DIRE : HELL (The Dire Saga Book 6)

by Andrew Seiple

  “Khalid, are you ready?” I voxed. “Crews all in their places?”

  “Yes. What are they throwing at us?”

  “More of those fliers that escorted Dire in.”

  “Ah. The Pazuzu.”

  “The what now?”

  “That is their proper name. Light, fast, as strong as three men.”

  I looked down at the scratches in my armor. “Sounds about right.”

  “We shall load accordingly. The bulk of them will seek to approach from above.”

  I warmed up my particle blasters, letting crackling gold sparks seep out from my gauntlets. “Leave those to Dire. At least for the start...”

  And then the swarm dropped from the sky, and there was no more time for talking.

  The javelins came first, relying on gravity to do their work. They targeted Beaky’s heads, striking at the presumed weak points. Beaky roared in pain and rage, jerking in midair, trying to escape the pestering bites.

  But it was futile. If they’d known more about the Striges, they might have known that Beaky didn’t keep his brain or anything much important in the heads, beyond the eyes— and we’d taken the time to armor those up. Each head had slitted metal plates riveted directly into the bones of the skull. It had actually made him easier to control, sort of like blinders on a horse. Fewer distractions, less stimuli to trigger his instinctual behavior.

  So when the winged warriors dropped down like a tide of angry bats, Beaky met their predations with blasts of howling fire.

  As for me, I shrugged off the javelins, strolling gently along as they fell around me, a few pinging off of my shell. They shredded my cape something fierce, but I didn’t mind. A small sacrifice for the greater good. I focused on blasting the warriors who were trying to close with me, spreading my beams wide and at about sixty percent charge. I’d taken their measure during the earlier fights, this setting was enough to blast them well away from Beaky and shred them. They’d be wounded enough that the fall down to the ground would finish the poor bastards off even if the beams didn’t.

  The crowd around the top thinned, the lines peeled back and away and angled in. I measured their approach and smiled. “Khalid,” I said, knowing what awaited them. “Run out the guns.”

  Two solid months of work. Uncountable gallons of enzymes and chemicals and non-organic braces shoved into Beaky, turning him into some sort of hellspawn cyborg. At the end of the day we’d freed up raw tonnages for cargo capacity and reinforced his sides to take recoil from extremely heavy weapons.

  And then we’d given him cannons.

  Those cannons thundered now, blasting out from the vents he used to exhale waste gas, throwing great canisters of leaden shot into the sky. Their accuracy sucked; they threw stinking clouds of gunsmoke into the sky, obscuring the gunners’ vision, and they had a two-minute reload time.

  They hit the unsuspecting army of Pazuzu like a boulder rolling over a kitten.

  On the underslung cameras, I watched shredded bits of demon fluttering down below... and I watched shot from the keelward guns rain down to wreak havoc on the city below.

  There was an army gathering down there; the other two point nine million that Illwrack had bragged about, I supposed. Clustered as tightly as they were, firing from the height that we were, the carnage was pretty impressive. The panic was just icing on the cake, really.

  Beaky shuddered with the cannon volleys, screaming, shrieking, and spewing fire all around.

  The few Pazuzu that survived the initial volleys curved down and tried to come up, under his belly, and ran straight into the arrows that the archers below were firing up at Beaky. Poor coordination, that. But then they didn’t have radio, or vox networks, or any other way of changing orders in midstream. Perhaps there were horns or something, but Beaky was wailing way too loudly for such things to be heard.

  Some survived. I wished them luck in injuring Beaky from below. Beaky was good at eating things below him, and if they managed to do enough damage to convince him to open his mouths, any arrows that got in wouldn’t kill him.

  The problem lay in the reloading time of the cannons. Two minutes wasn’t long, not when you were dealing with siege artillery. But the vanguard demons they’d thrown our way were fast, and if an officer worth his salt was up there, he’d start testing them, and then they’d find out the limitations on my guns. Then it’d be boarding through the gunports, a desperate fight to repel boarders, and internal damage to Beaky. Not so good. A losing scenario.

  I eyeballed the regrouping clouds of flying fiends. Not more than a few thousand.

  I’d spent three years learning the art of fear.

  Time to show them the fruit of my studies.

