Free Commando Bats by Sherwood Smith Page A

hand.
    “Your name?” Hera — I may as well call her
that—demanded.
    “Bettina Wilson.” Bettina slipped her hand in and almost
immediately withdrew it. Something winked with a diamond glitter on her finger
and then vanished.
    “Come,” Hera said to Lady Gotrocks, who turned away from the
railing with obvious reluctance. I noticed her eyes were red-rimmed. “Your
name?”
    “Cecile . . . Schuyler.” The hesitation before the last name
sounded odd. Suspicious? Definitely hauteur. When Hera imperiously shook the
lotus bag (the leaves actually rustled) Cecile reached in with the air of one
about to touch an extremely dead fish. She gave a little gasp, pulled her hand
free, and wrung it.
    “Hephaestus, Herakles,” Hera said to me and Cecile, then
smiled at Bettina. “And Zeus. Ah ha! Judicious choices.” That compelling voice
belled with an undertone of laughter.
    Bettina rubbed furiously at her hand, her fingers sparkling
in the sun.
    “The male gods,” said Hera, “have displeased me. I have
taken all their powers." She hefted the lotus bag, and the leaves
fluttered in the wind, sending out an aroma of pungent greenery. "Perforce
they must watch. Perhaps they will learn something about the exigencies of
power."
    "Who’s going to teach what to whom?" Bettina
asked, still suspicious.
    "You," Hera stated. "Will teach them. Long
have I listened as crones are made the butt of japes. If the fools listened to
those who have the least power yet the most wisdom, would not the world be in
better case? Prove me right."
    Sunlight flashed off the seawater, dazzling our eyes. I
caught a confusion of whirling wings, and then all the noise of the pier — whose
absence I had not noticed until then — closed around us: the wash-splash of the
waves, the cry of seabirds, the chatter of tourists and the clatter of fishing
poles.
    The three of us were no longer isolated. We were joined in a
shared emotion of horror, disbelief, and a complete inability to know what to
do next.
    Cecile was the first to react. She turned her back on
Bettina and me and headed for the stairway to the upper level of the pier. As
she passed one of the sturdy benches looking out over the water, she hit the
back of it, either accidentally or in an expression of frustration. Then she
recoiled as a corner of the iron-bound back support about the size of a dinner
plate broke free with a loud crack and hurtled up into the air some hundred
feet, spinning crazily.
    I was staring in total disbelief, so I didn’t see exactly
what Bettina did, but I sneezed as a beam of hot, electric air shot by me and
intersected that spinning piece. Light glowed around it for a nanosecond, then
vanished, leaving a puff of ash to float down to the ocean water below.
    My head whipped around in an Exorcist neck twist; there was
Bettina in the act of wringing her fingers violently. Only instead of water
dripping off, light zapped, splashed, and shot around crazily in a fireworks
display that made my eyes hurt.
    She froze. I rubbed my eyes as dozens of tiny fires sent
white smoke twirling lazily upward on the sea breeze.
    “What the hell?”
    “Hey —”
    “It’s a bomb!”
    The voices broke out behind me. Once again I did a Linda
Blair, in time to catch Cecile bracing her hands on that bench support as if
she were trying to will it whole again. The result? The thing broke into
splinters, and as she recoiled, her hands jerking to her shoulders, fingers
spread, the splinters shot skyward, a whole bunch of spinning shards of iron
and stone that were going to come down and cause a world of hurt.
    “Halt.”
    The voice, unlike Hera’s imperial ring, was soft as fog,
cooling as rain, a whisper that somehow seized time. The smoldering fires all
winked out. The lethal shards overhead reversed their trajectories in a flash,
reassembling seamlessly. The ashes even swooped up from the water below like a
clump of tiny mites, blurring together into a chunk that reattached to