Legacy of a Mad Scientist Page 5

  Bobby rolled his eyes. He was tense, perhaps afraid of the rambunctious dog, Ash knew the Dunkirk's owned a cat. If she could get Bobby and Jack to get along, that would be for the best.

  “I don’t want him to go crazy every time he sees you,” she explained.

  Bobby knelt in front of Jack, and in a rare moment of forced maturity, said, "Sorry for chasing you around like that." He stretched out his hand. "Shake on it?"

  Jack rolled his head to a side, glancing from Ashley to Bobby, and sensing it was okay, raised a paw, putting it in Bobby's hand.

  Bobby smiled and rubbed Jack's head.

  The beagle barked, his tail wagging, and tackled Bobby onto the ground, where they wrestled a bit. Bobby played with Jack’s ears and the beagle rolled against the boy’s arms. Bobby climbed to his feet laughing, while Jack bounced around the smiling kids.

  From the edge of the circle, an older voice made itself heard. "Goddamn, Bobby, you are such a bitch! I'm embarrassed you're my brother."

  The kids spun as if of one mind.

  Bobby's older brother Evan stood on a nearby rise. He was fourteen and had hit his growth spurt early. With one foot on his hoverboard, he towered over the other kids. He looked big enough to play for the varsity punch-ball team. Two of his friends stood with him.

  "You let a girl make you apologize to a dog? What the hell? Didn't I teach you better than that? Are you wearing panties?"

  "What... It's just..." Bobby mumbled.

  "I asked you a question!" Evan snapped. "I said, Are you wearing panties?"

  "No, What... Screw you, Evan."

  Even slid down the slope, piloting his board to a stop directly in front of his brother.

  “How could you?” he asked.

  Bobby flinched as Evan raised an arm overhead, as if to hit him. The blow didn't come. Evan seemed satisfied with the flinch.

  Evan looked at Ashley. "Who the hell do you think you are?"

  "Your brother was being a dick," Ashley answered. "I see it runs in the family."

  The kids gasped and held their breath.

  “I'm a dick? I'll show you some dick." Evan stepped onto his board, walking it toward Ashley.

  As soon as he was within range, Ashley kicked the hoverboard out from under him.

  He crashed to the ground and a moment later, scrambled back up to his feet.

  Ashley had already taken a couple of steps back, out of range.

  She and Evan stared each other down.

  He hesitated.

  Ash picked up Jack's leash from where it lay in the clearing and handed it to Geoff. "Put this back on Jack," she said.

  Geoff nodded, took the leash and secured it to Jack's collar.

  Jack stared at Evan, growling quietly.

  Evan hadn't taken his eyes off Ashley and continued to glare.

  "Come on, we have to get home for dinner," Ash said.

  As she and Geoff walked Jack from the clearing, Ashley noticed several smiles and nods aimed in her direction.

  Behind them, Ash heard Evan turn his ire on his brother. "What the hell is wrong with you, Bobby? Letting a girl boss you around like that?"

  Then they were too far away to hear any more.

  Chapter 5 – Fox Family Dinner

  Ashley and Geoff led Jack into the low-walled patio section of the property. Ash released the clip from Jack's collar and hung the leash on its peg inside. She saw her school bag on one of the chairs inside the front door. Most likely her father was home, in his study. Usually he'd appear for dinner and then leave again until well after midnight. She waved to her mom in the kitchen and went upstairs to wash.

  On the back patio, Geoff wrestled with Jack and scratched his ears.

  From inside, his Mom said, "Get in here and get cleaned up."

  Jack followed Geoff into the house only to be chased back outside. The puppy sat on the other side of the glass, panting and fogging the pane.

  Dr. Fox carried a file to the table as his wife chased Geoff into the nearby bathroom, attacking the task of cleaning the boy's face and arms. Fox thumbed through a top-secret logistics brief, his left hand resting on the Micronix device.

  A few minutes later, Ana returned with Geoffrey, placed the last of the dishes on its wicker mat and looked upstairs. She took a deep breath to call for Ashley.

