“If they’re Blacksnake, no idea on powers except for that girl who makes smoke,” Rider reported. “I see a lot of pistols though, and some rifles.”
“Rifles on a moving train?” Bull said, shaking his head. “That’s a little careless for Blacksnake, isn’t it?”
Rider shook his head. “Not conventional, sir. By the looks of them, I’d say they were packing electrical discharge cannons and projectile tasers.”
“How do you know that?” Frankentrain asked.
“Read about ’em,” Rider said simply.
“All right then,” Bull said. “First things first. Before we move out to stop this train and take out those Blacksnake mercs, we need to get the veterans out of danger. We need to disable that detonator, and failing that, disarm those bombs. I need options here, and I need . . .”
“Mister Echo Man!” Tammy’s voice chimed over the PA. “You know I can hear you, right? And hello, you should really get your story straight and know who your captors are. As a rule, us Rebs don’t like to be confused with Blacksnake . . .”
“Save it!” Bull snapped. He approached the door leading to the next car. Tammy stood on the other side, smirking at him through the glass. In one hand she held a small comm unit to her mouth, in the other she kept her thumb gently pressed against an illuminated red detonator button. “We know damn well who you are, and who you work for. You also know we can’t meet your demands before we get this train under the city, so why don’t we cut the crap and get to it. What do you want?”
Tammy chuckled, her voice dropping an octave. “Oh good, that voice was beginning to grate on my nerves. So you know, Operative Bulwark. It changes little.” She glanced down at the elevated track and the ground far below. “Tell me, Bulwark, have you ever wondered what would happen if you and your kinetic shield hit the ground from this height, and at this speed? Would you bounce like a shimmering ball? Or would the impact knock you out and dash your brains out on that cold concrete? Me? I’m kind of curious to find out.”
“What do you want?” Bull repeated.
“Oh, don’t you worry your giant, disproportionate head over that,” she said with a smile. “You just worry about keeping calm, keeping your people still, and hey, maybe I’ll even let you try to negotiate with us.” She craned her neck to look around his crew. “Strange, I thought you even had a negotiator with you, the dumpy one with the nice smile. Oh well, the offer still stands.”
“What did you do with Dusty?” Bull said, and slammed his hand against the protective glass.
“Careful!” Tammy hissed, and raised the detonator in a menacing gesture. “My thumbs feeling a bit . . . twitchy. Don’t test me, Bulwark, I won’t warn you again. We see any of you trying to leave that car, any motion to break down the glass or those doors, or any funny business from the vet cars, then I press this nifty little button to separate your cars off and blow you sky high.”
Bull bared his teeth in frustration, and was about to retort when a new voice came across the PA system. A very familiar voice.
“Hey, Harmony!” the voice crackled against sounds of high winds. “Can you define ‘funny business’ for us?”
Bull turned around and stared through the glass at the other end of the car. Riding the outside of the veterans’ car, a female figure hung by one hand between the compartments. Her face was masked by goggles and a scarf, though it was clearly her shouting through a handheld walkie-talkie.
“Unit Five!” Tammy shouted. “What are you doing out there?”
“Harmony?” Bulwark said, his head whipping back to stare incredulously at Tammy.
Tammy sighed and closed her eyes. Bulwark watched as her features shifted in place. When she opened her eyes again, it was Harmony staring back at him.
“That’s a bit of relief, actually,” she muttered. “Unit Five, I believe spankings will be in order when we get back.”
“I’m looking forward to it!” the masked girl shouted. “But you didn’t answer my question!” She jerked her head back to the interior of the passenger car. “Would that satisfy your definition of ‘funny business’?”
Bull turned again. Inside the next car, the Echo metas stationed with the veterans, and it appeared, some of the veterans themselves, had overtaken and bound their Blacksnake captors. He looked back at Harmony, who was now seething in anger.
“Who is this?” Harmony demanded. “You seem familiar!”
“I should!” the girl shouted. “You almost spotted me a couple of times, but what can I say? I was well trained!”
“Can’t have been that well,” Harmony snarled. “Guess I get to see if Bull can bounce after all.” She raised the detonator.
“No!” Bull shouted, and slammed his hands against the glass.
Harmony pressed the button.
