Archon's Queen

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Not so cocky now, are we?” She grumbled, tamping out a small fire on her sleeve.

  Near exhaustion, she stumbled over to where he had dropped his gun and came close to falling as she picked it up. She aimed at him. It chirped a ready tone as her finger hit the trigger; she froze when a voice to her right yelled.

  “Drop it.”

  A pair of security men pointed rifles at her over the hood of another car. Anna rotated her head to stare at them without moving anything else.

  “Don’t make me shoot you, honey. Drop the fucking gun.”

  She squinted, an action imperceptible to them from that distance. When she erased herself from their sight, they prairie dogged. To them, she had simply vanished. As they spun around looking for her, her arm swung the pistol in their direction and fired. Three seconds and eight shots later, the dying men caught sight of her shimmer back into existence. Anna stared at the readout showing three bullets left. Her arm shook at the realization she’d killed two men.

  So easy. She no longer even wanted to touch the pistol. And they’re afraid of us? Any idiot with a gun…

  Creaking metal made her turn, but she was too slow to avoid Gordon’s boot. It caught her in the chest, knocking her flat. The gun sailed into nowhere as his fist crossed her face before he grabbed her by the armored vest and hurled her into a car. She sprawled there, motionless, exhaustion from the massive shock and the sudden assault left her head spinning. Fingers in her hair drove her head into the fender twice, before she absorbed another punch or six to the ribs. She coughed up blood, and scrabbled at the painted metal in an attempt to stand.

  When he reared back for another round of thumping, Anna shoved herself out of the way, leaving him pounding a dent into metal. She surprised him by lunging toward him, flattening her hand over the hole in his armor. Hot skin met her fingers, and she called on every ounce of her desire to live. The zap left him twitching and slumped on his knees. His left hand grabbed her forearm, breaking her contact seconds before he would have passed out. She tried to recoil away, but his grip tightened to the point where the bones in her arm creaked on the verge of splintering.

  His fist smashed downward across her face, drilling her into the pavement. Beaten delirious, she lay helpless as he grabbed her hair and lifted to expose her throat. Her hand flopped at his wrist, a feeble attempt to break his hold before the blade came. At the sound of a longed-for voice, she broke into sobs.

  “That’s quite enough.”

  James had arrived.

  Gordon grunted as the knife twisted its way out of his hand. Anna struggled to look up at her savior; vision blurred from exhaustion and beating. James’s presence let her feel utterly at peace and safe. Unable to speak, her mind managed a weak telepathic whisper before she fell into unconsciousness.

  I love you James…

  gent Gordon turned to face James Mardling; his head covering liquefied and flowed into a metal ring on the chest plate, exposing a sweat-covered face and a glittering dark metal headband. The two men circled in a manner akin to a pair of gunslingers in the Old West. Anna lay unconscious a short distance away. Her hair and strips of torn shirt blew in the gentle breeze sweeping over the parking deck. The distant warble of alarms lent an almost inaudible backdrop to the sound of boots in orbit.

  “Killing her was not part of the arrangement, old boy. In fact, what the hell are you doing here?”

  Gordon spat, picking at the hole in his armor. “Neither was this. Your bitch almost killed me.”

  James chuckled with a sinister smile. “Well then, she is apparently stronger than I gave her credit for. That, or whatever you said to her got her a bit cheesed off. I thought you SAS blokes had more self-control.”

  “We had a deal, Mardling. Thompson’s gone unhinged. They’re calling me a rogue agent now. I’m the one that’s in hiding, not you criminals.”

  Genuine amusement spread over his face. “Thompson… Lord Connor Thompson, the only psionic-tolerant moderate in the House of Lords. Do you honestly think I would allow a mundane like you to shift the mindset of Great Britain against us even more? You are deluded. What you thought of as a deal was you simply doing as you were told. I should have been rid of you after you pursued her into the Tube on a bloody motorbike. Are you daft man? She could have crashed.”

