Disclaimer and credits will be found after the end of the
chapter.




           DRUNKARD'S WALK II:  ROBOT'S RULES OF ORDER

                      by Robert M. Schroeck



12:  Shoot Him Now!  Shoot Him Now!

"Beware the honorable man of peace who is forced to war.  He will
do anything necessary to end the conflict in his favor in order
to protect his own and restore the peace."  -- Unknown, as
paraphrased in "Best Served Cold" by Robert Knighton

"Warriors, come out and play-ay."  -- Luther (David Patrick
Kelly), "The Warriors" (1979)

"I'm going to go for violence, 'cause I know that works."
-- Peggy U.V. Schroeck as "Shadowwalker," during her very first
roleplaying game session, 1988



A rooftop overlooking a darkened street amidst the Shogakukan
complex.  Thursday, February 12, 2037.  7:23 PM


"<System!  'With A Little Help From My Friends'!  Play!>"

From her position high above the action, Lisa could hear Doug's 
strong tenor voice clearly.  She paid only token attention to his 
words, though, as she tried to follow his awkward backflip with 
her camera.

He had never mentioned this particular song to her, let alone the
effect it would have, but she understood enough about his power
to guess what it would do.  And Lisa knew it could irrevocably 
turn Sylia into his enemy.

Half a virtual century and hundreds of virtual lives spent in the
image of Doug's homeworld had taught Lisa Vanette many things.
She had acquired a unique perspective on international relations
and the politics of global social issues.  She could use the
crucible of Doug's tumultuous homeworld as a contrast against
which to compare the world in which she had been born, and
acquire insights thereon.  She had witnessed -- had participated
in -- dozens of wars, "police actions" and "intercessions".  And
she had seen the Warriors -- whose four branch teams had never
numbered more than a dozen members each at any one time -- in
action.  Doug's boast notwithstanding, the Warriors *were* an
army.  A very successful one.

"Oh, Doug," she murmured despairingly.  "Overkill is *not* an
option."

They appeared together, though not in the same manner.  What drew
Lisa's attention first were the pair of roaring, writhing two-
meter tall columns of blue-white lightning that danced on the 
roadbed on either side of the spot where Doug had landed in a 
painful-looking crouch.  A ripple of brighter, whiter light raced 
up each one from base to top, and in its wake the wild energy was
constrained -- in the form of a woman's body.

There was a thunderous crack and a flash like a monstrous
arclight.  In spite of themselves, the Sabers flinched at the
visceral impact of the blast.  When their flash suppression
systems disengaged, all that was left of the pillars of lightning
were writhing streamers of electricity snapping and hissing
across the asphalt -- and two women.

Both were as tall or taller than Sylia out of her hardsuit.  The
one on the left was lean and hard-muscled, with a short but
feminine crop of auburn hair, windblown and gently waving,
surmounting her black-clad form.  She wore a bodysuit of some
soft-looking fabric, with a high neck and cutouts that left her
shoulders and most of her midriff bare save for a golden metal
ring that linked top and bottom together.  Low-heeled, knee-high
boots and a bolero jacket, both of shining black leather and
trimmed with small metallic lightning bolt accents, completed her
ensemble. 

The one on the right was a figure of living chrome, from her
waist-length ringletted hair of spun silver to her gleaming
metallic feet -- and she was utterly, unconcernedly nude.  Her
bearing was curious, suggesting both a no-nonsense, all-business
attitude and a matter-of-fact sensuality.  A coinlike disk was
visible at the top of her generous cleavage.

"Wetter Hexe," Lisa whispered with amazement as the memories
welled up unbidden from the back of her mind.  "Silverbolt."

As Lisa watched and took her photos, the two glanced down at the
injured Doug and simultaneously took a step closer to him,
looming over him protectively.  Silverbolt raked a slit-eyed gaze
across the Sabers, and clenched her fists.  Both her hands and
her eyes began to glow, blue-white again, bright enough to cast
shadows.  Hexe's eyes widened, and she looked at her own hands.
Raising her eyebrows, she quickly glanced about herself, ending
with a sly, sidelong look at Doug, almost as if to say, "Oho,
what have we here?", the look an irritated but fond older sister
might give.  Then she settled her own tight, unyielding stare on
Priss and Nene.

Behind Hexe and Silverbolt, part of the darkness between two
buildings moved, twisted, and detached itself.  One step took it
into the street, where it revealed itself to be the form of a
slim, lithely-muscled woman clad in black Spandex from head to
foot.  The only parts of her not covered by the shimmering fabric
were her mouth and a waist-length French braid of thick, heavy
hair a darker, browner shade of auburn than Hexe's.  "Maggie!"
breathed Lisa as she recognized the woman -- then another name
came to her.  "*Shadowwalker*."  She had barely taken form from
the shadows that were her namesake when she, too, spotted Doug,
crouched and bleeding.  There was an audible rush of displaced 
air, and she seemed almost to teleport to his side; her all-but
invisible movement set litter swirling in the gust of wind left
by her passage.  With a gentleness that seemed heartbreakingly
tender to Lisa, Shadowwalker reached down to her wounded husband
and helped him to stand.

Priss growled and took a step forward, and the last of them
appeared.  With a snarling cry that echoed down the length of the
street, a great spotted hunting cat erupted from the ground in
front of the other Warriors, exploding upward *through* the
undamaged asphalt like a ghost launched by a catapult.  Fangs and
claws bared, it dropped to all four paws in a stance that spoke
of readiness to attack, and snarled a challenge to the Knight
Sabers that echoed up and down the glass-sided canyon.

*A perfect Jack-in-the-Box,* a voice from another world whispered
in the back of her mind, and Lisa realized that the cat was not
an "it", but a "she"; not *a* cat, but...  "Kat!"

In the street below, the cheetah yowled again, then her form ran
like wax under a blowtorch.  Yellow pelt faded as black spots
expanded, flowed together, and exchanged the texture of gleaming
fur for the slick shine of gleaming cloth and leather; tanned,
muscled flesh appeared among the black.  Blonde hair exploded
into a fan around her head, then gently dropped to drape now-
human shoulders as two green eyes stared balefully at the Sabers.
Kat the woman now sat crouched upon the road, the elegantly-
manicured fingers of one strong hand splayed out before her on
the asphalt, the other hand curled clawlike in front of her
impressive bosom.  In tones of menacing soprano velvet that
easily carried to the roof she snarled, "Keep.  Your.  Distance."

                              * * *

	"<Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends...>"

The process of selecting and manifesting the simulacra only took
a second, but the strain involved left me momentarily stunned and
shaking.  Not to mention the drain on my mana reserves, which,
even with the node to draw upon, had been immense.  I was, in
fact, nearly tapped out.  It was a good thing that they had
dropped into formation around me, as I couldn't have dodged a
slow-thrown bean bag there for a little while.  I was more than a
little concerned -- it had never been that bad before.  Then
again, I had never tried to manifest four simulacra at the same
time before.  I'd never had a need to -- I'd always had at least
a couple *real* Warriors handy.

As Maggie helped me to my feet, I shook my still-spinning head
and made a mental note to myself:  Do not, in the future, summon
four simulacra at once if I can at all avoid it.  Especially
while wounded.

	"<...Gonna try with a little help from my friends...>"

I don't know how long it lasted, but for a time the street was a
silent tableau as the squad surrounded me protectively and the
Knights tried to assess the new dynamics of the field of battle.
I caught my breath, forced my vision to stop swimming, and
viciously suppressed the pain of my wounds.  Then I lifted my
head and looked White straight in the lack-of-eyes.  "Knight
Sabers, meet the Warriors.  Warriors, the Knight Sabers."  Hexe
was already at work; I felt the ambient air temperature rise
almost instantly to the range needed to support her usual
thunderstorm.  Completely encased in their suits, the Knights
probably wouldn't notice until too late. 

White's helmet swung from side to side as she checked out my new
companions.  "I'm surprised, Colonel," her filtered voice buzzed.
"You manifest women to fight women?  I'd hardly expected that
kind of sexism from you."

I laughed, and so did the others.  "Sexism?  On the contrary, 
White.  I'm taking you *extremely* seriously.  I've brought out 
the team's heavy hitters.  Each and every one of these lovely 
ladies can kick my little leather-clad ass six ways from Sunday.  
Especially my beloved wife."  I gestured toward Maggie, who 
inclined her head with a smile.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Hexe smirk.  (The simulacrum
was showing considerable restraint; usually by this point the
real Hexe would have told me to shut up and then taken over the
conversation.  Instead, she seemed almost amused at the idea of
me being in command.)  In front of me Kat idly mimed grooming
herself, feline-style.  "<'Women and girls rule my world',>" I
added, misquoting Prince with a vicious little grin that they 
probably couldn't see.

The still air was disturbed by a growing breeze.  I didn't have
to look up to know that the sky overhead was clouding over with
preternatural speed.  Of course.

"<They're just typical battlesuit goons, ladies.  Have fun,>" I
murmured, and grinned.  Nastily.

                              * * *

"Sylia?" Linna murmured.  "I think we may be in trouble."

                              * * *

"Abort primary mission.  Repeat, abort mission," Katherine
Madigan calmly intoned into the microphone.  "Switch to
observation and recovery protocols."

She released the thumb switch on the handset and swore softly.
*Damn him!  That man is chaos incarnate!*  Any chance she had
thought she might have to snatch some kind of success from the
rapidly-distintegrating mission profile was completely gone now.
*Four* new allies from nowhere, *four* -- all clearly paranormals
like the Visitor -- and now even the Sabers were pausing to
reconsider their attack.  Knowing the mercenaries' history,
though, Katherine thought it unlikely they would do more than
pause.  The chance that her merely human operatives, as well
equipped as they were, could pull off this mission now was zero.
Better to pull them back and plan a second assault than add to
the debacle forming in the streets at that moment.  Not to
mention the unexpected storm which was suddenly brewing over the 
city.

At least the tiny sensor relays that her teams were leaving
behind (per their standing contingency orders) were better suited
to observing -- and surviving -- the imminent conflict.  Between
that and the post-combat sweep her people would perform to find
any damaged and/or discarded fragments of the Knight Sabers'
technology, she ought to be able to salvage *something* from this
debacle.  But the utter collapse of her initial plan still galled
her no end.

*First thing I have to do for next time,* Katherine snarled to
herself, *is make sure that the Knight Sabers are completely out
of the way!*  As the radio relayed confirmations that her
operatives had withdrawn from the incipient combat zone, she
forced herself to calm, and then began to plan once more.

                              * * *

Overwhelm and destroy.

As I've said before, that's the Warriors' philosophy when it
comes to approaching the enemy.  If we're deployed, we're not
there to make nice, we're not there to negotiate a surrender, and
we're not there to let the enemy walk away under their own power.
We are the U.N.'s last resort in a violent and unpredictable
world, and we take the "last" part of that very seriously.  So
it's very rare for us to fight at anything below our absolute
full power.

However, this time I needed us to.

We always have at least one mid- to high-powered telepath on the
team -- Skitz had been filling that role when I was ejected from
homeline.  We weren't the first team to realize the tactical
advantage of a telepathic dataweave, but I can safely say that
the Warriors have made it an artform.  A dozen silent metahumans
in black who move like one single organism and know the location
of every hostile mind within several hundred meters?  Face it.
We're *scary*.

What I wouldn't have given for a telepath at that moment.  I
had brought out the best of the team not just for their raw
power, but also for their finesse.  I needed to tell them that it
was the finesse that was really needed, without letting the
Knights know.  Without a telepath -- none of them were psis -- I
had to resort to another method.

So even as I blustered in the face of the Knights' firepower, I
appeared to fidget as I hung onto Maggie, scraping and kicking 
the ground with one booted foot.  I wasn't really fidgeting, 
although I certainly was nervous enough; I was in fact using a 
Warriors' tap code, specialized for battle situations -- a real 
code, too, not a cipher like Morse.  The triplets of taps I made 
said, "Hostile non-enemy.  Non-lethal combat.  Delaying action 
only.  Divide and keep separate."

