That was not what Gabby’s protocol was getting, peeking around the corners of their mental shields.
The Thule soldiers were unsettled, even nervous.
They did not understand what they were doing or why they were doing it, even more so than is usual for personnel in the field. They had received alarming intelligence that morning, Delphi theorized, offering guesses as to what in their briefings might have unsettled them.
“Interesting,” Maxim said, eyeing the heavily armored SUV out near the main road. “I wonder what got them rattled?”
“We’ll find out,” Gabby said. “First things first. What do we do about your friends?”
He wanted to protest, to remind her that they were not friends, but the air was too hot to argue.
Download authorized, Delphi, Maxim thought. Let Gabby in on it.
The young woman winced as the telepathic briefing was forcibly implanted in her mind, and Maxim felt some sympathy.
Delphi was never any gentler than she needed to be.
“I got it,” Gabby said, nodding as she wiped blood from her nose onto her knuckles. “Not a bad plan, really. I have just one suggestion, if you don’t mind…”
***
“I suppose this means that you plan to live,” Emily observed. “That’s good for you, at least.”
Renton laughed as she put out silverware for him.
“You don’t sound too happy about it,” Renton said. “I was just about to thank you for having your vampire rescue me.”
“You don’t have to thank me,” Emily explained, heading into the kitchen. “I’m not one to pass up the opportunity to do Anastasia a favor.”
“Wow,” Renton said good-humoredly. “She’s figured it all out, hasn’t she? Emily used to be such a nice girl.”
Emily returned with a plate of food and a look of affront.
“Are you saying I’m not nice?” She glanced at the plate in her hands. “I don’t have to feed you, Renton. You won’t starve so easily.”
“Don’t take it the wrong way! I mean it as a compliment,” Renton insisted, fork and knife already in hand. “I like a woman who takes charge. It’s a turn-on.”
“That’s another thing I didn’t need to hear,” Emily said, putting the plate in front of him and returning to her seat. “Please behave yourself.”
Renton grunted and tucked into dinner.
“I’m glad you’re not dead, man,” Vivik said. “What happened to you?”
“I tried to take down Lóa Thule. I still don’t think it was a bad plan, but it turns out I’m the world’s worst double agent. I don’t think I fooled anyone,” Renton said, around a mouthful of food. “I figured out her protocol eventually, but that took hours of torture. Her torturing me, I mean. Would’ve been fine the other way around,” Renton said, grinning. “Fun, even.”
“Gross,” Eerie whispered. “You are so gross.”
“She’s not wrong,” Emily agreed, sipping from her water glass. “I have no idea what Anastasia sees in you.”
“Don’t be like that, ladies,” Renton said. “Nobody likes a mean girl. Like Lóa, for example. She was a real piece of work, let me tell you. By the time I figured her out, I was hanging by a meat hook with electrodes on my feet and tongue and dick.” Renton laughed at Alex and Vivik’s discomfort. “Wasn’t much I could do but bleed and twitch, you know?”
“I do,” Alex said queasily. “I wish I didn’t, but I get it.”
“I guess we’ve all been through some shit,” Renton said, shrugging. “Anyway, long story short, Katya showed up, beat Lóa to death, and saved my life.”
“I know how that goes, too,” Alex said. “Katya has excellent timing.”
“I would have preferred if she showed up a little sooner,” Renton said. “I don’t even know if my junk works anymore, you know?”
“You are disgusting. And wrong about at least one thing,” Emily said. “Katya didn’t kill Lóa Thule.”
“Are you sure?” Renton shook his head. “She did a real number on her with a blunt object, let me tell you. Her head looked all funny, after Katya was done.”
“Yeah,” Eerie said, shuddering. “It was awful.”
“Be that as it may,” Emily said, patting Eerie’s hand from across the table. “Lóa was rushed to the Thule estate a few hours ago, according to what I’ve heard. In a very bad state, but she wasn’t dead.”
“I only wish I was so well-informed,” Renton said. “Seriously, I’m impressed. How did you hear all of this, Emily?”
