I stood at the top of the Prince of Thebes' cargo ramp and checked my gear. Everything was right where it'd been when I checked it the minute before. I was as ready as I was ever going to be. I looked at my watch. It still said it was 10:42 PM on Thursday, September 29, but it was on Worcester time. It'd be 8:42 here. Or down there, anyway. Up here it didn't really matter. I turned to the person next to me and asked, "Are you sure you want to do this?" Thanks to my radio headset, I didn't have to yell, though the plane's cargo cabin was full of the roar of wind and the drone of engines. The person I was speaking to had a headset too, but she didn't answer me verbally; she just tugged one of the straps of her harness a little tighter, then gave me a huge grin, her teeth and eyes glinting scarlet in the red glow of the get-ready light. Not for anything like the first time, I remarked to myself that my recently-acquired apprentice was a strange, strange child, and one who bore close watching. Fearlessness is handy, but it can get a person into a world of trouble. I've done a lot of things in my life that weren't legal, but today I was breaking new ground. If taking a minor into a potential combat situation is reckless endangerment - and it is - I don't even want to think about what getting her there by jumping out of an airplane is. I sighed to myself and turned to look out and down. Silly, really. I couldn't see my target; A, by the time it would be visible from this doorway, I'd better not be standing here, and B, there was nothing to see out there but nighttime. Hitting a specific spot on what is, let's face it, an inconveniently big planet from a moving airplane is a tricky business. If your drop aircraft is off-course by just a little bit, or you jump at the wrong time, you miss. If your target is near water and that happens, you could end up taking a swim. If you happen to be parachuting among huge craggy mountains and that happens, you might find the ground a lot closer than you were expecting, or even, if you're very unlucky, ride your drop aircraft into a cliff. Nothing I could do about any of that, though. I'd just have to trust Zoner to get me to the right spot at the right time, and then it'd be my turn to do the rest. "It's been good," I reminded myself wryly. "I got to meet Jackie Chan. And Bolo Yeung!" The light above the door turned green and, for a moment, I didn't have time to think any more. "Let's go," I said to Sakura, and then I flipped my goggles down and stepped into the night. Suddenly it was very quiet indeed. As I plummeted toward - I hoped - the Province of Alberta, I still didn't have time for a lot of rumination. While the icy wind snapped at my clothes and the glowing dial of the altimeter on my wrist wound down, I only had one stray thought: How did I get into this again? Eyrie Productions, Unlimited presents A Third Universe from the Right Production of a Straight On Till Morning Film STREET FIGHTER: WARRIOR'S LEGACY BATTLE 06: INDEPENDENCE Benjamin D. Hutchins with the aid of Philip J. Moyer Laura Roxanne created by Lawrence R. Mann (c) 2010 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited It was Monday, September 26. It was cool in Worcester. I was working the day watch out of my little office off the kitchen, thumbing through the mail and considering my situation, and there was much about it - or at least one big thing about it - I didn't like. When we got home from London six weeks ago, I spent a couple of days in a funk, and the rest of the time in a corner. When I have a problem - a big problem, I mean - I can do one of two things. I can figure out a strategy and then handle it; or I can find a bunch of other things to do, do them, and ignore it, hoping it'll just resolve itself or go away. I recognize that the latter is a bad habit, and most of the time I can consciously overcome it. In this case, I failed, though in my defense, that wasn't simply for lack of trying, like it would've been in the old days. It was just that there wasn't a lot I could -do- about whatever the hell happened to Cammy and me, besides mull it over. It was never a -normal- relationship; me living in Massachusetts and her living in Scotland pretty much precluded that, even if she hadn't been a special agent for the British government. But the last time I'd been in London, the new Director of Secret Intelligence (M.), her overall boss in SIS, had forbidden her to see me any more. When I protested that that was a damn shabby move, Cammy came out to the lobby of SIS headquarters, told me she never wanted to see me again, and left. If I hadn't been so preoccupied, I might have realized how strange and weird and out of character that was. As it was, all I realized at that particular moment was that it hurt, hurt terribly - hurt more than I had thought I could be hurt. After all, it's not like we had any great towering romance going on; we were... sort of... buddies with snogging privileges. I was always pleased to see her, but I hadn't even realized how badly I'd fallen for her until she looked at me so coldly and told me never to show myself around her again. In the old days, I'd just have quit the field at that point. No sense in putting yourself forward if you're not wanted, after all. Now, I at least had the nous to realize that the whole thing had been too damned peculiar to be what it looked like on its face, and I surely had the motivation to look into it further. The problem was that, while the direct approach hadn't gotten me very far at all (apart from nearly getting me into a gunfight with the British Army), circumspection didn't make for a ton of progress either. Zoner and I put feelers out to all our own contacts in the intelligence scene, asking whether they had any information, but all we got back was a lot of shrugs and apologies. Whatever SIS had Cammy doing - whatever reason she might have had for cutting me loose like that - it was buried very deep, so deep that not even her former teammates at UNIT Delta Red, whom I reached through my contacts with SPECTRUM, had any idea what had become of her. And if -they- didn't know, odds were the only people who did were this new DSI and her inner circle. The only hint of an in there I had was Laurence Bowen, and he'd dropped off the grid as well, presumably sent on another mission as soon as he could be turned around. Zoner's contacts came up just as empty. He'd burned most of his outstanding favors setting up TACACS for Meg Bennett (not that I'm complaining), and besides, nobody in the US intelligence/special ops community seemed to know anything about it. Stymied for the moment, the only thing I could think to do was what I had been trying to avoid doing: find something else to do and see if anything developed on its own while I was doing it. So over the next six weeks, I threw myself into Sakura. ... Let me rephrase that. I spent all of my time working on her. ... What I mean is... (Look, I know what you're thinking, and Zoner keeps giving me this irritating little smirk, but -really-.) In that respect, even before we started with the martial arts aspect of it, there was a lot to do. We had rafts and rafts of paperwork to make her officially a member of our household, and that took some doing. She was a foreign national and a minor, disowned by her parents and taken in by a couple of twentysomething single men who claimed on their tax returns that they were in the freelance courier business. Even with Zoner's connections at State (and my own with the free and sovereign government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts), that was sure to raise some official eyebrows. We had to soothe the savage breast of the Child Welfare Division, and that of the City of Worcester. There were... hearings. And there were going to be more of them, before it was all said and done; it turns out you can't just go to the town office and say, "I solemnly swear that I am not up to any weird shit here." We were, our contact at CWS assured us, exceedingly lucky just to have received the court order authorizing us to foster her while the system worked its way toward a final, official determination, which was going to be a long and involved process. Between all that, getting her into school, working out a training regimen for her, and gauging her existing skills, I would've been pretty busy even without my admittedly less than entirely successful intelligence-gathering project. As it was, it was a good way of getting my mind off my troubles without just hiding under the couch or staying in bed for a month like I would have back in my teenage rebel days. I was still at my desk, having disposed of the mail, when the phone rang. I looked at it and saw that it was my personal line, not the one Zoner and I used for business, so I answered it with a simple "hello" rather than the "Trailing Edge Air Lines, you call, we haul" schtick. "Gryphon," said a voice that was familiar, but that I didn't immediately place. "... Speaking?" I said, not sure why I was making it a question. "This is Bill Guile," said the caller. I blinked. Captain William Guile, USAF, was not one of my biggest fans. We had a few friends in common, but tended toward frosty silences on the rare occasions when social currents brought us into proximity, and the last time we'd seen each other, I'd been violating the security perimeter on an Air Force base and Guile had broken my nose. What on Earth could he be calling on my private line for? "Uh... hi. Captain. What's up? If you want a rematch from last time, you've got the wrong number. You won -that- part of the fight." (And then Cammy had kicked him around the hangar like a sack of old potatoes, but - to my eternal regret - I missed that part on account of being unconscious.) "That's not what I'm calling about," Guile said. "It's about White. I heard she was missing. Wondered if you knew anything." I blinked, wondering what he was on about, and then remembered that "Camilla White" was the code name Cammy had been using when she'd infiltrated Area 51. "Why do you care?" I asked, probably more sharply than I really intended. "She kicked your ass for you." "Yeah, well... it could be argued that I was asking for it," Guile replied with something it took me a few moments to recognize as mild sarcasm. "Point is, we were all kind of at... cross purposes that day. I've heard about what you were really there to do, and it sounds like it was for a good cause. I just wish you didn't have to do it on my base. Anyway, what do you know about these rumors I've been hearing? Anything to them?" "Well, -I- don't know where she is. I don't know if that means she's missing, as such. I'm probably the last guy you should ask." And then, without really understanding why I was doing it, I told him all about it - the San Francisco thing, the scene in the lobby of SIS Headquarters in London, all of it. I finished my tale of woe with, "Since then? Nothing. Dead ends and closed doors everywhere I look. Wherever they've sent her, they've buried it deeper than I can find it." "Huh," said Guile. "That must be tough. I mean... I've got no way of knowing what you think of her, but the way she tore into me? Obvious she's got something pretty big for you." I stared at the handset for a second - that was simultaneously the best and worst news I'd had in weeks, and the most affecting thing Guile had ever said to me - then put it back to my head and said, "Uh... thanks. No, seriously, thank you. I... I kind of suspected as much? But it's nice to have it sort of confirmed." He chuckled. "Oh, it's true all right. You should've seen the look in her eyes, she came in that hangar and saw you laid out on the floor. I haven't been worked over like that in a while. 'Course, it didn't help that you'd already softened me up." "Pff," I said. "I was fighting like a fifth-grader that day. Dan Hibiki could've done a better job on you." "I dunno if I'd go that far," he said, and suddenly we were laughing together, like old buddies. It was weird. A little creepy. "Well, look, you want to do it again sometime when I've had a decent night's sleep and some lunch, I'm game," I heard myself saying. "Might take you up on that," Guile said. "Tell you what, we do that, we can blank the score from the last one. In the meantime, I'll dig around a little, see what I can come up with. I imagine you've had Charlie looking around the spec-ops community already, but I've got some contacts over at Interpol from my days with Special Investigation. Maybe they know something." "Well... thanks, Guile. I appreciate that." "Not a problem. We might not always see eye to eye, but all three of us are World Warriors, right? We have to stick together." He seemed to get a little embarrassed at that point and finished up briskly, "Anyway, I dig anything up, I'll call you, yeah? In the meantime, hang in there. Guile out." What a weird way to end a phone call, I thought as the line went dead and I hung up the phone. Must be an Air Force thing. I sat looking out the window for a minute, trying to get my head around the conversation I'd just had. On the one hand, it was great to hear some independent confirmation that Cammy really liked me, particularly to the part of me that will always be in the seventh grade. On the other, that made whatever had happened between us in London that much more painful. I sighed and muttered to the world in general, "Couldn't you at least call?" Somewhat to my surprise, the phone rang again, making me jump a little. I looked; my line again. Picked it up, said hello, and for three milliseconds thought she had; but the voice at the other end was lower, mellower, and the accent was English prep-school, not highland Scottish. Lara Croft - world traveler, traceuse, adventure archaeologist extraordinaire - was as famous to civilians (that is to say, non-street fighters) as anybody in my circle of friends and acquaintances, or at least tied with Ken Masters - but Zoner and I knew her when, before the Discovery Channel series or the improbably dramatized TNT biopic. She was Trailing Edge Air Lines' first paying customer. Our very first job was flying her to Peru for what had turned into a three-week extravaganza of Nazis and hidden treasure that had launched her to stardom and me out of college. "My father's having lunch with the Minister of Defence next week," she said after the opening pleasantries. "I thought I might ask him to pry at the edges of the Official Secrets Act a bit on your behalf." "Word gets around," I