The others exchanged a look.
“Come on,” Warren said. “He knows stuff. We should use him.”
Lance said, “Perhaps. But first, let’s all put our heads together and try to think of a time when involving Max in something didn’t make matters worse. I know where Max is. He believes he’s safe, and as long as he stays hidden, he won’t be getting in our way. He’s more of a liability than an asset.”
“Then what are our other assets?” Brawn said. He flexed his right shoulder. “I’ve almost recovered, but I wouldn’t be anywhere near as strong as the clones. We’ve got half a dozen Paragon suits, and two spares. One now, because the other is being modified to fit you. And there’s Colin, Danny and Kenya. She’s really only starting out, and Danny’s missing an arm. We just don’t have the raw power we’ll need to take on Cross.”
“I’m working on it,” Lance said. “I have a plan. It might not pay off, but if it does, we’ll be able to put a stop to Cross for good.”
Warren said, “In the parallel universe, in Krodin’s world… You had to work alongside former enemies to stop Krodin, right? Slaughter and Daedalus. We should do the same now.”
“You’re talking about Yvonne,” Lance said. “Her hypnotic voice was by far her greatest strength, and she no longer has that. Sure, she’s smart, and from what Stephanie told us, she’s furious with Cross... But I don’t trust her. No, she stays where she is.” He unclipped his radio from his belt, and hit the “call” button.
A few seconds later, Colin’s voice said, “Yeah?”
“How are things, Colin?”
“OK. They’re still unconscious.”
“All right… I’m sending Renata to you. Danny’s with you, right? Leave him there—if anything happens, he’ll be fast enough to find you. As soon as Renata gets there, you both resume your mission.”
Renata yawned inside her helmet. Dawn was breaking through the eastern horizon and she’d been up all night, drifting through the sky after Colin.
How does he not get tired? She wondered.
But she knew that even if their mission was called off and she returned to Sakkara, she probably wouldn’t be able to sleep. So much had happened in the past few days.
She still couldn’t quite get her head around the thought that Butler was dead, and wondered if that was because they hadn’t spent a lot of time together since the war. After Impervia had split them into three teams, the groups had barely seen each other.
At least I got to go to Australia, she thought. She had already decided that when this was all over—if they won—she was going to move to Melbourne. Her parents still wanted her to finish high school and then go to college, but college didn’t appeal to her. She knew that most of her friends had gone, and a few of them were even working in the same fields they had studied, but that seemed a lifetime ago. They were all in their mid-twenties now, many with families of their own.
They knew about her, of course. Everyone knew who she was, how she been lost for ten years when she was frozen in her crystalline form. There had even been a made-for-TV movie called Diamond: the Renata Soliz Story. That had been a source of great amusement to Danny and the others, especially since most of the movie had been completely fictional. Her entire background had been changed, because otherwise the movie makers would have had to pay her family to use their stories.
Butler had laughed so hard at one scene—in which an obviously plastic dummy of Colin’s character was thrown off a roof in an attempt to make it look like it was flying—that he’d fallen back off his chair and smacked the back of his head on the edge of a table. He’d still been laughing while the others helped him to the infirmary so that Warren could sew up the wound.
Over the radio, Colin said, “Renata?”
“I’m here.”
“OK. See that crossroads down there? A little to your left, right by that hill with the sticky-up bit?”
“Yeah, I see it. But where are you?”
“I’m about half a mile above you. Set down there and wait for me.”
Renata eased the thrust on her jetpack, and steered herself toward the crossroads. The jetpack was controlled by sensors inside her gloves: by squeezing her fingers in certain patterns, she could adjust her height, direction and speed. It had taken a lot of practice to be able to use the armor without zooming off at a weird angle every time she made a fist, but it was second-nature to her now.
She set down with a slight bump in the middle of the crossroads, and looked up to see Colin rapidly descending toward her.
He came to a stop about fifteen feet overhead. “OK. Stay here.”
Renata watched as Colin drifted toward the small hill. From the air, the grass-covered hill had been barely noticeable, but here on the ground, now that she was aware of it, it was clearly artificial. Its peak was maybe twenty feet above the ground, and it was too round, too perfect.
Colin suddenly shot straight up, kept going until he was only a dot in the sky. Then he came back down, fast, head-first.
He slammed into the hill hard enough to send a shockwave that cracked the concrete under Renata’s feet. A thick cloud of dirt and rocks began to erupt from the small hill, and Renata had to jump aside to avoid a flying boulder larger than her head.
By the time Colin was done, the entire crossroads was buried under three inches of dirt and stones, and the artificial hill had been reduced to a crater.
Colin drifted back to Renata, carrying a smooth metal sphere the size of a beach-ball under one arm. “I guess this is it.”
“Yeah, but what is it?”
“You’ll see.” Colin set the sphere down, and they both slowly circled it.
“Looks like a wrecking-ball,” Renata said.
“Trust me, it’s not,” Colin said. “According to Lance, we just crack it open. You ready?”
“Not really. I don’t know what’s supposed to happen.”
