Liberty Read online

  And it seemed, at first, to be working. The energy stream left long gashes in the glowing mass, and the creature as a whole began thrashing as though it were finally having some reaction to the damage it was taking. Cygnus pulled up at about 600 feet from the blob, rising up to join Miss Liberty.

  ‘It’s working,’ Miss Liberty said, ‘but it’s still regenerating.’

  ‘And it’s starting to turn around. This is going to be next to useless underwater. We need something faster.’

  ‘The missiles. Explosions seemed to hurt it more.’

  ‘Right…’ Hurriedly, Cygnus began shifting her energy attack. ‘Everyone back off. I don’t know how this is going to spread.’ Beneath her, Eldritch-03 was almost entirely healed of the scarring she had caused and it was smashing its way through the docks as it tried to get back out to sea. Cygnus rose up to about twelve hundred feet, turned, and fired off a spread of three shimmering projectiles. Each of them hit the skin of the blob and erupted into a burst of ionised air. In their wake, massive areas of the blob were left blackened and the creature slowed briefly before picking up its pace.

  ‘I am fairly sure that that is physically impossible,’ Vindicator said, ‘but I don’t care. Hit it again.’

  Cygnus was ahead of him. Another three bomblets dropped across the mass of jelly, blasting deep into the mass and causing it to shudder, lurching backward before it again tried crawling toward the sea. It was noticeably slower now; Cygnus was clearly doing damage. Another three barrages went down and the glow from the creature became dimmer and dimmer until it faded out entirely and they were left looking at a slick of oily, blue-green sludge washing gently back and forth with the waves. Eldritch-03 was dead.

  Seattle Watchtower, Lake Washington, WA.

  ‘The police have sealed off the marina and the Coast Guard are deploying some floating barriers which will, hopefully, contain the… pollution.’ Patterson grimaced. ‘It doesn’t appear to be radioactive, but it may be corrosive and toxic.’ From somewhere, he had produced a bottle of champagne to celebrate. Everyone was partaking except for Miss Liberty.

  ‘I suspect,’ Doctor Ultimate said, ‘that with the “parent” entity dead, the remains will become inactive quite quickly. They likely already are. Cygnus confirmed that the cosmic energy field has dissipated, which appeared to be the element binding the whole together. I should caution you to keep a watch on that region of Puget Sound for a while, but I believe the danger is over.’ His intent gaze settled on Cygnus. ‘Some impressive improvisation, young lady. Even if, as Jon says, what you did should not be physically possible, your bombardment technique worked well.’

  ‘Wrapping quantities of gamma photons in cosmic energy so they explode?’ Cygnus asked sweetly. ‘How would that be considered impossible? We were dealing with a colony of individually unpowered cells connected together using cosmic energy.’

  ‘Yes, well, implausible physics aside, it appears that we have successfully defeated this threat. Well done, everyone.’

  ‘I’m not really sure I did anything very useful,’ Miss Liberty said.

  ‘You helped us get the information we needed to defeat it, my dear.’

  ‘And you kept it in the marina today,’ Cygnus added. ‘If it had got into the town, the clean-up would be worse.’

  ‘Oh, well, I suppose there’s that,’ Miss Liberty conceded. ‘I suppose one person can’t do everything.’

  ‘Nope. I wouldn’t have had a clue how to stop that thing without Hugh, and Hugh couldn’t have figured out how it worked without both of us to get the data he needed. Team effort. Of course, I’ll get all the press…’ Cygnus grinned, but Miss Liberty looked rather pleased with that notion.

  ‘You can keep it. Half the pictures of me just show my butt in this costume.’

  ‘I remember when they just used to take pictures of my butt. Good times…’

  ‘I remember those pictures too,’ Adamantium said. Brightstar gave him a look. ‘Uh, I concentrate on pictures of Ally’s butt now, of course.’

  ‘A little better,’ Brightstar said. ‘Watch out, Miss Liberty. The next thing will be Cygnus persuading you to be in one of those calendars.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Astraea said, ‘but right now we’re concentrating on Sally.’

  Enhydra jerked as though someone had just shot her. ‘Me? I don’t think I could–’

  ‘Of course you can. It’s not like you wear clothes most of the time anyway.’

