SPECIAL DISCLAIMER FOR TORONTONIANS: Yes, I know that there's no such place as Cathedral Tower in downtown T.O. Suffice it to say that, in the PENGUIN$ universe, a big.... no... an unbelievably HUGE hunk of available space opened up at the south-east corner of Bay and Front and Mayor Mel gave permission to a wealthy developer (secretly a victim of Penguin mind-foo),to build the tower there. All similarities to the BCE Tower, though, are completely intentional. :)

...and now, back to PENGUIN$

****************************

Downtown Toronto, Cathedral Tower

A soft ding announced the arrival of an elevator in the darkened, opulent
lobby of the prestigious consulting firm, Diokletian Incorporated. The doors
opened to reveal an elegantly dressed young man with dark smoldering eyes
and glossy black hair that fell to his shoulders. His footfalls echoed on
the black marble tiled floor as he passed the discreetly backlit reception
desk. He ran his fingers over the corporate logo embedded in it as he
passed.

Pausing briefly to allow a retinal scanner to identify him, he continued
down a long hallway and stopped at a door that had his name on it, followed
by the letters C.E.O. Once inside the office, he shrugged out of his
precisely tailored black wool coat, carelessly tossing it over the back of a
black leather couch as he approached the panoramic office window.

He left the lights off, preferring to view the glowing spread of city
beneath him from the darkness. He'd found that he did his best thinking that
way, as if drawing power from the squirming crush of humanity and technology
that was so deceptively beautiful from afar. It was a mental image that was
destined to become reality.  In just over eight hours the city would be his,
and the world would have taken it's first step to becoming a better place,
thanks to his genius.

Leaning his forehead against the plate glass and shuddering as its cold
seeped into him, he shut his eyes and wondered again, for the millionth time
it seemed, if what he was doing was right. But as usual, whenever he began
to question himself something would inevitably drag his thoughts elsewhere.

The discreet trill of a cellular phone interrupted the stillness of the
office. Reaching into the inner pocket of his black Armani suit jacket,
Byron Pisces brought the palm sized device to his ear and spoke softly into
it.

"Yes?" He said, and then listened intently.

"Very good," he said finally. "I'm pleased that we're ahead of schedule. I
want you to begin the warm up and calibration sequences so I can have the
results when I'm ready to start."

After listening a few moments longer, irritation flashed across his handsome
features. "I don't care," he said into the phone, "If she really feels that
hostages are necessary, then take it up with her, but I won't tolerate any
more killing. It defeats the entire purpose of this endeavor."

He listened again, then sighed. "Very well, I'll come up." He ended the call
and tucked the phone back into his jacket.

Running his hands through his hair, he stared hard at the ghostly image of
himself reflected in the window. He did it more to assure himself that the
face that looked back at him was still his own and not the strange other
person he had began to suspect he was becoming. A year ago, he'd been an
unknown, yet brilliant, research assistant, sent to study mundane things at
the order of superiors with small minds and tight pocket books. What he'd
discovered in Antarctica had drawn the attention of the media but had been
ridiculed by his peers. Then, one day 'they' had come for him and shown him
the truth. Or, at least, what he thought was the truth. This truth sat in
his mind like a beacon sending out signals so very loud and strong that any
attempt to examine it for flaws dissipated like smoke.

The door behind him opened slowly, allowing a trickle of faint light into
the room.

A shadow appeared.

"Is it too much to ask for a moment of privacy?" Pisces snapped. "Next time
knock."

The shadow became longer until the figure creating it came into view.

"I said I'm coming," Pisces snapped viciously, grabbing his coat.

The penguin blinked its glossy obsidian eyes and said nothing.

