High Stakes: A Wild Cards Novel

by George R. R. Martin

  Anger tinged with unholy anticipation took control of her. Wings sprouted from her back, but not her normal ones. These were leathery, bat-like, mismatched in size but seemingly more powerful. She swooped up into the air and from the roofs and dark crannies of adjacent buildings other winged creatures joined her—faceless devils seemingly carved from jet, moths with death-skull markings, lizards of every size and hue, swarms of insects from the size of ants to dogs. She led them toward the choppers, her black sword pointing the way.

  The faster creatures overtook her. She let them, and they bore the brunt of the rocket and machine-gun fire. She swooped low, dodging under the flight of bullets and the gunners aimed at what they thought were the most dangerous targets. And they were wrong.

  Saurians and moths fell from the sky in droves as the Angel came in low and unseen under the copters, turned, and came at them from behind. She braced herself in the sky and swung her black sword. It punched through the shiny metal armor of the copter’s tail assembly and the chopper twisted and tumbled in the sky. The pilot of one of the other choppers noticed her and pulled up. She dodged the machine-gun fire coming from the open side door but the hail of bullets followed her as she jinked and twisted in the sky, leading it to fire into the nose of one of its companions. She laughed aloud as the bullets stitched a path across the airship’s fuselage and it spiraled down in a path of death, exploding when it hit the ground.

  The pilots of the remaining craft panicked, but the Angel was not going to let them escape. She came up from underneath one, cutting a way into the fuselage with her black sword. She levered the sword to peel back the metal floor panel and pulled herself into the cabin. Inside, four armed men stared at her with disbelief as her wings disappeared and she was among them with her sword before they had a chance to react. She laughed in sheer delight as heads and limbs flew. One got a shot off with a sidearm and the bullet burned her side as it passed by. She stuck her sword into his gut and twisted, laughing as he floundered in his own intestines. The last crewman jumped out the door and fell to his death rather than face her.

  Bloodied and frenzied she stormed into the cockpit and chopped left and right at the seated pilots. As the copter dove earthward she hurled herself forward, sword first, and burst through the shattering plastic dome that shielded the cockpit. One of the giant moths banked low and she fell onto its man-sized thorax, took a deep breath, and leaped off as her wings disappeared.

  Only one helicopter was left in the air and it was turning and heading for the desert that surrounded Talas. An armed force of vehicles and troop columns was waiting out there to attack the city after the choppers had softened it up, but the plan hadn’t worked. As the Angel watched, swarms of countless tiny insects caught up to the copter as it tried to right itself and flee. It barely got away from the city limits before the bugs caught up to it and enveloped it within the dark haze of its million little bodies. The chopper swerved, jerked, and then dove.

  The ground forces beneath it tried to escape but it crashed hard and exploded into a ball of flames and metal shrapnel that cut through flesh like bullets. The troops broke, heading back to wherever they had come from.

  The Angel let them go, chased by what was left of her airborne flotilla. She wanted to return to the heart of the city to claim the prize that had been offered her.

  The message from Jayewardene had been terse: Earliest Bruckner release two days. Not earlier. Will keep working, but …

  The trailing ellipsis said all that Barbara needed.

  Barbara and Billy Ray, now joined by Michelle Pond, were back in the same conference room Barbara and Ray had been in earlier, but no one watched the flat screen, and Barbara let her wild card power wash out over the entire room, putting them in a safe bubble of understanding that anyone outside wouldn’t be able to understand. Billy Ray, in his immaculate white outfit, looked almost half bored as he leaned back. Michelle stared into empty space.

  “I’ve heard from the Secretary-General,” Barbara said without preamble. “The earliest Bruckner can be released from prison is two days from now. We don’t have two days. We have eighteen hours at the most. We need Bruckner, which means we’re going to have to go and get him. Then convince him to drive to Talas.”

  “I just fucking got out of there,” Michelle said. “What a bitch.”

  “I know,” Barbara said, knowing she would be thinking the same thing if it were Klaus sitting there discussing their options. I don’t want you to go back there, she’d tell him. Please don’t go back. And Klaus would shake his head. She could nearly hear his voice. “I have to. I must…” he’d say.

