"With retrospect, you can see how this carefully-balanced, teetering pile of megalomaniacs was beautifully set up, and only needed one disaster to be escalated into almost unbelievable catastrophe." --Alan Moore FRIDAY, AUGUST 27, 2004 THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON DC 9:00 AM LOCAL TIME William LaFontaine hated meetings with the President. It couldn't be helped; as the Secretary of Homeland Security, LaFontaine had spent quite a lot of days meeting and working with President Grover over the last two years. All that time together had convinced him of one thing; he detested working with Grover. Still, LaFontaine was nothing if not a loyal member of the Party, and when the Party said "go," he went. The Secretary walked through the door to the Oval Office, obligingly opened by the ever-present Secret Service agent. There, as expected, was the President, rising from his seat and grinning his trademark goofy grin. "Billy," Grover said, extending his hand, "good to see you." LaFontaine swallowed the correction he wanted to make - Grover's habit of giving people childish nicknames was personally irritating, but could be handled - and shook the offered hand. "Mr. President," he said cordially as the two men sat down. Grover waved off to his side. "I hope you don't mind, but I asked Roman to sit in with us for this one." LaFontaine blinked and looked in the direction Grover waved. Sitting in a chair off near the wall was the pudgy, chipmunk-faced form of Roman Marx, the President's "Special Advisor" and political flack. LaFontaine wondered exactly what Marx was supposed to be doing here during an antiterrorism briefing. "Well," said the President before LaFontaine could reply, "I know you were expecting to give me the usual report on terrorism, but something's come up." The President opened a desk drawer and removed a thick stack of manila folders. He dropped the stack on the desk. "This is information I've received about a group of terrorists operating inside the US, Billy. I want you to round them up. You'll have my full backing on this one, call in as many troops as you need; FBI, ATF, CIA, whatever. Just get a hold of them as quick as you can." LaFontaine's eyes widened as he reached out and took the stack of documents. "Sir, I..." he stammered, "where did you get this? None of my people have heard anything about this group.." "Just never you mind where I got it," snapped Grover. "The important thing is what you're gonna do with it, y'unnerstand?" LaFontaine nodded dumbly as he thumbed through the top folder. "This is explosive stuff, Mr. President. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it... the thing in Nevada was one of theirs?" "Yep, apparently a dry run for one of their terror weapons or something. I don't know the details, but it's all there in the report." "My God, they have that kind of power?" "What we'd like you to understand, Mr. Secretary," interjected Marx, "is that this comes at a, ah, -delicate- time for the President, with the Iraq situation not going as well as we'd hoped and the public opinion polls not favoring us in the election. We'll support whatever measures you need to take in order to arrest these people, but we'd also like you to do it with as little disruption to public life as possible." The Secretary stared at Marx. "There's a terrorist threat loose -inside the country- and you're worried about -opinion polls-? I don't know which rock you crawled out from under, Mr. Marx, but the security of the American people is more important than how many points you're running behind-" "That's -enough-, Billy." Grover said sharply. "Roman's right in one thing, we don't want to go charging in half-cocked and scare everybody. We'll need to move quiet-like until we're ready. How soon can you be ready, Billy?" LaFontaine looked over the folders, his mind putting together an estimate of the force he'd need to arrest this... Jihad group. "We could be ready by Monday," he said. "We'd have to work all through the weekend but..." LaFontaine nodded. "Monday is doable." "All right then," said Grover, "you'll go in on Monday." "I'll want to increase the threat index up a notch," warned LaFontaine. "Just as a precaution if these people get wind of our movements and decide to strike first." The President nodded and grinned his goofy grin. "Of course, safety first," he said. "I knew there was a reason I picked you for the job, Billy. You go on now, get the ball rolling." OFFICES OF THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY WASHINGTON, DC 11:00 AM LOCAL TIME The DHS offices were buzzing with rumors. Ever since LaFontaine came back from his meeting with the President, speculation was rampant about what they'd discussed. It was pretty obvious that whatever happened, it wasn't the usual daily briefing. Instead, the Old Man had requested an all-hands meeting with his top management. The group filed into the briefing room, almost filling it past capacity. Once the last person entered and found a spot to sit down, the lights dimmed, the room's projector rig turned on and one of LaFontaine's aides stepped up to the front of the room. "Okay, you've heard the rumors about how something new came up this morning. Well, they're right." Consternation from the group. "Apparently the Old Man found out - don't ask me how - that there's a gang of terrorists operating right now inside the country, that they've been here for years, and they're about to strike, and strike hard." Serious consternation now, a buzz of anxious murmuring. "Obviously, our job is to stop these bastards before they set off another 9/11, or maybe even make things worse. "Now, here's the rundown on our targets. They call themselves the Jihad, but so far we don't have any evidence of an al-Quaeda or other Islamist connection. We know they've got a lot of high-powered weaponry at their disposal, and probably NBC weapons to boot. For a lot of these guys, we've only got codenames. Some of 'em, we don't even have pictures. We'll be hoping to draw those out of hiding by grabbing the ones we *do* have records on. Anyway, let's start off with the well-documented characters." Click. "I'm sure most of you recognize Jonathan Fnord. He's one of the major financial guys behind this group; most of his profits go into their bankroll. He also may be one of the Jihad's top strategists, which means he'll be well-guarded and extremely dangerous. This joker thinks he's above the law as a corporate executive. We're going to prove him wrong." Click. "This is Kirk Felton. He runs a small cellphone company out of Frisco, and he's one of the Jihad's top leaders. Supposedly he's in command of the field operations. He's out of the country right now, but we know he's vacationing in the UK, so the Old Man's coordinating with MI5 even as we speak." Click. "Katze Brenner. Don't let the age in the dossier fool you; she's one of the senior members of the Jihad and one of their best psy-ops people. She's recruited a pretty sizable cadre of assistants and followers in the Berkeley area, too; a list of known associates is in the dossier. Be sure to nab as many as you can." Click. "Andrew Wyatt and Dierdre Griest. Gunsmiths with a small gun hotrodding shop in Arizona. They're the conventional arms suppliers for the Jihad, which means they'll have enough guns to start a war hiding in their compound." Click. "Dennis Anderson. Also known as Jack Cole, Daniel Armstrong, with the Jihad codename 'Cecrops'. This is their top covert ops guy, the one who carries out the Jihad's dirty work. He's a freelance mercenary believed to be behind bombings and assassinations in Egypt, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Poland, Romania, Russia, South Korea, Japan, and the United States. Consider this one extremely dangerous, as he was trained by the United States and our allies. If we take down the rest of the Jihad, he will move on to the next highest bidder." Click. "Rens Houben, aka Chad Houben. Another field operations guy, this one comes out of Europe. Unlike Anderson, he's very much a true believer. We've also run across his tracks before, during a rash of assassinations five years ago." Click. "Joseph Lacroix. Another field ops guy, we know he works with Anderson most of the time. When he's not out killing innocents, Lacroix works as a high school teacher in Denver, spreading Jihadist propaganda to American kids." Click. "Kevin Jameson. Jihad codename is 'Killjoy,' and that's what he does. The Jihad's top enforcer and commando, capable of taking inhuman amounts of punishment and dishing it right back out. If he won't come quietly - and he probably won't - your orders are to shoot to kill." Click. "Now we get into the people we don't have real names for. This is codename 'Malaclypse.' Supposedly one of the major leaders of the Jihad and their top unconventional weapons expert." Click. "Codename 'Aristalarus.' No, I don't know what it's supposed to mean, either. She controls the Jihad's communications network. Also a known associate of Brenner, which means they might be together if we're lucky." Click. "Codename 'Shadur.' Another one of the Jihad's field operatives. He works in tandem with Houben for the most part. Like with codename Aristalarus, find one and we may get the other." Click. "Codename 'Puppeteer.' The Jihad's brainwashing expert. This guy mentored Brenner in psy-ops, and if given the chance can leave you believing in fairies and elves and not knowing which way is up. If you run into him, be -very- careful." Click. "Codename 'Lord Owsen.' This scary mother was sighted in Vegas earlier this year. We don't have much on him, but he's reportedly the Jihad's favorite assassin. He did a number on a lot of Gulf War vets back in March, but since then he's dropped off the radar. Treat this one cautiously and shoot to kill." Click. "We don't have a picture, but here's the big prize. J. Ramsperger, aka J. Marburger, aka J. Yearnshaw, aka J. Schneider, aka J. Foxglove, aka J. Rock. This person, or persons, is the big target; the Osama or Saddam of the Jihad. All of these names might be standard aliases for one of the other Jihad leaders, with the J standing for Jihad, although in some places it is listed as Jim or James or another common name starting with J. Finding out this person's true identity and location is a top priority. You catch any of the others alive, you get this out of them first." CNN NEWS BROADCAST ATLANTA, GEORGIA 2:00 PM LOCAL TIME "This is CNN Headline News, I'm Brett Beefsteak. Our top story this hour: Homeland Security Secretary William LaFontaine in a press conference just now raised the national security level from yellow to orange in response to intelligence indicating a possible attack on the East Coast. Secretary LaFontaine was quick to point out that this was just a precautionary move on the part of Homeland Security..." "On the campaign trail today, Democratic presidential nominee Senator Daniel Callaghan attacked the Orange Alert announcement today, calling on President Grover to come clean on the nonspecific terrorism reports and claiming that the Grover administration is only interested in 'scaring the public into voting for Jack Grover against their best interests.'" THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON, DC 11:34 PM LOCAL TIME As befits a building of its age and importance, the White House contains many secrets. Most of these are fairly mundane; service passages for the staff, the occasional unmarked room designated for the Presidential mistress, things like that. A handful of these secrets are kept for reasons of National Security, like the bunkers and War Rooms hidden deep underneath the building's foundations. Inside one of these secure bunkers the President of the United States knelt on the floor, praying to his god. Jack Grover knew in his heart of hearts that he didn't deserve the position that Fate had thrown him into. He owed his job to his name, his faithful team of political fixers, his family's connections in the Republican Party, and to his god. Especially his god. Without his god, Grover would have never come as far as he had. Everything he did was in his god's name. As far as Grover was concerned, he was but the steward, preparing the way for his god to return and rule. The funny thing was, much of this was known publicly. Indeed, it was Grover's frequent, carefully managed public declarations of faith that drew enough voters to make the election close enough for Marx and his boys to steal. The -funnier- thing about it, though, was despite his well-known faith, Grover never went to church. This discrepancy was noted by the paranoid and the cynical, and then dropped as a non-issue. It never occurred to anybody that the god Grover worshipped wasn't the same god whose churches dotted the landscape. Grover knelt on the hard concrete floor of the bunker, mumbling in religious ecstasy. He knew that his god would appear to him. It had been a long five years without knowing the touch of his god, but that time was long past. Why had the dossiers come to him, if not because his god willed it? All he had to do was pray long enough, and he would be rewarded... A large, fuzzy paw touched his shoulder. "Well done, my good and faithful servant." Grover heard the paw's owner say. Heart leaping with joy, the President looked up and saw the face of his god for the first time in years. "You've done super-duper work since we last talked, Jacky. I'm real proud of you." Grover smiled, blinking back tears. "I missed you, Barney!" The purple lizard smiled. "I know you did, Jacky. You're my bestest buddy, my most specialest of Special Friends. You did -real- good work with those reports, too. You got them to the right people and got the ball rolling. Why, -nobody- could have done better! Now those meanie Jihaddi won't be able to hide! They won't be able to hurt anybody once we're done with them!" Barney smiled benevolently down at his groveling minion. "Yessiree, we're going to deal with them." ------------------------------------ */ Warren Zevon "Lawyers, Guns and Money" /* Illuminati International Pictures presents a tale of the J I H A D U N I V E R S E 3 . 0 The Day It Fell Apart written by S. Malaclypse Breen, Dan DeRosia, Kirk Felton, Rens Houben, Aris Merquoni, Patrick Stewart, Warrior Tang, and Kat Templeton Directed by S. Malaclypse Breen (c)2005 The Jihad to Destroy Barney ------------------------------------ MONDAY, AUGUST 30, 2004 TOLMAN HALL, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA/BERKELEY BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 9:00 AM LOCAL TIME Katze wandered into her office, only to find Laura already there. "Can you believe it, Katze? They've gone to orange!" "Whoa, whoa, what's gone to orange?" "The stupid terrorism alert. You know they're just doing it because Callaghan said this weekend that Grover is horrible on protecting us from terror." "I'm sorta surprised Callaghan got any screen time at all given the Republican convention." "Yes, but I just know that's why the terror alert was raised. Stupid Grover government, playing politics..." "You expected them to do anything else?" "Not really. I'll be so glad when Callaghan is in office." Katze grinned. "Now, you're not campaigning here, tell us how you really feel." Laura looked up at Katze and saw the smile. "Touché. Peace offering?" "Whatcha have in mind?" "You, me, and Mikiko if she shows up, how about we go out to lunch. Let's hit up Tako. Mikiko tolerates the sushi, and you and I haven't had it in a while. Besides it would get us out of this office." "You have a point. What classes are you TAing for this semester?" "Just Psych 1. I mostly have clinical rounds. And you?" "None, actually, I'm taking a writing semester. Professor Von Heilgard loved my thesis on magical thinking, and he thinks I just might have a shot at graduating in May if I just take two writing semesters. And the department actually came up with fellowship money." "Nice. They going to kick you out of our homely little corner?" "Gods, I hope not. It'd feel wrong to be anywhere else than with you and Mikiko, we've shared this office for what, three years?" "Something like." UNDISCLOSED LOCATION SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA 9:30 AM LOCAL TIME "The plan is straight, then. The large majority of you will come up Sproul and spread out across campus so we don't lose her, and a small squad is going to Tolman Hall in an attempt to apprehend the suspect?" "Right." "What about help from jurisdictional police?" "Campus police have agreed to stay out of our way, although the captain I talked to said that he wouldn't risk any officers." "Better than them being actively hostile. Why doesn't he want to participate?" "Sir, he said, and I quote, 'It's goddamn stupid to conduct a raid on Sproul at noon.'" "Screw him. The plan continues." 10:00 AM LOCAL TIME "Secretary of Homeland Security LaFontaine has called a press conference for three PM eastern this afternoon. There is no indication at this time what will be covered at this press conference; however, we assume that it will be discussion on the homeland security move this morning to put the terror level at orange. "Next on CNN, we bring you highlights from last night's Republican convention..." 10:05 AM LOCAL TIME Toby poked his head in the door. "Press conference at noon." Katze looked up from her computer. "Press conference for what?" "They dunno. Secretary LaFontaine just called one." Laura snorted. "Probably just justification for their bumping up to orange. But I'm telling you that it's Callaghan's remarks last night that did it." Toby shrugged his shoulders. "CNN reports it, I just pass on interesting subjects. One was so interesting it made Katze leave for a whole month." "I told you what happened. My grandfather got severely ill. I had to go help with all that." Katze said. Technically, it was correct, Owsen *was* one of the founders of the Jihad, so he could be considered a grand-father. Laura smiled nicely at Toby. "Anyway, Toby, it's nice of you to let us know, but Katze and I are going out to lunch, maybe with Mikiko, at about that time. Keep us posted, though? I'm interested in LaFontaine has to say about this." SPROUL PLAZA BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 10:30 AM LOCAL TIME Students were dragging tables out of storage and setting them up. Traffic would rise over the next couple hours, so you had to get set up fairly early if you want to get a good spot and reach the most students. A couple preachers were ranting and raving already. They would attract a crowd. The Larouchites had their table set up and were busy trying to convince anybody who would listen that the economy was doomed. A couple of students was breaking out the equipment for a noon rally on the steps -- BAMN had gotten permission for their biweekly harangue about affirmative action, the State of California, and the evils of Regent Jean Worley, the guy who was trying to ban affirmative action, and that the only way to protest was to attempt to sack the chancellor's office -- or maybe mess up classes for an afternoon. A lone UCPD officer stood on the steps of the Martin Luther King, Jr. student union, making sure that no trouble seemed to be developing. Everything was rather peaceful at the moment, so he was just hanging out in the shade and making sure that things stayed peaceful. It was going to be a good day, a calm day, despite the BAMN protest, he decided. 10:45 AM LOCAL TIME Mikiko walked into the office, only to find both Katze and Laura each busy at work. "I do not understand how Toby is still passing his classes," Mikiko announced to the room at large. Katze looked up from her typing. "There are many mysteries in this world." "He asked me if I knew about the press conference. I do not care what your Homeland Security does." "Right, but Laura and I care, and Toby probably cares for the same reason." "Yes, but he will be here to tell us about every second of the press conference and I do not want to know about it! Every day he does that." Laura looked up from her work. "No, we're not going to be here at the time of the press conference." "We are not?" "No, Mikiko, Katze and I were going to Tako for lunch, and we were wondering if maybe you wanted to join us." "Anything to get away from here!" "I figured you'd see it that way. Anyway, we'll head out in about another forty-five minutes and just have a nice leisurely walk across campus," Laura said. "That good with you, Katze?" "Works for me," Katze said. 10:55 AM LOCAL TIME "There are rumors floating around Washington that President Grover has requested time from the networks this evening. Sources close to the President are neither confirming nor denying the rumor. Presidents traditionally do not ask for national air time during their convention, but the Grover administration has never been one for tradition. "Secretary LaFontaine's press conference is still scheduled as of three this afternoon. There is still no word what the Secretary plans to address, and sources in Washington are being unusually tight. We'll continue to bring news as we have it. "Next up on CNN is Tom Yeager with the roundup of the international news." SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA 11:00 AM LOCAL TIME "The tour busses are brilliant." "I had pondered using panel trucks, but it would be a mess in this heat. And nobody would notice tour busses around Berkeley, and they park right by Sproul." "Who are you taking with you to Tolman?" "Neatby and Watkins." "Ooh, good choices. Do you really expect our suspect to put up a fight?" "You saw the orders from Washington, we're to consider these people armed and dangerous. And they just very well might be planning something that makes 9/11 look like child's play. You saw that mess out in Nevada, no?" "Yeah, I did." "That's their handiwork. Imagine them doing that to New York or Washington." "Or San Francisco." "Or San Francisco. Anyway, let's load them up, we've got a job to do." SPROUL PLAZA BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 11:10 AM LOCAL TIME The BAMN folks had just about gotten their sound equipment up and traffic was starting to increase on Sproul Plaza. A few more student groups were dragging their tables to less prime spots on the asphalt, but most of the groups that were going to be out here today were already out. And the domain of the lone UCPD officer had stayed rather peaceful the whole time. Oh no, what was that? A Larouchite had broken away from their table and was harassing the guys putting up the sound system. The officer strode across the plaza. "Alright, alright, that's enough shouting. Go back to your table." The Larouchite looked like he was about to argue, but the officer stopped him. "No, if you're going to harass these folks, I'll kick you and your friends off campus. You're not a registered student group and you technically shouldn't be flyering here." With a last word of "...stupid fascist cops", the Larouchite returned to his table. The officer looked up at the two young men assembling the sound system, "'Lo Hector, Abdul." Hector, a small Hispanic man, looked up from his work, smiled. "Hey, Officer Jenkins, you busy keeping an eye on us for your fascist masters?" Jenkins grinned back. "Only to stop your anarchist ways, you know." Abdul, who was Arab in complexion and taller than Hector, came over. "Officer Jenkins, thanks for not beating us over the head with a billy club last spring when we took over Wheeler," he said, a slight Arabic accent hidden in his speech. "You're welcome, but thanks for breaking up the protest peacefully when we asked you to leave. What's the plans for today's rally?" Jenkins asked. Abdul pondered the sky for a second and then responded. "Nothing major. We're just going to yell outside Chancellor O'Keefe's office for a few hours. We promise not to try to invade California Hall this time." "Aw, Abdul, you weren't supposed to tell him that! He's a cop!" Hector cried. Jenkins smiled. "Well, yes, but I'm also here to keep your bunch somewhat out of trouble. I know, I know, Hector, by any means necessary, but you don't have to do stupid things in that name." His radio chose that moment to crackle. "Officer Jenkins, what's your 10-20?" "Excuse me a moment, boys," Jenkins said to Hector and Abdul, and then clicked his radio. "On Savio Steps, keeping the peace." The radio crackled again. "Be advised, the chief has ordered all officers off Sproul Plaza during the noon rush." Jenkins frowned. Hector and Abdul both wore varying expressions of shock and dismay. "10-4 10-19. Jenkins 10-26." "Dispatch 10-26." Jenkins looked back up. "I know you heard the radio, I'm not going to ask you to ignore it. Just, please, boys, please pass word to your compatriots that although there's no police to baby-sit them, they really need to stay out of trouble." "Isn't it odd for them to call you off Sproul? Why would they do that?" Abdul said. "Beats me. Anyway, please stay out of trouble." Jenkins watched a smile slowly grow across Hector's face. "Hector, I'm serious here. You don't know why. There's worse things that your friendly neighborhood UCPD." "Yeah, well, fuck the police!" Hector said. Abdul sighed. "I'll keep him out of trouble, Officer. The best I can." Jenkins nodded. "Thanks, Abdul. Now, I've got to go back to station and see if I can find out why they're pulling me off Sproul." He turned to climb the stairs up to the entrance of Sproul Hall, the campus administration building, if only because it was quicker to climb these stairs and drop back down a flight than it would be to walk around to the station in the basement. UCPD STATION, BASEMENT OF SPROUL HALL BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 11:25 AM LOCAL TIME "Yes, I am quite aware of that. Thank you, Chancellor, we'll keep your input in mind. Police Chief Patricia Martel was beginning to rethink the sanity of her job. Was it really only five years ago she was named the first woman to head a major university police force? It was something she was considering more often these days, and she wondered if maybe it was time to retire to her farm in Marin. Especially today. Captain Ortega had informed her three hours ago that the Feds were intending to come to Berkeley and raid Sproul at noon today and that was simply a headache she did not need. To be frank, she was angry at whoever ordered this without consulting with UCPD first. If there was something on campus they needed, they were *supposed* to run it through the UCPD first. Martel had been a cop for far too long to ignore the instincts that were screaming this was going to be a travesty. But Ortega said he'd warned them against the foolhardiness of invading Sproul at noon and was told point blank that they planned to do it anyway. The chancellor and other high muckity-mucks in the University hierarchy were already screaming at her to do something about this, and were not happy when she said that her hands were tied. The best she could do was keep her officers from getting hurt. But that had brought Officer Paul Jenkins in front of her right this second questioning her decision. He'd just come in from Sproul, where he'd had the 10 to 1 shift out there. Of course, she would have been sending Sergeant Ramirez out to join him for the noon rush, but this noon raid was preoccupying her thoughts. Jenkins was a good officer and he had a rapport with the kids that didn't go unnoticed. There was some talk of promoting him to Sergeant in the next promotional period, but right now, Martel was wondering of the wisdom of this idea. "Sir, with all due respect, is it really wise to have no officers on Sproul?" "Officer, it's not your place to criticize my orders. I made the decision to talk to you because I understand my orders were somewhat surprising, but I can't discuss my reasons for pulling you off Sproul with you." "Ma'am, you do realize BAMN had the stairs for a rally today, right? And the Larouchites are out tabling, and probably the SJP is as well. And the Communists *always* show up when BAMN has a rally. Same with Berkeley High students. And you never can trust the Berkeley College Republicans to not stir up trouble when they have half a chance. You need an officer out there." Martel sighed even more. Oh great, she'd forgotten BAMN had a rally today. Well, that confirmed her decision that taking Jenkins and Ramirez off the Plaza was the right one. It also meant that she was powerless to stop the coming storm, and she only hoped that none of the students got hurt either. Jenkins stood there, looking at her, waiting for her. So much pressure. "Officer, I do not want these words repeated outside of here. A federal team of some sort is after something, and they have mentioned their intention to run a large force through Sproul Plaza at noon. We attempted to warn them that this was not a wise idea and they are insistent that they still plan to do it. We simply agreed to stay out of their way." He looked suddenly stunned. "It's going to be a mess out there." Martel sighed. "You're severely underestimating it." "Did they give any reason for this?" "None." "Well, shit. Pardon my language, sir." "I've been saying worse all morning. Now please do not go back out there." "I understand, sir. Permission to attempt to stop the rally?" "Didn't I just order you to stay off Sproul? Never mind. If you think you can stop it, do so. Just be back in the station at 11:45 and no later." "Yes, sir." The phone rang just then. Martel picked it up. "Hello? Yes, hello, President Lyman. No, I don't know what they wanted..." She looked up, and Jenkins was gone. She wished him luck. They were going to need it. COWALL, SCOTLAND 7:35 PM LOCAL TIME "Listen up, lads. I know the timing of this operation is rather sudden, and I appreciate each and every one of you for stepping up to the line." Sergeant Michael Callahan steadied himself as the Metropolitan Police Force SWAT van he was in wobbled down the uneven country road. He was kneeled on the floor, surrounded by five of Scotland Yard's best Anti-Terrorism specialists. He'd been leading this hazard element for the better part of a year now, and he'd had little doubt that they'd be up for the challenge. "As most of you already know, MI5 is coordinating a joint strike with the American federals against the leadership of an alleged extremist faction calling itself simply 'the Jihad.' Operations was planning a standard pre-dawn op, but the Americans, against all common sense, are mobilizing in the middle of the day; you know how they like their theatrics." A general murmur of dissent went up. "So in order to minimize risk of flight, we're synchronizing our op with others worldwide. Fortunately for us, we at least have the cover of dusk to work with." Callahan unfolded a blueprint and spread it out on the floor, highlighting it in the dim van with his flashlight. "The target is a 17th century tower house, recently restored, two floors. Surveillance has determined two points of entry, here, the main entry from the courtyard, and here, what's likely the kitchen." He produced a photograph from his thigh pocket and laid it over the map. "Suspect is a male Caucasian, 170 centimeters, 70 kilos. He is considered to be well-armed and extremely dangerous, so we're taking no chances in apprehending him. We also expect to apprehend a female Caucasian, allegedly the suspect's wife." Callahan handed the photograph to one of the lads, and as it was passed around he turned his attention back to the map. "The surrounding terrain is flat, and the cover is dismal. There's a small stand of trees about thirty meters to the southwest that will mask our initial approach, but once we're clear of that we'll have to hope the sunset at our backs will obscure us enough." General grumbling. None of them liked the odds of that. "We'll make our approach two abreast, gents. Red team will break to the north side of the building and take position at the rear entrance. Blue and Orange teams will break to the south side. Blue will stake up at the main entrance while Orange proceeds to the east end of the building. On my signal, Orange will deploy CS through the upper story window and then backtrack to meet up with Blue. Blue and Red will deploy CS canisters through the lower story windows, and, on my signal, breach, bang and clear. We don't have a lot of intelligence on the interior so we'll be winging it from there. Any questions?" There were none. This kind of operation was old hat to this crew. Callahan checked his watch. "All right. ETA is fifteen minutes. Let's gear up, lads." TOLMAN HALL BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 11:35 AM LOCAL TIME Katze, Laura, and Mikiko walked out the door next to the psych library, into a land with a deep blue sky. They stood there for a second, wondering which way they should go. Katze offered to show them the route past the Chancellor's house and around Haviland to the major north-south axis of campus, which would pass through Sproul Plaza on the way to Telegraph Avenue, where Tako was. They walked single file down to the bridge over the north fork of Strawberry canyon, and stood there for a few minutes, pondering the creek and the fence it disappeared into upstream, the fence that gave the Chancellor a backyard. Katze, who had been behind the fence once her freshman year for a scholarship reception, let the other two know about the beautiful gardens they were missing. They continued walking around the north side of Haviland Hall, home of the social welfare department, and then cut south through the parking lot, which put them on the main road through campus. Katze pointed to the asphalt path past Memorial Glade, where a few students were already taking advantage of by sunbathing or playing a rousing game of frisbee. Tranquility was all there was. SPROUL PLAZA 11:40 AM LOCAL TIME Jenkins emerged from the building. More of the BAMN contingent had arrived, and Abdul was standing somewhat away from the larger bunch of them. The flow of traffic had increased over the last twenty minutes. This made Jenkins wince knowing what was about to transpire. But he had to hope he could stop it. Jenkins walked over to Abdul. "Abdul?" Abdul jumped, startled. And then he turned. "Oh, hello, Officer Jenkins. What's up, why are you back out here?" "Cancel the rally. Please, for god's sake, cancel the rally." "I, unfortunately, don't have that power, and Hector's got more sway over the folks that make the decisions. Why?" Abdul asked. Jenkins shook his head and looked crestfallen. "I can't really tell you, Abdul, I've been sworn to secrecy. But if anything happens on Sproul, please come inside the building. I'm going to report back to the chief and then take a seat on the second floor, in front of financial aid. Please come up and find me, Abdul, please." "Okay, Officer Jenkins. But the rest of the BAMN contingent?" "Tell them to stay out of trouble. But I doubt it'll do any good." BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 11:45 AM LOCAL TIME "Alright, gentlemen. We're here, and we begin in fifteen minutes. I believe it is my job to inform you what we will be doing. "There is a suspected terrorist on the UC Berkeley campus." The man speaking at the front of the bus waited for the cries to die down. When the bus had grown quiet again, the man continued. "I have here a picture of the suspect, one Katze Brenner," he said, pronouncing the first name with one syllable instead of two. "The suspect is most likely in Tolman Hall, where we have sent three other agents, but it is highly possible that the suspect could be anywhere. So while we are mainly serving as distraction, we are keeping an eye out for her. Please take a close look at the picture. If you see her, you are to call on the radio for the rest of us to surround her. She is to be considered armed and highly dangerous, so don't take any chances. "I remind you that there may be others on this campus, as well. So I want weapons out and ready. You are not to put up with any guff, and you are first to clear the plaza before spreading out over the campus. We will advance in a line up the plaza towards Sather Gate, forcing folks ahead of us to get out of the way. Be ready for anything, and