“WE HAVE VISUAL on the train,” the helicopter pilot said in the headphones. Dekka crouch-walked to the cockpit and leaned over the pilot’s shoulder. And there it was, visible through the bubble canopy, just a mile ahead and, astonishingly, stopped.
“Someone’s standing on the roof,” the pilot said.
“That would be my girl Shade,” Dekka said. “Land just ahead of it.”
“No can do, miss: wires.”
“Damn!”
“And now it’s moving!” the pilot shouted.
“Keep pace with it and get as low as you can!” Dekka ordered. “We’re about to get another passenger.”
The helicopter swept in a tight circle and came back to hover just above the electrical wires, keeping pace with the train, which accelerated slowly, five miles an hour, ten, twenty . . .
Suddenly the helicopter lurched as it took on the weight of a new arrival. Shade Darby had jumped from the roof of the train straight into the helicopter’s passenger compartment.
“Talk to me, Shade,” Dekka demanded.
Shade had far too much to say to be able to do it in buzz-speak and de-morphed quickly. “He’s got people on that train. He’s already ‘Vectored’ one person and the rest aren’t going to argue with him.”
“How many passengers?”
Shade shrugged. “Looks like a few dozen, maybe fifty people.”
“We need to stop that train, no matter what,” Simone said, surprising Dekka with her intensity. “If Vector reaches Washington, the US government will be over. Then there’ll be no one but us. Just us.”
No more “father,” no more “Markovic.” Simone had seen what her once-father had become and had begun to accept that Bob Markovic no longer existed. Dekka felt a wave of pity for the girl: she’d been through a hell of a lot in a very short period of time. It said something about her that she was still standing at all, let alone that she had adapted so quickly and . . . Dekka had been about to add “easily,” but of course that was almost certainly not true. Dekka had known many kids in the FAYZ who seemed to be coping easily and ended up as psychiatric in-patients or suicides. Simone might be suppressing the pain for now, but it would come. Impulsively she reached and squeezed Simone’s shoulder.
Malik said, “She’s right, Dekka. This isn’t a maybe-we-should-maybe-we-shouldn’t thing. If Vector takes Washington, the eight of us will be dead within a month. He’ll be able to turn military, FBI, everything against us.”
“You think that many people in Washington will just go along with some unhinged lunatic?” Cruz wondered aloud.
“Obviously you don’t pay much attention to politics,” Malik snarked. “People are weak. They take the easy path. Wait until Vector has the president on a live feed, screaming in pain and begging for death. Not one person in ten thousand will stand up.”
“He’s right,” Sam said. “And once people roll over for Vector they’ll resent anyone who doesn’t. It’s human nature. They’ll serve Vector and they’ll easily be turned against us.”
Dekka looked out through the open door, down at the train, wind blowing her snake-dreads straight back. The Acela was moving at maybe twenty miles an hour already. “Fifty or sixty people . . .”
“I can try to get some of them off the train,” Shade said, “and maybe Francis can, too, but anyone we save may have Vector’s bugs on them. We could save them and Vector simultaneously unless I take the extra time to de-bug each hostage.”
No one was telling Dekka what to do. They all knew the decision she had to make, and Shade, while knowing what she would do herself, was glad not to have to make the call. The passenger compartment of the helicopter was a howling wind tunnel, and yet it seemed quiet as they waited for Dekka to decide their fate, and quite possibly the fate of the human race.
“Lieutenant,” Dekka yelled to the pilot. “You’re going to have a sudden loss of weight.” Then, with her heart in her throat, Dekka turned to Sam and Francis and Armo and said, “Let’s do it.”
The helicopter flew low, keeping pace with the accelerating train. Armo stood and hefted the heavy artillery shell. Francis gripped his furry arm tightly. Dekka took Francis’s free hand.
“Wish us luck,” Dekka said just as a swarm of copper and silver and red insects flew in through the open door. The bugs swirled around Dekka, invulnerable in morph, and went straight for their vulnerable targets.
“No!” Cruz cried. Cruz was not in morph.
In the cockpit the pilot and copilot slapped frantically at bugs aiming for their eyes, mouths, and ears.
Shade was already morphing fast, fast enough that Vector’s beasts did not find her before chitin armor covered her.
“Cruz! Morph!” Malik cried in slo-mo speech.
