by Laer Carroll
Several floors down Sasha located a staff locker room. Nearby was a supply closet containing clean hospital uniforms. She had to walk by the door to the closet three times before the traffic cleared. Then a quick left-right twist to the door knob broke the lock and gave entrance to her.
She had to wait several more minutes before she could hear that the hall was clear to leave the closet. In another restroom Sasha unwrapped the clothing from around her waist where she had hidden it under her jump suit. She left the restroom dressed in the hospital nursing staff uniform. Her jumpsuit wrapped around her waist gave her a usefully plump appearance.
Near the intensive care unit she helped with several small chores, moving in such a way as to obscure the fact that she wore no staff badge.
Once she nearly got caught when another nurse noticed the lack and drew breath to ask questions or alert others. One of Sasha's hands struck like a snake. A quick grip was enough to send commands to the nurse's brain. The woman reeled and nearly fell, buoyed up by Sasha's arm around her shoulder.
"Sit down before you fall down! When did you eat last?"
The woman shook her head, dizzy. She pressed a hand to her stomach. It growled as Sasha had commanded it to. The woman laughed feebly.
"I thought I ate lunch. I suppose not."
"Then we need to get you prone while I get you something."
There was a room close to the ICU nurse's station for rest breaks. The nurse lay down thankfully; Sasha had flooded her system with fake fatigue poisons. In moments she was asleep. In perhaps an hour she would awake much refreshed and, to her life-long relief, would never be sick.
Meanwhile Sasha had taken the woman's badge and changed her appearance to match the woman's as closely as she could. It was not perfect; Sasha had not practiced assuming specific appearances. But it was close enough that a quick glance or a distant regard would mistake Sasha for the woman. The nurse had a slight limp; copying that made it easier for people to quickly "identify" her at a distance.
It was no problem for Sasha to get into the ICU. She just walked in and the radio ID unit at the double-door entrance recognized the badge.
Sasha toured the unit, staying out of sight of nurses and doctors as much as she could. About half of the beds had a green curtain surrounding them, concealing patients who were being treated or partly shading those who were asleep or in a coma .
She had her nose turned to high sensitivity. It told her Saya was in the unit but the air flow was too gentle and non-directional to help much. But Sasha did get enough detail to find her friend after about ten minutes (9 minutes, 43 seconds by her internal clock).
Saya's bed was surrounded on three sides and part of the fourth by a green curtain. She was unconscious and was hooked to an elaborate bed-side console by a clear plastic hose connected to an oxygen mask and by at least a dozen wires. Several read outs showed spikes, curves, and numbers which likely told medical people just what was happening inside her friend.
Saya looked small and broken. The covers pulled up to her chest made her seemed flattened. A great wave of sadness and pity welled up in Sasha's chest. Tears burned her eyes and trembled on her lids.
Then another emotion blazed through her body: rage. Someone had pointed a gun at Saya and plunged a bullet into her chest.
Sasha's body tightened as if crushed by an all-over body girdle. Some profound change began to take place. Her arm muscles struggled against each other, her hands clenched in the desire to rip someone apart. The bones in her upper body and rib cage and hands flexed with the enormous effort.
Reflexively she quelled the impulse. Even her extraordinary body could not exert so much force against itself without harming her.
Another reflex took her to Saya's bedside. Her nearest arm reached out to clasp her wrist to Saya's nearest wrist. As skin squeezed against skin submicroscopic messengers went into Saya and returned bearing information. Something within Sasha's brain diagnosed Saya's ills, sent out submicroscopic prescriptions to Saya's body.
And moments later two big veins in Sasha's wrist found and merged with matching veins in Saya's wrist.
Used blood poured into Sasha, arterial blood flowed into Saya. An esoteric blood transfusion was taking place.
Minutes passed which seemed eternal to Sasha, her body sped up so that time seemed to slow to a halt.
A process completed. The two friend's veins retreated to their normal state.
Saya stirred, turned slightly in her bed, sighed, and settled into a restful sleep. Her body had been mostly healed. Now she needed rest to complete her healing.
Sasha leaned over her friend and spoke very quietly into an ear. "We're all here. You will be fine. Sleep well." She had spoken in English. She repeated it as best she could in her very basic Japanese.
Saya smiled. She opened her eyes briefly but saw nothing, seemingly. She closed her eyes, still smiling.
Sasha left her friend behind, moving briskly. A little while later, the nurse's badge restored to her, dressed once more in her jump suit, she stuffed the hospital uniform down a clean-and-sterilize chute.
Then she left the hospital, anger held to a simmer. Before she could tear terrorists limb from limb she first had to figure out how to get to them.
Sasha called her family and friends and said she wanted to spend time at Saya's hospital. Then she found a place to sit on the Village green and pulled out her info slate. She needed to find out just what the terrorists had done.
The various news channels had only bits of the story. Sasha had to piece the information together and she could not be sure of much of it.
