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Kinsella smiled. “Not yet.”
4 (#ulink_3b592888-01a7-5694-9ed9-fc334ebceb21)
SHORTLY AFTER DAWN, Renata, Butler and Danny walked into Sakkara’s infirmary to find Warren Wagner – Colin’s father – waiting for them. A former paramedic, Warren was currently filling the role of Sakkara’s chief medical technician.
In one corner of the large room, Max Dalton was working at a computer station.
Only one other person was in the room: in the bed closest to the window, Mina looked as though she was asleep.
“So how’d it go?” Warren asked.
“Fine,” Danny said. He and Renata had agreed not to mention what they’d found on the island. “Any word from the people in Hungary?”
“Nothing yet,” Warren replied. “We’re not even certain that the sighting is reliable.”
“We should be trying to find him,” Renata said.
“We are.”
“No, I mean we should be. Me and Danny, you and Caroline. We know Colin better than anyone else. We can persuade him to come back.”
Danny glanced towards Max Dalton and quietly said, “Col won’t come back as long as he’s still here.”
Butler yawned and said, “This gonna take long?”
“It takes as long as it takes,” Warren said. “But you can go first. Get behind the screens and strip down to your shorts.”
While Butler was being examined, Renata and Danny walked over to Mina’s bed.
“God…Poor thing,” Renata said. “Four months in a coma.” She reached out to stroke Mina’s blonde hair, which had now grown to shoulder-length.
“I wonder if she’s dreaming?” Danny said, examining the plastic bag of liquid connected via a tube to Mina’s arm. “She probably is. I just hope they’re not nightmares.”
“She is dreaming,” Max Dalton said, appearing behind them. “At least, according to the EEG readings. And she’s not really in a coma. She’s just asleep. She moves from time to time, just like everyone does when they’re asleep.”
He doesn’t look well, Danny thought. Max’s hair was now completely grey and his once-handsome face was haggard and drawn.
Renata asked, “So the wake-up message didn’t work?”
“Obviously not,” Max said. For weeks, Max and his team had been scouring through thousands of hours of Sakkara’s audio logs, searching for recordings of Yvonne’s voice, and singling out the snippets of her voice where she appeared to be using her mind-control. The idea was that they would compile pieces of Yvonne’s orders into a “wake up” sentence for Mina. “It looks like Yvonne’s hypnotics can only work when they’re issued live. That definitely indicates that it’s more telepathic than vocal.”
“So what are you going to do now?”
“We’ve taken X-rays, CT scans, MRIs, ultra-sound images…There’s nothing there. Short of performing exploratory brain surgery, there’s nothing else we can do. Not directly. This is where you come in, Danny.”
Danny looked down at Mina. “So what can I do?”
“You can tell us everything about how you regained your powers.”
“I don’t think I ever really lost them. I think it was the shock of what happened to my arm. I just sort of shut down.” To himself, Danny added, That, and my vision of the future.
“But the powers came back. If we can figure out how, then maybe we can trigger the same thing for Mina. You said that your powers returned when Renata was trapped in the computer room, after Dioxin’s men shot her, right? Sure there was nothing else before that?”
Danny shook his head. “No.”
“Façade said that during Dioxin’s attack you insisted on coming back here instead of going to the safe-house. Why?”
“I just didn’t want to be left behind. I thought I might be able to help.”
“And why did you think that?”
“Just a feeling,” Danny said, shrugging.
Max absently fingered the scar on his neck. “That’s how it started for your father. He used to get ‘feelings’ about things, or he’d know something he couldn’t possibly have known. And then the visions started to come.”
“Don’t ever talk about my father, Dalton. He’s dead because of you.”
“I know, but…” He stopped. “Look, we’ve already had two cases of superhumans effectively losing their powers and then regaining them, and that’s you two.” To Renata, he said, “Your recovery can be tied directly to the power-surge from Victor Cross’s machine—”
Renata interrupted him. “You mean, your machine.”
“Right. But that’s not something we can replicate here. Even if we were to build another one, the power-surge was an unrepeatable accident.”
