Screaming like a ship’s whistle, the rat-creature reared up. Its fur burned with blue flames and a stinking smoke that filled her nose like burrs and clawed her throat and lungs.
She came up rampant. With a swipe of her forepaw she knocked the huge beast through the air. It struck, rolled over and over in the sand, extinguishing the flames. It landed in a bush and lay still.
Its outline writhed. Blown sand and steam swirled up to hide it momentarily from her sight. Then it cleared.
A man lay in the bush on his back. His fat, nude, blue-white body was gashed and torn and washed with gore. His limbs stirred feebly.
Dismissing him instantly from her mind, the Destroyer turned away. Grievously wounded she might be, but she had better prey than a mere man.
But instead of the armored cars and little tanks among which she had rampaged as if they were baby gazelles, she faced a crescent of full-sized tanks. Their cannons were trained upon her.
Even if she had all her strength she could not prevail against such monstrous power. And she felt her strength draining through a hundred wounds. Within, John was silent, stunned.
She was Sekhmet the Destroyer; but she was also a protector. She felt duty to her comrades, puny though they were. She turned and loped back to where they huddled against the white flank of a dune. She could at least shield them with her body as she fell. She turned back to snarl at the tanks where they squatted like vast impervious turtles. Her grip began to slip. Exhaustion and injury—and despair—had sapped even the will of a goddess.
She raised her muzzle and roared defiant denial: No!
It did no good. She whirled down and down, away from being.
In an ecstasy of fearful frustration Sun Hei-lian paced the palace terrace, hugging herself tightly beneath her breasts.
Since Tom’s murder Nshombo had refused to let her and her team leave the capital. Hong monitored radio traffic from the front in real time. Even when it was encrypted his specialized Guoanbu equipment and training easily cracked it.
The war went badly. That morning Simba armor had thrust triumphantly along the Niger Delta coast toward Lagos. Abuja, well inland, was the national capital. But capturing the huge seaport would seal the conquest—strike that: liberation—of the country. Or at least its coastal oil fields.
Then Nigeria mounted a massive counterattack. Taken by surprise, the PPA spearhead was cut off. Now half-coherent reports claimed a terrible monster was ravaging the Simbas. A giant golden lioness—appropriately enough, she supposed, given “Simba” meant “lion”—had miraculously appeared to fight it.
John Fortune and Butcher Dagon were going at it in their alternate forms. But Nigerian traffic revealed an armored battalion closing in to deliver the killing blow. Not even the Destroyer could deal with that.
Hei-lian shook her head. The other Committee aces were useless in an armored battle. Toad Man, the Lama, Snowblind, Brave Hawk . . . the Committee sent us its B team, not the powerful aces who broke the Caliphate’s army at Aswan last year. Whether John Fortune had simply misjudged, or had regarded Africa as unimportant, his parsimony was about to lose it all. If only Tom still lived.
“Hei-lian?”
She stopped and spun and glared. Sprout had emerged from the French doors of the palace onto the terrace. She wore jeans and a T-shirt. She clutched a slim picture book to her chest. “I’m sad,” she said. She held out the book. “Will you read to me?”
No! Hei-lian’s mind raged. Get away from me, you unnatural thing! Why do they suffer you to wander the palace still, without your father to protect you?
Her eyes welled. “Yes,” she heard herself say, as from the depths of a pit of sadness. She took the book. Charlie and the Mouse Ace, the cover read. “Let’s sit here in the shade.”
They sat on white-enameled metal chairs beneath an awning. Hei-lian’s fingers trembled as she opened the brightly colored cover.
“ ‘Charlie was a little boy with a big secret,’ ” she read. “ ‘He had a friend who was a mouse. And more than that—’ ”
“So when I was little,” Buford was saying when John Fortune opened his eyes, “Uncle Rayford, he had him these naughty magazines.”
John raised his head from the sand. “Oh, shit,” he said with a groan. His head dropped back. His neck felt like boiled pasta. “Am I naked?”
