The Primary Protocol: A Cyberpunk Espionage Tale of Eldritch Horror (The Dossiers of Asset 108 Book 2)

by JM Guillen

  Being so suddenly without pain was the most pleasurable thing I could imagine.

  I glared up at the figures still nearby. One of them helped the fellow I had fired upon, who was standing though wobbly. It must have only been a few seconds since I had fallen, but it had felt like an eternity.

  I spat. My mouth tasted dusty and hot as if it were full of cinnamon.

  “You fucks.” My eyes narrowed as I pushed myself to my feet. I only had one of my disruptors, having dropped the second while writhing in misery, but one was all I needed. “Didn’t expect me to get up, did you? Thought you could just stand over me while I screamed?”

  Unreasoning fury boiled in my blood. I had not wanted to attack them, not at all. I had held back.

  I would not make the same mistake twice.

  When I swung toward the closest Drażeri, his black eyes grew wide.

  I flipped the focus of the disruptor to its narrowest radius and fired squarely into his face.

  This setting created an entirely different effect than the first shot had. I had initially struck my opponent with a large amount of force, which had been diffused over a wide range. He had taken the brunt of it over most of his abdomen.

  That was before this particular Drażeri had tortured me in the street.

  He received the same amount of force, narrowed to a centimeter.

  Dark blood splattered in a wide fan as the disruptor punched through his skull and out the back of his head. Both of his friends jerked their heads toward him the moment he died, as if pulled by the same invisible string.

  “That’s right.” I reached for the disruptor on the ground and kept my eyes on the other two. “It’s not over as easily as that.”

  Bishop? Rachel’s link sounded tight but not worried. Your adrenaline is spiking.

  I bet. I winked, knowing she could feel it over the link. I’m fine.

  Then I heard the otherworldly scream.

  It wasn’t a new sound to me; I had heard it on my last assignment. It was an unearthly, maddening cry, a wail that hit me like a physical thing.

  I now faced one of the Vyriim.

  Of course I had seen the tendril inside the man I had just slaughtered, but to be honest, it had slipped my mind. The crippling agony had drowned every thought in my head, and in the moments after, I had been primarily focused on making certain that the man responsible was put down.

  Now that inky tendrils were wetly tearing loose from his corpse, I wondered if I had acted too quickly. Perhaps I would have preferred dealing with the host, rather than the aberration. I remembered the last time I had used the disruptors against the Vyriim as they swam through the air. They had simply flowed around the blasts like eddies in a river.

  I didn’t even have my katana handy.

  Then, I noticed the other Drażeri.

  Slowly, they stood and walked toward me, shambling like the long dead. They didn’t seem concerned about their well-being, even though they had just watched me slaughter one of their own like a pig.

  That held a special kind of horror.

  The pieces clicked into place. The first Drażeri I had killed hadn’t been host to one of the aberrations, but the second had. Now that I saw these two, shambling like puppets without strings, I realized that they probably weren’t hosts either.

  They weren’t anything anymore. The Vyriim had taken everything they were, and now they acted simply as its tools.

  I took two steps back and kept the disruptors pointed at the emerging monstrosity. At the wet sound of the tentacles tearing loose from the corpse, visceral and grotesque, I kept my breath smooth and my thoughts clear.

  Then others stepped from the doorways of buildings behind them. They all moved with an ethereal grace in a concerted fashion that seemed completely unnatural. Like a flock of birds or a school of fish, they all moved together. More and more servitors stepped out from their houses, their eyes empty, dead.

  Oh fuck.

  Alpha, I believe I am in trouble. I glanced over my shoulder as I linked to make certain I wasn’t being surrounded, but more people streamed in behind me. I swallowed. This had gone from facing one Vyriim to a dozen beings in a matter of seconds.

  Hold your position, Bishop. Gideon was firm, resolute.

  We are less than five minutes from you, Michael. Anya’s link was crisp, businesslike, as she tended to be when things became intense. We will be coming up behind you following the path you took.

  Copy that, Anya.

