“Yeah,” she said coldly, “so you say. So, did you just call to play the sympathy card, or do you have something of use for us? We’d kind of like to know where our friends are being held.” ~
“I’ll tell you,” she said, “but not on the phone. In person. We need to meet.”
“Yeah,” said Paige, “so you can lead us into another of Black’s traps.”
“No,” she said, “so you can meet with Black. There’ve been some new developments, not good ones either. He wants to sit down with you and talk the situation out.”
“Trap,” said Paige, “trap.”
“Just you six, and the two of us. That’s all. Nobody else will even know.”
It was quiet. She probably had muted the phone and was conferring with the others. “We don’t believe you. Why should we?”
Black was looking at her out of the corner of his eye. “Hand me the phone,” he said.
She gave it to him.
“This is Black. You have my personal assurance that this will be a meeting on neutral ground. You will not be harmed or detained. I know of a location on 1-95 in South Carolina, just across the border. It’s very busy, very public. There’s a hotel there, and I’ve already reserved a suite for you. Espeth tells me that you’ve been living in difficult conditions the last few days. Surely a nap in a real bed seems attractive right now.” A pause. “No, it isn’t intended as a bribe, but whatever works. The situation for your friends is a good deal more complicated than it was only a day ago, as is my own. It is never the wish of a true Genogoth to see a mutant harmed. Please meet with me.”
A much longer pause. He smiled slightly. “Espeth has the information on our meeting place. I’ll put her on.”
Angelo stared at the information that Paige had written down. “Little Latveria?” He shook his head in puzzlement. “They want us to drive to Europe?”
“Not the real Latveria,” explained Paige, “Little Latveria. I’ve heard of it. Some kind of major tourist trap for people traveling from the northeast down to Florida. Should be lots of attractions, food, shops, a hotel, lots of people in and out all the time. The Genogoths wouldn’t dare risk doing anything there. It’s way too public.” She saw the look on Angelo’s face. “I thought we agreed. I told them we’d come.”
He smirked. “What if we just don’t show?”
Jubilee put her hand on the phone. “We could just wait until after Logan calls back. Maybe we don’t need her at all.” Paige shook her head. ‘They have other information that we need, and even if we do know where we’re going, there’s no saying we’ll get past the Genogoths without Espeth’s help. Maybe we can negotiate some kind of truce with Black.” She shrugged. “Even if it’s an ambush, we’d at least know where we stand.”
Monet was looking at the atlas, and had pinpointed the exit for Little Latveria. “An ambush, with a desperate fight against overwhelming odds. For ten minutes in a hot shower, I would gladly risk it.” She smiled just the tiniest bit. “Dibs,” she said.
“Little Latveria?” Leather stared at the e-mail on his tiny computer’s screen. According to the message he’d just received from Visor, Black had reserved an entire suite at Little Latveria’s Doomstad Hotel using one of his personal credit cards. He took another sip of bitter, diner coffee, waved away a waitress in a pink uniform who was trying to freshen his cup, and considered the implications.
He already knew that Black hadn’t put Espeth on a plane, as he’d indicated. That meant that she was likely part of his plan. If they intended to hide out from him, there was no reason for them to need an entire suite, or for him to reserve the room in advance by credit card. That suggested the possibility that he was reserving it for someone else.
- ,He pulled his phone out of his pocket and hit the speed-dialer. “Pull our people back to a circle ten miles around Little Latveria. Yes, that Little Latveria. Tell them to stay out of sight until I give the word. No helicopters. Warn them that they may see Black or Espeth, and possibly the Xavier mutants as well, but they are not to be seen or to make contact. Clear?” He listened to the phone for a moment. “I’ll be in Little Latveria, of course, waiting to spring the trap once everyone is safely inside.”
Sharpe reviewed the video and telemetry playback of the Hound mission for what must have been the tenth time that afternoon. From where he sat in the control room, he could see the three young mutants strapped into their monitoring chairs. The Hound armor had been removed, but each still wore a headband containing the mind control circuitry, the very circuitry that concerned Sharpe right now.
