Rise of the Heroes (21 page)

“Ah, time for my other power. Hold your hands out.”

Emily extended her arms as far as possible. Lorna held her hand out, fingers rigid like a karate pose. Then her hands started to glow white-hot.

“I've never actually seen this before!” cried Lorna excitedly. “I was invisible every other time!”

She struck down, easily severing Emily's handcuffs; the metal bubbled from the heat. Emily shook them off, rubbing life back into her wrists. Lorna blew on her hands, the heat suddenly vanishing.

“There you go!”

“Nice trick,” agreed Emily. “Now let's get your mom and get out of here.”

She took a step forward, but Lorna grabbed her arm and pulled her back. “It's not going to be that easy.”

“Why not?”

“We only have a few hours left with these powers. We don't want Mom to know about them. And we can't leave Tempest to carry out the rest of his plan. He's crazy enough to destroy the world!”

“So you're saying we have to stop all of this on our own?”

“We won't be on our own. If I know my brother, he'll probably already be here.”

Toby stumbled in the snow, falling flat on his face. He was weak from both grief and lack of sleep. The
missiles had struck the Hercules and they had crashed into the mountainside. The last he saw of Pete was when the burning fuselage raced down the slope toward them. He wondered what Pete was trying to tell him before the missile hit. Toby forced himself to cling on to the reason they had come to this inhospitable wilderness—to find Lorna and to rescue his mother and Emily.

He picked himself up, his clothes so white with frost he almost blended into the landscape. Through the blizzard he could just see the rest of the towering peaks of the Antarctic's Neptune Range, in particular one that had a pair of flashing beacons indicating the entrance to a hangar. That
had
to be Doc Tempest's lair.

The only problem was, it was going to be a
long
climb.

“You know, Toby,” said a voice, “you always have to do things the hard way.”

Toby blinked the snow from his eyes and looked up. Pete was hovering just above him.

“Pete? You're alive!”

“Of course I am! Unlike you, I keep remembering that I can
fly
! Why are you walking, you idiot? After Tempest's hurricane, these winds aren't so bad.”

Toby started to shake with relief. The fatigue he had been feeling dropped from his shoulders and he suddenly felt like he could go for hours without stopping. He jumped into the air and hovered next to his best friend.

“You have no idea how glad I am to see you!” he said.

“Toby, I need to tell you something.”

Toby shook his head. “No, tell me after all this is over. We're so close to rescuing them now. That's what's important.”

Pete took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay. You're right. Let's go and be heroes!”

Footsteps echoed down the ice corridor. Sarah stopped and tensed as the footsteps continued, getting louder as they approached. A quick check confirmed that there were no hiding places in the corridor, and she had come too far to go back and hide. Instead she raised the rifle she had taken, and aimed it like she had seen in so many movies. The barrel trembled in her weakened state.

A guard turned the corner, his nose buried in a comic as he walked. He changed direction automatically, only looking up at the last moment to see the business end of a resin-rifle pointing right at him.

“This is your unlucky day,” Sarah said through gritted teeth, and fired. There was no recoil in the weapon, just a hiss of gas as three black, sticky globules shot out, striking the man across the mouth and chest and crumpling his comic book. He staggered backward as the glue-balls expanded, fastening him against the wall.

Sarah examined her handiwork with satisfaction. “Oops,” she said with a smile as she passed him. She was
unsure where she found the energy to keep walking. She had to get her insulin, and fast. It was only a matter of time before she became hypoglycemic and passed out.

She forced herself to continue down the stark corridor, and praised herself on handling the unreal situation so well. She had finally accepted that all that had happened wasn't a hallucination brought on by her illness. First a tornado had struck her house, created by a villain who had kidnapped her; then she had been brought to a secret ice base where a bunch of would-be saviors
flew
through the air. Then the freaky-headed kidnapper had warned that her children should not try to rescue her. And despite the odds, she had managed to escape.

