Iron Mike Sweeney was ready for the coming battle. He was more ready than he had ever been. His fighting skills had been refined by a thousand battles, and through the teachings of his Zen master, Shinobi, his mind was cool, detached, receptive.

Upon the War Machine he sat at the top of Corn Hill, watching the town below him. Night had come upon the town, and Iron Mike, Enemy of Evil, was ready. Energy hummed through the War Machine’s circuitry. Across Iron Mike’s chest was the strap supporting his satchel of fusion bombs. Each was rolled tightly to compress its charge, and bound with a single unbreakable strand of a rare natural material similar in appearance to rubber bands. Iron Mike had disguised the bombs to look like copies of the Evening Standard and Times. He smiled thinly, amused at his own cleverness. None of the Evil Ones would ever suspect that they were under attack. He would ride down among them, heaving fusion bombs onto their very doorsteps, and then he would go to warp drive and soar to a minimum safe distance of one thousand kilometers before he remote-​detonated the bombs. Then the whole of Corn Hill, that wretched hive of scum and villainy, would become one huge mushroom cloud of cleansing nuclear fire. Not even the minions of the Evil One could survive that. Then the rest of Pine Deep could sleep in peace for another night, the lives and souls of all the true humans protected yet again by Iron Mike Sweeney, the Enemy of Evil.

Perched atop the hill like a huge predator bird, he looked at his transtemporal chronometer strapped to his muscular wrist.

It was time.

Very carefully he removed his cerebral-​interface from his pocket and placed it on his head, adjusting the earpieces so that the data flow would be perfect. Then he touched the keypad of the InfinityMind uplink. Immediately coded data flowed into him. The InfinityMind was in one of its playful moods, Iron Mike noticed with a wry smile; it fed him his battle data in a kind of strange musical encryption that, to anyone else but a cyborg warrior of justice, sounded much like the Beastie Boys.

“Let’s do it,” Iron Mike said with a cold voice. It was in fact what he always said right before battle.

He touched an invisible button on his handle-​grips, releasing the engines from station-​keeping. Another button put the battle engines online. They purred like great cats. With his thumb he activated the forward shields. He never used the aft shields. He was Iron Mike Sweeney: his back would never be toward the enemy. They would always see him coming right at them, cramming justice right down their throats!

“Let’s do it,” he said again, lips curling back into a warrior’s smile, revealing gritted teeth.

The War Machine leaped forward, accelerating smoothly as it shot down the steep decline of Corn Hill. As he swooped down toward the first of the Evil Ones’ lairs, Iron Mike thrust a hand into his satchel and gripped the first fusion bomb.

“Eat this, alien scum!” he snarled and threw the bomb with perfect precision. It cut through the black shadows and the miserable spray of light from the streetlight and arced over the hedges. Iron Mike knew that they weren’t really hedges but holographic projections designed to disguise the front of the alien encampment. He wasn’t fooled. The fusion bomb soared past the holograms and struck with a ringing thud on the red-​painted front portal. The bomb dropped to the ground and lay there, destruction hidden in Iron Mike’s own deceptive covering.

The Evil Ones are going to get a lot of bad news tonight , he thought, and grinned wolfishly.

He sped on, zeroing in on his next target. Target acquired, he delivered his next “special edition” and rode on, laughing with righteous triumph. Above and beyond the town, dark clouds loomed and the gods threw lightning to mark his way.

Iron Mike Sweeney, the Enemy of Evil, rained destruction as he soared down Corn Hill, the warp nacelles on the War Machine channeling limitless power into every atom of the attack craft.

The battle to save mankind had begun!

4

“Okay, gentlemen,” Terry said as he breezed into the office, “someone want to bring me up to speed?”

A dozen men and women were scattered around, standing, sitting backward on chairs, lounging against filing cabinets; some held cups of coffee in Pine Deep Police Department plastic mugs. A dozen heads turned in his direction; eight of them he recognized, the others were strangers. Of the first batch, Gus Bernhardt dominated the place, not with any sense or aura of command, but with sheer physical size. He was approximately the size of a panel truck, as bald as an egg, and as red as a twenty-​dollar lobster. Chief Bernhardt was a massive, sloppy Buddha figure in an ill-​fitting gray uniform that was all decked out with whipcord and buttons and polished fittings. His accoutrements were the only neat part of him; the rest of him looked like he’d spent the night in the backseat of his patrol car, which might have been a fair guess. Terry knew that Gus was a lousy chief, but he was related to practically everyone in town and no one else really wanted the job. To be fair, the job rarely entailed anything more capital than ticketing speeders on A-32, citing overtime parking, discouraging kids from shoplifting baseball cards from the drugstore, and rousting the teenagers who went out to Dark Hollow to get drunk and screw. Terry knew that Gus spent much of his shift time eating, reading old dog-​eared Louis L’Amour paperbacks, and sleeping.