The door to the room slid open and Happersen stepped in. He smiled. “Reviewing yesterday’s success I see. The mission couldn’t have gone better could it? Not a glitch, and we have a new mutant subject to refine the process on.” Then he saw the expression on Sharpe’s face, and his own smile faded. “What’s wrong? The mission was a great success.”
Sharpe motioned him over. “Look at this.” The console in front of them had three large screens showing the view from a camera mounted in each of the Hound’s helmets. Below these, a smaller bank of screens showed the view from each of the cyberhounds, and several others located in the nose, sides, and tail of the helicopter. Below that, a row of intermediatesized screens showed columns of numbers and banks of graphs. These last could be configured to examine in detail any of the telemetry data that had been transmitted from the Hound armors, the cyberhounds, or sensors in the helicopter.
At the moment, all the displays were frozen. Happersen scanned the video screens. This was the moment of capture, when the mutant target had been trapped and frozen in a lake.
- * Sharpe moved his finger over a touch-pad and the displays began to move.
Happersen saw the amphibious mutant struggling against the ice. Sharpe had turned up the audio track.
“Let me go,” the mutant appeared agitated. “Mutants ain’t real, they’re only in the movies!”
As he did every time he saw that clip, Happersen chuckled. But Sharpe wasn’t pleased. “Did you see it?”
He shook his head. “See what?”
Sharpe rewound the recording, then ran it forward slowly. He pointed at a graph showing three lines, one purple, one red, one blue. As the mutant spoke, the lines spiked slightly, especially the blue one. “That,” said Sharpe, “is an emotional response. The mind control device should have completely shut down that part of their brains.”
Happersen studied the spikes. “The control systems are cross-linked at the command buss level. It could have just been a transient power spike. The cold might have cause it. At worst it was a moment of involuntary empathy that the system immediately compensated for. I don’t see it as a problem.”
“I can’t take that chance. One of the problems with Project Homegrown is that we were too lax in the mental control of our subjects. This situation is worse. These three were well connected in the mutant community. They will almost definitely be used against mutants they know, even close friends. There can be no trace of sympathy, no shred of mercy left in them.”
Happersen sighed. He pointed at a control. “We could turn up the BMP gain, but it’s dangerous. We could be risking brain damage in the subjects.”
Sharpe reached for the control without hesitation and pushed it up to near maximum. “Better that than losing control. These Hounds of ours, they have always been expendable.”
According to the story, immigrant businessman Peitor “Bubba” Vukcevich ran a once-popular truck stop that had been bypassed by the freeway. The good news for him was that an exit had been built only half a mile away. The bad news is that people weren’t inclined to get off the freeway and drive even that short distance. He had tried billboards, but with only limited success.
Then one morning, he picked up a copy of a Washington, D.C., paper left in his diner by a passing trucker. On the cover was a photo, taken by a stringer for the New York Daily Bugle, showing sometime Fantastic Four foe, Victor Von Doom. Doom was appearing at the United N
ations for the first time in his role as the ruling Monarch of Latveria. Vukcevich had been struck by the fearsome armored figure draped in regal green robes, his gauntlet covered hand held high and outstretched, as though issuing a command that could not be refused.
Struck by inspiration, he immediately changed the name of his establishment, and showed the picture to the company who painted his billboards. Soon, the billboard closest to his exit was decorated with a huge cut-out of Doom in the same pose as the newspaper photograph. Next to it were the words, “Doom COMMANDS you to Exit here for LITTLE LATVERIA.”
The day the sign was completed, his business increased two hundred percent. Soon there were dozens of signs, all up and down 1-95 and spanning three states. He hired local women to sew Latverian peasant garb for all his employees. He added Latverian folk dishes and “Doomburgers” to the menu. Within months, the business had turned around enough for him to break ground on a new hotel. It would be a halfscale replica of Von Doom’s castle constructed from painted cinder-block rather than stone, for reasons of economy.
