“Suru, drone across some maker material, will you? Tubs A, B, and... yeah, mixture H.”
“Affirmative.”
“What’s this, then?” Alpha asked.
“You’ll see. Now shush, she’s getting nervous again.” I switched back to external audio, addressed the twitching secretary.
“AT ANY RATE, YOU HAVE A CHOICE, SEÑORITA.”
“I do?”
“YOU MAY WALK OUT OF HERE WITH ANY PAY OWED YOU, AND GO ON WITH YOUR LIFE. YOU WILL NEED TO FIND A NEW JOB, OF COURSE. OR YOU CAN CONTINUE TO SERVE AS DIRE’S SECRETARY.”
“I... can leave?”
“IF YOU WISH. HOWEVER, DIRE HAS NEED OF A SECRETARY.” I reached over to one of the briefcases I’d opened during my brief search of the office, and gently pinched a packet of hundred-dollar bills with my suit’s fingertips. I dropped it on the desk, with a meaty thud. “FIGURE THIS IS FAIR PAY FOR THE FIRST WEEK. WE CAN NEGOTIATE AFTER THAT ACCORDING TO THE PERFORMANCE YOU’VE DISPLAYED.”
She gnawed her lip. “May I ask questions? I mean in general? It’s okay if I don’t know something right away, right?”
“OF COURSE!”
“And you’re not going to shoot me if I ask something stupid?”
“NO.” I slid the packet of bills toward her, and she pocketed it from my bloody gauntlet without hesitation. I decided I liked this woman. “NOW, LET’S TALK ABOUT CORAZON’S BUSINESS...”
Half an hour later, I was starting to form a picture of things. I managed to corroborate some of her testimony from the records that she retrieved from about the room, and even more of it once the computer was up again, and I could check the deceased dictator’s documents.
Put it all together, and I was starting to get the big picture. It wasn’t pretty.
Señorita Spetta shrieked as one of my quinta-drones whirred through the window, payload dangling below it like the thorax on a particularly misshapen bumblebee. “OH DO SETTLE DOWN. IT’S HARMLESS.” I took the payload from it, and poured the sack of ball bearings into my gauntlet’s hand.
“What— what are those for?” She asked, standing on a nearby chair to peer into my palm.
“THIS.” I activated the repair systems.
She almost fell off the chair when dozens of tiny mechanical spider ’bots crawled out of the exhaust vents on the front of my armor, and clattered their way to my hand. As she teetered I grabbed her, swiftly moved her to the floor before she could hurt herself. Then I knelt, and stretched out my arm so she could see them work.
The tiny bots dug into the ball bearings, which were composed of raw materials. This particular batch was the mix from tub A, made to fill in any gaps from missing armor. The robots melted it with the solvents in their chemical feeds, and applied it liberally across the front of my shell, sealing holes and reinforcing damaged areas. A few slipped inside the casing and got to work pounding out dings with force bubbles.
Spetta watched with fascination. I drew my arm back as she reached out to poke one of the tiny bots. “CAREFUL. YOU’D LOSE A FINGERTIP AT BEST. THEY’RE FAIRLY SIMPLE, THEY MIGHT TRY TO REPAIR YOU.” That got her backing off quickly. I was exaggerating, but not by much. One of the benefits of being a villain was that you don’t have to build safety measures into your gear. Which is a downside sometimes, come to think of it.
I straightened up. More quinta-drones hummed through the window, depositing various raw materials, and my armor repaired itself as I looked through the last files. “SO. BASICALLY THE COUNTRY IS BROKE.”
“Y-yes.”
“BECAUSE CORAZON MOVED MOST OF THE MONEY OVER TO HIS SWISS BANK ACCOUNT.” Couldn’t have a Cayman Islands account like most of the corrupt CEOs in America, no... I could have hacked those easily. But Switzerland was another thing entirely. That would be hard.
“Yes.” Spetta adjusted her glasses.
“IS THERE ANY MONEY AT ALL LEFT IN THE TREASURY?”
“N-no, Doctor. The Minister of the Interior took it to safety while you were— during your attack on the palace.”
“SAFETY.”
“Yes. I believe his private helicopter left the ground a few minutes after you killed— after your speech at the Cabildo.”
“BELIEVE IT OR NOT THAT WAS A SNIPER ON A ROOFTOP. DIRE’S HANDS ARE CLEAN IN THIS ONE.”
Her eyes flicked to my blood-spattered gauntlets.
“METAPHORICALLY SPEAKING.” I rubbed them on the curtains. Spetta winced.