said ruefully. "You and Zoner have put out feelers to a lot of people who know each other," she pointed out. "It was inevitable that some of us would find out we were on the same trail - though I daresay not everyone is taking the mission quite so personally as I am," she conceded. I arched an eyebrow, though she couldn't see me. "And why," I wanted to know, "are you taking the mission personally?" "Because," Lara replied bluntly, "she's the first woman who's been decent to you in five years and I don't want to see you have to start all bloody over again." From someone else I might have taken that as an affront, or at least an annoying presumption, but that's the kind of relationship Lara and I have always had. I was walk-into-a-closed-patio-door smitten with her from the moment I first saw her... /-- SIX YEARS EARLIER BOSTON LOGAN INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT It occurred to me, as we stood just outside the international terminal's security checkpoint, that we might have a problem. "Zoner?" "Yeah?" "Do you know what she looks like?" "Um... no, actually." "Does she have any reason to know what we look like?" "Doubt it." I put my hand to my forehead. "Great." "We should have made a sign," said Zoner, shrugging. "And me without my chauffeur cap." "I guess we could just ask everybody who walks by." "Well, not -everybody-. I think, for example, we can rule out the gent with the handlebar mustache." "Probably. And anyone under 10 or over 40." "Wait... I have an idea. C'mon." I turned and led the way back to the baggage claim carousel, moving into position next to the hatchway where the bags first pop into view - an easy enough task, since the flight hadn't disembarked yet. "Why," Zoner wondered, "are we hanging around the luggage claim?" "Watch the bags as they come out," I said. "When one comes out with her name on it, see who picks it up." Zoner grinned. "Hey... good idea." He glanced toward the exit, where an airport cop had taken notice of the two guys hanging around the luggage carousel for a flight that hadn't disembarked yet. "Assuming, of course, that security guard doesn't throw us out," he added. The airport cop might have come over and spoken to us, but it was just about then that the actual passengers started arriving, and before long a sizeable crowd had formed around the carousel. I leaned against the wall, hands in the pockets of my jeans, and looked them over. Sometimes I like to do a spot of people-watching when I'm in a place like an airport that's conducive to it. There were a few middle-aged couples, some arriving from England to begin vacations, some returning. Here and there I saw businessmen in somewhat rumpled suits, holding briefcases and waiting, most likely, for garment bags. Old ladies with blue-rinsed hair and tweed suits, very Miss Marple; a youngish couple with two children so loud and unruly they had to be American... ... wow. Hello. I no longer noticed the other passengers. They were unimportant. For a moment, I went blank and completely forgot my mission, my whole reason for being at the airport. My whole attention, the full span of my concentration, was occupied by the young woman who had just emerged from the security checkpoint. The distinction between girls and women is subtle and sometimes difficult to place, and it has nothing to do with age. I've known thirty-year-old girls and fourteen-year-old women. It's largely a matter of her attitude, with external cues carried in her posture, her mannerisms, the way she walks. All of which goes toward explaining why, looking at the person who'd just come out of the security gates, I immediately thought of her as a woman, not a girl, though she couldn't have been much older than me. She was about my height, trim and athletic, her slender build and the very upright way she carried herself giving her the illusion of greater height. She walked with an easy saunter, giving an impression of restrained energy. Her clothes were nothing too special - gray stonewashed jeans with the cuffs rolled and tucked tight, black Chuck Taylors, and a leather flying jacket with a fluffy sheepskin ruff around the neck, unzipped to reveal a black-flecked grey fisherman's sweater. Her long brown hair was drawn back in a braid. As she entered the baggage claim area, she tipped her John Lennon sunglasses down and surveyed the scene coolly through deep brown eyes. Her gaze raked over the assemblage from right to left, then came slowly back, examining a few notable points in greater detail. I guess I was a notable point. It occurred to me about a half-second before that gaze reached me that I was staring, but by the time I thought of it, we'd made eye contact. I'd always thought people who talk about feeling a thrill at moments like that were full of it, but that moment made a believer of me. I fought my instinctive impulse to look away and blush, and instead kept eyes front, smiling acknowledgement and hoping like hell it didn't look like a leer. For a moment, the corners of her mouth twitched down in a faint contemplative frown; then she came to some internal decision and smiled at me before breaking off the momentary contact and plunging into the crowd. I stood there a moment longer, considering the odd sensation that had washed over me when she smiled. I didn't know her at all, and might never see her again, but I felt as if we had -connected- on some level with nothing more than that quiet, steady moment of eye contact. I told myself that was a matter of wishfulness on my part. For some reason, whenever I meet a really attractive woman, my first level of desire is an intense longing to be friends with her. I guess I subconsciously figure I can move on to other things from there. With her disappearance into the crush of passengers at the other end of the carousel, my awareness of the world around me returned abruptly. I felt like letting out the breath I hadn't known I was holding and leaning against the wall for support. Amazingly, Zoner had been watching the luggage emerging from the hatchway the whole time, and had missed her entirely. I would have had a difficult time explaining why I'd just nearly swooned, but he hadn't noticed that either. By the time he glanced over at me, I was leaning on the coaming at the top of the carousel's angled conveyor, watching the luggage go by. A black nylon duffel bag... a pair of extremely battered, brown, hard leather suitcases, much stickered... a yellow Palm Beach overnight bag not unlike my own... a midsized black Anvil case. An Anvil case? As it passed I reached down and flicked the handle tag over. L. CROFT, it said, in a firm but graceful hand, and an address in Northants, England. "Bingo," I remarked, and Zoner looked at me. "The black Anvil case, it's hers." We turned and watched as it trundled down the conveyor, and just as it reached the other end, it was claimed... ... by the woman in the flying jacket. O frabjous day! Calloo, callay! I raised my hand and caught her eye; she smiled slightly in recognition, then started working her way through the crowd. When she was within earshot, I put out a hand and managed to say without my voice cracking, "Hi, I'm Ben Hutchins." "Lara Croft," she said, and I wanted to sigh and fall down. It's not just women who love the sound of an English accent. Her grip was warm and strong, but she wasn't looking for a contest of strength, just a greeting. "And this must be MegaZone," she continued, as Zoner all but climbed over me to get his turn. --/ ... and over the course of our Peru adventure, she managed to let me down easy with such consummate aplomb that we've been the kind of friends who can talk about any damn thing ever since. She's disapproved of all the girlfriends I've had since (not, as my grandfather says, that they could fill a rowboat), on the grounds that I could do at least as good as her and shouldn't settle. So I said I'd take that as a compliment on Cammy's behalf, and I'd take all the help she could give me, but she shouldn't get her old man locked up in Wormwood Scrubs trying, and she laughed and said the Minister of Defence was her father's fag at Eton - which took me a moment to parse - and wouldn't dare. And then, showing the kind of grace she always had in these conversations, she changed the subject and asked me how I was finding the sensei life. "Not bad, for something I wasn't looking for," I admitted. "Shaping Sakura as a martial artist is turning out to be a bit like that old joke about being a sculptor." "How do you make a statue of Napoleon? Simple, you just find a block of stone and chip off everything that doesn't look like him," Lara said. "Yeah, that's the one. What I mean is, I figure what she's ultimately going to be is already inside her somewhere. My job isn't to make her what I think she should be, it's just to help that come out without being... distorted. You know?" She said she did. "That makes my job both easier and harder." "How so?" "Well... it's easier in that I don't have to worry much about prescribed moves and techniques. Harder because it means I'm constantly making it up as I go. But it's rewarding work. She's a good student - better than I was afraid she'd be when I'd agreed to take her on - and her talent's unmistakable. I just hope I'm up to the job of helping her reach her potential... and keeping that potential out of the wrong hands." I sighed. "It was a lot easier being the student." "I'm told it usually is. Listen, I have to go, but if Father learns anything, I'll let you know straightaway. Good luck with your student. You should bring her by sometime soon. We can put her through my obstacle course." "You know, that's a good idea. We really should." The next day was sunny and breezy, good weather for working outdoors. Sakura got home from school, found the heap of firewood Zoner and I had split and left for her to stack (that being a traditional task for martial arts apprentices), and complained that she'd been wanting to spar all day. Since I'm such a softy, I decided she could do the wood after dinner, and we sparred instead. We'd been at it for half an hour or so, not really going at it but pacing ourselves and having a good time, when she got a contemplative look on her face. "What is it?" I asked, blocking her next punch combo. "I was just thinking about something Zoner said the other day," she replied. "What?" I said, making her duck to avoid my patent-pending double kick. "He was talking on the phone with someone - his girlfriend, I think - and I guess the hearing we had to go to came up. He said he was surprised they'd let me stay here, even - what was the phrase? Pending further investigation." "Well," I allowed, taking one of her high kicks on an upraised forearm, "it -is- a pretty unusual situation." "That's what Zoner said." She gave me a quizzical look as she swung into a roundhouse kick and asked, "Sensei, who's 'Nabokov'?" I was so startled by the question I completely failed to defend myself and took one of her size-6 Chuck Taylors right in the breadbox, entirely unprepared for it. I've shrugged off much harder blows, but only when I was ready for them, and the impact drove all the wind out of me, sending me crashing to the grass with a great, thundering WHURRRGGHHH. Shocked, Sakura sprang to my side at once, kneeling down next to me. "Oh my God, Sensei, are you all right? What did I do?" "... good... good hit," I managed to croak. "that's all for now. please go inside and tell zoner that i will kill him someday." She hesitated, biting her lip. "Are you sure? I didn't really hurt you, did I?" "no, no," I replied. "just need a little rest. i'm old now and i get tired." Sakura lingered for a few moments, then got up and, with one last worried look back, went inside the house. I stayed where I was, savoring the return of oxygen to my system. When the momentary discomfort had passed, I just lay there, looking up at the fluffy afternoon clouds and thinking about this and that - - until suddenly the shape of a woman in a dark business suit appeared over me, freakisly distorted by the extremely unusual viewing angle, and said in a clipped English voice, "Caitlin Sanders, SIS. Would you come with me, please, Mr. Hutchins?" I considered the request for a moment, then replied, "No." She blinked. "... I'm sorry?" "I said no," I told her. Keeping my tone pleasant and nonconfrontational, I explained, "It's the opposite of an affirmative response. In this context, it means I do not care to go anywhere with you or any other SIS sonofabitch at this time. As it were." "Rather thought you'd feel that way, old boy," said another, familiar voice. I turned my head to see Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart coming briskly toward me at a Batman camera angle, looking out of place in a civilian suit and a camelhair overcoat. For the first time I noticed that it was getting a little chilly, the autumn afternoon gathering toward dusk. "Brigadier," I said, surprised. "I didn't expect they'd send you if they wanted to talk to me again." Lethbridge-Stewart smiled, opened the gate, and reached down to help lever me to my feet. "Let's take a walk," he said; then, turning to the SIS officer, he added, "Wait here, Sanders. He won't say a damn thing to me if you're hovering around." "Sir," said Sanders, though she clearly didn't like it. "Where'd you get -her?-" I inquired as the Brigadier and I walked down the street toward Elm Park. "The Evil Queen of Numbers insisted one of her own people come with me in case I got up to anything," Lethbridge-Stewart replied, speaking the uncomplimentary nickname as if it were an official title. "Don't worry; if she tries to follow us, I'm sure Sgt. Benton will think of some way to keep her busy." I arched an eyebrow. "... 'The Evil Queen of Numbers'?" Lethbridge-Stewart chuckled. "My little nickname for the new M. Rather caught on around Headquarters, I understand, much to her ladyship's chagrin. Bloody beancounter is all she is; if she'd been in charge of UNIT back in the day, we'd all be speaking Zygonese now, I expect. But I digress." We crossed Russell Street and entered the park, a pleasant, tree-lined expanse of green (designed, incidentally, by none other than Frederick Law Olmsted). "At any rate," he went on, "she's gotten herself into a bit of a mess. And before I can explain what the mess -is-, I have to give you some background information - and I warn you now you're not going to like it." And he was right: I didn't like it. I wasn't sure which part of it I didn't like the most: the fact that Cammy was a former Shadolu agent, or the fact that SIS hadn't seen fit to mention that fact. To her, I mean. It wasn't any great surprise that they hadn't mentioned it to me. "M. sent her -back in?