“I don’t plan to say,” Emily said. “You can trust the information, though. My sources are impeccable.”
“I’m blown away,” Renton said, holding out his empty plate to her. “You’ve really got it all figured out, don’t you? All this, and you can cook, too. You’re an idiot, Alex, you know that?”
Eerie mumbled something inaudible, while Emily rolled her eyes.
“I know it,” Alex said. “That’s not a secret.”
***
The hill offered perhaps two hundred meters of elevation, but the soupy, stifling air stole the oxygen from his lungs and sapped his stamina, making the climb arduous. Maxim was drenched in sweat before he was a third of the way up, the sole of one of his boots loosened by the heat and flapping freely with each step. A mixture of dust and ash coated his sinuses and settled in his lungs like a blanket spread across the cilia. Gabby fell behind, waving him ahead with a scarf wrapped loosely around her face and neck to keep out the smoke.
Maxim forced himself up the grade, stopping occasionally to cough up black gunk on the brown grass. He fell to his knees at the top, and it was another minute before he collected himself enough to unroll his rifle and take a prone position behind it.
He found Gabby in the scope, a little more than halfway up the hill, and considered the crosshair that Delphi conveniently applied to her head, wrapped in a sweat-stained checkerboard scarf. He put his finger on the trigger, then sighed deeply and panned over to the armored SUV, in time to see the rear doors open.
Three people stepped out, wearing full-face respirators, the kind used by firefighters, an oxygen tank strapped to each of their backs. That and the bulk of the ballistic armor they wore delayed Delphi’s identification process, but Maxim was not overly worried.
It would be much easier to ID the bodies, after all.
Delphi thought they were two men and a woman, two carrying shotguns, and another wielding a squat FAL gun that straddled the line between a battle rifle and a submachine gun. Analysis of body language indicated unease and a very high level of stress, maybe even fear.
That lined up with what Gabby’s protocol indicated. Something had spooked this unit before they’d even contacted the enemy. It could have been the fire, of course, but that seemed an overreaction to Maxim.
The road was clear, and their vehicle was easily capable of outrunning the blaze.
He checked the brush on the other side of the road, just ahead of the fire, and saw nothing. That was where they had to be, though – Simeon and Daniel and Chandi, crouching somewhere in the sagebrush and smoke, trying to judge the best moment to charge out of cover and into combat.
Maxim checked on Gabby, and found her not too far below, hands on knees, gasping through her scarf. Delphi prodded him gently, but Maxim did not give it any real consideration.
If he killed her, he decided, it would be face to face.
He returned to the Thule troops, adjusting his scope slightly to account for the poor visibility, more out of habit than necessity.
Delphi made the scope almost redundant, an artifact of his pre-Activation training. In a pinch, he could fire accurately to around two hundred meters, even without iron sights. He had done it before, with lethal results.
Today, however, he wanted any possible edge.
If it were him, Maxim thought, he would send Daniel Gao first, taking advantage of his invisibility, probably with Simeon acting as a sniper from somewhere in the brush, providing suppor
ting fire from a place of concealment. That was the obvious thing to do.
So obvious that the Thule forces would be expecting exactly that. It seemed overwhelmingly likely that they had planned for exactly that scenario, but Delphi was still struggling with their telepathic encryption, unable to scan deeply enough to give him that sort of insight.
It seemed a safe assumption.
Would that make Simeon and Daniel change plans?
It would be risky to go forward, knowing that they would be facing an enemy expecting them to attack in exactly that manner, but any other approach would mitigate their strengths, rather than accenting them. A frontal assault, for example, would be near suicidal, even if they left Chandi behind for better mobility. The Thule soldiers had taken ideal positions, arrayed about the vehicle, with overlapping and complementary fields of fire. The scatterguns would tear them to shreds before they made it five steps.
They could try Simeon’s protocol, of course, and hope that his barrier would be enough to protect them, but even the strongest barrier protocols would struggle against that volume of fire at that range. Staying in place and using the protocol to avoid the fire was equally futile, as the barrier would stop the flames, but not the heat, cooking them inside an impermeable bubble.
