powers around unsuspecting humans was suboptimal to their productivity, and could even cause (although rarely) long-term emotional disruption.
Not that Jacob was capable of empathizing directly with any of the various agents around him. He simply acted in accordance with the math. That is to say, he used the most logical protocol available based on risk/reward analysis. For example, the risk of “emotional disruption” had an estimated negative score. The added advantage for apprehending the target using “disruptive measures,” such as smashing through walls, had an estimated positive score. These scores and many others were factored in with the relative value of apprehending the target. For instance, was the target likely to be dangerous to other people, products, or property? If the target somehow avoided capture on this occasion, what was the likelihood of apprehending him later? For a being like Jacob, any decision could be boiled down to the return value of a mathematical formula.
Given the data available, the “direct approach” protocol was given a value of “false.” He went through a series of other protocols, and within a billionth of a second he settled on simply flying to the target’s apartment, but taking the time to use the existing hallways to get there.
Before proceeding to the target’s apartment, Jacob briefly considered apprehending the woman who was warning the target. It was a sin to knowingly aid a demon, giving Jacob the authority to arrest her. She was not far away. Judging by the direction and intensity of her call, coupled with the obstacle layout of the area, Jacob estimated her position at around one hundred meters. However, subduing the subject would take some time, and now that the alarm had been sounded, time was of greater importance. Furthermore, she was not his target. Worse yet, she could just be a distraction. Perhaps the warning did not emanate from a human at all, just a voice simulation. This had been used on Jacob before, and he was not about to make the same mistake twice. No, Jacob would continue on to the primary target and deal with her afterward.
Jacob took flight with a thunderous boom as he broke the sound barrier. His flight applied pressure to the surrounding walls, but they did not tear. Almost instantly, his sensors detected a humanoid around the corner ahead, right in his path. This forced the angel to land before the corner and run. Jacob was heavy, and the impact points of his feet were relatively small, which increased the risk of generating great amounts of noise and damaging the floor. This was not optimal. However, Jacob could not fly past the citizen. The pressure emanating from an angel passing a human in these tight quarters would likely cause injury.
Passing the human, Jacob scanned the citizen to confirm that he was not the target. He was not. Passing the startled man as a blur, Jacob then returned to flight, causing another sonic boom. He had to immediately slow down to negotiate the corners of the hallway, after which he accelerated again, creating another sonic shockwave. By the time he got to the door he had made four separate shockwaves, although they were so close together that to a human ear it would only sound like a single deafening blast.
Jacob was now within scanning range of the target’s dwelling. His scanners penetrated through the walls, indicating there was nothing inside that matched mammalian tissue density. He did a quick calculation based on his pursuit algorithm. The woman who screamed out the warning did so only 0.8 seconds ago. Assuming that the target was in the reported dwelling at that time, he could not have gone far.
Although alone in his home, his sanctuary, Todget did not feel safe. It was that female human he had seen in the hall as he was about to enter his apartment. There was something about the way she looked at him, something about how she walked away from him that made him uneasy. The only reason he had returned to his apartment at all and lingered there now was because he expected Lily to return. She knows not to wander after the sun rises, Todget thought. He had chastised her about her carelessness before. “Travel only when the humans sleep” is what they had agreed on. Yet, where was she? Todget did not allow himself to entertain his most awful fears about her absence. He assured himself that Star Sisters were, by their very nature, capricious and independent to a flaw. She had done this before.
Nevertheless, he would not have escaped the reserve or survived as long as he had in the outside world if he had not learned to trust his instincts. Since returning to his apartment, he had prepared himself for the worst.
Quickly, he drew his knife from his pant leg and slit the mattress open. This abuse of furniture was of no consequence, for the living fabric would mend itself in a week or so. He thrust his hand deep into the foot of the mattress and extracted the weapon. It was in the shape of a long rifle, nearly a meter long. It had a set of three canisters mounted side by side under the weapon, just in front of the trigger guard, running up to the front of the barrel. The weapon had no stock; it did not need one. Its recoil was minimal and it was only effective at short range, so bracing it for careful aiming was of little use. At over forty kilograms, the weapon was heavy-even without a stock-but this was of little consequence to Todget, who was stronger than any human male.
