“Not what you expect,” he whispered back. Then, louder and not to me: “Do you speak English?”
A long pause.
“Speedy?” Sparky said, still staring at what seemed to be absolutely nothing. “Introduce us in Greek, and ask them if we might have their permission to talk via an electronic device. Face the same direction I’m facing, and use the dialect Helen would have spoken, please.”
The koala grunted and scampered off of the stone block to where Sparky’s avatar was standing, and…
Well.
I could do a line-by-line of what happened, but let’s just say we lived through a kids’ riddle, the kind where it seems like there’s an easy answer but it’s mostly just confusion in need of a punchline. Even the ghosts didn’t speak the same dialect of Greek, so Speedy had to translate not once but multiple times. This is the gist of it:
Koala chatter in Greek >> Ghosts debating amongst themselves >> Ghosts replying to Sparky >> Koala translation in English >> Debate amongst the living >> Koala chatter in Greek >> Ghosts debating amongst themselves >> Ghosts replying to Sparky >> Wash, rinse, repeat for thirty minutes.
By the time we were finished, the ghosts understood that we were looking for the Antikythera Mechanism. Sparky had shown them a green digitized image of the machine, and the ghosts were extremely excited to learn we were hunting for information on its creation. It also seemed they were willing to help; Helen said that she was good friends with Archimedes, and she knew exactly where to find him.
(Which meant that Archimedes was still around and eeeie!)
There are a few other takeaways from this conversation.
I finally saw adult Helen of Sparta’s face in my cell phone. Yes, she’s absolutely breathtakingly beautiful, but so’s Mount Everest. If you’ve been thinking of Helen as the approachable kind of beauty, the kind you find in a sunlit meadow with flowers and butterflies? Rethink that right fucking now. She’s a frozen murder mountain. I now sincerely believe that face could have really launched a thousand ships; I also believe those ships were sailing in the opposite direction to get the hell away from her.
She was impressed that I had managed to acquire what was left of her necklace. I tried to get her to promise to stop coming into my dreams, but she arched one eyebrow and I felt my teeth clench shut. Dreams. Good. Yes. Hello, Queen Helen, please make yourself at home in my head.
And that one last thing.
This is the part that weirded me the hell out, and I’m going to retell it without the confusing pauses in translation so you can share in my panic attack.
Half an hour was all that Sparky would allow himself for out-of-body travel. It’s physically taxing: projecting and maintaining an image of yourself halfway around the world is exhausting. Not many other cyborgs could spend that much time in their avatars all the way in Greece, and the only reason Sparky can do it is because he’s got enough metabolic mass to offset the energy consumption requirements of his chip. Towards the end, his avatar was getting slightly blurry around the edges.
That’s when (I’m told) Helen grabbed my face in both hands and looked me straight in the eyes.
“I am tired of this world,” she said. “The beast waits below the island. Set us both free.”
Now. That’s what happened from Sparky’s perspective.
From mine? I felt my head seized by invisible hands with incredibly strong fingers, and a cold chill settle into my stomach as a frozen wind roared wordlessly in my ears.
People, I ask you, is it any wonder that normals are terrified by ghosts? I knew what was happening (husband calling my name in an eerily calm voice, koala translating the words of a furious dead queen, Mike holding onto my hands so I didn’t slug said queen in her invisible jaw…), and I’m still poking the goosebumps back into place.
Then? She was gone, along with her ghostly entourage, and Sparky left to go back to his own body a moment later.
The three of us living non-cyborgs found ourselves standing on a sunny stretch of the Asklepion, with at least eight Hired Goons surrounding us in a loose circle some distance away, confused expressions slapped all up and down their faces.
“We doing this here?” I asked them. When they didn’t answer, Speedy translated my question into Greek.
The one who had waved at me before just smiled.
“Right,” I said, and me, Mike, and Speedy set off down the hill to pick a place to have a fight.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Let me tell you the most annoying thing about politics.
