Garibaldi listened over the link, someone having brought it out of storage for him, as Susan relayed the information they had.
"Where does the information come from again?" he asked.
"The Vincents," Susan said. "She is a bounty hunter, guess he left behind something we missed."
"Uh huh," Garibaldi said, noting the woman's tone of voice. "All right, anything else I should know?"
"Rally Vin..oww! Damn it Franklin," she snapped. "Give me a moment. Sheesh. Miss Vincent is joining the hunt."
"Okay," Garibaldi said with a frown. "Thanks for the heads up."
He frowned and thought about what he was saying.
"Okay, I want you guys to make a quick try to cut him off," Garibaldi said. "Put five people here in waiting."
He looked around at everybody.
"Understand?" he asked.
"We got it Chief," someone said earnestly. "We've all been itching for a chance to get this bastard in our sights. Everybody knows what you did for him, heck you've done the same for more than half of the officers here. We'll run him down."
"Good to hear," Garibaldi said. "Now, Lou, lead the hunt. Zack, I want you and...say five officers here."
"That's...nowhere near where you're having Lou push, Chief," Zack said, a bit confused.
"And if you had to get away from me Zack, how would you do it?" Garibaldi asked.
"Well," he thought. "I'd find a place to hide to let the pushers past and then cut through..."
He pointed to the map where Garibaldi wanted him and stopped talking for a moment.
"Umm, oh," he said. "I got it chief."
"Good," Garibaldi said. "Now, I'm going to head here with two people."
He indicated the general area that had to hold the scene Ivanova had described.
"Uh, Chief?" Zack asked.
"When you get a chance, Zack," Garibaldi said. "There's this great show called Romance of the Three Kingdoms from the 20th century. Based on some really old book which was based on some wars. You might want to look into seeing what happened to Chow Chow when he was running with his tail between his legs from Red Cliff."
"I think that's 'Cao Cao', Chief," someone said idly.
"Well," Garibaldi said. "It was good show, anyway. So, you've got your orders, let's get to it."
Vivian sat aside in medlab as Dr. Stephen Franklin worked about looking over Susan's leg, apparently for the second time.
"You're supposed to be resting this thing," Franklin said. "Not trying to film your own action movie."
He frowned and looked over at Vivian.
"What's going on?" he asked.
"Garibaldi's aide," Susan said. "He took her sister and went Downbelow."
"Hmm, Garibaldi will find him and get her back," Franklin said in an encouraging tone.
"Rally will find her first," Vivian said.
"Franklin," Susan said before wincing. "IF you're done torturing me, think I can have a word or two alone with the girl?"
Franklin frowned and looked up toward Vivian and then Susan.
"Well, fine, but I'd better not come in here you doing anything stupid," he said cautiously.
Susan waited until the doctor was gone to call Vivian over and talk to her quietly.
"Does Psi-Corps know about you?" she asked dangerously.
"No," Vivian said. "Not until your report goes out anyway."
"That won't come from me," Susan said. "And if I can fix it, it won't come from the Station at all."
"But..." Vivi said confused.
"Psi-Corps legally has authority to police telepaths," Susan said. "You are not a telepath. So there's no need for me to report you."
"Why would you do that?" Vivian asked.
"How long have you been hiding from Psi-Corps?" Susan asked.
Vivian looked around cautiously.
"All my life," she said. "Rally says that they killed our mother. Shanti's and mine."
"Yeah, well that's something we have in common then," Susan noted quietly.
"What do you mean by that?" Vivian asked.
"Psi-Corps learned my mother was a telepath when I was young," Susan said. "Forced her to take pills to suppress their talent. Eventually..."
Susan stopped and frowned deeply, taking a heavy breath before continuing.
"Eventually, she killed herself rather than continue with it," Susan said. "I'm not friendly to the Psi-Corps, and, as I said, you are not a telepath. Very nice that they give us that little loop hole, isn't it?"
"Ummm, yeah, I guess," Vivian said. "So...we won't have to leave then?"
"Well, you just got here, didn't you?" Susan asked, trying to sound encouraging.
Rally made for Gray Sector quickly enough, but she hadn't been there long enough to familiarize herself with many of the paths and dangers of the Gray Sector. She had the official blue prints, but those were only mildly helpful given that the lower sectors were never completed.
It was a mass of hodge-podged metal and lurker alterations Downbelow. Which meant that the terrain likely changed fairly frequently. Rally had taken quarters on the Brown Sector, in the finished section of that Sector, so that she had easier access to that maze in case of an emergency.
But she hadn't had more than a handful of looks into it so far.
Rally hadn't really expected to need to go into it a mere month into her stay there.
"Hey, girlie where do you think you're going," a voice asked her as she strode through one of several debris formed alleyways.
Rally sighed and looked ahead to see some men forming an impromtu wall of bodies ahead of her and several others slipping in behind. They were clearly making threatening gestures with a number of improvised weapons.
"You look like you have some money," another said. "How about staying for a donation and some fun."
"Tsh, this sucks," she muttered simultaneously to drawing a PPG and firing three times as she continued walking the same way she had been heading.
The first shot destroyed a club in the hands of a man in front of her, the next two were at the feet of the bandits ahead, scattering them away from her.
"People think I'm some sort of ninja or something because I can get in and out of command posts and battlefields," she muttered,
She pointed her gun behind her and fired at the men trying to approach her from behind with only a moderate amount of attention.
"I dare anybody to get completely undetected through a slum," she muttered. "Now that'd be a ninja."
