Gruefield 18 (Tarnished Sterling Omnibus)

by Robert McCarroll

  “You’ve got the look down, but you’re not doing your name justice,” Dietrich said in a sultry tone. She turned back to the control panel. “Red, deal with him.” In response, a pale blue glow suffused the area and a hundred voices called forth an unnatural harmony. Fear prickled up my limbs as the spectral scythe cut through the span of catwalk I was standing on. I landed in an undignified heap on the lower level. Were my brain not reeling from the litany, I might have had the presence. of mind to hover when my footing was taken from me. Jennifer’s profanity-laced tirade echoed from below as the spectral choir reached her ears. The column of red light in the center of the room flickered out and the winged figure collapsed to the floor.

  “This it?” Victor asked. “It’s not moving.” The winged figure burst into flame and crumpled to ash. Victor rushed onto a platform, but the immolation was absolute. “All this effort!”

  “We are still almost completely on track,” Dietrich said. “But your part is completed.” With a flick of a switch, the column of red light reformed, and Victor was frozen in place, confusion on his features. In the corner of my eye, I saw Adamantaphrax cut a slice into the skin of reality with his glaive. Dietrich and the girl in the red dress and horned mask stepped through as if it were a slit in a curtain. The spirits followed, with the reaper’s scarlet cloak fluttering inside at the last second before the cut closed.

  Freed from the litany, we picked ourselves up.

  “We have got to find a way to block that damn song,” Jennifer yelled, her face livid.

  A klaxon started chirruping. “You didn’t stop Dietrich, did you?” Ellison asked.

  “She got away,” I said.

  “And the mantles were offline long enough for the prisoners to notice. We’ve got multiple breakouts in progress. Wrap up your dragons and get up here.”

  “Is it everyone?” Donny asked.

  “Just those who were able to break their mantles during the lapse, and those they choose to free. But that’s still way too many.”

  “Victor is trapped in the red light,” I said.

  “Then he’s not going anywhere unless someone shuts it off again. Focus on the prisoners who are loose. Tower three could use backup when you’re not busy.” I could almost hear the sneer on Ellison’s voice.

  “On our way,” Ixa said. Her measured response gave me a moment to keep myself from snapping at the Warden. As Donny and I made our way to the floor, Jennifer picked up Rusnak with a construct so we wouldn’t forget him. The sound of the klaxon chased us through the ill-lit bowels of the prison as we made our way towards Tower Three. We reached the stairwell and started up.

  “We’re in Tower Three. Warden, where do you need us?” I asked.

  “Fourth floor.”

  Rusnak was unhappy to be fitted for a new mantle at the first checkpoint, but he had no illusions about being able to take us and the guards in a fight. We left him in the hands of the prison staff and climbed. The sound of gunfire reverberated down the halls. The checkpoint at the exit to the fourth floor was unmanned. I did not see any sign of where they went.

  “We’re going to need a breather,” Donny said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Dude, straight out of that last fight, halfway across the prison in the dark and six stories straight up to here? At least let us catch our breaths.” He winced as the sound of more gunshots reached us. The girls were silent, but looked as tired as he did. I stopped and activated my earpiece.

  “We are on the fourth floor of Tower Three, what is the situation?”

  “Corrections Officers have been forced to withdraw from the floor entirely by Prisoner One Zero Six Eight Zero Six.”

  “Does this prisoner have a name?”

  “Michael Ahlers,” Ellison said. “Also known as, Michelangelo.”

  I have little doubt the others saw me close my eyes and silently swear. Of course he got loose. Why wouldn’t he? It was just my luck.

  “I’ve heard the name before,” Jennifer said, “But I’m not too familiar with him. What’s he got?”

  “Strength, toughness, energy absorption, eye beams, anchoring,” I said. “All turned up to eleven. He put Mister Thirty-Eight into the hospital.”

  “And he murdered our mother,” Donny said. I didn’t want to focus on that unhealed wound again, but just laying eyes on him earlier had been enough to rip it wide open.

  “So how do we beat this guy?”

  I adjusted the frequency on my earpiece. “-and move in behind them,” Dad was saying as I found the right channel.

  “Razordemon, this is Eight-Beta.”

  “Report,” he said.

  “Warden Ellison has confirmed that Michelangelo is loose on the fourth floor of Tower Three and driven prison staff from that area. We are just outside the stairwell on that floor. Requesting instructions.”

  “Do not engage,” Dad said. “I will send reinforcements as soon as I can.”

  “Copy.” I lowered my hand. “He said we are not to engage.”

  “Well that’s tough shit for you,” a guttural, snarling voice said. The squat, broad figure in orange was mostly obscured by the armored door he was holding as a shield. Though the meal slot, I could see the upturned, almost porcine nose and the two fat tusks that jutted from his lower jaw. He held a shotgun in his free hand. He emerged fully from around the corner at the end of the row.

  “Is that...?” Jennifer started.

  “That’s just Little Piggy,” Donny said.

  “The name is Marc Steyrs!” Little Piggy shouted.