Gradually, he expanded, adding carnival rides, gift shops, more restaurants, fireworks stands, tee-shirt airbrushing, go-karts, and an assortment of other attractions. Business continued to grow. On the fifth anniversary of his original Doom billboard, he started his greatest project, a two-hundred foot 'tall statue of Doom himself, towering over the freeway and visible for miles in either direction. A spiral staircase climbed up through his leg and armored torso. For a small fee, visitors could climb to the top and gaze out through the holes in his fearsome mask. And even though there was nothing in particular to see, other than the air conditioners on the roofs of the buildings below and the freeway stretching long and straight to the horizon in each direction, on some days, the lines were a hundred people long.
“Howdy y’all,” said the man at the hotel desk, “all hail Doom.” He leaned forward and whispered. “That’s just part of the show, you know. We’re all good Americans here.”
“I'll bet you are,” said Paige, examining the painted faux stone and Styrofoam simulated open-beam interior decor. “You have a reservation in the name of Black?”
He checked his computer, and his eyes widened just a little. “Yes, Ma’am. Four-room suite, all paid for up front.” He looked at her. “You’re on some kind of school trip, it says?”
She nodded. “We’re headed for the Varsity Snipe Hunting
National Championship in Miami. Our coach was held up with car trouble, but he’ll be along.”
The man behind the desk looked concerned. “You’re minors? We have a policy about checking in unaccompanied minors—”
She waved at die computer. “As you said, it’s all paid for in advance, and our coach will be along.”
He looked unimpressed.
“For your trouble and understanding, why don’t you just put a hundred dollar tip for yourself on the bill. Just charge it to Coach Black’s card. Heck, make it two hundred.”
The man’s mouth fell open. “Uh—sure. I got no problem with that.”
She smiled as he handed her a key.
“Room 300,” he said. “Elevators up the hall there, past the Doombot Arcade. Can’t miss it. Nice rooms. Close to the Snack-O-Matic.”
In the course of capturing their two subjects in Seattle, Sharpe’s people had assembled a rather thick dossier on their habits and associations, particularly on a campus mutant organization called M.O.N.S.T.E.R., with which all three subjects had apparently been associated. Public reports were that the organization had shut down after a series of arsons and hate-group attacks. But not according to a report from the Shared Mutant Intelligence network, which distributed such information among government agencies. It had simply gone underground.
It was outside an enclave of M.O.N.S.T.E.R., a former frat-house in Seattle, where two of the subjects had been ambushed and captured, and where the two had been observed to spend much of their free time. The file also included information about other individuals who frequented the M.O.N.S.T.E.R. house. Most of them were confirmed human-normals associating with mutants for unknown reasons, some were unknowns, and several were confirmed mutants.
It was this last list that Sharpe flipped through on his computer screen. He picked one with whom the subject “Three-dog-night” had been seen on a number of occasions, a college sophomore named Peter Darcy, a.k.a. “Fourhand.” His obvious physical mutation was relatively minor as these things went. At the elbow each of his arms sprouted two forearms, each with a fully functional hand. Apparently the mutation extended to his brain and nervous system, allowing him to do separate, mechanically complex, tasks with each hand.
“He has a brilliant future as a watchmaker,” Sharpe muttered. But even for their Hound program, designed to exploit limited mutant powers, Sharpe wasn’t sure how they’d be able to use this one. He made a notation on the file, just for future reference: cull. There was one purpose, however, for which this “Fourhand” would be useful.
Sharpe routed their surveillance photographs and recordings into the Foxhole’s super-computers where they were processed and overlaid onto a virtual training target. He routed the target into a virtual training exercise for Three-dog-night, then stepped from his office, down the hall, and into the Hound control room.
Beyond the glass front wall, he could see the three Hounds, strapped into their chairs, virtual training visors over their eyes.
Happersen was already in the room. He seemed a little startled when Sharpe walked in. “I was just going over the bio-scans. There a few things I wanted you to look at.”
