* * *
With Dan’s guidance, it took Artur five minutes to find the controls for the counterweight shield. It would’ve taken a lot less time had it not been for the riot squad turning up. They’d seemed pretty confident when they’d spotted Artur scurrying along the corridor towards them, but appeared much less so now that they were all unconscious, screaming or – in one case – stuck part way through a wall.
Once the shield dropped, Dan stepped out of the cell and into a warzone. Or the aftermath of one, at least. Groaning bodies lay scattered along the corridor, piled up in doorways, or upside-down and partly folded against various walls. An assortment of Tribunal weapons were strewn all over the floor. Most of the guns would be locked to their assigned owners, so Dan grabbed himself a shock rod and tested it by jamming it into a semi-conscious Enforcer’s neck.
Yep. That worked.
“We should get out of here,” Artur said, leading Dan back through the trench of destruction he’d left in his wake. “Much as I enjoy kicking the shoite out of these fellas, we’ve got bigger bastards to bake, if ye know what I’m saying?”
“Ollie?” Dan guessed.
“Bingo. She’s… How can I put this? She’s behaving a little oddly,” Artur said. “In that she’s flyin’ around the place and probably getting up to all sorts.”
“It’s Aranok,” Dan said. “Aranok has her.”
“I thought something like that was probably the case,” Artur said. He lunched at an armed officer who appeared around a corner, delivered a powerful flying headbutt to his testicles, then fell back into step beside Dan. Behind them, the cop crumpled to the floor. “Although, to be honest, she was acting kind of weird before yer man set up shop inside her. Sort of scary, like. She summoned some demon fella just by waving her hand. It was pretty cool. If, ye know, a bit terrifying.”
“It must’ve sensed her,” Dan realized. “It was able to get a lock on her power, that’s why it left.”
“She also killed Jay Anus, but he was asking for it.”
“Who the Hell’s Jay Anus?” Dan asked.
“Just some dead guy,” Artur said, shrugging. “No-one important.”
Up ahead, a squad of Enforcers filed through a doorway, energy shields crackling from their wrists.
“This way,” said Dan, turning down a side corridor and hurrying along it.
“But that’s not the way out,” Artur said. “We need to get past that shower of rumbly arseholes to get to way out.”
“I’m not looking for the way out. Not yet,” Dan said.
He ducked around another corner just as a bolt of blaster-fire streaked along the corridor behind him.
“Want me to slow them down for ye?” Artur asked, his eyes wide and brimming with hope. “Keep them busy while ye do what ye have to do?”
Dan slowed. He looked down. “Would you mind?”
Artur snorted. “Would I mind, he says!” With a roar, her beat his tiny fists against his blood-slicked chest, then double-backed. “Right, ye boss-eyed bastards!” he cried. “Pick one someone a fraction of yer own size!”
Dan hurried on to a soundtrack of screaming, gunfire, and breaking bones. It had been a while since he’d been down in the bowels of a Tribunal station, but they were all more or less the same, so he had a good idea of where he was going.
Hanging a right at the next junction, he jammed the shock-rod against the neck of a clean-up grunt who picked the wrong moment to step out of a storage cupboard, then pressed on to the evidence lock-up further along the passageway, dragging the babbling cop behind him.
The door opened to the grunt’s fingertips. Dan slammed the butt of the rod against the side of the guy’s head, tipping him over into unconsciousness. As he stepped into a room lined with industrial steel shelving, a volley of blaster fire screamed towards him.
Ducking, Dan scrambled for cover. He found some behind a stack of metal crates that were presumably all waiting to be processed. More gunfire hammered against the other side and the top two crates came crashing to the floor, missing Dan’s head by inches.
The contents of the crates spilled out around Dan. Drugs. Hacking modules. Someone’s severed ear.
And a hat, bashed and dented and scuffed.
And something else, too.
Across the room, the lock-up manager peeked out from behind his tipped-up desk, his gun trained on the stack of crates.
