Post by Avatar on Jul 23, 2017 17:52:23 GMT
A Day in the Life of an Angel
Susan de Vries, half-asleep, answered the door-chime from her bed with a directed eye-blast, an electromagnetic pulse to kill the annoyingly loud device. This was Sunday, her day to sleep in. Even the craziest evildoers in Hampton City had enough sense not to annoy her on her rest day. The door chime disabled, someone now knocked at her door instead; boom, boom.
Susan rolled out of her prone floating position above her bed and floated, vertical, down to the floor. She rubbed her eyes and muttered to herself, “Someone is about to lose an arm.” She padded over to her armoire, opened it, and chose a day-robe, underclothes, and house slippers to throw on. Mustn’t greet the soon-to-be-handicapped Sunday morning uninvited house-guest naked, she supposed. Ruffles, her pet dog, barged in to announce with a bark that he was hungry, frisky, wanted to be fed and walked. Susan said to him, “You have to wait, Ruffles, I have company.” Who was the person who still knocked at her door? By now anyone with common sense would have realized what an error they’d committed and would flee the vicinity. Susan looked with her enhanced senses to see who stood outside her little, modest, rather heavily fortified Virginia Capes homestead. She instantly recognized her two visitors, Miz Smith and Mister Jones, the two Sheepdogs from the Service. That could only mean one thing. “For the love of…” she said, disgusted. She chose work clothes, instead. Sunday was ruined.
Three hours later she approached San Francisco. The Tuesday Free Canada terrorists had detonated a bomb here about a century ago and removed the old city, but the Bay was so beautiful and so useful that Californians decided that a new city would be appropriate to fill the crater. In the center of the bowl-shaped depression that was the new City by the Bay was the kilometer high State Tower. Around it was MacArthur Park, next to the Nimitz Flyway. Susan picked out a signal from the base of the tower, She dropped to below Mach One; announced herself with a radio burst from her mind to the radio receiver that she presumed was a part of the transmitter. Zephyr, San Francisco’s hero, was supposed to be skittish about his or her secret identity. Of course, that hero could be skittish about it and have one. That hero didn’t glow a blue glory as Susan did twenty-four hours a day. Susan dove for the south side of State Tower. She landed in the grassland circle that separated the tower from the tame forest.
“Nice, soft landing. I thought you flying types cratered when you touched down that fast,” said a voice behind her.
Susan nearly jumped out of her indestructible skin. She whirled around to face a small Japanese woman dressed inconspicuously in a gray and blue pantsuit. Susan willed the lightning gathered in her hands to discharge harmlessly. She said crossly, “Don’t do that! I could hurt you! Is that you, Zephyr?”
The little Japanese woman gave a short bow and replied, “That person am I, yes.” She looked Susan up and down. She remarked, “They grow you angels very tall, don’t they?”
Susan’s blue eyes flickered white hot. It was her involuntary reaction to provocation. “I am not an angel,” she said.
The Japanese woman, not cowed at all, smirked at her. “You may wish to deceive yourself about this, but we know you are an angel. I need your help.”
“So Miz Smith and Mister Jones told me,” said Susan.
“Ah, here in San Francisco, we have Mister Brown and Miz McCoy as our Sheepdogs,” the Zephyr said pleasantly. “We must move. We talk too public here. A blue comet, that descends as you did, becomes an instant marker that says, ‘Here is the Seraph.’ I do not want to discuss my needs in public. The Seraph in San Francisco, as a known fact, is bad enough.” The Zephyr grabbed Susan’s right hand. Suddenly, there was a compressed tunnel-of-light effect. Susan saw herself standing in a log-cabin type room. A stone fireplace dominated it, with a cheerful log fire to provide heat. The furniture, chairs, tables, and drawer chests were fashioned stick-and-plank of pseudo-redwood.
“Nice trick,” Susan muttered. “I thought you were a speedster, Zephyr, not an instant shunter.”
The Japanese woman went to a sideboard where there was a silver service. She uncapped two bottles and asked, “Tea or rice wine?” She poured some tea for herself. “I believe you once said to some reporter that video heroes are the ones who can throw mountains, and travel at faster than sound without suffering the effects of Newton’s Motion Laws. Real speedster heroes worry about recoil forces and sonic booms—or they can shunt faster than light.”
