Gruefield 18 (Tarnished Sterling Omnibus)

by Robert McCarroll

  "Good, keep their attention on you."

  "Will do, boss."

  Part 10

  Crouched atop a giant water filter, I watched the pattern of shadows from the flashing alarm lights. Three of them reached into the water works, and no two flashed at the same frequency. The pattern of shadows drifted through a long cycle that would look random under brief observation. It seemed Agent Six was right, no one was going to try to escape via the sewers, so two guards would have been overkill. After Alpha made it through the front door, the number of sounds loud enough to reach my secluded corner of the base was greatly diminished. It would be almost peaceful, if not for the klaxon.

  I was starting to hate that analytical part of my mind that said keeping the least capable team members guarding the least probable escape routes made perfect strategic sense. It just presupposed that I counted among the least capable members. Well, it was true, wasn't it? When compared with the rest of the roster, I couldn't help but admit it.

  "I have seized the control center," Dad announced over the radio, "And their security systems are now... offline. Turrets should be down, cameras are ours, blast doors opening. And I'm turning off this damned alarm." The flashing red lights and the klaxon came to an abrupt stop. A moment later, I heard voices in the hallway outside.

  "Do you think that means they beat them back?"

  "Are you kidding? Have you ever been through a hero raid? They come down on you like the wrath of God. I swear, the Ygnaza were not prepared for what hit them."

  "That's what those creepy buggers are called? I just called to them hexapedes."

  "You're an idiot. We have to figure out a way out of here."

  "Like sneak past the heroes?"

  "Like kill the abomination, ditch our robes and pretend to be prisoners. Then when the heroes 'rescue' us, they'll give us a ticket back home instead of a beat down."

  "What are you going to tell the Hierophant? We were supposed to get something for the abomination. You know, cash?"

  "The truth. You know they're going to plaster this all over the front page. It's better than the alternative."

  I climbed down from the water filtration unit and made my way to the doorway.

  "His temper is getting short these days. He might transfer us to Project Thirteen."

  I peered into the hallway. My streak of people not looking in my direction when I did that came to an end. The two figures in white robes were already facing towards the doorway. They stood on either side of a large box that vaguely resembled a pet carrier. Their faces had wide cheekbones and high foreheads. One had chestnut-brown hair, the other, black. They did not react well to seeing me.

  They reached for their belts as I exploded from the doorway, kicking the black-haired one in the side of the head and tackling the other to the ground. A swift punch to the face left him dazed as the black-haired one got out a gun. I kicked the pistol out of his hand and followed through with a right hook that spun him around before he dropped. Chestnut-hair groaned and tried to stand, but I twisted his arms behind his back and zip-tied his wrists. Tossing his pistol aside, I tended to his associate, applying restraints to the unconscious man.

  "Well that bites," Chestnut-hair said, his senses returning.

  "Nice robes," I said. "They look familiar."

  "The Order of the Final Star is everywhere. Your closest friends may be among our number and you would never know."

  "Or you could be a fringe group of dragon worshipers driven out of every country where you've tried to set up shop." He glared at me, but I just smiled. "What's in the box?"

  "An abomination, a crime against God and man."

  "We're running short on those these days, people are getting a bit jaded."

  "The Ygnaza were to dispose of it for us."

  "Alien slavers tend not to do people favors. Especially not when they expect to walk away with cash from the bargain. That tells me you were planning on making a sale. We must have hurt your finances pretty badly." He clammed up and looked at where the pistols had landed. I went over and systematically dismantled them, keeping the firing pins with my lock picks. "I wouldn't get any silly ideas. Outside the hero cordon is the Special Ops cordon. Outside that are the feds, then the army. Nobody is getting away from this place." I approached the box again, finding the far side had a door with a metal grate.

  Staring mournfully out from behind the metal grille were a pair of huge white eyes. Two black pupils swam around massive fields of white. Light blue nictitating membranes blinked across them. They were set high in a face that was almost, but not quite human. The nose was mostly absent, save for a pair of nostril slits partially covered by folds of white skin. The skin was a similar shade of pure white to the eyes, smooth and shiny, looking wet without actually being wet. The mouth sat low in the face, all but precluding a chin. It housed conical teeth, most thicker than they were tall. The interior of the mouth was also blue. From the top of the head grew a long mane of white hair, and two swept-back horns of an ivory hue. It was both cute and greatly disturbing. Narrow fingers sporting vestigial claws hooked through the grille and its eyes pleaded with me.

  Given the size of the head and hands, it had almost no room to move within the box. There was little chance it was comfortable. Extracting my lock picks, I sprang the lock on the door and opened it. A white streak leapt out of the box, pouncing on me. I got ready to kick it into the wall. I hesitated as I heard it exclaim, "Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you," realizing it was actually hugging me, not attacking.

