by Rob Rogers
Jason stopped his own flight in midair, hesitating.
Ducett looked surprised, but did he know what was going to happen to him? Did Julian? What were they fighting about, anyway?
Jason flew back up into the night sky, moving rapidly to avoid being seen, aiming for the low clouds.
* * * * *
Julian Kalodimos walked slowly back toward the shack, sighing and rubbing his sore jaw. He didn’t enjoy killing people. And now he was going to have to find somewhere else to put Zhdanov, which was a major complication. It had taken some serious thought and planning to come up with the trap he’d placed her in. In the shack, she knew that if she tried to touch him, if she did to him what she’d done to the orderly, then she would probably never make it out of the ramshackle building alive. Until she was a willing confederate, until he had persuaded her to help Uncle Costas, getting near her—and, especially, trying to move her—was extremely dangerous. He’d have to come up with another plan before someone came and found the doctor’s body.
He was glad that he had missed hearing the man’s body strike the ground. He’d heard the sound before, caused the sound before, and it haunted him.
The man hadn’t screamed. “He didn’t scream” wasn’t much of an epitaph, but there’d been worse. He shrugged. Walking lightly across the damaged roof, he wondered if there was any chicken tandoori left.
And then he heard a rage-filled shout and felt something slam into him.
* * * * *
Cain swallowed. He’d grown, too, he thought. He was maybe a foot taller. His shirt and shoes and socks were gone. His pants had split along the legs. “The Devil of Dubai,” he whispered, his voice pitched lower than he was used to, his baritone voice gone bass.
Jazz’s voice suddenly filled his ears. “Come to me, Cain!” she shouted. “It’s time to come to me!”
Cain walked to the building and stared at a window of reinforced glass installed in an exit door. His face was more or less as he’d expected it—distorted, demonic. The needle-sharp teeth he’d felt in his lower jaw glistened white. Tiny red and black hairs covered his body in a fine fur. The horns were curved, twisting like corkscrews. There was a little bit of Cain Ducett in that reflection—his cheekbones, his eyes except for the irises, which had turned blood-red, his hair. But not much. “Okay, Jazz,” he muttered to himself, a twisted smile on his demonic face. “I think under the circumstances that I can squeeze you in.”
But he had something else to take care of first. There was Scion, who had hurled him from the building. And there was Zhdanov, who was probably an even graver danger to the city.
Spreading his new wings and using his powerful legs to launch himself into the air, Cain took flight.
The air rushed around him again. His heightened senses seemed, if anything, even sharper in this form. He didn’t just see the edges of the building as he flew past. He heard them, heard the ambient noise of Devil’s Cape echoing off of them. He heard them like a bat would hear them.
He heard something else, too. The night air passing around a solitary object above. There was something floating directly above him in the low-lying clouds. A human form.
Scion, he thought.
Cain thrust himself even faster through the air, approaching the form. All the anger and fear and confusion that had been boiling in him since that dream had shattered his controlled life a few days earlier erupted from him as he screamed and then tackled the flying form, smashing with his fists, tearing with his claws.
* * * * *
Jason saw the demonic form of Cain Ducett flying up, but he felt confident, until it was too late, that the man couldn’t possibly see him and wouldn’t be focused on him if he did. And then Ducett slammed into him, knocking the breath from his lungs, stunning him as surely as the bullet to the eye had. His Argonaut uniform was made out of thick, durable fabric, reinforced with leather, but Ducett’s claws tore through it, tore into his side. The pain felt hot, awful, and he could feel blood running down.
“Wait,” he said, but his voice was faint in the night air. He shoved the monstrous figure away, sending Ducett spinning about forty feet to one side, but the winged man was already turning back.
Ducett grabbed him again, slammed a knee into his side, punched him in the kidney. His clawed fingers glanced off of the protective lenses Jason had sewn into his mask, and he was grateful that he’d taken time to replace the one that had been shattered by the bullet.
They skirmished like this for a few seconds, Ducett clawing at him like a wild beast, scratching, yelling, and raging, and then Jason shoving him away. And then Jason reached out for Ducett and grabbed him by the wrists. After all, he thought, he had the strength of Heracles. He pivoted their bodies, pulling Ducett’s arms in back of him, maneuvering him into a painful hold. Autolycus, he thought, had been a wrestler. “I said wait,” he said, his breath coming back to him, his side still burning. He twisted the man’s arm again. “Wait, damn it.”
* * * * *
Julian fell to the roof with the shock of the blow he felt. It set the rooftop shaking again, pieces underneath him breaking loose. As he scrambled to his hands and knees and then literally flew a few feet into the air, he saw a ten-foot-by-ten-foot section of the roof just break free and fall to the floor below. It didn’t stop there, the heavy chunks of flooring working downward with increasing mass and momentum like falling dominoes, until a huge channel was open nearly to the bottom of the building. “Hell,” he said.
He felt something slice into his side, felt scratching as though from claws. “Jason,” he said softly. He wasn’t being attacked. Jason was.
And then, hearing the yelling again, he looked straight up. Far overhead, he could see his brother, his silly cape billowing around him, fighting some kind of winged creature. “This just gets better and better,” he said.
