"Commander, you cannot wait any longer." Anderson reached out and very deliberately turned off the briefing screen. "We cannot allow Spectra to get a foothold in Lulo City. You are to leave now."
"But Jason..." That was Keyop, and Mark sympathised with every bone in his body. He wanted to go find his second, because despite the lack of communication, he was utterly sure that Jason wasn't off celebrating his race win. He should have been here by now. Something was wrong.
And it made no difference, because Anderson was right. Lulo would be a desperate place to dig the enemy out of, if they got established there - a new city, near-completion but barely inhabited yet, located in a deep ancient sinkhole with a transparent weatherproofing dome over the top. ISO had to get someone in there right now or they might not be able to get in at all.
Mark stood up. "G-Force, we're leaving," he said, putting every ounce of command presence he had into his tone. "Phoenix, now."
He glanced around, checking that everyone was with him, and went into the slow armsweep, relieved that they were following.
"Transmute!"
There were voices nearby, dim and muffled. Two, male, talking about climbing Boomerang. That was the route he and Mark had put up, the first summer, before the war had started for real, on the cliffs down by -
Why was he here? Oh...
Memory and nausea hit simultaneously. Jason rolled over and retched until he was empty. He was vaguely aware of a car pulling away below him, but when he finally stopped heaving, head swimming and vision blurred, all was quiet. No Spectrans. Why hadn't they come after him? He must have been out for long enough for them to get up the cliff if they'd wanted to, because those climbers wouldn't have been nearly as calm if they'd witnessed what had just gone down. Or if there was a squad of goons on the road waiting for him to reappear.
Jason considered getting to his feet, decided it was a bad idea, and instead crawled to the edge of the cliff. The Skyline was still there - how could they not have realised its significance? The car behind it was gone. The car in front was still there. The Spectran convoy was gone, with only a steaming puddle of blue fluid on the roadway showing where it had been.
Why didn't they come after me? Why didn't they take the G-2?
They're alien, he'd been told repeatedly. They don't think like us. Don't expect them to.
Well, not thinking like us had just cost them the chance to capture the Condor.
He considered transmuting and had to swallow hard as the nausea returned with a vengeance. No, not a good idea. He was only five minutes from ISO. He'd go back in civilian mode. Carefully and unsteadily, he lowered himself over the edge, trusting his instincts to remember where the easy route down lay.
.
Jason hadn't ever seen Anderson this angry. The man was practically glowing with rage as he came through the door of the briefing room.
"Chief," he said desperately, "there's something you should know. I'm late because I was attacked."
He'd hoped that new information would redirect some of that anger, but Anderson's jaw was set.
"You're late because you stayed to win a race." His tone was icy and controlled despite his expression. "G-Force are on their way to Lulo City without you. You are grounded."
"But Chief -"
"I do not have time for this now. Stay here. We will discuss your behaviour later." He turned on his heel and was gone.
"You need to tell them..." He didn't bother finishing. The door had slammed shut and there was the click of a lock turning.
For a moment, his mind went completely blank. Stay here. You don't matter; keep out of the way; we wish you didn't exist. That had been his life before he came to ISO. Right now? Hell yes he mattered, keeping out of the way could get his teammates dead, and if Anderson wished he didn't exist, well, that was Anderson's problem.
He banged on the door. "Open this now!"
"Sir, I'm sorry, we have orders that you're to stay inside." Probably some security guard, not a voice he recognised. Anderson had simply left, off to do something he considered important, which doubtless didn't include telling G-Force about Spectra's new detransmutation ray since he wouldn't listen long enough to find out the damn thing existed.
Jason had transmuted before he'd even considered how he'd felt about it ten minutes earlier. This time... it was okay. Better than okay, actually. Something to do with a tuned field undoing whatever crap that ray had triggered? Compartmentalise. He felt better and he was in birdstyle. Good enough.
The lock hadn't been designed to stand up to a furious Condor. Jason had been sure of that. Slightly less sure that the guards would decide that their orders to keep him inside didn't extend to shooting him. The door slammed open with barely a hint of resistance and he was out of the room, down the corridor, and taking the shortest route to his car. Nobody got in his way, which was fortunate for them.
"Still nothing from Jason?" Mark asked for maybe the fifth time, and instantly felt bad. Like Princess wouldn't have told him the moment their missing team member made contact.
"Nothing. And... I'm not sure, but comms are weird. We're five minutes out from ISO, everything should be crystal clear. We're still in contact, but it's as if we're at really, really long range."
"Comms with ISO, you mean?"
"Yes."
"Transmitted directly from that massive dish on the roof of the north tower, about a million times bigger than the transmitter in a bracelet?"
"Yes."
That was all she needed to say - he could join the dots from there perfectly well. Spectra was blocking their comms, or trying to, and chances were that even if Jason was trying to contact them, he couldn't.
