Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis Read online

  “It’s all right. I’m glad you did it.”

  He takes a step back and rubs the back of his neck with discomfort. “Look, I’m going downstairs to get a cup of coffee. If you want to join me, that’s great. Otherwise I’ll bring you a cup of tea, all right?”

  “Sure. I’ll just be a couple of minutes.” She wants to blow him a kiss as he backs out of the room, but she can tell that he’s embarrassed by his sudden burst of affection. She waits until the door closes to turn back to the equations.

  “I believe in you,” Dan’s voice echoes in her mind. She imagines him taking the elevator down to the first floor and then he goes to the cafeteria, where he’ll sit in a secluded corner with his cup of coffee to chide himself for being so stupid. She wants so badly to go to him, to explain she loves him. She’s loved him since the first moment she saw him. But first she has to finish this; it’s important. She isn’t sure why, only that she has to do it.

  She blows out a deep breath and returns to work. With Dan’s words in her mind, she examines the rest of the page that she hasn’t translated yet. The symbols seem to unravel before her, almost as if bending to her will. Within minutes she has the rest of the page translated. Just as she thought, the page is full of nothing but basic equations that any junior high student would know. In her case, Emma had learned them by first grade.

  Why would anyone give her this? Was it really some kind of test or hazing? Maybe it was a crank letter someone had dumped on her desk. What was the point?

  She shivers as if a cold wind has blown through the room. As she looks around, she doesn’t see anyone, but she knows she’s not alone. The room spins around her and grows larger. With a start she recognizes the walls of her childhood bedroom. She sits on her bed, the covers clutched tightly in tiny hands.

  “Mommy? Daddy?” she whimpers. There’s no one in the room and yet she can still feel a presence. She looks into the corner, where she can feel it lurks. Daddy has examined this corner, proven to her nothing exists there, but she can still feel the shadow.

  She presses her back against the headboard as a shadow detaches itself from the wall. It floats across the room like a ghost to take on a vaguely insect-like shape, like a grasshopper blown up to seven feet tall. Only this grasshopper has eyes the color and consistency of liquid mercury. “It’s you!” Emma says. “You’re the monster!”

  The grasshopper comes to stand at the foot of her bed; its liquid eyes glare at her. Its mandibles part as it chirps something in its language. Emma can’t understand what it says. Then it reaches out with a clawed hand. In that hand is a piece of paper, on which are the equations she solved back at the Plaine Museum, when she was a grown-up.

  “You gave these to me? Why?”

  The grasshopper chirps something again. Emma reaches out with one tiny hand to take the paper. She studies it again and remembers her translation. She looks past the giant grasshopper, to a poster of the constellations tacked to the wall. Now she understands.

  ***

  The bed and her childhood bedroom disappear. Emma stands in a void of blackness, an adult again. Though she can’t see it, she knows the giant grasshopper is around; she can feel it just as she could in her bedroom as a child. “Where are you?” she asks.

  The grasshopper appears out of the darkness. She nods to it. “You’ve been trying to communicate with me through those equations,” she says. NASA had done something similar with the Voyager satellites; they had used a combination of pictures and math equations to communicate with any potential aliens who might find the satellites. It’s widely believed that math—not music—is the universal language. That’s only true if you can understand the equations. “Who are you? Where do you come from?”

  Another sheet of paper appears in Emma’s hand. This one contains a diagram of the Milky Way galaxy. A dot indicates the 23 Librae star system. “That’s your home?” The grasshopper chirps what she thinks is an affirmative. The 23 Librae system is eighty-four light years from Earth; the grasshopper is a long way from home.

  Emma looks at the equations again. She thinks back to the other times she had seen these; the first came after she tried to touch the case of red armor, when she switched bodies with Becky. After that when she tried to cut into the meteor—

  “The meteor. That’s how you got here. It’s not really a meteor, is it?”

