by Nels Wadycki
The distant howl of sirens indicated the approach of law enforcement vehicles. Jrue swooped through another lane of traffic, hoping that the car behind him wasn't armed. An inexperienced police vehicle would get blown to bits if the man chasing him could shoot anywhere near as well as he could fly. Jrue was not going to take his chances with the experience level of the officers inside whatever patrol car happened to be in the area. He opened up a comm channel to the Agency.
"This is Jrue Gueye, authorization 860149. Need back up at 3000 N Halsted. Unknown vehicle attacked and pursuing. Assisting Valkyrie Project agents, other possible opposition personnel inside the research laboratory at Halsted and Wellington."
He said it all without taking a breath, knowing that even if the agent on the other end couldn't parse the data, the machines that had tuned in as soon as he'd given his authorization code would collect, slice, analyze, process, and execute before their human counterpart could even get a word in.
The voice on the other end crackled a bit as it came over, probably just parroting whatever the display had spat up.
"Assistance is on its way."
His pursuer probably wouldn't take a shot through all the traffic, but that was only an educated guess. And if he didn't, it would only be because he didn't want to waste ammunition. Jrue knew it because he had been trained that way too. If the man behind him did have guns or rocket launchers tucked away in the cavities of his hovercar, Jrue was very worried about his chances. The giant hunk of metal he was steering—you couldn't really call it driving at the speed he had pushed it to—was as tough as a skyscraper on a fault line, but it fought like one too.
He veered again, his body sending sweat through every pore available, soaking the underarms of his base layer, rivulets running from hairline to eye line, palms slipping a bit on the controls. He leaned the hovercar through an arc to point back in the direction of the building from which they had departed. He had been ambushed, and Marisol and Ana might be facing something even worse. He hoped he could get back to them before the man with the long scar could catch him.
The hovercar teetered as it sped through traffic, halting other vehicles in several of the skylanes. The stopped hovercars provided nice cover and served as good obstacles, but the Takuro Spirit behind Jrue weaved through them like the ephemeral entity for which it was named.
Jrue dove once more as he rounded the corner of the building containing Ana and Marisol. Back to ground level, hoping he could scoop up his team and, if they were lucky, even their target, Dr. Portofil. He slowed as much as he could get away with as he passed the entrance, but there was no one outside, and no one waiting inside the glass doors of the lobby.
The transport blasted back up to Lane 5, flipped as tightly as Jrue could make it and went back across the front of the building just above the roofline while Jrue tried to decide if the less crowded side streets would make it easier to lose his pursuer, or if he should just maneuver through the throngs of commuters again and hold out until backup arrived.
--
There was an audible crack as Ana slammed back against the man in the elevator. She hoped it was a bone breaking, but guessed it was just the stems of the roses. She knocked him back into the elevator, broken bone or not, but he bounced off the back wall and came at Ana faster than she would have thought possible. She parried an initial blow and held off another.
"Go!" Ana yelled at Marisol and her partner ran down the hallway.
The man fielded Ana's knee as it headed for his groin. With him no longer on the offensive, she stretched back and slapped the key on the elevator panel that would get them to the top of the building.
Ana rebalanced herself on both feet just as her opponent attempted to sweep her leg. He connected with her right leg, just above the ankle, with enough force to dislodge her foot from the floor of the elevator. Ana wobbled a bit as the muscles in her left stiffened, holding her position.
His arm shot out and slammed a flat palm straight to her sternum, knocking her even more off balance, and her left leg decided to give up its hold rather than tear itself apart trying to keep her upright.
The door to the elevator slid open as she toppled backward and Ana rolled through a reverse somersault and popped back to her feet in a wide berth of hallway almost identical to the one where she'd let Marisol off to find Dr. Portofil.
Marisol might have gotten away, but the man with the hook nose continued to come after Ana. He leapt from the elevator and took a lunging swing. He struck faster than a man his size should, but Ana turned the blow aside, used the transferred momentum to dodge away from her attacker and then sprinted for a door with a red exit light above it.
The light flashed as she barreled through the door, but it opened. There was no alarm—at least not an audible one.
Ana bounded up the stairwell on the other side of her escape hatch and heard a crash as her pursuer came through the door after her. A moment later, Ana burst through another door onto the flat gray roof of the ten-story structure. She turned and drew her gun, knowing she'd have only a few seconds to train her sight and draw a breath.
Ana pulled the trigger twice as her pursuer burst through the door, making him stumble awkwardly as he charged toward her. She backed up a couple steps, but then he veered away and toward the edge of the building. Ana wondered if it was too much to hope that the two shots she'd fired would somehow send him over the edge of the roof some thirty meters away.
It was. He stopped five meters short and turned to face her. The man whipped a gun from the jacket of his dark suit, and had it pointed at her too fast for her to shoot it from his hand. The gun almost disappeared when he pointed it at her. It was one of the smallest and slimmest Ana had ever laid eyes on. The bullets had to be needles to fit in something that size, but she wasn't about to underestimate the effectiveness of anything coming at her at five hundred kilometers an hour. He didn't shoot, though, and Ana used the break to draw a quick breath and size up her enemy.
