The Man Who Stole the Weather

Her strike knocked off his shades and sent him staggering backwards while she with her left hand grabbed the Impeller and tore it from his grip. The ork went down to one knee on the marble a few feet away.

Holding up the Impeller, Dawson scanned the room and spoke to the department heads. "Any other weapon in history would have killed me four times by now. You built a gun that fires twice and then turns into a club, one that's too hot to even hold properly."

She tossed the smoking, fatally jammed Impeller onto the meeting table where it melted partially into the solid wooden surface. The department heads pushed away from it immediately as if they'd never supported the idea to begin with. Collateral scrambled out from beneath it for fear of its molten runoff landing on his suit.

"If you thought that was scary, keep in mind that I actually want to live another day. The same can't often be said of people out there on the street." She walked to Cranston and offered the ork a hand. He looked up at her with a combination of embarrassment, professional respect and what could only be arousal. He took it and let himself be hauled to a standing position.

"For agent Cranston's sake," Dawson went on, "Build a better fucking gun. Or just give him an Accelerator and let him do what you pay him for."

She moved back over to her seat and put her coat and gun back on in total silence. After a good thirty seconds Gaines had gotten his breath back.

"I think that'll be enough for today," he said with a slight strain in his voice. "The head of heavy ordnance tactics and strategy has just demonstrated the shortcomings of the Impeller. In a month I want them sorted out, and if they're not then one of you will be her assistant next time."

Nervous laughter, backed by the genuine terror that one of them might be contractually obligated to be her human shield. The only genuine chuckle in the room came from agent Cranston as he put his sunglasses back on.

The room emptied out save for Dawson and Gaines. When the door shut, Dawson was looking out of the window facing the square, towards her apartment. The windows were still at the tint she had left them at last night.

Gaines sat on the table, well away from the smoking Impeller. "Could have warned me beforehand," he commented.

She didn't turn to face him. "Would have made it less meaningful. Hostages are rarely volunteers."

"Hostage?" Gaines asked with amusement. "I couldn't tell if you were trying to hurt me or jerk me off."

"You'd know if I was jerking you off," Dawson said, eyes wandering across the square and the many buildings on the far side of it. Just looking, in case something was amiss. "You'd be asleep by now."

He let out a snort of ugly laughter. "I knew it would be a blast having you around again. It's a shame none of the others are here to appreciate your wit, or your headlocks."

She waited a moment to comment. "I saw Pickers a few months ago."

Now it was Gaines who waited a moment to speak. "You were putting him in handcuffs, I hope."

"Couldn't," Dawson admitted. "Would have fouled up the project: glimpse case to do so. Would have been the end of the line."

"That bastard must have the Adversary himself looking out for him."

"He's still angry," she said, softer than she'd have thought she would have. "He probably always will be. Until he dies."

In the corner of her eye Dawson could see Gaines shaking his head sadly. "Have you heard anything about Vayger?" he inquired.

"Not since she left San Francisco back in '69. Could be dead for all I know."

"I've searched a few times," Gaines admitted. "As recently as last year. If she's out there somewhere, she's not using her SIN. She's living off the grid, under the radar."

"The occupation fucked all of us up in some way or another," Dawson said, half with bitterness and half with gratitude. "For Pickers it was the orks that killed Reyes. For Vayger it was the camps."

"And what was it for you?" Gaines wondered out loud.

"No one thing in particular," she supposed. "I think one day in '65 I shot someone I could have sworn I'd shot in '63. In '67 I blew up a building I was sure I'd blown up in '62. Thought I was losing my damned mind, and that was when I was sober."

"It was a good thing, what we did," Gaines offered. "We forced Saito out. What the Protectorate was doing was monstrous, no one denies that."

Dawson shook her head softly. "We did it because Damien Knight paid us to protect his bottom line. If you can call the things we did 'right' they were damn certain for the wrong reasons."

"We don't live in a world that cares about motives, Dawson, only results. You understand that because if you didn't you wouldn't have gone after a badge. You never let a little thing like the law get in the way of making the world a better place, do you?"

The glass of the window showed the reflection of her slight smile. "No," she said, "I certainly don't." She turned around and gestured to the Impeller on the meeting table. "I think that makes a good conversation piece."

