Apex

by Mercedes Lackey

  But, oh, it was so good to be able to talk to Mark at length about Josh.

  “…and he’s been holed up in one of the old bunkers ever since,” I concluded. “Now Uncle wants to know if he knows anything about what Drift’s done to the Psimons. That’s why we’re out here, to find that out.”

  “Probably not,” Mark replied. “If he did, I’m pretty sure he would have told you when you were out here during the storm.”

  I hadn’t said anything about that, but now that Mark knew Josh was here, it was pretty easy for him to put that together with my absence during the storm and come up with the right answer. Mark was a great many things, but stupid wasn’t one of them.

  “I’m pretty sure too, but maybe he doesn’t know he knows something,” I pointed out. “It’s worth asking.” It was a relief to finally get all of this off my chest. Now if only I could tell someone about Torcion as well…

  We paused when Bya alerted me to let a flock of Willow Wisps pass in front of us. They didn’t know we were there, and there was no point in starting a fight that might bring more Othersiders running when they heard the noise.

  We felt our way into the ruined building, guided by what we could see in our NVGs. The stairway was pitch-black, but we managed to get down it all right, and the door lock clicked open in response to the presence of my Perscom. We all squeezed inside the antechamber—it was a tight fit—and once the outer door was closed, I tapped the code Josh and I had worked out on the inner door, then applied my Perscom to it as well.

  Mark shoved the unlocked door open, allowing us to spill into the big room and turn on our headlamps. Josh was just emerging from the kitchen door. “I don’t suppose you brought pizza?” Josh said.

  “Not this time, buddy.”

  Josh stared at Mark with his mouth open. Mark took his hand, then pulled him into a back-slapping hug. “How are you holding up out here? Kent and the prefect sent us. Joy filled me in on what’s going on.”

  “I’m doing better than I would with Drift,” he replied. “But I’m glad to see you. I never thought I would miss people, until there weren’t any around.”

  “Well, speaking of that particular devil, that’s why we’re here,” I put in. I was giving him as much of a look-over as I could in the light from my headlamp, and truth to be told, he was looking better than he had in a while. Better rested, for one thing. In that moment I definitely envied him. It wouldn’t be so bad to be out here alone with nothing to do but eat and sleep and read.

  “In that case, come into my den and make yourselves comfortable,” he replied.

  We followed him into the storeroom, and we all sat down on his improvised “couch” made of mattresses. He offered us water, which I was glad to take, and the Basic Ration Biscuits, which we passed on. The Hounds arranged themselves around us, making things much warmer and cozier. This was not the worst living situation in the world, but it was damp and cold down there.

  “Well, Drift showed her hand,” I said after Mark gave me a little nod, indicating that I should take the lead here. I described the Psimons in their armor, how they’d been pulled from regular duty and put on the Barrier, and how Drift was making quite the big deal out of it. Josh listened, his brows knitted, until I came to the end.

  “She’s not lying about pulling all the Psimons,” he said immediately. “To put that many Psimons on the Barriers would take all the Psimons. And we’re not as tough as Hunters; we couldn’t do twelve-hour shifts. It would have to be shifts of no more than eight hours at a time. But I never heard of anything like this, even in the planning stage. She has to have been keeping this very quiet somehow.”

  “The armor didn’t look all that special,” Mark said after a moment. “She could have had that in the works for a while.”

  “But…if she’s managed to figure out a way of multiplying a Psimon’s power without killing him—that’s not only new, it’s a game-changer….” Josh suddenly got a look on his face.

  “Well?” I demanded.

  “That might be more than armor. That might be life support,” he said. “In fact, that might be why she put them into it in the first place. If those suits are big enough, they could hold a lot of medical equipment.”

  Mark and I exchanged a look. “Is seven feet tall and really broad big enough?” I asked.

  Mark nodded. “Most Psimons aren’t what you’d call robust,” he replied. “There’d be more than enough room in those suits for a Psimon and his twin.”