  "Okay, you thanked me, you can get off me now." It scrambled off me and up the wall, its hands and feet clinging to the bare concrete like a gecko. Out of its box, I had a better look at the creature. Generally bipedal, it had a tail about half again as long as its legs. Its head sat on a very flexible neck proportionally about twice as long as that of a human. Its hands looked human save for the vestigial claws and the last finger. Instead of being the shortest, it was by far the longest, stretching as long as the rest of the arm put together. A thin membrane ran from this finger along the back of the arm to the side of the torso: a simple wing. The only hair it had was on its head, which ran long and wild. Its only clothes were a tattered pair of black trousers with a split seam to accommodate the tail. Even clinging to the wall, it was able to turn its face towards me.

  "Who are you?" I asked.

  "An abomination!" the chestnut-haired cultist cried. I kicked him in the face. He growled, but didn't speak again.

  "Who are you?" I asked again.

  "I'm Xiv," in a voice that sounded just to the young side of puberty. "They wouldn't give me a name, so I took what was on the outside of my tank."

  "X I V, as in the numeral fourteen?"

  Xiv glanced sheepishly from side to side. "I didn't know that at the time. When I figured it out, it was already my name."

  "That's okay, I've dealt with stranger. I do have another question. What are you?"

  "I guess I'm a dragon boy."

  "Oh?"

  "Yeah, the rest of those guys," he pointed a finger at the cultists, "Kept trying to clone a dragon. From what I overheard in the lab, the genetic material had holes in it, and they tried to patch it. I'm the only one that survived, but they weren't happy with me."

  "You make a mockery of God!" the cultist spat.

  "Do I have to hurt you again?" I asked. The cultist looked away. "Xiv, how did you find all this out?"

  "I have really good hearing." Which was odd, because he didn't seem to have any ears. But when your godfather can fly without wings, it's not hard to believe a dragon-hybrid clone could hear.

  "I know it happened before you were born, but do you know what they filled in the gaps in your genome with when they made you?"

  "Human, I think."

  "Now Xiv, I know I just let you o
ut of your box, but we're in the middle of bringing down a slaver camp. Procedure says I have to restrain everyone I run into, prisoner and bad guy alike."

  "Oh." He looked rather disappointed.

  "Now, if I don't put restraints on you, I will get in trouble. I don't want to do this to be mean, I just have to. Do you understand?" He climbed down from the wall and stood up. On his feet, he came up to my chin. He held up his hands with the little finger folded as tightly against the sides of his arms as he could. "This is only until we've secured the facility and sorted out who the bad guys are, okay?" He nodded and I put a pair of zip ties on his wrists as best as I could given the structure of his hands.

  "If I wanted to get away," Xiv said, "I could gnaw through these in under a minute."

  "In your case, it's symbolic. It means you're cooperating and it makes it a lot easier to advocate for you when this is sorted out."

  "I won't give you any trouble," Xiv said, sitting on the box and holding his hands by his collarbone. I pressed the transmit button on my earpiece.

  "Shadowdemon to Delta Leader, I have two Final Star cultists and their prisoner by waterworks. All restrained, please advise."

  "Sit on them for a while," Agent Six said, "We're busy."

  "He sounds rude," Xiv said.

  "You do have good hearing," I said. Leaning against the wall, I waited. The black-haired cultist regained consciousness and looked at least as surly as his counterpart. They realized that they couldn't beat me unrestrained, and appeared to be biding their time. Fine by me.

  "Delta, we have a situation," Dad said.

  "What would that be?" Agent Six asked, sounding rather winded.

  "The aliens are not withdrawing through their portal. They are instead reinforcing. We need you to return to the sub-basement to shut down the power."

  "I'm a little cut off from the sub-basement," Agent Six said, "These four-armed bastards are giving us a seriously hard time." He grunted, probably an unintentional reaction to getting hit.

  "You entered through the cistern under water filtration, right? Your sentries should be able to advance on the reactor from there without having to fight through the bulk of the alien forces."

  "I only left Shadow-Ooph! All right, that's enough you green-" Agent Six stopped transmitting.

  "Shadowdemon," Dad said.

  My hand went to the transmit button on my earpiece. "Copy."

  "Are you still in position by water filtration?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Take a look around you, there should be a larger-than-average chilled water line running through the hallway." For the first time, I paid closer attention to the mass of pipes and conduits running along the ceiling. Near the wall, slightly lower than the others, was a thicker insulated pipe marked 'coolant' with some alien script stenciled by the sign.

  "I found it."

  "Follow that, it should lead you right to the power plant. Shut it down so we can cut off their reinforcements. Whatever you do, do not overload it."

  "Yes, sir," I said. Chasing the pipeline along the hallway, I asked myself if I knew how to turn off a human power plant. The answer was at best a "maybe," assuming a best-case situation of clearly labeled control panels. An alien power plant? The image that came to mind was of Cupric looking down at Doctor Omicron's control panel and finding Cyrillic labels. As I reached an intersection, I heard someone rushing up behind me. Turning around, I saw Xiv, freed from the zip ties. "What are you doing?"

  "I'm coming to help you," he said with painful sincerity.

  "You don't even know me. This is dangerous, why would you want to help?"

