LAKE MONTCALM – MICHIGAN – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

The group of six made their way down the embankment to the railbed in silence, quick and sure-footed, spilling out into a circle as their boots crunched on the gravel between the concrete sleepers. Thorne emerged from the middle of the group and paused, flipping up the visor that covered her face so she could taste the air. Like most of the group, she wore a non-reflective helmet with integral low-light scopes, and a matching bodysuit of signature-dampening meta-materials. Her weapons and equipment hung off her chest in a cross-rig, and she ran her gloved fingers over the safety latch holding her Zenith semi-auto pistol in place. She turned to face eastward and glimpsed the faint glow of the city in the far distance, the weak amber light of it reflecting off the bottom of low clouds.

One of the others detached from the group and came to the closest of the rails, on the line that threaded west out of Detroit toward the state line and beyond. He sank into a crouch, and she heard the faint whine of micro-motors in his joints. The largest of them in build and bulk, he was almost a full-body prosthesis cyborg and what flesh there was of him seemed more like a coating applied to a steel sculpture than the true matter of the man. In particular, his organic face hung on a hairless chromed head like a mask, inset with two bulky crimson optic implants that gave him a permanently doleful expression.

Thorne knew little about him, other than rumors that the man had been patched together with experimental augmentations and vat-grown bio-mech limbs after surviving the detonation of a truck bomb. All she cared about was that he was as capable as he looked. Others had chosen these operatives to assist her, based on algorithms and predictive models that Thorne would never be privy to. Each was augmented to a lesser or greater extent, many with exotic modifications that she had never seen before. But that mattered little in the situation before her; all that was required of Thorne was to marshal them to complete the objective.

He placed a hybrid flesh-metal hand on the rail and was still. “It is coming,” he said. His words were precise, clipped and heavily accented. “We should prepare.”

“You heard him,” Thorne told the others. “Take your places.” She indicated three of the operatives. “Team One, board in the crew car behind the locomotive. Team Two, we’ll board the rearmost car and sweep forward.”

The others all gave nods of agreement and set to work double-checking their gear. A slender, athletic man with recurved cyberlimbs dropped the bulky backpack he had been carrying and handed out the contents to the group – each of them were given a disk-shaped device with a pair of grips on one surface, a glittering metallic nanofluid on the other. “Test,” he called, when all the units had been distributed.

As one, the group twisted the grips and red indicators on the disks turned blue.

“Deploy,” ordered Thorne. On the breeze, she could hear the fast-approaching rush of an engine, and at her feet the rails were starting to vibrate. Each of the nine operatives found their assigned positions along the straightaway before them, each dropping down to lie on their backs with the disk devices resting across their chests, like offerings to the night sky. “Activate timers,” she called, snapping her visor shut as the rumble of the oncoming train rose to a roar.

There was a brief flash of white as the headlight on the engine swept across her, but the wavelength-deadening material of Thorne’s suit blended her body shape into the shadows. She tensed against every rational sense that told her to flee from the oncoming train, for fear it would crush her beneath its spinning steel bogies – and then it was thundering over her, a black wall of noise a few centimeters from the brow of her visor.

Thorne closed her eyes and let it happen. She felt the electromagnetic disk in her hand go active and held on tight as it automatically triggered and drew her up off the ground, and into the spaces on the underside of the train’s trailing carriage. The shock of the impact resonated through her limbs, but she hung on regardless. After a moment, Thorne dared to turn her head slightly and catch a glimpse of the railbed blurring past right below her.

Five green lights flickered on in her visor’s display; they were all aboard. Somewhere to her right, she saw a bright flare of laser light as a beam cutter began to slice through the floor of the carriage above her head.

* * *

Vande looked up as Chen entered the rear cargo wagon, swaying slightly with the motion of the train. She nodded toward the door he had just come through, leading to the center-most car where the load they were guarding was held. “How many times are you going to check those crates? We still have a long way ahead of us.”

“And miles to go before we sleep,” Chen added, with a faint smile. “I can’t help it, I’m on the spectrum. Just indulge my mildly obsessive-compulsive impulses and leave it at that.”

She frowned. Now they were clear of Detroit’s city limits, the train would not stop again until it reached their destination, a military decommissioning center in the Dakotas where the US Army disposed of their more dangerous hardware. Vande had already applied a no-sleep drug patch to her arm and she intended to remain alert and awake – but after everything that had happened during this investigation and the chaos of the firefight at the airport, fatigue was making her patience run thin. Chen’s good-natured banter chafed on her, and what he thought was endearing, she found irritating. Vande got up and toyed with the idea of moving to where the other members of her team were situated, in the forward cargo carriage two cars closer to the engine at the head of the train.

She tapped a spot behind her right ear, manually activating her infolink. “All call signs, report in.” Chen, the other agent in her car and the three up front all did as ordered, drawing a nod from her. “Solid copy. All right, from this point we are going to clear protocol. Check in every hour, alert calls only, otherwise maintain radio silence. Base, you get that?”

Jarreau’s voice echoed distantly in her head. “Roger that, mobile team. We’re tracking you from here. Safe journey.”

Vande nodded again and cut the signal. Jarreau was about to go into a virtual meeting with Manderley and the directors in Lyon via the NSN, largely to answer for the disruption caused in Detroit and the heat Interpol was going to draw because of it. She didn’t envy him. Vande had never liked dealing with the upper echelons of command, even in her time as a regular cop. She was better in proactive situations, in the field, in the action. She’d joined Task Force 29 because she thought they could provide that for her, but lately…

“So, anyone got a deck of cards?” said Chen. “I forgot to bring an e-book.”

She eyed the tech. “I think I may have to shoot you to shut you up,” Vande told him, her tone suddenly ice-cold and utterly serious.

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