All my smug musing stopped, as he pulled another pistol from his pocket, jammed it under his chin. “Not one step closer, señora.”
“CALL HER DIRE. OR TYRANT. NOT SEÑORA, THOUGH SHE IS ONE.”
“Señora,” he insisted, beads of sweat streaming down his forehead. He blinked, and swallowed hard. “Don’t make me do this.”
“IT’S DAMAGE REFLECTION, ISN’T IT? ANY WOUND YOU TAKE GOES TO THE NEXT NEAREST PERSON. YOU ATTACKED IN SQUADS SO THAT RICIO DIDN’T CATCH ON. CLEVER.”
“They... they knew how it worked. We all knew the cost.” Guilt flared in his eyes.
“BUT NOW THE SECRET’S OUT. ONE OF THEM. WANT HER TO TELL ANOTHER SECRET?” I drifted closer, and he jammed the gun up against his throat. “YOU’RE NOT SURE IF YOUR POWER WORKS ON WOUNDS YOU DO TO YOURSELF. YOU’RE NOT SURE IF IT TRIGGERS ON THAT.” He’d gotten his power this morning. He hadn’t time to figure that part out, I thought. A gamble, true, but all I needed to do was sow doubt, here.
More sweat, and his mouth set in a grim line. “No gain without sacrifice,” he whispered, and his finger tensed on the trigger.
“YOU’D SACRIFICE EVERYONE, THEN? EVERYONE ON THIS ISLAND? MAYBE EVERYONE IN THE WORLD?” I spread my arms wide. “SHE THOUGHT YOU BETTER THAN THAT, HERO.”
“I’m no hero. Wait, what are you talking about?” He didn’t really want to pull the trigger, I could tell. Just had to drive in the finishing blow...
“DIRE’S ARMOR IS PROGRAMMED TO AVENGE HER. AND YOU WOULD BE ITS TARGET.” I pointed to his gun. “IF YOU PULL THAT TRIGGER, ONE OF TWO THINGS WILL HAPPEN. EITHER YOU WILL DIE, BECAUSE SUICIDE DOESN’T TRIGGER YOUR POWER, OR YOU WILL KILL DIRE. IN WHICH CASE HER ARMOR GOES AFTER YOU UNTIL YOU ARE DEAD.”
It would avenge me, yes, but every time it killed him, he’d shunt the wound to the closest person in range. So my armor would register him as still alive, and try to kill him again. And he’d shunt the wound to the next closest person in range. Rinse repeat, continue, and with an unkillable man and a heavily armored battlesuit with a fusion generator on its back, this was pretty much an extinction event... well, possibly. If his power was range restricted, then it would eventually run out of people to kill within his radius. Maybe he’d die then.
But he didn’t know the particulars of it yet, and neither did I.
He paled, and his finger eased back from the trigger. “Madre de dios...”
“SMART MAN. SURRENDER TO DIRE.” I said. “YOUR FRIENDS CAN LEAVE THE CITY. SHE DOESN’T CARE ABOUT THEM.”
“How do I know you will keep your word?”
“HOW DOES SHE KNOW YOU WON’T TRY KILLING YOURSELF IN YOUR PRISON CELL, WHEN SHE COMES DOWN TO GLOAT AT YOU?” And I would, too. Had to keep up appearances. And it’d give me an excuse not to execute him.
He nodded. “Yes. Yes, alright.” He lowered the gun.
Three steps and I was to him, grabbing him up, shielding him with my body, and hustling back to Ricio’s command. If someone got the bright idea to snipe him now, then I’d be toast. “GOING TO GO MAKE SURE HE’S IN A REMOTE PRISON,” I called to Ricio. “PULL BACK THE SOUTHERN FORCES, THAT’S AN ORDER.” He nodded as I passed by, and gave me a fast salute. I kept on flying. He had snipers too, after all.
The thing was, I wasn’t kidding about that potential extinction event. If he didn’t have an upper range limit, then El Hombre Último really was global waiting to happen. Did non-targeted attacks trigger his power? If he fell in lava and got stuck there would everyone on the planet burn?
You run into this shit when powers surface. You have to deal carefully with this stuff, or seriously bad things could happen. The fact that the world had survived nearly a century of random powers popping up and sometimes having earth-shaking consequences was a matter of luck, meddling by precognitives and other powerful entities, super-geniuses like myself, and... gah, I hated to admit it... heroes.
Time and again, heroes had saved the day. Mostly with a healthy application of luck.
But...
They weren’t always there. Things fell apart, matters spun out of control, and my projections were bad, any way I did them. The more we relied on heroes the more the status quo worsened, and the less prepared we were as a species to handle the travails of a constantly changing world.
