Iglesia ………………………..Episode 10

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Tuesdays Episode

He almost forgot to notice what a strange and memorable sensation this was, high speed para-sailing behind a train, in a strikingly beautiful Arizona desert twilight. So he noticed it. Then he stopped and ran a weapons and systems check and patted the pocket where the bagel and the UV light were, just in case.

Now that the spools were reeling them closer and closer to the metal roof of the train, they had to pay close attention to aerodynamics and be ready to react quickly to gusts of winds and….oh shit, was that a fucking BAT?  

Yup, that was a fucking bat, a big one too. Fortunately the bat picked them up on its sonar soon enough and veered off and lit out for parts south post haste. His partner was right next to him now, their wings almost touching. Ok, get sharp now, 40 feet left on the spool, train moving at about 170, wind 10 from the left and man….this was scary fun! He switched the magnets in his boots on and hit the spool release.  To avoid any last minute tangling they would cut loose from the filament while they were still above the train.

And they did. And they fell in perfect tandem the last ten terrifying feet on to the top of speeding railroad car and felt the magnets catch. Somehow it felt like they were moving faster when they were on the train than when they had been flying above it. The freefall drop the last few feet, and then the feeling of clunking on to the sheer mass of the the hurtling train and feeling it painfully solid beneath him, after the gossamer feeling of flight, was striking. Literally. THAT sensation he would remember.

His partner unclipped his spool and handed it to him. He pulled out the UV light, clicked the switch and shone it onto the filament, starting a reaction that would destroy it. Even the few inches embedded in the trains nosecone. He pocketed the spools.  

They were one car back from where they were supposed to have landed. Mental note to give undeserved shit to the Planning crew back at HQ. That would be fun, since Planning was made up of literally the nerdiest people on the entire freaking planet. Giving Planning shit was one of the few semi-sanctioned (iow, not strictly prohibited) fun activities available at The Center. His partner was in the lead as they crawled forward, climbed down and up….no cowboy jumping from car to car at 170 per….onto the correct car. His partner already had the LOX out and was starting to paint a double man sized circle onto the top of the train car as he fished the circular sonic detonator, known colloquially as a bagel, out of its pocket in his Chamo Camo suit. Still maintaining radio silence he checked the readouts. Nothing on Sat, no alarms from the train. As expected there were no autosensors on the roof. Somehow the trains designers hadn’t anticipated someone dropping out of the sky onto the roof of the speeding train, and the filament embedding itself had been well below the sensitivity of the nose cone sensors.

His partner finished painting the Liquid Oxygen compound on the roof and stowed the container back in its pocket. he set the timer on the bagel and placed it in the center of the circle. They braced themselves against each other, looking into each others visor. Their left arms on clamped on each others shoulder and their right hands on the triggers of their guns and stood up into the wind, ready to drop in when the hard frozen circle in metal roof of the train car shattered.

And it did,

And they dropped.

Ready to hit the floor and roll after a straight eight foot fall on to a hard floor, since Planning had determined that this section of this car would be most likely to be free of any surprising …and pointy…obstacles beneath them.

And so they were pretty darn surprised when they fell into the foam and it closed around them.