The Far Shores (The Central Series)

by Rawlins, Zachary

  “Eerie, I don’t have time for this.” The doorknob turned hard, the momentum snapping the cheap built-in lock. “Now, come on already...”

  Emily opened the door a crack, then shrieked and slammed it shut in the face of the snarling, lunging rottweiler on the other side.

  “Holy shit!” Emily took several deep breaths. “Oh my God. Okay...Eerie, do you have a dog in there with you?”

  “That’s Derrida,” Eerie explained brightly. “He saved me.”

  “That’s nice,” Emily said coldly. “Now you can save him.”

  Eerie pulled Derrida close in a panic, burying her face in his muscular neck.

  “What? What do you mean? Don’t be awful! He’s just a dog!”

  “Eerie, if you come out of there right now, and close Derrida in behind you, I’m sure that he’ll be just fine,” Emily suggested sweetly. “If you don’t do exactly what I tell you to, then I’m going to drown him inside of that closet, and then I’ll drag you out of there afterwards. Any other questions?”

  Derrida whined as Eerie struggled to her feet. She rubbed the back of his head thoughtfully.

  “Thank you, Derrida,” she whispered, planting a kiss on the top of the rottweiler’s head. “You are a super good dog.”

  Then Eerie opened the door and stepped out from the utility closet. Emily slammed it shut the moment she was through, then leaned against the door while Derrida barked and raged on the other side.

  “That was unexpected,” Emily said, with obvious relief. “Alright, Eerie, let’s take a walk...”

  Emily trailed off, staring at the Changeling, who had slumped down beside the utility room door, flushed and feverish.

  “This is absurd,” Emily said, hurrying over and trying to pull Eerie up, only to have her collapse again. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  ***

  “Hold on,” Haley’s ghostly form urged, one hand pressed to her temple, eyes screwed shut. “There’s something...”

  Mitsuru glanced back, her expression hovering between surprise and concern.

  “What is it, Haley? We are exposed, here. I don’t want to stay any longer than we need to.”

  “There are...not people. Things.” Haley’s eyes snapped open, her glowing outline flickering with alarm. “Mitsuru, we are surrounded!”

  “Defensive formation!” Mitsuru barked, drawing both pistols from the holsters on her back, and spinning around in a circle, scanning the surrounding decrepit warehouses with a downloaded thermal-imaging protocol. It was as Haley said – behind corroding walls of aluminum and rusted steel were swarms of signatures, some vaguely human in stature, some lupine, and more than a few monstrous. “Find your partner.”

  Mitsuru understood the enemy’s decision to choose the spot for an ambush – their position seemingly couldn’t have been worse. The roadway was wide and exposed, with half-toppled chain-link fences bordering the strip of asphalt on either side. There were a total of three buildings nearby, one enormous structure to the southeast, and two to the northwest, ranging from about five meters to about fifteen meters distant, all with multiple points of egress, thanks to a wealth of open doors and broken windows. The only available cover was a pair of concrete barriers pushed to the edge of the roadway to allow traffic, along with the weathered remains of a Zaporozhets subcompact, rolled on its side and stripped of anything worth salvaging.

  Alice...we have company.

  Activating the Etheric uplink, Mitsuru requested a real-time survey of the area from the remote viewers, looking for numbers and potential avenues for movement under fire. At the same time, she activated a ballistics protocol – recently upgraded to mesh with the thermal-imaging input, to provide superimposed silhouettes over the heat signatures of her restless opponents, analyzing Etheric and thermal information to give her estimates of force strength, probable armaments, and likely points of attack.

  The numbers were grim. The protocol identified in excess of fifty signatures in the immediate area, with a ninety-plus-percentile estimation of more in concealment. According to the protocol, they were mostly Ghouls, with a liberal scattering of Weir. Mitsuru uploaded the information to the Etheric Network, for dissemination among the Auditors.

  We got you, Mitzi. Karim is moving into position to suppress to the southeast. Prepare your forces to engage hostiles to the northwest. Once the southeast is clear, you will retreat in that direction, while Karim provides cover fire. We are moving to flank.

