“She doesn’t care about you, Martin. Not really. She’ll use you like I use my frontline troops. For fodder.”
“Must make for a catchy recruiting slogan. Join WEB, be fodder, listen to a huge bitch gloat.”
“Well, someone’s got to tie up the traps and turrets.” Martin reached the stairwell, pushed the door open—
And looked up into somewhere between two dozen and thirty guns. The entire stairwell was packed with WEB troopers, all of them pointing guns, big-ass ones, down at him.
“Now the second-line troops,” Arachne said, smugness positively purring in her voice. “Those guys I don’t waste so easily. They’re good at, oh, sneaking ahead to hold chokepoints while the fodder distracts my foes.”
“Well. Shit,” Martin said. He glanced behind him, down the hall, and saw a group creeping up behind... still a ways off. He thought he recognized some of the bloodstains. The guys moving up on him were the survivors from the machine shop.
But the stairwell was more of a problem right now. Ninety bullets. Thirty-some guys. And their armor ain’t as good as mine, but it’s good enough it’ll take a couple of shots for each one. That’s figuring I can get off more than a few shots before all those guns shred me.
“Don’t bother running, you’ll just die tired.” Arachne’s voice cooed. “Just stay there, while I hunt down the rest of her mice. Hell, keep the weapon if it makes you feel better. You won’t do any real harm with that little thing.”
A new voice rang out. “How about this one?”
Martin jerked around, stared back into the stairwell, as Vorpal burst out of the top of the stairwell, charged down into the first rank of surprised troopers, and started laying about her with a blade of pure lightning. Pulsing and strobing, it flickered and turned the tight quarters into a rave... moreso when the lights went out, plunging the place into pure darkness.
Shit!
For all their armor and whatever little training they had, the WEB troops were like gangers. Martin knew gangers. And he could guess what would happen now. Without stopping to think about it he hurled himself back from the door, as thirty-something automatic weapons roared, tearing the door, the frame, and the floor around it to shreds. Some were probably firing at Vorpal too, but packed as they were, it wasn’t going to end well for them.
It was a hard lesson they were learning, one that any modern soldier or guy who’d hung around a modern soldier could tell them.
Friendly fire, isn’t...
Flat on his back, he sighed in relief. Vorpal had one of those forcefield things. She’d be fine. Worse came to it she could pull out and let them shoot up each other in the dark. Most days he couldn’t stand the homicidal little shit, but for times like this? He was willing to make an exception.
God damn. She’s going to kill thirty guys in there, and I’m cool with it. He should be horrified. Instead he was just tired. He lay there and stared up at the metal ceiling.
“Don’t move!” A gun barrel entered his vision, about three feet from his head.
Oh, right, the guys behind me.
Martin knew he should get up. He should get back to shooting, back to punching, but he couldn’t. He tried to move his arms, couldn’t. Tried to rise up to his knees, couldn’t.
“Maybe his armor’s shorted out?” he heard one of the other troopers whisper. A female voice.
“Hey,” he asked, and his voice modulator distorted the word. The barrel on him quivered, as the guy holding it jumped back slightly. “Hey, listen. What you guys getting out of this shit?”
“Shut up.”
“They won’t talk to you.” Arachne whispered in his ear. “They fear you now. What’s that feel like?”
“Because seriously—” Martin continued, rolling over onto his belly. A bullet whined off his mask, and his screen flickered for a second. “—Y’all are dying like flies, not spiders.”
“Shut up! Don’t move!” The whole squad was backing up, setting up firing positions so that they wouldn’t hit each other. From behind, Martin could hear the firing in the stairwell dying down. But the crackle and snap of electricity from Vorpal’s blade was still going strong.
“I mean, look at the situation, here. Even if you get through my armor, you got the lady behind me to take out. And her girlfriend’s got better armor than mine, and knows how to use it. And if you get through that, there’s still Doctor Dire to go.” A lie but hell, they didn’t know she wasn’t there. “So what the fuck are you doing here? Seriously?”
“Shut up! Shut up dammit!” The leader was shaking now, gun barrel dipping and rising as he trembled.
