“NOT BAD.” Some golden jewelry, easily repurposed. A few twists of metal that contained palladium—
—and my breath hissed between my teeth, as I grabbed up a ring of pure zinc. “THIS ONE. WHERE DID THE MERCHANT OBTAIN THIS ONE?”
I’d instructed them to ask follow-up questions with every purchase. Even tested their memory. Fortunately, First Whisper’s powers of recall were about as good as mine.
I’d also slipped a few recording worms into First Whisper’s purse, but I didn’t want to spend the time it would take to go through their logs unless it was absolutely necessary.
“Let me recall...” First Whisper’s fingers brushed mine as she closed the jewelry box, and I scowled underneath my mask. It wasn’t the first incidence of such ‘accidental’ contact.
“Pitward. To your... southeast?”
“Yes, the southeast of Wroth,” The Cat added. “There are pools of the stuff in the more hazardous lava fields out that way. The local lords use favored slaves they’ve saved from the Styx to harvest it.”
“The Komar Riding, that’s the name of the place.” First Whisper nodded, handing the jewelry box off to Epsilon. “Some minor holding out in the frontier.”
“THEN THAT’S WHERE WE’RE GOING.”
“Zinc? Really?” Vector frowned. “What’s so special about the stuff?”
“IT’S NOT. BUT REFINING ZINC YIELDS INDIUM. AND THAT, PROFESSOR, IS A DIFFERENT MATTER ALTOGETHER.” Indium alone wouldn’t be enough for a full repair of my suit, was only one of the materials I needed, but it was a step in the right direction. And it would let me throw together a few more inventions and enhancements for Beaky and his kin.
I checked my recollection of the map, found the Komar Riding, and programmed the course into Beaky. “NOW COMES THE TRICKY PART...”
Eight minutes later, after we’d transferred Gamma and Epsilon back to their respective Strix, our beasts turned as one and flew south. Immediately Eyeblight’s sentries below sent up an alarm, blowing on horns, banging on gongs, and making a general fuss.
And with a great cry thousands of bat-like hellspawn took to the skies, doing their damnedest to bring us down.
I sat on my throne and watched them try. Beaky shook as the cannons spoke nonstop, putting forth their arguments in lead.
And it wasn’t just those weapons that were arrayed against the hellish air force. Above us, climbing out of the hatches and rushing to defend his topside, ran Vector’s Spitters. He’d had the time and raw material to get us roughly a hundred and fifty of the hideous monstrosities.
It worked out pretty well. The Striges grasping tendrils tended to the ones from directly below, the cannons kept the sides relatively clear, the multiple heads with sharp beaks and fiery breath arrayed around our spawn took care of that angle, and the Spitters dealt with the geniuses who decided to try to fly up and drop straight down upon us.
Not without casualties, though. The bat-riders had plenty of spears, and the bats themselves were five hundred pounds of rage in a four-hundred pound bag. They did damage on the way down, making the Striges roar their pain in fire while the Spitters just died.
But neither all of them, nor enough of them, and we cleared the southern city wall and kept on going.
“QUADRANT FOUR, TURN SIX DEGREES,” I instructed the cameras, and the one I addressed registered the command and obeyed.
There she was.
Queen Eyeblight stood on her tower, next to her jumbo-sized riding bat, staring right at Beaky. She stood with a fifteen-foot-long spear in hand that crackled with eldritch energies. She was obviously ready to throw down.
But she wouldn’t.
Not unless I appeared. Not unless I came out.
I’d had plenty of downtime over the last few days while my minions did my bidding. I’d read and analyzed the Pax Infernum and thought very hard on what it said and what it didn’t say.
“She won’t pursue,” First Whisper spoke, sneering her joy at being proven right. “She fears you.”
Not true, not entirely. I’d seen this custom in Caym, even if I hadn’t realized it at the time. And I’d encountered it in Wroth, albeit in a more hurried fashion.
Simply put, the demon lords only got involved if their armies couldn’t handle the job or if the other side’s demon lord got involved. To do less, to jump the gun, was to admit that your army was the weaker. Only when the fighting was fiercest, when the enemy could be taken down with a decisive strike or their own army was vulnerable to such a strike, did the demon leaders engage.