(If I hadn't had to use a song to *make* my allies in the first
place, I could have served as the telepath.  Switchboarding a
dozen familiar minds was something I could do even before Psyche
had decided to train me, and five minds -- including my own --
wouldn't even have been a conscious effort for me then.  That
being moot, however, I employed one of our several fallbacks.  I
would have used a gesture code if Kat hadn't been facing away
from me; Maggie's sonar would have picked it up easily.  It would
have been a little "cleaner", but I had to make do with what
would work in the situation as it was.  That's *why* we have a
half dozen or so different alternative codes.)

The ladies made their acknowledgements after the I repeated the
sequence.  We each have our own unique ACKs, to keep an enemy
from discerning a pattern in our communications.  (Mine is the
first bar of "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down", whistled or
hummed.)  I felt Hexe's breeze play over my nose in a short-long-
short series of minigusts, while Maggie's inaudible low-powered
sonic caress slid across the exposed area of my cheek.
Silverbolt acknowledged with focused static charge that raised
and lowered the hair on the back of my left hand in a distinctive
sequence.  And Kat hissed up the register and down again -- which
startled Blue and Pink.  They twitched, and in response my
teammates exploded into action.

"<No retreat, baby!  No surrender!>" I bellowed as they did,
knowing the start of a fight when I saw one.  "And no quarter!"

Kat leapt forward and to the right a little, shifting to cheetah
form and noncorp at the same time as she went *through* the blue
Knight Saber to get at the olive one.  Once through Blue, she
went corp again and hit Olive high on the chest with both front
paws, sending the two of them rolling down the street like a pair
of kittens on a sunny rug.

Blue froze for a moment from the shock and surprise of a
shapechanger in mid-shift jumping at and *through* her.  (It's a
freaky experience, I can tell you, and intentionally so.  Kat may
be all soft-spoken sweetness and light when off-duty, but she's a
demon when it comes to psychological tactics.)  In that critical
moment when Blue was stunned, Diana took off and hit her at the
waist in a literal flying tackle, grabbing the Knights' brawler
and dragging her a good hundred meters down the street along a
slightly different vector from Kat's.  Their flight ended with a
painful-sounding impact as Diana stopped short but let Blue
continue flying -- into the concrete wall of one of the buildings
lining the street.

Pink's twitch had snapped open her wings and taken her straight
up, her boxy-looking flight pack surprisingly responsive and
agile in the air.  Over my shoulder I heard Maggie chuckle.  She 
let go of me, and I felt her step away.  I had a suspicion what
was about to happen and, grinning to myself, looked up.  I was 
right.  A moment later, as Pink hovered a dozen meters up and 
spun in place, Maggie stepped out of a shadowed nook on the 
facade of the floor above her and leapt upon the Knight Saber's 
back.  The unexpected impact sent Pink into a barely-controlled 
dive away from the other Knights and toward the street; Maggie 
held on tightly until they were about three meters from the 
ground, then let go and allowed herself be thrown clear by Pink's 
wild gyrations.

My wife's delighted laughter echoed along the concrete canyon as
she tumbled to the ground, landing flat on her feet facing Pink
at the next intersection.  Reaching back without turning her 
head, she seized the half-full municipal trash can behind her 
with one hand and slung it overhand at Pink.  "Catch, slowpoke!" 
she shouted and took off down the street at a leisurely jog.  (It 
*had* to be leisurely -- I could actually see more than a black 
and auburn blur for once.)

The can arced upward, leaving a trail of litter in its path like
some kind of diseased comet.  Pink clumsily sideslipped away from
it, barely avoiding being hit.  A half-eaten something splattered
across her faceplate a moment later, and I swear I heard her
growl.  It was probably the engines in the flightpack, though,
because she took off like a rocket after Maggie, one hand
furiously wiping her visor.

I would have kept watching that fight, if a sizzle-crack and a
flicker of motion in the corner of my eye hadn't drawn my
wandering attention back to the matter at hand.  I snapped my
gaze back to forward, to find Hexe's open hand twenty centimeters
in front of my nose, just beyond my field.  A thick, silvery
liquid not unlike mercury, emitting a blue glow like one of those
killer knitting-needles, sluggishly dripped from her fingers.  "I
think not, White," Hexe said, her Japanese no more accented than
her English -- which is to say, just barely enough to sound
exotic.

I uncrossed my eyes to see White lower her new weapon from its
firing position.  "You must admit it was worth the attempt."

Next to me, Hexe nodded and smiled.  "Agreed.  So is this," she
snapped, and with a blast of thunder that set my ears ringing and
the entire street shaking, a bolt of lighting speared down from
the clouds overhead.

                              * * *

The ADP launched its second salvo at the boomers before the music
had faded into the distance.  As cyberdroids dropped and spasmed
in the plaza before the entrance to Geo City, Daley watched Leon
try not to shoot worried glances in the direction in which the
Loon and the Sabers had vanished.  To a causal onlooker, Leon's
cool was undisturbed.  For someone as practiced at reading his
moods as Daley was after all these years, though, the inspector's
disquiet was visible.

It took a third salvo to bring down the last of the rogues, and
then Leon and Daley led the ground troops forward to make the
official captures.  The ADP progress across the plaza was slow
and cautious.  Weapons throughout the ranks were drawn, and the
frontmost line kept a bead on the fallen boomers.  As they
advanced, Daley kept one ear to the radio, monitoring the chatter
from the Firebees circling overhead; they would be the first to
see if a particularly-canny boomer were merely lying doggo,
awaiting a chance at a clever ambush.

Luck was with the AD Police this night, though -- every one of
the rogues had been sufficiently disabled that they could be
safely deactivated.  The ADP recovery teams found their hands
full for the first time in years.  For far too long if they had
been called out at all for an incident it had been been merely to
sweep up the pieces left behind by the Sabers.  Sitting on the
hood of the squad car, Daley smiled to himself as he watched them
unlimber every piece of near-mothballed equipment they had handy,
whether it was really needed or not.  Nearby, Leon stood at the
driver's door, radioing a report to HQ.

A warm, moist breeze played across Daley's face and he frowned.
*Warm?* he mused absently.  *In February?*  Looking up, he felt
an ominous chill unrelated to the weather when he realized a low-
lying bank of clouds was swelling with unnatural swiftness.
Quickly obscuring the all-but-full moon, the clouds spiraled
toward the darkened blocks of the Shogakukan Complex, into which 
the Loon had led the Knight Sabers.  The clouds' roiling 
undersides, underlit faintly orange-pink by the remaining
streetlights below, already cloaked the tips of the city's
tallest buildings.  Daley shook his head in worry.  The sky was
supposed to be clear all the way through to morning, and clouds
just didn't form that fast.  "Leon?" he called, standing up to
take a step toward his partner.

As Leon looked up from the radio handset, flickers of white light
darted about within the cloudbank.  Then it vomited a bolt of
lightning directly into the heart of the blacked-out zone.  The
seething pillar of electricity lasted somewhere between an
eyeblink and a second, washing the plaza in a bright white light
that momentarily overwhelmed even the garish neon of the nearby
buildings.  Then it cut off, and the thunder exploded upon them,
battering their eardrums and pounding at their chests.

"Shit!  Priss!" Leon hissed unthinkingly when the thunder faded,
loud enough that Daley heard him.  He dropped the handset and
threw himself into the driver's seat.  Daley hurled himself to
the side as the door slammed and the engine revved.  Tires
squealed in protest and the engine howled, leaving a stunned and
surprised Daley half-sprawled on the ground, watching as the car
disappeared into the maze of streets on the other side of the
plaza.

"'Priss'?" he murmured to himself, one eyebrow raised.

                              * * *

As she studied the action below, Lisa found herself occupied with
several tasks that took up the majority of her attention.  

The first was, of course, taking the necessary photographs.

The second was a cycling litany of thanks to every god she could
think of that she was up *here* and not in the street.  Not just
because she was out of the way of most of the action, but because
it was the perfect vantage point.  In the precious few moments
between the explosion of motion below and the subsequent blast of
lightning, the four Warriors and the four Sabers had spread out
along the length of the block into four individual battles.  She 
was in the best place to see *all* of them.  *Thank god for 
telephoto lenses,* she thought, continuing her silent 
thanksgiving.

Her ears still rang from the explosive thunder of the lightning 
bolt that struck less than 20 meters away.  *And thank god Sylia 
shelled out for a military-grade camera after "Sailor Loon".  My 
old one would never have survived the EMP from that bolt.*

The third task occupying her mind was a growing undercurrent of 
worry.  Although the battles were currently at ground level, they 
wouldn't necessarily stay that way.  Between all the hardsuits' 
jump jets, Nene's flightpack and (according to the disturbingly 
complete "memories" she had) Hexe and Silverbolt's ability to 
fly, there was no guarantee that they would remain there.  She 
took a quick glance around herself to make sure she had an 
evacuation route if anything untoward came her way.

One other major concern preyed upon her mind:  in the presence of 
the Warriors, the memories from Doug's homeworld were growing 
more and more intrusive.  Worse, they seemed to be becoming an 
increasingly seamless part of her own memories, frightening in 
the level of detail available to her most casual consultation.  
Glancing along the street to where Nene hurtled like a buzzbomb 
toward the woman with the auburn braid, Lisa could feel them 
bubble up unbidden.  "Shadowwalker," she whispered to herself.  
"Headmistress, Warriors Academy.  Real name, Margaret Ursula 
Viel.  Nickname, Maggie.  Spouse of Douglas 'Looney Toons' 
Sangnoir.  Born April 6, 1962.  Height, 171 centimeters.  Weight, 
55 kilograms.  Hair, auburn.  Eye color... None...?"

A flick of the eyes, and she saw a cheetah rake its claws along
the stomach of Linna's armor, apparently with no effect.  "Kat," 
she recited almost automatically.  "Public Relations Officer.  
Real name, Kathleen Mee Avins.  Nickname, Kat.  Spouse of Joseph 
'Dwimanor' Avins.  Born June 21, 1965.  166 centimeters, 52 
kilograms.  Blonde hair, green eyes."  This was more than merely 
disturbing.  She could clearly recall Kat's short run in the 
London production of "Cats" during the winter of 1986-87; she 
remembered that Kat had undertaken the double role of Jellylorum/ 
Griddlebone in her Warriors ID as a combination of a publicity 
stunt (for both the theatre and the Warriors) and personal wish-
fulfillment.

Lisa shook her head violently.  *I was *not* there, dammit!  I
don't care how clearly I remember the acrobatic stunts she did
during her big number.  I wasn't even born in 1987.  Hell, *Mom*
wasn't even born then!*  She viciously shoved the ersatz memories
to the back of her consciousness and tried to focus on the chaos
below.

                              * * *

"You missed," said Sylia calmly from where she crouched.
Sangnoir was rapidly retreating out of the action, she noted
absently.

"Yes," the black-clad apparition replied.  "I meant to.  If I
hadn't, you'd now be a steaming heap of meat in a tin can."  Her
voice was surprisingly sweet, a striking counterpoint to the
vaguely contemptuous look in her green eyes.

Inside her helmet, Sylia raised an unseen eyebrow.  "And why
is that?"

Her opponent shrugged, almost carelessly, as she idly approached.
"I don't intend to kill you."  She was very tall, Sylia noted
irrelevantly.  Were she out of her hardsuit, Sylia herself would
barely have matched the woman's height.

"No?"  Within her armor, Sylia tensed.

The ghost of a mocking smile flickered on the woman's face.
"No."

"Pity.  I don't feel quite the same obligation."  Sylia's laser
blade snapped open, and she exploded out of her crouch into a
savage lunge.

There was a clash of metal against metal, and Sylia found herself
bent over at the waist, her sword-arm twisted away and locked
into place by a pair of wicked-looking black daggers -- one at
her wrist, the other at the weakly-armored inside bend of her
elbow.  Twin coronas of blue sparks played along their edges,
occasionally sending forth streamers that grounded out into her
armor and her own blade.  Her opponent held her in place with an
effortless strength that overpowered the hardsuit's own, with
one ankle in position behind Sylia's right leg to finish the
takedown maneuver if necessary.  A moment's shock washed across
Sylia when she realized that she hadn't even seen the woman move.

"That's just one of your problems," the woman continued calmly,
evenly, as if she hadn't just stopped the rush of over 125 kilos
of hardsuit and wearer, and the edge of a laser blade.

