ONSET: My Enemy's Enemy

by Glynn Stewart

  “Understood,” David acknowledged. “Get the wounded under cover if you can, but keep those vampires out of the building.”

  “They’re not coming in this way,” Stone promised.

  Before David could say anything further, he felt the building vibrate—explosives detonating somewhere in the structure.

  “That wasn’t you, was it?” he asked Stone.

  “Not here,” the gunner agreed. “We secured the side entrances; it can’t be…”

  “Walls,” David said flatly. “They’ve blasted through the walls. Hold your position,” he ordered Stone. “Pell, you have incoming. They’ve blasted through the walls; they’ll be coming up the staircases.”

  “I brought friends,” the machine animator said grimly. “We’ll hold.”

  “Some are going to head your way, too,” Hellet noted, the Mage sounding strained. “If Stone or I move, they’re going to overrun the APs.”

  “I’ll deal with any that come upstairs. Hold your positions, everyone.”

  His empowered senses could hear running footsteps now, the fastest of the vampires having already sprinted up dozens of flights of stairs.

  “They’re almost here,” he said quietly. “Which means they’re everywhere.”

  #

  David was moving even before the vampires broke the doors down, his sense of the future warning him where they were coming in.

  There were two stairwells, one at the north side of the elevators and one at the south. He could hear two vampires coming from the south, one from the north. He only had a few seconds’ warning for each—but it wasn’t that big a space and he moved fast.

  The vampire was kicking the locked door open when David reached it, the reinforced wood splintering around the dead-bolted lock. The door gave way to the creature’s superhuman strength—and then the ONSET Agent reached the door.

  Memoria flashed around in a brutal strike. There was no finesse to the blow, just the mind-boggling strength of a Class One Physical Empowered and the unimaginable sharpness of the demon-forged blade.

  The blade cut through the door and then through the vampire’s armor, flesh and bone. Door and vampire alike collapsed to the ground in pieces, the creature decapitated before it even recovered from kicking the door open.

  That was a wound that would kill even a vampire, especially with Memoria’s ability to cripple any regenerative ability the victim had. Leaving the corpse, David lunged back across the room to intercept the other two vampires.

  They’d made it through the door and opened fire as they saw him close. Both vampires were men, clad in black bodysuits similar to those worn by ONSET troopers and carrying expensive Heckler & Koch submachine guns.

  A half-second’s prescience was more than enough to dodge bullets, and David dove around and under their fire as he crossed the twenty-foot length of Talon Security’s reception. Memoria flashed forward in a perfectly precise thrust at the closer vampire’s throat.

  The creature spun, his SMG smashing against the side of the blade to deflect the strike. David twisted his wrists, rotating the blade in a deadly tight arc that sent it spinning back toward the monster’s fanged face.

  His enemy managed to interpose the gun again, but this time, Memoria hit it edge-on. The sword cut the SMG in half like it was made of tissue paper and smashed into the vampire’s torso, cleaving through ribs and spine with a horrible splintering sound.

  David’s prescience flashed and he leapt backward, yanking the sword out of the vampire’s chest as a stream of silvered gunfire cut through the space he’d occupied a moment before.

  The armored raider kept up the gunfire, superhuman strength allowing him to compensate for the gun’s recoil in full automatic as he drove David back step by step, the vampire fast enough to keep adjusting to keep David away.

  Then he ran out of bullets and the ONSET Commander charged forward again, knowing exactly the instant the attacker would run dry. The vampire could reload fast, the new mag slamming home into the gun before the empty one even hit the ground.

  David could move faster—but even he couldn’t close ten feet in the time it took the vampire to reload. Twisting sideways, he dodged most of the first burst of gunfire as he sliced Memoria through the gun. A silver bullet slammed into his shoulder, sending searing ripples of pain through his body as his system attempted to regenerate the wound and couldn’t.

  The submachine gun fell away in pieces, the vampire scrabbling backward and going for another weapon. David would never know what that other weapon was, as he lashed out with the sword again, mirroring the precise thrust he’d started his attack with.

  This time, the tip of the sword plunged cleanly through the vampire’s neck, severing his jugular and spine in an injury instantly fatal even to a blood-charged inhuman monstrosity.

  He had a moment to stop and breathe, warmth and pain radiating from the wound in his shoulder. The bullet had gone clean through, leaving behind only fragments of silver. His system would slowly push those out as it regenerated. It hurt and it was slower than normal, but he’d be able to use his arm again soon enough. If he judged it right, probably by morning.

  Then a new threat warning flashed across his prescience and David dove for cover behind the receptionist’s desk as the elevator doors exploded inward in a blast of black fire and magic.

  #

  “You of all people, Commander, should know good soldier is hard to replace,” a woman’s voice with a thick Russian accent said over the wreckage of the desk David was hiding behind. “Year just to not be stupid fledgling. More to train.” She tsked as David rose to face her.

  The speaker was a female vampire clad in a black gown that reached to just above her ankles, revealing sensible combat boots underneath it. Her face was pale and her eyes bloodshot under jet-black hair woven into a tightly woven braid around her head.

