Read Online The Awakening by Michael Carroll - Free Book Online Page B

supply.
    The computer sparked once, then was silent.
    “Don’t waste time trying to fix it,” Victor said. “Just get the backup system online.”
    The phone on the wall buzzed and a woman’s voice said, “Er…Mr. Cross? Some bad news.”
    Victor grabbed the phone. “What the hell did you do?”
    “We ran a low-power test on the nucleus. There was some sort of leak. I don’t know why, but it shorted out all the computers here. It shouldn’t have had any effect.”
    “Well, it did. We lost our main computer here too. Who told you to test the nucleus?”
    “No one, but we thought…”
    He interrupted her. “You didn’t think. If you’d thought, you’d have asked me first! What did we lose?”
    “O’Brien and Hammond…They’re alive, but badly burned.”
    “I’m talking about the equipment.”
    “Oh. Nothing that can’t be replaced.”
    “Consider yourself lucky, then. I want you to assign two people to scour the entire base and see what effect your power surge has had. Make the security systems their top priority. The rest of you, repair everything and get back to work on the nucleus. I don’t want any more time lost on this.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Victor slammed the phone back into its cradle. He turned to the nearest technician. “Damage report?”
    “I think that the data files are safe. The backup system will be online in a couple of minutes. What was that, anyway?”
    “They think it was a leak from the nucleus.”
    The man’s face drained of color. “Is that dangerous?”
    “Only if you’re a superhuman.”

    The energy surge had rippled through the entire complex. The technicians assigned to check for damage went through the complex level by level, room by room. A few computer components had short-circuited, but aside from that, the effect was minimal.
    When they reached the storage room on level one, they opened the door, flipped the light switch and looked in.
    “Nothing in here,” one of them said. “Just a few old crates and that weird glass statue.”
    “It’s not glass,” his companion said. “Me and Kulvinder were moving it earlier and he slipped and it fell over the rail. Right down to level seven. Didn’t get a scratch. If it was glass it would have broken into a million pieces. And then we had to carry the damn thing all the way back up here.”
    They closed the door and moved on.
    A few seconds later, the door was opened again. The technician reached in without looking, turned off the light and closed the door behind him.
    If he had looked, he would have seen that the statue of the girl had moved.

    Colin was strapped into a seat, still handcuffed, sitting with his parents and Danny against the side wall of the copter. Danny was still unconscious, snoring softly.
    Colin’s enhanced hearing had returned a few minutes earlier. Now, he could hear the pilot talking to Façade.
    “Fuel’s getting pretty low,” Colin whispered to his father. “We’re going to be touching down to refuel any minute.”
    “Where are we?”
    “Somewhere over the Atlantic,” Colin said. “There must be an aircraft carrier or something.”
    His father said, “No, this is a Boeing CH-47 Chinook. It can set down on water.” He nodded toward two large metal drums secured close to the cockpit. “It’s my guess that they’re reserve fuel tanks. They’ll set down and switch over. They probably have enough fuel to get us to mainland America.”
    “What are they going to do to us, Dad?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Colin looked at Danny. “What about Danny’s brother? If Façade has been pretending to be Mr. Cooper for so long, doesn’t that mean that he’s really Niall’s father?”
    “Yeah. It does.”
    The door to the cockpit slammed open and Façade stepped through. He crouched in front of Danny and pressed his index finger against the boy’s neck.
    “Leave him alone,” Colin said. “Haven’t you done enough?”
    Façade turned to Colin. “I was checking that he’s all