by Toby Minton
“We have a position on the targets,” Price said, nodding as he punched up a series of enhanced photos of the twins in what looked to Savior like a public train car. “We got a positive ID from security cams on one of Sky City’s outbound trains. I dispatched the lander we had on standby. It’s shadowing the train now.”
“Is the Hunter onboard?” Savior asked, anticipating the slight tightening of Price’s mouth at mention of the bio-mechanical former scout drone.
“Yes, sir,” Price responded evenly despite his apparent distaste. He hesitated only a second before voicing his concern. “Sir, can the Hunter be trusted to stick to its orders with a mission of this delicacy?”
“Was it briefed?” Savior replied simply with a slight smile. From Price he encouraged the occasional questioning of his orders, in private. For all intents and purposes, Price was his executive officer. His was a necessary check and balance to keep Savior’s tactical skills sharp. And if there was one thing Price could be counted on to question, it was treating the Hunter like any other soldier, when to him it was little more than an armored animal.
“Yes, sir. For the past three hours, it’s been fed a continuous loop of the footage from Sky City, along with the older file footage you provided and your latest orders.”
“Then I trust the Hunter with this mission more than I would trust you,” Savior said. “It will know exactly how to deal with them. Send the engage order. It’s time to bring the children home.”
Chapter 6
Nikki
“Relax,” Nikki said, trying not to laugh at the terribly obvious look of suspicion on Michael’s face as he studied the other passengers in the train car. “He didn’t say he was coming after us right this minute.” And he thought I was going to draw attention.
But Michael didn’t relax. When Savior had promised to hunt them down, Michael had gone on high alert. Even though the press conference was over—the TV was now running ad after ad for products they could supposedly buy in the northern coastal cities—Michael still looked like he suspected everyone on the train of planning to turn them in. His restless eyes finally stopped on the man in the back of the car scribbling in his old notebook, and if anything, Michael’s expression grew more suspicious. He looked ready to bolt at a second’s notice, but his voice was still unshaken and pitched for her ears alone.
“You don’t understand, Nikki. If Savior gets his hands on us—”
Nikki let out a husky sigh. “Now we’re talking.”
“—he’s not going to turn us over to the Sky City cops,” Michael continued. “He and his goons at Generation are going to ‘find out everything they can about our abilities.’ That means everything from needles and probes to vivisection—we’re not talking about a polite interview here.”
“Then we don’t let them catch us,” she said easily. “If they even get close, we make them wish they hadn’t.”
Michael didn’t seem convinced. He was watching the guy in the back again, but Nikki could have told him that guy was harmless. The weasely guy’s body language was screaming that he was both terrified of and fascinated by the three women two rows up from him. She’d bet all the money they no longer had that his notebook was full of heavy line sketches, creeper journal entries about the way people smell, and probably some carefully collected and catalogued fallen hair.
If Nikki had felt like feeding Michael’s paranoia, she’d have told him to focus on the gym lovers on the other side of the aisle, the not-a-couple she’d affectionately nicknamed Helga and T-bone.
T-bone was a chiseled ebony sculpture making a brand new T-shirt’s life a living hell. His head was shaved bald with not a hint of stubble, and his extra wide cheekbones were supporting a set of blackout sunglasses. He looked to be about mid-forties and was just a step on the wrong side of hot, but he had enough swagger, even sitting down, to make it work.
Helga was probably T-bone’s age, but she outstripped him in the looks department. With those long, shapely limbs, smooth and strong features, crystal blue eyes, and deep auburn hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, she looked like a Dutch Olympic athlete.
Nikki could see T-bone reeling in a catch of Helga’s level if his attitude lived up to Nikki’s expectations, but she suspected he wasn’t fishing with the right kind of bait for Helga. She was wearing a faded button-up with the sleeves rolled up, which could have been cute if it wasn’t tucked into a fitted pair of dark cargo pants, with a belt. Not a cute belt either. This thing could have held up metal pants.
I hate to stereotype, but—Nikki laughed out loud, drawing Michael’s eyes from the stalker. Who was she kidding? She loved stereotyping, enough to wager on clothing alone that Helga played starting pitcher for the all girls team. But it was the body language that really sealed it. T-bone had one impressive arm draped along the windowsill and the other elbow resting on the seatback next to Helga, his long forearm effectively making a barrier between them. He was looking anywhere but at Helga or Nikki and Michael. Helga had her arms crossed and her back stiff and straight as a Chinese soldier’s. Her eyes were straight ahead unless Nikki stretched or shifted position, which she did now just to test the waters. Sure enough, out of the corner of her eye she saw that auburn head tilt her way.
Starting pitcher. No doubt.
Which meant either those two were one wonky set of traveling companions, or their names were Officers Helga and T-bone of the recently humiliated Sky City Police Force.
Nikki wanted to laugh off her conclusion, but for some reason she couldn’t. She had an unfamiliar hollow feeling building in her stomach that she would swear was telling her to do something she never did—run. Maybe Michael’s paranoia she could feel through their link was finally rubbing off on her, or maybe Savior’s pledge to hunt them down really had gotten to her on some level. Whatever it was making her want to turn tail and run, she didn’t like it.
