So there I was with a person in rags clinging to my back as I used some notoriously unreliable tk to keep us afloat. Not the best position to be in when you’re facing potential enemies and also true of potential allies…

The one taking his sweet time gliding beside us turned a meaty hand over, thumb jutting, vigorously bobbing toward the ground. I then asked him him why with a gesture of my hands and an awkward exchange of expressions and gestures ensued. This went on until frustration won over and me justifying the decision with the thought that anyone who would negotiate this long wasn’t out to get us.

A flurry of pointing and waving got us to an abandoned stretch of main drag in a warehouse district on the outside of Chicago. Annalise slid off my back and I had this strange feeling of being a pack mule…I digress. The bandanna-wearer stood a good six feet from us, towering. The building-vaulter hung behind him, wiry and keen. Of the two, I think you can guess who spoke first.

“What cell are you? And don’t give the silent treatment either. This region is our turf and you just messed up my op. If you don’t me a damn good answer I swear I will break you…”

Well, from the way he was talking I knew he saw what I did and he sure as heck didn’t look like a guy to make idle threats, which meant he something to back up the threat he just made…

“I waiting for an answer you little punk.”

Annalise gave me an expectant look and I was about to open my mouth, but I had a better answer for him, or at least a flashier one. I knew there was a fault line with in a few miles of here. Small and stable for the last few millennia, but it would do. I looked around and most of the street lamps were intact. I decided to pull some things out of my old tattered bag of tricks.

Reaching outward and feeling deep into the earth, I found the fissure and began to pull. Reaching back toward us, I found a power sub-station a few blocks away. The breaker was intact and I wouldn’t have to spend time throwing switches. I threw the electrons in the cables into oscillation and then into full cycles until I reached sixty hertz. The hard part was plugging all the alternate lines and not turning every point in the power grid into a small bomb. I was able to establish a crude series circuit with the street lamps in the loop.

The synchronization was close enough that the street lamps blazed with in a couple of seconds or so of the ground shaking. It was enough to throw Mr. Bandanna off balance while I walked forward and magnified the sound waves leaving my mouth.

“I don’t give a damn for you or your questions. I was there and I acted. You weren’t and you didn’t. It’s called first come, first serve, genius. That means I don’t need your permission and it also means I sure-as-hell don’t need any grief from you..”

I let everything die in one sharp freeze. Acting fast enough to prevent his eyes from adjusting to the light, I grabbed at his throat and squeezed until I sure he wouldn’t break my grip, if he was strong enough. His wiry side-kick took decided to jump feet first at my head. It was flashy and made natural use of his talents, but lacking any fragment of tactical thinking. I threw my head back with enough room for his heels to miss my nose by an inch and he landed quite gracefully, but was promptly knocked flat by an electric arc that left Annalise’s hand.

I turned back to my to Mr. Bandanna and gave him a simple command, “Tell me your name first and then tell me why you stopped me. In that order or I break you.”

I let go and Annalise pointed a hand toward him. Visibly shaken, he began slowly.

“They call me Jigger. The little guy you just laid low is called Cannon Ball. I ain’t tellin’ you our real names. Why were we there? We were tying to ambush the Primers. Took us six months to track that scum. You messed it up in one night…”

I heard enough and I could piece together the rest. “Take me to your leader. I want to speak with him. I think we could be allies, if you use your heads a bit more.”

He just about snapped after the last syllable left my mouth and let out a long string of explicative I won’t repeat, but the jest of it was that he wouldn’t give them up. Admirable, but not what I needed right then.

I could aggressively strip mine the information out of his head, but that would leave him with either severe shell shock or a drooling mass for several years. Also not something I wanted. Cannon Ball was still out cold. The information came out him easy.

With an axe hand strike I folded Jigger’s jugular vein for a split second and left him as unconscious as Cannon Ball. I through them over my shoulders and with a nod Annalise climbed back on. I could hear more sirens approaching and going airborne with tk was feeling less and less appealing. Rooftops.

