Also, this was a test of the sniper’s raw power. Before they’d managed to stay unnoticed in a distant spot, with a small, impromptu mob. Now? The mob was about six times the size of the original, and people were watching from the tops of all nearby buildings. How strong was their power? How well could they remain unobtrusive with this many people around, this many looking on? This world had very few absolutes in it. Even Crusader had his limits.
I’d found Crusader’s limits through science, experimentation, controlled risks, and the willingness to put my ass on the line when things went south. I’d find the Sniper’s limits the same way. “Diagnostic suite ready?”
“Yep. If he’s here, we’ll get some good readings out of him.”
“Out of who?”
“The sniper.”
I frowned. What was he talking about? “Just stick to the speech. No time for nonsense.”
“He’s here!”
“Yes, Ricio is down there.” I indicated the front of the Cabildo. Ricio had a glass screen, and good separation out of a direct line from my suit. We had to keep him safe from... safe from... my brain itched.
But I fought it. I knew this feeling was unnatural. And if I was anything, I was Dire. I was the master of my fate!
And though it hurt, my mind cleared. “Keep an eye out,” I hissed through gritted teeth. The nearest people around me eyed me warily, and drew back. I turned the grimace into a grin, and sidled away.
“The Maestro’s calling!” Alpha whispered.
“Maestro M?” I blinked. “Now? Patch Dire over to him, and go ahead with the speech.”
“Are you sure? You’d be using your natural voice.”
I chuckled. “Thought of that. Suru, activate the distortion.”
She did. The Maestro would hear my words in my usual screeching roar.
As for my part, the Maestro whispered through my earrings, rerouted from the holo-emitter he’d left behind. “Doctor. Obeisance causes much trouble these days. Too many would-be killers. My goodness, one’s about to take a shot at you now. Words fail, I fear.”
“You have information about the assassin? How convenient.” Damn, my head hurt. Even talking about the assassin brought pain in waves and shudders that I hadn’t experienced before.
“PEOPLE OF MARIPOSA!” Alpha roared. “A WAVE OF ANARCHY ROSE AGAINST YOU, AND CORAZON THE FOOL LET IT GROW RIGHT UNDER HIS NOSE!”
“Do you want me to be brief? My goodness, I’ll try. Bidding farewell to long-winded soliloquies is a bit out of my sphere. When in Rome, I suppose.”
“You’re babbling. Please get to the point.” Bastard was stalling for the drama of it.
“INDEED, THE INSURRECTIONISTS FOUGHT HIM TO HIS VERY DOORSTEP! THEY DROVE YOU FROM YOUR HOMES! THEY KILLED YOU IN THE STREETS! THEY COST MANY LIVES TO STOP!”
“I suppose I can. Say... a favor owed later on, perhaps?”
“We already negotiated the favor. Your man’s life for the information.”
He chuckled. “Elaborate ruse, my dear Doctor, but you know that as well as I.” He dropped the creepy whisper, and spoke casually. “The man’s simply a minion, I have more. I only ask a future favor, nothing major, in exchange for the full disclosure. Are you in or out? Clock’s ticking. Shot’s coming.”
“AND THEY FELL BEFORE DIRE LIKE WHEAT BEFORE CHAFF! WITH THE HELP OF GENERAL RICIO, THEY WERE DRIVEN FROM THE CITY LIKE THE COWARDLY RATS THEY ARE!” My suit gestured an arm toward Ricio, and the crowd’s roar rose to a fever pitch, many pumping their arms and shouting his name. Unlike their cousins, the Chamis, the Maris folk of the cities had no problems showing joy, no taboo that kept them restrained.
“Got him!” Alpha called. “No, wait. Got her.”
I switched channels. “Who’s she targeting?”
“Me.”
I smiled, and flipped the channel back to the Maestro. “No deal.”
“No deal? Doctor, you’re being cocky.”
“No. She is being Dire.”