  "I'll get her," Dr. Fox said. Before he cleared his chair, Ashley appeared at the top of the stairs and came down. She took her seat and noticed the black rectangle sitting before her father.

  "What's that?" she asked.

  "Work," he replied. “A paperweight.”

  Despite its near constant presence, it was rare that Andrew let his children catch a glimpse of the device. Neither of them had ever asked about it before.

  Dr. Fox looked at both his children. "Don't ever, ever, touch this. Not under any circumstances. Is that understood?"

  Ashley and Geoff nodded. Geoffrey looked at the device. He looked as if he was going to reach out for it, but didn't.

  Their mother returned and began serving the meal. Geoffrey started shoveling food into his mouth. Ana finished serving and sat. Neither Ashley nor her father moved toward the food. Ashley had noticed that when he had something to say, he usually did it before he began eating.

  Ana broke the ice. "There's something we've been talking about…"

  Ashley tilted her head and looked at her father.

  Dr. Fox met his daughter's gaze, "I've arranged for you to attend a special camp this summer."

  Ash asked to attend the Wellstone ballet camp and had her heart set on it. Summer programs were a great way to get familiar with the academy, making it easier to get accepted later.

  Her father had said he’d think about it, an answer recognized by kids everywhere as synonymous with No.

  "It may interrupt your ballet training for a couple of weeks," he said, "but Sifu Pan's Flying Dragons Martial Arts Academy is having a camp you should attend. Several of the instructors are accomplished dancers. The cross-training will help you with your ballet."

  "Not as much as ballet camp would.”

  Her mother smiled but didn’t say anything.

  “Plus, I could get hurt," Ashley pointed out.

  "You could get hurt dancing," her father countered.

  "I bet more people get hurt fighting.”

  Ashley's mother laughed.

  Ashley looked at her food, her jet-black locks concealing her face. She raised her head, and her looked back to her father. "What if Geoff wants to take Kung Fu when he's older, does he have to take ballet too?"

  Dr. Fox had raised his fork but set it down again. "Yes."

  "Wait, what?" Geoffrey asked.

  "If he asks to study martial arts, then yes, that aggression should be balanced by a softer art. Maybe not dance, but music or oil painting, something for balance," Dr. Fox answered.

  "But that's not why you're making me take these classes, for balance?"

  "With a boy who wanted to fight, you'd be trying to check aggression and develop maturity. With a girl, it's the opposite. You want to build physical self-esteem and intuition. But that’s not why you have to do it. You have to do it because I said so. Is that clear?"

  In her father's study, the phone began to ring. He ignored it. It continued to ring as Dr. Fox held his daughter’s stare.

  The ringing became incessant.

  "Yes, clear." Ashley glared at her plate.

  In the other room, the phone clicked over to the messaging system.

  “I'm not hungry," she said.

  "You're excused," Fox said.

  Ashley stood and left the table.

  The phone began ringing again.

  Dr. Fox nodded to his wife and rose from the table, crossing to his study to answer. "What kind of problem?" he asked.

  Chapter 6 – Gravity Knots

  A few minutes earlier…

  Far out in the middle of the barren desert, the massive Project Epsilon Research Facility hung in the evening sky. No
guards stood their posts, no vehicles moved on their patrols around the perimeter.

  Documents, tatters of clothing and broken glass littered the interior of the facility. Doors hung from mangled hinges or lay at angles on the floor, unable to find comfortable positions as their handles kept them forever tilted just a few inches away from perfect slumber. Couches, chairs and desks, all reduced to kindling and wire-ribbed tumbleweeds of stuffing. Only short tongues of untended combustion moved, pacing themselves in their consumption of the scattered debris.

  The relatively indestructible terminal monitors of the observation labs all flashed the same message, EVACUATE. Scattered across the floor lie the message's intended recipients, the lifeless bodies of the project technicians. Opposite the monitoring labs, small, comfortable cells lined the other side of the hall, each occupied by a single unmoving individual.

