The Legend of the Red Specter (The Adventures of the Red Specter Book 1)

by M. A. Wisniewski

  "Oh, I assure you, this is no joke, Mr. Specter. Is it okay if I call you that? I mean, calling you 'Red' sounds odd, but—"

  "NO SUCH THING AS WOMEN'S LIBERATION LEAGUE, IS THERE?"

  "Sure there is," she quipped. "As of several hours ago. I'm the President, Treasurer, Secretary, and founding member. Now, about that inter—"

  "REALLY EX-KIB?"

  "Yes, I really am," she said. "Though I wasn't an agent; I was an analyst. Translator. But I took a whole bunch of the Supplement Field Training Courses—"

  "GO HOME!" The Specter snapped, pointing back to the city.

  "Well, of course I'll be happy to go home," said Joy, keeping polite and professional. "Just as soon as I can get a firm commitment to an interview—"

  "KIND OF BUSY NOW!"

  "Well, of course you are," said Joy, letting some of her irritation through. "Or you should be, but instead you're standing around talking to me. We need to get moving and rescue Lin Lin!"

  "BUT... YOU STOPPED ME!"

  "No I didn’t. I was chasing you and you stopped on your own," Joy pointed out. "I was just making sure I didn't lose sight of you before I got my interview, which is important, but we can save that for after you've finished doing your whole Red Specter thing. Now hurry up and catch those crooks already. Don't worry about me, I'll be right behind you."

  "BUT—"

  "Less jawing, more stepping," said Joy, borrowing a phrase from one of her KIB instructors. "Before they can make it to their steamship and maybe get away or something. Rescue first, interview second. Where's your priorities, man?"

  The Red Specter leaned in and glared at her, held up a finger like he was about to say something. Joy wasn't intimidated this time. This was her job. The Specter seemed to realize this, clenched his fist in frustration, and took off running, with Joy in pursuit.

  "THAT SHIP WON'T ESCAPE," he growled over his shoulder. "AND THE RED SPECTER DOESN'T DO INTERVIEWS."

  "Well, I think the Red Specter isn't considering the many benefits of a good interview," she yelled back, as he began to pull away from her. "Because if the Red Specter doesn't control his own public image, other people are going to seize on that opportunity to create their own media narrative, and..."

  Joy had to cut her spiel short as the Red Specter clambered up a wall of cargo crates and disappeared over the top. She attacked the wall just like she was on a Caliburn course, and found it to be not so hard as all that, so long as she remembered not to use her injured pinky for anything. From her new vantage point she saw where the Specter was headed and ran along the top of the wall in pursuit.

  They'd nearly reached the dock for the Joanne Spaulding. She saw the paddle steamship rocking in the water, next to the crane golem and the maze of cargo containers beyond that. Although that maze had been greatly altered, with the nearest section of it transformed into piles of blackened refuse--though it in no way could be described as “half the dock being burned down.” It wasn't nearly that bad—way to exaggerate, Benny!

  As if summoned, Benny and a cluster of his men came into view, staging a running retreat down the dock towards the Joanne Spaulding. Shiori was with him, easy to spot with her black-and-pink flag draped over her armor, along with Daphne—and there was Lin Lin. One of the Triad goons had her tossed over his shoulder. The rear of their procession was a loose line of machine-gun-toting Triad men finding cover points and exchanging fire with the KIB agents, while a couple of them ran ahead and boarded the Joanne Spaulding.

  The roar of the gunfire strung together in a continuous chorus. Some of the Triad gunmen didn't seem to know how to use their weapons properly, blasting out extended salvos of bullets, burning through ammo too quickly. The continuous kick of the automatic rifles was probably causing them to fire over their targets’ heads. Even Joy knew you were supposed to use short bursts. She hoped that might tip things back in the KIB's favor, because otherwise they seemed badly outgunned.

  Joy saw the Red Specter turn another corner, and she half-climbed, half-jumped her way down the cargo wall. The maneuver forced her to take her eyes off her quarry for a second, and she looked back up to find that he’d vanished. Panic sent a burst of energy to her legs, and she zipped off towards the location where she’d last seen him. She found him in the cleared area surrounding the crane golem, tried to close the gap, and had nearly made it to the base of the crane golem when she realized she was following farther than she'd originally intended--that she should've stayed under cover in the stacks of cargo.

