It was a moment before they replied.
“Two streets up. I’ll mark it for you.”
A yellow light flashed on his retinal viewer and he automatically pushed it to the air car’s console. He didn’t want the retinal viewer interfering with his sight as they neared the takedown.
He spoke to the driver.
“Break lanes and get us to the station before them.” The air car suddenly dropped and turned out from the rest of the traffic as it sped toward the station. The building and people grew larger through the window as they descended, until they finally reached street level. They double parked at the curb and his team deployed. Two went to the station’s entrance to prevent their targets from entering, while the other two moved to flanking positions out of sight. Lex leaned against the car and waited.
This was not a particularly busy station, but they garnered quite a few panicked stares at the uniforms and weapons being carried by his team. They also carried non-lethal rifles in case their quarry decided to run. While similar in appearance to their lethal counterparts they shot only small, non-lethal charged projectiles that would temporarily immobilize the target. If the target was standing, they would simply fall into a pile on the ground. If they happened to be running, there was nothing that would prevent the road rash destined for their face. Care had to be taken, however, not to deploy the device anywhere close to large drops or locations where the fall could put the target in harm’s way. His contract directed that the subject was to be taken alive and their fee would be significantly reduced otherwise.
“Bravo team. Take it down to street level and form up on their rear.” Lex didn’t want his targets escaping back the way they’d come, and was feeling comfortable he’d left them nowhere to go. He had all his pieces in place and there was no reason this shouldn’t go down smoothly. The trio walked toward him and he could see their faces as they approached. They appeared completely unaware of what was coming their way.
“Everyone ready. I’m making contact.” He saw the pursuit team park and step from their vehicle. The men on the flanks shifted and adjusted their grips. Lex stepped forward.
***
Rayne was in turmoil. Abena had asked her to hold out her wrist and had slipped the metal bracelet on. Then she’d dropped the bomb. Someone was after her? Here? Why? She had so many questions, but the pressing need to find safety and avoid pursuit took over. Abena had looked extremely worried and had hurriedly tried to explain what she’d known. Rayne was different somehow. People wanted to study her. They wanted to take her to a lab and pick her apart. The captain was trying to stop them, but they needed time. If they were to get separated, Rayne was to go to Capital City’s central plaza, next to the tallest building. She had pointed toward the city center on the horizon, pointing out the tallest spire.
“Don’t go with anyone you don’t know, Rayne,” she’d urged her. “If it’s not someone on the squad or the captain, you need to run.” Abena had looked her hard in the eyes to make sure she’d understood. Rayne had nodded in confusion, still trying to wrap her head around why she was being chased. She was free now, wasn’t she? She was off that hell of a planet, among her own people. Why did someone want her? She started to get angry but kept her focus. This should not be happening. After everything she’d been through, after all the loss and suffering, someone was looking to take what little she had.
Rayne’s paranoia increased and she began paying more attention to her surroundings and the vehicle that had been circling them for the last ten minutes. She kept walking as Abena and Taft both tried to give her advice and instructions if they were to become separated. She barely paid attention as she tracked a second vehicle drop from the air lanes and glide smoothly to the street in front of the station in the distance. She enhanced her vision and identified the weapons the passengers carried as they exited the car and took positions. The vehicle circling them began to descend. It was apparent they’d been located and whatever force being sent was moving in. She put out a broad spectrum ping of the area, not caring if she was tracked. There was little point now that they’d been found.
“Rayne? Rayne?! Listen to what I’m saying. It’s important.” Abena tried to catch her eye as they continued to walk toward the station.
“It’s too late. They’ve found us,” she said quietly.
“What?” Taft looked around wildly. “Where?”
Rayne nodded to their front.
“Four hundred meters to the front. Black car with five men wearing the same clothes. They’re carrying both lethal and non-lethal weapons.” She nodded to her rear as an air car dropped smoothly from the sky and began shadowing them from the rear. “That one’s been circling us for ten minutes. There are four men inside.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” asked Taft, irritated.
Abena answered for her.
“Cause until two minutes ago, she didn’t know anyone was after her.” She was worried as well, but knew Rayne couldn’t be blamed for what she didn’t know. “We’re just going to have to go to plan ‘B’ a little sooner than we thought. Do you remember where to meet if we’re separated?”
Rayne nodded.
“We’ll come to get you. If it’s not someone from the team or the captain, you run.” Abena turned to Taft. “We need to run interference for Rayne.”
“Got it. What do you have in mind?”
Abena shared her hastily-constructed plan and Taft smiled.
***
Lex watched patiently as the three approached. The two marines looked relaxed and uninterested at his presence. The girl. He gave her a once over. This was the girl they were after? From the descriptions and cautions he’d been given, he had expected more. She looked to be in her late teens, just as the file had said. Her hair was short, black and mostly hidden under a black cap on her head. She was tall for her age, at least as tall as the female marine walking with her, and pretty, though it was hard to tell with half her face buried in the shoulder of one of the marines as they walked. The girl wore a pair of loose fitting cargo pants, short jacket and a small pack.
