by Blaze Ward
“I don’t know, Eve,” he said. “But we’ve got to try.”
Crime Boss
It had been a month from hell. Marc had no other way to quantify it. Six weeks ago, he had been the functional ruler of the entire world of Zathus, living in the shadows yes, but with his tentacles into almost every aspect of that world’s economy and polity.
Granted, he had inherited most of that power from that idiot Warreth, the birdman Cinnra, but the gang Marc had taken control of, the small army of corrupt officials and merchants, did his bidding. Nobody did anything major without a nod or a word.
And then those two lizardmen had turned on him and ruined everything.
Even Marc had been shocked at how tenuous his organization had turned out to be, so maybe it had been for the best that it had all gone down the way it had. He had shut down the main facility on Zathus and sent everyone into hiding before going to Hurquar, bringing on twenty-five people with him.
Of those, ten had made it out of the trap that he had managed to spring on himself.
Even Marc wasn’t so arrogant as to suggest it was anybody’s fault but his own. He could have killed Gareth instead of taking him prisoner. But he had wanted information that the Nari woman had. And the two Yuudixtl. They had been the ones that had upgraded Marc in the first place, taking a lowly human and turning him into something even more dangerous.
Seven-foot-four. Three hundred and forty pounds of muscle. Genius-level intellect to go with it.
And he was still human, underneath. At least in all the ways that mattered. Everyone else belonged to the Accord of Souls. Psionically linked to one another in such a way that intramural violence was almost impossible.
Almost.
There were a few. There were always a few who slid into the cracks. Criminals born wrong, to hear the locals talk. As if that was a mental-health issue that could be fixed with a little genetic surgery. Just undo those miswired neurons and you’d be right as rain.
And boringly obedient.
Humans didn’t have those limits. Marc Sarzynski wore the physical form of a Vanir, but his soul was still human. Some of his old gang have lived in fear of that. Many of them had turned on him.
Like this stupid bastard.
Marc looked down on the Elohynn tied to the chair with cruelly-tight leather straps. They were in a warehouse, another in an immeasurable string of them, where Marc and his closest associates had hidden like rats when the Constabulary had suddenly known too much about too many things.
Like perhaps someone had started feeding them tidbits, not realizing that he was the only person who knew some of them, so things could be traced back to him.
The room was cold, but Marc was sweating with effort. He had stripped down to dungarees and a T-shirt with some band he had never heard of on the front.
The Elohynn was sweating, too.
They were alone in this office. Several of Marc’s people were outside, where they could watch though the big picture window if they wanted, but he doubted most of them had the stomach for it. Maiair and Yooyar probably, the Warreth sisters who were fast becoming his indispensable right and left hands. Zorge, the Nari physicist-turned-spymaster. They had been there when Gareth Dankworth had unleashed his ultimate abomination on the galaxy.
When he had transformed into a dragon.
Damabiath the Elohynn had obviously thought that he could get away with it. Too many raids had gotten too close. Maybe the Elohynn planned to make a little profit feeding the cops tips about Marc’s whereabouts for the reward money. Something. It had worked.
Right up until he forgot that he was dealing with a Vanir that had a 200 IQ and absolutely no qualms about doing violence to one of his fellow sentient creatures.
Marc missed his medical theater equipment. It had been perfect for slowly torturing his enemies into revealing the little tidbits that he had needed to take control of the gang, and the underworld, and eventually the cops and prosecutors on Zathus.
But he didn’t want anything from Damabiath.
Well, technically that wasn’t true. There was just nothing that the Elohynn could tell Marc that he didn’t already know. Or wanted to know.
No, they had a much more personal conclusion, and it was at hand.
The Elohynn was naked. Marc understood the importance of removing the clothes from a victim. The psychological effects of being completely unmasked.
This particular species tended to run taller than humans, perhaps six and a quarter to six and a half feet for the men. The slightest bit smaller for the women. Plus those gorgeous wings.
Mark Sarzynski was a head taller now.
The angelic criminal was seated, which just emphasized the size difference. The straps holding his arms and legs to the chair were too tight, cutting off circulation in ways that would start to be troublesome in another hour or so.
If it mattered.
His wings were stretched out as far as they would go sideways, and then held in place by spikes Marc had personally punched into the tips and attached to chains in the walls, far enough back that Damabiath couldn’t pull them loose by tearing skin. Not without breaking bones first.
The man’s mouth was gagged with a piece of leather that showed intense bite marks, but had resisted all attempts for the Elohynn to get through it. Maybe if he had a few more hours he could have managed.
Marc reached down and picked up a pair of pliers. They were already covered with blood and down at this point, so he wiped them slowly on a messy towel that had been clean a hour ago.
Marc examined his victim closer. All the feathers had been individually plucked from the left wing. From his studies, that was the single most debilitating fear any Elohynn could face. Many chose self-termination, rather than lose the ability to fly and be relegated to the “two-dimensional crowd,” as they tended to view the rest of the Accord.
Marc watched the eyes follow the pliers, rather than the wielder. There didn’t appear to be any mind left inside there at this point. Marc hadn’t asked a single question once he got the man trussed up like a turkey for the plucking.
