Kyle couldn’t hold back any longer. In a fury, in a red-blind rage, he plunged through the air at Ultitron, fists before him, ready to plow straight through the robot’s head.
SPA-KOWWWW!
Instead, he screamed in agony as the force field crackled and snapped around him, hurling him higher into the air.
Ultitron laughed again. “Your function in the drama that is the Mad Mask’s takeover and ruination of the world is over, Azure Avenger! You are and always have been surplus to requirements. Our partnership is at an end. All that remains now is to decide what to do with Mairi. Her beauty offends my advanced sensibilities. I should, by all rights, simply destroy her …”
Kyle screamed. He didn’t scream “NO!” or “How dare you!” or anything coherent at all. No, he simply screamed a pure, animalistic cry of anger, rage, defiance, and, ultimately, helplessness. He flew at Ultitron as fast as he could, not caring that he’d broken the sound barrier and caused a sonic boom that would rattle and shatter windows for miles around.
“… or perhaps,” Ultitron went on, “her spirit needs to be preserved, in which case, she should be hideously scarred so that she is worthy of standing as the Mad Mask’s queen, ruling over the new, disfigured planet Earth!”
Kyle collided with Ultitron once again, knowing he would pay a penalty, but hoping that his unbound speed and strength would be enough to smash through that force field once and for all. Maybe it would kill him — probably it would kill him — but at least the momentum from his speed would carry his body through, tearing a hole through Ultitron’s head. Ha! Let’s see him function after that!
But as much as Kyle wanted to sacrifice himself for Mairi, he failed in this. The force field — that blasted, impossibly strong force field — still held. Pain seared him, like being electrocuted over and over while gigantic, molten-hot mallets pounded every inch of his body. He thought he heard the Mad Mask laugh as he bounced off the force field, his limbs spasming and jerking uncontrollably.
The last thing he saw before he blacked out was a green-and-gold blur on the horizon.
Thank God, he thought. Mighty Mike.
And then the shock of that thought — and the ocean of pain — knocked him out.
Kyle awakened in a crater of crumbled asphalt to one side of Kimota Road, miles and miles from Ultitron. A cautious crowd of onlookers gathered around him. As he groaned and propped himself up on his elbows, everyone took a step back at once, as if they were all attached to the same marionette strings and the puppeteer had just yanked.
“It’s really him,” someone said. “The Blue Freak.”
An undercurrent of agreement, awe, and worry rippled through the crowd. Kyle was in too much pain to correct them.
“Are you all right?” Erasmus crackled in his ear. One of the plugs had been damaged — he was only receiving static in his left ear. It was like listening to Erasmus with the shower running in the background.
“I’m all right.” He managed to get into a sitting position and that was about it for now. Every muscle in his body hurt. Every bone in his body hurt. Kyle was pretty sure even his glands and skin hurt.
“Help him up!” someone said. “He was fighting that thing!”
“Are you nuts? The FBI and Homeland Security are after him. He probably built that thing!” someone else replied.
As the crowd argued among itself — proving to Kyle once again that great things never happen when you get more than a couple of people together; greatness happens alone — Kyle strained and grunted until he was standing. His costume was still intact, but it had fresh tears and scorch marks all along it. His own breath tasted and smelled sour in the confines of his mask, so he knew his face was still concealed. Thank God for small favors.
“Look!” someone shouted, and Kyle held up a hand to forestall any applause at his monumental task of standing up on his own, only to realize that the “Look!” didn’t refer to him. He followed a dozen pointing fingers to the sky, not that it was necessary — the sound of rotor blades and engines was clue enough.
The Army had arrived. Finally.
Apache attack helicopters dropped into formation over Bouring, flanked by what looked like a small flotilla of Predator drones, unmanned, remote-controlled death machines. Kyle laughed at the irony. The military was sending in a fleet of robots to fight a robot. He didn’t give them very good odds.
The crowd hustled closer to the action, Kyle forgotten. He couldn’t believe these idiots. Clearly terrified and undoubtedly out of their league, they were still getting closer to the danger, not farther away. And why? To get a better look. To shoot video with their cell phones. Nincompoops. At the first explosion, they would run pell-mell for cover, probably trampling each other.
