Apex: A Hunter Novel

by Mercedes Lackey

  I was about to excuse myself and get out of there, leaving Jessie to further read her husband the riot act, when Tober came striding into the medbay. “Joy, Knight, have you seen what’s on the newsfeed channel?”

  Since neither of us had looked at anything since we came in, we both shook our heads. Tober aimed his Perscom at the nearest monitor, ran it back a little before we got a good look at it, and restarted it. The newsfeed channel came up right in the middle of something.

  It showed a line of people in some kind of armor, standing right at the Prime Barrier on our side, spaced about a hundred yards apart. “What the—” Mark began, but Tober shushed him and turned the sound up.

  “…Senior Psimon Abigail Drift’s new deployment for PsiCorps,” the announcer was saying brightly. “All Psimons have been pulled from regular duty to form the new Barrier Patrol.”

  The cam zoomed in on one of the silent, motionless figures. Tall figures, easily seven feet, and bulky to boot. “Each Psimon has been fitted with armor for protection, and a psionic amplifier, newly in production, that enables each Psimon to do the work of twenty.” The cam panned around to the front; the Psimon was wearing really tough carbon-fiber armor, and a faceless helmet that somehow managed to look friendly. “Psimons will each take eight-hour shifts at the Barrier, not only to detect Othersiders, but deter them as well. Senior Psimon Abigail Drift had this to say earlier, at the first deployment of PsiCorps at the Barrier.”

  Abigail Drift’s weasel face appeared; she was standing at a podium on the steps of the PsiCorps building. “Today marks a new day in the safeguarding of our city,” she intoned. “Thanks to tireless work by PsiCorps scientists and engineers, we have found a way to make Psimons truly effective against the Othersiders. PsiCorps has always been a bastion of protection for the Cits of Apex, but now they are more than that; they are as effective as any army. In fact, they can do what the army cannot do—they can ensure that the Othersiders are dealt with, and there will be no collateral damage. My Psimons can turn the Othersiders against each other, quickly disrupting and subverting any attempted attack on the Barrier and forcing them to kill each other. No longer must the Cits of Apex settle for passive protection and detection of trouble, and wait for response from the army and the Hunters. PsiCorps will provide active protection and detection, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.”

  Mark and I exchanged an incredulous glance. “Do you suppose she figured out a way to boost her Psimons that isn’t going to kill them?” he said.

  “She must have—” I began, but then the screen went to a static image, the logos of PsiCorps and Apex City, side by side, flanked by two Psimons in armor, with a third in armor kneeling at the front. Their hands were conspicuously empty of weapons. “PsiCorps, day and night,” the announcer said. “Guarding your city!” There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that this new slogan had been deliberately phrased to echo the one Apex News used with stories about Hunters: And that’s your Hunters on the job! Keeping Apex and the territories safe!

  And the screen switched to the announcer, and business news. Tober turned it off.

  “What are we going to do about this?” he demanded.

  “You tell me,” I replied, before Mark could say anything. “Drift is not only completely within her rights to do this, she’s obligated to, if she really has found a way to boost her Psimons without killing them. Can we stand around at the Barrier all day?”

  “Well…no,” Tober admitted.

  “Seems to me this is a win for us,” Mark observed. “You look how she’s got her Psimons spaced—even if she moves them to five hundred or a thousand yards apart, that still means she’s going to have to pull all the snoops in the city and armor them up to keep them at the Barriers day and night. Do you really care if they do that?”

  “Well…no,” Tober repeated. “But…”

  “Psimons themselves are not our enemies, Tober,” Mark said reasonably. “Drift, now…she’s got a hatchet just waiting for Charmand, and she’s dying to replace us. But the prefect knows that, and he knows never to turn his back on her. As for us—well, they can’t be on callout and stand duty at the Barrier all day. That frees the Hunters up to patrol inside, and us to take care of trouble outside.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “So the best way we can back him is to keep doing what we do already…excellently.” Mark concluded. Jessie nodded in agreement, and so, finally, did I. “Don’t forget that Psimons saved our bacon at the first Barrier Battle. If they can do now what they did then, that’s going to be a big weight off our shoulders. Any amount of Othersiders they can stop at the Barrier is going to mean fewer we have to deal with in the city. And that means the more of us who can deal with what’s going on outside.”

