Covenant

by James Maxey

  “Uh oh,” said App, over the whine of motors and turbines kicking to life. The drone suddenly leapt a yard into the air. A small red spot appeared on Lindon’s forehead.

  “Ghost mode!” App yelled, leaping into the air. As he fell, his body became intangible. He dropped straight through the drone. The second he was clear, he once more shouted “Dense mode!” He reached up and grabbed the laser rifle with both hands and jerked it sideways. A nanosecond later, the top of Lindon’s left ear vanished as the rifle flashed. With a grunt, App swung his legs up, pressing his feet against the hull while he still held onto the rifle. With all his strength, he tore the gun free of its mounting. He fell to the concrete floor, landing hard amid a shower of sparks.

  Nathan’s voice sounded in his head. “Bad news. One improvement in the model z909 versus the z808? A self-destruct mode. Don’t want these things falling into the wrong hands if they’re crippled. You’ve got about ten seconds. I can pull you out with the space machine, but we don’t have a nanomap of the detective to grab him safely.”

  “I’ll shield him,” said App, rising to his feet. He still had the enhanced strength in his legs. Leaping toward Lindon, he shouted, “Airbag mode!”

  He hated airbag mode. The collagen in his skin was reconfigured to make it both highly elastic and extremely tough, with the tensile strength of spider silk. At the same time, his whole body filled with carbon dioxide, swelling him like a balloon. This wasn’t his most dignified power.

  He crashed into Lindon, flattening him beneath his still ballooning body, bracing for the BOOM! The drone exploded into a zillion shards of flaming shrapnel. The momentum of the larger pieces was absorbed by his yielding flesh. Smaller, needle like fragments riddled him with holes, but were robbed of energy before they could damage his internal organs. All the tiny puncture wounds felt like he’d been fighting the world’s angriest porcupine. Worse, the holes let the gasses escape in a chorus of raspy, farting sounds, like a thousand balloons being deflated at once.

  “Wud duh hull juh huppun?” asked Lindon, his voice muffled by the blanket of App’s flesh.

  “Foam mode,” said App. His body changed back to something slightly less freakish. But any sense of restored dignity was stripped away as he started vomiting torrents of foam. It was a necessary evil, since the exploding drone had set the wooden rafters of the old tobacco warehouse aflame. He’d trained in foam mode extensively when he’d been chasing Sundancer, a supervillain who could burst into flame. He could spew his flame retardant foam about thirty feet, more than enough to douse the flaming rafters. In barely a minute, he had the fire under control.

  He turned back to Lindon, who was clutching the ruins of his left ear.

  “I’ve been in law enforcement thirty damn years,” said Lindon. “Thought I’d seen every weird thing there was to see.”

  “Reset,” said App, shifting back into his normal body, assuming the word normal applied to him any longer.

  “How the hell did you get such a strange mix of powers?” asked Lindon.

  App shrugged. “A hacked teleportation belt that reconfigures my body in useful and disgusting ways. I really can’t give you much in the way of specifics.”

  “Classified?”

  “Nah,” said App. “I get to use the powers, but I don’t completely understand how the belt works. There’s a lot of math.”

  “You don’t have a math mode?”

  “Hmm,” said App, rubbing his chin.

  Lindon winced as he took his hand off his ear. He looked at his fingers. There was no blood.

  “Sorry about your ear,” said App.

  “It could have been worse,” said Lindon, nodding toward Leone’s body.

  “Yeah, but if I hadn’t messed around with this thing it wouldn’t have woken up.”

  Lindon shook his head. “I let you do it. Don’t—” He stopped in mid-thought as the radio on his belt crackled to life. The dispatcher sounded agitated as she called out a series of codes.

  “Gun battle out at the airport,” said Lindon, translating. “Officer down.”

  The dispatcher shifted into plain English. “Witnesses report that that one of the combatants is a dragon.”

  “And now we’re in a fantasy film,” said App. “Sounds like a job for a superfreak. Best get going.”

  “To fight a dragon?” asked Lindon. “You got a lance mode?”

