Author's Notes: This story originally came to me in a series of vividly episodic dreams that I had after seeing Michael Jackson's Moonwalker sometime over the Christmas holidays between the end of 1989 and the beginning of 1990. I was twelve years old. I first wrote the story down in a spiral notebook that I was keeping as a dream diary; I went back and re-visited it several times over the past twenty years, polishing it and re-working it as I developed as a writer. But I didn't share it with very many people. It's Moonwalker fanfiction, I reasoned. Who'd read it?
To this day I have no explanation for what transpires here in this tale, other than the fact that it was dropped in my lap by the powers that be, and I couldn't not write it. I grew up listening to Michael Jackson's music. It has been a huge influence on my life, as it has been with just about everyone else in my generation. His passing is an unfathomable loss, and this story is dedicated to him.
Another thing - though the idea of the powers of some of the characters in this story being elementally-based has a part of the story since I was first writing it at the age of 12-13, I feel that I must also acknowledge certain similarities to the awesome online Moonwalker RPG by Sarah J. Holt, which I also participated in during the summer of 2003. I guess there must be something to the old saw about great minds thinking alike. :P Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash is also in a very similar vein, so much so that I can't not mention it either.
Also: No copyright infringement of any sort is intended with this story.
ETA: By now I have seen the new G.I. GOE film. And I'm sure there will be folks who will point out the similarities in this story. Nanotechnology is not a new concept - especially not in the realms of Science Fiction - though its full potential may be a few years beyond our grasp here in the real world. For more on this subject, I'd recommend Engines Of Creation: The Coming Era Of Nanotechnology by Eric Drexler, and The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Trancend Biology, by Ray Kurzweil.
Anyway, on with the show:
THE STARLIGHT SAGA
CHAPTER ONE
"Rain, where are you?"
Kristoph's insistent query buzzed through Rain's earpiece, prompting her to adjust the volume to a lower setting.
"Still here. I'll tell you when something happens," she muttered back to her partner, who at the moment was still holed up in his surveillance van.
Rain had been discreetly following mob underboss Benny D'Nofrio and one of his underlings for blocks now. Thanks mostly due to the noise of the city traffic and the usual Saturday night revelers out on the busy city street, Rain knew she wasn't close enough by far for D'Nofrio to hear their whispered conversation...but his companion was another story altogether. Rain knew for a fact that the other man, one Peter Franchetti, was supposed to be dead. She'd found the man's body herself, in fact. Yet there he was, staggering alongside his cohort as they swilled liquor out of a sliver flask that they kept passing back and forth. A terrible premonition had begun to surface in Rain's mind over the past hour and a half that she'd been following them, particularly since Franchetti reeked of an all-too-familiar Etheric taint.
Rain herself was strictly operating "under radar..." as if she had a choice. She never seemed to attract much notice from the mundane people around her, wherever she went. It was as if they instinctively knew she did not belong, and generally chose not to perceive her presence on a subconscious level. Store clerks took her money without ever looking up from their registers. Bartenders and wait staff at the establishments she frequented served her without ever really seeing her at the table or on the other side of the counter. She breezed through metal detectors and security checkpoints at airports without even trying. She had no ID beyond the fake ones that were provided to her in the course of her missions, and no Social Security number. There was no official record anywhere of her existence. To the "Normals" Rain was as good as invisible, and to the "System" she was practically a ghost.
No one ever saw Rain unless she wanted them to - and even then, it was never a sure bet.
"D'Nofrio and Franchetti are headed into the alley behind Giovanni's. I'm following them in," Rain whispered into her mic.
***
Benny D'Nofrio had felt that there was something strange about his buddy Petey all evening. It wasn't anything he could put his finger on, but the guy had been slightly "off" all night. Generally he was a real ladies man, but tonight he'd kept all the broads at arms' length. He wasn't being very chatty, either. He didn't seem to have any problem with hitting the booze, though, which was also weird - in Benny's experience, Petey generally liked to keep a clear head when they were out on the prowl.
Earlier Benny had asked Petey if anything was bugging him. Petey simply claimed that he had a headache, and Benny had shrugged it off. It had been a long week. He was feeling a little beat down himself. When Benny suggested that the two nip over to Giovanni's, a local hotspot they frequented on almost a nightly basis, Petey had been all for it.
They were in the middle of a shortcut through an alleyway on their way to the place when everything went horribly wrong.
