“Ori, pleased to meet you. Why don’t you and Mr. Hovis here have a conversation while we’re on the way down to the sub-basement?” I said, introducing the dwarf to my explosives expert.
Today was going to be all kinds of fun. We trooped to the elevator and rode it down.
“Fred climbed all this?” Ori asked as we sank deeper into the Earth.
“I guess so,” I replied. “Why?”
“Old bastard’s tougher than I thought,” Ori replied with a very Gallic shrug. “Where’s the listening post?”
“Level eighteen, north side,” Hovis replied. “I checked in case we’ve got to drop a level. We should be good, since we’re going to be six stories deeper.”
“Where’s the breech?” Wilson asked as the doors slid open on twenty-two. “I thought you said we were going to twenty-four?”
I stepped into the corridor and checked both directions before jacking into a communications jack.
“Dispatch.”
“Salazar. Why did we stop two levels above the breech point?”
There was a pause.
“The breech has shifted up through the rock, and now is probing toward the southeast corner of level twenty-two,” Dispatch replied.
“Roger that,” I said pulling the jack free. “Southeast corner.”
Diindiisi led to the southeast, while I made sure Johnson got the gear off the elevator before Hiebert went topside for the remainder of the supplies.
“You got this?” I asked Johnson before following the team into the level.
“Yeah, me and Andre here,” Johnson pointed to a heavily armed dwarf, “we’ll keep the gate open, boss.”
“Does anyone hear bacon frying?” Holt asked as we worked our way down the corridor.
We had to check every room to make sure whoever lived or worked on this level was gone.
“No, but I’ll keep an ear out for it,” I said.
Diindiisi held up a fist, and we all stopped.
“Jesse? I don’t have clearance to open this room,” she said, pointing to a door on the inside of the corridor.
“Roger that,” I said, walking to the keypad.
Fifteen button presses later, the door opened. On the other side was a small enclosure of armored glass, looking vaguely reminiscent of Hannibal Lecter’s cell in The Silence of the Lambs. Beyond the glass sat a huge nagaraja—a king of nagas.
“Human, what is happening?” the half-snake, half-human asked. “I hear the very stone around me boiling.”
Normally I’d have answered, but we’d put this particular nagaraja in the cooler years ago because he was the king of the fearsome aspects of snakes and nagas. He’d taken his imprisonment more as being placed into a situation in line with his august personage, settling in to receive the worship he was due. He even learned to cooperate with us, and management had improved his quarters as a result. The nagaraja had also spent so long doing nothing but growing and eating that he was too damn heavy for the elevator, and bitched incessantly if we required him to use the stairs, so he hadn’t moved from his quarters in years.
“Someone should have told you what was up,” I said, checking the room.
“Yes, a minor functionary of my court mentioned there was an issue. Is there anything I can do to help?” he asked with predatory swiftness.
I wasn’t about to make a deal with an evil snake/human hybrid. Shit like that was well above my paygrade.
“Stay here and be ready to defend yourself if necessary, oh king of nagas,” I replied.
“Certainly there is something?” he called to my back as I left the room and locked it down.
“Problem?” Diindiisi asked.
“No, just the king of nagas. He knows something’s up and wants to help,” I said, motioning for Padgett to take point for the next bit.
“Help whom?” Diindiisi asked.
“Himself, probably. If the Piroboli make it this far, he could be an issue,” I said.
The frying bacon sound was louder as we rounded the corner and headed south along the corridor. We reached a point where we could see steam rising from the rock wall.
“Yeah, boss, I’m not going any further,” Padgett said.
“I agree. Hovis, Ori, can we drop the ceiling here?” I asked.
The explosives expert and the mining accountant examined the walls and ceiling, while the wall continued to smoke.
“Yeah, we can plant charges, but I’m not sure how long it’s going to keep them out,” Hovis said, as the frying bacon noise changed to chewing. “Besides, the lithovore’d just eat anything we dropped. Ori has a suggestion, though.”