  “That’s an excellent set up for a dirty joke and I hate that I can’t think of the punchline.” Then, to Nathan, “A cut and paste to the airport, please. Find a nice open spot on the runway.” Then, to Lindon, “I’ll be in touch after I take care of this. Keep me in the loop if you find out anything about the perp. I’ll get my guys to…” his voice trailed off. He’d been moved instantaneously through space in mid-sentence. Sparks flashed all around his feet as bullets struck the airport runway.

  Chapter Two

  Killing Machine

  The bullets hadn’t been aimed at him, they were only random shots hitting the ground after missing their targets. App squinted, his eyes adjusting from the dimly lit warehouse to the glare of runway floodlights. The warehouse had been chilly but out here in the wind it felt like he’d been teleported to the artic.

  “Fever mode,” he said. Instantly, his body temperature climbed to a level where the freezing air felt pleasant.

  Loud CHATACHATACHATA sounds rattled the air. A hundred yards away, a plane was on fire in the middle of the runway. Three drones identical to the one he’d seen in the warehouse were buzzing around the burning plane, and a half dozen men in camo fatigues were firing wildly into the air with automatic rifles. App turned his social media streams back on. Breaking news was always legal to broadcast. “Getting ready to engage in battle!” he cried out. “Time to kick some ass!”

  His bravado was tempered as bullets zinged around his feet again. App crouched, covering his head with both hands as bullets rained down. “Ghost mode!” he shouted. In his intangible form, he was safe from any stray shots. Unfortunately, since he’d not been moving in any particular direction, he had no momentum, and moving fast in ghost mode was impossible due to the lack of traction. He was too far from the action to do any good.

  “Fast mode!” he shouted. His neurotransmitters shifted to alter his perception of time. The stray bullets fell from the air slow enough to see, bouncing from the tarmac like little rubber balls. He ducked and dodged through the deadly precipitation, wondering who he was going to hit once he reached the fight. Were the guys in camo thugs or actual military? And what the hell were they shooting at? They seemed to be aiming at something above the drones.

  Then he saw it, a black beast with red eyes and nostrils belching steam dropping down out of the darkness, wings spread like the world’s largest bat. His eyes bulged. It really was a dragon! Instantly, his social media likes started to explode.

  The dragon obliged the internet viewers with some cool action shots as it snagged one drone in its jaws, caught another with its fore claws, and swatted the last from the sky with a tail that looked like it ended with a sword. The dragon slammed to the runway, smashing the drones. The self-destruct modes kicked in and the shockwave of the explosions caught App by the chest and threw him backwards. He landed hard on the tarmac as an enormous, Hollywood-style fireball rolled toward him.

  “Ghost mode!” he shouted. “Ghost mode!”

  He was intangible as the fire reached him. It didn’t really help. His senses were muffled in ghost mode, especially his sense of touch. But though his nerves only transmitted pain at a fraction of their normal intensity, he still felt as if he were being roasted alive, as the flames slipped through the atoms of his intangible skin.

  The second the flames passed, he whispered, “Reset,” and fell to his knees. He was back to normal, at least physically. His brain couldn’t yet let go of the certainty he’d been cooked alive. As his fear slipped away, he took a deep breath letting his heartrate slow.

  He looked back toward the scene of the
explosion. The dragon had survived. “Eagle eye mode,” he whispered, and found his vision bumped to the absolute maximum sharpness. He could see now that the dragon was some sort of machine. It looked almost as if it were made of cast iron, which might explain why it had weathered the explosion so well. Its wings looked like black silk, though obviously such a delicate material wouldn’t have survived the blast. He spotted bullet holes perforating the wing flaps, and the rear hind leg seemed to be leaking oil. Whatever this thing was, it wasn’t impervious.

  Now that it was done with the drones, the dragon turned its attention to the plane. It had torn off the left wing and was tearing back the canopy to the cabin with its razor sharp claws. Sparks flew around its snout as someone inside opened fire with an automatic weapon. The dragon reared up on its hind legs, drew its head back, and unleashed a jet of white hot steam. Even a hundred yards away, App could feel the heat. Agonized screams sounded from inside the plane. A few seconds later, everything was silent.

