The New Heroes: Crossfire

by Michael Carroll

  Colin said, “If there are more clones like Shadow, if they’re as tough as he is, we’re not going to win.”

  “You definitely won’t if you play nice,” Brawn said. “Colin, you might have to kill them.”

  “That’s never going to happen. I’m never going to kill anyone.”

  Brawn and Razor exchanged a look.

  “What?” Colin asked.

  Razor said, “You might not have a choice. Col, I understand your position, but don’t make promises like that.”

  “My parents never killed anyone when they were superhuman.”

  “They never had to.”

  Brawn said, “They tried to kill me, once. But that was Max Dalton, using his mind-control on them. I’ve been thinking that maybe he’s the man we need to talk to about this.”

  “Max is not exactly answering the phone these days.” Razor said. “He went into hiding after the Trutopian war.”

  “That jerk is usually more trouble than he’s worth, anyway,” Colin said. “If I had my say, I’d—” He paused. A sound outside had caught his attention. “Something’s coming. A helicopter... Stephanie’s flying it.”

  Brawn shook his head and muttered, “I don’t know how they can let someone so young fly a helicopter!”

  Colin flew over to the gym’s external doors, entered the code, and stepped back as they slid open.

  The copter set down on the grounds outside the gym’s steps, and a few minutes later Stephanie Cord helped a man to climb out.

  The man looked to be in his late thirties or early forties, heavily bearded with shoulder-length hair that whipped around his face in the down-draft from the copter’s rotors. He was walking with a limp, leaning heavily on a wooden cane.

  As Stephanie climbed back into the copter she greeted Colin with a wave and a smile. He returned the wave, and resisted the urge to go to her.

  Once—before the Trutopian war, before Victor Cross had forced Colin to choose whether Stephanie’s father or Renata’s entire family would die—Colin and Stephanie had been close, always just on the verge of becoming boyfriend and girlfriend. Now, they were still friends, but that was all.

  Not for the first time, Colin wondered whether he should ask Cassandra to scan Stephanie’s mind, to find out what she really thought about him. But that felt wrong, like a betrayal of trust.

  He’d almost asked her once, a few months ago, but even as he was trying to steer the conversation in a direction where he could make the request without it seeming too awkward, Cassandra had said, “Don’t ask me to do that, Colin. You’ll regret it no matter what the answer is. If she does still have feelings for you, you’ll always be sorry you didn’t wait to find out from her. And if she doesn’t, you might end up resenting her for that. And resenting me for telling you. You have to let these things sort themselves out naturally.”

  Razor had given him almost the same advice, in a much simpler way: “Let it go, Col. If it was meant to be, it’ll happen.” Then he’d smiled and embarked on an out-of-tune rendition of The Supremes’ song, “You Can’t Hurry Love.”

  The stranger walked slowly toward the steps. He called up to Colin, “Hey, kid?” He tapped his left shin with the end of the cane. “Got a bum leg. I’m not great on steps. If you’re not too busy being tragically heartbroken, you might want to offer some help.”

  Colin walked off the steps and drifted down to the man.

  “Thanks. Let me lean on you, huh?”

  “Uh, sure.” Colin stepped close to him, and the man placed his left arm over Colin’s shoulder.

  Step-by-step, they ascended. By the time they reached the top, both Brawn and Razor had come to the doorway.

  “Chair?” the man asked Razor. “No, you take your time, son. There’s no rush. Maybe if you take long enough, my leg might grow back.”

  “Sorry, who are you?” Colin asked.

  “Lance McKendrick. I’m your new boss.”

  Chapter 13

  Victor Cross looked up from his computer screen when the small red light above the door began to blink. He immediately reached under the desk and turned off the fan-heater that had been keeping his legs warm.

  The light told him that Evan Laurie was approaching down the icy corridor, and would reach him in a couple of minutes. For the past year Cross had worked hard to give his assistant the impression that he wasn’t bothered by the cold.

