"What is it?"
"Dad found out I hadn't told the Elementals I was leaving before asking to join you guys. He feels it's inconsiderate."
"In a way, it sort of is."
"If I weren't worried about them playing fast and loose with the rules, I'd agree too." The door to the bar opened, and a guy in an apron tossed a couple of black garbage bags into their dumpster. He gave us a dirty look before heading back inside.
"Now what?"
"We leave," I said. We climbed into the car.
"That's a great plan, but after that?"
"We go talk to Dekker. Or see if he's in any shape to talk."
They had scrubbed the smoke damage off of the exterior facade, and appeared to be well on their way to repairing the damage the fire had wrought. Though there was no indicator of when the closed sections of Vanguard would reopen, it didn't look like it was all that far off. I had little doubt that the fund had called in some community service work to speed along the repairs. It was overkill, but Vanguard was one of our symbols in the city. I recognized the nurse behind the counter. My last encounter with her hadn't been all that civil, and she'd ended up calling security on me.
Speaking of security, it appeared that the special response team had been moved to a more visible location. Their partially powered exosuits made for an intimidating look. But given the patients treated here, even they would only be buying time until the cavalry arrived under the worst circumstances. The suits were too expensive for general use, and from what I hear, a bit flaky. Still, given the number of secure sites the Fund owned and the way the guards were equipped, we had a private army. Admittedly too dispersed to be visible, there had to be a lot of these guys in the aggregate. That's not even counting the general membership. I was starting to see how someone might get the wrong impression. A self-regulated organization of powered individuals who hoarded advanced technology and employed a metric crapload of people equipped to be able to solo a swat team... The parallels to Icerazor's conversation with Shiva dug their claws into the back of my mind.
I shook my head as Donny did the talking and pleasantly requested permission to be allowed in to talk to 'our patient'. We didn't mention Dekker by name. While I didn't actually believe Morlocks could be anywhere, it would make sense for them to keep an eye on Fund sites. "Ward 17," the nurse said with a smile.
"Thank you," Donny said, before we headed off. The nurse showed that she remembered me with a narrowed gaze. I didn't respond. Antagonizing the medical staff isn't that good of an idea. Vanguard had a floor plan measured in acres, so it was a bit of a hike to the correct part of the hospital. It was also three floors up. Ward 17 was a secure ward, and we had to swipe, sign in and state our business before we were permitted to continue with an escort from the SRT. If I hadn't been living in a nuclear missile silo, these might have been the strongest looking doors I'd ever seen. A couple in our base trumped them from sheer mass, but these probably closed faster. We stopped at room number 04-17-032. I guessed floor-ward-room, but it wasn't that important.
Dekker looked a little less dead than last time I saw him. He was sitting on a bed behind a glass partition. The heavy-duty electrical apparatus he was hooked up to appeared to be siphoning off his excess energy into a stack of Leiden jars, or something visually very similar. "Oh, hi," he said as we entered. "Who are your new friends?"
"This is Icerazor and Baron Mortis."
"I thought Baron Mortis was a black dude."
"He retired."
"They're telling me that I'm apparently generating this juice now, and they're not sure if they can turn it off. They think I waited too long to seek treatment."
"We came looking for information."
"I figured you would."
"Atlas Holdings."
"Sounds familiar," Dekker said. "I think it was a fake company they made to launder funds from sympathetic donors. Anonymizing the transactions and that sort of thing. The closest I came to the financial side of things was during the Walker raid."
"All right, if the rest of your cell was sprung from jail, where would they go to ground?"
"A couple of places. The spot you found me, but they'd have noticed you were there when all their stuff wasn't. There's the concrete plant out in Brooksville, but that's way out of their way. Then there's the old PCN station on First. They were the first to put a broadcast antenna on Mount Kline. But they moved out of that building and have been using it for storage. If I had to guess, it'd be there. It's a block away from the Doolittle Highway, easy escape after they figure out where they need to go. But still a busy enough area in the city that they can have someone run in supplies and not arouse suspicion. It's big enough to house them all, and it's not in active use."
"Do you know of any other safe houses?"
"Not off the top of my head. I could look some up, but that might clue them in that I'm not dead."
"I don't think you need to worry about that," Serar said, "Because I'm going to fix that oversight."
As before, Serar's voice was in my head. Before I could turn to look for the gargoyle, I was flung forward. Striking the glass partition hard enough to crack it, I tried to figure out what hit me. There hadn't been an impact per se, it was almost as if I'd fallen sideways. I hadn't felt anything like it since Wolfjack had changed the direction gravity pulled me. Was this what it was like to be on the receiving end of telekinesis? Dekker looked to be fighting against his own muscles as his arm reached for the cables hooking him into the devices siphoning off the excess power.
