War Dance

THREE: Z9 - 5

It was the worst time at a smaller station. One train full to the brim arriving you can cope with, but two at once makes the place impossible to navigate through. For a society built on having things delivered and done without needing to be there in person, at that moment there seemed to be far too many people trying to get out and get in their own way.

Z9 caught sight of Bear Man headed through onto the platforms. She shoved a man with a bad case of body odour out of the way and threw an arm out in apology before he could begin a red-faced rant and bring everyone over to the scene. He bit his tongue, scowled, muttered something under his breath, but thankfully turned away and didn't call for security. Much more to Z9's relief, Bear Man didn't turn around, either.

The chances that he would figure out she was following him was slim but not impossible. Anyone that goes to such lengths as he had to get the thing safe wasn't taking chances. Still, would he recognise Z9 if they got close enough? Probable. They wouldn't give the swap job to just anyone that happened to be around. He was obviously trained for this kind of operation, had likely done it before. Maybe he'd even been in Special Ops somewhere in the Empire.

Still, he didn't seem to have noticed Z9 tailing him up the stairs to the platforms. He took a right for platform 3.

His head slightly turned to look out the corner of his eye before the wall covered his line of sight. Z9 swiftly glanced up at the signs, doing her best instant impression of a tourist trying to work out where the hell they should be going. She paused for a second, hoped it was enough to keep her hidden but not fall behind. There was a thought to linger there a beat longer, but an announcer over the speakers stopped any such ideas. 'Train now arriving at Platform 3. Thank you.'

Turn the corner. Up the stairs. Keep an eye on the back of Bear Man's head. See him turn. Follow.

The train pulled up as Z9 arrived on Platform 3. Thanks to the stairs (once more she cursed their existence), she almost lost the mark. Then she spied him get on the train. She walked along to a different door and stepped inside just as they closed. Before she could sit down, the train rumbled out onto the web of chutes that threaded their way through the Celestrian cityscape.

Unlike the station, the train itself was fairly empty. A few teenagers talked amongst themselves, and an older man spoke in traditional sign language to a neighbourly woman sat next to him. At the far end of the carriage an Androssian bopped along to music which sounded distinctly like demonic chanting. Through the door into the next carriage, there was a single other passenger besides Bear Man. Too few bodies to sneak through without being noticed. Z9 therefore took up a position where she could see through the window in the door to eye him up, and pretended to relax.

Outside the window the towers flowed past the train like mountain peaks. Curtains of rain swept towards them, plunged them into a roaring shower, then vanished out the other side. Two stops came and went. Nobody got on. Nobody got off. Silence returned as they travelled.

Z9 kept her eyes on the bag. Bear Man could do what he liked, but they needed that artifact. She considered going up, pretending to trip, slapping a tracker on the bag, and then leaving again. Mark23 and the tech gurus back at base could follow it and catch up after. Her job was, after all, strictly reconnaissance. But that was the simple way, the boring way, and she wasn't paid to do that. She was paid to get results. She liked results. It proved that she was there for a reason. She liked being better than everyone else. At the end of the day, what else was there to do in life?

As she had done before in the port, she took out her Halo-Core and began to type. This time, with one eye remaining on her target, it really was to send messages to her superiors. If they could get someone at the other end, they might be able to do something.

Trouble was, she had no idea where Bear Man was heading. She initially had an idea that he might jump off at Wellspring Station, just on the edge of Regions 26 and 27, and slip through the divide into 27 on foot, but he got up a station earlier than expected, and stood for the door as they slowed.

The best Z9 could do was very quickly send a message to GinaOne: NEW TARGET. TRACK ME. BACKUP NOW.

She waited at her door. The train drifted to a halt, people passing ever more slowly outside the glass like dull-eyed trees. The doors opened and she stepped out into the cold air again.

There was a half decent crowd waiting to get on, so she hoped that they would block Bear Man's view of her.

They didn't. He turned his head in her direction casually. Froze upon making eye contact. Eyes widened.

He bolted. With a speed somehow supernatural for such a large man, he sprinted across the platform and ran down a set of stairs three at a time, bag behind him like a clumsy cape, before Z9 could get close.

She shoved people out the way as she drew her gun mid-stride. Shouted above the noise of people turning and looking and murmuring, and eventually shouting themselves over the whistling of the train as the doors shut again and prepared to leave. Rain thundered on the roof overhead.

She reached the top of the stairs. Bear Man touched the bottom, heels stepping out to one side from under him as he went for the corner like a cartoon character on ice. There was a moment when he was almost over and on his ass, but he kept his balance. Went for the corner.

Finally Z9 had her gun ready and primed but the shot wasn't clean. She'd be more likely to hit a passer-by than her target. But she knew this station now, had remembered it in the seconds racing across to the steps down underneath the chute and into the station proper. Down those steps it was into a chute of corner after corner, tightly walled up and headed into a lobby with plenty of hiding spaces. If it wasn't now, she wouldn't get the shot in, and without line of sight she'd never find him again.

Now or never.

She raised the muzzle as his figure began to move behind the cream tiled wall dotted with red graffiti, graffiti that looked almost like bloody targets in the flickering lights.

A warning would be pointless.

She squeezed the trigger as late as she dared before she lost him.

The shot ripped through Bear Man's shoulder and buried blood and bone into the far wall. He spun on his heels, winged by the blast, and collapsed to the floor. His legs were still in view as Z9 descended after him, but he was trying to get up, trying to hurry away.

He wasn't fast enough. Bloody trail behind him, she caught up to the man. Planted a heel on his back and when he tried to move, shifted it to the fresh wound.

'C.A.T. Don't try anything. I'd like you alive but I've got no specific orders on whether that's necessary.'

Station guards hurried across to her, guns at the ready. Slowly taking ID from a bag that had been turned inside out and back to front a hundred times in the past hour, she tried to calm them down. 'C.A.T Agent Z9. It's ok. You can take the gun off me.'

The guards looked across at each other. Two of them put the guns down, but one kept it trained on her as a precaution.

'Come with us, Miss,' said one of the guards with his gun lowered, a dark bald man with a gut the size of a planet. 'We've got him from here.'

'Keep weapons on him the whole time,' Z9 warned.

'Don't worry. We might not be C.A.T, but we're not stupid.'

Z9 allowed cuffs to be slapped on Bear Man, and snatched the bag from him as he was led away.

It took five minutes for Z9 to fully convince the guards that she was who she claimed to be. It involved a few calls and the occasional insult, but eventually she was allowed out of a dingy little cell.

'There'll be a police follow-up for this,' said the big guard. 'And we'll need to impound that bag of yours as evidence. The one you took from the man you shot.'

Z9 smiled. 'Try me.'