Altered Ch. 07

Also, the counter vector that always centered on me could be overcome by splitting my mind and having my mind focus on both centroids at once. This could become pretty distracting and it slowed my own reactions but at this point it didn't matter; I only had one foe and as long as no one else came into the fight I could use this.

The mech, rather than go around the cop car, grabbed it and heaved it aside. I used the time it took for him to move the car to focus my force vector. I didn't need to limit the amount of force that I normally would because the counter vector would be used against it. I centered one vector on the mech head horizontally going left and the counter vector went right centered on his left foot. The vectors were so strong they created torque and flipped him onto his side, slamming his suit head first into the ground. The force of impact was likened to a car crash and the person inside was knocked unconscious.

The mech suit was somehow blocking my mind control and I couldn't read the users mind. I would have to get inside the suit somehow but unfortunately the task force down the street came roaring into the scene and I didn't have time to find a can opener and with one good arm I doubt I'd be able to rip it open. I couldn't just leave it there so I decided to kill two birds with one stone and lifted him off the ground changing the vectors so that it hovered over the road and timed it so that I dropped it in front of one of the police SUVs coming to the rescue.

There was a loud crash, screeching and shouting as I bolted across the road up the slope. I got lucky no one spotted me and I stealthily crept from tree to tree up the hill to my stash. I guess hindsight is twenty-twenty but I scouted out the area and saw no signs of a mech unit in my scouting. They not only cloaked their minds but there was no heat signature nor anything out of the ordinary that I knew to look out for. If I had known I would have taken my railgun with me, as it was, I had it stashed in a duffle bag further up the slope where the road wound back in its zig-zag fashion.

I heard the telltale signs of gunfire and the whirring and buzzing sound of the mech battling with the cops. There was a loud roar of what sounded like rockets and I looked behind me and I saw the mech rising into the air with what looked like some sort of wings on his back. It looked heavily damaged but somehow it was still functioning.

I took out my railgun and got it in my sights aiming for the opaque port where I knew the head would be. The gun was amazingly fast at charging and was ready to fire in four seconds. I could probably only get off a single shot, but the dumbbell shaped tungsten cored bullet which weighed close to 80 grams going over 5000 FTPs would have enough kinetic energy to tear holes through two-inch-thick titanium armor. The gun made a kind of buzzing noise and it didn't have the same kind of a kick like an explosive round would; it was less jerky and seemed to only pull in one direction so the rail guide stayed straight. Compared to a 50-caliber rifle, it barely made a sound when the projectile left the barrel. Although the gun had no explosives, the sheer speed and friction along the barrel got the gun and ammo extremely hot.

The impact of the rail gun was something to behold. The projectile seemed to explode through the mech as it's slow rise quickly turned into a downward spiral. I used my abilities to flip it midair so that it would land head first, (might as well not take chances). And it landed with a sickening thud along the dirt slope.

I grabbed the rest of my gear in my bag, ran to my stolen motorcycle hidden in some brush and took off up the road.

My arm was in pain but I could move my left hand by the time I took off, it would be awhile before the nanobots restored the carbon nanotubes in my bones but my actual bone would be fully healed in a matter of minutes.

"I'm on my way now, baby, sorry about the delay but I ran into an unexpected problem with a Robotech looking mother-fucker," I sent.

"Hurry, babe, your daughter is waiting for you!" Tracy cried.

I drove for a couple of hours just short of my SUV then dumped the stolen bike and walked a couple of miles to my SUV. It took me 6 hours to get home.

"You're here..." Tracy started. "Oh, baby, are you OK?"

"Yeah I'll be fine, I'm a lot better than I was six hours ago." I took a look at her and said, "You look like you're going to pop any minute too!" and she beamed.

I walked in to find Robin up and about, she looked perfect as if she hadn't had a child! The only thing I could see that gave any indication was the swell of her breasts.

"What's going on? Why aren't you in bed?"

"I'm fine, Nate. Really."

"Yeah," Tracy interjected. "It turns out that we don't give birth the same way human women do," she said excitedly.

Mom got flustered and interrupted, "It's not fair, Nate! Their vaginas open up twice as far as a human! She didn't even go through any labor pains!"