  “Oh, never mind,” Jennifer said, nonchalantly ramming a construct into his shield. The hit rang through the hall, but knocked Little Piggy flat. A snarl of impotent rage forced its way past his malformed teeth.

  “Oh, shut up,” another voice said. The familiar, casual tone did nothing to prevent me from tensing up at the recognition. “If you’d shot them instead of arguing nomenclature, you wouldn’t have been embarrassed,” Michelangelo said. “Now who’s down there?”

  “Children,” Little Piggy said.

  “You have a terrible track record against children,” Michelangelo said. He stepped into view with an unconcerned gait and a malicious smirk. “Though this lot are more accurately termed ‘Teens’.” His gaze turned on me. “Where did we leave off? Oh, right, I was about to kill you.”

  Sulphur-yellow beams lanced from his eyes and slammed into my force bubble. They coruscated around the red static, dancing with the nimbus of shadow as I was shoved into the wall by the impact. Jennifer retaliated with a Doric column of gold light. Michelangelo actually staggered as the construct shattered against his pectoral. A smile played across his lips. “And I thought today was going to be boring.” I hammered him with a force-bubble wrecking ball, which Jennifer followed with a battering ram construct. Despite the thunderous impacts echoing through the halls, Michelangelo only took two steps back to remain standing. He loosed a chuckle. “Let me guess, you just want to waste my time until the adults show up. What a terrible idea.” His gaze moved back to me. “That tends to be a lethal pastime.” A mocking, arrogant smirk crossed his face.

  With an incoherent cry, I wrapped myself in shadows and shot down the hall. Not missing a beat, Michelangelo caught me by the arm and redirected my charge into the steel bars of the cell behind him. The hit knocked the cell door from its moorings. Before it even finished falling to the floor, Michelangelo had me by the back of the neck and slammed me into the back wall of the cell. For a moment, I heard nothing but the cracking of concrete. A hammerblow of a punch between my shoulder blades drove me deeper into the wall. Amid the cacophony of crumbling concrete, I heard stones spalling off the exterior facade.

  There was a pause in his onslaught. Pulling myself from the cavity in the wall, I turned about. Michelangelo had caught o
ne of Jennifer’s constructs, and was siphoning energy out of it. The gold light lost its luster and faded to powdery gray smoke as the sulphurous light behind his eyes blazed even brighter. He turned in time to see me slash for his face. My claws drew three lines of scarlet across the marble-white of his cheek.

  The sulphur yellow beams burned through my shadowstuff and rammed me through the broken wall. Tumbling end over end through the void, I struck the ground with a wet thud. I gave an agonized half-cough as my eyes lost focus. Pain and darkness took me.

  I awoke under a harsh light. I was strapped to the table and involuntarily thrashed. The pain hadn’t left me. A team of people in pastel garb and cloth masks crowded about me. The light in my eyes left the walls faded and indistinct. “Get him under control,” one of the figures said.

  “Upping dosage,” another said. An opiate haze clouded my mind and pushed aside the agony. I stopped thrashing, even as I felt tugging on my innards. It was an operating room. The people around me were a surgical team operating on my chest. The clink of bone on metal marked the retrieval of another fragment of rib from within my organs.

  “You warned me this guy was going to wake up, and I still didn’t believe it. I don’t think I believe it now.”

  “This isn’t the first time I’ve operated on this guy,” the first voice said. “Though last time he got pounded into the ground by a dragon.”

  “Can he hear us?”

  “Every word.”

  “So no joking.”

  “That would not be appropriate, no.”

  Even with the narcotics in my system, an iota of panic clawed at my mind. I couldn’t breathe. Of course I couldn’t breathe, my chest was split wide open so they could pick bits of my ribs out of my lungs. A cardiopulmonary bypass machine sat next to the operating table, quite happily pumping blood through my system while the surgeons worked on my insides.

  If this was the same guy who operated on me after the fight with Valeria, that meant either I was at Vanguard, or he was in Georgia. But, that was several hours by air. I could not have survived that long. There was no way it could be true. Unless, he was vacationing in Georgia. I discarded the possibility as another one fought through the drug-induced confusion. This was far from the first time I shouldn’t have survived. It fit with a pattern. Somehow, it failed to reassure me.

  Part 13

  I was released from Vanguard Hospital with a torso brace that felt like I was wearing a corset. Or at least how I imagined it might feel. It was there as a precaution. Even with magical aid, healing took time. I was fortunate that they saw fit to let me leave before the start of the school year. I’d already annoyed Leyden Academy enough last year. If I needed one, my cover story was going to attribute the brace to the car crash I’d been in back in June. It was believable enough to deflect questions. What it didn’t deflect were the questions in my head about the gap between the prison and the hospital. But that just fed back into the ‘pattern of survival’ some people had noticed. By rights, I should be dead several times over.

  Nick picked me up in a silver station wagon whose front end looked angry. Nick was a few years older than me. He had platinum blond hair, brown eyes, and an almost skeletal build that he tried to hide with baggy clothes when not on-duty. The orderly who’d wheeled me out helped me into the passenger seat and closed the door.

