Daedalus’s attack was relentless, merciless, devastating.
A few moments ago Daedalus had angrily slammed his clasped fists into the side of Brawn’s head, even though Brawn had been grappling with Krodin.
Roz knew then that Abby had been right: Daedalus was worse than Krodin. Anyone would have to be completely insane to attack an ally so that he could get to an enemy.
Again and again, Krodin was forced back, but each of Daedalus’s blows seemed to injure the Fifth King less than the one before.
She knew that Krodin was going to win. He could keep fighting forever, but eventually Daedalus’s armor was going to run out of power.
Working together Roz and Suzanne had already taken the fallen guards to safety, Roz using her telekinesis and Suzanne swooping down and lifting them away. Now they could do nothing but watch, and wait for either Krodin or Daedalus to gain the upper hand.
Again, Brawn recovered and leaped into the fray. He pulled Krodin free of Daedalus’s grasp and tossed him high into the air.
Krodin came down hard on the Carrier’s landing deck, and Brawn whirled about to face Daedalus. “What do you keep hitting me for?” Brawn bellowed. “I’m on your side!”
Daedalus looked up at the giant’s face for a moment, then took a step back.
Suzanne nudged Roz. “What’s he doing…?”
The metal framework on Daedalus’s back extended once more. The twin arms spread straight out on either side at shoulder height and then quickly began to unfold, the arms splitting into a series of thin strips.
In seconds, the mechanism was complete: Giant metal wings sprouted from his back. They flapped once, and Daedalus soared into the air, arcing toward the Carrier.
Suzanne whispered, “Of course. Daedalus.”
Roz looked at her. “What does that mean?”
“Greek mythology…Daedalus was an inventor, a genius. King Minos locked him in a tower so that his knowledge could never be used by anyone else. Daedalus used feathers and wax to create wings for himself and his son. But Icarus flew too high, and the heat of the sun melted the wax. He fell into the sea and drowned.”
“And Daedalus?”
“Daedalus flew.”
Brawn limped over to Roz and Suzanne, examining his bloodied knuckles. “Now what? I still don’t know which one I’m supposed to be fighting! We should just leave them to it and then take on whichever one of them is left standing.”
The idea was so tempting that Roz found herself leaning toward it. She shook her head briskly. “No. We fight with Daedalus against Krodin. Daedalus might be insane, but I’m guessing he’s still mortal. If we win and he turns on us and enslaves the planet, at least he’ll eventually die of old age.”
Suzanne’s shoulders sagged, as though all the fight had left her. “Roz…Even if there was a hundred of us, we still wouldn’t be able to defeat Krodin. You know that, don’t you? My people have been gathering data on him for years. He has no weaknesses.”
Roz stared at the Carrier, where Krodin and Daedalus were pummeling each other with such ferocity that they could hear the blows even where they were. “Everyone has a weakness. We just have to find it.”
Brawn straightened up, slowly turned to the south. “Something’s coming.”
Roz looked. Above the treetops a dark dot was approaching. A fighter jet: It streaked overhead and then banked to the west.
“Reconnaissance,” Suzanne said softly.
Another jet appeared, then two more, each one coming from the south and then taking a different path.
“Unity,” Suzanne said. “They’re here.”
Lance and Josh looked over Remington’s shoulders at the computer screen.
“We, uh, input the source coordinates here, destination coordinates here,” Remington said. “Here we tell the system when we want it to activate, so we can queue them up in advance. Right now it’s gearing up to run through a set of emergency procedures.”
Lance looked at the complex list of figures that was rapidly scrolling up on a second screen. “What’s all this?”
“Aw no!” Remington slid his chair over to the second screen’s keyboard and began typing. “Fighters—hundreds of them! MiGs, Tornados, Hornets…Looks like the whole world has turned up for the party. This is exactly what Krodin was expecting, except that none of us were supposed to be here.”
“Forget them,” Lance said. “Unseal the door to the teleporter room.”