She did not see any blood coming from the places where she'd hit him. The concept of invincibility jumped to the front of her mind. She had considered mind control a science fiction trope until a few days before. Was the ability to withstand high-velocity slugs that unbelievable?
No. Ana often wore under-armor made of thin, light material, and while it came at some cost of encumbrance and bulk, the Continuum had demonstrated an array of high-tech weaponry that exceeded the capabilities of what the Agency produced. Ana had not felt any sort of body armor underneath his suit during their earlier skirmish, but she couldn't discount the possibility that it was there. The design of the gun the man held proved that.
"How did you know?" he said, his baritone growl carrying across the roof.
"Ali doesn't have a husband."
He nodded, conceding the point.
"Who are you?"
"I should ask you the same thing."
Ana had a flashback to the hotel room where she'd captured the last Continuum agent. If there were telepathic agents and they had any sort of range, she stood close enough to be in it.
A gust of wind blew across the flat expanse of roof, not strong enough to knock either of them off their guard, but tousling his hair and splaying Ana's out behind her. Ana thought she caught the sound of police sirens, but it could have been just the whistling of the wind. The door to the roof might have set off a silent alarm, though. Bringing in some police at this point might not be a bad thing.
The man stepped around the roof in a cautious circle maintaining the distance between them. Ana wondered for a moment if he was getting in position for an extraction, but the wind died down and all she heard was the faint rush of traffic from a few stories down.
The hook-nosed man took another couple steps on the circumference he had drawn around Ana. The arc circumscribed inside the square of the roof brought him closer to the edge while staying the same distance from her. A few slugs in his center of gravity might be enough to topple him over the side whether the
y penetrated his hidden armor or not. She realized too late that he had the same thought, except he intended to go over the side under his own inertia.
The tiny gun in his hand made three small pops and Ana was able to fire back with two rounds before jumping out of the way. She managed to keep him in her range of vision while scrambling to make sure whatever came out of his gun didn't hit her. One of her blind-fire bullets cut across the landscape of his face, creating a dark red valley as it went. Ana hoped it would be enough to stop him long enough for her to recover, but he had a running start and jumped straight out over the empty space, a thin spray of blood trailing him as he went. Gravity pulled him toward the Halsted skylanes and out of her view in under a second.
Ana sprinted to the edge of the roof and looked down. She expected to see him smashed on the street far below, or maybe on the roof of a hovercar if he'd been lucky. She didn't see him anywhere. He could not have disappeared into any sort of transport that fast even if someone had been waiting below to catch him. Ana should have been able to spot him scrambling to get inside the extraction unit somewhere along one of the skylanes. But he wasn't there.
She peered down the side of the building to see if he had managed to stick to the side. She scanned the faces of the other adjacent buildings. Ana looked down at the ground again to double-check. She had seen him jump and watched him heading down.
Any further attempt at investigation was interrupted when a hovercar zipped down between the buildings, dipping and climbing through skylanes like a bee across a flower bed. It looked identical to the one that Jrue had used to escort them to the building on top of which Ana stood. Except this one had a beaten-up Takuro Spirit chasing after it.
The lead vehicle shot through Lane 5, just missing several cars, bringing a halt to the high-speed commute for which they had purchased an expensive pass. It had to be Jrue and his government vehicle's skeleton key pass that allowed him to zoom from lane to lane faster than even the priciest of fare cards would permit. The pursuing car must have had the same unfettered access, a privilege that rivaled illegal weapons for the price it fetched on the black market. Especially for a pass that worked in the overcrowded lanes of Chicago.
Without even thinking about it, Ana flicked a telemetry switch on her gun and took stock of the distance between where she stood and the vehicle that was chasing Jrue. The gun followed the movement of the trailing car, but Ana could not squeeze a shot through the traffic that Jrue was using as obstacles to slow his pursuer. She needed Jrue to draw him out like a crawfish crank so she could sink her hook in him. Of course, he had no way of knowing she was out there ready to take out the twin engines that flanked the Spirit. The heavy government car dove again, speeding around the corner toward the entrance of the building. Jrue must have been worried that the Valkyries were waiting for him. In a sudden flash of panic Ana remembered Marisol and Dr. Portofil. Perhaps they had made it down there and were waiting for him.
She cut an angle across the roof so she could check for her friend while keeping an eye on her man. The thought sliced through her mind so fast she almost didn't catch it. No time to consider a Freudian slip.
Jrue dropped to Lane 1 and slowed a tiny bit as he reached the front of the building. Ana looked down and saw no one. An uncomfortably familiar feeling. Had there been another—or rather, a third, if you counted whoever was chasing Jrue—agent working with the hook-nosed man? Had the third operative been able to capture Marisol and Alicia?
The thoughts and scenarios raced through Ana's mind as fast as Jrue's hovercar zoomed back up to Lane 5 and doubled back in front of the building. He was closer to her now and the Spirit drew nearer as well. Not as much traffic on the Wellington Street side of the building. Ana raised her gun again, holding it with both hands to steady her aim.
