The New Heroes: Crossfire

by Michael Carroll

  There was no response.

  Butler said, “I should stay. Cover all of us with the force-field. At least until we have some idea what we’re up against. You get up there, see what’s coming.”

  Colin had to agree with that. Though he was their group’s most powerful member, Butler’s military-school training had given him a strong grasp of tactics. With Cassandra unconscious, Colin was their best early-warning system.

  He rose quickly and silently through the trees, hovered a few feet above them and began scanning the horizon.

  Then a dark object was racing toward him, approaching from the left at too great a speed for him to react. It struck him hard in the side, knocked him high into the air, tumbling head over heels.

  Before he could right himself he was struck again, this time in the back of the head. From far below, he heard Brawn bellowing with rage—but he didn’t have time to help his blue friend now: the two flying objects were rushing at him from each side.

  Colin darted straight up for the count of ten, then immediately shifted direction, flying straight down. He saw the objects narrowly miss each other as they reached the point where he had been less than a second before.

  They zipped away, curved and came back, zigzagging through the air, moving too fast for even Colin’s superhuman eyesight to see exactly what they were, other than that they appeared to be human.

  He picked the one on his left for no better reason than the sun was on his right: the light coming from behind him would—he hoped—give him some advantage over the attacker.

  But the attacker was even more maneuverable than Colin had expected: he changed direction in mid-flight, instantly zooming out of Colin’s path without decelerating. Then the other one was on him, coming down from above and crashing feet-first into Colin’s back.

  Colin whipped around, his fingers coming within half an inch of the attacker’s black boot, but he was too slow.

  The first one again struck him from behind, a vicious punch to the back of his neck. He pitched forward, straight into the swinging fist of the second attacker. It slammed into his stomach, his entire body convulsing with the force of the blow.

  Another punch, this time to the left side of his face, followed immediately by a powerful kick that crashed into his right temple. He made another grab for the one on his right, and immediately the two broke away.

  They hovered in place for a moment, watching him. They both wore matt-black suits that covered their entire bodies. Not even their eyes could be seen behind the black visors of their small helmets.

  Ignore the pain! Colin told himself. Grab hold of one of them and pound his stupid face into paste!

  Façade had once told him: “When going up against a more powerful enemy, your best approach is to catch him off-guard. Do something he’s not expecting. If he wants you to run, don’t. Stay and fight. If he puts something in your way, don’t avoid it—go toward it.”

  He examined his attackers’ uniforms. Looks like cloth, but it could be some kind of lightweight armor.

  One of the attackers drifted away from the other, moving to the left but constantly facing Colin and keeping the same distance. A few seconds later, the other copied the action.

  Colin turned slowly, trying to keep both of them in his field of vision.

  They’re not doing anything. What’s this about? Are they testing me?

  It was only when a third attacker struck, coming at Colin from the forest below, that he understood the truth. The first two had simply been keeping him distracted.

  The third attacker was dressed identically to the others, and he moved with the same speed and grace, the same silent, lightning-fast approach as all three struck at once.

  One crashed into Colin’s legs and locked his arms around his knees. Another hit him from behind, pinning Colin’s arms to his side. The third hovered in front of Colin as he slammed his gloved fists into Colin’s face over and over.

  Pain tore through Colin’s body as punch after punch landed home, delivered with perfect accuracy and relentless force. He felt his upper lip split, a gash above his left ear tear open, one of his lower front teeth crack.

  He concentrated on the ambient heat, soaked it into his pores, allowed it to build. Let’s see how these jerks cope with this!

  Colin released the heat in an air-scorching shockwave that ripped through all three of his attackers, searing their uniforms and blasting them away from him.

  He knew that the time for playing fair was over. The attacker who’d been punching him had caught the worst of the blast—Colin threw himself at the tumbling, falling figure, putting as much speed as possible into his flight.

  The others raced after him. Colin momentarily felt their gloved hands grab his arms and legs, but he was moving too fast for them to get a firm grip.

  He caught hold of the falling man’s leg and increased his speed as he held on tight, dragging the attacker behind him. They rocketed towards the treetops at a shallow angle, and Colin suddenly stopped, swung his arm forward and let go. The man recovered just in time to shout, “No!” before he crashed straight through the four-foot-thick trunk of a giant oak tree.

  The remaining two launched themselves at Colin again, but this time he was ready for them. Don’t avoid the attack, he reminded himself. Go toward it.

  The one rushing at him from his left had his right arm pulled back, his fist tightly clenched. Instead of dodging or ducking to avoid the punch, Colin lashed out with a powerful lightning bolt and struck the man’s fist full-on.

  The attacker screamed, pivoting in mid-air as he clutched at his wrist, the white-hot armor now melting into a thick liquid that spewed smoke and sparks as it burned into his skin. He tried to drop down out of Colin’s path, but instead of pursuing him Colin flipped over onto his back and—upside-down—launched himself at the last of the three.

  The man saw Colin coming and shifted his stance, as though preparing to dive to his right.

  Yeah, that’s what I’d do, Colin said to himself. Fake left, but go right.