Susan said, “Through inflated wormholes.” She refused the rice wine, “Water, please. I don’t trust you.”
“Can you even be poisoned?” asked Zephyr, curious.
“Nope,” said Susan, as she sipped the water, “but you might try it out of curiosity, and then San Francisco would need another hero.” Susan set the water aside and asked, “What help do you need?”
Zephyr flopped herself into a wooden straight-back chair near the fire. She said, “Four cargo freighters from Taiwan sailed for San Francisco’s port over the last month. Those freighters drifted out of control, lost power, had to beach, unload, and were total losses. I investigated. Something ate out their reactors.”
“You mean the fissile fuel disappeared?”
“No.” Zephyr was emphatic. “Something literally ate the reactors. It left bite marks as evidence.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Susan worked her way through the “hot” rooms. Dead maintenance robots cluttered the route to the power room. Whatever “it” had plowed through them and these smashed passages was much bigger and stronger than a human being. Not a terrorist attack, thought the Seraph, as she arrived at the Pittsburgh steel hatch that allowed entry to the power room. That door was two inches thick. Nothing on Earth, short of a meson cannon, the Avatar, or herself should have been able to get through such a door. Not even Zephyr, with her shunt ability, could wormhole through Pittsburgh steel. That was carbon iron alloy in frozen time. Yet here was a hatch made of the stuff, pulled and bent out of its frame. Something could shunt through the exposed crack. That was how Zephyr finally entered. The Seraph used a simpler method. She braced herself and tore the hatch loose completely, leaving the manhole clear. That would help the salvage party repair the freighter reactor after the radiation half-lifed to safe levels. The Seraph entered the power room. Incredibly, amidst the tangle of pipes, cables, smashed bent braces, and support struts, Susan saw bite marks. No reactor. Something had eaten the reactor!
Susan worked her way back to the topside deck of the beached freighter. She found Zephyr at the sensor mast, climbing down the ladder. Zephyr had a black box strapped to her back. She stepped onto the access stage to meet the floating Seraph. She looked up at the angel, and said, “Well?”
“You aren’t crazy. Something bigger than an elephant smashed its way in a straight line through two hundred meters of robots and passageways, pried open the power room door, and ate the reactor. There are no signs of forced entry from outside the hull. It could not fit through a companionway. It had to have come in through one of the cover hatches to a hold and drop in, yet none of the covers are moved. Their seals are intact.”
“Meaning?” suggested the Zephyr.
“Meaning?” Susan was tired of games. “Meaning that you know exactly what ate those reactors. Why not tell me that you think you have a Shaddenite on the loose?”
“I don’t even know what a Shaddenite is,” protested the Zephyr, “All I know, is that whatever it is, it has at least four arms and four legs, it’s huge, and it can shunt.”
“So can I, Zephyr,” said Susan, tiredly. “It’s not that big a deal. Just call the National Guard. They’ll send out a tank, slice the Shaddenite up, and send its dead chunks to the Moon. It’s pest control!”
“I said it can shunt,” Zephyr retorted icily, “I chased it off this last freighter. It’s as fast as I am—maybe faster. Too fast for the Guard.” She pointed to the black box on her back. “I hope that this will give me a clue as to how to stop it.”
Susan muttered, as if she already knew the answer, “Freeze it solid.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The recorder did not show much. The two event tracks blurred in parallels as the monster and the Zephyr raced through the freighter. This was about the fourth time for the Seraph, but even her enhanced senses and twelfth order mind could not resolve anything, except for when the power-room camera showed what was obviously a huge, brown-furred, four-armed, four-legged, six-eyed monster, which sported a pair of curly ram’s horns on its triangular-shaped head. It stopped only long enough to rip at the power room door, shunt through, appear in the power room long enough to tear a peanut-shaped steel bottle out of its nest of pipes, sit on its pairs of haunches, and munch on the reactor. The Zephyr winked in, and the monster winked out. It took the reactor with it. The Zephyr looked up into the video camera and then vanished.
“That was helpful,” said Susan sarcastically. “You could have died! Didn’t you see the bent door? Didn’t that tell you something?”