“I’m just saying. I don’t see nobody behind you, so I’m guessing you’re the last ones who came in this way. So there’s nobody to stop you, if you turn around and leave now.”
He put his hands on the ground and pushed up, got into a three-point stance with one knee up, the other down, and one hand on the ground. Another bullet whined by, this one missing him. But the bulk of them were quiet. Quiet and considering, looking at him, and looking back to the empty tunnel behind.
“Just saying,” Martin said, rising.
They fled.
“Hm. Not bad.” Arachne’s voice crackled over his comm.
The end of the hall exploded, and the squad of fleeing troopers went down screaming. Red beams flickered out, tearing through them like lava through paper as they died.
“Not bad, but pretty futile.” Arachne mused. Something moved through the smoke. Something big, and scuttling, with too many limbs. Metal clattered rapidly on the steel grating of the floor, and Martin backed up. “Can’t let cowardice go unpunished, you know?”
There was a hole there at the end of the corridor, he saw. Right where the corridor turned, something had plowed right through the wall, and that something was scuttling toward him now. A robot or drone, spider-like, with weapons instead of mandibles. It was the size of a car, and it was coming toward him fast.
He turned and fled.
“Don’t you like my new body, Martin?” Arachne chuckled. “I figured I’d give physical embodiment a whirl. I wonder what she’ll say!”
Martin hit the stairwell, ran into Vorpal coming the other way. She bounced backed, squawked, and desperately tried to avoid taking his head off with her flaring blade as he scooped her up under one arm and took the stairs three at a time.
Vorpal squalled, yelled in protest and beat on him with her free arm... and stopped struggling when they got to the fourth turn, and Arachne burst through the bottom doorframe, crumbling the walls around her as she trained clusters of laser sights on her fleeing foes.
One mandible popped up and cycled, and something like a machine gun barked. Vorpal’s forcefield flared and flared. Martin took the better part of valor and kept the short blonde as a shield between him and the bullets. She wouldn’t be using those if they couldn’t hurt me.
“Okay, well how about this?” Arachne asked, and Martin didn’t stop to think, just hurled himself through the door at the second level entry as a red beam flickered into existence behind him, ripping through the stairs, sending girders and railings crashing down as molten metal sprayed. Now he spun and put himself between Vorpal and the metal, hoping like hell the hardsuit could take any random splashes. A few sizzling noises, smoke rose from his back, and the display flashed angry warnings. But he had no time to look at them so he kept running, shifting Vorpal to a fireman’s carry. She was ignoring him now, tapped into her comm, and rattling off words he didn’t have time to listen to.
Finally, she pounded on his mask. “Turn left here!”
He didn’t have time to argue, so he skidded, took the corner so hard his boots sent fragments of metal grating splintering and spraying into the wall, and jerked left. Vorpal let him go for a bit, then pounded his face again. “Stop!”
Martin stopped, and tried to put her down. “No! Up! Lift me up!”
Alright. He didn’t see what this was accomplishing, but whatever. Behind him, metal legs cl
attered as Arachne approached...
Vorpal stood on his shoulders, and her sword flared black, black with the energy type Dire had never managed to figure out. And with four quick strokes, she cut a hole in the ceiling above, and flipped back off his shoulders as it fell. He scrambled back too, letting the concrete and metal plug crash through the grating below, leaving a huge hole.
“Hey!”
“Up! No time to whine!”
He leaped, and she scrambled up behind him, up and through the hole—
—and into a room filled with winking lights. Twenty feet away a raised metal platform hummed and glowed blue. Next to it, Bunny stood in her own hardsuit, gun barrel smoking. She had scars and dents too, though not as many as his. Anya and Minna were waiting on the platform, and Minna was holding some sort of glowing, shining gizmo that looked like a collection of test tubes in a metal rack the size of a chess board.
“Go!” Martin beat feet to the platform, and Vorpal followed, arriving just as a steel, multi-jointed leg felt up through the hole as Arachne began climbing up.
“Go? Yes. But first this,” Minna said, holding up a remote, and pushing a red button.