The alley was empty, which wasn't too strange. What was so strange all of a sudden was the fact that Benny could feel Petey's eyes on his back. The hairs on the back of the gangster's neck rose as he turned to face his companion. Petey's eyes were shining with an unnatural yellow gleam in the dim lamplight. Something within Benny D'Nofrio knew that it wasn't just the booze, and was screaming for him to run.
So Benny did what anyone in his situation would have done...he went for his gun. Big mistake.
Before he could blink, Petey knocked the gun out of his hand with a wide sweep of his arm - and he was still standing about ten feet away from Benny. His arm, which had stretched to cover the distance, was metal. Petey's yellow eyes were glowing hellishly in his steel face, which contorted obscenely as he pinned Benny to the brick wall of the building with his abnormally outstretched limbs. Benny did not have within him the words to express his horror at the utter wrongness of what he was seeing, other than to whimper,
"This has to be a dream. This is a nightmare."
'Petey' just grinned, his lips skinning back to reveal row upon row of horrible metallic buzzaw teeth, like the maw of a robot shark. Sickeningly, the muscles under 'Petey's' skin seemed to roll and boil as he burst upward and outward into a hideous skeletal abomination that reeked of decay, bristling with spines and flailing tentacles that quickly ensnared him in a vicelike grip and lifted him clear up off of the ground. Benny choked back a wave of nausea at the stench as the thing snarled,
"I have to borrow something of yours. I hope you don't mind." Its voice was now a hollow mechanical rasp, like nothing even remotely resembling anything produced by normal human vocal cords; it resonated unpleasantly through Benny D'Nofrio's being like a painful burst of electricity. The distorted metal face rippled like quicksilver, the once-familiar features melting and shifting to resemble Benny's own.
Suddenly the thing jolted as if struck from behind, keeling over to reveal over to reveal a dozen small, dark protrusions like glassy black diamond knives that were lodged in its back. Snarling, it abruptly dropped Benny and turned to face its attacker...a tiny redhead in a raincoat who tossed more of the razor-edged projectiles at the metal monster, hitting it square in the face.
"Run," the woman shouted to Benny, her voice all but drowned out by the monster's enraged wailing as it charged her. That wall of sound hit Benny like an oncoming truck, shattering the streetlamps that lined the alleyway and throwing him back a few feet into the brink wall of the building behind him.
***
"Gaaaahhh!"
Listening to the battle in progress in the safety of his surveillance van, Rain's Danish partner Kristoph yelped in unexpected pain as the Nergal Faction Drone's desperate, unfocused sonic attack resounded in Rain's mic, resulting in feedback that felt like an ice pick was being plunged repeatedly between his temples. Kristoph, Rain and others of their kind were more resistant to the Drones' caterwauling than ordinary humans were - which was fortunate for them, but boded ill for the man that Kristoph knew was caught in the crossfire in the alleyway...
***
Covering his ears, Benny saw the woman calmly draw something from her coat in with lightning-fast flick of her wrist...it was a sword, some kind of samurai sword. Before Benny had time to blink or flee or do anything else, he saw the redhead go to town on the thing, ginsuing it like a soda can in one if those infomercials that Benny had seen on late-night TV. With a final liquid gurgle the thing that had looked like his friend collapsed, and quickly dissolved into a pool of metal slag on the concrete.
The lady put her sword back and fixed Benny with a solid, rock-hard, blue-eyed stare that felt like ice.
"Stay out of trouble," she said flatly. Then she stepped back into the shadows and melted away into the night, leaving Benny alone in the dark with the puddle, his bleeding eardrums, and his still-racing heart. Thus he was found by some of the guys in the club a few seconds later, when they came spilling out of the back entrance to see what all the commotion had been about.
Hours later, when Benny D'Nofrio was able to speak coherently again, all he was able to tell them was that he'd almost been waxed by some thing that wasn't Petey, and then a broad had come along and killed it. Mercifully, most of the details about the monster had already begun to fade from Benny's brain as soon as it bubbled away into an unrecognizable silvery sludge, as if the sight of the creature that had attacked him had been too horrible for the human mind to retain. But barring the monster itself, what disturbed Benny the most was the fact that other than her red hair and her hard, cold eyes, he really couldn't remember what the girl looked like either.
His crew soon became convinced that Benny was losing it. When Peter Franchetti failed to turn up, many of them wondered what had actually become of Benny D'Nofrio's AWOL right-hand man. Meanwhile, those who actually did know what had become of Peter were more concerned with the thing that had temporarily usurped his place.