I mean *anything*." Patricia Martel looked up at the crestfallen face of her officer, Paul Jenkins. She knew immediately that things were about to come to a crest. "It didn't go well, did it?" "No, sir," he said, somewhat stunned. "The student I know in BAMN with a straight head on his shoulders doesn't have much sway within the organization." Martel drummed her fingers on the desk. This was bad, very very bad. Hotheads on the one side, armed federal agents on the other. Her farm in Marin sounded very nice right about now... Jenkins squirmed a bit in the silence, and he said, finally, "With your permission, sir, I'd like to take one of the department video cameras up to the second floor and tape this." Martel stopped drumming her fingers. "That's a good idea. Go ahead. At least we can prove we didn't have anything to do with the coming fiasco." Jenkins nodded and turned away. Martel looked at him. "Paul?" she said, calling her officer by his first name for the first time. He turned and looked back. Martel said. "Paul, if you're the praying sort, pray that we don't have another Kent State on our hands." He nodded, and left the room, leaving Martel alone with her thoughts. She stared at the wall for a few minutes, and then picked up the phone. Lyman and O'Keefe had better be ready for anything. A large crowd was starting to gather. Some of it was traffic from students heading to class, some of it was people who were arriving for the rally, and some were just folks hanging out to watch the goings on. Sproul was a popular place for people watching, so much so that 'Sprouling' had entered the local lexicon as a synonym for that very activity. Traffic was higher than usual as well because it was the first couple weeks of school, and people had to buy textbooks. The store was in the basement of the Student Union, so folks often cut through Sproul to get there. So it was the perfect place for the Cal Student Orientation staff to set up their stuff for freshmen who were struggling with their classes or just the whole process of being at a rather large state university, as well as tidbits for students who knew the ropes. Today, somebody had hung some balloons on the top of the canopy right in the sun, and they'd been there for the last hour on one of the hottest days of the year. It was a bouquet of dark blue and gold balloons that somebody had brought to make the canopy more visible to Cal students. Nobody in the plaza thought anything more than that it was nothing more than a normal Monday in late August, just like all the years before. THE SPIRAL BUILDING DENVER, COLORADO 12:50 PM LOCAL TIME Dr. Jonathan Fnord was well-known among the Spiral office workers as a person who liked to work through the lunch hour. As a consequence, when most of the staff went out for the noon lunch rush, Dr. Fnord, his daughter and a handful of others would, for all intents and purposes, be the only ones in the building. Especially on a beautiful Colorado late summer day. This would end up being quite fortunate. Mal was in his office on the top floor going over the most recent progress reports from the R&D division. It had taken a bit of work to get the mundane scientists to accept his "inventions," but at the current rate Mal was certain that they would have a fully-operational nanofactory setup ready for public release by the end of 2005. Minerva had joined him for the lunch hour and had parked her bioshell on a couch near the west window, letting it take a well-deserved nap while she surfed the Denver information flow. Suddenly, her eyes snapped open and she sat upright. "Something's up," she announced. Mal was buried in technical reports and paid only a little attention. "Hm?" "Traffic on the police bands just spiked. Lots of encryption, too. Looks like DPD is going to make a big bust... hang on." Minerva cocked her head to one side as she analyzed the transmissions. "Huh. That's odd, I'm hearing FBI and ATF authorization codes in this, too." "The target is on the top floor of the building. Our job is secure the ground floor and all the exits; our FBI friends will take care of going to the top and apprehending the suspect. If he manages to slip past, remember that he's to be considered armed and extremely dangerous, so don't take any chances." KINGMAN, ARIZONA 12:52 PM LOCAL TIME "Goddamn hydraulics... this is all so much easier without all this stone-age crap," Dee muttered to herself as she tightened some fittings to a hydraulic cylinder. Despite the grumblings though, she was proud of her creation. It was a perverse thing, especially given many of the things she'd worked on in the Jihad, but over the course of 2 years of free time here and there, Dee had managed to piece together a powered exoskeleton using nothing but mundane technology. It was even armored and everything; admittedly it would be a pushover compared to any Jihad technology or even a tank, and it also needed a power cable at the moment, but it was mostly intended to impress the shit out of people at gun shows anyway. The last of the fittings got tightened and she rechecked the electrical connections before latching the access panel. Standing, she checked the time from the computer in her artificial arm as she wiped her brow with the other. "Dammit, I wonder where Damo is with lunch." She turned around from the power armor and squinted across the horizon, barely making out a black speck trailed by a bit of a dust cloud. The shop truck was a faded red, and they weren't expecting any visitors. She went inside the shop and took a pair of field binoculars, focusing in on the vehicle. "Chevy Suburban... two of them..." she muttered. "Driv... oh shit." The driver and passengers on both vehicles were in full assault garb; helmets, body armor and the rest. She barely made out "FBI" on one's chest. At a thought she sent off a quick cellphone text message to Damo; "FBI incoming in force. Geared for assault. Closing shop." And then she got very busy. Athena Heavy Industries being located out in the middle of the desert, with nothing around it in a 5 mile radius was no accident. There were all sorts of benefits... land was cheap, there was a lot of empty space to drive around or set up firing ranges in, no neighbors to complain about noise... and you could see anyone approaching from a very long ways away. So Dee knew she had a good 5-10 minutes to get everything that they didn't want people to see out into the bunker behind the building. It *COULD* have been a perfectly legitimate reason to have the FBI out here geared for assault, but it was absolutely imperative that there was no chance of finding anything that was too high-tech... and besides there were a lot of things that she and Damo didn't want to lose. She knew exactly what that entailed and where everything was, and there was a lot of it. Fortunately, this is something that had been anticipated. Damocles was every bit as paranoid as she was, and thus they had a plan laid out for something like this. The cart was exactly where it was supposed to be, and a lot of the guns were stored within arm's reach. Computers were shut down anyway, so the hard drives got pulled and added to the pile... and a lot of stuff was already in the bunker anyway. So the load of the cart only came to 130 pounds; they had weighed it before. Well, there was one thing that was left out, but it might come in handy and really was too big to load anyway. Panting from the exertion, she pushed the cart towards the backdoor, using her arm's computer to trigger the remote and open it, and then let go as the cart rolled down the slope towards the bunker. Really, it was more of a glorified gun safe that happened to be dug into the ground. Bank vault would be another way to think of it, Dee thought, as she leaned all her weight against the massive door and finally threw the bolts. She ran back to the building as she triggered another remote, this one dumping a load of sand over the entrance of the bunker to disguise its existence. MLK STUDENT UNION BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 11:53 AM LOCAL TIME "So John, what are we doing?" "I'm setting up my video camera to get establishing shots for my movie." "You're working on *another* movie?" "Hush. This one's about the life of a typical Cal student." THE SPIRAL BUILDING DENVER, COLORADO 12:54 PM LOCAL TIME "Come on, decrypt dammit, I know this key works... Aha! Finally! Now let's see what you're supposed to..." Minerva's voice trailed off as she listened to the decrypted police traffic. "Something wrong?" Mal inquired. "It's... Boss, they're going to raid the building!" "Raid the- our building!?" "I don't know -why-, but they're going to hit the building in five minutes! What the hell is going on here?" "Don't look at me, I haven't violated any laws recently... okay. Okay." Mal pressed his fingertips to his temples. "Calm now, panic later. The federales are on their way here. Five minutes. All right. Plan. Got it." He looked up. "Min, you're moving back to Blanca right now. Before you go, hit the fire alarm. I want the building as close to totally evacuated as possible by the time the cops arrive. I'll wait for them to arrive-" Mal held up a hand "-and I don't want to hear any arguments; it would be impolite not to receive guests. Besides, I want to know what they're up to." "But," Minerva asked, "how will you get out?" Mal smiled darkly. "With a bang. Don't worry, I'll meet up with you soon." Minerva frowned, but nodded her head, and as the fire alarm began to ring, she called up a portal and stepped through. Mal sat back in his chair and tapped thoughtfully at his desk terminal. Time to make some preparations of his own. Since the excitement during the spring, the assembled Jihaddi had agreed to maintain on the lookout for any signs that their longtime enemies were making more moves. As a result, Blanca remained operational and on the fullest alert status the twelve remaining Jihaddi could maintain - which, admittedly, wasn't much. But it beat getting caught off guard again. Their inability to manage that, Minerva thought darkly to herself, seemed to be chronic. "Who's on duty?" she asked aloud, trusting that her innate links to the base computer network would transfer her question up to the situation room. "It's me." Aris Merquoni's voice came back from the nearest intercom speakers. "Pupp's up here too; he just got off shift though, he's sacked out in the back. What're you doing here in the middle of the day?" "We have a problem." SPROUL HALL 11:55 AM LOCAL TIME Officer Jenkins sat in the 2nd floor window of Sproul Hall, holding one of the UCPD's video cameras. They usually used them to shoot footage of protests and the Big Game so they could identify and prosecute students who had gotten out of hand. He adjusted the tripod on the small balcony-like structure just outside the window, and screwed the camera onto it. He looked out over the scene. Underneath him, on Savio Steps, the BAMN folks were just about to get underway. He could see Hector standing at the mike ready to go, and Abdul was standing a bit away. Across the way, on the balcony -- the restricted balcony -- of the Student Union, there were a couple of students setting up their own video camera. At least he wouldn't be the only one taking shots of this, and that outweighed the two students being where they shouldn't be. On the plaza near the stairs, there was a large crowd. BAMN was really pulling them in today, but he wondered how many of the students watching were freshmen who just wanted to catch the Berkeley air and participate in a protest. He hoped the feds were smart enough to avoid this, but he doubted that. So now it was just that he hoped Abdul would take him up on his offer. 11:57 AM LOCAL TIME A student getting off a 51 bus couldn't help but gawk at the large amount of people wearing body armor labeled FBI and carrying lots of weaponry. He could see seven or eight shotguns, and about that many rifles, and they all wore sidearms. He wondered what they could be here for, and then decided it was none of his business, and walked onto Sproul Plaza to go to his noon class. 11:59 AM LOCAL TIME Officer Jenkins turned on his video camera. Chief Martel sat in her office waiting for the clock to tick to noon. Abdul tried to get the attention of the person who could be considered the leader of BAMN, if BAMN could be said to have a leader. Hector grinned rather largely at the crowd and flicked on the microphone. The traffic flow on Sproul, which was highest between 12 noon and 12:10, during the class change, increased. Students shoved flyers in other students' faces. Other students hawked their student groups as if they were precious wares to be found in no other bazaar. The two students on the Student Union balcony swung their camera towards the Telegraph end of the Plaza. Toby watched a CNN anchor say "Stay tuned for the Secretary of Homeland Security's press conference." A car with government plates pulled up in front of Tolman Hall and three men piled out. The feds at Sproul formed a line across the Telegraph end of the Plaza and prepared to move. Katze, Laura, and Mikiko crossed Campanille Way and were mere minutes from Sproul Plaza. Up in the Campanille, the gears turned. The hands moved. The bell tolled the first chime for the hour. And things were set in motion which could not be undone. FAYETTEVILLE, ARKANSAS 2:00 PM LOCAL TIME Tangaroa nibbled his doughnut, sipped his coffee, and glanced through the hotel's newspaper. There was an article in the local section: "Terrorist Threat Closes Regional Airport". It looked like he'd be staying at the hotel today. He turned on the television news to see if they had anything about it. It certainly wasn't about him. Any competent police agency would have busted in and arrested him before sunrise. There was nothing about it on the news, so he turned to a movie. What Tang was up to could certainly be viewed as highly suspicious. He'd leased a helicopter to cart loads of explosives off into the Ozarks for no-one knew what purpose except him and Killjoy, who had provided the materials and transportation to Arkansas but had just up and checked out of the hotel a few days ago without telling Tang. Killjoy had a sixth sense about things, and maybe Tang should have taken that as a hint but it was just as likely that the eccentric giant had some personal things to take care of. When Owsen was going on his rampage, he had insisted that an unstoppable "Scourge" was coming to destroy humanity. Although that could have come out of his Lyran-driven insanity, Tangaroa wasn't going to take the risk that it wasn't. All signs from Owsen's return pointed to the Lyrans preparing to launch another attack, and Tang hadn't seen enough signs from the Triumvirate to feel secure that they were taking the chance of such a threat seriously. Rather than being idle, he wanted to do something to strengthen the Jihad's position. With no known enemies on Earth and the Jihad not recruiting at the moment, his options were limited. And one option was very attractive to Tangaroa. If there were a war and the retirees started streaming back, two bases in different parts of the country would be better to have than one. Besides, Tang had his own personal reasons for going back into Delta, mainly that he'd left stuff down there when the Doberman base was decommissioned. It would take a lot of time for Tangaroa to blast his way into the place, even longer now that KJ had taken off. Wrapping things up with his girlfriend's family in Japan had already taken more time than it should have. If there was a Scourge coming and Tang couldn't outrace it, at least the base would be closer to ready than it would be if it remained untouched. Right now, his chief objective was to get all of the explosives out to the forest next to the base and of civilian sight before it caused any trouble. Then he could start blasting. A few minutes later, he picked up sounds of distress coming from the hotel's pool area. He turned off the TV, opened the window looking out over the pool so he could hear better, and looked outside. People were scrambling out of the pool and peering over the fence at something interesting in the parking lot. Something in the back of his mind told Tangaroa that this was a good time to leave. He started towards the door and heard the thunder of many heavy boots coming down the hallway. Not good. He roasted his Jihadlinker. If he escaped from this and got back to Blanca or Spiral, he wouldn't need it. Otherwise, it was a liability. Whoever was approaching kicked down the door without bothering to knock, but Tangaroa was already running for the window. "Federal agent! Freeze and put your hands on your head!" Tangaroa threw himself against the window screen shoulder first, popping it out and falling to the ground on the other side. The windowpanes in the other panel shattered, a few tiny shards cutting into in his hip. Looking up from the ground in a mild daze, he saw a tiny plume of dust rise from the concrete halfway across the pool and thought it better to roll to the side before standing up. He dashed past the sign saying [NO RUNNING IN POOL AREA] and shouted at the few people still milling by the fence. "Get down! They're shooting!" he lied desperately. He ran into a mess of bodies trying to escape through the stone gatehouse and emerged through the other side into a triad of black-suited bodies, knocking them to the ground, tripping on someone else's ankle, and falling down himself. He started to get up and a heavy blow struck him on the shoulder, knocking him back down. He looked to his left and saw the foot of someone still standing. Ready to cripple him, Tangaroa reached a hand out to begin casting a fire blade spell but stopped when he felt a cold steel cylinder at the top of his neck. "Don't move or you're dead." At least they gave him the choice. Tangaroa didn't move. He'd have better luck escaping after they took him in, anyway. THE SPIRAL BUILDING DENVER, COLORADO 1:00 PM LOCAL TIME When the police arrived outside the Spiral building, they found three fire trucks blocking the plaza outside the main entrance and about a half-dozen firefighters trying to keep a couple hundred office workers and curious pedestrians away from the building. The lead FBI agent in charge of the operation was outraged. "What the hell is this?" he yelled. The fire captain jogged up to the police contingent. "Great, you guys are a godsend," he said, "we need help with crowd control.." "Never mind that," growled the Fed, "what in hell are you doing here?" "We got a call that the Spiral building had a fire. We're firefighters. -You- figure it out." "Call your men back." The Fed said with the imperious tone that only comes from being a member of federal law enforcement. "We need to apprehend a dangerous fugitive in the building. Likely he's pulled the fire alarm to sow confusion. You're putting your men at unnecessary risk, Captain." The captain looked dubiously at the Fed. "I don't know about that," he said slowly, "if there is a fire, we're putting the entire downtown at risk if we let it collapse..." "THERE IS NO-" the Fed's face went red and swelled, then suddenly went slack. "All right, whatever. Check out the building, but don't go above the twentieth floor unless we tell you otherwise. Understand?" "I wish I understood what was going on here, but..." "But you don't need to understand, this is a Federal matter involving terrorism, got me?" "Oh. Oh! Right. Can I at least keep the uniforms for crowd control?" "Is the building evacuated?" "As far as we can tell, yeah." "Then you're more than welcome to. Now, if you'll excuse us.." The Fed turned and barked orders to a group of fifteen agents dressed in black body armor with "FBI" painted on the front and back. The group picked up their weapons and charged past the puzzled onlookers and into the building. The fire captain looked at them for a moment, then went to tell the cops that they were on crowd duty and to tell his crews inside to stay below the 20th floor until further notice. BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 12:00 PM LOCAL TIME It was one of those seconds that seemed to last forever, the world waiting in anticipation of what was about to happen. And then the sonorous bells of the Campanile chimed out the hour, twelve bells for high noon. Officer Paul Jenkins of the UCPD could only watch and wait from his second story window and hope nothing horrible happened. At the Telegraph Avenue entrance to the Plaza, the squad commander of the Feds cried out, "Let's go!" and they were off, the fifteen of them, working their way up Sproul Plaza, herding people in front of them. Most people were smart enough to let themselves be herded, but a few people decided that it would be fun to be a pain, and those idiots usually found themselves on the receiving end of a shove and an order to continue forward. One would-be rabble-rouser was a little smarter than most, though, and made a beeline to where Hector had just started speaking. Hector stopped for a second, listened to the person who had come up to him, and then, surprisingly calmly, said, "Ladies and gentlemen, it appears we have company. The fascist pigs in this administration aren't simply content with gutting the right for Latinos and African-Americans to attend school, but they send people to break up our protests and destroy our work! The Feds are here! Let's show them that we're not going to take it!" The crowd roared, and Hector left the mike where it was, jumped out into the crowd and made for the south side of it, where the Feds were just approaching. Jenkins, up in the window overlooking this, muttered quietly, "Hector, you're an idiot." Abdul, who had decided too late that maybe calling off the rally was a good thing, stopped and stood in shock at what he heard Hector say, and the approaching Feds. He stood there frozen as the crowd started shouting "Fuck the police!" and "Fucking feds!" He stood there for a beat more, and then beat a hasty retreat to the doors of Sproul Hall just behind him. The herded crowd smashed into the crowd like a neutron smashing into a block of uranium. Nobody could keep track of where anybody was in the swirling currents of humanity. The student orientation staff, them and their tables pinched between angry students on one side and armed federal agents on the other, abandoned their post and threw themselves into the mob. The squad commander evaluated the situation and decided it was time to fall back away from the crowd that seemed to be sizing them up. Even with fifteen men, there were too many students to make this mission possible. Better to pull back than to risk his men, his boss would just have to understand. But as he was taking the time to make this decision, one of those little things happened that changes the course of history. One of the retreating staff had knocked the canopy and some of the tables over in the process of escaping. From the point of view of the feds, there were a few loud bangs that sounded as if somebody had attempted to shoot at them from the middle of this chaos, and a couple of the Feds, already a bit twitchy from their orders that morning, responded about the only way they really could -- by discharging their weapons into the crowd. KINGSMAN, ARIZONA 1:01 PM LOCAL TIME "So what do you think that thing in the front of the building is?" "Fuck, how should I know? Modern art maybe. It looks kind of like sculpture in a way... something out of a cartoon." The FBI troopers piled out of the Surburbans and assumed ready positions in the sand, rifles trained on the building. This far out in the middle of nowhere they didn't have to worry about a lot of things... no civilians, no press, nothing. "This is the FBI. We have a warrant for the arrest of Andrew Wyatt and Deidre Greist. Come out with your hands up, or we will be forced to use force. You have one minute to comply." "Forced to use force?" one of them hissed, a barely controlled chuckle in his voice. "Shut up." "Are you sure this is the right place? These two are supposed to be heavily armed; they make guns!" Just then there was movement by the building. To the astonishment of everyone the piece of modern art straightened up slightly; it looked much more like an armored person now. And more importantly what had looked like a support pillar before now resembled a very very large rifle. "Oh shit... open fire!" yelled one of them an instant before the autocannon fire split one of the Suburbans in half. DENVER, COLORADO 1:02 PM LOCAL TIME Lacroix bustled around his apartment, getting some last-minute things together. He definitely wasn't minding how the schedule looked to be working out for the upcoming school year; through some accident of course layouts he had several periods off in the middle of the day, which had the advantage of giving him a really, really long lunch hour. This let Lacroix get the opportunity to run home for things at times, which would still let him get back in time for the last classes of the day. Granted, he also got nabbed with overseeing a few of the after-school clubs the students were organizing. The writer's circle would be great fun to supervise, and Lacroix considered that something of a treat. On the other hand, whichever someone handed out the intramural assignments also stuck Lacroix - a devout if liberal Catholic - with the afterschool Christian fellowship, which was more than a little off in the conservative Protestant camp. Not that Lacroix couldn't keep his own views out of what was after all the students' group, but the good Lord knew it wouldn't help his blood pressure much. "Oh well, I've still got my job," Lacroix muttered to himself as he collected a stack of papers and lesson plans for the afternoon's class. He made a mental note to call up Minerva and thank her for saving his ass career-wise later. It was kind of odd, he thought to himself as he paused a moment to look out the window at the beautiful day outside. Lacroix had spent the past few months strobing back and forth between his Jihad and Mundane lives to find himself back in the latter again. He was still processing the events of the spring; the news of Owsen's return, the reconstitution of some of the Jihad, the hunt and chase spanning most of the United States, that final clash in Dry Well. It seemed to go on forever at the time, especially the times when Lacroix was actually in battle (or worse, on the sidelines watching someone else in it), but looking back on the calendar Lacroix was out on his "medical leave of absence" for only about two months. He shook his head again, bemused again that time in the Jihad still felt like that the second time around, and hefted his shoulder bag, now full of all sorts of academic horror for his upcoming seventh-period class. He winced a bit as he took the weight on his right arm, a bit annoyed that the wound from April still twinged now and then. Lacroix started walking towards his apartment door when he heard a sound in his bedroom. Oh, duh, he thought, he'd left the TV on. He quickly walked back to the other room, rolled his eyes at the news ticker mentioning Grover planning yet another substanceless speech about terrorism sometime later, and turned it off, plunging the apartment into silence. As soon as he turned the TV off, he heard the sound of booted footsteps - a lot of them, from the sound of it - pounding across part of the apartment. It sounded like it was coming up the staircase at the other end of the hallway, coming towards his apartment door. "What the -?" he started thinking to himself. He had only started walking towards the living room to see what was up when he heard a loud slamming noise coming from the door, followed by a second slamming noise as the door fell to the entry floor, followed by stomping noises as those same booted feet hurried over it into his apartment. "FBI! We know you're in here!" one of the figures shouted. "Come out slowly, with your hands up!" Well, shit. COWALL, SCOTLAND 8:02 PM LOCAL TIME In the upper-floor bedroom of a certain recently-restored 17th century tower house, Keili Lamont sat upright on her bed, legs tucked beneath her under the covers. There was a bit of worry in her oddly violet eyes as she watched her husband as he poked ineffectually at the wood burning in their fireplace. She voiced this worry to him. "I know," he replied, straightening up. He placed his hands in the small of his back and stretched, eliciting a series of crackles which always made her wince. That wasn't what worried her, though. It was the series of mottled stains that covered that back, looking for all the world like faint tiger-stripes. Her husband, who went by the name of Kirk these days but at other times was called Nemesis, looked over his shoulder, trying to smile in a reassuring way. How many times lately had this very same conversation taken place in this very same room? How many months had it been? "It's been almost five months," she said, as though answering his unspoken question. But then, they'd never really had to speak to each other at all to know what the other was thinking; that was one of the special things about them. "We knew it could happen," he said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. He rubbed at his tired and pained eyes; he'd had to resort to wearing colored contacts to at least put on a facade of normality, and lately it seemed like the burning sensation that came with them never ceased. "I showed ye the report from my last TRES physical. The notes about instability." "That was so long ago, though," Keili said, crawling forward to wrap her arms around his torso in a hug from behind. "You haven't changed all that often since then." She sat there in silent thought for a moment, cheek pressed against his warm back. "Are you going to tell them?" she asked. "If I think it's important. I don't think it is, right now." "It's important to me." Kirk sighed, turning in her arms to press a gentle kiss on her forehead. "Aye, I know." A thought was nagging him, and he couldn't help but chuckle at it before he asked, "Will ye still love if I'm a monster?" Before she could answer, the first of the windows in the little tower room shattered. In the spray of glass a small black object tumbled, rebounding off of the foot of the opposite wall with a metallic thud. Neither of them had to see the first plumes of greasy white smoke come curling from the little canister as it spun on the floor before they could recognize it for what it was. "Gas!" KINGSMAN, ARIZONA 1:03 PM LOCAL TIME "God. Fucking. DAMMIT." Dee swore as she put on the shoulder holster with her pistol, then her riding jacket. "I fucking spent 2 years on that metal bastard, and I don't know if I can ever get another autocannon... the wrecked fighter was a great find." She grabbed her motorcycle helmet and emergency bag and stalked into the other room, furious. The video feed from the power armor was superimposed on her vision in one corner; the modified Quake 3 bot AI controlling it seemed to be doing a good job of keeping the FBI agents screaming for help on their radios without killing them. "FUCKERS!" she swore again, overriding it for a moment and pouring a full second of continuous fire into the second Suburban, the one that they weren't hiding behind. The 30 rounds of high explosive 20mm cannon fire reduced the SUV to scrap metal almost instantly in a tremendous display of firepower and made her feel a little bit better. She set it back to automatic and it went back to using single shots to keep everyone hiding. Her bike was ready to go, as always. She damn well wouldn't leave -that- behind. She paused as she pulled on her helmet and opened a Jihadlinker line. Maybe she could call in a favor. "Hey Mal," she said in her most innocent-sounding voice, "I've got some FBI agents pinned down with heavy gunfire here, and I was wondering if I could ask for a big favor and get a gate out of here." "Dee?" The voice the responded was too high a register for Mal, and Dee blinked. "Min? What're you doing on the line?" "Long story. You said you've got FBI agents pinned down?" "Yeah... it's a long story." "You don't know the half of it, Dee-chan. Stand by, I'll get you a gate in a couple of seconds." Dee blinked, then flinched as the bot blew up something large and hard in the background. "That was easy." "Something funny's going on. The Spiral building's being raided." "WHAT!?" Dee yelped, the sound and fury behind her forgotten. "Raided!? By who? -Why?