"Okay, Jay. If you can pop a flame, I can skip jump to you directly," Marcus then said over the comms. "Then we can figure out how we're going to bust through that barricade outside." "Copy that. One of my guys has a lighter. Is that good enough?" Jay asked.
"Yeah, that'll do it," Marcus said, quickly scanning for a fire nearby to use as an entrance into the fire plane.
There: a fitfully burning piece of paper garbage, probably from the initial assault. It wasn't much, but was more than enough to get him onto the plane.
A quick focus and blink he was there. A second focus on Jay and his head was swinging around of its own accord to find a nearby flicker of orange and red. Then blink, he was through and standing beside an astonished member of Delta Team, who held a lit lighter in his gloved hand.
"Holy shit!" the operator breathed, eyes wide behind his goggles. "He really can jump from flame to flame!"
Jay threw the operator a hard look for the unprofessional outburst as he stepped towards a frowning Marcus, the earth primal's body armor scorched and dented. Then he was giving the younger primal a nod.
"Hey. Thanks for joining the shit show," Jay dryly noted.
"Thanks for the invite," Marcus retorted before looking at where a handful of Marines were clustered behind a column, one of them looking around it into the reception space and towards the entrance.
"So, is the sitch normal or fucked up?" he asked, looking back at Jay. "If we push the Soulless from their makeshift barricade out front, will that allow the evac choppers to get onto the roof?"
"As long as there aren't any more of those bastards floating around out there where we haven't seen them, yeah," the stone primal replied. "So normal? I think? At least, it's straight forward.
We take them out and my team and the Marines should be able to handle the black tags."
"Well, I didn't see any more Soulless wandering around outside when I got here," Marcus said before frowning. "But then again, I wasn't really looking."
Stepping past a frowning Jay, the younger Descendent then stepped out from behind the supporting wall they were using as cover to drop into a tactical crouch. From there he crabbed forward until he had joined the handful of Marines at the column.
"Hey," he said when they all looked at him. "Marcus Gray with RedSky. How's the entrance looking?"
"Pretty fucked, to be honest, sir," one of the Marines that had been looking around the corner indicated with a grimace on his sweaty, soot-stained face. "Our body armor can't handle that fire attack they got, and they keep pelting us with chunks of rock the size of our heads whenever we leave cover. We try to rush the entrance and they'll knock us down and burn us to ash!"
"At least we smoked a bunch of the assholes that were carrying guns," another one of the Marines indicated.
Marcus favored that one with a quick look even as his fire-enhanced brain churned through possible attack scenarios. Including a version of the stealth attack he and Val had used against the Soulless at the Centennial Bridge.
Then Jay bumped into him as the earth primal crouched just behind him.
"See anything good?" he asked when Marcus glanced over his shoulder at him.
"Maybe," the fire primal replied, returning his attention to the Marines. A quick gesture pulled the two peering around the column back then he took their place. He then carefully extended his head around the column to get a glimpse of the entrance.
A quick scan was all he got before enhanced reflexes jerked his head back in time to avoid rocks slung by their earth elementals, as the Marines had reported the Soulless doing. But it was just enough to confirm his stealth attack would work here to thin out the Soulless numbers without a frontal assault.
Working back to Jay, he looked at the curious earth primal.
"Is there enough debris around here made of stone for you to fashion some projectiles with?" he asked.
"I think so. But I can't get line of sight to aim them," Jay pointed out.
"You don't need to," Marcus said before quickly explaining what he and Val had done against the Soulless in Panama. By the end of it, not only was Jay nodding in appreciation of the plan, but so were the Marines.
"If you can keep those bastards busy, Agent Gray, we'll rush the door and take positions on either side to target the soldiers on the other side," the unit's gunnery sergeant said.
Marcus looked at the gunny and nodded then back over at Jay.
"First wave will be scatter shot," he indicated. "Enough to make them put their heads down. That's when you need to put your head around that corner and aim the next wave, Jay, punching them through whatever you can see out there. Soulless, black tags, doesn't fucking matter. Just cut them all down!'
Jay nodded, his expression grim even as he held up a hand and dust began swirling around it.
"That, I can do. I'll have the first wave ready in a couple minutes," he said and Marcus nodded again, this time in satisfaction. He then turned back to the Marines.
