US ARMY RAIL TRANSPORT 995 – MICHIGAN – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. The lurching motion almost threw Thorne off her feet, and she turned back to glower over her shoulder

The lurching motion almost threw Thorne off her feet, and she turned back to glower over her shoulder. “What was that?”

The tech-operative paused with the glowing laser cutter in one hand, and peered at the virtual screen on his wrist-guard, his eyes widening. “Ah. This is non-optimal.”

“Explain.”

“The locomotive’s control systems have just gone into critical mode.” He stabbed experimentally at a few buttons. “No. The control interface is unresponsive. It’s no longer answering direct commands.”

“And yet we’ve just picked up speed.” She pushed past him to the hatch that Jensen had sealed shut, eyeing the streak of blood on the floor around the doorjamb. “Who made that happen?”

“Who do you think?” The operative nodded at the door. “Looks like the monster they gave us hasn’t done his job.”

Thorne’s temper frayed at his sarcastic tone and she pointed at the hatch. “Get it open! Now!”

The panel shifted open a few inches. “Almost got it,” said the operative.

She steeled herself. If by some fluke Jensen had been able to find a way to defeat the German, then, as with so many things, Thorne would have to do the job herself. That brought a cruel smile to her face. Her masters wanted the ex-cop to keep breathing, for reasons she could not comprehend; and given how tired she had become of their gnomic, contradictory and overly elaborate orders, Thorne felt a special kind of thrill at the idea of deliberately killing Jensen. She liked the taste of that defiance.

“Once I get past this,” the operative was saying, as the laser melted through the locking rods, “I can get up to the locomotive and burn the couplings. If we’re lucky, that’ll slow us down…” The door juddered and retracted with a sudden crunch of metal on metal. The cargo wagon revealed beyond was a disordered mess of dead bodies and fallen crates.

Thorne saw a puddle of fresh blood on the deck just inside the hatchway. “Wait…”

But the other operative had already stepped through. He was barely inside the next train car when Thorne saw movement from the shadows and a white-knuckled hand jammed a compact disposable derringer into the flexible ballistic cloth around the operative’s throat. There was a flat bang of discharge and the little holdout gun blasted the man’s neck into a ruin of meat and bone. He spun toward the deck.

A second – and final – shot from the derringer droned out toward Thorne as Vande pushed away from where she had been hiding in the lee of the hatchway, and let gravity drag her down, firing as she went. The heavy-caliber bullet went wide, humming past Thorne’s head to bury itself uselessly in the wall.

Her smile returned and she stalked forward, shaking out her arms like she was warming up for an exercise routine. Vande was on the floor, cursing at Thorne in Dutch with the empty disposable still smoking in her grip. A lot of the TF29 agent was already spilled across the deck of the rocking train car, and the pallor of her face showed how close she was to death. Thorne decided to hasten that inevitability.

Flexing the muscles in her arms in a predetermined pattern sent nerve impulses to a dozen hardened nubs of myomer implanted down the outside of her arms. From slits in the surface of her skin emerged curved barbs made of a synthetic diamond analogue, each one of the razor-edged spurs whispering through the material of her sleeves until her arms resembled the stem of a rose.

Vande tried to back away, but her wounded body betrayed her and she failed to find the energy she needed to do it.

Thorne picked her way closer, moving with the swaying motion of the floor, and grabbed a handful of the Interpol agent’s short hair. “You’ve failed. That’s the last thing you will ever know.” She raised her arm to strike.

“Thorne!” Jensen shouted her name from the hatchway at the far end of the train car, listing as he came through from the engine cab. “No!”

Her lip curled in contempt. As if he could stop her with a word. Thorne swept down in a wide arc that let the spurs on her arm cross the bare throat of the woman on her knees, opening Vande’s neck in a jet of crimson. She kicked the agent away as she died, watching the shock in her eyes harden into glassy emptiness.

Thorne looked up, her gaze locking with Jensen’s, and the raw fury on his face was perfect. It was the most honest emotional reaction she had seen from him since the moment they had met in Facility 451.

“You sick witch…” he growled. Blunt-headed swords slid from hidden slots on his hands, twitching with barely caged violence.

“No, just easily bored,” she corrected, shaking her head. “Where’s the German? I refuse to believe you are capable of killing him…”

“He abandoned you.” Jensen bit out the words. “Figures. The Illuminati have never been big on loyalty, right? Everyone is disposable to them.”

By pure chance, in his rage Jensen hit on a blunt truth and Thorne’s post-kill smile melted off her face. “You’re an impediment. A nuisance, too stupid to die. You’re no-one’s hero, Jensen. Why do you keep acting like you matter?” Her voice rose and she shouted the words at him, but they were directed as much at herself as at him. “You’re just a crude, ignorant tool, do you understand?”

