She hated being a diplomat, too.
“Kukkuu—Madam Lajunin—I assure you that we take the need for cooperation in these matters with the utmost seriousness. However—”
Saara let him blather on for what felt like forever but was really less than five minutes before reaching for her cell. “I feel like a sandwich today, gelato for dessert. Do you—” She got no text connection on her pre-dial menu. “That’s—”
She’d been caught in enough explosions to know what the slam of shock was—the sudden disorientation of all inputs of sensation overwhelmed by crushing weight of impact, flash, and sound, her brain rattling in her head as flung ejecta struck her body and flung her into harder things.
Sensations she could process returned. Weight. Muffled cracks and grinding, the sounds of debris settling over her. I’m face up, that’s something. She couldn’t see, but she wasn’t being crushed. She couldn’t feel her power filling her up, translating kinetic force against her into reserves for her to use.
She wasn’t filling but she was damn near full—she’d entered the office with only a shallow reserve, generated that morning by vigorous calisthenics and sparring, now she felt like a balloon inflated almost to popping.
Let’s do something about that.
She pushed the pressure inside out through her hands in a controlled blast of pure kinetic force against whatever was on top of her. The Continental Guard’s Brussels offices were on the top floor of the Europa Building for roof-access, and her third try punched a hole in the fallen ceiling to flood light in. Pushing more force into speed and strength, she let what she held flow away as she climbed out of the wreckage and into open air. Finally she could see and— No. No, no, no, no!
The Europa Building was gone. Just, gone. Everything was gone.
Shell could think fast enough to make a speedster look like a turtle, but she’d rarely felt so helpless. Hope and the others had no idea just how much raw data she routinely harvested from the electronic environment—street and traffic cams, cell-tower traffic, every electronic media, public dispatch networks, even power grid usages—to her it was like sight, sound, ambient temperature and the wind in her hair.
In information-dense places like cities, she “saw” so much she’d dubbed herself Panopticon. Give her a few seconds and she could extend her electronic senses to any location in the developed world—but not now. Here, with Brussels under cybernetic attack the very things that provided her senses were crippled, limiting her to what she could see from afar and through her drones and mask-cam eyes. Here where she most needed to see, she was practically blind.
Confirmed high-yield attack, Berlimont and Europa buildings gone, no radiation, no chemical particulates in shock front, pressure waves indicate hypersonic strike, speed at impact Mach 10, blast wave indicates at least twelve-kiloton energy release—conclusion, sub-orbital Kinetic Energy Weapon.
EU security systems report seventeen additional attacks matching KEW impact signature, France, Germany, Flanders, Spain, Italy. Confirmed targets: power plants.
Odds of additional Brussel’s bombardment? First KEW impact centered on Rue de la Loi—impact zone maximizes damage to major government buildings, not optimal placement if additional KEWs tasked to Brussels. Low odds additional bombardment.
At least that was reassuring, since Hope was flying them all right into the middle of it.
Rule #1: Keep. Hope. Alive.
“What was that?” Hope finally asked.
Shell watched through drone eyes as the first wave of green zombies erupted into the surrounding streets. It looked like here The Enemy had gone with using warehouses and storage units instead of trucks for spaces to fit their delivery cages. “It was a Kinetic Energy Weapon. Imagine a tungsten spear the size of a telephone pole dropped from orbit.” Their quantum-neural link fed her every microsecond of Hope’s dawning horror through her physical reaction, a haptic intimacy that made Shell feel like she was her BF’s own skin. She diverted the sensation-emotion into a monitoring subroutine. “Additional KEW strikes throughout the EU, targeted strikes and I think we just saw Brussel’s only hit—the zombies are coming. No sign of minitanks or arson drones.”
“Call it, Shell—point us where we can be the most help!”
The quantum ghost-girl began lighting up Hope’s vision with icons, madly refining target selections from the handful of sensor inputs she had. The zombie wave couldn’t be all of it. And Brussel’s Continental Guard team had been based in the Europa Building so they might just be gone, but where were all the EU’s heroes?
