DIRE : SEED (The Dire Saga Book 2)

by Andrew Seiple

  Mentot frowned at her, and Mags looked chagrined. Talking telepathically? I couldn’t tell.

  “THE MORE DIRE SEES OF HEROES, THE LESS SHE IS IMPRESSED,” I said, removing the warm tone from the modulator. “CASE IN POINT.”

  “We were good enough to take you down,” Mags grinned.

  “INCORRECT, THOUGH YOU FOUGHT WELL ENOUGH. DIRE REFERS NOT TO THE FIGHT, BUT THE REASON YOU’RE HERE IN THE FIRST PLACE. YOU ARE BEING USED.”

  “How so?” Mentot asked.

  “WAS IT COINCIDENCE THAT YOU WERE PATROLLING THIS AREA AT THIS TIME? FOUR OF YOU?”

  They shared another look.

  “Anonymous tip,” Mags said. Her stance loosened a bit, and she put her hands on her hips. “You think this was a setup? What was in that truck that you needed to destroy it?”

  “NOTHING. NOT EVEN A DRIVER. THE TRUCK WAS EMPTY SAVE FOR REMOTELY-TRIGGERED EXPLOSIVES.”

  “Yeah, like I believe that.”

  I turned my cameras to the truck. “GO AND LOOK FOR BODIES IN THE WATER, DIRE WILL WAIT—”

  I stopped cold, as I saw what was going on back at the site of the explosion. Vines were crawling out of the water, leafy vines that were flexing and contracting like tendrils, inching along and poking through the smoldering wreckage of the truck.

  “OKAY. THAT’S A NEW ONE.”

  Mags looked confused. “What’s a new one?”

  But Mentot was staring at the water, eyes growing wide. “Oh shit.”

  “Language,” Mags cautioned. “Don’t need any more demerits with— Oh holy fuck!”

  “INTERESTING.” I didn’t know any plant controllers. None had shown up when I’d done my research on Icon’s heroes and villains. Didn’t mean there weren’t any, though.

  “Is this like that hentai stuff I’m not allowed to watch?” Mentot asked.

  “Jesus I hope not,” Mags muttered. “Whoa. Whoa whoops, that’s bad.” Several of the tendrils slunk out of the water on our side of the inlet.

  “YES, IT IS. THAT THING’S LOOKING FOR CARGO THAT ISN’T THERE. SO IT’S GOING TO KEEP SEARCHING... AND YOU’VE GOT TWO UNCONSCIOUS TEAMMATES NOT TOO FAR FROM IT, DON’T YOU?”

  “Crap. Get Speedbump,” Mag told Mentot.

  The shorter hero flapped her arms. “Muscle problems, remember? No go!”

  “So use your telekinesis!”

  “It’s too weak! I could, like, lift his legs, but not all of him! Can you drag him by his belt buckle, like you did that one time?”

  “Yeah, but—” She shot me a look, and I finished her sentence.

  “BUT YOU’RE USING YOUR FULL POWER TO RESTRAIN DIRE. QUITE THE QUANDARY, HM?”

  “How about the MRB? Are they almost here?” Mags asked Mentot.

  “They said they’d be about ten minutes, it’s been like four!”

  “YOU KNOW THE SOLUTION TO THIS.”

  I watched Mags mouth pull into a frown, as she glanced back and forth from me, to the encroaching vines. Finally Mags jogged over to Speedbump, grabbed his arms, and pulled him back. She was moving slow, and I could see sweat rolling down the exposed part of her face. Physical activity, plus the effort of maintaining her powers, was taking a toll.

  The vines kept coming.

  “YOU KNOW WHAT HAS TO HAPPEN HERE,” I said with a sigh. “WHY DO YOU DELAY?”

  “She’s right,” Mentot said. “If that thing had a brain, I could do something, but once again I’m totally flipping useless. And you can’t drag Tina like that, so you have to let Dire go—”

  “Hush!” Mags barked, dropping Speedbump, putting her hands on her knees and heaving. “Maybe the vines won’t...”

  There were a lot of vines. And in a few of them, I was seeing thorns under the leaves. Slowly, they crept toward Serpent Tina’s prone form, questing and coiling.

  “WELL. YOU HAD YOUR CHANCE,” I said. “TYPICAL HERO.”

