Mike and Shelley were still talking, so I decided to go back to my room to stew for a while. I had some piano practicing to catch up on, anyway.
Yeah, you heard me right -- piano practicing. What, you thought I was just a thug who likes pounding on monsters all day long? Nah, I have all kinds of higher sensibilities. I've been playing piano since I was a little kid, and I must say I had an excellent teacher. (I did mention that my mom teaches piano, didn't I? Us kids didn't get a choice whether we learned to play or not.)
Our rooms at HQ are small enough that I can't fit a real piano in there, just an electronic keyboard. It's a nice one, with the full set of eighty-eight keys and a sustain pedal, but it does kind of limit what I can play. Bach works great, and I like Bach anyway. I've got my well-thumbed copy of Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier, and I'm currently working my way through The Liturgical Year, although that's plenty tough to play without organ pedals.
Mozart would work nearly as well, I guess, but he and I don't always see eye to eye, much to my mother's dismay. I love Debussy, so I have to play that regardless, but most Romantic stuff like Chopin or Brahms just won't work. You simply can't get the sensitivity of touch that you need without a real piano, and you can just forget about anything marked "una corda".
But you know what I really love playing these days? Ragtime. I got this big, thick book called American Piano Rags for my birthday, and man, I have just been tearing through it. There's just so much energy in that music; I could play it all day long, especially when I'm mad or frustrated. It makes my mom happy, too, since she's big on American composers. She'd love me to start studying Gershwin and Gottschalk seriously, but ragtime's close enough, I guess.
I had been working on "Gladiolus Rag" for about an hour when Wizzit started dimming the lights. Even though we can't directly see the outside world from HQ, he does try to keep us on a fairly regular day-and-night schedule. Lights out at eleven pm, lights on again at seven am, Greenwich time I think. This was his signal that lights-out was in about half an hour, so I decided to switch off the keyboard and turn in.
I had just lain down when the monster alarm went off. With a groan, I slipped on my combat vest and a pair of shorts and jogged out to the common room. Shelley was already there, dressed pretty much like I was and tying her hair back into a ponytail. "I left Padma in her room," she told me. "Did you see Mike?"
I shook my head, but just then, he entered the common room, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. It looked like he had gone to bed even earlier than I had. He ran a hand through his hair and asked, "Where is it this time?"
"Wizzit said that he detected something attacking St. Petersburg. Russia, not Florida. Some kind of water thing."
Mike grimaced. "And nobody here speaks Russian, right? Any chance we can pull Trina in? Her leave is almost up anyway, isn't it?"
"I've asked Wizzit to alert her. I'll call her in if I think we need her. We've gotten by before without translators."
"Fair enough." He grinned at me. "Hey, how's it going, mate? We didn't get a chance to talk much earlier. I hear you got caught groping a minder. Nice work if you can get it, eh?"
"Not what happened, Mike," Shelley put in briskly before I could say anything. "Are you ready?" When Mike and I both nodded, she said, "All right, Wizzit, take us out. Prime Red, activate!"
"Prime Orange, activate!"
"Prime Indigo, activate!"
When the haze had cleared, we found ourselves on a bridge suspended over a broad river. It was late at night, and it appeared that we had the bridge to ourselves. I looked around. Wizzit doesn't initially teleport us into the middle of a crowd; that would cause more problems than it would solve. He usually sets us down in a deserted area near where the action is.
"There!" Shelley was pointing to one bank of the river, where there stood a huge whitish building, brilliantly lit up. Not huge as in tall, but huge as in "man, that thing's, like, ten blocks long!" An Enclave beastie, surrounded by Zoinks, seemed to be trying to tear it down.
Zoinks? That's Mike's word for them; I don't know what Enclave calls them. Mindless, disposable foot-soldiers that Enclave sends out with some of their monsters. I'm not even sure they're alive in any reasonable sense of the term. They run interference for the monsters, terrorize the populace, and generally make it hard for us Primes to do our jobs. Fighting one is almost not worth the effort; fighting half a dozen is enough to make it interesting. Our friend on the riverbank looked like he had brought between twenty and thirty with him.
Shelley began running along the bridge towards the monster. "Orange, you and Indigo keep the Zoinks off me. I'll take on the monster. Wizzit?"
"That is St. Petersburg's Hermitage Museum they're attacking. Already done some damage. Museum's closed now, which is lucky for us. Sensors detect one human nearby, but not in danger. They're clearly hostile; go ahead and take them down."
