Shadow Ops 3: Breach Zone

by Myke Cole

  Goblins.

  Swift knew he should run, but his body refused to obey, frozen in disbelief at what he was seeing. He stood rooted to the spot as the first sorcerers emerged, their skins white with the chalky paint the goblins used to mark their magic users. One of these spit something in its own language and gestured at the people fleeing up the steps. A fireball shot from its hand and slammed into them, sending a woman flying, her gray suitskirt crisping to ash as she tumbled through the air.

  The crowd shrieked and pelted back into the building.

  The goblins poured out of the portal until they filled the entire street and began to pile up the steps of Federal Hall. Here and there, standards bobbed, poles topped with the giant skull of a bird, striped red and orange. One of the goblins climbed up to stand astride the pedestal beneath the bronze statue of George Washington. It was slightly bigger than the rest, its face dotted with white, a long, leather cape around its neck sewn with shining bronze discs. It brandished a spear at its fellows, shouting.

  The throng of goblins began to shift left and right across the street, clearing a path to either side of the curtain, leaving the cobblestones bare save for streaked blood and the bodies of those traders who hadn’t gotten out of the way in time. A goblin walked among them, stabbing down with a spear wherever one of them twitched or cried out.

  At last, one of the wolfriders raised a horn to its lips and sounded a long, low note. It was answered by a shriek from inside the gate. The sound cut through the crowd, they surged with even greater fervor, running frantically. The first of them reached Swift, and he stepped out of their path, numb with horror.

  Then the first new creatures came through.

  They towered twelve feet in the air, their skins liquid black and cut only by a slash of white smile, showing dagger teeth. Their humanoid bodies were topped with long horns, their hands dragging longer claws. They flashed through the gate, moving across the street in discrete blinks, one second in one place, another in the next. They lit among the stragglers streaming around the building, cutting them down with great sweeps of their clawed hands. The goblins drew back from them, shivering at the cold they exuded.

  Gahe, the Mountain Gods of the Apache. Relentless, vicious monsters that froze with a touch or killed with a swipe of their dagger claws.

  Swift’s eyes widened as a woman stepped through the curtain, the giant black creatures parting respectfully around her.

  She wore a suit of black leather armor, edges crudely stitched with strings of hanging beads, dotted with white patterns much like the skin of the goblins around her. Her own skin was milk pale, her black hair cut in a severe bob, almost jutting to points along her jawbone. Her eyes were wide, dark, and hauntingly beautiful. She surveyed the scene, the corner of her mouth quirked in satisfaction. A shimmering pulse passed through the air from her head to one of the huge black creatures surrounding her. It nodded, more pulses passed, and they began to fan out into the street, now eerily quiet.

  She nodded back at the monster, then turned to the curtain behind her, extending her hands. The air pulsed and the curtain’s edges began to rot once more, faster now, fading from green to purple to black in rapid succession, tearing ever wider, until the ragged hole in the air stretched beyond the edges of the buildings, easily admitting more of the slick black monsters, horned heads tossing, dagger smiles grinning, fanning out into the charnel-house corridor that had once been Wall Street. Training or no training, the panic won out then, and Swift was airborne, streaking through the sky back to his safe house.

  Because he knew that woman. Because he knew what she could do.

  What she would do.

  She could have had a roc carry her the forty stories up. One of the goblin Aeromancers would have been happy to oblige. But this was a homecoming, and Scylla wanted to walk in the front door, just like old times.

  For the most part, it was. Naeem, the doorman, showed no sign of recognizing her as she strode in, one of the tall Gahe beside her, a small cluster of goblins coming behind. He backed up behind the counter, mouth agape, eyes dinner-plate wide.

  The building was just as she remembered it, wide-beamed hardwood floors and cast-iron sconces giving the lobby a stately splendor that served as a reminder: This wasn’t a building for everyone. Only the greatest of the great lived here. The ceiling was hand-painted in rococo style, pompous and overblown, replete with gold leaf. Fortunately, this was one of the few buildings in the city with ceilings so high that even a Gahe’s horns wouldn’t scrape them.

