XII. Fire Tests The Gold
The First Hunt for The Pack's Own Überwolf...
“Watcha thinking, chief? I’ll make it, won’t I?”
Jovian lay on the rack beside Eric’s desk, the elder red mechanic tending to the mountainous hound before him. He had ordered everyone out of the room—even Valentina—and sought to have a heart-to-heart with a figure he never thought he’d see.
“You ain’t some labbed-up cocktail, friend” the haggard working hound chuckled. “You still mostly you. More than I can say for the other fellas who showed up in this office. Though most of ‘em came with more problems, or more hardware. You just got yourself a little of both is all. Mind if I switch your neck-plate up?”
Jovian hesitated at first before parting his massive locks of dark gray hair to one side. “Just be careful you don’t flip ‘em.”
“I’ve rebuilt engines fiddlier than these, pally.” Eric grinned. “And they ain’t what I’m after.” He plugged a short cable into a hole in the bottom right hand corner and plugged the other end into the computer terminal. “Now just relax, and we’ll download the surface. Nothing intrusive, just the basics.”
Jovian’s breath sped up briefly, before he felt the calming hand of the mechanic on his shoulder. “I spend a bunch of my life fighting made-up monsters in a ring, and this is the shit I get scared about.” His voice fluttered like an old cassette.
“And you’ve every right.” Eric smiled, “But you’ve also every right to a good long-n-healthy life. I’m hoping we can get you that chance again.”
“Not the way I look.” the seven-foot gray sighed.
“Friend.” The red mechanic took a stern tone while returning to the terminal. “I’ve seen 100% organic creatures in this desert that’d put your heada hair up in a beehive if you saw them. A black eye and a ribbon-chest plate ain’t gonna kill your chances of leading a good life out here.”
“But what about—”
Eric spun round and shot him a look he hadn’t seen since his father, way back in Haven. Since the night Jovian’s father gave him his first pep-talk before going out into the Colosseum at all.
“You can’t control the past, kid. You can only make peace with it. And I know you ain’t ready for it, but one day, you will be. One day sooner than you’d ever dream.”
Just like that, the download was finished, the wire removed, and the big gray wolf felt that same fatherly embrace in Eric. He didn’t cry, he didn’t erupt into a fountain of emotion. He took the embrace as it came, and Eric showed him what was retrieved on the monitor.
“Well my stoic friend,” he grinned. “That’s what you’re made of. All the biometrics, all implants, all front-facing operating systems. And we ain’t seen anything like this in our hunt. Show the rest of the pack in for this.”
Jovian got up, and greeted the quartet of wolves with his same warm smile and shaggy hair. “I guess we found something!”
First over the threshold were the red couple Marcus and Sabina, who shook the hound’s hand, then Valentina and Brennus. Jovian’s fellow (if shorter) gray met him with a proper Roman handshake, arm-to-arm, while the white-furred leader popped a kiss on the towering hound’s cheek.
“Turns out,” Eric began, one leg up on his chair, “the folks behind the games hid these details in plain sight. This squares fine with what we know of Project Nero, but it gives us specifics on what’s been altered to achieve that superior form.”
First came some of the obvious ones; improved muscle capacity, elevated testosterone, subtle enhancements to the cardiovascular system to offset the strain of the heart. What proved even more fascinating were the artificial enhancements. The colored chest was, in effect, a live calculator, gauging and calibrating moves, current status, and the limits on Jovian’s fighting capacity. His black eye was a classic cybernetic aug; a camera eye through which internal records were kept, improving memory.
Then, of course, came the brain.
“Internally, I ain’t ever seen a mechanism like this.” the scruffy red mechanic continued. “In effect, a personality regulator rigged via fiber-optic cabling, tapping into and reconstituting various parts of the wolven mind through the panel on the neck. The reason he’s still Jovian is because that’s his prime personality. This ‘Tertius’ fellow is what the scientists at the Colosseum aimed him to be. I’ve taken the liberty of filling the dip-switch sliders to keep them in place. They should hold fine and keep him in his prime state.”
Jovian leaned over the computer for a moment, sheepish as he absorbed the explanation. He looked over the diagrams and readouts, broad palms resting on the desk. In the glass came the reflection of himself, his piercing mechanical eye. Then, upon his shoulder, a white hand. Then a gray. Then three reds.
The Pack gathered around the young wolf, and with gentle smiles and reassuring nods, he knew—for now—there were no qualms about himself as a part of the crew.
