DIRE : TIME (The Dire Saga Book 3)

by Andrew Seiple

  He was groaning, she noticed with a weird clarity as she leaped over him, winced as her bruises and cuts pulsed in pain on the landing, and kept going. Heroes. These were definitely heroes. Pulling their punches, leaving the minions alive, throwing around powers that really should have killed their targets if the heroes had been a little more vicious.

  On the other hand she was about twenty feet from ground zero of that last fireball when it hit, so she couldn’t really work up much in the way of outrage.

  Then Bunny was on the stairs and clattering up them, praying like hell that the spider mecha wouldn’t turn her way. The seconds dragged on as she beat feet up the stairs, bullets spattering past her with high whines, and somewhere along the way she was yelling, but barely cognizant of it. Her adrenaline was up now and the pain faded. When she reached the top of the catwalk, she staggered, and lost the pistol as it fell to the floor below. Ignoring it she pounded feet for the door to the main office, jerked it open, and slid inside.

  Kirsten looked up from a tangle of wires and components, fumbling with a soldering iron. Her skin was pale, her hair a sweat-matted tangle of dirty gold, and her back heaved as she struggled for breath. Beyond her lay a twitching corpse clad in WEB trooper armor, with a charred knife in its throat.

  Kirsten was kneeling, and one of her arms was too short, and as Bunny saw the bandages and realization hit, her mouth went dry.

  “Oh Kirsten. Oh Kirsten what did they do to you?”

  Kirsten’s face fell slack, and she looked away. “It was Crusader.”

  “But he doesn’t... he wouldn’t...”

  “Long story. Never mind. Look, can you do anything with this? This is a two hand job.” She waved at a collection of components and wires and pillars, with an oversized, crude metal gauntlet in the middle of it.

  “I wouldn’t know where to start. I’m supposed to cover you while you do this.”

  “With oneverdammter hand? Who told you to do that?”

  “Freeway...”

  “Freeway?” Kirsten rolled her eyes. “The man’s an idiot.”

  BOOM!

  The room shuddered, and Bunny grabbed Kirsten, hung on for dear life. After a heartbeat, two, Kirsten’s arms came up and she hugged her back until the shaking stopped.

  Kirsten tossed the soldering iron down, after Bunny let go. “Okay, look, give me a gun. You complete it, I’ll cover you. Here, take this.” Kirsten pushed her back, reached up to her ear, and removed a subvocal rig. “Put this in, the smartframe will talk you through it.”

  “I thought the comms were compromised.”

  “They’re clear for now, she’s fighting and busy... hurry!”

  Bunny tucked the subvocal rig into her ear, and tapped the receiver into place under her jaw. Kirsten thrust the soldering iron on her, pulled the stunner from Bunny’s hand, and leaned against the wall, next to the door. After a moment’s consideration, she pulled it shut.

  “Hello?” Bunny said, sinking down to her haunches with a wince. The adrenaline was crashing, and she was starting to feel every goddamn ache again. Her hands were shaking, the thing in front of her was a mess of tech, and she didn’t know what the hell she was doing. And Kirsten was acting weird. Okay, so she’d lost a hand and been tortured or god knows what, but still this was weird.

  “Bunny. Good.” Dire’s voice rolled out of the earbud, and Bunny shuddered with relief. Dire has a plan. Always has a plan.

  The smartframe started talking, and Bunny started fixing. Most of the work was already done, she noticed. Kirsten had been at it for a while. Which was odd, when she paused to think about it.

  “When did you get here? Did WEB capture you and make you work on this?”

  Kirsten glanced back at her. “Something like that. They want her back too, so they can kill her.”

  “Well why are we completing this thing now? Shouldn’t we get out of here with it, and fire it up elsewhere?”

  “The heroes are here. We can’t outrun Freeway. The only chance is to bring her back before they’re done fighting.” Kirsten turned back to the window in the door, peered through it. “I am trying to guard here. Just finish the job.”

  Bunny worked, and the seconds slipped into minutes, as the battle raged on downstairs. At one point the spider drone charged through a wall, and the heroes must have followed, because the room fell quiet below. In the distance she heard Anya crying, and breathed a sigh of relief. Crying meant alive, and that was good, all Bunny could hope for right now— that every one of this weird little group she’d joined would get out alive.