Gus’s crew of officers ranged from subpar to not bad. Jim Polk and Dixie MacVey were longtimers like Gus, career cops in a town that hadn’t much use for serious law enforcement. Shirley O’Keefe and Rhoda Thomas were law students from Pinelands State College who took part-​time police coop jobs just to get some vague idea of what the whole cops and robbers thing was all about, though they had quickly discovered there were no robbers, as such, in Pine Deep, and the cops were not exactly NYPD Blue. The remaining three officers, Golub, Brayer, and Shanks, were local boys, fresh out of college, who took the job because it was a job and because they hadn’t had anything better lined up; but they were decent, intelligent, and conscientious young family men, and they worked their shifts with something approaching dedication if not actual competence. Terry nodded to a couple of them and shook Gus’s beefy mitt. The four strangers regarded him with neutral expressions, their faces registering nothing because he wasn’t in uniform and that meant that he was a civilian. The wall between the cops and the rest of the world was typically palpable.

Gus made the introductions, waving a hand at the closest of the four, a tall, middle-​aged, balding black man with a lugubrious expression wearing a dark blue nylon windbreaker with POLICE stenciled on the breast and back in crisp white letters. Terry thought that he looked like Morgan Freeman without the sense of humor.

“Terry, this is Detective Sergeant Frank Ferro with the Philadelphia Narcotics Division. Detective, this is our mayor, Terry Wolfe.”

The narc’s eyes registered the information and his attitude softened just a little, accepting the mayor as more or less “one of us.” He extended a thin but surprisingly strong hand and they shook.

“A pleasure, sir. This is my partner, Detective Vince LaMastra.” A cheerful-​looking and very tan young man with a buzzed head of blond hair extended his hand and gave Terry a wrestler’s handshake. He was one of those athletic types who are so superbly muscled that his tanned face looked like a leather bag full of walnuts with each angular muscle in cheek and jaw sharply defined, but the bright blue eyes and the youthful smile offset the effect. Like Ferro, he was wearing a blue windbreaker over a white shirt and dark tie. Having cast Ferro as Morgan Freeman in his mind, Terry cast LaMastra as Howie Long. Matching everyone he met to actors was a trick Terry had always used to remember people in business. It had long ago become automatic, though oddly he had never been able to figure out which actor could play him.

Gus nodded to the other two, both wearing ordinary police uniforms. “Officer Chremos down from Crestville,” Gus said, and Terry shook hands with a Greek-​looking man in his midforties in starched black and white.

The last man stood and offered his hand before Gus could make the introduction. “Jimmy Castle.”

“One of Black Marsh’s finest,” Gus said wryly.

“Absolutely,” said Castle with a grin. He had sandy blond hair and freckles and an instantly engaging manner. The other Pine Deep cops just nodded and kept to the background, clearly intimidated by the big dogs from Philly.

“Okay then,” said Terry, looking around at the faces. “Well, ladies and gentlemen, where do we stand?”

Gus opened his mouth to speak, but Sergeant Ferro beat him to it. “If I may? Your Honor, the situation is this—we have three suspects, part of a small team that had worked out a drug buy with your generic Jamaican heavies. Nothing unusual, usually no hitches in an operation like this. A standard midvolume buy staged in an empty warehouse, happens all the time, every day of the week. These things generally don’t get messy because that interrupts the regular flow of trade. The product has to flow smoothly in order for everyone to get rich. It’s all business.”

“Okay, I’m with you so far,” Terry said as he settled his muscular rump on the corner of Gus’s desk and listened attentively. He composed his face into a stern, slightly superior frown but raised his eyebrows to show that he was ready to hear their report. It was a tactic that worked pretty well on the town council, and seemed to work well enough with Ferro. Inside, Terry’s heart was hammering against his chest, beating out a rhythm of excitement and apprehension. He just didn’t let it show.

The cop said, “The buy was set up in Philly, which is why Detective LaMastra and I were in on the case. Our narcotics unit is a division of East Detectives, and we sometimes work with state and federal narcotics offices to stop interstate flow of drugs. Now, since there was a shoot-​out and one of our officers was killed, we would like to be actively involved in this investigation.” His eyes were hard as he said this and the room was very quiet. “I’ve asked Chief Bernhardt if he would mind if I called in some Philly blues with their units to help with the search. They’ll be here within the half hour. If…that is acceptable to you, sir.”