by R. K. Syrus
“Drop your pistol.”
“Now don’t do anything hasty, my friend,” Artuk stammers. “And don’t let her turn around, she’s dangerous—”
The elder’s pistol has no sooner clattered to the ground than the squishy, raspy sound of metal being driven through cloth and flesh comes from behind Sienna. Blood sprays over her shoulder as Khalid pulls out the bayonet that has passed through the old man’s body. Artuk is dead on his feet. He falls.
“Turn around, Colonel Sienna McKnight,” Khalid says. “I want to tell the mudarris I looked into your eyes when I killed you.”
Sienna turns around. Looming over her is a brutish, hulking man with dark, enraged eyes which have bored their way out of his wicked soul. These stare at her from above a bramble of beard. Whether from the urgency of the situation or the man’s resemblance to someone else, something inside her surges. Something ancient connects with something brand-new. And a power she has never felt before, never knew existed, courses up her shoulder to her right hand.
She looks into his eyes. Then she kills him.
The flat river-washed stone in her palm disappears into a vapor trail with a crack of dry thunder. It is imbued with such force. Sienna squints as the heat of incinerated atmosphere splashes back on her cheek. The dark smoke tail smells like brimstone. She has launched a miniature meteor of wrath and given away her position with the sonic crack. At that moment, though, her reason is on leave. Her rough racht beast is delighted by the explosion of mud bricks behind Khalid, which she can see through Khalid, or at least the fist-sized tunnel that appears in the dead man’s torso.
Someone must have heard that. Naw. Everyone must have heard that. She can still make for the truck. If she’s lucky, the two groups, with their respective leaders dead, will fall into disarray. Confusion with homicidal overtones can only help her escape. She looks at the smashed mess of Khalid. His body is a broken rag doll, his rifle charred and shattered. The mess lies on top of rubble that used to be the foundation stones of a building.
How strong am I? Is this? Gotta watch blowback and collateral damage.
Footsteps sound, running in from the main street toward her and the two bodies. Sienna remembers something, something she wants to make certain of. The old guy had a note. She searches Artuk’s pockets. There. She unfurls the paper and sees the two-bladed Scythe symbol.
YOU HAVE A PRISONER.
KILL HER AT ONCE.
GIVE THE HEAD TO KHALID.
Asrah. He IS the mudarris.
Him.
Him!
30
Her hand closes on the paper. Instead of crumpling, it burns. She swats away floating embers. Her world bleeds into two colors: red and black. She does not run from the approaching footsteps. She runs toward them, stooping to pick up stones.
No muzzle flash.
No sonic crack. Unless she wants one to echo between buildings to further confuse the enemy.
Unlimited ammo.
Nice.
Her fast assaults on both factions has them firing wildly at air and, better yet, each other. Khalid’s men, in neatly tailored black pajamas, fall into disarray. Whatever their training, they are not ready for super-heated stone shrapnel coming at them from nowhere. From shadow.
The rocks Sienna has in her hands are one to two inches across. Some are brittle. At first she uses too much energy to propel them. They break apart in the air. By the third one loosed in rapid succession, she has the hang of it. The last of a trio of oncoming combatants receives a neat, skull-crushing dent between the eyes. No messy exit wound.
Sienna approaches the jumble of bodies, weapons, and spent casings. Others will come soon. Sienna looks for a communications device, a stolen sat phone, a civilian Lux/Net device. Nothing doing.
Spak, spak, spak!
Incoming rounds go way wide. Harmless. But there are more. Khalid’s goons have come out of cars and covered trucks. Local fighters emerge from basements and take positions on rooftops. They are eager to impress Artuk, unaware he lies dead in the alley, his alley, stabbed in his back.
She dives into the doorway of a solid, oval structure, grabbing more ammo along the way. Held now in the sway of her rough inner beast, she muses that if there is one good thing about this country, it is the endless supply of well-formed stones. A good-sized stream must have flowed here, back in the day. Back when the Six Hills were ringed with green. Perhaps as it now is, eroded down to windblown clay and gravel trimmed with prickly brush, it is more its true self. This place has always been sustaining, never nurturing. How different, how alike, is its daughter?
