Nova Academy: A Superhero & Supervillain Novel Page 13

  "He's fine. Just still in shock. I didn't want to mess with his head any more than I have to, he needs to process what happened on his own.”

  Which reminds me of the telepath and I look over to where he's still kneeling on the ground, drooling. I'm not going to ask again if he's going to be all right, it's obvious he's not. "Okay, we're out of here," I say as the distant sounds of sirens start to fill the air.

  We both run back to the office building. I want to detour and see if I can steal from them what they were stealing from Henderson Robotics, but there's no time and I keep going. I really, really, want that tech now that I know it is worth the effort to the guys we just took out. Thirty seconds later I’m coming back down off the roof with our stuff and retrieving my rope and heading in the opposite direction of the tech park to get to the retail strip center on the other side where we parked the car. It’s parked in front of a Smokey's BBQ restaurant, which reminds me I’m pretty hungry right now. Carly ditches her mask and puts on a bright yellow jacket she's carrying in her bag, and walks around to the car as casual as a customer. If anyone saw her that's not a telepath, they won't remember her, which gives her a lot more confidence than I'm feeling of getting away clean. She gets in the car and pulls over to the side of the building and I put our gear in the trunk and get in.

  "Let's follow the plan and circle South around town and cross at the bridge on the other side of town. We’ll just make a big loop back to the hotel.” It takes us an hour to get back to our hotel that's only a mile and a half away as the crow flies.

  Chapter 27

  We get back to the room and we're both still amped about what happened. We didn't talk even once during the ride back, and I wonder if Carly was walking through her mind everything that happened like I was. Dropping our bags in the entry to the room, we turn to each other and grab each other in a hug.

  "You were incredible tonight," I say into her hair I have my face buried in.

  "So were you," she replies into my chest. We’re both pretty sweaty and break away the hug a little sooner than we would like to spare our noses.

  "Come on," I take Carly's hand and we walk into the bathroom for a long, hot, shower. We repeat our afternoon, except slower, less rushed, and with a lot more emotion. We easily outdid our afternoon session, which I didn't think was possible, and fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  In the morning I call for room service and order half the breakfast menu, then sit down at the office desk in the room and start writing out our statements. I want to make sure I meet the time I gave the officer for uploading the files to the dropbox and I'm going to need some time to get out to a Starbucks to use their Wi-Fi so the authorities can't track where I'm sending from and who I am.

  After breakfast, we pack up and head out. Stopping at a Starbucks, I make the upload without actually going inside the coffee shop in case they have cameras, then we drive back to Nova Academy. Our weekend was a success so far as we are concerned, although I’m not very happy about not acquiring one of Henderson’s neural interfaces. We will have to wait and see how it is reported in the news. We have not heard anything on the television this morning or on the local AM news talk radio shows.

  By Monday morning, nothing has been reported on the news channel, so I check the website to see if the files have been downloaded, and they have. However, when I check the URL the files were copied to with a tracking program, I discover it wasn't a government website in Evanston that accessed the files, it was some website in Russia, which makes no sense. Unless whoever accessed the files was routing their connection through multiple servers to hide their location. That makes a lot more sense than the villains being Russians – in Russia. After all, I have just done the same thing and routed my computer through a server in Iceland and a dozen other countries to check to see if the files have been accessed. It also means the files were not accessed by the police. I have my doubts now of ever seeing anything on the news.

  I tell Carly about the Russian URL and we're both stumped as to what to do next.

  There's not much we can do about the story not making the news, so we decide to just keep an eye out and get back into our weekly routine. I’ll keep checking the drop box to see if anything comes back, but otherwise it’s done. After dinner Monday, we go back to my dorm room. Carlos is working tonight at the Commons and we have the room to ourselves.

  "Hey, come 'ere," I say, grabbing Carly by the waist and pulling her to me.

  Putting her arms around my neck, she gives me a nice slow kiss, then pushes me away and says, "Behave. We need to go over what happened."

  Instead of getting wild and passionate, we spend the next three hours going over every detail of our stake out and battle on Saturday and watch different parts of the video taken by the camera we left on the roof.

  I ask Carly, “Are all telepath duels like that?"

  "Yeah. Pretty much,” is her only response.

  "Seriously, you just stand there and look at each other?"

  "Physically, yeah. Well, most of the time. But that's not the duel. The duel is in our heads and is just as violent as the fight you had with…what did you call him again? 'Welcoming Committee?' It's all in our minds, though. I don't know if you can imagine what it's like. He was trying to force his way into my consciousness with brute force. It was all violence and anger and willpower. The only thing I could do was deflect it over and over and over -- he was stronger than me, but didn’t have any finesse. I've never had someone try to smash into my mind as brutally as that. He was trying to kill me,” shuddering, she continues, “I could see what he was trying to do. He was going to reach into my mind and just rip the whole thing out.” Carly got a distant look. Like she was reliving the fight and she began taking deep breaths.

