Shadows (Ultrahumans Book 2) (3 page)

‘We came up with a solution. I mean, maybe she’ll just tell him who she is, but it’s probably safer if he doesn’t know. I sort of wish you didn’t know about me, but at least my secret identity is, uh, more secret.’

‘I’m not sorry,’ June replied. ‘I wouldn’t change it for the world.’

Penny nodded, not trusting her voice. She hoped June would never have to regret that attitude.

~~~

It was agony, and it was ecstasy, and Andrea never wanted it to end, but no matter how she drew it out with changes of pace and teasing pauses, the end was always the same. When it came, when they came, it was as though her body was exploding with pleasure and she almost collapsed on top of Jacob as the detonation subsided, her breathing ragged.

She almost did not notice him reaching toward her face, but she felt his fingers against the mask. It and the choker were the only thing she was still wearing. His thumbs started to push the lace upward and she reached up, taking his hands in hers.

‘Why not?’ he whispered.

‘Let’s leave a little mystery,’ she replied. ‘If you ever need to, you can still say you’ve never seen my face.’

‘But…’

‘This has to be our secret, Jacob. Cygnus lost Bobby… I don’t want to have to turn up to your funeral.’ She lifted off him, swinging around and sitting on the edge of the bed. Then she reached down to retrieve her bra from where it had fallen.

He slid up behind her, his knees to either side of her hips, and his arms slid around her waist. The moonlight made her dusky skin paler and turned his dark skin even darker against it.

‘So you sneak into my house at night and slip away again before anyone can see you? How do you do that anyway?’

‘Yes, and it’s a trade secret. It’s better this way. For now anyway.’

‘Better for who?’

‘Both of us. You don’t need to lie, and I don’t need to worry about you. It’s really hard to get dressed with you holding me like that. Even if I don’t really want you to let go.’

He laughed and the tension in her stomach released. He was going to be okay with this, at least for a while. He let her go and settled back onto the pillows, a grin on his face.

‘I guess I can live with that. Heather’s going to know, y’know? Soon as she next sees us together, she’ll know. She’s perceptive like that.’

‘Is that going to be a problem?’

Another laugh. ‘Only for me. She’s going to want to know all the intimate details.’

Andrea chuckled in reply. ‘Going to tell her?’

‘I might exaggerate a bit. A man has a reputation to uphold.’

‘Four times isn’t enough to hold up your rep?
I
was impressed.’

He shrugged, even if he did look pleased with that. ‘So I won’t need to exaggerate much.’

8
^th
March.

The problem with what she had spent Friday night doing was that it made what she had to do on Saturday night harder. She told herself that Twilight had taken Jacob to bed, and Andrea was the one walking into Lena’s rooms. Not even the real Andrea, she added firmly. Andrea was heterosexual, except when playing a prostitute for David Tonaldo’s lesbian daughter. Somehow, though, Friday night had turned the subterfuge into a real lie.

Then again, the bright smile she got from the top-heavy blonde helped push that aside. Lena was an unwitting source of information about the criminal activities of her father and his organisation, but she lived for the nights when one of her lovers was allowed up to her apartment. Andrea had put a lot of effort into making sure that she was Lena’s favourite, the one she asked for most often. It was hard to be entirely unmoved by the level of devotion Lena had for her.

‘I’ve had a bit of a sucky week,’ Lena said. ‘I’m glad you could come tonight.’

‘I had to move a couple of appointments,’ Andrea lied, slipping her coat off to reveal the tiny, black mini-dress she was wearing beneath it. ‘But you know I’ll do that for you. I’ll make you forget all about your problems, don’t you worry.’

‘It won’t be easy. Poppa’s been in a foul mood since that diamond heist Cygnus and Twilight broke up.’

‘Was that one of his?’ Andrea asked, keeping her voice light. She crossed over to the sofa, settling beside her client. None of the intelligence suggested the Tonaldos had been behind the robbery.

‘No. That’s what’s bothering him. Some team from out of the city. He doesn’t like competition.’

Leaning over, Andrea kissed Lena’s neck just under her left ear, eliciting a soft gasp. ‘I think I have a few tricks that’ll take your mind off it,’ Andrea purred.

9
^th
March.