  The grasshopper makes a negative sound. Emma nods to herself. “It’s a spaceship. That’s how you came to Earth and that’s why I picked up those readings from inside it. And that’s why it wouldn’t let me take a core sample.” The grasshopper makes an affirmative sound again to confirm her suspicions.

  She thinks back to the equations again. “You’re a scientist then? Like me?” The grasshopper confirms this. “You’re here to study our planet?” Again she gets an affirmative. She smiles to herself; it’s the strangest game of Twenty Questions ever. “You’ve been studying me? Following me?”

  The grasshopper chirps something and then another sheet of paper appears in Emma’s hands. This one is different, but many of the symbols are the same. As she decodes it, she sees it’s the grasshopper’s alphabet, the letters arranged to correspond to their English counterparts, though the grasshopper language has far more letters; it’s closer to Mandarin or Japanese in complexity. Still, with this to use as her Rosetta Stone, it’s easier to decode the next piece of paper.

  On this piece of paper, the grasshopper explains that it is a female. As with ratspeak, the female grasshopper’s name is too complex to spell out into English, so she calls herself Sarah. As she has previously stated, Sarah comes from the 23 Librae system, from the fourth planet in the system. The civilization there is far more advanced than humans, to the point where Sarah’s people—she refers to them as the Librae for purposes of simplicity—have gained the ability to transform their physical matter into energy. In effect they can free their souls from their bodies.

  A group of scientists decided to build tiny ships that resembled meteors to use as vessels of exploration. Inside the meteor’s shell was a storage compartment for the transfigured Librae scientists—the same compartment Emma had detected with her spectral analysis and that had shocked her when she tried to drill into it.

  According to Sarah, she’s traveled for over three hundred years. Earth is not the first planet she’s visited, though it is the least civilized and least evolved of the worlds she’s visited. “Yours are a primitive and backwards people,” Sarah says in her notes. “So backwards that at first we didn’t think you were the dominant species of your world.”

  From orbit, Sarah had initially thought dolphins to be the most advanced species on the planet. Then, in a twist that would make Jim Rizzard smile, she decided rats were more advanced because of their larger numbers. She finally decided to take the ship down to the surface to study Earth’s life forms up close.

  Another sheet of paper appears in front of Emma. When she reads this, her body turns cold despite the lack of heat or chill in the void. From what Sarah says, the landing went wrong. The ship crashed through the roof of a building, to land inside a house. Emma stops and remembers what Bykov had told her about how his son Ivan had found the meteor in a hunting lodge.

  Sarah wanted to wait for an analysis of the house and its occupants before she emerged, but her partner ignored her orders. He abandoned the meteor ship to attach himself to the nearest life form: Ivan Bykov. While Sarah remained in the ship to be stuffed into a case by Bykov’s men, her partner ventured off on his own. Worse yet, he soon went incommunicado, blocking even her telepathic attempts to reach him.

  Emma stops again as she remembers what Ms. Chiostro had told her about her darkened aura. “You attached yourself to me psychically. That’s why the armor wouldn’t let me touch it, because it was afraid you might take possession of me.” The other half of the equation comes to her. “Just like your partner took possession of Ivan Bykov. It brought him here, to Rampart City.” She doesn’t need Sarah’s confirmation to kno
w Sarah’s partner is Koschei.

  Her next page goes on to explain her situation. After she attached herself to Emma, Sarah initially decided to continue with her mission. She planned to study humans and then possibly find a more advanced life form like Pepe. It was when she scanned Emma’s memories that Sarah witnessed what her partner had done. “He came here to find the strongest life form and kill it for sport,” Sarah says. Emma thinks back to the zoo and the animals Koschei had freed. She had thought he was some random nut sowing havoc, but in reality he wanted to search the collection of animals for the strongest, which he would then kill with his “inferior” human body. From what Sarah says, her partner has never done this before. “Your primitive world has infected his mind like a disease, turning him into a barbarian like yourself.”

  “I’m not a barbarian,” Emma says.

  Another page appears in her hand. “You are foolish creatures who let your emotions guide you to ruin and keep you trapped in such a primitive state. If you focused your intellect you could be as advanced as other species in the galaxy.”

