Choose your enemies carefully s-2

by Robert N. Charrette

  That wasn't the pre-arranged signal. Sam's mouth went dry.

  "Willie?" he asked tentaively.

  "What's going on?" she replied. "Where are you guys? It's been twenty minutes."

  "We're holding for your signal. You didn't signal."

  There was a pause. "Couldn't you hear the screams?"

  "Drek!" No sound had reached the watchers.

  Sam leaped up, drawing his Narcoject Lethe as he did. The tranquilizer gun felt light and insubstantial. People were being tortured to death and all he had was a toy gun. Was that justice?

  Estios was already halfway across the street by the time Sam left the sidewalk. Chatterjee and O'Connor were only a couple of meters behind their leader. As usual, the tall elf was going to be the first one in. Hart hung back, pacing Sam. He knew she could move faster than that. Didn't she feel the same urgency as the rest of them? They were only five people and a drone against the seven druids and an unknown number of flunkies. Sam wished Dodger and his Sandier were along, but the elf was still haunting the Matrix.

  Estios barreled through the doorway, only to be flung immediately back. Sam skidded to a halt and shifted to his astral senses. A glow lit the doorway, a magical barrier. Estios picked himself up, his own aura flaring as he did. Sam watched the color shift toward the hue of the barrier as Estios attuned himself to its psychic frequency. The tall elf leaned grimly on the luminescent wall until the tones matched and he passed through.

  Chatterjee grabbed O'Connor, enveloping her with his own power and dragging her through. Sam shifted back to normal perception and followed. Maybe it was a good thing that Dodger wasn't there; Sam didn't know Chatterjee's trick and Dodger would have been unable to pass the barrier.

  Hitting the wall felt like pressing through a plastic bag. It stretched and strained until it suddenly released him and he was inside in the deeper darkness of the building. Now he could hear the screams. Impelled by a new urgency, he barreled forward, only to be caught by O'Connor.

  "No so fast, Twist. You're no shock trooper," she whispered urgently. "Dodger would never forgive me if I let you rush to death."

  She was right. Getting themselves killed wouldn't help those poor unfortunates, and rushing blindly in would get them killed. There had been one barrier, and there might be more. There might be physical traps as well. Or hidden guards.

  Estios, Chatterjee, and O'Connor scanned the dark with their elven eyes. Feeling inadequate, Sam tugged out his light amplification goggles and donned them. The murk lightened a little.

  Estios cursed. "This fragging rattletrap distorts sound. Call the halfer and get a precise location. I want numbers of hostiles and weapons."

  "What about electronic intercept?" Sam asked.

  "They're busy. Remember?"

  A long quavering scream punctuated Estios's question.

  Sam passed Estios's request on to Willie and switched his receiver to full speaker mode.

  "Two flights down in the sub-basement," she reported. "About ten meters northwest of main door. Seven druids and eight assistants present. Don't know where the rest went. All have knives. All assistants and most of the druids are packinga151nothing heavy. Access on north and west."

  "Frag it! I wish we had a picture," Estios said. "Can't be helped. Chatterjee and I will take the north approach. It'll take us a while to get into position, so the rest of you get to the west entrance and wait. Nobody moves until we go in. Got it?"

  "Yes," O'Connor answered.

  Sam nodded.

  It wasn't until he and O'Connor were crouched just outside the entrance to their destination that Sam realized Hart was not with them. But the shattering impact of the scene before him drove all worry about her from his mind.

  The chamber was huge. Great arches and porticoes extended it beyond Sam's line of sight. The floor on the east side dropped away abruptly in an embankment. An arm of the Thames had been diverted into this area. Sam noted distortion on the water surface and searched the shadows until he found Willie's spy drone, hovering near the vaulted ceiling. From the scattered piles of moldering crates, this place had once been a loading dock. In olden times it had held the hustle of honest workmen, or perhaps dishonest ones. Now it hosted workmen of an evil bent. Its stone walls range with the screams of their tortured victims, scattering the echoes into an infinity of agony.

  The druids were gathered in a cleared area about five meters south of the west entrance. Magefire lit their work, providing enough light for Sam's goggles. Far too much light. He had no need to see them slicing flesh from the victims who remained alive. They were moving briskly; there already were three skeletons on the dank floor.