"I agree," Gaines said, standing up. "It's definitely staying." He moved around the table to meet her by the door, spreading his arms for a hug and clapping her on the back.

"If you need anything, don't hesitate to ask. Got any plans for the day?"

"Have to get home," Dawson said, "Pets act up if I'm gone too long."

"Right, those street cats you adopted. Never figured you for the type, but we all need hobbies. I'll see you in two weeks at the party, won't I?"

Dawson smiled impishly. "Of course. It'll be the best one yet."

= = =

The door was open for just five seconds before Nyana, clad only in one of Dawson's shirts, came around the corner and padded straight towards her. There was barely time to shut the door before the elf bumped up against Dawson's body and buried her face into the human's neck. Once she had nuzzled in close, Nyana took the end of her pink braid and pushed it into Dawson's left hand while her right cupped the back of the elf's neck. The effect was something like holding Nyana by a leash.

"Miss me?" Dawson asked softly. The elf nodded vigorously, breathing in through her nose audibly and making soft, gentle thrusts of her leg against Dawson's hip.

After only a few moments of this intimacy Alenia's head poked around the corner, forest-green-and-white dyed hair hanging down from one side of her head. Her melon-colored eyes peered at Dawson as if the other side of her neck was free real estate just waiting for someone to move in.

She scurried down the hallway and latched on to Dawson's left side, standing on her toes to lick the larger woman's jaw and throat before nibbling on it insistently. Dawson turned her head and kissed Alenia on the left temple, making the girl's tongue slip out of her mouth in a half-smile, half-sigh.

"Let me get my coat off," Dawson said, beginning to attempt to walk with only limited success. She made it to the end of the hall where she was met by Rierra, who was carrying a cup of soykaf fresh from the new machine on the kitchen counter. She stopped in front of Dawson and took advantage of the fact that the woman's arms were both currently occupied by kissing her directly on the mouth, breaking for a moment to smile and then kissing again, pushing her tongue in a little.

Rierra didn't relent until Shelara appeared beside her and used her hands to pull Dawson's face in her direction, stealing her lips for a far sloppier kiss of her own. It left Rierra free to sip from her cup and ask, "Have a good day?"

Dawson couldn't answer for a solid ten seconds and had to gasp for breath when Shelara finally broke the kiss. "Fine," came the eventual answer, "Nothing I haven't done before with less finesse."

She felt her pants being unbuttoned and looked down to see Jastira tugging them down by the waist, to expose the white boxers she had on below. The elastic band was easy prey for the neon-green haired elf's prying fingers, granting her quick access to Dawson's defenseless cunt. Her lips dragged gluttonously across the black stubble that coated her mound, kissing at her lower lips with the same energy Shelara had kissed at her upper ones.

"At least let me get my shoes off before you start making a meal of me," Dawson said. All the same, she let the elves work at her for a few minutes. She couldn't deny it felt immensely gratifying to be so wanted.

Eventually she summoned the will to shake off the elves, placing one hand on Jastira's head and holding it still as she took a half-step back, leaving a string of her liquid arousal briefly connecting her pussy and the elf's tongue. Someone took her coat and hat, putting them on the rack where they belonged and in a few moments she'd stowed the Accelerator in the wall safe. She stepped out of her pants and let Alenia pull her shirt up over her head, which she promptly wrapped around her face, breathed in the scent of and then put on in place of the shirt she'd already been wearing. It would be days before she gave it up to be washed.

Walking with the elves on her heels, all Dawson had time to do was slip a compact disc into the player to provide a shred of atmosphere to what was going to follow. Music started to pound out of the speakers, slow and sensual and heavy all at once.

"The job is done, and I go out - another boring day... I leave it all, behind me now - So many worlds away..."

The beat was something Dawson found easy to roll her shoulders to, loosening up for the assault that was imminent. The gentle thrum of the speakers as they broadcast the whine of a guitar captured on tech from almost a century ago filled her with an eager energy the likes of which she had not felt since she was in her 20s but was feeling again in the last few months.

"I meet my girl, she's dressed to kill - and all we gonna do..."

She made her way to the couch and did herself the dignity of sliding down her underwear, leaving her looming body bare and just beginning to bead with sweat.

"Is walk around to catch the thrill - on streets we call the zoo!"