  While I positioned myself, the dead-eyed inhabitants of the place edged ever closer. Their motions weren’t exactly in unison so much as choreographed to move together as a whole. They approached as if they weren’t individuals at all but appendages of one great body.

  I shuddered, remembering the Vyriim’s attempt to take me during my last assignment. For the briefest of moments, their awful consciousness had plundered my own, and I had understood the unity that they shared.

  They were one. One. It was impossible to communicate how it had felt, that wild, infinite moment where their minds had come together with mine. An uninterrupted consciousness flowed between them, and it was vast.

  For the briefest time after being freed from them, I had been confused. Concepts such as individuality or even gender seemed monstrous.

  Now the ramifications of their unity clarified. How many of them were aware that we were here because I had been detected by a single Drażeri? Did the entire city know? If so, I imagined our cause was hopeless. We could never stand against that many.

  Then four of them rushed me.

  Only one of the four had a weapon of any kind, a thin length of wood he was wielding as a club. The others simply hurled themselves at me like a swarm of insects, uncaring about their own lives.

  “No!” I aimed at the one with the club and fired with the same disruptor that had killed his ally.

  The shot clipped him in the shoulder, spinning him to the ground.

  He didn’t even cry out as he fell, a spray of blood exploding from his wound.

  Another Drażeri lunged at me, his face twisted into a mask of hatred. I spun toward him, thanking Rachel inwardly for the injectables. I squeezed the trigger, firing with the other weapon.

  The focus wasn’t quite as high on this disruptor, so the shot hit him in the chest like a cannonball.

  He sailed backward into another of his fellows, sending them both crumpling down in a tangled heap. They weren’t even done falling before I had sprung forward and fired twice more at another Drażeri who was rushing up on me, holding one of those silver blades.

  He fell, bringing me a moment’s space, and I noted that the group of them, all, stared at me with unblinking, fury-filled eyes.

  “Is that enough? Huh?” I swung my pistols wide and wild. “I won’t run out of shot, you know. I can shoot you all down.”

  They had no response, no drifting poetry in my mind. They weren’t Drażeri anymore; they were like angry hornets, a nest I had accidentally kicked.

  They rushed me.

  Out of the corner of my eye, as I shot down two more Drażeri, I saw the Vyriim. It was a knot of gleaming tentacles, shining dully with viscera. Instead of undulating through the air toward me, swimming like some kind of monstrous squid, it simply drifted in the air, tentacles writhing. It remained quite safe, smugly out of reach.

  What was it waiting for? My brow furrowed as I peered at it. Every time I had faced one of the aberrations before, it had been a very active combatant. Now, this one simply hung in the air, drifting on unseen currents.

  I fired three more times, dodging as a bare-chested young woman reached for me. I kicked at another, my boot smashing in his face as I shot down two more.

  The Drażeri continued attacking, slow but relentless. More were on the way; I saw them in the dim twilight, shambling like blind, ruined savages from a madman’s nightmare. A few of them, in a slight stupor, seemed slightly more cognizant of themselves and their surroundings.

  “Fine then.”
I spat the words through gritted teeth.

  Again and again, I turned and fired. The ones that I struck with the disruptor in my right hand were immediately slain, hurled backward in a spray of dark blood. The others were spared, simply being driven back by a tremendous bolt of kinetic force.

  Even as I shot, more came. Though a few ran with what I expected was their natural grace, most shambled mindlessly forward. Figures, dressed in what I guessed was typical Drażeri garb, almost universally had a lurid red pulsing beneath their brands. A few, however, wore thick cloaks, and some of these held the censers of spiced smoke.

  In only a few moments, one of them had slipped behind me and wrapped a gangly arm around my torso. He grappled with me, trying to pull me to the ground. I spun the disruptor in my right hand back, firing over my shoulder, and the force of it tore through his neck. The man crumpled to the ground, but another ran up to take his place.

  There were too many. This was impossible.