-" I asked, incredulous. The Brigadier nodded, frowning - clearly, the idea didn't sit any better with him. "That's crazy," I said. "She has no memory of being a Shadolu operative, so it's not like she'd know how to fit in among their forces any better than anyone else. And what if she's recognized? Do you even know how senior she was?" "We have some idea. M. believes she was part of Bison's inner circle." I blinked. "Oh, -wonderful-. Not like he's going to wonder where she's been all this time." "M.'s idea was that she could play the amnesia card." I shook my head. "Who is this woman? Where did she come from? What's her background?" "Lady Barbara Mawdsley is an administrator," the Brigadier said, "not a former special operative like Admiral Messervy. I'm told she's very good at what she does, and I don't doubt it - but she doesn't understand the realities of the secret world." "That's obvious," I snapped. "Doesn't she have ANY IDEA what Shadolu is, what BISON is? This isn't some megalomaniacal attention deficit case like Cobra Commander we're talking about here. Bison is one of the most dangerous men in the world - personally, not just politically." "She's realized that, albeit a trifle belatedly," the Brigadier said. I turned to him as something suddenly occurred to me. "Was M. responsible for our little scene at headquarters last month?" "Yes. Thought it best for Cammy to break all outside ties before going under, I suppose." "I'm surprised she went along with that," I mused, then admitted, "And more than a little hurt she didn't at least try to get word to me that she didn't mean it." "She was afraid you'd get hurt," Lethbridge-Stewart told me, his voice gentle. I looked at him in surprise; he nodded. "She believed that if you had any inkling that none of it was her own idea, you'd tear the place apart," he added with a wry smile, "and don't try to deny it." "I damn near did anyway. That... " I searched for a concise way of expressing what I was feeling, didn't find one, and settled for finishing lamely, "... stung." "I've reviewed the security tapes," said the Brigadier. "It appears we've much to thank your young assistant for. At any rate, that's the long and short of it. Cammy hated to do that to you, but she felt it was for the best. Besides which, she was under orders, and whatever else she may be, she's a soldier. M. wanted you gone from the picture before it got complicated. She doesn't like freelancers much. Security risks." I snorted. The Brigadier nodded sympathetically. "As I said, she hasn't the background to understand our world." He smiled ironically. "But I daresay she's learning." "Well, she'd better learn quick, or she's going to get a lot of good people killed. You can't play patty-cake with Shadolu." "Quite." Entirely serious now, the Brigadier gave me a long, steady look. "Cammy worked for me in UNIT for three years before she was transferred to Double-O Section. I couldn't be fonder of the girl if she were my own daughter... and now we've lost contact with her." I felt a cold, hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach, even though I'd known that was what Lethbridge-Stewart was leading up to all the while. But at the same time... "You don't look surprised," he said. "I'm not. Look, Brigadier, this may sound crazy, but Bison's not... not quite human. He has psychic powers. It's said in my circle that he may be able to read minds, and if that's true... " I closed my eyes, forced the words out. "... then Cammy's probably already dead." Lethbridge-Stewart nodded gravely. "That's a possibility... but if she -isn't-, then you're the only one I can think of who has a chance of getting her out alive." I opened my eyes again, looked at him, and gave a mirthless laugh. "That must stick in her ladyship's craw." "It does, rather," the Brigadier said, a little mischievous light coming back into his eyes. "Damn near killed her to give me the go-ahead to ask -you- to do this. I had to go through all the files and give her a two-hour presentation proving that you and MegaZone have been more reliable, more valuable assets to SIS in the past than some of our own top agents." We'd finished our circuit of the park; as we crossed Russell again, Lethbridge-Stewart added, "She didn't want to believe it, but she did. Give her credit where it's due: She believes in information. Give her good data and she'll do the right thing. And I think she was being leaned on by someone highly placed at the Ministry of Defence, but you didn't hear that from me." "Do you know where Cammy is?" "We have a reasonably good idea. When we lost contact with her, M. assigned 002 to follow her trail. He made it as far as Calgary before vanishing as well, so we asked the Canadian SIS for help. They assigned one of their best agents to look for the pair of them, and reports indicate that -he- was captured before he even acknowledged the mission. Chances are CSIS's entire comms network is compromised - Shadolu knew their man was on his way before -he- did. "At any rate, from his last known location and some surveillance data we, er, borrowed from our American friends, we were able to determine that Shadolu have a facility in the Canadian Rockies." I blinked. "The Canadian Rockies?" I parroted, but then something clicked in the back of my head. "DRDC used to have a research facility up there, back when. Department something. One of those cutesy acronyms that work in English or French. They were screwing around with some kind of super-soldier research." The Brigadier hesitated, glancing at me. "Er, yes. I'm surprised you know about that." "Blame Zoner," I replied, evading the real explanation of how I knew. Lethbridge-Stewart, for once in his life, simply didn't have the need to know. "I thought the Canadians shut all that down at the end of the Cold War." "As far as we're aware, they did, but the Canadians neither confirm nor deny it. They don't think we know anything about it, and I admit we don't know -much-. Where it is, that they have a base there, but nothing about what they -do- there. The only thing visible on satellite images is a lake with a dam on it; everything else is either underwater or underground." He sighed. "The only thing that seems sure is that if you find the Canadians' man, you'll find Cammy." I gave the Brigadier a thoughtful look. "So the idea is that you give me the coordinates for this place, and Zoner and I go tearing off to bust in and get her out... and if any member of our I.M. force is captured or killed, the Director, Secret Intelligence, will disavow any knowledge of our actions." The Brigadier gave me his slightly tired smile again. "That's about the size of it," he said. By now we'd reached the house again. The uniformed driver standing next to Lethbridge-Stewart's car came to attention as we approached. "Sorry to keep you waiting, Sgt. Benton," the Brigadier said. He looked at Benton for a second, then glanced around. "Sgt. Benton?" "Sir," Benton replied. "Where's Sanders?" Without batting an eye, Benton replied stolidly, "She's in the car, sir." Lethbridge-Stewart and I both glanced at the car. I don't know about him, but I couldn't see anybody in the passenger compartment. "Ah," said the Brigadier with a slight smile. "Very good." Then he turned to me and handed me a USB flash drive. "That's everything we know about the matter. Use your SPECTRUM reserve cipher key to open it." I tucked the drive away. "Thanks. Now let's talk price." Lethbridge-Stewart blinked, uncharacteristically taken aback. "I'm kidding," I assured him. "It's how I keep my spirits up when I've just learned that a friend has disappeared on a suicide mission." He accepted the barb, knowing that in doing so he was only acting as a proxy for M,, and smiled slightly again. "Here's hoping it wasn't," he said. Then he shook my hand and said sincerely, "Good luck, my boy." "Thanks," I said. "I'll need it." We started planning the job that night. Of course, my initial instinct was to -go- that night, but Zoner and I both knew that wouldn't be a good idea. Undertaking such an operation hastily is a great way to get killed, and if I had managed to forget that, Zoner would have reminded me. We've worked together too long to let ourselves fall into traps as obvious as that. About midnight we realized two things: 1. We were very hungry. 2. We didn't feel like cooking. Faced with those circumstances, there are really only two things to do in Worcester, and since we didn't feel like dealing with the crowd at Denny's, we piled into the Lincoln and went to the Kenmore Diner instead. The Kenmore opens at 11 PM - yes, you read that right - and specializes in, well, diner food. They're not the world's best burgers, but they're pretty good, and the home fries are outstanding. I did the driving. I was quiet on the way back to the house, lost in thought, half-listening to Zoner and Sakura chatting. Most of my attention was turned inward. As we pulled into the driveway, the headlights slashed across the front of the house. I didn't know it at the time, but Zoner saw something move on the front steps. The first hint I had that something was off was when Fury crowded into Zoner's lap in the passenger seat, looking in the same direction, taking in big whiffs of air. He didn't seem upset, though, just interested, which kept me from getting antsy. Fury has a pretty reliable nose for trouble. "Gryph," Zoner whispered, and the tone of his voice snapped me the rest of the way out of my reverie. "What?" I replied, suddenly alert. "Somebody on the front steps," Zoner said. "Light 'em up," I said, and Zoner put the spotlight next to his quarterlight into action. A moment later the beam flicked on; he trained it across the front of the house, pinning the front door and steps in the beam. Sure enough, there was somebody there. It looked like whoever it was had been lying down on the wide top step, and had sat up when we drove in; that was the movement Zoner saw. An arm came up to shield a pair of eyes from the glare, and then a voice came to us, sleep-blurred and annoyed: "Turn out that flamin' light, willya? Whaddaya tryin'a do, gimme a migraine?" Zoner didn't recognize the voice, but I did. I shut off the car and climbed out. Zoner, Sakura, and Fury all piled out as well, and we made our way to the front door. The light above the door must have burned out, because all we had to go by was the light of the moon and the streetlamp across the street at St. Spyridon's. That was enough to tell that my instinct about the voice had been right, though. The owner of the irritated voice was a rather rumpled Asian girl of about Sakura's age, who'd been sleeping on the step under a yellow raincoat with a small duffel bag for a pillow. She had her dark hair chopped into a kind of a punk pompadour effect and big safety-visor sunglasses pushed up on her forehead. "About time you guys got home," she groused as she got up, put her coat back on and picked up her bag. "I've been out here for hours." She gave me an annoyed look. "You could at least leave the garage unlocked. I'm lucky it hasn't rained." "You're lucky we weren't out of town," I replied. Of all the things I hadn't expected to be doing tonight, high on the list would have been talking with a tousled, tired-looking, somewhat grubby girl named Jubilation Lee - and the strangest thing about it all was that she looked scared. I always thought Jubilee, as she prefers to be known, wasn't scared of -anything-. "What are you doing here?" I asked her. "Where's Logan?" Even as I asked it, I realized I knew the answer. It tied in too neatly with what Lethbridge-Stewart had told me earlier in the day. I just hadn't put it together... "I don't know," she replied miserably. "That's why I came to you." My heart sank. "Oh no." I unlocked the front door, took a step inside and disarmed the security system, mostly for an excuse to take a moment and think. I might as well have saved myself the trouble and let Zoner do it, because all I could come up with was, "Come on in. When's the last time you ate?" She thought about that for a moment as she kicked off her shoes in the foyer, then said, "I dunno. Friday maybe. No, I had some popcorn on the bus from Newark, day before yesterday." "I'll get you something to eat, then," I said, and headed for the kitchen. "C'mon," said Sakura, leading the way to her room. "You can use the shower and borrow some of my clothes. I'm Sakura Kasugano, by the way - Gryphon-sensei's Eldritkar." Jubilee mustered a smile and told Sakura her name as they went around the corner toward the bedroom Sakura had staked out for herself. At the back of my head, I had the odd feeling that I might have just witnessed one of those Liddy-meets-Hunt moments - two vergences in the Force coming together that should never have been allowed to touch - but I put it out of my head and got to work. Fury went into the den, paced around in a circle, then flumphed down in his favorite spot by the end of the couch with an audible harrumph. All this was too much of a disruption to the routine of his house for him to take with good grace. While I got some of the big russets out from under the sink, washed them, and started chopping them for home fries, I thought about my old friend Logan. I first met Logan when I was 13, on my first trip with Rose to Japan, where I was to learn to handle myself abroad and defend myself against sudden ambushes by spending the summer touring the country alone and being randomly attacked by ninja. It was a pain, but I can handle a sneak attack now, and it did wonders for my ability to swear in Japanese. Anyway, I was getting my gaijin ass kicked in a noodle shop in Osaka when one of the guys trying his best to skewer me knocked over this little hairy guy's table. The little hairy guy didn't appreciate that, and in expressing his displeasure, he made one hell of a mess. Then he bought me some squid. Rose turned up for one of her periodic spot checks while we were eating and didn't seem very pleased, since A, I was supposed to handle the ninja on my own and B, she apparently knew Logan and didn't like him. (The feeling seemed to be mutual.) She backed off a little bit when she discovered that the ninja involved in this altercation hadn't been part of the Ibuki clan, with whom Rose's arrangement to help