“BUT THE TRIUMPH IS NOT RICIO’S ALONE! NOR IS IT DIRE’S! THIS IS YOUR MOMENT, MARIPOSA! THIS IS YOUR TRIUMPH! YOUR NEW FACTORIES CHURN OUT WEAPONS TO DEFEND OUR SHORES FROM ANY OPPORESSORS! YOUR NEW POWER STATIONS DO WHAT CORAZON COULD NOT, AND THEY BRING MODERN BROADCAST ENERGY TO YOUR VERY HOMES!”
A sniff, from the Maestro. “I’d truly hoped for better from you, Doctor. One so rarely meets peers in this business. We could have collaborated, you and I. You would have made a perfect Wrath.”
“Wrath?” I asked.
BOOM!
Alpha rocked back, as hell itself exploded against the Brute Suit’s mask.
The crowd gasped as one, as the mighty armored figure fell back and started to fall.
I tapped the channel over. “Alpha? Alpha!” If he fell now, if he showed weakness...
But he didn’t.
Alpha came through. I breathed a sigh of relief as the Bruit Suit’s reactor ports glowed blue, and he stopped in midair, righted himself with an out-thrust finger, pointing northwest and down.
“THAT WAS TWO. IF YOU TAKE A THIRD, YOU DIE. ANY QUESTIONS, YOU COWARDLY CUR?”
My mask was ruined, the hole in the suit’s helmet clearly visible from the back. I stared for a full half-second, in utter disbelief. The force it had taken to do that! If I’d been in the suit, I would have died.
“NOW, WHERE WAS SHE?” The suit floated back to the tower, and prepared to resume haranguing the crowd. Below, the security detail did their job, and quietly escorted Ricio back into the Cabildo and safety.
“Hm!” The Maestro sounded pleased.
I tapped the channel. “She found your lack of faith disturbing.”
He laughed, and it was the most honest sound I’d heard from him. “You passed the test. Very well, I’ll send you the files and abide by our original bargain. Happy hunting. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll leave you to your— oh dear.”
“What?”
“Probably no danger to you, but you might want to look to your minions. Ta, then.”
“Sniper’s retreating boss,” Alpha whispered. “Not sure what that big-ass gun was, but I got some good footage.”
“Can you see anything else?”
“EVEN NOW, THEY SEEK TO SLAY YOUR NEW TYRANT! EVEN NOW THEY FAIL!” Alpha switched back to my channel. “No, why?”
And then the screaming started.
I tried to see the cause of it, but even with my height the best I could make out was the bystanders nearest to the Cabildo recoiling. Panicking. And... falling?
Then I got shoved to the side, as the people around me realized hey, they should be running too. And in a heartbeat, panic broke out through the square. I abandoned any hope of getting a better look, and thrashed out, as I strove to avoid being trampled.
It was a near thing. In the middle of it, Alpha’s voice shouted in my ear. “Snakes!”
“Snakes? What?” I elbowed an elderly matron who was trying to trip me up to give herself some breathing space.
“The ground is swarming with snakes!”
“Low-yield concussion missiles, now!”
“There’s friendlies down there, bitten by poisonous snakes! We’ll have injured—”
“Better injured than dead! Do it!”
I managed to grab hold of a lamppost and worm my way up a few feet, so I had a clear view as the Brute Suit’s chest cracked open, and micromissiles rained down. They were more of a clinch surprise than a main weapon... I’d designed them to stun and disorient the average adult.
Snakes had a fraction of the body mass of an average adult. And most of them were far more sensitive to vibration.
I winced as the explosions rippled across the front of the Cabildo like a string of the world’s biggest firecrackers. The mob kept on panicking, and I clung to the post like a shipwrecked survivor clinging to a mast on a turbulent sea of screams. I stuck there, watching the bloodshed, watching the chaos, I felt my lips peel back from my teeth in utter hatred.
They would pay.
“So swears Dire,” I rasped, putting words to thought. When the crowd had thinned enough I shimmied down the post and stomped toward the fallen figures around the front of the Cabildo, arms at my sides and fire in my veins.
Alpha, bless him, was already down among the fallen, picking them up individually and lifting them to Mariposa City’s main hospital. I let him go. Some part of my mind noted that it would be good PR, but I didn’t care at the moment. At the moment, all was rage.