I turned to face the dwarf.
“So, Father Salazar, the lithovore is the key here,” Ori said, dropping his pack and rummaging through it. “We deal with a type of lithovore in the Mine back home.”
“Which means what?” I asked.
“Well, they tend to eat anything that looks like rock, so if we take a couple blocks of C-4, wire it to a detonator, and dip it in this,” he held up a can, “powdered rock, it should swallow the charge, no problem. Then the charge goes off in the middle of the enemy.”
“A couple blocks of C-4?” I asked skeptically.
“Two-and-a-half pounds should do the job, sir,” Ori replied. “We can make it three blocks if you prefer.”
The chewing continued.
“What about the walls and whatnot when the C-4 goes off?” I asked.
“Most lithovores are, how do you put it in human, explosive proof. Even three pounds of C-4 shouldn’t do more than craze the outer skin of the lithovore, sir,” the dwarf replied.
“Anyone got a better plan?” I asked.
“Not that doesn’t involve dying in great pain,” Baxter replied.
“Right then, Ori, you and Hovis do your thing. The rest of you, let’s fall back around the corner, just in case,” I said.
We retreated, and the two explosives experts followed about a minute or so later, Ori handing me a tablet.
“We use these to check shots in the mine,” he said. “It’s tied to a camera around the corner.”
“Magic?” I asked, impressed with the ruggedized hardware.
“No, we order them from a company in Taiwan,” he said, grinning like the Cheshire cat.
“Contact,” Diindiisi whispered in my ear.
I looked at the tablet—something had broken through the wall. It waddled through the rubble, scooping up huge mouthfuls and ramming them down with its tongue.
“Is that a T-rex made of stone?” I asked Ori.
“Close. We think form follows function, although we’ve never been able to…”
The lithovore exploded, showering chunks of stone everywhere.
“Ooo, that one had a bit more internal pressure than normal,” Ori said. “They usually just go POP and crumble.”
I snuck a look around the corner as one of the Piroboli, the male one, stepped through the breech into the cloud of dust that was still settling from the lithovore’s case of explosive gas. He looked somewhat human. Well, if you took flame and formed it into a human’s shape.
“Light him up,” I said, wincing at the implied pun.
Two things happened—first, Padgett hammered the Piroboli with fire from his UMP. Second, the fire suppression system in the ceiling cut loose, showering all of us with foul-smelling water. The Piroboli strode through both incidents, taking no damage from the silver bullets, and only pausing to wave a hand at specific sprinkler heads to fuse them shut as he passed them.
“Oh, joy,” I said as the female walked through the opening they’d burned into the stone.
“How the hell did they get through?” Holt asked.
“Twenty-two isn’t completely warded like twenty-four,” I said. “They probably bounced off the spells down there and shifted their line of attack upward…”
The male had walked to the next cross-corridor and started heating the stone, to the accompaniment of the frying bacon noise.
“Shit,” I said, looking at exactly where he was burning the water out of the stone. The problem wasn’t the floor—well, that depended on how much floor he removed—but the wall. Because the wall along where he was boiling the stone was the back wall to the nagaraja’s enclosure. “This should prove interesting.”
The Piroboli heating limestone to around 1400 degrees Fahrenheit got the nagaraja’s attention, because he smashed through the section of wall under attack before the floor gave way beneath the Piroboli. At the same time, a wave of misshapen creatures poured out of the tunnel and into the corridor.
“Orco!” Ori shouted, seeing the blind, tusk-faced monsters.
“Orco! Light them up!”
The orco turned toward us en masse, and we ripped into them, slaughtering them until the floor ran black with their blood. I don’t know if we killed them all, their will broke, or they finally ran out of bodies, but eventually they stopped pouring out of the tunnel. Overlaying the smell of cordite from the guns and the burnt copper stink of the orco’s blood was a stench of burnt meat.
“Go,” I said to Padgett as soon as we’d all reloaded.