  She turned her attention to the northwest, trusting in Karim’s ability to neutralize the enemies to her rear. Mitsuru approved of Alice Gallow’s choice – the ruined car and one concrete block gave her forces decent firing positions, and left them facing the smaller end of the force arrayed against them.

  Alex, Katya, take position behind that car. You’re with me, Min-jun, behind that concrete block. We need a barrier. Haley, hold back until I identify a target. Engage on my command.

  For once, there was no argument, hesitation, or questions. The students were not Auditors – not yet – but they had spent enough time in the field, under fire, to understand the value of following orders rapidly. Alex shifted his rifle from his shoulder to his hands, using the sling to brace and improve his grip, and then moved to the looted carcass of the rusting subcompact in a crouch. Katya followed him closely, a readied grenade in one hand, needles glittering in the other.

  Mitsuru moved for the concrete barrier with Min-jun tagging along just behind her, her ears popping with the change in air pressure as his barrier flickered to life. She slid in behind the broken concrete block, and Min-jun crouched beside her. One end of the block had been fractured, probably when it was shoved aside by heavy machinery to clear the road, and nothing was left besides the twisted protrusion of the steel rebar. The concrete was hardly sufficient to stop a bullet to begin with, much less so in such poor condition, but Min-jun’s protocol would be sufficient to protect them from most small arms fire. Mitsuru did not expect too much in the way of gunfire from their enemies, in any case – Ghouls’ subhuman intelligence prevented them from using any tool more complicated than a blunt instrument, and the Weir lacked opposable thumbs after they transformed. The most likely strategy would be a human-wave attack, in the style pioneered by the PLA during the conflict in North Korea. If Ghouls were good at anything, then it was absorbing fire. Mitsuru ran her eyes across her squad, receiving nods from each of them. Only Alex looked nervous, but she noted with a certain amount of pride in her student that his hands were steady as he thumbed the fire selector switch on his rifle to burst.

  We are in place, Alice. The natives are restless, but they haven’t made a move yet. Waiting on your order.

  Beside her, Min-jun checked the illuminated sight atop his Daewoo assault rifle and fiddled with the electronic fire-control unit, which controlled the fuse perimeters for the grenade launcher mounted beneath the rifle barrel. The dual-purpose rifle made Mitsuru nervous, due to both complexity and dependence on electronic components, but Min-jun had insisted on the usefulness of a single weapon providing both standard fire and air-burst grenade capabilities.

  Karim is in position. Begin your attack as soon as he hits.

  Mitsuru switched her ballistics protocol over to automatic targeting in dual-pistol mode and slowed her breathing, purging her mind of extraneous worries. The implant in her mind hummed as she cued another downloaded protocol, readying it for immediate use. Min-jun took a prone position, the front grip of his rifle resting on the top of the concrete barrier. Alex rested the back of his head against the rusting underside of the Zaporozhets and looked vaguely ill. Katya smiled at him and toyed with the fuse on her Chinese-manufactured fragmentation grenade.

  The warehouse behind them exploded, accompanied by the shrill whistling sound and smoke trail of an AT-4 projectile. Mitsuru knew from the briefing that there were actually two separate munitions in the anti-structure explosive – an armor-piercing charge designed to breach walls, and a timed high-explosive charge th
at detonated within the building – but the deafening noise made differentiating impossible. She flinched at the explosion, feeling the heat of the blast on her face as metal debris clattered to the ground around them. An influx of Etheric Signatures drew her attention to the northwest, where Ghouls poured out of every conceivable exit from a pair of decaying warehouses, swarming their position in a grotesque wave of desiccated flesh and rotting teeth.

  Mitsuru spent a fraction of a second digesting the flood of information that her ballistics protocol fed directly into her mind through the conduit of her implant, and then quickly made a decision. The tactical implications were fairly evident. And yet...

  She delayed, and wrestled with the appeal of her Black Protocol, the temptation to activate it and then handle the Ghouls herself, a perfectly ghastly surrogate to absorb her unfocused rage. It was foolish, and she never truly considered following up on the desire. It was a snare for her thoughts, though, and she lingered over it longer than she intended, her reverie broken by gunfire and a panicked telepathic signal from Haley. Mitsuru swore and pushed through her bizarre inaction, delivering the orders that should have come moments before.

