Hidden Potential: Nibiru Rising: Book 1 Page 14

  Using his powers to amplify his voice again, he yelled after his opponent’s retreating form.

  “Wait, come back. There’s more I want to show you!”

  Pulsing again, he quickly caught up to Reaper retreating form, shadowing him from the ground. Bursting forward, he approached a building and launched himself upward before springing away when he drew level with the rapidly approaching figure.

  Before Reaper could react, Rick held his staff vertically overhead, like a samurai about to chop downward. Tucking himself in a ball as he got nearer, he started spinning like a saw-blade with one tooth, ripping his right leg off his brother as he banked sideways to avoid getting split in half. Grabbing the now detached leg in his aura, he whirled it around to slam into the cyborg’s backside, causing him to tumble wildly toward the ground.

  “Oh look! I’ve got you kicking your own ass now!”

  Regaining control at the last moment, the cyborg rocketed forward only a few feet above the street. Dropping back down to ground level to pursue him, Rick realized they were starting to reach populated areas. Pulsing forward again to catch up on his fleeing target, Reaper suddenly spun over, a beam of light lancing out from his hands. The beam caught him just above the hip as he dodged, causing him to ricochet off the side of several buildings before suppressing the pain and regaining control of his movement. Cursing, he realized he was clenching his jaw, more from embarrassment from getting tagged than the actual pain it caused. Wincing, he launched himself forward again, closing the gap to his brother.

  Sonofabitch! What the hell is wrong with me. He’s somehow got me playing by his rules and now someone might get hurt because of it!

  He felt the adrenaline surge through him with his sudden urge to catch up. Keeping his altitude, he bounced from building to building, pushing himself past the sound barrier, the pressure wave causing windows to shatter behind him. Catching sight of Reaper again, he pushed himself closer to hypersonic speed, hoping to redirect the fight back toward unpopulated areas. Wincing again in pain, he momentarily shifted his focus to accelerate the healing process around where he’d been hit. Glancing down, he noticed a fist sized hole through his left side, the edges blackened by the blast.

  Looking back up again, he spotted Reaper was only moments away from being captured in his aura again. Before he could lock on, he watched in horror as several volleys of mini-missiles erupted from his opponent, streaking away toward the traffic in front of them.

  Reaper spun over again and flipped him off before abruptly changing direction, leaving Rick with the choice of continuing pursuit or chasing after the missile volley.

  Yeah, like there’s really a choice…

  Ignoring his brother receding into the distance, he pulsed forward again, trying to snare as many of the projectiles in his field, but he suddenly realized his aura had shrunk more than he realized when he’d healed himself. Gritted his teeth, he watched them slam into the side of a twelve-story building that was just being erected. Only the girder framework was in place at this point, easily allowing the missiles to reach several support beams. He slammed into the ground where the missiles had destroyed the beams. Looking up, he watched the building swaying from the shockwave before slowly leaning in the direction of the destroyed supports.

  Dropping his staff, he reached up and grabbed the end of one of the mangled beams, extending his field as far into the structure as possible. Using one of his orbiting spheres, he tapped on the mic control of his external headset.

  “Guys,” he said through clenched teeth. “I could use some help here.”

  Chapter 22

  “Approaching target area. Be advised we need rescue crews in the area for any injuries and casualties. Will update shortly with damage report.”

  Kaitlyn tapped her foot impatiently, willing the aircraft to go faster. The battle had easily outdistanced them as it moved inland. Jetlag was still en route to Rick’s last coordinates, but as of yet, they didn’t have any idea how bad the damage actually was. All they had to go by was Rick’s terse request for help before the channel went dead. Nothing had prepared her for what she witnessed when she arrived.

  “Holy Jesus,” she whispered on final approach. She’d known he was powerful, but what she saw went way beyond anything she’d ever witnessed before.

  “Team! Get as many people out of the here as you can! Go! Move!” she yelled, leaping out of the hatch before they’d even touched down. Bursting into flames, she took to the air and rushed toward where Rick was keeping the entire structure from falling on the people below.

  “Newton!”

  “Oh… Hey hot stuff… Nice to see you… I’d give you a hug but…” he said, grimacing as a hum vibrated through the structure.

  “We’ll get you out of here! Just hold on!” she said turning away to find help.

  “Kat… How hot… can you burn? Can you melt… steel?”

  Kaitlyn spun back around, trying to figure out where he was going with this.

  “Yes, I can melt metal, but I don’t see how that’s going to—”

  “Get Glaizia and Thunderclap over here,” he said, grunting again.

  “Hurry… I don’t know how much longer I’ll be… able to hold this.”

  She jabbed her throat mic, nearly gagging herself accidentally.

  “Thunderclap! Glaizia! On my position, now!”

  “Now what?”

  “When they get here… Start bracing the structure with the girders… over there,” he said, indicating the pile with his head.

  She could feel her shoulders slump in frustration.

  “I don’t know where to put them!”

  “I’ll show you…”

  “We’re here…” they said, trailing off as they realized what was happening.

  “Quick, grab those girders and bring them over. Newton’s going to tell us where to put them.”