Kyle called out for them to head in the other direction instead, to safety, but his voice was weak and he had no strength to yell. Fine. Let them suffer their fate. It was the cruelest iteration of the Prankster Manifesto: These people who took themselves so seriously would pay the ultimate …
A booming noise from overhead shattered the darkening sky, sending fireworks and flares in every direction. Ultitron had just zapped an Apache and the helicopter had spun out of control, careening smack into the giant robot, where it exploded into a million flaming pieces. Kyle’s eyes widened, his throat tight with sudden grief until he saw Mighty Mike swooping away from the wreckage, the two Army pilots tucked safely under his arms. It was comical — a kid-size body hauling two full-grown adults — but right now Kyle could find nothing funny about it.
The street rumbled. Tanks would be on the way. Maybe the combined might of Mighty Mike and the military could stop Ultitron, but Kyle doubted it. Only one thing could do that, he knew:
The Mad Mask.
But how could he get to him? The Mad Mask had to be operating from somewhere nearby, Kyle knew. Whether he was using Wi-Fi or a special microwave link to Ultitron, it would only work over short distances — five or six miles at the most. Still, five or six miles in each direction from Ultitron … That made for a circle with a diameter of up to twelve miles and a total area of, uh, πr2, which worked out to over 113 square miles of —
Gah! He grabbed his head as if that would shut off the endlessly calculating part of his brain. He needed all of his brainpower, all of his focus on finding the Mad Mask somewhere in that 113-square-mile range of places. Even a tiny town like Bouring had thousands of buildings to hide in….
Off in the distance, the crowd that had been around him was now way too close to the danger zone. Against his better judgment, Kyle figured he should save them from themselves. He looked around for something to throw at them, to make them scatter, and found only a manhole cover, knocked partly loose from the road by the force of his crash landing. That would do.
Kyle lifted the one-hundred-pound steel disc as if it weighed nothing. “Hey!” he shouted, finding his voice again. “Watch this!”
The crowd, hearing him now, turned just in time to watch him whip the cover toward them like a Frisbee. Of course, he was very careful because he wanted to scare them, not hurt them. He made sure to give it the right amount of loft and twist so that it would spin up into the air overhead and land harmlessly on the other side of the street.
But it worked — they didn’t realize they weren’t in any danger, and the crowd split up and ran for cover.
Good. He put his fists on his hips and turned in a slow circle. If I were the Mad Mask, which building would I —
No. Wait a second. Kyle’s math was wrong. The blow from Ultitron and the rough landing must have rattled his brains more than he thought.
The formula πr2 was for the area of a circle, a two-dimensional space. But this was the real world. It wasn’t flat — it was three-dimensional. (Actually, it was four-dimensional and maybe as much as thirteen-dimensional, but Kyle didn’t have time for that right now.) The Mad Mask’s microwave link could go five to six miles in any direction. That meant up or down, too, he told Erasmus.
The AI’s voice crackled and hissed: “He could *ftz* anywhere *ftzzzzz* sphere with a *crrtzl* —”
“With a volume of 4/3(πr3) which works out to over nine hundred cubic miles, but …” The enormity of scouring that much territory before Ultitron could be contained … Even at Kyle’s speed, it seemed impossible. He would have to look high and low….
“Up *kzzzrkll* down,” Erasmus suggested.
Yes, up and …
And down …
Kyle looked down at his feet. At the crater he’d made in the road when he’d landed.
At the open sewer hole.
Down.
An open sewer hole …
He thought of the gigantic trench where Ultitron had awaited activation, concealed underground…. The robot had been underground all along….
“Of course,” Kyle whispered. “He hates beauty … So why wouldn’t he …”
“*kzrtl* in filth,” Erasmus said. Kyle got tired of the static and popped out the earbud that was damaged. Now he couldn’t hear Erasmus in stereo anymore, but at least he was clear.
