INTRODUCTION 7 page

From this angle, looking past the ring of burners and smoke generators, it was obvious that the volcano was both fake and hollow. A translucent fiberglass roof covered the opening, and a large panel in the center of the roof was rolled back to reveal a huge silo in the middle.

Rudy tore himself away from the view and turned to look down into the open hatchway, which was probably big enough to fly a small helicopter through. Or launch a missile, which, judging from the rounded nose cone visible just below, was more likely its purpose.

Rudy’s eyes widened. “Dude, is that a‑”

I nodded. “Yeah, kid, it is.”

“A water heater!”

I cringed. “No, doofus, it is not a water heater. Don’t you know a missile when you see one?”

“Not really.”

“Nor a water heater either, I guess. You’ve got a lot to learn, apprentice.”

“Yeah, I guess.” He stared at the missile with growing concern. “Dude, I was happier when it was a water heater. Should we be worried about this?”

“About what?”

“It’s a missile, dude!”

I looked up. “Is it aimed at you? Looks like it’s aimed at the sky to me. Probably another evil plot to destroy the moon. We had three last year in L.A. County that I know of.”

“ The moon? Seriously? What happened?”

I shrugged. “Moon’s still there, isn’t it? Somebody stopped them, I guess.”

“Who?”

I shrugged. “You’re not an apprentice to NASA, Rudy, you’re an apprentice to BOSSE.” I was careful to pronounce it “boss,” the e is silent. Rudy kept calling the union “Bossy,” and the shop stewards didn’t take kindly to that.

I spotted a roof stair and a line of heavy‑duty compressor units twenty yards around the crater to our right. “Come on, we’ve got a noisy blower to fix.” We reached the stairs and I tried the knob. I’d been secretly hoping it was locked, as we’d then have to wait, with the meter running, for the customer to return. But it turned freely, and as I opened the door, I noticed that, strangely enough, the lock had been neatly melted out of the middle. “Something’s not quite right here, kid. Keep an eye open.”

He looked at me. “Dude, we’re going into a fake volcano with a missile in the middle, and you say it’s not quite right? Are you like having a Homer moment or something?”

“Homer moment?”

“You know: D’oh! ”

I frowned at him as I headed down the stairwell. “Do not ever say ‘D’oh’ to your designated union journeyperson. There’s almost certainly a regulation against it, and if not, I just made one up.”

I turned my attention to a series of heavily insulated coolant pipes running down the wall from the compressors above. Following them would lead us to the evaporator coils and the blower. We went down three floors to find a giant octopus of another kind, a huge central air‑conditioning unit from which large metal ducts snaked off in all directions. As we stepped closer, we could hear the fan rumbling with an unhealthy, scraping noise just audible under the rumble.

I located the access hatch on the side, but found it padlocked. I held the lock in my hand and sighed. Unlike a locked roof door, this was no real excuse on this kind of system. “We’ll go in through the ducts,” I said.

Rudy looked surprised. “Dude?”

I nodded up toward the metal tentacles spreading out in all directions. “The ducts. Look at the size of them. We’ll find a grate, climb in, and walk back to the central unit. Look at the size of those things! We’ll hardly have to duck.”

By now, it was becoming clear to me that we were in some kind of lair. Though I hadn’t done much myself, mechanicals guys‑HVAC, plumbing, electricians‑they love lair work. Lots of mechanicals on a big scale, and price is usually no object. Where these guys get their money, I’ll never know, but they aren’t afraid to spend it. And for HVAC guys, a special treat: big ducts. Really big ducts. With great big registers over every secret filing cabinet, master strategy table, supercomputer, and self‑destruct console.

Or so I’m told. Me, mostly I do industrial parks, big‑box retail, and office buildings, so this was kind of new to me. Mostly I was going on union‑picnic shop talk and secondhand info. But I couldn’t let on to the apprentice. I kept my chin up and acted like I did this every day.

We walked down a stark corridor lined with numbered doors. Maybe it was an evil lair of some kind, but except for some roof support girders and other architectural details seemingly borrowed from Forbidden Planet (1965, Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, and pre‑ Naked Gun Leslie Neilsen) it could have been a ministorage based on appearances.

