The machine gun stopped firing.
But Roger laughed from inside the helmet.
“Oh, my sweet little Sasha...you have to do better than that if you want to harm me. This armour is very well protected against your lightning. You could actually say that it was a design requirement to withstand it.”
“Right. Then let’s see how well protected you are against this,” Sasha snarled and pointed the flat palm of her other hand at Roger, releasing a powerful wave of pressured air in his direction.
The kinetic wave blast struck into Roger with the force of a railroad engine, lifting more than 650 pounds of metal and flesh off the ground as if weightless. Man and machine were thrown more than thirty feet through the air, until the metal colossus knocked into a fast food restaurant at the far end of the rotunda with a tremendous crash. The sheer mass of the armoured man crushed tables, chairs and kitchen equipment underneath him, as he sailed all the way through to the far end of the restaurant where a concrete wall finally stopped him, the impact shaking the entire building. Shaken loose by the shattering blow, half of the restaurant’s ceiling came down one moment later and buried Roger under hundreds of pounds of metal, wiring and debris.
Sasha lowered her hand, and released her breath as she gazed at the scene of destruction.
And her eyes went wide, as chunks of rubble flew wide and Roger rose from the pile of debris like a metal phoenix and stalked back towards her, each of his steps sending small tremors through the floor.
“Nice attempt,” he said and extended both his metal arms to point at Sasha, while he kept waltzing in her direction. “My turn now,” Roger snarled - and several small clouds of white steam shot out of his arms as he fired three pairs of rocket-propelled grenades at Sasha.
There would be no time for Sasha to get out of harm’s way fast enough, so she collected every bit of available magic energy in her body and reinforced her protective shield with it, hoping that it would be enough to withstand the incoming missiles. The swarm of rockets knocked into Sasha’s force barrier and a combined fifty pounds of high yield plastic explosives set off in a giant ball of fire. The multiple blasts almost blinded Sasha, despite she had her eyes closed for the anticipated explosion. She felt her magic energy reserves being sucked out of her, as the brutal force of the exploding grenades drained her protective shield fast. The next thing she noticed was her body sailing through the air, knocked back by the immense concussion her energy shield wasn’t able to completely shield her from.
Sasha reopened her eyes just in time to witness herself being thrown into a souvenir store located a good thirty feet from where she had originally been standing. Her protective shield saved Sasha from being instantly killed as her body smashed into the shelves with enough force to send stuffed pets, T-shirts, and other souvenir items flying in all directions, but it did exhaust Sasha’s final bit of magic energy. With a desperate groan, Sasha had to let go of the protective shield, which then promptly collapsed around her, together with the better part of the souvenir store. A shelf crashed down on her an instant later, knocking the air out of the flailing woman and burying her under heavy wood planks and dust.
Coughing, Sasha shoved the wooden debris from her body and staggered back to her feet.
When she looked up, Roger stood right in front of her. Sasha couldn’t see his face under the steel mask, but she was fairly certain that he was grinning at her.
Her magic energy only slowly recovering, Sasha guessed that she would need at least two minutes of rest until she could create another energy shield. And her offensive powers hadn’t done anything to Roger’s armour.
Breathing heavily from exhaustion, Sasha defiantly stared at Roger, while she realized that she was likely going to die.
“Ouch, that looked as if it hurt, my dear,” Roger chuckled, as he raised his machine gun arm to point at Sasha. “Don’t blame yourself too much. This armour is pretty much designed to counter your powers, Sasha. I am afraid that you never had the slightest chance.”
“Is it designed to counter mine, too?” another female voice said, making both combatants spin around.
Sasha smiled briefly when she saw Firebird floating just above the escalators, holding her arms out at the armoured Roger. A split second later, a welding beam of fire shot out from Firebird's palms, directed at the villain's head.
