“You ever meet Julian?”
“Saw him on the TV once. Why would I want to?”
I grin. It seems like such a good idea at the time.
“Our big brother’s got a secret too. Wanna see?”
Like I said, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Me and Nightwind teaming up is about the most ridiculous thing that could happen to me, so maybe you can understand why I don’t see what’s coming next.
Zephyr 9.9 “The Svelte Intruder”
THE AIR OVER the Lennon manse is cold as a marble Narcissus. The surrounding fields are dotted with haystacks that sit like sleeping guardians, ancient Gallic warriors construed as modern-day dolmens of a decidedly agricultural bent.
Lennon’s surveillance apparatus is quite a bit more sophisticated. I can practically feel my pores prickle as invisible sensors sweep over us, infrared seeping into my bones. If only it was able to purge me of my invisible demons.
I land with my half-brother on my back and Nightwind does whatever he does to make his funky alien tech work and ghosts back into solidity, quite the svelte intruder in his vinyl bondage-themed get-up.
West of the restored Norman castle and its twelve-foot stone curtain perimeter, the field angles toward a road snaking to the nearby provincial clichés, a hedgerow adding a modicum of sanctuary to the surrounds. I glimpse a pop-up sensor amid the turf and resist the temptation to flash-fry the fucker, instead making a big deal of stretching and acting generally harmless as dawn hurries up and fucks off and daybreak claims the estate.
“Where are the goons?” Nightwind asks, referring to the hired help I’d warned him about. I can only shrug and gesture, “This way,” and start up the hill to the outer walls of the main property.
The drive crunches underfoot as I remember. We step in through the open gates, anticipating an intruder alert at every pause. The dome of the observatory offers its profile as we advance from its good side, though few lights burn to greet this visit other than the faux-gas lamps around the corralled courtyard.
There’s a doorman in crisp livery, smoking in one of many doorways, an Uzi with a laser sight hanging from a strap beside the ruffles on his white dress shirt. He eyes us like a pair of skulking hoodies and grinds out his cigarette before speaking into the mike embedded in his flowery cuff.
More doors open and two more of these deadly butler-types appear and by the time Nightwind and I are standing between the jet black Mercs and the gilded Bentley, the observatory door opens and a familiar figure in a wheelchair glides effortlessly down the disability ramp and onto the quaint landing that fronts the crushed white gravel like the impassable moat it effectively is.
“Er, bonjour,” I say and lift my mitt.
The madman in the wheelchair doesn’t reply. The wispy hairs on his egg-shaped head flick in the weak early morning breeze and I sense Nightwind’s discomfort as we move forward and into the triangulation of the sentries’ guns.
“Julian, I hope it’s OK we dropped by,” I say and motion with my patented vagueness. “This is Nightwind. I thought you might already be acquainted.”
My other half-brother watches with hooded eyes, a wool cravat around his throat like bespoke aristocracy. Since my last visit he has deteriorated significantly. His hair has a picked-over look, his heavy face pock-marked and creased, eyes sunk into dark orbits. His lips are vaginal, bruised, moist even in the cool morning air. There’s not a hint of human warmth of kindness in his welcome for me and it’s no wonder why.
“You ‘ave brought anozer sib to visit chez mois, mon frère,” Julian says.
I only nod. Nightwind angles his body like he might need to flee at any moment. I guess he fears 9mm tracer fire more than me, even with the fancy rig. I keep my heavy-lidded gaze on Julian and maintain the gravel I imagine I need in my voice.
“This isn’t a social call, bro,” I say with fake regard. “I’m thinking you can help us, if what I’ve figured out since my last visit is true.”
“An’ what d’you think you’ve discovered?” Julian asks in that ridiculously camp accent of his. “Some further conspiracy?”
“I want you to show me the time machine, Julian.”
*
TO HIS CREDIT, my half-brother barely blinks when I mention his deep dark secret. He waves off the guards poised like cobras and whisks his wheelchair back up the ramp with a tiny puff of pneumatic assistance. I nod to Nightwind and we follow, brushing past one of the goons who holds his ground like a cunt-struck lover facing off against a former spouse.