Never mind that. I quickly found what I was looking for‑a large, conveniently accessible air register. I hooked my fingers around the edge, and it easily popped open without the need to remove any screws. From what I’d heard around the union hall, conveniently opening registers were popular lair‑specific features. I tossed my tools inside and climbed up, noticing as I did that it was far easier to see out through the register than in from the outside.

Rudy climbed in behind me, dragging the heavy tank of refrigerant, and closed the register after us.

I considered unclipping the flashlight that I carried on my belt, but it was surprisingly well lit inside the ducts. I stuck my index finger in my mouth to wet it, and held it up into the air flow. “This way,” I said, heading “upstream.” I noticed, as we walked, that these were top‑quality ducts, heavy metal. We were able to move silently. None of that thin, galvanized sheet metal that thumps like a kid’s tin drum every time you shift your weight. “Quality all the way,” I said.

We followed a series of twists and turns past many other registers. Occasionally I would stop to look out into empty control rooms bristling with blinking lights, workshops equipped with menacing looking industrial robots, labs filled with colorful, bubbling beakers, and a room with the biggest damned hot tub I’ve ever seen (and when you’re from L.A., that’s saying something).

“Dude!” Rudy was really impressed with the hot tub.

Finally the rumbling of the blower started to get louder, and it felt as though we were walking into a stiff wind. Ahead, I could see the filter housing. We were quite close to the condenser coils and the blower, but we needed to get past the filter first.

I found the latches and opened the housing. As I did, a number of oddly shaped white objects clattered out onto the heavy metal floor of the duct.

Rudy bent down and picked up what looked to be a long, white bone. He grinned and waved it above his head. “Did you see that space‑monkey movie?”

I frowned at him. “ Planet of the Apes was a ‘space‑monkey’ movie. You’re thinking of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I liked Dr. Strangelove better.” I frowned again, and leaned closer to examine the bone, nearly getting my head conked in the process. “I think that’s a human femur,” I said.

Rudy went white as the bone, and dropped it like it had suddenly burned his hand. “Dude!”

I bent down and picked up the bone. The surface was bleached white and slightly pitted, but it didn’t look old. “I’ve seen this before,” I said. “Back in ’99, some guy in North Hollywood tried to soup up his window AC, and accidentally turned it into a death ray.”

“Dude, a death ray?”

“There are some things non‑union man was not meant to meddle with.”

“So, you’re saying this air conditioner is a death ray?” The implications suddenly hit him, and he quickly backed away from the filter housing.

“That’s not what I’m saying at all. Just that a death ray could be involved.” I kneeled down and examined the other bones: scattered vertebra, a shoulder blade, several ribs, a disarticulated jaw, and a wristwatch. I reached down and picked it up. Rolex. Top of the line.

As I examined it, I accidentally pressed a stud on the side of the case and a needle‑fine red beam shot out and heated a spot on the metal wall to incandescence before I could turn it off.

Seeing the beam, Rudy screamed like a school‑girl and threw himself into a wall so hard that I thought he’d knock himself unconscious.

“Calm down,” I said. “Don’t you know the difference between a death ray and a laser?”

Rudy blinked in confusion. “No.”

“Well, this watch has some kind of cutting laser in it. I think this is what melted the lock outside.” I thought of the abandoned Lotus downstairs, and it all started to make some kind of sense. I opened the filter housing all the way, and the rest of the skeleton appeared to be there, stuck in the fuzzy filter material.

Rudy stared at the bones, panic growing in his eyes. “Dude, there’s a dead guy in the HEPA filter! We should get out of here!”

“Technically,” I said, “this isn’t a HEPA filter at all.” I was starting to feel intrigued. “Anyway, I want to find out what happened here, and we’ve still got a blower to fix.” I pulled out the filter frame to reveal a plenum chamber behind. Ahead, I could see the condenser coils, curled like intestines, dripping condensation.

I started to climb through the opening. I looked to see Rudy just standing there, shivering, but from fear or proximity to the condenser, I couldn’t be sure. “Buck up! This is what you signed up for. Be a man!”

Rudy looked at me and nodded weakly. Slowly, he climbed through after me, still lugging the tank. We slipped past the condenser coils and I could see the huge fan spinning ahead. The scraping noise was very loud now. On the wall of the chamber to our right, I could see an electrical box with a handle on the side. I pulled it down.

