New Praetorians 2 - Shetani Zeru Bryan

by R. K. Syrus

Th—

  There’s

  There’s a trick.

  A trick.

  A trick.

  Fifth wishes he would shut up.

  A trick!

  Then a delightful scream as the cobra strikes over and over. Curved fangs pierce nose, lips, tongue. He continues biting even as the head of Tomee Sheera puffs up into a swollen purple pustule.

  These reptiles have no ears, but the gratifying vocal screams of Tomee Sheera rebound through scaled skin and jawbones into reptilian inner ears.

  Fifth hears the sounds coming from Tomee Sheera in stereo. Once through his own snake and again through his link to the others. It tickles. Not for the first time, the Fifth considers Third’s compulsive cruelty may be the only reliable form of recreation on this otherwise incomprehensible planet.

  The flesh monster stops making sounds. He stops moving. The python clenches around his chest. She flexes her jaws open and looks down at the top of Tommy Shara’s head. The snake’s puppet master makes her stretch open as wide as she possibly can.

  30

  RAN OLIPHANT

  Ran grabs the first sharp piece of silverware he sees. The killers in the Ansible test chamber are not using firearms. Must be some scientific reason. Melanie would know. They’re doing a very good job without.

  On the 3-D display, a dying technician’s face convulses, then freezes. His rictus of agony and a midair spurt of blood fades, first into crumbling analog pixels, and then to transparent. For a second, he haunts the luxurious observation deck as a tortured specter from the depths of techno Hades.

  Gaggles of important people are horrified to realize they might be next. Panic bursts through the room like water out of a ruptured dam. This is swiftly becoming the worst A-list party ever.

  Stodgy old men trample young women, who suddenly wish they weighed more than a fashionable paperweight. Chairs overturn and crash into mirrored walls. Champagne bottles tip and gush. Shattered glass falls everywhere.

  Where’s Melanie?

  Secret Service have hustled Everett away. General Halley huddles in an alcove with a clutch of special-ops bullyboys. He mouths obscenities at the Russian ambassador.

  There.

  Dr. Françoise wavers like a willow in the crush of moving bodies. A thickset bodyguard pushes her, and Melanie bends like a reed. She snaps back and gives him a solid blow between his unibrow with the heel of her hand.

  Bravo, just like I showed you. Ran moves toward her.

  As Melanie checks her fingernails, the dazed idiot grabs her dress and yanks. She spins like a top. Instead of stumbling, Melanie plum clinches Unibrow’s fireplug-sized neck and jump-knees him to the jaw. The blow lands flush. The boor drops as though hit with a sledgehammer.

  So that’s what those big slashes up her dress are for—Muay Thai techniques. I never showed her that one. She must be watching cage fighting again.

  “You a’right?”

  Melanie rubs her knee. “By the way my patella feels, I must have conked him with eight thousand Newtons of energy. You don’t think I’ve killed him?”

  “Not unless you step on him in those heels.” Unibrow tries to rise, decides otherwise, and flops back on the comfy carpet.

  “Humph.” Melanie checks her clothes for rips and stares daggers at her downed assailant. “Serves him right. This dress is Brunello Cucinelli!”

  “I’m sure he’s suitably contrite. Let’s get out of the stampede.”

  Ran and Melanie pick up a waitress. The frail girl has a bloody nose and gashes on her hands and knees. They take cover in an alcove. It has a window to the collider level.

  The Ansible test chamber juts over the darkness of the man-made valley. The murderous intruders are inside. There seems to be only one exit.

  “Ranny, someone’s trying to steal—”

  “The Ansible.” For once, he completes her thought. “I know. I’m not a complete bampot.”

  “Don’t even think about going down there.”

  Ran glances the way the Russian cyborg went, thinking about going down there.

  “If they’re prepared to take on heavily armed super special operators, what can you do with a lemon fork wearing your ascot… which has come undone.”

  Ran looked down. The first piece of sharp-ended silverware he had been able to find had indeed been a lemon fork. The tines splay out stupidly, and an enemy would have to hold very still for it to do any damage.