  She looked so much like a stereotypical vampire, David was surprised for a moment—until his prescience warned him to dodge as she sent a bolt of black fire through where he was standing.

  “I am not here for you,” she told him. “Stand aside. Here for idiots who don’t know enough to know what they reveal.”

  “Everyone in this building is under ONSET’s protection,” he replied. “You’re going to have to go through me to get to them.”

  “Very well.”

  Even without prescience, he wouldn’t have been surprised by the attack that followed. The sweeping sheet of flame that filled the entire reception lobby was intended to catch someone as fast as he was. She filled the room with black fire, a wall of destruction that swept toward him with inexorable speed.

  The desk didn’t survive, the wood bursting into flame and disintegrating as the glass and metal portions liquefied in the magical heat—heat David’s empowered speed gave him time to register as the fire rushed toward him.

  In a movement more futile instinct as training, he lashed out with Memoria, the blade cutting a curving arc through the fire. To his shock, the enchanted steel cut the spell as it slashed, severing the links that held the magic together.

  The wall of fire collapsed outward from him, the heat fading away before the flame reached him. Half of Talon Security’s gorgeously manicured lobby was wrecked, carpet burned to ash and marble scorched black.

  For a moment, he and the vampire faced each other in the burnt-out space, the vampire Elder clearly as surprised at his survival as he was. Her face twisted into a snarl as she sent more fire hammering out at him, a rapid-fire sequence of tiny darts of black flame seeking the energy of life.

  Not all—indeed, not many—vampire Elders wielded magic. Fewer wielded magic that was practical in combat. Marcus Dresden, the former leader of the Familias, had apparently been a master manipulator, but he’d fought David blade-to-blade with nothing but enhanced strength and speed.

  The same kind of enhanced strength and speed David possessed. He dodged around the firebolts, deflecting with Memoria the ones that came close enough to try
and latch onto his life force as he closed with the vampire.

  A blast of force threw him backward, and more firebolts flashed through the air. His sword flashed through the air, severing the magic of each dart as it neared him. The Elder snarled, sending another wave of force at him… and he leapt over it.

  Bouncing his wounded shoulder off the ceiling and wincing in pain, David came down in a rough landing within reach of the vampire, slashing out with Memoria only to be parried as she conjured a blade of black flame.

  “I killed Marcus Dresden,” he told her quietly. “Why do you think you’re going to defeat me?”

  “Dresden was a fool,” she hissed, conjuring four hovering blades of dark fire and lunging at him. Five swords of flame circled David, trying to find a weakness in his defenses. She wasn’t as fast as he was, and neither were her flying swords—but five were a lot for him to handle, prescient or not.

  A blade collapsed into nothingness as Memoria cut through it, and he dropped to one knee under two more as they sliced through the air. Before the woman could respond, he launched himself back up, the demon-forged blade slicing through two more of the blades as it tore through the Elder’s defenses and took off the top half of her head in one strike.

  The remaining floating blades flickered and died as the vampire’s corpse stood, frozen for a long moment, and then finally crumpled to the ground.

  David’s prescience wasn’t warning him of any new threats, and he stood over the bodies, breathing heavily and wincing against his injured shoulder. The Elder had flown up the elevator shaft, and he was glad they’d decided to stop the elevators one floor up—like the blocked staircases, it had forced the vampires to come to him.

  He was reaching for his radio to contact the rest of his team when the entire building trembled, the ground shaking under his feet as a second series of much more powerful explosions went off beneath him.

  Chapter 21

  With the storm, David could only barely see the other office towers around them, but it was enough for him to be aware that the top floors—the floors he and the civilians he was trying to protect were on—were easily moving several meters back and forth.

  “Report,” he demanded over the radio. “What just happened?”

  “That was above us,” Stone reported. There was silence for a moment. “Fire from outside just cut off like someone called for Sunday dinner, too. Still got movement, but… Yeah, they’re definitely pulling out.”

  “I felt power getting flung around above us as well,” Hellet said. “Are you all right?”

  “Don’t know if it was the one who conjured the storm, but they sent a Mage Elder to deal with the civilians,” David said grimly. “The building’s the worse for wear, but I’m all right.

  “Pell, report,” he ordered.

  Silence answered him.

  “Agent James Pell, what is your status?” he demanded, wishing they’d been wearing real combat gear. If Pell had been in the armored bodysuit with its augmented reality HUD and vitals scanners, he’d know if something had happened.

  “Want us to check it out?” Stone demanded.

  “No. Hold the line,” David ordered. “I’ll check on him.”

  Wounded or not, he could still do thirty-five flights of stairs faster than Stone could do three.

  #

  The door to the third floor was a shattered ruin. Like the doors upstairs, it had been kicked in—and then it had been smashed to pieces by explosives.

  The rest of the third floor looked like the aftermath of an apocalypse. A massive explosion had gone off at most a dozen feet from the stairwell, destroying floor and ceiling alike in a circular area of devastation that ended at the scorched concrete shell of the emergency stairs.

  David judged distances carefully and jumped across the crater, landing precariously on the remaining floor as he looked around for Pell. The server chamber wall had been shattered by the explosions, debris and shrapnel having torn through the sensitive electronic equipment beyond.