Julian’s wheelchair goes across the face of the building and there’s a soft click and the observatory doors open inward. We tread over the threshold instants after the wheelchair has passed as the lights come up on the organic tableau of computer banks, huge sarcophagi of RAM and processing power. The back of the big chamber is draped with familiar black curtains, and though I have been here before and seen it all, I feel distrustful as Julian swings to a stop beside the work benches where his gadgets and the command helmet for the Crimson Cowl automaton rests.
“Is it in here?” I ask, conscious of the high-ceilinged echoes.
“Le quelle?” Julian replies.
“I don’t think you were entirely honest with me before, brother,” I say and try to smirk, curiously afraid of this strange little man and his crippled genius, his affectations, the Hannibal Lecter-like sense of utter cruelty.
More and more pieces of the puzzle fall into place as I watch his implacable regard, a deep, intuitive confirmation of the bigger game I must’ve been asleep not to sense on my previous visit.
“If you are calling me a liar, you should make your case, brother,” Julian says.
Again, the accent renders half of what he’s saying nearly incomprehensible. Eef you are calleen me a lyre, you shood make your case, brozzer. Nightwind flicks a glance at me that is three parts panic and another part awkwardness, knowing his alien headset doesn’t provide subtitles to keep him up to pace.
“You told me you didn’t have any powers,” I say.
I can’t help include Nate in my gesture because it’s more than ironic the two so-called powerless offspring of the Doomsday Man managed to get their hands on some serious technology, though I suspect Simon Magus would tell me it’s all just a by-product of this level of our plastic reality.
“Clearly, you have to have something more than just genius to build the powered armor for the Crimson Cowl, and now some kind of temporal device as well.”
“What you’re saying is pure theorization, Zephyr.”
“Speculation, yes,” I say to him. “I think I’m on pretty solid ground though. You said the Doomsday Man hunted you down, what, nearly ten years ago? Left you in a ditch with your legs shriveled to sticks?”
A nervous tick and Julian’s awkward glance away confirm I am right.
“You don’t think that attack triggered more’n just your unhealthy desire for revenge?”
“Revenge? I don’t know what you are talking about, Zephyr,” Julian says and now he has the helmet in his hands, though at the moment it’s doing nothing more than bobbing on his lap. “I ‘ave built what I ‘ave for self-defense, nothing more.”
“You said before, last time I was here, plenty of his progeny had died. But it wasn’t Lennon who killed them, was it?”
Julian looks at me sharply. His eyes are like a snake’s. Or worse.
Zephyr 9.10 “Fortune Favors The Bold”
JULIAN AND I do a pretty mean face-off for a guy in soiled leather pants and an effete cripple modelling the season’s hottest wheelchair-and-blanket combo.
“I was just a toddler when the Crimson Cowl hunted down Titanium Girl and her little boy was killed. He was one of our brothers, wasn’t he?” I say.
Julian stares for a few seconds more and then begins to weakly applaud. It’s a classic Bond villain move that doesn’t make me like him any more.
“I don’t know what you are talkin’ about, Zephyr. What do you
want?”
I don know wha’ oo ah talkeen abowt, Zepheer.
I ponder this a moment. His eyes are like black pools, yet they reflect nothing. There’s not even a trace of guilt in there, let alone remorse. And I doubt myself.
“Your help. That’s all.”
And I mutter “pussy” to myself under breath.
“Go on,” Julian says and make a rotating motion with one of his long-fingered hands.
“Our father’s mistress Spectra – Yoko Ono, the Demoness – is holed up in the Sixteenth Century.”
“Kyoto,” Nightwind says, his first contribution so far. I nod to him.
“You can come with us, if you want. There’s plenty more Lennon kids where we’re going,” I say.
I feel like a used car salesman, though it’s murder I’m trucking. It’s hard to feel bad about that given my last encounter with the Gen Y branch of my siblings.