  ‘Hello, Naeem,’ Scylla said, ‘any mail for me?’

  Naeem blinked, recognition dawning on his face. ‘You’re . . . You’re dead.’

  Scylla laughed. ‘Yes, well. Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.’

  He snatched up a phone, punched three digits, held it to his ear for a moment before pulling it away and looking at it.

  ‘I think you’ll find the lines tied up, old friend,’ Scylla said. She looked at her feet. He had been an old friend, after a fashion. It was all gone now. Ruined. She shrugged off the emotion. The die was cast. It was no time to go soft. ‘I’m heading up.’

  Naeem shrank behind the counter, uselessly punching those same three digits over and over.

  She headed to the elevator bank. A single car occupied the end closest to the counter. It only serviced one floor: the penthouse, where Scylla had lived before magic changed everything. She pressed the single, stainless-steel button.

  The doors didn’t open.

  She turned slowly toward him. The goblins surrounded the counter. One slapped a javelin down on the reflective surface and struggled to scramble up the smooth front with little success. Scylla guessed it might have been comical under other circumstances, but Naeem only stared at the javelin, face slack with horror. The creature finally rolled up on one elbow and mantled up onto the counter. It snatched up the weapon, jabbing it at the doorman’s throat. Naeem screamed and backed into the corner, pleading in his native Urdu.

  This wasn’t the time for sentiment. She was a war leader now. But Naeem had served her faithfully all the years she’d lived here. He’d delivered her packages, taken her messages, made sure to send her holiday greetings for occasions counter to his own faith. He had, in his way, cared for her. He didn’t deserve to be harmed.

  But she hadn’t won the goblin Defender tribes to her banner by promising mercy. They wanted revenge on humanity, and they would have it. She knew no single life was worth losing the loyalty of half her army.

  She had to sacrifice a few for the good of many. She need only allow it until victory was secured, then she would turn her cheek, give the good cop control. She thought briefly of Mao’s axiom: The people are the sea, and the insurgent is the fish. So long as the sea is hospitable to the fish, you will never catch them all. First she would hurt them, then she would win them.

  The Gahe came to stand at her side, watching impassively. She suppressed a shiver. The things were damn cold. It thought-pulsed to her, pictures forming in her mind. The Gahe could speak to anyone with their thought-pictures. It was a useful trait, and had made it possible to communicate with the goblin tribes, to give them the words of inspiration needed to bring them to her banner. Revenge against the humans for FOB Frontier, that hated outpost in the Source that had brought such misery. Scylla had destroyed its perimeter, opened it wide for their plunder. Now she could complete their revenge. More importantly, she promised that with their help she could bend the humans to submission, ensure they never again set foot on goblin lands.

  Even now, the creatures poured through the breach between the planes, eager to vent their rage. Too long had they been helpless in the face of humanity’s superior technology and magical might. Now they would show the people who had built a military outpost in their backyard the other end of the spear.

  The breach was one of two
in New York, rotted out of thin spots between the planes. The Gahe could sense them but only pass through singly when some lucky shift in the planar fabric permitted it.

  But they could show Scylla where the thin spots were, and her rotting magic Bound easily to anything.

  The Gahe flashed another picture in her mind. The second breach, opened out in the water off Manhattan’s tip. The other half of a pincer, closing around New York’s tender throat. She nodded, and the Gahe changed the subject to the third breach, in Mescalero, showing her an image of the dust-choked pass between red cliffs even now filling up with goblins, Gahe marching at their head. Few humans lived out in that wasteland, the least populated corner of a sparsely populated reservation. Those few ran out to the Gahe, grinning like fools, shouting greetings and wordless whoops of joy. The Apache Selfers, who worshipped the Gahe as their ‘Mountain Gods’.

  The Gahe thought-pulsed the image again. The single Mescalero breach wasn’t enough. It pulsed images of the six thin spots it had shown her across the reservation grounds.