I watched theory turn into reality as we slipped away clean. The fiends followed us for a bit but soon fell back far outside of cannon range.
“Why didn’t we use the lightning against them, Doctor?” First Whisper asked.
“WE WERE TOO CLOSE TO THE GROUND. IT WOULD HAVE WREAKED HAVOC ON THE CITY BELOW.” I eyeballed the pursuit, judged it to be a cautionary measure. As long as we didn’t look like we were circling around and didn’t show weakness, we’d probably be fine.
“I still don’t see why you care about that,” The Cat said. “It’s not like you were sticking around to add it to your domain.”
“OH, DIRE IS WELL AWARE THAT YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND. THAT IS WHY SHE WON’T BOTHER EXPLAINING IT.”
“Random massacres are bad, m’kay?” Alpha drawled.
“Now that we’re away, can I show you something?” Vector asked.
I glanced at the flock of fiends on the monitor, then nodded. “SURE. IT’LL HELP BREAK UP THE SCENERY, AT LEAST.” We had a long way to go, if the map was accurate.
The thin scientist grew more animated as we walked down Beaky’s halls, towards his lab. “It’s something I’ve had in mind ever since I met your minions. They’re people, you know.”
“WELL, YES.”
“No, I mean, these are the first androids I’ve ever run across that have their own personalities, their own motivations. They’re a lot better company than most humans I’ve had to interact with, to tell the truth.”
“GET TO THE POINT.” I paused, measured the waves of irritation that surged within me. No, this was out of proportion to his actions and words, not natural to me at all. “SORRY. SHE IS STILL FEELING WRATHFUL.”
“I’ve been compensating for that with drugs. Want some?”
“NO.”
“Anyway, the point is they’re really distinctive.”
“WHAT?”
“If the Chorus could blend in more with homo sapiens, they’d be the perfect infiltrators. You’d open up a lot more uses for them, and I think it would be good for their development. I mean, robot skeletons are pretty much your style, but is it theirs?”
He smiled as he parted the curtains to his lab, waited for the airlock to settle into place, and opened the inner set of curtains with a flourish.
There, in five wall-to-ceiling tubes, stood five deflated corpses... no, they weren’t corpses. They were skinsuits. Two female, and three male. They were relatively similar, save for breasts, and...
“YOU MADE THEM ANATOMICALLY CORRECT.”
“Well, yes.” Vector coughed and didn’t meet my eyes. “They’re essentially cloned from DNA samples from the Damned, with a few splices in there, and overlaid on a fungus-like carrier that simulates flesh, down to a few minor functions that will help them pass—”
I pointed to the far right skinsuit. “THAT ONE HAS A HARD-ON, VECTOR.”
“Shit.” He moved over to the tube, started pushing colored sections of it. “The chemical mix is off, let me adjust the feed.”
“THEY’RE PRETTY MUCH ALL FULLY FUNCTIONAL, AREN’T THEY?”
“Well yes!” Vector was blushing now. I wanted to palm my face, but I didn’t know how much I could push the man. “What do you do when you’re infiltrating? Sometimes it involves sleeping with a target, or it could depending on the approach. And what if they want to sleep with someone? That’s part of their development, or it could be—”
“ENOUGH. PLEASE. ENOUGH.” I l
eaned against the wall. “YOU’RE TALKING TO THE EQUIVALENT OF THEIR MOTHER, YOU KNOW.”
His blush got worse. “I ah, I er, I really hadn’t looked at it that way, but...”
“BUT THEY ARE FULLY GROWN. THEIR GESTATION CYCLE IS MUCH FASTER THAN THE USUAL ORGANIC PATH.” I sighed and decided to take pity on him. Put in the right light, and ignoring the creepy-ass overtones, it was a rather touching gift. “GIVE HER A SECOND. LET’S CALL THEM IN AND SEE IF THEY LIKE THE NOTION.”
One vox call, and a quick camera reroute to patch Gamma and Epsilon in remotely, and my Chorus got their first look at their gift of flesh.
“I’m... speechless,” Alpha said, walking around the tube, looking the skin up and down. “You want us to wear these things? I think I read a wargame where skinsuits over metal skeletons are like an elite unit of psychotic murderbots. You really want us to be murderbots, man? I mean, we can do that, but I’d rather cosplay space marines any day.”
