Genosha: The End of the Beginning:

[x-gambit.livejournal.com]

The first team moves in, making their way towards the power plant.



Marie-Ange tugged at the hood of her jacket for the umpteenth time, checking to be sure it was still covering her hair, and plucked a spread of cards from her pocket, selecting the image of a graffiti'd wall topped with barbed wire. She gave a mildly apologetic glance to North, but didn't re-pocket the card. "The guards patrol takes them away from this location for a full minute. Emma, you can make that two or three minutes? It will mean at least four fewer guards to contend with before we get inside."

At Marie-Ange’s look, North had tilted his head to get a better look at her selected cards. Seeing that one image curled a corner of his lips even as he dry-swallowed a small pill. “Apt, I think,” he murmured, waving away her misplaced sentiment as he returned to watching the guards, two fingers against his pulse point as he counted heartbeats and seconds in his head. An image of the Berlin Wall on the other precog’s card was not going to phase him, especially if it meant (he guessed) protection for their unlikely team. “Interesting deck.” Perhaps he should wrangle a reading out of her later.

His train of thought was derailed as his double vision kicked in. Blinking, the German man studied his watch. “Like clockwork.” North nodded at Emma as he watched a vision play out. “Patrol moving out in 20.”

Emma was fairly certain that spending a few days "back" in a mental asylum had left her with an even more twisted sense of humour. Thus her neat telepathic dive into the minds of the guards as they reached the furthest point of their patrol did not knock them unconscious. Instead she neatly shuttled their thoughts away from their planned patrol, a small telepathic command that would mean they would not remember they were guards or on patrol for at least the next several minutes. She routed that pathway, instead to their visual cortex, and filled that with thousands of delightful butterflies. She let a small smile play on her lips as the guards dropped their guns and began to try to catch butterflies instead. It wouldn't last long, but it didn't have to.

On Emma's word, the team moved ahead briskly, from their cover outside the gates to the gap between a pair of parked vans and the exterior wall of the complex. The guards passed by them unawares.

"Cypher says the other teams are in place." Marie-Ange said, after adjusting her comm earpiece, and gestured with her cardless hand to the guardpost. "On your mark, Maverick?" She asked.

Two blinks and a headtilt. Marie-Ange’s cards were always so fascinating. “You’ll give us some cover. Emma and I will take out the four at the post. And we’re in. Two inside for Bishop to take care of before they see faces.” Another blink and his gaze shifted to his watch, and watched as a second watch face was superimposed onto it, tracking the slim second hand. “In six, five, four…”

Bishop moved out of cover right on cue, darting past the watch posts and into the building. He trusted his teammates to keep him safe by engaging the overwatch as he kicked the door in. He wanted just enough force behind it to get in without making too much of a ruckus. The suddenness of the entry gave him more than enough time to fire a round from his silenced pistol into the dead center of each guard's chest. "Clear." He said softly into his headset.

Emma let her mind track the guards inside the post and then let them drop from her consciousness as she turned into diamond. "Two inside the door, one back right, one back centre," she said to North as they headed to the door, only a touch behind Bishop. Training had done its thing and they hit the door almost simultaneously, bursting it open. Letting her remaining momentum carry her forward, Emma opened her fist into a flat blade and drove it through the unprotected throat of the guard closest to the door. The impact stopped her forward momentum, but she had strength to swing the suddenly slack body of the guard in front of her and use it to deflect the shots of the men at the back of the room.

Not one to believe in wasting bullets, North disarmed the second guard by the door with the butt of his gun, and hauled him in front of the line of not-quite-friendly fire. With his spanking new shield in place, two clean shots were fired off and the small guard post sank into quietness. Four distinct thuds were heard, bodies hitting the bullet-littered ground. But Emma and North were already out the door, darting into the building after Marie-Ange.

Marie-Ange's ever-shifting wall of brass and silver discs that had been slipped away into goo. She held the door open for long enough to control another image - figures cloaked in black and royal purple, with a chillingly white face to pull the bodies into the building behind them. She pulled one of the guards' earpieces off and tossed it to North. "I cannot do the accent." She said, as an explanation, and then barred the door.

Bishop holstered his pistol once the scene was clear, moving to panels and beginning to open them so he could see what they were working with.

Emma leaned around Bishop's shoulder as he opened panels, cataloguing all of electrical circuits, conduits, breakers and fuses as they appeared before her. She pointed out a particular junction box to Bishop. "That one," she said. "And anything else you find that looks like it. Most of the power through the circuits is going to have to go through a junction box at some point. We may not be able to take out everything, but a good proportion of the circuits should short if you destroy them." She smiled suddenly. "And it's entirely possible that you may light up like a Christmas tree."

North had rattled off a string of generic reassurances into the headset, positioning himself away from the women to keep guard as Bishop worked his magic on the power generators. They'd been inside for almost two minutes now, and his gut told him that they needed to get out as soon as possible. As if North had jinxed them with his thoughts, a sharp order to report in was issued over the headset. The spy caught Marie-Ange's eye and gestured sharply with his watch hand. The absence of Emma's little patrol had been noted.

Marie-Ange nodded at North and set a image of interlocking metal discs against the doors. "We should move quickly. We are no longer unnoticed." The barricade of discs kept growing until it was several layers thick and the doors were entirely obscured.

After just a moment, Bishop had a pocket knife flicked out and was pressing the blade in between the rings of metal shielding to interrupt the current. Although the method threw sparks before a loud electrical pop echoed through the room, the man didn't seem to be adversely effective. His clothing was not so lucky.

Emma reviewed the sight before her with a appreciately raised eyebrow. "I feel like saying, "Hulk smash!"," she said. "But that seems rather gauche. And probably some kind of copyright violation." She cast a somewhat more critical eye over the junction box that was now a blackened, smoking ruin. "That should have taken out some of the main systems. Can you take out that one?" She pointed at another junction box further along the wall. "With that down, I think we should be able to overload the main grid and..." Emma's gaze rapidly shifted along circuits and calculated flows and feedbacks, "if you can feed some of that power back into there," she pointed at a black, plastic-covered box, separated from main circuits, "we should be able to take out both the main power and the back-up in one go."

Bishop pried boxes open as Emma pointed, exposing their cluttered, shiny metal guts. "As long as you're not making this easy." He quipped about the feedback. He poised the blade of his knife along the wires of the second junction box, wrapping his left hand in wires from the main circuit breaker. He thrust the knife into the wiring while tugging the breaker lines free with a quick jerk, using himself as a node to overload the circuit.

With a loud pop and a spray of sparks, the lights went out.