“SELF-DESTRUCT SEQUENCE INITIATED!” Dire’s voice roared.
“Well, that’s just spiffy!” Arachne chuckled through Martin's commlink. “You know I’ll be back, right? And next time—”
Shimmering, a wave of light, and they were standing on a concrete floor in a dim and dusty warehouse. Tarps covered crates and barrels, and in the distance a rumbling roll of thunder split the air as Dire’s primary lair turned itself into rubble.
Martin dropped to his ass, weary beyond belief.
This was his life. This was his life now. Stuff like this, over and over again until one day his luck ran out.
CHAPTER 6: DIRE – TRAVELS AND TRAITORS
“Americans don't really understand maps of Europe. They look at two cities, and go huh, these are only a couple of hundred miles away. Be there before dinner! No, no. All those little countries? It takes time to go through them. Takes time to deal with the roads, which don't always go in the straightest lines. Takes more time to deal with checkpoints, and papers, and local troubles, and all the various things that aren't an issue in America. Okay, so it's a little better these days, but back in World War Two? It took some effort.”
--Nigel Hampston, amateur historian and proprietor of “mystical” curios.
The carriage rolled into the night, as Zagreb receded behind us. My bonnet itched like a fucker, the overstarched linen burning against the thin hair at the back of my neck. “East around the mountain, then north through farmlands. Trucks are waiting for us,” Father Kovacs had explained with his broken English. “Tadej’s friends.”
It had been too easy.
We’d expected the city to go under martial law. But the Nazis seemed content to let the current government carry on as they pleased, so long as nobody bothered the salvage operations. Three of their own war machines and my own wrecked Direnaut hulk were too tempting to leave alone. I wished them the joy of the Direnaut— I’d built it to brick itself after the ejection pod fired.
That’s one of the many problems with mecha, even a light model like that one. It’s a big chunk of advanced technology, so you have to account for the possibility that it might fall into someone else’s hands. Not a problem when you have my knack for redundancies, but those eat up space that could be put to better use.
Space was the core of my current problem, to tell the truth. My skirt clinked as I adjusted the harness under it, and Bryson shot a glare from his seat to my left. Dressed in a rough peasant cap and rude jacket, he definitely didn’t look like he was enjoying himself. Losing his fine clothes, even temporarily, made him grumpy. I understood, perhaps more than he did. It was all part of his kayfabe, his act, his persona.
Hell, I was feeling a bit off myself. No mask. Felt funny to be going without one, after all this time.
“Stop squirming.” Bryson grumbled. “Your... toys... are going to give us away.”
I smiled and met his eyes with my own cold stare. “Come now. Like they’re really going to check her folio braces?”
“Polio! Dash it all woman, it’s polio!”
“Right, right. How silly to forget. Must be her giddy female brain.” I hadn’t forgotten; I just liked poking at him, and screwing up words was one of the easiest ways to get his goat. Behind me, Unstoppable muffled his laughter.
Bryson either didn’t hear the restrained mirth or pretended ignorance. He subsided, muttering. “Still idiotic. The goal is to stay undercover, if we’re caught out here at this point the game’s up anyway.”
The game was already up. I'd caught suspicious radio transmissions last night, while testing my devices. The conclusion seemed inescapable; one of us was a traitor, and I didn’t know who.
I tuned out Bryson’s grumbling. The man had spent the few days we were cooped up together in the hideout explaining things. Explaining every little detail as to why I should sit still, do as little as possible, do everything they said, and for god’s sake think of the future, woman!
I was a bit more sanguine about the future. At this point I figured it could take care of itself. And he’d lost my sympathy when he’d stumbled upon my work in the junk room, and the devices I’d made from his stockpile of components. He’d practically had a fit about the possibility of the items falling into Nazi hands and changing the course of the war.
As if I hadn’t thought of that already. He only subsided when I showed him the gadgets one by one, and explained their basis in current technology. The Tesla Deflector was one he himself had helped invent, the sonic rifle was a riff on the Nazi Lowë tank’s main weapons array, and the jetboots were of a make currently in use by Mussolini’s uplifted gorilla squad. “So you see,” I’d told him, “capture or death will only result in the Germans gaining things they already have. Now if you’re done ranting about things already considered and wasting her time, perhaps you could go help out in the kitchen? Dottie was mentioning she could use an extra hand or two.”
