DIRE : HELL (The Dire Saga Book 6)

by Andrew Seiple

  ...but he didn’t spare me a second look, turning and zooming toward Pagliacci.

  ….Who dodged him, leaping up and grabbing the iron auger, before crawling up it like a greasepaint-and-blood-coated spider.

  “What drives you, fallen hero?” Pagliacci called over his shoulder, with a wicked cackle. I swear to gods, he was enjoying this.

  Damned if I’d let him upstage me in front of a hero.

  “SHE TRIED TO DO THIS THE EASY WAY. SO BE IT! YOU FACE DOCTOR DIRE NOW, AMERICAN PARAGON! AND THE MAN WHO KILLED YOU?” I cranked up the particle cannon. “SHE FUCKING BEAT HIM!”

  “Wait, what?” He turned just as my particle beam caught him, blasting him across the cavern, arms flailing... until he slowed. Stopped.

  My particle cannon chimed warnings in my HUD. I focused the beam, landed on the platform, rerouted power as I blazed away at him...

  ...and he waded through it, taking it all on his chest, grunting and powering through it.

  Paragons.

  This was what they did.

  Then the cannon chimed and blew a breaker. The beam flickered, dropped to half strength, and he was on me. I threw the useless gun away when he grabbed for where my breastplate met my mask, and lifted me into the air. “You lie!” He shouted, getting right up in my mask—

  —and froze as First Whisper slid her hands onto his bare shoulders and pressed herself against his back. “Uh,” he managed.

  “You don’t really want to hurt us,” she whispered into his ear, moments before nibbling it. I saw her wince when her scarred side brushed him, but she held my gaze with pleading eyes.

  I couldn’t nod, so I gave her a thumbs up.

  “Why don’t you put her down?” Whisper whispered. Dazed, Paragon dropped me.

  “GET CLEAR!” I commanded her. I knew something about Paragon, something she didn’t. But she didn’t listen, as her hands stroked up and down his sides, running along his chest, dipping lower...

  “He’s breaking the spell!” The Cat howled at her, and she barely had time to jerk back and away before the hero turned, murder in his eyes.

  Just as I’d known he would. The American Paragon was famous for being able to resist mind control.

  “That’s enough of that, young lady!” He thundered at her, clapping his hands and blowing her off the ledge. He darted after her before she could hit the lava, caught her by the leg, and swung her around with a heavy CRACK as she hit the stone. She lay still. She could have maybe survived that, I supposed, but by then I was darting to the side, putting the iron ram between me and him.

  “Pssst!” I slowed, glanced over to where The Cat was perched on top of the ram, trying to get my attention.

  “Get off me, you clown!” I heard the paragon yell from below. Okay, I had a few seconds.

  “WHAT?”

  “He felt hopeful, when you said you beat Short Dinner. He really wants to believe you.”

  “SCHWARZER RITTER?”

  “Whatever.”

  The Cat’s mental powers weren’t any sort of mind control, so I could believe they had worked here.

  Crazy laughter swirled up from below, followed by the crunch of bones, and fists meeting flesh. The paragon was holding back, I could tell, because Pagliacci was still laughing. He was buying me time. And in the seconds before he fell silent, I thought through the ramifications of what The Cat had said... and how I could use it.

  “THAT’S RIGHT!” I bellowed, as The Cat fled. “DIRE DID WHAT YOU COULD NOT! SHE BEAT SCHWARZER RITTER AND SAVED TESLA FROM HITLER! SHE SINGLE HANDEDLY WON THE WAR FOR THE ALLIES, NOT THAT THOSE INGRATES WOULD EVER ADMIT IT!”

  A pause from below. Then that spit-curled, lantern-jawed face looked up. “Wait. You mean to tell me the Nazis didn’t win the war?”

  “THEY LOST IN FORTY-FIVE. ONCE SCHWARZER RITTER HAD BEEN FREED FROM HIS MIND CONTROL IN FORTY-THREE, THE NAZIS WERE LOST WITHOUT THEIR EQUALIZER. THE GOOD GUYS WON.”

  He stared, wide-eyed, and I saw tears start at the corners of his eyes. “They told me we’d lost. That Hitler was running the world now.”

  “THEY LIED.”

  The American Paragon turned to glare at Shudderworm’s back. “Yes. Yes, they did.”