  Cross took the time to sit back and examine the eight other monitors on his desk. They were a mismatched collection of LCD panels and old CRT screens, all connected via a tangle of cables to the six networked PCs stacked next to the desk. A year ago the PCs had been top-of-the-range models, but now Cross was eager to replace them with newer machines.

  The largest of the monitors showed the clones’ life-signs in a grid of six across and four down. Fifteen of the boxes were grayed out, as they had been since shortly after the clones were removed from their artificial wombs. He knew that nine surviving clones out of twenty-four wasn’t a bad rate, but he was still disappointed. Twenty-four would have greatly increased the odds of getting what he wanted.

  He could always make more clones, but they took a lot of time and energy to maintain. Right now he wanted to see how this first batch worked out.

  For the most part, Victor was pleased with them. Especially Shadow. He was immensely powerful and almost completely without ethics. He had responded perfectly to the neuro-linguistic programming that Cross had devised to give the clones the equivalent of twelve years’ education in only six months.

  The others, too, had responded well. Tuan wasn’t as smart or as inventive as Shadow, but he had the most interesting ability of them all. He could increase his own size and body-mass by somehow stealing energy from the people around him. Victor was still trying to figure out exactly how that worked.

  Likewise, Roman’s ability to modify the atomic structures of simple base elements was invaluable. Though the effort left him exhausted and depressed for days, Roman was able to transmute ordinary graphite into any other form of carbon, from pure diamonds to graphene, a material so strong and durable it could be used to construct anything from thousand-story buildings to machines too small for the human eye to see.

  That alone had promoted one of Cross’s back-up plans from being merely an intriguing idea into a full-blown project that was now close to completion.

  The rest of the clones hadn’t yet fully developed their abilities. The artificial age-acceleration process—for reasons Cross had yet to determine—had been more effective on some than others.

  Nathan seemed to be impervious to extremes of heat and cold, almost as much as his progenitor Colin Wagner, but in the months since that aspect was discovered, there had been no indication of any other abilities. He also appeared to have developed a resistance to some of the neuro-linguistic programming, specifically the parts that should have instilled a strong sense of loyalty to Cross. Nathan didn’t like him and wasn’t shy about making that known. But Cross kept him around anyway, because Laurie was fond of him.

  The door to Cross’s room opened, and Laurie entered. “I hate this place.”

  “Oh, really?” Cross said. “Well, you should have said something before now. Strange that you’ve kept it to yourself, instead of mentioning it every single time you talk to me.”

  “And the sarcasm really helps, Victor.” Laurie picked up the room’s only other chair and carried it over to the stack of PCs. Their fans exhaled a small amount of warm air and Laurie always took advantage of that. When Laurie left the room Cross would move the chair back again, just so that he’d have to pick it up and move it next time.

  “It’s time to schedule another round of tests for the boys,” Cross said. “The works, this time. Blood, hair and saliva samples. And a spinal tap—let’s see what’s in there. Run everything through a full-spectrum genome comparison and flag anything unusual. And while you’re at it, I want ultrasound, MRI and x-ray scans too.”

  “I don’t know if we can do a
spinal tap or take blood. Their skin’s very tough. Soon it’ll be impenetrable.”

  Cross pulled over his secondary keyboard and began typing. “Way ahead of you.” He swiveled one of the monitors around. It showed a schematic of a hypodermic needle. “Get Roman to create these out of graphene; they should be strong enough. No sign of any other abilities? Aside from the usual flight and enhanced strength?”

  “No. I figure they’re fourteen now, almost fifteen. If any of them have any dormant powers, they’re well hidden.”

  Cross sighed. “Disappointing. We might need to kick-start them into action. So. What do you want?”

  “Me? I want to go home. I want to sit in the open air on a warm day, with a cool drink in one hand and a great big bacon sandwich in the other. I want to meet people who don’t have your face or Colin Wagner’s. I’m beginning to forget what women look like.”

  Cross returned the computer screen back to its original position, and resumed typing on the primary keyboard. “Aside from all that, what do you want?”

