June 9th, 2013, 5:52 PM
“Excuse me, I’m afraid I need to take this,” said Countess Whisper, glancing down at her phone. Her husband waved her out. Heavyhand was demonstrating, using silverware and salt- and pepper-shakers, the showdown at Fort Terrence that had made him his first million. A pleasant enough man, was Heavyhand, full of interesting stories about the past, but not up to her weight. A shame Jay couldn’t have come; sparring with him would have made the evening much more entertaining.
She picked up. “Yes?”
It was one of her spies on the other end - low-security; the kind who just watched for obvious things and occasionally got caught by people.
“That man who attacked your prison just destroyed Count Pyre’s palace and tried to kill the king,” her spy said urgently.
Whisper’s heart rate increased noticeably. “Repeat that.”
“It’ll be all over the internet in a few moments. The man - he’s called Jacobin, he just called himself that - who attacked your prison just telekinetically crushed Pyre’s bunker, then threw it - threw the whole thing like he was just chucking a rock - at the royal palace.”
“That’s what I thought you said,” she said faintly, hitting the alert button on her ambush bracelet as she did. “Thank you. You’ll be rewarded.” She’d be fine in here. Heavyhand and Solaris were two of the strongest fighters in the world and so they could easily defeat Jacobin. Should she tell her husband? No, he and Heavyhand would rush off after him, and if Jacobin escaped again... his first flight - he ran as soon as he saw Solaris! - made her husband look heroic. If Jacobin escaped again it would make him look like a fool. And so the less the government got his and Heavyhand’s help, the better.
When she returned, it was with a smile. “Nothing too important, dear. All taken care of.”
- 6:03 PM -
“Thirty-six deaths... thirty-seven. Our kinetic deflector stopped it.” Steelmind sighed. “Bloody Lizzy.”
She looked up from her own computer screen, at the other end of the room.
“This is a credible attack. With the palace shield down, only the kinetic deflector stopped it. If it had been slower, we might have died.”
“So it is,” she said with a smile. “We’re back on wartime conditions. I’ll go after him immediately.” She snapped the laptop closed. “You coordinate the search.”
“I can do that on the run,” he said, “and do it better if I can look at the evidence myself.”
“Right,” she said. “I’ll whistle up my knights. Pyre’s dead?”
“So it appears.”
“Then this is my business. I’m the one in charge of the Counts. Including avenging them.”
“We’re back at war,” said Steelmind. “You need my help.”
“I want your help,” she said. “Just so long as you remember it’s me who’s being helped and you who’s just helping.”
He shrugged. “As you wish.” His other remote body drones had already begun moving, but they were unnecessary. He was Steelmind, and every security camera in the Fifth was his eye, now, scanning the world in a thousand fields of vision for something, anything, related to the attack.
- 6:09 PM -
The plane boomed over the heads of Nicator’s team, and Captain Crush glanced up at it. A single thing was falling from it, and it was so high in the air it seemed a steel raindrop as it descended through the air. Moments later the jetpack flared to slow its motion, and the armor touched down on the ground, weight balanced on one hand and both feet.
The armor then unfolded itself as the body stood. It was beautiful powered armor, yet true armor, not simply a miracle, broader than Nicator’s across the shoulders, marked with blood red and gleaming gold ascending ‘round the body in wide loops like corded muscles rising to a facemask that showed nothing but a horrible shark grin, jagged teeth and no other face. Bloody Lizzy Balog’s Durendal armor, the Girardoni.
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“Your majesty,” Nicator said, bowing.
“Knights of Pyre. Whither away?”
“We are going to intercept the man who killed him, your majesty,” said Nicator.
“Where?” she snapped.
“An abandoned apartment building, at 14th by Marseille.”
“My team will take over. Wait here for debriefing.”
She leaped and accelerated. The plane caught her, and she was off again.
“That’s not right,” said Jim Skullcracker. “He’s our target, not hers.”
“We have other options,” said Nicator, “and should consider them.”
“B-”
“In silence.”
The silence stretched. Captain Crush tapped his feet, twiddled his fingers, waited, checked his phone, waited. Nicator stood stoically, without bothering even to move. The Thunderer paced in circles. Skullcracker, Nicator’s friend, pulled a dog-eared paperback out of his back pocket and started reading.
