Nightwatch on the Hinterlands

by K. Eason

  “Go left,” Gaer said suddenly into her helmet, and, “Stay low.”

  Iari dropped, crouched and pivoted, as beams of bright not-quite-white light speared past her, over her. Sunlight, that was sunlight, bent and focused by arithmancy into lethal beams that Gaer wielded with a sniper’s accuracy. He cut a swath across a shelf on the far end of the back room, nearest the door.

  More swarm erupted from dark corners, flapping. Burning, adding to the light in the room, adding to Gaer’s ammunition. He built a lattice of beams ever more fine, more focused, searing whatever they touched.

  Polymer. Swarm. Flammable liquids. Wooden walls.

  Gentle Mishka, Gaer was going to bring the whole place down on her. Except Gaer was a skilled arithmancer, and this lattice-light show was her cover.

  So she used it.

  Iari bulled into the room and smashed her shield against one of those walls. Swarm had no skeletons, they didn’t break, but they could (did) rupture in little sparkling bursts of corrosive liquid that chewed past the hex-shields and left little smoking pits on her armor.

  She pivoted and put that burning wall at her back. Alcohol fire wasn’t hot enough to crack through her rig’s hex-wards. Even if Gaer managed to ignite every bottle, she’d be fine.

  Gaer, however—oh voidspit. The swarm had figured out he was the problem, had redirected en masse. They converged on him, a burning, flapping, spattering blanket of teeth-legs and sucker-mouths. Gaer met them head-on: swiped, right-handed, to knock them aside. He had a monofil blade in that hand, which would cut almost anything. He caught one swarm with it, sliced it in half; but then there were three more on him, then four, dragging his arm down. One of them jumped for his chest. Landed and began to slither-run across his torso.

  For a moment Iari thought it’d go for his left arm, straight for the light-hex, and commit noble suicide; but then it surged up, at the last, and slapped itself across his faceplate. Because if he couldn’t see, he couldn’t aim the light-hex, which made him as much a danger to her as he was to the Brood.

  Not stupid at all, for flying gelatin blobs.

  “Drop the hex,” she shouted. “Let it go, let it go.”

  He did, with a snarled setat. The beam-lattice vanished. The smoldering swarm converged on him, trailing fire and burning bits of themselves. Iari swiped at several in passing. Killed two, wounded one; but swarm were fast and many and they’d piled themselves on a part of Gaer she didn’t want to swing at with an axe. Miss, cut through the swarm too neatly, she’d take off his head.

  “I’ve got a rig breach,” Gaer said, breathless. “Iari—”

  Might be kinder to decapitate him than let swarm eat his face. Or she could think of something better.

  She pivoted hard and drove for the back door. Raised her shield and rammed and noted, a blink before she hit, that there was a bar, a padlock, and a voidspit keypad, all engaged—

  —and then she hit. The shield absorbed the brunt of the impact, fed still more to the rig, and still she felt the shock in the bones of her forearm. Her HUD flashed a report, eyeblink quick, the contents of which went straight to her implants. The bar on the door hadn’t broken. The padlock had. And the keypad, which meant electrical locks—

  Sparks erupted, blinding, that became a crackling shockweb spreading over her shield, her arm, making the arcing jump to her chest. The lightning tangled itself in the Aedian crest, jumping angle to angle, winding itself into a sizzling ball as her rig’s defenses responded. Lethal ward-hex, she noted, black market, anyone unrigged who’d been trying to break it would’ve been fried.

  The bar across the door, though. That was plain, brutally tough polysteel. She staggered back, fuck balance, and slashed in with the axe. Not an optimal angle, but whitefire sliced through the polysteel like it was butter. She ducked her shoulder and rammed again. Her HUD flashed an alert as momentum overtook balance, and then she burst through the door and skidded and finally fetched up on her back, top-of-her-skull first into the opposite wall of the alley.

  The syn blanked the pain, all those little nanomecha intercepting her neural reports, redirecting that bioelectrical energy to more useful projects. Like getting her upright, more or less.

  She looked back at the storeroom. Daylight spilled through the broken door—watery, strained through clouds, but still brighter than Brood ever liked. The swarm burst off of Gaer like a flock of startled birds (slimy geometric birds, without wings).