* * *

He had no gun. The empty flechette rifle had been abandoned in the engine cab and the next closest firearm to him was lying on the deck, down at the far end of the train car. To use the nanoblades, he’d need to be close in – but he saw those glistening thorns that the woman had grown, saw how she had dispatched Vande, and Jensen knew that she would kill him before he could kill her. He was wounded and he didn’t have the speed.

Vande. His gaze tried to stray to the dead agent. He’d been wrong about her, wrong to suspect that she was a turncoat. And now she’d paid the highest price to prove her loyalty to the Task Force and its goals. The callous, almost amused way in which Thorne had ended her ground on Jensen and it was all he could do to keep his rage in check.

Thorne was still snarling at him. She jabbed a finger in his direction as a violent shudder shook the deck of the train car. “You think anything you’ve done will make a difference? Do you think that anyone who opposes them makes a difference?” She barked out a cold, sneering laugh. “You’re only alive because of the blood in your veins! If it wasn’t for that, you’d be decaying at the bottom of the ocean.”

He stiffened. She was talking about his unique gene markers, the super-compatibility effect that Megan Reed had discovered and kept from him for so long. And if Thorne knows that about me, who else does?

“You’ve lost,” he growled, silencing the questions in his mind. “I’m taking your prize off the board. We’re gonna end this here and now.” The carriage’s wheels shrieked as the curve finally began to bite, and the deck tilted, loose items slipping away toward the apex of the turn.

“Good.” Thorne’s pale face split in a wide smile, her lips reddening. “That’s how I want it.” She exploded into motion, nerve-jacked and neuro-accelerated reflexes boosted to their maximum potential, her muscle implants forced to the red line.

Jensen sprinted down the car to meet her, boots clanging on the deck as he closed the distance. Time slowed as fresh adrenaline flooded his veins.

* * *

He had one chance to take down his opponent; a wicked, twin-blade slashing strike as they passed one another, like two ancient samurai on a dueling field going for that singular, perfect cut. But Jensen had been beaten to within an inch of his life, he had a throat full of blood-laced phlegm, who knew how many busted ribs and the tiny motors in his augs were slipping gears with each movement.

Thorne was at full strength, she was agile and ruthless, and she would kill him.

The game had to change.

His implanted bio-cells had just enough charge for one final offensive option, and a moment short of their paths crossing in the middle of the train car, Jensen suddenly retracted his nanoblades and went down on one knee, ducking his head and swinging up his arms like he was about to take to the air.

Across the upper surface of his torso and his limbs, micro-miniature ejector ports snapped open as one and expelled a storm of tiny spherical explosive charges. Each one no larger than a ball bearing, they spun out from Jensen, putting him at the core of a detonation that briefly turned him into a human cluster munition. When David Sarif created this augmentation weapon, he named it the Typhoon – and it was a deadly storm.

Flaming arcs of concussive fire spread like Icarus’s burning wings and ripped apart the interior of the train car. Too close to stop her headlong rush into the blast radius, Thorne took the force of the detonation wave and the discharge tore into her.

Jensen rose, and against all odds, he realized she was still alive. Broken, fluid sounds emerged from Thorne’s throat, forming into words. “This… means… nothing. This is… not the war. Not even… a skirmish. A distraction.” Her eyes stared blankly into nothing and her last breath was spent mocking him. “They… still win…”

Thorne’s voice stilled, her ruined body slumped into an untidy, smoking heap. Dying here, this was retribution for every pitiless murder she had committed – but it didn’t seem like it was enough.

* * *

Jensen pitched back as the cargo wagon groaned and pulled away from the outer rails, the angle of the tilting deck growing steeper. In a few seconds, the whole train would follow it into ruin and fire.

He sprinted toward the broken skylight hatch where he had first boarded and hauled himself back through it, ignoring the pain down his chest and stomach. Every movement was like acid burning him from the inside out.

On the roof of the train car, his vision was distorted by driving rain and screaming wind. He couldn’t clearly see the ground streaking past on either side of him at nearly two hundred miles per hour, he could only feel the fatigue clawing at him, trying to pull his hand free of the grab bar he was clinging to. His power cells were almost drained, his landing system implant useless to him. If he fell, he would be dashed to pieces.

Metal screamed and Jensen felt everything around him give a monumental shudder. This was it; the train was crashing.

He let go, and against all reason he ran, allowing the wind and the rain to push at his back. Light, stark and blinding, came from out of the sky, suddenly surrounding him in a halo of whiteness. He heard a woman shouting his name, saw the shimmer of cables swinging into arm’s reach. Behind him, the locomotive left the rails and there was a crashing, tearing discord as loud as the world ending.

Jensen leapt into space without thinking, without hesitation, without fear.

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