We can't go back for him. We just can't. Anderson had been unequivocal - and right - that allowing Spectra time to dig in would be a complete disaster.
"Any sign of the G-2 on scanners?" he asked.
"No," said Keyop, so quickly that he must surely have already been checking. "And they're fuzzy. Low resolution."
Like the comms. It has to be related.
"Five minutes to Lulo," Tiny said. "Where do you want me to land?"
Oh, for his second-in-command sitting behind him, making a million suggestions, most of them wildly risky. If Jason had been there, he knew exactly what he'd do: have Tiny take the Phoenix vertically down into the city just long enough to drop the other four of them off, before blasting out and going to wait somewhere safe. He didn't dare try it with only two people to back him up, neither of them the Condor.
He stared at the plan of the new city: partly constructed, thankfully not inhabited yet. Anderson had assured him that the construction workers had been evacuated. The city of the future, with geothermal heating and a retractable transparent roof over the top, several hundred feet above the buildings, to keep bad weather out. It was laid out with streets radiating from a large central square - well, circle. Large, open, intended as the focus of communal events. Plenty big enough to take five Phoenixes. He disliked the idea of leaving her there, obvious and unmanned, but he had no choice.
He brought up the plan on the secondary screen, highlighted the square. "Right there. Drop straight in fast. I suspect they'll be expecting us to land outside and infiltrate on foot, so let's not do that. We're all going out."
Tiny's expression was horrified. "But -"
"I thought you hated being left behind? We'll seal her up tight, and she'll be close by."
"Commander," Princess said, "I'm worried that bracelet-to-bracelet comms may not work at all. Contacting the Phoenix is more likely to work."
She was, he supposed, his acting second-in-command. And he was glad she'd told him, and understood why she'd done so officially. Even if he didn't want to hear it.
"I can't leave someone on the ship," he said simply. "I can't. Not when we're a man short. It's not a huge city; if someone needs to communicate they will have to come back to the Phoenix and use the comm system here. Is everyone familiar with that?"
He was looking at Keyop, confident that Tiny used it on a regular basis but unsure about their young engineer. The kid nodded confidently, though, and Mark left it at that. In any case, there wasn't time to remind him. They were already dropping towards the open central section of the dome. It didn't appear damaged. He didn't know what the significance of that was, and right now it didn't matter.
He superposed a quick set of lines on the map: four people, four quarters of a circle, numbered 1-5 with 2 missing.
"One quadrant each," he said. "Check for survivors just in case the reports were wrong; but the main objective is to find the Spectran headquarters. Don't take them on alone. Information-gathering. If comms don't work and you're in trouble, send up a flare. Anything unusual, back to the Phoenix. In any case, back to the Phoenix after an hour unless I say otherwise. Clear?"
Two nods from the seats behind him, and one to his left.
"Ready to go in," Tiny said, a question in his voice.
He glanced at the screens, at the scan reports (Keyop was right, they were fuzzy as all hell). No mecha, and nowhere for any to hide. No visible heavy weapons, though they could be anywhere in the city. He had to hope that there hadn't been time for any to be set up. It was still less than an hour since the first reports of an attack had come in. They'd been quick. Quick enough? The next three minutes would be the proof of that.
"Take us down."
Mark didn't arm the Super launcher - he wasn't sure that the natural cavern would survive an explosion of that size - but he had two Standards hot and ready to go, and his eyes glued to the screens for signs that what was going on here was far more extensive and long term than an attack only a couple of hours old. He was twitchy as all hell about this mission, and it wasn't just because Jason should have been the one with his hand on the big red button right now. It felt wrong. If a mecha had come out of the cavern wall he'd have been entirely unsurprised.
It didn't. Nothing did. The city below them lay apparently deserted. Not a light. Not a pedestrian. Not a moving vehicle. Only the Spectran transports sitting in the southwest corner of the square, ramps down, engines cold, gave away that something was very wrong here.
"Northeast corner, Tiny," he said.
"Roger that."
There's no way they haven't seen us coming. But there was still no sign of the Spectran invaders beyond their empty troop transports. What were they doing?
The Phoenix settled gently to the ground, nose pointing perfectly through the gap between two trees and out into the centre of the square, optimum position for an emergency takeoff. Still no sign of anyone.
"Anything on the scanners?" he asked.
Keyop's response was something particularly rude in Russian. Mark swung round to see, and found the Swallow shrugging helplessly at a screen which looked as if it had a bad concussion. Doubled images, blurry lines...
"I take it that's as focused as you can get it?"
"Yes." It was spat out in disgust, and Mark patted his young team-mate on the shoulder.
"Not your fault, kid. Princess, how are comms?"
"No radio contact with ISO since we dropped out of line-of-sight. Probably the rock, but..."
