True Dark

by Niall Teasdale

  June followed suit, trying to work out what an appropriate flying pose was. There were so many to choose from. Cygnus, she had noticed, tended to go with the ‘variable geometry wing’ option, keeping her arms at her sides, but angling them out from her body more at lower velocities. But there was the ‘spear’ form – with both arms out in front and legs together – or the ‘punching space’ pose – with one fist forward – and then you had the options regarding legs – together or with one leg bent. She had already decided that the ‘T’ formation was only for when playing around, but it was hard to resist using it just now: flying was still too new not to be exciting.

  Well, unless she looked down. The waves were looking further away. She was about to ask again how high they were when there was a thud and a slight shock ran through her body. ‘What was that?!’

  ‘Congratulations. You just broke the sound barrier,’ Cygnus replied.

  ‘I did! Oh, wow. I mean… Wow!’

  Flashing a grin at her girlfriend, Cygnus pushed ahead. ‘You’re still accelerating. Try to keep up.’

  ‘Oh, it’s on.’ And June followed, catching up and coming in alongside Cygnus as they flew higher and faster.

  Okay, so June had the strong feeling that Cygnus was holding back. She certainly had more acceleration than June did, but they were still not really sure what Cygnus’s current top speed was. Even across the Atlantic, she had not hit her maximum airspeed before it was time to slow down again. But June remembered that Cygnus had not been able to fly supersonic when she had first started out. June could, and she was determined to see how fast she could go. She was so determined, in fact, that she did not really notice the sky darkening around her.

  ‘Looks like you’re capping out just inside Mach four,’ Cygnus said. The sound was just in June’s ear, transmitted through the earpieces they were wearing. ‘Something over twenty-five hundred miles per hour.’

  ‘That’s fast, right?’

  ‘It’s faster than most military aircraft. What’s even more interesting is that you haven’t complained about the atmosphere.’

  ‘What about the at– Holy shit! How high up are we?!’

  ‘Thirty-five thousand feet. The air isn’t breathable up here and it averages about minus seventy Fahrenheit. Do you trust me?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Cygnus looked up and began to climb faster. ‘Then follow me.’

  They were only climbing for a couple of minutes before Cygnus began to slow. June’s eyes widened all the way up as the sky darkened to black and the stars came out. ‘We’re in space,’ she almost whispered.

  ‘The edge of it,’ Cygnus replied. ‘We’re a hundred miles up. You don’t have the speed to reach orbital velocity, but you’ve enough acceleration to hold yourself here for a while.’

  It did feel like she was fighting to stay where she was and June nodded. ‘This… This is amazing. I never thought I’d see space. Except on TV.’

  Cygnus giggled. ‘You should’ve said. I’d have brought you up here. The point is, you’re not cold and you’re still breathing. You can handle vacuum.’

  ‘I guess I can. I feel like I can go faster up here.’

