Chapter Text
The lost workshop was bedlam. Aisha and Lisa were scrambling madly at the Comm center as messages and alerts poured in from all their contacts great and small; the tinkerbots were racing back and forth across the floor, dodging people's feet and sounding their own clarions as the members of the Alliance raced about trying to batten down the hatches. Sparky was down in the portal chamber, pulling in people from every corner of Brockton Bay as Tagg's PRT agents rolled up the streets right on their heels.... And one Adrian Smith, the rogue cape known as Skinwalker, standing in the middle of it all trying to maintain the illusion of control.
Taylor watched her boyfriend as he clutched his head and tried to shout instructions over the growing din. She'd never seen him this agitated, and she didn't blame him. One of the countless things they had been dreading had come to pass: Director Tagg, militant, bigot and Weapons Grade Asshat, was now in charge of the PRT ENE, and it seemed he had decided to come out guns blazing. He had both the heroes of the Protectorate and squad cars full of PRT agents out in the streets, table-flipping Brockon Bay as if there were no script and no time limit.
If it hadn't been for the subtle and timely warning by, of all people, Director Piggot, there was no telling how many of the Alliance or their friends or family or contacts would have been caught in the sweep. Several of the Alliance themselves had gotten close shaves; Taylor was just back from helping Parian settle into one of the spare workshops. The rogue dressmaker had just barely missed getting swept up at her dress shop; by sheer fortune Adrian had been there as Skinwalker and managed to teleport her out. Taylor shook her head and growled to herself; so much for the Unspoken Rules. Or the Written Laws, for that matter, she seethed to herself. All that effort Parian had put into remaining a neutral rogue, and one eager beaver in the PRT proved that none of it mattered.
They'd lost the downtown office, and their (public, obvious decoy) bank accounts had been locked. Several of their business contacts had been rounded up for questioning and "Master/Stranger screening," and on the grayer side of the line many of their street-level contacts had seemingly disappeared-- either vanished down their burrows and hidey-holes, or snatched up by the PRT, there was no telling.
She laid her aching triangular ears back along her head. And that damned Comm center kept blatting out news reports at full volume...
Adrian stalked over to the Comm center, his jet fur bristling in irritation. "Can you shut that off?" he all but barked at her, waving at the monitors. "Or turn it down or something. Everybody's stirred up as it is."
"Not if you want to keep up-to-date," Tattletale said, not looking away from the mass of screens. Even as she and Adrian dickered, the Thinker was surfing the cable channels on the main screen with her free hand, apparently letting her Power sift through the soundbites for anything important while her attention was elsewhere. "My power can spin silk purses out of sows ears, remember, but I gotta have the sow's ears at least."
"Yeah and right now we got a lotta pork byproduct to pick through," Aisha chipped in. Her eyes had gone milky pale, they way they did when she was looking through her ravens. "No sign of the po-po for a half-dozen blocks in any direction. Leastways they haven't figured out the location of the Workshop yet."
Taylor felt the knots in her insides loosen a little at that. It had been one of her recurring fears, almost from the day she'd moved in--- that all their enemies would corner them here someday; that she'd wake up and find the Empire or the PRT or who knew who else standing over her with guns raised...
She shook that off. You're not a little girl hiding from the boogeyman, she scolded herself . You're Hemlokk, one of the most dangerous independent heroes in the Bay!
.... Silly, edgelord-ish hero name to the contrary, a voice in the back of her head said wryly. She grumped at it and ignored it yet again.
The main screen on the Comm center surfed methodically from one news channel to the next... then stopped, then clicked back several channels to lock on the image of a very familiar building. The DU office. Bayleaf stopped sniping with Tattletale and looked up. "What is this?"
