The next day the three Turks were on a submarine, staring at a map, as Mr. Bradburn-whom Reno immediately despised-was briefing them on their mission.
Elena was watching Bradburn with hawklike eyes, taking in everything he said. To Reno, who had worked closely with her, it was obvious that she didn't like Bradburn any more than he did. Rude glanced up once in a while from the bomb he was inspecting. Reno knew he was listening to the briefing, but was more interested in the explosives.
Reno looked from the map to Bradburn. The mission seemed perfect, almost like heaven to him. No civilians. Sneaking into a high security area. Blowing shit up and having to think while doing so. Extreme danger. And for once, a cause. It seemed flawless, and that was why he had a bad feeling about it. No mission was perfect. There didn't seem to be a downside to this, and he didn't like it.
"We'll be arriving on a small island just Northeast of Costa Del Sol, where we'll then be boarding a land shuttle continuing northeast. That will be on land," Bradburn said in his nasal voice.
Reno cringed every time he said something with an M or N in it. "Hence the name, 'land shuttle,'" he said irritably.
"Exactly," Bradburn said, seemingly unaware of the sarcasm.
Elena snickered, and Reno rolled his eyes and went back to twirling his nightstick.
"That will be a short ride, perhaps an hour to the next submarine base, and it will be midnight by then. You'll board, and at that time you may rest in your private room until we dock on the small island just south of the Northern Continent, as I'm sure you'll all be pretty tired at that point." He laughed nasally and Reno cringed again. "By sunrise we'll dock, and you'll take an armored van to a point just shy of the facility's hidden entrance, where you'll immediately head underground. No one will remain behind to cover you," Bradburn said slowly, as if to make sure they all understood.
He clicked the button and the slide of the map changed to one of a blueprint of the facility. "We managed to get this blueprint. We're not sure if it's still entirely accurate, but it can't have changed drastically. You'll start by disabling the security cameras at the front door. No personnel will be stationed there, since it would call attention to the hidden door. Disable the cameras for three seconds and no more, while you get into the facility. Any more time will be suspicious to those watching the security tape. One of you will temporarily short the cameras so that the three of you can get in.
"There is an air duct on the floor immediately to the left of the door. Enter it, and you'll be crawling underneath the laboratory for nearly the whole way. The first security office is to the right, just as you enter. If their door is open, or if there is someone walking around, you'll have to be prepared for that eventuality. They might come out to inspect the camera. You have to make sure you're all in the air duct by that time.
"Plant the first bomb close to the entrance. Mr., uhh, Rude will make certain that the timer is set with however much time you think you'll need to make it to the other end. The logistics are written on the map. It's a very large laboratory and a grueling crawl, I'm sorry to say. Halfway through, plant the second one," he said, indicating a point on the map. "You'll know the halfway mark when you come to a grating at which you can look up into a bathroom."
"A ladies' room?" Reno asked, trying to break the monotony.
"The bathrooms are unisex," Bradburn went on. "Again, set the second timer leaving enough time for you to get to the end. Towards the end, you will have to climb or grapple up the air duct to get back out. The equipment you'll need will be on the submarine, along with your materia. Plant the last bomb directly before the climb to the top.
"There is another door near the back. There are sure to be people around that area. We don't care what you do with them. Eliminate them if you have to; it won't make a difference at that point. Just make sure they don't escape, as they will not only have information on cloning, and on the facility, but also your personal descriptions. There will be a helicopter waiting for you at the other end when you get out."
He switched the slide back to an overview of the area on the Northern Continent that lay over the facility.
"Of course, you will have to get out before any of the bombs go off, since the resulting shockwave will collapse the ground over it and cave in the entire facility.
"Perhaps because of the underground building, there is very little Lifestream in this area. The facility seems to have acted as a sort of scar tissue to the Planet, so the blasts will not affect the Planet itself. The facility is using Mako to help their clones along, but since it's underground, and since the laboratory will act as a sort of seal over it, we won't have to worry about very much Mako pollution or leakage.
"Any questions?" he asked, clicking off the slide.
"I got one," Reno said, beginning to grin. Elena glanced sharply at him, as if she thought he was going to ask Bradburn about the stick up his ass or something, and she was warning him not to. He winked at her. "How come bathrooms that men and women can both use are called 'unisex'? Doesn't 'unisex' mean 'one sex?' Shouldn't they be called 'bisex' instead?"
