Super Powereds: Year 3 (133 page)

           
      
The towel, now stained red, was folded up and tucked back into the briefcase. Nick stepped over the corpse still wearing its same dark combat armor, and paused. If he was playing someone smarter than Nathaniel, then his best bet was to assume they were as smart as he was. Nick looked out into the night and thought hard about the situation at hand. If he were the one plotting this game, where would he station himself?

           
      
One of the un-bombed buildings was the obvious first clue, though who knew how many would stay un-bombed by the end of the night? It was a shell game; sticking a pea under a cup, shuffling them around, and making the customer guess which one the pea was under. Only, in this case, looking under a cup ran the risk of finding a sudden explosion.

           
      
Nick paused his steps as that analogy tripped something in his mind. A shell game . . . the good ones were built around speedy hands, misdirection, and subtlety. But the best ones . . . those were the ones where the shuffler slipped the pea into his hand without being seen. No matter which cup you looked under, you were wrong. Because the first assumption you’d started with, a pea being under a cup, was flawed.

           
      
He turned his gaze to the Business building, the first one to be bombed. It had hit one of the lower floors, and the flames were slowly climbing upward. Whoever was doing this had planned out every step so far. They’d locked down communications, dropped a dome over the campus, and probably added a few safeguards Nick didn’t even know about. Why not bring along a Super with a knack for keeping fire at bay? After the initial evacuation, the Business building was the last place anyone, human or Super, was going to go.

           
      
Hiding right in plain sight. They’d bombed the building where they wanted to set up shop. It was ingenious, assuming Nick was right. As he lifted his briefcase and began to move across campus, he had a feeling he was. It just fit so well, right along with the rest of this person’s plan. Of course, if they’d been able to think this far ahead, there was another factor Nick had to consider.

           
      
They knew he would figure it out, and would be waiting for him to arrive.

*         
      
*         
      
*

           
      
Orange light dimmed as the last of the mercenary team slipped into unconsciousness. The energy tendrils faded away, and the young man in gray turned to find his next obstacle. To his shock, it was already there, wearing a tattered red coat as it gazed down at him with familiar eyes.

           
      
“Please tell me you borrowed that properly this time.”

           
      
“Of course. We were in a pinch; I had pick of the powers.” Thomas’s voice sounded strange in the night air, being moved by a mouth unfamiliar with all its nuances. “But this is a good one, and easy to use without a whole lot of practice. More on topic though, what the
hell
are you doing here?”

           
      
“What little I can,” the man said. From behind him, a much smaller form emerged. It greeted Thomas’s body with an uncertain wave.

           
      
“Much as I want to charge in here, I can’t. The questions it would raise, the connections people might make . . . we’re so close, and it isn’t my right to sacrifice everything based on my own beliefs. Still, I had to do something. Shift down. We’re going to give them a helping hand.”

           
      
“How much help?” Thomas’s voice warped and stretched mid-sentence as the vocal cords creating the words changed into that of another person. Despite the gray mask covering his face, many of the student population could still have picked out the familiar form of Adam Riley.

           
      
“I’ll be working unseen, tweaking whatever I can, but we need someone more overt. Luckily, I have just the candidate in mind.”

242.

               Zero slammed a fist through the feeble padding offered by his opponent’s armor. Even without his own suit’s augmentations, Zero could have made short work of the small squad. He was thankful for every second of advantage it did provide though. Time was both their greatest asset and enemy at the moment. True, every second lost meant more time for innocents to die, but it also brought the inevitable moment of victory closer.

           
      
The Hero Certification Program had been given an almost impossible task when it came to securing their facilities. How does one account for defending against every type of power they knew about? Even worse, what about all the ones yet to be seen? It had quickly been established that a truly impregnable defense was impossible unless they were willing to keep dozens of specialized Supers on hand at all times. What they could do, however, was implement safeguards on top of safeguards. The possibility of losing communication during an attack was one of the first issues they tackled. The solution was a simple one: a server in the DVA pinged each HCP on multiple communication networks once per hour. If any of them failed to connect, it tried redundancies. If those failed too, an immediate distress call was put into place. It had caused some costly misunderstandings more than once, but the system was never altered. One necessary situation justified ten thousand fuck-ups.

           
      
“Zero, we have an issue.” Emerald Hydra’s voice crackled over his earpiece, sending a shot of dread through his spine. It took a lot to rattle that woman, but from the tone of her voice, something had achieved that lofty goal. “We’ve got new players on the field. I can barely pick up their thoughts, but their minds feel . . . warped. I don’t know how to describe it. The only thing I can tell is that they seem strong.”

           
      
He’d been waiting for this, deep down. One Super with the power to block teleporting was rare, though not unheard of. The DVA employed one in its most secure location, after all. Getting enough to cover a whole campus, on the other hand, was damned near impossible. Same for the dome; there was no way they wouldn’t be abreast of a Super with that kind of scale. No, the simplest answer was the scariest one: they had a power amplifier in their fold. Someone was juicing up the abilities of low-powered Supers to accomplish this attack. And if they could do it on defense, it was folly to assume offense wouldn’t follow.

           
      
“Get me to the nearest one,” Zero ordered. No doubt, this was their big move, a push to wipe out Lander’s opposition. They’d accounted for the strength of the professors, possibly even the response of the students. But there was no way they’d accounted for him. Aside from his presence being a highly guarded secret, it was a realization dictated by simple logic.

