by John Conroe
The mutated legs and arms flashed across the floor, like nitrous-powered, armored cockroaches. I grabbed an arm, its needle-sharp legs digging deep into my fist. With a snap that broke the sound barrier, I flicked it up, dislodging it into the air, and then clapped both hands together on it like it was a quarter. My aura-lined hands hit with explosive force and the arm burst into a cloud of black powder.
Grim turned, taking us back out to the guards’ chamber in time to see our bear slam a leg-snake with one massive paw. The snake limb was almost four feet long but ‘Sos’s paw is just about a foot and a half in length. The whole middle of the creature flattened and sort of burst, yet the ends retained their awful life, snapping back up to stab my bear-wolf’s paw with super sharp spikes.
He friggin’ yowled. Almost one ton of bear, making a surprised, deep-toned yowl like some twisted gargantuan alley cat. Very un-bearlike. Then he slammed his paws together, crushing more of the snake thing. And again, spattering more of the twisting, writhing black thing, and yet it still hung on to his paw by its deeply planted spikes.
Suddenly, his form blurred and he became a much smaller wolf, the snake falling from a paw that was now vastly smaller—a paper-plate-sized appendage rather than oversized turkey platter.
The alien snaky thing was battered and broken, yet already I could see it being rebuilt, the length of black shortening as it used its own mass for reconstruction. Wolfish eyes looked at me in confusion, clearly asking for help. I pointed at the small sink along one wall, near a mini fridge, three small cupboards, and a short length of counter complete with espresso machine.
With a snap and a flick, Sos chomped the snake thing and flung it through the air to land in the sink. Grabbing the big jug of hydrochloric acid that was still on the counter, I poured it over the snake. Smoke billowed up instantly as the powerful acid went to work on the thrashing alien. Acid spattered and smoke rose from multiple spots on my clothes.
“Watch yourself,” Senka said in clipped British tones. I pushed away from the sink as Senka flipped one of the arms into the melting mess. I poured more acid on top and got more spatters in return.
“Is coming your way,” Arkady growled, the second carbon-armored leg snake sliding off the blade of the massive bowie he always carried in a back sheath and landing for three points in the smoking sink. I poured acid again, the fumes and acrid smoke starting to fill the room.
Blue light lit up in the far corner and I spun to see two squirrel-sized Omega bots burning bits and pieces of the spattered head. The air in the room was now completely toxic, but I was holding my breath and I think Senka and Arkady were as well. ‘Sos backed out of the room, eyes locked on me. I capped the jug of the acid and waved the two vampires toward the door. Senka was suddenly in front of me, the breeze generated by her movement blowing back the acid smoke for a brief moment.
She darted to the biohazard box containing the alien slug and grabbed its carry handle. She checked that the box lid was shut and latched before turning to look at me, eyes alight with excitement.
I gestured toward the doorway and she gave me a tiny bow before following Arkady’s broad form out of the room. Bursts of blue light continued to flick and glow in the white clouds as I shut the door behind us, sapphire flashes strobing like a nightclub or a cop car. More blue light flashed as the bot on the glass top of Doc Singh’s glove containment box started to burn the two samples.
Outside, I found the guards, Rochat, and my entire team waiting. My phone spoke from my pocket as I looked at Tanya and the twins.
“I am continuing clean-up operations. The atmosphere is currently deadly to humans. Arrangements will need to be made to pump out the fumes and neutralize the remaining acid. Some of the diamondoid armor has survived the acid bath, but appears to be inert. I will deconstruct it. Please note that laser application in the blue spectrum is effective but not as efficient against the diamondoid armor as infrared spectrum wavelengths. I have tried both. The fumes tend to occlude laser light, so lasing must take place at extremely close quarters,” Omega said. “Also, the sink and drain will need serious reconstruction.”
“That was…” Senka began.
“Awful?” Lydia said. “Terrifying?”
“Exciting, dear. It was the most fun I’ve had in ages,” Senka said, ignoring her seven-foot-tall bodyguard, who was dabbing a wet cloth at the few acid spatters she’d received.
Tanya was looking at me, head tilted. When she caught my eye, she pointed first at my torso and then patted her shirt in a half dozen places. I looked down. Smoke was rising off my ruined shirt and pants, gaping holes appearing in the material.
Something flew my way and my left hand caught it automatically before I even looked up. It was a bottle of water. Arkady gave me a grin and I nodded back in thanks. While I splashed myself, I looked over the others to see how everyone fared.
