Kenneth shrugged off the unworthy emotion and concentrated on the task at hand. One of the dozen screens glowing on the inside of the helmet showed a schematic of the huge tender vessel. Thousands of tons of metal were kept aloft by six anti-gravity devices. The devices had been developed by the Dominion of the Ukraine decades ago, but remained rare and hideously expensive; they were artifacts, each hand-made by the handful of Neolympians with the gift to make such things. Their power requirements were massive, and only a nuclear power plant or some parahuman-created equivalent could meet them. Sure enough, his sensors detected the tell-tale particle emissions of a fission reactor placed near the center of the vessel.
Ultimate flew past him, moving at supersonic speeds and still accelerating. A second later Hyperia also overtook Kenneth. They would quickly catch up with Mind Hawk and his team. Myrmidon was flying in a wide arc in an attempt to get on the other side of the vessel should it or any of its crew try to escape in that direction. That put him out of action for the time being, but Ultimate and the assault team would be able to deal with anything they encountered. They would need to be careful not to damage the ship’s nuclear power plant, however.
“Brass Man to attack elements,” Kenneth said through his comm system. “Be advised, there is a nuclear reactor inside the vessel. Try to capture it intact if possible.”
“Roger that.” Ultimate sounded like his own self. John was always calmest during emergencies. It was only during the interludes between times of crisis that his mind seemed to feed on itself.
There was a brief flurry of acknowledgments from the other Legionnaires as they flew closer to their target – and came into range of its defensive systems. The tender ship was more than a carrier: it boasted its own formidable armaments. Two dozen heavy air to air missile launchers and a storm of auto cannon and laser fire reached out towards the approaching Legionnaires. Ultimate just flew through the barrage. Depleted uranium slugs and megawatt-laser beams bounced off him like so many raindrops.
Kenneth’s armor was nowhere near as resilient, so he had to maneuver around the worst of it and use his plasma guns to knock down missiles before they could hit him. A few near misses and a direct hit with a high-intensity laser made Kenneth grunt with pain. The armor absorbed most of the damage, but the residual heat that got through would have knocked out or killed a human pilot.
Mind Hawk’s attack group was shielded by an energy bubble, courtesy of Shocking Susan. They seemed to be weathering the attacks just fine, and had nearly reached the craft. The Invincible Man got there first: he flew straight into the side of the ship and plowed through its battleship-grade armor plating as if it was cardboard. The rest of the attack group entered through the breach Ultimate had made.
The ship exploded a fraction of a second later. The nuclear reactor aboard the vessel had been more than a power source: it was also a weapon.
A small sun was born over the Caribbean.
Searing light and heat washed over Kenneth, blinding him. He could smell his own flesh being roasted. He had time for a brief scream before the blast wave from the nuclear explosion swatted him from the sky and sent him crashing into the sea.
Hunters and Hunted
New York City, New York, March 13, 2013
Vincent Bufalino – ever since becoming a made man, he had insisted on being called Vincent, and people called him Vinnie or Vin at their peril – stared sourly at the security camera footage on his computer screen and puffed furiously on his Cuban cigar.
“Fuckin’ Face-Off,” Dominic D’Onofrio, Vincent’s second-hand man, muttered under his breath as he and Vincent watched Face-Off kill the Lightning King on the screen one more time. Vincent had blown close to a million bucks bringing the Lightning King into the States and setting him up as an enforcer, and the colored freak had lasted all of three months before the faceless fucker wasted him. Fucking Neos. Vincent hated Neos, despite the fact that he technically was one of them. Just a Type One, though, barely better than a normal human. Sure, he’d taken his gifts and put them to good use, but he still hated the freaks, not least because he’d gotten the short end of the stick when they were handing out super powers.
“Yeah, that fucker really screwed us.” How badly, Vincent wasn’t sure, but he feared it would be as bad as it could get. He’d gambled and lost, and he didn’t know if he could cover his stake.
“We gotta find ‘em,” Vincent growled. “Him and the girl. Shit, I don’t care if I never lay eyes on his ugly mug, but we gotta find the girl, Dom.”
