Rally hefted the small, pistol sized launcher in her hand and frowned as she considered it. This was the third debris pile she'd found since the lurker had led her to the first. And it was the third grenade launcher that she'd found.
"All right, has anybody seen someone strange around here?" she asked, looking to the lurkers staring at her.
"What's strange?" one of the lurkers asked. "Everybody that comes down here is kind of strange."
"I'm strange, your strange," Rally said flatly. "We're all strange. Thank you Cheshire. I mean doesn't belong here kind of strange. Too shiny to work for a living."
"There was a woman," someone said. "She came down here, had a case..."
"A woman," Rally said idly. "Let me try to describe her..."
"How can you do that?" the lurker asked.
"I can smell when a trail is being laid," Rally said idly. "I can probably guess in at most three tries."
It took two.
It made sense that whoever brought Jack back wouldn't have left yet. Not one of Goldie's and not this close to her.
Back in Chicago this would call for going to Becky and doing a search of names or faces on the station. But there was no way to contact Becky at the moment and even if there was, she was too far away to swiftly hack B5's records like that.
For her own part, her skills were in the form of the battle, the stalk and the hunt. All the physical aspects of the field.
She had an excellent amount of both deductive and inductive reasoning, but without all the information, reasoning still left holes.
"She's following Goldie's will still," Rally reasoned as she moved through the tunnels of Down Below. "So where would she be?"
The scrape of a sound to her side attracted Rally's attention and she dodged aside barely as the knife slashed down at her, slashing a harmless line across her neck that was only half an inch from being deadly.
The PPG was in her hand and aiming at the assailant in the same flash, but the trigger wasn't pulled as Rally's eye trailed down the woman's left arm to the grenade launcher there, loaded, primed and aimed right at their feet.
"Rally Vincent," the knife wielding woman said with a smile. "She wants to talk to you."
"Goldie is dead, Diane," Rally said, already calculating and planning. "If you think otherwise, it's the kerasine talking."
"Goldie is never dead once," Diane said with a chuckle before glancing off to the side with glassy eyes. "She found the presents just like you said. I have brought her to you!"
Rally briefly considered the direction that Diane was looking and immediately dismissed it as a delusion.
Still it was a delusion that she could use.
Rally fired out, shattering the grenade launcher's hammer in Diane's hand and at the same time half-melting a fair sized chunk of the surface of what proved to be a prosthetic hand.
"You replaced the hand, I see," Rally noted.
The woman snapped to awareness and slashed outward with her knife as she discarded the useless grenade launcher.
Rally stepped back away from the knife, trying to increase range between her and the brainwashed and expertly trained assassin. Diane was faster, but her insanity was not the asset against Rally that it would be against some.
The gunsmith sidestepped a slash as she aimed down at the lunatic's feet and used her free hand to shove Diane away further down the hall.
The woman rolled into the fall and came up to her feet, throwing her knife. Rally batted it aside and fired again, striking over Diane's shoulder and scoring across slender armored shoulder pads warn there to deal with PPG fire.
Such a slender protection was only worth one or two direct shots, but it got the knife wielding fanatic in close enough to draw another blade, a small fighting blade which Rally was familiar with. It had cut her at least once before in the hands of another deadly woman.
The small blade slammed into her side with force but not accuracy, missing anything vital and barely scratching Rally through the faux leather she normally wore on these sorts of jobs.
Rally felt a sudden coldness that came with a distance from reality and an urge to sweat. It didn't feel like kerasine, but drugs were certainly not far from her mind, especially as the crazed image of Diane leaning over her morphed smoothly into that of Goldie's image reaching out to caress her as she sat helpless and tied to a chair.
The hallucination may have continued as the chair burst apart around her into splinters that rained over Goldie's image and Rally's mind fashioned its rejection of the induced image in the form of her preferred CZ 75. The image Goldie stared at her arrogant, mocking and seemingly unaware until the the moment that Rally pulled the trigger in her mind.
