Elite: A Hunter novel

by Mercedes Lackey

  Did the Cits realize the danger they were in? Since I hadn’t watched any of the vid channels, I didn’t know. Some people certainly did; high-ranking officials, surely, and I was pretty sure they had sent their families out on fast trains, maybe had gone themselves. Premier Rayne had left the Premier’s Mansion. Officially, he was vacationing, but we all knew that he’d deserted the City, and there was unvoiced contempt for his cowardice.

  Not Uncle, though. “I’m not leaving while there’s a single Cit or building left to defend,” he’d said in a little speech he’d made in the hangar for all of us. I didn’t even bother to argue with him; truth to tell, that pronouncement had won over a lot of Hunters, who up until then had just taken him for another bureaucrat.

  I’d been cleaning the weapons I’d been using at my last practice session when Kent had spoken out loud. So now I looked up to see what had caught the armorer’s attention. “That’s…very odd.” He was looking at the vid-screen, which had been tuned to the weather radar. I felt my eyes widen. Because what was on there was not “odd”; it was right off the scale for “shouldn’t be there.” A storm was heading for us, moving stupidly fast, arrowhead shaped, and increasing in size with every passing second. A storm that had not been there ten minutes ago.

  And I knew what that was. I’d heard about this from the Masters back home.

  “Kent! That’s the attack!” I said urgently, pointing at the storm. “They’ve brought in Thunderbirds! They’re coming in under the cover of the storm, and they’re going to use Thunderbirds to short out a pylon!”

  Kent cursed and slammed his hand down on the alert button he now wore strapped to his wrist beside his Perscom. I went over the counter into the armory proper and began grabbing my chosen weapons and ammo, too impatient to wait for the assistants. When I had what I needed, I rolled back over the counter and grabbed a headset from the wall, sprinted out the door, and made for the landing pad. All the choppers were being kept out there, to minimize delays in deploying—including a couple old models we didn’t use much anymore. I dove into one of those older choppers at the same time the pilot reached it, throwing myself into the seat farthest from the door and strapping down even as the motor whined and the blades over my head started to move. This was an oddball ten-seater with no door gunner, so that would be the size of our team. The minute my butt hit the seat, I was registered on that chopper and no other; the same would go for everyone else piling in. One-Nine-Alpha.

  The first Hunter bar me threw himself into the chopper and strapped down next to me. I didn’t know him, but I did know the next two, Tobor and Trev. And the next three, Cielle, Hammer, and Steel; Steel had lightweight casts on his leg and arm, but otherwise he looked about a hundred times better than the last time I’d seen him. Then came three more I didn’t know, and the chopper lifted off, angling sharply into the east. I concentrated on the orders that the armorer was rattling off, assigning leaders to teams depending on who had piled into a particular chopper together. Finally he got to us. “Chopper One-Niner-Alpha. I see your crew as Hammer, Steel, Cielle, Tobor, Trev, Denali, Trooper, Hudson, Souxie, and Joy.”

  “I’ve seen Thunderbirds, sir. I can go lead on this.” I almost didn’t believe the words I was saying, but…it was true. No one else on that chopper had the experience I did.

  “Roger that, confirming team lead and assignment on the Thunderbirds; Joy’s right, she’s seen them before and should be the one dealing with them. I want to be having drumsticks and wings for dinner when this is over. Do you copy?”

  “Roger, Armorer. Copy,” I said, my throat tight. Hammer gave me a thumbs-up, and Steel a wink.

  “Brief your team, Elite Joy.” Then Kent was on to the next chopper. All eyes were on me. I took a shuddering breath and held up three fingers, then two, to signify what channel we’d be on. I was pretty sure no one had grabbed thirty-two yet, and when we all tuned in to it, it showed green. I locked it to our team.

  I remembered what I’d seen—but mostly, I remembered Uncle’s story. “Thunderbirds are about the size of a fighter jet,” I said. “According to everything I know, they’re generating the storm. Their weapon is electrical in nature, pretty much identical to lightning. They come down slowly, in a descending spiral, with their wings spread. And as they come, lightning will strike from out of their eyes and their mouths. I’m pretty sure that they are the ones that are going to be going for a pylon. The Othersiders tried brute force last time, and it didn’t work; what they’ll probably aim to do is short out the innards of the pylon rather than taking it down.”

