Titans

by Niall Teasdale

  The world snapped back to normal speed and Mercy stood there for a couple of seconds, listening to the shrieking noise of her stressed ears. The apartment door burst open, and she turned toward it. Joe was there, shouting something which came through as a muffled garble. He was clutching the pistol Faith had got for him, but there was no one left to shoot.

  ‘It’s done,’ Mercy said. Maybe he could hear her; she could barely hear herself. ‘Get security.’ Hopefully, she would be able to talk to them when they arrived.

  ~~~

  Only the first man Mercy had shot was still alive by the time the security officers arrived to see what they were dealing with. Faith appeared in the apartment doorway twenty minutes after that. She seemed rather sanguine about Mercy’s use of magic bullets to kill gangsters. In fact…

  ‘That one I’ve seen before,’ Faith said when Mercy described the pulses of light. ‘They call it Annihilating Bullets. It’s a Disruptor power. So is the barrier ability, by the way. If you can stop shotgun slugs with it, you’ve got it at a useful level, but be careful with it. It works like a shield. You have to know it’s coming and react to whatever’s attacking you. And it’s basically no use if you’re not attacked head-on.’

  ‘Okay,’ Mercy said. ‘Alright. Teleportation?’

  ‘Never actually seen it, but it’s rumoured that Disruptors can do it. I haven’t seen it now, but if you say–’

  ‘She vanished out of the bedroom,’ Sophia said, ‘and then I heard gunshots in the lounge.’

  ‘And thank God my ears have stopped ringing,’ Mercy added.

  ‘Yes, well, same here,’ Sophia said, ‘but I’m still trying to get my head around you teleporting.’

  ‘You can make things appear from nowhere.’

  ‘That’s… a very valid point.’

  ‘Anything else that manifested while you were stressed?’ Nick asked. He was not being especially useful, but he was there to provide support and ask questions.

  ‘Uh, I could sense things through the walls,’ Mercy replied. ‘I knew where they were, even though I couldn’t see them.’

  ‘Not one I’ve heard of,’ Faith said, ‘though it does make sense of some stories about Titans.’

  ‘And, well, it seemed like either everything around me slowed down or I sped up. It wasn’t an adrenaline rush. This was really like time was flowing wrong.’

  ‘Those shots seemed awfully close together,’ Sophia said. ‘You fired twice?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was like they were right on top of each other. Bang bang. Rapid fire.’

  ‘I took the time to aim at both of them.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Nick said. ‘Perhaps fascinating.’

  Mercy grimaced. ‘Don’t start.’

  ‘Time manipulation is another Disruptor speciality,’ Faith said. ‘It’s quite possible that you did accelerate your own timeframe. So, you’re developing more capabilities and the Organisation is quite determined to grab Sophia.’

  ‘Yes. To both. I think… I think if I’m going to be a “walking engine of destruction,” was it? If I’m going to be that, I should use it for something. I want to know all there is to know about the Organisation. And then I’m going to persuade them to stop bothering us.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. But it’ll be something destructive.’

  30th April.

  It was Sunday, but there was no regulation about Sunday opening in the NYA and Zuri was in her shop. That worked out well for Mercy as she swept in through the door to find the seamstress behind the counter.

  ‘Oh, wow,’ Zuri said. ‘I knew that coat would look awesome on the right woman. It billows just right when you stride like that and oh shit, that look’s not for me, is it?’

  Mercy came to a grinding halt, but then she had been going to anyway after seeing Zuri’s face. Specifically, Zuri’s left eye which was swollen shut and a livid shade of purple. ‘What look? Did that thug De Santis do that to you?’

  ‘You’ve got the glowing eyes and skin thing, but there are… streamers, flames. Blue flames streaming out from your eyes.’

  ‘Oh. You didn’t answer the question about De Santis.’

  Zuri’s brow tightened. Then she winced and relaxed it. ‘What are you going to do if I say yes?’

  ‘I’m going to ask him not to do it again. Where does he live, Zuri?’

  ‘If he finds out I–’

  ‘Zuri, it’s my fault he hit you. He came back at you to take out his humiliation on someone who couldn’t fight back. I am not going to let him do that again.’

  ‘You don’t have to–’

  ‘I have other reasons for wanting to demonstrate to the Organisation that they should stop messing with me and my friends. It’s not just because a bully hit you. Given that I need a message taken to whoever their leader is, I may even leave De Santis the use of his legs.’

  ‘Well… When a Titan needs something from you, it’s never wise to deny them.’

  ‘I’m not trying to force this out of you.’

  ‘You might not be, but your eyes are doing a pretty good job all on their own.’

