Commando Bats Read Online Free

into a million
pieces. So I smashed everything of his, and threw all his furniture over the
balcony onto our private beach. His furniture, his precious suits from London,
everything.”
    (I knew it, Ocean Front Walk, I grumped to myself.)
    On the tablet, my search turned up a row of entries on
Hephaestus.
    Cecile went on. “I was starting on his study when you
called. He should be getting home soon. I’m afraid he’ll have me arrested, or
committed. Or if that Hera woman is real, she’ll come around and turn me into a
tree, or whatever they do.” She put her hands over her face. “Maybe all this is
hallucination and I have a brain tumor.”
    Swell, Hephaestus was crippled. Joke’s on me, Hera!
    I looked up, finding Cecile staring at me. “Tell the hubs it
was a break-in,” I said, trying to sound friendly and helpful. “Gang hoodlums.”
    I could see them both contemplating the likelihood of a
bunch of hulking young guys in tats and hoodies driving unnoticed up Ocean
Front, which has enough private security to run the secret police of a small
country, just to break in and trash an old guy’s New England wing chairs and
Gieves & Hawkes suits.
    “Or not,” I said.
    Bettina shrugged. “He probably won’t believe that you could
do it. But if that Hera was serious, you’re right, we’ve got a bigger problem.
How do you think we look to Them so far?”
    I could hear the capital T, and after all, if we could be
given superpowers, we could be watched by all the gods.
    It was then that I got to Hephaestus’s attributes.
Blacksmith . . . metal worker . . . Inventor, Holy Crom! Metal automatons?
Hephaestus had robots as his minions!
    Cecile’s expression had reverted to the remote hauteur we
first saw. That’s how she looks when she’s scared. “I want to give it back,”
she whispered.
    “Doesn’t look like that’s an option.” Bettina set her coffee
cup down. “So here we are. Either we go our separate ways, in which case, good
luck. Or we deal with this together. She did put us together.”
    Cecile said, “She picked out three people our age who
happened to be standing at the end of the pier.”
    “Cosmic joke,” I said.
    They both ignored me. Bettina said to Cecile, “You don’t
think she couldn’t have separated us out if she wanted to?”
    I couldn’t get my mind off those robots. I felt the art
itch, for the first time since the stroke that poleaxed me while standing in
line at the post office. “Going home,” I said, beginning the exasperating
struggle to shift myself from bench to walker to scooter. “Experiment.” To
Bettina, “You want me to fix your house, call. Morning.” In addition to
everything else, I was talked out.
    I put down my share of the bill, and exited.
    On my way home, I touched every pole, wall, fence, and other
kind of structure that might have electricity. I discovered that I had to have
some kind of metal under my fingers to get a schematic, but it didn’t have to
be much. A few electrons through my fingers could find their way in picoseconds
past shielding — the world is filled with EM. And the larger the power
source, the better schematics I could command.
    Living on social security means being very careful with
money. I stopped at a 99c store to pick up some cheap toys to experiment with,
ones that contained at least a bit of conducting metal.
    When I reached the gate at home, the motion detectors put on
the lights. As I rolled into the yard, which was warm and still and full of the
scent of jasmine, Twila Dewey’s voice startled me.
    “Nancy, what you doing out so late? Got a fella at last?”
    “Hobby shop. Supplies,” I called, holding up my bag of toys.
    “Good for you! You just keep at it, you’ll be drawing
unicorns again in no time!”
    Unicorns? I’d never been in Twila’s place, nor she in mine.
How did she know what I drew? I shook my head as I rolled in and shut my door
firmly. The NSA could save a bundle on cyberspy equipment just by