  And then, to her surprise, the remnant-survivors came right at her. Into the light. She lurched to her feet, rode the syn’s boost and got her shield up and ready; but the swarm slewed away from her, surprisingly graceful, and skittered-fluttered a hard right up the alley. They moved fast—not running, exactly, flapping and scuttling, smoking where tendrils of sunlight found their way into the canyon of shop-backs.

  She hesitated. Looked back at the dark guts of the storeroom. “Gaer!”

  “Fine.” He sounded breathless. “Go after them.”

  She started to run, scared she’d lose them. But it turned out there was no need to worry: they slewed into an open cul-de-sac, where a ring of buildings backed on the alley and made a dead end. There were two other alleys emptying into that cul-de-sac, wider than Iari’s own, which meant major streets on the other end of them.

  Elements, please don’t let the swarm split up—

  But again, no need for worrying. The swarm aimed themselves at a set of red double doors and skated beneath them.

  Iari stopped. Swarms were vanguard Brood. First wave. Little and terrible and so much less awful than what came after them. Or with them. There could be—what, exactly, in that building? It looked bigger and wider than its neighbors, like a warehouse. Like it could hold, oh, a great many Brood of various sizes. There could be more swarm, or a couple of boneless, or even something bigger inside.

  Assuming her comms stayed offline, worst case: at a run, synning to stay at full speed, fastest route, she was a quarter-hour at least from the Aedian gate, and another quarter-plus before she’d have people rigged and ready to follow her back. So say an ungenerous hour before she returned with reinforcements.

  Swarm could go a long way in an hour. And even if she ran only until she had long-range comms again, assume, oh, ten minutes: that was still a lot of time for swarm to relocate. It’d take weeks to sweep all of B-town, and the panic that’d cause would be epic, plus political fallout, void and dust, it’d be like a season of Jacta: The Last Defender without the required victorious resolution.

  And if she went after Brood now, alone, she might end up outnumbered by worse than swarm.

  Protocol said report this (and she would). But her oaths said something else, about stopping the Brood, being the shield between light and darkness. Pretty poetry, very inspiring, from the first page of the Catechism. Those lines got recruits through the Aedis door. Sometimes it carried them through their first couple of fights, until their training turned into reflex.

  And sometimes those pretty words sank all the way in, deeper than even the nanomecha, so that you went to midnight prayers every night, and not just on festivals.

  “Iari!” echoed in her helmet, and she turned to look at Gaer finally hauling his spikey ass up the alley. He looked mostly intact, no bits of his rig hanging off. The riev pounded behind him. Brisk Array held the lead but only just. Char was behind him, bits of the tavern floor jammed into the various crevices and crannies in their armor. Char shed them as they ran, little clouds of ash and wood.

  “Where did they go?” Gaer asked, a little breathless.

  “In that building. Red doors.” She pointed with the axe. “I’m going in.”

  She heard the hiss of inhale, Gaer ready to argue. But then Char said, “Yes, Lieutenant,” and Brisk Array repeated it, and they split around Gaer like a river around an inconvenient stone.

  “Setat,” he said, aggrieved. “I
’m with you.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The warehouse doors, unlike every other slagging thing in this section of town, weren’t wood. Voidspit polysteel, according to her HUD, and likely locked on the other side. And, because of where they were in Lowtown:

  “Gaer. Check for warding.”

  His left hand drifted up, fingers spread, the gauntleted tips of his talons pointing at the door. “Oh, yes. Couple of nasty ones. One’s locked to particular biometrics, and it’s scribed on the back side of the left door. The other’s alchemical. I can get that one. It’s on the locking mechanism itself. The first, however, will take time.”

  “Which we don’t have.” Iari’s shield could absorb the hex’s damage. Probably. “Kill the alchemical. I’ll deal with the other one.”

  Gaer’s left hand clenched. Something popped. Smoke began to bleed from the seam between the doors.

  “Done.”

  “Good.” She hesitated. Wouldn’t ask another templar this, but Gaer wasn’t. She was supposed to be his security. “You all right?”