"So why did I have to rush down here?" I faked annoyance.

"Come on, Nate, it's not like we had anything to go off of," Robin answered. "Besides, I didn't need a doctor and my vagina is just as tight as it ever was," she winked.

I grabbed her up in a hug, hoisting her above my head while I spun her around in the air, then pulled her into me for a kiss.

"Great! You ready for another one?" I whispered. She just nodded enthusiastically.

Mom in the meantime went into the other room and brought out TWO beautiful baby girls.

"Wha-?" I gasped. "You said, daughter, not daughters!"

Tracy started to laugh and said, "Yeah well we wanted to surprise you!"

I took my two children, swaddled in their tiny blankets, into my arms and gave them both Eskimo kisses. All parents believe their children are the most beautiful children in the world and I was no exception. I wanted to hold them forever. I didn't hold them for too long because my arm was still in a lot of pain. I was rescued when Robin took them away to feed them.

After telling them about what happened when I got ambushed by the exoskeleton, the girls grew concerned.

"You were lucky he missed you and you only took an indirect hit," Robin noted.

"Yeah, not to mention how he smacked you around like you were a child," Tracy added.

"What if there had been more than one of them?" mom worried.

"I get all of your concerns, and you are right - and yet what would you have me do? Hide and hope they don't find us?" I asked and looked around and could see they had no answer. "We tried that already. No, I have to keep the pressure up. They are getting desperate. They already revealed their technology - that's not supposed to exist - to twenty some odd cops... Besides even after they sucker punched me I still recovered. Next time, I'll be better prepared."

"Look, Nate. We know you are just protecting us," Robin vented. "But, we LOVE you - you know?"

"I know you do... I'M DOING this because I love you too," I assured. "Before I go after anyone else, I have to get our children to my safe house... I don't want to leave my children fatherless but if I keep exposing them maybe eventually they'll back off. Besides, soon the whole world is going to be in chaos once the pandemic the OEC set off is found out."

I took the next couple of days off waiting for Robin to give birth and packing our gear. I was able to pack most of it on top of the roof. We really didn't have much left since the attack on our cabin destroyed most of our clothes and other essentials. All we had left was what we had packed up in our emergency bags. My wait on Tracy wasn't in vain; at the end of the second day, she went into labor when her water broke.

Labor for her wasn't what I expected. Yes, she had contractions but they didn't seem very painful. Her labor only lasted a half hour and she opened up wide enough for you to stick both hands into her easily and pull the babies out.

After we pulled out the placentas and cut the umbilical cord, Tracy's body reformed back to her original pre-pregnancy shape in less than an hour. My mother even noted that she didn't have any stretch marks. Her breasts were leaking milk and the babies latched on and started feeding right way. Four kids and at least three more on the way. I only had three car seats for the SUV luckily it had three rows so there would be enough room to fit two in the very back and two in the middle - barely. I wasn't expecting so many kids, we shied away from doctors to keep them from asking too many questions like why the fuck their gestation periods were so fast etc.

I had a feeling that although Robin and Tracy both had baby girls, they were probably like their mothers and could change their sex later. It seemed that the starting sex for their kind was always female. I wasn't certain though because I was born male and my babies were a hybrid of my species and Robin and Tracy's species.

My worry now was Anya and Tanya; they both would be due soon. My mother wasn't due for another month. Anya assured me that everything was fine and that the doctors assured her that her babies were both healthy, surprising me with the fact that I was having another set of twins. Since she was human, I didn't want to pull her away from the support that her father could give her. He had private doctor's caring for her and nurses at her disposal 24/7. She had bodyguards protecting her better than the secret service. Taking her away from that was not a smart move.

Tanya on the other hand was like Fort Knox, she would not allow me in. Her mind was shut down to me and to her I was a monster - her enemy. The link was still there and I could try to force my way into her mind but whatever was poisoning her mind to me was out of my reach to stop. I needed to get to her before she gave birth, there is no way I would willingly allow the OEC to use my babies as guinea pigs.