- What..." "Yes, by the Feds, and no we don't know why yet..." Minerva paused. "Hang on," she continued, a note of suspicion in her voice, "why were -you- expecting the FBI?" "Er... hey, what about Damo?" Dee hastily changed the subject. "Got a hold of him on his Linker. He's safe - we'll pull him through once you're here. Gate in five seconds. Ready?" "Anytime." BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 12:03 PM LOCAL TIME Hector, who had just made it to the point that he could just about get in a Fed's face, happened to unfortunately choose a Fed who had chosen to fire. He reeled back in surprise and shock at the loud roar, looked down at his white shirt which was quickly turning bright red, and fell over onto the plaza. Screams echoed over the plaza, as others who were hit reacted. The squad commander, who was about to issue the fallback order, heard the pops and the immediate return of fire. "Cease fire!" he frantically yelled. "Cease fire!" And then upon seeing the rest of the crowd surge forward, he issued the order he had meant to: "Fall back! Retreat! Now!" Jenkins sat in his window blinking at what he had just caught on tape. He'd heard the pops too, and wondered if there was somebody in the crowd who had been stupid enough to actually fire a gun at the FBI, but the sound didn't sound right. He hesitated, playing the "what would I do in this situation" game, and then decided that he would have held fire. But on the other hand, he was familiar with these Berkeley kids, and knew a lot of them were better than the rabble-rousers they liked to portray themselves as, and he had no idea what their orders might have been. He looked at his wristwatch. It was 12:03 PM. Three minutes. It seemed longer. The crowd underneath him swirled in anger and fear and shock and a large group of them seemed to have decided that it was a good idea to go after the FBI. Smart, just go after the guys with weapons. They're only armed and you're not. "Officer Jenkins?" a voice called out from behind him. He looked back and saw Abdul, face as white as a sheet, tears on his face. "I should have tried earlier. I should have tried when you asked." Poor kid. He looked like he'd been through hell and back. And it really wasn't his fault even, but the poor kid felt like it was his fault for not doing what he could to prevent it. How many more were there going to be like Abdul? How many more would remember this day for the rest of their lives, wondering what they could have done differently for a different outcome? How many students wondered the same thing after Kent State? COWALL, SCOTLAND 8:05 PM LOCAL TIME CHOOM. The latch of the two oak doors on the front of the house tore free, lock and all, in a spectacular fashion thanks to a breaching round fired point-blank on the other side. The left door swung open slightly and a hand pitched a small metal cylinder across the floor. The flash-bang lit off with harmless but disorienting CRACK. The doors flew open as the first pair of SWAT officers entered fast and low, weapons at the ready, the beams of their tactical lights cutting through the haze of the gas they deployed through the windows in anticipation of the breach. Blue swept in first, breaking to the left to circle the perimeter of the main hail. Callahan and his man entered directly behind them, circling to the right, covering the door into the adjacent room. "Red one, clear," came an announcement over their radios. "Red two, clear." The kitchen was empty. Blue's lights flashed under the table, behind furniture, behind curtains and tapestries. "Blue one, clear." "Blue two, clear." "Orange two, clea-- hold it." There had been a flash of movement down the hall. "Possible target sighted, Blue, cover me." He edged toward the little hallway, with Blue team at his back. Orange two paused at the doorway, shining his weapon's tactical light through the greasy fog of gas. It opened into, judging from all the books, a study or reading room of some sort. He saw movement again, and the beam of his light fell on its source. It was a young woman with deep brown hair, dressed in a black silk nightgown. She squinted at the light, seemingly unperturbed by the gas, shielding her eyes from its bright beam. Had they been slightly more observant, the officers might have noticed her brief glance above them. "Freeze! MP--" A fist flashed down from somewhere above arch-level, catching Orange two sharply in the face mask before he could finish barking his order. The plastic shattered, sending him sprawling onto his back with stars swimming in his vision. Felton dropped down from where he was clinging to the wall, snarling. Damned CS... his eyes burned and his heightened sense of smell was being blasted and it was hard to breathe. Keili seemed to have some sort of natural immunity to it as she did all sorts of other toxins, but to him the men invading his home were blurry, indistinct shapes. And he was angry at them. If his ears weren't ringing enough thanks to the flashbang going off a few yards away, they certainly were when the first startled cracks of gunfire went off almost in his face. He felt the concussion of bullets zipping by his torso as he lashed out at the closest assailant, slapping the offending weapon aside, wrenching it from his hands and smashing his facemask in with the butt. His knee came up with his preternatural quickness, catching the intruder in the gut with enough force to lift him up and send him back into his comrades, scattering them. Felton brought the submachine gun, spraying near-blind through the doorway. Callahan grabbed the collar of Blue one as he fell and heaved him out of the way as bullets rained around them, sparking off of the stone floor. No sooner had Felton let up on the trigger did Keili slide past him, gliding effortlessly into a neat tuck-and-roll that snatched up Orange two's fallen MP5. Callahan kicked over the long table as she did so, and as she came up on her knee the short burst she fired spacked into the old wood, throwing up a hail of splinters around the police. Felton stepped casually over Orange two's unconscious body, glancing down briefly... and noticing for the first time with some clarity the large bold-white letters imprinted on his tactical vest: POLICE. "Keili, wait!" he shouted over the ringing is his-- and most likely her ears, sprinting out after her as she dashed across the floor to position herself for a better firing angle. Red team burst from the kitchen hall, moving and firing. Kirk caught Keili in a flying tackle, bearing her to the ground as their small-arms fire smashed out the remaining windows behind them. The cubes of shattered glass cut into his back as he rolled, curled protectively around his wife. As they slid to a halt, he tossed away his weapon. "Cease fire! Cease fire!" he pleaded, snatching away her weapon and discarding that as well. The MPS officers were on them immediately. They were heedless of the broken glass as they forced the Jihaddi couple to the floor, handcuffing their wrists behind their backs. And though he tried to cooperate, the sight of that glass biting into his wife's cheek was too much for that little angry voice in the back of Kirk's mind to handle. Behind his eyes, Nemesis snarled. He rose swiftly, tossing the officer from his back. And he received a gun-butt to the back of his head for the trouble. UCPD OFFICES, SPROUL HALL BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 12:05 PM LOCAL TIME "Sir, Washington's just announced that we've gone to severe risk, and James Boyland is on the phone and he wants to speak to you." Chief Martel looked up from her desk. Captain Ortega was standing in the door to her office. She recognized Boyland's name as the head of the FBI in the San Francisco Bay Area. But she was still angry at him for this morning's mess and wanted to keep him waiting for slightly longer. "What's the situation on Sproul?" she asked. "Officer Jenkins radioed down. The students were fired on." "Casualties?" "At least five, maybe more. The rest of the people apparently chased the FBI folk off Sproul and attempted to detain them. Jenkins has gone down on Sproul to help with triage and to attempt to keep the Plaza clear while we get medical crews in here." Martel bowed her head for a second. Her worst fears, a Kent State, right here on her campus. How could it have happened. "Alright, Captain, punch the call through, I have a few words to give Boyland." The phone rang. Martel picked it up. "Seems like it's not such a good afternoon here, on your account, Mr. Boyland. Next time you want to conduct raids on the UC campus, I would prefer if you listen to my officers." "I apologize for that, Patricia," Boyland said, using her first name. Martel hated that. "I was under strict orders from Washington not to tell anybody what we were up to." "And what exactly were you up to?" "Terrorists. Specifically, there's one on your campus." Martel blinked. This was unexpected. "And for this you shot on innocent students?" "Patricia, believe me, any firearm discharge will be fully investigated. As will other incidents involving the FBI. But these terrorists, they're ruthless." "And I suppose the one that you were sent to get on this campus has eluded you." "Right. She's one of the ringleaders, she's really important that we bring her in. The safety of the US depends on it." "Fine, Boyland, I'll give you about half my officers. The other half are doing cleanup duty from the mess your boys made on Sproul." "As best as we could hope for. We'll have some officers from the Berkeley Police and the Alameda County Sheriffs helping as well. Is that okay?" "Mr. Boyland, are you aware of the history that the Alameda County Sheriff's Department has on this campus?" "No, I do not." "Sometime, read up about People's Park. Your boys may have exceeded those dark days in atrocity, though." THE SPIRAL BUILDING DENVER, COLORADO 1:06 PM LOCAL TIME The agents fanned out through the lobby, securing all the exits. Ten of them took up stations in the lobby, watching the elevators and the stairwells for any possible escaping terrorists. The remaining five piled into an elevator for the ride to the top of the building. The next few minutes were fairly nerve-wracking for the agents; they had no clue what they were going to find at the top of this building. They emerged from the elevator in a small but serviceable lobby with only one exit. The brass nameplate on the door said simply "CEO," and a small DO NOT DISTURB sign was hung on the doorknob. Never ones for obeying door signs, two of the agents kicked the door in, causing it to swing inward, almost snapped off its hinges. The other three then charged into the room. The office was large, ultramodern and mostly empty. A few couches sat next to large picture windows to the west and east, and in the center a good-sized sleek metal desk dominated most of the room. The high-backed chair behind the desk was turned away from the entrance, obscuring any view of the occupant. The agents all pointed their weapons at the chair, clicking off safeties and chambering rounds. The lead Fed took a single step closer. "Jonathan Fnord?" The chair turned around slowly. In it sat a stocky man in late middle age, with short gray hair and a close-cropped beard that was almost white. His hands were folded in front of him, elbows resting on the chair's arms, plainly in view of the agents. In one hand he fidgeted with a silver pen. His face was set with a mixture of boredom and contempt that made the agents feel that, yes, this guy -did- think he was better than everybody else. "Can I help you gentlemen with something?" Fnord inquired. BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 12:07 PM LOCAL TIME Toby Harrington was spending his lunch hour watching CNN. Well, okay, so he spent most of his time at school watching CNN, much to the snickers of his classmates. Little did they know that he was doing research on psychological stressors and the news, and to do it accurately, he had to watch a lot of news. And since he was usually the one in the lounge watching CNN, he was often informing his classmates when there was breaking news, which had earned him the sobriquet "Bad News Toby". Of the entire department, only his fellow classmates Katze Brenner and Laura McKinley seemed to care. Laura, he understood completely, seeing as how she'd worked for the Dem nominee for president in both 2000 and last summer. But he couldn't understand Katze's fascination for the news. He coupled that fact with the odd sense he always got that there was more to Katze than she was letting on, as if she was trying to hide in plain sight. It wasn't anything personal, she was nice enough to him. It was just a sense he got off her and had never found himself in a position where he could voice his suspicions. And he sorta didn't want to -- she might be a Mafioso or something. There wasn't much to be gained by it, so he quit thinking about it, and turned his attention to the television set, in which they were introducing Secretary LaFontaine. LaFontaine stepped up to the podium, looked out at the Washington press corps who were covering this (and by extension, Toby himself, who was watching). Toby wondered what Mr. LaFontaine was going to say. The very beginning seemed like the standard rigmarole that associated itself with these occasions. But it was very quickly established that this was not a typical occasion. Had Secretary LaFontaine just said that they were going to red? Holee shit. The next little bit made Toby laugh, though. "There's always terrorists in the United States, and they always have weapons of mass destruction," he spoke back to the TV. "Quit trying to scare us and just tell us the truth." Toby got up from the couch. Behind him, the tiny figure of the Secretary was saying, "We have every reason to believe that, while armed and dangerous, the suspected terrorists are isolated from one another and may be arrested with minimal disruption." Toby was too busy talking to himself to notice that. He also missed the scrolling bar that started to spell out messages of disasters big and small rippling across the country. He continued to spout to himself how it was unethical for the government to scare its own people. He finally turned around to hear the words, "As a result, all non-essential government facilities will be shut down as of 4:00 PM Eastern today. Airports are being advised to begin grounding all commercial traffic..." He stared at the TV as the Secretary advised the nation that the borders were closing, and the National Guard would be available for help. He sunk back down into the couch. They were serious for once. He never thought he'd see the day that this government would do anything to prevent terrorism, and now, apparently, they were reacting even more seriously than they had to September the 11th. Holee...and the President was going to address the nation that night about this? Oh... "FREEZE! FBI!" Toby jumped and looked to the doorway, where there were three FBI agents pointing their sidearms at him. He thought for a second, and then very carefully stuck his hands in the air. The next few seconds stretched by very slowly as they established there was nobody else in the room. Still holding their guns on him, the one in the center said, "Your name?" "Tobias Harrington, sir." Toby looked around at all three of them and wondered just what the hell had brought FBI agents -- real FBI agents -- to the psychology department, completely missing the connection to the press conference he had just viewed. Their next question gave the game away. "Do you know where we might find a Katze Brenner?" the agent asked him, mispronouncing the first name. Toby grinned. It looked as if Katze's mafia days were over, and that the long arm of the law had finally caught up with her. "It's kat-SAY, not kats." "We don't care the pronunciation, we're just looking for her," said the agent closest to the TV. "So, do you know where she is?" "Last I knew, she and her officemates were going out to lunch. They left half an hour ago." "Do you know where?" The TV behind them crackled loudly. "We have breaking news coming out of both Denver, CO and Berkeley, CA." The guy closest to the door said, "It's nothing. Where's your friend, punk?" "Out, I told you. And I don't know if I'd call her my friend." "I don't care what her relation to you is, I want to know where exactly she went out to!" "I DON'T KNOW GODDAMNIT, they didn't fucking mention where they were getting their fucking lunch at!" "And reports out of Berkeley indicate a situation of utter chaos at the University there, where there have been reports of a shooting on the main campus center..." The agent in front of the TV and the agent by the door looked at each other. The third one said, "Haul 'em in. Material witness." And Toby looked in shock at all of them, as the two agents lifted him bodily off the couch and pushed him out the door in front of them. The TV continued blubbering in the corner to itself, talking of the disasters big and small that had befallen some cities in the eternal fight against terrorism. BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 3:07 PM LOCAL TIME "All right, men, settle down." The lieutenant stepped up to the podium and immediately the banter of the FBI assault section. "I know rumors have been going around about something big planned. Well, our orders have come through." He clicked a remote control and a slide came on. "This is our target." There was dead silence for a few seconds, before finally one of the fully armored agents raised his hand. "Sir, with all due respect, is this a fucking joke?" "No, this is not a fucking joke. The target is Kevin Jameson, known by the alias Killjoy. He's one of the lead hatchetmen in a terrorist organization calling itself the Jihad, and has been arrogantly hiding in plain sight as, yes, a professional wrestler." The lieutenant clicked the next slide. "This is the apartment he's currently staying at, a rundown flophouse in Boston. I'll be leading team A to apprehend him, while team B will be in the area to give chase if he avoids us. There will also be heli-borne snipers attached to the operation." "We're seriously expecting a fight, sir? Two full fire teams to apprehend one man?" "That's right. Let me spell it out for you. According to our intel, Jameson is incredibly skilled in all forms of combat, equivalent or better than special forces training. He can be assumed to be very heavily armed, wearing body armor, and fully prepared to resist arrest. If he makes any hostile moves, and I mean any, your orders are to shoot to kill. My superiors have repeatedly assured me that the threat assessment I am giving you is completely accurate to the best of their knowledge and so, as extreme as these precautions seem, I am following them to the letter." There was stunned silence. "But... he's a professional wrestler! Everyone knows pro-wrestling's full of a bunch of fakes." "This one isn't." BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 12:08 PM LOCAL TIME Katze, Laura, and Mikiko had just passed Durant Hall when Katze got an odd feeling that things weren't quite right. She slowed behind Mikiko and Laura, wondering if there was anything that might have triggered such a feeling in her sightlines. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, so she caught up with Laura and Mikiko, who had stopped. Katze stopped as well, and noticed she'd come to a stop on a manhole cover. "Katze, do you know a way around this?" Laura gestured towards the mess they would be walking into if they crossed the bridge through Sather Gate onto Sproul. Due to an odd quirk of geography, the north side of the South Fork of Strawberry Creek was higher than the south side, so the three people standing in the center of Dwinelle Plaza had decent sightlines down towards Sproul. Katze frowned into the distance, cursing her nearsightedness. Even though she wore prescription lenses, they still made it slightly blurry in far distances. It was Mikiko who asked, "Are the FBI your federal police?" "Why do you ask?" "Because those are the letters of the guys on the far side of the plaza. Is this a usual occurrence?" Katze frowned. Why would the FBI be here? "Hang on a second," she said, frowning in the middle distance. Or at least, that's what it appeared to Laura and Mikiko. Katze however was flipping through thoughts in much the same fashion as one might flip through TV channels with one's remote, hoping to try and figure out what was going on. Panic, panic, panic, fuck the police, panic, confused, scared... She flicked through one more time and was rewarded for her troubles with something that resonated much like a fingernail on a blackboard, only very loud. Loud enough to lose track of a few things, and had to struggle mightily to keep herself from losing control of half a dozen things, most notably her self-identity. Oh ow, oh wow, oh goddamit it hurt. To Laura and Mikiko, it seemed to them that for no reason, Katze rather suddenly fell to her knees clutching her head. The two of them took spots on either side and Laura softly called out, "Kats? You okay?" In the whirling maelstrom, two things happened nearly simultaneously. The sound clicked off as oddly and as abruptly as it had come, and Katze heard Laura. "Yeah, I'm...give me another second and I should be okay." Tentatively she reached out one more time in the hopes of finding out what was going on and got back "shotamanhe'sdeaddidn'tmeanterroristnotworth..." Following a little more careful, she was surprised that by "terrorist, he meant *her*. Oh fuck, as if there wasn't enough stress today... Her head spun and whirled with the worst headache she could recall, and she was trying to think of what to do. First, make herself untraceable, so the cell phone had to go off. Her hand brushed against her 'Linker, and she wondered if a signal could be traced off of it. Better to not take any chances, she decided, and spun it to somewhere she knew would be both safe and not on her person. Her head ached worse after doing that simple maneuver, which gave Katze the hint that she wasn't going anywhere faster than her own feet could take her. She got back to her feet. "Laura, Mikiko, I want you to turn off your cell phones and get out of here. Don't go back to Tolman; don't go home. I'll be fine, but I have to get out of here. Please don't ask me why, just do what I say." Laura frowned at her, and Katze knew the question was coming, "What's going on? Who are you?" Katze gave an odd grin and said, "I am who I am, and apparently according to the United States Government, I'm a terrorist. Now, I have to go. Please, please *please* get out of here." And Katze took off uphill dashing for Wheeler and a way off campus without being seen. A few friends of hers had once pointed out a door in Wheeler that lead to the steam tunnels, and she was going to head into them, if for nothing more than to give her some more time for her head to clear. Things had come a little too close there for her own peace of mind. Drop down in the basement level, find that door, and then maybe she could breathe for a few minutes and figure out a way out on her own two feet. And maybe warn Josh, despite her aching head. And she had to do it all with perhaps the worst headache she'd ever had. DENVER, COLORADO 1:08 PM LOCAL TIME Lacroix edged back into his room in the moment before the agents began to fan out through the kitchen and living room. He couldn't tell how many there were, but it sounded like four or five. It wasn't like he could leave the bedroom to check. Inventory! Fourth-story window, no other exits except into the feds' hands. The only other things in the room were the furniture, his officer's sword over the closet door, the closet itself, his Linker, and himself. His sidearm was in the dresser, but his bullets were in the kitchen, and Lacroix wasn't about to pull a gun on a police officer in the first place. "What the hell is this?" Lacroix shouted into the other room. It gave away where he was, but it also gave him a couple instants to think and figure out just what was going on. "Joseph Lacroix," one of the men in the next room said, using the English rather than the French pronunciation of his name, "you are under arrest." He sounded a bit less nervous, a bit more authoritative, now that he had his quarry placed. "Come out, *now*, and surrender!" "I'll think about it," Lacroix shouted back, trying to keep up appearances, "when you give me a charge and show me a warrant. *Not* before." He edged back towards his dresser, took his Linker, and pocketed it while gauging distances and speeds. "Warrant?" the fed laughed, "for unlawful combatants? You can't be that dumb. You are in the Jihad, and you are charged with being guilty. Now *move!*" "I wouldn't come any closer if I were you. I'm armed," Lacroix lied. Looking around the room, he found nothing that could be of enough help to him. At the same time, the fact that these guys were gigging him for his Jihad membership was a bit too suspicious. There was something to this other than a paranoid DHS, which made Lacroix a lot more eager to resist arrest than he would have been a few minutes earlier. He took his TRES Corps officer's sword off the wall hanger above the closet as quietly and as quickly as possible. So it was only a half-lie. "So are we, smartass," the fed replied. There was a pause, obviously for hand signals or something. The pounding of feet foretold the feds' charging the bedroom door. The first FBI agent rushed through the door armed not with a pistol but with an assault rifle of all things. He made the mistake of glancing to the left instead of the right as his first choice entering the room, which gave Lacroix the brief moment he needed. What Lacroix lacked in swordsmanship he made up for in speed. Swung upward with as much force as he could muster, the still-sheathed sword struck the man's rifle, knocking it up and out of his hands. Before the officer could react, Lacroix switched to a two-handed grip and drove the pommel sideways into the stunned officer's face. The man flew backwards into his companion right behind him. The confusion bought Lacroix enough time to slam the door in their faces. As quickly as possible, he drew the sword out of its scabbard and drove it through the flimsy door at an angle, pinning it shut against the wall on the opposite side. It wouldn't hold them if they treated the bedroom door like the front door, but he hoped the subtle message of a sword being driven through the door and into the wall opposite it would give the agents pause. He didn't wait to find out, however. As soon as the sword stopped going forward, Lacroix sprinted for the window, covered his head, and put himself through it, aiming for the fire escape across the narrow alley. The sound of the breaking glass - ow - mingled with the stutter of a burst of automatic weapons fire through the bedroom door behind him. Lacroix was too busy hoping he'd got enough speed going through the window to make it to the opposite fire escape. The plan was to catch the edge of the fourth-storey escape and use that to get to the roof. He'd be in plain sight for a bit, but it gave him a couple more places to go. Of course, he misjudged the distance. If someone didn't hear the smashing of the window or the shots, they would definitely have heard the thudding clang of Lacroix at least clearing the rail on the *third*-storey fire escape, landing on the grating, and skimming into the brick wall it was attached to. Once again, ow. Taking a brief moment to get his head together - nothing felt broken, even if quite a bit felt cut up and bruised - he pulled himself unsteadily to his feet against the rail. A slam across the alley; they were working on the door, but only managed to put a hole through it so they weren't in the room just yet. Okay, time to get moving. Lacroix began running up to the rooftop. The building he was climbing was five stories, and then a bit of an overhang to get to before he could make it to the roof. He started running, taking stairs three at a time. Another slam downstairs; they'd be through any moment. In a few moments, Lacroix was on the fifth-floor fire escape. Unfortunately, the roof was eight feet above him. Muttering about a dislike of heights, Lacroix clambered onto the rail corner, took aim, and jumped. Just managing to catch the overhang of the roof, he dangled for a moment and started pulling himself up just in time to hear a more final-sounding crash from across the way. Willing himself to hurry, he managed to pull himself up over the side to collapse on the roof just in time to hear "where the hell did he go?" shouted from below. THE SPIRAL BUILDING DENVER, COLORADO 1:09 PM LOCAL TIME "Jonathan Fnord," repeated the Fed, "you are under arrest." "I see. Tell me," asked Fnord, "what are the charges?" "You are classified as an enemy combatant under American law, and as such will be not be informed of the charges against you. Hope you like Cuba, scumbucket." "Such language," Fnord chided, a flicker of interest passing across his eyes. "Hardly becoming of a government agent." He tapped his right index finger twice against the side of the pen. "And I am to assume that the heavy weapons are to make sure I go quietly?" The Fed nodded. "Make any funny moves and we'll blow you to ribbons." "How charming. Well, then. I guess I have no choice..." BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 3:10 PM LOCAL TIME The crashing woke Killjoy. It was several doors away in the tiny Boston apartment he was at, but he'd always been a light sleeper... and things were crashing all the time anyway. He glanced at the time briefly before turning to the side of the bed and sliding his feet into a pair of pink fuzzy bunny slippers. Letting out a yawn and scratching the back of his head, he stood and threw a faded grey bathrobe over his enormous bulk. Another crash, closer this time, sounded as he strode to the bathroom and started brushing his teeth. The third crash was a *LOT* closer, and he started to glance behind his back. "Freeze, FBI!" There seemed to be a couple people in his apartment, in black assault gear. Both had submachineguns pointed at him. There were probably more out in the hall, but there wasn't really room for them in the apartment. Killjoy slowly turned around and raised his left hand as he kept using his right to brush his teeth. "We have a warrant for your arrest, as an enemy combatant." "Warf te... scufe me." He turned around in the tiny bathroom and spat in the sink, then rinsed his mouth with a cup of water. The FBI agents seemed non-plussed at the casual way he was ignoring the guns. "That's better. What are the charges?" "As a member of a terrorist organization, we are not required to tell you." Killjoy nodded and took a step out of the bathroom. "Can I at least put on some pants?" "Not another step, perp!" The two members of the FBI assault team were crowding back towards the door, noticing that he was almost within arm's reach. "I guess not, then." Faster than he could react, Killjoy lunged forwards and grabbed the muzzle of one of the agent's gun. There was a gunshot fired as the man's finger clenched down on the trigger and a bullet flew into the apartment. KJ didn't even slow down as he used the butt of the gun to club the second agent in the stomach, then in a reaction from that threw the SMG out of the way and grabbed the agent whose gun he had borrowed. The two peering in through the doorway might have had time to react, but unfortunately the angle was such that there'd be a real risk of hitting their own men. They hesitated, and then were struck by a thrown FBI agent followed a few seconds by another. "And STAY out!" Killjoy shouted before quickly lunging for the massive white enameled object next to the door. The refrigerator was an old 1950's vintage one and very solidly built. With a grunt of effort he jerked it 3 feet to the left and into the doorway. Before any of the agents could get back to their feet, their way was blocked by several hundred pounds of fridge. "Dammit, you can't think this is going to stop us!" came one of the shouts from the other side of the door. And various other, less polite shouts. The fridge rocked under the force of someone pushing against it, but then the top would hit a heating duct and stop it from moving any farther. The fridge stopped rocking for a moment, then vibrated slightly as one of the agents emptied a magazine from his gun into it. Another sound filled the silence afterwards, one of the agents swearing after getting hit by a ricochet. Killjoy more or less ignored the Mexican jumping fridge though, calmly getting dressed. There were more gunfire sounds, but they didn't seem to be any more successful. Just as he was pulling on his boots a third burst was fired, penetrating the door of the fridge and pockmarking the far wall and a table with bullet holes. The table where he'd set his Jihadlinker on its recharger. Peering at it, it was very obviously very destroyed. Now, this was a problem in all sorts of ways. The most obvious is that he was on a 7th story apartment with armed FBI agents somewhat intent on killing him on the other side of a refrigerator that was becoming increasingly transparent. Obviously, he wouldn't be able to use his Jihadlinker to call for a gate. He also wouldn't be able to use a phone to call for a gate, even with the number Mal had given him so he didn't end up going through obscure entrances to Blanca and setting off the traps. It was a slum apartment with no phone service, and he didn't have a cell phone. The real kicker though is that he wouldn't be able to use the fire escape either... because there wasn't one. The apartment was formerly larger and was crudely walled off... which was another problem because the agents were bound to think of going to the next apartment over and breaking through the wall. In fact, there was another crashing sound now of the door to the next apartment being rammed down. None of this went through Killjoy's head, thought he did mutter "fuck". He strapped on the series of holsters that he customarily wore, threw on the trenchcoat that would somewhat conceal them, and grabbed his axe from where it leaned against the wall. No real way to conceal *THAT* but he needed it to get down. He glanced up and saw one of the walls of his apartment start to crack from where the FBI agents had managed to fit a battering ram on the other side. They'd just managed to break a hole big enough to see him duck out the window. Seven stories is a ways to fall onto concrete. It would likely be lethal for just about anything, really. Which is why the first thing out was the head of the axe. As was normal for fireman's axes, the reverse side was a hardened metal pick. This pick he drove into the concrete of the building as deeply as he could before swinging down on the axe handle. It momentarily supported his weight, which was all he needed; in the instant that the axe was jerked out of the building and he was stationary, he had slammed it downwards into the building again and repeated the process. The third time didn't work as well; some asshole put a window there, and those were notorious for not holding up when hit with an axe. He barely managed to catch the bottom of the opening enough to haul himself in. There was a scream. Killjoy blinked at the young couple on the bed in the room he hauled himself into, who had evidently been in the midst of... coupling. With a muttered apology he threw himself back out the window towards a parked van that he saw on the way down. It was only a fall from the 3rd story and the roof of the assault van caved in nicely to break his fall, so he was able to roll to his feet and start running just as an FBI agent looked out the window of his apartment and see where he ended up. There wasn't even a chance for gunfire as he rounded the block. "Where the hell did he go?" called the leader of the FBI assault team. "Sorry sir, we lost track of him too," replied one of the spotters for the sniper team. "No one expected him to come out of the window." "Just fix it... comb the area, he can't have gotten far." DENVER, COLORADO 1:10 PM LOCAL TIME Lacroix lay on his back a moment, panting, as he tried to figure out his options. There was no way he could stay there unnoticed for more than a few seconds. There was also no way he was going to blend into a crowd any time soon, not with the cuts on his arms, back and one leg. Nothing looked like it would need more than a couple of stitches, but he was still going to stick out. So where to go? The rooftop had a good view of the downtown core, the numerous office towers and other buildings jutting into the sky in a cluster. He could make out the towering Spiral Corporation headquarters amidst the other buildings, but that was more than a bit of a walk even without the FBI and God only knows who else on one's tail. Besides, that agent wanted him for being in the Jihad. He didn't know if it was any of the gazillion Jihads DHS was alleging existed, or whether it was *his* Jihad, but if it was the latter then Spiral was going to be a target. On the other hand, he couldn't think of much else in his current state, and staying on the roof wasn't going to do much. He crawled a few more meters from the edge of the roof to stay out of sight, then got up and started sprinting to the opposite end of the building. "Okay, *think*, Lacroix," he muttered to himself as he looked for a way off the roof and onto someplace else. The street was almost definitely crawling with cops, feds or worse, and they'd proven not to be shy about shooting. They knew he was on, in, or around the apartment complex he was running across right now, to make things even better. Where to go? Reaching the edge of the building, he looked over the edge. The street was sixty feet below, a distance made more dizzying by the adrenaline in Lacroix's system. It was also crawling with police and a couple of FBI agents. One of them was so kind a to look up, notice Lacroix, and point while shouting something. "Calisse!" Lacroix muttered, and bolted the other way. There was no time to think this time; they *knew* which building he was on. The only option was to get off it. Trying to get up as much speed as his bruised body could give him, he bolted to the edge of the roof, hoped his aim was better this time, and launched himself off the edge. All told, he landed on the roof of his own apartment building far better than he'd landed on the other building's fire escape, and the impact and subsequent roll/skid only hurt a lot instead of a hell of a lot. Coming to his feet, he kept going to the small maintenance shed in the middle of the roof, ducking behind it to put at least something between himself and the other building. He flattened himself against the wall and tried to force a couple of deep breaths. That's when the top several floors of the Spiral Corporation's office tower, several blocks away in the downtown core, exploded in a towering column of flame. THE SPIRAL BUILDING DENVER, COLORADO 1:10 PM LOCAL TIME Fnord tapped his pen three times rapidly. "You know," he mused, "if this had been something simple I might've been willing to look the other way, but this requires drastic measures." He grinned. "Since you were expecting trouble, it would be wrong of me to not deliver- -Juno!