Chapter 1

It was a cloudy, starless night, the moonlit skies were still, with not a sound beside the occasional gust of wind blowing over the farm fields of the Midwestern United States. The overcast clouds in the sky made for an incredibly dark night, which was both a good and bad thing. On one hand, it made travelers in the night almost invisible to the unassuming eye… but on the other, it made the engines of the flying VTOL craft easy to spot in the night sky.

Flying at a relatively low altitude of 3,000 feet, the C-400 Hummingbird flew across the sky with its tail and wing lights off. The nose of the aircraft held an ovular cockpit which contained, among a variety of instruments and displays, a double seat for a pilot and copilot. The way it was designed, the bare C-400 bore a wide, but thin profile, with the area behind the cockpit making a sharp 90 degree angle to a top assembly which connected two large twin engines on both sides of the wings notwithstanding an extra thruster in the back to assist in mobility while hovering. The reason for such an open and strange aircraft was due to its adaptability. Depending on the job at hand, the C-400 could be configured to hold an assortment of carriages in its underbelly, from a fuel tank for in-air refueling missions, numerous vehicles of all sizes, cargo, weapon systems. As it was now, this craft had been configured to be a troop transport.

The engines of the aircraft flew across the sky like two comets in the night, deliberately under their maximum power to not break the sound barrier and wake the sleepy American countryside. Although the aircraft was designed to be flown by two trained individuals, only one person was manning the helm of the cockpit on this mysterious night. Although not meant to be flown in such a manner, the pilot of the craft wore a Helix Securities blue and yellow set of Raptora personal lift armor, a large suit of mechanical armor that, while designed to protect its occupant, was also as complex as the aircraft that she flew in. A booster and a set of adjustable flexible wings were folded down on the pilot's back, while the seat, which had been designed to accompany the possibility that an armored individual may have to man the helm, was designed to support the back of the armor and leave free room for the wing behind it. The weight of the entire unit was not meant for inter-vehicle operation, but the augmented strength of the armor made sure that Lieutenant Fareeha Amari was able to safely operate the craft without any issue.

The Egyptian woman wasn't sure what she was doing at the moment or where she was heading, but, for as much as she didn't like to admit it, her source had been right on everything up to this point. If she really wanted answers, then she would have to keep flying west in the direction of the coordinates in the heart of flyover country.

The C-400 was a military craft, a special variant contracted by Helix Securities. Therefore she was flying with her radio transceiver off, which meant that the RFID transponder was not sending out her coordinates to air traffic control or Helix Command, and the black box not recording her actions. As of this moment, she was completely AWOL. Somewhere in her mind, she was wondering what the consequences of her action would be, going rogue as she was. But she was more focused on keeping the unmarked craft at a low altitude and below the radar. After all, she knew that her superiors at the company were dealing with bigger problems at the moment.

Two hours ago, a leader in the international field of medical research was almost assassinated on stage in front of thousands of onlookers. In the official statement by Helix Securities, it was the resourceful action of Helix's diligent agents that dove into action to protect their VIP from the infamous terror organization known as Talon. Unofficially, to the inner mechanism of Helix, what had transpired was a cunning ruse to draw out the horrible terror cell to expose them for justice. Essentially, everything had been planned from the start and their agents had kept their charge completely safe from harm. When all was said and done, this would be the answer they would give at the end of the whole ordeal.

In reality, Fareeha was beginning to get suspicious at the event. More and more of the anonymous tips and warnings that had been sent to her in the days leading up to the convention had begun to become too convenient to be coincidences. There had been doubts in her mind when she dove to the stage and stood in front of the keynote speaker, but the sniper's bullet lodged in the breastplate of her armor had immediately rid any doubts from her mind. Since then, the predictions of this unnamed source were more than sufficient to believe that she should follow the instructions of the mysterious benefactor.

The land below the transport was dark, just like the night sky above it, and doubts were beginning to set in once again as she neared her destination. However, that was not meant to be. Activating the night vision mode out of the nose camera of the Hummingbird, a bright light suddenly lit up on the ground. The pilot flipped off the night vision, and sure enough, the glow of a red emergency flare was visible on the ground below.

Slowly, Fareeha pulled back the throttle from cruising speed and gradually began to lower towards the ground. Still thousands of feet in the air, the flare began to move, and then several more flares lit up on the ground. As she neared, the pilot investigated the promised landing site, and noticed that bright lights seemed to be near a house with its interior lights on, and the red burns were coming from a thicket of trees. On her console, Fareeha flipped the lights for seatbelts to be buckled, and began to increase her descent to the ground.

