‘Well…’ Kopf said, a slight smile on his face. ‘The clever little vixens…’
~~~
The elevator car shook as Cygnus landed on its roof. She lifted again, briefly, before settling and putting Twilight down.
‘Was that…?’
‘Grenade,’ Twilight said as though she had felt a few grenades go off in her time. ‘Jonny has the subtlety of a tank.’ She pulled the hatch open and ducked her head down to check the corridor. Then she dropped down to the inside of the car without a word.
Cygnus followed her and found herself in what looked like a war zone. There were bodies, both dead and still twitching. Some of the twitching ones were also dead. There were burns on the whitewashed walls, a crater in the floor about ten yards down. The source of the noise of battle was not visible, however. Jonny’s army had fought its way to the first corner, it seemed.
‘There are at least two levels,’ Cygnus said. ‘The chamber they had me in was double height and there was a door at the base as well as the observation room.’
‘Okay…’ Twilight’s gaze flicked around and she pointed. ‘Think you can open that vent for me?’
Lifting herself a foot into the air, Cygnus grabbed the mesh and pulled. Bolts twanged as they gave up the ghost. ‘Yeah, but are you sure you’ll fit?’
Twilight gave her a grin. ‘There are advantages to smaller boobs, y’know? I’ll go down, you take this floor.’ With that she bounced up to the hole in the wall and pulled herself through into the duct beyond.
‘Be careful,’ Cygnus told her before turning and flying down the corridor.
It seemed like the zombies were losing. They were not bulletproof and Jonny’s boys had a lot of guns. In fact they seemed to be using the P90 sub-machine guns she had seen before. Big magazines full of armour-piercing bullets were being used to hose down the not-dead creatures. In this case that was working against the living since the smaller penetrators had less effect on the dead flesh, but the sheer volume of ammunition was definitely pushing the monsters back.
What was stopping them right now was a heavy door which the zombies were guarding. It had been open when Cygnus had been escaping, but now it was shut. Gritting her teeth, Cygnus pulled back as far as the corridor would allow, and then powered over the heads of the mobsters. Her impact with the door was cushioned by two zombies, but she still felt it, along with the bullets smacking into her back. Ignoring the latter, she grabbed the locking wheel on the door and turned it, pulling the heavy metal back before going through and then up.
‘She opened it for us!’ Cygnus figured that was Jonny Tonaldo. ‘Get in there, boys!’
Someone else yelled, ‘Grenade!’
‘Shit,’ Cygnus grumbled, and she poured on the power away from the doorway. There was a clattering sound, as though a metal ball was bouncing across concrete, followed by a loud bang.
She heard Ghostfire’s voice then, somewhere up ahead. ‘Return fire!’ The corridor filled with flying lead.
~~~
Twilight dropped silently into what appeared to be some sort of storage space. There were crates enough, metal and wooden. She could see a doorway at the back; the room beyond it pitch black. There was no sign of anyone in the room; it appeared that she had lucked out.
Right up until the point where the room filled with bright light. She shielded her eyes from the glare, squinting and trying to figure out what was going on. Her sword was in her hand almost before she was aware of drawing it, but there was still nothing to cut.
‘I was hoping that Cygnus would turn up here.’ The voice came from several speakers making it impossible to localise. She did not recognise it, but it was not English. Blutadler had had a German accent, according to Cygnus, and Conrad was Austrian. ‘She is the one I was hired to kill.’ Conrad then. ‘However, I’ve studied you as well. You will make an acceptable addition to my tally.’
‘What’s with the lights?’ Twilight yelled back. Her eyes fixed on the doorway at the back of the room. That had to be where he was, but getting to it…
‘I said I’d studied you. Kopf is unsure exactly what you do, but your ability to evade us appears to work in darkness. These lights eliminate even your own shadow. Now…’ She saw it then, the glint of light on a double gun barrel in the darkness of the doorway. ‘Goodbye, Fraulein.’
