by James Maxey
“How the hell did you learn to fight like that?” he asked.
She shrugged. “My dad was big on self-defense. I know a little judo.”
“A little?”
“Maybe a lot,” she admitted.
He smiled, then his face dropped. “Goddammit,” he grumbled, rubbing the back of his neck as he stared at the fallen felons. “Do you know how much paperwork this is going to cause me? I can’t even get a break on my day off.”
The bartender said, “I’ve already called the sheriff, Carson.” She studied the broken bottles and damaged mirrors, shaking her head. “Jimbo’s going to have a fit when he sees this.”
“Look,” said Sarah, stepping close to Carson. In another minute, the place would be swarming with law enforcement. She’d been lucky that Carson hadn’t recognized her, but she didn’t feel like pressing her luck. “I’m supposed to be flying out first thing in the morning. I’d rather not be up all night making statements. Would you hate me if in all the confusion I mysteriously disappeared into the night?”
“Lawton’s gotta be on probation,” said Carson. “He’ll be going back to jail for this even without your testimony. I’ll let you go on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“You give me your phone number.”
“For, like, a statement…?”
“For, like, me calling you just to talk.”
“Okay,” she said.
“I mean,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ll ever be back in town, but…”
“I said okay,” she said, reaching into her jacket for a pen. “I need paper.”
“Write it on the back of my hand,” he said.
She took his offered hand, which was bleeding at the knuckles. Despite the damage, she noted how cleanly he cut his fingernails. Not that there was anything dainty about his hand. It was rugged, even leathery, covered with fine scars. This definitely wasn’t his first fist fight.
She finished writing her number and said, “I can come back pretty much anytime. I mean… I can fly.”
“Great,” he said. “I’m off again next Tuesday. And there’s a pizza place downtown that doesn’t serve alcohol. We’re slightly less likely to get into a fight there.”
“You know, whatever,” she said. “I’m easily amused.”
“Excellent,” he said, as she backed away and turned to slip through the crowd that had gathered around them. She made it outside and darted around the corner into the shadows, looking around to make sure she wasn’t followed. Her heart was racing, her body tingling with adrenaline, but not from the fight.
Holy cow! She’d met someone! Someone decent and nice and normal. And he’d asked for her phone number! Maybe the stars really were in her favor.
She felt like she was walking on air. Looking down, she saw that she was. She’d have to be careful about that.
Turning her face toward the stars, she floated into the heavens, swearing that, seriously, this was the last time she’d fly under her own power. But as the wind washed her face she laughed, knowing that she’d be aloft again the following night, and the night after that. Maybe astrology wasn’t complete bullshit. Gemini was supposed to be a twin, right? Two people with the same face. And maybe she could live with two faces, as normal, ordinary, grounded Sarah Buchanan by day, and by night, unseen and silent, still riding the sky.
Chapter One
A Job for a Superfreak
Today
When App popped into the warehouse the first thing that hit him was the smell. Usually he wasn’t invited to look at crime scenes until weeks into an investigation. He’d been ready to look at a taped outline on a floor. He hadn’t expected to find the victim’s corpse still sprawled on the concrete, and definitely wouldn’t have worn his new running shoes if he’d known the space machine was going to cut and paste him into a puddle of half-dried blood, sticky as jelly.
“You guys are lucky you don’t have to smell this,” he said to his online audience.
“Jesus,” said the old man crouched next to the body as he jumped up, startled by App’s voice. “I never heard you come in.”
“Sorry,” said App. He turned his head in a wide arc to let them see the scene, a large, shadowy warehouse, almost empty save for several large shipping containers. “Didn’t mean to sneak up on you. The space machine doesn’t make any sound. You’re Detective Lindon?”
“Yeah. You must be App.” The detective’s face was thin, borderline gaunt, with a big, sharp nose and ears that seemed a few sizes too large for his bald head.
“Before we talk any further, do I have your permission to broadcast our conversation?”
