by Adam Thielen
BOOM!
The artillery exploded low in the air, with its downward momentum showering Nina and Sai with shrapnel. Several pieces landed around the sniper and one clanged against her metal leg. Several more stabbed into the top of Sai’s van.
Abriham moved to the minitank shelling his comrades and squatted down, grabbing it by the treads. He strained and for a moment, the tank sat smugly in place. Abe growled and extended his legs, slowly lifting the side of the vehicle until its weight did the rest, tipping it onto its side.
From the foyer, the last guard fired on Daria with his automatic rifle while she hid behind a pillar. Chunks of cement and plaster exploded from the support. She transitioned to blue and summoned a short purple shard that resembled a small dagger made of glass. The man stopped firing, and Daria leaned to the side then back. He fired again, a single shot this time. He was ready and waiting for her to make a move.
As her mind raced to think of a way out, she saw a thin glowing strand tracing the path of the guard’s last bullet. She looked at the shard as it slowly pulsed with a faint glow. She envisioned it following the bullet’s path, and the dagger pulled toward the trail. Cretu continued to focus on that thought until the shard pulled free of her hands and raced up to the foyer. It flew past the man’s gun and stabbed him through the shoulder.
The guard screamed and Daria ran to another downed officer and picked up his rifle. She bounded up the stairs and stopped before reaching the top, rolling to her back. The man had heard her coming, but his aim was too high. He fired over her body while Daria peppered the man’s torso.
The last of the resistance, the man slumped forward, dead. Cretu rested her head on the floor and sighed. The Cepheid campus had grown quiet.
“You betches good?” she asked.
“Nina, checking in.”
“Sai’s all good.”
“Did you guys see me? I tipped over a tank.”
“I’m too old.”
“For this shit?” asked Daria.
“Period,” replied Taq.
“Bad news,” said Sai. “We partied too loud. UTI security forces are on their way from every precinct in the city.”
“Did we even have an escape plan?” asked Nina.
“Everyone get out,” said Taq. “There’s something I’ve got to do.”
“So do I,” Cretu announced, heading for the elevator.
“Hurry,” said Taq. “Sai, Nina, Abe, you’ve got to get clear.”
“Understood,” said Abe. “Good luck.”
“Let’s blow, Neen,” said Sai.
“I’m comin’,” she replied. “Be well, and call us when this is over.”
Taq came out from behind the car and stared up at the tower.
“Anne!” he shouted. “I’m giving you one last chance to do the right thing! Disarm the bomb and bring down the missile.”
He waited for a half minute before she responded. “The missile can’t be stopped, not by me, not by anyone. It’s over, Jones. You won’t leave this city alive, and you can’t touch us in here,” she said.
“I don’t need to,” he called back. “I’m going to bring your tower down, and you with it.”
Courtemanche smiled and snorted contemptuously as she gazed down at the tiny mage. She turned to the board members, all of them standing and casting nervous glances at each other.
“C-can he do that?” one of the men sniveled.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she replied. “It’s his last-ditch attempt to scare me. He’s lost.”
“If they come up here, they’ll kill us all,” said another member.
“The lower floors are sealed and the elevator is locked down.”
“But they defeated your security,” said Khan. “They seem to be very resourceful.”
“Khan, please,” chided Anne. “Working the others into a hysteria is not helpful.”
“We need to get out of here,” declared a councilwoman. “You have a monocopter on the roof, right?”
Anne sighed. “Just calm down. The security officers are on their way.”
“You keep saying that! But where are they?”
“Let’s all cram into a copter before they find a way up here.”
“If they don’t bomb us first.”
CLICK.
Anne cocked back the hammer of her revolver and shoved it in the woman’s face. Broadus drew his handgun to let the rest of the board know that trying to disarm his boss would be a mistake.
“Listen to me, you fucking weasels,” started Anne. “Not one of you is leaving this room. I did not do all the heavy lifting for your pathetic company just so you could run out on me. None of you are worth a damn. You’re driven by fear instead of vision and half of you are barely literate. I do not like you,” she stated, moving the sights of the gun from one head to the next as she spoke. “I grit my teeth… and I tolerate you. We just murdered a thousand nocturnals and ushered in a new era. Now is not the time to start running, or we will never stop. So sit down and shut up.”
Taq took a deep breath and summoned a crown of ice onto his head. That measure would keep his head cool; the rest would be up to his endurance. He cleared his mind and held his left hand out. A red dot appeared before his palm and grew into a rolling ball of fire only a little taller than his hand. It floated, suspended in the air and tethered to his palm.
While holding that spell in his mind, he waved his right hand over the ball, leaving a trail of fire in its wake that fell and clung to the existing flames, growing the blaze. Jones placed his right hand beside his left, then pushed it aside, transferring the spell to his opposite hand. He then repeated the wave, this time with his left hand. More flames slithered onto the fireball. Back and forth he went, adding more and more Ether to the spell in a ritual he had never practiced at this magnitude.
Quickly, the blazing orb grew until its diameter was half Jones’s height. Anne marveled at the sight below. What he was doing did not seem possible, and it trivialized her tech-assisted casting.