The next few days were recuperative ones, Jovian taking the time to exercise himself in ways he hadn’t for a while. One was a chest press, the towering hound pushing a car away from him as though it were an unlocked door. Another involved pulling two by the hitch towards him, chains wrapped along his forearm. In both instances, he favored drivers piloting the cars. Both became something of a trust exercise.
One day, he’d have Sabina behind the wheel of his Lincoln. He’d tease her enough to get the pedal down, but knew her hesitance would keep her from gunning the town car. The next, the wolven men in their muscled-up sedans would be at the ends of his chains. To both hounds’ shock, even with the rides opened wide, Jovian could still pull them in.
The closest he ever came to any real danger in the exercise was when he tried his chest presses against Valentina’s Humvee. The white wolf was steady on the throttle, but she could just barely see him over the hood of the jacked-up machine. When he asked for more, she didn’t hesitate, her sandaled paw slipping further and further to the floor until she felt the pedal hit the footwell, and the back tires began to scream. She held it there until she heard the electric roar of the gladiator, shoving the Humvee back far enough for her to see him. She was quick on the brake, and leapt out to make sure he was alright, fearing she almost crushed him.
Instead, she was scooped up in the young hound’s arms and held tight. “Just set my damn PR!” The slim wolf guffawed with relief as she returned the embrace.
The last day saw Marcus getting in on the action, managing to hold out for a solid minute in the “hot-rod pull-up” as he dubbed it, Jovian’s Lincoln and Sabina behind the wheel of their DeSoto putting up a good fight for him. When Jovian checked on him afterwards, he was met with an old Roman handshake, arm-in-arm, and a familiar look in the musclebound red’s eyes; the thrill of triumph.
Valentina, with Eric’s help, also expanded her dossier with everything downloaded from Jovian’s aug software, as well as his testimonies. Every night, the 20-year-old flung open the Lincoln’s door, helped the white-furred leader in, and pinned the pedal down, bolting into the desert night to loosen his nerves. They’d pull off the patted-down dirt road, and Valentina would ask every question she had.
“So you remember entering through the backdoor in Comm/Ent.” she quizzed.
“Yuh-huh.” Jovian nodded. “I don’t know how they did it, but it was like you entered a normal office, then the dressing room, then you walked in and BOOM, there’s the ring! You could see the street clearly, but you couldn’t see it when you drove up.”
“Does the phrase ‘Second Plane’ mean anything to you?”
The gray gladiator shook his head. “Never heard of anything like that. All I ever knew was that address, 368 Webley in Comm/Ent, just a skitch away from the big telescreen boards.”
“The hell’s a skitch?” Val asked.
There was a solitary blink between them before Jovian realized and burst out loud. “Oh shit, I forgot that’s something more in the city than out here. Skitching, yeah. Skating-and-hitching. It’s when you’re riding a hoverboard, and you catch the fender of a passing hovercar with your hand. You get taken for a little ride till you let go. Me and some of my buds used to—”
He stopped himself as a flood of memories washed over his face, his jaw slackened and his organic eye began welling up. “Shit, I miss them.”
Valentina pulled him tight as an ox into her, running her white fingers through his thick black hair. “Felt the same way when Pa died.” she soothed. “I ain’t got nothing but this. Nothing but right now for you.”
It all flowed out of him for only a moment before he calmed down. “Thank God I never did this before a crowd.” he chuckled to himself. “Can’t have the muscleman bawling over bullshit.”
Valentina smirked. “You’re tougher than all four of us combined and you got more guts to boot. You ain’t owe anyone shit when it comes to manhood.” She gave him a friendly nip on his cheek and called it a night.
When all was said and done, it was time again to make their journey westward. With their goodbyes made to Eric once more, off the cavalcade went.
They raced on to make up for lost time, and to get away from the honey pot in Níyol for Jovian’s sake. They gave him a radio for his sleek town car, and he took the drive to properly test it.
“I spy—”
“Sand.” Marcus cut in.
“With my little—”
“Rocks.” came Brennus.
“...just finish it, Val.”
“Cactus.” the white wolf answered from her Humvee. “I get it, it’s boring as shit, big guy. It is what it is.”
“I know, I know.” Jovian sighed. “Would help if you had more than two stations out here.”
“It’d help if we had more than two radio towers, city-boy.” Marcus teased. “Get that paw in ‘yer tank and I’ll show you the nearest one.”