  ~~~

  Dane De Santis lived in a significantly smaller apartment block than Mercy’s a little south of Greenwich Village. It was five storeys of brick-built structure with a fire escape. A pretty typical New York apartment building. It was still early on Sunday, so there were few people around to see Mercy storming into the building and heading for the third floor, aided by the fact that the lock was busted on the front door.

  She found apartment 302 and was about to kick the door in when she paused and considered a slightly more subtle approach. The door had a basic lock on it, so she reached out and put her index finger on the keyhole. She concentrated. The same sort of effect as her blue disintegration beam, but more localised. That would do fine. Blue light flared from beneath her finger and the entire lock crumbled into fine powder.

  It was almost enough to make her smile. Almost. The thought of De Santis waiting inside was enough to make it almost. She pushed the door open and marched in. And that was somewhat anti-climactic since there was no sign of the man in his lounge, which the door opened straight onto.

  De Santis had a comfortable-looking life, though you could tell the furniture had been scrounged together to make that comfort. No self-respecting thug would have gone out and bought a sofa with floral-pattern fabric covers. That said, there was a lace cover draped over the coffee table, so maybe…

  Mercy headed for what she hoped was the bedroom. De Santis seemed the type to enjoy a lie-in on a Sunday. Hopefully, he was alone. The thought that he might not be gave Mercy brief pause, but she decided heaping a little more humiliation upon the creep was acceptable. He could get beaten up in front of the girlfriend he was cheating on, if such a foolish woman existed.

  She slammed through the door and was greeted by ‘What the– Oh fuck!’ and the sight of a buck-naked De Santis scrabbling to untangle himself from his sheets and get out of bed. There was no moron with boobs in bed with him; Mercy’s opinion of her sex improved slightly. There was a shotgun leaning against the bedside cabinet, which De Santis was probably trying to get to.

  ‘You seem perfectly ready to use your fists on a woman who can’t fight back, asshole,’ Mercy said, ‘so why do you need a gun for me?’ She kept walking, around the bed and toward him, so that, as he grabbed the pump-gun and began to swing it around, she caught the barrel in her left hand to stop it rising and then punched him in the gut. There was a flare of blue light and De Santis was blasted into the wall beside his bed.

  ‘That’s new,’ Mercy said, but her victim was not listening. De Santis crumpled to the rose-patterned carpet. ‘Well, damn.’ He was going to be hard to intimidate if he was unconscious.

  Luckily enough, De Santis was a careful man and had a first aid kit in his bathroom cabinet. It looked like it was fifty years old and a lot of the chemicals in there were likely pretty dodgy, but there were
some capsules of smelling salts which were probably good given their nature. She broke one under De Santis’s nose and he jerked into life, immediately letting out a shriek of pain and clutching his stomach.

  ‘The fuck? What– Shit! Oh shit. I think you broke my ribs. Crazy bi–’ He bit off the rest of the word as Mercy’s eyes began to flame brightly in front of his face.

  ‘Listen up, De Santis. If you play your cards right, a couple of broken ribs is going to be all the damage you get out of this. I need to send a message to your bosses. The message is, “Leave me and my friends alone.” That means you stop coming after Sophia and you stop trying to kill me. And if any of you people ever go near Zuri Adamson again, I’m going to come back here to take it out on you. This is personal. You pay, no matter who does it. Understand?’