  He threw himself to the man’s left just as he was expected to do, but he lashed out to the right with twin lances of fire that struck the armored man square in the back.

  For only the second time, one of them spoke: A cry from the man with the burning hand. “Abort!” He shot up into the air, followed immediately by his colleague from the trees below.

  No you don’t, Colin thought. You’re not getting away with this!

  But he knew he couldn’t catch all of them. He raced after the third man, who was only now beginning to recover from Colin’s fire-blasts. Colin crashed into him from behind and wrapped his left arm around the man’s neck, held his right fist clenched in front of the man’s visor.

  “Who are you!?”

  The man slammed his elbow back, aiming for Colin’s chest, but Colin had been expecting this: still with his arm around the attacker’s neck, Colin pivoted his body at the shoulders until he was lying parallel to the ground. He squeezed tighter. “I said, who are you?”

  The attacker continued to struggle, squirming in Colin’s grasp. It was all Colin could do to hold on. Man, he’s strong—might even be as strong as me.

  With his free hand he grabbed hold of the man’s helmet and dug his fingers into the strong black material. He tore through the helmet just as the man broke his grip and spun around.

  For a moment they both hovered in place, staring at each other.

  The attacker wasn’t a man. Not yet. He looked to be maybe a year or two younger than Colin, but taller and with a stronger build.

  And he had Colin’s face.

  He grinned. “Hello, brother.”

  Chapter 4

  In fast-time, Danny arrived back at the hotel in Tiergarten to see Warren Wagner frozen in the process of getting off the motorbike he used to drive around Berlin.

  Danny switched to real-time, and walked up to Warren. “Another busy day, Mister W.”

  Warren removed his motorcycle helmet
and hung it on the handlebars while he pulled off his gloves. “When is it ever not busy? Gerhard tells me you went to Bremen.”

  “Yeah, they needed authorization documents to close the bridge. What happened with the Trutopians?”

  Warren led the way to the hotel’s entrance. “The usual. Arrested and locked away.” He held the door open for Danny.

  “There can’t be many more of them left,” Danny said. “I was thinking about what you said about them bribing their way into the city… I don’t think that’s it. None of the Trutopians we’ve discovered have had anything on their minds other than killing everyone who isn’t them. I can’t see them collaborating with anyone.”

  “True. We should be done here in a couple of days,” Warren said, “then we can start looking into it in more detail.” He looked at his watch. “Way past dinner-time. Have you eaten?”

  “Not since lunch. I’m starving.”

  “Gerhard told me there’s a great Italian restaurant around here. Mina likes Italian, right? See if she’s back. We’ll meet back down here in, say, thirty minutes?”

  “Sure.” Danny shifted into fast-time and raced up the stairs to the fourth floor. It was a lot quicker than waiting for the elevator. Back in real-time, he knocked on the door of Mina’s room. “It’s me. You in there?”

  There was no reply, so he dug his cell-phone out of his pocket and called her number as he walked to his own room. The call went to voice-mail. “This is Mina. I’m off saving the world or something. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you when I feel like it. And if you’re near a store, buy me a present! Thanks! Bye!”

  “Yeah, Mina, it’s Danny. Warren and I are going for dinner. Give us a call when you get this.”

  He unlocked his room and collapsed onto the bed, yawning and scratching at his thin beard. Not for the first time, he began to wonder why he didn’t seem to be able to sleep in fast-time. That’d be a real time-saver, he thought. If I was watching TV I could get the equivalent of a whole night’s sleep during the commercial breaks.

  He showered and pulled on fresh clothes, then lay on the bed reading in fast-mode. Brawn had introduced him to the world of cold-war spy novels, and right now Danny was reading all of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books in chronological order. He had a stack of the paperbacks beside his bed.

  Reading was somewhat difficult with only one arm as he had to put the book down to turn the pages, but Danny was determined to master the art. In fast-time he also had to be careful not to turn the pages too quickly in case he ripped them to shreds, which had happened so often in the first few months after he lost his arm that no one in Sakkara would lend him their books.

  He finished On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and closed the book over, then made his way down to the hotel’s lobby, where he realized that he still had twenty minutes to go before meeting Warren. I could go back up and read the next one, he thought, but then decided to leave You Only Live Twice for another day.

  He dropped into one of the lobby’s overstuffed armchairs and watched as the concierge attempted to explain theater locations to an overweight young man in cycling shorts who seemed to be particularly useless with directions.

  He felt his stomach rumble. Come on, Warren! I’m dying of hunger here! Wish I could slow myself way down as well as speed myself up. That’d make waiting a lot easier. Especially at the airport. Man, that was boring.

  Danny, Warren and Mina had taken a commercial flight to Germany, and their flight had been massively delayed. At ten minutes to boarding time, the passengers were told that there would be a short delay, another few minutes. They were “another few minutes” away from boarding for the next three and a half hours. By the time they were finally called to board the plane, Warren was sound asleep, Danny had read every article in the three newspapers Warren had brought, and Mina had explored every inch of the airport, teleporting herself from one location to another and always coming back to complain to Danny that if they let her, she could teleport them all to Berlin in only a few minutes.