Politics doesn’t operate on just one level. Political maneuvering operates within its own nigh-infinite sphere of influence, stretching across time and space and persons and communities, and if you think that an offhand comment you made to a friend in the sixth grade can’t come back to bite you when you’re running for office forty years later, you’re a sucker who deserves what’s coming.
What I’m saying is, yes, someone had paid a bunch of dudes to beat us up, but causing us pain and inconvenience wasn’t their primary purpose. Creating bad press for OACET was one likely reason. Disrupting our efforts to find more information on the Mechanism was another. Then there was the Occam’s Razor explanation, which was that whoever hired these dudes (yes, yes, that would be Hanlon, thanks) is just a dick.
But the most likely reason we were getting hired goons thrown at us was because they were a distraction.
Eight goons is an insult. Either Mike or I working alone wouldn’t have broken a sweat on eight goons; put us together and the goons stood slightly as much chance as a snowball in a bonfire. If, however, we were forced to focus on an obvious threat, that would leave us vulnerable to a sneak attack from an unseen opponent.
My money was on Atlas.
Oh, he wouldn’t sneak in to stab us in the kidneys while we were fighting the goons or anything like that, but if you’re concentrating on a big threat here, it’s easy to ignore a small threat there. He could swipe any information we found and funnel it back to Hanlon, and we might never be the wiser because we’re focused on the big looming Gooncloud on the horizon.
Why Atlas? Well, as soon as I had learned that he had worked with Hanlon, I had both him and Darling checked out by OACET’s team of world-class information specialists. Atlas had been in contact with Hanlon much more recently than he had claimed; the phone calls had begun flying back and forth as soon as Ambassador Goodwin had contacted him and asked him to work with me.
On the other hand, Darling seemed to be a good penny: no connections between her and Hanlon had turned up. That didn’t mean she wasn’t running a con on us with her cousin, but she honestly hated that guy. I think she’d side with me, Mike, and Speedy out of spite.
The goons followed us down the mountainside. We hadn’t hired a car or taken the bus or anything, as the Asklepion was an easy (for us) walking distance from our hotel.
When we hit the road, Mike and I started running, with Speedy sitting pretty on Mike’s shoulders.
Poor hired goons.
The Asklepion is set on a lovely old mountain with a nice, gentle slope down towards Kos Town. If you’re taking a car, it’s a smooth and winding road to the top. If you’re on foot and you follow the road, you’re probably going to get a little puffy.
If you leave the road and sprint down the side of the mountain, nobody short of a mountain goat will be able to do anything about it.
Mike and I ran the three-plus miles back to town. Four of the goons had tried to follow on foot; the other four had gone to their rental cars and were trying to box us in so they could stop and beat us up, but we were having none of that and those cheap sedans weren’t built to go offroad. Mike and I ran over rough terrain until the goons on foot were exhausted, and then we put on some real speed. The four jogging goons waved down their friends and piled into the cars. As soon as they did that, Mike and I jumped a nearby highway divider and ran straight down a steep hill into the center of Kos Town.
Kos Town is an old, old city. Th
ere are ruins every which way, and streets better suited for carts than cars. The marketplace stretches out over a few blocks, and while most of it has been polished and paved to a nice modern standard, there’s a few spots that are ripe for some good old-fashioned pandemonium.
The Kos Market Hall is a lovely indoor shopping venue. We had walked around there the day before, scouting locations and sampling the local foods.
The three of us thought we might have to wreck a good part of it.
Mike and I breezed through the archways that led to the marketplace, a grand total of zero hired goons behind us: parking in Kos Town can be tricky. If we had lost them? Good! We didn’t think that anyone would risk jumping us in the middle of a crowded marketplace. A quiet winding road down a mountain, or an alley off of a busy street where everyone is minding their own business? Yes, definitely, pass the brass knuckles. But we thought we would be safe here.
If we weren’t? Well, we had picked this marketplace for a reason.