  Fire at will! Haley, on my signal.

  There was no response from Alice, no question or censure. Mitsuru wondered if she could allow herself to hope that the Chief Auditor hadn’t noticed.

  Min-jun’s barrier might not have been as powerful or resilient as some others, but its unique characteristics more than compensated for that. Mitsuru felt the heavy thud of the discharge from the rifle-mounted grenade launcher in the pit of her stomach, the projectiles passing effortlessly through the visual distortion of the barrier, while enemy fire ricocheted harmlessly off of it. He had set the grenades to air-burst directly overhead of the oncoming swarm of ghouls, to devastating effect, as the shockwave and fragmentation tore into their front line.

  The first wave of Ghouls was torn to pieces, but those behind were not deterred. Even those badly injured by the grenades dragged themselves forward on whatever limbs they still possessed, heedless of pain or death. Their brown-and-grey mottled skin reminded Mitsuru of the peel of an avocado and was as tough as cured leather. They loped along like apes on long wiry limbs with their fingers scraping the ground, their eyes milk-white and blind. Their wounds bled thick and green, a product of the fungal infection that created the monstrosities. Mitsuru could not hear them howl as they charged, half-deaf from the explosions, but she could see rows of rotting brown teeth and bloated tongues inside their wide-open mouths.

  The ground shook with another explosion as Katya’s grenade detonated underfoot, sending a crowd of Ghouls flying in all directions. Mitsuru’s ballistics protocol struggled to update the count of their enemies as more emerged, charging over the writhing bodies of the wounded, trampling them into the dirt.

  The desire to activate her Black Protocol was like a steady hum in the back of her skull now, a creeping anticipation that Mitsuru did not believe herself capable of containing. Instead of satisfying her perverse desire to activate her protocol, her actions in Kiev had instead seemingly made the longing keener. The knife on her belt had become weighty, and the scars on her inner arms ached, while all the while an entire colony of black bees made the interior of her mind a home. The omnipresent buzz made her teeth hurt.

  She forced it down, asserted a self-control that she knew was crumbling.

  Mitsuru trusted Min-jun’s barrier to protect her from the sporadic but accurate fire from within the warehouse, and focused on the downloaded Shining Cloud Protocol.

  When she opened her hands, she released a bloom of nanometer blades, carried along by a gentle telekinetic push, swirling and flowing like pollen in the wind.

  It was nowhere near enough for her.

  ***

  Haley floated invisibly overhead, watching the battle unfold below. Remaining on the ground was not a requirement when she activated her Astral Protocol, and normally she enjoyed the perspective.

  At the moment, however, there was very little to enjoy. Instead, she felt overriding concern and anxiety for her friends and fellow Auditors, and a certain amount of shame at her own safety during their time of vulnerability. All she could do was facilitate their telepathic link, relay information to and from Central and Analytics, and wait for Mitsuru to give her a cue.

  She flinched at the explosions, even though the fragments thrown in her direction passed through her insubstantial form harmlessly. Her body was safely lying back at the field headquarters, after all. Haley was nothing more than a concentrated manifestation of her thoughts and awareness, projected to a point ten meters above the battle, suspended in the chilly morning air.

  Haley’s vision was the compound product of the limited visual information her Astral form perceived, fused with an acute awareness of the Ether. At the moment, this awareness was primarily focused on the Etheric Signatures of the Auditors and their adversaries. In the distance, from the top of a nearby apartment building, she could see Karim’s signature as he squinted into the scope of his sniper rifle, the discarded tube of the AT-4 rocket launcher still radiating heat beside him. Chike stood nearby, watching the scene with a sniper scope and relaying spotting information and reading the wind.

  In the ruins of the warehouse Karim had destroyed, the majority of the surviving Ghouls and Weir thrashed and struggled, pinned by debris or injured in the explosion, blind and deaf from the blast. Those that were not trapped or disabled were disoriented, struggling to find exits to the collapsed building to join the attack. Their slow progress made them easy prey for Karim, and the sniper dispatched them as soon as they cleared the building and set foot on the road with lethal efficiency.