  ‘Just give in, Sally,’ Cygnus suggested. ‘Once she’s got an idea in her head, she’s never failed to get her target in front of a camera.’

  Enhydra’s furry brows furrowed. ‘I know you can’t tell through the fur, but I’m blushing right now. Just saying.’

  Colorado Springs, CO.

  ‘Why would someone blow up a burger joint?’ Astraea asked.

  The news of an explosion in Colorado Springs had come through at about eleven thirty, just as everyone was packing up to leave. Cygnus, Astraea, and Miss Liberty had flown down direct. Doctor Ultimate, Adamantium, and Brightstar were taking the longer route via Antarctica, but Ultimate had decided that he would take an interest in these random explosions and Adamantium would be useful in the rescue effort.

  ‘Maybe they really hate fast food?’ Miss Liberty suggested. If that was the case, they really hated fast food. The entire building had been demolished by the blast. Glass from the windows was scattered in a wide arc and the walls had been blown out entirely. Police officers were already evacuating all the nearby structures, though the destroyed building was surrounded by parking and the nearest other building was two hundred feet away.

  There were people starting to pick over the wreckage as well, but they paused as the three heroines swooped in to hover over the flat-pack restaurant. Cygnus had already reconfigured her powers, and her radar was picking over the debris. ‘Okay… I am not hopeful, but… Let’s start with that section of rubble there.’ She pointed, and Astraea and Miss Liberty headed for the section of roofing she was indicating.

  ‘We’re not going to get anyone out of this, are we?’ Miss Liberty asked, her tone sad and a little sullen.