We slipped and slid our way through the piles of bodies filling the corridor to find two things—the Piroboli had burned through to level nineteen, and the nagaraja was no longer a problem. Ori took one look at the burned remnants of the nagaraja and puked.
“Hovis, once Ori can work, get with him and seal that tunnel,” I said, pointing. “Everyone else, cover them, then get ready to pull back to the elevator.”
“Why the elevator?” Baxter asked as Hovis and Ori walked to the tunnel.
“Because, Mighty Mite, we need to reload, and the closest stairs down to twenty-four are next to the elevator shaft. Unless you want to drop through the hole the Piroboli just burned?”
Baxter took a quick look at the barbequed nagaraja and shook her head. “If it’s all the same to you, Jesse, the stairs are fine. I need to get in some cardio anyway.”
We went back to the elevators and reloaded. Hiebert had joined Johnson in covering the pile of ammo and assorted sundries.
“Right, let them know up top that the Piroboli are on twenty and headed down,” I said, opening the Emergency Stairs. “We’re going to try to hit them when they drop through onto twenty-three.”
“Will do,” Hiebert said, gesturing to the rack of self-contained breathing apparatuses against the wall. “Fred sent these down with me. Said you might want to grab a rig, because when he starts spraying the Piroboli, the nitrogen content might get a little high for comfort down there.”
I hadn’t thought about that.
“Everybody, grab an SCBA,” I said, slinging one of the heavy beasts on over my armor, and then pulling the straps tight.
“Fuck cardio,” Padgett said to Mighty Mite, making sure her SCBA was tight.
“I agree,” she replied, checking his.
“Everyone ready? ‘Cause those fuckers are probably working on the stone and trying to figure out a weak spot in the spells as we speak,” I said, starting down the stairs.
I bypassed twenty-three and went through the door to twenty-four in a semi-controlled sprawl.
“You ok?” Wilson asked, coming through the door behind me.
“Yeah, just not used to taking stairs with an extra fifty pounds of gear on,” I said. “Diindiisi, take your team and check the area near where they dropped through into twenty-three. Everyone else, let’s go find Mr. Lucille.”
Lucille was in a room at the far end of the corridor, naturally. Every spell guarding the room had tripped, and the corridor looked like a bad 1960s anti-drug film as a result, complete with strobing lights and flashes of different colored gels.
Dalma came trotting up as we reached the wards.
“Good news, bad news, which do you want first?”
“Bad news I guess,” I said.
“The dwarves are going to make a shit ton of money rebuilding this place,” she said.
“Then what’s the good news?”
“The Piroboli aren’t through yet, but it isn’t from lack of trying. They’ve heightened the ceilings of the corridors down here on twenty-three in a couple of places.”
“How’re they doing that?” Ori asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“If they leave the sprinkler heads in place, any water that hits the calcium oxide they’ve made should cause an effect called ‘slaking.’ The heat from that could be shattering the remnants of the floor for them, even if the spells keep them from physically dropping to this level,” Fred said, striding down the corridor, dragging a huge hose and nozzle combination behind him, and wearing a silver suit. Two other dwarves in silver suits followed, and another four were standing in the doorway to the stairwell, tending a machine and feeding hose to Fred.
“Yeah, that might do it,” I said as a huge hunk of ceiling fell in behind me. The wards flexed.
“Mask up!” Fred shouted, tossing his head like a horse. A silver hood flipped down, sealing over his face.
Everyone scrabbled for their masks, fitting them in place.
“What about Lucille?” Dalma asked when her mask was in place.
“The spells on the room should provide,” Diindiisi replied. “If not, he’ll go into stasis.”
One of the Piroboli dropped through the hole in the ceiling, discarding a piece of scorched bone, and strode down the corridor toward us, its feet leaving glowing impressions in the floor.
“Fred?” I asked.
“Wait for it,” he replied.
The Piroboli strode closer. The wards flexed again, and the second one dropped from the ceiling as well.
