Zephyr VI

by Warren Hately

  Another of Doc Prendergast’s creations, last seen back when the robot malfunctioned at City Hall so long ago now. I’m really starting to think someone should run that guy outta business.

  “No,” the robot replies in that stentorian baritone I only now recall. “I am not Hermes. I am his better. You will call me Mercury.”

  He opens his palm and a beam of light opens up on me.

  *

  “CALL YOUR ‘BOT off of me!” I scream, too fully engaged in vaulting sideways to salvation to worry about the grammar of a corn syrup-sipping redneck.

  Mercury’s power beam sizzles through the opposite furnishings, including a cinder-block wall, and I only get to my feet all tousle-haired and fabulous a second or two later to see Diablo also dragging himself upright, gauging me with his devil’s grimace – and all while I’m painfully slow-motion aware of Hermes swiveling at the waist like the unnatural creation he is, that same negligent palm open and tracking me intent on my obliteration.

  Except Diablo raises his hand.

  “Stop,” the older man rasps.

  The robot takes a long moment, but he obeys, and I give it three deep breaths before I straighten out of fight-or-flight mode, conscious of Seeker doing the same off to my right, cleverly declining to stand in a nice, neat cluster with me just in case this momentary peace-time vanishes as quickly as it arose. Diablo strategically relaxes in turn and I give him an equally forensic once-over, feeling his eyes on my skin like a man with no other troubles in the world.

  “What do you want?” he asks.

  “We are looking for some people,” I say. “Haven’t you noticed the chaos outside?”

  “You brought it here with you,” Diablo says.

  As he struts free of the immediate debris, I’m surprised to note he is nearly as tall as the gargantuan robot which somehow continues to stare at Seeker and me with a psychopath’s gaze despite lacking anything even closely resembling a human demeanor.

  “Keep your pet back.”

  “Mercury is no pet,” the robot booms. “I am of the Lyceum in full Ascendency.”

  “We’re not Lyceum thugs,” Seeker says. “Your codes and titles mean nothing to us.”

  “Who do you want?” Diablo yells.

  “Someone was hiring muscle. You must’ve heard something,” I tell him. “They have Infernus and Raveness, and those two always crew together. Also an Asian chick with a sword. Katana.”

  “Katana? I’ve never heard of her.”

  “No, the katana is the name of the sword.”

  “You think I don’t know this?”

  “Her name’s Ruse,” I tell him. “But I think you know exactly who I’m talking about. Any other Lennon kids come looking for work your way?”

  “Could be,” Diablo shrugs with a lothario grin. “We could be friends, you two and me.”

  “Dream about it,” Loren hisses.

  “I will. Thanks for the permission though. Shall I take that as interest?”

  “You should take it as you being an asshole,” I reply.

  Diablo’s eyes flick to the looming bulk of the mandroid and I can tell there’s temptation to whistle and set the gold-garbed cahoot onto us. Instead, chewing the inside of his cheek, the grizzled mercenary angles back again.

  “Infernus and Raveness are not members of the Lyceum. Raveness was expelled years ago,” Diablo says in what I’d call a Shakespearean drawl. “You did not think to find them here?”

  “We’re just shaking the trees to see what falls out,” Loren says in her best streetwise monotone – one honed by those many years on the streets busting heads many years ago.

  Diablo eyes us up and makes some manner of decision.

  “They hire through Cornelius Wang,” he says, then shrugs to show the admission costs him nothing.

  “Cornelius Wang?” Seeker asks.

  “If you’re feeding us a fake name, buster, you’ll –”

  “Diablo.”

  “Diablo,” I concede. “If you –”

  “Stop your prating, woman,” he snaps.

  “Prattling,” Seeker corrects him.

  There’s an awkward silence. Diablo looks at me. Seeker joins him.

  “What?”

  Reluctant in my pedantry, I tell her, “Prating is a . . . Middle English word for talking . . . foolishly . . . and at length.”

  I guess I drop my eyes for a moment there. After a long silence, I meet Loren’s glower.

  “Sorry.”

  Loren fumes, Diablo be damned.