  ‘Probably not,’ Astraea replied, ‘but you have to have hope.’

  ~~~

  ‘The FBI are suggesting suicide bombers,’ Brightstar said.

  ‘Obviously a possibility,’ Doctor Ultimate replied, ‘but only if the group sending them has access to some quite advanced technology. From my analysis of the explosion, I would estimate that this would require some eleven hundred kilograms of TNT. Even using a modern thermobaric composite, almost six hundred kilos would be needed. Achieving this with a package a human could viably carry into the building unobserved would require some beyond-normal technology. Super-science.’

  ‘Or it’s an Ultra,’ Cygnus suggested.

  ‘Not a known one, but yes.’

  ‘Detonatrix escaped from the Fortress…’

  ‘Her explosions, while impressive, do not compare with whatever did this.’ Ultimate shook his head. ‘If this is an Ultra, it’s someone new. And I’m not sure telling the FBI that would help matters.’

  ‘They would be required to hand it over to the UID,’ Brightstar said, ‘and they are trying really hard not to do that.’

  ‘Thanks for coming down to do this,’ Cygnus said. ‘You could’ve just headed back to the icy wastes.’

  ‘Sun or icy wastes,’ Brightstar mused. ‘Let me think about that for a while.’

  ‘While you’re thinking, I’ll get back to searching for bodies.’

  ‘Good luck.’ Brightstar sounded quite sincere about that, but they both knew it was going to take more than just good luck for them to pull anyone out of the rubble alive.

  New Millennium City, MD, 14th March.

  ‘What we’ve got is something of a mystery,’ Bianca said from the big screen. She was at home, down in the Minx Cave, and teleconferencing with the best encryption UltraNet could supply. ‘A mystery, or something a little more sini
ster.’

  ‘Oh great,’ Cygnus said. ‘Give us the bad news.’

  ‘Well, UID records state that Adrienne Philips, aka Heartbreaker, died in the Fortress attack. What UID records don’t say is when she was transferred to the Fortress in the first place. There is a transfer request taking her out of the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women on the tenth of December twenty fourteen, but there’s no destination listed.’

  ‘That sounds… illegal.’

  ‘It certainly shouldn’t happen. Your friend Kopf was taken to the Fortress on the thirteenth and is also listed as dead, by the way.’

  ‘That’s uncomfortably close timing. Or I may be being paranoid.’

  ‘Not so sure,’ Andrea said. ‘The Court finally got me the information I asked for on Project Jekyll.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Bianca interrupted. ‘Project Jekyll?’

  ‘It’s a name that’s come up a couple of times,’ Cygnus said. ‘Some kind of secret project. Slapstick said they were, or would be, interested in me, and the guy who tried to assassinate the Amazon Queen was supposedly a product of Project Jekyll.’

  ‘And that makes sense,’ Andrea went on, ‘because Project Jekyll was a UID project attempting to create super-soldiers. The project was initiated in March of nineteen sixty-five, just over a year after the UID was founded. It ran for five years and was officially shut down having shown no results.’

  ‘But?’ Bianca asked.

  ‘Yes… But there have been various rumours that it was continued under a slightly less official remit. It supposedly became a black project looking into ways of making existing Ultras useful to the intelligence community and the military.’

  ‘But just rumours,’ June said.

  ‘Rumours with some evidence to back some of them up. The assistant director of the original Project Jekyll, a man named Gerald Theakstone, went on to run a high-security UID facility at Andrews. He took a lot of old Project Jekyll staff with him. One or two developments in anti-Ultra equipment have appeared within the UID despite there being no evidence of any development work in that area. The biggest evidence we have didn’t come from the Court, but they have confirmed parts of the story. Bodach, the assassin in Amazonia, was used extensively by the CIA, but they didn’t train him, or turn him into a useful asset. That seems to have been down to Jekyll. As far as I can see, Heartbreaker would be just the kind of person they’d be interested in, and they could definitely swing vanishing her and then having her listed as dead.’

  ‘You know that means they probably hoovered up Kopf too,’ Cygnus said.

  ‘I doubt he even made it to the gates of the Fortress,’ Andrea agreed. ‘Maybe they even have him back trying to create super-soldiers.’

  Cygnus grimaced. ‘Poor bastards. Considering what he did to me just to test my powers, I hate to think what he’d do to give someone powers.’

  Iron Cap Black Site, WA, 15th March.

  ‘The process requires both gene therapy and extensive psychological conditioning,’ Kopf stated as he prepared for the final stage of the process. ‘This is merely the activation stage.’

  Beyond the reinforced glass window in front of him, a volunteer selected from several hundred candidates identified within the Army and Marines was being strapped into a seat which looked alarmingly like an electric chair.

  ‘Psychological conditioning?’ Theakstone asked.

  ‘It is a well-established fact that the expression of Ultrahuman genetics has as much to do with psychology as biology, Director. Except under certain unusual circumstances, one must have the correct genes to manifest any abilities at all, but those genes are all related to the construction of the nervous system and brain. The form of the abilities comes from the mind of the Ultra. You wish a certain type of Ultrahuman expression. To achieve this, we must condition our subjects to expect certain results upon activation.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Unfortunately, we are still experimenting with the precise form of conditioning required. Some of my earlier attempts proved… intractable.’

  ‘You mean psychotic.’

  ‘They had issues involving anger management.’

  ‘If they survived.’