  “Nathan had a question that I couldn’t answer.”

  “I’ll set aside the obvious jokes, and assume that this is something important.”

  “It is, I think,” Laurie said. “Our people picked up Colin Wagner in Romania, after he left the New Heroes.”

  “And?”

  “Where was he going?”

  Cross stopped typing, and straightened up in his chair. “Oh.”

  “Huh. Never seen that look on your face before.”

  “Shut up, Laurie. I’m thinking.”

  Victor ran through the current processes in his superhuman brain and one-by-one put all of them on hold, something he hadn’t done in almost ten years. He scoured his memory for every conversation he’d had with Colin, for every piece of data he’d collected about the boy since his powers first appeared. He fed this information into each part of his brain, instructed it to examine the problem and return a plausible answer.

  Cross’s brain worked fast, and the answers came quickly. They were all discarded. He ran the process again, this time adding every piece of information that Dioxin’s mercenaries had stolen from Sakkara’s computers.

  Still nothing viable.

  In desperation, he included everything he knew, every piece of data his flawless memory had gleaned in the decade since his own powers first appeared.

  Finally, he came to an answer, the only possible answer his extreme intelligence could reach. He turned to Laurie to tell him, but Laurie was gone.

  He glanced at the clock on the wall and saw that he’d been processing the problem for almost three hours.

  Three hours to come up with this? No way. I must have made a mistake somewhere.

  But he knew that couldn’t be so. He didn’t make mistakes.

  He had his answer, and he mulled it over as he left the room to find food. The answer astonished him: it was not an answer he was used to encountering.

  Where was Colin Wagner going?

  I don’t know.

  Lance McKendrick sat in the chair with his good leg stretched out and resting on the edge of Brawn’s bed. “So how have you been, Gethin?”

  Brawn said, “Mostly in prison. You?”

  “Only occasionally in prison. Y’know, it’s hard to tell because you’re so weird looking, but you haven’t aged a day, man.”

  “You have. What’s with the beard and the long hair?”

  Lance pointed with his cane over to where Razor and Colin were watching from the long-unused bars on the far wall of the gym. “Long hair and a beard seems to be working for this guy.”

  “You lost your leg.”

  “I wouldn’t say I lost it. We just had a parting of ways.” Lance shifted in the chair. “OK, so this is the famous Sakkara, and the little dude is obviously Titan’s and Energy’s kid. Who’s his hairy pal?”

  “Calls himself Razor.”

  They both looked over toward Razor again.

  “Ah, I love irony,” Lance said. “So. I get a call out of the blue from Impervia. ‘We need you to come and organize the team because you’re so clever and handsome and sexy.’ Those weren’t her exact words, but I knew what she meant. My people tell me that your people picked up a new member in Somalia.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Hmm. You’ve got one dead, one missing. How desperate is the situation?”

  “Must be more desperate than I thought if they called you in. The kid who attacked us, the clone… Lance, I’ve only seen someone as fast and vicious as him once before, and that was Slaughter. If there’s an army of them, we’re toast.”

  “All right…” Lance reached into the pocket of his jacket and removed his cell-phone. “I know you’ve been briefed on Impervia’s plan...”

  “Yeah, some of it. She’s taking Cassandra somewhere, but she didn’t say where.”

  “That was the plan. I changed it. Ms Cord will be accompanying Cassandra instead. She’s quite a pilot, I have to say. Can you imagine being able to fly a copter at her age?”

  With a deep grunt, Brawn sat up. “Lance… Things aren’t the way they used to be. These new heroes are good, but they’re on their own. We had the older guys—Titan and Paragon and that lot—to back us up. They don’t.”

  “They have us. And back in the day, we were pretty good at what we did.”

  “When you say ‘we’ you’re including yourself? That’s a stretch. You were never a superhuman.”

