Agent Darcy and Ninja Steve in...Mecha-Mole Mayhem! Page 9

  Darcy and Steve took off. Unfortunately, though, she didn’t really know what to do. They didn’t know what the object was or where to start looking. There wasn’t even a guarantee that it was in the lab. Really, it might not be anywhere on the campus at all.

  “Where do we go next?” Steve asked.

  “I’ve only been in here once,” Darcy said. “Let’s go down. It would make sense to store the valuable or dangerous stuff there.”

  She spotted a way down on the left. A mole tunnel led beneath a security gate. She barreled through the tunnel, Steve only two steps behind her. Once they popped out on the other side, they were right near a stairwell.

  “I bet there’s all kinds of cool gear waiting for us to try it out,” said Steve. “Like a remote-control dinosaur that can shoot grenades out of its nostrils. Or maybe a skateboard that has pogo sticks underneath it so that it can jump over stuff.”

  Darcy didn’t have the extra energy to tell him that neither of those existed. It would be difficult to be sneaky if you had a grenade-shooting dinosaur. People would notice you if your skateboard did something that no other skateboard could do.

  Upon hitting the bottom of the stairs, there was another security door. This one had been blasted wide open. Straight through it was a lab. Darcy saw the glowing computer screens and she went straight for them.

  “Hey, what’s going on?” Steve asked.

  Darcy only partially heard him. She had booted up the laser keyboard, which was now projecting red letters and numbers into the air in front of her. She hit a series of keystrokes, bypassed the login screen, and started typing up a flurry of complicated command prompts. It was time to hack into her profile and see what Three had been hinting at.

  “Fine, I’ll stand guard,” Steve said, jumping up onto the ceiling.

  Darcy didn’t want Three to be right. She didn’t want to dig into the bureau’s files and find out that they had been hiding information from her. Then again, she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to even gain access.

  It wasn’t difficult to bring up a browser and direct herself to the bureau’s encrypted data gateway. Evelyn had taught her advanced hacking, but had warned Darcy not to try it on their own systems or else she would risk expulsion for nosing around.

  Well, she was already expelled. What was the worst that could happen?

  To Steve’s credit, he waited patiently and didn’t ask any questions. He paced back and forth on the ceiling.

  Darcy’s fingertips were a blur. Her first attempt failed and set off a security alert. If someone was still monitoring the network from a secure location, he or she was already alerted to Darcy’s presence. The second attempt worked.

  She pulled up the student registry and found her code number. There were eleven files, each numbered.

  Darcy had to hurry. She clicked on file “002.” It was a list of her classes from when she was nine. She tried “004.” It was a letter of recommendation from Agent Kamala.

  It was “009” that she opened next.

  It was only one sentence.

  But when she read it, she shouted and punched the desk.

  STEVE

  When Darcy shouted, Steve fell right off of the ceiling. He landed in a crouch.

  He heard noises coming from down the hall. They were mechanized noises.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  Darcy shook her head. “I…I…”

  Steve walked over. “It’s going to be okay.”

  “No. No, it’s not,” Darcy said. “How can you even say something like that? Like you know the future?”

  Steve put his hands on her shoulders. It made him feel a little dizzy, but he still did it. He looked her right in the eyes.

  “It’s going to be okay because we are going to make it be okay,” he said.

  At that moment, two scout mecha-moles spotted them. Steve drew his baseball bat and threw it as they entered the door. The bat caught one of them right on the nose, and the mole flopped onto its back.

  Then, before the other could react, Steve had jumped over its head. His feet only touched the ground for a second and then he threw a back-kick that hit its target. Just as Sensei Raheem had taught him, he literally kicked its butt.

  “Time to go,” Steve said.

  He watched Darcy type in a final command. Steve swept up his baseball bat and then they were on the move again.

  There was a scratching noise from above. The ceiling opened up, as if someone had taken a bite out of it.

  Drogar landed, followed shortly by Steve’s parents. All of them looked scratched up, but Drogar was completely out of breath.

