The elevator to the corridor leading to Windom's laboratory opened, and Ben strolled out alone. He greeted his men. "Hey, John, Reynolds. Larry, I thought you were on patrol, you and Sam."
All four security guards looked up, their faces breaking out in smiles. "Ben, glad you're here. Windom's been looking for you; couldn't find you before. Wants you inside. Wants your help, or something." One of the men shuddered dramatically. "Wouldn't want your job, boss. There's some nasty shit coming out of that lab."
"Lots of screaming," another confirmed. "It's quieted down now. Hope it's over. I'm gonna be hearing that voice in my nightmares."
Ben nodded somberly. "Yeah, you're right, John. It's nothing you want to get involved in. Mutant stuff. Look, I got it covered, so you four head on upstairs, okay? I sent Walters out on recon, and he hasn't checked back in yet. The four of you head out after him, toward the north forty. I know I'm just jumpy, but…" he let his voice trail off.
"You got it, boss." None of the four wanted to remain down here in the basement listening to the unidentified horror going on behind closed laboratory doors. "We'll check on Walters, no problem." They hustled past the super-soldier and into the open and waiting elevator. The silver doors slid shut with a hiss, a gentle hum following as the lift rose.
Lexa released the three members of Mutant X from her invisibility, and they stepped away from the wall. Wouldn't do for the guards to accidentally bump into something that didn't look like it was there. "Not bad, Sutter. You have a flair for this."
"It's in my genes." But the humor was quickly fleeing as Ben concentrated on the entrance. "It's quiet in there. Too quiet," he added. "Guys, my mother is in there." Meaning, she's just as much a prisoner as Jesse.
"And she's helping Windom," Lexa returned coolly.
"Not by choice." Ben indicated the almost closed wound under his shirt. "She doesn't know about this."
"Which means, neither does he. Windom still thinks he has a hold over you." Brennan was more than happy to put the best face possible on things that were already too sticky. "How do we take this? What's the layout? Ben?"
"There's a generator far back left," the super-soldier said, ignoring the icicles that Lexa continued to shoot forth. "Take that out, and the power's gone. No matter what, he can't use most of his toys on Jesse, or on us."
"And what, exactly, kind of toys can we look forward to?" Lexa asked.
Ben ticked them off on his fingers. "One, there's an electrified cage that he's been keeping Jesse in while he's not needed. There's a healthy amount of juice running through there, not enough to fry anyone on a permanent basis but enough to make sure that you won't be turning cartwheels for the next ten minutes. He's been keeping Mother in there, now that she's not being quite so cooperative."
"Not a problem." Brennan clicked his fingers. A spark of electricity ran up the miniature Jacob's Ladder. "Remove the generator, and everything hooked up to it goes dead. Next?"
"Windom's got an inhibitor," Ben told them. "It's got its own power supply. Last time I saw it, it was wrapped around Jesse's head."
"Let me guess. One wrong move from us, and he zaps Jesse." And those puppy-dog eyes will look at me blankly forever. "What would happen if the remote control was no longer in the picture?"
Ben got his own blank look. "You know, I'm not really sure? I assume that the inhibitor wouldn't work. It won't have any signals fed to it."
"And this will be in Windom's hand?" And can I laser off that hand at the wrist while I'm destroying that menace to mutant society?
"That I'm not so sure of," Ben said honestly. "He usually leaves it on a bench somewhere, out of Jesse's reach, just in case. He's usually busy with getting samples for the cure for Mrs. Windom. And he leaves Jesse so wiped that he couldn't use his powers even if he wanted to. The inhibitor is just a fail-safe."
Lexa had heard enough. "All right, that baby's mine. Search and destroy. What else?"
"Guards," Ben said promptly. "Four of my guys are in there. Guys that really don't want to be doing this," he added pointedly. "You can back them into a corner, and they'll happily put down their weapons." He thought for a moment. "I can order them to lay down arms. They'll listen to me, more than Dr. Windom."
"Do that," Shalimar told him. "Any bright ideas, I'll handle them. Anything else?"
Ben looked uncomfortable. "Treo. He got called in to help when they couldn't find me. Took some doing, too. He hates science, and this won't be helping. He's not a bad kid, guys. Just happened to pick the wrong parents."
"His tough luck." Lexa considered. "Which phase of water will he be in?"
