My mother was always there, no matter what." She shook slightly as emotions long ago locked up finally burnt their way out, as she finally understood that terrible time, finally saw what truly happened.
"I always thought afterwards that the poltergeist thing was just what happened when a Talent appeared. It couldn't just happen, it had to happen dramatically. I was just a teenager. I didn't know. And afterwards–" she sagged in her chair, heartbroken for that poor girl that lived now only in fragmentary memories, "I didn't want to think about it at all."
Mr Shaou nodded, and checked his watch. "You have been here for twenty minutes, and we have already made a great step forwards. We shall celebrate with tea." He extended his hand. "You may call me 'Bert.'"
Nadiya took the hand and shook it. "Nadiya, but you already knew that."
"I did," He rose and started to walk for the door, "but I didn't know who 'Nadiya' was. Now I do. You have great potential, I think. It will be an interesting journey for us both. Milk and sugar?"
"No sugar, thanks. Bert?" she called after him. He paused by the doorway to listen. "I'm sorry about calling this place a dojo before. I didn't mean anything by it. You're Chinese, aren't you?"
"I was born far away from here," he admitted.
"Hong Kong?"
He shook his head. "Warrington."
And then he was gone, but for the creak of the stairs as he went to make the tea.
Tale of Terror
Nadiya, Ian, and Gilbert stood bolt upright, eyes forward, with sober air. Talos, before them in its custom-built lift car solemnly saluted them. As one, they returned the salute. Silently, the transparent lift doors slid shut, their edges marked with black and yellow hazard tape. Then, as the lift began to rise, Nadiya, Ian, and Gilbert began to hum the theme to Thunderbirds.
Up, up Talos rose, as its squad mates performed Barry Gray's classic march, neither entirely in time with one another, nor in key, but with undeniable sincerity. As the lift disappeared from view, they dropped their salutes and walked to the window, still humming. Seconds later, the sound of Talos' flight units winding up to speed was heard through the open window and then Talos flew into view some ten metres above them. It was still saluting in flight, so they felt obliged to salute too and also upped the volume of the mouth music.
Talos cruised away from them before dropping the salute, banking left to fly past the Student Castle tower. Forms could just about be seen in some of the tower's windows, waving at Talos as it shot by.
Duty performed, the rest of the squad returned to, in the case of Ian, rereading Modesty Blaise, and Nadiya working on a new and slightly different variation of her usual battledress.
"I'll see you two later, okay?" said Gilbert, entering the ground access lift.
"Bye, Gilbert," said Nadiya.
"Give my love to the fragrant Sara," said Ian, not looking up.
The lift closed, and Gilbert was gone.
Now Ian glanced up, and regarded the lift sourly. "He's always going out of an evening now, that 'un," he said. He clapped the book shut and dropped it on the table. "Just you and me again, Kysla."
"Why do we have to hum that tune every time Talos launches?" said Nadiya, absorbed in her needlework.
"It's a tradition. We always have. Well, if we're not doing anything more interesting, or there's a scramble on, or summat."
Nadiya nodded at this intelligence. "I hope there isn't a scramble tonight. I want to get this dress finished."
"Black and white again," said Ian, nodding at the material.
"I like black and white."
"You should ask Abel if you want new battledress."
"Good with a needle, is he?"
"You know what I mean. He could have you five brand spanking copies of your dress here in a week."
"I know, but... I want to broaden my wardrobe a bit. I get bored wearing the same thing all the time. As long as it's got enough room to let me wear the armoured bodysuit underneath, I can wear pretty much anything I like on top."
"As long as it's black and white."
She smiled briefly at him. "Yeah." Then she looked at him mournfully, like a puppy left in the rain. "So... thirsty..." She made little coughing sounds.
"You are such a user, our Nadiya," said Ian, heading for the kitchen. "I'll make a pot of tea."
"And biscuits!" she called after him.
When he returned with the tea and a packet of Jammy Dodgers, he poured while Nadiya carried on sewing. After a while she stopped.
"Are you just going to sit there and watch me?"
"I've finished me book, there's nowt on TV, and I'm bored."
"Talk to me, then." She started sewing again. "Tell me how much better the Goon Squad used to be in the olden days."