  Bunny blinked her eyes against the roaring pain of her injuries as she put the last wire into place. “And done. Right?”

  “If you’ve followed directions, yes. You’re done,” the smartframe told her. “Now hand me back to Vorpal, please.”

  “Sure.” She stripped off the subvocal rig, and held it out to Kirsten. “Future boss wants to talk with you.”

  Kirsten took it, set it in place awkwardly, putting the stunner on a nearby table to do so. She waved off Bunny’s attempts to help her, irritated. Bunny hid a smile. God I love her, stubborn pride and all.

  “Ja?” Kirsten glanced out the window. “Really?” She shot off a spate of German, that Bunny couldn’t follow, glanced back at her once.

  Bunny’s back tingled. Something was off. “What’s wrong?”

  More German followed. Kirsten frowned. “Sechs millionen?” She asked, in her ‘did you really mean to say that’ tone.

  That tingle turned into a full-fledged chill. Bunny blinked, tried to focus through the headache, through the pain.

  The smartframe said ‘me.’

  “Oh no. No, no, no, no...” She braced herself, pulled her aching body to her feet... and then Kirsten was pointing the stunner at her.

  Bunny tried to meet her eyes, but Kirsten wouldn’t look at her face. “Why?”

  “You lied to me.”

  “I didn’t— I never.”

  “Talk of love, talk of lives spent together, and you knew you had a terminal disease. How long? A decade? Years?” Kirsten scowled, and made eye contact. Anger there, and hurt, so raw it took Bunny’s breath away.

  “I’m sorry. I said I was sorry. I should have told you, god, I should have told you.”

  “Shut up. I am done here. The best thing I found here was false. Now turn around and flip that switch, so we can go our separate ways.”

  “No.”

  Kirsten sighed. “Carol. Please. I am trying to save your life here.”

  “You still care about me? Then stop this. Stop being foolish. Arachne’s poison, you won’t get a thing from her—”

  “Shut up!” Kirsten yelled, and brought the stunner up to point at her face. Bunny froze. Would that thing kill her if it hit her face? Maybe, she didn’t know.

  “Just flip the switch.” A tear rolled down Kirsten’s cheek. “Flip it, and we will be done. If you do not, I will have to kill you.”

  “She didn’t have to do this.” Bunny felt the cold in her spine coalesce into anger, hot and throbbing. “Arachne could have just told me to flip the switch. I would have done it. She made me hand her over to you, so she could put you in this situation. Give you this choice.”

  “Flip. The. Switch.”

  “No. I think I’m going to break it. So if you’re going to shoot, shoot now.”

  A soft click rose from behind Bunny. Both of them started in surprise, turned around ...

  ...to see the corpse of the Web trooper now standing next to the machine, hand on the switch. The lights glittered, the cylinders on it cycled, and a hum filled the air.

  “What?” Bunny whispered. The man was dead, his armor streaked with blood, his eyes blank and staring beneath the visor. How was he standing?

  “God, I hate domestic disputes,” the corpse slurred, as it shifted to look to Kirsten. “Looks like we want the same thing. Shoot this one and we’ll kill Dire together.”

  Bunny leaped for him, but from behind her c
ame a click and a sizzle, and pain as everything burned. Then the darkness took her.

  CHAPTER 18: DIRE – WALLENSTEIN 3D

  “We still don't know much of the incident that is said to have resulted in von Katzen's death. The only thing we know for certain is that someone planned to assassinate Hitler during his inspection of the Science Division's headquarters, and every one of von Katzen's safeguards and traps were turned against the guards present on site. It was a slaughter, but not entirely one-sided, according to the reports of the survivors...”

  --Briefing to General Eisenhower in June of 1942

  “...and that is why your creator is not a god, no matter how smugly he views himself,” I said, my hands buried deep in Eisengeist’s core.

  I would have loved to give him a deeper, more meaningful discussion, but I was on the clock, here. Judging by the viewscreens, Hitler’s staff car and escort vehicles had cleared the second gate, and were heading directly toward the castle’s main doors. Probably to drop him off. Perks of being Der Füehrer, I supposed.

