If I have seemed a bit remiss in the matter of Jet Lightfoot in previous chronicles, it has largely been deliberate. She is particularly alert to her personal security, which is hardly unique for someone in her profession, but her take on privacy is definitely off center by most standards. Never have I seen her less than appropriately composed in front of a camera or media microphone; no matter the circumstances, she has always had a rapport with journalists, DJs, and VJs which some people in the business thirty years or more never attain. Were this not the case, I have no doubt that she might well have had considerably more difficulty remaining in the United States, but the issue of her immigration status, long settled now, was much in the papers at the time and I feel no great need to discuss it here.
For the benefit of those new to these chronicles, however, I will recap what I have previously said about her background, inasmuch as some of it is pertinent here. We first met her unexpectedly almost nine months after the events of Across the Eighth Dimension. A troop of Bravos were laying an ambush for our encampment at the time; noticing only that there were civilian campers in the wood, the lady set things in motion before they were properly positioned. Certain of her actions warned us things were amiss, giving us the chance to be ready for it when the first gunshots were fired. When she was wounded during the engagement, the soft body armor we found her in left little question that she belonged on the side of the angels.
Buckaroo, of course, took it upon himself to see to her welfare, and it was not long before he introduced her to us as Jet. Within a matter of weeks she'd settled in as much as any of the interns and was re-working her armor for our benefit. Some five months later, what initially appeared to be an earthquake demolished a bar we played a charity show in one night, taking several people below street level with it, Jet included. As the only one that involved who wasn't still in the hospital, she was interviewed a few days later, and one of Hanoi Xan's lieutenants named Deng Fat passed the tape on to his master with several choice comments about this intern being someone with either far too much luck or far too much talent to ignore. Xan had taken immediate notice, although at the time only she expected that the interview might somehow make its way to Sabah. She watched her back accordingly from the moment she stepped out of the studio; to that point, she had no firm reason to believe he'd noticed her, but she hadn't stayed alive as long as she had by taking unnecessary risks.
Nor was it luck that she was healthy enough to do the interview to begin with. There are those who've accused her of thinking she's some kind of superhuman. The fact of the matter is that she's very aware of her own limitations (hence the body armor, the likes of which we'd never seen before) and despite appearances, being human isn't one of them. This above all inclines her to cherish her privacy; while we're unlikely to make a guinea pig of anyone, there are those in our own government who'd love the chance in her case. As it was, she was injured frequently enough in the time she spent with us that Buckaroo has done significant physiological studies on the female of her species, both with and without her active and knowledgeable assistance. By the day she left to return to her own folk, she was as much family as any resident has ever been, and as sorely missed by those of us who knew her.
For others, of course, she was neither fish nor fowl. While it is true that some people who come to the Institute never make it past intern status, we had never before had anyone leave after making their residency. This put her in the rather awkward position in two respects: firstly, that she was to some degree abandoning her second family in favor of her first, and secondly, that our new personnel didn't always react well toward her on the rare occasions when she could be with us. Certainly it did not help her any that most of those visits coincided with trouble of one kind or another; although he'd never knowingly met her, Wayback was but one of several folk well convinced she was at best a stormcrow.
Lindbergh, on the other hand, had rather more of an open mind on the issue. Where he was concerned, anyone in intelligence was deserving of careful scrutiny and could be fish one day and fowl the next without warning. Or not; one was never really certain. Best to keep one's attention to oneself and one's mouth shut. On the other hand, if we were sure enough of her to make it clear we still considered her a resident, then Jet was a special case. Very possibly, trouble found her more often than the other way about. Certainly that would explain why Buckaroo was admitting that we scarcely knew the woman he'd learned to think of as Replay. It also very much justified Pecos's remark that bravos inhabiting the Phantom Zone would have been too easy an occurrence. He'd never actively intended to get caught up in intelligence operations, but Lindbergh had been on the edges of enough of them to know that the best use of the word simple in that context was in describing people who thought the days of cloak-and-dagger would come to a screeching halt if the Soviet Union ever fell.
Evidently Buckaroo had expected to hear Pecos comment further, for when she fell silent, he took note of her gaze. The shadow which had been against the glass a moment before was gone by the time he looked, but rather than writing it off as her nerves working overtime, he started toward the door for a better view. "Hold that thought," Big Norse said before he was halfway there, her own attention rather less elsewhere than an eavesdropper might have expected from the tone. "I've lost the carrier."
"Checking," Pecos said almost immediately, trying her own go-phone only to discover that while the screen lit up enough to prove the batteries weren't low, there was far too much static and flicker to make out an image. She had to bring the audio all the way up to get anything at first, then hastily backed it down again when the device produced only static hiss and high-pitched squeals. "Someone knows where we are."