"I'm impressed," Sylia said in tones that sounded far calmer than
she actually felt.  "A knife fighter willing to take on a
swordswoman?"  What she didn't say was that a knife fighter so
willing would have to be either suicidally foolish, or inhumanly
skilled.  Sylia feared that it could only be the the latter.
Stepping back, she wrenched her blade and arm free from their
electrically-charged trap.  Her opponent let her.  Again, a sign
of either overconfidence or insane skill.

The woman in black -- this *particular* woman in black, given the
others -- simply shrugged.  "I'm very good at what I do, and I
have good tools."

Sylia didn't reply.  Instead, she studied her opponent for a few
moments; the woman didn't seem to begrudge her the time, which
only added to her confusion.  Sylia's attempt to divine some
information about her opponent didn't help; the woman stood in a
loose, relaxed stance that didn't resemble any knife-fighting
form Sylia could recall save for the obvious "ready" position of
the blades themselves.  If anything, it looked like some of the
"rest" positions Linna would take between the parts of a dance
routine.  *Maybe she's a dancer.  Maybe *Linna* should fight
her,* Sylia thought to herself with grim humor.

She held her daggers in a reverse grip just below chest height,
edge-forward and not quite horizontal, their points outward,
which told Sylia she was an experienced knife-fighter in a style 
born more of battle and expediency than of any martial art.  
Sylia grimaced; that much she knew already.  That, and that this 
woman could intercept a round of armor-piercing ballistic fluid 
from the BB-2000 Eliminator with only her hand and display no 
apparent ill effects.  *Whatever she is, she is not a human 
being,* Sylia decided, and threw herself into another attack.

                              * * *

Linna fell back, panting.  In all her years of practicing martial
arts, all her years as a mercenary with the Sabers, she had never
fought an opponent remotely like the woman-beast before her.
Boomers were fast and strong, yes, but compared to a hardsuited
combatant most were almost laughably clumsy and slow.  And humans
were chaff blown before her wind.

Not so the opponent she faced now.

She had thought that Sangnoir was fast; he was nothing next to
these women.  They did not move so much as seem to teleport,
disappearing from one spot and appearing in another almost
instantly, a sonic crack often heralding their change in
position.

The cat-woman, however, didn't seem as fast as the others.  It
might have been the only thing giving Linna a chance, but she
doubted it; there was an infuriating casualness about the
werecheetah's movements and attacks that suggested that she was
taking the time to toy with Linna -- like a tabby torturing a
captured mouse.

Linna vigorously suppressed a shudder at the implication.

Her opponent at the moment sat on its -- her -- haunches,
licking a paw and passing it over an ear like an overgrown
housecat.  One intelligent and evaluating eye remained on Linna
at all times, but the cheetah seemed content to allow her
opponent a chance to regain her breath.  In between licks, its
muzzle and lips peeled back in what on a human face might have
been a smile.  A less than comforting smile.

What really shook her confidence was that Linna could not touch
the cheetah in combat.  Literally -- trying to land a blow on the
woman-cat was like trying to punch a fogbank; Linna's hands and
feet passed through her opponent as though she were nothing more
than a hologram.  Only twice, out of all the punches and kicks
she'd thrown, had she managed to hit anything solid, and that had
felt more like striking a slab of gelatine than flesh.  Still, 
the cat had reacted to the hits, and that gave her some hope.

Still... Linna risked a glance at her right forearm, where four
long, narrow gouges revealed the dun-colored cerametal that
underlaid the brightly-colored outer layers of her armor.  No
normal cheetah's claws could have ripped through a hardsuit's
surface coating like that.  Hell, most boomer weapons couldn't
damage a hardsuit like that.

Worse yet were the four cold stings across her belly.  One of the
great cat's paws had passed *through* her armor as though it were
no more than mist.  Its claws had barely scratched along the skin
of her stomach, and Linna couldn't decide if she had just been
lucky, or if the cat had chosen to hold back what would otherwise
have been certain disembowelment -- a killing blow.  In her HUD,
the hardsuit computer blandly acknowledged damage to her softsuit
and the presence of her blood, but insisted that the integrity of
the abdominal armor was uncompromised.  And that was impossible.

Just *what* kind of creature was she facing?

                              * * *

"Take that!" Nene snarled and let loose with the Vulcan.  With a
sound like an angry jackhammer, the minigun spat a stream of high-
caliber rounds, leavened with the occasional tracer, at the
grinning woman in black Spandex on the ground below.  Her target
dodged nimbly out of its way, avoiding both the bullets and the
chips of concrete and asphalt sent flying when they splattered
across the sidewalk and the street.

Nene screamed and swung the weapon in wild arcs, hoping to walk
the line of fire into her target as she had with Sangnoir.  The
woman's smile never diminished; she simply backpedaled into a
slash of black shadow draped along the edge of the building
behind her, and disappeared from Nene's sight.

"Wha...?"  Nene switched from visible spectrum to infrared.
"No!" she choked out.  The woman had vanished utterly.  The only
trace of her left in the darkened nook was a pair of footprints
glowing a faint, fading orange in the false-color infrared
display.

"Surprise, little merc," a warm alto voice filled her helmet.  It
was soft and breathy, and sounded as though the speaker were,
impossibly, inside it with her.  Nene froze in shock and
surprise, just before her hardsuit's external microphones
abrubtly cut out, and the right wing of her flight pack exploded
into a shower of dust.

                              * * *

"Oh, no, Nene, don't go after her," Lisa murmured, lowering her
camera for a moment.  *Damn.  Doug's picked his squad well,* she
thought as her borrowed memories laid out all the powers and
abilities of the four metahuman women for her to survey.  Two 
lightning-throwers, who could use their control of electricity to 
short out or subvert the hardsuits' power and computer systems if 
they so chose.  Both electrics were multimach flyers, too.  The 
shapeshifter and one of the electrics were variable non-corps, 
which canceled out the armor value of the hardsuits completely.  
And the last one was a sonic -- the only thing worse for a...  
*What was the word Doug had used?  Mechanic.  The only thing 
worse for a mechanic to face would have been a vibe.*  She 
groaned softly.  *Add to that Maggie's shadow-to-shadow teleport, 
and Nene'll be lucky to have a suit left when Shadowwalker's done 
with her.*

She wasn't surprised to see Maggie 'port from her exposed
position in front of Nene to a shadow behind her; it was no less
than she'd expected.  There was a brief lull in the action as
Nene frantically scanned Maggie's last position.  Behind her,
Maggie grinned and seemed to say something, although from her
rooftop position Lisa could hear nothing; all she could see was
the movement of the the older woman's mouth.  She saw Maggie take
a deep breath, and then...

Then Shadowwalker attacked.

Lisa, no matter how she tried afterward, could never fully
explain what it was she heard in that moment, or describe it to
her satisfaction.  All she could give were metaphors that she
felt still lacked some vital essence of the experience:

It was a song; it was a scream.  It was the wail of damned souls; 
it was a choir of angels.  It lasted an instant; it lasted an 
eternity.

It was, she knew from her borrowed memories, a sound that was to
ordinary noise what an industrial laser was to a penlight.

On her rooftop perch, Lisa shrieked and grabbed hold of a nearby
vent-pipe as the very building beneath her hummed and shook,
resonating to its arpeggio of harmonics and overtones.  It tore
into her ears like uncontrolled guitar feedback, even as her
chest throbbed and pounded with the force of it.

In the street below, streetlamps shook and flickered.

Windows too close to the line of fire exploded into dust,
showering the street with powdered glass.

It was visible to the naked eye, snapping into existence between
the Shadowwalker and Nene, connecting them in an almost physical
bond.  Within the narrow cylinder of sound, rainbow glints played
and flowed; with every crest and trough, the violently changing
air pressure within warped and refracted the light that dared
pass though it.

For a moment it seemed nothing more than a harmless visual
spectacle, for all its earsplitting volume.

Then one of the wings of Nene's flight system exploded, reduced
to an expanding cloud of red powder.  As its tip -- sliced off as
smoothly as by a knife -- hurtled through the air to smash
through one of the surviving windows, the Knight Saber lost power
and augered into the asphalt below.

                              * * *

Shakily, Priss forced herself back to her feet.  Behind her, an
impact crater two meters tall marred the otherwise-pristine
concrete skin of an office building.  She glared hatefully at the
woman before her.

Taller than Sylia, the woman's body combined lean, hard muscles
with lush curves that seemed more appropriate for a centerfold
model.  She was nude, but it didn't seem to matter.  Her skin was
cool, gleaming metal, as though someone had dipped her in a vat
of mercury, as though she were a statue cast in chrome.  Her
narrowed eyes -- whites and irises both -- were the same shade
save for their pupils, and even these bore a metallic sheen.  Her
hair was a lion's mane of curls and ringlets that seemed formed
from the finest silver wire.  In the center of her chest, just
above and between her breasts, a small, sculpted disk seemed to
be embedded; at this distance it looked like nothing more than a
large, antique coin.

"Fucking boomer!" Priss snarled as she swung her knuckleguard
into place.  The silver woman looked faintly puzzled for a
moment, and the distant, tiny part of Priss's mind that housed
her rationality at moments like these noted it.

"No.  I am not a boomer.  I am human!" her opponent said in a
heavily-accented Japanese that was at odds with her melodious 
voice.  "I am Greek!  Born on the island of Mykonos!"

"Not with metal skin like that," Priss growled, dropping into a
crouch in preparation for a charge.

Puzzlement crossed her features again.  "Because I am safe in
my metal skin I am boomer?  Then you are boomer too, little blue
girl, safe in *your* metal skin."

Forgetting her spike shooters, Priss screamed in rage and hurled
herself at the chrome woman, her knucklebomber sizzling and
crackling to match her mood.  With an almost bored look on her
face, the woman simply stood there.  Priss drove her fist into
the woman's gut with all the ferocity she would have shown any
other boomer, and the knucklebomber discharged its deadly payload
with the impact -- but her follow-through was stopped cold,
sending an unpleasant jolt back up the hardsuit and to her arm.
She stumbled backwards in surprise, thrown off-balance by the
unexpectedly abrupt end to her punch, and narrowed her eyes.

The anti-boomer weapon had barely marred the gleaming metal of
her opponent's skin -- metal that was already flowing over and
smoothing out the minimal damage.  Just like the boomers she'd
faced in Aqua City years before.

The woman kept her eyes on Priss and didn't spare a glance at
what should have been a fatal wound.  "You are not just a little
blue girl, you are a *stupid* little blue girl.  You attack me 
with that puny mechanical thunderpunch?  Let Silverbolt show you 
the *right* way!"  And with that she held up her right fist.  
Crackling rings of blue-white electrical fire rippled up her legs 
and left arm, across her torso and up her right arm, to set her 
fist ablaze with a seething nimbus of St. Elmo's fire that shone 
so brightly it lit the darkened street around them like a halogen 
lamp.

"Oh, shit," whispered Priss.

                              * * *

The Joe Cocker version of "With A Little Help From My Friends"
runs for five minutes and five seconds.  According to the timer
display in my HUD, it'd already been playing for a bit over a
minute.  I figured that combined with the time spent by the merry 
chase on which I had led the Knights, the full run of the song 
would be more than long enough for the ADP to finish up its 
experiment at non-fatal recovery of the rogues.  So what if the 
song's languid pace didn't match the usual frenetic rhythms of 
combat?  I'd deal.

In the mean time, I needed to decide what to do.  Oh, yeah,
right!

"<System, open crypto channel designation 'Knight Sabers' receive
only.>"  I had a tactical edge; I was going to use it.  It had
taken four continuous weeks of processing for the very elementary
codebreakers that I kept in helmet storage to crack the Knights'
scramble algorithm.  I probably could have used the systems at
IDEC to speed that up a bit, but I still felt a certain kinship
with the Knights -- a group who, as I have said, were still
supposed to be among the good guys, even if I didn't agree with
their methods.  Or their philosophy.  I didn't want any risk 
whatsoever of someone in GENOM getting the results of my work and 
misusing it.

Now if only I'd taken the time to actually listen to more of the
decrypted samples than I needed to confirm it worked -- but I'd
been too preoccupied with re-engineering that gravity gun.  No
matter.  The live traffic would be sufficient for my needs.

