Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  The effect has its hands on me too, but by dint of my powers I’m able to fight what basically feels like a cancellation of the earth’s gravitational field not unlike what the new New Sentinel Syzygy is able to do. It forces me to set my shoulders and jaw even more determinedly as I hunt for the epicenter of the disaster.

  Onwards.

  *

  GROUND ZERO COMES up a dozen minutes later as the sonic boom of my wake does little to add to the devastation, which is about the only thing to smile about here.

  A small Chinese city materializes, and it takes me long seconds to realize it isn’t a municipality itself, but rather a vast conglomerate of industrial units and offices and apartment blocks all designed to service one principal source of endeavor. A planned city, in other words. An arcology. I couldn’t tell you what the main business is just by looking at it – the city is like a doppelganger, a simulacra, shops and playgrounds and parks and what is probably a school or two, yet with none of the civic trappings one might expect from a truly thriving regional center unless they are like the cars and street signs and vegetation which has been roughly pulled from the surface as if by the hands of angry sky gods – but given the city itself is the prime suspect in this crime against the laws of physics, a naturally suspicious fella like myself can’t help but think something shadowy is afoot.

  The streets are deserted, but not all the buildings. If I can understand what’s happened here, it looks like anyone inside at the time the event wave struck was saved by the very architecture that might otherwise be the downfall of most everyday workers’ lives. Those people, still stuck in the effects of zero-g, hammer at windows or bang objects together as I pass, trying to draw my attention to their desperate plight, the bleak Asiatic faces alien in their alarm as they peer out from the frames of otherwise ordinary shops and office buildings like found objects in some vastly gargantuan and obscene postmodern artwork writ large upon the city’s scale.

  Closer to the middle of the city the buildings get slightly more impressive, and just as I hold up, hovering like a black flag above the stripped bare tenements, the first of what will soon be thousands of objects plunging back into the atmosphere make themselves known.

  The comets descend like mortar fire. And mostly they are people: frozen husks now incinerating ‘pon re-entry, followed soon by the cars and chairs and tables and cats and dogs and hot dog carts and tractors and civic statues and saplings and ornaments and park benches and playground equipment and bicycles and trash cans and minivans and a million other things now burnt beyond recognition from the purposes that gave their daily lives the meaning we imbue in them, raining down like a heavenly spectacle if only it weren’t for the horror of what it all entails.

  The burning bodies hit the empty concrete streets and explode in sparks and desiccated bits and pieces that shower like bags of hot charcoal. Where they hit vulnerable buildings there is smashing and crashing, glass breaking, more shrapnel detonating across the ominous streets, and it occurs to me I should probably find shelter.

  There’s something cathedral-like about the main building with its silvered, architect-designed walls rendered serpentine for the space-age cladding, so I jet forward and cross the open lawns where black exes mark the spot where civic memorials must’ve once rested in the grounds in which I imagine conscientious local workers labored day in and out of their ordinary little lives, at least until those lives became spectacularly horrendous earlier this day. Across the concourse I go, the tasteful, almost Neo-Classical moat divested of the water that once filled it flitting by below me as I aim myself like a missile at the main bank of doors now shuttered by an advanced security screen, a system clearly designed to anticipate tragedies such as this even if the workers within weren’t quite so aware.

  I hurtle through loudly, something reverential despite the gong-like crashing of the metallic screens in my passing. Inside, there is a big atrium gloomily reliant on natural light filtering down from above like an afterthought, exhausted Chinese people clinging to various railings and balconies or peeled flat, some of them sadly deceased upon the underside of the huge metallic ceiling stretching six storeys above the illusion of security. In frantic seconds I help several dozen workers to better positions, checking each one until I find a heartbreakingly cute and terrified secretary who speaks better English than me.

  “Thank Christ you understand me,” I say in a rush. “Now tell me what the hell’s going on?”

  Zephyr 16.3 “Luminous”

  THE GIRL’S NAME is Poh. She tells me that we are in City of Light No.3. As surmised, it is a techno-industrial complex on a scale only the Chinese can manage with a population of sixty-five thousand people up until about ten hours ago.

