
“Other than hacking skills, gravity wells, and frictionless grease,” I noted. “Not to mention anything else he might have up his sleeve.”
Luna looked as though she had something to add, but Alpha Prime cut her off.
“That’s enough, you two,” he declared. “I think you’re both right to an extent. Mouse obviously isn’t to be taken lightly, but – at the same time – if he could just build anything he needed, he wouldn’t be stealing from the League.”
“So basically,” Electra
said, “we need to get our arms around what he took so we can figure out what else he might need.”
“And once we know that,” Alpha Prime added, “we might be able to catch him.”
Chapter 33
Alpha Prime, Buzz, and Luna left shortly thereafter, with my father promising to reach out to me regarding next steps. That left me and Electra in the conference room by ourselves.
“You want me to teleport you home?” I asked her once we were alone.
She seemed to mull it over for a moment, then asked, “What are you going to do?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. I mean, none of this makes sense to me. I know what I saw earlier, with Mouse in the Vault, but I still can’t wrap my head around it.”
“You mean him going on the attack and wanting to destroy the League?”
“Not just that – this whole idea of him maybe taking over the world.” That part in particular was troubling to me – mostly because I had been scanning my father and his colleagues empathically during our conversation, and had picked up on feelings of sincerity in that regard.
“Well, as you so plainly noted,” Electra said, “we don’t know what he took. So maybe we don’t need to cross that bridge yet.”
“But why would he take anything?” I asked. “I can’t imagine that there’s something in that Vault that’s better than…”
I trailed off as the thought that was in my mind finished forming.
“Better than what?” Electra asked, bringing me back to myself.
“I need to go check something out,” I replied.
“What? Where?”
“Mouse’s lab.”
“Then I’m going, too,” she insisted.
“Suit yourself,” I said with a shrug, then teleported the two of us.
Chapter 34
We reappeared in Mouse’s lab. The room was completely dark, and I was about to switch my vision over to the infrared when the lights began to come on – seemingly as a result of our presence.
“So what are we doing here?” Electra asked.