He spun quickly, scanning the horizon in all directions. “Nothing that shouldn’t be there, just a plane coming in to Shreveport.”
Then he realized he was still thinking in two dimensions. He looked up.
A dark object was rocketing toward them from directly above.
“Renata, move!” Colin shouted. “Go—get back to Sakkara!”
He focused his vision on the approaching object, and saw it split apart into three separate people. Each of them had his face.
Oh man, this is it! He concentrated on building up a charge, but he knew it would do no good.
Renata shouted, “Lance said we take the fight to them!”
She’s right. They’ll expect us to run, or stand and fight. They won’t be expecting an attack. He grabbed her arm and soared upward, aiming directly for one of the clones.
The clone dodged out of the way at the last second, and Colin immediately threw Renata off to the side with as much strength as he could muster, then he flipped around, angling toward another of the clones.
The first one had paused, and was now chasing him.
Colin stopped immediately, putting himself in the clone’s path. He released a small bolt of lightning at the clone and followed it with a much more powerful charge aimed directly above him.
The clone arced up to dodge the first bolt, and the second struck him with enough force to knock him out of the sky.
One down, for now. Colin quickly looked around. The others… No, that’s the wrong approach. That’s what they’ll expect. Forget the others. Keep after the same guy!
He threw himself after the injured clone, following the trail of thick smoke from his burning uniform.
A glance told him that Renata had followed his order: she was zooming from the scene. Good—at least one of us should get away.
He sensed the other clones racing after him, but he had a good lead on them, and the injured clone was falling at the pull of gravity: Colin’s speed was at least five times that.
He reached out and snagged the clone’s limp right arm, then immediately shifted his direction, heading straight for the other two. They broke off as he approached, darting away and circling him, clearly unsure what to do next.
As he flew, Colin pulled the injured clone nearer, clenched his fist and slammed it into the clone’s blistered face. Hitting a man when he’s down, Colin thought. Definitely not my usual style.
One of the other clones bellowed with rage, but Colin kept hitting his injured companion, again and again, in the face, the neck, the stomach, leaving a trail of blood and scorched fabric behind him.
He felt sick, but knew that he had to do this. Another punch, and he felt one of the clone’s front teeth crack.
The others were right behind him now, so Colin let go of the injured clone and immediately dropped down, heading feet-first toward the ground as he looked up to see how they would react.
Again, the clones split up. One went to help his colleague, the other came after Colin.
Now we’re talking, Colin thought. One-on-one. “Come on!” He yelled. “Show me what you’ve got, you coward!”
The clone yelled back, “Learned a few tricks, I see!” and Colin knew then that this was Shadow. He glanced down—he was heading straight for the airport. Can’t go that way—too many people could be hurt.
The sick feeling in his stomach grew when he realized that was exactly why he had to go that way. Shadow would be expecting him to protect the ordinary people, not put them in danger.
A 737 was taxiing to the runway, preparing for take-off. Colin put on a fresh burst of speed and flew directly at it, praying that Shadow would be focused only on him.
Two hundred meters above the runway he shifted direction again, aiming for the terminal building, then immediately switched back. A glance behind him showed that Shadow had been caught out—the clone had altered his course then lost precious seconds before he corrected it.
The moving plane was only meters below Colin now, and Shadow was approaching fast from the side.
At the last possible moment Colin swooped below the plane, putting him temporarily out of Shadow’s line of sight.
Without slowing down, he flipped his direction and soared back out the way he had come. He slammed head-first into Shadow’s chest and wrapped his arms around him, forcing him back up into the air.
The impact had knocked the wind out of both of them. Colin’s lungs felt like they were on fire, but he couldn’t allow himself the luxury of stopping.
Shadow slammed his right fist hard into the side of Colin’s head and Colin flinched with the force of the blow. He squeezed his arms together with all his strength, and Shadow groaned in pain.
He can’t breathe! Colin thought. In the past, he would have let go long before now, would have allowed his enemy a chance to breathe before he suffocated. But this psychopathic doppelganger had murdered Butler in cold blood, had tried to kill Brawn and Cassandra.
Still squeezing, Colin lashed up with his right knee and slammed it into the pit of Shadow’s stomach.
Shadow spasmed and—unable to scream without any breath in his lungs—emitted a short, low-pitched moan.
Colin felt Shadow’s fists slamming into his back and head. He knew he was cut, his scalp above his ear had been ruptured, and blood was flowing freely, but he didn’t care. He maintained his grip on the clone’s chest as he continued to rise.
Behind them, the other clone was racing after them, gaining speed.
Have to get this over with!
He knew from their last fight that Shadow didn’t seem bothered by heat or electricity, but there were other forms of energy Colin could use.
He closed his eyes and concentrated, knowing that he was going to hate himself for this. He allowed the ambient heat around him to build up, drew in heat energy from Shadow himself, and when he felt that he could take no more he quickly let go of Shadow, placed one hand on his chest and spun about to slam his other hand onto the other clone’s face.
He released his stored energy into both in one powerful, sustained burst.