Sienna has astonishing accuracy. No line-of-sight target is safe. She prefers to hold spares in her left and fire with the right. Coming up to a tricky corner, she stops short. There’s a gap between buildings. An alleyway funnel. A chokepoint. Danger. On the ground in front of her, just above her own shadow, is someone else’s. A guy on a rooftop is ready to ambush her when she steps out.
She doesn’t step out; she leaps. Spinning around in mid-air, she lets fly with everything she’s holding. The resulting devastation would make any 30mm cannon envious.
Stones are bulky. There have to be better types of projectiles, but this is not a great time to start experimenting. Sienna finds drop-leg belt pouches on a guy who has no more use for them. Deep inside a sheltering doorway, she pauses. The stone hovering over her palm becomes hot. It nearly burns her finger.
Ow!
She flips her hand open. It falls, giving off heat waves like a barbeque coal. If she holds something and grips, heat promptly builds up. That almost makes sense. As much as any of it does.
A figure pops up in her view, his rifle ready. Her left hand flings out instinctively, and the man goes down sprawling. With her personal artillery making no sound besides a whipping impact, her enemies have no idea where she’s shooting from. They line up like ninepins.
One veteran village fighter sees others, men he must have fought beside for years, go down one by one. He senses the rain of death has to be coming from a window or a doorway, but his mind cannot process just how that’s happening.
Suddenly, his last remaining companion’s shoulder is struck and obliterated. The fighter is alone. He loses it and runs away screaming. In his terror, he lapses into his home dialect, a variation on Nuristani. It has florid, emotional terms for expressing shock and awe. Perhaps he has not used these words since he was a boy listening to scary stories about demons told by his grandfather around the dying embers of their communal hearth fires.
“FROM THE SHADOWS!” the man shrieks. He falls briefly to his knees, as though the ground has been pulled out from under him. Scrambling to his feet, he keeps shouting to his dead friends and no one in particular. “From the very shadows—bolts of death. It is the Iblis made of the smokeless fire! It is come to kill us all for our sins. NO ONE CAN SAVE US!”
Unfortunately for him, he does not drop his rifle. He could run away until he thinks he’s safe, then turn and take pot-shots at her back. The village fighter, scared out of his wits as he is, is still a threat. She has a smaller rock ready. It’s about one inch across and pointed like an arrowhead. The hysterical man scuttles around debris, dodges between burning wrecks of cars. Funny thing is, Sienna hasn’t thought about aiming at all. Not from the time her first projectile, a surplus molar, left her hand and found its necessary target.
This guy here, he’s two hundred meters out and more. Running wild. A single bullet to center mass using iron sights? Difficult. A rock to his right kneecap? Impossible!
Until it happens.
The projectile skims out, leaving a razor-cut vapor trail in the mid-morning air. It takes out the running man’s knee in a gout of bloody gristle and torn pants leg. He drops, rolls. He is still screaming, just not words anymore. He is out of the fight, but alive.
She feels she could have shot a mosqui
to off his shoulder if she had wanted. Crazy. Absurd. Mine. Her life depends on it.
She replenishes her ammo. Something the man yelled echoes through her combat-clear mind. Iblis. The sassy jinn angel who refused to bow to Adam. Bolts from shadows.
Shadowbolt, not bad.
On the bullet-pitted wall of a cellar doorway cling pieces of mirror. Fragments reflect fiber-optic material embedded in two arms. They glow with unearthly energy. My arms.
***
A few minutes later, things suck, bad. Bullets snap, close enough to feel. She keeps her head behind solid cover. The hostiles are delighted. They have her pinned down; they have the hated Iblis dead to rights. Her assertive tactical plan has gone south hella fast. Sienna is caught in the middle of the town square. She jams herself up against a jumble of bricks that used to be the town’s main well.
It crosses her mind that maybe, when she had the chance, she should have rolled on out in that truck. But if she had done that, quite a few of these guys would have had the pleasure of gnashing crooked yellow while cussing her out for having crawled off, as expected, like a whipped bitch.