  Tober and I exchanged a glance, and I shrugged. “He’s right. The one thing we should worry about is whether or not the Psimons really can do what she claimed without burning out and dying. They aren’t going to be helping all that much if they can’t. And we need to be ready for the consequences of their failure, if it happens.”

  Tober’s face cleared. “Well, that’s right. So what do we do about it?”

  “The first thing we do is make sure the armorer knows all about this as soon as he gets in,” I replied. “I’ll go talk to Hammer and Mei. You go talk to Flashfire. Mark already knows. That’s six of us. So whoever is not on callout when Kent gets in reports to him with everything we know.”

  Mark and Tober both nodded. Jessie got an almost-sly look on her face. “I c’n make sure Mark is here,” she declared. “I wanna ice down them bruises anyway.”

  I looked at Mark, who shrugged. Or rather, shrugged with one shoulder. Those bruises had to be hurting, and if it meant he was going to be here to make sure Kent heard all about this, well…“Works for me,” I said.

  “All right,” he agreed, and texted something on his Perscom. I assumed it was to Kent, asking him for contact as soon as he returned. “I’ll ping you in on this if you’re still in HQ, Joy,” he said as he lay down so his wife could begin working on him. “I’d rather you were the one to handle this anyway.”

  I sighed, but agreed.

  As it happened, I needn’t have worried. Kent actually saw the line of armored Psimons at the Barrier as he came in, and being Kent, the first thing he did was contact someone at HQ to find out what was going on. Only when he had learned more did he answer Mark’s message, and at that point he was on his way to a meeting with my uncle, along with the brigadier general who was in charge of all of the army assigned to protect Apex. The general, I learned later, was not a happy man; Drift had swooped in and absconded with all the Psimons assigned to the army without so much as an “Excuse me, I need these.”

  This was way past my pay grade, and I figured if there was anything they wanted me to know, they’d let me in on it soon enough. As for me, after another callout—a small one that only needed a team of four this time—I had something else in mind that needed doing.

  The problem was, in order to do it, I’d have to get on the other side of the Prime Barrier. Without anyone knowing.

  At night.

  When my shift was over, I went to my room and summoned Bya and Myrrdhin. I patted my bed and they both jumped up and laid themselves down on it. I sat cross-legged on the comforter opposite them.

  Guys, I thought at them, I need to talk to Torcion. Which means I need to get on the other side of the Barrier.

  You could summon him here, Myrrdhin pointed out. To this room, if you liked…

  No way in hell am I bringing him on this side of the Barrier to memorize a location for a Portal, I said immediately. No, it has to be in Spillover or not at all.

  She’s right, Bya agreed. We need to think of a place in Spillover that is safe at night.

  Myrrdhin thought about this. Or we think of a place in Spillover that we can make safe.

  It got very quiet. I knew better than to interrupt at this point; I couldn’t think of any place that would do,
and they needed to compare mental notes. Finally they both looked up at me again.

  We have a place. We will need to go for a walk so you can summon Dusana. We will take you there, then you can summon the rest of the pack and we will make the place safe.

  And that was what we did. I left my Perscom on the bed, made sure I was armed with my old weapons that were still in my closet, and we slipped outside. I summoned Dusana and we bamphed our way across the landscape, to the Barriers, through a Pylon, and to the spot the Hounds had decided on. It turned out to be the ruined building where Ace’s brother had died. We lucked out. It was empty. It was also dark. I summoned an entire fleet of mage-lights; I figured better to chance that something might see them and come investigate than to get ambushed in the dark by something I couldn’t see.

  The Hounds deployed themselves around the edge, and I stood in the middle with mage-lights overhead, and called. “Torcion! Torcion! Tor—”

  “Right here, shepherd,” said that smooth, amused voice from behind me.