  "This one is diseased," Carstairs announced as if observing the color of a house.

  "Dispose of the affected parts. Such flesh is unsuitable," Hyde-White told him.

  Carstairs nodded. The golden sickle in his hand rose and fell. The Lord Mayor's victim shuddered and went limp, her screams abruptly cutting off as she fainted. Or died.

  Sam's mouth filled with bile as he watched Carstairs hold out a severed limb to one of the assistants. The man who took it was tall, well-dressed, and almost regal-looking. He seemed pleased to be of service. He carried the arm reverently across the chamber and stopped a foot from the stairs that led down to a river landing. Throwing underarm, he pitched the limb far out into the polluted waters where it splashed softly and disappeared. The man returned to his station, oblivious to the blood on his hands.

  A flicker of motion caught Sam's attention. Two men were moving in from the north entrance. Estios and Chatterjee. Sam watched them crouch in the lee of a pillar and begin a mystical centering process. He turned his attention to the druids, drawing a bead on Glover. He was not happy to see the pectoral of the archdruid on the man's chest.

  Estios and Chatterjee unleashed a brace of fireballs. Mystic energy exploded on either flank of the druids' gathering, flinging flaming men and women in all directions. Sam saw Carstairs go down.

  At the sudden violence, Sam flinched involuntarily, but his target reacted better. Glover's body flared with a defensive spell as he ducked for cover. "Hanson," he shouted. "Protect me." Sam lost his clear shot as the big acolyte stepped between him and Glover. Just delaying the inevitable, Glover. He shot Hanson, but the man didn't go down. Another dose of the Lethe tranquillizer might overload his system and kill him, but given the man's involvement in the druids' affairs, Sam didn't care. He fired again. Hanson staggered, but still didn't go down. He showed no sign that the drug was having any effect at all. Sam emptied the rest of his clip into Hanson, rapidly reloading as the man stumbled forward.

  By Sam's side O'Connor opened fire, raking the crowd with her H amp;K G12. Sam watched her hose down a group clustered around Hyde-White. His protective flunkies fell like mown wheat. The fat old druid sagged as O'Connor's slugs reached him. He joined his followers on the cold, damp stone.

  Taking down half of the Circle's numbers wasn't enough to stop the fight. The enemy had split up, scattering around the chamber in search of protected firing positions. Fortunately, the enemy's actions remained uncoordinated. Better still, they were indecisive. That was good; the druids probably didn't realize that they had the runners outnumbered, outgunned, and outmagicked. The imbalance of magicians was what worried Sam the most. Flashes and bursts of sound and smell from the far side of the chamber raised his worry to fear as Estios and Chatterjee came under magical attack. Their defenses and luck were holding, though, and the sharp buzzsaw sound of their G12s made it clear that they were still functional.

  A throbbing moan announced the arrival of the runners' equalizer, Willie's combat drone. Unlike the smaller spy drone, this machine was armed and armored. It was also far from quiet; only the sound of the combat had allowed it to approach undetected. But it was here now and odds shifted more in the runners' favor. The drone's high-tech nature made it largely immune to magic, and its firepower alone was probably more than the druids could deal with. Panels slid b
ack along the cylinder's side and gun muzzles snouted forth.

  Before the drone could open fire, the room was suddenly lit by an enormous flare of white light. Sam screamed as his amplification goggles overloaded, the compensators not quite quick enough to spare him from all of the burst. The shouts and howls from the druids' forces showed that the runners weren't the only ones caught unprepared for the tactic. Sam dropped to the floor and ripped the goggles free. He rubbed at his eyes as if he could scrub the whirling spots of color away. Blind, he was helpless. The drone wasn't firing. Had Willie's sensors been affected too? If so, they were hosed. Several people ran by his position, but he could do nothing. He heard O'Connor's G12 fire and send slugs into the wall. Her sight was affected as well. They would have been dead now if the druids hadn't been more interested in escaping. Sam's eyesight cleared with maddening slowness.

