GeneSix (16 page)

The man shook his head.

But the long-haired one said, “I do. I’ve done my homework. What can I do? I’m a telekinetic, and a telepath.”

Just then, someone called out, “The EMT’s are here!”

Scott said, into the audio field about them, “Sammy, we have to move now. Are you ready?”

“Ready, Scott.”

“All right,” Scott said, raising his voice above the din of helicopters growing louder from outside. “We’re going to attempt to beam the child from Miss Stratton to the holding chamber in our headquarters.”

“Attempt?” The telekinetic said.

“The child is emitting huge amounts of zeta energy right now. It could disrupt the teleportation beam. Jake has to power down almost entirely for us to beam him anywhere.”

“Is there no method of neutralizing zeta energy?”

Scott shook his head. “Not here, there’s not. The power drain to do that is enormous. I don’t have any portable method of doing it.”

April said, “If we don’t try it right now, she’s not going to live long. The child is tearing her up.”

“Sammy?”

The computer said, “Energizing.”

Wait-a-minute, Scott thought. Helicopters? Outside the windows? They were on the fourth floor, and there was plenty of room for choppers outside, but what were they doing there?

He went to the window, just as Sammy’s voice came over the audio field, “Teleportation blocked. An electromagnetic field is being formed around the building.”

From the window, Scott could see four military choppers, painted black. Attached to the landing gear of each was a box with a dish. From the noise of the choppers, he figured there were more than the four he could see. Probably on the other side of the building.

“They’re trying to keep us from beaming out,” Scott said.

“Scott,” April said. “We have to do something.”

He charged back to April and Mandy. To the telekinetic, he said, “Just how strong is your ability?”

“I can lift a car if I have to.”

“All right. I want you to reach inside her, and hold her uterus together, until I can figure a way out of this. Can you do that?”

Quentin nodded. “I can try. But I have to be precise about this.”

“Touch my mind, and you can get the exact coordinates as I get them from my computer.”

Quentin nodded. “My God. If this doesn’t work..,”

“It won’t, unless we make it work. And we don’t have much time to debate it.”

Quentin nodded, closing his eyes. “I am reaching to your mind now.”

Scott could feel the fingers of the telekinetic reaching into his thoughts.

“My God,” Quentin said. “I have touched minds before, but yours..,”

“The coordinates,” Scott said.

“Yes, I have them.”

And Quentin reached with his mind into the abdomen of the woman lying curled on the floor, and wrapped his telekinetic energy about her uterus.

“The strength of the child,” Quentin said. “It’s like there’s a bomb going off inside this woman. I’m trying to contain it, but..,”

Scott noticed a trickle of blood making its way down Quentin’s lip.

Rick Wilson said, “It happens every time he uses his power.”

A chopper was now flying very close to the windows, the noise of its rotor rattling the glass.

“Sammy,” Scott said. “Get Jake back here.”

However, there was only a sound of static from the audio field.

April said, “What’s going on?’

“They’re jamming our communications. We can’t call Sammy or Jake.”

The side door of the helicopter slid open, and a man decked out in full SWAT regalia fired a weapon toward the window. The glass shattered, spraying shards about the room, and a canister bounced across the floor. A grayish gas began hissing from it.

“Nerve gas,” Wilson said.

Jake materialized in the courtyard of the detention center, where they were holding the man known as Peter LaSalle. Pierre LaSalle, actually, according to his birth certificate, but he usually answered to Peter.

He was better known to Jake and Scott as Bumblebee Man, because of the ridiculous yellow and black get-up he had worn when he attacked Jake a few months earlier. He had called himself Power Man, but Mandy Waid had referred to him as Bumblebee Man in her article on the event. Mandy had a way of coming up with catchy names which tended to stick.  Jake knew this all too well.

LaSalle’s power seemed to be superhuman strength and an extreme desensitivity to physical trauma. Scott (who read too many comics) used the word
invulnerability
. In any event, bullets at best bruised LaSalle a little, but caused him no real harm. The limits of LaSalle’s strength hadn’t been measured, but he claimed to have derailed a train once, and Jake fully believed him.

LaSalle was now being held in an institution with walls made of steel, each a foot thick. LaSalle had pounded his fists bloody against them, and managed to dent the hell out of the steel, but had so far not been able to break free.

He was about to be transferred to a cell in Texas, in a facility designed specifically for him. Walls made of concrete and steel over four feet thick. He would have room to move about, and food would be supplied. He would have access to a television, and he would be allowed to surf the web. But he would not be allowed to roam about freely outside.

April was a bit appalled by this, as his crimes didn’t call for indefinite solitary confinement. He had been charged with vandalism, destruction of private property (to the tune of a couple million dollars), and physical assault and battery (when he punched Jake and knocked him through the wall and down to the street below). The reason for the indefinite solitary was because society was simply afraid of him. Jake knew he and Scott would be facing a similar fate if the authorities were able to capture and confine them.

Jake and Scott had considered the possibilities of springing LaSalle and inviting him to join the team. But LaSalle’s limited cognitive ability (in other words, he was not the sharpest tool in the shed), and his ethics which seemed to be aimed mostly at self-interest, would make him a poor team member.

As a service to the public, because Scott believed they should always act in the best interest of the public to prove they were not in reality super villains (again, Scott read too many comics), Jake had gone to help the Army escort LaSalle to his new home.