“I don’t think it matters much now, John,” said Simone. She knelt beside him. “Just try to rest.”
“Did I see like half a dozen tanks pointing their guns at us?”
“Eight tanks, yes,” Snowblind said. “Nigerian ones. Look just like Vijayantas.”
“Anyways,” said Buford, who sat beside them with his legs drawn up, “I never saw no bad pictures nor wanted to. But Uncle Rayford, he showed me the funnies. I liked them.”
“How badly am I hurt, Simone?” John asked.
She flicked a glance along his body. Then she turned her head. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Now, he showed me this one I still remember. It had like this big hero guy with a big old mace, and a couple little scrawny guys with a pitchfork and a club.”
“Why aren’t they killing us?” John asked.
“I think they wait to see if we have any more surprises. Then again, they may just be toying with us.”
“All around them, see, there was thousands and thousands of these knights on horses. And they all had spears pointed at them three fellas.”
John’s sense of detachment from reality was beginning to fade. Which really sucked. Even Isra’s voice was stilled. Exhaustion had overcome her. For the first time since that dramatic evening in his mother’s L.A. home, he was alone. I should be with Kate, he thought, picturing her face, her smile. I never had a chance to say good-bye. “Snowblind,” he croaked. “You couldn’t, like—”
He had his eyes closed but somehow felt her headshake. “What’s the military term for lots and lots of vehicles?”
He sighed. “A shitload.”
“There’s a shitload of Nigerians, John. They are all around us.”
“So anyway,” Buford said, “this fella with the big chest and big old shoulders, he’s saying to his pals, ‘Don’t worry, boys. They can’t stop men who want to be free!’ ”
He laughed and laughed. “Kill me now,” John said.
“Be careful what you ask for,” Simone said. “Their gun barrels are zeroing in on us.”
John wondered if their deaths would make the evening news. Back home, the second season of American Hero was the most watched show in America. The fighting in Nigeria made page six in the Times, maybe. The only news crew on the scene was the one from China. It’s just Africa, he thought bitterly. No one cares. “Help me,” he said. Simone lifted his head and scooted a knee under it to support it. Which he needed; it weighed at least a ton. No question the gunners in the tanks were tuning up their aim. “I guess the douche bags’re just gonna smoke us—”
Down from the sky speared a shaft of white light. It transfixed the middle MBT like a pin through a bug. It was so bright it cast shadows on the dunes.
The tank erupted in blue-white fire.
Another sunbeam stabbed down, another.
Another.
Each left a pyre blazing on the sand.
Big diesel engines growled. The Nigerian armor began to mill. Main guns probed the air, seeking targets.
A man landed on a tank’s front glacis. A white man with shaggy golden hair. A man who laughed. He grabbed the main gun, heaved. The whole multiton turret came right up out of the well. Grunting, he threw it end over end through the air. It smashed down on top of another tank, dented in its turret. Yellow fire enveloped both as their ammo stowage went up.
From twenty meters away another tank fired at him. It couldn’t miss. Yet somehow he still stood, laughing.
“Shell went right through him,” Bufo
rd said. “Pretty fine trick, you ask me.”
The man stretched out his hand. Red flame lanced from the palm. It shot down the gun barrel and gushed out of the breech, which the loader had opened to receive a fresh shell.
The shell blew up. So did all the others.
Just like fucking that, one tank remained. It churned away as fast as its treads would carry it, throwing up a great bow wave of sand. The infantry and lesser vehicles had already fled. Simba armored vehicles fired after them, over the heads of the three Committee aces. They didn’t try to pursue.
“You have got to be shitting me,” John Fortune said. “Tell me I’m hallucinating.” Maybe they would live to see another day after all. Kate, he thought.
Somehow his companions heard his feeble croak above all the explosions. “It’s the Radical,” Snowblind said. “Ce n’est pas possible. But it is him.”
Tom Weathers vanished. Reappeared at once, ten feet from John and a yard in the air. He landed a little unsteadily, walked forward a couple steps.
