“It’s easily explained,” I say. “That’s otherworldly technology in your possession. I don’t know what world. Or which. But I know a Lyceum dirtbag like you sure as fuck shouldn’t be wielding forces beyond our comprehension.”
Diablo snorts skeptical air and I shrug, nondescript in my own convictions.
“I’ve just stopped one ideational weapon falling into the wrong hands,” I tell him and mentally cross my fingers, trusting Sting is true to his word and good to his intentions of cleaning up the nest of extra-dimensional escargot I left in the wake of my destruction in Afghanistan.
I nod to Diablo to reinforce my earnest intent.
“I’m not about to let that happen here either.”
“Oh, so you’re going to beat me and what – throw me in custody?” he laughs.
“I don’t give a shit about you,” I answer. “Without that armor you’re just another street-level asspony I could beat to a pulp without batting an eyelid.”
“You talk tough for a chick,” he says. “If you are one.”
“I’m not one,” I tell him. “I’m Zephyr.”
And that’s when I throw my fist into his surprised face.
*
DIABLO MOTORS BACKWARDS as fast as he can, but my darkness-encrusted knuckles slam across his chin before he can really get any momentum going. Super-dooper armor be damned, there’s nothing extra-special about this asshole with his head sticking out like a turkey on a platter. His quick reflexes save him from the full extent of the blow, which I was sort of imagining as an explosion of his head with my fist.
At least Seeker has my back, and thank crap she does, because Diablo’s octopus-like tentacles of ideational force crackle into action at the same time Loren flies in and hovers above me, opening her arms wide in her classic savior pose, lambent energy showering upon the hapless armored mercenary who clearly lacks any protection against spiritual attack.
Diablo falters and I feel the sudden animal pressing of my deep passenger like a monster trapped in a well. Not dissimilar to the overwhelming urge to projectile vomit, the demon in my soul clambers up the inside of my spine like upon a ladder from Hell, scuttling monkey-quick and savagely strong for the driver’s seat of my mind.
I realize what is happening at the last instant and sheer panic slams my mental shutters shut. Diablo – waiting perhaps for execution at my hand – passes out like a drunk, and while I resist the desire to heave, sweat dripping from me as I kneel over my own thighs grasping straws at my inner struggle, I hear the near-organic susurrus of the clicking plates and subtly humming otherworldly electronics of the fallen villain’s tensile suit as it clicks back upon itself, retracting and steadily exposing the sweaty, thirty-pounds-too-fat torso of the barely conscious man otherwise known as Diablo.
The light of fear dims in his eyes only because of rising self-interest, his alarm in full expression as he feels as much as sees the powered suit abandoning him.
“No,” he murmurs like a woman scorned. “No.”
I acknowledge the armor like one might an emissary from an alien world, conscious as I use my left hand to grasp the metallic collar into which the bulk of its material looks to be receding. Within seconds of Diablo’s bed-wetting pleas, I stand from my crouch holding a long and serrated, segmented, segregated device that, while mechanical, slithers and seeks to twist its dangling extremities around my wrist, the collar emitting steampunk noises like some gigantic leech.
“What in Christ’s name is this?” I stammer.
“For an atheist you sure blaspheme a lot, Joe,” Loren says beside me.
The metal seems to twitch at the sound of her voice.
“That’s an interesting observation, honey,” I tell her, “but I guess being a quasi ex-spiritual figure yourself, you’ve got a good nose for that sort of thing.”
Loren’s caramel gaze hardens in an instant, and within that same moment in time the bizarre contraption hanging from my grasp gives a twitch like an alien lobster and leaps to Loren’s surprise from my hand to land right between her still magnificent breasts.
“Jesus fuck!” she squeals.
“Pot-kettle,” I snap back.
“Don’t stand there scoring points, Joe,” she yells. “Get it off of me!”
Ah, those immortal words.
*
EXCEPT THERE IS no “getting it off of” Loren. Whatever the origin of this mechanical species, it’s clearly well experienced in the business of swapping hosts. Within an eye-blink of Loren’s cry, the device encrusts itself around her entire chest and in mere moments it concertinas out and out, marveling itself over her arms and legs and turning almost liquid in its sinuous expansion over the admittedly well-deserving terrain of Loren’s torso. It flowers at the neck and – perhaps incorporating its most recent experiences in the redesign – splits into a costume designer’s Knights of Camelot fantasy with equal parts Karl Lagerfeld, Halliburton and St Thomas More. As Loren lifts her astonished arms, the canny thing even fashions long trailing cape-sleeves inspired by aerospace design or perhaps the anatomy of dragonflies or some nightmarish intercourse between the two.
“What in Hell?” she says softly, awed.
“The Seeker reborn,” I say, getting it in one.
Loren’s astonished eyes slowly find mine. The very same moment a glowing blue halo of light appears like a headband across her forehead, emanating from the highest point of the flanged metal fighter jet wings either side of her collar.
“What is it, Joe?”
I don’t know what to tell her, and when I turn my gaze to the erstwhile Diablo wearing nothing but a pair of cheese-reeking cycle shorts, eyes sunk into a skull somehow chimpanzee-ified without the armor, I know I am bereft of anything sensible to say.
