Habib the Djinni looked nothing like Barbara Eden...yet...

 
Simon felt better after throwing up and washing his face. Gray eyes below the receding light brown hair looked back. His 51 years showed in the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. He decided that he needed to shave but put it off for the moment.

The ring on his left pinkie caught his eye and he examined it for a moment without taking it off. He felt reluctant to remove the item. A little doubt about the reality of his owning a djinn ring remained but he was nearly convinced.

When he turned to leave the bathroom, there stood Habib, holding a glass of water.

“Drink this,” said the djinni. The little man had evidently changed his outfit; now he wore a pair of blue jeans, chukka boots and a gray hoodie sweatshirt with the hood back. It looked a lot like an outfit Simon had in his closet except sized to fit Habib. Without the turban, Habib’s hair proved to be the same dark brown as his beard and just as curly and neatly trimmed. A prominent widow’s peak left a single Superman-curl hanging on his forehead.

Simon smiled and drank the water down, it tasted delicious and seemed to be the last element of Habib’s cure. “Thank you,” he said, handing the glass back. The djinni’s new appearance tickled him for some reason.

“You might want to take a bath, too. You still smell like a hangover,” suggested Habib. “I can make breakfast, do you want eggs?”

“That would be nice, I bought rye bread for toast, yesterday, uh, day before yesterday,” said Simon. He tried to sniff his armpit.

“Very good, master,” said Habib, smiling. “Am I correct that you do not have work to go to, this morning?”

“That’s right,” said Simon, starting water running. “I worked yesterday on Sunday, so I have today off.” He closed the door and got undressed. “If you’re still talking, I can’t hear you,” he shouted. Not hearing a reply, he proceeded with his bath, and shaved with his wet-dry electric razor

He didn’t notice if Habib actually came into the bathroom but when he turned off the shower and stepped out, a clean set of clothes hung on the back of the door. He used one of the fluffy hotel towels to dry off and got dressed, smiling the whole time.

Just as he stepped into the little dining alcove, Habib placed two plates of scrambled eggs, buttered toast points and orange slices next to two steaming cups of hot coffee.

“This is nice,” said Simon. “I... will you do this every morning?” He took a seat and the djinni sat down opposite him.

“If that is your wish,” said Habib. “It is my task to serve you, master.”

Simon sipped his own coffee black and watched as the little man put four heaping teaspoons of sugar into his cup. They ate. The eggs were fluffy with bits of cheese and garlic in them. Simon got up to find the marmalade for his toast. Habib shuddered as he watched his human master spread sweetness on rye bread.

“I don’t usually butter my toast,” said Simon.

“I’ll remember that,” promised Habib. He got up to pour more coffee and repeated his performance with the sugar while Simon stole one of the last orange slices off his plate.

Habib smiled and Simon grinned while they sipped their second cups.

“These wishes...” Simon began to ask. “Oh, thank you for breakfast.” He gestured, waving the piece of orange before taking a juicy bite.

“You’re very welcome,” said Habib. His nod conveyed the impression of a cultured bow.

“These wishes,” Simon repeated. “Do I get a set number of them? Or...? Just how does this work?” He realized that he no longer had any doubts that Habib was indeed a djinni, even if the little man did not act precisely like the mystic servants portrayed in movies and on television.

“I am here to serve your needs and desires, master,” said Habib. “There are limitations on what I can do but not on the number of requests you can make of me.”

“Huh,” said Simon. “What kind of limitations?”

“I can’t grant a wish to cause bodily harm to another being directly by magic....”

“I wouldn’t wish that!” protested Simon.

“You might in some circumstances, and indeed I can do so if it is necessary to save your life.”

Simon nodded, thinking about First Law versus Second Law, sort of, but he didn’t say that aloud.

“I can make you wealthy, if you desire, but I can’t conjure more than a pound of gold in a week, or the equivalent in gems, jewelry or other metals or goods or items of value. I can advise you however on investments.”

Simon blinked. A pound of gold had to be worth something like twenty thousand dollars, even if it was in those funny pounds used for precious metals. Twenty thousand dollars a week? Simon was good with numbers, that amounted to about one million a year. He swallowed hard. Would he need to pay taxes on money he wished for?

Habib continued. “I can use magic to ensure that you enjoy a long and healthy life but no one lives forever, not even the djinn, and I can’t save you from your own folly if you insist on....” He frowned. “My last master liked to drive too fast.”

“Huh,” said Simon. “That wreck...?”

Habib nodded. “I’d rather not speak of him. He died because he ordered me not to protect him from doing what he wanted to do. I chose you to find the ring and become my new master.”

“You did?” Simon looked, and felt, pleased. He wondered if any particular virtue of his had attracted the djinni’s attention or if it had just been the luck of place and circumstance. He didn’t know how to ask that so he took another sip of excellent coffee.

They both sipped coffee.

After a bit of staring at his reflection in the window, Simon asked, “What do you get out of it? You seem like a very powerful being, why do you serve someone like me? I’m just an ordinary guy....”

Simon wasn’t sure just what Habib’s expression meant but the djinni looked solemn.

“Three thousand years ago, thereabout, my people were enslaved by a powerful human sorceror and his allies. The sorceror bound the djinn with oaths to serve him and his allies. All of those humans are long dead but we are still bound to serve those who hold the talismans they created. In my case, it is the ring.” Habib gestured toward the piece of jewelry on Simon’s hand.

Simon stared at the ring for a moment. “That sounds horrible!” he exclaimed. “You’re a slave to the ring!”

“It is so,” Habib agreed. “Do not feel too sorry for us master. We were not blameless, being wild spirits of magic with no discipline and no authority over us. Those djinn who could be trusted were allowed to return to our own world but we miscreants who had proven to be dangerous were bound by Suleyman’s magic.”

Something clicked for Simon. “Suleyman? King Solomon?”

“That is a belief so common as to become legend but no, a different man of nearly the same name living about the same time. Suleyman the Sorceror was a Phoenician wizard living in Persia, Solomon was King of Israel living in Jerusalem. They both lived a very long time but Suleyman died while Solomon was only a boy.” Habib shook his head. “A later man, an Arab sorceror and owner of one of the talismans, was also called Suleiman and that didn’t help the confusion.”

“It’s like something by Shakespeare,” said Simon, making a weak joke of it. “Uh, were you there for all that time?”

“It is so,” said Habib. “The original Suleyman, in Persia, cast us down and bound our spirits to objects of this earth. We had been like gods to the humans and did as we willed. Suleyman showed us that our ways were evil.”

Simon swallowed hard. He wanted to know more and he wanted to change the subject at the same time. Habib seemed to have stopped talking for the moment, staring at his cup of coffee.

The little man looked up, “Did you want more coffee, master?”

“No,” said Simon. “Uh, if you must know, I kind of wish you would not call me ‘master’.”

Habib smiled. “You Americans are so emotional about servitude. Since it is your wish, of course, it is my fulfillment to obey. If I call you something else, it will not change the situation, you will still be my master. But what would you like me to call you... sir?”

Simon winced. “Oh, just call me by my name, I suppose.”

“Very good, Simon,” said Habib. He stood up, still smiling. “Shall I clear away and wash the dishes?”

“I...” Simon began but he had no idea what he intended to say. Offering to help with the clean-up just seemed wrong. “Uh, can’t you do that kind of thing with magic?”

“Certainly,” said Habib. “And sometimes I will do so. But really, there is nothing free in the universe, it all has to be paid for someway. And using magic when I don’t really need to might mean that I might not have enough magic when I did need it.”

Simon watched as the little man cleared away the dishes and ran hot water in the sink. “Remember, Simon, I told you there are limits as to what I can do with my magic? There are three kinds of limits. The first, I suppose, is the limit imposed on me by the Seal of Suleyman; the contract of servitude I acquiesced to thousands of years ago. The second limit is the fact that while I am very powerful, I too am really a mortal and do not have a god’s power to do infinite magic--if even the gods have such power!”

He smiled over his shoulder at Simon. “But there is a deeper sort of limit to magic, the very structure of magic itself. Do you know how magic works, Simon?”

“No. In fact, until this morning, if you had asked me, I would have said I didn’t believe in magic.”

Habib laughed. “Modern people often don’t. There is less magic in the world today than there once was and what magic there is, is often hidden. But you see, magic is the control of energies and substances flowing between universes.”

“Huh,” said Simon. “How do you mean?”

“Well, for instance,” said Habib, rinsing the last of the dishes and putting them into the drainer. “If I magicked up a cup of coffee for you, what I would be doing is reaching into another universe and finding the cup of coffee you would be having if you were there.”

“Uhh?” said Simon. “Does that mean that some other me doesn’t get his cup of coffee.”

Habib almost grinned. “Theoretically. But that other you is only a possible you, not a real you. It’s like Heisenberg’s cat. I reach into a space where a coffee cup may or may not exist and I make the choice that it does exist.”

“The only thing I can think of is Bullwinkle reaching into the wrong hat,” said Simon.

Habib chuckled which caused Simon to grin widely.

“Some theorists maintain a magical Law of Compensation exists,” Habib continued on the same topic, “such that somewhere in this universe a cup of coffee disappears in order to balance the equation. Generally, the nearest similar cup and a quantity of coffee from nearby to fill it. It might be your own cup and some of the contents of your own coffeepot -- but that doesn’t seem to always happen and sometimes it is not even possible.”

Simon nodded and frowned. “Huh?” he said. “I mean, I don’t mean to sound stupid, I think I get that but... can you give me an example.”

“Certainly,” said Habib. “Let’s say you requested from me a four-foot-tall terracotta statue of Lindsay Lohan playing a ukelele and wearing a grass skirt. Do you think such an item actually exists in this world? Most probably not. And yet, there certainly could be a universe in which such a thing did exist and I could reach into that world and conjure it into this one. If I did so... what would disappear from our universe in compensation?”

Simon laughed out loud and Habib chuckled again. “Not Lindsay Lohan herself, surely!” Simon choked out and they laughed again.

Habib wiped his eyes. “It’s been a long time since I actually laughed at something one of my masters said. Thank you, Simon.”

“You’re welcome,” said Simon, still grinning. He stopped to think a moment. “So the answer to my original question....”

“Is yes, I will make breakfast for you every morning if that pleases you,” said Habib with a twinkle in his eye.

“Well, after that one then, how many wishes do I get? And, there’s no limit on how many but there are some limits on what you can do?”

“It is so,” said Habib with a nod.

“Uhh....” Simon stammered a moment. “Well, there’s one wish I’ve had since I was a little kid and I don’t know if you can do this or not....” He trailed off.

“Ask,” said Habib.

If wishes were bicycles...

Simon stammered a bit before he managed to say, “I-I’ve always wished I had superpowers.”

Habib squinted at him. “You mean superhuman abilities?”

Simon nodded, swallowing hard, his face red. He looked as if admitting what he wanted had embarrassed him.

Habib gestured at himself. “Wish granted, you command a djinni.”

Simon frowned. “That’s kind of like being Johnny Thunder.”

“Who?” said Habib.

“He was a character in a comic seventy years ago, he commanded a living thunderbolt. But the hexbolt did everything, Johnny just stood around and told him what to do.”

Habib pulled an iPad out of somewhere or nowhere and tapped at the screen a moment then examined the result. Simon craned his head trying to get a look.

“Ah!” Habib exclaimed, turning the iPad around to show Simon the Wikipedia page he had found. Leaning close, they both read quickly.

Simon shook his head and Habib nodded. “No,” said Habib. “I can see why you wouldn’t want to be anything like that fellow, or fellows. There seem to have been more than one of him, and one of them was a her.”

“Well, he’s fictional,” said Simon.

“Hm, mm,” said Habib, putting the iPad back wherever he had gotten it. “What about real superheroes?”

“Uh, there don’t seem to be any,” said Simon, looking disappointed. “A few nuts running around in costumes but no one who has real powers like in the comic books I read as a kid.”

“I’ve read a few of those and seen some of the movies,” said Habib. He wrinkled his brow, pulled on his beard and chewed on his lip. Simon watched the djinni for a bit.

“Can you give me superpowers?” Simon finally asked.

Habib looked up. “Maybe,” he said. “But there is the magical Law of Obscurity, I can’t do anything to attract the attention of the masses. Nothing that looks like I’m working miracles without some available explanation. I’m not the only djinni in the world and if all of us did magic in the marketplace, there would be chaos. There are powers in the world that even a djinni must fear.”

“Really?” Simon’s voice almost squeaked. “What are they? Gods? Demons?”

“It doesn’t matter what you call them, they exist and they enforce their rules,” said Habib.

“Oh,” said Simon.

“I can do a lot for you,” said Habib. “I can make you healthy, strong, quick, sharpen your senses. But superpowers,” he shook his head. “I just don’t know if I can do that.”

“Could-- could you try?” asked Simon.

Habib smiled. “I can try,” he nodded. “But the sort of flashy powers you probably want would almost certainly look like miracles.”

“But,” said Simon, “that’s allowed as long as we don’t get caught at it.”

“Something like that,” agreed Habib. “I can conjure things for you in private, even where a few others can see but not where it would attract a lot of attention.”

“So maybe... someone like the Dark Knight. Moving in shadows, using gadgets that could explain some things. And, and, you say you can make me strong and fast and healthy? Like maybe just a little bit better that anyone else? Not enough so it looks miraculous but is just believable?”

Habib smiled. “It may be so,” he said.

“Wow!” said Simon. “This is going to be so cool!”

“Let me consult with some of my peers,” said Habib. “Is there anything you need before I depart for a short while?”

“Uh, how long are you going to be gone?”

“Not long, no more than a couple of hours, maybe much less.”

“Oh, I guess, I’m fine,” said Simon.

Habib smiled. “You are the most agreeable of masters, Simon. And the least predictable. Most men in your situation waste little time in wishing for at least one houri.”

Simon blinked. Habib blinked out of existence.

“What’s a houri?” Simon asked the empty air. He booted up his home computer and wasted a little time wandering around Wikipedia. Then a little more time on on Toonopedia and finally fiddling for a bit with one of his personal software projects, a database to keep track of databases available on the internet.

An hour seemed to pass with grinding slowness. Normally, Simon could waste time on the internet with the nonchalance of a skateboarder in an empty parking garage. But waiting for Habib to return sucked all the savor out of cute cats and wikiwalks. To waste more time, he dug his laptop out of his backpack and set it up to sync all files with his desktop machine while charging the portable’s battery.

Then he wandered through the tiny kitchenette he shared with the other room on the basement level of the hotel and down the hall to the full bath. His own 3/4-bath did not have a full-length mirror and he wanted to look at himself.

At fifty-one years of age, Simon Paul had maintained himself in tolerably good physical condition. Biking six miles each way in all kinds of weather to his job at the university library did a lot to keep him in shape. The hotel weight room next door to the basement full bath helped to, when he used it which was probably not often enough.

“Nader,” he said to the other resident of the basement rooms coming down the stairs from the dining room on the lobby floor.

“Simon,” said Nader. Seeing Simon walking into the full bath, he asked. “You going to be in there long?”

“Not long,” said Simon. He didn’t explain. Nader got a little proprietary about the big bath since his room did not have one. Once in, with the lights on and the fan running, Simon locked the door and stood back from the mirror at a comfortable distance.

He still had a full head of rusty brown hair cut unfashionably short, though his widow’s peak got more pronounced every year. His brown eyes looked out from under a distinct but not Neanderthal, somewhat furry, brow ridge. His nose achieved beakiness without being Durante-esque. He had a chin and only one. He had tried to grow mustaches and beards at various times but they always came in a dirty blond color which he thought looked stupid with his brown hair.

He stood a hair under six-three and weighed about 190, lean but not skinny. Most of his muscular development was in his legs and back; he did not have an extreme triangular shape like a boxer or weightlifter but a lean, long one like a swimmer or bicyclist, which he was. Despite the fact that he looked like what his lifestyle had molded him to be, he longed for the wide shoulders and beefy arms of the men who played Thor and Captain America in the movies.

Self-consciously, he struck a few heroic poses, laughed then reached over to flush the toilet before opening the door. Just as he had expected, Nader Farhadi came hurrying down the hallway toward him, carrying towels and a clean change of clothes. Nader smiled as he squeezed past Simon to claim the room with the only tub on the basement level.

“I’m glad you weren’t using the room long,” said Nader.

“Sure,” said Simon. He wandered back through the kitchenette to his own room, shaking his head at Nader’s predictability. The man was the same way about his side of the refrigerator and his shelves in the cabinets of the tiny cooking space.

Just as he walked back into his room, Simon recalled that Nader was also Persian, or really, Iranian since Persian was no longer a nationality. “I wonder if he knows anything about the djinn?” Simon asked himself aloud but decided not to ask. Nader was a political science major, not at the same university where Simon worked, and he interned with a city councilman’s office. He did not strike Simon as the sort of person who would answer as random a question as the ones Simon wanted to ask.

He checked the time but realized he had no idea when Habib had disappeared. It must have been at least an hour before but surely less than three. It wasn’t yet noon and Simon still felt satisfied from breakfast, he didn’t feel like making anything for lunch yet.

Desperate for distraction, he pulled a couple of long boxes out from under his bed. In the white pasteboard containers he kept a few hundred of his favorite comics. Thousands more were stored in the crawlspace under the front of the hotel in the small corner allotted to him as a longtime resident and he paid a small monthly extra for twice as much space as most of the hotel tenants had.

He pulled out a recent run of Daredevil and browsed through the covers, remembering the stories as he did so. He didn’t need to re-read them; he exercised the one ability he already had that almost passed for a superpower--a near perfect memory for anything he had ever read. Daredevil’s super-abilities were mostly sensory, to make up for his blindness but ol’ Hornhead also had unbelievable agility and the same kind of uneven weird luck a lot of superheroes shared.

He put the Daredevils back in their box, much as he liked to read the adventures of the blind lawyer, he had no real desire to be him. From the other box, he took a few of his prizes--mostly silver-age issues of Action, Superman, Superboy and other titles featuring the strange visitor from another planet. Some of the books were older than he was and all of them were acquired by painstaking bargain hunting at comic conventions as far away as Atlanta.

And all of them featured someone else gaining Superman’s powers. If you’re going to collect forty-year-old comics and don’t have a fortune, you have to specialize and Simon had picked his theme. It occurred to Simon that now that he had an income of a pound of gold a week, he could afford to expand his collection to some of the rarer issues from the 1940s and early 50s.

Or even star in a few comics about himself. That thought made him smile.

He had issues where Batman, or Jimmy Olsen, or Lois Lane, or Lana Lang gained superpowers; another with an Army private and one with just some guy walking along a beach; even three with a super Perry White. He loved them all.