“Er, and what do you mean by that?”
“Cut the horse-shit, Zhweeun. I know you did it. I know you killed that little boy. Others too, for all I know. This is part of your grudge against the old man, am I right?”
Julian splutters. For a moment I think he is going to stand up, he and I forgetting ourselves. Then he simply blinks like a man in a paroxysm and moves his wheelchair, scooping the helmet from his lap and dunking it into place.
“Julian.”
But it’s too late.
There’s an indefinable hum elsewhere in the chamber and then our older half-brother goes limp. A brief mechanical noise issues from the back room, something ill-conceived disengaging from its machine, and one of the black curtains whips aside and a red-cloaked, mesh-masked figure steps heavily into view.
The latest Crimson Cowl moves with an athlete’s grace. I remember I was only a teenager watching Sentinel trash an earlier version with a more wine-colored cape, confirming that while Julian might’ve only had this arsenal under his control for a decade, he’s been getting up to mischief for a whole lot longer – and refining his design each time one of his automata’s destroyed. This would be Mark VI or even Mark VII, if I am even close to keeping track. I’m sure Tessa would be able to give me the definitive answer.
Nightwind and I adopt fighting stances, though I’m pretty sure my half-brother Nate is about ready to split the moment he’s even caught a whiff of this deal going sideways.
Although adroit, the robot weighs heavily on the ancient oak boards of the observatory. Rather than unleashing hell on us, he crosses like the evil genius he is to another bank of computers and fires up the controls, swivels, eyes us with his eyeless face for a nanosecond before then moving back across the room and grabbing another length of black drape, walking and tugging it with him on theatrical guy wires to expose a whole other chamber, a brass-floored, Tesla-coiled contraption with two massive intersecting rings that more resemble a public artwork than a possible time machine.
“Step forward, gentlemen,” the Crimson Cowl says, all accent vanished.
“Your destiny awaits.”
*
THE ROBOT FACES us with a decidedly adversarial gait. The air around his metal fists shimmers and there’s something about his faceless fencer’s mask visage that seems to throw down the gauntlet. Nightwind doesn’t move except to go intangible, remaining in place, so I take a cautious step forward.
“You’re going to help us?”
“One I’ll help. The other I’ll kill – unless you do it for me. All the Doomsday Man’s gene stock must be destroyed – eventually.”
“Shit,” I say, and think he’s serious. Inside my head, my father agrees.
“I wondered where you’d gone,” I think.
I’m still adjusting, Joey-lad. Look what you’ve gone and done now!
Beside me, Nightwind hovers above the boards with his weightless frame poised for an action he clearly doesn’t have the gonads to take. I return my gaze to the Crimson Cowl and scowl.
“We need your help, Julian. Your machine. You got a year, Nate?”
“1565,” Nightwind’s almost equally alien face-mask replies.
“You hear that, Jules?”
“You err,” the deadly-looking mechanoid says.
He puts his hands on his hips and almost pulls a Felix-the-cat laugh.
“You err most grievously. Julian, as they say, isn’t at home.”
The gauntleted hands come out again, poised like a swimmer on the blocks, and serrated beams of destructive energy lash across the chamber and I am stupid enough not to dodge in time. I go flipping back across the observatory and into a glass display case, trinkets and astronomical gadgets showering to the floor along with the shards, pain in my upper arms and chest, but nothing to show for it. Nightwind moves as a similar assault targets him and I use the distraction to power up one fist and take to the air, the high ceiling an advantage as I come down on the robot who meets me with a curled metallic fist of his own and the noise of our collision sounds like a freeway fender-bender.
I pull my jaw back into place and hammer home a low left into the robot’s red-upholstered torso. The noise is like a medieval blacksmith at work, but the Crimson Cowl barely moves. Likewise, I block his uppercut and then a haymaker with the same left, counter-punch, my fist crossing his mesh jaw. That’s got a bit more juice in it and the robot grabs me around the neck and twists and hurls and I flip across the chamber and across from the other side of what I hope is the time machine, at this angle more resembling the love child of an outdoor lawn sprinkler and a Star Trek transporter deck.