Rude looked up from the bomb and shook with silent laughter.
-
Later that night, Reno lay half awake on the bunk bed in the submarine, which was headed for the Northern Continent. There was no light from the other beds, so he assumed Elena and Rude were asleep, or at least had their eyes closed. Elena was in the bunk above his, and Rude was in the one across from his, by the door.
The whole mission seemed too perfect. It was bugging the hell out of him. Something was amiss; it just felt wrong. He couldn't sleep.
He put his foot on the bottom of Elena's bunk, which was above him, and kicked it.
"What?" Elena mumbled in annoyance.
"Can you sleep?" he asked her softly, so that he wouldn't wake Rude.
"Well I just fell asleep, Reno, and then you woke me up."
"But you couldn't sleep before then?"
He heard her sigh heavily. "All right," she sighed, "what's the matter?"
"It's this whole mission. It just seems a little funny, and by 'funny' I don't mean 'Boffo the Clown' funny."
There was a long silence, and Reno assumed she had fallen back to sleep. He turned over and looked toward Rude's bed to see if his eyes were open. They didn't seem to be.
"I know," Elena finally said. "Do you think it's a trap?"
"You mean like a kamikaze trap? Kill two birds with one stone kind of thing?"
"Yeah."
"No, I don't think so. Besides, we're too smart for these people. Their plan isn't bad, but it's simple. They don't seem to know much about being ready for the unexpected. It's almost as if they don't care how sloppy it is. But that's not what bothers me. It just seems too easy, and too..."
"Too perfect," Rude finished, from his bunk across the room.
"Right," Reno said. "And Bradburn didn't hang around for very long to answer questions, did you notice that? He was out of there really fast."
"Like his ass was on fire and his head was catching," Rude noted.
"I know," Elena concurred. "There's something else that's bothering me, I just can't figure out what it is. It's an easy mission and we've done these things before. I know this body factory needs to go. But why not expose it? Just expose it, shut it down?"
"Because using ShinRa's Turks against ShinRa's leftovers is expedient and relatively cheap," Reno said. "We've been cleaning up after these scientists for years. This is the easiest way."
"True," Elena said. "And if they were to just expose this body factory, there would be too much to lose from people who would have it spared for any number of reasons. But I'm bothered by the fact that we don't get any recon work on this."
"We'll check it out before we plant the firecrackers," Rude said. "But I'm not wild about how the explosives work. I don't like timers, I like remotes. These bombs are small, too. I'm not sure they're up to the job."
Elena sighed. "Well, you know, if the bombs don't do their job, that's not our fault. At least they'll do some damage; then if they don't do the entire lab, at least people will know it's there. We'll check it out first, to be sure. And we'll use some materia defensively."
Reno turned over in his bunk. The others didn't seem to have anything further to add.
He knew he wasn't the only one who wanted to get it over with.
The next day, Rude found himself grimly thinking that Reno had been right to be worried. The mission had gone perfectly. Bradburn had given them their gil up front, and while Rude didn't necessarily like carrying around thirty thousand gil on his person during a mission, he also didn't think that anyone would be in a position to take it away from him.
Once they'd been dropped off at the site, they had gone directly from the back of the van and up to the door, which was a nondescript, metal door that seemed to lead to a small storage building. The rest of the lab was underground, invisible to passers-by. Rude couldn't see the other side of the small room with the door, and there wasn't much time to be standing around trying to get a better look at it.
The air was cold, but the ground was damp and there was no snow on it. Reno had shorted the cameras immediately with his ElectroMag rod, and they'd slipped in. The first thing they'd seen upon entering was the old ShinRa logo, proud as anything, right on the inside of the door.
"Damn," Rude said, "they're never gonna die. Goddamn ShinRa."
"And look at this," Elena said. She pointed to the small symbol under the logo which depicted a bright green DNA double helix superimposed over the form of a sexless human body. Stretching out behind it were multiple outlines of the same body, smaller and smaller, until they faded away.
"That image was on a lot of Hojo's folders," Reno said.
"They're continuing his work," Elena said in a tight voice. "How could they? After the mess they made the first time!"
