[BGC][FanFic] Hopelessly Lost: Calm Before

[Benjamin D. Hutchins]

If any of you out there go back far enough to -remember- Eyrie
Productions' second fanfic series, 'Hopelessly Lost' (which began as a
farcical offshoot of UF and mutated along the way into a vaguely
serious piece), you may have noticed that there hasn't been a new
episode of it since 1993.

Well, that's all over now.

This is the first part of a four-episode arc which should, if all goes
according to something like the plan, resolve most of the issues left
outstanding in the third HL episode, "Stark Fist", and leave the way
clear for the third and final planned arc. I won't be foolish enough
to profess any kind of a release schedule, but I will say that
significant enough portions of both remaining episode arcs are
complete that I can realistically hope to get them out faster than one
episode every six years! :)

(Digression - anybody else have the Boston album "Third Stage"? The
liner notes contain a short essay by guitarist Tom Scholz entitled
"For the Technically Curious, or, How to Make a Record in Just Six
Years". I feel rather like that right now. :)

Enjoy!

--G.
--
_O_ Benjamin D. Hutchins, cofounder, Continuity Line Editor, webmaster
[. .] Eyrie Productions, Unlimited - An AnimeTech Limited Company -><-
- Cyberleader Darul says: "0 dB SPL is the lowest level of 1KHz tone
the average person can detect." WWW: http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

------

MONDAY, MAY 2, 2033
THE PACIFIC OCEAN, SOMEWHERE NEAR GUAM

The ship officially had no name; it was merely referred to on
the rolls of the corporation that owned as "GENOM Corporation Deep
Ocean Survey Ship No. 7", a designation reflected in its voice- and
data-communications callsign, "Survey Seven". In the Company's
declaration of seaborne assets, Survey 7 was listed as a deep ocean
exploration and survey vessel of the Ballard class, tasked with
"location, identification, and preparation for exploitation of deep
ocean resources". And, indeed, GENOM did own a small fleet of
Ballard-class exploration vessel which plied the oceans of the world
from the Company's seaport bases in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Rome.
Occasionally, one of those ships would report to the Tokyo or Los
Angeles base, its proud numeral 7 showing on its rakish funnel, to
take on fuel and supplies.
That ship, however, was not Survey 7; it was Survey 1, its
identifying marks changed offshore, under cover of darkness, the night
before. The world's oceans were busy places; no one ever noticed that
Surveys 1 and 7 were never in port at the same time. While Survey 1
was playing its masquerade, the real Survey 7 lurked offshore, as she
lurked perpetually offshore, never seen by unauthorized eyes - perhaps
the greatest secret held by a company which held a great many.
To the three men and twelve boomers who made up the crew of
Survey 7, their ship went by another name except when they were on the
datalinks to their shoreside masters. On board, the ship still went
by its original name: Arkhangelsk.
In 2025, the Russian Federation, chronically strapped for
cash, began retiring several obsolete classes of nuclear-powered
submarines, starting with those most expensive to operate. Unable to
bear the costs of properly dismantling the nuclear-powered boats, but
unable to afford the worldwide approbation that would result in just
pitching the old reactors and other atomic waste into the Arctic Ocean
as had been standard Soviet operating procedure, the Russians took the
only available course: they contracted the jobs out to any corporation
or entity willing to scrap the subs and keep what remained, under the
watchful eye of a United Nations inspectorate determined to keep
nuclear reactors and warheads out of the hands of the undeserving.
The United States Navy expressed little interest in obsolete
submarines which had been inferior to their own when new; they took a
couple of the old Delta IV-class missile submarines, scrapped their
reactors, and let their Seawolf-class SSN skippers have a grand old
time torpedoing Russian boomers, as they had spent their whole careers
wanting, but unable, to do. Other than providing stress relief for
the Navy, this exercise was of dubious value.
A small British corporation, Armstech International, acquired
another antiquated Russian SSBN and followed all approved procedures
in disposing of its reactor and warheads. Shortly thereafter, they
began selling a new, inexpensive missile system eerily similar to the
SS-N-26 Seahawk II. The Russians made a lot of grumbling noises, but
in the end, nothing was done.
Several smaller nations expressed interest in the various
attack boats on offer, but the UN did a good deal of throat-clearing
and most withdrew their requests. One small Middle Eastern nation
which shall remain nameless, but whose four-letter name begins with
'I', persisted until it was eventually given an Akula-class attack
submarine; two years later the boat's reactor had not yet been
scrapped and the UN informed the country that -it- would take the
submarine off their hands, RIGHT NOW. After a show of force at the
border, the sub was surrendered, its local markings hastily scrubbed
off, by a sheepish local navy.
The one class the Russians had no trouble ridding themselves
of were the Alfa-class SSNs; their titanium hulls made them the only
boats on offer materially worth the trouble and expense of scrapping.
Their single-use reactors were at the end of their operational lives
and could not be refueled, so there was little danger of those subs
being used for nefarious purposes.
GENOM Corporation won the bid for the disposal of the largest
subs in need of dismantling - indeed, the largest subs in the world:
the forty-five-year-old Typhoon-class missile submarines. In 2026,
they took delivery of all six Typhoons and the two even larger Typhoon
IIs at their extensive port facility at Los Angeles, California.
There the eight submarines disappeared into a massive drydock facility
where they were, with much righteous bustling and many
public-relations and press tours, dismantled. Their reactors were
carefully removed, counted and tagged by the UN inspectors, and, all
sixteen accounted for, disposed of in an approved manner. The weapons
were meticulously dismantled, their dismembered parts offered up to
the inspectors for their satisfaction. What remained was cut down and
the materials recycled into GENOM's highly successful line of heavy
construction equipment. Swords into plowshares, indeed.
Except that two years after it was all over, with public
attention focused firmly elsewhere, one of the Typhoon IIs slipped
quietly out of the facility and disappeared undetected into the
Pacific, undismantled, unmelted, and quite undisarmed.
The two reactors supposed to have come from this sub were
quite real; they had been near the end of their operational lives
anyway, and GENOM had therefore been quite willing to haul them out
and parade them in front of the inspectors. They'd have had to come
out anyway. As for the weapons, well - ballistic missiles and
torpedoes were not hard to come by, it was only the warheads that were
tricky; and those which had been shown, "already dismantled", to the
inspectors were fakes. Some of GENOM's own stock of fissionable
materials had been sacrificed for the sake of the ruse, while the real
warheads remained snugly in their launch tubes aboard the former
Russian missile submarine Arkhangelsk.
In the two years since the salvage project's "completion",
GENOM's engineers had revamped the Typhoon II from end to end,
modernizing systems, installing advanced automation equipment anywhere
it could be placed, and streamlining operations. By the time they
were done, the ship was powered by a single, highly automatic fusion
reactor - the first of its kind ever installed on a ship - and direct
electric drive. Its torpedo loading systems had been roboticized.
Its diving, valve and trim systems had been automated and slaved to an
expert system. Automatic maintenance and repair facilities were
installed. By the time the engineers were done, the ship's crew
requirements had been cut to seven personnel per shift: an officer of
the watch, a helmsman, a weapons officer, a sensor observer, a
communication specialist, and two engineers.
So it was that, in the spring of 2029, the Arkhangelsk began
its new life as GENOM Survey 7, prowling the oceans of the world. Its
crew consisted of three men, all ultra-loyal, specially trained
members of the GENOM Corporate Security Force, and twelve Bu-33/S
sexaroid boomers. The men acted as officers, one in overall command
and a first and second officer, each taking a shift as OOW; the
replicants would rotate in two twelve-hour shifts to perform the crew
functions, as well as, in the grand 33/S tradition, servicing the
needs of the officers.
For the men, assignment to Survey 7 was a very high honor; it
was also a dream assignment. The submarine had never been called upon
to do anything, and everyone within GENOM knew it was unlikely ever to
-be- called upon to do anything. It existed in the company's
inventory solely because Quincy liked the idea of owning a nuclear
ballistic missile submarine and being able to call on it if he had a
greatly pressing need for it. It was one of his toys. In reality,
this most serious and honored posting within CorpSecForce was a
six-month tour of air conditioning, good food, all the books you could
read, all the ice cream you could eat and all the replicants you could
screw, while the rest of CorpSec stood at attention in the lobbies of
the branch offices for eight hours a day, or greased tank bogeys at the
Armored Response Center, or froze their asses off guarding the
Antarctic Oil Station. Life was good aboard the Arkhangelsk, at least
for the officers; and no one ever asked the crew their opinions, for
boomers, the corporate wisdom insisted, did not -have- opinions,
however much it sometimes seemed like they did. Only programming, the
manual said, to make them seem more human, to put their human masters
at ease. Pay it no mind, said the manual, and so the officers paid it
no mind.
First Engineer Lyudmilla 104-Tereshkova (someone had thought
it would be cute if the crew-boomers on Survey 7 had Russian names)
had opinions, the manual be damned (and that, indeed, was one of
them); and at the present moment, her foremost opinion was that they
would all be better served if she were allowed to disconnect the
automatic lubrication pump for Main Drive Motor No. 1 and eject it
through the trash tube. Repairing the pump was proving to be more
work than just keeping the motor shaft oiled manually would be. Milla
(as the others called her) loved the Arkhangelsk as a ship's engineer
should, but that one lube pump was the focus of all her enmity.
Well, all right, not -all- of it; a good deal of it had to be
reserved for the Second Shift Officer of the Watch, Lieutenant Joshua
Pemberton, who had unfortunately taken a fancy to her from Day 1 and
had a regrettable fondness for games like "I'm the Warden, You're the
Convict Caught Trying to Escape". As the number-two lube-oil feed
line burst free from the pump casing and sprayed foul-smelling
greenish-blue lube oil all over the compartment and the Engineer, she
found herself wondering if she'd let it happen on purpose in hopes
that the oil's stench and disgusting viscosity might keep Pemberton's
hands off her that particular night once their watches ended.
Ruefully, she decided it probably wouldn't work anyway, and set to
reconnecting the hose.

TUESDAY, MAY 3, 2033
WORCESTER, MASSACHUSETTS

In the small brick house at 22 Lee Street in Worcester (which
was just far enough west of North America's BosWash Corridor
metropolitan sprawl to have remained a small city unto itself in an
era of ever-merging metroplexes), the day was just beginning, though
it was around noon. This was hardly unusual; the people who inhabited
the place were college students, and classes being over for the
summer, they had little enough to do, and savings enough to go perhaps
another month before they were forced to find work.
One of the people inhabiting the house was not a student, but
he was on an extended vacation, so there was nothing to get him up
before noon either. Eventually he did rise, yawn, and shuffle off to
the bathroom to, as Archie Goodwin might put it, cleanse and drape the
form. Ben Hutchins, known to his friends as "Gryphon", spent half an
hour at that critical task before heading downstairs to see if anyone
was up and interested in food.
Apartment 1 was quiet, and for a moment Gryphon thought he'd
be out of luck; then he heard the sound of typing from the back
bedroom and realized that Android was up or, more likely, had never
retired the evening before. He stuck his head in to see the
dark-haired, bearded gweep at the console of his five-year-old but
reliable Cray DD-442 workstation, intent on the screen. Android
caught the movement out of the corner of his eye and looked toward the
door.
"Good morning," he said. "I've found something very
interesting on those discs your friend gave you."
Gryphon hadn't told Android the full story behind his
acquisition of the several optical discs Dana O'Neill had left behind
in his car. Specifically, he had left out the parts about Dana
disappearing in a dimensional rift at the Gateway Arch in St. Louis,
and all the information he'd found about her during her brief time
with him having vanished from the computer systems of the world as she
disappeared off the face of the Earth. Not only didn't he feel like
explaining such a thing to anybody, he didn't feel much like thinking
about it too often himself.
Nevertheless, he was interested in the data on those discs,
since, according to Dana and one of the mercenaries hired by GENOM
Corporation to get them and kill her, it had to do with a new series
of humanoid infiltration droids being developed by GENOM or a
subsidiary, and GENOM's plans for same. Dana had seemed to think that
the corporation planned to use them for political intrigues, maybe
even assassinations. Gryphon wanted more information, but the discs
had proven unreadable to the systems in his car, so he'd turned them
over to Android for analysis.
The first thing that had come off the encrypted discs was a
list of personnel involved in the project, in a dozen different
divisions and subsidiaries of GENOM. The Knight Sabers had come over
to help capture and interrogate two of them, Eiji Takamura of GENOM
Boston and Madison Carter of the Providence division of Universal
Business Machines. The operations hadn't gone flawlessly; Carter had
been shot full of holes by his own Corporate Security officers, but
they'd at last grabbed the data about the new series' AI from his
computer.
Satisfied that they'd put a big enough dent in the project
(Carter was probably dead, his data stolen and erased, and Takamura
couldn't remember anything about the three days he'd been missing) to
hold it up for at least six months, the Knight Sabers had returned to
Japan and another, higher-priority project. Gryphon had stayed behind
in an attempt to complete his vacation and get a bit more work on the
new-series project in the process, and Android had kept digging at the
data on Dana's discs.
"Most of the data on these discs was garbled by signal loss
before being encrypted," Android was saying, "which makes untangling
it even tougher. I've figured out most of what's on which disc, but
actually getting at the information is another story. I haven't even
tackled most of the tech data yet, but I've found a few memos. One of
them mentions the subsidiary where project coordination is being run
out of."
Gryphon cocked an eyebrow. "It's not GENOM's Chicago office?
That's where Dana said the database she hit was."
"Chicago is Central Project Accounting," Android replied.
"The project office for Project 2608 is at GPCC up in Bangor."
"Bangor, Maine?" Gryphon wondered.
"Second largest city in New England," said Android.
"What?!" Gryphon blurted.