  “I’m remembering more and more every moment why it never worked out with you and me,” she says, then quickly snaps, “And don’t correct my grammar.”

  Discretion is the better part of murder. Diablo looks bemused, to say the least.

  “You and she were lovers?”

  I give him a sideways look and sniff like a jail yard dog.

  “Yeah. When I used to be a dude.”

  Diablo’s eyes and nostrils flare as he re-appraises a few assumptions I decline to correct, conscious all the while of Loren’s eyes on me.

  “You just can’t let it go, can you, Joe?” she says with that lonesome, disappointed inflection most the women in my life eventually mastered through over-exposure to me. “You always have to have the last word.”

  “If all you seek is information –” Diablo starts to say, but I cut in.

  “You’re calling me a pedant again without having the cojones to say it,” I say to Loren. “You know misinformation is a trigger for me.”

  Seeker fumes, hands on svelte hips.

  “Didn’t one of your mothers ever say, ‘Do you want to be loved Joe or do you want to be right’?”

  “No,” I say flatly. “They never said that to me. I’ve literally never heard that phrase before.”

  “Literally? Or figuratively?” Seeker replies.

  “You really don’t want to go there.”

  “You literally use the phrase literally too much.”

  “Just . . . don’t,” I tell her, words unstoppering despite best intentions. “Shut up. Please.”

  And we stand there glowering – long enough for Diablo to finally get a word in edgewise.

  “If all you seek is information, then be silent and still and listen, women or she-women or whatever you are – listen so you can begone,” he says loudly. “There is no profit to the Lyceum in senseless conflict.”

  He dismisses Mercury with a motion. The strapping robot gives an electronic snort and steps backwards away from us before sinking into the gloom, clomping off into the darkness and leaving us with the two unconscious goons from before, one gently groaning like a dog having a bad dream.

  “An approach was made to the Lyceum,” Diablo says quietly. “All I will say is the origin of the offer raised . . . questions we did not want to ask, and therefore offered opportunities we felt were not in the Lyceum’s best interest.”

  “Who made the offer?”

  “I can’t tell you who was behind the offer because we dealt with an emissary,” he says and then looks at us, needing the barest encouragement to reveal our target’s name.

  “The negotiator’s name is Baroness,” Diablo says. With a touch of dramatic tension, he adds, “But we know she works for a man called Mikhail Khodorkovsky.”

  “Khodorkovsky,” I repeat it with only the slightest hitch in my voice, strained as it is with the sound of my own puzzlement. “Why do I know that name?”

  “I’m surprised you do,” Diablo says. “Khodorkovsky was – or I guess he still is – a Russian multibillionaire. His financial empire was destroyed when he crossed powers within the Kremlin. The story of his escape from Siberia and the new black market empire he created is the stuff of underworld legends.”

  “Film rights been optioned yet?”

  “You’re cute, woman, but your dumb act is as see-through as I believe you’d want it to be,” he says. “And that’s your downfall.”

  I would reply, except I see the subtle na
rrowing of Loren’s eyebrows and I ken that she knows something she can’t let on. Brevity is the soul of wit, and so I nod to Diablo and briefly acknowledge his two broken Centurions.

  “We thank you for your help. We’ll leave you now.”

  “You will leave because I permit it and for no other reason,” he says.

  I don’t need a pissing contest right now, especially when I have to squat to do it. And too damned many questions still buzz around inside my skull right now. I pause in departure, fixing Diablo with my frustrated look.

  “Where the hell did you get your hands on that suit?”

  He shrugs. “From a dead guy,” he says.

  “Seems like there’s a lot of that goin’ round.”

  I shake my head and follow Loren from the building.

  Zephyr 21.10 “The Devil’s Lair”

  LOREN KNOWS WHO Baroness is. That much is evident as we stride without speaking into the side depot entrance of the compound, another lonely street in sight beyond rusting chain-link fences. I pull up a few paces from the slight ascent of the ramp to the trade entrance.

  “OK, spill,” I tell her.

  “We should go.”

  “We’re clear,” I say. “I need to know we got what we came for.”

  “Before we do what?”