I kept tk to a minimum, using it to keep Annalise on my back while I kept the other two from flopping down onto the street below. Where we were going would take some time, even with the good pace, so I decided to ask questions of Annalise when I had the breath.

“Ok, assume I have been living under a rock for the last fifty years. What happened here. Give me the shirt version.”

“Where do I start…The best place would probably be when your President Kennedy survived assassination by a loan and mentally unstable Delta. His wife had to suffer the tragic mistake of taking the energy blast meant for her husband. He—Kennedy I mean—suffered severe head trauma and a dozen or so broken bones in the back blast, from what I remember of my history lessons. It has been so long. Anyway, after treatment with the best healers in the country, he returned to office and announced the loan Delta, whose name they never did release, was not such a loan soul after all. He was part of a large network of anti-Capitalist anarchists who had been planning a highly synchronized uprising throughout the country.

Considering what followed, I am inclined to doubt such things, but he always stood by the story. After that, everything changed. The Delta Registration Act. The dissolution of your Congress. The declaration of martial law. And I guess that leads us to this point, you and I.”

She had a knack for conversation and made the time pass with startling speed. One jump from the second floor of a burned out building onto the street below and we arrived at the entrance of the dreaded Southern Illinois Cell of the American Defiance. Reputation didn’t always follow reality.

It was a subway terminal, left forebodingly decrepit and bleak. Clever tactic. Using a little active ultrasound I found the door behind the concrete slab of the rail tunnel wall. They had a camera trained on me with giving off enough heat from its circuitry to warm a house. I turned to it and spoke.

“You can either let me in or i can break, but either way you’re going to have to deal with me.” They took long enough to even wear my patience thin, but the slab opened with a slow and ponderous gate. Heavy construction. Also smart. Maybe they were slightly brighter than their comrades.

A single room held ten people of varying sizes and appearances, with one in the center sitting in an old office chair with a worn steel desk at his control. Radio gear of military vintage lined the walls, as well as mattresses.

I set Cannon Ball and Jigger down and waited for some response from the menagerie. Predictably, the one in the center spoke.

“I’ve never seen you before, but your new reputation precedes you. Two Delta Prime agents incapacitated. That is a feat, even for me. What do you and the girl with you call yourselves?”

“You can call us…Hunter and Black Widow.” Yeah, I know. Not the most creative, but codenames seemed the norm for these people and melodrama follows secret identities and the like with karmic quality.

“Ok, now let me ask another question. Why do this to my agents? You seem to want the same thing that we want, if I guess correctly.” He had stood from his eat, revealing the same type of torn and worn fatigues as Jigger’s, but with something like a cloak around his shoulders. Strange. Almost egotistical. Too little anger and too much curiosity. I didn’t trust him, but I just might have to deal with him.

“What do I call you?”

“You can call me Cavalier.”

And that began some rather long, but guarded explanations. We agreed that we had mutual interests and that we would go out on the next mission against the Delta Prime regional office. I got the idea that “Delta Prime” was the agency responsible for the enforcement of laws concerning Deltas (not hard to miss the connection), but any more questions probably would have set “Cavalier” on edge.

Sleeping in that hole was hard enough with sets of eyes trained on me in the darkness (they slept in shifts). I didn’t have to sleep, but despite Annalise’s calm beyond her years, I could see her hands shaking and could hear the little gasps leaving her mouth as she stifled a cry. There wasn’t much space for sleeping, so they put her near me, close enough to give her a apt on the back and to have some conversation to get her mind off of whatever was troubling her.


“Why do we have to go with these thugs…uh…Hunter?”

“We need into that regional office. I think I am here to end this all.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning this whole regime. This suffering that Kennedy has caused. Its going to stop.”

“But how does breaking into one Delta Prime office due that?”

“Information is the most powerful weapon of an army.”

“We don’t have an army, if you notice.”

“I know. Now get some sleep.”