  Mardling paced, folding his hands behind him as he half turned his back on Gordon.

  “Your pet pissed me off in Gwynedd, Mardling. That little zap of hers snapped me out of the fog.”

  “Oh, that is most unfortunate.” James sighed. “I had a feeling something was amiss when you shot her. Why did you bother legging her?”

  “So she could watch me kill you.”

  James laughed as if the greatest joke in the world had been told.

  A second grey hover van circled in and landed. Gordon grinned as the side door slid open and five more mercenaries leapt onto the deck with rifles at the ready.

  Agent Gordon’s hand crept behind him as he stopped walking. “Psionics are too dangerous; there is no way to properly police them. They could sow chaos and discord, overthrow the government.”

  Doctor Mardling’s gaze fell upon Anna; his words took on an undertone of anger drizzled with contempt. “Are those men supposed to be some kind of threat? Gordon, I do believe that knife you are secreting into your left hand would look much better in your thigh.”

  The psi screen went into a flurry of blinking; two seconds later, smoke formed a halo around him and the device broke into pieces. Gordon ran with sweat, his trembling arm extended. His eyes rolled up as if trying to stare at the broken headband, clueless as to how it could have failed. Gordon sank the blade three inches deep into his own leg. Terror and pain laced his scream. He staggered backwards, snarling, unable to make his arm pull it loose. Mardling’s eyes shifted in the direction of the mercenaries. He invaded their thoughts all at once and forced their perception of reality to change. Believing the building crumbled out from under them, the men panicked and fell, howling as they hallucinated plummeting to the ground from high altitude. Within seconds, they had all passed out from fear.

  James frowned at the blood leaking from Anna’s nose and lifted an eyebrow at the gasping CSB agent. “Give her a twist, mate.”

  Gordon’s arm obeyed, and he roared his way down to one knee. “You’re a bleedin’ monster.”

  “Monsters haul small children away from their mums in the middle of the night. You are not even a mere psionic, Gordon. You are nothing, and you had the gall to strike one of The Awakened? You were quite lucky we had a bargain, you know, but you show me the folly of my charity. You did quite well convincing her it was too dangerous to stay in London, but I did not give you permission to injure her. Since you have attempted to kill her, I’m afraid, my dear boy, you are simply too dangerous to be allowed to live.”

  Gordon leapt for his gun but never hit the ground. A few seconds of airborne flailing got him nowhere. He ripped the blade out of his thigh and hurled it at Mardling’s head. It stopped two inches short, hanging in midair. James turned, waving his hand in a dismissive flick. Gordon flew into the side of a parked van, across the aisle into the rear window of a car, and careened off a light post and over the edge of the roof.

  Black-gloved fingers slapped onto the concrete rim, Gordon’s desperate grunt reverberated through the hollow space of the parking deck below. James walked over to Anna, scarf fluttering over his left shoulder. The hanging blade glided along until it came to a halt above the black-gloved hand and rotated point down.

  James stared at Anna’s limp figure, his words at a precipice between speech and shout. “No savory pleasure to the imperious man above whose head hangeth the spring-loaded combat knife of Damocles.”

  His frown deepened as he forced the knife downward with enough force to spike it into the concrete. Gordon’s subsequent scream did not crack his dour glare, only caused the focus of his telekinesis to shift from the weapon to the hand through which it had been impaled. He
shoved Gordon off the ledge, leaving a bloody smear around the blade where it tore through his palm. The screaming fell into the distance, and silence.

  Anna rolled onto her back and floated straight up until James cradled her in his arms. As he carried her to the van, Aurora’s nude form stepped out of a cloud of mist. She looked about ready to faint from exhaustion.

  He paused at the door, glancing at her. “Would you mind tending to the rubbish, my dear?”

  Aurora trudged over to the men, stooped, and took one of the rifles from their unconscious hands. She unloaded the magazine, sweeping automatic fire back and forth through the group. Her skin, the color of new-fallen snow, spattered with crimson until the magazine ran dry.