"Nay, nay, report!"  With that startling archaicism, an elegant-
sounding woman's voice announced the first field success of my
crack.  Little pauses and breaks, barely a fraction of a second
each but noticeable, punctuated the transmission, the high end
was a little clipped, and there was a nasty bass buzz underlaying
every syllable, but what she was saying was reasonably clear.
Okay, so my reverse-engineered algorithm wasn't perfect -- I'd
never ID the speaker by her voice, and the decrypt was
stuttering, running a hair slower than realtime.  But it was good
enough.

"Owie owie ow.  I'm -- ow -- okay, Celia," what sounded, despite
the audio artifacts, like a little girl's voice shot back with a
small groan.  "I'm banged up some, but okay.  No worse than
getting slammed into a wall by a boomer."  Ah.  Must be Pink, who
was at that moment getting up out of the ten-meter-long furrow
she'd plowed in the road surface, courtesy of my wife.   "I'm
gonna get that witch," she snarled.  With her voice, that made
her sound like a peeved kitten.  I smiled privately.  Maggie was
more than a match for some junior battlesuit goon.

I took a quick glance about myself, looking for where I could
cause the most trouble with the least effort.  "<'I think I
better dance now,'>" I murmured self-indulgently, and jumped into
the fray.

                              * * *

Priss waited until almost the last moment before she fired her
jumpjets, sending her up into the darkened, cloud-swamped sky
above her opponent.  The attempt to dodge faster than this so-
called Silverbolt could react wasn't entirely successful -- the
plasma-enshrouded fist had still grazed her leg, discharging 
against the armor with a crack of miniature thunder that shook 
her violently.  Priss' neat half-powered/half-acrobatic jump spun
wildly out of control, and her hardsuit's status monitors began
flashing urgent warnings.

Tucking her limbs in even as she fired the suit's various
attitude jets, Priss struggled to regain control of her flight,
finally righting herself at the zenith of her trajectory, many
meters above rooftop level.  Looking down, she saw a smirking
silver face waiting below.

As she began to drop, Priss spared a moment to glance at the suit
status display report and swore -- almost all of the cerametal
had been vaporized from an 8-centimeter-wide swath along the 
inner side of the right calf.  The leg itself was still 
structurally sound -- it could take any load or stress that she 
might inflict on it -- but the actual armor itself was nearly 
tissue-thin where the thing that called itself Silverbolt had 
almost-but-not-quite hit her.  *Right, then,* she thought, 
smiling grimly.  *If I'm goin' in, I'm goin' in fists-first.  
Like always.*

A half-roll set her up, and while she recharged the knucklebomber
Priss loosed a salvo of railgun spikes.  She felt some relief to
see her opponent make an effort to dodge rather than simply allow
the spikes to hit her.  *So maybe she ain't completely
invulnerable,* Priss mused, a grin breaking across her face.  She
fired her jump jets once more, sending herself into a howling
power dive.

With a metallic smile playing across her gleaming lips,
Silverbolt silently rose to meet her.

                              * * *

Plasteel lenses shattered in the wake of the blow.  The sharp-
edged fragments dropped to the street with dull clicks and
clatters that belied their crystalline, glass-like appearance.  A
second blow, and one unfolding panel of Linna's new weapon was
shredded into strips of twisted cerametal and frayed wiring
hanging limply from the remains of their mountings.  Her suit
diagnostics were already blaring alerts at her, needlessly
announcing the imminent death of the heat gun array Sylia had
spent so many hours crafting.

So many hours to build, and so few seconds to destroy.

Linna threw herself into a rapid series of backflips to escape
another assault by the cheetah, launching herself spinning high
into the air with the last bounce.  Feeling her acrobatics set
the remaining fragments of the heat gun swinging wildly to
clatter against the hardsuit, she lifted her arms and spat a
command to the suit's computer.

Before she could begin to fall back towards the ground, explosive
bolts fired, and the remains of the weapon flew in all
directions.  One piece hit a window, which burst into a storm of 
glass shards.  Another passed through a snarling cheetah on the 
run without bothering it in the least.

Linna dropped to the ground in an elegant two-point landing that
left her poised and ready for the charging cat.  It was only a
second's respite, but it gave her time to bring her panting
breath under control -- her lungs were burning, and her softsuit
was sopping wet with sweat, sweat that the hardsuit's groaning
environmental system struggled to absorb.  The creature she faced
was driving her to levels of exertion and desperation that she
hadn't reached since they'd faced Largo's doubles, years ago.
*One last weapon left to try,* she mused grimly.

She held her ground as the cheetah raced up to her, praying that
this gambit would pay off.  At the last possible second, she let
her shock darts fly.

As she had feared, they passed through the big cat's body as if
it weren't there.  With a pair of dull thuds, the twin
monomolecular blades buried themselves in the asphalt, and Linna
felt the tension on their tether/powerlines slacken.

Then the cheetah yowled in pain as electricity crackled across 
her body, arcing from one line to the other.  The sleek feline 
muscles spasmed and twisted, throwing the cat away from the 
shockdarts and their lines to fall with a muffled, hollow-
sounding thud against the ground a meter or two away.  There it 
lay, eyes glazed and breathing heavily, but otherwise unmoving.

Linna retracted the darts and cautiously stepped to the cat's
side.  Prepared to leap away at the first sign of movement, she
stretched out one booted foot and nudged the furred shape with an
armored toe.  Other than something that sounded like a breathy
moan, there was no response.  Linna stretched out her leg again,
ready the nudge the cat once more, harder, when she realized --
her opponent was *solid*, no longer a living ghost.

And, momentarily at least, helpless.  Time for a little
retaliation.

Linna charged her leg bomber, and drew her foot back to deliver a
kick.

And stopped.

*This isn't a boomer,* Linna thought.  *This... this... woman,
who can be a cat, is strange.  And threatening,* she added as the
scratches across her stomach made their presence known once
again, *definitely threatening.*

*But for all that she is a cat right now, she is a living being,
a human being.*

*And I will not kill a fellow human being.*

Linna sighed and deactivated the bomber.  As gently as she could,
she lifted the stunned cheetah into her arms, and retreated into
the entryway of one of the office buildings.  There, she laid the
panting cat back down upon the concrete, and crouched
protectively next to her.

*And what if *boomers* are living beings?* she asked herself.

                              * * *

"Stand still, darn it!" Nene growled as her opponent literally
ran circles around her.  *She's not taking me seriously, darn it!
After all the time it took to become a real equal to the others,
I don't *need* this!*

She fired a burst from the Vulcan which completely missed the
woman, and hissed in frustration.  *Argh!  I can't keep this up,
I'm almost out of ammo.  And what did she hit me with?  The
flight pack's ruined and she nearly took the gun with it.  It's a
miracle I didn't bend the barrels when I crashed.*

Even as she attacked, she spared a fraction of her attention for
the readouts and displays from the automatic sensors and analysis
programs with which her hardsuit was equipped.  Sound.  That's
what it had been -- an intense, overwhelming blast of sound
focused and directed at her.  The flight unit had literally
shaken itself into dust when the beam had struck it and 
sympathetic vibration had taken over.

Sound.

Her eyes are covered.

An intuitive flash struck Nene at that moment, the same kind of
hunch that she always got during her most difficult hacking runs,
the kind that had always paid off.  She stopped firing at the
woman -- the Vulcan's magazine was exhausted anyway -- and began 
issuing commands to the powerful computer integrated into her 
hardsuit.  The first disengaged the half-destroyed flight unit 
and its minicannon to clatter on the ground behind her.  The 
remainder deployed her hypersensors, then plied layer upon layer
of filters over the ambient noise around her, stripping out
anything that wasn't what she was looking for, narrowing the
target zone over and over until...

*Yes!*  She almost cried out aloud when her guess was confirmed.
A rapid cycle of ultrasonic pulses, regular but complex,
originated from the woman, who had begun to approach warily now
that Nene had apparently disarmed herself.  Ignoring her, Nene
continued to fire commands to the sophisticated signal processors
that comprised nearly half the computing power available in her
suit, assembling a pair of macros she knew would win her the day.
The first, she mapped into the firing interface of the abandoned
Vulcan.  The second, almost identical, she set running
immediately, routed to the external speakers on her hardsuit:
sample, invert, play, loop.

The woman with the braid stumbled to a halt.  She tilted her head
one way, and then another, as a momentary puzzlement crept over
what little of her features were visible.  Then a small smile
crept upon her lips.  "Oh, clever, very clever, Pink," she said,
not quite looking toward Nene.  "Nicely done.  Not perfect, but
good enough to confuse."  The smile broadened.  "But I can't let
you have the advantage."

Nene shrieked as the globe of darkness exploded and engulfed her,
and the woman screamed another attack.

                              * * *

Sylia backpedaled calmly as the auburn-haired woman lunged
forward, one black blade thrusting towards the center of her
chest.  Turning on her heel, Sylia parried neatly, only to find
her opponent was no longer there.  *Damn!  A feint!*

She spun, but not fast enough.  There was a sudden tug at her
right elbow, and she knew even before the telltales lit up her
HUD exactly what it was.  One of those blades had cut through a
dozen layers of kevlar and woven steel to sever the armored
feedline to the BB-2000.  Without its ballistic fluid -- now
pouring sluggishly out over the ground -- the Eliminator was
nothing more than a dead weight.

"Well," declared her opponent as she blurred back into visibility
before Sylia, "that takes care of *that* little problem."  She
raised one eyebrow and offered a mocking smirk.  "Shall we
continue?"

She stood loosely, unconcernedly, and Sylia took advantage of the
moment's opportunity to run her sword through the woman's chest.

"I presume that means 'yes'," she continued placidly as Sylia, in
shock, withdrew the blade from her opponent's unmarked torso.
Small streamers of her body trailed after the sword like wisps of
fog, stretching out several centimeters before giving up and
falling back into her black-clad form.

"A hologram?" Sylia mused.

"Hardly," the apparition replied, and closed again, a gleaming
black blade whipping out in a whistling backhanded arc designed
to slice across the chestplate of her hardsuit.  Sylia only
barely parried the attack, the violently sparking clash of blade
against blade putting the lie to her supposition.  "I admit it's
not sporting to take spiritform against a mundane, even one in
powered armor, but honestly, I don't care."

Steeling herself, Sylia redoubled her attack, pouring every iota
of determination she possessed into her next blow.  Her
opponent's eyes widened momentarily, and Sylia's blade returned
with a trace of blood upon it.  Inside her helmet, she grinned
mirthlessly -- small as they were, she'd take her victories
anywhere she could get them.

At the same time, something like respect grew in the woman's
eyes, and she gave a small, thoughtful nod.  "Very good, White.
It takes both great skill and great force of will to harm my
spiritform.  There may be some hope for you yet."  A knife blade
flickered out and with a hissing shower of sparks slammed the
point of Sylia's sword into the asphalt at her feet; the force
of the blow rattled the entire hardsuit and numbed her arm for
a moment.  "Looks like I'll have to take you a bit more
seriously."

Sylia's momentary elation faded as she frowned and tugged her
blade free of the ground.  Small victories aside, this was a
losing battle, no matter who won in the end.  She shut down her
voder and opened the encrypted link.  "Prime to Wing," she called
calmly.  "Emergency pickup needed.  Aggressive measures
required."

"Wing to Prime!" Doc Raven's agitated voice crackled through her
earphone.  "I can't!  There's a full-blown lightning storm over
your position keeping me from dropping below 200 meters!  Between
that and these winds, I'm having the devil's own time trying to
stay near you!"

Sylia glanced up to see what had escaped her conscious notice
before -- the thick, low bank of clouds overhead, shot through
with ominously flickering white light.  A low, almost subliminal,
rumble of continuous thunder punctuated the moment.

"Your air support isn't coming, White.  Not yet, anyway."  Sylia
snapped her attention back to her opponent, who had politely if
mockingly paused in her attack.  "Not until I let it."

"How...?"

A shrug.  "Nothing that moves in the air is unknown to me."

"Then you're doing... that," Sylia said flatly, with a vague
gesture at the sky.

The auburn-haired woman bared her teeth.  It might have been a
smile.  "They don't call me 'Wetter Hexe' for nothing, White."

Sylia didn't need all of her considerable fluency in German to
know that meant "Weather Witch".  A chill ran through her.  And
she had thought Sangnoir's powers were dangerous!  Without
further thought she launched herself again at the woman in
black...

