by Stan Lee
Then he noticed the couch on the far side of the lab, set under the holographic pseudo-window. It appeared to be made of some seamless leather-like material, almost butter-soft as John poked it. A good place perhaps to zonk off when experiments went on all night.
He lay Peg out full-length, hauled off his own helmet, then worked the release on hers. The helm was stuck, perhaps welded in place from that shot on the shoulder. John worked delicately, afraid to apply too much pressure—he didn’t want to tear Peg’s head off. Finally, after one more rasping snag, he was able to slide the thing free.
Peg’s face was deathly pale, every freckle seeming to stand out with greater prominence. Her hair was a tangled, sweat-matted mass. But she was breathing, that was the important thing.
John blinked perspiration out of his eyes, then turned to the ticklish job of getting Peg free, breaking plast-alloy parts where he had to. When he finally got her upper torso cleared, he drew in a breath between clenched teeth. The union suit style undergarment was scorched and tattered at the right shoulder. The skin showing through the rents had an angry red, burnt look.
The lower armor was easier to remove. John was pulling off the last boot when Peg stirred, her breathing taking on a different note. He knelt beside her as her eyelids fluttered open, revealing big, confused gray eyes. “Wha—the fight!” She struggled to a half-sitting position, her face tightening as she tried to use her right shoulder.
John tried to ease her back. “It’s over. The Deviants are on the run. You got hit. I’m going to put you into the automed.”
“The force cannon.” She pulled her memories into order as she glanced at her injured shoulder.
“You were lucky. Looks like you just got caught by the edge of the beam.” His face must have given something away, because she stared at him with a sudden intensity.
“Someone—is there someone else who wasn’t lucky?” Peg’s eyes went unfocused for a moment, and John knew she was conducting a mental search. He knew the drill. Ever since he’d discovered his own psionic abilities, the location of friends was easy—there was the barest tickle that showed which direction led to them.
Unless, of course, there was no longer a mind to be found. Peg shuddered under his supporting hands, her eyes widening, yet blind. “No Mike?” the words came as a bare whisper.
Then her eyes focused, boring into his as her mind came crashing in, grabbing for his memories. She saw what had happened to Mike, and her eyes clouded with tears. “Oh, no,” she breathed. “No, no, no.”
Peg’s grief and desolation became a tangible presence in both their minds. John moved instinctively to the most basic form of comforting. He took her in his arms.
She hissed, and they both pulled back, feeling the pain from her shoulder. John grimaced. He might not be able to help her emotional hurt, but he knew how to handle this. A couple of probes, and he’d blocked the nerves carrying the message of pain.
Peg looked at her shoulder in surprise. John intercepted her hand before it could touch the inflamed flesh. I just stopped the ache for a while. It still needs treatment.
She stared at him open-mouthed. They were communicating wordlessly, their minds still intertwined, meeting on deeper channels than they’d ever shared before. He was exquisitely aware of the tactile sensation as she flung her arms around him, the tears finally flooding out.
After the sobbing ceased, they clung together for long moments in an interchange even John didn’t understand, a transaction on a very basic level.
Then Peg’s lips were brushing his, as she clung to him with desperate intensity. Perhaps it was like whistling in the dark, the need to affirm life against death, but John couldn’t have identified such an intellectual construct if his life depended on it.
All he knew—all the two of them knew—was a rush of feeling, of need. They were both clothed, but felt a nakedness beyond any exposure as their joined minds confronted what they were about to do. John’s doubts and fears of awkwardness in what for him would be a first encounter, Peg’s regrets and ambivalences, all were there. So was John’s love, like a bright, warming star, a star that had a twin in Peg’s mind.
They were breathing faster as Peg pulled back again, her eyes glued to John’s as her fingers undid the closure on her suit. An almost little-boy wonder flooded his mind as her body was exposed.
He leaned forward to brush his lips across her bared left shoulder, the hollow of her throat, the cleft between her breasts, the pale pink tips that darkened as they suffused with blood.