"It wasn't better," he said, leaning back into the sofa, cradling the World's #1 Dead Hero mug one of his fans had sent him. "Just different. Not even massively different. I mean, I was in the Squad, and Talos has been for years, too, so half the team's the same as it is now." He hesitated, thoughtful. "Well, not quite. I'm still the same, but Talos, not so much."
"How do you mean?"
"We lost Talos for a while. It took a kicking, and vanished for over a year. No messages, nothing. Missing, presumed rusting in a ditch somewhere. Then, pop! It's back. But different, you know? Looked a bit different, behaved a bit different. I reckon it rebuilt itself while it was gone, and that included rebuilding its brain. Not the same personality, now."
"Yeah?" Nadiya rubbed some tailor's chalk from her fingers onto her cardigan, and looked at Ian. "What did it used to be like?"
Ian glanced over his shoulder at Talos' access lift, as if making sure it hadn't come back to hear them gossiping about it. "Nasty," he said. "Brutal. It was a war machine, after all. But, still... not much sense of proportion. Once saw it turn over a car with a couple of car thieves still in it. Whump, right onto its roof. They were just lucky it didn't set it on fire while they were in there."
"Talos did that?" This was a real surprise to Nadiya. She knew full well how much force Talos could apply when it wanted to, but it had always used good judgement in her experience. In fact, she often thought Talos was the most philosophical member of the team, machine intelligence or not.
"Yeah. We used to get warnings because of stuff it'd done all the time. Some kid who'd been tagging train carriages got dumped stark-bollock naked up in the Peaks in winter. Another time it tore the roof off a place that was growing weed. Derailed a tram as a roadblock to stop some joy riders. Certain tendency to overreact, our Talos. It was like it'd been programmed by the ‘Daily Mail’."
Nadiya shook her head. "I just can't imagine Talos doing things like that. You say it was badly damaged? How did that happen?"
"Ah, now. Thereby hangs a tale. You sew, I'll tell you all about it."
This isn't so long ago, really (said Ian). About five years, it must be. The line-up then was me, Talos... obviously... Mara, and Siobhan, AKA the Gladiatrix.
"The Gladiatrix?" interrupted Nadiya. "I thought she's with the Lionhearts?"
"She is now, but she used to be one of us. Got a transfer three or four years ago. Said she had family down there, but I think they turned her head. Sponsorship and a bigger profile. Don't get me wrong; Siobhan's a diamond and everything, but she saw the main chance and went for it. Can't say as I blame her. I mean, we're all getting older. Well, not me. Or Talos." He considered. "When you stop to think about it, there's a fair few Talents who aren't getting any older. Anyway, she's not one of them. Nice new cossie, makeover, face up on billboards, personal trainer, although who'd willingly spar with her I have no idea. She's a big lass, by which I mean she's six-six if she's an inch, and she can punch a hippo into next week."
"Used to have a bit of a girl crush on her," Nadiya admitted. "No idea she used to be in the Squad. Only heard of her after she joined the Lionhearts, though, so that would explain it. That can't have been easy on you, Ian. You hate the Lionhearts."
&n
bsp; "I do. Not her, though. She gets a pass. So, you going to keep interrupting me, Kysla?"
Nadiya put her sewing aside and settled down with her tea mug. "Yep."
Okay. Lovely. Where was I? Oh, right (said Ian). So, anyway, this was the time they accidentally made some anti-matter at Manchester University High Energy Physics Lab.
They hadn't meant to; it was just one of those silly things when somebody pushes button B when they're supposed to press button A, and Bob's your uncle, ten grams of anti-matter are suddenly floating around in your experiment. Could happen to anyone.
Massive panic. Ten grams of anti-matter will cancel out ten grams of matter, yeah? And you get twenty grams-worth of energy released. Five minutes with a slide rule and E=mc2 will tell you that will result in a – technical term here – shitload of energy. About three or four times the energy released by the Hiroshima bomb, yeah?
Wow, everybody goes. Maybe we should evacuate the city. Maybe we should evacuate the Greater Manchester area. Yeah, that's a good idea.
So, the city gets ghostly pretty quickly. Useful thing about Manchester is that it's a good way inland and there are roads and rails going every which way. Push comes to shove, you can start walking. None of that faff about bridges getting blocked like they have in Manhattan every time some bugger decides to blow the place up, or sics a kaiju on it, or whatever. Give it a few hours and the army and GMP doing their thing, and there's hardly a soul within a fifteen mile radius of the city centre.