-" When Mal yelled "-Juno-!" several things happened at once. First, computers sent commands to millions of tiny machines linked together and embedded in the frame and walls of the top five floors of the Spiral building. These machines, designed by Mal, were built to make sure the top of the building could handle any type of structural stress. At this command, they now disengaged from each other, turning the carbon-fiber structure of the top of the building from incredibly strong to something that would disintegrate in a stiff wind. Similar machines did the same thing for the power, water and network lines. Next, other tiny machines in the floors beneath strengthened the building in order to absorb a massive shock. Openings - elevator shafts, stairwells, air ducts, etc - were closed off by heavy blast doors. When this was ready, the computers triggered the three tons of specialized high explosives and aviation fuel stored in the offices directly below Mal's. Finally, in the microseconds before the blast, a Gate portal opened beneath Mal's chair and swept upward, swallowing him just as the fireball consumed the office. All of this happened in the space of an eyeblink, so to outside observers it appeared that Mal, the five federal agents and the top five floors of the Spiral building vanished in a towering column of flame and black smoke. In the streets below, the crowd of evacuated Spiral employees, firefighters, police officers and assorted gawkers cried out and scrambled for cover. Panic reigned for a few brief instants, until it suddenly dawned on the crowd that the sky was, in fact, -not- raining office equipment and assorted debris from the explosion. The fire captain chanced a look up, and saw the column of smoke and soot slowly drifting away from the now-truncated Spiral Building. While his vantage point wasn't suited for a proper inspection, it appeared that the top of the building had been sliced off cleanly and crumbled into dust. "What... the... -hell-?" he mumbled, giving voice to the thought on the crowd's collective mind. DENVER, COLORADO 1:10 PM LOCAL TIME For a few moments, all Lacroix could do was stare in shock. It was suddenly obvious that someone was after not just *him* but the Jihad as a whole. Oddly enough, that made Lacroix feel a lot better. On the other hand, now he was checking the rooftop beneath him, wondering if *he* was going to be blown up next. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to be where he was after all. The roar of the explosion finally reached Lacroix's ears, slamming across town like a physical blow. Like a slap in the face, it brought him the rest of the way back to his senses. Glancing to the other side of the building, his eyes fell upon the small stand of trees growing around the back of the complex. They had been there for some time, and a couple of them were almost as high as the building in places. Well, it'd be less obvious than the staircase, and they were hopefully looking at the other building. Cursing himself and swearing not to do anything involving jumping after today, he hurled himself once more off the roof. Fortunately, his aim was right, and he plowed right into the trunk of the tree he was shooting for. As quickly as he could, he bounced down through the branches, making far more noise than he wanted to, and hit the ground with only a few more scrapes to tell for his trouble. As he heard footsteps pounding from the parking lot around the corner, Lacroix rushed to the back fence, vaulted it, and by chance came down between the fence and a dumpster. "Good a time as any," Lacroix thought to himself, pulling out his Linker and trying to get a connection with VRDET HQ. "Blanca," Lacroix heard Minerva's voice say. "Thank God," Lacroix said to himself. "Lacroix here. I've got a bit of a problem -" "We know," Min replied, "we've got it too. bringing people in as fast as I can. Mal and Shad just came through -" Lacroix's blood pressure halved - "and the Gate's firing up for you right now. One more minute and you can come through." "Acknowledged," Lacroix said. "Mind aiming the portal a few meters south of me? I'd really rather run *away* from the feds than *towards* them to get to it." "I'll do what I can," Minerva said. "See you in a minute. Blanca out." Lacroix came to his feet more than a little uneasily, and shook the mental cobwebs loose. This was shaping out to be a really shitty day. No matter; the portal would be there soon. Lacroix took a breath, walked slowly around the edge of the dumpster, and found himself staring into the barrel of an automatic pistol, four feet in front of him. BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 12:10 PM LOCAL TIME The office where Josh worked was near enough to Bri'in's law firm, that Josh had taken to eating lunch with his friend. He did this partially because Bri'in was more interesting company than his co-workers, and partly because sometimes the lawyer would otherwise forget to eat if Josh didn't intervene. That Monday hadn't been any different. Josh slogged through the heat, picking up sandwiches at the deli for him and Bri'in, and then walking up to Bri'in's office. But the lawyer had as usual cleared his calendar for the noon hour, and was glad to see Josh arrive with lunch. "How's work going?" Bri'in asked. "The usual, y'know? Gives me something to do so I'm not going mad while Katze's at school." Bri'in smiled. "Yeah. You two have a date picked *yet*?" "Not really. Want to see how close Katze is to graduating before we make any formal plans. Her advisor seems to think she's really close, though." "Maybe next spring?" "I sure hope so. And you? How's your practice going?" "The same. Things just might be picking up on the economic front. The indicators are all..." Josh felt a tickle in the back of his head. "Hang on, Bri'in," he said, trying to focus. There would only be one person who'd even try to talk to him this way, but something was wrong. [Katze?] The "voice" came through rather faintly, as if there was some distance between the two of them. But Katze should have been at school, which wasn't really that far. [Josh...get out...coming...] [You're really faint, where are you?] [Wheeler. Get out...go...keth...] [You okay?] [Long...chat...get out...they...I'm...get out.] [I'm maybe catching one word in three.] Josh caught a glimpse of a dark room, and an overwhelming sense of pain, as if Katze was talking through clenched teeth. [The gov thinks I'm a terrorist. Get out, get Bri'in, go back to Marraketh, and wait until you hear from me. I'll be fine, but there's no way I can port right now, trying to be clear like this *hurts* and I know you. Get out, please, don't worry about me...] [Can't help but worry.] [I know, Josh, but...] The connection faded off. Josh looked up at Bri'in. "We have to get out," he said. "Katze?" Bri'in asked. "The government apparently got some wires crossed, and they think she's a terrorist. She wants us to flee the dimension, I don't know for how long." "That's insanity." "This place is insane, Bri'in, you know that." There was a crashing sound from Bri'in's front office, and Josh looked worriedly at Bri'in. "Do we get out of Dodge, or do we stay here and be sitting ducks?" he asked. Bri'in listened to the sounds from the front room. "Let's get out of here," he finally said, and grabbed Josh's hand. "On three, jump...one...two..." The door splintered open just as Bri'in called out "Three!" The FBI agent who had kicked down the door stared in bafflement at the half-eaten sandwiches and the lack of escape routes in the room, and shook his hand. The boss wasn't going to be pleased with this one. Katze leaned up against the wall in a room filled with some shadowy equipment that she wasn't sure what its purpose was. She closed her eyes to keep any ambient light out and tried, slowly to piece her head back together. The spell to unlock the door had been less problematic than attempting to speak to Josh. She still had no idea if he'd heeded the advice, but at least maybe there was a chance he got out. Even if it had been bloody painful to even give him a fighting chance, she figured he deserved it. Besides, the only reason he would be in trouble was because he was her fiancé. So she was taking a moment to give her head a chance to stop aching. She figured she was actually somewhat safe at the moment because nobody would have expected her to take to the steam tunnels. It probably seemed counter-intuitive on the warm day. Her friends had mentioned that it had gotten rather warm down there even on a relatively cool Berkeley night, and she really wasn't looking forward to going down inside. She tried to think ahead and make more plans, and the one thing that bugged her about the whole thing came forth. She was pretty sure the charge had some connection with her Jihad days, but why now she wasn't completely sure as to the timing. Sure, there'd been that spat with Owsen, but why wait until everything settled down? The whole goddamned thing didn't make any sense. And why just her? She winced as her head throbbed again, and she decided she'd been sitting long enough, and it was time to move forward. She grabbed one of the hard hats off the hook by the door and headed down and in, taking the tunnel fork to the right. Her friends hadn't lied. It was oppressively hot down here, but it wasn't so much the heat that was icky as it was the humidity. The steam swirled in the air, and what few lights were on in the name of safety were small and unevenly placed. This was going to be nothing like navigating aboveground, and she made her way slowly around. Find a grate to the outside and orientate yourself, she thought. In most places, the tunnel was large enough to stay upright, but occasionally it dropped off to just crawl space. It was greasy and grimy and felt dank, and she knew she was going to be a mess when she finally crawled out of this maze. But there were more important things to think about at the moment, and probably most important was staying alive. Up ahead, sunlight shone through a grate. She crept up on it and found herself looking up at Barrows. Okay, wrong direction. She sighed and started back in the other direction. This could be a very long day indeed. Chief Martel looked up as Officer Jenkins walked into her office and put a small video tape on her desk. "Riot footage," he said, quietly. Martel sighed. "How bad is it out there?" "There's at least three dead, another half dozen or so that we're trying to get to the hospital, and fifteen to twenty folks with either grazes or some trampling injuries in the panic," he said. It sounded as if he was still in shock over the whole thing, and was trying to act like a professional anyway. "Would you like to know why this happened, Officer Jenkins?" He nodded and she continued. "James Boyland, the head of the FBI here in the Bay Area, called me and said it was because they were hunting down a terrorist." "And this gave them permission to shoot at students?" "Boyland seemed to imply that this terrorist was a student. He's faxing over a few things for me, I've got half the department about to join the search." "Permission to join the search?" "No, you're more needed on Sproul, to keep it clear so we can get medical personnel onto the plaza as needed. I'll get you a copy of the fax so you can keep an eye out for our suspect in case she decides to cut through the Plaza in a misguided attempt to get away." "Yes, sir. Anything else?" "Lyman and O'Keefe are meeting with Mayor Ryan about canceling school and calling out the National Guard." "As bad as that would be, the rioting seems to be getting worse, not better, it's just spread away from campus at the moment." "They'll probably decide similarly. Anyway, I'll send a runner out to you with more information when we've got it." Jenkins nodded and turned away. Martel watched him go. Maybe he was good sergeant material after all. VRDET HQ BLANCA MOUNTAIN, COLORADO 1:11 PM LOCAL TIME Mal half-stumbled, half-fell out of the Gateway, his clothes still smoking slightly from the demolition charge that had taken the top off of the Spiral building. He dropped to his knees, panting, and growled. Picking himself up off the floor, Mal ran out of the Gate chamber, cursing up a blue streak as he headed for the situation room. "Fuck fuck fuck fuck FIVE FUCKING YEARS of work blown completely to hell by the FUCKING FEDS! I am going to RIP OUT THE HEART of the motherfucker responsible but first where's the comm system need to know what the FUCK is going on ARIS!" The last word jolted that worthy nearly completely out of her chair. She jumped up, looked around wildly until her eyes fell on Mal. The combination of his smoldering clothes and the intensely pissed-off look in his face made her pause for a second and wonder if being a Jihaddi leader eventually caused -everybody- to crack explosively. "Aris. Find the others. -Now-." "What? Mal, what -happened-?" "Don't argue. Find them. Linker, cellphone, -smoke signals- if you have to, just -find them-. I need a sitrep, and I need it five minutes ago." "Okay, okay, hang on..." Aris hit a couple of controls on the communications console and started an all-call search for the active Jihaddi. "So, while I'm working, care to fill me in? I know Min said the cops were coming to visit..." "It wasn't just the cops," Mal replied, his tone grim. "It was FBI, possibly DHS, ATF... hell, EIEIO for all I know. They were there to arrest me on charges of terrorist activity against the United States." Aris spun around in her chair, face blank with shock. "WHAT!?" "Less gape, more work," said Mal, turning on the main display screen and switching it to show the latest feed from CNN. The headline news program was running a live feed from Secretary LaFontaine's press conference, along with bulletins about "reports of disturbances" on the UC-Berkeley campus. "I don't know if this was an isolated strike on -me- or if it's part of a hit on -us-. We need to find the others and bring them in as quickly as possible." "I'm working as fast as I can... and where'd Min go? She could do this faster than either of us." "I'm still here," Min's voice came over the speakers. "I've got my hands full cracking the DHS databases. Somebody decided to upgrade the encryption here. So you're going to have to work for yourselves for a couple of minutes. Sorry." "Fine, fine, leave me to do the tough work," Aris mock-grumbled, then blinked at the console. "Hey! I've got a ping from Shad!" "Great, get me a line." The situation room speakers clicked, then the familiar voice of Shadur T'Kharn filled the room. "Hello?" "Shad, this is Mal. Where are you?" "Huh? I'm hanging off the side of a mountain. What's going on?" "Is anybody else with you?" "No, I'm alone. Mal, -what is going on-?" "Dammit. Okay, we'll freak about that in a minute. Stand by for transport." Mal adjusted the controls on his console, activating the Gate to send a portal to Shadur's location. "Trans- wait a minute! What's got you so jumpy!?" "I'll explain when you get here. Now go towards the light." "There'd better be a good reason for this, dammit.." "There is Shad, trust me. Now -move-!" The communications console chimed as somebody called into the system. Aris hit the receive button. "Blanca base, go ahead." "Blanca, this is Delgado." Miranda Delgado's voice was even, a testament to her training in TRES Intelligence. "Something seriously bad is going on at the Berkeley campus, looks like someone's started a riot. Can you give me any more detail?" Mal and Aris exchanged worried looks. "Captain, what's your location? We need you ready for immediate evacuation." "I'm in... standby, Blanca." Delgado's voice faded slightly, then vanished altogether in a sudden rush of breaking wood and shouting. There was a second of silence, then the voice of a gruff man became audible. "Who is this?" demanded the man. "Identify yourself!" Mal snarled and punched the disconnect. "FuckfuckfuckfuckFUCK! Minerva!" "Hold on.. here. I'm here." "Min, lock on to Delgado's Linker and send the remote autodestruct. Then pop open a microgate and get a tracer on her quick. I don't want to lose track if possible." "I'm on it. Sending autodestruct now..." On the other side of the country, the FBI agent who had picked up Delgado's Jihadlinker for evidence purposes cried out as the device grew red-hot, burning his hand before crumbling into a black powder. While the agents were distracted by this, a tiny circle of light opened in the air near the ceiling. Out popped a robot no bigger than the head of a pin. The robot buzzed around the apartment, then flew outside through the open door. Finding Delgado as she was being marched into a paddywagon, the microbot flew up and quickly attached itself to her, melting painlessly into the upper layers of her skin to act as a homing beacon. "Tracer's got a lock, I'm following it now," announced Minerva. "Good, keep monitoring her. I want to know her movements at all times." "Understood." "Mal..." Aris said slowly, "if there's a riot at Berkeley, then that means Katze..." "I know," Mal said, "but we can't do anything right now but keep trying to contact her." Just then Shadur stormed into the situation room. "Okay, what the hell is going on that made you so jum--Jesus!" Shad skidded to a halt in front of the main display, which was at the moment showing "exclusive CNN footage" of the chaos surrounding Berkeley split-screened with a view of the smoking top of the Spiral building in Denver. The anchor was going breathlessly on about terrorist arrests gone spectacularly wrong and the increase of the terror alert all the way to Red for the first time. Mal looked over at Shadur's gobsmacked expression. "Yeah, that's about the right reaction," he said dryly. "It seems that we've outstayed our welcome. The federales tried to pick me up earlier, and the party in Berkeley probably involves Katze." "Holy shit." Shad shook his head. "Holy SHIT." "I've got a ping from Kat!" called Aris. "Where?" "It's... here?" "Bwah?" "Processing..." Minerva scanned the base. "Confirmed. Kat's Linker is in her quarters. However, she is not in the base." Mal swore. "Goddammit, of all the days to forget her Linker." Shad gazed at the screen the whole time, face blank. Finally, Shad tore away from CNN and looked at Mal. "You've got a plan, right?" Mal blinked. "A plan? Um." That brought everything in the room to a screeching halt. Mal didn't have a plan? Mal -always- had a plan! For his part, Mal was mentally kicking himself. He'd spent far too much time since Minerva had noticed the Denver cops circling reacting to events instead of acting. If they were going to survive this, that had to change, and quick. "Okay," he said, "the plan. First order of business is finding out how many of our people are in custody or.. otherwise indisposed. We know about Delgado, we need to know about the rest." "Right." Shad nodded. "Minerva, when you've got a spare minute, open up a VR room for simulation work. I'll need a tranq gun, standard load plus a couple of extra clips. Let me know the when they start moving Delgado out of the city." "Tranquilizers?" Mal asked. Shad shrugged. "They're just following orders. I don't see a reason to slaughter them if I can avoid it." Mal nodded. "Fair enough. Get going. Lacroix will back you up when you're ready to go; -he'll- have lethal weapons, as a last resort." Shad considered this for a few seconds, then nodded once. He wasn't happy, but he'd accept the compromise. As time was of the essence, Shad turned on his heel and strode off to the simulation rooms without further comment. DENVER, COLORADO 1:12 PM LOCAL TIME "I don't think I have to tell you to freeze," the FBI officer staring down Lacroix said. "No, you don't," Lacroix said. He paused for what seemed like a minute but could only have been a couple of seconds, trying to think quickly. "I think I have to tell you to put the gun down and get out of my way, though." "And *I* have to tell *you* to shut up and get on the ground." the agent replied, playing along since he knew he held all the cards. Well, "knew," anyway. Lacroix thumbed a random button his Linker as he raised it, making sure to show it wasn't a weapon. "You know what just happened downtown?" Lacroix asked. "It's going to happen in the building across the fence if I take my thumb off this button. So I'm going to have to tell you once again, sir, drop the gun and get out of my way." "Nice bluff," the agent responded. He was truly awful at hiding his uncertainty, though, and Lacroix actually saw the gun waver. "It still means you're leaving here either dead or in federal custody." The sparkle of the Gate portal began to form. A couple more seconds. Unfortunately, the portal was less than a meter behind the agent. Crap. "So come on, buddy," the agent continued, trying to sound conciliatory now. "You're caught, whether you like it or not. It's just a matter of whether you want anyone else to die today." The portal was almost fully formed. "Surrender, and we'll get those cuts looked at. They look like they hurt." The agent edged a bit closer Lacroix, taking one hand off his gun and reaching for the Linker. Oops. "Thanks. I'd forgotten about those," Lacroix grumbled, realizing he had. The portal was wide open and waiting behind the officer. "And your offer kinda makes sense, but I'd really rather -" Breaking off in midsentence, Lacroix swung his right hand, with the Linker in it, at the agent's gun hand. Catching the man by surprise, he landed a solid blow. The pistol went off, a round embedding itself in the dumpster. He didn't knock the agent's gun from his hand, but he did knock the gun out of line enough for the shot the agent fired by reflex to miss. Running on a mix of adrenaline and reflex, Lacroix hurled himself forward, swinging a punch with his left hand. The agent was quick and blocked it, but by the time he could do anything about that Lacroix was on him in a clumsy tackle that was enough to send both of them falling forward. Lacroix landed, not on the parking lot of the apartment complex, but on a metal platform. Two other sounds came at the same time - the thud of another body, and the skidding clatter of a pistol landing somewhere a ways away. Joseph Lacroix stared down at the Gate platform and the face of the FBI agent he had pinned. The agent stared back at him. VRDET HQ BLANCA MOUNTAIN, COLORADO 1:12 PM LOCAL TIME "Min, Aris," Mal ordered, "keep monitoring the comms and bringing people in. I'll be in my office trying to re-center. Let me know when we've got everybody or when Shad's ready for the rescue op." "Understood," said Minerva. "Hold that... I've got Lacroix. He's coming through now." "All right, tell him to meet Shad on the sim level." Mal walked out of the situation room and down to his office. "You know where to find me," he called. Once safely in his office, Mal went to his desk and pulled a small communications device out of one of the drawers. The device looked like a standard-issue Linker, but this Linker didn't connect to any of the Jihad communications systems. Mal contemplated the device. "I thought I'd never have to use this thing again..." he mused. Then, taking a deep breath, he pressed the large green GO key. "I need your help," he said. A few seconds later and a deep voice replied, "What do you require of Agharti?" "Was this your idea of punishment? If so..." "Be calm, Seeker. This wasn't our doing. We had no cause to see our works destroyed because you happened to be avoiding reports for a month." "All right then, who's responsible?" "Our intelligence indicates that your old enemy has returned and is using the mundanes as a puppet." "... Of course. And Owsen was a -lightning rod-, sent out to locate Jihaddi who might be active." "A conclusion based on incomplete data, but it does fit the known facts." "Okay, that clears that up. How about Spiral? We're close enough to hitting the last critical breakthrough for the Project..." "We will take care of that. Your... dramatic exit eliminated the only agent who had full knowledge of your involvement with the Jihad. Memelayers are already at work spreading the story that Spiral was not a terrorist-held company but a target of terrorism. The company should survive what comes next. Jonathan Fnord is, of course, considered 'dead' and should stay that way." "Agreed. If we need a new public face, I might be able to find somebody, but we can wait. Thank you." "It was no great difficulty. The Council wishes you luck in your war. We may provide backup later, if things turn too ill." "Thank the Council for me, then. Talk to you later." "Of course. 'Heute die Welt..'" "'..Morgans das Sonnensystem.'" For a moment Lacroix and the FBI agent could only stare at each other. The agent broke the silence. "You - what the fuck just happened?" he managed to say in a high-pitched splutter. "I *told* you to get out of my way!" Lacroix said testily, picking himself up and limping off the Gate platform. The agent sat up slowly, still obviously gobsmacked, and by the time he was on his feet Lacroix had found his pistol and was holding it in a not-quite-threatening way. "Well, either way. Since you decided to come along -" splutters - "I suppose this time *I'm* going to have to tell *you* to do as I say, and *you* are going to tell *me*..." The agent stared at him, still a bit stunned. Lacroix prompted, gesturing with his free hand. The agent sighed. "Yes, sir," he muttered. "Good, we understand each other," Lacroix said. "Mind getting off that? Someone else might come through any minute now, and I'm not sure what happens if someone's on the platform when that happens." The agent twitched and jumped down off the Gate's platform, looking a little more shaken. "Okay, now let's go see what's up." Gesturing with the gun, Lacroix herded his charge towards the situation room. "Lacroix?" Minerva's voice came over the comm. "Shad's in Sim Eight, you're to meet him up there ASAP." "No can do, Min," Lacroix said, occasionally saying "left" or "right" to guide his goggling friend along the corridors. "I'm wounded, it sucks, and I'm stopping by the med deck before I do anything. Plus I brought along a guest." "A g -" Minerva broke off and paused for a moment; Lacroix could almost feel the AI peering into the corridor. "You didn't." "Don't look at me!" Lacroix said. "He seemed to want to force the issue. Do you think you could prep something at the clinic for me? I'll be up in a sec." "What do you think you need?" Min asked, this time from a different speaker as the pair entered an elevator for the command level. "The afternoon off and two six-packs," Lacroix said. If silence over a speaker could be scathing, Lacroix learned what it sounded like. "Oh, in the clinic. Yeah." Lacroix briefly went over his condition as the FBI agent in the opposite corner of the lift found the presence of mind to roll his eyes. The elevator door opened, revealing the Situation Room. Mal and Aris were the only people in the room at the time, and both turned their heads to watch an FBI agent stumble out, with a bloodied and bedraggled Lacroix right behind him. Aris' doubletake at the agent implied that Minerva hadn't relayed the news. Lacroix fought down the urge to say the obvious line, beginning to feel fatigue washing over him as the adrenaline left his system. "You know, in most circumstances I'd actually be kind of curious," Mal said, "but I'm pretty busy right now. Lock him in one of the enlisted's quarters when and we'll figure out what to do from there." Lacroix nodded, and nudged his friend back out the corridor. They walked for a few minutes in silence. "That was Dr. Fnord?" the agent asked after awhile, mainly out of a desire to drown out the ringing silence of the empty corridors. "That and more," Lacroix responded vaguely. "I suppose I should welcome you to his home. The Old Man built this complex a few years back. Left," he added, guiding the bewildered agent through another intersection. "Built ..." the agent stopped and shook his head. "I can’t believe it." "Then don’t," Lacroix answered. "We’re actually still – right - in Denver, with my back to a dumpster, and – straight – and you’ve still got a gun aimed at my face." "I wish," the agent groused sourly. "This is turning out to be a Shitty Day." "I hadn’t noticed; I was too busy bleeding here," Lacroix shot back. They continued through the corridors in tense silence for a few minutes, broken only by directions. "Just what *is* this place, anyway?" the agent finally burst out. "Where *are* we?" "We’re still in Colorado," Lacroix answered. "Right now you’re a couple miles beneath Blanca Mountain. This is VRDET HQ; our base, if you will." "Under – bullshit," the agent said, grasping at an opportunity to flare up. "I know I wasn’t knocked out, and I’d *know* if we had gone a tunnel that long. One minute we were behind your apartment, and the next we were in that weird room." "That’s exactly what happened," Lacroix said, enjoying the opportunity to tweak the man’s mind a little. "That ‘weird room’ was our gating chamber; it’s how we get in and out of here. My escape route opened behind you, so you forced me to shove you into it so I could get out. I *told* you to get out of my way. Left." The agent sighed, to himself more than anything. "I don’t want to believe this. Then again, I didn’t want to believe there was some big goddamned terrorist group operating in the United States." "One of those is true," Lacroix said. "One isn’t. Whether you believe it or not, I’m on your side right now." "You have a funny way of showing it." Bitterness, not defiance. "So do you," Lacroix said, feeling a stirring of sympathy for the man. "But, like it or not, we are. Your guys are making us have a very busy day, or else I could prove that to you. Ah! Here we are," he said, stopping in front of a nondescript door and opening it. He guided the agent in. "Welcome to your new temporary home," Lacroix said, quickly pointing out the few amenities the spartan compartment had to offer. "Just what do you people do to your hostages?" the agent asked, again trying to stir up some defiance – even as he tried to fit "evil terrorist group" into the same part of his mind that saw him being locked into bare, but comfortable, living quarters. "I have no idea," Lacroix said: "you’re our first." He turned towards the door so the agent wouldn’t see his smirk. "What -?" Lacroix turned back, getting his face back under control. "I meant what I said, Officer. We are on your side. We have been for a long time, and you’re not going to be harmed here." "I’m almost starting to believe you," the agent muttered. "Good, good!" Lacroix said brightly. "I’ve got to go get my window plucked out of my arms or something now. Someone will be by later to check on you once we figure out what to do about the ... situation. Until then, make yourself comfortable, Mr...?" "Trevor Stallard, Mr. Lacroix." "Mr. Stallard. I would say I was pleased to meet you, but I doubt either of us wishes we knew the other right now." Stallard snorted derisive agreement. Lacroix nodded, feeling a bit more civil towards the man than he did a few minutes earlier, and walked out. He closed the compartment, made sure it was locked, and took a few steps towards the infirmary. Only a few, though, before he leaned against the opposite wall, slumped to a sitting position, and let the shakes he had been holding off for twenty minutes come. Almost instantly, a speaker on a wall panel squawked to life. Minerva’s concerned voice sounded above Lacroix’s head. "Uh... Joseph?" Lacroix waved a somewhat unstrung arm vaguely. "I’m okay, Min," he sighed. "I’m okay. Just give me a minute." BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 3:18 PM LOCAL TIME Irritatingly, there wasn't anyplace Killjoy could find a payphone that was out of the way. At least not quickly. And oddly enough, most people didn't feel like opening their doors to a giant wearing a trenchcoat and carrying an axe. He could hear a helicopter too, so he'd been staying towards the relative safety of the sides of buildings. Relative safety being the key, of course. A bullet slammed into KJ's shoulder from the back with a wet crunch, and broke the rhythm of his stride. He dropped the axe and flashed his hand under the trenchcoat, drawing one of his pistols. He spun and aimed the pistol with both hands just as a second bullet slammed into the street. They didn't get a third; the helicopter's canopy starred and shattered from the pistol rounds he was pouring back at it and the pilot veered off. There was a clatter, the spent magazine hitting the ground. Killjoy holstered the pistol again and picked up the axe from where he dropped it before walking more quickly than before. Blood from his wound fell to the ground and sizzled against the pavement as he went, but even that stopped after less than a minute; his body had already closed up the wound from the rifle. He flexed his left shoulder slightly to test it as a siren drew close; the bullet hadn't dissolved yet but the joint was still working, if painfully. What few people there were on the streets had scattered at the gunshots, so the Suburban with the siren screeching around the corner was treated to mostly clear streets. That was especially fortunate as Killjoy had drawn one of his shotguns, a stubby thing sawn off as much as possible so it would work in a thigh holster. The first blast took out the front left wheel, and the second the front right... because it never hurt to make sure. The black SUV obligingly slid into a building and crumpled. The agents inside were on the ball though. The doors flew open and the two people on the passenger's side turned towards him, weapons at the ready and firing as soon as their feet hit the pavement. The submachinegun fire walked up Killjoy's torso and across his head in the fraction of a second before he fired another pair of shotgun blasts, low, taking out the agent's legs. They fell, screaming, and stopped firing. The bolt had locked back on the shotgun so he reholstered it as he turned, seemingly oblivious to the dozen bullets that had struck him. He started walking again as the other agent in the back of the SUV got out, and turned the corner before that one had a chance to connect with more than 3 rounds. "I need medics here! Three men down, two with shotgun wounds to the legs and the driver is out after we hit the building!" "Smith, this is command... we have medics enroute. Pursue the suspect; that's an order. We don't want to lose this guy no matter what." "Command, this guy just took at least two rounds to the head without flinching. Body hits I can see armor but..." "That's an order, Smith. Backup is inbound. This guy is a known terrorist and a threat to national security, you need to take him down." It took only another two minutes to find a payphone that was working and secluded enough for his purposes; an old subway station actually, one of those ghost stations that wasn't on any maps anymore and nothing actually stopped at. Most of the station was smashed or otherwise vandalized, including all the lights, but one of the payphones was still working. He walked straight to it, picked up the receiver, frowned, smashed the coin box with his axe, fed the phone a pair of quarters and dialed. "Operator, get me out of here." "... you did not just say that." "Sorry. I'm in Boston, one of the lost subway stations... by 37th and..." "Yeah, we have you. You could've used your Jihadlinker." "It got shot up." "Figures. Gate coming any time now." KJ hung up the phone just as booted feet started down the stairs. In the gloom he could see the heat of the FBI agent more than anything else. "You're not going to come quietly, are you... I should just shoot you, but I want to know how you did the trick of getting out of the building and how the hell you're walking after all that lead," the agent said. Killjoy chuckled, a deep, vaguely sinister sound. "What's so funny?" "I don't think you guys got very good intelligence on some of your targets," KJ replied. "Did you know I can see you perfectly well right now?" The agent fidgeted. "I know that you can't see me. I can see that you have your MP5 at the ready, but you don't have the combat flashlight forend. You're not pointing it anywhere near me, by the way. I also have two pistols and two shotguns on me, as well as an axe." "You're bluffing... you know there's nowhere out." Killjoy chuckled again as he felt, rather than saw, the gate resolve into existence behind him. "Am I? I think that you're bluffing. You know what you guys tried to do to me and how well it worked... and you can't see where I am. Think about why you, and your comrades, are alive. Oh, and don't trip on your way back out." He took