I rolled over, having the strangest feeling of looking up at the doorway. The gray-skinned little man with the oversized tongue was standing on the shoulders of one of the SRT officers. His tiny fingers clutched the edge of the man's helmet and both the Officer's and Serar's eyes burned with angry blue light. Donny looked around for a weapon. Anything he could animate. Everything in immediate sight was made of concrete, metal or plastic. For a moment, a glimmer of hope passed through his expression as he spied a book, then he remembered paper was too processed to animate.
Icerazor had no such problem. A glimmering white crystalline duplicate broke free of his body and charged the doorway, swatting the gargoyle off the SRT officer. Forcibly separated from Serar's influence, the guard crumbled, his suit slowing the collapse to a safe rate. Instead of giving in to the influence of gravity and falling to the linoleum, Serar was surrounded with a nimbus of ivory light. The light stretched into an ideal humanoid figure, albeit a mostly transparent one. Once fully formed, it sprouted a pair of golden wings that wrapped around its torso. Icerazor's diamond double hammered the construct, but the wings shielded Serar from its blows.
Flinging his wings wide, Serar's avatar struck Icerazor's double with both palms, hurling the mass of diamond towards me. I rolled aside before it smashed into the glass partition, sending razor sharp shards flying in entirely unnatural directions. One such shard, longer than my forearm and a half inch thick, plunged inexorably through Dekker's chest. Crashing into the wall next to him, I found myself outside the influence of whatever had held me to the partition, and promptly fell to the floor. Icerazor's double melted away in the tinkle of rapidly evaporating jewels.
"Code White," the remaining SRT officer called into his radio. "Doctor Armstrong, Doctor West, Doctor Black to Ward Seventeen." This alert was soon repeated over Vanguard's PA system.
"They shan't arrive in time," Serar said, his wing slicing through the man's arm as he narrowly avoided losing a head.
The guard screamed in pain as blood jetted from the severed limb.
Part 19
Dekker looked very dead. I saw the pained look on Donny's face. I don't think he's ever animated a human corpse before, and certainly not one so freshly slain. I tried to remember if we'd ever tested Omicron's force bubbles against psychic constructs before. Miss Pain had be
en otherwise occupied when we'd fought him, and we'd been a bit lax on testing the limits of the technology. Radiating waves of doubt bathed my mind, causing me to freeze with inaction. Analytical me pointed an accusatory finger at Serar. Fighting the mocking questions that sounded as if they emanated from my subconscious, I called up a force bubble around Serar.
"Thanks for the shield," Serar said. Doubt flooded through me again and I lost focus, dropping the bubble.
"Screw these mind games," Icerazor said, taking up a ready stance facing Serar.
Instead of a physical attack, he began to draw on the air with his finger. A blue-white line of energy followed his fingertip as he drew on the fabric of reality in front of himself. Once he completed the glyph, he repeated the same seemingly unpronounceable word as he jabbed the icon. When his finger passed through the glyph at the same time as he spoke the word, a sliver of cold jetted out. A few pokes generated no response, and a few mistimed utterances were wasted, but he kept up a fairly rapid barrage. Serar blocked his face with his wings, but the slivers embedded themselves in the golden light. A snarl of anger rumbled through my forebrain from the gargoyle.
"You're no magic user," Serar said as if the utterance would make it so.
"Oh, yes I am," Icerazor said, drawing his blade. The first two slices carved off Serar's wingtips. They reformed quickly, but the gargoyle glided back, trying to stay out of sword range. The doubt evaporated like fog. I hadn't seen Nick actually cast in battle before, but given what magic has done to him in the past, I can understand his unwillingness to resort to it. It certainly hadn't been as impressive as what Ixa could unleash, but it was a heck of a lot faster. Without his focus, the glyph he'd drawn melted away.
With a telekinetic shove, Serar threw Icerazor down the hall. Tumbling along the tiles, Nick cried out in pain. Coming to a stop, he clutched his side, gasping. That didn't bode well for the state of his cracked ribs. Rushing into the hall, I scooped up Icerazor's sword and tried to keep Serar occupied. The problem with fighting a telepath is he tends to know what you're trying to do, especially when it's not simply muscle memory. I'm not much of a swordsman, but my fists can't hurt psychic constructs. I didn't have much of a plan as I slashed about, unable to make contact with the gliding gargoyle. The SRT thundering down the hall towards us heartened me, but psychic constructs were annoyingly durable against standard weapons.
Serar threw his arms wide and I landed flat on my backside. The wave of energy he cast down the hall hit like a sucker punch to the brain. The world spun in confusion around me as I stared in confusion through my own eyes. My body stood unbidden and of its own accord. I watched like a spectator as my fist broke a hole in the ivory light and I grabbed Serar by the face. He looked as confused as I was. Slamming him against one wall, I turned and hurled the gargoyle at the far side of Dekker's room. A second later, I hurtled after him, smashing through the wall in a shower of concrete and brickwork.
