Apex

by Mercedes Lackey

  As he stepped through the Portal, I opened the Way and sent back Hold and Strike. Then Dusana knelt and I mounted on him, and offered Josh a hand.

  He took it and mounted behind me. “How are we—” he began. And Dusana bamphed.

  We bamphed all the way home; it was faster than waiting for a pod. By the time we got back to HQ, Josh was very, very sick. So sick he shut himself in the nearest bathroom to the HQ entrance and I was pretty sure he was going to be in there for some time. Meanwhile, I discovered that Kent was off doing something (I wasn’t sure what) with the recordings he’d made of Torcion and Laetrenier, while leaving orders for all the Hunters to go on full standby. And he had left Archer in charge, after a brief explanation—and a sample of what he’d recorded. On Kent’s orders, Archer had alerted the army that there was going to be another try at the Barrier. Kent and I knew we were all about to be in for a worse time than the previous two Barrier Battles; the only question was where on the Barrier were they going to appear? We couldn’t count on the Psimons to alert us or stop them this time—or even help us.

  Everyone left me alone, not knowing what had just happened, maybe thinking I was still too hurt to count on. But I checked in with the medics to make sure Torcion had healed me, and left them with their jaws on the floor. I was as good as new, maybe better. Then I headed to the armory. I wanted to choose my weapons carefully. Very carefully. No just grabbing things and hoping they were going to turn out to be what I needed.

  I’d finished building my load-out when I realized my Perscom was still on Torcion’s wrist.

  I cursed and went to the techs to get another, though of course it wouldn’t be nearly as good as the one Uncle had given me. I got a separate Psi-shield for my other wrist since there wasn’t one on the Perscom. Then I went to the hangar and waited for the callout, thinking about what was ahead of us. The hangar was empty, open, and quiet, all things I needed right now. We were about to go into the worst fight ever, and I had to make sure all the baggage I was carrying wasn’t going to keep me from doing what I had to do.

  At least one of my two big secrets was out. But in the quiet of the hangar, not unlike the quiet of the meditation room back at the Monastery, I was getting my head in order.

  That was where Josh found me.

  “I can’t believe you do that all the time,” he said, looking pale but no longer queasy. “Why aren’t you sick?”

  “I guess you get used to it,” I replied. “I promised you an explanation….”

  “Good. Let’s hear it. Because you are clearly not the person I thought you were.” It wasn’t an accusation; in fact, he said it in something of a tone of wonder.

  So I gave him the explanation. He listened. He didn’t interrupt me. He also didn’t yell at me. I sat with my elbows on my knees and my hands clasped, and kept my eyes on my hands the whole time, to avoid seeing his reactions. When it was over I glanced at him. He just shook his head. “I’m not sure if you’re crazy, brave, or both.”

  “Both, I guess,” I replied. “Where do you want to go from here? It’s probably safe enough for you to go back to Uncle—”

  “I’m going to PsiCorps,” he replied, “and turning on my Psi-shield. That’s the last place Drift will expect me to be, if she even thinks I’m still alive. But someone has to get to the Psimons and try to persuade them that Drift is the Folk Lord’s tool. I’m the best one to do that.” I looked up and saw that he was nodding at me slightly. He reached for my hand; I reached for his at the same time, and we looked into each other’s eyes. I was pretty sure he read the fear in mine, and his eyes mirrored that fear. “I’m not going to just sit back and let her hand my city and my Cits over to the Othersiders,” he continued, his voice steady. “And I can’t believe every single Psimon she’s got would go along with this if they knew what she was doing.”

  “You sound like Hunter Elite now,” I replied, and my voice was shaky. “That’s pretty darn brave.”

  “I’ve got a good example to follow right in front of me,” he told me, and squeezed my hand. “No matter what you’ve been thinking about yourself, every single person that can count you as a friend is lucky to have you, Joyeaux Charmand. I’ve got to go. I won’t ask you to keep yourself safe out there. I just ask that you remember you’re more valuable to all these Cits here alive than dead. Martyrs can’t help anyone.”

