Alien Storm (2 page)

“Very good, sir,” Commander Craig said on the other end of the video link-up. Behind him, Rachel could see the desert and blue sky flying past the windows of his vehicle. “We're ten minutes from the enemy base. We've got four hovercopters moving in from the east. I'm in the lead copter. There's also a ground convoy of thirty soldiers being deployed from the south.”

Rachel nodded approvingly. She picked up the satellite photograph of the
enemy base
– a collection of caravans and trucks parked in the middle of the Australian outback, three hundred kilometres north of Adelaide. This was the hiding place of Major Bright, the right-hand man of Colonel Moss, the former director of HIDRA's military operations. Bright was the only member of the old HIDRA military command that hadn't been arrested for his actions following the meteorite strike. Together, Moss and Bright had imprisoned the children who had developed powers from the fall virus. Bright had been responsible for torturing those children to expose their powers and he had been the first and only person to be given the serum developed from their blood. As a result, he had developed an amazing mix of powers that made him very dangerous.

And now he was hiding out in the desert with his own little army of followers – mostly thieves and outlaws.

“I hope you understand what you're going up against, Commander Craig,” Rachel warned, looking back at the camera. “Major Bright's powers combine the strengths of all the virus-altered children.”

“If he still has those powers,” Craig added. “He's probably run out of serum by now.”

Rachel considered it, but shook her head. “Colonel Moss created enough vials of serum for almost a dozen doses. We never found those vials, even after he was arrested. We can only assume that Major Bright has them.”

“And if he has the serum,” Commander Craig said, “he has his powers.”

“You should be ready for a fight.”

Craig grinned at the camera. “Don't worry, sir. HIDRA Special Forces are always ready for a fight.”

Major Bright sensed them coming as an image in his mind's eye – four hovercopters moving almost silently through the skies above the Central Australian desert. It was part of the psychic early-warning system he'd inherited from Colonel Moss's experiment with the fall virus. He was supposed to be the leader of a new generation of superhuman soldiers, but now there was only him – stuck in the outback amidst outlaws almost as wanted as himself. The forces of HIDRA were coming to capture and imprison him, just like they had Colonel Moss.

Swinging his legs off the bed, he reached into the water bowl on the nearby table and splashed the lukewarm liquid on his face. Looking in the cracked shaving mirror on the table, he ran his hands over his closely-cropped hair and stroked a finger down the old battle scar that ran the length of his cheek. He frowned at his reflection. After six months of hiding out in the desert he'd put on a little weight in the face, but his body was still hard and muscular – barely a gram of excess fat. Bright flexed his bicep and nodded approvingly. He was ready to go to war.

At the doorway of his caravan, Eco stood to attention in readiness for any command. Eco – the eighteen-year-old kid who'd become his ostensible second-in-command at the camp during the past few months. When Bright had an order to give to the collection of almost a hundred crims and misfits who lived around him, it was Eco who delivered it.

“Is there anything wrong, sir?” the teenager asked, his thin face almost invisible in the darkness – the window shades had to be kept down during the day against the searing heat of the desert.

Bright dried his hands on a towel and looked round. “Wake the camp. We're going to be attacked. Tell them we've got about ten minutes.”

Even in the darkness, Bright could see the kid's mouth fall open stupidly. Months of rage and frustration bubbled away under the major's calm exterior, but he suppressed it. Bright was used to commanding highly-trained men (the very type of men who were being sent to capture him), but here he was reduced to living with common criminals and ordering around a teenage misfit looking for a father figure. Eco continued to gawk as if he'd just spoken in Latin.

“Well?” Bright snapped, just as he would at one of his underlings when he had been in control at HIDRA. “Wake the camp! Get to it, soldier!”

“Yessir!” Eco yelped, giving some kind of half-salute as he stumbled into the blinding light of day.

Major Bright shook his head as the gangly kid exited the caravan, and then went to the cupboard near the bed. He removed a single item on a hanger and tore off the protective plastic. Even in the dimness of the caravan the brass on his old uniform sparkled – the rips and tears from his last battle with Sarah Williams and the other children had been repaired so it was almost as good as new.

