Lindbergh started badly enough that he almost dropped the phone. That one had been very close; he could smell the ozone, and just maybe something scorched as well. He decided against trying any further calls and yanked his makeshift splices loose so that he could close the junction box again; no use taking out anymore of the system than absolutely necessary. He left the phone sitting on top of it to mark the spot for the repair crew, and headed back for the bus.

Partway there, he saw a figure on the ground, doing a variation on the classic infantry crawl which didn't seem involve keeping a rifle out of the muck. Another few steps brought him close enough to realize it could only be Replay, or Jet, or whatever Buckaroo was calling her now; no sane person would have chosen to be out in this kind of weather in only a t-shirt even if they were upright rather than sprawled across the wet pavement. Concerned for her, he broke into a run, reaching her just at the bus. The doors opened before he expected them to, and he pushed her up the steps into T-Bear's ready hands before boarding himself.

Where everyone else was wet, she was positively soaked from head to toe, water gushing out the back of the damaged jacket the moment she started to stand. It was immediately clear she was none too steady on her feet, and T-Bear would have picked her up without a second thought and taken her at least as far as a seat if Buckaroo and Rawhide hadn't been at hand. As alert as she seemed not to be, she might even have cooperated with such a plan without comment. Certainly she made no effort to get her hands on the towels herself.

Buckaroo had more pressing concerns on his mind than the apparent miracle. There was plenty of time later to figure out exactly what had happened outside; his immediate priority was for Jet's present condition, which couldn't be good. Being a neurosurgeon, he'd seen the kind of aftereffects lightning could have on the human body, ranging from almost indetectible to severe. But while he had amassed a considerable amount of data on her physiology, this was the first lightning strike he could document as affecting any of her species, and the fact was that he had almost no clue what to expect. It was possible that she'd been moving on instinct -- on autopilot, as she would undoubtedly have put it -- from the time she'd been hit and just hadn't returned to reality yet, in which case even she didn't know how badly she might be hurt. It was equally possible that she was instead going shocky on him already; with what she'd already been through in the last few days, such a lapse from her normal behavior wouldn't have been all that peculiar. The only certainties he had at this point were that she was visibly unmarked, apart from the ruined leather, and still self-mobile, if only marginally.

Rawhide was just as concerned, if blessedly rather less aware of how bad the worst case might be. He didn't say anything as he helped walk her toward the back of the bus. The look he gave Buckaroo was more telling in that regard than words might have been: how much more could she take? Buckaroo's immediate answer to that was equally silent; not so his second thought. "Dingo?"

"Not going anywhere," Rawhide answered. If he noticed he'd stepped on a piece of wire, pulling it free from its anchorage where one of the jacket's snaps belonged, he didn't make anything of it.

"He should keep for five or six hours, " New Jersey said, slipping in to take Rawhide's place. "Long enough for someone to tell me what's going on, I hope." He was more confused than usual, uncertain whether he'd missed something or whether things were just a bit weird. Repairs made to injuries she'd suffered long before meeting any of us were substantial enough for her to be a bit of a walking lightning rod; by rights, she ought to have rather extensive interface burns where flesh and metal came together, one of them made even more visible by scortched hair. Of course, he wasn't nearly as familiar with the details as Buckaroo was; it was possible there was insulation he simply didn't know about.

"That makes two of us," said Perfect Tommy. "No luck with Reno. Jamming's too heavy."

Buckaroo nodded, too distracted to notice whether Tommy caught it. The news made too much sense to surprise him any. "I think Dingo may be the only direct threat here," he said. "You guys get us rolling, and keep working on the comm situation."

Lindbergh interrupted at that point. "Half the cops in this end of the state should be on alert by now, Buckaroo," he reported. "I patched into the landline and asked the locals for reinforcements."

"Code two, please," Jet muttered, surprising them all. She sounded like a woman talking in her sleep, barely audible two feet away and scarcely aware of what was going on. "Damn sirens 're loud."