"I'm going to need a fire source, gunny. Like a flare or something that I can use to jump Agent Bamfield's projectiles into position. Whaddya got?"
****
The earth elemental that was monitoring movement inside the embassy frowned as an emergency road flare arced into sight from where he knew the embassy's Marine detachment were taking cover. After a short flight, it hit the ground, hopping a couple times before coming to a sputtering rest. Then he was grunting as the air filled with razor-sharp shards of stone, the projectiles hissing as they cut through the air to pound into him and a number of his comrades.
Grimacing, he felt at where the projectiles had either sliced through flesh near the surface. Or drilled holes through his body armor to penetrate into his body. What the hell was this? The humans didn't have any capabilities that allowed them to fire such projectiles! And the earth primal that was shivering behind shelter like a coward needed line of sight to aim such an attack! And he didn't see ...
The second wave scythed through the staggered elementals without mercy, striking as they still were assessing the damage from the first. This wave, however, had guidance as several of the shards abruptly changed direction mid-flight to knife through a head, or pierce a crouching elemental through the heart.
In seconds they had gone from standing and ready to fight. To slowly toppling over, like trees abruptly deprived of their roots, falling on the ground, eyes wide in shock and bleeding out fading lives onto the street.
The earth elemental that had witnessed the first wave of the counterattack was still alive to watch a second flare bounce into view from where he lay on the ground, bleeding from multiple wounds. Then, as he finally started to fade away, he heard the screams of the surviving elementals and not a few of the modified soldiers that were supporting them as a third wave of projectiles sliced through them like terminal hail, their armor as ill suited to slowing and stopping the deadly shards as the very air was.
"Go, go, go!" the gunny snarled as he stepped out from behind cover to fire a burst from his M4A at the stunned black tags that had survived. The rest of the detachment quickly followed suit, along with Jay's Delta Team and, for a furious moment, the air between the shattered entrance and the makeshift barricade was filled with muzzle flashes and hissing harbingers of death as the Marines engaged the surviving black tags.
Hearing the Americans open fire in their counterattack, the Heer and BPOL Special Operations units quickly advanced, adding their firepower to the fight. Snipers dropped hard-to-reach targets while soldiers and federal police officers directly engaged with the dozen or so black tags that were on the outside of the barricade.
Knowing they were dead one way or the other, whether in combat or getting silenced while in custody by a Null Faction agent, the black tags fought ferociously, neither giving nor asking for quarter. And they were still fighting when the Ranger company from Rammstein finally arrived in Nightstalker Blackhawks, the RRT company quickly moving to consolidate the rest of the square along with the roads leading through the Brandenburg Gate and beyond.
Only when Jay let Marcus skip him along in his stone form did the besieged Americans start getting the upper hand as the earth primal barreled into a knot of stamina and strength black tags and knocked them into a pulp to crush the heart of their formation. The earth primal worked his way through the barricade from there, keeping his stone form to let bullets ricochet off his rocky hide even as he used hammer and axe hands to batter, cudgel, and cut his way through the remaining mods.
Then, with an almost audible hush as the weapons fire fell silent, it was over.
"Medevac One, this is RRT Delta. I repeat, Medevac One, this is RRT Delta, do you read, over?" the commander of the Ranger RRT force was saying into a handheld field radio as Marcus and Jay strode towards him.
"RRT Delta, this Medevac One. We read you five by five. What's your status?" a voice said from the captain's hand held.
"The embassy is secured, but we need medical personnel on the ground to assess and treat.
Marking your dust off with orange flares. Do you copy?" the ranger officer quickly replied. "Copy orange flares marking dust off. Moving in," the voice said, and Marcus watched as the Sikorskys started to drop out of orbit and prepare to land.
"Captain, I'm Agent Jay Bamfield with Redsky," Jay said as he came to a halt a couple paces away from the Ranger officer. He jerked a thumb at Marcus. "And this is Agent Marcus Gray."
"Agents," the captain said with a perfunctory nod. "I was told you were helping the Marines to secure the embassy against the attack. Hyper humans to fight hyper humans. Thank you for your efforts."
