Mercury Revolts (20 page)

“Um,” replied Mercury again. “I’m sticking with the loyalty
thing.”

“Because the traitor reveals the inherent absurdity of war,”
Arnold went on. “If the British are all just basically good men doing their
jobs and the Americans are all just basically good men doing their jobs, then
switching from one side to another should raise eyebrows no more than a man
walking down the street to save a farthing on a loaf of bread. But allowing
officers to change sides at the drop of a hat would make a mockery of the whole
idea of war, so we create this elaborate fiction around the idea of ‘treason.’
The traitor’s only crime is to listen to his conscience rather than blindly
accept the absurd contradictions of war.”

Mercury raised an eyebrow at this. “Conscience?” he asked.
“Is that what you’re calling it?”

Arnold sighed heavily. “Perhaps my conscience is faulty,” he
admitted. “Perhaps I’m not so much following my own inner voice as rebelling
against the decrees of small-minded men. I don’t like my actions being dictated
by the whims of fools.”

Mercury had no response for that. He didn’t particularly
like it either.

“In the end, though,” said Arnold, “I suppose I’m just a
pawn in a game that’s beyond my grasp. Tell me, Mercury, how does it all end?”

“What all?” asked Mercury.

“America,” he said.

“You mean, do the Americans win?”

Arnold thought for a moment. “Yes, that, I suppose. But I’m
really wondering whether, in a bigger sense, the American ideal survives.”

“The American…”

Arnold laughed. “Ah, never mind,” he said, wistfully.
“Someone in your position, on the outside, you can’t see it. There is something
special about this place, though.
And about the people.
Something about the combination of the British
love
for law and order and this wild, untamed country. You can see it in the best of
America’s citizens, like Washington himself. If this country can follow his
example, and not fall victim of the sort of petty backbiting and narrow
self-interest that has befallen me—and which I, to my regret, have engaged—this
country could become something the world has never seen.
A
beacon of freedom and justice.
I want to know whether that could really
happen, or whether men like Washington and Jefferson are doomed to be
disappointed by what this country becomes.”

To this, Mercury had no answer, and for a long time the two
stared quietly out across the water.

“Sloop,” said Mercury quietly at last.
“Sloopy
sloop.”

Chapter Twenty-four
            
 

Grand Rapids, Michigan; August
2016

The silver-haired figure burst from
the clouds and plummeted toward the roof of the Vanden Heuvel Building. At
first he fell limply, as if he were asleep, but as he approached the roof, he
began to look around frantically, as if suddenly realizing where he was. But by
then it was too late: he was caught in the Balderhaz Field, making it
impossible for him to exert control over the interplanar energy fields. His
eyes went wide as the roof grew steadily bigger. On the roof, almost directly
under him, was a black duffel bag. He wondered what was in it. He wondered if
he could make himself hit the duffel bag, and whether it would break his fall.

Fortunately, he didn’t have to worry about the pain caused
by hitting the roof, because when he was still about a hundred yards up, he was
riddled with automatic weapon fire. It seemed that hiding behind various
ventilation ducts had been several men wearing camouflage that made them
virtually indistinguishable from the gravel of the rooftop.

The figure hit the roof about three feet from the duffel
bag, which, holding only a cinder block, wouldn’t have done much to break his
fall anyway. He lay unmoving as the men ran out from their hiding places, their
guns still trained on him. The door to the stairwell burst open and Zion
Johnson ran out to examine the main. He pulled out a cell phone and punched a
button.

“It’s me,” he said into the phone after a moment. “We got
him. I’m sure, yeah. My guys tore him up pretty bad, but there’s no mistaking
the hair. So far, he’s the only one who’s shown up, but we’re working on
tracking down the other two. When this guy comes to, we’ll put the screws to
him.”

Zion Johnson hung up the phone. Michelle had told him
Mercury was the ringleader of the group, the one they needed to capture at all
costs. The other one, Eddie, was a mild nuisance at worst, and Michelle was
convinced that without Mercury he was no threat. Suzy was nothing to worry
about either; they’d already gotten the thumb drive with the Brimstone data on
it, so she had no proof of anything. Mercury was the one big x-factor, the fly
in the ointment of Michelle’s plan.