But that would take too long. One of the bugs was inches from Cruz’s face. Shade could see the beats of its penny-bright wings. She snatched it out of the air and crushed it. Then looked down at it in her hand, a broken toy, yellow insides oozing, antennae broken like twigs. She threw it out the door.
Then, the Whac-a-Mole game got serious. Hundreds of insects had found the pilots, but dozens had recognized Cruz and Sam as targets as well, neither being in morph. Shade’s hands and arms were a blur, snatching and crushing, snatching and crushing. The bugs were not quick by Shade’s standards, but there were a lot.
And Shade found she had help from an unexpected source. The living dreads on Dekka’s head were almost as fast as Shade, snatching bugs out of the air and biting them in half.
But neither Shade nor Dekka could wedge into the cockpit and save the pilots flying the helicopter, which now veered wildly away.
Cruz had begun to morph, an amazing thing to watch with Shade’s accelerated senses. And as Cruz’s morph appeared, the bugs attacking her seemed to lose focus, as if they’d forgotten what they were doing. They turned in midair, and redoubled the assault on the cockpit.
“The pilots!” Dekka cried.
But Shade could see that it was too late. Far too late. The lieutenant pilot’s face was already erupting in pus-filled boils, slow-motion corruption of the flesh.
No time to consult Dekka. No time to parse the moral pluses and minuses. Time only to see the solution, the bright, clear, ruthlessly drawn line from where Shade was to a solution. The faint, probably futile, but only solution.
Shade pushed Dekka aside, reached into the cockpit, grabbed the pilot by the shoulder of his uniform, reached around to smack the buckle of his safety harness, yanked him out of his seat, and hurled him out of the door.
She was back to repeat the same sequence with the copilot. Finally she grabbed Malik bodily and pushed him toward the cockpit. All of this within three seconds.
She had time to watch in horror as the two men fell so very slowly, arms windmilling, mouths open to scream. The pilot hit the ground. The copilot smashed into a tree. Two rag dolls.
Three. I’ve killed three men today.
It took seconds for the others to realize what she’d done. It took Malik seconds to realize he was in the pilot’s seat. It took Dekka seconds to cry, “What have you done?”
“The only thing I could do,” Shade said at a speed Dekka would never be able to interpret.
Sam was on his feet now, putting an arm around a furious Dekka. He said, “Not now!”
The helicopter banked sharply, so hard that Shade was certain it would roll completely over and hit the ground in a fiery explosion. But then the roll slowed and reversed. Cruz and Armo crashed together into a bulkhead, knocking Sam and Dekka to their knees on the steel floor.
Shade knew one of them, just one, had the power to escape unharmed.
“Francis!” she cried.
But it was a tenth-of-a-second chirp in a howling tornado of wind as the ground rushed at them.
Malik quickly saw what Shade had done, quickly saw that she was hoping he would somehow figure out how to fly a helicopter, and stared in blank panic at an array of unfamiliar instruments.
Through the windshield Malik saw tall, straight pine trees rising suddenly like arrows, then tilting away. He felt the helicopter accede to gravity and slide sideways toward the ground. House roofs. Telephone poles. Grass. An aboveground backyard swimming pool. It was as if some giant had scooped the ground up and flung it at them, so that it felt less like they were falling and more like the ground was attacking them.
And yet, they were falling.
Malik understood Shade’s thinking: Malik was a techie, a gamer, a guy who’d spent thousands of hours driving virtual tanks and flying virtual jets. He was the best choice to play emergency pilot.
Just one thing: he’d never even flown a virtual helicopter.
To his side, right where the parking brake might be on a sports car, was an ornate sort of yoke, but it was no simple stick; it had various holds, things that needed to be pushed, things that needed to be rotated, things that needed to be pulled, and he had no idea, none, none, none what to do. But in flying planes, pulling back on the yoke had always sent the plane upward.
So Malik pulled up on the yoke. He heard the rising scream of the turbines, felt a sudden surge of speed, saw a whirlwind outside the bubble canopy . . .
The tip of a rotor caught a power line. There was a shower of sparks; the helicopter shuddered and jerked wildly, rose a few feet like a breaching whale, and spun madly. Malik was pushed back in his seat by the centrifugal force, suddenly several times his own weight. Behind him the bodies of his friends—those not buckled in—were hurled around, smashed into bulkheads, and suddenly Dekka fell, back first, feline hands clawing at the sky, out of the helicopter.
Shade moved, snatched Dekka’s desperate hand, and held on, but she wasn’t strong enough to pull Dekka in against the force of gravity and the delirious spinning, spinning . . .
