An Eye For An Eye
Chapter 11: "Find Acosta"
A Neo-Sailor Moon fanfic
By Bill K.
Luna walked into the Royal Chambers to check on Queen Serenity. After spending part of the day listening to her try not to fret about her daughter being half a world away, the cat had finally convinced her to paint to take her mind off of things. Peeking in on her, she found the Queen at her easel, hard at work on something. Scampering over to the antique bureau behind the Queen, Luna leaped up onto it and peeked over the Queen's shoulder to see what she was painting.
It was a portrait of the Princess.
"Really, Your Majesty?" sighed the black cat.
"Oh, go catch a mouse," Serenity scowled as she dabbed pink onto the portrait.
"Whatever for?" Luna recoiled.
"This was your idea," the Queen told her as she stroked with the brush.
"And leave it to you to make me regret it," fussed the cat. "Although I must say, it is a nice likeness. What did you plan to do with it once you've finished: Present it to the Princess, or put it on your night stand and pine?"
"You're going to look awfully silly when I paint over your crescent moon in pink," Serenity said, her mouth twisted in a pout.
"Some decorum actually befitting your station, Your . . ." Luna began.
She stopped when Serenity's brush clattered to the floor. Luna looked at the Queen and saw an expression of utter shock and horror. Instantly Serenity sprang from her chair, the paints and canvas forgotten, and raced out the door, the black cat in hot pursuit. Racing to keep up, Luna saw that Serenity was headed for the King's computer room. At once, Endymion emerged from the room and met Serenity half way down the hall. He gripped her by the upper arms.
"Endymion!" Serenity cried frantically.
"I felt it, too!" he answered, just as frantic.
Instantly their auras flared, hers silver and his gold. And in the blink of an eye, the King and Queen were gone, leaving Luna standing alone in the corridor.
"Oh dear," swallowed the cat. Then she turned and ran back down the corridor, shouting, "ARTEMIS!"
As if the scene in the restaurant wasn't chaotic enough, with five women laying on a table or the floor bleeding and unconscious, the scene was disturbed further when a tall man with black hair and a shorter woman with long blonde hair trailing from round gathers suddenly appeared out of nowhere. They were clearly Asian and completely out of place in the South American restaurant. The woman broke from the man even as police and medical rescue teams were pulling up and ran for the fallen women. The man started to as well, then stopped when he spotted one of the on-lookers. He came up to the woman, a youth barely eighteen with crimson hair piled on top of her head like a mountain and held by three gold rings.
"Ves, what happened?" Endymion demanded. Ves seemed in shock. It took a moment for his question to register in her brain. She looked up at him in confusion.
"I-I don't know," she mumbled numbly. "I was upstairs - - slept in. I heard Palla-Palla call me."
"A man came in," one of the wait staff said. Endymion's computer translator engaged so he could understand the man's Portuguese. "He shot them. He just stood there and shot them!"
"What did he look like?" Ves rumbled. Endymion could see the girl's temper rising.
"Tall, dark," the waiter said. "He had on dark glasses and a long black coat. Very rough looking."
"ENDYMION!" Serenity shouted.
Endymion was at her side in a flash. She was on her knees next to the unconscious body of his daughter, a charred, ugly wound in her upper right chest that was oozing blood. His doctor instincts kicked in and he could see that the angle of the shot had missed any organs and the amount of blood oozing indicated that none of the major arteries had been hit. Serenity stuck out her hand. He took it instantly. Their auras flared.
Out of nowhere, Ami Mizuno appeared. She was dressed casually and had her glasses perched on her nose and a book in her lap. After a moment's disorientation, Ami gathered the situation and came over to them. Ves watched as she and Endymion gave all five victims cursory triage. By now emergency medical personnel were there and assisting.
"It's a miracle," Ami judged. "None of these wounds are life-threatening."
"That's pretty odd," Endymion replied and the others looked at him. "For a professional hit, this guy was a pretty bad shot."
"Someone did this on purpose?" wailed Serenity.
"From what Ves described, I'd say so," Endymion told her.
"Nevertheless, these wounds need to be tended to immediately," Ami interjected.
Instantly Serenity grasped Endymion's hand. She, her husband, Ami and the five victims all flashed out of the room in a burst of silver light, leaving Ves and the other patrons to stare in wonder. As everyone milled about and conversed in amazement among themselves, none of them noticed Ves's jaw tighten. A police officer came up to her.
"Were you a witness to this?" he asked. "I'll need a statement."
"I'm busy!" snarled Ves and started for the door.
When the officer tried to restrain her, Ves shoved him to the floor. Her henshin stick was out immediately. After a shouted transformation phrase, the officer found himself staring at Sailor Vesta.
