Zephyr 14.12 “Faster Than A Speeding Bullet”

THERE IS A bank of equipment that wouldn’t look out of place on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise and the doc works the controls like Stevie Wonder, monitors flicking on to life with the spirit of Frankenstein, the high-talking nurse scooting in and calmly assisting like Tchaikorvski’s going to start operating on a patient instead of liberating one.

Negator hangs back. There’s past trauma here I’m not even going to get into. But I edge close to one of the monitors as the code goes in to call up the inventory of White Nine inmates, bad guys in deep sleep to keep the rest of us having sweet dreams. It’s fair to say my eyes bulge at the human who’s who, options like a fantasy footballer’s dream trade list.

“Hang on, you’ve still got Crescendo in here?”

“Uh, yeah,” the director replies, going back to his switching and flicking.

“Alright. Hold on,” I say. “G-g-give me a second here.”

I look back to Negator like he might be any kind of counsel and the guy just somehow manages to give me the puppy dog eyes even through the narrowed slits of his mask, making me feel like the moustache-twirling villain of the piece. I turn back to Tchaikorvski.

“Back up a second. Let me see who else you’ve got.”

“Who . . . else?”

“Sure.” Off his look, I give a frustrated-like growl-stare that manifests in the roll of my shoulders, the director backing off a pace like the dwarfed lab-coated figure he is.

“Look,” I say to him. “We’re trying to take out a space station here. I need Ill Centurion for his teleportation.”

“But the teleportation comes from his suit –”

“And you’ve got that, right?”

“Well sure, but –”

“So I’m not going to try and pull off more than three impossibles in one day, OK? Christ knows the sort of security counter-measures that sonofabitch has got in there. He can operate the suit as long as we can get him to get us up there.”

“Yeah,” Negator says thoughtfully from one side. “How are we going to do that exactly, by the way?”

“I’ll get to that,” I say, waving him off for now as I refocus my laser beam attention on the computer list on the director’s screen. “This isn’t going to be easy, OK? Now that I see who else might be at our disposal, I’m thinking we need to go big.”

“This isn’t a . . . baseball collection, Mr Zephyr.”

“It’s just Zephyr. Please.”

“We are in charge of incarcerating these very dangerous individuals –”

“Hey! The fucking city’s crawling with dangerous individuals right now. The whole goddamn country. Right Negs?”

“Straight up.”

“You want to do this for your country or what?” I ask the doc, not really believing my own rhetoric even if I do underestimate its power.

Tchaikorvski buckles under and turns back to tapping at his screen with a dark look he lacks the courage to aim at any of us.

“Who else were you thinking?” he asks. “We can only unthaw four prisoners at a time.”

I move closer over his shoulder, breathing down the back of his collar like a math teacher with a hard-on.

“Just keep scrolling.”

 

 

 

THE PROCESS ISN’T as quick as I’d like it to be. In the next few hours Negator manages to find some sleep and I sweet talk the nurse into opening up the cafeteria for me and the other staff who’ve been pretty much helping themselves anyway. Pretty soon the grill’s fired up and the air smells of eggs and bacon and I hold greasy court with a dozen-odd security staff hanging on my every word as I name-drop faster than a speeding bullet and they lap it up like I lap up the carbs going straight to my internal combustion engine.

A frazzled-looking Dr Tchaikorvski appears some time around dawn and leads me through the labyrinth to an observation theatre where I can look down, marvelling at the creations science has wrought for me like a kid with a backstage pass to Santa’s secret workshop in Hell.

Ill Centurion.

Crescendo.

Tragedian.

Raveness.

Yes, Raveness. Dangerous, I know, looking down on her pale, supine, powerfully-built figure. She is the first of them to crack her eyes open, barely able to move as a thousand paralysis-inducing probes stimulate her atrophied muscles back to life.

Tchaikorvski looks side on at me, checking I am resolute. I nod, giving a grin even I don’t really feel as the back catalogue of atrocities some of these guys have committed do pirouettes through my mind. I snatch up a needle gun and crack open the door poised above the narrow clinical white staircase down into the thawing chamber.

I hand the gun to Tchaikorvski before we enter the room.

“Give each of them a shot from this,” I say.

“Why? There’s nothing in it.”

“You want these guys running loose once they’re able to walk, able to fly?”

Gulping, eyes as big as spotlights, Tchaikorvski nods and stammers and takes the thing like it’s a baby porcupine. I slam through into the waking-up chamber and Raveness and Crescendo both snap their heads my way.

I grin back, discreetly nodding to the director who moves first to the still unconscious Tragedian and quickly depresses the hypo. He moves to Raveness, who twitches, frightening him, but she’s still got an hour or more to go before we have to worry about safety. Tchaikorvski guns her thigh and moves to Ill Centurion, regally deposed in repose, a strangely normal sight without the helmet and armour, jet black hair grown long in his five or more years on ice, combed back by the nurse from his square pallid beardless face.

