Extraction (2 page)

“No,” I said. “Why? You think they might extend us a little professional courtesy and look the other way?”

“Hardly,” she responded. “I’m more interested in knowing their abilities.”

I shrugged. “There are a lot of supers willing to hire out as mercenaries, and the guys we’re up against have deep pockets.” I reflected back for a moment on the fiasco at the Academy, where one such merc – a super called Estrella – had almost punched my ticket.

“I hate to break it to you,” Electra said, interrupting my train of thought, “but I’m not sure we’ll be able to use the vents. According to the security details, even those shafts have motion sensors installed – although no cameras.”

“In other words,” I said, “we need a new plan.”

*****

Shortly thereafter, we called it a night, with everybody promising to give some more thought to the matter over the next few days. Needless to say, I was extremely frustrated. I’d made a promise to Rudi and she was counting on me. There had to be a way to get this done.

It was several days later that I had my “Eureka” moment. I was fully preoccupied – as I had been of late – with thoughts of how to manage this rescue operation. If an idea occurred to get us in, I couldn’t think of a way out. In contrast, if I worked backward and started with an exit strategy, I couldn’t think of an appropriate way in.

I was wrapped up in that mental deadlock, thinking about how Rudi was going to be a grandmother before I came up with a plan, when the solution hit me. From my perspective, it was so beautiful, so elegant in its simplicity, that I could have kicked myself for not thinking of it before. I hurriedly convened a meeting with my two (literal) partners-in-crime.

Their response was less enthusiastic than I had hoped. In fact, when I finished explaining it, they both looked at me like I was a talking rabbit.

“You know,” Electra said, after a few moments of awkward silence, “when I called you an idiot the other day, I had no idea I was paying you a compliment. That’s your plan??!! That…that’s not a plan! It’s not even
half
a plan!”

“Hold on,” said Smokey, playing peacemaker. “The first part has merit, although it could use a few tweaks. But Jim, the second part…you have to admit it’s a little nuts.”

“No, it only
sounds
nuts because you guys have never seen anything like it,” I said. “But trust me, it’ll work.”

“Even with this place on total lockdown?” Smokey asked. “Because that’s what’s going to happen within the first minute of us initiating this plan of yours – before we even get inside – and
this
is the part I’m most comfortable with.”

“Lockdown, if you look at the plans and security data,” I said, “is really geared towards keeping people in rather than out.”

“Yeah,” Electra chimed in, “and getting out is where your plan seems to ask us to put you in a straitjacket.”

“I appreciate how you feel, but it’ll be okay,” I said.

Smokey and Electra exchanged a skeptical glance.

“Fine,” I said defensively. “You don’t have to believe me. But make no mistake, I’m doing this – with or without your help.”

Part II

Of course, there was no way they were going to let me go it alone. Thus we planned our extraction for the upcoming weekend – specifically, Saturday night. Being teenagers, it wouldn’t surprise anyone that we were out at the time, and with any luck we would be gone only a few hours at most.

As I mentioned before, the facility we were trying to break into had its own power plant. Per the diagrams, that power was principally derived from a nearby wind farm – a massive plot of land peppered with wind turbines. That was our first destination.

Having previously scoped out the area (and not triggering any sensors), I was able to teleport us right up to the edge of the wind farm.

We were all wearing stealth suits, which resembled skin-tight, grayish-white leotards with face-hugging hoods. They were made of some weird material that was surprisingly comfortable, and which would purportedly allow us to slip past any active motion sensors. The suits would, among other things, hide body heat and absorb sound waves, making us invisible to things like thermal imagery, radar, sonar, and the like.

The suits were Smokey’s idea, although I had no idea how he managed to get his hands on them. They also came with night-vision goggles, gloves, miniature rebreathers and backpacks. All in all, we looked like some bleached-out version of a Blue Man Group.

“Wow,” said Smokey, marveling at the sight before us. And in truth, even seen through NVGs, it really was impressive: acres of massive wind turbines – each two hundred feet tall with blades fifty feet long, practically spinning in unison. Unfortunately, we didn’t have much time to admire the view.

Electra was the first to break the spell of the wind turbines. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

With that, she stepped up to the closest turbine and laid a gloved hand on it. With her goggles in place, I couldn’t really see her eyes, but I imagined she had them shut, and I could feel her concentrating as small arcs of electricity began forming around the area where she was touching the turbine.

