Chapter 27:
Hackers
Jane was shocked, or possibly appalled, when Kate suggested they bring the files back to Kate's apartment to give them another look.
"I'm sick of the tower, Jane," Kate said, packing up as if their departure was a foregone conclusion. "I can't think here right now."
"I can. In fact, I prefer to think here."
"I need to get out. You can come with me or I can go alone. Your call, Sunbeam."
"Sunbeam?"
"Let's go."
A half hour later they were sitting on the floor of Kate's little flat, reviewing notes, and tossing theories at each other. For a brief moment, Jane thought they might even be getting along.
"What if it's some evil version of Doc, building his own super-villain team?" Kate said.
"An evil Doc? Like, his evil twin?"
"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," she said.
"We hang out with alien-boy, werewolf boy, and gravity girl, and you're going to tell me 'evil twin' is a stupid idea?"
"Good point," said Kate. "But I meant that this might be someone like him, a relic from a bygone era before the super-powered folks went off the radar, someone who's trying to bring back the good old days. Or the bad old days, if we're talking about a villain."
"That . . . makes a lot of sense," said Jane. "Do you think Doc had an idea something like that would happen? Maybe that's why he decided to bring us all together now?"
Kate shook her head.
"I think Doc always thought something bad could happen. But really, I think he picked now to bring us together because we're the right age. Old enough to go out there — "
"But young enough to make sure we don't go bad," Jane said. "That's why he took Emily so young you know."
"Because she's a menace to society if left to her own devices?"
"Because he was afraid someone else might try to turn her into a weapon."
"Thanks for the nightmare material, Jane."
"You're welcome."
They paused, shuffled some printouts around, and Kate pulled a laptop they had liberated from the tower's office in front of her.
"Let's review some of the files on here that weren't personnel documents," Kate said. "Maybe there's something we missed."
They spent a while opening up different files of exotic types, finding indecipherable pages of code. Eventually they discovered an .exe or exec file.
"Wonder what happens when we click that?" Jane said.
"In the history of computers, nothing good ever comes from clicking on executable files," Kate said.
"Maybe we should."
"Oh yes, let's click an executable file discovered on a super-villain's hard drive. It's probably a virus that will destroy the Internet for the entire planet."
"Or, it's something that could lead us back to the people we're searching for."
"How?"
"What's the worst that could happen? The tower has a hundred of these laptops. If it's a virus it ruins the laptop. It's probably just a version of the same virus that destroyed all the computers at the lab site," Jane said. "Might be interesting to see what it does to this super mojo futuristic laptop, right?"
Kate squinted at her.
"I know this is a terrible idea, but you're piquing my curiosity, and I haven't seen you play the devil's advocate before," Kate said. "This might be an opportunity we shouldn't miss."
"Want to do it?"
"Of course."
"What are we waiting for?" Jane asked.
"Wait just a — hang on."
Kate tapped out a message on her phone quickly then set it aside.
"What did you do?" Jane said.
"Sent a text message to Titus saying we were about to do something really stupid and if he doesn't hear from me in ten minutes to send a lot of help."
Jane nodded.
"Good plan. On three?"
"One, two, three."
Kate double-clicked the executable file.
They both sat back and watched. Kate held up her phone, aimed it at the computer screen, and Jane saw that she was recording video.
"Just in case — oh crap," Kate said.
A symbol appeared on screen, a cross between a skull and an octopus, in a deep, royal purple. It started to blink.
"Knew this was a bad idea," Kate said.
She stood up and began to unbutton her shirt, revealing the armor underneath. She empted the contents of a knapsack onto the floor; out spilled gloves, boots, and a utility belt. Kate started pulling each item on with rapid precision. "Did you bring your suit?"
"I'm wearing it under — where we going?" Jane said.
"We're not going anywhere," Kate said. "They're coming to us." She pulled her mask up over her face and flexed her fingers.
Jane took her sweatshirt off, uncovering her own costume, minus the cape.
"You hear that?" Jane asked.
"What?" Kate said.
And then they both looked up when they heard the sound of several metallic thumps overhead.