“Whew,” he said. “Takes it right out of you. But I’ll get my second wind in a minute. Then we’ll get it on.”
Somehow John remembered his duty. “Leave it, Weathers,” he said. “It’s good to have you back. But you’re part of a team, now. Just chill with us. We’ll sort things out.”
Smiling, Weathers shook his head. “That’s a big no-can-do, Mr. Establishment Man. It’s time to deal out some revolutionary justice.”
He vanished.
“How does he do that?” John asked the air.
A Simba infantry squad came down the dune. Their tall, turbaned Sikh officer shouted for medics. Dark hands propped John to a sitting position and held a canteen to his torn lips. Simone got up and went to stand next to Buford.
Away across the dunes, white light flashed against the sky like distant lightning. A black smoke stalk sprang up in response. A moment later, a rumble reached John’s ears. Another flare lit the sky. “I got me a bad feelin’ about this,” Buford says. “Never seen a feller look so crazy.”
Snowblind crossed her arms and leaned against him. “What he said,” she said.
Tom burned through energy like a drunk playboy’s bankroll in a Monte Carlo casino. But all he had to do was land and breathe for a few minutes. Then he was good to go again.
It was as if killing these running-dog colonial lackeys recharged him.
He leapt into the sky, seeking more lives to take. A mile ahead he saw a sizable village. As he approached, climbing for a clearer look, he saw fleeing Nigerian armor had locked the narrow streets up tight.
He smiled like the Angel of Death. And swept downward like a scythe.
Noisily Simone barfed over the side of the Land Rover.
Around them smoldered the ruins of a murdered town. The stench was as thick as the flies. The flies were thick as monsoon rain.
“There must be hundreds dead here,” John Fortune said. He wasn’t feeling so good himself.
The Lama floated by the car. “One thousand,” he said.
A reserve Simba column had routed the Nigerians raiding the base camp where the Lama’s body had sat in lotus while his spirit did its astral scout thing. Without Butcher Dagon to back them they didn’t put up much fight. Another Wolf and some intact Brazilian peacekeepers had been found. They drove the Lama up with Brave Hawk flying top cover to pick up their comrades.
The team followed Tom Weathers’s wake of massacre. To his crowning horror.
Simone had quit puking. Now she sobbed. “How could he do this?”
“His power,” John Fortune said. He shook his head. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. Like nothing I could’ve imagined.”
“I didn’t mean that,” the young woman said. “I meant, how could he do so horrible a thing? It’s worse than what happened in that village. A hundred times worse.”
John could only shake his head some more. He had no words. In the seat behind him Buford muttered under his breath. John could only make out the words “terrible bad.”
“Why the long faces, children?”
They all looked up. The taunting voice came from ahead and above.
Tom Weathers hung thirty feet in the air. He descended slowly to stand before them with hands on jeans-clad hips.
Anger boiled up inside John. “What the hell did you think you were doing here?” he shouted.
“I told you. Dealing out revolutionary justice.”
“But these poor villagers,” Simone said. “You killed them. You killed civilians.”
He shrugged. “They were collaborators anyway. They had it coming.”
John almost released Sekhmet again. But he was held together by duct tape as it was. And more than for himself, he feared that if he let the Destroyer out now, she’d prove no more discriminating than Tom Weathers had. “You’re a war criminal, Weathers,” he said. “That’s the only way to say it.”
“What? When colonialists bomb or shell neighborhoods full of indigenous people you call it ‘collateral damage.’ What makes this worse?”
“Just because others do it doesn’t make it right,” Simone said.
“I cannot believe what a bunch of posers you are!” Weathers yelled. “Bourgeois phonies. You come here saying, ‘Long live the Revolution,’ all that dorm-room shit. But when it comes down to hitting the barricades, man, when it all gets real, you can’t fucking take it.”
“This wasn’t revolution,” Simone told her fallen idol. There was no heat in her voice. No life at all. Verbal flatline. “It was murder.”