  The dragon looked around, deliberately eying all the bodies on the ground. Apparently, one of them wasn’t sufficiently dead, because it moved to the fallen man and drove its fore claws deep into the man’s back.

  App wasn’t sure if there was anyone left to save, but he’d seen enough to know that this dragon needed to be taken down. “Fast mode!”

  He took off running. In reality, he didn’t move that much faster than normal in his fast mode, but his accelerated senses gave him a huge advantage over most opponents in hand to hand combat. Not that he planned to hit this dragon with his fists. He just needed to get into position use other powers to stop the thing.

  The dragon saw him, its eyes slowly narrowing at it turned to face him. It lifted a fore claw, looking ready to strike, though with its molasses slowness App didn’t feel as if he was in any danger.

  “Glue mode!” he shouted as he reached the beast. Instantly, his sweat was transformed into a type of glue excreted by sea cucumbers. His own skin wouldn’t stick to it, but anything else had about three seconds from exposure to a bonding force powerful enough to hold a bulldozer dangling on the end of an inch thick steel rod. He high fived the dragon’s fore claw, then dove between its legs, coating the underside of the creature’s tail.

  “Wait!” The dragon cried out, in a distinctly female voice.

  App rolled to his feet, shouting, “Spectrum mode!”

  “I don’t want to fight you,” the dragon said, turning toward him, placing her glue covered fore claw on the ground as she moved. App could hear the sound of gears grinding against one another as the claw was instantly immobilized.

  “What the…?” the dragon sounded confused. App studied the beast as it wasted precious seconds trying to free its claw. Whatever the hide was made of, it absorbed most of the visible spectrum and a fair amount of the infrared. In the ultraviolent, he could see that the creature’s scales were made of some sort of heat resistant carbon composite. The head and torso were roughly the size of a large horse. The wing span was enormous, easily sixty feet from tip to tip. Though the signature was muted, he could vaguely make out the glowing outlines of a human form nestled within the torso of the beast. Maybe. The stealthy skin made it difficult to tell. If it was a human, it had to be a midget, or maybe a child, to fit into the torso with all the machinery inside. Whoever had built this thing had a steampunk aesthetic that App appreciated. Yes, it was a dangerous killing machine, but it was a carefully crafted killing machine with classic lines and lacy filigree highlights along the gears and pistons.

  “Who are you?” App asked.

  “Call me Steam-Dragon,” said the dragon.

  “Very well, Steam-Dragon,” said App. “You’re under arrest.”

  “No!” the woman’s voice cried out. “You don’t understand!”

  “You just killed a bunch of people right before my eyes. I understand enough.”

  “You’re one of the good guys,” said Steam-Dragon. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Since you’re not presently going anywhere, I don’t think that’s a problem.”

  “I’m leaving now,” she said. With a loud CLICK, her whole left claw came free of the leg.

  “Crap,” said App, as the beast spread its wings. Its belly puffed out as internal bellows filled with air. He jumped toward the beast and yelled, “Sticky mode!” He latched onto the front of the dragon’s torso and began to climb, hoping the creature couldn’t bend its neck enough to unleash a blast of steam at him. He crawled onto the dragons shoulders and straddled the beast’s neck, grabbing the back of its skull with both hands.

  “Eel mode!” he shouted. Instantly, he possessed the same shock capacity as an electric eel. It didn’t do him any good. His teeth tingled as the electrons he unleased showered off the shielded surface.

  “Acid mode!” he cried out as the creature flapped its wings and charged forward with a stumbling, three legged gait. He tried to dig his fingers beneath the scales, searching for any bare metal he could find. In this mode his sweat could burn a hole through plate steel. But against these scales? He didn’t think he was doing any damage at all.

  Luckily, the dragon wasn’t getting airborne. Maybe its crippled gait kept it from reaching launch speed, or maybe App’s added weight kept it grounded. At least here on the creature’s neck, he was out of reach of the beast’s jaws and claws. Then the creature skidded to a sudden halt, bending its neck forward. “Sticky mode!” App cried, to avoid being thrown off. Then he heard a whistling noise slicing the air behind him and remembered the sword at the end of the long, serpentine tail.