“Lance said there’s nothing to worry about. It can’t hurt you. But you’re going to have to ditch the armor.”
“Aw, come on!”
He nodded. “I’m serious. Ditch the armor. All of it. We don’t know what effect the metal will have.”
“OK, but you can’t look. I’m only wearing my bra and panties under it.”
“Renata, I have to look. I have to be able to see what’s happening.”
She groaned, and started unclipping the armor, helmet first, then gloves. “You’d better not be making this up!”
Colin pulled off his t-shirt and passed it to her. “Put that on if you’re uncomfortable.”
“Watch out for early-morning cars. I don’t want anyone getting an eyeful and then running me over.”
“There’s nothing for miles around.” Colin turned his back on her.
Renata unclipped her armor’s chest-plate and let it fall to the ground, then the back-plate, and the flexible pieces on her arms. They were coated with an extremely strong steel and polymer mesh, bullet-proof and fire-proof.
“Well?” Colin asked.
“I’m doing it, I’m doing it!” She kicked off her boots, then her leggings, and pulled on the t-shirt. “Ew! When was the last time you had a shower?”
“I dunno. How long ago was Christmas?”
“All right. I’m done.”
Colin turned back. “OK…” He looked down at the sphere, and ran his hands over it for a moment. “Here… This is where the two halves were welded together. Lance said the shell is about four inches thick.”
She saw his fingertips glow red, then white, and took a step back as thin rivulets of molten steel began to run down the outside of the sphere.
“That should do it,” Colin said. “Can’t melt it all the way, but this should be enough for me to get a good grip on it.” Almost instantly, the white-hot metal dulled and solidified as he reabsorbed the heat back into his body. “You get as close as you can. I’ll rip it open.”
Renata stepped up to the metal ball, so close that her knees were touching it.
The metal began to warp and buckled under his fingers. “This is part of your history,” he told Renata, his teeth gritted. “Remember when you and my folks and all the others went after Ragnarök?”
“Like I’d forget that.”
“Well, Ragnarök’s plan was to siphon all the powers out of every other superhuman. Except himself, of course.” The metal sphere split, and Colin jumped back.
Renata peered down into the cracked sphere. “So what’s supposed to happen now?”
If Colin responded, she didn’t hear it. Her entire body was instantly wracked with a tidal wave of pure agony. She felt as though her skin was burning, melting, sloughing away from her muscles, while a million poisoned darts plunged into her body from every direction.
She collapsed to the ground and her stomach heaved, her eyes streamed with thick tears, her ears ached like they had been skewered with railroad spikes.
Another wave of agony washed over her even before the first had subsided, and she felt every muscle in her body twitch and jump as though she was being electrocuted. Her hands slammed palm-down onto the dirt-covered road, and she felt her nails splintering on the concrete surface as her fingers curled into fists.
Then, instantly, the pain was gone.
Colin was kneeling at her side, and she held onto his arm as she pulled herself up into a kneeling position.
“Are you all right? I didn’t think it would hurt—Lance said it wouldn’t hurt!”
Renata wiped the back of her left hand across her mouth, and it came away streaked with mud, saliva and blood.
“It’s OK—you just bit your lip,” Colin said.
She turned her hand over, and looked at her nails, expecting to see bloody stumps where they had been ripped out of her fingertips. They were intact. “What? I felt them…” And then Renata looked back down at the ground, and saw two sets of four long, thin gouges in the concrete. “Oh wow.”
“Can you stand?”
“I think so.” Leaning on Colin for support, she got to her feet, then stepped away from him as she arched her back and flexed her muscles. “I’m OK.”
Colin said, “So… Ragnarök’s machine stole all that energy from all the superhumans.” He gave the metal sphere a kick. “And inside this is where that energy was stored, kind of like a giant battery. Max’s people had buried it, just in case it ever got into the wrong hands. At least, that was the official story. The truth is that he didn’t know how to make use of it. But Lance figured it out… Remember how Danny lost his powers, but he got them back after he ran into one of those blue lights? Well, they’re hard to find because only very few of us can see then, but Lance guessed that the energy in the sphere was the same stuff.” He grinned. “So, some of that was probably your energy to begin with. Well? Want to give it a go?”
She nodded, and took a deep breath as she concentrated. An almost forgotten sensation rippled over her skin, and her body became transparent and crystalline.
After a few seconds, she returned to normal, and smiled at Colin. “I’m back.”
Colin stared at her. “Yeah...”
“What?”
“Before you lost your powers you could turn yourself crystal, and then you learned to change other things, right? And then you learned how to change only some parts of your body... But those parts couldn’t move.”
“So?” Renata allowed her left hand to turn solid, then held it above her head and watched the refracted image of the clouds rippling through it. Never thought I’d see this again! But Mina sounded so certain when she said that my powers were gone for good, and that I was an ordinary human.
I know she’s a bit jealous of me and Danny but...
And how did Mister McKendrick know that my powers weren’t gone forever? For someone we’ve never heard of before, he knows way too much about all of us.
“Renata,” Colin said. “Stop day-dreaming for a second... I’m trying to tell you something!”
