(( I've been having trouble seeing some of the images, specifically the first two. If you didn't see three collections of newspapers hit reload and it should be visible.
Darn technology.))
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Yan Fei-Chung gritted his teeth behind the gleaming, mirrored visor of his motorcycle helmet. Ordinarily he loved motorcycles ... the concentration, the skill required to ride at speed. It reminded him greatly of Tai-Chi-Chuan, in its own way. Tonight, however, he had spotted a group of motorcycle riding thugs hounding a black sedan. Originally, he had set off in pursuit in order to stop the bikers, but soon it became apparent that BOTH groups were dangerous, as the windows of the car came down and two silvered machine-guns emerged, erupting gouts of lead at the pack at their heels. As Yan wheeled a corner in pursuit, one of the gunners missed his target and sprayed a defenseless elderly woman with his deadly weapon. The woman crumpled in a bloody spray on her own apartment stoop, another innocent victim of senseless violence. Yan
gunned his engine with renewed determination these madmen MUST be stopped.
He raced up to within twenty feet of the closest biker, whose pale blonde hair revealed him as one of the Birkhun. With stunning sureness of foot, Yan stood on the seat of his bike, bent to keep his hands on the handlebars. Another few inches closer, he knew, was all he'd need; and as his training told him the time was right he
LEAPT from his bike with unbelievable speed and accuracy. Through the air he flew, like a human arrow loosed from the surest bow, and
LANDED with uncanny ease behind his chosen target. His bike trailed behind them a full twenty feet and traveled some distance further before the tiniest of imperfections in the roadway caused it to shudder, sway, and eventually fall away. The German cried out in surprise as Yan settled in behind him and craned his neck around to see what had landed on his back ... Yan cracked him in the face for his trouble, dazing the man. Reaching around him Yan steered closer to the speeding sedan, but just then one of the gunment inside took aim at him and
FIRED! Yan leapt again with unbelievable speed, flipping a full turn and landing on the roof of the car. Hot lead took the life of the German biker, who careened out of control at high speed, his bike flipping end over end to
EXPLODE in a fireball behind the chase. Bullets ripped through the thin roof at his feet and once again Yan was forced to move, leaping from the car to another of the bikes. Just then Yan's preternaturally sharp hearing caught a familiar sound, and he knew friends were on their way.
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High above the firefight a sleek, fast ... odd machine sped through the rain-drenched night. Part helicopter, part airplane, it was a light, high-efficiency gyrocopter of amazing design and skillful manufacture. At the controls was a small, strange man. His dark skin and prominent nose revealed him as an ethnic Sephardic Jew, a southern people seldom seen on this side of the wide, deep ocean. This Jewish man,
Mordecai Solomique by name, was a traveler and a famous adventurer, in his own way, and yet to be present in Port Marlowe was no great travel for him, as he had made it his home. Mordecai had plumbed the depths of deepest South American jungles, and had traversed the highest mountain plataeus of frozen Antartica. He had even seen that strange, solitary temple where Yan Fei-Chung had honed his body and mind into one of the greatest living weapons man had ever seen, and he was one of merely a handful of outsiders that had returned from that breathless Tibetan retreat alive, a friend of the monks there. Mordecai had seen things mankind had thought lost, and had lost, for hundreds of years ... and had seen things man had taken no part in, buried thousands of years, that should have stayed buried thousands more. He had faced things that would turn any normal man's hair white with terror to merely gaze upon, with only his sword and pistol and wits to save him: and Mordecai had survived. He piloted his small craft now with the sureness of long practice, sweeping lower toward the racing gunfight.
Beside Mordecai in the open cockpit of the gyrocopter sat a small form in a bulky, brown bomber jacket. The straps of a leather pilot's helmet flapped in the wind, and below that, rain-slicked round aviator goggles gleamed in the sporadic nocturnal lights. The girl, for it was a girl, grinned with shining white teeth and leaned over the side of their craft, gauging the distance they had yet to close.
"Is that Yan down there?" The girl said. Her voice was little-louder than conversational, such was the quietness of the motor of their craft. A motor she had designed and built herself.
Mordecai twitched the Gyrocopter slighty to one side and looked down. "I do believe that's his helmet, yes." At that moment the form they attended leapt a full fifteen feet into the air and skitted like a cat across the sedan. "Definately him, yes." Mordecai concluded.
The teenager beside him hefted a large glass caraffe filled with a swirling, purplish liquid. "Hrm, it's going to be tough not getting him in the cloud." She mused out loud.
"I'll just let him know we are here, then, Doc." Mordecai declared and gunned their little aircraft into a masterful dive.
When they had first met the girl, not so long ago, she had asked them to call her "Marten". She offered no other name, and no matter how they pressed she would not relent on that matter. She was, as far as anyone could determine, an orphan, as well as one of the most phenomenal mental geniuses on the planet, and had no peer in the sciences or mechanical arts. She had amazed them with her aptness at inventing and creating mechancial tools and chemical substances, which she did with such creativity and regularity that she seldom seemed to be out of her laboratory or the cavernous garage and could be found in one or the other at almost any hour of the day or night. In response, they had begun to call her "Doc" or, even more frequently, "
Doc Marten"; a gentle joke that played upon her name and that of her chunky black shoes.
Mordecai sliced downward rapidly and leveled out just above the heads of the bikers below, buffeting them with the downdraft of his props as he
buzzed forward and back up. As they lifted up, Doc dropped her caraffe over the side ... another of her many inventions.
The beaker shattered into a thousand flickering pieces on the street and, with contact in the air, exploded into a cloud of thick, red-purple smoke. Too fast to correct, three of the bikers drove through the cloud as the pack raced down the street. As they emerged from that brume they weaved unsteadily and each slumped off his bike, wholley unconcious, tumbling like drunkards to the street and rolling like rag dolls along the pavement. The substance was a harmless gas that caused almost instant unconciousness which lasted for several hours. The bikers may break a few bones in their fall, but that would be the price they paid for their crimes. Doc Marten crowed as the gyrocopter rose into the air and banked to come back for another pass, wiping water from her goggles with one sleeve.
At a corner several blocks up a cab screeched to a stop. John Arm stepped out and resettled his fedora on his head, glancing over his shoulder at the cabby.
"Leave the meter running, I'll be back in a few, pal." He said and walked into the intersection. Down the street the gunfight raced toward him. Arm grunted and flicked open his trench-coat like a gunfighter's duster and drew a massive .44 revolver from somewhere inside. Neither the bikers nor the men in the sedan seemed to notice a lone man standing in the middle of an intersection on a rainy night. Between the shush of rain and the crack of gunfire, no-one heard his words as he grimly raised his gun.
"She wasn't anyone to you, and she didn't deserve to die."
He pulled the trigger. Once.
The front left tire of the sedan
exploded and the driver lost control of the car. It swerved and plowed THROUGH a fence and
crashed against the side of an abandoned chemical plant outbuilding.