Turning around she dropped onto the couch and in a moment the elves were on her. Rierra took possession of Dawson's left arm, Jastira her right. Nyana climbed onto Dawson's upper body and came to rest with her thighs beside the woman's face, legs over the back of the couch. Alenia and Shelara spread Dawson's legs and began to compete to kiss and tongue her still-wet cunt. Dawson's fingers were fed into mounds and a hairless and needy cunt was ground into her mouth. Like desperate scavengers they used every part of her desperately. A chorus of moaning started to drown out the music.

"We eat the night, we drink the time! Make our dreams come true!"

"And hungry eyes are passing by!"

"On streets we call the zoo!"

= = =

A little under an hour later, Jill Waldrite stepped up to the door and pressed the doorbell button beside it. A security drone flew down the hallway behind her head but didn't stop to inspect her; she assumed Detective Dawson got many visitors and it wasn't seen as unusual.

One full minute went by without the door being answered, so Jill reached out and knocked on it several times in quick succession, standing on her toes to make sure she was in view of the small lens on the front of the door that would show the person on the inside who was standing out in the hallway.

Another thirty seconds went by without any development and Jill reached out to knock again. Just as her hand was about to meet the door it opened up far more quickly than she could ever have expected, causing Jill to stumbled forward and put her closed fist against the bare chest of the woman who had answered it.

Jill's hand hit the space between the figure's breasts and her flesh was like steel. No longer being blocked by the door, music flowed out around the figure and filled the hallway.

"I! I live among the creatures of the night! I haven't got the will to try and fight... Against the new tomorrow, so I guess I'll just believe it that tomorrow never comes..."

Stepping back, Jill's face burned with a blush for several reasons. The first was that she had accidentally touched the person who had answered the door. Second, that person was topless--the statuesque woman was like something out of a trideo, and not the kind for children. She was built to the point of intimidation, broad shoulders and beaded with sweat all over her body, perky breasts outshined by the row of abdominal muscles arranged below them. Soft, lush black hair clung to her neck with sweat and the color in her clear face suggested she'd been in the middle of exerting herself.

The white boxers pulled down far enough on her body to show the beginnings of pubic stubble suggested it wasn't ordinary exercise. A scent rolled out around her: sex and mingled body warmth carried by the music and past Jill's eyes, nose and open mouth.

"A safe night, I'm living in the forest of a dream! I know the night is not as it would seem... I must believe in something so I'll make myself believe it, that this night will never go..."

Swallowing audibly, Jill placed her briefcase in front of her and gaped up at the tall woman, who looked down at her with polite annoyance.

"Yes?" she asked, bordering on breathlessness.

"I'm..." Jill started. Then started again a moment later. "I'm looking for detective Dawson..."

"That would be me," Dawson said. "What can I do for you?"

She swallowed again. "I... it's... about a... I need to report a.... A crime. Yes! A crime!"

"I'm on hiatus right now," Dawson said, taking a half-step back into her apartment. "I would recommend you try Detective Asher Brandt, with Lone Star. Tell him I sent you."

Dawson was halfway to closing the door when Jill stuck her left arm into it to keep it from closing and spoke. "Detective Brandt sent me to you!" she exclaimed.

At that, Dawson opened the door back up. Her previously cloudy, distracted expression was now sharp and intense, piercing grey eyes examining Jill with a shiver-inducing clarity. "What?"

"He told me there was insufficient evidence to open an investigation!" Jill went on, squeezing the handle of her briefcase. "But he said you have greater latitude in these matters."

"What kind of crime is this, exactly?"

"Someone is missing," Jill started. "Someone who happens to be a storm."

The raven-haired woman raised one eyebrow. "You're not laughing," Jill said, "So you're already taking me more seriously than Brandt's lieutenant did."

"Most people would probably regard a missing storm as a good thing," Dawson commented.

"This storm is a living, thinking creature!" Jill put forth. "If one of your neighbors went missing, wouldn't you look into it? Even if they were a little noisy?"

"Maybe not if they destroyed my property." Dawson stepped back, holding the door open. "Come in."

Refusing the detective's instructions felt impossible so Jill hurried inside, the heat and moisture of the air feeling leaden on her face. As Dawson closed the door, Jill turned the corner to her living space and was met by the cold stares of five elves in a state of near-nudity, a few of them pulling on shirts and nothing else.