"They're on the roof," Jane said.
They ran from Kate's apartment, leaving the laptop behind. Kate pointed down one end of the corridor, then to herself. Jane nodded and headed in the other direction. Both ends of the hallway ended in sets of stairs leading up and down.
Turns out it didn't much matter who went where, as heavily armored men with the most ridiculous sci-fi rifles Jane had ever seen stepped through the doors on each end. She let her hands burst into flames.
"Let's try something new," she said, pointing two fingers at the first enemy's rifle. Flames burst from her fingertips and into the barrel of the gun. The metal warped and bent.
At the other end of the corridor, Kate charged her target, jumping up onto the wall and then pushing off to land a hearty punch into the first armored man's head. The titanium caps on her gloves clanged against the man's metal helmet.
Then the man's neck began to spark. Kate threw a spinning kick at his head and it popped off. Exposed wires flashed, hissed, popped and smoked.
"Robots! Jane! They're robots! Don't hold back!"
Jane launched herself, airborne, down the hallway, driving a blazing fist into the chest of the first robot. The smell of burnt electronics filled the corridor. Not slowing down, she threw an uppercut at a robot that followed her, knocking its head clear and bouncing it off the ceiling. Behind her, Kate beat a second robot into malfunction with the butt of its own rifle.
They heard metallic stomping coming from both stairwells.
"Too many people in this building, Jane," Kate yelled.
"I know!"
Kate pointed at her.
"Make me a hole in the wall!"
"A — wait, what?"
Kate ran back to her apartment and disappeared inside. Another robot arrived at the foot of the staircase. Jane yanked a mechanical arm off and used it to decapitate the robot. Kate reappeared, carrying the laptop.
"A hole! Make me a hole in the wall!"
"How big!"
Kate shook the laptop at her. Behind her, more robots arrived and took aim with their rifles. "This big!" she said.
With both of her arms, Jane picked up what remained of the last robot. "Duck!" she yelled.
Kate dove to the floor.
Jane tossed the robot's body into its two cohorts at the end of the hall, toppling them like bowling pins. She turned, walked into the staircase, casually put her fist through the chest of another robot, and then went to kick a laptop-sized hole in the exterior wall of the building.
She underestimated her own strength, and most of the wall exploded out the side of the building. The remaining hole was more than slightly bigger than a laptop.
"I, ah, made extra room!" she said.
Behind her, Kate pounded away at one of the robots with a barrage of kicks and punches, her tungsten knuckles sparking off their metal hides. Another walked around with its head on backwards clearly confused by the entire situation.
As if part of a choreographed routine, Kate kicked the laptop with a free foot, sending it skittering down the hall to land right at Jane's feet. She picked it up and tossed it out the hole in the building.
Instantly, a half dozen more robots leapt from above in pursuit of the laptop. Their rifles fired green lasers, not bullets. They hissed in the night air.
Kate sprinted down the hallway, a pile of broken robot bodies in her wake.
"Come on!" she said.
She ran past Jane and then, without stopping, jumped out the opening into the air.
"Wait!" Jane yelled and lifted off as well, attempting to catch her falling teammate. Then Kate reappeared outside the window, arm around one robot's neck in a death grip, both of them held aloft by what appeared to be rocket boosters in the robot's feet.
Jane blasted out the window, picking the nearest robot and grabbing its head with both hands; she turned up the heat until the head began to melt. She threw the body at another passing robot, sending it spinning into a nearby building. Despite scanning the area outside Kate's apartment building, she couldn't get an accurate count of how many enemies they faced. Jane caught Kate trying to force the robot she was riding to blast his comrades. Her efforts were only successful in one instance.
"This is really inefficient!" Jane heard Kate yelling. She flew four stories from street level and climbed further, but Jane was beginning to think this wasn't part of Kate's overall plan.
Jane aimed for efficiency as well, zipping around, knocking heads off a few airborne robots, before getting clipped several times by their laser rifles. The pain wasn't enough to knock her out of the air, but with each zap her energy started to flag.
"There's too many of them!" Jane said.