Twilight dropped and rolled to the right, and then threw a handful of smoke pellets at the ground. She heard the explosion of Conrad’s gun, and a second explosion as the huge shell blew a chunk out of the wall behind where she had been standing. Shadow enveloped her like a friendly hug…
‘Your smoke will not conceal you for long, girl,’ Conrad said into the microphone beside his sniping position. ‘You must come out eventually and you cannot dodge forever.’
‘Don’t have to,’ Twilight said, and then she pushed her sword through his back. The big man let out a gasp, drew in a single, shuddering breath, and then collapsed over the butt of his rifle.
Nodding, Twilight pulled her blade free and turned around to see if she could find a light switch.
~~~
It was the light blast which gave him away. Cygnus saw it, an incandescent beam of white light coming from a nothing which was standing in the doorway ahead and sailing past her head to vaporise some ceiling behind her. He was there, Ghostfire, or Ultranova, or whatever, right where she did not have to see him. She accelerated down the corridor, covering the twenty yards in a couple of seconds. She felt herself hitting something, a body, heard a grunt, and started decelerating hard as her target slipped away beneath her.
‘Bitch!’
She heard his voice behind her, but she was too busy taking in the room around her. An open space with tables, a mess room for the human guards Jonny’s people were now engaged with. She turned before hitting the wall and a blast of light seared her cheek. She felt the heat, the sudden burst of pain letting her know he had done damage, and she dropped to the floor, landing in a crouch.
‘I wanted you alive,’ Ghostfire said, his voice rough with anger, ‘but we’ll have to hope Blutadler can extract this energy source of yours from your corpse.’
She saw the flare of light from his hand and dodged right, the beam lancing through empty space. Twisting she closed the gap between them, her senses alert for any sign of his position and… It was as if she could see him. She could not exactly see him, but she knew where he was, how he was moving. She saw the light begin to flare again, drew back her arm, stepped in, and slammed her fist into his chest. She felt the heat of his beam passing her leg, heard the air escaping his lungs, and she struck out again. The sensation that her fist was sinking into his chest was strange; the ribs collapsed like wet twigs and then there was the strangely liquid feeling as she pulverised his internal organs.
Ultranova, the man who was a hero to the city and also one of its criminal leaders, materialised in front of her. He coughed and blood spattered her face. He looked, of all things, surprised. ‘How…?’ he said.
‘That was for Bobby, you ugly bastard,’ she whispered to him. Then she pulled her hand free and he crumpled to the floor as though his strings had been cut.
~~~
Conrad had set himself up in the doorway to a laboratory. There were retort stands, test tubes, flasks, and a lot of other chemical apparatus, but they were not for drug manufacturing. There were also hypodermic syringes, scalpels, tongs, and then there were the cages.
Many contained rats, but there were a few rabbits and a couple of monkeys. It was the monkeys which drew Twilight’s attention. They looked sick, but beyond that they looked… warped. One had six-inch claws sprouting from its fingers and sabre-like fangs. Another had two extra pairs of arms hanging limply at its sides giving a new definition to ‘spider monkey.’
Whoever this Professor Blutadler was, and perhaps his real name was Kopf, he had been performing some rather unethical experiments. The metal-skinned thug at the warehouse, had that been his work? She figured he was definitely
responsible for the zombies.
There were also computers, or rather there were consoles. Thin clients to a much larger mainframe somewhere in the facility, but the consoles might do. She tapped a key on one and it sprang to life showing a desktop with icons. The operating system was unfamiliar and it took her a while to figure out where the file management system was. There was a search facility; Blutadler clearly had trouble remembering where he put things since that feature was pretty prominent. She typed in ‘Cygnus’ and started the search.
A sound behind her made her turn and she saw a figure shambling toward her. A zombie. The same semi-decaying form with the same cybernetic implants making it move, but this time it was different. The dark blonde hair was gone, the once clear blue eyes were yellowed, the skin was greying, but she could still see the bone structure of the face and she knew with horrible certainty that Blutadler had experimented on humans. Her brother, Andy, was walking toward her, raising his arms.
