Pulse

TWENTY- EIGHT

When Queen set out from the Mercury she had three plans of attack to gain entrance to the Beta compound. Her first and the most simple plan was to find an unguarded portion of wall and, using a grappling hook, climb and heave herself over. But fifty yards from the wall, her plan was foiled. A puff of gas revealed a crisscrossing maze of laser tripwires that not even a tightly clad Catherine Zeta-Jones could work her way through. If that wasn't enough, she spotted an array of heat-detecting sensors peering out from the twenty-foot wall like cycloptic guardians. She could have beat the heat sensors using the heat shield folded into a four-inch square inside her cargo pants pocket, but using the shield while working a laser maze would have been impossible without wings. Gen-Y knew what they were doing.

Moving through the darkness, she worked her way around the outer wall, careful to keep a good distance between her and the laser grid. She stopped one hundred yards from the facility's main entrance. A dirt road led up to the fifteen-foot-tall, barbed-wire-topped gates. Guard towers rose up on either side of the gate and spotlights illumi nated the area. She was sure an array of motion detectors and heat sensors would detect her approach anyway. Of course, she could always go the old-fashioned route by paying no heed to the sensors, killing the guards, and blowing the gate with C4, but King wanted the subtle approach for now. And she trusted his judgment. So she continued along the facility's outer wall, heading toward the base of the volcano, in search of a chink in the security barrier's armor.

She had hoped the volcano side of the facility wouldn't be walled— who would be foolish enough to enter or exit over such a steep grade— but then she realized that these walls were probably created just as much for keeping mindless monsters in as infiltrators out. The twenty-foot wall continued right up and across the incline. For a moment, short of a Trojan horse, she couldn't picture a way inside the technological fortress.

Then she saw it.

A sheer cliff rising fifty feet above the wall that ended at a ledge just large enough for her to stand on. From the ledge, she could descend into the compound without tripping any ground sensors and still be low enough not to appear as a blip on their radar.

After shedding and hiding thirty pounds of equipment that would have come in handy in a variety of other scenarios, but now served no purpose, she stretched and took inventory of her remaining equipment. A Heckler & Koch MK23 handgun with twelve hollow-point .45 ACP rounds, a LAM (laser aiming module), and a sound suppressor was strapped to her hip. She had two spare magazines for the weapon. Over her shoulder she held an UMP submachine gun, a light close-combat weapon that held the same hollow-point rounds as her handgun. But without a sound suppressor, the weapon would be reserved for when the gloves came off. Before then she'd use her most deadly weapons: her hands. She slung the heaviest piece of equipment, a T-PLS pneumatic grappling gun, over her other shoulder and started up the volcano's incline.

She climbed three hundred feet, making sure to avoid any sensors hidden within the crags of the volcanic stone, then cut across the mountainside perpendicular to the wall. She reached the cliff base a few minutes later. She stood two hundred feet away from the wall, but only five vertical feet taller. She looked up at the cliff, searching for handholds and found very few in the moonlight.

As a child, Queen would never have pictured herself looking at a wall like this with the intention of climbing it and throwing herself into an enemy compound. Before her mother died and her father hit the bottle, and her, she'd been a bookworm, and despite her good looks had been teased for her mind. As a result, she'd become timid and fearful, even more so when the beatings began. Over time, one fear after another began to manifest. At first it was obvious things like spiders and mice. But then a fear of heights took root. Elevators, enclosed spaces, lightning, and an array of wild animals joined the list. By the time she lost her son, with her fears exaggerated by LSD, she was more timid than a snowshoe hare. Her boot camp psychologist diagnosed her with an anxiety disorder brought on by mass phobias and past trauma. The psychologist suggested she tackle her fears head on, and quickly, or she'd be sent home. The idea was to hold a spider until she no longer feared spiders. But she discovered, after some experimentation, that she no longer feared spiders after she reached out and crushed one.

