She almost laughed.
These were not Sitnikov’s words. They were his orders. She could feel the disconnect between what he said and what he actually thought as a great, hollow space between each word.
“And the Horde? And the Qwm and the other sects? What of their threat to state security? I have much I need to tell my controllers.”
“We are your controllers,” Podolski said at last. His voice was flat and empty of fellow feeling. “You will brief us before you leave.”
“That will take some time,” Karin warned, thinking of all she now knew, of all that Pr’chutt un Threshrendum could tell them.
“We had best begin then,” Sitnikov said almost in apology. “Hooper is already in New York. He arrived with Agent Trinder three hours ago.”
“Trinder! He works with Trinder now and you expect me to cultivate him? OSCAR attempted to capture me and Trinder tried to kill me a few days ago.”
“Things change,” said Podolski.
“Not men like him,” she shot back.
Sitnikov went on in his calm, unhurried fashion. “Colonel, we need you to assess Hooper. You will make the decision as to whether he is regarded as a potential ally against this Horde, or just another threat to the Federation. I remind you, Colonel, that as fearsome as these creatures seem, they are still bugaboos from the Dark Ages. Medieval fright puppets. They fight with bows and arrows and swords. They wear chain mail. Mostly.”
“I wish they would wear more,” Podolski interjected.
“Indeed,” Sitnikov agreed. “As terrible a scourge as they might once have been, Comrade Colonel, one American nuclear warhead could do infinitely more damage to the Rodina than a massed army of these things. And the Americans now have another weapon. This Hooper. We consider it significant that he has passed from civilian control into the hands of OSCAR.”
“Very significant,” said the other man.
“We are aware of intense competition amongst the various security services in this country to secure Hooper for themselves. They see him for what he is. A weapon. You will first determine whether this new weapon is likely to be turned on us,” Sitnikov continued, “and if so, how we might defend ourselves against it.”
Karin sipped at her glass of tea.
“I would hope I was our first defense against him,” she said. “Were he to become a threat it would be my duty, surely?”
The two officers seemed satisfied with that, the Defense Ministry official especially so.
“That is good, Comrade Colonel,” Podolski said. “Because if you conclude that Hooper poses such a danger, you are to terminate him. Immediately. I give you this order now. Please acknowledge.”
Karin put down her tea and snapped to attention.
“Yes sir, Comrade General. It will be done. But what of Clearance? The FBI. Even the New York police? I am still a fugitive in this country.”
Sitnikov waved away the suggestion of any problem.
“Comrade General Podolski is here in America to specifically negotiate your free passage and ongoing cooperative arrangements to meet the common threat. The Americans have been greatly unsettled by the bugaboos. They have agreed in principle to set aside the issue of your previous operations. We do not expect Trinder will be an obstacle. He is to—”
Sitnikov froze.
###
Karin stared at him, waiting, but not for long, because it was not long before she realized the third secretary had not paused to gather his thoughts, or been distracted by something else in the room. He had not stopped talking. He had just stopped.
Everything had stopped. The two men were frozen as though caught in a photograph. Karin darted a look behind her, but saw only the drawing room in which they conversed. The double doors were shut. She hurried over to the windows and quickly scanned the street outside. Her heart lurched. The city seemed trapped in some magical binding spell.
She shook her head and shivered, forcing acceptance to come. With acceptance she could move forward.
But it was hard.
Of all the nonsense and borderline psychosis of the last week, nothing had threatened to twist her head clean off like this. Trinder’s raid? That was business. The attack of the Threshrend? Yes, that was admittedly deeply strange. But in the end, the daemon was an animal of sorts; sentient, evil, from another world, but a creature nonetheless and one she had slain with her own hands. The enchanted sword? The psychic powers? These things too were deeply unusual and unsettling. But they were not unimaginable. What little girl has not imagined herself a princess with a magic wand? How many stupid books and movies have turned on fantasies of a sixth sense, or some other extrasensory potential. The American author Stephen King had made himself richer than the Tsar with such foolishness.