  The debate continued all around her. She closed her eyes, letting her power seep out, and they were all shrieking nonsense to each other. Slowly, the hubbub died down as they realized that they could understand nothing of what anyone was saying. When the room was silent, she let the power dissipate.

  “We have a plan that we believe—we have to believe—has some chance of success, and we know who we need in order to complete it, and that’s all of you here in this room. Now—does anyone have anything concrete to say?”

  There was silence around the table until Ray leaned forward, elbows on either side of the report in front of him. “I’ve already seen everything that you’ve all described inside the disturbance,” he ventured. “I’ve seen it before—because I’ve ridden with the Highwayman and I’ve seen what’s outside the windows of his truck. Whatever dimension he travels, it’s the same place that Hellraiser has tapped into. It has to be.”

  “Yeah. Fucking maybe,” Michelle said.

  “Maybe’s the best we have,” Barbara said. “But we need the Highwayman, and we need him now.”

  Ray nodded. “Babel’s right. We break him out without asking ’em. We don’t have time for negotiations and bureaucratic red tape and legalities. And if the fucker doesn’t want to help, well, we don’t give him a choice.”

  Barbara looked around the table. “Anyone got something better?” No one spoke, and Barbara nodded.

  “I’ll be going with you,” she told the others. “I can make sure that the guards won’t be able to coordinate well enough to stop us. Michelle, we’ll need you: for St. Gilles, and for Talas.” Michelle’s face showed distress at that, but Barbara didn’t let her interrupt. Not now. Not when things were at least moving somewhere. Klaus would have just bulled through without a plan, without support.

  “We act now. I had Ink send us maps and photographs of St. Gilles, and of the hospital in Talas from before this happened. We’ll find Tolenka easily enough without him.”

  “Finding Tolenka isn’t the problem,” Michelle said.

  Barbara let herself smile at that. “No, it’s not,” she said. “But we’ll manage it. We have to. Let’s get started.”

  “What about Jayewardene?” Ray asked.

  “He already knows what we’re doing,” Barbara said. She glanced at everyone. “Let’s go over everything one more time, so we all know our parts and what to expect.”

  “Fucking bureaucrat,” Ray said, but a smile creased his face.

  “Just making sure we’re all on the same page,” Barbara told him. “Including me.”

  Babel was pacing with her back to the door of her makeshift office at the Cosmodrome, talking to somebody on a speakerphone, when Mollie stumbled in with her arm over Ink’s shoulders. The tattooed woman was stronger than she looked, and thank God for it; Mollie could barely open the portal from New York to Baikonur, and wouldn’t have been able to stumble through it without help. Like everything Mollie touched, Ink was smeared with blood.

  The administrator turned at the sound of their entrance. The first hints of a smile were tugging at the corners of her mouth, but they fled at the sight of Mollie. A shadow fell behind Babel’s eyes; it snuffed what might have been a spark of optimism.

  “I’ll call you back,” Babel said, killing the call.

  Ink deposited Mollie on the cot in the corner of the trailer. Mollie colla
psed there and watched, blearily, while the UN women hissed at each other in urgent whispers. She’d always thought it was merely a figure of speech, some overblown artistic expression, when people wrote about the color draining from somebody’s face. But it wasn’t. Babel’s face did exactly that just then.

  Mollie knew what that meant. She knew why they’d called her in California (don’t think about the T-shirt shop, don’t think about what happened there, don’t think about WHAT I DID TO THOSE PEOPLE don’t don’t don’t think about portaling two people into the same body don’t don’t don’t think about the torn-sodden-bedsheet sound they made when they exploded like an overfilled water balloon oh God oh God oh God don’t think about all the blood fountaining down the shop window for everybody to see and hear the sounds of teeth and shattered ribs hitting the ceiling fan blades don’t don’t don’t just DON’T FUCKING THINK ABOUT CALIFORNIA) even before she heard Ink’s voice. She hadn’t wanted to accept it, or admit it to herself, and maybe that stoked the murderous rage that erupted in … in … that place. But it was obvious.

