Simon Green - For Heaven's Eyes Only

The armed men in front of me stopped firing and fell back to let someone else through. He was carrying a massive armament known in the trade as Puff the Magic Dragon. He was a big man, and he still had to strain to carry the thing and point it in my general direction. He opened fire, and the long barrel pumped out five thousand explosive rounds a second. The sheer pressure of so many bullets slamming into me at once actually pushed me backwards. My strange matter was absorbing every single bullet and suppressing every explosion, but the sheer impact pressed me back like a fire hose. Until I dug my golden heels in. The wooden boards shattered underneath me, and my golden feet dug deep into the hard, stony ground. My backward momentum slowed and then stopped, my golden feet leaving long, deep grooves in the ground. I held my position, leaning slightly forward into the thundering fire, like a swimmer breasting the tide. And then, step by step, I forced my way forward against the pressure of the bullets. They hammered into me, raking across my chest and gut and then up to my head, but none of them could touch me. Until finally I stood right before the man and his gun, close enough that he could see his white, wide-eyed face reflected in my featureless golden mask. And then I ripped Puff the Magic Dragon out of his nerveless hands, broke it over my knee and crumpled the two pieces into junk with my armoured hands.

“Run,” I said. And he did.

I looked around, and Molly stepped out from behind a particularly sturdy booth. Even a Metcalf sister has enough sense to hide from that dragon. A man with an automatic rifle stepped out from a booth opposite and opened fire on her. I didn’t even have time to react. Molly stuck out one hand, and the bullets turned into butterflies in midair long before they reached her. Pretty pink butterflies, like animated scraps of sugar floss. But Molly had been through a lot recently, and her magic resources had to be running low. And the man didn’t seem to be running out of bullets. They inched steadily closer towards her before turning into butterflies and flying away. I left it as long as I could, for Molly’s pride’s sake, but in the end I couldn’t stand it anymore. So I picked up the nearest booth and hit the man with it. He disappeared from sight without a sound. Molly lowered her hand, breathed heavily for a moment and then glared at me.

“I could have taken him!”

“Of course you could,” I said. “I got impatient.”

A man stepped out from behind another booth and pointed one of the cloned monkey’s paws at us. He said the activating Words, and all its fingers fell off. The man threw what was left on the ground and stamped on it, then realised Molly and I were still watching him, at which point he quickly removed himself from the vicinity. That’s what you get for buying cheap knockoffs.

I looked around, but the walkways were deserted. The fair was almost empty. The crowds had seen what Drood armour and one really annoyed witch could do, and had lost all faith in the weapons the Supernatural Arms Faire had to offer. A great roar of engines overhead made me look up, and there was the vertical-takeoff plane hovering directly overhead. Huge and sleek and shiny, it must have manoeuvred into position while I was distracted, its noisy approach covered by the sound of gunfire. It rotated slowly overhead, held up by the massive down-draught of its engines. The pounding air slammed against my armour, blowing up great clouds of dust and dirt to blind me. Molly had already retreated to shelter, and sent a brisk wind my way to disperse the clouds.

The plane’s targeting system finally locked onto me, and it opened up with every weapon it had. Heavy machine-gun fire sprayed across me, followed by two supersonic missiles. My mask shut down again as the world disappeared in fire and noise. When I could see again, I was standing in a large open space, with all the surrounding stalls and booths blown apart or blown away. Quite a few more were on fire. Molly was standing some distance away, protected inside one of her special protective fields. But I didn’t know how long she could keep that going, so I ran forward and jumped up into the air, propelled by the powerful strength of my armoured legs. I think the VTO pilot guessed what I was up to at the last moment, because the plane started to rise, but I was already there.

I grabbed onto the undercarriage with one extended golden hand, the fingers closing hard, sinking deep into the metal. I hung there for a moment beneath the plane, and then pulled myself up so I could get a good grip with my other hand. I hauled myself up onto the wing and stood up. The massive VTO engines roared deafeningly, trying to maintain balance as I strode along the wing, heading for the cockpit. I could see the pilot staring out at me unbelievingly. I grabbed the cockpit roof and tore it away, the steel shrieking as it ripped and buckled under my grasp. The pilot panicked and hit the ejection button. He shot up past me, his chair leaving a trail of flames behind it that washed briefly and ineffectually over my armour.

The plane lurched back and forth, its balance gone without the pilot to adjust the engines. The nose turned down, and the plane plummeted back to earth, heading straight for the fair. There were still a lot of people down there, stumbling lost and confused up and down the walkways. I couldn’t let the VTO plane crash into the fair and kill them all. So I rode the plane down, leaning back and shifting my weight this way and that to guide its descent. The armour gave me the feel of the plane almost immediately, and a shift of my armoured weight at exactly the right times was all it took to steer it in the right direction. I rode the plane all the way down, over the fair and on into the valley, and then I jumped away at the last moment. I landed easily, my armoured legs soaking up the impact, and the VTO plane hit the valley floor hard and skidded along for some time in a billow of smoke before finally skidding to a halt in a shower of sparks. No fire, no explosion, nothing. I shook my head and ran back to the fair.

Still, what a ride . . .

I saw the Armourer facing off against the remote-controlled tank, and headed over to back him up. A great, hulking steel monster, the tank roared towards my uncle, who stood his ground and let it come. The tank fired shell after shell at him, each one dead on target, exploding against his armour without driving him back an inch. When the smoke from the explosions cleared, he was still standing where he had been, though some of where he had been standing wasn’t there anymore. I could tell from the way he was posing, arms folded easily across his chest, that the Armourer was enjoying himself. It might have been thirty years since he’d seen action in the field, but he was still every inch a Drood agent. Besides, all those years working in the Armoury had probably made him rather blasé about being blown up. The Armourer waited until the tank was almost on top of him, and then he leaned forward, ducked underneath and lifted the whole front of the tank up off the ground. Its tracks turned helplessly, unable to get a grip. The Armourer walked slowly forward, step by step, raising the tank up and up until it tipped over onto its back. It hit hard, and a series of things went bang inside it. Streams of black smoke billowed out of cracks in its sides, along with bursts of flame from electrical fires.

I went to stand beside the Armourer, and Molly came tripping up to join us. She threw her arms around me and hugged me as best she could through my armour. I held her carefully, mindful of my armour’s strength.

“How could you tell which was me?” I said.

“Your armour is quite different from everyone else’s,” she said, leaning against my chest. “You don’t realise how much you change it subconsciously these days.”