Author: Douglas A. Taylor
Category: Suspense
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Chapter 18
The place that I saw when the teleportation haze cleared from my vision looked more like the lab of some mad scientist than anything I would call home. A two-foot-tall, extremely agile mad scientist. Low tables, stacked two and three high, were everywhere and were littered with all kinds of equipment. Electrical-looking gadgets were in one corner, vials of chemicals in another. The place was jam-packed with all kinds of stuff, although it gave the impression of being very tidily jam-packed.
JB Swift lost no time. He sped over to a single-story table in a corner dominated by medical-looking equipment, indicating that I should follow him. "Put her down here. Quickly! There's no time to lose!"
I reached the table in two strides and lay Lily down. She had lost consciousness somewhere along the way, I noticed; her head lolled limply to one side. Beneath her tan Chinese coloration, her beautiful face was deathly pale and her lips had a definite blueish tinge. I reached down and touched her cheek. There was no warmth to it at all.
JB Swift had begun unzipping the front of her jumpsuit. "Come, come, we don't have time for you to stand here mooning!" he snapped impatiently. "Help me take these clothes off her!"
I shook myself and set to work. Now, I'll admit that I had occasionally daydreamed about taking Lily's clothes off, but in my imagination the circumstances were always quite a bit more, um, romantic, shall we say? There was nothing sexy about undressing this near-corpse.
"Those idiots have no idea what they're doing!" JB Swift muttered to himself as we sat Lily up and pulled the jumpsuit down to her waist. "She hadn't even finished recovering from that beating your friend Indigo gave her in New York when they sent her out!"
I eased Lily's shoulders back down to the table as JB Swift began tugging on her pant legs. "Actually, I was the one who gave her the beating," I admitted. "I was Indigo at the time. I have changed colors since then."
JB Swift glanced up at me. "Promotion or demotion?" he inquired. When I didn't reply, he said, "Well, it probably doesn't make any difference anyway. Warm, moist air, blowing directly on her," he added to the empty air. Immediately, I felt a warm breeze spring up from somewhere, blowing over top of Lily.
I looked down at her nude body, more pitiful than erotic at the moment. In the bright light of the lab, I could see half-healed scar tissue across her forehead, probably from my slamming her face onto the pavement. Gently, I raised her head. Drawing out her long, sopping-wet hair from beneath her, I fanned it out across the edge of the table so that it would dry more quickly.
Something caught the tip of my finger as I eased her head back down. It was the pin of one of her earrings, the little gold posts she wore that received the signals from her remote control and translated them into sensations on her ear that she understood as commands. Acting on a sudden impulse, I pulled the back off and slipped the earring from her ear.
"So, you people call me JB Swift, eh?" the little red hedgehog said. He was inserting a pair of surgical needles attached to slender tubes into an area along Lily's upper thigh. "I can understand the Swift part, but where did you get 'JB'?"
"It stands for Just Because," I said distractedly. I tucked the earring into a pocket of my battle vest. With any luck, they would think she lost it on the glacier in Iceland. "What are you doing to her?"
"Warming her blood," he said tersely. As I watched, a stream of dark red fluid flowed through one of the tubes, into a nearby machine and, seconds later, down the other tube. JB Swift chuckled. "Just Because Swift. I like that. It shows that you people have a sense of humor. That's good. My real name is Oswald Grumpf, by the way." He stepped back to admire his work. "Lily, self-heal," he commanded.
Lily's eyes remained closed, but her lips twitched faintly. I guessed she was giving him her standard response: "Self-healing."
JB Swift stood looking at her for a moment more, then he turned away. "There's nothing more we can do for her at the moment," he said. He began tugging off the scarf he had been wearing.
I glanced at the scarf. There were enough irregularities in it that it couldn't be something machine-made that he had gotten from a store. "Did someone make that for you?" I asked. Somehow I found it hard to believe that Enclave monsters gave each other presents.
"She did," he said, jerking his chin at Lily. "Surprised me with it on my birthday. That girl has all kinds of hidden talents." He gave me an appraising look. "So you used to be Indigo? You aren't by any chance the same Indigo who caused us so much trouble at the old base a couple of months back, are you? Back when we captured the purple Prime?"
"That was me," I admitted.
He nodded thoughtfully. "You were very clever then, very resourceful. I admire that. They never did figure out how you escaped, you know."
I shrugged. If he expected me to tell him, then he was going to be disappointed. Who knows, I might have to pull the same trick again some day. "I guess you'll have to remain in the dark forever, then."
"Oh, I didn't say that I never figured it out," he said with a chuckle. "The door to a storeroom torn open, a teleport trap set up and running, with the coordinates set to a certain small town in Ohio? It was obvious what had happened. I just made sure my masters never found out."
"Was that where the coordinates were pointing?" I said as casually as I could. I had set the teleport trap to send me to my parents' house, in fact, but I couldn't let him know that. "I just typed something in at random."
"You know, I might almost believe that," he said, "except that we had good reason to think at the time that the indigo Prime was a fourth-degree black belt registered with the World Tae Kwon Do headquarters at Kukkiwon, and that his first name was Trevor."
I felt a cold wave travel down my spine. I had hoped that that particular matter had been forgotten. Padma had let my name slip shortly before she was captured, and when I finally found her in the Enclave base, I had proved to her who I was by saying something like "fourth Dan, Kukkiwon." The room she was in, I found out later, had been bugged.