  Out the observation window, something catches his attention. The test chamber shudders on its moorings; bridge-style cables waver. Without warning, a fissure opens on the chamber’s underside. Bits fall into the thousand-yard crevasse to the generator pits. These are followed by a man’s blue overall-covered legs.

  After a few seconds of dangling, he falls. Poor blighter, he must have been knocked out. He doesn’t scrabble at air like most people would. He looks almost peaceful as he disappears into the gloom.

  “On second thought, Melanie, I’m good.”

  Ran whips off his tie and bandages up the worst of the waitress’s cuts. Between them, they haul her into a catering passage. They make sure she’s headed toward Lichtstrom medical.

  He keeps the lemon fork, just in case. Melanie is right, but it galls him to be out of the action. The hysterical mob peters out and becomes a trickle of dazed celebrities.

  “Ran… Ran, over here!” Sir Tenny calls out from under a table. “Was that the gigahertz thing? Did it blow up?”

  “Nope.” Ran rescues a rolling magnum of Dom. He pries the cork out. “I expect we’ll be here for a while.”

  “Right, questioning.” Tenny smooths down his jumbled blond hair, having absolutely no effect on it. “I could take you two under my diplomatic wing.”

  “No bother.”

  Ran studies an exterior view of the test chamber platform. It hangs precariously over the generator chasm. A hole gapes on its underside.

  Melanie quivers, eager to light out. He nods. She ducks through a catering passage hidden behind a mirrored pillar. She’s probably memorized the floor plan.

  “See you back in St. Albans, ta?” she trills.

  Ran bends down to the UK’s foreign secretary.

  “Buffet-style service notwithstanding, I’m going to stay,” Ran says. “Most of the time people asking questions give away more than they gain, especially when they don’t know what they’re after.

  “Tenny, hear me. Someone’s just pinched the single most valuable object in the world, possibly in history. They didn’t do it alone, and I’m convinced the motive will reveal who it was.”

  Only distant yelling now, nearly drowned out by the slopping from a caviar fountain. Tenny looks at the pillar Melanie seemed to have melted into.

  “She not staying?”

  “Police questioning bores her to sobs. She’s usually way ahead of them. Champagne?”

  Ran pours some delightfully normal-colored bubbly into his old friend’s glass. He twists the bottle to prevent dripping.

  Back before university and long before the Royal Marines, he had a notion of becoming a waiter in London to sup up hefty tips from Russian oligarchs and Middle Eastern potentates. His parents insisted he call himself a sommelier. For Ran Oliphant, head of Eurolincx, special enemy of Wolfgang Licht, both those incarnations seem like lifetimes ago.

  • • •

  Hours later, minor bloodstains have been shampooed by cleaning bots. Goop slopped by caviar dispensers still smells like low tide. Most guests made a break for the border. They didn’t get there. Anyone without complete sovereign immunity has been detained.

  Ran smiles. Melanie got away. Those diversion and evasion tactics they’d practiced paid off.

  Twelve agencies from six countries show up to investigate. The hall resembles an airport during a baggage handler’s strike. The wealthy, famous, and powerful lie dozing over couches or on the floor. The Russian Übermensch bodyguard is wheeled to an ambulance on a small forklift.

  A mousy, prickly looking man in a
trench coat approaches. He sports possibly the worst comb-over in the history of human hair. Ran has trouble not staring at the slicked-down scruffy mess that is plastered around a small Band-Aid and a huge welt on his forehead. Through thick milspec-framed glasses, the man studies Ran.

  “Sir, just a minute of your time.”

  “Right. Ran Oliphant, Eurolincx.

  “Fox, sir. Major Fox.

  “Which agency might you be from?”

  “US Military Intelligence, Corps of the Defense Administration. COTDA for short. I realize you may have been asked questions—”

  “By CIA, NASA, and I think even the FDA weighed in at some point.”

  Maybe he’s tired, or this fellow makes him testy. Fox brandishes a notebook and has a badly hidden buttonhole camera in his silly coat.

  “In brief,” Ran snaps, “the Ansible—I don’t have it. You can check my trousers. I don’t know who took it or why. I only came to sup Licht’s booze.”

  Fox isn’t fazed. Regular terrier.

