Unstoppable Arsenal

by Jeffery H. Haskell

  Yes.

  There are six white pads on the floor in a circle and a console not ten feet away with the controls for the quantum teleporter. If I didn’t know better I would think I walked onto the set of a Star Trek movie.

  “Okay, full active sensors. There’s no hiding our presence and I want to be ready.”

  He doesn’t answer but I see the response on the HUD as every bit of ECM we have goes live. The door slides open and two men rush in, they’re wearing technician’s coats and carrying laptops. They freeze when they see me.

  I don’t. IP cannons sing their sandpaper staccato, filling the techs with ionic energy and leaving them spazzing on the ground. Okay, now I smile.

  “Let’s find my parents.”

  The base isn’t nearly as big as Portland, no five-star restaurant, entertainment room, or other amenities.

  So far I’ve found a barebone barracks with incredibly spartan arrangements, a few apartments and a cafeteria that looks like prison food would be a step up. We’ve run into at least twenty people, all technicians, no guards, and I’ve stunned them all.

  “You get through their wireless firewall yet?”

  It is incredibly advanced and the coding is dense. The algorithm I’m building to break it will take time. Amelia, whoever designed this understands how AIs work. I wouldn’t be surprised if we encounter one in the near future.

  Awesome. How do I design defensive protocols against AIs? The advantage Epic has over traditional firewalls in incalculable. There isn’t a network in the world he can’t access given enough time. The only trade-off is staying undetected or not.

  “Epic make a note on this. We’re going to have to put in some serious brain trust time, maybe Mom can help? Her notes were what I used to finish you.”

  Take the next right.

  “You’re in?”

  Negative. Audio sensors detect the sound of shredding paper.

  I hear it now. The double doors are marked restricted. Psh. The IP cannon makes short work of them, blowing the right door off its hinges and leaving it hanging awkwardly. I kick it aside as I step through. It is a lab alright. A dozen people are in here and from the looks of it, they’re busy wiping hard drives and shredding documents.

  I stun the two nearest ones and pass their twitching bodies.

  “Special delivery, one angry daughter missing her parents…”

  Very Funny, Epic says.

  I thought so. My head bounces as a pipe clangs off my helmet.

  “Seriously?” I say aloud.

  I send a tech sprawling with a blast from a cannon.

  “Would John and Hope Lockheart please come forward, I’m here to rescue you,” I say with a grin. One of the remaining nine has to be them but they all have their backs to me… and it has been so long that…

  He turns around.

  Dad.

  I want to run to him and hug him but they don’t know who I am. Now, where’s…

  She’s right next to him. They’re older than I remember, fourteen years is a long time. He’s almost forty-three now and she’s thirty-eight. He still has the same round nose I remember. His once brown hair is speckled with gray.

  Mom’s raven black hair is shorter than I remember, but it’s my mom. I’ll never forget their faces. All of a sudden I am six years old again, riding in the back of the car.

  “That’s us. Please don’t hurt anyone else,” he says.

  “I’m not here to hurt anyone, I’m here to rescue you!”

  They look at each other and I see confusion in their expressions.

  “Rescue us? What kind of trick is this? We work here, we’re not—”

  I don’t know what’s going on but I have to show them.

  “Retract faceplate.”

  The silver opaque shield over my face retracts, “Mom, Dad, it’s me, Amelia,” I walk forward and he grabs Mom by the waist and pulls her tight.

  I stop. They're not emaciated but not healthy either. In fact, no one I’ve seen so far could be accused of being well fed. My vision narrows at the abuse they must have suffered.

  “I— I don’t know who you are but please don’t hurt my wife.”

  Don’t know… my heart pounds and I can’t breathe. How do they not know who I am?

  “I’m your daughter. It’s me, Amelia, your daughter. I’ve been searching for you for fourteen years! How do you not know me?”

  He shakes his head and they both are looking at me like I’m crazy, “We never had children. I’m sorry you must be confused. Can you please go and leave us alone? We are doing important work here.”

