DIRE : BORN

by Andrew Seiple

  “She needs you here,” I frowned. “More accurately, they need you here. You've got the most experience in getting these launched fast and well.”

  He nodded, and offered a smile. “I won't let you down.” Then he offered a wrinkled hand and I shook it, before answering with my own smile.

  “Dire knows you won't.”

  Next was Minna, and I found her in the kitchen. She was making breakfast with Anya and... Susan? Yes, Susan. I noticed that Susan was a lot less jumpy, here, than she had been the last few days. Starting to recover from her ordeal in the church? Maybe. I hoped so.

  “Minna. May Dire speak with you for a second?” The blonde woman looked at me, then to Susan.

  “Go on, we'll be fine. Anya, can you take over stirring?”

  The little girl practically ran to get a chair, pushed it over, climbed up on it and took her mother's place at the pot. Minna ruffled her hair, then followed me outside.

  “You know we're attacking the Black Bloods today?” I asked her. She grunted. I took a breath. “You can't go. Dire needs you here.”

  She frowned at me. “Why?”

  “There's something that needs doing, if things go wrong...” I told her my plan, pointing up at the highway. She looked at it, then looked back to me.

  “I can fight. I can kill.”

  “Which is why Dire needs you here. She trusts you.” And I did.

  She chewed it over, looked at the APC parked off to the side of the tents, and looked back up to the overpass.

  “After I do this, I come to fight with you. I will need a bicycle.”

  I grinned.

  A trip to the port-a-john, followed by a run through the breakfast line later, and I gauged the mood of the camp. People were laughing and talking as usual, but there was an undercurrent of uncertainty to things. They knew we were attacking tonight. They knew that Martin had bailed. They were nervous, restless, and hiding it through routine and socializing. I'd expected no less. This wasn't an army, nor were they soldiers. They were just people, stuck in an unreasonable situation.

  But then again, weren't we all?

  I went to check in with Khalid, and he silently handed me a row of little vials, all colored quite differently. “You'll need to drink this before you go,” he said, pointing to the silver one. I took it and upended it without hesitation, trying not to gag at the taste. Copper and eggs, with a faint medical undertone, but then it was gone. I looked up to see him frowning at me. “I said before we go, not now! It lasts only a few hours.”

  “We're going now.”

  He blinked. “I thought we were attacking tonight...”

  “Yes. That was the point. Come with, hm?” I slipped the rest of the vials into my pockets. I'd transfer some of them to the armor's compartments when I had a chance.

  He followed me outside, and waited by the door of the laundry while I checked my armor over. Abes had done a good job, by the looks of it. I climbed in and brought up the systems one by one, running diagnostics as best as I could. It was still crude as power armor went, but my synch rate was up to eighty-eight percent, thanks to the redundancies and enhancements we'd built in. I tested the movements, fond them within tolerances. The floor groaned beneath me in a most alarming way, and I left the tent with care. One way or another, I wouldn't be bringing it back in here again.

  I moved out to the center of the camp, and turned. And slowly, people dropped what they were doing and formed a loose circle around me. I waited. Let them build. Ignored the murmured discussions that got louder as Khalid walked to stand next to me, hands clasped behind his back.

  Finally, I deemed the moment right.

  “YOU KNOW DIRE.” Discussion died, as the echoes bounced across the beach, from the cold black ocean, to the empty road that bordered us. “YOU KNOW DIRE, WHO HAS FOUGHT FOR YOU. AND WILL FIGHT FOR YOU NOW. SOME OF YOU FIGHT AS WELL, AND HAVE FOUGHT TO DEFEND HER. TO DEFEND YOUR FAMILIES. TO DEFEND YOUR FRIENDS.”

  “TODAY WE ARE DEFENDING NO LONGER.”

  “TODAY WE ARE DONE WITH DEFENDING, FOR OUR ENEMY IS WOUNDED AND RECOVERING. TODAY WE ARE ATTACKING. TODAY WE BRING THE FIGHT TO THEM!”

  A ragged cheer.

  “TODAY WE END THEIR THREAT FOREVER!”

  A bigger cheer.

  “TODAY WE WIN! WE SHOW THEM THAT NO MATTER HOW SCARY THEY THINK THEY ARE, THEIR FATE IS DIRE!”

  Scattered laughter, and applause.