Finally able to catch his breath, Shadow screamed. It was a scream loud enough that it was heard on the ground, three miles below.
Twenty minutes later, on a large patch of undeveloped land close to Shreveport, the New Heroes arrived in the ChampionShip.
They found Colin and Renata sitting cross-legged on the ground, with Danny standing over them. Colin had torn the sleeve from his shirt and held it pressed against the wound in his head. The sleeve was soaked with his own blood.
In front of them, unconscious, were three of the clones. One was wearing a tattered, scorched uniform, his mouth and nose covered in blood, his teeth chipped and broken.
The other two looked to be merely asleep.
Stephanie Cord looked at Colin. “What did you do?”
“I did what I had to. I blasted their bodies with electrochemical energy, put their systems into overdrive, then I pulled it back out of them. The shock shut them down. Put them into a coma.”
“Colin, that could have killed them!”
He rose into the air, then lowered his legs so that he was standing. “I know.”
Chapter 18
“You’ve been having visions, on and off,” Lance McKendrick said to Danny. “Just like your father did.”
They were in Lance’s office in Sakkara, and Danny was keen to be elsewhere. “Look, can we do this later? I want to check on Colin.”
“There might not be a later. This new attack… Three at once. Could be that the end game is coming sooner than I’d expected, and we’re not ready. I want to know everything you’ve seen. Every vision, every feeling about the future.”
“Some of them are like dreams. You know how it is. You wake up and after a few seconds you can’t remember them at all.”
Lance shoved a pencil and a pad in front of Danny. “Just write everything you can remember, in as much detail as possible.”
“That’s going
to take a while.”
“Not for me, it won’t. Go into super-speed mode or whatever you call it.”
Danny sighed as he sat down, then picked up the pencil. “I need a pen—pencils snap too easily when I’m in fast-mode. And my handwriting still isn’t very good. I was right-handed.”
Lance passed him a ball-point pen. “Just do your best.”
Danny bit the cap off the pen, leaned his head way back and spat the cap into the air, then shifted into fast mode and began to write.
It was slow going at first as he tried to remember everything in the right order, but then he gave up on that and just described each vision on a different page, figuring that since the visions were of the future, it didn’t really matter much in which order he’d received them.
When he was done, he’d covered almost thirty pages, and his hand was beginning to cramp up.
He switched back to real-time, and caught the pen’s cap before it hit the floor.
Lance smiled. “Nice work. And a cool bit of showing off, too.” He reached over the desk and picked up the pad. “This is everything?”
“Yep. Near as I can remember.”
“Thanks. If I’ve any questions, I’ll call you. And if you want my advice, shave off that bum-fluff that’s doing a very poor impersonation of a beard.”
“Hah. You first.”
“I can’t shave mine off until my tan fades.”
Danny rose from his chair. “Do me a favor? Don’t tell any of the others what’s in there, unless you have to. It might not all come true, but…”
“I get it. This is between you and me.”
“And there’s another thing. Go easy on Razor, will you? You’re pushing him too hard. He’s already planning to quit.”
“You think I’m tougher on him than everyone else?” Lance asked.
“Well, yeah. Because you are.”
“He can take it.”
Inside a large, abandoned concrete grain-silo, two hundred miles west of Sakkara, Colin stood guard over the clones. None of them had regained consciousness so far, but he wasn’t taking any risks. He was constantly listening to their heartbeats and their breathing—if they started to come around, he’d know. He just wasn’t sure what he would do if that happened.
The wound in the side of his head was still aching, but it had finally stopped bleeding. His father had used superglue to close the cut; needles couldn’t penetrate Colin’s skin.
Danny appeared by his side. “Anything?”
“No. But this one,” Colin said, pointing to the first one he’d beaten, “is just knocked out. The other two… Dad thinks they might really be in a comatose state.” He looked at his friend. “What I did… I could have wiped their brains. But I couldn’t think of any other way to stop them.”
“It’s not like you had any choice. They would have killed you and Renata, and then come for the rest of us.”
“Doesn’t make this any easier. What did Lance want you for?”
“Stuff. You?”
“Probably different stuff. You’re not allowed to talk about it either?”
“No.” Colin moved closer to Shadow. “Is that really what I look like?”
“Yeah. They’re dead ringers for you, except for their haircuts. Hey, you know what we should do? We should shave their heads.”
Colin grinned. “Yeah. And their eyebrows. And we could tattoo ‘I love bunnies’ on their foreheads.”
“No, I’m serious. Say one of these guys recovered and managed to get rid of you, he could pretend to be you. But not if we shave their heads.”
“That’s a good point,” Colin said. “I should have thought of that. We’ve all seen enough spy movies to… What? What are you looking at me like that for?”
Danny hesitated. “Just had a thought.” He quickly looked away from Colin.
“I’m not one of them!”
“Yeah, but… How can we ever know that? I’m just saying. At some point in the future, one of them might show up claiming to be you. How would we know?”
“A password?” Colin suggested.
“No, that wouldn’t work, because whoever it is might be able to read minds. Hey, you think that’s how they got Mina? One of them went to Berlin and pretended to be you? She’d trust you, so he could persuade her to go with him.”