  “So I don’t have to back and beat it out of him.”

  “We don’t need Diablo or the Lyceum,” Loren says. “There’s that Cornelius Wang guy he mentioned –”

  “I think he totally made that up.”

  “– and then there’s Baroness.”

  “Baroness?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mask?”

  “Something like that,” the Seeker replies. “She’s a retired criminal mastermind or maybe she was just never very good at it. Now she’s parahuman logistics-for-hire. Think of her like the Medecins sans Frontieres of the criminal underworld.”

  “I don’t know if that allegory works.”

  “I know where to find her,” Loren says.

  “And that Khodorkovsky guy?”

  “What of him?”

  I shrug, still annoyed at the lack of connection when I’m sure that name means something I shouldn’t overlook, but my Enercom phone with its cache of Wallachian-sifted intel is with the rest of me – or at least I hope it is. I suspect there’s still a few answers to the ongoing puzzle of my genealogy in that trove of quantum intelligence. Just another thing to add to my once inimitable to-do list.

  My ongoing speechlessness clearly has Loren unnerved.

  “What is it, Joe?”

  I sigh and hold up my hand, doing my best hot blonde Robert De Niro impersonation as I finally acknowledge the background hum of irritation that’s been growing within me during every passing moment. Seeker snaps her mouth shut, catching herself in a self-rebuke she realizes just as quickly isn’t needed, for so many reasons, not least of them being that my annoyance isn’t with her.

  “I’m sorry,” I say sotto voce, swiveling back to the gaping doorway of the seemingly derelict building we’ve just left behind.

  “Joe, what are you doing?”

  “I can’t leave. That’s dangerous technology. Too dangerous.”

  “So you . . . you’re planning to do what?” Loren asks in the increasingly agitated and consequently annoying tone reserved for emergencies like this and other crises like when the toilet seat’s left up.

  I retrace my steps, getting a good righteous stink on as I trudge back through the leaky, rain-soaked building. Seeker flutters behind me like a veritable Tinkerbell, her Glow-derived powers not yet waning despite the earlier fracas.

  “Joe, think about this,” she chirrups at my back.

  “No,” I say. “I refuse to think.”

  And so saying, I re-enter the devil’s lair.

  *

  FOR SOME UNKNOWN reason, Diablo is still standing in the dark contemplating his armor-plated navel or something, and for all his theatrical dark looks, nothing less than a confused expression of Vaudeville befuddlement transforms his Slavic features into the truest of most cartoon, moustache-twirling villains as he sights us.

  “What are you doing here?” he barks. “I thought I had rid myself of you, and with lamentable charity, I might add.”

  I stop directly before him, about fifteen yards away and not quite the same level since he mounts a slight platform behind the podium where he was before. Seeker enters behind me and Diablo’s hooded eyes flick her way before travelling stealthily back to me. He studies my studied demeanor, my own theatrical flourish as I await the return of utter silence to frame my next remark.

  “Where’d you get the armor from?”

  “What, with the armor again?”

  “Serious questions deserves a serious answer.”

  “That’s a serious question?”

  “Deadly serious,” I tell him, and hope to God he accepts my conviction.

  And I think he does. For a moment. He eases off, taking in another long sideways glance at Seeker much like a man taking a pull from a long and enjoyable drink. His eyes come back to mine with an air of take-it-or-leave-it.

  “Tell me what’s with you and the armor,” he says conversationally. “Is this personal to you? I don’t get it.”

  “It’s easily explained,” I say. “That’s otherworldly technology in your possession. I don’t know what world. Or which. But I know a Lyceum dirtbag like you sure as fuck shouldn’t be wielding forces beyond our comprehension.”

  Diablo snorts skeptical air and I shrug, nondescript in my own convictions.

  “I’ve just stopped one ideational weapon falling into the wrong hands,” I tell him and mentally cross my fingers, trusting Sting is true to his word and good to his intentions of cleaning up the nest of extra-dimensional escargot I left in the wake of my destruction in Afghanistan.

  I nod to Diablo to reinforce my earnest intent.

  “I’m not about to let that happen here either.”

