“So, we strike multiple locations at once?” Caleb asked. “Division of forces in the face of an entrenched and numerically superior enemy is dangerous, but I can’t see many other options in this case. One House strikes the main power generators, another the backup, and Asmodeus heads for the prison, attempting to interfere with their security on the way? I would lead my Choir to whatever passes for their primary command center and attempt to throw their chain of command into disarray. With any luck, we’ll confuse them long enough to reach Azriphel before they receive orders to execute him.”
Kalil shook his head. “The generators are almost as distant from the entrances as the prison. They designed this facility from the ground up to be a defensive fortress. The central section is storage and housing, and from there the structure splits into four wings. Each wing only has two entrances. Those chokepoints will be dangerous. Everything of tactical importance is as far away from the primary entrance as possible.”
“And infiltration isn’t an option,” Tink said. “They must have a schedule for visitors and supplies, so anyone else coming in is automatically a security breach. Even if we did get in quietly, the first chokepoint would bust us. Did we find a schedule set up, Kalil? We’re not going to arrive there just in time for a routine delivery to find us, are we?”
“No,” he said. “I thought the same, but I didn’t find any evidence.”
Tink frowned. “That’s even worse. Supply runs might be done by request only.”
I tried to think of other possibilities. “One of the entrances is for cargo, right? They’d need a large entrance for bulk supplies to keep the place up and running. Food, fuel, water.”
Kalil nodded and shifted back to the overview map to point it out. “The central hub has a sizable entrance here, between these wings. It will probably be the easiest entrance to find, but also the most secure.”
Jakob of House Amon grunted. “If we could intercept a supply delivery, we could use it to get inside and surprise them. Or simply sabotage it.”
“It’d get us inside, but it wouldn’t get us far enough,” Venora pointed out. “Good, but not good enough.”
“Then what do you suggest?” Jakob asked.
An idea was coming together in my head. “Kalil, do you think they’ll have any security on the outside? Something tells me they’d need specialized electronics to survive the climate.”
“Nothing large enough to be visible on satellite images. Any electronics capable of surviving the weather would need insulation and probably a heating element. That’s not even accounting for power and communications. They’d either need insulated battery packs or be wired into their base grid somehow. It’s not impossible, mind you. It’d just be difficult, time consuming, and horrible to maintain.”
I turned to Tink. “Could they have magical security outside? Sensory circuits?”
She chewed on her lower lip for a moment before answering. “I want to say no. I don’t think any magical circuits would survive on the surface. They’d have to inscribe them deep into the ice to keep from breaking during a strong wind or storm, and they’d need to power them constantly. Like Kalil said, not impossible, just really damn hard to keep up. If anything, they’d inscribe runes on their doors. Open the doors, break the circuit, alarm goes off. Much easier to maintain.”
Kalil was flicking back and forth through different slides. “All the entrances look like airlocks,” he said. “Even the primary cargo entrance.”
“That’s it, then.” Tink pointed at the map. “If you open the outer door, alarms go off. The people inside verify you and either open the inner doors, or make you dead.”
“I don’t suppose you can spoof those alarms,” I said. “No, silly question. I’m just making it more complicated than it needs to be. Just to clarify, between the two of you, they shouldn’t be able to tell if we’re on the surface above their base. Right?”
Tink and Kalil looked at each other before shaking their heads. “Unless they have some deep magic below the ice and snow,” Tink added. “But that’d be next to impossible to keep up. Besides, they have a crazy amount of security just being in Antarctica. Who the hell is going to find them there?”
I clapped my hands together. “I have an idea. You’re going to love this. Kalil, your map of the facility is to scale, right? Superimpose it on the external view, assuming the cargo entrance is at the GPS coordinates. Orient it however you want.”
It took him a couple of minutes to arrange the images, but once he did, I jumped to the screen. “First, we find the cargo entrance,” I said. “Then use it as the origin to find another entrance. With two points of reference, we can figure out how the base is oriented. It’s not perfectly symmetrical, right?”
“No, it’s not. The cargo entrance juts out from the central hub.”
“So what does this do for us?” Tink asked.
I pointed at three locations, the power, the backup, and the holding block. “We get ourselves directly above these locations and we make our own entrances.” I held my other hand up and sparked hellfire. “Each House has two dozen demons. We can melt through the ice until we hit the base itself. Even if it’s hardened, it won’t be able to hold up against two dozen demons throwing hellfire at it.”
Caleb frowned and stepped up to investigate the map. “How deep below the ice is the base? Do we have any idea?”
“It can’t be too deep. The cargo entrance has to open to the outside, so how tall is it?”
“Thirty feet at its highest point. It looks like the entrance is a ramp,” Kalil said. “And it’s not the only thing on the top floor. If the top of their cargo bay is just below the surface and they have standard ten foot ceilings, I’d say the outermost ceiling of the top floor is around twenty feet below the surface, best case. The map doesn’t include the external ramp access. It could be longer, which would imply the base is deeper.”
