Dire : Wars (The Dire Saga Book 4)

by Andrew Seiple

  “Sh, no more details here. Jorge, thank you.” Jorge nodded, and held the door for me as we left.

  I noted that Mitch didn’t touch the geological survey I’d left on the counter. “Plan B,” I subvocalized to Alpha as I stepped through the door, and blinked in patterns as I switched my contact lenses to their new sight mode.

  “Hell of a thing, these last few days,” Mitch said, as we walked down the mostly-empty street. “Do you have everything you need? We can’t make a side-trip now. The boat leaves in ten minutes, with or without us.”

  “Us? You’re coming too?”

  He smiled, smoothing his gray hair with one worn hand. “For a little ways. I’ve got a stop across the bay, to talk with some old friends.”

  “So the Chamis are back!”

  He took my elbow and steered me off the street, down into a cul-de-sac that ended at an older part of the docks. “Shh. But yes, you’ll see them soon. Escala very much wants to talk with you.”

  I hesitated, and in that second, he knew.

  The grip on my elbow turned into a vice, his foot swept around and caught my shin, and I fell to the ground like a sack of potatoes. “Now!” I subvocalized.

  Click.

  My distraction had cost me. I lay there, wrist bent at a painful angle, as Mitch drew a tiny, silenced pistol from his coat. “Damn it Dorothy. I liked you.”

  “Past tense?”

  Behind him, a flicker of motion. My contacts blurred, as pixels collected, forming into the rough symbol of an enormous crimson red maple leaf, holding a gun pointed straight at me in its fibrous arms. What the hell was this— ah, right. The overlay.

  “No, you don’t die here. Not if you come quietly.”

  “You’ll forgive her, Mitch, if she doesn’t take your statement at face value.” Damn, that wristlock hurt. “Dire knows you’re not the one to decide that.”

  Mitch sighed. “Autism, my ass. That speech pattern’s involuntary, isn’t it?”

  “Long fucking story. So, are you going to surrender or do you want to go down fighting?”

  He froze, eyes darting around the empty cul-de-sac. “You’re bluffing.”

  “Is she?”

  “You going to do that ‘checkmate in X’ moves line on me? I’m not seeing how right now.”

  “First of all, it’s checkmate in zero, Mitch. You put yourself into it. Secondly, of course you’re not seeing how. That’s the point of it.”

  “If you want to monologue, you can do it on your way to the boat. Get up. Slowly.” He kept hold of my wrist the whole way, as I stood, kept the lock going. The maple leaf moved over to flank me. Mitch paid it absolutely no attention.

  “Mitch,” I whispered, my grin curling my cheeks in glee. “Look at your chest.”

  “You’re trying too hard—” he tilted his head, as if hearing a distant voice.

  And looked down at the swarm of red dots dancing on his black silk shirt.

  I punched him as hard as I could, slugging him straight to the jaw just as Bunny had taught me so long ago. He staggered back, I pulled my wrist free—

  And a machine pistol stuttered.

  Loud, so loud at close range. Almost as distracting as the flashes of my force field, as I whirled upon the maple leaf, and pulled out my mega-taser. The leaf took a step backward, two, shaking upon animate stems.

  “Uh-uh,” I whispered.

  The leaf stopped moving. My mind wobbled a bit, as things got blurry.

  But I could still see the overlay. I wasn’t sure what was below it, but I knew it was an enemy. “That’s right, Dire can see you. And so can the other snipers.”

  The leaf’s gun clattered to the ground... and memory returned to me. “Hello Colleen.”

  “God damn it.”

  I backed away, glancing over at Mitch. He was on his knees, a hand clapped to his jaw, blood leaking from between his fingers. “You need a doctor, Mitch?”

  He shook his head. “Get it over with.” His words came out slurred. Probably bit his tongue or gouged his cheek a good one. I couldn’t quite bring myself to feel sympathy.

  “Come on in,” I subvocalized, and through the light haze, my armor descended, laser-sights on its arms and chest winking as they played over Mitch and Colleen.

  “So what happens now?” Colleen said.

  “Now? You are her prisoners. Come quietly and you’ll remain unharmed.”