It was a hell of a view from here, I couldn’t help but notice. A long bay window looked out upon the Barrio del Sol, the northeastern part of the peninsula where most of Mariposa’s tourist resorts and beaches lay. Never noticed it before, but the nearest resorts were just wide enough to give Corazon’s office a perfect view of the waterfront. Probably deliberate.
“HE WAS BRAVE TO SIT WITH HIS BACK TO A WINDOW, GIVE HIM THAT.”
“Ah... the glass is strengthened. Very much so. No bullet will penetrate it.”
“THAT SO?” I tapped it with a knuckle, and it rang in a way glass shouldn’t. Some sort of superscience material? I’d analyze it later. For now, back to bureaucratic matters.
“SO. THE MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR IS GONE WITH THE TREASURY.”
“Yes.”
“DID HE ACTUALLY DO ANYTHING OR WAS HE A MEMBER OF CORAZON’S FAMILY?” The tyrant didn’t have much family left, but the ones he had, he appointed to cushy government jobs. They basically sat around and collected bribes.
“He was no relative. I think he was trying to figure out a way to meet El Presidente’s agricultural requirements for the year without any real budget.”
“SO HE ACTUALLY TRIED...” I rubbed my chin. “DID HE HAVE A DEPUTY MINISTER?”
“He is gone as well.”
“HM. WELL, GOING BY THE FILES, THE MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR ACTUALLY DID THINGS NOW AND AGAIN. PROBABLY HANDY TO SEE IF WE CAN APPOINT SOMEBODY TO PICK THAT UP. CAN YOU FIND SOMEONE SEÑORITA?”
“I... suppose so?” She worried at her glasses again. I took the time to check my readouts as she thought. Insect-like bots crawled over my mask, extracting slugs and filling in the holes. The repairs were about ninety percent, best I could get them without time in a machine shop. Then a reading caught my attention.
“Depleted uranium?” I muttered. That sniper had brought a hell of a big gun... must have been an anti-materiel rifle. The Geiger counter was clicking, and that was no good. I had the bots bring the slugs to the palm of one gauntlet, and cast around in the office. Ah, there.
I moved a painting, revealing a wall safe, and paused. Corazon was the type to be paranoid... a quick scan confirmed explosives. A more in-depth scan showed the activation triggers. And a few highly-focused particle beam shots disabled the circuits simultaneously, frying the main and the dead-man’s switch. Child’s play to pry open the safe afterward, and chuck the radioactive bullets inside. Then I paused, and took out the contents that had been left behind. Three bars of gold, a huge baggie of white powder, and a small, black book.
“CHECK THIS.” I told Spetta, handing her the baggie while I tucked the gold into the desk drawer and shut it. The notebook went on the desk. I enabled the microfine manipulators tucked between my gauntleted fingers, and turned the pages.
Names and phone numbers, mostly. Including the name of his Swiss banking contact. Good, good.
“It is cocaine,” she said. “A lot of cocaine.”
“HM.” She handed the baggie back to me gladly, after I extended a palm. I tucked it into a compartment. Wasn’t about to use the stuff on myself, gods only knew what it would do to my enhanced brain. But I knew enough about the stuff that it might come in handy at some point. One of my dearest friends had been a drug dealer years back, and I’d paid attention to his lessons.
“So... you wish me to find a new Minister of the Interior, si? Anything else?”
“NO, THAT’S ALL.” I turned, glanced out the western window. The sun was setting, and I could clearly see muzzle flash to the southwest. One
of the Barrios was still full of rebels, and that was a problem. “PROBABLY BETTER DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT.” Going by the orders left on Corazon’s desk, Colonel Ricio was the man in charge down there. The Mariposa City peace force was present with everything they had... save for the rocket trucks I’d destroyed earlier, of course.
“I’ll just go then.”
“YES, YES.GO, AND IF IT TAKES MORE THAN A FEW HOURS TO DO CHECK IN EARLY TOMORROW MORNING. WE’LL TACKLE IT TOGETHER.”
“Sí Doctor!” she replied, then fled.
Alpha chimed in on the vox. “I’ve been thinking about that sniper.”
“Who?”
“The one who just shot you?”
I blinked. What was he going on about? Well, it didn’t matter, I had business to finish. “We’ll talk about that later.”
I made my way out of the palace, and flew towards the front lines of the battle. I had a feeling I knew why the battle wasn’t over yet, and if I was right, this had the chance of being messy.