It was notably warmer. Sarah slowed her pace as a set of sliding double doors became visible ahead. She approached cautiously, rifle poised, ears straining against the silence. The doors slid open as she got close and a warm red glow emanated from within. Curious, Sarah edged closer and peered around the corner.

She had a view from a balcony at the top of the spacious room, overlooking a transparent cylinder that was as wide as a street and six stories high. Metallic rings were set along the tube at regular intervals and a red pulse of energy occasionally shot up the column.

Sneaking a look below, Sarah could see half a dozen technicians casually walking between control panels that were linked to the column by thick cables. She
guessed it was an electrical generator. But it was huge, and she couldn't help but wonder what kind of device required such power.

Without warning a sound wave shook her. It had come from the energy column as it flared brighter. The pulses within the transparent surface gained frequency.

Sarah had the sneaking suspicion that the generator was powering up.

Lorna's sense of direction was far superior to her brother's, but even so she was lost. She and Emily had encountered several henchmen walking around the complex and had dealt with them using their combined powers. It was so easy, Lorna almost felt sorry for them.

“I thought you knew the way out?” said Emily. She was sure they had walked down this particular stretch of corridor before.

“Me too.”

“And if we can't even find the way out, how are we going to find your mother again?”

Lorna felt a little bit annoyed. She had just rescued her friend, but all Emily had done was complain that they were lost. “We haven't heard any sirens so far, so I think it's safe to assume they don't know she's escaped.”

“Does this corridor seem sloped to you? It feels like we've been climbing upward.”

Lorna didn't reply, but inwardly she agreed, they could well be near the top of the mountain by now.

Lorna suddenly stopped and Emily bumped into her. “What's—?”

“Sssh,” said Lorna, making more noise than Emily had been and putting her finger over her lips. “Listen!”

Emily couldn't hear anything, and for a moment she thought Lorna must have downloaded super-hearing or something. But then she caught it: the faintest sounds of activity, punctuated by the distinct crackle of a monotonous voice over a public address system. It sounded just like a distant train station.

“The hangar!” said Lorna excitedly as she took off in the direction of the noise. “I knew we weren't lost!”

But it wasn't the hangar. It was another cavernous room, but this one was circular, almost like—

“We're at the peak of the mountain!” Emily exclaimed in an excited whisper.

The mountain's peak was gone and had been replaced with a wide glass dome, supported by steel spars and massive pneumatic rams. It looked as though the top of the mountain could be opened on a hinge. The room was bustling with lab-coated scientists who examined multiple computer banks. The whole setup reminded Lorna of sequences she had seen on television of NASA Mission Command, except in the center of this room was an intricate device.

It resembled a giant gun, like the ones that had been mounted on the front of Doc Tempest's flying barges. Except this one was longer, with a small satellite dish attached to the tip of the barrel. The machine had angular fins, like a shark, and concentric, transparent rings dispersed along the barrel that moved closer together or farther apart as the technicians ran a series of diagnostic checks.

Emily and Lorna entered the room and hid behind a bank of wooden packing crates against the wall. Most were empty, but some had spare parts inside, nestled in shredded newspaper. Emily opened her mouth to say something, but there was no sign of Lorna.

“Lorn?” she whispered. A slight pressure to her shoulder startled Emily, but she quickly realized Lorna had made herself invisible so she could stand up for a better view.

A small knot of technicians were gathered around a computer screen, their voices carrying across the room. “Extend the dampening plane by forty degrees!” As if in answer, the concentric rings along the barrel moved farther apart with a high-pitched whine of motors, similar to a dentist's drill.

“Rotate the gimbal a hundred and ten along the x-axis, and increase electron flow by twenty percent,” said another technician who seemed to be in charge. “We've finally got our coordinates: Washington DC.”

A cheer went up. The entire gun rotated on a complex arrangement of gears and hydraulics, angling the dish at the end of the weapon in a subtly different direction.

“Storm Engine primed!” shouted another technician. “Let's see how those suits in Washington like a rain of electrical fire!” Chuckles filled the room. “Just hope the bossman gives the nod soon. I'm starving! What time's the cafeteria close?”