with my training had been, and that these had, in fact, really been trying to kill me - but she still didn't like Logan. That was all right with me; she was welcome to her opinion. I, on the other hand, liked him quite a bit. I hung out with him for the rest of the summer, traveling all over Japan, Okinawa and (officially only South) Korea, learning far more than Rose ever thought I would (and in some respects more than she ever -hoped- I would, but that's another story) and getting into all manner of trouble. After a while the Ibuki didn't need to bother me any more; they could see I was getting quite enough practice without their help, so they switched to observing and providing backup where needed. You may have noticed that there isn't a ninja crime syndicate in Japan called the Order of the Emerald Dawn any more. That's because of Logan and me, that summer. At the end of the summer I went back to Maine and Logan went wherever he damn well pleased. We meet up every few months to eat teppanyaki, talk about what we've been up to since last time, and, if we can spare the time and have enough open space, do a little sparring. Logan likes to project a tough-guy image and pretend he's too gruff and nasty to bother with friends, but the truth is he's a huge softy. For the last year or so he's had his wing over Jubilee, a runaway from a California orphanage who'd been living in a shopping mall for months when he found her - or maybe she found him. It's hard to say who's adopted whom in that relationship. Which is why it was so alarming that she'd turned up on my doorstep without him. The last I knew they were in Arizona, hiking the mountains around Flagstaff. I knew, though, that Logan did have a job. He didn't just wander around the world as the whim took him -all- the time; just most of the time. The -rest- of the time, he was a top-level agent for the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, their equivalent of a 00-level agent in the British Secret Intelligence Service. He spent most of his time roaming around as he saw fit because the missions he pulled were so dangerous he spent all but about a month a year on leave. It was a reasonably short step from that knowledge, coupled with what the Brigadier had told me, to the cold feeling in my stomach. Of course, I could be wrong. Jubilee would presumably know if he'd been on a job when she lost track of him. I could get her to sort out the details after she'd had a chance to eat, and to sleep on something softer and warmer than our front stoop. Sakura came back a few minutes later, while I was heating up the deep fryer and Zoner was hunting for that pound of ground beef we knew was somewhere in the freezer, to report that our guest had been shown the shower, a sweatshirt and jeans had been placed at her disposal, and the clothes she'd arrived in were in the washer, but we'd probably better consider just burning them. "Thanks for taking care of her," I said. She grinned. "Part of the job, right, Sensei? I'm kind of like a shrine maiden." Zoner failed to suppress a snort and then ostentatiously busied himself with the freezer. Sakura sighed, rolling her eyes, and went to see if we had any ice cream in the big chest freezer in the garage, since none was to be found in the kitchen. (There was, and she also found the meat we were looking for.) Jubilee looked more comfortable once she was scrubbed and into fresh clothes, and the food improved her outlook still more. She told us what she knew, which wasn't a lot. She and Logan had been in Calgary, getting the oil changed in the old Winnebago they haul around in, when the call came in from his boss in Ottawa that SIS had a job for him. Before he'd even finished gassing up the Winnebago, a bunch of guys had jumped them. This, as I could testify, having traveled with Logan for part of a summer and intermittently since then, was no trivial task to undertake; if there is a man anywhere in the world harder to bring down in an ambush than Logan, I don't know his name. But - and Jubilee found this especially upsetting - these people had seemed to know exactly what they needed to do to drop him, and they had done it with machinelike precision. In less than five minutes they'd packed him into a van and driven away, leaving Jubilee stunned on the gas station forecourt. She was at a loss to explain why they hadn't killed her. "Can you describe the people who did it?" Zoner asked. "Were they wearing uniforms?" She nodded. "Yeah, but I didn't recognize 'em. They looked like commandos of some kind, but their outfits weren't black, they were kind of a dark purplish-red. They had those sweaters, y'know, with the cloth patches, and pants with a lot of pockets. And berets, except for their leader." Zoner glanced across at me, and I knew he could see on my face that I'd had the same thought as he had. "What was different about him?" I asked. "Her," Jubilee corrected me, "it was a woman. Tall, dark hair, would've been pretty if she wasn't so mean-looking. Her uniform was different; she had one of those jackets with the buttons up both sides of the front, and a hat like a cop's, only it was red like the uniforms, and the thing on the front wasn't a shield." "Was it a skull with a pair of wings?" asked Zoner. "Yeah!" said Jubilee. "How'd you know?" He looked across the table at me, and at the same time we both said, "Laura Roxanne." "You know her?" "I think so," Zoner said. "Did she have glasses, and a scar on her face, here?" He drew a line with his finger down the middle of his left cheek and under the edge of his jawbone. Suddenly I felt cold. I hadn't noticed that Laura had a scar like that on her face, the one time I'd seen her - - but I knew someone else who did. "Son of a bitch," I muttered. "What?" asked Zoner, Sakura and Jubilee all at once. "Nothing," I said, too quickly. None of them looked fooled, but none of them pressed it either. Jubilee was all for saddling up the horses and riding off to Logan's rescue right then and there, but between the relief of having found us home, the shower, and the food, the last few days of short naps under lousy sleeping conditions were catching up with her. After the second time she almost nodded off where she sat, I packed her off to one of the guest bedrooms - the only one left now that Sakura had staked her claim to the one in front. So here I was two days later, parachuting into the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, and Sakura was with me. I had all I could do to convince Jubilee not to come too; but she was smart enough to know that, even though she and Logan had their Batman and Robin thing going on, she didn't have the fighting chops to jump into the middle of a Shadolu secret base. Not yet, anyway. That didn't stop her from insisting on shotgun aboard the Prince, though, and I was sure that if we needed backup, she'd appoint herself Zoner's bazooka reloader or some damn thing. On the plus side, Zoner had come through as usual - I landed bang on target, right on the wide, sandy beach at the edge of a remote little body of water called Alkali Lake (not to be confused, as Zoner and I nearly had, with the one in British Columbia; that would have been embarrassing). Didn't even get my Corcorans wet as I touched down, collapsed my canopy, then shrugged out of the harness and started balling the whole rig up so I could hide it. As I did, I turned and scanned the beach. It was very dark - no moon, only starlight - but I should have been able to see Sakura sorting out her own gear, even if, like me, she was dressed from neck to toe in black. Instead, there was nothing but the dim pale crescent of the beach and the deep darkness of the water. I felt a momentary stab of panic. Had she fallen short of the beach and into the lake? If so, weighed down by jump boots and gear, she might well drown before she could get her life preserver inflated. We'd gone over the drill a million times, but even a quick study like Sakura only picks up so much in two days. Dammit! I'd tried to talk her out of coming along, but once that girl gets an idea into her head you might as well be talking to a cinder block. At the very least, I should have insisted that we jump tandem, even if that would have complicated the landing. First things first. I wasn't doing her any good standing around in the middle of the beach. I ran to the brush at the beach's inland edge, knelt down among the evergreen bushes, and then keyed my radio. "Sakura?" I whispered. Her quiet, muffled voice came back at once. "Where are you?" I sagged slightly with relief. "I was about to ask you the same thing." "I caught a gust and overshot the beach," she said. "I'm not far off, though. I can smell the lake." The lake did, indeed, have a faint but evident pungency. Probably where it got its name. There's hard water, and then there's water so hard you can smell it. "Are you OK?" "Yeah, I'm fine. I missed the trees. Just figuring out where I am now." "OK. Just like we planned it, then." We'd gone over CSIS's map of the area dozens of times on the kitchen table, planning rendezvous points, fallback points, entrance and exit routes. Sakura had taken to it all with slightly unnerving glee, as if being a commando might just be even cooler than being a martial artist. "Roger that," she said. "Meet you at RV1." There was a soft click as she switched off her set to prolong the battery life. I did the same, stashed my chute rig in the brush, looked around to get my bearings, and then headed for the rendezvous. I got there, to the edge of a small brook, before Sakura, probably because I had an easier time orienting myself. Now I had a small problem. On the one hand, I didn't want to be noticed by a passing patrol, should there happen to be any. SIS's satellite scans hadn't indicated any activity to speak of on the surface, but the way my luck had been going lately, all that meant was that Shadolu knew their satellite windows and timed their patrols accordingly. On the other hand, if I hid too well, Sakura might not be able to find me, which would sort of nullify the whole point of the exercise. I ended up sort of standing around next to the brook, trying to stay in a spot where I could duck quickly into the underbrush if necessary, feeling a bit like I was waiting for a bus - if waiting for a bus involved keeping one's every nerve tense for the slightest sound or movement. After a couple of moments, I heard someone slipping up behind me. Too stealthy to be one of Shadolu's jackbooted clowns, but not stealthy enough to escape my notice - I figured it had to be Sakura. I mean, who -else- was going to be sneaking around this deserted lakeshore in the middle of the night? I was just about to turn around and acknowledge her when she got an arm around my neck and kicked my feet neatly out from under me, toppling me backward. It was a well-executed move, but it irritated me a little - this certainly wasn't the time or place for horseplay, however technically competent. I twisted, grabbed the arm around my neck, and applied my considerably greater mass. I was still on my way down, there wasn't really any way of preventing that, but now - to her audible surprise - I was taking her with me. We hit the ground with rather more noise than I generally care to make when I'm infiltrating a vicious criminal syndicate's hidden stronghold. There followed a brief struggle in which it slowly dawned on me that, unless I had accidentally fallen asleep for a few years while waiting, this wasn't Sakura I was dealing with. My assailant was a woman, a grown one, and one who learned to fight in a completely different manner. She tried a number of dirty tricks as we scuffled around in the bushes, but I was ready for all of them and managed to avoid getting too badly damaged. Whoever she was, I didn't think she was a Shadolu guard. They had no need to be stealthy, we were a zillion miles from anywhere. A Shadolu guard would just have put her gun on me (and this woman did have a gun, I could feel it banging around on its sling as we fought) and done whatever came next. She might be one of the "special operatives" I had heard Bison kept around - - like the Brigadier said SIS thought Cammy had been - - but in that case why didn't she raise the alarm as soon as I'd thwarted her first attempt to grab me? She was being just as quiet as I was; it was a weirdly silent little wrestling match. That didn't make sense if she was a Shadolu op. So maybe she was an intruder too? While I was reaching that conclusion, she took advantage of my momentary distraction to gain the upper hand. She got me onto my back, knelt over me, and reared back a bit. In the faint starlight I saw something glint, and knew more from instinct than solid evidence that she'd drawn a knife. That wasn't anything I was interested in sticking around for (no pun intended), so I got ready to shift her by whatever means necessary. The next few seconds looked like getting very violent for a moment there, and then... In retrospect, I'm not entirely sure how the next part went. I think we recognized each other somehow - radar? ESP? pheromones? - at the same instant. The next thing I knew, the knife lay discarded off to one side and I wasn't being attacked so much as molested. That was nice, if unexpected and, under the circumstances, a bit surreal. Of course, that was the point at which Sakura finally turned up. Apparently she misinterpreted what was going on - little wonder, really - or possibly she simply took exception to it anyway. Either way, she announced her arrival by launching a kick that my erstwhile attacker barely avoided, nearly starting another fight. This was all getting quite out of hand, and the really frustrating part was that I couldn't just yell at everyone to quit it for a second. In the end, I managed to make an irritated sort of "FFFTTT" noise that seemed to get my point across. They both stopped, eyed each other, and then turned toward me. "What the hell are -you- doing here?" my former assailant and I hissed simultaneously. Sakura looked from one of us to the other and back, then whispered, "You know her, sensei?" The other woman looked bemused; I wouldn't have been able to tell, in the dark and with her face smudged with camouflage paint, except that I did know her. Quite well, in fact. "'Sensei'?" she said. I made a noise in my throat - this wasn't really the place or time for introductions - but then gestured as politely as I could and muttered with only mild sarcasm, "Fine. Baroness, this is my apprentice, Sakura