The Indestructibles (Book 4): Like A Comet (20 page)

Chapter
33:

Hidden
treasures

Prevention—or Laura, as Agent Black kept
reminding himself she wanted to be called now, I guess we're on a first name basis—parked
their Land Rover in a seemingly desolate place under the North Dakota sky. They
hadn't seen another human being for hours, not on the road nor on the dirt path
they'd taken to get here. If she hadn't been so chatty, Black would've thought
Laura had been leading him out to the middle of nowhere to kill him.

      She gestured at a rocky
outcropping fifty yards away.

      "There's our destination,"
she said.

      Black gave it a once-over, letting
his cybernetic eye run a complete scan on the area. No abnormalities, nothing
particularly threatening, no hidden soldiers or guns as far as he could tell.
Just a rock in the middle of nowhere.

      He reached down and loosened the
gun on his hip. Laura noticed.

      "So you're a shooter, huh?"
Laura said. "Gunman."

      "Yeah," Agent Black
said, checking his weapon for the tenth time, studying it, looking for flaws in
the machine.

      "You must love guns."

      "The opposite," Black
said. "To tell you the truth, I hate guns. I absolutely hate them."

      "Is that so?" Laura
said. "Seems counterintuitive for how you've made your living."

      "Maybe," Black said,
drawing the gun and shifting the weight of his massive pistol back and forth
between his hands. "But here's the thing. I can take this device, this
ignorant tool, and aim it at another living being and pull the trigger—push one
button, really—and a nugget of metal will fly hundreds of yards away and punch
through that person's eye and end their life. And that's it. That life is over.
There's no taking it back. There's no changing your mind. One button. One life."    

      "But you're a trained killer,"
Laura said. "This is your profession. That's the tool of your chosen
profession. A blacksmith doesn't hate a hammer."

      "But that's the point, Laura,"
Black said. "Any ignorant bastard can pick up a gun and end a life. They're
not the tools of an artisan. Most of them are made so you can hand them to
terrified kid on a battlefield and tell him to aim it in the right direction
and fire. Anybody can do what I do."

      "Not as well as you do it,"
Laura said.

      Black held the gun with his metal
hand, tightened his grip on the specialized padding, watched as the weapon
interfaced with his cybernetics. Ammunition counts, wind fluctuations, distance
to target, all manner of information flowed into his false eye, feeding his
head's up display, telling him better ways to kill. He put the gun back down.

      "No, not as well as I do it,"
Black said. "But does it matter? A bullet's a bullet. Death is death. And
guns are so easy. That's why I hate them."

      "How many men have you
killed, Agent?" Laura asked.

      "Not as many as you'd think,"
he said.

      "Really?" Laura said,
her lips quirking into a half smile.

      "Honestly," Black said. "Because
fear is more useful than murder. More often than not, my job is to instill
fear, so I don't have to shoot anyone. I'm hired as a deterrent to violence,
not as a spark to it."

      "And here I thought you were
just a big scary guy with a gun," Laura thought.

      "Then my reputation has done
its job," Black said. "The less often I have to pull the trigger, the
happier I am."

      Laura nodded. She unbuckled her
seatbelt and slid a jacket on in her seat.

      "What about you?" Black
said. "You have telepathic powers. Or at least that's what your file says.
What's your ethical stance on those?"

      Laura thought about her life when
she was known as Prevention—someone who, if her reputation were even half-true,
had a history of telepathic interrogation and mind wipes—turned her eyes out
over the hood of the truck and paused.

      "I wasn't given my powers,"
she said, leaning back in her seat. "I was born with them. And it took a
long time to learn how to not accidentally invade the minds around me. You'd think
being a mind reader would be tantalizing, but it's as invasive for the telepath
as it is for the person whose mind you read."

      "So you don't go around just
reading peoples' minds like browsing a magazine in line at the supermarket?"

      "Deciphering someone's mind
is like going into a stranger's home," she said. "It's uncomfortable.
It puts you ill at ease. You don't know where anything is. You feel like you
don't belong."

      "Then how'd you get into this
line of work?" Black asked. "If you don't like it."

      "If there isn't much work for
a guy with a metal arm," she said, "how much normal employment do you
think there is for a telepath?"

      "We do what we have to,"
Black said.