  Well, it was too late now, so when the Specter began to climb the ladder up to the control cab, Joy decided to follow, glancing back towards the firefight by the steamship. It wasn't going well. Men on the Joanne Spaulding had shoved cargo crates off the side of the deck onto the pier below. They'd cracked open upon impact, piles of heavy burlap sacks forming a barricade. The Triad gunners made the most of their new defense line. Just rearranging a few of those sacks gave them a terrific fortified position to hold until the Joanne Spaulding could be prepared to move out. Already there were small puffs of soot exiting the steamship's high smokestack. They were going to get away! And what was the Red Specter doing climbing up a crane while all this was going on?

  Joy felt some of the heat from the crane golem's smokestack from the other side of the ladder. Large steam engines, for ships, trains, or golems would normally be left running on ‘low steam’ mode, rather than switched off—they could take hours to heat up from cold. But the crane’s engine seemed to be more active than that. Joy realized that it had a container dangling from its right claw, a few yards off the ground. The crew must've heard gunfire and abandoned their posts mid-job, relying on the analytical engine to safely maintain the boiler pressure. It made sense—no job was worth getting shot over. The thought flicked across her mind just long enough to make her pause mid-climb. Maybe, after all this had ended, she should sit down and re-evaluate her priorities.

  The Red Specter reached the top of the high ladder, something like thirty feet in the air, right below the control cab. He pulled out his grapple-gun, aimed it at one of the crane golem's outstretched claws, and fired. Joy watched in awe as the Red Specter leaped out into space and soared across the docks, swinging around to pounce upon the Triad barricade from behind.

  One of the Triad men saw him coming and cowered back, pointed and screamed as the Specter released his cable and flew the rest of the distance, trench-coat billowing out behind him like wings. It was insane, charging into a tight group of armed gunmen, and Joy was sure the Specter would get shot to pieces, or gang-tackled when he landed. But half of the men didn't react properly. Instead of charging him, or lining up their shots, they shrank back. One of them even dropped his gun, and Joy, remembering Chen's reaction from earlier that day, began to realize the practical benefits to the Red Specter's ghostly persona. It was psychological warfare, meticulously carried out over the past few weeks, with carefully planned attacks and abductions, sapping the enemy's morale, terrorizing them to point that in a direct confrontation, they'd freeze up instead of shooting.

  But some of the gangsters were made of tougher stuff, recovering from their shock quickly, swinging their rifles around to get a bead on this new threat. But the Specter was already attacking, drawing his weapons from over his shoulder, that sword with the odd hilt and his combination buckler-baton; just like in the comics. They blurred as the Specter closed in on his prey with terrifying speed. At close range, the Triad men had a split-second to decide between trying to shoot or swinging their Manticores like clubs, and neither choice ended up being effective. Joy heard a scream and saw one of the gangsters drop his machine-gun and clutch at his hand. She saw a small piece of flesh flop away from the Manticore as it clattered across the dock. Was that a severed thumb?

  Joy averted her gaze from the sight, just in time to catch another flurry of movement, from a tugboat moored at the end of the pier, on the opposite side of the Joanne Spaulding. Six Kallistrate frogmen lunged out from beneath a
tarp on the deck, closing in on Benny's group trying to board the gangplank. The frogmen reached Daphne first, who calmly turned, kicked the lead man in the head, and managed to pistol-whip the second before getting tackled to the dock. But Benny booted that frogman off her, and then it was a full scrum between the two groups.

  Joy’s astonishment that Daphne was able to hold her own against real Kallistrate Army frogmen lasted only a second, before a thunderous peal of gunfire pulled Joy's attention back to the barricades. One of the gangsters had completely lost it, opening up full auto in a desperate attempt to stop the relentless demon tearing through their ranks. He drained his ammo drum in seconds, then watched in horror as his three buddies keeled over, while the Red Specter remained standing. The ghost stepped over the corpses, slowly stalked towards the gunman. The terrified gangster tried firing more shots from the empty gun, backed away, tripped over a sack of rice, scrabbled backwards on his butt, threw his useless Manticore at the advancing Specter, and missed.

