Before me—Friedrich emerges, hulking, filling the tunnel mouth, for a moment resembling some monstrous child being birthed into the cave. His head scrapes the tunnel ceiling. Sparks scrape, rock complains, metal screams. An ugly booming, roaring sound. A terribly familiar one.
My eyes fly to Volk and Hermann. And they knew. They knew. I knew that they knew something. That moment, that look. It was a decision to not tell us. To not bring us to this moment in full awareness.
But why? Are they the traitors Hannah suspects, or just the desperate people I want to believe they are?
But then there is no time for why. Because far too many people are trying to kill us at once.
34
WITH SIX SHOTS TO SECURE A WEAPON
Well, I’m certainly not going to pick a fight with Friedrich when I only have six pistol rounds to my name. And short of shooting Hannah in the back, that leaves me with the cultists.
They are jerking to their feet, scrabbling up from the moments of repose they apparently enjoy while in the company of their ridiculous, prodigious swords. I sprint toward them. Within seconds they are sprinting toward me.
In the breach, Tabitha stands behind Clyde, not cowering exactly, but hardly offering resistance. Clyde’s arm is outstretched, his mouth moving. His arm bucks, as if absorbing recoil. A cultist’s forward charge is abruptly reversed. He flies backwards, body snapping against architecture. Clyde lets the spell fly again, again.
He can’t get them all, they swarm past him. One closes on Felicity, swinging his sword in a flat horizontal arc aimed directly at her midriff. She ducks, rolls beneath the blade, closes the distance. And, again, up close the cultist’s absurd swords are more a hindrance than a help.
Felicity rises out of the roll. The heel of her palm strikes the cultist’s Adam’s apple. He drops the sword, staggers back. She catches him a quick blow to the side of the temple with her left hand, and as he staggers right, she pivots on one heel, spins, and slams a foot into the opposite side of the man’s head.
She’s had some hand-to-hand combat training. I shake my head. Felicity makes Chuck Norris look like an amateur. And she does it in hiking boots.
I charge into the fight, pistol up. As soon as a target looks big enough, I fire. I need to clear a space, a moment’s breathing room.
One cultist drops, a ragged wound where his jaw was. I catch another in the shoulder. He drops his sword but keeps running at me. Right up until Clyde’s spell catches him in his midriff and sends him jagging sideways across the floor, head and heels clattering over the rock. We come together, forming a tight knot.
A cultist lunges and I fire yet again, the bullet smashing into his chest, sending him reeling back.
Another comes, I aim, fire.
Nothing.
Six bullets. No weapon secured. And to make matters worse, I’ve just proven that Hannah was right when she said I should count my shots.
The cultist’s sword lances toward me, a searing blow aimed low, aimed to gut me, to be hard to avoid. My weight is off from the firing stance. All I can do is go with momentum, falling toward the blade, desperately trying to twist as I do.
I smack against the flat of the blade as it passes me, feel the upper edge, slice into the underside of my flailing arm. The wound is hot and bright and threatens to eclipse everything. I hit the floor. More pain. I grit my teeth. Close the distance. That’s what Felicity did. That’s how to survive without a weapon. And I have to survive.
But I’m too slow, too dazed from my impact with the cave’s stone floor. The distance is not small enough, and my attacker too quick. I’m on my hands and knees when the next sweep comes. He pivots like Felicity, letting the weight of the sword carry him around. I drop to the ground again, smack my chin, blink lights from my eyes. The cultist has his back to me, still spinning, is bringing the sword up to bring it down in a heavy two-handed arc.
I don’t bother getting up, I roll, twisting my body. Close the distance.
The sword is above the cultist’s head when I hit his ankles. It’s not a hard blow, but his balance is precarious, and he doesn’t need much of a push.
With a yell he trips over me, carried by the weight of his sword, feet actually leaving the ground as he’s whipped up by the momentum. The tip of the sword smashes into the ground six inches from me. Desperately hanging onto the handle, the cultist is cartwheeled around, a blur of flailing legs and naked flesh.
And then he completes his three hundred and sixty degree circuit, smashes back-first into the vertical edge of his own blade.
The two halves of the cultist go sailing over my head, land in separate bloody heaps.
Gingerly I pick myself up. The sword is leaning at a slight angle after the impact of its former owner. The handle points toward me.
I reach out and grab the hilt. Weapon secured.