"Got it."
Mike and I started running at full speed after Shelley, and soon we were in the midst of the Zoinks. I took the ones on the right and Mike took the ones on the left, while Shelley bulled her way in through the middle. I found myself actually looking forward to a good scrap.
Mike's a decent fighter, I guess. More of a bang-some-heads-together type of brawler than anything else. He knocked around the world for a few years before joining the Primes, and he learned to take pretty good care of himself. He might even have picked up a black belt of some sort along the way.
What's interesting about Mike, though, is that his reflexes are incredibly fast. Like, spooky fast. You know how you'll be walking along with a handful of potato chips and one of them will slip out of your hand and you'll catch it before it hits the ground, and then you'll think, "Hey, I'm pretty good!"? That's Mike on a bad day. A really bad day. A hungover-after-a-two-day-bender-and-sick-with-the-flu bad day.
Which makes him pretty cool to have as a partner. You never have to worry about him hitting you accidentally or getting in your way, and that's important. There's a certain art to fighting multiple opponents at once. This isn't the white-ninja-versus-black-ninja stuff you see in bad kung fu movies. The Zoinks don't attack you one at a time; they swarm you, and sometimes you just find yourself swinging at anything that moves. When that happens, you don't want a partner who's going to hamper you.
So, I got all punchy and kicky with the Zoinks. Mainly kicky; Grandmaster Park trained me well, and I loves me my Tae Kwon Do kicks. He also taught me to channel my anger into my martial art, and I had a fair amount of that left over from my awkward conversation with Padma, so I was knocking down Zoinks left and right. They don't die or anything once you hit them -- they're nearly as hard to get rid of as the monsters -- but if you hit them hard enough, it takes them a while to come back for more.
My primary job, as you heard, was to keep the Zoinks off of Shelley's back, because she was taking on the monster single-handed. Not the best of situations, but she looked like she was holding her own for the moment, at least. The bad guy had what looked like a long, long tail that trailed off the embankment and into the river itself, except that I quickly realized that it wasn't really a tail at all. It was a hose drawing up water, which the monster was able to shoot out in short, explosive bursts from nozzles in its chest.
I know it sounds kind of goofy, but Enclave sometimes does goofy stuff like that. And when you consider that a cup of water weighs half a pound, and if you saw how fast these half-pound bursts came out, you'd agree that they could do some pretty serious damage. I looked up in time to see Shelley take a hit directly in the chest, and it knocked her off her feet and back three or four yards.
While I was watching to make sure she was okay, I felt a hand grab my shoulder. I spun and threw a punch -- which missed Mike's nose by less than an inch as he jerked his head back. "Careful now, mate," he said cheerfully. "You almost hit me with that one."
<
br /> It occurred to me to tell him what a stupid idea it was to grab your partner's shoulder from behind in the middle of a fight, but I decided to let it pass. Indigo does not get to lecture Orange on tactics or anything else. And Mike was the one guy I knew who could get away with it ten times out of ten.
"Red's having some trouble," I said instead. "Should we call in Green?"
"Nah, not yet." He called out to Shelley, "Red, I'm going to pop out for some gear. You want anything?"
I could see her shake her head. "Stay here. I need you to help Indigo with the Zoinks."
"Zoinks are all well in hand. Indigo's being quite the badass today."
Shelley took her eyes off the Enclave beastie (I was really hoping at this point that Mike didn't dub it "the Hose-monster") long enough to survey the field. All the Zoinks were on the ground. A few were starting to get up; these, I ran over to and kicked into submission.
"All right," she said, dodging another water missile. "Get my sword."
"Good as done. Indigo, you want anything?"
"Nah, I'm good," I said as I popped a Zoink in the face.
"As you please. Wizzit, the weapons room, please." With that, Mike vanished in a puff of orange haze. Ten seconds later, he reappeared a short distance away, carrying Shelley's broadsword and his own favorite weapon, which was basically a club with a double-handed grip on one end.
Now, at this point you're probably wondering why Wizzit wouldn't simply teleport our weapons out on request, rather than having us fetch them ourselves. The answer is simple: Wizzit can't teleport anyone or anything except Primes. There's a transponder of some sort that's part of our belts. (And I remember Shelley saying once that Prime Commander carries a pager-type thingie that lets Wizzit pop him in and out of HQ.)