*************************

Sebastian Crowley, President of Tarot Technologies Inc. shifted his narrow,
frozen rear uncomfortably on the cement floor and wondered again about the
freezing point of nylon rope and duct tape. Across from him, the dead body
of Gerrard Horton, President of Twilight Hybrid Technologies Inc. and
Tarot's biggest competitor, was slumped forward against it's ropes, face
bloated and blue, tongue lolling in it's head. Crowley studied the body with
some interest. Horton had joked endlessly about the benefits of death for
tax purposes. Though he wasn't a religious man, Crowley wondered briefly if
the soul of the thirty-something Brit was reaping the benefits in heaven or
hell.

Three days ago Crowley's decision to sleep in his office after missing the
last commuter train to the suburbs had been, to put it mildly, a big
mistake. Of course, no one could blame him for overlooking the possibility
of being taken hostage and held at gunpoint by an invading force of
penguins. The birds had moved with deadly precision throughout the building,
killing those who resisted and using their mind control on those who didn't.
Those people now made up the impressive contingent of zombie-like human
supporters.  Crowley, and six others had, for unexplained reasons, been the
exception. For them the last three days had been the substance of
nightmares.

The penthouse of the Cathedral Tower was an elaborate machine room that
housed the complex environmental systems for an office building that on any
given business day usually contained more people than a small city. Crowley
had never seen this room before, but it was obvious to him that it had
recently been transformed into an elaborate mission control center, crammed
with technology and manned by blank-eyed humans who were watched over by the
ever-vigilant presence of many unusually large and vicious-looking penguins.
Hoards of smaller penguins milled about, somehow managing to be useful
without the advantage of opposable thumbs.  The combined squawking was near
deafening and the entire scene was undeniably surreal. Crowley was  having a
hard time believing what he was seeing, but, unfortunately, he found himself
forced to rule out job stress as a contributing factor hours ago. All of it
was real.

In the center of the room loomed a huge, unidentifiable piece of machinery
that extended through a hole in the ceiling. The hole was big enough that
Crowley could see a sliver of night sky in the gap between it and the
machine. The hostages had been grouped together in the only empty corner of
the room, tied with yellow nylon rope and gagged with long strips of duct
tape. The air conditioning system had been turned up to it's highest setting
for the comfort of the birds, but the humans, in dress shirts and blouses,
were freezing to death.

Besides himself, Crowley had counted six other hostages, one being dead.
Horton had brought his fate upon himself, he mused. The entrepreneur had
been poisoned by the odd oily substance that coated the bodies of the larger
birds when he decided that his imagined fighting skills were a match for no
one. A gaggle of the smaller birds had dragged him, as he died, over to the
others and tied and gagged him securely. Crowley had watched the life slowly
drain from his eyes and felt a moment's worth of pity, but really no more
than that. He was a man who believed that stupidity on that level was
deserving of it's fate.

Next to him, the other four hostages, all women, sat quietly with bleak,
defeated eyes. One was his mistress, who was the real reason that he'd
missed the last commuter train. The other three were vaguely familiar to
him. He was more than certain that the chubby and bespectacled dirty blonde
worked in his accounting department. He wondered briefly what his wife was
doing at the moment and whether she even cared that he'd been missing for
three days.

A door opened nearby and through it stepped a handsome, well dressed young
man, followed by a penguin. The young man stopped short at his first sight
of the hostages. He looked back at the bird behind him, eyes glittering with
repressed anger.

"Exactly what is the meaning of this?" He asked quietly, his voice deadly
soft and, Crowley noted, made silky by a hint of the deep South.

The bird looked up at him and somehow Crowley knew that the question was
being answered telepathically. The young man was obviously capable of
communicating with the web-footed invaders in this manner. It intrigued him.

"Not good enough," the young man snapped in reply. "This treatment is
inhumane." He pulled thin black latex gloves from his pocket and put them on
before crouching before Horton and placing two fingers on his neck. "This
man is dead," He said.

The bird waddled towards him, head pushed forward and wings pulled back to
add emphasis to it's thoughts. Two of the larger penguins left their posts
to stand behind the smaller one.

The young man's eyes narrowed. "Is that a threat?" He asked, his voice
colder than the room. "Am I correct in assuming that?"