  Cygnus grinned. ‘Okay. Well, if you start having problems, I can grab you and you’ll be safe. Let’s see if you can make orbit.’

  ~~~

  Montgomery Hill stood with his back to the door of his office, looking out at the city. He did not immediately turn as Jacob and Heather entered. Both could see a tightness about his shoulders: something was disturbing the man. He was, ostensibly, a lawyer. Jacob and Heather knew there was more to him than that. He knew that they knew. They all found it easier not to admit any of that.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ Hill said, finally turning around. ‘Please, take a seat.’

  Jacob looked at the rather narrow guest chairs in front of Hill’s desk. ‘I’ll stand. It’s easier on the furniture.’

  ‘Ah. I hadn’t considered… Well, this won’t take long.’ Hill waited until Heather had taken a seat and then sat down himself. ‘Let me first state that the current situation has necessitated some changes in our normal operating procedures. We normally operate under the convenient lie that Roman and Hill is just a law firm and that you know nothing beyond that. With Miss Morgan missing, we need all the help we can get to find her. She is rather more than the CEO of our… parent company.’

  ‘And she’s more than a friend to us,’ Heather said. ‘Jacob more than me, perhaps, but still… You seem sure she’s not dead.’

  ‘We are sure she’s not dead, Miss Bryant. Everything we’ve been able to determine indicates that she is alive. What we cannot determine is where she is.’

  ‘I thought you people could find just about anything, anywhere,’ Jacob said. ‘As long as it’s dark anyway. It’s been two weeks.’

  Hill nodded. ‘Unfortunately, Miss Morgan has control over our best means of searching for her.’

  ‘The shadow imps,’ Heather said.

  ‘As you say. We remain able to summon them, thankfully, but if she wishes to remain hidden from us, the imps will not report finding her.’

  ‘And you think we can help?’ Jacob asked. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’ll try anything I can to find her. The UoU is looking. We’re just detectives.’

  ‘And a very effective bridge between us and them. We have resources other than the imps. When we get intel which may be of use, we’ll share it with you and you will share it with the Union.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Heather said, ‘but you know they know about you too. Viviane especially. The Union helped Cygnus get to Italy when Andrea first went to the castle.’

  ‘We know.’ Hill gave a bleak little smile. ‘We still feel that a degree of separation will serve everyone best. When this is over, we can all go back to none of us admitting we know anything we shouldn’t. Call it plausible deniability.’

  Jacob gave a grunt which might have been a laugh. ‘I’ll call it anything you like if it gets Andrea back faster.’

  ~~~

  ‘She seems to have a pretty major adaptation to space,’ Cygnus said, looking up at the big screen on the wall where she could see Doctor Ultimate and his wife looking back. ‘She’s a lot faster once she gets above the atmosphere. She doesn’t need air and the cold is no problem.’

  ‘A strange expression of power,’ Ultimate said. ‘Even if you’ve no plans to take up wearing a mask, June, the Union would likely be interested in having you available for extraplanetary missions. We have relatively few space-capable members. Jacob’s ice powers are useful to us despite the fact that we have far more cold-weather members to call on. You would be joining a very exclusive club.’

  June nodded. Now dressed in jeans and a cropped top, she was sitting beside Cygnus on one of the sofas. ‘I can do that, sure. To be honest, I still need to find out if I have defences I could use, but I feel a little like the way Cygnus felt when she first got her powers. I feel like I need to use whatever I’ve got.’ She looked at Cygnus. ‘We need to work harder on my fighting. And, somehow, we need to find out what else I can do. I’m sure there’s more.’

  ‘Okay,’ Cygnus said. ‘We’ll see what else comes up. You learning to fight is a good thing anyway. You need to learn to control your strength. Her boosted lift is nearing two thousand pounds, Hugh. She’s punching around the same level.’

  ‘Quite impressive,’ Alice said, grinning. ‘Remind me not to challenge you to an arm-wrestling match, June.’

  June waved the comment away. ‘Oh, that shouldn’t be a problem. If I want to do that, I’ll take up cruising biker bars. Sounds like a really cheap way to get drinks.’

  9th June.

  ‘If that’s how they want to play it,’ Penny said, ‘then that’s how we’ll play it. Right now, it seems like they have about as much information as we do.’

  ‘None,’ Jacob grumbled. He had come out to the house to tell Penny about the arrangement with the Shadow Court via Roman and Hill.

 
‘Pretty much. Uh, well, Hugh is hypothesising that she’s in China or Japan. Probably China.’

  ‘What’s the theory based on?’

  ‘Hypothesis. There’s not enough evidence to call it a theory.’ Penny flashed a grin. ‘Hugh is a scientist before anything else. We know that Naryan had three ships. Two were over on this side of the globe and they blew up when the charges Twilight planted overloaded one of the reactors they had aboard. The first ship going up destroyed the second. The third ship was over China when it exploded. It also seems to have begun dropping out of orbit and it didn’t explode until about twenty minutes after the first two went. Hugh suspects Twilight got aboard that ship and destroyed it somehow. China and Japan were under the detonation.’

  ‘And China’s a real mess right now,’ Jacob said, nodding. ‘If she were in Japan, we might have had news of her, but China… It’s the perfect place to get lost.’

