DIRE : SEED (The Dire Saga Book 2)

by Andrew Seiple

  “ All right, Dire’s shutting her down... now!”

  A rattle of my fingers across the keys, and it was done. I watched in satisfaction, as the shimmering haze over the highways disappeared, and every electric car out there slowed, and started rolling to a stop. The power was down for the next five minutes, give or take.

  Originally this emergency override had been put in the power grid as a law enforcement measure. Fugitives escaping via the highway? Shut it down, shut it all down. But for all its effectiveness, it was rarely used, and I was seeing the reason why. Only about seventy percent of the cars on the highway were electric. Perhaps twenty to twenty five percent were fueled by hydrogen cells, and they had to adjust to suddenly-slowing traffic, and scramble to avoid their electric cousins. Not all of them made it, and I winced as a few collisions happened. Nothing serious that I could see, not in this part, but I still felt a twinge of guilt as a nasty fenderbender threw a sedan into a guard rail. “Insurance,” I muttered to myself. “Insurance will cover it.”

  The few diesel vehicles out there, mainly semi-trucks, fared a bit better. Horns exploded in a frenzy of indignant roars, electric cars used the last of their charge to dodge out of their way, and disaster was averted. Mostly. There was a distant WHUMP, and a thin plume of smoke to the south. I winced to see it.

  A part of me knew that I’d hurt people with this, no matter how much I tried to avoid thinking about it. I stared out the window, eyes unseeing, as tempers flared and horns blared.

  Was this who I wanted to be? Someone who clawed her way up regardless of who got hurt? Taking a few hundred thousand or million here or there to further my own agendas, at the cost of a few injuries here, or a few dead there?

  I shut the laptop, pulled a pair of sunglasses from my pocket, and slid them over my face. The HUD on my contacts flickered softly as it booted up, giving me a window into my armor’s viewpoint. The AR display manifested around my hands, hovering above the table inset into the booth. But I hesitated, holding my hand over the glowing text boxes that were my programs. The guilt bothered me, and I knew I had to think it through.

  A breath, then another. I thought back to the beach. To my first friends... homeless, outcast, unwanted. Just trying to find ways to survive the winter, surviving on kindness and their scavenging skills. No one had cared when they died, until everyone else was at risk, too. Sure, the neighbors had shown up to help, but only when their own rumps were on the line. People like that deserved what they got!

  I looked down at the highway again, feeling my lips curl back— but no. I couldn’t work up anger. This, too, was a prevarication. Just because my friends had a hard time, didn’t mean that random faceless commuters deserved a bad time, too.

  I was trying to make the world a better place. This didn’t help any.

  “She’s sorry,” I whispered, reaching out to touch the glass. “She won’t do things this way again.”

  And I wouldn’t. I took pride in my genius, didn’t I? From now on I’d put that genius to work, and find ways to my goals without this level of collateral.

  “So swears Dire,” I rasped. I powered down the laptop, and tucked it away in my backpack, next to the blocky lump of my backup forcefield generator. Vorpal was using my primary mobile unit; we expected her to come under heavy fire on the approach. Of course, with the broadcast grid down along this section of the highway, she was limited to battery power. If she got in a tight spot, it would only delay the inevitable.

  My other gadgets for this were a taser, a pistol version of my particle beam cannons, the universal remote, and three grenade versions of the sonic screamers I’d used in the courthouse. I supposed the subvocal rig and AR contact lenses were gadgets too, but they were more of a utility than anything else.

  I did have my mask of course, tucked safely away in the backpack. These days, the thing felt more like my face than my unmasked visage did.

  Not that my collection of gadgets really mattered. I was in reserve for this part of things. Acting as overwatch, only reinforcing if needed.

  Channel two clicked open. “Here it comes!” Chaingang said. I toggled through the AR menus, maximized the armor’s view to my left contact. And yeah, there was the delivery truck, plain white just like thousands of others in the local area. Two cars behind it, black sedans with four guards apiece, if the information was good. Four-to-eight more in the truck. I couldn’t see into the cab of it to get a count, not with the polarized windows in the way, but it didn’t matter.

