Hunter (9780698158504) Read online

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Lance said.

  Cam, who had continued to toss his coin while he and Adrianne talked, said, “Finished. One hundred coin tosses.”

  Thalamus said, “It came up heads between forty-five and fifty-five times. Am I right?”

  “Forty-eight. How did you know?”

  “We just talked about this. Probabilities. It could have been all heads or all tails, but it’s unlikely. The more the prediction deviates from the median, the lower the likelihood that it will be correct.”

  Adrianne said, “I understand that, I think. . . . You can’t say whether the Fourth of July ten years from now will be sunny or overcast, but you can be pretty sure that the summer as a whole will be more sunny than cloudy.”

  “Right,” Thalamus said. “Crowd theories—or swarm dynamics, or herding instincts, whatever name you want to give them—are usually applied to a large collection of individuals, but what if—”

  Lance jumped in: “What if we applied them to one person over a long period of time?”

  “Correct. Instead of attempting to extract a pattern from Slaughter’s actions by looking at the individual days, we broaden the scope. What is she up to overall?” Thalamus walked over to the large whiteboard. He wiped it clean with the edge of his hand, then picked up a pen. He drew a small X on the board, close to the left-hand side. “Here’s us.” He drew a small circle on the right-hand side. “Here’s Slaughter.” He added a series of arrows radiating from the circle. “She moves fast, so by the time we get from where we are to where we know she is, she’s already gone. OK? So, we need to find a way to predict where she’s going to be, and that’s where we aim for. Not where she is right now.”

  “Obviously,” Lance said. “But how do we predict it? That’s the hard part.”

  Thalamus said, “We get every one of Slaughter’s confirmed appearances and plot them on a four-dimensional graph. Then we should eventually be able to extrapolate the date and location of her next appearance. The more data we have, the greater the chance that our prediction will be accurate. It’ll take time, because we don’t know all of the forces that affect the target. Like . . . if someone rolls a ball down a perfectly smooth hill, you can easily figure out how fast you have to run to catch it. But if the hill isn’t smooth, it’s harder to predict the ball’s path. And what if there are gusts of wind that might knock it off course? Or if it’s a steel ball and someone’s switching a powerful magnet on and off? Or it could even be something as small as a grain of sand that sets the ball on a different course. The more variables you add, the harder it is to predict the path. You get me?”

  Lance nodded. “We get you. With someone like Slaughter, there are hundreds of different variables to take into account.”

  Thalamus clipped the top back onto the pen. “Not hundreds. Billions.”

  Cam muttered, “Oh man. . . . We’re going to be here forever!”

  Lance pointed to the X on the board. “So we simplify the process. We don’t go to her. We get her to come to us. We set a trap.”

  THE FOUR MEMBERS OF THE THINK TANK were clustered around a computer monitor that was relaying video from another of Max Dalton’s secret bases.

  Lance’s heart began to race when he saw his old friends Abby, Roz, and Thunder on the screen. “Man, it’s sure been a while.”

  Rosalyn Dalton, Max’s sister, was only a little taller than she had been at fifteen, and—being the only one of the three whose face was fully visible—was instantly recognizable.

  As a sixteen-year-old, Thunder had been thin and wiry and a little awkward. Now, aged twenty, he was broad-shouldered and heavily muscled. Despite his size he moved with the grace and fluidity of a gymnast.

  Abby—now calling herself Hesperus—was covered almost head to toe in brightly polished metal armor. She wore a close-fitting helmet and carried a sword in one hand and an ax in the other.

  “Whoa,” Cam said, “she looks dangerous.”

  Lance nodded. It’s gone, he said to himself. Whatever Max did to me doesn’t work anymore. Now she’s just someone I used to know. That thought gave him an odd feeling, like he’d lost or forgotten something, and it took him a moment to understand it. Makes sense. I’ve lived with the obsession about Abby for so long that now it’s like we’ve broken up or something.

  On-screen, Max said to the others, “Some of my people are watching and listening. They’ll be providing feedback and strategies as we go. We only have one shot at making this work, so we put everything into it, understood?”