  “Plus this time their offense will be in the air, less vulnerable to attack,” Tobor pointed out. I nodded.

  “So who has offensive distance spells besides me?” I asked. “Once the storm hits, the choppers won’t be able to stay in the air, so it’s all going to be us and anything the army or Psimons can bring to back us up. Sound off clockwise, starting with Tobor.”

  My team began calling out what they were bringing to the party. Everyone but Hammer and Steel had something that worked at a distance. Cielle had something like a fire bolt, but ice instead of fire. And that gave me an idea.

  “All right, this is the basic strat,” I said. “Hammer and Steel, you’ll shield us, same as last time. I’ll need you to drop the shield three times so we can cut down some ranks and generate manna for the Hounds. Once the Hounds are ready to feed us, you keep that shield up, and Tobor, Trev, and Denali, you concentrate fire on the ranks around us to keep that manna coming. The rest of us will work on the Thunderbirds. You guys on the birds, hit them as hard as you can. I’m going to work with Cielle to try and ice their wings and tails.”

  Cielle got it first. I could see from the sudden widening of her eyes. “Oh! You’re going to try and bring them down! Like an airplane in an ice storm!”

  “Exactly,” I replied. “Once we get one down and finished, hold your fire. I’m going to try something else. It worked once for my people. It might work again, and if it does, the Othersiders are going to lose the cover of the storm and their Thunderbirds.”

  “And if it doesn’t?” asked Steel.

  “Then we go back to the original strat,” I told them. “Using Thunderbirds was a good idea. The storm they generate is going to limit our backup to ground support. The Psimons might not be able to get a lock on their heads. And they’re pure murder in the air. But their fundamental weakness is that if you bring them down, they’re helpless.”

  “Let’s bring ’em down, then,” said Hudson, with a feral grin. “You heard the boss. He wants drumsticks and wings.”

  I’d never heard from anyone that Thunderbirds had Shields of any sort, and why should they? Normally they flew out of the range of most weapons, conventional or magical. The thing about lightning as a weapon was that once you got it started toward your target, the target itself, especially if it was metal, like the pylons, would generate a current that would “reach” for the bolt and connect the circuit for you. Obviously the pylons were built to withstand a few lightning strikes. But this wouldn’t be a “few” lightning strikes. This would be a barrage of lightning calculated to melt the lightning rods that protected them, overwhelm surge protectors, and fuse every component in the pylon. And the Thunderbirds would just circle the pylon, plastering it with lightning until eventually it failed, using the rain to cover their movements and staying high enough that they’d be harder to hit.

  We just had to make sure that didn’t happen.

  The chopper bucked and yawed, and we all clutched at our seats and safety harnesses; that would be us hitting the winds generated by the storm. I just hoped that we could all get over the Barrier and in place before the real storm hit, because trying to channel our teams through one or two doors in the bases of pylons would be fatal.

  Just as I thought that, the chopper pitched over sideways and began a rapid descent. When it stopped moving, we popped the buckles on our harnesses and piled out into what looked like acres and acres of grazing
field or maybe hay. It was all long grass, anyway. The chopper fled, and I didn’t blame the pilot at all because the tempest that was speeding toward us was seven kinds of ugly.

  It wasn’t as big or as bad as the storm that had locked everyone in Apex inside their buildings for three days, but it was bad enough. I didn’t know enough to know whether the Thunderbirds had caused that first storm, but now that I knew they were in the picture, I would be willing to bet they’d steered it away from its natural course and straight for the city. The attack on Bensonville hadn’t been timed that way because the Othersiders had been hungry; it had been timed that way because it had followed the first blow of the new offensive, meant to soften us up. We just hadn’t known that.

