Zephyr III

by Warren Hately

  It’s dark in the chamber, except for the strange aquatic light trained on me.

  “Don’t even think about trying to blast your way out of here,” a woman’s voice floats down. “We’ve given you a little shot of something.”

  “Not tequila, I’m guessing,” I say in a cracked voice they probably can’t even hear.

  Two figures walk into the light. I’m still expecting Fortress, though I can’t understand how he could still possibly function after my father burned out his brain like a tick from a wimpy kid’s thigh. Instead, the person in the lead gives me a genuine weak bowel moment.

  Lennon. Or I should say, another Lennon.

  He’s doing a pretty good Jesus impersonation himself. His costume, such as it is, is just a tattered white suit and a long black scarf. It’s the same outfit I saw my father wearing on the dreamscape beach when Siren was digging around in my head and that realization chills me to the very core of my miserable, withered being.

  Conveniently, this Lennon has a dirty great scar running down one side of his face, starting under his left eye and disappearing into designer stubble. His eyes are glassy, pupils contracted to pinpricks. With him is the Mongol guy. Ottoman, they call him.

  “Bellwether says you’ve got a little taste of me inside you, boy,” Lennon says. “How do you explain that?”

  “I’m not from around here,” I say, weak in my reply.

  Lennon closes his eyes and lifts a palm equidistant between my head and my dangling boots. Pain flares through my whole body. I feel like I’ve been dipped in molten lead, but just for an instant before the pain turns off.

  “I’ll ask again,” Lennon says. “What gives?”

  “I’m your son,” I say, spluttering. “From another parallel. Jesus.”

  The look on his face shows he wasn’t expecting that. His companion furrows elfin eyebrows under the Mongol cap, brawny bare arms crossed over his national costume.

  “Preacher?”

  Lennon lifts a hand, but this time it is just to deflect the Russian’s question.

  “Is that why our mental signature is so alike?” Lennon asks. “This is what Bellwether tells me.”

  “I don’t know Bellwether from shit,” I mutter.

  “Tovarich,” Ottoman says and takes Preacher by the shoulder. “Let’s just take him to Matrioshka. She will be able to tell.”

  “Are you mad?” the Liverpudlian replies. “What if he’s saying’s true? She’ll pull him apart, the crazy bitch. If he is my son. . . .”

  “You’re getting sentimental in your old age, my friend,” Ottoman says.

  I keep dangling. I don’t know if this is getting interesting or turning into an episode of Melrose Place.

  “Easy for you to say, Mikhail,” Lennon says and turns. “You have your children. I have none.”

  They stride together from the chamber and I relax, letting the weight go to my shoulders despite the pain as I strain to hear their last comments.

  “Leave him be for now,” Lennon says. “Give me the chance to get to the bottom of this.”

  *

  “I THOUGHT YOU said you would be able to mask me, once we were away from Titania’s village,” I hiss to the old man inside my head.

  I could, Joe. I’m sorry. I didn’t even sense these guys coming. Fortress is just like we left him: brain dead. There was someone else in control there, lad. I’m sorry. I don’t have all the answers.

  “We shouldn’t have left Haven,” I say.

  We would’ve brought all this down on them, Lennon replies. Haven’s powers worked by dissipating mental signatures, but mine was too strong, Joe. It would’ve looked like a black hole to any far-sensor.

  “Very convenient.”

  Look, Joe –

  “No, pops. Just shut up a moment and let me think my own thoughts.”

  You’d be used to this, wouldn’t you? Escaping the bad guy’s lair?

  “It never gets old,” I agree. “Back in the day, the best way to figure out a madman’s plan was to let him capture you. Sick fucks always want to blurt it all out to a captive audience. Beats actual detective work.”

  The words echo softly in the circular chamber. The walls are metal. I think it’s an old foundry of sorts. The aquamarine light continues down, no heat in it at all. And I can’t generate even a few inches of lift to take the pressure off my straining shoulders.