His memory for artwork was not as acute as it was for text and he loved to look at great comic book art. But he didn’t take his treasures out of their plastic vaults this time, carefully restoring them to their boxes and placing them back beneath his bed, instead.

Restlessly, he wandered through his tiny apartment, eventually ending up in his garden. A light rain fell as it often did in coastal Washington State but sunshine broke through now and then and the waterdrops on Mrs. Dumfries’ flowers gleamed like jewelry.

Standing under the portico, out of the rain, he reached to touch one of the delicately pink roses and captured a drop of water on his finger tip. The beauty of the flower in the rain and sunshine made him think of Habib’s comment about wishing for a houri.

At fifty-one, he didn’t feel old but he knew that probably thirty years before it would have been his first wish. He smiled. He’d had girlfriends, even been engaged to marry twice. But nothing had worked out between he and his lovers. Something about his private intensity made the women in his life feel overlooked. He sighed.

A magical companion who couldn’t leave him for someone else might be just his speed.

The thought deflated him a bit and he moved across the tiny paved area beneath the awning to examine his bike. What rain blew in under the covering had done a fair job of cleaning off any mud from yesterday’s adventure, he decided. But it must be about time to oil the moving parts and rub some leather conditioner on the seat. He wondered if Habib would do that for him.

Then he wondered if he would even be keeping the bicycle. It would seem odd to have superpowers and a djinni to command and still ride around town on a bicycle. Would he move somewhere more elegant? He would be able to afford to. Heck, maybe he could buy the hotel.

With that thought, he went back inside, smiling, just as Habib reappeared in his little sitting room.

The djinni smiled back. “Let us do this thing, Simon. I believe I have fashioned a way to grant your wish.”

Ten Thousand Wishes?

“Superhuman abilities are beyond human, more than human,” said Habib after he had made more coffee for both of them. They were sitting at the little white-enameled iron table on Simon’s tiny patio outside his bedroom window. Habib had already put four sugars into his coffee and sipped at the resulting oversweet liquid with satisfaction.

Simon drank his black, as always. “Well, yeah. How does that help?” he asked.

“What else in this world is beyond human, more than human?” Habib responded. He gestured at himself. “Djinn and other beings from non-terrestrial planes. You humans are folk of earth, we djinn are folk of fire, houris are of heaven, et cetera.”

“Et cetera?” Simon repeated.

“Hm, mm,” said Habib, taking another sip. “I consulted with some of my fellow djinn and a few other personages it is better not to name. I believe I can reach into another universe -- that may or may not really exist -- and pull out for you a different sort of essence. Such as your much-favored Superman. He is after all, not a man of Earth but of Krypton. And what does Krypton mean? That which is hidden.” Habib nodded exactly as if what he had said actually made sense.

“Those are just words,” said Simon weakly.

“And words are a kind of magic, too,” said Habib. “So let us consider what sort of superpowers you would like to have.”

“Well, Superman’s powers....” Simon trailed off. The whole discussion had turned unreal and seemingly childish. He felt like a nine-year-old suddenly, remembering when he had discussed the superpowers of imaginary characters with his friends during elementary school recess. Could Superman do this? Could he pick up Thor’s hammer? Could Spiderman beat Batman? Did Catwoman really run across rooftops in high heels?

Habib held up a forefinger. “And what is Superman’s most important superpower, the one without which he is not really Superman?”

“Huh,” said Simon. “Well, his strength -- no, it’s his invulnerability.” He did know his comic book characters, lots of others were strong or could fly but only someone like Superman could take a bath in the Sun..

“Yes, he is the paragon of invulnerability, almost nothing can harm him. It defines him, he is the ultimate outsider, outside even the pain and fear of death that everyone else faces.” He took another sip of coffee. “It must give the writers of his adventures fits trying to think up challenges for him.”

“Which is why a lot of stories focus on his emotional crises,” said Simon. “Batman is the physical one in stories because his defining characteristic is psychological, the vengeance he pursues.”

Habib looked at him. “You don’t want to be Batman?”

Simon shook his head. “Not really. I don’t think I have that kind of intensity. Blue Beetle, the Ted Kord Blue Beetle, or his clone Nite-Owl from the Watchmen, would be more my speed.” He grinned. “Those gadgets would be lots of fun.”

“Fun,” said Habib with no inflection or apparent judgement. “That is your objective?”

Simon didn’t say anything for a moment. “I suppose it is,” he finally admitted. “I mean, doing good and helping people would be nice, catching bad guys. But if it weren’t fun, why do it?”

“Why indeed?” said Habib.

They both looked around at the wide, beautiful world around them. The pleasure of a late morning in early April surrounded them. Birds twittered in the trees, bees hummed about the flowers. The sun had come out and the greenery gleamed with a green grandiosity, as if the color had just been invented for that particular moment.

Down the hill on the shore of the little lake behind Mrs. Dumphries’s property sat the Indian Summer Folly, a gazebo-like structure with covered patios on all sides and a small enclosed room made mostly of windows. A terracotta brick walkway lined with roses led down from the back of the hotel. It mostly got used for parties, barbecues and such in the fall when the weather turned warm, pleasant and dry, hence the name.

Simon found himself smiling and noticed that Habib was smiling, too. “What do you like to do, Habib?” he asked suddenly.

The expression that crossed the djinni’s face couldn’t be matched in Simon’s memory with any face he had ever seen before. A surprised longing, like a glimpse of bright hope in a night of despair--Simon did not know how to characterize what Habib had revealed.

“What do I like to do?” asked Habib. “I’m not sure I have an answer to that question. You are unlike any master I have ever served, do you know that, Simon? No one, not one in three millennia, has asked me so many startling questions.”

Simon grinned, embarrassed though he could not have said why. “What does that make? Two of them?”

“Even so,” said Habib. “You are one in ten thousand, Simon, one in a multitude.” He lifted his coffee cup as if to make a toast.

Simon kept grinning, he didn’t know what else to do. He lifted his cup and gestured with it. “Habib, I don’t know many djinn,” his grin got wider, “you’re the only one, but I am sure that you are remarkable among your people for wisdom, patience and humility.”

They sipped coffee. “See, that is what I mean, Simon. I’ve never heard of another master since Suleyman the Great who treated a djinni with such respect and courtesy as you show to me.” Habib shook his head as if in wonder.

“Isn’t he the one who enslaved all of you?”

“Yes, but he respected us. He let us write our own terms of servitude which we did willingly since our other choice was destruction.”

“Seems an odd sort of respect,” said Simon.

“Oh, but he knew that to destroy us, he would have been destroyed himself and also much of civilization at the time. We would have wrecked what we could and slain tens of thousands of tens of thousands.”

Simon swallowed too much coffee at once and coughed to clear his airway. It wasn’t so much what Habib had said but the calm emphasis he had given the numbers; it spoke of a calculated savagery that Simon had a hard time matching to the urbane appearance of his magical servant. Besides, Simon was good with numbers, he’d instantly multiplied and got hundreds of millions. How many people had been on the Earth three thousand years ago?

Habib finished his coffee and asked, “Do you want a noon meal? Or more coffee?”

Simon shook his head and held out his cup as Habib collected cups, saucers, spoons and sugar bowls on a gleaming lacquered tray Simon did not remember owning.

“There is a world somewhere in Chance that is very like this world, broadly. Except it has another star in its sky -- a dwarf companion of Kurash the Lifegiver, the Sun. They have named it variously but most commonly it is called Prometheus after the Greek Titan who is said to have given fire to humanity.” Habib carried his tray into the apartment and on into the little kitchenette and Simon followed.

Putting the used dishes in the sink, Habib continued. “The Promethean orbit is highly elliptical and at an angle to the plane of the Zodiac so that when it is at its nearest to the Sun, it is far enough from any of the planets not to present ordinary dangers of heat or radiation.” Habib ran hot water, of which there was always plenty in the hotel, squirted a little soap and quickly scrubbed, rinsed and put the dishes in the drainer.

Simon glanced around, Nader had emerged from his room.

Smiling, Habib greeted the other tenant in what Simon had to assume was Farsi since he understood not a syllable of it. Scowling, Nader replied in the same language then hurried past the little kitchenette alcove, down the hall toward the stairs up to the dining room above.

“What did you say to him?” asked Simon.

“That he would be late to pick up his girlfriend because he spent too much time in front of the mirror convincing himself that he was a handsome fellow,” said Habib.

“Ouch,” said Simon. “He does seem fond of himself, doesn’t he?”

“It is a vice of the overly good-looking that they are pleased to look at their own image. In my youth, I suffered from the same malady.” Habib spoke with a perfectly straight face.

“Not me,” said Simon. “I figure I’m lucky that mirrors survive me looking into them.”

Habib snorted. “You are neither handsome nor ugly, Simon. Your height and smiling eyes save you from being overly average in appearance.”

“Thanks, I guess,” said Simon, still smiling.

“We were talking about powers,” said Habib. “Superman has speed, strength, flight and invulnerability but the early character had much less of each.”

“Uh-huh,” said Simon. “The old mantra used to be, ‘faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound and nothing less than a bursting shell can penetrate his skin.’ They left that last one out of the TV show.”

“Even that is a tall order,” said Habib. “How about ‘faster than a cheetah, more powerful than an elephant, able to leap over houses and nothing less than a powerful rifle can do more than scratch his skin?’”

“My skin? Wow!” Simon wanted to laugh out loud.

“Add some vision and hearing abilities and you could be mistaken for Superman on a dark night and a galloping horse.” Habib’s eyes twinkled; Simon didn’t get the joke but he did laugh.

“Are those the powers you’re going to give me?” asked Simon.

“That’s what I’m aiming for, but this is not rocket science,” said Habib.

Simon looked puzzled.

“In rocket science, the equations work out the same way every time, so you can hit what you aim at. This is magic, the equations have only three answers; ‘can’, ‘cannot’ and ‘oops!’.”
Simon slowly grinned. “I know what I mean when I say ‘oops’, what do you mean when you say ‘oops’?” he quoted from a classic Bill Cosby routine.

“Exactly,” said Habib. “Getting back to what I was saying before Nader walked through, the other Earth, the one with two suns, the smaller sun makes magic possible on that world. Magic for ordinary people, unpredictable magic in that it grants what you would call superpowers to random people on that world when its eccentric orbit brings it near the Earth.”

“Huh,” said Simon.

“But that’s not important right now,” said Habib.

“And don’t call me Shirley,” said Simon, grinning again.

Habib frowned at him then apparently got the joke and shook his head. “The important thing is that I can get superpowers for you in this world, by reaching into that one with my own magic. But since part of the process is random, we can’t know for sure exactly what powers you will get.”

“Oh,” said Simon.

Habib stood. “Let us go down to the Folly by the lake before I work my magic. Because if you think about it, the powers you want are a pretty fair description of the Hulk, too.”

“Huh,” said Simon. He stood. “It’s going to be cold and damp down there this time of year. And it may rain on us.”

“The djinn never get rained on unless they permit it,” said Habib. “Wear a jacket.”

Simon took time to put on a rainproof windbreaker and followed Habib down the path toward the Folly. The rain didn’t seem to be able to make up its mind where it had returned or finished for the day. Heavy clouds crowded the mountains to the east but blue sky poked holes in the overcast over the ocean to the west. A few drops stained the maroon of the jacket dark purple where they landed.

With hardly any wind, the chill coming off the lake felt like wading through a waist-high refrigerator but Simon rode bicycles in winter gales, he hardly noticed. True to the fiery nature of djinn, Habib seemed to ignore the cold completely.

The cabin of the Folly was locked and the benches under the wooden patio covers were wet and covered in debris that had accumulated since their last cleaning months ago. Simon and Habib stood in the lee of the little building, looking through the layers of windows at the little lake. Partly man-made, the lake covered about seventy acres and at its lower end merged into a slough that emptied into the White River which emptied into the Puyallup that flowed near the University and into Commencement Bay.

Out of the wind, out of the rain, it was almost warm and Simon took his hands out of his pockets. He stood almost a head taller than Habib but he did not loom over the djinni. Habib’s dignified attitude protected him from being cast into shadow by anyone merely human. Many things amused Simon and he smiled at this, too.

“Just another day in Paradise,” he said, gesturing at the rainscape.

“Indeed,” said Habib, nodding without visible irony.

“Speaking of which,” said Simon, “I read up on those houris you mentioned.”

Habib frowned. “I guess you are human after all. But we can think about that later, I am ready to do this thing now.”

“Here?” said Simon. He wiped a finger across one of the bolted down steel-and-timber trestle tables, it came away grimy. “The place is a mess.”

“I could conjure chairs for us,” Habib offered. “Clean, dry ones.”

“I can stand,” said Simon. “But we’re visible here from the hotel.”

Habib shook his head. “Not if I don’t wish us to be.”

A sheet of rain blew between them and the larger building and Simon turned around at the noise. He couldn’t see the hotel and of course, no one there could see anyone in the Folly.

“But I am willing and able to stand, as well, Simon.” He rubbed his palms together thoughtfully, staring at the window. “I shall do this thing,” he said.

The hair on Simon’s neck and arms stood up and he turned again to face Habib. The smaller man’s face seemed lit by some inner light and his green eyes had darkened almost to black.

Habib’s voice seemed deeper, more resonant as he spoke, like a special effect in a movie. “I reach through the worlds by my magic,” he said. “I claim for my master a piece of the Star of Power.” He made a sudden gesture and pulled back his closed fist then opened it, showing his palm and a glistening, pulsing, dark glow there.

Simon gasped and almost took a step back. Things poofing in and out were one kind of magic, this was something different.

“Only touch it, Simon,” said Habib, “and you will have your wish.”

Got Wishes?

Simon hesitated.

Habib asked. “Is it that you worry that this is not what you really want?”

“No,” said Simon, after a moment of thought. “I know I want this but I’m--I’m feeling guilty. I mean, why me? Why am I the lucky one?”

“Because you were there to find the ring when I needed a new master?” suggested Habib.

“That’s what I mean, it’s just luck. Gaining powers like this ought to have an element of Destiny, or at least karma.”

“Kismet is the Persian word,” said Habib. He lowered his arm, no longer holding the piece of Starstuff out to Simon. “There is no answer to that question. Do you think that you would know Destiny if it were a dog that had mistaken you for a tree?”

Simon smiled. “We would say fire hydrant, these days.”

“Excuse me,” said Habib. “Fire hydrant, then. Destiny does not come with bands playing and fireworks going off, Destiny is the glance of a maiden, the smile on the face of the executioner, the wind from a another direction. Kismet is a bird that poops on your head, Simon.”

“If the Foo shits,” Simon muttered.

“Exactly,” said Habib. “Here is Destiny in my hand but you have already had Destiny in yours.”

“Huh?” said Simon.

“The ring, Simon,” said the djinni. “You have the ring -- that is Kismet, Destiny on Horseback, Fate and a Favorable Wind. It’s all you need.”

Simon smiled. “I always worry about things, I have a compulsive need to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. For instance, I can’t help worrying about the gold.”

“Gold?” said Habib.

“You said you could summon for me a pound of gold a week, and being the sort of person I am, I can’t help wondering when the weeks start being counted.”

Habib laughed and shook his head, being careful not to drop the glowing object he still held in his hand. “The weeks get counted from the time you picked up the ring, Simon,” he said. “And if you’re going to worry about the gold, let me summon it now into a safe place in the apartment.”

“A-all right,” Simon stuttered. He blinked several times. “The other thing I keep thinking about is the houri.” With the overcast and rain, it was too dark under the Folly for anyone to see him blush but he could feel the heat in his face.

Habib looked blank for a moment and Simon realized that he needed to shout. “The houri, the houri!” Neither Simon nor Habib had noticed that the storm had grown somewhat. A wind had come up and occasional sprays of fine raindrops reached them under the canopy. It was actually getting uncomfortable for Simon although true to his djinn nature, none of the water managed to touch Habib.

That worthy put his free hand to his mouth, as if to hide a smile. “Really, Simon, we can worry about her later. At the moment, she’s purely hypothetical.” He thrust the piece of Fallen Star toward Simon. “We have one wish already in progress. Just touch the stone and think of the sort of abilities you would like to have.”

Simon still hesitated. Then he took a deep breath and stretched out his hand to touch the stone.

* * *

Any building near a lake needs a lightning rod; a working lightning rod. Unfortunately, the Indian Summer Folly behind the April Morning Hotel had been neglected over the winter and a previous storm had damaged two of the three redundant connections between the lightning conductor on the roof and the grounding wires. A wind had pushed the assembly out of alignment with the steel structure supporting it, the skeleton of the building’s core utilities. Another cable had attached the lightning rod to the plumbing in the building and that now made only intermittent and less-than-ideal connection.

The third wire had been outside the building, connected to the steel posts holding up the patio covers. This wire was simply missing, perhaps removed by a thrifty, if larcenous, squirrel who may have pawned it for its copper content. At any rate, the building had no functional lightning rod.

Non-functional lightning rods are better called lightning attractors.

In the midst of the downpour Habib had summoned to conceal their presence in the Folly, just as Simon touched the piece of Fallen Star snatched from another universe, the inevitable but highly coincidental happened. Twenty thousand amperes plus of current surged through the building, the decayed lightning protection system serving to divert only a portion of it. Water-soaked wood is a good conductor but the water turns to steam when the current is high enough. When that did happen, the Folly, quite literally, exploded.

* * *

When the lightning hit, Simon leaped forward, instinctively grabbing Habib as he dove for cover, rolling under one of the concrete benches. The explosion of the Folly rained broken glass and burning wood down on everything for fifty feet around.

Habib first gasped from the multiple impacts of being hit by Simon, then landing on the floor and rolling up against the solid bench then said, “What the devil?” in Ancient Persian, or words to that effect.

Simon pushed himself away and looked down at the slender, naked, dark-haired woman he had landed on. “What the hell?” he said in Modern English.

“What happened?” the woman asked.

“Who are you?” Simon countered.

The woman said something about camel dung that Simon did not understand.

* * *

When the lightning hit, Simon leaped away from the center of the Folly, down the aisle between the concrete tables. The explosion of the Folly hurled her completely out from under the patio cover and into the rose bushes along the terracotta pathway. She may have said something about Mrs. Dumphries’ habit of using organic fertilizer. It wouldn't have been so bad but her clothes had disappeared to. Not that they would have fit.

* * *

When the lightning hit, Habib vanished himself into that pocket dimension where the Djinn resided after Suleyman the Great had denied them the ability to go back to their own world without his permission. It was some time before he could reopen the path to return to the human Earth.