  “Important work? Category Seven kidnapped you, stole you from my life. Epic,” I don’t bother with lowering the faceplate. “Electromagnetic pulse, full power.”

  A whine emits from the suit as the capacitor builds up. This is something I’ve worked on for a while. Whatever is going on here, I am going to destroy this whole lab and leave Cat-7 with nothing.

  “Faceplate down.” It slides shut. “I don’t know why you can’t remember me, but you’re coming with me. I’m really sorry about this.”

  “Sorry about—”

  “Wide angle IP cannons, fire.” I raise my hands and stun everyone in the lab at once. They lose power when I use such a wide angle, but for normal humans, it doesn’t make a difference. My parents fall down, twitching but still holding each other. I know that being six when they were taken doesn’t leave me with a lot of memories of them, but I remember how much they loved each other. This is them, but how do I get us out?

  EMP at the ready.

  “Have you broken their wireless yet?”

  Their firewall is down, I’m in.

  “How much data on their network?”

  Hundred of terabytes. It would take me a day to scan through it all let alone download it.

  Dammit, I was hoping to take some files with me, but I would rather destroy it all then let Cat-7 keep it.

  “Deploy Shai-Hulud, let me know when he’s entrenched.”

  Deploying. Ten seconds for network saturation.

  “Have they disconnected the communications net yet?”

  Negative. Our intrusion is localized only but it will not remain so for long. Once they know we’re here they will send reinforcements. I have confirmation of Shai-Hulud’s spread to the next hub.

  Excellent. The worm will work its way through Cat-7 and the longer they go without detecting it the more information I’ll have. When I tapped into their corporate network I did something similar. But this isn’t their official network, this is something else entirely.

  “What the hell are they working on here?”

  I believe this is the origination of the plasma gun technology and the quantum teleporter.

  “Figures. Okay, time to go. Fire the EMP!”

  I brace myself, I haven’t exactly tested this yet. Theoretically, the suits shielding will hold. We came up with the idea after we fought the Creature. I doubled the shielding in the MKII for this very reason. One thumbnail sized ZPFM ejects from a compartment in my shoulders and explodes. The heat energy is minimal but the EMP is powerful and instant. My HUD dims as the pulse bursts every circuit, battery, hard drive and wipes any information kept on a magnetic or electronic media. The lights shatter and we’re cast into darkness.

  My HUD refreshes with an overlay of green night vision as well as thermographic. I can see heat sources hotter than ambient air which means people stick out like a sore thumb. I hadn’t counted on them being unwilling participants in their own rescue. Think, Amelia, think!

  Multiple quantum teleportation signals are blooming around the base.

  “Reinforcements?”

  I don’t think so…

  Several rapid pops and half the scientists in the room are gone. Oh no. Evacuation.

  “Open comms to Kate, now Epic!”

  I run over and scoop my parents up in my arms.

  “Amelia?” Kate’s groggy voice sounds in my ear.

  “Kate, I nee
d you right frigging now!”

  Kate Petrenelli is my best friend for a reason. Before the sound is even done echoing in my helmet, she’s here. Dressed in a modest pink nightie and slippers, she appears next to me.

  “Arsenal, what the hell is going—”

  “My parents, Domino, these are my parents. No time to explain, port them to my lab!”

  Her eyes narrow but she doesn’t say anything else. She touches my mom and the two of them vanish.

  “Epic, as soon as we’re back, full spectrum jamming on the lab. There’s got to be a way to block the signal they’re using to lock onto them.”

  Affirmative.

  She’s back with a pop, leaning over she takes my father and vanishes.

  I watch as the last of the people in the room disappear like Kate. Is that how she does it? Is her teleportation quantum-based? I briefly wonder if they came up with their advanced tech by studying supers. They certainly have the access.

  With a pop of displaced air, Kate is back. She puts her hands on my shoulders and—

  We’re in my lab.

  “Full spectrum ECM now!”

