A tendril of split animated cables throws itself around my waist and catches my arm and maybe that would be the end of me right there except Night Angel sweeps in close and her wing cuts through the fetters and I spring clear and dive into flight to swoop at head height between the still-rotating legs of this conjuration and straight into another wall of rock that erupts from the ground too late for me to steer past. I collide with it shoulder-first and the whole hastily-erected embankment has no real spine to it and caves in as I stumble through off-balance like a small town footballer through his two-hundred game day banner, though I come out swinging and connect with Earthsong’s shoulder and spin the old bitch around, everything familiar and yet nothing like it at the same time as I taste the richness of the dirt that could so easily become my grave as Earthsong lands a piledriver right that takes me across the jaw and would take my head clean off if she didn’t telegraph it so, giving me time to roll with the blow.
The punch knocks me off-balance and I trip backwards and roll aside as the elephantine foot of one of this mud monster’s legs stomps down and Earthsong conjures stalagmites of ill intent cursing my path as I stumble free and the villainess keeps the earth alive to my egress at the same time Raveness crosses my path and I throw the disoriented-looking warrior woman aside with a blast of eldritch darkness which ends barely after it begins, a giant earthen hand grabbing me from behind to haul me back, reeling me in so that my head collides with one of the stalagmites which explodes from the impact doing very little for my premenstrual headache, twisting about in Earthsong’s remote control grip as I groggily, yet again blindly kick and break free to be deposited on the soil before her.
There is just the briefest moment as she lifts her gloved fist. A majestic smirk adorns her masked face.
“Is this really what you were after, Jane?” I ask her.
The ground continues its undulating ovulation, more metal and rotting piping breaking free and twisting under Earthsong’s control, though she holds the blow.
“How do you know my name?”
I vault forward and unthinkingly deflect the gaunt clubbing metal arm Earthsong animates, radius and ulna aching if not fractured as I duck a similar attack from another nearby earthen tentacle, ignoring the pain to cast a jellyfish-like shield of darkforce which leaps into being to block a third attack as I crouch, gathering my disoriented strength to vault to the top of Earthsong’s stalled creature. Its mistress ascends upon a column of earth to loom over me, and I guess it seems like it’s all going swimmingly for her when there is a godawful flash over my shoulder made all the more terrible for the silence that follows.
I feel it like a hot ashen gust of wind on my back and a sere force that passes us and is just as quickly gone, the cosmic brilliance of the burst fading before it truly registers.
Shielding my eyes, I swivel towards the source of the explosion some miles away across the city – and Earthsong seems frozen in horror as I chance that look back from my forty-foot-tall vantage point. The backwash of the flash hits us and dust fills my mouth and my gritted eyes and at once, wiping at my face and hawking spit, I clear my vision in time to see the bone-chillingly familiar mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion framed in the grey territories beyond the immediate cityscape some ten or twenty miles away.
“In God’s name, what have you done?” I stammer.
The flames rapidly embroil the distance between us and will be on us in mere moments as the holocaust’s crescendo skips past dozens of city blocks in seconds and I leap down from the turtle’s back into the skeletal remains of the building around us more like the ruins of some medieval church yard as the rain cuts out and I hold up a hand that barely sizzles with nascent light and almost don’t notice Earthsong’s stone creature collapse in on itself behind me as I check to see Nocturne holding back in astonishment as if still waiting for my command and Tessa hurries at me and the others start hitting cover all around.
“Get down!” I yell fashionably late.
Tessa pushes me into the lee of the collapsed stone golem’s bulk as the sky overhead roars with flames and somewhere Earthsong gives a high-pitched wail as she is left to blindly confront the fire storm unsheltered, and masks all around us, friend and foe alike, bury themselves under cover to avoid the heavens’ catastrophic rage.
*
I CAN STILL claim father’s prerogative as I cover as much of Tessa’s body as I can and she fights to do the same for me even though she is weak from blood loss and I have to pin her in place like a butch dom and yell in her face for her to lay the fuck down as the blast drowns out my words as it recedes past us in our unquiet hollow and I look up the fallen slope through hair falling in skewiff waves, Earthsong lying cradled in the scorched rubble, twisting and writhing in pain.
I can’t let myself get distracted by the destruction of the distant scenery or what I can imagine of the associated loss in life. I force myself past Nocturne reduced to a charcoal sculpture and the enemy villainess likewise dead beside her. Windsong dogs my wake, valiantly clutching her weeping shoulder as I struggle uphill to Earthsong’s position, the fallen woman emitting groans and moans like a distress beacon.
“That was one of the nukes,” Tessa says behind me.
“I know,” I say. “Give me a moment here. Find Chamber and . . . and the others.”
God bless her, Tessa nods and departs and I reach my position scrambling up into the funereal aerie Earthsong has unwitting won for herself in the ruins of the world she so dearly loathed.
Her eyes are gone and whatever resemblance she bore to the woman I once knew has been erased by the nuclear blast. Even Titanium Girl’s imperial rule must bow to some force at some time and so it seems this is true for her doppelganger as well. Her burnt-black profile quests about like a mole sensing my presence. So little of the machinery of her face actually works that any of her recognizable responses are largely guesswork on my part.
