Aces High

HALF PAST DEAD

By John J. Miller I.

Brennan followed the Mercedes full of Immaculate Egrets to the gate of the cemetery in a gray BMW he had stolen from the gang three days before.

He stopped a hundred yards behind them, his headlights off, while one of the Egrets got out of the Mercedes and swung open the graveyard's sagging wrought-iron gate. He waited until they went on into the cemetery, then he slid out of the BMW, took his bow and quiver of arrows from the back seat, slipped his hood over his head, and crossed the street after them.

The six-foot-high brick fence around the graveyard was stained with city grime and crumbling with age. He pulled himself over it easily and dropped down inside without a sound.

The Mercedes was somewhere near the center of the cemetery. The driver killed the engine and turned the headlights off as Brennan watched. Car doors opened and slammed shut. He could hear or see nothing significant from where he stood. He had to get closer to the Egrets.

It was a dark night, the full moon often hidden by thick, shifting clouds. The trees growing wild inside the cemetery screened most of what city light there was. He moved slowly in the darkness, the sounds of his passing covered by the wind blowing with a hundred whispering voices through the branches overhead.

A shadow shifting among shadows, he moved behind an old slab tombstone canted like a crooked tooth in the mouth of an unkempt giant. He watched three of the Egrets enter a mausoleum that had once been the crowning glory of the cemetery. The monument of a once rich, now forgotten family, it had been allowed to sink into decay like the rest of the graveyard. Its marble stonework had been eaten away by acid rain and bird droppings, its giltwork had flaked away over years of neglect. One of the Egrets stayed behind as the others went through the wrought-iron door into the interior of the mausoleum. He closed the door behind the others, and leaned against the front wall of the sepulcher. He lit a cigarette and his face shone briefly in the flame of the match. It was Chen, the Egret lieutenant Brennan had been following for the last two weeks.

Brennan crouched behind the tombstone, frowning. He had known since Vietnam that Kien was channeling heroin to the States through a Chinatown street gang called the Immaculate Egrets. He had scouted the gang and latched onto Chen, who appeared to rank fairly high in the organization, with the hope of finding hard evidence to link the Egrets to Kien. He had witnessed a dozen felonies over the last few weeks, but had uncovered nothing concerning Kien.

There was one inexplicable thing. The past several weeks had seen an incredible influx of heroin into the city. It was so plentiful that the street price had plummeted and there had been a record number of o.d.'s. The Immaculate Egrets, through whom the drug flowed, were selling it at cut-rate prices, stealing customers right and left from the Mafia and Sweet William's Harlem crowd. But Brennan had been unable to discover how they were getting their stag so cheaply and plentifully.

Skulking behind a tombstone was getting him nowhere. The answers, if the graveyard had any, would be in the mausoleum.

His mind made up, he drew an arrow from the quiver velcroed to his belt and nocked it to the string of his bow. He breathed deeply, smoothly, once, twice, caught his breath, and stood. As he did he glimpsed the name pecked into the weathered rock of the tombstone. Archer. He hoped it wasn't an omen.

It wasn't a difficult shot, but he still called on his Zen training to clear his mind and steady his muscles. He aimed a foot lower and a little to the left of the glowing cigarette tip, and, when the time was right, let the string slip from his fingers.

His bow was a four-wheel compound with elliptical cams that, once the tension point was reached, reduced the initial pull of one hundred and twenty pounds to sixty. The nylon bowstring thrummed, sending the shaft through the night like a hawk swooping on an unsuspecting target. He heard a thud and a strangled groan as the arrow struck home. He slipped out of the shadows like a cautious animal, and ran to where Chen lay slumped against the mausoleum wall.

He tarried long enough to make sure that Chen was dead and to leave one of his cards, a plastic-laminated ace of spades, stuck on the arrowtip protruding from Chen's back.

He nocked another arrow to his bowstring and creaked open the wrought-iron door that closed off the interior of the tomb. Inside, a stairway led down a dozen steps to another door haloed by a dim, steady light that burned in a chamber beyond. He waited for a moment, listening, then went down the stairs silently. He stopped at the door of the inner chamber to listen again. Someone was moving around inside. He counted to twenty, slowly, but heard only quiet, scuffing footsteps. He'd come this far. There was no sense in turning back now.