I tried to think of a clever reply, but the best I could come up with was "So?"
"So the place those coordinates were pointing to was at one time the home of a young man named Trevor Chiao, who just happens to be a fourth-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do, registered with Kukkiwon. Such a coincidence would beggar the imagination, no?" He folded his arms across his narrow chest. "Do I make myself clear, Mr. Chiao?"
It was a good thing I had my force shield on, because I was having a hard time maintaining a poker face. "Let's assume for the moment that what you say is true and that I am this Trevor Chiao person," I said cautiously, trying to keep my voice from cracking with nervousness. "You said you have kept this information from your superiors. Should I assume you wish to strike some sort of bargain with me?"
He regarded me thoughtfully for several seconds. "It appears that I have a bit of leverage over you," he said at last, "but I recognize that it is a brittle lever, likely to snap in half the moment I put a hair too much pressure on it. The way your Prime Red publicly outed herself tells me that you people are willing to sacrifice yourselves and your secret identities for the greater good. That's an admirable quality, but it means that I couldn't force you to, say, become a traitor to your team."
"That is certainly true," I said. And it was. Already, I was trying to figure out the best way to tell Wizzit about this conversation. JB Swift knowing my true identity might mean the end of my career as a Prime, but I was not going to lie to my teammates.
"And of course I wouldn't stoop so low as to threaten the lives of your parents or your sister Angela," he went on.
"You threatened to kill her once," I pointed out.
"Ah, so you were there, were you?" He beamed at me. "Thank you for confirming my suspicions." Oops! I had been present as Trevor Chiao, not as Prime Indigo, when he had made that particular threat. Dumb, dumb, dumb. "But y
ou happen to be in luck," he continued. "I know exactly how I wish to apply this particular bit of leverage, and I think it is something you would be willing to agree to."
"I doubt it," I said flatly. "I won't make any sort of secret agreement with you. Everything we say here will go straight to my boss's ears. We hold a complete debriefing after every mission, and this conversation will definitely be part of it. I will hide nothing."
There was an odd light in his eyes as he looked at me. "I envy you the trust you have in your comrades. Here, no one trusts anyone if he can help it. I suppose that's one reason I treasure the attack doll so. We have complete trust between us."
I didn't say anything, although privately I was thinking that Lily had little choice but to trust JB Swift; she was his slave, not his partner. After a moment he went on, "What I would ask of you is this: Don't kill her. Don't kill my attack doll. Nothing more than that. I watched you carefully in New York. You had her helpless, unconscious, and yet you still moved in to take her life. Today, you took unnecessary risks to preserve that same life. I can see that you are of two minds regarding her fate. In return for my silence, I would ask that you simply let your better, more merciful mind prevail."
I stood there, unmoving, thinking about what he said. I also thought about the way Trina had looked at me when I told her that, yes, I had intended to kill Lily in New York. I didn't like that look.
"I can't make any promises regarding what happens in the heat of battle," I said. "You know what she's like when she's in attacker mode. She might force my hand; I might not have a choice."
"Understood."
I sighed and looked over at Lily. The attack doll no longer looked like some dead thing, but she was still deathly pale and unmoving. "Honestly," I said, "I don't want to kill her. Hell, I don't even like beating her up." I took a deep breath, held it for a moment, then let it out. "All right, you've got your bargain." I reached out my hand. "I promise that I will not intentionally kill Lily. I'll even take reasonable precautions to see that she doesn't die accidentally. Fair enough?"
"Fair enough. And I will do my best to keep my knowledge of your real identity to myself." He took my hand and shook it, sealing the deal.
There was a flicker of red, and JB Swift disappeared. Seconds later, there was another flicker, and he was back. He held something out to me, evidently having retrieved it from somewhere at superspeed.
"What's this?" I asked, bending down to look at the device. It appeared to be some sort of computer thumb drive.
"Evidence."
"Evidence of what?"
"You'll know when you see it," he said. "Oh, don't be stupid!" he added irritably when I hesitated to take it. "Do you honestly think I would try to plant a bomb on you at this point?"
"A bomb, no. A tracking device . . . maybe." I chuckled as I took the thing and slipped it into a pocket of my battle vest. "We'll take precautions."
"Very wise of you," he said, giving me a devilish smile. "But now it is time for me to send you back."
"Uh, didn't you promise us some advice on how to fight those monsters out there?"
"Did I? I don't remember." I growled, which made him laugh. "I'm just kidding, blue Prime. I always pay my debts. What you need to do is to bring the two monsters together. You can't beat them separately."
"Bring them together?" I echoed. "How the hell are we supposed to do that?"
"I haven't the faintest idea," he said, unconcerned, "but that will give you your best chance to defeat them. Understand, these are not my monsters; they're the products of those idiot twins. I have seen the data sheets on them, though. Their power grows in proportion to the distance between them. Apart, they are fairly strong, but if you bring them together, the fire and the ice will neutralize each other."
"Like vinegar and baking soda?" I asked him skeptically. "Or more like matter and anti-matter? How violent will the reaction be?"
"How should I know? That's your problem, not mine." He stepped forward and took my hand in his paw. "Katla volcano, caldera," he said firmly, and we vanished in a flash of light.