“You never got into learning anything on the Defense Array?” Dread asked him.
Peter shook his head. “Nothing that high level. Not even close.”
“Well,” Shifty said, “it really depends on the Defense Trick you’re using, or who you learned it from, but usually, the easiest way to block teleport is to block the remote viewing of a landing site.”
“Oh, yes. That,” Dread said. “Obviously.”
Shifty gave the big man a smile. “Here’s how it works, Big Dog. If I’m going to teleport myself, or all of us, I need to know exactly where I’m going to drop us, right? I mean, I know where I am in space, but I also need to know where I’m going to go. Not very safe to teleport to a random spot in three dimensional space. You might end up materializing in the floor.”
“So, what, you magically view the spot?”
“Not always. It’s easiest if you can use line of sight. But to teleport somewhere that you can’t actually verify visually, you sort of… feel it out is the best way I can describe it. You probe around with your mind into the space where you’re thinking about going, and if the spot is safe, you sense that.”
Dread thought about that for a second. “You ever been wrong?”
“Naw, man,” Shifty said. “They make you do, like, hundreds of blind teleports in tandem with your instructor before they’ll let you try one solo. Safety first, you know?”
“Have I ever told you,” Dread said, “how much it terrifies me that you’re the guy who teleports us through space, considering how much weed you smoke?”
“Oh, hardy har har. Anyway, the easiest way to prevent a teleport is to prevent anyone from being able to probe around mentally like that and find a safe spot to arrive. Your mind simply won’t let you teleport blind like that. Polonius is using the outer shell of the building’s structure as a focal point for the screen, like a conductor for electricity.”
“Could you do that?”
Shifty let out a little laugh. “Not that fucking big. I could do that to a car, or maybe a one story house by doing the same thing, using the contour of the physical structure to focus the screen, but Polonius is in another league, man. There’s a reason why he wasn’t just a Maestro, but the Maestro.”
“This is all fascinating, but none of it gets us inside,” Cass said.
“So, how are you going in?” Edison interrupted, poking his head into the huddle with difficulty.
Dread started once he realized Edison was talking to him and not Cass. “Um, we haven’t... probably up through the basement, clear the building floor by floor. Is that right, Cass?”
“Is that what Kerry did with Two?” Cass asked.
Edison nodded. “Okay, good, I’ve got your Healer, so...”
“We’re not going in that way.”
Edison stared at Cass. “What?”
“We’re not going in that way, not through the basement,” Cass said.
“Oh, come on, Edison, do the math,” she said once she caught his look. “Twenty-four story building, he’s most likely on the twenty-first floor, give or take. It’s either fight up through twenty floors of insanity or down through three. Which would you want to do?”
“Two went in through the basement,” Edison said.
“And they got wasted, didn’t they? How far did they make it? Three floors? Four?”
“Six.”
“Six. Well, Kerry was a tough son of a bitch. But he still got taken, because going up from the basement is going to be like trench warfare. It turned into Stalingrad for Two, and I am not replaying the Charge of the Light Brigade. We insert on the roof and hit down.”
“Charge of the... there’s no way,” Edison said. “None of your mages have flight capability. You can’t parachute onto that roof… it’d take an expert jumper, and half of your team aren’t jump qualified at all. Six tried to rappel onto the roof and...” He nodded toward the flaming wreckage of the helicopter to finish his sentence.
Dread shifted about a bit, as if he was itching to say something, but not with Edison there to hear it. “Cass?”
Cass frowned and looked the building over. There was no way to go up from the ground. It had to be the roof. Everything inside of her, every instinct, every molecule, was screaming at her that it had to be the roof.
But without helicopters, parachutes, or magic, how exactly was she going to get seven heavily armed people onto the roof of a twenty-four story building?
Maybe Polonius will let us back a big old cherry-picker or crane up to the building and we could ride up, she joked with herself.
The answer was there. Somewhere, rattling around the back of her mind. She just needed to make room for it.
Edison was talking, shifting about, making his noise, but Cass tuned him out, tuned it all out, trying to make the space for the solution to enter the front of her mind. Images began to come into her mind, seemingly random, but she let them come without question.
Hopping, jumping, skipping along. Here comes Peter Cottontail. Kangaroos bouncing across the ground.
That wasn’t it. Something was in there, though, something she needed.
Jump to the moon. Serious vertical leap. Dunking on everybody on the basketball court. Up over top of everybody. Can’t stop me. Breaking the backstop. Landing right on top of…
There it was.
“Shifty, how far around the outside of the building does the teleport screen extend?” she said.
Shifty stirred and tore his attention away from the blueprints. “Um, I don’t know. Maybe about five feet. Maybe less. Just enough so we couldn’t teleport next to the building and try to grab on to something.”
Cass nodded, wheels still turning in her head. “And above the building?”
Shifty blew out a breath and smiled. “Damn, Cass, you’re a genius. Yeah. Yeah, only five feet at most.”
“What? What?” Edison asked. “Who cares? Five feet or five hundred feet, it’s...”
“We can’t teleport into the building because of the screen,” Cass began, looking pointedly at Dread.