"Of course, captain," Jay said with a thin smile before sobering. "If you have this location secure, we'll withdraw from the operational area. Before we do, however, I would like to borrow a squad of your Rangers to help me locate members of my team that I lost on infil to the Null Faction ranged attacks."
The captain nodded in understanding. Before he could order any of his company to form a recovery squad, a handful of German officers, both in Heer urban camouflage, and BPOL GSG 9 dark green and gray, approached.
"Actually, we've already taken care of your fallen comrades, Agent Bamfield," one of the BPOL officers indicated as they came to a halt close by. "I am Director Stefan Muller, GSG 9, Berlin Command." He pulled the tactical glove from his right hand before holding it out towards the two Descendants. Without hesitation, Jay took it and gave it a good shake before letting it go to allow Marcus to do the same.
Nodding to each young man as he shook their hand, the square jawed director, his blonde hair shortcut and graying, smiled.
"Thank you both," he said as the medevac choppers finally touched down, and corpsmen with medical kits and body armor hopped out to run into the embassy. "Your efforts here have helped the Bundespolizei and the Bundeswehr to take control back from the terrorists. I have teams in the city retrieving your comrades. They'll have them here within ten minutes."
"Thank you, Director, for that," Jay said with a nod. "As soon as ..."
Before the earth primal could go on, there was a 'ping' in their ear pieces, and he lifted a hand to his ear.
"Patch Actual to Bamfield. Do you copy?" a voice that wasn't Barna's, said.
"Bamfield here," Jay said with a frown over at Marcus. "Go ahead, Patch Actual."
"Jay, this is Barna," Barna's voice came on to say. "Have you secured the Berlin embassy? Overwatch shows medevac on the ground out front in the square."
"Berlin has been secured, Patch," Jay confirmed. "You can send a transport to extract us out."
"We'll extract Delta Team and your casualties, Jay," Barna said. "But I need you and Marcus in Amsterdam. Doug and Charlie Team need reinforcements to finish retaking the embassy there from Null Faction."
Jay frowned in confusion.
"Yeah, we'll still need transport for that, sir. Marcus can jump between flames. I can't."
Marcus looked at the earth primal when he said that. He still remembered that brief conversation they had in the Boneyard during Rose's testing to see if the Descendants all had some sort of instant transport ability, like Marcus's jumping into the plane of fire and out wherever he wanted to on the planet, as long as there was flame nearby. A conversation about the possibility of taking Jay along to the plane, if he could transform into a heat-resistant type of stone.
That being said, Marcus also knew Jay wasn't the most clever out of the four of them. Or the most studious. He had admitted as much to not knowing any of the stone types the fire primal had suggested as being able to pass through the fire plane, and would need to study up on their atomic and molecular structure before attempting to change into them. With little time between that testing and the fuckery they were currently in, he highly doubted the earth primal had taken the time to do that studying.
So no wonder Jay wasn't volunteering to try to make the jump through the fire plane. He wasn't confident enough in his abilities to free shift into a type of stone he didn't have burned into his memory by hard study and long practice.
Frankly, Marcus couldn't blame him. The fire plane wasn't a place to be trifled with. And it would be a horrible place to die, if Jay didn't get his stone formula just right.
"There will be no transport to get you to Amsterdam, Jay," Barna grimly noted. "You and Marcus need to figure a way of getting you both there now! That's an order! Patch Actual out!"
As the comms went dead, Jay looked over at Marcus, a mixture of uncertainty and anxiety washing across his square features.
"I ... I haven't studied the heat proof rock types that we were talking about, Marcus," he confessed in a hoarse whisper. "I can only transform into granite. And I don't know if that's heat resistant enough to make a transit through the fire plane."
Marcus glanced over at the knot of officers that, between discussing how to finish a follow up investigation before cleaning up the area so recovery and construction crews can start their work, they were looking over at the two Descendants and their urgently whispered conversation. As he did, he spun his own brain up to consider a solution to their now thorny problem.
While a direct order from a RedSky commander wasn't as serious as one in the military was, it wasn't ever a good idea to go against one. And Jay, the most military of the four of them, having been raised on a military base since they found him wandering around out in the bush as a child, always obeyed orders without fail. Always.