“No,” Lindon said. Then he looked at App’s empty hands. “You, uh, don’t have a camera anyway.”
“I’ve been upgraded so that my visual and audio data can be transmitted in real time. Everything I see or hear gets shared with my followers online. Lucky for them, no smellovision yet.”
“Christ,” Lindon said, shaking his head heavily. “No. No cameras. I mean, I don’t know how you turn off your eyes but…”
“No problem,” said App. “Sorry folks. Gotta sign off. Live crime scene. App out!” Then, to Lindon, “I’ve stopped broadcasting. I was in fuzz mode, so no one saw your face or heard your unfiltered voice.”
“Fuzz mode?”
“It’s, uh, not a slur of cops,” said App. “For legal reasons, I know to blur video and distort audio when I jump someplace new. Anyway, I’m no longer transmitting.”
“How am I supposed to be sure of that?”
”You could feel my pulse. My blood pressure is spiking now that I’m disconnected from my social media feeds. You know how some people can’t stop looking at their phone? My whole brain is like a smartphone now. If I’m not seeing tweets about me at every moment I start wondering if I really exist. I trend, therefore I am.”
Lindon gave him a blank stare.
App grinned. “I’m joking. I’m fine.” He wasn’t completely joking. “Anything you say will be private.”
Lindon closed his eyes and rubbed his eyelids. “I’ve only myself to blame. I knew what I was getting into when I called you.” He opened his eyes again. “You got here faster than I expected. I mean, it’s barely been two minutes since I phoned this in.”
“It was a slow night. When you called about the murder I was happy that the evening wasn’t going to be a complete snoozefest.”
Lindon frowned.
“Not happy,” said App, realizing what he’d just said. “I’m never, ever happy to be called about a murder. Rest assured, I’ll treat this situation with all the gravity it deserves.” He stopped talking, feeling like his attempt to project sincerity was coming across as mockery.
“Christ. Look at you. You look like you’re still in high school,” said Lindon. “I don’t suppose it’s too late to get Servant?”
“I’m twenty-eight,” said App, which was technically true, and it was time-consuming to explain that he looked eighteen because he’d been frozen for an ageless decade as a cloud of disembodied data. “Don’t worry. Servant’s who you call if you need a dump truck tossed into low earth orbit. I’m the guy you want to call if you need a room scanned for microscopic clues.”
“Whatever,” said Lindon, sounding weary. “Gotta say, I never thought I’d wind up calling a goddamned superhero in on one of my cases.”
“We’re here to help,” said App.
“I’ve seen your poster down at the precinct. Says to call you if we run into anything that might be the work of superfreaks.”
“It really says superfreaks?” asked App. “Does Rick James know about that?”
“Nah. It’s got something more politically correct. But I’m old enough to remember when we didn’t have superhuman terrorists popping up every other week. People who can fly, burst into flame, run at the speed of sound… freaks. That word bother you?”
App managed faint smile. “I’ve been called worse.”
“Enough chit c
hat,” said Lindon. He motioned toward the corpse on the ground. “You see anything strange about this guy?”
“Spectrum mode,” said App. Instantly the room flashed through a rainbows of colors that had no name as his retinas became sensitive deep into the infrared and high into the ultraviolet. His cones and rods rearranged themselves to see colors normally only visible to bees, birds, and some reptiles.
He squatted over the corpse. He didn’t need more than ordinary vision to see that the cause of death was the big, cleanly cut hole punched into the center of the man’s forehead. No, not punched. Burned, the edges of the hole neatly cauterized.
“I can tell you he was shot with a laser rifle,” said App.
“Five years ago that would have been useful information,” said Lindon. “Back then, only a handful of collectors could get their hands on a weapon like that. These days, even the street gangs carry ray guns.” He smirked. “Kind of glad about it, actually. Thugs gravitate toward these fancy rifles because they look scary. But unless the perp is lugging around a fifty pound battery pack, most of these guns exhaust their power in two or three shots.”