  Two minutes later, after absolutely every last worm that wasn’t my pet turncoat had been ripped in half or hurled into the lava far below, we managed to talk the American Paragon out of killing the newly-promoted First Worm.

  We collected the amazingly still-breathing Pagliacci, who at this point was basically a bag of broken bones and sat on the iron skyscraper for a proper pow-wow. I filled American Paragon in on how we’d ended up here, and what we were doing about it.

  “...SO THAT’S THE STORY. WE’RE EITHER GOING TO LEAVE HELL OR END UP SITTING UPON ITS THRONE BEFORE THIS IS ALL SAID AND DONE.”

  “Satan might have a thing or two to say about that,” said American Paragon.

  “YOU KNOW, SHE READ A COMIC BOOK ONCE. IT HAD A PICTURE OF YOU PUNCHING OUT HITLER ON THE FRONT OF IT.”

  “I’m sad to say that never happened, Ma’am. Though not for lack of trying.”

  “WANT TO DUPLICATE THAT POSE WITH THE DEVIL INSTEAD OF HITLER?”

  He scratched his chin, and smiled. “I think I’m happy to be aboard, if you’ll have me.” The fallen legend shook my hand, refraining from crushing it into paste.

  “SPEAKING OF ABOARD, WHAT’S THE STATUS OF OUR REMAINING STRIGES?” I glanced over to Alpha.

  “They’re playing keep away with the dragon. Gamma and Epsilon are coordinating, every time he starts getting close to one of them, the other will draw it off. The thing’s stupid, so it’s working pretty well.”

  “HOW LONG CAN THEY KEEP IT UP?”

  Alpha shrugged. “Until they run out of food for the Striges, probably. A few weeks, at most. Maybe a month.”

  I looked down to the massive auger we were sitting on, then smiled underneath my mask. “RIGHT. FIRST STEP IS TO REBUILD THE VOX BOOSTER, THAT’LL BE A FEW HOURS, USING THE SCRAPS THE WORMS STOLE FROM US.”

  “The first step usually implies a second step,” Vector offered.

  I tapped one of my multi-tools on the iron of the auger and smiled at the sound. “THEY JUST HANDED US A HELL OF A LOT OF RESOURCES AND AN IMMENSE SMELTING FACILITY. WE ARE GOING TO HAVE SOME FUN, HERE...”

  CHAPTER 17: WRATH FADES, ENVY FESTERS

  “In-party conflict happens, sometimes. A good Monster Master knows to stay out of it.”

  --Excerpt from the second book of the Chronicles of the Shared Lie; The Monster Master’s Methods

  Back in the ring of Sloth, under the influence of unseen forces that made us procrastinate and fiddle around, it had taken us weeks to build a basic setup for Beaky. We’d spent days building a bathhouse, for heck’s sake.

  It had been worth it, but that wasn’t the point.

  The point was that I’d unconsciously been sandbagging, earlier. And while Wrath ground on you, it also made a pretty good motivator. I poured my frustration into industry, with the help of a very concerned geomantic demon, my metahumans both dead and living, and the three members of the Chorus I had on hand.

  And, oh, a few hundred Damned ex-slaves. The first project on the agenda had been to free them from that collapsed cave-in, and recruit the ones running around and hiding in the tunnels. For the most part, they were agreeable. They literally had nothing else to do, and if they wandered off into the unknown, something would probably eat them for all eternity, or they’d fall into lava and be fucked over for at least a couple of millennia.

  In any case, we had the hands; I had the technology, and thanks to Shudderworm and his recently-deceased crew, we had the materials.

  Oh gods, did we ever have the materials. They’d collected the resources of a small country, all in one place for my harvest.

  And by the time Gamma radioed in, letting me know that her Strix was starting to lose speed, we were ready to go.

  “LURE THAT BIG STUPID BEAST TO SECTOR SIX-ONE-FOUR,” I
belted from my throne. Around me, riveted steel walls stretched out around the bridge. Two viewing ports provided a panoramic view of the vast vertical cavern around me. The Chorus stood along the wall, interfaced with my new lair’s wi-fi. The lower decks held the Damned, the various labs and workshops we needed, and our cargo.

  Everything else was machinery to power my penultimate achievement.

  The Direnaut Mark II.

  “JANISSARY, CYCLE THE REACTORS!” I called through the vox.

  “On it!’

