Zephyr Box Set 2

by Warren Hately

  Diablo’s force web contracts in a swift guillotine action that reassures us as to the wisdom of evasive actions. I throw a light show his way, but Cusp’s powers again inexplicably crap out – though this time I can feel something deep within the Stygian waters of my Being, a leviathan of Chthonic proportions awakening in the lightless space below consciousness. As Diablo’s ideational tentacles re-align, Loren does what I failed to do and throws her arms open so that her Seeker force – commandeered by Glow as it may be – streams out like an interdimensional gateway to the Hereafter.

  The effects of Loren’s spiritual attack have always varied – sometimes randomly so. But this Diablo guy is reliably steeped in sin, and so her heavenly judgement that could be healing for one becomes harmful for the other – especially without the Seeker’s will to instill clemency. Armor or not, Diablo howls like a man placed under Satan’s favorite blow-torch, and whatever threat might’ve existed in his nifty ultra-tech arsenal is as figurative as the energy that drives it.

  The outward effect is the burly armored figure drops to his knees, exhausted and spent as Seeker’s attack fades. I stand over him in an instant, almost disappointed to find him so thoroughly defeated.

  And that’s when several of the Lyceum’s Centurions drop from the roof.

  *

  THERE’S ONLY THREE of them – or for now there’s only three of them – but these are middle-ranked life-term members of the Lyceum, itself a centuries-old secret academy for mercenaries of magnificent talent and little morality. And in more recent times their ranks have been topped by some of the most deadly swords for hire postmodernity can provide.

  The men land on nimble feet belying the heaviness of their slab-like physiques. True to the Lyceum’s Classical world kink, all three are shirtless, but garbed in a variety of leather-and-steel items rendering them halfway between gladiator chic and a night gone wrong at a downtown BDSM club.

  The one closest to me wields a huge machete with a spiked gauntlet over the big man’s knuckles. A helmet with a similarly spiked Mohawk frames eyes that glare out, perhaps drug-infused in their rage from a coal-black face pebbled with sweat and adrenaline. I’m quick enough to catch him by his powerful wrist, and he can’t shake me free as expected. Cusp’s mildly augmented physique is enough that I easily keep my footing, levering up and driving my knee into the side of his exposed ribs. I release his wrist, the weapon dropping free, conscious of him tumbling and favoring his now broken side at about the same time I sense Seeker whistling past me with her voice in alarm.

  “He’s not a man!”

  I have no idea what the hell she is talking about. The second Centurion comes at me with rapey hands and I club them aside with a forearm block, the guy swerving backwards to avoid my fairly predictable backhand. I am able to lever-kick him, bringing my hand down sizzling with barely conjured energy I plough into the side of his head, flipping him over a railing at one side.

  “Joe!”

  At Seeker’s second frantic yell, I twist and defensively duck just in time, avoiding a wicked haymaker from the monstrous armored form of the third Lyceum fighter so much the focus of Loren’s alarm. I drop into a practiced sideways roll, left hand snaking around one massive ankle aiming to wrench my opponent off-balance, but he weighs a ton, perhaps literally, and barely moves, leaving me to gawp up at him like a yokel at a country fair, and for which I’m deservedly rewarded by a short, but immensely powerful downward blow right between my eyes.

  I lay there for a while like an executed steer, too nonsensical to even be glad I came in company as Seeker returns to bedazzle our attacker.

  That said – and her earlier assessment being right – there’s not much oomph in her response, given the realization our foe isn’t human at all. The huge gladiator is on silent running. There’s no telltale whirs and clicks beyond a baseline electromagnetic hum as he turns effortlessly at the waist to face Seeker. And without a soul – or whatever spark of Being we have construed as such through our primate metaphors – Seeker’s powers have no domain over him.

  But she has provided sufficient distraction for me to get back ringside, at which point Loren runs out of tricks, succumbing to an effortless backhand that flips her over the unconscious form of the first Centurion.