  It didn’t care about New York beyond the chance to visit violence on the humans who had shunted its children, as it thought of the Apache, into desert prisons. Once, the Apache had ruled the mountains as far as they could see. The white eyes had stolen everything from them: their families, their lives, their land. And now they would do the same in the Source.

  Scylla smiled at the irony; she’d always thought it was humanity who would be influenced by the strangeness of the Source, but the influence ran both ways. To the Apache, FOB Frontier was another Fort Sill, an enemy encampment in the midst of an indigenous homeland, and the Gahe saw it that way, too.

  It wanted to be in Mescalero. All the Gahe did. But that wasn’t the deal. Scylla would rot the other thin spots open in Mescalero only after she was paid.

  Her price was New York.

  The goblin reached with the javelin, pricking Naeem’s neck. His eyes ranged over the creature’s shoulder, finding hers, pleading.

  In spite of herself, Scylla hissed loudly, and the goblin froze, looking up at her. She motioned sharply and it stepped back, leaving Naeem gasping, a small bead of blood working its way down to stain his collar. The creature’s eyes narrowed, and she saw the dawning sense of betrayal. Revenge denied, a promise broken.

  She knew it was a tactical error, a softness she couldn’t afford if she was to win this. She told herself that when Latent-kind took its rightful place at the helm of the world, they would still have to live alongside humans like Naeem. There was no need to antagonize them needlessly. Let her begin showing mercy now.

  But she saw the anger in the goblin’s eyes and knew the right of it.

  Naeem fumbled frantically under the counter, and the elevator door chimed and opened.

  ‘Thank you, Naeem,’ she said, then turned and entered the elevator.

  ‘Wait here,’ she said to the goblins. They hungered for revenge, but they were terrified of her magic, and she’d shown her willingness to use it when she wasn’t obeyed. It would hold them, and do double duty in cementing her position at the head of this army. If she was to lead, she had to be obeyed.

  The Gahe joined her as the doors slid shut, and the elevator sped skyward. It was precisely as she remembered it, save that the new owner had removed the end table she’d kept in the elevator car, along with the apple-shaped dish her sister had given her as a college-graduation gift. She’d used it to store change and keys for years.

  The elevator rose quickly enough to put butterflies in her stomach though much of that could be anger, or satisfaction. Outside, her army was spreading through the streets of New York, beginning to make good on the debt she owed this government, this country – justice delayed but not denied. Her apartment was only one small sliver of that, and perhaps the least important, but it would feel so good to make this right.

  And make it right, she would. The invasion was one small indulgence, the bite of chocolate cake before launching the new exercise routine. She gambled to win, not just for herself, but for all people, Latent and human alike. When the dust cleared, Latent people would be free to use their powers as they saw fit, and humans would understand their place in the genetic order, no longer tying themselves in knots to hang on to power they’d long since lost the right to hold. With magic decriminalized, there would be no more need to fight one another. Many had died to bring her to this point, but their numbers paled compared to how many she would save. The new order would be just. The new order would be peaceful. The new order would be free.

  At last, the doors chimed again and slid open on the past.

  She didn’t recognize the place. A man stood in the broad kitchen that connected to the open living room. He’d repainted, stark white covering the soft colors she’d preferred. The appliances had been replaced, a central stove with hood put in. Whoever this man was, he liked to cook. He was slim, gray-haired, good-looking in a distinguished way, in his late fifties. He wore slacks and an expensive-looking button-down shirt. She was sure she knew him from somewhere, but with his face contorted by fear, it was hard to say from where. He stared openmouthed as she walked in, the Gahe moving off into a corner.

  Scylla was familiar with many types of fear. Some froze and screamed, as Naeem had. Some resorted to anger. This man was one of the latter. ‘Who the fuc . . .’ he began, his face purpling.

  ‘I’m the owner of this unit,’ she said, ‘and I don’t remember selling it to you. So, the real question is, who the fuck are you?’