Meanwhile, there's us, a few regulars, and a handful of really worried physicists who are trying to figure out how to get this stuff from a huge experimental rig into a portable magnetic bottle without vaporising everything. Oh, and doing it in a vacuum because air equals matter equals bang.
"I'm a bit surprised you haven't heard of all this," said Ian, breaking off to look curiously at Nadiya. "It was international news."
Nadiya looked uncomfortable. "I did hear about it."
"Oh. So why the face?"
"You've got to understand, Ian, I was with The Mischief then. I didn't think like I do now. It was just some city in another country. Birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, the news called it. A symbol of unbridled capitalism and the exploitation of the poor."
Ian's eyes narrowed. He understood all too well. "You wanted it to blow up," said Ian quietly.
Nadiya nodded. "Soz," she said miserably.
Ian regarded her stonily, then continued the story.
Right, so there we were. Massive potential disaster. One bit of luck. Ever hear of Ouroborous 1 up in the Canadian Yukon? They make anti-matter there, and the portable bottles they use are made in in the UK. The lab in Oxford had just completed one, and reckoned it could take ten grams, although it'd never been designed to take so much. So, touch and go, but it should work. Once it was in the bottle, they could look at ways of making it less likely to evaporate a city.
We had the easy part of the gig; just holding a perimeter on the off-chance some silly sod decided they had a nefarious use for ten grams of anti-matter. To be honest, you wouldn't have to be a genius to come up with the obvious blackmail scheme. The stuff's not radioactive, and the bottle fitted inside a thing about the size of a big suitcase. Any idiot could smuggle it into a city with a timed cut-off on the power, or even just a little bomb to wreck the bottle. Either way, boom. "Pay up, or your city's for it."
The regular plods had pulled back, and we just had a handful of army guys. They were there to back us up if there was trouble, and to get the scientists out in a hurry if it started to go wrong. Had a chopper sitting in a car park, ready to go. Few others in the air, looking out for stragglers and looters.
You'd think it would be real sweat-on-the-upper-lip time, and it was kind of worrying for people who had anything to lose – not me, obviously – for about an hour. By then the boffins were saying the bottle in the lab was rock solid and showing no signs of trouble, so everybody relaxed a bit. Then another chopper carrying the portable bottle turns up, and it all gets a bit arse-clenchy again for a while. The thing works like a champion, though. If it'd been in a film, they'd have dragged it out for ages, but in realty the boffins spent most of their time setting up. Once it was ready, they opened the bottles, the stuff went schloop from one to other, they closed the bottles, checked everything again for ages, separated them, and there you go. Now the problem was portable, which was a better state of affairs.
There was an RAF transport waiting at Ringway – sorry, 'Manchester International Airport,' I'll never get used to that name – and the plan was to fly the bottle there in the chopper, transfer it to the transporter, and fly it across ocean and unpopulated areas as much as possible, all the way to Ourobouros 1 where they could break the stuff up into smaller chunks. Lot of organisation – especially sorting out the air space in a hurry – but a simple plan, really.
"So, what happened?" asked Nadiya. She'd finished her tea, and once again took up her sewing.
Ian scowled. "Lord bastard Terror happened, that's what."
Nadiya sat up. "People keep mentioning him around here."
"That's because he's such a royal pain in the arse."
I've explained grandees to you before, haven't I? Global threats. The biggest of the big bads. Lord Terror's one in aces. Textbook megalomaniac genius. Possibly an artificial intelligence, but I don't believe that. Hard enough to get a machine to behave even as human as our Talos, never mind making it a huge drama queen, too. Nah, there's a human mind in there. Looks like a machine, though, even if it keeps changing its design. We've been up against him three times, and each time he's looked different. Big robotic thing, but a different big robotic thing.
Hadn't been heard of for a few months at that point. Last seen trying to claim Madagascar as his personal kingdom. The Africans didn't like that, and sent in Quadrant Blue. That's one of the pan-African SpecT-Ops teams. Bunch of explosions later and they kicked him out.
Lost half their people doing it, though. They were a good team, too.
Bear that in mind; Terror is hardcore. He may ponce around and talk like a Saturday morning matinee villain, but he's a killer. None of that Nyahaha-now-I've-got-you-in-my-deathtrap stuff with him. He'll drop you where you stand if he thinks you're a threat.