Sasha was standing more than fifteen feet away from the point of impact, but the searing blast of heat still stung her skin as the intense and focused fire exploded right into Roger’s face. Out of sheer survival instinct Sasha jumped aside just at the same time as Roger released a burst of machine gun rounds at the very point she had been standing at a moment earlier.
And then something made Sasha stop.
Roger groaned.
“Firebird,” Sasha yelled, realizing what had happened. “The heat, it hurts him!”
“So you’re not all that invincible after all, are you, bully?” Firebird quipped as she maintained the two steady lines of flame at Roger. “Let's see how you handle this tin can of yours turning into a pressure cooker.”
Roger screamed as Firebird intensified her fiery onslaught against his steel armour, and took a few steps backwards in a futile attempt to get out of her range.
But then he overcame his short moment of surprise and confusion, and refocused. An invisible fist clenched around Sasha’s stomach as Roger extended his arms towards Firebird and Sasha could see the rocket propelled grenades pointing at her companion, ready to fire. Sasha remembered Firebird telling her about her body being able to repel small-arms fire. But RPGs definitely didn’t count as small-arms fire. And Sasha had still not yet recovered enough power to cast an energy shield around Firebird to protect her from what was to be thrown at her. Sasha had enough power for just one small spell. She had to make it count. And there was only one thing coming to her mind what she could do to prevent the RPGs from hitting Firebird.
Sasha pointed both her hands at Roger’s steel-encased feet and locked her mind on them.
With a snarl, Sasha pulled hard.
Roger yelped as Sasha’s telekinetic powers wiped his feet from the ground they were standing on, and his 650 pounds of total weight uncontrollably toppled backwards - in the very same moment as he had triggered the RPGs.
The sudden fall made Roger’s arms instinctively flex upwards - and the missiles no longer pointed at Firebird.
Instead, Roger’s arms now pointed straight up.
Six RPGs tore into the airport’s glass and metal roof and set off in a giant ball of fire. The resulting pressure wave wiped Sasha from her feet and sent Firebird sailing backwards mid-air, as all three were showered with shards and metal debris from above.
A bone-shattering creak from above made both women look up in horror.
Weakened beyond the point of no return by the explosion, the roof’s centre support pillar gave in.
***
Looking up at the ceiling, Firebird’s lips formed a silent ‘Eeep’ as the entire roof started to come down on them.
Using her metahuman abilities, the blonde heroine propelled on her feet and launched her body into flight, urging it forward as fast as she could. Soaring only inches above the floor, she shot towards Sasha with such alacrity as to cause the debris on the floor to scatter to the sides violently.
Firebird guessed that Sasha’s magic potential was still too weak to cast any major spells, and that she would have no way to escape the incoming apocalypse. The white-haired girl was still on her knees, staring at the ceiling with wide-open eyes. But Firebird was not about to let her succumb to the falling debris resulting from the selfless assist. In the last possible moment before she bumped into her, Firebird reached out with one arm and looped Sasha at the waist.
From the corner of her eyes Firebird saw the first parts of the roof falling towards them. The ton-heavy glass windows would crush both of them like ants if they would hit them. With a defiant narrowing of her eyes and a dramatic increase in velocit
y, she launched herself towards the balustrade overlooking the arrival level one floor below and propelled herself over the railing and into the air.
Still firmly holding on to Sasha, the two women cleared the balcony and Firebird spun her body around in mid air, one moment before they crashed into the large glass front beyond. Hitting the window with her back first, Firebird shielded the unprotected Sasha with her own body as their impact shattered the window to pieces.
Accompanied by a shower of razor-sharp glass shards, Firebird and Sasha cleared the window and sailed out of the building a mere second before the roof smashed into the floor with a thundering crack. As the building collapsed behind them, one heroine carried the other to a welcome respite - Firebird set down on the roof of the parkade on the other side of the street and let go of Sasha.
Both women turned around and looked at the smouldering ruin that moments ago had been the front section of Vancouver airport’s international terminal building.
***
“What a disaster,” Firebird lamented, looking at the half-collapsed building. “Do you think he's...?”
