JT was going to save him.
Someday it would be Buzz saving someone. Someday it would be Buzz who made someone else feel the way JT made Buzz feel now. Buzz broke out in a crazy smile, all the warning Victor needed.
Drone One had survived San Francisco. It was in the back of the truck, close enough JT didn’t need his truck’s amplifier to control it. For all the hate and rage and pain pumping through him, JT wasn’t mindless, he wasn’t an animal. And Drone One could see just fine. JT unloaded with Drone One right into the wizard’s back.
Bullets into snowballs, same trick as before, but JT didn’t care. JT unloaded. JT knew what it was like to be hit by a supersonic snowball. Take a hundred, you traitorous fuck.
Victor flew three meters from all the snow that hit him.
JT stopped firing.
One of Victor’s arms stuck out of the pile of snow, limp and unmoving.
JT huffed on the edge of the pit. He looked at Buzz cowering, all that beautiful fear on his face. Lust and a vague thought to take Buzz sparked through JT. He had defeated the wizard and now here was his prize. Take him. Take him, some part of him said. The idea so instinctive and compelling it was almost enough to distract him from what really mattered. Almost.
“My truck,” JT whined. “My goddess-blessed truck.” It looked no different than before, but all the truck’s conductive surfaces and the nano-engineered gold catalyst in his fuel cells were gone, turned to lead, and the truck was useless now.
“JT.” Buzz tried to pull JT away from his broken truck. JT batted the little guy away. JT wasn’t entirely sure even he could fix it. He’d have to gut the whole thing. Every single electrical component in the whole blessed thing. Victor should have just killed JT. It couldn’t have hurt any worse than seeing his truck like this.
“JT, they’re coming.”
It would feel so good to pop that fucking wizard right in the head. Let’s see how he likes it. He pulled the pistol from the belt of his jeans, smart system autoconnecting, and flipped the safety off.
“JT, the ’copters!”
Something struck his arm, a lame punch from Buzz to get his attention, just as a lashing wind storm kicked up: two Nightshrikes coming over the tree line. That snapped him out of it.
JT grabbed Buzz by the collar and dragged him along as if it had been his idea to run. One Nightshrike opened fire just as they ducked beneath the wooden deck. Wood cracked and splintered. JT and Buzz wove through supports and braces, trying to get as close to the foundation wall of the lodge as they could, so as to put as much deck between them and the bullets as possible, but even down here the air was filled with splinters.
The gunfire stopped as the second Nightshrike landed and disgorged soldiers to follow them. They were kitted out like the ones in San Francisco had been: body armor, smart helmets, QCW-10 submachine guns, and runeblades.
JT and Buzz circled to the downhill side of the lodge and onto yet another deck, one floor lower than the last and overlooking the lake. There were bench seats and fire pits built into it. A full wall of glass sliding doors opened into the lodge. The doors were unlocked. JT and Buzz ducked inside and slid the door closed behind them.
“What are we gonna do?” Buzz panicked as they crawled fast through the lounge they had found. Couches and half walls broke up the space, hiding them from anyone looking in from the deck. Halls led off to conference rooms, glass-walled and covered with vertical blinds for privacy. Outside, they heard bootfalls on the decking. They chose a hallway at random and fled down it. “We’re fucked, JT.”
“We ain’t fucked. We got Drone One. Now all we need is a Nightshrike.”
Five of the Electric Dragon’s 49ers lay dead, and that’s when Austin felt the cold. Tahoe in June was never hot, but this was cold, real cold. It seeped straight to the bone, and a mist that wasn’t there moments ago stirred around his feet.
He pressed against a tree, camouflage hiding him perfectly. He listened. The whine of Nightshrike rotors was dull in the trees. The gunfire back toward the lodge had stopped. That meant JT and Buzz had gone to ground somewhere; they were safe. Or it meant they were dead. JT was two years out of practice, and he’d never been caught in the thick of things anyway. Christ, had Austin just gotten his best friend killed?
No. JT is pro. JT is top bill. JT is fine. Do your job. Listen. The necromancer is here.
An icy breeze came from the other side of the tree. Austin inched his way around it. Bark tugged at the back of his nylon combat jacket.
A man in Chinese robes and jade floated a meter off the ground in the center of a small clearing. He carried his staff of bone capped by a skeletal hand. The hand twitched and its fingers curled and uncurled.