  “So plenty of room for equipment.” Josh nodded. “We’ve got a lot of life-support stuff Drift hasn’t let out to the general public. Some Psimons…well, they’re not exactly functional. They can do their jobs, but they have to be drugged up to do them. And some really strong Psimons kind of forget to do things, like breathe, when they are concentrating on controlling something.”

  We questioned Josh every way we could think of, but he still had no idea how Drift was boosting her Psimons, or what, besides the obvious, her plan might be. Finally I asked him the one thing I hadn’t yet.

  “Do you want to go back?” I asked. “I mean, if you know you aren’t going to burn out and die…” I thought going back would be possibly the worst thing he could do, personally, but it was his decision after all.

  “Well, that’s the thing, I don’t know that,” he countered. “You can’t see into those suits. You don’t know what she’s done to those Psimons. Why put them into faceless suits with helmets you can’t see through if there’s nothing to hide? They could have tentacles growing out of their heads for all I know. No, no thanks. I don’t trust Drift at all. Besides, if I did go back, no matter what my excuse might be, there isn’t a chance in hell that she wouldn’t put me through a full Psi-assisted interrogation about where I’d been, and that would get you, Prefect Charmand, and the armorer all in trouble. I can’t do that to you. I just wish you could figure out somewhere for me to go.”

  “Nowhere safe,” Mark said after a moment of hesitation. “The attacks on the towns around Apex are getting worse, and the Othersiders have started kidnapping people now. Kids mostly, but they almost got Denali. The ones on those raids are being commanded and organized by some sort of superior Folk Mage. I don’t think anything running wild out here is going to find you….” He shook his head. “I never thought I’d be thinking of the Othersiders out here in Spillover as petty, but compared to what we’ve been facing, they are. They’re certainly not very bright, and even if they sensed you, I don’t think they’d be able to find you.”

  Josh looked as if that was cold comfort. I emptied my pockets of those energy squares I liked to carry, to cheer him up. They were pretty tasty and a big improvement over Basic Ration Biscuits. “Next time I come I’ll bring some kind of decent food,” I promised as I stood up to leave. Mark patted him on the back sympathetically and also stood. “Oh, hey, I know—I have something with me.” He rummaged around in his backpack and emerged with a hardened tablet, which was like a Perscom but way bigger. “Here,” he said, handing it over to Josh. “You can at least watch vids or play games. I’ve got a lot of games loaded on it, vids too.”

  Josh lit up, and the two of them proceeded to bond over the darned thing. I did my level best not to look impatient or annoyed, although I was both. Josh was a real Cit and had probably never been more than fifty feet from a vid-screen for his entire life. He had no idea of how to keep himself entertained all by his lonesome. But then I kicked the annoyance in the head, because it was nice to see Josh being something other than worried. It was also nice to see the two of them being friends again; Mark probably hadn’t even texted Josh after Josh and I had broken up. Oh, I’d explained it all to Mark so he wouldn’t get the wrong idea, but Mark was a loyal guy. He’d probably think he needed to be “on my side.”

  Finally, Mark finished showing off every last file he’d loaded on the pad, clapped Josh on the back again, and said, “Glad I had that with me. Hopefully, this will keep you from going insane.”

  “I’m
going to mount a holder on the front of that charging bike as soon as you leave,” Josh replied gratefully. “Actually—before you leave, let me make sure the coast is clear.”

  He thumbed his Perscom, frowned for a moment in concentration, and thumbed it again, turning the Psi-shield off and on. “Nothing out there to worry about, and nothing at all lurking around in the building.”

  “Thanks, Josh,” Mark said, then he gave me what he probably supposed was a subtle wink, and whistled to his Hounds to follow as he left, giving me some privacy with Josh.

  Before I could second-guess myself, I sort of threw myself at him and kissed him.

  At least I was pretty good at the kissing part.

  “Did I give you enough time?” Mark asked anxiously as my Hounds and I joined him outside. I pulled down my NVGs and blinked hard to adjust my vision to the blurry green-and-black view around me.