And then reality came smashing in as she came to in time to feel the satisfying crunch as Diane's chest plate shattered under her free hand's punch. It was the problem with some of the cheaper concealable armors, they just didn't handle a physical blow very well.
"Ho...how! Mistress! Where are you!" Diane demanded pitifully as she tumbled back onto her rear and immediately was dodging aside as Rally advanced firing.
She turned her back, letting the remains of her armor take the first couple of blows before she snatched up her knife again and dodged around a corner.
Cursing and wishing for a good slug thrower to perform a ricochet with, Rally thought about dodging low and going for the shot around the corner, but the woman would be expecting the slide.
Instead, Rally grunted with effort as she jumped high and wide around the corner, staying well away from it and easily dodging the debris thrown her way as Diane rolled forward under the bounty hunter's shot and came to her feet with another knife in hand.
"You're too close to use a gun safely!" Diane shouted. "I'm disappointed. She's disappointed!"
Rally grimaced as she dodged aside again, back against the wall and reaching into her jacket for a moment as Diane turned about to face her again.
The lunatic found a small spray can of filling her vision just briefly before a fine mist sprayed out over her.
A laugh moved through her mind just before the mist reached her face, thinking it was something like commercial mace or such. Then the pain ripped through her as the mist covered her eyes and sent her screaming in crippled agony.
"Sorry about the bleach, but I want you alive," Rally said shortly before slamming her PPG into back of Diane's skull.
Rally sat on the bed and waited for the tests to come to see whatever might have been on that knife edge. She glanced across toward where Diane was shackled into her bed and was struggling about.
The gunsmith frowned sadly and shook her head.
"Poor girl," she muttered.
"She's hardly a girl," Dr. Franklin said. "And if you really felt sorry for her, you wouldn't have sprayed her in the eyes with a can of undiluted bleach."
"Ever get something in your eye, Doctor?" Rally asked idly. "I hated to do it, but she isn't someone you can save. It would be kinder to kill her, but I think we need to talk to her first."
"What are you talking about?" Franklin asked.
Rally shook her head and looked toward the woman again.
"Do you know about Goldie Musou?" Rally asked.
"She was the drug lord that developed kerasine 2," the Doctor said with a frown. "That's about all I need to know about her."
"Goldie had a thing for teenaged girls, especially innocent virginal types," Rally said. "She'd find a girl with a happy life and loving family and then kidnap them. Dose them with kerasine and work at them until she'd programmed them completely."
"That's hardly anything..."
"I'm not finished," Rally said quietly, interrupting Franklin. "Then she sends the girl back to the family...and the girl waits until her loved ones are all in place then she kills them all according to her programming. Mother, father, younger siblings, older siblings, boyfriends, best friends...everybody."
"Good god," Franklin said.
"After that, Goldie recollects them and waits for the kerasine to drop enough for the girl to realize what she's done," Rally whispered. "You see, she stays on the drugs, because then she can pretend that this is all a nightmare. She can deny that it was her hand who killed her own family. She's so determined to avoid that that she's stayed programmed ten years after Goldie Musou's death."
"And you think you can get something useful out of her?" Franklin asked.
Rally nodded quietly.
"The game is close to reality," Rally said. "She'll know something."
The doctor stared at the struggling woman along with Rally and felt a distinct shiver work over his spine.
"Your blood work is clean," he said, recovering himself. "Whatever was on that knife must be normally untraceable or else quickly processed."
Rally nodded.
"Thanks for that," she said. "Maybe it was just a wandering thought."
Not that she had those much anymore, but it was always possible.
"Whatever," Franklin said. "We'll tell Garibaldi when she's ready to be questioned. We're just getting started on her preliminaries here."
Rally smiled grimly at the thinly veiled dislike and the implication that she would be kept away from the patients before leaving the room.
"Targeting you specifically," Garibaldi said, shaking his head. "Goldie's famous sex pets wonderful."