He hadn’t liked that one bit. Not sure why. She did need the help, and as the group found out when they’d volunteered me to be her chief helper, I couldn’t cook worth a damn. They told me to cook bread, but didn’t explain how. I figured okay, the heat level to cook bread’s probably not far from the melting point of lead, and went from there. The results had been fairly inedible.
Unstoppable had eaten it without a complaint, but then his power gave him an unfair advantage. He could survive anything, even my cooking, it seemed. One of the perks of being the world’s foremost regenerator. He’d been the one trapped in the burning car when I’d phased in.
I glanced back over my shoulder at him, and he tipped me a wink and a smile. Whereas I seemed to make Bryson uncomfortable for no reason I could tell, Unstoppable had been nothing but friendly. He seemed impressed by me, for some reason. We’d spent a fair amount of time talking, oddly enough, most of it reminiscing about America. I couldn’t go into too much detail— even I had to acknowledge the temporal risks— but I saw no harm in telling him minor details, and confirming that yes, this thing was still there, and no, that restaurant wasn’t around any more. Stuff like that.
He was handsome, now that he wasn’t covered in soot and running around in his regenerating coveralls. Black hair, warm blue eyes, a clean-shaven cleft chin, high cheekbones, and an infectious grin. He was also probably about ten years younger than me, give or take.
I rather thought that his reminiscence with me indicated a form of loneliness. I was afamiliar touchstone, in a way. He'd been too long a stranger in a strange country, undercover with no other Americans around. True, my country was a different ‘when’, but that didn’t seem to matter so much to him.
I really hoped he wasn’t the traitor.
Father Kovacs sat next to Unstoppable, sweating and glancing around at the deepening shadows. He’d insisted on coming along, had an argument with Tadej abo
ut it. From what I could tell, the Croats came from two different resistance movements, with differing goals. Or they were slightly different in ethnic ancestry, or religion, or something like that. From the little I’d seen about Croatia, it was a place where the differences between people were keenly felt; a source of old grudges and new conflict.
From what Unstoppable had told me, Croatia had joined the Axis powers willingly, and started up their own concentration camp program with enthusiasm. Croatia lay far away enough from the Allied fronts that they weren’t in any danger, save from the rebels trying to bring down the government. Some of those rebels had been trying even before the government threw in their lot with the Axis.
I’d gotten the Croatian spoken language down pretty well by now. My advanced intelligence is a hell of an advantage when it comes to learning new languages. I hadn’t let my new comrades know about my mastery, though. Not just yet.
I looked to the side of the wide dirt road, over to Henri, bulldog-face placid in the growing darkness, guiding the reins of the other wagon’s horse with the long skill of a man who’d spent most of his life farming. I liked Henri. He’d shared his beer with me, and given me very little shit. He seemed content to watch and listen to the others, myself included. Most of the time he watched Bryson, and was the first to offer help when the man needed an assistant with one of his own devices, or the first to run out and get groceries or supplies. He had a flawless poker face, Henri did. From what Dottie had said, he was the other powered individual in the group, apart from myself and Unstoppable. I had no clue what his power might be, and Dottie didn’t want to talk about it further. She’d merely warned me to be careful of accepting any strange-sounding offers from him.
Dottie herself sat next to Henri, leaning on his arm like the farmer’s wife she was pretending to be at the moment. I had a hunch that was more due to Tadej sitting directly behind her than anything else. Tadej watched Dottie constantly, and from the comments he dropped in Croatian to Father Kovacs, he was rather curious as to how she was in bed. The Father usually shut him down with reminders of the dangers of lust, but the tone seemed to indicate a long-standing problem. But Tadej had the local contacts, and his efforts got us the papers that we used to leave Zagreb and get through the government checkpoints without any real fuss.
DIRE : TIME (The Dire Saga Book 3) Page 9
