Becoming Zodiak

by Craig Jones

  With a respectful nod, Crabbe spun his wheelchair forward and looked out of the hovership’s vast front windows onto the scene below. The street in front of the bank was empty and the police had erected temporary barriers at each end to keep the public back, not that they were really required. Yes, a group of people had amassed, but they were far from a mob. They more resembled visitors to a museum, intrigued by the sight of something long since thought extinct, and the police were little more than the curators. They needed Zodiak to actually get the job done.

  “That van really is quite the problem,” Crabbe muttered. Then louder: “Libra! Get me eyes in there.”

  Libra swept a hand across the full display once more, bringing screens labelled with the names of Sagittarius and Gemini to the front. He tapped a fingertip to his left ear.

  “Sag… Gem… Do you copy?”

  The green edge on both screens blinked once, twice.

  “Infiltration team, you’re good to go,” Libra informed them. “Weapons free on my mark.”

  Libra paused. He loved this part. It almost made up for the costume.

  “Zodiak! Go!”

  4

  Sagittarius hooked up the abseil ropes as Gemini checked his phone one final time.

  “You expecting a call, handsome?” she shouted over the thrum of the ship’s engines as she clipped her harness into place, ready to drop to the street.

  “No, no, no.” He shook his head. “I have hacked the bank’s security systems, but the cameras, they tell me nothing.” Though Gemini’s French accent made him sound permanently annoyed with the world, he was clearly annoyed now. Still, he copied Sagittarius and manoeuvred himself into position for the abseil. Their last act was to pull their protective helmets onto their heads. Across the top of Gemini’s helmet was his symbol: ♊

  “Ready?” he asked, and Sagittarius nodded.

  “Un, deux, trois!”

  Together they leapt from the roof. Sagittarius hit the ground and released herself from the rope. She glanced left and right. The crowd’s focus was now on her and even the police marshalling the public had turned from their tasks and stared her way. To the left, at the nearest corner, she spotted Leo’s hypercar. The headlights flashed once and she raised a thumb in reply. She didn’t need to look the other way. Training and practice told her Scorpio would be there, waiting on his motorcycle.

  “We can use their van as cover,” she said and began to slink forward. She reached behind her back and detached her crossbow from her red body armor. She plucked the string to test its tension. “Call the shot, Gemini.” She took a step forward, waiting for her colleague’s advice, but none came. She turned to face him. “Gemini?”

  He was nowhere to be seen. His rope swung from side to side but Gemini had not descended with her. A quiet whistle from a few metres above her head drew her attention upwards. Gemini swayed on his rope about halfway down the building they had been descending. His body armor was similar to her own, but he was nearly able to blend into the brickwork as his was the same bland brown as Libra’s hated pilot suit.

  “A different… How you say? Perspective?” he said. He unbuckled his harness and let himself fall to the ground. He landed with perfect poise. “Now I see the shot. Take out the smallest window, top left, and I’ll get some eye balls in there. You see how close it is to the wall inside? The wall will be my target.” He drew a heavy-looking handgun from his hip and checked the chamber before sliding a telescopic sight into place along its barrel.

  Sagittarius touched the side of her helmet. “Lord Crabbe, without visuals I don’t want to blow the glass out. I could blind someone.”

  Through their earphones both Sagittarius and Gemini heard Crabbe’s reply “Agreed. We can’t get decent thermal imaging with that van in the way. I suggest an acid dart. Melt the glass, then let Gemini do his work.”

  “Yes, Sir.” Sagittarius turned her left forearm over to reveal a keypad built into her suit. She punched three numbers, and with a short hiss a six-inch long dart emerged from an integrated quarrel on the back of her suit. She reached back and snatched it, slotting it straight into place on her bow.

  “I have the shot,” she announced, dropping to one knee. An amber lens, crosshairs etched in the middle, slid down out of her helmet over her left eye as she took aim. She pulled the butt of the crossbow tight in against her shoulder so it sat right over the most padded part of her outfit, just where her logo was stitched: ♐

  “In one, two—” she began.

