by M. Lorrox
Li Chen huffs at Steve and yanks on the trunk, and Steve starts moving forward with him again.
Madeline shakes her head. “We know you’re trying Steve, you’re doing fine.”
“-sigh-”
She turns to Qilin. “Listen, you didn’t ask me if I wanted you to get me an insanely expensive buyout ticket… I want to fly to Italy about as much as I want another hole in my guts, but I’m not leaving Steve.”
Qilin shrugs and half-rolls her eyes. “We can just sell them at the gate. Alright Steve, here’s the plan. We’ll go through the first security checkpoint and look for Lorenzo at the boarding line. If he’s there, we’ll take him. If not...We’ll just have to grab him in Italy.”
Jambavan watches Steve, far below, picking up the trunk to move it forward a place in line.
“Ugh, this is getting better all the time.”
Qilin sighs. “Before you go through security, you’ll have to ditch your mic and transmitter. You can’t take the chance of them finding out... And Steve, remember what I said about the ring: you cannot give it to Lorenzo. Stall as much as you can, and if all else fails, bail.”
Madeline raises a finger to get Qilin’s attention. “And don’t forget your phone, Steve. Even if it won’t make calls on their networks, you can use Wi-Fi.”
Steve glances around, but he doesn’t see Madeline. “Hey, listen guys, can you take over the trunk from here till check in? I gotta pee.”
John groans at him. “Just hold it, princess. We have to get the tickets, and you and your precious ID are needed.”
Steve rolls his eyes at the back of John’s head. I hope I get to kick your ass. Talk to you later, Mad.
The Ghost attack boat leaves the dock with Jono waving at them and wishing them well. At first, Stephanie pilots the vessel slowly away from the marina. When she approaches the light-gray patrol boat, she notices out the windshield that its crew is lined up on the deck, hollering and clapping. “That’s a nice little send-off.”
Johannes, sitting next to her in the cockpit, looks up from the boat’s manual. “All the Kiwis I’ve ever met were just as friendly.”
She smiles, then continues at three knots until she’s a quarter mile away from both the patrol boat and the surrounding land. When she pushes the throttle, her smile transforms and overtakes her cheeks.
As the attack boat clears eight knots, the computer brings the pair of underwater tubes closer together, and as the turbines inside them pick up speed, the hull of the craft begins to lift out of the water. When this happens, the drag against the boat is significantly decreased, and the ride grows smoother the faster they go. The design of the tubes and support struts create a thin air pocket around the rest of the underwater elements, and the while the boat’s turbines maintain the same RPMs, the boat picks up speed.
Stephanie stays under twenty-five knots until they leave the sound and turn southwest to travel alongside the island.
Then, she floors it.
The people in the cabin feel the initial acceleration, but when the boat is up to speed, the passengers experience an incredibly smooth ride.
Most the team is busy preparing for the mission by studying maps or going through equipment boxes and gearing up. Owen is absorbed by a laptop and a funny looking device connected to it by a USB cable. Naga acts like a huge island himself; he’s on the floor in the middle of the cabin doing breathing exercises and yoga.
July watches Naga in amazement as the colors she sees around the gigantic knight shift slightly with every breath. Deep blue, then ripples of lighter, then deep-like-the-ocean blue again.
His eyes are closed, and with his next movement, he accidentally smacks her in the shoulder. “Oh, I’m sorry. Won’t happen again.”
“No, it’s okay, I’m getting up.” She walks over to Owen. “What is that?”
He doesn’t look up. “Uh, an electromagnetic signal detection and transmission device…” He bites his bottom lip, then types in another few commands. He nods and looks up. “Are you interested in—”
July shakes her head. “Not really, I was just curious… I’ll let you be.”
“It’s no problem if…” Owen trails off as July walks away. Oookay. He returns to his work.