* * *

When the lightning hit, Simon had his hand on the Fallen Star, trying to think about the sort of powers he wanted and all the comic books he had read and about wishes and houris and how even with magic you couldn’t really have it all....

That’s probably what caused all the trouble.

Raindrops keep falling...

It wasn’t that Simon had never held a woman in his arms. But he had never held a beautiful, naked woman in them. And whoever she was, she was quite beautiful. He had picked her up to carry her out of the burning folly but now he just stood there, staring at her. She had long black hair, bright green eyes, smooth skin, and a long, slender, but well-padded body.

“It’s me, Habib,” she said.

“I’m not Habib,” said Simon.

“No, I am,” she said.

“Who?” said Simon. He smiled down at her, she had the most delightful voice.

“I am Habib,” she said, trying to make things clear. “I’ve been turned into a woman. The stone, the wish, the lightning--something went wrong.” A tiny wrinkle formed between those beautiful eyes.

Simon sighed to see the slightest evidence of pain or displeasure on the face that went with his lovely armful. He lifted her up a big higher, holding her closer.

She lifted her arms and put them around his neck, it seemed the most natural thing in the world. And the most natural consequence for Simon seemed to be to fall in love with the beautiful woman he was holding in his arms. He did it without thought, without effort; much the way he had ended up carrying her when the Folly exploded.

He smiled down at her. “Huh?” he said.

“Are you listening, Simon? Simon?” He loved the sound of his name when she said it. He could listen to her talk all afternoon, ignoring the sound of the rain falling and the fire still burning behind them.

“The fire...” said Simon, half turning to look back. “We’ve got to get back to the hotel.” He glanced up at the roof of the Folly then strode out from under. The rain seemed to be doing a job on putting the fire out but he still wanted to get the beautiful woman in his arms to safety. And to his room in the hotel, the thought of which almost made him quiver like a tuning fork.

Habib kicked her legs and frowned but neither disturbed Simon’s hold on her. He moved quickly, out from under the burning roof and straight toward his own patio, ignoring the paved pathway that wound between rose bushes. In fact, he leapt over the line of greenery marking the edge of the picnic grounds around the folly. He leapt without thought or effort and continued on, smiling to himself because--because he had superpowers--and a beautiful woman in his arms as well.

* * *

The second Simon -- the one who had landed in the rose bushes when she had leapt away from the fire and the force of the exploding Folly had hurled her further than she had intended -- the other Simon, the female one, pushed mounds of soggy hair out of her face with one hand and felt of one of her breasts with the other.

“What the heck?” she said.

She felt of the other breast, just to be sure. They both seemed enormous and when she looked down, all she saw was pillowy boobies.

“Oh, crap!” she said. “I wished myself into being Power Girl!”

Something swooshed overhead while she was looking down. She looked up quickly but she didn’t turn around because the burning Folly caught her eye. Flames from the explosion of the central room had spread to the timbers holding up the patio roof. With the rain still coming down, it didn’t really look like the fire would get anywhere but something occurred to her; wasn’t she now a superhero?

“Hey! Maybe I should try to put that out!” She quickly stood up, the stinky mud of the rosebed clinging to her curves. The rain immediately began washing the filth away.

The rain seemed to be doing the job on the fire, too, but Simon stood in the middle of the rose bushes and huffed and puffed anyway, trying to produce super-breath to blow out the flames.

Nothing happened except she got a little dizzy from hyperventilating.

“Crap, crap, crap,” she muttered, glaring at the fire. The rain was really doing a good job of stopping the flames so super-breath was hardly necessary.

“Do I even have super-powers?” She looked down at herself again. “Besides the boobies.”

She pondered a moment. “I got blown out of a building by an explosion, naked, and I landed in some rose bushes. It’s raining in April in Tacoma. I’m not cold and I don’t think I have a scratch on me.” She beamed, running her hands down her side, slick with rain. She found no scratches or tender spots.

She stopped when she reached her ass. “I’ve got.... Boy, I’ve got a big.... Is all of that me?” She tried to turn around to look but, of course, she didn’t have that kind of super-power.

* * *

The Little World, as the Djinn called their pocket dimension between Earth and the original version of the Djinn realms, had mountains and lakes, forests and rivers. That it was not a whole planet was not readily apparent and each Djinni had a dwelling, modest or imposing as befitted his rank among the Djinn.

The Djinn are ruled by judges among themselves, not kings or nobles but leaders respected for their experience, wisdom and skills. The title of respect for such djinni is Hakeem and large important families may have one, each clan selects an elder to the post and the gatherings of clans select a tribal judge. All of the hakeems together select one of their member to be The Hakeem who serves in that post for as much as a thousand years.

“You knew the rules, Baghadu’ur. Changing someone’s sex, even by accident, even your own, is a forty year sentence of sanctioned powers,” The Hakeem of the Djinn said on the portico of his magnificent dwelling.

“But I didn’t!” protested the djinni who had told Simon to call him Habib but whose real Djinn name was Baghadu’ur. “Look, I’m still male!” He gestured at himself, his real self. Not the slender middle-aged accountant-type body he had showed Simon but his own djinni self; large, muscular, imposing and aggressively masculine.

The Hakeem quirked an eyebrow. “And your client?” With a gesture, the official judge summoned an image of Simon, the female Simon, standing in a rose garden in the rain, feeling her butt with both hands and looking mystified.

“That’s Simon?” asked Habib/Baghadu’ur. “Oh, dear. The wish turned him into...that? He looks like, uh, she looks like Power Girl with Barbara Eden’s face--only more so.”

The portico had a marble floor and colonnades that set off the view of the mountains across The Hakeem’s lands, farmed or him by lesser djinn. A lovely houri made sure that their silver-trimmed crystal goblets were kept filled with the mixture of peach brandy, citron zest and spring water that The Hakeem favored. The houri, young and beautiful as all houris appear, reminded Baghadu’ur/Habib of his client’s altered appearance and he turned back to the view of Earth conjured by The Hakeem.

The two very male Djinn contemplated the image for a moment. “Nice work, in a way,” said The Hakeem. “But this rule is for your protection. If your clients know that you will not be able to grant all their wishes for forty years, they will not be asking you to change your sex or theirs either. So many of them are filthy perverts anyway.”

“But... but...” Habib/Baghadu’ur protested. “My master, er, mistress, is going to need me now.”

“But!” said the Hakim. “But one of the sanctions is that you must stay here an entire Shabat before returning. So you cannot go back until sunset on Saturday.”

“It’s still Monday, isn’t it?”

The Hakim nodded. “And even when you go back, the other sanctions will be in effect.”

“I’ve never crossed this rule before, what are the other sanctions?”

The Hakim detailed the sanctions, it took some time but Baghadu’ur/Habib had almost a whole week to listen. They sipped peach brandy cocktails and ate spicy peafowl breast and other delicacies served by the beautiful houri while they talked.

* * *

Simon, the tall one with muscles, carried the woman who had identified herself as Habib toward the lower back entrance of the hotel, his private entrance into his little two room apartment with the shared kitchenette. Up the slope to the left, the second rear entrance of the hotel led into the two-story utility room attached to the kitchen on the main floor. Directly above Simon’s rooms lay the main dining room with it’s own outside deck, the floor of which was the roof of Simon’s patio.

Since it was raining in the middle of Monday afternoon, no one had been eating on the deck but two people had been munching snacks and enjoying the free coffee in the dining room. The big windows provided them with a view of the burning Folly but the heavy rain kept them from noticing too many details.

One brave soul with an umbrella ventured out onto the deck to get a better look. Lt. Colonel Edgar “Edge” Wyes, US Army, retired, had spent most of his career pushing papers in top secret think tanks in and around Washington DC, Brussels, Tokyo and Moscow but he had military training and felt that he needed to respond to what looked like an emergency. In his late forties, he had retired after twenty four years when he was passed over for promotion to full colonel due to budgetary cuts related to the winding down of military commitments.

Keeping himself fit for two decades in a desk job had become a way of life for the colonel, he ran two miles every morning and sometimes entered long distance races. Which explained the unnaturally bright orange tape on the sleeves and back of his windbreaker as he ventured out onto the rainswept deck.

Edge had a cellphone in his hand and had already dialed 911 to report the fire. Still talking to the dispatcher, he gave details on what he saw. “No, I don’t think anyone was in it,” he said. “This time of year, it’s pretty deserted. Wait, wait, somethings moving around down there....” He held the phone against his chest while he peered into the downpour. He could see movement but not identity and whoever or whatever it had been, disappeared almost as soon as he noticed.

“Maybe it was a deer,” he said into the phone. “We get a lot of them around here.” Then he stopped talking for a moment as he saw something else.

A break in the steady rain showed him someone standing in the rose garden, a person this time, he felt sure. Even on a dark and dreary afternoon with the lights from the hotel masked by the rain he saw something, someone... a girl? An even larger gap in the rain gave him a better look. A naked girl? A naked girl standing in the rose garden, her hands on her shapely ass, her back arched, her magnificent breasts clearly revealed -- and then the rain came down in sheets again and she was gone.

Colonel Edge blinked.

The phone was saying something to him, asking him something. “No,” he told it. “No, I don’t think I saw anything after all, just a trick of the light in all this rain.”

He listened a moment. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll stay on until the firemen get here.”

Behind him, Mrs. Dumfries herself, the owner of the hotel, emerged from the dining room wrapped in a black nylon rain suit and carrying an umbrella with hand painted Japanese flower designs all over it. Her gray hair showed in a curly aura peeking out from under the hoodie of the rain suit and she had a phone in her hand, too. She had called the fire department directly, not reckoning a fire in an outbuilding on a rainy day counted as a real emergency.

She stepped up beside Colonel Edge, as near to the railing of the deck as either of them could get without touching the rain-soaked barrier. “There wasn’t anyone out there, was there?” she asked.

“I don’t believe so,” Edge lied. He knew what he had seen and he knew how to keep secrets.

The Starchild by Erin Halfelven   Chapter 7 Get Around

Simon managed to open the door to his apartment without putting the woman in his arms down; hugging her close to him was no hardship and the rainy patio was no place for someone who was barefoot.

“Here we go,” he said as he eased her down onto his sitting room carpet.

“Thank you, Simon,” she said. She smiled up at him, though the expression seemed a bit strained. “You are still the best master ever.”

“Huh,” said Simon, not sure how to respond. “Habib!” he called out. “Habib? Are you in here?”

“I’m Habib,” said the beautiful naked woman still standing oh-so-very-close to Simon.

* * *

After spinning once like a dog chasing her tail, the girl who thought of herself as Simon realized how ridiculous she must look and contented herself with feeling of all her appendages and accessories. “Jimmies! I’m built like Coco Austin with bigger boobs,” she complained.

She shook her head, flinging water from her hair, her chin and other pointy parts of her anatomy. “Ooo, that was weird,” she said. She looked around to see if anyone had seen her but the rain had began falling harder and she could hardly even see the hotel. Downslope, the Folly continued burning but probably not for much longer. In the distance, she heard the sound of a siren and realized someone must have called the fire department.

“Sugar Pops!!” she said, “I’d better get inside before someone sees me.” She started to trot toward the door to Simon’s apartment but stopped suddenly; the bouncing felt just too weird. “First thing to do is to get Habib to change me back into a guy!” She walked the rest of the way to the door, looking around and calling for Habib several times.

* * *

Up on the deck above the lower entrance to the hotel, Colonel Edge watched the girl he had seen in the rain walk toward him. Mrs. Dumfries had gone out through the front of the hotel to intercept the firetruck and direct it around the building to the narrow track leading to the Folly. Or what was left of that unfortunate building. Edge was alone on the deck outside the dining room.

Alone with a vision of beauty that left him almost breathless. The girl had a shape like an hour-and-a-half glass. Generous, top and bottom, but wasp-waisted almost to an extreme. Long hair that was probably blonde when dry reached to her waist.

She walked toward him through the rain and mist with a background of fire. She did not look up so she didn’t see him on the deck above her. He hung back a little though he could not have said why but he moved forward as it became obvious that she intended to use the lower entrance to the hotel. He kept her in sight until she disappeared almost directly beneath him.

Edge thought there might be a room down there in what he thought of as the basement. He searched his memory to see if he knew who might live down there. He thought he remembered someone complaining that the hotel dining room was directly over his bedroom -- thin, dark fellow, looked like a Mediterranean version of Elvis -- Nader Something?

He debated with himself about going downstairs and trying to find the girl but what would he say to her? I saw you naked on the back lawn looking magnificent in the rain and I wanted to get a better look? He smiled, a little lopsidedly. He didn’t think so, it wasn’t his style. He’d find out who she was before he introduced himself.

* * *

“Crap, crap, crap again,” the girl who thought of herself as Simon muttered as she reached the the patio. She had her arms wrapped around herself under her breasts in an attempt to minimize the distracting motions. “Bounce, bounce, bouncey! Habib! This is not amusing.”

She turned to look back toward the burning hulk of the Folly. “Where is Habib?” she asked aloud. “Habib, if this is your idea of being funny...” She turned back toward the door of Simon’s apartment. Despite it being only about two in the afternoon, gloom filled the space under the first floor deck and two yellowish patio lights did little to make it less foreboding. It was a perfect place to feel a chill run down the middle of your back.

Simon felt a nasty one as she reached for the door handle and heard voices from inside her apartment. One of the voices sounded familiar, kind of like her father who had been dead for almost ten years.

* * *

Across the city, in off-campus housing for the University of Puget Sound, two young second year students woke up bright and early Monday afternoon from their usual weekend drinking binge. Neither of them were far from being expelled for grades and non-attendance and, even with the intervention of wealthy relatives, seemed unlikely to get degrees at this particular institute of higher learning.

Howard Dudat, known variously as Howie (from his first name), Dude (from his last), Bluto (from a supposed resemblance to John Belushi), and Jackass (from his personality), rolled over and groaned. “Am I sleeping on the floor?” he asked no one.

Regardless, he got an answer from his roommate. “Keep it down, Dude,” said Peter Henry Piet from somewhere behind and above Howie. “You ain’t sleeping if you’re talking unless you’re talking in your sleep and if you start doing that, besides the snoring, we are going to be ex-roommates fast.” Pete had several nicknames, too, but usually went by Pete or Piet--who could tell?

Together the friends were known as The Booze Brothers and if someone squinted just right and imagined them in blue business suits with sunglasses and fedoras, they did resemble Jake and Elwood. Either that or a clean-shaven Mutt-and-Jeff.

“Shaddup,” said Howie, with his customary morning charm. He levered his rotund body to a sitting position and looked around the ruins of their apartment. “Dafuck? Who painted shit on the wall?” It did look like shit but was really brownish plum sauce from a local Chinese delivery joint.

Pete, who had been lucky enough to drape his length over the davenport, grunted. “Probably the same chickie who threw up in both of our beds.”

“Both of our beds?” protested Howie. “Now we got to fuckin’ move--again?”

“That or do laundry,” agreed Pete.

With various noises worthy of a logging camp donkey engine, Howie struggled to his feet. “It’s fuckin’ cold in here, too.” Goosebumps covered his exposed flabby flesh and a lot of it was visible since he wore nothing but a stained pair of boxers and a torn Nirvana t-shirt.

Pete hadn’t moved except to put his arm across his eyes. “You know the upchucking chick? Her boyfriend broke the windows in our rooms.”

“Both our rooms? Christ, what an asshole. What dafuck did we invite him for?”

“I don’t think we did. At least, I didn’t,” said Pete. “You, on the other hand, are enough of a dickwad to do something like that.”

“Shaddup,” said Howie, stumbling toward the bathroom. “Didn’t anyone think to close the doors to the bedrooms?”

“Apparently not,” said Pete. “What a good idea. You gonna do it?”

“Shaddup,” said Howie, making tinkling noises into the toilet bowl.

“Apparently not,” Pete repeated.

Howie flushed then brushed his teeth and gargled before saying anything else. “Where dafuck is the Tylenol?”

“We’re out. Take some aspirin,” said Pete. “It’ll work better anyway.”

“You tryna kill me? You fuckin’ know I’m allergic to aspirin.”

“Oh, yeah.” Pete snickered, still on the davenport.

“Smartass,” said Howie, stumbling through the refuse toward the kitchen. He thought he remembered part of a bottle of Tylenol in the spice rack. Tylenol was sort of a spice, wasn’t it? What the hell else would you keep there if you didn’t actually do any cooking?

At the kitchen table sat Pete, buttering saltine crackers and popping them in his mouth between sips from a can of Canada Dry Diet Ginger Ale.

“How can you drink that fuckin’ stuff?” asked Howie.

Pete sprayed cracker crumbs answering. “Mmeef, mpf dmf mf n-nf br-pf,” he said.

“Whadda ya mean, we don’t have any beer?” Howie checked the refrigerator. “Muthafuck! We don’t have any beer!”

“Pt-lmf mu tpf,” said Pete.

“Yeah, yeah, give yourself a fucking no-prize.” Howie shrugged and took a can of diet ginger ale himself and popped it. He took a sip. “Nasty!” he said and took another. He gestured at the spice cabinet but it was out of reach above the stove. The door of the little box glued to the wall flew open anyway and a tiny travel-size Tylenol floated out all by itself.

Pete watched, his mouth full of cracker crumbs. “Mow few noo nadh, Noonadh?” he asked.

“How’d I do what?” asked Howie as the pill bottle orbited his head. He didn’t seem to notice and took another sip of ersatz ginger ale, his eyes slightly glazed.

“Dat,” said Pete, pointing at the Tylenol container.

Howie glanced up then snatched the bottle out of the air. “Muthafuck! Don’t throw stuff at me while I’m hungover!”

Pete laughed damp cracker crumbs all over the kitchen table then took several sips of his beverage to clear his mouth. “It’s not your hangover, it’s your overhang,” he said, pointing at Howie’s belly.

“Shaddup,” said Howie. He wandered back toward the living room, extracting a couple of pills and washing them down with soda.

Still draped across the couch, Pete lifted his arm and squinted at him. “Hey, Dude. Maybe I swapped those Tylenol for aspirin?” he suggested.

“What -- the fuck?” Howie spun around and looked back into the kitchen where another Pete was again buttering saltines and laying them in neat rows. “The fuck?” Howie repeated, spinning back.

Now there were two Petes sitting on the couch, yawning identically. “This is such a crazy day,” they both said. “I think I’m beside myself.”

Howie spun around twice more, spilling diet ginger ale into the detritus of their weekend before fainting dead away.

A fourth Pete emerged from the bathroom and knelt to check Howie’s pulse. “He’s alive,” the triply redundant Pete announced. The two Petes on the couch looked around the room and added, in unison, “If you call this living.”

