Ascendance

by John Birmingham

  ‘It’s a ham,’ she said. ‘I would have made eggs for the protein, but there was no power until two minutes ago.’

  Dave waved a hand around in the warm glow of electric light.

  ‘Well, power’s back now. So where’s my eggs, woman?’

  It was a tired shot at lifting the mood. She took neither offence nor amusement from it. Instead, she used her katana to carve a massive hunk of cold meat sheathed in fat from the leg of ham, a whole leg including the hoof too, with only a few slices missing.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Karen. I just watched you stick that all the way into a monster’s ass.’

  ‘I cleaned it off,’ she said. ‘No cooties. See?’

  She sliced off a huge chunk of pink meat and took a fist-sized bite of it.

  The streets far below throbbed with the red and blue lights of the emergency services. Sirens rose and fell, but there were so many sirens all over the city it was impossible to say which were headed toward them. A lot, Dave guessed. A lot of ambulances anyway. Did they put dead people in ambulances? Would they bother, when the dead were piling up all over the city?

  The penthouse afforded views far to the north and west and it seemed as though hundreds of fires burned out of control. He twice saw military aircraft swoop down from the night sky, unloading high explosive weaponry, rockets and bombs, on less built-up areas. It looked like a news report out of Gaza or Syria. Except that those rockets were falling on an American city. On the American city. Hours ago he would have run to the windows, gaped in horror. But he’d had his fill of more intimate horrors. Instead he collapsed on the white leather couch and fed on little tubes of energy gel until he no longer felt like he might fade out of existence.

  ‘How long . . . ?’ He trailed off, not even sure where to begin.

  ‘Not long,’ she said. ‘You’ve been out of it less than half an hour. ESU took down the last Thresher at the same time they rescued us.’

  He stared at her like she was a puzzle he couldn’t quite figure out.

  ‘But we killed that one. You stuck it in the ass.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘There was a third. On the floor above. Remember? You were just asking me about it when the Grymm set off that satchel charge.’

  ‘They what?’

  He felt even dumber than he just had, as though he’d woken from a nightmare, but was unsure whether he was actually awake, or still dreaming.

  ‘The Grymm set off a charge, blew a hole through the wall,’ she explained as she carved off more ham. ‘It’s a proven technique in house to house fighting. Your forces used it a lot in Iraq and Afghanistan.’

  ‘Where’d they get a bomb?’ he asked, and then waved his own question away. ‘Forget it. It wouldn’t be that hard, would it?’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t, if you knew what to look for, and they did. They’re learning. The ambush was simple, an old tactic. They let us spring the first stage and when we survived they launched the second attack. The real one.’

  ‘Jesus, that first one felt pretty fucking real to me.’

  Karen gave him the ham bone, keeping the heavy flank of pink meat she’d cut off for herself. He took the offering with a hand that was scabbed and scarred and held together with fresh pink skin that itched ferociously as it healed.

  ‘The last Thresher was old,’ she said. ‘Cunning. He did something. Shielded his mind, but also mine. That’s why I couldn’t feel him or the Grymm.’

  ‘Or the Sliveen,’ Dave added.

  ‘No, nor them,’ she conceded.

  ‘So, Karen,’ Dave said, resolved to press on. ‘Do you see you were wrong?’

  She looked at him, her head tilted just a little to the side.

  ‘I was not wrong,’ she said, without bothering to ask what he meant. ‘The tactic worked.’

  ‘But you didn’t need to push those guys into beating the bushes for us. We could have found those Threshers without sacrificing so many people. And if we’d lost more of them, we’d have been fucked, wouldn’t we? There’d have been nobody to help us when the Grymm ambushed us. You should think on that next time.’

  She stared at him, not offended. She appeared to be giving the question her honest consideration.

  ‘No, you are wrong, Hooper,’ she said at last. ‘If we had done it my way, we would not have needed our asses pulled out of the fire. We would have probed for the Threshers, located them, and killed them. Your squeamishness nearly got us killed. But you are not a soldier, are you?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not. But even soldiers are people, Karen. Their lives aren’t forfeit just because they signed up.’

  ‘Their lives are forfeit the minute they sign up.’