The three of us pretended to browse, returning to many of the same vendors we had visited yesterday. Speedy had taken a liking to an old woman who was selling salted seaweeds, and we killed time with her, gnawing on samples of something I can only describe as asparagus jerky.
Her booth was positioned in front of an alcove. More of a short hallway, really. As best as we could tell, this hallway led to a bunch of stockrooms that were always kept locked. Maybe the owners had a problem with theft, I dunno, but if the goon squad showed up again?
We might have to put that hallway to good use.
Mike and I put ourselves with our backs against the wall, and munched on pieces of seaweed while Speedy told filthy jokes in Greek. The old lady laughed as she scratched Speedy behind his ears, while her fellow shopkeepers and an assortment of locals and tourists gathered around the koala.
Just when we thought we were in the clear, the hired goons began to pop up in the crowd.
“Twelve, thirteen, fourteen…” Mike said quietly, all the while browsing a pamphlet on local restaurants. “They called in reinforcements.”
“Show of force,” I replied. “They know they aren’t going to jump us here.”
“There’s enough of them to make a reasonable ‘Come along quietly or else’ argument.”
“Well, then,” I said, as I rolled my shoulders as nonchalantly as I could. “Let’s get this over with.”
I took a few steps away from the crowd, pointed at the Smiling Goon, and followed it up with that come here crooked-finger gesture. He did, still grinning.
“English?” I asked.
He nodded.
“There are security guards all around us,” I said. “You were hired by a third party. Trust me, the guy signing the checks doesn’t care if you go to jail. Walk away.”
“No,” Smiling Goon said, his gaze crawling over the marketplace. We were a goodly distance away from the nearest doors, and it would be hard for him to get us out without making a scene. He flipped open his jacket in a practiced move to give me a quick glimpse of his gun. “Come with us and no one will be hurt.”
“Let’s do this the easy way,” I said to him, and opened my bag to show him a huge stack of Euros. “You’re getting paid to beat us up, but not kill us. Otherwise, you’d have taken a few shots at us when we were running down the mountain. Take the money, go back to your boss, and tell him you did your job. Hell, I’ll give myself a black eye and walk with a limp for the rest of the week to make you look good.”
“No need to rush into a decision,” Mike said. He had found an enormous fruit smoothie somewhere, and was working his way down through the strata of pinks and oranges. “Talk it over with your friends. We’ll be waiting for your answer.”
They did. The hired goons actually did. They huddled up and had a hushed meeting about the most logical course of action, and I thought maybe we’d be able to bribe our way out of this one.
“Nope,” Speedy’s voice came behind us, his ears perked forward to catch every whisper. Some of the folks who spoke English glanced up, wondering what he was talking about; the security guard standing close enough to listen in on Speedy’s jokes wasn’t among them. “No go. They’ll take the money, leave, and then jump us as soon as they can get us somewhere without cops.”
“Aw hell,” I grumbled. “I hate it when these guys are smart enough to double up on their profit.”
The goons broke apart and started to circle us, trying to keep us boxed in while still acting as if they were preparing to leave. Whee, threats.
Smiling Goon came back. “Yes,” he said. “We accept your deal.”
I hesitated until he scowled and held out his hands. “Money, please.”
“Are you robbing me?!” I shouted, and clutched my bag to my chest.
The smile vanished from his face in a heartbeat as our trap snapped shut. The security guard came a few steps closer.
Now, this is the part where I was hoping we’d get lucky.
If we got lucky, Smiling Goon would do the math, count the bystanders and the guards and the cameras, and take his posse and leave until things cooled down. We’d still have to deal with them later, but they wouldn’t try again until the next day, and by then we might have left town.
If we weren’t lucky, Smiling Goon or one of his coworkers would rush us, and it’d be on.
Smiling Goon was definitely the best banana in this bunch. His eyes moved across the crowd, and he took a few steps backwards, his hands up in the air and that too-familiar What is this crazy lady talking about? expression on his face.
Sadly? His buddies were too amped to power down.
No luck for us.
Plenty of fun, though.