"Sex...what?" Ivanova asked.
"Brainwashed teenaged girls she used as assassins and sex slaves," Garibaldi explained gingerly.
"Oh great, plural, how many more do we have to deal with?" the Russian commander asked.
"Two others, unless there are more than I know about," Rally said.
Sheridan nodded gruffly.
"We're going to question her soon as the Doc clears her," Garibaldi said. "Already logging her in, though had to remind one of my guys that her knives aren't for purchase or collecting."
"That's just the sort of added complication we don't need around here," he said irritably.
"Regretting the decision to back me?" the bounty hunter asked.
"Maybe just a little," Sheridan said. "But we all have our pasts and all of it was pretty colorful in ways. I don't doubt that we'll all be getting more than our fair share of attention coming soon."
"Just one thing," Garibaldi asked.
"What's that?" Rally asked as she stood up.
"Is this one of those girls?" Garibaldi asked.
Rally frowned as she looked over the photo. The woman in the picture was familiar, but she wasn't sure where she'd seen it before. However, she was way too young to be one of Goldie's girls. Maybe they were emulating their old mistress?
That was a disturbing thought.
"No, and what was she doing outside my store back when I caught Jack the second time?" Rally asked.
"What makes you say that was when this was taken?" Ivanova asked.
"Because he held back to tire his shoelaces," Rally said simply.
"Shoelaces?" Ivanova asked, glancing down at the laceless boots. "Really?"
"Hey, I was rushed," Garibaldi protested. "Anyway, we're not sure what she was doing there, we didn't get much of a look."
"Right," Rally said. "I've got to go and look to see if there are any more launchers around before someone finds them. How'd your terrorist hunt go?"
"Thanks for attending to this, Miss Vincent," Sheridan said. "It's good to know we can count on this protection going two ways. Though I assume you are getting paid."
"In a manner of speaking," Rally said.
"These are military grade arms," one of several people noted. "And armor, bullet and energy resistant. With this we can take the fight to Psi-Corp!"
"Not yet," someone else said as they looked through the crate and weapons. "We're untrained and there aren't enough of us."
Several people agreed.
"We have to prepare first," he said then. "But maybe soon we won't just be running."
Sheridan breathed heavily as he looked back over his shoulder at where Garibaldi had left.
The security chief had asked to be brought in to Sheridan's suspicions about Bureau 13 and Sheridan had obliged.
The day had been very hectic.
"At least none of those grenades went off," he muttered.
Diane stopped struggling as she heard a couple of doctors and nurses heading her way again, talking about scans and examinations.
She chuckled darkly for a moment.
"Hey Doctor, did you ever watch 21st century films?" she asked with a raspy, bleach damaged voice.
"What's that?" the voice asked.
"You see, my mistress taught me how to take the pain away and replace it with pretty lights," Diane said chuckling.
"What are you talking about?" he wondered before his eyes widened. "Damn it! Don't do..."
A nerve impulse sent through her prosthetic limb, triggering a motion of the mechanical fingers which further sent a new, wireless signal.
The explosion ripped out of her body from the implanted device, tearing her to pieces as the operating theater of medlab was torn into pieces with shrapnel flying in every which direction.
Stephen picked himself up from the floor as he looked about the mess of his medlab and listened to the coming cries of the wounded about him.
Looking around, he was sure that nobody seemed to be dead, which had to be some kind of miracle. But the operating room was trashed and even as he watched, something thunked down in front of him before rolling to a stop.
The still smiling head of the woman staring up at him.
Morden crossed his arms and considered the two women he saw sitting down across from him.
"No," he said idly toward his side. "They're insane, but they could be useful. First, we just have to know what they want."
He smiled then and rocked back lightly on his heels.
"And that's not the kind of thing to ask them up front," he decided with a trace of dark humor.
See other episodes by Thrythlind
(Posted Wed, 26 Jan 2011 10:43)
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