Sasha shook her head. “I don’t think Roger’s dead, no. I tossed him into a concrete wall earlier, and that barely seemed to have scratched him. Perhaps his armour is a bit dented and scratched, but I am fairly certain it’s not over yet.”
“Nobody was in the other terminal. We still have to find the hostages,” Firebird said.
“They are not anywhere at the airport,” Sasha said.
“What makes you think so?”
“Other than I couldn’t find a trace of them there when I checked out the building? A hunch. And I tried dabbling in that ‘thinking like a criminal’ thing. Would you try to barricade yourself into a building that has more doors than there are holes in a colander? A location you’d need an entire army to defend? That, and Roger told me that he kept only a few of the hostages. Why would he release most of them, unless he planned to move the rest to somewhere else?”
While Firebird was still pondering Sasha’s words, a dark shadow rose over the airfield behind the terminal building with a rattling noise.
Firebird turned to Sasha, raising an eyebrow, while she pointed at the fast ascending aircraft. “People can buy attack helicopters in your country?”
Sasha gazed at the Russian made Mil Mi-24 gunship. “I don’t think he bought that one in a hardware store.”
“You’re recovered enough to fly?”
Sasha nodded. “Yeah, let’s go. I think he will lead us to wherever he took the hostages.”
***
“Where's the Canadian Air Force? No flying horses?” Firebird teased, as the two women tailgated the helicopter just far enough behind that they were unlikely going to be spotted from the aircraft.
“In contrast to some popular stereotypes about Canada we have got an air force, all right. But I guess this guy is flying at a too low altitude for the radar to pick him up. They haven’t noticed him yet.”
“Where do you think he’s heading to?”
“From the direction I’d say it looks like as if he’s going to downtown.”
“Wonderful,” Firebird sighed out loud with audible disappointment. “So the hostages could be really anywhere in the city?”
Sasha pointed at the Skytrain tracks below them, connecting the airport to downtown with an automated rapid transport railway. “No, actually I think I know how he got them out of the airport without anyone seeing it, and where he is holding them now.”
“Public transportation? Well, where does the line end?” Firebird asked.
“Near Canada Place.”
“What I don’t get is...why did he even wait in the airport, when the hostages were long gone?”
“Distraction, I guess. Half of VPD was busy setting a perimeter around the airport, but they had no idea that he took out the hostages before they even arrived. So, a large portion of the police force is nowhere near where they could pose any danger to his real operation. That and because he was waiting for me, I guess. Roger knew that I wouldn’t stand aside while he is holding my parents hostage. I would actually think he intentionally made sure that my parents would end up being among his hostages. He wants to kill me, Heather.”
***
The Mi-24 circled around downtown Vancouver’s skyscrapers as if they were slalom gates. The need to stay out of sight in combination with the chopper’s camouflage painting made it difficult for Sasha and Firebird to follow the zig-zagging aircraft in the urban canyons, but its noise at least gave the general direction away where to look for the helicopter. That and of course they had a good idea where it was ultimately headed for, anyway.
In a wide arc the helicopter circled around the Shangri-La tower - Vancouver’s tallest building at more than 200 metres - and vanished out of sight for Sasha and Firebird once more, like it had done at least half a dozen times.
But this time, when the two women passed the building, the helicopter was nowhere to be seen. They stopped in mid-air to look around for it.
Sasha frowned. “Where did he go this time?” she asked, only to earn a shrug from Firebird.
Then both women’s eyes went wide as they picked up the helicopter’s noise again.
From behind them.
“Blast it, they must have spotted us and circled around the building,” Firebird spat, as the helicopter raced straight towards them like an angry bird of prey.
Sasha’s gaze focused on the huge helicopter and zoomed in into the nasty 30mm machine gun mounted under its cockpit. She drew on her magic and conjured two force barriers around Firebird and herself in the same instant as the pilot fired the gun, and the 30mm gatling cannon spat out high-calibre bullets at the two floating women at a rate of 4,000 shots per minute.