The penguin stared at him a moment longer and then waddled away, leaving the
two larger ones in their places.

The young man shook his head and muttered to himself before turning back to
the hostages. "I won't allow them to keep you like this," he said to the
group. "I promise. It may not seem like it right now, but we're about to do
something wonderful, and you will all have the privilege of witnessing it.
You'll see."

Crowley shook his head and coughed into his gag. It was the best he could do
under the circumstances.

"I know, I know," the young man said gently. "But it's really for the best.
I can't imagine a better way to make this world right, and between the
penguins and my little invention we stand a serious chance for the first
time in human history."  He stood up. "It was our mistake to fight them in
the first place. If we'd simply let them go about their work instead of
resisting them so violently they wouldn't be forced to take such extreme
measures."

Crowley sighed and gave up. Something told him that a part of this young
man's mind had been toyed with in some way.

"I'll be back," Byron Pisces said. "You can count on that."  He turned and
walked away from them, flanked by the two soldier penguins.

Crowley shut his eyes and leaned his head back until it touched the wall
behind him. The young man had said that the penguins were going to make the
world right for humanity. After what he'd seen he sincerely doubted that. It
looked more to him, as if the Penguins were about to take over the world and
make humanity right for them. He realized that if someone didn't do
something soon, the world was destined to become a very different place. He
was obviously not that someone.

He wondered if anyone was.

*****************

Dallas, Texas, Parkland Hospital

In a hospital in Dallas Texas, Chris Ely, Supreme Leader of the Anti-Penguin
Resistance forces opened her eyes as she slowly regained consciousness. The
last thing she could remember was being trapped against the body of her
penguin adversary moments after all hell had broken loose and the
Whitewright facilities had collapsed around them. Injured and confused, with
the sounds of her people screaming and fighting around her, she'd still
managed to kill the big web-footed bastard with her bare hands but knew that
she'd be dead in a short time if she couldn't make it to the cabinet with
the antidote locked inside.  Her last thoughts had been of how proud she was
of her team and how much she'd miss them before the world went mercifully
black.

Now the world was a blurry haze of bright white, except for the dark blob of
a figure hanging over her that slowly focused into the familiar image of a
dark haired, bearded man.

"Harry?" She asked, still groggy.

"No Chris, it's Jim."

Chris blinked then nodded slowly, "Thas okay," she said. "If you don't mind,
though, I think I'll just go back to sleep until Harry gets here."

"Chris," Jim said gently. "Harry's not coming. He's not real. He's a figment
of my imagination."

Chris sighed and grinned. "Story of my life."

She was awake now and clear-headed enough to tease. Fourteen generations of
Texas born and bred ancestral genetic material had given her a constitution
stubborn enough to face just about anything. Penguins included.

"Are you sure you're okay?" Jim asked, sounding uncertain.

"Nope," Chris replied, chuckling now and struggling to sit up, "but for the
regular reasons." She sighed again. "Bring me up to speed here Jim. What
happened?"

"Oh no you don't," said a voice. Beside the entrance to the room stood a
devastatingly handsome red haired male nurse with a thick Scottish burr and
a tag that read 'Ian'. "You'll be wantin' ta rest now Ms. Ely. Doctor's
orders."

"Ga…," said Chris, her jaw dropping.

Jim rolled his eyes. "Yeah, you're okay. I, um, think I'll be going now." He
shook his head. "I'll be back when the doctor says it's okay."

Chris nodded vaguely, looking a little dazed.

Ian the male nurse beamed and held up a bar of soap in one big hand. "But
before I go I'll be givin' ye yer sponge bath," he added.

Chris' jaw dropped open a little further. "Oh YES! Thank you GOD!"

"Bye," said Jim, still shaking his head and moving towards the door.

"Wait Jim, don't go!" Chris cried, one hand on Ian's muscular forearm. "I
can't rest without finding out how the war is going. Are you seeing a lot of
fighting?"