“Surrender now. Final warning,” he barked. He waited for a response that didn’t come. “Surrender now, or I will shoot you.”
“Funny,” said Dan, standing upright. He raised a hand, levelling Mindy’s yawning barrel at the Tribunal guy’s head. “I was about to tell you the same thing.”
* * *
Dan stepped into the corridor, closed the evidence room door behind him, and walked around the unconscious grunt on the floor.
He met Artur a few twists and turns later, surrounded by the groaning and whimpering riot squad. “Ye alright?” Artur asked. He nodded to Dan’s hat and coat. “I take it I’m right in thinking ye got what ye were after?”
“I did,” said Dan, holding Mindy up for him to see.
“Great stuff,” Artur said. “Now, I think the exit’s somewhere back this way, so we’d best get a move on.”
“Relax, I’ve got it covered,” Dan told him. “Mindy. Explosive rounds,” he said, then he took aim at a nearby wall, squeezed the trigger, and created a whole new exit all of their own.
“I like yer style, Deadman,” Artur said. “I mean, subtle as a stripper in a school yard, but I like it.” He gestured towards the opening, and the dark city street that lay beyond. “Shall we?”
The cool night air helped clear the last of Dan’s brain fog, although this only served to bring his headache back into sharper focus. He shook it off and looked both ways along the sides of the Tribunal building, expecting to see squads approaching from both directions, but spotting no-one.
Getting out of the building itself had been too easy, he knew. There should have been dozens more officers in there. Hundreds, maybe.
It was only when he noticed the caterwauling of distant sirens, and the thundering booms of assorted explosions that he realized why. There was an all-units emergency underway, and most of the city’s law enforcement had rushed to respond.
Lightning crackled across the sky, illuminating several of the city’s taller buildings. Something bright and colorful screeched like a firework, before erupting with a bang that trembled the city beneath Dan’s feet.
“What the fonk is going on out there?” Dan asked.
“I tell ye what, I’ll give ye three guesses as to who’s making all the fuss,” Artur said. He smiled and winced at the same time. “And the first two don’t count.”
“Ollie,” said Dan. “Aranok.”
“I’d have accepted either of those answers,” Artur told him. “But bonus points for getting both.”
“We have to stop him. Her. It. You know what I mean,” Dan said.
“And just how d’ye propose we do that?” Artur asked. “She’s stronger than she looks. Sure, we’d need an army to stop her.”
“We have to… Wait. What did you say?”
“When?”
“Now. We’d need an army to stop her.”
Artur tutted. “Well, if ye already knew why did ye bother asking? That’s just wasting my time and yours. But mostly mine.”
An army. Artur was right. If Ollie was as powerful as Dan suspected, and Aranok was now in control, then an army was exactly what they needed.
Fortunately, he knew just where to find one.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Ollie watched helplessly as she compacted a squadron of Tribunal officers into a sort of gelatinous cube of flesh and then fried it to a crisp, all without raising a finger.
A hail of explosive rounds detonated on the ground around her. The flames crystalized as they rolled in her direction, becoming tiny pebbles with smooth edges that tickled as they bounced off her body.<
br />
The officers who had fired the shots tried desperately to resist as they turned their weapons on each other. There were a number of whumpfs, a succession of booms, then an assortment of fast-moving body parts flying in every direction at once.
Trapped somewhere at the back of her brain, Ollie was equal parts horrified and amazed by what she – or perhaps the thing that had taken control of her – was capable of.
Then she made an old man’s head implode with a single glance, and the balance tipped fully in favor of ‘horrified’.
“Stop!” she screamed, except her thoughts weren’t currently connected to her mouth, so the word went nowhere. She tried to look away as a group of bikers emerged from a bar with knives, clubs and coshes raised, but her eyes were no longer hers to control. They were merely a window she had no choice but to watch through as first the clothing, then the skin, muscle and bones of each biker were whittled away into nothing.
She could feel the Inhabitant inside her, swelling in her head like some fast-growing tumor. She could feel its hatred and rage, its uncontrollable thirst for power and its desire to rule and destroy, in no particular order.