  “Ghost mode!” he shouted, the barest fraction of a second before his skull would have been split open. The creature jerked upward, and he found himself sinking trough the beast’s body into the torso. It turned out to be filled with lights, hundreds of dials and gages glowing pale green. For the briefest flash, he saw a woman’s face reflected in one of the larger dials, her face glistening with sweat and panic.

  The dragon turned away, leaving him dangling in the air.

  “Reset,” he said, dropping to the pavement.

  The dragon started galloping away, at a pretty decent clip for a quadruped missing a claw. App switched to his speed mode and gave chase, but the dragon still pulled away. His only flight capacity was his airhead mode, but that only let him drift around like a balloon. What the hell could he do to keep this thing from getting away?

  “Nathan, you watching this on the monitors?’

  “You kidding?” said Nathan. “The whole crew’s watching. I want the résumé of whoever built that dragon. That thing’s cool as hell.”

  “Cool or not, I need to cripple it. Cut and paste me about fifty feet in front of it. Ink mode!”

  “Executing… now!” said Nathan.

  With no sense of movement, App found himself in front of the rapidly charging dragon. He started to projectile vomit. Ink mode was another power it was impossible to use with any dignity, as his stomach was now lined with squid cells churning out several quarts of black ink per second. His dense core muscles let him spew the foul liquid a good twenty yards. Inside his head, he saw his social media feeds explode with people typing “EW!” and “GROSS!” But he’d gone with this mode because it was effective. In seconds, he’d completely coated the dragon’s face with the opaque liquid. Assuming that the user inside the torso had done the obvious and put cameras in the dragon’s eyes, she was now blinded.

  App wiped his mouth, waiting for the creature to stumble or skid to a halt. He wasn’t expecting the thing to keep charging at full speed. With the distance closing fast, he had maybe a second to get into ghost mode before he was trampled.

  Unfortunately, his esophagus was still full of ink, and he choked as he tried to shout out the words. The beast barreled into him, knocking him backward. The impossibly sharp claws of the rear legs tore through his chest muscles, piercing his heart. A thousand little frowny faces popped up on his media feeds.

  What happened after that h
e didn’t know because he was dead.

  Chapter Three

  Half the Population of Earth

  App opened his eyes, staring up into a bright light. He wondered if he was ascending to Heaven for a fleeting second before remembering that he was at an airport. He was looking directly at a flood lamp. He sat up, his stomach tightening as he saw the blood on the ground around him.

  “I died again?”

  “Sorry man,” said Nathan. “All your vitals flat lined. We had to do a remote reboot.”

  “Thanks,” said App, standing up, trying not to get freaked out by the fact that all the blood around him was his blood, or at least his blood from a body he’d worn only seconds ago. This wasn’t the first time he’d been killed. Depending on how you counted, it was death number ten. “I guess we’ve proven I’m not a cat.”

  “What?” asked Nathan.

  “Never mind,” sighed App. He didn’t really want to make lame jokes about his resurrection. He didn’t want to talk about it at all, or even think about it, which was difficult when all the social media feeds running through his mind’s eyes were full of fans asking what had happened. There was a curious mix of shame and despair as he saw his current viewers had jumped from about fifty thousand at the start of the fight to just shy of a million. Ever since the first time he’d died while live-streaming, word spread fast any time he went into battle. His ego swelled at the thought of his popularity, and shrank again at thought that so many people liked to watch him die.

  And what if this wasn’t just his tenth death? What if every time his belt tore apart his atoms and put them back into a new configuration, he was dying and being reborn? He did this a few dozen times a day. What a way to live. Assuming he really was alive. He swallowed hard, as the constant nagging fear that nibbled at his mind threatened to overwhelm him. He’d been born Johnny Appleton. What if Johnny Appleton had died and stayed dead the second Rex Monday had first blasted his body into subatomic particles? What if he was only some digital artifact thinking it was a man? He didn’t have the courage to toss that question out onto his feeds. As addicted as he was to the internet, he knew it wasn’t the best place to go to have a serious philosophical debate.