Dog Warrior uo-4

by Wen Spencer

  As the Gets disappeared under the snarling Dog Warriors, the other fighters sprang to the other exits from the room to bar the doors shut. All around them, the Ontongard gathered in an angry swarm, like bees from a kicked hive.

  Atticus cupped his earpiece to lessen the noise of the fighting. "Ru, we're down the steps! Can you tell which way we should go next?"

  "Big room, six exits total?" Ru asked, and then clarified with, "Counting the door you came in?"

  The door directly in front of him boomed as Ontongard threw their bodies against it.

  "Yes!" Atticus shouted over the din.

  "They're in this room," Ru murmured to the others with him.

  "Which way?"

  Some of the dead had been there before they arrived. Atticus recognized the cultist Ether, stripped of her clothes, sprawled in a puddle of vomit. Mice had chewed holes out of her abdomen, the transformed flesh escaping the dead body.

  "Looking, looking, looking," Ru chanted.

  "This area is deeper, more extensive." Kyle's voice carried over Ru's side of the connection. They had to be hunched close together, poring over the same architectural drawings.

  "No, I say this way," Indigo countered. "That area had work done by noncompromised contractors, whereas this area was totally done by the Ontongard."

  "Ru?" Atticus trusted his partner.

  "Okay, with your back to the stairs you just came down, to your left, on the same wall as the stairway, is a door," Ru said. "It leads to a long hallway with lots of doors off it. Ignore them all; go to the end."

  "You sure?" Atticus said.

  "No," came the answer from all three federal agents on the other end.

  "All the other doors lead to fairly small areas," Ru explained. "At the end of the hall, though, is another stairway into an large area isolated from everything else."

  "Look at these electricals." Indigo must have produced drawings to support her theory; paper rustled loudly.

  "Oh!" Ru was convinced. "Atty, there's a shitload of power lines going into that area. It has to be the right place."

  Atticus hurried to the door, aware of Rennie moving to join him. The Pack leader had been shot in the left arm; a gaping hole punched through the muscle and the arm hung useless at his side. The wound, though, was already healing closed. A mouse clung to Rennie's shoulder.

  They'd lost ten of the Pack fighters to the thirty-two Ontongard dead, which was surprising, since they seemed so equal in strength.

  "We value our hides." Rennie tucked his shotgun under his useless arm to load, doing it with an ease that suggested it wasn't the first time he had had to work one-handed. "So we're better at protecting them. But there's only a hundred of us and they've got us outnumbered two or three times over. We have to get this done before they overpower us."

  Atticus nodded and indicated the door. "We think the transmitter is this way."

  Rennie's mouse took advantage of the moment of stillness to scurry down into Rennie's coat pocket. "Let's do it then. Dogs, to me! The rest, seal those doors and get the dead contained."

  A four-foot-square steel plate barrier was brought forward. With speed and efficiency no human team could match, the Dogs readied around the doorway and behind the shield wall. No sooner was the last person in place than they battered down the door and opened fire. Gunsmoke formed a cloud.

  It was an expensive win. Of the fifteen Pack who pushed their way down the hallway, only Atticus, Rennie, and Stein were left standing at the end. Yet Atticus couldn't sense any Ontongard beyond the last door. He cautiously opened the heavy steel door and found an empty stairwell.

  "Wait!" Rennie caught Atticus's shoulder before he could step forward, pulling him back away from the door.

  "What is it?"

  Rennie pulled out a handful of loose coins and flung them at the open doorway. With a crack and the sudden smell of hot metal, the coins rebounded to the floor at their feet, blackened and twisted. "They've got an energy field up."

  "Oh, cool," Kyle said over the radio. "But that's not on the as-built."

  OSHA wasn't going to like that. "How do we get through it?"

  "We don't." Rennie shot one of the slightly dead Ontongard who had stirred back to life. "Nothing on Earth can penetrate it."

  "Where the hell did it come from?"

  "The scout ship; Hex stripped out the armory. See if there's a way around it."

  With that Rennie and Stein worked back down the hall, stomping on hapless rats and shooting the fallen Ontongard in the head and chest—anything to keep them dead. Fighting broke out in the large center room, an endless thunder of guns backed with the snarls of the Pack. Atticus noticed for the first time that neither side shouted or cursed or screamed other than short yelps of pure animal pain.

