DIRE:SINS (The Dire Saga Book 5)

by Andrew Seiple

  “Bad idea to go off half-cocked. We need to scout the facility before we hit it,” I mused. “Can you get there, take the teleporter beacon?”

  “I can. Are you going to send along instructions on how to set it up?”

  “Better. Alpha, come on out.”

  “Huh?” Manuel’s expression changed from puzzlement to shock, as the exoskeleton stepped out of the hallway, and offered a metal-fingered wave. “Oh you can’t be serious.”

  “Relax, just pop me in the trunk of the car,” Alpha offered. “No wait, they call it the boot here, don’t they. Why’s that, anyway?”

  “England,” I shrugged. “Anyway, Dire needs to establish casus belli for herself before she can hit that place. And then there’s the heroes to think of, the poor dears will need a proper trail, one so obvious that even their reactive butts can follow it. You? You’re golden and stealthy scouting is your specialty. Even if they see you, you’ll be expected. You’ve got your reason, now Dire needs hers. So, let’s talk about this night club you mentioned...”

  Half an hour later, I’d helped him pack the car, seen him off, and found my way back to my workshop. Solemnly I considered my armor, hanging motionless in its cylindrical cradle. It was done recompiling, and ready to fly, ready to fight.

  I’d test both tonight.

  “Open,” I commanded, and Suru, my old voice interface, crackled to life.

  “By whose command?” she asked, just as I’d programmed her to.

  And I’ll be damned, if it didn’t feel good to shed the mask of the urban housewife, to show the lion hiding in the mouse as I bared my teeth and put my hands on my hips. “So commands Doctor Dire!”

  The cylinder hissed back, as the cables around my armor snaked away, parts of the cradle unsealing with puffs of vapor and the hiss-click of electromagnets unsealing. My suit slumped, then stood, striding out of its cocoon with three great strides, before dropping to one knee. Its back unsealed with one final hiss, cavity gaping wide, revealing the snug compartment within.

  There always came a small touch of unease, as I clambered within my alloyed shell. But I had made this, and I trusted my work as I trusted nothing else in the world. Some people put their faith in gods. I’d met a god, and found him wanting.

  I put my faith in me. And I’d never let myself down, so far.

  Five minutes later, as the fading wisps of the teleporter’s photonic waste faded around me, I activated the gravitics for the first time and found faith once more rewarded. I did not fall, and Soho hung below me like fallen strings of Christmas lights, tangled upon a vast concrete floor.

  I would be noticed eventually. That was fine, that was within the parameters of the plan. I didn’t need to be up here for long, anyway.

  The club was easy enough to find... and while the top level of it gave way to my thermal vision, revealing a mass of squirming bodies below, I noted that the floor below them was suspiciously opaque. A flip over to galvanic vision showed far too little ampage coming into the place, for the amount of electronic equipment they were powering.

  That meant a generator. And where you find a generator, nine times out of ten, you find criminals.

  Broadcast power is cheap. Broadcast power is easy to gather, from the towers in any city or town. But broadcast power is easily tracked, and often the first thing checked when reports of illegal technological development or usage was a possibility. So most career criminals invest in generators, or they don’t stay free long enough to make a career of it.

  Well then. My path was clear.

  I turned my gaze from the main rooms of the club, examined the offices to the side. Three warm figures, two with suspicious-looking dead spots in their chests and arms. A third one, all heat, bent over a desk.

  I turned myself groundward, pointed boots to the sky, and dove.

  You don’t get far as a supervillain without learning how to make a good entrance. I gave this one an eight point zero. I smashed through the corrugated-metal of the roof, slammed through insulation, sending a puff of pink stuff in all directions, and slammed to a perfect three-point landing in front of the desk. The floor cracked, but I was up in a heartbeat, grabbing the surprised looking seated guy by his overlong necktie, and yanked him to his feet so quickly that his teeth clicked together, sending the line of coke he’d been snorting up into the air like sugar from a powdered donut.

  “WHO IS YOUR SUPPLIER?” I roared in his face.