  But when he began to focus on his surroundings, he almost wished he couldn't. Some kind of dark slimy sludge was puddled near the body of an acolyte who had fallen near the open sewer. Contrary to the slope of the floor, the puddle was moving. Sparkling with an oily iridescence, the polluted surface of the river was flowing up and over the cornice. The leading edge of the slick reached the fallen woman but instead of creeping along and under her outstretched arm, it crawled up and over. Black smoke rose hissing where sludge contacted flesh and cloth, Sam saw bone where spatters of the slime had leaped ahead of the puddle's leading edge.

  As the body disappeared under the advancing foulness, the slime began to bubble. A mound humped where the woman had lain, welling up into a hideously humanoid column.

  Sam flashed on a warehouse in Hong Kong, remembering the thing Glover had raised there. Then, the toxic spirit had saved Sam's life, even though the result had only been incidental to saving Glover. This time, it was Sam who threatened Glover. The noxious parody of a man lurched toward him. As the slime thing rose, the remaining druids and their acolytes burst from hiding. Under cover of magical and mundane firepower, they made a concerted break for the northern entrance. Estios and Chatterjee, unable to reply to the concentration of firepower, couldn't stop them. Leaving their dead and wounded behind, the druids fled.

  As soon as he had a chance, Estios fired at their retreating backs. He rose from his hiding place and shouted for the runners to follow him in pursuit. He didn't wait to see if he was obeyed. Chatterjee was hard on his heels, and O'Connor hurried to join her fellow elves. Sam hesitated, unsure of the wisdom of pell-mell pursuit into the dark; he had lost his goggles. In that moment, the thing moved between him and the northern door. Like an angry wasp, Willie's drone buzzed the slime shape, 5.56mm machine guns blazing. The drone's high velocity slugs tore through one side of the thing and out the other with no apparent effect. The thing's half-formed head swiveled to track the drone as it circled.

  Willie concentrated the fire of both guns on the shape's malformed shoulder. Bullets slammed into the viscous goo, perforating the limb. The guns raked up and down, dumping a volume of fire that eliminated in-pouring slime before it could reseal the breech. The right arm that had been reaching languidly toward the drone dropped to the floor and splashed on the hard stone.

  A rapid series of beeps from the drone was Willie's cheer.

  Sam didn't join in. He was watching the puddles of the arm coalesce and flow into the base of the shape. Willie wouldn't be seeing it; she would be concentrating on amputating the thing's other arm.

  The second limb splashed down only to trickle back to the parent mass. Willie was keeping its attention but doing no significant damage. Sam thought it would be wisest to get out as soon as he could. A bulge was beginning to develop on the monster's right shoulder. It would be restored to itself soon, and Willie's ammo supply was limited.

  Sam was looking for a way past the thing when he realized that it wasn't reforming an arm. Its shoulder just continued to bulge until it began to look hunchbacked. Willie's fire gnawed at its neck, but the thicker attachment was proving more resistant to the drone's fire.

  With appalling speed, a tentacle burst from the growth on the thing's shoulder, whipping out and wrapping itself around the drone. The shock and mass almost brought the machine down, but Willie revved the rotors. The blades sliced gobs from the pseudopod and the drone rose again, but it was still trapped.

  The monster pumped its substance into the tentacle, becoming thinner and thinner as the portion gripping the drone bloated. It was nearly a caricature stick figure by the time the mass overcame the drone's lift capability and the machine crashed to the floor. The drone's landing gear was still retracted and the rounded lower end offered no stability. The cylinder canted sideways immediately. Guns firing wildly, the drone toppled.

  With the drone down, the massive cord wrapped around its middle sagged. The walls of the tentacle relaxed, letting its toxic substance flow across the surface of the captive machine. The shining metal pitted and blackened everywhere the slime touched. A shower of sparks erupted as the first drip slithered through the open gun ports. The drone crackled with miniature lightnings, and acrid smoke billowed out through seams and service ports. A strangled machinery sound began to come from somewhere inside the drone, rising to an unbearably high pitch before suddenly cutting off. The lights which had begun flashing as soon as the drone hit the ground winked out.

  The hovering spy drone's rotors cut out, and it dropped into the river with a splat.

