“Does it have six red eyes?” Khalid asked.
“Three.”
“It’s a parasite controlling him. But it is juvenile, we can destroy it without harming the metahuman host. Deploy a number six shell.”
“NUMBER SIX SHELL!” I ordered, and Alpha hit the buttons. He really didn’t need to, I could have done it over the AR interface, but it was fun to sit on the bridge of my walking battleship-equivalent and order doom and death for my foes. And really, down here, fun was rare enough that you had to make the most of it.
Fuck, when I got back to Creation, I’d have to stop taking things so seriously. Maybe relax a bit and enjoy my career instead of rushing to take care of this or that crisis.
But no. But no... to fix the world, to make it what it could be, I’d have to step up and change the world. And I would, for none could do it better than—
“OH FUCK HER RUNNING, WE JUST CROSSED THE BORDER INTO PRIDE, DIDN’T WE?”
“Yes,” Khalid confirmed, on his way out the door. “I’ll tell you how to ward against it after I take care of that speedster.”
“SIT DOWN, SIT DOWN.” I looked over at the pattern of invisible waves, battering my suits around, plotted the course, and fired the shell.
The shell burst in midair, showering silver flakes down into the area, saturating it and a mile radius around it with one of Khalid’s variant distillates. I’d fought speedsters before, and I knew how to beat them, and I’d never once met a speedster who didn’t have to breathe.
Today was no exception. The man appeared in the middle of the boulevard, clawing at his face, as something like a cross between an octopus and a spider thrashed and leaked green slime.
“I could have done that,” Khalid said, as he took his seat.
“HE’S SMALL FRY. WE’RE SAVING YOU FOR THE BIG GUNS.”
That mollified him. But the thought occurred to me that metahumans were a naturally dramatic lot, prone to impulsive actions, rash behavior, and abandoning sound plans with impulsive measures. And we’d just crossed into Pride. Khalid wouldn’t be the only one feeling the tug, there.
I got on the intercom. “WE’RE ALMOST THERE. READYING TO JUMP, CALLING IN THE HARDSUITS.” It was time to pull in assets before we got cocky.
“He’s gone,” Delta reported.
“WHAT?”
Someone knocked on the bridge’s emergency exit door.
“The speedster, I don’t know where he is—”
I gestured to Beta. “OPEN THE DOOR.”
The second Beta had that door open, the guy materialized out of thin air, nude, hands over his crotch. “Say, who are you folks? And where is this?”
“IT’S HELL, AND WE’RE BEATING UP DEMONS.”
“Oh. Alright, I’m game. Got any pants?”
“GET THE MAN SOME PANTS, BETA.”
Turned out his name was the Saffron Speeder. I hadn’t heard of him, and mostly-ignored his friendly chatter as I checked over systems, monitored the bird’s eye view from the drone, and made ready to jump. Pagliacci just sat in the background shaking his head as the hero prattled on, and my pet demons looked thoroughly poleaxed at his presence.
Then the guy was leaning on my throne’s armrest. I twitched and barely kept myself from blasting him. “So, what should I be doing, sir?”
“YOU’RE TALKING TO A WOMAN.”
“What, seriously?”
“YOU SHOULD BE HOLDING ONTO SOMETHING.”
“Why, what’s going to happen, ma’am?”
The Direnaut jumped, and he disappeared. I wasn’t too worried for his sake... the guy looked like a classic speedster, and everything would be in slow motion to him if that was the truth. If I was wrong, well, he was Damned. He could recover from anything that would happen to him.
Scary to think how blasé I’d gotten about that.
We passed over about a dozen walls, heading deeper into the maze. I nodded as the radar tracked three fast-approaching dots. “DESCENDING!” I roared over the comms and slammed the Direnaut into a crouch, fetching up in a high boulevard, decorated with skull patterns in the walls. Funnily enough, the walls in this area were glowing slightly red. Geothermal activity? It made sense. With the fucked up physics of Hell, they could be heated on the underside and conveying that heat up above, radiating it for the common benefit.
Or it could be a giant hibachi to fry Damned up on. I gave it about thirty-seventy odds.
Then the fliers were upon us. Humanoid bats three times the size of the one that Queen Eyeblight had ridden into battle, back at Wroth. They hit us with sonic shrieks, and I grimaced. The forcefields couldn’t stop sound, and the mecha shook, as damage readouts flickered green.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, lady, but are you a villain?” The speedster appeared again, holding the too-big pants up around his thin waist.
“SHE’S FIGHTING DEMONS TO SAVE HUMANS. DOES IT MATTER?”
“Well shucks, when you put it that way, how can I help?”