And yet, when he arrived in the courtyard, to his surprise, he found a couple dozen National Guardsman standing with rifles aimed at him.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

That was all he had time to ask. One rifle fired, and Jake found a dart landing in his neck. He tried to flip the mental switch to power-up, but other rifles were firing. Another dart bounced off of his jumpsuit, which could easily resist a bullet, let alone a dart. But a third landed also in his neck, and one caught him in an exposed hand.

Knockout juice, he realized. A sedative of some kind, and a fast-acting one. The world quickly started becoming distorted around him, and his knees were growing wobbly. He found he could no longer focus his thoughts enough to power up. He fell to the ground, and all went black.

Nerve gas, Wilson had said, and Scott thought he was probably right. The authorities had apparently not given up their attempts to gain control of himself and Jake Calder. They were now taking advantage of Mandy Waid’s medical condition to attempt a capture.

They were beginning to really piss him off.

They might have blocked communication with Sammy or Jake, and Scott was not in his battle suit, but he was wearing his battle suit’s utility belt. He never went anywhere without it because, as was being proven at this very moment, you just never know.

“I’m engaging a force field,” he said, flipping a switch in the front of belt. “I’m enveloping it around us.”

Unfortunately, he couldn’t extend it enough to include all of the people in the news room, but he got it around himself, April, Mandy, and the three new meta-humans.

All about him, the grayish fog swirled, and the news staffers began to drop.
I hope to hell the gas is not
fatal
, Scott thought. However, those within the force field had a bubble of oxygen that should at least last a few minutes.

Sammy had some security protocols built in, should he ever lose contact with Scott or Jake. Scott hoped they were kicking in now. If so, then they shouldn’t need the force field for more than a few minutes.

“I don’t know how much longer I can hold this,” Telekinetic Man said, blood now streaming down his face from both nostrils.

“Just do what you can,” Scott said.

Tompkins was in a chopper, advancing quickly toward the building. He had discarded his suit jacket, and was shouldering into a flack vest.

He was wearing headphones, and through the ear piece an agent said, “Sir, they have erected some sort of force field. The gas has incapacitated the civilians within the room, but the subjects are still on their feet.”

He was disappointed. He hated to fail in an assignment. He had hoped to capture Scott Tempest, so tests could be conducted on him, and they could finally learn what made him tick. The agency had tried for years to work with that freak, which Tompkins had been against from the start. Finally, Washington was beginning to listen to him.

There was also the girl. As far as Tompkins knew she was not a meta-human, but she had information about Tempest and Calder that would probably prove valuable. And Tompkins was still pissed that Tempest had sprung her after Tompkins had arrested her. Tompkins had never lost a prisoner before. She would be interrogated, and Tomkins planned to conduct it himself, and he hoped she resisted. He would make it an interrogation she would long remember.

But now Tempest was finding a way to circumvent the nerve gas.

Kincaid was beside Tomkins, also wearing headphones. “Sir, do we implement Plan Baker?”

Tompkins nodded reluctantly. “I had hoped to capture them alive. But I suppose as long as Tempest is incapacitated and no longer a threat to society, then the mission can be considered at least a partial success. Yes, implement Plan Baker.”

“Implement Plan Baker,” Kincaid said into a microphone mounted onto his headset. “I repeat, implement Plan Baker.”

Two of the helicopters then fired missiles at the building. Upon contact, the missiles exploded, and the fourth floor disappeared in a flash of flame followed by a thunder clap that shook Tompkins in his seat. Fragments of concrete and steel shot past the choppers.

He watched from the chopper as the building crumbled, shaking the ground and spewing up a cloud of dust.

Scott found he was lying on the ground, concrete debris strewn about him, a cloud of grayish dust hanging overhead. He was shaken up, but still conscious. One leg had been struck by a flying chunk of concrete, and was now at least severely bruised. Possibly broken at the shin. He doubted he would be able to stand on it.

He had wondered how much abuse his force field could take in a real-world scenario. Sure, he had tested it in his lab, but now, as he looked at the rubble about him and the dust cloud overhead, he could say it held together quite nicely as the building was blown apart about them.

The field was no longer operative, obviously, or the chunk of debris would not have struck his leg. And he was coughing on dust.

“April!” he called out.

“Over here.” She was already on her feet, but a little shaky. “I’m all right.”

“Sammy,” he said, into the communicator mounted on his wrist.

Still no response. No audio field was forming around him.
We could all be in real trouble
.

To April, he said, “Locate Mandy.”

“I’m trying. I was right beside her when all hell broke loose, but now I can’t find her.”

April hadn’t taken the time to grab a battle suit before they beamed in here. She had been in running shorts, which she wore very short. Pleasingly so, Scott thought. Jake had thought Scott never noticed, but he had. Her legs were now covered with scratches and bruises, and blood was trailing from her nose, as she pawed through the rubble, searching for Mandy.

Near Scott was T-Man (Scott had never actually gotten his name). The man’s eyes were shut, and his mouth and jaw were covered with blood. Scott did not know if he was alive or dead, or how many of his injuries were caused by the collapse of the building, and how many simply by using his ability.

“I can’t find her,” April called out. “It’s like she’s disappeared, or something.”

“Possibly buried under some of this rubble.”

Scott tried to rise to his feet, but found his leg would indeed support no weight. He fell back to the ground, slamming one elbow into another chunk of concrete.

He then became aware of figures moving ahead of them in the cloud of dust, working their way toward them. After a moment, he could see they were in uniform. Helmets, oxygen masks, goggles, and flack vests. And they were all carrying weapons.