  “TODAY, DOCTOR DIRE AND THOSE WHO WILL STAND WITH HER GO TO REMOVE THE SMILE OF RICTUS. WE GO TO TOPPLE BARBATOS FROM HIS THRONE. WE WILL SMASH ALL THAT THEY HOLD DEAR. ARE YOU WITH HER?”

  The biggest cheer yet, and I let the approval of the crowd wash over me. Approval that turned to confused murmurs, as I spoke further.

  “WE LEAVE IN HALF AN HOUR.”

  Cheers died, turned to confusion.

  “IF YOU ARE GOING, GRAB YOUR GUN AND ANYTHING YOU NEED. BID YOUR LOVED ONES FAREWELL FOR NOW. ASSEMBLE BY THE APC WHEN YOU ARE READY. IT LEAVES IN HALF AN HOUR. IF YOU ARE STAYING, HELP GUZMAN GET THE BOATS READY. IN CASE OF ATTACK, YOU'LL BE HEADING OUT TO THE BAY UNTIL IT IS SAFE TO RETURN.”

  Confusion turned to purpose, and people got moving. I looked around through the crowd, until I located Bunny. She was standing next to the APC, smoking. I stomped toward her, and she looked me up and down as I approached. “Nice upgrade. Colorful.”

  “AESTHETICS TOOK A BACKSEAT TO FUNCTIONALITY.”

  “Thought we were leaving tonight, though.” She scratched her chin.

  “YES. EVERYONE DID. JUST AS PLANNED.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “Ah.” She pulled the cigarette from her lips, and flicked it toward a burn barrel.

  “ARE YOU READY TO DRIVE?”

  “Yep. I'll get Roy and we'll load Sparky now.” She pointed at a wood-and-scrap rig up on the former turret's space, held together by baling wire and rope. “Pretty sure that'll work unless a sniper gets lucky.”

  “HOW LIKELY IS THAT?”

  “Unlikely. Most of the ones that could shoot that well died with Stig. The rest are typical gangers. Sights are on top for a reason, but they always seem to forget that.”

  “LET US HOPE THEY ARE EVERYTHING WE EXPECT AND LESS.”

  “All right. So, you have a plan?”

  “THE TOWERS.”

  “Straight to the heart of it. Yeah, okay. Here's how I think we should go about it...”

  We talked tactics for a bit. Khalid went away, then returned, wearing his Janissary outfit. People muttered and stared, unsure what to make of it. I stretched forth a gauntlet, and he clasped my hand, with a small smile upon his face. “Well. I'm glad you have the sense to attack them during the day. I will admit I was getting somewhat worried earlier.”

  “NO POINT IN LETTING THEM DEPLOY DRAUGR IF WE HAVE A CHOICE IN THE MATTER.” I tilted my head. “SO WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE IF DIRE HAD INSISTED ON ATTACKING AT NIGHT?”

  He shrugged. “Used you for a distraction, and gone hunting for the Locust.”

  “Cold,” Bunny remarked, tapping a new cigarette out of a packet.

  “If you had insisted on it, you would not be the person you need to be here, and History would go on.” He looked me up and down. “But the battle is not won yet, and History may grind on without you regardless.”

  “WE SHALL SEE, JANISSARY. WE SHALL SEE.”

  Bunny snorted laughter, and both Khalid and I looked at her, confused.

  “It's just... wow you sounded like a classical supervillain with that statement. All you needed was a sinister laugh at the end, and a vat of acid to lower him into or something.”

  “CUTE,” I remarked. I was a little stung, really. Not much I could do to help matters, someone had done their level best to mold me into a villain. But I was doing good here, regardless of whatever label I ended up with after all was said and done.

  A cold wind blew, rustling the tents, and I watched people get down to business. Husbands embraced wives, mothers embraced children, and goodbyes were said. My people were solemn
and quiet. A gray light filtered through the overcast clouds above, lending a gloomy air to it all. A light snow started to fall, and I sighed as I surveyed the place that had been home to me, for most of my remembered life.

  I had the uncanny feeling that I would never see it again.

  CHAPTER 19: Going Down Fighting

  “They didn't follow Barbatos because he was strong, though he was. They didn't follow him because he was vicious and brutal, though no one else came close. They followed him because he was sharp. Motherfucker covered all the angles. Called all the shots. He was somethin' else, and Dire's first plan... well, it didn't go so good.”