The three of them stood staring at the icon until Elena said, "Let's start this thing and get it over with."
The crawl through the ducts was tedious, but they'd made excellent time. Reno had made one unscheduled stop to stare up into the bathroom one last time after planting the bomb, to see if any women had come in. By the time they reached the end of the facility, where the duct went straight up, they had about 30 minutes to spare.
Elena shot the silent grappling hook to the top of the duct and the three of them climbed to the top. Surprisingly, Rude didn't feel out of breath when he reached the top. He thought he might, since he hadn't done such a physical mission in a long time, and he occasionally smoked. When they'd joined the Turks they'd been told that smoking was prohibited, since it would interfere with their cardiovascular performance and they'd stand less of a chance of completing such physical missions. Or fighting, or even running away, for that matter. Drinking, yes, hell yes, they were allowed to drink when they were off duty. As long as it didn't affect their performance on the job and they never showed up drunk or hung over.
Elena was peering through the grating of the air duct above them as she dangled from the grappling hook. Reno, hanging right beneath her, tickled her leg, and she kicked him squarely in the head. Rude rolled his eyes.
Elena let her hand drop and held up three fingers, indicating to both of them that she saw three people walking around above them. Reno nodded and flicked on the EMr with the hand that was not holding onto the grappling line. Rude watched him twirl it expertly in his hand as it whirred to life. Rude knew the fidgeting meant that Reno was nervous. Suddenly Reno looked down at the EMr and frowned.
Rude tilted his head in silent question. Reno shook his head, dismissing it.
Rude felt that dismissing worries, however vague, was a bad idea.
Elena quickly cast Sleep on the people above them once they got close enough to her, pushed the grating aside, and climbed out. Reno and Rude followed her directly.
"We have time to look around," Reno whispered, as Rude peered around the corner the hallway that intersected where they'd come up.
"Seems to be the end of the building just like they said it'd be," Rude commented. "Should be more personnel and security cameras right before the exit. It won't be hard to find the way out."
"Let's see what they're up to before we go," Reno suggested. "I still have a funny feeling that there's..." He was interrupted by a squeal of feedback from the EMr. "Jesus!" he muttered, exasperated, as he shut it off and then flicked it back on again.
"Problem, Reno?" Elena asked as she edged down the hallway across from the one Rude was guarding. There were a few sealed doors down that hallway.
"Yeah," he said. "My rod's acting up."
"You wanna be alone?" Rude said. He knew that Reno had set up for the pun, but he took the bait anyway in the spirit of things. He saw Elena roll her eyes.
"Maybe later," Reno said. "Let's see what else might be going on here. We have twenty minutes to get out."
They edged down the hallway and came to a stop in front of one of the sealed doors. Rude unholstered his gun with the silencer on it and aimed it at the lock, angling it so the ricochet wouldn't hit any of them. With that, he shot a small hole in the door where the lock was and swung it open.
"Stop right there!" called deep voice said from down the corridor. Elena turned quickly, cast Sleep, and missed.
The man fired his own gun before they'd gotten a clear look at him, and the bullet grazed Reno's shoulder, barely making a hole in the arm of his suit. He flinched back against the wall and Rude calmly trained his own gun at the man's head.
He hesitated for a fraction of a second when he saw that he was taking aim at himself. He registered the empty look and blank eyes of the clone. Then he pulled the trigger.
Elena stood with her mouth open, blinking slowly as she watchedthe bodysink to the floor. Reno fell back against the wall, one hand over his heart.
There was no time for hysterics, and Rude was keenly aware of the need to be practical, above all. He turned to Reno. "How's your arm?" he asked.
"What arm?" Reno whispered, still staring at the fallen clone.
"The one attached to your shoulder, dumbass."
"Uh...don't worry about it," he said, absently dusting off the place where he'd nearly been shot as he walked briskly to the dead body. Rude watched him silently as he knelt beside it. "You just killed yourself, man," he said, looking up at Rude.
Rude shrugged. "That's not me. Just a clone."
The clone seemed to be a younger version of himself, from what he could see. It was a version of him at about eighteen years old, when he had first joined ShinRa, twenty or so years ago. But then, he wasn't looking all too closely.
"This is bad," Elena finally spoke up.
"Don't worry about it," Rude said. He knew what was him and what wasn't. What he had killed was a mass of DNA that had little to do with him otherwise.