He grimaced as he approached the bloody figure on the roof.
Zion Johnson had been given mug shots of Mercury, but there was no chance of
identifying his face in this condition. If it weren’t for that ridiculous hair,
there’d be no way of knowing it was really him.

Zion Johnson grabbed a walkie-talkie from his belt. “This is
Big Dog. Quicksilver is in the bag. I repeat
,
Quicksilver is in the bag. Send the elevator to the roof. Let’s get moving.”

One of the men threw the silver-haired figure over his
shoulder and they made their way to the elevator. They took the elevator down
to the parking garage, where they loaded the limp body into an unmarked van and
got inside. The driver had been waiting for them; Zion Johnson threw his
crutches inside and managed to climb into the passenger’s side. The van peeled
out, heading for the exit.

“Bomb… in… garbage…” moaned the silver-haired man in the
back. One of the men kicked him in the ribs.

“Shut up!” yelled Zion Johnson. “And don’t try anything.
I’ve got this cube thing.” He pulled the Balderhaz Cube from his pocket and
regarded it. He couldn’t help but laugh, despite the pain in his leg. “You guys
aren’t so special. All it takes to bring you down to our level is this little
black cube.”

The tires screeched and the Balderhaz cube jumped out of
Zion Johnson’s hand as the van came to a sudden stop.

“What the hell?” said Zion
Johnson.
But when he looked up it was clear why the driver had stopped. He’d been just
about to pull out of the garage when a couple had walked in front of the van.
And not just any couple: a weasely-looking guy and a chick with purple hair.
They were standing in the middle of the sidewalk, momentarily paralyzed with
fear.

“Apprehend those two pedestrians!” growled Zion Johnson.

The van door swung open and four of the men jumped out.

Eddie and Suzy took off running, but they didn’t get far.
The men tackled them, ziptied their hands, and dragged them back to the van.
They were hoisted into the back of the van along with the silver-haired man.
Zion Johnson’s men climbed in after them and slammed the door shut. The van
pulled onto the street.

“Ha!” exclaimed Zion Johnson, looking behind him at the trio
tied up in the back of the van. “I not only got the big fish, I got the two
little ones too.”

“…garbage…” the man in the back murmured.

“Yeah, good job on that,” Suzy sneered at him. “You’re like
some kind of tactical genius.”

“Suzy!” snapped Eddie.

“What?” said
Suzy.
“It’s too late
for him to do anything about it. It’s up to Mercury to stop the bomb now.”

Zion Johnson felt a sinking feeling in his gut. It was
possible this was some sort of ruse, but it didn’t feel like one. He jumped out
of his seat, grimacing as pain jolted through his leg. “Out of my way!” he
yelled at the men crowded into the van, as he clawed his way toward the man
lying curled up in the back. He leaned over the man and grabbed his hair,
yanking his head back so he could see his face. But it was no use; the man’s
face was still badly beat up and covered with blood. He understood that these
BIOS—Beings of Indeterminate Origin, that’s what they were calling them—healed
at an extremely accelerated rate, but maybe the cube thing was interfering with
that ability.

He pulled his hand back and found it sticky with blood and…
something sparkly? It smelled like solvent. He turned to Suzy. “Is that…
spray
paint?” he asked, already knowing the answer. The
sinking feeling had become more of a plummeting-in-free-fall-without-a-net
feeling. He drew his gun—a Desert Eagle .44
magnum—
and
held it to the man’s temple. “Who are you?” he demanded.

“…bomb…” the man with the spray-painted hair murmured.

“His name is Nisroc,” said Suzy. “He’s from Chaos Faction.”

“But then…” said Zion Johnson, “Chaos Faction is
here
?”

“You seriously didn’t know?” asked Suzy.

Zion Johnson said, “They were supposed to be… I mean, I
thought they were…”

“They’re here,” said Suzy. “And they’ve got the bomb.”

“…couldn’t find the red
X
…” the man with the sticky
silver hair murmured.

“Shut up,” Zion Johnson growled, and shot Nisroc in the
face.

Chapter Twenty-five
                 
 

Grand Rapids, Michigan; August
2016

Mercury crashed through a window on
the top floor of the Vanden Heuvel Building, hitting the carpet and rolling
several times, finally coming to a halt as he slammed into a heavy wooden desk.