Oh, he didn't like this at all. But no comms so wasn't an excuse not to do his job. "Anyone not clear on the plan?" he asked.
Three heads shook.
"Then let's do it. Back here in an hour, or sooner if there are problems. Princess, radio check with me as we move out. I want to have some idea how well our comms will work."
.
Princess started counting out loud as soon as they separated at the bottom of the ramp. She was heading northeast, straight into roads and buildings. Mark had assigned himself the direction which involved being out in the open the longest, across the middle of the square and past the deserted Spectran transports. By the time he'd gone fifty yards, her voice over the bracelet was almost unintelligible. Before he'd reached the other side of the square, there was nothing but crackling static, a strange pattern which felt artificial, somehow. He didn't think it was the rock.
Should he have sent them out in pairs? No, he decided, the time factor was crucial here. Two pairs would take twice as long to cover the same ground as four individuals.
For the first time, he wondered if the Spectran plan had been to separate them. If so, they'd succeeded. Every nerve on edge, and hoping the rest of his team were feeling the same, he activated the scanner in his bracelet. It was basic and short range, but it didn't seem to have the same problem that the Phoenix's sophisticated systems had - at least, there was movement on it, just around the next corner. In the wrong place to be one of his team-mates, even if the interference had messed up the identifying signal.
Slow movement, just one person. Not a Spectran squad, and odd behaviour for a single goon, surely nervous at being out in the open on their own. Could it be a civilian, maybe one of the workers left behind in the panic of evacuation? Anderson always assured them that evacuation had been completed. Mark had had his suspicions about how accurate that was before.
Still, no need to take risks. He stayed close to the buildings on the left side of the road, with the line of trees between him and the roadway. This was a shopping district, many shopfronts already carrying the logos of famous brands and some looking almost ready to open for business. The actual construction here was complete. Had anyone moved in already, maybe earlier than they were supposed to, maybe unofficially? The signal on his bracelet moved towards the buildings, and Mark broke into a run. He didn't want to have to search indoors if he could help it.
He rounded the corner, checking instinctively for danger. No Spectrans. Thirty yards ahead of him, a woman crouched in the street, clutching something and sobbing. He'd been right. She wasn't a construction worker.
He was at her side in moments. "Ma'am, are you okay? I'm here to help."
"My... my baby!"
Oh heck, first aid... He knew some, though. "Let me see. Maybe I can -"
The child was thrust into his arms. His first thought was horror - it was stiff and cold, surely long dead. Then confusion. This was a doll, not a baby. Lifeless plastic. Staring glass eyes.
"Ma'am?"
He'd only glanced away from her for a moment, but she was gone, leaving him with a confused impression of long blonde hair.
The unmistakeable sound of Spectran rifles being cocked. Multiple, all around him. Trap.
He raised his head slowly, trying to buy himself time. Too far to get back to the corner. The next junction was dozens of yards away. Between him and the nearest cover - a particularly pathetic tree - were multiple goons and... what the heck was that thing? Not a gun barrel. Not a weapon he'd seen before, at least not that he remembered. The figure standing next to it he remembered all too well.
"Good afternoon, Commander." Zoltar smirked - did he have any other expressions? - and Mark stood up straighter, uncomfortably aware of just how much taller than him the Spectran leader was. "Do you want to know what my new toy does?"
He had no intention of playing Zoltar's game, but he needed alternatives. Did he have any chance of making it to the nearest doorway? Possibly, but chances were the door was locked. He had no hope of making it through a locked door before taking bullets, even without whatever that thing was shooting at him.
"You don't care?" Zoltar sounded almost disappointed, and Mark reminded himself that this was not a man, it was an alien. Human psychology didn't apply.
He shrugged, casually and disrespectfully. "Not particularly."
"Oh, but you will! This is my detransmutation ray."
Mark snorted derisively. "Sure it is." Stay relaxed, he told himself. He's probably better at reading you than you are at reading him. He wants you to care. Make him think you don't.
"Indeed it is!" Zoltar's voice rose in a near-cackle, and the hairs went up on the back of Mark's neck. "Fully operational, and tested on a member of your team, I might add! And now, Commander, I shall demonstrate its effect to you personally!"
Jason... No time to consider that, or to find the flare he'd told them all to use in an emergency and never thought he'd need himself. Mark took two accelerating strides and leapt for the lowest point in the surrounding roofline, the only place where the buildings were single storey. Maybe he could survive a shot from that thing. Maybe it would miss. Either way, if he was in the next street he had at least some chance of getting away.
"Fire!" Zoltar shrieked from behind him.
Green light flaring all around, a flooding wave of nausea, and the sickening realisation that Zoltar had been telling the truth about his weapon's capabilities. Out of birdstyle he had no glide at all. Mark hit the roof hard, rolled down the far side uncontrollably, and felt himself drop over the edge to the street below, his awareness fading even before he hit the ground.