Finally the waiting ended as a squad of levy drones approached them, accompanied by a metallic figure that looked like a man in half-armor, the snake-and-crown in blue and gold on the chest. Crush had seen Steelmind’s proxy drones back during the war; the remote bodies were less inhuman, more capable of real facial expressions, than the combat drones, and since Steelmind was Steelmind he didn’t need any projection suit to pilot them.
“Hello,” said the Prince of Novapest.
“Your majesty,” said Nicator.
“Your highness,” he corrected. “You are Nicator, yes? Pyre’s new knight?”
“Your sister the princess wanted me to wait here to be debriefed.”
It played the sound of his sigh. “’Hood’ seems to be stronger than expected. Nonetheless my sister should be able to take care of him.”
“He has a habit of escaping, your highness.”
“So he does. If he evades her, you have my authorization to go after him. The murderer of a Count cannot be permitted to escape due to petty political disputes.”
“As you command, your highness.”
“Whatever is necessary, let it be done.”
- 6:12 PM -
Jacobin glowered. His head was pounding (he’d never stretched his powers that far before), but that was nothing compared to what he had found here.
“Everyone’s dead.”
They’d been volunteers, individuals, David Alleyne and Olu Sasere and Thura Ei and Luis Rojas and many more names he’d never learned or hadn’t remembered, half or two-thirds the Tyrant’s incomers not men born and bred in Saint-Andrews and yet they showed no hesitation, and now they were bloodstains and nothing else. The building had half fallen down and the remains were leaning badly; someone’d blown a hole straight through it and into the next.
There was a plane moving fast, going fast, in a moment he’d hear it, but it had no iron parts, just iron held within, and he wasn’t near an airport -
oh
He was still invisible. Would he rather fight at close-range or long? Long if he could.
He propelled himself out of the building with the strongest push he could manage, gritted his teeth against the whiplash as he tried to keep his body steady. He pulled all the iron he could towards him as a weapon (his headache got worse, and he tried to ignore it).
The plane fired a missile and (without even reaching the point of awareness) he crushed it into itself and it detonated, and then it was bullets but they were jacketed, their paths bending under his will, turning straight back at the attacker and now his gritted teeth were a snarl as minions descended from it to land on the ground, most with the snake-and-crown, and the one in the lead wore the red-gold Durendal.
Tyrantspawn. He hurled out a hand and unleashed his power. Frying pans bent and twisted into spikes, support pillars wrenched out of concrete and shattered to leave the buildings behind them crashing to the ground in pillars of dust, nails ripped themselves out of walls and all hurtled towards the armor, as did the bullets its plane had fired, all headed straight towards it. Every one reversed direction as the Durendal charged for him, peppering nearby buildings with shrapnel. He pulled himself straight up, hurling himself up into the sky to get away - only to be tackled out of the air by a flying woman in an impractical outfit.
Jacobin went sprawling, crashed into a balcony, her still on him, her first punch into his chest making a crunch sound as his suit buckled under the blows. He smashed her in the chest with an iron bar and she kept hitting until he wrapped it around her head, forcing it into enough pliability that it encased her skull, which was when she started trying to claw it off. The royal was still out of reach and so he bent the railing into spikes and fired them at the man with werewolf claws who was climbing the wall towards him, and then the royal made a jetpack-assisted leap onto the balcony. Through his headache he pushed down against the balcony, shoved it down and letting the royal fall.
Lasers and stun-bolts and bullets and jets of corrosive acid were flashing past him (he was invisible except the occasional blur on his stomach) all his attention to dodging. He spared a shred of attention for his attackers - he hurled metal scrap at them to sweep the henchmen away - and then a lens on the falling royal’s shoulder opened up.
And then there was a flash of fire and he was falling, and he could smell burnt meat and the crackle of smoking electronics and his chest had just been hit harder than the brick had ever managed to, and his arms were invisible but his torso wasn’t and he tried to grab control of himself and turn it into a guided crash, jetting away from the battlefield. His arms were invisible but his stomach wasn’t - what district was he in? He wasn’t sure. But the invisibility system was still working. Mostly. Enough.
When he came to a stop he looked around.
Didn’t recognize it. The plane was still flying, people were still hovering, but no one seemed to have followed him.
“Damn,” he whispered. Pyre was dead, and that had gone just as planned, but after that - he had just been beaten, and beaten badly. Nothing he could throw at her - at Bloody Lizzy, she must have been - could so much as scratch her. The stories were true.
“Luminosa?”
There was silence.