Chapter #19Celebrity Soup by: Seuzz   "Mutants?" Patterson says, and he looks more than a little skeptical. "You're talking like they've got superpowers." You nod, and his frown deepens. "How does that work?"
"You'd have to ask the smart guys," you say. "But we've tangled with them before, we know what they're capable of."
"Do they work for a government?"
"Nah. They got their own secret club. No one really knows what they get up to when they're not hassling us. And they do. Hassle us, I mean."
"Why?"
"I dunno, ask them. Apparently, they're the ones that gave us the idea for these projects, been around for hundreds of years or something," you continue as Patterson's expression turns even more skeptical.
"Gave Fane the idea, you mean?"
"Yeah. Fane learned about the celebrities a long time ago, they've been one of their bugaboos, but their scientists finally figured they were far enough along with their research that they could try making up 'exotic tech' that would mimic the powers that the celebrities have. That's actually why the projects have names related to the planets, because the celebrities seem to think they get their powers from the planets. It's all, like, astrology and shit. So Fane set up Diana and the rest, gave 'em code names related to the planets—"
"Can you give me an example of a celebrity and what they can do?"
"I can give you a bunch of them." You leap over to a bookcase in the corner of the room. "I really shouldn't have these here," you say as you pull down an oversize picture book and drop it onto the coffee table. "But they're only photos, there's no classified information in them. Only the celebrities or someone who already knows about them would know their significance." From the book you pull a thin pile of glossy photographs: the same images as decorate the dart boards.
"So, we don't know their real names," you say as you leaf through them. "Well, we know the names of some of them. But we give 'em names of our own. We're not even totally sure which 'planets' each of them go with, since they sometimes surprise us with some pretty goofy powers. Like this one."
You pull out a photograph of a twenty-something man with brilliant blonde hair and a bright smile. He is so photogenic he seems about to crawl out of the picture. "This is Cupcake. We can't pin down what planet he's supposed to be. He's all over the place. He practically glows in the dark, and he's got this jeep-like ability to appear and disappear. We've also caught him doing some amazing vocal mimicry. I mean, best voice impressionists around can't match him." You push the photo away. "That's why it's real dangerous right now to use phones, because if he's on the other end, you'll never know it's not your best friend talking to you."
"But you don't know which 'planet' he's—"
"No, like I said, he's goofy. Lots of them are goofy. Cupcake's got too many powers, but this one's got powers we can't even identify." You pull out a photograph of a young, slim, and very serious-looking Chinese man. "Hu Minquiang, but we call him 'Abbott'. We're not sure, but we think he's their 'Jupiter'. He's rarely in the field, but we have the impression that he directs their operations. Whoever is running them does a real good job, because although they don't hit us very often, they almost always hit at the time and place and way that causes maximum damage.
"But you wanted some good examples. Here, this guy." You now pull out a photo of another young man, this one with a mane of wild hair. "Crazy Ivan. We know he's tied to Uranus, because he's crazypants, and Uranus is crazypants."
"What makes him crazypants?" Patterson laughs softly.
"Things blow up, things go weird when he's around, it's like they become possessed. Just yesterday, one of our zampos got caught in a classic Crazy Ivan trap. It was the middle of the night, no one on the roads, and in the middle of a roundabout, three driverless street sweepers appeared and did a minuet around his car, boxing him in for five full minutes. Then they drove off." You shake your head. "Then there's this one. Greystoke."
"Are all these guys eternally young or something?" Patterson asks as he stares at a picture of an intense-looking man with dark hair.
"No, they've got some oldsters, and they seem to age normally. They just seem to be clustered right now around the thirty mark. Anyway, Greystoke is one you really have to watch out for. He's got a wicked punch and something like Jedi mind powers for picking things up and throwing them. We think he's their Mars. Nerio would so love to take him apart."
You continue in this way through the other five photographs. "Brunhilde. Another really dangerous one. She's probably Venus. You've got to keep an eye cocked on the vegetation when she's around, and that includes the grass. This is Dragon. We're not sure about him, but there's a story that five Spartacus soldiers once walked into a room that contained nothing but a music box he'd made, and when a sixth soldier walked in later, he found nothing but their combat boots lined up in a circle around it. Oh, and inside the boots were their feet, ankles and the bottom halves of their calves."
