Heroes Lost and Found Read Free Page A

special…” His speech trailed off at the end, his last few words indecipherable.
    “Let’s start at the beginning. We know about the jet packs. What’s this tracking/activation device?” My voice trembled on the last sentence, my suspicions rising through the fear.
    Outrager sighed. It seemed like the sigh of a child caught stealing cookies and trying to sound repentant. “We developed a special attachment to the Guardian wristband.”
    Hunter flinched and looked down at his own device again. It’d been dead since we took down the mainframe and destroyed the database holding all of our activation codes. The damned wristband wouldn’t come off and had gotten in the way more than once during our entanglements, a very visible reminder of our past.
    “We had a plan. If a Guardian died, we’d have to switch the owner…” He frowned, and I could see the wheels in his mind reconfiguring his speech. “We figured out a way to have more than one code on a Guardian’s brace. All the Guardian needed to do was scan the super’s plug, and the attachment would add the code to the activation brace.”
    “How would he keep them apart?” Hunter interrupted. “How would you know which code belonged to which super and so forth? And how many codes could one of these hold?” He looked at his own dead bracelet. “And how the hell is he powering it when mine’s been dead since we took out the base?”
    Outrager held up a picture. It showed a small black box, barely the size of a computer mouse. “This was only in emergencies, you understand. The idea was to put the super back under control until the Guardian could return to base and the super reassigned to a different Guardian. Purely as a last resort, you understand.”
    Steve let out something between a growl and a snort. I felt like joining him. The depth of the Agency’s demand for total control over our lives seemed to have no limits.
    Outrager scratched one ear. “So, ah, back to your question. It could hold up to twenty different codes until retrieved by the base computer and distributed to new Guardians. As to activation…” He flushed a deep red.
    I felt a stab of panic in my belly. In all the time we’d been dealing with Outrager, I’d never seen him flustered. Now he looked like a virgin asking his first girl out on a date.
    “He just taps in the code, as with all Guardians. Multiple supers, multiple codes, but they’ll all still explode when he hits the button. As to the power, ah, well…” Again the pregnant pause.
    “Spit it out already,” Rachael snapped.
    Outrager stared at the super for a second, taken aback by her attitude. Away from her captors and bullies, she’d blossomed into a pretty tough young woman.
    Despite the circumstances, I smirked.
    “The emergency power pack was built to not only keep the wristband going but to provide extra memory space for the codes.” He let out a nervous cough. “It will detonate all the codes and thus all the plugs if it’s removed from the Guardian’s wristband or if the Guardian dies, unless properly hooked up to an Agency mainframe and a shutdown procedure followed. No pulse, automatic activation. Prevents the supers from taking out the Guardian in a mass rush.” Outrager glanced over at me. “Or if the Guardian gets knocked out. Any major disruption of the Guardian’s brain waves indicating unconsciousness and the device activates all the plugs at once.”
    My half smile died, replaced by a wave of nausea. “How does the scanning work?”
    “That’s where you got lucky, in a matter of speaking.” He tapped the photograph, his short manicured nails denting the glossy surface with half-moons. “The super in question has to stand still and be within twenty feet to be properly scanned. One code at a time under very controlled circumstances. It’s not meant to be done in a hit-and-run sort of situation.”
    The headache blossomed with a fury I hadn’t felt in years. “So this is what the bastard