Aces High by George R. R. Martin
“They’re calling to that thing out there. TIAMAT. The whole organization has existed for centuries just for the purpose of bringing that horror down on us.”
Tachyon’s sigh was heavy. Suddenly he felt very tired. Forty years of one horror and another, he was entitled to feel fatigued. He knew Fortunato, standing in his elegant living room with his bulging forehead and the power practically crackling in the air, wouldn’t have agreed with him.
Power calls to power? Oh, what he could have told them about that, Tachyon thought. And if he could have stepped back far enough to see the grand design of the universe, what he might have learned himself about his own people and the Wild Card Day and the approach of TIAMAT or the Swarm or whatever it was. Maybe there was a true grand design to the universe; or maybe it was just the wild card powers calling the Swarm. Of course, that would mean the virus had called the Swarm before the virus had even existed, but Tachyon was accustomed to dealing with the absurdities of space and time.
Not that any of it mattered anyway. He looked at Fortunato, who was energized with kundalini and impatience. The time for agonizing was long, long past; now was the time for doing, for doing as much as he could and not a bit less. To atone, perhaps, for a time when he might have done more, but had failed.
When he had failed Blythe.
After so many years, the sense of loss had not abated. It wouldn’t stay hidden at the bottom of a bottle, it couldn’t be obscured by an unending parade of the finest lovers. Only the work he did at the clinic ever seemed to give him some kind of comfort, inadequate but better than nothing at all.
His gaze met Fortunato’s and he recognized the look in the other man’s eyes. “Power calls to power and sorrow to sorrow.” He gave Fortunato the barest of smiles. “We have all lost something precious to us in this battle against horror. But still we must go on, go on and turn back the darkness. If we can.”
Fortunato didn’t return the smile. Everything seemed to call for one of his goddamn fucking faggot speeches. “Yeah, sure,” he said roughly, turning away. “Go up there and kick some ass, you and me and what army?”
Tachyon reached for the telephone. “We’ll have to call them out.”
The cop actually threw a net over him. It was so startling that he reverted to human form, bruising elbows and knees and scraping his flesh as he rolled over and over on the sidewalk. The cop was laughing even as he pulled his gun out and stuck it through the net.
“Don’t get any ideas about changing back,” said the cop, “or I’ll have to put you out of your misery. Jesus, wait till they check your action up to the Cloisters. I can hardly believe it myself.”
He shivered in the net, unable to take his eyes off the barrel of the pistol. The cop really would shoot him, he didn’t doubt it. Silently, he cursed himself for not being content with simply sailing over the city, enjoying the lights and scaring the piss out of the occasional rooftop couple. How many people could say they’d been buzzed by a pterodactyl—lately?
The cop bundled him into the back of his car and drove through town, still snickering. “I don’t know what the Astronomer’ll want to do about you, but you’ll probably amuse the hell out of him. You make the smallest tyrannosaurus that ever was.”
“Ornithosuchus,” he murmured, swallowing hard. Another dinosaur-illiterate with a gun. He wasn’t sure what to be more afraid of—the gun, this Astronomer guy, or his own father, who would shortly discover he wasn’t up in his room asleep. He was only thirteen and he wasn’t supposed to be out this late on a school night, especially in the form of a fast-running flesh-eater of the Triassic period.
“Come here, my dear. So I can see you better.”
Jane hesitated. The aura of evil that her dreams had hinted at was too definitely present around the old man in the wheelchair. Moisture began to bead lightly on her face and neck. She looked to Kim Toy but the woman’s attention was on the Astronomer, just like everyone else’s in the great hall. Whoever they all were. Masons. She recognized the man who’d brought her in—Judas, Roman had called him. Roman was seated at a computer terminal off to one side, near a low brick wall that seemed to have been attacked with a pickax. Spray-painted on it in metallic gold was the legend EAT ME.