The weight of the weapon was mainly due to its ammunition. In the middle cylinder there was a composite metallic mixture that had a boiling point of over thirteen thousand degrees Celsius. In the two flanking cylinders there were potent chemicals that, when combined, created so much heat that the resultant mix would melt any material known to man. When the weapon was fired, contents from all three chambers were injected into the ignition chamber. Although relatively stable apart, the combination of the two ignition chemicals would cause a tremendous exothermic reaction. This mass of rapidly heating liquid would fuse with the metallic slurry from the central cylinder, and long before the chemical reaction could reach its zenith, the contents of the ignition chamber would be expelled out of the barrel. Then, over the next few nanoseconds, after the superalloy slurry had burst out of the muzzle, its temperature would rise to its full potential. The superheated goo would stick to anything it hit, melting and boiling via its own unearthly heat.
The weapon was called a BB gun. The “BB” stood for “bombardier beetle,” which was the inspiration for its design. Millions of years ago, the bombardier beetle had evolved a unique and ingenious defense mechanism. The beetles stored two separate chemicals, hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide. When the creatures perceived a threat, the two chemicals squirted out through two tubes. They mixed, along with some catalytic enzymes, and then underwent an extremely powerful exothermic chemical reaction. The boiling, malodorous liquid underwent flash evaporation, and when the gas was expelled, it created a loud pop.
The BB gun had cost Todget a small fortune. Since it was a sin to buy, sell, or possess modern weapons of any kind, the excessive price was appropriate. However, its status as an illegal modern weapon was only part of the story, for the BB gun was in a class of blasphemy all its own. Aside from being a modern weapon, it was specifically designed to combat agents of the Divine Authority. It was well known that Divine Authority enforcers were only vulnerable to nuclear weapons, and even then, only if the source of the blast was nearby.
But all solid matter, regardless of its “divine” properties, had its melting point, and so the BB gun was meant to exceed the melting point of all known things, thereby obliterating anything it hit. Even the nanotech crystallized metal that was used for the ammunition of the weapon could not withstand its own heat for long before it also vaporized. Because of this last point, a BB gun was only effective at short range-fifty meters maximum-and although the weapon would still kill an armored human at a much longer range, it would do little to one of the Divine Authority’s enforcers. Todget knew he needed to get near his enemy to be effective; however, Todget also knew that if an angel was that close, chances were that he would already be dead.
His finger caressed the trigger. The weapon rested on one leg, hidden under his heavy cloak as he stood facing his bedroom wall.
As was typical of apartments in this neighborhood, the apartments were connected directly together, and although Todget and Lily always kept the doors locked, Todget now left the door open to his neighbor’s living room in preparation for flight. He wasn’t exactly sure how the open door would assist him; perhaps it would serve as an exit or as a decoy. All that he knew for certain was that he didn’t feel comfortable being penned in.
The man next door peered curiously through the open doorway. He and his neighbors had never met, and Todget briefly speculated that the hollow-eyed spanker probably wondered why his reclusive neighbor had left their adjoining door open. But the truth was that the neighbor had little interest in Todget himself or his unprecedented exhibitionism; instead, he was trying to catch a glimpse of Todget’s beautiful roommate-the girl that every guy in the mound talked about but rarely saw and never spoke to.
His neighbor would have been taken aback if he had actually been able to see Todget’s face, for it was caked in a gel that was both fire retardant and heat insulating. Upon returning to the apartment, he had quickly caked his entire naked body with this gel and then shimmied into his fire-retardant clothing, making a sticky mess underneath. Such discomfort was trivial to him, however. If he did need to use the BB gun, most likely he would need some protection from its awful power. If he did not need it, well, then it was easy enough to clean up