  “You have no idea what kind of shitstorm you’re kicking off here—”

  “Save it. Twice you’ve tried to kill her now. Twice. And that’s ignoring the bait you just swallowed and the abduction you tried. We ate hamburgers together, Mitch! Hamburgers!” I scowled at him, and waved the mega-taser in a scolding motion.

  His lips tightened.

  “Oh just grab them,” I told Alpha.

  He flew ahead of me, taking them back to the palace. I took my time, stowing the weapon and rubbing the pain from my wrist. Once I was back on the main streets, I passed a few people, enjoying the brighter sunlight through the haze. I still coughed, now and again. The stuff had a way of getting into your sinuses.

  But I was smiling the whole way. Two loose variables contained, a successful operation, and now I could move on to the next priority. Yes, this was much better. Too long I’d been trying to play the hero here, reacting to my enemies instead of advancing my own schemes. The advantage of villainy was best realized by being proactive. Anything less yielded the initiative, and when your enemies are legion, you don’t give up anything.

  Twenty minutes later we rendezvoused in the Palace dungeon. Mitch and Colleen had been strip-searched by glaring guard-bots, and divested of several nifty and deadly little devices.

  Alpha took their clothes and gave them simple uniforms, spares from the palace guard barracks. My reputation was bad enough, no need to imply perversion. When they were done processing, I saw them into the cell myself.

  They stopped in the doorway when they saw the masks hovering in the corners of the room, eyes glowing blue with sparks as current danced around and through them.

  “What the hell is this?” Mitch asked.

  “Standard issue deathtrap. Nothing too complex. See that one over there?” I pointed to the corner.

  As they looked to the one in the northeast corner, the masks in the northwest and southwest silently flew forward, inch by inch.

  “Ah, quick, behind you!” I called. The two of them whipped around, and the masks slid back at the same rate, as if chastened. But the ones they were looking away from started to hover forward.

  I bit my tongue as the masks crept closer, but Colleen figured it out in time, red hair flying as she pressed against the wall and looked at each of them in turn. “This is like those ghost monsters in Luigi Brothers.”

  Damn it. Embarrassing when someone guesses your inspiration. “Never heard of it,” I lied. “Anyway, they’re charged with a painful amount of current. They’ll keep back so long as you’re looking at them.”

  “Uh-huh. So what happens when we have to sleep?”

  “Wellp, guess you’ll be sleeping in shifts.” I turned to leave. Alpha had my back, I wasn’t concerned about any last-minute desperation ploys. They’d seen the visible parts of the automated security on the way down. There was no escape here, not at the minute, anyway.

  “Wait.”

  “Hm?”

  “You aren’t going to interrogate us?”

  “You want her to?” I raised an eyebrow, as I looked back over my shoulder. “She can go get some pliers and a hammer from the torturer’s room, if you want.”

  “No, that’s... I mean...”

  “Okay. Well, she does have one question.”

  “Question for a question?”

  “Sure. Why Canadian Girlfriend? That’s a pretty stupid name.”

  Colleen stared at me, blinked a few times.

  “What?”

  “That’s the most pressing question you have right now?”

  “For you, yes. Getting you out of pla
y so she can concentrate on the real problems was the goal, here. That’s done. Everything else is icing on the cupcake. So why Canadian Girlfriend?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I didn’t choose it. Ah, do you know the old joke?”

  “Can’t say she does.”

  “There’s a stage teenage boys go through when they lie about getting laid.”

  “Oh, yes! Saw that on television a few times. Common trope. Interesting to hear it’s rooted in reality.”

  “Some of them make up girlfriends that don’t exist, to brag to their peers. They’ll come back to school after summer, and lie about having sex.”

  “With you so far.”

  “So their friends will say ‘Show me this girlfriend!’ and the liar will say ‘you can’t, she lives in Canada.’ Or some other country. And since I was born in Nova Scotia, it kind of stuck. But Canadian-American Girlfriend is a mouthful to say.”

  I stared at her. “That’s the joke?”

  “Well, it sucks when you hear it explained, sure. Again, I didn’t choose the name.”

  “Fair enough. So what’s your question?”

  “I’ll ask it,” Mitch piped up. He’d been silent through this, turning back and forth to watch the masks. Smart man, he was saving his neck muscles for later.

