‘Joe, have they left sentries at the doors?’
‘No. All of them went inside.’
‘Damn.’ Mercy looked back the way she had come. There were emergency stairwells on both sides of the building. Had they split into three groups or sent the other five up one side? If the latter, which side? She pulled her revolver. She was unlikely to know the answers until the second group got to this floor, but she could see into all three stairwells from the centre, so she waited, aiming her pistol down at the team she knew was coming up from directly below her.
That they were up to no good became apparent when the first to round the corner immediately raised his rifle into firing position when he spotted Mercy. Unfortunately for him, that was a second too late. A pulse of blue light hit his helmet, passed clean through it, and punched out the back of his neck. They were all moving in slow motion. Mercy realigned her aim and fired again before the first body hit the landing. Her second target’s head vanished entirely in a brilliant burst of blue light and she moved on to the next. Five men fell in a second, two of them headless by the time they hit the floor.
She turned. The second team was coming up the rear emergency stairs which meant Steve’s office was between her and them. Still operating in her accelerated timeframe, she ran back toward the man she was hoping to rescue, dropping the two remaining rounds in her revolver into her palm to save for later as she did so. She pulled a speedloader from her coat pocket and slotted seven new rounds into place, snapped the cylinder closed, and dropped to one knee outside the door of the office.
They were already in the corridor, but her speed seemed to take them off-guard. They were still raising their weapons when she opened fire. One of them was hit in the chest before their fingers could squeeze the trigger. He began to fall as she lined up on the second and put a blue light ball through his heart. Bullets began to fly back from the only man with a clear shot since they had been advancing in two columns with one man in the middle at the rear. She barely felt the first round to hit her; it was slowed so much by her barrier that it barely left a bruise. The second bullet got in a better hit, however. Pain blossomed in her stomach as the jacketed lead punched through her skin, tearing into the flesh beneath. It threw her aim off and her returning fire missed its target. The fire in her belly made her react on some sort of instinct; throwing out her left hand toward the squad, she did something and suddenly the men vanished into a sphere of utter blackness.
No more bullets came out of the black surface. She was not entirely sure what she had done, but they were trapped and she was bleeding. Clutching her stomach, Mercy lurched to her feet and into the office. ‘Come on, Steve, we’re leaving.’ There was no way to tell how long the black sphere would last. Getting out while they could was the best option.
‘You’re hurt,’ he said, stating the blindingly obvious.
‘Yeah, but if this works out the same as last time someone tried to kill me, in a few seconds, I won’t be.’
New York Authority.
‘Obviously, they were Damned Ones,’ Hart said. ‘You say there are Damned Ones on Danbury. Kerry states that it was Damned Ones who attacked the scouts. They came back and–’
‘Private Kerry,’ Mercy said, putting a little emphasis on the rank since Hart had not mentioned it, ‘saw a woman with horns and red hair, clearly a Titan, and several others, men and women, dressed in just the kind of thing you’d expect of a street gang post-apocalypse. Leather. Torn T-shirts. Chains. The Titan apparently used a chain as her weapon.’
‘Lilith,’ Faith said. ‘That’s Lilith. She’s one of The Damned’s Anathemas, possibly his most trusted one, and exceptionally dangerous, especially at close quarters.’
‘Okay. The men who came after us were not Damned Ones. They were dressed in modern combat gear. They had modern battle rifles. Specifically, they had the same gear I saw up at West Point. These were the same mercs that have occupied the academy and they seemed to know I was there.’
‘You appear to be saying that they were sent specifically to eliminate you,’ Hart said. ‘Why would they do that?’
‘Why would they go to Danbury to finish off a scout the Damned Ones missed? How would they even know that there was a surviving scout? Someone’s pulling strings in the background. Someone is running those mercs, and that person knew that the Damned Ones would be moving into Danbury at some point.’
‘You’re turning this into a conspiracy theory.’