  “TREMBLE BEFORE DIRE!” I roared and jetted into the sky. With a sweep of my arm my right pauldron’s missile rack cracked open and spat micromissiles that blossomed into flaming explosions among the crowd. With my left arm I tracked and fired wide spread particle beams, catching five or eight per shot, shredding them with golden light. Then I was in among them, and I snapped my weapons ports shut, barrelling through them straight-armed like the flying brick superhero of your choice. Only with rather more gore, since I was moving at Mach two. The sonic boom shook them; Beaky howled fire below, and I moved like a dervish, arms grabbing, swiping, squeezing, and tearing with inexorable force.

  It wasn’t entirely one-sided. They fought like, well, demons. But their weapons couldn’t break my armored shell, and whenever I got a stubborn cluster, or a fighter who knew his stuff, a point-blank particle blast saw them off.

  All in all I only killed a hundred and fifty three, by my calculations, before they broke and surged back into the ash clouds. I smiled and returned to Beaky’s back, arms crossed. “IS THAT ALL?” I roared at the city.

  Evidently it wasn’t.

  Smoke blossomed from half the towers around the city, and my eyes grew wide behind the mask. “Move! Drop down!” I screamed through the vox. Beaky shuddered and moved below me... but too slowly, as the first cannonballs screamed past.

  Not all of them missed.

  A whump, a spray of ichor from Beaky’s side, and the bird-beast howled in pain and rage. I staggered, activating the gravitics to avoid falling. Wouldn’t look good, couldn’t look weak.

  I growled, low in my throat. “Damage report?” I voxed Vector.

  “He’ll live, but we don’t want to take too many more of those.”

  I nodded. “Descend, then. Plan H.”

  “Ah, which one was that again?”

  “Get next to the walls and have him eat the archers. Drop Spitters as necessary. Cannon for any bigger threats that come our way.”

  “They will sight us in and adjust the cannon in short order,” Khalid shouted, his voice overshadowed by Beaky’s primal scream of pain coursing through the airways. Our poor Damned must be near deaf, right now, and I thanked my foresight for putting noise dampers on the vox transceivers. “We need the Tesla Deflector!”

  We’d lined Beaky with copper wire and rare earths, built a crude generator in a non-conductive part of his guts. It would generate a vast, frangible forcefield that would intercept and deflect fast-moving objects like bullets or cannonballs. But we couldn’t fire it up with the anomaly still active.

  I ground my teeth. If it was what Khalid thought it was, I could do this, but I’d have to get close.

  I looked down, measured the odds. The teeming hordes below surged forward as we descended, hellions ranging from half-human sized to over ten feet tall, studded with extra limbs, spiky bits, and fanged, screaming mouths. About half were armored; all were armed, and the casualties they’d taken earlier seemed to deter them not at all. An arrow pinged off my mask, and I shifted my gaze to the wall, saw spidery-thin demons with four arms apiece drawing, aiming, and shooting as fast as they could pull arrows free.

  “They have a good vantage point on those walls,” I mused over the vox. “Let’s steal it. Vector, get ready to drop the Spitters there. Clearing the LZ
in five... four...” I jumped off the edge, slammed to a halt in midair next to the battlements, calculated the best firing arcs and hosed down the battlements with golden light.

  Above me, Beaky’s maws yawned open, tentacles snapping down, a full score of them. And tangled within every tentacle was a cocoon of flesh, twelve feet around. They splatted onto the battlements, sticking and rocking wetly, fluids roiling within and spurting without.

  The horde below the walls stopped, war screams fading as they watched, entirely unsure what to make of the situation.

  The cocoons split as one, fluid draining away as fleshy shells burst open, and monsters never dreamt of in Hell clawed their way into the world.

  Vector's spitters. As large as cows standing upright, hooded like cobras, and eyeless, because they didn’t need those to see. They stood on the wall, tottered on tall legs, and shook amniotic fluid free of their scales.

  For a second the hellspawn gazed up at the mutants, and the abominations of Satan gazed upon the abominations of Man.

  Then some dimwit demon chucked a spear that bounced off of the first creature.

  In reply it roared, and with the roar came a fountain of green liquid spraying into the crowd below, melting those caught in its direct blast.