* * *

Simon, the male one, stared at the slender dark-haired woman. “You mean you really are Habib?” he asked. He sounded distressed by the idea.

Habib, the female one, nodded. “When I made your wish come true, something went wrong, and....” She trailed off looking down at herself, now wearing one of Simon’s white dress shirts with the sleeves rolled up above her elbows.

“Wow,” said Simon. “That’s... something.”

Habib frowned. “It’s perverse, is what it is. Djinn rules are very strict on changing someone’s sex. I think I’ve triggered some sort of.... I cannot....” She frowned. “I think I’m being punished.”

Simon looked wounded. “Does...? Does it hurt?”

Habib shook her head, distracting herself for a moment with the movement on her back of the mass of hair falling down almost to her waist. She reached up with both hands and gathered it off her neck.

Simon took a deep breath.

“No, it doesn’t hurt, but I cannot reach into other worlds, only this one. I cannot make contact with other djinn.” She sighed. “The standard punishment for perversity is forty years of restricted use of djinn resources and abilities.” Her frown came close to turning into a pout. “But I would have thought I would get a chance to explain! I didn’t do this on purpose and neither did you.”

Simon shook his head. He intended never to admit it but the thought had occurred to him to have Habib turn into a Barbara Eden-style genie. And it had sounded perverse to him, too, which is why he would never say anything about it.

“Forty years is not so long,” said Habib. “I once spent half that long as a horse.”

“A horse?” Simon said, startled.

“Yes, not all masters are as reasonable or accountable as you are, Simon. I think I can do this, half the human race manages to be women without to much effort. Eh?” The corners of her mouth turned up.

Simon smiled to see her smile.

She pulled her hair up above her head. “What am I going to do with this? I have no idea how to take care of all this hair. It’s an obscene lot of bother, don’t you think?”

Simon grunted. ”Don’t cut it,” he said in a strangled voice.

She looked at him. “I had thought to, but now I can’t.” She frowned again.

Neither of them moved for a long moment as the realization sank in on both of them that Habib was still bound to Simon’s will by three thousand year old magical agreements.

* * *

On the Little World of the Djinn, Baghadu’ur, the other Habib, the male one, continued to enjoy his luncheon with the Hakeem. The day was bright and peaceful, the land, the food and the houris all beautiful and appropriate. Baghadu’ur felt almost content, though a thought for his master back on earth nagged at him occasionally.

The terms of the djinn sanctions against perversity meant that nothing could be done to change a female Simon back into a male one for another forty years. Habib shrugged, half the human race managed to be women on a daily basis, surely Simon could adjust. And he, or rather she, would have superpowers just as had been wished.

“What in Seven Worlds?” he heard the Hakeem ask and looked up to see where the Judge of the Green Djinn’s gaze was fixed. A very long-eyed race in themselves, Djinn could also magically enhance their vision and Baghadu’ur clearly saw what Hakeem must be looking at.

Miles away, out at the edge of the land around the Judge’s estate they saw a rider moving quickly toward them, driving his horse with almost cruel urgency.

Simon, the female one, realized that she had to reach up to the handle of the sliding glass door that opened from the patio into her apartment. “The heck is this? Habib, you not only turned me into a girl, you made me short!”

She measured herself against the frame and estimated her height. “Being only five feet tall is not a superpower, Habib!” she fumed, reaching again for the door handle.

* * *

Inside, the other Simon was asking, “What’s the word for a female djinn?”

Habib, the female one, said, “Djirini. Someone is outside calling my name.”

“Your name? Who knows your name?” Simon turned and looked but he had automatically closed the drape when he carried Habib inside; something about having a naked woman in his apartment made him cautious about privacy, perhaps. Well, she had one of his shirts on, now, so....

He moved to open the door, saying at the same time. “I can’t keep calling you Habib, isn’t that a guy’s name? What’s the Persian female version? Habibeh?”

“Please don’t call me that!” Habib protested. “Habib means friend, Habibeh means fiancée!”

Simon paused for a moment, started to turn back but a noise came from the door, so he pulled back the drape and slid the door open at the same time, just as the female Simon outside the door tried to do the same.

They stood there looking at each other in astonishment for a moment; one -- very tall, male, and wearing clothes that seemed a bit small for him; the other -- little, female, stacked and naked.

“Dad?” said the shorter of the two Simons. “You look like my dad....”

* * *

Wilson Courage had never expected to end up a member of the police department of Tacoma. His college major had been in Art with a minor in Business Administration, strictly as a fallback. But he’d been recruited as a staff artist for the department and had gone back to school to get a credential in Law Enforcement.

Then he’d found out that no one got promoted above Officer First without time on the streets, so he’d spent six months as a beat patrolman then two years in a squad car, taken the sergeant’s exam and passed with a nearly embarrassing 100%. He still did I.D. art when the department needed it and had a desk in the Detective’s Office downtown, complete with computer and all the drawing software he needed.

That’s where he found out that no one made Lieutenant without time in the detective squad. He’d put in for a transfer to the detective squad last December and it had finally come through, along with a promotion to Detective Sergeant Third. His art desk became his permanent desk in the detective office, with a smaller desk alongside for a phone and a computer.

Tacoma wasn’t a big city, just a middling large one, so they only had one detective squad, commanded by Captain Vance Andrews and Lieutenant Marjorie Ullersen. Both of them were standing near his desk when he arrived that April morning. Andrews was OIC of Downtown Division on weekends and Ullersen was CO of the Detective Squad and Wilson’s new boss.

“Seems funny to say welcome when you’ve been hanging out here for almost a year,” said the Loot. “But I guess I can say, ‘Welcome, Sergeant Courage!’ at least.”

Wilson grinned. He’d sewn the sergeant stripes onto his uniform only that morning. Not that he was wearing his police uniform today, as a detective he would normally be in plainclothes now.

Captain Andrews laughed. “Our new sergeant is an ambitious lad, Marje. Have you seen the webcomic he works on when he thinks no one is looking?” Andrews was a large man, nearing forty, with big hands, dark skin and a receding hairline in front of his mini-Afro.

Marje nodded. “It’s called ‘Captain Courage,’ right? But maybe you’re bucking for my job since I think the character is a policewoman?” She grinned. A tall blond woman with piercing blue eyes that still had a twinkle after ten years of police work, Lt. Ullersen reminded Wilson of a Valkyrie from Norse Legend. Department legend was that she had been a part-time member of GLoW, Glamours Ladies of Wrestling, in her college days.

“Ah, yes, ma’am,” he said. He didn’t want to admit it, but he had modeled his webcomic character after the lieutenant, disguising her with red hair instead of blond. He tried to change the subject quickly, afraid that one of the two would ask to see some of his artwork. “Have you got an assignment for me, today?”

“What do you think, Skip?” Ullersen asked Andrews. “Break the new guy in easy?”

The captain grinned as if what Ullersen had said was funny. “Sure, sure,” he agreed.

Marje nodded. “You’re on ride-around with Sergeant Murrows, all this week, Courage.”

Wilson winced and his two superiors chuckled. Abel Murrows was senior sergeant on the Detective Squad and a bit of a grump. But at least it gave him an excuse to get moving and avoid any further interrogation.

He’d just got down to the parking garage and turned up his raincoat’s hoodie against the drizzle when he saw Sergeant Murrows talking on the phone in a plainwrap cruiser. He hurried toward the car wondering what his first detective assignment would be like.

* * *

“You look like my dad, but you’re not, are you?” the naked girl at the door said to Simon.

“Uh, no, miss, I don’t think I am...” he trailed off. Talking to two naked women in one day made it a very unusual day. This one looked young enough to be a daughter of his, if he had ever had a daughter but as far as he knew, he had not. She even has a vague sort of family look, except that she was so short.

“You’re Simon Paul, aren’t you?” asked the girl, pushing wet strands of hair out of her face. Moving her arms up to do that sort of pushed her rather large chest into more prominent display.

Simon glanced away, his face turning red, just as Habib came up beside him. “Uh, yes, yes, I am, Simon Paul, and uh, this is my apartment. Um, do you need to come in and… and call someone? I think I can find something for you to wear.” He stepped aside.

Blinking, the girl stepped inside, dripping a bit on the doormat. She stared at Habib wearing an oversize dress shirt. “If you’re Simon, who’s this baked goods?”

“Pardon me?” Simon yelped, surprised at the girl’s rudeness. Despite it being mid-afternoon, the overcast day and the roof of the patio had made it rather dark outside. Seen in the interior light, she had a truly astonishing figure and Simon looked away again, swallowing hard. “Th-that’s not a very nice thing to say!” Baked goods? Had she said baked goods?

“It’s all right,” said Habib. “You can call me... Roxanna, I guess. Which....” She trailed off, staring at the girl.

“Huh,” said the tall man and the short girl at the same time.

Simon shook his head, startled into looking at her again. “Let me... look for something for you to wear,” He stammered and headed for the closet.

Roxanna, or Habib, headed for the bathroom. “You’ll need something to wrap up all that hair,” she said. “I’ll find you a towel.”

“I suppose,” said the girl. She looked very downhearted and sank slowly until she sat on the rug in front of the door. She glanced down at herself and frowned, sort of swatting with one hand at her breasts and feeling behind her with the other one. “It’s like a... fahrfegnugen pillow back there,” she muttered.

“You didn’t tell us your name,” said Roxanna, returning more quickly. She knelt beside the girl and offered the big, fluffy green bath towel.

“If he’s Simon,” she muttered, “...I guess... I guess, I don’t know who the jam I am.”

Roxanna leaned in close and whispered. “I think I know who you are.... Simone?”

The girl looked up startled, her blue eyes wide.

Roxanna pointed at herself. “I’m Habib,” she said.

Simon came back into the room carrying a light blue t-shirt with a Superman logo on it. “Uh, this is a bit small on me, maybe you can wear it as a dress?”

The girl’s gaze snapped to him. “A candy-striped dress?” she yelped.

“Well, uh, no,” said Simon. “That’s a Superman logo....” He trailed off, confused.

Habib, or Roxanna, dropped the big green towel over the girl’s head. She held a hand out for the t-shirt and motioned that Simon should leave the room

With some relief, he did, even closing the door behind him.

“What’s the big fudge delight?” asked the girl under the towel.

* * *

Three amateur astronomers in different places all spotted Earth’s new companion about the same time. Later, they would all three be asked to suggest a name to be bestowed by the proper astronomical authorities. The Persian offered Mehrzad, meaning child of the sun because of the object’s brilliance. The Scot suggested Emeraldine because of it’s gorgeous green color.

And the American wanted it named Krypton, meaning hidden, because where had it been all this time that no one had ever seen it before?

Image credit: mariyaermolaeva / 123RF Stock Photo

 
The man who had called himself The Urban Commando for nearly twenty years looked into the woman's eyes. She repeated herself. "You're dying."

"I heard you," he said.

The explosion had nearly ripped him in two, if not for his armor he would already be dead. "Got those people out?" he asked again.

She nodded. "Most of them."

Which meant not all. So Baron Stryker had won, innocents had died and Urban had failed. He already knew that Stryker had escaped, riding that doomsday device he had stolen from Hermetic Labs.

"'S'funny," he whispered. "All I wanted to do was stop the street crime, people getting shot. Who knew I'd end up fighting a fricking mad scientist for half my life?"

She didn't laugh, pushing her silvery hair away where it almost fell into his face. "I can save you," she said.

"Do it, Lady K," he said. "I still have to get that bastard Stryker."

She nodded. "You know you will die as Urban Commando? But you'll live on as someone else, someone who would have died without your life force?"

"Got it," he said. "Be quick."

Lady Karma put her hands on his face and everything went dark.

* * *

"She's a fighter," someone said.

Tessie heard them talking about her.

"Broken ribs, concussion, pneumonia, she could have died in the plane crash, let alone walking out of the Cascades with her injuries in the winter."

They probably didn't know she could hear them.

"Pretty remarkable for a little girl," one of the voices commented.

"I'm only eight now," thought Tessie. "I could use a long vacation but you've got less than a decade, Stryker. Then I'm coming for you." She snuggled with the enormous Raggedy Anne her new parents had bought for her and went back to sleep.

Don't blame me, someone asked if I could continue this...

 
As soon as she knew she would be alone for a reasonable length of time, Tessie dialed the seventeen digit number that would connect her directly to Centurion headquarters. It took awhile to set this up because who leaves a wounded eight-year-old alone for very long?

But her new parents were sound asleep after a couple of drinks at dinner and what had sounded like marathon sex. And her new older brother slept like a lump of basalt at the bottom of the Atlantic trench. She ought to be safe from being interrupted for a while.

She spent only a moment wondering why Kenny took so much delight in annoying her. Maybe it was just what older brothers did. Silently she mouthed apologies to the younger sisters of Hank Herbert who was no more.

She negotiated Daedalos's security gadgets with passwords, a triple layer that depended on timing as well as exact words because her voice print wasn't on file. She tugged on her braids when the phone finally began to ring.

"Hello?" someone answered cautiously. Tessie could understand that, she'd used Urban Commando's private codes and that would show on the phone screen.

"It'th me," she said.

"Who'th me?" the voice on the other end lisped back.

She recognized the voice; Blueblazes must surely be someone's older brother. She sighed. "Jutht put one of the grownupth on will you, Billy?"

"Urban? Is that really you?"

"It'th Tethie now. Tess-ie," she said carefully. "I need to talk to Kay."

"It's three in the morning, honeybun. I'm on mids so...wait? Guess who just came in?"

"Oh, hurry, Billy! Put her on the phone," Tessie urged.

"What's the rush? Sounds like you've got some growing up to do. Tessie, did you say? Are you a girl now? A little girl?" Billy Blueblazes snickered.

Tessie danced with a new urgency. "Yeth! Okay? Now put the Lady on 'cauthe I've got a little girl bladder now, too, and I don't want to leave a puddle in the living room!"

Over Billy's laughter, Lady Karma's voice said, "I knew you might call tonight, Urban." The advantages of dealing with a psionic sorceress, Tessie reflected momentarily.

"Oh, Kay!" Tessie whimpered, looking around to see that she wasn't being watched or overheard. "I think my new daddy is a thupervillain!"

"F-for heaven's sake, honey! Who do you think he is?" Even Lady Karma could be surprised.

Tessie enunciated carefully. "Death Masque," she whispered.

I'm writing these as I post them, so don't expect too much. :)

 
"Why do you think your Daddy is Death Masque, sugar?" asked Lady Karma. She waved at Billy Blueblazes to stop laughing.

Tessie sighed. "Am I on thpeaker phone?" Her eight-year-old tongue persisted in giving her trouble with sibilants.

"Um, yes."

"Listen up, Billy, and quit laughing like a cartoon," said Tessie.

"Hey!" said Billy. But he sat down and started clicking at the keyboard of his terminal, pulling up a dossier.

Lady K smiled. "Go ahead, Tessie, we're both listening and I'm recording."

"Three things," said the child who had once been the Urban Commando. "One, I recognized him, we fought back in the seventies before Last Centurion formed our group. Remember, Masquerade was a bad guy group. Miss Glamour, Dr. Domino, Z9, that bunch."

"Losers," commented Billy. "Didn't he wear a mask?"

"Pretty much," Tessie agreed. "But just one of those Spirit-type masks. Not very good."

"That was before your time, Billy," said Lady K. Still in his early twenties, Billy Blueblazes ranked as the youngest of the active Centurions, not counting Tessie.

"And there's the other two thingth - things," Tessie paused. "Yesterday, when we were out on the deck, for jutht a second I could see the sun shining through him."

"What the heck does that mean?"

"It's in the dossier," said Lady K. "Death Masque absorbs the powers of anyone he kills. He killed all his partners in Maquerade; so he should have Miss Glamour's invisibility, which had the disadvantage that in a strong light you could sometimes see through her."

"I had a girlfriend like that," commented Billy.

"You had a girlfriend?" Tessie and Lady K said simultaneously. Tessie giggled but Kay only smiled.

"Hey!" said Billy. "So what's the third thing?"

* * *

After her report to Centurion HQ, and a quick trip to the bathroom, Tessie yawned like only a sleepy child can because an adult would dislocate something.

She tiptoed down the hall, to her own room, after glancing at her new parents' bedroom door. She left her own door open and crawled into bed, pulling her colorful dolly into a tight embrace. "Don't be afraid, Annie," she whispered. "I'll protect you."

Feeling only a little silly, she kissed the doll and went back to sleep.

 
Billy Blueblazes closed the file on the supervillain group once known as Masquerade. Most of the members of that ill-fated group had died in the late seventies but one member, at least, had never been convincingly buried. "Do you think Urban, uh, Tessie, is right about her new daddy being Death Masque," Billy asked Lady Karma.

Kay pushed silver hair away from her face and looked thoughtful. "It's worth checking out."

"Yeah, but," Billy said, "Tessie's just eight years old now, maybe she imagined it."

"It's possible, but Urban fought crime and supervillains for twenty years; we've got to trust that his judgement is still worth something."

"Umph. How does that work, anyway? The kid is still the kid but she's also Urban? I couldn't believe it when she made the joke about my girlfriend, I don't remember Urban even having a sense of humor," said Billy.

"Tessie would have died after the kidnapper's plane crashed, Urban's lifeforce joined with hers enabled her to walk out of the mountains to where the Rangers could find her. She became, um, sort of a sideways reincarnation of our friend Hank Herbert, the Urban Commando, with her own and Hank's memories, sensibilities and personality. It'll be awhile before they completely meld into one person."

"Sounds uncomfortable," said Billy. "And unreliable. Middle-aged black crimefighter becomes cute little blond girl."

"If I ever have to reincarnate you, Billy, I'll try to arrange something more your speed, like a Labradoodle, a neutered Labradoodle," said Lady K.

"Oh, give me a break. Speed is my middle name, Kay."

"I thought 'Blue' was your middle name. Hey, Billy?" She pointed. "Your hair is on fire."

"What, like I haven't heard that one before?" He passed his hand through the cobalt flames that covered his shaved head, grinning at her.

"No, really," said Kay, sounding entirely serious.

* * *

Todd Munson eased down the hall in the early morning light with long practiced quiet. He checked first on his daughter, brave little Tessie, still recovering from her wounds, snuggled with her dolly. Those kidnappers were lucky they had died in the crash; if Todd had ever caught them.... Still invisible, he checked on Kenny, too. Both kids slept soundly, safe for now.

Candace joined him in the hall; groping a bit to find him, she slipped her hand through the crook of his elbow and pressed herself against him. Visible again, he looked down into her face. "Any ideas yet?" she asked.

He shook his head. "As long as we don't know who called for the snatch, it could happen again."

They squeezed each other. "Do you think it's because someone knows who you are?" she asked.