  Servos shrieked, and the armor’s motors ground, as I wrenched with terrible force, and in a cacophony of sparks and shrapnel, I tore the ceramic structure of the arm free of the steel of the armor. Mags shrieked, and Mentot dove for cover as I swept the glowing palm of my gauntlet across them—

  —And aimed it at the vines.

  Three shots at wide dispersal, and the vines were torn to shreds, along with the nearby foliage, the remnants of the truck, the trees on the opposite bank, and most of the underbrush on the other side.

  “Holy Christ,” I heard Mags whisper.

  We watched the water for a second. The vines didn’t come out again.

  “You, ah, you could have done that any time, yeah?” Mentot asked.

  “YES.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “DIRE WISHED TO SEE WHAT YOU WOULD DO. THOUGH THIS FARCE DOES BEGIN TO BORE HER.”

  The force around my armor dissipated, and the armor fell to the ground. I managed to turn it into a three-point landing, falling with some modicum of grace.

  I straightened the suit up and had it turn, looming over the two standing Torchbearers, eight feet of battered armor and intimidation. I folded my arms. “ARE WE DONE HERE?”

  “Okay. I’m not dumb,” Mags said. “There’s something going on here, and it looks like I need more facts. And you just proved I can’t hold you here, so I guess truce and we both back off?”

  Yeah, that worked. Except... wait, there was an opportunity, here. They were in contact with Sparky. There was one matter he could help me with, one that I needed to solve as soon as I could.

  “THERE IS ONE MORE THING.”

  “What?”

  “TELL SPARKY THAT DIRE NEEDS TO KNOW SUSAN’S LAST NAME. SHE MAY BE IN DANGER.”

  “Susan?”

  “THE ONE MINNA SAVED. HE CAN FIND OUT HER NAME IF HE DOESN’T KNOW IT. DIRE WILL MEET WITH HIM ALONE AT MIDNIGHT TONIGHT IN THE PLACE WHERE HE ALMOST KILLED DIRE. PASS THIS ON.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know if he’ll go for that.”

  “HE WILL.”

  She sighed. “Fine. We’ll pass along the message.”

  Without another word I launched into the air, moving at half speed, and heading south, low over the treetops. I set the armor on autopilot. It would evade for a while, move randomly and as stealthily as it could, before ending up in an old quarry that I’d scouted beforehand. Come nightfall I could get it back to the outskirts of town and fly it out to a pickup point.

  With a sigh of relief, I closed the link, and pulled my mask off, returning my attention to my own body. Working remotely without the control harness was tricky.

  But it had mostly worked out in the end.

  “Everything go okay?” Martin asked.

  “Mostly. Everything good here?”

  “Yeah. We got off the highway ’fore the cops showed up. Vorpal’s a ways back on her bike making sure we ain’t followed. Gonna be a few minutes to the swap point. Transfer the cargo, ditch the van, go to the rendezvous. Simple. Easy.”

  “Maybe not,” I mused. “Turns out there’s someone else in this mess.”

  “Oh?” Vorpal asked over the subvocal channel.

  I told them about the exploding truck, the Torchbearers, and the strange vines.

  Midway through, Vorpal started cursing, a steady stream of foul language. I understood about half of it, before she finished. “Never easy, never simple. Great. Just great.”

  “So there’s another player in the game,” Martin mused. “Now this adds a fourth possibility; A fake out.”

  I nodded. “Not a trap, or a distraction, or office politics. Unless the office plants are rebelling against their masters.”

  “Fear the ficus,” Martin muttered. “No, my guess is that was a fake out. Make whoever was controlling the plants think that the cargo got destroyed.”

  I nodded. That made sense, and raised even more questions. Who was the new player? How did they know of the shipment? What is in those boxes?

  I turned and considered them. “Such a fuss over these crates. Tempting to open one and see—”

  “He
ll fucking no,” Martin said. “Our luck it’d be plant zombie virus bullshit. Turn us all into kudzu or something.”

  “—which is why Dire’s going to wait until we’ve got a secure environment and some hazmat suits before we look inside,” I finished. “Have a little faith, Martin.”

  Vorpal’s channel clicked open again. “I have a question.”

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “How did the plant controller know where we were going to ambush the convoy?”