‘So you didn’t chicken out?’ Cygnus asked, grinning mischievously.

‘No,’ Twilight replied, ‘I didn’t. And don’t think you’ll distract me by trying to discuss it.’

‘Would I?’ Cygnus threw a feinted punch and Twilight blocked the real attack, a low kick, with apparent ease. ‘How was he?’

‘I wasn’t disappointed.’

Cygnus turned, one leg swinging up for a back-kick. Twilight caught her ankle and pushed.

‘I won’t say “I told you so,”’ Cygnus said from the floor.

‘You just did. It made seeing Lena last night a little more… stressful than usual, but I did get something useful.’

Pushing herself upright, Cygnus turned in the air and floated to a standing position. Her expression suggested she wanted an explanation.

‘Those thieves we caught? The diamond robbery? They were from out of town. Tonaldo is worried about it.’

Cygnus gave a shrug before shifting into a sequence of punches and leg sweeps which Twilight stepped clear of, backing slowly across the floor.

‘We left a power vacuum when we took out Ghostfire,’ Cygnus said. ‘Tonaldo hasn’t managed to solidify his control in the zones Ghostfire held. He’s bound to see externals coming in.’

Twilight stepped under a punch, pushed her elbow into Cygnus’ chest, hooked her leg, and there was an ‘Oof!’ as the tall blonde landed on her back. Grinning, Twilight held out a hand to help her up.

‘Yeah, but Lena seemed to think this was more significant. Something to do with the target. Maybe we should have someone look into that shop.’

‘I’ll see if Red can dig anything up. But you’re the one with the UID contact. Quite a lot of contact.’

‘Four times,’ Twilight replied.

Cygnus raised her eyebrows. ‘Well, he’s got stamina.’

11
^th
March.

‘There’s not much noise about it,’ Red said as she watched Penny chopping vegetables. ‘Definitely not a local team. No one knows them and there wasn’t any indication that they were coming in to pull the job before they arrived.’

‘No clue why Tonaldo would be up in arms about it?’ Penny asked.

‘Nothing that anyone’s saying. He put word out that he would pay for information about the backer, which means he doesn’t think they were acting under their own instruction.’

‘Huh. Maybe Twilight can get something out of her new boyfriend.’

‘She did it then?’

‘They did it, four times, and she wasn’t disappointed.’ There was a slightly melancholy edge to Penny’s voice which Red did not fail to notice.

‘You’re going to see Last soon, aren’t you?’ Red said, mostly to change the subject.

‘Doctor Ultimate? Yes, day after tomorrow.’

‘He’s okay, but be careful of the Union. They probably haven’t got over you declining their offer.’

‘I’m going to see him, not them.’

‘He was one of the founders. Just, keep your eyes open, okay?’

Penny glanced at her and then nodded. ‘Okay,’ she said.

Unity Base, Antarctica, 13
^th
March.

Stepping through a warp portal was a little like being sucked through a straw. It was not painful, but it was far from comfortable as dimensions were compressed and reality did a double-take at what was happening to it, and apparently decided that the best course of action was to stick its fingers in its ears and hum very loudly.

On the other hand, if you were trying to get from North America to Antarctica, there were few faster ways of doing it. The members of the Union of Ultrahumans did it all the time, Cygnus reminded herself as she tried to figure out whether her limbs were still attached on the other side.

‘It takes a little getting used to.’ The voice came from a slim woman with long, red hair who was standing in the doorway of the room Cygnus had arrived in. She looked somewhere in her late thirties, maybe early forties; she had a calm confidence about her which seemed to come from age and being around Ultras, though Cygnus suspected that she was not one herself, because whoever this woman was, she was not anyone recognisable.

‘I guess people must, otherwise the Union would never get anything done,’ Cygnus replied. ‘I’m–’

‘My husband’s latest infatuation,’ the woman replied without rancour. ‘Cygnus. He’s been talking about you on and off since before Christmas.’

That put a name to the attractive face. ‘Oh, so you must be–’

‘Alice Last.’ Doctor Ultimate’s wife stepped forward, offering a hand. ‘The Union calls me Patience. They say my power is putting up with Hugh.’

Cygnus giggled and shook Alice’s hand. ‘I’m going to assume that he’s infatuated with my powers, not me.’