Brennan dove through the door, and came up on one knee, bowstring drawn back to his ear. One man wearing the colors of the Immaculate Egrets was in the room. He was counting plastic bags of white powder and marking the tally on a sheet of paper on a clipboard. He opened his mouth wide in astonishment just as Brennan released the arrow. It struck him high in the chest and knocked him backward over the kneehigh pile of keys.

Brennan leaped across the chamber, but the Egret was as dead as everyone else in the boneyard by the time Brennan reached him. Brennan looked up from the body and glanced around.

What had happened to the other two Snow Birds who had gone into the sepulcher? They had vanished into thin air. Or, more likely, Brennan thought, through a door concealed in one of the walls.

He slung the bow across his back and checked the walls, running his hands over them, looking for hidden seams or cracks, rapping and listening for a hollow sound. He had finished one wall without finding anything, and was starting on the next when he heard a muffled whoosh of air at his back and felt a warm, humid breeze.

He whirled around. The look of astonishment on his face matched that of the two men who had appeared from nowhere into the middle of the mausoleum. One, who wore the colors of the Egrets, had saddlebags draped over each shoulder. The other, a thin, reptilian-looking joker, was carrying what looked like a bowling ball. They had, Brennan realized with some astonishment, vanished into thin air. And now they were back.

The Egret carrying the bulging saddlebags was closest to him. Brennan unslung his bow, swung it like a baseball bat, and connected with the side of the Egret's head. The man dropped with a groan, collapsing next to the pallet loaded with heroin.

The joker reared back, hissing sibilantly. He was taller than Brennan and thin to the point of emaciation. His skull was hairless, his nose a slight bump with a pair of flaring nostril pits. Overlong incisors protruded from his upper jaw. He stared unblinkingly at Brennan. When he opened his lipless mouth and hissed, he exposed a lolling forked tongue that flicked frantically in Brennan's direction. He clutched his bowling ball tighter.

Only, Brennan realized, it wasn't a bowling ball that the joker held. It was the proper size and shape, but it had no finger holes and, as Brennan watched, the air around it started to pulsate with flickering bits of coruscating energy. It was some kind of device that had enabled the joker and his companion to materialize into the mausoleum. They were using it to bring heroin in from-somewhere. And the joker was starting to activate it again.

Brennan swung his bow at the joker, who dodged with easy, fluid grace. The halo around the artifact grew brighter. Brennan dropped his bow and closed in, determined to take the device from the joker before he could escape or turn the thing's energies on him.

He grappled the joker easily, but found that his opponent was unexpectedly strong. The joker twisted and heaved in Brennan's grasp in an oddly fluid manner, as if his bones were utterly flexible. They tugged against each other for a moment and then Brennan found himself staring at the joker, their faces inches apart.

The joker's long, grotesque tongue flicked out, caressing Brennan's face in a lingering, almost sensual manner. Brennan flinched backward involuntarily, exposing his neck and throat to the taller joker. The reptiloid lunged forward, relinquishing his grip on the strange device, and fastened his mouth on the side of Brennan's throat where it curved into his shoulder.

Brennan felt the joker's teeth pierce his flesh. The joker worked his mouth, pumping saliva into the wound. The area around the bite went numb almost immediately and Brennan panicked.

A surge of horror-induced strength enabled him to pull free from the joker's embrace. He felt his flesh tear, and blood ran down his throat and chest. The numbness spread rapidly over his right side.

The joker let Brennan pull away with the device. He smiled cruelly and licked Brennan's blood from his chin with his lolling forked tongue.

He's poisoned me, Brennan thought, recognizing the symptoms of a fast-acting neurotoxin. He knew that he was in trouble. He wasn't an ace. He had no special protection or defenses, no armor or fortified constitution. The joker was confident in the efficacy of his poison. He stood back to watch Brennan die. Brennan knew he needed help fast. There was only one person who might be able to reverse the damage the poison was already wreaking on his body. She'd be at Tachyon's Jokertown clinic now, but there was no way to reach her. Already he was finding it hard to stand as his heart pumped poison to every cell of his body.

Mai could help him, if he could get to her.

Brennan silently screamed her name with a surge of desperate energy.

Mai!