He heard crashing sounds from the building. That little fall of his, breaking the chunk of the roof loose, was triggering something much larger, and he wasn’t sure that the building would survive it.
His side was already feeling better. He looked up at Jason, wondering what he was doing there, who he was fighting. And then he decided to concentrate on the business at hand. The fight above was an opportunity, and Julian Kalodimos wasn’t one to overlook an opportunity.
He sprinted to the shack and thrust the door open. Olena Zhdanov sat on her cot, eyes wide as the room swayed around her.
“We’re going,” he said simply. “Try anything on me, and believe me, I’ll kill you before you finish me.”
Her deep eyes seemed to be considering the possibility, but then she nodded. “I’m ready,” she said. Her seductive smile didn’t reach her eyes.
* * * * *
His arms—and therefore his new wings—locked painfully behind his back, Cain wondered if he’d made a mistake. He’d thought he was attacking Scion. How many other flying men would be in the area? The man had the same build. He moved the same way. His voice was the same. And he smelled the same, too. The aftershave—orange blossom, coriander, cedar, vanilla. But as they struggled, he could see that the uniform was a different color. The man didn’t have a beard. He wore a cape. But still . . . the same scent? The same voice? The same way of moving?
Cain had been a street fighter, full of action and reaction, chaos under the surface. He’d spent years establishing rigid control of himself, honing his intellect, training his impulses. But now, in this demon body, the scent of blood in the air, filled with anger and frustration over his lost control, he lashed out. “Scion,” he said, “I’ve had enough of you.” His arms locked, he craned his head around and bit the other man on the arm.
“Damn it!” the other man swore, shoving Cain away again, freeing him. He grabbed at his bleeding arm.
And Cain seized the opportunity. Reaching out with both hands, moving as fast as he could, he slammed into his opponent, flew him down hard and fast onto the rooftop below.
The roof shuddered and snapped when they stru
ck it, and an area around them about the size of Cain’s Holingbroke office broke away, forcing them down into the level below, clouds of disintegrating plaster filling the air and choking them. Somewhere nearby, one of the few remaining windows exploded into splintered shards. Rivets popped out of concrete in a staccato pop-pop-pop like gunfire. Concrete cracked, then crumbled, chunks of it falling down in a small avalanche. Sparks danced through the air. A support girder groaned and creaked, then began to bend, ultimately folding in on itself at a weak, rusted spot with a grinding grunt. With a sudden, jarring crash, they fell again, smashing their way down through the poorly bolstered center of the building, plummeting perhaps two or three more stories. The south wall began to buckle, concrete blocks popping out until it seemed to be making a gap-toothed grin. Falling cinderblocks slammed everywhere, exploding like mortar fire.
And then the whole building collapsed around them.
Katherine Brauer—Kate joined TI in 1999 and was elected Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff in 2004. She currently works at the Vanguard City Technology Center and has made significant contributions to the company in the areas of . . .
— From “Seven technical innovators honored with promotion to TI Fellow,” Infolink, internal news site for Texas Instruments
Chapter Thirty-Five
Devil’s Cape, Louisiana
Eight days after the deaths of the Storm Raiders
7:15 p.m.
Kate opened the door to her secret room, letting Samuel inside as she went through the last steps of her preflight preparation. “Welcome to the Juan Marco Quintana Memorial Laboratory,” she said, the hint of a smile on her lips.
Samuel was wearing jeans, sandals, and a Hawaiian shirt. A dragon cavorted with a topless dancer across his chest. “Where y’at?” he asked. “That’s Louisiana for ‘how’s it going,’ I think.”
“Hey, where y’at?” she said. She had brought a bamboo Chinese paneled wall into her lab as a changing area, and her armor was currently shrouded from view inside. She gestured at the one chair in the lab not piled with data books or DVD-ROMs, then moved behind the panel.
Eschewing the chair for the moment, the short man peered around the lab. He stared for a moment at the framed picture that Kate had borrowed from her father’s own lab, the picture of the Storm Raiders—her “aunts and uncles”—posing in their uniforms with their masks off. He moved on without comment, taking in the dozens of machines, the computer hookups with multiple monitors, the shelves that supported hundreds of pounds of armaments for her armor. “You’ve got beaucoup equipment here,” he said. “You could put most universities to shame.”
She chuckled. “You should stop with the lingo,” she said. “You’ll hurt your mouth.” She stepped back out from behind the panel, a powerful Xenon flashlight in one hand. Shining the flashlight back toward the armor, her gaze pensive, she said, “Ideally, I’d like to have a clean room, but that’s beyond what I can do for the moment.”
“So you going to let me see it?” he asked, gesturing at the paneled wall. On the main panel, a Chinese fisherman was casting his pole back, ready to throw his hook forward into the sea. A gray heron flew over the calm waters.
She flicked off the flashlight and nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “I am.” Kate was wearing light sweatpants and a thin, long-sleeved cotton shirt. The armor had interior cooling, so she wasn’t likely to get overheated, and it was better to have a layer of cloth between herself and the armor. She pulled her short hair back with a headband, then held a finger up to him. “Just a sec,” she said.