‘Oh, I’m not feeling jealous, if that’s what you mean. If I was worried about him chasing scantily clad younger women I’d spend my life in a constant state of worry. No, Hugh loves me and physics. Not necessarily in that order.’ Alice gave a smile and turned back to the door. ‘Come on, he’ll have forgotten you’re coming, but he’s been looking forward to it for weeks.’

Following her out into a broad, gleaming corridor, Cygnus asked, ‘He’s really
that
absent-minded?’

‘Hugh’s mind can be doing up to six things at once, unless he’s really fixated on a problem. Then he can be working on it from twenty angles at the same time. That kind of thing tends to mean his local focus goes.’

The Union headquarters facility was big. Penny knew that from documentaries she had watched on the Discovery and Ultra! channels. That was without the adjacent United Nations building which had been constructed after the one in New York had sunk. It was felt that putting the biggest target on the planet beside the largest concentration of high-powered Ultras on the planet was a good idea, even if the UN was little more than a talking shop, ignored by the major powers.

Here in Unity Base there were training facilities, laboratories, workshops, communications facilities, and a huge operations room. If a truly world-shattering event happened, it was hoped that this would be where all the world’s Ultrahumans would be coordinated from.

The next part of Cygnus’ journey had not been on any of the documentaries, however. Alice stopped at an unassuming elevator door and placed her hand on a plate beside it. There was the flicker of a scanning beam and the doors opened.

‘I thought there was only one level to this place,’ Cygnus said.

‘To Unity Base, there is,’ Alice replied, ‘but we’re going to Hugh’s labs. If you’ll pardon the phrase, given my name, we’re going down the rabbit hole.’

A second palm scanner closed the doors and set them moving, down. A long way down, as far as Cygnus could tell. They dropped for about thirty seconds before the car slid smoothly to a stop and the doors opened, and they walked out onto a gantry above a machine room. Cygnus looked to her right and gasped at the huge, three-level toroid system which filled much of that side.

‘Isn’t that…?’

‘The largest fusion reactor Hugh has ever built,’ Alice interjected. ‘That thing would run two major cities and it just about copes with the power demands from this place. The portal generators suck up power like sponges.’

Crossing the gantry took them to another door with a palm scanner, which let them through into a split-level, circular area. Above them was a walkway with doors around it. At the level they were on, half the floor was taken up with what appeared to be computers of some sort, though they did not look like the computers Penny had used at work. The other half was open, a hole through which Cygnus could see the floor below, which was full of benches, open areas with half-finished machines in them, and other signs of an absent-minded genius.

‘He’s down there,’ Alice said. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I have my own work to take care of. I’ll be down later to remind him he needs to eat and let you go home.’

‘Uh… right,’ Cygnus said, lifting into the air and gliding over the rail. ‘Thanks for showing me down.’

‘My pleasure, dear,’ Alice replied as she headed for a staircase to the upper level.

Doctor Hugh Charles Last, known to much of the world as Doctor Ultimate, was a short, nondescript man with brown hair and hazel eyes, dressed in a lab coat which had seen far better days over an MIT T-shirt and jeans. Aside from the fact that he was tinkering with a gadget which Cygnus had no clue about the function of, he showed no signs of being a certified genius until you got the chance to look into those eyes of his. As he looked up blankly at her, his eyes were hidden behind a pair of magnifying goggles, making him appear more like a mad scientist.

His face shifted as the part of his mind which had been expecting her took control. He grinned broadly, swept the goggles off his face, and got off his stool, stepping forward as though he had just been presented with an award of some sort.

‘Cygnus! Excellent. I’ve been expecting… and the tests of course… mind on a thousand things… Are you ready?’

‘You didn’t really explain what you wanted to do, Doctor,’ Cygnus reminded him. Her short conversations with him previously had taught her that he tended to get ahead of himself when talking to people whose minds ran at normal speed.

‘I didn’t? I’m sure I… Oh, perhaps not. Sorry. Let me just collect… Right! The data collected from Kopf’s work.’ He frowned. ‘I’m sorry you had to go through that. The man should never have been… Well, Operation Paperclip you know?’

Penny knew. Penny had watched a documentary about the repatriation of Nazi scientists after the war. It had not mentioned anyone named Kopf, however.