Kasugano. Sakura, meet Anastasia Sergeyevna Onatopp, Baroness de Cobray." "-You- have an apprentice?" the Baroness inquired archly. "What's so funny about that?" I wondered, a trifle indignantly. "You told me once you would never take a student," she said. "You told me once you would never leave Destro's side, but I don't see him here," I shot back. "... Touche," the Baroness replied, a tad frostily. "Look, can we do this later?" I asked. "We're exposed out here and I have places to be." Ana retrieved her knife, put it away, and led the way across the shallow brook and into the woods, making a "follow me" gesture as she went. Sakura glanced at me; I shrugged and followed, and she came after, as quietly as she could. "We can talk if we keep it quiet," said Ana as we moved deeper into the woods. "I've been watching this facility for days. Shadolu doesn't patrol this sector; we're not within their active perimeter yet." We hiked through the woods for the better part of a half-hour before Ana waved us to a halt in a small clearing. We sat down on rocks and, through some kind of silent consensus, started checking over our gear. "The Shadolu outer perimeter is just over the next ridge," Ana told us. "I believe I've identified a path through their patrol zones that will get us to a possible entrance point to the facility itself." Sakura said nothing, instead eyeing the equipment the Baroness was double-checking. Then, in a low voice, she said, "You didn't tell me you knew any dominatrixes, Sensei." I suppressed a laugh; the Baroness made a low growl and asked, "Why does everyone make that assumption?" "Maybe it's the spike-heeled jackboots," I speculated. "Or the black leather bodysuit. Or the whip." "It was a gift from a friend, and it is a very useful tool," she said defensively. "No one thinks -Indiana Jones- is a dominatrix." "Ana, Indy doesn't wear a leather catsuit and call himself 'The Baroness'." "Thank -God,-" Sakura muttered. "I -am- a baroness!" Ana protested. "Dr. Jones is not a -state-." "... You have a point," I conceded. "Of a sort. And you're not really a baroness." "Of course I am!" "Ana," I said indulgently. "You 'convinced' the Prince of Borokovia to ennoble you at -gunpoint-." "A simple misunderstanding," she said stuffily. "Right." I scratched my head. "So. Uh. What are you doing here?" "Seeking the secret of Shadolu's dark power," she said lightly. "You?" "I'm just looking for someone," I said. "Say, uh, you wouldn't be planning to use that dark power for evil, would you?" Ana spread a hand on her upper chest. "Me? Surely not. Do I look like the kind of girl who would do a thing like that?" "I don't think you want me to answer that, Baroness," I told her after a pause. She folded her arms. "Hmph. Do-gooder." "That's me." I eyed her. "I notice you're not wearing the... snake head... logo... thing. Gone freelance?" "In a manner of speaking. Why? Are you hiring?" "Well, that depends," I said reasonably. "Are you still a vicious, amoral terrorist without a shred of remorse or human decency?" "Oh, please," she said dismissively. "You will grant that I've always had a -shred- of human decency. Or have you forgotten Malta?" I considered that, nodded. "OK, I'll stipulate to that." Ana smiled her I've-got-you-figured smile and added, "And if I know you, you are going to all this trouble for the sake of a woman." "That's true. And if I know you, you're going to all this trouble because the danger helps you forget that you still haven't found a meaningful direction for your life." She narrowed her eyes at me. "You are an annoyingly perceptive man. Have I told you that?" "It seems to me that was why you dumped me," I noted. "The second time." Lara, I recalled, had -really- not approved of the Baroness. "But then, I think you were only drawn to me in the first place because I was the first guy you really got to know who didn't wear a -mask- 24-7." "Mmm... possible." "Speaking of which, how -is- Destro?" I asked, retying my boots. "I would not know," the Baroness replied coldly. "Why don't you ask his 'secretary'? I believe her name is Leticia." "Ouch." I finished one boot and started on the other. "Well, I told you that guy was trouble." "You are an annoyingly perceptive man," she repeated. "Have I told you that?" I sighed. "Oh, you're not -still- mad about what I had to do to Xenia, are you?" "It -was- a trifle unsporting," she said. "Unsporting? She was trying to kill me!" I shook my head. "Anyway, I didn't hurt her... permanently. If anything, I like to think I provided a valuable service." Ana eyed me skeptically. "Service." "Absolutely. If she's at all smart, she learned an important lesson about messing with forces you don't understand." "I'm sure that thought brings her great comfort," said the Baroness dryly. "Uh... I'll just be over here, missing all the subtext," Sakura put in. "When you're older," Ana and I told her in unison; then we glanced at each other, I shrugged, and she said, "What about you?" It took me a moment to track the question back to its source; then I nodded toward the ridge and the facility beyond it and said, "If she's alive, odds are she's in there somewhere." "Ahhh," said the Baroness, nodding. "Now it all makes sense." Rising, she adjusted her submachinegun sling so the swivels wouldn't clink and said, "Come on, then. Let's get closer. We must be very quiet now." Closer inspection, once we'd topped the ridge and made our way down again, showed the bulk of the Shadolu facility - at least the part of it that was visible from the outside - was a concrete arch dam at the end of the lake. This close, we could hear water flowing through the spillways. I wondered whether it had an operational hydroelectric plant. That would be handy for any secret goings-on Shadolu might be getting up to inside. For a second I entertained the notion that we were all on the wrong page here, and this was just a hydro dam belonging to some local power company - until closer inspection revealed the patrolling guards along the brow of the dam, with their paramilitary uniforms and slung assault rifles. "This place kinda -reminds- me of Castle Destro," I murmured to Ana. "I wonder if any of these guys are ex-Iron Grenadiers." "It is entirely possible," she replied softly, studying the dam through a pair of night-vision binoculars. "Shadolu has all but cornered the international terrorist job market these days." We eluded the surface patrols and entered the dam through what had probably been some sort of secondary drain originally, but now seemed to have been converted into a freight tunnel. Inside, the concrete tunnels and clusters of overhead pipes seemed authentically industrial enough, but the whole place was too clean and clinical to really be an ordinary hydroelectric power plant. The "ALL HAIL LORD BISON" posters and whatnot were also a pretty good giveaway. "The decor brings me back," the Baroness observed dryly. "Imagine if the Commander had had the chops to back up his ambitions," I told her. "That's Bison." "Hm," she said, and I couldn't tell if she looked chilled or intrigued. The three of us moved warily through the dam's empty corridors. Some part of me was interested to note that Ana and I slipped easily back into the old rhythm, taking down a secure facility commando-fashion being something we had done before, and that Sakura fitted herself into the pattern with the same instinctive ease that she'd shown in picking up the framework of Shotokan karate we were building her Ler Drit training on. We were alert but not nervous, ready for action but not looking for it, and we penetrated deep into the facility without detection. The place seemed to be lightly staffed at night, though there were signs everywhere of extensive occupation. The lab - because that, we concluded after encountering the first few rooms crammed with mysterious but obviously scientific equipment, was what it was - had obviously passed through a couple of different hands in its day. Some of the markings on the wall were clearly older than others, and in different stenciled typefaces to boot. We didn't know what most of the legends on the walls and doors meant, since they were in some alphanumeric code for which we didn't have a key, but the corridors all seemed to be converging on a central point, and after a half-hour or so of careful exploration, we found it. Sometimes, in my line of work, you enter a room that immediately screams "great evil committed while you wait." The central chamber of the Shadolu lab at Alkali Lake was one of those. It was sort of a combination mission control and mad scientist operating room, its walls covered with banks of computerized equipment and sporting a raised observation area off to one side. "Ah," said Ana, slinging her MP5. "A computer. Now we're getting somewhere." So saying, she crossed to the terminal that sat on a table up in the observation area and started negotiating with it. Sakura and I paced warily around the middle of the room as she did so, trying to watch all the entrances. That was easier said than done, because there was a very distracting obstacle in the center of the room. It was some kind of massive... what? Sarcophagus? Tank? Bit of both. It was transparent, like some sort of giant aquarium - maybe six feet high and across, and 10 feet long, reinforced at the corners and edges with massive metal beams, open at the top. Along the long sides of the upper rim were rows of articulated metal arms that looked like they were designed to swing down into the tank at regularly spaced intervals. Sakura edged closer, intrigued, and examined the object at the end of one of the arms. "Some kind of drill bit," she said, then blinked, visibly a little freaked out, and said, "... and it's -hollow.-" I stepped up alongside her and looked. She was right. The arm ended in what looked for all the world like some kind of surgical-grade power drill, and there was a hole at the tip of the bit. A braided metal hose was connected to the back end of the drill, leading away into the guts of the equipment at the base of the far wall... and, I now saw, there was one for each of the arms. "OK, I don't even want to -know- what they do in here," I said, putting my hand on Sakura's shoulder and steering her away from the machine. She kept staring in disturbed fascination at the drill thing for a few seconds, then tore her eyes away from it and swallowed. "I've got something," said the Baroness. "This is the center of the facility. There's a detention area further along toward the face of the dam - that way," she noted, pointing to the door at the far side of the room. "The manifest lists two prisoners, both slated for transfer to Central Headquarters within the week. One level down. Stairs are about 20 meters further along." I restrained myself from asking "what's that in real units?" - there were times for teasing Europeans about the metric system and times for not - and we set off. I have rarely been gladder to leave a room and its contents behind. We had reached the door leading to the stairs when Sakura made her first real rookie mistake - a perfectly understandable one, not to be held against her, but a genuine schoolgirl error all the same. "Where -is- everybody?" she wondered quietly, and a moment later the stairway door opened from the other side and a patrolling guard in a Shadolu uniform stepped out. I'm not sure which of us was more startled, me or him, as we suddenly found ourselves face to face across a distance of maybe 16 inches. His eyes got huge, and for a couple of seconds we just stared at each other in silence. And then Ana, being Ana, shot him. Her weapon was suppressed, so it only made a muffled sort of coughing noise, but something on the guard's uniform wasn't, and -it- made an earsplitting wailing sound as he collapsed to the floor in a heap. Which was, a moment later, drowned out by the overhead sirens going off. "Oh, for fuck's -sake,- Ana," I grumbled, not that she could hear me over the din. Guards suddenly flooded out of doors all up and down the corridor, looking confused and surprised, their uniforms and weapons in various states of disarray. Turning to the Baroness, I leaned close enough that she'd be able to hear me and yelled in her ear, "Why does it always have to be the shooty with you?!" "Well, YOU didn't seem inclined to do anything about him!" she shot back (as it were). "Go on! You're almost there. Down one level, take a left, first door on your right." She yanked a miniature grenade from her web harness and thumbed its primer cap. "I'll deal with these." I flimberted, then gave it up, grabbed Sakura's shoulder - she was still staring in shock at the dead guy - and hustled her through the door and onto the stairs. We reached the landing halfway down, and she grabbed at my arm and tugged for me to halt. I turned to her, noticing that all the color was gone from her face. "This isn't really the time," I said, but before I could get further she was babbling, "S-s-sensei, she, she, she -killed- that guy! Just... right in front of me! Shot him! In the head!" I took both of her shoulders in my hands and looked her in the eye. "I know," I said. "I should have expected she'd do something like that. It's... it's the kind of person she is. I'm sorry you had to see it. But it's done now, and you and I are in a -lot- of danger. I need you to focus. All right? I promise we can talk about it as much as you need to when we're safe, but right now you just have to hold it in and keep going. Can you do that?" Seeing that she was still just staring at me in shock, I gave her a little shake and said in a harder voice, "Sakura. -Can you do that?