  “Oh, so you’re going to beat me and what – throw me in custody?” he laughs.

  “I don’t give a shit about you,” I answer. “Without that armor you’re just another street-level asspony I could beat to a pulp without batting an eyelid.”

  “You talk tough for a chick,” he says. “If you are one.”

  “I’m not one,” I tell him. “I’m Zephyr.”

  And that’s when I throw my fist into his surprised face.

  *

  DIABLO MOTORS BACKWARDS as fast as he can, but my darkness-encrusted knuckles slam across his chin before he can really get any momentum going. Super-dooper armor be damned, there’s nothing extra-special about this asshole with his head sticking out like a turkey on a platter. His quick reflexes save him from the full extent of the blow, which I was sort of imagining as an explosion of his head with my fist.

  At least Seeker has my back, and thank crap she does, because Diablo’s octopus-like tentacles of ideational force crackle into action at the same time Loren flies in and hovers above me, opening her arms wide in her classic savior pose, lambent energy showering upon the hapless armored mercenary who clearly lacks any protection against spiritual attack.

  Diablo falters and I feel the sudden animal pressing of my deep passenger like a monster trapped in a well. Not dissimilar to the overwhelming urge to projectile vomit, the demon in my soul clambers up the inside of my spine like upon a ladder from Hell, scuttling monkey-quick and savagely strong for the driver’s seat of my mind.

  I realize what is happening at the last instant and sheer panic slams my mental shutters shut. Diablo – waiting perhaps for execution at my hand – passes out like a drunk, and while I resist the desire to heave, sweat dripping from me as I kneel over my own thighs grasping straws at my inner struggle, I hear the near-organic susurrus of the clicking plates and subtly humming otherworldly electronics of the fallen villain’s tensile suit as it clicks back upon itself, retracting and steadily exposing the sweaty, thirty-pounds-too-fat torso of th
e barely conscious man otherwise known as Diablo.

  The light of fear dims in his eyes only because of rising self-interest, his alarm in full expression as he feels as much as sees the powered suit abandoning him.

  “No,” he murmurs like a woman scorned. “No.”

  I acknowledge the armor like one might an emissary from an alien world, conscious as I use my left hand to grasp the metallic collar into which the bulk of its material looks to be receding. Within seconds of Diablo’s bed-wetting pleas, I stand from my crouch holding a long and serrated, segmented, segregated device that, while mechanical, slithers and seeks to twist its dangling extremities around my wrist, the collar emitting steampunk noises like some gigantic leech.

  “What in Christ’s name is this?” I stammer.

  “For an atheist you sure blaspheme a lot, Joe,” Loren says beside me.

  The metal seems to twitch at the sound of her voice.

  “That’s an interesting observation, honey,” I tell her, “but I guess being a quasi ex-spiritual figure yourself, you’ve got a good nose for that sort of thing.”

  Loren’s caramel gaze hardens in an instant, and within that same moment in time the bizarre contraption hanging from my grasp gives a twitch like an alien lobster and leaps to Loren’s surprise from my hand to land right between her still magnificent breasts.

  “Jesus fuck!” she squeals.

  “Pot-kettle,” I snap back.

  “Don’t stand there scoring points, Joe,” she yells. “Get it off of me!”

  Ah, those immortal words.

  *

  EXCEPT THERE IS no “getting it off of” Loren. Whatever the origin of this mechanical species, it’s clearly well experienced in the business of swapping hosts. Within an eye-blink of Loren’s cry, the device encrusts itself around her entire chest and in mere moments it concertinas out and out, marveling itself over her arms and legs and turning almost liquid in its sinuous expansion over the admittedly well-deserving terrain of Loren’s torso. It flowers at the neck and – perhaps incorporating its most recent experiences in the redesign – splits into a costume designer’s Knights of Camelot fantasy with equal parts Karl Lagerfeld, Halliburton and St Thomas More. As Loren lifts her astonished arms, the canny thing even fashions long trailing cape-sleeves inspired by aerospace design or perhaps the anatomy of dragonflies or some nightmarish intercourse between the two.