I shoved the musing away as I approached the palace, making my way back to my office. “SPETTA! SEÑORITA SPETTA!” I called, as I entered the office, straightening up and depositing El Hombre on the Persian carpet.
He looked around, face wrinkling in disgust. “This is how that pig lived?”
“MORE OR LESS. YOU SHOULD SEE THE BATHROOM.” I considered. “ACTUALLY YOU SHOULD, MIGHT WANT TO CLEAN UP. GOING TO ARRANGE SOME NEW CLOTHES FOR YOU, TOO.”
“Prison clothes, hah?”
I lowered my voice.
“NO. TECHNICALLY YOU’LL BE A GUEST. THE FACT IS YOU’RE A THREAT TO ANYONE AROUND YOU RIGHT NOW. SO UNTIL WE CAN FIGURE OUT YOUR POWERS, AND HOW TO LET YOU LIVE WITHOUT RISKING INNOCENTS, YOU NEED TO BE IN THE SAFEST PLACE POSSIBLE.”
“Which is?”
“DUNNO. HAVEN’T EXPLORED THE PALACE THOROUGHLY YET. GOT SOMEONE WHO MIGHT HELP WITH THAT.” I gestured at the door... and right on cue, Spetta ran in.
“Sí, Doctor...” she blinked, skidded to a stop at the sight of El Hombre. “Oh! Ah, hola.”
He looked back to me. “GO CLEAN UP. YOUR PANTS ARE TORN, YOUR ASS IS SHOWING, AND WE’LL GET YOU NEW CLOTHES.”
Thank gods for Catholic cultures. He blushed, slammed his back to the wall, and edged along it. “Ah...” He looked to me, and I realized what the problem was.
“BATHROOM’S THROUGH THERE.” I gestured at an arch, and he scurried away.
“Who was that?” Spetta asked.
“ONE OF THE REBELS.” I briefed her on the situation, and her eyes grew wide behind her glasses. “YEAH. SO WE’LL NEED A SAFE SPOT FOR HIM.” I sagged in my harness. The pain was catching up with me. I’d been running on willpower, but it had been a long goddamn day, and my headache wasn’t going away. Sleeping in the harness would be a no-go, thanks to my side.
“I’ll see what we can do,” Spetta promised. “Um, should I take the gun from him?”
I shook my head. “IT MAKES HIM FEEL BETTER. AND A TRULY DETERMINED MAN CAN FIND A WAY TO KILL HIMSELF, NO MATTER WHAT PRECAUTIONS YOU TAKE. LET HIM KEEP IT.”
She liked this idea less and less. “Okay, but I’m putting him far away from my room.”
“OF COURSE.”
She went and found him one of Corazon’s spare suits, which amused me no end, and promised to get him squared away. For my part, I went into Corazon’s master bedroom, locked the door, and swept it six times with every sensor I had in the armor. No bugs, no traps, and a hell of a lot of interesting black market supertech security devices. I polarized the windows with a tap of my gauntlet, decanted from the suit, and painfully, carefully, maneuvered myself to the bed.
Ow.
Fucking ow.
I’d gotten soft during my stay with the Chamis. It had been hard work, yes, but generally without serious injury. This wasn’t precisely serious, thankfully, but it still hurt. Hopefully time would heal it.
My earbuds chimed. “Okay, now that things have calmed down, I have to ask what the hell you’re thinking?” Alpha. Of course it was Alpha.
“She’s thinking she’ll need some ointment for the bruises. Maybe tiger balm if she can find it.”
“No! Are you seriously going to try to take over this third-rate banana republic?”
“Of course not.”
“Okay, that’s good.”
“She’s not going to try, she’s going to do it.”
“Fuck me running.”
“Maybe later. Currently a bruised mess. Not much titillation to be gained there.”
“Okay, that’s just Oedipal and disturbing. You’re my creator, after all.”
“She was kidding. Look... here’s the problem with trusting you. She’s your jailer. Right now it’
s not in her best interests to tell you anything. You were a rogue variable...”
“But now I’m accounted for. I’m not going anywhere. What’s the harm in telling me your sinister plan? I know you love a good monologue.”
I do, but... “See, you’re future tech. She’s got you now, but who knows what capabilities you have to bring to bear? If you escape, she’s going to be hard pressed to grab you again. Unless...”
“Unless what?”
I told him.
He didn’t like the conditions, but eventually we came to terms.
CHAPTER 8: ORGANIZING OPPRESSION
“What the hell is she DOING down there? No, no, listen. This is not the time for action. Trust me, just sit back and watch. She’s got to be up to something, and we need to figure out the plan before it bites us in the ass.”
