Sensation: A Superhero Novel (19 page)

           
It worked before; why not again?  The principle is the same.

            “I need an answer,” he said.  “Do we have a deal?”

            “Sure,” I said resolutely. “You can expect me to deal harshly with you before this is over.”

            Then, for the first time in my life, I teleported myself to a place that I had never actually been.

            And walked straight into a trap.

Chapter 22

I didn’t realize it was a trap initially.  I popped into the room where Electra was being held.  I saw her, then tried to encase her in my power and teleport out.  (Emphasis on
tried
.)

            Nothing happened.  I tried again, with the same result.  It was then that I realized the trap I was in. The room I had teleported myself into was also home to a nullifier. I wasn’t in one of the League’s formal nullifier cells - it was a makeshift one - but it was just as effective.

            At the same time, the two guys flanking Electra realized that someone else was in the room.  They turned around, and only hesitated a second before they charged.

            The good news is that years of training under the tutelage of BT and Gramps had made me an excellent hand-to-hand combatant.  Moreover, I’d also been versed in how to fight multiple adversaries at once.  These two were obviously just brawlers who were used to simply applying brute force to every problem – especially fights.  But they had never received any formal training (or if they had received any, they hadn’t paid attention). Thus, in a nullifier cell, without their super strength, they were seriously outclassed, despite being bigger and stronger.

            Herc, who was on my left, was closer and got to me first.  I reached out, grabbed him and performed a judo throw, using his own momentum to flip him.  He landed hard on the floor, the wind knocked out of him.  He may also have had some broken bones.  He groaned but didn’t move.

            The other one, HammerHand, grabbed me from behind in a bear hug.  I kicked back as hard as I could and felt my heel connect with his shin.  He screamed and let me go, then fell to the floor clutching his leg.  I didn’t think I’d broken it, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

            I didn’t waste any time, but hurried to Electra to untie her.  That’s when I heard a door open, and all of a sudden there were bodies all over me.

            It was very much like Feral’s fight on the security footage.  I punched and hit and tried to apply martial arts techniques, but there were just too many of them.  They were destined to win by sheer weight of numbers, and in short order I found a dozen strong hands pinning my arms behind my back.

            That’s when Paramount came in.  He had a look of extreme satisfaction on his face.

            “Well, if it isn’t the great Kid Sensation,” he said.

            “I’m glad you didn’t say ‘
late
, great,’” I replied.

            He smiled.  “A sense of humor.  That’s good.  It shows you haven’t lost hope.  And the truth of the matter is that there’s still hope for you yet.”

            “What are you talking about?”

            “Hope that you might join us. Aqua tried to recruit you when she came to your room.  I was surprised that it didn’t work.  Most guys find her powers of persuasion irresistible.”

For the first time, I noticed Aqua leaning against a far wall, with Incendia next to her. They each winked and blew a kiss at me simultaneously. My hypothesis about them having some type of mental connection was starting to look less theoretical and more factual by the second.

“In truth,” Paramount continued, “my conversion actually started with you.  I should be thanking you, since you’re the one who showed me the way.”

            “What do you mean?”

            A weird gleam came into his eyes.  “Until you made him disappear two years ago, I didn’t realize how much I hated him.  How much I wanted him dead.”

            With a jolt like lightning, a sudden realization came upon me as to who he was talking about.

            “Alpha Prime?  Your father?  Why would you hate him?”

            Unexpected rage suddenly erupted from him.  “You have no idea what it’s like to have to be his son! To have to constantly live with the comparison!  Always knowing that you’ll never be good enough!”

            “That’s crazy!” I shouted.  “Everybody knows that you were being groomed to take over, that you would be the world’s premiere superhero one day!”

            He laughed maniacally, then leaned in close to me.  “You honestly don’t have a clue, do you?  No one does.  Well, let me enlighten you.  There was never going to be a day that I would take over, never going to be an opportunity for me to say, ‘This is my time.’

            “My father came to this world over eighty years ago,” he continued.  “Do you know what he looked like then?  The same way he looks now. Scientists have studied him, and as far as they can tell, he’s practically a living god.”