"Fauna assimilation, Condor!" she roared. Transforming into a condor, Vesta was in the air and out the door before anyone could stop her. Free of the hotel, Vesta soared up into the air and away, headed toward the abandoned lab where all of this had started.
Landing on the roof, Vesta peered down through the hole Pallas had made. The building was dark. Nothing seemed to be there but the debris of her last encounter with Marcelino Acosta. Satisfied that it was safe, Vesta hopped through the hole and used her wings to make a soft landing on the tile floor.
Immediately she transformed into a bloodhound. Pressing her nose to the floor, Vesta began sniffing around. There were several scents to sift through. Instantly she recognized Sancha, Pallas and her own. There were other scents, probably of the cyborgs helping Acosta. Vesta pressed on.
Suddenly it was there: Acosta's scent. She recognized it from being in his presence in her other animal forms, but now it was clear and bold to her senses. Vesta followed it over to the wall and through the back door. It led out into the service alley behind the building, then disappeared. Vesta kept sniffing the ground, but couldn't come up with it again.
"There's something here, though," Vesta thought. "Residue of something mechanical. Yeah, a hover car! It's the ozone smell hover cars leave when their superconductor tech interacts with the atmosphere! He got into a hover car!"
Trailing the smell, Vesta got to the end of the alley and looked down the cross street. Hover cars filled the street in both directions. As a bloodhound, there was no way she could follow the scent through this traffic.
Things were just now settling down at Saint Joseph's Memorial Hospital in Sao Paulo. When Serenity materialized everyone into the hospital emergency room, it naturally caused a stir. Usa was taken into an exam room, accompanied by Serenity and Endymion, while Ami and the doctors on duty tended to the senshi on Gurneys in the corridor. All of the other exam rooms were occupied at the time with other cases. Of the five, Hotaru and Palla-Palla seemed to be the worse off. Due to Hotaru's history of heart problems, she was taken into another exam room so a cardiac sensor module could be used. Ami leaned over Palla-Palla, using a sterile sensor probe to examine the wound while holographic telemetry hovered above her. She was still astounded that the wound was in the exact place that would cause minimal thoracic damage.
"Palla-Palla told him to miss," Palla-Palla mumbled. Ami realized she had read the question in her mind.
"Telepathically?" Ami asked as she glanced at the telemetry.
"Yes, Ma'am," Palla-Palla said softly. "Palla-Palla heard what he was going to do. And all she could think to do," and she took a shuddering breath, "was to tell him with her head not to kill us."
"It sounds like you implanted the thought into his mind telepathically," Ami told her. "This is going to sting, but it will go away quickly."
Palla-Palla grunted softly, but didn't cry out. Ami put the sterilizing probe down and reached for a cellular growth accelerator to prod the musculature around the bones to knit.
"Is everyone OK?" Palla-Palla asked weakly.
"They all have wounds much like yours," Ami informed her. "But none of them are going to die. Your quick thinking saved them all, Palla-Palla."
"What about Ves-Ves?" Palla-Palla asked. "Is she mad?"
"Why don't you go to sleep for a while and let your body heal," Ami advised her.
"Because," Palla-Palla persisted, her anxiety rising, "Ves-Ves does bad things when she's mad."
To help her, Ami administered a mild sedative to the girl. At that moment, there was a flash of silver from the exam room the Princess was in. Ami smiled to herself. "You just won't let medical science do its work, will you."
Inside the exam room, Usa pushed herself to a sitting position. She glanced at her chest. There was no evidence the wound had ever been there.
"How do you feel, Honey?" Serenity asked with a trembling voice.
"Better now, Mom," Usa sighed. She was still fatigued from the whole ordeal. "How are the others?"
"Not in any immediate danger," Endymion related.
"I blew it again," frowned the Princess.
"How so?" Endymion asked.
"You told me to keep my eyes open, Pop," Usa replied, chastened. "I let my guard down. I didn't think this Acosta guy would actually take a shot at us in the middle of a crowded restaurant. I almost got everyone killed."
"Honey," her father said, reaching over and cupping his hand behind her neck, "anyone who expects to be attacked at any moment in a place where there is no visible, logical threat is a raving paranoid. You can't blame yourself for not anticipating something that can't logically be anticipated."
"You don't know this Acosta guy," Usa argued.
"I was looking over that file you send me to decrypt. He's clearly a rough customer. But someone who would try this is either inhumanly bold or incredibly desperate. And you can't anticipate the actions of someone like that."
"Yes, Usa, please don't blame yourself for this!" Serenity exclaimed. She grabbed her daughter and pulled the girl's head to her chest. The Princess struggled for a moment to try to escape, then saw the futility of it and gave in.
Hover cars careened wildly to avoid the monstrosity barreling down the street. Using her Fauna Combination powers, Sailor Vesta had transformed into a bloodhound roughly the size of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Commuters lurched to get out of the way and any craft that didn't either glanced off of the canine's huge legs or was crushed underfoot.