  Sam hoped the electronic feedback had only knocked Willie off line. There was no one there to jack her out if the destruction of her combat drone had caused a lethal interface loop. She might be dying alone.

  He, on the other hand, was facing a messier death. He watched the slime flow and reshape itself into its hulking, humanoid shape.

  Hart knew that she should have done something sooner, but she had been paralyzed by an uncharacteristic indecision. While she had dithered, the runners had set out after the Circle. Her arguments against precipitous action had been overriden by an equally uncharacteristic agreement between Dodger and Estios that they could not wait. Having those two elves backing him was all that Sam had needed.

  His obsession with seeing the Circle stopped was every bit as strong as his fixation had been with bringing Haesslich to justice. But this time it was purer, more noble. It was more than just a revenge scheme. He was working against the Circle because he had been tricked into helping them with their plots. Deep down, though, he was out to stop them because they needed to be stopped. And he was right.

  Maybe that was why her arguments had lacked force, why she had not found other ways to handle the problem.

  When she had not been able to deflect the runners from charging in on the Circle's ritual, she had gone along. Opportunities could not always be predicted. Besides, if they had all been out of her sight, she would have had no way of keeping track of their actions, no hope of guiding them. She had still been looking for a way to short-circuit the raid when the precipitous rush into the old warehouse had begun.

  The Lady would not be happy.

  Hart had seen most of the druids escape the runners' attack. Given their capabilities, she had no fear that they would not escape Estios and the others, especially now that Willie's surveillance drones were neutralized. The Hidden Circle would re-form to perform their dirty magic. They were still a functional ritual group; even though they had lost members, their leaders and strongest magicians survived. Perhaps that would be enough for them to do whatever it was that the Lady expected them to do. If so, Hart's lack of action would be excusable. Except for one matter. Sam.

  From beneath the cloak of her invisibility spell, she watched him scramble about the warehouse looking for a weapon. He snatched a pistol from the hand of a dead acolyte and began firing at the slime thing stalking him. His calm was commendable; he grouped his shots neatly between the dark pits that would have been eyes if the monstrosity had had a face. His shots inflicted no significant damage.

  The stubbornness that made him so persistent ha
d betrayed him. Had he faced his true nature, he would have known how to deal with this summoning. This was a thing of magic; evil and twisted magic to be sure, but magic nonetheless. Short moments ago he had seen how ineffective the combat drone's machine gun fire had been. Had he studied spirits as he should have, he would have known that the minimal firepower of a pistol could not affect it. Magic must needs be fought with magic.

  It would be so easy. All she had to do was turn her back and it would be over. She wouldn't even have to do it herself. Sam would be dead and the Lady would be satisfied. Or reasonably so. Distracting or eliminating Estios's crew wouldn't be so hard. By the letter, her contract would be fulfilled.

  So why didn't she? Why was her heart racing and her palms sweating? She felt her concentration slip, and the invisibility spell die.

  Sam's attention flickered from his opponent to her as she appeared. She saw fear in his eyes, and when he shouted, she knew what he feared.

  "Get out! I can't stop it! Save yourself!"

  Could she?

  She summoned energy, twisting it into the shape of her most powerful spell of banishment. She felt the thing become aware of her. If she failed, it would come for her and she, exhausted from the attempted dismissal, would be easy prey. She unleashed the first tendril of magic to bind the spirit into submission. The spirit howled astrally as the ribbon of azure energy touched it. It struggled.

  She sensed a vague familiarity-a feeling of previous acquaintancea151as contact was made, and shuddered. She had never summoned such a thing. This was a toxic spirit such as could only be summoned by a demented magician. She would have no truck with such warped evil.

  Her revulsion fed her will. The second tendril wrapped the spirit, adhering more tightly than the first. The spirit struggled against the bonds. Its efforts tore the first, but Hart replaced the sundered binding with a third and fourth. The thing's attempts at escape weakened. It began to plead wordlessly, but she had no pity for such a monstrosity. She tightened her spell, squeezing the toxic spirit out of existence. What should never have been, was no more. The world spun and her vision greyed as she slumped against the wall. The sludge spirit was banished, its animating presence terminated. Sam ran to her, carefully avoiding the puddles of caustic slime that were all that remained of the thing.