There was a loud clack of relays opening, and the motor fell silent, the fan spinning down, and with it, the scraping noise quieted. The big fan slowed until the cruciform shape of the individual blades resolved out of the shimmering disk, and it slowed to a halt. I stepped up and examined one of the blades, its sharp, leading edge buried in the top of a skull.

With some effort, I pulled the skull free of the blade and held it up to Rudy. He was turning white again.

“Well,” I said, “there’s our noise.”

“Good,” said Rudy. “Dude, can we go back to the shop now?”

I looked past the fan, where a long return air duct stretched off into the distance. “Not yet,” I said. “I want to know what happened here.”

“Do we have to?”

“Dude,” I said, “we do.”

I stepped carefully past the blades of the fan and into the duct beyond. In doing so, I must have triggered some kind of motion detector. The air in front of me shimmered and glowed, forming the life‑size translucent image of a short, slope‑shouldered, bald man with a goatee and sci‑fi looking wraparound sunglasses. The glowing image began to speak.

“Greetings, my British friend. I’m sure you think yourself quite clever, sneaking in this way, but I’ve prepared for any eventuality. You are about to become the first test subject for my‑” He paused for dramatic effect, a bit too long in my opinion. “‑death ray!”

Then he began to laugh maniacally. As he did, I saw a panel in the side of the duct begin to slide up. Something inside began to move.

I dropped my toolbox and reached back to snatch the tank from Rudy. I pulled out the filler hose and twisted the valve just as the ugly black muzzle of the death ray began to emerge from its hidden recess behind the door. Clouds of refrigerant shot out, enveloping the sinister device.

I kept the stream concentrated on the muzzle as it locked into position and began to swivel toward us. The flow sputtered and died as the tank emptied.

The apprentice yelped in fear.

I quickly hoisted the tank over my head and slammed it down on the death ray. The super cooled metal shattered like glass.

I dropped the empty tank and turned back to Rudy, a smug smile on my lips. “You see! If you learn nothing else today, learn this: This is a central air‑conditioning system. We are HVAC men! This is our turf, and we have advantage here. You shouldn’t be afraid. Doctor what’s‑his‑face should be afraid of us! Fear our skills! ”

Rudy slowly drew himself up straight, the fear draining from his features.

I patted him on the shoulder. “We can do this!”

Rudy nodded. “Yeah. We can do this.” Then a moment of doubt. “Uh, what is it we’re doing?”

“Whatever Mr. Rolex back in the filer was looking for, it’s at the end of this return duct. I say we go check it out.”

More hesitation. “But‑ why?”

I gestured at the shattered death ray. “Look at this! It’s an unauthorized modification. This Longbeach character, he’s voided his warranty, and that’s not something we take sitting down. Are you with me?”

Rudy nodded weakly. “But what if there are more death traps?”

I grinned, drunk on my own adrenaline. “Oh,” I said, “there will be!”

I was right, too. We’d traveled maybe twenty yards when I spotted a small vent inside of the duct (looking out onto nothing) and a bunch of dead cockroaches littering the floor. “Breather masks,” I said with alarm, grabbing my mask from the pouch on my belt even as I heard a hissing sound.

I slid the mask over my face, pulled the straps tight to form a seal, and then helped Rudy, who was still fumbling with his.

I had just pulled the last strap tight when the air before us shimmered. The phantom doctor grinned at an empty spot in space to my left, confirming what I’d already suspected, that the holograms were recorded. “Well, my British friend, you’ve cheated death once, but you won’t a second time! Is it getting hard to breathe? Well, by now, you’ve already sucked in a fatal dose of my‑” Again with the pregnant pause. “‑nerve mist! Now you can spend your last moments contemplating your failure to stop my world‑destroying missile from launching!” More maniacal laughter.

“Man,” I said, my voice muffled by my mask, “that gets old quick.” I signaled Rudy to follow me. After we’d traveled a few yards, there was a relay click somewhere behind us, and the big fan began to spin again, sucking away the clouds of poison mist.

I turned to watch them go. “Probably a good thing he gave the minions the day off,” I said, “or he’d be gassing them right about now.” I pulled off my mask and gave Rudy a knowing look. “Just goes to show, you shouldn’t tamper with things you don’t understand.”