I look back to Loren, a distance entering my gaze as I’m unable to tell her it’s bad enough one of us is unresolvedly bound to a parasitic entity.
The Seeker turns away from me and gestures with her hand clad in metallic snakeskin. She is lost for a moment to her own transformation. Figurative distortion conjures the dust from our surroundings and a broken chair on its side is struck by the ideational force and miraculously transformed into a faded red fire hydrant. The ground is peopled with sunflowers. I hear the chittering of bats. The smell of rain. It grows instantly warmer. Just as quickly, Loren turns and repeats the gesture and a tendril shimmers indistinctly, briefly, her palm firing invisibly at a previously thrown desk which evaporates and is replaced by three penguins who eye the devastation with skeptical frowns.
“Holy flipping shit,” I say and try not to laugh.
And a dozen Centurions scale down from above.
*
THE SHADOWS DISARTICULATE the specific architecture of the abandoned warehouse complex. I don’t actually understand what the fuck the Centurions are doing up there and why they’re coming down now, or even frankly from where. They rain down like extras from a bad movie in their bondage Flashdance outfits (a much younger Demi Moore was crazy hot in that film), and the two guys closest bear the brunt of my allegedly sorcerous powers. My right hand ignites like a speck of the sun itself, the flash somehow not blinding me even as the newly-arrived assholes cover their eyes too late and lose their eyesight for good and the closest two are partly incinerated by whatever reality underpins those special effects.
I guess I’m just roll-of-the-dice lucky that Loren was turned away at that instant – or maybe that freaky light-show headband of hers confers some degree of protection – because one moment we’re under attack by twelve dudes, and the next moment ten of them are kneeling or otherwise stumbling about, several almost crying for their mothers as life’s precious seconds wear on and they realize their ability to see ain’t coming back any time soon.
The demon within me stirs, but again I clamp it down, conscious that these serpentine, subterranean movements somehow further untether Holland’s powers.
The first of the Centurions gingerly feels out his face, blinded and unable to
understand where the sudden sunburn came from. His probing fingers find petrified eyeballs rendered unto charcoal nestled in what he once called a face – what will soon be listed as fourth degree burns, if he ever makes it to a hospital, which appears decreasingly likely as he drops to his knees and emits a soundless howl that might wake the ghosts of the junkyard dogs buried hereabouts. The bawling ends with a wretched rasping I realize is a semaphore as the man’s blackened lungs take their last.
He topples sideways and I swear to Christ ash explodes from him so that I barely notice Mercury thumping down to stand all glowering and cold-blooded and majestic and shit behind me.
Zephyr 21.11 “Chiaroscuro Breeze”
WHEN SHAKESPEARE WROTE “Be like Mercury,” this vision from the smelting midden of Hephaestus’s worst nightmares is not what he meant, the robot standing like the self-conscious star of one of those god-awful cheap knock offs where actors once did bad imitations of real life superheroes.
Mercury stares at us with his gold-hued Classical bust, face an unmoving plate somehow making his stare all the more sinister, if stare it can in fact be, me attributing to him those very human qualities his maker deemed fit to imply despite the unthinking, but merely calculating reality of any semblance of artificial intelligence this renegade creation has.
Seeker edges slightly away from me, us each doing the clever thing and moving apart to avoid being easy targets.
“We’re done here,” I tell the machine.
“Who is to say here is now and not another instant?” the robot replies.
I merely stare at this, unexpected as it is to be drawn into a philosophical discourse, especially one where the truth might more likely be that I am dealing with a living computer that can no more understand time the same way I do than it can whistle Dixie with its air filters.
“I really don’t have an answer for you there pal,” I say dismissively. “Seeker? Wanna take a shot?”
Despite the new badass heavy metal, the woman I know so well remains the woman I know so well. She shoots me an aggrieved shrug, put out to be put on the spot so soon once more, but I only shoot a cheesy grin which I forget doesn’t come from Zephyr’s face, and so it turns into a pronounced wince, pondering how exactly I appear. Unwomanly?
Any further contemplation is marred by the gladiator-looking robot swinging into action, throwing incredibly powerful punches I dodge as I really wonder what the hell Doc Prendergast was thinking making his boy robot boy so damned near invincible.
Seeker’s Glow-induced powers were worthless against Mercury before, but her arsenal has changed along with our fortunes – and at rapid pace both. A shimmer runs through her metal carapace as she hefts arms like weapons, a squid-like array of quasi-perceptible tentacles lashing towards her target.
Mercury lifts one big arm to ward himself as he jet-boots backwards, but the tendrils enclose his limb, which he wrests away smoking and blackened. Somehow Mercury’s unmoving metal mask conveys the effrontery of the wound as he twists, posture strangely cat-like despite the enormous, metal-infused bulk of him. A cornea of light in his tensile palm flickers and I take it as my cue to fire my light powers straight upwards, the broad, laser-like pulse shearing through the upper storeys and creating an egress into which I leap, yelling for Seeker to follow as I jet upwards through the still-raining debris.