...who idly swatted Sylia's blade out of the way.  "Sloppy.  Very
sloppy."  She pursed her lips, as if in thought.  "Odd.  I don't
usually chat this much during a battle," Wetter Hexe mused.

Sylia recovered her balance and set herself against the
inevitable counterattack.  "Then why are you bothering?"

It came, with a blinding speed that was both infuriating and
emotionally overwhelming for the careless grace with which it was
delivered.  "Because, from what little I know, you are a leader
who cares for her people.  But you've let yourself be blinded by
your emotions.  I could have been you.  So...  Even though I
doubt you'll listen, I wanted to remind you to think of your team
and what you, as their leader, owe them.  Not only as
subordinates, but as people.  Have you used their trust to make
them into something they did not want to become?  To turn them
into murderers?"

"I hardly need to be lectured on the responsibilities of my
command!" Sylia barked a bit more sharply than she had intended.
Jump jets firing, she leapt high into the air to drop upon her
enemy from above, swinging her laserblade at Wetter Hexe's
unprotected head.  She focused all the force of her considerable
willpower into the blow, thanking the gods she hadn't believed in
for fifteen years that her opponent had been foolish enough to
reveal an exploitable weakness.

With a hiss and a crash, Sylia landed, one knee bent, her left
hand stretched out to balance her.  Her blade had been caught
between the two black knives, their blades improbably scissored
into a tight grip.  With a snarl that betrayed her growing
frustration, she twisted and sawed the lasersword back and forth
within their trap, hoping at least to damage the weapons, but to
no avail.

Her opponent recognized her ploy, and smiled as she released
Sylia's weapon again.  "You'll have to do *much* better than
that, White.  These blades were forged for me by Hephaestus from
mithril mined by the Svartalfar, breathed upon by Indra and
blessed by Marduk."

A flicker of thought led her to the obvious conclusion.  "You 
expect me to believe you're a deity?" Sylia grunted as she ducked 
the black-clad woman's thrust and tried a counter-attack of her 
own.

Wetter Hexe blocked and smiled sardonically.  "I couldn't care
less what you believe.  Truth is truth, no matter its face."  She
parried Sylia's strike, and the scrape of the black-bladed
knife's edge along the sword's sent another cascade of white-hot
sparks crackling and showering over the pair.  "The gods all have
many faces and names.  Does it matter which I use?  I am still
who I am.  And I am *no* mortal."

And with that she sliced through Sylia's lasersword, sending its
blade clattering down the street.

                              * * *

In a Place that was not a place, Three Beings watched.

"Is that...?" asked One whose Voice was as that of a child.

"Yes," replied another, whose Voice was as the chiming of bells.
"Yes, it is."

"So that is what the Stormsdaughter has been doing with Herself
these past few decades," murmured the Third, whose Voice would
have been deemed sultry by any mortals who might have heard it.

"Ssshh!" hissed the First.  "You're missing all the action!"

                              * * *

There was a crash like two cars colliding on a highway, and
Linna's head jerked up.  A hundred meters away, Priss and the
chrome woman had just plowed into each other in midair, then
rolled away from each other to land.  Even with her visor's
magnification turned up Linna couldn't be sure, but it looked to
her like Priss might have gotten a good hit on the other woman.
Then she turned and Linna saw her yank a bloody railgun spike out
of her stomach.  Her metallic skin smoothed over the wound even
as she threw the projectile away and batted a charging Priss
aside.

A soft mewling noise, much closer, returned her attention to the
sidewalk in front of her, where the cheetah now began stirring.
"Hey," she said softly, "hey, are you okay?"

The only answer was a sound somewhere between a growl and a
hiccup as the cheetah then lurched to her feet.  Linna scuttled
backwards, still staying in the entryway, as the cat shook her
head and then turned green eyes upon her.  The look in them, she
realized, was anything but hostile.

Then Linna's breath caught in her throat as the cheetah's body
melted and shifted, settling a moment later into a bizarre hybrid
form that was half woman and half jungle cat.  "Wow," the
shapechanger said, as she turned around to sit with her back to
one of the entry's plate glass windows.  Her voice was a sweet
soprano, laced with odd sibilant accents.  "I'm still woozy.
That's a nice trick with those darts you've got there."

"Thanks.  You're not mad?"  Fascinated, Linna stared unabashedly
at her.  Her body was mostly humanoid, although her legs were
jointed backwards, feline-style.  While her hands were 
recognizably human, her feet were still paws, and all were
heavily clawed.  Short, black-spotted golden fur still covered
her unclothed body -- even her face, which was muzzled and
whiskered and tipped by a coin-sized patch of dark brown nose-
leather.  Linna suppressed a surge of irrational envy at the
lush, athletic curves of the body under that fur.

The catwoman waved one hand dismissively.  "Nah.  Fortunes of war
and all that."  She glanced around at the entryway.  "Thanks for
dragging me out of the street."

Linna tried to shrug.  It wasn't a movement for which hardsuits
had been designed, and not much of it came through, but her
conversational partner seemed to catch the meaning.  "I couldn't
just leave you out there."

"For which I am eternally grateful."  She held out her right
hand, the claws retracting silently into her fingertips.  "They
call me <Kat>.  That's with a '<k>'."  She said the name and the
letter in English.

Linna kneewalked forward and automatically held out her own right
hand, only to have the blunt, rounded shape of its gauntlet brush
ineffectually at Kat's fingers.  "Oops," she said, then chuckled.

A feline eyebrow raised.  "What's so funny?"

Linna grinned, although she knew Kat couldn't see it.  "Irony."
She held up her right arm to show the other woman its rounded
shape and the five retracted manipulator "pads" on its underside.
"I'm the one with a cat's paw at the moment."  She chuckled
again, and Kat joined her.  Then she held out her left hand, in
its soft, glovelike gauntlet.  "You can call me Green."

Kat took Linna's left hand in hers and shook.  "Pleased to meet
you, Green."

"So," Linna said as they released each other's hand, "how come
you're not attacking me now?"

Kat gave her a sidelong look.  "Is this a problem?  Because I
*can* attack you if you want."

Linna held up both hands and laughed.  "No, no.  I'm just
curious."

The catwoman shrugged.  "Our goal is to delay you only.  If I can
do that by sitting and talking rather than standing and fighting,
I'd much rather sit and talk."

"Fair enough."  Linna crawled over to sit next to Kat.  "I don't
really feel right about fighting you anyway."

"Because I'm not a boomer?"  The green eyes in that golden-furred
face drilled right through the visor into Linna's own.

"You know about boomers?"

Kat nodded in the general direction of Sangnoir, who was running
back into the combat.  "We got a kind of briefing from him."

Linna considered that for a moment.  "Ah.  Okay.  Yeah, because
you're not a boomer."

"Mmm," was all Kat said in reply.

There was a brief, companionable silence as Armageddon in
miniature played out in the street before them.

"So," Linna said.  "Can you tell me a little about the world you
guys come from?"

                              * * *

The battlezone was visible from blocks away -- audible, too, even
over the squad car's engine.  Leon brought the vehicle to a
skidding halt a safe distance away and hopped out to stare at a
sight unlike any he'd ever seen. Overhead, the impossible
cloudbank seemed to bulge downwards like some fat beast's heavy,
pendulous belly; the faint pink-orange sheen cast upon it by the
sodium lights still illuminating the street only reinforced the
image.  Lightning flickered along and through it, filling the
street with a constant low rumble like the nearby passage of a
convoy of trucks.

Between street and cloud, he saw... war.

In an expanding pool of silvery liquid, a knife-wielding woman in
black held the White Saber -- Sylia Stingray, he was certain -- 
at bay, with a blade to the throat of her hardsuit.  He wouldn't 
have thought that would be a credible threat, but Sylia seemed to 
be taking it very seriously; the stub of her laserblade, cleanly 
sheared off at the base, glittered in the streetlights and gave 
silent testimony to her reasoning.

A dome of inky black further down the street gave away nothing
except when a pink-armored arm or leg would break its surface and
then vanish within once more.

That worried him more than the woman with the knives.

Saber Green -- he didn't know for *certain* that it was Linna
Yamazaki, but who else qualified? -- was nestled away in a
building entry apparently chatting with, of all things, a
catgirl.  The Loon was there, too, bloodied but apparently
unbowed; as he leaned down, Green started to surge to her feet,
only to have the catgirl restrain her.  Backpedaling, the Loon
stumbled and then caught himself; as Green sat back down at the
catgirl's urging, the latter flashed a toothy, fanged smile.

That worried him even more than the black dome and Nene.

And in the middle of everything else...

Blue armor.

Priss.

Facing off against a woman made of gleaming silver.

The silver woman casually grabbed the back end of a car and
lifted.  When the bumper came off in her hand, she dropped it,
dodged a volley of railgun spikes, and ripped a lamppost out of
the sidewalk.  Time seemed to slow as she drew it back like some
monster bludgeon.

Before he knew what was happening, the Earthshaker was in his
hand.

                              * * *

There was a gunshot.  Silverbolt's eyes widened in surprise, and
she dropped the lamppost.  Idly fending off with one hand Priss'
attempts to tag her with a knucklebomber or two, she reached down
with the other and peeled an irregular circle of dull grey metal
from the gleaming skin just above her waist.  She glanced at it,
looked around.  "Ah," she said, and Priss followed her gaze to
see Leon, his Earthshaker's barrel still smoking.

"Oh, shit," Priss muttered.  "Leon, you fucking idiot."

"Excuse me, please," the chrome woman said to Priss, then with an
ear-splitting crack, she appeared before the startled ADP
officer.  She towered over him, her nearly two meters of height
all but dwarfing him, and frowned.  Then she flipped the
flattened bullet from her fingertips like a coin, sending it
spinning through the air to clatter dully on the pavement at
Leon's feet.

                              * * *

She was, Leon realized with a certain growing numbness, quietly
and calmly floating ten or fifteen centimeters *above* the
sidewalk, electric blue sparks crawling wildly across her body.
She was also, he noticed as his eyes drifted up to gaze upon a
pair of magnificent chrome-plated breasts, quite nude.  To his 
extreme discomfort, her physical presence exuded a palpable mix 
of impending menace and overt femininity that reminded him  
uncomfortably of his wife-to-be.  In spades.

A hundred meters away, Priss screamed in outrage and took off
toward them.

There was a flicker of shining skin and a whiff of ozone, and
Leon found his Earthshaker abruptly yanked out of his grasp hard
enough to leave his fingertips tingling.  The silver woman
studied it for a moment.  "Excuse me," she said in heavily-
accented Japanese.  "Is not for a policeman with little gun to
fire on a Warrior."  With quick, effortless movements, she
flattened the full length of the revolver's barrel between her
thumb and forefinger, then rolled it up against the cylinder like
a ribbon on a spool.  Then she held the gun between her hands and
crushed it into a ball.  A pair of muffled explosions and a few
wisps of acrid smoke from between her fingers announced the
detonation of the remaining bullets, but neither her grip nor her
expression changed.

"Here."  She reached out to take one of his hands, turned it up,
and dropped the wadded mass of metal into his gloved palm.  Leon
distantly observed that the Earthshaker's remains were noticeably
warm even through the leather.  "Is *not* for a policeman with 
little gun to fire on a Warrior," she repeated with grim
emphasis, then glanced over her shoulder.  "Excuse, please, now.
Must play more with the blue girl."  She turned, and with another
air-shattering blast she disappeared, only to reappear in front
of Priss, who was now on the ground, apparently tripped and
entangled by Sangnoir's scissoring legs.

The title of an antique ecchi anime floated uninvited through his
mind, an unconscious echo of the silver woman's last comment, and
Leon had to fight down a near-hysterical burst of laughter at the
intersection of that image and his volatile fiancee.

His radio crackled.

"Yo, Inspector McNichol?"

It was the Loon, of course.  Leon snapped himself out of the
state of shock into which he had been sinking and glanced back
down the street.  The helmeted figure was rapidly skittering away
from the restarted conflict between Priss and the woman who had
called herself a Warrior.  He brought the radio to his lips with
a quick, crisp motion.  "McNichol here."

"I'd just like to tell you that this is a *non-lethal* combat
we're fighting here.  Ouch, dammit!  At least *my* side is,"
Sangnoir muttered.  "I'm just trying to keep the Sabers occupied
while your boys mop up.  Would you *please* not fling bullets
into the fray?  Someone might get hurt, and it *won't* be me or
mine."