“Even at twenty feet below, that’s a lot of ice to melt,” one of the Leviathans said. “But we can do it. If we melt enough, it’ll be water on top of their structure instead of ice, and water weighs more than ice by volume. They’ll have their structure reinforced enough to hold up the weight of ice, but if we weaken enough of the ceiling, the weight of water could collapse it.”
“Flooding a base in Antarctica,” I said. “I’m falling more and more in love with my own idea.”
“What would you have us do?” Caleb asked. “I’m very reluctant to send my people through any of the breaches you open, considering the amount of hellfire and ichor you’ll be using.”
“You’ll go in through one of the normal entrances,” I said. “Once we’ve broken in, the normal security checkpoints should be distracted. Take advantage of the confusion and decapitate their command structure like you said before.”
Caleb nodded. “Good. Contingency plans?”
“Run around screaming and draw attention away from us.”
“Also good. Here’s the big question. Extraction.”
I frowned and looked at Kalil, who shook his head. “Closest portal is still the closest portal. Looks like we’ll be flying out.”
“Are you serious?” Tink asked. “Three problems. Who’s going to have the strength to fly thirty miles away after the amount of fighting we’re going to do? Can any of you actually fly high enough to reach the portal? And who’s going to carry the asshole, because I don’t think he’s going to be in any condition to fly himself. Becky and I are going to be especially fucked, you all might be able to breathe at seventy thousand feet, but we’re going to pass the fuck out.”
“What other options are there?” I asked. “Yeah, it’s going to be a long, cold flight home, unless you can think of something else. No, we’re not going to hike it. It’s even more exhausting than flying and we need to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. We might need to set up some sort of base camp to rest before flying up.”
“There’s got to be a closer portal we can le
ave through!”
Kalil highlighted a spot on the map. “This one is about twelve miles away, but it’s deep below the surface.”
“We can dig down to it, can’t we?”
I looked to the other demons for their thoughts. Amon’s commander looked uncomfortable, but Leviathan’s commander nodded to me. “We can try,” I said. “How deep is deep?”
“Between five and six hundred feet below the surface.”
I sighed. “And the location isn’t too exact, is it? Sorry, Tink. Looks like we’ll be flying out. I’ll make the final call when we get out.”
“Fine.”
I looked around for any other ideas, but no one seemed to have anything more to say, though Caleb looked thoughtful. “All right. Make sure everyone’s ready for the cold. We drop in five.”
The room emptied out, leaving me with Caleb, Tink, and Becky. “I’ll get a warmth spell ready for you,” Tink said to the other woman. “We’ll be chilly, but no chance of hypothermia.”
“Hold that thought,” I said, turning to face Becky. “Why?”
She squinted at me. “Why? They hurt me and they hurt my friend. What more reason do I need?”
“Kibs?”
“We get along.” Becky cracked a grin.
I knew they did. She probably gave him all sorts of porn and booze. “You know how dangerous this is.”
She chuckled. “Bright, you know I am more than capable of taking care of myself.”
“I know, but usually you have Lionel backing you up. Speaking of him, where’s he been? Normally he’s attached to you at the hip.”
Becky’s smile collapsed to a grim line. “My father does not approve of my friendships. He does not want to support or encourage me working with non-humans. It may affect our family business. So, Lionel has been assigned other responsibilities now, which do not include me.”
“Really? I can’t see him just walking on you.”
She looked away. “He does not disagree with my father’s reasoning.”
That stung. Lionel and I weren’t exactly friends, but he did know what I was. I had never imagined someone I knew distancing themselves from me if they already knew my heritage. “Well, then.”
“Don’t worry, Bright. I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself.”
“I do,” I said. “All right. Hook her up, Tink.”
“Hook up with her?” Becky’s grin returned.
“You heard me.”
Five minutes later, around eighty people crowded the back yard. Each of them wore unseasonably warm clothing and looked vaguely miserable. I knew their misery. Full demons and angels would barely feel a chill in their native forms, but this was one of the cases where my human heritage outweighed the demonic. I couldn’t stand the cold, even in demon form. Tink slapped a piece of metal into Becky’s hand. “Keep this next to your skin and it’ll keep you warm enough. It’ll only last a little over an hour, so if you start freezing your ass off, let me know so I can recharge it.”
Becky started to say something, but I cut her off. “I’m carrying Tink. I need a volunteer to carry Becky. A strong one.”
An Amon demon stepped forward, the one she had faced off with a few minutes earlier. “I’ll carry her.”
“Thanks, Tyrith. Any last concerns?” I waited out the silence. “All right, portal up! Try to keep each other in sight and rendezvous at the coordinates we were given! See you on the ground, ladies and gentlemen.”
The portal rippled to life, an imp floating in the air above it, stretching it open as he rose. Once it was open wide enough, Caleb led his angels through. As the portal grew, demons poured through, two and three at a time. Becky waved as Tyrith carried her through. When we were close to the last people left in the yard, I looked to Tink. “Ready?”
She reached out and squeezed my hand. “Don’t worry, my spell will keep you warm too.”
I let out a sigh of relief. “I was afraid I’d land as a popsicle.”
“Suck it up. Let’s get this over with.”