“I can’t. Krodin and Max are the only ones who can do that.”
Josh said, “Then disable it.”
“Same problem.”
“All right,” Lance said. “OK, let’s think…. Right. If Unity wants to destroy this base, we’ll let them. Set up the teleporter to send us all away from here. And send Abby first. Uh, and Roz too.”
Remington shook his head. “McKendrick, that’ll take ages to set up if we can’t get into the teleporter room. At the subatomic level there’s no easy way to differentiate between a person and his surroundings. It took nearly an hour to get the teleporter to lock on to you guys in the Raptor. Anything inside the teleporter room we can send almost immediately, because we know the precise shape of the room and we set up the energy field to match. When we pulled Max out of the swamp, we had to do a best guess. We took a hundred gallons of water and half a tree with him.”
“We have to do something!”
Remington shrugged. “What’s the point? They’re already here. The base will be overrun in minutes.” The first computer beeped, and he returned to its screen. “See that? That was an order to transport someone inside the base.”
Lance gritted his teeth. “Shut down the emergency protocols. Now!”
Remington looked up at him. “Chancellor Krodin will—”
“Do you remember the key? Imagine that was your thumb.”
Remington pulled the keyboard closer and began entering instructions. One by one, the pending orders began to disappear.
Josh, standing next to Lance, said, “Teleport Krodin out of here. Send him to the middle of the Sahara desert or some place where there’s no one for him to hurt.”
“It doesn’t work on Krodin,” Remington said. “Not anymore. Anything you do to him will work only once before his powers adapt to resist it, and he’s already been teleported.”
“So you can’t even send him back to his own time?” Josh asked.
Lance said, “Even if we could, that would be the biggest mistake in human history, Josh! He’s immortal, remember? If we did that, he’d have a four-and-a-half-thousand-year head start on us. He’d already taken over the known world by that stage—I hate to think what things would be like now with him having been in charge all that time.”
“So what do we do?”
“I’m thinking.” We can’t send him away, can’t send him through time. But we’ve got an incredibly powerful weapon here…. There has to be some way we can use it against him! Then he smiled. “Got it.”
“What are we going to do?” Josh asked.
Lance ignored him. “Remington, lock the teleporter onto Krodin. Track his position at all times. Wherever he goes, I want the thing targeting him. You can do that?”
“Yeah, but what’s the point? I just told you, it won’t work on him!”
“Just do it.”
Abby let the steel pole clatter to the floor and flexed her hands into fists. Her knuckles cracked.
For the past few minutes she’d been trying to force open the massive steel doors that sealed the teleporter room from the rest of the base. “I’m sorry, Mr. Cord. It’s just not working.”
Cord angrily kicked at a lump of fallen masonry. “There has to be a way!”
“My strength works best on metal, so I should be able to open the doors, but there’s something else holding them closed.”
“We’re running out of time,” Cord said.
“I know,” Abby said, then muttered, “What would Lance do?”
“What?”
“Just,
you know, wondering how he’d get in there. He seems to be good at that sort of thing.”
Cord laughed. “You’re right. If you can’t solve a problem, just ignore it. We don’t go through the door. We go around it. Through the wall.”
“Or the ceiling,” Abby said. “Daedalus crashed the Raptor into the roof—it’s already weakened.” She snatched up the steel pole once more. “This way!”
They ran back along the corridor toward the dormitory where she and James had broken through into the base.
As Cord rounded the last corner to the dormitory, Abby grabbed his shoulder and suddenly pulled him back—just as a series of small craters appeared in the wall next to where he’d been standing.
A woman’s voice called out, “This is Agent Amandine Paquette, chief of the Manhattan Praetorian Division. The base is completely surrounded! Drop your weapons and get down on the floor!”
Cord and Abby exchanged a glance, then Cord whispered, “I’ll let her take me. You stay out of sight. First chance you get, go to the roof and break through to the teleporter.”