The cream-colored DeSoto leapt off the road and into the desert, the pearl-white Lincoln following suit. Brennus went to join the chase in his slick black Mustang, but was stopped by Valentina over the radio. “Let ‘em have their fun.” she smiled. “They could break our arms if we didn’t.”
The roaring laughs of the two gladiators rang in both wolves’ ears as they pulled off to wait. Five minutes of white-hot engine roars screeched to a halt in the distance, Val and Brennus now worried. When they bolted off-road, they saw why the strong-hounds stopped.
The body of a young tan wolven woman, no older than any of themselves, dead in the desert. Marked with shots of red along her body. Whoever she was, it was no natural death.
“Where’s the nearest town?” Marcus asked grimly.
“Sopwith.” Brennus replied. “A few miles west.”
They made tracks for the town, and hightailed it straight for the sheriff’s office. It was a far more developed hamlet, almost resembling a suburb. And when they arrived, the body loaded in Val’s Humvee, the first words out of the haggard old gray chilled them to the bone.
“That’s 5. Dammit all, that’s 5.”
Sheriff Nic Seal was a proper Old West lawman, right down to the waistcoat and a thick-furred muzzle, bordering on mutton chops. The elder wolf explained the sordid tale of the other four of these types of abduction/slaughter cases to the strangers. All young wolven women in their 20s, all with a drilling of holes in them. He was expecting them to do the usual “oh gosh, that’s awful, we’ll keep an eye out” routine. Two of these killings had been happened upon by wayfarers and the understandably shaken civilians were unable to do more than “keeping an eye out.”
What he didn’t expect was a team of five new night-watch hounds. Even Jovian, for all his peculiar gear and his lone dark eye, was welcomed to the cause with a tentative shake of his large hand.
“If you folks is all together,” Sheriff Seal nodded. “Then I ain’t gonna split hairs about who’s got what in ‘em. Every bit helps.”
They’d need all hands on deck too, for the quiet town of Sopwith was about to endure the loudest evening of its life.
Sopwith was a far more developed town than most, its streets lined with weathered model homes and downtown shopping district. Its many alleys made for a maze of hiding spots. The Pack’s four cars all occupied streets that weren’t being patrolled by the remaining litany of black-and-white sedans. In this way, they enjoyed the benefit of any plain-clothes officer. Jovian made sure to button up his shirt and kept his electric eye peeled. Marcus and Sabina traded binoculars, hunting for any suspicious movement. Brennus slid his black metal stallion into the shadows and waited with steepled fingers.
Then came Valentina.
She kept her gun on her hip, but her windows rolled down. Partly to air out the last lingering scent of the body—her snout still catching acute whiffs of the decay—but also as bait. She was a slim 25, dead in the range of other victims. If the killer was going to come for anyone of the bunch, it would be her.
In Jovian’s district, however, things were beginning to move.
A far younger wolf, a red no older than 15, was walking down the sidewalk. Jovian’s eye scanned her briefly, marking only her name from the flap of her purse, “Angie Stevens.” It was just as the young girl crossed Jovian’s alleyway that he heard an engine rev up from behind. He fired the Lincoln and cut off the path, only to get blown away and sent spinning into the brick facade.
It was an old Dodge Coronet, from the hammering straight-six to its four-eyed dinner-plate headlights, barreling towards the young girl who was sprinting in frantic horror.
Leaping out of the car and bolting ahead of the screaming sedan, Jovian leapt into action and snatched up the teen-aged pup. He tucked her in close to him and rolled away from the sidewalk and onto the astro-turf of a house's lawn, the Coronet barreling towards him. Jovian rolled again, just in time to miss the Coronet’s bumper slam into the base of the house.
The seven-foot gray bounded back towards his town car, the teen under his arm like football. He tossed her into the passenger seat, climbed behind the wheel and slammed the door behind him.
“You’re safe with me.” he panted, getting the car back in gear before radioing in. “We got action on Bleaker. ‘66 Coronet 500, dark green paint.”
Fortunately, the commotion caught everyone’s attention as a swarm of cop cars, as well as Marcus and Brennus’s rides surrounded the bucking sedan. Tried as it might, every ride closed in on it, pushing the car in closer and closer until a half-dozen rides boxed it in, throttles down and tires screaming to keep the car in place. When a shot of laser fire blasted through the back windshield, the whole street stopped.
The driver’s head was blown clean off.