Leon grimaced, and thumbed the transmit key.  "Acknowledged."  He
released the button and muttered, "Not like I have any choice in
the matter at the moment," as he gazed disconsolately upon the
neatly crushed and rounded remains of his Earthshaker.

                              * * *

She'd almost panicked when the darkness had engulfed her, and if
she had been relying on her own reflexes and responses, that 
might have been the end of the fight.  But the second macro 
kicked in automatically, just as she had intended, sampling the 
deadly beam of sonic energy, inverting its phase, and using all 
the power of the hardsuit's external transducers to pump out a 
signal that she hoped would cancel the incoming attack, just as 
the first macro did for her opponent's pervasive sonar.

To her relief, it had worked.  She hadn't been sure it would; her
transducers couldn't begin to match the attack in raw power, if
the sensor traces told the truth.  But they had put out enough.
The beam of coherent sound had lashed across her armor, lifting
her up and throwing her back with its force -- but it did little
more than that.  To her satisfaction, the hardsuit's diagnostic
systems reported only minor damage.

Switching to IR defeated the darkness and revealed her quarry,
who seemed to be confused.  Nene smiled nastily to herself.
*Play games with me, huh?  Well, then, you witch, you lose.*
With a twitch of her finger in its gauntlet, she raised the power
on the sonar jamming a notch, and watched the false-color image
of her opponent flinch suddenly.  Another twitch charged the sole 
electrode of her holdout knucklebomber.

Then Nene threw herself at the woman, firing her jumpjets as she
did.  She struck her target low, at the waist, with all the power
of her jets behind her fists.  There was the familiar, if muted, 
crack of a discharging bomber, and the woman went flying a yelp 
of pain.  The inky darkness flew with her, revealing itself to be 
a globe as it left Nene behind.  Then it flickered and vanished,
leaving behind its author, sprawled upon the sidewalk and
apparently stunned, just shy of the gleaming grey marble of one
of the Shogakukan buildings.

With a little acrobatic tumble, Nene landed lightly on her feet
and then launched herself once again, this time to drop down upon
the stunned woman in black like a stooping hawk, one fist
outstretched with all the combined mass and velocity of her
hardsuit behind it.

Either her target hadn't been as stunned as she had seemed, or
she recovered quickly, because she sensed the coming strike and
twisted slightly, if slugglishly, to one side.  It wasn't enough
to avoid the blow, though; Nene's armored fist glanced off her
just above her waist, and the redhead thought she felt the
satisfying crunch of snapping ribs.

The masked woman beneath her drew in a deep breath, but Nene
pounded her solar plexus with all of her hardsuit's strength,
forcing her to gasp it back out in pain.  *Keep her off-balance,
keep her on the defensive.  If she gets even a moment to recover,
she'll tear me to pieces!*  Nene drew back her fist and threw
another punch, battering that hidden face.  Then another.  And
another.  Her opponent grasped randomly at the arm of her
hardsuit, but Nene drove a fist back into the damaged ribs in her
side.  More cracking, and the woman cried out in pain.

A red haze seemed to drop over Nene's eyes.  A low, growling
voice filled her ears, and only dimly did she recognize it as her
own.  A distant cry didn't even register.  "I'm... *not*... going
to let you... win!" she ground out through gritted teeth as she
drew back her fist for another punch.

But before she could throw it, something slammed into her
shoulders with the force of a truck.

                              * * *

When Blue screamed and charged for Diana and McNichol, I
blindsided her.  Diana had things in hand there, and letting Blue
get her two cents' worth in was potentially dangerous to the good
inspector.  Best to sideline her before the one unprotected
normal in the fray got caught by a careless shot.

So I stormed across the street and dropped into a slide aimed to 
take me right between her legs as she ran.  I scissored my ankles
around one blue-armored calf and punched the weak spot behind the
knee of her other leg, which obligingly folded right up.

It took more than a few seconds for the two of us to untangle
ourselves, during which 1) Diana returned; 2) I avoided one point-
blank gauss needle by the barest of margins; and 3) I swore
profusely in response to the latest pain from my wounds, which
hadn't approved of this course of action.

While Blue returned her attention to Diana, I backpedaled out of
their line of fire.  I was feeling rather pleased with myself --
until Maggie cried out.  I didn't even think of what to do next.
"Silverbolt!" I snapped as I turned and took a running long jump
at her.  "Javelin!"

With one hand, Diana suddenly shoved Blue hard enough to embed
her in a nearby car.  With the other she snatched me out of the
air, catching me by the back of my jacket; without breaking
stride she swung me through a half-circle and flung me overhand
like a baseball -- straight at Pink.

I twisted in mid-air like a cat so that I was flying feet-first
at the littlest Knight Saber.  I hit her high on the back on a 
bit of an angle, just as she was about to throw another punch, 
and knocked her completely clear of my wife with an impact that 
ran all the way up my legs and jolted my pelvis.  Having imparted
almost all my momentum to Pink, I used what was left to roll to 
my feet after landing in a tumble, just centimeters short of 
scraping myself painfully along the marble-sheathed wall of the 
building next to them.  What complaints my wounds had about all 
this were drowned out by the pounding of the blood in my ears.

Pink was on her hands and knees and shaking her head as if to
clear it.  I stepped in front of her and looked down for the
briefest of moments; a narrow crack was visible across her
shoulders.  "<You have made me very angry,>" I murmured.  "<Very
angry indeed.>"  Then I kicked her in the stomach.  

Have I mentioned that the boots I wear with my uniform have
heavy steel toes?  U.N. safety regulations are quite specific
about that.

The impact was off-center, lifting Pink more sideways than up.  
She gave an agonized little squeak and fell over on her side with 
a clatter.  A moment later, as she levered herself back up on her
hands and knees, I seized her by the shoulders, yanking her up 
and spinning her to face me.  "You.  Leave.  My.  Wife.  
*ALONE!*"  Then, with the adrenaline raging through my veins and 
granting me a berserk strength beyond that which I normally 
possessed, I lifted her up and threw her into the building wall.

The thin black stone covering cracked and crumbled under the
impact, revealing the grey concrete beneath.  Before she could
slide down, though, I was there.  I planted a hand under her
chin, and by dint of that same hysterical strength I held her up
against the shattered surface, leaving her absurdly high-heeled
boots dangling a few centimeters short of the sidewalk.  I drew
my fist back and stared deep into that opaque visor.

It was at this point that my brain finally started to wrest
control of my body from my adrenal glands; I suddenly wondered
what was going through Pink's mind -- and what I was going to do
next.

                              * * *

Overhead, Lisa drew in her breath sharply and lowered her camera
in disbelief.  *Doug...*  The anxiety that swept through her made
her want to jump down into the middle of the fight and *do*
something -- but on which side, and for whose benefit, she
couldn't even begin to say.

                              * * *

Linna surged to her feet only to be tackled by Kat, who dragged
her, ghostlike, partway into the pavement.  "No!" the
shapeshifter hissed at the side of Linna's helmet as the Saber
froze in surprise and fear at the unearthly sensation.  "Don't
interfere!"

                              * * *

Priss' blood ran cold as she turned.  The bastard had Nene up
against a wall by the neck!  She had to...

Two silver arms with the strength of a hydraulic press clamped 
themselves around her with a glittering speed that left Priss no 
time to react.  They pinned her arms and held her so tightly in 
place that her hardsuit creaked under the pressure.

"Do not try it, little blue girl," Silverbolt's voice was harsh
in her ear.  "Or his reflexes alone will kill her.  And this is
not wanted."

                              * * *

At Sangnoir's outburst, Sylia's head snapped away from her intent
study of Wetter Hexe.  "Nene," she whispered in horror as she
watched Sangnoir draw back his fist for a killing blow, and
without a second thought she triggered her jumpjets.

Only to be batted back to the ground by a downward blast of wind
that overpowered the jets with absurd ease.  As Sylia crashed
into the pavement, an electric sizzle surrounded her; she emitted
an involuntary, wordless cry of disbelief as her HUD died and the
hardsuit froze, powerless, around her.

"<Looney!>" she heard Wetter Hexe bellow from where she loomed 
over Sylia.  Impossibly, the thunder from the sky above roared 
the English words with her.  "<Stand down!>"

With the loss of power her visor had reverted to clear plasteel,
and from her prone position Sylia watched helplessly as
Sangnoir's arm twitched, almost dropped, and then returned to its
original ready position.  *How can he suspend her like that with
only one hand?* the ever-analytical part of her mind wondered,
and then she remembered.  "My physical strength is pretty much
human normal, but the adrenal mutation also gives me some burst-
mode enhancement in stress situations," he had told them during
their one extended conversation, weeks earlier.  *This certainly
qualifies,* Sylia thought grimly even as she feared for Nene's
life.

                              * * *

In the plaza before the entrance to Geo City, the forces of the 
AD Police, the news crews, and the onlookers all froze as one 
when the distant thunder suddenly formed into English words that 
rang clearly across the square:  "<Looney!  Stand down!>"

A sudden atavistic fear drove itself like a spike throuogh Daley 
Wong.  Something in that voice of thunder called to the most 
primitive part of his brain, filling him with the need to fall to 
the ground and grovel.  Its visceral impact staggered him 
physically, and only his white-knuckled grasp on the patrol car's 
door kept him upright.  With an obstinance that might have 
surprised his partner, he shook off the imperative coursing 
through his mind; looking around, he saw that some of his fellows 
were not as lucky or as strong.

                              * * *

Her hardsuit's cervical armor kept the pressure across her neck
from strangling her, but it did nothing to help Nene's state of
mind.  Shock and fear and the suddenness of his attack had all
but paralyzed her.  As Sylia's recorded voice repeatedly
announced the loss of armor integrity across her shoulders, Nene
struggled to suppress the shriek of terror that threatened to
bubble up out of her.  She would *not* give him that
satisfaction!

Trying to look anywhere but at those goggles with their hypnotic
flickers of moving color, Nene's eyes darted from side to side as
far as they could go without moving her head.  A movement behind
Sangnoir caught her attention.  *Oh, crap.*  The woman in black --
Sangnoir's *wife*, Nene corrected herself -- was struggling to
sit up.  Her skin-tight outfit was torn in places, she was
bloodied and bruised, and her drooping, shredded cowl still
served to hide her face even as it threatened to give way
entirely.  *If she decides to get back at me, I'm dead...*

The woman propped herself up on one arm, heaved a breath, and
wiped the other arm across her face.  The remaining scraps of her
cowl gave way with the motion and fell to the ground to reveal
her bruised and bloodstreaked features.  Nene stifled another cry 
at the sight -- she had deduced that Sangnoir's wife was blind, 
but...

The woman had no eyes.  Nor could she ever have had any.

Not with two glistening patches of fine, silvery grey fur growing
on the smooth, flat skin that took their place.

                              * * *

I remember the first time I killed.

I was 24.  It was a damned stupid accident.  I didn't even use my
metagift.  It was with just a switchblade.  I was trying to bluff
him, confident I could dance around the asshole and just make him
look bad in front of his mates.  But he was drunk, or high on
something, and he zigged when I zagged, and...

I got sick afterwards; I managed to hold it for a block or so
before I dropped to my knees and threw up in some reeking, 
unnamed Soho alley.  Then I made my way home and got sick some 
more.

I've taken many lives since.  Most of them deliberately.

I don't get sick anymore, but it's never easy to take that power
into your hands, whether you're meta or normal.  The one absolute
power almost all humans possess -- the power to annihilate a
fellow sentient being.

I stood there and felt the rage surging, just barely controlled,
railing at the battlesuited crunchie who had *dared* harm my
wife.  The rage which demanded I use that power.

I didn't *want* to do it.  But I felt like I had found myself in
a place where I had no choice.  I didn't want to do it, didn't
want to kill this, this playful, giggling, childlike girl of a
mercenary.  But I had come this far, whether I had intended to
or not, I had forced myself into this corner, and I felt that I
couldn't back down.  No matter how desperately I wanted to.  I
couldn't retreat, I couldn't show weakness.  I had reached a
point of no return.