  Black clouds raced toward us, covering most of the eastern horizon with a phalanx of black dots in the front, riding on the wind. There was lightning, but it was minimal. The Thunderbirds wouldn’t want to waste a single electron that could go toward breaking the pylon. “Stay down,” I cautioned. The pilot had set us down near the base of the pylon they seemed to be making for, but I didn’t want the Thunderbirds to spot us and change their target. At least Steel isn’t going to have to move on that leg. “Get your Hounds here, but stay low—”

  “I’ve got something for that,” Souxie said with a feral grin. “Let’s get the doggies here, and you’ll see.”

  We overlapped Glyphs; experimentation had proved that we could do that to minimize the amount of space we took up, and Hounds could come through just fine. In moments, the area around us was full of Hounds. “Put up those Shields, boys,” said Souxie, screwing up her face and beginning to trace Glyphs in the air with both hands. “We’re about to give them a surprise.”

  She finished with a showy handclap…and I didn’t see anything. But then I did a check on our position with one of the cams on the pylon, and even though I zoomed in on us, there was nothing where we were supposed to be. “Nice trick!” I said with admiration.

  Souxie shrugged but looked pleased. “Light bending, instead of illusion. That way it fools everything, from monsters that can see through illusion to cams. If you look really hard, you can tell there’s something here, but I figure the big chickens aren’t going to be looking all that hard when there’s so much else to worry about.” Souxie was right about the “so much else” part, for sure; the chopper pilots were coming in hot all around us and dropping their teams, concentrating on the three likeliest pylons to be attacked. “Kent, tell the pilots to back off my pylon a little, but not too much,” I said into the comm on Kent’s frequency. “If they back off too much, it’ll look like a trap. I just want it to look attractively weak.”

  “Roger that,” the armorer replied.

  Now the winds before the storm came in at ground level; we hunkered down as we were buffeted by heavy, cold gusts and blasted with kicked-up dirt and debris. “Goggles,” I said as I pulled mine out. “It’s gonna be raining pitchforks in a few minutes.” The rain line was visible now, in fact, as a silvery curtain that reached from the cloud base to the ground, obscuring everything behind it.

  “All Hunter teams on the ground,” Kent said on the common frequency. “Army moving in, pincher formation, but you’ll have to hold your own until they get here.”

  “Psimons?” someone asked hesitantly. Kent’s only reply was a snort.

  Now it was possible to make out that the shapes riding the storm front were ebony birds, birds easily the size of a small jet, riding the winds like a hawk or a vulture rides an updraft, wings scarcely moving except at the tips. But they were nothing at all like a hawk; they had long forked tails, long necks, and their wings were long and pointed, like a swallow’s, not blunt like an eagle or a hawk’s. They did have raptors’ beaks, but the thing that put chills up my spine were their eyes, eyes that glowed brilliant red. In a way, they were beautiful—but I remembered the other stories about them, how they snatched up humans and carried them off to eat, decimating entire small villages. And most of all I remembered how they had attacked my people and would have destroyed them, and I hardened my heart.

  They were definitely making for the pylon we crouched beneath, and Bya and Myrrdhin trembled under my hands with tension.

  Just before they got in range to start pasting the pylon, they swooped down, neatly skimming the earth, and little dark figures leapt off their backs at the bottom of their arc. Moments later, Portals opened up all over the place as the Thunderbirds rowed their wings to gain the altitude they’d lost and get into formation to make their attack.

  “They dropped off Folk Mages to open Portals. Hold steady,” I murmured into my mic. Hordes of monsters were pouring out of Portals and engaging with the other teams. Some were converging on our pylon, unopposed for the moment. “Remember, we’re not supposed to be here.” It was hard to crouch in place as the sounds of battle erupted all over the field; I could feel my Hounds burning to get out and attack. But we needed them nearer, near enough that our Hounds could absorb their manna.

  Without the need to fight their way to the base of our pylon, the troops of Othersiders coming our way were trotting along with grins on their faces. I was extremely happy to see that most of them were creatures that were vulnerable to plain old bullets. Goblins, Kobolds, Redcaps, a gaggle of Hags. What Shields they had were rudimentary and wouldn’t stand up to much physical punishment. It looked to me as if they had been told to set up a little distance away from the pylon and defend the Thunderbirds from attack from the ground. The really heavy rain hadn’t reached us yet, but it was bad enough, coming at us slantwise, hitting the Shields and sliding down them in sheets, deforming our view.