"No, it's bad," Elena said. "Rude, they cloned the Turks. Probably all of us."
Reno paled as he turned his head sharply to her. Then he tried to force a smile. "I'll bet mine scores a lot," he said, and forced a laugh. He ran his hand across his face tiredly.
"They cloned Sephiroth, they could have cloned anyone. Rufus, his father, even Hojo. Jesus, what if they're already out there, like Sephiroth is?"
Rude was halfway listening as he looked into the room that lay behind the door he'd just opened. It was a room full of filing cabinets, with some desks and a few computers. On the far side of the room was another open door, with stairs that lead to a lower floor. Rude could hear a constant humming, along with an occasional faint liquidy sound coming from beyond the door. He nodded for the others to follow him as he went inside. Reno dragged the body of the clone along, and Rude tried not to look as he put it behind a filing cabinet in the corner. It didn't exactly bother him that he had killed his clone, but it was eerie seeing the care that Reno took to be gentle with the body, as if it was really him. He tried not to think about it. If he had to eventually, he'd store it away for future pondering. But now was not the time. Now was an important, dangerous, and suddenly unpredictable mission.
"This is really sucking hard, you know," Reno was whispering behind him as they went down the stairs. "This mission is beginning to suck a lot of ass. I knew it seemed too cool. I knew something had to start to suck really badly soon. And now it does. It totally sucks."
"Shut up, Reno!" Elena whispered.
"I'm just saying," Reno went on. "This is starting to suck."
"I know, shut up about it!" she snapped.
Reno's EMr began to make a loud whirring noise. Rude turned quickly. "Turn that thing off. Either that thing or your babbling mouth is gonna get us caught."
Reno shrugged helplessly and switched it off. It made a faint whistling sound as it died down. Reno twirled it once and put it in the side holster dangling from his belt.
Rude was the first one down the steps, and the first thing he noticed was that the stairs were old and wooden. The room they'd just come from, and indeed the corridors, had looked like a spotless, polished laboratory. Upon entering the basement, Rude was stunned to note that there was nothing spotless and nothing polished about this part of the lab. In fact, at first he wasn't even sure if he was seeing correctly, but Elena's sharp intake of breath behind him confirmed what he'd seen.
It was a large room, with over a hundred steel tables. On the tables, strapped down, lay naked bodies. Rude wasn't sure if they were alive or dead. He assumed they must be alive, even though none of them moved, as they were all connected to intravenous Mako drips. Not just one each, either: there was a needle in each arm, in each leg, and one Mako drip catheterized directly into the chest. Five needles in all per body. That was, in Rude's estimation, a shitload of Mako, give or take a pint.
Their arms were spread out to their sides. There was blood on the floor, on most of the bodies, and the entire room stank of filth and chemicals. The steady Mako drip made a soft, liquidy noise in the bags. The lights in the lab were turned off, but the glowing Mako made up for it in hazy green light.
"Holy shit," Reno whispered.
Rude wanted to disagree. This was possibly the unholiest shit he'd ever seen, this side of the whole Sephiroth / Jenova / Meteor thing he'd witnessed.
"Are they alive?" Reno whispered, as Elena silently walked up to one of them.
"Must be," Rude said. "Waste of Mako otherwise."
"You're right," Elena said. "They're breathing. They're sleeping. This is disgusting. I hope these bombs take down the entire facility and everyone in it."
Reno walked up beside Elena. "Let's go," he said quietly. "Mission's over. This is not cool. We need to get the hell out."
"You're right," she said, suddenly businesslike again. "Rude, check the..." She stopped suddenly, and uttered a strangled cry.
Rude followed her gaze to one of the tables. A young man lay strapped to it, his eyes closed, arms splayed like those of the rest of the clones. He looked no more than eighteen years old, though chronologically he might have only been in existence for half of those years. He had fair skin and black hair. Rude knew that if his eyes were to open, underneath the green Mako sheen, they would be as black as his hair.
"Tseng!" Elena whispered, and began to run to the body.
Reno's eyes widened as he realized what was going on. He caught Elena by the arm and pulled her back.
Rude slowly walked to the body as Reno held Elena back; he could hear her breath coming in muffled gasps as she tried to twist away from Reno.