“HEAD BACK OUT THE WAY YOU CAME IN AND DO SOMETHING ABOUT THOSE.” I pointed at a horde of burren-like beasts, driven by metal-clad hellions, stampeding toward us. “DIRE DOESN’T HAVE TIME TO DEPLOY HER TROOPS AGAINST THEM.”
“Speeding out!” And he was gone, to appear on the screen a moment later. His force wave, anyway. Come to think of it, it did have a faint yellow after-image.
I shook my head and focused the main batteries on those goddamned bat-men. “SPEEDING OUT. SERIOUSLY, WHAT THE FUCK?”
“The Seventies were a strange time,” Delta said.
“YOU RECOGNIZED THAT GUY?”
“He was one of the Michigan’s Mightiest back for half a year when that team was running. Well, before he got caught with a girl half his age. They quietly canned him for that.”
He hadn’t looked that old, and I pushed the resulting realization from my mind. “DEFINITELY SHOULDN’T BE IN THIS RING THEN. LUST IS FAR, FAR FROM HERE. THAT SETTLES IT. THERE’S A THRIVING BLACK MARKET TRADE IN METAHUMANS, AND THOSE BASTARDS HAVE CORNERED THE MARKET.”
“You know what that means,” Pagliacci told me. And I did.
“HE WAS ONLY THE VANGUARD. LET LOOSE THE HARDSUITS AGAIN.”
I focused on bringing down the last bat, which was a mistake, because as soon as I looked up, the ground fell away from under us.
“That’s not geomancy!” First Worm howled as the world tilted, but Alpha was on the ball and he shifted power to the anti-grav.
I stared down to see a horde of tracked vehicles the size of cars, with whirling giant drills at their front. They burst out of the hole and made a beeline straight for us...
...only to stop short as I brought the Direnaut hovering up out of their reach.
I knew those drills. “MOLIARTY? FUCKING MASTER MOLIARTY, THE MALICIOUS MINER?”
One of the drill hatches opened, and a man with a pink face mask, looking nothing so much as an enormous snouted nose, glared up at me. He yelled back at his drillbots, and they extruded stubby little legs, pointed up at me and started launching their drills like rockets.
“IT IS! HAHAHAHHAHAH!”
The Direnaut’s point defense took out the incoming drills, and the Direnaut’s foot stomped Moliarty and his Moleminer flat.
But then the next wave of hellions was upon us.
And a whole lot of costumes followed in their wake.
We fought them, hellions and heroes and villains alike. The Direnaut took hit after hit... our defenses were good, and our mobility let us avoid a lot of trouble, but with so many different types of attack methods, so many powers, it was inevitable that we’d run into troubles that we hadn’t foreseen.
But I am Dire, and I do not do things by half measures. We won. Some of them were mind-controlled, through spell or parasite or other method, and they joined us or fled when released. Others seemed to have their own free will, and those we atomized. The less remaining of a Damned body, the longer it took to regenerate. We’d found that out all through our trip down through this be
nighted place. We pushed deeper and deeper into the iron city, eventually drawing our hardsuited troops, damaged and tired, back into the battered form of the Direnaut for ease of transit. And after the twentieth broken defensive line, resistance abruptly ceased. Our hop over a wall was met with empty streets.
“Energy readings!” Epsilon called. “Massive and unknown, ten streets south!”
“HOLD POSITION,” I commanded and stood, walking toward the screen.
And with a squeal and a great gout of wind that shook my mecha on its feet and strained our antigrav to its limits, a hole opened ahead of us. Stars shone through, stars blotted out by something that clawed its way through, legs spilling out of the hole, hoofed legs, each the size of the Direnaut or bigger. And in the center, emerging into the light, a leonine face with solid golden eyes.
It looked to us and sneered, extruding fully into existence as its legs spread out. It had a disc-shaped body, hidden by a massive mane, and a wild circle of goat’s legs spread out around it like the rays of a sun. It balanced on one of them, and the iron wall it stood upon collapsed under the Fallen Angel’s weight.
“Buer,” Khalid whispered, running for the elevator. “I need my blade!”
I looked at the massive lion-circle thing that dwarfed the mecha I’d spent a month building.
Then I stabbed the intercom button. My Direnaut’s battered mask, holed and sparking, looked up at the great beast and opened its mouth.
“GREETINGS, BUER.”
It smiled at us.
I glared back.
“DIRE’S GOING TO GIVE YOU ONE CHANCE TO GET OUT OF HER WAY.”
CHAPTER 19: WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD
“One more alteration we have made, for our shared lie. All stats for angels have been removed from our game. The truth of them is that they are not monsters to slay in random encounters. They are great and terrible and to be fled from at the first opportunity.”