      Laura nodded. She slid out of the
vehicle, and Black followed her.

      The sensors in Black's cybernetic
implants picked up on it before his eyes did, a hidden door carved into the
ground where the rocky outcropping began. Laura knelt down beside it and
brushed away the dirt until she found a small hatch. Flipping it open, she
entered a code into a keypad.

      "Give me a hand with this,"
she said, indicating a pair of handles in the dirt. They each grabbed hold of
one and lifted. Inside, a darkened staircase led deeper into the earth.

      "You're kidding me,"
Black said.

      "You know the Department had
this place out here when I came onboard?" she said. "Just locked up
and abandoned. So I used it. Off the books."

      "Off the books," Black
repeated. Suddenly his speculation that she'd driven him out here to kill him
didn't seem so farfetched.

      "Yeah," she said,
heading down into the dark. Black followed her, his cyborg eyes kicking up the
light to make up for the shadows. At the bottom of the stairs, he could hear
Laura feeling around for a light switch.

      "What is it, a bunker?"
he asked. Maybe the plan is to hide out until the invasion hits, he thought.
Wasn't the best plan in the world; he'd seen worse.

      Laura found the lights and
instantly the entire space was illuminated. It was roughly the size of a
football field, and filled with an array of contraptions and vehicles, some of
which were easily identifiable, others which straddled the line between machine
and modern art.

      "I started stockpiling things
the Department found," Laura said. "Not everything, but if I could
divert something that might be useful some day, I moved it here. I thought this
might be a good place to look for some toys."

      Black stared at one vehicle in
particular, a dark cylinder that could have been a submarine. But no, those
engines were designed for flight. This was an airship.

      "I thought you brought me
along as your shooter," Black said.

      Laura smirked.

      "I heard a rumor that the
same cybernetics that connect to that fancy gun of yours also lets you
interface with other technology," she said.

      It was Black's turn to raise an
eyebrow.

      "Maybe," he said.

      "Well, some of these machines
respond to telepathic control," Laura said. "But a bunch of them need
a cybernetic interface to operate. I was thinking you might want to give it a
shot."

      Black looked around at the huge
warehouse full of oddities, some clearly weapons of war, others more elegant, indiscernible
in design.

      "Beats shooting people,"
he said.

Chapter
34:

Welcome
home, flyboy

Billy woke in a bed he wasn't familiar
with, staring into tubes of light turned dim. He moved a little, shifting his
shoulders, feeling pain across his whole body. Nothing broken, he thought. Just
tired. Beat. One big bruise.

      Dude? He thought.

     
Good to have you back
, the
symbiote said.

      How long was I out?

     
About one hundred and fifty
thousand miles, give or take,
Dude said.
You didn't miss much.

      Billy squirmed, the bed creaked
beneath him. He blinked his eyes a few times until he could focus on something:
Titus, in human form, sitting in a chair with his feet up, a comic book in his
hands. The werewolf folded the comic and set it aside. 

      "Welcome back, flyboy,"
Titus said. "Rough trip?"

      "Ugh," Billy moaned. "Where
am I?"

      "Jane brought you to the
Tower," Titus said. "She figured Neal would know what to do more than
anyone at a regular hospital."

      "Why would I need a hospital?"

      "Because you fell out of the
sky and passed out," Titus said.   "Jane caught me?" Billy said.

      "Yep," Titus said. "She's
probably never going to let you forget it, either."

      Billy waved a hand dismissively.

      "We do that. It's our thing."

      "What?" Jane said, entering
the room.

      Billy noticed she was wearing sweatpants
and carrying his dog. She plopped Watson on the bed and the terrier licked his
nose and eyes.

      "Nice pants," he said. "Easy
buddy. Watch the mouth."

      "At least I'm wearing pants,"
Jane said.

      This was the awkward point. Beneath
the blankets, Billy wasn't wearing any clothes.

      "How did this happen?"
he said.

      "You and I shall never, ever
speak about who got you into that hospital bed," Titus said. "We're
never going to acknowledge it. I've seen things…"

      "Stop," Billy said.

      Jane pulled up a chair and sat
down.

      "You up for talking about
what you found out there?" she asked.

      "I was until you guys pointed
out I'm not wearing pants," Billy said.

      "You're not wearing any
pants?" a new voice said.