"It's not Tseng," he heard Reno say. Reno sounded shaken, as if he wasn't entirely sure himself. "It wasn't Rude before, and this isn't Tseng. Please don't let it be Tseng," he added, more to himself than anyone else.
Rude looked down at the body. Sure as hell looked like Tseng, yet he somehow knew it wasn't. Or isn't it? he asked himself. Why not? Sephiroth came back. Why not Tseng? What if Tseng died, and now is really in this body and we blow the hell out of this place, with him in it? He had to know for sure.
He pried open one of the eyes. All he could see was the white of the eye and a light green half circle near the top. The body twitched a little. Rude slapped him across the face and heard Elena cry out softly over Reno's shushing noises.
The body's eyes snapped open and stared blankly at Rude. "Tseng," he whispered almost inaudibly, "you in there, man?"
The black-green hazed eyes looked him over with no hint of recognition. Not only lack of recognition, but no sense of reason or intellect. Tseng might have made a few foolish choices about a few things concerning his life and his work, but he'd always been intelligent. It shone in his eyes. It was what Rude remembered best. There was a chance, he thought, that this body had been so sensory deprived that it hadn't had a chance to develop Tseng's intellect and personality, but something told him this was not the case. It sounded strange to admit to himself, but he couldn't actually feel Tseng anywhere nearby, and that made all the difference in the world to him. Rude knew for certain that Tseng was not in this body. His soul, or whatever the hell anyone wanted to call it, was elsewhere.
He turned back to see Elena hiding her face in Reno's jacket while Reno almost absently stroked her back. He was looking at Rude, and tilted his head slightly, questioning him with his eyes. He looked pale and nervous. Rude shook his head. Reno sighed with relief.
"Rude checked it out, Elena," Reno said softly. "It's definitely not Tseng. Come on. We'd know if it was him." He held her by the arms and pushed her away from him. "Now pull yourself together," he said. "This mission sucks, but it's still a mission and we have to get out. You're the leader of the Turks; lead us out of here."
Elena wiped her eyes and straightened her back. "You're right," she said. "I'm sorry. I let my emotions get in the way again."
"Don't apologize, let's just go. We've seen enough and this place is gonna..." He stopped mid sentence and turned his head quickly toward the stairs.
"Who's there?" said a man's voice, from the top of the stairs.
All three Turks silently stepped back and pressed themselves against the wall. Rude and Elena took out their guns, and Reno unholstered his EMr. He didn't turn it on right away; Rude guessed he was waiting until the last second so the strange noises it had been making wouldn't give them away.
They all heard the man descend the stairs, and a second later he came into view: a tall, thin man who must have been a scientist or a technician, in a crisp, white lab coat.
Reno nodded at Rude. Rude stepped away form the wall. "Only us Turks," he said, startling the man enough that he faltered for a second. Reno turned the EMr on quickly and a bolt of bright blue electricity shot out of it, hitting the man in the center of his chest. The man hit the wall, slid down, and fell on his side on the floor. The EMr immediately thereafter began to squawk and make a high pitched whining sound.
Rude and Elena both flinched, and Reno shut it off quickly.
"What's wrong with that thing?" Rude asked him, as they walked over to the man lying on the floor. The way he was twitching reminded Rude of the way he and Elena had found Reno a few nights ago.
Reno was about to answer, but was momentarily distracted when he saw the face of the man on the floor. Rude saw a moment of surprise on Reno's face, which quickly turned into a small, nasty grin. "Heh," he laughed softly. "Been waiting a long time to do that," he said, and kicked the body.
"Who is it?" Elena asked.
"Just a little prick with a needle."
"How are you gonna use that thing if we need to, Reno?" Rude asked, ignoring his statement about the technician. If it was important, Reno would tell him later.
"I don't know," Reno whispered, as they stepped slowly up the stairs, "but it's really weird. It looks fine and it's all charged up but there must be something in the magnetics around..." He stopped mid sentence once more, and Rude was startled to notice that he staggered back momentarily and caught his breath.
"What?" Rude asked, as they reached the top of the steps. He looked around both corners to make sure no one had heard the awful noise and had come to find out what it was. He glanced at his watch. Ten minutes to get out.
"Nothing," Reno said. "I guess I just thought...but there has to be hundreds of places like that."