  ‘We don’t cave just because some Titan says we should.’

  ‘Huh. Loyal to the end. When you wake up, tell your bosses what I said. And tell them I’m going to be demonstrating why they should do as I ask.’

  ‘I’m already awake.’

  Mercy slugged him in the jaw. There was another flare of blue light and he bounced off the bedframe before lying still. ‘Huh. Walked right into that one.’

  ~~~

  ‘Okay,’ Mercy said, looking at a tablet she had brought over from Pallas, ‘according to the president, the Organisation is the sole supplier of cannabis to the region. Taking down their farms should give them a headache.’ She was holding a planning session with her team in the men’s apartment. On the tablet, there was a false-colour map of New York City and its environs.

  ‘I thought cannabis was legalised throughout the US before we left for Saturn,’ Joe said.

  ‘It was. Technically, it’s legal. Certainly, if you can get it, there’s nothing stopping you from smoking it and NYAS won’t arrest you for having the stuff. However, there are regulations against the use of NYA resources for “unnecessary” projects, and the Organisation didn’t ask before diverting water and power into their farms. Also, they have a monopoly, so they can charge whatever they like. The president said that if she could get her hands on some, she’d put effort into growing it for medical purposes, but no one even knows where the Organisation got the plants from.’

  ‘And they haven’t searched for these farms?’ Nick asked.

  ‘Yes, but they don’t have the kind of resources needed. The police used to search for cannabis farms with infrared cameras. In urban areas anyway. Fly over with a helicopter and look for unusually hot attics. Or neighbours would report weird smells. Well, there are no helicopters and there are plenty of places to set up shop where there are very few neighbours.’

  ‘I see, so– Ah! Of course. You tasked Theia with an infrared survey of the planet. If you modified the task a little, you could get a more detailed survey of the city.’

  Mercy grinned. ‘I knew you’d get it. So, these are the results. We’ve got a lot of hot buildings up around Harlem and the Heights.’

  ‘The hydroponic farms,’ Nick said. ‘If they’ve hidden their illegal farms in that area, they’ll be almost impossible to find.’

  ‘True, but there are more people there who might notice the smell. Plus, there are these hot spots in the Upper East Side which are not known hydroponics facilities.’

  ‘They may not be what you’re after either. There are various reasons for having a hot roof.’

  ‘You’re right, but I can go look.’

  ‘And what do you plan to do if you find them?’ Sophia asked.

  ‘Well, I don’t think the NYA needs all the plants the Organisation’s farming…’

  ~~~

  By evening, they had identified four locations they were sure the Organisation was using to grow cannabis. This was achieved largely through Joe flying to the locations Theia had found on the infrared survey and using his nose. He wanted to go in with Mercy to deal with them, but someone had to guard Sophia in case the Organisation tried again. Besides, Mercy was the one with all the destructive abilities.

  She deployed one of them on the lock of an apartment block on East 78th Street, a narrow sort of building with grey render on the exterior wall, which was cracking in places, and sash windows. The doorway had quite an ornate lintel over it including a light which was not working. It was after nine p.m. by this point and quite dark within the city’s canyons, but Mercy had her new spatial sense to work with. The darkness did not bother her, sort of, though she was still trying to get used to moving around without actually seeing where she was going. She could barely see the lock on the front door, but she knew where it was even if she had to concentrate to see it in detail. It crumbled into metallic dust at her touch, and she pushed through into the hallway beyond, still in darkness.

  There continued to be nothing but darkness as she climbed the stairs to the upper floors. Her spatial sense spread out before her, showing her the total lack of occupancy. She was getting a better idea of what it could do now. It could not see beyond about a foot of material. In the open, it had a range of about a hundred metres, give or take, but a couple of brick walls would obscure what was beyond. It could see through more of the partition walls within the building. The beams holding up the floors produced interesting shadows in her view above and below.