"Whichever one suits his purposes," Ben said honestly, "and he can go from one to another in a heartbeat. Guys, I really don't know which way Treo will jump. This is his father, and his mother, but beyond that I think he's really skeeved at what's going on. He's not into torturing fellow mutants."
"Could've fooled me," Brennan grunted. "All right, if he doesn't play nice, I'll work him over."
"Be careful," Shalimar warned. "If he douses you with water—"
"Then I'll move in close and rearrange his face," Brennan replied promptly.
"Think of fighting Jesse, using his full powers," Ben advised worriedly. "Defensively, he's almost unbeatable. If he goes gaseous—"
"I'll turn him into a steam bath," Lexa interrupted. "Next?"
"That's probably all—" Ben said when the intercom on the wall erupted.
"Ben! Boss, we've got bogies in the northwest! And, dude, they're in black rubber suits! We're not touching them with anything we've got!"
Ben swore. "The Dominion! They're back for another round." He looked around for non-existent help. "If I don't go and help my people, the Dominion'll be breathing down our necks down here in minutes. My guys aren't equipped to handle what the Dominion can throw at them. They'll get mown down."
"Go," Lexa ordered. This way I don't have to worry about which side you're on, super-soldier. "Keep the Dominion out of here for as long as you can. We'll extract Jesse and move out fast."
"Only fair, since we probably led them here," Shalimar put in.
Ben wasn't satisfied. "My mother—?"
"She'll be as safe as we can keep her," Shalimar told him. "She's not the enemy, Ben." I hope.
Ben nodded, accepting the necessity. "Keep in contact. I'll hold the Dominion off as long as I can." He headed for the stairs, eschewing the elevator as too slow. The stairwell door shut quietly behind him.
Time to get the job done. The three of Mutant X looked at each other. "On the count of three," Brennan said, holding up his hand. "One—"
A ragged cry emerged from behind closed doors. None of the team waited for Brennan to get to three. Brennan slammed into the door, flinging it wide open to bang against the wall. He dropped and shoulder-rolled to a kneeling position. He didn't bother to scan the situation; he left that for his teammates. A quick aim, a blast of lightning, and the generator in the far corner went up in a shower of sparks and noise.
It was a good example of teamwork: by dropping to a low position, Brennan cleared the way for Lexa to hurl a little of her own havoc. Her target: the remote for the inhibitor that she saw encircling Jesse's head.
At first she couldn't find it. Windom himself held Jesse's head in his hands, staring deeply into the molecular's eyes and clearly inflicting his own empathic powers onto her teammate. The inhibitor that Ben Sutter had spoken of encircled Jesse's head as a precaution, but the remote? Her gaze shifted to the other occupants of the room: Dr. Sutter was engaged at the hypodermic plunged into Jesse's back. Treo was in the corner of the room, working some controls and trying not to barf. The guards likewise had kept their eyes downcast, and were now grateful to have something different to focus on rather than the tortured mutant in their midst.
Where had Ben said? The bench? There the little bugger was, a small black box that looked like it had been salvaged from a television remote control junk heap, a nasty little oblong that had far too many buttons and knobs for any sane person to figure out how to use.
Lexa couldn't torch the inhibitor itself, not without frying Jesse, but Ben had said that Windom couldn't get the damn thing to work without the control box. Exit one control box. Lexa focused a slender but very hot shaft of laser light, and took out not only the remote control but a substantial portion of the bench that it rested on. Treo huddled back into the corner, turning into an icicle to protect himself from the flying shrapnel.
Windom spared a split second to register what was going on. "No!" he howled. "Not now! Get them!" He turned back to glare into Jesse's brain, wrenching out a cry of agony from the molecular. "Bea! Get the sample! Hurry! So help me, Bea, I'll blow your son to shreds if you don't hurry!" And he meant it.
Dr. Sutter had no choice. She bent over the syringe inserted into Jesse's spinal column, withdrawing the required straw-colored fluid, ignoring the havoc emerging around her. Tears leaked down her cheeks.
The guards likewise saw no choice. They had been instructed to protect Windom from Mutant X at all cost; it was their job, and there was no Ben the Boss to countermand those orders. They advanced. Hesitant, sure, but they advanced.