Tanya was holding Wulf, and Nika had Cora, all four of them looking at me with varying degrees of either fascination or mild amusement and just a touch of baby drool. Two fully formed Omega bots, each the size of a border collie, bracketed them, laser and rail gun arms humming with power. Behind them, against the wall, a cluster of micro bots was plugged into the electrical outlet, probably broadcasting power to the rest.
Senka stood with her bodyguard, her eyes animated, her normal poker face shifting through various expressions of mild excitement. Lydia had the twisted remains of the cell door and was straightening the bent steel by hand, ignoring Rochat and his men and their looks of shock. When it was mostly restored, she carried it to the cell and began to wedge and bend it into place.
Seeing a five-foot-nothing girl bend, then carry, a two-hundred pound steel door like it was made of cardboard was having a serious effect on the Swiss Guard soldiers’ worldviews.
“Captain, you’ll want to get that sealed and have the fumes pumped out,” Tanya said to the tall blond soldier. He had to tear his eyes away from Lydia’s hand-to-door construction project, but he nodded and moved to the wall-mounted telephone.
A cell phone started to ring, playing a snippet of what I was pretty sure was Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It came from inside the cell.
We all looked at each other, then Senka started to pat her pockets. “Oh, that’s mine, I suppose. Christian, your clothes are already mostly melted. Be a dear and pop in and get it?” she asked me.
“Unnecessary. I am rerouting the call to Lydia’s phone now,” Omega said, Lydia’s pocket starting to vibrate almost immediately.
She pulled it out and hit the speaker button while looking at Senka, who arched one eyebrow but addressed the call. “Yes?”
“Elder, it is Ilse. The teams you sent out to the other locations have reached check-in time. Two teams have missed the deadline and there is no response to any attempt to communicate with them,” a female voice said with a rich Italian accent.
“Which teams?” Senka asked, looking around the circle we’d quickly formed.
“The San Clemente team disappeared not long after entering the third level, which is the Mithrian section, and we are missing the team that descended under the Basilica of Santi Giovanni e Paolo. Both were four-member teams,” Ilse said.
I looked at the members of our group. “We’ll have to split up. Senka and Arkady take San Clemente, and Lydia, ‘Sos, and I will take Santi Giovanni.”
“I will, of course, accompany both teams. I am preparing more capable avatars,” Omega said. “Some form of portable microwave incinerator will likely be useful.”
I looked at the dog-sized robots, looking like mechanical centaurs with four legs and two weaponized arms. The laser aperture on their arms was as big as a quarter.
Tanya met my eyes with raised eyebrows of her own.
More capable? Microwave incinerators?
“Omega, I’ve been meaning to ask. How is Declan and the others? Are you in contact with them?” I asked.
“They are well. It is a very alien world, but they are adapting with some help f
rom the Moores.”
“Declan keeping his head on straight? No issues?” Tanya asked.
“There is much more free energy or magic available to him. He is coming to grips with it. Stacia is keeping him centered,” Omega said, which really wasn’t a complete answer. After an awkward pause, my vampire shrugged at me and I shrugged back. We had too much going on to press Omega for answers now, but as soon as we caught a breath, I was going to have a whole lot of questions for him.
Chapter 9
Fairie
Mack decided that Ian hadn’t exaggerated one little bit about the boring nature of their jobs. He and his sister had stood for an hour, listening to Ashley speak the dragons’ messages across the giant amphitheater while the two queens and their advisors responded back. At least it was all in English, as Ashley didn’t speak Elvish, although Omega gave them a running translation of the side conversations Zinnia and Morrigan held with their people. The translations came up on Ashley’s iPad, which was propped in front of her the whole time. And the acoustics were so good under the dome that everyone just spoke in regular voices. Gargax watched and listened from his aerie, occasionally glancing at Ashley as the two conversed mentally.
But the negotiations were all about who could fish what part of which oceans and who could raise meat animals in which lands, and what islands in the vast ocean were off-limits to elves, and so forth. Fairie had one massive continent, the Fairie analogue to Pangaea that just never broke up.
The dragons, it seemed, lived on the coastlines and islands out to sea, as a great deal of their food came from the ocean. They ate fish and marine reptiles and mammals as the largest part of their diet, but also consumed herd animals on the plains and in the forests and jungles.
The elves felt the northern and southern forests were their exclusive domains, while the dragons had no tolerance for elven ships upon their seas.
The vast belt of plains that stretched from coast to coast across the temperate zone of the Fairie land mass was contested by all three factions. The dragons hunted the big herbivores that migrated across the flatlands while the elves mostly domesticated them and used them as beasts of burden.