  Joy winced. She'd realized that the Red Specter's slow stalking routine was a performance to hide the pain of getting shot. She’d seen it at the warehouse. The Specter’s armor might stop the bullets from piercing his flesh, but the energy from the impact must be like getting hit by a hammer. He was walking it off. It looked like he'd used one of the Triad-men as a meat shield, but Manticore bullets could penetrate all the way through a man’s body. Some of them must’ve hit. The Red Specter closed in on his cowering target and lashed out with his sword, smiting the gangster in the head. Joy steeled herself for a fountain of blood and brains, but the Triad man just fell over, head intact. She noticed that the Specter had shifted his grip to strike with the blunt back edge of the sword. In fact, none of the fallen gangsters had any slices across their heads or torsos, just their extremities.

  But there was no time to admire the Red Specter's restraint, for Shiori Rosewing had joined the fight, and she wasn't scared of his reputation one bit. She threw a dagger at him, which he barely deflected with his buckler, but she'd already closed the distance and drove him back with one powerful strike after another. His stiff, strained reactions told Joy that he was still hurt from the Manticore shots, and then two more Triad men with pistols swung up besides Shiori, getting clear lines of fire, and opened up on him.

  The Specter barely reacted as the bullets slammed into him, and the gunmen shrank back, staring at each other in bafflement, but he staggered and swayed as Shiori pressed her attack, barely able hold her off.

  Joy saw Benny, a somewhat-mussed-up Daphne, and the rest of their entourage boarding the gangplank to the Joanne Spaulding. The frogmen all lay on the pier, either writhing in pain, or completely motionless. One of the thugs still had Lin Lin. Benny glanced back to the barricade, sent some more of his men to aid Shiori, and headed up the gangplank to board his steamship.

  Everything had gone wrong. The good guys were losing. The bad guys were winning. She had to do something. Joy remembered where she was, looked up to the control cab above her. Well, it was worth a shot. She climbed the rest of the way up, hoping that the fleeing crane operator hadn't bothered to lock the door behind him. He hadn't! Joy slipped inside and gave herself a second or two to figure out the controls.

  The crane golem was orders of magnitude simpler than the military steam golem, with its vast array of switches and dials. This had a meager handful of pressure and temperature gauges. Joy had no trouble finding the blinking display light that read STANDBY. She hit the big green ACTIVATE button below it, and she was in business.

  Joy found that pressing either foot-pedal would rotate the crane in either direction; that was much simpler than the complex foot-tread drive system for a full steam golem. The arm controls were more intuitive as well—two control-sticks mounted on scale models of the crane arms, attached to the pilot's chair at around shoulder-level. Each control-stick had three ring-triggers, which corresponded to the operator's index finger, middle finger and thumb, allowing fine control of the crane golem’s three-fingered claws. Her hands were a bit small for the rings, but found that she could manage them well enough, despite the pain from her left pinky every time she shifted her grip. That was practically background noise for her at this point. She had to stretch to push down on the pedals, which annoyed her, but she didn't have time to figure out how to adjust the seat.

  Joy noted the golem still held a large container crate in its right hand, only it had been smashed into other piles of cargo. Testing the foot pedals had done that. Whoops. She flexed her fingers against the control rings, and the giant steel digits opened. The crate tumbled free, crashed to the docks, tipped over, and splashed into the harbor. Joy didn’t pause to watch it sink. Hopefully there wasn’t anything important in there. She swung the crane golem around to bring the duel between the Shiori and the Red Specter into view of the floor-to-ceiling glass front of the control cab, and reached out to grab Shiori with one of the huge claws.

  The former Caliburn knight saw it coming and leapt back as the claw closed around empty air. Joy frowned. The military golem simulator had been much more responsive than this thing. She aimed another grab at Shiori, missed again. Already she felt the strain on her arms, pushing at the control-sticks to try and make them go faster, while the crane’s hydraulics whined in protest. She supposed a machine designed for cargo loading, as opposed to dragon-fighting, wouldn’t be engineered with fast reflexes as a priority. Fine—she could try this another way.