  She sashayed to her waiting ride, vanishing into the astral for less than a full second―long enough to shed the coating of gore.

  irst Class accommodations on the inter-coastal shuttle gave them a private room with four large seats, two facing front and two facing rear. James sat to her left near the door while Anna’s window seat offered her a view of the clouds below. Her body ached, though it showed no outward signs of the beating she had received. Lauren, wearing an oversized pair of sunglasses, reclined in the seat facing Anna. Most of her skin hid behind boots, gloves, and a long coat. No one had taken much of any notice of how pale she was at the shuttle terminal.

  Anna looked away from the swirling white, ten thousand feet below, and sent a loving smile at James. When she needed him, he had been there for her. Feeling her stare, he lifted his eyes to meet hers and returned the affectionate glance.

  “James… why is the shuttle so high? We’re only going to the other coast.”

  Mardling rolled his eyes. “Apparently, the rebels have lost control of most of their land. Some nonsense about cyborgs they sent out there to clean things up turned traitor. Funny bit of karma, that.” He chuckled. “The shuttles fly up here to avoid missiles.”

  “Rebels?” Anna shook her head, laughing. “Now you’re beating a dead horse.”

  “Terrence is doing well in the west. He has already found half a dozen other psionics interested in my philosophy. According to the data you retrieved, we have five years before the ship is completed. That should enable us to get things set up quite proper.”

  Aurora shuddered in her seat, sitting bolt upright for an instant before she collapsed again. Anna gave James a worried look; he had no reaction to the writhing figure, as though such episodes were a matter of routine. Aurora slipped into a half-awake state, her arms clawed at the air as if to stop from falling.

  Overwhelmed with curiosity, Anna peered into the woman’s mind. The vision saturated her thoughts, pulling her in and trapping her in Aurora’s perspective. They fell through the bottom of the shuttle, sailing out into the sky. Anna screamed in silence, the scene so close to real it triggered primal terror. Aurora sensed it was a dream vision and took control, riding the air currents and following whatever force pulled her down in a graceful curve.

  She moved through the clouds far faster than a normal fall; her trajectory flattened out, skimming over cracked desert ground. Scrub brush and weeds rocketed past, followed by the occasional cactus and scrap vehicle. In the distance, a smudge of maroon seemed more distinct than the surroundings, like the one object of color in an otherwise black and white video. Aurora headed for it, and an old wooden wagon made from the trailer of an ancient box truck painted dull red-orange grew from the speck. Tall white letters dominated one side with the phrase: “Magic Healer - 10 Coins.”

  Two living horses grazed to the left of it, detached from the otherwise unpowered vehicle. She swung around to the other side where a line had formed, dozens of people. Wanderers, bandits, and the unfortunate souls condemned to the Badlands had queued up from a point defined by a portable metal podium, an item once used to hold sheet music.

  Behind it, a dark-haired man his early thirties dressed in the garb of a cowboy pranced about and waved his arm. “Come one, come all, see the great magical healer who can cure you of anything that ails you. Any condition except death can be fixed for ten coins.”

  Their point of view glided past him, sliding under where the open side of the wagon formed an awning. Tucked between a small bed wrapped in dingy sheets and a pea-green wooden cabinet sat a tiny metal cage. A little blonde girl no older than seven peered through the bars with eyes that glowed luminous blue. Tears streaked clean lines over grimy cheeks as she struggled to reach through the bars at a dying man on the ground by the podium.

  The child wailed at the salesman, pointing at the man. He smiled at her, shaking his head to the negative and patted a fat pouch of coins. The man would die because he had no money; the girl was more upset over his death than her captivity. Aurora gazed at the scrawny waif clad only in grime. For an instant, the girl seemed to look right at them.

  Shock at being seen broke her concentration. The wagon, the crowd, and the desert flew into the distance, her point of view sucked up into the sky.