  She let her eyes roam the living-room walls, scanning across a painted family portrait, some expensive-looking Asian tapestries, stopping at a number of corporate plaques. She paused as she read the name, then looked at the corporate logo.

  Rage curdled in her stomach, souring all thoughts of freedom and justice, leaving only the sick bile of revenge. ‘Tom Hicks. Entertech’s pride and joy. Why am I not surprised?’

  Recognition dawned across the man’s face. Angry fear gave way to another kind, sick and weak. Hicks’s knees buckled, and he sagged against the expensive, granite countertop, staying upright only by an act of supreme will. The Gahe turned to the ceiling-high windows, tracing one long claw across the surface, leaving trails of dirty hoarfrost. Scylla had owned the entire floor, but she favored the south-facing glass wall that overlooked the cobblestone plaza where the famous statue of a bronze bull stood. The Gahe looked out over it, watching as her army spread across the street below.

  ‘Look,’ Hicks said. ‘They told me you were dead. I had no idea that . . . I’ll just leave. You can have the place back. I’m happy to make arrangements to get it put back into your . . .’

  ‘Oh, please,’ Scylla said. ‘I don’t care about the apartment. I’m here to free you. To free everyone. Things are about to change, and I’m going to need your help.’

  This would be the tricky part. The man would have to be made to listen to reason, to understand his place in the new order. Her first convert. ‘Limbic Dampener is going to play an important role here. I’ll need someone to interface with Entertech, someone they trust to . . .’

  Hicks launched himself over the counter, thudded to the tile behind, and stood, gun in hand.

  The Gahe stutter-flashed across the floor, moving in short, teleporting hops to his side, seizing his arm. He cried out at its freezing touch, shivering, teeth chattering. He fired, the round vanishing into the creature’s torso as if it had been swallowed. The Gahe didn’t so much as flinch.

  Scylla swallowed her shock, bit down on the rush of adrenaline. Disappointing. Humans never learned. It was bad enough that they tried to make her a slave, but they were so addicted to power that they’d rather die than yield one ounce of it. They’d take the carrot eventually, but first they’d need plenty of stick.

  ‘From the moment I Manifested, I swore I’d find a way to do some good with this,’ she said as he
pulled against the monster’s grip, lips turning blue, crystals of ice forming on his arm, his gasps misting the freezing envelope of air around the Gahe. ‘You took that from me. At first I was angry, I thought I’d been robbed. But now I understand that you were just prepping me for the bigger show. This way will be much faster. I’m sorry you won’t get to see it.’

  She leaned forward as his shivering grew more violent, close enough to feel the cold nip at her nose. ‘I’m not a monster, you know. Someone has to make the tough choice. Someone has to break the eggs to make the omelet. You’ll never change on your own.’

  But he didn’t hear her. He slumped to the floor, his frozen arm snapping off in the Gahe’s grip. She Bound her magic into his chest cavity, liquefying his heart and lungs. No sense in being petty. She’d made her point.

  She turned back to the Gahe, then twirled briefly, taking in the space she once called her ‘deluxe apartment in the sky.’ It pained her to see this strange man’s imprint on it, his furniture, his artwork. The place even smelled of his cologne.

  She went to the window, watching as a troop of goblins raced down the street, spear tips trailing shredded clothing, the spoils of raided shops. One of them dragged a mannequin behind it by a single plastic leg.

  Yes, the landscape had changed.

  But it was good to be home.

  Chapter Two

  Second Chance

  The ‘goblins,’ as the army calls them, are a highly diverse species, adapting to their environment. The Three-Foots tribe trades with the Po-na-tu-ree, an aquatic subspecies of goblin. Usually furs or cattle horns acquired in raids are exchanged for fish and aquatic mammals. The sea has molded the Ponaturi; they are as comfortable under the water as above it. Their physical forms are much more varied than their land-bound cousins. Some look more like fish or octopus than goblin. They are crusted with barnacles and kelp, but they still hold the same basic beliefs as all goblins, and are united with them in their fervent hatred of humanity and the devastation our presence in the Source has wrought.