  "You're the only one who helped me." From his expression, it was clear he had no idea what he was trying to get into. I barely had a clue. I'd been a sidekick for years, heard a lot of heroes talk about a lot of weird encounters. But I don't recall any of them mentioning what to do when faced with a genetic chimera trying to follow you into a dangerous situation because you were the only one who wasn't physically or psychologically abusive to it. "It," that was the pronoun the cultist used when calling Xiv an abomination. No matter how off-putting Xiv might look, he did not deserve to be thought of as an "it."

  "Listen," I said. "If you really want to help, you can keep a lookout and warn me if anyone else tries to get into the power plant. Okay?"

  "Sure," he said, somehow cheerful. I guess ignorance is bliss. I turned my attention back to the pipe. At the intersection, it crossed the side corridor at ceiling height, ran down the far wall, then turned right along the floor. I followed it to the end of the hall, where it passed through the jamb of a metal door. This door was mostly marked in alien script, with just the English words "Keep Out" stenciled on it. Taking hold of the large wheel in the center of the door, I tried to turn it. It didn't budge in either direction. The door was locked from the other side, and without a visible mechanism for unlocking it. Cupric or Omegaburn would cut through the door. Jack or Molot would smash it down. I didn't have those options. What would Dad do? In a moment of mad inspiration, I knocked.

  There was a clunk, and the wheel turned. The face that greeted my fist had to be one of the Ygnaza. Its head was shaped like a blunt wedge, with the flat side forward. Sunk into either side was a translucent, jelly filled sack holding thousands of captive eye-stalks in a conical depression. Its skin was a sickly yellow-green in hue and a band of blue cloth was draped over the middle of its face. The cloth was weighted down in front by a handful of metal baubles whose imagery probably meant something to the Ygnaza. My fist collided with a very solid part of its skeleton and sent the creature tumbling back. The pain shooting up my knuckles was an unwelcome side effect. As I shouldered my way through the partly open door, I got a better look at its full form.

  Its body was shaped like a thick ribbon, with four bony nodules, one at each end and two evenly spaced down the middle. My fist had met the uppermost nodule, which held the eye sacs. The second nodule held two arms, smaller and more gracile than the other limbs, with long, nimble looking fingers. The third carried larger arms, with thicker, bonier fingers that grew in such a way as to allow the Ygnaza to walk on the bottom knuckle. The back nodule bore the thickest limbs, the legs. Whatever digits their hind limbs once had long ago had fused together into hooves. The Ygnaza wore a singlet which reached down to the wrist or ankle of each limb, and up to halfway between the "shoulders" and head. A single band of cloth continued forward to drape over the head.

  Letting out some sort of warbling squeal, it fell back to the metal grate that formed the floor of the room. The room itself was square, with banks of control panels, readouts, and gauges along the right hand wall. The middle of the room was dominated by a massive circular tower that all but pulsated with energy. No light spilled from it, but there was a distinct hum, and proximity made all of the hairs on my body stand on end. The Ygnaza at the control panels turned to look at me. Their skin tones seemed to range from yellow to green, with one pale blue fellow in the back. The colors and patterns of their clothes were not uniform, but the style of the cut looked the same. Their size varied from about waist high to the one I'd punched who was about as tall as me.

  One of the Ygnaza inflated a pair of air sacs below and behind the eyes, releasing a very glottal vocalization. The warble sounded like, "Human," ending with a "glug" as the vocal sacs collapsed. At first, I thought it was referring to me, then a figure came barreling out from behind the stack. The top of my head would at best have reached his chin, if I stood on my toes slightly. His short black hair was wild. He had a nose that looked like it had been flattened with a shovel, then healed closed. It was obvious he was breathing through his mouth. He had a leather vest made by roughly tearing the arms off of a leather jacket that failed to reach his waistline. He wore black cargo pants and heavy work boots. The bare skin of his torso was liberally covered with tattoos, mostly i
n greens, reds and blues. The artistry might have been quite skilled, but my attention was drawn to the half-inch thick, five-foot long steel dowel in his hand and its sharpened point swinging for my face.

  I ducked the swing and delivered a punch to the solar plexus. A side of beef would have been more yielding. The tower of muscle laughed. "Fists do not hurt Xiao," he said, kicking me into the wall. "Bleed, little man," Xiao said, hurling his makeshift spear at me.

  Part 11

  It was less than twenty-four hours since Torquespiral had come into my new hideout and informed me that the Fund wanted my help on this raid. Since then, I'd had the lovely experience of crawling up a sewer, freed a genetic chimera, met my first alien, punched it, and now had my face frozen in an expression that read "Oh, crap." While I managed to narrowly avoid the spear, I was struck with the explosion of concrete chips as the length of steel buried itself partway into the wall. Tumbling to the floor, I rolled to a crouch. Xiao looked to have extra strength and possibly extra toughness, an annoyingly common and prized combination among underworld types. He wasn't invulnerable, his nose and his tattoos said as much.