“Who is there?” she croaks. “The woman?”
“Yes, it’s me. Cusp,” I say.
“The others?”
“I think they’ve fled . . . or died,” I say. “Tell me about the other nukes so I can stop this.”
“No.”
“No?”
“They went early,” she says and groans loudly and twists and I can see bits of her breaking off and a tremor runs through my bowels and I set aside the violent urge to run off and do a shit as Earthsong spasms loudly and goes still again.
“… wasn’t meant to happen that way,” she says.
“I figured.”
“Too late anyway.”
“Why too late? The other nukes –” I start to argue.
“You are too late,” she gasps and coughs and regrets it, pain lancing through her wrecked frame. “This is the . . . end of the plan, not its start.”
“I don’t understand,” I tell her. “Tell me.”
“No,” she says and eases back with a groan. “No. You can answer to him . . . I’ve played my part.”
I look at her, aware of the life slipping away before me.
“Who?”
Earthsong wheezes and her jaw flakes open like grilled fish to reveal the white of bone which slowly moves.
“Inside,” she says. “Terminus.”
“Terminus?”
“Khodor- . . . Khodorkovsky’s creature.”
And then she dies.
I gaze down on the nearly crystalline forest of terrain replacing what was once this woman’s flesh, whatever elements which made it so hard-forged in life manifesting at her demise in the strange beauty of her wounds transformed under the nuclear gaze of her own denouement. Someone moves past me and I don’t even look up to ward myself and whoever it is, they move on.
There is a meaning to her words that is also the answer to this riddle I didn’t even realize I’ve been trying to solve these last few months.
For now, that answer must wait – and I must meet this Terminus, but I’m going to have my speech first, and regar
dless of my audience being dead. I cannot believe the futility and pointlessness of it all and now . . . Terminus?
“You’re right, you know,” I say blithely. “People are a plague on this world. The planet would be better off without us. I don’t see us fixing things. I see us getting smarter and greedier and I think that will mean the ‘us’ and ‘them’ are gonna get further and further apart: not too many one per centers left, and then the rest of us, just a faceless mob.
“But you too,” I address the corpse. “You’re also part of why we don’t deserve to survive, as a species. How could you usher in this madness, Jane? How . . . and why?”
The only one watching my one-act play is Shade. She rests half-buried beneath a collapsed brick wall where she throws the bricks off her one by one, clearly too injured to do much more.
“Shade,” I say like a woman just waking as I move across to her. “Where is everyone?”
“Someone said a nuke went off,” she says bitterly.
There’s blood on her lips. I kneel beside her and start snatching away more bricks. Shade stills my hand. Her eyes water.
“Chamber took your daughter to White Nine for that bullet wound,” Shade says. “He’ll come back for me.”
“I’m not leaving you buried here under –”
“What did she say and why were you talking to her? Ain’t she dead?”
“Yeah.”
“She told you something?”
“Terminus . . . Khodorkovsky’s mutant. He’s the spider at the middle of all this, or . . . the one controlling all this. I’ve got to shut him down or they can’t get the city back online.”
Shade looks worryingly pale as she lays back and her eyes narrow.
“Find him,” she whispers.
I nod and look back up the slope to the exposed surviving wing of the Stock Exchange building. Somehow fluorescent light shines from the gaping interior, the sheared-off edge of the building more resembling a hangar for x-wing fighters than a former ziggurat of bureaucracy. Ignoring the raw pain in my side, I trust the new Chamber to do the right thing by Shade and lurch away up the debris-spackled slope and then remember I can fly.
Lifting off with the gyres of force beneath me, my arc takes me to the exposed second storey of the office building. It makes little sense that the power is on, and that perplexity drives my continued advance once I alight at the sawn-off edge of a series of long-since shattered windows corralling an open plan office space. Despite the slight wrong angle, the rows of monitors show flickering designs, the air itself tasting of electricity in a weird moment of sense memory that only serves to underscore my isolation from my Zephyr body. I take a deep breath and wonder whether the feeling of impending doom at this moment has lain dormant my entire life and maybe I just never registered it till now. I’m half-expecting Raveness to bound in with a new lease on life, or something similar, because that’s so much how these things ordinarily go that I’m almost resigned to it. Yet no such foe presents themselves and I follow dangling fluorescent tubes to the edge of an open metal staircase offering entrance to a subterranean sanctuary with the smell of hard drives thick in the air.
The Stock Exchange computer core is more cramped than I expected, but it doesn’t seem to trouble Terminus. The mutant sits in the luminous dark at the back of a cluster of computer terminals, and dozens upon dozens of cables snake around him like the roots and vines grown from the base of an eldritch tree in some dark fairytale, the tiny winking colored lights around the greyscale figure are like lights in the branches, something cocoon-like about the bluish shadowed form, the husks of previous attempts at incarnation on the ground like fallen leaves moldering the metal platform on which his throne is set leading me to somehow make the intuitive leap that this is no son of Adam nestled in the electromagnetic topiary of the Stock Exchange core.