a step backwards through the gate just as it was fully formed. "Agent Smith, where did the suspect go?" The other FBI agents had caught up to him only a minute or so later, some of them with flashlights. "I don't know. He was taunting me and then there was a light and he was gone. No way he could have gotten away, but... he did." "Shit. Washington's going to be pissed." "Yeah, I know... but better them than dealing with this monster." "Amen to that." BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 12:30 PM LOCAL TIME "Martel! There's a student here who wants to speak to you!" Martel was sitting in her office, having it out with Boyland, who'd come over to direct traffic on this terrorist case. Boyland always seemed so self assured, and he was confident that they'd find his terrorist. Martel wasn't so sure, but she'd pulled school records, and had somebody run a second copy out to Jenkins. Boyland was studying this school record with dark amusement when Ortega had poked his head in again and let Martel know of the student. "What's she want?" "Apparently, she's seen the suspect as recently as noon," Ortega responded back. "Bring her in," Boyland said, and Martel glared at him. Ortega nodded, and went to get the student in question. "I'd appreciate it if you would give me authority in my own office," Martel growled. "Oh, calm down, Patricia, you know we both wanted to hear it. Besides, you're helping *me*, remember?" Martel rolled her eyes. Right. Yeah, after this, it was time to file for retirement. Ortega escorted the student in. Martel eyed this person, noting that Boyland was doing much the same thing. The student looked somewhat unsure of herself, Martel noticed, as if she was going to spill the beans on a friend. This should be interesting. Boyland put a tape recorder on Martel's desk and turned it on. "For the record, we're taping this. You okay with that?" The student nodded, and then when pointed to the tape recorder, said, "Yes." "Your name?" "Laura McKinley." "And you know that we're conducting a terrorism investigation here?" Boyland asked. "Yes, sir, and I bet it involves Katze." Martel nodded, so far one for one. Boyland noted something on his paper, and continued the questioning. "You know Katze how?" "We're both graduate students in psychology. Officemates, in fact." "And when you last saw her, she was doing what?" "Running uphill to that large white building the other side of the plaza." "You think she knew?" "Oh, she most definitely knew that you guys want her for a terrorism investigation. She said it quite clearly." "What's your motivation for turning her in?" "Nothing at all, really. I just want to be a good American, since it seems we actually do have terrorists in the states." "Before today, would you have been surprised to hear of your officemate being called a terrorist?" "Yes, sir, she didn't really seem the type." "Is there a type for terrorist activities?" "Well, no, sir, but you never know..." "'Tis true. You never know. Patricia, you have accommodations for this student?" "Why?" Martel asked. Boyland smiled and turned off his tape recorder. "I'm authorized to hold material witnesses, and I think this officemate makes a good one. Better than the one we took in earlier today." Laura's face went from shock to dismay to horror. Martel almost felt sorry for her. Almost. On the other hand, she'd willingly and voluntarily turned her friend in. So Martel couldn't get up too much sympathy for her. Ortega entered the room, handcuffed the girl, and led her away to the holding cells. Boyland called a few of his agents and asked them to do a room by room search of Wheeler, because the suspect might be hiding there. And Martel wondered just what beasts they'd all turned into over a few scary words. FAYETTEVILLE, ARKANSAS 2:30 PM LOCAL TIME Well, this was an interesting development, thought Warrior Tangaroa as he sat shackled in the back of a police van, being eyed by a half dozen dark-suited security agents and uniformed policemen. The back door opened, and another greysuit finished his chat with an officer and stepped in. He carefully eyed Tangaroa. Tangaroa carefully eyed him. The greysuit was a man in his mid-30s, of Asian descent, with eyes that sparkled with intelligence and an expression that meant business. Special Agent Zhen Pu looked over the captive, a young man in his mid-20s with eyes that sparkled with intelligence and an expression that meant business. It was also, certainly, the person his team and car had run into in the earlier, mysterious house-sitting investigation in Houston. Even with the new set of investigations which appear to be somehow related to that operation, his directors still hadn't told him what the deal was with that. Zhen sauntered up to the prisoner and started asking some questions. "We've looked through your stuff. No identification except what you put down in the hotel register, which we know isn't your real name. Who are you?" "Can't tell you," Tangaroa responded. "Pleading the Fifth?" Zhen asked. "No," Tang said simply, "just not going to tell you." The agent was a bit taken aback by the prisoner's commanding attitude, but knew that he had the initiative. "You're not allowed to do that, you know." "Sure I am. Miranda." "SOLDAT." "Huh?" "Strengthening Our Legal Defenses Against Terrorism Act of 2003," Zhen smugly explained. "Signed into law last February." "Oh," Tangaroa uttered, his know-it-all attitude suffering a blow. "So, what are you allowed to do, uh, arrest me?" The matter-of-fact way in which the prisoner asked this, with hardly a hint of juvenile daring, wrenched on Zhen's nerves. One of the guards coughed to restrain a snicker. Zhen sighed. "Do you really want to make this worse on yourself?" "Not really, but I don't how much worse it could get than what we have now." "Are you familiar with the term, 'Extraordinary Rendition'?" "No, I don't believe I'm familiar with the term." "You don't want to become familiar with the term." "This is America. Even with whatever crazy laws you've passed, you're still not going to take me out back and shoot me, so I figure I'm fine." "You have a strange way of figuring things." "People tell me that sometimes. I'm usually right, except for those times that I'm wrong." "I can tell you that you're not helping out your case." "I don't see what I'd be helping, since from all appearances and all that I haven't been told, you don't actually have a case against me." "You really think that? So tell me, what are you doing in Arkansas with a helicopter and a half ton of TNT?" Tang thought for a moment. "Would you believe me if I was to tell you that I was trying to catch a two-ton trout?" "And the helicopter?" "If a fish weighed two tons, then I'd need a helicopter to carry it away." The corner of Zhen's mouth turned up slightly. "No, I don't think I believe that story." "Too bad. It was an interesting one." "So since you won't tell me who you are or what you're doing here, who are your accomplices?" "I'd have to be a criminal to have accomplices." "Who is the other man that was with you at the hotel?" "Don't you know that already?" "We'd rather you tell us." "Didn't he register himself into the hotel?" "Yes, but we'd like to know what you have to say about him." "What, do you have something like union rules that you have to have an English expert read the registration papers, so you can't do it yourself?" "That's not very funny." "Yeah, the two ton trout was better. I'll try to be funnier next time." "We do know the man you're working with." Tang simply kept a steady, sly smile through the opening Zhen had left him to talk. After a few moments of silence, Zhen continued. "The abnormally tall man." Tang didn't say a word. "The professional wrestler." Tang's expression didn't change. "Killjoy." Tang raised an eyebrow, but didn't speak. Zhen kept talking. "Killjoy rented a helicopter for you, and you have a half ton of explosives to use with it. Your record seems to indicate that you are very innovative and not very selective or restrained in your use of explosives. So, why did Killjoy hire you?" Tang chuckled. He hated working with explosives and had only used them in Moscow because he'd been in a one-man, personal war against the Mafia, back after the Jihad had disbanded, and he needed to hit a bunch of places at once. In his current task, the paranoid care he was handling them with was probably quadrupling the time it would take to clear out the rubble covering the entrance to Delta. In any case, Tang decided the agent deserved an answer. "I can't tell you anything about that, other than that you are mistaken on many counts." "Which counts would these be?" "Most of them." "Are you going to tell me why Killjoy hired you?" "I can't do that." "So... at least tell me one thing. How did you get away from us back in Houston?" This question demolished Tang's poker face as his jaw dropped open in disbelief. "What... You're the same guys from Texas?" Tang nearly shouted. Zhen nodded. "How the *hell* did you track me down?" Tang did shout. "We have our ways," the agent smiled widely. Tang sighed and calmed enough to return the smile. "I am very impressed." Then the smile relaxed to cold determination. "I'm going to find out." "That's not very likely. So how did you escape?" "I have my ways." "I'm going to find out." The agent smiled. "We'd both rather you didn't." "I don't think so. I'd like to know." Tangaroa shook his head. "Trust me. You wouldn't want to know what sort of things I'm involved in." "We know all about you and your little Jihad, Mr. Dennis Anderson, recently of Kyoto, Japan, or would that be Mr. Daniel Armstrong of, alternatively, Seoul and Berlin? Or, perhaps, Mr. Jack Cole of London and Prague? You seem to get around a lot." "So you know everything except my name," Tang grinned widely, chuckling. "Then shall I call you... Agent Cecrops?" the agent asked. Tang laughed out loud. "What's so funny?" the agent asked. "Did I touch a soft spot?" "No, it's just that I haven't heard that name in years and you got the title wrong and -- wait. Wait a second. What did you say earlier?" "I said we know everything about your little organization." "Little?" Tang chucklingly objected. "Now that's an understatement if I ever heard one." Then Tang remembered that the Jihad's membership was down from circa 20,000 to about, oh, a dozen or so. "To a degree," he quickly added. This piqued Zhen's interest. "So how big is your group?" "Big enough for the time being. How big is yours?" The agent had to control himself from laughing at the cognitive dissonance. "We're the federal government!" "That's pretty big, isn't it?" The agent took a deep breath and nodded. "Now, you work with the FBI, right?" Tang asked. "Department of Homeland Security." Tangaroa took a moment to think, but he didn't remember ever coordinating with moles in any Department of Homeland Security. "Close enough. I'll take my phone call right now. You have a cell, you'll make it. There was a Deputy Assistant Undersecretary Johnny Johnson of the FBI's financial crimes division. He's a friend of mine. Use your cell phone and get him on the horn, and we'll get this mess cleared up." "JJ?" Zhen remembered Johnson as being a friend of his former supervisor. "He retired in '01." "Okay..." Tang sighed, "Special Agent Frank Frizzona. He's probably made deputy director by now." "Actually, he retired in '99." It was funny, Zhen thought. Frankie F. hadn't put in his years yet, he just up and quit. That's the only reason Zhen remembered him. "I know other people. Let me think.." "Name-dropping your old contacts isn't going to help you," Zhen noted. "We know your profile. You used to be a federal asset, and then you went rogue." "Used to be?" Tangaroa spit out. The truth was 'never was', but planting a different doubt in the agent's mind might get him out of this. "Um." Zhen stumbled over his thoughts as he started to consider the implications of this discussion. "As long as we're discussing your friends, another mystery from Houston that I'd like an answer to is your relationship with Saul Hoon. How do you know him?" "Saul?" Tang chuckled and shook his head. The Doberman Fleet Commander was still using his alias for a real name... or he had been. Tang's face sobered. "We were friends. Do you know what happened to him?" "We were hoping you could tell us." "He's dead. That's all I can tell you about him." "Were you involved in Mr. Hoon's death?" "No." "Do you know how Mr. Hoon died?" "Yes, and I'm not telling you." "So you know who killed Mr. Hoon?" "Yes. It was another... old friend. You don't have to worry about him anymore. That case is closed." "You killed him." "No." "You had him killed." Tangaroa hesitated a bit. "No." "Your Jihad had him killed." "Our... what?" Tang was suddenly speechless. "That's something you know about," Zhen smirked. "You said Jihad. You said it before, too, I think." "Yes, we know about the Jihad." "How much do you know?" "I believe I'm the interrogator here, but we know quite a lot and we are going to know a lot more after we're done talking to you and the other prisoners. Yes, other prisoners. For your information, you've been arrested as part of a worldwide police operation against the entire Jihad leadership and activist structure. By this time, we've also captured your friend Killjoy along with Katz Brenner, Kirk Felton, the assassin Rens Houben, the Athena arms factory, and of course, Jonathan Fnord of Spiral Corporation, along with a few other principal characters. You can sit there and think about this for a while, and when we get to the holding station, you can decide whether it's in your best interest to give us some answers before they do." With that, Zhen turned and walked towards the back of the van. As the agent opened the door to leave, Tangaroa called out to him. "Hey. I'm going to get away this time, too. A word of warning: you don't want to be around me when I decide it's time to leave." Zhen stopped and turned around. "Is that a threat? Threatening a Homeland Security agent is a serious crime." "It's not a threat. It's a pledge. You've made a great mistake, and you should be getting as far away from it as possible." Zhen closed the door and stepped down to the ground outside, accompanied by his men. Seeing the prisoner face to face made him wonder if he accurately recalled the strange events of Houston, but there was still something about this man that made him nervous. A corner of his mind wondered if it was possible for the prisoner, chained and guarded, to still make good on his threat. One of the uniformed officers came to him. "Are you going to be riding with the prisoner?" "No," Zhen said. "I think I'll be in the lead car. We'll question him further when we get to Federal." VRDET HQ BLANCA MOUNTAIN, COLORADO 1:36 PM LOCAL TIME Aris wasn't fluent in all forms of Draconic. She'd been raised speaking Th-varian, more or less, and only knew her so-called native tongue secondhand. And Shad spoke a different variant than she did. Still, she could make out a couple of words. "Spineless egg-sucking sons of retarded deaf-mute drooling weak-shelled HATCHLINGS!" This, punctuated with soft wooshes, which was all the sound the tranq pistols made. Less punctual than gunfire, Aris had to admit. Still, it was impressing Lacroix, who while understanding much less than Aris was rubbing his throat in unconscious sympathy for Rens' vocal cords. "This sucks," Aris said. Shad snarled and reloaded his pistol, taking aim at the targets again. "They stole my adjunct. Of course it sucks." "I just don't get the no warning part." Aris shook her head. "I mean, nothing. When we met in June? Nothing. Delgado had her ear to the ground good and there was bupkus." Shad snarled again. A simulated FBI agent went down with enough tranq to put three brontosauri down. He reloaded again. "I mean, Lacroix," she said, turning to Joseph, who had been quiet. "Did you get any sense that this was going to happen?" Sense of duty, perhaps, kept him from looking at her like she was crazy. "Nothing." "This. Is. STUPID." Shad punctuated each word with a soft woosh. "There's no way this could have happened. Nobody was tracking us. Nobody was even looking at us funny in June. And now this." "And we're back to pieces of a Triumvirate," Aris muttered under her breath. She sighed. "Anyway, Min's found a good few places for an ambush on the freeways around Berkeley, so you'll have plenty of time to prepare when they start moving her. Mal also says we should leave 'em the Fed." Lacroix raised an eyebrow. "The one I brought with me?" "Yeah. We don't need to feed him." Aris waived airily. "I'm heading back to the situation room. We'll beep you when they're on the road." "Sounds good to me," Shad said. As Aris left, he put a few more simulated federal agents into deep, dark slumber. "I think," he said to Lacroix as he reloaded, "That it's a good idea for you to be the one carrying live ammo." Lacroix looked at the fallen sims, especially the one breathing funny from tranquilizer overdose, and nodded. BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 12:50 PM LOCAL TIME It was damp hard work forcing one's way through the steam tunnels, and if she had to choose again, she'd not go that way, Katze decided. Especially not at noon on a hot August's day. Plus, as she came across each grate, she had to back off and make sure it was clear before she proceeded. Once a car had come along, and the rattling and bumping it had made spooked Katze enough to be doubly careful when crossing through grates. And to top it off, somewhere along the way, she'd managed to lose her watch. It was just gone, and she wasn't sure if the clasp had come undone, or if something had actually cut it off. There was enough protruding bits in the tunnels to make one wonder. So she didn't know exactly how long she'd been running around below ground, as it was all rather the same down there, and time seemed to flow at odd rates. She wasn't sure if it was her head acting up, or disorientation from the underground monotony. She thought that she'd figured out the main part of the tunneling system, and if she was right, the grate just ahead should open in front of Dwinelle Hall. And if she played it right, there'd be nobody there, and she could flee to downtown, and maybe escape on BART. It was better than the rest of her plans. And as expected, the tunnel grew larger until it was a small room just under the grate, and it was marked "Emergency Exit." Katze took a deep breath and popped the grate open, only to surprise a couple civilians walking up the hill. "Oh, sorry! Utility work!" she said, with perhaps a bit too much shrillness, and slammed the grate closed behind her. The two civilians looked at one another, and then one shrugged his shoulder and they continued up the hill towards their destination. In the distance, the Campanile pealed out one bell, for one PM. VRDET HQ BLANCA MOUNTAIN, COLORADO 1:55 PM LOCAL TIME Special Agent Trevor Stallard looked around the confines of his cell for what seemed like the fiftieth time. It wasn't a bad one, as cells went - Fnord's comment of "enlisted's quarters" drifted past his mind again - but it was secure. The door was locked from the outside, there were no windows, and the one ventilation duct he'd found was too small for anything larger than his arm. He was vacillating to himself, and he knew it, but he had to do something to keep his mind off what had just happened. ... One moment he'd been standing on the street in Denver holding a suspected terrorist at gunpoint, the next he had been bodily tackled and when they'd hit the ground, they'd been... somewhere else. Wherever this was. Probably not Kansas anymore, he reflected sourly to himself. A knock on the door interrupted his reverie. Some distant part of his brain giggled at the notion of a prisoner being asked for permission to enter his cell, but he shrugged it aside. "Yes?" The door swung open to reveal a man dressed in black street clothes that he recognized almost immediately from an earlier briefing. He didn't appear to be armed aside from the handcuffs he was carrying in one hand, but if even half the intel on Houben had been accurate that was a moot point anyway. There was an angry scowl on his features and Trevor wondered absently if he should be glad that something wasn't going well for this terrorist or be deathly afraid. "Special Agent Stallard?" The words "How did you know that?" were suppressed as quickly as they formed in the back of his mind. "Yes?" "We're going to exchange you for one of our own. Put these on." He didn't move to take the proffered cuffs. "Bullshit. The FBI doesn't do prisoner exchanges with terrorists." "I said *we* are going to exchange you. I don't recall saying anything about giving the FBI a choice in the matter. Now put these on. Please." Today was an excellent day not to die by pointlessly annoying a terrorist. He put the cuffs on and followed his jailer out. Stallard recognized the room as the one he'd first landed in when he'd arrived... wherever here was. The terrorist he'd originally been trying to arrest - Lacroix, his still-reeling mind idly noted - was already standing next to the raised area where... Something... Was floating. Looking directly at it hurt gave him a headache, but at the same time he couldn't quite make himself look away as whatever it was coiled and bulged and turned in on itself in ways that would make M.C. Escher jump screaming off a cliff while in its core flashes and glimpses of things beyond his comprehension appeared. It was like a peeping hole directly into infi- Someone whapped him, lightly, on the back of his head, breaking the trance. "Careful. Don't stare too much into the Gate when it's on standby - you'll sprain your eyes." He glanced to his side, where Lacroix was glaring at him while keeping an assault rifle not quite pointed at him, with the safety not quite off and his finger not quite on the trigger. The sound of an ammo clip being loaded into an automatic pistol caused him to turn to the right, where Houben was putting the loaded gun back on the table in front of him and repeating the action with a second before picking both pistols up, holding one in each hand, aiming at nothing in particular for a moment to test the weight, and then suddenly opening both his hands as if to let them drop -- but instead of dropping they vanished into thin air. Stallard was by now feeling too numb with shock to do more than blink, though, as Houben turned to face him and his captor. "Nearly time, gentlemen. Lacroix, any last-moment questions about the ops plan?" Upon receiving an answer in the negative, Houben turned to him. "Stallard, your part in this is fairly simple. Sit tight, go with Lacroix when he tells you to, don't ask any questions how or why. Minerva, if you'd care to do the honors?" The disembodied voice he'd heard earlier from the speakers responded. "Certainly. Gate opening in five... Four... Three..." There was a subtle change in the background noise of the room. The gentle thrumming he'd been only barely aware of started increasing in volume and tempo, as if it was the heartbeat of some gargantuan monster preparing itself for battle. "Two..." The whatever-it-was on the raised platform -- the gate? -- started expanding, its coils twisting and loosening, stretching the area in its center through which scenes started flipping more rapidly. "One..." A lot of things seemed to happen at once. The coils suddenly exploded outward, then snapped themselves rigid in a rough circle, and the shifting mass contained within resolved itself to what looked like a stretch of highway that could be almost anywhere in the USA. "Gate established. Come on down and step on through." Houben shot a long-suffering glance at the speaker from which the voice had come, then stepped into the gate, which vanished with a flash behind him. Special Agent Trevor Stallard just stood and gaped. "And now," Lacroix said from next to him, "we wait our turn." INTERSTATE 80, ROUGHLY THREE MILES SOUTHWEST OF CORDELIA JUNCTION 1:15 PM LOCAL TIME Except for a few sparse landmarks, this particular section of freeway had very little indeed to distinguish itself from any other stretch of any other freeway on the continent. Sporadic tufts of grass interspersed with the occasional tree dotted the hillsides around the wide strip of asphalt, and occasionally a car would zoom by, enroute to someplace - any place - more interesting. Then, for about five seconds, it became *much* more interesting, as a shimmering circle of light opened in midair just long enough for a single person to step through before vanishing as suddenly as it had appeared. Rens spared a moment to glance around to see if anyone had taken notice of his arrival, then thumbed his 'Linker to life. "Home base, this is Bait. Insertion successful; confirm target is still enroute." Minerva's voice came back almost immediately. "Bait, this is Home Base. Confirm target enroute, ETA your location about three minutes. Switch confirms he's standing by for your signal." He nodded and started walking alongside the lane. "Then let's get it done. Start the final countdown when they're twenty-five meters behind me, with five-meter intervals." "Yokai." "... You're not Japanese, Minerva." "Spoilsport. ETA two minutes thirty seconds." Rens chuckled and shoved his hands in his coat pockets, twitching his fingers to cue his hyperpark retrieval circuitry, selecting the item he'd specifically loaded into it an hour before, then nodded in satisfaction at the responding feedback tingle in his palm. Ready. Then his face darkened again, confident smile morphing into a vicious snarl that had no business on a human face as Shadur's rage flared through him again. Dragons are, by nature, possessive in the extreme. Even the most mild-mannered ones will eventually find something they start to hoard and then defend it against all would-be thieves - or even those perceived as such - with a fury and ferocity out of all proportion to the actual threat. This is something inborn and instinctive; sometimes they don't even realize they've started hoarding until someone takes something that's theirs and the only warning is a surge of fury and a desire to smash the taker into the ground. Likewise, it's almost impossible to tell *what* it is that a given dragon hoards, except by experimentation (which tends to be a risky business) or asking and hoping he's in the mood to discuss the issue (not all that much safer in many cases). It is almost always something they find most precious to them, which probably accounts for the popular image of a gigantic reptile dozing on an equally large pile of gold and jewelry. Others value knowledge, and either bury themselves in a deep library sealed in a vault of their own creation, or run an information brokery. Some hide their precious things away where none but themselves can see them, others proudly put them on display for all to see and admire. One dragon, unbeknownst to almost everyone, secretly owns nearly half of the world's art museums through several layers of false identities, front companies and anonymous donations. Shadur hoarded friends. Losing one in combat was something he'd gotten used to over the years, as much as anyone can get used to that, but none had died unavenged. The sudden surprise attack, by people they'd never actually considered "enemies" as much as "the people we're protecting and trying to keep out of the line of fire", had shocked him equally as much as it had the others, but once the shock had died away the fury hat set in, and Shad had been steadily fuming since. Hearing Mal's account of what had happened to Miranda just minutes before he'd arrived at the base had only made it worse. {How *DARE* they? MY friends. MY allies. MY adjunct. *MINE*.} It had taken a lot of effort for Rens to convince his other half that flying in, savaging the van and every agent in it, and flying off with Miranda wasn't an option for now, but his own anger at the situation was demanding a very explicit message to be sent. "ETA forty-five seconds, Bait. Looks like a full escort with 'em - four cars ahead, four behind." Minerva's voice in his earbug broke Rens out of his reverie, and he shook himself. "Bait acknowledges. Let's dance." Less than half a minute later the noise of the police sirens was clearly audible as they came up rapidly behind him. Rens didn't turn around, but instead merely kept walking while Minerva started calling off the remaining distance. The leading cars didn't slow down; evidently they'd concluded that a lone hitchhiker was unlikely to be a threat. As Minerva called the twenty-five mark, Rens made a grabbing motion with his right hand still in his pocket, activating the recall. His trenchcoat concealed the flash as his personal hyperpark system pulled the object he'd requested out of its subspace pocket. "Fifteen meters." He felt it settle into his hand and pulled it slowly out of his pocket. "Ten." Rens thumbed the primer and flicked it in a low arc, landing it directly in front and center of the oncoming van, where it detonated just before the van passed over it -- spilling a dozen razor-sharp caltrops directly in front of all four tires, which exploded almost simultaneously. Normal reaction for a driver in these kind of situations would be to panic, lose control and plow into the nearest immovable object. Fortunately, this particular driver had better reflexes, and managed to keep the van from keeling over before he'd brought it to an upright standstill. Even more miraculously, all four of the trailing cars had managed to brake and swerve out of the way rather than plow into it from behind. Undoubtedly, they'd all recover their wits soon enough, but at least for the moment they were completely surprised, and Rens was already moving, pushing off the guardrail to vault onto the roof of the nearest police car and from there on toward the van's door. He pulled one gun from hyperpark and fired two shots in mid-flight, both bullets smashing in through the side window and out again through the windshield, fragmenting the glass and turning both windows into opaque messes of starred cracks. The agent in the shotgun seat had only barely managed to recover from the second shock in less than five seconds when a boot crashed through the side window and impacted with her temple, sending her into unconsciousness. Her partner behind the wheel had only marginally longer, but not enough time to do more than begin to reach for his weapon before a backfist sent him to join his partner in blissful oblivion. Rens took a moment to evaluate the situation. Van halted, check. Driver not likely to be getting on the road again in the immediate future, check. Make sure we're rescuing the right prisoner... He banged the bulkhead separating the driver's cabin from the prisoner compartment. Two beats, pause. Two more beats, pause again. Two more, pause a third time. One beat. Wait. The were almost finished piling out of the escort cars and surrounding the van with weapons at the ready when the side wall resounded as something inside the prisoner cabin slammed against it, then once more. Check. Rens activated his linker. "Home base, Bait. Hook, line, sinker. Switch is go. I say again, Switch is go." "Bait, Home base confirms Switch is go. Estimate forty-five seconds to completion." "Roger. I'll keep the peanut gallery entertained. Advise when Switch is done." "Yokai." "You're *still* not Japanese, Minerva." "Keep that up and you get to walk home. Home base, out." Rens grinned to himself as he put the Linker back into hyperpark storage, then looked out the side window. Good, the cops still hadn't finished surrounding the van. His grin widened. Time for some *fun*. If the police officers were surprised when he calmly exited the van by the side door, they hid it well. Seven shotguns swiveled as one to point at his head while the eighth keyed his megaphone. "Step away from the vehicle, put your hands behind your head and lie down on the ground!" Rens turned to look him in the eyes, and grinned, in much the same way that gigantic predators had once grinned at the officer's distant ancestors, with some of the same effect. "I suggest..." He raised one hand, and all four patrol cars suddenly rose into the air, hovering several meters above the heads of the officers, who were reduced to staring with their shotguns dangling all but forgotten from suddenly limp hands. Eventually, their gazes were drawn back to Rens' face, and he watched the speaker blanch most satisfactorily as the black-in-black of his eyes registered. "... That you take your own advice." He flung his hand out to the side, and the cars were sent careening through the air off the road, coming to a bouncing, rolling, crashing halt in the fields. Rens maintained eye contact with the speaker as the cars exploded, letting the silence speak the words he didn't say out loud. All of you would have been in those wrecks, had I chosen so. I did not so choose. Remember that. His reverie was disrupted when Miranda's voice sounded through his earbug. "Bait, this is Watcher. Switch successful. We're ready to bring you home at your call." Rens smiled as he pulled his 'Linker from hyperpark. "Watcher, Bait. Good to hear your voice again. I'm done here, recall at will." "Roger, Bait. Minerva says five seconds to portal. See you soon... And thanks." Special Agent Trevor Stallard glanced around the inside of the police van which seemed to be his new home. All he clearly remembered of the last minute or so was a riot of light and motion as Lacroix guided him into the "gate" again. He vaguely remembered suddenly being in the van, a confused shuffle, and some tapping on the front wall. The next thing he knew, the light was appearing again, Lacroix guiding a small woman in handcuffs into it. "The same side," Lacroix reminded him. He vanished into the light, which vanished itself, before Stallard could say anything. A few moments later, the van’s doors opened. Several officers, obviously armed, obviously terrified – and now obviously confused – stared at him. Growing used to two of those states, Stallard stared back. SOMEWHERE UNDER THE VALLEY LIFE SCIENCES BUILDING BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 1:15 PM LOCAL TIME Somewhere under Valley Life Sciences Building, a fugitive rested. It was a cool spot, which after the oppressive heat and humidity of the steam tunnels was a nice change. The two very large tanks of hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide nearby were a bit scary, but nothing more scary that what she'd faced before ... or for that matter, what she was faced with now if she got caught. Katze Brenner, psych graduate student, former Jihaddi, and now apparent terrorist, leaned against the wall in the foundation room she'd found. The hard hat she'd swiped from Wheeler was on the ground next to her, and she was busy twisting her normal hat in her hands. She still wasn't sure of how much time had passed, and it wasn't like there was really any way to find out, short of trying to come aboveground somewhere with a view of the Campanile, and she wasn't quite ready to give up in massive defeat. Right now, though, it was a matter of soaking up the cool air in the foundations and attempting to see what could be done without pain. So far, she'd found the answer was, "Not much." Basic stuff like light spells and unlocking doors only seemed to be twingy, and that was good, but anything beyond that got kind of dicey. It felt rather odd to be like that, to do next to nothing in defending oneself because the only ways one knew to defend involved methods that were rather prone to spectacular failure at the moment. So she was trapped. Trapped, like a cornered rat and left alone to the whims of an uncaring universe. There had been one time previous she'd felt this way, locked in a dungeon several universes over from this one, but at least that time some of the melancholy seemed justified. This time, she was the only one who could know just how alone she felt. She pulled out her cell phone and looked at it for a very long time. Was it worth the risk of turning it on to make one phone call? Just one, to hear the voice of