“She’ll kill you!”
“She won’t. She’ll want to interrogate me first.” He pushed Abby back and called out, “Don’t shoot! I’m alone and unarmed!” He placed his hands on top of his head, took a deep breath, and stepped around the corner into the dormitory.
Abby fought the urge to go after him; she knew he was right. She quietly backed away from the corner. A large section of the ceiling had partially collapsed, hanging at an angle against one wall. Abby crouched behind the array of water-soaked tiles, steel pole at the ready.
Angry voices drifted back to her: the agent yelling, “On your knees, Cord! Now!”
A man: “You two, cuff him, search him.”
Four of them at least, Abby thought. He’s not superhuman, but he should be able to deal with four.
Then Paquette’s voice again: “The rest of you, search the base. Two teams of four.”
Another eight. It’s not going to be easy to sneak past them.
She heard approaching footsteps splashing on the damp floor, tightened her grip on the pole.
Through a gap in the tiles she saw shadows stretching across the floor.
Agent Paquette said, “You don’t know me, Cord, but I knew the other version of you. I’m the new acting vice-chancellor.”
They might not look here, Abby said to herself. She held her breath as the first soldier passed, then the second.
Paquette said, “Solomon Cord. By attacking this base you have committed an act of treason against the state.”
A black-gloved hand reached around the edge of Abby’s makeshift shelter and began to pull it aside.
“During a time of war there is only one punishment for treason: immediate execution.”
Abby threw herself forward, crashing through the ceiling tiles and into the startled Praetorian soldier. Still gripping the pole in both hands like a quarterstaff, she rolled over him, landed on her feet.
She jabbed one end of the pole into the stomach of the next man just as the two who had passed were turning around.
Abby slammed the other end of the pole into the floor, vaulted over the fallen guard, and crashed feetfirst into one of the remaining men.
The last one had enough time to raise his weapon. Abby ducked and rolled, spun the steel pole around so that it slammed against the side of the man’s knee.
He screamed as he collapsed to the side, and his automatic rifle erupted into life.
In the close corridor the sound was almost deafening. Abby kept low until the shooting stopped, then rolled to her feet. The wounded men were still screaming, and it took her a moment to realize that there were more screams than there should be.
Just beyond the corridor another half dozen Praetorian soldiers lay on the ground, shot at close range by their colleague.
Amandine Paquette’s voice called out, “Whoever you are—stand down! I’ve got Solomon Cord here. Drop your weapons, put your hands on your head, and walk backward toward me. You have ten seconds to respond, or I will snap his neck!”
“Just a minute!” Abby replied, in the same tone she used when her mother asked her to wash the dishes. She dropped the steel pole and quickly looked around for something else—anything—she might be able to use as a less obvious weapon.
“Now!”
Abby gave up the search and did as she was told, walking backward into the dormitory and carefully stepping over the wounded Praetorians. As she rounded the corner, she saw, at the edge of her vision, Solomon Cord kneeling on the ground with the woman standing behind him: Her hands were on his neck. There was a gun in the woman’s holster.
Superhuman, Abby thought. She has to be. Otherwise she’d be using the gun. She lowered her hands as she slowly turned around, and forced a smile. “You got him, then. Good. I’ve been chasing him all over the base.” She waved her hand back the way she had come. “Come on, we’ve got some of his friends holed up in the teleport room.”
Amandine Paquette looked at Abby for a moment, then said, “Huh. How come you’re not singing ‘Happy Birthday’? After all, you must think I was born yesterday if you expect me to fall for a line like that.”
“I figured it was worth a go.”