  “No! Wait!” Gemini shouted.

  “Okay, Gem… In un, deux—”

  “No, no… For once, please save your American sarcasm! We have visitors!”

  Sagittarius immediately snapped to and spun on her heels. “What the heck?”

  Gemini had two scruffy men by the scruff of their necks, his biceps bulging with strain even through the protective layer of his armor. One of the men gripped close a huge digital camera, the other a boom microphone on the end of a long stick.

  “Are you guys for real?” Sagittarius asked, incredulous.

  “Hey, someone’s gotta report the news,” quipped the man with the camera.

  “Oui,” Gemini snarled. “And someone has to kick your—”

  “Gemini,” Sagittarius interrupted, then glared at the intruders. “Get out of here and you get to keep your camera. Go!”

  The two men scampered away towards the police cordon. Gemini placed one hand on his hip as he redrew his gun and stared at Sagittarius. “You should have let me—”

  “Maybe, but we’ve got a job to do. If you can just keep that temper under control for a few more seconds?”

  She pivoted and dropped down to firing position, and with an almost silent phtt, the dart was on its way.

  It hit the target dead centre with a dull thud, and the hiss of the acid being released followed immediately. The glass melted away in a thin veil of steam and the dart fell to the street. Voices, gasps and shouts from within the bank, previously muted, could suddenly be heard.

  Gemini didn’t hesitate another instant. His handgun was up and the shot made in a microsecond.

  “I am one man, but I see all,” he said, holstering his gun with a flourish.

  His aim as ever, was unerring. The single black bullet flew through the space where the glass had been just moments before. When it struck the wall, the shell shattered, releasing dozens of tiny ball bearings that scattered within the bank.

  “Libra, you should have visuals now,” Gemini announced. “Eye balls deployed. I repeat. Eye balls deployed.”

  Libra’s response was heard by the whole team through their headsets. “Visuals confirmed. We have eyes on the scene. Six bad guys, lots of hostages. Patching pictures through to your helmet viewfinders.”

  A shotgun blast went off inside the bank. One of the giant windows shattered outwards in a hail of glass shards, adding a deadly tinkling echo to the gunfire.

  Sagittarius, stood with her back to the scene, didn’t flinch but pointed a thumb over her shoulder in the direction of the bank as the broken window was sprinkled across the sidewalk. “Why didn’t they do that two minutes ago and save us the effort?”

  The people massed at each end of the street all retreated, screaming. Most of the police officers ran with them. Some stumbled, fell, were trampled as the volume on the street reached a fever pitch. The few police who tried to hold their positions seemed out of their depth and unsure what they should actually be doing.

  “You don’t need me to tell you what that was,” Libra shouted through Zodiak’s headsets. “Infiltration team retreat… Ground assault, over to you.”

  5

  Inside the bank, pandemonium ran amok. The customers and staff shrieked and whimpered. Parents pulled their children closer to them and the youngsters hid their eyes, as if that would make the bad men disappear forever. The stronger amongst the crowd hovered, anxious, in place on the floor, desperate to do something but frozen by fear. The echoes of the single gunshot l
ingered in their ears like church bells.

  One of the robbers stood in the middle of the room, smoke still swirling out of the end his shotgun, which shook in his hands. One set of window blinds, blasted ragged by the shrapnel, fluttered in the breeze. A final stalactite of glass standing where the massive pane had been fell with crash and everyone yelled out once more.

  “Right. Everyone set the safety on your guns!” shouted the driver, the obvious leader of the robbers. His voice silenced the hubbub of the terrified crowd. “It’s ten years just for pulling the trigger, and if we hit anyone it’s twenty.” He marched across to the middle of the room and snatched the expended gun from his associate. “And if you hit one of them, that’s it. You’re in for good.”