“Whoever did this sprung for the big battery pack,” said App, gingerly touching the blackened flesh at the edge of the wound and peering into the hole. “This goes all the through.” App stood up. “I’m uploading pics of the wound to the forensics team at the Knowbokov Foundation. They can probably tell us the make and model of the rifle by the cauterization patterns.”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea what kind of weapon did this,” said Lindon. “Take a look over here.”
They walked toward some shipping containers. Having been cut and pasted onto the scene via the space machine, App wasn’t entirely certain where he was. Opening a few windows in his retinal display, he saw that he was in a tobacco warehouse in Raleigh, North Carolina. Tax records showed the property to be abandoned when the company that owned it merged with a British conglomerate four years ago.
“Dirty dealings in an abandoned warehouse,” said App. “Every day my life feels more and more like a movie.”
“Mine too,” said Lindon, opening the door of the shipping container. “A science fiction movie.”
“Wow,” said App. The cargo stood revealed as a military quad-copter drone, a big one, the size of a small car. Hanging from its belly was a laser rifle that looked capable of punching a hole through a man’s skull.
“This is the murder weapon?” asked App.
“No,” said Lindon. “This is the drone that didn’t work. Look around. There are twenty of these containers. Nineteen of them are empty. Someone walked out of here tonight with serious firepower.”
“No kidding,” said App. “You did the right thing calling us. We can’t have something like this loose in the world.”
“You’re a little late to that party,” said Linden. “North Carolina is home to several big military bases. Lots of lethal hardware coming in and out of the state, and lots of opportunities for less than honest men to feather their nests by diverting some of that equipment.”
“Rest assured, the Covenant will put a stop to that,” said App.
“I don’t need you for that,” said Linden. “By morning there will be about nine government agencies working the case.”
“Oh,” said App. “Then why, exactly, did you call me?”
“Because of the victim,” said Lindon, leading App back toward the body. “An illegal arms deal goes wrong and a buyer or seller gets offed, that’s not exactly a rare event. But this guy shouldn’t even be here.”
“He’d probably agree with you.”
“I know this man,” said Lindon, kneeling beside the body. “Name’s Nathan Todd Leone.”
“From your tone, I take it you weren’t on friendly terms.”
“This bastard shot me,” said Lindon. “Twenty years ago. I was part of a SWAT team handling a hostage situation. Leone had a history of domestic abuse and had just gotten out of prison for beating his former girlfriend so hard he blinded her in one eye. The first thing he did when he got out of prison was to steal a gun from his brother-in-law and go hunting for his ex. He went to the restaurant where her mother worked, but she’d called out sick that day. Leone got into a shouting match with her manager, trying to get the mother’s new address. When the manager didn’t cooperate, Leone shot him. Running back through the restaurant, he was confronted by an armed citizen who wanted to play hero. Leone shot him, then killed nine more people before taking hostages and demanding that the cops produce his girlfriend.”
“Jesus,” said App. “You’re sure this is him?”
“No question,” said Lindon. “Look at this tattoo.” He nudged the man’s collar aside to display an elaborate tattoo of a dragon. Script letters under the drawing spelled DARGON’S BLOOD. “I mean, unless he had a twin with the same illiterate tattoo artist.”
“And he shot you?”
“Yeah. He’d grabbed a two year old and was slinging her around like a rag doll against his chest. I snuck up behind him while my supervisor held his attention. The last bullet he fired that day was into my shoulder as I jumped him.”
“You save the girl?”
Lindon nodded. “Small victory. He’d killed 11 people that day, four of them kids. Everything was captured on security footage. It was an easy conviction.”
“So he escaped prison?” asked App.
“No,” said Lindon. “He was the poster child for the death penalty. Never seen appeals shot down so fast. The day he died, I was there. Lethal injection. I watched him stop breathing. I saw his body wheeled to the prison morgue.”