"Must be," he said glumly. "We don't live rich enough to attract kidnappers otherwise. I need more information but I don't see how I dare leave you to go look for it. I'm going to call someone who might be willing to help."

Candace kissed him. "Do whatever you think is right, Todd. I'm on your side."

Todd sighed. "I've been straight so long, I'm not even sure I know how to go on the crook anymore. But considering everything, I sure can't go to the authorities. Blue Galaxy, the Protectors, the Centurions -- you know they'd all like to toss me in Tartaros."

Candace smiled up at him. "My hubbers, the big bad supervillain. You know it's Tuesday, did you put the cans on the curb last night?"

They both laughed softly, careful not to wake the kids.

 
Daedalos listened to the log tape again. Lady K's magic had worked, Urban Commando had survived and now lived as the daughter of a man who might be a fugitive supervillain. Interesting. But there was something else on the tape that was even more intriguing. As Security Officer and Gadgetmaster of the Centurions, he'd have to bring this to the attention of the group. Carefully. Sooner or later.

And how would this little sidelight influence his own special plans for the future?

* * *

"You got any idea what time it is?" the voice on the phone growled.

"Three hours later than it is here, Pierce," said Todd Munson calmly. "I'm in a jam, I'm calling in a favor."

"All for the glory of Cell Block B, huh?" Pierce growled.

"Something like that."

"I thought you went legit?" Pierce asked.

"And you got a pardon from the president. Better off than I am. Blue Stars catch up with me and I'm for that little old retirement home down in the Superstitions." Todd meant the Federal Bureau of Corrections Apache Caverns Installation under Flatiron Mountain in Arizona, commonly called Tartaros, where federal prisoners considered too dangerous for ordinary lockups were kept. State prisoners could also be transferred there under the Overman Act.

"You still hiding out?"

"Uh huh? You available for some security work?"

"You paying? I've got a steady gig here in New York. Bodyguard for a supermodel, no less."

"You dog," said Todd, grinning. "I'm sorry -- you old tomcat."

"It's a living," said Pierce with a laugh.

"Yeah, I'm paying. $500 a day plus expenses. Be here soonest?"

"Okay, where's here?"

"I'll pick you up at Sea-Tac, call me back with your flight number."

"Yeah, oh, I'm using the name Leonard Paine these days."

"I'm Todd Munson," said Tessie's new father. "Leo, Todd, Todd, Leo." After he hungup he sat staring at the phone for a bit. The man he'd known as Tom Pierce would make a formidable bodyguard for his children while he tracked down the would-be kidnappers' boss. Pierce, or Paine as he called himself now, wouldn't hesitate to kill in defense of a client and that's exactly what Todd wanted.

He stood and went looking for his wife. "Candace, honey? I got us a babysitter."

* * *

Out over the Indian Ocean, a man in an enormous plane that never landed in daylight received a bit of intelligence from one of his agents. He didn't show much emotion as he read it on the screen built into his laptable but his grip tightened on the wrist of the boy sitting in the well-upholstered chair next to him. The boy moaned softly, and the man looked at him, his colorless eyes invisible behind mirror shades. "I'm sorry," he said, "did I hurt you?" He released the boy and patted him on the knee. "We'll be in Dubai soon, we can get out there and stretch our legs. Would you like that?"

The boy nodded.

"Maybe we'll see some camels," said the man, smiling. "That might be fun."

The boy nodded again.

"Go up forward, Johnny, and tell Captain Spartako that I'd like to speak with him. You can stay up front for a while, too. Use the computers if you like."

"Thank you, sir," said the boy before dashing off to the forward cabin of the plane.

* * *

Back in the Seattle suburb where she now lived, Tessie got up when her mother called her. She did her morning business then went out to the bright airy kitchen. Her broken ribs had hardly even twinged when she pulled on a fresh t-shirt, one decorated with sad-but-cute blue bunnies.

"Muffin or cereal?" Candace asked her.

"Muffin," said Tessie, sitting at the smaller white table under the window where her brother Kenny was already pushing Froot Loops into his face.

"Morning, Snotnose," said Kenny.

"Morning, Booger-breath," she replied.

"Knock it off," said Candace. "I'm making scrambled eggs for both of you, too, so no disgusting talk at the table. Sheesh!" She poured juice from a large decanter for them and set a blueberry muffin down in front of Tessie.

"He started it," said Tessie.

"Doesn't matter. Your dad's gone to the airport to pick up a friend and I don't want to have to get out the lion tamer chair to separate you." Candace sipped her coffee, wondering if she could talk Todd into letting her call her sister to take her place so she could join him in his -- hunt. Probably not. This Paine fellow sounded like someone who might eat Krystal up. Or vice versa, she reflected, knowing her sister's taste for dangerous men matched her own.

Kenny put Froot Loops into his nose, while Candace wasn't watching, in an effort to gross out his little sister.

Tessie giggled. "Now eat them," she told him.

 
Oakland, California. The city across the bay from San Francisco, better weather, better food, better living to hear the locals tell it -- but a little more well-known for the higher crime rate, especially violent crimes. A working city where the ships dock and the trains stop. A city that always needed its heroes. Near the east edge of town, in a cemetery spread across the hills several people gathered to say goodbye to a friend.

The services for Henry J. Herbert's family had been earlier in the morning but near noon, some of the current and past members of the Centurions came to pay respects.

Kendra Worth followed the motorized wheelchair of Nathan Ryder through the paths between live oaks and hedges of huckleberry vines. Two towering sequoias marked the upper corners of Veterans Field near the middle of which Specialist Herbert's body lay under a fresh layer of green sod. Len Salvatore stood already by the grave and they were soon joined by Gilbert Bellows, Sylvia Glass, Ted Andropoulos, and Penelope Haeckel Ryder.

No one said anything for several moments then Len asked. "His family don't know, do they?"

Kendra shook her head, her silvery hair concealed beneath a lacy black cloche hat. "Only his sister Danetta. She's the only one that knew -- who he was."

"Hank's the lucky one," said Nate. "A hero's death and yet he lives on." He thumped the arm of his chair and looked across the grave toward his ex-wife. Penelope did not look up but she nodded, silently.

Gil rubbed his shaved head and said, "It's not the same. Urban is gone, unless someone wants to take up the identity?"

Len shook his head. "I'll wear his uniform for a few appearances, just to confuse things. And make Stryker worry. We going to go after that sumbitch?"

Everyone except Kendra nodded. "I'm going to go up to the Seattle area first, check on Tessie. See if she's right about her daddy."

Ted cleared his throat. Besides security and gadgets, he was the group's liaison with the Blue Galaxy, the federal super-troopers. "We might be able to wrangle a pardon, if this Death Masque hasn't committed any serious crimes since the seventies."

Kendra shrugged. "I'm not sure I'll get close enough to ask that sort of thing."

Sylvia squatted beside the grave, dropping a yellow rose onto the fresh turf. "Goodbye, my brother," she said. Len stepped close and offered her an arm; she accepted the half hug but stepped away to wipe her eyes. "We keep losing good ones," she murmured, remembering other deaths, other cities. She'd buried almost a whole team once, including her own twin sister. She added Hank's name to the roll call in her head.

"He's not exactly dead-dead," Gil pointed out to no one. Penelope bent over Nate's chair to kiss his cheek and then everyone left.

* * *

In the concourse at Sea-Tac, one tall man shook hands with an even taller one. "Leo," he said, "I'm Todd."

"You recognized me?" asked Leo. "I thought the dye job on my hair was pretty good."

"I can see about twice as many colors as most people," said Todd. "And I can smell you."

Leo nodded and they walked through the crowds toward the carpark. Outside, the famous Seattle rain fell on the righteous and the wicked, alike.

"Keep forgetting how wet this fricken city is," Leo muttered as they got into Todd's SUV.

"We'll have you home and dry soon enough, Catclaw," said Todd. "You can meet the family."

Leo grinned. "They all wear shrouds and carry scythes, Reaperman?"

"Not hardly," said Todd. "Let me tell you what's been going on."

* * *

Tessie shivered for no apparent reason. Hank Herbert's grandma, when she saw someone shiver like that, always said, "Someone's walking on your grave, child." Tessie suspected that in this case, Grandma would have been right.

 
Tessie stared up and up at Mr. Paine. "You sure don't look much like a babysitter," she said.

Leo smiled and crouched down, though this still put his head nearly a foot above Tessie's. "Well, I'm a special sort of babysitter's assistant. Your aunt is coming over to do the babysitting and I'm here just to chase monsters away."

Tessie nodded thoughtfully. "Do I know you?"

He shook his head, "I don't think so, little lady. I'm sure I'd remember someone as cute as you." He winked.

Tessie blushed. Her brother Kenny crowed with laughter.

* * *

"I couldn't believe it when you said okay to me coming along," Candace told Todd. They were in the big SUV, headed up into the mountains where the kidnappers' plane had crashed.

Todd sighed. "I think the kids will be safe. Krystal is pretty level-headed and Paine is one deadly, fricken.... He's good."

"He's scary. Where do you know him from?"

"We used to be on the crook together.... Bad old days. Him, M'Caliber, Blooddraught, and me. Before Masquerade, they called me Reaperman. None of us had powers then...long story." He didn't say anymore for a bit and she stopped herself from asking for details.

They got off the Interstate and started up the narrower roads, heading high into the Cascades. Green trees, gray rocks, blue sky.

Finally he spoke. "Your job is going to be to keep me sane. Who else could I get to do that?"

* * *

Kendra took a cab from the airport. "Marshalldale? Lady, that's sixty miles away, you sure you want a cab? I'll have to charge you both ways, you could rent a car a whole heckuva lot cheaper."

"I don't drive," said Kendra. She didn't tell him that complicated machinery involving moving pieces of iron or steel tended to have some rather severe failure modes when under the control of a practitioner of psionic sorcery.

"You got an address?" he asked.

* * *

The jet carrying the world famous surgeon, philanthropist and composer, Dr. Hyman Meridien left Dubai airport two hours ahead of the sunrise, heading in a pole-crossing path directly for the same airport Lady Karma had just left.

It might have been fate but it wasn't.

In the "clinic" in the back of the plane, Spartako began the chemical and psychological process necessary for his new mission. It wasn't something he wanted to do but it felt like part of him, part of his destiny. But it wasn't.

In the wide, friendly lounge in the middle of the plane, the philanthropic doctor removed his mirror shades and looked deeply into the eyes of the boy, Johnny. Fascinated, Johnny couldn't look away. Dr. Meridien smiled.

Six miles below them lay the land where fortunate happenstance was called kismet. Dr. Meridien didn't believe in kismet, destiny, fate, fortune, luck or accident. Everything that happened in the world must have a purpose -- preferably Dr. Meridien's purpose.

 
"We called ourselves The Carrion Crew, and our big idea was to take scores away from other crooks. Sort of a Robin Hood thing, except we kept the swag instead of giving it away."

Candace smiled. The SUV bucketed over the washboard of a fire trail, the crash site couldn't be much further, she hoped. Her backside, however well-padded, had taken a beating.

Todd's grin looked off-center. "M'Caliber was a genius with any kind of long range weapon and pretty good at figuring tactics and operational needs. A bit of a coward in a stand-up fight though, but Catclaw, Leo as he calls himself now, more than made-up for that. Anyone more ferocious in hand-to-hand wouldn't be human. Literally."

After a moment, he repeated it, "Wouldn't be human."

* * *

Krystal lay down her cards. "Knock," she said. Tessie and Leo moaned and began to count their penalties.

"You keep feeding her," Tessie complained. "Let's switch chairs."

Krystal ran the totals quickly. "I'm out, 300. We could play something else?" she suggested, glancing over at Kenny, still lying in the floor and watching The Incredible Hour on television.

"Nah," said Leo. "Cutthroat is my second favorite game." He gathered the cards in his big, scarred hands. "We'll just deal the other direction this game. That way I can feed you for awhile," he said to Tessie who promptly blushed.

"What's your favorite game?" she asked to cover her embarrassment.

Leo and Krystal exchanged glances.

"Oh," said Tessie. "Gross." Leo winked at her and she blushed again.

* * *

"Blooddraught was our intelligence, finding jobs and getting details. A punker chick who went deeply goth before goth was cool. She liked to think of herself as Mata Hari or something and almost no one caught wise that their new girlfriend had set them up."

"Men are stupid that way," agreed Candace, causing Todd to snort.

A pair of boulders, and the surrounding trees, effectively blocked the progress of the car so they got out. Rain hats and slickers kept off the worst of the high altitude drizzle, the day like so many on this side of the mountains had gone all gray and damp.

"Take this," said Todd.

Candace belted the holster on then checked the load and safety, using the open rear hatch for shelter. A simple 9mm holding 13 rounds, a lot like what most cops carried these days, she knew. Todd had two guns; another nine and a ten, a fully automatic machine pistol.

"What was your job in the group?" she asked.

Todd checked his load and safeties and passed her another gun, a one-shot flare she could clip to her belt.

"I had to convince people we would kill them if they didn't give it up," he said. He closed the hatch and they started up the hill.

* * *

The cabbie asked, "You sure this is the place."

"I'm certain," said Kendra, "but can you wait? I may not be here long."

"Sure, the meter's running, though, lady. And I need another hunnert before you get out of the cab."

She gave him the money and stepped out on the curb next to the Munson mailbox.

* * *

The family mutt had taken one look at Leo and hid himself in the back of Kenny's closet behind the toybox. Now he emerged and made his way to the family room. Whining, he placed his head in the boy's lap and cut his eyes toward the front rooms.

Kenny looked up and frowned. "Mr. Paine?" he called out. "Someone's outside, Beefus always knows."

Leo grunted, glaring at his hand. "He and I both knew that ten minutes ago, he's just getting around to telling you." He looked across at Krystal and Tessie. "Got any fours?" he asked.

 
"Do you think we're going to find anyone up here?" Candace asked.

"Yes," said Todd, pulling a black and red ski mask over his face.

When she had her solid red mask in place, Candace asked, "Why?"

"Because the rangers told me on the phone that the police haven't gone over the site with their usual thoroughness. The kidnapping took place in Marshalldale, so yeah, maybe the suburban PD doesn't have the resources. But the Washington State Patrol could be called in and for a kidnap case, the FBI has jurisdiction.

"No cops means someone is blocking the investigation, which means there may be something at the site worth seeing. Someone may be coming back to destroy evidence because no amount of pressure can keep the cops off of working a homicide for long."

"Homicide?" said Candace.

"The kidnappers died, Tessie killed them."

"How? Didn't the plane just crash?"

"No, Tessie made it crash."

"How do you know that?" asked Candace, whispering.

"She told me."

* * *

When Kendra knocked on the door, a dog somewhere inside barked once. Less than a minute later, a very tall, lean man opened the door. "Well, hello," he said, leaning on the jamb and looking her over.

"You aren't Todd Munson," she said.

"Nope," he agreed. "I'm Leo. The Munsons aren't in. Can I help you?"

Kendra considered. The man did not act like an intruder but as if he had a perfect right to be there. "Actually, I'm here to see their daughter, Tessie?" She leaned closer to the tall man. "There are men sitting in a parked car down the street and more men hiding in the neighbors bushes."

Leo grinned. "I know. But I don't know if they're good guys or bad guys. Which are you?"

She smiled. "I was going to ask you the same thing."

He laughed and stood out of the way. "Come on in. Tessie's whomping my ass at cards, I could use a break." After Kendra passed him and said hello to Crystal inside, Leo stepped out on the lawn and waved at both sets of hidden watchers. "That oughtta put a knot in their knickers," he muttered before going over to tell the cabdriver to get lost.

* * *

Hyper-acute senses inherited from Dr. Domino warned Todd that, yes, someone smoking a cigarette and using a battery-powered drill was working at the crash site. Multiple someones.

He waved Candace to wait for him behind a screen of trees then used Miss Glamour's power to become invisible. He approached the scene slowly, stepping on needles to avoid footprints mysteriously appearing.

Three mountaineer motorbikes sat parked on a trail. One man stood guard with a peculiar-looking weapon while two worked with tools on the plane wreckage, apparently removing identifying marks.

Todd positioned himself carefully and fired three shots from the 9mm in his right hand. Z9 hadn't had M'Caliber's incredible long range accuracy but he could never miss such easy targets with his favorite gun.

 
The motorcycles exploded in one very satisfying fireball; Dr. Domino's talent for biggest result with least effort had certainly helped that along. The guard with the strange looking weapon started toward the blast but stopped suddenly as Todd stepped out of concealment. The other two agents scrambled for their own weapons, more ordinary pistols, while at the same time taking cover inside the wreckage of the plane.

Still partly invisible, and apparently about four feet left of where he actually stood, Todd spoke in a huge voice that seemed to come from the sky.

"I am Death Masque, the Eater of Souls! Give up your secrets and live or I will drink them from your dead skulls!"

The guard brought the bell of his odd gun around and fired at the place where he saw Todd's simulacrum. The gun fired a sabot that disintegrated into hundreds of armor-piercing needles and dozens of scalloped, razor-edged darts -- specially designed to penetrate the armor of Star Troopers and butcher the man inside. In this case, however, the needles and darts destroyed only some bushes, the ten-foot wide steel cloud not quite wide enough to touch the real Todd.

A four-round burst from the 10mm full-auto in Todd's left hand nearly cut the guard in two. Not a technological marvel like the buzz gun but lethal nontheless.

The painful psychic impact of the guard's death hit Todd's mind and he screamed like Lucifer falling from Heaven.

* * *

Leo paused on the lawn after dismissing the cab Kendra had used. Grinning, he mimed the two groups of hidden watchers coming out of concealment and performing lewd acts on each other.

Inside the house, Tessie launched herself at the civilian-clad Lady Karma with a shout of "Auntie Kendra! You came!"

"You don't have an Aunt Kendra!" protested Krystal.

Tessie hugged Lady K with eight-year-old ferocity. "You wouldn't know her, Aunt Krystal. She's actually Daddy's aunt. And Kenny's named after her, so there!"

"Huh?" said Kenny.

Kay rolled her eyes, Tessie winked at her, and Leo came back in, just then, still grinning. "I think the guys in the car are state cops but the ones in the bushes may just be local perverts," he said. He looked at Kendra, "Now who in the name of Sam Spade are you?"

"She's my Auntie Kendra," announced Tessie, giving Kay another hug.

"Wait a minute!" Krystal began. A scream from outside interrupted her.

* * *

While Dr. Meridien and the boy, Johnny, enjoyed the hospitality of one of the local plutocrats, Spartako rode out to an auxiliary airport in the desert. The cis-orbital craft called the Screamer took a lot of room to land.