"Like what?" Elena asked.
"With messed up polarities, although I can only remember it happening in one specific place. Just weird magnetics, lots of concrete and metal and Mako, was my guess, Lifestream bubbling up... all concentrated in one place."
Rude and Elena kept walking, and checked down the next corridor. Rude spotted the last security office and the door they needed to escape from.
Reno had stopped walking.
"Come on," Elena whispered.
Reno shook his head as if to clear it, and began walking again. Then he stopped again.
Rude turned on him suddenly. "What is it, Reno?" he asked. "Can we figure it out later?"
Elena was crawling down the corridor, stopping once to check her weapon and down an Ether as she edged over to the security office.
"It's just that," Reno said, "well, when we were on the submarine and in the van, we didn't change direction once, right?"
"I don't know, I slept most of the way," Rude answered hastily. Just what the hell was Reno getting at? He saw Elena cast Stop on the people in the office, and he took Reno's arm and pulled him along.
"Well it's just that we were heading Northeast the whole way," Reno said. "And since the air duct was a straight line from one end to the other, we'd still be going Northeast. If we were, you know. Going Northeast. We never saw the sonar watch station on the sub."
"Yeah, so?" Rude was beginning to tune out Reno's babble. It seemed to him that whatever kind of messed up frequencies his EMr was getting, they were bouncing off Reno's dim red head as well. He often thought that Reno was far too attached to his weapon and had some bizarre connection with it.
"It just seems that we never really checked our direction and we've been underground for a few hours, so we wouldn't know if we had been going in the other direction, because, you know, there's only one place in the world I've ever had this problem," Reno went on. "After Meteor and all."
Rude frowned at him. The babbling was familiar to him, and the sound of it settled cold in his stomach. Reno had developed the annoying quirk of speed-talking after Sector Seven, whenever anyone mentioned anything in connection to its destruction.
Elena had slipped into the security office and found the mechanism that opened the door from inside.
"And I'm just thinking that-that if we were actually going Southwest as opposed to Northeast," Reno went on, "which is easy to mix up when you can't see the sun or anything, and you know I can't use a compass if I have the EMr because it messes it up the, you know... Then we'd definitely be exactly underneath the one place where I've ever had this problem."
Elena had looked out the door to make sure their escape helicopter was where it was supposed to be. Rude had been paying more attention to Elena's actions than to Reno's increasingly panicked rambling until he saw Elena turn and look back at them. Her face betrayed her own panic, and suddenly it all came together in Rude's mind.
He closed his eyes and waited for the worst.
"We'd be right under Midgar," Reno said. There was an odd calm to his voice. "And we are, aren't we?" he said after a long pause. "Aren't we, Elena? Aren't we right under Midgar?"
Reno seemed inclined to just stare blankly at the space above Elena's head. Rude grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the door.
"No!" Reno said, pulling back.
"Reno, LET'S GO!" Elena shouted. There was no use in being quiet now. Rude looked at his watch. They had six minutes.
"No," Reno said. "You go on, I'll catch you up."
Rude shook his head slowly. There was absolutely no way, not in this world or in any world, that he was going to let Reno do what Reno obviously thought he was going to do. "You can't defuse them, Reno, there's no way to do it. I looked all three of them over and there's no way."
"There's always a way!" Reno said, as Rude advanced upon him. "Come on, man. Don't stop me."
"I don't wanna fight with you about this, Reno," Rude said.
"Let's go!" Elena shouted. "Reno, that's an order!"
"To hell with orders! You wanna stop me, you're gonna have to fight me! Otherwise just let me do this by myself. Either I go in there with a chance of stopping this thing or we all stand here and fight about it till it blows us all to hell, YOUR choice!"
"Reno goddamnit!" Rude bellowed. Even Elena flinched. Few people had ever heard him yell. He knew it was intimidating. "They're small bombs; they'll cause a tremor up there!"
Reno switched on his EMr and stared back at Rude, breathing heavily. "That's bullshit," he said. "This place is going to cave in, and it'll take..."
"We've got five minutes, Reno, that's all we've got left! You're gonna defuse three bombs in five minutes when it took you hours to crawl through that thing? You stupid all of a sudden?"
"I have to try. At least the last one." Reno dodged out of the way as Rude tried to cast Sleep on him and missed.