"Bad." Lisa leaned back, face suddenly pale, her finger rising off the scroll button on the panel. Taylor felt ice trickle through her veins as the newscaster's voice-over droned on. "---gunfire, as the PRT attempted to arrest one of the leading members of the Dockworker's Union for questioning in the Master/Stranger Device investigation. Reports are that one Daniel Hebert... shots fired as he resisted arrest--"
The world faded away. The shouting and chatter of panicking people all around her disappeared in a staticky whine as the blood drained away from her face. She toppled--
Large, furry hands grabbed hold of her, strong yet gentle. They lowered her to the cushions of a meeting-room couch as a deep, rumbling voice barked orders above her. Adrian was shouting... something at the people around them, something commanding in full Skinwalker mode, but it was Adrian, her Bayleaf who spoke in her ear; "He's okay. He's okay, Taylor, don't worry, I'll take care of this..."
Adrian felt the icicles slowly thaw from around his heart. "Danny Hebert was just evacuated from the scene," the prattling news-idiot was saying. He was alive; they didn't evacuate the dead. He fervently and silently thanked God. Nobody appreciated how tough Taylor was, Adrian reflected as he lowered his girlfriend's half-insensate form to the couch. In the original canon timeline she had not only survived but dominated, powering through challenges that would have shattered the will of a Terminator. But here and now she was stilll a young woman and was terrifyingly vulnerable. She had lost her mother to a traffic accident and it had left her reeling; her best friend had betrayed her and it had left her a shell.
The very suggestion that she might have lost her father--
Adrian rose to his full height. Everyone in the room found themselves taking a step away from the worgen; he was radiating a bloody fury like a furnace radiated heat. "Give me tracking on those PRT squads," he growled at Tattletale, his voice a gravelly purr.
Tattletale hastened to obey, her fingers dancing over the keyboard as she pulled up a traffic map of the city, one dotted with moving labels. It was a simple program, barely even AI, and had begun as a handful of unrelated off-the shelf hacker and tinkerware kludged together, but brilliant in its simplicity, enough that no less than Dragon herself had complimented Tattletale and Hemlokk on its creation, even as she had tightened up and patched some of its makeshift oding. It cross-referenced traffic reports, police scanner bulletins, public e and publically accessible video cameras with facial and pattern recognition software to track the movement of...well, anyone or anything in the city, if the search parameters were concise enough. It was a learning system,and it had its limitations. It wasn't some all-seeing eye; it couldn't track everything and everyone at once. But police routes? EMTs? Maintenance crews? PRT vehicles? Eay Peasy. Lines of dots, marked in red to denote PRT forces, began inching their way across the digital map. "They're probably making a beelione for the nearest hospital--" Lisa started to say.
"No, they won't make that mistake twice," Bayleaf said. "They tried to corner us in a hospital ER once and it went badly for them. Besides why would they? The PRT has a full medical suite, better equipped than anything in a civilian hospital. And Taylor's dad is a bargaining chip; Tagg will want to keep completely under his own control." One clawed finger reached up and tapped a little row of dots winding their way through the Brockton Bay streets. "There. That one."
"Signs point to yes," Tattletale agreed. "My power is screaming that the others are decoys, and-- whoa, wait, what are you doing?" For Bayleaf was pulling on the last of his uniform, along with a bandolier of healing potions.
"I'm going to rescue him," Bayleaf said, tightening the bandolier strap.
"Not all by yourself--"
"Wouldn't it be better to let them, y'know, patch him up first, THEN go rescue him?" Aisha chipped in. Several of her ravens warrrked in agreement.
"These are a new batch of healing potions," Bayleaf said. "Anything short of decapitation, they'll fix. They'll have to be enough."
"But..."
Bayleaf donned his cloak. His eyes burned with intensity. "Mr. Hebert isn't just family, and he isn't just the guy who helps us launder our money," he said with a hint of snark." He's been in the thick of things with the Alliance right from the start. He knows our names, he knows our aliases, he knows the location of our secret base. We have got to get him out of the PRT's clutches before Tagg finds out exactly what he's got his hands on, or we're all cooked." He caught a glimpse of the whites of her round eyes, then he'd whirled and was racing up the stairs to the roof.
"Who's going with you?"