Spartako looked forward to piloting the hypersonic scramjet again. He'd be leaving Dubai in less than an hour and arriving in eastern Washington mid-afternoon, Pacific time. Then a more conventional two hour flight to some little town called Marshalldale.

Spartako buckled his monomer gloves on and snuggled down his annealed rare earth glass helmet. He really looked forward to piloting the Screamer again. Marshalldale just sounded like more boring work.

* * *

Todd's scream had words in it. Down the hill, a quarter mile away, Candace heard them clearly.

"Blood Masque! Second guard in the trees. Kill first, question later."

She cursed under her breath, muttering, "I think I'm supposed to be Blood Masque!"

 
"Candace?" Todd called.

"Up here," she said.

He looked up. Candace crouched about fifteen feet up on the limb of an evergreen, she had the flare pistol in one hand with the other bracing her against the trunk. "What are you doing in a tree? I didn't know you could climb trees." He pulled his mask off and smoothed down his hair, grinning up at her.

"You said.... Where's the guard you warned me about?" She pulled off her own mask to look down at him.

"Still running, with the other two, I think. I had to kill one of them.... But I got the information I wanted, I know who hired them. I just don't know why."

He stepped forward to catch her as she dropped the last few feet and they hugged each other with relief. "I'm sorry you had to..." she murmured in his ear.

"Me, too." He kissed her. "You've got mask hair," he said.

"Oh!" She ran her fingers through her tangles for want of a comb. "Oh, that voice! How did you do that? Whose power was that?"

"That's actually my original power. Or non-power. Remember I said my job was to convince people?" He showed her the microphone in his mask and the tiny bud-like speaker cones he could scatter around an area while they walked back to the SUV. "It helped that in high school when everyone else wanted to play guitar in a rock band, I was building my own speakers and wiring sound boards. Actually worked as a roadie for a couple of groups."

Later, on the way back down the mountain, he told her, "His name was Paul. Paul Doncaster, they called him Donk." She understood him to mean the man he had killed. "And the guy that hired Donk was a crooked State Patrol lieutenant named Frank LeJeune."

She looked at him. They'd been married fourteen years, she knew he didn't want to tell her the rest. But he would.

Todd set his teeth in a grimace. "From the Marshalldale office. We'll call Leo as soon as we get down to where cell phones work again."

* * *

The screaming outside turned out to be from the state cops out of the parked car down the street trying to arrest the two FBI agents who had been hiding in the bushes. One of the federal agents was a small brunette woman with a penetrating howl.

Leo stood around enjoying kibitzing while the four law officers tried to settle their jurisdictional dispute before calling in any superiors.

Krystal, Kendra, Tessie and Kenny watched through the windows for a bit then Tessie drew Lady K away for a private talk in the kitchen.

"Urban?" said Kay. "Is that really you?" It seemed unlikely that the grizzled old street warrior had become this little pig-tailed blonde pixie.

Tessie wrinkled her nose. "Yeah, it's me. But I'm Tessie too. Do you really think you can help my daddy?"

Kendra nodded. "Yes," she said. "I really think I can."

Outside on the lawn, Leo made a suggestion. "Why don't you guys shoot each other? That would solve the whole thing."

Three of the law officers snapped at him, "Shut up!"

The fourth put one hand on one ear and held his cell phone to the other. "Yes, sir," he mumbled then closed the phone up, looking satisfied. "That was Lieutenant LeJeune, he's got a meeting at the airport then he's gonna come over here and sort out Fred and Wilma."

Meaning the FBI agents, all pairs of which were called Fred and Wilma, or Fred and Barney if more appropriate, or very occasionally, Wilma and Betty, by local cops all over the country. Any third agent was automatically Dino. Generally speaking, the Feds hated the nicknames.

 
Billy Blueblazes liked to say that while he wasn't the fastest man on the planet, he was certainly the fastest man on Earth. Doc Spectral could fly at the speed of light, line of sight or fly by wire, and Dynamann could fly in space at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour using the solar wind like a one man space-going clipper ship. Billy's teammate, the Nuclear Knight, in a cis-orbital trajectory could peak at about Mach 9 but Nukes wasn't human.

Nobody could run faster than Billy.

And surrounded by his protective cold blue flames, Billy could run so fast that he could almost break the sound barrier. Almost. Every time he had gotten that close, he'd lost control -- crashed -- twice he'd almost died. Daedalos's new boron-nitride-fiber armor with the teflon and single molecule iridium layers might just keep him alive -- if he crashed again.

Because he just had to get to the Marshalldale airport in less than an hour, a distance of 737 miles. Just a hair faster than the speed of sound, maybe only a molecule faster but Billy couldn't even try to break the sound barrier near a city, that would be too dangerous. So he'd have to try to make up a bit of time on the long empty straightaways on the interstates.

And there were mountains to climb. And when he got close to Portland, he'd have to try to decide whether to try to reach Marshalldale through Yakima or Tacoma. Either way, the last thirty miles would be on narrow, twisting mountain roads where a trip or stumble could be disaster.

Because if Billy didn't make it, somebody might die. Somebody besides Billy. He just couldn't allow that. Not and keep calling himself a hero.

* * *

Spartako liked flying the jet-assist copter almost as much as the Screamer cis-orbital. Not nearly as fast as the big scramjet but you flew close enough to the ground to see the country. Well, what you could see traveling at nearly half the speed of sound. It wouldn't be a long trip, though. Less than an hour to Marshalldale, now.

Being a cyborg wasn't all bad when you had so many neat machines to plug into, thought Spartako. He tried not to think about what he had to do when he reached

* * *

"You're kidding?" said Leo. He'd stepped away from the squabbling state and federal agents to take the portable phone handed to him by Krystal.

"Donk remembered this guy LeJeune hiring him. A crooked state cop and he's right there in Marshalldale," Candace told him, repeating the story Todd had gotten from the memories of the dead thug. "We're just turning onto I-90 now, we're about an hour away. Reception has been crap." Cellphone frequencies don't like rain and the slopes of Mt. Rainier have plenty of it.

"Yeah, but -- LeJeune is the boss of these two state goons on your lawn. They say he's got an errand at the airport then he's coming here," said Leo. Before he said anything else, Leo turned around and saw Kenny, Tessie's brother, standing behind Krystal. "I'll take care of it," he said into the phone. "Call me back in a bit," and he hung up.

"Who's watching your sister," he asked Kenny who seemed fascinated by the argument between the plainclothes police officers.

"Aunt Kendra," said Kenny.

Leo rolled his eyes, already starting for the house while considering just what to do about a crooked and possibly homocidal cop.

In the house, Kay stared at little Tessie where she crouched halfway up the wall of the cathedral-ceilinged living room. "How are you doing that?" she asked.

"Friction, I think," said the pig-tailed little blonde who used to be Urban Commando. "I can increase it or make it almost disappear. It's how I made the kidnapper's plane crash." She scooched around on the wall so she could look at Kendra without craning her neck. "At first I was too scared to try it but I'm not really scared of anything much now."

 
Kendra caught Tessie as she released her friction grip on the wall just as Leo came back into the house followed by Krystal and Kenny.

"Okay," said Leo. "Who are you?"

Kendra glanced at the civilians then at the front door.

"Krystal," said Leo. "Get us some sodas and snacks, Kenny help her." He pushed them toward the kitchen.

"What about Tessie?" asked Kenny.

Kendra balanced the eight-year-old on her hip and Tessie smiled at her brother. "I'm staying," she said.

* * *

"It's funny," said Todd. They were heading up I-90 toward the main pass into the inner valleys.

"Yeah?" said Candace. "I ain't laughing?" But she smiled.

"Donk," said Todd. Paul Doncaster, the man he'd killed to find out who had wanted to cover up evidence about the kidnappers. "He's a funny guy. A mercenary SOB who would just as soon shoot you if you might cause trouble -- but he must have known several thousand dirty jokes." The big SUV could easily pull 75 on the steep grade and Todd steered around the slower traffic. He didn't want to worry about what might be happening in Marshalldale, trying to pretend that Leo --Catclaw, another mercenary SOB-- had everything under control.

"What kind of dirty jokes?" asked Candace. She turned in her seat to face him better.

Anything for a distraction. "Some of them are really filthy," Todd warned.

"So tell one, see if I haven't heard it."

"Okay. Let me think of one that is just dirty enough to tell to my wife," said Todd. "Guy picks up a hooker down on Aurora..."

"Thbbbt!" said Candace. "I've heard it."

* * *

Ted Andropoulos, Daedalos, followed Billy Blueblazes progress on the monitors, the boy hadn't realized that GPS sensors had been installed in his new armor. Ted could even get direct readouts of his speed. But where was he going? Through the city traffic, he'd barely been able to hit bursts of 300 mph or so, it just wasn't possible to safely dodge heavy afternoon traffic while going much faster than 150 or so.

Ted followed Billy's trace north then east on the 80, then a burst of speed as Billy turned north on the 505. North? Was Billy heading toward Portland, Seattle, or maybe Marshalldale where Kendra said Urban had merged with some suburban cutie who was all of eight?

Why?

And how had Billie known the little girl's hair color before Lady Karma had found out her name when the child called Centurion HQ? Ted had checked some databases, school photos weren't great source material but little Tessie Munson was definitely blond.

And now Billy had run off without telling anyone where or why. Had he talked to someone else? Who?

* * *

They were back on the plane, leaving Dubai airport in the early morning before dawn, Johnny and the strange man called Dr. Meridien, who made Johnny feel weak and confused whenever they touched. They were going somewhere called Halifax this time. But Captain Spartako hadn't got on the plane with them.

Johnny had heard him say where he was going and the boy had had a very short time alone in the little lounge in Dubai. He'd dialed the 17-digit special number his big brother had given him. He'd had to tell someone, Captain Spartako was scary because he wasn't really human anymore, he was part machine. Or something?

Dr. Meridien had done things to Spartako, Johnny knew that. Dr. Meridien did things to people. He'd done something to Johnny's big brother a long time ago. Johnny was afraid that Dr. Meridien would do something to him soon.

Maybe Billy could save them both, save all of them. He was a superhero now, wasn't that what they did? Save people?

Johnny sure hoped so.

 
"I can't believe he's that bad at telling dirty jokes," Donk complained.

"Well, he is trying to tell them to his wife, can't be easy," said Z9.

"Not that you were ever married," said Miss Glamour.

"How do you know I've never been married?" asked Z9.

"Oh, please," Miss Glamour said. She would have rolled her eyes for emphasis but none of them had bodies any more. "One, a girl can tell and two, we've all got access to each other's memories in here."

"Damnit! He blew the punchline on that one, too!" Donk snarled. "It's not about the potato, it's about where you're putting it!"

"Shows how much attention you were paying. I married Lady Kremlin back in 1986."

"Uh huh, and a couple of renegade Polish double agents offed her on your honeymoon. Doesn't count, a honeymoon is nothing like being married."

"We're missing something," said Dr. Domino.

"He better let me tell the next joke or -- is there anything we can do to him in here?"

"What do you mean a honeymoon is not like being married? That doesn't even make sense."

"Not much. A few itches, a headache maybe," said Glamour.

"I spent a whole day once, mentally undressing every woman he met. He had a job interview to go to, made him sweat a bit." Z9 conveyed the essence of grinning to the others without access to any of the equipment.

"There's some fact we don't know, some trivial piece of information that's keeping us from understanding what is going on," said Domino. "Why did anyone want to kidnap Tessie? Maybe if we knew that...."

"No, you idiot! You have to growl that line, 'cause it's the bear that says it!" Donk demonstrated. "You don't come here for the hunting, do you?"

"I don't get that one," said Glamour.

"You wouldn't," said Z9.

"Are you implying I don't have a sense of humor?"

"It's mostly a guy thing," said Z9.

"It's mostly a prison thing," said Donk.

"Shut up!" said Domino. "I'm trying to help him think about this."

"So it's true, Tessie somehow wrecked the plane and made it crash?" asked Z9.

"It was like all the oil in the engine turned to sand," said Donk. "That's what the other guys told me."

"There's someone big behind all this. Some invisible mastermind co-ordinating everything. A global manipulator with a secret plan...."

"Is that a chicken joke? There are dirty chicken jokes? Oh, that's disgusting!"

"His wife doesn't think it's funny either."

"Women never laugh at that one," commented Donk.

"Because it isn't funny!"

"It's all in how you tell it, he doesn't tell it funny."

"So if you're so good, how come he doesn't have your ability to tell jokes?"

"He's got it, he just ain't using it. He's telling them bad on purpose. Hey, Munson! You stink!"

"He can't hear you unless he wants to."

"He's telling them badly because he's trying to make his wife laugh at how bad he is at telling dirty jokes," said Glamour.

"Yeah?" Donk sounded doubtful. "It ain't working. She ain't laughing, she's getting this look in her eye like she wants to jump his bones."

They all stayed quiet for a moment.

"Son of a gun," said Z9, "he's using my abilities to seduce his own wife."

Domino snorted. "Not your non-existent charms, you would be Lothario. He's using my ability to play to her weakness, endearing himself with a display of husbandly ineptitude at being disgusting."

"You know, that would probably work," agreed Glamour.

"Hey," said Donk. "If they pull off and do it in the back of the truck, do we get to watch?"

Urban Renewal - 15 -   by Erin Halfelven

 
"No one knows exactly where he's heading but Bully Blueblazes is on the run!" The announcer on the local UHF-TV station in Bend, Oregon gave everything that little extra touch of excitement. Which meant that after listening to him for a while, everything sounded dull as ditch digging.

"The youngest member of the Oakland, California-based supergroup, The Ultimate Centurions, is racing up Interstate-5 going no one knows where because he isn't stopping to talk!" The newshead blinked his pretty blue eyes in bafflement.

"Blueblazes will be passing Bend in just a few minutes! Members of the Ultimate Centurions could not be reached for comment."

* * *

"I can't do it!" thought Billy, "I can't break the sound barrier. Every time I get close I feel my control going; I'll crash if I try!"

Still he ran.

"I don't know why I can't do it! When I bring a foot or hand forward to run, they've got to be moving at least twice the speed of sound. But they're inside my flames, so somehow, that doesn't count."

He ran on.

"Portland ten minutes away, one thing left to try, or I'll be too late," he decided. "That bastard Spartako is nothing but a hitman, he's going to kill someone in Marshalldale. I've got to stop him!"

And he kept running.

* * *

"Cellphone's out again," said Candace.

"They're no good in mountains."

"What are you going to do when you find this LeJeune?" she asked.

Todd didn't answer immediately. "I don't know. Depends on him, I guess." The rain in the pass seemed more like a geographical feature than an event. He couldn't remember ever driving I-90 along here without getting rained on.

"You...." Candace paused. "You going to kill him to find out what he knows?"

Todd took even longer to answer this time. "I don't know. Depends on him."

Candace looked at him. He shrugged, keeping his eyes on the road. They were more than an hour from Marshalldale now, traffic and weather slowing them down.

"If he won't talk?" she asked.

"I can be pretty convincing," he said.

* * *

Kendra's cellphone chirped Len Salvatore's identifier. Not Last Centurion's but the one for Len's civilian ID, probably to let her know that he knew he was calling Kendra and not Lady Karma. She answered, "Hey," meaning she wasn't alone. "Hi," would have meant no one but teammates around and "Lo," would have signaled that she had trouble.

"Billy is heading your way, do you have any idea why?" Len asked.

Tessie, Leo, Krystal and Kenny waited for Kay to get off the phone so they could determine who would stay behind while Leo went to the airport for whatever reason he wasn't saying.

Lady Karma thought about Billy. "Wasn't he kidnapped once when he was just a child?" she asked Len.

"Yeah, but he's always claimed he doesn't remember anything about it," said Len.

"Maybe he remembered something," she said. Or maybe he's been lying, she didn't say.

"Penny's going to launch the Knight," said Len. "Estimated transit time less than 45 minutes. Nate's already remote in Satellite 12; he says sensors recorded a cis-orbital lander near Spokane."

"Something wicked this way comes," said Kay.

"Wish I could get there more quickly, at least three hours for me. How's Urban?"

Kay glanced at Tessie who glared up at Leo.

"Cute, very cute," said Kay.

"I'm going," said Tessie.

"No, you're not," said Leo.

"And stubborn, very stubborn," Kay added.

Len chuckled. "Same old Urban."

{{Thanks to Heather Rose Brown for the lovely Tessie drawing! :) }}

* * *

Billy reached Portland and turned right on I-84, then veered off the Interstate toward the river. "Daedalos told me sound travels faster in humid air," Billy reminded himself. "I can run on water, like the kid in that movie. At the speeds I move, water is like concrete. Take roads to cut some of the kinks out of the river, it'll be shorter -- but those dams on the upper Columbia are going to be murder."

He ran.

"Maybe I can push the barrier instead of breaking it," he thought.

And he ran.

Urban Renewal - 16 -   by Erin Halfelven Art by Heather Rose Brown

 
"It's always midnight," thought Johnny. He doodled with his finger on the glass of the jet window six miles above France. He hadn't seen the sun since Dr. Meridien had taken him captive two years before. "What would it be like to be the night?" he wondered. "Covering the Earth from horizon to horizon, seeing what everyone does when they think no one is watching."

He leaned his forehead against the glass so he could catch a glimpse of the land below. "Crazy idea," he thought.

Johnny sat in the smaller forward lounge of the plane, Dr. Meridien being busy with business in the larger "office" further back. With Spartako gone on a mission, the colorless man called Joshua None took over watching him when the famous doctor had other things to do. Spartako scared Johnny but the cyborg warrior told stories, laughed at silly stuff and seemed much more alive than his replacement, despite being only half-human.

As if cued by Johnny's thoughts, Joshua got up, opened a cabinet and brought the boy a small case. "Your flute," he said. "You looked bored."

Surprised, Johnny assembled the instrument, a pure silver gift from Dr. Meridien. "Do you like music?" he asked.

Joshua nodded, sitting back down by the door to the back of the plane.

"Do you play?"

Joshua nodded then shrugged. "Cello, violin," he said before Johnny could ask. "Anything with strings."

Johnny considered. "What do you want to hear?"

* * *

Leo strapped his fighting claws onto his wrists and ankles while Kendra tried to reason with Tessie. "We're doing all this to protect you. Someone tried to kidnap you, y'know."

"Yeah," said Tessie. "And I saved myself, didn't I?" She looked adorably smug.

Leo turned around to admire the little girl's spunk. "She's got you there." He grinned at them, liking Tessie at that moment more than he had ever liked anyone else's kid.

Kay frowned at Tessie. "You did have help."