Mike tossed Shelley her broadsword, and the two of them went at it hammer and tongs on, um . . . I'll call him "Hose-guy". He seemed to be one of those Enclave constructs that's built like a tank -- slow, but tough and strong. And those water-blasts looked like they were pretty devastating, close-up.
I was kept pretty busy playing whack-a-mole with the Zoinks; as soon I knocked one down, another one or two would struggle to their feet and rush to the attack. I did have a short breather at one point, and I took the opportunity to draw my blaster and take a few shots at the thing's hose-tail. Didn't do much good; I'm not such a great shot, and the shots that did hit home just sent up sparks.
It did give Shelley an idea, though. With a shout at Mike to keep the monster busy, she set herself and started whaling away at the thing's tail with her broadsword. Its reaction was immediate. With a roar, it knocked Mike to one side, turned towards her, and fired all its nozzles simultaneously. The blasts struck her square and sent her tumbling backwards off the riverbank. I heard a splash as she hit the water.
"Red!" I shouted. "Red, are you okay?"
"I will be," I heard her say grimly. "Wizzit, tell Green to teleport out here as soon as possible and to make sure to bring the triple-blaster."
"Green will be available for teleport in ten minutes," Wizzit said after a delay.
"The hell!" Mike exploded. "Tell Green to get . . . Green's butt in gear!"
Shelley added, more diplomatically, "Wizzit, tell Green we're under duress here. See if Green can get here sooner."
Another delay. "Green will be available for teleport in two minutes," Wizzit finally said.
Another thing you might be wondering right about now is why our talk sounds so stilted at times. The Red-this, Green-that stuff is, I hope, pretty obvious. The Primes are known all over the world, but Wizzit, Prime Commander, and all of us Primes agree that it would be a good idea if no one knows who we actually are. Thus, no names are ever used when we're powered up, just colors, even in Prime-to-Prime communications. Absolute, iron-clad rule. No exceptions.
Commander Windham decided to take that one step further, though. Early on, he declared that the Primes should attempt to obscure as much about themselves as possible, including things like who's a boy and who's a girl. As far as the public was concerned, we should simply be faceless, anonymous, generic human beings. The blurring of the force shields makes that relatively easy, and the voice altering helps as well.
There are limitations, of course. It's hard for a force shield to disguise Trina's rather generous bustline, much less hide the fact that Shelley is six inches taller than me. Still, we obscure as much as we can, and that extends to the ways we refer to each other. We avoid using language that could be used to infer the sex of any Prime. In particular, no third-person singular personal pronouns are to be used -- no "he", "she", "him", or "her" -- if at all possible. It takes some getting used to, but if you don't mind sounding a bit odd, it works out all right.
(As a side note, let me add that all of this obscuring makes the popular press accounts of our battles sometimes hilarious to read. A few of the London dailies have dubbed Shelley "Eric the Red", because she's tall and wields a broadsword. And after one particularly tough battle where Nicolai got badly hurt and Toby had to carry him out of a collapsing building, there was some speculation in the American press about the "obvious tenderness and affection" that Blue showed for the "graceful and undoubtedly lovely" Prime Yellow, and a couple of the more romantically-minded columnists predicted wedding bells for the couple. Nicolai and Toby -- both of whom are guys, in case that's not clear -- didn't think it was funny, but the rest of us got quite a hoot out of it.)
Regardless, back to the battle. Mike pulled out his blaster and began taking pot-shots at Hose-guy to cover Shelley while she pulled herself out of the drink, and after a couple seconds, I did the same. She was limping a little, and I suspected she was more injured than she wanted to let on. Nevertheless, as soon as I saw she was clear, I holstered my blaster and resumed my one-man war against the Zoinks.
It's funny how your mind sometimes wanders when you're involved in a battle. As I pounded on one Zoink after another, I found myself thinking about the human that Wizzit had detected in the vicinity. He or she hadn't shown him- or herself, hadn't even poked a nose out to satisfy curiosity, and I started to wonder whether they were hurt or just had the uncommon good sense to run away.
I had just come to the conclusion that there were a few sensible people left in the world who could resist the urge to watch a Prime battle when I happened to look over and saw a dark figure running straight toward our monster.
"Orange!" I shouted. "Behind you!"