“You have a great power, my dear,” the old man said. “One that would be greatly useful for the visitor bearing down on us from the stars. TIAMAT.” He paused, waiting for her reaction. She stood uncomfortably under his gaze. The extra illumination they had brought in and tacked up so carelessly had only made the shadows at the far corners that much darker. She had a sense of horrible things waiting there for a signal from this Astronomer to crawl out and devour her. EAT ME. She put one elbow in her fist, pressing the other hand against her mouth so she wouldn’t start laughing and never stop.
“Are you familiar with that name? TIAMAT?” prodded the Astronomer. Jane pressed her hand tighter against her mouth and shrugged awkwardly.
“Well.” The old man leaned forward slightly. “It would be helpful if we could have a demonstration of your power. Aside from what you did on the street with the fire hydrant.” He squinted at her. “Or are you doing it now, my dear?”
“Oh, really subtle,” said the bleakly thin man standing at the Astronomer’s right. His eyes made Jane think of tombstones. “Just what we need, an ace whose big power is heavy sweating. World domination, here we come.”
The Astronomer chuckled and Jane thought it was the most evil sound she’d ever heard. “Now, now. We all know she’s capable of much greater feats. Aren’t you. Yes. For instance, you could conceivably remove all the water from a body, leaving—well, not much.” He gestured at the rest of the people and chuckled again at the look on her face. “No, I thought not. The only one you might care to use it on right now is myself, and I’m immune.” He nodded to Red, who vanished under one of the brick arches. A few moments later, he reappeared, guiding two men who were pushing a cage on wheels into the middle of the room. Jane blinked several times, unable to believe her eyes in the bad light.
There was a dinosaur in the cage. A Tyrannosaurus rex, all of three feet high.
As she watched, it bared its ferocious-looking teeth and ran back and forth behind the bars, its little forearms cuddled up close to its scaly body. One dark reptilian eye regarded Jane with a glitter of intelligence.
“Vicious creature,” said the Astronomer. “If I were to let it out, it could snap your leg off in one bite. Kill it. Withdraw all the water from its body.”
Jane lowered her arms, her hands still curled into fists.
“Oh, come now.” Another of those evil chuckles. “Don’t tell me your heart is touched by every stray dinosaur that comes along.”
“There’s someone in there,” she said. “You want a sample of my power? Here’s a close-up!”
Something almost happened. She had focused on an area just in front of the Astronomer’s face, intending to dash a gallon of water into his eyes. The air blurred momentarily and then cleared. The old man threw back his head and roared with laughter. “You were right, Roman, she breaks out with bravado at the oddest moments! I told you, my excellent dear, that your power won’t work if I don’t want it to. No matter how much power you have, I have more. Isn’t that right, Demise?”
The skinny man stepped forward, ready to obey some order. The Astronomer shook his head. “There’s another waiting for us, much more receptive. She won’t try to throw a bucket of water in our faces.”
Jane wiped her own face without effect. Water was beginning to pool around her feet. The Astronomer watched her, unmoved. “To have real power is to be able to use it, to be able to do certain things, no matter how awful you may find them. There is more power than you can imagine in being able to do such things, or in being able to make someone do them.” He gestured at the cage. Jane followed the movement and then had to clap both hands over her mouth to keep from crying out.