Sharpe slid into a chair at the console next to Happersen. “Later. I want to run a training exercise on Three-dog-night.”
“Now?”
“Now. You’ll find a target matrix already programmed into the system. Set up the environmental parameters, something the subject would be familiar with.” Sharpe hesitated. He wasn’t overly familiar with Seattle. “The Space Needle, observation deck. Is that in the standard library?”
Happersen checked, “Yes, sir.”
“Set it up.” While Happersen worked, Sharpe slipped on a headset with boom mike and patched in an audio channel. “Attention, Three-dog-night.”
“Yes, control.” The voice was flat and unemotional. “Prepare for training scenario. Target is being displayed for you now.” He sent pictures to the subject’s training display. “Do you recoenize the target?”
“No.” '
Good. The memory blocks were working, at least on a conscious level. While the subject still had his memories from before the activation of the mind control device, he could no longer access them. Of course, the real test was yet to come. “Three-dog-night, this is the situation. You are in pursuit of a dangerous mutant. Your teammates have been incapacitated and you are alone. The target has been cornered in the Space Needle. Apprehend. Use any force necessary. Capture dead or alive. Understood?”
' '“Apprehend,” said the flat voice. “Dead or alive.”
Sharpe turned to Happersen. “Are you ready?”
Happersen nodded. “I’ve set it to nighttime, after hours, no bystanders.”
Shaipe nodded. “Good. Keep the scenario clean. All we care about is the target. Start program.”
The door opened with a click, and the Gen X crew filed into the suite. Angelo stopped to take in the fierce looking boar’s head mounted over the fake-stone fireplace with its plastic logs and electric flames. “Razorbackhe muttered, “why did it have to be Razorback?”
Razorback was a little-known super hero based in Arkansas, and possibly the world’s most obscure mutant hero. He’d come onto the kids’ radar screen the previous summer when he’d intercepted an assassin’s bullet intended for the President, and briefly become a media darling. It had annoyed them all that he’d become a celebrated hero precisely because he wasn’t widely known as a mutant. All that was obvious was that he was an ex-football hero with a silly costume, some gadgets, and a customized semi-truc
k called “the Big Pig.”
Thanks to Professor Xavier’s files, they’d all known differently. Razorback had a minor mutation that allowed him to instinctively operate any vehicle.
“What they don’t know won’t hurt them,” said Angelo, to nobody in particular. Other, better-known mutants like the X-Men had saved the world on a regular basis, and got only scorn and grief for their trouble. “From now on,” he said, “I’m telling people I fell into a vat of experimental skin cream or sumthin.”
Monet scooted past him, “Shower,” she said. “Hot. Mine. Now.” She vanished into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. It locked with a loud click.
Paige walked in and stared mournfully at the door. “Why do I feel like none of us are getting in there for a long time?” There was a whoop from the next room. “No prob,” called Ev, “there are more where that came from!”
' ■* Jubilee did a flying leap onto the nearest bed, bounced into the air, did a somersault, then landed sprawled on her back.
Jono was inspecting the small, free-standing wet bar. He pulled a spigot and watched as a stream of brown fluid came out.
Ev came out of the other room and strolled over to watch. “RC Cola on tap,” he said. “Figures.”
Jono released the tap. “Not that it does me much bloody good,” he said. “But I do like to smell a good root-beer every once in a while.”
Angelo walked around the room, inspecting the array of framed photos and newspaper clippings. A framed page from a guest register signed by Buford T. Hollis, indicating that he’d stayed here shortly after making the headlines last summer. The centerpiece of the collection was a painting of the man himself, a hulking individual in a leaf-grcen jumpsuit, yellow gloves and boots, and a boar’s head, not unlike the one in the other room, perched on his shoulders. The man’s wide, smiling face could be seen projecting from where the boar’s mouth would have been. He reached up and touched the painting. “Black velvet,” he said. “At least we’re consistent.”
Generation X - Genogoths Page 14