35
The back of the cave is filling with Uhrwerkmänner in a way that I tend to associate with imminent death. Hermann and Volk fall back.
Friedrich dwarfs them. Before him, they are a child’s action figures. He smashes a fist at Volk. The Uhrwerkmänner dances back, surprisingly light on his feet, but comes up against the edge of the cave. He barely ducks Friedrich’s follow-up blow. The monstrous Uhrwerkmänn’s fist plows into the rock, sending shrapnel shards flying. They dent and pit Volk’s armor plating.
In the moment while Friedrich recovers his balance, Volk is on him. He delivers a flurry of blows to Friedrich’s midriff. Gears whistle, his fists blur, metal screams.
Friedrich backhands Volk halfway across the room.
The noise is deafening. Like a car crash. Volk rolls, comes up on his feet. Like a badass. Apparently he went to the same hand-to-hand combat training course as Felicity. Still, one of his shoulder guards is mostly scrap, hanging uselessly off his shoulder.
The spot on Friedrich that Volk was whaling on looks like it’s been lightly buffed. This fight just doesn’t seem fair.
Friedrich starts advancing on Volk.
A gunshot joins the cacophony of battle. A ricochet sparks off Friedrich’s sleek head. Another shot, just as ineffective.
Friedrich turns and looks at Hannah, standing puny before him, pistol gripped uselessly in her hands.
She fires again. The bullet pings off Friedrich’s skull. He keeps staring at her. The sort of stare that precedes very bad things.
I stumble toward her, dragging the massive sword after me. It clatters and jumps over the rocks, like an anchor weighing me back. But it’s the only weapon I’ve got.
Hannah gets off three more shots before I get to her. Friedrich is on the move. She’s lining up the fourth. I slap her hands away.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I yell above the sound of the battle. “You said you have three-quarters of a clip. You might as well be spitting paper wads at him!”
She turns to me, eyes blazing. “I am buying bloody time for Hermann.”
My brows crease. I glance back at Friedrich. He is ten yards away, closing fast.
And then I see Hermann, in the air, leaping, up above Friedrich, then coming down toward him. Like a basketball player going for the slam dunk.
As he comes down Hermann delivers a hammer blow to Friedrich’s chin. I almost expect to see Friedrich’s head spin and his eyes roll back to reveal dollar signs.
As it is, Friedrich is mostly stoic about the experience.
One of his hands fires out too fast for me to track, smashes into Hermann’s gut. Metal screams. Hermann’s body jack-knifes around Friedrich’s fist. Then, with a flex of pistons, he flings Hermann away.
“You buy Hermann any more time and he’s going to get killed,” I snap. “We need to get the fuck out of here.”
The skin around Hannah’s eyes tightens as she stares at Hermann dragging himself to his feet. One of his legs trails badly as he limps a retreat.
Volk has another Uhrwerkmänn caught by the throat and is ripping streams of cogs and rubber piping from a
gash in its midriff, but two other robots are circling to his left and right.
Kayla seems to be having fun at least. She is astride a fallen Uhrwerkmänn repeatedly stabbing it in the back of the head.
I look back to the other fight. It is blurring into this one. Several cultists are hacking down an Uhrwerkmänn, its limbs lying around it in spreading pools of oil. Another Uhrwerkmänn is wearing most of the upper torso of a cultist on its fist like a glove.
Felicity, Clyde, and Hannah are at the edge of the cavern, pushed up against the wall. Felicity ducks one sword blow. Tabitha screams, holds up her laptop.
A sword blow bisects the machine. Sparks explode everywhere. Tabitha screams again, louder this time.
Clyde spins, sees the cultist preparing a backhand sweep of the swords, and steps toward him. His hand is held out, is inches from the cultist’s face.
Electricity crackles over Clyde’s teeth as his speaks his spell. The convexity of the cultist’s face inverts, becomes concave. As he drops to the floor his skull becomes a bowl full of blood.
But Clyde’s rage has cost him his situational awareness. Even as I start toward him, the pommel of a cultist’s sword smashes into the back of his head. He sprawls. The cultist flips her blade up.
My scavenged sword still feels like an anchor. I try to get it up in front of me, but I don’t have the time to take the weight, to work it all out.
Instead I keep running, put my feet down and push. The cultist’s muscles bunch as she prepares the killing blow. My feet pound on unforgiving rock.