That was Shalimar's cue. She bounced off the wall, taking delight in smashing a bank of beakers on her way, and sent guard number one into oblivion with a single kick. Mindful of Ben's concerns, she was uncharacteristically gentle with the others, wrenching them quickly and carefully into something resembling sleep. The fourth she didn't have time for. Brennan, having completed his assignment of taking out the generator, traded several blows with the last guard who had the misfortune to actually be competent in martial arts. If Ben had been there, he would have informed Brennan that Svensen also held black belts in three different traditions. For Brennan, it only made the task more enjoyable. After having been held psychic captive by a teen age girl upon whom Brennan couldn't seek revenge, the elemental longed for an opponent worthy of his attention. Svensen went down.
Windom snatched the filled syringe triumphantly from Beatrice Sutter's hand, releasing Jesse from the empathic torture. The molecular slumped in his restraints, spent. But Dr. Windom wasn't finished. "Tell them to back off!" he ordered Dr. Sutter. "Tell them to back off, or I'll activate the bomb inside your son!" He held up a small button. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that that little button would send a signal to the explosive inside Benjamin Sutter.
Except that explosive was no longer inside the super-soldier. Only Ben knew where he'd dumped it, but it wasn't inside the man. But Windom didn't know that. And neither did Dr. Sutter.
Beatrice Sutter: researcher, doctor, scientist—and mother. Above all: mother. A mother with a son in danger. There was anguish in her voice, misery in every line of her body, but she snatched up a scalpel and held it to Jesse's throat. "Back off!" she ordered. "Please! Stay away!"
They stopped.
"Put it down," Brennan told her. "There's no longer any threat. Ben is safe."
"They'll say anything to save him," Windom hissed. "I only need a few seconds more!"
"We're not lying," Shalimar said earnestly. The scalpel was only scant millimeters from Jesse's jugular. The molecular seemed unaware of his danger, his eyes closed, his hair plastered to his head in exhaustion. "Ben got the explosives out. I saw the wound myself."
"Don't trust them!" Windom added something to the syringe. "Listen to me, Bea! Don't trust them! I'll blow your son up!"
Dr. Sutter looked from one to the other. "Please stay back!" she pleaded. "Give him another moment! It will all be over then. You can have Jesse back."
"Dr. Sutter—" Lexa started, when a croak interrupted her.
"Dr. Sutter." Jesse couldn't look around to stare her in the eye, not with being buckled into Windom's fiendish contraption. "Dr. Sutter, your son is safe. I took the explosives out of him myself."
Dr. Sutter froze. Frightened. Not knowing what to think. The wrong choice would cost the life of a man, and that man might either be her son, or the mutant at whose throat she held a sharp blade.
"He's lying, Bea." Windom continued to work, continued to prepare the solution to restore his wife. He only needed a few seconds longer. "I held him captive. He couldn't have done it. He's lying."
Jesse coughed, trying to clear a throat made hoarse by screaming. "There's blood under my fingernails from where I reached in to grab it. Look at my hands, Dr. Sutter."
Dr. Sutter looked. "The fingernails; they're brown. Old blood."
"Dirt," Windom insisted. "Justin, take the scalpel from her. Help Dr. Sutter." Meaning, I'm losing this argument, son. I need more time!
"Stay where you are, Treo." Lexa's voice was full of lethality. "Dr. Sutter, put the scalpel down." But didn't add: before I burn it from your hand. Even though the others knew and feared the possibility.
"Call him," Shalimar added. "Call Ben. Ask him."
But the facility intercom interrupted them. Ben's own voice crackled over the speaker. "Mayday! Mayday! The Dominion has broken through the northwest entrance! We're falling back!"
"Ben?" Dr. Sutter turned, alarm in her face. The edge of the scalpel hovered a scant hair from Jesse's throat.
It was enough. The feral flashed in, snatching the blade from the doctor's hand. Brennan, right behind, hauled Dr. Sutter back and out of harm's way. The older woman squealed in surprise and shock.
But the shock was Justin 'Treo' Windom. Not happy, but, just as Ben was Dr. Sutter's son, Treo's mother was living as a collection of disparate molecules in an over-sized fish tank. A mother who was about to be restored to life with one single additional dose of what was in the syringe in Dr. Windom's hand.
The water molecular darted forward to take Jesse's head in his hands. "Stop!" he yelled, as much fear in his voice as they had ever heard. Treo's hands shook, but he kept them at Jesse's temples. "Stop, or I'll kill him!"
"He can do it," Dr. Sutter warned, still held captive in Brennan's grasp. "He can turn the water inside every cell to ice. All the cells will freeze and burst. Jesse will be killed instantly."