The look in Ian's eye warned him not to upset her, so Jim kept it short.
"There's been nothing for some time now," he said, "In fact, the only action
we've heard of is just a bit up in Canada."

"Canada?" Chris asked, suddenly very serious. "You wouldn't by any chance
know if this action happened in Toronto?"

"Well, yeah." Jim looked at her curiously. "How'd you figure that out?"

Chris rubbed her temples. "I was sort of expecting it, but not so damn soon.
I Guess I'd have had to tell you sooner or later, but we had to be sure."

"We?" Jim asked suspiciously.

"Ian, could you give us a moment?" Chris asked. The male nurse nodded and
tried to stare Jim down as he left, failing miserably. Chris smiled
dreamily, muttering "Hmmmm hmmmm, Sweet Georgia Brown," as she watched his
uniformed butt disappear behind the door.

"Now then," she said with a sigh. "First I want you to tell me everything
that Valeria Orbus told you. Everything."

********************

Small town CAN/AM Border Crossing

Something woke John Atkinson, small town Canadian border guard, from a
fitful sleep.  Blinking in the darkness, he rolled over carefully to avoid
waking his wife and glanced at the glowing red numbers on the bedside
digital alarm clock. Pushing aside the covers, he sat up in bed and strained
his ears to pick up anything out of the ordinary, but all he could hear was
the normal silence of the sleeping house.

Then he heard it again, a growling, roaring, wailing noise in the distance
that was nothing like he'd ever heard in his life. Padding across the
bedroom in his bare feet, he opened the window and leaned out over the
driveway to get a look at the road and the toll gate that cut across it. Far
in the distance, he could make out unusually bright twin beams coming down
the lonely country road.

"John?" His wife asked in a sleepy voice. "What's that noise?"

"I dunno Anne," John replied, baffled. "You stay here, hon. I'm just going
out to take a look."

"Well, be careful."

Something wasn't right about that sound coming down the road. John put on
his slippers and bathrobe and made his way through the darkened house, tying
his sash.

Outside, a cold fall wind was blowing leaves and debris around and around in
tiny twisters. John put a hand to his hair to keep it from blowing over his
face. The lights were getting brighter, and the sound was now very clear.

"Daddy?" Atkinson's teenage daughter appeared behind him with her mother in
tow. Together, they watched the lights approach at breakneck speed. Whatever
was making that noise would be upon them in seconds.

A moment later, a black van with the words 'Smith Veterinary Clinic' painted
on the side crashed through the toll gate, sending splinters of wood and
metal flying.  It screeched to a halt before John and his bewildered family.
The unearthly sound coming from inside it died and the darkened drivers
window rolled down to reveal an impossible number of cat faces.

One black and white cat squeezed through and spoke.

"Pnguins heer?" It inquired.

The Atkinson family stood silent, frozen in shock.

Interpreted as a no, this prompted some whispered discussion among the cats.
Then the black and white feline spoke again.

"Got Fshy treetz for kats?" It asked, accompanied by a sea of nodding,
demanding cat faces.

John Atkinson swallowed hard. "N-no. Got a Coke machine," he said.

"No gud," the Cat said. "Got littr box?" The other cat faces became
desperate.

"There's a sandbox in the playground in town," John Atkinson's daughter
said, giggling and pointing up the road.

The cat seemed to find this acceptable and withdrew into the van. The engine
started with a loud roar and the van's tires spun on the asphalt, laying
rubber as it tore away. The unearthly noise began to pour from the van once
again.

John Atkinson was at a loss for words for the second time in his life since
he'd lost his virginity on his wedding night. He shook his head. "Did what I
think just happened... happen?" He asked.

"What was that god awful noise coming from it?" Anne Atkinson whispered in
awe.

"That wasn't a god awful noise Mom!" Their teenage daughter said. She rolled
her eyes, snorted through her pierced nose and wound her hair, dyed midnight
black, around a finger tipped with deep purple nail polish. "THAT was 'Love
Cats', by The Cure." She giggled, and added, motioning in the direction the
van had disappeared. "I think they were singing along with it."