It was as though they had established a reciprocal circuit between their brains, the pleasure given by one sizzling through the nerves of both.
Peg’s undersuit was completely off now, and John’s armor clattered to the floor as they both worked to strip him bare. He sighed as he stroked a hand over the supple curve of her back, gripped the tightly-fleshed roundness of her ass, caressed the firm, sweet curve of her hip. It seemed as if beneath the smoothness of her skin he could feel the strength of every muscle, sheer vitality radiating from her.
Sliding a leg between John’s, Peg pushed his undersuit down to a puddle of cloth on the floor. She’d seen John naked before—but naked and unconscious. Despite his muscular build, he’d seemed lesser than life, shrunken somehow. Now the stocky form before her seemed to ripple with power, vibrant, and oh, yes, as she planted kisses downward from the bands of muscle at his chest, rampant.
They sank to the couch, too eager for lovers’ games. Peg greeted his entrance with a wordless cry, and not only their bodies, but their minds and very souls seemed to meld together like long-separated parts of an intricate puzzle, conjoining, interlocking, even as they danced the most ancient of all dances.
Their gasps weren’t merely from tactile stimulation, but of wonder as the pleasure of one partner augmented that of the other, as they saw through each other’s eyes, felt with each other’s bodies.
And when they faced the little death, that moment of ultimate vulnerability and least connection with this world, they embraced it together.
A sex-flush colored Peg from head to toe. Her eyelids were closed, and she seemed to be sipping air in little whistling gasps.
And when her eyes opened to look at him with a strangely grave air, John realized they were separate—and themselves again.
“Ah—” Peg said, trying to find some kind of words.
John silently got off the couch, picked up her nude form, and brought her to the automed.
“Ouch!” he heard from the closed capsule as he psychically removed the nerve block on Peg’s shoulder. Then came the humming as the cybernetic healer proceeded to examine her.
In moments, the capsule opened and Peg emerged with a glistening film sprayed across an already less angry-looking burn.
“Prescriptions being prepared,” the machine announced through the translator on John’s suit.
A small slot appeared at the side of the capsule revealing two plainly wrapped packets.
“The smaller package contains a spray healant/analgesic, to be used as necessary.” The machine-voice paused for a second. “The other packet contains a selection of contraceptive devices, which might be advisable.”
Peg froze in the middle of reaching for the bundles, blushing bright red. “Thorough machine,” she muttered. “Very bloody thorough.”
John managed to rustle up an Argonian lab coat for Peg to wear and donned his old undersuit.
She burst out laughing as they headed down the corridor to the living quarters. “We don’t exactly look like super-heroes,” Peg said as they reached her room. She ruffled her voluminous garment and tweaked the saggy, sweat-stained union suit John wore.
He nodded. “The tighter the costume—”
“The stronger the hero,” she chimed in to finish one of Harry Sturdley’s most basic laws of comics. Peg ran a hand through her hair and made a disgusted face. “All this hero wants is a nice shower, and then bed—”
She cut off abruptly, glancing
at John, the color high in her cheeks.
I’d almost rather face the force cannon than this, John thought. “Just remember to spray on that healing gunk.” He took a deep breath. “If you need any help—”
Peg’s color-was still high as she grabbed his wrist. “I could probably use somebody to scrub my back and aim the spray from package number one.” She looked him in the eye, and gave him a grin. “Play your cards right, and we may find out what’s inside package number two.”
* * *
CHAPTER 15
The very stuff of the Rift buckled under the pressure as the higher-order dimensions impinged on the Earthly nexus. And down in the three-dimensional universe, larger and larger areas were influenced by forces not of this Earth ...
Tony LaPointe had never heard of Larry Hammeyer, but he did know the name Billy-Ray Woolsey.