"<I said stand down, Looney!>" Hexe repeated, again with the 
voice of the thunder underlining her words.  "<That's an order, 
mister!>"

	"<What do you see when you turn out the light?
	 I can't tell you, but it sure feels like mine...>"

"Doug?" a hoarse whisper drifted up from behind me.

"Maggie?"  I resisted the urge to turn and scoop her up in my
arms.

"Doug, I'm okay.  Don't do it.  Remember, I'm not the real
Maggie..."

That cut through the roar of the blood in my ears.  Of course.
Not really Maggie.  A simulacrum.  An animate packet of magical
energy, nothing more.  Not Maggie.

I should know better.

But I wanted her there so badly, wanted so badly to believe it
was her...

The rage drained away with that thought, and I sighed.  I
unclenched my fist and lowered my right arm.  Without my anger to
sustain it, my extra strength faltered and my temporary
anesthesia faded.  In moments the muscles in my arm started to 
tremble, then spasm.  Then, with a stifled cry of pain I let go 
of Pink's neck.  We both barely managed to avoid spilling 
ourselves across the sidewalk.  I'd like to think I did it 
somewhat more gracefully than she.

We had both straightened up, still face-to-face and (presumably)
eye-to-eye, and I held that gaze.  With the faintest snarl in my
voice I said, "I'm a soldier, Pink.  I'm a trained killer.  But
I'm not a murderer.  Unlike *you*."  She flinched.  "I choose not
to kill today.  And it's not just because I was ordered not to.
Under the right circumstances, I wouldn't've given a shit about
those orders."  Somewhere in the distance I heard Hexe snort.  I
ignored her and continued.  "You're only doing what you think is
right.  I can respect that."  I paused for a beat.  "But I can't
allow it."

And with that I turned my back on the pink Knight Saber, dropped
to my knees and put my arms around Maggie.  That got me a weak
smile of gratitude from the simulacrum of my wife.  In my ears
messages crackled back and forth on the ADP band -- it sounded 
like Hexe's orders had had a bit of an effect on them, but other 
than that they'd finished retrieving all of the rogue boomers, 
with no deaths on either side.  Mission accomplished, then.  
There was no reason to prolong this any further.

Without looking back at the Knight Saber, whom I could still feel
was poised somewhat uncertainly over the two of us, I sighed with
satisfaction.  "Get out of here," I said a moment later.  Then, I
shouted into the street, "Just get out of here!"

A rumble of thunder from overhead punctuated my shout, and I
looked up to again see the lightning-shot clouds looming 
overhead.  "You're still doing that, Hexe, right?" I called.

I didn't have to look at her to know the expression she wore at
that moment.  "Naturally," she answered with just the right
amount of "are you stupid or what?" in her voice.

I nodded, more to myself than anything else.  "Let their plane
come in to pick them up."

"Oh, by your leave, my lord Looney," Hexe replied mockingly.  And
at that moment the wind and thunder stopped, and the cloud cover
simply dissolved away to reveal the night sky above; a pity that
the city's lights washed out almost all of the stars.  At least
the moon, almost full, was visible now.  A few moments later, a
black VTOL dropped down to hover over the street.

                              * * *

Sylia very quietly let out her breath.  When Sangnoir had let go
of Nene, his companions had released their holds on the other two
Sabers.  Priss, predictably, tried to land a punch on the chrome
woman, only to be shoved violently towards the incoming Knight 
Wing.  Linna, however, waited calmly to be extracted from the
street.  Then she turned and bowed with graceful formality to the
werecheetah, who returned the gesture.

Power abruptly returned to Sylia's hardsuit at the same time, and
she found Wetter Hexe extending a hand to help her to her feet.
Once she was again standing, she took a moment to run a quick
diagnostic on the suit and its systems; they reported no damage
beyond that already extant before its unexpected shutdown.  
Satisfied (if mystified) by the results, she looked up to see 
Sangnoir watching her, his posture betraying no small amount of 
residual anger.

"Well, White?" he asked impatiently.

Sylia weighed her options.  Despite the apparent firepower he
could bring to bear on them at the moment, none of her team had
been seriously injured.  Furthermore, if she gave the order, the
Knight Sabers could certainly outlast this ... manifestation of
his (assuming his companions *were* a manifestation and not
something different).  The Sabers *might* regain the upper hand.
But there was no purpose or profit in it.  Their target had
originally been the boomers, not Sangnoir, and from the ADP
transmissions she'd overheard, that goal was moot now.  Within
her helmet she frowned and made her decision.

                              * * *

"All right, Colonel.  You've made your point," White said.
"We'll go.  And we'll stay clear of your 'operations' from now
on."  The eyeless helm tracked towards me in the sudden calm that
statement provoked, sending a slight prickle down my spine.
"Personally, I'd like to thank you for the restraint you've
shown.  But ask yourself this:  Can you always afford to show it?
Can you give everyone the justice, and every situation the
treatment, that they deserve?"  She gave a cold little bow.  "I'm
sorry, but we've never had that luxury."

I stared at her a moment, then sneered.  "The luxury of letting
slaves try to make a better life for themselves?"

"The luxury of saving them at the expense of the lives of
others."  Her voice and posture were hard at first, then softened
as she spread her hands wide.  "What else would you have me do?"

I didn't have an answer for that.  I was still wrestling with
with that dilemma myself.

                              * * *

"Linna, Priss, Nene," Sylia announced over the encrypted link,
"stand down.  We're leaving."  As two sets of protests -- one 
pained, one outraged -- blared back over the channel, Sylia turned 
down the gain and added, "No arguments.  Now."

                              * * *

Linna turned to Kat.  "Oh, well, Mother's calling."  Inside her
helmet, she grinned, hoping it was audible in her voice.

Kat mock-pouted.  "Can't you stay out and play a little longer?"

Linna laughed.  "Sorry, maybe next time."

"Maybe," Kat agreed, then reached for Linna's hand -- her left
hand, Linna noted with a smile.  "I probably shouldn't make this
offer, but if you're ever in our part of the multiverse..."

Linna nodded and her smile grew even broader.  "I'll be sure to
drop by."

"And we'll take you out to the Red Lion for a night on the town,"
Kat replied with a feline smile of her own that split her muzzle.
"It was nice meeting you, Green."

"You, too, Kat."  She inclined her head toward Sangnoir.  "Try to
keep the jerk out of trouble, okay?"

Kat's smile widened to match Linna's own.  "We'll try.  But he's
a handful."

"I'll bet."

"Linna, if you're quite finished fraternizing with the enemy..."
Sylia's amused tones crackled over the link.

"Coming, mother..."

                              * * *

Some minutes later, aboard the Knight Wing, Nene slowly strapped 
herself into her seat, trying to do as little as possible to 
exacerbate the fading dull pain in her abdomen.  Once she had all 
the buckles snapped shut securely, she removed the helmet of her 
hardsuit.  As the VTOL's engines spun up to full power, she turned 
it around in her hands to stare at its blank faceplate.

There was a round, spiky splatter of blood on it, a dark red
highlight against the playful pink of the cerametal.

She hissed with a sharp intake of breath as a sudden stab of
guilt drove itself home in her gut to replace the more physical
pain that had predominated until now.  Holding the helmet in one
hand, she raised the other and, spreading its fingers wide,
turned it this way and that in front of her shock-widened eyes.

The knuckles of her armored gauntlet were stained with blood.
Long, thin incarnadine trailers traced spiderweb-fine lines along
the gauntlet's backplate, and down to the tip of each finger.
She stared, unseeing, at the armored glove; in her mind, she
finally saw, actually *saw* what she had done -- the bloodied,
torn body of the woman she had beaten mercilessly.

Closing her eyes against the threat of tears, Nene whispered,
"Oh, god.  What's happened to me?"

Unnoticed by her, the drying blood on her hands turned into
glittering motes of golden light and vanished without a trace.

                              * * *

I didn't say anything more as the Knights trudged up the ramp and
into their carrier.  It closed behind them with a final-sounding
thud, and then the black aircraft took off.  Its engines' howl,
almost loud enough to be painful, reverberated off the buildings
on either side, but their backwash didn't touch us, thanks to
Hexe.

As the Knights' plane slowly rose into the night sky, the squad
gathered around me.  All except for Maggie, that is, whom I had
already helped off the ground and whom I now held; we just stood
there with our arms around each other.  Overhead, Hexe and
Silverbolt hovered, alert and ready to respond should the Knights
attempt any kind of sneak attack once the VTOL was in the air.
But no attack came.  The Knights were as good as their word.

From where we were, I could see Inspector McNichol some distance
away.  Like us, he stood silently and watched the aircraft
disappear into the night sky.  Then, shooting us -- or maybe me --
an unreadable glance, he got back into his patrol car and drove
off.

"Well..." I began as the engines of both airplane and automobile
faded.

"That was a waste, Looney," Hexe abruptly interrupted me.  She
was hovering still, her back to me.  "Of time, resources *and*
what little goodwill they still bore you."

I gaped at the simulacrum.  "What?"

Hexe turned to face me and sniffed dismissively.  "You heard me.
Because they dared actually hurt you -- worse yet, got first
blood in a fight -- the great and powerful Looney Toons had to
teach them a lesson.  You went for overkill because they wounded
your precious ego.  You didn't need to summon us to delay them.
You just wanted to humiliate them and prove how much more
powerful you were."  She shook her head in disgust.  "Typical
macho dick-waving bullshit.  That was unworthy of you.  I thought
you *knew* better."

I boggled.  Never had a simulacrum ever given me this kind of
dressing down before; something in my subconscious mind must have
been far more disturbed by events than *I* was, and that was
saying a lot.

"I mean," the Hexe simulacrum went on with the beginnings of a
sneer on her lips, "*what* happened to your training?  What
happened to scaling the response to the opposition?"

"What happened to 'overwhelm and destroy?'" I countered.

Hexe rolled her eyes.  The other simulacra, even Maggie's there
in my arms, were silent and almost motionless, as if all the
vitality which had formerly animated them had been drained away 
to fuel the angry Hexe before me.  "This was *not* one of our 
usual operations, Looney.  These were *not* enemies to be 
eliminated.  All you had intended to do was delay them a few 
minutes, and instead you almost turned it into a massacre.  
Idiot!"

"Hey, they took the first shots!"

"After you shoved them off their emotional balance with an
application of your metagift, then tried to violate the mind of
their leader!  What did you expect?"

"I told you 'non-lethal, divide and separate'," I pointed out 
thorugh gritted teeth.

"Oh, yes," the image of Hexe replied with her usual sarcastic 
edge.  "Just like telling a bazooka 'only a *little* hole.'"  She 
literally looked down her nose at me.  "You intended nothing less 
than to humiliate and hurt them."  She sniffed.  "Well, I hope 
you're proud of how well you beat up a little girl with no 
metatalent."

I felt my level of irritation start to climb higher.  "Look, you!
I am *not* going to waste my time arguing tactics with a
manifestation of my own subconscious!"

"Wrong."  Hexe dropped to float directly in front of me.  She's
taller than I am to begin with, but when she's almost half a
meter off the ground, it's like being in first grade again and
looking up at an angry teacher.  "This form is only *partly* a
manifestation of your subconscious."

I stopped short and cocked my head.  "Come again?"

"I am a *goddess*, Looney.  Any true image of me with belief
behind it attracts a fragment of my attention.  Whether or not
you realize it, you have some measure of belief in this..." she
waved her right hand at her torso, "...simulacrum.  I *am* here."
She got in my face.  "Believe it."

                              * * *

After snapping several shots of the departing Knight Wing, Lisa
turned her attention back to the street level, where it appeared 
an argument -- in heated English -- was brewing.  *That's so 
strange,* she thought, remembering her encounter with Kat in 
Doug's apartment and what she'd learned then.  *It's like he's 
fighting with himself.*  Then another thought struck her.  *How 
come I can suddenly hear them so clearly?  It's like they were up 
here with me...*

She tabled that thought for future investigation, and took a
group photo.

                              * * *

Not entirely believing the Hexe simulacrum's claim, I dropped
into magesight.

And got the surprise of my life.

Kat, Silverbolt, even Maggie there in my arms -- in magesight
they were exactly what I had expected:  featureless blobs of
magical energy otherwise indistinguishable from any other active
spell construct.  But Hexe...

