by Mike Wild
Caballistics, Inc.
Better the Devil
The Caballistics are attacked in London and forced to use powerful magic, which breaks The Accord - the pact that forbids the use of sorcery. They've been set up and it looks like someone wants them out of the way, but why? The answer lies with doppelgangers of figures who are key to activating a British variation of the terracotta army. To stop them, Caballistics, Inc must form unholy alliances with the "dead of London" and the shadowy organisation known as the Dark Parliament.
London is about to become a war-zone...
CABALLISTICS, INC
-Mike Wild-
#1: HELL ON EARTH
#2: BETTER THE DEVIL
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A 2000 AD Publication
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Copyright © 2007 Rebellion A/S. All rights reserved.
All 2000 AD characters and logos © and TM Rebellion A/S. "Caballistics Inc" is a trademark in the United States and other jurisdictions. "2000 AD" is a registered trademark in certain jurisdictions. All rights reserved. Used under licence.
ISBN (.epub): 978-1-84997-062-4
ISBN (.mobi): 978-1-84997-103-4
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Caballistics, Inc.
Better the Devil
Mike Wild
Caballistics, Inc.
The Illuminati, demonic possession, the Templars Resurgent, Opus Dei and the Hidden Inquisition, occult Nazis, the Starry Wisdom, hollow Earth theories, Delta Green, alien abductions, the Rosicrucians, the Cult of the Black Sun... some of that stuff's real.
Chapter One
There was a click. If there was one thing Hannah Chapter hated, it was a click.
The click of a pistol, cocked by an unseen hand, as it pressed up, hard and cold, against her temple, perhaps. The click of a lycanthropic jawbone dislocating to become a bile-dripping maw in readiness for a final, decapitating bite. The click of Lawrence Verse turning on his goddamned PlayStation for another noisy all-night ass-whupping in Doom Bang-a-Bang 3, or some such shit.
That kind of click.
But all of these clicks paled in comparison to the click she hated most of all.
The click of a booby trap that had caught her off guard and unawares, as if she were some goddamn greenhorn straight out of field-training school.
Particularly a booby trap that was activated by a pressure plate right under her foot.
Jeezus, Hannah!
"I recommend that you remain absolutely still, Miss Chapter," a voice advised. "Do not move a muscle. Do not breathe."
The lithe, dark-haired American followed the shadowy speaker with bespectacled eyes, continuing to curse herself. Solomon Ravne, her bearded and suited colleague from Caballistics, Inc, circled her with an infinite slowness, the well-groomed consultant in arcane affairs assessing her predicament with a knowledgeable gaze.
"I wasn't thinking of doing the Birdy Dance," Hannah said through ventriloquist lips.
"Do not, because if I am correct this one contains a nastier surprise than all the rest."
This one, Hannah thought. Christ, she'd had just about enough of this place. What the hell had they been protecting in this shithole that needed so many defences? They'd only entered the dark and deserted labyrinth half an hour ago and she'd already run out of fingers to count the number of nasty surprises that the three of them had inadvertently triggered.
The whole fiasco had started only twelve hours earlier, when an outfit named Capek Construction - who had been digging the foundations for an industrial unit near Peenemunde, Germany - had broken through into something they had not expected to be beneath their feet. A Nazi bunker, in fact, abandoned since the war. There was nothing unusual about a Nazi bunker as such - their empty shells still dotted Europe to this day - but the fact that the breakthrough seemed to have revealed some kind of laboratory gave rise to some concern and no small amount of curiosity. This was, naturally, something that the German authorities should have handled, but Conrad Capek was not, it seemed, a man who put much store in the due process of things, and he wanted a private investigation first. Which was, of course, where they came in. Turned out Capek was a bosom buddy of their own boss - no doubt they were fellow members of the Billionaires Brigade, or whatever society the super-rich paid their dues to - and within hours she, Ravne and Verse had been stepping off the plane. Whether they would be stepping back on it was now a moot question, because bossman Ethan Kostabi had sent them slap bang into the middle of a seventy year-old death-trap.
"YO, PEOPLE!" another voice boomed. The hulking figure of Lawrence Verse emerged from a side room back along the corridor from where Hannah stood stock-still. Like the others, her former freelance partner and defrocked priest aimed a pencil torch ahead of him, picking out detritus in the dark. "NOTHING IN ROOMS EIN, ZWEI OR DREI SO I SUGGEST WE... Oh, bollocks, not again."