"Freaks," her father said, shaking his head and avoiding the glare his
daughter sent in his direction. He went back to bed.

In his opinion there were some things in life that were better left
unexamined.

**************************

Dallas, Texas, Parkland Hospital

"She actually kissed it?" Chris shrieked with laughter, slapping the bed
sheets with one hand and wiping tears from her eyes with the other.

"Okay," Jim said, his eyes serious, "I've told you what I know. Your turn."

Chris chuckled some more, but soon sobered, chewing her lower lip in
thought. She sighed and began: "About a year ago, Tamela, one of our
intelligence operatives, started following reports coming out of Antarctica
about a young research assistant named Byron Pisces. He'd made some
fascinating discoveries about Penguins and was taking his information to the
media to make it public. He was, of course, ridiculed for the same reasons
we keep our operations secret. We were hoping to recruit him before he could
do any more damage, but, one night while being interviewed by Larry King on
live television, he was pulled off camera and his satellite signal cut under
suspicious circumstances."

"The birds got to him first," Jim said grimly.

"Well, that's what we assumed right from the start." Chris nodded. "He
pretty much dropped off the face of the earth for a while. There was really
nothing to go on."

"But something made you keep looking," Jim prompted.

"Well, not me, Tamela actually," Chris said. "A month and a half later, she
picked up his trail in Toronto, of all places. He'd kept his name, but
everything else about his life had changed."

"Changed?" Jim asked.

Chris nodded again, "Yep. For one thing, he wasn't an underpaid government
research assistant anymore. He had a personal fortune in the hundreds of
millions sitting in a Swiss Bank Account. We also found that he owned a
consulting firm,  Diokletian Inc., that operated out of Cathedral Tower, one
of the most prestigious buildings in Toronto's financial district. But what
made us even more suspicious, was that all this good fortune was the result
of one client. When we checked out the client, we found it was a numbered
company belonging to....," Chris rubbed her eyes and stared at Jim again.

"God, don't stop there!" Jim cried.

"Jim, I'm telling you this because I trust you, but I have to warn you that
half the reason that I didn't come to you sooner was because I'd discovered
we'd sprung a ton of information leaks over the past several months. It got
to the point that I didn't feel I could trust anyone completely, and this
was big, really, really big."

"Who?" Jim demanded.

"Anita Blake." Chris looked away to avoid meeting his eyes. "We don't think
she knew about it. We're pretty sure that Sigmund had his people set it up
in her name. If she'd been in on it she'd never would have gone and done us
that nice big favor by killing him."

"So the rumors were true." Jim smiled grimly.

"Oh yeah, he's dead all right," Chris snorted and continued, "trust me, I
was there when she shot him, but she didn't know that. After she left the
scene with Ted Forrester and Larry Kirkland, we cleaned up the mess she made
with her shotgun. We couldn't have the police finding the body, and we knew
they'd be all over the place after that double murder involving the Master
of the City in the stadium next door."

"So who's running things now?" Jim wanted to know. "This Byron Pisces guy?"

"We're not sure. That's what we were hoping to find out in Toronto." Chris
sighed. "Things got really out of control for a while. Intelligence tells us
that Blake was supposed to end up in New Mexico. Which didn't happen. We had
Team Toronto under surveillance because all the evidence pointed to the fact
that the security leak was working out of that office. Hell, for a while we
thought the whole office had turned. That's when we came up with Operation
Penguin Storm."

Jim blinked.

"Don't look at me like that Jim Butcher," Chris chided, shaking her finger.
"It was a damn good plan until Ted Forrester's cross-dressing twin brother
came into the picture. How the hell were we supposed to know that he'd shoot
the penguin under those conditions?"

"Why do I get the feeling that you know more about this particular purple
penguin than I do?" Jim was suddenly very glad he was in a hospital.
Hospitals had sedatives.