  Engaged.

  “Okay Amelia,” Kate says standing next to me in her nightie with sweat beading on her brow from the rapid teleports, “You want to tell me what the hell is going on?” Kate asks. Hands balled into fists on her hips and she looks none too happy.

  It turns out Cat-7 uses a subdermal tracking implant to keep tabs on its people. Once the ECM was on they couldn’t lock onto the implant. It survived the EMP because it’s a radioactive marker, low-level enough it wouldn’t harm my parents, but strong enough that Cat-7’s sensors could pick up on it. Once the full jamming suite activated in my lab Mom and Dad were safe. The first thing we did was neutralize the tracker with a proton beam.

  Currently, Mom and Dad are sleeping in an empathy-induced rest while I explain to Kate what’s happened.

  She isn’t happy with me.

  Wheeling around to my display I punch in a few more metrics. I thought maybe it wasn’t them, that my memory was fooling me, but everything Epic has says they are indeed my parents.

  “I don’t understand why they don’t remember me…” I say for the umpteenth time.

  Kate has the far away look in her eyes she gets when reading people.

  “You should have told us, Amelia, we could have helped,” she says, blowing a strand of perfect black hair out of her eyes.

  “I’m sorry. The more people knew the more likely Cat-7 would know I was on to them. It’s taken me forever to find them, Kate, I just couldn’t risk it,” I tell her. Of course I’m not looking at her, I flip a couple of more buttons and—

  My chair jerks around and she’s eye-level with me.

  “We’re friends, Amelia, or supposed to be. You should have trusted me.” The pain in her voice is heartbreaking.

  I am the dumbest smart person I know. I drop my face covering it with my hands. I was so wrapped up, so focused on my parents I hadn’t even thought about telling her. What’s worse, that I didn’t trust her or I didn’t think to even tell her? A hundred different words come to mind but all I do is sit there with my mouth open like an idiot. The genuine hurt on her face is killing me. What would Luke think when he found out? Would… would he break up with me? If he felt as betrayed as Kate does…

  “Stop,” she puts a gentle hand on the top of my head, “Self-pity tastes awful on you. And no, I doubt Luke will be as upset as me,” she says cocking her head to one side to peer at me. “You really didn’t think to include me did you?”

  Having an empath for a friend, a best friend, has its ups and downs. Sometimes I feel like my conversations with her are me feeling things and her replying to them as if I had spoken. Regardless, her touch tells me she’s passed it.

  “I’m sorry Kate, I… I was so wrapped up in finding them, in knowing where they were, I fell into old habits. Of course I can trust you… do trust you. I just—I’ve been alone for a long time and when it all came down, I went back to instinct. I’m sorry.” I’m terrible at this, I know. Since I was six years old the whole world has thought I was delusional. I had to stop talking about my parents or they would put me in counseling to ‘actualize my grief’. I learned that lesson the hard way. I guess I need to ‘unlearn’ it.

  She squats down to look me in the eye, raising my head with her fingers on my chin.

  “You’re not alone, Amelia, not anymore. Okay? We all believe you.”

  I can feel the tears welling and my heart is pounding as her face fills with warmth and a smile that makes it all better.

  “It’s okay,” she says.

  I smile back wiping my eyes for a second before I speak. “Why don’t they know who I am?”

  She gives me one more reassuring look before standing up and turning to evaluate my parents. Her eyes take on the distant look, a kind of unfocused gaze, as she uses her powers.

  “Mind if I touch them?”

  Her abilities work on many different levels, touch is one of them.

  “Please do,” I tell her. I look up at the big screen. Epic has the news from Boston on it. He’s monitoring the situation, making sure I’m not mentioned. I don’t think any cameras caught sight of me, especially since we hacked all the CCTV within a block of the building. I came down just before dawn so even a night vision camera wouldn’t have worked well. So far, they are going with ‘building fire’. Why hide what really happened? Unless it was an illegal building and they don’t want to draw attention to it.