The huge man nodded in understanding. “But we can teleport above it, above the roof, right above the limit of the screen… and five feet isn’t that far to drop.”
Dread
Damn. Wish I’d thought of that. But that’s the way it is with me and Cass; I’m the slow and steady pack horse, she’s the superstar. I never told her that Edison offered me my own team once and I turned it down to stay with her. I don’t know why I never told her. It just seemed like one of those things you keep to yourself.
Maybe it’s because she knows the business at a much higher level than me. Oh, sure, I know the procedures, and anything that’s been written down or tried before I can learn; but Cass, she’s on a whole other level. She understands how these Vives think, and she knows the job so well, she can come up with new tactics on the spot… and they’ll work.
I could never do that. I would’ve gone up through the basement, cleared the building floor by floor, because that’s the standard procedure when you can’t teleport in, and we would’ve gotten creamed.
Yeah, I’m the slow and steady one. Always have been. Back in the Corps, I made my way into MARSOC… that’s the special operations forces for the Marine Corps… mostly though straight-up, dogged determination. They beat the shit out of me, and I took it and asked for more, until they finally let me in.
Then with SWAT, too. They tapped me pretty quickly for the Wreck Squads, considering my combat experience. On Squad Four, I was probably the guy who’d seen the most heavy combat… Stephen had been a medic with the 82nd Airborne and had been through a ton of shit, but the only other military veteran on the Squad was Mike, who’d been an MP with the Air Force before joining SWAT.
I ran into Cass early on in my SWAT career; even though she was new to the Squads, she was already a superstar. She just had it. I had light years more combat experience, but she had that spark that separates the good from the great.
Pretty quickly
, we fell into the roles that we played to this day. She thought around corners, I did things the old fashioned way. That’s how it went with that meatgrinder at the warehouse, when we got ambushed by the Slashers.
They would zip in and out, attacking kind of like a pack of wolves. One would attack you from the front, and as you tried to fend that one off, another would zip in from the side and attack you on your unguarded flank as the first one retreated. Then, when you tried to turn and defend against the second attack, that second one would retreat while you were attacked once again by the first one or maybe even a third or fourth.
Since they moved in so close, all amongst us, we couldn’t shoot them. Trying to shoot them wouldn’t have been easy to do under the best of conditions, considering how thin their bodies were and how fast they moved. As things were, any attempt to shoot a Slasher would probably end up in a friendly fire casualty.
A lot of the squad was starting to panic and freeze up, not knowing what to do. It was impressive enough that we had the fire discipline to not shoot each other to pieces in panic even as we started to get slashed open from every angle.
We were, in my humble opinion, the best of the Wreck Squads, but even the best can get tripped up and overwhelmed by something new. Nobody had ever even heard of a Slasher before that day.
I don’t care what your name is. The first time you see something inhuman… a Conjuration that some mage has pulled out of thin air like a rabbit out of a psychotic hat… it gives you pause, I’m here to tell you. I’d seen a ton of shit during my stint with the Corps, but that stuff was all… natural.
And sure, there’s plenty of scattered Youtube videos of cell phone footage that some bystander or another has managed to capture of some of those creatures over the years. And of course we had extensive briefing and training videos at SWAT before we ever actually went out into the field.
Still. That all goes right out the window once you see your first Conjuration. Your mind actually starts to twist and bend, as if your brain doesn’t want to believe what your eyes are seeing. You keep looking for the zipper on the costume or whatever else might give away that what you’re seeing isn’t real. And if you’re not careful, you can get lulled into inaction by that disbelief.
Hesitation will kill you. You have to act. Violently. Explosively.
And so when the Slashers came at us, that’s what I did. I couldn’t shoot, so I had to go hand to hand. We all carried Kukris… long, machete-like knives with wide chopping blades. Not exactly standard issue for street cops, but on a Wreck Squad, you need a lot of lethality at your disposal.
I drew mine out, shrugging off the pain of the cuts getting scored across my arms and legs from what seemed like every angle. We always wear body armor vests, and since I figured that would protect me from getting eviscerated, I went right at them.
The Slashers were accustomed to using fear to their advantage. I could tell. People are terrified of getting cut. Of course they are. It’s only common sense. It’s a visceral, primal reaction to shrink away from something that will slice open your skin. And the Slashers were relying on that to keep them safe from any counterattack.
It’s a classic tactic. Keep the enemy off balance, terrified, and that way, they can’t respond to your attack.
But I’m a dumb pack horse, and I went right at them. The closest one darted in and spun, opening up a nasty gash on my cheek, but I simply let the pain make me get pissed off. I grabbed the skinny bastard by the tentacle that had cut me, and yanked it close, chopping at the trio of eyes at the top of the creature.
It wasn’t ready for that. Now, it was the Slasher’s turn to panic; I could feel it try to pull away with the desperate strength of a wounded animal. I held on with everything I had and hacked at those eyes… I figured that if the damn thing had a brain, it would be near the eyes.
While I attacked that Slasher, another one came close and cut me pretty good across the right arm. So what. Fuck him. I wasn’t playing their game anymore. Go ahead and cut me. Your buddy is getting wrecked, right here, right now, no matter what happens to me.