  The truck was leading. Too easy, too easy by far! That was confirmation enough for me that this wouldn’t go right, but I’d promised Vorpal, so I went ahead with the plan.

  We’d chosen a spot near a spur of Lake Silent for our ambush spot. The road curved and wound through some light trees here, so the truck was forced to slow.

  And right as it was about to make the last turn, my suit put a particle beam right through its engine, from one side to another.

  Brakes screamed, the front of the truck exploded in smoke, and the vehicle shuddered as it tried to stop, failed, and plowed through the fringe of vegetation until the front end of it hit the lake, and was brought to a stop by the sucking mud of the shallows.

  Channel three clicked open. “Beginning my approach! They are turtled up.”

  “Hit’em hard, Vorpal.” I said. “The fewer shots they get off into the stopped traffic, the better.” Then I clicked back to Channel two. “What are the other two cars doing?”

  “Pulling to a stop at the edge of the road. Yep, they’re coming out, getting into cover.”

  “They’re yours. Now to crack the shell...” I whispered commands, and the armor burst from its cover, flying at half-speed through the trees. I heard distant shouts through the audio link, and a smattering of gunfire. Uncaring, I maneuvered to the right of the mired truck.

  The doors were still shut. Had they hunkered down? Were they still stunned from the sudden stop?

  I was suspicious, so I kept my distance, popped open my right shoulder launch array, and fired a concussion micromissile at the vehicle. It hit, and the water geysered up, as the glass windshield of the truck pretty much disintegrated from the sheer force of the munition.

  Nonlethal, to minimize casualties, here. It’d shake the occupants up, but wouldn’t kill them. I’d even angled it so that the windshield would blow outward, rather than inward. They should be fine.

  Except that they weren’t. They were nonexistant. With the smoke from the engine temporarily scattered, and the glass no longer in the way, I could see inside the cab without trouble. There was nobody there.

  “Trap!” I called. “Get out of—”

  The truck exploded, and damage reports scrawled across my screen, as my armor fought to stay stable. I winced as my viewpoint spun, and showed flashes of trees before I got a very close and personal view of dirt, grass, and fleeing wildlife as my suit was blown to the opposite bank, hit it face first, and skidded across the ground, tumbling like a discarded doll.

  “Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck! What did you do?” Chaingang shouted.

  “Quietly! Subvocalize! It was empty, the truck was empty save for explosives.” I checked over the reports, winced. The forcefield had taken the brunt of the hit and soaked the impact of the ground, but was temporarily nonfunctional. Still, several secondary systems were offline, and my missile array on the right-hand side was jammed, since it had been open for the whole tumbling trip. I didn’t dare launch another missile until that got repaired. Too much chance of a misfire.

  Interestingly enough, it looked like the forcefield had negated some of the impact. I’d have to look into the physics of that, later. That hadn’t been my intention when I designed it, but I could maybe use that to assist with surviving unexpected drops, and other gravity-related problems.

  I switched channels over to Vorpal. “Trap confirmed. Go!”

  “Scheisse! Alright, here I go!” Vorpal responded.

  “No cargo?” Chaingang asked. “Fuck. We’r
e withdrawing, yeah? Got two of them but the rest scattered, and the bullets are starting to— oh fuck. Heroes are here.”

  I struggled to get the armor upright, saw it lurch, and grimaced. The gravitics system was down. Flight wasn’t possible, until that was handled. It would take a couple of minutes for the damage mitigation mechanisms to reroute to backup circuits, but until that was done, the armor was grounded.

  Then Chaingang’s comment sunk in.“Wait. Heroes? Plural?”

  “Torchbearers, coming straight up the road. I’d know those speedlines anywhere.”

  Speedlines were afterimages, left behind by certain types of superspeed. These suggested that Speedbump, the fastest member of the Torchbearers, was on the scene. He wasn’t as fast as Freeway, but he had a few different tricks, including the ability to carry other people in his wake. There had been speculation that he was related to Freeway, but that had died down a few years ago.