--Wiretapped discussion between WEB listening posts intercepted during an MRB/FBI joint operation. Original quote attributed to Arachne, one of WEB’s mysterious backers.
“This feels weird,” Alpha said. His voice echoed off the stone walls of the dungeons, bouncing around the empty cells that I’d claimed for workrooms and storage. The floors were a little tacky with dried blood and the occasional tooth here and there, but they sufficed for privacy.
A steady stream of Quinta drones had brought me the supplies I needed from the lair... though now that the fire was winding down to the North, I no longer had a nice, concealing cloud of smoke to cover things; Further aerial delivery would be difficult. No matter, the important components had been transferred. The rest would be delivered once the tunneling bots finished their work under the bay.
“I can touch things. Touching things is strange. I have no idea how you people can take this sense for granted.”
I fiddled with the connections on the server. Above it, Alpha stood in his new shape; a softly glowing blue see-through human, with traceries of lines around a toned body. Patches of squares and pixels preserved modesty, not that I’d programmed his image to be anatomically correct.
The Macrohard Corporation probably had grounds for a lawsuit against me, given that I’d shamelessly ripped the image off from a sympathetic video game character in a shooter game I’d spent too much time playing. But hell, at this point, I figured copyright infringement was the least of my worries. The villainous path had to come with some perks, after all.
The hologram moved around the shelf, barely two feet high, poking various things to test his new sensations. At one point he walked over and tugged on my hair... tried to, anyway. The static amplifiers I was using to simulate haptic feedback didn’t really have the strength to do more than tousle my hair before his hand passed through it. Nonetheless it tickled, and I waved him off as I finished hooking things up.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said again, settling on a shelf. “I’m trading immortality away in exchange for answers, and you’re being damn cagey with those.” He waved a hand at the server, where the core of him was now hard-coded. I’d pulled him out of the shapeless, online-adapted form future me had given him, and built him into something bound to his hardware. Not unlike one of the now-extinct digital intelligences, really. Of course he didn’t have their capability or potential for growth, but he was still sophisticated enough to run rings around most things with his processing speed.
The lights in the halls flickered, the generator I’d installed fired up with a rumbling groan, and layers of circuitry along the walls hummed to life. I resisted the urge to laugh maniacally... wasn’t my finest hour, really. Just kitbashing things together to maximize my materials and their utility.
“There,” I told him, putting the tools back into their belt, and straightening up. “You should have free run of the palace. Go have a look around.”
“Thanks!” He disappeared. I packed things up as best I could, looked back at the armor, and sighed.
El Presidente’s shower had been glorious. A hot tub with about as much area as a king-sized bed sat to the side, and if I hadn’t been dealing with some deep tissue bruises and a minor concussion, I would have enjoyed it a lot more. Still, it had been heavenly. Getting back into the armor after that was pain and a bit of a letdown. Decanting down here and getting my hands dirty... pure joy. But now I’d need to suit up again, because I was still on treacherous ground, and I couldn’t afford to let anyone see me out of the Brute Suit.
Unless...
I tapped my earrings. “Hey, Alpha?”
“Yes?”
“Ask señorita Spetta if there are any recent applicants to the palace staff. Couch it in terms to suggest that Dire’s looking for an assistant for her.”
“That might be a little difficult.”
“Oh?”
“She’s currently holed up in her bathroom screaming about naked midget ghosts.”
Oh. Yeah, I probably should have warned the guards and staff before I unleashed Alpha’s new form to walk among them. My bad.
I suited up, got upstairs, just in time to persuade the frantic kitchen staff that no, we didn’t need to call in a priest. Spetta took less convincing, thankfully, and seemed embarrassed by the whole affair. She seemed a bit startled at the notion of having help, but promised to get me the files. Turned out that government jobs here were seen as posh, easy roads to riches, and they had plenty of female applicants.
“I’ve also found someone from the Ministry of the Interior,” she offered, as she adjusted her glasses.
“OH?” Good, good. We had a number of projects to renew, restart, and reduce. The economy was in shambles, and getting someone skilled and experienced in to help with the transition would save me valuable weeks.
“You want to meet him, Empress?”
“YES, SEND HIM IN.”
Five minutes later I was staring at a small, fat man with a neatly trimmed mustache. His plain white shirt had patches on the elbows that didn’t quite match the color of the original material, and his pants had a blown belt-loop. He couldn’t have been more than thirty at most, and his shoes were scarred from cheap brushes and not nearly enough polish.
“YOUR NAME?” I rumbled, and he recoiled, took a few gasping breaths. He held up a shaking finger, pulled out an inhaler, and took a hit.