“I can smell you, Austin Shea,” said the Necromancer Owen Ren Leng. His voice was like fingernail scratches on rough paper. The necromancer touched his staff to one of Austin’s victims lying dead on the ground. The corpse twitched and struggled to stand. “Do you see the irony, here? Strike my soldiers down—you only make my army more powerful.”
Yeah, Austin had caught that. Well, they’d smashed him into a cloud of joss paper before, hadn’t they? They could do it again. All Austin needed was a big-ass truck to run him over with.
The necromancer turned in a slow circle, staff in front of him. Owen Ren Leng might have been able to smell Austin, but he still didn’t know where Austin was, and Austin had no intention of giving himself away until he had a plan. It grew colder. Austin’s breath misted. He didn’t know if his camouflage extended to his breath. He breathed as shallowly and slowly as he could.
The dead soldier got his feet under him and swayed. Austin’s other victims emerged from the darkening woods. Zombies with submachine guns. Just fucking great. Austin stayed still as a mouse, hoping to God his camouflage held against whatever senses the undead had.
Joss paper everywhere, Austin thought again. Yes, carefully folded and tucked beneath cloth and jade, the necromancer’s hands and fingers were made of paper. His neck was made of paper. Owen Ren Leng wasn’t human at all. He was a ghost inhabiting a body made from hell money.
Hell money was meant to be burned.
Austin nocked an arrow and swung out from hiding. He loosed a rope of orange flame. Without looking, he knew he hit. Austin always hit. He ran, circling wide. Second arrow: rope of flame. They might not have been able to see him, but they could see the flame every time he shot. Gunfire incoming. Roll. Rattle of submachine guns. Bark flew and the air went thick with pine scent. Third arrow, fire-blossom, zombie gunfire behind him. Keep moving, keep moving. Fourth arrow, his last. Behind a tree, he caught his breath and dared to look.
Three thin streams of fire ran the paths Austin’s arrows had flown. They crossed like a burning asterisk or the beginnings of a spider’s web or 3djinn’s logo. Pinned, run-through three times in the asterisk’s center was the Necromancer Owen Ren Leng. The fourth arrow burned, caught in the hand of the necromancer’s staff, the Withered Arm of some Chinese Hell King. Austin counted that as a hit. The necromancer’s elaborate robes began to smolder. Small fires caught all over him. The necromancer hissed and writhed like a snake, but that didn’t set him free; all it did was start more little fires as the flaming ropes twisted around him.
Then the necromancer breathed icy breath on the arrow grasped in the staff’s skeletal hand. The arrow frosted over. Its fire guttered and died. There was a crackle in the air and the fog became thicker. The fiery ropes flickered and went out. The patches of flame on his robes and where paper had caught faltered and died.
Frost swirled out from Owen Ren Leng and glazed the ground. It ran in lacy patterns everywhere and swept beneath Austin’s feet. Austin had walked barefoot nearly all his life—cold concrete, snow, ice, he was used to—but this frost was nothing like that. This frost struck him numb. He leapt away. It didn’t matter whether the necromancer could see him; the frost was thickening, the cold was everywhere. He had to get out of here.
He needed more
power; more than he could draw from the land or a stone. Enough power to create a conflagration Owen Ren Leng couldn’t extinguish with his deathly cold. And Austin knew just where to get it.
“A Nightshrike?” Buzz said. “JT, I’m never going to be able to hack that system. Not on the fly like this. It’s military-grade encryption, and I don’t have a back door.”
They were hunkered beneath a conference table in one of the glass rooms, whispering. Their entry into the room had stirred up enough breeze to make the vertical blinds sway. JT watched them, wishing they’d stop.
“Right,” JT said. “So we need a direct patch into their system. And you’re not going to do it; I am.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“Grab one of those soldiers.”
“By yourself? Are you nuts?”
“I ain’t risking you.”
“Very fucking noble. By which I mean stupid. You’ll have to keep him conscious and you’ll have about a tenth of a second to take over his system and shut him out of his own hardware. He ain’t going to just stand there while you do that.”
And of course Buzz was right, but that wasn’t the point. And he was going to explain that, but Buzz put one hand on JT’s shoulder. It felt good there. “I helped you before, didn’t I?” Buzz said.
“Yeah, but—” JT thought of blue fire. He thought of how he’d frozen seeing Buzz go into his trance back at the apartment. And this plan here, this was a whole hell of a lot more dangerous than hacking the Bay Area Traffic Net.