I chopped off one of the eye stalks and then the Slasher jerked away from me so hard that I simply couldn’t hold on. Fine. It retreated into the dark and wouldn’t be coming back for more.
A quick backhand swing of my Kukri, and I caught the second Slasher… the one who had just cut my arm… right below the eye stalks, severing the top of the body. I don’t really know if it was a head, per se, but the end result was similar to decapitation.
Taking those two out gave me the precious seconds I needed to get my bearings and figure out what to do next. Even more importantly, it opened up a gap in the Slasher’s constant attacks, which allowed my teammates to get back into the game, as well.
Everyone started pulling their knives and fighting back. It wasn’t easy; people kept getting carved up something fierce, and often, it was bad enough to make them drop. Stephen ran around, patching us back together with his magic, and once Shifty was able to get one of his force fields up to hold the one flank, the tide started to turn.
On a nearby wall of the abandoned warehouse, there was one of those emergency red boxes with a glass front and a fire axe inside. Perfect. I yanked that thing out and started going Conan the Barbarian on those skinny freaks.
So sometimes, the dumb, direct, no-frills method works. But then again, we ended up losing Stephen.
And like Kerry’s team, if I’d been in charge of Squad Four, we would’ve lost everybody, because we would have gone up through the basement of Revival Tech to go after Polonius. Leave it to Cass to think her way around that puzzle on the fly. Like I said, she was always a superstar.
Then there’s that whole other thing about Cass, that there’s no use denying. I’m falling for her.
At first I thought it was nothing but a schoolboy crush, or the fact that we spent so much time together because of work. Then there’s the fact that people who share intense experiences begin to form an emotional bond, and with what we did, intense experiences came fast and often.
But it’s not any of that. It’s the real deal. She’s the most intriguing, strong-willed, incredible woman I’ve ever met, and working alongside her has passed like a dream… years now, gone by in the space between breaths.
I can’t tell if she feels the same way. I guess it’s only a matter of time before I find out… sooner or later, if she’ll have me, we’ll get together.
For now… back to business.
***
“Don’t,” Edison said, shaking his head, obviously wanting to disagree. “It’s not... wouldn’t Polonius have thought of that?”
“Why would he?” Cass said. “It’s never been done before. Don’t be fooled by the magefire he tosses around; Polonius is still only a man. He’s fallible, he’s beatable. He’s smart, but he’s not all-knowing. Do you see what I mean? He can’t think of everything. There are always oversights, something they don’t know or don’t anticipate or just plain don’t remember.”
“Still,” Edison said.
“Sir,” Dread said, “it greatly increases our chances of success. We’ll hit him from an angle he isn’t expecting.”
Edison seemed to think that over for a few seconds and then nodded his assent. “Good. Good, actually, yes, that works out well. There should be no reason for you to go as low as the sixteenth floor, then.”
“What do you mean?” Cass said. “Why is that important?”
“Listen,” Edison said. “I’ve spoken with Dr. Adjani. He says there is particularly sensitive equipment on the fourteenth through sixteenth floors, so I want you to avoid going on those floors.”
“What sort of sensitive equipment?”
“That’s need to know, Wheeler.”
“Need to know?” Cass said. “What is this, the CIA all of a sudden?”
Edison took a second before answering. “It’s some sort of classified research. Suffice it to say…”
“We’re not going in there to
steal his favorite set of beakers, Edison,” Cass said. “And what do we care what this Adjani guy says all of a sudden?”
“I’d like to keep things on a positive basis with him. He’s being very cooperative.”
Cass let out a laugh. “I should think so, considering he’s the knucklehead who created this whole mess. I’m guessing Revival Tech’s lawyers are going to be putting in a lot of overtime over the next couple of months.”
“That’s not our concern. Just stay off those floors.”
“Whatever. We still need to deal with getting a replacement Healer.”
“Have you tried contacting the feds?” Shifty said.
Cass was taken back for a second. Shifty rarely spoke up when the brass was around, usually leaving his questions and comments for her or Dread. “What? Feds?”
“Yeah,” Shifty said. “Getting some backup from the feds.”
“We’ve never needed them before,” Cass said.
“We’ve never gone up against a Vived Maestro before.”
“Shifty…” Dread began to say.
“Don’t start with me, Dread,” Shifty said, looking around at the rest of the group. “I mean, seriously, we’re not going to talk about this?”
“Talk about what?” Edison said.
“What?” Shifty said. “Two entire Wreck Squads wiped out, back to back? Has that ever even happened before? And before anybody says ‘don’t be a pussy’, go ahead and take a look at what’s left of the guy that Polonius just ripped inside fucking out.”
He waited a beat before continuing. “You all know exactly what I’m talking about. This level of threat, I mean… maybe we wait for some backup… the feds or something. We should have a goddamn army to take in there, not just the six of us.”
Cass frowned. This was not the best time for Shifty to be doing this, but before she could say anything, Shifty was continuing.
“Someone’s got to say it, Cass. We almost got wiped out ourselves only a week ago. A week ago. And now Two and Six are gone, within hours of each other, and the Vive is a goddamn Maestro, the Maestro.”
Mage Hunters Box Set Page 5