somebody she trusted, and find her way back from this hellish halfspace her life had chosen to occupy? This morning, she had kissed Josh goodbye and wandered off to school, fairly secure in the belief that life wasn't going to be making any more sudden and severe changes. Now? Nothing. There was no gang of screwballs coming to the rescue this time, if she was going to get out of this mess, she had to do it alone. She put the cell phone back in her pocket, and tried to muster up the strength to continue on. But dammit, it would have been good to hear Mal's voice again, the way it had been on that day so many years ago in Marraketh. INTERSTATE 71, MISSOURI 3:57 PM LOCAL TIME A nondescript grey van traveled along the road in a small convoy of police cars. Its cargo, sitting on a bench with his back to the passenger compartment, held his head down and eyes closed, but his brow was ruffled in concentration. Behind him, where no one could see, a tiny pinprick of bright red light glimmered on the links on his handcuffs, and if his guards had been paying attention, they might have noticed a slight metallic scent in the air. In another time, Tangaroa would have simply waited until he could use his phone call and soon a high-ranking bureaucrat, or someone who by all appearances seemed to be, would have leaned on the cops to have the great mistake of his arrest reconciled. However, times had changed and his arrest was no mistake. The news he heard faintly coming over the radio in the van's cabin added to Tangaroa's fears. There had been a bombing at Spiral Headquarters, the civilian spinoff of the Verthandic Rangers, and some kind of shooting had broken out in Berkeley where at least one active TRESie was living. The Jihad against Barney, or what was left of it, had been specifically targeted for extermination by the federal government, this according to the agent who had arrested him and who should have had no reason to even know of the Jihad. This was war. Suddenly, Tangaroa lifted his head. "Hey." The officers turned to him. "Put your hands in the air and I'll let you guys go." The officers guffawed momentarily, then shouted out in shock as their prisoner stood up and raised a hand at them. One reached for his gun and dropped it, screaming, as his face blistered in a wave of heat. Tangaroa didn't take any chances with the other officer, slamming him into the wall with a beam of energy and kicking his head as he slumped to the ground. "You can live if you want to," Tangaroa warned as he lifted the officers' guns. The officers were in too much shock to argue. "What the hell's going on back there?" someone shouted from the passenger compartment. Tangaroa now needed to get the van to slow down enough for him to disembark and remain in one piece when he landed. Threatening or attacking the driver carried risks... Tang knelt down and put his hands to the van floor, casting a variation of his shield spell on the other side of the floor, in the rear axle compartment. It took some effort, but his magic solidified enough to form a break on the rear wheels. "We're slowing down!" the driver shouted, staring at the falling speedometer and lifting his feet from the pedals. Hitting the gas again only partially mitigated the reduction in speed. "Why are they slowing down?" asked an officer in the car following the van. Then a call came over the radio. "We've got a situation here! I don't know what's going on..." Then the van began to regain speed. "Ah, they're speeding up again." These words had barely escaped the officer's lips when the van's rear doors flew open and the prisoner leapt out onto the road in front of his car. "What the.." the officer began to exclaim. "Run his ass over!" his partner shouted. CITY HALL BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 2:00 PM LOCAL TIME Berkeley Mayor Jason Ryan stood in front of a sea of cameras. "Between the rioting which has spread off campus from the noon attack of Sproul Plaza and the existence of a terrorist-at-large on the Berkeley campus, I, as mayor of the City of Berkeley, am forced to call out the National Guard. I know several of the older members of my community remember the National Guard occupation that followed in the wake of the People's Park Riots of 1969, and the eventual use of tear gas on a civilian population by that same occupation. However, we do not have enough police to contain the rioting that already exists, and we ask that people bear with us as we call in the National Guard. I turn the podium over to my colleague at the University." Chancellor Seamus O'Keefe took the podium. His Irish brogue was rather different in tone than Ryan's California accent, but his message was completely in coordination. "Due to both Mayor Ryan's request to call out the National Guard, and the fact that an ongoing search for a known terrorist continues on the UC Berkeley campus, I am canceling all classes that meet on or after 2 PM today on the University Campus and all classes tomorrow. The Board of Regents will convene an emergency meeting for tomorrow to discuss the possibility and feasibility of further closures." He started to step away from the podium, when a UCPD officer handed him a slip of paper. He opened it, quickly read it, and announced its contents to the cameras. "The FBI believes that they are very close to apprehending a suspect. Details will be made available as they become known." INTERSTATE 71, MISSOURI 4:00 PM LOCAL TIME Tangaroa's knees bent low as he made a solid landing, placing one hand on the ground to steady himself. He threw his other hand up and cast a shield spell to stop the oncoming car. The car smashed into the shield, its hood crumpling and its tail lifting into the air before it settled itself down. The cars behind it slowed as they saw the crash. A few tails of flame swirled around Tangaroa as he summoned his fire magic but didn't give it any form or command just yet. He climbed up onto a less craggy part of the car's hood, scrambled up the roof, and sent the flame into the car, setting the upholstery and the stunned passengers' clothes afire. As the next car pulled up adjacent and stopped, Tangaroa leaped onto its hood and repeated the attack, then directed the flames outward as the officers tried to escape. The last car stopped a few feet away. Tangaroa drew his guns and fired on the officers as they scrambled out of the car and aimed at him over their doors. He hit the driver, but missed the other. Tang leapt sideways off the car before the standing officer could return fire, and fired in midair, twisting his body to account for the kick from the first shot and getting off a second shot with the gun in his other hand. The officer hit the ground about the same time as Tang did. "Fucking miracle," Tang muttered, getting to his feet and scooping up a gun that had jumped out of his hand when he landed. He ran to the end of the last car to put the entire convoy at one side of him and turned around to face it. Fortunately, there were few other cars on either side of the road. The van and lead cars were stopping now. Tangaroa got low and aimed through the smoky haze. Zhen tried to imagine a rational explanation of how his prisoner could have accomplished his miracles, including this new curiosity of how the rear of his convoy suddenly looked like it had been struck by RPG fire. He stopped the car and got out and immediately felt a sharp stinging pain in his lower left side, where his vest didn't cover his body. He barely had time to register it before the armbone below his shoulder shattered at a second impact. Zhen fell to the ground wincing and soon lost consciousness. VRDET HQ BLANCA MOUNTAIN, COLORADO 3:05 PM LOCAL TIME "I've got something," Minerva announced. "Something about an attack on a DHS convoy in Missouri. Give me a minute and I'll pin down a location." "Missouri?" Mal wondered. "What the hell is going on in Missouri?" "Probably Tang," Killjoy rumbled. Since his escape from Boston, the giant had taken up his favorite looming position in the situation room and stood there, completely silent as events rolled around them. Mal shot a look at Killjoy. "I know I'll probably regret asking this," he said, "but what, pray tell, was Tang doing in Missouri? Better yet, what were -you- doing in Missouri?" KJ shrugged tectonically. "Wasn't Missouri. We went down to Arkansas together. He asked me for some help with explosives." "Explosives?" Another shrug. "Yeah." Mal fought an urge to swear violently. Cecrops Tangaroa had a reputation as something of a loose cannon, and to have him running around the Ozarks with -explosives- of all the things... "Min, pinned it down yet?" "Hang on. Okay, got it. Just west of the Arkansas state line on I-71. Looks pretty bad - whatever 'it' is - and there's police, fire, rescue, you name it approaching at high speed. We've got maybe five minutes before the area's neck-deep in cops." Mal sighed. "Shad?" The dragon got out of his seat. "I'm on my way," he announced as he dashed out of the situation room en route to the Gate. SOMEWHERE UNDERNEATH THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 2:05 PM LOCAL TIME After what seemed to have been roughly five minutes, but could have been one, or fifty, Katze pulled herself off the ground, put her hat back on, and then grabbed the hard hat. Her head felt slightly less painful, at least. Maybe it was time to risk coming aboveground. She explored around and found an exit out to Valley. She didn't know where she could go from there, but at least it would get her out of the steam tunnels. That would be a blessing in and of itself. But as she approached the door, she heard some muttering from outside. She drew back in the shadows, and peered through the small window set in the door. Two of them were uniformed cops of some sort or another, and the third was dressed in a suit and was probably a Federal officer. They had their back turned to the entrance into the room she was in, but there was no way she could get out that door without them noticing her, and if they noticed, the game was up. The Federal agent turned around, and Katze tensed up against the wall, hoping he hadn't seen her. He looked into the window, tapped the door, and said, "What's in here?" The answer he got seemed to please him, as he came out of the window. Katze let out a breath she didn't know she'd been holding, and held her position for a few minutes longer to make sure he wasn't still looking in, and then bolted for the tunnels. Dank, dark, hot and humid was nothing compared to getting caught. She fled through the tunnels, this time moving a little faster due to familiarity, although the heat kept her pace down. She was really starting to feel like a rat in a trap, running to and fro with nowhere to escape, and it slowed her down a bit. Plus, there was checking before crossing below every grating, to make sure there wasn't somebody there just waiting for her. She slogged uphill, away from Valley and towards Center Campus, looking for somewhere to come out. She was starting to feel the very weariness in her bones, and knew the heat and humidity wasn't helping. Her head even seemed to throb in time with some of the mechanical sounds echoing through the tunnel. And she still had no idea what time it was. So, after it had seemed like she'd walked for hours, uphill, in a humid swamp, she finally came to another manhole, and decided to try her luck. She climbed up a ladder nailed to the side of the tunnel and pushed the manhole up and out. Katze poked her head out, only to find three UCPD officers standing there in baffled surprise. They looked at each other for a very long time before Katze said, "Ulp! Bye!" and disappeared back down the shaft, running for dear life. The three UCPD officers stared at each other in mass confusion before one of them finally had the presence of mind to figure out that was their suspect and radioed the news back to the station. BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 2:15 PM LOCAL TIME Officer Jenkins was standing on Sproul. It was oddly quiet for quarter past two on the Monday of the second week of school, but then again, Sproul had only once had to deal with the aftermath of a rally that had gone as bad as this one had, and at least that one didn't end as awfully badly as this one had. He swung the briefing papers he'd been handed with the information on his suspect, which must have included everything the University could have found on the unlucky person, up to and including academic records. Funny how the sanctity of academic records was even thrown out the window in the case of a terrorism investigation. The pictures were not bad. They were obviously ID photos, the top one having the rough dimensions of a Cal student ID photo, and the bottom having to be a California state ID picture. The face in the picture looked oddly familiar and Jenkins couldn't place it. Obviously, he had a name, but the name hadn't rung any faint bells either. He stood there musing when one of the students who had been helping with triage came over. "What are you looking at?" she asked. Jenkins showed her the front page. "The suspect I'm supposed to be watching for. The one whom the FBI was searching for in the first place when this..." He struggled to find another word and found no other one that worked, so resigned himself to swearing in front of a student, "...shit happened." The student frowned at the papers. "What'd she do?" "Apparently, the FBI wants her in conjunction with some sort of terrorism investigation." "No, sir. That seems wrong to me." "Why?" "She's been my psych GSI in a couple of classes over the last year. She's just not the sort of person who'd attempt to commit terror. If anything, if I don't miss my guess, she'd be the sort who'd try to *stop* it." "Well, the strangest people get involved in these sorts of things," Jenkins said. But the student was already gesturing one of her friends over. Against his better judgment, Jenkins showed the second student the pictures as well. The second student shook his head as well. "There has to be some mistake," the second student said. Jenkins shook his head. If what both these students were telling him was true, there was a possibility the mess on Sproul had gone down because of a case of mistaken identity? He asked the second student, "Why don't you think it's a possibility?" "Whoever put this together didn't know Katze," the second one said. "She came across as a bit of a pacifist, and somebody who seemed to catch the idea that you can't scare people into believing what you want them to believe. Not saying that it's not possible, but if I was to put a guess on it, I don't think she's the one you guys want." Jenkins' radio crackled. "Units in the Sproul area, be advised our suspect was last seen in Wheeler Auditorium, and could be coming your way." Jenkins acknowledged the call, and as soon as he had the radio off, the students both said that they hoped their former instructor would get away. This surprising loyalty to their instructor interested Jenkins, and he decided that he'd better find this person first. He left the students where he'd been standing, and started to walk towards the campus end of Sproul, thinking to himself about possible hiding places around the area. BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 2:20 PM LOCAL TIME Katze opened a door in the basement of the library cautiously, checking to make sure there wasn't anybody there. She pulled her ID out of her pocket, and decided this was a good time to race into the stacks. There was always a place to hide in a place with thousands and thousands of books. She raced up one flight of stairs, and then forced herself to walk the rest of the way through Doe to the Underground Main Stacks so she wouldn't be suspicious. She flashed her ID to the student guarding the gate into the stacks, and then fled down into them. At the C level in Main Stacks, she stopped, only to hear yelling coming from upstairs. Knowing she didn't have much time, she dashed into the Stacks and came face to face with the campus' highly efficient shelving units. You see, when the university had built Main Stacks, they had placed a large chunk of the bookcases on tracks, and you could crank in between one shelf and the next. And this gave Katze an idea. Now, hiding in the crankable stacks was a problem for most people, because you needed somebody on the outside to crank the stacks back shut while you tried to jam yourself into a shelf sized box. In other words, you needed an accomplice, which Katze didn't have. However, this was less of a problem if you could convince yourself and some other solid object to exist in the same place at the same time. It was something she'd never done under these conditions, and she was horribly out of practice. And her head was going to ache again after this. But it had to be done, the Stacks had turned out to be just as much a rat trap as everything else had been so far. She began whispering to the shelf in Marrakethian, the language she used for her all her wizardry workings, asking it kindly if it wouldn't mind sharing its space with her, and explaining what kind of trouble she was in. Luckily, these shelves were highly accommodating to her request, and she slid in with them with seconds to spare, as the FBI slid onto the floor looking for her. The next few minutes were absolutely utterly tense, as Katze pushed a lot of her spare energy towards maintaining both the spell and her self-identity, which was a difficult juggling assignment. Err too far on one side, and the problem of two objects existing in the same space asserted itself, err too far on the other and risk losing your atoms in the bookcase. Either wasn't a pleasant way to go for a mage, and Katze was not only maintaining the juggling act, but trying to ignore the ache her head was giving her in complaint to her juggling. Somehow, the dumb luck that had propelled her through the afternoon's comedy of errors continued, and the FBI quickly established she wasn't hiding in the obvious part of the stacks and headed off in the direction of Moffitt Undergraduate Library, which was at the west end of the C level. She carefully extracted herself from the shelves, thanked them for being helpful, and ran off towards the east end of the Main Stacks and the emergency stairwell, not noticing that she forgot to account for her ever present baseball cap. It continued to sit neatly on the shelf alongside books in the H section of the Library of Congress classification. INTERSTATE 71, MISSOURI 4:30 PM LOCAL TIME Shadur swooped dangerously close to the small convoy of police vehicles on I-71 in southwest Missouri. With the vehicles already stopped and in varying states of incineration by the time he got there, the risk was worth the inspection. Shad landed and changed into his human form, walking among the vehicles for a closer look. "Eesh... and Mal tells me *I* suck at subtle." The policemen had been shot, gouged, burned, and left for dead. Fortunately, many were not yet. Rens walked down the row of vehicles, opening their passenger-side doors and looking in for a first-aid kit. "Hey! Dragon!" someone shouted from the tree line a few yards off the side of the road. Tangaroa, his clothes bloodied, waved and jogged up to Rens, following a step behind him. "Let's get the hell out of here. There'll be backup coming any minute." Rens barely gave Tangaroa a glance. "These people are still alive." Finding what he was looking for, he leaned inside the cabin and pulled out the first-aid kit. "Their people will take care of them," Tang insisted. "Let's go." Rens silently started dressing the third-degree burns of the survivor in the truck's passenger seat, not showing any visible reaction to Tangaroa's pleadings. Tang shrugged and walked over to the most obviously living officer near him, who shirked back and whimpered at the approach of his recent assailant. A few moments later, there was an ear-piercing, agonized scream. "TANG!" Shad angrily shouted, glaring at the Dobe. "Sorry," Tangaroa apologized, "I don't have much experience with healing magic." He tossed a stained bullet onto the roadway and pressed his handkerchief on the bleeding wound. "Could I have some gauze?" Shad tossed a roll and a lecture Tangaroa's way. "The shock from that could have killed him." "Nah, he wasn't too badly hurt." Tangaroa quickly taped down the bandage and continued to the next of his victims. "Now, this guy, I'll be more careful with." Shad grumbled and returned his attention to the wounded. Rens Houben and Tangaroa continued to render first aid to the policemen who had been the victims of Tang's violent escape from their capture. The two Jihaddi had by now acquired a small audience of motorists. It was hard not to have one's attention drawn to a cluster of burned out police cars around which the only people still moving were the ones who were apparently not the policemen, and a few of the braver motorists discovered that they would not end up like the policemen if they stopped to gawk. One of the civilians had even stepped forward to give the Jihaddi a hand with his own car's first aid kit. "Take care of him." Rens pointed Tang toward an officer lying on the ground, after Tang had finished applying a bandage to another. Tang looked, felt, and used his magic to try to sense further. "Nah, he's gone. I think that's all of them, when you're done with that one." He stood up and looked away into the distance as he heard a far-off siren. "Shad..." he started. "You can't hurry this," Rens said, adding, "I hear it too." Fortunately, he was just finishing up with the dressing. "Alright. He'll make it." "We've got to get out of here before the news choppers show up," Tang said. "Who are you guys?" the civilian asked. "We're nobody," Rens said. "You didn't see us. Good job on giving first aid for all these people. Stay here and don't follow us." Rens and Tang walked into the woods by the highway until they shortly reached a small space where trees wouldn't get in the way of the portal. They looked back to make sure no one could see them, then Rens pushed a button on his Jihadlinker and spoke into it. "Minerva, we're ready." "It's about time." "We had some things to take care of. Get us out of here." A few seconds later, a portal opened up in front of them and they stepped through. VRDET HQ BLANCA MOUNTAIN, COLORADO 3:45 PM LOCAL TIME The two Jihaddi appeared in the chamber with bloodied hands and clothes. Rens calmly apologized. "I'm sorry it took us so long to get back. There were things we needed to take care of." Tang started to wave, then thought better of it and quickly returned his stained hand to his side. "Konnichi-wa, Dee. I'll go wash up a bit and then let's go bust out everyone else they got." Mal welcomed the incoming Jihaddi. "Congratulations on your second rescue today." "All in a day's work," Shad said. Tang smiled at the sight of the Seeker. "Grimace, I'm glad to see you! They told me they'd arrested you all. By name." Mal smirked. "Yeah, they said that about John Gotti too. Now, which they and what did they tell you?" "It was an FBI -- no, he said he was from a Homeland Security department. That's a new one, I think. He knew about the Jihad, you, me, Shad, Killjoy... You need to know this. He was the same guy who tracked me down in Houston." "Oh, now that's interesting," Mal said. "It might not be as serious as it sounds. There were holes in his information and it seemed like he was getting a lot of it secondhand. Still, it looks like somebody's been planning this for a while. "I think going to Sam's was the mistake," Tang continued, as much to himself as to Mal. "I don't think they were expecting me specifically. I talked to the guy who was supposed to be interrogating me, and he didn't know who Sam was or anything about him. Of course, maybe he was just acting that way, but like I said, I don't think he had all the information." "And from your appearance, we're not going to get whatever information he had." "Well..." Tang blushed. "There were survivors. You can mostly thank Shad for that. Do you think we should visit some of them in the hospital tomorrow and throttle them for information?" Rens furrowed his brow at Tang. "Just how hard do you plan to 'throttle' them?" "Figure of speech. If they're going to talk at all, just my showing up will scare any words out of them. Otherwise, we might bring them here and shack them up until they think we're okay." "I don't think we need any more guests," Mal said. "And by the way--" Mal tossed a Jihadlinker across the table to the Dobe. "If you hadn't destroyed your 'linker at the first sign of trouble, we could have brought you in." "... it's standard procedure." "It might have been standard procedure in 1997, but times have changed. Please keep up with them in the future. Now clean yourself up and Aris and Dee will fill you in on the details on what's been going on." VRDET HQ BLANCA MOUNTAIN, COLORADO 3:55 PM LOCAL TIME Aris returned to her quarters and stood for a couple minutes, tapping her fingers on the doorframe. For dragons, at least the dragon species commonly known as the "Galactic Dragons", certain things were simple. Guard your hoard, protect your friends. And Katze was missing. Katze was also a teleporter, but Aris had some experience with that herself. There were plenty of things that could stop someone's magic from working, including tranquilizers and unconsciousness. If Katze was still alive and in captivity, she needed help. If she was injured and not in captivity, she still needed help. So. Help needed to be. Aris took off her backpack and pulled out a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, and put those on over her unitard. She then dumped her fatigues, her 'Linker, and her sword into her backpack, and printed out a Berkeley campus map. As the printer whirred she got down on her hands and knees with a roll of masking tape and worked a circle onto the carpet, complete with runes and cardinal directions. Then she picked up the map and stepped into the center of the circle. "Hokay," she said to herself. "Aristalarus Lemalishtara Merquoni, you're going to be doing something completely stupid. Are you forgetting anything?" "Well, self," she responded, "I've got everything I need in my backpack, so I don't think so." "What happens if someone takes your backpack away?" "Good point, self." Aris set her backpack down and got out a permanent marker. When she was done writing runes on her backpack, she pointed at it and chanted a few words in Th'varian. "Great. So now I can call if I ever need it. Anything else? Can't think of anything. Good. Shut up and go." She hoisted her backpack to her shoulders and invoked the teleportation spell. BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 2:55 PM LOCAL TIME Check the hallway, sidle down the staircase, check the hallway and room...so far it was going well and the cats were nowhere in sight, but you never knew when one of them would turn up. Katze took a breath, checked outside the window in this lonely classroom in Wheeler, and climbed out the window. The distance to the ground was a bit further than she'd guestimated in the first place, and she misjudged her descent, coming up limping slightly from an ankle she only hoped she'd tweaked. Wasn't much that could be done about it now, anyway, and tried to run along the space between Wheeler Hall and South Hall, but the ankle was turning it into a half-run, half exaggerated limp. The end of the buildings was coming up soon and Katze decided better not to slow what pace she had to check for agents. Instead, she continued her half run across the top of Wheeler Plaza and down the staircase on the other side. There was a footbridge there, and Katze couldn't tell what made her decide to vault the bridge into the creek, other than "it seemed like a good idea at the time." As she splashed into the water, she was suddenly glad she'd worn her good hiking boots to school today despite Josh telling her she was crazy for doing that in this weather. This part of the creek was rather treacherous, as there were three or four concrete conduits connecting the substation on the south side with the buildings on the north, and Katze managed to connect her head with one of these, opening a cut above her eyebrow. She managed to keep her wits and stay silent and continued to move west along the creek to Sather Gate. And then she found a hiding spot. The creek jogged south, slightly, and most of the year there wasn't enough water to matter. But when the winter rains came, the jog in the creek bed would straighten out over time as it eroded away the hillside. Somebody had fixed this problem by allowing the creek to jog south most of the time, but create a way for the water to flow through a diversion tunnel during periods of high water. It being late August, there was very little water in the tunnel except the little bit of seepage from the small cofferdam that kept the creek from flowing in the tunnel at all times. It wasn't the largest of quarters, but it would work until dark, she hoped. And it was cool in there, unlike where she'd spent most of her afternoon. Again, time flowed odd without her watch, and she wasn't how long it had been before a quiet voice said, "Hello? Is there anybody in here?" Katze tried to keep very still, but the voice apparently had a flashlight, and the light shined in the darkness, and Katze was finally pinned down. Game over. She sighed, and said, "I'm unarmed and I'm coming quietly." The tunnel was a bit muddy, but she crawled out anyway. Wasn't much choice in the matter. Officer Jenkins stalked around just east of Sproul Plaza by the creek, trying to think. If he wanted to hide on this campus, knowing all the buildings would probably be searched from roof to subbasement, where would he hide? The steam tunnels were out, the cops would be searching those now as well since it seemed that's where she'd tried to hide in the first place, and so where else was there? The problem was rather difficult, until he remembered the one time he'd had to drag somebody out of the flood tunnel. It would be a good hiding spot, most folks didn't even know it existed. Yes, he would go check that out and see if a certain suspect type had holed up there. He stepped across the creek and in front of the tunnel outlet, readied his flashlight, and called into the tunnel, "Hello? Is there anybody in here?" He thought he'd heard some movement, and he shone the flashlight in the tunnel. Sure enough, there was somebody holed up in there. The figure put a hand up to block the light and Jenkins turned it off. The person responded, "I'm unarmed and I'm coming quietly." He heard the scuffle of somebody crawling out and then found himself face to face with all the trouble. For a supposed leader of a terrorist organization, she looked surprisingly like a normal student. Well, a normal student who was exhausted, covered in grime, and somewhat stunned by the day's events. He finally said, "Relax, I just want to talk." The look of surprise was evident. "You're not taking me in?" "Not right this second. And when I do, I'm not going to tell them what's been said here, so be honest with me. I take it you're the person for whom the FBI's been tearing up the campus trying to find." "Yeah." The person smiled a bit. "The infamous Katze Brenner, apparently. So why do you care?" "I have prided myself on listening to students. Helps me be a better cop, if they trust me. And two students told me point blank that they couldn't believe that their psych GSI could be a terrorist. At that point, I got curious and hoped I'd run into you so I could get a sense of who you were. And here you are. Why do they want you?" "I'm not one hundred percent sure why. I've got my guesses, but none of them make sense as to why just me." She frowned, thinking. Jenkins looked at her. "You think you're the only one? When's the last time you heard the news?" "About eleven-thirty this morning, why?" "Well, besides the rioting going on around town from Sproul, uh, well...the country's gone to severe alert on DHS's little colorbar, presumably to apprehend a large group of terrorists, and other cities have been having as much fun as we're having. Denver's the big example, and we're thankful for 'em, 'cause otherwise Berkeley'd still have the rep for being Terror Central." Jenkins watched Katze blink. She said, in obvious surprise and shock, "...Denver?" "Yeah, why, do things suddenly make more sense with that?" "I have a friend there, who'd likely, if somebody was picking out for something we did when we were younger, be picked out as well. But even then, we weren't terrorists." "Who's your friend?" "You wouldn't know him." Jenkins nodded. "Probably not. Didn't hurt to ask. What would you do right now if I arrested you?" Katze closed her eyes and thought for a moment. Then she looked up. "Go with you quietly, wait until I had a chance, and pull the most mysterious jailhouse escape that I could, and do it without hurting anybody else. There's been enough pain today, I think." Jenkins stood there, gaping in disbelief at Katze's confidence. "How? Once I bring you in, you're not going to be alone for a second!" "It's pretty easy. It's just a matter of..." Did she shift slightly on him? She had, just about a foot to the left from where he'd thought she'd been. What in all that was holy? "...doing the unexpected. Ow." "Who...who are you?" Jenkins backed off slightly, wondering what was going on. "A friend, if you'll let me." "A friend?" "Yeah. Besides, who would you tell what you just saw? It's a bit on the unbelievable side. Go ahead, take me in. I surrendered." "No. I think I'm going to let you go. You're no harm to anybody, and I think your students pegged you rightly. But you're going to leave?" "Probably. It's going to hurt, but I know where I'm going..." Katze trailed off, as the Campanile chimed the bells for three PM. She thought for a second. "And don't let the Feds know I'm gone. The resources committed here might be valuable if they couldn't be shifted elsewhere." "Now, see, that's something I can do." Katze smiled, her first deep genuine smile he'd seen from her, despite the tiredness. "I'll owe you the next time I get a chance, Officer." He smiled back. "Whenever." He turned to walk away, and stopped to look back. There was nothing there. "A bit on the weird side, that one..." UCPD STATION, SPROUL HALL BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 3:00 PM LOCAL TIME James Boyland stood over the desk, staring at three maps -- one of the University campus, one of the general Berkeley area, and one of the entire Bay Area. All three were carefully marked up with notations, and the box of markers Boyland was using to make his careful notations was sitting on the map of the Bay Area. The story the maps told was one of repeated failure. There was the early success of capturing Delgado, but from that point things had gone horribly wrong for the FBI -- things Boyland knew he would be answering for later if he couldn't cause another success. But there was no success to be found on the map. Boyland ran his mind over the list of names. Gregory Wu had been not only out of town, but out of country, and wasn't due back until the weekend. When his agents had asked where he was, they'd found out he was in Shanghai. Since Wu had a return ticket to San Francisco International dated that coming Friday -- Boyland had found it on the system easily -- and extradition treaties took time to execute, Boyland made a decision that it was probably easier to have agents meet Wu's plane and take him into custody at that point. Brian Taylor was a lawyer who specialized in tax law, and was probably doing some of the money work Fnord didn't want to touch, Boyland suspected. Him and Josh Schnider, the fiancé of his main target, had lunch together, so Boyland had sent a team there to collar the two of them. However, the agent who had attempted to make the arrest reported arriving through the door of a room that only had one exit, or so the secretary said. There were remnants of a lunch all over Taylor's desk and the agent reported the coffee was still hot, so there had been people in that room