“My internet connection has dropped,” Konrad noted after several fruitless attempts to discover the problem. The Brussels research hospital had the most state-of-the-art network connection money could buy.
“Herr Doctor?” his attendant inquired. The institute had provided the personal attendant for the duration of his stay—a privilege he could have done without. Doctor Konrad Kardinal toggled his chair away from the desk, enjoying again his finger’s quick response to his commands—a blessing of dexterity he hadn’t possessed for several years.
The treatment series is working, I can put up with a stranger’s fussing.
He could use a break from his research anyway; the field of German studies wasn’t going anywhere. The years after The Event had seen a boom in academic research into myth and folklore. He chuckled. Motivated by new experience.
The large, deep window of his room in the old medical institute looked out across Parc du Cinquantenaire, and even the overcast day couldn’t dim the beauty of the scene in his eyes. With his increasing command of his limbs giving him courage, he had twice been able to pilot his chair along the green arcades just across the avenue. Holding his body firm through both trips had been exhausting and he’d been scolded, but now his impatience ate at him—a reversal of so many years of acute drifting depression.
Of course it wasn’t the treatments that ended the depression. He smiled at the tap-tap of his attendant’s fingers on his laptop keyboard as the man tried to figure out what was wrong, and then an anomaly below his window caught his eye. Why is all the traffic stop—
The explosion burst the windows and drove shards of knifing glass into his face.
What. What. His ringing ears heard nothing else. His stinging face felt wet. Bleeding. I’m bleeding. He raised shaking hands, felt liquid and his glasses. Cracked but they’d saved his eyes. He turned his chair towards the sound of shrieking—his attendant slumped bowed over the desk, his back sliced by glass. Spinning back around, Konrad looked out through crack-crazed lenses. Over the park and the European Quarter rose a cloud of smoke, a mushroom-shaped cloud. Konrad shouted, powering his chair away from the window before almost laughing.
Idiot! Not a nuke—the heat of the flash would have cooked us and all truly big explosions take that shape. An attack. This is an attack. This is a fight.
A smile stretched his lips as his vision faded, his skin cold, and then he looked out of eyes higher off the ground than his chair could lift him, as he rode the air high over the institute gripping his axes in great blue fists. Everywhere below there were shouts, cries, screams, nothing to the thrilling chill of ice in his veins. Brandishing his axes and calling out his enemy, the frost-giant Malmsturm left his mortal shell comatose to sail forth on air in a whirl of snow and ice to find and punish the villains who’d done this.
Shell’s quantum-link to Hope disappeared—a loss that always felt like going numb—and with it her ability to provide her BF a virtual heads-up display. “We’ve dropped into a magnetobridge anchor zone!” she called out through the team’s earbuds. “Drone-sightings show three insertions of green zombie units, north, east, and west of KEW strike crater!”
“Sifu make delivery!” Hope rattled off. “Iron Jack Harlequin east, Artemis Sifu west! Galatea east—I’ve got north!”
“There’s two wheels located south-southeast,” Shell informed Sifu, dropping the coordinates into his inertial nav unit. He blurred o
ut and then back in sitting on the Benelli TNT motorbike she’d found him, taking Iron Jack up behind him and disappearing again even as Hope grabbed Galatea and launched them both. Hope took a wide swing to throw Shell’s Galatea shell at her assigned targets on her way north over the hell that was the shattered impact zone.
Her immediate sensory inputs narrowed to Galatea and a couple dozen drones, Shell flew through fog with cotton-stuffed ears, near blind and useless in Brussel’s dead zone. She’d spotted two local superhumans so far in her spreading drone-net—Kukkuu, who she and Hope knew, and Malmsturm, who they’d never met—but couldn’t talk to them at all. So instead she flexed her virtual fingers and dove into the wild of EU’s uncompromised networks, hunting, hunting. More had to be coming, but they weren’t going to stand alone if Shell had to bring the cavalry herself.