Colonel Ricio was a slim, weathered man in his forties, whose eyes tracked my mask’s gaze like two chiseled pieces of flint. He looked at me like he was sizing me up for a noose, and maybe he was. Twenty feet away, at the sandbag barricades, his troops kept watch on a tangle of junked up barricades a few hundred yards away. The rest of his troops watched me, and a few clicked safeties off as I stalked towards their officer.
“YOU ARE RICIO. REPORT.”
“First, Miss, I must ask you to confirm the instructions I’ve heard over the radio. You are to be our new presidente?” His voice was as hardened and dried as the rest of him.
“INCORRECT.” His eyes widened. I continued. “DIRE IS YOUR NEW TYRANT.”
He snorted, and pulled a Cuban cigar out of his pocket. “Well, you tell it like it is at least.”
“REPORT. DO WE HAVE CONFIRMED PYONGYANG EFFECT?”
The scowl on his face told me all I needed to know.
In a nutshell, we lived in a world where the most stressful moment of a person’s life could give them superpowers. War and the associated horrors it brought were really fucking stressful.
And so any military assault, especially those that involved quite a lot of collateral, or a drawn-out fight, has a chance of triggering disproportionate numbers of power surges. True, it’s only one person in every half-million, give or take, but that is an average for the globe. If you get enough people with the potential together in the same place, the averages can get blown out of the water.
When the army special forces metas assaulted Pyongyang back in the Korean War, their attack got bogged down, and triggered power surges left and right.
And then they’d triggered the meta who would become Dark Harvest, with the result that there wasn’t a Korea anymore. Or a Korean people. Or any chance of reclaiming that land for a good long while.
“Yes, it was a power surge. He triggered this morning.”
“JUST ONE?” That was surprising. And worrisome.
“Just one.” He sat down on a nearby ammo box, motioned to a camp chair. More out of courtesy, I thought, since I’d clearly crush the thing.
“SHE’LL STAND, THANKS. TELL HER ABOUT THIS METAHUMAN.”
“They call him El Hombre Último.”
“THE LAST MAN.”
“Yes. It’s a pretty good description. He leads the charges on our first line of barricades. Every time we bring down his troops. But he always survives. And when he gets close enough, my men start dying.”
Shades of Dark Harvest indeed. “HOW CLOSE?”
He shook his head. “It’s not the same every time.”
“GOT ANY FOOTAGE OF IT? ANY RECORDINGS?”
“No.” He scowled. “You think we have time to stand around while this hombre kills my men?”
“HOW MANY TIMES HAS HE COME?”
“Five.” He stood and hurled the stub of his cigar over the sandbags, flipping off the rebel barricades before he sat back down.
“FIVE... SO WHY HASN’T HE OVERRUN YOU YET? YOU CAN’T SHOOT HIM, BULLETS DON’T WORK.”
“Been asking myself that. Instead he just shoots back for a while, then runs back to his own lines. Then they move the lines closer.” The Colonel stared up at me, lowered his voice. “My men are about to break. This asshole... we can’t take him. And somebody went and killed the heroes who were going to reinforce us.”
I chuckled, and my laughter made the troops nearby step back and cross themselves.
“SHOW HER THE BODIES.”
The Colonel gestured to blanket-covered corpses nearby, and I stooped and examined each one, looking for commonalities. Soon enough, I found them. Each and every corpse bore a gunshot wound. Sometimes multiple gunshot wounds. I prodded and poked around in the wounds, ignoring the gasps and whispers of disgust from the onlookers.
Not a single body had a bullet in it.
I had a theory. It’d be a risk to test it, but hell, I wanted the Colonel working for me and I needed to make a show of strength here if that was going to happen.
I straightened up and nodded. “DIRE SHALL HANDLE THIS THEN. WAIT HERE.”
Thin eyebrows rose above those flinty eyes. “You need backup? Facing him alone might not go so well.”
“NO. NO MORE OF YOUR MEN DIE TODAY.” I put a gauntlet on his shoulder, and to his credit he only flinched a bit. “YOUR MEN HELD HIM THIS LONG. THEY SUFFERED TO HOLD THIS GROUND AGAINST AN UNKNOWN FORCE. THAT TELLS DIRE THAT YOU ARE A GOOD OFFICER. DIRE WILL HAVE NEED OF A SKILLED GENERAL IN DAYS TO COME.”
His lips quirked. “We’ll see if you come back... tyrant.”
Implication being that if I didn’t, well that was okay too. That was fine. Given the circumstances, I couldn’t blame him. “ONE LAST THING. PULL BACK THE TROOPS TO THE SOUTH.”
His smirk vanished. “We’re blocking their means of retreat. We pull back, they can escape through the docks.”
“YES. SHE KNOWS.”
