Just Cause Universe 3: Day of the Destroyer (32 page)

“Lionheart’s trapped in there,” said Faith.

“Look at it, for God’s sake!” Shane said. “It’s an inferno in there. Unless you’re fireproof, you’re not going to get through a wall of flames to go look for him.”

Faith whipped out her radio. “Lionheart, it’s Pony Girl. We’re here and we’re coming in to get you.”

She strained to hear Rick’s faint “
Hurry,
” over the radio.

“He’s still alive. I’ve got to get inside that building. I can find him faster than anybody else.” An idea occurred to her. “Gretchen, how good can you control your power?”

Gretchen shrugged. “Okay, I guess.”

“Can you make your vacuum in a tube shape?”

“I think so. Why?”

“I’m going to run through it.”

Despite protests from Shane, Gretchen, and the fire commander, Faith insisted that it was the only way for her to get into the building to find her trapped teammate. Nobody knew for sure what would happen to her in the second or so she’d be exposed to Gretchen’s vacuum, but Faith knew they had to try.

Once more, Gretchen struggled with her power until she’d forced a tube of nothingness into the fire, letting Faith see all the way through the collapsing wall to the building interior. With lots of open space inside, there wasn’t as much fire and she thought she’d be all right. She patted Gretchen. “Hold it just like that for a few seconds.”

Before she dared think it over, she dashed through the empty space.

Air blew from her lungs and out her ass in the second it took to pass through the vacuum. She had the oddest sensation of her saliva boiling in her mouth without burning. Passing back into the scalding air made her gasp, but with no air in her lungs, it felt like she’d had the wind knocked out of her. She staggered and fell to her knees, trying to draw breath with a confused diaphragm. The tangible heat washed over her like a physical assault. As air started to find its way back into her lungs, she looked around.

The walls and some of the ceiling were burning. Vats of chemical dyes and bolts of fabric made bright, hot flames in fuming pinks, blues, and greens. Paint peeled and blackened off the machinery as grease and dust made billows of black smoke. Faith coughed, remembered her radio, and held it to her lips. “I’m in,” she said. “Lionheart, where are you?”

She raced through the building, dodging around burning support beams and the chemical hot spots, which made the fire dance like a living creature from the air currents. After what felt like hours but probably only took a few seconds, she found him. An interior building, perhaps an elevated supervisor’s office, had collapsed and trapped both his legs under a heavy wooden beam.

Rick coughed. “My hero,” he said as Faith knelt down beside him. The flames were getting very close to him. He had a blackened two-by-four in one hand that he kept using to push away burning pieces.

“I’m going to get you out of here,” she said. Working as fast as she ever had, she found enough debris to lever the heavy beam up with a piece of pipe that she wielded like a pry bar. Rick roared in pain as the pile atop him shifted, but the beam moved when Faith lent her weight to the pipe. Rick dug his fingertip claws into the floor and pulled, his muscles standing out in sharp relief under his golden fur. Then he popped free. The pile shifted and threatened to engulf Faith, but Rick pulled her to safety as well, and the two heroes lay entwined in each others’ arms as the factory burned around them.

With a rumble, part of the factory roof caved in. Faith ran, leading a limping and gasping Rick across the floor. “Elevator shaft,” he said.

They found a shaft with water running down its walls from the fire hoses outside. Rick was in obvious pain and couldn’t put his full weight on one leg. With Faith’s help, he climbed up onto the top of the elevator. For the moment, they would be safe in its steel confines. Faith grabbed her radio. “We’re in a safe place right now. Elevator shaft. We need to rest before we get out. We’re both kind of beat up.”

Unmindful of the pools of sooty water, they sank to the roof of the elevator beneath them.

#

Never before had Harlan had access to tools or a facility like the one in Just Cause headquarters. He itched to get a peek inside that whatever engineering wonderland had first built the highly-advanced Steel Soldier.