  To make matters worse, I could feel the viral mecha that Rachel had given me begin to wane. A distinct limitation of injectables, they were quite effective but unless programmed otherwise, only lasted for a short period. My limbs started to slow as my reflexes returned nearer and nearer to normal.

  As one of the cloaked men struggled against me, he whispered, little more than puffs of breath against my ear. In my mind, I could feel his words:

  Inevitable is the dark autumn

  All must fall into the cold arms of death.

  As certainly as I was assaulted by the man, I was assaulted by the images that came with his words. I looked across a bleak, desolate landscape. A quiet, haunted wind blew against my face.

  The image brought despair, hopelessness.

  “You can fuck right off!” I jammed my elbow backward into the man, hard, even as he tried to pull my arm toward him. The hard point of my elbow caught him in the face, and I felt bone crack.

  Another of his friends seized my left arm even as I struggled to get free with my right. Still another stepped up in front of me and slammed a thick, meaty fist into my abdomen, knocking the wind from me.

  I sure could use some backup.

  The man struck me again, and I sank to the ground.

  Always such a whiner. Wyatt’s link was only for me, and I could feel his sarcastic grin through my Crown. Do yourself a favor and keep clear of these two bad boys.

  WHUF. WHUF. The moment he fired, Wyatt spent the resources to send my Crown an overlay of the locations of the two spikes, each approximately four meters away from me. I had no idea what their purpose was, but Wyatt’s overlay contained a faint red circle surrounding each, about a meter on a side.

  I was certain I did not want to step within that radius.

  We are on site, Bishop. I am making my way to you. I could hear the quiet song of the Seraph’s blade as Gideon powered up his weaponry.

  Finally.

  Several of the Drażeri stepped forward and then tumbled wildly into the air as they came into the radius of one of Wyatt’s spikes.

  Gravitational, huh? I linked to Wyatt as two more stepped too close and hurled upward into the sky, shock on their faces.

  I do enjoy the classics. He grinned. I’ll shut them down soon; they pull a lot of juice.

  Roger that.

  As the more aware Drażeri watched in horror, I took advantage of their momentary shock and pulled free from the men who held me. I shot one of them squarely in the chest with the narrowly focused disruptor pistol and spun on one of the others, firing at him but missing as he ducked out of the way.

  Moments later, five of the figures plummeted from the sky as Wyatt keyed down his spikes. They pounded into the cobbled streets and crunched wetly with splattering blood and bone.

  I don’t know why you didn’t just do that, Wyatt teased over the link. See how easily I took care of them?

  I guess we can’t all be as clever as Wyatt Guthrie. I saw an opening and sprinted in the direction of my cadre, thinking to join up with them. I took down two more of the Drażeri, one a young woman who looked scarcely grown.

  I had no time for remorse.

  As I sprinted, I saw Gideon step into a knot of the figures, and the Seraph sang. His foes cried out in agony as his blades cut through five of them at once, simply dematerializing parts of their atomic structure wherever it struck. The corpses fell into piles of ash, screaming before they knew they were dead.

  Then, I saw Gideon’s eyes had grown wide and his left hand came to his face.

  He sank to his knees and screamed.

  Baseline Rationality has spiked two-point-seven degrees. Anya’s tone remained matter of fact. It’s psionic in nature. Michael, I’m directing you to the source.

  A blue indicator appeared in my sight and cast an eerie aura around one individual. The Drażeri was just staring at Gideon, his eyes wide and black.

  His vitals look just like Bishop’s did earlier. Rachel sounded frantic, as she often did when we were in a hot zone. I’m shutting down his pain receptors, but it won’t last long.

  It appears that the Drażeri form a mental connection with their targets. Anya’s link was thoughtful. My readout shows axiomatic strands forming between the two of them.

  Understood. I raised one of my disruptors, prepared to shoot the Drażeri man, when Rachel yelled over my link.

  BISHOP! Horror seeped through the link. Don’t! I don’t know what will happen to Gideon if you kill that thing while they are psionically connected!

  Oh— I hadn’t even considered. Copy that. I started to lower the pistol but then saw another robed Drażeri sprinting toward us. Two quick bursts laid him low.