  “Yes. No. I don’t know,” I replied, flushing and glad he couldn’t see it.

  “I probably did, then,” he said with satisfaction—a little too much, if you ask me. What is it about married people that they always want to hook up everyone around them? Couples were like that back in Safehaven too. “Let’s get out of here. What’s our pretense for being out here, anyway?”

  “Meeting with Uncle’s rebel informant,” I said. “The informant told us that the rebels are suffering heavy attrition from the Othersiders, and he’s looking for a way to get to another city where it might be safer.”

  I made it up on the spot, but it was a plausible story and one that would be impossible to disprove.

  “Excellent.” He nodded. “Let’s get out of here fast. Any good reason why we shouldn’t ride Dusana?”

  “Only that we have the chance of coming up on something the Hounds can’t see,” I pointed out. “Just because we can all see in the dark, it doesn’t mean we can see well.”

  Mark thought about that. “As opposed to not getting a full night’s sleep…”

  “Point.” I turned to Dusana, but he had already made himself big enough for both of us to ride, and had knelt so we could mount, me in front, Mark behind. We got on, and Dusana took off at a lope, going roughly four times as fast as we could have walking.

  “So, Jessie’s pregnant,” Mark said, too casually, in my ear. There was no mistaking the mixed emotions in his voice. Pride, of course; most men like to have their virility confirmed, especially Christers, who are invested in producing as many kids as possible. But there was worry, and given our current situation, it was justifiable.

  “Sending her back to your parents?” I asked without making any of the mean remarks that I was thinking. Because to be honest, I don’t care what his deity said, getting pregnant in the middle of a situation where Othersiders were essentially laying siege to Apex was a pretty bad idea. And Safehaven was called that for a reason.

  “She’s insisting on staying here.” More worry in his voice now. I couldn’t think of any way I could reassure him that he hadn’t already used to try to reassure himself.

  “There is no safer place in all of Apex than Hunter HQ,” I said finally, and left it at that. I changed the subject to Denali and whether or not Mark’s people had ever seen Manticores or dealt with anything that had a venomous stinger. But I was glad when Dusana got us to the Pylon and our waiting pod.

  Morning began with the callout alert going off at the same time as my alarm. Thanks to Dusana, we’d made good time last night, and reciting our cover story hadn’t taken all that long, so we’d gotten to bed more or less on time.

  But this morning the choppers didn’t take us far. In fact, the Barrier was visible from where they dropped us off.

  Like many towns that had done away with their defenses because they were so close to Apex, this one was the next thing to a sitting duck—more so because the only use they seemed to have for their concrete defensible buildings was as storehouses. The good news was that we had gotten here so fast, the Manticores were only just starting to pour out of the Portals. The bad news was that those Portals were inside the town. Right inside the town—in the middle of it, to be exact. Minotaurs had already set up defensive lines on every street into town, with Nagas behind them. Once again, they were coordinated and disciplined, and this time they had something new: actual physical shields, like Romans or knights would have, along with their swords and axes. As we clashed with their lines, it quickly became apparent that the shields were the focus of individual static Shield spells.

  So this Lord Laetrenier learned from his mistakes. No entrusting the Shields to Folk Mages who could be disabled by a simple dazzling spell.

  Yeah, but he doesn’t realize that will only make it easier to take down the Shields. Static Shield spells weren’t self-renewing. Break them, and they stayed broken. “Static Shield spells on the physical shields. I’m working middle to right,” I said into the radio, and proceeded to plant embrittling spells on all those shiny shields.

  “Middle to left,” said Scarlet, who’d learned the trick from me. Moments later, bullets started hitting the Shields, and the Shields began to fail. Spectacularly.

  Just as we were starting to fight our way in…more choppers started arriving.

  But they were not the army reinforcements that I had thought we would get.

  No, what spilled out of the choppers were people in bulky armor in PsiCorps colors, with closed, “friendly-looking” helmets—helmets you couldn’t see into.