  Adrenaline flushes into me in a fear response and ice fills my chest then descends into my stomach as I realize she may not have won her fight with the telepath as easily as she made it look. What if she had been killed? Or turned into a vegetable? I don't know what I would do. I’d have killed the guy. Just smashed his head like a pumpkin in the same way I put down Welcoming Committee. Only he wasn’t a Class 4 who could take that kind of hit. Wow, I realize I’m getting angry just thinking about it.

  Letting go of the thought, I say to Carly, “But you beat him. How'd you do that if you had to constantly deflect his attacks?"

  "Men don't multi-task worth a damn," Smiling at me with the insinuated jab, Carly goes on, "Deflecting him was hard, but he was doing the same attack over and over in the same way and I would deflect the attack a different way all the time to keep him mentally off balance. He had his own defenses up, so while he was pounding on my mind, I was poking his defenses. Only I was poking all over the place. Not too hard, but in several different parts of his brain simultaneously. I kept doing the same four attacks over and over and he started predicting my next poke, which wouldn't have mattered, except he started predicting my next poke to limit how much concentration he needed to put into countering me."

  I was showing my standard response whenever Carly tells me about telepathy stuff, my mouth was half open, my eyebrows were trying to climb up on top of my head, and I stared at her, in awe of her every word. I’ve never had a problem visualizing anything. No matter how complicated. But, trying to get an understanding of telepathy is beyond me.

  "He quit protecting everything except the next thing he thought I was going to attack so he could put more effort into his attack on me. It’s a pretty simple trick I pulled on him.”

  My mouth starts to move like I'm going to ask a question, but Carly cuts me off before I could formulate the words.

  "I just went through the attacks, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, over and over until I felt he was defending before I started. Then I just changed up the order, and he was wide open. My first attack to get through tripped his mind into REM sleep and I gave him a pretty vicious nightmare. Once I did that his mind was there for the taking, so I went through his memories. That guy is messed up. He hurt a
lot of people from when he was in grade school on.”

  "Wait, what? You went through his memories?"

  "Yes, I did. What do you want to know?" The I-know-something-you-don't-know look Carly's giving me gets a frown back from me. She's been holding out on me!

  "You've been holding out on me!"

  "No, I haven't!" Carly starts getting excited right back at me, "You said in the hotel room we'd go over everything that happened later! Well, it's later." My frown of disapproval was met with a matter-of-fact, tough-crap, deal-with-it, stare and she put her hands on her hips for effect.

  Bowing to her will, I reply, “All right! You're right." I hate arguing with Carly — because it turns out she is usually right, which is really hard for a super genius to admit.

  Looking at me like she's trying to judge if I'm going to start arguing again, Carly tells me what I want to know, "They were trying to steal the neural interface, just like you thought. The telepath, Tim Johnson was his name. He didn't know much about it other than it was a neural interface and it was going to be used to improve a piece of equipment his boss is working on. His boss was the guy with all the bling, which is what we thought; only he didn't know his real name. He was just told to call him, 'Mr. Newton'. He wasn't able to read his mind. The one time he tried, he woke up a few hours later with a major headache. I accessed his memory of when he tried and his memories were all smudged and nonsensical. That’s what happens when someone does a down and dirty, sloppy job of wiping your memories.”

  We finish putting everything we can together on the guys who did the break-in, then spend twice as long going over our teamwork and what we are each capable of doing and how to work together better. Carly isn't as vulnerable as she looked after the first minute of the fight, which is how long it took for her to break the guy's defense and only a few seconds before I threw the baseball at him. Once she broke him, she was able to pay attention around her and use her telekinesis to stop the ball. She was actually protecting the guy to keep him from getting hurt any more than the hurt she was already putting on him.

  It's important that I know when she's vulnerable in those situations, and also when she can start defending herself again or needs to call for my help, which is tricky as she won't always be able to call me for help if what happened to the other telepath had happened to her. Still, Carly can take care of herself, which is a nice improvement over Bubble-E.

  Chapter 28

  It's been a week and nothing has been reported about the break-in at Henderson Robotics. Then on Sunday a local news channel makes a report about the robotics company being broken into and some prototype robotics equipment that was stolen the night before, which, I'm thinking, is a week later than it actually happened. And they didn't get away with anything the way the news report says. That's until I see a reporter’s camera pan over to the roll-up doors at the tech park and there is a forklift stuck into the door used to force it open. What the hell? There was no forklift. What happened to our break-in?

  Were they able to cover-up the first break-in? Was this a second break-in? They may not have had a strongman (thanks to me) for tearing a hole in the door the second time, so they had to use a forklift? I haven’t seen Welcoming Committee around the Atlas Quad this week. He’s usually hard to miss.

  I call Carly and she comes over to my dorm room and we go onto the news channel's website and watch the news report again.

  Carly asks me, "What do you think?"

  "I think these guys are seriously connected, is what I think. To be able to suppress the first break-in. And they’ve got resources and manpower,” I reply, mulling over what it all means. "I'm also wondering why Henderson Robotics didn't move the stuff out of there before the place was hit again. That’s if it was hit again.” I didn’t voice that it could have been an inside job, or a repackaging of the earlier job.

  "You're assuming they knew about the first time the place was hit — It hasn't been on the news, maybe they didn't know."