"Stand where you are, Mr. Verse!"
"Standing... I'm standing."
"So what is it this time?" Hannah Chapter whispered, swallowing slightly. She looked down. Under normal circumstances her own torch and trained eyes would have easily picked out the fine lines of the edges of the pressure plate, but they had been impossible to see, obscured by decades of undisturbed dust fall.
Ravne softly blew away the dust and followed an exposed wire trail from the pressure pad with a finger, rising with it from the floor and along the wall. There it met a grime-smeared membranous bulb mounted in the shadow of a junction box, purposefully hidden from the view of anyone entering the corridor from the direction they had come - which, the collapsed roof having been deemed too unstable for use as an entrance, just happened to be the only way to progress further into the bu
nker from the front door.
What Ravne was looking at was the size of a bloated bladder and glowed dully red through its years-induced coating of crap. Ravne prodded it twice, carefully, with a manicured finger and something stirred violently within, snapping and gaseous in form.
"Ah, yes," he sighed. "Now here is something I haven't seen in some time." He spoke in an almost reverent tone, as if he had uncovered some rare treasure.
"What? What, for Christ's sake?"
"A slavesoul."
"A slavesoul?" Hannah echoed.
"A human essence sucked forcibly from the body at the exact moment of death then ritualistically bound within the bladder of a-"
"I know what a slavesoul is!" Hannah hissed in frustration. She stared ahead to where, about a hundred metres down, the corridor split at a T-junction and a faded and half-rotted swastika flag hung on the wall, a reminder of the last inhabitants of this secured facility. It was no ordinary swastika, either, over-emblazoned as it was with a stylised pentagram - the standard of Sonderkommando Thule, the Nazi's occult warfare division. "Sonderkommando Thule perfected the slavesoul capture technique in the gas chambers at Belsen and Auschwitz, to name but two. The bastards only achieved a one per cent success rate from all the poor innocents they slaughtered, but that one per cent was more than enough for their purposes."
"Slavesoul bladders were deployed everywhere the Nazis faced allied incursions, and on every battlefield in Europe," Verse went on. "Planted beneath corpses, next to minefields, in munitions piles, you name it. Once burst, the slavedsoul would take possession of whichever unfortunate had released it, driving them forward into enemy fire, further traps, whatever hazards lay in their path. Backwards sometimes, too, to attack their own, before they had to be cut down by their horrified friends. The slavesouls were simply desperate for the death that had been denied them, piggybacking their hosts and using them as vessels to reach the white light."
"But the possession only lasted sixty seconds, right?" Hannah asked. "Then the soul dissipated and was lost for ever?"
Verse nodded. "The Tommies named them Mayflies."
"Makes them sound almost charming, doesn't it?" Ravne commented as he gently stroked the bladder. In the half-light, he permitted himself a small smile, then tutted. "Charming, but the cause of such horrific carnage."
Verse frowned, studying the proximity of the slavesoul to his long-term business partner. "A single tremor down the wire and the slavesoul triggers," he said ominously. "If we try to cut the wire, the slavesoul triggers..."
"And once it is triggered possession is instantaneous," Ravne said.
Verse sighed. "We have got ourselves a problem on the scale of serious shit."
"No..." Hannah corrected him. "I have got myself a problem. You two just turn around, get to the safety of the entrance, and don't look back." She bit her lip. "I'm going to try and fight this thing..."
"No can do, doll," Verse said. He very slowly moved to stand directly behind Hannah, looming like an oversized shadow, and placed his hands gently on her shoulders.
"I can do this!" Hannah insisted.
"Maybe so," Verse rumbled in her ear. "But once you've fought the first, what about those?" The priest pointed into the darkness of the corridor and, now that he did, Hannah began to gradually make out a number of dull red glows emanating from behind other visual blinds.
"Shit."
"These slavesouls would have been hung here to guard against incursion by an entire enemy unit," Verse said. "Once they were all triggered and the defences that are doubtless hidden along this corridor sprung, it would have been a massacre."
"Like I said. Get the hell out of here."
"And like I said, no can do."
Verse moved before Hannah could react, suddenly dropping his hands to her hips and - tight against her - swaying with her body as if he were beginning to dance some tango. Then, timing his moment perfectly, he slid his own foot onto the pressure plate and with his left arm flipped Hannah away and behind him. He stood now in her place.
"Mister Verse, what the hell do you think you're doing?" Ravne asked.