“Scum like this, you let them go they’ll be a thorn in your side forever. Never wipe them out, if they get into the jungle.”
I knew that. I was counting on it. “NONETHELESS, YOU HAVE YOUR ORDERS.”
He glanced to the west, looked back to me. “Of course. Once you are done with El Hombre Último, we will of course pull the southern forces back.”
I turned without a word, hopped over the sandbags, came down with a ringing crash, and walked west.
“EL HOMBRE ÚLTIMO!” I bellowed. “COME FORTH AND FACE DIRE!”
Bullets answered me. A whole lot of bullets, as every rebel behind the barricades, snipers in the surrounding buildings, and a few heavy machine gunners up on the tops of nearby bodegas opened fire. I ignored them, crossing my arms and keeping my feet wide and apart, cocky and unconcerned.
Once they saw that bullets did nothing, they opened up with heavier stuff. RPGs, grenades, even a few Molotov cocktails that fell far short. I ignored those too, though inwardly I winced as they undid a portion of my repair bots’ hard work.
But it was all worth it, when the smoke cleared and I saw their faces. The cobblestone street around me was cratered and wrecked, the posh little cafe to the side of me a charred ruin, but I stood untouched, save for some scorch marks and scrapes.
“IS THAT ALL?” I asked, taking a step forward. When no reply came, I forged forward, and the rebels abandoned the barricade as I came, fell back to sturdier cover down the street.
All save for one, a small, thin man of perhaps twenty, wearing a shredded blue shirt and torn jeans. He wore a rebel scarf around his head, and it looked like the only undamaged piece of clothing on him. He was tan, with some dreads poking out of the scarf, and a thin mustache above a frowning mouth.
“They say you killed Corazon!” he yelled.
“YOU ARE DISTURBING THE PEACE OF DIRE’S CITY, AND KILLING HER SOLDIERS. DEPART OR SURRENDER, SHE CARES NOT.”
He shook his head, as he stepped nearer. “Oh no. We sacrificed way too much for this. Buried too many friends. We cannot go back
now señora. Even if we wanted to.”
“YES, YOU SHALL. AFTER SHE DEFEATS YOU, SHE SHALL GATHER HER FORCES INTO AN UNSTOPPABLE JUGGERNAUT. FROM THE NORTH, FROM THE SOUTH THEY WILL COME, AND DRIVE YOUR FRIENDS BEFORE THEM LIKE A MONSOON OF STEEL! DIRE SHALL LEAD THEM INTO GLORIOUS BATTLE, AND YOU, AND THOSE THAT FOLLOW YOU SHALL LOSE.”
“Like hell!” he snarled, and he was running toward me, pulling a pistol out of his waistband and jerking the slide back, as he brought it to bear on me.
And the world slowed.
I had options, and depending on what his power was, and how it worked, and also how much he knew about it, the wrong choice could get me killed.
Fact: All his victims had gunshot wounds.
Fact: Some of them had multiple gunshot wounds.
Fact: He did fire a gun as he attacked.
Fact: Every time he attacked, he charged in with a group of multiple people.
Fact: He never pressed the attack beyond a certain point. Never got too close.
Theory: His power had drawbacks at close range.
So as he charged I boosted my newly repaired gravitics, and counter-charged him.
What was he afraid of?
He fired wildly as I approached, but nothing seemed to happen. A shot nicked the suit and then I was on him... and past him. He stumbled to a halt, confused, as I skidded to a stop, turned, and backhanded him gently with a lazy swipe.
Pain! Ow ow ow... I rocked in my harness as he flew across the pavement, then he hit a wall and I saw stars, blinking for a second as the pain in my side subsided to a dull throb, and I could see again.
When I could, I saw he’d picked himself up off the pavement, grinning. His shirt was torn, but his chest wasn’t even scraped. Whereas I felt blood seeping down my stomach.
“AH. SO THAT’S YOUR POWER.” Damage reflection!
It had been one of the possibilities, and the main reason I’d pulled my punch. Hopefully I didn’t have any broken ribs. Probably have a nice row of bruises for a good long while.
His grin faded as I turned to face him, floating nearer. “WELL, FORTUNATELY DIRE’S GOT A WIDE VARIETY OF NONLETHAL OPTIONS AVAILABLE.” Not the taser, I’d end up tasing myself. If his power worked with electricity, anyway. But the glueglob gun or the tiny net would work pretty well here. Maybe I’d use the tiny net. I rarely found a good situation for it, be a shame not to try it here.
Dire : Wars (The Dire Saga Book 4) Page 11