Sasha and Firebird were shaken through as the bullets assaulted the energy shields, deflecting left and right in tiny explosions of sparks and fire. Both women flinched as a salvo of stray bullets struck into the Shangri-La tower behind them, obliterating the glass windows and a larger portion of the rooms behind them.
Realizing they had to keep the fire away from any civilians in the densely populated city, the two women launched themselves away from the building, gaining altitude fast. Another spray of bullets struck their shields from behind as they soared towards the harbour area, where the Burrard Inlet fjord separated downtown Vancouver from the North Shore communities, creating the natural deep-water harbour that was arguably the most important reason for Vancouver’s very existence.
“What’s the maximum range of your shield?” Firebird screamed over the continuous onslaught of bullets and the staccato of the helicopter’s gatling cannon behind them.
“Five metres, no more,” Sasha said. “You have got to stay fairly close to me. If you get too far away I won’t be able to keep your shield up.”
“We can hardly coordinate any sort of counter-attack if we're glued together like that.”
“We might not have to. He wants to kill me a lot more desperately than you,” Sasha said, after a short moment of pondering. “Let’s go sharp to the right on three, and then you break off. Just make sure to get away quick, ok?”
“You sure you can handle the helicopter?”
“Forever? No. For a while? Yes.”
Firebird nodded and Sasha counted down from three, all the while the 30mm gun fired more shots at them.
When the countdown reached zero, both women went into a sharp turn to the right, making the stream of bullets slice through thin air. Before the pilot had any chance to compensate for the girls’ sudden change of direction, Sasha ascended upwards in a sharp angle, while Firebird broke off in a diving loop. The pilot would have to decide to follow only one of the women now.
The helicopter swung upwards and sped after Sasha.
***
Sasha glanced over her shoulder. Thanks to her unsuspected manoeuvre, the attack helicopter had lost a bit of distance on her, but it would be hard to completely shake the aircraft, at least
if she wanted to retain any hope of finding it again later. Another salvo of 30mm bullets struck against her energy shield, and Sasha realized that her protective shield would be exhausted long before the gunner would run out of ammunition. And a glance at the helicopter’s wings told Sasha that it had another, even more fearsome weapon it didn’t even use yet.
As if the pilot had read her mind, Sasha witnessed two white streaks of smoke appearing from under the helicopter’s wings, and extending fast towards her. Sasha went into a sharp left turn, just in time to evade the first of the two anti-tank missiles the helicopter pilot had fired at her. But the second one struck her dead on.
The missile exploded on Sasha’s energy shield with a tremendous fiery explosion that knocked Sasha through the air like a tennis ball. Her protective shield flickered, for the blast had sucked most of Sasha’s remaining magic energy out of her. Dazed from the close-by explosion, Sasha frantically tried to regain some control over her flight path, as she spiralled down towards Canada Place.
Cold sweat appeared on Sasha’s forehead as she noticed from the corner of her eyes that two more missiles were launched at her from the helicopter. Frantically probing her magic reserves for more power, Sasha abruptly changed her direction and propelled herself upwards and to the side to escape a deadly hit by the missiles. A lump formed in her throat as she managed to get of harm’s way in the last second to save her own life, but the missiles passing her at mere inches instead slammed into Canada Place below - obliterating one of its world-famous sails and setting two more on fire.
Sasha and Firebird would have to put an end to this, before innocents would get hurt or even killed.
Turning around in mid-air, Sasha let her body slowly float downwards while facing the helicopter. Watching the aircraft coming closer, she drew on her magic power and conjured a mighty lightning. With a snarl she launched a billion volts from her hand at the hovering gunship. The blue streak of electricity struck the helicopter right at the cockpit with a thundering crack.
And Sasha cursed as the helicopter continued on his path as if nothing at all had happened. But she had been afraid that the military aircraft would be well protected against lightning strikes.