  I nodded. He kissed me hard and quick, and left, walking fast and not looking back.

  Before I could have any sort of emotional reaction, Archer came in, laden with a full load-out. He nodded at me and I nodded back. “You’ve heard the recordings?” I asked.

  He shook his head in disbelief. “Insane. If this hadn’t been your doing, I wouldn’t have believed it. And your Hounds all trust this…magician.” Even now, he didn’t dare say aloud what Torcion was, or his name.

  “All of them,” I affirmed.

  “Insane. But what do I know? Nothing’s been making any sense since Ace went rogue. I’ve got the army ready to move at a moment’s notice. I’m just waiting for Kent to get back from briefing the prefect. We need a plan of attack for the first push when it comes.” He sat down with me on the bench at the side of the hangar. “The plan won’t survive past the first fifteen minutes, of course, but we need something to start with.”

  “I can tell you things you already know,” I offered. “If Drift has her way, the Psimons won’t help. We’ll be facing just as big a force as we did at the last Barrier Battle, and we’re all worn to a thread. But there won’t be Thunderbirds or a storm this time, so we won’t be wasting half our energy trying to keep the rain off, or trying to keep warm. So there’s that.”

  “We’ll have to do this without Mark, Steel, and Hammer.” He thought about that for a moment. “Your Shields are good. Flashfire’s are. Kent probably knows who in the general Hunter population has good Shields….” He made a note on his Perscom. “What about finding and taking out the Folk Mages, especially the Big Bad?”

  “I think that might be our only hope of getting this over with.” I didn’t say “quickly,” because I didn’t think there was any way of getting this over “quickly.” I was just hoping to end it all without any more of us dying. “Is it practical to hope for gunship support?”

  “Good question.” He made another note.

  We continued to try and think of things together, and to be honest, it was absolutely surreal. Here we were in the big, empty, echoing hangar. We knew all hell was going to rain down on us soon, but we didn’t know exactly when, and right now, everything seemed peaceful. We knew Drift had already betrayed the entire city as well as us, personally, and yet we couldn’t run around shouting this to the rooftops, even though we wanted to. Or I did, anyway.

  “Do you think your friend is really going to do what he said he’d do?” Archer asked at last. “Because that could make a big difference.” I knew he didn’t mean Josh; if he’d meant Josh, he’d have said boyfriend, or Psimon. So that meant Torcion.

  “Only if the lords of the Alliance believe him.” I made a face. “And we’re talking about creatures whose motives we probably don’t really understand.”

  “I dunno…I’ve known cats that understood revenge. And the gods know that crows do. Your friend probably wants revenge on his cousin right now for trying to kill him.” He took out a knife and began putting an edge on it.

  And that was when my Perscom alerted me to a text. As Archer looked over my shoulder, I pulled it up so we could both see it.

  It was from Josh.

  Three-fourths of those suits are empty.

  “What the—” Archer didn’t quite gasp, but it was pretty clear he was as shocked by this as I was.

  “But it makes sense,” I said after a moment. “How many Psimons did she lose? I watched techs walk those suits into the transport, rather than the Psimon who was inside doing it. That means the suits are autonomous. She could just walk the empty ones out and leave them there; it’s not as if anyone was going to know they were s
eeing an empty suit. And there are a lot of suits at the Barrier. She knows where the attack is going to be. She can put the manned suits there and nowhere else, if she intends to help the Othersiders.”

  I texted back, Where are the manned suits?

  I got back what had to be the feed from whatever control room was monitoring those suits—a screen with a map of the Barrier, with red dots in a line along it everywhere except a small section in the south, where the dots were green. A new place, one the Othersiders hadn’t attacked from before, probably because the army base was there—

  “Shit!” Archer swore. “They’re planning on hitting the base first!”

  He got on his Perscom and began muttering into it—presumably telling his army contact what was about to fall on their heads. Meanwhile Josh had texted me again.

  I’m going to do something about filling those empty suits.

  Okay. That made no sense. With what?