‘No…’ she breathed, stumbling back from him. Something seemed to have grabbed hold of her heart and squeezed. How could it be…? Ultranova had killed… They had never found a body.
He reached for her again and she leaned away from the clumsy grasping. ‘Andy? Can you hear me?’ The eyes were dead. There was nothing in there but whatever was left of a brain and the circuitry needed to keep it all functional. ‘Oh God!’ His hands found her throat and began to squeeze and all she could do was look into those dead eyes. ‘Andy… please…’ she choked out, but she was not looking at Andy, not any more. This was the body they had never got to bury and it was choking the life out of her.
Her sword came up, slashing open the zombie’s chest, but he kept squeezing. She slashed again, hearing something metallic snap, but the pressure on her throat continued. She was starting to feel foggy, vague. Her sword swung again, and again… And the pressure stopped.
Gasping for breath, Twilight sank to her knees as her dead brother collapsed backward onto the ground in front of her. Behind her the terminal chimed to indicate it had finished its search, but she ignored it, massaging her throat and trying to ignore the body she had just killed again.
~~~
Jonny Tonaldo pushed his way into the mess hall to find out why the shooting had stopped. What he found was a tall, blonde woman in a black catsuit standing over the body of Ultranova. The front of the hero’s chest looked like someone had taken a sledgehammer to it, but there was only the girl. The girl with blood on her face.
‘You’re that Cygnus, right?’ Jonny asked.
Cygnus turned slowly and looked at him. ‘You’re Jonny Tonaldo,’ she replied, her voice dull.
‘Uh… yeah, and that’s Ultranova…’
‘That’s Ghostfire, Boss,’ one of his men said. There were not so many left out of the twenty-seven he had brought with him. Ducco was one of the smarter ones, even if his voice made him sound like an idiot. ‘I seen it myself. She was poundin’ on nothing, and the nothing was shootin’ at her, and then he just appeared. They said Ghostfire was invisible, right?’
‘Right,’ Jonny said. He looked at Cygnus, who had gone back to looking down at the man she had just killed. ‘Guess we get two birds with one stone.’ He raised his rifle.
Cygnus wheeled around and punched him in the face. It was with none of the force she had used on Ghostfire, but there was still a lot of blood splatter as his nose turned into a pancake. He staggered backward, the P90 dropping out of his hands as he clutched them to his face.
‘Fucking bitch, you broke my nose!’
‘There are still lots more bones I can break,’ Cygnus growled as she marched toward the inner door. ‘Keep out of my way.’ Almost wrenching the door of its hinges, she continued walking, looking for anything which might be useful to her, but also for Blutadler; she had a score to settle with him.
Turning a corner she heard a voice she thought she recognised and a doorway which seemed vaguely familiar, and ran toward both.
The observation room’s window had not been repaired. The shackles she had torn down were still broken on the floor of the room beyond. That chamber seemed lifeless, but the six screens Blutadler had used to monitor her were alight with his image; a looped recording was playing.
‘I see you have beaten my protégé, Cygnus. Well done. Was it you or Twilight who thought of sending our location to Tonaldo? Not that it matters. A clever plan. Twilight has defeated Conrad. I thought you would like to know. I sent one of my blood zombies to delay and distract her. I have no illusions that it will kill her, but I needed to get past her to my escape vehicle, you see. A tunnel leads to the bay from here. You have no chance of finding me.’
His old face smiled at her from the screen. ‘You are something unique, Fraulein. Something all my years of research into EMX-One mutations has never uncovered before. Your potential is… limitless, yet you seem limited. I will find you again, have no doubt, and next time I will be ready for you.’
The screen went to snow for a second, and then the message repeated. Cygnus ignored it, jumping through the shattered window and heading for the door at the bottom of the containment chamber. Twilight could be in trouble.
~~~
There seemed to be no trouble, just an eight-limbed capuchin, an unmoving Ultra hunter, and a zombie with its chest ripped open and a dish-towel draped over its face. Twilight was standing with her back to both bodies, facing a terminal. As Cygnus turned to check on her, she pulled a memory stick out of the console and held it up.