  “VECTOR, GET READY FOR THE PRESSURE SHIFT!” This far down we had a life support system made of fungus, vat-tissue bladders, and some sort of cooling rig with blobby veins that sprawled throughout my steel giant.

  “Yes, fine, whatever.” He’d been pissy lately. I needed to find out why. Pissy, mad scientists were problems.

  “JUDY! PARAGON! START YOUR ENGINES!”

  “Ready an’ willin’!”

  “Yes Ma’am!”

  Really big treadmills. No shit. It was simple; it used the immense amount of force they could bring to bear to good effect, and it was something they could keep up for pretty much fucking forever. My main engines were two metahumans. The fusion generator was just there as a backup, to keep the electronics going in the event that brute force failed.

  Once Gamma and Epsilon radioed in that the dragon was in position, I threw the switch.

  And twenty-two stories worth of robot thundered to life.

  So impractical. So very very much a bad idea, at least on Earth. It was a big target, decidedly un-nuke-proof, actually kind of under-armored for its size, and with way too many weak points that heroes could punch for extra damage.

  But then, we weren’t on Earth, were we?

  This was my magnum opus, my statement to Hell and all its denizens that I was going to personally come over and fuck them up, regardless of what was in my way. It was both a warning that I was coming that could be seen from miles away and a luxury lair that would see me and mine to the end of Hell and out of it. And gods help any who got in my path!

  We surged upwards, banks of gravitic compensators humming to life, powered by the treadmill generators manned by American Paragon and Punching Judy. It was a mighty leap that punched through the ceiling of the cavern, and carried us up and out of the tunnels.

  I monitored the gravitics as we went, adjusting madly as we soared to a stop kilometers away, then punched them up to full when we touched down. We sunk a few meters into the ground, but not enough to break through into the smaller caverns below.

  And on the horizon, the dragon took notice. The Striges who were doing their exhausted best to stay equidistant to the big predator made a beeline for me, just as planned, then broke off once they were sure I held its attention.

  It would have to be bored after fruitlessly chasing those tiny meat-snacks for weeks. Here was something interesting and shiny to look at! What would it taste like?

  “Come on you son of a bitch,” I whispered under my mask, bringing up sensor arrays and watching calculations scroll by. I moved the Direnaut while I watched, getting us well away from the tunnels, leaping and bounding with gravitics enhanced speed and lightness. I had to wait until two conditions were satisfied; The first being that we were on ground that could bear our weight. The second was to ensure the Striges were clear before firing, otherwise they’d become hellspawn paste.

  The dragon closed fast, but we were faster, and just as he drifted over the remnants of the tunnels, I hissed between my teeth. “Gotcha!”

  “Now!” Alpha shouted, and I hammered the big red button that I’d put in place for just this occasion.

  Instantly our gravitic generators stopped supporting us, and as a result thousands of tons of steel, composite ceramic, impact gel, and circuitry settled with a groan onto the Direnaut’s wide feet, sinking dozens of meters into the stony scree below.

  The air rippled and literally tore, wind screaming to the side as I focused all our gravitic manipulation from here to there.

  The dragon relied on its powers to move, to exist, to fly. It was built to withstand pressures equivalent to the earth’s core.

  But it relied upon gravity being a constant.

  I watched a look of reptilian alarm spread over the dragon’s face, as for the first time in existence its powers ceased to support it—

  —and the thing screamed as it fell, crashing into and through the broken rocky ground, spraying lava as it sunk down into the tunnels below and kept going.

  I kept the high-grav zone going for another few minutes, and then we watched.

  “Popcorn?” Beta offered.

  “NOW WHERE DID YOU GET THAT?” I said, as I accepted the small woven-hair-and-bone basket, filled to the brim with popped kernels. Then a thought made me pause; “THESE AREN’T ACTUALLY KERNELS, ARE THEY?” For the next month or two, we couldn’t eat plants. Not until we’d dealt with Buer.

  “No, they’re all actually meat. As to where it came from, Professor Vector got bored a few days ago.”

  I shrugged, looked around, and decanted from my suit. We’d won, even if the dragon didn’t know it yet. So I enjoyed popcorn-like poppers while I waited for the dragon to be a dragon.

  After a few more minutes the dragon’s head rose above the level of the vast crater. A smaller-scale satan for a smaller-scale fall, I supposed. I popped it in the eyes with the Direnaut’s freeze-ray.