/* John Linnell "Maine" _State Songs_ */

Eyrie Productions, Unlimited
in association with
Real Job Time Management Services
presents

A Private Sector Production
Of a Much-Delayed Film

Benjamin D. Hutchins
Reika Chang

HOPELESSLY LOST
CALM BEFORE

with
Nene Romanova

Gryphon's Interceptor provided by
Bell Motors, Unlimited
Livermore, California

GRF-series power armor by Don Griffin

Accommodations by Motel 6
(the official motel of Eyrie Productions, Unlimited)

Theme song by John Linnell and the Statesmen
(_State Songs_, Zoe/Rounder Records 01143-1005-2)

Written by Benjamin D. Hutchins
(c) 2000 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited

When he was yanked out of his accustomed place in the
space-time continuum and catapulted 40 years ahead into a parallel
future, Gryphon was required to make a number of uncomfortable
adjustments. He had to become accustomed to the fact that, in the
early 2030s, cybernetic enhancement and robotics technologies were
advancing beyond anyone's control. He had to get used to higher
levels of urban violence and corporate abuses of power than were
predicted by even the gloomiest of the 1990s' pundits. Since he
arrived in Tokyo, he had to get used to speaking Japanese. He had to
learn to handle the strange truth that this was a parallel future,
one in which he had apparently not existed - no trace of his family
had ever been found. Stranger, his friends from college -did- exist,
were the same age as the versions Gryphon remembered from his home
plane where the year had been 1992, and, strangest of all, -they
remembered him- from college, although that was clearly impossible.
On the whole, the adjustments hadn't been too hard; the last
one, with its bizarre cross-time implications, had been the toughest.
After all that, it was ironic to him that the biggest shock
he'd yet received was what had become of Bangor, Maine, which in his
memory had been a small city of about 30,000 on the northern side of
central Maine, the seat of Penobscot County, and, coincidentally, the
city where he'd been born.
Five hours hour north of Boston, Gryphon was therefore amazed
to discover that small, sleepy Bangor had somehow become a city, a
full-fledged metropolis, complete with towers, alleys, gangs, rogue
robots, an oppressive megacorp, and two and a quarter million
residents. It was small compared to Mega Tokyo, but set against the
Megalo City itself, any other human settlement would seem small. I-95
through the city and the I-395 spur across the Penobscot River to
Brewer were both eight lanes wide now, and supplemented by I-895, a
ring highway encircling the Twin Cities and saving those bound for
points north or south the trouble of driving right smack through the
middle of town.
The city looked completely different, but the exits on I-95
were about where Gryphon remembered them. He got off at the Union
Street exit, wondering if the surface streets would be as familiar.
They were - in fact, down here at the roots of the towering city, a
lot of the buildings were even recognizable, wedged between or tucked
under the towers. He followed the directions he'd been given to the
corporate headquarters of GPCC.
It was decent-looking as megacorp subsidiary HQs go; a modest
two-dozen-story office tower with a pleasant brick plaza, complete
with decorative fountain, out front. Gryphon parked in one of the
visitor slots and went into the lobby, which could have been described
as palatial had anyone ever built a palace made primarily of brass,
chrome and greenish glass. At the reception desk, there was a Buma.
No, he corrected himself - it's phoneticized differently in English;
when in North America, call them boomers.
Personally, Gryphon thought "Boomer" was a better name for a
large, friendly dog - say a Labrador retriever - than the class of
humanoid automatons, but he wasn't the marketing division of a
multinational megacorporation, for which he regularly thanked the
gods.
Anyway, the boomer at the desk, who looked like a pretty
raven-haired girl except for her dead-white plasticene skin and the
silver pickup caps where her ears belonged, asked if she could help
him.
"No, thank you," he said. "I don't suppose you can. I just
wanted to come in and have a look around." He turned for the exit.
"Thank you and come again," the receptionist said. Gryphon
marveled inwardly at the way the service robots of the world always
sounded more sincere when they thanked you or wished you a pleasant
day than the humans remaining in the service industries.
He went back downtown and sought out the library. It was much
larger than he remembered, like everything else in town, but there was
some familiarity there: the structure he remembered as the library
entire was here something like a vestibule, the entryway at the front
of the building. Apparently it had been added onto so many times that
the additions by far dwarfed the original structure.
The library was staffed by boomers too, pleasant-looking
humanoid ones with robotic features like the ubiquitous silver-cap
ears blended cleverly into their appearances to comply with the
visual-differentiation laws (robots which were outwardly
indistinguishable from humans being illegal worldwide). Gryphon
declined their offers of help and shut himself up in the archive room,
where a networked terminal provided him with access to digital copies
of all Bangor Daily News numbers since 1987.
Over the next four hours, a picture of Bangor's change
came into focus. In 1999, the city had been just as Gryphon
remembered it from home, sleepy and stolid, its population hovering
around 30,000. Then the General Products and Cybernetics Corporation
had sprung up in an industrial park near the airport and begun doing
good business. That business attracted other businesses. The city
fathers, showing surprising good sense, altered the local tax
structure to encourage even further business. Bangor had grown to a
city of 100,000, most of them working for GPCC's aerospace and
consumer-electronics divisions, and in 2022, GENOM Corporation had
acquired GPCC and reinforced it further by diversifying its product
lines.
Then the Great Kanto Earthquake had leveled Tokyo in 2026, and
GENOM had been ready with its industrial automation product line to
aid in the cleanup and rebuilding. The robots proved their worth in
the rapid reconstruction of Tokyo, and the Boomer Revolution had
begun. GPCC succeeded in proportion to its gargantuan parent, and
as it grew meteorically, other industries appeared. Transorbital air
travel had rendered Bangor's distance from the sea and the major
population centers of Maine irrelevant to its success, and just as
GPCC boomed in proportion with GENOM, Bangor boomed in proportion
with Tokyo, reaching 2.2 million by 2032.
As Gryphon pushed his chair back from the research terminal,
it struck him that the history he had just read was more than a little
weird. Tokyo's destiny intertwined with that of Bangor, Maine? River
City becoming a post-cyberindustrial megaplex?! He groaned and rubbed
at the bridge of his nose. It was too much to believe.
One of the robot librarians poked her head into the room and
inquired if he was all right.
"No," he replied, "but I expect I'll feel better after I get
something to eat."
The librarian offered several dinner suggestions. Gryphon
thanked her, switched off the research terminal and went back to his
car.
He sat in it for several minutes, tapping his fingers testily
against the steering wheel and trying to make sense of what he'd just
read. After a few minutes he gave it up and drove north.
Though it was much larger and lacked the original's
incongruous converted-from-a-steakhouse decor, there was still a
Chinese restaurant called the Oriental Jade right where he'd left it.
He parked the car around the back of the restaurant, shut down the
turbine, and opened a scrambled satellite comm session on the
dashboard computer. From there, he got onto the Knight Sabers
mainframe and activated one of his false identities.
Closing out his comm session, Gryphon thumb-keyed open the
car's center console, then retina-scanned the hidden compartment below
the false bottom open. He removed his wallet from his pocket,
selected another from the row of them ranked neatly in the secret
compartment, transferred the cash, and put the new one in his pocket
before locking it all back up. Then he did a quick visual scan of the
area. Noting no one around, he tabbed a couple of controls on the
car's instrument panel.
In the dark, it would have been hard for any outside observer
to see that the car had just changed color even if there had been
anyone there to see it. The venetian-blind-like change of the license
plate from a California tag to a Maine one would have been a little more
eye-catching.
Reaching behind his seat, Gryphon pulled a small duffel bag
onto his lap and zipped it open. He stashed his main wallet, the one
with all his real IDs in it, in a niche next to his tube of
toothpaste.
Satisfied, Gryphon locked up the Camaro and went to have
dinner.
After a meal, he felt a bit better, but still at odds with
everything around him. He drove the now-dark streets of the city
aimlessly, as he had done many times in the quieter streets of the
Bangor of his youth. He'd actually grown up in Millinocket, sixty
miles to the north, but there hadn't even been a movie theater in
Millinocket, so driving to Bangor was the first thing anybody with a
driver's license got used to doing first.
The fact that this was a city bolstered by a subsidiary of
GENOM was not lost on him; much of the signage and graffiti he saw was
in mangled but recognizable Japanese, as though the city recognized
its karmic bond with MegaTokyo and sought to acknowledge the same in
its visual style.
At around midnight, he found himself back at the GPCC
building. He pulled off to the side, parked the Interceptor, climbed
out and walked over by the fountain. Arms folded, Gryphon looked
around at his surroundings.
The plaza was brightly lit and pleasantly cool in the May
evening; the fountain's merry splashing drowned out much of the noise
of the city and sprayed a fine mist of cool water on the back of his
head and neck. Small spotlights, arranged behind a neatly trimmed
hedge so that they weren't visible from the plaza, cast a silvery glow
up the mirrored flanks of the tower itself. Since the streets around
the plaza and the back of the building were only accessible from the
driveways on the streets fore and aft, no traffic passed through. The
low buildings surrounding the tower appeared to belong to GPCC too;
Gryphon wondered if they were shops, warehouses, further offices, or
what. Next to one of those buildings, a nondescript articulated cargo
truck was parked and idling, its driver perhaps catching some sleep in
this well-lit, secure area.
Gryphon looked up at the tower. Only a few office lights were
on at this hour, but the lobby was still bright and inviting behind
its glass doors. From out here, with the lights inside much brighter,
he could see clear past the reception desk to the elevators. As he
stood gazing thoughtfully at this building, which he knew he would
have to invade electronically or physically to find what he wanted,
one of the elevators arrived and discharged four suited men. Two of
them were talking animatedly and cheerfully. They looked like
executives who had just finished a long night's negotiations and were
pleased with themselves. The other two were silent and wore
sunglasses even at this hour - Gryphon made them for bodyguards,
probably boomers.
He wondered if they would hassle him if he just stood by the
fountain watching them leave the office in the middle of the night.
The plaza was private property, after all. At that thought, he
wondered why the truck driver hadn't been bothered by GPCC Security
yet himself, and wondered how long the truck had been there. He
glanced at it as the four men emerged from the front doors of the GPCC
tower.
It shivered, twitched, and then burst, the trailer splitting
at the seams like a can of Poppin' Fresh biscuit dough, as a large
mecha, some kind of walker tank, stood to a full twenty-five feet tall
and walked away from the wrecked truck with a scuttling crab-like
gait. Gryphon blinked. The machine looked maddeningly familiar, yet
he could swear he'd never laid eyes on its like before. He frowned
and searched his mental Rolodex.
"Well, there's something you don't see every day," he remarked
to himself as the crab mecha moved with considerable speed across the
courtyard toward the four men, who were now near the bottom of the
steps.
The two men in shades looked without apparent emotion at the
crab-tank, then quivered and burst out of their clothes as their
opponent had burst from the truck. As Gryphon had suspected, they
were 55-series security boomers. What he hadn't expected, however,
was the fact that the two men he'd taken for executives were, too.
That seemed to take the crab aback as well; it paused in its
charge, drawing back on its suspension with an almost animal
hesitation. One of the four 55s fired its particle cannon; the beam
splashed off the crab's armor without any visible damage, but the
attack seemed to make the crab's mind up. It backpedaled, turned, and
headed for the exit.
That, naturally, was a cue for the situation to get even
weirder. Gryphon had just pieced together the supposition that what
he'd just seen was an assassination attempt, failed because
anticipated by GPCC, who had substituted security boomers for the
targets. A bell rang in the back of his head - there had been a
similar incident in Texas about a month before he'd left Japan on this
vacation. Was that where he remembered the crab from? No, he didn't
think so. He scowled at himself as the memory refused to come.
This attempt was interrupted by the situation getting weirder,
to wit: the walls of the low outbuildings surrounding the square
crumbling to permit six armored vehicles hidden within them to
enter the square and engage the crab, one of them rolling right over
the remains of the semi truck to do it. Gryphon blinked again. A
minute ago he'd been standing here admiring the GPCC Tower, and
suddenly he was witnessing a pitched battle between a crab mecha and a
half-dozen M1A4 Abrams MBTs.
He ought to have run for cover, of course: either over to his
car, which was parked, hopefully out of harm's way, out of the
courtyard alongside the GPCC building itself, or possibly into the
building lobby. Instead, he merely stood next to the fountain, hands
in pockets, too caught up in the absurdity of the situation to think
of his own safety. What the hell was going on here?!
The crab had the advantage over the tanks in terms of agility,
but it was hemmed in by the buildings and the tanks' 120mm guns, being
mounted on swivel turrets, could track it pretty much wherever it
tried to go. For such a big mecha, its weapons load was fairly light.
It appeared to have little more than a laser cannon and some pipsqueak
General Purpose missiles, handy for dealing with light armor and
combat boomers but useless against the armor of a main battle tank.
Gryphon stood with his hands in his trouser pockets and
watched in bemusement as this weird battle unfolded before him. The
expression on his face never changed from one of what might almost be
called polite curiosity. It was almost like some bizarre kind of new
sporting event: the crab-tank, the conventional armor, the four
boomers - ooh! Make that three boomers - darting about putting in
their two cents' worth with their particle cannons whenever possible.
A curious detachment stole over him. Without changing his expression
or stance, he shuffled around a little as the battle passed to the
right of him, turning in place to watch it go by and work its way up
the steps of the GPCC building.
The crab-tank wasn't faring well; though it had destroyed two
of the boomers by this time and immobilized one of the tanks with a
lucky laser hit to the drive wheels, it was sporting some major dents
and blast burns and one of its missile launchers had been disabled.
Having reached the GPCC tower, it reared up and became more spider
than crab, climbing the building with claw-like grippers built into
its feet. The M1A4s crowded around the base of the building, then
backed away so they could elevate their guns enough to get a bead on
their quarry.
For a moment, it looked as if the crab might escape. It was
climbing fast, and the tanks, their guns at maximum elevation, were
running out of room to back up. Gryphon stepped nonchalantly aside as
one backed through where he had been and ran over the fountain. He
wasn't sure who the parties in this battle were, but because of a
combination of his inherent dislike for GENOM and its subsidiaries and
his natural fondness for underdogs, he found himself rooting for the
crab.
Then a pair of Soviet-built Hailstorm attack helicopters
whipped across the plaza from the southeast, their cannons raking the
crab and the general area of the GPCC building around it. The crab
shuddered under the attack, shifted in its stance, and lashed out with
its laser again, neatly shearing off the tail section of one of the
choppers. Deprived of its torque-balancing tail-tip thrust duct, the
Hailstorm spun out of control and smashed into one of the side
buildings that had hidden the tanks, its fireball casting a pleasant
orange glow across the proceedings.
The other chopper jinked to the left and let fly with an
anti-armor missile that took the crab high on the right side and
relieved it of its starboard legs. Unbalanced, it broke free from the
wall and plummeted a good fifteen stories to the steps of the GPCC
building, then tumbled down and came to a smoking halt in the plaza.
Gryphon frowned. The trump-card arrival of the aircraft
struck him as unfair. He trotted, completely unnoticed, across the
plaza to his car.
The crab's battered dorsal armor blew off and two human (or at
least humanoid) operators scrambled from seats behind darkened
controls. They wore blue and white jumpsuits and matching helmets
that made it impossible to see their faces, though it was clear from
their body lines that one was a man and the other a woman. The tanks
crowded around; the two boomers moved in as well. The remaining
Hailstorm hovered overhead, its cannon trained.
The commander's hatch on one of the M1A4s opened and a man's
head and shoulders appeared. He spoke into a boom microphone on his
helmet and his amplified voice boomed from speakers on the tank:
"There's no escape!"
The crab's erstwhile crewman looked at the woman; then they
both turned back to their opponents, tense, unwilling to give up
despite the hopelessness of the situation.
The lead tank's commander smiled and adjusted his cupola
machinegun. He was under no orders to take these two alive, and he
could always find out who they were later on. It had been too long
since he'd had the chance to shoot at live targets.
The mingled roar and shriek of a fusion turbine interrupted
his train of thought, and to his infinite astonishment, a sleek gray
sports car suddenly dove through the gap between his tank and the next
one over, then slewed to a halt with its passenger side presented to
the crab-tank's crew, passenger door popping open.
"Come with me if you want to live!" Gryphon shouted to the two
jumpsuited figures. The woman hesistated, then was shoved by the man
toward the door.
"GO!" said the man; the woman piled into the back. The man
was almost there when the lead tank's commander raked the car's
driver's side, facing him, with machinegun fire. The bullets failed
to scratch the car, but two or three passed over the low-slung vehicle
and struck the man, who went down with a strangled cry.
"Kou!" the woman shouted; Kou's helmeted head looked up at her
shout, and he feebly waved a hand. The woman tried to climb back out
and help him aboard as another burst of fire, this from one of the
other tanks with a slightly better angle, spattered the ground near
the fallen man. He waved her back furiously, the anger putting some
strength back into his limbs.
"Go!" Kou repeated, his voice strained. He flipped his visor
up, revealing dark, almond-shaped eyes full of pain and frustration,
and locked them on Gryphon's face. "I'll have to trust you - GO!"
The last word trailed off into a kind of gurgling rasp as the
tank's commander put a bullet through the back of his helmet; he
collapsed face-down, a puddle of crimson liquid slowly spreading
beneath his head.