“Man,” said App, scratching the back of his neck. “We’ve stepped out of a science fiction movie into a horror film. You think Leone was some kind of zombie?”
“I don’t know what to think,” said Lindon. “That’s why I called you.”
App looked up at the ceiling. “I suppose it’s a bit much to hope that there are security camera. Maybe we could get some clues as to why he was still alive if we could see who it was he was talking to when he got shot.”
“We’re not that lucky,” said Lindon. “Though if we can retrieve one of the drones, we’ll know more. This model records everything it sees and hears.”
“Excellent,” said App. “Then the one left behind must have heard something.”
“Unfortunately, it didn’t power on,” said Lindon.
“Maybe its motor didn’t turn on, but its CPU is still fired up.”
“How do you know?”
“Spectrum vision,” said App. “In infrared, I see the heat being vented by its computer.” He walked back over to the drone. “Nathan, can you pull schematics on this drone?”
“What?” asked Lindon.
“Sorry,” said App. “I’m talking to my support guy back at headquarters.”
Inside his head, Nathan answered: “These are Raptor Class drones. Model Z909. They aren’t in use in the field yet. They’re being tested at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base about 70 miles from your present location.”
“You’re joking,” said App. “There’s really a place called Seymour Johnson?”
Nathan ignored that question. “I tried to check inventory levels, but, of course, they’re classified. Also, I can’t legally get my hands on the schematics.”
“How about illegally?” asked App, holding up his hand so that Lindon would know he wasn’t talking to him.
“Nemesis Technologies manufactures these things. Most of their tech is proprietary, but they don’t waste money redesigning proven tech. Looking at their subcontractors, I’m guessing the recorders on this thing are stuff you can buy on the open market. They probably encrypt the data, but I’m betting we can get past that. Can you remove the top panel?”
“Got it,” said App.
“Got what?” asked Lindon.
“I’m going to tinker around in the guts of the drone,” said App. “See if I can find the recording equipment.”
“I can’t let
you tinker with evidence,” said Lindon. “I stalled calling the Air Force because I wanted you to look at Leone before they arrived, but I can’t really put it off much longer. They won’t be happy if they learn you’ve been poking around inside their top secret drone.”
“It’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission,” said App. “Besides, you want to find out what happened as much as I do. If there is something recorded, I’ll share everything I learn. You think the Air Force will give you that kind of access?”
Lindon crossed his arms, a scowl on his face. “Make it fast.”
“Dense mode,” said App. His enhanced vision switched off as his belt reconfigured his genetic structure. Now, his body had the GDF-8 mutation that granted him extremely dense muscles. With both hands he grabbed the drone and lifted it, carrying it out of its shipping container so he’d have access to the top panel.
He placed it gently on the floor, then stretched his back to relieve the tension. “This thing’s heavier than it looks,” he said to Lindon. “Three hundred pounds, maybe.”
“That’s all?” asked Lindon. “It’s the size of my car.”
“Carbon fiber’s pretty light. Sticky mode.”
“What?” asked Lindon.
“Sticky mode,” said App. “My hands and toes reconfigure to have the same grip patterns as a gecko.” He looked down at his now bare feet. “The belt also deletes my shoes so I can take advantage of this power.” He latched onto the hull of the drone and scrambled to the top, crouching over the panel on top.
“You got the power to turn your fingers into wrenches?” asked Lindon.
“Hah,” said App. “I do carry a pretty kickass multi-bot in my belt.” He pulled out a six inch rectangle of chrome and set it on top of the hatch. The tool unfolded itself into a small robot with spidery legs. Faint green lights flickered over the hatch as the multi-bot scanned for bolts and screws. With a whir, its adaptable head configured itself into the star-bit needed to open the panel. In seconds, it had the first screw out, then scrambled across the surface toward the second. Before it reached the second screw, the whole machine shuddered.