“We’ll find her, Vincent,” Dom said, but Vincent could tell Dom was just going along. There was no way they would find her in time. Vincent had thought he could get a better deal if he played the angles, and now he’d lost big time. Fucking Neos were supposed to be luckier than regular folk on top of all their abilities, but his luck had been all bad this time.
Doing business with the Russians was always a bad idea. They were bugfuck crazy, for one, and you never knew if they were doing something for the money or if they were working for that crazy metal-headed freak running the show back in the Motherland. But they had a lot of money and special toys, so it was hard to turn them down. Especially because if you turned them down the crazy fucks might take offense and decide that your head would work great as a bowling ball.
So when they had offered a good payday for a simple snatch and grab – okay, not so simple, at a freaking hospital, but easy enough – Vincent had seen no reason to decline. The Russians had been respectful and had come to him instead of trying to do business on his turf without his say so. Russians weren’t short of muscle but they didn’t do well outside Brooklyn, and Vincent had contacts everywhere. He had half a dozen rackets running out of New York-Presbyterian, so grabbing some skirt out of there sounded easy enough. Everybody wins, nobody gets hurt.
When the details of the job started coming out, however, Vincent had gotten suspicious. And greedy, let’s not mince words. The job was more complicated than it had sounded at first, and Vincent had smelled a bigger payoff. For one, the girl had to be kept heavily sedated and trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey. That could only mean she was a Neo. As soon as he figured that out, Vincent had done two things right away: he’d sent out one his own Neos and his top enforcer, Danny Giamatti, along on the job, and he’d started figuring out the angles.
He was supposed to drop off the girl somewhere in Brighton Beach as soon as they got her, but Vincent had decided to delay the delivery for a bit, and see if he could renegotiate the contract, sweeten the deal a little. He would hold on to the girl and claim there had been some complications, so now the job wasn’t worth his while unless the Russians upped the ante. The Russians would be pissed, but they would pay up. They might be crazy, but Vincent ran most of Manhattan and the surrounding areas. They weren’t crazy enough to start something just because they’d been shortchanged a little bit. Vincent wasn’t even going to ask for much more, just a couple of concessions here and there, get his foot in the door on some of the Russian rackets, like those new ray guns they were getting from the Ukraine. They were going for fifteen grand a piece, and word was they would deep-fry a guy no matter how much body armor he was wearing. Vincent was already collecting taxes on any transaction the Russkies did on his turf, but he wanted a real piece of the action. So instead of delivering the girl, he’d told Giamatti to sit on her and made a few phone calls to get things rolling on the negotiations.
It had been a nice plan, except things had gotten fucked up from the get go.
First, Giamatti had gone off the reservation and killed four civilians at the hospital, the stupid mook. It should have been an easy in-and-out job. Vincent had greased the wheels with the hospital people so they knew to get out of the way and be on a break when Giamatti and his boys showed up. Somehow someone had zigged when they were supposed to zag, and Giamatti had started shooting people like this was a fucking Asian War. Okay, that had been bad, but not the end of the world. In fact, it even gave Vinc
ent a perfect excuse to demand a better deal. But then Giamatti had decided to take the night off instead of staying with the skirt he was supposed to be watching – which normally wouldn’t have been a big deal, granted – and fucking Face-Off had been waiting for him at his place. Why Face-Off had decided to go after Giamatti tonight of all nights, Vincent didn’t know.
He had some suspicions, though.
Face-Off mostly went after small-time assholes, especially guys who killed or hurt civilians – gang bangers, serial killers, sick fucks that had little or nothing to do with Vincent's rackets. Vincent's people usually didn't bother civilians; they mainly went after others in their business – competitors or traitors, assholes nobody was going to make a fuss about. That kept his dealings off the radar of vigilante types like Face-Off or Condor. Once in a while things went wrong; usually that meant one of Vincent’s guys had decided to break the rules, and then vigilantes would step in and mess things up. If things got too serious, Vincent had his own Neo muscle ready at hand, although most of the time his freaks were there to impress the paisans and deal with the competition.