“I didn’t know what I’d find. When I saw what it was, I took the prudent course of action,” snapped the Zephyr.
“You took one look, ran for it, and you called me in as rented-muscle to tangle with it, until I set up the shunt trap and rendered it,” reinterpreted Susan. “I don’t like being used that way, Zephyr. I especially don’t like it when the user isn’t honest. If all you needed was a strong back and a weak mind to commit a murder, then contact Mister Maximum in Denver. He’s closer. He fits more of your requirement for the stooge than I do.”
“I asked the Service. They asked you,” said the Zephyr.
“You asked for me by name,” the Seraph corrected her. “The Avatar, if she would have bothered to respond to your request; would trap it for you, kill the Shaddenite out of hand, and then, because of this nonsense you pulled, would render you, too. That’s why you didn’t want her. Ghost Ranger? This is out of his league, though he could have told you properly how to stop it, as easily as I can. Mister Maximum is mentally challenged. He would have died, because he would slug it out with the Shaddenite.”
“But you just said!” said Zephyr.
“I said that he fit your requirements for all muscle and no brains,” snapped Susan, who now glowed a dangerous cobalt-hued glory. Her eyes went white-hot. “If you were truthful, you could have sent me an e-mail stating that you had a reactor-munching space monster, described what you saw in that message, and asked for my advice. I would have come out prepared; we would have set the trap; it would have been shunted to the Moon in chunks by now, after the Guard sliced it up. All you needed was that monster stopped. It angers me, Zephyr, that you wanted me to murder it for you!” Susan de Vries, furious, was not someone whom a person of sense wanted.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Once the problem defines itself, the solution is always simple. Susan thought She needed bait for the trap. This monster seemed to have found what he thought was a free lunch on the Taiwan to San Francisco robot freighter run. A freighter was due into port this afternoon. The monster, from its past behavior, seemed to shunt in, just as the freighter made its final approach course correction to enter the Bay. That meant the monster set up its launch origin at Magoo Point. The Seraph was a slow-shunter, not a fast-shunter like Zephyr—and apparently this Shaddenite. Susan was well-known for her deliberate gate events of great power, distance, and duration. That meant that she mappedher wormholes when she gated. That also meant she did the same to intercept enemy gaters, fast or slow. Once she had a firm pattern, she could backtrack and lay an ambush.
The ambush was simple. The California National Guard provided a tachmenotron. This weapon was a chain reaction suppressor. It could also be used, once Susan modified it, to suck the heat from anything on which it was properly focused, almost instantly. The weapon only needed an aim-point. Susan mapped that Magoo Point location and the National Guard gun crew did the rest. There was also a National Guard tank, complete with a meson cannon. This was set up, too, to point at much the same exact aim-point.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Shaddenite shunted onto the robot freighter, and true to its pattern, shunted back to its origin point. The tachmenotron auto-fired and the monster, now code-named “Mercury,” froze solid at about five degrees above absolute zero. The tank crew fired and sliced it up sixteen times. A dual-spin hypermass-powered shunter, borrowed from the Service, gated the remains to Uccello crater on the Moon. Problem solved.
Zephyr returned from her patrol and shunted into her isolated mountaintop aerie. She gated in tired but happyinto her living room. She dropped the tools onto the floor that she, as a vigilante, used to fight her city’s crime. She’d pick those tools up later after her hot bath. She stopped two attempted rapes, one attempted mugging, and a married couple from murdering each other. It was a good afternoon’s work; she was about ready to tackle the Shaddenite reactor muncher problem, as her Monday chore. She didn’t need that damned Seraph. She would ask Mister Maximum for his help, and while he wrestled with it, she would shunt it to the Moon...
“Did I ever tell you, that you as a Human being send out your thoughts as weak radio broadcasts, and that I can read those thoughts?” the Seraph said.
“EEEEK!” The Zephyr tried to shunt.
“Nope,” said the Seraph. “Won’t let you. Not until you hear what I say.” Susan was not as cruel as this when she dealt with the usual malefactor to be redeemed, but Zephyr the Seraph intended to steer onto the righteous path, “to scare her to Heaven,” as the Avatar would say.
“What do-do you mean, you wo-won’t let me?” stammered Zephyr.