  “Sure,” I said, leaning on the door frame.

  “Have you found them yet?”

  I frowned. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

  He let out a long breath. “Thanks. Bye, Dorothy.”

  “What?”

  He shut up, sitting down on the floor. Colleen slid in behind him, so they could cover both sides of the cell without having to move.

  I rolled my eyes. Mitch was probably fucking with me. I shut the door and returned to my office.

  “Well, that went smoothly.” I rubbed my wrist again. “Mostly. More bruises. And just after she’d started to get over the last ones. Lovely.”

  “They were your friends?” Alpha asked.

  “Yes and no.” I sighed. “We enjoyed our time in the village together, back when we weren’t putting on our real faces.” My hand strayed into my purse, caressed the traveling mask I’d taken along just in case. “Still not anywhere near the first friends Dire made. More like acquaintances who were traveling in the same direction.”

  “First friends?”

  I closed my eyes. “Some dead. Some incarcerated or gone. Made the mistake of trying to hold them too close, and they suffered for proximity to her. Villainy is a lonely course, Alpha. In the end, only the ones who went on without her prospered.”

  “It can’t have been all bad.”

  I sank into the chair, remembering Martin and Minna, how they’d argue with looks and gestures, but they only spoke the friendliest of words to each other. How they’d kiss when they didn’t think I saw them. I remembered Bunny, brought in under protest, and how she’d warmed to me, started acting almost a bit like a big sister toward the end, there.

  And then I remembered Kirsten— no, Vorpal. And my reverie soured.

  “It wasn’t all bad. But there was some bad,” I replied to Alpha. I took the mask out of my purse and stared at it, letting the memories roll over me in perfect detail. The downside to this facet of my supergenius; my eidetic memory didn’t soften any blows. The bad came with the good, and I could let none of it go.

  “Is it better now?” He manifested as his sprite, and perched on the corner of my desk. I chuckled to see it, and that was probably part of his goal, now wasn’t it?

  “Mostly,” I replied, after giving it a full three seconds of consideration. “Didn’t really form any lasting attachment to the other Peace Corps members. So the fact they tried to kill her doesn’t feel like a betrayal. They were working for a corrupt, meddling government all along, it’s not like they turned their coat.”

  “That makes it better?”

  “Not really, but it’s a little more forgivable.” I flipped the mask into the air, caught it. “From their perspective, they’re doing what’s right and just for their nation. That’s one of the things Dire’s going to have to fix, eventually.” I scowled. “That trick with the snakes, that caused innocent deaths. That resulted from hard men and women making hard decisions. People who should have fucking known better, getting stupid. Yeah, definitely in need of a fix.”

  “What are you going to fix? Their perspective?”

  “No, nationalism. In general.”

  “That’s kind of ambitious.”

  “Didn’t say it would be easy.” I flipped the mask again. “Anyway, we’ll give them a few days to cool off in the cell, then see about an interrogation. If there’s time. You’ve got see-gulls watching the smoke shop, right?”

  “Oh yeah. Want the proprietor brought in?”

  I remembered how his eyes had misted, when he talked of his wife.

  “No. He’s suffered enough. Besides, maybe the healer or the snake-woman will show up at his shop. Sun Tzu had a few things to say about leaving enemy spies in place. We’ll try that, now that the two most dangerous elements are neutralized.”

  “Canadian Girlfriend I can see. How’s that Mitch guy dangerous?”

  “He knew where the voxcaster was. Probably didn’t share that information freely.”

  “Makes sense. So what now?”

  “On to the next step of the dance.” I tucked the mask on my face, closed my eyes until the air flushed and the lights played across my eyelids again. “LET’S GIVE SEÑOR ACERTIJO A CALL, SEE IF HE’S READY TO MOVE AGAINST THE MAESTRO YET.”

  I activated my comm, and called the burner phone’s number. It rang about six times, then picked up.

  “YOU IN A SAFE PLACE?”

  I asked.

  “No,” Spetta whispered.

  A chill ran up my spine. “SPETTA? WHERE ARE YOU?”

  “They have him. La Codicia has us all.”