  She kept her left claw interposed between Shiori and the Specter, put her right claw on the opposite side of her and the other Triad gangsters, and slowly brought her hands together. She’d force them to jump off the pier if they didn’t want to get squished. Not that she was going to try to actually squish them, she just—

  The staccato roar of one of the Manticores cut her train of thought short, as spiderwebs sprouted all over the glass in front of her face. Joy shrieked, instinctively throwing her hands up for protection. But the control sticks wouldn’t move fast enough, and instead her whole body slid down in the seat, making her stomp down hard on the right foot-pedal. The cab spun around and around, until Joy calmed down enough to stop it, putting the back of the cab between her and the shooters.

  That would be another big difference between a crane and a military golem. A real steam golem would have an armored cockpit, not a bunch of glass. Joy stared at the bullet holes in front of her and wondered why she wasn’t dead. She looked behind her and saw more holes, most of them in a cluster where the roof and the back of the cab met. One of them had put a neat circle through the top of the headrest, still adjusted for someone much taller than Joy. Good thing too. The shooter had been firing low to high, with a gun that kicked up. It was Joy’s lucky day, ha ha.

  Whatever. She needed to see, and the glass in front of her was a mass of white fractures. Joy shifted back into position on the chair, and carefully brought one of the crane’s claws around until its index finger pointed at the broken glass. It put Joy in a surreal position with the control-sticks, like she was going to poke herself in the face. She pulled her legs up and tried to shrink back in the seat as much as she could, as she brought the massive steel digit in, piercing the ruined windshield and raking up and down to clear the glass shards away. Joy felt a sting on her shin as one of the shards nicked her, but that was the worst of it. The cab floor was covered in broken glass now, but she was able to use the soles of her sandals to brush the foot-pedals clear without further injury.

  Now she could see again, but what could she do without armor? The sight of the huge steel claw hovering a foot away from the cab gave her an idea. She rotated the claw so two of its fingers pointed skyward, palm facing her, then pressed it up close to the cab. Now she had armor. She spun back around to resume the attack. First, she spotted the KIB pressing the attack on the Triad’s barricade, which she demolished with a swipe of her claw. The big drawback to her new armor was that it blocked her line of sight. She had to spread the fingers apart and lower her prot
ective claw in order to pick a target, and then strike half-blind, as she hastily covered up to block retaliation shots. She saw Triads fleeing up the gangplank and swung at them. The sounds of screeching metal, banging, splashes, and screaming suggested that she’d hit. Joy searched for another target, and something pinged off the inside of the crane’s fingers and lodged in the roof. Joy looked down to see Shiori, then looked up to see one of her throwing knives.

  While part of her had to be impressed that the Caliburn had even been able to hurl a knife that distance, the other flailed out in a rage, raking her attack claw down in an overhand smash as she was raising her shield claw up. Joy saw just enough to realize she’d overextended her swipe, as her claw pierced through a huge container of dirt lying on the deck of the Joanne Spaulding, and dragged it over the edge, to spill its contents onto the pier below. Or at least, that’s what she thought. Joy lowered her claw enough to check, waggling the cab side-to-side as she did, to deny anybody a clear shot. There was a huge pile of dirt on the pier, and more had spilled into the water. No sign of Shiori, and a sudden breeze from the harbor told Joy that what she’d spilled wasn’t dirt. It was fertilizer.

  But never mind what it was—it might interfere with KIB forces storming the ship. Joy reached over to clear the mess when she realized the ship was moving. It was pulling away from the pier. She had to stop it!

  Joy lunged out with her right claw, shoving against the control-stick with all of her might, willing it to go faster, to make that grab before it was too late. Desperately, she grasped for the fleeing ship, saw her claw come down, barely catching it at the widest part of its hull, the back edge of the paddle wheel.

  The steel digits ripped through the top of the cowl and snagged the steel paddle on the upward rotation, crumpling three of them together before the wheel screeched to a halt. The other paddle kept going, churning up a high spray of water on the opposite side of the ship. Joy tried to pull the steamship back in, but the metal of the crumpled paddles started to shriek and deform, and she realized she was in danger of ripping out her handhold. She extended the crane arm to relieve the pressure and get a better grip on the ship. It worked: she saw the claw hook something a bit more solid, but Joanne Spaulding surged forward as she did, and now the golem arm was stretched out further, with weaker leverage. Now what?