Vesta's course had taken her out of the Downtown District. From the looks of it, she was headed for the residential northwest side, an upper scale neighborhood near the private airport. As she reached Pacquan Street, the scent turned to the left. Vesta kept following it, oblivious to the attention she was attracting.
The trail turned into a driveway leading to a three-story townhouse. It was well-apportioned, but very quiet. Vesta followed the scent of the hover car up to a connected garage. There she transformed into a cockroach and wriggled under the door.
"Bingo," Vesta thought as she looked up at the parked hover car. "Must be one of his safe houses."
Scurrying across the floor, Vesta wriggled under the door and moved across the connecting hall to the door to the townhouse. Entering the home, Vesta used her antennae to determine that the room was empty. Only then did she revert to Sailor Vesta. After becoming human again, Vesta spotted the surveillance camera. Immediately she transformed into a house fly. She headed for the next room, the one where sounds from a video stream were coming from.
"If Marcelino is here, that camera probably alerted him that I'm here," Vesta thought as she landed on the ceiling and looked around. "I got to be more careful! I can't let him get away again!"
A pulse of laser light lanced out and struck the ceiling where Vesta had been. Only thanks to the superior reflexes she had as a house fly, Vesta avoided it. A second pulse tracked her as she flew. Arcing in flight, Vesta spotted Acosta. He was sitting on a sofa, a laser pistol in his hand and a security monitor by his side. He was using the prosthetic visor that gave him back his vision to track her. She remembered from their last encounter that it contained some sort of infra-red or motion sensor software that allowed him to do that. Vesta ducked under a third pulse and headed for him. As she dived, Vesta transformed again, this time into a full grown Bengal tiger. She snarled as her teeth bared, seeking his throat.
And at the last moment, Acosta brought up a metal bar in his other hand and swung it like a club. He caught Vesta with it, mostly on the neck, but enough on the head that the force altered her course and sent her crashing into a table. The table broke under the impact. Acosta flinched back to avoid flying debris as Vesta struggled to her feet. He brought the pistol to bear, but Vesta snapped at it and he flinched back. Scrambling to his feet, Acosta pointed the pistol at the crouching tiger before him. Vesta kept stalking him, moving relentlessly toward him, her cold yellow eyes fixed on him. She could see the gun tremble in his hand, for even though he knew the tiger was really Vesta, it was still an unnerving sight to be this close to this much naked feline predator.
"Stay where you are!" demanded Acosta. "I will shoot you between the eyes!"
"Like you did my friends?" bellowed the tiger, and that was as unnerving as anything else, because the tiger bellowed in the voice of his old nemesis Vanessa. "You don't have any cyborgs or hired guns to do your dirty work now, Marcelino! I don't think you've got the balls to shoot me when I'm looking you in the eye!"
He pulled the trigger. Vesta tried to dodge, but the laser pulse caught her in the shoulder. The force of the pulse slammed Vesta to the floor and the shock of the wound caused her to lose her transformation. Still, Vesta was quick to get back into a defensive position, crouched on one knee.
"THAT MAN ENOUGH FOR YOU, VANESSA!" roared Acosta. "The next one goes right between your eyes!"
"You aren't that good a shot!" sneered Vesta defiantly. Blood dribbled down from a nasty wound in her left arm. She could move it, but it was painful. Still, not moving it was just as painful, so she used the pain to fuel her rage. "And you don't have Sancha to hide behind this time!"
"Stop disrespecting me!" Acosta barked. "I am not the little runt you and Rudolfo beat up on and sneered at! I am king of the drug trade in this end of the city! Me! And I did it without being able to see my hand in front of my face without my prosthetic! And you won't disrespect that!"
He moved closer, the laser pistol trained on Vesta the entire time. Vesta's eyes burned with hatred for him, and it was good because he hated her just as much.
"And now you're going to pay for taking my eyes from me!" Acosta continued venomously. "And who knows - - maybe once you're dead, I'll have your eyes transplanted into my head so I can get rid of this damn visor forever. Yeah, that's a good idea. The final slap in the face."
Vesta just glared at him.
"No smart-ass remarks?" Acosta demanded. "No defiance? Are you finally scared, Vanessa?"
"Just remembering the look on Rudolfo's face when he died," Vesta replied in a low, guttural growl. "And the look of terror on Sancha's face when she found out you'd given her son Caina. And the look on Palla-Palla's face, laying there in a puddle of her own blood." Her teeth clenched. "Just so I don't lose my nerve."
And Vesta sprang at Acosta, her hands out and clutching for him. Acosta squeezed the trigger on the laser pistol. It fired off a pulse of deadly light.
Concluded in Chapter 12