  “Unhurt. Pissed off. Not green, Iari.” He took an impatient bite of air. “The seal on my visor is damaged, but it will function. Just don’t submerge me.”

  All right. Her ambassador wasn’t just an arithmancer, he was something with combat skills. File that for later. But for now, just a nod for acknowledgment, before she turned back to the door.

  Her arms-turing found the weakest spot there: the seam between the two doors, at just about midway up. She hefted the shield. There might be a bar on the other side, like there’d been in the pub’s storeroom. She’d have to hit hard.

  “Lieutenant.” Char thrust out their stump. “Let me.”

  Massive Char, all over hexwork, and built for exactly this: bashing into closed spaces and taking what was inside apart.

  Iari stepped aside. “Go. I’m behind you.”

  Char slammed their right shoulder into the door and—polysteel or not, bolted or not—it folded like paper. There was a second’s delay, and then the hex went off: a shower of sparks, then a bang that blew part of the door inward. Iari’s HUD registered intense heat, alert alert, and then a fireball blasted the door back out again, knocking both panels off their hinges, and rolled over Char.

  Iari jerked aside, riding the syn’s mecha-induced adrenaline spike for speed. Her HUD’s temperature displays spiked high and red. But the battle-rig’s hexwork held. Iari let her breath go as the fireball dissipated in a ripple of superheated air.

  Char was still standing in the door, framed by splinters of glowing scorched polysteel. The hexwork on Char’s body throbbed the same sullen orange as the shattered door. The stump of their right arm glowed, tip to shoulder. The patchwork cap on the broken end had partially melted. A drip of semi-molten metal gleamed like blood on the pavement, even as the heat warped the stone and sent cracks spidering across the tiles.

  Void and dust.

  “Char. You all right?”

  “Yes,” they said, with what couldn’t be, but sounded just like, satisfaction. The riev’s head turned slightly. Their teslas gleamed brighter than any fire. Then Char swung their ruined limb and stabbed the doors aside, and Iari saw jagged shards of plating in the stump like shattered bones, as if something had bitten through. It was old damage, its hexwork gone dull and dead. Saichi damage.

  If they lived through this, if, Iari was going to make fucking sure Char got repaired.

  She followed the riev into the warehouse. Expected an onslaught of swarm, an immediate mobbing of teeth-legs and flapping bodies. But it was quiet in there. Empty. Teslas on auto-sensors popped into life overhead, one-two-three, until the whole space was daylight-bright. It was a larger version of the tavern’s storeroom, except stone-floored. Shelves on one wall, empty, floor to four-meter ceiling. A line of crates bisected the room. Iari could just see across the tops of them. She spotted an office space toward the front right part of the room, what looked like a three-by-three cubicle added onto the original interior structure, beside a second, smaller set of double doors facing what was presumably a main street entrance.

  “Where the setat are the swarm?” Gaer sounded indignant. Iari tracked him, a friendly green dot on the translucent map in the HUD’s bottom left corner. Brisk Array, the other moving green dot, came behind Gaer through the doors, then immediately angled away toward the warehouse perimeter.

  “Don’t know.” Her HUD still read Brood emissions. “They’re still close.”

  “There will be an alarm on the door we just destroyed,” Gaer added mildly. “Someone will know we just blew our way in. Maybe Tzcansi owns this place. Maybe she’ll just walk in here.”

  “Huh. We can’t get that lucky.” Iari took a careful step. The syn made her legs shake, all that energy stored up for leaping, slashing, rolling, and she was locking it down to a creep.

  “Lieutenant.” Char had stopped. Was standing, tilted forward, looking—down? Elements bless.

  Iari moved that direction. “What?”

  “The Brood are here.”

  Iari squatted beside Char. Her knees shook a little less in this position. That was nice. There was a grate set into the floor that was dry, mostly, except for a little slickness between some of the bars. The HUD confirmed her suspicions. Brood effluvia, which meant, “That’s where the swarm went.”

  “Into the sewers. Fantastic.” The green blip that was Gaer’s rig moved on the HUD map, a sudden and rapid diversion in her direction. “Do you still want to go after them?”