Kate hadn’t expected the claustrophobic feeling of climbing into the armor. She’d used the exoskeleton before, had tried on every single piece of the armor multiple times, including the helmet. But somehow, stepping into the ensemble was different. Her breath felt tight. She thought of Fortunato in Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” slowly being sealed behind a brick wall. But in truth, the air inside the Doctor Camelot armor was flowing freely, filtered, slightly oxygen-rich. She whispered a voice command—she had backup controls that would allow her to activate the same protocols manually, but voice was her primary means of control—and a series of projected displays appeared inside her faceplate. She pivoted one arm, testing the range of motion. The armor moved with her without discernible lag, the digital signal processors interpreting and reacting to her motion in real time.
“Are you ready, Uncle Samuel?” she asked. The voice that emerged from her armor was pleasant and melodic. It sounded like a normal, everyday female voice with a wide range of pitch, timbre, and emphasis. It just didn’t sound like Kate’s voice. She’d developed an algorithm that altered her voice enough to make it unrecognizable as her own and to baffle any attempts to match her voice print, but that still sounded eminently human. As a tribute to the Doctor Camelot heritage, she’d also given the voice the hint of a British accent.
“On pins and needles,” he said. “Are you waiting for me to throw doubloons or something?”
Kate stepped out from behind the paneled wall. The armor was sleek and curved, its joints nearly seamless. She’d shined it, and most of it sparkled liked burnished chrome. The Doctor Camelot coat of arms—a sword laid across a shield with a purple background behind them—had been carefully emblazoned on the upper left side of her chest as well as her left shoulder, bearing tribute to the three men who had carried the name before her. The armor was a testament to miniaturization and compressed space. Her father’s armor had been bulky; not only had it weighed about 150 pounds, but it had added inches to his height and more to his circumference. Kate’s armor, although stronger and more durable than his, added only a few centimeters to her, except at her forearms, which were broad in order to hold her various weapons, and her back, which contained jet propulsion systems and concentrated fuel cells. While her father’s helmet had resembled a medieval knight’s, with a metallic faceplate that covered his face and slightly limited his range of vision, Kate’s helmet was significantly different. The front of it, surrounding her face, looked like smoked glass. Anyone looking at her could clearly tell that a woman’s face was inside, but the details were obscured enough that no one could identify her. Nor could they see the dozens of projected displays and gauges that allowed Kate to monitor her armor’s systems and extensive suite of sensor devices. A short amethyst cape dangled from her shoulders to just over the exhaust vents of her jet pack, another tribute to her predecessors’ sense of style. The cape was more or less there just for decoration; it would break free easily if someone tried to use it to grab hold of her.
“Wow,” Samuel said. “I wish your dad could see this.”
Kate smiled behind the smoky faceplate. “Glad you like it,” she said.
He finally sat in the chair she’d offered earlier, eyes taking in every detail. “So that’s really as durable as his?”
She nodded. “More durable, actually.”
“It’s odd actually getting to see your face,” he said, “even though I can’t quite recognize you.”
She tapped the faceplate. “I thought it would be useful to look more human, more approachable,” she said. “And if my armor’s systems kick out, then I might lose my various heads up displays, but I can still see out.”
“But if it breaks, the glass in your face . . .”
She shook her head. “This plate can take a mortar shell,” she said. “If something’s powerful enough to break the armor, then more than likely I’ll already be dead from shock waves passing through.” She held up a hand. “Don’t worry, though. It’s tougher than Dad’s in pretty much every way.” Including the neck joints, she thought but didn’t say, the image of the Behemoth and his huge tattooed hands invading her mind.
Samuel’s eyes sparkled. “The chestplate’s pretty different than your dad’s too,” he said. He made an exaggerated gesture with his hands, teasing without being flirtatious. “Isn’t that kind of . . . un-aerodynamic?”
She smiled. “It’s comfortable,” she said. �
��And I don’t want there to be any question about my gender.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” he said. He contemplated her. “You ready, Katie?”
“Yes.”
He nodded, then gestured at the variety of machines stretching around the room, broken only by her framed picture of his team and the plastic plant she’d placed in one corner as a half-hearted attempt at decoration. “So,” he said, “I’m like your mission control?”
“If you don’t mind,” she said. “Just for the time being. I ultimately shouldn’t need someone here monitoring things, but I’d appreciate it this time.” She’d quickly run through the various monitors and machines, explaining what system each sensor was reporting on, what each machine was there to do.
Finally, he said, “You’re stalling, Katie.”
She nodded, clasping him gently on the shoulder, and then opened the hidden door that led to her neighbor’s rooftop. Waving at him, then closing the door between them, she walked quietly across the roof, putting some distance between herself and her home before starting. “Can you hear me?” she asked softly, transmitting back to the machines in the Juan Marco Quintana Memorial Laboratory.
“Where y’at?” he said.
She grinned. Looking at the streets below, she cycled through ultraviolet and infrared displays, reassuring herself that no one was watching her. Then she ignited her jet pack, its muffled engine a mere whisper in the night air.