And it is my sworn Army duty to exceed people’s expectations.
Suppressing fire keeps her pinned. It is all she can do to keep her hard point from being out-flanked. Having seen their fellow killers taken out individually, Khalid’s people amass down the street, supported by clumps of Artuk’s men. They are preparing an all-out assault. One of the black robes screams with joyous hate to the white-bearded driver of the Zeus.
“Nasir! We have her now. USE THE BIG GUNS!”
As his buddies keep Sienna from dashing to better cover, good old Nasir cranks the chassis that holds four cannon barrels. Through a brickwork crevice, Sienna watches the turret swing from its normal vertical position to an awkward horizontal angle. Down the main street. At the well. At her.
This ruin-spewing monster is the guts of a quad ZSU. An anti-aircraft gun capable of letting loose a hailstorm of high explosive shells that can knock a modern jet out of the sky a mile straight up.
And here they are aiming it at poor little Sienna. She does not know whether to be shocked by their savagery or flattered. If they let loose with that fusillade of shrapnel, she will be neither. The mud bricks she huddles behind will be no more effective protection than tissue paper.
She seethes under the chastising lash of her inner demon. If she gets killed, they, the two of them, won’t be able to hurt the rest of their enemies. And that would be unforgiveable. More offended at her own mistake than afraid, Sienna scans her six. No one’s angling for a better shot. They don’t want to be in the sights of the Zeus when it opens up.
There’s a rusty piece of metal. Something that shook loose from a cart or trailer. She reaches out quickly to retrieve it, wincing slightly as the thud of rifle and pistol bullets impact where her hand has just been.
Getting ready to shoot at me with a freaking anti-aircraft gun! They must really feel threatened.
The ZSU has a hell of a kick. It’s normally mounted on a twenty-ton tank. This one is perched on a civilian flatbed. And not a big American one at that. The first shots will be way off. She’s sure. They have to be.
Sienna’s assailants are so focused on her, none of them notice what’s parked farther down the main drag. What they are all lined up in front of: a fuel truck. The long tanker sits low on its suspension, but that could be due to poor maintenance.
Let’s hope it hasn’t made its delivery yet.
To hit the fuel tank well and true, she will have to angle over a yard. Or two. Into the open street. The piece of metal in her hand starts to glow orange. Then its center blossoms white. Just when she feels her hand start to blister, the ear-splitting WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP report of the AA gun starts.
The muzzles of the Zeus are so close she can feel the overpressure as the weapon warms up to its firing rate of four thousand rounds per minute. The first shells hit dirt. Nasir over-compensated for the anticipated kickback. He lets up the trigger to adjust his sights.
Dust as thick as a smokescreen conceals her desperate lurch. Sienna lets fly. She can’t see crap. She does not hear her projectile hit the oblong metal of the fuel truck. Yet she’s certain it does.
It’s called situational awareness, you geniuses.
A jet engine roar accompanies concussive fists of air, which fling a sandstorm of dust and a year’s worth of gutter trash and her back down the street.
She sees
hard-packed ground
a patch of blue sky
a gout of oily black smoke
hard-packed ground
a patch of blue sky
as she rolls like a tossed rag doll. Still, she’s doing better than the enemy. They were in the gullet of the blast. Everything in the V-shaped avenue in front of her that can burn is suddenly, gloriously, on fire. Smoke chokes her nose, mouth, and lungs.
Sienna struggles around flames. A baser need competes with her desire to breathe. She can feel it. The battle is done. Her racht is not. Into the empty spaces underneath human words, it whispers. Its desire permeates the hollows between sentient thoughts:
That Monster—he still hunts us. Hunts us as surely as we hunt him. These are his people, his hands. Crush them. Show no mercy. Make them feel your pain!
In front of her, a black-robed combatant tries to prop himself up on a splintered arm. His other hand holds a rifle. Sienna’s kick to his head sends his neck snapping back and his body reeling into a dusty heap. He moves no more.