  “Our emotions make us human,” Emma says. She thinks back to her encounter with Dan. “Love makes our lives valuable.” Sarah makes a sound that Emma can tell is the Librae equivalent of a derisive snort.

  On her next page, Sarah says, “You attribute higher powers to simple things, such as coupling. My people learned to discard these primitive notions long ago.”

  Emma’s cheeks redden at this as she realizes Sarah was with her as she and Dan made love. “Love isn’t a primitive notion. It’s more involved than coupling. It’s a joining of souls, uniting us.” Sarah snorts at this again. “Look, let’s just focus on the problem at hand. What about your partner?”

  The next piece of paper prompts Emma’s hands to shake. “He has made his selection. He will destroy the one you call the Scarlet Knight.” Emma drops the paper; it disappears in the void. She thinks back to the battle in the zoo, how she’d rounded up the escaped animals, and then the fight on the Sheraton rooftop. From that Sarah’s partner determined that the Scarlet Knight was the most dominant lifeform on the planet. He would make her his trophy kill.

  “He’s going to kill Becky,” she says. “How can I stop him?”

  A piece of paper appears in Emma’s hands. It outlines what Emma must do in order to stop her partner and return him to the meteor ship. Once there, Sarah would deal with him. “I will bring him back to his senses,” she says.

  “I’ll find a way to bring him back,” Emma says.

  Then she woke up to find herself tied up in an abandoned building, a half-dozen Russians surrounding her. It would be far more difficult to save Becky than she thought.

  Chapter 28

  The lead Russian held a phone to his ear; he’d taken off his mask. He turned to Emma and smiled at her. “There is someone who wants to speak with you,” he said.

  He passed the phone to one of his men, who in turn put it to Emma’s ear. Markova’s voice came through the phone. “Ms. Beech, I regret what has happened. My employer regrets that the situation has come to this. He offers you one final chance to save your life—and that of your boyfriend. Give us the meteor and your friend Emma Earl and we will let you and your friend go unharmed.”

  Emma considered this offer for a moment. She couldn’t give them the meteor now or else Koschei would continue to run amok. Even if the Russians didn’t kill Becky, Koschei certainly would. “I can’t, Katarina,” Emma said at last.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “I know a lot about you—and your employer, Mr. Bykov. Tell him that his son Ivan is in trouble. That meteor he found is dangerous. It’s going to kill Ivan unless I help him.”

  “You are lying,” Markova said. “You know nothing of Ivan or the meteor.”

  “I’ve seen the meteor and what it’s done to Ivan. It’s made him into a monster. He’s already killed at least one woman and he’s going to kill again unless he’s stopped.”

  “My employer’s men will deal with him. We do not need you.”

  “Yes you do. I’m the only one who knows how to stop him without killing him.”

  “Then tell me and I will let you and your friend go.”

  “I can’t do that. Your people have to let me handle it.”

  “You are lying to buy yourself time. Your bluff will not work.”

  “I’m not bluffing! Katarina, please, it’s me. It’s Emma.”

  “You are not Dr. Earl.”

  “Yes I am! The meteor did this to me. The woman you think is me is really my friend Becky. She’s done nothing to you or Bykov. She’s innocent. So is Dan. Please, tell these men not to hurt them and I’ll save Ivan.”

  There was silence on the phone for a long moment. Markova finally said, “I want to speak to Sasha again.”

  Emma looked up at the Russians. “Which one of you is Sasha? Ms. Markova wants to talk to you.”

  The lead Russian seized the phone. He listened for a moment and then began to speak into it in Russian. “No, she’s not the scientist. She’s just a fat pig,” he said. He saw Emma watched him, so he stomped away from her to carry on the conversation in private.

  Beside her, Dan stirred. Like her, he was tied to a wooden chair and surrounded by Russian thugs who cradled machine guns. “What’s going on?” he said. “Where are we?”