Lex grimaced. This felt an awful lot like kicking puppies. Here he was with an eight-man team comprised of ex-special forces soldiers preparing to take down a teenage girl like she was some kind of wild animal. He shrugged his shoulders and stepped forward. That was the contract. Whether it was fair or not, or she was really as dangerous as he’d been told, didn’t really matter. He was getting paid to do a job and he was going to do it. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been given bad information on his target.
“Lance Corporal Abena. Private Taft.” They stopped as he approached, apparently just noticing his presence. They both turned to him with questioning expressions.
Lcpl. Abena spoke first.
“Yes?”
“I’m Mr. Lexington. I’m here to take custody of this young lady here.” He motioned toward the girl with her face still buried in Abena’s shoulder.
The marines looked confused.
“Take custody?” Pvt. Taft asked. “For what? Has she done something wrong?” He looked nervous as the two men with the stun rifles moved in.
“Not at all, Pvt. Taft.” He kept his tone professional and calm. “The young lady is apparently in need of treatment, and I’ve been sent by Fleet Command to collect her.” He really didn’t know exactly what the girl was being collected for, but he guessed it involved a lot more than treatment. You didn’t send a team like his for someone to bring them in for counseling.
“Oh.” The marines mouthed together. They seemed to accept the situation, but the corporal still seemed suspicious.
“You wouldn’t mind showing us some credentials would you? I’m not going to hand her over unless I know you are who you say you are.” She looked him in the eye.
“Of course.” Lex pulled his identification and held it up for the lance corporal’s inspec
tion. She looked it over thoroughly, looked to his face and back to the identification’s picture to make sure they matched. Finally satisfied, she nodded and relaxed.
“Are you taking us, too, or just Rayne?” she asked.
His flanking team members had closed the distance, and now stood at ease with their stun weapons. The others waited either in the car across the street or at the station’s entrance behind him. The transfer appeared to be going smoothly with the marines’ cooperation, but they remained alert.
“Just the girl. You are free to go about your business.” He stepped forward to take the girl’s arm and that was the last thing he remembered for the next ten minutes.
***
Abena squeezed Rayne’s arm twice as the signal she’d been given to move. She lashed out with a kick to the head that left the man they’d been talking to unconscious on the pavement. She pushed Abena into the man next to her with the stun gun. Abena hooked her leg around his, ensuring he’d go down, and sprawled on top of him as if she’d lost her footing by mistake. Rayne leaped over the air car for the station’s entrance and saw two more men moving to meet her. Taft, seeing the other man raising the barrel of his stun gun stepped in front of it as if he was trying to call Rayne back.
“Rayne! Stop!” He got those two words out and then went down with a strangled cry as the stun round struck him in the back. Rayne heard the gun cycle again, just as she as met the first man moving to block her way. She heard the stun gun fire, slipped past the man in front of her, grabbed his chin as she passed and pulled him into the path of the round as it struck his chest. He went down without a sound. Rayne was grabbed from behind in a bear hug. She snapped her head back and heard delicate nose bones break. The grip around her loosened marginally and she stepped out with her feet, grabbed a hand full of soft tender flesh and twisted. She slammed her head backward again while he was distracted, catching the man on his already broken nose. His grip loosened further and she spun out of his grasp, kicking him in the temple to ensure he’d stay down.
Rayne’s brain flashed warning of an incoming projectile. It was off target by several inches and shattered on the wall behind her. She ran for the entrance, tracking six men in pursuit as she ran. She needed to arm herself, but hadn’t had the time to take weapons from the men she’d incapacitated. Her main priority at that moment was escape.
A train hummed quietly on the platform as she ran through the large double doors. It was a small station, with only one platform and she ran toward the far end, hearing her pursuit crash through the front doors behind her. A tone sounded as she ran, signaling the doors were about to close and the train depart. She ducked through the nearest door as it closed.
She looked back out the window to see if her pursuers had made it on the train. She cursed, seeing three of them running down the platform looking through windows. Three outside meant three of them probably made it inside. She looked back toward the door that separated the train’s cars and saw three men moving forward, checking the faces of each passenger as they went. They were nearly to her car.
Rayne looked around quickly. There were half a dozen people in the car with her. Most were engrossed in video feeds, reading or conversation, but several looked at her with curiosity at her odd behavior. This was a horrible place for a fight, but she didn’t have much choice. She ran toward the rear door and met the men coming through just as it opened. Rayne jumped, swung from the overhead racks, kicking the leader in the chest. She heard cries of surprise from the other passengers as the man fell back into his fellows. Rayne pressed her advantage as all three went down in a heap. The man in the front would still be trying to get air for several more minutes, difficult to do with broken ribs, so she caught the second man under the chin with her boot. His eyes rolled up into the back of his head and he collapsed on top of the man behind him. She quickly pulled the stun gun from his unconscious hands, pointed it at the chest of the third and pulled the trigger.
