The funnel cloud seemed to lose energy; then a torrential wall of wind smashed into Modular Man from above. His flight path staggered downward. Saint Elmo’s fire played around his figure as energy surged through his generators. He fought the wind shear, reeled upward, then realized that there had to be a better way to do this.
He ceased struggling against the wind and, tumbling, allowed it to cast him downward. He flailed with hands and feet. He hoped he would look completely out of control. Trajectory calculations flashed through his macro-atomic mind. The gray surge of the moat spun nearer. Spray leapt up as the wind struck the water. The android called on his flux generators to sideslip him out of the grasp of the wind shear, then called on his full energies to stop his descent. Gravity tugged at him as his descent slowed. Spray filled the air. The android streamlined his weapons over his back and gave himself maximum lateral thrust. He shot out of the wind shear’s grasp like an orange pip squeezed between finger and thumb.
With any luck Cyclone thought he’d been smashed into the moat — the spray might have concealed his escape. Modular Man raced back into the fog bank, then sped north at wave-top height, following the curve of the outer curtain wall. Once he was thoroughly hidden in the fog, he rose, skimmed over the wall, and began a long ascending curve toward the Brooklyn shore.
He should be well behind Cyclone now. He shot straight up into sunlight, seeing the boiling fog below, the waterspouts dancing over the water, the ruined gatehouse. Cyclone and Mistral were facing away from him. He rose above Mistral in a curving are, calculations flashing through his mind.
He was in the perfect bounce position, above and behind the two aces. He was dropping out of the sun and their billowing cloaks prevented them from checking their six o’clock.
He couldn’t lose. Mistral was going to fall, then Cyclone.
This was going to be murder.
He reached the top of his arc, began to descend. Deployed the laser.
He didn’t have a choice.
He’d been ordered to defend the gate.
He couldn’t think of a way to do that without killing Cyclone and his daughter.
He remembered how he’d fought against the Swarm alongside Mistral, the way she’d hovered over the scenes of the worst disaster, her wind power tearing at the invaders.
He thought of what the microwave laser would do, stimulate the water content of Mistral’s body until her flesh exploded in a blast of steam.
He didn’t want to do this.
And then the rearmost of the two waterspouts, the one that hadn’t hit the Wall yet, lurched forward.
Heading straight for Cyclone.
There was a lengthy moment when Modular Man couldn’t comprehend what his sensory apparatus was telling him.
The funnel took Cyclone from behind and swallowed him. There was a brief impression of arms and legs spinning, of fragments of costume being torn away.
Modular Man hovered, undecided.
The funnel spat Cyclone out and began to disperse. Cyclone tumbled, his famous cloak in rags. His arms and legs fluttered in air.
Then a wind picked him up, buoyed him slightly, altered his trajectory. His arms and legs moved feebly, as if he was trying to move — or perhaps that was just the wind.
The wind increased in velocity. Cyclone began to tumble. He picked up speed very rapidly.
The wind smashed him against the outer curtain Wall of the Rox. Modular Man almost winced at the force of the impact. Cyclone slid off the Wall into the angry, wind-whipped sea. It swallowed him instantly.
The two waterspouts faded. The fog began to roll in again.
Mistral began to fly toward the Rox. Modular Man was still high and behind her, undetected.
Jumped, Modular Man thought.
Mistral penetrated Bloat’s Wall without hesitation and Bloat’s remaining fish-knights parted to allow her to pass.
Modular Man followed her all the way to where the governor waited.
The huge wooden gate grew stronger by the moment.
Inside the barbican, jokers were jeering at him through the slit windows. Tom ignored the taunts, summoned his telekinetic battering ram once more, and hit the gate again.
The crunch of impact echoed through the tog. On his screens, he saw the center of the gate give under the blow. The cracks in the wood widened visibly. Another dozen hits and he’d smash through… except…
The gate was healing itself. Tom watched it happen. Wood reached out to wood; the great, gaping cracks narrowed, faded, and were gone. He zoomed in tight, saw black iron veins creeping slowly through the grain, groping toward each other, thickening. Veins of metal deep in the wood.
“HE’S TURNING THE WHOLE THING TO IRON,” he told Danny through his speakers, his voice thick with frustration.
He heard the voices jeering down from fog-shrouded parapets above, glimpsed joker faces peering out through the slit windows. Someone tossed a Molotov cocktail down out of the fog, but the shell was too far back. He watched it arc out and hit a good ten yards shy. A fireball blossomed briefly on the water.
“The Jersey Gate is down,” Danny told him. “Detroit Steel’s inside the gatehouse. Snot took a direct hit with an armor-piercing shell. You ought to see him now. So are we going to the dance or what?”
A machine gun opened up somewhere above them, firing blindly through the fog. Danny swore and returned fire. Tom frowned, tightened his grip on the arms of his chair, and hit the gate again. The crash sounded more metallic than wooden this time. Again the gate gave a little, then held.
“Radha’s high enough,” Danny reported. “She’s moving in. The windy twins have a nice tornado going in the east, that ought to hold Bloat’s attention awhile.”
On screen, Tom watched random fire kick up the water of the bay. Another Molotov cocktail came spinning out from the gatehouse. The iron snakes were melting into each other, mating, becoming solid metal bars.
Shots went pinging off the steel plate.
“Shit!” Danny cried out in alarm. “Too damn close!”
“YOU ALL RIGHT?” Tom asked.
“For now,” she said. “How long you planning to park here? Not that I’m complaining, but one of us isn’t wrapped in armor plate, remember?”
Tom grimaced. He could smash the fucking gate. He knew it, even if the jokers inside did not. He could imagine what it would be like. It left a bad taste in his mouth. He twisted the volume of his speakers up to maximum. “LISTEN UP IN THERE. YOU GUYS IN THE GATEHOUSE. ANYONE UP ON THE WALLS. GET OUT OF THERE. NOW.”
Hoots and catcalls were all the reply he got. The gate was almost whole now, solid iron fifty feet high.
“That scared ’em,” Danny offered. “Good idea, they’re laughing too hard to shoot.”
“I MEAN IT,” the Turtle insisted. “YOU ASSHOLES WANT TO LIVE, GET THE FUCK OUT OF THERE.”
“Look at the third-floor window, over on the right,” Danny said. “I think they’re trying to tell us something.”
Tom zoomed in on the window. One of the joker guards was mooning them. The window was very narrow. Fortunately, so was the joker’s ass. “Just hold that pose,” Danny said. She aimed and squeezed off a careful round. The joker in the window shrieked, and suddenly vanished.
“Good news and bad news from Jersey,” Danny told him, a little breathlessly. “The good news is, Pulse just showed up.”
“About time,” Tom said, relieved.
“The bad news is, he’s on their side. He’s fighting the Reflector. You ought to see it. It looks like Snot’s inside a cage of light, wrestling with a hundred glowing snakes. His clothes are on fire. I think he’s pissed.”