  “Yes. But we can’t do it—”

  “Oh, thank all the dark lords.”

  She shot him a glare he couldn’t see. “—from here. Someone’ll have to get down into the tunnels. There’s maintenance access.”

  And the swarm could be anywhere by now, in that network of drains under B-town. There might be plans in the city records. A map with access points, a way to get templars and priests down there. Hunting Brood in the dark. Well, some of the bored initiates would be a great deal less bored in the coming days.

  Iari stood. Refused an urge to stomp on the grate. Her syn still wanted a fight. Her HUD told her one was coming. The sensors were acting like she was surrounded, but there were just walls and a ceiling, no extra floors and—

  Wait.

  Iari circled the grate. The overhead lights didn’t get much past the metal grate. Solid black down there. But her HUD said, among other things, the nearest Element past that grate was aether.

  “There’s no water down there.”

  “It hasn’t rained especially hard lately.”

  “That’s not the point, Gaer, listen. My HUD’s still lit up like there’s Brood all around us, but I’m thinking they’re not around us, they’re under us. This part of town was flooded during the last Brood-surge. All the first floors became basements and cellars. There’s got to be another level below this one. Or a partial level. Maybe sub-basement.”

  “Well, there is nothing in here worth the security on the doors.” Gaer had pried the top off one of the crates, was stretched up on his toes and peering inside. “Anything deserving those hexes must be elsewhere. Your hypothetical sub-basement would be a good bet. Maybe we’ll find some contraband.”

  Irritation prickled through her chest, hot and spiky and urged along by the syn. “I don’t care about smugglers or fucking contraband. I care about the Brood.”

  Gaer slid the crate’s lid back in place and turned to face her. The light broke on the alien planes of his visor like oil on water, purple and blue running over the black. She felt his stare through the layers of armor, cool and hard as the visor itself. “I know that.” He picked his way around his accented Comspek like there might be venomous snakes in its syllables. “I’m only adding to the available information. Someone wants to protect something inside this place, and it’s not shipments of alwar undergarments. It’s something
very valuable.”

  Iari’s irritation soured. She spun away from Gaer and glared down the way she’d come at the shattered double doors. The hex still smoked. Hell, Char still smoked. Gaer was right about the security. That kind of arithmancy didn’t come cheap. Certainly wasn’t legal. So whoever owned this place had something to protect.

  And Brood in the basement. If there was a basement. Which there was. There had to be. And in the absence of obvious basement access—no lift, no stairs—then the way down must be concealed. She closed her eyes. Took a deep breath of rig-filtered aether. Tasted like ozone, a little metallic. The syn buzzed behind her eyes, under her skin. Didn’t make thinking easy; the Aedis gave the syn implants to templars, not priests, for a reason: to fight well, to fight fast, mated up with a battle-rig. Priests got a different set of nanomecha. A gentler set.

  Point was, the syn wasn’t meant to help thinking.

  Another breath. Iari forced the syn back to a hum, a bone-deep itch.

  Gaer started speaking again—

  Of course, always talking.

  —and Iari squashed the syn down, and held it, and listened.

  “We were down here looking for an alw named Tzcansi,” Gaer said, still enunciating and therefore still angry, “who might or might not be involved in the death of an artificer. We are not looking for smugglers. Brood are a source of alarm, yes, which is why we should get somewhere the setatir comms work so you can report to. The Knight. Marshal.”

  Except this was Tzcansi’s territory. Tzcansi was very likely involved in smuggling. The ganglords usually were. Tzcansi, who had neighbor gangs scared because she had riev enforcers. And now some association with Brood. Brood and riev? That seemed impossible, but all of this did.

  Iari realized Gaer hadn’t said anything for too long. He was waiting for her to—what, agree with him, likely, okay, you’re right, let’s go call Tobin.

  Her irritation was entirely gone now. This buzz was anticipation. “There were Brood in that tavern, which we know Tzcansi hit. They ran here. That’s not random. They knew where to go. That means they’ve been here before. That’s a link between them and Tzcansi. And they’re underneath us right now, so there’s got to be a, I don’t know, a trap door hidden somewhere in here. Some kind of access. We need to find it.”