So saying she passed on through as the would be thugs scattered away from her, only one getting close enough for an opportunistic piece of debris to be slammed in his face so that he was clothes-lined painfully to the deck without even so much as altering Rally's stride.
She re-stashed the PPG in her hand and looked to the numbers on the wall, grumbling when she found that she'd overshot her target somewhere in this labyrinth.
Turning around, she walked back through the regrouping set of thugs who scattered like rats as they saw her come back around the corner. The one that she'd clothes-lined was slow to react and found himself pushed against a wall and feeling a knife against his throat.
"I need directions," she said before glancing down and twitching a little. "And then you need to change your clothes."
Jack froze in place, holding the half conscious girl with him as he listened to security pushing into the maintenance tunnels everywhere they could find them. But they were very obviously pushing him rather than seriously hunting and he found a place where they would pass him by easily enough.
Really, did they forget how often he'd run this same exercise to hunt some fugitive? The only thing making it half difficult was the girl he was saddled with just in case they did catch up with him and he needed some leverage.
"Don't tear my dress," the girl muttered, shaking her head trying to clear it.
"Shut your mouth," Jack said, squeezing hold of Shanti's wrist.
She responded by ripping her other arm around to clip him across the forehead, distracting him enough for her to break free of his grip and then shoving him hard back against the wall with both hands hard enough to just about push the breath out of his lungs.
The smart thing at that point would have been to run away and take several corners until she clear. That's what she'd been taught to do, disorient the enemy and run. Or at least, that's what Rally had so far tried to teach her.
It wasn't her habit to break off once she started, though.
Jack caught her hand in the next attack and twisted her arm about to slam her into the bulkhead, dazing her again.
"Oww!" Shanti shouted as she struggled to free her arm from Jack's grip, just about pulling her own shoulder out of joint to do it.
"Damn you're a vicious one, girl," Jack muttered as he held her and looked about for any sign of security.
His search was interrupted as a fire ripped up amongst the piled debris in the area around the two. He hauled Shanti to her feet and watched as the fire spread to more flammables in the area around them, as if the fire were being drawn in a circle around him.
"What the hell is going on?" he asked, pulling back with his hostage who slumped wearily, as if suddenly tired.
Finding her a bit more docile he backed away from the fires, waving the smoke away with his gun hand and hauling Shanti along with him.
He was out of the area before security started to be drawn to the smoke and fire and a fire suppression crew was called in.
"Let me go," Shanti shouted with a bit of a slur from the concussion.
She instead found herself being gagged after her arms were tied up.
"What's she training you to do?" Jack wondered with a smirk as he re-evaluated Rally Vincent based on this encounter with one of her supposed children.
He was thinking about this when he realized that the area of Downbelow he was in seemed clear of the normal riff-raff. Stopping, he frowned and turned back away.
Garibaldi had outguessed him it seemed and sent men ahead to catch him slipping the net. Too bad for them that the team had spooked the local populace. He was going to have a bit longer of a walk, but he had another way to get to his safe-area and the resources he'd cached there just in case.
He was moving through one of the many alleys of debris and rudimentary shelter when a form stepped out from behind cover and pushed him easily off of his feet to the floor, pulling Shanti off and to the side.
Jack moved to raise his gun up to target the interloper, recognizing Rally Vincent's face. His hand was only partially raised when a blast of fire ripped through it, blast a sizeable hole through the main center of the man's hand. The PPG fell from his practically destroyed hand and was then blasted away with a second shot.
Rally turned to look at her daughter's state of being and Jack took the opportunity to get to his feet and make a break for escape.
He had no question as to whether or not he could take a battle-field hunter killer fully prepared for him and having already taken first blood.
Rally fired another shot as the man turned a corner, grazing a thick line into his thigh and setting him to limping. It would have been easy to run him down from that, but she let him limp off, turning back toward Shanti.
"Are you all right, Kitten?" Rally asked, taking the gag out of Shanti's mouth and using a knife to cut her bonds.
The veteran caught sight of the developing bruise on the teen's head and frowned darkly as she glanced back toward where Jack had already vanished.
"Kitten?" she asked, turning back toward Shanti and brushing her hair back, looking into her face nervously.
"I'm fine," Shanti said shakily, holding onto Rally's arms tightly. "I feel a little sick though."
"Right," Rally said. "Let's get you to the doctor then."
"Rally?" Shanti said nervously. "I burned some stuff."
The bounty hunter stopped and looked uncertainly toward the vanished man.
"Did he know you did it?" she asked.
"I don't think so," the girl said.
"Damn it," Rally muttered. "Well, we might have to be leaving anyway."
"What do you mean?" Shanti asked. "And how'd you find me?"
"Vivian," Rally said. "I couldn't find what she was talking about, but there aren't that many paths to that area from where our quarters are. All it really needed was to watch a choke point."
Jack limped into his way the rest of the trip into the section of Downbelow that hid his safehouse. A sigh of relief started to work out of his mouth as he walked in to sit down on one of the few seats he'd brought into the area, scrounged from somewhere else.
"Well, it took you long enough," a familiar voice said. "Looks like you took a beating getting here."
Jack turned about to see Garibaldi sitting in one of the more out of the way corners with a PPG in hand. Two other officers stepped out into view on his speaking.
"Hello, Garibaldi," Jack said smugly. "I guess this means that I'm under arrest now.
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(Posted Fri, 24 Dec 2010 13:52)
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