  “I can’t say I expected you to be the one to pick me up,” I said.

  “I haven’t been medically cleared to return to full duty, so I’m holding down the fort while everyone’s hunting escapees.”

  I winced, trying to pretend it was from pain. “How bad is it?”

  “You haven’t heard?”

  “I’ve been bedridden.”

  “Most never got out of the prison walls, but did manage to kill a number of their fellow inmates. Most who got out slipped away while Michelangelo had the response teams tied up. He didn’t get away,” Nick said. “Highest priority has been given to recapturing those who did get out. There’s a pack of media sharks hounding the Fund for ratings. You know, the usual shit we get when something bad happens.” He pulled out of the lot and turned down First Street.

  “You know you’re going to hit a thousand red lights going this way.”

  “So what? I don’t want to go near the Shining Future with my new car.”

  It was hard to argue, we had been on our way to that bridge when his last car was totaled. So we rode out the red lights. And waited for the drawbridge. It took us way too long to get to Gruefield. What was once the Gruefield Missile Base was rapidly turning into a city all its own. The government had sold off the land and the silos not that long ago, despite the missiles having been decommissioned ages ago. As essentially greenfield land just across the river from New Port Arthur, it became hot property. Gruefield Eighteen was one of the few silos whose underground structures were essentially intact. There was more construction in the area these days. Not just the above-ground work on our slice of the base, but a few housing developments and at least one strip mall.

  TNT Research officially owned Gruefield Eighteen, but they were a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Community Fund. The new compound was going to be larger than what had been destroyed, but so far they’d only gotten so far as pouring the foundation and putting in I-beams. A scaffold-covered walkway led to the elevator down. We sank into the earth and the familiar passageways of the missile silo. Titanium white paint with a few navigational lines shone brightly in the artificial light. We headed down to the residential dome. This end of the base was eerily quiet. The main room of the residential area was the mess hall. It was separated from the tunnel by a heavy blast door and a small atrium. Technically, the atrium wasn’t that separate from the mess hall, split by a wall that didn’t run all the way to the ceiling two floors up.

  Aside from Nick and myself, the only person I saw was Xiv. He sat at the end of the table. His face was against the surface, and his arms folded over it. His ivory horns protruded up between his fingers, and his simple wings covered him like a cloak. The pale white membranes ran up his sides, along the underside of his arms, and along his extended last finger. I sat down next to him. He didn’t respond.

  “I know you heard me come in,” I said.

  “I know,” Xiv said, his voice muffled by his arms.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Xiv tipped his head up and peered at me. His eyes were huge, dominating his face. Though their color blended with the snow-pale complexion of his skin. Ice blue nictitating membranes blinked across them.

  “They keep saying I can’t go outside,” Xiv said. I tried not to frown at the dragon boy.

  “At all?” I asked.

  “They made some excuses,” Xiv said.

  “Standard procedure for an all-hands emergency is to stand down sidekicks,” Nick said. “Unless they’re explicitly called up.”

  “That’s one of them,” Xiv said, his eyes narrowing into a glare. “But what about just going outside and not going after bad guys?”

  “Xiv,” I said. “Have you ever been out in public alone?”

  “No.” The undercurrent of anger on his tone was unmistakable.

  “I think it’s been a case of us being overprotective,” I said.

  Xiv didn’t say anything, he just sulked and waited for me to continue.

  “We’re afraid that someone out there is going to react badly to you, say or do something inappropriate, and you’re going to get hurt.” I paused. Xiv still didn’t say anything. “Of course, keeping you locked up doesn’t do you any good either.”

  “Devil’s advocate, though,” Nick cut in. “The public is worked up over a mass escape of powered criminals. The chances of someone flipping out are going to be higher now than with almost any other time.”

  “Why should I be locked up because of that?” Xiv asked.<
br />
  Nick was about to speak, probably with some variant of ‘for your own good’, but I spoke first.

  “You shouldn’t. You haven’t done anything wrong,” I said. “But, if you do go out, I want you to remember that no matter what any one person says or does, not everyone thinks the same way. Also, take a phone with you, so you can reach us and we can reach you.”

  “Tell me you’ve covered the concept of money and how stores work,” Nick said. “The last thing we need is a misunderstanding leading to a charge of shoplifting.”

  Xiv sat up and folded his wings back. A pronounced frown marked his low-set mouth.

  “Yes,” Xiv said. “I know how money works. I don’t have any.”

  The ‘Operations Room’ took up a third of the perimeter on the first floor of the command center. It was across the hall from the infirmary. The outer wall had three massive displays, and a holograph table sat in the middle of the space. Currently, most of these were dark, as was the room overall. The middle display showed a communications center, probably a mobile trailer. It was equally ill-lit, but Dad and Donny were visible.

  “So you’re not dead,” Donny said.

  “Very funny,” I said.

  “You looked pretty dead when I last saw you.”

  “Isn’t ‘Baron Mortis’ supposed to tell the difference between ‘mostly dead’ and ‘all the way dead’?”

  “Enough,” Dad said. “How are you recovering?”