Silence. It was something Sombra didn't get a lot of anymore, and she relished the opportunity to finally clear her head. Endless hours of poring over technical documents and directing Talon goons had been taxing, even for her cybernetically enhanced mind. Now, alone in her tent at last, she could let out a sigh she'd been holding in for weeks, and turn her attention to other matters.
There was a baseball bat propped up against one of the computer mainframes that occupied most of the tent. Humming under her breath, the hacker picked it up and ran a critical eye across it. Stained and worn from years of use, the bat was one of Sombra's few permanent physical possessions. Under the light of the naked bulb hanging overhead, the shaft of the weapon glowed with the distinctive fluorescent paint used by the Los Muertos gang, a call back to when the weapon had first been given to her.
Sombra twirled the bat between her fingers, admiring the way it left a faint glowing trail through the air as it moved. Then, with a happy laugh, she seized it in a two-handed grip and drove it through the screen of the nearest computer.
For a few short minutes, the tent was lit by cascading sparks and flashes of purple and blue light, as the world's most notorious hacker darted between the banks of Talon-supplied equipment, leaving nothing undamaged. The bat punched holes through monitors, flexi-screens and mainframes alike, while the electromagnetic discharger affixed to her other hand pulsed intermittently, erasing memory drives and frying circuitry.
Then, silence returned. Panting, the hacker dropped the bat and collapsed onto a stool to catch her breath.
Silence…I could get used to this. No more orders, beamed straight from the mysterious Talon Council straight into her implants, and no more directives from Reaper as he hovered at her shoulder. In a way, she knew she'd miss Gabriel and Widowmaker – but not as friends.
Deep down, Sombra still felt a twinge of disappointment. Widowmaker was a lost cause, as far as friendships went, but there had been something else about Gabriel Reyes that interested her. Beneath that mask and his intimidating persona, there was a complex and tortured individual that Sombra was keen to learn more about. Having exhausted the detail records kept by Overwatch, she had tried in vain to find more information in Talon's own archives, but all her investigation had turned up nothing she hadn't already known.
They'd left her a parting gift, or rather, Widowmaker had – Sombra could tell it was something she had made specially. The device was hidden in a sandbag inside her tent, and triggered with a time-delay mechanism that activated a few minutes after the pod launched. Sombra gave an amused chuckle as the detonator whirred loudly in her hands, trying vainly to activate the bomb which now lay in pieces on the workbench. Gabe's little spider…I guess jealousy is the hardest emotion to remove.
There was more shouting outside the tent. Sombra resumed packing her things, tossing the most important pieces of tech into a backpack before downloading the rest via her neural attachments. Talon was breaking camp, and Sombra planned to slip away in the confusion. She'd got what she needed from them, and as long as the other parts of her plan fell into place, she would not cross paths with them again.
As she worked, her mind wandered back to the events of the day. The launch of the capsule had been a success, as far as they knew. There had been no explosions, no loud noises. The occupants of the capsule had simply thrown a switch and disappeared, vanishing from the current timeline instantaneously. For all the buildup, Sombra was expecting something a little more dramatic. Whether the occupants had survived their trip was not something they could easily find out, but at least there were no messy failures on the launchpad. Sombra's eye for technical detail could be thanked for that.
Her hand halfway into her backpack, the hacker suddenly froze. From the rear of the tent came the unmistakeable snick of metal as someone cocked a gun.
"I can tell you're wearing an iron under that coat of yours. Toss it."
Sombra slowly reached under her coat and unclipped her shoulder holster, allowing her customised Sentinel submachine gun to drop to the ground. There was a faint shuffling sound behind her, and a hand emerged from the gloom by her feet, seizing the strap on the weapon and pulling it back out of her reach. Satisfied, Sombra's captor stepped out into the light.
"So. You're one of them. Huh." Beneath the shadow of a broad-brimmed hat, Jesse McCree shifted his ubiquitous cigar to the other side of his mouth. "You never mentioned Talon. You just said you were good with computers. I didn't pick you for a straight shooter, but this…"
"I didn't feel like spoiling the mood. It was Christmas Eve, after all."