Given what a big deal he is, you might wonder why we keep seeing him around here. Manchester's not a huge city by global standards, after all, and you know it hurts me to say that. It's a great city, and I'll argue anyone into the ground who says it isn't, but when you've got a whole world to victimise, why does he keep coming back here?
Talos – that's why. Terror never gave a tuppenny damn about Manchester until Talos joined the Squad. There's some sort of bad blood there, but good luck finding out what it is from Talos. Common wisdom is Terror built Talos and Talos went rogue on him. Might be true, might not. All supposition.
Anyway.
So Terror hears about ten grams of lightly protected anti-matter, and he thinks to himself, "Sounds good. I'll have some of that," gets on his bike, and comes to visit jolly old England from wherever he was licking his wounds after the Madagascar barney.
First we know about it is a noise like Jehovah descending with a Saturn V strapped to each leg. Amazingly, it didn't require my razor-sharp detective instincts to deduce we were getting a visit from his nibs. He came in to land on a sort of plaza area in front of the building, broke paving slabs where his feet came down, and bellowed really loud – unnecessarily loud, y'know? He's got speakers built into him that give Deep Purple decibel envy – "I AM LORD TERROR!"
Well, thanks for telling us. We never would have guessed.
Wanker.
Now, a man's got to know his limitations. Dirty Harry said that, so it's gospel far as I'm concerned. I do detective stuff, I'm good dealing with people even if the people concerned wouldn't agree, I can soak up damage, and I make a decent cup of tea. Fancy another?
Nadiya shook her head. Ian continued.
What I'm not good at is big stupid battles when we're fighting stuff the size of a mammoth. My handy little stun-gun is bugger all use, and the likes of Lord Terror can pound me into an oily smear on the pavement in no time flat. Could I survive that? Maybe, but I don't really see the point in letting him try. At the time I didn't have me stunner. I was using a real actual bang-bang-shooty pistol, a Browning HP35, if that means anything to you. Lovely bit of kit, but not very forgiving if you have to put a nine mil in somebody. The stunner's better. I get to shoot people all the time with that.
Anyway, even thirteen rounds of lead aren't going to upset Terror, that's if he noticed them in the first place. So, there's me and Siobhan with the soldiers and the scientists, Mara's covering the rooftops, and Talos is nowhere near, off overflying the perimeter. I try to squawk Talos on the RT, but Terror's jamming all the comms. We had no warning at all, despite all the military eyes on the city. Not so much as a blip on radar.
Talos can pull that stealth stunt, too, which is another reason we reckon it's originally a piece of Terror's handiwork.
Well, there's no point me wading out there. The body he'd decided to come out in was a big bastard, almost as tall as a double-decker bus, I'd say. I'd be halfway through reading him his rights and he'd stamp on me. So, I stick with the anti-matter and we try and get it past Terror. I tell the squaddies right off, don't bother opening fire. Assault rifles will just irritate him. The most useful thing they can do is to help lug the magnetic bottle to the chopper and get it the hell out of Dodge before Terror realises what's going on.
Meanwhile, Mara is outside doing her thing.
"I don't know anything about her," said Nadiya. "What does she do?"
"She was a witch. Hated being called a sorceress or enchantress or wizard or anything like that. She could do amazing stuff. She was good. Really good." Ian paused, thinking.
Nadiya noticed the use of the past tense, and made a mental note to ask Gilbert more about Mara. She had a feeling it wouldn't be wise to ask Ian.
Terror's just getting his bearings when he suddenly finds himself in a fog bank. Poff! Out of nowhere. I take that as my cue to cover the squaddies and civvies out the back, the four soldiers carrying the anti-matter bottle. The original plan was to use one of those equipment trolleys, but I thought it'd be too noisy. Better lugged by a bunch of guys up on their tiptoes than a squeaky, clanking trolley blowing our position.
Course, the big bastard has thermal imaging built in, doesn't he?
He comes thumping out of the fog in a sprint. Something that big looks sort of weird sprinting, but there you go. That's okay, though, because we knew he'd do that, the fog's just a distraction. Thump, thump, thump, he comes out of the fog – "GIVE THE ANTI-MATTER TO ME, AND YOU WILL LIVE!" – thump, thump, thump.