"Just to get away; I took care of the kidnappers all by myself. Um," she looked momentarily confused. Referring to herself before Urban and after Urban in the same sentence rather shook the integration of her two personalities. "And--and now, I'm just me and twice as dangerouth. Dangerous." She used her tongue to feel the place where her new front tooth was coming in.

Leo didn't help Kay's attempts at persuasion much by laughing his ass off just then.

* * *

Yup, thought Billy. At better than 700 mph, water was just like concrete. Very, very slick concrete. Or better, ice. If he fell, he'd probably slide right into one of these damn flood control weirs still going about 400.

He ran up another of the convenient salmon ladders to get around a dam and back onto the river. The confluence with the Wenatchee couldn't be more than fifteen minutes away and the Marshalldale airport was just a mile or two this side of the branch.

He couldn't spare the attention to look at the sky to see if he could see Spartako's jetcopter. He probably couldn't anyway, not yet, and it took all his concentration to run at this speed without hitting anything. His flames took care of small objects like bugs but even something only as large as a remote-control airplane or an inconvenient mudhen could be a disaster.

He shortened one stride slightly to avoid tripping on the head of some swimming rodent; a beaver he supposed though it was actually a nutria. He hoped he'd jumped enough to not scorch the poor animal's ears. Oops, another bad landing like that and he might end up part of one of these damn dams or weird weirs.

He smiled. Stars and comets, he loved to run. The map in his head showed one long straightaway remaining, the top of a lake behind one of the dams. Maybe he'd try to break the sound barrier again, this time on the "ice" where conditions might be more favorable.

Urban Renewal - 17 -   by Erin Halfelven Art by Heather Rose Brown

 
Penny, her body lying comfortably on the lounger in her garage, guided the Knight's cis-orbital flight with her mind. She planned to land on a rocky hillock just east of Wenatchee; a safety margin for anyone under her flight path to allow her plenty of time to change her jets from atomic to conventional. Or self-destruct if things went seriously bottle-shaped.

Nate, her ex-husband and the former mind-pilot of the Nuclear Knight, kept watch on the skies above central Washington by mind-control of Skytower, the robot orbital station built from pieces of old wrecked Knight bodies.

"Copter, jet-assisted, approaching Marshalldale airport from the east. Tapes show it came from near the landing spot of a cis-orbital packet originating in the Middle East. Interceptors scrambled from three air bases have been called back, no info on why or how. Be careful, Penny!" Nate's voice sounded in her mind.

"You know I'm fine, as long as the Outsider doesn't try to interfere with our control," Penny told him.

"No sign of that alien creep," said Nate. His injuries had been caused by neurological feedback from crashing a previous Knight to prevent an Outsider takeover of the robot. "Billy's on the river, running north. Karma and Catclaw are heading to the airport in a car and Munson and his wife are somewhere in the mountains west of town."

"Are we about to have an old home week?" Penny asked.

"Looks like it. Four arrivals within minutes of each other."

"Order?"

"Jetcopter, Billy, you, Kay and company then the Munsons sometime later and Centurion probably after that."

"Billy still not answering calls?"

"Nope. At speed his flames make radio reception difficult, you know that."

"That boy was born difficult."

Nate chuckled.

* * *

Spartako's sensor arrays kept him aware of aerial threats; he'd spotted the incoming Nuclear Knight before apogee. He knew he'd be at his destination with enough time to complete his mission before the big robot could safely land. The trick would be getting away after incinerating LeJeune.

* * *

On the lake bed, Billy tried something new -- concentrating on expanding his flames to their maximum before attempting to break the sound barrier. The energy cost might not leave him enough oomph to accelerate through the barrier and a fall in the trans-sonic turbulence might rip him apart.

"Tell me again how much I get paid for doing this?" he muttered.

But he'd heard Skytower's arrival predictions and knew he'd never beat Spartako to his target without a last minute boost. "Johnny," he whispered.

His flames grew as bright as they had ever been, extending around him for almost a yard. He kicked like a sprinter and the transonic forces reached through his fiery shield and plucked at his armor.

But he knew he'd broken the barrier. Accelerating up to Mach 2 with new energy he ran on, saving a celebration for later.

Urban Renewal - 18 -   by Erin Halfelven Art by Heather Rose Brown

 
Lt. Frank LeJeune paced nervously beside his patrol car. When he'd first taken money from the mysterious man he knew as MacAllen, it had been for little things like unlicensed landings at the Marshalldale airport. Later, he'd bought into the redistribution of a plane load of hypradine. After that, MacAllen had owned him, of course.

Hypradine, known as Hype, Thug, Killer, Dyne or Jooce sold for as much as $10,000 a dose on the street; so a plastic bottle of it holding a mere 200 five milliliter doses wholesaled at point of entry for an incredible $100,000. A case of twelve bottles went for a cool million. Six months before, LeJeune had helped unload 44 cases of the stuff at the same Marshalldale airport where he waited, less than patiently, for a courier from MacAllen.

LeJeune suspected that the courier wanted to talk about what had gone wrong with the snatch of the little Munson girl last week. LeJeune had had minimal involvement with that and considered it none of his business why MacAllan wanted an eight-year-old spirited outof the country. Sure, through his connections with the West Coast gangs that distributed the Hype, he'd sent a cover-up gang to destroy any evidence remaining after the clumsy kidnappers had crashed their plane on the Olympic Peninsula.

But he wasn't really a kidnapper himself. Whatever kink MacAllen had was nothing to him. In fact, he'd leave the country, stopping only long enough to pick up the money he'd been depositing by wire transfer in the Banque du Miquelon et Saint Pierre before heading to Brazil or Lemuria, maybe.

From the upper end of the parking lot around the airport, LeJeune could see the panorama of the Marshalldale Valley stretching out. From the eastern edge, a cloud like the one that might be raised by a dust devil or low-flying helicopter approached. Above that and a little to the left, a second small sun seemed to be setting on the eastern ridge. And to his right, south of the city -- had the river caught fire?

Urban Renewal - 19 -   by Erin Halfelven Art by Heather Rose Brown

Spartako came in low and fast, not so much riding the jetcopter as wearing it. His targeting software picked out the patrol car parked on the verge of the airport runway. The man standing beside the patrol car fit the profile for Frank LeJeune and wore Frank LeJeune's cellphone, which Spartako confirmed by ringing the cell. Still a half-mile away, the cyborg assassin twisted the tails of two incendiary rockets and sent them on their way.

Billy Blueblazes left the edge of the river just at that moment, racing up the sandy wall of the riverbed and the low hill between the water and the streets around the airport. Not even a mile away and slowing now from nearly fifteen hundred mph to about one thousand. The shockwave around him had some peculiar properties due to his flaming forcefield but there would be lots of broken windows in Marshalldale and Wenatchee today.

Spartako dived lower, under the curve of the hill, and changed heading to intercept just where Billy would reach the street. He armed his transonic missiles and prepped their target computers; for a cyborg, a matter of attention and thought. When Billy topped the rise, Spartako would release the transonic hunter-killer missiles.

East of the city and above it, Penny directed the Knight to switch from atomic jets to chemical, using the residual heat from the atomic fire to super-charge her directed flames. The golden alloys of the sixteen-foot tall Knight-body glowed with re-entry as well and internal heat pumps shed that energy into the jets, too. Lasers and masers from the robot's head beamed at the jetcopter, hoping to scramble the control signals from the cyborg to its missiles.

LeJeune dived behind his car and rolled under it, intending to come up behind the fire and rescue truck beside it.

In the Munson sedan, Tessie screeched at Leo from the backseat, "Turn here!" Leo cut the corner, almost hitting the curb, but controlling the turn onto a service road at the opposite end of the airport from everyone else.

On the runway to their left, a puddle-jumper commuter aircraft taxied toward the terminal building. Down at the end of the service road, two missiles arced out of nowhere at a parked fire truck.

Urban Renewal - 20 -   by Erin Halfelven Art by Heather Rose Brown

 
LeJeune's natural suspicions, cop reflexes and drug dealer paranoia kept him alive a little longer. He rolled out from under the fire truck and under another vehicle just as the first rocket exploded. The second, for some reason, turned upward and zoomed high above the airfield before bursting like a fireworks star shell. LeJeune climbed out from under the sedan and into an airport service vehicle that had keys conveniently dangling from the switch.

Billy followed the hill, curving west of the airport instead of topping the rise directly between him and Spartako. Two and a half years of tactical training by Last Centurion and Urban Commando had taught him a few things. When he did come over the hill, he immediately went back below the curve after seeing where his enemies' location.

Spartako launched the transonic missiles in Billy's direction then scanned for LeJeune's new location. The renegade cop still had the telltale phone in his pocket and the cyborg quickly located him. Turning to pursue his principal target, Spartako sent a lance of depleted uranium slugs from his electric Gatling guns after the fleeing LeJeune.

Penny changed the Knight's trajectory into a glide toward the airport, swinging north to pinch Spartako and LeJeune between Billy and her robot self. From her own launchers she sent out ECM anti-missile missiles, using data relayed from Skytower along with a message, "Centurion en route with three Blue Star super-troopers," Nate told her. "ETA seventeen minutes."

"Way too slow," Penny sent back. "This may all be over in seventeen seconds!"

"Out!" screamed Leo as he pulled the Munson sedan in front of LeJeune's getaway vehicle. Tessie and Lady Karma went out the right hand doors and Leo went out the left, the little girl still holding her Raggedy Anne dolly.

"Don't be thcared, Annie," Tessie shouted. "I've got you." She rolled across a narrow grass margin onto a sidewalk and Kendra pulled her, and the doll, close.

On the far side of Wenatchee, across two rivers, Donk, Z9 and Dr. Domino all agreed, LeJeune would try to use the city to lose pursuers, assuming he escaped the carnage at the airport. Accordingly, Todd turned south on the Route 285 business loop through the middle of Wenatchee.

"Why are we going this way?" Candace yelped as the big SUV dodged around a beer truck. "The airport is on the other side of the Columbia!"

"Trusting my luck," said Todd. "Put my mask on top of my head and get yours ready, too. We may want to use them."

Urban Renewal - 21 -   by Erin Halfelven Art by Heather Rose Brown

 
LeJeune backed away from the wreckage, pulling his state-issued nine-millimeter from his back holster. In the strange light of sun filtered through smoke, the tall man coming at him seemed to have stripes in his hair. He'd read the State's copy of Jane's Metahumans, Mutants and Overmen. One of the Tigermen? he wondered. The band of mercenaries who had hunted down Tiger-Man had all been tainted by David Hawkes's monster blood. Catclaw, M'Caliber, Ghost Tiger, Merc4Rent or maybe some wannabe? Sure wasn't Cat Ten Hawks, the monster's cousin, she was much more recognizable.

He put a bullet into the advancing figure just to see what would happen. The big man jerked from the impact but didn't slow down. M'Caliber only used long-range weapons; Ghost Tiger didn't like daylight; Merc would have weapons all over him; this one only had knife-like claws strapped to his hands -- Shit! It's Catclaw! How do you stop a guy who regenerates from wounds in just seconds?

LeJeune aimed at Leo's head.

* * *

Billy danced through the hail of spent uranium slugs, swatting them down or aside to plow furrows in pavement or make craters in concrete walls. His blazing forcefield protected and concealed him in the flaming wreckage as he approached the cyborg. He slowed down more, crossing the sound barrier going down, and the turbulence blew a wide hole in the smoke and debris.

The jetcopter hovered thirty feet above him, Billy leapt to the top of the terminal building then ran on the flying pieces of exploded firetruck scattered by his own shockwave. He shouted something no one could hear. "Wyatt! Wyatt Helmstrong! Captain Wyatt, it's me, Billy!"

* * *

The Knight's ECM-missiles buzzed in Spartako's senses, hunting his control frequencies; one otherworldly technology battling another. The cyborg set part of his mind to tracking the missiles and burning them out with phased maser pulses. He couldn't hear Billy's voice but he knew Billy knew him.

The Knight would be here in seconds, Billy and the girl were in the circle of destruction, time to do what he'd come to do.

* * *

"It's a suicide run!" Lady Karma shouted into her communicator. "He's not after LeJeune, he's here to kill Billy and Tess!"

In one of those transmission flukes that happen on the battlefield, Billy's voice came back loud and clear. "I know, but he's got to catch us first!"

And leaping down practically from the wing of the jetcopter, Billy landed beside Tess, snatched up the little girl, dollie and all, and headed east where the Knight could run interference for a precious few seconds.

"Hang on tight," he told Tessie.

"I can do better than that," she said, closing her eyes to concentrate.

Urban Renewal - 22 -   by Erin Halfelven Art by Heather Rose Brown

Leo didn't make it easy for the renegade cop by standing still and the first two bullets missed widely. Then Leo's claw flicked the gun from LeJeune's hand against the concrete barrier marking the safe driving lane. A chemical spray hit Leo in the face but he ignored it; uncomfortable, even painful, but it hardly slowed him down. The canister hit the wall of the building and a third blow sent LeJeune's backup gun flying also.

"Next one's your head," said Leo.

* * *

Billy's time distorting force field, his flames, wrapped Tess in the same bubble of experience as the speedster. "Still seems fast," she gasped as the world flashed by.

"Yeah," said Billy. "Otherwise it would take me subjective weeks to run here from Oakland. I can adjust the distortion. What are you doing?" The question came as Billy noticed the change in his force field.

Tessie hadn't been sure she could effect something so insubstantial but the reverse proved true; it took lots less effort to make Billy's flames frictionless or nearly so. They were speeding past the edge of the airfield now, running by the shadow of The Knight flying in to recover their retreat.

Like a buttered knife slicing through hot bread, they slipped through the sound barrier into the transonic with hardly a quiver. The thunder of their passing rattled the vineyards and hop orchards of the east valley.

Billy looked down at the little girl in his arms. "Where you been all my lofe, darling?" he drawled.

Tessie giggled.

* * *

Lady Karma watched the burning line of Billy and Tess disappearing, and the Knight flying in from the little knob of Earth where Penny had landed the big robot. The jetcopter started after Billy, but pulled up, trying to gain altitude for the clash with The Knight.

Kay could sense emotions like other people see colors, smell odors or feel textures; Leo's bright savage pleasure in action, LeJeune's stink of fear, the hard-edge of Billy's determination and the granulated surface of Tessie's concentration. Behind and around her, the crowd made a background of confusion and terror. Mentally, she reached for the jetcopter's cyborg pilot, feeling there the glossy sheen of practiced action, the steel of imposed duty, a kernel of some dull hope and a shroud of despair covering everything else.

She probed, hoping to find some edge of purpose she could bend. Spartako's mind was strong but seemed oddly hollow, as if much of his own desires and emotions had been sucked out of him. A pattern of darkness attracted her and she winced, death and pain formed a cage around a hate so intense she felt almost blistered by it.

One thing seemed clear; Spartako was not a free agent but a mind enslaved to some hated otherness. Willing, even eager, to die to complete his mission, the cyborg had not given up yet.

* * *

"Take us back, Billy," said Tess. "I've got an idea."

Urban Renewal - 23 -   by Erin Halfelven Art by Heather Rose Brown

 
Penny sent the Knight into combat with the jetcopter. When the crash had crippled Nate, and gave her shared mental control of the big alien robots, she hadn't felt certain of her ability to fight. She'd turned out to have a real talent at it; maybe more than Nate had ever had. And just like Nate, when she controlled the Knight, she was the Knight.

Acting quickly as thought, she sent another barrage of "nuisance" ECM missiles -- she only carried so many and she went ahead and used the last of them. She wanted to keep Spartako from tracking Billy. Then she pulled the big atomic jet over her shoulder so it sat on her chest. One short blast would reduce almost anything in front of her to radioactive slag; she just had to stay aware of what was behind her and remember to balance on her boot jets.

As a cannon, the atomic jet made a heck of a good bluff; Nate had never actually used it against a living enemy. So far, neither had Penny. But then, a cyborg wasn't exactly alive.

* * *

Lady Karma sent out a spell to trap the mind of everyone in range who feared for their lives, to get them to evacuate peacefully and without panic. Then she turned to consider Spartako approaching the Knight. Warrior minds resisted being affected in the middle of combat but she might manage a distraction at a critical moment. Or a psychic lance into Spartako's ego center.

Catclaw scooped the semi-conscious LeJeune off the ground and looked around for somewhere to stuff him where he couldn't get away. The crooked cop struggled weakly against Leo's grip.

"Lemme go," LeJeune whimpered.

"Yeah, right," said Leo. "I'm missing the big fight and you ain't going anywhere, mook." He looked at a piece of sheet steel from the fire truck, maybe he could wrap it around LeJeune like a tamale.

"No, no, lemme go! They're giving away those big candy apples at the Wenatchee Farmer's Market!"

"Say what?" Leo shook him.

"Ouch! The green ones with the caramel are my favorites! Please lemme go?"

* * *

"Let's loop around to the north, Billy. We'll come back in by that spur and old Nastyko won't see us until it's too late," said Tessie.

"You got it, insect," said Billy. He'd used the odd endearment with his baby brother, once upon a time.

"Insect?!!"

"Darlin' little bug face?"

Tessie considered. "Better, Mr. Propane-head, but don't push it."

Urban Renewal - 24 -   by Erin Halfelven Art by Heather Rose Brown

 
"What the heck is going on there?" Candace asked.

Todd carefully negotiated through the crowd that had spilled off the sidewalk and onto the street. "It's the Farmer's Market, looks like a riot. Maybe the vineyard owners and the hop growers came to blows?"

Candace laughed. The growth of vineyards east of Marshalldale since the 1970s had been bitterly resented by the local hop farmers. But both groups were still hugely outnumbered by the apple growers in the larger Wenatchee area. A local cartoonist had drawn a prizefight between boxers labeled "beer industry" and "wine industry" while a large audience drank from cups marked "cider".

A block later, Todd suddenly pulled to the curb. "Donk says that's him." He pointed at a man jogging across the street in front of him.

"The guy in the torn clothes who's bleeding from his hair?"

Todd got out, used Z9's covert ops moves to disable LeJeune and tossed him into the back of the SUV all without the surrounding crowd really getting an idea of what had happened. Candace got into the back to tie the crooked cop up while Todd drove on toward the bridge over the Columbia and Marshalldale.

* * *

From the roof of a hangar Catclaw missed a leap for the landing gear of the jetcopter. "Son of a Comet!" he cursed as he fell between a baggage tram and a tow truck. Picking himself up off the pavement and straightening his left wrist, he muttered, "Just because it heals doesn't mean it don't hurt."

Sensing that Leo had survived the forty-foot fall, Lady Karma continued to concentrate on weaving a net of worries and distraction out of the stray thoughts she could capture from Spartako. Little enough and probably useless, this just wasn't her sort of fight.