‘Conspiracies happen, General. Most of the ones the public make popular are bullshit, but conspiracies happen. The smaller they are, the easier they are to keep secret. This one has relatively few moving parts, but they’re all starting to come together, so the pattern is getting more obvious. Something is going to happen, fairly soon. And unless we get lucky, we’re not going to know what’s going on until it happens.’
~~~
‘You wished to speak to me, Sergeant York?’ Faith asked of the nervous young woman standing at stiff attention in front of her desk.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ York replied quickly. She was an attractive girl, but less so when she was sweating.
‘Then please stand at ease and speak.’ Faith added a smile. Smiles could do wonders with putting people at their ease. It did not really seem to work on York.
‘Ma’am, I overheard a radio call. I’m a communications officer. A tech. I, uh, overheard someone using an unencrypted channel we don’t normally use.’
‘I see. And was this radio conversation something we should be alarmed about, Sergeant?’
‘It was between an NYAS officer and someone in the Damned Ones, ma’am. They were… They were warning the Damned Ones of the scout unit being sent to Danbury.’
Faith tried her hardest to maintain her smile. Do not shoot the messenger. She had known there were spies in her administration. Certainly, the Organisation had them. There was a suspicion that Melville Royce had someone keeping an eye on the NYA. The Damned Ones were another matter. They were not organised enough for something like this. Who could it be?
‘I assume you’re unable to give the name of the traitor, Sergeant?’
‘I know who it is, ma’am. Th-that’s one of the reasons it took me some time to come forward. I’m sorry about that.’
Faith lost the smile, her expression hardening. ‘Who was it, Sergeant York?’
‘General Hart, ma’am. I’d know his voice anywhere. It was definitely General Hart.’
~~~
‘I honestly don’t know what I did,’ Mercy said. ‘I got a bullet in the gut, which hurt like hell, I missed the shot, and I panicked. Then there was this curved black wall filling the corridor.’ She was making another report to her friends over dinner, as was their habit.
‘Which nothing came out of?’ Nick asked.
‘Nothing. No bullets, no men.’
‘And it was entirely black? Not like… a pool of oil. There were no reflections.’
Mercy frowned, thinking back to the scene in the office building. ‘Now you mention it, no. And my spatial sense couldn’t see anything past it.’
‘You stopped time.’
‘Sorry?’
‘You can accelerate your own time,’ Sophia said. ‘Why not stop time for other people?’
‘Okay…’ Mercy frowned. ‘That’s a sort of logical conclusion, but how did you get there, Nick?’
‘Primarily since it’s clear that light could not escape the region of… null time you created.’
‘Like a black hole?’
‘I’m a biochemist, but my understanding of black holes suggests that the analogy is weak. However, at the event horizon of a black hole, time is essentially stopped. Light cannot pass from inside the event horizon to outside it, so the surface is black. Sort of. I believe there are some nuances which would not apply in this case. Basically, however, this zone you made is black because no light from within it, or anything else, can exit it. Similarly, I would imagine, your spatial sense relies on some sort of emission and t
hat was trapped within the sphere too.’
‘Okay. So, I can stop time somehow. I suppose we don’t really know how any of us can do any of the things we can do, so nothing new there. I guess I should experiment with it to find out–’
‘It does explain how we were trapped aboard Theia for fifty years,’ Nick said in a musing tone.
‘I… What?’
‘It’s a documented fact that some Titans experience power… outbursts when they first emerge. These are generally extreme manifestations of the powers they will exhibit later. You said you were in considerable pain when the Wave hit Theia, yes?’ Mercy nodded dumbly. ‘That seems to be one of the triggers. The more pain you experience, the more likely it is that an outburst will happen. You were in pain and you reacted, freezing all of us in time for a greatly extended period. I doubt your current power can contain anything for fifty years, but that one time, it did.’
‘I-I’m responsible for that?’
‘I don’t believe “responsible” is the correct word. You were not in control.’