Which was likely why Barna used that language on him. Because he knew it would force Jay into finding a way, the oldest Descendant's behavioral tendencies well known and recorded.
Then, like a bolt out of the blue, it occurred to him. Reaching out with a hand, he took an uncertain Jay by the arm and turned him away from the officers. As he did, he leaned in close to speak in a low voice.
"Maybe we don't have to transit through the fire plane," he began. "Maybe I can skip you to Amsterdam."
"Skip ... me?? Dude, that's over 650 klicks! Not the twenty and thirty feet that you've been skipping shit over!"
"I fuckin' know that, bro!" Marcus snapped back. "But hear me out. When I was in Nicaragua helping Valentina out, I skipped a Hercules cargo plane several kilometers into the sky to help us escape from a black tag base in the jungle."
"You did what??"
"Skipped a C-130 like over a distance of several kilometers and over a klick up. I could do it because I realized something about our abilities. Like how our clothing and shit stays the same even as we move in and out of our primal forms. Like they don't care about physical reality. If we want it done, our abilities just bend physics and ignore reality to get it done. Like keeping our clothing and gear intact in our elemental forms." He paused slightly.
"Or skip a plane into the air without feeling how heavy it was. Just sending it to the starburst flare I could see in the night sky. And having it happen, because I needed it to." "Holy fuck," Jay breathed in astonishment.
"Yeah. So, wanna give it a try?" When Jay looked at him with wide, uncertain eyes, Marcus smiled lopsidedly. "Beats trying to walk through Johnny Cash Land, buddy. Worse case scenario, you go nowhere, and we're borrowing a chopper from the Rangers to get there in a couple hours."
Jay blinked rapidly as he absorbed that, obviously considering Marcus's words. Then, as abruptly as Marcus had first appeared in Berlin to help him and his team, the earth primal was nodding his head.
"Fuck me. Okay. Let's do it," he said with a grimace. "And quick, before I change my mind."
"Fuckin' capital, as Doug would say!" Marcus said with a grin before sobering. "Speaking of our air primal brother, we need to contact him to see if he can give me a fire I can focus my skip on. Do you have your cell on you? I left mine back in the Patch when I woke up suddenly to jump to Central America to start this whole merry-go-round of a day!"
"Yeah, right here," Jay said, fishing his smart phone out of an inside pocket. A quick dance of his fingers over its interface and the call was ringing through.
"Jay??" Doug's voice answered, sounding surprised. "What the bloody hell are you doing, calling me on my cell phone??"
"Unpucker, Doug, and turn your camera on," Marcus leaned close to the phone to tightly direct. "I need to see a fire in your close vicinity to enable a jump in for Jay."
"Uh, a fire??" a suddenly confused air primal replied.
"Yeah, a fire, Doug," Jay spat. "So Marcus can skip me to your location. Get on it! Now!"
"Right." The screen blurred and for a brief moment they were looking into Doug's dust-streaked face. Then the air primal flipped the camera from facing him to facing away and he disappeared. To be quickly replaced by a flickering fire burning fitfully several feet away, the remains of what appeared to be a wooden cabinet that had been struck by a fire elemental attack.
"Is that, is that good enough?" Doug stammered.
"I hope so," Marcus replied before looking over at Jay. "Better go stone form, bro. This is going to be rough and abrupt, if it works." He hesitated slightly before putting a hand on Jay's shoulder.
"And try not to puke your guts out when you get there."
"Puke my ... what the fuck is that supposed to mean?" Jay demanded to know even as he shifted into his granite form.
But Marcus was unheeding as he focused on the flame that danced on the smart phone's screen.
He just needed to make Jay go there!
Pouring everything into the effort, like he had with the C-130, the fire primal focused so hard on the image, he thought he himself would use it to jump into the fire plane. Then, after a slight pause, just like with the transport, the space underneath his hand was empty. At the same time the smart phone winked out of existence, leaving Marcus with nothing to confirm he had successfully skipped Jay all the way to frickin' Amsterdam.
"Fuck!" he grunted, quickly pushing aside a wave of annoyance to refocus. Then he cast frantically around for a fire source he could use to jump to the fire plane.