As the sun's rays washed over me, I fell limp, and plunged towards the pavement four stories below. Fear jolted the realization that I had control of my muscles again. Twisting around, I fired the line launcher at the face of Vanguard.
My shoulder dislocated with a loud pop as the line launcher caught in the moment before the safeties began playing out line in an attempt to bleed off speed without ripping my arm off entirely. I hit the sidewalk with about as much speed as if I'd tripped. Laying there, looking up at the sky, I watched Serar flying away. I tried to bubble him, but the glove said he was out of range. A crowd was already starting to gather around where I lay on the sidewalk. Unless I was going to pull myself back up on a dislocated shoulder, there was no point in leaving the cable attached to the building. I retracted it and forced myself to stand. The crowd parted as I held my arm still to minimize the pain and hobbled back inside.
In some ways it was convenient to have injuries happen at a hospital. Of course, they're not going to be happy about the hole in their wall. As I handed over my BHA card and explained my injury, my mind replayed the last few moments of the fight with Serar. It was the exact same sensation of watching my body act on its own that I'd had during the dreams about the shadow attacks. I shuddered at the implications.
A quick x-ray verified my assessment that my arm was out of it's socket. The doctors set it back in place and advised over the counter painkillers. Donny found me as they were going through the standard spiel about my co-pays being billed to the fund. I adjusted my sling and went to find out what he had to say.
"What's going on?" Donny asked.
"You're going to have to be more specific."
"I get the part about the psychic gnome fooling people into thinking he was still comatose. Somehow that's the normal part of today."
"Okay. I hadn't given that part much thought. But what is it in particular that's bugging you."
"You - going through a concrete wall. It didn't look like the gray guy battered the hole. It looked like you shoved him through it."
"His name's Serar," I said. "And I'm not entirely sure what happened." I looked around to see if anyone was in earshot. "Donny, I'm not sure how best to put this. From the time Serar mind-blasted the hallway until I was falling outside the building, I wasn't in control. I don't mean I was too angry to be rational. I mean I was a spectator to my own actions." Donny frowned. The expression looked alien to his face.
"Has this happened before?"
"I don't know."
"That's a rather ominous answer."
"Ever since I got that remote control from Omicron, I've been having very strange dreams. Dreams that look a lot like events other people report to me later on."
"Premonitions?"
"More like real-time." I paused as an orderly pushed a cart of lunch trays past us. "Donny, I've been dreaming of shadow attacks - from the shadow's perspective."
"You think Doctor Omicron managed to slip something past all the scrutiny the fund gave his gift?"
"That's the least disturbing possibility," I said. We paused again as another patient was wheeled past us. "This is probably not the best place to have this conversation."
"On other topics," Donny said, "Getting thrown down the hall turned Icerazor's cracked ribs into fractured ribs. And the cops have arrived. They're going to want a statement."
"And a mess of paperwork." I followed Donny back to Ward 17. "Good morning Detective Esposito," I said, "Or rather, afternoon." Esposito glared at me. He wasn't wearing his trademark coat, just an off the rack gray suit and tie.
"Figures you're here," he grumbled, shoving a clipboard at my face. "Now explain the dead Morlock."
I spent much of the afternoon recounting events of the day to various people - Detective Esposito, Ixa, dad. In each, I glossed over the specifics of how a concrete wall at Vanguard developed a hole large enough for me to fall out of it. The hard part was trying to fill out BHA forms with my arm in a sling. Because of the exceedingly slow pace I managed, Esposito actually let me off with closer to the minimum. I was shocked, but they were wheeling Dekker to the morgue, and he seemed to have lost interest in me. The other reprieve I got was when Donny pointed out that we were in danger of missing Baron Mortis' retirement party.
Outside of the dais, there were no assigned seats. Being among the later groups to arrive, we got a table in the back corner. We being Dad, Ixa and I. Donny got a seat on the dais so the skull mask could be formally passed on. Instead of Sterling Towers, the venue was a restaurant a few blocks away. For having such a large footprint downtown, it had to be pricey. Among the attendees were a bevy of retired community members, and far too many people I couldn't put a name to.
One of these people approached our table and held out a hand. She was lithe and slim. She dressed in silver save for a white patch which started wide at her shoulders, narrowing towards her navel and meandering several times left and right on its way down
. It took a moment for me to figure out that it was supposed to be a stylized tornado. Her mask covered from the tip of her nose to her hairline. Her dark brown hair was pulled back into a simple ponytail, and a slight smile bent the corners of her mouth. "Ixahau, it's nice to see you again."
"I can't recall having met you before," Ixa said, "You may have been thinking of my mother."
"How is she?"
Gruefield 18 (Tarnished Sterling Omnibus) Page 82