  But then suddenly I remembered something he’d told me when we had first met. About all the low-level psychics that Drift deemed “insufficiently talented” to join PsiCorps. How they got enough training so they could use the little they had, then went out to a separate school (more like normal people, I’d bet) and went on to get jobs that needed just a little bit of psi. Like…with the vid-channels.

  And those suits amplified psionics. A suit turned a regular Psimon into something amazingly powerful. Would it turn a marginally talented psionic into a Psimon?

  …the Marginals? I texted back.

  I could almost see him grin. Got it in one. Gonna be busy now. You kick some butt.

  Archer ended his conversation. “All right, they’re alerted. I don’t know what else I can do.”

  “Maybe tell everyone to get their load-outs and wait?” I said, floundering a little. I’d never been in a position like this before.

  “Already done. I only skipped you because I thought—” He finally took a look at me. “Why are you loaded up? Where’s your cast?”

  “My ‘friend’ healed me to prove we could trust him.” Archer’s eyebrows practically hit his hairline. “And I mean healed everything. Healed things instantly, like, faster and better than I’ve ever heard of.”

  “And how do you know he didn’t just—I don’t know, make you think you were healed?” he retorted.

  “Because I’m not stupid. First thing I did was check with the medics. It didn’t take long. One bone scan, in fact. He might be able to mess with my head to make me not notice pain, but I don’t think he can jinx the bone-scan machines.”

  He was going to reply, when the alarm went off. In the next moment, Kent came charging into the room with his full kit. “You two with me, Chopper One!” he yelled as he went by, the hangar door opening for him automatically. We followed right on his heels.

  We picked up Cielle, Scarlet, and Tober in short order, and Kent directed the chopper away. We were no sooner in the air when we saw explosions in the distance—right where the army base was. “What the—” Tober swore over the comm. “How can they—”

  “I’m finding that out! Stay off the freq for a second,” Kent ordered, one hand to his ear as the chopper powered its way toward the base. Then Kent’s face went cold. “They sent suicide squads of Ketzels over the Barrier to attack the choppers. Fully fueled choppers.”

  I felt all the blood drain from my face. Fully fueled bombs was more like it….Whatever protection against static, sparks, or lightning those choppers had, it wouldn’t be enough against a whole flock of Ketzels. Especially not if the Ketzels had been controlled to attack without regard to their own safety.

  We were already off to a bad start.

  We flew over the airfield on our way to the Barrier; there were some choppers in the air, and a lot of soldiers out there doing their best to gun down the Ketzels, or at least keep them away from the choppers and the fuel tanks. But we flew past them too fast, and I couldn’t see how that was going. All I could tell for sure was that there were far too many burning choppers on the field, huge billows of black smoke and flames coming up from the ones that the fire crews hadn’t gotten to yet.

  “There goes our air support,” Archer muttered, saying aloud what we were all thinking.

  The chopper we were in engaged the field that let it pass through the Barrier; there was a feeling of resistance, and tingling all over, then we were setting down right next to the Barrier. There were a few troops here already, and some artillery pieces.

  And the Psimons in their armor…were gone.

  No one commented on that. At least it meant we wouldn’t be attacked from behind by people who were supposed to be on our side. The best I could think to hope for was that Josh had gotten through to some of them. They couldn’t all be toadies to Drift, could they?

  The chopper set down and we bailed. The other choppers were not far behind ours, kicking up dust as they touched down just long enough to let the rest of us off. There were Portals blossoming all over the bean fields in front of us, so we lost no time in summoning our Hounds.

  Some of the others were summoning fast and dirty, but I was thinking of the long slog we were going to have in front of us. To conserve energy I used the Glyphs—and the first Hound to burst through the Portal once I opened the Way was Bya.

  I wanted to fall to my knees and hug him, I was so happy to see him, but the rest were coming through right on his heels—and within sight of us, Othersider Portals were spewing nasty things.

  I am happy to see you too, he said in answer to my unvoiced thoughts, as he took his proper place at my side. Are we to Shield?

  Yes, we have to make up for Hammer and Steel still being unconscious. I didn’t mention Mark, but Bya got up on his hind legs and gave my cheek a sympathetic lick.

