I'd love to know where they got that. I think I want one. Hope TECH's not back in town.
    Arms popped out from its sides, firing down toward where Phoenix Talon and the wolves were—and Holly and her presumably innocent cameraman. Swearing silently, I moved the latter two out of the field of fire. Very, very gently, as Talon backflipped out of the way of the energy blasts.
    I went after the raven woman who was driving the truck and missed badly as the semi looped evasively. Phoenix Talon's nerve strike took down one of the wolves, and he dragged the man away, toward the stairwell. Thunderbolt scowled and lifted his hands to try to drain the truck's energy source, but it was something he'd never encountered before.
    A crater appeared in front of Talon and his prisoner as the blasts barely missed him. He jumped it, with little care for the way the man's head smacked into the edge. The truck circled again. A tendril snaked out and grabbed hold of Talon's captive's leg.
    A second or so later I had my close encounter with the lasers on the truck, and another of those delightful free-fall moments before my remaining shred of consciousness kept me from getting up close and personal with the parking lot. I do hate energy weapons.
    Scott hung as a gas before the truck, coalescing into a liquid as it moved through him, spreading himself over it like a layer of paint. He caught a brief glimpse of the startled faces of the raven women. The cab was airtight, and the engine was shielded. Of course. But at least he had a grip on the thing. Now what? Munin hit a switch. The cab began getting very hot, and there was nothing Scott could do about it but metaphorically grit his teeth and bear it.
    Odin's cable started retracting, pulling him up to where he could climb into the back of the bizarre vehicle. It was moving erratically now, with an upward angle to make sure it didn't run into anything.
    Phoenix Talon was being dragged up along with his former captive, a couple hundred feet in the air. He whacked at the tendril with his bokken, but it didn't quite break. I saw him let go. Idiot. There was a reflecting pool in the office park below him; he was actually trying to angle himself to hit the water.
    Thunderbolt was wondering where everyone had gone all the sudden. He looked around for the other wolf, who was nowhere in sight. There was a man standing at the edge of the crowd, wearing a trenchcoat. No sign of the wolf head. He saw Thunderbolt looking at him, and ran.

[Aside: Scott]

    I flew over and caught Phoenix Talon before he could splatter. My phone rang.
    "Yeah?"
    "Hi, I just thought I'd call you so you can track me as I'm being dragged under Boston Harbor by the runaway flying aquatic truck," Scott chirped. "I think we're about fifty feet under and descending rapidly."
    "Thanks."
    Away in the distance we could see Thunderbolt chasing someone. We headed over in that direction. I dropped Phoenix Talon on the ground. He popped a flash, but the guy was putting his wolf mask back on, and it shielded his eyes for that crucial second. Electricity streamed from Thunderbolt's hands. The fleeing man stumbled slightly and kept going. Phoenix Talon whipped a grapple around his legs, sending him hard into the pavement.
    "Stop, in the name of the law!" Talon barked.
    The guy rolled over, reached for the cable, looked around and saw the three of us surrounding him and sighed. "All right, I give. Can I talk to my lawyer, please?"
    Bright boy.
    A few moments later I got another call.
    "They just blew the skin and the tires off the truck," Scott told me. "I'm sorta sinking here. I think they got away. I cracked the windshield—that thing's hard! I put my hand through a bank vault easier than that. I've got the Mariners on the other line, they said they're getting a mini-sub out to come look for me. I kinda figured this was going to happen."
    It took them over an hour and a half to get him. For the rest of us, the first thing was to get back to Caduceus and find out what had been taken. Holly was long since gone; no doubt going to spend the night playing with her tape.

[Aside: Phoenix Talon]

    While Phoenix Talon saw his date home, the rest of us helped get the scene stabilized, as far as we were able to given the state of the building. Eventually we ended up in the vault with Dr. Drescher.
    "You said they took something from here?" He looked around what was actually a rather sizeable space.
    "Apparently," I told him.
    "Let me go through the inventory. Y'know, I don't know what's going to happen to all of this, this used to be an airtight clean room...."
    "Not anymore. Hope it wasn't contagious."
    "No, there's nothing actually kept here, that was just to make sure that the equipment all stayed in perfectly functional order." He started going over lists. "Oh, no. Looks like they took the gene sequencer. Box about yea big by yea big." He indicated the size of the machine with his hands; twice the size of a breadbox, maybe.
    "What the hell would they want with that?"
    "This was one of the cutting edge, one of the serious pieces of tech that we'd laid our hands on," he explained. "Able to handle protein folding. I don't know why they'd need it, but anyone who was attempting to do serious genetic manipulation would have to get their hands on one."
    I unclenched my teeth with an effort, nodded and kept listening.
    "The fact that we had this was one of the reasons why we considered the business to be viable. If we can't get it back, then we're kind of dead in the water." He looked lost at the prospect. "If you guys can get it back—we need it."
    "We'll see what we can do."
    "If they really knew what they were doing they'd be able to grow, say, Ebola virus in this... we wanted it in order to try and find counterviruses that would latch onto the viral sites in the body that, say, AIDS attaches to, to make sure that AIDS couldn't attach to it. The full potential, somewhat frightening... I trust that you'll be able to get it back to us in a timely fashion?" he asked hopefully.
    "We'll see what we can do," I repeated. I wasn't about to make promises at this point, and Thunderbolt's murmur of agreement suggested similar caution on his part.
    "I'm glad that you guys were here, otherwise the building could have been seriously damaged."
    "As opposed to...?" I looked at the hole the truck had left in the lab ceiling.
    "Well, nobody got killed," he pointed out.
    "This is true. Do you have anything else that they might want?"
    He waved around the room. "Anything that they would have wanted, the technology's all in here."

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