Invisible fingers tugged Emily's arm, and she allowed herself to be pulled from the room by Lorna. It was a freaky experience watching her own arm lead her from the room.

They moved farther down the corridor, which offered cover behind yet more stacked supply crates. The air shimmered as Lorna became visible.

“That's Doc Tempest's weather machine! That's how he's been able to create those storms!”

Emily nodded. “And it sounds like Washington is going to be burned off the map. We have to find a way to stop it!”

“We also have to find our way out of here. The moment we try and sabotage that weapon, they'll know we're here. I have to get my mom out first.”

Emily sighed. “It still doesn't change the fact that we don't know where the hangar is.”

“Hey!” The voice made them turn—a guard was staring at them, rifle leveled, his finger on the trigger. Lorna and
Emily froze like rabbits caught in headlights, raising their hands in surrender. “Don't try anything funny or else!”

“No!” whimpered Emily. They had been so close to success; to get caught just as they were about to rescue Lorna's mother didn't seem fair. The man stared hard at her.

“No!” the man repeated.

“I'm not doing anything!” Emily said in alarm. Her body ached from where she had been pummeled with the glue, and she had no desire to go through that again.

“I'm not doing anything!” echoed the guard.

Lorna experimentally lowered her hands. The man didn't say anything, but the gun remained leveled. Lorna gingerly approached him, pulled off his red visor and waved her hand in front of his face; he was rooted to the spot, staring fixedly at Emily.

“He's in a trance.” She smiled gleefully. “You have him under some kind of control!”

“Me?” Emily said doubtfully. “Okay … lower your gun.”

The man complied without a squeak of protest. Emily remembered something. “I was wondering what the fourth power I downloaded was. This is it—mind control!”

“Just get rid of him.”

Emily finally lowered her hands. “Go do your job and forget you saw us … in fact, you can't see us at all.”

The guard looked around, seeming confused. He glanced at his rifle for a moment, wondering why it was in his hands. Then, with a shrug, he shouldered the weapon and continued past the girls, completely oblivious to their presence. Once he had turned a corner, both the girls quietly giggled.

“That is so cool!” said Lorna.

“Yeah. Mind control would be so useful at school. But it still doesn't change the fact that we're lost.”

“Actually we're not. We know we're at the top of the mountain, right? When they flew you in here, I had a view from the front of the barge. The hangar door is built into the side of the mountain, just below the peak. We're really close to getting out of here!”

Toby and Pete flew into the base without more antiaircraft missiles trying to pluck them from the sky. They felt warmer as they passed through the main hangar tunnel that led inside the mountain. The tunnel itself was a runway that ran entirely through one peak and into an adjoining one. The end of the runway opened into the hangar.

The boys flew close to the ceiling when they entered the cavern. They hovered in a high corner to allow their eyes to become accustomed to the light after flying through the dark tunnel, and also because
they were next to an air vent that was pumping out hot air.

Dozens of soldiers milled through the hangar, oblivious to the hovering heroes. Some worked on another empty Hercules transport plane that was being prepared to return to the supply island. A pair of mechanics gripped a refueling hose that fed the Hercules with avgas from a massive tank at the rear of the hangar.

A platform circled the second level of the hangar, doors branching off it. Boots clanged on the steel steps that led from the hangar floor to the mezzanine level as technicians busily walked to and fro with clipboards, equipment, and on one occasion a burger, the smell of which drifted into Pete's nostrils and made his stomach growl so loudly he feared he would be heard.

Beyond the Hercules aircraft lay the barge that had brought the bullion from Fort Knox, although there was no sign of the gold. The barge rested on a giant steel trellis, and a similar, but empty, bay stood alongside it.

To one side of them were freestanding racks that housed a dozen flying glider-discs, which were stacked sideways to save space. Pete took some satisfaction in noticing there were many empty slots. Testament to the heroes' combined might.