"As far as explosions go," Tracer began, kicking a crushed soda can aside as she ambled across the dark street, "This is somewhat...tame? I love ya Winston, but I was hoping my trip to the States would have a bit more me time. It's been ages since I've had a real vacation, y'know? Why'd you need me to take a gander at this?"
A deep fissure ran from one side of the street to the other, the black asphalt buckling in on itself where it had cracked, sinking a bit in the center where the earth beneath it had given away. The blast was shaped somewhat like a comet, with a crater in the center of the road and several cracks trailing off from it in one direction. On the far side of the road was the ElecTrail public transport train, nearly derailed by the tremor, across from the entrance to the parking lot to the Los Angeles Natural History Museum.
It was the statue leading up to the parking lot that had stolen the show. Police men, reporters, and caution tape had wrapped around the scene for hours after the incident, preventing Tracer from getting a good look at it. She had to wait until late in the evening after everyone had gone home before she could be sure she could assess the situation without interference. The street lights had been destroyed in the quake, so all she had to rely on for light was her chronal accelerator and a shoulder-mounted clip-on flashlight. The statue itself was a relic of the past, a leftover from the original museum some fifty-odd years ago. A bronze Tyrannosaurus rex engaged in mortal combat with a Triceratops on a waist-high cement pedestal, with a holovid screen mounted below, which would've had scrolling advertisements for upcoming exhibits had it not been cracked in half.
The facts as Tracer knew them were these: sixteen hours ago, a man had been impaled upon the metal horns of the Triceratops statue. Something had exploded in the middle of the street, cracking it in half and collapsing the sewer underneath, knocking out streetlights and traffic signals, and throwing the man into the statue and nearly fatally piercing him through the abdomen. Paramedics removed him and rushed him, along with another casualty, to the hospital.
Being careful not to tread in the jagged crevice, she stepped over the caution tape and approached the statue. Tracer gave a low whistle as she let the blue glow of her chronal accelerator play over the burnished surface of the dinosaurs. One of the Triceratops' horns was still conspicuously crusty.
"Yuck," she murmured into her communicator. "Like I said, this explosion is small potatoes compared to what we normally deal with. Don't we usually let the local authorities take over situations like this? I mean, sure, given how much damage it's done, it's astounding that only two people got hurt..." She trailed off, glancing over her shoulder at the buckled road. This place was packed with tourists and field trips and patrons earlier that morning; how did they get so lucky that so few people were injured in the blast?
"Did you happen to find anything?" Winston asked from his base, viewing the scene from a satellite feed. He could make out an infrared silhouette of Tracer from above, standing on the corner with the statue.
"Nope, nothing, sorry big guy," she said, pulling her scanner out of her pocket. The small teardrop-shaped pod floated in her hand, a sliver of blue acrylic gently pulsing as it waited for her command. "Display results." The scanner tilted upward, the fat rounded side with the acrylic piece facing the sky, and projected a holovid. "No shrapnel, no nuclear evidence, nothing in the way of combustible materials. No exploding gas leak under the street, no lighting from above, nothing. For all I can tell, the street blew up of its own bloody accord and tossed that bloke straight onto this dino here," she said, fondly patting the Triceratops' knee. "By the way, is he expected to make it? I heard the chap survived."
"It's been confirmed he'd recover. The statue's horn missed all major arteries." Winston snorted, apparently unimpressed that the civilian hadn't been gored to death. His FaceCam finally connected up in the corner of her vision. His big head was propped up by a hairy blue hand, the other one busily typing away. The glazed-over look in his bespectacled eyes gave Tracer the impression that he'd been at his computer terminal all day, following this story intently as information was released.
"You don't seem too happy that he survived," Tracer observed, suspiciously.
"Want to know what else I heard about this man? Something that has yet to be broken to the public?"
"Sure."
"He was a Talon agent."
"Woah, wait, what?! That changes things, Winston."
"Yes."
"Get out of here."
"I'm serious. Genndy Takyama. He'd taken the alias Reagan Tani. He was identified and exposed as an undercover terrorist when he was brought to the hospital. They'd accessed his records for medical history and found that it was a stolen identity. He likely didn't think he'd get caught, so he didn't put a lot of effort into covering his tracks. Talon is probably going to let him rot in prison rather than expend any energy in trying to reclaim him, given how easy it was to expose him."
"So that's why you interrupted my vacation. I thought you'd called me over to LA just to meet up at that dingy old 'Socal Base' you've been digging up. Well, clearly this is Talon's work, then," Tracer concluded, gesturing to the ruined street. "What about the other casualty?"
Winston wrinkled his nose. "That's the touchy part. Takyama was, for reasons I haven't figured out yet, posing as a substitute teacher at an elementary school on the other side of LA."
"Uh huh."
"He was taking his class on a field trip to the museum. One of his students was injured in the blast-"
"Are they-!"
"He's fine, he's fine," Winston quickly assured her. "I probably should've led with that..."
"Ya think?"
"It's very unclear what his injuries were, they appear to be shock related. His parents didn't want any of his information to be released, so the hospital remained vague on his condition. He was unconscious for most of the day, but according to the report, he's in a stable condition."
"Good," she sighed, relieved. The last thing she wanted was another Mondatta scenario... she pushed that thought aside, for her own peace of mind. "I dunno what Talon's playing at. They couldn't be bothered to get the bomb into the museum itself? They couldn't even make it to the parking lot before it detonated?"