/* The Propellerheads "Spybreak!" _Decksandrumsandrockandroll_ */

Gryphon had seen enough to know the man was dead. His mouth
set in a grim line, he keyed the passenger door shut and stepped on
the throttle, setting the concrete screaming with the bite of the
Camaro's plasteel tires as he gathered speed, shot the gap between two
other tanks, and aimed the car for the street outside the plaza. In
the rearview mirror, he saw the tanks breaking formation and turning
to pursue - a hopeless task, but he admired them for trying - and the
boomers kicking into hover-flight mode, which had a better chance. No
doubt the Hailstorm was tracking him, too, and that was the biggest
threat he had to contend with.
He glanced over his shoulder at the woman in the back seat.
She was sitting rock-still, her hands trembling, either with shock,
fear, or rage; Gryphon couldn't be sure, because her face was
invisible behind her helmet's mask.
"Hang on back there," said Gryphon. "We're not out of this
yet."
"Who are you?" the woman asked in a tightly controlled voice.
"Later," said Gryphon through his teeth, slinging the
Interceptor to the right around the exit to the plaza and down the
street. He consulted the rearview mirror and the center-VDU map in
quick succession, then tabbed the keys that would switch the map into
the HUD projected into his field of view by his mirrorshades.
Cannon fire stitched the street next to the Camaro; Gryphon
eased it a little to the right as the chopper's gunner tried to
correct his aim, then dove down the next side street. A missile
failed to correct for the turn and blew away the green depository
mailbox on the corner.
"Tsk," said Gryphon. "That's a federal crime." He took the
next left, crossed over three blocks, and turned right. The
Interstate ought to be around here someplace. He scowled. He was
doing a hundred miles an hour easily, with two boomers and a Soviet
combat helicopter on his tail, and was there a a single cop in sight?
Of course not. One would think this kind of thing happened all the
time in Bangor.
On the other hand, he mused, what cop in his right mind would
want to get involved in any situation involving a Soviet combat
helicopter?
A weapons-fire warning howled in his ear. He gritted his
teeth and flung the car to the left. There was no cover here; the
street was completely exposed. No place to turn off, either. Gryphon
had realized that he'd be vulnerable if he took this course, but it
was the fastest way to the Interstate, so he'd taken the chance. He
put the accelerator to the floor, waited a half-second for the
missile, and juked to the right.
The missile slammed into the asphalt just to the left of and
behind the car's left rear corner. The shockwave threw the car into
the air. Gryphon cursed, his passenger made a noise of sudden shock,
and the car tumbled side over side and end over end in a complex
motion, hurling Gryphon against his straps and bouncing his passenger
around painfully in the back.
Then it was all over, and the car was somehow on its wheels.
Gryphon didn't argue; he just put the throttle down, swung the
car through a bootleg turn and made for the highway, wondering how
damn many missiles that chopper had. The car's handling felt a little
funny; the computer was reporting a broken strut in the right front.
He ground his molars and kept driving.
Ahead, the gray line of the elevated Interstate appeared. A
ramp approached on the right, then vanished behind as Gryphon
completely ignored it.
Instead, he continued for another block, using the breathing
room he'd gained by making the chopper dodge I-95 to make it another
block. A block and a half up was the similarly elevated deck of the
Bangor Mass Transit monorail, which ran through the center of the
city, roughly paralleling I-95. The space underneath the tracks was
paved and kept clear to provide space for maintenance equipment and a
quick route for emergency vehicles in case of accidents on the trains;
with the obvious exceptions of the spots where the train line's course
crossed surface streets, travel there was illegal.
Gryphon threw the Camaro into a slide to the right, corrected
its course with a nudge of the throttle, and dove off the street into
the maintenance lane. A blinking red warning appeared in the corner
of the navigation screen, alerting him to the illegality of his
course.
The main reason travel on the BMT maintenanceway was illegal
was its narrowness: it averaged slightly less than a regulation
traffic lane wide. The concrete pillars holding up the monorail
tracks whipped past on either side of the Interceptor at an alarming
clip as Gryphon drove the needle of the speedometer up into the yellow
zone, his face a mask of concentration. The lateness of the hour - it
seemed Bangor, even with two and a quarter million people, still
rolled up its sidewalks pretty early - kept traffic on the cross
streets low, but he had to stay alert; it wouldn't do to T-bone some
hapless citizen at 150 miles an hour. He wasn't sure this was a good
idea. On the one hand, the monorail deck above and the regularity of
the pillars would keep the chopper off their backs. On the other, he
wasn't sure where this thing came out, and being wedged in between the
two rows of pillars gave him very little room to maneuver when it came
down to it.
"You'd better get strapped in," he said out of the side of his
mouth to his passenger. "And keep that helmet on, you might need it.
Who the fuck are you, anyway? No, forget it, save that. I should
learn not to ask questions when I'm busy." The woman climbed into the
front, belted herself in, and made no reply. Her fists were clenched,
but other than that, she was taking the crisis with admirable calm.
Gryphon suspected he might like her for that, if nothing else offered
itself.
Something flickered in the rearview mirror, and Gryphon
snarled at it. He'd hoped that he'd lost the boomers by now, but
there they were, and just as he'd feared, he'd locked himself into a
perfect line of fire for them. He hit the smoke generators. The
boomers had more than just optical sensors, of course, but the cool,
thick mist was good at confusing IR too, and it would at least make an
attempt at interfering with the beams of their energy weapons.
The car twitched and an alarm screamed as a particle beam
licked at the aft armor, blowing out the right taillight and a chunk of
the fender. Another beam flashed overhead and blasted a piece off one
of the support pillars. A third slashed across the back window, not
penetrating it, but carving out an ugly burn scar.
Up ahead, Gryphon could dimly make out a line of flickering
blue lights; the police had finally decided to get in on the action,
and had set up a roadblock across the BMT maintenance lane. Gryphon
made a quick guess as to how many cross streets away they were,
watched three intersections tick past, tried not to notice as another
particle blast splashed against the rear window and shattered the
thin, overtaxed klaster panel into hundreds of glittering hot
fragments. All it would take now was one lucky blast through the
inside of the car and his head could be vaporized right on his
shoulders, or his passenger's head, or both of them if the luck went
-exactly- wrong.
He snarled again, touched the brakes, and hurled the car
between two of the pillars to the left. The broken right front
suspension betrayed him, making that wheel grab unpredictably and pull
the nose of the car a bit further than he'd wanted it to come; the
right rear fender banged against a pillar, sending a wrenching impact
through the car and making something catch in the left rear
suspension. Down to two powered wheels on opposite corners of the
car, Gryphon kept his teeth gritted and his foot down, willing the car
to make the three-block dash back to the Interstate, knowing that he
was presenting his broadside to his pursuers for all the time it would
take them to get there.
For a moment, he almost thought they were going to make it.
Then a missile plunged into the right rear of the car, just
behind the wheelwell.
The skin of the Interceptor was half-inch Valiant Lamellor
Mark IV composite plating, very sturdy stuff for its weight: it could
stop a 105mm discarding-sabot penetrator. The armor on the right rear
was already compromised, though, having been penetrated and deformed
by an oblique energy-weapon hit. It did its best against the
anti-armor missile's AP-tipped high-explosive warhead, but its best
wasn't good enough. The impact jarred the car to the left, wrenching
it hopelessly out of its driver's control as the right rear suspension
fragmented, the wheel flew off, and the damaged drivetrain to the left
side was shattered. The rear of the car became an inferno.
Gryphon yelled an incoherent curse as the burning car skidded
across the road, hitting the corner of the Interstate overpass
abutment squarely in the middle of the driver's door. It rebounded
halfway across the road without losing much speed, glanced off a
support in the median, spun, and plowed nose-first into the opposite
abutment, only a couple of feet inside the far edge of the underpass.
The moment right after a severe crash is usually eerily
silent, broken only by the light tinkling of broken glass and plastic
falling to the ground and perhaps the gush or hiss of spilled fluids.
This aftermath was still pretty noisy; the impact of the crash had cut
in a safety system that automatically shut down the car's fusion
turbine, but several of the alarms that had come on in the last few
seconds kept screaming, and the fire was burning merrily with a sound
like a blowtorch.
Gryphon was only out for a fraction of a second, if that; the
crash-protection systems of the Interceptor had again done their job.
He got his bearings quickly, reaching for the door handle. It was
a futile effort; the door was bent and hopelessly jammed. Growling,
he punched a pair of adjacent keys on the dash; the roof panels above
his seat and the passenger seat blew off with a dull crump.
He thumbed open the buckle of his harness and turned to his
passenger. She was slumped limply in her seat. He made a quick
inventory and found a flat spot on the right side of her helmet where
it had been thrown against the window. Thinking it fortunate that
he'd suggested she keep that helmet on, he parted her harness as well.
The growing roaring sound outside told him he only had a few seconds
before their pursuers arrived on the scene. Reaching behind his seat,
he extracted the small duffel bag, then slung the bag and the
unconscious woman over his shoulder and beat it. There was no point
trying to get his armor case; it was back in the cargo compartment,
entombed by twisted metal and engulfed in flames. The suit itself was
probably badly damaged - powered down, it lacked the forcefields that
gave the activated suit most of its strength and resilience. Besides,
there was no time - he barely cleared the Jersey barrier at the exit
to the overpass before the Hailstorm roared over the Interstate,
hovered briefly, and set down not far from the Interceptor's burning
wreckage.
Gryphon arranged his unconscious passenger out of sight, then
crept to the barrier and peered over it. The Hailstorm was parked on
the street, rotors clutched out but turbines still running. Its pilot
had climbed out and was walking toward the Interceptor, sidearm in
hand. The two boomers were also there, approaching the wreck at a
quicker pace, unconcerned about the fire.
"No one here," he heard one of them say.
"Search the area," said the chopper pilot, "they can't have
gotten far. And do it quick, the cops will be here any second."
Gryphon's thumb pressed a stud on the side of his watch. As
he had hoped, the car's engine systems were still in, if not perfect,
at least operable condition; the turbine turned over and started
without protest. The pilot drew back a half-step, then peered
curiously at the car.
"What the - ?" he wondered.
"Must be a short," one of the boomers observed.
Gryphon turned the bezel of his wristwatch first one way, then
the other, as if he were dialing a combination safe. After four
twists, he felt it vibrate under his hand. The turbine started
running faster, then faster still, its whine becoming a banshee wail.
The two boomers and the chopper pilot stood there in confusion, then
started to edge backward.
"Better get out of here," the pilot observed. "It might be
getting ready to blow!"
Truer words, Gryphon mused to himself, have never been
spoken. He ducked back behind the barrier and thumbed the stud again.
The Interceptor's fusion turbine self-destructed with a dull
WHUMP that shoved the Jersey barrier and the man behind it back a
couple of feet and a burst of heat Gryphon felt even from behind
cover. The device had been designed to destroy the car so completely
that none of its components could teach an investigator anything - no
mean task, given the toughness of some of those components. Gryphon
heard the crash of the Hailstorm overturning with some small
satisfaction.
The blast ensured not only that nothing recognizable would
remain of the car, but also that whatever remained of the Iron Man
suit would be completely destroyed. Deactivated and probably already
damaged, it was sure to be vaporized by such a hot explosion.
He slung the woman back over his shoulder, picked up the bag,
turned his back and walked away from the now-much-larger fire without
a backward glance.

