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“No can do, miss: wires.”
“Damn!”
“And now it’s moving!” the pilot shouted.
“Keep pace with it and get as low as you can!” Dekka ordered. “We’re about to get another passenger.”
The helicopter swept in a tight circle and came back to hover just above the electrical wires, keeping pace with the train, which accelerated slowly, five miles an hour, ten, twenty . . .
Suddenly the helicopter lurched as it took on the weight of a new arrival. Shade Darby had jumped from the roof of the train straight into the helicopter’s passenger compartment.
“Talk to me, Shade,” Dekka demanded.
Shade had far too much to say to be able to do it in buzz-speak and de-morphed quickly. “He’s got people on that train. He’s already ‘Vectored’ one person and the rest aren’t going to argue with him.”
“How many passengers?”
Shade shrugged. “Looks like a few dozen, maybe fifty people.”
“We need to stop that train, no matter what,” Simone said, surprising Dekka with her intensity. “If Vector reaches Washington, the US government will be over. Then there’ll be no one but us. Just us.”
No more “father,” no more “Markovic.” Simone had seen what her once-father had become and had begun to accept that Bob Markovic no longer existed. Dekka felt a wave of pity for the girl: she’d been through a hell of a lot in a very short period of time
. It said something about her that she was still standing at all, let alone that she had adapted so quickly and . . . Dekka had been about to add “easily,” but of course that was almost certainly not true. Dekka had known many kids in the FAYZ who seemed to be coping easily and ended up as psychiatric in-patients or suicides. Simone might be suppressing the pain for now, but it would come. Impulsively she reached and squeezed Simone’s shoulder.
Malik said, “She’s right, Dekka. This isn’t a maybe-we-should-maybe-we-shouldn’t thing. If Vector takes Washington, the eight of us will be dead within a month. He’ll be able to turn military, FBI, everything against us.”
“You think that many people in Washington will just go along with some unhinged lunatic?” Cruz wondered aloud.
“Obviously you don’t pay much attention to politics,” Malik snarked. “People are weak. They take the easy path. Wait until Vector has the president on a live feed, screaming in pain and begging for death. Not one person in ten thousand will stand up.”
“He’s right,” Sam said. “And once people roll over for Vector they’ll resent anyone who doesn’t. It’s human nature. They’ll serve Vector and they’ll easily be turned against us.”
Dekka looked out through the open door, down at the train, wind blowing her snake-dreads straight back. The Acela was moving at maybe twenty miles an hour already. “Fifty or sixty people . . .”
“I can try to get some of them off the train,” Shade said, “and maybe Francis can, too, but anyone we save may have Vector’s bugs on them. We could save them and Vector simultaneously unless I take the extra time to de-bug each hostage.”
No one was telling Dekka what to do. They all knew the decision she had to make, and Shade, while knowing what she would do herself, was glad not to have to make the call. The passenger compartment of the helicopter was a howling wind tunnel, and yet it seemed quiet as they waited for Dekka to decide their fate, and quite possibly the fate of the human race.
“Lieutenant,” Dekka yelled to the pilot. “You’re going to have a sudden loss of weight.” Then, with her heart in her throat, Dekka turned to Sam and Francis and Armo and said, “Let’s do it.”
The helicopter flew low, keeping pace with the accelerating train. Armo stood and hefted the heavy artillery shell. Francis gripped his furry arm tightly. Dekka took Francis’s free hand.
“Wish us luck,” Dekka said just as a swarm of copper and silver and red insects flew in through the open door. The bugs swirled around Dekka, invulnerable in morph, and went straight for their vulnerable targets.
“No!” Cruz cried. Cruz was not in morph.
In the cockpit the pilot and copilot slapped frantically at bugs aiming for their eyes, mouths, and ears.
Shade was already morphing fast, fast enough that Vector’s beasts did not find her before chitin armor covered her.
“Cruz! Morph!” Malik cried in slo-mo speech.
But that would take too long. One of the bugs was inches from Cruz’s face. Shade could see the beats of its penny-bright wings. She snatched it out of the air and crushed it. Then looked down at it in her hand, a broken toy, yellow insides oozing, antennae broken like twigs. She threw it out the door.
Then, the Whac-a-Mole game got serious. Hundreds of insects had found the pilots, but dozens had recognized Cruz and Sam as targets as well, neither being in morph. Shade’s hands and arms were a blur, snatching and crushing, snatching and crushing. The bugs were not quick by Shade’s standards, but there were a lot.
And Shade found she had help from an unexpected source. The living dreads on Dekka’s head were almost as fast as Shade, snatching bugs out of the air and biting them in half.