-" She blinked at the sound of her name. "Y... " She took a deep breath and seemed to become a different person, the way she did sometimes when we were really in the dojo groove. She straightened her back, her eyes became flinty, and she snapped, "Hai!" and bowed from the shoulders up. "Good. Good soldier. You're doing great, I'm proud of you." I slapped her shoulders and propelled her onto the second half-flight of stairs ahead of me. "Let's go!" We hit the corridor onto the lower level expecting more guards, but found none. There were no alarms sounding down here, though the red lights were flashing in the upper corners of the halls. Above, very faintly through the layers of muffling concrete, we heard the sounds of gunfire and explosions. "Will she be all right?" Sakura asked me, her near-breakdown apparently forgotten now that it had been overcome. That was more or less how she dealt with -any- obstacle, so it shouldn't have come as a surprise. "Sure she will. It's what she does." I looked up and down the corridor. "Take a left... first door on the right." I tried the door. It didn't work. I didn't have time for doors that didn't work, so I kicked it very hard. It was a surprisingly sturdy door; my hardest kick did it no harm at all. It -was- propelled clean out of its frame to smash down flat on the floor and slide some distance into the room, but it wasn't even dented. The room beyond was basically the panopticon of a cell block, complete with an upper-level perimeter catwalk, but instead of prison cells, it was ringed with what looked like upright metal coffins, the upper third or so of their lids made of glass. I ran to the middle of the room and turned around, scanning them with my eyes. Most of them were empty. Two of them weren't. I started toward one of them, not sure whether to be relieved or even more filled with dread, when a voice from above said sharply, "That's far enough." I looked up to see the upper-level catwalk filling with guards from a door leading out the far end of the room. In the center, standing with hands on hips while the guards filed out to either side of her until the catwalk was entirely full, was a slim young woman in a dark garment that looked like the love child of a leotard and a commando sweater - in the general shape of one but made of the ribbed knit material one associates with the other, and with the same kind of shoulder and elbow patches. She had brown hair that was partly tucked under one of those canoe-shaped military caps, and she looked a bit smug. I turned to see another group of guards entering by the doorway we'd just used, with another girl - this one short-haired and blonde - in the same kind of uniform apparently in charge of them. All told, there had to be 40 or 50 of them, all armed with submachineguns and pistols, plus the two unarmed commando girls - who I figured were the greater threat. I felt Sakura's shoulders settle against my back and turned my head to glance over my shoulder at her. "Sorry I got you into this," I muttered. She smirked slightly and tugged the knot of her hachimaki a little tighter. "It'll be good training," she replied, adopting her modified Shotokan starting stance. "Give it up, you two," the girl up on the catwalk demanded. "There's no possible way you can escape." "You've been kind enough to walk straight into our little trap - don't ruin it now by forcing us to kill you," the blonde added. "Well, you wondered where everybody was," I told Sakura wryly. "I won't make -that- mistake again," she said ruefully. "You want to know what -I- think?" I asked the brunette. "What do you think?" she asked. "I think you don't really dare to have your men open fire in here," I said. "What with all these exposed pipes around that say things like GAS and LIVE STEAM," Sakura added, gesturing to the industrial walls above the detention chambers. "You didn't plan this very well." The brunette looked a little less smug and a lot more annoyed. "Weapons down, men," she ordered, and all the guards slung their weapons. Then she smiled darkly and said, "Beat them to death." The guards drew their truncheons and advanced. /* The Ramones "The Shape of Things to Come" _Acid Eaters_ (1993) */ Fighting 50 or so trained security officers in a relatively confined space is an interesting way to spend an evening. I Chain Lightninged the first six who came over the railing from the upper level, but after that I didn't have the time to aim or concentrate that much. Similarly, Sakura leveled at least as many charging in from the lower-level entryway with one of her modified Shotokan fireballs, but then she didn't have much room for that kind of stunt, and it became all about fists and feet and elbows and knees. This was the first time Sakura and I had been in a really serious fight together; our adventures in Transbelvia had mainly consisted of a car chase, and her street brawl with the lowlives down by the bus station was more or less over by the time I got onto the scene. We'd been training together for almost seven weeks at that point, but never faced honest-to-God combat with nobody to depend on but each other before. This would be, I realized as it started, the real test of whether our partnership was going to work on the road, so to speak. She could take my direction in the dojo or out in the yard, but when the chips were down and everything depended on instantaneous reaction, on being able to read each other's silent cues and shape our courses accordingly, would we -work- as a team? In three words, Oh -hell- yeah. We didn't just click, we -ignited-. We were Fred and Ginger with fireball fists and eyes in the backs of each other's heads. We -owned- that room and every mook in it. My favorite move of the melee came when two of the guards tried to flank me with their truncheons and, without saying a word, Sakura sprang onto my shoulders, vaulted my head like it was a pommel horse, and flattened them both at once with a V-leg kick, then circled around, flipped across my back, and took out the one to my right with a haymaker while I was busy banging another pair's heads together. It was startling when she did it, particularly the first bit, but amazingly elegant - one of those moments I wish I had on video, so I could just watch it again and again. The last guard bounced off my knee and went down in a clattering heap of riot armor and gear, and we were back to back again, looking around to see if anybody was getting up. "Seventeen," Sakura panted, catching her breath. "Not bad for the new kid." "Not bad at all," I agreed. "But you ought to count the guy with the red 'tache. I just pushed him over, he was already out. Look sharp - main act's about to begin." The brunette jumped down from the catwalk, landing nimbly between a couple of her crumpled subordinates, and looked around with an expression of vague disgust while her blonde counterpart moved to flank us from the other side. "It's true what Master Bison says, Juni," she mused. "If you want something done right... " "... It's best to do it yourself, Juli," her colleague agreed. /* Depeche Mode "Nothing (Headcleanr Rock Mix)" _Remixes 81-04 (Limited Edition)_ (2004) */ I was right. The two of them were a much greater threat than their 50 armed thugs had been. They were fast, they were agile, they were startlingly powerful, and - worst of all - they fought in a style I found eerily, dishearteningly familiar. They fought just like Cammy, and it was very distracting, particularly since she was right over there in display case number 12, seeming to watch the whole thing unfold with a glassy-eyed indifference. I hoped that was just a side effect of whatever these things used to immobilize their occupants. Woolgathering in that fashion earned me an experience I'd been eager to avoid when I'd fought Cammy herself the previous year, and I have to report that my surmise at the time was right on the money. Getting your head crushed between somebody's knees - even a pretty girl's - and being flipped through 270 degrees onto the floor is really not any fun at all. Sakura backflipped away from her own dance partner, catching her a nice clip under the chin in the process - very Guile, that maneuver, I wondered when she'd seen him do it - and landed next to me, putting a hand on my shoulder. "Focus, sensei!" she told me. "I don't want to end up in one of these boxes!" I glanced at her and grinned. "Let's switch it up a little," I told her, and when I sprang to my feet, we slapped hands, crossed paths, and engaged each other's adversaries. It wasn't really much of a change for us - the two girls fought like they'd been stamped from the same machine, which, I realized with a slight fleshcrawl, they might've been - but it seemed to disconcert them. Their timing got a little ragged as one - I'd already forgotten which was which, was the blonde one Juni? I guess it doesn't really matter - tried to adjust to the sudden tripling of her opponent in size, while the other struggled equally to cope with Sakura's greater speed and her sheer ferocity. It was still a very hard fight, and we were winded, but Bison's dolls never quite regained the upper hand. The closest they came was when the one I was fighting backtucked out of range of my slide kick (and nearly into the middle of her partner's fight with Sakura), almost tripped over one of the guards, rolled over him, and came up with his pistol in her hand, swinging it to aim at me. "No you don't!" Sakura snapped, backhanding hers (Juli, I think) our of the way and charging. Rattled, Juni tried to spin around and got off one shot at her, missing well high and to the right, and then Sakura was coming up from below with all the power in her deceptively sturdy little body behind her fist and a very creditable pseudoelectric ki nimbus around it. Her cry of "SHO-OHKEN!" was almost drowned out by the crack of the energy discharge, the gun flew one way, the commando girl flew another, and nothing more was heard of either one that day. "That's for nearly breaking Sensei's neck!" Sakura informed her crumpled foe. A metallic sound from behind her told us both that the one who was still standing had had the same idea; we turned to see Juli picking up a castoff submachinegun. "You really ought to put that down," I told her. "Why?" she replied, and then the Baroness stepped through the entry door and shot her in the thigh, fracturing her femur and causing her to drop the gun and fall to the floor with a yelp that was as much surprise as pain. "Ana! God DAMMIT, can you not do that!" I barked. "She's young," Ana replied, unconcerned. "She'll probably walk again. The upper level's clear for the moment. I suggest we make good our escape." "Mm." I kicked the submachinegun away from the fallen, weeping girl and briefly felt bad about the whole thing. With her game face off, she looked like she should be cutting geometry class, not commanding thugs. "That's why you shouldn't point guns at strangers," I told her apologetically. "Lord Bison will make you suffer for this," she said bitterly. "Not if I see him first," I said with a confidence I didn't entirely feel, and went to see if I could figure out how to get the detention capsules open. That turned out to be no harder, from the outside, than opening a fridge, though Logan didn't react until I thought to press the green button labeled RELEASE on the little control panel, then peel the two electrodes off his temples. The instant I did, his eyes snapped back into focus and he said, "Thanks, kid. Who's your sidekick? She ain't bad." "We'll do introductions later," I said. "You OK?" He stepped gingerly out of the pod and flexed his arms thoughtfully. "Little stiff. Bored outta my flamin' skull - these things keep you conscious. But nothin' serious. Let's get the hell outta here." He angled his chin at the other occupied capsule. "I think I recognize somebody." I went to Cammy's pod, opened it, and repeated the procedure that had revived Logan. She, too, came back immediately from wherever the immobilizer had sent her, her eyes focusing on mine - but unlike Logan (uh, fortunately), her first reaction was to kiss me. "I'm sorry," she said, "I didn't have any choice. What're you doing here?" It took me a second to work out what she was apologizing for (at first I thought it was kissing me), and since there wasn't really time to get into that right now, I only said, "What do you think? I came looking for you. Can you walk? We've got to get gone, and fast." She stepped unsteadily out of the pod, took a couple of deep breaths, and then straightened up and said, "Just try and stop me." We reached the upper levels unopposed; I tried not to look too closely at the evidence of Ana's extended firefight up here while Sakura and I were busy below, and Sakura looked straight ahead until we were out of the area. We didn't pass through the room with the strange tank, which I was just as happy to miss, and emerged from a bulkhead onto the road running across the top of the dam. No guards were in evidence up here either, but there was a vehicle parked at the far side, some kind of big SUV, and that seemed like our best bet for a quick exit, so we made for it. Halfway across the dam, a helicopter appeared from beyond the dam and fixed us with its Nightsun while it maneuvered into position to land between us and the truck. For a second I wondered if it was Zoner, having arranged a more direct extraction for us, but closer examination showed it was a Soviet-built Hind, one of their big tankbusters, and it had Shadolu markings. It crouched on the concrete between us and our escape, its rotors whining down, and then eight or ten figures alighted from the side door. Most remained by the chopper, fanning out into a neat squad defensive formation, but two broke away from the group and walked toward us, silhouetted from behind by the beam of the still-lit searchlight. The only good thing I could identify about this was that neither of the people approaching us could be Bison; they were both too small and, now that I looked a little closer, too... woman-shaped. Then the searchlight went out, replaced by area floodlights up on poles along the brow of the dam, and it all became clear. Well, one of them did. The other remained a bit behind, in the shadows. "Hello, Laura," I said. "Long time. I hope you didn't get into too much trouble over the Siberia thing." Laura Roxanne stared at me coldly from below her Shadolu officer's cap. She looked like she'd had a hard week; one of her arms was in a sling -and- a cast, she had bandages covering part of her face and one ear, and she was walking stiffly, her left knee not bending much, with the aid of a Lofstrand crutch in her good hand. "So," she said. "The pretender. I might have known." After the day I'd had, I wasn't going to rise to that bait. "Sakura, cover your ears so you don't have to hear me tell this nice lady to get the fuck out of my way." "Hai, sensei," Sakura replied, grinning. Laura's face darkened further. "'Sensei'?" she said. "You dare presume to take a -student?