  She glanced back and noticed sweat starting to pour down his face. She also noticed a slight tremor starting in his legs.

  “Hurry! Move! Move!”

  “Where do we need to put them?”

  She watched as one of his orbs, then another, lifted off the ground. Flying through the air, they slammed into the underside of the horizontal girders, leaving dimples behind.

  “Start there,” he whispered, his face scrunched in concentration.

  “There! There!” she indicated as her team returned.

  “Wedge them up under there.”

  She gritted her teeth as the metal screeched from being forced in place.

  “Now… weld them…”

  Launching into the air, she focused the flames around her hands into blowtorch temperatures, slowly orbiting each girder. She watched the metal soften, then glow bright orange-white before flowing together. Satisfied, she moved on to the next one.

  “Keep them coming,” she yelled, the echo of spheres impacting the underside of the more beams.

  Slowly, they added more and more beams. Soon the sounds of the structure vibrating grew steadily quieter. Jamming the last one next to the stump of the beam Rick had been holding, he slid to the side slightly to allow her to weld it in place before slumping to the ground in exhaustion.

  “Not one of my finer moments,” he mumbled, sucking in big gulps of air. The pain on his face was easy to read.

  “What are you talking about! You held up a friggin’ building! I’d called that pretty damn impressive!”

  “Yeah, but if I hadn’t been playing with Reaper, this wouldn’t have happened, would it?”

  “There’s no way to answer that,” she said, gesturing around her.

  “Regardless, it did happen. And you saved hundreds, if not thousands, of lives by what you did here. You didn’t have to catch a building. Nobody would have blamed you if you’d kept chasing him. Hell, I can’t even begin to think of anyone who actually could catch a falling building. So suck it up and put on your big boy pants. You can go catch that bastard when we’re done here.”

  Nodd
ing tiredly, he slowly stood back up.

  “You’re right. A lot of people would have died if I wasn’t here. I just need to finish this so something like this doesn’t happen again.”

  As he started to move toward her, Blitz came to a stop in front of her.

  “Report.”

  “All the civilians have been removed from the area. Our people are going to have a field day trying to cover this mess up.”

  Glancing over toward Rick, he paused before speaking again.

  “Dude, did you get bigger?”

  Chapter 23

  Rick rode in silence. Regardless of what Kaitlyn had said, he’d been careless. Instead of dealing with him appropriately, he’d put innocent people at risk by playing with his opponent. He had nobody to blame but himself. If he had just stuck to the plan and knocked him around a bit before letting him escape, that building wouldn’t have been damaged, putting all those lives in danger. Just one more mistake in judgment he had hanging over him now.

  “Did you see that buzzsaw attack? That was friggin’ awesome.”

  He glanced up, listening to Scattershot’s continued description of Rick’s fight.

  “I just wish I’d seen the rest of it, but they got out of range.”

  “Yeah, they’d gotten out of range of me as well,” responded Jetlag over the radio. “I’ve never seen anyone move that fast before. Even for me, it looked like watching a film in fast forward.”

  Kaitlyn glance over at him before keying her mic.

  “Okay everyone, let’s celebrate once we get back. We still need to figure out if the mission was successful.”

  He nodded in thanks before returning to his brooding.

  Good question. Were they able to track him? Did I cause enough damage, or was it just a matter of diverting resources to deal with me?

  “Hey…”

  Rick noticed Kaitlyn standing in front of him.

  “Hey.”

  She spun a nearby chair around before sitting down, facing him.

  “You need to stop beating yourself up over this.”

  She held up her hand before he could respond.

  “Listen. Could you have done better? Sure. But you need to let it go. There’s been plenty of times I made a mistake in the field, a wrong choice that cost lives. It’s part of the job.”

  “Yeah, but this isn’t my job. Hasn’t been for nearly twenty years. I got careless and cocky and it nearly ended in disaster. I’ve already got too much innocent blood on my hands. It’s one of the reason’s I got out of the game. It’s only by luck that there weren’t any fatalities today.”

  She surprised him by jabbing him in the chest.

  “Luck had nothing to do with it. Your talent, powers, and skill did that. I had no clue how to keep that building from collapsing. That was all you. Instead of panicking or freezing up, you took charge of the situation while holding up a friggin’ building. Even I froze up when I got there. You’re the only one who had the presence of mind to come up with a plan of action, preventing a tragedy.”

  “But…”

  “No! Reaper put them in danger, not you. You saved lives. Period.”

  The stern look on her face melted into something softer.

  “I’m just glad you’re on our side, After all this is over, I hope you’d consider sticking around,” she said, laying her hand on his leg before getting up.

  “I’d be honored to have you on our team.”

  He started to open his mouth, but she cut him off gently.

  “Don’t give me an answer now. Just think about it.”

  §§§§§§§§§§§§

  “Did we find the base?”

  Kaitlyn strode into the tac-center ahead of Rick and the rest of the team. She forced herself to control her breathing. If this mission was a failure, it would look badly on her. While everyone else gathered around the monitors, she noticed Rick hanging back.