Chapter Sixteen
“We shall not enter into any of the abstruse definitions of war used by publicists. We shall keep to the element of the thing itself, to a duel. War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale. If we would conceive as a unit the countless number of duels which make up a war, we shall do so best by supposing to ourselves two wrestlers. Each strives by physical force to compel the other to submit to his will: his first object is to throw his adversary, and thus to render him incapable of further resistance.
“War therefore is an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfil our will.”
Carl von Clausewitz, On War.
Nike was going to rip the man’s spine out and beat him to death with it. “Sidestep’s delivered Armada and Terrassiere to the Maasvlakte! The two best able to do the job!” she explained again to the general on the screen. The attack—What was it?—had turned the manmade island expansion of Rotterdam’s Europort and the power-station that sat on it into a burning crater in the North Sea, a scene from Dante’s hellish imaginings. “And we’re getting intel on all the other strikes but Brussels! Our team there is silent! I respectfully repeat my request to deploy Garde to Brussels!”
“Request denied, Commander Nike,” he answered levelly. The stoic malakas remained unmoved by the scenes scattered across the screens in the packed Rotterdam Guard tac-room. Maybe he wasn’t looking at the same images in whatever bunker he was hiding in?
“General, this is everywhere. Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, Athens—every city with a Continental Guard base has been kissed—”
“—with a dozen other strikes, commander. All of them to power-stations and military bases—”
“—but we can see them all! Except Brussels! We have no idea what’s happening there! We—”
The screen filled by the general’s ugly face split to add a freckled redhead Nike’d never seen before. The young woman wore no uniform or costume, just a black athletic shirt with white lettering that spelled out Boo! And a black baseball cap with—the Chicago Sentinels logo? “Commander. General. What is going on there is Brussels received a strike to the European Quarter. Parliament and the Council were both in session and are gone. What your own people haven’t told you yet is that the strikes came from someone emptying all the KEWs in Apollo’s Quiver.”
Her general turned purple, the proper manner that made her want to punch his face wiped away. “Who are you? How did you break this secure communication? How do you know about Apollo’s Quiver?”
“You can call me Power Chick, and wrong questions. The right question is ‘Why is Brussels blacked out?’ Commander Nike, the Guard team stationed in the Europa Building appears to be a total loss. I’ve spotted three responding superhumans and none of them are Continental Guard. Brussels is receiving the same personal treatment given Chicago, GZSs—Green Zombie Soldiers—deploying in zones around the Quarter.”
A cascade of smaller boxes flooded the lower third of the big screen, lurching green soldiers firing Incendiaries and rockets?
“I have no way to speak to the three superhumans independently deploying to meet them, but I believe them to be The Morrigan, Malmsturm, and Kukkuu—” more boxes “—based on visual imagery.”
The American—obviously some kind of cyberkinetic—swept the images from her side of the screen with the wave of a hand. “Sir and ma’am, all the bolts in Apollo’s Quiver have been shot, you’re not going to see any more KEW strikes. The blackout and GZS wave means your attacker isn’t done with Brussels yet and only five Sentinels and three European capes I can’t communicate with are there to stand against what’s coming at them next. I respectfully suggest you all move your asses.” The girl disappeared, leaving only an explosively purple general and dead silence in the tac-room. Nobody spoke.
“Commander Nike.” Her superior officer got his voice under control. “Deploy Sidestep with Tribuno to verify that woman’s claims, immediately.”
Her lips curled but she fought the sneer into what he could reasonably interpret as a smile. “Thank you, general.”
“Get down!” Shell yelled in Hope’s ear. She dove for the street, putting a spin into it like Atlas had trained her as a mini-missile screamed past her head. “What was that?”
“Recoilless rifle anti-tank round!”
That explained why they hadn’t brought any mini-tanks. “Sifu, target the recoilless rifle teams! Keep them off the slow-pokes and other fliers!” She hit the street behind a bus, launched herself around it keeping the abandoned vehicles choking the street between her and the GZSs as she closed with her targets. Malleus met the recoilless before the second zombie in the two-man team could reload it and then it was a matter of just swinging away until the nightmarish mold-covered corpses lay in stinking bits. “Ukh. Shell, they smell terrible.”