The board had turned docile, some of them still watching the hologram of the missile flying high above the planet. Others closed their eyes, and a few watched Courtemanche as she stared out of the window. Broadus moved next to her out of curiosity and looked where her eyes pointed.
“What?” he whispered at the sight of the fire. “What is he casting?”
“He’s not just casting,” she said, almost giddy. “He’s weaving. He’s showing me that he can do it, Broadus. He does remember, that clever old man. He’s going to kill us all.”
“Yeah? You seem pretty froz about that,” said Broadus. “I think it’s time we cut our losses.”
“I made this, you know? I made all of this.” She stopped beaming and nodded. “Let’s go.”
She followed Broadus to the door while the board, quietly behaving themselves, watched her with alarm. Courtemanche turned to face them.
“I was wrong,” she said. “And it is time to part ways. I suggest you look out the window. It’s quite the show.”
“Wait, you can’t do this!” yelled Khan as Anne and the security chief stepped out of the room and closed the door behind them. Courtemanche used quick hand signals to lock the door, then followed Broadus to the elevator.
The chief of security of Cepheid had just left his employers to die. He exhaled in relief, glad that he was not among them. He pushed the button for the top floor and they rode up in silence. He looked at Anne. She stared into the distance, lost in her own thoughts and exhausted at the conclusion of a long day.
They stopped at the top floor. It was an empty set of offices, like much of the tower. As they climbed a short flight of stairs to the roof, Broadus became alarmed at the sound of a loud hum outside the door. He rushed forward and flung it open. He gawked at the small but well-armed monocopter hovering above the building, the wind whipping at it and pushing it to one side, followed by automated stabilizers pushing it back.
In the cockpit sat Daria Cretu, her face wild w
ith excitement at seeing the man emerge. Out of the loudspeaker, her voice cackled, “Surprise, muthafuckaaaz!”
Broadus drew his pistol and started firing at the copter. Cretu squeezed the trigger on her weapons joystick and a sharp line of large-caliber rounds tore through the chief’s torso. The two halves of his body folded together onto the rooftop. Anne shrieked and hid inside the stairwell.
Daria pulled away from the building. “I left our package in the lobby, maybe it will help,” she told Jones.
Anne emerged from hiding, looked down at Broadus, and then up at her stolen aircraft. She moved to the side of the roof facing Taq and looked down. The captive fireball was now almost as tall as he.
“Do it!” she shouted. “Take a building down with a spell, and your filthy kind will never know a moment’s peace. Humanity will hunt all of you down. You will beg for death, and those that follow after me will grant it!”
Taq’s ice crown had long since melted. Sweat mixed with blood trickled from the corners of his eyes, nostrils, and lips and flowed down his neck as veins bulged through his skin. He gritted his teeth, enduring the immense pain.
Obliging Courtemanche, he released his hold on the burning globe. It raced to the building, angling up above the front entrance and slamming into the gleaming marble facade of the lower section. The side of the tower caved in and the ball exploded into a supernova of orange fire.
The bomb Daria had left in the lobby exploded, knocking out several of the support columns. The fire from the spell traveled up the length of the skyscraper. For the first few floors, stone, foamcrete, and steel shattered or bulged outward. And for each floor above that, one by one, the windows exploded into equal parts dust and shards.
Both Taq and the Cepheid tower began to fall together. He collapsed to his knees as the weight of the building crushed the weakened floors at the bottom. He gazed up at the destruction. As the tower began to lean over him, he knew he had succeeded. He closed his eyes, fell onto his hands, and then lowered himself to his stomach and... looked across the picnic table at Annie as they sat under the great elm. A gentle breeze swept her dirty blonde hair with its blue spiral. She turned to Taq and smiled.
“I should have said yes,” he told her in his delirium. “I would have done anything for you. What is that, if not love? But it simply wasn’t what I felt. I thought my honesty a kindness, and when you left, I sat here—right in this spot—almost every week, blaming myself for your sudden departure, but it never occurred to me that you needed me. I’m sorry.” Taq’s vision blurred and went dark as the last remnant of his conscious thought ceased.
Courtemanche fell to her knees and clutched the rampart at the edge of the roof with her arms. She stared down at the ground, crazy-eyed. Her vocal cords constricted, and as she tried to scream, she could only force out a squeak. The rooftop cracked apart, the rampart crumbled, and Anne Courtemanche was swallowed by a sea of masonry.
Daria’s feet landed next to Jones as her new monocopter slowly descended. She transitioned her aura green and grabbed Taq by the armpits, rolled him over, and then dragged him onto the craft’s boarding ramp as the skyscraper tumbled downward, breaking apart as it fell.
“Please don’t be dead,” she said, unsure if she spotted his chest heave or if she had imagined it.
A shadow engulfed the copter and surrounding turf. She hurried to the pilot’s seat and yanked on the flight stick, then veered to the left and gunned the throttle. Glass and debris rained onto the aircraft while Daria evaded the large sections of tower that crashed to the ground.
As they departed, the form of the skyscraper disintegrated into a cloud of dust that enveloped the Cepheid campus.