“I jammed your talent. Now listen to me, Zephyr. You don’t need to worry about your monster,” said Susan. “The California National Guard whacked him, and sent his bits to the Moon hours ago. All they needed was a little help with their aim-points. I supplied those aim-points. You could have done that; you could have asked me for that advice, as I told you. Not difficult.”
“Than…than…thank you,” stammered Zephyr shaking. Only now she realized what she had unleashed when she angered the Seraph.
“Second, you did some good work this afternoon, but you could do much more, if you remember that you are not the whole solution, just a part of it. Arrogance and pride, Zephyr. They go before your fall. There is a San Francisco Police Department. Cooperate with your city’s police! Notice that I worked with California’s National Guard to deal with the Shaddenite? Humanity is a powerful species. Don’t think for a minute that you are special to such a species. You may ask the Avatar about that someday. Your best chance with our dangerous kind is to work with them. I tell you this from bitter personal experience.”
“What do you mean?” said Zephyr.
“You don’t think I came here to handle the Shaddenite?” Susan glowed a deep, deep cobalt, while her eyes glittered with tears. “Smith and Jones would not send me to you to handle something so trivial.”
=====================================================
The Seraph stopped over that evening to visit her friend the Avatar in her own little homestead. Susan was amazed that Saint Louis paid Karen enough to purchase this hilltop fortress. The place looked like Cinderella’s castle on steroids! She took coffee with the “dark angel of death.” Both angels were seated in a reproduction of a nineteenth century American sitting room.
“How can you afford this?” the Seraph marveled.
“Second job.” The Avatar did not elaborate. “What did you do with Zephyr after the Hero’s Lecture?”
“That’s a bit complicated,” Susan said. “She is a good person, but she doesn’t know the responsibility part, or the help part of this life; either the need to ask or to give. She is too powerful to let run wild, so I decided togive her a Mentor.”
“Ghost Ranger?” asked the Avatar.
“He trains me,” said the Seraph. “And so far, knock wood,” (she rapped the Pinocchio puppet seated in the third chair), “it works for me.”
***** ******* *******
7 November 2011
Copyrighted 8 November 2011
Susan de Vries, half-asleep, answered the door-chime from her bed with a directed eye-blast, an electromagnetic pulse to kill the annoyingly loud device. This was Sunday, her day to sleep in. Even the craziest evildoers in Hampton City had enough sense not to annoy her on her rest day. The door chime disabled, someone now knocked at her door instead; boom, boom.
Susan rolled out of her prone floating position above her bed and floated, vertical, down to the floor. She rubbed her eyes and muttered to herself, “Someone is about to lose an arm.” She padded over to her armoire, opened it, and chose a day-robe, underclothes, and house slippers to throw on. Mustn’t greet the soon-to-be-handicapped Sunday morning uninvited house-guest naked, she supposed. Ruffles, her pet dog, barged in to announce with a bark that he was hungry, frisky, wanted to be fed and walked. Susan said to him, “You have to wait, Ruffles, I have company.” Who was the person who still knocked at her door? By now anyone with common sense would have realized what an error they’d committed and would flee the vicinity. Susan looked with her enhanced senses to see who stood outside her little, modest, rather heavily fortified Virginia Capes homestead. She instantly recognized her two visitors, Miz Smith and Mister Jones, the two Sheepdogs from the Service. That could only mean one thing. “For the love of…” she said, disgusted. She chose work clothes, instead. Sunday was ruined.
Three hours later she approached San Francisco. The Tuesday Free Canada terrorists had detonated a bomb here about a century ago and removed the old city, but the Bay was so beautiful and so useful that Californians decided that a new city would be appropriate to fill the crater. In the center of the bowl-shaped depression that was the new City by the Bay was the kilometer high State Tower. Around it was MacArthur Park, next to the Nimitz Flyway. Susan picked out a signal from the base of the tower, She dropped to below Mach One; announced herself with a radio burst from her mind to the radio receiver that she presumed was a part of the transmitter. Zephyr, San Francisco’s hero, was supposed to be skittish about his or her secret identity. Of course, that hero could be skittish about it and have one. That hero didn’t glow a blue glory as Susan did twenty-four hours a day. Susan dove for the south side of State Tower. She landed in the grassland circle that separated the tower from the tame forest.