“The growth doesn’t colonize all the host-body’s cells. Brain and nervous system, muscle fibers . . . that stuff it keeps and the non-essential stuff like the circulatory and digestive systems just rot for fuel, plant food. It’s pretty putrid.”
“Brain?” Hope swallowed her rising gorge. “Please tell me they’re not still people!”
“No no no,” Shell almost babbled. “No higher brain functions outside of what’s tied into the Green Man’s decentralized megamind. It looks like he’s kind of an organic version of me—if I was getting my computing power from hundreds or thousands of linked CPUs. They’re not even like Platoon.”
“Okay. Okay.” Hope shook herself. Even if they had remembered something of their former lives—wherever they’d come from—ending them would still be a mercy. Artemis would say that. A hail of stinging rounds bounced off her and an incendiary burst against her side, splattering her with burning napalm. So not the time for a moral crisis, anyway. And nice to know the Green Man was as stupid as most everyone else—wasting shots on targets that can ignore them.
The napalm wouldn’t even scorch her treated wig or Vulcan-produced armor and costume.
“Two new attack zones!” Shell called out. “GZS’s hitting the streets south of us!”
“Call targets for everyone!” Hope launched herself skyward again.
Sifu wove the Benelli—a nice bike, he’d need to look into getting one—through time-frozen cars and pedestrians and into the middle of the GZS squad. Kicking the stand down and getting off, he dropped back over the line into mere 10-1 Hypertime and shot the first zombie soldier as the world unfroze and picked up to molasses speed. They might be organic zombies, but shoot one in the face and it was useless with no eyes. Ducking around a second GZS, he shot his primary target—a GZS holding the recoilless—shot the trigger on the anti-armor weapon as it fell, ripped an AK from the hands of another GZS, ran a tight circle as he sprayed the whole squad, got back on the bike and pushed back into time-frozen Hypertime.
“All recoilless teams serviced on Trone!” he called out for Shell as he rode past Iron Jack, frozen mid-charge—the man must have launched his charge from cover the instant he saw Sifu’s blur in the middle of the group pinning him. The M3 recoillesses out of action, all the AK rounds they threw at the iron Ajax-Type wouldn’t even slow him down.
Hoppi
ng a curb to clear a blocked way, he dropped back to 10-1 to let Shell get his report, flicked back into frozen time to turn down Rue de Paris as the HUD in his helmet gave him the next squirt-transmitted targets.
And stopped. The new icons’ direction and distance put them all the way across the Quarter, on the other side of the crater. He’d have to skirt around it, and how many more attack zones were they going to see?
“You’ve got some distance this time, it’ll take you a few minutes,” Shell’s squirt-transmission message continued. “For your riding pleasure, may I suggest we start with a classic?” Sifu laughed as his ears filled with the pumping sounds of Who Let the Dogs Out?
He turned the bike and opened the throttle. I am not memory, I am not anticipation, I am here
Brussels was burning. The KEW strike on the European Quarter had practically self-extinguished any fires buried under shattered and collapsed structures, but the GZS’s had brought incendiaries Shell identified as military-canister types, something every nation had long since signed treaties against. Thrown through windows and onto rooftops, they spread flames across the city.
Hope turned in air. It would be a lot worse if the big blue frost giant who’d descended on the fight with a roar—alternating between a miniature whirling blizzard of hard-edged snow and a laughing ice-breathing axe-wielding maniac—wasn’t taking time from slicing up GZSs to sweep across the worst blazes.
But there were so many of them—Shell reported they had to be waiting in cages set to drop in their arrival zones in relays, emerging like an impossible flood of clowns from clown-cars. Sifu was eliminating the worst of their heavy-punch threat, but he couldn’t keep that up—Hope knew from years with Rush that that kind of in-and-out dance with Hypertime was exhausting.
Repercussions (Wearing the Cape Book 8) Page 15