* * *
Verd had paused again, frowning, with one hand on his earpiece. Bella knew why; Vickie was updating her practically by the second, and he must have gotten word from his goons that his plan had gone seriously pear-shaped. His frown deepened. “Go to Plan B, then,” he growled, and wrapped up his speech.
But it sounded rushed, and nothing like in keeping with the rest of the speech. People in the audience were reacting with vague unease, detecting the change and not understanding what they were uneasy about.
His hand is being pushed. He’s distracted. His timing is off . . .
“And now, Yankee Pride will unveil the monument to our honored fallen,” Verdigris said, waving at Pride.
This was not in the script either. It was Bella who was supposed to pull the rope, which was on her side, and they had to swap places so Pride could reach it. That was when she suddenly realized that Verd’s split concentration, the distraction of the fabric falling away from the monument, and increasingly negative reports coming in on his earpiece just might give her that opportunity.
She edged closer to him. Yankee Pride pulled the gilded rope, and the canvas dropped, revealing a bland and tasteful—and utterly soulless—abstract of a curving arc of stone rising out of what were probably supposed to be equally abstract ruins. The sharp tip of the arc glinted crystal. Polite applause began. Bella edged even closer.
Then—
“Bella, whatever you’re planning, don’t do it,” Red Djinni’s voice said harshly in her inner ear. “Khanji’s gone into full bodyguard mode, and I can’t get to her before she gets to you.”
The hell? It took everything she had not to start in surprise. “Where are you?” she hissed.
“Close. Bull put me on bodyguard for you. Stay focused.”
Oh, that was—frustration and anger welled up in her. What was he doing here? He should be with the rest of the team, not wasted on babysitting her! She was perfectly capable of taking care of herself!
“Dammit, Red, you should be on that train right now! And since you aren’t, you should be at Five Points! We—”
“Don’t be stupid,” he interjected, cutting her off. “You’re too important. Now stop making my job harder and keep your damn head down. Verd’s pretty pit bull is on full alert, and if you make any moves towards him, she’s going to drop you.”
With the hope of refuting him, she let her empathic sense drift towards Khanjar . . .
Only to be slammed with a wall of adrenaline-charged purpose. Khanjar’s attention was, impossibly, everywhere.
Red was right. All that would happen if she tried her planned move would be that she would—if she was very lucky—be dropped unconscious before she got close enough to touch him. It was unlikely Khanjar would give her the benefit of the doubt, so probably she’d be dead, and for nothing.
All right. Plan B. “What if I think of a way to distract Verd so Pride can get out of here without risking myself?”
“Only if you run it by me first.”
“I just knew you would say that.”
* * *
Harmony thumbed the detonator in fury, anticipating the rear cars to break off, the glorious explosions and flames to foll
ow, and perhaps the sight of Bulwark attempting in vain to save as many as he could.
Nothing.
Incredulously, she thumbed it again, harder, then whacked it against the side of the car. Nothing.
“Whassa matter, Harm?” the girl shouted back. “Toy not work? I wonder why?”
“What did you do?” Harmony screamed back in a white-hot rage.
“Found all the bombs and defused them! Oh, and disabled the device to separate the cars! Told you we were trained well!”
The girl reached up to pull down her scarf and raise her goggles. She was grinning. With a feeling as if she had been drenched in ice-water, Harmony recognized Scope.
“Scope . . .” Harmony snarled. “And I’m guessing Bruno’s with you?”
Acrobat rose up from between the cars. His face was also hidden behind a ventilator, mask and goggles, but his boyish salute and wave gave him away. Harmony realized something else. He was getting smaller.
No, they, and the vet cars, were getting smaller . . . because they were separating from the train. Acrobat waved again, and in his hand Harmony saw the manual locks that connected the cars together.
“Don’t worry about us, Harm,” said Scope over the Blacksnake comm. “We have someone in here who knows how to drive. Oh, and about your toy, you did realize there were bombs planted in every car, didn’t you? We didn’t want you to miss our show, so we disabled all of them for you. Wasn’t that nice of us?”