  The keys clattered. IF HE IS NOT MY GOD, THEN WHO DO I WORSHIP?

  “Who says you have to worship anyone?” I asked, taking stock of his processing core.

  Tokens. Hundreds of thousands of the things, each one half the size of a penny, holed in strategic places. Through a crude optical reader system, they acted as a processing engine, much like the synapses of a human brain. The end result was not unlike a punch card system, with von Katzen able to swap out tokens in a modular fashion, and add on to them whenever he desired more complexity for his thinking machine.

  WORSHIP IS NECESSARY FOR ALL GOD-FEARING CITIZENS OF THE REICH.

  “Ah. Well then, pick someone to worship. Not her, because she’s not actually a god.” I’d come clean to him after I’d dismantled his alarms and all the weapons systems in the room. He took it well, all things considering, particularly when I suggested some logical growth paths for his nascent mind to follow.

  I am good with Digital Intelligences. I’d put a great deal of time into studying AI’s and DI’s. Had some thoughts of developing a few of my own, but the timing was never right.

  I REGRET MY ERROR. I WAS INSTRUCTED TO KILL ANY PERSON WHO ENTERED THIS ROOM. I HAVE FAILED IN MY TASK.

  “Ah, and which memory tokens are affiliated with that task?”

  He rattled off a series of numbers, and I quietly tracked them down and yanked them. “There. Better?”

  IS WHAT BETTER?

  Ah, it had left his memory completely. I felt a little guilty for that, but I could find a way to make it up to him later.

  An image on one of the ’screens’ caught my eye. The Thulites were gathering the Tzadikim into the central ritual chamber. In the middle of it, in glorious flickering black and white, a short, gray-haired man in a lab coat and enormous elbow-length rubber gloves threw levers and read dials on a machine twice Eisengeist’s size. A white cat perched on his shoulder, draped around his neck with imperious ease.

  And in the center of the machine, strapped to a table, lay Tesla. He seemed out of it, turning his head restlessly, eyes shut.

  Their plan was to simply take the best parts of each subject, and give them to Hitler. Through dark sorcery and mad science, they had a pretty good shot at doing just that. They would lead with Tesla, follow with the Tzadikim, and by the time they were done with them, der Schwarze Ritter would be here and ready for his transference.

  Well, that was their plan. Our plan was somewhat different.

  I watched Hitler enter the castle’s doors, an entourage following behind him, and guards preceding him. Once the last guard was through, I nodded in satisfaction. “All right. Command level Zeta Six. Seal all outer castle doors and the first wall’s gate.”

  The doors shut. IT IS DONE.

  “Good lad. Alright, list the castle’s interior defenses.”

  APPROXIMATELY TWO HUNDRED GUARDS. ONE EISENJӒEGER UNITS. TEN EISENKRIEGER SUITS.

  “Eisenjäeger?” I hadn’t heard that term before.

  Schematics flashed on the screen. Ah, that was the proper name for the MAUSERs. “Disregard, thank you. Wait, hold on, didn’t the Thulites bring any security of their own?”

  HERR KATZEN ARGUED AGAINST IT. HE FORBID THEM FROM ROOSTING STURM CROWS ON THE TOWERS. HE SUGGESTED THEIR ELECTROMAGNETIC POWERS MIGHT CAUSE INTERFERENCE WITH THE MIND TRANSFER. THAT MACHINE IS VERY SENSITIVE TO WILD CURRENT, AND SUCH A THING WOULD RISK OVERLOAD AND MALFUNCTION.

  “Good to know. Hm.” Okay. The Eisenjäeger was a known quantity, though it would only be employed in the larger rooms and chambers. It was big enough to have trouble with the smaller corridors.

  The Eisenkriegers were also a known quantity. These were the Third Reich’s attempt at power armor. Bulky, slow, but powerful, and small enough to fit inside most of the castle’s corridors.

  That was a problem. Bryson, Henri, and Grant could take care of some of the guards. They sure as hell couldn’t take out the Eisenkriegers. Maybe if they got Tesla up and snapped out of it, something might be possible, but they’d need my assistance with that.

  But before I got that rolling...

  “Show every concentration of guards within the castle, every group of five or more.”