- To pass on your perverted mockery of the True Art to a child?" "Yeah, go figure," I said. "I thought I'd teach someone who came to me of her own free will, instead of brainwashing the help like your boss. It's less efficient, but kind of more rewarding somehow." She knotted her fists. "You will not speak of Lord Bison in that way," she said. "No? Well, you know, this experience today has -taught- me something about Bison," I told her conversationally. "You might like this. I've discovered that there's at least one point - very possibly ONLY one, but definitely at least one - on which he and I agree." Everyone stared at me, Laura included. I let them hang a moment, then explained, "If I had his resources? I would -totally- have a praetorian guard of cute girls in commando outfits. I mean, -why wouldn't you.- Mind you, I would endeavor to keep things professional in the shop at all times, and I bet I'd offer a better benefits package, but the actual, you know, -aesthetic?-" I nodded. "I'm down with that. Me, Bison, and Colonel Qadhafi, we're all on that bus together." Then, while she audibly ground her teeth, I cracked my knuckles and said, "Now, I've had a long day and I want my bed, and, no offense, but you look like you could stand some more rack time yourself. Are you late because you got hit by a bus on the way here?" "(Somethin' like that,)" I heard Logan mutter with dark satisfaction behind me. "So what do you say you admit you lost this time and we all walk away?" I proposed. Laura stared hard at me for a moment, as if trying to kill me with her thoughts. When that didn't work, she limped aside and said sharply, "Since you seem to appreciate the Dolls so much, here is another one. Decapre!" /* The Prodigy "Invaders Must Die" _Invaders Must Die_ (2009) */ The other figure who had followed her over from the Hind stepped out of the shadows. She was another girl in the dark commando-sweater- like uniform the ones Sakura and I had fought were wearing, complete with a little yellow fake necktie on the front; except she had on black tights and a full-face mask with triangular eye slots, no nose or mouth, and a dull gunmetal-blue finish. She was blonde, with her hair done up in a pair of long braids, a jagged little forelock sticking out in front between her garrison cap and the top of her mask. That last detail I found particularly arresting in that moment. Blonde hair in long braids is neither here nor there, but that forelock was very distinctive. I knew someone else who had one just like it - and I heard that very someone gasp with startled recognition at that moment. "I don't think I'm going to like this," I murmured. "I can guarantee you won't," Laura replied with a faint smirk. "Let's see how well your new enhancements perform in actual combat, shall we, No. 12?" "Affirmative, Commander," the masked girl replied, her slightly muffled voice flat and lifeless. "Engage, then," Laura told her. "Full sanction. Kill them." The masked girl - "Decapre", apparently - stepped forward, the blank eyeholes of her mask fixed on me. She raised her fists in front of her chest, crossing her arms at the wrists - - and with a very familiar metallic sound, three gleaming blades sprouted from the back of each hand, extending in an eyeblink to nearly the length of her forearms again. "Yup. Called it," I muttered, and then she was upon me. /* 00:50 */ The other girls in the commando outfits had fought eerily like Cammy. This one fought, as indeed she now looked, like a strange combination of Cammy and Logan. The mask gave her a passing resemblance to Vega, master of the Spanish ninja, as well, but nothing in her brutally efficient fighting style called to mind Vega's pointless, narcissistic flamboyance. This girl - this creature - just wanted me dead, as thoroughly as possible and as fast as possible. And that might be very fast indeed, because so was she. Adrenaline fizzed in my veins as her claws flashed out, passing just barely to the left, then just barely to the right, of my head. The rush erased the aches and pains of the fight in the detention room. I dodged and weaved, using every evasive trick I knew to keep those blades away from me. My best chance at avoiding a gutting was to get inside her reach, but that was no guarantee of success, because she was - like Cammy - obviously well-trained in close-quarter combat. I got inside the arc of her right arm, deflecting her claws away with a blow to the inside of her wrist; she half-turned, cold blue eyes glinting emotionlessly through the mask, and rammed the other elbow into my face. That hurt a lot more than it really should have, even under the circumstances, and I stumbled back and barely ducked a swipe aimed at my eyes. That elbow strike was like getting hit in the face with a length of rebar - and between that and the claws, I understood why. Remember how I had said I didn't even want to know what they did in the room with the big fishtank covered in articulated robot drills? I think I know now. I wondered if this was, in fact, the -same- facility where a secret branch of the Canadian government had experimented on certain members of the armed forces, trying to turn them into super-soldiers by bonding a nearly indestructible metal to their bones. Logan knew that had happened to him, and that the government had probably been responsible, but not where; and I knew that this place had originally been part of that same or a similar project before the Canadians wound it up and Shadolu took it over. I decided, as Decapre nearly took one of my arms off, that this was not the time to be thinking about that. It was time to get off my ass and start fighting back rather than just defending myself. I had been in a bit of a slump, fighting-wise, for a little while now. It started with the aftermath of my World Warrior bout with Ryu, in which, for convoluted reasons having to do with pigheadedness (not my own) and pride (my own), I'd had to go straight from barely beating Ryu to getting my head kicked in by Ken. I hadn't quite recovered from that when I found myself unexpectedly squaring off against Guile at Area 51 and taking an even worse drubbing. Two losses in a row weren't going to look too good on my Street Fighter Tournament record card. Since then I hadn't had a ranked fight - hadn't had any fights at all apart from sparring with Sakura. Nobody on the circuit had challenged me, and with the losses and the whole business with Cammy, I hadn't had the heart to go looking for a match myself. Today's warmup against the goons in the basement, and the fight with the two commando girls, seemed to have re-engaged something. I felt myself firing on all cylinders, using all my skill to stay ahead of Decapre's claws and get in the occasional counterattack. This was complicated slightly by the fact that I wanted always to stay between her and the others - I'm sure Logan was recovering quickly from his time in storage, that's what he does, but he'd only carve her to bits, and for reasons I couldn't quite identify I didn't want to see that today. Cammy was still shocky and I didn't want Sakura anywhere near those blades. And Ana - Hell, I knew what she was going to do. I gave Decapre an open-handed blow right on the fake knot of the little simulated necktie on the front of her sweater, driving her back a couple of paces, and used the time it bought me to turn and put out a warning hand, but it was too late. Ana was already drawing a bead with her sidearm. "Ana, wait, DON'T - " I yelled, but she fired. Her aim was good; the bullet hit Decapre in the forehead, a bit to the right of center, in the gap between her hat and mask. The impact made a sharp metallic TANG and a fat yellow spark, and she jerked backward, wobbled slightly... but didn't go down. She blinked twice, shaking her head, and before my eyes the ugly tear in the skin of her forehead closed and disappeared as though it had never been there. "Great, yeah, she regenerates too," I muttered. "Of course." "Ballistic attack: ineffectual," Decapre murmured in that same flat voice, then renewed her attempts to fillet me. Something about that struck me as faintly odd, but I was too busy defending myself to mull over what it really meant. The other two commando girls had been kind of snarky. This one had all the personality of drywall. It's funny the things you notice about a girl when she's trying to kill you. The style of Ler Drit I specialize in is called "Icon of Stone". When I'm fully concentrating on a fight, like I was just then, I can do one of two things with the vital energies within me, what Chinese martial artists call chi and my own form calls the eponymous Ler. Normally I push it outward, where (at least in my case) it takes on a character not unlike electricity. But in a situation like this, with an opponent much swifter than I and armed with deadly weapons, I can also pull it inward and... well, the mental image I always get is one of compression. My Ler crystallizes in and around me. I don't actually turn to stone - that's impossible - but if you hit me, you might just think I had. I don't actually use the Icon technique itself very often. It makes me much slower than normal, and I'm not one of the speediest fighters on the tour to begin with. But in a situation like this, against someone so much faster than I am anyway and armed with a half- dozen razor-sharp blades, it's just the thing. It didn't make me invulnerable to Decapre's blades, but it meant that unless she scored a direct hit, the worst harm she could inflict was a nasty cut. Nasty cuts I could deal with later. Being disemboweled, not so much. We went back and forth a few more times, neither of us ever quite taking the worst of an exchange. The blows that landed were almost all kicks; I managed to avoid or block all but a few glancing hits with her claws, but the effort either kept me out of punching range or occupied my arms with deflecting her. She kicked like a mule, but I was deep into the Icon now and didn't feel them much. I'd feel them later, for sure, but the important thing right now was to make sure there WAS a later. Even now, that wasn't a given. I couldn't sustain this level of concentration forever; I could already feel fatigue creeping up on me, though still at a level where I could push it out of my mind and keep slugging. Decapre, too, was starting to move a little more slowly and a little more sloppily, but I knew from years of sparring with Logan that she needed only a short breather to get a second, third, or even fourth wind. At the moment, we were about evenly matched, fortitude and fury striking a delicate balance. I recognized that it would take one of us playing a wild card to tilt the fight seriously in either direction. And, as my defenses absorbed a furious flurry of kicks and elbows, I realized that I had one to play. I risked a glance back over my shoulder and saw that Sakura's attention was riveted on the fight; we made an infinitesimal moment of eye contact, and she knew what she had to do. Then I turned away again, bore in on Decapre, and launched a series of punches I knew she would block, tried a kick I knew she would dodge, faded back from her counterattack - and stumbled, nearly falling over backward. The Icon deserted me as my concentration broke. I felt all the cuts and scrapes I'd absorbed from Decapre's claws light up with pain as they started to bleed. My back arched, I barely managed to stay under a wide two-handed claw sweep - the phrase "limbo for your life!" raced through my brain - and I saw Decapre leap, her eyes still devoid of any spark. My back hit the concrete. Decapre filled the sky above me, her claws glinting, ready to cleave into my chest like so many butcher knives. From somewhere "above" my head came Sakura's voice: "Shinkuu - HADOKEN!" Her eyes leaving me, Decapre made the very slightest sound of surprise - and then a bolt of blue-white fire swatted her out of the air like the fist of an angry god, sending her tumbling halfway back to Laura's position. I sprang to my feet and raced in. She was disciplined, her self-possession exceptional; she'd landed on her feet and in another half-second she would be ready for more, despite the thunderclap punch Sakura's fireball had given her. But I wasn't going to give her half a second, because I was already executing my all-or-nothing wrap-up - the seven-maneuver chain of techniques Zoner, in a fit of puckishness, had dubbed "Murder on the Orient Express". This was either going to work or get me killed, but against this woman on this day, it was all I had left. Years of periodic sparring with Logan had taught me a few things about fighting someone with metallized bones - first among them, although it's trickier to do it without hurting yourself, never underestimate the value of the good old-fashioned sock on the jaw. A person with an unbreakable skull can still be concussed. Failing that, go for the soft parts. Even to a regenerating opponent, body blows hurt. By the third punch, I was pretty sure my strategy was going to work. When I came out of the double kick and she made no attempt whatever to stop me grabbing the front of her uniform and slamming her to the ground, I -knew- it was going to work. I almost felt bad about finishing the sequence by grounding on one knee alongside her as she hit the concrete and bouncing her armored skull off the ground with a Ler- flared elbow... but not quite. After all, she was going to live, which was more than she had planned for me. I straightened up, dusting off my hands, and regarded her. "That ought to hold you for a while," I panted. As if in reply, her mask, cracked in the middle by my final blow, split in two and fell away to either side, revealing her unconscious face. "WHAT the - " I said, and then the world exploded in a flash of white light as something hit the back of my head like a wrecking ball. THE BARONESS I do not know what it was about the masked girl that so shocked Benjamin, but he was frozen in disbelief for nearly a full second - more than enough time for the woman in the Shadolu officer's uniform ("Laura", I think he had called her), battered though she was, to bash him in the back of the head with the shock baton built into her crutch and send him toppling off the dam into the lake. With a shocked cry, the blonde girl he'd apparently come here to rescue dove after him. His young apprentice, to her credit, responded to this affront with energy and dispatch, smashing the weapon from Laura's hand and calling her a name so filthy I would ground my teenage daughter, if I had one, for a month for uttering it. She apparently understood the Japanese curse as well as I; her face went red and she snarled, "You dare call me a cheat after the shabby trick the two of you used to defeat Decapre?" "Didn't Bison teach you the Law?" Sakura replied. "'Valdritkar and Eldritkar, when the fight is at hand, are one combatant.'" She balled her fists and blue-white flames began to flicker around them. "Ask him about it when you come to." The Shadolu officer drew a pistol, aimed it at her, and said, "I think not." "Now who's cheating?" Sakura asked. "This isn't a game, little girl," Laura said coldly. "This is a war, and in war there are no rules." "Is that so? OK," Sakura said, not backing down. Then she snapped, "Baroness! Shoot her." My admiration for the child's spirit grew. It was a bluff, of course - she hated the very thought of me shooting anyone else - but one delivered with such conviction that Laura believed it. And, of course, I fully intended to shoot the woman anyway. Her bead on Sakura faltered slightly as she flicked her eyes to me and saw that I had her dead to rights, assuming she didn't have a metal-plated skull like that other girl. She could kill Sakura, but she would die instantly thereafter. Behind her, the troops she'd brought with her were hustling forward, their weapons at the ready. Beside me, Logan deployed his own claws. For a very long moment, we all balanced on the edge of an explosion that promised to be an unhappy ending to everyone's day. And then were were all reminded, loudly and chaotically - in his case, could it have been any other way? - that Benjamin had another partner long before ever he met his little Japanese firebrand. MZ "Five seconds," I said, banking into a pylon turn to port. "Got your targets?" "Got 'em," Jubilee replied in my headset. "Man, this telesight helmet thing kicks -ass.