Tom’s kid aces, augmented by two were-leopards and a squad of non-shape-shifting Leopard Man commandos, were raising adequate hell among the cars and crews. Tom wanted the barge. Blowing up and sinking it would look really cool for the cameras. Hei-lian and her crew were squatting ass-deep in a nasty stagnant pool a quarter mile away, capturing the action through the papyrus shoots.
It would’ve been easier, of course, to zap the barge before it off-loaded the squadron, but Doc Prez wanted his new aces showcased in action, showing the world how not just every ethnic group but every age group of the People’s Paradise was stepping up to fight imperialism.
Tom raced toward the papyrus screen at the water’s edge. Without pause he dove in. Drawing in a deep breath he willed himself to change even before his outstretched fingertips touched the roiled brown syrupy surface.
Then he floundered, his belly scraping bottom. What the fuck? he wondered in amazement. I’m supposed to be a fucking super-dolphin now!
Another voice, deep and sonorous, said clearly in his mind: You are unworthy. I care nothing for these land dwellers. Your madness endangers the creatures of the sea as well. I go, and wish you only failure.
The words were French, with a Quebecois accent. He had never heard that cold, contemptuous voice before. As the Radical. But in memories from his hated hippie predecessor he recalled hearing it from his own altered mouth…
In his befuddlement Tom ran out of air and broke through gasping ten yards from shore. A gunner on the barge’s superstructure spotted him. A 12.7-millimeter heavy machine gun opened up like Doom with a stutter, throwing up really enormous jets of water around him.
He sucked deep breath and dove. The water deepened rapidly. Despite its weight of armor, the Caliphate barge had a shallow draught for river work, especially relieved of a hundred tons of armored car. Tom had plenty of clearance to swim beneath to the other beam. He may not have a dolphin’s torpedo speed, but he still swam with more than human strength in arms and chest.
When he broke the surface of the water there wasn’t a face in sight on the barge’s starboard side. Everybody’s attention was fixed on the battle the other way, no doubt looking for the shattered body of the PPA’s unmistakable field marshal and general rock star of World Revolution, the Radical.
He laughed. Laughing, he rose. He could have scuttled the vessel with a single blinding lance of white light. Instead he stretched out his hand. “Burn, baby, burn!” he shouted, and rained down fire from the sky.
Noel Matthews’s Apartment
Manhattan, New York
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not looking to start a revolution. But somebody’s got to step up to the plate because governments have failed. We live in the freakin’ twenty-first century, and here we are with people starving, and armies fighting in the Sudan, and for what? Oil? National pride? We could achieve wonders, hell, make that miracles-end hunger, travel to the stars, have perfect privacy and total freedom, but we’ve got to get out of the trees. We’ve got to tamp down the monkey brain…
Noel leaned back from the computer screen. The rant continued for several more pages, but he had read enough to have a sense of the writer. An idealist, but angry and cynical. I can work with that.
Working from the handle provided by Broadcast, Noel had determined that the Signal on Port 950 was really Robert Cumming, age twenty-three. He lived in Chicago, Illinois, and he was a joker. He avoided almost all human contact, but he still had to eat.
Noel checked his watch. The groceries were about to be delivered to 865 Lake Shore Drive, apartment 723.
People’s Palace
Kongoville, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
He was still freaked out when he stalked into the war room of the Nshombos’ new vanity palace in K-ville, a great gleaming concrete iceberg, a true city within a city, if still a bit raw. The air-conditioning inside was like a frigid river flowing outward. Tom still welcomed it after the stinking sauna heat of the Sudd, and the diesel-reeking heat of K-ville. But it raised goosebumps on his arms.
That fucker, he raged. He stole Aquarius from me. He lessened me. Long ago, when his enemy ran around in a purple Uncle Sam suit calling himself “Captain Trips,” he invoked his “friends” by taking unique decoctions of psychoactive chemicals, each and every one devised by Meadows in hopes of invoking him. The man who called himself Tom Weathers now. The Radical.
At last Mark Meadows got his way. And Tom had had things his way ever since. But it had come at a cost: Tom didn’t dare use any kind of drug more mind-warping than coffee or chocolate. No pot. No booze. Not even antihistamines. Because anything that altered Tom’s consciousness risked snapping his mind and body back into the long dark prison of Meadows’s subconscious.
But the only way of reclaiming the surly shape-shifting Canuck who called himself Cetus Dauphine was to re-create the drugs that Meadows used to invoke him. Tom felt sick certainty that wouldn’t work, either: no formulation his enemy had ever tried had sufficed to bring back Starshine after he “died,” or martial-arts goddess Moonchild once she retired from the world in horror at taking a human life. And while Tom had access to many of his predecessor’s memories, he lacked Mark’s biochemical genius. He couldn’t even try.
“Oh, Tom,” Alicia Nshombo said, rising as he came through the automatic sliding door. Video screens covered the walls of the room beyond, showing moving scenes of battle in the Sudd, of Congo-basin forest, of everyday life in K-ville. “I am so glad you are back.”
Dr. Nshombo sat behind a vast gleaming black African blackwood desk. As usual the President-for-Life’s face showed no more reaction than the desktop.
“The United Nations has offered to broker a peace conference between ourselves and the Caliphate of Arabia,” Nshombo said gravely. If he was capable of talking any other way Tom had never heard.
“So? Fuck ’em.”
Alicia uttered a little gasp and pressed fingers to her mouth. She’d reacted the same way the thousand other times she’d heard Tom use such language. “Tom, cher,” she said. “Please don’t take such a tone with my brother. You need each other so much.”
Dr. Nshombo wasn’t one to mouth meaningless phrases. He went on as if Tom had not spoken. “I have decided it is in our best interests to participate. I mean to send our foremost jurist, Dr. Apollinaire Okimba, as our representative. He enjoys an impeccable reputation on the world stage. His participation will play well, as our clever young friend the Chinese colonel would say.”
“You’re shitting me,” said Tom. “You’re not actually gonna negotiate with this fat imperialist Allah freak?”
“Our representative will deliver to Siraj our ultimatum: either he withdraws his support from the genocidal aggressors in South Sudan and pulls back his armies, or we shall destroy those armies, depose him, and liberate the suffering people of the Middle East from the chains of a brutal superstition. There will be no negotiation.”
Tom could only stare at his old comrade. “Yeah, well, that will play well, I’m sure.”
Dr. Nshombo’s brows twitched a millimeter closer together. It was the equivalent of a normal man throwing a rage fit. But Alicia’s mouth crumpled, pursed between plump cheeks, and her eyes got dewy behind her bat-wing glasses at Tom’s rudeness. “But Tom,” she said, “if the Arab gives in, the war will end.”
“Siraj won’t give in. It’d mean crawling home on his belly. And the U-fucking-N? Those Committee fuckers helped protect Bahir when he kidnapped my daughter!” He was half standing and all shouting.
Nshombo faced him impassively. “The Revolution must come before your petty desires for vengeance, Tom, but I am not unmindful of the wrong you suffered.” Then he actually smiled. “It is not my intention to send Dr. Okimba to the Paris peace conference at all.”