Freya’s eyes fluttered open. Freezing wind whipped across her thin gown and bare feet. She heard deafening helicopter blades and the roar of an engine straining against a buffeting storm. Lighting crashed, illuminating the endless ocean below the aircraft. Two fatigue-clad medics loomed over her, each bucking and pitching in their folding jump seats.
You’re in a military medical transport. Think.
But she couldn’t yet think through the fog of medication. She could only focus on single words, each slamming into her mind like a freight train of consequence.
Transportation. Extradition. Incarceration.
Freya moaned again, tugging against her plastic zip cuffs. She felt the abdominal stitches where the doctors had sliced into her and inserted tubes, pumping warm saline solution into her lower abdomen, irrigating her organs from within. She dully realized that the treatment must have lasted days, leaving her to drift in and out of dreamless sleep as her pain-wracked body slowly warmed from near-fatal hypothermia. Her memories of the Japanese military doctors and the shipboard surgical suite were incomplete, jumbles of images: boiling oil flung into the captain’s face, kicking the handsome grad student — what was his name? Oh, yes, Benny — down the stairs, watching the mob of students and crew attack, feeling their hands on her, then the momentary weightlessness before her plunge off the side of the research ship and into the cold ocean. All a useless blur.
Focus. She was awake now. Aware. The edge slowly returning to her shattered mind. She pulled her wrists against the zip cuffs again, feeling the resistance of the plastic. The ties were tight, well secured, thick. But they wouldn’t be enough to hold her.
The helicopter jolted against sudden crosswinds. They dropped sickeningly, heeling over as a gust of rain and wind whipped through the open doors, soaking her through the thin cotton gown. The pilots turned to glance at each other, their anxious tension clear as the helicopter picked up speed once more, flying against the roaring wind. Within moments Freya could see lights of Tokyo beneath her, silhouetted skyscrapers rising tall over the endless canals and aqueducts of the coastal megatropolis.
The helicopter was over the mouth of Tokyo Harbor, the distinctive lights of the shoreline almost invisible through the heavy storm. The tone of the rotors shifted as the pilots slowed the aircraft over massive Yokosuka Naval Base. Japanese warships and marine transports crowded around their American counterparts, men swarming over the vessels like ants as they loaded vehicles, arms, and ammunition under the illumination of harsh white floodlights. The two combat medics were staring now, too, their masked faces trained on the staggering scale of the logistical operation. A few ships slowly pushed away from the dock to make room for others. More moved the short distance to join a growing convoy.
As the truth dawned on her, rage flowed through her blood, hot like the anesthetic they’d injected into her femoral vein.
Himura had lied.
His deliberate, purposeful strikes had nothing to do with environmental revolution. Her cause betrayed, her emotions manipulated, all for this.
Himura wanted a war.
She lifted her head as lightning struck one of the tallest buildings, illuminating the city center like a flashbulb. As the helicopter banked, Freya caught the faintest glimpse of an angular shape far below, a matte-black shadow moving upriver from the harbor, like some mythological monster.
The booming thunder hit again, closer this time. Freya involuntarily yanked her wrist against the restraints, her rain-slicked skin imperceptibly slipping against the plastic ties. A second echoing thunderclap shook the helicopter a heartbeat later. She screamed, twisting her entire body against the plastic restraints, bicep muscles bulging, abdominal stitches giving way as the tie suddenly snapped. Her newly-freed hand snaked towards her other wrist, fingers frantically clawing against the remaining zip cuff.
A medic grabbed her forearm, twisting it as he shoved a knee into the center of her chest. She wriggled, slipping one of her legs out from underneath the nylon straps. Freya reared back, sweeping her newly-freed foot around the front of his face before bringing her legs down again, pinning his neck between her thighs.
The second medic lurched toward her with a syringe as she threw a flailing hand between them. The needle plunged through her palm and out the other side as the plunger depressed, spurting bitter anesthetic across her face.
Freya blinked against the burning fluid as the copilot swiveled in his seat, his pistol already out of its holster. She loosened her grip on the medic between her legs just long enough to slam her heel into the side of the copilot’s face, hurling him forward into the controls.
The helicopter pitched again as a wind shear dropped it like a stone. The lights of Tokyo dizzying as they spun outside the open doors. Grimacing, Freya used her teeth to yank the empty syringe out of her hand and spit it out of the open door.
The medics sized her up — both loudly plotting their next move, her element of surprise long since expended. She was still stuck on the gurney with only one hand free, the other bound by an unyielding plastic zip cuff.
And then they charged, both slamming their shoulders into the side of the gurney. It snapped free from its aluminum mounts with the force of their impact. Only the thick nylon straps across her chest and stomach prevented her from tumbling through the open helicopter door. Her free hand swept back, trying to find something sharp, something heavy, anything she could turn into a weapon in a losing fight. There wasn’t time to focus or breathe. Stinging rain drenched her, and wind violently whipped her across the face.
With her free hand, she traced the oxygen tubing away from her loosened mask down the arm of her gurney. Her fingers brushed against the smooth aluminum of the high-pressure oxygen tank. She grasped it by the metal nozzle and yanked it from its mount. The medics were shouting now. Then, she felt the jerk of a sudden release as the first of the nylon straps was cut free.
They were going to throw her out of the helicopter.
Not this time.
Freya hurled the oxygen tank out of the open side door. The roaring wind caught the heavy canister as it tumbled through the empty air, yanking against its own tubing a second later, and swinging like a pendulum up towards the tail rotor. It hit the blades with a concussive blast, erupting into shrapnel-filled vapor. The helicopter shrieked, sparks bursting from the tail as the blades tore themselves apart in howling mechanical destruction. The entire aircraft slid sideways, tilting dangerously as the cockpit control panel blossomed into a flashing maelstrom of red system failure lights, the audible stall warning barely audible over the roar of the engine.
Freya jerked her head toward the medics — one had fallen partly out of the door, his partner desperately clinging to his legs as the aircraft tumbled toward the ground. They were lower than the skyscrapers now, surrounded by wet glass and glistening steel, too low to maneuver.
The pilots nosed down the aircraft toward a flat-roofed building complex far below, trying to regain control. The spinning helicopter’s free fall was nearing an end, about to crash when the pilots flared hard, the engines spinning up for one final roar as they slowed to a shuddering wobble in the seconds before impact.
And then they hit. Hard. The nose smashed through a glass skylight on a flat-topped roof, landing gear crumpling, rotor blades splintering into pieces. Freya somersaulted forward, plastic zip cuff and nylon straps giving way as she slammed into the back of the cockpit seats. With the wind knocked from her lungs, and an unconscious medic pinning her against the seats, she tried to breathe but couldn’t. Everything went black, until moments later, her eyes fluttered open once more. Her heart caught in her throat as the creaking helicopter settled in the skylight, fragile struts straining, their metallic groans lost to the cascading rain. Snap. The machine lurched forward again, grinding metal against metal as the nose slipped through the skylight. Freya felt one more heart-stopping moment of weightlessness as the aircraft plummetinged two stories before slamming into the center of a brightly lit interior courtyard.