by Martha Carr
“Whatever. No one’s gonna take us seriously. Especially not you, man. No offense.”
“Let me take care of that.”
“Yeah? You have more neat tricks up your sleeve, halfling?”
Cheyenne glanced around the table. “The Bull’s Head aren’t the only ones with working tech on this side. I’ll just say mine’s better.”
“No shit?” Bhandi snorted. “You got some James Bond shit goin’ on, Goth drow?”
“Please.” Cheyenne’s smile grew a little. “You guys can take down whoever the hell you want when we’re there, just not the colonel, and only after they make a deal, or he runs his mouth about what they’re doing.”
The agents nodded and shrugged in agreement.
“You said they’ll have machines there. Surveillance.” Rhynehart finally looked at her again. “What do we do about those?”
“If it’s active when we get there, I’ll be able to shut everything down long enough for us to get in without setting off alarms, at the very least. Probably longer. I can’t get them all, so we’ll probably be fighting magicals and machines. So there’s that.”
“Any tips for blasting those things to pieces?” Yurik asked. “You know, for those of us who can’t make the ground swallow up a giant machine.”
“Yeah. They all have something like a head, I guess. The control center.” Cheyenne pointed at her own. “Focus on that, and eventually you’ll take it down. Unless they’re super tiny. Then you blow ‘em up.”
“Huh.”
The dining room fell silent, then Rhynehart drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “So after that highly educational briefing, let’s talk ops. The best points of entry are here, here, and here. I don’t think these guys are gonna be walking in all together and holding the colonel’s hand, so we know at least two of these entrances are already…”
As Rhynehart explained whatever plan he’d come up with on his own, Cheyenne’s activator flashed in her vision with yellow light. She frowned and followed the prompts, turning to scan his living room. The yellow light flashed faster, switched to orange, and then that stupidly loud alarm blared in her head. The displayed warning was an extra precaution, apparently.
Incoming threat detected, source location unknown.
Chapter Forty-Two
Shit. Cheyenne turned the alarm’s brain-splitting volume down to a background drone and kept searching.
Ember leaned toward her and quietly asked, “What’s going on?”
“Something’s wrong.” Cheyenne turned around and scanned the hallway into the kitchen, then the hallway to the front door. The orange light flashed brighter and lit an arrow in her vision that steadily grew larger and blinked furiously.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
Rhynehart stopped talking and looked up at them. “Am I boring you?”
Incoming threat detected. Arrival in 00:24.
The seconds counted down in Cheyenne’s vision, and the blinking orange arrow came into clearer focus as it moved up the far wall of the living room, turned into the ceiling, and moved slowly to the center of the living room and their little gathering at the table.
“Something’s coming.”
Rhynehart glared at her. “Just a feeling you have?”
“It’s in the fucking wall, Rhynehart. I can see it.” She pointed at the orange arrow in her vision, then summoned a crackling sphere of black drow energy. “If anyone brought anything useful in those crates, I’d get it out.”
Tate, Yurik, and Bhandi darted to the crates on the other side of the table without a word. Todd frowned at them as Jamal slowly lowered a panting, whining Tammy to the floor. “You guys jump to it ‘cause she says she sees shit in the walls?”
The crate’s locks clicked, and Bhandi flung open one of the lids. “Makes no sense if you haven’t been in the field with her, man.”
Yurik hauled one of the large black duffel bags onto the table and nodded at Todd. “This is yours, right?”
“Yeah.”
Tammy started barking wildly, growling and yapping and darting all over the place with nowhere to aim her warning.
Rhynehart spun and leaped to the table beside the couch on the other side of the room. A drawer slammed open, and he turned around again with pistols in both hands. “What the hell is it?”
“If I knew,” Cheyenne muttered, “I wouldn’t be standing here waiting for it to—”
The ceiling two feet away from the center of Rhynehart’s dining table erupted in a shower of drywall, dust, and chunks of plaster, and a violent spray of reeking sewage cut through the air between Bhandi and Jamal.