She heads to the aft of the vessel and sits across from the stowed weapons. She relaxes until she notices the red-and-black handle of Charlie’s samurai sword sticking out and growling at her. She shudders, rises again, and walks farther toward the front. Gabriel, a quiet knight she hasn’t talked to very much, stands alongside a wall. “Mind if I join you?”
Gabriel takes a step to the side to share the space. “It has been a busy trip so far.”
She studies the tall knight with soft features. “Yes, it certainly has... You’re not like the others.”
“Neither are you.”
July nods. She hears Johannes laughing at something Stephanie said, and July motions toward him in the cockpit. “Neither is he.”
Gabriel glances. “We are all slightly different.”
July looks back up at the tall knight. “When most people I don’t know look at me, I can tell that they feel odd. Like they’re uncomfortable and sad. When he looks at me, it’s all sad, but never uncomfortable.”
Gabriel glances down at the observant girl. You are more perceptive than I believed. “You said I was unlike the others.”
She nods. “When you look at me, I don’t see anything. Well, that’s not true... I mean I never see a fast change in you. No matter who you are with, or what you’re saying, you never seem to change like they do.”
“I like to stay detached.”
She looks away. “You don’t seem nervous either... Does anything scare you?”
“Sometimes, yes. While there is little in any person’s control, on occasion, I am confronted with something that is beyond the usual, and that usually is a harbinger of fear.”
July looks back to the aft of the cabin, to where Charlie’s sword is.
Gabriel follows her gaze.
She sighs. “I understand that.”
“I was afraid you’d say that...”
July looks up and sees that Gabriel is smiling lightly toward her. She smiles back.
Steve and Li Chen set the trunk on the scale at the baggage check, and the airline’s desk attendant triple-takes when she reads the weight. “Uh, this is going to cost a lot.”
John hands her a printout. “That’s fine. Also, I can sell the spare ticket on my reservation.”
Steve bites his lip. Maybe Lorenzo bought a seat for Madeline too? Sheesh, he must be super-loaded.
The desk attendant takes the printout and scans it. “Rome, Italy. I’d love to visit there.”
Steve’s eye’s blast wide. ROME? Goddamn you, John!
“Let’s see...” She takes a moment to study her screen. “Most others have checked in, and we don’t have adjoined seats. That wasn’t part of the reservation—”
John smiles waves his hand. “That’s fine, they don’t mind.”
“Boys? I’ll need both of your IDs.”
They hand them forward.
Fuck, fuck, fuck... Qilin didn’t respond when the lady said Rome. They must be out of range or their radios are off. I’ll have to text them.
The attendant hands the IDs back. “Steven, here you go... Lincoln, here’s yours.”
Li Chen glances over his shoulder at Steve.
He briefly forgets his stress and beams at him. “Ready for our trip, Lincoln?”
Li Chen groans and puts his ID back in his pocket.
“Excuse me, miss? Can they bring my ticket to me? I really have to use the bathroom.”
She nods. “You’ll need it to get through security. Bathrooms are down on the right side.”
“Thanks.” Steve glances at Li Chen. “I’ll meet you in the security line,
Linc.”
When Steve’s out of sight, he sends Madeline a text, then in the bathroom, he ditches the microphone and transmitter.
Madeline’s phone is going through the x-ray machine when the text comes in. On the other side, she, Jambavan, and Qilin grab their stuff and double-time it toward their gate. Madeline doesn’t check her phone when she slips it into her pocket, and Steve’s message is unseen.
When they reach the gate, the plane is boarding, and there’s no sign of Lorenzo. Qilin motions for Jambavan and Madeline to follow her over to the side and out of the way of traffic. “Looks like we’re going on a trip. Mad, stay between Jambavan and me. If we see Lorenzo or Li Chen, hide and we’ll do our best to block their view of you.”
“Can you just take him from off the plane?”
She sighs. “If he puts up a fight, there’d be plenty of civilians in the way for him—or us—to hurt. I’d much rather land and take him on the ground, then fly his ass back.”