  ‘Yup. It’s a good working hypothesis, but the evidence is entirely circumstantial. She might have been above China, but then we’re saying that she could be in China now because we might not know if she was. It’s thin.’

  ‘Very thin, but I’ll pass it along to Hill. They must have people in China.’

  Penny grinned. ‘I’m sure they do. They have people just about everywhere. The question is whether they can actually find her and what state she’s in if they do.’

  Hong Kong, China, 12th June.

  June in Hong Kong tended to be hot and humid. Today it had rained around nightfall and the sky was still overcast, but the temperature was up above thirty Celsius and that was with eighty-five percent humidity. The roads were wet and glistening in the light from bright neon signs. People on the sidewalk outside the Midnight Dancer carried umbrellas and tried to avoid the puddles which might mess up their clubwear.

  Lĭ Wěi stood beside the entrance, watching the passers-by with the professional disinterest of a man who knew his job. Wěi’s job was making sure that only the right kind of people entered the Midnight Dancer. Generally, that meant attractive women, rich and attractive men, and members of the 8G triad. Wěi was a member of the 8G and he took his job very seriously. He was also pretty good at it since he was a minor Ultra, a guàiwù. He had skin tough enough to bounce bullets and had added to that by building an impressive physique. People tended to be intimidated by him. Those who were not intimidated tended to be unable to handle him.

  When a woman turned toward the door, he paid her more attention. One hundred and seventy-five centimetres and maybe seventy kilos. Fit, attractive, obvious but smooth muscle under dusky skin. There was plenty of skin on display thanks to a short, black, slightly translucent dress with a deeply cowled neckline and a skirt with slits from the hem to the hip on both sides. There were high-heeled platform sandals which pushed her almost up to Wěi’s six feet. She had somewhat untidy black hair, clipped short except down her neck. Her face was quite angular, hard, and her eyes were jet black across their entire surface.

  Wěi held out an arm to block her. She fitted the ‘attractive woman’ criteria for entry, but she failed on the one big no-no. The 8G preferred to keep Ultras they did not own out of the Midnight Dancer. She looked like an American, so Wěi spoke English. ‘I am sorry, miss, but the club is full.’

  She turned and smiled at him. He expected her to say something about having seen others go in or for her to offer a bribe. ‘You really don’t want to get in my way,’ she said. A threat, or what amounted to a threat, he had not expected. His muscles tensed and he pulled himself up straight, glaring at her. ‘I warned you,’ she said, and he found himself falling into her eyes.