She had the worst headache she'd ever had in her life. This
was the first and, for several minutes, only fact that came to her
attention upon regaining some semblance of consciousness. The second
was that she seemed to be lying on a couch. She struggled to put her
identity back together again. What was she doing on a couch? Wasn't
there an operation tonight? They were... yes, they were in Bangor.
The GPCC assault was on tonight. Headache or no, she shouldn't be
lying around; she should be getting ready, going over the attack plan
with...
... Kou...
!
She sat up, winced as the sudden movement made her head throb
to three times its previous size before settling down again, and
looked wildly around. She was in a smallish, pleasantly furnished
living room that gave her the impression it was part of a house rather
than an apartment. Beige carpet covered the floor. Her helmet sat
nearby, discarded carelessly on its side, a large dent showing. The
lights were off except for one small lamp on a dark wooden endtable.
At the other side of the room, a large dark shape sat in a
straight-backed chair next to what looked like a desk, speaking on the
telephone. She started to get up, but the shape waved her back, and
without really knowing why, she subsided.
"In the woods," the shape was saying, in a low, rumbling
voice. "Listen, I need a favor. The Paul Morrow ID is dead as far as
GPCC are concerned. Be alert - when the flags go up from the
investigation, close out everything neatly. I don't want them to smell
anything funny about it and keep digging. Odds are they wouldn't get
anything, but I want them confident that he was a random local with a
hot car and an adventurous streak, and that he's dead."
He listened for a moment, then: "No, I'm all right," he said.
"I'll continue as myself for the time being, I've still got my primary
IDs. Got a few things I need to do. I'll be in touch." Another
pause. "I will. See you."
He hung up the telephone, turned to her, and said softly,
"Hello, Vision."
She gasped.
"I couldn't remember where I'd seen your mecha before," he
said. "My memory must be getting soft. Edison warned me that would
happen, but that's not important now. It all came back to me when I
took your helmet off." He didn't really seem to be talking to her.
She stared hard at him, mind racing. How much did he know?
It wasn't unthinkable that he'd recognized her face; she was fairly
famous, even if her usual stage makeup did alter her appearance a
bit. But who was he? What did he want?
She vocalized those two questions, and his silhouetted head
cocked thoughtfully.
"My friends call me Gryphon," he said. "If you've heard of
the MegaTokyo Roadmaster, that's me - or it was until I lost my car."
He sighed sadly, as if at the loss of a friend. "As for what I want,
I've been wondering about that a lot myself lately. For now, I want
to stay alive, and keep you alive, if I can."
She got to her feet and winced as the pain in her head spiked
again. "My head is killing me," she observed.
"You don't have a concussion," he replied.
"How do you know?"
"I'm a doctor." He got to his feet, and a slash of
streetlight coming in through the blinds lit up his eyes. They were
blue and tired-looking, and Vision thought they were kind in a way.
"Whose house is this?" she asked.
"I don't know," he replied. He rubbed at the bridge of his
nose and then put on a pair of wire-framed, octagonal eyeglasses.
"Come on," he said, picking up the duffel bag sitting next to
the chair he'd been in. "We're not out of this yet."

They left the small house by a side window, crossed a couple
of darkened yards and emerged onto a quiet residential street. The
sidewalks were fairly well-lit, giving Vision a better look at her
companion. He was a somewhat short man, thickset but with a quick and
easy gait that surprised her. He wore black work boots, too-long
jeans with the cuffs rolled up, and a dark trenchcoat that obscured
whatever else he might be wearing. His hands were shoved deep into
his trouser pockets, the slouching stance making him seem shorter
still, and the duffel bag on his shoulder strap bumped against his leg
with each stride.
His face was round and pleasant, but set in a scowl that
detracted from it, and it had been more presentable; he hadn't shaved
in a couple of days and his blue eyes were starting to develop dark
rings. He had long, straight brown hair that was tied into a
ponytail; it swished back and forth across his broad back as he
walked. Vision, her head still spinning (and pounding), wondered if
he were angry at her.
In fact, he wasn't - he often scowled when deep in thought,
and right now he was trying to figure out what to do next.
They emerged from the residential neighborhood onto Stillwater
Avenue, and Gryphon absently turned north. A few blocks later, the
Interstate appeared in the distance, and just before it glowed the
sign of the Nite Owl convenience store.
They went into the store; he bought a couple of sodas and some
extra-strength Tylenol. They must, Gryphon reflected, have made a
strange couple - the scruffy, rumpled man in the trenchcoat and the
gorgeous, exotic woman who looked like she'd been in a motorcycle
accident - but the night manager didn't bat an eye.
A bit further down the street, they sat on the ground behind
the roadside barrier by the highway overpass so as not to be spotted
by passing cops, took some Tylenol, drank their sodas, and felt sorry
for themselves.
"I'm sorry about your friend," Gryphon observed after a few
quiet minutes.
She gazed morosely at the top of her can. "He always said he
would die to protect me," she said in a small voice.
Gryphon nodded. Vision seemed like she might be about to cry.
He drained his can, crumpled it in his hand and tossed it away, then
got up and dusted off his pants. "Come on. We have to get out of
town."
By the time they reached their destination, twenty minutes
further down Stillwater Avenue, Vision was starting to become unsteady
on her feet from fatigue. Gryphon had been lost in his musings the
entire time. The only sounds were the scrapes of their shoes on the
pavement and the occasional swish of a passing car. This quiet
denouement to an evening of frantic, disjointed activity had an almost
hypnotic effect on the exhausted woman; to keep herself going she'd
locked her eyes on Gryphon's broad back and trudged mechanically after
him, oblivious to her surroundings. When Gryphon stopped suddenly,
she almost walked into him, and in stopping she felt her balance
flicker and stumbled against him.
"I'm sorry," he said softly, holding her up with one arm.
"Only a few more minutes, then you can sleep. I promise."
Vision nodded, head down, and held onto his arm. He was like
a rock, solid and unmoving under the black coat. She put her forehead
against his shoulder for a moment, then steadied herself and stepped
away. She looked around, awakened enough by the near-collision to get
her bearings again; they were in the courtyard of a small strip mall.
He smiled at her, patted her shoulder, and went to a nearby
pay phone. There he screwed some small device onto the mouthpiece of
the phone, then dialed a long sequence of numbers.
"It's me," he said. "How'd you like to do something totally
illegal?"