            “And you’re just like him!” I interjected.  “You’ve got his genes!”

            “No.” He shook his head.  “I’ve only got half his genes.  Do you know what that means?  According to doctors, I will probably live an extraordinarily long life.  And I’m not talking a hundred or two hundred years here.  I’m talking thousands….thousands of years.”

            He put his head down, then went on. “Do you have any idea of what life is like when all you have to look forward to is being a poor man’s substitute for something else?  When all people see when they look at you is a grainy copy of the original?”

            “That’s why you got rid of him,” I said, understanding.

“What did you expect???!!!  He can’t be beaten!  He can’t be killed!  He’s never going to grow old, and he’ll never die!  If I were only going to live a normal lifespan, maybe it would be tolerable.  But a millennium of living in his shadow?  Two?  Ten?  Living for eons and never having a chance to be my own man?  I’ve barely made it through eighteen years.  The thought of that being my life was unbearable.”

“So you made a deal with supervillains.”

“Yes.  At least that way, I get to live my own life, right or wrong.  I get to make my own choices.  And now, you get to make yours.”

That’s when I saw what he had in his hand.  It was BT’s inhibitor collar. 

“No!” I screeched, instinctively trying to lean back, away from him.  My powers were a part of me. Part of who I was.  Losing them would be as agonizing as losing a limb.

I struggled like a wild man, but I was simply held too tightly; there was nowhere to go.  He slipped the collar around my neck and I heard it lock in place.  He held up a small controller in his hand and pressed a button.  At the same time, the inhibitor began making a high, keening noise which soon faded.

“Now, let’s make sure we understand each other,” Paramount said, looking at me levelly.  “This inhibitor is particularly attuned to you.  With this controller, which is modified to work for me and only me, I can turn it off or on. And just so you don’t get cute, the inhibitor is also equipped with a bomb.  In other words, I will dissolve the current partnership between your head and neck if you don’t do what I want.  So–”

“I already know the spiel,” I said.  “You want me to bring you Mouse’s tablet so you can bring the TNIP back online and free your masters.”

“Not exactly,” Paramount said, laughing. “I want you to bring me his tablet so I can make sure they
never
get free.”

The shock must have shown on my face.  It was also reflected on the faces of several members of his little army, including Incendia and Aqua.

“Uh, Paramount,” Aqua began, “that wasn’t the plan.  We’re supposed to free the Masters–”

“I don’t have any masters!” Paramount screamed.

“What?” he said, looking round at his cohorts.  “You think I threw off the yoke of my father just to put on that of another bunch of costumed clowns?  Who do you think destabilized their device in the first place?”

This was almost more than I could contemplate, so I could only imagine the shock of his followers, who looked back and forth at each other while processing all this in disbelief. I had seriously underestimated Paramount, in terms of abilities and ambition.  So had the League.  So had his friends.  And so, especially, had his one-time masters – the supervillains now trapped in another dimension.

“So you’ve been going off-script this entire time?  Doing your own thing?” I asked.  “Including framing me for murder?”

“Actually, that order came from the Masters,” he answered.  “
Former
Masters, I should say.  Kubosh was a meta with a recently-developed tracking ability, and he was hired to locate you.”

That explained why Kubosh hadn’t tried to run me to ground before and get the reward.  He’d only recently gained the power to track things down.  Too bad it wasn’t an ability that did him much good in the long run.

Paramount went on.  “Once we helped him cross your trail – you can thank Omen and his visions for that – it was just a matter of time before he found you.  However, he got greedy, tried to play both ends from the middle.  He told us about your little mansion hangout outside of town, but then he tried to collect the reward on Kid Sensation by telling the Alpha League your whereabouts.  Omen and his buddies felt that was a little bit of a betrayal, and the rest is history.”

“How’d you know about the inhibitor?” I asked.

“Omen again.  In one of his visions of the future, he saw how it could be used to take away your powers.  Which brings us back to the current plan,” he said.  “The nullifier is now off.  In a minute, I’m going to turn the inhibitor off, and you…”

His voice trailed off as I stopped paying attention to what he was saying.