  Anna found herself on the floor, wracked with shivers and cold sweats. She felt dizzy and as sore as if she had fallen down stairs.

  James helped her into a seat. “Now you know why I wait for her to tell me what she saw. Clairvoyant visions have a rather nasty habit of taking over an eavesdropper’s consciousness.”

  Aurora convulsed and gasped in her sleep.

  Anna got up on her knees, patting the woman on the cheek. “Hey, wake up. What happened?”

  Aurora leaned forward and rubbed the bridge of her nose.

  “I just saw… the present, I think.” She squinted at the window. “Yes, it didn’t feel like past or future.”

  James raised an eyebrow. “That is quite unusual. You only see the present when something horrible is about to happen, though I dare say I would call that the future.”

  “What did you see?” Anna returned to her seat.

  Lauren thought for a moment. “Another Awakened, I think. I’m not entirely sure. That child had a strange energy about her.”

  Clouds of ill-scented mist rolled through the rain-soaked ground, drifting through rows of pipes running in all directions. The autocab zipped off into the distance, Anna found it confusing they called them PubTrans here; the name would take a long time to get used to. She looked over and up at a row of massive white hyperbolic towers.

  She squeezed his hand. “James, is this what I think it is?”

  He smiled. “Indeed. We found an old power station in a part of town where the police are terrified to go. It makes a perfect metaphor I think. We are more than capable of protecting ourselves from the local rabble.”

  A young man of about seventeen emerged from a four-story reinforced building. Metal stairs clanked as he trotted over to the approaching trio.

  “Doc Mardling is it? It’s great to finally meet you in person. I’m Terrence, but everyone just calls me Terry.”

  James glanced upward, transfixed for a moment by the eerie lime glow in the windows of the decaying building. He drew in a breath, spread his arms, and levitated all four of them to the roof. Aurora laughed aloud at the face Terrence made. Anna kept her eyes closed until her weight settled onto her feet again. Folding his hands behind his back, James strode to the edge of the wall like an admiral taking command of a new vessel.

  The wind picked up, fluttering his hair and scarf as his right eyebrow notched upward into an imperious look of disdain at the city spread out below him.

  “Good evening, Terrence. You shall know me as Archon.”

  Born in a little town known as South Amboy NJ in 1973, Matthew has been creating science fiction and fantasy worlds for most of his reasoning life. Somewhere between fifteen to eighteen of them spent developing the world in which Division Zero, Virtual Immortality, and The Awakened Series take place. He has several other projects in the works as well as a collaborative science fiction endeavor with author Tony Healey.

  Matthew is an avid gamer, a recovered WoW addict, Gamemaster for two custom systems (Chronicles of
Eldrinaath [Fantasy] and Divergent Fates [Sci Fi], and a fan of anime, British humour (<- deliberate), and intellectual science fiction that questions the nature of reality, life, and what happens after it.

  He is also fond of cats.

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  Division Zero, by Matt Cox

  (http://j.mp/1ggujIv)

  Most cops get to deal with living criminals, but Agent Kirsten Wren is not most cops.

  Shunned by a society that does not understand psionics and feared by those who know what she can do, Kirsten feels alone in a city of millions.

  Unexplained killings by human-like androids known as dolls leave the Division 1 police baffled, causing them to punt the case to Division 0. She tries to hold on to the belief that no one is beyond redemption as she pursues a killer desperate to claim at least one more innocent soul – that might just be hers.

  Bone Wires, by Michael Shean

  (http://j.mp/Npsr8B)

  In the wasteland of commercial culture that is future America, police are operated not by government but by private companies. In Seattle, that role is filled by Civil Protection, and Daniel Gray is a detective in Homicide Solutions. What used to be considered an important—even glamorous—department for public police is very different for the corporate species, and Gray finds himself stuck in a dead end job.

  That is, until the Spine Thief arrives.