“Now?” I asked.
“Now,” Fred replied, signaling the dwarves by the door.
The corridor flooded with fog as the nozzles opened. Fred was playing a stream of liquid nitrogen over both Piroboli, who slowed. They went from beings of fire, to glowing statues, to dark statues with glowing creases.
“NOW!” Fred shouted.
Two dwarves armed with mauls ran out the door and began crushing the now frozen Piroboli to dust.
“We’ll have to vacuum up the dust and drop it at sea, but that should take care of the issue,” Fred said, watching the destruction.
“Drop them at sea?” I asked, sliding off my SCBA.
“Yeah, separate seas is preferable,” Fred said. “Although there’s going to be some mixing of the male and female aspects due to the way we’re smashing them.”
“Won’t they just reform?” Dalma asked.
“Nope. They’re stone, not liquid metal,” Fred replied as one of the mauls turned the male Piroboli’s head to chunks. “That should be a good size.”
* * * * *
Chapter Eighteen
Saving Lucille’s life twice in the period of a week seemed to have made an impression on him or something, because after the pointy hat and pipe smoke brigade released him from the safe room, he asked to talk with me, and only me. Fortunately there was an interrogation room up on twelve we could use. Lucille could wait until I’d had a chance to run through the shower and change clothes.
Turned out he needed time for ablutions as well. I was starting to wonder if he needed to see a doctor about his urinary incontinence, because whatever homeopathic remedy he was taking wasn’t working for him, especially in high-stress situations.
“Mr. Lucille,” I said, sitting down across the table from him.
We were in one of the more formal conference rooms downstairs. It was just as warded and covered with as many cameras and whatnot as the one I’d been interrogating Jennifer the werebear in, but the mailed fist hid under a velvet glove here. The walls had oak panels in soft colors, and the tables and chairs moved without resorting to a jackhammer.
“Father Salazar,” he replied.
Yes, I’d worn my official working duds for this meeting.
“I understand you wanted to talk to me?” I said, pouring a cup of coffee for myself and offering Lucille a cup as
well.
He declined.
“If I’d been told the same lies you have, I don’t know that I’d drink our coffee either,” I said, taking a strong pull from my cup.
“You don’t happen to have a cigarette, do you? I gave them up for a vape, but I could really use a smoke after the last few days,” he said with a needy look.
“Sorry, man, they’ll set off the smoke detectors in here. I can see about a vape, if you’d trust us with that.”
“I…I don’t want anything to smoke that bad,” he finally said.
I sat there sipping coffee. This was his meeting, after all. Finally he sighed, grabbed the pot, and fixed himself a cup, heavy on sugar and cream.
“You probably think my friends and I are—well, they were—idiots,” he said with a great sigh.
I’m the first one to admit my mouth overloads my ass all the time.
“Yeah, pretty much,” I replied.
His face fell.
“We didn’t set out to do anything stupid. It just seemed like there were so many Otherkin who needed our help, and we thought it was a good cause.”
It probably didn’t help his self-esteem when, after that confession, I started laughing.
“Look, man, the Rodent Liberation Front thinks y’all are posers,” I said when I caught my breath. “Otherkin, as you call them, generally don’t need human help unless they’re on the wrong side of the law, and then it’s usually because they don’t want to face the penalties for what they’ve done.”
“I’m beginning to understand that now,” he said. “When I think of all the time we wasted protecting things that didn’t need it…what happened to Ashley, that was too much.”
“What happened to Ashley was a result of a contract he agreed to with a representative of a devil. The devil of greed, specifically. What were you thinking?” I asked.
“I don’t know about Ashley or James, but I just wanted some publicity so we could help the cause, you know?”
“Yes. Normally that’s how one gets into trouble with a devil in the first place. ‘The highway to hell is paved with good intentions,’ or some other homily,” I said, refilling my cup.
Blood Moon Eclipse (The Shadow Lands Book 2) Page 14