  As I’m doing this, big doors crack open at ground level and mundane light floods in. Beyond the metal chamber it looks like any downtown office, white walls, fluorescent lighting, though it looks like no one’s clocked in for work out there in about the past thousand years. A half-dozen self-styled crack troops and a crazy-looking woman in a broad-necked gown stroll in. The collar of her studded emerald dress fans around like a platter to support her bald, oversized head. While her face is that of a weird, but otherwise normal-looking woman, her cranium is two or three times the standard, stretched and distorted, one side studded by a series of short black tubes, amethyst light bubbling between them. They seem to vanish into the ether scant distance from her skull. The woman’s face has a look of theatrical cruelty. The hand she raises to draw my attention wears a strange, possibly cybernetic glove, the fingers ending in syringes.

  “I’m guessing you’re Matrioshka,” I manage to say without wheezing or peeing in my pants.

  “I see my reputation’s proceeded me.”

  She smiles. Her lips are nearly black and I suspect this isn’t due to cosmetics. There’s a dead pallor to her skin. She reminds me of Sinead O’Connor except evil, more dead than alive, and exhumed after two or three centuries trapped in some kind of Viking afterlife.

  “What do you want?”

  “I heard a whisper,” she says, voice like a sparrow with a broken wing. “I thought I would come to see for myself. Do you mind?”

  I grit my teeth, immune to any illusion of permission.

  She moves close now, doing the whole evil lover act as she takes her dangerous digits and caresses the side of my face, lifting my head to enforce the stare, lidless black almond-shaped eyes boring into mine.

  “You are a strange one, aren’t you?” she croons. “Shall I take a look inside?”

  *

  I SENSE MOVEMENT from the needles prickling my stubble, but then more shadows converge at the doorway and I am strangely fucking glad to see Preacher among them.

  Matrioshka.

  It is thought, not speech, that rattles through my sensorium.

  The scary woman turns and relinquishes my face.

  Preacher. Is there a problem?

  The captive is mine. Ottoman brought him in. A gift to me.

  Really? the strange woman replies. But I want a gift, dear friend. Will you give him to me?

  Suffice to say I am hanging on the reply. The psychic energies practically rebound from the metal walls. It’s no wonder the spill can even be heard by a psychic dummy like myself.

  I haven’t finished with him, Lennon says.

  Matrioshka nods. It’s a surprise to me, perhaps to everyone.

  “I wonder what I have to do to earn such a favor from our dear Russian conqueror,” the mad woman says aloud.

  She fetes me with a fey smile, heavy-lidded now in the best tradition of evil queens everywhere, and then glides slowly from the chamber taking her shock troops with her.

  She passes Lennon standing in the doorway. There is another woman, equally deranged-looking. She wears a medieval-looking contraption on her head that is equal part Samurai helm and court jester’s cap. A bell at the bent conical tip tinkles as she moves aside, a long cloak slithering on the smooth floor behind her. Her gown is micro-fine chainmail and she carries a long staff, the end fashioned into a crescent moon. Her face is Asiatic, but not of any people I know from my world. Matrioshka inclines her head to the woman as she smooths past.

  “Bellwether.”

  Matrioshka.

  And then she is gone.

  Lennon says something I can’t q
uite hear and then shuts the doors on his companion, crossing hurriedly to me.

  “You weren’t honest with me before,” he says as he reaches up and flicks the restraints on my wrists.

  I catch myself before I drop like a dead weight to the floor. Crouching, I rub my wrists as Lennon produces a thick syringe and motions for me to turn my shoulder.

  “What’s this?”

  “It will give you your powers back.”

  I grunt and he forces the needle in through the dense muscle even the chemical suppression of my abilities cannot undermine. I feel the shot flood my shoulder like liquid ice. I hiss gently between clenched teeth as the Preacher steps away, discarding the device.

  “I have to get you out of here before Matrioshka returns. Left to her, you’d be undergoing dissection this afternoon. I can’t let that happen.”

  “Why?”

  Lennon eyes me seriously. Like the others, his aging has been slowed. He doesn’t look fifty, let alone the age he should be.