There! Burning fuel by one of the shot up BPOL carriers. Almost as soon as his eyes found the jumping flame, he felt himself blink and he was in the now familiar space of amber, gold and red. Where he had to push aside an impulse to just hang out there for a bit and catch his breath, knowing it meant little in terms of time passing in the real world even if he spent hours in here.
'Alright, Jay, Doug, and Amsterdam,' he grimly thought, letting his eyes scan over the columns of fire dancing all around him, their seething power a cool breeze against his sweating skin.
'Where the hell ...?'
There. A flame that shifted with familiar purpose and presence. Focusing on it, he felt himself rush towards it. And then blink.
Jay was just picking himself up with a groan of pain when he appeared out of the flame he had used to skip the earth primal across the distance between the two European capitals.
"Fuck you, Marcus," the oldest Descendent growled as he laboriously climbed back to his feet to see Marcus standing close by. "You didn't say you'd be skipping me into a fucking wall! That hurt, man!"
"At least you didn't have to walk through fire, bro," Marcus flatly pointed out before looking at an astonished Doug and an amazed Charlie Team.
"Hey boys and girls! What's up?"
"Gray," Doug shook off his astonishment to tautly say. "Congratulations on your successful transport of our comrade from Berlin via skipping."
"Thanks, bro," Marcus said, slapping the air primal on the shoulder, earning himself a wince from the more slighter built Descendant. "Now, what's the sitch?"
Doug glanced at Jay as the earth primal joined them. Then a gesture made a map appear in front of them made out of dancing light and dust.
"The American Mission here, in Amsterdam, is actually divided into two parts," he quickly explained. "The Embassy, which is located close to the Hague where all the official buildings of the World Court are and such. And the Consulate General, which is located in the historic Museumplein area of the city, crowded with old buildings that are decades old. While the ambassador and her diplomatic staff are located at the embassy, the day-to-day work done by the Mission is at the Consulate General."
"I'm guessing Null Faction hit the Consulate, then," Jay said with a frown.
"Since that would interrupt more vital work, like passports and work visas. Instead of menacing the ambassador so close to international buildings, which would invite an international response."
"Did you read a book on the way here, Jay?" Doug said with a hint of reluctant approval in his voice, albeit tainted with a hint of his usual acerbity. "I didn't think you had the IQ to put those two points together."
"Nice," Marcus grimaced. They didn't have time to deal with Doug's overbearing ego just to pull his ass out of the fire.
"So, you got all your shit wired, then, Doug? Got it covered? Cuz me and Jay can just fuck off and find a place to grab a beer, if you do ..."
"You know I bloody don't," Doug growled in return.
"Then stop being such a dick and let's get this figured out, yes? So, Consulate General? Museumplein?"
Grimacing, then sighing, Doug nodded before turning back to the map he had crafted from dust and light.
"Null Faction must've studied this location fairly extensively," he noted before touching points on the map that brightened slightly. "They cut off power, communications, and blocked the streets in and around the consulate building at these points. All simultaneously and in about five minutes."
He dropped his hand.
"The Dutch National Police were able to move in with their Special Interventions Unit, along with regional SWAT teams to evacuate all the civilian non-combatants from the area but were unable to evacuate any personnel from the consulate building itself. Including Dutch nationals that had day jobs in the building. The Dutch military has cordoned off the area, but have made no gains in trying to retake the neighborhood, saying they are ill-equipped to handle hyper human assailants."
The air primal folded his arms.
"With no US military bases in the Netherlands, only NATO bases, a call went out to Ramstein to send a Ranger RRT to help with the situation, along with four medevac Sikorskys to evacuate the staff from the embassy." Doug frowned.
"Two of those medevacs are now smoldering heaps of metal somewhere in the vicinity, shot down by air enhanced-fire elemental attacks. And the RRT team is in orbit around the city, waiting for us to secure the air space around the consulate so they can insert." "Damn. And I thought Berlin was a shit show!" Jay growled.
"At least they just hit the consulate, and not the embassy itself," Marcus pointed out. "And they didn't hit other American sites across the country, like they did in Germany."
"Only because there aren't any," Doug noted. "Just NATO. And if Null Faction hits them, it's Article 5 and all out war!" The air primal's expression tightened. "But why concentrate on American global assets? Why not Britain? Or France? Or even Brazil? China?"