The electricity around her hand seemed to become more powerful, and both Smokey and I involuntarily took a step back. Suddenly Electra’s arm stiffened, and I heard a distinctive crackling noise as a bolt of electricity seemed to shoot through the turbine. A second later, there was a sound like a dozen streetlamps exploding, and we looked up to see a glorious shower of sparks raining down from the turbine’s shaft. I wrinkled my nose as I caught the scent of burning insulation and ozone.

“That should do it,” Electra said.

What that should have done, if we were lucky, was shoot an electrical spike into Chamomile’s power grid strong enough to take its power plant offline. Unfortunately, the place had a backup generator (powered hydroelectrically by an underground river), but it would take about fifteen minutes to come online.

Without a word, I scooped Electra up into my arms and took off running, depositing her at the air vent we were planning to use. Then I ran back for Smokey. (I could have teleported, but Electra had insisted that I “get into character” – basically, only using a single super power: speed).

I was back at the turbine within a minute. I reached for Smokey, but he slapped my hand away.

“Dude, what do you think you’re doing?” he asked. “You’re not carrying me like some chick you’re saving from an apartment fire.”

Before I could say anything, he motioned for me to turn around, then hopped on my back.

“I take it your male pride is okay with this?” I asked as I shifted his weight.

“Tally-ho!” he replied.

Shortly thereafter, we arrived at the ventilation shaft, and I practically dumped him on the ground. The vent itself was essentially a three-by-three-foot, square-shaped piece of metal that extended about two feet above the ground. At each of its four corners was a metal rod about six inches long, and screwed down onto those rods was a cymbal-shaped covering. A high volume of air blew up forcefully and noisily from the shaft.

Pulling a screwdriver from my backpack, I shifted into super speed, removing the screws and then taking the covering (which was obviously intended to keep out the elements) from the vent. I did the same thing to a grate that was screwed in place at the top of the shaft opening.

Since the moment I had brought her to the vent, Electra had been busy with an item from her own backpack. It was a steel rod of adjustable length, with metal grips on the ends. It also had a generous amount of grappling line in the center and a three-man harness attached.

With the vent now accessible, she came over and – after making sure it was the proper length – placed the rod so that the ends of it fit over opposite sides of the ventilation shaft. Then she adjusted the grips so that the rod wouldn’t move. Seemingly satisfied that it was safe, she grabbed the harness and strapped herself in.

“Well,” she said, after adjusting the harness around her waist, “we don’t have all night.”

Smokey and I quickly strapped ourselves in as well, and a few minutes later we were slowly descending down the shaft, with Electra holding the controls for the grappling line and Smokey shining a flashlight so we could see where we were going.

Frankly speaking, all of this effort felt kind of foolish to me and a bit like a waste of time. I could have phased us into the vent and then flown all three of us down the shaft. (It was about a fifty-foot drop straight down, at which point the shaft angled the rest of the way down towards the Chamomile facility.) However, Electra wasn’t having it.

“We already talked about how you were only going to use one power on this mission, almost from cradle to grave,” she’d said. “Plus, what if something happens to you? At least with the harness in place, there’s a chance that we can get out – especially if your crazy plan goes to pieces.”

So I was stuck in the harness, moving at what felt like was a snail’s pace. The air in the vent blew wildly, and if it wasn’t tucked into her hood, I was sure Electra’s hair would have been smacking me in my face every time I leaned too close to her.

Although it felt longer, we were at the bottom of the shaft in just a minute or two. Then we unhooked ourselves, pulled out the schematics, and started walking.

*****

Getting through the shaft took longer than anticipated. I had hoped that – just like on the surface – I’d be able to zip through the shaft at high speed with Electra and Smokey. As luck would have it, however, this portion of the shaft was far too narrow for me to get through carrying anyone. Hence, we went through the vents at what my friends probably considered a good pace, but which I found maddeningly slow. (I spent the time reaching out empathically for Rudi. It was how I had first come into contact with her, but now I was getting nothing. It was as if she were hiding from me.)

It took us about ten minutes to reach the end of the shaft. Apparently none of us knew how to read a schematic properly because we didn’t come out where we expected. We had intended to exit fairly close to the living quarters. Instead, we emerged in what – under other circumstances – I would have described as a dark, dank basement. (In our defense, we did encounter a lot of interconnected shafts, and schematics aren’t always accurate.) However, seeing that almost all of this facility was underground, the entire thing could be classified as a basement.