  Kopf ignored the slight tone of rebuke. It was barely a hint of disapproval; Theakstone was not really that worried about losses so long as Kopf could produce results. ‘The survival rate is now over sixty percent.’ Behind the glass, the technicians had finished strapping the soldier down and were leaving the room. ‘Let us see whether this will be a success.’

  His aging fingers tapped quickly over keys on a computer console and several screens lit up showing diagnostic displays and the output of an array of biological monitors. ‘Heart rate is a little elevated,’ Kopf noted. ‘Not unsurprising.’ One of the screens – having scrolled through a wall of messages too fast for anyone to read – paused with a flashing cursor and a question: Initiate? Kopf tapped the Y key and hit return.

  Beyond the glass, the room brightened, the light coming from no obvious source. The subject’s heart rate ticked up toward a hundred beats per minute. Then a wide beam of white light shot down from the ceiling, enveloping the soldier. You could just about make out that he was straining against his bonds, and his heart rate shot up to a hundred and fifty and kept climbing. Even through the soundproofing, you could hear the man screaming.

  Then the light shut off and the soldier collapsed back against the chair, breathing hard. Kopf watched the heart-rate monitor, letting out a soft sigh as it began to drop, slowly at first and then more quickly. ‘Physically, this one is a success,’ he said.

  Theakstone could sort of tell that. The man had been naked when he was strapped in, and it had been clear that he had a reasonable amount of muscle. Now that muscle was more obvious, thicker and more defined. Theakstone would not have been excessively surprised to discover that the man could bounce bullets with his stomach muscles. The man’s fists clenched, and he tried to lift his arms. His biceps bulged almost alarmingly, and the Kevlar straps appeared to be stretching under the pressure. The man looked up at the figures on the other side of the glass. There was a manic gleam in his blue eyes. His teeth were gritted in a taut, slightly insane grin.

  ‘Ah,’ Kopf said. ‘Unfortunately, it would appear that the latest modification to the conditioning has not been effective.’ He stabbed at a button beside the keyboard, and the soldier jerked, his eyes widening for a second before he slumped forward. The thick needle which had been jabbed into his neck was just visible.

  ‘Is he dead?’ Theakstone asked.

  ‘Sedated. It is frequently more useful to study one’s failures than one’s successes. Science is a process, Director.’

  Theakstone stared at the unconscious man beyond the glass for a few seconds. ‘What about that other thing we discussed?’

  ‘The weapon? I have constructed it. A relatively trivial matter given that it utilises the same projection technology as the cosmic energy beam in there. Obviously, I have been unable to test it.’

  ‘We’ll field test it when we need to. I have no doubt there will come a time when it’s needed. Meanwhile…’ He finally turned away from the ex-soldier in the chair. ‘I’ll see that you get more volunteers.’

  Part Three: Faith

  Andrews Field, MD, 20th March 2017.

  The Secret Service really seemed to have relaxed in the past few months. Well, it seemed like they were less worried about Cygnus dropping in for a visit with the president. It was an arranged visit; maybe they would have been a little more worried if Cygnus had just turned up to land outside the official residence, but she was expected, so no one batted an eyelid.

  In fact, Delphine came out of the ‘work house’ to meet Cygnus, waiting on the path which led out to the small circle of roadway the two buildings sat on. ‘Come on, she’s not behind on her appointments today.’

  ‘Is she usually?’ Cygnus asked.

  ‘Meetings never take the time they’re scheduled for. Of course, she cancelle
d a couple to drop you into this afternoon’s timetable, which may explain why she’s not running late.’

  ‘Must be important.’

  ‘That’s for her to tell you.’

  Cygnus’s eyes flicked to the gap between the two houses. There was now a sort of tent forming a walkway between the buildings. ‘I thought she didn’t want that covered walkway between the two houses.’

  ‘She didn’t. Then she realised it would stop anyone seeing her walking from the house to the office, so to speak, so she could work in jeans.’

  Cygnus was still smirking at that when she entered the lounge/office to find Hart – in skinny jeans and a racerback shirt emblazoned with ‘GO RAMS’ on the front – pouring coffee. ‘I’ve never heard you say no to coffee,’ she said as Cygnus walked over to the sofas.

  ‘And you’re not going to hear me say it today, Madame President.’

  Hart looked up and raised an eyebrow. ‘You got the “Madame President” thing out of your system now?’

  ‘I think I have to say it once a meeting.’ Cygnus settled down and took the offered coffee cup. ‘You know, your predecessors didn’t call Brightstar to come visit as often as this.’

  ‘I can’t speak for them, but I like you better.’

  ‘God! Don’t ever let Alison hear that.’

  Hart grinned and looked around at Delphine. ‘What do you think, blackmail material?’

  Delphine gave a small grimace. ‘I wouldn’t recommend it. She’s been known to drop submarines on people.’

  ‘One time,’ Cygnus said. ‘I did that once. And it wasn’t a big submarine.’ She paused and tapped her lip with a finger. ‘Of course, I’ve got stronger since then…’

  ‘Okay,’ Hart conceded, ‘no blackmail. First thing on the agenda, these bombings. What do you know? The FBI is still calling it terrorism related and probably suicide bombers.’

  ‘Well, I happened to have Doctor Ultimate handy when the second one happened.’

  ‘Third. This was the third. The second happened in some out-of-the-way town in the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘Canyon Day, Arizona,’ Delphine supplied. ‘An unoccupied house was blown up on the nineteenth of February. No injuries. The FBI weren’t brought in until the local cops decided that it wasn’t a gas leak.’