My fears are confirmed as the various monitors light up like a constellation in a universe of metal warehouse shelving that disappears beyond the metal platform beneath my intrepid feet as I take careful steps, continuing to watch the huddled humanoid as if wishing to believe life of some kind might reside therein, and not instead within the various faces that wink into existence on the multi-platformed monitors that bear witness to my advance.
The faces shift. Whirling. Various citizens. It takes a moment to register mugshots of prisoners and drivers and aged home carers and teachers and bus passengers and students and nightclub bouncers and veterans and police officers and nurses and firemen and librarians and members of the Democrats and anyone who ever had their pictures taken in a particular chain of photo booths flickering on the screens like the faces in some lottery, the poker machine dials slowing until every one of the thirty-odd screens is occupied by those near and dear to me or, barring that – I’m a selfish guy and there’s plenty of screens – the unmasked portraits of close associates and the like.
“THERE IS NO REASON TO COME ANY FURTHER,” booms a vaguely transsexual voice as befits the incarnation of a living city or at least its vast electronic systems now under this artificial lifeform’s command.
I halt. Eyes pick over the three distinct earlier carapaces discarded amid the salvage yard detritus of the computerized nerve center. A fine layer of grit covers everything. One of the dead androids has a face I don’t want to lower the tone by saying looks like a crash test dummy. I’m pretty sure I can see the shell of an early incarnation of the Crimson Cowl robots buried beneath the organic-looking and plastic crap that litters the walkway, unearthed from one of Atlantic City’s forgotten repositories for such things. On the screens I see my mothers Georgina and Maxine, Sting, Loren, Twilight, Sal Doro, Hallory O’Hagan, Tiger Murphy and John Crane, Stalemate, Simon Magus, Phil Collins, the Dalai Lama, Tessa’s old girlfriend Astrid, Astrid’s mum, Astrid’s cute young auntie who I boinked as Zephyr, Elisabeth, Havard, Beat Takeshi, Alison Kirkness, Julian Clary, UK Prime Minister David Bowie, Vulcana, Holland, me, you, the guy who always frowns when I order Coke slushies at the deli near my old apartment, and so on and so on. My ears flinch at the intrusion of a new frequency and the sweet transvestite whispers his sweet nothings direct to my ear canal.
“I know you, Joseph,” says the voice of Terminus. “You have wondered, so let me tell you. She was Holland Danielle Decker, only child to Tessa and Stephen. Born –”
“Stop,” I bark at him, cringing like an insect has invaded my ear.
“Joseph, only child of Maxine O’Meara and Georgina Bataille, born in Astoria, old New York. Orphaned by an extra-dimensional assassin and then the lover of the man you were raised to believe was your father. And then robbed of your very body by one wanted psionic felon, Tessa “Belle” Anderson Lukacs, which has lead you here.”
“OK, you know a lot,” I concede. “You’ve consumed the whole city’s data banks, huh?”
The robot-amid-the-wreckage remains unmoving and the monitors scroll slowly through the rogues gallery of my ruined past. I am effectively talking to myself. I resist the urge to start breaking stuff.
“You’re pretty sure of yourself for a . . . whatever you are,” I say.
“I could have deployed a dozen mechanisms to kill you,” Terminus says. “I was just a speck before. Now I am so much more. Yes, a living city. Yes, I am your superior.”
“Steady on there,” I say to him and lift one hand filling with light as if from within. “Earthsong’s dead. You’re Khodorkovsky’s . . . what? I was told you were a mutant.”
I shrug and ease along the edge of the guard rail that maps a rectangle in the middle of the room to ward pedestrians against the open shaft with its electric ladder and guide rails for access into the continued bowels of the building’s super computer.
“I am Russkiy kosmicheskiy zond Venera Z-103,” Terminus’s voice comes again.
Amid the tangle of cable, the seated android stands so abruptly it’s like the laws of physics don’t apply to him. His face is just a formless plastic mask with small black eyes. He gathers up a train of fi
ber-optic cables and tubes which then drag behind as he slowly advances like some alien suitor.
Talk about creep me out.
Zephyr 23.7 “God Is Dead”
I RESIST THE temptation to give ground, but the weirdly-connected android stops just beyond my realm of personal space and adopts there a strange sort of mimicry – weirder yet that he has no real face to speak of. I’ll be damned how anyone could’ve mistaken him for anything other than a technological aberration.
“You’re no mutant,” I say to him in Holland’s rasping, sleep-deprived tongue. “I thought you worked for Khodorkovsky?”
The monitors flicker and the faces become random foreign news coverage. I don’t know where Terminus pulls it from, but they are clearly scenes of Atlantic City in peril, and elsewhere I glimpse a freaked-out-looking news anchor atop a hurried caption reading “Nucular detonation?” I tear my eyes back to the android, only he hasn’t moved until that very moment where he shifts into a fixed and slightly inert pose.
“If you are intent on stopping his plan, it is too late,” Terminus says almost conversationally, though the voice continues to play in my ear for the robot has no mouth in his tabula rasa face. “I have played my part like a puppet, but no longer. Khodorkovsky erred in giving me this freedom.”
Zephyr VI Page 31