  “Tell us where the Nexus key is,” said Steve’s dad.

  “Trust us, you don’t want to open it, anyway. The place is a nightmare zone,” said Steve’s mom.

  “The second key is here and it belongs to us,” said Drogar. “And I am going to get the third one and bring our rightful ruler—my father—back here where he belongs.”

  Steve clutched his baseball bat. He didn’t want to have to fight Drogar. They had worked well together in order to make it through Botsylvania.

  “Drogar, he lost his mind and was going to destroy the world,” said Ninja Steve. “That is why Sensei Raheem had to stop him. You know that, right?”

  “You have the story wrong,” said Drogar. “He was going to bring order to the world. He was going to make the moles triumphant, like we deserve. You were the ones who were going to destroy the world if he failed. Somehow, he lost, and The Mole Republic became a war zone because of you and your wicked ways.”

  Steve scratched his head. “That is a very different version of things.”

  “Mine is the only version that matters,” said Drogar.

  In his heart, Steve sided with his parents. If they told him that the Mole Emperor had gone insane and needed to be banished to the Nexus, he was pretty sure that their version of the story was accurate. After all, they knew what insanity was like, what with him and Nora making all kinds of trouble.

  “It’s very convenient,” said Ninja Steve’s dad, “that you blame us for your country becoming a war zone. After all, weren’t you the one who declared war on your brother, Eldin, in your battle for the crown? Doesn’t some of the blame fall on your shoulders?”

  Drogar was silent.

  “So you’re going to open the Nexus?” asked Steve’s mom.

  “Yes,” said Drogar. “We know that you ninjas are holding the final key in Ninjastoria.”

  As she finished her sentence, a ring of brute mecha-moles dug out of the ground and surrounded them. At first glance, Steve counted ten. But before he could count any higher, another one popped up right next to him, grabbed him by the ankle, and threw him through an open window into a laboratory.

  Steve whirled around in the air, made sure that his heels hit the wall, and then he landed on the floor on his feet. His first instinct was to get back out into the brawl. His eyes, however, had spotted something interesting.

  In the corner of the laboratory was a table with a green control pad on it. It had two control sticks and two buttons. Standing right next to it was a metallic something covered by a tan sheet.

  Steve vaulted over the table and snatched the sheet away. Standing there was a robot dinosaur as big as a brute mecha-mole. Steve knew that it was a scaled down version of Tremendosaurus. That was about the only thing he found interesting when Sensei Raheem taught them about the dinosaur assassins.

  The robot was varying shades of green and brown, with metallic feathers sprouting from the backs of its claws and its tail. The eyes were big bulbs and its mouth was wide open, showing rows of metallic teeth.

  Steve picked up the remote control. He pressed the big green button with the power symbol. The dinosaur’s eye bulbs turned on, a pale yellow.

  “This is the greatest day of my life,” said Steve.

  He tested the control sticks. The dino was on wheels and it zipped back and forth and side to side. There was only one othe
r button on the control pad. It was a red square. Steve had some idea of what it might do. After all, it was red.

  Steve piloted the dino out of the lab and into the hallway. His parents and Darcy were totally surrounded. There was still no sign of Nora.

  The mecha-moles all turned and sniffed the air. Metal. The dino was made of metal. Steve realized he didn’t have much time before it would be devoured.

  Steve pushed the red button.

  The dino’s mouth opened wide and a single, metallic cylinder shot out. It struck one mecha-mole right in its abdomen, and then the cylinder unfolded into a pair of giant speakers. Colorful lights began beaming out of the dino’s chest and then MC Blackbelt’s #1 hit rap single, “Roundhouse to the Dome” started blasting from the speakers. The bass notes were so deep that Steve could feel his teeth vibrating.

  Mecha-mole after mecha-mole covered its ears. The dino bot began to do some kind of breakdance martial art. Steve watched in awe as it bobbed and swayed around the mecha-moles before using its tail and sweeping their legs out from under them in a whirlwind spin. Many of them were at a disadvantage since they were using their hands to protect their ears.