It took us more than a day to get to the bunker, I had to stop in a town to buy another car seat and get some much-needed baby supplies. I had Tracy in the back row with her children, Robin was in the middle row with her children and mom sat up front with me.

After we arrived, I finally was able to let out a sigh of relief, and I was surprised to find one of the quarters already prepped with bunks and custom bunk-baby-cribs. Mom and the girls quickly went to work making their quarters into a home. I was going to be sleeping in a bunk with some of the security personnel mainly to save room, mom it seemed would be having multiple births also. Dr. Laura was not only medical doctor but an OB/GYN amongst her other designations so mom would have the best help possible when the time came.

It seemed pretty suspicious and even too convenient that she would happen to be an OB/GYN but the way she explained it, half of her work involved cloning and producing artificial wombs. Most of my father's staff had at least one OB/GYN on staff. It seemed to fit what Tracy and Robin's descriptions of his staff and my mother, being an insider, also confirmed it.

The three loyal OEC security officers had been sedated before I left to get the girls. My mother worked on their minds while I weakened their resolve with my abilities. She was able to erase their minds of the hours before they were sedated and replace their memories with false ones. They would believe that during the fire fight they were overwhelmed by an unstoppable force (me), and they found a way to set off the bunkers self-destruct before they made their escape. I had to cut all of the old landlines to the outside so the OEC couldn't even ping us. They had to believe that their base was truly destroyed. They already dumped their warehouse and the police seized it and put it up for auction and I had Dave buy it under a faked company as an investment property. In order to mask the transaction, I had Dave start buying all of the properties in the area so that we could justify our purchases as potential retail development project. It was all very controversial at the time but it created the right kind of noise. Rather than be stealthy we were sneaky.

Normally I wouldn't try something so risky but the OEC was on the run and they weren't crossing all of their 'T's or dotting all of their 'I's. This bunker was completely defensible and in the middle of a large city and the OEC was no longer backed by the Illuminati. But we didn't want to have all of our eggs in one basket either so one of the first things I assigned my new Sergeants (Tracy and Robin) and my logistical officer (my mom) was to look into fallback bunkers. The cabin we just left wasn't compromised so we still had it as a safehouse if things went wrong, but I wanted more options. We had to think bigger too because we were already expanding. I had Ataruians flocking to me, volunteering their help in our struggle.

I wish there was a convenient word for 'unpowered' Ataru like Muggles but they were called humans which was a dirty word in Ataru culture, so I started calling them Potentials because they still had some Ataru genes they just didn't have detectable abilities. One thing I knew about them was that they were immune to the coming plague so we went on a massive recruiting campaign to tap into this often-abused underclass. It turned out Lieba was a Potential and she took on the recruiting effort herself.

In less than a week we had over a thousand interested in joining our cause. We had them referred to the resistance and they put them through their standard recruitment processes. I had the resistance ease back some of the requirements on the Potentials and people that they rejected solely for not having enough psychic power were referred to me. The resistance was too strict and I found hundreds of Ataru that had talents that we could use such as IT professionals, hackers, electrical engineers, chemists, as well as tradesmen such as welders and electricians. Part of the process of filtering out the recruits was to read their minds to find out if they were plants or their minds were tampered with, so getting these recruits on board was a godsend since the enemy was likely to plant moles and assassins.

We started using these new recruits to build bases all over the country. The tradesmen were not only cheap since a lot of them were volunteers, but they were loyal and happy to be accepted by someone in the Ataru community.

In my spare time I posted the attack by the mech on the highway patrol officers and more importantly on one of the trackers. This created a huge divide with the trackers and OEC. The trackers started publicly announcing on Ataru media that they were wanted nothing to do with the OEC and everyday it seemed like the numbers of loyal Ataru to the OEC were falling as public sentiment decreased. One bounty hunter in Detroit, in particular, volunteered all of the information about an active OEC base that he knew of in downtown Detroit. I turned the information over resistance and headed out to Detroit to meet with a resistance strike force there so that we could reconnoiter the base and come up with a plan to take it over or destroy it. That's when all hell broke loose.

"Oh my god!" Robin sent, "It's all over the news..."

Besides our closed private network, we were only using over the air television and radio in the bunker so I knew that Robin must have been watching the news.