"Sounds like fun to me," Nene Romanova replied cheerfully.
Inwardly, she was concerned, and had been ever since the last call
from him almost an hour before. Gryphon sounded all right, tired but
steady, and though she took heart from that, she knew the destruction
of his car must have been a terrible blow. Now he was sneaking around
a foreign city, a maybe-fugitive with an injured, hunted woman in
tow. He still seemed to be in fairly good spirits, though, and far be
it from Nene to bring him down.
"I'm on Stillwater Avenue in Bangor, near the Bangor Mall,"
Gryphon's voice came in her headset. "I need transportation."
"No problem," said Nene. "Stand by," she told him, cracking her
knuckles and getting to work. She pulled his location from the pay
phone's transponder, looked up the nearest automobile dealers and rental
agencies to his location, and then started compromising their inventory
systems looking for something suitable.
In five minutes, she grinned.
"Gotcha," she murmured, and keyed her mic open again. "About
a mile from your location is Bangor Ford on the Hogan Road. Know it?"
"I know it," Gryphon replied.
"They handle the fleet orders for the City of Bangor. Around
the back you'll find a couple dozen official vehicles. The ones on
the left, if you're facing away from Hogan Road, are new, not yet in
service. The ones on the right are retirees that the dealership
hasn't sent out for auction yet. They've been known to sell the less
worn ones outright. Take the black and white Crown Victoria, third
from the end in the back row on the right. It'll have the number 23
on the roof. I'm flagging it sold and delivered yesterday."
Gryphon grinned, though she couldn't see him. "Nene, you're
indispensible."
"No sweat. You want to reg it to your genuine ID?"
"Only one I've got left," he said.
"Could be dangerous."
He shrugged. "It's a matter of record that I'm from around
here and in the area," he said. "There's nothing to connect me to
what happened downtown tonight. It's a chance I'll have to take."
"OK," said Nene. She turned to a second terminal and busied
herself with the slightly more complex process of attacking the Maine
Department of Motor Vehicles mainframe. A slightly more complex
process, but a much more serious crime: the Maine DMV might have been
a minor agency of a minor government, but it was still a government
agency. Circumventing the intrusion-detection systems represented the
first real challenge Nene had faced in weeks. She knew as she
defeated the system that she wouldn't be able to get the grin off her
face for hours.
"It's all yours," she told Gryphon five minutes later, after
squaring things with both databases and covering her tracks.
"Can you do anything with the physical security?" he inquired.
"I've set the keybox to open for your thumbprint and looped
the lot security cameras. Passing human eyes, I can't do anything
about."
"Well, that's OK," he replied. "Thanks a million. I can't
imagine how fugitives who don't have you to count on do it."
He sounded so tired that Nene couldn't remain totally upbeat
any longer. "Are you really all right?" she asked, letting her
concern bleed into her voice.
"I'm fine," he said. "Thanks for asking, though. I'll call
you when the details shake out. Bye."
Nene looked at the disconnect message on her phone's display
window and sighed sadly. The thrill of the hack was already
tarnishing. She couldn't really enjoy it not knowing whether her
friend, so far away, was in over his head.
She turned back to her main workstation and started another
attack. Six thousand miles away or not, he wouldn't have to fight his
battle alone...

Gryphon hung up the phone, looked up Stillwater Avenue to the
gleaming green and red lights of the traffic signals at the
intersection with the Hogan Road, just within sight. Then he turned
to look at Vision. She had sat down on the sidewalk at the front of
the strip mall and fallen asleep leaning over against one of the steel
posts that held up the open-air walkway's roof.
He smiled a little to himself, then slung his bag on his
shoulder again so that both of his arms would be free to carry her.
There was one sticky moment as they approached the bottom of
the long hill with the dark, closed bulk of the Bangor Mall on their
right; up ahead, a police car drove up to the corner of Stillwater
and Hogan and paused at the green light. Gryphon cursed mentally. He
could almost feel the cops' eyes on him, wondering what he was
carrying, what he was up to.
"Go away," he muttered through his teeth, staring at the
cruiser, knowing it was about to turn left and drive down to make his
life difficult.
It turned right and slowly cruised away.
"That was close," he muttered to Vision as soon as the police
taillights had vanished from his sight.
Vision stirred at the sound of his voice and nodded her
agreement even though she hadn't really heard him and wouldn't have
known what he was talking about if she had. She frowned as she
realized that she wasn't standing.
"Why are you holding me?" she asked him.
"You fell asleep," he replied, striking out for the Hogan Road
intersection again. "You're going to fall asleep again in a minute."
"No," she replied, stirring a little. "Put me down, this is
ridiculous. I can walk the rest of the way."
"Nope," he replied calmly. "You're tired and I don't mind
carrying you. Go back to sleep."
She might have put up a fight - after all, she was a grown
woman, and a fairly strong one, and not accustomed to being cradled in
the arms of total strangers and conveyed about the streets of
darkened, sleeping American cities in such a fashion - but he was warm
and his upper arm had a reassuring solidity against her ear where her
head rested against it. His manner was so absolutely non-threatening
that she had to concentrate in order to summon up any worry at all
over his intentions, and while she was pondering that, she went back
to sleep.
Gryphon smiled privately at her sleeping face and kept
walking.

The rows of cars behind Bangor Ford were just as Nene had
described them, and Gryphon found Retired Unit 23 without difficulty.
The keybox hanging on the driver's door opened to his thumb as Nene
had promised, and he used the remote control attached to the key to
disarm the car's alarm and unlock the doors. He walked around the
unit, elbowed the passenger door open, and deposited his sleeping
bundle on the passenger seat, taking the time to strap her in before
closing the door gently and stepping back to look at the car.
He hadn't paid much attention to the cars of this era. Living
in the depths of urban Japan, he'd had little to pay attention to
other than the innumerable tiny plastic electroboxes used for in-city
commuting. Few people in MegaTokyo owned cars that could be called
interesting, and even fewer of those were of American manufacture.
Besides, even in the US he'd discovered that almost all modern
American cars looked alike - boring blobs of aerodynamic paneling.
Chrome had died in the early 1980s and apparently never been
resurrected, and interesting body shapes had about gone by 1999.
The 2030 Ford Crown Victoria wasn't anything too special to
look at, but it had a squareness and solidity that appealed to
Gryphon. They gave it a certain character that the blobby sleekness
of other modern American cars he'd seen had sorely lacked. As police
and cabdrivers faced Ford with their immutable need for a car with
more strength, interior room, and power than the minimum sizes that
could be foisted on the civilian public nowadays, the Crown Vic seemed
to have devolved a bit, reacquiring its plain, square-cornered bulk
somewhere along the line.
The car could be nothing other than what it was, a
decommissioned police cruiser. It had the large metal push bars in
front, their connection to the car's front frame members hidden behind
the chrome teeth of the grille, and the small remote-operated
spotlights just forward of the front doors. The distinctive
black-and-white paint scheme was a giveaway, too, and on the doors,
front fenders, and the rear of the decklid the faded outlines of the
Bangor city seal and the car's official lettering was still visible.
The roof numbers hadn't been removed, though the light bar had,
leaving behind a dirty stripe where it had been mounted.
Gryphon tossed his bag into the back seat, slid behind the
wheel, adjusted his seat, and got the mirrors situated. The interior
was plain and built for durability in black vinyl; the mounting
brackets for the police radio still hung below the center of the dash.
The barrier between the front and rear seats had been removed.
Yes, Gryphon though, this will do nicely.
He put the key in the ignition and twisted; the car came to
life with a rumble that brought a small grin to Gryphon's lips. It
was rare for a car in this day and age to have an internal-combustion
engine of any sort, let alone a V8. Apparently the Police Interceptor
package meant something in 2030.
Gryphon backed out of the line, glad the most suitable car
hadn't been blocked into the middle row, and then eased the cruiser
out of the lot without lights. He didn't turn those on until they
were out, unobserved, onto the Hogan Road. In seconds they were on
I-95 heading north.
He set the cruise control. He wouldn't need stimulants this
evening if he kept himself occupied, so he switched on the radio with
the volume down low and found a classical station that was playing a
block of eighty-year-old rock songs.

/* Frankie and the Teenagers "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" */

Vision stirred and murmured, but didn't awaken, so he took his
hand away from the volume knob. Taking occasional glances at the
empty road, he drove almost on autopilot for a few minutes, looking at
the pleasant lines of her sleeping face. What a fascinating woman, he
thought.
Oh, sure, Ben, he told himself irritably. That's just what
you need, get hung up on another woman. You're not even over the last
one yet, let alone the one before her. Who you've left hanging half a
world away. Why don't you at least call her up and break it off?
Well, she never said she'd wait for me. Maybe she's gone her
own way by now.
That's what it's really all about, isn't it? You don't want
to be the one to say "this didn't work," so you're going to wait until
she does it and absolves you of your failure.
Yeah. You're a big, tough man.
He shook his head, disgusted with himself all over again, and
drove.
The Crown Vic was a good, solid car; it held a line well,
drove very smoothly, and the seats were comfortable. The engine was
the most powerful piston engine still available on the market, and
gave the car excellent acceleration for its size. It maintained a
steady seventy-five miles per hour in near-silence save for the radio.
North of the Bangor-Brewer sprawl, everything looked just
about as Gryphon remembered it, though it was admittedly hard to tell
for sure in the dark. There were certainly no more megaplexes. He
passed Exit 56, for Medway, East Millinocket, and Millinocket, without
slowing; the local version of his old hometown held no attractions for
him. It was still too civilized for his needs.
A bit further north he got off I-95 and onto State Route 11, a
winding two-lane stretch that led into the woods of Aroostook County.
He took increasing heart in the familiarity of the small towns they
passed through along this route; Sherman and Patten were still sleepy
little towns, completely shut down and closed up at this hour. Car 23
cruised through them in silence, tackling the hilly country north of
Patten with aplomb. The Knowles Corner plow turnaround flashed past.
Gryphon kept an eye on the ultrasonic system that was supposed to keep
wildlife from wandering into their path; moose strikes were tragically
common on this stretch of Route 11 in his memory.
Midway between Knowles Corner and the tiny village of
Masardis, Gryphon slowed Car 23 and took a left onto an even narrower
road, too minor to have even a state route number. He drove through
the twisting woods lane for a couple of minutes with a look of mixed
anticipation and anxiety growing on his face, but the anxiety faded
away as they rounded a turn and were faced by a long, straight stretch
of road.
Ahead of the car, a pitch-black swell in the horizon indicated
they were approaching a hill, the long upgrade marking the town limits
of Oxbow Plantation, population (when Gryphon last knew it) sixty-five.
Though it was incorporated and had town officers, Oxbow wasn't
really a town. It had no shops, no town center, in fact no streets.
All the homes and the town's three businesses (two seasonal hunting
lodges and a Christmas-wreath shop) were along this road, obviously
named the Oxbow Road. There was a post office, a small and homey
affair in the front room of the residence of a pleasant woman who was
Gryphon's cousin on his mother's side. There were street addresses,
but only so the 9-1-1 emergency call system in Ashland, the nearest
proper town, could have some way of indicating where calls were coming
from.
When Gryphon was growing up in his world, his paternal
grandparents had lived in Oxbow, his father had grown up there. He
loved the place more than any other he could think of. Oxbow was
magic, it was healing and regrouping and spiritual resurrection. Even
though his grandparents had apparently never been in this world, he
held out hope that, after everything else had failed to make sense to
him, Oxbow could save him.
He drove for another few minutes, up and down the hills, past
farms, one of the lodges, stands of trees, and the dirt path leading
down to the loop in the Aroostook River from which the town took its
name. He passed the white bulk of the non-denominational, seldom-used
but well-maintained Oxbow Church on his left. On his right was a
dark, wooded place that in daylight would prove to be a tangled stand
of spruce trees, their curiously ordered rows among the wildly growing
underbrush betraying that they had once been the citizens of an
abandoned tree farm. Here, on the left, was the place he sought most
of all.
It was a three-story, turn-of-the-previous-century house, a
large and rambling one with dormers on the third floor, a single-story
apartment added to the back, a large dining room added to one side,
and a barn-like garage standing next to it. Gryphon pulled into the
gravel driveway, got out of the idling Crown Vic, and stood looking up
at its familiar dark bulk against the starry, moonless sky. No lights
were on, no cars in the driveway. In the patch of grass between the
front porch and the road, he could see the familiar shape of a
real-estate sign.
Gryphon went up to the sign and illuminated it with his
penlight. That was what it was, all right; For Sale, by a real estate
agent in Ashland. He smiled as a thought came to him, switched off
the light, put it away, and sat down on the steps for a few minutes.
For a man who had had such a bad night, he mused to himself,
he was sure doing a lot of smiling. The notion made him do it again.
Then he got up, walked back to the Ford and drove another
twenty miles north to Ashland. Dawn was pinkening the eastern sky as
he checked into Chris's Motel. With a room key in his pocket, he
drove the car around to the room, carried the sleeping Vision inside,
went back for his armor case and then chained and bolted the door.
He surveyed Vision, stretched out on one of the twin beds, for
a moment, then decided that he couldn't leave her for hours in that
dirty, constrictive jumpsuit. Fortunately, he was dead tired himself,
so it was with clinical detachment that he stripped her out of it and
got her installed between the covers of her bed.
Then, after double-checking the locks and the 'do not disturb'
sign one more time, he got out of his own clothes and fell gratefully
into bed.

