Fall of Hades

  Welch’s brow furrowed. “What do they look like?”

  “One of them looks like a destroyer. The other one has a huge deck with helicopters on it.”

  Welch’s brow furrowed still deeper. “It’s the Edison and the Franklin, Hatch’s new attack boats.”

  “It’s no problem,” J.D. said. “They’re just on patrol.”

  “Are you sure?” Taylor asked, walking up close to the captain.

  J.D. put his hand on Taylor’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, honey. Everything will be just fine.”

  Taylor’s face turned ashen, and then she shoved the captain away from her. J.D. laughed and turned to me. “You have a feisty girl there, Mike.”

  “You were right,” Taylor said to us. “He’s betrayed us. He sold us out to Hatch.”

  Jack and Welch pulled out guns. One of the crew members reached for a gun, and Zeus blasted him against the wall.

  “What is this about?” J.D. said, trying to act innocent.

  “You tell us,” Gervaso said. “Tell us why you betrayed us.”

  “Why would I do that? You are my friends.”

  He even sounded like a liar.

  “He’s not a friend,” Taylor said. “He’s a traitor. He sold us all out for money. He wants the million-dollar bounty for Welch, and he asked Hatch if he could own me. As his pet.”

  “I’m going to electrocute him,” I said.

  Before I could shock him, Gervaso knocked him out of his seat with a punch. Then Gervaso jumped on him and continued to beat on him until his face was bloody. “Tell us what you did.”

  J.D. cried out, “Okay, okay. I will tell you.”

  Gervaso leaned back, his fists red and covered with blood. “Are the Elgen waiting for us?”

  J.D. looked up at us from his back, terrified. “Yes.”

  “We’re dead,” Jack said, taking over the boat’s steering.

  “Not before he dies,” Zeus said. “I’m going to fry him slowly.”

  “No,” Gervaso said. “Not yet. We need to know what he’s arranged. Taylor, come touch this scumbag. I need to be sure he’s telling the truth.”

  “I’d rather touch vomit.”

  “He is vomit,” Jack said.

  Gervaso turned back to J.D. “If you lie once, Zeus will burn off your feet. Do you understand?”

  “Just give me the word,” Zeus said, grabbing the man’s ankle.

  His voice quivered. “I understand.”

  “What arrangement did you make with the Elgen?”

  “I told Hatch that I would bring all of you to him.”

  Jack groaned out.

  “Why didn’t the Elgen attack us at Nike?” I asked.

  “Hatch wanted you to get to Hades. Then he was going to send his forces to surround the island.”

  “To capture us?”

  J.D. didn’t answer.

  Gervaso repeated more forcefully. “To capture us?”

  “No. He intends to kill everyone in battle.” He glanced at Taylor. “Except this girl. And Vey. He has ordered Vey to be taken alive. He has special plans for Vey.”

  “What kind of plans?” I asked.

  “An ancient Fiji tradition. He said to prepare the ai cula ni bokola.”

  Ostin looked at me with horror. “It’s what I was telling you about. It’s the cannibal fork they used to eat people.”

  For a moment I was speechless. “Hatch is planning to eat me?”

  Taylor covered her mouth as if she were going to throw up.

  “The general plans to serve you for the feast to celebrate the end of the resistance.”

  I looked at J.D. “You knew this, and you were still going to deliver me to him?”

  “What he does with you is not my business.”

  “How much did they pay you for us?” Jack shouted. “Thirty pieces of silver?”

  “How could you do this?” Gervaso said. “I trusted you.”

  “I needed money,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “. . . For drugs.”

  Gervaso’s fist balled up. “You pathetic piece of crap. When did you become a junkie?”

  “It’s your fault,” J.D. said. “After I got shot saving you, they put me on painkillers. I got addicted. When the painkillers stopped working, I needed something stronger. If it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t be a junkie. You share the blame.”

  Gervaso spit on him. “You had a choice. Everyone has a choice. You took the cowardly way.

  “And if you couldn’t handle it, you should have put a gun to your head instead of ours.”