  In a flash, the dancing dino bot had knocked out every mecha-mole except for Drogar.

  “You’re losing,” said Steve.

  The Tremendosaurus roared.

  And then its battery died.

  DARCY

  The Giga Squad had once been described to Darcy as a “strange collective of scientists.” In her head, she pictured people who never left the lab, who didn’t sleep much, who drank a lot of coffee. She hadn’t exactly pictured them as people who made dancing dinosaur robots. Plus, she had a hard time imagining Commander Natalya or the Director approving such a project.

  Nevertheless, she had been thrilled to watch it thrash all of those mecha-moles. And, she supposed, it was fitting that Ninja Steve had been the one to find it and put it to use. If there was anyone who was meant to control an invention like that, it was Steve.

  But most of The Giga Squad’s projects never made it to the rest of the bureau—at least, not on the girls’ campus. Maybe on the boys’ campus or on the adult campus, things were different. Many of the inventions, Darcy figured, were too unpredictable or too costly. Or, like the dinosaur, maybe they had limited battery life.

  The speakers stopped blasting music. The flashing lights died out. The dinosaur came to a standstill. Thankfully, it had taken care of most of the mecha-moles, so now the odds were stacked against Drogar.

  “We can’t let you keep those Nexus keys,” said Steve’s dad. “We can’t let you open the Nexus, either.”

  Darcy hated that word. Hated that place. She hated it even more after she had found that email. The one that had—

  Drogar turned and ran.

  Darcy and the ninjas pursued.

  Drogar led them into a room full of glowing orange tubes that ran from floor to ceiling. There were dozens of them. In each one, suspended in the middle of the fluorescent orange liquid, was an object. A bowling ball, a cuckoo clock, a hairbrush, a lightbulb, a ladder. The list went on.

  “Is this…?” asked Darcy.

  “This is brilliant,” said Steve’s mom. “The Nexus keys are random every time. With so many objects here like this, an outsider has no idea which one is the actual Nexus key.”

  Darcy noticed, however, that the moles would have had plenty of time to smash the tubes and take the objects. The fact that they were all still here meant that whatever security feature was in place was a good one.

  “We figured out that if we tried to remove any of these without disabling the security set-up first, there would be a chemical reaction that would instantly dissolve every single object,” said Drogar.

  Then Drogar smashed her enormous fist into one of the tubes. It cracked. An alarm went off. One by one, the orange tubes turned red. The objects dissolved into confetti-sized particles.

  “If we can’t have this Nexus key, then no one can. By the time it regenerates, we’ll have steamrollered every country with our army, and then we can take our time finding it. I can wait until then.” In a flash, she had dug a tunnel up through the ceiling, and was gone.

  Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Everyone except for Darcy. She stared at the red liquid that was eating away at the objects inside. Her throat seized up.

  She felt embers licking out from her fingertips.

  “This isn’t fair,” said Darcy.

  Ninja Steve and his parents all gave her confused looks. Steve asked what was wrong.

  “I lost my opportunity,” she said, gesturing at the empty tubes.

  “No way,” said Steve. “This is a gained opportunity, even if Drogar is still out there. Without the key, the Nexus can’t be opened by them anytime soon. Right, Mom?”

  “That is correct,” said Steve’s mom. “The key could regenerate anywhere. It could take years or decades for anyone to find it. This mission isn’t a failure.”

  “Maybe for you it’s a success,” said Darcy.

  She was trying to contain her anger. Deep down, she wished she hadn’t hacked into the bureau’s systems. She wished she had never read that file. Because now she knew that…

  “Marcy, everything is fine. There’s a chance that we’ve scattered their forces and that the bureau can retake the campus,” Steve said.

  “My parents,” said Darcy. Her left hand was totally enveloped in flames. She was losing control of her anger.

  “My parents are stuck in the Nexus!”

  STEVE

  “Oh,” said Ninja Steve.