Gryphon rose at two in the afternoon. Vision, he found, was
still out cold, which was fine; she'd had a busy night. He showered,
shaved, and put on his single change of clothes. Then he walked down
Main Street to the modest center of Ashland and sought out the office
of the realtor whose sign he had seen in front of the big, vacant
house in Oxbow.
He didn't recognize the name "Maurice Tierney" or the balding
middle-aged man who introduced himself by that name, but that didn't
mean anything; his knowledge of the people and habits of Ashland had
never been as encyclopedic as his grandparents' had been. Gryphon
thought that the name sounded vaguely like the sort of name whose
owner was always running for selectman, or state senator, or possibly
governor in particularly ambitious years. He liked the man's smile
and the way he shook hands, though.
Without much in the way of preamble, Gryphon asked Maurice
Tierney what the asking price for the Oxbow Lodge was. Tierney gave
him a number that sounded reasonably fair for a huge old house in an
out-of-the-way place with some business potential.
"Done," said Gryphon. "Will an electronic funds transfer be
acceptable, or should I call my bank to have a certified check
expressed?"
"Wh - done?" said Maurice Tierney. "Just like that?"
"Just like that, Mr. Tierney," Gryphon replied with a smile.
Tierney grinned. "Anybody who buys a house that big without
haggling at all gets to call me 'Mo'," he said.
"'Mo'?" Gryphon replied, cocking an eyebrow. "Forgive my
saying, but you don't look like a Mo."
Tierney's grin widened. "Didn't hit like him, either. My
parents named me for Mo Vaughn."
Gryphon grinned back.

When he got back to the motel, he did a careless thing.
Coming in without looking around, he turned to lock and chain the door
again, and only then did he turn to look into the room.
Vision wasn't in his field of view.
Something moved in the corner of his peripheral vision.
Gryphon reacted without thinking. He dropped the shopping bag
in his hand, took a jumping step to his right and pivoted as his left
hand dove under his trenchcoat and yanked his Browning Hi-Power
automatic from its place under his right arm. He straight-armed the
gun toward the movement before his eyes had time to properly focus on
it.
It was Vision, tousled and angry-looking, a Colt .32 automatic
in her hand. Gryphon's jump placed them about the door's width apart
on either side of the door, their outstretched arms crossing at the
wrists. Her jumpsuit was still draped over the back of the room's one
straight-backed chair, so she was wearing very little, but he couldn't
spare himself the time or attention to really take in the appealing
vista before him. The gun held most of his attention, and the angry
brown eyes that looked over its sights at his.
"Take it easy," he said softly. "I'm not your enemy."
"Who the hell are you, then?" she demanded. "I want answers.
Don't think I don't know how to use this."
Gryphon nodded. "I don't." The .32 was his; she must have
dug it out of his duffel bag. It had been careless of him to leave it
behind, but he hadn't expected her to awaken before he returned, or to
be this suspicious of him. She'd seemed to accept his harmlessness
toward her last night; but that might have just been exhaustion and
shock dulling her wits and making her trust, childlike, in anyone with
warm hands and a calm voice. He kicked himself for not anticipating a
reaction like this after a full night's sleep and some time to
consider the previous day's events.
"Then tell me what I want to know," Vision said to him.
He nodded again. "I'll answer any question you ask. Will you
put the gun down, please?"
"You first," she said.
Carefully, he let the Browning's hammer down with his thumb;
then he crouched and laid the weapon on the floor. Straightening, he
held out his empty hands in front of him, not in surrender, but simply
showing her that he had disarmed himself.
"Now?" he asked, keeping his tone gentle.
She stared hard at him for a couple of seconds, then bent and
put the .32 on the floor.
He went to the chair, took her jumpsuit off it and tossed it
to her, spun the chair on its legs and sat down backward on it with
his arms folded across the top. She looked at the jumpsuit for a
moment as if she'd never seen it before, then threw it away and sat on
the edge of the bed near the door, where he'd slept that morning. The
arrangement put her between him and both guns, but he didn't mind
that; it was why he'd sat where he had.
Gryphon spread his hands. "Ask," he said.
"Who are you?"
"My name is Ben Hutchins," he told her.
"Your real name?"
"The one I was born with," he said. "My friends call me
Gryphon."
"You said you were the MegaTokyo Roadmaster."
"I was. I'm not any more. My partner was killed last night."
She looked puzzled, realized he was talking about the car, and
said angrily, "So was mine, and he was a friend."
He nodded solemnly. "I know. I meant no disrespect. In its
way, my car was a friend too."
"How did you know who I am?" she asked.
"You wouldn't believe me."
"Tell me. You said you'd answer any question."
"All right, fine. I'm from a parallel dimension where you and
several other notable people of this world are fictional characters.
I've seen the video series you're all in. This world is its setting.
I came here through a transfictional rift caused by a multiversal
crisis."
She gaped at him.
"I told you you wouldn't believe me," he said mildly.
"You're right," she said when she found her voice. Her eyes
had a look of mild unease mixed in with the anger and suspicion now.
Before, she had suspected him of being a mercenary or criminal of some
kind; now she was beginning to wonder if he might be a nut.
"It's the truth. If I still had my car, I'd show you what was
under the hood, but... " He shrugged, then looked thoughtful. "It's
funny, but I had a hard time remembering. I knew I'd seen your mecha
before, but I couldn't think where. It didn't come together for me
until I got your helmet off and saw your face, and even then I could
only remember your stage name. Can I ask -you- a question?"
She looked a challenge at him. "Go ahead. I won't promise to
answer it."
"How's your head?"
She looked aback at the question, having been expecting
something more personal. She blinked, then shook her head. "I'm
fine."
"Well, I'm hungry," Gryphon replied, reaching behind him to
pluck the telephone off the desk next to the TV. "The last time I was
in town, there was a decent pizza place back on the corner."
Vision began edging toward the door and the weapons that still
lay on the floor on either side of it. "Are you going to tell me how
you knew me, or not?"
"I already did," he replied, unconcerned. "You don't want to
believe me, that's your problem."
"How can you -expect- me to believe you?" she demanded.
"Well, first of all, Sam Waterston sends the spy guy in the
Piper Cub over to Russia, to the restaurant with the bad service - oh,
sit down, for Pete's sake!" he barked as she got up and started
heading for the .32. She froze in her tracks at the crack of his
voice and turned to look at him. He pointed at the bed. "Sit," he
declared. She sat.
"Look," he said. "If you're not prepared to believe it, then
I -can't- convince you. It's not exactly something I can prove.
Anyway, if I meant you harm, I'd have harmed you by now."
"Give me the phone," Vision said. "I have to call some
friends."
"You mean your buddies in the Hou Bang? No way. We can't
trust them."
She paused, narrowing her eyes at you. "You think you know
everything, don't you?"
"Did you think they just -guessed- you were going to show up
last night?" he wondered. "Or maybe GPCC just sends boomers dressed
like executives walking out of the building in the middle of the night
every night, and has tanks and helicopters stationed in the area just
for laughs." He shook his head. "Nope. They knew you were coming,
and they knew you were coming -last night-. Somebody in your
confidence set you up. Until we get this straightened out, we can't
trust any of them."
"But I can trust you?" She sounded skeptical.
"Right now I'm all you've got," Gryphon said. He got up,
walked around her, picked up the guns, and put the Browning away.
Vision watched him do it, but didn't try to stop him. She wasn't sure
why not.
Gryphon checked the .32, set the safety, and surprised Vision
immensely by handing it back to her butt-first.
"You might need this," he said. "These are dangerous people
we're up against."
She took the gun, looked at it thoughtfully, and then turned
her eyes up to Gryphon as if she had no idea what to make of him.
He smiled at her and then turned to the door. "What size
clothes do you wear? You need something more presentable than that,"
he said, cocking a thumb at the jumpsuit crumpled in the corner.
She gave him that puzzled look for a few more seconds, then
told him.
"I bought you a toothbrush and the like." He indicated the
shopping bag he'd dropped by the door. "Wash up if you want to.
Don't call your friends while I'm gone," he said. "It could get us
both killed."
Then he left.
She looked at the gun in her hand, then the telephone, and
then the door where he had gone.
"What a strange man," she observed softly to herself.

He came back two hours later with a large shopping bag, then
went back to the car for another. One more trip produced a set of
decent luggage. He tossed one of the suitcases and two of the bags
onto the bed Vision had slept in.
"Make any calls?" he inquired as he began taking clothes from
the shopping bag he'd retained.
"No," she replied, regarding the bags he'd tossed onto her
bed.
"Good," he said. He started removing tags from the new
articles of clothing, refolding them, and packing them into the
suitcase he had kept. "I hope you don't mind the sorts of things I
got you. I'm not much on women's fashions, so I tried to err toward
plain."
"That's fine," she said abstractedly. "What do you expect to
do next?"
"Pack the car," he said, not looking up from his work inside
the suitcase. "Get some dinner. Go open up my new house. Plot our
next move."
"'Our'?"
He shut the suitcase and regarded her with exasperation over
the top of it. "OK, look. You and I are up against basically the
same thing. I thought we could try and work together on it, two heads
being better than one and all that. You don't want to do that, fine,
I'm not holding you prisoner here. Take your stuff and go do what you
want. You can keep the .32. Mail it back to me if your pals don't
kill you when they see you."
She scowled at him. "Fine," she said. She picked out fresh
clothes and underwear, then went into the bathroom. Gryphon kept
packing, listening with half an ear as the water ran for some time.
When she came out, she had put on a pair of jeans and a gray
sweatshirt. The .32 was out of sight; Gryphon supposed she had stuck
it in the back of her waistband. She stuffed the tank top and
underpants she'd been wearing into her suitcase, then put on the
sneakers he'd bought for her and went to the door.
As she reached for the knob, he said, "You know what your
problem is?"
She stopped, turned, and said in a tone of cold anger, "What?"
"Your rage is unfocused," he told her, zipping up his suitcase
and garment bag. "I can understand why you want to hurt GENOM for
what they did to your sister, but killing researchers and executives
won't accomplish anything. They can be replaced. It's the -company-
you've got to hurt."
"Is that so."
"That's so," he said, turning and sitting down on the bed's
edge. "Say you go back to the Hou Bang and I'm wrong, nobody there
set you up, it was just dumb luck for GPCC that they nailed you last
night. Say they don't get anything out of the wreckage of that
crab-thingy. Will you just dust off the emergency backup crab and go
raid another corporate office? It won't get you anything. They're
onto that tactic, and I don't care how much money the Chang Group has,
the corps've got more firepower than you do. Eventually they'll
either kill you in combat or figure out who you are and assassinate
you."
"You think you know so much," she snarled. "Well, I didn't
ask you to save me! What you did last night doesn't give you a
license to preach to me! You can't understand what I'm trying to
accomplish."
"Sure I can," he replied. "You're a spoiled little brat
lashing out. You seem like a smart girl. If you stopped and thought
about it for a moment, you'd realize that there are a lot better ways
to get your revenge than beating your fists against a brick wall." He
stood up and spread his empty hands. "I'm offering you a chance to
make a -real- difference."
She glared at him in cold fury, turned on her heel and put her
hand on the doorknob. Gryphon felt her slipping away from him and
knew he had only one more card to play. Fortunately, it was his best
one.
"I knew Irene," Gryphon said.
She froze, then whirled again. "What?"
"I knew Irene," Gryphon repeated. "Did she ever tell you
about a friend of hers called Linna, Linna Yamazaki?"
Vision nodded. "What about her?"
"She... used to be my girlfriend," Gryphon said. "We went to
dinner with Irene a few times. She was a nice girl. It tore us all
up when she was killed. We tried to help her, but, well... There's
no way to dress it up. We blew it."
Vision stared at him, uncertain whether to believe this, the
latest in a series of fantastic stories to come out of the mouth of
this strange man.
Then she realized that she knew him. He had been in one of
the pictures of a party Irene had sent in her last letter - the bulky
fellow with the ponytail at the very edge of one frame, next to the
dark-haired girl named Linna. She hadn't realized it was him when she
saw him for real; the situation was too unexpected, and she hadn't
seen him as he had been in the photo, laughing and happy.
"Who are you?" she whispered again.
He grinned at her. "A strange visitor from another world," he
replied. He held out his hand to her.
She looked at his eyes for a few seconds, at his hand for a
few more, and then took it in her own.