  "Ru, is there any way around this?"

  "Actually, there is, but you're not going to like it," Ru said.

  "How?"

  "Go back to the first door. There's a small odd-shaped room that doglegs around the fresh-air ventilation shaft leading down into the Ted Williams Tunnel. There's an access panel into the air shaft. On the other side of the shaft is an air duct into that area."

  The room was a supply closet, stacked haphazardly with construction supplies and tools. Atticus pushed through the equipment to the far back corner and unburied the access panel. The metal panel was secured to its frame with screws; he shot them out and pried off the panel.

  Night air rushed out of a pitch-black shaft.

  He found a flashlight in the clutter. He turned it on and discovered that its battery was nearly dead. He tried shining it into the shaft. The darkness swallowed the feeble beam. By holding on to the edge and leaning through the opening, he could make out the opposite wall. The shaft seemed to be about ten feet square. Fans roared somewhere overhead, and the sound of traffic echoed up faintly from the darkness below.

  "Are you sure, Ru? I don't see anything."

  "Opposite wall. It's smaller, and maybe to the . . . to the left."

  He played the light across the far wall and found it. "Oh, shit."

  "What is it, Atty?"

  "It's like two and half feet, maybe three feet wide."

  "It's the only way, Atty," Ru said.

  "I know." He fixed the spot in his mind and pitched the flashlight aside. "Here goes nothing."

  Atticus leapt into the darkness. He hit the wall hard, clawed at the darkness, found the edge of the air duct, and scrambled madly to haul himself up into the tiny crawl space. "I'm in!"

  The only response to his news was a relieved sigh over the radio link and the thunder of guns behind him.

  ***

  Ru told him that the air duct went only fifty feet, but it seemed longer, crawling on his stomach through the tight, square passageway. The other end opened onto a vast room filled with a bewildering array of equipment. Pipes from an inch to a foot in diameter bisected the room into grids. Besides pressure gauges and meters, nothing was labeled. Scattered around the room, in seemingly random order, were racks of computer equipment. Nothing seemed centralized. Nothing looked like the heart of a machine. No convenient big red switches.

  He dropped lightly down onto a catwalk that ringed the upper level of the room and stared around him, suddenly feeling like a caveman asked to stop an aircraft carrier. No, worse—like a flea inside a supercomputer, whose only possible act of sabotage would be throwing himself on a random circuit and hoping that his death would fry an important chip.

  Unfortunately, the room wasn't empty of Ontongard, and he'd been noticed. Three Gets started up the catwalk toward him. One was the missing Iron Horse from the DVD of the Ontongard attack on the Buffalo DEA team, the big, black, sleepy-eyed David Toback. The two others looked like construction workers, and were nearly as big and muscular. They carried short lengths of pipe; apparently they were loath to fire guns in this room. They split up, heading for the two ladders up to the catwalk, planning to catch him between them.

  This was going to hurt.<
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  "Can you see this?" he asked his team.

  "Yeah, we're picking it up." Ru sounded as disheartened as he felt.

  "I'm open to suggestions at this point."

  "I don't know what to do," Kyle admitted while the other two remained silent.

  "Not a clue?"

  "Atticus," Kyle whined. "It's not like I can download a user file on this in PDF format with diagrams. It's an alien machine!"

  "Shit!" Atticus charged toward the first construction worker to the right as he climbed the steep ladder to the catwalk. He did a flying kick, connecting with the Get's head as it cleared the top step. He heard the crack of bone, and the Get dropped backward.

  Catching the handrail, Atticus let momentum spin him around and landed back on the catwalk. On the second-floor landing below him, the Get lay in an awkward sprawl. Atticus pulled his pistol and took careful aim. Fighting alongside the Dog Warriors had taught him how to maximize his damage. Two bullets into the skull kept a Get down the longest.

  Toback had climbed the other ladder and rushed him now. The second construction worker was close behind him. Atticus aimed at Toback and fired. Even as he squeezed the trigger, the Get dodged aside, the bullets whining past harmlessly.

  Damn, he read my mind!