--Excerpt from the fifteenth chapter of the first book of the Chronicles of the Shared Lie
I’d heard many things in the few years my truncated memory allowed me. The sound of fae screaming as they died. Hitler ranting his hatred at me as my allies subdued him. The President of the United States himself calling me a menace to world peace and all civilized societies.
But I’d never heard a Fallen Angel laugh, and as pain ripped through my skull, and my skeleton felt like it was shaking within my body, I realized that this was one particular sensation I could have truly gone without.
Then the noise compensation kicked in, and the pain stopped. I let the leonine bastard have his guffaw and started checking various systems and subsystems. The repair drones had finished up almost everything but the armor and a few of the redundant circuits, so that was fine. I estimated our battle fitness to be eighty-nine-point-six percent.
If things didn’t work out like I planned, we’d need every decimal point of it. Probably more.
“DOES SHE TAKE IT THAT’S A NO, THEN?”
It considered the Direnaut. “You may take it so,” the entity spoke, and to my annoyance I realized I heard it in the same way I heard The Cat’s speech. I glanced around to find The Cat firmly under one of the command consoles, tail wrapped around itself. First Worm was next to it, snaky tail sticking out. First Whisper sat on the floor, eyes shut, prostrating herself.
My Chorus were unaffected at least, at their stations, looking to me. Pagliacci alone seemed unconcerned.
Yes, he would, wouldn’t he? “About ready?” I voxed Last Janissary.
“I have the blade, and the elixir. I would say I hope you are right...”
“It’s a moot point either way. If she’s wrong, he’ll recover.”
I stared at Buer. Then I pulled up the scanners and activated the full sensory suite. My eyes widened as I saw the truth of him spill out, unknown reading after unknown reading...
...slowly quantifying into measurable results, as the vast servers in the clustered enclave of the Direnaut’s hidden heart went to work.
Also, he was moving my way, legs bending in ways they shouldn’t, hooves crushing the walls and buildings of Dis as he came.
“A MOMENT, GREAT ONE.”
“Why?” the word ripped through my mind. “Are you going to beg? Now that matters have gotten to this point there is no use in pleading for mercy. I have been called, and I come.”
“OH YES. BUT BEFORE THIS IS ALL OVER, SHE WISHES TO ADMIRE YOU.”
“What?”
“IN THIS ARMOR, SHE HAS INSTRUMENTS UNLIKE ANY FORGED BY OTHER HUMAN HANDS. THEY ARE SEEING YOU, SEEING YOU IN WAYS YOU HAVE NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE BUER, BY ANY BUT YOUR CREATOR.”
His eyebrows lifted on his face, ascending a building’s worth of space as the Fallen Angel scrutinized me with disbelief. “You would raise yourself above the great deceiver?”
“DIRE WORSHIPS NO GODS. AND THE ONE SHE MET WAS A DICK WHO COULDN’T TAKE A PUNCH, SO FUCK ’EM.” Mind you, it had been Crusader doing the punching. But that was neither here nor there.
Buer stood still for a long moment. Then he laughed, and by the time he was through, my brain ached like a four-alarm hangover. I swallowed nausea. “Look then, ye mighty, and despair,” he said.
“THAT’S A MISQUOTE ACTUALLY.”
“What?”
“NEVER MIND.” He probably didn’t know the poem.
The minutes crawled by, but he didn’t stir. Evidently Fallen Angels had patience. And I watched as theology turned into science right in front of me, theory and myth collated into data.
Data that matched, in a lot of ways, the data I’d gathered before, clandestinely, on another subject. “Confirmed,” I voxed to the Janissary. “Stand by.” I reached over to my throne, and flipped a red toggle-box up, revealing a button glaring yellow, a black radiation symbol emblazoned atop it.
“What are you doing, Doctor?” Pagliacci said, stepping closer.
“DOING WHAT HUMANS DO. WINNING AGAINST THE ODDS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION, BUER.”
Buer blinked. “You are welcome, I suppose.”
“FOR YOUR GRACIOUSNESS, SHE WILL ALLOW YOU A SECOND CHANCE TO STEP OUT OF HER WAY. WILL YOU?”
“Have you gone mad? Or perhaps you have found your courage, child?”
“SHE’S NO CHILD OF YOURS, AND AS TO COURAGE... SEE, THAT’S THE PROBLEM WITH YOU HELL-DWELLERS.” I stared at his readings once more, double-checking my work. It took all of half a second, and I was being lazy at it. “YOU DEAL WITH HEROES. THE PEOPLE WHO STOP YOU WHEN YOU BURST INTO REALITY? THEY ARE HEROES. ALL YOU KNOW IS DEALING WITH HEROES.”
