Blackjack Dead or Alive (The Blackjack Series Book 3) (28 page)

Sharing a bed with that woman was an experience. Nearly as tall as me, she was broad in the shoulder and back, and each leg was chiseled from granite. An athlete without her gifts, Apogee was thick and muscular, while still maintaining her feminine lines.

She also liked to sleep in the nude.

I took off my boxers and matched her, expecting a bit of an after-hours workout, but she rolled away from me after a soft kiss and settled into her side of the bed. I sat there, looking at her in disbelief. Apogee must have sensed my frustration because she turned back to me.

“What?”

I smiled and raised an eyebrow.

“Oh,” she said and adjusted herself so she could face me.

“Yeah,” I said, leaning in, but she checked me with her hand.

“This is going to suck,” she said. “But bear with me.”

“Oh, God…”

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s probably best if we don’t.”

I leaned back on the pillow, “I have the hottest woman on the planet in bed with me and you’re telling me I can’t do anything to you?”

“Well, it’s like a prize boxer before the-“

“Wait a minute,” I snapped. “What about last night?”

She smiled, “I had to get laid.”

“Convenient,” I said, then got an idea. “Okay, so I’m the prize boxer and I should save it up, huh?”

Apogee nodded.

“But we’re not having a fight in a ring, with rules. No one’s going to be wearing gloves and there’s not going to be a judge. Right?”

She furrowed her brow, not following.

“I mean, we’re going to fight for our lives. We may die.”

Apogee smiled and looked down at my muscled chest and stomach. “I see where you’re going with this. This might be our last chance.”

She leaned in and kissed me.

“Very convincing, sir.”

I rolled atop her, kissing her hard, and threw the sheets aside.

*              *              *              *

The next morning, I checked in on a bleary-sounding Bubu, and the report was grim. In trying to fix the problem with the online code, they had erased part of it, and lost hours of work by having to return to a backup. By mid-day, I was tired of sitting in the command center and sought Apogee out for another training session.

As we made our way to the training spot, I said, “How much do you know about fighting with kicks?”

“I’m trained in a couple of different martial arts. You liked the kicking work?”

“My double was really effective with it. They hit hard, and kept me on the defensive. I don’t know, it was just-”

“Pressure,” she said.

“Yes, constant pressure. I couldn’t defend myself, I couldn’t reset.”

“Show me his stance,” she said as we arrived at our training spot, and I tried to replicate Blackjack 2.0’s fighting style. It was wider, more splayed, with the legs ready and active, always moving.

“Looks like Muay Thai,” she said.

“He kicked a lot,” I said. “Shit, it’s all he did.”

She beckoned me, “Show me.”

I tried to depict one of his kicks, a bad imitation of his athletic maneuvers.

Apogee stayed close, waiting to the last minute to stop the kick with a coiled leg and blocking arm. She not only stopped my attack, which was half-powered to begin with, but pushed it off. I lost my balance and stumbled back.

“What was that?”

“Huh?” She dropped her guard, confused.

“That push thing,” I said. “It was brilliant.”

Apogee giggled, “You don’t just block the kick, Dale. You attack it.”

I stepped away, circling. “Interesting.”

“Always attack. Always. Even when defending,” she said, drilling in the lesson. “Okay, so he’s fond of wide kicks. That’s good. We can work on some simple blocking to defend against that stuff. Muay Thai is hard core, but it’s not the worst thing out there, so we-“

“Wait,” I said, recalling another type of kick Blackjack 2.0 was fond of. “He also did this thing – it was weird. He coiled his leg, like this.” I brought my knee up to my chest then snapped a low kick outward.

“Savate,” she said. “Boxe Francais Savate, a French style. So he uses Muay Thai to attack from the outside, and Savate for inside moves. Get closer than that and he starts throwing elbows and knees to rock your world. Tricky little fucker.”

I gestured to the scars and bruises on my face.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “He knows some flashy stuff but that won’t save him from big, bad Blackjack.”

I was smitten by her boundless enthusiasm. It was contagious, even if I was still feeling the pain from the most recent ass kicking. She lapsed into deep thought, idly scratching at the back of her head while nibbling at her bottom lip, and I fell in love with her all over again. Oblivious to my goggling, she said, “You take too much punishment. You charge into the fight and get mauled, but there’s a basic principle of martial arts, the Ring of Fire.”