"Noone," he said. "We need all hands on deck here. Give Sparky whatever he needs to finish his project, fortify this place and work on pulling in everyone to safety. Especially New Wave, do whatever it takes to get them onside. Mr. Hebert isn't the only one who can spill the beans on us." He reached under his cloak and pulled out a glowing hearthstone. "Tattletale, I need an address--"
Tattletale's eyes flickered over the screen. "Okay there are three groups of PRT transports moving away from the Docks," she said. "Two are distractions, The real ambulance escort is passing fourth and Cornwallis. There's no way you'll catch up with them--"
He ignored her, his eyes focused on someone on the far side of the chamber. It was Sparky. The blood-elf changeling's robes were a stained mess, and his normally impeccable blonde mane was a disheveled mess.. "Sparky! How long till liftoff?"
Shar'Din stood erect and smoothed his rumpled robes. "That's what I've come to tell you," he said. "It's ready to begin. It'll take an hour once it starts---"
"Start it now." His voice as grim. "Mr. Hebert and I will be back soon."
Shar'Din blinked, then his expression turned serious."You know that once it starts, there's no stopping. All the portals will seal, all the Hearthstones will reset. If you aren't back before it peaks, you won't be able to port back in." His warning was dire.
"That's why I'm going alone," Bayleaf said. "Start it now." Wordlessly Shar'Din nodded and raised his staff to a rune engraved on the wall. There was a deep note, like an underwater church bell, and the rune began to glow a deep pastel purple. The glow began to spread along the scrollwork stretching out from the rune., around the room and out through the doorways. "You've got sixty minutes, tops," Shar'Din said.
Bayleaf nodded. He popped the latch on the skylight and looked over at Hemlokk, who had just woken from her swoon, His amber eyes softened. "I'll be right back with him, I promise," he said. There was a swirl of transformation magic, and a giant owl vanished through the skylight.
Not a moment after the skylight closed there was a commotion down one of the corridors. Who should step into the room but Danny. He was scuffed up, there was an IV bandage just below his rolled-up trenchcoat sleeve, but he was very much whole and alive. "I'm okay, I'm okay," he said breathlessly in response to the shouts of surprise and alarm all around. "I couldn't get my hearthstone to activate until a minute ago---"
"DADDY!" the distraught wail was his only warning before he was hit amidships by a furry torpedo and borne down to the couch behind him. It was all he could do to cradle his werewolf daughter as she sobbed and burrowed into his side.
"What the hell? We thought you'd been shot!" Lisa yelled.
Danny shook the lapel of his trenchcoat. "I was!" he said . Taylor growled silently. "Hey, easy Little Owl. Your boyfriend's gift came through." He tugged on his trenchcoat's sleeve ."Got a couple bruised ribs and knocked on my can. Adrian was right on the money; This coat you gave me stopped the bullets cold." He looked up woozily and held up one bandaged hand. "Got more cuts in my fingers when they shot the hearthstone right out of my hand." He grinned crookedly and plucked the thong hanging around his neck, pulling a rune-etched stone pendant from under his shirt. "Good thing I carry a spare, huh? Didn't manage to activate it till they let me go to the can..."
Taylor pulled back and looked at him in shock. "You weren't in the ambulance?"
Danny blinked. "No... no, I never left the building!"
Lisa looked up at the board. The trio of vehicles she'd tagged as carrying the elder Hebert was continuing on its way, meandering back and forth across the map as if it was in no particular hurry to get to the forcefield bridge and across to the Rig. Facts clicked together. "It's deliberate," she said. "Crap. It's three card Monty, and I forgot the first rule: the Queen card is never on the table in the first place. Tagg was already three steps ahead. It's all a trap!"
*****
The PRT sergeant swore silently to himself in a steady stream as his escort convoy wove its way through the streets of Brockton Bay. Tthere were three vehicles, two heavily armored troop carriers loaded with PRT squaddies packing assault rifles, brute tazers and foam throwers, and a single bulky vehicle that served as a parahuman ambulance-slash-prison transport with a couple of EMTs, and a few MORE PRT officers armed for bear. They were allegedly transporting a wounded "person of interest" with instructions to transport them straight to the Protectorate floating base and the medical facilities onboard.