  ‘How very Russian,’ he said sarcastically. He wanted to eat. Needed to. Saliva was shooting into his mouth, but he swallowed it and pressed on. He needed to say this. ‘Nobody signed up for your militia tonight. You pushed them. Don’t do that again. Not here. What you do when you go home, that’s your business. But if you want Americans to die for you, at least have the decency to ask them. They might surprise you.’

  There was no heat to the exchange. He was exhausted and all he wanted was for her to understand. She did not push back.

  The ham joint was still cold from the refrigerator, in spite of the power failure. More saliva shot into his mouth as he bit into it, disgusting him a little bit and undercutting all his noble feelings about putting Varatchevsky in her place. He couldn’t separate the memory of so much torn human flesh from the clean, smoked meat between his teeth. His empty stomach cramped, but he kept chewing and swallowing and trying not to remember. There was no joy in the mere consumption of fat and protein, but it was necessary. With each mouthful he could feel himself healing. His strength was not yet returning. It wouldn’t until he was at least halfway recovered from the damage of combat.

  They spoke while they rested up, but their conversation was flat. An exchange of information. Nothing more. Tallies of the dead, casualty counts on both sides.

  Thirty-seven cops.

  Nineteen firefighters.

  The civilian death toll, still unknown, but high. Very high.

  Dave ate and recovered his strength. Karen too. There was no alternative. They were spent.

  They discussed fighting styles. A leashed Fangr was, in many ways, easier to deal with than one unleashed by the death of its master. They tended to run berserk when freed. Unnamed Hunn were invariably savage, but stupid. Sliveen were vicious and cunning. The Grymm, when faced outside warp, were horrifying. Dave had no doubt that were it not for Karen, they’d have killed him; and Karen for her part conceded she could not have survived the encounter without him throwing a fridge at them.

  ‘I didn’t really throw it,’ he shrugged. ‘Used it more like a battering ram.’

  They swapped details of the effects of different types of human weaponry. They ate. Dave eventually got up and found beer in the fridge, but Karen made him drink water.

  ‘To hydrate.’

  She led him through a tactical discussion of how best to deal with empath daemons in future.

  ‘If you are unwilling to risk a few pawns, we will need a ranged option,’ she said. ‘Snipers, air support or even artillery in the open. Infantry or spetsnaz or Zaslon operators, to clear urban environments like this.’

  Dave had no idea what a Zaslon operator was. He could hear again the ghost of a Russian accent in her voice when she used those Russian words.

  He was too exhausted to say what he really thought, that she was worse than anything Trinder had said of her. But he didn’t have to. She would already know. With Karin Varatchevsky, just thinking something was enough. She would know. She’d also know he thought Trinder was full of shit.

  Dave didn’t even bother cataloguing his injuries. He just ate his ham, and finally found himself enjoying the calorie-dense fat with a particular relish. He waited for the furnace inside him to burn the fat away. The windows of the penthouse rattled with the force of an explosi
on going off within a mile or so. They ignored it. When he’d finished a gallon of tap water, Karen let him have that beer. She drank from a large porcelain jug while reclining in the single-seater across from him, her boots up on the coffee table. Or what he assumed to be a coffee table. It was a machined block of stainless steel weighing a ton and had probably cost its own weight in gold.

  Lucille lay on top it. Karen had fetched the maul up from the site of their death struggle with the Grymm and laid it out next to a bowl of nuts.

  ‘What are you drinking?’ Dave asked, mildly interested. ‘A milkshake?’

  He wouldn’t mind a milkshake. There was only the one beer.

  ‘Raw eggs, protein powder, creatine and cocoa.’

  ‘Okay then. Enjoy that.’

  He ingested mouthfuls of pink pig meat, wondered at the lives of the people who’d lived in this penthouse and what the hell was happening across the city beyond it.

  A phone rang. Not the apartment landline, as he first thought. A cell. Karen frowned, her eyebrows knitting to form a single furrow between them. If she’d done Botox, Dave thought numbly, she couldn’t do that frowny thing. So she hadn’t done any Botox. Good for her. He ate some more ham, tearing the meat from the bone with his teeth as though ripping into a giant drumstick. Karen put the revolting protein shake down on the stainless steel slab, leaving a ring. A phone in a ruggedised case appeared from deep inside her gore-stiffened biker jacket.