Delphi suggested that they could bring Chandi Tuesday with them as they advanced, rather than leaving her behind, in the hope that the Thule forces would hold their fire, but Maxim doubted it. The rifleman deployed across the hood of the SUV was there for likely that exact reason, and the road was more than wide enough for a skilled shooter to pick both men off cleanly. That approach only worked if Simeon and Daniel had elected to surrender and fall upon the mercy of the Thule Cartel.
There was no possibility they would surrender, Maxim decided. Simeon was too stubbornly practical, and Daniel was too smart. They would know the most likely outcome of such a course – a bullet in the head in some lonely room, after hours or days of torture.
Daniel would move first, Maxim thought. Delphi agreed, flashing him a set of projected positions.
The array of Thule forces was less than ideal, situated to provide overlapping fields of fire. Even invisible, wherever Daniel started, one of the other two soldiers would have a clean shot.
Maxim wished desperately that they could have coordinated. A timed attack would have allowed them to each take a single target, leaving only the rifleman with his muzzle poking from a gun port in the SUV, and potentially the driver, to be dealt with later.
Wishes never came true in the field, in Maxim’s experience, so he returned to practical considerations. Delphi drip-fed ballistic information into his occipital lobe, superimposing target tags and drop calculations.
Gabby staggered up the crest of the hill and collapsed on the dirt beside him. Her brown hair was plastered to her head, soaked with sweat, and her face was smeared with dirt when she pushed aside her dripping scarf.
“Hey,” she panted. “Thanks for not shooting me.”
“Shut up,” Maxim thought. “I’m thinking.”
“I know,” she said. “You have to get involved.”
He did not bother to put aside his exasperation, since the empath was aware of it regardless.
“Why?”
“You are right,” Gabby said, not at all flustered. “They will die for sure if you don’t.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because you are,” Gabby said, smiling at him. “You’re just reluctant to commit.”
Maxim bent to study the targets through his scope, the smoke from the fire irritating his nose.
“She’s right, you know,” a voice said, from just above them. “I bet you would have been able to pull it off, if you had the guts to try.”
Delphi howled, outraged at deception. Maxim spun around and found himself looking at a grinning face he had only seen in photographs and file reports.
The former Chief Auditor and the most feared of the Anathema, a respirator pushed to the side of his tanned face, looking like he was about to laugh, or had just finished doing so. Alistair had a silver revolver in his hand, pointed somewhere in the dirt between the two of them. Despite the smoke, Maxim could see the dimpled lead crowns of the bullets in the cylinder in detail.
Delphi vomited information into Maxim’s brain, a stew of warnings and red flags. Maxim rolled over, his hands at his shoulders. Gabby did the same, looking more surprised than worried.
“That’s right,” Alistair said approvingly. “Let’s make this nice and easy, and nobody…holy shit. Gabriela Thule? What are you doing here, with Maxim Yurchenko of all people?”
“That’s actually quite difficult to explain,” Gabby said. “It has been a strange few days.”
“You kids never cease to amaze me,” Alistair said, shaking his head. “We’ll have plenty of time to talk it over once I finish here, so think of an entertaining story, okay?”
Alistair aimed at Maxim’s head and pulled the trigger.
***
They watched Renton scarf down a massive amount of food, temporarily forgetting their own meals.
Emily smiled over the rim of a glass of rosé. Alex and Vivik resumed eating, but they were put to shame by the appetite on display from the injured man.
Eerie cowered at the far end of the table, nibbling fragments broken from the sugar basket.
“Jesus, Emily,” Renton said, around a mouthful of au gratin potato. “I forgot how good you are at this.”
“Thank you, Renton,” Emily said. “That’s nice of you to say.”
“You’ll make a great wife,” Renton said, eyeing her. “Cooking like this and looking the way you do.”
“Thanks,” Emily said, giggling. “I think.”