  “Understood,” Thunder said. “You still haven’t told us what we’re going to do with Slaughter if we succeed.”

  Lance muttered, “Wow, his voice is a lot deeper than it used to be. That’s probably just for show, though—he can control sound, so it’s easy enough for him to make his voice as deep as he wants.”

  Thalamus said, “OK, see, because you were talking, we all missed what Max said next.”

  “Sorry.”

  Adrianne said, “It was something about a holding facility.”

  “Everyone please stop talking!” Thalamus said.

  Max spoke into his radio. “Think tank, are you picking this up?”

  Thalamus put on his headset and spoke into the microphone. “Signal’s coming through perfectly, Max. All feeds are in the green. We’re ready when you are.”

  “Good. We’re departing now. Our ETA is twenty-two minutes. Keep all the lines open and watch our backs.”

  “Will do.” Thalamus switched off the microphone. “Better get some lunch. Battles against Slaughter can take a while to play out.”

  “I remember,” Lance said. “You guys can go, I’ll stand watch.” He was finding it hard to look away from the monitors, harder still not to raise his hopes. An hour, maybe two, and she’ll be our prisoner.

  Lance thought back to his last meeting with Suzanne Housten, in the alternate universe that was created when Krodin was sent back in time. She hadn’t been Slaughter in that reality, just a freedom fighter, but the moment he’d seen her, he’d flown into a rage and tried to kill her. That was over four years ago, he reassured himself. Four years and different universe. I’m not the same person I was then.

  And neither is she. This is the woman who murdered my brother and my parents. Part of him was hoping that Slaughter wouldn’t come out of this conflict alive.

  Thalamus said, “No, I’ll stay. I know how all of this works. You’ve got fifteen minutes, no more. I’ll call you if I need you before then.”

  As Lance, Cam, and Adrianne made their way up to the dining area, Cam said, “This is way cool! We’re going to get to see a real, live superhero battle!”

  “Calm down, or we’re going to have to put newspapers down for you,” Lance said. “Don’t forget that people can get killed during these things.”

  “Sorry. But still, I’ve never seen anything like this. Man, I wish they’d taken us along.”

  “Well, I’ve never seen the inside of the sun. Doesn’t mean I want to go there.”

  Lance was halfway through a chicken sandwich when Cam said, “We’d better get back.”

  Adrianne followed them to the escalators. “Listen, I don’t think I want to see the fight. If Slaughter is there, it’ll be . . . It’s just too soon.”

  “I understand,” Lance said. “But I’d like you there anyway. You don’t need to watch the screens, just be in the room. Can you do that?”

  She nodded. “I’ll try.”

  In the Strategarium they found Thalamus still staring at the monitor.

  “Any news?” Lance asked.

  “I said I’d call you if there was anything.”

  “I know.” He pulled over a chair. “What’s their ETA now?”

  “Three minutes, thirty seconds.”

  “Hope this works,” Lance muttered.

 
It had been four weeks since the think tank had been formed, three weeks since they’d presented Max with their plan to capture Slaughter.

  Thalamus’s analysis of his database of Slaughter’s past appearances had shown four further instances of Slaughter heading to the same area of Queens, New York, over a period of two months, and the satellite photos Max provided suggested that she was indeed traveling to an elementary school.

  Max’s people had set up surveillance of the school, and on the first day they spotted Slaughter arriving a few minutes before nine in the morning, driving an ordinary SUV with a seven-year-old boy in the back. Slaughter dropped the boy at the school, then drove the car to a nearby parking lot, where she parked on the uppermost level before quickly stripping off her “mom” clothes and revealing her costume underneath.

  Within twenty-four hours, they had everything they needed to know about Slaughter. Using the name Nicola Annette Priest, she was living with a divorced father—Harland Mayfair—and his son, Curtis. In the mornings she worked in Hancock, New York, under the name Jennifer Macht.