  J.D. was quiet for a moment, then said, “You’re right. I should have. But I didn’t.”

  “No, you didn’t. But before we’re through, you’re going to wish you had.”

  Gervaso took control of the boat while Jack, Zeus, Ian, Taylor, Welch, and I rounded up the rest of the Risky Business crew and brought them down to one of the berths. We tied them up, leaving them in a row on their stomachs. Everyone except for J.D., who we kept tied up on the control deck.

  “If the boat sinks,” Jack said to the crew, “you drown. Choke on that karma.”

  We returned to the control deck and told them what had happened. It was like reading the jury’s verdict of death. Everyone was quiet. Only Tanner seemed undisturbed, which was disturbing in its own way. I couldn’t get Hatch’s plan for me out of my mind.

  “Maybe J.D.’s lying,” Tessa said. “Maybe he just made the whole thing up.”

  “That would be like confessing to a murder you didn’t commit,” Jack said.

  “He’s not lying,” Taylor said. “He sold us.”

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Welch said. “We’ve got to turn the boat around.”

  “And go where?” Gervaso said. “We don’t have enough fuel to get anywhere, we’re not fast enough to escape their boats, and even if we could, the cannon on their battleship can shoot more than twenty miles. They’ll just blow us out of the water.”

  “Then where do we go?” Tessa asked. “The Joule?”

  “No, we don’t have that option now,” Gervaso said. “It’s too far. Our best chance is to dig in at Hades and defend ourselves. Hatch built an inescapable prison to keep people in. Let’s see if it can keep them out.”

  “They’ll surround us,” Jack said.

  “We’re already surrounded,” Welch said.

  “What if they decide to just starve us out?” Tessa asked.

  “The prison’s got to have food and supplies,” Welch said.

  “No,” Quentin said. “Hatch isn’t that patient. He’ll fight.”

  “We’ve got to reach the island and break into prison before they reach us,” Gervaso said. “Jack, get us there.”

  “Yes, sir.” Jack pushed the boat’s throttle all the way, and the front of the boat lifted with our speed.

  “What do you see, Ian?” Gervaso asked.

  “The Faraday is being loaded with soldiers. It looks like they’re bringing their whole army.”

  “Fifteen of us versus ten thousand of them,” Welch said.

  “Seventeen of us,” Quentin said. “We’ve got Tara and Torstyn.”

  “And the prisoners and GPs,” Welch said. “They’ll fight. There are at least two hundred being held captive. They’ll fight for their lives.”

  Gervaso turned to Welch. “Is there anything we should know about how the Elgen will fight?”

  “Hatch likes spectacle. There’s no other reason why he didn’t just sink our ship. He did the same thing to me. If he weren’t a slave to his ego, he would have just executed me on the spot. Instead, he wanted to make a show of me being fed to the rats. I think this is what he’s doing now. The final battle of Elgen versus Electroclan. He wants a spectacle, something for the history books.”

  “The bigger army doesn’t always win,” Ostin said. “Like George Washington crossing the Delaware to attack Trenton. He was outnumbered, with two thousand hungry, sick, poorly equipped soldiers when they attac
ked the superior, well-armed, rested mercenary Hessians—the most feared, well-trained soldiers in the world. Washington not only won, but he didn’t have a single soldier killed or wounded. Providence marched with them that day.” As if to punctuate the point, lightning lit the sky around us, followed by a loud thunderclap.

  Welch looked up at the sky, then said, “Let’s hope providence is with us, too.”

  We put a long chain, with a padlock, around J.D.’s neck, partially to secure him and partially so Taylor wouldn’t have to touch him to read his thoughts.

  As we neared the island, Gervaso said to J.D., “You need to help us dock. Remember, if the boat sinks, you’re going down with it.”

  “The island is surrounded by reef,” he said. “You have to dock the boat at the dock.”

  “He’s telling the truth,” Taylor said.

  Welch, Gervaso, Jack, and I looked over a map of Hades. “That reef will be an advantage,” Welch said. “It means they can’t run their boats in all at once. After we disembark, we’ll blow the dock. They’ll have to swim in to get us. It’s not easy to win a war waist-deep in water.”