Sophia and Joe thought differently. Mercy could see it on their faces. ‘I suspended us in time. Stopped us getting home for fifty years. I did that.’ If she were honest, Mercy was not buying Nick’s line of reasoning either. It had happened because her powers had overreacted.
‘Frankly,’ Nick went on, ‘I consider it a good thing. We missed out on the early years when things were really bad. We would not have been able to affect things here anyway, given the time it took us to return to Earth.’
Mercy looked around at Sophia and saw the hurt in her eyes. Joe was the same, but with a hint of anger. ‘I, uh, need to think about this,’ Mercy said. ‘I-if anyone needs me, I’ll be aboard Pallas.’ Then she was gone.
~~~
Hart had his home in a stone-clad brick building on Spring Street with plaques mounted on it suggesting that it had once been something famous. The arched doorways had steel shutters filling them and the windows – complete with fake balcony rails on the second floor – had been retrofitted with metal-plate shutters to make the building somewhat storm-proof. There were good, solid reasons for having all that metalwork, it was just that the actual reason appeared to be to fortify the place, and not against Wave Storms. There were some smaller windows on the third floor which were open, and gun barrels could be seen protruding from them.
‘We can’t get in,’ Faith said from a position at the barricade Security had set up at the junction of Hudson and Spring. ‘We could blow the shutters, but those gun positions are stopping us getting anyone close enough. They’ve got even better weaponry at the back. Better field of fire. Here they’re at least somewhat restricted, but–’
‘Do you need any of them alive?’ Mercy asked.
‘If they’re captured, they’ll be exiled. We don’t have much variety in punishments, but we can’t let them off with a misdemeanour here. I’d like Hart for interrogation, if possible.’
Turning, Mercy started down the street. ‘I’m not making promises.’
Around her, time slowed as Mercy made her approach at a steady walking pace. She was angry. It was primarily at herself, but she was happy to take it out on some soldiers who had betrayed their commander-in-chief. She had locked her entire crew in stasis for almost fifty years, taking them from their families at a time when they were most needed. Her own family… Well, there was no great love lost there, but Joe and Sophia were another matter. Thinking about it, Mercy had no idea about Nick’s relationship with his parents, or even whether he had had siblings. Still…
The barrel of what looked like a sniper rifle began moving toward her and she moved. One instant she was in the street, the next she was standing in a corridor leading up to a small window and behind the sniper. He lifted his head from his scope in surprise, but it did not occur to him that she might be right behind him now. Not before a beam of blue light appeared right through the back of his skull, obliterating his head in an instant.
Mercy’s spatial sense spread out through the building, searching for targets. There was another sniper in the corridor to her right, beyond an unoccupied room which looked like a bedroom. To her left was an office. There was a desk, a few chairs, a laptop on the desk, but no sign of an occupant. One floor down, she could sense three men around a stairwell. They were armed, but at ease at the moment. They were, she figured, there to stop anyone coming up if they breached the shutters. There were possibly more on the ground floor, screened from her senses, but the numbers seemed low and there was no sign of Hart.
She relocated herself behind the other sniper and he died in a similar fashion to his compatriot. It was probably painless. Their brains likely had no time to realise what was happening before they were reduced to nothing. Maybe – and given the weirdness in the world the Wave had exposed, Mercy could not entirely discount the idea – their spirits knew what had happened after the fact. Maybe some annoyed ghosts were now following her around, demanding to know what she thought she was doing. If so, her new senses did not include a method of seeing them. She looked around and down, and then she translocated to the second-floor stairwell.
One of the three guards was looking at her when she appeared. He started to call out a warning, lifting his PDW from where it hung on a sling as he did so. Mercy’s disintegrating blade appeared, lancing through his chest and killing him instantly. She slashed the weapon to the right, out through his ribs without the slightest resistance and through the stomach of one of his companions on its way to the third. All three were dead before they could lift a weapon, and Mercy was turning before their bodies hit the ground, searching for signs of life on the first floor.