"Perhaps it went off by mistake? Maybe his mission was compromised and he tried to do as much damage as he could before his cover was blown. Or maybe it was just faulty equipment."
"He must have remotely detonated it, or was at least a good distance away from the bomb itself, since he wasn't blown apart six ways to Sunday. He was far away enough that he wasn't incinerated, but close enough that the shockwave shish-kabob'd him onto the statue."
"But it doesn't appear to have been a bomb, though," Winston said, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. "Like you said, there were no signs of any chemical, combustible, or nuclear explosion. It almost seems as though...I don't know, as though a great big invisible hammer came down and crushed this intersection like a sheet of cardboard."
"True. There's not even any ash here, where the blast looks like it started from," she said, now standing in the shallow crater that appeared to be the origin point from which the explosion radiated. She traced the toe of her boot around, but no ash or similar residue came up.
Her attention snapped to Winston's camera, his face suddenly illuminated by a flashing red light. Athena, his AI program, was alerting him to something off screen.
"What is it?"
"You've got company," Winston grumbled. "Looks like Talon agents have been dispatched to do a little examination of the scene as well."
"I'll take cover for now. Keep me posted in case of any funny business." She turned off her shoulder flashlight and vaulted over the statue, landing lightly behind it and crouching below its base, peering around the corner. A car was pulling in with its headlights turned off, taking advantage of the busted streetlights, using the cover of darkness to further mask its approach. Tracer's goggles had some slight night-vision ability, but it didn't give her an immediately clear picture of what was going on. The car was forced to stop where the streetlights had fallen and blocked the road.
The windows were tinted, so it was impossible to tell how many Talon operatives were in the car. The passenger door opened and an agent climbed out. He stood there for a moment, surveying the scene, his hands on his hips. From what she could tell, he was dressed in the standard-issue Talon regalia: a helmet and face mask/respirator combo that covered his whole head, red-tinted goggles, and a heavily armored combat uniform. She wasn't close enough to hear exactly what he was saying to his comrades in the car, but it sounded something like "...Really underestimated...lucky to be alive..." The driver rolled down his window and urged the agent to hurry up and "find it," whatever "it" was. Their respirators made it difficult for them to be understood, even in ideal conditions.
"What are they searching for?" Tracer heard Winston mutter in her earpiece, more to himself than to her. She saw the Talon agent pull out a scanning device of his own, the small smooth metal device floating in his hand for a moment, before blinking red and zooming off down the street a few hundred yards.
"Did they dispatch a scanner?" Winston asked. "I can't tell from my satellite feed."
"Yes, it appears they're looking for something, something we didn't pick up on..." Tracer whispered, leaning further around the statue to observe, doing her best to keep the glow from her chronal accelerator hidden. The agent's scanner had stopped and stood hovering over a downed traffic light. Attached to the top of the traffic light was-
"The traffic camera!" Tracer hissed. "Wouldn't the explosion have been recorded by the traffic camera?"
"I-well, no, I don't think so," Winston said, furiously typing away to pull up the published details from earlier that day. "According to the reports, the explosion destroyed the cameras, there wasn't any footage that the police could get to.."
"It looks like Talon has a way to access it, though," Tracer said, her grip on the statue's base tightening. Even without the use of her goggles, she could see the tell-tale LOADING EXTRACTION symbol floating over the agent's scanner as it began to wirelessly collect the traffic camera's contents.
"They're going to find out what exactly happened this morning," growled Winston.
"Not if I can help it." The scanner had finished its download, the red LOADING EXTRACTION symbol shifting to EXTRACTION COMPLETE.
"There we go," Tracer heard the agent say. Within half a second she'd Blinked over to him, the bright cerulean flash of her chronal accelerator hurtling her through time and space to end up inches away from the agent's side.
"Evening chap! Whatcha got there?" she said, cocking her head to one side to look over his shoulder. "Ooo, looks like you were able to pry something good outta that banged-up camera. Mind if I take a look?" She quickly leaned back to dodge a punch, using her momentum to throw herself into a back handspring and withdraw her Pulse pistols. "Play nice! I just want to take a quick peek!" she chirped, before opening fire. The street was lit up with bright blue bolts of energy as she rained down a hail of ammunition on the guy. He crumpled to the road, one hand on his undrawn weapon, the other grasping the scanner. She landed on the roof of the car, denting it it where her heels landed. She could hear the man in the driver seat below rustle around with his own weapon and take aim, pointing his weapon up at the ceiling. She Blinked off the car just in time, the roof of it exploding with bullets, shredding it with the amount of firepower at close range. She swung around and kicked through the open window on the driver's side, her heel satisfyingly connecting with the second man's jaw, sending him face-first into the passenger window. He didn't move again.
After making sure there wasn't anybody in the back seat, Tracer extricated herself from the car and returned to the scanner, prying it out of the agent's hand. She pulled the memory card out of it and inserted it into her own scanner. "I'm sending the footage to you now," Tracer said, pausing to blow a lock of hair out of her face, the only indication she'd been engaged in combat just now.
"Thank you. It doesn't look like Talon sent particularly skilled agents to retrieve this information."
"Nope, part of me wanted to drag on the fun for a bit longer, but I was worried the scanner would get damaged."
"The video should be all loaded up now. I'm starting it from a few minutes before the explosion occurred. Shall we?"
"We shall."
Winston pressed PLAY, and the resulting holovid shimmered into view for both of them.