  I opened my mouth, and shut it again. “The controller may have known the route... but the vines showed up within minutes. That is oddly specific.”

  “Maybe he knew ’cause someone told him.” Said Martin.

  I narrowed my eyes. Betrayal? I’d been stung once by it, twice if you counted a druggie who’d murdered one of my best friends.

  I didn’t like traitors.

  Neither did Vorpal, from the venom in her voice. “Chaingang,” she snarled.

  “We don’t know for certain.” Martin said.

  “True,” she said. “There were no plant creatures on the highway during our assault.”

  “But that could simply mean they’ll be waiting at the rendezvous point.” I finished the thought, and settled back in the seat. Adrenaline was fading, but a cold anger was growing. I was tired, and had a few bruises from my bouncy force field ride. This made me even more exhausted. I puffed my cheeks out, blew a raspberry.

  “Say again?” Vorpal asked.

  That must have sounded pretty weird over the channel. “Just commenting on the tragedy of existence. All right, so here’s what we’ll do...”

  Ten minutes later, we were pulling up five blocks away from the rendezvous point in a stolen pickup, with a camper shell on the back. The van had been ditched and sterilized with bleach, and the license plates stripped. For good measure I’d swapped out the ones on the pickup with some generic fakes. As long as no cop ran them, we’d be fine. Which meant that I’d be the one driving. Even in a city as tolerant as Icon, we were still on the north side, the local cops were still mostly corrupt assholes, and Martin was still black.

  Vorpal was covering us from a few streets down, with the stolen laser rifle. We’d convinced her to ditch it after we were done here. I’d disabled the obvious tracker, but if the rifle had something like the trojan they’d tried to slip us through the memory sticks, then it would send up a signal later at the worst possible time.

  The rendezvous point was an old power station, next to a few warehouses. It had been stripped of most of its copper long ago, and there was nothing left to steal. It was in former Black Blood territory, and squatters still feared to shelter in places like this.

  But it wasn’t the power station I cared about. Some of the warehouses around it were still in use, and their security systems were just what I needed. I adjusted the universal remote to maximum range, and started searching through the networks of the area.

  And soon enough, I found what I needed. “Got it! Active camera system.”

  “Can you see it?” Martin asked.

  “Give her a second.”

  I piped the camera feed to my contacts, and adjusted the camera angles until the power station came into sight.

  “Not seeing much—” I panned around, considered it from several angles. “Wait.”

  One of the larger windows around back was broken. By itself not a big deal, could have been attributed to vandals, would have if we hadn’t been suspicious. But there was something just inside of the window. Something large. I couldn’t make out details, but something that could have been slimy flesh rippled and fell.

  It was breathing.

  I muttered a curse. “Martin, take over please. Drive us to where we can get a vantage on the back of it. Don’t go slow, just average speed.”

  “Drive casual, got it.”

  I slipped my mask on as we went, and clicked over to infrared vision. And as he pulled around past chain-link fences and empty street corners, we finally got a good look at the back of the building. I gasped, as an enormous red splotch filled my vision. The power station was two stories high, and that thing looked to be filling both floors.

  “KEEP DRI—” I paused, pulled my mask off. “Keep driving,” I said through clenched teeth. “Whatever that thing is, we want no part of it.”

  “Thing?” Vorpal asked.

  “Not sure, but it looks like there’s a small kaiju in there. Or something equivalent.”

  Martin’s hands shook on the wheel, but he got us turned and gone without trouble. I clicked through the camera networks, and erased the brief views of the van as we pulled away.

  “Kaiju. Gott im Himmel.” Vorpal swore.

  I nodded, realized she couldn’t see me. “Yeah.”

  Kaiju is a term used to refer to giant monsters, usually created by the maddest of mad scientists. They were usually mutants, although some were new species in their own right. Rumors said that the Atlanteans had a number of them below the ocean, just in case humanity got surly. More rumors said that some kaiju were of alien origin. I doubted that one. Every alien or alien-related incident on record had either been a hoax or later been proven to be quite terrestrial.

  They were fairly rare, going by the bits I’d read. I hadn’t spent a lot of time studying them.

  As I mused, Martin drove, looking more and more pissed as we went.

  “We would have walked in there,” Martin said. “Walked right into the yard, waiting for Chaingang.”