There was a grate over the end of the vent, but there was so much noise and wind blowing that we didn’t worry about being heard when Smokey kicked it off. We peeked out and looked around.

The vent we were in was located about five feet above the floor of what appeared to be a large tunnel. Numerous ventilation shafts similar to the one we were in dotted both sides of the passageway. Although no alarm was sounding, red lights – placed equidistant from each other in the ceiling – were flashing. As expected, when the power grid went offline, the place had gone into lockdown.

A quick consultation with the diagrams revealed that we weren’t too far off the mark. We were, however, a few floors beneath our intended destination. Still, we felt we had a better chance of success by getting out of the vent here rather than trying to go back through and find our intended point of egress.

The three of us jumped down, Electra refusing any offer of assistance. Then we ran through the tunnel, which grew in width and height as we traveled, in the direction that the wind was coming from. When we reached the end of the passageway, we saw something that was almost as impressive as the wind farm.

At this point, the tunnel was at least fifty feet tall as well as wide. Filling that entire space at the end of the passageway was a massive fan in a metal frame. The blades on it were roughly twenty feet in length, and whipping around so fast that we could actually see through to the other side of the tunnel where a single metal door was set in the wall. Not only was the fan generating an incredible amount of airflow, its movement sent notable vibrations through the ground.

My companions looked at me, and I shrugged. I picked up Electra again and shifted into high speed. Sensing what I was about to do, she turned her face towards my chest.

From my perspective, the blades on the fan slowed down until they were barely moving at all. At that point, it was child’s play for me to simply step between them to the other side, where I lowered Electra to the ground. Then I went back and brought Smokey through, again on my back (although this time he spurred me on with a “Giddy-up!”).

It was after Smokey hopped off my back that I noticed the suction; air on this side of the room was being pulled into the giant fan. The force of it wasn’t strong enough for any of us to worry about being blown into the blades and turned into sushi, but it was disconcerting nonetheless. (In a perfect world, there would have been grating of some type on both sides of the fan to prevent someone from getting hurt.) We hurriedly made our way to the door and exited.

*****

They were waiting for us on the other side of the door, although we didn’t notice them at first. Upon leaving the area with the giant fan, we found ourselves seemingly alone in some type of engineering room. The space itself was monstrously huge both in length, width, and height, and dotted with what appeared to be generators, transformers, etc. – some of them several stories high and massive in size. It quickly became obvious that we were in the main power plant.

Here, as in the room we had just left, red bulbs flashed all around in place of normal lighting. There also seemed to be an inordinate number of stairways, walkways, and railings around much of the power plant equipment, as well as lining the walls.

According to the blueprints, the door we needed was on the opposite wall. With me in the lead, followed by Electra and then Smokey, we began furtively making our way across the plant floor.

“
Where is everybody?” Smokey asked in a whisper as we walked down a narrow passageway between two bulky pieces of equipment.

I shrugged. “Probably in their rooms or whatever is designated as a secure location down here. They probably practice for stuff like this the way normal people have fire drills.”

“Yeah,” Electra said, “but from what I can see, this is the power plant. There should be a bunch of engineers in here trying to get power restored and everything back online.”

I was about to object on some basis, but that actually made a lot of sense. In sudden alarm, I stopped walking – so quickly, in fact, that Electra bumped into me – then reached out to the surrounding area empathically. That’s when I felt them.

They numbered eight altogether – six normal security guards and two supers. The security guards I picked out easily; homing in on their location with my empathic ability as I sensed their various emotions, I then telescoped my vision until I could see where each of them was positioned. Outfitted in matching uniforms and body armor, they were strategically placed on the stairs and walkways above us. In short, they had the high ground, and they all had weapons pointed at us.

As to the supers, I sensed them on the ground level with us, although currently out of our line of sight. I motioned for Electra and Smokey to stay back, then stepped out of the passageway into what was essentially the center of the plant (or at least the portion with the most clear space). The two supers were there, about thirty feet away, standing out in the open and looking as if they were expecting me (which they obviously were).

The first was a young guy – early twenties, I’d say – with brown hair, a slim build, a nose ring, and a conceited grin. He was in a fighting stance, dressed in a black-and-green costume, fists balled and projecting glowing spheres around his hands that fluctuated somewhere between yellow and green in the color spectrum. I sensed a certain recklessness in him – cockiness and impetuousity coupled with a manic desire to prove himself. Even more, I recognized him as a meta called the Plasmatic Kid.