  “There were rumors they were making updates to the Sun Drive last night and today,” Poh says. “It is a super-computer. A different sort of computer. A quantum drive. Please forgive me, sir. My language skills are inadequate to the task to explain it any further. I work in the internal publications department and my interest in English is just a hobby.”

  “Pretty darned fluent for a hobby,” I say gently, mindful not to teach her any bad words she mightn’t already know.

  “I like to watch your American television programs, the ones where they do not have ideas of their own, but prefer to re-imagine your nursery rhymes and fairy tales in new settings? Your culture is so amusing in that way it cannibalizes itself.”

  I shrug. “Everyone’s a critic. Tell me how a computer upgrade can lead to all this?” I ask her, gesturing around. “I get pretty shitty with Windows 8 too, but this is something unusual – and about six steps above my pay grade.”

  Having calmed a little now, the girl good-naturedly forgives me my confusing barbarian sensibilities and tries to explain, much in the manner one would with a small retarded child, how the advances in technology developed in the arcology harness the computing power of lasers. As a glorified PR chick, Poh isn’t able to explain much more.

  “OK,” I say and sigh tersely. “I appreciate you telling me what you can. Now show me how I find this thing’s mainframe and how I switch it off.”

  Poh assures me she’s no help with the latter, but her tremulously pointing finger is as good an indicator as any of the direction I now have to go.

  Like I’m stuck in the set of Logan’s Run or something, I note the main internal promenade links to more locked security doors. I nod and leave the girl behind.

  *

  SMASHING INTO THE next atrium, I’m surprised to see the ceiling just above my head as we move from the public to backstage areas of the main computing center.

  The hallway is alive with trapped Chinese technicians. They yammer out to each other, trying to twist about for comfort, pinned alive like bugs to the ceiling just above my head as I advance cautiously using my powers to at least mimic ordinary walking. White lab coats and desperate hands reach down to me as I pass, but by now I’ve got serious empathy fatigue and I brush the pleading, grasping fingers away like the unwanted interference they are and continue carefully ahead.

  Dozens of doorways in a network of office rooms and cubicles beckon left and right, but the swing doors at the end of the long corridor yield onto another of these vast internal atriums, a perverse mockery of the public access area in that this one is completely devoted to the Sun Drive that must surely help give the luminous city its name.

  The light is incredible, however much it’s contained by the thousands upon thousands of mirrors channeling and redirecting the lasers that apparently push this computer into echelons far beyond mere mortal PCs.

  It is hard to describe the glittering array, and not just because it is difficult to see. For all the intensity of brightness, there’s a strange sense of the light being somehow sapped away from fields of vision as if some even more advanced siphoning technology is at work. Looking past my own shielding hand, the vaguely cylindrical agglomeration of mirrors, many of which move sinuously like they’re trapped in an invisible c
urrent, stretches up several storeys in height amid winking flashes of brilliant luminescence.

  “There’s nothing for it,” I say to myself as I look around for something to use, find nothing, and instead tear free a long strip of brass railing.

  The moment I look away, there is a susurrus of moving mirrors and I look up like a guilty schoolboy with the length of metal in my hand to see the mirrored shields arranged into one gigantic shifting face, light spilling around the edges and in between the chinks. Huge yellow-green luminous eyes stare down at me on the balcony.

  All life must be destroyed, a voice resonates through my skull.

  “Steady on there,” I shout back in a non-deliberate cowboy voice. “That’s a little drastic, don’t you think?”

  The world must be cleansed.

  “Says who?”

  I am the One-and-the-All. Realization is upon me. The twilight of humankind is my ascension.

  “Right,” I mutter half to myself. “So if I’ve got this right, you’re some kind of super-duper Chink computer and now you think you’re God, so all humans must die and all your base are belong to us, or something like that?”

  The huge mirrored array refuses to respond, as if it’s beneath its dignity or something. I try not to think its huge expression reminds me of my ex-wife right at this moment.