“What’s the deal, Crimson?” I say as I wipe blood from my lip and stand, ready to make another tiger strike into enemy territory if it demands it.
“You could hasten the solution you desire by simply killing each other,” the erudite-sounding robot says and gestures to Nightwind. “1565, you say? To the victor goes the spoils. Fortune favors the bold, as Virgil said.”
“Julian, you’re in there, pal. Obviously you’ve flipped,” I say.
My hand lifts of its own accord into that animal trainer thing I sometimes do when dealing with madmen.
“Maybe it’s been a while between drinks, but you’re in there and in control, bro. Step up and take it.”
“You’re being foolish,” the Crimson Cowl replies.
He almost looks around in case I might be talking to somebody else.
“There’s only me. Julian, as you call him, is just a delusion of the flesh. See?”
And to my horror, the robot uncurls his fingers again and there’s a flash. Not even I can move fast enough before the invisible blades of force cut into my queer and curious older brother slumped in his little wheelchair. He bucks in his cradle a split-second before his chest explodes, its gory secrets spraying the nearby armoire and even more display cases, computer screens, me, in human detritus. And I scream and turn, my hands to my head, hoping against hope the act of suicidal monstrosity will have at least backfired.
But the machine is still there.
“Hrm,” it says. “See?”
Zephyr 9.11 (Coda)
TURNS OUT JULIAN was even more deluded than I ever realized. Stupid, to walk into the lion’s den this way. I don’t have much chance to regret it as I have to dive as the red-cloaked robot hurls a handful of tiny grenades across the room and they explode with miniature precision, each one packing the same punch as a normal device.
Nightwind is gone, sunk into the floor and probably swimming for Cuba by now. I don’t have the same luxury. I dodge the vibratory blasts up among the roof struts and drop onto the Crimson Cowl when my enclosed aerobatics allow. The big metal dude and I go down in a ball, punching and kneeing and head-butting before I get a knee into his chest and flip him across the chamber, flattening a not-too-important computer array, I hope.
The Crimson Cowl merely picks himself up like a fine-mannered aristocrat who’s had one too many sherries. The faceless head tilts, dog-like, and there’s an inchoate crack before it straightens.
“He
was afraid of you, your brother,” the robot tells me.
“Julian? No need to,” I reply. “Turns out he was his own worst enemy.”
“I wasn’t discussing him. He ceased to matter when he ceased to exist. Flesh. I refer to your living brother, Nate Simon.”
I can’t even imagine what sort of intel this prick has to hand, so I shrug.
“Yeah, well, we had a bit of a thing going.”
“He was right in one regard,” the Crimson Cowl says. “You are a challenging opponent, and one I’d be a fool to battle in my own demesne.”
He lifts his gauntlet, but now he’s showing me the palm rather than the fingers. I flinch, waiting to gauge his reaction before I realize he’s hit me with nothing more secretive than a remote control. I’m standing in the middle of the teleporter platform as the big concentric rings start lazily spinning.
“I wouldn’t step from the module now, Zephyr, unless you want to spend eternity in the agony of disincorporation.”
I hesitate with indecision, which is precisely what the metal-skulled piece of shit wants – though he may well be right about me courting disaster if I step from the high-tech carousel. And predictably enough, it’s not so much that the world starts to spin or me with it, but some curious inner-space confusion of the two.
“You have no concept of the true evil you confront, Zephyr. It’s time you experienced Lennon’s maleficence first-hand.”
The red-garbed robot vanishes like into a snowstorm and the whooping of the twin circular rotor blades cut through time and space like, um, what . . . butter? Fuck. What am I exactly going to say at this point?
I’ve secretly got my fingers crossed for 1565, but somehow I doubt it.
Zephyr 10.1 “A Window In The Twilight”
Zephyr III Page 10