Shadows (Ultrahumans Book 2) Read Online Free Page B

on and off since before Christmas.’
    That put a name to the attractive face. ‘Oh, so you must be–’
    ‘Alice Last.’ Doctor Ultimate’s wife stepped forward, offering a hand. ‘The Union calls me Patience. They say my power is putting up with Hugh.’
    Cygnus giggled and shook Alice’s hand. ‘I’m going to assume that he’s infatuated with my powers, not me.’
    ‘Oh, I’m not feeling jealous, if that’s what you mean. If I was worried about him chasing scantily clad younger women I’d spend my life in a constant state of worry. No, Hugh loves me and physics. Not necessarily in that order.’ Alice gave a smile and turned back to the door. ‘Come on, he’ll have forgotten you’re coming, but he’s been looking forward to it for weeks.’
    Following her out into a broad, gleaming corridor, Cygnus asked, ‘He’s really that absent-minded?’
    ‘Hugh’s mind can be doing up to six things at once, unless he’s really fixated on a problem. Then he can be working on it from twenty angles at the same time. That kind of thing tends to mean his local focus goes.’
    The Union headquarters facility was big. Penny knew that from documentaries she had watched on the Discovery and Ultra! channels. That was without the adjacent United Nations building which had been constructed after the one in New York had sunk. It was felt that putting the biggest target on the planet beside the largest concentration of high-powered Ultras on the planet was a good idea, even if the UN was little more than a talking shop, ignored by the major powers.
    Here in Unity Base there were training facilities, laboratories, workshops, communications facilities, and a huge operations room. If a truly world-shattering event happened, it was hoped that this would be where all the world’s Ultrahumans would be coordinated from.
    The next part of Cygnus’ journey had not been on any of the documentaries, however. Alice stopped at an unassuming elevator door and placed her hand on a plate beside it. There was the flicker of a scanning beam and the doors opened.
    ‘I thought there was only one level to this place,’ Cygnus said.
    ‘To Unity Base, there is,’ Alice replied, ‘but we’re going to Hugh’s labs. If you’ll pardon the phrase, given my name, we’re going down the rabbit hole.’
    A second palm scanner closed the doors and set them moving, down. A long way down, as far as Cygnus could tell. They dropped for about thirty seconds before the car slid smoothly to a stop and the doors opened, and they walked out onto a gantry above a machine room. Cygnus looked to her right and gasped at the huge, three-level toroid system which filled much of that side.
    ‘Isn’t that…?’
    ‘The largest fusion reactor Hugh has ever built,’ Alice interjected. ‘That thing would run two major cities and it just about copes with the power demands from this place. The portal generators suck up power like sponges.’
    Crossing the gantry took them to another door with a palm scanner, which let them through into a split-level, circular area. Above them was a walkway with doors around it. At the level they were on, half the floor was taken up with what appeared to be computers of some sort, though they did not look like the computers Penny had used at work. The other half was open, a hole through which Cygnus could see the floor below, which was full of benches, open areas with half-finished machines in them, and other signs of an absent-minded genius.
    ‘He’s down there,’ Alice said. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I have my own work to take care of. I’ll be down later to remind him he needs to eat and let you go home.’
    ‘Uh… right,’ Cygnus said, lifting into the air and gliding over the rail. ‘Thanks for showing me down.’
    ‘My pleasure, dear,’ Alice replied as she headed for a staircase to the upper level.
    Doctor Hugh Charles Last, known to much of the world as Doctor Ultimate, was a short, nondescript man with brown hair