It made perfect sense that the Mad Mask would have his lair underground, in the sewers. Decision time: Should he head back out and try to help Mike destroy Ultitron or should he go after Mairi?
There was no other option. Sure, he could join Mighty Mike and the Army and maybe together they could all beat Ultitron, but he doubted it. Besides, he wasn’t about to make the same mistake he’d made with the ASE. That time, he let Mairi stay in danger while he ran off to save the planet. End result? Mighty Mike became more popular than ever and Kyle ended up a fugitive from the law. This time, he would find Mairi and rescue her … and drag the secret to deactivating Ultitron out of the Mad Mask. There was no downside.
“Here we go, Erasmus,” Kyle said, and hopped into the sewer before he could think of a reason not to.
Kyle had a pretty good imagination, but the sewer was even grosser than he had imagined. The walls crawled with muck; the ceiling and the pipes sweated drops of foul liquid. It smelled like a bathroom had thrown up.
The concrete conduit ran north to south, and each direction was nothing but filthy water with stuff floating in it. Kyle didn’t want to spend too much time thinking about what the stuff was.
“Have you got a schematic of the town sewer system?” he asked Erasmus.
“I’m not sure,” Erasmus admitted, his voice small and tinny through the lone earbud. “I had to off-load a lot of data to make room for Ultitron’s schematics. Let me look.”
“Hurry. I don’t want to waste time going the wrong way. And pump your volume while you’re at it. I’m having trouble hearing you.”
Kyle took a step forward and immediately regretted it as his foot sank up to the ankle in something thick and sucking that was much more than just liquid. He pulled back and hovered a few inches over the river of sheer gross that flowed under him. The sewer was only six feet in diameter, so he didn’t have a lot of room, but he would rather bang his head than step in that … stuff again.
“Anything?” he asked Erasmus, peering ahead into the darkness. The open manhole was right above him and even though it was rapidly darkening outside, it was still brighter in this little spot than anywhere else, where total black enveloped the sewer. Kyle shifted the lenses in his mask to ultraviolet and groaned — now he could see (in the bright green tones of night vision) the grotesque oozing stream below his feet as it slowly flowed south, as well as rusting, sewage-sweating pipes that ran along the sides of the conduit.
He could also see a family of rats the size of small dogs clustered a few yards to the south, clinging to the pipes and staring at him. Just terrific.
“Erasmus …” he sing-songed.
“I have some of the blueprints,” Erasmus chimed in, his voice louder but unbalanced, causing Kyle to tilt his head to the right, “although not all of them. Bad news is that there are a number of large intersection chambers where the Mad Mask could set up a command center of some sort. We’ll have to check them one at a time.”
Just then, the ground shook and the fetid air vibrated. Jets thundered overhead and tanks came onto the streets of Bouring. Kyle heard the kuh-BOOM-BOOM! of the big repeating cannons on the tanks.
“We don’t have much time. Ultitron’s gonna wipe out the Army if the Army doesn’t wipe out the town first. Collateral damage. Scan the blueprints for the chambers that are easiest to access from the surface.”
“Okay, but it doesn’t matter,” Erasmus protested. “The Mad Mask could just teleport into any of them, so the easiest ones are —”
“But he can’t teleport something as big as Ultitron, I don’t think. So he would have to be near … by …” He drifted off.
“But Kyle, you can’t be sure that —”
“Hush!” Kyle told Erasmus. Something … something was right on the tip of his tongue.
“What do you mean, hush?” Erasmus said indignantly. “I will not —”
Kyle clawed up his mask on his right side and pulled out the earbud for some silence.
Something Erasmus had said … about teleporting …
Kyle closed his eyes. Teleporting. The Mad Mask could teleport anywhere, couldn’t he? So he could teleport to his lair no matter where …
But wait.
If the Mad Mask could teleport …
(And he could — hadn’t Kyle witnessed it himself near the lighthouse that day?)
If he could teleport, then why …
If he could teleport.
If.
He couldn’t, Kyle realized. The Mad Mask couldn’t actually teleport.