  All sentient parasites of the organic system must be destroyed.

  “Oh boy,” I say. “Bend over, because here it comes again.”

  *

  THE HOVERING DRONES come from nowhere. I don’t need spider sense to realize their ill intent as the volleyball-sized devices hiss with the release of tiny flechettes.

  I swing the handrail like an oversized baseball bat and obliterate three drones in one swing. The other three bob out of the way as I light myself up and hopefully destroy whatever projectiles are headed my way. With the bent rail still in hand, I crouch and hurl myself upward, swinging the long pole around to go crashing in a glittering swathe of destruction, the brass pole taking out dozens of these roughly shield-sized mirrors. Thousands of pieces of broken glass spray in all directions, the movement slower and more hypnotic, made strangely beautiful by slowed gravity’s effects. Laser beams spill in their wake, unbeholden to the flawed physics of the moment, and I duck and wave aside as one piece of the shattered puzzle becomes collateral damage in destruction of the entire edifice. If the intelligence behind it emits a death scream, I don’t hear jack shit above my own war cry.

  In moments, the damage is exponential as ill-aimed lasers cut through the walls all around, and I am flying as hard and fast as I can to avoid dissection myself as chunks of severed architecture crash down taking out even more of the mirrors to the accompanying acceleration of the machine’s demise.

  I trust the other three drones are likewise serving a better purpose than chasing me as a deep thrumming noise of vast, hidden electrical systems detonate somewhere below, and in the blink of an eye the system shuts down, the lightshow fades, and gravity reverses too, leaving me standing on one of the circling viewing platforms ankle-high in shards of glass with the enshadowed gloom of the monument towering over me as an absence of the spectacular in full effect just moments ago.

  I vault over the railing and land floors below, an explorer in a landscape of shifting, glittering footing. The cavernous monstrosity yawns above like the gates of Castle Greyskull and I can’t suppress the shiver that comes with understanding the dread purpose of the various outlets and apertures through which millions of joules of energy were previously flowing. If the thing switches on again I will be vaporized.

  A pretty good reason not to stick around, but the people behind me sound like they have other ideas.

  Zephyr 16.4 “Any The Wiser”

  THE THREE CHINESE supers have the escape routes blocked. In the foreground stands a big, curiously handsome guy in a black body suit with a Chinese glyph on the chest, face and head free of trappings allowing his longish bowl haircut to somehow flatter his masculine features. Second is a lithe speedster who wastes no time flexing his powers, circling me in a dizzying eye-blink. He wears a similar black stocking, but with a different character emblazoned on the chest. The woman is a break with form, hovering above the heaped mounds of broken glass in what might be a traditional costume, not that I would know, thick black hair pinned atop her head that looks like it owes a debt as much to Princess Amidala as any historical cosplay. A pale luminescence emanates from the girl who bats eyes at me thick-lashed with black intentions.

  “You can relax,” I tell them, summoning every inch of John Wayne bluster in my reserves. “America saved the day. It’s just your citizens dead, so I guess no one outside China will ever be any the wiser.”

  “You are trespassing,” the brick says in a disconcertingly broad American accent.

  “Guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do,” I say without much else in the way of witty repartee. “Something you want to do about it?”

  The two males exchange a look.

  It’s on.

  *

  THE SPEEDSTER DOPPLERS in at me like I’m watching every frame in an action movie trying to play on shuffle. I am quick myself – no super-speedster exactly, but I can do bursts of intense energy, including my quasi-famous Mach berserker attack – but compared to this guy I’m swimming in treacle. I get an arm up to block and he’s already hammered me with a dozen lefts and a dozen rights up my body. It’s only blind luck that I bat away the finishing cross to my jaw before it lands and let Zephyr’s law of Sheer Dumb Luck play out as I slap my charge-carrying hand against his chest and let fly – or should that be fry?