Mike turned, and in a split second had swung his club to meet his new attacker. It bounced off the dark form as if it were a whiffle bat. Now, Mike's a fairly strong guy, and when he hits something, it generally falls down. In this case, though, there weren't even any sparks. Either our new assailant was uncommonly powerful, or . . .
"Orange," I shouted again. "Don't use your club on her! It won't work. She's an unaltered human!"
"The hell she is! Nobody can move this fast!"
Shelley used her sword to bat aside a barrage of water missiles and charged Hose-guy. As she ran, she shouted, "Indigo might be right. Wizzit, confirm."
"Yipperoo," came Wizzit's voice. "Unaltered, one hundred percent human female. This is the same minder you met earlier today."
He was right. In the light from the museum, I could see that it was Lily. Her face held that same blank expression I had seen earlier, after JB Swift had used his remote control on her, and she was attacking Mike with that same deadly ferocity.
"Damn!" he said as he blocked a shoulder-high kick. "How did you guys ever manage to subdue her, anyway?" She was almost a blur of punches and kicks now, and I could tell Mike was fending them off purely by his almost supernaturally-fast reflexes. He blocked one punch high and stepped in to try a palm-strike to the throat -- a potentially deadly hit, if it connected. It didn't. Instead, Lily grabbed his wrist, pivoted, and threw him over her shoulder, much as she had done to S
helley.
He twisted like a cat and landed on his feet. Lily, as soon as she had completed her throw, had turned and was now running towards Shelley. Mike caught up with her and grabbed hold of her hair from behind, pulling her down. He didn't hold on long, though, because Lily somersaulted backwards, then straightened her body, propelling herself feet-first at his chest.
I spotted a flash of greenish light off my left shoulder, and then I heard Trina's altered voice say, "I am here. Where is target?"
Right away, I could tell she was mad, because Trina tends to drop her articles when she's angry or excited. (And if you didn't grow up the son of a linguist, articles are the words "a", "an", and "the" in English. In Russian, they don't exist.) Shelley laid into Hose-guy a few times with her broadsword and said, "Keep this monster busy while I chop off his tail."
Trina, besides being our resident Russian speaker, is hands-down the best marksman of the Primes. I think she actually prefers the long-range stuff to getting down and dirty with Zoinks or monsters. Doesn't make much sense to me, but I guess it takes all kinds. Her preferred special weapon is a blaster that she had Wizzit modify to deliver a shot roughly three times as strong as our regular blasters. I tried it out once. The tripling of the power makes it inaccurate as hell, but somehow Trina manages to score bullseye after bullseye with the thing on our target range.
She put that ability to good use now, peppering Hose-guy with triple-strength blasts to cover Shelley, who started pounding on the hose-tail with her broadsword again. Between shots, Trina asked me, "So, who is girl beating up Orange?"
"Some minder that Red and I encountered earlier. She's pretty tough." As I spoke, I saw that Hose-guy had finally figured out who was shooting at him. He swiveled in Trina's direction and set himself. "Heads up, Green," I called. "He's gonna shoot at you."
Trina tucked and rolled as Hose-guy sent a barrage of water-shots through the spot where she had been. "If Orange would just duck, I could shoot her," she commented.
I knocked two Zoink heads together and kicked a third Zoink in the chest. "Your blaster wouldn't work. She's immune."
Trina barked a short laugh. "No one is immune to -- ah!"
Stupid me, I had drawn her attention away from the monster, and Hose-guy had managed to hit her with one of his water missiles. As she fell back, I saw the monster set himself again. "Hold on, Green," I shouted. I grabbed one of the Zoinks I had downed and hugged it to me as I dove in front of where Trina lay. I felt a series of thumps as the water missiles struck the body of the Zoink. "Are you okay?" I asked anxiously.
I saw her get up to her hands and knees and shake her head. "Ow! That hurt a lot," she commented. She slowly got to her feet. "Damn that thing, anyway!" With that, she fired a series of shots that first staggered the monster, then knocked it off its feet. "You had better not talk to me any more, Indigo," she said with a laugh. "I find you much too distracting."
Grinning, I tried to keep an eye on Shelley, Trina, and Mike as I continued to keep the Zoinks in check. I was actually starting to get bored by now. Mike was clearly in the most trouble at this point; probably half of Lily's kicks were striking home now. I think this was the first time he had had to fight an opponent who was as fast as he was and whom his weapons wouldn't affect. His lack of formal discipline was showing.
