GEN13 - Version 2.0 (24 page)

Fairchild drew a sharp intake of breath as the razor wire whipped around her. It tore swaths through her uniform and drew blood from the skin that lay underneath— the same skin that even bullets couldn’t penetrate. The molecularized wire couldn’t cut all that deeply; Fairchild’s flesh was still too tough for that. Still, the fact that it could cut her at all was enough to alert all of Gen
¹³
to the danger it posed.

The lethal tendrils rose toward the ceiling as Ivana reared back for a second lunge. But before she could bring them down, Freefall yelled, “I got it!” With a gesture, she increased the weight of the wire exponentially. The strands of razor wire plummeted to the floor, throwing Ivana off-balance. As long as Freefall maintained the effect, the razor wire was no longer a deadly weapon. Instead, it served as a mass of unbreakable chains that bound Ivana to the floor.

Fairchild leaped over the inert wire to reach Ivana in a single stride. Effortlessly, she bent the muzzle of Ivana’s gun with one hand, rendering it useless. With her other hand, she grabbed Ivana by the front of her blouse as the others rushed in behind her.

“You don’t get it, do you?” Ivana said with a sneer. “You’re too late! You’ve already lost!”

Lynch ran to the central control panel for the launch center. “She’s already initiated the launch!” he said, his face grim.

A small, digital counter on the panel ticked off the time to launch:
00:02:04. 00:02:03. 00:02:02.

The smoke in the next chamber was starting to thicken. The missile was vibrating faster as its engines throbbed with power.

Fairchild pulled Ivana in close. “How do we stop it?!” she yelled in Ivana’s face, louder than she intended. Ivana laughed. “You don’t! I’ve won!

“Don’t you see? I’ll never give you the code to disarm it. The missile will hit its target as planned. And once that happens, the only ones who’ll be able to prevent the end of the world will be Gen
¹⁴
!”

Ivana grinned nastily and added, “Of course, if you grovel sufficiently, I might consider letting you all join my team, too ...”

00:01:57.

Fairchild looked desperately toward Lynch. His fingers were flying across the keyboard on the panel, but to no avail. “It’s no good!” he said, his tone hinting at the urgency that he didn’t allow to cross his poker face. “Our only hope is to either find the code or get in there and stop it manually!”

In fact, Burnout and Rainmaker were already letting loose the full force of their powers as they hammered away at the window that separated them from the missile. But the portal had been built to withstand the heat and fury of the launch of an intercontinental missile. It stood up equally well to whatever flame and lightning they could muster.    -

00:01:51.

“Oh, by all means, try to find the code,” Ivana said, with a mocking tone. “There are only upward of sixty million possible alphanumeric combinations. How difficult could it be to find the correct one in, oh, a minute and a half?”

Grunge stroked his chin thoughtfully as he gazed at Burnout and Rainmaker, and then down at the floor. He bent down and, gingerly touched one of the strands of razor wire.    -

00:01:45.

Instantly, Grunge’s form began to change. His skin took on a silvery, metallic hue. The outer edges of his body narrowed and tapered to razor-sharp edges. Only then did Grunge realize the one downside to his scheme, as his body sliced itself right out of his clothes. His garments fell in tatters around his now-bare feet.

“Whoops,” he said.

Freefall raised an eyebrow. “Uh, pookie ... ?”

Grunge gave a resigned shrug in reply. Without a moment’s hesitation, he raced toward the window and hurled himself through the air with a cry of
“COWABUNGA!”

Grunge extended his arms in front of him, as though diving through water. He met the window with the full momentum of his leap. The window had been reinforced against the wide-angle shocks associated with the rocket thrust that came with a missile launch. It had never been intended to stand up to a more narrowly targeted attack from a giant, man-sized blade. When you also factored in the fact that the molecularized razor wire was enough to cut even Fairchild’s skin, there was no way that a window was going to turn it back.

00:01:39.

