XI
"Fire it up!" the Overwatch girl said over the comm. Ferris Mercer wasted no time in complying. He was used to giving orders, not following them, but there was something about the girl in yellow. Something undeniable that he'd seen in precious few others. Jack Morrison? Perhaps, but there was something more.
Without skipping a beat, he gestured to doll-face, and her hands began to fly over her keyboards. In the movies, there might be a purple bar filling up, perhaps with a skull above it, handily indicating that they were being hacked. Here, the presence of Sombra was far more sinister, an invisible guillotine while Mercer was forced to stare down into the blood-soaked basket. She was hard at work, waiting at her terminal, God knew where, for the chance to get back in.
"We have company!" Zaryanova roared. Ferris cast one nervous glance over his shoulder and saw the legion of monstrosities marching on them. Humans, omnics, oddities, rising from the pit of the Median's atrium. At their head was the omnic with the cruelly smiling face,the face like broken glass. Congealed blood dripped down his chin into thin tendrils. This was the return of Thaddeus Ellis in earnest. This was the Mindflayer.
"Get the monitors online," Ordered Ferris, as calm as he could manage. "Then comms."
There was no visible response, but Ferris could see Doll-face nod in his mind's eye. It was the benefit of long, intimate experience. It was acknowledgment enough.
Ferris had firmly in mind a list of systems Sombra would want control of, the big systems that would give her the most control. From these, she didn't need the passwords of the smaller systems. So those were the ones he locked down. He worked from top to bottom. If he worked fast enough, he could get control of each system before Sombra could use the old password to get back in. But she knew this, and she was clever. If she got access to a smaller system, there was a strong possibility that she'd be able to worm her way up. So, Ferris had ordered Doll-face to start from the bottom up. The security systems blinked from red to green, closing in like twin walls. Even the visualization was threatening, but he could only imagine the shadowed face of Sombra widening wolfishly at the challenge.
Try me, cholo.
When the security monitors blinked away from static storms and the phrase, 'no signal found,' Ferris' guts sank. The true gravity of the situation was simply overwhelming. The Icebox was perhaps the largest prison facility in the world, but not because if its volume of occupancy. Its isolated location meant that the staff all had to live there, in the Median. So much of that size was dedicated to public works, hydroponics, amenities. Even so, there were two-hundred and thirty-seven prisoners in the Icebox, all of which were here because they were the most dangerous people and the planet, of their number, seventy-six of them were oddities. And now, every single one of them that still lived were coming for him.
On his monitors, he saw the girl, the cowboy, Morrison, and the hog, rushing back to the front. Behind him was Aleksandra Zaryanova and the other junker. All through the corridors, he saw the halls congested with the Mindflayer's army. Despite his well-hidden terror, Ferris knew there was a plan. He just didn't know if it was going to work.
Morrison and the Cowboy split off, heading down different corridors, while the girl blinked out of sight, instantly appearing in one of Ferris' other monitors.
With a few keystrokes, Ferris got control of the pacification systems, from the look Doll-face shot him, he got a message. "Activate that shit right now," it said.
"All part of the plan," said Ferris. "Steady. Keep working."
The legion came forward, not stopping. Their footsteps turned to thunder that Ferris could hear with his ears and his monitor. Not yet.
They stood directly in the center of the median, at the crossroads. Not yet.
"Now!"
The silver domes on the wall flipped open like lids on trashcans, and from them emerged riot cannons. They began to fire electrical stun disks at the prisoners, taking down a few before the rest scattered in each of the four directions. All according to plan. Down each corridor, the turrets switched on, all in a row, chasing the mobs of convicts further and further into the Residential, Maintenance, and Powered wings.
Mindflayer and twelve more prisoners were the only ones brave enough to stay steady on towards the corridor that he and Zarya were holed up in. But he wasn't sure she could handle even that many. Zarya fired discs of iron into the crowd, taking some down, and the rail-thin junker took down a few more, but the turrets in the presence of Mindflayer wouldn't touch him. They didn't fire. It had to be a glitch in the system, but every single turret in the hallway leading to Ferris would not fire. Even manual control was blocked out, but not from outside the prison. Looking again, the interference seemed, impossibly, to come from-
"I thought Mindflayer didn't have powers without his helmet!" Doll-Face said, as if it were Ferris' fault.
"I'll show you what he doesn't have!" shouted Zarya. Out of ammunition for her improvised weapon, she set it horizontally in front of herself and charged the hallway. She ran, appearing in Ferris' monitor as a grey blur, barreling over Mindflayer and his two remaining lackeys.
Almost at the same time, Jack, McCree, and Tracer all appeared in their respective corridors. Jack stood brusquely at the exit from Residential, taking shots at anyone who dared advance, forcing the criminals behind the cover of tables, chairs, waist-high walls, whatever they could find. McCree shot six rubber bullets into the prisoners' kneecaps, somehow hitting twelve of them, though that had to be a trick of the light, then dodged three overconfident crooks as he reloaded, almost too fast for the camera to catch, and let the riot cannons take care of them while he knocked down twelve more.
Ferris could barely comprehend what he was seeing in the Powered wing, which contained the most enemies by far. Storms of low-energy pulse munitions rained on them from within the wing from no discernible direction, driving them back into range of the riot cannons, but any stragglers, or anyone who came close to the exit, seemed to trip on something that was gone as soon as it had appeared, and was hit with a stun disc. Before long, the criminals had grown wise to this, and had all huddled into a tightly packed group, where the ghost couldn't touch them.
But this was the point where Ferris regained control of the guard exos. The control blinked green, and smiling, Ferris awarded manual control back to the exo-pilots.
"You've got control," said Doll-Face, grinning. "Give 'em hell, kids."