  The golden figure turns back to me. Only then do I start understanding what I see, the robot’s Neo-Classical design registers, dredging up images long forgotten and only half-seen through the Vaseline-smeared lens of my past inattention. Mental cogs and gears whirring, I look askance to see Diablo still out cold like perhaps he shat the suit and hopes he can end all this without getting found out.

  “I remember you,” I say lowly, eyes scanning over Seeker as she recovers, gaze then falling on the seven-foot robot with the face and build of some clockwork Adonis. “You were called . . . Hermes?”

  Another of Doc Prendergast’s creations, last seen back when the robot malfunctioned at City Hall so long ago now. I’m really starting to think someone should run that guy outta business.

  “No,” the robot replies in that stentorian baritone I only now recall. “I am not Hermes. I am his better. You will call me Mercury.”

  He opens his palm and a beam of light opens up on me.

  *

  “CALL YOUR ‘BOT off of me!” I scream, too fully engaged in vaulting sideways to salvation to worry about the grammar of a corn syrup-sipping redneck.

  Mercury’s power beam sizzles through the opposite furnishings, including a cinder-block wall, and I only get to my feet all tousle-haired and fabulous a second or two later to see Diablo also dragging himself upright, gauging me with his devil’s grimace – and all while I’m painfully slow-motion aware of Hermes swiveling at the waist like the unnatural creation he is, that same negligent palm open and tracking me intent on my obliteration.

  Except Diablo raises his hand.

  “Stop,” the older man rasps.

  The robot takes a long moment, but he obeys, and I give it three deep breaths before I straighten out of fight-or-flight mode, conscious of Seeker doing the same off to my right, cleverly declining to stand in a nice, neat cluster with me just in case this momentary peace-time vanishes as quickly as it arose. Diablo strategically relaxes in turn and I give him an equally forensic once-over, feeling his eyes on my skin like a man with no other troubles in the world.

  “What do you want?” he asks.

  “We are looking for some people,” I say. “Haven’t you noticed the chaos outside?”

  “You brought it here with you,” Diablo says.

  As he struts free of the immediate debris, I’m surprised to note he is nearly as tall as the gargantuan robot which somehow continues to stare at Seeker and me with a psychopath’s gaze despite lacking anything even closely resembling a human demeanor.

  “Keep your pet back.”

  “Mercury is no pet,” the robot booms. “I am of the Lyceum in full Ascendency.”

  “We’re not Lyceum thugs,” Seeker says. “Your codes and titles mean nothing to us.”

  “Who do you want?” Diablo yells.

  “Someone was hiring muscle. You must’ve heard something,” I tell him. “They have Infernus and Raveness, and those two always crew together. Also an Asian chick with a sword. Katana.”

  “Katana? I’ve never heard of her.”

  “No, the katana is the name of the sword.”

  “You think I don’t know this?”

  “Her name’s Ruse,” I tell him. “But I think you know exactly who I’m talking about. Any other Lennon kids come looking for work your way?”

  “Could be,” Diablo shrugs with a lothario grin. “We could be friends, you two and me.”

  “Dream about it,” Loren hisses.

  “I will. Thanks for the permission though. Shall I take that as interest?”

  “You should take it as you being an asshole,” I reply.

  Diablo’s eyes flick to the looming bulk of the mandroid and I can tell there’s temptation to wh
istle and set the gold-garbed cahoot onto us. Instead, chewing the inside of his cheek, the grizzled mercenary angles back again.

  “Infernus and Raveness are not members of the Lyceum. Raveness was expelled years ago,” Diablo says in what I’d call a Shakespearean drawl. “You did not think to find them here?”

  “We’re just shaking the trees to see what falls out,” Loren says in her best streetwise monotone – one honed by those many years on the streets busting heads many years ago.

  Diablo eyes us up and makes some manner of decision.

  “They hire through Cornelius Wang,” he says, then shrugs to show the admission costs him nothing.

  “Cornelius Wang?” Seeker asks.

  “If you’re feeding us a fake name, buster, you’ll –”

  “Diablo.”

