Hero (Gone 9)

Vector had no idea what Shade had planned, but one thing was certain: he had to get the train moving again and quickly. The damnable thing was that the door from the passenger car into the energy car was a secure door, and no amount of battering was likely to bring it down. Which meant he would have to send his swarm outside and enter the cockpit through the shattered windshield.

Two problems: One, his swarm moved at no more than about thirty-five miles an hour, and the train, while slowing, was still going faster than that. If he swarmed outside, the wind would blow him clear away from the train.

The other problem was that he had no hands, which meant he could not manipulate the instruments, could neither step on a pedal nor throw a switch.

Definite downsides.

He looked through his many eyes, searching for a hostage young enough and fit enough for what he had in mind. He settled on a young Hispanic man wearing sneakers.

“You!” Vector said. “Break that window.”

“Break it?”

“Use that fire extinguisher. Bash it out!”

The young man complied. It was neither quick nor easy; the glass had to be hit again and again until enough glass was pushed out to allow the man to writhe through the open window. At that point the train was moving at perhaps twenty-five miles an hour. So the man hit the ground, rolled like a stunt man, jumped up, and ran away across backyards, scrambling over fences.

Dammit!

Another mistake! Vector swarmed around a fit-looking woman with a toddler in tow. “You: climb out, make your way to the front of the train. If you disobey me, I will give your brat my own special treatment.”

The woman did as ordered. She climbed out as her daughter cried and called to her, and she shouted back, “Don’t be afraid!” in a voice guaranteed to have the opposite effect, and, “Carlita, you have to be quiet!”

The train was slow enough now that Vector could follow the woman out, watch her struggle to stand up on the windowsill and try to claw her way clumsily up onto the roof of the car. But she was too short to manage it, and Vector had to waste still more time getting two other hostages to grab her legs and boost her higher up.

By the time Vector’s unwilling, impromptu engineer had made it to the roof, the train was nearly at a standstill.

And there stood Shade Darby atop the roof, in morph, looking quizzically at them. In slo-speech she said, “Well, hello there, Markovic. Bummer not having hands, huh?”

“If you try to stop us, I will take her child and its screams will fill your nightmares!”

“I see you’ve mastered the art of supervillain monologuing,” Shade said.

“If you don’t—” But Shade was gone. He cursed silently and raged at his hostage, “Get down there! Slide! Now!”

The hostage did, and Vector flowed after her. He was a quick study, and the train’s controls were not difficult to grasp. He gave the hostage his orders, ignored her weak requests for reassurance about her child, and the train began moving once again.

It accelerated smoothly away, and Vector breathed a sigh—a figurative sigh, since he had no lungs—but realized he had a different problem now: neither he nor his captive knew what speed they should set. Vector knew vaguely that different sections of track were capable of sustaining different speeds, but decided to take the risk of going full speed. So what if the train derailed? It would slow him down, but only the humans aboard would die.

Shade had not tried to derail the train, though she probably could. She had only tried to delay it. Which meant the train was being pursued, probably by the rest of the Rockborn Gang. Could he destroy them without killing Simone? Did he care? You couldn’t make a revolution without breaking some eggs, and this was a revolution, wasn’t it? No more democracy with idiot voters making idiot decisions; he would rule directly. He was a businessman, not some bumbling politician. He knew how to get things done.

Yes: a revolution. The rise of the Vectorian Age. Hah!

That thought made him happy, an emotion that lasted for a full five seconds before he realized he had wasted too much time: a helicopter was passing overhead, and it was not a news chopper.

Vector flashed suddenly on The Wizard of Oz. On the Wicked Witch of the West dispatching her flying monkeys.

“Fly!” Vector wheezed. “Fly, my pretties, fly!”

CHAPTER 36

Too Late for Flying Lessons

“WE HAVE VISUAL on the train,” the helicopter pilot said in the headphones. Dekka crouch-walked to the cockpit and leaned over the pilot’s shoulder. And there it was, visible through the bubble canopy, just a mile ahead and, astonishingly, stopped.

“Someone’s standing on the roof,” the pilot said.

“That would be my girl Shade,” Dekka said. “Land just ahead of it.”