  I’ve killed his pain response. Rachel sounded relieved. He should be up and around in a moment if Bishop is any indication.

  I took the free second to hold off three more of the Drażeri who had tried to triangulate around Gideon and me. One of them wore the ceremonial robes, but the other two just seemed to be typical citizens who had left their homes at a dead run to defend their masters from the interlopers.

  Wyatt stepped forward and fired off two spikes, his fingers madly keying in whatever wickedness he had in mind. Moments later, a half dozen of the Drażeri burst into flame.

  For the moment, we were alone. About fifty meters away, the Vyriim pulsated as it hung in the angry twilight. I had no doubt that it was already calling reinforcements.

  What—? Gideon linked, sounding befuddled and drunk.

  “Finally.” I took Gideon’s mumbling as my cue and shot the Drażeri who had attacked him. I took him squarely in the forehead before his focus was even fully back within his body.

  He had been the last—of this group at least.

  Come on, Alpha. I stepped over to him and extended a hand. We should form up.

  Making the calls now, are you? Gideon gave me a rueful grin but took my hand. Arrogant ass.

  As I pulled him up, I saw the truth. Across from us, next to the small park full of gently swaying fungus, I saw even more Drażeri come outside. They were, of course, innocent inhabitants who had just been enjoying an evening to themselves before strangers had invaded their streets. In the distance, the Vyriim undulated in the air, and I was certain it permeated the minds of each of them, urging them forward.

  Alpha, there’s more coming.

  Gideon followed my gaze, his mouth a grim line as the Drażeri streamed from their homes, wielding knifes and small clubs. The shadowed figures under the glaring moon scrambled forward with a dire and deadly purpose.

  In less than two minutes, the newcomers would be on us.

  Well, fuck. Gideon glanced behind us, groping for a strategy that didn’t end with us all dead. Anya and Rachel stood behind us, each completely absorbed with her interface.

  I glanced at Wyatt, and he gave me a long, slow nod.

  Looking at him gave me an idea.

  Wyatt, my link mused, like these fine blue-skinned folks, I was brainwashed by the Vyriim back in Detroit. I didn’t even know
it, didn’t understand until you shot a spike at my feet.

  Yep. He nodded as tiny, white print scrawled over the blue glass of the oculus. That was more Rachel and Anya than me. It was a combination of restoring your normal brain function and disrupting that bitch’s weird hypno-signal.

  Well, this Vyriim is uncharacteristically staying out of things. I bet its side-seat driving for every Drażeri in a kilometer’s radius.

  “That’s…” Wyatt’s eyes narrowed. “That’s something to consider.”

  Wyatt. Rachel pushed her link in before he could respond. That was a different situation. We knew Bishop’s mental structure before you created that link.

  Bishop has a mental structure? I felt his snarky smile.

  Human anatomy is quite similar, regardless of the individual. Anya seemed to actually believe that her point somehow countered Wyatt’s snark. It wasn’t difficult to axiomatically recalibrate Bishop until his brainwaves were within the accepted average beta range.

  We don’t have time for the philosophy. Gideon cut in, all business. Wyatt, Bishop has a point. Can you create spikes that will block or slow the Vyriim’s control?

  Yes. He paused. Maybe. I felt Wyatt’s uncertainty over the link. I have no idea what their normal brainwave—

  We’re not here to rescue them. I want the connection severed or slowed. Here’s the play.

  I blinked, and my head jerked as Gideon patched a large packet to us over the comm. It was an overhead image of the area and placed the Drażeri, the Vyriim, and us at our current locations.

  Incorporating the packet felt like lifting bricks with my mind.

  Wyatt will place five spikes, here, in a crescent. Gideon continued to link as I saw the spots blossom into color in my mind. If we can slow the Drażeri, even for a few moments, we can make it back the way we came and then set out for the anomaly Anya picked up.

  As he spoke, I could see the intended route on the image.

  Anya, are you still receiving the distress signal?