  “Diablo,” I concede. “If you –”

  “Stop your prating, woman,” he snaps.

  “Prattling,” Seeker corrects him.

  There’s an awkward silence. Diablo looks at me. Seeker joins him.

  “What?”

  Reluctant in my pedantry, I tell her, “Prating is a . . . Middle English word for talking . . . foolishly . . . and at length.”

  I guess I drop my eyes for a moment there. After a long silence, I meet Loren’s glower.

  “Sorry.”

  Loren fumes, Diablo be damned.

  “I’m remembering more and more every moment why it never worked out with you and me,” she says, then quickly snaps, “And don’t correct my grammar.”

  Discretion is the better part of murder. Diablo looks bemused, to say the least.

  “You and she were lovers?”

  I give him a sideways look and sniff like a jail yard dog.

  “Yeah. When I used to be a dude.”

  Diablo’s eyes and nostrils flare as he re-appraises a few assumptions I decline to correct, conscious all the while of Loren’s eyes on me.

  “You just can’t let it go, can you, Joe?” she says with that lonesome, disappointed inflection most the women in my life eventually mastered through over-exposure to me. “You always have to have the last word.”

  “If all you seek is information –” Diablo starts to say, but I cut in.

  “You’re calling me a pedant again without having the cojones to say it,” I say to Loren. “You know misinformation is a trigger for me.”

  Seeker fumes, hands on svelte hips.

  “Didn’t one of your mothers ever say, ‘Do you want to be loved Joe or do you want to be right’?”

  “No,” I say flatly. “They never said that to me. I’ve literally never heard that phrase before.”

  “Literally? Or figuratively?” Seeker replies.

  “You really don’t want to go there.”

  “You literally use the phrase literally too much.”

  “Just . . . don’t,” I tell her, words unstoppering despite best intentions. “Shut up. Please.”

  And we stand there glowering – long enough for Diablo to finally get a word in edgewise.

  “If all you seek is information, then be silent and still and listen, women or she-women or whatever you are – listen so you can begone,” he says loudly. “There is no profit to the Lyceum in senseless conflict.”

  He dismisses Mercury with a motion. The strapping robot gives an electronic snort and steps backwards away from us before sinking into the gloom, clomping off into the darkness and leaving us with the two unconscious goons from before, one gently groaning like a dog having a bad dream.

  “An approach was made to the Lyceum,” Diablo says quietly. “All I will say is the origin of the offer raised . . . questions we did not want to ask, and therefore offered opportunities we felt were not in the Lyceum’s best interest.”

  “Who made the offer?”

  “I can’t tell you who was behind the offer because we dealt with an emissary,” he says and then looks at us, needing the barest encouragement to reveal our target’s name.

  “The negotiator’s name is Baroness,” Diablo says. With a touch of dramatic tension, he adds, “But we know she works for a man called Mikhail Khodorkovsky.”

  “Khodorkovsky,” I repeat it with only the slightest hitch in my voice, strained as it is with the sound of my own puzzlement. “Why do I know that name?”

  “I’m surprised you do,” Diablo says. “Khodorkovsky was – or I guess he still is – a Russian multibillionaire. His financial empire was destroyed when he crossed powers within the Kremlin. The story of his escape from Siberia and the new black market empire he created is the stuff of underworld legends.”

  “Film rights been optioned yet?”

  “You’re cute, woman, but your dumb act is as see-through as I believe you’d want it to be,” he says. “And that’s your downfall.”

  I would reply, except I see the subtle narrowing of Loren’s eyebrows and I ken that she knows something she can’t let on. Brevity is the soul of wit, and so I nod to Diablo and briefly acknowledge his two broken Centurions.

  “We thank you for your help. We’ll leave you now.”

  “You will leave because I permit it and for no other reason,” he says.

  I don’t need a pissing contest right now, especially when I have to squat to do it. And too damned many questions still buzz around inside my skull right now. I pause in departure, fixing Diablo with my frustrated look.

  “Where the hell did you get your hands on that suit?”

  He shrugs. “From a dead guy,” he says.