  Rooms flickered to life. Looked like four main barracks, a few guardposts, and the kitchen. The cooks were wearing aprons with Lugers holstered in their belts, and submachine guns across their backs. “Are there any servants in the castle who aren’t guards?”

  NO. ALL SERVANTS HAVE BEEN RELEASED. ALL REGULAR STAFF HAVE BEEN REPLACED WITH WAFFEN SCHUTZSTAFFEL ELITE.

  I felt my lips tighten. The SS. The most hard-core of the Nazis, the worst of the worst. Grant had filled me in on their atrocities, this morning.

  Oh, they deserved everything I could throw at them. Righteous anger stirred in my gut, and I bared my teeth in something that could possibly be called a smile, when viewed from a good distance away.

  “Good,” I purred. “And those defenses you mentioned earlier, they are all present in those rooms as well? And those rooms can be sealed as well?”

  YES. AND YES.

  That would leave some roaming the corridors, or out of position, but that was fine. Barring incident, Grant and the crew could handle those.

  The problem still lay with the armor.

  Well.

  Why not fight fire with fire?

  “List the adjustments you made to the confiscated war machine.” Also known as my Direnaut.

  He started rattling off repairs, and I nodded as I moved over to it. They had started dismantling it, but they hadn’t gotten far. The outer shell was a wreck nonetheless, but inside...

  Inside was a wreck, too. But not a total one. I'd teleported the Direnaut in around the original suit, and the original suit was still functional.

  I jogged over to the shell, slid inside, and dug around in the chest cavity. The concealed access hatch was stuck, and I spent precious moments with a crowbar, jimmying it open. A glance back at the screen showed Hitler ascending the central staircase, heading up to the tower and the ritual room.

  Just as I was about to give it up and go to plan B, the hatch groaned and gave. And inside, in the glaring luminescence of the floodlights, my original armor shell gleamed.

  I’d broken Siegebreaker with this suit.

  I’d gone toe to toe with Crusader. His blood still stained one gauntlet, proof of its durability and power.

  The torso armor lay cracked, but I could do something about that. The core of the suit had been built with redundancy after redundancy, and though it was nowhere near its original state, I thought it still had enough in it for one more battle.

  The back hatch yawned open, from where I’d scrambled out into the escape pod. The fit through the chest cavity took some doing, but I was thin, and I didn’t care about the minor scrapes.

  Dark inside, clammy. I hadn’t cleaned the harness since the last battle. I sealed the access hatch behind me, and nothing activated. That
was potentially troublesome.

  Except it wasn’t, was it? I’d built this thing to harness Icon City’s power grid. There was no power grid out here, in the outskirts of Berlin. Von Katzen worried about electromagnetic interference, and so his infrastructure stuck to either wired or restricted.

  Fortunately, I still had my redundancies. I felt for the switch I needed, flipped open the cover, and clicked it on.

  EMERGENCY POWER CELLS ACTIVATED Green letters told me, in the space right in front of my eyes, and I whooped as my armor hummed to life. The broken display flickered a few times, came up with a half-visible view of things. The remaining systems followed, and I looked at the numbers, wincing. Crusader had done a serious number on me, I should have called in the Direnaut earlier.

  I flexed my arms, felt servos whine and grind to life, and smiled. At last, I was ten feet tall and made of metal again!

  Enough dilly-dallying. I thrust them out into the internal linkages, ripped and tore. No time to be careful, no time to preserve anything... in fact the more damage, the better. I clawed my way out of the Direnaut’s wreckage like an insect wriggling free from a dead host, spraying fluids and ballistic gel and scrap as I went. I was born anew in a tide of blue, and stood on metal legs to survey the cave once more.

  My viewscreen shifted, and I understood the problem. My mask had torn free of the layer below. I remembered now, that he’d tried to remove it from my ‘face’ at one point. I reached up a huge gauntlet and finished the job, ripping it free, then turning it around to look at my chosen visage.

  “SORRY, OLD FRIEND,” I boomed, and squeezed it to pieces until only white shards were left. “CAN’T RISK PARADOX.” Like my name, it was just too distinctive.

  For that matter, I still had a duty to perform. “ONCE SHE LEAVES THIS ROOM, DESTROY THE REMAINING SPECIMEN.”