It was a good sign that she was able to get words out at all, even better that they were in English and clearly related to the subject at hand. Still, there was only one way to be certain whether she was pointing out a hazard for the officers, or discussing something she presently found offensive. "Are you all right?" Buckaroo asked her.

It might have sounded like a stupid question on the surface, but it was one of the few things he'd never known her to ignore. It seldom got a straight answer, but answer it invariably got; he'd long since learned to sort out the truth of the matter from even the most smart aleck responses. On this occasion, she made no real effort to be heard, which itself was an valuable indicator; she was about to be brutally honest with him because even the most marginal of misdirections would have been too much effort. "Either keep it down, or shoot me now."

That wasn't good, but at least it was a complaint he had a reasonable chance of diagnosing and treating readily; if she confessed to being sound-sensitive it was because she had the sort of headache we wouldn't have wished on anyone, even Hanoi Xan himself. Under the circumstances, that could be caused by something as obvious as the shocks her eardrums had been forced to cope with, or it could be an early symptom of neurological damage. There were field tests that could help determine which was most likely, not as definitive as even a CT scan might have been and definitely less useful than if he'd been dealing with a fellow human, but with a few modifications they should still be good enough to pick up anything he'd need experienced help with. Best to begin as quickly as possible with them; the sooner he could treat even minor problems, the more likely she was to recover completely.

With someone else, he might have started with the usual questions -- who she was, what the date was, the color of an object in her line of sight. She hadn't been able to answer the first two correctly even before the sky fell on her, and the third was far too likely to draw no response at all. He needed a question she'd be sufficiently annoyed by to answer, preferably one he could phrase in a way that would force her reply to address the deeper issue. He settled upon one of her own expressions in its original language. "K'het ataahn?"

"Sheh'shalla," she answered, clearly unhappy he was bothering her with such trivia. It was enough to satisfy every resident in earshot that she was coherent enough to know what he'd asked her. "You got a better idea than I do." She stopped short of calling him something marginally rude more from a lack of the necessary ambition than from caution. Where away? was a query that made no sense at all to her, and she'd said so; if he knew her memory was playing games, he shouldn't expect any answer more specific than what planet this was. If that.

***

It hadn't taken long for Bobby "Crusher" Garbanzo to figure out that things were further out of control than he'd thought when our rental car didn't reappear in his rear view mirror as he passed the Earth City Expressway's on-ramp to I-70. Maybe there was something going on in that god-forsaken wasteland after all, he decided; he couldn't imagine any other reason that we might have gotten off the interstate there when it was so obvious that the lunatic driving could have continued at it indefinitely. Unfortunately for him, it would have drawn entirely too much attention to try doing anything about his misjudgement immediately. He could still get off at I-270 and pick up St.Charles Rock Road to the other end of the Expressway and head south there, but then he'd be lucky if he caught up in time to watch the rest of the bag squad wrap things up. The only other option was to pick up 270 southward and cut over on Dorsett in an attempt to get ahead of us and close the only escape route he was aware of.

Crusher had more of a reputation for brawn than brains, but didn't consider himself anyone's fool. Things weren't falling apart on him due to anything he'd done wrong, though he'd had his doubts about this plan from the start. It had nothing to do with the way the two Malays had come in and pretty much acted like they were God's gift to crime; they were dangerous enough that he didn't want to cross them over anything as obvious as that. The root of the problem was that they'd been too full of themselves to give any serious attention to his boys when planning the operation. He'd never had to contend with that kind of problem before, of course, but he read all the Mafia wars books he could get his hands on, and they all agreed that failing to know the countryside well was something that would get you killed.

So far, that hadn't happened, but they'd need to be insanely lucky to prevent it. Crusher didn't think that merely being bravos was going to help Deng Fat and his sub-lieutenant any in that department. Hanoi Xan's personal bodyguards and officers didn't get any more of a bonus there than the next guy, and it was already possible that the fiasco downtown had cut heavily into whatever luck they'd had when they'd arrived in the country. Which, come to think of it, could explain why this operation had been so quickly and so poorly planned. Deng Fat probably wanted an obvious patsy to blame things on so he could keep his own head where it belonged. Crusher and his boys made a convenient target for such a plan.