Mutant X stopped. The photons died away in Lexa's hands.
Dr. Windom finished his preparations. Advancing on the tank, he inserted the syringe and depressed the plunger, pushing the contents into the psychedelic swirling inside.
The swirling took notice. The colors began to coalesce, began to take shape. An arm appeared, then a shapely leg flashed by the glass barrier. A glimpse of a face, quickly replaced by a hand pushing away from the glass.
"It's working," Windom said in a hushed voice, awed. "It's working! Katherine, are you there?"
"Mom?" Treo too took a step forward. And, incidentally, a step away from Jesse.
A stunning woman emerged from the tank, dripping wet—and naked. Mutant X had expected any wife of Abner Windom to be his own age, old enough to have given birth to Treo and Amanda. But this woman looked little older than Lexa, and in almost as good shape. Living inside a tank as a few million disassociated molecules had clearly agreed with her.
She was naked—and furious. She snatched a stray towel from behind Abner Windom, holding it to herself, water dripping from long strawberry blonde hair. "Abner Franklin Windom, you are an absolute ass!"
Oops.
"Did you ever think to ask me if this was what I wanted?" The woman continued. "Did you ever think that perhaps this was the next stage in evolution for a molecular? That being part of the world, touching every possible molecule on earth, would be what I wanted?"
"But, Katherine—"
"Don't 'but, Katherine' me! You have always taken what you wanted, no matter what the consequences!" The woman shook a dripping finger at Dr. Windom, water droplets flying. "This was my experiment! And you ruined it! You cooped me up in that tank for years, Abner!"
"Katherine—"
"I could have taught Justin how to do this, once I learned the technique of going and coming into a plasma state. Did you ever think of that, Abner?"
"Katherine—"
"You are impossible!" the woman shrieked. And then she slapped him.
Dr. Abner Windom saw stars. He staggered back against the bank of computers. The little button that controlled the explosives that had formerly been inside Ben Sutter went flying.
Normally, that would be a good thing: the controls no longer within Dr. Windom's grasp. But the button slammed against the wall, depressing the controls that set off the explosives.
Even that shouldn't have been a bad thing. The explosives weren't inside Ben Sutter any longer, even though Dr. Sutter, not certain of that, screamed in horror.
The noise of the scream was lost in the explosion, and all occupants of Dr. Windom's lab learned where Ben had placed the explosives in his hurry to escape the lab: underneath the tank. The quantity of explosive material wasn't extensive, but the effects were. As real estates agents were wont to say: location, location, location!
The shrapnel of the generator was a mere prelude to what was produced by the over-sized glass tank as it blew up. Treo instantly converted to ice to protect his mother. He couldn't reach his father, nor Mutant X. They ducked, Brennan taking Dr. Sutter to the floor and the girls covering their injured teammate. The din was incredible, with the sound of the explosives being overtaken by the shattering of the tank and the crash of the glass against anything and everything inside the lab.
The silence following was equally deafening.
Lexa straightened up, Shalimar easing herself away from Jesse. The molecular groaned, his head flopping back. The pair instantly went to work on the buckles restraining him, Lexa flinging the remnants of the inhibitor to the glass-covered corner of the room. Brennan too pulled himself to a standing position, Dr. Sutter uttering a grunt of dismay at the slice a sharp piece of glass had left in his leg. Brennan winced, the smile more for show than for reality. "Care to make a habit of patching up Mutant X, doc?"
"Not by choice," she replied wryly.
"Mom?" Treo asked, reverting back into his usual state of matter.
"I'm all right, dear," Katherine Windom said, adjusting the towel around herself, reaching up to straighten her hair only to realize that that would entail detaching the hand restraining the towel in place. "My, you've grown so tall during this time. How long has it been?" She chose to abandon the hair. Then: "Abner!"
The main casualty of the explosion was Abner Windom himself. Victim of his own explosives. A shard of glass had pierced his heart.
But—
"Talk to me, guys," came nervously over the intercom. "What's going on? What was that noise?"
"We're cool down here," Brennan called out, and, looking around, added, "mostly."
"Clean it up quick," Ben advised. "The Dominion is through the gates. We got our asses whupped, and my guys are sitting on the ground with fingers laced behind their heads. I'm heading back toward you right now. The boys in black are conducting an in depth search of the premises, and I do mean in depth. ETA your location in less than ten minutes. Better boogie, dudes and dud-esses. They are looking for you, and they mean business!"