The man closest to me grabbed my hand and yanked, and I pretended to fall off-balance with a loud scream that got the attention of anyone not already watching. Another goon took a swing at Mike, who turned his smoothie over and dumped the contents on the floor as he stepped out of the path of the man’s fist as easily as if he were dodging a leaf on the breeze. But, instead of returning his punch, Mike seemed to trip and fall straight at the goon, and somehow ended up in the goon’s half nelson. The goon was quite surprised at that, but didn’t question his good fortune and clamped down on the lock.
Smiling Goon and two others turned and ran. Smart.
Or maybe they had just seen Speedy.
Remember when I said that you need to deal with Speedy straightaway, or Bad Things Happen?
The goons had focused on me and Mike, and had allowed Bad Things to Happen.
A low noise started to reverberate within the marketplace. Koalas don’t growl, bark, or yip, but if they’re decently pissed-off, they can combine all three of these into a sound somewhere between a frog in a blender and a tornado siren. This noise started to creep into his steady stream of profanity, giving his cursing an otherworldly vibrato that I felt more with my spine than heard with my ears. Speedy seemed to grow in size as his fur stood on end. His claws began tapping on the tile countertop in a sharp staccato, a warning for anyone with the sense to understand it.
Then? He lunged.
Speedy didn’t get his name from his smarts—he is faster than fast. Our default image of koalas is that they are sleepy, dopey dumps of fur. No. Sleeping and creeping are lifestyle choices. Physiologically, koalas can move like cracked-out squirrels if they feel the urge.
And if a koala wants to move?
Get out of its way!
Speedy is a practical soul. He took out the nearest goon by springing straight at his face and going for his eyes. He missed, but only because the goon covered his eyes in time. This, unfortunately, left the tender skin of his ears exposed, and Speedy went to town with his teeth.
The goon slipped in the chunky wet crap of Mike’s smoothie and fell, screaming. Speedy launched himself off of the goon’s head onto a nearby banner, and scrambled up a dozen feet before he dropped onto a second goon. This time, he reached the goon’s eyes, and then was off of the second man’s shoulders
and airborne towards a third victim.
The third goon covered his eyes and ears the instant he realized the koala had targeted him. Speedy unleashed those inch-long claws and went for his mouth instead.
I should mention that throughout this carnage, Speedy is laughing in that multitoned vibrato like a fucking maniac.
It was…disturbing.
Before the rest of the goons could react to those five seconds of koala-perpetuated horror, Mike reached up to grab the wrists of the man holding him in the headlock. There was a brief flash of panic on the goon’s face, and then he was airborne.
The kotegaeshi throw was perfect. The goon landed in the hallway and slid down the length of it, with Mike blocking the only exit.
It was time for me to go to work.
I grabbed my own goon by his shirt and flipped him towards Mike. Mike grabbed him out of the air and tossed him down the tunnel, disarming him in the process.
Two in the hole, three had scarpered, and Speedy had put four on the floor.
Six goons left. They closed in on Speedy, trapping him on the weeping wreckage of his fourth victim.
I ran forward, calling for Speedy. “Catch him!” I shouted. “Please catch my little koala! Fifty thousand Euros to the person who brings him back to me unharmed!”
Bingo bango bedlam.
The marketplace had gone stone-still the instant that Speedy had erupted into violence. Nobody thinks of self-preservation when a small cuddly animal is involved. It’s like watching a kitten run amok with a chainsaw—it’s so surreal that it takes you a minute to realize that the red stuff isn’t ketchup. The promise of money got the tourists and locals to break out of their torpor; those who understood English leapt into action, and those who spoke Greek followed as soon as the translation reached them. They knocked the goons aside in their rush to get to Speedy, who had managed to run straight up one of the tourists and climb onto another handy overhead banner.
One of the six goons still standing was reaching into his jacket. I doubted he was going for his wallet, so I targeted him next. Left hand on his shirt, right hand on his pants, and I swept his legs out from under him before lobbing him towards Mike in a fast tomoenage.
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