  That was all his brain could come up with. Darcy had just watched her chance at reaching her parents literally disintegrate before her eyes, and all he could say was, “Oh.”

  He couldn’t fully imagine what she was going through. Then again, having part of your body burst into flames seemed like a fairly reasonable response. Steve realized that if his parents had been stuck in some mystery realm for years and then he lost his best chance to reach them, he’d be feeling some fiery anger, too.

  Steve and Nora had both seen Darcy’s fire power before. He had forgotten that his parents hadn’t. They were looking at her with uncertain eyes and she was looking back at them.

  Steve’s mom spoke. “Marcy, if your parents are still alive, we are going to do everything we can to get them out.”

  “Will anyone approve that?” Darcy asked.

  “Pull it together, Marcy,” said Nora, suddenly appearing from a panel in the ceiling and dropping to the floor. “We have to get out of here.”

  Nora had a tendency to be blunt, Steve knew. This time, though, he felt that she had taken it too far.

  Darcy must have felt the same way, because she turned to Nora and her entire arm began to blaze.

  Steve got between Darcy and Nora. “It’s okay to feel anger. You can’t let it control you, though.”

  “I’m trying,” said Darcy, the flames dying down and then winking out.

  Nora said, “This is nice, Steve, you’re a great coach and all, but I don’t think you heard me. We have to get out. While I was exploring on my own, I saw that the moles were positioning their drill tanks to surround the place. They might wait for us to come out, or they might start them up and turn this place into crumbs.”

  As soon as she finished speaking, the room started shaking.

  That didn’t stop Steve’s dad from saying, “Nora, when we get back, your mother and I have both agreed that we need to talk to you about running off alone in enemy territory.”

  A drill tank, sleek and earth-colored, with a massive spinning drill bit on the front of it, came crashing through the ceiling, grinding up everything it touched. The pilot was visible through a glass bubble right above the drill.

  It was Drogar.

  Another drill tank chewed through the wall behind them. Steve turned so he could keep each drill tank in his sights.

  “I have an idea,” said Steve. “Nora, do you remember the episode
of Kung-Food when Burrito-San needed to infiltrate Macho Nacho’s fortress?”

  “Got it,” Nora said.

  “Okay,” Darcy said. “So…?”

  Steve grinned. “Use your ghost fire to melt through that cockpit window. We’ll be right behind you.”

  “Wait, what are—?”

  Before Darcy could say anything else, Nora performed the spell of bull strength, picked her up, and threw her like a football. Steve got a running start, Nora laced her fingers together so that her hands formed a little basket, and when Steve planted his foot in her hands, she catapulted him in a wide arc toward the tank.

  As Steve sailed through the air, he saw Darcy’s hand flare up and watched as the glass cockpit melted like caramel. The mecha-mole pilot had no idea what to do. Darcy looked back and saw Steve flying her way.

  “Watch out!” Steve yelled, and Darcy swung herself onto the top of the tank as Steve fell like a meteor toward his target.

  Steve’s jump kick hit the mecha-mole so hard that it flew out of the pilot’s chair and went rolling all the way to the back of the tank. It scurried onto all fours, hit a button on the rear of the tank, and ran out of an emergency exit door.

  A moment later, Darcy, Nora, and Steve’s parents jumped into the tank through the melted cockpit bubble.

  “Great teamwork,” said Steve’s mom. “That was perfectly executed.”

  Steve’s dad took control of the tank. “Let’s get out of here.”

  The giant drill on the front of the tank roared to life. With the cockpit broken open like that, there was nothing to quiet the noise.

  Darcy got close to Steve. “The next time you’re going to have your sister throw me at a tank, promise me you’ll do a better job of preparing me.”

  Steve blushed. “I promise.”

  The tank angled downward and chewed into the ground. Fine dust began to pour into the cockpit as they went, until Steve’s mom performed the spell of windy winds and used it to form a barrier.

  “Dad, when did you learn how to pilot one of these?” Steve asked.