***
Kristoph almost jumped straight up out of his seat at the gentle tapping that sounded at is window of the surveillance van where he'd been sitting for the past six hours. He was perfectly aware that Rain was capable of slipping into the van without a sound if she were so inclined, but in Kristoph's case she was usually polite enough to knock.
"That drone was stealing the shape of its victim. I'm positive," Rain told him as she climbed into the van. As usual, her face betrayed little in the way of her emotion, but the tone of her voice was grim.
"What do you mean, stealing the shape of its victim?" Kristoph sputtered.
"Exactly as I said. The Drone led him into an alley, and then it grabbed him and started to shift into his exact likeness. It looked like it was killing D'Nofrio in the process. I took care of it," Rain said.
"You're serious about this? You saw this with your own eyes?" Kristoph asked. Rain nodded.
"It's probably some sort of corrupted Metamorphic Enhancer that they've developed; that's what it felt like, anyway," Rain explained. "It caused the same kind of sick resonance in the Ether."
"What is this going to mean?" Kristoph lamented. "What if they've managed to do this before now? They could look like anyone, go anywhere! Talk about identity theft. What are we going to do now?"
"Same as always. We hunt them down and we destroy them," Rain said simply.
***
Back at the safehouse, Kristoph broadcast his report and his request for further instructions through the usual channels.
"Blue Canary here," he typed, giving his callsign. "Regen caught a Nergal Drone shapeshifting into the exact form of one of its victims," he typed into the encrypted window, quoting Rain word's exactly as she has spoken them. It was only a few minutes before he received a response. Many of their comrades knew that Rain had been on the prowl that evening, so it followed that there would be many of their fellows on the online network of their friends and allies that they called the "Relay" waiting for the results of her sortie.
Kristoph knew that the reaction to his missive was bound to be met with considerable alarm. No sooner had he settled back in his chair to wait, when an instant messenger window with the words,
"TQ here. Come again?" popped up on his screen.
"This is on the level. Regen confirms. What are the Kommissar's instructions?"
"Standby. Punting the ball over to Kommie."
In a few more minutes, the message repeated;
"Greetings, Schatz. Am I reading this right?"
"She was very clear about what she witnessed," Kristoph answered. "She believes it to be the work of a new type of M.E. Please advise."
"Where is she now?"
"Here," Kristoph answered him. "Shall I put her on?"
"Bitte," was the Kommissar's response.
***
Kristoph opened the door upon a scene that was pretty much what he expected. Rain sat on the floor surrounded by her handiwork; row upon row of her obsidian throwing knives, or "shot" as she liked to call them. She worked with a disturbingly mechanical, almost obsessive-compulsive precision as she steadily added to the array, chipping out new blades from chunks of the volcanic glass with a blunt piece of elk antler. She was very practiced at her craft; each blade was a dark, deadly gem that could rend flesh and pierce bone. And though the Nergal Drones were metallic, silicone-based creatures by nature (as were all of Pleiadian stock) in certain physical states they were as vulnerable to the wicked little blades as the earthlings they were attempting to infiltrate.
TQ had once joked that they were her "lucky stars."
Kristoph knew that she would carefully sweep up the pulverized obsidian dust left over from her pressure flaking and store it in tiny, sealed plastic tubes; the dust had several nasty but undeniably effective uses all on its own. The volcanic glass itself was ideal because it held a better edge than steel - obsidian scalpels were even in use among surgeons, in fact, when steel just wasn't keen enough - and it didn't show up on any metal detectors. You couldn't really throw them very far - or into Pleiadian flesh at all once it had solidified, or the brittle volcanic glass would shatter. Rain sometimes used throwing stars made of anodized steel or black ceramic when more durability was required. Still, the obsidian ones usually got the job done well enough. They were practically her calling card.
Even more deadly than Rain's obsidian shot was her skill with the shikomizue; the single-edged katana blade concealed in a simple wooden cane that she'd used to kill over a hundred Drones in her many long years as the Einherjar Faction's most lethal covert agent.
Kristoph cleared his throat, and Rain glanced upward. For a second her blue eyes reflected the light from the doorway behind him with a feral gleam and he faltered, forgetting what it was he was supposed to tell her as he was momentarily transfixed by her diamond-edged sapphire stare. Even after all the years he'd known her, Kristoph had never quite gotten used to Rain's ability to freeze people with her eyes. The Gorgon's Stare, they called it; it was a gift that many of their people possessed. To them, it could be unsettling enough; many humans found it downright disturbing.
It's bad enough that she can't really "turn it off..."
"The Kommissar is online now. He wants to talk to you," Kristoph said after a few seconds, when Rain realized what had stalled her friend and blinked, abruptly jarring him out of his trance.