“It’s not like that, I mean I know you aren’t,” Vector said, polishing broken spectacles on his grimy lab coat.
Beta simply offered him an open hand. Vector stared at it.
“Thank you,” Beta said. “I’ve been wanting something like this for a long time.”
Vector shook his hand. “You’re welcome.”
“Can we adjust the features?” Delta said. “I want huge knockers.”
“No.” Gamma said. “Absolutely not.”
“Hey! It’s my womansuit, I get to do what I want with it!”
“I’m calling in the favor you owe me. You can’t have bigger tits than mine.”
“Oh Jesus G, you really want to use that for this? Seriously?”
“FAVOR?”
“Nothing, don’t worry about it,” Gamma and Delta chorused simultaneously.
“Trust me, you don’t want to know,” Alpha confirmed.
“OH-KAY...” I held my gauntlets out, fingers waggling, and shut up.
“It could prove an intriguing experiment,” Epsilon finally spoke up.
“I know, right?” Vector said through the vox. “Both in perception and mentality. I mean, perception of others, and your own mentality, of course.”
“I’ll simply say thank you, Professor, and I think I speak for all of us when I say we accept your gift wholeheartedly.” Gamma stroked his ego, and I smiled to hear it. “Also, I have some reference photos for my skinsuit. I assume they can be modified? And the final product will have hair?”
“Yes, I just have to work on the follicle simulation, and the relevant blastocysts—”
“WELL, HAVE FUN WITH THAT. SHE’S GOING TO LEAVE YOU TO SORT OUT THE DETAILS.” I waved to the three minions in the room and shut off my vox connection to the two who were remoting in. It was time to seek saner company. I went hunting for Khalid.
I didn’t have far to go.
The chamber full of orphaned Damned were happy to point me a few “doors” down, to his workshop. I pushed through the membranes and was immediately thankful for my mask, as toxicity meters flared. I backed out, not knowing if the atmosphere would poison me through my skin, and not willing to take the chance. Instead of risking it I opened a vox channel. “Khalid? What are you doing?”
“Please bide for a minute. I was not expecting company.”
I heard fans whir to life. Still, judging by those toxicity levels, it would take a while to drain. Mercury was pretty high up in there, and I vaguely recalled that as being dangerous as hell to exposed tissues.
I made a mental note to cleanse later, in the shower we’d rigged up. Then I considered that we were in Beaky’s lungs and got even more worried. “Should you be working with that stuff inside Beaky?”
“He is vast, and the dosages are comparatively small. It may perhaps shorten his lifespan by a few years, but he shall not be overly hindered for your purposes.”
Your purposes.
“Our purposes, surely.”
It was a few seconds before he responded. “Yes, that is what I said.”
It hadn’t been, but I let it slide, and in a few minutes he opened the channel once more. “You are safe to enter.”
Vector’s lab space had been woven into the walls, organic piping and tubes resembling something out of H.R. Geiger’s wet dreams. By contrast, this was elegant and spartan, racks of bone hanging from the walls, each with secured vials, beakers, and other glassware. Samples of various elements lay neatly stacked in metal crates
And on a smooth bone altar, covered with cloth woven from human hair, lay Khalid’s sword. It glowed silvery-white, glowed so brightly that it engaged my mask’s flare compensation.
Like too many things I’d seen down here, it gave off unidentifiable energy readings. Magic. Detecting it was one thing, figuring out what it did was another thing completely.
“ANTI-DEMON CHARMS?” I asked.
“Something of the sort.” Khalid sprinkled the length of the blade with salt, muttering under his breath. The light receded, revealing new symbols etched into the metal of the weapon. “This is the best I can do, since angelic invocational formulae are practically useless down here.”
I took a closer look at him. He seemed haggard, worn. There were still stains on his cowl from where he’d shed blood, back during that fight with Judy while she was possessed. His facesucker was new at least, busy pulsing away and filtering the air. I figured he’d trusted it to keep him alive while he was working with the mercury. Speaking of that...
I checked the air once more, registered acceptable contamination levels and sighed. Then I removed my mask. Khalid glanced up at me, brow furrowed as he frowned. “I would not risk that if I were you. Mercury is pernicious.”