Thing was, Face-Off knew stuff, stuff he had no business knowing. Not too long ago, the faceless fuck had found out one of Vincent’s guys had been running a snuff film racket using girls nobody would miss. That was something Vincent hadn’t had a clue about until Face-Off shut down the whole operation and put three of his people behind bars and four others in the morgue. While cleaning up the mess afterward, Vincent had gone over the operation, and the security had been tight. The seven guys involved had been careful, and left no witnesses or clues behind. And yet Face-Off had just strolled in like he knew every little detail. He probably had some Neo juju that let him know things, clairvoyance or something. And that had to be how he’d found Giamatti, and then the girl. Vincent fucking hated Neos. You never knew what kind of shit they could pull on you.
Things had gone from bad to downright horrible. Face-Off had whacked everybody at the warehouse, including the expensive Type Two Neo Vincent had sent along, and made off with the girl. Vincent had known something was wrong when Giamatti didn’t check in, but by the time he sent some guys to the warehouse, it was too late. The only good thing about the situation was that Face-Off wasn’t the type to go to the cops, not that it mattered much at this point.
Vincent had already set up a sit-down with the Russians to renegotiate the deal, and now he didn’t have the girl to deliver. He’d figured on working things out in a few hours, tops. The Russians had sounded like they wanted the girl very soon; the whole job had been set up in less than a day. There was no way Vincent was going to be able to find her before the Russians figured he either didn’t have her or was trying to screw them. When they did, the shit would hit the fan.
Like all Neos, Vincent hadn’t gotten any older after reaching full adulthood. He’d been born in 1935, and he looked like he was in his thirties; if he dressed up like the asshole kids did nowadays, he might even pass for someone in his twenties. His top lieutenant Dominic was the grandson of the original Dom, who had retired to Florida and died of a stroke during a shuffleboard game. Vincent was not going to die during a shuffleboard game, but that didn’t mean he was going to live forever, either. His years of experience had gotten him where he was, at the head of the D’Agostino family, wiping out all the original D’Agostinos along the way. He ran New York and all of Jersey that mattered. But this kind of screw-up was how heads of families got cut off.
He could delay the Russians for a bit, but soon enough they’d know. If the girl was important enough, this could mean war. At the very least, there would be retaliation. They might even decide to go after him personally. That would be crazy, but the Russians had cornered the market on crazy for a long time.
Vincent had a great big house – ‘the manor’ his wife called it – out by the Catskills, but he spent maybe three days a week there. His home away from home – not counting the three apartments he kept for his mistresses – was hidden under an old restaurant in Little Italy. That was the heart of his turf, the place he had grown up in. He’d single-handedly kept the Chinks from moving into the neighborhood, and kept the place Italian, the way it was meant to be. He’d owned La Trattoria for close to five decades, turned the small eatery into one of the best restaurants on Canal Street. The restaurant proper only occupied a small portion of the entire city block that served as Vincent’s headquarters. He had offices, a hidden fortified bunker that only a few made guys knew about, and a nice little apartment that would go for a few million if he ever wanted to sell it. The hidden bunker was where he held important meetings, where had had signed many a death warrant, and where, on three occasions, had done the deed himself.
He should be safe there. The best defense was secrecy. People knew he owned the restaurant and that he ate there all the time. Only a handful of people – two of them were in the room with him – knew about the secret bunker belowground. To enter it, he had to go into a basement on Spring Street with a hidden door leading into a tunnel. He’d had to grease a lot of palms with assorted city workers to get it done, and afterwards he’d quietly disposed of everyone involved in the project. On top of that, Vincent always had a pretty impressive Neo bodyguard around. He and Dom were as safe as could be. Of course, he couldn’t stay in the bunker forever. Going to the mattresses only worked for a while. But if he could string the Russians along, maybe he could fix things.
“Dom, let’s get things going. Start with Jerk-Off. Send the guys out to find any known associates, friends, anybody he fucking hangs out with. See if anybody knows where he could be.” That was probably just pissing in the wind, but he had to start somewhere. “Next, find me a Neo tracker. There’s one guy in Atlantic City and another in Newark, they can find people with their minds.”