  ‘Wow. Is that a BlackBerry?’ Dave said. ‘Did the KGB pick ’em up cheap on eBay or some –’

  ‘Shut up . . . Yes?’

  The first comment she directed at him, the second at whoever had called her. Dave had half-expected her to say hello in Russian. Dasvidaniya Tovaritsch, or Stolichnaya Ivan or something like that. But he supposed it could just as easily have been a call from her made-up life. Her cover. Except she probably wouldn’t bother answering that anymore, would she?

  The crease between her eyebrows grew deeper, and the line of her mouth thin and tightly pressed.

  ‘Sure,’ she said, almost spitting the word out. She passed the handset across the stainless steel table. For a second he didn’t know what she meant him to do.

  ‘It’s for you.’

  From her expression, she was as surprised as he, and pissed off with it. Although Dave was pretty pissed off that he had to lever himself up from where he’d been lying, exhausted, stretched out on the couch eating his ham and drinking his beer. Fuelling up. Totally fuelling up, not being a lazy, irresponsible slug while the city died around him.

  ‘Super Dave,’ he said when he had the phone – yep, a BlackBerry – up to his ear.

  ‘Hello, Dave. It’s Emmeline.’

  . . .

  What the fuck?

  ‘Uh. Hi . . . Doc,’ he said. Each word more uncertain than the one before it. ‘How are you? Besides, you know, alive,’ he said, recovering a little. ‘After I rescued you and stuff.’

  His confusion was as deeply felt as his astonishment. They had not parted on the best of terms. The only thing that could have surprised him more was big gay Igor commando-roping in to give him a kiss.

  ‘Yes. I’m alive, thank you,’ said Ashbury.

  Dave’s bewilderment was mirrored in Karen’s face. Or rather, Karin. He assumed from her furious expression that this cell phone really was a Russian government unit. Probably specced out the wazoo with all sorts of security that Ashbury had just poked through to say hello.

  ‘I suppose I should say I’m sorry for my performance in Omaha,’ said Emmeline, sounding anything but repentant. ‘You did save my life and I rather prefer being alive. So thank you.’

  ‘Jeez, don’t choke on your joie de fucking vivre, Doc.’

  He put his thumb over the mic, or what he thought was the mic and mouthed at Warat.

  Is this your phone? Like, your spy phone?

  Uploading an empath daemon to your cortex made for easy lip reading. She rolled her eyes, but nodded. Yes, it was her spy phone. Cool, Dave thought as he sat up a little straighter and poured the last of the beer down his throat. He was reviving. His whole body still burned with a low-grade fever as it repaired itself, but he didn’t feel as though he was in the last stages of viral pneumonia anymore.

  ‘Fucking NSA,’ said Varatchevsky, under her breath, but loud enough that Dave didn’t need his Spidey senses to hear.

  ‘We need to meet,’ said Ashbury.

  Dave turned all of his attention back to the woman on the phone.

  ‘Can’t get enough of Dave’s special sauce, eh, Doc?’

  Emmeline’s grinding teeth were probably audible to Karen across the table. He heard elevator doors open outside the penthouse. A low burble of voices. Medics or cops, he supposed.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Hooper,’ Ashbury said. Her voice sounded much sharper and familiar for it. ‘Listen to me, you witless man-child, I am sorry for being such a petty bitch in Omaha. It was wrong of me and unworthy. But you have been a complete dick and people are dying for it.’

  He felt as though she was about to say ‘Again’. His face flushed, more with irritation than shame or guilt. Guilty Dave was on a break. But he saw the smirk sketched on Karen Warat’s features and it punctured his usual defensive reaction to being made to feel at fault.

  ‘So what is it you want, Doc? Oh, and my friend Karen isn’t very happy about you calling me on her phone.’

  ‘Your friend is the agent of a hostile power.’

  ‘Well she’s hostile to monsters and that asshole Trinder but that don’t make her unique in this conversation, does it?’