  On the second storey, she could already see the shapes of plants on the top floor. Plants set on benches with large, overhead lights mounted above them. The details were unclear at that distance and through several floors, but the general shape looked right and even with some form of air filtration system, the sweet scent of cannabis oil pervaded the air.

  Up at the top, the interior walls had been knocked through to give more growing space. The floor was split by a central corridor, but there were two large rooms running the depth of the building filled with luscious, green plants with their distinctive leaves. There was plenty of light to see by here; overhead LED panels glowed brightly, hidden from the outside world by windows which had been painted over in black. The scent was heady.

  ‘Okay,’ Mercy said, and her blue beam of destruction flared into life. ‘Time for a little overzealous pruning.’ She swung the beam.

  ~~~

  Either she had tripped some sort of silent alarm at one of the previous two buildings or this one was better guarded. Through the walls, her spatial sense was showing her five men armed with guns. Focusing on one of the weapons, she was fairly sure she was looking at P52 personal defence weapons. If they were loaded with their original munitions, that meant she was facing armour-piercing rounds. Would her shield hold up against something like that?

  There was only one way to find out. On the other hand, being smart about this seemed like a good idea. The building had a fire escape hanging fairly low right beside the front door. It was pretty easy to jump up, catch a rung of the ladder, and ride it down so that she could climb to the upper floors. It did make noise, however. There was some possibility that they knew she was coming.

  Down at ground level, the facia was some sort of fake ornamental style. Maybe Victorian or something. Architecture was not one of Mercy’s fields of study. The top four floors were red brick with four sash windows per floor. Each window was divided into six panes and one of those on the top floor became rough sand after an application of Mercy’s disintegration power. Light shone out through the gap; they had blacked out the windows again. Reaching in, she undid the catch and pushed the window up. The light was almost blinding coming from the darkness outside, but her spatial sense was still working, so she relied on that while her eyes adjusted.

  Here, it seemed that the Organisation had knocked through the walls connecting four buildings. The external style had been similar in all four. The space was vast, crammed with sweet-smelling greenery. More, she could sense two more floors below this one with the same setup. This had to be at least one of the main farms in the city. Letting all this go to waste would be as much of a crime as growing it. She decided that this one would do as her present to Faith, but first there was t
he matter of the five men charging up the stairs with assault weaponry.

  There were three coming up one stairwell while two more were using the one at the other end of the open floor. They were hoping to flank her, and it would have worked without her new sense. As it was, it was going to be difficult to keep her directional shield in the way of what they were going to shoot at her. This might get– She kicked herself, cutting off her negative thoughts. She could teleport.

  She landed on the floor below as the duo reached the top level. They were focused, weapons raised to allow them to use the reflex sights. They were hunting for her in among the greenery, but she was not there. They went into slow motion as she arrived back on the top floor, but now behind them. Two metres of blue light flashed into existence and swept from side to side. The annihilating energy passed through the two men’s necks, and Mercy watched in mild horror as her victims began collapsing, falling apart as they went. She had known what would happen, but seeing it was another matter. The lack of blood just seemed to make it worse, though that was just at first; blood started pouring out of the severed necks before the bodies hit the ground.

  Tearing her attention away from the falling men, Mercy focused her attention elsewhere and vanished herself to the other end of the floor.

  The remaining trio were speaking in slow motion too. ‘What happened?

  ‘Did she get them?’

  ‘How could she?’

  ‘Didn’t the report say she could teleport?’

  ‘Fuck! Circle up.’

  They moved, one of them turning his back on the other two just in time to see Mercy pull the trigger on her pistol. The pulse of blue light hit him between the eyes. His companions had no chance to realise what was happening before a second charge hit another of them in the back of the head. Mercy darted forward as the last one turned. Her hand closed around his weapon and she focused on it. She smiled into the man’s face as the casing disintegrated and gun parts fell to the bare floorboards.