Man of Mystery

2004-04-07 - 1:17 a.m.

Continued from last time

Quentin Holte walked into Harrah’s casino with a strut like Travolta mixed with Bruce Lee and Buddha. Something half report’s instinct, half synchronicity spirit channeling led him here. Letting the feeling take over he made his way though the casino like he owned the place, unaware that in his wake, every slot machine had just hit the jackpot, every dice had just come up boxcars. Some people were money and didn’t even know it.

***

Padraig turned just as the dark form entered the room.

“And can I…” the rest of the sentence was lost in a hail of darts. Padraig rolled out of the way and triend to rise up to a fighting crouch, but another form, this one little more than a blur, moved in, hitting him across his face and slamming his body into unconsciousness.

The woman stood over Padriag’s unconscious form and pulled the pair of sound baffles from out of her ears.

“You’re aim sucks.”

The large man in black shrugged. “I didn’t think he could move that fast. What the hell, no one told me he had that kind of speed trading?”

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned working for the Estrodome, Liam, it’s that any man who they’re interested in are far from ordinary. Let get this guy out of here.”

Liam nodded and shouldered the unconscious form. The woman and he then both reached into their belts and triggered the light bending shadow fields that Doctor Oblivion had supplied, their forms blurring into a barely noticeable quicksilver shadow as the pseudo invisibility wrapped around them. Walking into the hallway, they began their way out of the hotel when a voice from behind froze them.

“You’re not seriously thinking about leaving, are you?”

Both turned and saw the form of Quentin Holte leaning against the corridor wall in an almost laconic manner.

“Shit” the woman thought. “How can he see us?”

“Oh please,” Holte said out loud in a mocking tone, as if reading her mind. “If there’s one thing you should have learned working for the Estrodome, any man they’re interested in is far from ordinary.”

The woman smiled and killed her stealth field. “Liam, leave. Get to the van and extract the boys. I’ll cover you.”

“I can take him out. I’ve got the cybertech from the Doc….”

“No, he’s mine. Take The Voice to the Mistresses.”

“You know,” Holte said as he walked slowly towards the woman. “I’ll catch your friend. You both know this. You might as well quit now.”

“But then it wouldn’t be interesting.”

Holte smiled as the woman began to move, both of them circling each other.

“What’s your name, girl?”

“Holly.”

“As in ‘Go-Lightly’?”

“As in ‘Go-Anywhere-I-Damn-Well-Please.’”

“So how do you want to play this?”

“Good old fashioned hand-to-hand.”

A thrill of pleasure shot down Holly’s spine as her body tensed for combat. Quentin Holte, the world’s greatest martial artist. Sure the other Men of Mystery were goo in their own right with their gunplay and esoteric weaponeering. But Holte was pure uncut chop socky. The real, raw deal. She knew she was breaking the rules, that her Mistresses wanted Holte brought to them, along with that bastard Actionhero. But she couldn’t resist. She shared her Mistress ‘Pet’s special affection for Quentin Holte. She’d read his dossier, spent countless hours and enjoyed countless orgasms watching the videos and combat sims that Doctor Oblivion’s nanocams had put together. She had memorized every nuance of his body, burned it into her mind for exactly this moment and now she was going to see if the real thing lived up to the legend.

They moved simultaneously. Holly advanced with a flurry of palm strikes, all expertly blocked by Holte. Before she knew it, Holly realized that she was fucked. Holte’s blocks had moved her arms, opened her up like a cheerleader’s thighs and left her defenseless. Holte’s hands then shot in, as accurate as a samurai’s arrow, hitting her nerve clusters. With a gasp she fell on the floor, her body numb and unable to move.

“Paralysis wears off in half an hour. You’re good, girly, you might have even given the ‘Hero a minute or two of pause, though he’d probably be looking at your legs before he knocked you out. But while you’re good enough to work for the Estros, leave this kind of work to your Mistress.”

Holte keyed the implanted bonefone.

“Hero, this is Quentin. You there?”

“Yeah. I’m almost to New Orleans on Heph’s airship.”

“So you got a hold of him?”

“Yeah. Dragged him out his goddamn Valley of Lost Histories. He’s still bitching about it.”

“Well, tell him that this is officially a rescue mission. The Estros have Padraig. I just took out one of their Girls but the rest of extraction team got away.”

“You did one of those 5 second fights again didn’t you?”

“Let’s just say I’m saving myself. Anyway, do you have a lead on these Estros?”

“No. Too well hidden. I tried hacking their system after Circe left but I got nowhere.”

“Well they’ve got Oblvion’s cloaking fields.”

“No, I’ve got ICE breakers specifically designed for that. They must be using Curare’s tesseract technology as well. Damn. I knew I shouldn’t have put the specs on the net.”

“Well met me see if I can find them the old fashioned way.”

Quentin keyed off the bonefone and looked down at the prone form of Holly. He pulled out a slim cigar, of the special ones that Heph had custom made. Lighting and taking a small puff, he smiled at her.

“So I take it you’ve read my file. But there’s just one thing that I’m sure you don’t know about me. I’m an Invisible named Archimedes Lochs. And I read minds.”

***

Actionhero keyed off his bonefone and reclined in the plush armchair in the drawing room of Heph’s airship, The Layla. It was a baroque piece of work, designed by Heph’s insane aviators and mad scientists. An amalgam of zeppelin, flying wing, Viennese palace, and Victorian gentleman’s club. No law of physics should have allowed her to fly and even fewer should have allowed her to be invisible. But the she was infused with black technologies and secret mechanics that even esoteric technologists like Wheel and Oblivion didn’t know about. She was a work of art, just like the woman she was named after.

“This had better be good, Hero.” Heph had been in a sour mood ever since Actionhero had called him and bummed a ride.

“Look, you’ve been bitching the whole trip. You needed to get out of that damn valley and you can compose power ballads with Hendrix and Beck and damn time. Besides, we have to get the monkey out of hot water. Again.”

“Women trouble?”

“Is there ever any other kind?”

***

Quentin Holte breathed the morning air: its mix of coffee, baguettes, hangovers, and post-coital awkwardness. He had killed the night in a smoky jazz bar, enjoying the mournful strains of the blind blues man. Even after the bar had closed and Holte had turned down the advances of the dark eyed Creole bar maid, he stayed inside, killing a bottle of bourbon with the blues man and the bartender.

“You must have a busy morning lined up, turning down Gigi like that.”

“What makes you say that?”

The blind blues man cackled. “Boy, I may be blind but I ain’t dead. A girl like Gigi asks you home, you say yes and call in sick the next day. A man’s gotta have some pretty important business in the morning not to sleep in with a woman like her. Or an even hotter woman.”

“You could say a little of bit of both.”

Whe the two men left, he stayed in the bar, spending the rest of the morning checking his gear: the Mitsubishi laser on his wrist, the Kalashnikov knockoff of a Czech machine pistol that Russian NKVD hitgirl had given him during that thing with the mummies, the boomerangs, and all the other little odds and ends he’d picked up in his walkabouts. As morning gave way to afternoon, Holte looked out the window to the building across the street and saw a motorcycle pull up. The leather clad rider dismounted and walked inside. Quentin waited a few minutes and then walked out of the blues cub and into the Café Napoleon….

There. Play with that for a while.