  Give them this, they were fast. The two men to my side were on me, grabbing me and trying to pull me loose. One of them yelled incoherently, and his arm bulged, cables bursting out from under the sleeve of his shirt as he pulled, revealing a full cyberarm.

  I chuckled, and locked my gravitics.

  Cables flexed, servos whined, and the arm gave a grinding “CHUNK” and spewed out smoke. He fell back, staring at broken metal fingers.

  From the other side my armor registered current. The idiot was trying to taze me. Right, because somebody who’d built elaborate power armor capable of flight, and who crashed through ceilings without damage totally wouldn’t ground their circuitry. I was tempted to let him keep going at it.

  But it was distracting, so I let go of tie-guy, turned, and poked a finger into taser-man’s belly. Then I flew up, just a few inches.

  Fun fact. Current wants to go down.

  Next fun fact. I’d just removed down as an option, so it wouldn’t go down through my grounded outer shell.

  Final fun fact. The shortest possible path to the ground for the current he was sending into me was now back through him.

  He shrieked and dropped. I turned back to tie-guy, and found the metal-fingered mook hustling tie-guy out the door.

  “Lady Thrush is incoming,” Alpha whispered in my ear.

  “Good,” I subvocalized back. She was a big part of this plan, she or another hero like her.

  I turned my attention back to tie-guy, lined up a perfect particle-beam shot, got ready to blast the two of them down the stairs... and stopped.

  My luck had always been shitty, and I’d just promised Manuel that I wouldn’t kill any more people. It would be truly pathetic if one of them snapped their neck from a hard fall.

  So instead I lowered my hand, folded my arms across my chest like the world’s least amused schoolteacher, and flew down the stairs after them. They slammed the door at the bottom of the stairs in my face. I burst through it without slowing down.

  We emerged into a strobing, moving mass of dancers and lights, tables scattered around at the edges and people shaking bits of their anatomy all across the twin stages. Music blared, dubstep remixed and pumped up with electronica. The wubs echoed hot and heavy, and many of the dancers wore, or had implanted, bright LEDs and glowstrips.

  I supposed they were trying to distract me and use the shifting light levels for cover. That might have even worked against somebody who hadn’t built military-grade flash suppression into her sensors.

  But even though I could track them without trouble, there was the crowd to consider. They shoved people aside without care, threw them at me. So I hovered above the crowd, and darted after them. They dove over the bar, ripped open a door beyond, and I saw tie-guy yell something at metalfingers. Instead of following tie-guy down the stairs, metalfingers turned, braced himself, and spread his arms wide in a ‘come-at-me-bro’ stance.

  I admired the loyalty of the minion, even as I scorned the cowardice of the master. So I merely drilled him in the chest with a fifteen-percent charged particle beam. He bounced off the wall, and I cruised past him without losing any real speed.

  Behind me screams rose as people started to realize I wasn’t part of the show. But then I was flying down the stairs, hot on the heels of tie-guy.

  The stairs ended abruptly at a metal door, with a keypad next to it. Tie-guy slammed out a hand against the door to stop himself, and tried to enter a code into the keypad. I didn’t give him the chance, catching up to him and grabbing him by the back of his shirt. I hauled h
im up, shifting my hold on him to one arm as his shirt tore, and dangled him in front of me.

  “YOUR SUPPLIER. NAME THEM.”

  “Please, no! I just manage the club, I don’t run the shop!”

  “WHO DOES?”

  “It’s automated, I don’t know, I, I, I—”

  I bounced him off the walls a few times. Not hard enough to break bone, but he’d have some serious bruises. “YOU THINK DIRE STUPID?”

  “Who? Wait. Wait, oh shit, you were on telly a few months back...”

  “THEN YOU KNOW WHAT SHE WILL DO IF YOU DISPLEASE HER.”

  Fun fact: I didn’t know what I was going to do if he displeased me. I don’t torture, and I had multiple other ways to my goal here, so I didn’t care if he clammed up. I’d have to find some excuse to not hurt him if he actually did find his courage.

  But when you make vague statements like the threat I’d given him, you put the most horrific force in the world into play:

  Human imagination.