  I managed to turn without looking as if he’d sent my heart right into my throat. “We need to talk,” I said. Firmly, I hoped.

  “I thought we were,” he replied, with a slight smirk. Somehow they manage to be alien and have all the most annoying characteristics of humans.

  But then I remembered what his people had just done, and I smoldered with rage. “One of your friends just staged a raid on a town today and kidnapped about a hundred children. He tried to kidnap one of us too.” I had stalked toward him, and now I was right up in his face. Or at least as up in his face as I could get, seeing that I was at least a foot and a half shorter than he was. “What does he want with those children?” I snarled.

  He looked down at me, as startled as if a kitten had suddenly grown the teeth and claws of a cougar. “It seems as if he has learned that one can gain more aetheria by keeping someone alive than by merely slaying him.” His brows creased. “This does not bode well for me or for you, shepherd. What did he look like?”

  Curbing my temper, I described the golden Folk Lord, and Torcion’s brow creased even more. “That is Laetrenier. He is the chief architect of the Grand Alliance. I do not know if he will keep this wisdom to himself, in order to gain ascendancy, or impart it to the rest of the Alliance, in order to strengthen the whole. In either case, this is dire news for those like me, and for your kind.”

  “Well, what are we going to do about it?” I growled, clenching my jaw with equal amounts of fury and fear.

  “For the moment, we are going to do nothing at all, for you and I are not yet a we,” he replied maddeningly, with a slight toss of his head that made the beads in it sparkle. “You may do whatever you choose. I am going to consider my options.” He made as if to move away.

  “Wait!” I snarled. “I’m not done yet!”

  I really, really did not expect him to stop, but he did. “The Manticores—the monsters with stings in their tails—they stung a friend of mine. He’s unconscious—”

  I was going to ask for the antidote, but he waved his hand. “He will awaken in time. There is no great cause for concern.”

  “And…” I stopped. Did I want to tell him about the Psimons and their new, supposedly boosted abilities? What if he was just stringing me along to get whatever information I’d give him? I’d been suspicious of Josh; shouldn’t I be even more suspicious of a Folk Lord?

  He peered at me quizzically, the mage-light casting flattering light on his disturbingly handsome face.

  “And what are we supposed to do to get the children back?” I said instead.

  “I will admit…this troubles me,” he said, finally. “I will give it thought.”

  This time he did turn and walk away, far enough to cast a Portal. But before he stepped through it, he paused one more time and looked back at me.

  And then at Myrrdhin.

  The Hound nodded once as if the Folk Lord had spoken to him. Then Torcion said to me, “I think you and I are tentative allies, shepherd. When I have information for you, your companion there will bring you a blue rose.”

  Then he stepped through the Portal and was gone.

  DUSANA GOT ME BACK into my room without incident, and my Perscom and vid-screen showed no one had tried to contact me in all that time I was gone. I felt a little weak with relief that I had managed to get out and back without incident. I was strapping the Perscom back on when my vid-screen lit up with an incoming message alert.

  “Accept,” I said, and sat down as the screen brightened to show my uncle.

  “If you don’t get any callouts tomorrow, I want you to do some research for me in Spillover,” he said with a very slight lift of one eyebrow.

  “Would it be acceptable if I do it after I get off shift?” I replied. “I know it’ll be dark, but with all my Hounds, I should be all right.”

  He sucked on his lower lip a moment. “I’ll tell Kent to assign you some extra protection,” he replied. “But yes, that’s acceptable. I see your point. If we get another callout like the one today, you should be able to respond.”

  “Yes, sir,” I replied, and the screen went blank again.

  So…he and Kent must have put their heads together and decided I needed to see if Josh knew anything about the new Psimon program. That was pretty reasonable—a good idea, in fact. No stone unturned and all that.

  Mind you, I didn’t think Josh knew anything we hadn’t already guessed, but he was our only contact who had any real insight at all about PsiCorps. At this point we didn’t have much else.

  Thanks to nerves and energy expenditure, I was starving. I ate what was in my cooler unit and went straight to bed. I had a feeling it was going to be a long day.