Ian had said that the elves shunned material technology, instead embracing biotechnology to a degree that would stun Earth. They modified the plants and animals of their world to fulfill their needs for transportation, weapons, agriculture, medicine, heat, lights, cooling, and communication. They grew their homes, furniture, and tools. They also modified themselves as well. Made themselves into faster, stronger warriors, administrators with enhanced memories and calculating skills, mediators with empathic talents, telepathic communicators who could connect with their counterparts thousands of miles away.
It’s why Ashley had been grabbed in the first place. They used Earth as a raw material supply center for their biology sciences. Grab humans with psychic gifts and breed, splice, or hack the genes into their own people. But never grab witches. Ever.
“So what happened? That time they grabbed one an eon ago?” Mack had asked Ian not long into the second hour after Jetta had been relieved.
They were guarding the entrance to the balcony where Ashley spoke for the dragons. There was a current lull in the negotiations, and a quiet conversation would just be one of hundreds currently happening under the dome.
“I’ve never heard a straight answer to that question,” Ian said.
“It is generally considered very bad form to discuss that event,” another voice said, and Stocan came around the corner from the hallway that led to Gargax’s aerie. He was carrying a tray of glasses and several beverage pitchers, which he set down on a bench.
“It happened a long, long time ago. Hunters brought a witch child from Earth. It is my understanding that witch clans guard their children well, especially the promising ones. This particular child had been found away from her people, lost in the woods near the portal the Hunters came through,” Stocan said, taking a seat on the bench. “They brought her back and presented her to the queens. Both wanted her and neither was willing to concede her. They fought, sister against sister, Court against Court. Hundreds of elves died in that battle. And more would have but suddenly it was noticed that the witchling was gone. The battle ceased, a truce called while they searched for the girl. The Hunters and Guardians quickly picked up her trail, but when they tracked her to a small village, the citizens rose up and attacked them.”
“It was unheard of—regular people attacking the queens’ warriors. It was a slaughter and when the warriors were done, not a single villager was left alive.”
“Punishment for assaulting soldiers?” Mack asked.
“No,” the tall elf said, shaking his head. “The villagers kept attacking to the last person. It was as if they were driven to do so.”
“Ah, she was likely an Air witch,” Mack said. “They are especially skilled at influencing others.”
Stocan and Ian both turned to look at him with expressions of surprise.
“What? I live with like forty of them,” Mack said.
“And when they found her?” Ian asked.
“The Hunters and Guardians immediately turned on one another, wiping each other out,” Stocan said. “The queens only realized then that it was the witchling, pitting them against each other. So they attempted to use their own powers, but each time, they would find themselves fighting each other. You really live with that many? Do they influence you?”
“Nah, they’d have to be stronger than D…” Mack said but was interrupted by Ian’s sharp cough. “—than each other,” he said, shifting his words rapidly. Stocan just looked confused. “What finally happened?” Mack asked.
“The Hunters and Guardians were called back and the queens retreated to their own realms. Morrigan dispatched her killing Frost and the girl was killed,” Stocan said.
“Witches were banned from Fairie by mutual agreement.”
“Killing frost?” Mack asked.
“He means Neeve. That’s one of her names—the Winter Queen’s Killing Frost or Black Frost,” Ian said.
“She was able to do what the others couldn’t?” Mack asked, slightly disbelieving.
“Morrigan’s Black Frost has never failed. Her blades always bring death,” Stocan said.
“Well, except for Declan,” Mack said, thinking about the story. “That little witch must have had some serious spells.”
“What do you mean… except for Declan?” Stocan asked, suddenly almost in Mack’s face.
“Well she stabbed him once but he electrocuted her and before they could get into it, Ashley intervened. But she seemed to get over it,” Mack said, leaning back a little from the intense elf.
Stocan turned to Ian. “This is true?” he asked.
“Yeah, I saw it happen,” Ian said. “Why?”
“I know of no one who has been bled by Neeve’s living blades who still lives. I have never heard of such a thing,” Stocan said.
“Well there must be others, training partners at the least. I mean, she had her blade to my throat once and it drew a drop of blood, and I’m still here,” Ian said.
Stocan’s eyes got rather large. “Truly? Two of you in one group?”
“What does that mean?” Mack asked.
“I do not know. I will have to think about this and maybe ask one other,” the elf said.
“Ask about what?” Stacia asked, coming down the hall, wolfishly graceful.
“A minor mystery,” Ian said. “You here for Mack’s relief?”
“Yup, and D will be along in an hour to spell you, Ian,” Stacia said.
“Spell him?” Stocan asked, alarmed.