  “You’re my ticket out of here, son.”

  Zephyr 10.9 “The Matrioshka Effect”

  PREACHER HELPS ME like a cripple from the detention chamber, almost fatherly in his own way. Here is this world-class psychic, like my own father, reduced to peeking around hallways as if we’re escaping the Death Star – or sneaking out of detention.

  It’s the lady with the big head, Matrioshka, he fears.

  “What’s the deal?” I bark, exhausted and limping and more than a little pissed to be relying on this ass-wipe for assistance. How To Be An Action Hero this is not.

  “Scans confirmed you’re not from this parallel,” Lennon says. “We can rig you up to the wormhole and get out of here. I didn’t even get around to checking on your paternity. The mental signature seems to say it all. Then she caught wind of what we were doing and wanted in on the party.”

  “Who is Matrioshka, exactly, and why are you all afraid of her?”

  “Shhh, don’t even say her name. She’s too powerful,” this Lennon says.

  We get to the edge of the hallway. We’re in a ruined skyscraper, the distressed remains of a shattered city stretching out through broken windows in every direction. I recognize the Reichstag, the great dome caved in, and realize this must be Berlin. Somewhere close by a bell tolls, though for whom, I try not to imagine.

  “She was just one of us,” Lennon says, lost for breath a permanent state of affairs for him it seems. “The Resistance killed Arsenal, so the Twelve needed fresh blood. She was promoted through the eastern control theatre, under Ottoman’s command. Just another A-level psionic, you dig?”

  Lennon laughs weakly. It turns into a racking cough.

  “Every mentalist is different. Telepathy, psionic mind control, these were her big things.”

  Lennon pauses to watch a flare fire into the distant scenery. There are more hovercraft peppering the twilight out there. It’s a permanent police state in a world like a regurgitated lunatic’s asylum.

  “We had no idea she was a plant.”

  “A plant? You mean, she was planted?”

  “No, mate. I mean she’s a fucking plant. She became infected on one of her intergalactic wanderings. She has a . . . I don’t know what you call it . . . projecting tower. A place for far-sensing, in her outpost in Prague.”

  “Ah, Prague,” I remark.

  “You wouldn’t like it now,” Lennon says. “The Charles Bridge is a living gallows. The rivers are choked with dead. We sought to bring about a Utopia, pal. She just wants to see the world burn. And she’s winning.”

  “Shit.”

  “Those pipes in her fucking head give her an extragalactic connection to this other place. The place she found. A whole planet devoted to the mind – which she’s conquered. One by one she’s turning The Twelve into her puppets. Frying the Fortress just hastened her cause. She’s already got half the others under her command, and the world, mate . . . this world is fucked.”

  “They are fighting her, though. Titania and others.”

  “That silly bitch,” Lennon says and spits, wipes his chin. “Like you, she’s not even from here. Her and her band of merry fucking wanderers came through here and she told ‘em to move on without her. Something about a crusade.”

  Lennon sighs and it seems like the light darkens just a tad. Nightfall.

  “Come on,” he says. “There’s a way out of here. But it’s going to take everything we’ve got.”

  We barely start to move – I am at least on my own two feet again – when the wall buckles in behind us and new figures step through the dust haze, their heads aglow in a clear sign of the Matrioshka effect.

  I’m not quite prepared for who I see next though.

  Sting, St George and Shade, each with that dead-eyed glow, fists curled ready for their assault.

  *

  “FLY!” LENNON YELLS as he pushes me to one side and an almost visible cone of psionic energy blasts all three of Matrioshka’s puppets flat.

  I don’t expect it to lay them low for long and likewise I don’t really anticipate making any dramatic exit. I regroup just long enough to confirm my powers are leaking back into their internal reservoirs, energy crackling over my knuckles. Then I dive into Sting and George Harrison, barely recovered and swinging wild, deadly punches to keep them down while logic struggles to penetrate my thoughts.

  “Pops!” I shout. “Can you take over?”

  Odd looks be damned.