She felt like she knew it, somehow. Like she shared not its memories, but the feelings and emotions they evoked. Through those feelings, she knew that it would not stop until everything lay in ruins before it, and everyone was cowering on their knees. It would destroy without thought, kill without remorse, and it would use her to do it all.
Ollie had long thought her self-proclaimed ‘father’, Kalaechai, to be the personification of evil itself, but she had never experienced hatred and darkness like this. She had never witnessed such rage, such desire, such an all-consuming hunger for chaos.
If Kalaechai was a monster, then Aranok was the thing that lurked beneath his bed. The thing that other monsters whispered about round campfires late at night.
And it was inside her now, using her power as its own, turning her into a weapon to be wielded.
Something sleek and fast-moving flew in low through a canyon of skyscrapers. Gunfire churned along the street towards Ollie, throwing up chunks of molten rock and debris.
Her hands raised, then came sharply back down. The fighter craft flattened like a tin can beneath a boot. Now a spinning disc of razor-sharp metal, it hurtled harmlessly high above her head, before cleaving an apartment block in two.
Aranok savored the screams of the people inside the collapsing building, which left Ollie no choice but to listen, too. She roared inside her head, desperately trying to take control, to force the Inhabitant out, but it pushed back against her, shoving her deeper down into the murk of her own subconscious.
It wasn’t her favorite place in the world, because it wasn’t very nice in there. It was full of bad memories and dark thoughts that she’d fought long and hard to suppress. She welcomed them now, taking comfort in the familiarity of her old nightmares as the new latest in a long line of them wreaked havoc around her.
Even down there, though, in the deepest recesses of her mind, Ollie couldn’t miss the worst of the Inhabitant’s rampage. Cars imploded. Buildings crumbled. Most of the Tribunal officers had realized they were on the losing side and had begun to flee, but Aranok picked a dozen of them off for fun, twisting them until their top and bottom halves faced in opposite directions, or their legs were folded backwards over their heads.
Ollie burrowed down, trying to lose herself somewhere to deep to notice what the Inhabitant was doing – was making her do.
She felt long-dormant memories rise up like swamp bubbles around her. Normally, she’d push back against them, try to force them to stay buried, but the memories of her past were better than the reality of her present, so she focused on them, dredging them up until…
A baby cried.
Out there. Not in here.
Ollie realized the swamp was burbling up around her, its gloop gathering around her ankles and dragging her down.
A baby cried.
Ollie kicked against her memories and clawed up through the murk. The warm wet darkness gurgled and hissed in complaint, but she ignored it, forcing herself higher and higher, faster and faster, until those windows were before her again and the world snapped back into view.
A woman ran, a sobbing infant clutched against her chest. Ollie saw her own hand raise, felt her own face contort into a grin of anticipation.
A baby cried.
Her fingertips flared.
Ollie screamed, and this time the sound slurred from her mouth as a whisper.
She couldn’t move the hand much, but she moved it enough. A crackle of energy spat from her palm and went wide of the woman. It turned one of the many abandoned Tribunal cruisers into a puddle of molten metal, and Ollie felt the Inhabitant’s hypothetical hands around her metaphorical neck as it directed its fury towards her.
Pain tore through whatever part of Ollie was still her. She knew she wasn’t choking, not really, but the panic of asphyxiation was flooding into her, making her brain go light.
She felt like she was getting smaller, shrinking beneath the weight of the Inhabitant. She had a vision of herself collapsing like that squadron of Enforcers, only not so wet and pulpy, and with fewer pairs of boots sticking out at various awkward angles.
No, she wasn’t being compressed like them, she realized. It was more like a star. She imagined the immense gravity of the demon inside her collapsing her into a black hole that sucked in the world around her.
Ollie struggled, but now Aranok’s attention was on her, it was like trying to wrestle the wind. He was all around her, behind her, inside her, squishing her down and stretching her out as he scorched the earth inside her head.