Over the next week, Vision watched as Gryphon slipped happily
out of grim intensity and into a handyman persona. He opened up the
old house, fixed what needed fixing (which was surprisingly little
given that the place had been shut up for five years), updated some of
the facilities equipment, had utilities and telecom services
reconnected, then fitted out the Lodge with elaborate, mostly
concealed security measures, monitoring systems and entry-prevention
equipment. He bought a second-hand pickup truck from an ad in the
County edition of the Bangor Daily News and they went on trips to
Ashland and Presque Isle for furniture and supplies.
The apartment attached to the rear of the kitchen area had
presumably been added for some previous lodgekeeper to live in, so
that the big Lodge could be shut up for winter to save on fuel costs.
Gryphon didn't give a damn about fuel costs, so he set up his living
quarters on the ground floor and part of the second floor, cleaning
and dusting the furniture in the front rooms and moving the guest beds
out of the second-floor left front bedroom (Room #3) to make way for a
big old brass bed he found on a sweep of Presque Isle's Salvation Army
thrift store. Vision, given her choice of the remaining rooms,
selected the one behind his, #2, separated by his room and the
second-floor porch from the road.
For the first day or so, Vision just watched him work, puzzled
and a little annoyed that he would choose this moment to buy and
refurbish an old house in the woods. After all his big talk about
helping her make a difference against the corporations, he'd gone and
turned handyman on her, what the hell was that about?
Still, she was neither lazy nor ungrateful for the help he had
given her, whatever her doubts about his character or sanity. By day
three she was pitching in. Between them, they washed all the floors
and walls; aired the linens for the lodge's numerous beds; checked the
seals and locks on all the windows and doors; fixed a couple of minor
problems with the oil furnace in the basement; built some sturdy
bookshelves for the study; installed a pair of chest freezers in the
pantry and stocked them; checked the roof for leaks and, happily,
found none; and performed a thousand other minor repairs and
maintenance tasks.
As she first watched, then helped Gryphon with the mundane but
rewarding task of refitting the old house for service, Vision found
her skepticism about him fading. She wasn't sure she believed that he
was a visitor from another dimension, but as the week passed she was
at least beginning to believe that he didn't mean her harm. It seemed
absurd that a rival syndicate or megacorp would go to so much trouble
to lull her into a sense of security when they possessed the firepower
and strength of numbers to simply take her.
The idea had occurred to her that he might be some kind of
nut, like the deranged fans she had sometimes had to deal with during
her singing career. His behavior wasn't consistent with it, though.
He was friendly and polite, but he didn't pay slavish attention to her
or impose himself upon her when she sought time alone. He seemed
pleased that she'd stayed on with him, but wasn't making a big deal of
it. And she certainly wasn't a prisoner; she had a key to the house
and to the pickup, and on the first day she'd gone to the makeshift
shooting range some previous owner of the lodge had built in the
backyard and determined that the .32 did indeed work.
Just as her opinion of Gryphon had changed, he himself had
changed since they arrived at the lodge. The night of the incident in
Bangor, he'd been tense and restless, tight-lipped and angry, and no
wonder - he'd been thrown into a situation he had only a partial
understanding of, and his car had been destroyed into the bargain.
Later that night, though, on the long walk to wherever he'd got that
retired police car, she'd seen a different side of him. He'd shown
something almost like tenderness toward her when she'd been overcome
by exhaustion and he'd had to carry her. His touch had been gentle
and entirely chaste.
Working on the lodge - just being -at- the lodge - brought
something like that side of him out again, calmed him and made him
more cheerful and more serene at the same time. His love for the
place and joy in having it and working on it were apparent. Vision,
who appreciated peace and beauty in things herself, found it his most
sympathetic trait. Later, when she thought about it, she would trace
her warming to him back to her realization that he genuinely loved the
old house and the remote patch of Maine it was located in.
On Thursday, May 12, nine days after Vision's abortive attack
on the GPCC building in Bangor, she rose at nine in the morning,
yawned, stretched, and looked around the bedroom. She'd been in it
long enough now that it was familiar to her on awakening, its
dark-stained pine paneling, square-beamed bedframe and plain wooden
bureau friendly sights. The mortice lock on the old-fashioned door
worked, but she'd stopped locking it after the third day; the key was
sitting on top of the bureau. Gryphon had never disturbed her at
night, and by day four she'd stopped expecting that he might try.
She put on the fuzzy blue bathrobe she'd bought in Presque
Isle, slipped her feet into her slippers and went to the second
floor's communal bathroom at the back of the house. The room was warm
and the window and mirror still faintly steamed over; Gryphon had
already risen, then.
Half an hour later, she arrived in the kitchen. No one was
there, but there were several rashers of bacon and a couple of waffles
sitting on the griddle, which was set to 'warm'. A plate, fork, knife
and glass were in the drying rack next to the sink. Life in the Oxbow
Lodge had already developed a certain domestic rhythm. Vision smiled
to herself as she got a glass of milk and sat down to eat her
breakfast. After washing up her dishes and putting them in the drying
rack next to Gryphon's, she went looking for him.
He was in the large room off the back of the kitchen which had
been a three-room apartment until he'd removed the partitions. Vision
hadn't been sure what he was converting it to, and hadn't asked; now,
as she entered it through the short hallway from the kitchen, she had
her answer.
Gryphon was standing in the middle of the room wearing a pair
of loose-fitting gray sweatpants (spattered with white paint from some
touch-up work on the kitchen walls) and a gray t-shirt emblazoned with
the F3600 Anti-Gravity Racing League's logo. He was barefoot and had
a sweatband keeping his hair out of his face where it escaped from his
ponytail. He didn't see Vision enter because he was too busy kicking
the hell out of somebody who wasn't there.
She folded her arms and watched him, trying to identify the
martial art he was using. It looked a bit like kung fu, but the
movements were more fluid, less percussive than she'd been taught.
Maybe it was Japanese kempo; she'd heard that was related to kung fu,
but had evolved away from it. He was, she considered, remarkably
graceful considering his stocky build. He wasn't in perfect shape,
either; he carried some extra weight, mostly around the middle, but it
didn't seem to slow him down. There was hard muscle under that layer
of padding - there had to be, because even with that padding, he was
fast and sure.
He spun through a punch combination, turned, and saw her there
watching him. He seemed slightly taken aback. It was hard to tell,
since his face was already a bit flushed with the exertion, but it
could have been that he even blushed a little bit. He finished the
turn, drew himself up, and bowed to her.
"Good morning, Vision," he said.
She smiled a little wryly. He hadn't called her by her real
name once, though he certainly knew it. It was as if he thought that
using her real name would be presumptuous.
If the multitude of fans of Vision, the international rock
star, could see her now, she doubted they would recognize her. She'd
learned from experience that, without her flamboyant stage dress,
carefully applied makeup, and the green stripe in her hair, people
generally didn't recognize her. Today, in already-fading jeans and a
man's button-front flannel shirt with the tails knotted across her
midriff, with her hair in a kerchief, she suspected the members of her
own -band- wouldn't recognize her.
She returned his bow. "What form was that?" she wondered.
"Shaolin kung fu," he replied, mopping at his face with a
towel.
She frowned thoughtfully. "Really? It didn't look like the
kung fu I studied."
"You've studied kung fu?" he asked.
Vision nodded. "My grandfather thought it was necessary that
I learn to defend myself. He said I wouldn't always be able to rely
on Kou." A shadow passed over her features. "I guess he was right."
Gryphon nodded. "Kept up with it?" he asked.
"Off and on. I've been very busy lately."
He grinned. "I know the feeling. I've actually been trying
to deny my training... part of a little identity problem I've been
having lately. See, I learned it in a time-dilation construct."
Vision blinked.
"A pocket dimension where time flows faster inside than out in
the real world," he elaborated. "I spent five years training with a
Shaolin master named Caine, and when I came back out my subjective age
reset itself to conform to the outside timestream, where only five
minutes had gone by. The end result is that I have all the skills,
and I can call up individual memories of any incident that happened
during my time there, but the experience as a whole doesn't seem to
have taken more than five minutes." He shook his head. "It's very
confusing if you think about it too much."
"I can imagine," said Vision wryly.
"For a while I thought that the best way to get my head around
it would be just to ignore it, not use the skills, and try to forget
it ever happened, but this morning I woke up and realized that was
stupid. I -enjoy- kung fu. I'm proud that I was able to learn as
much of it as I did. Why should I toss that up just because the way
in which I learned it makes me feel a little strange? So I came down
early and started dusting off my technique." He struck a stance.
"Care to spar a bit?"
"No thanks," she said, reflecting that if it was a come-on, it
was at least a fairly original one. "I'm not really dressed for it."
"You're supposed to be ready to defend yourself no matter what
you're wearing," he said, and another shadow flickered across her face
as his manner reminded her of Kou; then he broke the illusion by
grinning and continuing cheerfully, "But hey, it's not like I'm your
keeper." He released his hair from the ponytail, went into the
bathroom adjoining the apartment, and sluiced water over his head from
the tub faucet, then scrubbed at it with the towel.
"I'm glad to see you're dressed for work, though," he said,
raking a comb through his wet hair before refastening it into its
ponytail. "Today we tackle the barn."

The man door on the side of the barn creaked a bit as he swung
it open and stepped inside its familiarly musty confines with Vision
on his heels. He reached to the side of the door and flipped the
light switch, wondering if the bulbs still worked after five or more
years of dormancy. Many of those in the Lodge hadn't.
Several failed, but several also survived, casting enough
light to get around by. The garage was as dusty as the house had
been. A workbench stood along one wall with a few dirty, slightly
rusty tools sitting on it or hanging on the wall behind it. One of
the two bays was empty except for a bit of haphazardly stacked lumber.
The other had a rusty table saw, a lawn mower, and a snowblower.
The two of them cleaned the garage up as they had the house,
sweeping, dusting, scrubbing surfaces, and leaving the tools in a
derusting bath overnight. There wasn't much conversation - only
comfortable quiet and talk relevant to the work at hand.
It was an hour or so before dark when they finished with the
ground floor of the barn. They stood in the open door of one of the
bays for a couple of minutes, looking across the road at the former
tree farm, lost in their own private thoughts; then Gryphon looked at
Vision and in doing so caught her eye.
"You want to take a look in the loft," he asked, "or the shed
next?"
Vision considered for a moment, then said, "The shed."
Gryphon grinned and led the way to the smaller building, which
sat at the edge of the driveway opposite the house, at right angles to
the barn. It was too big to be a proper shed and had a solid,
swing-up garage door on the driveway side. In Gryphon's "home"
reality, it had been his grandfather's fur shed, where the trapping
supplies and pelts had been stored. Before that, Gryphon's father had
used it as an automotive workshop.
Gryphon had to unscrew the hasp of a padlock to get the shed
open, which gave him a furtive feeling even though it was his own
property he was breaking into. He pushed up the garage door and
squinted into the dusty gloom. The shed had only one small window on
the opposite wall, and that was so grimy that it wasn't of much use.
There were benches along two walls and large wooden shelves on the
third, a man door coming in from the side cornering on the garage.
The middle of the concrete-floored rectangular room was dominated by a
large, bulky shape under a dingy sheet. A hint of gasoline tickled at
Gryphon's nose.
Gryphon pulled back the sheet carefully, so as not to send up
a huge cloud of dust, and then laughed aloud with pleasure at the
sight of what was underneath it.
Vision cocked her head inquisitively at the automobile he'd
uncovered and asked, "What is it?"
"Somebody's Sunday-go-to-meeting car, I guess," he replied.
"Hasn't been out of here in at least ten years, maybe more." Gryphon
walked slowly around the car, taking it in from different angles,
smiling to himself.
It might not have been the biggest car Vision had ever seen;
her family was rich and powerful, and she herself was a successful pop
musician, so she'd seen and ridden in a lot of limousines. This car,
though, won out in the "aesthetic mass" category - where most of the
limos Vision had seen were very large versions of regular cars, this
car was huge and looked as if it had never been anything but. Its
dull, faded paint had once been pink; its chrome was tarnished and
pitted, which was a shame, because there was a lot of it. It sat on
the concrete floor of the shed on its rims; the crumbling remains of
whitewall tires lay scattered around the wheels. There was a defect
eerily resembling a bullet hole in the middle of the windshield, with
a spiderweb of cracks radiating out from it and obscuring most of the
driver's side. At least one of the side windows was either rolled
down or missing altogether.
Gryphon went to the driver's door and opened it, releasing a
small cloud of dust. Vision stepped up behind him and peered over his
shoulder as he bent to look into the car. The interior was in
similarly sad shape; though the seats still had their upholstery, it
was streaked and grimy. A hole in the dash marked where some
enterprising soul had removed the radio. The gauges on the dash were
all analog, and two of them were missing their needles. The
mechanical odometer showed 78,493 miles. The steering wheel was huge,
in scale with the rest of the car, but its spokes and rim were
narrower than those on modern cars.
"Where's the airbag?" Vision wondered, pointing to the small,
round cap in the center of the steering wheel.
Gryphon chuckled. "This car was built in 1957," he said.
"Decades before airbags. Back then, -seat belts- were an option."
Vision frowned. "Are you serious?"
Gryphon pointed to the seat. "Kids today," he said to
himself. "No regard for history."
"I think I'm older than you are."
"I was born in 1973," Gryphon told her.
"Oh. Right." She stepped back and regarded the decrepit
hulk. "Then to you, this car's not so old."
"Not quite," Gryphon admitted, stepping back himself. He
didn't look at her. He knelt down and tapped at the metal behind the
front wheel, his face thoughtful, as he continued as though talking to
himself, "Not quite, but old enough. These things were classics where
I come from too... and I've always wanted one. Hell, I took my street
nick from them," he went on as he moved to the back, knocking gently
on the car's body panels below the driver's side door and around the
rear wheel.
"How's that?" Vision wondered.
He looked back over his shoulder and grinned at her. "Look at
the decklid."
She went around the back of the car, running a hand idly along
the top of the tailfin as she did so, took a step back, and saw the
chrome letters mounted on the back of the curved decklid:

R O A D M A S T E R

She laughed. "Oh."
Gryphon worked his way around the fin, then got down on his
back and slid underneath the back of the car. Vision heard him
banging lightly on metal underneath there; then there came a hollow
thump and the sound of small particles, like sand or fine gravel,
being poured on the floor.
"Damn," Gryphon said. He slid out, brushing at the smear of
red-orange dust on his chest and down his left side. He rapped on the
lower edge of the decklid and the massive rear bumper, then gave a
satisfied nod and worked his way up the other side of the car to the
front.
Vision met him back at the front of the Buick, giving him a
hand up off the floor. He dusted off his hands and scratched at the
back of his neck as he regarded the old car.
"Well, the interior needs work, the wiring's probably shot,
and the gas tank's rusted out, probably because it wasn't sealed
properly when the car was put away and condensation formed inside
it... but the body is as solid as they come, and the frame looks
good." He grinned at her. "Be a shame to leave it here to rot."