  --From the statement of Martin Jackson, survivor of the Y2K incident, and former confidant of Doctor Dire.

  We moved west. The APC took the lead, crawling slowly as I flew above. The thirty-odd people we had fanned out behind, taking both sides of the street. Inside the APC, Bunny drove and Sparky manned the turret. And we put blocks behind us, as we rolled toward the Towers. A light snow fell over it all, and the morning was silent save for the thrum of the APC's engine.

  We made it about eight blocks before the first shots started coming our way. A few whistled by me, a few poked at the APC, and a very few headed toward our 'troops', who were still a good couple of hundred feet back.

  I switched the mask to thermal sight, and found the shooters holed up in a parking garage to the south. I swooped that way, sent a couple of spike rounds into the lip of the garage. The impacts sent puffs of concrete shrapnel up. They ducked back and stopped firing, but it didn't matter. I hadn't shot at them to hit them, I'd fired at them to mark them for Sparky. And sure enough, he obliged with a seriously heavy bolt of lightning that sparked through the floor they were on, sizzling between cars and sending the shooters jerking and twitching to the floor.

  They might have survived it, since it wasn't a direct hit, but I didn't spare the time to check on them. This was war, now. They were on the side I wasn't, and all we could do was get through it. I played spotter, waiting for the gunshots and pointing out positions to Sparky. In the few cases where the barriers they were behind were too solid for his bolts, or too insulated, I used spike rounds to drive them back. Only once did I have to zoom in for a close-up fight, bursting through a brick wall to get at the snipers who had set up lightning rods in the windows to either side of their occupied apartment. It was clever, but when faced with the bulk of my upgraded armor, they had no chance. I dropped one as he went with a beanbag to the back, and let the other go. He'd dropped his guns, and I threw them out the window before I left. Though I'd been drilled at point blank range by hunting rifles, I was pleased to see that the heat increase was quite minor. By the time I got back to the battle group it had faded entirely.

  We didn't face the first serious ambush until we were about three blocks from the Towers. The sound of approaching vehicles alerted me, and I saw incoming garbage trucks from the north and south. It looked like they were trying to get in position to ram the APC as it came through an intersection. I gnawed my lip as I considered the heavy vehicles. It looked like more metal had been bolted to the front of them, so my coilgun wouldn't be sufficient to stop one without a lot of work.

  This was going to cause some trouble.

  I fired the coilgun at the southern one, twisted, and dove toward the northern one. I dropped onto the hood, scrabbling with my gauntlets, managing to dig in before the truck started twisting and turning. Behind the armored slits on the windshield, I could see a grizzled man with an untrimmed beard. He was yanking on the wheel for all he was worth, trying to shake me off.

  If he was in a car, he might've had a chance of doing it. But the truck was slow and lumbering, and handled poorly. I waited until the turn was done, whipped my arm up and punched metal-clad fingers into the windshield armor. With a scream of tearing metal and shattering glass, my armor's hydraulics ground and thundered, and I ripped away a huge patch of armor. My next punch went through the windshield, grabbing ahold of the wheel and ripping it away. That done I threw myself from the hood, kicking in the gravitics and hovering up as the truck twisted and went out of control. I heard it crash as I rocketed back toward the APC, and saw Sparky throwing bolt after bolt of flashing lightning at the other truck. Its hood slagged, the armor smoking, it nonetheless plowed into the APC in a crunching crash. I held my breath as the truck rebounded, and the APC tipped up, up, and hung on edge for a split-second before crashing down on its wheels again. I exhaled a long sigh of relief. That couldn't have been good for the transmission, but it could have been much worse.

  Distant popping, and my forcefield rippled as it registered a hit. The Black Bloods had used the distraction to move their people up, and I juked right as I surveyed the ground. Our troops had come into play as they moved up. They used cover as best they could, and fired back. Some had fallen already, and I didn't have time to count them or see how bad their wounds were. Sparky's scrap shield was jerking back and forth, splinters flying as the Bloods did their level best to shoot it to bits, and Sparky wasn't returning fire. I hoped he had enough sense to stay down in the main body of the vehicle.

  Right.

  First priority, getting Sparky back into play.