‘I got everything they collected on you. There’s a lot of scientific data and their plan for getting their hands on you, and some other stuff that’s not really your concern.’
Cygnus blinked at her. ‘If it’s about me…’
‘It’s not. It’s about me…’ She turned, her eyes flicking down, and Cygnus followed her gaze to the zombie. Why cover its face and not cover Conrad? Unless…
‘You knew him?’
‘That… That used to be my brother.’
‘You said he died. You said Tonaldo… Oh, you said they never found a body, just a wallet. Blutadler…’
‘Professor Blutadler, or Kopf, or whatever his name is, turned my brother into that walking corpse. Have you seen him?’
‘No. I found Ultra… Ghostfire’s taken care of, but Blutadler sent that to distract you while he got past to some escape pod or something. He left me a message, on the consoles in the observation room.’
‘Damn… Well, I just sent a message to Special Agent Dannon telling him where this place is. Maybe we should go see whether there’s another escape pod.’
Cygnus frowned. ‘Might be better if he didn’t find me until we’ve cleared my name.’ She turned and headed for the door, stepping over Conrad’s body. There was a lot of blood pooling under him and he was going to be lucky if he was found before he bled out. Another corpse, but not of her making, and considering what he had done she was not going to complain about it.
There was a doorway hidden behind some crates at the eastern end of the storeroom. Cygnus turned the wheel and opened it, and they found themselves looking at a corridor that belonged on a submarine. Metal walls, decking rather than flooring. The door they were going through looked like it had been designed to hold back water if needed.
There was another, similar, door at the end, and beyond that was a room which fitted the science fiction bill nicely. On their left was a tube with a heavy, glass door keeping out the greenish water which was filling it.
‘He said he’d be out in the bay before we could catch him,’ Cygnus said. ‘He must have… a submarine?’
Twilight’s teeth clenched as she snarled. ‘I’m going to get that bastard if it’s the last thing I do.’
‘He’s coming back. He said he was coming back for me. I don’t know why. He seemed to think there was something special about me.’
‘Then we’ll be waiting.’ Twilight’s gaze scanned the room and she walked over to another door, opening it and looking in. ‘For now, get
your special butt over here. There’s a ladder, going up. Hopefully it’ll take us to the surface.’
‘I hope so. Anywhere has to be better than this.’
~~~
‘Oh thank God!’ June exclaimed as Cygnus and Twilight came in through the balcony window. ‘You just went out and I didn’t know what had happened, and ACPN has been going on about a raid on a meat-packing plant in Churchton, and… Oh my God what’s that stench?!’
Stopping just inside the door, both Ultras began to strip on the spot. ‘The super-secret escape ladder from Ghostfire’s base,’ Twilight said, pausing to pull off her cowl, ‘opened up into the main Churchton sewer.’
‘You’d better get a bucket or something for these,’ Cygnus added. ‘I’m first in the shower.’
‘Fuck that,’ Andrea replied as she shucked off the last vestiges of Twilight. ‘We’re all girls together and I’ve seen you naked before. Besides, we’ll both need someone to scrub our backs.’
Penny sighed. ‘Yeah… June, could you get the scrubbing brush from under the sink? And maybe the bleach?’
Part Six: The New Protector of New Millennium
New Millennium City, MD, 17th December, 2013.
‘We return to our main news story tonight,’ the ACPN presenter said. ‘At midday today it was announced that Ultranova, protector of New Millennium City for the last decade, was killed in action by a previously unheard of villain, Ghostfire.’
‘The story isn’t going to change,’ June pointed out.
Penny adjusted her glasses. ‘I know, but if I keep watching them tell it, maybe I’ll believe it wasn’t me that killed him.’
‘At the same press conference,’ the presenter continued, ‘UID Supervisor Harold Kent announced that Ghostfire himself died in the fight and that the heroine Cygnus was, in fact, framed by Ghostfire. ACPN investigations suggest that Cygnus and her partner, Twilight, were instrumental in ensuring that Ultranova’s sacrifice was not for nothing.’
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