The tyrannosaur had been replaced by a boy no more than twelve or thirteen years old,
“There is no more time to try to court you, my dear,” said the Astronomer, and all pretense of kindliness was gone from his voice. “TIAMAT is very close now and I cannot waste even a moment trying to lure you in with us. It’s too bad; your killing a child even in the guise of a dangerous dinosaur would have bound you over to us, traumatically but completely. If I had but a few more weeks, you would have been ours painlessly. Now it’s a matter of choosing between your life and your brave little ethics. You have as much time to decide as it takes for me to cross this room. I have no doubt which you’ll choose. May your ethics sustain you in the next life. If there is one.” He gestured at the skinny man. “Demise—”
Several things happened at once. The cockroach-man stepped forward with a loud rustling sound and shouted “No!” just as water splashed into Demise’s face forcefully enough to knock him over and then another voice, incredibly loud, bellowed, “THIS IS THE GREAT AND POWERFUL TURTLE! YOU WILL ALL COME OUT PEACEFULLY, WE HAVE THIS PLACE SURROUNDED AND NO ONE NEEDS TO GET HURT!” And then, impossibly, Jane thought she heard something that sounded like the old theme from the Mighty Mouse cartoons: Here I come to save the daaaaaaaay! This was followed by an ungodly caterwauling that went from extreme bass to an earsplitting high, shaking the entire building. There was a crash as the cage toppled to the floor, spilling the boy out. Jane fought to keep her balance and reach the boy in the general chaos of people trying to run in every direction. He turned into another dinosaur barely two feet high, this one very slender and agile-looking, with slim, clawed fingers. She forced herself to grab the fingers as it scuttled over to her.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” she said breathlessly and more than a little unnecessarily, and looked around. Demise and the Astronomer had vanished. The little dinosaur pulled her across the room and into a shadowy gallery under the archways. Holding hands with a dinosaur, she thought as they fled down the gallery. Only in New York.
She didn’t notice Kafka struggling after them.
It was really a hell of a beautiful sight, the Great and Powerful Turtle said later. Aces of every variety rising up out of the trees around the Cloisters, swooping down on the Masons that spilled out of the building onto the brick paths and into the ruined gardens. He had seen just about everything during the battle. One of the things he missed, however, was Jane and the boy-dinosaur creeping along part of a columned arcade surrounding an outdoor area now overgrown with weeds. They saw the Turtle sailing overhead with several colorfully costumed aces clinging to his shell. One of the aces pointed down at something; in the next moment, he was floating gently to earth, lowered by the Turtle’s power. Jane heard the little dinosaur hiss alarmingly. When she turned to see what was the matter, he had changed back into a boy, his nudity covered by shadows.
“That’s the Turtle!” he whispered to Jane. “If we could just get his attention, he could get you out of here!”
“What about you?”
For answer, he reverted to dinosaur again, this one well-muscled and almost as ferocious-looking as the tyrannosaur. It looked vaguely familiar to Jane, who couldn’t tell a crocodile from an alligator. She tried to remember the name. An Alice-something-or-other. Alice or perhaps alas, for as mean-looking as it was, it was also no bigger than a German shepherd. It growled and pushed her along with its three-clawed hands, hustling her onto the stone path surrounding the weed-choked garden. There was another one of those grotesque howls; Jane felt it shudder clear through her and the little dinosaur—allosaurus, she remembered suddenly, for no reason—roared in response, clawing at its head painfully. She bent, meaning to embrace it or comfort it, when there was a flurry of feathers, a glint of metal, and then an extraordinarily beautiful woman lit on a low marble wall.
“Peregrine!” Jane breathed.
The allosaurus made a small, excited sound, looking the winged woman over with wild eyes.
“Better get out,” Peregrine said good-naturedly. “The Howler is going to shout this place down. Can you manage, you and your, uh, pet lizard there?”
“It’s a boy. I mean, he’s really a little boy, an ace—”
The allosaurus bellowed, either in agreement or in protest at being called a little boy.
“Vicious, really vicious.” Peregrine smiled at Jane as she launched herself upward, her great wings beating the air “Best you get out now. I mean it,” she called and soared away, the famed titanium talons up and ready.
Jane and the allosaurus ran around the ruined garden and tore down another arcade. She heard the little dinosaur fall behind, and paused, squinting in the darkness. “What’s wrong?”
She could just make out a human silhouette. “Gotta change. Need a fast runner, I’m getting tired. Hypsilophodon’s better than an allosaurus for running.”
A moment later she felt long claws grab her gently and tug her along. This one was about the size of a large kangaroo.
“I don’t think we’re going the right way to get out of here,” she huffed as they came to a dimly lit area and a staircase leading down. The dinosaur melted into boy briefly before he reshaped as a pterodactyl and glided down the stairs. Jane could only gallop after him. At the foot of the stairs, the pterodactyl suddenly swooped around and came back toward her. Reflexively, she ducked, stumbled, and hit the bottom just in time to come face to face with a man even handsomer than Roman. He wore a navy-blue jumpsuit and a tight-fitting skullcap and there were guns seemingly attached directly to his shoulders.
