The mineshaft elevator rumbled to a halt and a few seconds later the front of the cage creaked upward. The twelve members of the Constant Lightning team blinked as their eyes readjusted to the natural light of the Virginia sunrise streaming through the dingy payroll office windows.
"Vell," said Sven Turgensen taking in the view outside, "I guess ve all get to play astronaut today, ya?". The six-foot-two blonde-haired, blue-eyed Icelander was a former silver medalist biathlete but he felt just as comfortable invisibly tracking down prey in the too-crowded streets of Mogadishu as he did holding a rifle and wearing a pair of cross-country skis. Although he could read and write a score of languages, the polyglot managed to speak each one with a thick Reykjavikian accent. His comrades joked that even his International Sign Language swapped out all his 'w's for 'v's.
He hated to fly.
His partner, Lance "Ratso" Berger was raised on the streets of New York City and survived by his wits from the age of six. He moved from gang to gang, learning the system and inventing quite a few tricks himself. He knew, almost by instinct, where to find food, shelter, and, later, weapons. By the time of his ANON recruitment at age fourteen he was the de facto general of a small children's army allegedly responsible for over seventy percent of the gang-related activity throughout the Five Burroughs.
The now 25-year-old Ratso just glanced up at Sven, shrugged as if to say "Been there, done that." and walked off toward one of the six awaiting craft queued up on the hardpack runway adjacent to the now nearly-empty parking lot. Sven followed and the rest of the team split into their designated pairs, each silently heading for their own plane.
From above, the half-dozen stealth-enabled copies of the VSS Voyager looked like a row of matte-black seagulls frozen in mid-flight. The twelve team members stopped outside the hulls of the multi-windowed suborbital craft mounted to the underbellies of the motherships and began to don their awaiting "spacesuits".
These were not spacesuits in the traditional sense - they were only designed for survival in the unlikely event of an sudden cabin depressurization, not for extended stay in the harsh environment outside of Earth's atmosphere. Instead of the bulky, outdated archetype normally associated with astronaut-wear, these electric-blue composite fiber flightsuits were light, sleek, mobile, and virtually form-fitting. Even the helmet was stylish and comfortable.
After the last of the team had buckled themselves in, the cabins self-pressurized and the six spaceplanes simultaneously began to trundle down the bumpy runway under the control of a flight computer in Twitchy's laboratory, each lifting off seconds behind the one in front.
Each mothercraft climbed upwards in a tight spiral keeping the group's flight fingerprint constrained to a one-mile-wide column. When the group reached 50,000 feet the internal communicators slowly dissolving in the ANON members' digestive tracks crackled to life.
"All teams, comm check," ordered Twitchy from far below. Everyone all murmured an affirmative response except Sven, who groaned miserably.
"Ok... everything checks out, and your final destinations have been fed into the onboard guidance computers. You are go for launch in thirty seconds. I have temporarily cross-connected your communicators through the spacecrafts' radios, in case our prodigal Team Leader wants to give everyone the traditional rousing into-the-breech speech. Just make it quick."
There was silence as the planes gently banked into their respective launch positions. Just when everyone thought he wasn't going to respond, Captain Awesome cleared his throat.
"Let's go do our jobs," he said.
The six spacecraft detached themselves and began to fall away from their carrier ships. A second later,each ship's hybrid rocket boosters simultaneously roared to life, launching the spacecraft on supersonic suborbital trajectories toward their designated targets. Their diverging contrails made it look as though a six-pronged icy crack had suddenly appeared in the cerulean dome of the sky.
(To be continued...)
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