  They split up in a highly coordinated fashion, half running left, half running right. As the ones nearest us took up stationary positions, it became obvious that they were arranging themselves in a circle around the town, spaced an equal distance apart from each other.

  I was too busy shooting Nagas and trying to get to the Manticores before they broke into houses and started abducting kids to pay much attention to the Psimons as they got themselves arranged to their liking. But I sure noticed the difference when they had.

  Because suddenly, the Nagas near me turned their backs on me and started attacking the Manticores.

  They weren’t effective as attackers, since the Manticores just turned and started darting them with their tail-stingers—one after the other, killing them dead—but they were effective at keeping the Manticores from breaking into the buildings. Howls of rage were countered by angry hissing; the Nagas always lost, but they got in some good hits with those swords they carried. By the time the Manticores finished off the Nagas, they were all wounded and bleeding, and now they had to contend with us.

  And then, suddenly, they had to contend with each other. With the Nagas gone, the Psimons turned the Manticores against themselves.

  Slashing claws and darting stingers made wading directly into the fray a bad, bad idea…but on the other hand, bullets and magic worked, even if we had to be more careful of where we were shooting this time because so many of the buildings were wooden-walled.

  It appeared that the Manticores were immune to the venom of their own kind, but being stuck by a stinger as long as my lower arm was not doing them any good, either.

  “Break up and spread out,” Kent ordered. “Take advantage of what PsiCorps is doing for as long as they can keep it up!”

  The other members of my team split off to the right and left, leaving me and my pack to tackle the street alone—a task that was pathetically easy, since the Psimon about twenty yards behind me seemed to have the situation well in hand. Still…

  Hevajra, go back and guard the Psimon. Take Hold with you, I ordered. While I might loathe Drift, that Psimon was on my side, and I wasn’t going to leave him hanging out to dry.

  Or her. No telling in that armor.

  Alert us if something comes after him, I added as Hevajra and Hold peeled off and dashed behind us. Or if it looks like he’s having any trouble.

  Then I loaded a new clip and proceeded to stitch Manticores with lines of carefully placed bullets.

  It was over as quickly as it began. The Portal at the end of the street I was on abruptl
y closed, leaving the few Manticores left without a way to escape. “Elite Joy. Portal closed!” I announced, but I was by far from being the only one reporting the same thing. The Portals were closing all over the town, leaving the Othersiders with nowhere to escape. In fifteen minutes, we had the last of them mopped up, and in twenty, the town was ours, without a single kidnapped or even injured Cit.

  Sadly, the bodies were going to goo; I’d hoped, despite the mess it would make in cleanup, that they would have stayed solid. I had a notion of collecting stingers and poison sacs to use in making antivenin.

  I walked back toward the Psimon in his armor; he was still standing there in the street, as if the armor had frozen into position. Well, if Josh was right, maybe it had. If that Psimon had completely exhausted himself, he might be on life support about now.

  “You did fantastic work,” I said to the helmet visor, which didn’t show any sort of change. “I have to thank you, both you and everyone from PsiCorps who turned up here.”

  Nothing.

  “Is there anything I can do for you?” I persisted. “Anything I can get for you?”

  Still nothing.

  I hesitated to touch that armor. It looked pretty formidable, if you looked past the pretty colors and patterns and actually paid attention to how bulky it was. There might be—in fact, there probably were—defenses built into it, defenses I might trigger with a well-intentioned touch.

  “Should I call for your evac?” I suggested. I might have gone further and just done it, but at that moment the same choppers that had brought the Psimons began arriving again. As soon as they touched down, the Psimon turned and began walking back toward his ride.

  But this time there was something very mechanical about the way he was moving, as if it was the suit doing the walking and he was just along for the ride. This was nothing like the clumsy but natural running he’d done to get in place. That impression was reinforced when he got to the chopper and stopped, and two men jumped down out of it and picked up the suit with the aid of a hook and pulley and hauled it inside.