It was hardly necessary to say more. From Buckaroo himself to the newest intern on the tour, we'd all known that this was at best a temporary solution to our housing problem and the main thing it had going for it in terms of physical security was the fact that it was officially unoccupied but not yet up for sale, hence as nearly invisible as was possible for several acres of Church property to be. Quite apart from the handful of local Blue Blaze Irregulars who'd managed to provide us with minimal amenities in the space of a couple hours on no advance notice, we knew of only 2 police officers who were privy to our exact location. Still, as we well knew, Xan's spies could be almost anywhere and if it wasn't good fortune that had allowed us this much time undisturbed, then it was assuredly part of his master plan somehow.
Under the circumstances, no one considered a simple malfunction to be the likely explanation. Go-phones are hardy devices; they have to be to survive some of the field conditions we encounter. While it's true that landing hard on one after a long fall will usually do damage, they've been known to transmit after such treatment, and dead batteries are the largest obstacle we face with them on a routine basis. Unfortunately, like so many other electronic communication systems, they're no more immune to jamming than to electromagnetic pulses.
Knowing you're about to be under attack and being able to do anything about it, however, are sometimes two completely different things. Buckaroo spent a moment examining the door as closely as he dared without opening it, then tried the knob when he saw nothing alarming. To everyone's surprise, it turned to no effect. Using both hands and putting body weight behind it didn't help. "Locked?" Perfect Tommy wondered. If that was the problem, it was almost solved already.
"Jammed. It's not even moving."
Lindbergh got up and took his chair with him, setting it on the floor again close to the door. "Let me try. I used to be good at this."
"This I gotta see," said Tommy. Buckaroo stepped back, and the pilot leaned in close to the door frame, which he began to tap with one fist. About a third of the way down the latch edge of the frame he dug into the adjacent wall with a fingernail, leaving a slight mark.
"Can I have about another foot?" he asked Buckaroo. "Wouldn't wanna hit anything by accident." He didn't wait for an answer, but hefted the chair by the legs and swung it at the doorframe, aiming at the spot he'd marked a moment before. The entire wall shuddered under the impact, but something fell to the floor on the other side of the door, bounced metallically a few times, and was silent. The chair was on the ground again before the bouncing stopped, and he had his Beretta in hand before he tried the doorknob.
This time the door came open, revealing a hall that was completely empty except for three pennies laying in the floor, one of the coins rather obviously having seen better days. (Later examination would reveal a penny-sized indentation in the door at precisely the altitude Lindbergh had struck the frame, but I digress.) "Pecos, Big Norse, back Rawhide," said Buckaroo, getting back to business. "Tommy, see what you can do about raising Reno. Get them back here if you can. Sidney, you take the north end; get people together and meet me at the bus. I'll take the south end."
***
While Wayback and Lindbergh disagreed as to whether Jet was trouble on two feet, Rawhide knew enough of undercover work from personal experience to understand that things didn't often go entirely as planned. While he hadn't particularly had any qualms about Replay's background, he wasn't especially surprised that things were threatening to fall completely apart; no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy, and there was little reason at present to presume this should be any different even if Wayback wasn't precisely that kind of a problem. The cover she'd been operating under very successfully for the last few weeks wasn't likely to be something we could reassemble for her quickly enough to keep our intern telepath from discovering the relatively minor deception, and the last thing she needed at present was anyone harassing her, justified in their suspicions or not.
Just now, it was all he could do to keep her firmly focused. There was no doubt in his mind that she had every right to be a little worried even before the weather had rolled in; if she hadn't been running at least a little nervous, he'd be a lot more concerned about her sanity. As it was, he wasn't certain we'd defined the real problem yet; her admission that she wasn't altogether sure she'd really dealt with Indigo's flashbacks was only a symptom of something much bigger. Why was it that she could remember the troubled ex-Ranger and her own pencil work, but draw obvious blanks on everyone she'd seen since waking? And why didn't she remember Raven, who was as much a part of her daily routine at home as Indigo? As far as that went, what other things was she likely to surprise us with by remembering?
For that matter, he was beginning to wonder if he was even dealing with her as Jet, either. From watching her on stage, in the field, and around campus, he knew she'd always been a social chameleon; who was to say that she wasn't as much a different person among her own? Very like Jet, perhaps, the way her routine operations were very like those at the Institute, but still recognizably different to someone who knew her both places; certainly the cover persona she'd been using was distinguishable in spite of drawing on most of her real history with us for its background. And undoubtedly some of her behavior was going to be dictated by plain old ordinary physics regardless of issues of the society she was interacting in. The storm was excellent example of that.