I turned and looked up the duct. It dead‑ended twenty yards ahead at a single, man‑size air register. That, undoubtedly, was our goal. “Destroying the world,” I said, “is bad for business. We’ve got to stop this guy’s plan, and oh, yes, we are going to bill him for the time!”

I stepped boldly forward, but as I did, I noticed yet another grating in the duct wall, from which, even over the sound of the fan, an ominous buzzing could be heard.

Hesitating not at all, I reached for the roll of filter material and slapped it over the grating, holding it in place with my outspread hands. The buzzing within grew loud and angry, and I heard the thumping of something hitting the back of the filter material, like popcorn in a popper.

There was a glow just visible at the corner of my eye, and I knew our holographic friend was back. “Well, my friend, I’m very impressed, but now taste the bitter sting of my‑”

I growled. “Oh, get the hell on with it, will ya?”

“‑mutant killer bees!”

I looked at the filter material just in front of my face, and saw many small somethings poking through. It took me a moment to realize that I was seeing hundreds of stingers poking through the material.

“Duct tape,” I yelled to Rudy. “Give me duct tape! It’s the only thing that can save us now!”

It was in that moment that Rudy seemed to come into his own. All fear, all hesitation vanished from his face. He pulled a roll of duct tape free of his belt and pulled out a long strip in the same motion, ripping it off with his teeth.

He slapped the strip along the top of the filter material, then went back for more tape.

Behind the filter, the bees were buzzing, but it was Dr. Longbeach who droned on. “As you writhe in venom‑induced agony, eyes swollen shut, airway tightening down until you choke, know that you’ve failed, and that my missile will soon disperse its cloud of self‑replicating nanobots, converting the entire crust of the planet into‑”

Rudy slapped more tape across the bottom of the filter. I was able to pull my hands free and reach for my own roll of tape. But I took a moment to glare at the hologram. “Get on with it!”

“‑peanut butter! Oh, yes! All shall know the deadly, sticky‑sweet touch of‑”

I kept slapping tap over the filter, entombing the deadly insects. “Dr. Scholl’s? Dr. Pepper? Dr. Spock?”

“‑Dr. Longbeach!”

“Never would have guessed.” I slapped the last strip of tape in place, and ran for the vent, Rudy hot on my heels.

I popped open the grate and stepped into a glass‑walled control room overlooking the missile silo. Far below us, clouds of rocket propellant vented from its tanks, eerily like the refrigerant I’d used earlier. Above us, a fluorescent light flickered and buzzed, adding a disturbing surreality to the scene.

I looked quickly around the room. There were the usual consoles, covered with banks of unmarked, ever‑flashing, and incomprehensible lights. But in the center of it all, there was one thing that I could understand, a big, red digital readout counting down toward zero.

59… 58… 57…

And it was then, in one moment of horrible realization, I understood the gravity of our situation. Like Alice Through the Looking Glass (the 1974 TV version, with Phyllis Diller as the White Queen and Mr. T as the voice of the Jabberwock, was surreal even by the standards of Wonderland) we had stepped out of the ductwork. We were out of our element, and suddenly I felt lost.

“We’ve got to stop it,” said Rudy.

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“ Do something!”

“Do what? I don’t know anything about rocket control systems.”

44… 43… 42… 41…

Rudy stepped toward the console, his hands hovering over the timer mechanism. Impulsively he reached down and pried open a panel below it, exposing a rat’s nest of colored wire. He stared at it desperately. “Do something.”

“I can’t,” I answered miserably. “I don’t know how.”

31… 30… 29…

Rudy gazed at the wires. “Look, just‑Just think of it as a big thermostat! A thermostat that counts seconds instead of degrees!”

I looked a him, incredulous. “That’s stupid!”

“So to stop the furnace‑the rocket‑from going off, we need to make the temperature go down instead of up!”

“You’re saying we need to reverse time?”

Rudy frowned. “That doesn’t work, does it?”

“We’re doomed.”

23… 22… 21…

“Look,” he said, “what do they do in the movies?”