  I’d done my research on the public Icon hero teams, and I knew about the Torchbearers. They were one of the rare junior teams; teenagers and others who’d gotten their powers early, and were training to join other superteams someday. I didn’t like it on general principles; it smacked a little too much of using children as soldiers. But from what I’d learned, most of them had either volunteered, or come from circumstances that precluded a “normal” life. Either their powers caused problems that needed special treatment, or they’d been rescued from villainous exploitation.

  The absolute worst thing you could do when fighting a Torchbearer was kill one. The hero community, and even a few supervillains would declare open season on you, above and beyond the regular unwritten rules which discouraged killing if at all possible. Great Clown Pagliacci had slaughtered the entire team back in the eighties, but that was him, and he’d reaped punishment for what had happened. I wasn’t his brand of crazy, or particularly evil, so that was off the plate.

  Well. That was fine. I hadn’t come out here to kill anyone. Nonetheless, I couldn’t just escape, not with the gravitics damaged and a teammate in the field.

  “Go,” I told Chaingang. “Cut and run, Dire will keep them busy.”

  “Got it,” he said. The armor’s sensors registered an increase in the gunfire from across the lake, and I zoomed in until I saw muzzle flashes, and started picking off the shooters with stunning particle beams. I caught a glimpse of Chaingang, down to three duplicates, running like mad through the trees, before diving into the lake. His copies moved with an eerie synchronicity, using the organic tethers between them to swing up over obstacles, and help each other change direction. He vanished below the waterline, and I wondered how long he could hold his breath. Probably a good while, the power speculation gridsites I haunted suggested that most enhanced-strength types had enhanced lungs to boot.

  Movement in the treeline, shouts, and a scaly bulk burst through the trees, pink cloth and green skin, and a mane of pink hair on top of a ten-foot tall body that was some mix of reptile and human.

  I didn’t get much of a chance to study it. It was heading in the same direction as Chaingang, so I opened up on it, but beams that would have stunned and thrown back a regular human just knocked it off balance for a second. It skidded to a stop, raised an arm to shield its broad, snake-like face, and looked at me.

  Ah, yes. This had to be Serpent Tina, the Torchbearer’s current powerhouse. Big, strong, sturdy, kind of slow.

  “We’ve got a blaster!” She called back. Deep voice, still identifiable as feminine.

  I amped up the power on the particle beams, and had the armor drill her square on. She staggered back, and slipped behind one of the larger trees, with a muttered “Ouch!”

  I shook my head, amped up the power a little more, and shot through the tree to get to her. The blast knocked her backward, through the fringe of trees, and out onto the road. Cored clean through, the tree stood smoking for a second, before crumbling, toppling into the water with a creaking groan.

  “SHE GIVES YOU ONE CHANCE, AND ONE CHANCE ONLY,” I boomed through the armor’s speakers. “RETREAT, AND DIRE WILL LET YOU GO.”

  A flight of crows lifted off from the trees to the west, circling and cawing in protest at the fuss. Aside from that, the silence was my only reply.

  Vorpal’s channel pinged open. “They have fucking lasers!”

  I winced. Lasers? That was military-grade stuff at best, or superscience at worse. The forcefield was a lot less effective against lasers, they’d drain charge much faster than bullets. I tapped to open channels one and two at the same time. “Martin, are you in position to assist?”

  “No! The off-ramp’s full of stopped traffic. Can’t get close unless I abandon the van.”

  “Three minutes, minimum, before the power’s back on. Vorpal?”

  “Pinned down. Took out two cars full of guards, but the rest have those fucking lasers! I can’t get cover, had to ditch the motorcycle, and if I stop moving, they’ll kill me!”

  “Calm down. Dire’s on her way.” I left the booth, ignored the glare that the lumpy woman shot me, and jogged toward the overpass. If I could get a good angle from there, maybe I could do something.

  “Are they watching their fire? Avoiding civilians?”

  “Fuck no! There’s a panic going on, people abandoning their cars and flee—” She broke off.

  “Vorpal?”

  No response. I ran faster. Something exploded to the south, sending greasy smoke high into the sky.