Running into Jesse McCree in a bar in her hometown was certainly a happy accident. Sombra was the kind of person who preferred to plan ahead when gathering intel, but after she had gotten over her surprise, she joined the vigilante at the bar. He'd never heard of her before, of course, but she had, and with the help of a drink or two she had his tongue wagging.
"Mind telling me just what this little operation is all about? I never thought Talon had the brains to do more than the occasional robbery or hostage-taking."
"They still don't. I'm the brains, and when they can afford my time, I help them pull off their bigger jobs."
"Like what?"
"Top secret, I'm afraid." Sombra grinned, allowing her arms to slowly drop to her sides as her captor moved closer. "What brings you this far out? We're miles from the nearest saloon, cowboy."
The barrel of his revolver sparkled in the light as McCree spun it skilfully between his fingers. "I have my reasons. Matter of fact, some old friends called in a favour from me. Do you happen to know of a woman named Lena Oxton? You see, these people were pretty certain she'd passed through here a few hours ago."
"Lena Oxton? Now that you mention it…yeah, I've seen her. She didn't stay long, must've been a little short on time."
The irony was lost on McCree as he paced back and forth in front of her, spurs jangling. He frowned in confusion as he gazed at the smoking remains of the computer equipment scattered around the tent, and examined her baseball bat where it lay on the sandy floor at his feet. The innocent confusion on his face almost made Sombra want to chuckle.
Briefly, both of them were distracted by a flurry of activity outside. Shadows flashed against the fabric walls of the tent, and a long burst of gunfire echoed out from the other side of the camp.
"Sounds like you brought company, vaquero." Reaching down, she grabbed one of the straps of her backpack and began to edge towards the door. "So if you don't mind…"
Sombra had only made it a few steps before McCree reacted. His robotic arm shot out, seizing her by the collar and pushing her back against the nearest support pole of the tent. Her hands scrabbled against the hard metal shell of his prosthetic, but found no purchase.
"I didn't come here to play games with you. Tell me where she is!"
Mcree's prosthetic suddenly glowed purple under her fingertips. Realisation flashed in his eyes a second too late. The revolver snapped up, but before McCree could get a shot off, he slugged himself across the mouth with his own prosthetic arm. The robotic hand clamped around his throat and drove him down to the sandy floor of the tent, gasping for air.
"Like I said; Everything can be hacked – and anyone." Sombra picked up her submachine gun and holstered it beneath her coat. "Adios, McCree. Another time, perhaps?"
McCree said nothing, his face slowly turning from mauve to a shade of deep purple. Sombra flexed her fingers, and the rogue arm relaxed slightly.
His good arm suddenly whipped out, and the world exploded in a thunderclap of light and sound as a stun grenade burst centimetres from her head. Sensors overloaded, Sombra staggered back, the submachine gun falling from her grip. She had just enough presence of mind to rake her hand across her bodysuit, activating her thermoptic camouflage, before the first slug from McCree's revolver tore through the space she had occupied just moments before. She executed an acrobatic roll that took her out of McCree's reach, then sprinted out of the flap of the tent, and out into the cool night air.
Sombra had only taken a few steps before a figure emerged from the tent behind her, gun raised. She turned to run, but was brought up short when she crashed headlong into someone running the other way. The impact was enough to disrupt her suit's camouflage, and as it dissipated, she saw a gloved fist flying through the air towards her face.
An hour later, the Overwatch transport shuttle Guardian was climbing to its cruising altitude of 40,000 feet, high above the New Mexico desert. With Athena at the controls, the jet emerged from between the clouds and began to follow a meandering pattern across the American mainland, avoiding main population centres and military facilities. It was possible to fly higher and faster, but in order to keep up the pretence that they were a civilian cargo plane it was necessary to blend in with the hundreds of other aircraft that passed by in their local airspace. The spacious interior of the jet was lit only by a few faint emergency lights. In the pre-dawn darkness, the passengers could try to catch up on some sleep.