  “There’s something not right here,” Kate says over her shoulder. I wheel over to see.

  She has a hand on each of them and her face crinkles up like she smelled something bad.

  “It isn’t like anything I’ve seen before. There are different levels of manipulation. The basic stuff, like what I do passively is pretty harmless.” She doesn’t open her eyes as she speaks, just cocks her head to the side as if she were working through a puzzle. “If I try real hard I can make a man more attracted to me then he normally would be, but I couldn’t persuade him to do anything he didn’t already want to do. The next level is active persuasion. That is where I shift people’s emotions and feelings in the direction I want them to go. Third level is where the low-level mind control starts to come to play. While I can do one and two better than just about anyone, mind control is strictly the domain of the telepath. And there just aren’t a lot of them capable of this fine control. As far as I can tell, your parents are perfectly normal. If it wasn’t for the fact that I’ve been reading people’s emotions since I was fourteen I wouldn’t even think there was anything wrong...”

  “But you do think there is?” I say hopefully.

  “Yes, there’s something wrong, but it’s slippery. I can’t quite get a grasp on it.”

  I shake my head, if she can’t fix it, what do I do? I’m no neurologist. In all my plans and backup plans, undoing brainwashing wasn’t one of them. Stupid, really. Why didn’t I think of this? Between my parents they have three advanced degrees. If they could have found a way to contact me they would have. I’d always assumed I’d been under some kind of threat and that was why but… now it all makes sense.

  “Which begs the question, who could do this?” I ask Kate.

  “I don’t follow?”

  “Every person with superpowers is on a list of some kind. Either through government registration or as a criminal, right? You said yourself, there aren’t a lot of empaths and even fewer true telepaths, right?”

  She nods, “Yeah. We went to a special school in New York state, up north away from people. Some of us were too dangerous to allow out and others, like myself, needed time to learn how to control our powers before we were safe around people. I think there was,” she looks away for a second, “Fifteen or so students when I was there ten years ago. As far as I know, the rate of emergence of mind powers stays a fairly small percentage. The vast majority of supers get the F1 package, you know, better than normal vision, levitate
a foot off the ground, that sort of the thing. The number one power set for F3’s is speed, strength, and reflexes. The higher the rating the less often the powers emerge. I’m an F4 empath which is rare in itself, but only a small percentage of F5’s are telepaths.”

  I nod, my mind whirling. If there is a school, then there is a list.

  “Epic—”

  Way ahead of you. Checking.

  “If someone did mess with your parents’ minds, and I am pretty sure they did, do you think they would have gone to the School? Mind control, true mind control, is dealt with pretty harshly. Our headmaster was the strongest telepath around and if he found out you were consciously using your abilities to force people to do things they didn’t want to do…” she shivered. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her afraid or upset before. This guy must be a piece of work.

  Was his name Mr. Kana?

  “That’s the guy. When people think of mind control they think of big-brained individuals. Mr. Kana is from Samoa, the biggest man, and I am including Luke when he’s hulked out, I have ever seen. Six-seven if he was an inch and—”

  Deceased.

  Kate stumbles, her face flashing pale, “Dead? No, he was only ten years older than me… what happened?” She releases my parents and walks over to the screen where Epic was relaying the information. The screen fills with news stories of a mugging gone wrong and Mr. Kana tried and failed to intervene. He caught a bullet in the back of his head.

  She shook her head, “No. Amelia, just… no.”

  I look at her then my parents and back at her. I need her help to fix them but she is as distraught as I’ve ever seen her.

  “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

  “You have to understand,” she says, “He is… was an F5 Telepath, do you know what that means?”

  F5’s are the most dangerous of all powered people. They’re rated based on how much property damage, or lives they can take in a given minute. They stop counting at F5. Once they got to the part where they could wipe out a city in a minute, giving them ratings above that just didn’t make sense.

  I shake my head, “I mean I know what an F5 is and I can only assume an F5 telepath is probably a big deal—”