I scooped her up and took a deep breath as I stepped up. The portal was merely a shimmer in the air, showing nothing of the polar wasteland waiting for us. Everything in my body told me not to step through, but I ignored all the warnings and took a step.
Free fall was always an interesting sensation. I could feel my organs shifting uneasily as we dropped. A distant part of my brain registered Tink screaming. Another distant part registered my screaming as well. We screamed together for a few thousand feet before I recovered the presence of mind to shift into my demonic form. Immediately, the sharp bite of the wind whipping into my face reduced to a chilly breeze. Expanding my wings let me slow our drop. “Do you think anyone’s jumped from this height over the Antarctic?” I asked Tink.
Whatever she said in response was inaudible with her face buried in my shoulder. I chuckled and looked down. A few dark specks showed below me, but none with wings. “Sorry, going to dive to catch up,” I said.
Her face appeared for a moment. “You’re what?”
I flipped us around so I was face down, my arms secure around her, and folded my wings. She shrieked again as we dropped through the sky. The temperature seemed to drop as we closed in on our landing site. Every thirty seconds or so, I shifted to a glide to follow the rest of our team down. As we grew closer to the ground, I shifted to gliding most of the way to cover the horizontal distance. Miles flew away beneath us as I used my ichor to push our speed up.
It took nearly a half hour to make it all the way to the ground. By the time I fluttered to the ground, Tink had stopped screaming. I wasn’t sure if she had passed out at some point. Demons and angels hovered over the icy surface. A cluster stood together, heads bowed over what I assumed were electronics, trying to get our orientation straight.
Tink stirred and I put her down. “That was fun, wasn’t it?” I asked her.
“Do you think I won’t stab you?”
“I thought stabbing was my job now.”
Her face reddened and she turned away. “I hope you freeze solid.”
Without her spell close to me, I could feel the cold seeping into me. While she stomped around, I winged my way over to the cluster. “What’s the story?”
Venora looked up from her tablet. “We’re getting GPS signals and it looks like we’re at the right coordinates. The Choirboys and Amon are sweeping the area to find the entrances. It can’t be too hard to hide something the size of a cargo door.”
Kalil’s map hadn’t shown the dimensions of the door, but it had to be large enough to justify the thirty-foot tall cargo bay. “Start spiraling out and looking,” I said and turned to my own House’s forces. “Get airborne. Fly about twenty feet up or so. Look for any disturbances or unnatural geometric shapes and point them out to the ground searchers.”
My second in command was the grenadier from Tehran, who I had immediately dubbed Boomy upon seeing him again. “Got it, Marquis.”
I flew back over to Tink. Becky had joined her and they were stomping around together now. Neither looked particularly thrilled with the situation. “Either of you have any ideas about finding this place?”
Tink nodded. “Just dig all over.”
“You’re being less than helpful.”
“Dig with hellfire.”
“No sense wasting our strength.”
She rolled her eyes. “What good are you demons, then?”
“About as good as your magic. Can’t you sense anything?”
“Of course,” she snapped. “There’s magic all over the fucking place underneath us. Plenty of patterns and shit, but I don’t know what they fucking mean. It’s probably how they find the entrance.” It was more than we had come up with, but it was still spectacularly useless.
“Found something!” I turned and flew my way to the speaker who had brushed aside enough snow and ice to reveal metal. Hands and claws tore into the surrounding area until we outlined the massive cargo door
, measuring at least two dozen feet tall and almost as wide.
“If it’s rectangular, we can orient properly now,” Caleb said, floating next to me.
“Let’s find one of the smaller entrances just to make sure. No hurry. They don’t know we’re here,” I said. It took only a few more minutes of direction from our map team to get us to a pair of secondary doors, maybe the size of a small garage door each. Afterwards, we killed time while the electronics team oriented the layout of the base under us. Tink and Becky were starting to shiver by the time they finished.
I crowded around Venora with the other commanders. Tink wormed her way in too. “Main generators go to Amon,” I said. “Backups to Leviathan. I figure those will be less defended, so once you’re done there, feel free to do your computer work. We’re not looking for taps here. Smash and grab. When you’ve both done your jobs, the power should be out. If it’s not, help the other team finish up. Once the power’s out, head for the holding cells.”
They nodded and I turned to Caleb. “Pick your entrance. When my team gets through the ceiling of the holding area, I’ll toss some hellfire in the air as the signal to go in.”
“Got it.”
“Once you’re done with the command staff, make for the holding cells too. We extract once everyone’s there or accounted for, or an hour after Asmodeus breaks in. If you’re late, you’re on your own to get home. Understood?” Everyone nodded. “Let’s do it. Once you reach the base itself, throw hellfire in the air, high enough so we can all see it, and then stop until we’re all at the same point. So, fourth signal, not first, Caleb. Let’s move!”
Boomy and I scooped up Tink and Becky as we led the House troops toward our designated dig spot. Once we reached the vicinity, I let our people with GPS argue over the precision for a moment before pointing at a spot between them. “Right there. Light it up.”
The Demon Behind Me Page 23