He’s never even apologised for kidnapping me and Colin, Danny thought. He glanced at the stump of his right arm.
From the far side of the room, Warren called, “Renata? You’re next.”
They looked up to see Butler pulling on his T-shirt as he left the room.
As Renata walked over to Warren, Max said to Danny, “You’re still blaming me for what happened, aren’t you?”
“Who else should I blame? You funded and ran the whole operation. Because of you I’m going to spend the rest of my life with only one arm.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” Max said. He led Danny to his computer station, and called up a program. On screen, a three-dimensional model of a mechanical arm rotated slowly. “I’ve been making some modifications to Razor’s design.”
Danny shook his head. “I don’t want to know.”
Max didn’t seem to hear him. He tapped at the screen with the end of a pencil. “I was going to remove the third and fourth fingers to reduce the complexity, but there’s been a few breakthroughs recently in reading and interpreting nerve impulses. We’ve built a whole array of sensors into the chest harness, and the software is clever enough to be able to differentiate between the nerve signals.”
Despite his misgivings about the mechanical arm, Danny couldn’t help being impressed with the amount of time and money the government was spending on the project.
“So all you’ll have to do is put it on, and within a few seconds you’ll be able to use it like it was a real arm. There won’t be any feedback, but when we really get a handle on the micro-miniaturisation we should be able to build-in thermal and touch sensors.” Max stuck his pencil between his teeth and typed a command into the keyboard.
The screen changed to show a wire-frame figure of a man wearing the arm and the chest-harness. “It’s still just as heavy as it was, but it’s much stronger and the harness distributes the weight pretty evenly, so you’ll get used to it. I’ve redesigned it so that you’ll be able to put it on without needing someone else’s help. And our tests show that when you switch into hyper-speed mode, the arm will too, so it should be able to keep up with you.”
Without saying a word, Danny turned and walked over to the window, and stared out.
Why can’t they just get the hint that I don’t want a mechanical arm? Maybe I should tell them…
But Danny knew that telling them wasn’t an option. Max and Impervia had known Quantum, and they’d seen how his visions had turned him into a broken man.
Danny didn’t want them to know that he had inherited not only his father’s speed, but also his ability to sense the future.
It didn’t work well, and he couldn’t control it, but there were times – like back on Isla del Tonatiuh – when Danny somehow just knew that something bad was going to happen.
And once, shortly before he’d lost his right arm, Danny had seen a vision of himself with a mechanical right arm.
If Quantum’s prophecy was accurate, and I’m going to be responsible for starting a huge war in which billions of people will die, then…Then there’s nothing on Earth that’s going to make me take that mechanical arm. If I don’t take the arm, then the future I saw can’t ever happen.
His thoughts were interrupted by a hand on his shoulder. He looked around to see Renata standing beside him.
“You OK?”
Danny nodded. “Yeah. Just…thinking.”
Behind them, the door hissed open and two female guards entered, one of them pushing an old woman in a wheelchair. The woman glanced around, spotted Warren and instantly looked away.
One of the guards put the wheelchair away while her colleague helped the old woman into bed.
“Another interrogation session,” Renata whispered.
Danny said, “I don’t care if Ragnarök was her son. How can they treat an eighty-year-old woman like that?”
“I suppose they think Mrs Duval knows something that can help them track down Yvonne.”
“What could she know? They’ve never even met each other!”
Renata shrugged.
Warren walked over, avoiding Mrs Duval’s glare. “Dan? We need to get you checked out.”
“Why do we have to get a check-up after every mission?”
“General’s orders,” Warren said. He picked up the chart from the end of Mina’s bed and flipped through the pages. “Back in the old days, we just fought the bad guys and went back to our normal lives. Now, we’ve got the might of the military behind us. Like things weren’t complicated enough. One superhuman we can’t wake up, one missing in action, one turned against us…Only three of you left.” He put back the chart and smiled at Danny. “But soon enough, there’ll be four.”
“You found a new superhuman?”
“Better than that. Razor’s team almost have the new Paragon armour finished.”