Three leading bullets flew out faster than her eye could track, but she only needed to watch the Spirit to see the result. The first shot was high and crashed through the back window of the Spirit, but the other two blasted through the hull of the engine, catching at least one reactor core with a loud tearing sound. It lit up like a tiny supernova and sent the car plummeting towards the hard concrete. With its nose turned down, the car's momentum combined with gravity to send it crashing to the pavement before the driver could escape what had become a large metal deathtrap. It exploded on impact and sat burning for several seconds before Jrue noticed and slowed his car. Ana was far enough up that the sound of the car hitting the ground barely registered. Almost as faint as the wailing of police sirens she heard in the distance. Good to know they would at least try to show up.
Jrue swung around and Ana bolted for the door. She flew down the top flight of stairs and back into the hallway with the elevator. She was a little surprised to find it empty, but only had time to think that the security guards might be closer to Marisol and Alicia than the elevator where she had tussled with the hook-nosed man.
The elevator dropped her back down to the first floor almost as fast as the enemy car had gone down. As soon as the doors split open, Ana sprinted for the large glass panes of the building entrance.
Jrue set the van down opposite the wide swath of glass and Ana raced to him. The door to the transport popped open and Ana was about to ask if he knew who had been chasing him when he beat her to the punch with a more important question.
"Where's Marisol?"
He didn't ask about Dr. Portofil. Ana appreciated that his primary mission was their safety and protection even while their focus was on securing the doctor. In her rush, and concern for Jrue, Ana had assumed that Marisol had made it out with Alicia already. Foolish, of course, since she'd already considered the possibility that more than one enemy agent had gained entrance to the building to pursue them. In fact, it was not just a possibility, but more likely a reality, as evidenced by the flaming hull of a hovercar a hundred meters down the street.
Ana leaned against the shell of the Valkyrie transport, trying to catch a few quick breaths.
"Can't you scan for her?"
"Yeah, been a little busy."
Jrue was still short on breath himself, but he brought up the tracker display.
"She's still inside the building. In a stairwell."
He touched the display and the building flipped to a three-dimensional rendering.
"Looks like she's coming down the stairs. Should be an exit about fifty meters from here."
Ana pushed herself upright and looked back at the building. She spotted the exit Jrue was referring to.
"Anyone with her?"
"Yes, someone else just ahead of her. Gotta be the doctor, right?"
"Yeah, what about behind?"
"No one in the stairwell. There are other people moving around quickly, but they could be good guys or bad guys. No way to tell."
Ana nodded. She took a couple steps toward the door when a man approached the front entrance from the inside. He was the same height as the hook-nosed man. Same skin tone. Same gait. A reflection on the glass obscured his face, but Ana's hand already touched the butt of her gun.
He pushed through the doors and looked in the direction of the exit from which Marisol would emerge at any moment. He showed her enough of his face even in profile for her to tell he bore an off-kilter nose and a bright pink scar that ran from the tip of his high cheekbone to where his ear connected to his head. She'd found him. Or he'd found her. That scar, though—even with biofoam and the best medicine on the planet, no one could heal that fast.
Ana's gun was up. It pointed at his head, then at his shoulder. She didn't want to kill him if she didn't have to. Then she remembered the last time she'd spared a Continuum agent for interrogation purposes and her aim went back to his head. Better safe than dead.
How much longer before she would be as cold and callous as Rani? Was that really better than dead?
"Don't move!"
Didn't work. The man rushed back through the large glass doors with the bullets from Ana's gun shattering them behind him.
Scarface Hook Nose was almost to the elevators where Ana had first encountered him—before she'd marked his cheek with her bullet—and the display announced the impending arrival of Elevator 3. Ana fired off two more shots, but she didn't want to hit someone inside the elevator, so they went wide and hit the wall to the left of the door. He barely noticed. She dashed after him as the door opened, but there was no one inside to slow him from getting in. The door slid shut and the elevator shot toward the upper floors of the building.
Ana waited to see what floor the man got off on, but knew she had already fallen too far behind. Her comm lit up with Marisol's face, and she tapped the screen, still monitoring the display between the elevators.
"Ana, we have Alicia. I'm with Jrue at the transport. Get your fat cooch out here so we can get away before anyone else comes."
Mission accomplished. Ana did not want to get used to the feeling of leaving so many loose ends after every mission, but they had the doctor and their responsibility was to protect her and not go dashing off after men who could disappear off the roof of buildings or—for all she knew—from inside an elevator.
The thought brought up an image of the Great Anton from one of the old long-form dramas she'd watched with her father. He'd said that Anton had been one of the most sought-after men of his time. Of course Ana hadn't known if he'd meant Anton or the actor who played him. Either way, she knew what it was like to go after men that many others wanted as well. The Agency and the Valkyrie Project expected it from her on a regular basis.
But there was only one man she really wanted to find and it was not her father. She had stopped wondering about him at pretty much the same time she'd stopped harboring illusions about her role as a foot soldier in a war that would never end.