The rotors hit again, and this time they bit into something solid, and tree branches and pine needles lashed the windshield. Trees. A fence. The helicopter’s tail rose sharply, and the machine flipped over and smashed into the ground.
Even after impact the rotors churned on, tearing up grass and lawn toys and throwing steel chunks into the house whose backyard they had invaded.
Then . . . quiet, as the turbines whined and stopped. Malik was on his side. A tree branch had shattered the cockpit and now stuck there like a gnarled spear, having barely missed Malik’s head.
Then . . . Malik smelled smoke!
To Shade the destruction of the helicopter was like watching a car crash on a slowed-down video. The rotors moved very fast, but she could see the individual blades making their individual contacts with trees and dirt. The helicopter had flipped onto its side so that Dekka was now above her and falling in toward the door.
Dekka, though, did not need Shade’s help: with feline speed she landed with feet and hands on the open hatch.
Cruz had buckled up, but blood was pouring from a gash in her leg—or at least the leg of whatever morph she was in. Francis lay in a heap, her neck at a precarious angle.
If Francis dies, we’re done.
Simone had been lucky enough to be thrown into Armo, who lay now on his back on the grass with Simone cradled in his arms.
Priorities: Francis.
Shade went to her, holding on with one hand and a leg pressed against the door to the cockpit. She knelt and saw a slow pulse throbbing in her throat. Her neck . . . her neck . . . it had to be broken!
But then Francis stirred and moved her hands in a wild, belated effort to protect herself. Shade caught her hands in midair, pushed them down, and looked up at Dekka, still stretched across the doorway. Dekka spit blood and yelled, “Smoke!”
Dekka jumped out of the way, and Shade blew past her, up and out through the sky-pointing door. She saw it: fire, spread out in a fan shape behind the helicopter, burning the wooden fence, burning random yard toys, burning the crumpled tail section and beginning to eat its way forward.
Shade dropped back inside and had to crawl to reach Malik, separated from him by a substantial tree branch. She pulled at the branch, but not even her morphed strength was enough.
“Bzt!” Shade yelled, then forced herself to slow down and yell, “Everyone off!”
“I’m trapped. Get out of here!” Malik said.
“The chopper’s on fire,” Shade said and tried to squeeze past the branch, but here speed was of no use. She needed a chain saw or the Jaws of Life.
The breeze caught the smoke and brought a dense cloud of choking, oily black smoke into the cockpit.
“I don’t want to burn again!” Malik cried. “I don’t want to burn again!”
“I’ve got you!” Shade said, but did she? Could she do . . . anything?
Now came the heat behind the smoke. A frantic glance showed orange flame licking its way along the fuselage as smoke filled the passenger compartment.
“Can you get out through the windshield?” Shade asked, but Malik, cool and calm Malik, was no longer able to comprehend. He was in full, flailing, screaming panic.
“Malik! Malik!” Shade cried as she saw the smoke being drawn into his nostrils.
“Don’t let me burn! Don’t let me burn!”
“Malik!”
The fire was so close now, so close, and Shade knew she would be able to escape, knew she could run through the flames before they could touch her and knew that if she did, Malik would burn and she would live to hear his desperate cries echoing in her mind forever and knew that she could never . . .
A hand reached through the broken windshield. The hand felt around, then found what it sought. Francis’s fingers closed around Malik’s knee, and all at once Shade was alone in the cockpit.
She crawled back to the passenger compartment and found Sam, groggy, fighting for consciousness, a gash down the side of his face. She pushed one arm beneath his back, her free hand grabbed a leg by the ankle, and she pushed him up, up and tipped him out of the sky-facing door.
Then Shade leaped clear, landing on a deep-green lawn that looked as if someone had attacked it with a massive hoe. A long piece of rotor stuck from the wood siding of a two-story house.
The Rockborn Gang was spread around a suburban lawn, standing or sitting back from the fire, upwind from the billowing smoke. And now Shade saw the damage done. Francis’s leg wasn’t just bleeding, white bone was protruding through the skin of her shin. Dekka had had to carry her to rescue Malik. Sam’s gash was easily six inches long, gushing blood, and would require stitches. Simone had a sprained wrist. Cruz had sustained a head wound that bled down her face in rivulets, blood pooling in the hollows of her eyes and spilling like red tears. Malik lay coughing up smoke and gasping for breath.