The cyborg seemed intent on escaping to the east, accelerating now toward the Knight whose voice boomed out. "This cannon can cut the blades off your vehicle in 1/20th of a second. Give up and land that thing."

Spartako replied on several radio frequencies at once. "I have my own thermonuclear device. Back-off, Space Junk!"

Sensing the approaching cusp, Kendra threw her net before the cyborg got out of range.

* * *

"He must be two hunnert feet in the air, Billy," said Tessie. "How close can you get me to him?" In the condensed temporal bubble of Blueblazes force field, they seemed to have plenty of time to discuss it.

Billy considered for some infinitesimal of real time. "At this speed, I can jump pretty high." He hadn't crossed the Mach 2 barrier with Tessie in his arms, fearing even greater turbulence than he'd faced at Mach 1. Mach 2 was the one that had killed a lot of good pilots, but Mach 1.95 was still more than the speed of a rifle bullet on target. "I can get you close enough to touch him, I think. But you're going to have to help me with the landing."

They said nothing about taking the risk. Neither of them had ever planned on dying any other way, and Urban had already died once. Tessie kissed her rag doll and whispered, "Let's do it."

Urban Renewal - 25 -   by Erin Halfelven Art by Heather Rose Brown

 
Todd and Candace bypassed Airport Way, taking the road that led to the East Wenatchee Valley where the cyborg jetcopter and robot Knight faced off over a field of dairy cattle. Their black and red masks perched atop their heads, the Munsons looked very grim. Candace had the buzz gun they had salvaged from the mountain in her lap.

"Donk says just point and shoot?" she asked.

"Yeah. It's like a big shotgun, rocket-propelled sabot full of darts and needles. The sight reads the distance to the target and sets when to burst the shoe for maximum effect."

"Nasty."

"Yeah."

"Probably useless against that thing."

"Yeah."

"We going to be in time to do anything at all?"

Todd didn't answer for a moment. "Domino says that if we're lucky, I'll be there in time to see him die. They're preparing a welcome party."

Candace grinned. "Save some cake for me if I don't make it."

They reached across the seat with their free hands and touched fingers.

"Is Tessie safe?" Candace asked.

"I don't know," said Todd.

* * *

Spartako's targets were approaching again. And he'd maneuvered and managed the situation so that he had no reasonable hope of escape. His programming would now allow him to self-destruct to complete his mission. He'd tried this earlier but Blueblazes and the younger target had escaped. This time he would not fail.

* * *

Lady Karma summoned a wind to keep her close enough to the psychic net she had cast to keep it powered. At worst it might slowdown Spartako's reactions a fraction of a second, at best it might cause him to make the wrong decision at a critical moment.

Catclaw pursued her on foot, limping at first. "I didn't know she could fly!" he grumbled.

* * *

Penny powered up the Knight's atomic cannon. Maybe she really could slice the rotors of the jetcopter and force a crash. Maybe she could do this without having to kill anyone, even a half-mechanical cyborg assassin.

Nate's voice in her mind said, "Star Troopers, ETA twelve minutes, now. Centurion, Sky Bolt and two guys in powered armor."

"Too little, too late. I'm here now." She tightened a mental finger on the virtual trigger of the cannon, the boot jets already programmed to balance the thrust. Nothing behind her to be damaged. Draw down her aim on the point of rotation. Squeeze.

* * *

Candace fired from the window of the SUV, the sabot set for bursting at 330 yards. She aimed for the point behind the first window, where Dr. Domino had told her she would do the most damage.

* * *

Summoning all her remaining will, Kendra sent a psychic lance at the Cyborg. The turbulence of a sonic boom knocked her off the crest of the wind she'd been riding and she fell toward the ground, almost unconscious from her effort.

* * *

A burning lance of nuclear flame sliced the rotors from the jetcopter.

Needles and darts from a bursting sabot ripped a hole in the side of the cyborg vehicle, revealing the tanklike inner-capsule holding what remained of Spartako's body.

Now thought Spartako, sensing the approach of his window of opportunity. Now. Something glitched in his programming....

* * *

Billy and Tessie raced down the river, under the bridge, past the airport in less time than it takes to turn a page. Billy chose his path carefully, picking a ridge to run along to get him closer to Spartako. The jetcopter dropped a bit, it's rotors gone. A hole opened in the fuselage, still a hundred and fifty feet up.

"I'll jump, you do your thing," said Billy.

"Right," said Tess.

Billy leaped from the top of the ridge, a human-sized ballistic missile now. At the top of his arc the falling cyborg aircraft loomed over him. He extended his arms with Tessie between his hands, trying to get her as close to the rip in the plane as possible. Billy's forcefield kept time slowed to geological scale.

Tessie stretched out, her small hand reaching into the hole. She tapped on the metal of the case holding Spartako.

"Jinx!" she said. "You're it!"

Urban Renewal - 26 -   by Erin Halfelven Art by Heather Rose Brown

 
For Spartako, the world seemed to just go away.

Boosted in some mysterious way by Billy's forcefield and reinforced by Kendra's spell in some other way, Tessie's power seemed to extend into the atomic domain, increasing some quantum analog of friction -- entropy perhaps. In the capsule containing the remains of a man once called Wyatt Helmstrong; one arm, part of a spine, a neck and most of a skull containing a heavily wired brain; in that capsule, interactions of moving particles slowed to nothing -- and stopped.

For Spartako, the effect seemed no different than what he expected. Sudden darkness, silence, timelessness and unconsciousness look a lot like a point 0,0,0 nuclear explosion from the inside.

* * *

Billy's arc continued and he pulled Tess close to him as they fell away from the inert jetcopter. Both of their forcefields had been used up, time flowed normally now for them, decelerated only by adrenaline effects. Or for Billy, at least, the effort had left Tess too exhausted, mentally and physically, to do more than whimper.

One hundred fifty feet below them a vineyard waited, basically a rocky field covered at this time of year with sharp sticks pointing upward. Wrapping himself completely around Tess, Billy tried desperately to re-ignite his forcefield. He needed a spark of energy, electricity, flame, ionized plasma, something.

He thought of Hades in the Disney movie, checking to see if his hair had gone out and smiled grimly. Even with his forcefield on they would only make a big splash in the vines. Tess on the other hand....

"Tessie, honey, wake up," he murmured. "Urban? Hank? Therese Marie Munson! Wake up!"

"I'm awake," she whispered. The wind around them, the wind made by their fall, began to grab at their clothing and exposed flesh. "I don't know if I can..."

Still over a hundred feet up, their fall slowed, changed angle. They began to tumble, their clothing tearing.

Billy whispered something in Tess's ear. She nodded, her cheek moving against his chest.

* * *

Staggered by the sonic boom, Catclaw caught Lady Karma before stumbling and falling to his knees on the edge of the asphalt. "Craptastic!" he growled but the blood of monsters in his veins had already regrown the skin he'd just lost. "There's a reason I picked Paine for my new last name," he said.

"I know," said Kendra. He sat her own her feet and she looked up at the drama still unfolding. If the cyborg was already dead she could help him on his way. She opened her senses and reached out.

* * *

Seeing Billy and Tess appear out of the blazing blue arc from nowhere shocked Penny. Automatically, she dived forward to try to catch them before remembering that her descent from orbit and firing the atomic cannon would have heated her armor to red-hot if she'd been constructed of anything so mundane as steel. Even her recuperative magnetic cooling wouldn't lower her outer layers below three or four hundred degrees before she reached the falling heroes--if she could get there in time.

At least their momentum has carried them out from under the aircraft, it won't fall on them, she thought.

Nate's voice reached her from Skytower. "Laser the boy, re-ignite his forcefield."

She did that, aiming for what looked like in her sensors the hottest spot, shining a tiny focussed heat beam on Billy's shoulder armor. Then she redirected all cooling fluids to her arms and shed the outer, hottest layer of her own armor. "Talk about blowing hot and cold," she said to Skytower.

He chuckled. "Don't forget to stow the cannon before you try to catch them."

"Done." The big golden robot arced across the sky, still not certain she would be in time. Bright outer plates flaked off her, shedding heat as quickly as possible.

* * *

Todd turned the engine off and leaped from the still rolling SUV.

"Tess!" screamed Candace. She pulled the red mask from her face and threw down the buzz gun. "Tessie!"

Death Masque reached toward the cyborg with his power. Too far away, he thought. Almost a quarter mile. Oh, Tess, what's it going to be like to have you inside me? If I can reach you....

Urban Renewal - 27 -   by Erin Halfelven Art by Heather Rose Brown

 
"Ignition!" shouted Billy. Blue flames, the visible side-effect of his time-bending forcefield, burst out from his shoulder armor where Tess had concentrated her friction power and Penny had provided a laser spark. Tess switched her waning powers to simply thickening the air around them.

Their fall slowed. Billy had practiced falling from heights many times and with turbulent rapid scissor kicks managed to guide them toward the now-only-toasty warm outstretched palms of the giant robot.

"Got you," said Penny in the bass growl of the Nuclear Knight.

Tess's eight-year-old body, reserves all used-up, collapsed into unconsciousness at the announcement of their safety.

The hulk of the cyborg jetcopter crashed into the vineyard below them, wings tearing off, boom-like tail section breaking in half. The armor glass of the unused cockpit shattered and the heavy plastic fuel bladders in the tanks burst flooding the crash site with jet fuel that quickly caught fire from hot pieces of engine debris.

A column of greasy black smoke rose and was quickly blown into a ring by the first of several vapor explosions. For a moment it looked as if a nuclear explosion had occurred after all.

Penny opened the passenger shelf on the front of the Knight's body, letting Billy slip inside the narrow compartment, still holding Tess, who in turn still clasped her ever-more-raggedy dolly. The big robot then bent its path toward the airport where Lady Karma and other first aid could surely be found.

Smoke and flames rose behind them: Spartako's funeral pyre.

* * *

Seeing that the kids would be safe, Lady Karma reached out for the spirit of death and dying she sensed, a hungry spirit of longing and weariness. "You may go home," she told it. "Ride the wheel again or find your own peace. Goodbye, goodbye, I tell you three times, goodbye to this entangling life, you wounded souls."

Her eyes popped open. Souls?

"Man," said Leo beside her watching the burning wreckage, "What a candle!"

* * *

At the far edge of the airport, past some warehouses and untidy commercial buildings, near an empty SUV with both doors open, Candace Munson knelt on the ground holding her husband's head in her lap. "She's safe, Todd, she's safe! Wake up, honey!" She'd pulled off both their masks when she'd seen him collapse after watching Tess's rescue.

Todd's eyes fluttered, half-open. "They're gone," he whispered.

"No, no," said Candace. "The big mecha saved them! They're okay, Tess and the boy, they're okay."

He tried to sit up and she helped him. "I saw that," he said. "Then I reached for the mind still in the wreckage and something sucked all the others out of me." He looked at her, a small if worried smile playing with his expression. "They're gone, all the ghosts that haunted me are gone."

Urban Renewal - 28 -   by Erin Halfelven Art by Heather Rose Brown

 
Z9 lead the way. "The sky is full of stars," he called back to the others.

"That's nuts. It's daylight," said Donk.

"The sky is the world, the stars are souls," said Miss Glamour. She followed Z9 out of the confined space somewhere below Todd Munson's consciousness.

"Our best choice for optimal results is to swim up to the sky and become a star," said Dr. Domino.

"After you, you freakin' poet-pansy," said Donk.

Dr. Domino also left.

"Well, I ain't stayin' here alone, wait up you guys," said Donk and he left, too.

A woman's voice called to them, "Goodbye, goodbye, I tell you three times, God-be-with-you, goodbye."

* * *

Z9 burst out of darkness into a room with maps and charts on the wall and a view out the window that he recognized as Torino, Italia. A handsome middle-aged woman wearing stylish but severe make-up smiled at him. "Zetanove! Alejandro, it's been years. How are you?"

The room looked as it had always looked, though its location had changed from time to time: Bristol, England; Quang-dong, China; Archangel, Russia; Montevideo, Uruguay, Tel Aviv, Israel. The view out the window might change but not the furnishings or the woman.

"I'm dead, I think," said Z9. "And you?"

"Benissimo. Well, your last assignment did not work out so well, did it? I'm sorry."

"No worries, camerata mia. But I hear the Cold War is over."

"Ah, well, yes. But the conflict between good and evil goes on and the world still needs warriors in that gray area between, unflinching humanites like yourself. Are you ready to accept a new assignment?"

"I believe so, though I may be a little rusty with some of my weapons and tactics."

She made a mark on a piece of paper. "Have you ever trained with a pom-pon?"

* * *

Miss Glamour walked until darkness became a corridor and a curtain. She pushed aside the night-colored cloth and found a dressing room. Several girls in different stages of undress busied themselves putting on various costumes.

"Sam!" one of them exclaimed. "Sam Terry, we're on in five minutes and you're dressed like that?"

Someone else threw her a costume and she began to get undressed, musing that it all seemed so strangely familiar, too uniquely mundane, such a common miracle. How odd that her costume appeared to be nudity. Naked as the day she was born, she left the dressing room and entered her new life, stage center.

* * *

Dr. Domino swam upward into the light.

"John," said the light.

"Yes," said John Domingues.

"Have you found out what you wanted to know?"

John thought about it. "Not everything."

The light danced a chuckling dance. "No one knows everything, John. Do you think you know enough?"

"I don't think there can be enough to know to satisfy me," he said.

"And that is the end of knowledge, the beginning of wisdom," said the light. "Come, you are done with learning, now you must teach."

And John Domingues entered into the light.

* * *

The darkness knew his name. "Donk," it said.

"That's me," said Paul Doncaster.

"You have lied, cheated, stolen and killed. What have you done to redeem yourself?" the darkness asked.

"Well, I felt bad about most of that," Donk said.

"That's true and it's worth something, but unshed tears cannot balance blood, deceit, violence and hate."

"Hey! I never hated anyone! Sometimes it was just business and sometimes I was just drunk. But I never hurt no one because of no hate I had on."

"And you never did." The darkness spoke as if it had found a diamond tiara in a sewage tank. "You were kind to the weak, brave when frightened, loyal according to your own codes, generous whether you had much or nothing. Your virtues cancel out your crimes in the eternal scale."

"Huh?"

"You could go either way, Donk." The darkness had become an even gray field under a featureless gray sky. "Into the light or back into the darkness, forever." The voice now came from an enormous silver-black figure standing on the horizon.

Paul would have licked his lips if he'd had any. "I get to choose?"

"No. You are here, in limbo, until someone comes to claim you. The deeds you have done in life will work out to their ends, and one day tip the balance."

"Oh, shit." He couldn't imagine anything he'd started in life having a good ending. "What can I do now?"

"I can spin the wheel for you," offered the Lord of Limbo.

"You do that," said Paul. "Can I double my bet?"

"You wish to learn more virtue through more opportunity to sin?"

"Uh, yeah."

"Very well, double or nothing, Paul-Doncaster-who-was."

The wheel spun, sucking Donk into a new life.

Urban Renewal - 29 - Epilog   by Erin Halfelven Art by Heather Rose Brown

 
The scene at the airport bustled with Centurion's duplicates, Blue Star Troops in armor, and various local, state and national authorities. Sky Bolt wanted to take LeJeune in as material witness in an overcrime case while the FBI and DEA held that they had prior jurisdiction in the venue of corruption, money laundering, kidnapping and drug smuggling.

"What drug?" said Sky Bolt. The fin on his tall blue helmet had seldom looked more shark-like as he grinned toothily down at the other federal agents.

"We haven't made that determination yet," said the DEA man.

"Oh bullshit, you know it was jooce, which makes it overcrime since metahuman blood is the only known source for hypradine."

* * *

The argument continued while The Last Centurion called a meeting of his partners. Nate as Skytower, coordinated the telepresence of absent members while Len made a few proposals.

"You know I've never liked having the group named after me, I'm proposing that we change our official designation to The Urban Commandos or maybe just The Commandos, in honor of Hank," he said.

Daedalos pointed out that "commando" is a collective noun, like battalion, and doesn't really need to be plural but the resolution passed unanimously anyway.

"Next item," said Len, "new members. Kendra has nominated Todd Munson for probationary status and Leonard Paine as associate member. Also, Tess Munson is to be re-enlisted as a reserve member. Any discussion?"

"Codenames?" asked Daedalos, who liked to keep all the records straight.

"Paine is using Catclaw, Munson probably won't want to use Death Masque if the feds let him switch sides and I'm not sure about Tessie," Len admitted.

"I've got an idea for Tessie," said Billy.

* * *

Don Turpen, Senior Star Trooper present, opened his faceplate to get a better look at the information panel the FBI forensic technician held up. "So Spartako isn't dead?" They both glanced at the still steaming hulk of the shattered jetcopter buried in the vineyard.

"Well he's not exactly alive either," Agent June McAtkins said. A lot of FBI agents hated the official federal superteam members but McAtkins thought Turpen more than a little cute -- and she'd seen him out of armor plenty of times.

Don waggled his Groucho-like moustache at her. "An undead cyborg monster assassin? Comets and catfish, but I hate it when one of those shows up."

FBI agents seldom giggle, McAtkins reminded herself.

* * *

Billy's residual blazing forcefield on the top of his head lit the darkened room with an eerie blue glow. Keeping a bit of his flame going made it easier to expand it during an emergency and looking like his hair was on fire had a certain coolness he liked. It beat carrying a Bic lighter in his pocket.

He sat on the edge of the kid-sized deskchair and looked at the sleeping little girl. Exhausted by her adventures, Tessie slept deeply, cuddling her ragged-and-stained dolly in her arms, two fingers of her right hand resting on her lower lip.

He sat quietly for some time just watching her; unusual behavior for the Man in Motion.

He thought about Hank Herbert, whom he'd known for years and whose spirit now inhabited the tiny sleeping warrior in front of him. He thought about Johnny Bellows, the brother he hadn't seen in six years who would now be ten years old -- and still a captive of Dr. Meridien. For Johnny's sake, he hadn't told anyone of the Man Who Would Not See the Sun Again and his strange penchant for kidnapping the children of metahumans--but that would change now.

Besides warning of Spartako's assasination and kidnap attempt, Johnny's brief call from the Dubai airport had included the news that he'd worked out his own escape plan. Win or lose, the boy would soon be free of Dr. Meridien leaving big brother Gilbert, alias Billy Blueblazes, free to pursue the man who would not see the sun.

"Maybe you can meet my brother someday, punkin," Billy whispered. "Good night, Jinx." He kissed a fingertip and placed it gently on the sleeping girl's forehead before leaving the room.