I cast about for some way I could help him. My blaster wouldn't work, nor any other long-range weapon I could think of. I guess I could have thrown a Zoink at Lily, but I could just as easily have hit Mike with it as her. Suddenly, I had an idea. "Orange, I'm going to try something. Get ready to hit her hard."
I heard him grunt as he blocked what looked like a reverse whip-kick. "At this point, mate, I'm up for anything," he gasped.
"Okay, here goes: Lily, stand down!"
She hesitated. It was only for a second, but that was all Mike needed. He jumped up and planted a beautiful roundhouse kick right against the side of her head. The impact staggered her. "You are not . . . authorized," she said faintly, and then she collapsed, unconscious.
Mike stood over her, panting. "Damn! It worked," he muttered. "Thanks, Indigo, I owe you one."
I heard the hissing rush of water, and I turned to see that Shelley had finally chopped a hole in Hose-guy's tail. "That should end those blasted water missiles," she said, dodging back from the spray that came out from the jagged tear in the tail. "Orange and Green, come help me finish him off. Indigo, stay with the minder. I mean to take her with us this time."
"But the Zoinks . . ." I started to protest.
"The Zoinks will keep," she said with an edge to her tone that told me she was hurting pretty badly. "Move it, Indigo. Now!"
You just don't argue with Shelley when she uses that tone of voice. I threw down the Zoink I had been pummeling and sprinted over to where Lily lay. I could hear Shelley calling out orders to Mike and Trina as I looked down at the minder. Mike must have kicked her really hard; I could see a bruise already forming on her temple. Her face had relaxed, losing that awful blank look; despite the bruise, she looked as if she might be merely asleep. Peacefully, innocently, beautifully asleep.
I shook myself. No sense in getting maudlin. Pulling two sets of disposable cuffs from my battle vest, I rolled her onto her stomach. I started to bind her wrists behind her, but she groaned as I pulled her arms back, as if she were in pain. Looking down, I could see that her forearm had a huge lump on one side. It was pretty obviously broken. That must have happened sometime during her fight with Mike. Funny, but it hadn't seemed to slow her down at the time.
I decided just to tie her ankles together. She was wearing the standard-issue black Enclave jumpsuit now, I noticed. Not skin-tight, but snug enough to show she had a pretty nice shape to her. Again, my daydream had not been much of an exaggeration.
I rolled her onto her back and bound her wrists in front of her as gently as I could, forearms parallel as if she were shaking hands with herself. Then I settled back to watch the other three Primes for a while. They were really putting it to Hose-guy now; it shouldn't take long for Wizzit to announce that their weapons were tuned to his Enclave frequency. Then Shelley would call out for one last, coordinated hit, and it would be bye-bye, Hose-guy.
I felt Lily move and looked down at her. Her eyes were open, but just barely, and they were rolling under the lids. I probably appeared to her as if I were part of some weird dream. "Oh, it hurts!" she moaned, her head tossing from side to side. "Why does it hurt so much?"
"Your arm is broken," I said quietly. "Lie still."
Her eyes opened wider, and she seemed to focus on me for the first time. "Who are you?" she asked.
"I am Prime Indigo," I said, and for some reason I added, "I want to help you. I . . . want to be your friend."
"My friend?" She grimaced as if her arm were hurting her. Her eyes squeezed shut, and a tear spilled out from either side. "I have wanted a friend for so long," she murmured, and then she passed out again.
I heard Shelley call for the final strike, and seconds later I saw a shower of sparks and then an explosion. Hose-guy was definitely history. At almost the same instant, I felt something strike my shoulder. It felt small and light, but there was enough velocity to it that it sent me sprawling backwards. I picked myself up in time to see a small, red, spiky figure jump onto Lily's stomach and shout, "I've got her. Get us out of here -- now!"
I sprang toward them, but I just wasn't fast enough. Lily and JB Swift disappeared in a flurry of gray mist just as my fingers closed about her ankle. "Damn it!" I shouted.
"What happened, Indigo?" Shelley came limping over to me. "Where's the minder?"
"JB Swift knocked me down and 'ported out with her." I slammed my fist against the ground in frustration.
"All right, take it easy. I think we're done here." She looked around and spotted Trina. "Do you want to go back to where you
were, Green?" she asked.
"No. Is no point. I will go back to HQ with you."
Shelley nodded wearily. "Okay. Wizzit, bring us home."
Chapter 9