The sword starts to descend.
I barrel straight past the cultist.
My sword, pivoted out at an angle, clattering over the rock, slices into her ankle. She screams. Staggers. Her blow goes wide.
I stagger to a stop, manage to turn despite the momentum of my sword. The cultist is on the floor, screaming, gripping the jagged stump of her leg.
Damn, these swords are sharp.
Felicity is caught between two cultists, unable to close on one without exposing herself to the other. Clyde is still on his hands and knees shaking his head.
Tabitha is staring at the separate halves of her laptop and weeping. Openly weeping.
We have to get out of here.
“Hermann!” I bellow, but the battle is too loud for him to hear me. He and Friedrich are on opposite sides of the cave, tearing cultists from their bodies. Friedrich hurls one at Hermann, and the body leaves an obscene red stain down the Uhrwerkmänn’s body as it slumps to the floor.
I run toward him, as fast as my sword will let me.
“Hermann!” I scream again.
This time he hears me, flicks his head in my direction, some approximation of annoyance on his approximate features.
“The oil!” I jab my finger at the fallen Uhrwerkmänn. “Set fire to the oil!”
It’s all I can think of. A desperate stab at buying us time so we can beat our retreat.
Then he spits. A stream of liquid fire leaping out from between his teeth.
It is like someone turned the lights on in hell. Maddened cultists coated in ink and blood scrambling on the walls, dancing between fallen bodies, the air full of their sharpened blades. And among them—maddened Uhrwerkmänner, vast hulking ruins of machinery, coated in rust and blood, bits of bodies smeared across their limbs.
The flame from Hermann’s spit reaches the fallen Uhrwerkmänn. There is a soft whoomph. And then the louder, angry clap of detonation.
The shockwave cracks me across the face, sends me spinning. I eat floor, taste stone and sweat, oil and blood.
When I come up, Kayla is wiping her mouth, spitting. Beside her a cultist half picks himself up. Without even looking, Kayla spears him through his skull.
Jesus, we have to get out of here.
“Move!” I scream, lungs burning. The room is filling with smoke from the Uhrwerkmänn’s splayed flaming corpse. “MI37 to me! We have to move!”
Felicity is picking herself up beside me. Blood runs from gashes in her forehead and cheek. Tabitha is lying on her back, still clutching the separate halves of her laptop, still staring at them. Clyde grabs her underneath one shoulder, hauls. Blood runs down his arm, leaves a stain on her dark skin.
Kayla is moving, has Hannah in a vice grip. Hermann and Volk follow. Friedrich’s bellow chases them.
We push past stumbling cultists, through the bronze portal, into the belly of their fortress. The room is all yellow rock and hard edges. My over-sized sword skitters over the floor, tugging at my shoulder. Two corridors lead away, one left, one right.
“Left,” I yell. Experience has taught me that when you have absolutely no information to go on, decisiveness trumps wasting time trying to apply logic. Especially when you’ve only got a two-second lead on the bastards trying to kill you. We jag left—
—straight into a group of cultists charging toward the sound of fighting. Seeing us, they hesitate.
Kayla doesn’t.
She barrels into them like a sword-wielding bowling pin and limbs fly like struck nine-pins. I bellow with exertion hefting the leviathan sword above my head. The laceration in the bottom of my right arm screams pain. I scream too.
A cultist has turned her back, has turned to face Kayla. I bring my sword down. I bisect her to her sternum. Her feet splay. Her own sword drops lifeless to the ground.
One down.
I go to tug my sword free. It doesn’t move.
To my left and right cultists close.
Oh shit and balls. I heave on the sword once, twice more. But it is too heavy, too firmly embedded in the bone. Shit, shit, shit.
One cultist swings laterally, the other straight down. Because they’re assholes, I imagine.
I drop the sword, leap backwards as fast and as hard as I can.
I have to live. If I die then reality dies. I have to live.
Right up until reality dies.
God, this is messed up.
A sword skims over my face, a sting of pain from the tip of my already injured nose as it bounces off the flat of the blade. The descending sword catches on my shoe leather, sends me tumbling.
I lie on the floor. Blood is flowing from my nose again. I’d probably be more concerned about that if wasn’t lying prone on the ground with two cultists poised above me.
I glance around. Help? Anyone? Ferris Bueller?
And there’s Hannah. With a pistol. She points it first at one cultist and then another.