  And then Toback slammed into him like a linebacker. They tumbled, Atticus struggling to clear his mind even as he fought to break away from Toback. The construction worker swung at his head and he ducked. Still, the glancing blow rocked his consciousness, flashing darkness through him. He sensed a second hit coming and threw up his right arm to ward off the blow. He felt the blow shock-wave through his body and his hand flew open, releasing his pistol. It went skittering across the catwalk, just out of reach. From the numbness of his arm he knew the bone was broken. The Get swung his pipe upward.

  I am void. I am nothing.

  He twisted on his left shoulder and heaved Toback's head into the pipe's path just as the pipe came down. Blood scented the air, and Toback went limp. Rolling, Atticus kicked out, shattering the Get's kneecap. Pain as brutal as someone driving a spike into his bone lanced up his broken right arm. Snatching up his pistol with his left hand, he turned and fired awkwardly.

  He missed with the first two bullets. The third and fourth took the construction worker in the chest. He put two more in the Get's head, just to be sure. Then he shot Toback twice, leaving himself three bullets. The three Gets were down, but that was bound to be temporary.

  He had to destroy the transmitter before the Ontongard recovered. He reached out mentally to the Pack. They were far fewer in numbers than he'd hoped. " Rennie!"

  " I can hear you. No need to shout."

  " What part of this is the most critical to it working?"

  " Let me see."

  Rennie pushed into his mind. Atticus resisted automatically, and then, gritting his teeth, let the Pack leader in. Rennie leaned against the cold cement wall of the central room, panting in the gunsmoke, ribs bruised from shots taken by the body armor. He ached in his heart and soul as those he loved died around him—they were losing. If they had to pull out, anyone left behind would be at the mercy of the Ontongard.

  Rennie closed his eyes, shutting out distractions, focusing on Atticus.

  " Turn your head, Boy."

  Atticus carefully scanned the room, and Rennie gazed out over the equipment, recognizing it, knowing how it was built and how to take it apart. Knowledge transferred to Atticus. The three-story cylinder housed the dimensional containment field for the exotic matter. The faraday cage, waveguides, and EM pumps extracted exotic matter as Earth moved through space. The long corridor lined with waveguides was used to puncture a pinhole in the M-brane, the exotic matter bleeding into the hole to keep it open long enough for interstellar communications.

  Rennie focused on the tall cylinder. " Hex must have salvaged most of the exotic matter from the sled's drive. Crack the housing open and not only will you destroy this setup, but there won't be any rebuilding."

  " Okay."

  " First take the barrier down." Rennie picked out the field generator, and knowledge of how to turn it off filled Atticus. " You'll have, like, a minute, maybe, to get out of this rat maze, and then the fireworks will start."

  " A minute?" Atticus shut down the barrier.

  " If you're lucky."

  The tide of the battle turned for the worse. Rennie dropped the mental link to fight. Atticus felt strangely alone and hated it.

  An acetylene torch sat in one corner of the room; he wheeled it to the containment housing.

  Backing up to the door, he took careful aim with his left hand. He had only three shots to get it right, and then he'd have to get closer to set the stupid thing off. He wasn't sure what the dark matter would do once the containment field went down.

  "Atty?" Ru whispered. "Are you okay?"

  "I'm fine." And then, because it was dawning on Atticus how desperate their situation was, he added, "I love you, Ru. You've kept me sane."

  "Oh. Oh, Atty, no."

  The first bullet ricocheted off the cement floor.

  The second shot hit and the acetylene exploded in a hot white flash. He was flung backward on a wave of flame into the stairwell, and an instant later everything went pitch-black and the grave-cold air of the maze rushed back over him. He scrambled to his feet and stumbled up the stairs.

  There was a great howl of white noise, and it felt as though he were moving through heavy surf, invisible water trying to drag him backward. A deep, ominous rumble grew louder as the staircase quaked underfoot. The rumble changed to a roar of rushing water, and the smell of the ocean raced before the floodwaters. The first wave slammed him off his feet, and he tumbled into the black water. It swept him into a corner, smashing his broken arm against a cement wall, jolting agony through him. He flailed, disoriented.

  Suddenly someone had a hold on him, dragging him against the current.

  " This way, Boy." Rennie guided him through the raging seawater.