A corollary of twisting centrifugal forces fling me into the sky and I reach my zenith, spinning still, blue eyes stabbing into the gloom of below for a precious second as my powers refasten their hold on me in defiance of gravity. Seeker hurtles like a missile from an array, the aerotech connotations of her armor design positioning her well for such work as she streaks past me with Mercury in her wake.
“What the hell do you want, robot?” I yell as I deliberately sweep in and crash sideways against him.
The flying mandroid swings a backhander I don’t evade as well I’d like, pushing his metal mitt off me before he can clutch my throat. The temptation to knee him in the balls is so strong I do it anyway, unsurprised at the crunching of my knee as the robot and I spring apart like particles reaching the end of a fountain’s spray.
For a moment I am in freefall, conscious of the wind all around as I guess ordinary humans see it – given the absence of my wind powers and barometric senses – though few would find examining that force of nature quite so natural while starting to tumble from a few thousand feet into the air. My tactical gaze takes in Mercury zooming in on a tight arc towards me as Seeker returns to the affray wielding a nebulous ultraviolet-blue force.
Loren is unskilled in her new power’s use. She hauls the leviathan force like a newlywed struggling to fold a fitted sheet. The freezing haze boils forward like a slow-moving storm-front. I flit away on my chiaroscuro breeze, the ideational wave passing empyrean above me. Mercury is no lesser a wit and he too descends beneath the ideational thunderheads that rain a gross mucus speckled with tiny writhing alive things. My adversary is far less creeped out than me as bats and frogs and cat fetuses and other barely-alive things spatter down around us as he hooks in and sweeps his right fist into the middle of my tits.
I’m pummeled groundwards about fifty yards and into the side of a dumpster, caroming off that and into a supermarket wall, a scattering of dust-choked abandoned shopping trolleys gathered like the ceremonial guards of some forgotten steampunk age of cognitive Babbage engines – or maybe they just revive repressed memories for me as my world whirs and chirrups and dented bricks drop shards of ancient paintwork and brick render on my battle-stained garb.
Then the wall caves in behind me.
*
IT RAINS BRICKS for a couple of seconds, my scrabbling hands batting at them like at curious pests besetting a picnic and not the nominated battlefield of an abandoned long commute suburb’s riot-savaged shopping strip. The robotic Mercury touches down like a small naval fleet given wings, and a weird metallic dish swivels into existence around the wrist of the fist that just felled me. Like the stunned cattle I must resemble at that moment, my mouth just gawps as he hefts the offending limb and a pulse of intense sonic energy hammers my position. More bricks and shit go flying backwards, and after a second or two, like a thwarted salmon upstream, I twist my position on the chipped and cracked bitumen and scuttle backwards as well.
Seeker lands behind Mercury like a metallic female parody, arms flanged with blades as her smart-suit weaponizes in anticipation of her blow. Seeker punches the robot between what we would call the shoulder blades and then it’s Mercury’s turn to be thrown forward. I just wish I could claim I had my act together to be the second integer in a timeworn one-two, but not on this occasion. The robot arrests himself mid-flight with instantaneous command of foot and hand blasters. Halting like a steampunk Jesus, he twists back to return fire when instead he is seemingly erased from the picture by a vast blue energy beam.
Mercury’s disappearance reveals a skinny old black guy in a black body suit, visible wisps coming off him as his trademark absorption of visible light around the old-age hero turns him back into the familiar human question mark known once around the world as the Enigma. Standing around the world-famous and most decidedly well-past-it superhero are four other figures, each and every one of them as well known to me: Sentinel, Maxtor, Mistress Snow, and the Brit hero Lionheart.
I pause my renewed gawping to check where the killer robot was standing and where he might be now. The Enigma clearly took a bet on firing one enormously, insanely powerful blast, emptying his entire reservoir into wiping our adversary off the map. I follow the trail of destruction and drag marks through the ashes and rubbish and the day-old snow which ends at another violated brick wall a hundred and fifty yards distant across a parking lot. I lack the appetite to investigate further.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I curtly announce.
“You’re not much of one for pleasantries, young lady,” the white-haired and still quite busty Mistress Snow says from the top of her pedestal.
What a fucking asshole.
“We met before?” he squints as he asks.
I realize I’ve again fallen too far into the trap of thinking Zephyr-wise, rather than confronting the reality which seems so fixed for right now – and might well be forever. I am Cusp, not Zephyr. I literally (shit, there I go again with the “literally” Loren finds so irksome) close my mouth to the retort I want to give and relax awkwardly into the posture Holland’s svelte frame desires. Balanced lightly on the toes of my feet, however prettily, I remain admirably ready for action while looking fetching in the process, if not a little small-town-girl-awkward which Holland’s frame bewitches. The smiles of the three retired male masks relax with me and I can’t help let a slight growl besmirch my demeanor – a growl I fix on Lionheart, standing there looking all bronzed and leonine and shit despite his dopey good looks.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I bark at him.
“Me?” he says, surprised, English accent that of a well-educated rugby player and thus a rugby player nonetheless. “I came to see how our friends in the Colonies were faring, since it seems our Government’s put your lot in the too-hard basket.”
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