As best as she could determine, at noon in the large hotel dining room in the working hotel tower four to seven terrorists had entered the second-floor balcony above the room. They had fired automatic weapons into the ceiling to get everyone's attention and issued an ultimatum.
Somewhere in the process they had shot a security guard to death and beaten down several people who they thought were resisting. Then they selected three or four dozen people from the diners, most of them wearing the blue jump suits of athletes. They herded them downstairs and entered the tunnel to the uncompleted hotel tower.
At some point Saya had resisted. Sasha guessed she had been grabbed or pushed and reflex, not Saya's abundant common sense, had taken over. She had fought back and been shot. That only one shot had been fired into her suggested that the terrorists had reacted reflexively also but restrained themselves. And they had let one of the captives loose to take care of Saya.
That small mercy earned the terrorists no consideration from Sasha. She would crush any one of them who got in her way.
But there were others in the way, she found in her research. A crowd of spectators surrounded the second tower. A French security force had pushed them back quite far and out of any terrorist line of fire, but they were still an obstacle.
Then there were the security forces. They were all under cover around the tower, but they could see the outside of the tower which was well lit. The tower was also being observed by video cameras from several positions.
The complete observations was a big obstacle. Sasha had discovered months before that she could climb prodigiously, by extruding a sort of super glue from her hands, belly, knees, and feet. It set and unset very quickly, so she could climb up sheer vertical surfaces. But she could not move any faster than a crawl and during the hour or two she climbed the outside of the hotel she could be seen. And she left a thin but visible film on the wall .
The underground tunnel was blocked and watched also. No entry there.
She would need a parachute to get to the top of the hotel tower, and a plane ride, and training in parachuting that she did not have. And the plane's pilot would not let her get on the plane with a chute even if he could be bribed to fly over the tower.
She sighed over the unlikely scenario. Then paused as a thought surfaced. Could she jump from the top of the occupied tower to the uncompleted tower?
Sa
sha returned her attention to her info slate. She had much research to do.
At twilight Sasha found an unwatched spot of the Olympic Village fence near the equipment and supply dump on the south side of the Village. She glanced around to be sure no one was watching her, or could watch her. Then she ran a few steps and leaped upward, somersaulting slowly forward.
At the top of the leap she was upside down over the fence, a few feet above it. At what seemed like slow motion to her, she reached down to the top wire, grabbed it between barbs, and made a slight adjustment in the direction and impetus of her motion. Then down she came, rotating toward an upright stance, onto a cleared area a few feet inside the fence, bending to a squat to reduce her landing impact.
To an ordinary human watching it would have seemed an impossible feat. To Sasha it was nothing special. It was not even worth a conscious thought. She just did it.
Coming fully upright her lungs, squashed on landing, expanded deeply. A dozen scents jostled for her attention: the smell of the river, the concrete dust odor of the expanse beneath her, oil and gasoline and rust and aluminum oxidation and much more .
There. The crane would give her a good view of the site. She ran lightly forward and leaped up at a slanting arc nearly fifty feet long. Catching a crossbar on the open-work crane arm she slung herself upward another twenty feet. Thus ascending like some large monkey she ended up in the open basket at the top of the crane.
She glanced west, out over the fence and toward houses a half mile away nearly hidden by old trees. A few lighted windows were visible against the eye-straining half-light between day and night. Further west and over the residential area a few clouds glowed gold and red.
At this height the wind was stronger than it was on the ground. It was starting to chill her until she, without a thought, adjusted her skin to insulate herself better.
North she could see the entire Village laid out, including parts of the side streets where the village widened northward to three and then five blocks. At the far end the domed stadium glowed white from interior lights—lights which shown on no events. The Olympics had shut down all competitions.
Halfway to the stadium were both towers of the hotel where the emergency had occurred which caused the shutdown. They were brightly lit by floodlights but none of the windows in the towers showed lights. They were either well-shielded on the inside or none of the outside rooms were lit.
If Sasha could see much of the Village she could also be seen in her perch. But only if someone was looking directly at her with binoculars. Even then she would have been hard to see. Her bottom half was inside the basket.
Also, she had turned her skin dark chocolate and hair black, curling it into tight ringlets close to her head. She wore tight shorts and a matching athletic-bra top. The clothing was brown patterned with large dusky orange blossoms. She would be hard to see in dim light but in bright she would seem to be dressed to look nice, not to be secretive.
At last she gazed at the storage area below her. This was what she had come for. She knew she had the power to leap from atop one hotel tower to the top of the other. But she did not have the skill to gauge the distance well enough to infiltrate the tower held by the terrorists, nor to precisely control her leap. She was here for the next few hours to practice.
Sasha tightened the sash secured around her waist, re-positioned it minutely. Inside it around her waist were strung two sacks of marbles she had bought earlier today. Hidden in the sash they did not look like deadly weapons. But they would be if she threw them with all the whip-lash force of her immensely strong muscles.
An instant's study of the scene below her and she plunged out the door of the basket, descending in quick monkey-like swings and drops to the top of the nearest stack of supplies.