“I’m not a kid, JT. I told you, I’m done with working in the background. I can do this, and you . . . it’s not really your thing. I mean you’re not terrible, not with out-of-box configurations, but—”
JT shushed him. The hallway went darker. Someone had moved into it and was blocking the light filtering in from outside. The blinds had almost stopped swaying. But the soldiers would be moving in pairs at the very least, low-light, UV, and IR vision all slaved to their smart-guns. There was no way to hide from them, blinds swaying or still. And, heavy as it looked, this table they were under would probably only stop the first few bullets before it all blew into splinters.
“Fine,” JT said. He gave Buzz a quick kiss so awkward one tusk nicked Buzz’s ear. Buzz was 3djinn, he told himself. Buzz was every bit as good as Roan had been. (But Roan had died. No, don’t think about that.)
JT had maneuvered Drone One inside through a side door on the floor above them. It was a minute away, but that was a guess. He brought it down a staircase, clumsy as hell. Next drone he built would have six legs, not four.
Shadows grew and faded as the soldiers in the hall went door to door. Across the lodge, Drone One descended step by step. Buzz produced a patch cable from one of the pockets of his shorts. He flipped aside hair and plugged the cable into a skull jack. He worried the other end in his hand. They stayed crouched beneath the conference table, wheeled chairs around them.
Drone One made the bottom of the stairs. JT moved it down the hall, not quite sure how to get through the maze of shaded rooms to the one where they were hiding. Drone One wasn’t subtle at all. Its legs clunked on the rug-strewn floors, and it was going to draw attention before JT wanted it to.
Buzz was sweating, anxiety like the bouquet of a wine. JT blew the scent out from his nose. He checked his smart pistol, marked Buzz as friendly.
Shadows at the door. The handle turned.
Somewhere in the lodge, a pair of Electric Dragon soldiers rounded a corner and saw Drone One.
“Shit,” JT said. The soldiers opened fire on the drone. Bullets pinged off nano-engineered steel and ceramic plating and the glass walls all around it shattered from reflected shots.
The handle stopped turning. The soldiers outside the door were going to run toward the gunfire and join the rest of their squad. It would ruin everything.
JT dropped the pistol, hefted the entire table, and ran it like a mahogany battering ram. He plowed straight through the door and shattered the wall. Aluminum framing folded like cardboard. Two 49ers folded like cardboard. JT tripped on debris and hurled the table through the far wall of the hall even as he crashed to the glass-strewn floor, right alongside one of the soldiers. The soldier swung his QCW-10 around, and JT wrenched it out of his hand and flung it down the hallway. The soldier tried to draw his sword. JT pounced, swinging wild and hard as he could. The soldier’s helmet absorbed everything, so JT tore the helmet off, ripping though nylon and snapping plastic. Beneath it was a young man, nose bloodied.
Buzz shouted, “Fuck! The gun ain’t working! JT!”
The second 49er flung the table off her and brought up her QCW-10. JT leapt away, but there wasn’t a bit of ground not covered in some broken thing, and JT stumbled again. He tangled in the cords of a set of blinds, and pulled the whole damn thing down on top of him when he fell. Bullets tore through the space he’d been in.
The soldier cast her gun aside and pulled her sword. It burst into flame, and its edges went red, then orange hot.
Buzz cussed up a storm and tried to fire JT’s gun again, but it was slaved to JT and wouldn’t do what Buzz wanted. JT fired it for him. Buzz yelped and dropped it, surprised. The helmetless soldier had been in a bad spot and fell dead with two holes in his head.
A flaming sword swept too near Buzz’s throat. Buzz squealed and tried to fall back, but the soldier grabbed Buzz by the neck with one hand and lifted him off the ground as if he weighed nothing at all. Buzz’s face went instantly purple, and he made a horrible noise. The soldier hauled her sword back to gut him.
JT dropped a loop of cord around the soldier’s neck and pulled tight as he fucking could. The soldier dropped both Buzz and her sword and clawed at the cord on her throat. She clawed at JT. The soldier’s right arm was mechanical and strong as fuck. It clamped down around JT’s wrist and would have snapped it clean if the angle had been better. JT yanked the cord harder. “Buzz,” JT hissed, gritting his teeth. The mechanical hand closed tighter. It would crush his wrist. “Buzz!”