  I was out of breath by the time I reached the overpass, passing parked and stalled cars, and a few brave souls who had ventured out to stare at the flashing lights just south of it.

  Thankfully, Vorpal’s channel clicked on again by the time I’d reached the middle of the bridge. “Scheisse, scheisse, scheisse! They blew up a car near me. I took cover after the explosion. Hard to tell, but I think they’re hunting me now. Spreading out a bit, I’ll see if I can pick off a couple of them.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. “One car’s worth or both?”

  “I think it’s both. Going quiet for now.”

  I gnawed my lip. Two minutes to go, give or take. Then the city engineers would be able to reset the traffic grid, and we’d lose our shot.

  And speaking of losing our shot...

  “She can’t get a good angle,” I told Martin and Vorpal. I could see the truck, sure, and the two remaining SUV’s, with doors open and black-uniformed men scattering through the traffic. But if I fired and missed, the beam would hit another vehicle. Too many civilians, too much collateral.

  Flaming wreckage of a car about three hundred feet back from the truck marked Vorpal’s general area. But I couldn’t do much from up here. I glanced to the exit ramps... nope, too far. I was already out of breath, and it would take more than two minutes to get down them.

  An idea struck me, a horrible and wonderful idea. I swung my backpack off, pulled it open, and looked at the forcefield generator.

  It had shielded my armor from the impact, prevented the worst of it.

  I eyed the highway below.

  Math. I had to make sure I had the math right. I ran through the calculations in my head—

  —And as I did so, my armor trilled an alarm through my HUD. The Torchbearers had finished huddling or talking strategy or whatever, and were moving in. Damn it all! Not now! “Dire’s got a situation!” I subvocalized. “Stay alive, she’ll be down to help directly.” No response, but I didn’t expect one. I was already switching the armor’s view to both lenses.

  Thirty more seconds on the flight gravitics, but I didn’t have that. The speedlines were darting around the curving road to my right, barely visible through the trees. Speedbump, probably with a teammate or two.

  My proximity alert screamed and I threw the armor to the left, and a whirling tree trunk merely clipped its side, rather than striking it head on. With the forcefield down the armor took it straight on the layers, staggering but not falling. The trees to the right of me weren’t as lucky as the trunk rebounde
d from me and ripped through them, two of the smaller, thinner beeches exploding into splinters and cracking to bits, branches and leaves coming down in masses of bark and green.

  They’d distracted me, and Serpent Tina had thrown a tree. The armor was a bit exposed out there on the shore. I withdrew back behind more trees, getting out of sight as best as I could. A few more hits like that would shake armored plates loose, or crack the ceramic. And after that, things would go downhill fast.

  The speedlines had stopped. The heroes were in the trees around me. A lot depended on who they’d brought with them for this trip. There were two of them whose powers were useless against the armor, more or less, and one who’d be a real pain in the ass.

  I couldn’t see them. But the armor had a directional microphone... I tested it, and my lips curled in a grin as I caught whispers to my left.

  “—Can’t feel anything, it’s like she’s not there! I don’t know if this is how her brain works, but there’s nothing there for me to grab—”

  Mentot, the young mentalist. One of the useless Torchbearers for this situation. I could safely ignore her.

  And then my alarm was shrieking, as a sonic boom ripped through the trees and leaves exploded, as something cracked into my abdomen armor at the speed of sound. I backed up, brought an arm up to protect my middle, and WHACK, speedlines blurred as something hit me from behind. Speedbump!

  Well, I knew the solution to speedsters, didn’t I? I hit the screamers, and was rewarded as a yellow-and-blue costumed teen phased in twenty feet away, staggering, and dropping to his knees. A rock fell from his hands, chipped and smoking from impact where he’d been slamming it into me repeatedly at Mach 2. I sent him backward with a flourished taser shot, flipping my cape over my shoulder, and waiting to confirm he was unconscious before killing the screamers. Got one!

  Wait. Something was missing. What, though? I thought through it, then smacked myself on the forehead. Right, right, dialogue!