In this way she didn't simply conquer her fears, she destroyed them. After completing boot camp successfully, she took up hunting, base jumping, and freehand cliff climbing whenever she had enough leave time. It turned out that the wide range of experience garnered from her extracurricular activities and the outright aggression toward fear-inducing situations helped her excel beyond the standards of her male counterparts. She joined the Army Rangers three years after enlisting. Delta recruited her, the first woman in special ops, one year later when her reputation grew to legendary status among the Rangers. She held her own with the men and used her feminine wiles to disarm them and her fists to pound them into submission. The first man to resist the urge of underestimating her because of her blond locks and perky breasts sparred with her for ten brutal, bloody rounds until Keasling called a stop to the fight. King, still bleeding from his right eye and nose, invited her to join his new team on the spot. Having earned her respect, she agreed.

That had been three years ago, the official banishment of the last vestments of her fears. She was Delta now. Fearless. After chalking her hands she launched onto the wall. She felt for handholds, some barely big enough for her to claw onto with her fingernails, and hauled herself up. Halfway up, she discovered a vertical crack, which she jammed her fingers into with each upward lurch. She covered the fifty vertical feet to the small ledge in fifteen silent minutes without even a grunt of exertion to give away her position.

She squatted on the ledge, looking into the compound from above. A long, four-story building stood at the back of the facility, its roof ten feet below her current elevation. On both sides of the main building were what looked like four water tanks. Beyond lay an open courtyard, an air-control tower, and the outer wall and guard towers. It was all very plain, but one thing did catch her eye that had been obscured by shadow in the satellite photos. A tunnel ran from the back of the main building, through the outer wall, and into the side of the volcano.

Though interesting, the tunnel didn't concern her. It was the facility she was absolutely positive existed beneath the surface of the compound that she needed access to. She unslung the grappling gun and replaced the metal hook with a titanium arrowhead. She took aim at the rooftop of the main building, looking for a suitable target and found it in the tar rooftop itself. She pulled the trigger. The grappling gun coughed as 400psi of compressed air launched the arrowhead towing a black 7mm Kevlar line behind it. The arrow struck the tar roof, burying deep with nothing more than a dull thud. The butt of the gun held a spring-loaded cam, which she jammed into the crack she'd climbed and triggered the locking mechanism. Two serrated "axes" sprang out and bit stone. Designed to stop a free fall, the cam could hold her weight, plus the rest of the team's if need be. She wound in the line until it was tight, clipped on a small, high-velocity trolley, grabbed on tight, and flung herself out over the cliff without a moment's hesitation.

She glided silently over the wall and sailed toward the main building's roof. She let go as she cleared the roof, absorbing the impact first with her ankles, then knees, and ended in the roll. She made no more noise than a squirrel might. She lay on her stomach, searching for signs of alarm, but her approach had gone unnoticed. She crawled to the vent and began unscrewing the four screws that held it in place.

A scuff of shoe on tar caught her attention, but she didn't pause. Whoever it was hadn't sounded an alarm yet, and time was of the essence. She wasn't concerned. Whoever the unlucky person was, they were about to discover that God sometimes does throw lightning bolts from Heaven.

As the fourth screw came up, she heard the wet pop and felt the sprinkle of liquid on her back she'd been expecting. Not God. Knight. And the lightning bolt was actually a 25 x 59mm armor-piercing round that turned the man's head into mist.

She spun around and caught the now headless Gen-Y security guard's body before it could hit the roof with its full force. It wouldn't be loud, but if there was someone in the room below, they'd surely hear it. Blood oozed from the body as Queen returned her attention to the vent. She pulled the covering off and peered inside.

The smooth corrugated metal of the vent's interior looked solid enough for her to move through with a good degree of silence, but the barely two-foot-square space would make for a tight fit. Still, there was no other choice. Queen gave a thumbs-up toward the volcano, knowing Knight and Rook would see, and slid into the bowels of Manifold Beta.