Soon he would be a commander of men once more, not boys or criminals.

Laying the uniform down on the bed, Major Bright took a plastic case from the cupboard and flipped it open. Inside sat a syringe-gun and glass vials, each containing a sample of the virus serum that gave him his powers. Every few weeks he felt his enhanced strength draining, and that was when he had to inject more of the serum. He counted the vials –
only two left
.

Bright placed one of the precious vials in the gun and held it against his left arm. With a pull on the trigger, the serum shot into his bloodstream like molten iron. He gritted his teeth to stop from crying out in pain and gripped the side of the bed as his entire body was racked by muscular spasms.

One more vial
, Major Bright thought as the pain subsided.
I need more serum
.

Luckily, he knew just where to find it: the original children from Colonel Moss's experiment –
Project Superhuman
. He sensed them in the east with his attuned psychic sense: Sarah and Robert Williams, the Colombian twins and the two younger ones. Their blood was the key to their powers. When Bright had their blood, he could make serum on demand. When he had that, he would be truly indestructible.

With a smile, he began to dress for battle.

Meanwhile, Eco ran around the camp, unkempt blond hair flying around his face as he went.

“Wake up!” he yelled, banging on the door of a caravan. “We're under attack! Get to your defensive positions!”

Before he reached the next vehicle, someone caught his arm, almost pulling him off his feet. Eco looked up into the eyes of a bearded biker with tattoos on his face.

“What are you shouting about, Shrimp?”

Eco gritted his teeth.
Shrimp
. He hated that nickname, but people didn't use it when he was around Major Bright.

“HIDRA is coming,” he said, pulling his arm free. “Time to show your loyalty to the major.”

The biker gave him a look like he thought he was crazy. He turned and signalled to two of his mates, who were dressed in jeans and leather and sporting full beards despite the crushing heat. They walked in the direction of their bikes.

“Hey, where are you going?” Eco demanded, running after them. All around the camp people were emerging from vans and caravans, blinking in the sunlight.

The biker looked round as he swung a leg over his Harley and fired the engine. “It's been cool hanging out here, but I ain't taking on no army for that freak.”

Eco was aware of half the camp watching their conversation. He stepped in front of the bike. “You're not going anywhere.”

The biker looked round at his friends and they roared with laughter. The man leaned over the handlebars of the motorbike until their noses were almost touching.

“You know, kid,” he said, “for a snot-nosed teenager, I kinda like you. So don't make me ride this hog over your head.”

Eco looked around the camp. “We can defend this place! The major will protect us!”

A murmur went up from the people watching the scene. The biker sighed and revved his engine for quiet. “Major Bright ain't got nothing but a bunch of party tricks up his sleeve. Anyone stupid enough to stick around for those HIDRA boys to roll in here—”

His voice trailed off as the door to the caravan opposite slammed open as if it had been kicked. Major Bright stepped out into the light. Everyone in the camp looked round at the towering figure – now dressed in his black and gold uniform. For a moment he didn't move, regarding them all with his cold, blue eyes. Nobody breathed. Finally, Bright started down the caravan steps and walked slowly across towards Eco and the biker.

“Is there a problem?” he asked as he reached Eco's side.

The kid looked round, relief written all over his face. “This guy wants to leave.”

The major looked at the man on the bike and raised an eyebrow questioningly.

“Hey, look, it's been great,” the biker stammered. He seemed to have shrunk half a metre in height since Bright walked out of the caravan. “But me and my crew didn't sign up to fight a war…”

Bright held up his hand, palm forward, fingers splayed. “Then you should go.”

There was a dull thud as the biker exploded in a puff of red-tinted mist. Eco wrinkled his nose at the burning smell that had filled the air. Without its rider, the Harley toppled over onto its side. A scrap of the biker's leather jacket floated through the air and landed on the rear wheel. The other two bikers jumped off their machines and stumbled backwards, away from the major and Eco.