           
      
If they’d known Zero was at this school, they’d never have come in the first place.

*         
      
*         
      
*

           
      
Larry and Bubbles marveled at the world that had been hidden under their feet all along. The massive concrete corridors went off in who knew how many directions, and in front of them, lifting platforms kept rising and falling, bringing with them more fellow students in gray masks and uniforms. They’d noticed that a few of the masked people wore black uniforms as well, and they’d even seen one in white. Neither had any idea what it meant; they just had a hunch it meant something.

           
      
Around the room walked a tall woman with a soothing voice. She wore no uniform at all, just a pants suit and one of the gray masks. As she made her way around, she paused every time she found someone who had been injured, touching them for a few seconds and moving on. Burns vanished, tears dried, and broken bones were reset as she walked among them.

           
      
Two other men were also milling about, these each wearing black suits and more masks. Despite their formal attire, they seemed more casual than the woman, greeting students as they were dropped off by the lifts and explaining that everything would be okay, they just needed to stay put. No one put up much of a fight; after the hell they’d escaped above ground, everyone was happy to have found an oasis of peace.

           
      
“Damn it, I still can’t get a signal,” Bubbles said, tapping at the buttons on her phone. “No internet, cell, nothing. How are we supposed to check on Steve? What if he saw the report and came down and got in, and now he’s stuck up there, while we’re sitting around and—”

           
      
“Steve is fine,” Larry assured her. “He’s smart enough to steer clear of something like this, first off. Secondly, even if he wanted to bust in, there’s that giant yellow dome keeping everyone out. I’m sure he’s more worried about us than we should be about him.”

           
      
“All the more reason to call.” Bubbles went back to messing with her phone, and Larry felt around in his pocket for his special sunglasses case.

           
      
His fingers closed on it, and he let out a small sigh of relief. That sigh grew exponentially as he opened the case up and saw that his frames hadn’t been damaged in the fall. At least the lenses he’d never needed to worry about; the things were made of solid lead, after all.

           
      
Larry had abandoned his lead-lined eye makeup, along with the nickname of L-Ray to everyone but Bubbles, mid-way through his sophomore year. He’d found that he no longer wanted quite that much attention as he got older, especially since it was like hanging a sign that said “Powered” around his neck when people asked. Larry refused to be ashamed of what he was, but he also didn’t feel compelled to explain to everyone who asked about his silver-shining eyelids. The glasses had been what he started using instead. It wasn’t as quick as shutting his eyes when an attack came, but after so many years of having spontaneous X-ray vision, it took more than glancing guts to wig him out. In that time, he could pull out and don the specs as needed.

           
      
Tonight, he wasn’t willing to take that chance. These people had gone out of their way to save his life, and had opened up their secret base to offer him sanctuary. Maybe that fell in line with normal Hero duty, maybe it didn’t. All he knew was that he owed them, and respecting the secrecy of whatever faces might lurk under those masks was the least he could do.

243.

               Shane felt the hot pain carve its way through his leg before he even registered the loud cracking sound of the gun firing. He fell against the soft grass, already too aware of the footsteps racing toward him. Stupid. It had been stupid to try and cross this open area. It had been stupid to split up from Chad so his friend could run a group to the base. It had been stupid to do a perimeter sweep alone. He knew better than that, had been trained better than that, but it didn’t save him from making key mistakes in the heat of actual conflict. Now, he was going to pay for those mistakes, unless he acted quickly.

           
      
Flipping onto his back, Shane was momentarily knocked dizzy by the movement and blood loss. He could see the three men coming, dressed in the same combat gear as every other squad he’d managed to avoid so far. There was no avoiding these three. Their weapons were trained on him; it was clear they were lining up their shots. If he hurried, if he was precise and quick, he could cut them all down. There would be no time for wounding, however. Shane had to kill them. He had to cut their lives away with their flesh, and as he tried to focus, that thought kept bounding back to the front of his mind. He’d never killed before, and as he looked at their approaching forms, Shane DeSoto did something he’d never done before. Shane hesitated.

           
      
It wasn’t much, but it was enough. Even as he tried to refocus, Shane knew it was pointless. The bullets would shred him long before he could counterattack. All that was left was to wait for the inevitable.

           
      
This time, he heard the bullets before he felt them; chiefly because they never hit Shane at all. Instead, they ricocheted off a golden wall that had suddenly materialized in front of him. At a single glance, he knew who had created it. Save only for its owner, there was no one in the world more familiar with the golden metal than Shane. He’d been fighting against it for as long as he could remember.

           
      
As the sound of bullets died away, Shane realized he could make out the noises of a battle taking place on the other side of the wall. It wasn’t what he was accustomed to hearing, though. Rather than the soft slaps and ruffles of blows striking flesh or clothes, Shane heard a cacophony of light-whistles, painful screams, and wet sloshes. He tried to pull himself up to look, but his leg refused to bear his weight and the wall blocked his view even as it protected him. Then, with one last sound of something crashing to the ground—and splashing into a puddle by the sounds of it—the fight was over. The golden wall disappeared, revealing Angela in her usual suit of Sunlight Steel armor.