She looked out through the windows of eyes that no longer belonged to her, taking one last look at the burning street with its gallery of chaos and gore.
It was then that she saw him, silhouetted against a dancing wall of flame. A man who wasn’t running. A man who wasn’t afraid. A man wearing a hat that didn’t particularly suit him, but she’d never have the heart to say.
“Aranok!” the silhouette said, in a voice like grinding gravel. “How about you do us both a favor and get the fonk out of the girl?”
Ollie felt the demon slither around inside her head and her power begin to flare. She tried to stop her hand raising, but it didn’t waiver by a single inch. Energy buzzed along her arm.
And then an enormous mass of undulating nanobots slammed into her from behind, lifting her into the air before crashing down on her like a breaking tidal wave.
Dan cracked his knuckles, cricked his neck, then stepped forward into the light. “Or do we have to do this the hard way?”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Aranok leaped up onto Ollie’s feet, and a rippling wave of energy rolled away from him. Dan was tossed backwards like a rag doll, but the nanobot cloud took the brunt of the attack. It rippled and folded in on itself, then reformed into a vast wrecking ball suspended in the air above Ollie’s head.
The Inhabitant raised both hands, pushing upwards against the sphere. While the demon was distracted, Dan pulled Mindy from her holster and blasted it with a couple of stun shots. It flinched at each one, but didn’t so much as stumble.
A pillar of white light screamed upwards from Ollie’s hands, punching a hole straight through the ball and turning it into something resembling an enormous metal donut.
The donut became a twisting whip of metal that swung at the demon as if it had been spring-loaded. Aranok made a chopping motion with one hand, and the whip was cut in two. He had to concentrate to wrestle Ollie’s face into a tight smile of victory, and failed to notice both the shape’s severed halves come rushing towards him from opposite directions.
He caught them both right before they could crush him, his arms shaking as he forced each half apart. As he did, both pieces became flowing streams of liquid metal that wrapped themselves around Ollie’s arms, then tightened across her shoulders and chest. A band of them tangled around her legs
, forcing them together. Dan caught a glimpse of the panic behind Ollie’s face before the nanobots swarmed over her head, cocooning her completely.
Dan raised his wrist and barked into a comm-device. “You sure she’s safe in there?” he barked. “This better not kill her.”
“It shouldn’t,” said Tressingham, although that rock-solid conviction that comes part and parcel with vast amounts of wealth was notable by its absence. “She should be protected enough that it’ll do no lasting damage, just knock the wind out of her.”
Dan sucked air in through his teeth. Aranok was still stumbling around inside Ollie’s body, clawing at the silver covering as he fought to be free. The nanobots might hold them, but what if they didn’t? This could be their only chance.
“OK. Artur, go!” Dan ordered.
“Be right with ye,” Artur replied. Along the street, a Tribunal cruiser roared into life and powered along the street towards them.
Aranok had just torn away a fistful of nanobots and was shrieking in triumph when the car slammed into him at full speed. The hood crumpled. The back end raised. Artur swore loudly, tumbling around inside the vehicle as it flipped up into the air, before coming back down again on Ollie and Aranok’s combined head.
She didn’t fall. That was the first thing Dan noted. Whether it was Ollie, the demon, the nanobots or some combination of the three, but the two successive impacts from the car weren’t enough to bring her down.
Artur darted out of the tangle of wreckage, his long skirt torn, his beard very slightly on fire. He gave Aranok a wide berth as he staggered over to Dan’s side.
“So much for that then, eh?” he muttered. “Maybe we should’ve hit her with a fecking tank.”
The nanobot swarm tightened around Ollie’s body, bunching up around her throat and making her arms fat and cumbersome. Still the demon clawed and grabbed for them, covered hands tearing and swatting at the smothering suit of Tressingham’s tiny robots.
Dan switched Mindy to five per cent slowdown rounds and took aim. If the demon broke free, it might buy them some time. Time to do what, Dan didn’t really know, but he’d cross that bridge if they came to it. With a bit of luck, the nanobots would do their job.
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