  Naked, hairless and still, the test subjects floated in the air, several feet above the floor. Before each of them hovered a small black rectangular object, a Micronix device. Anyone not preoccupied by a floating rectangle of black metal was lying in a crumpled heap, oozing fluids.

  In the very center of the facility, loose items had begun to gather. Bits of paper, glass and chunks of office furniture began to slip and slide along the floors, becoming trapped against other objects, walls or ceilings. The center of the facility began to churn with the debris. Human bodies, office appliances and furniture, all flowed forward to become a formless boiling mass. The center grew tight then burst into flame as white-hot fusion consumed the physical elements.

  With a second pop, the burning knot at the center went dark, expanding exponentially, inhaling, igniting and consuming furniture, walls and floors as an ocean drinks from rivers. In a fraction of a second, the implosion consumed the entire facility, leaving a massive crater in the empty desert where Project Epsilon had once stood.

  At the center of the devastation, one item survived. A rectangular chunk of black metal, a single prototype, lay in the dust.

  In a separate, much smaller facility, hanging in orbit far above the desert site, three agents monitored the Earth. They sat with their backs to one another, in a triangular formation, each occupied with their own bank of monitors and control panels. They sported beards and crazy longhair, as they were in orbit and had lost the desire shave and get regular haircuts.

  The astronauts double-checked and confirmed their readings.

  "We'd better call Dr. Fox," Carlson said.

  "Where is he anyhow?" Wilkins asked.

  "Dinner with the family," Bryce answered.

  "Fuck, man." Carlson dialed the doctor. “No answer.”

  “Better dial again,” Bryce said.

  Carlson tapped resend and waited.

  "Hey, Doctor Fox, this is Carlson, up on Kojima Station, we've got a problem with Epsilon."

  "What kind of problem?" the doctor asked.

  "Well, sir, it's gone."

  "Gone?"

  "Exploded, sir, or imploded maybe. We've forwarded our footage."

  "How did it start? Anything preceding?" Fox asked.

  "There was some kind of accident, sir. We've got all the data backed up to the server, but on the security feeds... it was psychokinetic. Also, the server might be contaminated as well. We're not sure."

  "Has it given you any strange readings?"

  "You should have the stream in just a couple of seconds. We did see some lights, but it could be just a backup battery coming online. They were floating again and then everything got sucked toward the center of the facility."

  "A gravity knot? Like before?"

  "Yeah, only this time... No survivors."

  "That we know of?"

  "Sir, we’ve got a fifty-kiloton release and an eleven-mile crater. FLIR and sonics show no life forms. We do have confirmation that a small black metal object is lying in the middle of the crater. One piece of shrapnel, that's all that's left."

  "How small?"

  "Looks like, flat rectangle, it would fit in the palm of your hand. Spectrometers register it as pure terillium."

  "Thank you, Gentlemen."

  "Kojima out."

  Upstairs, in her room, Ashley flopped onto her bed. She pulled her journal from her bag and opened it...

  Ashley’s Journal, June 22, 2308, Evening

  I can’t believe I am actually considering running away, but he is making my life impossible. There’s no reason for him to treat me like this.

  I hope Mom brings up my plate, but as hungry as I am, it’s not worth going back down there.

  Ashley heard the door to the garage open and close. Then the big garage door opened, and her father’s car lifted off. Ash could easily tell the difference between them. His cruiser had a deep low rumble, while the family wagon had a slightly higher and quicker purr.

  Ashley opened her door and found her mom halfway up the stairs.

  “Come down here,” She said. “I want to talk to you.”

  Ashley rolled her eyes but followed her mom down the stairs.

  She sat back at the table and noticed the food was still quite warm.

  “Go on,” her mom said.

  Geoffrey had finished and gone down to his games and simulators.

  Ashley didn’t talk but quietly ate her food.

  After a few minutes and a few more bites, Anastasia looked over to her daughter. “You don’t know how much he cares about you, Towanjica.”