I stood, giving into the kayfabe, and flipped my cape back, even though he couldn’t see it. “AND TODAY, YOU AND ALL YOUR KIN ARE UP AGAINST A VILLAIN. IT ISN’T ABOUT COURAGE, IT ISN’T ABOUT MERCY, IT’S QUITE FRANKLY PRAGMATISM. THOSE PEOPLE IN HER LAIR? SHE’S NOT SAVING THEM BECAUSE IT’S THE RIGHT THING TO DO, OR BECAUSE IT’LL MAKE HER FEEL BETTER ABOUT HERSELF. SHE’S SAVING THEM BECAUSE SHE CAN. BECAUSE IT AMUSES HER.”
“Do you have a point, or are you merely riding the waves of Pride?”
“OH, SHE’S BEEN DOING THAT FOR A WHILE NOW. BUT IT DOESN’T MAKE IT ANY LESS TRUE.” I turned my back to the screen, folding my hands behind my back, interlacing metal-clad fingers. “YOU AND THE ONE YOU CALL MASTER HAVE GREATLY, GREATLY UNDERESTIMATED HER AND ALL OF HUMANITY. FOR YOU SEE, SHE HAS SEEN YOUR ATOMS, BUER. YOU ARE NOT IMMORTAL. YOU’RE JUST VERY, VERY FUCKING TOUGH. BUT YOU ARE MATTER AND ENERGY, LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE. AND DIRE?” I sat down again, held my finger over the yellow button. “DIRE KNOWS ENERGY. WITH ONE TOUCH OF A BUTTON, A SUN WILL BLOOM IN HELL, FOR THE FIRST TIME. A HUMAN SUN, AND A GREAT ROARING THAT WILL DISRUPT YOUR CORE. SHE WILL END YOU, BUER. SHE WILL END YOU WITHOUT CARE OR HESITATION IF YOU DO NOT STEP ASIDE.”
“You threaten me? When your doom is inside you and has been all along?” Buer’s mouth stretched wide, and he roared.
If I’d thought it was pain in my brain earlier, this dwarfed it. I bent double, clenching my m
ask, feeling something vast, feeling the touch of forces I had no name for, not yet...
...but I would after this. I straightened up as the forces passed, and I laughed, laughed long and hard, as the leonine face became puzzled. I checked the scanners as I rose, saw plants, disparate and alien, bursting forth from every window in the nearby iron walls.
“FOR BUER TEACHES THE VIRTUES OF HERBS AND PLANTS!” I roared, pounding my knee with a fist. “AND GIVES GOOD FAMILIARS, BUT THAT’S NOT IMPORTANT. TWO STRAIGHT MONTHS OF EATING MEAT, YOU SONOVABITCH. TWO STRAIGHT MONTHS ON THAT DIET, SHITTING LIKE A FAUCET, JUST TO MAKE SURE WE WOULDN’T HAVE ANY VEGETABLE MATERIAL IN OUR STOMACHS THAT YOU COULD MANIPULATE.”
His face twisted into fury. Khalid had told me of this one’s portfolio, and our gamble had paid off. Not a huge gamble, but it had just saved all of us from becoming sacks of fertilizer.
The Fallen Angel roared and rolled toward me—
—and I spun the Direnaut with grace he couldn’t counter, leaping miles away in an instant, full power to speed.
“AND NOW YOU SORRY BASTARD, WATCH CLOSELY.” I boomed. “ALL OF YOU WATCH AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE FALLEN ANGEL MEETS THE RISING MUSHROOM CLOUD!”
I pounded my fist toward the yellow button—
—and Pagliacci caught it.
Held it.
Servos whined and groaned, and sparks flew. I ceased downward motion. He’d stopped momentum that should have turned his bones to paste, vampire blood-enhanced muscles or no.
“Enough,” he said, smiling. “Buer, you may return,” he said, in a voice that shook my mind and not my ears. On the screen, Buer instantly disappeared back into his rift, smiling his leonine grin.
I turned my attention to the clown who wasn’t a clown at all.
“SHE KNEW IT,” I said. “KNEW YOU WERE A PHONY.”
“Did you?” He smiled. “Then why did—”
“Now,” I whispered to Khalid.
Air cracked, light flared, and ‘Pagliacci’ screamed. I twisted, grabbed him, and ejected backward through my armor’s fast release. Couldn’t see in the blinding light, could barely breathe as sulfur flooded my nostrils. But I knew where the real button was on my armrest.
DIRE : HELL (The Dire Saga Book 6) Page 28