  “Mr. Oliphant, who were you talking to at the time of the incident?”

  • • •

  A generous hour of asinine drubbing later, footmen in bright uniforms outnumber the remaining detectives. They upload data and whisper into scrambled satellite phones. Ran decides to check on his horses. One of Licht’s people follows him.

  Bloody snoop. If only they’d been that attentive with the Ansible.

  His pair of Percherons stand under cover, munching hay from an automatic feeder. Cassius snuffles his pockets and threatens to eat his yellow rose boutonniere. Ran nudges him back.

  “I’ll have my man come from Geneva to get them. Don’t let anyone try to take the gold plates off. You’ll just pull their coats.”

  From the tree line, Sir Tenny emerges. Alongside are some rough-looking blokes in Sabre Tactical jackets.

  “Tenny, thought you’d be long gone.”

  “Ran, heh, just been with our SIS people. There’s been, uh, some strange goings-on in the woods. A lot wilder than they appear. Hope Melanie’s all right.”

  “I’m sure. When she gets wind of a mystery, she’s a combination Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple.”

  “With the bum of a CrossFit instructor, eh?”

  Tenny can be a tosser.

  “Remember, Sir Tenny, when she noticed you were being murdered by slow poison?” Ran reminds him. “While your doctors and everyone else hadn’t a clue”

  Sir Tenny nods bitterly. “Bloody Sri Lankan butler. I never liked him.”

  “I’ll bet Melanie’s in the Big Smoke cross-questioning contacts at New Scotland Yard. Nothing can put her off. Her mind is a steel trap. Inescapable.”

  31

  HOXTON

  THE BIG SMOKE

  MELANIE

  “Lalalalalalalala,” Melanie Françoise trills to no one in particular.

  My knee, throbbing stopped, sprayed homebrewed analgesic on it right where meanie at the not-terribly-fun-party hit it with his maxilla + zygomatic bone, icy hot, my knee.

  Melanie’s eyes flit up and down the two-story shops along Hackney Road in Hoxton, London. Her thoughts hop about.

  Ideas pop and fizz like fireworks under a strobe light the size of the moon.

  During her tween years, she realized not everyone experienced reality like this. The more tedious doctors called it hyperphasic delirium. Well, she has some diagnostic words for them: hyperphasic poopyheads!

  She’s learned to deal without medication.

  If you just wander into a shop and stare silently at things and people while you breeze through the kaleidoscopic swirl of images, formulas, equations, and theories inside your head, it tends to make people uncomfortable. She decides to pick a single idea.

  Glad. She’s glad. Glad to be working for someone who appreciates her unique gifts, hasn’t fired her, or tried having her committed to an asylum. Ranulph Oliphant is that someone. He’s never suggested she take any medication at all.

  Unlike her parents.

  Not their fault.

  Before preschool, before Melanie had even ridden a tricycle, doctors told them she was DSM-5 ADD and borderline bipolar with signs of hyperkinetic disorder.

  There are meds.

  Many meds.

  Stimulants to make her concentrate, which is like putting bifocals on a laser beam.

  And sleeping pills.

  Lots.

  As a youngster, she was up all hours. People were never sure if she was awake or sleepwalking. As if there’s such a great big hairy difference.

  Mostly, psychiatrists threw up their hands, eyebrows, or bad weaves and prescribed lithium carbonate. This powerful antipsychotic mood stabilizer came in cute gel caps shaped like trademarked cartoon characters.

  Her preteen medication mix was tweaked until everyone was sure that, if she absolutely had to have multiple personalities, the dominant one would be socially acceptable at formal dinners.

  For six-seven-eight-nine-year-old Comtesse Françoise, as she called herself before her doctorate was conferred, days and nights smushed together. Schoolwork became nearly challenging. So did remembering where she was.

  Once, during the tenth year of her reign, she found herself at the apex of a cheerleader pyramid, without any idea how she got there. She learned she had been the cause of the acrobatic formation breaking out in a regularly scheduled, and otherwise uneventful, Dalcroze Eurhythmics dance class. After that display of leadership, she needed special permission to enter the gym.