I reached for my tool belt and took out a pair of diagonal cutters. “They cut a wire. But which wire?” I sighed, thinking of all the countless red, digital timers I had seen in various movies. “It’s usually the red wire or the blue wire.”

“Unless,” said Rudy, “it’s the white wire or the black wire.”

I groaned. He was right. The timer‑readout was always standard, but the wires were always different.

15… 14… 13…

Behind me, I heard a door creak open, but there was no time to wonder who it was.

“Just cut one,” begged Rudy, “any one!”

The timer flashed. Sweat ran down into my eyes. That flickering light made my head hurt.

Cut a wire! But which one?

4… 3… 2…

I felt someone lean over my shoulder.

A hand sheathed in a black rubber glove slipped past me, holding something.

A knife blade glittered in the flickering light.

The blade slipped into the nest of wires and smoothly plucked one out, pulling it tight and cutting it with a snap…

1…

1…

1…

I sagged against the console, the diagonal cutters slipping from my cramped fingers.

Rudy jumped into the air, letting out a victory whoop. “Dudes!”

Dudes? I turned to look at our mysterious rescuer.

He stood, a titan in gray coveralls and a baseball cap. He hoisted up his tool belt, sniffed, and rubbed his bushy mustache with his index finger.

“Who,” I said, “are you?”

He folded his pocketknife and slipped it back into a holster on his belt. “I’m the electrician,” he said. “Somebody called about a busted fluorescent.”

Dr. Longbeach appeared at the door, a black plastic Radio Shack bag clutched in his hand, and surveyed the scene. “Oh, thank God you’re here. I was afraid this time I was actually going to get away with it.” He shuddered. “ Peanut butter. Eeew.”

Okay, so the men from HVAC didn’t save the world.

Not that time, anyway.

But we helped.

“Dude,” said Rudy, looking at the electrician in admiration.

“Hey,” I said to the kid, “you’re my apprentice!” I turned to address the stranger as an equal. “You have skills, my friend, as do we. We should team up.”

And that, as you’ve surely guessed by now, is how the Justice League of Contractors was born.

THE SINS OF THE SONS by Fiona Patton

T he city of Riamo was neither so large nor so grand as the five other city‑states that graced the Ardechi River. Its marble palazzos were small and compact as were its cathedral and its single monastery. Its market piazzas were neat and well laid out and its harbor sturdily constructed. It was known for the skill of its weavers and its dyers and the guilds that oversaw these industries were both prosperous and progressive. While not large enough to boast a necropolis like its great neighbor Cerchicava, it nonetheless housed five cemeteries within its ancient walls, one each for the nobility, the merchant class, the military, the Church, the trades, and the poor. Even its heretics’ graveyard, built outside the western wall, was tidy, well‑organized, and decently protected by a complement of city guards who took their duty seriously. The necromantic trade, so rife along the Ardechi, had never gained much of a foothold in westernmost Riamo. A fact that both the Church and the governing council were justly proud of.

Standing on the ducal Palazzo de Gagio’s fine marble terrace, Luca Orcicci stared out across the river, his cold, blue eyes carefully hooded. Known as Luca Preto, a reserved foreign aristocrat with a modest fortune, he had lived in Riamo for nearly twenty years, ever since his master, Lord Montefero de Sepori, the premier Death Mage in Cerchicava, had sent him here to gain a very substantial foothold for the necromantic trade. Whatever the Church and the governing council might like to believe, far more of its citizens were damned then they would ever have imagined.

Turning his head slightly, he listened as the cream of Riamo’s nobility fluttered about the palazzo’s main audience hall like so many agitated geese. The Duc Johanni Gagio had been murdered in neighboring Pisario, the second largest and singlemost aggressive city‑state to the east. The duc of Pisario, Cosimo Talicozzo, had immediately closed the harbors, arresting anyone even remotely suspicious while denouncing the act as loudly as possible. The public belief was that the deed had been committed by the fabled Huntsman, a mysterious crossbow‑wielding assassin of consummate skill who had terrorized both Cerchicava and Pisario in the last year. But the older members of Riamo’s court held to a more insidious conviction, that Talicozzo himself had been behind the murder. It was not so long ago that Pisario had cast a covetous eye along the entire length of the Ardechi River, going so far as to wage full‑out war against Cerchicava itself. Riamo could easily be next.