Weathers sneered. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
Buford gripped John’s arm. “It’s all over here, Mr. Fortune,” he said. “This is a bad place. Let’s go home.”
“Yeah,” John said. “It is over. We’re not part of this.”
“Yeah!” Tom flared at them with wild hateful laughter. “Your work here is done, right? And I did it for you. Now you want to run on home. Run, then.
“You’re all fucking fascists. Just like the rest of them.”
Standing amid the devastation he had created, the Radical watched them drive away. His chest pumped like bellows. His stomach was a surging chaos of nausea. He had spent himself unimaginably. Soon his body would pay the price.
He gave it no thought. What he thought was, There, Meadows, you simpering hippie fuck. That’s what I think of your peace-and-love horse shit.
“This is all for you, man,” he said aloud. “All for you.
“I hope you fucking like it.”
“Why are we here?” Chen asked. He clutched his heavy camera to his chest like a teddy bear.
“No idea.”
Hei-lian glanced around the helipad next to the palace. A crowd had gathered. Wide-eyed, Sprout stuck close to her. She had panicked when Leopard Men came to escort them brusquely here.
So had Hei-lian, almost.
“Look,” Hong said. “It’s Nshombo. And his sister.”
“Are they going to shoot us?” Chen asked in Mandarin.
“I don’t think they’d have had you bring your gear,” Hei-lian said. “Since they did, you’d best start shooting. Something’s going on.”
“Hei-lian?” Sprout asked in a small voice.
Quick headshake. “No idea, honey,” she said. “Just stay close.”
She saw the young healer-ace, Dolores. She stood between Nshombo and Alicia, dressed in gleaming white. Her face shone as if with inner radiance.
Someone shouted. Pointed to the sky. Everyone looked up.
A hundred voices gasped. A pale-skinned, golden-haired man floated above their heads. He raised a fist.
“Vive la Révolution!” shouted Tom Weathers. “Vive Dr. Kitengi Nshombo!”
“Long live Mokèlé-mbèmbé,” roared a claque of Leopard Men.
To mad cheering, Tom descended from the sky. Palace guards in powder-blue uniforms held the mob at bay as he swapped handshakes with Nshombo and an embrace with his sister.
He turned to give Hei-lian a big grin as she approached. She was too stunned to talk for the benefit of the microphone she’d clipped to her shirt collar moments before.
“Sorry to scare you like that,” he said. “But we had to keep things secret. We wanted to spring a little surprise on the imperialists.”
She flung arms around his neck and kissed him deeply. Then she stepped back.
“Why are you still alive?”
Dolores was suddenly by his side. Still holding Sprout in one arm he slipped the other around the Congolese girl.
“She healed me,” he said. “She’s the real heroine.”
He turned and kissed her on the forehead as camera flashes flickered.
Hei-lian wondered why she felt so hollow.
Double Helix
UNTIL THE DAYBREAK, AND
THE SHADOWS FLEE AWAY
Melinda M. Snodgrass
SHADOWS ARE STRETCHING AND dancing on the plaster walls of the old cottage as Niobe clears the battered table. The air is redolent with the smell of beef stew. After delivering them here I teleported to Kirkwall for supplies.
We’re using oil lanterns for light, saving the generator to heat water for baths. Drake’s face is rosy from the heat of the fire and a large meal. He is nodding, then suddenly jerking back awake. Niobe ruffles his hair.
“Go to bed, kiddo.”
“Can I have some more pudding?”
She smiles indulgently. The soft golden light and the shadows hide the worst of her acne. Drake spoons more chocolate pudding into his bowl and shuffles out. A few moments later I hear the springs on the old bed-stead creak.
“Why here?” she asks me as she starts to wash the dishes. I fill the chipped glass with more wine.
“Because there are seventy islands in the Orkneys and only seventeen of them are inhabited. If he loses control nothing but gulls and rabbits will die.”
“He won’t.”
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