Winston looked up from the piece of Talon hardware he was partway through disassembling and looked around the cabin. Ana and Jack were having a muttered conversation in the cockpit, presumably discussing what their next move would be. McCree was sprawled across the top of several packing crates, his hat pulled down over his eyes. He may have been asleep, although Winston never had been able to tell.
McCree's reaction to seeing his two former commanders alive had been mixed, to say the least. After a brief moment of shock, which amounted to little more than a raised eyebrow from the vigilante, he gave Ana a stiff hug. He then offered his hand to Jack, who took it, after a moment's hesitation – and that was the end of the encounter. Just a few weeks ago, Winston had only known of a handful of former agents who were still active in the post-Overwatch world, and now there were four of the best aboard the ship.
There was, of course, one major exception. After spending two hours sweeping the campsite and interrogating Talon operatives, they were unable to find any sign of Lena or Emily. The tracking device in the chronal accelerator had dropped offline a few minutes before they had arrived, but if the harness had been destroyed Winston could find no trace of it. Eventually, and with the threat of Talon returning in force to take back the camp, Overwatch was forced to retreat almost empty handed.
Almost…
There was one other newcomer onboard the Guardian, someone that McCree had brought aboard himself. A woman, dressed in an outlandish purple and black outfit and sporting an equally distinctive haircut. She was strapped into one of the jump seats mounted to the far wall of the shuttle. Seeing Winston looking at her, she gave him a grin, apparently ignorant of the swelling on her lips and the dark area around her eye that was more than just makeup. When she shifted in her seat, purple cabling on her suit flashed in the gloom.
"So, you must be Chief Scientist Winston." She spoke with a Mexican accent, with a playful note that matched her smile. "I've got to say, you're a bit of a childhood icon of mine."
Winston frowned. "I don't recall…
"The leaps you made in remote interfacing…and thermoptic camouflage!" The woman chuckled. "Your work gave me a big break when I was starting out. And you were nice enough to store it right where I could reach it!"
"She's trying to get a rise out of you, Winston."
Jack Morrison descended the stairs from the cockpit area and walked over to where McCree was reclining, apparently asleep, with his hat pulled down over his eyes. He nudged him awake, and pointed at the prisoner.
"You know this woman?"
"We've met before…at a bar. We had a drink, talked a little…but I haven't seen her since then." McCree shifted uncomfortably.
"Oh, I think we did more than that, Jesse. I've got a few pictures here that might jog your memory." A series of holographic video windows materialised in the air around her head, with accompanying sound issuing forth from some hidden speaker. "Hmmm. Sure looks like a whole lot of nothing to me."
Jack gestured, and a harsh spotlight snapped on over the prisoner's head, cutting off the video windows. She blinked at the sudden light, and as she did the former Strike Commander moved in swiftly and struck her, backhanded, with a blow that rang out in the confines of the jet.
"You're not in a position to play games with us. I was just about ready to leave you for dead and clear out before I was convinced otherwise. The others say you might be useful, Sombra, so you'd better start giving me some answers." Jack drew closer. With one gloved hand, he roughly pushed Sombra's head to one side, examining the web of cybernetic implants on her scalp. "I've heard your name before. In Egypt. You were working for Talon back then, too."
Sombra jerked away, still smirking despite the blow. "I might have been. My work takes me all over."
"You still haven't answered my question from earlier. What has Talon done with Tracer and her partner? Are they still in danger?"
"Aye! I told you earlier, Jack. It's complicated. You'll probably need your Chief Scientist to help you understand it. Believe me, time is no longer a factor in their safety."
Jack cocked his hand back menacingly, but Ana caught it, giving him a stern look.
"We'll be continuing this discussion back at base." Jack turned back to Winston. "What's our flight time to Gibraltar?"
The scientist adjusted his glasses as he pulled up a holographic display. "The Guardian lacks the fuel needed to make it back to Gibraltar in a single hop. According to the satellite uplink, the refuelling platform at the old Grand Mesa Watchpoint is still operational, and I recommend that we land there to resupply. With any luck, we'll only be on the ground for an hour or so."