Even without the footage of the twin lightning strikes, the late Billy-Ray’s friend Jesse-Bob Fargis had succeeded in selling his video to the local news, which in turn had passed it up the line on a slow news day. Combined with the amazing story that the exact same set of winning numbers turned up in both the Colorado and Utah state lotteries, it made for an amusing network-news wrap-up on a wave of odd luck that seemed to be heading westward.
When he’d watched the news, LaPointe had chuckled appreciatively. Luck—specifically probabilities—was his line of work. He ran the Golden Cactus resort and casino—the easternmost house of chance in Las Vegas.
As he stood now watching the bank of television monitors covering the casino floor, LaPointe wished he’d been paying a bit more attention to the news item. From the looks of things, a wave of weird luck had just engulfed his casino. The crowd on the floor was roused almost to fever pitch. At the craps table, a fat, sweaty, aluminum siding salesman from Pittsburgh continued the longest and most lucrative dice run in recorded history.
As he rolled the ivories in his cupped hand, his eyes popping, his mouth in a rictus of tension, the salesman looked like a prime candidate for a stroke. LaPointe didn’t know if he should be rooting for the guy to keel over—at least he wouldn’t win anymore—or if it were better to follow the gambler’s creed and let him go on. He’d have to crap out soon.
LaPointe decided not to panic over what was happening at the blackjack tables either. Several part-time players who would normally have busted by now were hitting blackjack after blackjack. A casino—like an insurance company—does not make its money by paying out. The business lies in pulling money in. And like an insurance company, casinos depend on a very small but quite profitable set of percentages. Insurance companies bet that sober twenty-year-olds who invest in life insurance won’t die before the policy is paid out. Casino operators bet that anyone who draws over a sixteen at blackjack will probably go bust.
Occasionally, of course, flukes happen and the percentages get flouted. That might happen once in a while. But when it happens simultaneously on the craps and blackjack tables ...
People now began jumping and screaming arpund the roulette wheel. LaPointe whipped out a silk handkerchief and began mopping a suddenly ashen face. If the wheel turned against you, too ...
A whooping siren-like noise echoed through the building. The $100,000 slot machine, which supposedly only paid off once every three months—and which had showered wealth on an amazed sucker only ten days ago—had just kicked in.
The house was in danger of being broken.
That’s when the phone rang. LaPointe’s deputy answered it and turned to his boss with an odd look on his face. “It’s the Bonnie Dune up the block. Manager wants to know if anything—uh—out-of-the-ordinary is going on.”
The Bonnie Dune. A block west of here.
“Tell ’em yeah, and get ’em off the phone,” LaPointe answered, a potential way to make up the evening’s catastrophic losses now occurring to him. “Then get me the racing form. I want all the long shots at Santa Anita ...”
John and Peg were not destined for relaxation, much less rest. Within hours of repulsing the raid on the Citadel of Silence, the S-Force was deluged with reports of Deviant activity. Nowhere—and no one—on Argon seemed safe from these outbreaks.
Sighing, the couple donned their armor and went to lead the response.
“Don’t bother lying to me,” John told the Argonian merchant in a flat voice. “I’m one of those barbarian mind-readers—lots of evil gene in me.”
Most of John’s words to the terrified Argonian were lies themselves. After twenty-seven hours of constant flying and fighting, he doubted he had the strength to crack even this character’s weak personality shields. And John didn’t feel evil—he was more exhausted than anything else.
But he was the one who’d insisted on a counter-terrorist offensive, following up on every lead in the captured Deviant records. Judging from the reports filtering in, the S-Force was actually nailing some of these guys.
That left to him the job of running down whatever leads they could get from characters like the one he was facing— a small-time merchant who’d been funneling technical supplies to the Deviants. After innumerable similar interviews, the man was no longer an individual in John’s eyes, but a type—a collaborator rather than a sympathizer. He’d let himself be used. Although he knew from the value of the goods he received in exchange for his technotoys that they had to be illegally obtained, he’d shut his eyes. The merchant was like a lot of Argonians in this war, just going along with the prevailing wind.
Well, the wind was blowing from another quarter now.