  Babel needed Mollie’s help. And from the way she and Ink stared at her and whispered, she needed it desperately. Even a person half out of her wits with grief and fear of herself could see that.

  She couldn’t stand it. The naked fear on their faces. Not the fear for themselves—though that was present, too—but fear that Mollie was too far gone to do whatever it is they needed from her. They were wondering when she’d blow up again, when she’d try to murder them in a fit of pique.

  “Oh, Jesus, stop whispering. I might be losing my mind, and increasingly prone to random acts of violence, but I’m not stupid. You need me for another taxi ride.”

  They stared at her. Shared a look. Then Babel gave Ink some minute sign, and the tattooed woman departed. Mollie realized she hadn’t closed the New York portal. That was getting harder, too. She waited until Ink was back at the UN before clenching her eyes shut, concentrating hard until the damn thing closed.

  “‘Increasingly prone to random acts of violence’? What exactly do you mean by that?”

  Only then did Mollie realize there was another person in the room. Billy Ray, the SCARE guy with the mashed-up face. He’d been sitting in the corner the entire time. Probably chiming in on Babel’s phone call. He sat next to the door, and Mollie had too much blood caked in her eyes (strangers’ blood don’t think about it don’t think about it don’t think about what they didn’t deserve) to see him when Ink carried her through. The question had come from him.

  Mollie said, “I, uh … I never used to get so angry. But it’s like … it’s like after being exposed to supernatural rage so many times I can’t ever really leave it behind, you know? I’m tainted and I can’t get clean. And now I’m stuck in limbo and I get angry so easily and when I’m furious I start doing things with my power and when I’m back I don’t even understand what I did or how I did it. I’m dangerous. I need to be put away.” SCARE. That meant he was some kind of fancy federal cop, right? He could do that. “Look at me. I’m a mess because I just killed two people—fuck, it’s three by now—just because a shopkeeper chided me for knocking over some merchandise. I deserved to get thrown out of the store. They didn’t deserve anything at all except to live their lives. But he reached for me, and it reminded me of the way Berman would touch me, and it made me so mad…” She tried to wipe her eyes with the back of her hand, but it just smeared the blood stippled on her face.

  Ray and Babel shared another look.

  Mollie said, “And now you’re scared shitless. Which tells me you’re up to something important.”

  Babel said, “We think we know how to stop this.”

  “Stop me from losing my shit? Stop me from becoming a murdering lunatic?”

  “Stop Horrorshow. We have a plan for putting an end to this.”

  Mollie’s heart tried to chisel through her breastbone. Her pulse tripled. First in exhilaration, but then in dread. “And I’m the transportation.”

  “Yes.”

  “It means going back to Talas again, doesn’t it? Because that’s where … Because that’s the epicenter.”

  Babel shook her head, waving her hands for emphasis. “No. No, no, you don’t have to worry about that. That’s the great part. We don’t need you to open a doorway to Talas. Instead, we need your help breaking somebody out of jail. He’s in Belgium. Very far from Kazakhstan.”

  Mollie blinked. “I know I’m losing my mind, but still, I have to admit that is not what I expected you to say.” She shrugged. So far, it didn’t sound so bad. “Jails are easy. Who is he?”

  “This jail won’t be,” said Ray. “Ever heard of the Highwayman?”

  “Nope. Wait a sec—highwayman? As in robbing people on horseback?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What’s he doing time for?”

  “Ah.” Babel cleared her throat. “War crimes.”

  Mollie leapt to her feet. “Are you fucking serious?”

  Ray was out of his chair, too. Wow, for somebody whose face looked like badly sculpted clay he was spooky quick.

  The entire world was getting absorbed by the evil insanity zone but instead of dealing with that problem these fucktards wanted Mollie to break some war criminal out of jail? What, so he could make the inevitable atrocities even worse? It was disgusting. It enraged her.

  (Even as a meek little voice in the back of her churning mind said, What right have you to be so high and mighty? So what if he’s a war criminal? You just murdered three people in cold blood.)

  She said, “What the fuck are you two playing at?”