“Keep your hands where I can see them.” Her eyes narrowed. “You’re not one of Unity’s agents. You’re her, aren’t you? The one who took down the Raptors in Midway. You simpleminded fools—this country needs Krodin! Eight minutes ago more than a million Unity ground troops touched down on U.S. soil. All along the Gulf coast, across the borders from Mexico and Canada. We don’t know how they amassed so many troops without our early-warning system alerting us, but they’re here. They’ve got upward of two hundred fighters in the air, and they’re locking cruise missiles on to everything we have. Their aircraft carriers are already engaged with ours.” Paquette let go of Cord’s neck, then kicked him between his shoulder blades, knocking him facedown to the floor. At the same time she pulled her sidearm from its holster. “If we hadn’t been so busy chasing you morons, we might have seen it coming!”
Abby didn’t recognize the woman’s name or her face. If she is a superhuman, then who was she back in our world? If I knew that, I might have some idea of her powers.
On the ground beside her, Cord rolled onto his back, then pushed himself up. “We came here to stop Krodin before Unity could strike. We didn’t know how insane Daedalus is. We have to stop both of them.”
Paquette looked at him with disgust. “You’re weak. Pathetic. Our version of Solomon Cord was ten times the man you are.”
Abby had kept constant watch on Paquette’s gun. It hadn’t wavered once.
A crazy thought struck her: Bullets are metal, and my powers give me some control over metal…. Maybe I’m bulletproof.
She felt her heart racing at the thought. Even if I’m not, I’m certainly stronger than Cord. I could take a run at her. If she shoots me, he might get away.
She shifted her weight onto her right foot, tensed her muscles for the jump.
“Go ahead, kid,” Paquette said. “I’m going to execute you both anyway.” Abby jumped, and the gun flared.
CHAPTER 33
SO FAR, THE UNITY JETS had been making only low-level passes, and for that Roz was grateful. But according to Brawn—who seemed to have incredibly sharp eyesight—the whole base was surrounded by a wide ring of copters, all hovering in place. She knew that at any moment they could be given the order to attack: When that happened, it was all over.
Roz let go of Suzanne’s hand and dropped the remaining four yards to the hull of the enormous Carrier. She hit the deck hard, rolled, and came to a stop on her feet just in time to see Suzanne streaking toward Krodin.
Suzanne slammed into the small of Krodin’s back, sent him sprawling across the deck, ripping up blackboard-sized steel panels in his path.
Even before he stopped moving, Krodin snatched up one of the panels and hurled it at her like an oversized Frisbee.
Roz lashed out at the spinning panel with a telekinetic blast, knocking it a little off course: It sailed over Suzanne’s head, missing her by less than an inch.
Then Roz suddenly realized why the Unity forces hadn’t launched their attack: They were watching the fight.
Daedalus struck next, his wings folded back as he swooped down toward Krodin at an almost vertical angle. He struck hard, snagged Krodin’s head with the claws on his boots, and launched himself upward once more, dragging the Fifth King beneath him.
Krodin reached up, grabbed Daedalus’s ankles, and started to pull himself up.
Brawn leaped at them, his massive arms grabbing Krodin around the waist from behind, and held on.
Roz could hear the motors in Daedalus’s beating wings begin to whine with the strain of keeping them all aloft.
Krodin roared with anger and started slamming his right elbow back into Brawn’s face over and over as he pulled at Daedalus’s claws with his left hand.
They were almost a hundred yards above the deck when Krodin broke Daedalus’s grip.
As Brawn and Krodin tumbled down, Suzanne rushed at Krodin again, moving so fast that she was a blur. She struck his jaw so hard that the sound echoed across the swamp.
Suzanne held on as they fell, hitting him again and again, not letting go even when they crashed heavily onto the deck.
Brawn had landed on his back, still with his arms around Krodin’s waist.
Roz rushed toward them. Come on! Hit him again! Brawn, squeeze the breath out of him! Don’t give him a chance to—
Krodin caught Suzanne’s wrist in his right hand, lashed out at her face with his left fist.
He let go, and Suzanne collapsed backward.
Before she had hit the deck, Krodin had pulled himself free of Brawn’s grip and pounded down on the giant’s stomach with an equally powerful blow.
The Ascension: A Super Human Clash Page 28