The guards, armed with riot rifles and plastic shields, stormed through the halls, replacing and flushing out the legions that came before. Their rage, bred by hours of imprisonment, manifested as cold efficiency.
Ferris' hopes, however, were dashed as soon as they surfaced. Mindflayer raised his hands with a maniacal cackle, and the ceiling began to groan, cables snapping, metal shifting.
"Get out of there!" Ferris shouted. "The ceiling's coming down!"
Too late. A tentacled mass of steel and wire tore down the walls, shredding the Median's atrium. The guards below rolled out of the way, but one got caught under it, his leg bleeding. Zaryanova dropped her weapon, throwing her own safety out the window. She grabbed hold of the collapsed steel mass, lifting it.
Zarya could feel her muscles shredding under the gravity. How much did this piece of garbage weigh? She supposed it didn't matter. The guard limped out from the obstruction, leaving a bloody trail before one of the exo-pilots picked him up and dragged him to safety. She was ready to drop it, run back to the rest, regroup, but then more groaning steel fell on top of her.
She tsked in frustration, hiding abject terror as the bullets and various projectiles from the convicts was blocked by a new tomb of steel, all relying on the single piece she held to remain above her, not crushing her. Her mind suddenly flashed, and she swore that she saw flames erupt from the walls. It was only her memory, however. The train wasn't here. She tried to remember that as the sweat streaked on her brow, her arms on fire.
Hog saw the column of steel fall on Zarya, and time seemed to freeze. What was happening here? For the first time in a long time, his first instinct was to rush forward, to help the idiot who'd put herself in harm's way. For as long as he'd bothered to remember, he'd only done it for Rat. But that was what you did for your business partner, right? Zarya had acted the fool, by the laws of the Waste, she should die in her steel prison.
By the laws of the wastes, so should he.
Hog ran forth with uncharacteristic speed.
"What are you doin' you lug!?" Rat shrieked after him. "Stick to the plan! Let the bleedin' heroes take the bullets!"
That had been the plan, certainly. But then, Rat's plans were rarely properly followed. Hog ducked under countless energy bolts, those that hit him glanced off his bulk, the minor plasma burns healing in short order from the Hogrogen he breathed constantly. Growing frustrated at the tall, scaly one with slightly better aim than the rest, Hog cast forth his hook, wrapping around his gangly legs, his shark-like grin turning to terror as he was pulled away from his allies. Hog ended him with a methodical point-blank shot, execution style.
When he finally arrived at the mass under which Zarya was both protected and threatened, he wrapped his giant fingers around the nearest piece and lifted.
Once again, Rat shouted. "STOP!" he said.
"She'll die," Hog said simply, ducking under another energy bolt.
"Bloody right she will! Hold on a sec!" And Rat's eyes scurried in an arcane way over the precarious structure.
"Rat," he said. No response. "Rat," he said again.
"This piece!" Rat said, he touched a single long beam sticking out from the puzzle.
Hog, not one to distrust Rat when he really knew what he was doing, dropped his sheet, and lifted at the point Rat suggested.
A very surprised Zarya was soon revealed, as if hatching from a massive metal egg. Her face burned red, her arms quivered at their limit.
"Told you you needed a spotter," Hog quipped. No one laughed, but he thought it was quite clever.
"Get the bloody fuck outta there already!" Rat shrieked, lobbing a few chaotic bombs at Mindflayer's remaining posse.
Get out, she did, scooping up Hog's discarded weapon and firing a few warning shots back. She handled the recoil quite well, all things considered. Suddenly, however, he took the weapon forcefully back.
"Get to cover," Hog ordered.
"Not while the battle is still on," Zarya said. "I can fight."
"I have ammo," said Hog. "You don't. Go."
Without another word, Hog cocked his mound of scrap metal that approximated a weapon, and started to brave the hail of energy.
Usually, Hog had relied on Rat to decide the exact course of every incursion. Rat had the plan, and thanks to Hog's ability to walk through just about anything meant that the plan would usually work. But right now, the path seemed very clear. Directly in.
Around him, the white walls dissolved into black sludge, groaning steel signaling that the collapsed column of steel was only the beginning. He managed to sink a blast into the first oddity's guts, and by now, their advance was slowing. They were afraid. Good.
However, soon they'd started to wise up. They began taking up positions where neither his hook nor his gun could reach. The fires came so rapidly, from so many different directions, that he found his body's ability to heal couldn't keep up.
"Well, that's what you get," he mumbled to himself. Scooping out an Omnic's jaw.
Then, six gunshots rang out, and as many oddities fell. It was the cowboy. He said something, but Hog didn't take the time to be grateful. He advanced on the final enemy, the one with the black face like broken glass, whose tattered prison greys now hung and swayed around his knees like some kind of robe.
"You," he chuckled. "Of all the people I expected…. Well, certainly not one of you."
"We're not all… ninnies like you," said Hog, taking the briefest moment to find the word.
"Those are pretty bold words for someone who's about to die," said Mindflayer. His fingers stiffened into claws, energy crackling around them. "Your tech, the very lifeblood of civilization is mine to control! MINE! As it should be! Humankind should have known better than to create their superiors! I am a God!"
Hog's gun fired just as well as it always had, and for some reason, this shocked Mindflayer, whose face widened in the purest disbelief Hog had ever seen. He doubled over, clutching the black synthetic ichor dripping out. Then Hog finally got it.
"Huh," he said. "No computer, no flaying."
Mindflayer tried to claw at Hog's mask, as if he had some other trick up his sleeve that could let him win. It was kinda cute. More annoying though.
With a giant, meaty hand, Hog slapped Mindflayer to the ground, creating more cracks in the omnic's face. "You," said Hog, pointing a colossal finger. "Are being very rhetorical."