No one being strangled thought about network security. They thought about getting air and getting free. Buzz snapped his patch cable into the soldier’s helmet jack.
“Her arm,” JT said, “Shut down her fucking arm!”
Buzz did more than that. The soldier dropped unconscious in JT’s arms. The hand on JT’s wrist relaxed.
“Got her,” Buzz said, happily, hoarsely, eyes slightly unfocused. Then his eyes went wide and very focused. “Oh shit. They’ve got—” and Buzz collapsed to the floor.
Austin sprinted, threading trees. Owen Ren Leng followed, sailing airborne. His gold-and-red robes billowed behind him. Austin was certain the necromancer couldn’t see him, but either the heat of Austin’s body or simply the fact that Austin was alive called the necromancer to him, sight or no sight.
Frost chased Austin. It glazed trees and turned the soft carpet of pine needles into knives. Austin would have left bloody footprints behind him if he weren’t constantly calling on the land to cover his passing. Had he finished his own studies as a druid instead of following a more violent path, maybe the spirit of this place would have accepted his blood as a sacrifice. He prayed that the unknown spirit might anyway. One never knew.
Zombies chased also. These weren’t the slow kind of zombies Owen Ren Leng had created before. These ran on all fours, howling like they were possessed by hounds, trailing their own blood and gore behind them. The necromancer whirled his Withered Arm over his head, spurring them ever faster.
Austin burst from the woods out onto the gravel lot. Overhead, two Nightshrikes swung around the lodge house. A squad of Electric Dragon soldiers sprinted low across one of the lodge’s many decks. That meant JT was still alive and kicking ass. Austin raced toward the soldiers faster than anything other than a fox had a right to go. His camouflage flickered gray gravel, trees, and sky as he ran. Undead chased after him.
Austin drew one final draft of power from the land, and he leapt four meter
s onto the lodge deck and plowed right through the line of soldiers. The zombie hounds dug unnatural claws into wood and hurtled themselves after him. The soldiers panicked at the sight of their dead brethren transformed, mauled, and eyes glowing green, and they opened fire on them, chewing through ballistic cloth and reanimated flesh. The zombies fell on them, enraged and uncaring who they slaughtered. Owen Ren Leng swept up and over them all, fighting for control over the butchery beneath him. And Austin slipped past it all, unseen.
“Buzz!” JT shouted. His blood went cold and his stomach knotted and he couldn’t breathe right. He couldn’t move. He could only stare down at Buzz sprawled out on the floor. No, he told himself. No, he’s not dead. He’s okay. It’s a hacker’s trance, is all. There’s no smoke, no reddening of the skin from internal burns, none of that awful smell of burnt hair and burnt electronics. None of that. He’s okay. He’ll be okay as long as I don’t stand here like an idiot.
He dropped the soldier in his arms and knelt by Buzz. Buzz whispered words too fast and too quiet to follow. Beneath closed lids, his eyes darted like he was in REM sleep. JT felt his pulse at his neck. It was racing, but not dangerously so. The Electric Dragon had brought a network specialist of their own, and Buzz was deep in the Nightshrike’s cyberspace fighting for his life. JT grabbed the patch cord, thumb on the tab that held it in place. He almost pulled it. Probably, he should have pulled it. Instead he let go.
He tore the helmet off the unconscious soldier and fit it over Buzz’s head and fastened the chin strap. He tucked the excess patch cord down Buzz’s T-shirt so it wouldn’t tangle or catch. And he hefted Buzz over his shoulder like he was a buck sixty of nothing. All JT had to do was keep Buzz safe and let Buzz do the rest.
Down the hall, grenade canisters clacked against a wall and spewed thick gas. JT ran down the hall, away from the gas, knowing that was exactly what they wanted him to do.
The druid’s circle was a modern one, its granite stones precision cut by a water saw, one by three by nine. The circle was open on the quarter that faced the lodge. The rest of it was covered by a series of lintel stones. It seemed like poor placement for a circle, Austin thought, since trees would block out the star lines, but the sloping altar stone in the center had been well-used. In the forty-odd years since the Awakening, sacrifices had left the altar streaked with dark stains. He hoped these druids were Reformed and not Boudican Adventists. The thought that the power he was about to draw upon might have come from ritually murdered people made Austin queasy.
The Glamour Thieves Page 11