Madeline raises her eyebrows. “That’s a lot of shenanigans, isn’t it?”
Qilin laughs as she walks toward the Blood-Scent Checkpoint line directly in front of the boarding line, where specialty K9 TSA units check passengers for open wounds. If the dog sits and barks beside a passenger, that person is escorted to a room where they strip naked, and if they have an open wound, they get a free, two-hour stay in a solitary confinement quarantine. Qilin pauses and turns to Madeline. “Are those fresh bandages since your surgeries? Your skin is healed around your stab wound, right?”
She nods. “Yeah, I’m good… Do you think those dogs bark at women having their period?”
“They don’t.”
Jambavan looks away uncomfortably and clears his throat.
Madeline flushes, then she frowns. “Grow up dude, it’s part of life.” She looks at Balena and rolls her eyes. “Anyway, isn’t all this flying around too much hassle if we can just nab him from the plane? You could just jump him or something—he doesn’t know you.”
“What, can’t waste a day or two of your life on airplanes? I hear the food’s gotten better. And sometimes on international flights they serve wine.” Qilin smiles at the thought.
Madeline groans. “I’m not twenty-one yet, you insano.”
She shrugs. “Oh. Well, trust me, you’ve got plenty of time for that later.”
The Ghost attack boat can’t navigate shallow waters at low speed, so the options for dropping Ghost—the knight—off so she can conduct recon is limited. The boat can push in close to shore, maintain speed to keep the hull out of the water and the tubes nearer the surface, and she can jump out; or the boat can pause in deeper water, but she’d have to swim farther to shore.
To Charlie’s surprise, she wants the boat to come to a complete stop before she jumps into the water. She notices his confusion. “If I get water in my ears, it’ll drive me nuts for hours... Maybe after we’re all done, we can bring this baby up to full speed, and I’ll try. But with a job to do, I don’t want to take any chances.”
Charlie agrees, and they stop as close to the southernmost tip of Sutherland Sound as they dare. Naga gives her a hug and a kiss on the forehead before she dives out, but no words are shared between them.
When she gets to shore a minute later, she darts straight into the tree line. There, she removes her weapons from dry-bags and stows her equipment.
True to her name, she disappears without a trace.
Naga closes the boat’s rear hatch, and Stephanie turns the boat around. As they leave Sutherland Sound, headed north, Mount Longsight is on their left. It stretches into the sky, and Stephanie keeps it on her left, following around it to the Tasman Sea, then into Bligh Sound on its other side. She follows the water inland, first southeast, then southwest, then southeast again—like a lightning bolt directed toward their target.
At the far tip, the boat stops. Les assumed the team would find a more typical boat to use and that they could navigate that boat into the river that leads another two miles inland. But Ghost—the boat—isn’t designed to be used in rivers. Hecate bails out the back, and when she also disappears into the tree line, the rear hatch closes, and Stephanie turns the attack boat around again.
In the middle of the middle section of the giant lightning-bolt shaped sound, Stephanie pulls in as close to the eastern shore as possible and positions the boat beside a tiny, tree-lined cove. There, Charlie hopes to set up an initial base of operations where the team will wait for Ghost and Hecate to return from their scouting mission.
Charlie sends Naga out to secure the semi-circular section of beach alongside the quiet cove. When the massive knight leaps from the back of the floating, twenty-two ton, high-tech boat, it bobs. When he hits the water, everyone closest flinches and expects a torrential splash, but he hardly makes one at all. He’s on shore in thirty seconds, and within another minute, he’s waving the all-clear signal.
Stephanie drops anchor and activates the weapons system, “Just in case,” and “because, why the hell not?” She covers the team while they swim containers of M4 carbines, ammunition and grenades, and some medical equipment to shore. As she watches through the electric cannon’s video-based targeting system, she familiarizes herself with the controls. When it’s finally time for her to join the rest of the team on land, she deactivates the weapons system and begins the vessel’s rather lengthy shutdown procedure.