“I— sorry. Asthma, you see? Oh, I’m babbling. Sorry, sorry. My name is Julian Moreto.”
“JULIAN MORETO. SEÑOR MORETO.” I turned my back to him, looked out the windows of the office. Really was a beautiful morning. It would be noon before too long, I’d spent much of the daylight avoiding it, buried in the dungeon, upgrading the Palace infrastructure. “COME, STAND BESIDE YOUR NEW TYRANT. TELL HER WHAT YOU SEE, SEÑOR MORETO.”
He found his courage and joined me, fussing with the collar of his shirt. No tie, just a collar, stained nearly yellow from years of sweat. His eyes roamed over the vista, then he looked up to me. “Really empty beaches.”
They were, weren’t they? “YES. SOME OF THAT COULD BE DUE TO THE FACT THAT THERE’S A WAR ON. BUT SHE’S HAD OCCASION TO OBSERVE THEM BEFORE. FOR ALL THE AMOUNT OF TAXES MARIPOSA RECEIVES FROM THE RESORTS, THEY DON’T SEEM TO DO ENOUGH BUSINESS TO JUSTIFY IT. TOURISM IS ACTUALLY PRETTY LOW, ESPECIALLY WHEN CROSS-REFERENCED AGAINST THE NUMBER OF VISITORS REPORTED FROM THE PORT AUTHORITY. NOW WHY IS THAT?”
“I don’t know.”
“NO?” I turned to look at him directly, and he flinched. “WHAT EXACTLY WAS YOUR POSITION IN THE MINISTRY, JULIAN?”
“I.. I was the senior file clerk at the department of building inspection.”
“SHE SEES.”
“Who does?”
I waved a hand. “DIRE SEES. SHE SPEAKS OF HERSELF IN THIRD PERSON, MOST PRONOUNS ARE INSUFFICIENT TO DESCRIBE HER GREATNESS.” That was a lie, but it was better than ‘I cut chunks of my brain out to make sure nobody could fuck with my past and loved ones, and hit the language center by accident.’
But back to the topic at hand... “YOU ARE NOW THE MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR.” I handed him three wads of money, and his eyes bulged as he
juggled them, dropped one, and apologized profusely as he picked it back up. “YOUR JOB IS TO DIG INTO THE RECORDS AND FIGURE OUT WHY THE TOURIST COUNT IS SO LOW, BUT THE TAX GAINS ARE SO HIGH.” I had my suspicions as to why this was so, but it was oddly well-buried. If I came at it personally it would take me time, and might spook someone into destroying a vital link of the chain. Julian here would be a pawn... I’d put him out there and use Alpha to watch him, and if someone started reacting to what he was doing, Alpha could alert me and investigate at the speed only a machine intelligence could muster. There was a slight chance that Julian might be at risk from this; but given the amount of money I’d just handed him, my conscience rested easy.
There had to be a reason that everyone who was anyone in the Ministry had grabbed money and fled the second I’d taken charge. What were they so scared of?
The other reason that I’d appointed someone to the task was far more prosaic. I simply didn’t have enough time to manage everything and secure a happy outcome for Mariposa, let alone myself. Alpha was a step in the right direction as far as delegation went, but I had to nominate and trust people along the way or I’d fail. Spetta was one, Julian was another. I was leaning towards Ricio as a third, but he’d require that I handle him with care. Do it wrong and he’d try a military coup. But so long as I appeared strong, this was a minor risk.
Speaking of Ricio...
I patched into the military bands, and broadcast until I got the man on the line. “GENERAL RICIO, HOW FARES DIRE’S CITY?”
There was a pause. “Your pardon Tyrant, but I’m only a colonel.”
“YOU’VE BEEN PROMOTED.”
Another, shorter pause. “I see. You understand that Corazon was the only general we had.”
“THAT IS BECAUSE CORAZON FEARED HIS OFFICERS. DIRE DOES NOT.”
“There are four other colonels, who might take this promotion unkindly. Unless you are planning to promote them as well...”
This was a test. Fortunately, I’d done my homework. “YOU ARE MISTAKEN. THERE ARE ONLY THREE OTHER COLONELS. ONE WAS EXECUTED LAST NIGHT ACCORDING TO REPORTS, AS THE REBELS SEIZED HIS GARRISON IN PUTNAM’S PROVIDENCE. THE OTHER TWO HAVE DECLARED DIRE A USURPER, AND REFUSED TO SWEAR ALLEGIANCE TO HER.” True, that. I’d called them this morning, and gotten short, sharp statements of defiance.
Dire : Wars (The Dire Saga Book 4) Page 12