  Lance had badgered Max about sitting on the information when they should be acting on it, until Max said, “We have to wait until the time is right, Hunter. We’re only going to get one chance. If we miss it, she’s gone for good.”

  The plan was to have Thunder, Paragon, and the others lie in wait for Slaughter in the multistory parking lot. When she returned there after her morning’s work to change back to her civilian clothes and collect her car, they would engage her. At the same time, another team would pick up her boyfriend and his son. “We get them as far away from her as possible,” Max said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Slaughter threatened to kill them in order to escape.”

  • • •

  Over the monitor’s speakers, Max’s voice said, “Spotters have her. She’s on the way.”

  Lance leaned closer to the monitor. It was now showing grainy footage from the parking lot, with the focus on Slaughter’s SUV.

  Then she was there, dropping out of the sky, and Lance automatically clenched his fists. His mouth had gone dry and he found it hard to swallow. “Oh boy . . .” Get her, he found himself thinking. Hurt her. Make her pay for what she’s done! He took a deep breath and held it for a few seconds, forcing himself to calm down.

  Moving quickly, Slaughter unlocked her car and pulled out a backpack, from which she removed a pair of tracksuit bottoms and a large, loose-fitting sweater, and pulled them on over her costume.

  Max’s voice whispered, “Hold fire . . . Hold fire . . .”

  Slaughter climbed into the driver’s seat and started up the engine. She reversed out of the parking spot, and Max yelled, “Go! Go!”

  The car suddenly rose into the air, and from the edge of the screen Roz Dalton came running, followed closely by Hesperus. There was a crash as Thunder dropped down onto the car’s roof, and then Paragon was zooming in, blasting at the driver’s-side door with a weapon that shot a high-velocity stream of thick, clear liquid. Lance knew this liquid to be an almost unbreakable glue that set instantly upon contact with metal.

  But before the liquid even touched the door, Slaughter had shot straight up, puncturing the roof and crashing into Thunder, sending him sprawling through the air.

  Thalamus immediately switched to a camera attached to one of the seven helicopters hovering over the city. On-screen, Slaughter arced through the air, curving back to collide with Thunder.

  Then Hesperus vaulted over the parking lot’s top rail, throwing herself into the air with her sword and ax ready.

  Watching this, Lance felt his heart stop. He hadn’t been able to persuade Max to leave Abby behind on this mission. “We believe that the time Quantum predicted for her death is still a couple of years away,” Max had said. “So we know she’ll survive this.”

  Lance had replied, “In that case, we also know that even if we do capture Slaughter this time, we won’t be able to hold on to her.”

  The view switched to the tiny camera attached to Paragon’s helmet, and the members of the think tank found themselves unconsciously swaying left and right as the armored hero chased Slaughter through the city.

  “Come on, Sol,” Lance muttered. “Thalamus, tell him to herd her back toward the others. We need to get her out over the East River where she can’t do as much damage. Adrianne, what’s Max’s emotional state?”

  “He’s scared. I think. Superhumans aren’t as easy to read as ordinary people. With Max it’s even trickier, because he could be channeling the emotions of the people whose minds he’s reading.”

  “Interesting,” Lance said. “And worth a shot. Thalamus, tell Max to try to scan Slaughter. We can see how she’s feeling about this. If he can do it, and you can sense her emotions, Adrianne, would that help you to locate her in the future?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “It can’t hurt.”

  “Keep your focus on him. Let me know if there’s any sudden shift in his emotions. Cam, what’s your take on this?”

  The teenager grinned. “This is wicked—it’s like a free action movie!”

  “No, dummy—you’ve read all the reports about Slaughter’s battles. What’s she likely to do next?”

  “Oh, right. She’ll go for the weakest. Paragon. His weapons aren’t much good against her. She’ll try to use him against the others. But he’s too fast for her, as long as his jetpack isn’t damaged.”

  “Good. Thalamus, get Paragon out of there. One kilometer out, and hold position. Instruct Thunder to blast her with shock waves, slow her down long enough for Hesperus to take a swing at her.”