“Hi,” he said. “Didn’t I see you at the ape-escape?”
Jane blinked, shaking her head dazedly. “What—I don’t—” And then, as the man’s guns swung up to track the pterodactyl circling around them, “No! He’s just a little boy, he’s a good guy!”
“Oh, all right, then,” said the man, smiling at her. “You two better get going.” Jane ran past him, the pterodactyl gliding over her head. “Are you sure I didn’t see you at the ape-escape?” he called after her.
She wouldn’t have had the breath to answer him even if she’d wanted to. The pterodactyl sailed ahead of her as she felt her legs beginning to weaken. Panting, she stumbled along, watching as the gap between herself and the pterodactyl began to widen.
The pterodactyl banked sharply to round a corner in the hall and disappeared. Half a moment later there was a flash of blue light, a screech, and a thump. Jane thudded to a stop, hanging onto the stone wall. Please, she prayed. Not the little boy. Don’t let them hurt the little boy and they can do anything they want with me. She forced herself to move forward, holding the wall for support, and peeked around the corner.
He had changed back into a boy again when he’d hit the floor, but she could see his bare chest rising and falling as he breathed. The roach-man was standing over him with a nasty-looking weapon that looked like a stinger.
“I had to stop him,” the roach-man said, looking up at her. “He’s not really hurt, though. He’ll come out of it in a few minutes. Honest. I need your help.” He held out his free hand to Jane. She took a step forward. The face was inhuman but the eyes were not. Just before she would have taken his hand, he snatched it back.
“I meant that just as a gesture. Don’t touch me. Rouse him and come with me.”
Jane knelt beside the unconscious boy.
Judas stood by the tomb with his hands over his ears, unable to clear his head long enough to decide what he should do. Every time he tried to think, another one of those awful howls would shiver through him. He swore his ears were bleeding.
The chaos was beyond believable. The Astronomer’s people had been running in and out of the large room like the bunch of chickenshit losers they all really were. He’d known they were all chickenshits in the beginning, he’d been a cop long enough to recognize the breed. It was enough to make a person
He looked around and saw Red and Kim Toy making their way toward one of the darkened galleries, searching for a way out. Might as well start with them as anyone else, he thought, and drew his gun.
“Halt! Halt or I’ll shoot!”
Kim Toy’s head snapped around, her long straight dark hair flying with the movement.
Judas switched his aim from her face to Red’s. “I told you not to move!”
Red threw a hand up in front of his head as Judas was about to pull the trigger and then, suddenly, he was in love. Birds were singing, making nests in his brain, and the whole world was beautiful, especially Kim Toy, most exciting and exotic of women. He flung his gun away and staggered toward her, loving her too much to feel hurt when she fled from him with Red.
His ears really were bleeding now but he no longer cared enough to notice.
Like all the rooms in this place, this one reminded her of a chapel. She could see where an altar or a baptismal font might have stood; that place was now occupied by a machine.
“You’ve seen this in a dream,” Kafka said to Jane, putting a hand on one of the machine’s impossible angles. Jane had to look away—the craziness of the outline was threatening to tie her vision in knots. She stared at the more-prosaic form of a nearby computer housing with a large monitor sitting dark and silent on top of it.
“The Shakti device,” she said.
“Yes. The Shakti device.” He winced as another one of those awful howls tore through the building. “Tonight we may all die, but this must be protected.”
Jane’s mouth twisted with distaste. “That TIAMAT creature—”
“Our only chance…”
There was a rustle as the dinosaur-boy—Kid Dinosaur, he’d told her—wrapped a sheet from Kafka’s cot more tightly around himself. She’d asked him to stay in human form so she could talk with him and reluctantly he’d agreed, provided the roach-man would give him something to cover himself with. “I don’t know how much you think you can trust this guy,” the boy said, “but I sure wouldn’t.”