He turned to run, but Elena was faster, and cast Sleep successfully.
Rude grabbed Reno as he fell. "Elena, go!" he shouted. He threw his arm around Reno's waist and dragged him along easily.
Elena was out the door first and Rude followed, still holding Reno up, just as the Stop spell that Elena had cast on the security personnel wore off. The people left behind in the lab began to shout about intruders, and one of them punched the alarm, but it was too late. Rude cast Sleep on them too, so they wouldn't be able to escape with information, and then he ran, following Elena and dragging Reno, to the helicopter.
It seemed to take them forever to get to the chopper, and Rude considered how many precious minutes they had lost between seeing the clones and dealing with Reno's sudden impracticality.
Elena climbed into the chopper and started it, while Rude carelessly threw Reno into it and climbed in behind both of them.
Elena glanced back furiously at the open door they'd just come out of. Then she glanced up at the blades of the chopper, which weren't moving nearly fast enough to make her feel at ease. "We're not gonna make it," she muttered.
"Yeah we are." Rude said. "We'll be fine." Though in truth, he wasn't entirely sure, due to the fact that his suddenly very unreasonable friend had held them all up. He wanted to smack Reno right in the mouth for being such an idiot. He understood what Reno had gone through with Midgar in the past, but it was insanely useless of him to hang around stupidly trying to undo it this time.
The chopper began to hover above the ground, and Elena steered it away from the door they'd come out of. They were moving-too slowly, Rude thought-over Midgar.
One minute.
"Crap!" Elena yelled, as the chopper wobbled crazily for a moment.
The chopper gained both distance and height over Midgar, but not quickly enough. Rude heard the rumble of the first bomb going off, followed almost immediately by the second. A few seconds later, he heard the third-the delay between the second and third doubtless caused by Reno's fascination with trying to see if there had been women in the bathroom. But that was no big deal, a lapse between the timers; it was almost standard. It was rare, in fact, to get them to go off that close together.
It would have been perfect, if a section of Midgar hadn't been swaying beneath them.
With a sudden gust of searingly hot air, as the ground beneath Midgar rumbled and sent a wave of heat spewing up, the chopper rocked dangerously. Elena shrieked and Rude held on for sweet life.
"I'm losing it!" Elena said. "Rude! There's no fuel in this thing, we're running on vapors! What the hell! I have to bring it down somewhere."
"Then bring it!" Rude said. If they were going down anyway, better to be closer to the ground where they had a chance of surviving the impact and escaping the possible explosion of the aircraft. Who the hell would leave them a chopper with no fuel in it? Only someone who didn't want them to escape.
A complete, well thought-out setup, and they had gone for it. He wondered who would have the power to pull off such a set-up, but decided that he would think of that after surviving the rest of the day.
Some of the taller buildings in Midgar were shaking madly. Rude doubted any buildings in the vicinity would have windows left in them. There would surely be deaths. He could see the outer wall of the city not too far off in front of them. Elena had gained enough speed to almost reach the city limits.
"I'm gonna try to make it out!" she hollered to Rude above the noise of the falling city. "Make sure Reno doesn't get hurt!"
Rude braced himself against the back of the chopper and braced Reno with his free hand as the chopper sailed, wobbling all the way, over the wall of Midgar.
The ground was coming up quickly, too quickly for it to be anything other than a devastating landing. And to make matters worse, the chopper was pointing dangerously downward, almost in a nosedive. Elena fought madly to right it, and just before impact, she did.
It skidded hard to the ground and almost spun out, right outside of Midgar. Elena was kicking at the door before the chopper even stopped moving, and she finally wedged it open.
"Come on!" she ordered, as she jumped out of the aircraft. She waited by the door, her arms held out in front of her, and Rude realized she wanted him to get Reno out first. He handled Reno carelessly, as there was no other way to do it, and Elena caught him as he fell, and struggled to hold him up. As soon as Rude was out, Reno opened his eyes.
"The hell?" he asked.
Elena simply grabbed his arm and started pulling him along as Rude ran beside them.
Another blast of hot air sent them all sailing above the ground as the chopper blew up behind them.
No fuel...explosion...detonated chopper. Reno was right about one thing, Rude thought, right before losing consciousness. This mission sucked.