  Vector called them the Mark Sevens. I called them Spitters. They wouldn’t hold against that horde, not forever, but they’d cause a lot of damage on the way down. The demons would have to take them out in hand-to-hand combat or get cannons on them, or use tricks we hadn’t seen yet. And all the while they’d be contending with Beaky’s feeding tendrils, cannon shots angled downward, and gouts of acid.

  As distractions went, it was pretty goddamn good, I thought. Might get me half an hour. But the problem lay in the tower-mounted cannons, which I hadn’t anticipated, and really should have. Of course they’d have smaller guns than the big ones on the walls. Flying enemies were a thing here, so the cannons were smaller, but they were still a problem.

  Time to shut down that anomaly and render the smaller guns a moot point.

  I turned in midair, ignoring the spears and arrows flying at me, and zoomed toward the center of the city. I arced my flight down as I approached the anomaly, slowly easing the gravitics down so they wouldn’t be affected by its electromagnetic properties.

  The hordes in my way objected, of course. My forcefield flared as gunners took aim at me with bell-mawed blunderbusses. Pikemen rushed to contain me when I was low enough, and I bulled through them with scattered blasts and backhanded sweeping blows.

  For a moment, I wondered if it was really going to be this easy.

  Then a spiked iron ball about the size of a Volkswagen crashed into my side and knocked me through a brick wall.

  I rose, sending smaller demons scattering, retreating into the interior of their warren-like dwelling. A whimpering, half-eaten Damned watched me from where he’d been spiked to a stone altar. Apparently we’d interrupted the demons’ meal.

  My HUD was alight with damage icons. All green, thankfully. Still...

  The spiked ball that had come in with me started to withdraw, and I grabbed it, riding it out. It turned out to be attached to a chain, which in turn was attached to a metal bar that filled two of the hands of a fifteen foot tall demon. He looked at me stupidly through three eyes and reached out with his two free hands to pluck me free.

  I turned his three-eyed face into two eyes and a smoking hole with a hundred-percent particle beam shot, and he toppled with a deep wail. I grabbed the flail’s stock from him as he fell, gave it three or four experimental whirls and sent it flying down the path I needed to follow, running along behind it... not as smoothly as I would have liked. One of my right leg’s actuators had taken a nasty dent, and I had to favor it or risk the damage worsening.

  I followed in the wake of the thrown flail, through busted walls, over piles of bloody gore that had been demons. With a howl, the ranks that had drawn back surged in again around me, and I fought with everything I had. The smaller ones, the human-sized ones, they could knock me about, but they couldn’t actually damage me. The larger ones, though... those could. I prioritized them as targets and used the terrain to keep them from grouping up on me, but it slowed me down.

  Then I was to the point where the anomaly started affecting my particle beams, and I had to switch to melee-only. Scooping up weapons from the demons I felled, I waded through a small sea of blood and fallen demons to reach my destination. Sweat coated my back, ran down my face, and my armor’s environmentals worked overtime to keep me cooled. I would ache tomorrow, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

  Finally, I came to the edge of the foundry and found the hordes pulling back and away. I looked around for a reason.

  I found one above me.

  Illwrack hung there, the limbs on his sturdy frame churning, whirling around him as if they were attached to him by ball bearings, like he was a rotary fan and they were the blades. It should have seemed funny... but it didn’t. There was nothing natural or logical about their motion as he hovered there, sneering down at me. One of his arms, this one not turning, held a blackened hammer as long as I was tall. Another arm, also still in contrast to his churning limbs, held a spear double the length of the hammer.

  “SO THE LORD OF THE CITY DEIGNS TO SHOW UP TO DEFEND IT.” I flicked blood from a sword I’d grabbed earlier and banged it against the remnants of a slab-like shield I’d liberated from one of the larger demons. “COME AND TRY. COME AND DIE.”

  I was hoping for a monologue, or a boast, or some other piece of kayfabe.

  Instead, I got a hammer to the face, a rapid relocation down the street, head over heels, and a brand new yellow damage icon on my HUD. Not for the first time I was really glad that my actual head was in the chest of my armor. The head up above was a decoy, and it had just saved me a busted nose.

  I rolled to my feet, shook my armor’s head like I’d felt it, and tilted my borrowed shield, exposing my gauntlet. I waggled a finger at him, beckoned him in. “GO ON. TRY THAT AGAIN.”