But this?
The whole world in stasis?
Karin felt herself unmoored and floating away from any connection to reality. Sitnikov and Podolski still stood behind her, but now they were as wax dummies. Not lifeless, but utterly motionless.
“Comrade Secretary? Comrade General?”
Her voice was irresolute. Not yet frightened, but not at all confident. She returned to them and examined her glass of tea. It was hot and liquid. She had been half-expecting a frozen or gelatinous mass. Instead she sipped at it and found it to be no different. Perhaps a little cooler, but then it would have cooled just slightly since she had last taken a drink.
Next Karin carefully placed her fingers against the pulse in Sitnikov’s throat. There was none, and yet there could be no doubt that the warm flesh under her touch still lived.
Quickly now, Karin retrieved Sorrow from where she had rested her against the empty fireplace. The song of the enchanted weapon was unchanged. The fallen soul which animated the spirit of the blade had not deserted her. But the rest of the world had. Back at the tall windows, Karin could see the city outside still frozen. Except for a lone, blackclad figure striding up the road towards the building.
Hooper.
He was dressed in the tactical uniform of an American special weapons officer. He wore a fighting knife strapped to one leg and a pistol holster on the other side. And he carried before him the war hammer with which he had fought in New Orleans.
“Shit,” she breathed.
Was he responsible for this? Had he somehow stopped the world so that he alone might pass through it. He and Varatchevsky. It would explain the great speed with which he appeared to move on the video from New Orleans. Karin watched him, searching for the carrier wave of his thoughts and…
SHIT!
She recoiled from the force and clarity of psychogenic energy coming off him. This was not like reading other men. It was awful.
This brutish-looking man advancing on her with malign intent had been sent by Donald Trinder. To capture or kill her, no matter what. His mind roiled and contended within itself, but that did not surprise Karin Varatchevsky. Until a few days ago this Hooper had been a normal, if unpleasant human being. But he had fallen in amongst monstrs and now moved in company with men whose schemes were far beyond his limited abilities to comprehend.
She shut out as much of the emotion and as many of the jumbled, irrational thoughts radiating from him as she could. It was like trying to think in the middle of competing rock concerts. Hooper’s signal died away, never disappearing completely, but fading enough that she could think clearly again.
She laughed, a short bitter sound.
Podolski was going to be both very happy and very unhappy.
He had been confirmed in his belief that Hooper was a threat and needed to be put down.
Her first thought was to find a gun. She raced out of the drawing room, the double doors banging open behind her. After wasting precious time running up and down the second floor corridor, she cursed herself and descended the main staircase to the two uniformed men who guarded access to the upper floors. They were as still and lost in time as Sitnikov and Podolski. But they were not armed as she had hoped.
Sh
e could hear Hooper in the reception area now. There was no time left to find the armory and Karin had no idea whether a relatively complex system like a machine pistol, or even a simple semi-automatic would fire when she needed it. A pity, but she would have to fall back on her own resources. Hurrying back upstairs as quietly as possible, she stopped and moved a small table with a vase of flowers away from the wall, creating a small visual glitch in the long and elegant corridor, something that would draw the eye and invite consideration, hesitation. She would only need a fraction of a second.
She left open the doors to the room in which she had been meeting with her superiors. They too should draw Hooper’s attention at the moment when she needed. She took up her station in the room across the corridor, angling herself just out of sight.
He was coming up the stairs. Karin heard his breathing, the rustle of his stiff black coveralls. The squeaking leather of his boots and the creak of polished hardwood under their tread placed him on the main staircase. He must have just walked past the two guards down there. But she did not need to listen for him now, she could sense him, and not just the dumb, heavy shape of his feelings, but their very particular outlines and meaning. Hooper’s emotional state and the mindless, blundering train of thought which carried it, always threatening to crash off the rails, were nearly as lucid to Karin as her own thoughts. Being in his head was…unpleasant.