There was a loud shriek as the window parted at the impact of Grunge’s fingertips. The hole widened as the rest of his body passed through. Grunge plunged through the window almost as if it wasn’t there, and fell below the view of the window. With the barrier breached, the sound of the missile’s engines became deafening throughout the control room.

Ivana’s cool sense of triumph turned to panic. “You’re insane!” she cried over the din. “Those engines aren’t designed for this! They’re supposed to ignite only after they’re safely away from the sub that launches them!” She tried to pull away from Fairchild’s powerful grip, but it was no use.

“What are you saying?” Fairchild demanded.

“I modified the system to fool the missile into thinking it was safe to ignite the engines! The heat of the rockets is incredible!”

“And... ?”

“ ‘And ...’ the only thing protecting us was the window you just broke! We’ll all be killed!”

The color drained from Fairchild’s face as she stared at the missile. Then, she turned back to her captive, pulling her close with a look of desperate fury.

“Now,
will you give us the code?!” Fairchild yelled.

“Never!”

A disgusted growl came from deep in Fairchild’s throat. She released her right hand long enough to punch Ivana in the jaw. Despite the bionics that ran through Ivana’s body, the blow laid her out cold on the floor.

00:01:32.

Freefall was already squeezing her petite body through the hole that Grunge had made. However, with Grunge’s body narrowed from the change, the opening was too small for the others to fit through.

Fairchild reached her hands through the breach. She used both hands to pull one side of the tempered glass toward her as she braced her feet against the other side and pushed. Fairchild gritted her teeth as she applied all of her prodigious strength to the task. The window resisted her at first, but leverage was on her side. With a loud, creaking noise, the opening slowly widened, until it was wide enough for Burnout and Rainmaker to soar through. Fairchild started to follow them, and was halfway through when she stopped at the sound of Lynch’s voice.

“Kat!” he shouted. “Let them do it! I need you here!”

Fairchild clambered back in through the window and ' dashed to her mentor’s side. “What can I do?” she called over the noise.

“We need that code, or a way to bypass it! Between your computer skills and my understanding of security systems, maybe we can figure something out!”

Fairchild nodded and took over the keyboard. Neither of them said what both of them knew. The odds of coming up with a solution in time were so slim that it would take a miracle. But it wasn’t going to stop them from trying.

00:01:18. " " '

Inside the silo, the smoke was thick enough to make it difficult to see or even breathe, let alone do enough damage to stop the missile. The hatch at the top of the underground silo was already open. Under the circumstances, the clear, blue sky that showed through the open hatch seemed less hopeful than ominous.

Freefall floated above the worst of the smoke as she poured her strength into the strongest gravity field that she’d ever created. The missile’s natural weight already tipped the scale at approximately 130,000 pounds. Freefall strained to multiply that, hoping beyond hope that it would be more than the missile’s rockets could bear.

Already, the only one who could bear the heat at the bottom of the silo was Burnout. He’d realized that, with the casing of the missile designed to withstand the heat of reentry, his own flame would have little chance of melting through. Instead, he added his superheated plasma to the existing heat of the jets, in the hopes that the combined temperature would be enough to fuse them shut, or at least do enough damage to prevent an effective launch.

Meanwhile, more than twenty feet above Burnout, Grunge’s razor-sharp feet had tom footholds in the side of the second stage of the missile. They supported him as he used his arms to rip through the graphite epoxy casing of the missile and into whatever lay inside. Grunge had no idea what was there, or how much effect he was having, but he prayed that if he wrecked enough of it, then maybe he’d break something important.

Another twenty feet up. Rainmaker hit the missile with all the elemental fury she could muster. Even as she battered the gargantuan weapon, she simultaneously pored through her memory to recall whatever she could about nuclear missiles from the no-nukes literature she’d read. Unfortunately, though, all of the pamphlets and articles had devoted much more attention to the threats nuclear weapons posed than to ways to disarm them in a pinch. What she did remember, though, was that the detonators had to go off in a very specific way to trigger a nuclear explosion. And so, she directed her attack several feet below the nose of the missile. Perhaps she could damage the missile’s guidance systems, or set off one of the detonators out of sequence. Rainmaker knew full well that if she did manage to accomplish her goal, the resulting blast could cost her life.