He didn’t want to make a sentient suit, but he wouldn’t mind stealing all the secrets he could. Over the past two hours he’d learned so much about the internal systems of the Soldier, his brain felt like a coil of overstuffed sausages. He was already desperate to start applying some of that knowledge, but he knew he’d never work with secondhand junk parts again. A project such as the Destroyer Mark II armor deserved nothing less than state-of-the-art components. That meant money, and Harlan already had some ideas on how he could obtain some and make more.

Before he could do that, he had to ensure the Soldier wouldn’t trouble him in the future. As Javelin dozed while pretending to watch him, Harlan installed a switch that he could trigger either through a radio signal or a sound broadcast. Said switch would dump fuel gases into the Soldier’s battery compartment and trigger its internal capacitors. Harlan smiled as he tightened the connections on the switch. The Soldier would only continue to function as long as Harlan permitted it to.

He replaced a frayed cable, found the spot where it connected and when he plugged it in, the Soldier’s eyes flickered and unintelligible garble issued from its speaker.

Javelin sat up. “What was that?”

“Progress,” said Harlan.

Agent Simmons came back into the workshop. His face was red and veins stood out in his neck as if he’d been shouting. He sat on the workbench beside Harlan and put a hand on his shoulder. “Son,” he began, with the awkwardness of a man destined never to have any children of his own. “I want you to know that I’m very sorry for the loss of your mother, and that the government is going to take care of you.”

Javelin snorted from across the room.

Harlan made his lip quiver a little. “I miss my momma.” He tried to sound small and pitiable.

“My partner is trying to get a judge roused right now,” said Simmons. “That judge will sign an order remanding you to our custody so we can take you away from these so-called heroes.”

“I don’t like them.” Harlan, fine-tuned an adjustment on the Soldier’s electronic brain. “They’re mean.”

Javelin laughed. “Mean? We’re a hell of a lot better than you deserve. As many people died in your rampage tonight, I guarantee you’ll be tried as an adult. You know what they do to sweet young boys in prison?”

“That’s enough,” said Simmons.

“You better learn to love cock,” said Javelin, “because it’s gonna be a real sausage fest.”

“That’s enough!” Simmons’ face darkened again. “Nobody’s going to prison.”

“He’s lying to you,” said Javelin. “He’s a government stooge. Lying is in his job description.”

“You got a hell of a big mouth,” Simmons said. “Somebody ought to stick his boot in it.”

“You think you got the stones,
hombre
?”

“Rrrrr…” said the Soldier. Javelin and Simmons both stopped in their argument. The Soldier’s eye lights flickered. With the hum of numerous tiny servomotors, one of the focusing lenses opened, then shut, and then returned to partway open.

Harlan made another adjustment. The Soldier made a noise like a cassette tape in rewind, and the eye lights went out. Harlan growled under his breath and reached for the tin snips. He cut a small piece of sheet metal and with a soldering gun, bridged two sections that had been physically connected before the Soldier’s encounter with Destroyer’s bolt gun.

The eye lights lit once more. “Reboot commencing,” said the Soldier in its normal tone of voice. “Diagnostics… Power system at three percent and falling… Writing short-term memory to archive… Motive systems at twenty percent operation… Sensors at fifty-five percent… Fuel reserves at zero percent… Suspending damage control operations pending power input. Standby. Standby. Standb—”

The Soldier’s lights went out.

“Is it dead?” Simmons bent down to look closely at the Soldier’s smooth skull-shaped head.

“No,” said Harlan in satisfaction. “It just needs electricity. Plug it in once the grid’s back online. It’s got its own damage control. It should be able to handle most of its own repairs.” He didn’t mention his own special addition to the Soldier’s innards. The way he’d tied it into the Soldier’s very core, he doubted the android would even detect it.

“Well I’ll be flipped,” said Simmons. “You’re some kind of a savant, kid.”

“What happens next?” Harlan yawned. The lengthy, stressful day had taken its toll on him.

“We wait to hear from a judge,” said Simmons. “And then I take you out of here.”