  On the other side, Mitsuru and the other students from the Program were locked in combat with a varied force of Ghouls, Weir, and rogue Operators. The initial charge had been composed of dozens of Ghouls, largely serving as living shields to absorb the grenades and gunfire of the Auditors, and to provide cover under which the Weir and Operators either advanced or took a concealed firing position. Haley counted five Operators under cover within the two buildings; they used an array of high-powered and automatic rifles to pin the Auditors down behind their cover and limit the effectiveness of their attacks.

  The swirling Etheric discharge of the Shining Cloud Protocol was almost beautiful, if Haley put aside the reality of what she was watching, the miniscule blades imbued with the Etheric energy of the telekinesis that directed their movements, blossoming like a flower from Mitsuru’s outstretched hands and then streaming through the air in an illuminated and deadly fog. Their contact with flesh, however, was anything but beautiful. It decimated the first wave of Ghouls, reducing their hideous bodies to little more than puddles of shredded tissue, dismembering them on a cellular level with a multitude of cuts so fine that they were impossible to perceive. The remnants of the protocol were no kinder to the second wave, made up of equal parts Ghoul and Weir, severing limbs and cutting arteries with clinical precision, infusing the air they breathed and then eviscerating the creatures from the inside out, so they died coughing out the liquefied remains of their own lungs. Despite herself, Haley felt a slight relief as the protocol petered out. It seemed a particularly hideous way to die, even for such inhuman and savage enemies.

  From behind the ruins of an abandoned car, Alex and Katya exchanged fire haphazardly with the Operators concealed in the building in front of them. Katya used a bolt-action carbine, forcing the barrel through a breach in the car’s undercarriage and choosing her shots carefully, while Alex fired off panicky, aimless bursts each time he worked up the courage to work his rifle around the back fender. Min-jun, in the meantime, had exhausted the grenade launcher portion of his rifle, and was instead attempting to provide suppressing fire as Mitsuru stood fearlessly in the confines of his barrier, ignoring incoming fire while discharging two pistols with uncanny accuracy.

  Counting Etheric Signatures, Haley estimated that less than half of the original force arra
yed against the Auditors remained in the fight, discounting the incapacitated, wounded, and dying. Despite their losses, the Ghouls and the Weir charged relentlessly, seemingly without fear or regard for their own safety, ignoring the gunfire and rapidly diminishing the distance between them and the cover that sheltered the Auditors.

  Haley! The Operator in the right-side building has the angle on Alex and Katya. Take him.

  Haley responded to Mitsuru’s order with an affirmation and dove, passing through the aluminum and drywall of the building without resistance. There were three Operators in the room, all taking cover beside windows or hunched behind their rifles. Her target was a brow-haired man with deeply tanned skin and a jumble of tattoos covering his exposed arms. He wore a flak jacket and carried a Dragunov, the sniper variant of the infamous AK rifle, carefully adjusting his telescopic sight. Haley allowed the momentum of her dive to take her directly into his head, aiming at the small bald spot forming at the very top.

  There was a moment of terrifying dislocation while both of them struggled to comprehend their current situation and assert control. Information flooded Haley’s system, as he struggled to assert his identity in the face of the alien occupying his cerebral cortex. Fortunately, Haley was experienced and trained to deal with the circumstances, while she had to assume that possession was a new and terrifying experience for the man. She couldn’t help but feel a certain amount of sympathy, all the while intuitively overriding a variety of neurological connections, paralyzing some segments of his cerebrum, while hijacking other areas of the cerebellum, picking and choosing the few facts that she needed from his thoughts. His body felt to Haley like a set of dominos, building in momentum as systems were co-opted. First to go were involuntary movements, as the man discovered abruptly that he could no longer breathe or blink his eyes without conscious effort. Subverting these systems was merely a precursor to what was to come, distracting his neurological defenses by forcing his attention to the autonomic nervous system. Haley bypassed his psychic defenses with ease, as they were designed to prevent external telepathic or empathic interference, not a revolution from within.