That no one had even whispered the suspicion that the necromantic trade might be involved struck Luca as both amusing and irritating. But such was the way in Riamo; egotistical, political squabbling with no clear understanding of the real clandestine powers that flowed beneath their lives like an underground river. It was a belief that Luca did his best to promote but lately he was beginning to wish that the complacent nobility and wealthy merchants of Riamo might, just for once, come face‑to‑face with reality. The tedium of security was beginning to make him restless. No doubt that was why the Huntsman had chosen Gagio in the first place. He always did have the uncanny ability to read Luca’s mind.

The thought transformed his expression from one of contempt to consideration as he made his way inside. He was not fond of crowds, palazzos, or the nobility; the first clouded your thinking, the second hampered your vision and the third… He caught sight of Piero Bruni, his manservant, standing patiently in the wings by the great double doors and nodded his head to indicate that they would be leaving shortly. The third would betray you faster than your heart could stop beating beneath a cutter’s knife. But unfortunately all were necessary evils at the moment. He would have to remember to thank the Huntsman when he finally returned home. Schooling his expression, he headed for the knot of people standing beside the ducal throne.

The Bishop of San Salvadore had a firm grip on Johanni’s son, Eugene ’s, attention‑no doubt lecturing the new duc to do nothing either rash or impolitic regarding Pisario‑when Luca approached. Resisting the urge to bare his teeth at the bishop, Luca gave the young potentate a sympathetic bow before moving on with a modicum of satisfaction. Condolences having been given, he was now free to retire before the desire to see the churchman laid out on his dissection table got the better of him.

At the door, he paused a moment to speak with Dante Corsini, a long‑distance trader of powerful influence in legitimate as well as illegitimate affairs. Although untainted by the necromantic trade, he was nonetheless deeply involved in all other aspects of the city’s unlawful activities. The two men treated each other with a guarded respect, so when Luca gave the other man a formal nod of greeting, Dante caught up a glass of wine from a passing servant and raised it in response.

“A bad business this, Preto,” he stated before the man had moved out of earshot. “Terrible for trade with Pisario.”

Luca frowned at him. Most of the wealthy merchants in Riamo treated their servants as if they were blind, deaf, and mute, but generally Corsini was not so careless; such thinking had led too many men of both their acquaintances to the gallows. All of Luca’s servants were members of the trade and carried binding spells so strong that their very skulls would explode if they even considered betraying him, but Corsini did not have that luxury. No matter how powerful a Court Mage he was reputed to be, only the Death Mages were capable of such precautions. The servant who had brought him his drink also carried Luca’s binding spell, but Corsini could not have known that when he spoke. Outraged grief or stunned disbelief were the only safe reactions at this time and Luca said as much with a dark glance at the other man.

Corsini dismissed his concern with a wave of his hand. As he lifted the glass to his lips, Luca saw the tiny flash of a discreet, blue purity spell scatter throughout the wine and nodded inwardly. At least Corsini wasn’t completely stupid. It paid to be careful, even in pedantic, law‑abiding Riamo.

“I wonder if they’ll linger over the funeral arrangements now that the cold weather’s here,” he mused, steering the conversation to a slightly less dangerous topic.

“I heard the bishop dispatched his own people to Pisario straightaway to prepare the body,” Corsini answered. “And that old fart, First Minister Poggeso, sent messages out to the five cities just as swiftly. Ducal parties mean ducal security but it also means increased business opportunities.” He sipped his wine thoughtfully. “I wonder if Eugene will be replacing Poggeso now,” he added with a speculative expression.

Luca shrugged. “I shouldn’t think he’d make any changes until after the funeral, but if you have a candidate in mind you should bring it to his attention as soon as possible‑before too many other people offer their own choices.”

As one, they both glanced over to where the bishop was still monopolizing the duc’s company.

“He’ll be expected to take a wife now, too,” Corsini noted sourly. “And you can be certain her family will be swift to exert their own influence.”

“The bishop will likely come to that subject soon enough. He has a niece of marriageable age.”

Corsini grunted. “So have I, but my sister married a scheming little viper and I’ve no intention of increasing his power base. Pity you and I didn’t think to have daughters. That might have been our influence.”