  Ashley looked up at her mom. It had been years since Ana had used the pet name for her little girl. Ashley had been born with bright blue eyes and a shock of dark blue-black hair. Lakota for ‘All Blue,’ Towanjica had been Ana’s term of endearment for her daughter.

  Anastasia Zelena was the daughter of a Czechoslovakian manufacturing mogul and an American Indian, of the Oglala people. Both her parents insisted that Anastasia be fluent in their native tongues, so she spent lots of time between the two countries, learning English and Russian, in addition to Czech and the Lakota languages.

  Ana had tried to pass on some of what she remembered to her children, but Geoff and Ash seemed to absorb none of it.

  “I know it feels like he’s ignoring you, but he isn’t. He’s just got a lot on his plate right now.”

  “He always does.”

  “You heard that phone call? Well, things might be changing a bit.”

  “What do you mean, changing?” Ashley asked.

  “You might not be going to camp at all.”

  Ashley put her fork down. “What happened?”

  “I just need you to be extra patient with your father this summer. What ever he wants you to do, just do it. Don’t fight with him, just do it.”

  “Mom! He’s not listening to me! Don’t you understand?!”

  “I do understand. I know you feel trapped, like you have no control over your own life. You’re right, you don’t. But this time will pass very quickly. Once you’re grown up, you’ll wish you’d enjoyed it more.”

  “Is that all?” Ash asked.

  “No, that is not all,” Ana paused. “Eat your food. You need to eat.”

  Anastasia waited until her daughter picked up her fork again.

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about your father.” Ana looked out through the glass doors, into the back yard. “I was only twenty-six when we met. He was a couple of years older, but he already had the world by the tail. Everybody wanted what he had.”

  “What did he have?” Ashley asked.

  “Everything. If you wanted it, he could get it, or could make it. Once he created that healing compound, he was the one everyone looked to. And he’s been working on a new project, and it just went sideways.”

  Ashley didn’t speak.

  “Over the years, your father has embarrassed some very important people, and they aren’t the forgiving sort. They are looking for any excuse to take a shot at him.”

  “They’re going to shoot him?” Ashley asked.

  “Only if he’s lucky,” Anastasia answered.


  “What?” Ashley asked.

  “They might arrest him, and try him for treason.”

  “What happens to us?” Ashley asked.

  “We run.”

  Ashley set down her fork.

  The legendary spy and ninja, Anastasia Zelena, smiled at her daughter. “Take it easy on him. He really does have a lot on his mind.”

  Ashley nodded.

  “And whatever happens, don’t be afraid. If I could give you any advice, that’s it. Don’t be afraid. Take the fear and do something with it. Kill whatever is scaring you and don’t feel guilty about it. Whether it’s a spider, a snake or a man, kill it and kill it again, until you aren’t afraid of it anymore. But then, you have to clean up the mess.”

  Ashley smiled.

  “Oh and give his little camp a shot. It won’t be so bad. You might actually be good at it.”

  “Ugh,” Ashley replied.

  Anastasia laughed and cleared the empty dishes.

  Chapter 7 – Noodles

  Monday, June 22, 2308 7:31pm

  Major Ross, Chief Warrant Officer Reid and the rest of the crew were stunned, watching the real-time feed being streamed from Kojima Station.

  “What the hell?” Ross asked no one in particular.

  “Holy shit,” Reid echoed.

  On the monitors, the Fox family was seated at the dining room table, having dinner. Ashley was engaged in her camp point counter-point.

  A phone rang in the background.

  Ross pulled up the network transcript. “It’s Carlson up on Kojima, dialing the doc’s home line.”

  Ross picked up an amplifier and projected Dr. Fox’s feed onto one of the inactive monitors.

  Ross and the lab crew watched as Fox answered the phone and listened as Carlson informed him of Epsilon’s destruction. They watched his vitals remained calm and cool. Of course, how could he be surprised by something he must have already been aware of?