  La Codicia... Spanish for ‘Greed’.”

  “A SIN. ONE OF THE MAESTRO’S SINS.” Fuck me, of course he had people on the ground over here.

  “Ye-yes— ” A rustling, and a harsh slap of flesh on flesh. Spetta cried out.

  “You Dire?” a synthesized voice asked, harsh and modulated much like my own tones.

  “YES.”

  “I have three of them. Warehouse on Pier Siete, come alone and unarmored or in half an hour I’ll have two of them. In an hour, one. You see how this goes.”

  “OH, SHE’LL BE THERE,” I said, rising and feeling my fury rise with me. “AND HELL COMES WITH HER.”

  CHAPTER 17: THE SIN OF BETRAYAL

  “THE BEST ADVICE SHE CAN GIVE YOU IS TO TAKE CARE OF BUSINESS AS QUICKLY AND BRUTALLY AS POSSIBLE AS SOON AS IT COMES UP. THINGS TYPICALLY HIT ALL AT ONCE, YOU DON’T HAVE TIME TO HESITATE AND WEIGH YOUR OPTIONS.”

  --Overheard conversation between Doctor Dire and an aspiring supervillain after the Buenos Aires crisis

  Twenty minutes later, I walked down the empty streets of Barrio del Ingles, to the point where it joined Barrio del Agua. When the British had taken over from the Spanish, most of the new arrivals had settled here, expanding the city to the edge of the cliffs that made up its southeastern corner. Old houses here, historical buildings... and my factories. Quite a lot of money lived here, and rumor had it that most of them didn’t appreciate my industrial intrusion. But they were still afraid, still quiet, so I doubted I had much to fear. High-walled manors fell past to either side as I walked, wearing a jumpsuit full of toys, and the mask, my true face, upon my head. A hoodie thrown on over it all hid everything important from view... save for my hair, that poked out around the edges of the hood. Blonde strands trembled in the Caribbean breeze that found its way down the hill.

  At the bottom of the hill, sprawled Barrio del Agua. The fishing hub of Mariposa City. The streets turned into narrow, crooked, barely-paved muddy lines, the houses shrunk to shacks, one-story moldering remains, and docks that stretched into the horizon.

  The overseas traffic came in at Barrio del Sol.
Del Agua was strictly for domestic usage, and Mariposa did not bother to hide its squalor in this neighborhood. A hell of a lot of crime went down here.

  I had some in mind myself. Though I supposed it wasn’t crime, when you ran the show. More like a one-woman police action.

  Pier Seven had a single warehouse that covered the end of it. I’d contemplated sending the construction bots out to undermine it, and set up a nasty killzone, but that notion was thwarted when I found out that the building wasn’t resting on land. Just the sturdy wooden planks of the pier itself, and water below. My worm-like construction bots didn’t do well with seawater.

  Did La Codicia know that? I doubted it. I’d kept them out of sight; my aces in the hole in case everything went bad. This particular instance seemed like my bad luck at work again.

  But I am Dire, and genius is my talent, my curse, my trade. One plan gone, another arose, and I set it in motion without hesitation.

  I scanned the warehouse, and found it shielded against thermal sight.

  Well.

  I’d been invited, now hadn’t I?

  I opened the door, looked around—

  —and muzzle flashes turned the darkness all around me to light.

  My forcefield flickered, as I dove for non-existent cover. I backed out, but they fired through the walls, hosing me down with bullets. The forcefield generator screamed in my HUD, and I dropped off the pier, caught the edge with one hand, and drew out my own gun.

  “ALL RIGHT, WE’LL DO IT THIS WAY.”

  I waited for the lull, flipped back up onto the pier, charged in, and opened fire. Golden light roared, as particle beams illuminated the warehouse, blew through crates, and dropped gunmen from their perches one by one. I’d set it to twenty-five percent... enough to traumatize flesh, but survivable. I didn’t know whether or not La Codicia actually had the hostages here. Couldn’t risk killing them with a stray shot.

  Somewhere around the two-minute mark, my force shield dropped. I charged through the remnants of their lines before they realized it, dropping a grenade in my wake. With a hum and a click it activated, then my mask’s audio filters howled white noise, as the screamer went off.