“What the fuck!” Bhandi leaped away from the spray. She swung her fell pistol up to the ceiling as a dull silver head burst from the hole. The troll squeezed off one shot before the war machine’s plated head darted toward her like a striking snake and knocked her backward. She slipped on the growing puddle of sewage and went down hard.
Rhynehart fired, but the bullet pinged off the machine’s metallic head and buried itself in the far wall of the living room in another spray of plaster.
“No bullets!” Cheyenne launched her energy sphere at the war machine and knocked the head sideways against the ceiling. “Seriously, you’re gonna kill one of us instead.”
“Then what the hell do you suggest?”
More water and sewage burst farther down the pipe in the ceiling, then an eight-foot section of drywall collapsed in the center of the room. The long, segmented metal body of the war machine hit the dining table and knocked it to the ground. Whirs and clicks emanated from the thing as it lifted itself out of the plaster chunks and sewage, coiling and lifting its elongated head to scan the magicals and the two humans in the room.
“Jesus Christ, it’s a fucking shit snake!” Yurik lifted a fell rifle from one of the crates and powered it up. The low whine rose quickly in pitch as the fell energy’s green glow came to life within the rifle’s moving parts.
“Wait!” Cheyenne reached out to him, but he fired his first shot anyway and struck the machine snake below the head.
The thing let out a low, metallic hiss as red and orange lights flashed on its featureless head. The end of its tail, which was eight inches in diameter, swung back to knock Yurik aside, and the goblin’s rifle fired again but went wild into the ceiling and the reeking mess still spewing from the pipes.
Cheyenne launched two more energy spheres at the snake, but they barely made a difference. The machine headed swiftly toward Rhynehart, rearing up again and preparing to strike.
Tammy yapped incessantly, scrabbling around on the slippery floors and falling all over herself. Jamal almost knocked into her when he stomped to the war machine’s segmented body and reached down to pick it up. The thing squirmed in his grasp and whipped away from Rhynehart. Jamal roared and hauled the machine across the room.
“Wait, wait!” Cheyenne shouted. “Don’t try to—”
The ogre slammed the snake machine on the floor, and a series of segmented panels on the thing’s back lifted. A swarm of tiny insect-shaped machines lifted from the panels and buzzed around the room, firing green and red and yellow bursts of magic in every direction.
“Oh, hell, no. I hate those things!” Ember fired brilliant flashes of violet light from both hands.
Bhandi, Tate, and Yurik lifted their fell weapons, and they all took aim at the segmented body writhing on the floor as Jamal tried to wrestle it. Sewer water splashed all over the place, splattering the walls and the magical agents as they fired round after fell round.
Cheyenne’s activator highlighted the tiny whirring bodies of the flying insect-machines, and she selected the prompts to take them out one by one. Silver light flashed at her fingertips as she flung the machine-bugs against the walls and ducked others coming at her.
Tammy kept barking and darting back and forth, trying to avoid the snake machine’s lashing tail.
“Fuck this.” Todd jerked open the duffel bag and p
ulled out a massive weapon that looked like a crossbow with the head of a medieval battle ax attached. He slammed aside the heavy safety bar, and the fell weapon powered up with a shrill whine ten times louder than any fell rifle.
“What the hell is that?” Cheyenne raised a shield in front of Ember as five tiny metal bugs darted toward the fae. They smashed into the shield of dark light and sparked madly as they fell into the rank puddle on the floor.
Todd hefted the huge weapon in his arms and leered at the war machine. “Say hello to my little friend.”
Cheyenne rolled her eyes and summoned two more energy spheres in her hands. “Fucking moron.”
“Dude!” Tate glanced quickly at the human agent, then fired another fell shot as the snake bucked and sent Jamal staggering backward. “Watch where you aim that thing!”
The wide, flat head of Todd’s weapon let out a high-powered whine and flashed green light. The burst of fell energy sent the agent slipping back across the wet floor, and the shot went wild after the recoil. Rhynehart’s coffee table splintered, and Todd slapped a lever on the side of the weapon before his next shot.