“Nice, soft landing. I thought you flying types cratered when you touched down that fast,” said a voice behind her.
Susan nearly jumped out of her indestructible skin. She whirled around to face a small Japanese woman dressed inconspicuously in a gray and blue pantsuit. Susan willed the lightning gathered in her hands to discharge harmlessly. She said crossly, “Don’t do that! I could hurt you! Is that you, Zephyr?”
The little Japanese woman gave a short bow and replied, “That person am I, yes.” She looked Susan up and down. She remarked, “They grow you angels very tall, don’t they?”
Susan’s blue eyes flickered white hot. It was her involuntary reaction to provocation. “I am not an angel,” she said.
The Japanese woman, not cowed at all, smirked at her. “You may wish to deceive yourself about this, but we know you are an angel. I need your help.”
“So Miz Smith and Mister Jones told me,” said Susan.
“Ah, here in San Francisco, we have Mister Brown and Miz McCoy as our Sheepdogs,” the Zephyr said pleasantly. “We must move. We talk too public here. A blue comet, that descends as you did, becomes an instant marker that says, ‘Here is the Seraph.’ I do not want to discuss my needs in public. The Seraph in San Francisco, as a known fact, is bad enough.” The Zephyr grabbed Susan’s right hand. Suddenly, there was a compressed tunnel-of-light effect. Susan saw herself standing in a log-cabin type room. A stone fireplace dominated it, with a cheerful log fire to provide heat. The furniture, chairs, tables, and drawer chests were fashioned stick-and-plank of pseudo-redwood.
“Nice trick,” Susan muttered. “I thought you were a speedster, Zephyr, not an instant shunter.”
The Japanese woman went to a sideboard where there was a silver service. She uncapped two bottles and asked, “Tea or rice wine?” She poured some tea for herself. “I believe you once said to some reporter that video heroes are the ones who can throw mountains, and travel at faster than sound without suffering the effects of Newton’s Motion Laws. Real speedster heroes worry about recoil forces and sonic booms—or they can shunt faster than light.”
Susan said, “Through inflated wormholes.” She refused the rice wine, “Water, please. I don’t trust you.”
“Can you even be poisoned?” asked Zephyr, curious.
“Nope,” said Susan, as she sipped the water, “but you might try it out of curiosity, and then San Francisco would need another hero.” Susan set the water aside and asked, “What help do you need?”
Zephyr flopped herself into a wooden straight-back chair near the fire. She said, “Four cargo freighters from Taiwan sailed for San Francisco’s port over the last month. Those freighters drifted out of control, lost power, had to beach, unload, and were total losses. I investigated. Something ate out their reactors.”
“You mean the fissile fuel disappeared?”
“No.” Zephyr was emphatic. “Something literally ate the reactors. It left bite marks as evidence.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Susan worked her way through the “hot” rooms. Dead maintenance robots cluttered the route to the power room. Whatever “it” had plowed through them and these smashed passages was much bigger and stronger than a human being. Not a terrorist attack, thought the Seraph, as she arrived at the Pittsburgh steel hatch that allowed entry to the power room. That door was two inches thick. Nothing on Earth, short of a meson cannon, the Avatar, or herself should have been able to get through such a door. Not even Zephyr, with her shunt ability, could wormhole through Pittsburgh steel. That was carbon iron alloy in frozen time. Yet here was a hatch made of the stuff, pulled and bent out of its frame. Something could shunt through the exposed crack. That was how Zephyr finally entered. The Seraph used a simpler method. She braced herself and tore the hatch loose completely, leaving the manhole clear. That would help the salvage party repair the freighter reactor after the radiation half-lifed to safe levels. The Seraph entered the power room. Incredibly, amidst the tangle of pipes, cables, smashed bent braces, and support struts, Susan saw bite marks. No reactor. Something had eaten the reactor!
Susan worked her way back to the topside deck of the beached freighter. She found Zephyr at the sensor mast, climbing down the ladder. Zephyr had a black box strapped to her back. She stepped onto the access stage to meet the floating Seraph. She looked up at the angel, and said, “Well?”