She positioned herself a few steps from me. “From here, I can’t kick you. I can’t punch you,” she said, matching with a kick and punch combo that proved too distant to hit me. Her fist had no chance, almost three feet from my face, but her foot came within a few inches. “From this range, I can’t hit you, regardless of what I do,” she said. “This is the Ring of Fire. Move in closer and I can tag you.”

“So I get hit a couple of times, then-“

“How’d that go for you the last time?”

I shrugged, “Ask the dude with thermite on his balls.”

“Say again?”

“I dropped a thermite grenade down his pants.”

“That’s the stuff that burns forever?”

I nodded and Apogee giggled, “Then there’s one advantage you have over him.”

“Never underestimate the power of breathing. Oxygen does the body good.”

“You sure you got him?”

“I didn’t take his pulse, but he looked pretty crispy. If he’s not dead, he certainly won’t be eating, peeing, or shitting the way normal people do. Not without reconstructive surgery.”

She smiled at that and said, “Two of you. How did the world not spin off its axis?”

“He wasn’t me,” I said. “And he wasn’t the only nightmare Haha lined up for us. You got anymore words of wisdom besides don’t get hit?”

“I think I do,” she said, squaring up. “Kicks are powerful, but there’s a lot of technique that goes into the motions and understanding the spacing.”

“I’m a fast learner.”

“True, but full speed combat isn’t the place to find out your timing is off or your spacing is wrong. The other drill we did was pretty straightforward. Even if you get it wrong, you should have enough space to reset.”

“So we’re back to me getting mauled?”

“Just be quiet for a second,” she said. She studied me for a full minute before beckoning me forward. “Ok, let’s do this. Throw the big punch.”

I complied, throwing a half speed punch at her right temple. Instead of stepping away from it, she took a little half step inside the punch’s radius and used her arm to block, covering the entire side of her head and ear. The arm was locked tight like a triangle with the tip of her elbow pointed high. Her small step was enough to catch my fist on the meaty part of her bicep, the rest of the force distributed along her arm and shoulder.

Our skin had barely connected when she snaked her other arm onto my shoulder, slipping her blocking arm next to it, and brought me in tight. I didn’t realize her knee was moving until it thrust deep into my gut. She moved without the benefit of super speed, and put the barest force into the knee, but I felt my breakfast roiling around in my gut.

I belched loud as she stepped away from me. “You ok?”

“Yeah,” I said, placating her with a gesture. “What happened to not getting hit?”

“We both know a fist is eventually going to find that rock hard head of yours. This gives you a tool to turn it to your advantage. For my money, the knee is the most effective striking surface on the body. All the power of the kick, but much more versatile.”

“Show me,” I said and we got to work.

The castle was quiet by the time we returned. The gypsies had left, taking a fair amount of the dwindling petty cash on their way out. It hadn’t been the first wad of cash that had disappeared during our short association, but I suspected it would be the last. Dinner was warming in the oven, spiced meat, potatoes, and the bread, which I’d come to think of as Vertina’s calling card. That woman could make me bread anytime, anyplace. Next time I needed a feeding tube, I wanted Vertina’s bread mix thinned out and running straight into my gut.

Bubu appeared in the kitchen as Apogee was dishing out the food. “You guys been back long?” he said.

“Just got in,” I said, uncorking a couple of wine bottles. He was scanning between Apogee and I, and I felt him looking for a reason to leave. “Hungry?”

“No, bro. I had some before my nap.”

“Nonsense,” Apogee said. “Sit and join us. Please.”

Bubu shrugged at me, and set the table. The utensils were all store bought. I was pretty sure the aerogels would have been fine to eat with, but Bubu had been less enthusiastic. In his mind, there wasn’t much point fighting for our lives to die from cancer after eating toxic compounds. He told me all of this while huffing one of those nasty Romanian cigarettes, and was genuinely puzzled when I couldn’t stop laughing.

At first we ate in silence. The meat was a little well done for my taste, but it had a smoky flavor that made up for it. The sounds of the meal were getting cloying when Apogee said, “So Bogdan, Dale tells me you’re an accountant?”

Bubu stopped mid-bite and looked at me. It was my turn to shrug, and he said, “I have a piece of paper in a box that says I graduated from university next to an envelope of transcripts nobody cares about. But I have never been an accountant.”