But even if it did, it would save millions of others.

00:00:57.

Back in the control room, Fairchild had gently pried the faceplate of the control pane! loose so that Lynch could examine its inner workings. She took care not to lift the faceplate loo high, to avoid severing any of the wires that led to its instruments and controls.

Lynch crouched under the faceplate to study the maze of silicon chips and printed circuits that lay within the heart of the console. He probed through it with his fingers, tracing wires from the launch clock to the relevant chip, but knowing where the wires led still wasn’t enough to tell him how to stop the process. Even at a glance, it was obvious that the arrangement inside the console was far too complex to decipher in the time they had left.

Lynch stood up and shook his head. “It’s not going to work,” he told Fairchild over the mounting roar of the engines. “We need that code!”

Fairchild gently lowered the faceplate back into place.

She glanced over at Ivana’s inert form. “But how?” she asked.

“We’ll just have to figure it out ourselves!”

Fairchild looked at the launch clock. It read
00:00:51.
“There’s no time!”

“We have to try!” he replied. “Think like Ivana! What would she use as a code?”

Fairchild considered that for a second. “Well, lots of times, people pick passwords that have some kind of personal meaning, so they won’t forget them. What’s most important to Ivana?”

“Power,” said Lynch without hesitation. “Control!” Typing faster than she ever had back in her computer classes at Princeton, Fairchild entered the words as possible passwords:

Power

Control

The clock kept going.

Fairchild kept entering related words at a feverish pace, as fast as they came to mind. Lynch barked words for her to try as well. Fairchild’s fingers became a blur as they searched madly for the key to the puzzle.

Dominion

Rule

Queen

Authority

Command

Ambition . . .

None of it was making any difference. Time after time, the clock still kept going.

00:00:39.
   '

All the while, the team in the silo continued to hit the missile with all the force they could muster. Grunge continued to gouge his way through the casing that surrounded the second stage of the missile. As he tore deeper, he found himself pulling out hunks of an oily, waxy goop from the innards of the deadly projectile. One small comer of his mind wondered what the stuff might be, but there was no time to waste on idle curiosity. As Grunge burrowed deeper still, he scooped out handfuls of the substance and let it fall to the floor below.

Then, Grunge stopped, his attention caught by a burst of flame that erupted from below. For a moment, he thought it was the missile launching, but realized otherwise once he saw that the missile continued to stay in place.
Maybe it’s Bobby
, he thought,
working his fire thing down there.

Or maybe ...

Experimentally, Grunge pulled out another hunk of the mysterious goop. He held it to his nose and sniffed it, then recoiled from its pungent smell. Then, just to be sure, Grunge released his grip and let it drop. He watched the stuff fall until it was obscured by the smoke below him. A heartbeat later, there was another puff of flame.

Grunge nodded in understanding. Now he knew what the oily goop was. Solid rocket fuel.

A sly smile crossed Grunge’s face.

00:00:27.

“It’s no go! Nothing’s working!” Fairchild cried.

“Keep trying!” Lynch snapped back. “We’ve got to be on the right track! Ivana’s the biggest monomaniac I’ve ever met! Whatever the code is, she’d never pick anything that wasn’t directly related to hers ...”

Lynch stopped in mid-sentence. He and Fairchild stared at each other as the same thought struck both of them at the same time.

No, it couldn’t be. It was too simple.

And yet...

00:00:21.
.

Fairchild typed slowly and thoughtfully. It was nothing like the lightning pace she’d used up to that point.

She entered a single word:

Ivana

The clock froze.

00:00:17.

Fairchild held her breath as she continued to watch the display. One second. Two.

It was true. The clock was no longer counting down. Still, shutting down a nuclear missile isn’t like flipping off a light switch. The engines didn’t go silent as soon as Fairchild entered the code. But their roar was starting to die down now.