  He did, and his hammer met the shield this time. I chopped at him with the sword, which rebounded from the haft of his spear as he blocked. Then he was inside my guard and grasping for my mask, only to grunt and shift back as my rising knee crunched into the chainmail around his groin.

  I’d spent too long fighting heroes and supervillains who bought into the culture. There was no monologuing here, no threats or banter, just the very simple business of both of us trying to kill the hell out of each other. Or trying to kill each other out of Hell, as the case may be. I decided to save that witticism for somebody who would appreciate it.

  Finally, my armor battered and his own chainmail rent into rags, Illwrack backed off, panting. I would have pressed the advantage, but one of my knee actuators was shattered by an earlier stomp. I shuffled after him instead, raising my thoroughly gouged and nicked sword, keeping its point up toward his face. I’d cut him four times, badly. He bled black, the ichor running down his muscled body, pooling in the street around us. Could he bleed out? I didn’t know. I had the worrisome feeling that I would have to find out. He was skilled, and I couldn’t get a decisive blow in past his guard, whereas the only reason I was still alive was because of my armor’s sheer toughness.

  The demon lord laughed, cast aside his weapons, and tore the shreds of his armor from his frame. I waited for the trick, cursed my hesitation as he rose into the air, limbs flailing in that circular whirl once more.

  “You fight well, woman. But your weakness is plain to any who think it through.”

  “DIRE HAS NO WEAKNESSES.”

  “Then why do you not fly? Why does the golden light not burst forth from your hands?

  “SHE DOES NOT NEED SUCH THINGS TO END YOU.” I ran a few steps forward, wound up and pitched the sword at him. But my arm was stiff, thanks to damaged motors, and he dodged with contemptuous ease. I scooped up his spear from the street and tried to line up another shot, but Illwrack zigged and zagged
back and forth as he taunted me.

  “Foolish to come here, mortal. More foolish to spurn my offer. I would have given your sons my kingdom.”

  “YOU THINK SHE WOULD SETTLE FOR SUCH PETTY FARE?” I snorted, the point of the spear tracking him as I tried to gauge his rhythm. This would go either Plan F-4 or Plan T, depending on the next few seconds. “DIRE WANTS IT ALL.”

  “All? What do you...” his mouth gaped open, and he laughed, belly jiggling obscenely, the stupid little cola can on his crown bouncing up and down. “You think to conquer Hell?”

  From around me, a thousand gasps echoed from a thousand demonic throats. I glanced around to see the army had formed a ring around us, filing in between the half-wrecked buildings and rubble our fight had caused.

  “HELL ITSELF SHALL BOW TO DIRE. THE MORNINGSTAR WILL KNEEL OR HE SHALL FALL ONCE MORE.” I intoned, turning to the side, training my mask on him and lifting the spear one handed like a pointer. “YOU ARE NOTHING TO HER AMBITION. MERELY A SPEEDBUMP ON THE ROAD TO VICTORY.”

  “You would defeat Lucifer?” he howled and fury flooded his face, strained his inhuman muscles within his dark flesh, even sprayed blood from his wounds to rain upon the ground below. “Bitch, you cannot even defeat a lodestone!”

  The last piece fell into place. Plan T was a go!

  Illwrack charged me, and I weighed my options, calculated the effects, and deliberately missed with my stop-thrust. I pretended weakness as the demon seized me, bore me aloft into the skies above the foundry, well-within the anomaly’s danger zone. Anomaly no longer, though! I knew what it was, and cold logic and science would win the day.

  “A LODESTONE, YES! A GREAT WHEEL MADE OF MAGNETIC ORE, TO DRAW OUT THE TINIEST TRACES OF IRON FROM CRUSHED BLOOD!” I wriggled, got an arm loose, blocked a stray limb as it clawed at my mask.

  “THE SLAVES WERE USING ALCHEMICAL REAGENTS, OF COURSE, TO BREAK UP THE IRON CLUSTERS, PULL THEM FREE OF THE ROCK. WE THOUGHT THAT WAS WHAT THEY WERE DOING, BUT UP UNTIL YOU JUST CONFIRMED IT, WE WERE NOT CERTAIN. COULDN’T COUNT ON IT.” I flipped through my vision modes, got to one that wasn’t affected by electromagnetic interference, and surveyed the lodestone below me. A great stone wheel, flecked with dark ore, turning on a bronze spoke in the center of the river of blood.