Now only a few hundred feet above ground, she flipped the jets into hover mode, and stabilized the VTOL, circling the area. Like a crown atop the soil's head, there was a dense thicket of trees in the center of the seemingly endless miles of farmland. In the very heart of the canopy was an open area, of which a circle of 30-minute emergency flares highlighted the perimeter of the clearing, while someone stood with their lit flare waving it above their head.

Still in hovering, Fareeha deployed the landing gear and kept descending until the aircraft jolted, a clear sign that they had landed. She spooled down the engines, waiting as the temperature lowered and she checked to make sure that all systems were in working order post-trip. As she did so, the person who had marked her landing zone was running around the area with a bucket of sand and stuffed the flares head first into the container to extinguish them.

When she was ready, Fareeha hit the button to unlatch the hatch to the cockpit as well as the command to lower the door ramp to the troop compartment before exiting the vehicle. She swung herself over the edge and pulled the glass canopy of the cockpit shut before walking down the ladder that was built into the hull of the nosepiece, finally reaching the ground.

When she turned away from the craft, she was initially blinded, her eyes drawn to the blue light in front of her, but after a moment to adjust, she was able to focus once more, getting a good look at the host of this rendezvous. Lena Oxton, wearing her usual spandex athletic wear underneath a slim-cut retrofitted WWII leather bomberjacket, was waiting behind her. As was always the case with Lena, a bright blue light was shining from the center of her chest, from the core of an experimental device which, as Fareeha had understood, was the only thing keeping anchored to this moment in the Space-Time Continuum.

As long as she had remembered, Lena was always chipper, upbeat, which made sense after all that Lena had gone through, but not tonight. In this moment, standing with a bucket full of extinguished flares, she was all business. "Is everything alright?" she asked, her heavy English accent subdued as best as she could.

"Yeah, it was a close call, but our VIP is secure." Although having traveled around much of the world and spending much of her childhood in non-English speaking lands, Fareeha's father was Canadian, and as such, her English was clear and passed with only the tiniest hint of an accent. The soldier motioned towards the back with a nod of her head, adding, "there's a canopy in the back. Let's cover this before it attracts too much attention."

The two women walked towards the back. Fareeha was a tall woman, but with her Raptora suit on, she was even more so, causing Lena, about a head and a half shorter in their current attire, to put some extra pep in her step to keep up. When they reached the back on the vehicle, the ramp had finally finished lowering to the ground, providing an egress from the dark within, and as they arrived, their "special cargo" was waiting for them.

The lynchpin for this entire ordeal, Doctor Angela Ziegler, PHD, MD, stood at the opening of the transport ship with a hand on the side of the hull. Her shoes had a raised heel to them, and she was wearing a pair of black dress slacks and a salmon-pink dress shirt. Her bright blonde hair had been tied back in preparation for her address before an attempt on her life had ended the conference short. She waited, leaning against the hull of the ship until she saw the two women, and seeing her rescuer she attempted to stand, but wobbled on her legs.

Fareeha, seeing the jelly-legs, shot a hand out, catching the doctor's free hand and watched as she put all her weight against it, bracing against the coming fall.

"Are you alright?" asked Lena.

The doctor took a breath, but then looked up to see her savior and smiled, the blue lights from Lena's time device reflecting in the blue of her eyes, "thank you." She said, before reorienting herself and walking down the ramp. "Sorry," the Swiss doctor admitted, "I couldn't get my seatbelt on at all."

Still in soldier mode, Lt. Amari waited until the doctor was able to stand on her own before letting her go and asked Lena, "why don't you take her inside, I'll finish out here."

The good doctor attempted a humble protest, but Lena quickly said, "Rodger that," and took ahold of the doctor's arm, escorting her towards the house. Still a bit numb, Dr. Ziegler turned to look at Fareeha, but eventually allowed Lena to take her to the safe house.

As she had promised, Fareeha found the camouflage canopy in its compartment in the troop hold. From there, she unfolded it, and then used the anchor weights and threw them over the top of the vehicle, landing on the other side before stretching them across the ground to break the profile of the aircraft before using her augmented strength to stomp the stakes into the ground. After that, she walked into the troop hold one more time and began to disarm.

When she walked out of the Hummingbird, she was wearing a tank top and a pair of blue cargo pants, the only hint of her current occupation was her issued sidearm strapped into a thigh holster on her leg. As she raised the ramp up to close, she closed her eyes and gave a sigh, unsure what the future had in store for her.