Rage that froze into horror, as I saw Spetta sitting on the ground, bleeding from her nose. “No,” I whispered, and I ran to her, knelt next to her. “Are you bitten? Are you hurt?”
“I... what?” She held her head, and her eyes blinked, unfocused.
“Suru, analysis,” I whispered into the vox. I was no good at medical matters, but I’d managed to give Suru some basic aptitude with diagnosis.
“Highest probability; caught within the radius of a concussion blast,” Suru whispered into my ear. “Second highest possibility; blunt force trauma to the face from panicking crowd.”
I glanced at her legs. Her stockings looked untorn.
It was about that point I saw the snakes.
Hundreds of them, thousands, lying limp or thrashing in slow, sickly motion. Every one of them a brilliant, almost-neon green, with exaggerated fangs and glowing red eyes. Literally glowing, like something out of a bad movie.
The closest of them was six feet from Spetta’s toes. It squirmed, mouth opening and shutting, trying to find something to bite.
And beyond that one, a carpet made of green, with large holes interspersed through it where the concussion missiles had struck home.
I caught a glimpse of a familiar figure, half-covered in serpents. Julian Moreto, my new Minister of the Interior. His glazed eyes stared up unseeing, as foam trickled steadily from his mouth.
“Highest probability,” Suru spoke into my ear. I’d left her diagnosis mode on. “Death by toxin. Second highest probability—”
“That’ll do, Suru,” I whispered. A light on the HUD of my lenses acknowledged compliance as she turned off diagnostic mode.
I walked Spetta to safety, and left the other survivors to Alpha. The guards at the palace were on lockdown, but waved us through as soon as they saw our faces.
“Do you want the good news or the bad news?” Alpha whispered to me, as I escorted Spetta through the hallways.
“Let’s go good,” I muttered. “Could use a change of pace.”
“Crusader’s left the country. Video has him rescuing a shipwrecked couple off the coast of the Dominican Republic.”
That was good news. “The bad news would be the Maestro’s file, yes?”
“Yes. Without going into detail, because details make your brain get weird...”
“Get to the point.”
“The assassin’s CIA.”
I took a breath, let it go.
My rage had a target now. Targets, rather.
And I would make them pay.
CHAPTER 12: GETTING PERSONAL
“I used to believe in Maaya. I used to believe in a lot of things. Now I believe that I can burn anything to ash, if I try hard enough. That is the best kind of belief, because I am never wrong about it.”
--The Mother of Flame, overheard during the Putnam Occupation of 2003
“Her name is Canadian Girlfriend?” I finally managed to choke out.
Below me, the jungle of Mariposa’s interior rolled on as I flew. The canopy gleamed bright green, like the snakes that didn’t match any known terrestrial type, the snakes that had dissipated after a few hours of being harvested and observed, melted into goo that evaporated away to nothing.
“Canadian Girlfriend,” Alpha said again. “And the sniper’s costume certainly looked red and white.”
I had to take his word on it. Every attempt at viewing the footage myself activated the brain scrambling effect. “Anything else?”
“She was a redhead. I’m pretty sure of it, going by the bangs that had escaped her cowl.”
A redhead. A member of the CIA. I closed my eyes. “Fuck. It’s Colleen.”
“Who?”
“One of the Peace Corps, showed up two months ago, give or take. She always seemed distant. Just faded into the background. And Mitch flat-out said that she was his partner, that night that the Rebels interrogated him.”
“So why did she kill Corazon?”
I ground my teeth. “Been agonizing over that ever since his head exploded all over Dire’s mask. Got a few more pieces of the puzzle. That follow-up attack with the snakes. Remember your first warning to Dire? Of the costumes possibly awaiting her in the palace? Three were there, but three more were missing.”
“Frigida, the Icicle thrower. Curación de la Mano the healer. And Reina del Coral, the serpent summoner.”
“Yep. That was her in the square. Had to be. Which means that the CIA was supplying Corazon with supers.”
