12 Laser Focused

She stood silently on the concrete platform. Scores of people bustling through the crowded station, laughing, arguing, and chattering away. A particularly annoying couple just to her right bickered loudly. It would seem that the muscular man had cheated on the pretty one.

Soon, the bickering turned to shouting, and shortly thereafter, the crying began. Britney turned to face the two sobbing men and winced. The pair were dressed in transparent one-pieces, their two bare behinds facing away from each other as they embraced, tears still trickling down.

She made eye contact with the muscular one, cocked an eyebrow, and gave him a cold look. A look that made it look as if she cared. A look that seemed to say leave your fighting at home, not in public, and most importantly away from me. She did not care though. Not one bit.

Even as she gave Muscles that death stare, her focus remained on her true target. In her peripherals, she could see the Wolf standing there fifty feet away, alone, and frowning towards the couple at the center of the disturbance.

The sounds of a thousand chattering voices, and twice as many clattering feet filled the room. They were only ever muffled by the occasional GravPod arrival announcement, or by random outbursts from the hysterical couple on her right. Assorted scents of food not yet eaten, or dozens of different perfumes and colognes filled her nostrils.

Yet through all that stimuli, Britney remained laser-focused on the Wolf. Never looking right at him, but always keeping him in her peripherals. A deep and uncharacteristic rage burned inside of her. She pictured herself pushing the Wolf off the platform and into the abyss below. She could almost hear the sound of his bones crunching as he hit the bottom of the seemingly bottomless pit. A fitting end for her father's killer. Britney imagined herself beating him to a pulp. Punching, gouging, biting, and scratching, taking him apart one piece at a time. Killing him slowly, and with her bare hands, a perfectly painful way to go for her mother's murderer. She envisioned herself arresting him, here and now, finally bringing justice to the man who cut Erica's life short. Her life, and four and a half billion others. She took a deep breath and clenched her fists, her knuckles turning white.

I'd be damned if I let my feelings get the best of me, she thought. The case comes first.

The Wolf climbed into a GravPod and was gone in an instant. Britney frowned as the red bullet-shaped pod zipped through one of many transparent tubes ahead of her. Outside of the platform and the people, all she saw were tubes. Countless rows of GravPod tubes above her, behind her, and even below her. The tubes extended from one cavernous wall to another, tunnels cut into the rock allowing the pods to travel freely through the earth. The intricate complexity of the GravPod tunnels made following a target through them incredibly difficult.

Deep in the earth, the numerous tunnels bent and twisted, flipped and turned, converging with each other at places, and diverging at others, GravPod tubes merging or separating. Anytime a pod was on the move, its final destination was impossible to track. Millions of possible destinations as the pod moved from one tunnel to another, leaving no way to track the terrorist. Even nature's own network of oceans, seas, and rivers paled in comparison to that of Titanus's transportation network, and Britney had the distinct impression that she would have had better luck following a single bacterium tumbling its way through the ocean floor.

Typically, a tracking chip would have sufficed. It was simple really, she need only implant the target, wait until he reached his final destination, and then promptly follow. Today, however, she had kept her distance from the Wolf and was unfortunately unable to implant him with the chip. There was also no way of knowing if the tracking chip would even work on the Wolf.

If the piece of filth could turn off Jason's tracker at will, who's to say what he can do to a tracking chip attached to himself? Luckily, today it wasn't just Brittany working the case. With the help of facial recognition software, Nina was able to determine the alias the Wolf had been using with his new face. After that, all it took was an information disclosure request be sent to the transportation authority, and with Arthur's special authorization the request was instantly approved, and just like that, she had her target's itinerary.

Less than fifteen seconds after the Wolf had gone, Britney was in her own GravPod shooting through the earth, and following closely behind.

She grinned. I didn't even have to wait for the bastard to reach his destination, she thought. I'm starting to understand what Arthur sees in Nina. Not so useless after all...