“Your contact for these exchanges—what’s his name? Where does he do business? Do you know where he lives?”
John had gotten pretty good at interrogation. His “evil-psychopath-barbarian” approach worked even better than “good cop/bad cop.”
The merchant babbled a name and address, his fear so palpable it ruptured any personality shields. John turned to one of the two S-Force troopers patrolling with him, pushing through the fog of fatigue to recall the guy’s name. “Grumadon, this citizen has given us the information we need. Why not put him to sleep so he doesn’t pass it on to anyone else?”
Grumadon aimed a stun-bolt, and the merchant collapsed. The patrol moved on to the address John had gotten.
It was the Argonian equivalent of a nice neighborhood, a medium-sized spire on the outskirts of Kemot. When John made enquiries about Domergon, the obvious alias the merchant had given him, he heard of a quiet, unassuming couple—husband and wife. So, there were two potential Deviant captives to be taken. John took Grumadon with him to the apartment door, leaving the third patrol member outside the spire, -keeping an eye on the landing stages in case their quarry attempted to bail out.
The apartment entry was flush with the drop shaft, denoting the full floor was occupied by one apartment—modest luxury, in Argonian terms. Hanging in midair, John thrust his arms out in the tridigirector, blasting the door in.
“S-Force!” Grumadon blared through his external speakers. “Nobody move!”
The inner foyer was a donut of empty space, extending all the way around the drop shaft. The various rooms of the apartment split off from there in pie wedges.
Bursting into the place, John went right, Grumadon left, checking the foyer first. No one there. They met back at the wrecked door, then began to search the various rooms.
Blasters ready, John stepped into the living room, a tasteful evocation of the Argonian good life. The furniture all floated on gizmoidal fields, and the 3-D holo-projector was of the highest quality. Unlike most Argonian dwellings, however, this one had a floor-to-ceiling library of book-tapes. Few present-day Argonians had such literary tastes. John inferred that the Deviants in residence were progress fanatics rather than criminals.
Then he heard the ripping sound of blaster-bolts being unleashed. This was a bad sign—Grumadon was armed only with nonlethal stunners. John tore through the apartment, following the noise.
He found Grumadon in a bedroom. The S-Force trooper lay
inert on the floor, sparks sheeting from his shattered armor. But the room seemed empty—until John glanced toward what an Earthly architect would call the cathedral ceiling. Twenty feet above was a pair of Deviants, scrabbling at a hatchway disguised as a lighting fixture. The smaller of the two boosted through the opening.
The other Deviant hung from the dangling light fixture. He wore hastily-donned armor without a helmet, and his face tightened with fear as he saw John. The Deviant brought his free arm up, his fingers beginning to curl into the tridigirector.
John’s mental batteries were too low to consider a psionic attack. He didn’t know if he could hurl himself at the man. On instinct, he went with his third option. His hand speared up, fingers curling.
The Deviant’s blast-bolt sizzled past John’s ribs.
John’s bolt caught the man full in the face.
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” Peg said, trying to embrace John—a clumsy job, with the both of them wearing powered armor. At least their helmets were off, allowing for a chaste kiss in one of the tiny equipment bays lining the hangar walls at the Citadel of Silence.
“If you say so,” John whispered, his lips at the side of her neck. “Me, I’ll take my pleasure wherever I can get it.”
“Well, I’d rather not get it in the corner of a glorified industrial garage,” Peg told him. “What brings you back so unexpectedly? We thought you’d be out in the field until you ran through the list you’d made up.”
“We had a prisoner,” John said. “And a casualty. One of the Deviants nailed Grumadon. They’ve got him in an automed in Kemot.”
“My team rounded up an entire gang of Deviants—criminals rather than idealists,” Peg reported. “They’d gathered to share the spoils when we came walking in.” She grinned at John. “Want me to add your prisoner to my batch? You look like you could use a shower and some rest.” Her expression faltered a little as she pulled back slightly to look him in the eyes. “Please, John, don’t go out again.”