She lowered her hand. “I’m listening.”
He stepped closer to her. “I thought I saw... Look, just turn solid again.”
She turned herself completely solid, then flinched as Colin threw a punch at her. For a moment she thought that it wasn’t him, that it was one of the clones, but then she saw him grinning at her and she realized what he was trying to demonstrate.
Renata looked down at her crystalline hands, and flexed them into fists.
She returned Colin’s grin. “I’ve never been able to do this before!”
Colin nodded. “Yep. You can move.”
Chapter 19
When Colin and Renata returned to Sakkara they found Lance waiting for them on the roof. Before they could speak, he put his finger to his lips, and slightly shook his head.
He passed a hand-written note to Colin. It read, “Don’t speak. Do you know what an electromagnetic pulse is?”
Colin nodded.
Lance passed him a second note. “I’ll have one of those. Right here, right now. Extra-large, please. Enough to blanket the entire building. Everything important inside is shielded.”
Colin started to speak, but was handed a third note: “No, Renata will be fine as long as her armor’s not active.”
He showed the note to Renata, who immediately powered down her armor.
Two more notes came next. The first read, “Well?” and the second read, “I refer you to note number 2.”
Lance looked at him with an expression that said, “What are you waiting for?”
Colin had read about electromagnetic pulses, how they could disrupt electronic circuits and even burn out microprocessors. But he figured that if Lance said it was OK, it was probably important. Even though Lance had been wrong—or had lied—about the energy in the metal sphere not hurting Renata.
Lance took hold of Renata’s arm and pulled her away from Colin as he drew the energy around him into his body.
Colin felt the charge building inside him, growing stronger, itching to break free. Lance nodded, and Colin let it go.
The pulse was invisible, and completely harmless to humans, but Colin sensed it surge through the building beneath his feet, racing through electricity cables, along metal water-pipes, through dozens of free-standing pieces of electronic equipment.
“Done?” Lance asked.
“It’s done. It’s zapped a few computers, though. Better check for fires.”
“Everyone’s been warned about that already, thanks to good old pencil and paper.”
“I’m guessing the purpose was to destroy any bugs that the bad guys might have planted in there.”
Lance motioned that they should follow him toward the stairs. “Correct. I’m not saying that there was anything, but just in case. Now you know why we couldn’t discuss the plan out loud. So, Renata, I can see that you’re eager to tell me that it worked.”
She grinned. “It did. I haven’t really tested it yet, but look…” She pulled off her glove and held up her hand, and transformed it into crystal.
“Are we back to the stage where you can only transform yourself?”
“Only me, so far. And my clothes and my armor. But check this out!” She waggled her crystalline fingers. “I can move!”
Lance led them along the corridor toward the machine room. “Good. That gives me hope that one day you’ll regain the ability to change other objects. That would come in handy for keeping our clone friends prisoner.”
“Yeah, but I can move! I was never able to do that before!”
“Sure you were. You just hadn’t learned how. Takes a while for some of you to learn the extent of your powers.” Lance nodded toward Colin. “Like this guy. It was nearly a year before he learned how to fly.”
Colin began, “Mister McKendrick...”
“Lance.”
&n
bsp; “Lance. How did you know that Renata’s powers weren’t gone forever? Mina said that her aura was perfectly human. She said it wasn’t even like when my folks and the others lost their powers.”
“I wasn’t completely sure. I just had a hunch.” Lance shrugged. “In this world, especially when it comes to superhumans, it’s never wise to close your mind to any possibility, kids. We live in the age of miracles. Well, maybe not miracles exactly, but it’s certainly the age of really weird stuff.”
In the machine room, they saw that the room was once again swarming with technicians. Razor was at his bench, fitting components to the large framework, and he looked up as he saw them.
“No major damage from the EMP, Mister Mac.”
“I told you before. Call me Lance, or boss, or sir, if you don’t want me to call you Garland.”
“Yeah, whatever. If there were any bugs in this place, they’re toast now. Col? Give me a hand, would you? Take the big end and hold it up against this. Have to make sure it’ll fit.”
Renata said, “I can do that. I’m stronger than Colin, after all.” She walked around the bench and lifted the framework single-handed. “Where exactly do you want it?”
“Nice,” Razor said, smiling. “So what happened? How’d your powers come back?”
Lance said, “We can’t say, yet.”
“OK. But Mina said your powers were never coming back, that your aura was normal. Perfectly human.”
Colin said, “Yeah, that’s what I said.”
“Enough,” Lance said. “Seriously, this isn’t the time for that. Razor, how much longer before this machine is ready?”
“Four days, maybe.”
“You have one day.”
“What?! Are you crazy?”
Lance sighed, “Son, you don’t kid a kidder. Engineers always want to buy some more time, so they double how long they think it’ll really take. But you guessed that I know that, which means that you doubled it twice. So you have twenty-four hours.” He looked at his watch. “This time tomorrow.”
Razor threw a wrench across the room. “I quit.”
“Oh, really? You’re going to run out on your friends now, when they need you most?”
The New Heroes: Crossfire Page 16