  “That will slow them down,” Gervaso said. “But not much.”

  “Maybe long enough for us to thin them out,” Welch said.

  * * *

  The island of Hades was about a mile in circumference, flat and oddly shaped, like an amoeba. The water surrounding it was light and shallow, with a wide, coral reef visible from where we were, a hundred yards out. Surrounding the island was fine white sand, dark beneath the clouds. Under different circumstances it might have been a nice place to vacation.

  There was an old town on the west side of the island. At one time there had been a post office, a community center, and a church. Now it was deserted except for a few apartments kept for the guards. At one time the island had been lush, completely covered with various palms, mostly coconut and breadfruit trees, but that was before the Elgen had burned the land, clearing it for the prison. The prison sat on roughly thirty acres on the west side of the island and was surrounded with two twenty-two-foot-tall chain-link fences topped with four feet of razor wire.

  About fifty yards out from the prison fence the Elgen’s GPs and slave labor, taken mostly from the Tuvaluan natives, had been forced to build an outer wall made of concrete. It was shorter than the other fence but still daunting—ten feet high with razor wire. The wall had been built for prisoners, but it had also been built as a protection from the sea and was added after a cyclone had hit the island, damaging the original construction. Its construction reminded me of what we saw in Taiwan’s Starxource plant. “Creepycrete,” Taylor called it, drab, formless construction based on the lowest denominator of function.

  The entry to the prison was on the north side of the island, where the main dock was built. The Elgen guards had filled the last of the shuttles and were about to push off. To avoid them we sailed west, circling the island clockwise. As we came around the island, Jack slowed the boat down slightly. “I’ll wait until you give me the go-ahead,” he said to Ian.

  “Are you sure it’s not a trap?” I asked. “Why didn’t they blow the dock?”

  “Why are they leaving at all?” Zeus asked.

  “Maybe the dock’s booby-trapped.”

  “That would be the smart thing to do,” Ostin said.

  “I don’t see anything, but I’ll keep looking,” Ian said.

  Gervaso looked over the island with binoculars. “No, they’re giving us the prison. Apparently Hatch wants a fight.”

  A few minutes later Ian said, “We’re clear. The last of them just circled the bend.”

  “Got it.” Jack hit the throttle, and we sped east along the north bank of the island toward the prison.

  By the time we reached the dock, there was no one in sight. The dock led to a landing, with a road leading to a break in the concrete wall. There were towers on every corner of the wall, but they appeared to be deserted as well.

  “Why would they just desert it?” Tessa asked.

  Ian surveyed the site once more, then said, “It’s still clear.”

  “We’re going to have to blow the dock,” Gervaso said.

  “Then I’ll move the boat after we dock,” Welch said. “Just in case we need it.”

  Welch took over the boat’s controls and brought us up to the dock. With the size of the waves rocking our boat, we hit the side pretty hard, throwing us all to the port side of the boat.

  “Nice landing,” Tanner said.

  “Like to see you do better,” Tessa said.

  “C’mon,” I said.

  Jack and I jumped out onto the dock, and Ian and Tessa threw us the ropes so we could tie the boat onto the cleats. One by one everyone except Welch got off.

  Zeus and Gervaso, using towels from the bathroom, blindfolded J.D. and his crew. Then Jack, Zeus, and I took them off the boat.

  After everyone was off, Ian and I untied the ropes, and then Welch started to pull away from the dock. Suddenly one of the crew members pulled off his blindfold, then jumped in front of the boat into the sea, which was stupid on many levels. I couldn’t figure out what the guy’s plan was. Was he trying to get cut up in the boat’s propeller? Or was he planning to swim twenty miles to another island during a raging storm?

  Zeus, covered in a formfitting rain suit and two ponchos, reacted quickly and shocked the dude just as he hit the ocean. The sound of electricity striking the water was like dropping ice into a pan of sizzling bacon. The man went under for nearly a minute, then popped back up. “I give up!” he shouted. “Don’t shock me. I give up.”