"All right," Rain said, laying her implements aside as she got to her feet.
"No one doubts your word," Kristoph assured her. "But they're pretty shaken by the news." Kristoph's worry was clearly etched on his ruggedly handsome face. The biggest challenge that they'd always faced in hunting the monsters down had been the Drones' ability to take on human form and blend into the general populace. But until now, they'd never been able to steal the forms of specific humans. Apparently that had just changed.
"We should have expected this," Rain said softly. "They were bound to come up with a means of impersonating their prey sooner or later. We should have been prepared." From the tone of her voice, it sounded to Kristoph as though she blamed herself personally.
Knowing her, this assumption was probably pretty astute.
By the time Rain got over to Kristoph's workstation, the screen read,
"Hallo Liebschen."
Rain's mouth twisted into a wry ghost of a smirk---the closest most people ever got to seeing her truly smile.
"Should I leave you two alone?" Kristoph joked.
"How do we know he wasn't addressing you?" Rain deadpanned as the reply flashed across the screen,
"Schatz tells me that you've run into something interesting," the Kommissar's message ran.
"It was nothing I couldn't handle," Rain typed back. I respectfully request your permission to check out local contacts to see if this is an isolated phenomenon, or if there's going to be more of them."
The Kommissar's responded:
"Granted. Run this one to ground for me, Regen."
"Will do. I'll let you know what I find," Rain typed.
"Sehr gut. Keep an eye on Schatz, Will you? Kristoph just grinned and rolled his eyes at this.
"Of course I will, sir. Take care," Rain responded.
"I have an idea of where to start looking," Rain said as she headed back to the room where she'd been working before the Kommissar had summoned her. "A few people in this town still owe me some favors. If anything strange has turned up, they might know about it. And then there there's Michael." So saying, she stood and walked back to the room where her gear awaited. "I'm certain Michael is well capable of taking anything they can dish out, and then some. Convincing him to get back into the trenches with us will be another thing entirely."
"You don't have to tell me," Kristoph remarked. "Hey, If this is a new type of Metamorphic Enhancer, it's probably come from one of their nerve centers under the Pacific," Kristoph ventured as Rain collected her sword-cane and her finished blades.
"That would be my guess," Rain agreed. "We need to get in touch with everyone, and make sure we're all accounted for."
Kristoph's reply was cut off by the sudden chiming of his cellphone. He retrieved it from his jeans pocket and answered it.
"Hello?"
"Hey Kristoph. It's Justin," the speaker on the other end announced.
"Justin? Hello!" Kristoph said. "I was just going to call you, actually -"
"Word travels fast," Rain muttered bemusedly.
"Word is that you and Rain just ran into something pretty unusual," Justin stated. "I'm headed out that way to check it out for myself. Has anyone heard from Michael?"
"You're coming here?" Kristoph asked him, nodding to Rain as she spoke. Rain made a face, her second facial expression of the evening - a record for her. Then she pointed towards her gear, and then towards the window. Kristoph nodded.
"Can I speak to Rain?" Justin asked Kristoph.
"Rain? Let me see if she's left already," Kristoph said. Rain's eyes widened as she gave him a look at clearly stated, "I am not here!" This would have been clear on anyone's face, but the Gorgon's Stare gave the message an extra push that sent it flying right into Kristoph's brain like an arrow hitting the center of a target.
"She isn't here," Kristoph told Justin, as Rain began gathering her finished shards, tucking them into an assortment of hidden pockets in the sleeves and lining of her overcoat. The last item she concealed in her coat was her sword-cane.
Have either of you spoken with Michael?" Justin repeated.
"Michael? Not in about a week," Kristoph answered, as Rain looked back up from her task in sudden interest. "Why, does he know something?"
"Something's wrong. I can't find him. I must've tried contacting him at the store almost a dozen times, and I haven't gotten any answer."
"We haven't heard from him either," Kristoph said, with a significant glance at Rain. She quirked an eyebrow by way of response, and Kristoph hit the speakerphone button on his cell.
"Last anyone heard, he was going to take those three kids he's been sponsoring out to the park before dinner. He hasn't checked in since," Justin explained.
"Really?" Kristoph asked, eyebrows raising as he turned to Rain. She nodded back, already halfway out the open window.
"Listen, can't I just talk to her? This is big. If they're trying to go after Michael - "
"Rain's already on it," Kristoph assured him.
"Good hunting," he mouthed to the open window, before returning to his conversation with Justin. She was already gone.