  The eyes looking back at him from behind the mask of his admonished teammate were scared. “But they wear armor. We’ve all seen that stuff’s impregnable.”

  “So what use is firing your gun at them, then?” growled the driver. “You’re just going to make things worse for yourself!”

  “Hang on, boss,” snapped one of the robbers from behind the serving counter, his rucksack weighed down with hundreds of pounds’ worth of notes. “We had a chance to get out of here before they turned up and you told us to hold our positions. What are you playing at?”

  He strode around the counter and straight towards the driver. His aggressive demeanor was obvious to the hostages, who cringed and cowered closer to the counter.

  Their concern was palpable. If their captors started shooting at each other, no one knew who would get caught in the crossfire.

  The likelihood was everyone.

  They needn’t have worried. Hardly a second had passed between the object being fired through the window from outside and the destruction of one of the bank’s windows. No one had paid any attention to the dozens of miniscule ball bearings that had popped out of the black projectile when it had struck the wall and fragmented. No one had picked up on the fact that the bearings had spread themselves out evenly across the floor. No one noticed how easily it would be to step on one and lose one’s footing.

  Until it happened to two of the robbers at exactly the same time.

  “Rucksack” went first. Both of his feet slid out from under him and the weight of the money on his rear hurled him backwards onto the floor. Although the impact on his spine was softened by the layers of money, the crack as the back of his skull hit the tile was sickening; he was unconscious even as his finger autonomously squeezed the trigger of his gun. Luckily, he’d obeyed his boss’s order.

  The driver quickly followed Rucksack to the floor as the weight of two shotguns dragged him down face first onto the body of his mutinous partner.

  One or two startled sniggers came from the crowd of captured civilians, but no one dared move yet. There were still three shotguns on them.

  The driver shoved to his feet, but both his demeanor and voice no longer held the confidence of just a few seconds before. With a shotgun in each hand he still managed to present a formidable figure.

  “Anyone else want to question my leadership?” he huffed.

  No one responded, not the hostages or the rest of the robbers.

  “Good, ’cause we’re doing this my way. We sit tight.”

  6

  “The front door of the bank is their only exit,” Lord Crabbe’s voice echoed around the flight deck of the hovership. Libra reached out and flicked a switch on the console in front of him, then turned in his chair to face the older man.

  “Sir, there’s no need to shout. The microphones are extremely sensitive. You may have just deafened half of the team.”

  “Ah, yes. Sorry, sorry,” Crabbe replied. “I shall never get used to all this technology.”

  “You developed it, Sir.”

  “I meant I shall never get used to how good our technology actually is.”

  Libra smiled impishly and pushed the switch back to its original position. He raised a thumb, indicating to Lord Crabbe that the microphone had been turned back on.

  “Their only chance of escape is that van,” Crabbe continued, lower this time. “So let’s take it out of the equation. Aries? Taurus? Do you copy?”

  With a drawl that could only have come from the American South, Aries replied from her position. “Heck yeah, boss. I’m good to go.”

  Crabbe nodded. “And Taurus, are you—?”

  “The amphibian is approaching, Sir,” Libra interrupted. “Orders for the water team?”

  Virgo’s soft voice needed no microphone to be heard. “Tell Capricorn, Pisces and Aquarius to help the local law officers with crowd control. I don’t want this situation escalating.”

  “Yes, at once.” Libra relayed the order to the newly arrived Zodiak members.

  “Aries, I want you to hit the front door at precisely the same second that Taurus hits the van,” Crabbe directed. “The double blast will disorient the bank robbers. Then I want a full-scale assault. We have visuals now on six criminals. One is down. Libra is patching through Gemini’s images to your helmet monitors…” Crabbe looked to the front of the ship and was once again met with Libra’s raised thumb. “Now! Time to execution, three minutes. All members rally on Aries and Taurus.”

  Through the loudspeakers came affirmative replies and the green lights around Libra’s screens began to flash.

