The Impossible Girl

Lisa and Victoria 1

Caesar and Ivan were a pair of what most people would consider technical geniuses were slumped towards each other in thoroughly uncomfortable airport waiting chairs, laptops sitting open and perched on their laps. They'd been working on information scrounging for a long time, trying to find everything they could on a woman named Victoria Cross as they went oversees with their boss. The journey to Sussex was unnecessarily complicated, their boss had booked flights in a nearly roundabout way, resulting in a fairly lengthy and stopover heavy journey on which they were on the last leg of with their last stop in Dublin. She wasn't sure how much they could find out about the woman online, but she had deliberately made the journey as long as possible to maximize their time to work on it.
Lisa had done nearly twice the work as the men combined, and was still a ways off from needing sleep so she continued her own efforts while they dozed. They were wonder-kids and hard workers, but more than a half day of jet lag had a tendency to wallop just about any natural born human being. Caesar slumped a little more and Ivan easily elbowed him away even in his partly asleep state.Lisa smiled a bit at the nearly unconscious exchange, they'd worked themselves into exhaustion because she told them she needed them, even if it was because she paid them. Well, she was an important figure and major financer of the robotics company they all worked at, but she didn't hold a title that quite made her a direct boss. Still, she'd make sure they got an extra nice bonus this year.
Their combined efforts had turned up very little new on Victoria, the woman's life was barely online and where it was it was often full of lies. Victoria's biography as discerned by online resources pegged her as a very respectably intelligent and solidly athletic person with enough financial resources to be counted as rich but not wealthy. In truth she was an anomaly in space-time, a future superhuman made of deliberately engineered DNA, that had somehow been born and raised in the modern era. She was faster that a human could be, stronger than a human could be, and blessed with a brain that stored everything and learned faster than seemed possible. Just like Lisa.
The two men scrambled and joined her in line for the plane. Lisa could have gotten a more direct flight, much more direct. Between a few big patents, a modeling career, and an absurd amount of athletic sponsorships she had the money that she could have gotten a private plane on a direct flight very easily. However, she was rather nervous about her trip's destination. Victoria had shown up bearing a grudge and hit her a few times with more force than she'd ever been hit with. Her bruises were healing rapidly but the other woman's fighting skills were the least concerning thing about her in some ways. She wanted to meet the woman that could match and sometimes exceed her, especially outside of the context of a sparring match turned battle, but she was kind of scared to do it too, so she put it off as much as she felt she could. Each leg of the journey had her thinking about Victoria's plane and how it could be out there, anywhere, stalking any of the jets out there or she was on and there would be no way to know it. It was hard to keep entirely calm even though rationally she told herself that shooting down a plane was about the least productive or discrete way to kill her, that wasn't what this Victoria wanted.
She'd pretty much given up on finding out too much about Victoria's secret life from online sources so she changed tact and she'd been watching women's martial arts tournaments.
There was an announcement about their flight leaving so poked the two dozing men, "Wake up fellas. Last flight."
"Huh? I'm up, I'm up. What's that boss?" Caesar asked and she told him, "Why are you looking at that?"
Lisa closed her laptop and started heading for the boarding area, both guys following her, "One thing put me at a pretty big disadvantage fighting Victoria. Well, a few things did, but style is the one I can fix the fastest. She fights like a woman and I've always fought like a man..."
"What's that mean exactly?"
Ivan cut in and said, "Men use upper body. Punches, closed fists. Women have smaller arms relatively speaking, weaker and fragile... in most women. To match men in a fight, they need open hand moves, use the hips more. Legs sometimes. Boss fights like man to show everyone she's just that much better."
"Also stronger and faster," Lisa added but she was grinning, "it's worked for me so far, but I've never fought with anyone on my level before."
"Is she really?"
"You have seen this enormous bruise on my forehead, right? I would worry if you hadn't noticed it, it's faded, but...here, this is where she kicked me," Lisa pulled up her shirt enough to show the part of her abs that Victoria kicked, "the woman can slap harder than you could swing a chair and she's faster than me. I'm really lucky she wasn't actually out to kick my ass. She wouldn't have chatted so much and suggested a count system to determine a winner if she wanted me dead or beaten to a pulp."
"I find that utterly terrifying really..."
"Ticket please."
"Here."
The flight was short, hardly more than an hour and suddenly she had no more ways to postpone things. She'd been to a lot of countries before, and Britain more than more once, but she'd had no idea about Victoria before. It suddenly felt like she was exploring just outside the beast's lair even though she knew there was no way even a majority of Victoria's assets would be here, the country was just too well equipped to track too much. Lisa kept most of her materials and corporate connections in the US, but then she wasn't hiding. As they got off the plane Lisa knew something was off, but couldn't place what right away.
In her head she rewound and played back the whole trip as she looked around. There was one more passenger getting off than had ever been on the plane. She'd even smelled the man's cologne, why hadn't she put together that there was another man on the plane than what she could see? 'Distracted by Victoria, nearing the end of a waking cycle even for me, and not used to looking for invisible things maybe?' She picked up her pace and started to look through the crowd, looking for the one that didn't belong, she had to hurry before they disappeared into the airport's larger crowd.
"Hey!" she caught a man in a black jacket and spun around to slam him into a support pillar, "I didn't see you on the plane!"
"So? Maybe you just overlooked...guh!" he gasped as she lifted him up off his feet.
"I wouldn't have. How were you hidden? Do you work for Victoria?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
Lisa caught motion in the corner of her eye and spun around to the left and shoved the guy's back into the next side of the pillar just as gunshots started to ring out. The people in the crowd screamed and started to scatter, but it seemed that all the bullets hit the pillar, so she was clearly the target. Lisa spun the man around and shoved him into the pillar again hard enough to knock the breath out of him, but not wound particularly. She rifled through his clothes as fast as she could manage and pulled away a gun about a half second later.
Using the unknown man as a shield she risked a look out past the pillar to make sure the other man was trying to flank in the direction she thought he was. He sped up his efforts to get her back in the line of fire. He was kind of far away for most people to be at all accurate with a handgun, though there were a few explanations for that, he was sloppy, he wasn't really trying to kill her and was instead trying to make her think he was, or he was just a fairly good shot.
Well, we'll see how crack a shot he thinks he is in a second.' Lisa kept the man planted to the pillar with one hand and turned to look at the next down, picked a spot to shoot at and pulled the trigger once. She registered where the bullet hit and determined the gun pulled somewhat to the left and just barely downwards. She moved out of hiding enough to see, noted that there was no one else in the line of fire and estimated the distance between them to be 76 feet and fired the gun twice more. The man jerked and flinched in surprise and pain and reached up with one hand to find the top part of his ear removed by bullet and his fingers came back red. The other one was the same way and his eyes went a little wide. Lisa pointed the gun at him and gave him a bit of a 'try me' look and he started to set his weapon down slowly.
The man she was holding to the wall chuckled a little and said, "well, look at that. Maybe you're a match for the boss after all. I still wouldn't bet on it though."
"Didn't know what I was talking about, huh?"
"Got other things to worry about don't you?"
"Ivan! Caesar! See if you can get this guy to give up whatever he was hiding with," she turned on the safety and spun the gun so she wasn't holding it in a ready position, "I'll be back soon enough."
Security ran on the scene and she dropped the gun and got on her knees with her hands up once she saw they were close enough to the other guy that they could stop him from trying to fire again. Strange hands tried to be rough with her though they lacked the strength to really hurt her, but the restraints were a bit of a different story.