Up comes his arm, and the Gatling gun he's got mounted there starts spinning. Yeah, right. Like he didn't intend killing everyone right from the start. He gets a bead on us, and opens fire.
And there's Siobhan, shield flickering out of her bracer. Sort of amber it is, and transparent, shaped like one of those big old Roman tower shields. You've seen that, right? Big fan like you, you must have seen it. Jumps into the way and takes about a hundredweight of lead bouncing off the shield. Terror actually empties the gun trying to take her down. Soon as it clicks on empty chambers, she's running at him. Shield vanishes, and she's got the baton in her hand. Snaps out to quarterstaff length while Terror's still choosing which of his many other weapon systems he wants to play with next. Boom! Has a go at her with a rocket-propelled grenade, but she's vaulted on the staff, whizzy-whizzy, onto his back.
Terror's proper pissed off, now. The thing we've learned about him from fighting him in the past is that he gets what pilots call 'target fixation.' So keen on hitting the target, he forgets about everything else. It's how pilots have ended up flying into hillsides in the past, because they didn't pull out of an attack run soon enough. Now he's so keen to pulp Siobhan, he's forgotten all about the anti-matter.
Then Siobhan jumps off, and runs for it, so he shoots her in the back, but the RPG goes clean through her and blows up a bench, 'cos she was never there to start with. Mara's up on the roof, remember, chucking illusions around.
He watches bits of bench raining down and the Gladiatrix fading into nowt, and thinks, Oh, right. That means she's still on my back. She's got her footing by now, has lit up the end of the staff with the blade and is about to do Terror a mischief with it. You can do a lot of mischief with that blade, y'know.
"It burns at 25,000 degrees Celsius," said Nadiya.
Ian regarded her pityingly. "You fan girl."
Quick as you like, he reaches up, grabs her before she can start cutting, and chucks her overarm. Chucks her a hundred yards at the very least. Would have killed anyone else, but Siobhan... Well, you know all about her. She's pretty special. She does a tuck and roll in midair, comes down facing him in a three point landing. Course she's still doing about sixty when she hits the ground, so she scrapes backwards, sparks flying from her boots. Leaves twin trails of powdered concrete as she goes. Comes to a halt, the breeze blowing the powder in a little cloud in front of her. Looks up at him. Out comes the shield, relights the blade. Up and running at him in a second.
Nadiya was wide eyed. "Awesome!"
"Yeah." Ian smiled nostalgically. He sighed. "Too awesome for us, as it turned out. Still, no hard feelings, and it was great to have her in the Squad while it lasted."
We'd have stayed and applauded if we could, but we're supposed to be getting the ten grams out. We leave Siobhan going toe-to-toe with Terror while Mara backs her up, and head for the helicopter.
Army Lynx, it was. Nice and fast, and room to take the soldiers, scientists, and me. Another Lynx is flying by, all the pyrotechnics having attracted it. Nice bit of serendipity, because if Terror had heard our chopper winding up to lift, it might have made him remember what the daytrip was about in the first place. As it was, the airborne chopper made enough noise to confuse matters.
We got the bottle to the Lynx and loaded it aboard, climbed in, and we were off. Job done.
Now my main worry is for the girls, of course. Lord Terror's got all these little black stripes painted on his armour, painted in neat rows. Each one of 'em's for a SpecT he's murdered. At the time, there were about thirty of those little marks. I didn't want there to be thirty two by the end of the day.
We're clear of the buildings and the pilot gets us headed for Ringway. Sorry, sorry. Manchester International, that is. From the open door, I can see Mara's gone on the offensive. Weird little bolts of magicky stuff she could shoot. Never knew what they were going to do until they hit. Always something bad for whoever's at the receiving end, though. Siobhan's rolling between Terror's legs, and slashing with the blade. Terror's letting off weapons in all directions. Windows shattering. Lamp posts toppling. Stuff blowing up. It's like Freshers' Week down there.
And then... and then he looks up, and he sees us. And right then, I know we're buggered.
You can almost see a light-bulb come on over his big, power-assisted head. Ohhhh... the anti-matter. Yeah. The jets fire, and he starts to lift.