  I waited until the monsters were so close that it was a dead certainty that every bullet and shotgun pellet we fired would hit something. “Now!” I ordered, and Souxie dropped the camouflaging spell, and the rest of us let loose with blasts of magic intended to shatter their Shields. The Othersiders were caught so completely by surprise that they froze for a moment, mouths agape. Their Shields broke like so much glass, leaving them vulnerable.

  “Shields down in three, two, one!” called Steel, repeating the tactic that had worked so well the last time. And while the Othersider Shields were still down, we unloaded with everything we had, as the rain, no longer kept away by the Shields, pounded down on us, plastering our hair to our heads in seconds.

  The front ranks and part of the second were mowed down like so much hay. The Hounds leapt out of the circle of protection to finish off any creature that had survived the volley and to take down a few uninjured ones just for good measure. Then they raced back in among us, and Hammer and Steel put up their Shields, giving us shelter from everything the Othersiders could throw at us. And from the rain.

  Three times we repeated this because the response by Othersiders to being attacked was to charge in a rage. We could have been synced up like a bunch of Psimons, our coordination was so perfect—first, a magic blast to take down the Othersider Shields, followed by a hail of bullets and iron shot. I was keeping an eye overhead, just in case the Thunderbirds decided to take a hand, but they were circling high above the pylon, black against the charcoal of the clouds, occasionally discharging lightning into the top of it. So far, they hadn’t even melted the lightning rod on the top—but it didn’t look to me as if they’d ramped up to full power yet, and I knew it was only a matter of time before they did. And when they did, they would melt through or short out all the pylon’s protections. And then one good concentrated burst of lightning from all of them together would take down the pylon and with it, two sections of the Barrier.

  Just wait, I kept telling myself. Wait. Wait until the Hounds are sated. It can’t be long now. And then, as the third wave of Othersiders fell, I felt it—the rush of magical energy into me from my Hounds.

  I was not expecting this. And I don’t think anyone else was either.

  It was as if I had been asleep and suddenly came completely awake; my vision sharpened to a point that I can’t even describe, every
sound struck my ear as separate, clear and completely distinguishable, and every nerve ending on my body politely informed my brain of what it was feeling. I was immersed in sensation, but not overwhelmed by it. And as for my brain—I was thinking at light speed, processing all that information as quickly and coolly as a computer, and I was aware of everything, but especially of magic. Sensing magic wasn’t something I had to concentrate on now; it just happened and came more easily than breathing. Last of all, I had the uncanny impression, not that my perceptions and reactions had sped up, but that the entire world had slowed to a crawl.

  I glanced up and immediately identified the lowest-flying Thunderbird, and I almost laughed at the unsuspecting monster, circling slowly, building up both electricity and magic from the clouds and the storm. Fatigue was gone. Sheeting icy rain meant nothing. I activated the ice spell with a mere flick of my fingers. The spell lanced up into the sky, struck, and stuck. In moments, it had pulled rain out of the sky onto the monster’s wing and tail feathers, then sucked all the warmth out of the air around it. And since that heat had to go somewhere, as a nice little side effect, I brought the heat down to us, creating a cozy pocket around us. My team and I stopped shivering, even though we were still being pounded by the storm.

  The Thunderbird noticed what I was doing immediately, of course; it broke off its attack on the pylon and frantically pumped its wings for altitude, trying to get out of my reach. But more and more magic came pouring into me, and the bird would have had to get above the clouds and out of my sight before it would have been able to do that, and I felt Cielle’s spell working with mine, her ice bolts layering on top of what my spell had laid down. It couldn’t shake itself to break off the ice; birds can’t shake unless they’re perched. It could flap hard enough to clear its wings—but not its tail. That long forked tail that worked so well as a kind of anchor to allow it to turn quickly now worked against it as more and more ice built up on the feathers. Layer by layer, I added the ice; the bird’s wing beats became more labored as it tried to overcome the added weight. And Cielle turned her attention to icing the wings while I concentrated on the bird’s tail and back.