She liked it even less when the train lurched slightly, something they shouldn’t have felt with the fancy stabilizers on this passenger car. At the same time, the TV signal went screwy, the ads replaced by shifting blocks of pixilated colors then a solid blue screen.
She shot a glance over her shoulder just in time to see Helga press a finger to her right ear with a wince. Maybe she wasn’t dealing with a malfunctioning covert communication device. Maybe she just happened to have a sharp earache at the exact moment the TV went nuts. Sure.
Nikki turned back and saw Michael staring at Helga too. Nikki and her brother locked gazes, and for once they were on the same page without argument. They stood as one and walked quickly but as casually as possible toward the back of the car, Nikki taking the lead.
She made it through the three passenger cars between them and the cargo cars without a single glance back, which felt like a heroic feat of willpower. But as the door was hissing closed behind Michael as they entered the first cargo car, she looked back and saw the door at the other end of the passenger car opening, and a flash of auburn hair above a faded button-up.
“They’re coming. Let’s power up,” she said as the door shut, but Michael shook his head and nudged her toward the next car. So much for same page.
“Not this time, Nik,” he said, his voice maddeningly calm, which was so not fair now that his infectious paranoia had her all worked up. “We don’t have the time or the room to get charged up enough to face guns right now.”
Nikki started to argue as she walked, but Michael headed her off.
“After Sky City, you know they’re going to come out shooting from the start. No kid gloves first this time.”
As much she hated to admit it, she did know that. It sucked when he was right.
“We’ll open one of those outside doors in our cargo car,” he said as they sped up to a jog. “Then we’ll get back in our shipping crate. With any luck they’ll think we jumped.”
“Then quit lollygagging,” she forced a laugh as she broke into a sprint through to the next car.
By the time the door shut behind
Michael in the next car, Nikki was already pulling the release lever for the final door. She shimmied through before it finished opening and stepped into the familiar stench she wished she didn’t know so well. She went straight to the side door on her left, kicked the catch loose, and started to muscle it open, revealing the roaring wind and a blurred evening landscape rushing past at over three hundred kilometers per hour.
She didn’t notice the thing standing in the car with her until it was too late.
Michael
Michael had to turn sideways as he jumped through the closing door into their cargo car, banging his knee on the way through, but he was pretty sure their mad rush at the end had given them the lead they needed to get stowed away before their pursuers caught up, and that was worth a little pain.
He caught himself against their shipping crate and straightened up. “Nikki, we—”
The words died on his tongue as his mind tried to make sense of what he was seeing. The thing on the other side of the crate was a metal sculpture of…something—a shiny metallic hybrid of human, canine, and maybe insect. At least four meters tall, it was hunched to fit inside the container. How it got there…
The head pivoted to study Michael with cold, faintly glowing white eyes, and then it moved. Fast. Before Michael could react, its left arm shot out and its hand slammed into Michael’s chest and latched on, its sharp fingers wrapping around.
Michael’s breath whooshed out, and pain stabbed through his chest from every side as the thing jerked him off his feet. For a half second it held Michael a meter off the ground, then the world blurred and pain exploded all along Michael’s back as it slammed him to the floor of the car, its fingers punching through the thick metal to pin him.
Michael tasted blood and saw only blackness for a heartbeat. Then his vision returned in time to see Nikki let go of the side door and charge the thing with a wordless cry.
Nikki. She would be feeling the charge from his injuries. Nikki would—
Before she’d taken a full stride, the thing struck like lightning, backhanding Nikki into and through the side door. She and the crumpled door disappeared outside the train, sucked away by the wind ripping past.
The pain that flooded through their link seized Michael. It was like nothing he’d ever felt from Nikki, too much for him to make sense of her injuries. It felt like she was…broken. Then the pain, the burst of power starting to ripple through him, and all sense of Nikki through their link winked out.
She was gone.
He felt what power had made it through from her starting to knit his ribs and clear his head. He sucked in a deep, shaky breath, his first since the thing grabbed him, but a lance of pain from his side stopped it short.
He looked up into the white mechanical eyes of the thing as it crouched lower over him, its legs bending back and out like a dog’s. Michael tried pushing at the claw holding him down, but it was no use. It didn’t even budge. Not enough of the power had gotten through before Nikki—
Pain gripped him, stopping his breath again, but not pain from his injuries this time. She was alive. She had to be. She was just…she was too far away for their link to work. That had happened to them before. Once.
They had been eleven years old at the time, living in Chicago, squatting with a group of teenagers in a vacant apartment over a south side bar. The older guys in the group would take turns panhandling at the best spots around town. They had a rotation set up.
One day one of the guys took Michael out with him, said he and Nikki needed to start earning their keep. After they’d walked for a while, Michael realized he wasn’t feeling anything from Nikki, and he panicked. The guy tried to stop him, but Michael slipped away and ran back. It must have been about a kilometer, but he ran it faster than he’d ever run.
