“Then why did he give it to me?”
“He’s probably hoping you would incapacitate yourself, or maybe by the time it comes to that, his mission will be done and it won’t matter, anyway. Once they’ve taken enough people from your planet to win whatever conflict they’re currently engaging in, they might move on, and it won’t matter to him if he leaves a super powered person around here. Then again, if they plan to exploit your planet for the long term, it makes no sense to leave you with such a device.”
“So what we know is that they’re abducting people from here to serve as soldiers in some war of conquest on some other planet that we don’t have a clue about, and that the only people that can stop them are in this room. Am I getting close?”
“Pretty much.”
“Which means I have powers that were a complete mistake, but I should use those powers to save the world, except the world I’m saving isn’t even my own?”
“If you look at it that way, but we never said anything about saving other worlds, only stopping them from exploiting yours.”
“Seems if we can stop that, we can help the other one as well.”
“Except you don’t even know where it is or how their war has progressed.”
“Yeah, one step at a time,” Franklin said.
“There’s only one major complication,” Christy said.
“What’s that?” Kendra asked.
“If they suspect we’re onto them and see us coming, they’ll activate everyone they have already, and if they have the suits close by, it could get quite interesting.”
“What are the suits?” Walter asked.
“Mechanized suits. The person sits inside it and controls it through a neural interface. The suits are impervious to most weapons short of rocket launchers. There are two ways they are controlled. Either the operator controls it himself, when it’s a trained soldier fighting of his own accord, or remotely in the case of kidnapped soldiers which would be the case here.”
“Remotely?”
“Yes, They are organized in units similar to your military organization here, and there are controllers, usually aboard a ship in orbit, or sometimes in a hardened facility on the planet surface, who can control entire units at a time, or sometimes individual soldiers. They are very efficient. They’ve been using this model for over a hundred years, since their conquests were using up too many of their own men and they started taking people from other planets.”
“All this information is good, but if it comes to a fight, we don’t really want to kill our own people. Is there a way to disable them without killing the occupants?”
“You could disable the suits by inflicting enough damage, or by cutting the signal. With some of the older models, you could target a small receiver on the back of the neck area and that would short it out temporarily, but that is extremely difficult. The other option is to find out where the controllers are and take them out, but that involves taking out their orbital ship or whatever bunker they’re holed up in.”
“Something you’re forgetting,” Kendra said, “If they’re staging people from here for an assault somewhere else, we have to stop them before they leave, so it might not be that kind of fight.”
“You have a point,” Christy said, “We will need to get some intel on their facilities and come up with an assault plan.”
“Yeah, and one of those is on the freaking moon,” Franklin said, “How do you suppose we recon that?”
“Leave that up to me. I can get us there, but I’ll need help.”
Franklin’s face lit up with a grin from ear to ear. “Going to the moon? Count me in.”
23
Catherine Mixon was in a foul mood. She was back in her office underneath the warehouse, dressing down two of her men who stood mute before her with heads hanging.
“How in the hell did those two kids get out of here under both your noses, with their car no less?”
No response from either of them.
“What’s the matter, cat got your tongue? You were both here, the kids were locked in this room, and now they’re gone, along with their car, and you don’t have a clue how they got out? You know what I normally do to incompetent people like you?”
“Sorry boss. I went to take a piss, and they were gone.”
“You went to take a piss, and in that time they took their car and just exited the premises? Do you expect me to believe that?”
“I…I…don’t know.”
“You don’t know? It’s rather clear you don’t know much of anything,” she said, pulling out her pistol and pointing it at the man’s chest, “But why do I bother with the gun? I could take you out with a flick of my finger. How would you like that? Saves the ammo.”
“Sorry…won’t happen again…I promise.”
“You’re right, because you won’t get another chance for it to happen.”
“Catherine, my dear, there will be no need to punish him for something that isn’t his fault,” Jack said, entering the room.
“Isn’t his fault? He had one job, and he failed.”
“Dismiss him, we need to talk.”
Mixon dismissed the two men with a wave of her hand and sat down.
“Suppose you tell me what’s going on?”
“Don’t worry about the kids. Everything is going according to plan.”
“Plan? Whose plan?”
“We will bring you up to speed in due time. We needed to spread some information, and those kids will do nicely when they report back to Walter.”
“You had me nab them just for that?”
“Pretty much, and it worked just as we planned.”
“Would you care to tell me what’s going on?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss everything with you now. Just keep up what you’re doing and if I need any more favors, I’ll let you know.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes. Now,