  “I know that,” Lance said. He started keying a number into his phone. “Abby’s dead, but we’ve got the next best thing—her nieces. Plus they have the added bonus of being Paragon’s daughters. There’s a chance that they’ve got the same thing that me and Cord did. Daedalus told us about it when we were in Krodin’s pocket universe... There are three types of people, you see. There are ordinary humans, there are superhumans like you, and there’s a very small number of us who were affected by whatever it is that makes you guys superhuman. We’re not actually superhuman, but we’re changed.” Lance jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of Razor. “I’d lay good money the hirsute kid has it too. He’s got technical expertise way beyond his experience or education, right? Just like Cord.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  Lance held up one finger as he raised the phone to his mouth. “It’s ringing… Come on, pick up the phone!”

  A man’s deep voice said, “Hello?”

  “Guess what, dude? This is your best friend in the world, Lance McKendrick. How’s life in Reykjavík treating you?”

  “What? Oh no. You’re kidding.”

  “No kidding, James. I’ve got good news for you, man. Hope you can still fit into your old wet-suit, because we’re putting the band back together.”

  “Lance, you’re out of your mind. We don’t have our powers any more.”

  “We need you, man. We… Huh.”

  Brawn asked, “What is it?”

  Into the phone, Lance said, “Gotcha, dude. I see where you’re coming from. Some supervillain attacked you and replaced your spine with jelly, right? Or maybe he spliced your DNA with that of a flightless bird, made you half-man, half-chicken?”

  “Get stuffed, McKendrick! Maybe you’re still drifting around without any cares or responsibilities, but don’t assume that’s true for the rest of us!”

  “The New Heroes need us, Jimmy. I’m here in Sakkara now, with Brawn. Abby’s gone but that leaves you and Roz, and she’s already on the way here to join us.”

  Brawn frowned and started to say something, but Lance shook his head.

  “Lance, I can tell from the tone of your voice that you’re lying.”

  “No, you can tell I’m lying because you know Roz isn’t coming here. And you know that because she’s with you, right?”

  James sighed. “How did you know?”

  “I figured it out a while ago. Ever since Abby… I’ve been keeping tabs on all of you. Roz travels a lot, but always seems to end up in Iceland. Keeping it a secret from
Josh and Max, right? I don’t blame you. Is she with you now? Put her on.”

  “She’s not here. Lance, you can’t tell anyone. Seriously.”

  “I know, man. I won’t say a word. Give her my best, huh? You know I was kidding about putting the group back together?”

  “I figured. So… If you didn’t call to recruit us, why did you call? And if you had my number all this time, why wait until now?”

  “Because things are happening, James. Bad things. We’re not all going to get out of this alive, and I might not get another chance to say good-bye.”

  Chapter 14

  Alia Cord dropped onto the roof of the hotel in Berlin and shut down her jetpack. “Searching for Mina is a waste of time,” she told Danny, who had appeared on the roof as she was coming in to land.

  “You don’t think she’s worth finding?”

  Alia removed her helmet. “No, I mean she’s not here.”

  “Where else should we search? The Baltic? Your armor doesn’t work underwater, and Loligo couldn’t find any trace of her other than her cell-phone.” Danny reached into the large styrofoam cooler and took out a bottle of water beside him. “Open this for me, will you?”

  Alia opened the bottle and passed it back to Danny. “Did any of the cameras show anything?”

  “Not so far.”

  Warren Wagner had instructed Grant and Kenya to help the Landespolizei—the state police—with the painstaking task of examining the footage from the city’s CCTV cameras. Because of Mina’s ability to instantly teleport herself from one location to another, the job was a lot harder than it would be for any other missing person. Many of the CCTV cameras had been damaged in the war: there were large areas of the city with almost no coverage.

  Danny added, “Something might show up, though. Kenya had the idea that we don’t need to check every face in every frame of video. If Mina materialized somewhere and it was caught on camera, there’ll be a sequence where she’s not there in one frame, and is there in the next. So right now the cops are writing software to compare each frame with the one before, and flag any major changes.”