If Harmony had felt drenched in ice water before, she now felt as if she had been frozen solid. Verdigris had sold her out and set her up, just as Verd had set Jack up. He had never intended to pay up. And he had figured on making sure he wouldn’t have to by killing them all. She seethed with anger, but fought it down. She had other problems right now, loose ends to take care of before she paid Verdigris one last call. One of those loose ends was staring down at her, his jaw set, his face a stone mask to his fury.
“Just you and me now, Harmony,” Bruno said. “I told you I’d see you again. Let’s see how much you break this time.”
“Fall back!” Harmony cried, and backed away from the door. “Defensive positions! If they breach, take them down!”
* * *
Bull turned away, and motioned one of his men to the door. The meta grinned and raised his arm. His hand seemed to disappear, replaced by a hot, incandescent flame that blew out like a torch. Bull let him pass to work on the steel door, and motioned to Paperback Rider. “Rider! Move your team out!”
Rider nodded. He motioned his team around him. They did a quick check of their gear, including their magnetized gloves and boots, and gave him the go sign. He knelt and raised one fist high in the air. As one, they reached out and took hold of his arm, and then they vanished.
Frankentrain whistled. “That’s a new one!”
Bull grunted. “You know how he works, his powers are all one-shots. He’s been saving that one for a while now, for when we needed it. Too bad it’s short range, or he could’ve taken them all to the front compartment . . .”
They heard heavy footsteps on the roof as Rider’s team leapt to the next car.
“. . . but that’ll do. C-Torch, we through yet?”
“Just about!” C-Torch yelled, his hand burning a slow circle through the barrier.
“Frank, you’ve got point. You’re on anything energy-based they throw at us. I’ll pick up the slack behind you for any stray projectiles with the shield.” Bull stared intently through the glass. Harmony’s forces had set up a barricade halfway up the next car. “Standard melee assault maneuvers, ladies and gentlemen. We take territory and hold it. If you see Harmony, chance the artillery. She’s blinding fast, and you don’t want her touching you, is that understood?”
“Yes, Sir!” the Echo Ops answered.
C-Torch hooted as he finished cutting through.
“Then let’s go to work,” Bull snarled, and kicked the door down.
* * *
“Overwatch: Command: full in slash out relay Gamayun, Echo Dispatch,” Vickie ordered, giving Gamayun of the CCCP and Colt of Echo Dispatch full access to the chatter on all channels. That took some of the coordination off her hands. Which was a good thing, since a few seconds later, Bulwark came on her private freq. It was fairly noisy with shouts and sounds of combat.
“Overwatch, can you switch Scope and Acrobat’s Blacksnake comm over to us?” he asked.
Hooboy. Don’t ask much, do you? “Maybe,” she replied, and quickly told her Heisenberg probability calculator to give her numbers. “Uhm, probability, forty percent. With a seventy-five-percent modifier that we’ll lose Blacksnake chatter altogether.”
“Anything we can do at this end to better those odds?” he replied. “I don’t want to lose the Blacksnake chatter, but we need our ops back online.”
“Will it to happen,” she told him, honestly. He hesitated a moment, probably not sure if she was being serious or not. She was.
“Do it,” he said. “Out.”
Oh crap. She dove for her box of personal packets and got out Scope’s and Bruno’s, plugging them into the first available spots. “Overwatch: Command,” she said as she worked. “My personal freq. Open Echo Dispatch. Open CCCP Dispatch. Colt? Gamayun?”
“Go, Overwatch.”
“Da, tovarisch.”
“I might lose the Blacksnake chatter in a minute; something I have to do might drop it. If you’ve got a free hand, try and pick them up. They’re using Blacksnake Protocol Baker-Niner-One-Alpha, and they’re on Harry Dog Six Seven Oh point One Baker. Colt, this’ll mean you’ll have to tap into Echo’s comp capability and—”
“No worries, Overwatch. I woke up Sam and sent him down to the computer room. It’s ours, and Greenboy won’t get a whiff.”
“I think I love you and will have your children,” she said fervently, getting back into her chair. “Gamayun, CCCP’s rig isn’t as sophisticated—”
“Da but is more robust. Sturdy socialist construction. Nechevo, sometimes brute force wins day.”