Cheyenne fired energy spheres at the base of the metal snake’s “head” before she heard the man scream, “Fire in the hole!”
The fell blast from his weird-ass crossbow filled the room with a deafening crack and blazing green light, but it didn’t stop at one shot. A stream of fell energy arced from the end of the weapon and sprayed across the room in a continuous line, smashing through walls and cutting through furniture as Todd struggled to aim the powerful thing vibrating in his arms.
Sparks flew off the snake machine when the green light hit it, and the fell-powered laser shredded the metal segments with squeals and the cracks of exploding parts.
“Not the head, not the head!” Cheyenne shouted, slipping on the wet floor as she tried to race to Todd and his uncontrollable weapon.
Bhandi stared at her and shouted, “You said to take out the head!”
“Not this one. Todd!”
The agent laughed madly as he held onto the weapon spewing concentrated fell energy, his face reflecting the eerie green light. “Holy shit, look at this!”
Jamal’s huge fists whaled on the snake machine’s head as it bucked and jerked beneath the fell-powered weapons fire.
“Cut it off!” Cheyenne shouted, but Todd was too busy playing lunatic with a fell laser to listen. She slipped again and almost fell on her ass in the growing puddle of sewage still spraying from the broken pipes in the ceiling and reached out with her black lashing tendrils instead.
“Hey!” Todd stared at the tendrils curling around his arms and the fell weapon, which Cheyenne jerked down and away.
The fell laser cut through the snake machine’s segmented back with another squeal of shredded metal, and Jamal’s next punch sent the thing’s head flying across the room. It clanged against the far wall as the rest of the war machine’s body erupted under the fellfire, then the weapon shut off with a whirring click.
Rhynehart’s house was silent but for Tammy’s continued yapping, the hisses and sparks of the destroyed war machine, and the dwindling spatters of sewage on the floor as the pipes ran dry. A plume of green-gray smoke rose from the end of Todd’s weapon. He jammed the butt of it against his hip and leaned forward to blow the smoke away. “That fucking did it.”
“Fuck, Todd.” Rhynehart stared with wide eyes at the destruction in his living room, then glared at his friend. “Did you get clearance for that thing?”
“Not exactly.”
Jamal splashed across the floor and hauled the dining table back onto its legs.
“Thanks, bud.” Todd nodded at the ogre and dropped the weapon on the table with a thud.
Ember pointed at the empty weapon. “Is that a laser?”
“Kinda, yeah.” The man slapped a hand on the weapon. “Does a bunch of other cool shit too. Just passed the initial testing stages, so it’s not standard yet.”
“I wonder why.”
Bhandi wiped a smear of sewer water and shit off the front of her shirt and flung it into the puddle on the floor. “This is a new low.”
“My fucking house.” Rhynehart leaned against the back of the couch, the half that hadn’t been shredded by the fell laser, and blinked. “How the fuck did this happen?”
“You mean, you didn’t see the giant shit snake fall out of your ceiling and attack us?” Yurik glanced between the destroyed husk of the war machine and Rhynehart’s dazed expression.
“And I don’t think there’s supposed to be this much shit in your ceiling on a regular basis, man.” Tate stepped out of the puddle on the floor that had finally stopped growing and stared at the gaping hole in the ceiling. “Like, that doesn’t even make sense.”
Rhynehart smiled thickly. “It’s an old house.”
“You have insurance, right?” When Rhynehart glared at him, the tattooed troll lifted both hands in surrender and shrugged. “Just thought I’d ask.”
“Is that how these things move around all the time?” Todd asked as Cheyenne sloshed across the floor to the immobilized snake machine. “In the fucking sewer pipes?”
His boot kicked it with a clang, and the broken machine threw up another flare of sparks as it rolled.
“Dude, lay off.” Tate shook his head. “You don’t know what kinda shit you’re gonna set off doing that.”
“What, like a bomb? Please.” Todd sneered.