“Yeah, I know those guys,” Dom said. “They’re expensive.”
“Get them both. We need to find that little bitch quick, before the Russians figure out we fucked up.”
Dom nodded and started talking on his comm. Vincent left him to it and walked to the bar. The bunker office had all the amenities and his bodyguard could mix a killer Bloody Mary in addition to his other skills. “The usual, Tor.”
“Yes, Mr. Bufalino,” Toreador replied, his Spanish accent still noticeable despite having lived almost twenty years in the US. He was a real Spaniard from Spain, not some jumped-up Mexican or Cuban like the people doing the dishes at La Trattoria. Pretty classy guy, knew how to show respect. He also was a trained Neo assassin and a veteran of the Second Asian War. Vincent should have sent him on the job instead of Giamatti and that lightning-throwing punk, but he never felt safe when Toreador wasn’t around. He was a guy Vincent could trust.
Toreador had been on the run from the Freedom Legion, something about war crimes during the Asian War. Stupid shit, really; hadn’t they gone over there to kill gooks? What did they think would happen? Vincent had recruited him and given him a whole new identity and a place in the organization. Toreador was alive and free because of Vincent, and he never forgot it.
Vincent got his Bloody Mary and drank it while he thought on the best way to go about the situation. He’d let the Russians stew for a bit, let them call him first, and try to stall. If that didn’t work, maybe it would be best to hit them first, before they knew what was going on. If the girl was so valuable to them, he should find out why. Maybe it was something he could use. He smiled. Yeah, he was in deep shit, but if he played his cards right he might come out of it smelling like a rose. He was Vincent Bufalino, and he owned Manhattan.
The smile vanished from his face when the bunker’s reinforced door started to burn. “What the fuck?”
The door was built like a vault door, reinforced metal with multiple locking rods. The inside was covered with wood paneling. The paneling was smoking and smoldering. Something hot enough to cut through reinforced steel was drawing a blazing line through the entrance’s locking mechanism. The stench of burning wood and melting metal filled
the room. Someone was using a blowtorch on the door, or a Neo was doing a blowtorch impression on the door. Either way, it meant they had found Vincent’s hideout. Only Dominic and Toreador were with him. Chances were he was fucked, with no way out.
Vincent was many things, but not a coward. There was a weapons locker in the office, and he and Dominic hurriedly armed themselves with Thompson M10 submachine guns, big heavy fuckers that fired a fifty-caliber cartridge. The big bastards kicked like mules even with their advanced recoil suppression system, but they would take down anything smaller than an armored truck or a heavy-duty Neo. Toreador didn’t take a gun. Instead, he concentrated and a metallic black fluid flowed from his pores and covered him from head to toe, turning him into an ebony statue of living metal. Twenty-inch blades of the same black material grew out around his hands. Whoever came through that door was going to get a warm reception.
The smoke in the room cleared fairly quickly. High-end air scrubbers built into the bunker saw to that. When the door swung open, the invader was clearly visible. “Mr. Bufalino,” the man said. “I’d like to speak with you. Will you do me the courtesy of not shooting at me until I say my piece?” The man’s voice was deep and had a faint Russian accent.
“Yeah, sure,” Vincent said. “We can hear you fine from the door. But take a step in here and we’re gonna light you up.”
“Fair enough.” The stranger stood on the threshold. He was a short and skinny fuck, maybe five six; he would weigh a buck forty soaking wet if he was human, which he sure as shit wasn’t. His face was a curious mixture of old and young, with deep wrinkles on his forehead and the sides of his mouth, but bright blue eyes that sparkled with good humor and an otherwise youthful complexion. His hair was silver-white and parted down the middle in a style that had been old-fashioned before Vincent had been born. All his clothes were snow-white, from a well-tailored suit down to his shoes. His skin was naturally pale but the guy had also powdered it to look as white as a mime’s. The fucking finnochio was the whitest guy Vincent had ever seen.
New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl Page 9