He was aware, dimly, of the corresponding pulsation of energy in the device that he cradled to his chest. It felt warm and comforting as he hugged it. The joker's smile turned into a frown. He hissed and sprung forward. Brennan couldn't move, but that didn't matter.

There was an instant of gut-wrenching disorientation that his numbed mind and body only half-felt and then he was in a well-lit, softly painted corridor. Mai was standing there, talking to a small, slight, foppishly dressed man who had long curly red hair.

They turned and stared at him in astonishment. Brennan, himself, was beyond such a feeling.

"Poison," he croaked through stiff, heavy lips, and collapsed, dropping the artifact and plunging into deep darkness.

It was a swirly, starry darkness, redolent with musky jungle smells. The pinpricks of light scattered across his consciousness were the ends of his men's cigarettes and the faraway stars scattered across the Vietnamese night. There was silence all around him, broken only by the sounds of soft breathing and the noises made by the animals deep within the jungle. He glanced at the luminous dial of his wristwatch. Four A. M.

Gulgowski, his top sergeant, squatted next to him in the underbrush.

"It's late," Gulgowski hissed.

Brennan shrugged. "Choppers are always late. It'll get here."

The sergeant grunted noncommittally. Brennan smiled into the night. Gulgowski was always the pessimist, always the one to see the gloomy side of things. But that never stopped him from doing his damndest when the going got rough, never stopped him from picking up the others when they felt everything was hopeless.

From faraway came the whupping sound of a chopper. Brennan turned to him, grinned. Gulgowski spat silently onto the jungle floor.

"Get the men ready. And hang onto that briefcase. It cost a lot to get it."

Mendoza, Johnstone, Big Al… three of the ten-man picked squad that Brennan had led on a raid on regional VC headquarters were dead. But they had achieved their objective. They had captured documents proving what Brennan had suspected for a long time. There were men in both the Vietnamese Army and the United States Army who were dirty,' who were working with the enemy. He'd only had a chance to glance at the papers before stuffing them in the briefcase, but they had confirmed his suspicions that the biggest thief, the vilest traitor, was the ARVN general Kien. These papers would hang him.

The chopper landed in the clearing and Gulgowski, clutching the evidence that would damn a score of men as traitors, chivied the others to their ride home. Brennan waited in the underbrush, staring down the trail from which he expected pursuing VC to come at any moment. Finally satisfied that they had shaken the pursuit, he backed into the clearing as a withering hail of bullets burst unexpectedly into the night.

He heard the screams of his men, half-turned, and felt a searing flash of pain as a slug creased his forehead. He went down and his rifle spun away from him into the darkness. The shots had come from the clearing. From the chopper.

He flopped silently on the ground, staring into the clearing with pain-misted eyes. His men lay sprawled in the starlight. All of them were down. Other men walked among them, searching. He blinked blood out his eyes as one of the searchers, dressed in ARVN-style fatigues, shot Gulgowski in the head with a pistol as the sergeant tried to stand.

A flashlight beam picked out the killer's face. It was Kien. Brennan bit back curses as he saw one of his henchmen pry the briefcase from Gulgowski's death-grip and hand it to him. Kien rifled through it, nodded in satisfaction, and then methodically burned its contents. As the papers burned, Kien stared out into the jungle, looking, Brennan knew, for him. He cursed the paralytic shock that gripped his body, making him shake like he had a fever. The last thing he remembered was Kien striding toward the chopper, and then shock drove him into unconsciousness.

There were no lights in this darkness, but sudden hands of cool fire on his cheeks. They burned with a soothing touch. He felt all his pain and grief and anger drawn outward through them bit by slow bit, taken away from him like a worn-out cloak. He sighed deeply, content to remain in the healing darkness, as a sea of ineffable serenity washed over him. He was done, he thought, with strife, with killing. None of the killing had ever done any good anyway. Evil lived. Evil and Kien. He killed my father, but I can not, should not, harm him. It is wrong to bring harm to another sentient being, wrong…

Confused, Brennan forced open his eyes. He wasn't in Vietnam. He was in a hospital. No, the Jokertown clinic of Dr. Tachyon. A face was pressed close to his, eyes closed, mouth screwed up tightly. Young, feminine, beautiful in a serene way, though now touched by extreme pain. Mai. Her long glossy hair enveloped his face like bird's wings. Her hands were pressed against his cheeks. Blood trickled down their backs from between the spread fingers.