A block away from the apartment, his sense of Nikki returned, and he felt what they were doing to her, how they were hurting her. It wasn’t enough to make him stronger, not by much, but the fury he’d felt was like nothing he’d ever felt before, and nothing since.
He’d burst into the room in a rage, attacking them as best he knew how. But there were four of them, five when the one who’d led him away caught up. Michael didn’t have any fighting skill back then; he was no match for them. So he’d let them beat him.
They didn’t know about his link with Nikki, so they kept at him. And once Nikki was strong enough, the fight turned. When they tried to fend her off, they just gave Michael the strength to match his rage.
When he and Nikki finally ran away from the apartment, they left behind five unconscious teenagers battered almost beyond recognition. Two of them never woke up, Michael later learned as he and Nikki were leaving Chicago, but he never told Nikki. He knew he’d been the one who killed them. He’d known it when it was happening, but he hadn’t stopped. And it was his burden to carry.
After Chicago, Michael had started studying fighting techniques, but not to try to keep up with Nikki, as she loved to claim now. And not to better protect himself. He studied to protect those he fought. Nikki had…well, she’d become the Nikki he somehow still adored. And they hadn’t gotten far enough apart to lose their link since. Until now.
The thing holding Michael down shifted farther forward, and Michael noticed the thick antenna extending straight out from a port in its lower back, almost like this thing had been designed to be on all fours.
Michael slowed his breathing, focusing on shallower breaths to avoid the pain, and noticed the odd smell of the thing. It had the faint metallic odor he’d expected, mixed with rubber and oil, but underlying that was an almost animal musk that made him choke on even his shallow breaths. He forced the air through anyway, and what little calm came with it.
When the door hissed open above and behind Michael, he was expecting the couple from the passenger car to come in. He wasn’t expecting them to come in shooting.
The woman came through first in a crouching walk, a small automatic weapon held in both hands in front of her. As soon as she stepped into the car, she fired on the thing holding Michael, opening her weapon up in one long stuttering spray.
Michael flinched away as best he could from the rain of casings dropping around him, but he had no way to protect his ears from the echoing blasts from the gun.
With a grating squeal of metal, the weight lifted off Michael’s chest as the thing holding him recoiled then rolled backward away from the bullets ricocheting wildly off its body. It tumbled deeper into the car, pulling a tower of smaller crates down between it and the gunfire.
The man stepped through the door on the woman’s heels, took one look at where she was continuing to fire in short bursts, and started swearing.
“Command, this is Tail One!” he shouted after tapping his ear. He knelt to give Michael a quick glance but kept his focus over the crate. “Contact. Hunter is onsite. We are engaged. Repeat—”
“Coms are still down!” the woman shouted. She fired another burst toward the back of the car, but her next trigger pull met empty clicks. “Switch.”
The man reacted instantly. Rising with a grunt, he started firing in short bursts over the crate. The woman dropped back and down to one knee, ejecting her empty magazine and replacing it with a full one from her backpack.
Michael started to get up, pushing through the pain in his side trying to keep him down. He had to find a way off this train. He had get to Nikki.
“Where’s the girl?” the woman shouted at him, looking him up and down, eyes lingering on the bloody gashes in his shirt where the thing’s fingers had raked him.
Michael’s eyes went to the missing side door, and the woman cursed. She grabbed Michael by the collar and pushed him back onto his butt. Only then did he realize he’d been heading for the opening.
With his back against the wall, Michael could see the thing, the Hunter, slowly advancing toward them. It was crouched low, its torso almost parallel to the ground. And it was holding its wide forearms parallel in front of it to deflect the man’s
fire and shield what must have been more vulnerable components.
“We need those coms back up, Mos,” the woman said, shifting over beside Michael behind the crate. She crouched over him, sighting down the top of her weapon at the crate right in front of her and taking in and letting out a slow breath. Then she shouted, “flanking left!” and lunged to the right against the wall.
The Hunter pivoted instantly toward the other side of the crate at her words, exposing the antenna on its back, and the woman fired a single burst. The rounds ricocheted harmlessly beside the antenna, and the Hunter pivoted the other way, letting out an angry sounding squealing hiss.
The man, Mos, was ready. He had lunged left as soon as the woman’s shots rang out, and when the thing pivoted toward her, he fired a burst of his own, snapping the antenna off with one of the rounds.
“Yeah, mama!” Mos shouted. “Take it, shitcan!”
“Coms up” the woman said, one hand at her ear.
“I got this, Ace,” Mos called over his shoulder. “Call it in.”
The woman, Ace, grabbed Michael by the shirt again and looked him in the eye. “Can you move?”
“Yeah.”
She reached up and pulled the release lever to the previous car, then she hauled Michael to his feet and shoved him through ahead of her. Mos backed after them, stopping in the doorway to lay down cover fire.
“Command—Tail One,” Ace called, pressing her finger to her ear. “Package in hand. We need evac now.”