very recently. Boyland crunched a piece of paper and thought. He hated locked room mysteries, and Taylor and Schnider had given him a doozy of one. Miranda Delgado had been the early success. Agents had caught her in her apartment, talking to somebody suspicious on a device the chief agent said resembled a cellular phone. However, one of the people working that case was at the hospital having his hand checked, because the device had become molten metal slag while he was trying to figure out who Delgado was talking to. Nevertheless, it was a capture. Boyland had immediately sent them onwards to Travis Air Force Base, the nearest large military facility. It should have been an easy trip down Interstate 80. But what happened at Cordelia Junction was a mystery to him -- action reports were still garbled, and the people who could straighten it out for him were still en route to his location. But to hear them tell it, it involved flying cop cars and an FBI agent from Denver appearing out of nowhere. Boyland would simply consider that some of it would have had to be exaggerated, except for that he had sent two of his most sober and reliable agents to deliver Delgado to Travis. What they said they saw was what they had seen. Maybe them delivering their report in person would help Boyland make sense of it all. And his primary quarry? Boyland tapped a pencil against the edge of the desk, thinking hard. He had given the dossier to Patricia Martel to read while he handled the nuts and bolts of attempting to find and transport all his quarries and deal with the whispered reports that were coming in from around the country -- that it wasn't just Brenner being elusive, but that nearly all of them were either nowhere to be found or had gone missing very soon after agents had approached them. A manila file folder crashed to the desk, landing on top of the center map. Boyland looked up. "Ah, Patricia," he said. "Now do you see the gravity of the threat?" She stood there, frowning. Finally, she spoke. "What I see, Mr. Boyland, is a government agency bound and determined to overstep its authority. There was a right way and a wrong way to do this, and at every turn, you and your goon squad have chosen the wrong way." Boyland frowned again. "I assure you, the incident on Sproul was an accident. That was most definitely not what I had intended when I and my lieutenants planned the mission." "Nevertheless, it happened. And I don't believe a word of that dossier either. Who sold you that bill of goods?" President Grover himself, Boyland thought, but decided that wasn't exactly a ringing endorsement of the accuracy of the dossier. "What's wrong with it?" he asked innocently, attempting to draw Martel out. "Alright. We can see by Brenner's school records, which I trust, that she's currently a graduate student in psychology here at Berkeley. And we can see by those same school records that she's nearly twenty-six." Martel paused. Boyland waved her on. "So...why is somebody who knows that much about psy ops not *teaching* the psychology graduate classes as opposed to being a student in them? "And that's not the first thing. If she's that great at it, where did she learn it? In Berkeley records, we've got her high school transcript. And that's as normal as expected. And then she's enrolled at Berkeley with the exception of the period between the fall of 1998 and the spring of 2000, but students come and go all the time." Boyland nodded. Those problems had occurred to him too, but he was nothing if not dedicated to his job. He had to trust the information he was getting from his superiors was accurate. "Those are troubling questions, Patricia. But let's assume for a moment that one can become an expert in many things in the course of two years." "There's a difference between being an expert by the book and an expert in experience, and that pile of crap seems to imply the latter. She's too young to have managed to pull that off! And that crap about a secret organization that's there -- this mysterious "Jihad" you're chasing -- smacks of somebody who's read too much conspiracy theory!" Martel turned to leave the room, only to run smack into one of Boyland's lieutenants coming in. "Sir!" the lieutenant cried. "We caught one!" "Caught one? Where?" "Out by the clock tower! Just standing there! She was looking sorta lost, but she's definitely one of them, sir!" Boyland smiled, all his frustration erased. "Good. At least something's finally going right. Maybe we can get some answers about this crazy dossier from her." The last thing he saw before he left the room was Martel's scowl. Let her scowl, it would only help prove that Berkeley was full of terrorists and traitors. In the meantime, they'd finally gotten Brenner. It had taken them long enough. VRDET HQ BLANCA MOUNTAIN, COLORADO 4:02 PM LOCAL TIME Katze appeared back in her room in Blanca with her head spinning once again, but still in one piece. She rummaged for some aspirin, but couldn't find any that hadn't long expired. There wasn't a bandage to be found around the place either, so the cut would have to stay open. It probably just looked nastier than it seemed. She swept her 'Linker up from the bed, clipped it back to her belt, and sighed at her appearance in the mirror. It was probably obvious she'd wandered through Hades at some point in the afternoon (okay, so they were just underground steam tunnels, but they *felt* like Hades), but there wasn't time to get clean again. And her ankle was at least holding weight again, so it had to be just a tweak. She closed the door and headed down the stairs. If anybody was around, they'd probably be downstairs in the situation room. She relieved the stress from the afternoon by shouting most any curse words that came to mind -- including the Marrakethian ones. Especially the Marrakethian ones, they were less well known and were more blasphemous at times, which quietly amused Katze to no end. After all, how was she to have known that she wasn't the only one? It's not like she really encountered a radio during the three hours she'd played hide and go seek with the FBI. And she'd turned off or hidden devices that gave a signal so she couldn't be traced. She *had* been thinking, although it was probably the wrong thoughts. At the same time she ran out of amusing curse words, she'd arrived at the door of where she wanted to be. So, did she want to enter or not? On the one hand, she'd done what she'd thought was right at the time, even if it had turned out in hindsight to be the wrong thing. On the other hand, it was still a bit embarrassing to admit that she'd been caught, and just had been lucky as to who had caught her as to her presence now. She decided to sneak in as if she was late for lecture. Most of the time, the professors would just gaze balefully at you and not embarrass you in front of everybody, and she hoped this was going to be much the same. She took a deep breath and opened the door... ...only to find all the faces in the room turning towards her. So much for sneaking in late. She looked around the room, all of it in silence, and winced. And Mal, up at the front of the room, suddenly and horribly reminded her of some of the professors she'd had at university, majestic and terrible in their anger. Maybe the clothes would help. It had been a bad afternoon, and she probably looked something out of a refugee film. Maybe that would help things play out in her favor. There was a bit more silence in the room, and then Mal said, dryly, "How *nice* of you to join us, Ms. Brenner." Uhoh, Mal was angry. He very rarely used her surname. There were two options here, either apologize and sit down quietly, or fight back. Katze had never been one to grasp the concept of discretion, and she was somewhat spoiling for a fight, so she went with Plan B. "Why is everybody looking at me? What did I do?" Folks gaped. Mal looked as if he was attempting to keep himself under control and then had thought better of it. He exploded. "What did you DO?! Aside from turning off your comms when we were frantically trying to find you? Spending THREE HOURS running around God knows where while the entire damned law- enforcement machine of the United States was hunting for us? Aside from that, nothing at all! Hell's bells, woman, we're all freaking out that we'd have to grab you out of federal custody! Or worse, that some random Man in Black put a bullet in your skull! You could've called! Even once! Alright, it had been a really bad day, and Katze was frustrated now. She started yelling back. "Goddamnit, I thought I WAS the only one! I turned off stuff because they can trace that sort of thing! And I spent three hours slogging through Hades and trying to avoid the goddamn FEDS as much as I could. This DESPITE the worst headache I've EVER had in my goddamn life, and that was AFTER I fought with involuntary dissolution! I don't know what the FUCK happened, but it kinda threw me off, okay? And I didn't know it was three goddamn hours, I lost my watch somewhere in the first hour!" She stood there, waiting for a response, feeling oddly justified in yelling back. "The feds can't fucking trace the fucking Linkers and you would've fucking known that if you'd fucking remembered the FIVE FUCKING YEARS worth of training in using the fucking things." The volume of Mal's voice increased as he warmed to his rant. "Better yet, if you'd bothered to keep your fucking Linker with you we could've pulled you out in five fucking seconds but you had to go and do something so FUCKING STUPID as not have it on you! And don't talk to ME about 'voluntary dissolution,' I had to BLOW MYSELF TO FUCKING BITS, along with half a goddamn office building in order to evade the cops! You... I... withOUT... so... could've...AAARGH!" Mal collapsed back into his chair and put his head in his hands. Everybody looked back at Katze. She blinked at the scale of Mal's rant, and some of the stuff he'd said finally got through to her. She finally said, "Err...I'm sorry, if I'd been thinking properly, I'd not have hidden it, it's been here since noon or so." She thought for a second and then added, "Does anybody have an aspirin?" Mal waved his free hand. "I know, I know. Don't ever do it again, go thou and sin no more, yadda yadda. You're here, you're not in custody and you're not dead, that's the important part. So forget it, at least for the moment. We've got bigger fish to fry..." "Uh, boss?" Min said, calling everyone's attention, "We have another problem." Mal's eyes flicked up to the situation boards, searching for new information. Katze groaned and looked around the room. Then she frowned. "Hey. Where's Aris?" Minerva nodded. "That's what I was going to mention." She defocused her eyes for a moment. "She's in Berkeley." Shadur paled, then snarled out a short phrase that left scorch marks on the table. Katze swallowed, hard. "Lovely." Mal shot a look at Katze. She wished she could duck away, but Professor Malaclypse wasn't finished. He stood and gestured sharply. "You. Get cleaned up and meet me in the Gate room in fifteen minutes. You're partly responsible for this mess, you get to help clean it up." Mal stalked out the door. The others followed, finally leaving Shad, Delgado, and Katze alone. "Does anyone have an aspirin?" Katze asked hopefully. Miranda started hunting through her pockets. "Aris is a dragon, too, right?" she said as she looked. "So it could be worse." "Don't say that," Shad said, producing a bottle of painkiller from somewhere. "I mean it, though." Katze groaned and reached out a hand for the aspirin. "I totally screwed this one up. How could it be worse?" "Don't say that, either." Shad held the bottle away from Katze's questing grip until she sighed and threw up her hands in surrender. "Fine. No asking the universe for trouble. But I seriously want to know. How?" "Well," Shad said as he handed over the aspirin, "theoretically, we could have absolutely no clue to your location, an untested Gate, be lost in a world where we don't know the language or the geography, and having to sneak around the Wyrm every moment with no communications." Katze stared at him for a couple seconds before she got it. Then she grinned, shakily. "Yeah, I guess you're right." She looked down at the aspirin, fumbled the lid off, and dry-swallowed a couple pills. "I guess when you look at it that way, rescuing a dragon from the poor feds should be a cinch." OUTSIDE BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 3:15 PM LOCAL TIME Bundled in the back of an FBI van on the way to an interrogation, Aris was starting to think her plan was even stupider than she'd first thought. "Should have remembered directions to Katze's place. Or to ask where she might be. That would have helped." "Shut up back there," one of the agents growled. Aris pulled her knees up to her chest and lay her chin down on them. The feds had indeed taken her backpack away, but to them it was empty. She didn't want to grab for it until they stopped moving. As long as they didn't set it on fire, it would be okay. The door opened and the nearer agent, the one with the gun, gestured that she should get out. Aris complied, and was marched into a building and downstairs to an office. On the way she tried to remember exactly what would manage to destroy the dimensional gate in the backpack. Fire would, but sulfuric acid? Water was pretty safe, but there was something about a certain combination of chemicals that would cause the contents to shake up a bit... "This isn't Brenner." Aris looked up into the face of an unpleasant man with an unpleasant scowl on his face. "I'm sorry, were you expecting someone else?" Inside, though, she was quite pleased. If this FBI man hadn't found Katze yet, there was a better chance that she wasn't knocked out in the back of an FBI van or shot to death, both of which would have been suboptimal. "This is the terrorist codenamed Aristalarus, sir," the agent with the gun in Aris' back said. "She's a known associate of Brenner." The unpleasant man scowled for a few more seconds in silence. "Sit," he finally snapped at Aris. She did. The woman behind the desk, which helpfully had the nameplate 'Chief Patricia Martel' sitting on it, was looking unhappy as well, though her unhappiness seemed to be less at Aris' identity as not-Katze than at the unpleasant man and the whole situation. "I'm Special Agent Boyland, in charge of the San Francisco field office," the unpleasant man finally introduced himself. "And we need to know the location of Kats Brenner." "Kat-SAY," Aris corrected automatically. "How did you get 'Aristalarus'? Most people just call me Aris." "We know a lot more about you than you think we do," Boyland said smugly. "Wow, really?" Aris perked up. "Do you know where my backpack is?" Boyland's unpleasant expression deepened. "Where is Katze Brenner?" At least he'd started pronouncing her name correctly. "I don't actually know." "You were found wandering around with a map. Were you meeting her somewhere on campus?" "No, I was just lost." Aris scratched behind her right ear, then the line of her part where she'd caught a little sun. "Where were you going?" "Not sure." "Where were you and Brenner going to go? We have people everywhere looking for you." "Everywhere? Even the arctic circle?" Aris perked up again. "I'm impressed." "So that's where your base is?" Boyland asked, leaning forward. "North? Canada?" Aris blinked a couple times. "You're really not very good at this, are you." Boyland glowered, then lashed out with a backhand to Aris' face. "Ow!" she exclaimed. "You terrorist scum really think you're so smart," he said. "But we have the upper hand. We're rounding up all your compatriots, and we have you, and soon we'll have Brenner." "Mmmph. You're not doing such a good job so far, are you?" Boyland looked like he was about to burst a blood vessel. Finally, he stood and addressed the other FBI agents. "Pack her and the material witnesses up. We're going to take them to the Naval Weapons Depot in Concord. Safest place for questioning right now with the students here getting out of hand and blocking traffic. Keep combing campus and keep me informed by radio; when you're done here we'll start checking the city." He turned to 'Chief Patricia Martel', who had been sitting behind her desk looking more and more unhappy as things progressed. "Patricia, you'll keep an eye on things here when we expand the search radius." "Of course," Martel said, resigned. Aris tried to give her a cheerful wave as the agents shoved her out the door, but Martel just looked even more depressed. Aris shrugged and concentrated on not tripping as she was herded up the stairs. This just wasn't anyone's good day. The move was accomplished by putting Aris and one of the two witnesses in the back of one van, with the other in one of the cars going ahead. Aris' witness was female, and unhappy. "She's a *terrorist!*" the girl cried, pointing at Aris in pique. "Don't worry," Special Agent Boyland said, patting his gun. "I'll be keeping a close eye on her." "You really are bad at this," Aris said as she clambered into the back of the van. Boyland scowled, and the agent following her with the gun poked her with the muzzle. Aris, still wearing her magical body-armor unitard, was unimpressed. The witness made sure to sit as close to Boyland and as far from Aris as she could. This meant that she was sitting relatively between Boyland and Aris, but Aris didn't see that as a problem. "So," she said to the girl as the van lurched forward. "I'm Aris. Who are you?" She got a glare. "Shut up," said the agent with the gun out. Aris sighed and started massaging her temples. "You people are no fun at all." "I suppose you think fun is blowing up buildings, huh, terrorist?" "Don't talk to her," Boyland said. There went the last source of entertainment. They crept forward in traffic, inches by inches. Static crackled on Boyland's radio. "We're not going to make the freeway. There's rioting everywhere southwest of campus." Boyland growled under his breath, then hit 'respond'. "Fine. Use surface streets, then. Just get us there." "Yes sir." The van crept forward, then made a right turn at the intersection. "We'll have to go through this regional park here..." "I don't care if you have to drive across the White House lawn! Just get us there!" Aris reflected that Special Agent Boyland wasn't having a very good day either. She didn't have an urge to try and smile to make him feel better, though. The van moved a few feet further. Aris sighed and leaned her head back. The agent with the gun fidgeted. OUTSIDE BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 3:40 PM LOCAL TIME After another twenty minutes edging forward in traffic, and another right turn, both Boyland and the guy with the gun were letting their eyes wander. Aris gave it another ten minutes, enough for the guy with the gun to sigh heavily and start dozing himself. Then she opened her right hand and whispered "Arglefraster." The soft weight of her backpack tugged her fingers and she swiftly set it down on the floor, out of sight of the agents. Then she pulled it open and stuck her hand inside after her sword. With Mar'irr'anaka in her hand, she'd be able to... This wasn't a sword. In fact, it felt a lot like a power drill. Aris pulled her hand up briefly to check. Indeed, she was clutching a cordless Black & Decker power drill. Swallowing hard, she set it down quietly next to her backpack. As long as that was just a fluke, she could still pull out something which was not a box of Kix cereal which was what she had pulled out and the FBI folks must have swabbed the lining for traces of explosives or drugs which would explain everything going all wacky. A little desperate now, Aris shoved her hand into her backpack and swept around. At random she pulled out several Red Dwarf VHSes, a twelve-foot-long scarf, a copy of To Serve Man, three bars of soap, a hoverboard, a Dino-Riders Brontosaurus complete with action figures, an impossible fork, and a mesh bath sponge. She'd just come up with the fifth Xenophile collection, a going-away present from her mother, when the material witness looked over and squeaked. Boyland and the agent came to full wakefulness, looked at the pile of stuff, looked at Aris, and back at the pile. Boyland, having less of an imagination, was the first to act. "Cuff her," he snapped, grabbing the graphic novel from Aris' hands. "And take that bag away..." he stopped, having flipped the book open a few pages and then looked down. "Filthy un-American garbage!" he exclaimed, throwing the book across the van. Aris pouted. "That's bestiality!" "They still have human upper bodies," Aris said, eyeing the abused book mournfully. "They're centaurs, not real horses. And they're only accidentally centaurs. You should read the whole thing, it makes more sense." "Filth!" Boyland said again. "You! Clean up that mess!" The other agent, who had just finished handcuffing Aris, ducked his head in a nod. "Yessir," he said, then picked up Aris' bag and tried to figure out just how to stuff the hoverboard back inside. Failing that, he picked up the impossible fork and stopped moving for a while. When he wouldn't stop tracing the tines with his fingers, Boyland snatched it away from him and threw it out the window. The agent requested permission to go sit in the front seat with the driver, which Boyland wearily granted. Aris leaned her head back against the window, ignored the twinges in her wrists, and sighed. GRIZZLY PEAK BOULEVARD BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 3:55 PM LOCAL TIME Katze and Mal stepped out of the Gate portal on the edge of the road their captured friend was expected to travel over. The surrounding area was just over the top of the ridgeline separating the rest of Berkeley from the bay. The ridge was too steep for building on; on one side the hill was covered with scrub pines and heavy undergrowth, while the other dropped off sharply towards the city, on the other side of a Jersey barricade. Mal surveyed the scene and nodded. "Perfect. What's their ETA?" "You've got two minutes," Minerva informed them over Mal's open Linker. "They're still coming your way." Mal nodded absently and pulled an aerosol can out of his coat pocket. "Now, here's the plan," he said to Katze as he worked, spraying a large X on the road. "You get undercover in that brush, and I'll stop the convoy right about here. When I do, you jump in, grab Aris and call for a portal. In, out, shouldn't take more than thirty seconds. Clear?" Katze nodded. "One question. What about you?" "I'll be right behind you. Now get to cover, we've only got a minute." Katze nodded again and teleported off the road, taking cover behind a stand of dwarf pines. Mal jogged back down the road a dozen yards, taking up position in the center of the asphalt. Seconds later, the impromptu police convoy crested the hill. Two cruisers, lights flashing and sirens wailing, led a big blue standard-issue police wagon down over the ridge. The officers in the lead cars blinked at the spectacle of the man in the black trenchcoat standing in the middle of the damn road. A blast of the horn didn't seem to faze him, and they began to slow a little, in order to swerve around him without stopping. Let somebody who wasn't working on federal time take care of the crazies. Mal smirked as he drew his X-Pistol from its holster and straight-armed it right at the oncoming police vehicles. "Halt your fucking taxi for the son of God, dickweed!" Mal called, letting the heavy, slab-sided plasma gun add the punctuation. The X-Pistol let fly two bolts of yellow-white fire, each punching neat fist sized holes in the radiator of the lead car. The plasma drove straight through into the center of the engine block, rupturing the carburetor and causing the entire engine to explode. The cruiser's hood bent almost completely in half before the latch tore away, and the now-smoking car screeched to a stop as the cop inside frantically applied the emergency brakes to their wrecked vehicle. The other cars in the convoy, faced with this new obstacle, swerved and hit the brakes. The second cruiser barely managed to avoid clipping the first, missing the rear bumper by mere centimeters. Unfortunately, this bit of virtuoso driving ended up with the cruiser pointed directly at the barricade and still moving at a good 30 miles an hour. The cruiser ate Jersey barricade with a nasty crunching sound. The driver of the wagon, however, simply slammed on the brakes and hoped that he'd be able to stop before hitting either of the wrecked police cars. The wagon lurched violently, tires screeching, but it did indeed come to a complete stop before becoming another part of the pileup. Right on top of the X. Perfect. Mal holstered his X-Pistol and called up a pair of sonic stunners from hyperpark. "Kat! Now!" he yelled as he ran towards the wreck site. Every second counted, and he needed to keep the dazed cops from interfering. Katze didn't need any reminders. She watched as Mal stopped the convoy right where he said he would, and the moment the wagon came to a complete stop, she was ready. Concentrating furiously, she pictured the interior of the wagon and jumped. She reappeared exactly where she expected to be, in the center of the wagon. Inside, she found Aris, handcuffed and looking a bit put-out but otherwise intact. A plainclothes cop was also there, gaping slightly at the sudden appearance out of thin air. However, Katze wasn't expecting the -third- person in the back of the wagon. "Kat!" Aris cried. "KATZE!?" blurted Laura McKinley. "LAURA?!" blurted an equally amazed Katze. "BRENNER!" the cop yelled, reaching for his holster. Katze, still surprised at the appearance of her college friend in the back of the wagon, didn't see the motion. Aris did, and lunged towards the cop. She body-checked him with as much force as she could muster, slamming him back into the sidewall hard. He never saw it coming; his brain shut off like a light when he hit the wall, just before it could register what hit him. Satisfied that the cop wasn't going to renew hostilities, Aris sat back and looked at Katze, who apparently hadn't noticed the excitement. "So, uh, you two know each other?" she asked. Katze and Laura jumped slightly. "Er..." Katze started to say. "What the...?" Laura began, when they were interrupted by a crackle of static coming from Katze's Linker. "Kat?!" Mal's voice came in, obscured slightly by the sound of angry policemen and stunner fire. "What the hell are you waiting for? Grab Aris and get out!" "We've -" Katze hit the talk button on her Linker and continued. "There's a problem! We've got more than one prisoner here!" "Well, bring 'em along! The more the merrier!" "But..." "KAT!" Mal barked, as the sound of sirens joined the chorus, "we have -no- time! Grab whoever's there and -get out!- That's an order! Do it!" Katze grabbed onto Laura's arm and Aris' shoulder and nodded. Just then, a glowing blue disc appeared behind her. Without any fanfare, Katze jumped backward, pulling the two women through the portal with her. Aris added her own momentum to the jump, dragging Laura along. /They're here!/ Min reported to Mal over his lace. /Roger that,/ Mal replied. /On my way./ He fired another stunner burst at the approaching reinforcements and ran for the edge of the road. Vaulting the Jersey barrier, he dove feet-first through a Gate portal hidden from view by the barrier. The cops charged to the barrier, but instead of finding their suspect tumbling or skidding down the hill, there was nothing. Puzzled, the cops turned back to the tangle of wrecked cars and unconscious policemen and tried to figure out exactly what the hell had gone so utterly wrong here. VRDET HQ BLANCA MOUNTAIN, COLORADO 5:00 PM LOCAL TIME The problem with throwing yourself through a portal, Katze reflected, was the hard landing on the other side. Her head complained that it wasn't exactly being treated properly on today of all days upon the landing, but Katze ignored it as the least of her problems. She got up off the floor, and then helped Aris up so they could clear the Gate platform. The third person they'd drug through the gate was already up and moving on her own power, and was looking around the Gate room in a bit a of a daze. Katze could sympathize; the first time through the looking glass was always the hardest. She quietly wished it had been Mikiko and not Laura that they'd ended up with -- Mikiko was at least an anime fan and could probably deal with the high weirdness better. Laura turned at that moment, and apparently decided it couldn't be a dream with Katze standing right there, because at the moment Katze tried to ask the question of just how Laura had ended up in that van, Laura asked her own question. Thus "What happened?" was the first cry out of both of them. Aris cleared her throat gently. Katze and Laura stared at each other, each trying to read the other's expression. Impasse. Aris cleared her throat again and clinked her handcuffs. "Guys?" There was no response from either of them. Laura licked her lips nervously and half-ducked her head, while Katze frowned deeply, her eyebrows furrowed in concentration. Aris sighed, gave up on getting any help, and muttered a chain-breaking spell under her breath. With a 'tink!' the links gave way. The Gate started powering up, resulting in a wavy field that was uncomfortable to look at, so Aris pulled her hands up to rub at her eyes. It hadn't been more than a couple seconds since they'd gone through the Gate, but her eyes were watering and her nose had this scratch that she couldn't get rid of. And the sleeves of her sweatshirt were on fire. The sleeves of her sweatshirt were-- "Ah... AUGH! AAAAHHH! MY ARMS ARE ON FIRE!" Katze turned her head and stared, woken by the cry of 'FIRE'. At that moment, Mal slid suavely through the Gate like a baseball player sliding into home, stopping neatly at the edge of the staging platform. He got up leisurely enough and stretched while talking more or less to himself. "That was more fun than I've had in a long while. A most grand expedition, my friends. Now, who's our unexpected guest?" He turned around and stared. "MAL!" Aris yelled, waving her arms, which were on fire. "MY ARMS ARE ON FIRE!" Mal blinked. "We can't take you anywhere," he said. Katze sighed and muttered under her breath in Marrakethian. The throbbing in her head that accompanied the fire-quenching spell let her know that spellcasting still wasn't the wisest of ideas, but the fire was out. Laura, meanwhile, looked like she'd seen a ghost. Actually, more like she'd seen a wraith, Katze decided, darkly amused with herself, before remembering Mal's question. It took her another moment before she realized exactly which question he'd asked. And now that the fire was out he was waiting expectantly for the answer, looking like a professor who'd caught a student napping. "Right. Err, well, you see...," Katze started, and then realized that probably wasn't the best way of handling introductions. She started again. "This would be Laura McKinley, a fellow graduate student. We share an office." There was lots more she could say, but this would do for now. Mal stepped off the platform to the gate, and much to Katze's surprise, swept his hat from his head and gallantly bowed to their involuntary guest. "They call me Malaclypse the Seeker." He paused for a second for Laura to catch up mentally with what was going on around her, and then asked, "What's a nice, boring sort like yourself doing in the back of a paddywagon en route to Federal detention?" Laura frowned at the question. Katze looked over at Aris, who had picked up the cuffs from where they had fallen in the accidental small firestorm Aris had caused, and was looking at them somewhat suspiciously. Laura finally spoke. "I was detained as a material witness. That's what I was doing there." Katze turned her gaze back on Laura, about to ask where this had happened, when she caught a glance from Mal. She remained quiet as Mal asked a slightly different question than the one she wanted answered. "Tell me, Ms. McKinley, what you were doing when you were detained?" Laura was more daring than Katze expected. She looked Mal straight in the eye and said, "I was informing the police about a terrorist who was attempting to flee the area." Silence descended in the room. Mal stood there impassively, Aris looked up from her examination of the cuffs, and Katze frowned at the admission, attempting to hide how betrayed she felt. Finally, it was Mal who broke the silence. "Well. Perhaps this will prove a valuable life lesson in trusting law-enforcement. You're not regulation size, but we can't throw you back in the pond. Wouldn't be sporting. So..." He looked over at Aris, who had decided to go back to inspecting the handcuffs. "Aris, would you mind taking our surprise guest to one of the enlisted quarters?" Aris nodded, and led Laura out of the room. Katze looked at Mal. "Well, that could have gone much better," she offered. "We play the hand we're dealt," Mal said. "Now, do you want to talk to her, or shall I?" Katze sighed. "I'll do it. She wouldn't be here if it wasn't for me." BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 4:15 PM LOCAL TIME James Boyland blinked as his senses came back to him. His head was sticky, he felt like he'd just eaten a sock, and he'd probably taken quite a blow judging by the fact that he felt he was missing time. The world swam in his eyes as he tried to focus and recall what had happened, but he had the sense opportunity had slipped through his fingers. His superiors back in Washington were not going to be pleased with him. "Sir, you awake?" called somebody from the door. Boyland looked in that direction, only to find one of his men standing there with a puzzled expression. "Where'd they go?" Boyland tried to think against the spinning of the world. No explanation was coming easily. He tried to remember those few chaotic moments before he'd been knocked out, the moment when there was *four* in the back. Out of thin air. He laughed bitterly to himself. "Into thin air. That's where they went. Damned terrorist mind control, they're probably slipping off the hill laughing while we look at each other in bafflement." The agent nodded, but then decided to add a kink to Boyland's theory. "It was awfully nice of them to lock the door behind them, then, to keep you in." Boyland's head spun again. Wasn't this like Taylor and Schnider? Disappearing into thin air as opposed to any obvious way out? And the reports he'd gotten from the team hauling Delgado off hinted at another locked-room mystery. Did they have a way to get in and out of locked rooms? It was fantastic, Boyland knew, and he didn't dare breathe a word of it. He simply nodded. "Yes. It was nice of them." The memory of what had happened came back more clear. That moment of triumph when Brenner had suddenly shown up. And then that other prisoner, the terrorist and not McKinley the material witness, had come out of nowhere and taken him out. "Sir, we're going to have to get you to a hospital, I think. That's a nasty cut." Boyland put his fingers to the sticky area on his head, and pulled it away. Blood stained his fingers. Damn them. Locked room puzzles and injury. Today was not James Boyland's day. He let himself be helped up. Probably a minor concussion, judging by how much he suddenly wanted to sleep this heck of a day away, but he let himself be led to a waiting car. As he got in, there was the clink of plastic in his suit pocket. After he was belted in, he pulled the things that had made that clink out of his pocket. A cassette tape labeled 'McKinley interrogation' and a plain videocassette looked back at him. Boyland smiled. Maybe it was his day after all, or at least there was something salvageable out of them. He handed the tapes to one of his men. "Get copies of these and make sure the news media has them. Both of them." If he couldn't hurt them by taking them out, he would hurt them in the court of public opinion. Boyland leaned back and smiled as they drove away from the scene of the crime. It was the least they deserved for their damned locked room mysteries. VRDET HQ BLANCA MOUNTAIN, COLORADO 