Down here, there seemed to be more offices. Maybe Hart kept a staff here to assist him in running his half of Security. There was no one here now, and no sign of Hart. There was, however, a basement. Mercy could see no signs of anyone down there at the moment, but she relocated herself into one of the rooms down there, circumventing the need to figure out where the stairs were. Here she found another office, though there were no electronics. There were a couple of loose cables, suggesting that computers or other equipment had been here at some time, maybe recently from the patterns in the dust in some places.
Her spatial sense revealed a second level of basement. There were living quarters down there, a lounge and bedroom. Likely, this was where Hart relocated to when a storm hit. She jumped down and decided that, maybe, the bedroom upstairs was the less used one since things down here were pretty palatial. At least, palatial for the time. The furniture looked less like it had been recycled from somewhere. There were high-thread-count sheets on the bed. There was still no sign of Hart.
Where had the man gone? Faith had been quite sure he had retreated into the building on learning that he was to be arrested. Then again, if it had been her, Mercy would have had an escape plan, not a plan to hole up and hope her opponent would see reason or something. So, had the reports of him coming here been wrong or…
That was when she spotted the hole in the floor. It was, believe it or not, hidden under a rug and closed off with a steel plate. One of the guards must have replaced the rug after it was used to leave the building. Metal rungs were set into the floor, which was lined in concrete. This escape route had not been created quickly or recently; Hart had to have been planning to leave in an emergency for years, maybe decades. Maybe it had originally been designed as a way out if the NYA was overrun. Now, it seemed, it was Hart’s way out in the event of discovery. But where did it lead?
~~~
‘The tunnel?’ Faith asked, bewildered. ‘It’s supposed to be blocked. Hart said– Damn! He had the thing collapsed at several points soon after we arrived. He must’ve–’
‘It’s been collapsed at both ends,’ Mercy said, ‘but someone dug a second secret entrance at the other end out into the basement of a building over in Jersey. If it had been done properly, the tunnel would be full of water. I found a garage on the other side with recent tracks from a heav
y, wheeled vehicle of some sort. At a guess, he’ll have gone to West Point. He’s exiled himself.’
‘Yes, but to what end? Is he going to come back with those soldiers and try to take over?’
‘Doubtful. There aren’t enough of them to be really serious about a coup. If they still had the element of surprise on their side… Maybe. Now, he’d be better off cutting his losses. He really did hold a grudge from that first election, didn’t he?’
‘Much more than I suspected.’ Faith frowned at the unoffending sidewalk beneath her feet. ‘There’s no point in going after him. Perhaps we can ask Joe to take a look up there and see if he’s really gone to West Point.’
‘Perhaps. You’d better ask him yourself.’
Faith looked up, still frowning. ‘I was surprised when you were aboard your ship. Has there been some sort of falling out with the others?’
Mercy looked away from the president’s enquiring gaze. ‘I found something out that… I did something which affected all of us and they’ve a right to be angry about it. I’m angry about it. I’m giving them some space while they sort out their feelings.’
‘Hm. Far be it from me to step into a personal matter, but I think we’re going to need all of you soon. I don’t like how things are going around here, and this is no time for petty squabbles.’
‘It’s not petty, Madam President,’ Mercy snapped. Then she relented; maybe taking her annoyance out on others was not always appropriate. ‘It’s not, but it’s something we should probably work through sooner rather than later.’
Airborne, 8th June.
Joe was sort of regretting his decision to go flying. He had thought it would give him a chance to clear his head, put things in perspective, but the reality was that he was alone in an empty sky with nothing to do but go over his regrets time and time again.
He was blaming Mercy for not being there when whatever had happened to his parents had happened, but the reality was that his decision to join the crew of Theia was the problem. It had taken them four months to return. Even without the fifty-year gap, he would have been four months late to help in any meaningful way. He had heard what had happened when the Wave hit. Yes, if his family had survived those events, he might have been there when the asteroid impacts happened, but what good would that have been? Maybe Theia’s sensors could have seen the rocks coming and given some warning, but the devastation had been massive and he was no survival expert.
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