  “Seems like there’s a lot of that goin’ round.”

  I shake my head and follow Loren from the building.

  Zephyr 21.10 “The Devil’s Lair”

  LOREN KNOWS WHO Baroness is. That much is evident as we stride without speaking into the side depot entrance of the compound, another lonely street in sight beyond rusting chain-link fences. I pull up a few paces from the slight ascent of the ramp to the trade entrance.

  “OK, spill,” I tell her.

  “We should go.”

  “We’re clear,” I say. “I need to know we got what we came for.”

  “Before we do what?”

  “So I don’t have to back and beat it out of him.”

  “We don’t need Diablo or the Lyceum,” Loren says. “There’s that Cornelius Wang guy he mentioned –”

  “I think he totally made that up.”

  “– and then there’s Baroness.”

  “Baroness?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mask?”

  “Something like that,” the Seeker replies. “She’s a retired criminal mastermind or maybe she was just never very good at it. Now she’s parahuman logistics-for-hire. Think of her like the Medecins sans Frontieres of the criminal underworld.”

  “I don’t know if that allegory works.”

  “I know where to find her,” Loren says.

  “And that Khodorkovsky guy?”

  “What of him?”

  I shrug, still annoyed at the lack of connection when I’m sure that name means something I shouldn’t overlook, but my Enercom phone with its cache of Wallachian-sifted intel is with the rest of me – or at least I hope it is. I suspect there’s still a few answers to the ongoing puzzle of my genealogy in that trove of quantum intelligence. Just another thing to add to my once inimitable to-do list.

  My ongoing speechlessness clearly has Loren unnerved.

  “What is it, Joe?”

  I sigh and hold up my hand, doing my best hot blonde Robert De Niro impersonation as I finally acknowledge the background hum of irritation that’s been growing within me during every passing moment. Seeker snaps her mouth shut, catching herself in a self-rebuke she realizes just as quickly isn’t needed, for so many reasons, not least of them being that my annoyance isn’t with her.

  “I’m sorry,” I say sotto voce, swiveling back to the gaping doorway of the seemingly derelict building we’ve just left behind.

  “Joe, what are you doing?”

  “I can’t leav
e. That’s dangerous technology. Too dangerous.”

  “So you . . . you’re planning to do what?” Loren asks in the increasingly agitated and consequently annoying tone reserved for emergencies like this and other crises like when the toilet seat’s left up.

  I retrace my steps, getting a good righteous stink on as I trudge back through the leaky, rain-soaked building. Seeker flutters behind me like a veritable Tinkerbell, her Glow-derived powers not yet waning despite the earlier fracas.

  “Joe, think about this,” she chirrups at my back.

  “No,” I say. “I refuse to think.”

  And so saying, I re-enter the devil’s lair.

  *

  FOR SOME UNKNOWN reason, Diablo is still standing in the dark contemplating his armor-plated navel or something, and for all his theatrical dark looks, nothing less than a confused expression of Vaudeville befuddlement transforms his Slavic features into the truest of most cartoon, moustache-twirling villains as he sights us.

  “What are you doing here?” he barks. “I thought I had rid myself of you, and with lamentable charity, I might add.”

  I stop directly before him, about fifteen yards away and not quite the same level since he mounts a slight platform behind the podium where he was before. Seeker enters behind me and Diablo’s hooded eyes flick her way before travelling stealthily back to me. He studies my studied demeanor, my own theatrical flourish as I await the return of utter silence to frame my next remark.

  “Where’d you get the armor from?”

  “What, with the armor again?”

  “Serious questions deserves a serious answer.”

  “That’s a serious question?”

  “Deadly serious,” I tell him, and hope to God he accepts my conviction.

  And I think he does. For a moment. He eases off, taking in another long sideways glance at Seeker much like a man taking a pull from a long and enjoyable drink. His eyes come back to mine with an air of take-it-or-leave-it.

  “Tell me what’s with you and the armor,” he says conversationally. “Is this personal to you? I don’t get it.”