Harlan rested his head on the table and closed his eyes. “Suits me just fine.”

#

One of the Just Cause house security guards stood watch outside the workshop where Irlene’s brother was trying to fix the Steel Soldier. He nodded to Tommy and Irlene and stood aside to let them pass.

The Soldier’s disassembled carcass lay on a workbench with only a solitary blinking light indicating any function at all. Javier dozed in a chair in the corner while Harlan had his head down on his folded arms. Agent Simmons stared at them, stone-faced, drinking coffee that might have been hot hours ago. “What do you want?” he asked.

“I need to talk to my brother,” said Irlene. Her voice had taken in a hard edge that worried Tommy. He hoped she wasn’t going to become a grim-faced antihero type. Just Cause always seemed to have one or two members like that, who were driven more by anger and a desire for revenge than by a need to help people.

At the moment, Tommy realized with surprise, that anger-driven antihero was him.

“Don’t take him anywhere,” Simmons said. “Soon as we get the signed paper over here, we will be taking custody of your prisoner.”

“He’s ours until then,” Tommy said. “So why don’t you go polish your badge or something?”

“I’m not going anywhere. You got stuff to say to him, you can say it in front of me.”

Irlene shrank the agent down to the size of a plastic army man. She muffled his indignant yells with an overturned styrofoam coffee cup. “We don’t have time for The Man’s bullshit,” she said. “Harlan, wake up.”

Harlan stirred and looked up blearily. “What?”

“Harlan, you know about Momma, right? They told you?”

“She’s dead,” he said. “Yeah, I know.”

“Listen. Reggie’s missing. Do you have any idea where she is?”

“Yeah I do. When the power went out, I went to talk to Momma but she was gone. I bet she was out there looting like everyone else. People were yelling and breaking glass and setting fires and I didn’t think it was safe in that firetrap of an apartment. So I went to wake up Reggie and took her someplace safe.”

“You took her? Out into the streets? Jesus Christ, Harlan, you could have been killed.”

Harlan shrugged. “You’d rather we stayed and got killed by whoever killed Momma?”

“Harlan,” said Tommy. “Enough of this. Where is your sister?”

“Someplace safe. I already told you.”

“You didn’t tell us anything,” Irlene said. “Stop jerking our chains and tell us.”

“What’s in it for me?”

Irlene’s mouth dropped open in shock.

Tommy shook his head in disgust. “You’re trying to use your little sister’s safety as a bargaining chip for your own skin? That’s pretty low, kid.”

“You all keep saying how much trouble I’m in,” Harlan said. “I’m just trying to get some good will on my side, however I can do it.”

Irlene grabbed Harlan by his collar and dragged him off his stool. He yelped in surprise as she pulled him in close to her. “Where’s Reggie? Where’s my little sister?”

Tommy didn’t stop her. Once he might have, but the events of the day had brought out the cynic in him. A noise made him turn.

Agent Stull stood framed in the doorway, an envelope clutched in his hand. “Let the boy go,” he said. “I’ve got a court order right here remanding him into the custody of the United States Government.”

“Let him go, Irlene,” said Tommy. “If he wants his sister to be lost or taken, that’s his call. The Feds sure aren’t going to help.”

Harlan’s confident demeanor showed some cracks. “Of course they will. Won’t you?”

“Certainly,” said Stull.

“See?” Harlan sounded vindicated.

“He’s lying,” Tommy said. “How many times have adults lied to you? You ought to know not to trust anyone over thirty.”

“You can shut up now or I’ll charge you with interfering with a federal investigation,” Stull said.

“Speaking of federal charges, you better free the other suit before he suffocates under there,” said Tommy.

Irlene grew Simmons back to his original size. The inverted coffee cup perched ludicrously on his head before he shook it free.

“Assaulting a federal officer,” he yelled. “I’ll have your ass for this!”

“Honey, you couldn’t handle my ass,” said Irlene, and shook it at him.