Only Armo seemed to have survived unscathed, but his white fur was gray from the oily smoke. He lay on his back with the nerve gas shell beside him.
“We need an ambulance,” Cruz said. She was out of morph and pressing her palm flat against the cut in her forehead.
Francis had caught the worst of it. She could not walk, and from the sheet-whiteness of her face and the sweat beads on her forehead, it was clear she was in great pain.
“We can’t lose the train!” Shade cried twice, once at speed, then again in slo-mo.
“We can’t ignore our own people, either,” Dekka said firmly.
Shade nodded and started to call 911. Then she thought better of it. “How about I get you an ambulance and a paramedic and we keep going?”
Dekka pursed her lips and started to say yes, but by then Shade was gone. Her maps app showed an emergency room just two miles away, a matter of seconds. She was in luck and found an ambulance that had just unloaded a patient. She came to a sudden, startling stop in front of a paramedic just climbing out of the back of the red-and-white ambulance.
“I need you,” Shade said, and without waiting pushed the woman back inside and slammed the door. She zoomed around to the driver, opened his door, yanked him out as gently as she could, which was not very gently. “You, I don’t need.”
Shade hopped up into the driver’s seat.
“Hey! You can’t—” the driver protested, but by that point Shade had thrown the vehicle into gear, executed a tire-squealing reverse out of the emergency room loading area, spun the wheel, and taken off.
“Hey! Hey!” the captive paramedic in the back yelled as she was tossed back and forth by maneuvers carried out at speeds no normal human driver could manage.
“Strap in!”
“You can’t—”
“And yet, I did.”
This was no sports car, and it was top-heavy and precarious on corners. Coming around one sharp turn the vehicle started to tip, but its driver had extraordinary speed and felt the roll coming and shifted the wheel just enough to bounce violently onto a median and then careen back onto the street. It took longer to get back to the crash scene—easy to locate from the pillar of smoke—than it had to run to the hospital, but soon Shade crashed the ambulance right through the wooden fence and brought the vehicle to a halt in the destroyed backyard. On the way she blew past police cars no doubt heading to the scene and knew she would have just seconds to get away without a possible gun battle.
Shade leaped from the ambulance and practically threw Sam in the back, earning a shriek from the paramedic. Then she scooped up Francis and laid her as gently as she could on the stretcher inside the ambulance. She grabbed the paramedic, a twentysomething Latina, by the collar of her uniform and slowed her speech just enough to say, “Your patients. More coming.”
The police cars were pulling up on the street, sirens dying, lights flashing, but by then Shade had everyone but Dekka loaded.
“Let’s go!” Shade said. “I’m driving.”
“I have shotgun,” Dekka said.
“Yes you do, my friend,” Shade said.
Shade drove back through the fence she’d flattened, between two police cars, past shouting police officers as Dekka stuck a hand out of the passenger-side window and carefully shredded the tires of the cop cars. Shade mashed the gas pedal and aimed south, toward the New Jersey Turnpike.
Dekka, beside her, was already on the phone with General Eliopoulos. “No, no, if you bomb it or derail it, Vector will escape into the countryside.” A long listen. Then, “Delay, yes. Mess with the switches if you can.” Another listen. “I understand, General. Okay. Yeah. Then, what we need is no cops on our tails and a faster ride. Okay. Okay.” She glanced at Shade. “Yeah, that should work.”
“So?” Shade demanded.
“So he’s seeing about having Amtrak mess with the switches, but he can only do so much without derailing the train. Vector can force his hostages to climb out and manually change the switches, but that will eat up some time.”
“He offered to bomb it?”
“He has F-16s in the air. But if he tries that, Vector will just buzz away.”
“This ambulance’s top speed seems to be a hundred twenty,” Shade said, disgusted. “I thought ambulances were fast.”
“Eliopoulos has another idea. Some new helicopter they have with a top speed of two fifty. Faster than the train.”
“That would do it.”
“He’s having it meet us.”
“Where?”
“In the middle of the New Jersey Turnpike just south of Philadelphia.”
A police barricade waited at the on-ramp of the turnpike, but as they neared, the police cars hastily reversed out of their way.
“Eliopoulos,” Dekka said.
“Okay, then. Pedal to the metal.”
“And?”
“And what?” Shade asked.
Dekka smiled. “Lights and siren, girl. Lights and siren.”
“Hah!” Shade said. “Hell yes, lights and siren.”