  ‘Oh God, look, Hooper, just shut up, and . . .’

  He heard the phone being taken from her and a new voice came on. Deep and richly toned, but constrained, as though the man talking could not allow himself to truly speak his mind or let his feelings get away from him. Certainly not after Ashbury had let hers run free.

  ‘Dave, it’s Captain Heath.’

  Warat was up from her seat, but not headed toward the kitchen. She’d picked up her sword and the pistol she’d taken earlier from the cop. He was probably going to get into a heap of trouble for that. If he was alive. She seemed to want to check on whoever had arrived, and Dave left her to it.

  ‘Hey, Cap’n,’ he said, feeling a little dumb. ‘How’s things?’

  Even dumber.

  ‘Things are not well, Dave. But you know that. We’re inbound for New York. We’ll be there in less than an hour and we need you to meet up with us.’

  Dave found his heart was beating faster than it had all night. He had just fought monsters for three hours, and had come closer to being killed – like really killed, game over, no credits – than at any time since he’d fronted Urgon. But now his head was a helium balloon that might possibly lift off his shoulders and float out the window, drifting away across the burning city.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Did I miss the bit where we’re best friends again? If we hugged it out over a couple beers it must have been a shitload of beer because I don’t recall that at all.’

  His heart started to slow, but his words flew out faster and louder.

  ‘What I recall is you chewing my ass ragged and turning me out on fucking cable TV as the dipshit who got all your guys killed back in Nebraska. What I recall is Big Gay Igor trying to punch out my fucking lights, which is okay because he punches like a girl and you can totally fucking tell him I said that and . . .’

  He stopped.

  Everything had stopped.

  ‘Karen! Fuck! Did you just warp me out of my call?’

  She appeared back at the door of the penthouse.

  ‘Oh excuse me. Did I interrupt your tantrum? You might not have noticed but one of Trinder’s little friends was just outside. The half-breed they put into my gallery when they tried to grab me.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Dave. ‘Seriously? Half-breed? I’m appalled. You’re quite the bigot aren’t you. Is that like a Russian thing too?’

  ‘Asking
me if being a Russian makes me a bigot rather makes you an even bigger one. Now let’s get out of here before she comes back with the rest of the men in black. By now Trinder’s probably turned a Thresher into a double agent just to put a leash on us.’

  He pointed at the phone.

  ‘Hey. On a call here? Or I was until you hit pause.’

  She clicked her fingers in an unnecessary theatrical gesture and they dropped out of warp.

  ‘Your apology is accepted, Dave,’ Heath said.

  Hooper stamped on the brakes again, throwing them straight back into super slo-mo.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, Karen! He didn’t hear a thing I said. Just, “I’m sorry”.’ He shook his head at the unfairness of it all. ‘It was a sarcastic sorry. Sarcastic. Not a real sorry. I didn’t apologise and now Heath thinks I did.’

  ‘God. The snippy old British bitch is right. You really are a man-child.’

  ‘She’s not old. And she’s not snippy. She’s got autism.’

  Karen dropped into a pantomime East London accent. ‘Ooh, fancy a bit of hot English crumpet do we?’

  ‘What are you, my wife now? . . . Ex-wife . . . Soon enough.’

  Karen dismissed him with a flick of her sword.

  ‘Your thoughts, not mine. Just find out what they want, Hooper. They’re obviously playing way up the food chain if they can break into my phone. They might be able to deal with Trinder. And if they don’t, I will. Understand? Because we don’t have time for his shit anymore. So talk to your one-legged friend. Get whatever information you can and then we’re gone. There’s still plenty of monsters out there. If we don’t put them down hard, they’ll be all over us, everywhere. Fast.’

  She clicked her fingers again and they dropped out of warp. He wondered how she was doing that, riding on his ability. He couldn’t even feel her do it, which was how he’d lost track of his rant at Heath.

  ‘We were all under a lot of pressure in Omaha,’ Heath continued, as if he hadn’t been interrupted. And as far as the navy officer knew, he had not been. ‘I’m sorry too, Dave. I didn’t handle it well. Nor did you. But no messing around now, we are in trouble, Dave.’