  Wild, dark minutes later, they heaved up onto the steel stairway to the street. Hands pulled them upward as Atticus coughed up all the silt-filled water he'd swallowed.

  The Pack waited on the street outside, guns aimed at the door, ready to shoot anything that crawled out of the water that wasn't one of their own. Most of them were battered, bleeding, and bruised, but only the dead weren't armed.

  Atticus lay on the cold asphalt, panting.

  "You okay, Boy?"

  "Yeah. You came back for me?"

  "You're our Boy. We wouldn't leave you behind."

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Boston Harbor Hotel, Boston, Massachusetts

  Friday, September 24, 2004

  In all the confusion, Atticus managed to forget his brother until they'd dragged themselves back to the hotel and slept for a few hours.

  A knock at the door woke him. "Housekeeping."

  "Need towels," Ru grunted.

  So he got up, padded to the door, and after verifying that it was indeed the maid, opened the door. "We just need fresh towels."

  The maid handed him a stack and he bolted the door. It felt very wrong to return to normalcy after so much madness. He put the towels on the shelf, feeling numb, and used the toilet. Ru came into the bathroom for a glass of water.

  "What's with the rock?" Ru indicated a small pebble that had been sitting under his toiletry bag.

  Atticus grunted his ignorance and picked it up. For a moment he thought it innocent of all human traces, and then realized Ukiah had dropped it there. Why? There was nothing special about the stone except that he found it pleasing. A child's treasure.

  "Atty?"

  Atticus blinked to clear his eyes. "I need to go find my brother."

  ***

  The address listed in the Pennsylvania Department of Motor Vehicles for Ukiah led them to a huge house in an affluent city neighborhood.

  "This can't be the right place." Atticus eyed the stone house, all gables and ivy.

>   "Bennett Detective Agency," Ru read from the bronze plaque by the hand-carved front door. "Business must be good."

  Pressing the doorbell sounded eight muffled tones inside, an impressive door chime to go with the impressive house. After three tries with the doorbell, Atticus walked around the house, peering into the windows. The decor matched the outward appearance of the house—cherry-wood desks, silk drapes, chestnut burl paneling, granite countertops in the kitchen with stainless steel appliances, and a security system keeping all of the above safe.

  "You've got to be kidding me," Atticus growled when he rejoined the other two. "This is a fucking mansion."

  "I'm just getting an answering machine." Ru paused to wait for a tone and said, "Yes, this is Hikaru Takahashi; can you give me a call?"

  Kyle sat on the porch step, Web surfing on his PDA. "Max Bennett's driver's license lists this address too. It says he's thirty-eight to Ukiah's twenty-one. Maybe he's Ukiah's father?"

  Father or not, they'd last seen Ukiah with the Pack. There was no reason to think he wasn't still with them.

  As Ru left his number on the answering machine, Atticus reached into that empty place he'd been avoiding. No whisper of his brother pressed against his senses.

  He closed his eyes and focused. He should be able to feel the Dog Warriors protecting Ukiah.

  "Atty?"

  Atticus lifted his hand and pointed in the direction of a faint something."Let's head that direction."

  ***

  Going in a straight line proved to be impossible. There were rivers, gorges, hills, valleys, and one-way streets to contend with. They climbed an impossibly steep hill with a street pretending to be two lanes, but it was actually just one lane with haphazard parking. Downtown Pittsburgh lay across the river and far below, providing a view that was stunning but, judging by the dogged appearance of the houses around them, too common to raise property values. The Jaguar drew stares; it was out of place in this blue-collar neighborhood.

  The Pack presence led him to a house on the overlook, seemingly abandoned and boarded up. He followed local custom and parked by mostly blocking the right side of the street. The boards on the front door had been pried up and then pulled back into place, to give the appearance that the house was still unoccupied. The house had been built with its back to the street to take advantage of the view, so the front door actually opened to the kitchen. Someone had been renovating recently, and plaster dust scented the air and covered the floor. The vinyl flooring matched that of his adopted parents' playroom, a pattern of random terra-cotta-colored squares. The street-side windows were boarded shut, the kitchen and the hall were night dark, the living room off the hallway was a distant rectangle of light. No one came to greet him, so he stood in the darkness, reexperiencing the night of his adopted parents' death.