Siobhan dives clear. She's resilient, but those jets are melting the paving stones. Mara, bless her, she knows what's going to happen if Terror gets airborne, tries to bind him with a pile of web out of nowhere, but he just pushes through it, and the stuff burns where his jets touch it. Everybody in the Lynx is yelling, 'GO! GO! GO!' at the pilot, so he puts the nose down and he goes. Right behind us, we can see Terror climbing.
Siobhan might be able to fight him on the deck, but she can't fly. She has a bloody good go, though. Jumps up two storeys onto a low building, from there to a higher one, across the roof and jumps at Terror as he rises. He sees her coming, though, and opens up with another RPG. She opens her shield before it reaches her, but the blast and – I suppose – just the shield acting like an airbrake shortens her jump. She falls a
way and lands back in the uni precinct. That's her out of the game.
Mara, though, she can fly. Off like a hawk she went. Feisty. Not much she could do against Terror by herself, but she was going to try all the same.
Then the other Lynx gets involved. Terror's tooling along after us, and suddenly he's getting stitched with machine-gun fire. Have to hand it to the army pilots in that machine, they knew they stood no chance of hurting him. They just wanted to distract him, try and give us a space to get away. Terror puts up with all the little plinking noises on his armour for about ten seconds, and then gets narked with the people doing the shooting. This is Terror all over. If he could stay focused in combat, he'd do twice as well as he actually does.
He gets nadgy, though. No joke, he booms out 'FEEL THE WRATH OF LORD TERROR!,' rolls in mid-air and pops a couple of the dinkiest little heat-seeking anti-aircraft missiles you've ever seen at the support Lynx. The missiles are like a foot or so long, those model ones you can buy in hobby shops are bigger. When you think about it, though, it's pretty amazing. That small, but they're packing the heat-seeking bit, and a rocket motor, fuel, steering gear, and not forgetting a warhead, all in a little thing like that. Lord Terror would impress me if he wasn't such an utter tosser.
The chopper pilot sees them coming, turns to evade, flares start flying out, but it's all for nothing. I couldn't see exactly where they hit – we were maybe half a mile from them when it happened – but I saw one the rotor blades come clean off. Poor bastards went down like a brick.
They didn't die, though. Mara made the call, decided she couldn't really slow down Terror much, but she could save the crew of that Lynx, and she went after them. Pulled that webbing spell again across the trees at the Platt Lane entrance to Platt Fields just before the Lynx hit. It still came down hard, but it was survivable. Mara got in there and did some of her healing stuff, and the crew were conscious and talking by the time the medics got there.
She were a good 'un, Mara. She cared.
So, to recap. Siobhan's sprinting southwards at forty miles an hour, even though she knows she can't get close enough to help. Doesn't stop her trying though. Tenacious, our Siobhan.
Mara's helping the injured pilots and gunners from a wrecked Lynx that's dangling from some trees like an Apocalypse Now re-enactment. The thing's pissing aviation spirit all over the show, so it's pretty important to get them clear, else ways there's a chance they might end up in a giant rotisserie if there's a spark.
And Talos? No bloody idea. It could be anywhere. Comms are still messed up, you see. Thanks, Terror, like you're not a big enough problem without stopping us from calling for help.
The Lynx we're in is fast – can scrape a double ton with the throttle open – but Terror's faster. I can see how this is going to play out. He'll just stroll up, dismantle the helicopter around us, take the bottle, not say 'Thank you,' and piss off with it, leaving us in a bundle of crumpled metal heading earthwards.
We can all see it, to be honest. We can't even land and try and lose him on the ground, because we'd have to slow down to do it, and the whole depressing scenario would be played out that much sooner. The physicists were really quiet. Didn't wake up that morning expecting to be murdered by an international terrorist, so they're sick with fear. The soldiers are pissed off that they're going to die, and can't do anything about at least giving their killer a bad day. I'm not even sure I'm going to survive it. So, I say, "Ah, sod it," draw me Browning, and start plinking at Terror as he gets closer.
The squaddies have... oh, whatchamacallit? That bullpup assault rifle? SA something. Sixty? Eighty? Whatever, they've got assault rifles, and their corporal says something about not going down without a fight, and orders controlled fire on Terror. Doesn't slow him down the slightest bit, of course, but at least we felt better about ourselves.
Terror's getting closer and closer, and then... he's gone. We're all, 'What?' Then one of the scientists looking out of the other side is shouting, 'Over there! Talos has him!"
Talos does, too.