Just pain. Artfully applied, as if a psychotic Grace had needed to create a new sculpture installation.
Idly, Marc wondered if he might locate a Grace who viewed such torture as art. With their sensory tentacles, they might be perfect for this sort of thing if he could break their operant conditioning hard enough. Elohynn, conversely, were among the most empathic species in the Accord, so they could never really abide with pain, unless they were so crazy as to be dangerous. It made them good counsellors, and reasonable bankers, but lousy criminals.
Slowly, Marc replaced the pliers on the bench and picked up a knife. Damabiath had betrayed him. Sold him to the Constabulary for thirty pieces of silver and the hopes for a pardon. Expected that he would never be identified. Wouldn’t have, but for an inside leak, a data clerk with a gambling problem, trying to reduce her debt with information for Maximus.
“And now, we have reached the final stage of our conversation,” Marc said in a low tone.
Damabiath tried to say something through the gag. Tried to scream, perhaps, with what little was left of his mind and his soul.
“You, of all people, should have known how I deal with traitors, Damabiath,” Marc scolded the man. “You were there. You watched the punishment. Helped even, by providing me the proof I needed to unearth one of the conspiracies against me. My, how the mighty have fallen.”
Marc considered the being. His eyes were all whites at this point, painting a masterpiece in red blood and sweating skin.
“I do not feel good about this,” Marc admitted quietly. “Any of it. But you people have forgotten that I’m not one of you. Am not bound by your ridiculous morality. And even then, I probably wouldn’t have been reduced to something so petty as this, but someone had to become an example. The children of the night need to fear me more than they do the Constabulary. In that, your life will provide one, last, valuable lesson.”
/> Marc stepped forward and slammed the blade into the Elohynn’s chest with all his augmented might, driving it straight through the fragile keel bone and cutting his heart in two. There was precious little blood, and the light went out of the man’s eyes quickly.
Marc pulled the knife from the cooling corpse, cleaned it, and set it with the other tools, taking the time to methodically pack things away. Hopefully, this would send the correct message and he would never have to do this again.
How in the nine hells had Marc Sarzynski, Deputy Agent of Earth Force Sky Patrol, fallen so far? He considered all the tiny steps that brought him thus. None of them included a concrete commitment to evil.
And yet, here he was.
This road wasn’t even paved with good intentions. No. Easy clips. Corners cut. Mistakes when he tried to finally come out ahead of Gareth St. John Dankworth once and for all, only to fall ever so short, time and again.
And worse, he knew in his soul Dankworth hadn’t been competing. Or rather, not with Marc. Gareth had been competing with himself to become the best agent he could imagine.
Marc’s jealousy at second place was just a terrible taskmaster.
The door opened and closed, noisily enough as to be obvious. Marc glanced up. Maiair, her red crest at half-mast. Powerful, but not threatening. Supportive.
He would make her a queen, once he had regained his power. Not an Empress, but close. He would need her and her sister, and there was no better way to bind them to his throne.
“The body?” she asked simply, standing more or less at attention, but turned in such a way that she didn’t have to see or acknowledge the mess. Yooyar and Zorge waited outside the office, still visible through glass, but separated by the closed door.
Middle managers, as it were.
Marc considered his options. Terror was an effective tool, but it must be used like the edge of a razor, slicing a little at a time and withdrawing. Overuse would render it comically less effective. People could become inured to such atrocities if they became commonplace.
Once should hold everyone in fear for a year or more.
“Leave him,” Marc said in a heavy voice.
It was acceptable for Maiair to know that he took no pleasure in this task. No pride in a well-tortured opponent. That he still had his humanity, underneath it all.
“After we have made it to safety, contact a journalist,” he decided. “Give them the address and leave the door unlocked. Damabiath on the evening news will send the message to anyone wavering at this point.”
“Won’t the Constables know it was us?” she pressed.
“They already know we’re on this planet,” Marc said. “I need the local underworld to hide me. They must fear me more than they do that damnable dragon.”
“Understood,” she said as she turned. She hesitated.
“What?” Marc snapped, as he faced her.
“Are you all right?” she asked in a quiet voice. Nervous about overstepping an undrawn boundary.
“If I never have to do that again, it will still be too soon,” he replied. “But this has become a war. And bad things are likely to happen.”
Scientist
“Are you sure this is the sort of place you wish to go, father?” Pippa asked Royston as they approached the front door of the concert hall, surrounded by youngsters, teenagers frequently flirting with hooliganism but still safely on this side of the line.
Royston nodded, watching the scene with his pursed lips set in a firm, disapproving line.
There was no choice. Science had demanded that he try alternate methods to find the answer to the puzzle he sought. They were in a neighborhood he wouldn’t have come on his own, down by the wharves of East London, but all his logical deduction had led him to this conclusion.
“Two, please,” Pippa said to young woman inside the little kiosk at the front of the theater, sliding several shilling coins across the counter.
The young woman pushed a button and several strips of rigid, white paper emerged from the machine underneath with a mechanical clunk. The woman pulled them clear and handed them to Pippa, leaning forward just a little so she could observe Royston, standing next to his daughter.