  Between my carefully-constructed reputation and the images his fevered, coke-high brain could conjure, I was pretty confident that he would think up a far worse punishment than I could. And as his eyes widened and his pupils dilated, I knew that I’d succeeded.

  “No, no, listen, my boss is nowhere near here, I’m just middle management, please don’t kill me I’m not important enough to be in the loop I can tell you the code—”

  “NO NEED.”

  I ripped the keypad off with my free hand, and flexed my fingers three times, curling them toward my palm.

  My gauntlet’s fingers split apart to reveal string-like manipulators. I stretched out a palm toward the sparking ruin where the keypad had been, and the filaments surged in, flexing and writhing.

  “Oh god oh god oh god...” I followed his gaze up, to where my other gauntlet was locked around his arm. Yeah, that would be a pretty gruesome way to kill or torture somebody. Messy, too. No need to gunk up my manipulators.

  I didn’t have to correct his assumption, either, come to think of it.

  The door groaned open, without firing off the ring of shaped charges around its frame. I could have probably taken it, but Tie-guy couldn’t. Or the dancers upstairs, if they were as nasty as I thought they were. Or any innocents in the lab space, if those within could be called such.

  Flickering fluorescent lights inside, grimy concrete walls and stained tiled flooring. Drains broke the tiles every ten feet, and the hallway branched into doorways up until it T-junctioned. I flipped to voltaic vision, and found no help there. Power hummed and thrummed in the walls, too close and too bright for me to find an easy path back to the important bits.

  A slight tapping against my shoulderpad. I glanced over to see Tie-guy trying his damnedest to break free. I didn’t need him, now that he’d shown me the way in, and I believed him when he said he was out-of-the-loop. So I chucked him back through the wooden stairs behind me and moved in.

  One leisurely stroll later, I was fairly impressed. The surroundings were grimy, but the operating rooms contained state-of-the-art computers and machines. I paused before a medical chair, all sharp bits and mechanical arms. A touch of regret there, and I looked away, eyes stinging. Blinking away tears without triggering any of my pre-set suit functions took some effort.

  Some ghosts never leave you.

  Medical transport containers lay strewn about in other rooms, translucent and showing bits of bloody flesh. The clientele this place serviced did this for fun, not need. So when they implanted a cyber-arm or a replacement organ, it took the place of something healthy. Those healthy bits fetched a good price on the black markets. Unlike guns, or other hardware, it was fairly impossible for the local authorities to clamp down on the organ trade. People were made of those, after all.

  I pushed further in, rounded a corner—

  —and my forcefield flared to life as a bolt of energy spattered away.

  A man in blue surgical scrubs fired again... a simple compressed neutron blaster, I noted, as he backed up and darted through a doorway. Crude make, from the glimpse I’d gotten, and the minimal drain it had taken from the forcefield.

  I ghosted after him, skimming over the ground with but a whisper of cloth on the floor as my cape brushed it, arms crossed and supremely unconcerned. If this was the limit of their weaponry, I was in no danger.

  Then I got a look at the room I’d just entered, and I forgot about the idiot. This was the motherlode.

  Servers hummed and lights on the boxes flickered at the back of the room, encapsulated in cryogenic cooling chambers. Cables the size of my armored wrist snaked over to a heavy generator that rumbled like a snorting giant. The medical tech backed away from me, eyes wide over a surgical mask. “Stay back, bloody stay back!”

  “DROP THE GUN OR LOSE YOUR HAND.”

  I wasn’t kidding. If he hit the wrong thing in here, I’d lose valuable data.

  Alpha chose this moment to interrupt. “Boss, the heroes are a minute out.”

  I subvocalized back. “Heroes? Wait, there’s more?” That was concerning.

  The man hesitated, pointed the gun at me again. I raised a gauntlet, and let glowing particles seep from it, form a corona of light around my hand. “THREE. TWO.”

  He threw the gun down and ran toward a sealed door in the back corner, started jamming numbers into the keypad. I let him go, eyes on the prize.