  Someone had followed up with grenades. Talon Security’s servers were a mess—and they weren’t the only ones. As David looked around, it was clear that most of the companies in the building had kept at least local support servers here, and they were all wrecked.

  There’d been no precision, no planning to the destruction. A massive explosive charge had taken out the defenders and the walls, then at least one automatic grenade launcher had been used to finish the job. It had been a rushed job, a messy job.

  And Pell and the squad of AP troopers who’d been guarding the floor were nowhere to be seen. David’s hearing and sight were far better than a regular human’s, but he couldn’t see infrared or anything else that would allow him to find his wounded or dead subordinates in the debris.

  “Hellet, get up here,” he ordered. “Pell and the APs are somewhere in this debris. If they’re alive, we need to find them.”

  “Understood,” she said crisply. “Things seem quiet down here.” She paused. “Narita didn’t make it,” she told him. “We’ve lost a lot of the AP troops.”

  “Understood,” he echoed. “Stone, hold the line. Nobody else dies tonight.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  #

  “Seattle police are on their way,” the Mage warned as she stepped out of the stairs into the debris field that had been the second through fourth floors of the office building.

  “A building just exploded,” David replied. “They’d be incompetent if they weren’t on their way. Fortunately, we have OSPI to handle them today.”

  “I feel privileged,” de Bergen said, stepped out behind Hellet as the Mage levitated herself over toward David. “What am I telling Seattle’s finest tonight?”

  “As much as they’re cleared for,” he answered. “We need their manpower, if nothing else. I want every civilian out of this building and moved to a secure location ASAP.”

  “Are we charging them with anything?”

  “For now? No. At this point, it’s protective custody,” David told her. “The Familias sent a Vampire Elder to shut van der Watt and his people up. That might just be tying up loose ends, but even if so, I want those ends to stay loose—and I refuse to have civilians die on my watch.”

  “I’ll talk to them,” de Bergen promised. “I’m assuming we can’t rely on the elevators?”

  David glanced around the wreckage. The stairs and elevators were contained inside a concrete core, but even that was looking…less than its best.

  “I wouldn’t trust them,” he agreed. “Move everyone by stairs. I’d say evac by air, but this storm doesn’t look like it will let up soon.”

  “What about the media?”

  David shook his head, swallowing a curse.

  “As much of the truth as is safe,” he allowed. “Federal agents executed a warrant and were attacked by an unknown third party while interviewing the inhabitants of the office. We have both uniformed and attacker fatalities; more details are classified.”

  “They’ll dig,” de Bergen warned.

  “Let them. We have bigger problems. Hellet, are you finding anything?”

  She shook her head slowly.

  “I’m not picking up anyone alive,” she said helplessly. “And…I can’t find corpses at any great distance.”

  “Someone has to have survived,” David insisted. Even to his own ears, it sounded hollow. He listened, as hard as he could. He could hear approaching sirens, but no one was moving in the debris.

  “They’d have been…there,” he concluded, pointing to a particularly large pile of wreckage. He lowered himself into the debris, listening and watching as he crossed to where he figured the defenders would have made their stand.

  A large chunk of concrete had fallen from the ceiling, supported precariously by what looked like it had been part of an armored server-room wall. Checking his footing carefully, David pulled it upward, feeling Hellet’s magic take hold of it as he did.

  Even he couldn’t lift a twenty-foot slab
of concrete, but with the help of his Mage, he managed to pivot it upward and lean it against the wall to expose the underlying debris. Several of Pell’s “friends”—machine guns on tripod mounts with motorized aiming that he could control from a distance—were visible in the rubble.

  No bodies, though. Not yet.

  “Wait,” he said suddenly. “I hear breathing!”

  The chunk of server-room wall was supported by the pile of other trash, and he and Hellet set to with a will. The wall slowly moved up and away, back toward the wrecked room it had been supposed to protect, and exposed a tiny pocket—held up by two more of Pell’s tripod-mounted friends, reinforced with other guns and pieces of what looked like an industrial vacuum cleaner to form an improbable supportive cocoon.

  Three of the Anti-Paranormal troopers were unconscious in the center of that cocoon, protected at the last by Pell’s strange magic.

  For a moment, David saw no sign of his Agent—and then he spotted an outstretched hand emerging from under the debris and understood.

  The machinery that Pell could manipulate hadn’t been somewhere he could protect himself with it. Instead, he’d spent his last moments making sure that those he could protect survived.

  “Check them,” David said quietly, his voice half-choked.

  “Shouldn’t we still look for…oh.” Hellet followed David’s silent gesture and saw Pell’s hand as well.

  “Well, shit.”

  #

  With the storm dying down, David found a seat on the grounds outside, keeping a careful eye on the evacuation as the remaining Anti-Paranormals and the Seattle police eased his detainees out of the building and onto busses.

  He wasn’t even sure where the busses had come from or where they were taking people. He’d left that entire operation to Catherine de Bergen—the OSPI district chief knew the people, the services. He didn’t. His part of the job had been to keep everyone alive.

  The ambulances carrying the wounded had left now. There were still neat rows of covered bodies waiting for the weather to die down enough for the transport helicopters to collect them.