And she doesn’t pull the trigger. She switches her aim, back and forth, back and forth. There’s a helpless expression on her face.
She sees me staring.
The cultists’ swords go up.
She shrugs, infinitesimally, her lips move. I can’t hear her but her words are plain enough to read. “Only one shot.”
So fucking take it. But I’m through giving advice for her to ignore.
The swords are above the cultists’ heads. The moment their balance is weakest.
I push hard with my hands, lift my head, my legs, spin on my arse. My feet connect with one cultist’s ankles, a moment later my head with the other’s. The world spins a moment. I lose track of the falling swords.
I don’t knock the cultists over, but I do knock their swords wide. One blade lands an inch to my right, the other closer to my left.
Finally the shot rings out. A cultist falls to the floor.
One down. Thank God for small mercies.
Even as the second cultist tugs to free his sword from the trench it’s gouged in the floor, I am rolling forward and up, pushing myself to crash into his legs. He goes down, tumbling over me.
I hear the meaty smack of him landing face first on his own blade.
Two down.
I stand up. Everything is shaking. Around us the cultists have fallen. The smell of gunpowder is heavy in the air. I raise a shaking hand to my nose. The pain is excruciating. But the shape of my schnozz is still the same. Only skinned.
All in all, the fi
ght probably took about ten seconds. Unfortunately, our lead was only about two.
That booming screaming roar comes again, almost so loud it sends me reeling. An Uhrwerkmänn fills the corridor around us. A cultist clings to its back, howling and smashing. He sees us, lets out a shriller scream.
“Run!” I bellow again. “Run!”
36
A MINUTE LATER
I collapse panting. This is better than fighting with my backpack on, but not by much. We are horrendously outnumbered. I had rather conceived of this as a stealth operation. I honestly believed that a secret underground passage would lead to a secret doorway. This is to stealth what McDonald’s is to dieting.
We’re in a small square chamber. It is surprisingly decorative given the spartan aesthetic that seems to dominate here. There is a geometric tapestry in reds and maroons hanging from one wall and red flowers in an earthenware vase sitting on a blocky table cut from the same rough yellow stone as the fort itself.
Kayla is pressed against one wall. She peers around one corner. “I think we’re finally free of the feckin’ bastards.”
Volk and Hermann hulk in the middle of the room. They have made the sneaking thing significantly harder. It’s been like trying to sneak down corridors while accompanied by two pieces of farming machinery. One of whom complains loudly much of the time.
“I do not know why we ever asked for your help,” Hermann grunts. “This is pitiful.”
I ignore him. Pointing out that he’s only managed to get this close to Lang’s papers because of MI37’s efforts is only likely to set him off further.
Rather to my surprise, the one who seems to take his criticisms most to heart is Hannah. She flinches away from the Uhrwerkmänn, shaking her head. Kayla takes two steps toward her friend, reaching out a hand, but Hannah flinches away again. She seems to fold in on herself.
“Hey.” Kayla’s severe allergy to sounding in any degree soft or sympathetic makes the comfort sound harsh.
“No.” Hannah shakes her head. “Just… no.” She looks around the room, a pained expression. “I mean… just, what the bloody fuck is this? I mean… There’s no intel. There’s no plan. This is shit creek and it’s like we all just sat around and made time for burning paddles before we even got here. And it’s always fucking like this. Always. And… and…” She wrestles to find an expression to express herself. Nose wrinkled, lips curled. Some awkward place between disgust and sadness. “And you all seem so fucking comfortable here.” She’s aghast. “Like this is how it’s meant to be.” She points at me. “Even bloody him. He bloody took on two sword-wielding lunatics and won. And I couldn’t even pick one to bloody shoot in the face. I mean what the hell is that? That bloody… clown outclassed me. Hugely. I mean hugely. It was like I was a bloody rookie. And… Jesus.” She sweeps a hand around the room. “This is wrong. Everything you do is wrong. But I’ve read your file. And you do good shit. And I can’t do it. I bloody can’t. I’m bloody good at my job. I was promoted into this. This was a big bloody deal. And it’s going to fucking kill me. Because I can’t fucking hack it. And that…” She points at me again. Struggles to put her disdain into words, “…that fucking muppet is good at it.” She shakes her head. “I don’t understand. I just don’t. And it’s doing my head in something bloody awful.”
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