  “Swim to shore,” Zeus said. “Next time I won’t let you surrender.”

  As we walked off the dock onto the island, I felt a dark, eerie feeling of desolation. A line from the Bible came to me: Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil . . .

  Except I definitely feared. I was terrified of the evil to come.

  Welch anchored the boat about a hundred feet east of the dock and about sixty feet from shore, just outside the reef. He had to swim in to shore, and he was soaked and dripping when he caught up to us. Actually, with the exception of Zeus, with the amount of rain falling we were all soaked by the time we reached the prison’s main entrance.

  Unfortunately, the guards had locked up after themselves. Ian examined the kind of lock used, then turned to McKenna. “It’s mechanical. The best thing would be for you to melt the bolt.”

  “I can do that,” McKenna said. She walked up to the door, pushing her slim fingers as far as she could between the crack. Her hand immediately went bright white. It took less than a minute for the metal to turn to molten steel and collapse.

  “Anything waiting for us behind the door?” Gervaso asked.

  Ian shook his head. “Just prisoners.”

  “Let me go first,” I said. “Just in case.” I put an electric field around me and pushed the door open and walked through.

  As Ian had said, there was no one in sight. I turned back toward the others. “Come on.”

  Gervaso was the first through the doorway, followed by the rest. The next door wasn’t locked, but the power had been shut off inside the building. The room smelled musty like mold and was lit only by our glows, especially mine, which was now as bright as a sixty-watt bulb.

  “I can help,” McKenna said. She lit up, brightly illuminating the room.

  “How do we turn the power back on?” Gervaso asked Welch.

  “The place is powered by a mini Starxource plant,” Welch said. “Whenever there’s a plant, there’s a central power office. It should be near the entrance.” He turned to Ian. “Just look for a room with thousands of wires moving into it. All roads lead to Rome, you know? Just find a wire and follow it.”

  Ian began panning across the room, then stopped. “It’s over there. It looks like a bowl of copper spaghetti.”

  “That’s the place. I can turn it back on. I’ll need some light.”

&nb
sp; “I’ll go with you,” McKenna said.

  “Me too,” Ostin said.

  They walked off down the hall, and a few minutes later the lights came on. When they returned, Welch was carrying a roll of paper in his hands. “I found this.”

  Gervaso stepped forward. “What have you got?”

  “It’s the building schematics. The Elgen usually keep a set in the main control room. We can use it to plan our defense.”

  “What are we going to do with these clowns?” Jack asked, nodding toward J.D. and his crew.

  “There’s plenty of cells to lock them in,” Welch said. “That hall to the right leads to the interim cell. It’s the closest to the command center.”

  “How do I open the cell doors?” Jack asked.

  “Everything can be controlled from the central control panel,” Welch said.

  “I can do it,” Ostin said. “The controls will probably be similar to the academy’s.”

  “Just hurry,” Gervaso said. “We haven’t much time.”

  Jack and Zeus hurried off down one hall with J.D. and his crew, while Ostin and McKenna returned to the hallway they had just come from.

  Welch took the plans over to a desk and laid them out. The paper had a complete diagram of the prison complex, including the apartments outside the main walls. The prison was shaped like a U, with the open end facing west. The north corridor was where the guards quartered, and there were administrative offices and a small arms closet. At the end of the corridor was the mini Starxource plant.

  The eastern corridor was for the laboratory and experiments, and for the scientists’ convenience, the southern corridor was lined on both sides with cells for GPs. Cell 25 was located at the opening of the south corridor. The control room was located on the west side of the east corridor. Above it was the main tower, which had glass on all sides like an airplane tower. Next to it, in a separate building, was the radio tower and building.

  “I need a pen,” Welch said.

  “Here’s a pencil,” Taylor said.

  Gervaso, Welch, Ian, and I crouched over the map.

  “First we need to blow that dock,” Gervaso said, looking up at Welch. “That’s the priority. Do they have explosives? Dynamite? C4?”