"Oh," Jill said quietly, "Was I... interrupting something?"

"We were having sex," Dawson said, striding by her to retrieve a shirt that had been flung onto the ground in the kitchen.

"Really good sex," said one of the elves, a tough-looking sort with a datajack in the shaved side of her head.

"The pussy-melting kind," said another with tattoos of daggers on the side of her throat.

"The leg-trembling kind," informed another with a butterfly pattern on her face.

"Now I'm sore without any of the payoff," growled one with a piercing in her brow.

"And we're not in a sharing mood," said one with her brown hair bunched up on top of her head, probably from someone holding it in their fist.

"These are my elves," Dawson said, returning to the central area and turning the volume down on her music machine. "They've brainwashed themselves into my pets and refuse to leave. I'm still in the process of training them and we've yet to reach the section on manners."

Dawson proceeded to compel the elves to introduce themselves politely, bribing them with a brief three-second kiss for doing so, except for the elf Nyana who got an eight-second kiss that made her melt to the floor at Dawson's feet. The detective gestured to the cleared-out couch which Jill carefully sat on, finding it audibly wet. Dawson meanwhile sat in the arm chair across from it, a clear table between them. The elf Alenia inserted herself into Dawson's lap and nestled her face in the human woman's neck, earning one hand to the back of her head and another between her legs, making her squirm.

"To whom do I owe the pleasure?" Dawson asked conversationally. Jill swallowed while looking at Alenia writhe in the detective's lap, licking at her neck and face to express her overflowing pleasure. Dawson bore her affections with a stoic expression that communicated effectively that her full attention was on Jill.

Clearing her throat, she introduced herself. "My name is Professor Jill Waldrite. I'm a crypto-meteorologist with the North American Weather Service. For the last several years I've been studying mana storms off the coasts of north and south America."

"May I ask how you've been studying them?" Dawson said, putting a third finger into Alenia's mound and making the elf pant and roll her eyes upward.

"Um, yes of course... I'm... uh... Studying them... I mean I've been studying them in the hopes of eventually communicating with one via a particular type of radio I've designed."

"What kind of conversation do you expect to get out of a storm?" the woman asked, using her grip on the back of Alenia's head to force her to arch her back and bear down onto her fingers. On the floor around Dawson the other elves had crawled up close to her, hands working their cunts in the hopes that they would be next.

"Ah," Jill went on with some difficulty, "Well that's just it, we... we don't know yet... I had hoped to find out about a week ago..."

"Mana Storm Vorsyth," Dawson said evenly. "News said it vanished overnight. Is that what this is about?"

The woman caught on quickly! "Yes! Yes, that's exactly what this is about!"

"One moment," Dawson said, turning her head to Alenia and speaking to her in a firm, commanding tone that made Jill's spine tingle.

"What are you?" she asked the elf. Alenia simply babbled for a few moments, drooling and bucking without any apparent thoughts in her head.

"What are you?" Dawson questioned again, with such sultry authority that Jill felt she would answer herself if she'd known what she was supposed to say. The phrase managed to dredge up that information in Alenia's lust-fogged brain.

She slurred, "I'm... I'm mommy's special toy!" Around them the other elves echoed the phrase in lighter tones, apparently unable to keep from repeating the confession that had been coaxed out of Alenia.

"Yes," Dawson said, "You are." Her hand dove in a little further and lifted up, at the same time her knee began to bounce up and down rhythmically beneath Alenia's ass, driving her further into the human's touch. She started to scream but her voice was cut off by Dawson's kiss, the woman swallowing her passion whole while her body thrashed helplessly in her grip.

When it was over Alenia was limp and barely conscious, breathing heavily. Dawson peppered her face with another few shallow kisses and then finally pulled her hands out from between Alenia's legs, licking her fingers.

"Vorsyth disappeared overnight," Dawson repeated in the same tidy tone she'd been using before the elf's confession, "But isn't that how weather works?"

"No," Jill said shakily, "I was there at its edge, mo--er, detective." Dawson raised a brow and Jill hurriedly continued. "I was there! I recorded some kind of flash of light at the center of the storm and then it was just gone. There are no radar readings suggesting it went somewhere else, it was just... gone!"