The nullifier is off???!!!  Didn’t he know that the inhibitor was only partially effective at the best of times?

I didn’t wait to hear the end of his speech. I switched into super speed and then ran forward to snatch the controller from his hand.  Then I wrapped my mind around Electra and attempted to teleport…

And found myself in Mouse’s lab, along with a still-bound Electra. I could only imagine Paramount’s face as we disappeared, but we didn’t have time to gloat.  Goon had met me in the conference room right here at HQ.  I had a funny feeling that Paramount’s entire crew was fairly close.

“Mouse!”  I screamed.  “I’ve got an inhibitor collar with a bomb!”

Mouse stopped what he was doing and ran over. 

“Here,” I said, handing him the controller. “This is what’s supposed to detonate it.”

The inhibitor was making that keening noise again.  I felt for sure the bomb was about to go off, and then the noise began to die down like it did before. 

“Hurry!” I shouted.  “Before this thing explodes!”

Mouse raced over to a nearby workbench and grabbed some kind of toolkit.  In less than ten seconds he had the controller case open and was fiddling with wires.  I gave him the seriously condensed version of what had happened, taking less than thirty seconds to do so. 

By the time I finished, Mouse looked up and said, “Okay, you should be good for now.  If it goes off, it won’t be from this.”  He tapped the controller.

“Hey,” Mouse shouted at someone behind me.  “Untie Electra from that chair.”

For the first time, I noticed that there were other people in the room.  Basically, about a dozen teens were milling around, seemingly doing odd jobs around the lab:  moving boxes, sorting equipment, and so on.

“Who are they?” I asked Mouse, who was now examining the inhibitor with some odd-looking instruments.

“Ask your friend,” Mouse answered.  I looked around and saw Smokescreen, grinning as he walked towards me.

“I know what Mouse said about playing it safe,” Smokey said, “but I couldn’t let you guys try to make this stand alone.  So I rounded up what members of the teen supers I could and came as fast as possible.”

“And almost got shot for his trouble,” Mouse inserted.  “They showed up right after you left.  I thought it was Paramount and his guys trying to get in and almost blasted them.  He’s lucky I don’t have an itchy trigger finger.”

Nobody said anything else as Mouse continued examining the inhibitor collar.  I tried to look around and noticed Electra being helped to her feet.  She rubbed her wrists in an obvious effort to get circulation going again after being tied up for an extended period.  She saw me looking and mouthed “Thank you.”  I just nodded in response, but I noticed that she began to make her way towards us. 

“Okay,” Mouse finally said.  “Good news and bad news.”

“Great,” I muttered. “Another mixed report.”

“I’ll take that as you wanting the good news first,” Mouse retorted.  “Basically, you should still have most of your powers, and the bomb isn’t likely to go off.”

“‘Most’ of my powers?” I said incredulously.  “What exactly does that mean?”

“Well, that’s tied into the bad news.  From what I can see, this inhibitor has some type of adaptive logic circuit.  Basically, as you use your powers it learns about them and then figures out how to block them.  Afterwards, as long as you have it on, you won’t have that ability anymore.”

“Are you sure?” Electra asked.  “Because he just teleported us here.”

Mouse made a vague gesture.  “Go ahead and try it.”

I attempted to teleport to the other side of the room.  Nothing.  Likewise when I tried to shift into super speed.  Almost embarrassingly, I told Mouse that he appeared to be right.

“Unfortunately, there’s more,” he said.  “It’s locked into your biometrics.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means that, for all intents and purposes, that collar is now like an additional limb or appendage.  Where you go, it goes.  Didn’t you notice that you teleported here with it still on?”

In all honesty, I hadn’t even thought about trying to teleport without it; at the time, I was just trying to get away, and I admitted as much. 

“Normally that would be a foolish oversight,” Mouse said, “but in this case it wouldn’t have mattered.  Like I said, it’s locked in to your biometrics.  If you teleport, it teleports; if you phase, it phases. You’re stuck with it for now.”