  As she stood there, atop a vertical triangle of straining, trembling, sweaty co-eds, she had an epiphany.

  On the epiphany scale, it was pretty close to the flash of pink light from a hot delivery girl’s pendant that nearly put Phillip K. Dick into a coma. She looked twenty feet down to the polished hardwood floor, and a single thought flashed:

  I must start purging my meds!

  Fast forward through six years of psychotropic bulimia.

  Pause. Rewind to when they started injecting her.

  Fast forward through a sometimes messy, ultimately rewarding period of storing and transfusing her own plasma: blood-undoping.

  There was an upside to her preteen fight against Big Pharma and the psychoactive drugs they pushed as though they were Curly Wurly candies. She learned advanced biochemistry, how to operate a centrifuge, all about corpuscular cryo-storage, and how to find her own veins with large-bore IV needles. It spurred her interest in sort of attending medical school and becoming the best almost-doctor she could be.

  At sixteen, she landed on the doorstep of Eurolincx’s downtown London HQ. With a thump. The telecom company’s programmers had been knitting together important code all night. They ordered vindaloo takeaway. She was Chef Ashif’s main wee-hours delivery girl on account of her ability to be perky during wee hours.

  As she set out from the kitchen, Melanie knew something magical was about to happen. Even though she’d been up for fifty-two hours and had a Klonopin hangover, she couldn’t let Chef Ashif down. He was such a dear.

  She had roller skated along the deserted motorway of the great city. The Big Smoke. Her wheels were the only sound above the static hum of distant traffic.

  Clack-thrum.

  Clack-thrum.

  The air was cool. Charcoal-gray asphalt merged with dark sky. Corona glows of streetlights looked like fissures in a sad painting of London at night, portals to another city, where it was bright as day. The effect was mesmerizing and pulled her toward REM sleep. She was light in her head and dead on her feet.

  Clack-thrum.

  Clack-thrum.

  When she turned off Blandford onto Baker, the song playing through her hoop earrings—the insides of wireless speakers—changed over. As she was winding her way down Baker Street on eight wheels, the new song playing in her hoop-earring headphones was “Baker Street” by Scottish singer-songwriter Gerry Rafferty.

  Ma-gic!

  At the time, she wasn’t really a delivery girl. She was on a dee
p-cover mission to steal Chef Ashif’s Diwali beef wellington recipe. She has never agreed with intellectual property theft, but since her parents would not give her money to open her own restaurant—one which would have brought affordable langoustine to the masses—drastic measures were justified.

  At 3:33 A.M., having avoided the bobbies—her helmet and Balenciaga roller skates were not exactly street-legal—she fell in a curry-slathered heap right on the stoop of Eurolincx’s office building.

  Mr. Oliphant insisted she come in and clean herself up. He suggested a change of career, one less likely to result in traumatic brain injury or being held for ransom by the Green Lanes Gang, who during that period of London’s criminal history was growing in notoriety. She agreed. She gave up her night job, as well as the recipe-spying mission, and started at Eurolincx the next day.

  Most definitely, Ran is the best employer she has ever worked for. Also the most enduring, with second place being held by the three weeks at a pet shop in Transnistria.

  Among the many perks accruing to her as Special Executive in Charge of Various Things are: private aircraft at her disposal, a llama rescue ranch named after her, and a Black Pearl Oyster transit pass for unlimited tube and trolley rides and up to fifty percent off at Poppies Fish & Chips.

  Ran also set up an official expense account at her favorite tattoo parlor in Hoxton, which is where the airport bus and her feet have taken her this morning.

  “Escaping from that terrible Lichtstrom party, it’s made me so hungry. I came straight here.”

  Frederique, a tall transgender with a shaved head, wearing a polished black PVC corset, looks skeptical.

  “Y’realize, dahling, this is a tattoo parlor?”

  “Exactly. I won’t be tempted to eat! Though that shawarma place next door looks promising. Anyone with an eighteenth-century Senneh Knot carpet in the window should make a cracklin’ wrap.”

  The sides of Frederique’s corset strain as she sighs. “Girlfriend, if you wasn’t so smart I’d swear you were batty.”

  “Can’t I be both?”

  32