“You aren’t crazy. Something bigger than an elephant smashed its way in a straight line through two hundred meters of robots and passageways, pried open the power room door, and ate the reactor. There are no signs of forced entry from outside the hull. It could not fit through a companionway. It had to have come in through one of the cover hatches to a hold and drop in, yet none of the covers are moved. Their seals are intact.”
“Meaning?” suggested the Zephyr.
“Meaning?” Susan was tired of games. “Meaning that you know exactly what ate those reactors. Why not tell me that you think you have a Shaddenite on the loose?”
“I don’t even know what a Shaddenite is,” protested the Zephyr, “All I know, is that whatever it is, it has at least four arms and four legs, it’s huge, and it can shunt.”
“So can I, Zephyr,” said Susan, tiredly. “It’s not that big a deal. Just call the National Guard. They’ll send out a tank, slice the Shaddenite up, and send its dead chunks to the Moon. It’s pest control!”
“I said it can shunt,” Zephyr retorted icily, “I chased it off this last freighter. It’s as fast as I am—maybe faster. Too fast for the Guard.” She pointed to the black box on her back. “I hope that this will give me a clue as to how to stop it.”
Susan muttered, as if she already knew the answer, “Freeze it solid.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The recorder did not show much. The two event tracks blurred in parallels as the monster and the Zephyr raced through the freighter. This was about the fourth time for the Seraph, but even her enhanced senses and twelfth order mind could not resolve anything, except for when the power-room camera showed what was obviously a huge, brown-furred, four-armed, four-legged, six-eyed monster, which sported a pair of curly ram’s horns on its triangular-shaped head. It stopped only long enough to rip at the power room door, shunt through, appear in the power room long enough to tear a peanut-shaped steel bottle out of its nest of pipes, sit on its pairs of haunches, and munch on the reactor. The Zephyr winked in, and the monster winked out. It took the reactor with it. The Zephyr looked up into the video camera and then vanished.
“That was helpful,” said Susan sarcastically. “You could have died! Didn’t you see the bent door? Didn’t that tell you something?”
“I didn’t know what I’d find. When I saw what it was, I took the prudent course of action,” snapped the Zephyr.
“You took one look, ran for it, and you called me in as rented-muscle to tangle with it, until I set up the shunt trap and rendered it,” reinterpreted Susan. “I don’t like being used that way, Zephyr. I especially don’t like it when the user isn’t honest. If all you needed was a strong back and a weak mind to commit a murder, then contact Mister Maximum in Denver. He’s closer. He fits more of your requirement for the stooge than I do.”
“I asked the Service. They asked you,” said the Zephyr.
“You asked for me by name,” the Seraph corrected her. “The Avatar, if she would have bothered to respond to your request; would trap it for you, kill the Shaddenite out of hand, and then, because of this nonsense you pulled, would render you, too. That’s why you didn’t want her. Ghost Ranger? This is out of his league, though he could have told you properly how to stop it, as easily as I can. Mister Maximum is mentally challenged. He would have died, because he would slug it out with the Shaddenite.”
“But you just said!” said Zephyr.
“I said that he fit your requirements for all muscle and no brains,” snapped Susan, who now glowed a dangerous cobalt-hued glory. Her eyes went white-hot. “If you were truthful, you could have sent me an e-mail stating that you had a reactor-munching space monster, described what you saw in that message, and asked for my advice. I would have come out prepared; we would have set the trap; it would have been shunted to the Moon in chunks by now, after the Guard sliced it up. All you needed was that monster stopped. It angers me, Zephyr, that you wanted me to murder it for you!” Susan de Vries, furious, was not someone whom a person of sense wanted.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Once the problem defines itself, the solution is always simple. Susan thought She needed bait for the trap. This monster seemed to have found what he thought was a free lunch on the Taiwan to San Francisco robot freighter run. A freighter was due into port this afternoon. The monster, from its past behavior, seemed to shunt in, just as the freighter made its final approach course correction to enter the Bay. That meant the monster set up its launch origin at Magoo Point. The Seraph was a slow-shunter, not a fast-shunter like Zephyr—and apparently this Shaddenite. Susan was well-known for her deliberate gate events of great power, distance, and duration. That meant that she mappedher wormholes when she gated. That also meant she did the same to intercept enemy gaters, fast or slow. Once she had a firm pattern, she could backtrack and lay an ambush.