  “Somewhat,” the tech said, bringing her thoughts back to the matter at hand, “We’re still compiling the data, but I think we did.”

  “Explain.”

  The technician spun around in his chair to face them.

  “Well, once Reaper got away from Newton,” he started, but paused at the frown she gave him. Kaitlyn noticed Rick wince at the statement.

  I gotta figure out a way to get him to stop blaming himself. He’s by far the most powerful being in our arsenal, even if it was only temporary. Him bashing himself didn’t serve any useful purpose right now.

  Turning back to the tech, she waved her hand at him.

  “Go on…”

  “Well, we uh, lost track of him visually once he got a couple miles away,” he continued, spinning around and tapping some keys on his keyboard. Another display popped up in front of them. She noticed out of the corner of her eye Rick leaning forward slightly, an intense look on his face as the technician pointed out a few areas.

  “I remembered reading about how someone overseas determined they could track stealth aircraft by how they interfered with cell phone towers. I believe the cyborg has enough metal to do something similar. What you’re seeing on the screen is a map of all the cell phone towers across the country and their coverage areas.”

  He pointed at another spot on the screen.

  “If you look here, you can see what looks like a pinching of the signals. Those deflections were generated when Reaper passed through areas before he cloaked.”

  Tracing another part of the screen, he continued.

  “This is what we were able to render after that.”

  “What about this spot right here?” she asked, pointing to a spot where the cell coverage returned to normal.

  “Well,” he started hesitantly, “we think that’s where he either went high enough to stop interfering with the cell phone towers, or that’s where he went to ground.”

  “When will you know,” she asked, a tinge of irritation creeping into her voice.

  “Uh… We’re not sure. That’s what we’re trying to calculate. We’re running the data through different algorithms, things like his velocity when he vanished to see if he was slowing down or not. We’re also trying to process the data from all across the country. If we pick up any similar readings further away, we know the spot he disappeared wasn’t his destination.”

  The technician glanced nervously at his screen before continuing.

  “We know he headed in a straight line east once he left the city and cloaked, so we’re pretty confident he kept heading in the same general direction. That is assuming he didn’t change direction after disappearing off our screen. There’s also the possibility he went overseas, but it’s unlikely since a polar orbit would have been faster. There’s also—”

  Kaitlyn held up her hand in annoyance.

  “Enough with the geek-speak. How long?”

  “We should hopefully be done with the calculations by morning, uh, Major.”

  “Get it done faster! Everything else is lower priority as of right now. Let me know the second you have an answer. Understood?”

  “Yes ma’am!”

  She turning away, striding toward the exit.

  Let’s just hope you get it done in time.

  §§§§§§§§§§§§

  Rick glanced around quickly before hurrying after Kaitlyn.

  “Hey, wait up.”

  She glanced back at him but didn’t slow her pace. Quickening his pace, he jogged to catch up to her.

  “What’s the plan?”

  “At this point,” she replied, “we wait until the nerd battalion tell us where we need to go.”

  “So, what? We all just gonna wait, hoping they don’t blow up the city?”

  She stopped suddenly in front of him, forcing him to come up short. Spinning, he noticed the tightness around her eyes when she snapped at him.

  “You got a better idea?”

  “Yeah, let’s all head out and take a gander at where the signal disappeared. Maybe we’ll find something.”

  “No.�
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  “No? Why the hell not?”

  “Because!” she snapped, giving him a measured look before taking a deep breath.

  “Listen, if we go out there and find nothing, we run a real risk of tipping our hand, giving away our only advantage. Right now, he doesn’t know we might have tracked him. If we start poking around an area he passed through while cloaked, they’ll suspect something. If they think we’re closing in, they might blast the city sooner, rather than later. That’s why we stay put.”

  Rick paused, surprised at her insight.

  “In the meantime, we have plenty of time now for you to tell me more about your powers,” she said, poking him in the chest for the second time today, “Starting with how, between the time we left this morning until we found you under that building, you managed to put on what looks to be a good sixty pounds of muscle.”

  Rick stared at her, debating with himself for a moment before giving her a sharp nod.

  “Fair enough, but on one condition. This goes no further than the two of us. Is that acceptable?”

  She hesitated for a split-second before reaching out, shaking his hand.

  “Deal.”

  Rick nodded again before gesturing around the hallway.

  “Is there someplace we can talk without being spied on?”

  Kaitlyn smiled before leading him away. After walking down several corridors and down multiple levels, she finally stopped at a nondescript metal door. Placing her body between him and a keypad, she punched in a code, causing the door to slide sideways into the wall. Stepping inside, she waved him in.

  “This room is shielded from all external communications, just one of several we have,” she said, walking through a short hallway before stepping through another door. Once inside, he sensed the hallway separating, followed by a hiss as the air was removed.

  “Okay, short of being on the moon, this is as private as it gets. Power’s self-contained by a hand-sized fusion reactor located under the floor and the room is suspended by a cable connected to a beam that’s floating over a maglev track. Nothing, no sounds, no radio waves, not even flashing lights leave this area. So whenever you’re ready…”