  “Hunter, you’re forgetting Roz,” Adrianne said.

  “No, I’m not. I need her out of the line of fire for now. Thal, get Thunder to pull back as soon as Hesperus engages; I want him to focus his hearing directly on Slaughter’s heartbeat and redirect the sound to his camera’s audio pickup.”

  “It’s Thalamus, not Thal.”

  “Just tell him. Cam, slide over to the workstation at the end—make sure that we’re recording everything.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I said so.”

  Cam pointed at the screen, where Hesperus and Slaughter were locked together in midair battle. “But I’m watching the show!”

  Adrianne said, “I’ll do it.”

  “Thanks. If Slaughter’s heart starts racing, we’ll know she’s wearing down. During a sustained fight she has fits of fury that can burn her out pretty quickly.”

  Max’s voice came over the radio: “Hunter, why have you ordered Roz to hold back?”

  “Not the time for Q and A, Max,” Lance said. “Just get one of your copters to pick you up. Thal, get Paragon to charge full speed at Slaughter. Hesperus is to release her hold and drop down on your mark—I’ll tap you on the shoulder—and then on the second mark, Paragon is to divert his course. He’s to angle straight up, without slowing down if he can manage it.”

  Thalamus rapidly tapped at the keyboard while muttering instructions into his microphone. “Done. Paragon’s on the way.”

  “Show me. Camera eight, infrared filter.”

  The screen switched to a wider view, with bright dots superimposed over the image. The two in the center of the screen were squirming around each other, while a third, much brighter, dot was rapidly approaching them.

  Lance hovered his hand an inch over Thalamus’s shoulder. “Almost . . . almost . . .” He tapped the shoulder, and Thalamus said, “Go Hesperus!”

  Hesperus dropped away. Slaughter hesitated, started to go after her, then saw Paragon streaking toward her.

  “Distance?” Lance asked.

  “Two hundred meters,” Thalamus said. “One ten. Fifty.”

  Cam said, “He’s too close!”

  “Twenty.”

  Lance hit Thalamus’s shoulder again.

  “Go P
aragon!”

  On-screen, Paragon suddenly changed direction, zooming upward less than a second before he would have collided with Slaughter.

  Slaughter rocketed after him, and Lance grabbed the spare headset. “Thunder—on my mark, I want a focused shock wave. Hard as you can, hit her from the east!”

  “Lance?”

  “Not now, man. Roz, I want you and Hesperus in the air right now. Go due west, halfway across the East River, six hundred meters up, then hold tight and keep your eyes open. Paragon, you reading?”

  “I hear you, Hunter.”

  “She’s pushing way past her comfort zone. Don’t want to lose her. Drop your speed to five hundred, but do it gradually. Don’t make it look deliberate. Adrianne, what’s her heart rate?”

  The woman called back, “All I know is it’s very rapid.”

  “Good, that’s what we want. She’s close to burning out—she’ll have to rest soon. Roz, Hesperus—go faster. You’ve got to be there in twenty seconds.”

  Thalamus said, “What should I be doing?”

  Lance ignored him. “Thunder, you in position?”

  “Roger.”

  “Good. Paragon, ten seconds, then switch your jetpack’s power off and on. Five or six times should do it. Make her think it’s a malfunction. Adrianne? Shout if her heart rate increases. Thal, order camera two to move in to five hundred meters—and get him to zoom in on them.”

  The screen switched to show Paragon rapidly rising through the air, with Slaughter close behind. The exhaust flare from Paragon’s jetpack began to flicker on and off, and the distance between them narrowed.

  Adrianne shouted, “Heart rate’s up again!”

  “Perfect—she’s excited, thinks she’s catching him. Ready, Thunder . . . Now!”

  Thunder unleashed his shock wave, and Slaughter was instantly gone from the screen.

  “Roz, Hesperus—she’s coming your way. Catch her! Thunder, Paragon—close in on her. Thunder, blast her with constant white noise, keep her disoriented. Thalamus, get every camera on her.”