Before she dives into the water, she strips out of her ACU and stows it in a dry bag. Standing in her underwear, she runs her hand along the dark-gray, radar-scattering angles of the outer hull. “You take care, now, you pretty lady... Wish me luck.”
A tall mountain peak stands sentinel between where Hecate was dropped off and where the team is setting up camp. From a distance, the tree line toward the top looks well defined, but upon close inspection, a few old, dead trees stand slightly above it. They form a perimeter around the entire mountain, but these outliers are actually cameras and antennas in camouflage. Each has a small solar panel that creates and stores enough energy in the batteries inside the fake trunks for the cameras to operate.
They don’t record video, but they do take and transmit still images to The Plant every five minutes. Half of them took images when the boat was about to drop off Hecate, and the other half—staggered to be two and a half minutes later—capture images of the patrol boat as it returned halfway up Bligh Sound.
Now, every two and a half minutes, images of a motionless boat are sent to SeCComm. Hector is called over to a station, and he’s shown the different images and time stamps. He swears and scolds his staff for not alerting him as soon as there was anything to report, then he storms into the Command Center. It’s a huge room with dimmed lights, and he stomps across a suspended metal catwalk to his desk. It’s bolted down through the steel mesh panels that forms his floor, and below him are dozens of other stations—stations that all face a wall of monitors. He sits and enters some commands into his computer to initiate a systemwide alarm.
Red lights spin up in every hall and in every room.
He holds in a button while speaking into a microphone, “Red alert. Stay calm and secure your area.”
Finally, he sends an update to his entire security team—an update he wrote hours ago:
@Command, @SeCComm, the Order’s strike force has arrived. Assemble in Command Center, and prepare to engage.
Ghost continues south on her scouting mission, making her way along the quiet eastern shore of Lake Grave. She sticks to the tree line as much as she can, only darting into clearings for split-second bursts when the tree line curves away and following it to stay hidden would take too long. She’s travelling light, without a battle-pack, with only a canteen of blood slung over her shoulder, her extra-long, extra-black katars strapped to her legs, a utility belt around her waist, and a pistol that Balena insisted she bring in a holster on her hip. So far, she’s been making good time.
She notices something ahead, and she dives behind the trunk of a tree.
She pulls a small, stainless-steel mirror from a pocket on her belt. She holds it in the palm of her hand and slowly extends it out from behind the tree. What is that?
In the mirror’s reflection, she studies the wall of something hidden into the environment. It’s painted a dark-green-and-brown camouflage pattern, and draped over the top is a quilt of leaves and sticks. She sees something move, and she holds the mirror still. A pole extends out from one edge of the structure with a camera slowly panning at its top. And that’s an antenna... Tricky, tricky. She returns the mirror to her pocket and unsheathes her katars. She slinks through the trees while looking for other cameras. When she gets around to see the back of the structure, she shakes her head. Fucking zombies, another one of those remote thingies.
She circles the container to verify there’s only one camera, and she can smell the rotting zombies inside. She scrunches her face, then she decides to breathe through her mouth. Filthy… The facility must be watching, must be able to release the Z remotely. I wonder if I can disable the electronic wichamadoodle... She thinks back to the metro tunnel in DC when Hecate took the control unit off a container. It took her a while. And if they’re monitoring, then they’ll be alerted if this one’s camera gets all screwy. She shrugs. We’ll just have to deal with their zombies if it comes to that.
Looking around, she makes a mental note of the container’s location, then she continues on her mission.
Soon, she can see the tip of the tower over the mountain. If cameras on the tower were pointed in her direction—and not zoomed in—she’d be smaller than a single pixel on their sensors. If they were zoomed in precisely at her location, they could spot her. Being a good assassin, now that there’s a known chance of being seen by the enemy, she stays hidden below the edge of the forest’s canopy.