It took them three weeks to restore the Buick to reliable
running order, but neither seemed to mind. Resurrecting the Lodge had
started Gryphon toward a peace with himself and the world he found
himself in, and working on this old car seemed to complete the
process. It, like the Oxbow Lodge, drew him back toward his roots,
the things he had loved and believed in before he ever came to this
world.
Vision had never worked on an automobile, but she was a fast
learner, and it surprised her that she found the subject as
interesting as she did. In the course of her brief career as a
terrorist, she'd used mecha much more complex than this old Buick, but
she hadn't done the maintenance or repair work; the DG-42 had had with
it a whole squadron of engineers, techs and maintenance men who had
kept it in top condition. Vision had never had any interest in their
work; she was too busy improving her piloting skills and sharpening
her tactical and self-defense abilities. There had been too much to
do with all of that for her to get involved in anything as mundane as
maintenance and repair.
Now the situation was different. It had become obvious to her
during the house's rehabilitation that working on things was Gryphon's
way of thinking things over, and that they weren't going to move on
anything until he was satisfied that he'd put everything here in
order. She knew him well enough by now to realize that the gears
turning in his head as he worked were pondering more than just the
piston rings and brake drums. If she had thought about it, she would
also have realized that she was thinking of them in the plural in
terms of the impending "operation" without even noticing it. He was
planning something, and she took it for granted that she would be part
of it when it came; and with that, she was content.
As for Gryphon, he no longer caught himself wishing that he
didn't have the skills he had, or that he could leave this world. He
wondered if all that would unravel if he left Aroostook County. Would
he have to stay here, in the woods, far away from the dark, dirty
urban sprawls and their inevitable corrosion of the human spirit?
And would that be so bad?
The temptation to run away from it all and spend the rest of
his life in Oxbow was strong, but he knew even as he considered it
that it wasn't really an option for him. He was too loyal. He felt
guilty about abandoning his friends to their lonely quest for as long
as he had; making the abandonment permanent would have weighed on him
too heavily.
No, this was very pleasant, and he had no intention of giving
it up completely once this job was over; but he was in Maine right now
to do a job, however much the joys of rediscovering Oxbow had obscured
his remembrance of that for a while, and after that he would have to
go home to Tokyo. Oxbow was still the refuge for his spirit, but
Tokyo, he finally concluded, was home.
His mind made up, Gryphon spent an evening making a number of
very large online orders. Delivery trucks flowed steadily to the
Lodge for two weeks thereafter, and then all traffic to the old house
ceased.
In the basement below what had been the Oxbow Lodge's main
dining room for the Sunday afternoon smorgasbords, Gryphon had
re-created the Knight Sabers' mechanical fabrication shop. In some
cases he'd actually improved over it, installing more modern examples
of some of the equipment to be found in the Cave and a couple of
devices not to be found there at all. Here he would forge a new
weapon to replace Iron Man.
It took twelve hours for Nene to upload all the accumulated
technical information on the Knight Sabers' hardsuits and their
underlying technologies to the new Super Cray via an illegal encrypted
satellite downlink channel, and another two for the Super Cray to
decrypt and archive for production all the Iron Man data from the
Stark Enterprises data module Gryphon always kept near to hand. He
spent most of that time asleep, gathering his strength and refining
his new vision in dreams. The next day, he arose, showered, put on a
clean pair of sweats and a t-shirt, and began to create.
What he designed was not entirely new. It was based in
appearance and general configuration on the suit of powered armor
originally developed by one of his earliest transfictional avatars, a
fellow by the name of Don Griffin who lived in an alternate Marvel
Super-Heroes universe, of all things.
At the beginning of his career as a costumed adventurer, even
before he'd discovered his alien heritage and with it the full range
of his skills, Don had been inspired by a popular future-combat game
to design and build an armored battlesuit for himself. The look he'd
chosen for the suit was inspired by one of the battle machines in that
game, with which he'd happened to share a name. Battletech's Griffin
had stood thirty meters tall and weighed in at 55 tons. Don's
original version stood a mere six feet and tipped the scales at a
paltry 400 pounds.
One of the reasons Don had chosen the Griffin for the model
for his armored suit, aside from the pleasing synchrony of names, was
the fact that the Griffin was one of the most anthropomorphic of all
BattleMechs; it had two hands, properly articulated limbs, and a
correctly positioned head. It was one of the few 'Mechs that could be
adapted to a battlesuit without changing its visual configuration at
all, with the result that only scale would betray the outward
differences between the 55-ton GRF-1N medium attack BattleMech and the
400-pound Griffin Mk.1 armored combat suit.
A divergent Griffin series had turned up in the Undocumented
Features universe as well, -also- transfictionally based on Don
Griffin's original designs. The future technology available to the UF
version had been beyond what Gryphon himself had to work with here,
but then, UF-Gryphon hadn't had access to the accumulated notes and
insights of Anthony Stark. After his first transfic jump, Gryphon had
tried to build a Griffin suit of his own, but the tech of the
only-slightly-altered world he lived in then hadn't allowed for it.
Now, he thought he was ready to create his own variation on the theme.
For the visual configuration of his version, Gryphon went back
to the source, the original line drawing accompanying the entry for
the GRF-1N Griffin medium BattleMech in the Battletech 3025 Technical
Readout. From there he smoothed its lines only slightly, rearranging
a few minor details. Still, its profile made its inspiration readily
apparent to any fan of the game even in this newest model. It had the
same sturdy-looking metallic solidity, and it was still composed
almost exclusively of flat surfaces angled so as to please the eye and
help deflect fire. It head was a rounded metal bowl that fit directly
onto the shoulder plating without an exposed 'neck'; the front half of
the bowl was made of transparent duraplast, tinted so as to be
impossible to see through from outside. The tall armored flanges on
the suit's shoulders looked like they ought to obstruct peripheral
vision, and indeed they would have, had not the suit been fitted with
a holographic virtual environment system inside the helmet that
'scrubbed' the flanges from the suit operator's field of vision.
Slowly, slowly, the working design underneath the styled armor
shell took shape. Gryphon worked at it patiently and methodically,
gradually fusing together elements of Stark technology, Sylia's proven
methods, Don Griffin's own notes (provided to him on a field trip to
Don's home universe with Edison years before), and original
innovations that came to him in flash upon flash of inspiration into a
coherent whole. It was sometimes frustrating work. Several times he
got halfway through the design of some system before realizing it had
gone wrong or he had failed to account for something. Often he had to
throw the half-completed design out and start again. Occasionally he
gave up entirely, turning away in disgust to play "Soul Reaver" on his
antique PlayStation for a few hours, then sat bolt upright in the
beanbag chair with a gasp, dropping the controller and scrambling to
the Super Cray's console. Poor Raziel spent hours stranded on the
Spirit Plane, patiently waiting for a chance to resume his mission of
spectral vengeance.
Vision had learned enough of his moods by this time to realize
that it wasn't a good idea to interrupt him in the throes of creation;
it rather reminded her of herself when she'd had an idea for a song.
She lurked in the background for the better part of four days. What
she saw in her occasional glimpses of the screens around him, usually
when bringing him something to drink, she didn't understand at all,
but that didn't bother her too much. He probably wouldn't have
understood her scoring notes for 'Say Yes' either.
After the design was mostly completed, the actual construction
began, and this too was a trouble-fraught process. Some of the alien
technologies which had been difficult to synthesize in his head or the
CAD system proved even more recalcitrant in physical practice. Others
had to be extensively re-worked, completely re-thought, or scrapped
entirely.
The final product was a compromise, to be sure; any project as
complicated and detailed as a custom-designed powersuit was bound to
be. It was a compromise its creator was happy with, though, as he
stood over its gleaming length sprawled on a worktable, surrounded by
the implements of the modern armorsmith's trade. To Gryphon, it was
beautiful, its lines oozing power and strength. He could close his
eyes and see every circuit trace, every cable path, from the photonic
computer systems to the power delivery core for the suit's finely
crafted main gun.
With the suit itself completed, Gryphon took three days off,
finished "Soul Reaver", started "Soul Reaver II", and made a few minor
modifications to the Buick. Then he started the most physically and
mentally demanding part of the process: designing, fabricating and
calibrating the armor transference matrix.
At six feet, two inches and five hundred thirty pounds of
solid armor plating and reinforced systemry, the Griffin No.4 Mk.1
Armored Combat Powersuit was much too bulky and heavy to carry around
in an attache case like the Iron Man suit, even with the
gravity-defying Hermes coils in the shoulder and knee flanges that
reduced its practical operating weight to a mere eighty pounds. It
would have required a large, wheeled coffin to transport, and took
nearly five minutes to put on piece-by-piece. Don Griffin had run
into this problem too, when he'd constructed the original version.
The answer, which presented itself from Don's skills in the
fields of temporal and dimensional engineering, was the ATM, the armor
transference matrix. It took Gryphon two weeks of intensive study of
Don's notes and reference materials provided on the subject through an
improvised satellite link with Don himself to grasp the fine points of
ATM technology. Essentially, the matrix had two parts. The slave
unit, installed in the suit itself, mapped the suit's physical
structure onto a trans-quantum meta-dimensional shunt. This was a
dimensionally transcendent space contained within the three-dimensional
physical structure of the master unit. When activated by the master
unit, the slave unit would project the suit into the MD-space within
the master unit, where it would be suspended outside normal time and
space until recalled.
Gryphon understood this all in an abstract manner. He grasped
the principles behind it and could conceptually imagine how they
functioned. He had learned and applied similar but much simpler
meta-dimensional techniques in several of the suit's other systems,
including its faster-than-light photonic computer core, its
force-field generation system, and its Hermes coils, but those
components were much simpler than an MD unit-pair.
Fortunately, with the detailed instructions and diagrams at
his disposal, Gryphon didn't have to understand precisely how the
device worked to build a working example. Testing it was a bit
nervous-making, since an error or malfunction would probably result in
something rather like the gratuitous 'transporter accident' scene in
"Star Trek: The Motionless Picture"; but all went well, and the end
result was that the fully completed powersuit could be carried on a
chip secreted inside Gryphon's wristwatch, and summoned in an instant
when needed.
Satisfied, he strapped on that watch, shut down his workshop,
and emerged from the Cave of Creation into the brightly lit outside
world again.
"Sorry about that," he said to Vision at dinner that night,
"I'm afraid I've been a rotten host. The Muse was upon me... "
She nodded. "I understand. Now that you're finished,
though... what now?"
"Well, I've been thinking. How'd you like to steal $750
million worth of illegal equipment from a GENOM subsidiary and put it
to a use that will benefit society?"

HOPELESSLY LOST WILL RETURN
in
REDUCED VISIBILITY
(hopefully in less than six years this time)