“Ergh,” he said, as he lay on the floor trying to orient
himself
. He’d waited as long as he dared for the men with
the Balderhaz Cube to leave, but knowing that the bomb could go off any minute,
he’d had to make the last fifty feet or so of the flight inside the field. He’d
had to get up to a hundred miles an hour and aim slightly above the window to
compensate for gravity, since he would be relying on momentum to get him the
last fifty feet. He was a little amazed it actually worked.

He groggily got to his feet and looked around. He was in a
reception area, beyond which was a maze of cubicles. “If I were a cute little
nuclear bomb,” Mercury mused, “where would I be?”

After a moment he remembered that Nisroc had said the bomb
was in a janitor’s cart. He sprinted down a hall between two rows of cubicles
and turned at random down another. The cart was nowhere to be seen. He sprinted
down another hall, but still didn’t see the bomb. Realizing too late that he
should have used a more systematic method, he made another turn and found
himself back where he had started. Or was he? All of these posters selling
P
ERSEVERANC
E
and
D
EDICATIO
N
and
A
MBITIO
N
looked alike. It seemed
to Mercury that anyone who possessed any of those traits wouldn’t be stuck in a
place like this, but maybe that’s why they had so many of them. Had he passed
that seashore already? That mountain range looked familiar.

While trying to get his bearings, he literally stumbled on
the janitor’s cart, banging his knee against it while he was trying to make out
whether a distant poster read
D
ELIVERANC
E
or
P
ERVERSIT
Y.
He rooted through the
trash, finding at the bottom a lumpy, almost rectangular mass of components
wrapped in brown plastic, about the size of an Oxford dictionary. Mercury
shuddered. It looked just like the Wormwood bomb. He could try disarming it,
since now he knew which wire not to disconnect, but he didn’t want to take the
chance that they’d swapped the wire colors for the Mark II bomb. There was no
visible timer on this one, so it was impossible to know when it was going to
detonate. It was also impossible to determine why the bomb smelled like
gasoline, but that was a question for another time. He tucked the bomb under
his arm, sprinted across the floor, and crashed through the nearest window.

And immediately began plummeting toward the ground.

Mercury had taken so long to find the bomb that he’d assumed
the agent carrying the Balderhaz Cube would be well out of range by the time he
jumped through the window, but apparently he’d been mistaken. He managed to get
ahold of enough interplanar energy to slow his descent a bit, landing with a
crash on the roof of a parked Buick sedan, shattering the windows and crushing
the roof canopy. It was late enough that the streets were mostly deserted, but
the few pedestrians in the area stopped and gaped at him.

“Hey, it’s that terrorist from TV!” somebody yelled. “And
he’s got a bomb!”

This struck Mercury as a little unfair. Even if he was a
terrorist, there was no way anyone could know that what he was carrying was a
bomb. He didn’t even think it particularly looked like a bomb. It could be a
box of blueberry muffins for all they knew. Mercury wished it
was
a box
of blueberry muffins instead of a device for starting an uncontrollable nuclear
reaction that would level twenty blocks. He loved blueberry muffins.

Mercury leaped off the Buick onto the street and began
sprinting down the street away from the Vanden Heuvel building. If he was going
to get airborne, he needed to get farther away from the Balderhaz Cube. When he
was half a block from the building, he shot into the air, to the abject
surprise of the pedestrians.

Soaring above the buildings, Mercury gained velocity as he
left the Balderhaz field behind. His greatest fear was that the bomb would go
off while he was only half a mile or so up. He’d done enough research after his
experience with the Wormwood bomb to know that a ten kiloton bomb would
actually do far more damage if it detonated several hundred yards up than at
ground level. That had presumably been the reasoning behind putting the bomb on
the thirty-fifth floor of the Vanden Heuvel. If Michelle had really wanted to maximize
destruction, she’d have had someone carry it a few hundred yards higher into
the sky, right above downtown—exactly like Mercury was doing right now. The
Little Boy bomb, which had destroyed Hiroshima, was of comparable explosive
power, and it had been designed to detonate at 1,900 feet for maximum impact.