The car’s occupants were now screaming in panic, stampeding toward the back door of the car to reach the safety of the one behind it. Rayne ignored them, pulling weapons from holsters and to put them in her pack. She saw arm restraints on each of the men and decided to make sure they wouldn’t be pursuing her when she got off. She worked quickly as she heard the announcement for the next station’s stop and felt the train begin to slow. The time to get off was now. The train was a trap that left her with nowhere to run and was impossible to defend.
It pulled into the next station as she finished her work. The doors opened and she stepped out hurriedly, leaving the three men restrained in a circle around one of the support bars. She stepped past boarding passengers without a glance and kept moving as she heard the pounding of several pairs of feet coming down the platform. She heard cries of exclamation behind her as she kept her head down and moved through the crowd. This station was larger than the last, and hundreds of people shielded her escape as several police officers elbowed their way past.
Rayne kept her head down as she moved. Taft had warned her that surveillance video could be used to track her face wherever she went. She moved to the station map and looked for the platform that would take her further into the city where she needed to be. She was tense as she searched the map, simultaneously trying to track the movement of the people around her. While Rayne had gained some control, she was nowhere near comfortable with the crowds. She’d forced her brain to accept that the people weren’t all threats. It had taken days of meditation and practice to reprogram herself not to want to kill everything in sight. Now, she thought of them more as harmless mammals moving through the jungle. They could be ignored for the most part, until they proved themselves to be a threat.
“Are you lost?” asked a female voice next to her.
Rayne stepped back and eyed the woman suspiciously. She was middle-aged, short and slightly overweight. Her hair was short, dark and curled and she had a pleasant, but concerned smile on her face. Rayne relaxed slightly as she scanned her for weapons and found none.
“I’m sorry if I startled you. Do you need some help?”
Rayne nodded.
“Where you trying to get, hon?”
“City Center Plaza,” she answered quietly. She kept tracking the movement around her, wondering how long it would take for pursuit to catch up.
“Platform number nine. Take those stairs over there and just look for the number. You’ll want to take the green line, so you don’t stop at every station.” She smiled and moved off through the crowd.
Rayne walked quickly to the steps, watching as several more groups of police officers moved toward the platform from which she’d come. She found number nine and boarded the already waiting train. She sat quietly and monitored the people around her, and quietly thanked the kindness of a stranger.
***
Dr. Miller walked down the hall as she scrolled through the contents of her data pad. Without their test subject, she had quite a lot of time on her hands and was currently using it to make herself familiar with the varying specialties of her fellow scientists. She’d already started off badly with Dr. Gault and didn’t want to compound it by being uninformed about the other specialists in the group. She had a pretty good handle on the neurological aspects, but felt pretty deficient in the non-biological fields. The robotics and cybernetics fields were a bit of a mystery to her and she had been having difficulty following any dialogs related to those subjects.
Dr. Miller was a quick study and had signed herself into some crash courses in both fields. There was a research university near the lab and she had been auditing as many of those classes as time would allow, as well as pouring through the texts for each class. Still, it was like trying to learn a foreign language. It was ultimately possible, but would take some time.
She actually enjoyed being back in the university setting. She’d only finished school ten years ago, so she didn’t feel too out of plac
e amongst the younger students. She especially appreciated the fact that the Navy was paying for her tuition costs. Since the university was largely funded by military grants, and much of their research was done on military projects, tuition for her had been waved. Even better, she wasn’t subject to the same homework requirements, tests and grading as the rest. She was only auditing the class, so those requirements didn’t apply. Still, she did her best to keep up, even though it wasn’t expected.
Dr. Miller turned down an adjacent hallway, heading for the lab and one of the other doctors who specialized in robotics. Her current assignment involved some complicated software interfaces she just couldn’t quite seem to grasp, and she was hoping to get a little help. The others were good-natured about helping her and didn’t take offense to her asking. Many of the doctors on the team had spent some time teaching in the university setting at one time or another and didn’t mind helping. They were aware she had no expertise in their respective fields and respected her efforts to broaden her knowledge base.
Glass shattered next to her head as she walked down the hall. She fell backward to the ground, startled. She looked down at the glass at her feet and then up to the open door of Dr. Gault’s office.
“What do you mean she got away?! I thought you were supposed to be the best!” The voice was Dr. Gault’s.
“Do you know how many people I’ve got sitting around doing nothing? These are top scientists! The best in their fields and they’re sitting on their hands because you let their test subject escape!”
There was a momentary pause while the person on the other end of the call no doubt attempted to explain.
“I don’t want excuses, Mr. Lexington. I want results!” This last was punctuated by the crash of something inside the doctor’s office. Dr. Miller crabbed back, in case anything else came flying through the door. A scream of frustration sounded and then Dr. Gault came stalking out. She paused with a scowl on her face as she saw Dr. Miller lying on the floor. “What the hell are you doing? Get to work?” Dr. Gault stormed down the hall and out of sight, her lab coat billowing behind her like a cape.