The shockwave from the fuel tanker blast has flattened half the village. Still, that leaves the other half for her enemies to hide in.
After them!
31
Airborne filth from burning gasoline and tires churn through streets, darkening them at mid-morning on this cloudless day. And Sienna is not finished, not by a long shot.
Somehow, Zeus-gunner Nasir survives—most of him anyway. With blackened, bloody hands he clutches the burnt drumstick stump that used to be his leg. He sees her and, incredibly, remembers he has a sidearm. He reaches for it with hate in the one eye not broiled out of its socket.
Sienna speaks quietly.
“This here is my big gun.”
She sends a flat stone to crush the ribs over his heart. Bones splinter. The grizzled, broken fighter slumps against a pile of debris.
After the explosion there is an interlude, a stunned lull. In other places, one might expect to see a gathering of the brave or compassionate or curious. In other towns, there might be some influx of first responders who would sort through the wounded and fight fires as best they could. But this is old Khorasan, the north, the unforgiven land that scorns redemption. And its half-breed, bastard daughter has returned to kick over the hornets’ nest. She dares them to come out and sting.
All semblance of command and control ceases for both newcomers and locals. Khalid’s remaining men are convinced they have been betrayed. After regrouping to a strong point, the black robes shoot wildly at anything that moves. A few of the village fighters leave. Most of them, greedy for the hoard of cash known to be in the visitors’ trucks, wage a counter-offensive in the streets and alleyways they know well.
Goaded by this offering of frail human hostility, Sienna feels her racht cast off its final restraining chains. She can no longer control it. She does not want to.
With the reflexes of an Olympic athlete, a lifetime of physical and tactical training, and her new abilities, none of them stands a chance. Two of Khalid’s group hunker down beside the Toyota across the square. Black-coiffed heads pop up looking for a target. They are decapitated. Another runs with a belt-fed weapon to higher ground. That one’s pelvis explodes and his body folds limply backward, like a rag doll.
With each pulse of energy, with every hyper-accelerated bolt fired, Sienna feels not weaker but stronger. The eerie fibe
r she can see in her arms and feel in her shoulders and back innervate, giving her ever more confidence in her destructive capacity.
She has the accuracy of the best scoped rifle she’s ever fired, the stopping power of an artillery shell, and unlimited ammunition. She hears scuffling behind the last standing wall of a wrecked produce store. Two rifle muzzles poke up. She does not even break her stride. Four stone projectiles peal into the cinder blocks, blasting them into a jumble of dust and vaporized body parts: gray, pink, and brown. A final bolt bounces the rubble and makes sure.
Pent-up feral energies tear through Sienna’s mind and body. Older than human reason, more powerful than conscious will. She accepts their singular purpose: to LASH OUT and make them all know her Wrath.
Sienna has been wary of going into close quarters since the debacle with Artuk. Nothing like having a seventy-year-old duffer get the drop on you to make you think twice about entering the maze of narrow alleys. But that’s where her quarry is hiding. She follows.
Her powers and her liberated aggression prove effective against AK, pistol, and bayonet. One man’s body ends up draped over a second-story balcony, carried along by the enormous energy of a half-pound projectile traveling just under the speed of sound. His corpse makes a mess of a window box stuffed with flowers and radishes.
Concussion can kill as effectively as shrapnel. And it does. Sienna sends a two-handed bolt into the midst of four ambushers. Bones snap, organs rupture, ears and eye sockets run liquid scarlet.
I am your Beast, straining at my bonds, tied up, abused, taunted beyond enduring. Now unleashed. I am racht, I am all of you and more!
One of Khalid’s black robes searches for the phantom enemy in the cellar of a house. He rips up a flimsy wooden trap door. A frightened teenage girl in a rust-colored scarf stares up. She’s not the female he’s looking for. A local. Useless.
Frustrated, he rifle-butts the village girl full on her cheek. She sprawls back into the hiding place, into a cluster of the young and the elderly. This black robe is one of the group paid to cut the head off a chained captive and return the trophy to their master. Him!