She was using her wild card power to take his damaged body to herself, make repairs, and order Brennan's body to do the same. They had mingled minds and beings and he, for a moment, became something of her while she became something of him. In a confused meld of memories, he experienced Mai's grief at the death of her father at the hands of Kien's men.

She opened her eyes and smiled with- the serenity of a madonna.

"Hello, Captain Brennan," she said in a voice so low that only he could hear it. "You are well again."

She took her palms from his cheeks and the mingling of minds ended with the breaking of physical contact. He sighed, missing her touch already, missing the serenity that he could never in a thousand years find again on his own.

The man who had been with Mai in the corridor came to his bedside. It was Dr. Tachyon.

"It was touch and go there for a moment," Tachyon said, a look of concern on his face. "Thank the Ideal for Mai…" He let his voice trail off, regarding Brennan closely. "What happened? How did you come to possess the singularity shifter?"

Brennan sat up gingerly. The numbness was gone from his body, but he still felt light-headed and disoriented from Mai's treatment.

"Is that what it's called?" he asked. Tachyon nodded. "What is it?"

"A teleporting device. One of the rarest artifacts in the galaxy. I thought it was gone, lost forever."

"It's yours, then?"

"I had it for a while." Tachyon told Brennan the story of the peripatetic singularity shifter, at least what he knew of it. "How did the Egrets get it?"

"Eh?" Tachyon glanced from Brennan to Mai. "Egrets?"

"A Chinatown street gang. The Immaculate Egrets. They're also known as the Snow Birds because they control a good deal of the city's hard-drug trade. They were apparently using this shifter device to smuggle heroin. I took it away from them, but was wounded by one of their more… extraordinary operatives."

"It vanished when we landed in Harlem," Tachyon said. "Perhaps an Egret was in the crowd that gathered around us?"

"And took it, realizing what it was? Not likely," Brennan said softly, his gaze turned inward. "Not likely at all. Besides, Harlem isn't Egret turf. They have agents there, but not many of them."

"Well, however it turned up, I'm glad it did," Tachyon said. "It provides the possibility of a splendid alternative to Lankesters foolish plan of attacking the Swarm in space."

"The Swarm?" Brennan had been aware of the semisentient alien invaders that had been trying to get a toehold on the Earth for the past several months, but the fight against them had so far bypassed him. "What use could this, this shifting thing be against the Swarm?"

"It's a long story." Tachyon sighed and ran a hand across his face. "A man from the State Department named Lankester is in charge of the Anti-Swarm Task Force. He's been pestering me for weeks now to use my influence with the aces to convince them to attack the Swarm Mother-the source of the Swarm attacks-that's in an eccentric orbit around the sun. Its a nonsensical idea, of course. It would be suicide for even the most powerful aces to go up against that thing. It would be like gnats flinging themselves against an elephant. The singularity shifter, however, presents some interesting possibilities."

"It can teleport a man that far?" Brennan asked, seeing some of them himself.

"Someone totally unfamiliar with it, as, say, yourself," Tachyon said, "could use the shifter to teleport short distances. It would take a powerful telepath to reach the Swarm Mother. But it could be done. A man could shift himself into the interior of the thing. A man armed with, say, a tactical nuclear device."

Brennan nodded. "I see."

" I was sure you would. I'm explaining all this to you because, pragmatically speaking, the singularity shifter is yours."

Brennan looked from Tachyon, to Mai standing silently at the side of his bed, back to Tachyon again. He had the feeling that Mai had told Tachyon something about him, but he knew Mai would tell the doctor only what she had to. And only because she trusted him.

"I'm in your debt," Brennan said. "It's yours." Tachyon gripped Brennan's forearm in a warm, friendly manner.

"Thank you," he said. He glanced at Mai, looked at Brennan again. "I know that you're involved in some sort of vendetta with people here in the city. Mai told me something of it in explaining her own background and abilities. No details. None were necessary." He paused. " I know all too well about debts of honor."

Brennan nodded. He believed Tachyon, and, up to a point, trusted him. Tachyon probably wasn't connected with Kien, but one of the aces who had been with him-Turtle, Fantasy, or Trips-was. One of them must have stolen the shifter and given it to Kien. And Brennan, someday, somehow, would discover which ace it was.