5 (#ulink_9cfa9f1d-0d3c-5ffd-b64e-0124252547bd)
EVEN BEFORE DANNY and Renata reached the machine room, they could hear a loud pounding sound echoing through the building. They opened the door and stood on the gantry, looking down at Razor and four other technicians as they worked on what appeared to be the framework of a three-metre-tall bipedal robot.
“All right,” Razor said, standing back from the exoskeleton. He brushed his long hair back from his face. “Everyone get clear…Let’s try that again.”
The robot’s motors whined as it straightened itself – then, after a moment, it tilted slightly to the right, then stomped its left foot forward. The robot tilted to the left, then moved its right foot.
Danny grinned. “It’s walking! Finally!”
“Shutting down,” Razor said. “Take the readings, Mitch.” He glanced up at Danny and Renata, and beckoned them down.
Danny was instantly standing in front of the machine, staring up at it. “It’s looking good, Raze. Got it flying yet?”
“We’re getting there,” Razor said. “It can’t carry enough fuel to fly more than a hundred metres. That’s ‘cos it weighs almost a tonne.”
Renata arrived next to them. “Razor, how on Earth is someone supposed to fit inside that thing?”
“There’ll be a lot more space when we tidy all the cables away.”
“Maybe someone doesn’t need to be inside it. You could fit it with cameras. Then the new Paragon won’t even have to go into battle himself.”
“We thought of that, but the General feels that the public will have more confidence if Paragon is a person, not a robot.” Razor scratched at the three-day stubble on his chin. “That’s one of the things we’re arguing about. Piers wants the helmet’s face-plate to be transparent, so everyone can see there’s a person inside. But that’ll seriously weaken the helmet’s integrity, which is not a good thing considering that the armour will be equipped with shock-bombs.”
“What’s a shock-bomb?” Renata asked.
“Another of Max’s inventions. It’s a grenade that only explodes in one direction. You could hold one in your hand when it explodes – they’re about the size of a can of soda – and it wouldn’t do you any damage, as long as the business end was pointed away from you. And there’s no shrapnel.”
“Let’s see one!” Danny said.
Razor’s hair flicked about his face as he shook his head. “They’re way too dangerous to fool around with. How did the mission go? Find the weapons?”
“There weren’t any weapons. It was food.”
“Food? That seems…strange. Do you think Impervia knew?”
Renata shrugged. “It’s hard to say. She didn’t want us going into the building, so maybe she did know. We can’t ask her, because then we’d have to tell her how we found out. You know what she’s like about us breaking the rules.”
Razor asked, “Are you still thinking about leaving?”
“If I had somewhere to go, I’d leave in a second,” Renata said. “We should all go. Except Bubbles. But we can’t take Mina with us, and I really think that one of us should be here for her, if she ever wakes up.”
“I talked to Warren,” Razor said. “They’re no happier here than we are, but they won’t leave. He says that this is the best chance they’ll have to find Colin. There’s something else bothering them, but he wouldn’t say what it was. He did say that Sakkara is probably the only place that’s safe from Yvonne’s influence.”
Renata said, “Much as I despised Josh, at least when he was in charge we had some say in the way this place was run. Now if we want anything we have to go through Impervia.”
Razor noticed the expression on Renata’s face. “You really don’t like her, do you?”
“What’s to like? She makes us call her by her superhero name even though she hasn’t had any powers for over ten years.”
Razor’s cellphone beeped. “Oh, what now?” He flipped open the phone. “Yo…Oh, hi Caroline. What’s up?” He listened for a moment. “Damn…All right, we’re coming down.”
“What is it?” Danny asked.
“The guys you arrested on the island aren’t terrorists. They’re security guards. The food supplies belonged to the Trutopians. And they’re not happy.”
Colin stood at the back of the room as Reginald Kinsella stepped in front of the camera. Kinsella looked annoyed and a little flustered. He cleared his throat, took a sip of water from a glass.
Harriet, operating the camera, said, “We’ve got the link…Going live in thirty-two seconds.”