Episode 19: The Birth of Darkness
The city watched stoically as a bonfire was created in the middle of the sandpit. The collective mood had gone from excited, to shocked, to somber. Tsenka Cho slipped away during the impromptu funeral service to hide in the locker room, uncertain if it was safe to return to her quarters. She had outed a conspiracy against New Apulon and killed a traitor, but had alienated her only ally in the process, with an unknown number of co-conspirators likely seeking revenge.
Cho began to doubt her decision-making abilities based on the end results and had decided she needed to leave, when the world stilled itself and the visage of Desre Somer appeared before her yet again.
“Desre!” said Cho. “Your key got me into his computer, and I thought I was doing the right thing, but now I’m not sure. Is this what you wanted?”
Desre frowned, turned her head apprehensively to look behind her, then turned back to Cho. “If you had not killed him, you would not be in a position now to convince the council to evacuate.”
“What? Evacuate? Why?”
“Because I have failed. Let me show you,” she said, bringing up a two-dimensional video next to her face. It showed Cepheid’s missile launching, then falling onto the city, then a massive explosion. “I tried to stop it. I tried so many times. This is the best I can do. You must save the nocturnals now.”
“My god, is that from the UTI?”
“Yes,” said Desre. “And it’s equipped with an antimatter bomb that will kill everyone here.”
“How much time do I have?” asked Cho.
“Less than thirty minutes,” stated Desre.
“That’s not enough!”
“It might be. The missile is designed to penetrate through the landing bay. The ice and rock will contain much of the explosion underground. Get everyone to the surface heading east, and they can make it,” said Desre.
The seer looked behind her again as a strange scraping noise emanated from her projection. She faced Tsenka. “You must let him go.”
“Who?”
“We all have to make a choice. Let him make his.” And at that, Desre disappeared.
“Matthias? Dammit.”
Cho stood from the bench and hurried to the Dracul’s throne room. At the large double doors, his guards blocked her path.
“The Dracul is seeing no one.”
“I’m his successor now, I have the right,” she asserted.
“There is no successor,” one of the two men said. “Not until the Dracul makes it official.”
Cho slammed her fist into the first man, and the back of his head hit the door. The second guard started to raise his rifle, but Tsenka caught it on the way up and struck him in the throat. He relinquished his grip on his weapon to grasp at his windpipe.
She kicked the doors, causing them to part only a sliver, then pushed one of them open just enough to slip through. Tsenka marched to the throne as guards standing at the sides of the room rushed to form a barrier between her and Andrei, who sat on the throne sulking.
At the sight of her, he reluctantly stood and approached the wall of guards. “You killed my successor. Have you now come for me?”
“His plan was to see you dead,” said Tsenka. “Not mine. Your infosec manager can back up what I say.”
“Rogers is nowhere to be found, strangely enough,” spoke the Dracul. “But there were three dead security guards in his office.”
“I had nothing to do with that.”
“I know,” said Andrei. “The cameras in the office were disabled. But in the corridor, your friend Matthias chased one of the men down, then dragged him back out of sight. Now that man is also dead.”
“Then ask Matthias what happened,” said Tsenka.
“Once we find him, I will. But if you have not come to kill me, then leave. I do not wish to speak.” Andrei turned and walked back to the throne.
“I need your help,” she said. “And I trust you.”
The ancient vampire sat and sighed. “And what would I help you with?”
“The UTI has launched a long-range missile,” revealed Cho. “It will be here in less than thirty minutes. It has the capability of reaching the city and will destroy everything and everyone inside when it detonates.”
“And how would you know of such a thing?”
“The seer I told you about; she appears to me,” she explained. “Matthias’s invite didn’t convince me to come; she did. I didn’t find Diego’s files unsecured; Desre provided me with the key. And now she has shown me the rocket that is on its way here to destroy you all.”
“Even if I believed you, what do you expect me to do, Agent Cho?”
“We can evacuate to the surface.”
“That would be suicide,” said Andrei. “There will be sunlight up there for the next six days.”
“You have vehicles for this.”
“I’m sorry,” the Dracul replied. “There’s no way the people would flee the safety of this place on my word alone.”
“I don’t need you to convince them. I need you to convince the council to check the satellite and see it for themselves.”
The Dracul stared blankly at Tsenka, then looked to his protectors. “You are really convinced of this… very well. Men, I must task you with escorting members of the council to the security command center,” he said. The guards turned to face him as he stood. “Each of you pick one and let no one stop you. Go.”
At his directive, the guards rushed past Cho to do their duty.
“Come, Tsenka, we will meet them there.”
An announcement rang throughout the pods and the council members of New Apulon were called, then brought by escort to the city’s security hub adjacent to the infosec office. The men and women stood around a small table with a hologram of the southern hemisphere of the Earth sticking out of it.
“Dis betta be good,” said a councilman dressed in pajamas featuring cartoon characters.
The interim infosec manager accessed the satellite in orbit above Antarctica that was under their control, pointing its radar dish north. The hemisphere zoomed large, covering the table. Instead of showing a rocket, several fighter planes and a pair of monocopters were fast approaching the continent.
“Oh god,” said a councilwoman.
“Tsenka thinks we should evacuate,” said Andrei. “But it looks like that would have been a mistake.”