He remembered the first time he’d seen the Mad Mask, how the Mad Mask had watched Kyle fly away. At first Kyle thought he was ashamed that he couldn’t fly, too. Then, later, he thought the Mad Mask just didn’t want Kyle to see him teleport yet. But now …
Kyle popped the earbud back in and pulled down his mask.
“He didn’t want me to see him walk away,” Kyle said, interrupting Erasmus, who was still rattling off a litany of offenses Kyle had perpetrated against him.
“… constantly telling me to shut up and to — Wait, what did you say?”
“And if he could teleport,” Kyle went on, “he would have done it today. He would have gone straight from Lundergaard to my house. But he stole that car and drove. Which means he can’t teleport.”
“You saw —”
“I saw a flash of bright light and then the Mad Mask appeared. He must have been nearby, waiting. The light distracted me and then he just walked over while I was blinded.”
“Walked over from where?”
Kyle grinned even though Erasmus couldn’t see it. “From the sewer outlet near the lighthouse.”
Erasmus didn’t need to breathe, but just for the sake of verisimilitude, he made a sound like someone inhaling sharply. “Oh. Oh! Oh! Kyle, there’s a huge sewer conduit right near the lighthouse….”
“And that’s where Ultitron first showed up …”
“And where Ultitron lay before being activated …”
“Which means the Mad Mask had to be in the same place in order to work on Ultitron …”
“That’s where he is!” Erasmus cried, as proud-sounding as if he’d come up with it all on his own.
“South!” Kyle shouted, and flew. The rats scattered, some of them scampering off along the pipes, some of them dropping to splash to safety through the raw sewage. Kyle’s night-vision lenses kept him from being totally in the dark, but the strange green shadows and the twists and bends of the tunnels made it slow going. Pipes and wheels jutted out of the walls and ceiling at seemingly random points, forcing Kyle to duck and dodge as he flew. Soon, he was actually panting — not from exertion, but just from having to breathe through his mouth. The stench was terrible.
“I am so glad I don’t have a nose,” Erasmus said.
“I would totally trade places with you right now,” Kyle admitted, and kept flying through the tunnels, doing his best to
avoid the slime and general grossness. But he couldn’t help it entirely — stuff dripped from the ceiling and occasionally he would brush against a grimy pipe or stretch of conduit. He was going to have to invent a whole new kind of washing machine to clean his costume after this disaster. It would probably involve a high-powered laser. Just about everything could be improved by adding a high-powered laser.
He felt like he’d been flying for hours, even though Erasmus assured him it had only been minutes. The tunnels branched off and twisted and turned unexpectedly. Erasmus’s GPS couldn’t work underground, so Kyle had to rely on his own sense of direction and on Erasmus’s partial blueprints of the sewer system, hoping that he was headed the right way.
And just then, something emerged up ahead, and he knew he was where he needed to be.
It was the Mad Mask!
Kyle pulled up, hovering in the dank, fetid depths of the sewer, then flattened himself against the wall, no matter how disgusting it was. (He actually squished when he pressed into it and tried not to think about that.)
“What are you doing?” Erasmus whispered.
“I don’t think he saw me. His eyes aren’t green. His night vision is off.”
It was strange to see the Mad Mask just … standing there, in the midst of all that muck and sewage. Some filthy water dripped on him from above, but the Mad Mask just stood there.
“Something’s wrong,” Kyle said. “The Mad Mask would never just stand there and let grungy water get all over his cloak….”
The Mad Mask moved; he turned to the left, walked a few feet in that direction, and stopped. Then he turned to the left again, walked, stopped. He did this two more times, making a perfect square that brought him right back to where he’d started.
As Kyle watched, he did it again. Every thirty-two seconds, the cycle started again.
It’s a robot, Kyle realized. It wasn’t really the Mad Mask, just … an android designed to look like him. A … a MadDroid.
It’s standing guard. I must be in the right place.
Before he could think about it any more, Kyle pushed off from the wall and launched himself through the air at the MadDroid. He got within a foot before the thing realized he was there, looking up just as Kyle collided with it, driving them both back along the tunnel and into the filthy river of muck.