Jovian felt the young red wolf clinging tight to him, shivering with terror. “It’s all over.” he soothed, gently rubbing her back in reassurance. “It’s all over.” Without thinking he parted his long dark locks, his white-pupiled black eye shining through clear as a star. When he realized, he quickly brushed the hair back and turned away from her.
“Are you alright Mister?” she asked innocently.
“I’m fine.” Jovian replied gently. “I just know I can look scary sometimes, especially right now with all this commotion.”
Through her sniffling tears, she looked up and brushed the jet-black hair away. When she saw the eye, she actually began to laugh.
“Why should I be scared of that little thing?” she giggled.
Jovian smiled. “Lotta older folks are, that’s the problem. ‘Nuff about me though, where do you live?”
She pointed down one of the side streets. Jovian was just about to start down when he saw two headlights growing from the distance. First they veered left, then they veered right. Back and forth they swiveled until, into the lamplight of the main street came Valentina’s Humvee, screaming away past the commotion as a gray hand squeezed her neck, a damn-near naked wolf hanging off the side of the SUV.
“Marc, Brenn!” Jovian hollered. “Val’s in trouble!”
The DeSoto and Mustang broke from the formation and bolted away towards the Humvee as it sped out of town.
For Valentina, the bait proved too perfect, the gray producing not a gun but a slender black blade, protruding out the top of his balled fist. One wrong jerk of the wheel and Valentina would be skewered. Worst still, neither Brennus nor Marcus could line a shot on him. If they went for the head, the laser fire would still have enough energy to pass right through Valentina.
In the vice grip of the cruel gray, eyes furiously scanning the white wolf’s body, Valentina could see the blade receding. When it fully slid back, she slammed both paws on the brakes, the Humvee skidding through the desert sand, only for their assailant to swing himself from the side of the Humvee and onto the hood. Val shoved her paw down on the gas and sent the beige SUV bolting onwards.
Brennus and Marcus got up to speed and started taking their shots, only to find that laser fire was only removing the top layers of flesh and fur, revealing bloodied metal beneath them. It paid them no attention, eyes focused solely on Valentina behind the wheel. Deeper and deeper she gazed into the eyes until, as if thrown headlong down a fugue state, she was no longer in the Wastelands.
She was back in the ring.
She was back in the Colosseum.
There upon her hood, one of the gray robotic guards, eyes black as the midnight and glowering furiously. She felt her clothes slip away, denim and cotton evaporating, the leather beneath her paws no more. It seemed as though the arena was endless; an endless procession of arches, seats, and screaming “fans,” the miserable city-dwelling devils.
It went on forever, until it didn’t.
Quickly she saw the wall of Colosseum coming into view, her paw practically glued to the throttle, unable to move. She heard the crowd chant something, muffled at first, before the word came out loud and clear, and in the voice of her lover, Brennus.
“STOP! STOP! STOP!”
Val broke from the trance and slammed the brakes. Back in her jeans and tank-top, back with leather straps wrapped about her paws, and just in time to see her assailant fly off her hood and onto the desert floor with a hard thud.
The second the body landed, there came a pale town car to crush it.
It was Jovian. His Lincoln cleared 120 when it bounded over the android, a shot of red mist arcing above the Humvee’s hood. He backed over it at 100 to the same effect.
When the four-eyed Lincoln skidded to a stop, Jovian waved Val on with a flick of his fingers; it was her job to finish the job. She leaned over to see a metal skeleton staring back, body almost flattened. A fistful of dirt in his metal hand was all she needed to know he was ready to pounce. Val hit the gas first and pinned the busted machine to the ground. Before they did him in for good, she wanted answers. And answers she got.
“Welton Bludhorn had a P.D.0. out on him from Hell Patrol Central.” Sheriff Seal radioed from the scene in the middle of town. “When he knew the jig was up, he stopped dancing. But our girls are too old for the likes of him.”
“Then I think I know who’s really been killing your 20-somethings.” Val replied coldly. “He’s a bot. But for what end I don’t know. I’ll hack him and see.”
Valentina stepped out, letting out a dry cough before looking over the squirming, fidgeting mess. “That wasn’t just a vision I saw, was it?” she glowered.
“Whaddya mean Val?” Brennus asked, resting a gray hand on her shoulder.
“I mean I saw the Colosseum when I looked at this bastard’s eyes. I fought plenty of creeps and weirdos out here without ever losing it like that. Every time I ever see that place, it’s always because there’s some part of them from it. Why this one?”
She knelt down to look, just as a freed metal hand, blade protruding, came wheeling towards her...