In a weird echoing effect, she found herself in there. Or herself as imagined by the American. That was disturbing, finding yourself floating through a cloud of somebody else’s thought bubbles. Some of them paranoid delusions. Others grossly pornographic fantasies.
She turned her mind away from all but the most relevant images and introspections.
Hooper knew, or thought he knew, that she had picked up most of the same powers as him. Through him, she understood Trinder to be horrified by this, and desperate to contain or neutralize the perceived threat. Hooper simply found the very idea of her frightening, and the prospect of facing her more than a little daunting. He was not a killer, trained for combat like he imagined her to be. In his fevered mind a cold-eyed woman pulled a trigger on him, ran a blade between his ribs, or whipped a wire garrotte around his throat, pulling back hard.
He was scared. He doubted himself. Not his newfound strength or speed, but his ability to put them to any effect against someone like her.
He was not entirely stupid then, she conceded. Most men would assume they could defeat a woman, even one schooled in such arts as she. What was it de Beauvoir had written of them, of their entire oafish gender? That they feel in their fists the will to self-affirmation, the confirmation of their sovereignty. How much more imperative would such a presumption be in one like Hooper, raised to real power? Strangely though, he had no such assurance and swagger to him. He came hunting for her, not entirely sure that he was not the prey.
She felt him searching for her, pushing out his senses, and she withdrew her own thoughts, made them small, slowed her breathing. She did not fear that he could divine her thoughts or feelings as she could his. Pr’Chutt un Threshrendum was an empath daemon. The BattleMaster which Hooper had chanced to kill was not. The Hunn would have been more than a match for the Superiorae of the Qwm in single combat, but the Threshrend did not seek or enter battle on those terms. It was not their role.
Karin held Sorrow before her in a basic guard, ready to strike as soon as Hooper moved into her line of attack. If he fought with the power of a BattleMaster of the Hunn, he would be stronger than her. But slaying Pr’Chutt had still gifted Ekaterina Varatchevsky with strength and speed many times that of a mortal being. And she had her own very particular set of skills which were somewhat better suited to this encounter than Hooper’s undoubted facility with chug-a-lugging cans of beer and lighting farts for the amusement of his redneck friends.
“Karen,” he shouted.
She almost jumped at the sound of her name. It came as a jolt on her raw nerve-endings, already frayed by the unearthly silence and stillness. But she let any nervous surprise flow out of her body, remaining utterly relaxed, so that she might move with terrible swiftness and fluidity come the moment to strike.
He was on the second floor now. She distinctly heard the heavy fall of his boots. He was not even attempting to move with stealth, although she did sense his caution. His fear. The tightness of his hands around the long, hardwood shaft of the giant hammer…
…Or was it an axe?
No, it was a crude combination of both, she realized. A block splitter, she had heard them called, a long time ago.
In her own hands, Master Nagayuki’s beautifully crafted weapon rested quietly. Sorrow’s disengaged presence gave no impression of having any real investment in what was about to happen.
“Karen Warat,” he called out again, using the American form of her name. The cover under which she had lived for so long in his country. “My name is Dave Hooper. I’ll guess you know who I am. They sent me in here to get you…”
He was even more of an idiot than he had first appeared. His blundering approach, so loud and graceless, allowed her to track him almost to the inch. And she could have done so without any sixth sense. Trinder had sent a ham-fisted troll after her. The only thing to be said in his defense was that he was demonstrably ignorant and out of his depth.
It would not save him. This thing he had done, this huge and dreadful power barely hinted at in New Orleans, it could not be allowed to stand. Not now that he had so brazenly used it to walk in here, violating the sovereign territory of the Russian Federation. It bespoke an arrogance which was shameful even for an American. He was not provoking her. He was mocking her and the Rodina.
That is good, Comrade Colonel, Podolski repeated in her memory. Because if you conclude that Hooper poses such a danger, you are to terminate him. Immediately. I give you this order now.