  Danny and Warren had not been taken with that idea: Mina’s power allowed her to teleport herself or others over a distance of only a couple of miles. To get to Berlin from Kansas, she’d have to make thousands of jumps, and far too much of the journey would be over water.

  Why can’t I just slow myself down? Danny wondered. If I can alter my perception of time in one direction, I should be able to do the opposite. He concentrated on the baffled customer and the concierge, watched their arm movements as they tried to come to a mutual understanding of the concept of “south.”

  The concierge was waving his right arm toward the hotel’s entrance, and making flicking movements with his wrist to indicate that the customer should turn left, then right. The customer was peering at a heavily-creased map and stabbing one finger at the same location over and over. Neither of them seemed to be listening to the other.

  The thought occurred to Danny that he could offer to help—he’d come to know Berlin quite well over the past few days—but he was more interested in seeing if he could speed them up.

  When in fast-time mode, from his perspective everything else seemed to slow way down. It often felt like all he had to do to make it work was relax and allow it to happen.

  But the opposite effect didn’t appear to be working. The noise from the concierge and the customer was too distracting, their arm-movements too erratic to allow him to concentrate.

  The concierge was becoming irritated with the customer, his voice rising in pitch and his movements angrier and more dramatic.

  Well, it was worth a shot. Danny turned to his left and looked out the window to see a car hurtling down the road at what had to be more than a hundred miles an hour. Whoa, that guy’s gonna kill someone!

  He jumped to his feet and shifted into fast-time, and that was when he realized that moving into slow-time had worked: he was in normal-time now, the car was traveling slowly and carefully, and the customer and concierge were having a normal, calm conversation.

  Oh, that is cool! Danny grinned to himself and returned to the armchair. He tried again, and watched as people zipped through the hotel’s lobby at three or four times the normal speed.

  He saw the elevator doors open so fast they seemed to disappear, then Warren Wagner fast-walked over to him, his voice squeaking unintelligibly.

  Danny switched back to normal time. “Sorry, what?”

  “You OK? You were just sitting there like a zombie.”

  Danny stood up. “Yeah, I was experimenting. Turns out I can alter my perception of time in both directions. I can make things seem to move faster.”

  “Huh. Anyway, did you talk to Mina?”

  “She wasn’t in her room. I left her a voice-mail.” Danny fished his phone out of his pocket. “Maybe she called back when I was… No, nothing yet.”

  “Right.” Warren took out his own cell-phone, and keyed in a number. “Same here. Voice-mail.” He strode over to the reception desk, and Danny followed.

  “Hi,” Warren said to the receptionist. “Can you tell me if Mina Duval has checked in?”

  The young woman tapped at her computer keyboard. “Ms Duval last used her room key yesterday evening.”

  “OK, thanks.” He turned back to Danny. “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “I left her at the Brandenburg Gate, when you called to tell me about the Trutopians. She wasn’t there when I got back. I thought she was with you.”

  “Well, I’m sure she’s all right. She’s more than capable of looking after herself.”

  Danny knew that Mina could be a little flighty and had a tendency to go exploring and get distracted, but something about this didn’t feel right. “Call Gerhard and Herlind. Get them to check with their crews and find out who was the last person to see her.”

  “Dan, she’s just late, not missing in action. She probably spotted a cat or a puppy and got distracted again. She’ll turn up.”

  Danny pulled out his phone again and selected
a number. The call was answered instantly. “Razor? It’s Danny.”

  “Hey Dan. How’re things in Berlin?”

  “OK. Listen, can you do something for me? Locate Mina’s cell-phone.”

  “Hold on a sec.” Danny heard the sound of rapid typing on a keyboard, then Razor said, “Satellite shows it’s at fifty-five degrees, forty-one minutes, fifty-six seconds north, eighteen degrees, five minutes, forty-nine seconds east. Berlin’s an hour behind Greenwich Mean Time… Twelve hours is a hundred and eighty degrees, and twelve goes into a hundred and eighty fifteen times. Which puts Berlin’s longitude at roughly fifteen degrees east. So eighteen degrees would be about two hundred miles to the east of your position, at that latitude. The more north you go, the shorter the distance is between longitude lines. I could work it out—”

  “Or you could just look it up on the Internet,” Danny said.

  “Yeah, that’s a point.” There was more typing. “Middle of the Baltic Sea. Two hundred and ninety miles to the north-east of your location. What’s she doing there?”

  “We don’t know that she is there, Razor. Only that her phone is. Now I know something’s wrong.”

  Warren asked, “What’s the problem?”

  Danny shrugged.“Razor, who do we have that’s closest to that location?”

  “That’d be you guys. The nearest major city is Gdańsk in Poland. The cell-phone’s about sixty miles north of the coast. You can’t run on water, can you? Well, even if you could, the phone’s probably not on the surface.”

  “OK. Send someone to find her phone. We’ll check her room, ask the repair crews here who saw her last.”

  “Will do. Keep me posted.”

  Danny turned to Warren again. “Mina’s phone is in the middle of the Baltic Sea, sixty miles offshore. She can’t teleport herself that sort of distance unless she’s making lots of jumps, and she can’t easily do that over water. Someone’s taken her.”