"Well, we came up with this idea to test Team Toronto." Chris paused and
cleared her throat apprehensively. "We'd captured a young penguin about a
month ago and worked a little penguin-resistance-foo on it to turn it
against its own kind and convince it to spy for us."

Jim opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

"Just before the attack on Whitewright, we put it in a U.S. Mail courier
envelope and had one of our pilots fly it to Toronto and hand deliver it to
the stronghold mailbox there. The whole idea was that if Valeria Orbus'
people were clean, they'd kill the penguin, and if they weren't they'd take
it to the Penguin Army." Chris added as an aside, "Y'see, it was a purple
penguin. They're rare and valuable."

"Of course." Jim nodded, wondering if Chris had been hit on the head harder
than originally thought.

She continued. "My penguin knew what it was supposed to do once it got
there, but my guess is that when it got blown to bits by Forrester's
shotgun, the newly formed infant penguins didn't have a clue about the
mission." Chris shrugged. "I can't say for sure, because we got attacked
just after I'd handed the parcel to our pilot."

"The penguins told Anita Blake that they needed her help," Jim said.

"Yeah, well," Chris paused and scratched her head. "That doesn't really
surprise me, knowing her record for picking up strays. But the big issue is
that somewhere between the Toronto Stronghold and their run-in with Blake,
someone else got control of them in their newborn, weakened state. Someone
close by."

"There's no way in hell those infant penguins would have had their powers
developed enough in so short a time to work the mind-foo that Valeria
described," Jim said.

"Well, yeah, they would," Chris said. "They are the most powerful of their
kind, though nobody seems to know much else about them. We've been keeping
our eyes on those birds Jim. We have some theories that I'm not at liberty
to go into at the moment. All you need to know right now is that in the
wrong hands they could become a dangerous weapon."

"Unbelievable," Jim said.

"And here's the kicker," Chris added. "Pisces has been buying custom parts
from underground dealers in military technology. It looked to Tamela as if
he's building something big, perhaps a weapon of some kind."

"Okay," Jim said. "I'll head over to Toronto to check it out. I should be
able to get there in just over two hours at the latest."

"Forget 'I', try 'we' big man," Chris grunted, struggling with her sheets.

"Don't be silly," Jim grabbed her arm. "You're not well. You heard the
nurse."

"I can't worry about myself when the safety of the world is at stake Jim."
Chris sighed. "It's a responsibility I've accepted. Call Tamela and have her
put out a Code Yellow to every stronghold in North America and call Tom at
the base and have him warm up the aircraft. Before we go, we have to make a
quick stop somewhere and pick up something I can't go without."

"You really think it's that serious?"

"Jim, if my hunch is correct, this is the big one. We may not have time to
wait for the other teams across the country to get there. We're going to
have to make do with Team Toronto and my own special secret weapon."

"Hold on a second," Jim said, hand on the phone. "What the hell are we gonna
do when we get there; Stop someone and say 'excuse me, but have you seen a
huge invading force of penguins in the vicinity?'?"

"Did satellite recon turn up anything?" Chris asked.

"Nothing."

"Then they can't be far. They're probably in the city. We'll have to go with
our gut feelings and whatever Team Toronto can give us." Chris threw back
the covers on the hospital bed and pushed herself to her feet. She felt
better than she had a right to at the moment, but she realized that running
on adrenaline often had that affect. She'd pay for this later.

"Jim?" She asked. "Do me a favor and make those calls outside? I've gotta
get dressed."

"Sure," Jim replied. "Is there anything I can get you?"

"Now that you mention it," Chris mused, "can you get Ian back in here?"

"Christina," Jim said sternly. "Do we really have time for this?"

"Don't worry," the Supreme Leader of the anti-penguin resistance forces said
with a rakish grin. "I have a feeling this won't take long at all."

Continued in  Issue 6  of PENGUIN$..

Back to  PENGUIN$  page
.