He’d only heard three voices, and one of those had the misfortune of having a Dymaxion in his pocket. That left two. Piece of cake, but for this, he’d need to be able to see. Francis concentrated on the burlap sack and it flew off.
The OCI man sitting across from him had a revolver in his hand. He saw the bag go flying and realized what was happening. The muzzle moved toward Francis as the trigger was pulled, but Francis was already concentrating on stopping the cylinder from turning. Just like using your hands: if you want to stop a revolver that hasn’t been cocked, just grab the cylinder.
The G-man’s eyes widened as Francis threw a bunch of extra Power against the gun. Might as well, he’d been saving it up for days and felt like he had plenty to spare. The man fought, but the revolver gradually turned in his sweaty hands until the muzzle was pointing back at his face, then Francis let go of the cylinder and concentrated on the trigger. “No! No!” BLAM.
One down.
Francis turned just as the man at the motor realized what was going on and went for his gun, but it was too late for him too. The first agent’s revolver leapt into Francis’ outstretched hand, and he managed to fire twice before the last OCI goon tumbled over the side to disappear into the Potomac.
The shore was near and the lights of Washington were behind it. The boat had been pointed at this particular patch of shoreline for a reason. A big delivery truck was parked there, and he saw a shape pass in front of the headlights. Francis concentrated his Power on the motor, grabbed the stick, and kept them on course. That truck was probably OCI and related to Carr’s mystery attack. He sure as hell wasn’t going to let that happen on his watch. There were certainly going to be more gunmen there, but Francis had three bullets and a whole lot of Power. This was about to get ugly.
Faye’s job was simple. Mr. Sullivan had told her to be herself.
So that meant causing lots of trouble.
Unable to spot Francis or Heinrich amidst the confusion and the swirling magical oddity at the bottom of the main building, she picked the room that had the most people in it. From the way Lance had described the place, this was the OCI’s command center. That seemed like a relatively safe place to raise a ruckus. Sure, there were a bunch of folks in it who wanted to shoot her or send her to prison, but none of them were actively launching bullets at the moment.
Traveling to the back of the command center, Faye found herself in a confused scene. The room was filled with so much smoke and dust it was hard to breathe. There was a bank of radios on one wall, but they were wrecked and dripping sparks, and a big piece of the roof had caved in. She was a couple floors under where the big Dymaxion had been, but Faye could smell it burning with a sort of noxious chemical stink.
A few of the people in this room had been injured in the blast, but several of them were still up and scurrying about. Some were shouting orders, others had guns and were watching out the broken windows or guarding the door, a few were pulling papers out of some filing cabinets and throwing them into a fire that had been started inside a garbage can.
“Grims are in the courtyard, sir.”
“What happened to that fool Crow?” asked a fat old man who was holding a handkerchief over his face. “I swear he’s failed me for the last time. The robots are prepped? Very well. Send them in.” One of the men picked up a phone, cranked a charge handle, and started giving orders. The fat man turned to the ones at the burn barrel. “Make it snappy. I’m going to sue Dymaxion into the poorhouse for their faulty workmanship! Years of work ruined… I was mad to ever listen to Crow’s ideas, luring these damned wizards here. I want everything sensitive eliminated, including the experiments in building two.”
That made one of the burners pause from his shoveling of papers. “But… those are-”
“People?” The fat man strode over to loom over his subordinate. “They’re science projects! Nothing more!”
“Sorry, Dr. Carr.” The OCI man bowed his head and went back to throwing papers in the fire.
Science projects? Lance had said there were other prisoners. Were they doing things to them like they did in the Imperium? The possibility made Faye extra mad.
Nobody had seen her yet, but she was fed up with listening to these jerks, so Faye lifted her shotgun and pointed it at the nearest enemy. She hadn’t really thought this part through. She was extremely good at killing folks, but these had information that could clear her friends’ names, so just shooting them, especially the fat one, was out of the question. “Reach for the sky!” Faye shouted, because that was what they said on the cowboy radio serials when they captured outlaws, and it seemed as reasonable as anything else.
It didn’t work nearly as well for her as it did on the radio, though.
“Traveler!” Carr shouted, and ten men all decided to shoot her. Faye pulled the trigger. She was so close that the buckshot didn’t even separate. She simply blasted a big hole through the first man, then she Traveled to the opposite side of the room. She’d killed a second one before any of them managed to get a shot off, and that was aimed at the spot she’d just left. Faye ran to the side, jerking the trigger on her automatic shotgun, and as soon as they focused on her and her head map screamed danger incoming, she instinctively Traveled away before bullets filled the air where she’d been standing. Glass shattered and lead ricocheted off metal.
Faye hit the ground and rolled under a desk. She waited a moment and let the bad guys do her job for her. Panicked, confused by the smoke and the flickering lights, with their imaginations filling in grey-eyed killers popping into existence everywhere, they began to shoot at anything moving, which was mostly their friends. Faye grinned as she pulled shells off her bandoleer and stuffed them into her shotgun. She loved her job.
Seeing a pair of legs coming close, she blew his knees off, and then she shot him in the chest when he got to her level. Then she Traveled out from under the desk to the far wall, where she shot another man in the back, jumped to the other corner and had to fire several times to finally get enough lead to go through a filing cabinet to hit a fellow that thought he could hide from her. Shotgun empty, she pulled her. 45 with one hand while stepping through space, appeared behind somebody who was shouting profanities, and put a single bullet in the back of his neck. His buddy turned toward her and she shot him in the chest four times before he could even lift his pistol.
Faye paused to check her head map. There were bodies strewn everywhere. That’s what they got for not reaching for the sky like she’d told them to! Except for the crackling flames, the room was deathly quiet. Did I kill everybody already? So much for confessions. But happily, her head map told her that the fat doctor in charge was limping down the stairs. Her head map also said that whatever the oddness was below, it was getting bigger, right quick, and it wasn’t like anything she’d ever felt before. Instinct told her that if she Traveled next to that thing, there would be no coming back.
She’d deal with the doctor in a minute. It wasn’t like anybody could outrun her. Faye went over to the filing cabinet and pulled out some of the papers that they’d been trying to destroy. There was lots of writing and it seemed to be in code, which meant it must be super important, so Faye gathered up as much as she could possibly carry in both arms and Traveled away.
“What the hell are those?” Dan asked as he risked a glance around Sullivan’s shoulder.
Grey metal forms were marching out of the main building and across the hard-packed dirt of the OCI compound. These machines were similar to the one that Sullivan had met at the EGE factory, with rounded bodies and ungainly limbs, only these were slightly bigger and each one had a single glowing blue eye in the center of their rectangular heads. It reminded him of an illustration from a Popular Mechanics article about the future of warfare, only this was right now, and these things belonged to the secret police rather than the Army.