Then one near her crumpled like tinfoil. Jane looked up and saw Doc and Emily hovering a floor above them; Emily reached out a hand and clenched her fingers into a fist. Another robot crumbled into a ball.
"Gravity sucks, huh Optimus?" Emily said, crushing a third just as easily.
Jane smashed the head off another robot and saw Doc, with the casual wave of his hand, force yet another to deviate from its flight path and explode against a building. Then Jane spotted one, thrusters blasting, retreat into the night sky. It had abandoned its rifle in favor of cradling the laptop in its arms.
"Let that one go — oops!" Kate yelled, losing her grip on her own robot. It turned to blast her with its rifle when she fell, but Jane threw a ball of flame like a baseball at its head and Emily scooped up the plummeting Kate with a simple hand gesture. Kate spun loosely all the way to the ground, and Jane saw Emily smirking the entire time, weaving her fingers as if she were spinning Kate like a top.
Jane watched Kate try to stand up, then, like someone getting off a particularly bad roller coaster ride, bob and weave until she fell to one knee.
All around them, smoking husks of broken robots lay inert. Aside from the one that got away, it appeared as though they had destroyed them all, at least twenty. Doc drifted down to hover next to Jane.
"Glad to see you two getting along so well," he said, smirking.
Chapter 28:
Shared spaces
Once the fear and shock began to subside, Valerie decided it would be worthwhile to try to reason with the entity.
She wasn't sure if the other being could understand English, but it was the only tool Valerie had, and so she simply started speaking to it. At first asking for it to pay attention to her, asking if it could hear her, asking it if it could understand. When she got no response — aside from a swell of annoyance here and there, like a horse batting a fly with its tail — Valerie commenced a one-sided conversation, hoping the other creature would join in.
"Are you technically a hurricane?" she asked.
No answer.
"If we traveled inland, would you become something else? A blizzard, a tornado? Or do we have to stay along the coast?"
Again, no response.
They edged slowly out to sea, away from the Atlantic coastline, but Valerie felt them change directions sharply many times. There was no way to know if the storm would reverse course again and hit the mainland if that was its whim.
"We had lots of hurricanes in Miami. Obviously. The gulf and all," she said. "But I grew up in Chicago. No hurricanes there, but we confronted all kinds of weather. It's the Windy City. Did you know that?"
No reply. The only sound: simply the whistle of a strong breeze.
"It's not really the windiest city in America though. I remember reading that somewhere. It's just a nickname. Our winters are pretty unbelievable though. Really frigid."
Valerie thought back to the snow-swept streets where she grew up, the piles of graying snow standing as high as she was tall, the way she didn't miss the winter until she moved to a place where snowflakes never arrived.
"Can you make snow? Or are you only tropical? Is rain your thing?" Valerie said. "My last name is Snow. Pretty funny, named Snow and living in Miami. Maybe we could drop snow on Florida. They'd hate it, but it might be kind of cool. Give the kids something to remember when they're grown."
She felt the storm changing directions, but she couldn't quite tell to where. A breathy intake of air from one side, pulling her here and there.
"Look, I don't know if you're understanding any of this," said Valerie. "But if you are . . . I just want to go home. Haven't you ever just wanted to go home? Haven't you ever been a little frightened? Or lonely? Maybe this wouldn't be so bad if we could talk, but we can't. I don't remember the last time I said anything to anyone. I think I'm going crazy."
The silence felt like a wet blanket on her shoulders, a thick weight tightening around her chest.
"You ignoring me?" she said, finally, feeling an ugly combination of anger and self-pity rising up in her belly. "Are you? You can understand me, can't you! You know what I'm saying! I'm going crazy in here! Let me go!"
The winds around her began to pick up, swirling and dragging the cloud cover into a vortex around her. The air temperature plummeted dramatically.
"I hate you! Hate being here! I want to go home!"
Purple and blue lightning lanced across the sky. The clouds grew darker, violet and black — massive, muscular thunderheads.
"Why won't you speak?" Valerie screamed.
And then the storm began to move in earnest.