  That got its attention. A native to a ring of Hell where the heat was downright volcanic, the dragon was used to hanging out in planetary cores. Cold would be a stranger to it. And though its heat aura meant that ice couldn’t form, it would still probably either hurt or annoy it.

  It shook its head, sending dust howling to either side, trying to dodge the alien sensation. I kept on it, shooting the various eyes in turn, and when it opened its mouth, I froze its tongue as well.

  Entirely pissed off, the thing roared so loudly that nearby mountains crumbled. Then started to clamber out of the pit—

  —so I brought back the heavy-gravity zone.

  It disappeared down the pit so quickly, it thumped its chin on the edge before it dropped.

  Again, I gave it a few more minutes and munched popcorn.

  Six times it popped its head up over the edge, and six times I gave it what for. Then after half an hour passed with no activity, I nodded. “It’s over. Ring the dinner bell and call in the Striges.”

  I hadn’t even had to deploy the heat-resistant nanites. They’d been designed, with Vector’s help, to get into its nervous system and shut it down from the inside. Probably wouldn’t kill it, but it wouldn’t be doing much for a few decades. Ah well, I’d save those for another dragon, if I ran into one.

  I returned to my suit, while Alpha and Beta worked the buttons that extruded the spikes from the Direnaut’s shoulders. Most of them held impaled remnants of the worm demons and several of Vector’s vat-grown cattle substitute. Enthralled, and encouraged by the first food they’d seen in forever, the Striges made a beeline for the mecha’s shoulders, settling on it like giant fleshy shoulderpads, birds and nests combined.

  It was kind of grotesque, when you saw it in action. But for me, that was a stroke in its favor. Grotesque was the norm down here, in fact, the more fearsome the better. I wanted something that would make demons crap their kilts when they saw it thundering down on it and having shoulders full of raptory, fire-breathing heads was more or less a bonus.

  “She really, really wanted to fight it and punch it in its stupid dragon face,” I explained over the vox to my teammates. “But eh, it really wasn’t a foe. More of a force of nature. So there’s an anticlimactic end for the dumb brute. Crouching in a hole, whimpering, hoping the bad thing goes away.”

  “Oh, so you’re not getting any satisfaction from this?” Gamma asked, as the doors to the bridge hissed open, and she strolled out of the turbolift.

  “Well, Dire didn’t say that.” I finished the last of the popcorn and handed the basket back to Bet
a. “Trash can. How did we get this far into designing a facility without trash cans?”

  “I’ll run it down to the incinerator.” The pale android smiled. He smoothed his tunic and exited.

  Though I’d never bring it up, I was privately very glad that my androids were back in a situation where they could wear clothes again. They were my kids, and I really didn’t want to stare at them naked.

  “All right. Time to get this show on the road.” I opened the intercoms so that everyone on board could hear me. “People, we’ve come a long way. And we’re going to go longer still. We are going to leave the Wrathlands within three days, barring bad luck, then it’s into Envy.” I took a breath. “And then on to Dis, where it rests on the border of Envy and Pride.

  “We will take Dis. We will shatter its iron walls, with our own colossus of iron, and lay it low. We shall stand before the gates of Lucifer’s domain, and there we shall call him to task. And he shall see reason, or Dire shall make him see reason. One way or another, we shall leave Hell.

  “We’ll reach Dis in a month. Do what you must to prepare. And remember, no matter what happens, the demons who survive shall remember the day of our arrival and tremble!”

  I cut off the intercom, took a deep breath.

  Wrath had nearly gotten me killed. Envy... I didn’t know what the emanations from Envy would do to me. Hopefully I would be able to detect and overcome the foreign emotions, like I had these.

  We made our way across the plains, moving far faster than a mecha this size had any right to. Occasionally we had to shut down for maintenance. I’d had plenty of raw materials to work with but not everything. That was becoming a common refrain here in Hell. Never enough or too much of what you didn’t need.

  But as we went, tension eased. I found myself lying awake less, dwelling less on old grudges. I walked among the crew and teammates aboard the Direnaut, unmasked, sharing in their relief and laughing with their joy. I caught back up with my Romans, with Juno, with the other Damned that I’d been distant from for the last month.

  I hadn’t known them for long, but... looking back at my life, I hadn’t known anyone for long. Most of my relationships were forged in the fires of crisis and violence, why should the ones down here be any different?