“I think we can help each other,” she said, as if he had not spoken. She waved an empty fork around the room. “Dale comes up with things like this, life altering, world changing technology, and the only thing he can think to do with it is build a castle to play in.”

“Wait a damn second-” I said, but she cut me short with her fingers on my mouth.

“I know you see more, Bogdan. And so do I.”

I was about to start again, when Bubu said, “Where are you going with this?”

“I’m on the board of several charities. Most of them focus on cleaning up the messes we make. I’m sure you’ve seen what happens when supers fight?”

Bubu nodded. “I saw the video where he fought Lord Mighty.”

“D.C. is still rebuilding, homes, businesses, but also public utilities. Schools were destroyed, and hospitals.”

Bubu looked around the castle and said, “How much you think we could make?”

“A lot of that depends on you,” she said slyly, her eyes twinkling. “A business needs smart people making decisions.”

“But,” I said.

“I would keep it independent,” Bubu said, interrupting me. “Fuck stocks and shareholders. I don’t need the headaches.”

“Exactly,” Apogee said. “And there would be an immediate groundswell of interest for the unique services you would provide.”

“We could base it out of the U.K.,” he said. “Make it easier to coordinate with the charities that would be the bulk of our clients.”

“Think of the good we could do,” Apogee said, getting a little louder as she got excited.

“And the money we could make,” Bubu said, almost on top of her. “I could send Emil to the best schools.”

“Can I say something,” I broke in, almost growling, and they both turned to me, shocked out of their individual reveries.

“Of course, darling,” Apogee said. “It’s your technology. We would love your input.”

I felt my upper lip curl in a snarl, but what I said was, “It’s a really great idea.”

“Well I’m glad that’s settled,” she said, her smile mocking and beautiful. She lifted her glass and Bubu followed. “Cheers.”

They toasted with faux crystal goblets, and I tried to be irritated with them, but found it impossible. They looked to me, their glasses still touching and I added mine to the pair.

It was a little after two in the morning when the alarms went off. Buzzed and exhausted, I was a little slow on the uptake, the staccato ping a siren’s call pulling me from deep slumber. Louder alarms blared down the halls of Castle Black, resonating down the tall, empty corridors and chambers. The blankets flew away from me in a gust of wind, and Apogee was dressed in full costume faster than my eye could track.

“Showtime,” she said with a playful smile.

I looked past her, expecting the attack to come at any moment, but the billiard room was silent. I threw off my shirt and pajama pants, heading for my suit, which lay on a mannequin in the corner of the room. I reached for the Superdynamic suit, and my combat pants, noticing Apogee still standing at the door. She had a funny look on her face.

“What?” I said.

“You can do this,” she said. I was expecting a comment about my body, or about the similarity of this moment with the many times I watched her change during our original interlude.

“I’ll be fine,” I said, returning to the task of putting on my suit.

“I believe in you, Dale.”

I looked in the mirror behind her and saw myself. My body was a canvass of bruises and scrapes from my trip to Amsterdam, and the simple action of putting on a t-shirt was too much for me. Hell, I could barely raise my arms over my shoulders. She helped me get into the costume; first guiding my legs into the tight-fitting suit Superdynamic had designed for me. It molded to my body as she slipped my arms into the short sleeves and slipped it over my head.

I didn’t feel comfortable wearing only Superdynamic’s suit, and threw on my usual gear on top of it. She kept the usual snarky remarks at bay, tucking the shirt into my pants, buttoning them, and closing the zipper. Looping the belt around my waist, she latched the buckle.

“Can you bend over?” she said one of my Asskickers in hand. They were a new design, created by the 3D printers. I hadn’t had a chance to test them yet, but they were a rugged black leather build with advanced flight surfaces to help maintain a more level flight.

I tried, and clenched my teeth as sharp pain lit my midsection aflame.

“What am I going to do with you?” she said.

I took a few steps back and sat on the bed as she knelt, working the first boot into my massive foot. “You know me, Apogee. I’ll manage.”

She chuckled, “I know you, alright. But you know that nothing ever goes as planned. You should know that better than anyone.”

“I blame you, sexing me up last night,” I said, bringing a smile on her face as she knelt before me.

“There,” she said, wrangling my feet into the boots and snapping the clasps tight on the hard leather. She eased away and I stood, testing them. They were a good fit, specific to the minute differences between my feet.