  Then we will was all he said, but he said it with feeling.

  The Hounds and I put up our Shields, twelve layers interwoven. We tested them for strength and expanded them as far as we could, before toughening them against everything that the Othersiders could throw at us. Then we made sure they were transparent to magic on the inside, so we could throw spells when they were up. We were able to cover roughly the same area as if Hammer and Steel were there, although people had to crowd in a little closer than usual to fit inside. I listened with half an ear to Kent as he explained to the rest what was going on. He played an edited version of the recording for them; their reaction was pretty much as might be expected. There was a lot of rage. There was also a lot of fear. I think a lot of us had counted on the Psimons having our back, and maybe doing even better than that, what with the new suits and their boosted abilities.

  “Now listen up, Hunters,” Kent said over the comm when he’d finished giving them the situation. “The important part of all of this is that the Othersider leader is counting on taking us out in this fight. If he doesn’t, he loses. He’ll be concentrating on us and not on the Barrier this time. All we have to do is outlast him until one or more of his allies starts to get doubts.”

  That seemed a much too optimistic reading of the situation to me, but I kept my mouth shut.

  “So don’t waste anything. Not a bullet. Not a levin bolt. And most especially, not yourselves. Make everything you do count. Save your strength. We can outlast them. We’ve done it before, and we’ll do it again.”

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the bean fields, the Othersiders were pouring out of yet more Portals and forming up into ranks, just like the army that they were. Then finally, whoever was in charge of the army base woke up from his shock and realized that while living things couldn’t go through the Barrier, inanimate objects did just fine. All the artillery and tanks suddenly swiveled their barrels. We all heard the whine and grinding of gears and turned—to see every barrel that had been pointing somewhere else now pointing at those Portals. Then came the booms as they began pounding the Othersiders.

  Shells screamed overhead, more than low enough for us to see them clearly, and hit on the Othersider lines. It looked as if they were letting
loose with whatever they could load. I saw explosive shells, incendiary, frags….There wasn’t much consistency, but then given what we were up against, a mix was probably better anyway.

  A vicious roar came up from the Othersider ranks as the first shells landed among them. Evidently getting pounded like that broke whatever power kept them disciplined and holding rank, and they charged straight for us.

  At that point I found out just how hard it was for Hammer and Steel to do what they did. Whenever anything solid hit the Shield, it resonated unpleasantly with me, and magic energy drained away. I was constantly replenishing the thing—and so were the Hounds. They all hunkered down, even Hold and Strike, almost as if they were being beaten, and closed their eyes, concentrating on helping me.

  Elbow to elbow, back to back…I was in the middle, somewhat protected, but having to keep track of everything.

  I had to listen hard through the cacaphony for Kent’s instructions to bring the Shields down and put them back up. I had to keep an eye on all the people I was supposed to be Shielding to make sure none of them got separated from us while the Shields were down, and if they started getting pushed or dragged away, I sent a Hound to drag them back. Dusana, preferably; he was big enough to haul anyone back by the belt.

  We were surrounded by the enemy now, at least six deep, maybe more, but I couldn’t see past the row of Minotaurs. I also didn’t see any sign whatsoever that Torcion had gotten to the Folk Lords of this “Grand Alliance.” The Othersiders didn’t seem at all inclined to fight one another.

  So things are going according to Laetrenier’s plan. Well…crap.

  This was insane. The noise was incredible. Shells screaming by overhead; Othersiders howling, screeching, bellowing, in a dozen different voices. Gunfire and grenades when the Shields came down; magic explosions and the sounds of levin bolts and fire bolts hitting when they were up.

  Although I was in the center of the group, I was getting my hits in too. Specifically, I made liberal use of the skunk-spell. I’d picked up an old-fashioned slingshot and some bullets for it; I cast the spell on a bullet and let it fly over the heads of the Minotaurs, then triggered it. I didn’t care where it landed—anyplace would do. The point was to get the skunk-spell as far as possible from us. Anywhere it landed after that would do damage.