  Really, I’d come here for no other reason than to establish an excuse to go to Manchester, and Neo Variants. But there was bound to be some useful data on these boxes, maybe something that told me what we’d be getting into. Or even something that traced back to the other Sins, if I was lucky.

  I approached the nearest servers, flipped my gauntlets into tech-manipulator mode, and wormed cables into the USB ports. Their intrusion countermeasures met my carefully scripted code, and broke. “So, heroes?” I asked Alpha.

  “One guy. Looks like a walking lion in a suit, I shit you not.”

  “Absence of fecal matter noted. Well, thanks for the warning—”

  The medical tech ran past me, screaming.

  I had a split-second to wonder why he was running towards the door I’d come in from, rather than the one he’d opened...

  ...and that’s when the monster pounced on me.

  CHAPTER 5: ACID TRIP

  “Positive ID from the Yanks. The robot was wearing a Dire mask. Yes, THAT Dire. The MRB's offering any assistance we need, they can get agents on-flight within— what do you mean, NO? By whose orders? What do you mean you don't know?”

  --Agent Cavin, MI9 Division

  Layered protection.

  It was a simple idea, one that had saved my metal-shod keister more times than I cared to count. My armor is made up of layers, metal and ceramic alloy and circuitry and some very useful gunk called ballistic gel. There are a few more esoteric materials in there, but the point is that I don’t depend on any one single thing to protect me.

  Not only that, but I don’t depend on the armor part of it alone. I’d installed a forcefield within it, to help screen out high-speed projectiles and energy weapons that had a chance of inflicting serious damage or penetrating the armor.

  But the forcefield wasn’t infallible. The only way to keep it from being an immense energy hog was to construct it so that it only triggered when a fast moving object got within a few feet of me. Almost instantly, it would flare to life and create a barrier a centimeter out from me. Then, after impact or dissipation, in the case of certain types of energy, it would switch off again. It wasn’t fool-proof, but it worked well enough for my purposes.

  But unfortunately, that meant the forcefield did jack-shit against things like punches, tackles, or oh, cow-sized monsters trying to tear my head from my shoulders.

  Case in point: The big bastard gnawing on my helmet.

  I wasn’t too worried about it. My head was in the torso of the suit.

  Then damage indicators flared up, ones I hadn’t seen in a very long time. Che
mical contamination?

  Of course it had acidic saliva. After all, why wouldn’t it?

  I gathered my arms below me, shoved myself upright, straining servos and amping up power to my actuators to throw it off, and to get a look at the thing.

  Hissing like a teakettle, scrambling to get long, long legs in the right spot, it reared up. Hooded like a cobra, built like a man, and covered with slick, slimy scales, it looked like the love child of a dinosaur and a giant. In lieu of eyes it had deep pits.

  “WE MATCH,” I said, tapping my mask. My gauntlet’s finger sizzled as it contacted the ceramic, and I pulled it back, observed as the fingertip grew pitted and worn in the space of a second. I tried to flick the acid off, couldn’t. The stuff was sticky.

  It screeched something back. Words, maybe? I couldn’t make anything out. “ARE YOU SENTIENT? WERE YOU A PERSON, ONCE?” This definitely wasn’t a cyborged customer or enforcer. I had no idea why the damned thing was here.

  My questions became moot as it hurtled at me again, and I met it with upraised arms. My tech manipulators had auto-retracted after I’d been so rudely torn from my server grab, and titanium shod fists met scaled muscles with brutal impact.

  Frustrating, really. We’d already damaged some of the servers with our initial scuffle. I could see sparks spraying from severed cables where we’d knocked them loose. Coolant seeped free, creating billowing clouds around our feet. The more we fought in here, the more my prize slipped away from me. But it was sturdy enough that I couldn’t batter it down with a few punches, and too close to use any heavier weaponry, unless I wanted to blow up everything in the room that wasn’t me.

  Worse, its acid was doing a number on the armor. The stuff on my helmet had fizzled out, but every time it bit or spat at me, fresh damage readouts would flare. Once it saw its clawlike fingers couldn’t tear me it focused on trying to hold me still so it could keep its mouth in play.