  Steady on, Joe. You might be better here than me. I could mind-wipe these three, but that sounds like it’s not going to hurt this mad woman none.

  St George starts to rise and I backhand him so savagely that something inside his head snaps and he drops to the ground dead. I’m not as quick with Sting and he gets his psychic attack in at me and as I’m staggering, a charged-up Shade jumps on my back and actually sinks her white teeth into my neck. I shriek like a housewife at a spider and spin around, Shade’s legs taking out another concrete support pillar, and half the floor above us slumps on top of me. Amid the dust and slabs of industrial rubble, I elbow the English woman in the side of the head eight or nine times and then notice tempered steel skewers poking through her midriff from the concrete, her legs pinned beneath a huge shelf of the stuff. I lever her off me, blood gushing from the corpse like from a sponge, and choke through the haze to find Lennon slumped against an outer wall with plastered blood leaking from his temple. I grab him by the arm.

  “Come on. Where are we going?”

  “Tokyo.”

  “Christ. Spectra?”

  “You know her?”

  I don’t even answer this. I turn and fire a bolt of electricity at Sting, who dives for cover amid the ruins. Then Lennon and I vault down five or six storeys to a landscape of shattered bricks and submerged car ruins. Skeletons pave the streets, bones wrapped in the fashions of yesteryear turned the color of autumn leaves. As we move, there’s a keening sound and the ground rises up in a silent explosion and we’re whipped with the flying debris into the nave of a ruined cathedral across from the previous building. Lennon doesn’t look well, coughing and choking, and I poke him into a recess for safety’s sake and turn to address the latest threat.

  “Lord Electric,” Lennon wheezes. “Jaysus.”

  The big guy wears a toga over a midnight blue bodysuit. Wild, Greco-Roman beard and curly hair despite an Asiatic cast to his looks. On close inspection, I see the costume is actually skillfully crafted armor. Tech. It fits like cloth to his skin, though the dark fabric is layered like plates, bulking up his physique beneath the decorative short gladiator costume.

  The newcomer’s gaze narrows in on me as I break from cover, hoping to lure him away from Lennon if for no other reason than the rebel tyrant seems to be hinting at a way off this parallel. Lightning blasts from this Lord Electric’s fists and I lift off, swooping around the shattered plaza and up faster than he can track to land a kick upside his jaw.

  “Eat that, you fuck!”

  He go
es flying off in one direction and Sting descends from another. I fire another electrical blast just for cover, doing a high dive loop to make the distance as fast as I can while my erstwhile teammate’s still pulling evasive maneuvers, I assume with Matrioshka at the controls.

  I come down on Sting with an elbow piledriving into his collar just as he’s getting back some equilibrium. There’s no one home in his gaze as he whips his head up at me, mouth open, eyes vacant, and I headbutt him to the ground and stab my spread fingers into his chest and pour all the current at my disposal into his bucking and twisting body.

  “Sorry, old chum.”

  When I stand, smoke curls from ten black finger holes in the dead Englishman’s chest. The stubble on his fair face gently burns.

  Get moving, son. She’s coming. The Witch Queen herself.

  I nod, loping off through the shattered city. The other Lennon appears in the cathedral doorway, nods to me, and we take to the sky together.

  Next stop: Japan.

  Zephyr 10.10 “A Kind Of Freedom”

  TOKYO IS A shock compared to my latest city tour. It remains a bustling megalopolis, forty million people spread out over hundreds of miles, hardly any of the coast not turned into some kind of vast city-planet, like something out of Star Wars or a French animator’s fantasy.

  Lennon tries to tell me Spectra is some kind of just ruler, but I don’t want to hear it. Fascism is just another name for evil, as far as I’m concerned.

  In Europe, the people are at war with The Twelve. Here, they seem to be . . . moving on. Adapting. I guess that’s our great skill as a species.

  In the heart of old Shinjuku, a gigantic black glass building rises from among the other architecturally-designed ziggurats, two columns with a vast crescent-shaped connection, conjoined at the summit.