  He was falling, falling into darkness. There was no bottom, just the darkness and the falling. His grandmother had told him he would end up in Hell…

  ~~~

  Midnight watched the bouncer sliding down the wall in a dead faint, stepped around him, and headed into the club. Her examination of the Hong Kong crime scene had turned up a number of places to start, but she had decided on this place for obvious reasons: if she was going to own a club, having it named after her seemed like a nice idea. She had taken a little longer over her research than she probably needed to, but now she was ready to move. Tonight was the night.

  Part of her delay had been because things had changed and she had taken a little time to work out just exactly what had happened. Her best guess was that she had been affected by the cosmic energy bursts she had been rather close to. She had always been the dark source of Twilight’s power, but now she was truly the embodiment of that Darkness: the Darkness was her and she was the Darkness. Midnight was the thing people feared on the edge of the light.

  It was not that simple, however. Andrea had Ultrahuman powers beyond those granted by her shadow. She had always had them but the explosions had added to them. She was stronger and faster than before. Her senses were sharper. She did not really think she needed those powers when she had the other ones, but she was not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. Especially when the changes to her shadow powers had taken away her ability to throw blades of darkness. She had worked out some tricks which replaced that ability, but it was a little annoying. Apparently, if the shadow was her, it was less inclined to throw bits of it away. The part of Midnight’s mind which was most derived from Andrea Morgan’s thought that kind of inconsistency was just par for the course when dealing with the supernatural.

  The club was going to need remodelling. It looked like no one had redecorated since the nineteen seventies, maybe the eighteen seventies. Midnight thanked providence that there was not a mirror ball hanging over the dance floor. The place was all black glass panels and chrome poles. The lighting was dim, which was about the only thing she liked about the place. Greasy-looking men in suits sat around the tables which encircled the main floor. Most of them, she figured, were 49ers, bottom-level triad members. With the 8G, that did not mean they were not dangerous: the triad had been founded by eight guàiwù – hence the name – and they had accepted Ultras into their ranks where the more traditional triads had not. It had given them an edge. Tonight, Midnight would be proving that they needed a whetstone.

  Midnight was looking for a man named Zhāng Tāo, a ‘Red Pole’ who ran the club, particularly its security. He was an Ultra, an X2 with enhanced strength. To have that magnitude, you had to have some superhuman level of physical strength, so Zhāng was stronger than Midnight. But only in the purely physical sense. She knew roughly where he would be too: he always sat at a table at the rear of the club on a section of the floor which was level with the raised stage. It gave him a good view of the girls on the stage – there were always at least two dancing – and of the door. The lighting in his area was dimmed to ensure that he could see anyone coming his way before they saw him. Of course, that did not work well on Midnight.

  Zhāng was in his late thirties, muscular, and reasonably handsome. Brown hair, brown eyes, and reasonably typical features arranged in a reasonably pleasing manner. On the other hand, the fact that he lounged behind his table like some sort of monarch with a couple of barely dressed women young enough to be his daughters clinging to him did not make him especially appealing. Then again, Midnight was not that much older than the girls. Physically. In some ways, she was now older than the current species of humans. Whatever, unarmed and apparently harmless, Midnight was allowed to walk to within a few feet of the table before Zhāng and his bodyguards noticed her eyes and reacted. Guns were drawn. Midnight smiled.

  There was some rapid-fire Chinese which Midnight interrupted. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t had time to learn your language. It’s on the list.’

  ‘What are you doing here, guàiwù?’ Zhāng asked in English. He had a fairly thick accent, but it was clear enough.

  ‘I’m offering you the opportunity to surrender. Sign this place over to me and you get to live.’

  There was the inevitable laughing; Midnight had expected it. He followed it with, ‘Kill her.’

  The room sank into darkn
ess. There were a couple of shots and one shriek of pain from across the dance floor, and then the screams came from Zhāng’s table and the voice seemed to come from right behind his shoulder. ‘I told you, Zhāng, surrender or die.’ He felt a hand on his chest and cold bit into his body as though someone had thrust an icicle through his heart. The cold bit into his bones; he could not move or speak as the woman with the jet-black eyes sucked the heat from his body. After another second, he blacked out and part of his mind was thankful for that.

  When the shadows rolled back to where they were supposed to be, Midnight was standing right where she had been, still smiling. Zhāng was sitting exactly where he had been, but he was cold and dead. If his two girlfriends had not been passed out on the table, they would probably have started screaming. As it was, the screams came from various places around the room and started a few seconds later, accompanied by the sounds of customers running for the doors. Two of Zhāng’s men had the presence of mind – stupidity from Midnight’s viewpoint – to point their weapons at Midnight. The effect was somewhat diminished in one case since his hand was trembling.

  ‘You get to live,’ Midnight said, her tone pleasant. ‘For now. Take a message to your superiors. Midnight is taking over the Eight-G. I’ll slaughter every one of you, right up to your Dragon Head, if I have to and there is nothing you can do to stop me. Tell them I’m coming.’ Then she stepped forward and seemed to sink into the shadows under the table.

  ~~~

  Billy Hong had a flat in one of the tower blocks of the Sham Shui Po District. It was the poorest district in the city, and it was public housing, but it was the best Billy had been able to do. He had been planning to furnish it with a few extra luxuries during the blackout which had happened a few weeks ago, but that had failed when he had come across Midnight. Now… Well, now he was lying on his lounge floor – naked, hogtied, and gagged – waiting for Midnight to come back from wherever it was she had gone. She did not trust him to be free when she was away or asleep, and she was right: given any chance, he would have run like a scared rabbit.