"Playing our substitute," Verse smiled. He spoke to Hannah. "Think about it, babe. I've a lot more experience going up against this type of shit than you do."
"Dammit!" Hannah said. But she knew what Verse said was true. Before they had become partners, in the days before Verse had been excommunicated, he had waged a one-man war in Martinique against the horrors of voodoo and the Palo Mayombe. Verse was no stranger to the horrors of possession, and had felt its dark influence weigh against his own consciousness many times before.
"This is still insane. There must be four or five more of those things down there, each one of them seven-point-four grammes of concentrated death wish. Verse, you're not dying in my place."
"I don't intend to," Verse said. He stared at Hannah evenly. "Together we do what needs to be done."
"And what," Ravne interjected, "is that?"
Hannah swallowed hard. She knew what Verse was saying. They'd trained for such a thing, as much as they could, even if neither of them had really pictured a situation where they'd need to use the manoeuvre. "Me and my shadow?"
"Walking down the avenue," Verse half sang.
Hannah steeled herself and nodded. "You are a crazy bastard, but if it's the only way we're going to get down that corridor alive, let's do it. I'd recommend-"
"I know," the priest finished for her. "Not trying this at home."
And with those words, Verse was gone, springing off the pressure plate like an athlete - no pun intended - from a trap. It was the adrenalin that was already pumping through her body, Hannah knew, that made it appear as if her partner moved away from her in slow motion, but nevertheless as he mounted the corridor wall with his leather coat billowing behind him, she couldn't help but think he was getting a little too cocky doing an impression of Neo from The Matrix.
What the hell. She did a pretty mean Trinity herself.
Unholstering her twin Colts, Hannah sprang from her own starting position, no more than a half-second behind her partner, following his every footstep exactly, like the shadow she was meant to be. This was the point of the plan, to be his identical twin, to move with him, matching his every manoeuvre so that she could respond and protect him while he could not. She had already heard his groan as the first of the slavesouls had exploded from its prison and entered him like some darting red eel, and while he rode its desperate hold, it was her job to take out any trap it managed to drive him towards.
There, already. A machine gun turret dropping from the ceiling. She neutralised it by shooting out its servos. Another from the wall, ditto.
But Verse was already struggling, she could sense. The priest had obviously mounted the wall to avoid further pressure plates linked to the slavesouls, but in his semi-possessed state he had already accidentally collided with two more, bursting the bladders with his boots. There had been nothing she could do to prevent the eels whipping into him, and as Verse had absorbed them - blocking her from their influence - she could already see the sweat dropping from him like rain.
Under such pressure, mistakes were inevitable, and as Verse leapt to the side to avoid a third bladder he lost his footing against the opposite wall. Hannah allowed herself to fall with him, roll with him, and then with a guiding hand urged him on to launch back up the wall. The fall, though, had cost them a second, and ahead a turret had dropped unseen and was already spinning to fire. Thinking fast, Hannah grabbed Verse around the stomach, curled him into a ball, and somersaulted with him to the side. She allowed the thrust of the bullet that punched through the arm of her sheepskin coat to spin her completely around, and halfway through the turn fired and took out the turret from behind.
Almost there, partner. Almost there.
Visibly agonised, Verse ran the last thirty yards of the deadly corridor at floor level, purposefully triggering the remaining pair of pressure plates and acting as a human shield for Han
nah. He screamed out loud as the red eels entered him and Hannah could only imagine the strength of will - of faith? - that was preventing him turning on her and leaving them both sitting targets for whatever defences remained.
And there they suddenly were. Twin machine guns swinging in from the right and left at the end of the corridor like saloon bar doors. There was no way she could take out both.
But she'd be damned if they were going to fall at the last hurdle.
Or actually, maybe they were.
"Down!" she yelled, and that small part of her partner's mind that still remained, obeyed. The priest threw himself onto his stomach and slid rapidly forward, and as he moved Hannah threw herself flat on his back, riding him like a human sled. Momentum carrying them through, the pair skidded beneath the plane of spewing bullets, past the end of the corridor and out of danger. They smashed in a heap up against the T-junction wall.
It wasn't quite over, however. For another forty seconds Hannah clung onto her partner, roaring with determination as she refused to let his still possessed form move and attempt to return them into the firing line. Had he not been so exhausted by the strain of their insane gamble, the priest would probably have tossed her aside like a rag, but as it was Verse merely bucked under her as she held on for their lives, whispering, panting, in his ear: "You did it, big guy, they'll be gone soon, it's over."