"No shit? What happened to the rest of them?"
"No one knows, but the story goes that there was a pool of blood inside the music box, and it wouldn't stop playing the Chopin Funeral March, where before it played the theme to 'Love Story'."
You flip to another photo. "Speaking of pools of blood, this is Elmore—"
"Christ, he looks like a homeless man."
"Stinks like one, too. He's another one we're not sure about. Maybe Saturn, 'cos he's old. Or maybe he's their Mars character, and Greystoke is some other one, maybe Neptune. Anyway, him and this chick here, Firecracker?" You set Elmore's photo next to one of a small Japanese woman. "The two of them busted into Yam once upon a time. She had a katana and he had a meat cleaver. Fifty-eight corpses later, they walk out with some little girl that Yam had in custody. Of those fifty-eight casualties, the katana only got twelve. The rest were his kills. Oh, and neither of them so much as broke a fingernail."
"And what's her planet supposed to be?"
"The Sun, we think. That katana is like a fuckin' light saber. And finally this one—"
"Yowza."
"Hotchka," you correct him. "That's the sound Muniz made when he saw her, and when the rest of us saw her we also said—"
"Hotchka?"
"Exactly."
"But what does that mean?"
"It means 'Yowza'. It means, Hey baby how about you come back to my place so I can melt in your lap." You sigh deeply and lovingly over the girl's Cossack features. "Mercury, we think. She can move faster than anybody we've ever seen."
When you've drunk in enough of Hotchka, you sit back and close your eyes. The alcohol is beginning to catch up to you. But Patterson shuffles through the stack, studying each face intently.
And then he asks the question you hoped he wouldn't. "Where's the other one?"
"What other one? That's all there are."
"Bullshit." He turns to you. "These faces were on the wall back at Diana. But there were ten of them, and there's only nine here. And there are ten projects in Dark Stars. So who's the tenth celebrity?"
You sigh. "No one knows," you say. "We only picked up on Hotchka last year."
"You mean you haven't found the tenth one?"
"Nope. Presumably he or she is out there, but—"
"So whose photo was it that Knotts pulled from the wall?"
"No one's. It's a picture of the full moon, taken out of focus, as a kind of a placeholder."
"So why the excitement tonight?"
You squirm a little and don't meet Patterson's eye. "Someone was playing a practical joke earlier in the week, and after what happened today it suddenly seemed in bad taste. Nerves on edge. That's all."
Patterson stares at you a good long time, but you ignore him. You're getting comfortably, pleasantly sleepy, despite the discomfiture caused by this turn in the conversation, and you'd like to use it to bluff Patterson into giving up on it.
But he doesn't. He shuffles through the photos, and arranges them and rearranges them, and mutters over them. Finally he leans back. "You mentioned all the planets except Pluto and the Moon," he says. "And you didn't give Dragon a planet. So he gets one of them, and the mystery celebrity gets the other one."
"Well, these days astronomers say Pluto isn't really a planet," you observe. "So maybe there's only nine planets, only nine celebrities out there. Dragon is the Moon, and the mystery celebrity is a ghost." An involuntary shiver runs through you when you realize what you've said.
"But Fane thinks there's ten of them. Ten projects. Why?"
"Beats me, man. I said you could have the bed, and I'm ready to crash." You start to get up, but—
"He's the Moon," Patterson says suddenly. "Dragon is Pluto, and the mystery celebrity is the Moon. Right? You even said it's the Moon in the picture you guys are using."
"I said we don't even know if there really is a—"
"But Fane thinks there is, and they started up Diana to make exotic tech to go with the Moon, to mimic that celebrity." He stares at you intently, and speaks slowly. "Shadow warriors. Ninjas. Masters of disguise. Why would they do that, except—?" His hand goes to his shoulder where, under his shirt, there is a tattoo. "The tenth guy, the mystery one. Those would be his powers. That's why you can't find him."
You look away. A cold pit is forming in your stomach.
"And you and Knotts and everyone else," Patterson says slowly, "are worried that he's inside Diana."
"Spoiler--4"  You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
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