She'd walked away from the costume, and the feds, soon after the Rox War, for reasons she still refused to discuss. Jay figured that Cyclone's death had something to do with her decision. There was no way to walk away from the top hat, however. Her power didn't work without it, the same way Jay couldn't teleport anything without making his fingers into a gun. Ace crutches were a funny thing.
"You getting anywhere with that thing?" Jay asked, gesturing at the powerdeck. For the past hour, she had been trying to hack into the sealed files of the Special Executive Task Force down in Washington, in the hopes of finding out what the hell was going on.
"Nothing we didn't already know," she said, turning off the machine. The phantom letters vanished. "The feds have three major Sharks in custody. Dr. Etienne Faneuil, Philip Baron von Herzenhagen, and Margaret Durand. Durand's cut a deal and she's snitching out the other two. Pan Rudo, who seems to have been the head of the whole operation, is supposed to be dead, murdered at the UN by this six-legged yellow joker, who's either George G. Battle or Gregg Hartmann, depending on who you believe. On paper, it looks as though the Shark organization has been pretty well smashed up."
"What do you think?"
Melissa closed up her powerdeck. "Faneuil and Durand are in nice young bodies, which has got to mean that the Sharks have a tame jumper, or had one at one time."
Jay groaned. "Jumpers," he said. "Why is it always jumpers? From now on, we charge triple time for any case with jumpers in it."
"I know how you feel," Melissa said. She disconnected her modem, wrapped the line around the computer, took off her top hat and thrust the whole works inside. "Von Herzenhagen used to run the Special Executive Task Force, until he was exposed as a Shark. Now he's been replaced by Straight Arrow. That ought to be good news for our side. Nephi's an ace, and more important, he's a decent man, honest, loyal, hard-working ... only ..." She hesitated.
Jay didn't like the sound of that only. "Only what?"
"Only ... is he really Straight Arrow?" Melissa put the top hat back on her head and cocked it at a rakish angle. "With all this body-swapping going on, there's no way we can be sure who's who, or even who's alive or who's dead. We could be dealing with a Shark in Straight Arrow's body. All those SCARE aces could be Sharks by now. That would explain last night's raids. For all we know, Rudo is still alive in a new body, just like Faneuil and Durand."
"Not to mention how many more Sharks are still out there, under cover," Jay said gloomily. "Leo Barnett in the White House, hell, this damn thing may go right to the top." Jay's head was throbbing. He needed hot caffeine. He pressed his intercom. "Ezili, make some fresh coffee, will you?" There was no answer. She probably wasn't in yet. Ezili came to work when she felt like coming to work, usually around ten-thirty or eleven, but sometimes two or three. He looked hopefully at Topper. "I don't suppose - "
"You don't pay me nearly enough to make coffee," Melissa said. "Make it yourself."
"Have you ever tasted my coffee?" Jay said. "Have pity."
Melissa made a face at him. "Just this once," she said. She took off her top hat, reached inside, and pulled out a styrofoam cup of coffee, black and steaming. She put it on Jay's desk.
He picked it up with both hands, blew on it, took a swallow. Life seemed slightly more tolerable. "Real good," he told her. He looked wistfully at the hat. "I don't suppose you have a cheese danish in there?"
"Don't press your luck."
Something pinged against the office window. Jay looked up. A bright point of light hovered outside, beating against the glass, darting and fluttering back and forth in a frantic aerial dance, trying to get in. He got up and opened the window. The light shot over to Peter, circled around his head, then zipped up to the ceiling, buzzing wildly. "What's she saying?" Melissa said.
"How should I know? I don't speak tink." Jay went to Peter and shook him roughly by the shoulder, until he sat up groggily. The tink zoomed down and hovered in front of his face. Its buzz was frantic, insistent. Peter rubbed sleep from his eyes and listened. "They took him to Governor's Island," he said. "They're all there. We going to break them out?"
"Might as well," Jay said. "Can't dance."
♥ ♦ ♣ ♠
When the Thai was gone Moonchild waved her chief of security away. Inmon nodded his feathered head and left.
After the door shut on him Moonchild rose from the ornate chair and walked toward another door at the back of the great room. She weaved slightly. As she approached the door, painted in layers of white enamel, her feet sank several inches into the scuffed parquetry floor.
"Whoops," she said, and giggled. "Shit. I'm starting to lose it." Her outlines blurred, shifted, and suddenly it was a man, small and blue-skinned, enveloped in a hood and billow of black cape, who stood reaching for the brass doorknob.
"Screw this," he said in a high-pitched and peevish masculine voice. "I'm Cosmic Traveler. What do I need with doorknobs?" And he walked through the door.
On the far side a short hall led to another door. "That fool Meadows needs to quit fretting like a brooding-hen," the cowled figure muttered as it walked forward. "I've got all the memories that high-kicking bimbo does. And a lot more upstairs. Anything she can do, I can do better." At the door he paused and smirked. "And then some," he said, and stepped through. As he passed through the wood he felt tearing dislocation. "Oh, shit!" he exclaimed. "It's too soon - "
He fell forward, through the door onto the polished hardwood floor of a small office. What landed on all fours was another male figure, tall and lanky, dressed in jeans and blue work shirt, with ashy blond hair getting long and the beginnings of a goatee.
"Whoa," Mark Meadows said in a long expulsion of breath. "Almost lost it there."
He shook his head and reached for round wire-rimmed spectacles that had dropped from the aquiline bridge of his nose. "I'm being the Traveler too much. It's giving me a death wish."
Not to mention the fact that at the end of the interview Trav had broken character to ask if the colonel had a daughter, for God's sake. "If you can't maintain better," Mark said aloud, "I'm gonna start leaving you in the bottle and winging it myself."
Down the dim and dusty back-corridors of his mind a dry mocking laugh rebounded. The threat was empty, and no one knew it better than Cosmic. Power in Asia was a personal affair, and the President of Free Vietnam was Isis Moon, also known as Moonchild. Mark was her chancellor, fully authorized to speak for her - but unless she put in fairly regular appearances, people would sense an opening and start to conspire.
And Moonchild wouldn't come out to play any more. Not since she had broken her vow against taking human life by breaking the neck of the joker-ace Ganesha. Small matter that it was an accident - and that Ganesha had been trying to rape Sprout. Moonchild's powers and very existence were predicated upon observing the Tenets and Student Oath of tae kwon do; to her the third portion of the Oath, "I shall never misuse tae kwon do," meant she could not use her ace powers or martial arts skills to kill a human.
Mark had tried. Endless internal monologues elicited no response. When he took the silver-and-black powder that summoned Moonchild, he curled into a fetal ball and went catatonic for an hour. He didn't even know if she still existed. Or whether, like Starshine - killed by a Ly'bahr cyborg in orbital combat over Takis - she was simply gone.
So he had to rely on Trav, slimy and unreliable as he was. He was taking the blue powder too much; and when he took a single potion too often, bad things happened. Like the one-hour duration of a "friend's" visit became unstable, and you risked translating back into solid with skinny Mark Meadows in the middle of a hardwood door....