  “Crowd control dealt with,” Libra called. “Teams are ready to roll. Projecting countdown onto monitors.”

  Libra and Lord Crabbe’s eyes were focussed on a three-dimensional image of the inside of the bank, generated from the mini cameras in Gemini’s ‘eye balls’. It sat in front of the massive front windows of the hovership, mapped directly over the actual bank itself, an X-ray of the building’s interior. Neither of them saw Virgo stumble, almost fall, before she reached out and grabbed the safety rail between the upper and lower levels of the flight deck.

  “There’s something wrong…” she whispered. “There’s…”

  “Sir!” Libra shouted, ignoring his own advice about the sensitivity of the audio equipment. “We’re all over the news!” He swept his gloved hand from left to right and a television image replaced that of the activity in the bank. A handsome man in a sharp suit stared out from the screen at them, a grave expression etched across his chiselled face.

  “Welcome back to WWW News, your number one news channel worldwide. We take you live to Liverpool where the siege at a main street bank continues even though the undefeated crime fighting team, Zodiak, are now on the scene. Jennifer, over to you.”

  The image changed to a handheld camera and a woman wearing a bulletproof vest at ground level below. Behind her sat the team’s green amphibian on its hulking tank tracks. The body of the vehicle was shaped like the oversized egg of a long dead dinosaur, big enough to comfortably hold its usual three occupants. A water cannon was housed on top but the rest of the shell was perfectly smooth. There were no obvious doors or windows.

  “Thanks, Owen,” Jennifer shouted over the sound of the hoverhip’s engines as her hair was whipped across her face by the buffeting winds. “As you can see, the final members of Zodiak have arrived here in Liverpool and it looks like they are preparing for their next move.”

  The camera panned to the woman’s right, removing her from the shot to show Zodiak congregating on the opposite side of the street, in the criminals’ blind spot behind their own van.

  Crabbe released an angry noise. “Libra, block that transmission. If the criminals have anyone on the outside, they’ll know what we have planned in seconds.”

  The screen immediately filled with static before the live feed was pulled back to the studio.

  “We appear to have lost Jennifer for the moment,” said the anchorman, “so let’s take a look back at how all this started.” His face was only on the screen for a few seconds before he was once again replaced. This time the screen showed a battered white van lurch to a stop in front of the bank over the shoulder of a smiling woman who was being interviewed. Then five
men, all dressed in black, clambered out of the back before charging into the bank. Once they were moving, the driver of the van got out and casually followed them in. The camera tracked the driver shakily until the clip finished as the door swung shut behind him.

  Libra shook his head. “How did they know to have camera’s here at the start of all of this?”

  “Luck,” Crabbe replied. “And they’ll be lucky enough to have cameras here at the end of it too. Team! Are you ready?”

  Libra swept the screens, bringing his teammates’ points of view back in front of him. All nine flashed green.

  “Lord Crabbe?” The voice was soft, weak, almost inaudible. But Crabbe and Virgo felt it as much as they heard it.

  Crabbe and Libra turned in time to see Virgo swoon to the floor. She almost seemed to fall in slow motion, like a white and weightless feather that was just airborne

  “Libra! Help her!” Crabbe yelled, and then, to the rest of Zodiak, he instructed: “Zodiak? Be ready to end this now.”

  He spun his wheelchair and followed Libra to Virgo’s aid. No one saw the lights around the screen marked with Taurus’ name turn red.

  7

  Aries pulled her huge helmet—red with white ram horns painted on each side—down over her short, spiky blonde hair.

  “I’ve got great visuals on my screen. I’m going in,” she announced to her teammates. They were all crowded around her except for Scorpio, who had maintained his position on his bike in case any of the bank robbers made it out. Aries took her first lumbering step forward, the bomb-proof suit heavy and unwieldy until she built up some momentum. Her outfit was bright red, designed so the opposition would know something intimidating was on the way. She was, without doubt, a fearsome sight. Across her back, covering her whole torso, was her logo: ♈