The ambush was simple. The California National Guard provided a tachmenotron. This weapon was a chain reaction suppressor. It could also be used, once Susan modified it, to suck the heat from anything on which it was properly focused, almost instantly. The weapon only needed an aim-point. Susan mapped that Magoo Point location and the National Guard gun crew did the rest. There was also a National Guard tank, complete with a meson cannon. This was set up, too, to point at much the same exact aim-point.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Shaddenite shunted onto the robot freighter, and true to its pattern, shunted back to its origin point. The tachmenotron auto-fired and the monster, now code-named “Mercury,” froze solid at about five degrees above absolute zero. The tank crew fired and sliced it up sixteen times. A dual-spin hypermass-powered shunter, borrowed from the Service, gated the remains to Uccello crater on the Moon. Problem solved.
Zephyr returned from her patrol and shunted into her isolated mountaintop aerie. She gated in tired but happyinto her living room. She dropped the tools onto the floor that she, as a vigilante, used to fight her city’s crime. She’d pick those tools up later after her hot bath. She stopped two attempted rapes, one attempted mugging, and a married couple from murdering each other. It was a good afternoon’s work; she was about ready to tackle the Shaddenite reactor muncher problem, as her Monday chore. She didn’t need that damned Seraph. She would ask Mister Maximum for his help, and while he wrestled with it, she would shunt it to the Moon...
“Did I ever tell you, that you as a Human being send out your thoughts as weak radio broadcasts, and that I can read those thoughts?” the Seraph said.
“EEEEK!” The Zephyr tried to shunt.
“Nope,” said the Seraph. “Won’t let you. Not until you hear what I say.” Susan was not as cruel as this when she dealt with the usual malefactor to be redeemed, but Zephyr the Seraph intended to steer onto the righteous path, “to scare her to Heaven,” as the Avatar would say.
“What do-do you mean, you wo-won’t let me?” stammered Zephyr.
“I jammed your talent. Now listen to me, Zephyr. You don’t need to worry about your monster,” said Susan. “The California National Guard whacked him, and sent his bits to the Moon hours ago. All they needed was a little help with their aim-points. I supplied those aim-points. You could have done that; you could have asked me for that advice, as I told you. Not difficult.”
“Than…than…thank you,” stammered Zephyr shaking. Only now she realized what she had unleashed when she angered the Seraph.
“Second, you did some good work this afternoon, but you could do much more, if you remember that you are not the whole solution, just a part of it. Arrogance and pride, Zephyr. They go before your fall. There is a San Francisco Police Department. Cooperate with your city’s police! Notice that I worked with California’s National Guard to deal with the Shaddenite? Humanity is a powerful species. Don’t think for a minute that you are special to such a species. You may ask the Avatar about that someday. Your best chance with our dangerous kind is to work with them. I tell you this from bitter personal experience.”
“What do you mean?” said Zephyr.
“You don’t think I came here to handle the Shaddenite?” Susan glowed a deep, deep cobalt, while her eyes glittered with tears. “Smith and Jones would not send me to you to handle something so trivial.”
=====================================================
The Seraph stopped over that evening to visit her friend the Avatar in her own little homestead. Susan was amazed that Saint Louis paid Karen enough to purchase this hilltop fortress. The place looked like Cinderella’s castle on steroids! She took coffee with the “dark angel of death.” Both angels were seated in a reproduction of a nineteenth century American sitting room.
“How can you afford this?” the Seraph marveled.
“Second job.” The Avatar did not elaborate. “What did you do with Zephyr after the Hero’s Lecture?”
“That’s a bit complicated,” Susan said. “She is a good person, but she doesn’t know the responsibility part, or the help part of this life; either the need to ask or to give. She is too powerful to let run wild, so I decided togive her a Mentor.”
“Ghost Ranger?” asked the Avatar.
“He trains me,” said the Seraph. “And so far, knock wood,” (she rapped the Pinocchio puppet seated in the third chair), “it works for me.”
***** ******* *******
7 November 2011
Copyrighted 8 November 2011