Which made the endless instructed detours all that much more frustrating.
The PRT troopers in the convoy were not in a celebratory mood. They were all long term veterans of Brockton Bay; this was not the first time an ambitious commander or director or other high hat had gotten the brilliant idea of hitting the Brockton Bay underworld in a mass sting, and it had always played out the same way: a lot of dangerous, unpleasant excitement, followed closely by mind numbing debriefings and public flag-waving, and then a painful return to normal as the villains either escaped and rebuilt from what should have been rubble, or took advantage of the chaos to swell and grow into the vacuum of power left by those who fell. In the end the gung-ho commander would throw in the towel and transfer out, leaving Brockton Bay as it always was: a sinking Titanic with an unending game of musical chairs on deck.
And, of course, now under the latest gung-ho idiot's orders they were setting up a trap for the very heroes who were changing all that. They were violating the letter and spirit of the Unwritten Rules like a nun at a whorehouse.... Family was out of bounds, rule one. They were using the father of one of the Alliance as bait... not just to any team of capes ,mind, but to possibly the most dangerous and ruthless team of capes in the world.
So yes... not happy.
"This is bullshit," the lead driver spat into his microphone for the twentieth time.
"Copy that," one of the other riders muttered back.
"Complete bullshit!"
"You know that target is going to rip us a new one for geekin' on his girl's Old Man," a third voice said.
"Yeah, we do. So cut the radio chatter," came the voice of their sergeant. "And keep your eyes open for the target. We drew straws already and we're giving him your ass first for the kickin'." This got a few humorless chuckles. More than one pair of eyes scanned the skies at the reminder; it took a lot of training, even in the age of capes, to condition lookouts to look up.
And a rain of moonfire and sunfire fell on them from the sky.
The armor plating on the vehicles dispersed the arcane energy.... barely. The moon-white radiance that should have knocked them all cold instead only lit up their nerve endings and made every speaker and headset squeal. The engines backfired to a shuddering halt. Tires blew and steam rolled from under the hood as targeted beams of solar fury cooked the wheels and boiled off the batteries instantly.
The airwaves filled with cursing. For not the first time the sergeant cursed his men's sloppy radio discipline and hit the squelch so he could bellow over top of them. "This is Vehicle Three, We are hit! Engines are down. Vehicles One and Two what is your status?" He let his thumb up.
Crackling static and garbled swearing was his only answer. At least the sputtering noises SOUNDED like swearing..... The sergeant swore and got ready to radio it in to headquarters when a freaking grove of trees came running out of a nearby alley and SLAMMED, bodily, into all three vehicles. Troopers yelled in alarm as they were knocked about inside the vehicles. Both roof gunners on the fore and aft vehicles were nearly dislodged from their seats. The tree-men wrapped their flailing limbs around the vehicles, trapping the men inside. Thick woody vines erupted from the pavement,coiling with lightning speed over the wheels and doors and the mounted ma deuces. The groaning of strained, crumpling metal was deafening.
Only when all three vehicles were trussed like Brer Rabbit on his worst day did Skinwalker descent. He glided down and swiflty transformed from giant owl to werewolf, then to the shape of a massive were-bear, and climbed up on the half-toppled ambulance. He smashed out the viewport with one fist, wrenched it into a gaping hole like a man tearing open a bag of potato chips, and poured fistfuls of starfire into the gap till light shone back out through the cracks in the prisoner transport's chassis. He had no fear it would hurt Danny: long practice had shown this particular spell only stunned, it did not wound. But he made damned sure anyone inside was taking a solid unscheduled nap.
With a wrench of his wrists the back doors were open. He had the barest moment to blink in confusion. There were no EMTs, there were no PRT troopers. There was no Danny Hebert. Instead there was something that he could just about identify as some sort of net gun--
The net gun fired, wrapping him from head to furry toe in metal cables. A truly staggering amount of electricity poured down the wires and into his body. He squalled in pain, his body spasming.
He slumped down, the world going dark as the foam nozzles fired...