5:15 PM LOCAL TIME Laura McKinley looked around the quarters she had been placed in and wondered quietly to herself if she had dreamed the whole day. Had it only been this morning that she had been muttering at Katze about the Grover administration playing politics with the terrorist alert? And hadn't Katze agreed? She sat on the bed. The strange behaviour of her officemate bothered her. Grover and his government had been mumbling for months that terrorists were obviously in support of Democrats because some Democrats were against the war in Iraq. And Katze definitely was on the left politically -- but so were most people at Berkeley. Yet Katze knew that the FBI was on campus to arrest her for terrorist activity. How could she have known that without actually being a terrorist? It was impossible for Katze to obtain that information in any other fashion, so she had to be a terrorist. And she had thought that she needed to report that -- God only knew that the Dems and Callaghan had enough trouble with Grover and company suggesting that they were objectively pro-terrorist -- but the jerk of an FBI agent had immediately declared her a material witness. Even so, she was pretty sure she had done the right thing, and would do it again if she so had to. The door opened. Laura attempted to look stoic to her jailers. They'd called her a guest, but the first thing she'd checked when she'd been put in the room was the door. It had been locked and she couldn't get out. Guests really ought to be treated better, she thought. However, the jailer had turned out to be Katze, which made Laura feel a bit guilty over the whole day's mess. Katze stood there silently, which made that piece of shame at the heart of the whole matter ache. Katze finally broke the silence. "Can I sit down?" she asked, in careful tones. There was some wider chasm between the two of them than there had been previously. Laura wondered if it was the shame and the guilt she was feeling, or if it was a feeling of betrayal. Laura nodded, and Katze pulled out the desk chair and sat facing Laura. Katze looked around the room again, as if she was searching for the right words. Finally, Katze spoke again, "What happened to Mikiko?" The mention of their third officemate caused that inner voice that was wondering if she'd overreacted. "I don't know. She took off one way, and I went the other. Probably found some of her friends in that movie club she's always going to and hid with them." Katze nodded. "She's got it trickier, being a foreign national." Laura couldn't find it in her to object to that statement, and the room filled with oppressive silence again. Finally, Laura felt she couldn't contain herself anymore. "You said you were one," she offered, and when she caught the shocked expression on Katze's face, she elaborated. "You said they wanted you for terrorism. How could you have known?" There was another long stretch of silence, which made Laura wonder just what else she didn't know about this person she'd been hanging around with for three years. You share an office, and you expect that you would get to know somebody. She'd laughed when Toby had asked her if she thought Katze was a Mafioso, dismissing it as just his fevered imagination warped by too much exposure to the news. But now, she wondered if perhaps Toby had the jump on them all after all. Finally, Katze spoke. "There's a lot you don't know about me," she said. "I just wanted to be a normal graduate student. And I didn't know they were after me until just a moment before." Laura frowned. "There is no way you could have gotten that information beforehand. Don't lie to me, Katze." But as she said that, she thought back on the day -- of Katze appearing from nowhere in the police van, of the strange words she'd spoken before the fire went out, and now this admission that she'd gotten the information sheer seconds before she'd told them. "I wish I was lying. Would make this whole damned mess a hell of a lot easier." Katze sighed. "Because now, you know things about me that I really didn't want anybody in the department knowing." Laura turned away from Katze. "You aren't the Katze I knew. The one I knew wouldn't keep secrets from friends. I don't know you at all. Go away." "Alright." The quiet agreement hurt, Laura decided, and tried to hold back her tears so Katze wouldn't see them. There was the sound of the scuff of a chair, and of the door opening and closing. Laura waited until she heard the latch click before crying miserably to herself. METROPOLITAN POLICE HEADQUARTERS LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM 11:15 PM LOCAL TIME It wasn't bad as far as holding cells went, Felton mused. He had, over the course of his life, seen the inside of a number of them, and some of them in far worse shape. This one, a little eight-by-twelve box of concrete at least had a cot that was comfortable enough to sit on, and toilet facilities, though the latter would probably prove to be problematic since they'd seen fit to leave his hands cuffed behind his back. It was probably a good thing that he hadn't indulged in his usual early-evening pint. He looked up when the reinforced door opened and a pair of uniformed officers entered; he couldn't help but smile to see them dressed in Kevlar, even with his hands cuffed... not that Kevlar nor these cuffs could stop him from doing harm if he so chose. "On yer feet," one of them said, and they hoisted him by the armpits. He didn't bother to resist at all, being quite interested in just what the hell all this was about. They escorted him to another concrete box, this one having a large mirror on one wall and a table arranged with a couple of chairs; an interrogation room. They sat him in a chair, with the mirror off to his left, and departed, closing the door behind them. It was back to more waiting. It wasn't a long wait, though. Within ten or so minutes the door opened again, and in came a early-middle-aged man in a rather tasteless gray tweed suit. He carried beneath one arm a cardboard filing box, which he set on the table. Producing an ID, he introduced himself as Roger Langley, British Security Service. "MI5," Felton said, smiling vaguely. "Do you know why you're being held here?" asked Langley, sitting down. Felton didn't respond. It's not like he had any clue whatsoever. "You're being held under section 41 of the Terrorism Act 2000, under suspicion of the commission, preparation and/or instigation of acts of terrorism." "I'm an American citizen. I refuse to answer any questions until I've spoken with a representative of my government." "Do you?" Langley dipped his hand into the box, withdrawing a small bundle of papers. He slipped loose the rubber band binding them and riffled through the packet. "Ah, right you are, Mister Felton." He laid an American passport on the table between them. "Or is it Mister Lamb? According to this, you're also a citizen of Britain." He laid a second passport on top of the American one. "And of France... Mister LaMonte? Ah, and of Germany." He laid those down as well and nudged the stack of passports into a neat pile. Again Felton said nothing. What could he say in the face of a pile of forged legal documents? "We're well aware of your 'Jihad's' existence. Any information you share will be beneficial to your current situation." "Where's my wife?" "Your wife is safe," Langley said in a noncommittal tone, reaching back into the box. "Now, we found some other interesting paperwork in your home, but we'll come back to that in a moment." He produced a device and laid it on top of the pile of passports. It was a Jihadlinker. "Would you like to tell me what this is?" No, he wouldn't. And so he didn't. "It's some sort of communication device, isn't it?" "It's a prototype for a personal datacenter my company is working on," Felton replied, not-quite-lying. It was true enough that Pegasus had been working on a 'civilian' model based on downgraded 'Linker technology. It was due to roll out sometime within the second quarter of the coming year. "It was found with an interesting array of weapons. Swords, rifles, handguns-- many of which were very nice antiques..." "I'm something of a collector," Felton said, bitterly. "So it seems. You have a great deal of war memorabilia." Uhoh. "Some rather interesting items in it." Langley reached into the box and produced a set of dog tags. He held them up and read off the name. "Lambie, Vincent A. Lieutenant, United States Air Force." He glanced over the tags at Felton's face, noting the slight discomfort that seemed to be showing there. "I did a little digging. It's quite interesting that you have these considering that Lieutenant Lambie's plane was shot down over North Korea in 1952 and he was listed as killed in action." Kirk felt his heart beginning to flutter in his chest. One look into Langley's eyes was enough to tell him that the MI5 man had already drawn conclusions that were not in his best interest. Langley produced a small sheaf of papers from the box. "And it seems his son followed in his footsteps. Vincent A. Lambie, Jr. Air Force pilot over Vietnam. Honorably discharged a bona fide ace. Strangely, he dropped off of the face of the earth not long after." "Ye're wading into territory ye don't really want tae, Mister Langley," Felton warned. His interrogator ignored him and pressed onward. "One of the most interesting things we found, though, is this." He produced a yellowed, dog-eared photograph, an old group photo of a number of soldiers dressed in World War I era British uniforms. "Very nice photograph. Which regiment is it?" He smiled, waiting for some sort of reply, but all he received was a spite-filled glare. "Amazing how you're the spitting image of your... would be your great-grandfather, wouldn't it? But that's not really the case, is it?" Langley didn't seem to notice the air growing warmer in the tiny room as Felton's head sagged. "There is enough in that little pile of paperwork to lock you away for some time, Mister Felton, or Lambie, or whatever it is you call yourself," Langley said, poking a finger at the passports. "And with the unlicensed arsenal we've found, it'll be quite some time before you'll see the light of day again. But then, time is something you have plenty of, isn't it?" The Jihaddi looked at him, eyes narrowed, parroting his earlier demand. "I want to see my wife." Langley reached into the box and withdrew a whole sheaf of papers, which he hurled into Felton's face. "Marching orders, enlistment papers, forged birth documents, all of them dating back decades, centuries! Just what the hell kind of monster are you?" He shouldn't be here. With the exception of events just a scant few months ago, he'd been completely legit for over three years. Any paper trails tracing him to any sort of illicit activity should have crumbled into dust ages ago. And yet, out of the blue, the British government pounces on him. Nothing about this smelled right. It seemed to him that, at this moment, honesty would be the best policy. "My name is Gregor Lamont. I was born on the Cowall Peninsula of Scotland in the year of our Lord 1632. For over three hundred years-- three hundred years, Mr. Langley-- I have walked this Earth. You call me a monster... heh. Let me tell you about monsters." He leaned forward. Though separated by a good three or four feet of table, Langley instinctively flinched back. Probably it was because of the way red fire burned behind Felton's pupils. "There is great evil in the world, Mr. Langley. Most of them you know, as they are evils perpetrated by men in the name of power, or wealth, or ego, or even simple madness. You fight them every day. As have I, for many years. But there are worse things, Mr. Langley, far worse things that exist not of this world. I have borne witness to things beyond your worst nightmares, such horrors that only a mere glimpse of which would cause your balls to shrink into your chest and send you spiraling into the depths of madness. Ravening beasts that would suck the soul from your body as easily as they would suck the marrow from your bones. I pray that you will never have to see such things... and I have made it my duty to see to it that you don't." Felton smiled with a mouth so full of fangs that it caused Langley to shrink back even more, his chair skittering across the concrete floor with a squeal. But he was on a roll now, Kirk was, fueled by bitterness and anger and that little whisper in his psyche that always grew louder in times of stress. It was lunacy, divulging this much to a mundane, but hey, once the avalanche starts... "There is a war, Mr. Langley, hidden away from eyes such as yours, fought in secret with a great Enemy that conceals itself in the bright spotlight of the public eye. I won't waste your time trying to explain it to you-- you probably wouldn't believe it anyway. Nobody would... but that makes it all the more clever doesn't it? Hiding behind such an innocuous facade that no one would even suspect that it belies what is possibly the greatest evil known to man... but I'm digressing, aren't it? Our Jihad, my friend, is one of the most literal sense. A holy war, tasking itself with defending you and your kind from this unspeakable evil." Langley sat transfixed. Whether it was because of sheer terror or simple fascination wasn't obvious, but it didn't matter to Felton, who continued on. Had Langley not been so mesmerized, he might have noticed the paint on the walls beginning to turn brown. "Three years ago we thought the war was over, that the Enemy had abandoned its cause and fled back to whatever netherrealm it came from and its masters beaten back into the depths of space. The Jihad shut down. Buried itself. We all returned to the world, struggling to regain whatever sense of normality we could in our lives. But there are signs that the Enemy has returned. It would be in your best interest, Mr. Langley, to release me and my wife and forget whatever investigation--" "You're not the only ones," Langley said, still wearing the deer-in-the-headlights look. "What?" He was starting to snap out of it now. Langley slid out of his chair and looked like he was ready to bolt for the door. This had all suddenly gotten far too weird for him. "You were targeted as part of a joint world-wide operation to seize key members of your Jihad. A number of others have already been taken into custody." Felton's eyes went wide. Yes, it was all really starting to stink now. "Let me go. Now." The little whisper had become a roar. The paint on the walls bubbled and peeled. Beads of sweat trickled down Langley's brow. "I... I can't do that," he stammered, edging toward the door. He had a sudden need to be elsewhere. "I don't know what false information led to my arrest and brought me here," Felton growled, slumping forward again, "and frankly I don't care. I've been cooperative enough. But it's time to end this charade. You thought you were bringing in some sort of monster... you have no idea. One word of advice, Mr. Langley, if you value your life at all..." He closed his eyes, and they fluttered open to reveal twin orbs of red, lit like burning embers. The walls burst into flame. "Run." Nemesis came forward. The door slammed behind Roger Langley, and he pressed his back against it, wheezing as he tried to catch his breath. He was thinking that, perhaps, now would be a good time to take that holiday he had been planning. Anywhere but here seemed a good place to be at the moment. He was about to shout for backup when he felt the sudden bowing of the door behind him and the quickening, intense heat. Yelping, the back of his jacket smoldering, he spun off the door, which turned out to be quite a surprising survival instinct when, seconds later, the door exploded clean off its hinges and buried itself in the adjacent wall, driven by a roiling column of fire which blasted out after it. Like water, greasy, hate-fueled flames roiled out of the open doorway, spilling across the ceiling. Inside the interrogation room, an inferno raged. The one-way glass shattered under the onslaught of heat as Nemesis rose from his chair and, with a grunt of effort, muscles standing out with strain on his whipcord arms, the handcuffs binding his wrists stretched and snapped like taffy. He stepped out into the corridor as the sprinkler system began showering torrents of water, but the artificial downpour did little to quench the flames that slithered around him. As he turned, he smiled. They certainly were quick about breaking out the artillery, as over half a dozen assaulters poured into the end of the corridor, setting up a cordon with their weapons trained on him. He could see the sheer terror in their eyes, smell it on them, and he was amazed that they hadn't already shot him. Where were they keeping her, now? He shut out the bellowing cops, reaching out with his mind, probing, searching. There. His eyes opened, and he turned. Naturally, the way was barred by a whole lot of guns. He smiled. His fingers twitched. His Claws slid out. They fired. It was hardly fair. He felt two rounds impact his chest, tearing through one of his lungs. One ripped through his throat, and another through his left thigh. But such injuries were never enough to slow him down, and howling with fury the Maenad danced through the rain of gunfire, coming into their midst. The poor bastards were caught totally unprepared for such savage, in-your-face rage, but it was fortunate for them that Nemesis restrained himself. His Claws flashed, tearing through Kevlar and flesh with equal ease, slicing through muscle and tendons. Before he stalked away, he was certain that they would all live, though it might be some time before any of them walked or carried a weapon again. He hurtled down the corridor, pausing only to elbow the odd copper's face into the wall if they got stupid enough to try to get in his away. And behind him, the fire burned. Keili waited in a similar cell, plucking idly at her nightgown and musing at how nice it would have been to have been wearing some actual clothes before being dragged off to detention. She sat on the cot, head cocked toward the door. She'd heard the gunfire start and knew for certain that something big was up out there. Of course, her first indication was the sprinkler, which even now was drenching her to the bone, rather inconveniencing in such a skimpy little silk thing as she was wearing. She sighed, and waited. Her patience was soon rewarded. There was a metallic shriek as the hinges of the door were cut through, and then it bowed inward with the force of an impact, flying loose from its frame. Beyond it stood a horrible, grinning visage, a spikey vision of hell itself. "What took you so long?" she grinned, hopping up on her tiptoes and throwing her arms around his neck to press a kiss to his lips. Nemesis brushed the wet hair back from her face. "Let's get th'hell out o' here. I think somethin' big might be up." Taking her hand, the two dashed back out into the corridor. As they burst into the lobby, Nemesis surged forward to hamstring a pair of officers that were drawing on them, while Keili's bare foot snapped out to catch a third in the throat and sent him driving back. In a single smooth motion she slipped under his arm, snaking her hands into his sleeves and stripping off his jacket. After all, the London night wasn't know for being particularly warm. The front doors of New Scotland Yard ruptured with the force of a thrown body as a constable sailed through them and tumbled down the steps in a rain of glass. Nemesis and Keili dashed out after him, into the street, staggering as, with a loud WHOOMP, the glass facade of the first floor of the Yard erupted outward in a plume of fire as the maelstrom came up from the lower levels. "Oops," Nemesis said, looking back over his shoulder, and he began looking frantically for a means of getaway. There was, of course, a long line of gaudy silver-and-orange Met police cars, but how stupid would it be to make off in such an obvious vehicle? Fortunately, the answer came barreling down on him out of the night. He caught the yellow BMW motorcycle by the handlebars just before its rider, distracted by the display of pyrotechnics, rode him down. The bike pitched forward as he bore down, and his heels skidded for a good two yards before either of them came to a complete stop. The rider blinked at Feral beast behind his plastic facemask, dumbfounded. Nemesis smiled. "I need tae borrow yer bike," he said, hitching the man by the front of the shirt and lifting him with ease from its saddle. He gently lowered the rider to the ground, where he remained, stunned. "You're joking, right?" asked Keili as he mounted up. "Nope." "You know how I feel about these things." She climbed on behind him. "Yep," he said, cranking the throttle, and with the squealing of burning tires the bike vaulted off down Broadway. Keili clung to him, tightly enough to remind him just how she felt about 'these things.' "We need tae get to an auld safehouse," he grunted, hanging a soft left. "Tae get a call in tae Blanca and see if they know what th' fook is goin' on." "Isn't there one over in Soho?" she said, cheek pressed to his back. She risked a glance past his shoulder. "You're headed south." "Aye, I think it's best we get out o' London. There's one down in Brighton that with ony luck wasnae completely decommiss-shite!" Nemesis juked sharply as the silver and orange Met car whipped out in front of them, lights flashing. The bike tottered sickly to the side, dragging Nemesis' knee across the pavement as he struggled to keep it upright. Keili managed to tug her bare leg up in time to keep it from being shredded between the bike and the ground as Nem, hissing in pain, throttled it and spun it around in the opposite direction. "Okay, small detour," he muttered, gunning it up Victoria Street. Tires squealed behind them and the patrol car was on their tail as Nem wove drunkenly in and out of the late-night London traffic. There was a dull crump behind them as the police car wasn't quick enough and clipped a passing auto. Nemesis grinned. Keili didn't have to see the grin to know what he was thinking. "Don't you dare!" He slid over into the oncoming lane, weaving around the traffic coming head-on, riding up onto the sidewalk and scattering pedestrians. He weaved back across, crossing the centerline just as an oncoming lorry bore down on them. He felt the wind of its passing and roared deliriously into the night sky. "I am SO going to kick your ass," Keili muttered, clinging tightly to him. "Piece o' cake," the Maenad said. If you're going to drive like a maniac, it paid to have preternatural reflexes. He could practically do this stuff in his sleep. He hunkered down and pushed the bike harder. When the second interceptor pulled out next to him, it caught him off-guard. Its fender clipped the bike, sending it skidding sideways and off the road. Westminster Abby blurred past as Nemesis struggled to keep the bike upright, narrowly missing a police box as they blazed past. "Square!" Keili shrieked over his shoulder. "I know! I know!" The bike flew out into Parliament Square, and Nemesis hit the brakes, turning the bike into a hard slide to avoid sailing into the center of the roundabout. Oily plumes of burning rubber rose from the tires and the sole of his boot as he wheeled the bike around, clipping a car door, heading eastbound across the Westminster Bridge. The two police cars in pursuit skidded around the square, burning their own tires to avoid plowing into the traffic. They gunned their engines, struggling to close the gap that the more nimble motorcycle had managed to open up. Pedestrians scrambled as Nemesis and Keili mounted the footpath across the bridge, barreling down the narrow walkway to avoid traffic altogether. Well... at least traffic of the big metal variety. "If we can make it tae A23 we're home free," Nem said, swerving to avoid a bicyclist. "I'll ditch this thing an' jack a new ride. We're already terrorists an' arsonists an' cop-beaters, might as well take on another charge o' grand theft auto." Keili patted him on the right shoulder. "Company!" He glanced over... yup, the two silver cruisers had caught up. Possibly this was because the oncoming traffic seemed to have stopped. And that meant only one thing. He glanced far up ahead as the bike zipped off of the bridge, landing back on the street. Sure enough. Roadblock. Two more cars decked in the Metropolitan Police Service motif sat across the road. And they had a SWAT van with them. This wasn't good. It meant lots of men meaning to shoot at them, and while it didn't bother him that much, his beloved was a bit less resilient. He glanced over his shoulder. The two cars in pursuit were side-by-side now, and he judged the gap between them. It was a possibility, but it would take timing. The odds were long. He'd always been a sucker for long odds. He gunned the engine again, and it wailed in protest from this sort of abuse. Risking another glance back, he saw the pursuit pick up speed too... how convenient, and utterly, utterly dumb. Only a few hundred yards now at best... He throttled back, tapping the brakes. The bike knifed between the two cars as they overtook him, and with a quick sweep of his wrists his Claws came out, lacerating first their front tires, then their rear. As he tapped the brakes again the two cars began to slide out of control. Their front ends connected and they whipped around drunkenly, starting into a violent roll that send them careening into the roadblock. The MPs assaulted that had taken position behind scattered as the cars collided in a wrenching scream of twisting metal and shattering glass. The two cars providing the obstacle jolted with the impact. It opened a path between them, just big enough. Nemesis gunned it again, blazing through the wreckage before the SWAT officers had regained their bearings. With a jubilant, Feral howl, the Maenad and his Lady sped off into the night. BRIGHTON, UNITED KINGDOM 1:45 AM LOCAL TIME The battered old Mini rolled up to the curb and stopped. Whether this was because the brakes were applied or it simply didn't have the will to try to overcome a four-inch high obstacle wasn't clear, though it was very possibly the latter. It wasn't perhaps the best choice of getaway car, but it seemed to Felton that that fact made it the perfect one nonetheless. The engine sputtered and died. It was a horrific death. Kirk and Keili climbed out, looking at their destination. It was an aged, crumbling thing, what was once probably a flat but now looked to be nothing more than a pile of bricks held in the vague shape of a building by a great deal of timber. A condemned notice was tacked on the boarded front door and quite likely it should have been demolished a long time ago had a certain international holding company not bought it as well as the entire three blocks surrounding it. "This is the safehouse?" Keili asked, looking dubiously at the facade. It wasn't so much as leaned... no, it seemed to have much more of a /stooping/ quality to it. As though it might fall over if you looked at it wrong. Kirk nodded, going around to the little alley at the side of the building. Here was a small stairway descending to a door below street level. He felt around for a loose brick... granted, many of them were loose, but he was looking for a particular one. "'Safe' doesn't seem to describe it," Keili said. Kirk chuckled. "It's just a facade. I understand that it actually sits on top of a reinforced bunker. Now, if I can just find the right... ah." He swung the brick out, revealing a small retinal scanner. Looking into the lenses, he tapped the key. It chirped an error. Damn. He'd forgot about his eyes. "Would you, dear?" he asked, stepping aside. "What would you do without me?" Keili lilted, turning to scan her own eyes. There was a small chirp of confirmation, and the weathered wood door clicked and swung open. Though there was a great deal of dust inside, it was obvious that the place had been overlooked during the decommissioning. Despite being made of thick concrete, it was cozy enough, offering a couple of bunkrooms with comfortable enough beds, a small living area, bathroom, and a kitchen. Oh, and of course an armory. No apartment should be without one of those. Felton pried his way into the little vault. There was a rack of X-Rifles, unloaded, and their power-packs hadn't been charged for some time. A few vacuum-sealed packets of fatigues, one of which he offered to Keili. Rations, maps, protocol manuals, it had to be here somewhere... ah. Keili picked up a combat knife and strapped it to her thigh as he fished out the Jihadlinker. It was an older model, a bit dated, but it should still be compatible with the protocols. Even better was that its charge was still at half capacity. He'd just have to do a little negotiating... "Blanca," came a static-filled response, when he was finished adjusting it for the new bands and the uplink had been established. "Felton. We've been compromised. Requesting immediate extraction for two." "You're not the only one," said Minerva. "Have you been watching the news?" "I'm afraid I haven't had that opportunity," he responded, dryly. "Something epic is going down. You'll see when you get here. Stand by for transit it five... four... three... two... one." Kirk sighed with relief as the Gate portal opened and engulfed them. Something epic was going down alright, and, as they stepped out into the Gate transit room, he was dreading to find out exactly what. VRDET HQ BLANCA MOUNTAIN, COLORADO 7:00 PM LOCAL TIME HOUR 1 The bedraggled Jihaddi gathered in the situation room, waiting to see what the hell was going on. Around them, screens displayed the smoking top of of the Spiral building and scenes of mayhem in the streets of Berkeley. Newsdrones and various pundits babbled in the background, trying to bring sense to all the madness. Naturally, they weren't getting very far. "These guys are just as clueless as we are" grumbled Damocles. "No, they're -more- clueless," countered Shad. "We're the ones on the wrong side of the guns, remember?" "Okay guys, enough." Mal warned the group. "We need to know what the hell's going on. Hopefully the idiot in chief will give us what we need to know." Just then the various news channels flipped over, showing President Grover sitting at his desk. Grover settled into his Public Expression #4, something that was meant to be stern and resolute but ended up looking more self-satisfied. Apparently sensing that the entire nation had their eyes on him, he began the statement. "My fellow Americans, "Today marks the beginning of a new chapter in the War on Terra, and a new chapter in the history of our country. Acting on information supplied by watchful American citizens, the Department of Homeland Security, aided by the Department of Justice and the National Guard, acted to arrest a group of terrorists hiding inside the borders of the United States. (The room at Blanca was deadly silent for a second. "I guess that's confirmation, all right," Minerva said quietly. "Yes," Mal noted, "that does indeed clinch it.") "Sadly, they did not act quickly enough. At the University of California in Berkeley, the terrorists incited a riot, using the students as human shields. Five were killed in the following chaos, no doubt by terrorists using federal officers as a scapegoat. In Denver, a terrorist leader who had been cornered by the FBI blew himself up to avoid escape, and in the process destroyed the upper floors of a skyscraper, causing huge amounts of property damage. ("Oh now that's bullshit," grumbled Katze. "If the stupid cops hadn't charged straight into Sproul at high noon there wouldn't have been a riot. They're lucky that the students didn't eat them alive.") "These terrorists call themselves the Jihad, though we do not know yet if they share any Islamist leanings or connection to al Quaeda. They are well-armed, with nukulur and other weapons of mass destruction. Some of these weapons were stolen from American research labs. We know that this Jihad's purpose is to overthrow the rightful government of the United States and replace it with one of their own liking. ("Bullshit!" cried Dee. "I'd like to see those idiots put together a powered armor from scratch!" "Hey Mal," Aris inquired, "were you really planning to overthrow the government?" Mal shrugged. "I was planning to vote for Callaghan, does that count?" "You never do anything fun.") "Federal law-enforcement agents are, even now, continuing to hunt for these terrorists. Many have been arrested already. However, stronger measures are called for. I have already directed the Secretary for Homeland Security to raise the threat condition from high to severe. At the same time, as Commander-in-Chief I have ordered the U.S. Army and Air Force to launch an attack the location where the terrorist leaders are known to be hiding. ("Oh fuck.") "Finally, in order to force the terrorists to come out of hiding, I am declaring that a state of martial law in the United States, effective immediately. Local and state law enforcement will be aided by elements of the Army and the National Guard until such time as the crisis passes. ("Oh, FUCK.") "I urge Americans here and abroad to remain calm. These terrorists think that they can rattle and ursurpatude the will of the American people with their laserfying abilities. They are wrong, and we as Americans will prove them wrongerer. Working together we will defeat this menace. We will stand tall and walk hard no matter what our enemies throw at us. ("Laserfying? Ursurpatude? Wrongerer? The -fuck-? Since when was speaking English not a requirement to be president?" Shad wondered.) "Thank you, and may God bless America." The broadcast switched back to the stunned broadcasters and pundits trying to wrap their minds around the President's statement. In the VR situation room, the Jihaddi did much the same, trying to come to grips with the sudden, horrible realization that the United States of America had just declared war on them. "Minerva?" Mal asked, leaning back in his chair and gazing into the middle distance." "Checking... he's not lying, boss. I've got multiple inbound from Buckley, Kirtland and Peterson AFB, heavy activity over Nebraska..." The big screen which had shown the speech changed to show a tactical layout of the airspace surrounding Blanca Mountain. "And I'm seeing massive troop movements pulling out of Fort Carson. ETA forty minutes for the airpower, maybe another two hours for the ground forces." "Forty minutes..." Mal continued to stare at nothing as he weighed the issues. What happened next was going to be ugly, no matter what decisions he made. Blanca could easily stand up to a conventional assault - there were no physical entrances to the base anymore, and they could bomb the mountain for a hundred years and still not get within a thousand feet of the base proper. But if the government had been authorized to use a concerted nuclear attack... that could open the base. And if that happened... To Mal, it felt like he had spent valuable minutes weighing the options before coming to a conclusion. In reality, it was no more than a second before he straightened up and said, "All right. Minerva, fire up the defense grid. Maximum power. Give 'em a warning on the radio before they hit firing range, and if they don't pull back..." Mal closed his eyes and took a deep breath before continuing. "If they don't pull back, light up the sky. Authorization Omega Gold Niner, confirm?" "I... Omega Gold Niner, confirmed. Pass phrase for defense grid unlock?" "Pass phrase is," Mal paused one last time before plunging on. "'God will know his own.'" TO BE CONTINUED */ Masamichi Amano "Preview Of The Next Episode" _Giant Robo I_ /* NEXT EPISODE: The Jihad to Destroy Barney faces its greatest challenge ever, when the forces of the American government turn on them! Trapped in their base, the Jihaddi attempt to discover who has turned the people against them before the Hellwyrm Barney can finish putting his fiendish scheme into action! But will they succeed before one of them pays the ultimate price? Tune in next time for 99 HOURS, coming soon to http://www.jihad.net/