  “Calm down,” said Ray. He cracked his knuckles. “Calm down or I’ll put you down.”

  Babel said, “Ray, that’s not helping!”

  He dropped his fists. But Mollie wasn’t fooled.

  “Do you think you’re faster than I am? I could dump you in the ocean right now. I could send you to Talas. I wonder how long you’d last, tough guy, all by yourself in Cannibal Flashmob Central. Think you could find your wife before the madness claims you? Take one more step and you’ll find out.” So many possibilities. A hole opened in space. It orbited Ray like a dancer around a maypole, showing glimpses of Icelandic ice and fire. A cold wind howled through Babel’s office, rifling the papers on the planks that passed for her desk.

  “Mollie, please listen to me,” said Babel.

  Mollie had never noticed how mellifluous the UN woman’s voice could be. It was almost pleasant. She held off on sending Billy Ray to hell just for a few more seconds, just to hear what else Babel had to say.

  “I know it’s confusing and counterintuitive. But we’ll explain it to you and you’ll understand. We’re not breaking him out of jail because we like him or support the terrible things he’s done. We’re doing it because he’s our only hope for banishing Horrorshow.”

  Why was she standing? She’d been so angry a moment ago. Why? Over what? She could hardly remember now. All she wanted was to hear Babel speak a little more. The portal disappeared.

  She sat on the sofa. “Tell me your plan.”

  They did.

  Mollie was still turning it over in her head when one of Ray’s SCARE guys came in with a change of clothes for her. She recognized him—Agent Vigil. Babel said, “There are showers next door. Hurry, okay?”

  Mollie stood. She started to follow Vigil, but stopped. “This plan of yours. You’re not yanking my chain, are you? You’re serious about not returning to Talas?”

  “Completely.”

  “Okay. Good. Because as far as I’m concerned, Talas is a permanent no-go zone. I don’t care who might be stuck over there. I’m never ever opening another doorway to that hellhole. No matter how small, how short-lived, how compassionate the cause.”

  She was a broken lonely coward, and she cried in the shower until the water ran cold and somebody complained in Russian.

  Marcus and Olena didn’t talk about what happened. They would eventually, but Olena made
it clear she wasn’t ready yet. They’d disengaged with the rest of Vasel’s men, both sides backing away from the ace’s remains in an uneasy truce. Olena had kept her coin hand clenched in a fist. Back at the Committee compound, she’d rifled through a first-aid kit, found an ACE bandage, and wrapped her hand with it. Then she found another and wrapped it again. Marcus watched silently, there for her, waiting for the touch of her eyes on his. That touch didn’t come, but neither did she push him away. Together, they’d done the things they had to for the people who still needed them.

  The jokers spent the night in a dilapidated hangar. Marcus had protested. He wanted something safer than the sprawling outdoor camp the other refugees were housed in. But Babel had handed them off to the Russians and they claimed the hangar was the only place they could spare. It was an old structure, like something out of a black-and-white newsreel or something. Musky. Dark and dingy, with only a handful of working lightbulbs. One wall had half collapsed, leaving an opening to the outside, and the other walls looked like they were about to give it up at any moment. Hardly the safe haven Marcus had hoped for.

  Determined that one night in the place was enough, Marcus rose in the predawn, intent on getting them better accommodations. He left the jokers in seclusion—Olena there with them but silent, staring, holding her bandaged hand a little away from her body, like it wasn’t part of her—and he went looking for a better place, or for someone who could direct him to one.

  Despite the early hour, the entire compound thronged with purpose, people and cars and transports and tanks all on the move. Planes arriving and leaving, choppers thwacking through the sky: the place was a confusion of massive proportions. Lost within it, Marcus could barely get within shouting distance of anyone in charge. When he did, it didn’t do any good. At best they ignored him; at worse he found himself staring down machine-gun barrels. The message was clear enough. The jokers were on their own. Still, he kept trying.

  He was gesticulating with arms and shoulders and tail, trying to make himself understood to a cadre of Kazakh soldiers, when a smooth, Southern voice asked, “Hey, IBT, you know them fuckers can’t understand you, right?”