  “And been within its reach before we knew it was there,” I said. “Then it could rip through a door or window or even the concrete wall if it had the strength, and, well, squish.”

  Martin pulled the van to a stop.

  “What?” I asked.

  “The fuck you so calm?” He snapped. He raised his hand. “Look!”

  It was shaking.

  “Well, that just shows you’re sane,” I said.

  “Uh-huh. The fuck does that say about you?” He snarled.

  I stared at him, as evenly as I could, until he realized what he said. “Shit, sorry.” He looked away. “Didn’t mean it like that.”

  I muted Vorpal’s channel. “You’re forgiven. Odds are good she isn’t sane, or wasn’t. You know, that whole operating on her own brain thing.”

  “Sorry.” He raised his left hand, slapped the door in frustration. “Just... this whole thing. We caused like twenty traffic accidents, you had a shootout with a bunch of dudes with frikkin’ lasers, and now we got kaiju in this shit? Hidin’ in that building like ‘ho ho ho, this house disguise gives me plus eight in urban environments?’ Yeah. I think... I think maybe it’s good I’m not getting used to this shit.”

  I took his free hand, gave it a squeeze. “Thank you.”

  “For losing my shit?”

  “For providing a baseline. She’s still not good at being human. This helps.”

  He looked out the window, laughed. When he looked back, he was smiling a bit. “You ain’t getting on my case like you did when I gave you a hard time about Bunny, back in that drive with the Caddy.”

  I shrugged. “Time isn’t critical, here. Well, that we know of. We need to contact Vorpal, make plans.”

  I reached up, but just as my fingertip was about to tap the subvocal rig and de-mute her channel, my phone rang.

  I picked it up, stared at it. Vorpal’s number.

  Waitaminute...

  “Dire? Are you there? You went quiet.”

  “You didn’t destroy your phone?” I hissed.

  “No. I didn’t use it to read the datastick.”

  “Oh.” Well, that was a relief. Then my eyes narrowed. “Wait. What did you use to read the datastick?”

  “My desktop computer.”

  “Did you destroy it?”

  “No.”

  “What!” The trojan was due to go off in minutes!

  “Do not worry. I ensured that it was powered down before we came out here.”

  I closed my eyes. “Not goo
d enough.” Mostly-eidetic memory, meant that I could recall every line of the code, every function that trojan called. “It’ll turn your computer back on.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “Nope. Decidedly feces-free. Your computer has a Grid link, yes?”

  “Yes. But I haven’t used that since I put the datastick in there.”

  “Won’t matter. It found the link, put a subroutine out there. Even if your computer is off, your profile is still on the grid. Including the drop point.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “In about three minutes, our employer, who by now knows we burned him, will know the location of your desktop computer. Which is where?”

  Silence for a bit. Then a ton of swearing, in that language I didn’t recognize. Russian? German? Something European. I made a note to brush up on European languages in my free time.

  “Vorpal?” Martin’s voice was calm, soothing. “Where’s the computer?”

  “In my apartment. Along with everything else I own. Including my papers, my false ID, and my bank information.”

  I frowned. “You leave your bank information lying around?”

  “Well fucking excuse me for not being a supergenius and remembering sixteen character passwords! I wrote them down. Sue me.”

  I rubbed my face. Looked to Martin. “What do you think?”

  “About what?”

  I kept looking, and understanding dawned in his eyes as he cursed. “Aw no. Fuck no. Fuck no... we’ve already got one stray.”

  “She’s got nowhere else to go, has information on us, and now she needs her share of the ransom more than ever.”

  “We could burn her,” Martin suggested. Then flinched, as I glared at him. “What? Just saying, we could ditch her, keep her share, and life would be a lot simpler.”

  “Not going to betray her,” I said. “Not going to betray anyone. That’s not how Dire does business. Unless she’s betrayed first, mind. But Vorpal’s played fair. Deserves help.”

  “Dire... look, I’m pretty sure she was killing some of those laser dudes down there. That’s not cool.”

  “They were the ones using lethal force. And firing into crowds of civilians.”

  He sighed. “Yeah, guess so. Well fuck, it’s your call.”

  I nodded, and opened the subvocal comm back up. “Okay Vorpal, here’s the plan...”