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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
The 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 Joha