  “I’m not sure,” Emma said. “Probably in an old warehouse by the waterfront.”

  “Who are these guys?”

  “They’re Russian mobsters. They work for a man named Bykov.”

  “Russian mobsters?” Dan looked around at the goons. “What do they want with us?”

  “They think I—I mean Emma—stole something from them.”

  “Emma Earl? That doesn’t make sense.” Dan shook his head. “How could she get mixed up with Russian gangsters? She’s just a scientist.”

  At that moment, as she sensed she was about to die, Emma wanted to confess everything. But she doubted Dan would believe her if she did. “It happened when she went to Russia for that geological survey. She took a meteor home with her.” Tears came to her eyes. “It’s my fault. I took the meteor from her to study it.”

  “You? Why?”

  “I can’t really explain. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything I’ve done to you.” She shook her head. “I’ve hurt you so many times, in so many ways. I only wanted to protect you, to keep you safe and now you’re going to die anyway.”

  He stared at her; he didn’t comprehend what she meant. How could he? She had erased his memories from six years ago and he thought she was Becky. “Becky—”

  “I just want you to know that I love you. I’ve always loved you ever since we first met.”

  “I love you too—”

  He didn’t get a chance to finish as Sasha stomped back towards them. He hurled the cell phone to the ground. Then he seized Emma’s jaw roughly in one hand to look her in the eye. Dan struggled against his bonds, but couldn’t free himself. “You leave her alone!” he shouted futilely.

  With a nod of his head, one of the Russians hit Dan in the face with the butt of his rifle. Dan collapsed backwards in his chair. He groaned in pain as he lay on the ground. Emma wished she could free herself to rush to his side, but she could do nothing but look into Sasha’s cold blue eyes.

  “My employer says we are to free your friend,” he growled. Emma felt a moment of relief; then Sasha held up a pistol and took off the safety. “It’s a pity that I had to kill both of you when you tried to escape.”

  “No! Leave him alone!”

  Sasha aimed the pistol at Dan. His finger tightened on the trigger.

  ***

  The Aquatix Car Company opened in 1961 and closed in 1961. For six months, the company had built amphibious vehicles, cars that could double as boats. That was the theory. After a half-dozen of the vehicles sank, the company had to liquidate its assets to pay its legal fees. Its factory then added to the number of abandoned buildings along the Rampart City wate
rfront.

  At the moment the building was occupied by Becky. She put the final touches on her great surprise and propped it up into a corner of the old factory, next to an ancient fuse box that had probably electrocuted more than a few of the Sewer Rat’s friends over the years.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think this is the most asinine idea I’ve ever heard,” Marlin said.

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “You really think that’s going to work?”

  “Why not? I lure him into the building, hide up there in the catwalk and then spring when he attacks my double.” Becky had to admit the mannequin she had dressed in a red Halloween costume for another superhero didn’t look all that much like her. Still, from a distance it would look enough like the Scarlet Knight for Koschei to approach it. When he did, she would jump out to stab the Sword of Justice into his heart. End of problem.

  “You think he’s stupid enough to fall for his own ploy?”

  “It’s not exactly like his ploy. I’m going to be hiding up there, remember?”

  “Oh, well, in that case I’m sure he’ll be completely surprised.”

  Becky snorted at this, though with Emma’s body it sounded more like a sneeze. “Let’s hope he underestimates me as much as you do.”

  “Given your last performance that wouldn’t be surprising.”

  “Hey, I escaped, didn’t I?”

  “Barely. And only because I helped you.”

  “I would have figured it out.”

  “When you ended up in the afterlife or before?”

  “What do you want, for me to get down on my knees and beg your thanks?”

  “If you want.”

  Becky waved a finger at the ghost. “I don’t know how she deals with you.”

  “I don’t have to be as critical of her. Anymore.”

  “Right.” Becky snorted/sneezed again. “Look, we’ll give this a try and if I’m wrong you can gloat all you want, all right?”

  “It’s no fun gloating when the other person is dead.”