-" "Light 'em up," I told her, and over the thrum of the Prince's engines, I heard the comforting rip-roar of the Minigun opening up. Out the side window, I could see the tracers reaching for the top of the dam. "WOOOO HOOOO!" Jubilee yelled, and I noticed that she'd thoughtfully squelched her mic first so she didn't blow my ear off. I could totally get behind the sentiment, because hanging out the portside door of a C-130 on a bungee harness and letting the bad guys have it with a pintle-mounted GAU-17/A is one of life's most sublime pleasures. G I wasn't out for very long; hitting the lake made sure of that. Alkali Lake is well-named, and boy, I tell you what, when you're lightly covered in cuts, that shit stings. I surfaced, gasping, and was glad to find myself -behind- the dam, in the lake; it's a much longer fall down the other side. And here's how I -know- I wasn't out for long: I had barely broken the surface when Cammy appeared beside me. I think I was still a little out of it, because my initial reaction to that was to draw back and get ready to slug her if I had to. "Hey," she said, "it's me," and I knew that burr and the spark in those eyes. Blinking the stinging alkaline water out of my own eyes, I looked around, trying to get my bearings. From about ten feet above me, at the top of the dam, I could hear Sakura yelling and what sounded like automatic weapons being readied. "Oh, hell, -not- good," I said, trying to find somewhere I could climb up the dam. There was an access ladder, really just bent lengths of iron bar set into the concrete, and I started struggling up the slick metal rungs as fast as I could haul myself. The voices from above got sharper. Panic started to seize me as I pictured Sakura's fury getting her killed before I could reach - Then I heard another, even more familiar sound, and I knew everything was going to be OK. I got to the top of the ladder and raised my head above the level of the dam just in time to see the Prince's door gun open up on Laura and her crew, sending them stumbling back in a hail of plastic pellets and Glo-Stick chemicals, cursing, their weapons flung from their hands by the impacts. It was a bit like watching a cartoon representation of people being attacked by bees. Man, good old Zoner. Who else has a Minigun set up for -riot control?- 1800 tiny beanbags and little gel packets of glow juice per minute will leave a hell of a bruise. I think they were trying to get to the helicopter, but a moment later the minigun fire ceased momentarily and a streak of fire raced out of the sky, blowing it to bits. Cross off one of our half-dozen Stingers, but it was for a good cause. In the ensuing fiery confusion, Laura and her bodyguards managed to disappear, probably down a bolthole into the dam itself. I think Sakura was primed to go after them, but I, for one, had had enough excitement for one night. I helped Cammy back up onto the dam and we all made good our escape while the getting was good. As we passed the crater where Decapre had been, I took a lingering look before hurrying on. There was nothing there now but the halves of her mask. The Prince of Thebes droned eastward. There was enough room in the cargo hold - we hadn't loaded the extended crew module because of the parachute drop - that each of us could be off by him- or herself, alone with whatever thoughts we had to contend with after the day. There were four of us back there on the flight back East. The Baroness had left us in the woods, before we'd rendezvoused with the Prince on an old logging road; she knew Zoner wouldn't be too happy to see her, and besides, she had her own agenda to pursue. I suspected it wasn't the last we'd see of her. I came out of the mini-bathroom in the permanent quarters, having patched myself up with the first aid kit and swapped my soggy commando duds for a generic flightsuit, and found Logan in the galley with a cup-o-noodles and a beer. Jubilee, tired out by the excitement of door gunner duty, was sacked out with Fury in the lower bunk, the curtain partly drawn, and still looked utterly blissed about the whole experience. "Thanks for gettin' me outta there, kid," said Logan. "You'd do the same," I said. "Thank Jubilee, she came all the way across the country to tell us you were in a jam." I left out the part about my having been heading this way anyway; she hadn't known that, after all. Logan finished off his beer, put the bottle down next to the empty noodle cup, and got to his feet. "I knew she'd find some good help." He closed the curtain on her bunk the rest of the way and chuckled, walking with me across the galley. "Ah, it's a funny thing, bein' sensei," he said. "You don't go lookin' for it, an' one day it finds you. An' before long you wonder what you ever did without 'em." "Yup." "Yours is a real firecracker," he told me. "You shoulda seen her when she thought that woman from Shadolu might have aced you." "Speaking of which, I have to go talk to her. She's OK with danger and all, but when it all kicked off, Ana wasted a guy right in her face. She wasn't expecting to go there so fast." Logan nodded. "Hard thing to tackle. Kid's first trip to that hard white edge." I eyed him. "That was poetic." He smiled. "I ain't just a pretty face," he said; then he clapped me on the shoulder and went forward to the cockpit, and I went aft. If he had anything on his mind about his return visit to Alkali Lake, he preferred not to discuss it with me right now. That was OK. I had enough to deal with right now as it was. Sakura was in one of the jump seats near the side door, hanging onto a strap and looking out the porthole at nothing in particular. I sat down next to her and asked, "Hey. You OK?" She looked at me. "I think so. I'm sorry I freaked out like that. I just... I mean, we got shot at and stuff in Transbelvia, but... that was all just kind of a big adventure. I know Laurence hit a few of those guys he was shooting at, and that Spanish woman, but I could at least tell myself they might have lived. And they weren't so -close-." She looked down at her black nylon jump jacket, then back at me. "I think I've actually got blood on me." "It's never easy," I told her. "It -shouldn't- be easy. But you have to remember that you didn't kill him, and if one of us hadn't done -something-, he would have tried to kill us. You or I could probably have disabled him without permanently hurting him, but Ana's... different. She used to be nothing -but- a killer, and she hasn't... hasn't completely shaken off that... " A phrase Ryu had used once, to describe some inner conflict of his that I only abstractly understood, came to my mind. "... that killing intent." I put my hand on her shoulder. "You did a great job tonight. You were totally on the ball in both fights. You probably saved my life against Decapre. And you are -absolutely- the bravest little girl in the world." She sniffled slightly and gave me a half-hearted glare. "I'm 15," she said. "Still." I gave her shoulder a squeeze. "I mean it. You were amazing. Even Logan was impressed, and he doesn't impress easy. I couldn't have done this without you. You're probably going to have to come back to what happened with Ana again. Maybe a few times. That's OK. Understand? We can face up to it as many times as you want. Don't be afraid to tell me about anything that's bothering you. OK?" Sakura nodded. "OK." Then she gave me a smile and said, "Right now, I think you better go talk to Cammy." I smiled and hugged her. "Good soldier," I told her. "Thanks," she said, returning it. Cammy was all the way at the back of the hold, in the seat where I'd been sitting on the way to the parachute drop; she, too, had changed her wet clothes for a flightsuit, of which Zoner and I kept a stock in the Prince for just such contingencies. She wasn't looking out the window; she wasn't really looking at anything. When I sat down next to her, she leaned away a little and didn't look at me. "Are you OK?" I asked. It seemed to be the question of the night. "No," she said. "What's wrong?" "I... I don't want to talk about it." "How can I help you if I don't know what it is?" She turned to look at me then, her eyes sad. "If you knew what it was, you wouldn't want to help me." I frowned. "What could -possibly- cause me to -not- want to help you? I just fought my way through half of Shadolu's North American operation to get to you, and I think the other half to get you out." "I... " She hesitated, then sighed and said miserably, "I suppose you'll find out sooner or later anyway." She sat silent for a long moment, looking down at the deckplates, then met my eyes and said, "Those commando girls. The ones you and Sakura fought tonight. Bison's personal guard. I... I think... I used to be one of them." I nodded. "Yeah. I know. The Brigadier told me the other day, when he told me where to find you." She stared at me in surprise, then scowled. "I might've known he knew. Which means M. does too. But... " The scowl cleared, replaced with a worried expression. "You knew... and you came to get me anyway?" "Yeah. Absolutely." "Why? I know how much you hate Bison. Why would you risk your life for... " She grappled with the notion for a moment, then said bitterly, "... one of his -toys?-" "Well," I said thoughtfully, "I suppose... " I put my hand to the left side of her face, the side with the narrow triangular scar, and just looked into her eyes for a few seconds. The same blue, but so full of life they were completely different. "I suppose it's because I'm kind of in love with you," I said. Cammy blinked at me, startled almost out of her funk. "You what?" she managed after a few moments. "Actually, I doubt there's any 'kind of' about it," I said. "I don't know that I'd have gone through tonight for 'kind of' love." "You... you can say that. After what I did to you." "What M. made you do to me." "After finding out what I am." "What you were. Look. I -know- Bison. I know his methods. His personality. His warped sense of humor. I know what he can do to people's minds, their... their -souls.- Not many ever come back from where it seems you've been. It's probably just as well you don't remember it." I drew her into a hug; she resisted, but only for a moment. "The important thing to me is that you -are- back. You're who you are, not some... soldier doll. And that's good enough for me." She sat passively in my arms for a moment, then asked, "Do you have a phone?" That struck me as a slightly odd question, but I did have one, so I turned her loose and handed it over. Cammy flipped it open, dialed a long number from memory, and put it to her ear. "White," she said, her voice suddenly crisp and businesslike, then rattled off a second lengthy code. "Give me M. Urgent." A pause. "Ma'am. Yes. No, mission only a partial success. Shadolu will almost certainly abandon the facility. Significant assets disrupted, but the key personnel escaped and 002 is dead. Yes. I saw it myself. No ma'am. No. Further debriefing will have to be conducted later, by remote link." As I watched, her face hardened, her eyes glittering angrily in the dim night lighting of the hold. "Because, ma'am, I'm very tired now, and effective immediately, I resign. Good morning." Then she snapped the phone shut, stuck it back in my top pocket, and said with exaggerated, slightly desperate calm, "There. That's done. Now... just hold me, will you? Very tight. For a long time." I smiled. "I'm right here," I said, doing as I was asked, "and I'm not going away." The seating arrangement was not the most comfortable, but we were both very tired. Cammy drifted off before me, and as the Prince of Thebes charged toward the rising sun, I spent a hundred miles or so just appreciating the lines of her sleeping face. The intercom near the cargo door clicked and Zoner's voice asked, "Gryph? Everything OK back there?" I managed to reach and press the button without disturbing Cammy. "Everything's just fine back here," I said. It wasn't really, of course. Not with everything I'd seen and experienced that day rattling around in my head. I hadn't given much thought to the two girls Sakura and I had fought at the time; they had seemed plenty sharp enough, even snarky, and I had assumed they had signed on the dotted line and gone into the villainous minion game with full awareness of how it was played, as Laura evidently had. Decapre's dead eyes and flat voice made me wonder if I could have been mistaken... and the fact that the face under her mask looked just like Cammy's, but for the missing scar, made me wonder if there were more to my Scottish angel's unknown story, the one missing even from her own memory, than I had ever suspected. Not that it would change how I felt about her if there were. I knew that, deep inside me, just sitting there looking at her face. Whoever she once had been, I loved her now, and I had her back. That was all that mattered today. With that thought in my mind, I finally went to sleep. END BATTLE 06