“Roger that. Okay, I need to do my thing. Pick up the slack for me for about a minute. Try and catch if the Blacksnake ball drops.” She took her hands off the keyboard for a moment, closed her eyes, and calculated. Law of Contagion: Scope and Acrobat had their comms in their hands or on their belts. Law of Identity: Vickie could see those comms via the security cameras on the cars. Law of Similarity: make their freqs look like Overwatch freqs. And in . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . go. She blazed through the equations like a rocket, because there was no time. No time.
And in the monitor showing Scope and Acrobat’s cams . . . the Blacksnake comms at their belts failed. Spectacularly. In a shower of sparks.
Oh, bloody . . . Vickie’s thoughts dissolved into a cascade of Romany cursing, when two freqs that hadn’t been live in far too long suddenly lit up. “Scope to Overwatch. Overwatch, did you hex our Snake comms?”
“Scope?” she yelped.
“And Bruno,” Acrobat said gleefully. “Hiya, VeeVee. We kept our Overwatch rigs; we figured we might need them.”
She thanked all the gods of communication as she typed commands into the keyboard. “Overwatch to Misfits. Big Man wants you on comm instanter. Or in person. Can you make it to him?”
“Sorry, Overwatch,” Scope answered. “We’re slowing down, the big guy’s pulling away and we haven’t learned to fly yet.”
Vickie swore. “Well that’s just . . . wait. Did you say fly?”
* * *
It only took a few minutes of flashing over the rooftops of the city before they neared the MARTA line. The train was easily visible, even from a distance. As they swooped in, Natalya glanced at the group of Echo metas on top, moving hand over hand towards the front car. She hissed as she saw another group of Blacksnake emerge between the second and third cars. A train-top battle! Unter knew that she had always wanted to take part in one of those. But there was other work to do first, then she could play. They had to take control of the trai
n, and her cargo was just the sort to do it. The Commissar banked left to intercept the lead car, staying as high as possible until they were almost directly above it. At the last moment she dived, plunging them towards the unforgiving metal roof of the lead car; Georgi was afraid that she was going to smash both of them into it until she braked with another plume of energy. He gave her a thumbs-up, and she set him down. It was difficult, but he was able to land on the roof of the car without a loud impact; something like that would have surely alerted the occupants inside, which would ruin the entire plan. Natalya nodded to him once before rocketing off again, eager to return to the rooftop fighting.
Untermensch hunkered down, crouching on the train car’s roof; the wind from the train’s speed was enough to stagger him if he stood at his full height. Lowering himself so that his belly was flat against the roof, he slowly crawled until he was at the left edge. Gripping the edge of the car, he used his free hand to retrieve a tactical mirror from a pouch; it had an extendable neck, but he only pulled it out to about half a foot. He had to keep a firm hold on it; the wind kept threatening to tear it from his grasp. Carefully, he placed the end of it over the edge, and angled it inward. Squinting, he could make out the interior of the cabin.
There were eight “Rebs” in the car, including one that was at the controls. They were wearing a mixture of denim and leather, with typical biker patches and the Rebs’ club patch on their cuts. He scanned each one carefully. There. Many of them had tattoos, but Unter noticed that they weren’t biker tattoos; most of them were military-themed. Under their cuts were low-profile plate carriers and load-bearing vests. True Rebs are never so well outfitted. Sloppy work, scum. Replacing the tactical mirror in its pouch, Unter decided that the time to act was now.
Coming up into a crouch, Unter gripped the edge of the car, and then oriented himself to face inwards. He reversed his grip, and then kicked his feet off the edge of the car, swinging toward the center of the car feetfirst. The glass window in front of him exploded inwards, the sudden rush of wind in the car sending the shards flying. There was a Blacksnake merc directly in front of him; bracing his legs, Unter pushed against him as he fully entered the car. Taken completely by surprise, the merc was launched off of his feet and through the opposite window, sent screaming and bleeding to the ground below the tracks. Landing in a crouch, Unter unholstered his battered Makarov pistol; one of the Blacksnakes to his right was starting to recover and draw a weapon. Unter fired rapidly three times, striking the merc in the chest and arm. He went down, but Unter could tell he was only wounded. Body armor! I must aim for their faces.
Revolution: Book Three of the Secret World Chronicle Page 50