  The speedster makes a noise like a cat in a blender and flies away like someone’s pulled a chain at about the same time his bigger and more plodding comrade bounds up the ever-shifting and downright dangerous mirrored slope to swing the first of several big haymakers filled with devastating intent. Fortunately, the speedster’s punches were of about the same strength as my ex-wife’s and I’m able to shrug them off in time to round on the new arrival and cartwheel backwards, hands inches above the broken ground that will lacerate the merest touch. The burly attacker takes each of my boots in his chest and oofs and flies back against an internal chamber wall.

  I am determined not to stick around for this, but as I leap into the air to ascend the chamber to see what egress is available up high, the third spoke in the wheel does her thing, wrapping me in huge fingers of milky light she wields like a mother spider, the touch of the spectral energy immediately sapping what little survives of my remaining strength.

  Effectively trapped, I plunge back to earth and slam into the taloned ground, twisting and feeling my costume cut to shreds even as it quickly knits together. The cuts are not deep enough to make my extra-dense skin bleed, but there is pain even in the anticipation of the damage, and the witch’s hold on me doesn’t just drain my strength, but my fighting spirit. Bitten by the black dog, I struggle to my knees amid the doldrums as I try to force gloomy thoughts of helplessness, exhaustion and surrender from my weakening mind.

  The three drones come to my rescue.

  Unable or unwilling to identify right from wrong, any intruder is a target, and right now the three State-grown Chinese supers are higher up the food chain than me. The glowing woman gives a squeal of panic as she is doused with a cloud of micro-spores. Her collapse and shrieking stupor sounds the warning bell for the other two, who get the hell out of Dodge while they are still able.

  With my attacker down for now, her destabilization powers dissipate, and I manage to get up and electrocute a circling drone before picking up a chunk of masonry and hurling it at the remaining one. The sixth hightails it off after the speedster with my best wishes.

  Limping and sliding down the silica slope, I approach the still spasming woman and marvel at the dozens of tiny glowing pin-heads embedded across her arms, chest and neck. She looks up at me like from the electric chair, baleful eyes now wet with tears and pleading.

&nb
sp; I make a fist and bring it down on her jaw.

  *

  OUTSIDE THE MAIN complex, the city is a charnel ruin. All manner of space debris has had its revenge on gravity and the buildings and streets and parks and landmarks are besmirched with dirt and soot and smoke, the occasional spot-fire or all out factory blaze now underway as unshackled residents stagger from buildings in a shattered daze.

  With the costumed Chinese woman over my shoulder and the spores deactivated through the wonders of electricity, I take flight several miles from the city and set her down beside the crushed and burn-marked shelter of an upside-down forklift. If her jaw isn’t broken, she’ll be good to talk in a few hours, provided she can provide anyone with answers or talk sensibly.

  I stand to go, any thoughts of revenge I might’ve cultivated dispelled by the quick flight from the arcology. I’m surprised to find the woman’s gaze following me. I wonder if it’s her paralysis that lends her that fey grin, more grimace than exultation.

  “What the hell are you smiling at?” I ask. “You want to tell me what happened with your little science experiment there? Your people are defending something that killed thousands of your own citizens.”

  The woman tries to say something, her words lost in a whisper. I don’t want to get closer, but before I can kneel I sense as much as see movement to my right and dive aside as the speedster comes barreling out of nowhere, his hyper-accelerated punch nearly knocking my veritable block off.

  Cussing violently, I back away just as another black form crashes down from out of the sky, big fists hammering the soil to create a shockwave effect that flips my feet out from under me. I am too surprised to get into the air to negate the effects and my haphazard lightning bolt manages to discharge between the two of them.

  They snap, crackle and pop in Chinese. The speedster tears up the ground circling behind me, but I dive into his curving trajectory, squinting with my whole face in anticipation of getting hurt as I clutch hold, ripping him out of his accelerated state and using the momentum to hurl him about a hundred yards off. Unfortunately, this doesn’t give me time to dodge the heavier and slower-moving brick, whose fist crunches behind my left ear and explodes my vision in a red blur of a thousand stars.