At 2:00 in the morning Sasha approached the completed hotel tower from the rear. No one was around. The rear parking lot was thinly populated, with only service vehicles and several police vans and cars.
Sasha idled through the lot. She would be thought weird to be out here at this hour but not dangerous if she were caught. But there was no one to do that.
She approached a service door and pulled on the knob. Good. No one had replaced the super-glued shim she had placed near the top of the door just where it would keep the lock from engaging. She had plans if the door was locked, but the result would be noisy.
She eased inside. The interior was a hallway which led to a storage area and further on to a kitchen. The hallway was dimly lit, the kitchen brightly lit.
A cook sat at a table near the doors into the dining room. He was half asleep, the odors of coffee and snacks coming from a nearby area the reason for him being here. From the dining room came subdued sounds. Many of the French police and SWAT squad were inside it.
Sasha ghosted up to him and placed a hand on his cheek. He had a moment to startle and begin to sit upright before the submicroscopic messengers from inside her skin passed into his blood. Some put him to sleep. Others would neutralize the biological tapestry which bore the most recent fifteen minutes of short-term memory. He would wake in a hour or two if he was not disturbed with no memory of what had happened before he dozed.
There were several exits from the kitchen. Some of them allowed servers to deliver room service discreetly. One led up to a second floor mostly dominated by conference rooms.
Sasha took that one to emerge into a half-lit hall. She walked casually along it to a four-elevator entrance, to all appearances just another of the severely depleted number of room dwellers still allowed residence in the tower. One elevator took her nearly to the top of the tower.
The floor she emerged onto was discreetly corporate. It would normally house some of the executive offices of the building. One side of the level was taken up with a security suite. She knocked on the door.
It was opened by a burly guard in a dark-blue uniform. He wore a badge and a gun and other equipment on a wide black belt.
"Yes?" His tone was just barely civil.
Sasha pushed her way through the door. For a moment it seemed as if he would block her entrance, but then he yielded.
Standing beyond him she looked around the room. Two other men sat before a wall of view screens, their chairs swiveled toward Sasha .
Sasha ignored them and looked at the scenes depicted on the screens. Five lines of screens on the video checkerboard showed hotel interiors. Three others showed exterior scenes.
She sped up her nervous system so that time seemed to slow down. She studied the screens. There was no guarantee that the security suite in the enemy tower would show complementary views, but it was worth studying the views for the general setup.
She returned her personal time to match the rest of the world and smiled at the two men. It was quite dazzling. She was back to being a blond, though of a gold bordering on red rather than her own platinum. Her hair curled and foamed sensuously across her bosom, which she had enhanced. Her skin was now a light tan. The skimpy clothing, picked because it gave her body maximum freedom, hugged every curve. And she exuded pheromones.
The youngest guard was most affected. But the two older men were not unaffected.
"I couldn't sleep. I kept worrying that the, the...bad guys would come back."
"They're not likely to do that. With all the police we have here. They are really dug in over there."
Sasha kept them talking for several minutes, but they were interrupted by their supervisor. Sasha shut off her sexiness; she had gotten all the useful information she could and he did not anyway seem susceptible to her.
He followed her into the outer offices and to the elevator entrances, asking her who she was and why she was here. Sasha aged her face about a dozen years and looked at him coldly. When she refused to answer his questions he threatened her with jail.
Sasha grabbed one of his arms and ruthlessly put him to sleep and wiped his short-term memory. She was out of patience. She had to deal with the terrorists, not some official. She laid him down o
n the carpet and pushed the elevator Up button.
She had the elevator bypass the next-to-top floor, the tower-top restaurant, not in operation but (she had read) fully operational, only waiting for the personnel who would make it come live after the Olympics.
The very top floor contained a miscellany of offices and storage rooms, its most important function to her purposes a double-door which opened to stairs which led up to the roof of the building, where a small shed shielded the stairs from weather. There was a light for the shed but it was off. Stepping through the door marked by a dim red EXIT light, she saw why.
The top of the building was unlit, though a glance showed her floodlights on poles which normally would be on.
The roof before her had a rough concrete-like surface. At even intervals on it several round metal ducts housed fans turned on their backs. They blasted exhausted air out of the hotel up into the sky. The noise from them was considerable, half hiss and half rumble.
The corresponding rooftop on the twin tower 120 feet to the east was also unlit. Below the top of that tower the sides were lit with white light. The contrast between the dark top and the bright sides made it hard for her to see if anyone was on the top.
Sasha tuned her eyes to the infrared spectrum. She still wasn't very good at this, and could only see the high-infrared near visible light. But she could see two figures on the enemy tower-top as warm blotches. They were leaning on the waist-high parapet which kept anyone from walking off the roof. A cigarette tip was bright white in the infrared and dim red in normal light. To her it showed as faintly pink.
The terrorists stood just within the parapet surrounding their tower top, looking all about. They were out in the clear and could easily have been shot from her location.
Not so the two friendly soldiers, or policemen, on this tower top. They stood at the edge of one of the ducted fans, just barely able to watch the other tower.