“I mean it,” Renton insisted. “You are wasted on these losers. Any chance you feel like marrying me?”
“No chance at all,” Emily said. “But I’m glad you like dinner.”
“He’s right,” Vivik said. “About the food, I mean! Dinner is great.”
“Yeah,” Alex added. “Great.”
“I’ve been out of it for a while,” Renton said, chewing. “I need an update. Which of you two ladies is dating Alex these days?”
“You said you would be fun,” Eerie said sullenly. “That isn’t fun.”
“Sometimes I think you don’t like me very much, Eerie,” Renton said, draining a glass of ice water. “Which hurts, I’ll have you know. I have a very high opinion of you. You are easily one of my top fifteen favorite ex-girlfriends.”
“Renton,” Emily said, her expression growing cold. “That was…”
“I’m not your ex-girlfriend,” Eerie protested. “I thought you wanted to be friends! I didn’t understand at all.”
“You figured it out okay,” Renton observed, dipping bread into a sliced section of bone marrow. “You aren’t half as dumb as you pretend to be.”
“If you don’t stop immediately,” Emily said, “I’m going to ask you to leave.”
“You don’t have to leave,” Alex said, tossing his napkin on the table. “I can fuck you up right here.”
“You will do no such thing!” Emily snapped. “This is my house, and I expect you both to conduct yourselves appropriately.”
“Like the lady said,” Renton said, chewing on a scrap of crust. “Behave yourself, Alex, or you won’t get invited to any more dinner parties.”
“Alex,” Eerie said, tugging at his sleeve. “Maybe we should go?”
“That’s not necessary,” Renton said. “I’ll stop! I’ll even apologize, if you want me to. Sorry, Eerie,” Renton said, with a wolfish grin. “I was only playing.”
“One more obnoxious word,” Emily said, “and I will remove you myself, Renton.”
Renton grinned and returned his attention to his plate.
“I thought I was happy to see you alive,” Vivik remarked. “I guess I forgot what an asshole you can be.”
Renton laughed as he reached for his wine glass.
“I thin
k maybe we should go,” Alex said, looking at Eerie with concern. “Sorry, but I’m really tired, and…”
Renton smirked and snagged the remaining roast beef from Alex’s plate.
“Just a moment,” Emily said, putting her napkin on the table and standing up. “Let me walk the two of you to the door.”
Eerie stood quickly and practically ran for the door. Alex hurried after her, shooting Vivik an apologetic look.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Sorry to run. Finish your dinner.”
“I’ll let you out,” Emily said, following him. “You see, I have one teensy favor that I need to ask of you…”
Renton laughed, waiting until they all left the room.
“Some guys have all the luck,” Renton said, cutting the roast into bite-size pieces. “Wouldn’t you say, Vivik?”
“You really are a dick sometimes,” Vivik said. “You know?”
***
Maxim was not fast enough to dodge a bullet in flight.
Delphi warned him as the first muscles tensed in Alistair’s hand, alarms screaming across his brain as information fed directly into his primary motor cortex, bypassing the decision process for efficiency, delivering machine instruction that was unrefined and exquisitely painful.
It still wasn’t fast enough.
Maxim lurched forward spasmodically, and the bullet meant to strike him between the eyes ripped across the top of his head, cutting a bloody path through his scalp. His movements were dictated by his telepathic awareness, Delphi feeding him instructions like dance movements, and the second and third shots collided with the ballistic plate on his back, hammer blows that knocked him to the ground and replaced the air in his lungs with an agonizing wave of heat.
Delphi howled, but Maxim could barely move.
His automated defense systems engaged, launching a full-scale telepathic attack on Alistair’s nervous system, attempting to halt the impulses that would allow him to pull the trigger.
Alistair’s defenses were on a whole other level from anything Maxim and Delphi had previously encountered. He crushed the assault with a smirk, and then countered with a psychic attack of his own that cut through Maxim’s shields like a knife through silk.
The Church of Sleep (Central Series Book 5) Page 28