"What happened?" I asked concerned.

She let me in her mind and I saw and heard what she saw, "... Again, 49 dead in an apparent gangland style killing at the Georgopoulos mansion in Carmel By the Sea..."

Faces flashed across the screen, mostly people I have never seen before, however it was apparent that Anya's father and mother were both killed. Anya's link was still active so I don't think that they got to her however she was not responding to my sending. Then one image had me in shock. At first, I thought it was Anya but then I realized that it was Gina, Anya's twin sister.

"Nooooo!" I gasped, falling to my knees. "They've her!"

The anger and the rage took over me so much so that Robin had to break her link with me. I saw nothing but red.

I was slow to anger, but knowing Gina was murdered along with her whole family, not to mention all of the innocent staff, nurses, maids etc. and the possibility that they kidnapped Anya filled me with rage. I stopped the surveillance job I was working on in Detroit and rushed back to the bunker.

*

"San Francisco? That's like a thousand miles from here! It's too risky," Robin exclaimed.

"You'll be fine, they aren't looking for you, they want me. Besides, I know how to defend my mind from psionic attacks now."

"It doesn't matter, we need you, without you our babies will be without a father," Tracy argued.

"I agree, and I plan to come back home and be there for them... But, you are not the only mothers of my children... I am worried about the others. I need to find out if my other babies are ok. Tanya and Anya are both at nine months by now and if I wait any longer they will have their babies and I will lose my link to them... I think... Anyway, I can't risk it, both of them seem to be in California... I've got to do this."

"Our babies will need their father too!" Robin cried.

"Well for now, you are safe and they are not. You are going to have to make due. I promise I will do everything in my power to return to you, but only if it is safe..."

Robin tried to interject, "But, Nate..."

I turned to Robin, "I need you to be strong so that I can do the right thing."

"What about our broken hearts?" Robin cried.

"What about your mother? She will be without a son," Tracy argued.

"Mom will be ok, she's made of tuff stuff. She is the one that raised me and she taught me to fight back against abuse and I saw how futile it was to let someone slowly destroy your life. Nigel [my 'father'] needs to be stopped and he has shown that I can't hide from him anymore. I need to secure my family and find allies. I can't do any of that hiding."

I had just turned 19 but I felt like an old man, with the burden of the world on my shoulders.

"And, what about the Illuminati and all the rest that are after you, this could be a trap!" my mother moaned.

"You're all correct... about everything! It changes nothing, I still have to go. Don't worry, I'll be careful. I am expecting a trap and I have an idea of how to deal with it."

"We love you Nate!" Robin cried.

I pulled them all into a hug, "It'll be ok, I need to keep their eyes away from you. I need to out fox them. When a fox's den is threatened by a predator, it will lure the predator away by enticing them with itself as bait. I plan to be that cunning."

"You are much more cunning than a fox... and much more dangerous..." Lieba injected.

"At least take someone with you, Lieba maybe?" Tracy begged.

"No, I need her here. She's a good leader and I need her here to train the troops and make tough decisions while I'm gone. She's been in combat and won't freeze under fire, I need her here with you... it will set my mind at ease. Don't worry, I don't plan on going at this alone. I have some contacts with the resistance that are willing to help once I get there."

****

Mom dropped me off at a car dealership and I gave her a kiss on her cheek and off she went. With a couple of huge duffle bags and small suitcase full of essentials I walked into the dealership looking like a sailor just going on his leave. I was approached tentatively by a salesman, not knowing what to make of me.

I had black hair now, even my five O'clock shadow was dark. My eyes were no longer blue but dark brown. Tracey thought I looked a lot like Luke Evans, I didn't really see it but I was going for a ruggedly handsome look and if he was what I looked like then it could have been worse.

I had been planning to leave for many months. And I was preparing to go after the girls anyway, all this did was up the timetable. I finally had all of the credentials I needed. I changed my name to Jack Johnson, (Yeah, I know there is a singer with that name; I figured it was anonymous enough and any web searches would be filled with the celebrity). The Jack Johnson whose ID I took, had a history already; he was a petty criminal and wanted for many minor offenses in three different states.