Crusher may have been a few beans short of a bag, but he wasn't stupid enough to cooperate with his own demise that easily. He couldn't dawdle or cut and run; either of those options would have resulted in a slow and painful end to his life of crime. His only choice was to get back into play as quickly as possible and hope he could turn things around.

By the time he was set up properly for the Dorsett exit, a set of flashing lights had appeared in his rear view mirror, and he realized there were indeed circumstances when he was actually glad to see the cops.

***

Murphy hadn't expected things to escalate so quickly when she'd placed her initial call to St. Charles. They should have been far enough east to have handled things themselves, she'd thought, but by now there were three separate jurisdictions involved with the chase alone. Sorting it all out was going to take days, not hours, which might well be the only thing standing between her and unemployment. She thought about going home sick, but knew that staying at the station house was her best way to track what was actually happening until and unless Big Norse and her crew managed to find a solution to the communications problem. Still, it was frustrating on several levels to be in the squad room listening to the radio traffic; she was stuck with no way at all to pass on any of what she was able to learn, and way too visible if the Captain should come looking.

She'd known signing up that becoming a Blue Blaze Irregular isn't for everybody. Along with the moral code one must inherently hold to in order to consider joining, there are the physical training outings, the mandated annual educational advancements, and being "on call" at all times to help out either Buckaroo or one's neighbors as necessary. In her case, the opportunity to attend selected symposia at the Institute and the newsletter subscription came closer to being liabilities than the rest of it, but that was a matter of one person's opinion being a serious problem for her. The number of US jurisdictions where the police consider Team Banzai to be vigilantes waiting for an opening may be counted on one hand at last poll; for the most part we are at worst looked upon as responsible citizens who attract a certain amount of trouble due solely to our notoriety as musicians. Still, trouble can come as readily from prejudice as from obvious attack.

When the Captain came into the squad room, she thought at first that she'd had it. To her surprise, however, he didn't want to know how long she'd been involved with any of us. "You wanna tell me why you've got an FBI visitor in your lab?"

"No idea," she said, as much startled as relieved by that news. "Wilson has the bomb fragments, so it can't be that."

"You get done with the fed, you let me know what it's about. Got that?"

"In one," she answered, letting him take it as he would and retreating for her lab before he could say anything more. She couldn't imagine what the FBI might want with her, unless there'd maybe been a series of talava incidents across several states that the department didn't know about yet. Even that didn't quite make sense, though; if it was that straightforward, the Captain should have been the first to know.

***

"So what have we got?" Harrison asked as he walked into the morgue.

Parks pointed to the skull x-rays still hanging from the lightbox on the wall. There was a sharp-edged geometric shape visible where neck and head came together, alien enough for even a first-year rookie who'd never seen an x-ray to have judged it abnormal from across the room. "Guy's wired. What for, we're not certain. Coroner's deputy went off to confer with some experts; hasn't come back yet."

"You tell him what you didn't quite tell me?"

Parks nodded. "I think that's what he's checking into. I'm guessing it's a transmitter, not a bomb. Well, not a bomb this guy knew about, anyway. If it was, why dive out the window when you could blow your own head off and take some cops with you?"

"Transmitter. Like Captain Happen."

"First thing that came to mind when I saw the pictures. God knows I hope I'm wrong and its just some kind of civilian experiment, but it's too good a fit. Guy gets himself backed into a position where his only way out is to squeal; next thing you know, he's screaming and through the glass."

"Anybody got a handle on the next of kin yet?"

"Doesn't seem to be any to worry about. Just an ex-wife he dumped when she went nuts, and she'd probably cheer if she was stable enough to notice it happened; her people brought spousal abuse charges about 5 years back, but some hot-shot lawyer got him off on that and filed the divorce papers. Claimed she'd attacked him in a jealous rage and he'd only been defending himself."

"Real nice guy. Maybe we should look into where the lawyer's connections run."