“Not bad,” I said, reaching for the vest rig and slipping it on carefully. It attached to over my shoulders to my belt, with loops that wrapped around the thickest part of my thighs. Sixteen pouches lined the rig, four to each side of my chest, six along my waistband and two more in hip holster rigs – normally designed to carry a pistol, modified to handle more of my gadgets and tricks.

The new costume was a huge improvement over anything I had put together before, with a new design for the semi-rigid cape, an integrated smoke grenade system, and a vanish polarizer that allowed me, if I stood still, to nearly disappear, even in broad daylight. I had eschewed the goggles, which always ended up getting destroyed, for contacts built with same micro-circuitry that I used for a lot of the trick arrows. The result was a full sensor suite, multiple light spectrums, sonar, and radar, all of it integrated to a wrist computer I had rebuilt from scratch – with ten times the processing power.

I hobbled to the corner of the room and picked up the final pieces of the ensemble. The English longbow was not handmade yew, there wasn’t time for that and even the best 3D printer couldn’t replicate that intricate and time-honored process. The wood grain finish was as authentic looking as anything else in the castle, but I felt the difference in the weight and pull. The quiver was a masterpiece, two dozen different arrowheads, the love child of my imagination and unlimited resources, each of them fitted in a slot which fed to my contacts via Bluetooth, allowing me to decide which arrow I needed on the fly.

I threw on my hood and poncho combo, with the hover cape bundled like a parachute on my back. I raised my face cowl and ran out after Apogee when my cell phone rang. It was Bubu. “What is it?” I said.

“Three planes are circling,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t use the pager. We’re not online yet.”

I was jogging after Apogee, fighting every creak in my knees, ever-painful protest from my aching midsection, when it struck me, and I stopped.

“Say that again?” I said.

“Come on,” Apogee said, but I waved her off.

“Bubu, say that again!”

“It’s three planes,” he said.

“No, the last part. Are we online or not?”

“Not yet, bro.”

We were still in the billiard room, and I looked at the monitor set in the wall, one of dozens installed throughout the castle. Each of them was linked to our closed off network, capable of receiving feeds from any of the cameras mounted inside the castle, including the ones the drones carried on their frames. Turning it on, I tried to use my onboard interface to control the channel selection, but nothing happened.

“It’s not time to watch Jeopardy, Dale,” Apogee said. Bubu was still in my ear, explaining that the team was still trying to handshake the drone control program with the weapon software without luck. I put the cell down on a barstool and used the monitor’s buttons to manually run through the different feeds.

“Bubu says we’re not up,” I said, feeling Apogee hovering behind me.

“So?”

I turned back to her, “Then how the fuck did he find us?”

“Who cares?” she said. “Let’s go out there and kick his robot ass once and for all.”

I shook my head as the channels finally reached the signals of the individual drones. Tapping the button rapidly, I raced through the feeds, the drones hovering at different points around the castle, some of them bobbing right behind us. I kept the flipping channels until I reached the external defense net. Some of the successfully rigged drones flew a perimeter around the castle. One of them had sounded the alarm in the first place.

“If we’re not online, then Haha can’t break in,” I said. “It was all for nothing. The drones aren’t even-“

“Wait,” she said from over my shoulder, tapping me hard enough to feel through all the layers of clothing. “You see it?”

It flickered past the drones, and was gone. I flipped back through the channels slowly until it reappeared. I found it again, flying a perimeter around the furthest picket of drones, a few hundred feet from the steep hill upon which the castle was built. It was so fast it almost slipped out of view again, but these drones were equipped with ultraviolet cameras to guard against nighttime incursions.

Sleek and gleaming silver, it reconnoitered in a wide arc around the castle’s defensive perimeter, settling on one of the drones and shadowing it with some excellent piloting. I felt Apogee’s hand on my shoulder. She recognized the plane, too.

“That’s Epic,” I said, feeling my heart drop to the floor.

Apogee leaned in for a better look, shaking her head in disbelief. We both watched as a bright flash erupted from the nose of the plane, and the drone’s signal died. I was about to start flipping channels when the screen switched to a radar view that showed two more planes hovering around the castle.

“You seeing this, bro?” Bubu said.

“That makes no sense,” Apogee said.

“How long until we can go weapons hot, Bubu,” I asked over coms.

“I can’t communicate with the guys,” he said. “We must be getting jammed.”