"They hit British assets in Chechia, remember?" Marcus said, his expression grim. "But if I were to guess, the States remains the only world power that can respond to any issue across the globe in less than twenty four hours. Faster, now that we're involved."
"They're testing our response times," Jay grimly concluded and Marcus tapped his nose before pointing at him.
"If that's the case, we've barely managed to thwart most of their attacks," Doug said with a shake of his head. "If they start hitting major infrastructure and logistics targets world wide, like the Panama Canal attack, there just isn't enough of us to stop them. And we've already seen how ill-equipped regular militaries are to deal with hyper human threats."
"All the more reason to find the Zoo that the NSA guy mentioned in the brief before the shit hit the fan," Marcus indicated. "And where the grow ops are pumping out the black tags and the Soulless clones." He then made a tight, dismissive gesture.
"That, however, is a discussion for after we sort out what's going on here!" Marcus looked at the map. "Where are the Soulless attacking this place? And how many are we dealing with?" Doug also returned his attention to the map.
"Five teams of double each elemental. So eight per team. We saw them on the way in, before I used a tactic to keep them out of the building itself, creating ghost duplicates to give them the impression there were considerably more of us in here. Which made them hesitate long enough for us to secure the inside of the building."
Marcus glanced around at what appeared to be a reception area where consulate staff would interact with dutch citizens applying for visas and work permits. Compared to the massive chamber the Berlin embassy had boasted, it was almost a closet. But it was big enough to make defending it a challenge. Which Doug and Charlie Team had done, if the black tag bodies scattered liberally over the place were any indication.
"Where are the consulate staff and any civilians trapped inside when the attack started?" he asked.
"The Marines moved them to their reinforced bunker in the basement, along with the Consular General and her staff," Doug said with a look over at Charlie Team's commander, a capable woman with hard eyes, who nodded. "They're waiting for us to signal the all clear to begin the evacuation."
"Cool. Getting back to the Soulless outside. You didn't happen to take any out before you locked the place down, did you?" the fire primal pressed. Doug shook his head.
"I managed to avoid direct contact," he added before admitting. "I am capable, but I've not faced Soulless in combat before." He looked over at a frowning Jay. "I usually left the heavy fighting to Jay." Who immediately grimaced.
"Yeah," he grunted. "I'm overmatched here, Doug. A company of black tags I can handle.
Forty Soulless? Not a fuckin' chance!"
"If Panama taught me anything, it's that fighting together is much more effective than going solo anyway," Marcus grimly stated. "We need to figure out how to work together to take those bastards out!" He then looked at the windows.
"Anything outside that the Soulless and their black tag support are using for cover?" Doug nodded.
"A half dozen stolen armored cars," he said. "Pretty effective at keeping Commander Dreven's Charlie Team at bay. Being bloody bulletproof and all." Marcus frowned as something occurred to him.
"Armored cars, you say. Like ones made out of metal."
"No, the ones made out of paper mache. Of course they're made out of metal, Marcus!" Doug snidely retorted. "They are armored!"
"With ... metal. Which can be electrified," Marcus pointed out, speaking slowly as if explaining something to somebody that wasn't very intelligent.
Which was enough to send a ripple of annoyed frustration across Doug's lean features.
"Of course it can be electrified, Gray! Did you miss remedial science when you were ..." Only to stumble to a halt when he realized what Marcus was suggesting.
"Bloody hell."
"Yeah," Marcus said dryly.
"Charge the cars, Doug," Jay directed, seeing where Marcus was going with his suggestion. "Marcus, you superheat the metal at the same time and I'll bend it onto our friends out there. We time it right and we'll catch those dirty Soulless with their pants down around their ankles. Hopefully before they convince themselves that Doug's phantoms weren't real and assault the front door!"
The earth elemental then looked over at a thinly smiling Marcus.
"And you're thinking of doing one of those quick strike things while they're getting electrocuted, aren't you, Marcus?"
"Just a little after, actually," the fire primal said, his smile growing slightly. "Wouldn't want to get toasted by accident!" Jay chuckled wryly.
"No, that would suck." He sobered. "Do you need line of sight to charge those armored cars, Doug?"
****