A notion occurred to him. "Raven deal with Indigo at that close a range?"
"Beats me," she confessed. "The name doesn't ring bells."
"Medic-mechanic. Couple inches shorter and a little younger than you, same natural coloration, wears her hair in one long braid, and acts like she's running your show." Under the circumstances, using terms that the lady at hand would know seemed wisest; in that context, a 'mechanic' was equally likely to tend to the care and maintenance of automobiles, aircraft, or cyborgs. In this case, he definitely intended the latter.
She said a name he'd only heard once or twice, one Raven only let family use; had he been an intern, he probably wouldn't have recognized it at all. "Has to be, or you wouldn't be bringing age into it." He nodded. "Oh, yeah, she's been at close range. Takes it better than I do; she doesn't have ghosts from Nam of her own. Proves who's got the higher IQ, don't it?" If she'd made that kind of remark under more normal circumstances, it would have been a potshot at her own expense. He had doubts if she was egotistical at all unless a cover identity demanded it.
As it was, her tone worried him. Letting her get maudlin on top of paranoid wasn't a good idea under the best of circumstances. "Wouldn't know," he assured her. "I wasn't there. We were just getting off the ground back then."
"Talk to me about that," she said, surprising him a bit. "I need background I haven't got." If she seemed just a little on the verge of desperate, at least that was better than depression. "How much did I used to know?"
"Maybe more than we think," he admitted, "maybe less. You're hard to call some times. The first time Raven met Buckaroo, she said that you and he were too much alike."
"That explains a lot by itself." It was probably the last reaction he would have expected. She sounded distant for that moment, but it was a distance he recognized; she was suddenly able to put a lot of pieces in place at once. Even if they probably weren't a perfect fit, he'd just handed her a larger chunk of what she'd been asking about than he'd realized at first. When she spoke again, she was much more aware of her words. "I bet I've been known to pull his rank, too."
"Mostly on him. 'Medic's privilege'." Though he didn't say so, New Jersey had been known to invoke that particular right as well; even Buckaroo understood that we were better off in the long run if our medical personnel could override anyone whose judgment was questionable due to illness or injury.
"If he's as hard to treat as I've been, someone needs to." That much, at least, she was ab solutely positive of. Social chameleon or not, one thing he knew she was always serious about was medicine; she'd been known to risk her own safety to treat wounded if it was a matter of life and death. Considering the way she usually reacted to legitimate threats to our security, he would not have been surprised to find out she'd try to keep the world away from her patients with nothing more than a pocket knife if it came to that.
"You're worse about not knowing you're wounded than he is," Rawhide assured her, "but try keeping him in bed when he's sick."
"That's one thing I'm not at the moment, if you're wondering. If I was, I wouldn't be hungry yet. Not that I plan on looking for the lunchroom around here until the sky calms down some."
"You've got a clue where you are, then?" As the bomb was probably the last thing she'd seen before Buckaroo had carried her out of the hotel unconscious, he hadn't expected it of her.
"Only from the architecture and the smells. If it was still a school, we wouldn't be here this time of year, would we? Kids would've been dissecting frogs in that science lab, not Buckaroo sitting there wondering how far gone I really was. And if I was close to having my head on completely straight, we wouldn't be in this boiler room wishing the lightning would quit; we'd be miles up the road somewhere a lot more securable if I had any say in the matter."
He'd only just opened his mouth to reply when the building trembled from a direct hit and the lights went off. She swore, a single soft but heartfelt word in her mother tongue, more pain and startlement than frustration in her voice. He'd known she had a good reason for disliking thunderstorms and written it off until now as nothing more serious than any other pilot might develop. If nearby lightning was actually painful for her, that was another matter altogether, one he didn't have time to consider for long before he heard the faint scuff of someone trying to come down the stairs without being noticed.
It was just possible that those feet were friendly, not trying to avoid his attention, just cautious of a possible enemy presence already down here. In the dark like this, he didn't dare shoot first and ask questions later; a warning round aimed at the floor or a shot tried for real that inadvertently struck the wall could bounce as easily as penetrate the concrete in this room. Either one could get one of the good guys hurt badly and he wasn't about to take that kind of chance until he had no other option. Fabric rustled much closer to hand, the lady doing something with her blanket that was more appropriate than wearing it. She admitted much later that she was on the verge of throwing it at the intruder as a distraction when a voice she knew from home whispered in the darkness.
Chapter Five HTML-enhancement last updated: 9 May 1999
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