      It took Billy a moment to realize
who it was.

      "Oh come on," Billy
said, seeing Bedlam framed in the doorway.

      "Good to see you too, flyboy,"
Bedlam said. She leaned against the wall and crossed her arms.

      "Is everyone going to come
into my room?" he asked.

      "Emily for some reason
thought we should get you a pizza, so she's stepped out," Jane said.

      "And Kate's doing something
at the Labyrinth," Titus said. Jane gave him a puzzled look. "She
didn't say."

      "And your friend the alien is
resting," Jane said.

      "Dude is right here,"
Billy said, tapping his head.

      "The other one who crashed.
His name is Seng, by the way," Jane said.

      "And why's Bedlam here?"
Billy said. "Not that it isn't… wonderful to see you. You're always
welcome, but I mean you weren't here when I left and…"

      "I'm want to help,"
Bedlam said. "Heard you guys needed a bruiser."

      "Well," Billy said,
smiling awkwardly at the cyborg, "It's good to see you again."

      "So what you got for us?"
Jane said. "I hate to be pushy—"  

      "—But we're running short on
time," Titus said. "While you were gone we rooted out a few spies for
the Nemesis fleet."

      Billy nodded.

      "Doesn't surprise me,"
he said. "They're close. They're in the solar system. I have no idea how
long—"

      Less than a week,
Dude said.

      "Okay, Dude says they're less
than a week away," Billy said.

      "What about numbers?"
Jane asked. "Did you get a solid count of how many ships we're talking about?"

      "A lot," Billy said.

      "Is that a metric or an
Imperial measurement?" Bedlam asked.

      Billy pointed at her. "It's
more than a Smoot," he said.

     
Three seed ships. One brain
ship. At least a dozen independently controlled cruisers. Unsure how many attack
ships and fighters,
Dude said.

      "Three seed ships. One brain
ship. At least a dozen independently controlled cruisers. Unsure how many
attack ships and fighters," Billy repeated exactly.

      "So Dude counted and you didn't?"
Titus said.

      Billy shrugged.

      Thanks? He thought, silently.

     
I knew you weren't going to do
it,
Dude said.
One of us had to take responsibility.

      "It would be helpful if we knew
what those ships were capable of," Jane said.

     
I can help explain, if you
think you can translate,
Dude said.

      "I can talk us through it,"
Billy said.

      "Good," Jane said.

      "Also, I met Horizon out
there!" Billy said.

      "Horizon as in the other
Luminae guy who used to be on Doc's team?" Titus said.

      "Yeah!" Billy said. "He's
kind of nuts. Long story."

      Jane smiled and touched his
shoulder.

      "It's good to have you back,"
she said. "We thought we lost you."

      "Really?" Billy said.

      "I had complete faith you'd
make it back," Titus said.

      "Thanks," he said.

      "Just kidding—totally thought
the aliens got you," the werewolf said, bursting into laughter. He stood
up and tossed a pile of clothes onto the bed. "We'll let you get back on
your feet."

      Billy nodded in thanks and watched
his friends shuffle out of the room. The dog stayed with him, curled up at his
side. Billy scratched behind his ear.

      "Hey Billy," Jane said,
standing by the door after Titus and Bedlam had left.

      "Yeah?"

      "What are the chances they'll
talk with us?" she asked. "Do you think we can find a peaceful
solution?"

      Billy grimaced and looked at the
dog. He thought about the relentlessness of the larval creatures that had
attacked him near the moon; of the brutality of the attack fighters Suresh had
saved him from.

      "I don't think so," he
said. Nerves crept through his guts. He felt terrible saying it out
loud—especially to Jane—who Billy knew abhorred destruction when a better
solution could be found. "I'm sorry."

      She dipped her chin, acknowledging
what he said.

      "I thought so," she
said. "We'll be in the command center when you're feeling up to it."

      "Okay," Billy said. He
watched her leave and the door closing behind her.

      What do you think, Dude? Has
anyone ever made peace with these things? He thought.

      Billy Case, before we met the
Nemesis, my people were harbingers of peace. In the history of our existence we
parlayed for peace and for hundreds of years tried to make them stop. We never
made war.

      So that's a 'no', Billy thought
soberly.

     
One can always try again,
Dude said.
If one is optimistic.