“Rock on, grandpa!” she called with a smile that did nothing to assuage the doubts plaguing Royston as to the rightness of this task.
Still, everything else had failed.
Royston Loughty, PhD, FRS, CBE, CStJ, had discovered enough new aspects of mathematics and physics in the last month to probably be considered for a Nobel Prize one of these days, and possibly the Fields Medal, but he had still failed in his intended task.
Gareth St. John Dankworth had disappeared from his cabin aboard Shadow Base One, the Arsenal, and nobody could explain how. Royston had even considered it to be perhaps a practical joke, but there was something there when he looked. Radiation signatures he could not explain with any science, in places that lent credence to the story and defied him in all other things.
Pippa, dearest only-daughter who reminded him too much of departed Elizabeth, had suggested baldly that obviously his understanding of physic was simply insufficient. Royston Loughty, possibly the greatest expert on Stellar Radiation in the entire Solar System, was out of his depth.
He had laughed then.
And yet.
Nights spent with a pad of paper, his favorite pipe, and a forgotten martini had gotten him nowhere. His favorite syncopated jazz music, from the bizarrely-experimental down to the coolest hep-cats, had left him cold. Rachmaninoff and Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, even Gilbert and Sullivan. Nothing had provided him the inspiration he needed.
Royston escorted Pippa into the noisy auditorium on his left arm, as was proper. He felt desperately out of place here, wearing his traditional tweeds and a broad, silk tie that had been a gift from Pippa for some father’s day long forgotten. Even his porkpie hat made him stand out in a room full of youngsters that probably considered Pippa an old maid at twenty-seven, with their slicked-back hair greased into pompadours made to look like little duck tails.
The mass of humanity around him probably had a median age of twenty, and he suspected an analysis of the mean would be even lower if he wishes to apply scientific procedures.
He did not.
Pippa was a bright spot of color, in her uniform as a Women’s Auxiliary of Earth Force Sky Patrol. Crimson skirt just past her knees. Matching tunic as long as a blazer, double-breasted over the left with gold buttons and gold embroidery lacing. A yellow stripe edged the tunic and the collar, making her look like a professional woman, emphasizing the red hair and bright green eyes of her Scots heritage.
The children around them on all sides seemed to be in their own uniform. For the boys, blue dungarees, rolled up twice at the ankle. White T-shirts tucked in, frequently with a pack of cigarettes in the sleeve. Often a black jacket, sometimes leather and sometimes cotton denim.
The girls were identifiable by socio-economic class as Royston watched. Long poodle skirts gave way to simple skirts of a cut similar to Pippa’s, growing progressively shorter until they barely covered more than a beach costume, as one tended down the scale of their father’s income and profession. Finally, at what he considered the bottom, some daring souls were so androgynous as to ape the clothing of their male peers, even going so far as wearing pants in public.
Thankfully, Pippa’s rebellious stage had never progressed farther than experiments in hair colors. Even his reputation might not have protected her, to be seen in dungarees, somewhere other than a farm.
They made their way to wooden, fold-down seats closer to the rear than the front of the auditorium. Three teenage-looking girls in too much makeup politely slid sideways a seat to make space for he and Pippa to sit together.
The youngster Royston found on his left looked up at him and then touched him silently on the arm with a smile, her palm placed flat in a welcoming gesture that left him perhaps both more and less terrified at the same time. Pippa’s grin when he looke
d at her did nothing to assuage his embarrassment.
After a few moments, the lights came down and the restive crowd began to settle. Red velvet curtains across the stage withdrew slowly to the sides, revealing a band already in place, dressed in matching, slender black suits, with narrow ties and slicked back hair like so many of the men down front.
At the front, a young woman stood alone at a mic stand, eyeing the crowd like a predator stalking the high grass. She wore a turquoise, skin-tight dress, cut high on the sides to reveal too much thigh, like a nightclub’s torch singer. Her long, brunette hair was wild and loose, billowing lightly in the breeze of a fan down front and centered up on her.
Black opera gloves covered her to elbows, and the dress itself was only to mid-thigh. At least she had sensible pumps on her feet, rather than the black, lace-up boots that she seemed to project with this image.
Royston tore his eyes aware from the mesmerizing female as the drummer began, a hard backbeat so at odds with the light brush of good jazz.
It was primal. Powerful. Unyielding.
After sixteen full measures, the crowd had fallen to utter silence, perhaps snakes charmed by the man with the pungi as they emerged from the darkness of the basket into the sun of this woman’s music.
The bass player joined now, a harmonic beat walking back and forth on chords. His instrument was played upright in the classical style, but is was barely wider than the fretboard, with a plug emerging from the bottom to connect to the immense, black speaker stacks Royston saw threatening the crowd from both sides of the stage.
Two electric guitarists framed the woman, once closer to the front and one a step back, nearer in depth to the bass player. If he understood the mechanics and politics of the modern music, they represented a lead and rhythm guitar to offset the rhythm section of drums and bass. He did not see any horn players, so this would not be jazz as Royston understood the concept, but rock and roll.
He would survive the experience, come hell or high water.