I ran the scenario in my head. Three planes could mean anywhere between twenty and thirty supers. Even if the drones were functioning properly, that was too many. The castle’s defenses weren’t built to deal with numbers, and that didn’t take the diverse power sets into account. They would tear down the walls and bypass the traps, and the stasis chambers wouldn’t be able to handle the load should we prevail.

Hell, Epic alone was enough to ruin the whole plan. The first time we fought, I caught him by surprise, my rage overpowering his raw strength, but this time he’d be ready. Even if I could get it down to just him and me, he wouldn’t take me as lightly as he did on Hashima. Epic was coming with his A-game, and it was evident in the sheer firepower he had brought to bear.

“It makes no sense,” Apogee said again, mumbling incredulously.

“Could they have followed you?” I asked.

“You don’t think that I-“

“I’m not accusing you of a damned thing, Apogee,” I snapped. “But it’s possible. Your suit has a tracker, right?”

She looked down at the monitor, “Goddamnit. I’m so sorry, Dale.”

“No, no,” I said. “I’m just thinking that we can use that against them.”

Apogee stared at me in disbelief.

“They came here for you, right?” I said. “They don’t know for sure that we’re here, or that the castle is a trap.”

Shaking her head, she was about to say something but I interrupted her.

“We have the element of surprise.”

“Please tell me you’re not thinking of fighting that.”

“I’ve dealt with worse.”

She crossed her arms and stood in my way, “I’d love to hear about it, and about the time you beat two dozen top of the line heroes by yourself.”

“Well, not heroes-“

“You know Epic, Dale. Hell, I know him. He won’t come with a bunch of nobodies. You might not know this, but since the Utopia breakout, he’s been out there putting the worst guys away. That team of his is designed to bring you in. He’ll have backup, and a perimeter setup so you can’t get away.”

“I’m not going back to jail,” I told her.

She swallowed, “There are worse places.”

Could she be in on it? Did they send her to talk me out of fighting?

I must have been giving her a funny look, because Apogee recoiled, “Please tell me you’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking.” Her eyes filled with scorn, and her face twisted in anger.

“For a second, yeah, but I’m sorry.”

“If I wanted to bring you in, Dale McKeown, you’d be in handcuffs in a power suppressing room, waiting for the judge.”

I wanted to kiss her, but she turned away from me, her attention on the ships.

“Anyway, we don’t have time for this,” she said.

I sat against the pool table as Bubu chimed in over coms, “Bro, they’re landing.”

“So what do I do?”

She came to me, taking my hands, “You’re going to be fine, Dale.”

I shook my head, “I’m a convicted felon.”

“It will be different this time. I’ll be beside you. That will count for something.”

“That’s not how they work, Maddie. No, first they’re going to try me for all the shit that happened in Utopia, even though I had nothing to do with it.”

She squeezed my hands, as if trying to knock some sense into me, “Jesus, Dale, you saved the President’s life. I’ll make them remember that.”

“Like you did last time?” I wanted to say, but there was little bitterness left in my heart towards Apogee. She was here, trying to help me, trying to find a way out, but she was a hero, a good guy, and she only saw one alternative.

“There’s another way out,” I said.

Apogee cocked her head with a little smile, like when you catch a small child telling a lie. “It’s over, Dale. Don’t you see that?”

“Not necessarily,” I said as I kissed her hand and bounced off the table, heading downstairs, with her close behind.

“Bubu, we’re leaving,” I said into coms.

“Got it,” he said.

“Dale,” Apogee said, grabbing my hand to halt me. “I don’t want to fight those people. I’ll have friends down there.”

I put my hand on her shoulder to give her some reassurance. “Don’t worry. You’re not going to fight anyone. Hell, I’m not going to fight anyone, if things go right. But I am going to need you to play a role in this.”

“What,” she said, exhaling in exasperation.

“You’re going to be my bait.”

*              *              *              *

We gathered in one of the trap rooms, a lower level chamber that for all outward appearances looked like a huge dining hall, decorated for a wedding. Apogee didn’t like the plan at all, but what convinced her in the end was that it was clever, and it required humiliating Epic. I tied her up, and Bubu recorded me ranting like a mad man.

“Where’s the tracker?” I asked her.

“What’s going through your sick little mind?”

I smiled, “Well, it’s easier than taking off your whole suit.”

She put both her balled fists at her hips.

“I need cheese, Apogee. You’re the cheese.”