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12
The tall man slammed to the thin blue exercise mat, his breath whooshing out of him. He held up both hands and said, “Okay, enough.”
“I think I’m all patched up, Duke,” Raptor said, standing over him.
“Yeah, I gotta say I agree,” her commanding officer said, rolling to his knees and standing up. “Looks like all the repairs they did on your chassis worked out just fine.”
“Yeah, Vulcan even got me a better retraction system for my wings.”
“Vulcan? You mean Spiro, the little guy down in the lab?”
“He wanted a code name, and since Vulcan was the god of the forge, I figured it was as good as any.”
“Easier to fucking spell than Hephaestus, that’s for damn sure. Okay, Raptor, take to the sky. Let me see how your new wings work.”
Raptor crouched, gathered her legs under her body, and sprang straight up, flinging her arms out to the sides. Her titanium wings snapped out from her ribcage and locked into receivers in her forearms, gleaming fans of metal that came out with a smooth metallic hiss. Small jets extended from her shoulders, and Raptor leapt toward the ceiling. She flew high over Duke’s head, making tight corkscrew spirals and hairpin turns. She moved like a performance race car, only there was no steel and plastic frame wrapped around her, and no airbags or seatbelts. There was just her, rushing through the air in the large gymnasium, flying twenty feet off the polished hardwood floor and zooming low to buzz Duke’s head. She made one last big loop around the room, then dropped down in front of her CO, a broad grin splitting her features.
“I think the wings work just fine, boss. We took them out into the desert yesterday and did some high-speed stuff. I managed to get up to 10,000 feet with no problems. I didn’t want to fuck with the air traffic controllers, so I didn’t go any higher.”
“Pretty sure you still would have freaked out any ground controllers that picked you up on radar, Raptor.”
“Well, then I hope I was too small to notice, or at least outside of their range.”
“You’re good. I would have already heard about it if you’d freaked out the folks at the FAA. Again.”
“Hey, I said I was sorry about that one.” She knew Duke was just giving her shit, she could tell by the grin on his face. It felt good to be flying again. The three days she’d been grounded after the clusterfuck at the Manus compound had felt like a month. Not that she went anywhere, none of them did, since their whole team was on a media lockdown. But just knowing that she couldn’t leave the ground made it worse. “What’s next, boss man? More hand to hand? Or are you tired of getting your ass kicked by a girl?”
“Raptor, I’m pretty sure you could have kicked my ass when you were all factory original parts. With the upgrades we put in you, I never stood a chance.”
“Oh, come on, Duke, you lasted a whole three minutes last time.”
“Yeah, because you were blindfolded. Otherwise—“ Their banter was cut off by a klaxon sounding through the base. The lights in the gym flashed red, and they turned without a word and sprinted to the Command Center.
Raptor easily outpaced her CO on the run to the base’s operations hub, falling in step behind Tank as they thundered around a corner into the long room.
“Beat you,” Tank said, stepping through the door half a second before her.
“Only because I couldn’t get around your fat ass in the hall,” Sheila shot back, taking a chair near the video projector.
Whisper stood at the front of the room, a remote in her hand. Lone Star was already in a chair, and within a minute, Viper, Breaker, and Blackout filed in and took seats around the long conference table. When Duke strode through the door, Lone Star, Raptor, Breaker, and Blackout stood at attention. Viper ignored him, and Tank gave their boss a jaunty wave from where he stood at the back of the room. The Command Center wasn’t designed for long briefings, so there wasn’t a chair solid enough for Tank to actually sit.
Whisper pointed her remote at the ceiling and pressed a button. The screeching alarms fell silent, and the strobing warning lights all returned to normal illumination. “We have credible intelligence that suggest that the Cedar Valley Mall in Arlington will be the site of a multiple shooter attack this afternoon. The chatter we have intercepted indicates that the attack is a response to our little dustup with Reverend Manus last week.”
“How credible is this threat?” Duke asked.
Whisper pointed her remote at the projector, and an email appeared on the screen at the end of the room. “As credible as an emailed threat can be. We received this an hour ago. It says ‘You invaded the sovereign nation of Free White America, and now we will wreak havoc upon your materialistic society by bringing your capitalist god of commerce to her knees.’”
“At least the terrorists understand God is a woman,” Raptor said.
Whisper continued reading. “‘We will send soldiers of God Almighty to the hedonistic palace in Arlington, right on the doorstep of the Zionist Imperialist Occupation Network headquarters in Washington, D.C. We will destroy seven times seven of your heathen sinners for every life you took in Nebraska.”
“Can these assholes even count that high?” Lone Star muttered.
“And you think this is legit?” Duke asked.
“I do,” Viper said. “I traced the email through five proxy servers and a couple of anonymizers until I got it back to a house in Richmond that’s been rented to an Aryan Nation splinter group. These guys have rhetoric that talks about how Himmler didn’t go far enough in the concentration camps, and that America better get ready, because a race war is coming. These are some heavy-duty nutcases.”
“And well-armed one, too,” Whisper said. “Viper also found receipts where members of this same group have purchased large quantities of 7.62 mm ammunition. About ten thousand rounds in the last two weeks.”
“That’s a lot of AK-47 ammo,” Breaker said.
“Way more than casual use,” Viper agreed. “There are some other purchases I couldn’t identify, too, but the amounts were pretty high. Could be for automatic weapons or explosives, but the sellers did a good job of hiding the actual items shipped.”
“What did they claim to be selling?” Raptor asked.
“Baby formula,” the lanky hacker replied. “But none of the cell members have infants, and I’ve never seen anybody buy thirty grand worth of strained carrots.”
“Alright, team,” Duke said, standing. “Load up. Time to go to the mall. I hear they’ve got a blue light special on assholes.”