  I landed, racing towards the garbage truck that was backing away from the APC, and the driver flung open the cab and ran. The thing was pouring smoke out from under the hood anyway, I estimated a cracked battery. It was out of play, but it gave me a bit of cover as I followed it back and checked sightlines as I went. There! Up on top of some sort of civic building, judging by the artillery piece on the front lawn. I rocketed up, firing beanbag rounds as I went to keep the sniper's head down. Thanks to the work that Abes and I had done, firing the coilgun didn't mess up the forcefield in any appreciable way anymore.

  Which was good, as there was a squad waiting for me when I ascended to rooftop level again. Four men leveled machine pistols my direction and cut loose as I roared forward, sweeping my arms wide. The sniper ran for cover as my armor started to heat up, but then I was among them, catching two of them in the stomach and throwing them back in a perfect double clothesline before dropping my feet to skid to a stop. They flew backwards and fell off the roof with despairing screams. More screams rose as I triggered the flamethrower in the general direction of the last three. The sniper never stopped running, jerking open an access door and descending. The other two couldn't get out of the way as the flame washed over them, and I left them screaming and burning and trying to put themselves out as I turned and jetted toward the second sniper's nest.

  This one was in the middle of a defunct shopping mall. It had been long-abandoned, judging by the wear-and-tear, broken windows, and empty concourses visible as I burst through a sheet of plate-glass and came to a stop on a cracked, dirty tile floor. This had been a food court once, I noted as muzzles flashed.

  I turned my flight into a lumbering run, scooping up a table as I went. I hurled it at the group firing at me and they scattered... one of them too late, as it bowled him over with a despairing scream. He didn't get up. The coilgun accounted for another, and the third one nailed me in the chest with both barrels of a shotgun as I stomped toward him. The forcefield ate it, and I welcomed the warmth against the cold of the day. I grabbed his throat with one hand, picked him up, and shook him before kicking in the stungun. I dropped him as he went limp, and let the heat sinks do their work for a minute as I turned to the window and the fight outside to consider my next move.

  And then my world was light and fire and an eerie silence, and I realized that I'd been at ground zero of an explosion. The heat level in my suit rocketed upward, and I sweltered as I fell down, distinctly aware that I was smoking, vapor pouring out of the armor's vents to sizzle in the cold air.

  I'd gotten cocky. Couldn't do that again. Poking my head up I scanned with thermal sight, saw nothing— Wait! A small, hot sphere rocketed in the window, bounced randomly, and detonated a couple of hundred feet to my right. It sprayed shrapnel across a de
funct escalator. Grenade? Yes. Coming from below by the angle, just sheer bad luck I'd been caught the last time. Or was it?

  I turned off the forcefield, and the heat sinks went into overdrive to vent the accumulated charge. Hearing slowly returned as I crawled towards a long-abandoned Frickin' Chicken, getting a heavy counter between me and the outside. My ears were ringing, and I wondered about permanent damage, but at this point it was the least of my worries.

  Thermal sight caught two more grenades coming up, and I winced. They had multiple launchers out there. Probably more waiting for me to come out a window. I'd been bottled up, right at the point I was needed most.

  This had to be Barbatos' doing. He was supposed to be the strategist of the operation.

  Well, no matter. If things were going to plan, then Roy would have fired the flaregun we'd gotten from the Midtown Militia by now. That had been the pre-arranged signal for the Steampunks to take the Towers. Also had the side benefit of maybe involving the Militia, if they cared to show up.

  Another grenade rolled in and detonated. My counter sprouted holes as it took some shrapnel, and I shook my head. Couldn't stay here, couldn't go out... I checked my heat levels, found them good, and activated the forcefield again. Then I stood and jogged toward the central atrium of the mall, activating the gravitics as I leaped off my current floor, and headed to the ground.

  A shower of sparks, and the whine of my forcefield, as a heavy hit struck my back! I twisted, feeling the heat rise again, and caught a glimpse of a silvery metal mask staring down at me from a second floor balcony. I landed, my legs flexing as I crouched on the tile. I looked up at my attacker. He didn't have a gun out. What was he doing?

  My answer came as his arm flashed and I had no time to dodge as a silvery blur sped out from him. It hit the forcefield, and my heat jumped to sweltering levels as the object ricocheted away. It stuck in a nearby directory board, quivering.

  It was a butcher knife. He'd thrown a butcher knife hard enough to trigger my forcefield, and it had struck me with about half the force of a grenade.