Free Strike 2: Dawn of the Daybreaker by Charlie Wood Page A

of the prison where Vincent Harris was being held. Like Vincent, he was obsessed with the planet Earth, and he believed that unless the inhabitants of Earth were controlled and ruled over by Capricious, the universe was doomed to be destroyed. He was terrified about what might happen if the humans of Earth gained the ability to travel the universe, and believed it was his destiny to stop this from happening.
    “Using the information he had gathered from myself and the other heroes of Capricious, Marcus found the underground prison where Vincent was being held, broke him free from his cell, and awoke him from the cryogenic sleep he had been under for nearly five decades.
    “The rest of the story you know: with Vincent reawakened and threatening to travel to Earth, your father came out of retirement and helped me stop him. Your father paid a terrible price for Rigel’s actions that day. We all paid a terrible price.”
    “And now,” Tobin said, “Rigel is back, carrying on Vincent’s work since Vincent isn’t here any more.”
     “Yes,” Orion said. He watched the image of Rigel. “It appears that way.”
    After walking out of the museum’s giant double-doored entrance, Orion and Tobin walked across the headquarters’ brick-lined sky-ship landing platform. The gleaming, winged sky-ship known as the Sky-Blade was waiting for them at the edge of the platform, with its engines running.
    “When Vincent and I were both still members of the Guardians,” Orion explained, “I often heard him talk about something or someone called the Daybreaker. He was always saying that this Daybreaker was even more powerful and important than him, which is saying something, considering Vincent’s ego.”
    Orion and Tobin walked up the Sky-Blade’s ramp and into its open door.
    “Rigel and this other man dressed in green must be working together to search for the Daybreaker, to continue Vincent’s plan for the enslavement of Earth. And they must be looking at you as their main obstacle to finding this Daybreaker, which is why they were giving all those Earth criminals superpowers, in an attempt to get you out of their way.”
    Tobin shook his head. “Great, I’m flattered. So where are we headed now?”
    Orion sat in the passenger seat of the sky-ship’s cockpit. “First, we get Scatterbolt back. We find out where Rigel took him, and we take Rigel and his partner down in the process.” The old man held up the golden sphere that Scatterbolt had left behind in Boston . “There is only one person in the world who can help us figure out what this sphere is—the person who created Scatterbolt. And he lives, conveniently enough, in the one place that may be able to cheer Keplar up.”

CHAPTER NINE
     
    Five hours later, under the night sky, Tobin, Keplar, and Orion stepped out of the Sky-Blade and onto the wet, grassy shore of an ocean. However, Tobin thought, the ocean appeared to be more of a massive bog—the air was filled with a thick, rotten fish-stench, and nearly everything around him was black: the slow-moving water, the sand, the trees, even the patches of dried-up lily pads under his feet. Nearer to the shore, there were hundreds of rocks lining the sand, and they were also covered in a black, slimy algae. Looking closer, Tobin could make out crabs and six-legged rats scavenging and chewing on the carcasses of dead fish, hidden under the blanket of thick fog.
    “You guys bring me to the nicest places,” Tobin said, careful not to slip on the rocks.
    “Here we are,” Orion said. “My friend should be able to get us across the water more discreetly than if we flew in. We want to be as inconspicuous as possible, after all.”
    Tobin had originally thought there were no signs of human life along the ocean, but then he noticed a rickety, wooden dock sticking out into the water, and next to it there was a small, wooden shanty. The shanty was leaning to its left, like a condemned building about to fall down, and it was