“If you can hear me, perhaps we could just…”
Hooper came into view outside the room where she waited and Karin launched her attack. She did not explode with a war cry in her throat. She saw the way his head was turned, his attention drawn to the oddly out of place flower arrangement, just as she had intended. His neck, thick and sunburned, was exposed to the killing stroke—the same lethal strike she had used to cut down Pr’chutt un Threshrendum. Sorrow’s sub-aural hum suddenly turned into a madwoman’s shriek and Karin was shocked to feel the irresistible force of her downward stroke intercepted at the very last moment by some immovable shield.
The hammer!
Hooper had somehow used the steel head of the sledgehammer to ward off Sorrow’s cutting edge. A lesser swordswoman might had faltered at that point, tripping on the surprise of an unexpected defense, but Karin allowed the momentum of her attack to flow around the obstacle, ignoring the inexplicable blast of light and sound which seemed to come from deep within Hooper’s weapon, not just from the impact of steel on steel but from the energy of two souls attempting to annihilate each other. She pivoted on her left leg and drove the blade of her right foot into his exposed rib cage, feeling the satisfying crunch of bones breaking, and then marveling at the kinetic effect of the American’s body flying away from her, as though hit by a wrecking ball.
He flew, literally flew, across the corridor, yelling in pain and outrage, crashing right through the wall on the far side with a booming eruption of masonry and plaster dust. That did stop her, if only for half a second. The force needed to do that to a large man was…unfeasible. The damage he must have sustained from the impact would be…
Well, he should be a mound of pink jelly across the hallway.
But he was not. She could see him through the open double doors, hear his pain and distress, feel at a distance the awful damage she had done him, and he to Comrade General Podolski, who appeared to have been struck by flying debris and perhaps even the body of the American in flight. The general was nowhere to be seen, and Karin had no time to look for him. She could feel the dizzying heat that suffused Hooper’s body as it re
paired itself at a rate that was frankly impossible to believe—even for she who had seen what her own body was capable of doing to mend itself.
This was intolerable. She attacked again. Meaning to finish him. She held her sword on high in preparation for tobokami-waza, the appropriate technique when attacking an opponent of weak spirit or vigor. She did shout her kiai now, to fix the downed American with the spear point of her intent.
Using her inhuman strength, Karin leaped into the air, calculating the arc of her descent to deliver another stunning blow to his failed defenses, preparatory to taking off his head. Mortal terror throbbed off him in sick-making waves and she could visualize the result of her attack even before it was complete. But then she was flying, pinwheeling uncontrolled away from Hooper. Pain erupted through her body, as though a neutron star had birthed itself somewhere deep inside her. Bones cracked like boulders sheared apart by earthquakes. Her organs liquefied, their structural integrity destroyed by whatever he had done.
No. By whatever that fucking hammer had done.
Ushi to yasashi to was singing now. Sorrowful and Unbearable, fully awakened to the fight. And in an instant her enchanted blade had told her without words that she was locked in a death struggle not just with Hooper, but with the soul of the fallen champion animating the weapon with which he fought.
The room where she had of late conferred with the third secretary and the comrade general turned upside down and around and around and now it was her body which burned with a terrible healing heat.
To no avail.
She crashed bodily into the heavy oaken desk where Third Secretary Sitnikov had done his work, splintering the enormous piece of furniture. She cried as waves of devastation roared through her body, followed by waves of heat and healing. But not fast enough. Hooper was over her, his weapon raised on high, the cutting edge of the block splitter already descending towards her skull. He cried out and stumbled, lost his grip or his footing, and all the force of his hammer blow went into the remains of the desk, which exploded as though it had been rigged with dynamite. Vicious splinters flew outwards, one of them embedding itself in Sitnikov’s thigh. He did not move or respond in any way.
Soul Full of Guns: Dave vs the Monsters Page 9