  I wasn’t blasted awake by a callout alarm, at least, but I’d barely gotten dressed when the callout came. Miracle of miracles, it wasn’t a full-team callout, but it was the first of four that day. I dragged back in after the last, wondering if the night shift had been hit that hard. At least the Othersiders had acted normally, attacking with barely controlled chaos.

  I hadn’t forgotten Uncle’s plan, so as soon as my shift was over and I got a hot meal into me, I headed for the armory. But Kent wasn’t alone.

  Mark Knight was with him. Was this Uncle’s idea of “extra protection”? I’d thought it just meant he’d issue me a special weapon or something!

  “Joy, Knight, I’ve called a pod to take you to the Pylon at your entrance point,” Kent said without any warm-up. “Joy, you can brief Mark once you’re on the other side of the Barrier. Knight, you might want to pack an RPG launcher.”

  Well, better him than me. Those suckers were heavy.

  “Report in person to me when you get back,” Kent concluded, and checked his Perscom. “Your pod’s here.”

  Nice thing about Christers. They’re used to being told what to do and not questioning it. Mark kept his lip buttoned all the way to the Pylon, so to fill the silence, I told him about the Folk Lord I’d chased off back at the Manticore ambush.

  He made some rumbling noises. “So I guess he was the one that wanted kidnapped humans?” he said at last.

  “Not humans in general,” I corrected. “Children, and at least one Hunter. You think that’s significant?”

  “Dunno. They did try to carry off those ag-workers. Maybe they got their hands on some adults from Spillover, and—they weren’t right, somehow?” He shrugged.

  “Kids are more easily intimidated,” I mused aloud. “Also more easily scared. Maybe they’re better sources of manna because of that? We already know Hunters are better sources of manna than Cits, so that could be why they wanted one or more of us.” Of course I couldn’t tell him what Torcion had told me, but maybe I could steer him in the right direction.

  “You think now they want to farm humans for manna?” he hazarded. “Well, it’s an idea. Which is more than we had before.”

  “It’s a pretty ugly idea, but it’s the one that makes the most sense given what little we know,” I replied. Th
en I made a face—which, of course, he couldn’t see in the dark of the pod. “I’m beginning to feel like I somehow brought a curse down on us. I show up, and suddenly bad things happen.”

  “I prefer to think that God knew bad things were going to happen, so He sent you,” Mark countered. I blinked and looked at him hard. He sounded serious. He looked serious. Holy crud, he couldn’t be serious, could he?

  “Well, then God has terrible taste in saviors,” I replied. “Because I haven’t managed to accomplish much of anything.”

  He snorted but didn’t say a word.

  It wasn’t dark out here after sundown; the Pylon and the Barrier both glowed with a bluish incandescence, too faint to be seen by day but quite obvious by night. We got through to the other side, put on our NVGs, and summoned. Mark turned to me once the Way was opened and our Hounds were trotting through.

  “All right, what’s all this cloak-and-dagger stuff?” he demanded. “I’m tired of being a mushroom here.”

  “And I don’t blame you. Come on, I’ll explain as we walk.” With Bya in front, Myrrdhin behind, Mark’s Angels overhead, and the rest packed up around us, I told him everything, from when Josh came to me in desperation to when Scarlet, Kent, Uncle, and Bya and I smuggled him out.

  When I got to the end of that part, Mark let out a big sigh. “Darn it all, Joy, you should have come to me earlier. Josh’s my buddy too, y’know.”

  “I didn’t want you to find yourself in the crosshairs of a PsiCorps investigation,” I told him truthfully. “And if anyone had asked you about him, I wanted you to be able to look surprised and worried. You’re a worse actor than I am.”

  He rubbed the back of his head. “S’truth,” he admitted. “I can’t act for spit.”

  It was a wonderful warm night, with crickets and things making soft sounds all around us, and fireflies blinking in every direction. It was too bad there were so many things out here that would kill us if we gave them the chance. Having to keep your head on a swivel rather ruined the lovely evening. I certainly didn’t dare to relax in Spillover, not for a minute.