“So is insomnia. Have you slept since you came back aboard?”
He looked away, and that was all the answer I needed. I put a hand on his shoulder. “Khalid... whatever you’re doing, it can wait.”
“No. No, it cannot. Or rather, I cannot.” He stepped back, slipped free of my hand. “It gnaws at me, unceasing, a rage I have resisted for many, many years. And I fear what will happen if I give into it. This is my way of quelling it, turning it to something constructive.” He gestured at the blade. “This will serve me better than its previous iteration, the next time I must fight beside you.”
“Khalid, you fought well. Judy almost wrecked Dire single-handedly. If it weren’t for you and Gamma, she would have—”
“I should have been able to handle it,” he interrupted, brows glaring over his symbiote.
I pushed down my own annoyance and stared at him until he dropped his eyes. “We’re still in Wrath, right?” My voice wavered, some of the edge bleeding through. “Because Dire was pretty sure that Pride was two rings down, give or take. And what you’re saying sounds a lot like wounded pride.”
He turned away. I rolled my eyes at his back. Men. Men were starting to get on my nerves more and more often these days.
“What do you know of the Janissaries?” Khalid asked me.
I’d done some research a few years back. “A bit. You were the elite guards to the Ottoman Sultans. All Christians, in a contrast to the dynasty, which was entirely Muslim.”
“This is true. But it is not the whole of the story.”
“You were supposed to be elite troops, fearsome on the battlefield and loyal to a fault. And bureaucrats as well, after you retired.” I frowned. “Never understood that part.”
“It is a bit more complex than that. We were recruited from Christians, some tithed, others given freely because families had extra sons. Others were captured from wars against the local Christians.” He turned around, looked at me, and his eyes were old, old beyond measure. “Some few of us retained our faith, kept it secret. As secret as we could.”
“And the bureaucracy part?”
“Armies run on logistics. Administration is necessary to coordinate that. A lesson that modern armies have well learned, but that was revolutionary back in the pre-Renaissance eras.” It was hard to tell, but the way his
eyes crinkled, he might have been smiling. “Which is why I was spared when the first round of purges came. Because I was one of the few non-corrupt administrators, and I was well-educated and useful.”
Light started to dawn. “And you’re feeling useless right now. You shouldn’t. You’re our occult expert, and without you we’d be up shit creek.”
“And yet in every case, at every time where I have had an opportunity to alter the flow of events I have been either handily defeated or rendered inconsequential.” His eyes were glaring again. Not at me, but past me, at Hell in general perhaps. “I have spent centuries fighting these things and now find that my tactics are entirely ineffective. And it makes me angry.”
I nodded. “Especially because you can’t tell if it’s natural anger or the emotions that this circle pushes upon you.”
He glanced back to me. “Have you been speaking with Beta?”
“No, why?”
“He has listened to me complain more than once. Your android has the patience of a saint. I am glad for his presence.”
I nodded. “He does have a good shoulder to cry on. Not that that’s what you were doing,” I amended hastily. “Of course things are different here than they are there.”
“Yes. But it is more than that. Hell is...” he sighed. “Hell is a necessary evil, we were taught. Just the way things are. A component of the afterlife that God offers salvation and protection from. It is a place where the wicked are punished according to their sins. But...”
“It’s not necessarily so, is it?”
“There is a purpose here, but I am not sure it is God’s, It seems to treat the sinners as inconsequential, which is... disrespectful.” Khalid shook his head. “And that eats at me, when the anger does not.”
I took his shoulders in my hands and pulled him into a hug. The symbiote on his face pulsed and slobbered against my chest, and I ignored it as best I could. After a bit of hesitation, he returned the embrace. “You’re a friend, Khalid. Just because you’ve been having some problems of late doesn’t mean you aren’t necessary. It doesn’t mean you’re useless.” I pulled away and looked down into his eyes, still holding his shoulders. “It just means that we need to start fighting smarter. That Council of Worms? They pulled some nasty tricks on us, and that fight almost went very, very bad. So we need to prepare for the next one, and that sweet, sweet knowledge all locked away in your brain is going to be the key there. In fact, now that we know one major foe is coming, we can start doing that right now.”
DIRE : HELL (The Dire Saga Book 6) Page 19