Inside the Hexe-shaped energy construct was the unmistakable
golden glow of a soul.  And inside *that*...  Inside that was a
triple helix of colored energies -- blue, green and red -- that
I'd only ever seen in Hexe and a few other beings.  The signature
aura of an incarnated deity.

"Ho.  Ly.  Shit," I swore under my breath.  "It *is* you."

"You'd better believe it, Looney."  She looked me over.  "And you
certainly look the worse for wear."

"Getting shot and supporting four simulacra will do that to a
guy," I admitted.

She raised an eyebrow.  "Getting shot, surely.  But you are not
supporting these three -- I am."

"*You* are?" I said, disbelieving, and brushed my lips across
Maggie's too-still forehead.

Hexe lowered herself to the ground so I didn't have to keep
craning my neck to look up at her.  She crossed her arms and
looked down sternly at me.  "Yes.  Between calling me here and
generating those three, you pretty much drained yourself -- and
of those tasks, summoning me was vastly the harder.  Don't do it
again, or you're likely to kill yourself.  Anyway, when I arrived
and saw the situation, I took over their maintenance.  Or hadn't
you wondered why you had more energy to dance around with than
you expected?"

I considered this, nodded, and whispered, "Song off."  It
stopped, but the simulacra remained.  I nodded to myself.  "You
know, you shouldn't be able to do that."

A corner of Hexe's mouth quirked up into a fraction of a smile.
"You're right.  Normally I shouldn't, at least not in the avatar
in which my spirit dwells on our home timeline.  But this is not
*my* avatar, and I am not bound by the constraints I put upon
myself when I incarnated there."  She quirked the other corner
up.  "Not completely bound, at least."

"Do tell."

She looked around at our three companions, who were indeed almost
inanimate now.  "I'll dispel them now..."

"No, wait," I said, and she raised an eyebrow.  I ignored that
and turned my attention to... to the image of Maggie I had in my
arms.  "Good-bye, beloved," I whispered and gently kissed her.
She didn't respond, but that was all right.  I think it would
have been too much for me if she had.  "Okay," I said without
looking back.

Maggie, Kat and Silverbolt simply vanished.  I lowered my arms
slowly from their now-empty embrace, relishing the last
sensations of Maggie within them.

I suppose some of what I was feeling was on my face, because Hexe
then said, in a quieter, more sympathetic tone, "You invest too
much belief in these golems of yours."

"I won't complain," I said, finally looking back at her.  "It
netted me you."

"That's as may be," she replied with a shrug, "but you'll only
make more pain for yourself every time you use those songs."

"Well, then, Hexe, let me just say this."  I drew in a deep
breath and bellowed, "'Bugs Bunny to Earth:  Get me outta here!'"

Her usual supercilious expression drained away, replaced by one
of great sadness.  "I'm afraid I can't."

"What?"  I valiantly kept myself from shrieking outright, but I
suspect I was more than a bit strident.  "I thought you weren't
'constrained' here!"

She shook her head.  "I'm not -- and I am.  Understand something,
Looney, I'm not *all* here.  I am just a tiny fragment of my full
Godhead, yanked to this universe by the combination of the 
ancient covenant between god and mortal, and the raw chaos factor 
of your metagift.  I don't know how you got me here, or how to 
get back.  I suspect that when I release the hold that keeps me 
here, I'll just automatically snap right back to the rest of my 
Mind and fuse back into it, without having to chart a course back 
to our homeworld."  Her nose wrinkled as another possibility 
occurred to her.  "Then again, I may simply evaporate into the 
Void instead, leaving my primary Self infinitesimally 
diminished."  She shrugged.  "I won't know until it happens.  
Either way, I don't have much power in this world..."

"Bull-*shit*," I muttered.  "You just about fried the White
Knight."

Hexe actually smiled.  "Not the minor power I'm able to channel
through a weak vessel, Doug, but that of my full, true Self.
That's what I'd need to find our world from here *and* take you
with me."

"Fuck," I said without much force.

She frowned, studying me.  "There's also one other consideration.
You appear to be bound here, at least temporarily, by a wyrd -- 
a destiny.  You've been tied into the pattern of this world until
you accomplish some task, at which point you'll be released."
She shook her head.  "This fragment of me certainly doesn't have
enough power to shake you loose from that."

"Oh, joy," I growled, thinking unkind thoughts about the Three
once more.

She shrugged again.  "At least it will make you easier to find.
Now that I know the pattern of the world you're in, we can try to
locate it and come after you."  She bent down and got into my
face.  "Just *stay put*!"

I wasn't so sure I could do that, though, given what the Three
had told me.  According to Them, it had certainly sounded like I
needed to keep going forward, before I could get home.  And if
you can't trust Fate when it comes to what it is that you have to
do, who *can* you trust?  I also didn't want to risk the chance
that this "fragment" of Hexe wouldn't make it back home at all --
otherwise I'd be stuck in this cyberpunk hell endlessly waiting
for a rescue that would never come.  But I wasn't about to say
any of that to Hexe.

As if reading my mind, though, she looked at me sadly and shook
her head.  "But you're probably going to do something idiotic
anyway.  I know you too well, Doug," she said flatly.

I simply shrugged.

Hexe stepped forward so that she was standing almost nose-to-
forehead with me.  "I suppose that leaves me with only one
option."  Hexe raised her hands to lay delicate fingertips on
either side of my helmet.  "Although this world is far from my
spheres of influence, I can at least do this much for you."  With
that she leaned forward and brushed her lips across the U.N. 
emblem on the front of my helmet.  But I swear I could feel them 
on my forehead.  "You'd better take care of yourself, my friend.  
I will tell Margaret that you are well, and that you think of 
her."

"Thank you, Hexe...  Helene..."  I hesitated, then called her by
her True Name, which I had learned many years earlier and had
never before used, and which I will never record anywhere, not
even here.  My throat was suddenly, inexplicably tight, and
behind my goggles my eyes stung.  "Thank you."

She released me and stepped back.  "I can feel that my time is
almost up, Doug, and then I'll be gone.  Be well and don't give
up hope.  We'll be looking for you."  She smiled self-
deprecatingly.  "After all, you know how we hate to lose.  And
how much we'd hate to lose you."  Traceries of shining blue-white
began running across her body, and a moment later, I was looking
into the blazing star-eyes of a being of furious incandescent
light.  Then she, too, was gone.

I stood there in the silent, darkened street for several long
moments.  Then I called my motorcycle to come to me, and went
home to heal and to sleep.

                              * * *

"Wow," Lisa whispered to herself.  Whatever the freak phenomenon
had allowed her to eavesdrop had been, it had puttered out just
before that last exchange, but Lisa gave it no thought.  She had
snapped the shutter at the moment Wetter Hexe had transformed.
"I hope that comes out!  It'll make a great shot!"

"Yes, it will," a now-familiar voice said softly from behind her,
mild amusement apparent in its tones.

Lisa froze, then turned around slowly.  Wetter Hexe stood not
three meters away, feet slightly apart, arms folded across her
chest.  She wasn't quite smiling, although one eyebrow was
quirked in obvious amusement.

Lisa scrambled to her feet as Hexe broke her pose and strode
forward.  The young reporter got ready to throw her camera over
the side of the building and flee if necessary.  But Hexe did
nothing more than lay her hands on a trembling Lisa's shoulders
and smile down at her.  "I know who you are, Lisa Vanette," the
goddess said softly.  "You are a good friend to him.  Keep being
a good friend.  He is lonely, and although he will not admit it
even to himself, he is afraid of being lost forever among the
worlds."

Hexe then leaned down, and as she had for Doug, brushed her lips
across the girl's forehead.  "My blessing upon you, too, girl."
A disturbing edge seemed to slide into the goddess' smile.
"You'll need it."

Once again blue-white fire limned and consumed her shape, and
she disappeared.

Stunned, Lisa Vanette, tumbled backwards to land gracelessly on
her butt.

                              * * *

In a Place that was not a place, a Fourth momentarily appeared to
Three who watched.

"Honored Aunts, once Your bargain with him is complete, kindly
*butt the hell out.*"

Then She vanished.

                              * * *

GENOM Tower.  Thursday, February 12, 2037.  7:45 PM

"Tacteam G1 update."

Katherine Madigan thumbed the transmit key.  "Go ahead, G1."

"We have negative results on salvage.  As usual."  The crisp,
professional tone broke for a moment to reveal a familiar
frustration.  "By the time we got to street level, the discards
had self-destructed."

Her face hidden by the near-darkness in which she sat, Madigan
nodded to herself.  It was no more than she'd expected.
Discarded equipment left behind by the Knight Sabers invariably
melted down into slag and goo within minutes.  Analysis of the
all-but-unrecognizable remains of an entire (though heavily-
damaged) hardsuit abandoned on top of the Tower in the wake of
the Largo debacle had led GENOM technicians to theorize about
destructor nanites on a deadman switch, but no evidence of them
had ever been found; if they existed, they disassembled
themselves as thoroughly as they did the systems in which they
presumably lurked.

"Noted," she finally replied.  "Terminate operation and return to
base."

"Recall acknowledged.  G1 out."

Katherine shut down the relay and continued to sit in the
shadowed silence of her apartment.  The tacteam's hardened 
sensors had returned unparalleled video coverage of the conflict, 
although the audio had been somewhat spotty, particularly toward 
the end.  Still, there was much that Katherine had witnessed 
about which she had to think before she reported back to the 
Chairman.  

Still, it wouldn't hurt to begin drafting that report now.  With
a wave of her mouse/remote, she launched the word processor on
her apartment computer and began to dictate.  "New file.  Standard
memo.  Start.  To James D. Quincy, Chairman.  From Katherine 
Madigan, Senior Vice President, Special Projects...."

END OF CHAPTER TWELVE

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------------------------------------
(Version 1.1, 22 October 2003)

This work of fiction is copyright (C) 2002, Robert M. Schroeck.

Bubblegum Crisis, and the settings and the characters thereof are
copyright by and trademarks of Artmic Inc. and Youmex Inc., and
are used without permission.

"Douglas Q. Sangnoir," "Looney Toons", "The Loon" and any
representations thereof are copyright by and trademarks of Robert
M. Schroeck.

"Wetter Hexe" and any representations thereof are copyright by
and a trademark of Helen Imre.

"Maggie 'Shadowwalker' Viel" and any representations thereof are
copyright by and a trademark of Peggy Schroeck.

"Diana 'Silverbolt' Apostolidis" and any representations thereof
are copyright by and a trademark of Peggy Schroeck.

"Kat" and any representations thereof are copyright by and a
trademark of Kathleen Avins.

"The Warriors", "Warriors' World", "Warriors International" and
"Warriors Alpha" are all jointly-held trademarks of The Warriors
Group.

Lyrics from "A Little Help From My Friends" as recorded by Joe 
Cocker, words and music by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, 
copyright (C) 1967 Northern Songs. 

The above are quoted in this fiction without permission under the
"fair use" provisions of international copyright law.

For a full explanation of the references and hidden tidbits in
this story, see the Drunkard's Walk II Concordance at:

For a full explanation of the references and hidden tidbits in
this story, see the Drunkard's Walk II Concordance at:

	http://www.eclipse.net/~rms/dw2conc.html

Other chapters of this story can be found at:

	http://www.eclipse.net/~rms/misc.html

The Drunkard's Walk discussion forums are open for those who wish 
to trade thoughts and comments with other readers, as well as 
with the author:

        http://p202.ezboard.com/bdrunkardswalkforums

Many thanks to my prereaders on this chapter:  The Apprentice,
Joe Avins, Kathleen Avins, Nathan Baxter, Ed Becerra, Delany
Brittain, Barry Cadwgan, Andrew Carr, Kevin Cody, Helen Imre,
Eric James, Josh Megerman, Berg Oswell, and Peggy Schroeck.

Special thanks to Attila Imre for his information and advice
on proper knife-fighting style, technique and tactics, and for 
his help in choreographing some of Hexe's fight with Sylia.  
Sorry, Attila, but I *had* to be just a *little* cinematic.  
Oh, and my finger has stopped hurting.  I'll just let you 
demonstrate moves on someone else's body next time.

Finally, a special "master of obscure detail" award to Logan 
Darklighter, who discovered Nene's holdout knucklebomber in
original BGC canon material!

C&C gratefully accepted.

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