“Easy,” I say to Raveness, frothing growl is like a subsonic hum in the room reminiscent of a dentist’s surgery. The feral black-haired woman rests back, not surrendering so much as dismissing me as a threat, which is highly ironic, not to say I’m not a tad relieved.

Tragedian is a hairless white figure, more like a corpse than a man in the surgical smock. I have no idea how long he’s been down for. He opens lidless-looking blue eyes that stare at me, evaporating drugs suppressing his powers so that his mind control probe only plays at the edge of my awareness.

Across from him, Crescendo’s huge chest works like a bellows on the slab, his preternaturally dense arms and legs nearly confounding the very wires that are meant to revive him. Without his mask he’s a scary sight: sort of half-man, half-python, though there’s actually nothing reptilian about his genetic structure as far as any of us are aware, just the deformity that comes with being a natural sound controller. Eyes as dark and unguessable as distant galaxies find mine and he leers, almost grinning at me.

“How long have I been out?” he half-whispers hoarsely.

I have no idea, turning to Tchaikorvski for confirmation. The doc looks uncomfortably away, murmuring the answer under his breath.

I look back at Crescendo. “Three years.”

“Good to breathe real air again,” he says, almost pleased with himself, the gratitude in his beastly mien a ruse. “This is real, right?”

“You’re not in the simulation,” Tchaikorvski says.

Crescendo nods. His big head thumps against the table. He looks at the ceiling.

“Then what do you want?” he asks.

“He’s here for our help,” Ill Centurion says, tone ominous.

I flick a glance at Tchaikorvski, who shakes his head.

“It doesn’t take a telepath to know there’s special circumstances for you reviving us here, Zephyr,” Ill Crescendo says.

“Then you have to know this is pretty serious,” I say, knowing the time has come to make my sales pitch and see if I can grease through this trap with nothing but spit and my own natural charisma. “The trouble that’s come for us has come for all of you too. It’s time to fight for something you’ve always valued: your own asses.”

 

 

SO I LAY it on them. The whole shebang. Of course, my version of events is pretty skewed towards encouraging them to think my way about the incursion into our parallel and what that means for dudes like them who want to be the ones who control the world, not a bunch of Nancies from another version of Earth. It’s true that the Titans will seek them out just as they’ve sought out many heroes. If it wasn’t for the Wallachians fending scores of our best known and most public protectors to safety, I fear there would be many famous names we would simply never hear from again.

“One mission?” Ill Centurion asks.

Sitting up, he is every bit the dominating creature I’m used to in armoured form. The long thinning black hair suits him somehow as he casts his superlative glare over me and then Negator when the reformed villain joins me in a show of solidarity.

“One mission. And then you go free,” I say.

“What?” It’s Tchaikorvski who blurts this out. Negator escorts him from the room to looks of misgivings and approval, playing into my shell game con, me the maverick who might plausibly defraud the system like this for greater gain.

“How are we to trust you, Zephyr?” Ill Centurion asks.

“You don’t have to trust me.”

“I will just make him my puppet and then we walk out of here, friends,” Tragedian says.

“Not so fast. That injection the doc gave you was White Nine nanites. If you try to turn on me or foul up this mission, they’ll kick in and you’ll go back to sleep no matter where you are. If we’re in the middle of the shit at the time, well, I won’t be able to vouch for you.”

“Nanites, Zephyr?”

Ill Centurion’s eyes bore holes into me. I look around, my handsome grin a skeleton’s smile I cement in place as I scan over the others, each one a psychopath about six stages worse than the next. My gaze settles on Raveness looking every part the beauty on steroids. A wicked smile plays at the edge of her mouth and when she gets my attention for a fraction longer than expected, she licks her lips and chuckles as I look elsewhere.

“You heard me, Centurion. Your gear’s waiting for you. Your powers should come back inside the next hour. Do this one job that’s in your own best interests. Flex those muscles you’ve been dreaming about. This is sanctioned chaos, any means necessary. And once we’re done, you’re gone.”

“You will try and detain us or betray us by some means,” he says.

“You know that,” I say and nod. “Or, I expect you to expect that. I’m not too focused on our history right now. I told you already, there’s no other heroes out there waiting to bring you in. Do this job and we’ll decode the nanites, deactivate them or whatever, and then you’re free.”

Raveness chuckles again. “He’s lying about the nanites.”

“Of course he is,” Ill Centurion replies casually, voice gravid as always, theatrical, almost admirably Shakespearean. “What else is Zephyr to do?”

“My powers are coming,” Crescendo says and he takes a deep breath, humming, the room, anything not strapped down starting to dance on the spot.

But Ill Centurion shakes his head.

“No. We take up this task willingly.” Over his colleagues’ surprised replies, the older villain continues. “Zephyr is right. These are intruders to our world.”

“Whatever happened to ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’?” Tragedian asks.

“It remains true,” the Centurion says, eyes locked on mine as he smirks, the first real show of any emotion made weirder when the guy actually fucking winks at me. “But sometimes, you have to choose your enemies.”

 

Zephyr 14.12 “Faster Than A Speeding Bullet” is a post from: Zephyr - a webcomic in prose