“Does anyone else want to disappear?” Bright asked mildly, casting his eyes around the silent audience. “No one? Sure? Then get to your positions. NOW!”

The crowd broke and ran for their assigned places around the perimeter of the camp. For the last month, when they weren't out on scavenging missions to the nearest towns, Bright had been drilling them in how to defend the camp from infiltration. Eco felt his heart race as he saw men and women grabbing makeshift weapons and scurrying behind barricades. He looked up at the major.

“Don't worry, sir. We'll see them off or die trying.”

The major traced a finger down the scar on his right cheek.

“Sure. You will.”

3

Ten kilometres from the camp, Commander Craig tapped an area on the windscreen of his hovercopter and a Heads-Up Display, or HUD, opened showing a magnified view of the desert ahead. The camp in the distance was little more than a collection of rusting cars, trucks and caravans. To the edge of the screen a window showed a dark-haired woman in her late thirties – his boss, Dr. Rachel Andersen. She was overseeing the desert assault from the safety of her office, hundreds of kilometres away at the HIDRA base in Melbourne.

“Okay, Commander,” she said. “Tell me what I'm seeing.”

“The aerial assault is inbound on the camp, sir,” Craig informed her. He tapped a section of the HUD to the west, where a dust-cloud was rising. On Rachel's screen back at the base the vision would be highlighted. “That's the ground convoy. We've got six troop transports heading into the camp.”

Rachel Andersen said again, “I hope your men understand what they're going up against, Commander.”

“A group of outlaws and scum hiding out in the desert? Forgive me, sir, but this should be short and sweet.”

Rachel gave him a hard look. “I'm talking about Bright. I want him restrained and in a cell by the end of the morning. No mistakes.”

“Yessir,” the commander replied briskly as he reached for his comm. “Ground force, hold position one klick from the camp. Air support move in.”

The three other hovercopters surged towards the camp while Commander Craig kept his in a holding pattern.

“We can watch everything from here, sir,” he told Rachel as the magnified HUD showed the copters circle the perimeter of the camp. “They're conducting an initial scan. This should tell us exactly how many hostiles we're dealing with and where the weak points are.”

In the window, Rachel nodded as data appeared on the screen: close-up pictures of the camp and thermal scans of the vehicles. People inside the camp showed up in red.

Commander Craig studied the thermal overview. “Looks like we've got about sixty warm bodies in there, sir. There's a scattered group of about twenty moving to the south on foot. Probably deserters from the camp making a run for it. We'll pick them up later. Our intel suggests we've got at least thirty wanted criminals amongst this mob.”

“I want zero casualties,” she reminded him. “You have permission to proceed.”

“We have a go,” Craig said into the comm. “Air support, take out the unoccupied vehicles. Let's clear a path for the ground assault.”

The first missile hit as Eco was running across the central area of the camp. An ageing camper-van to his left exploded, rising into the air and coming down with an almighty crash that rocked the entire camp. Eco's legs fell from under him and he hit the sand, rolling onto his back and blinking in confusion. The sound of the explosion was quickly replaced by a ringing in his ears. He looked around and watched people running left and right, their mouths working as if they were screaming, but all he heard was the ringing.

I'm deaf
, he thought as something like a massive, black bird appeared overhead – a helicopter hovering directly over the centre of the camp. Eco watched in fascination as it made a leisurely turn, taking in its surroundings, completely unconcerned with the chaos it had created below. The machine stopped its rotation and fired a second missile, lighting up a bus that formed the back door of the camp. Eco pulled himself to his feet and walked backwards, noticing for the first time that the helicopter had no spinning blades. He wondered how it stayed in the air, as two identical machines appeared above the camp.

“Hey!” Eco yelled as a man ran from his hiding place near the east wall. “Do something! Shoot at them!”

The man tossed his shotgun at Eco's feet. “You shoot at them!” he said and fell on his knees, hands on his head. “I'm surrendering!”