“No!” Jamal whirled on the man, grabbed a fistful of Todd’s shirt, and hauled him away from the motionless machine. “No fucking bombs.”
“Whoa, Jesus. Okay.”
Cheyenne’s activator located the snake machine’s severed head, which had rolled under the relatively unaffected TV stand at the back of the room off the kitchen. She headed to it, creating dark, smelly footprints behind her.
“It’s the first time I’ve seen one move through the walls like that. First one shaped like a snake, too.” She crouched by the entertainment system and tipped the whole thing sideways to reach underneath for the metallic head. The furniture piece, which had a large TV, the cable box, and an Xbox console with at least twenty different games on it, crashed back down to the floor, and she stood with the snake’s head in her hand. When she turned around, all the agents were staring at her. “What?”
Todd cleared his throat. “You lift cars like that too, or what?”
Cheyenne ignored him and returned to the sopping-wet dining room. “Just for future reference, when there’s an ambush by one of these things, go for the head but keep it intact, okay?”
“Why?” Jamal grunted.
“Because I can trace this thing to where it came from, or at least get a good look at why it was here, what it heard, and if it relayed anything back to its operator.” The blank looks aimed her way made her roll her eyes. “If it was spying on us and told the Bull’s Head what we’re up to.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, good thinking.”
“Fucking shit snake.”
Bhandi smacked Yurik’s shoulder with the back of a hand and glared at him. “Man, you’ve said that three times now. Cut it out.”
“You were counting?”
Ember started when one of the fallen bug-machines leaped two inches and threw up sparks. A blast of purple light erupted from her fingers and blasted the tiny war machine into specks of ground metal that slowly drifted into the puddle of muddy brown water beneath her.
“You okay, Em?”
“I’d be better if I could’ve stomped on it.”
“Yeah, what’s with that anyway?” Todd asked.
“None of your business.”
Chapter Forty-Three
Cheyenne focused her attention on the metal snake head in her hands, which pulsed muted red light in three different locations but didn’t move or make any noise. Her activator pulled up the coded commands scrolling through the head’s mechanisms. Matthew’s code. This isn’t O’gúleesh.
She pulled out the war
machine’s last accepted command and the images it had stored, presumably to return to whatever Bull’s Head member had sent it here. With a grimace, she chucked the head onto the table beside Todd’s not-quite-approved fell weapon. “Well, at least we know it didn’t hear our conversation.”
“You can tell all that by looking at its head?” Yurik asked.
“It’s a little more complicated than that, but yeah.” It’s gonna take a hell of a lot more work than I thought to introduce activators to these guys. But they’ll be better for it. If I don’t strangle them first. Cheyenne turned to Rhynehart and shrugged. “It got here just before I realized it was here, so the good news is, it hasn’t been hanging out in your walls, waiting for a reason to attack.”
Rhynehart looked up to meet her gaze. “Then the bad news is that it was sent here without knowing it would find a group of magicals and FRoE agents with fell weapons hanging out in my living room.”
She gave him a sympathetic frown that felt more like a grimace. “Yeah.”
“Wait, isn’t that a good thing?” Todd asked. “I mean, ‘cause they don’t know we were here or that we’re planning to run this op on their doorstep tonight.”
“Yeah, if you’re not me, I guess that’s a fucking good thing.” Rhynehart peeled himself away from the back of the couch and kicked the severed end of the side table lying in the muck in front of him. The wooden piece sailed under the dining table, and the splash of kicked-up sewage made Tate and Yurik jump away from him.
“Whoa, hey.”
“Come on, man. That’s disgusting.”
“You’re damn right it’s fucking disgusting,” Rhynehart shouted. “Those motherfuckers sent a goddamn weapon into my house to take me out!”
“Wait, to kill you?” Yurik cocked his head and frowned. “Man, you’re pissed.”
“Oh, you have no idea.”
“He’s right, though,” Cheyenne said. “If no one knew we were meeting here, then they sent the machine for Rhynehart. They know he’s not active FRoE anymore and assumed he’d be alone and unarmed, without any way to see it coming.”