“I'm not quite following the leap of logic, there.”
“Something was wrong with the powerhouse that Dire fought in the palace. He was deranged, acted lobotomized. What if he hadn’t been properly ‘broken in’ yet? Corazon had a pet mind controller, met him briefly before Dire painted his brains over a wall. What if the CIA was brainwashing metahumans and handing them over to Corazon in exchange for his cooperation?”
Alpha thought it over. I picked up the road winding through the canopy, followed the gray ribbon of asphalt as it curved north. Not too far from Malo Verde now. The time had come to end this farce.
“You realize that we’re taking Maestro M’s word for everything,” Alpha said.
“The thought had crossed her mind. But it fits. It all fits.” I grimaced. “Losing one of their staunchest allied countries in this hemisphere to a supervillain, one that’s committed acts of terror on American soil... no. This election year’s rough enough that the president can’t risk it. He’d get eaten alive by his political foes. So he orders the CIA to make Dire disappear, and oh, wipe out her cabinet as well so there are no clear successors. Hell, if the guards evacuating Ricio had been thirty seconds slower, they’d have got him.”
“So it’s war against the US, then?”
“No. It’s war against the rebels. Damiano had his shot, but he’s too willing to ally with the US. Told Dire so back in the village, when he tried to court Mitch. So now we neutralize the rebels before they can win.”
“Neutralize.”
“Yes.”
“As in, kill?”
“No. Well, some.” I sighed. “This is war. Some are going to die. Not by Dire’s hand, but the rest of the army doesn’t have her flexibility when it comes to armaments.”
“For the greater good, huh?”
Dull anger throbbed in my skull. It had been a very long time since I’d gotten sleep. “If you have something to say, say it. No room in Dire’s life for passive aggressive programs.”
“All right,” he said, and his voice lost some of its warmth. “I think you know that you’re signing the death warrant of a lot of young idealists here, and you’re trying to ignore that.”
“She just told you she’s minimizing casualties—”
“Are you? And what happens to the ones that end up captured? Especially if you go through with the plan and fake your death so that Ricio can succeed you?”
“We have factories now, where they can work.”
“And the CIA’s active in the country so they can bust out any of the leaders they want to. We both know how corrupt the government and army are. You never cleaned any of that up. The CIA only needs one rebel leader to be a figurehead, and call for help. Then the US can come roaring in, as the cavalry.”
“Are you coming to a point?”
I took a breath. Took another, feeling disgust in my gut, feeling raw anger seethe through my skull.
And I stopped, hovering over the jungle. “You’re right.”
“I think so, yeah.”
Rage faded, replaced by bitterness and dark humor. “This why future Dire sent you back? To act as her conscience? Her own Jiginy Cricket?”
“I don’t think that’s his name, and you’re no puppet.”
“Some days it feels like she's a puppet.” I turned, feeling the suit move leadenly around me. It had taken hours to patch up the hole in the helmet, and replace the damaged circuitry. The mask was scarred now, and I ran my gauntleted fingers over it, haptics whirring to life and letting me feel the ridges and jagged tears where some obscenely powerful superscience bullet had ripped through.
“What makes you say that?”
“For someone who isn’t a puppet, she’s been dancing a dance she never meant to perform, all this time. Didn’t start this fight, didn’t plan to be running the show, didn’t plan to be posing as an evil dictator. Yet here she is, about to sentence a bunch of idealistic good guys to death because their potential allies are horrible assholes. For politics, basically.”
“A lot of people dream about being leaders, believing that it will gain them autonomy. But they don’t account for the increased responsibility. In the end, it’s hard to say if a powerful leader is in charge or if their nation or group or organization or whatever is pulling the strings. You gain freedom to make the big choices, but if you move against the pull, you suffer. Like now.”
Fascinating... “She programmed you with philosophy?”
“I’ve had a lot of time on my hands while I was looking for you and trying to figure out the next step. I figured you’d get close to someone in power and co-opt them, be a shadow behind the throne, as it were.”
Dire : Wars (The Dire Saga Book 4) Page 19
