Ghostfinders 01 - Ghost of a Chance

charge here, little man. I don’t need your help to take down JC and his team. If you make yourself a distraction or a liability, I will drop you in your tracks and go on without you. Understood?”
    Erik nodded frantically, and Natasha released his finger. Erik nursed his throbbing hand against his chest. “You play rough, Natasha. I’ve always liked that about you.”
    “If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking,” said Natasha, “you’re a dead man.”
    Erik smirked. “Good thing I augmented my brain, to make it immune to telepaths, then.”
    “Don’t underestimate JC,” insisted Natasha. “He has skill and experience far beyond his years. He’s a prodigy and a marvel, and quite possibly the next Head of the Carnacki Institute. Why else do you think Vivienne was so eager to sign his death warrant? She knows competition when she sees it. Remember the Case of the Horse Invisible, last year? JC. Did you even read what he did last night, face-to-face with a primal-god thing? No; JC is a better field agent than we’ll ever be.” She smiled suddenly. “Which is what will make killing him so much fun.”
    “This is a woman thing, isn’t it?” said Erik.
    “I could just eat him up,” Natasha said dreamily. “I’m sure his ghost will prove to be particularly tasty.”
    Erik said nothing. There were some things about his companion that freaked even him out.
    They stood together at the top of the escalator, looking down. All was still, and quiet.
    “Time to go to work,” Natasha said abruptly. “Time to ambush the good and virtuous, throw them down, and trample them underfoot.”
    “I don’t know,” said Erik. “I’m getting a really bad feeling about this. Something bad has come to Oxford Circus. Something far worse than we’ll ever be. Don’t tell me you can’t feel it, too, oh mighty Class Ten.”
    “Whatever it is, we can handle it,” said Natasha.
    “Probably,” said Erik. “But why should we? Why not let JC and his people take the risks and soak up the punishment? Then we can move in afterwards, while they’re weakened and off guard, kill them, and take the captured prize for ourselves.”
    “Every now and again you justify your presence as my partner,” said Natasha. “Set up your equipment, little man, and let’s take a peek at what our good friends and rivals are doing down there.”
    “You’d be lost without me,” said Erik. “Heh-heh.”
    He took off his back-pack and lowered it carefully to the ground, as though it contained something breakable and highly explosive. He untied the heavy restraining straps, one by one, and carefully lifted out his latest creation. It wasn’t in the least aesthetic, a brutally functional transparent cube containing rapidly moving parts, with a living cat’s head jammed on the top. Wires sprouted from shaved points on its skull. The cube was an intricate clock-work mechanism, in which all the swiftly moving pieces were made of solid light and shaped energy, blazing fiercely with more colours than the human eye could cope with. The movements alone could make your brain hurt if you looked at them too long, as they rotated through more than three spatial dimensions. The cube ticked and tocked, but not regularly. It raced and paused and speeded up again, like a clock driven mad by seeing too much of the wrong kind of Time. Erik had put a lot of work into crafting the world’s first far-seeing computer, and he was very proud of it. He patted the living cat head fondly, and it hissed and spat at him. Its unblinking slit-pupilled eyes were full of rage. Its thoughts enlarged and expanded through its intimate connection with the computer; it knew what had been done to it but was helpless to do anything about it. Natasha watched Erik make small, careful changes to the control panel on one side of the cube and turned up her aristocratic nose.
    “Even by your standards, that is a seriously ugly object. Are you sure this . . . thing, will do what it’s supposed to?”
    “Of course,” said Erik, bristling at the implied slight on his abilities. “The computer augments the cat’s natural psychic abilities, and together they can See and Hear whatever is going on for miles in every direction. They can even peek a short way into the Past and the Future. Theoretically. Ignore the spitting and the hissing and the occasional squalling; the cat’s head will do what I want, when I want it to. I plugged a wire directly into its little