  I start to ask why they wouldn't know, but it's pretty obvious, "Right, telepaths. They could have changed everyone’s memories of what happened. Right?”

  “It’s not that simple, but yes. We don't know if anyone else knows about it, or maybe they know it, but don't want it reported. Corporations have their own telepaths. Even small ones contract out to services to do regular employee scans. The cops sure as hell have their own telepaths – and their own super teams. You can't tell me they didn't go through Officer Michaels head with a spaghetti strainer."

  I don't have anything to say to that. I was not aware telepaths are being used as much as Carly is describing. I browse through the news channel's articles online and don't say anything. I'm not finding anything closely related to what happened last week. It's frustrating the bejeezus out of me that nothing has been reported – I want credit for taking that guy out, even if they just say unknown supers took them down. Just put on the news that a Class 4 was found unconscious at the scene with his face smashed. I smile at the thought of that, then have an idea, "Why don't we just send the video footage and our statements to everyone: police, FBI, local and national news organizations, — Hell, let's send it to Super Slammers!" I'm suddenly stoked about the whole thing. Super Slammers is a bloopers TV show for super humans being hit, smashed, and bruised in ways that would kill a normal human. It’s hilarious.

  "Really? Super Slammers?" Carly looks at me, smiling at the ridiculousness of sending our video to the show. "We can't."

  “Why not?”

  “Because no one will be able to tell you didn't kill the guy, and Super Slammers won't put on videos where someone looks like they've been killed."

  My newfound bubble of happiness is popped, "Aww, man."

  “We can send it to everyone else, though." Carly is trying to cheer me up with the consolation prize. "You sure you want to?"

  "Damn right," I say, starting to feel a little indignant nobody reported the biggest win of my super career in the first place. "I'll set up a dummy email and send it to everyone I can think of. Then, I'm done with this damn thing."

  Nothing ever was reported on the news or online. Whatever.

  Chapter 29

  Neither of us brings up doing another weekend in Chicago for the next few weeks. I'm pretty sure it isn't because we're getting into our first round of major exams, which is taking up a lot of our time. It's more like we both got a pretty good shock that our first time out we get into a pair of death matches that could have easily ended in both of us being killed. For me, it's not that I'm not scared to go out again; it's that I'm preparing to go out again. If Welcoming Committee had been a little faster, he might have gotten hold of me. I still have my field generator, which could have broken his grip if he had, but I'm not sure it would be strong enough to break it if he really latched on. That means I have more work to do to be better protected and make sure the heavy hitters don't get to latch on. It would be the end of me.

  It's Friday morning, my free day, and Carly is in class. This is my favorite day because it's all about what I want to do. Which also means I'm at the Student Lab working on my projects. The Suit is coming along, all of the armor plates are done and I've finally put together the flexible armored joints for my knees and elbows. At some point I'll have to upgrade my boots to get some armor into them, but that really won't be until I can get someone to manufacture, shape , and sew the armor cloth into the pieces I need. I have the formula for the cloth and I can make a batch of the stuff any time, but I don't have an extruder to turn it into the heavy thread I need and the Student Lab doesn't have machinery for weaving anything, no less nearly indestructible materials. But I do find a small ballistic tech company in Richmond that makes Kevlar cloth and bullet proof vests that can make it for me. And they have laser cutters that'll be able to cut out the patterns. I'm still negotiating the terms and pricing so they can't steal my formula — not legally, anyway.

  Today I'm casting the helmet and face shield, which is a little premature, since
I won't have the electronics suite ready for it for a few more weeks. I get the molds out of my locker as they are too big to be humping around campus and I'm not worrying about them being stolen since they're just shapes with no tech, and head to the common foundry to see if I can get a station to melt down the alloy bricks I brought. I created the bricks to have the extra alloy ready to go when I make the rest of the parts I need and by leaving out a final step in the process I am able to keep its melting point low enough to use in the school foundries. If I had finished the process like I did with my shield and war hammer, I never would have been able to melt them down again. At least not without getting access to a Cartwright Carbon Industrial Blast Furnace.

  I walk into the common lounge area and, as usual, there are twenty students in there talking science. Only today all but one of them is wearing a hat. It's cold outside, but not that cold. Some are wearing snow beanies, but most are wearing a light cap, with a few Super Nova Academy ball caps thrown in. The oddest one is a guy wearing a headband that it looks like he took from a 1980s Morning Workout show. He's just missing the leg warmers.

  About the time I ask myself, Why are they all wearing hats? Every one of them turns to look at me walking in. It's pretty creepy. I try to keep a neutral face and pass through like I don't notice them and they seem satisfied to just stare at me walking across the room to the hall leading to the foundries. I can’t imagine what living in Oppenheimer Quad would be like, but it can’t be good.

  There's no waiting at the foundries. Two of the three stations are vacant and the third is being used by a guy I have in my metallurgy class. He doesn't have a hat on, thankfully. "Hey, Jimmy."

  "Hey, Theo. What'cha gonna work on?"

  “Molding some pieces. How 'bout you?"

  "Oh, making parts for a mag-launcher. We're going to enter the pumpkin-chunkin competition over in Waynesboro over Thanksgiving break."