“But she’d see from his aura that it’s not me. Didn’t she say something about herself and Yvonne having different auras, even though they’re clones?”
“Yeah, I think she did.”
“Wonder how many of them there are?” Colin said, looking down at the trio of unconscious bodies.
“The bigger question is what we do when they wake up. If they’re all as strong as you are, how can we keep them prisoner? You could keep zapping them every time they wake, but that means you’re stuck here.”
Colin’s shoulders sagged. “You’re right. And if I’m here babysitting these guys, who’s protecting Sakkara?”
In his base in Zaliv Kalinina, Victor Cross turned to Evan Laurie and said, “He’s not dumb, is he?”
Laurie didn’t respond. Cross knew that the man was still furious with him, but that wasn’t a problem. He could put up with Laurie’s moods.
The audio transmission from the grain-silo crackled and faded again, as it had been doing for the past few minutes.
“We’re losing it,” Victor said, rapidly typing on his keyboard. “I’d hoped we’d had enough transmitters planted on the kids that some of them would survive intact, but clearly there should have been more.” He pushed the keyboard away. “And it’s gone. Still, we’ve learned a lot.”
Through gritted teeth, Laurie said, “You… You just threw the boys to the enemy! Just to see what would happen!”
“Yeah. Well, they’re my toys, I can play with them however I like.”
“But that’s Shadow and Tuan and Roman—they’re the most powerful of them all!”
“So far. But they’re not what I need. Besides, we can get them back easily enough. Colin’s idea is spot-on. If we attack Sakkara, he’ll come running to save the day again. Then we get the boys out. If we want to.”
“You really are an utter sociopath.”
Cross slowly clapped his hands. “Wow. You deserve a prize for managing to get to the end of that very long word.”
“Stop patronizing me, Victor. I’m not an idiot. My IQ is a hundred and eighty-nine.”
“Well, aren’t you the clever boy for spotting that he was being patronized?” Cross tapped his fingers on the edge of the desk for a moment. “Back to work. Roman’s created enough graphene for us to finish construction on the rocket. The propulsion system is working, so all we need to do is complete the shell, install the guidance system, add in a few fail-safes, and start drilling the silo so that we can actually launch the thing.”
“You’re still not going to tell me what the payload is?”
“No. That’s above your security clearance level. There are two levels. Zero and one. I’m at level one, everyone else in the world is at level zero. But get the rocket finished and I’ll double that. Come on, it’s only rocket science. How hard can it be? It’s a little easier than brain surgery, and more fun because we get to blow things up.”
In Sakkara’s gymnasium, Lance McKendrick sat with Warren Wagner and Brawn.
Warren said, “We’ve had no luck getting in touch with Roz Dalton. But you talked to Thunder, right? He’s not coming?”
Lance shook his head. “No. And I don’t want him to. If we all get killed, there has to be someone left to tell the world how fantastic I am. Besides, have any of you been in contact with him since you lost your powers?”
“Have you?” Warren asked.
“No,” Lance said. “But then I’ve only seen him a couple of times since that time in New Jersey when Brawn let Ragnarök go.”
“That was the right thing to do,” Brawn grumbled.
“Whatever. I’m not judging you, and I really don’t want to have that argument again.” La
nce looked at Warren. “You didn’t tell Grant and Alia why they’re really in Berlin, did you?”
“No. But I think it’s a bad move. They’re just kids. They’ll have no chance if Cross decides to move against them. Lance, if Stephanie realizes that her sister is just bait, she will hate you forever. She’s already lost her father.”
Brawn said, “I would not want to get on her bad side. Butler told me what she was like after Cord’s body was brought back. She blamed Colin, and didn’t speak to him for months.”
“I can cope with sulky teenagers,” Lance said. He stood, stretched, and walked in a slow circle around Brawn’s over-sized bed. “I’ve been trying to see the big picture, to figure out what Cross is up to. I’m not getting it. If I could talk to him, I’d have a much better chance. But the only way I’m going to get to do that is if we’ve already captured him.” He stopped walking and turned to face his friends. “If Cross simply wanted to rule the world, he would have stuck with the Trutopians. But he didn’t. He abandoned them, and triggered the war. So what’s he planning? It can’t be that he wants to destroy the world, because he’d have done that already. Whatever he’s up to, it’s something beyond the usual supervillain megalomania.”
“Right,” Warren said. “But what’s bigger than destroying the world?”
“I didn’t say bigger, I said beyond. Maybe he’s after something small.”
“Such as?”
Lance shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“When I met him in Lieberstan,” Brawn said, “he asked me about something he called The Chasm. He wanted to know what it meant to Ragnarök.”
“Quantum talked about that too,” Lance said, “in the video tapes Max recorded, but Danny’s visions don’t mention it. What does it mean? Maybe it’s a mistranslation of another word. Maybe ‘chasm’ means something else in a different language. It could even be a physical place. Whatever it is, it seems to be important.”
“We need to find Max,” Warren said. “See what he remembers.”
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