Absolute Power. Michael Carroll

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СКАЧАТЬ as he lay back on the hayloft in a remote farm in northern Romania, Colin Wagner understood exactly what his parents had been talking about.

      Yeah, adults are great at laying down the rules, but they’re not always so good at sticking to them. Working with Max Dalton is wrong. I don’t care if he’s the only ex-superhuman with any knowledge of how mind-control works. Max risked my life and the lives of tens of thousands of innocent people when he tried to use that machine. I know he thought he was doing the right thing, but that’s no excuse.

      Almost fifteen years earlier, on the day Colin’s best friend Danny Cooper was born, Danny’s father – the hyper-fast superhuman known as Quantum – had received a vision of the future. In that vision, Quantum had seen Danny as a young man leading an army of superhumans against the ordinary people. Billions of people would die in the war.

      Max Dalton knew Quantum well enough to realise that the future he’d seen had to be prevented. Max had used his mind-control on Quantum, forcing him to work alongside the villain Ragnarök to create a machine capable of stripping all the superhumans of their powers.

      It had worked. For ten years, there had been no superhumans. And then Danny and Colin – the son of Energy and Titan – reached puberty, and their own powers began to appear.

      If only Dad hadn’t destroyed Ragnarök’s machine just after it was used…Then none of us would have powers. We’d all still be living at home and we’d probably never have learned the truth about what happened to the superhumans.

      Once Max had learned that Danny’s powers were appearing, he’d attempted to build a second power-damping machine. But without Ragnarök’s understanding of how the powers worked, the machine was flawed. It would have killed Colin and Danny and thousands of other people.

      We had to stop it, Colin thought. Even if that means that the war might still happen…You can’t sacrifice innocent people just because one half-mad superhuman had a vision of the future.

      Colin sat up and looked around the barn. The shafts of sunlight were at a slightly steeper angle now. Better get out of here before the farmer comes to milk his cows.

      He froze.

      Something’s wrong. A farm is never this quiet.

      Colin pushed himself off the edge of the hayloft, dropped the four metres to the ground and landed silently. My God! I’ve gone deaf! But…He shook his head. This didn’t seem possible. Before he’d fallen asleep, he’d been able to hear the old farmer snoring in the farmhouse a hundred metres away. Now, there was nothing.

      Then Colin turned around and saw the well-dressed man and woman standing right behind him.

      Fifteen thousand kilometres to the west a large, sleek, black aircraft descended quickly and almost silently from the night sky, its six turbine engines blowing a large crater in the narrow, moon-lit strip of sand that separated the island’s dense jungle from the Pacific Ocean.

      Danny Cooper couldn’t help but admire the skill with which Renata Soliz handled the new StratoTruck’s controls; the craft touched down with barely a bump.

      The others were already out of the craft and running across the beach by the time Danny had managed to unclip his seatbelt.

      This was the furthest Danny had ever been from home: Isla del Tonatiuh was situated five hundred kilometres to the south-west of El Salvador. The island was less than thirty kilometres across and was covered in a thick canopy of vegetation: the perfect place for an international arms-smuggling operation.

      Danny silently made his way to the undergrowth, where the five others were waiting for him.

      Renata Soliz leaned close and whispered, “How is it that someone who can run as fast as you is always the last one out of the StratoTruck?”

      Danny grinned. “It would be a lot easier if whoever designed the seatbelts didn’t assume that everyone has two hands.”

      “All right,” Impervia said. “You know the drill. We move in hard and fast. Danny, you’re the scout.”

      Façade placed his hand on Danny’s shoulder. “Ready?”

      Danny nodded. He pulled his electronic compass from his pocket and examined it. The tiny screen showed his location and the location of the target. “OK.”

      Impervia said, “Take no chances, Danny. If they see you, get out of there ASAP. Do not engage.”

      “Understood. But they won’t see me.” Danny stuffed the compass back in his pocket, raised his night-vision goggles to his face and turned them on. The goggles had been specially modified so that he could put them on and activate them using only his left hand.

      “And keep the scanner going at all times. The target is two kilometres east, but the vegetation is heavy, so keep the noise level down.” Impervia looked at her watch. “Now…go.”

      Danny smiled at Renata, then concentrated. Slipping into slow-time was so simple now it was almost second nature. He pushed his way through the bushes.

      There were times when Danny was almost pleased that he was a superhuman. Times like this, when he knew he was doing something good, almost made up for the loss of his right arm. Almost.

      Since the start of the year, Danny Cooper, Renata Soliz and Butler Redmond had been involved in over a dozen missions like this one, and each one had been successful.

      It’d be a lot easier if Colin was with us, but even so…We’re not doing too badly.

      Danny felt a familiar churning in his stomach. Sometimes, when he thought about the way Colin had left Sakkara, it almost made him ill. He should have stayed, given us a chance to explain everything. Now he’s God-knows-where and his parents are worried sick about him.

      Danny climbed over a rotting, fallen tree and paused to check the compass. Through the night-vision goggles, everything looked green and washed-out. Worse, because he was in his high-speed mode the computer-enhanced images from the goggles flickered maddeningly.

      He glanced behind him and saw that his lightning-fast path through the jungle had shaken the moisture from the undergrowth, marking his trail with a cloud of droplets seemingly suspended in mid-air.

      Danny continued on his way, wondering how long it would take for Mrs Wagner to decide that the trip to the jungle would make a good topic for an essay.

      That was the worst thing about being a teenage superhuman: he still had to go to school. The previous month, Mrs Wagner had given him grief about not turning in his geography homework in time. Danny had tried to argue that he’d been kind of busy saving the world, but the teacher – a former superhuman herself – had simply said, “Danny, you’re the fastest human being alive. You could probably run to Alaska faster than most people could write an essay about it.”

      Life at Sakkara isn’t so bad, Danny told himself. Colin should have stayed with us. Max’s phone-filter thingy means that Yvonne can’t just call us and then use her mind-control, so we’re safe there.

       Well, reasonably safe. But Dioxin’s locked away and Victor Cross seems to have completely disappeared.

      Ahead, Danny could СКАЧАТЬ