by Tom Dowd
Vathoss slammed a full clip into the automatic rifle he'd been cleaning. He didn't look at Kyle, but instead began to polish the barrel. Kyle had no doubt the gesture had been directed at him.
Ravenheart ignored the display. "Yes. The other one was lost to the bugs. We're lucky this was still inside the containment area."
"More interesting luck," Kyle said. She nodded, and the two of them sat down on one of the crates. One of the other troopers, an Asian man with a fresh scar on his face, offered them both cigarettes. Ravenheart accepted, as did Kyle, even though he'd quit nearly a decade before.
"So, what are your plans?"
Ravenheart regarded him for a few moments. "I'd say I should be asking you that."
Kyle dragged on his cigarette, the smoke scorching his throat. "My plan is simple. I want to find my ex-wife and my daughter and get the frag out of this mess."
"You think they're still inside?"
"I don't know. I can't assume they're not."
"Is anyone with you?"
"Seeks-the-Moon, my former ally spirit."
"Former ally spirit?" she said, eyes widening slightly. Being a mage, Ravenheart understood the full import of that statement.
"Former," Kyle repeated. "I told you I was pretty close to buying it."
"And he didn't tear your head off once he was free?"
"No," Kyle said. "He didn't."
Ravenheart blew out a plume of smoke with an emphatic puff. "Lucky day? Frag, it's been your lucky week."
Vathoss looked over. "We're not running a refugee center here. Teller."
Ravenheart scowled at him. "Just keep cleaning your gun," she muttered ominously, then turned back to Kyle. "It would be a good idea if both you and your spirit were here."
Kyle nodded. Anne Ravenheart knew the potential power of a free spirit like Seeks-the-Moon and wanted it under her control. Kyle was willing to set up the situation, but only Moon could decide what he would or wouldn't do.
"How tight is the army's blockage?" he asked, shifting his body to include all the other troopers in the conversation. Everyone responded, except for Vathoss, though they first glanced at Ravenheart for permission before actually joining in.
"Pretty tight," said Asian. 'They're doing it by brute force, the way it has to be done. Zero tolerance—nothing in or out"
They've got a couple of surface-to-air missile batteries along each flank," another officer said, a tall, thin, Hispanic man with thick brown-red hair. "They're shooting down anything that isn't cleared, regardless of why it might be going in. The only mercy flights are the ones they stage. Everything else gets grounded."
“They send in the occasional hunter-killer flight of choppers, or more recently drones, gunning for suspected new nests or gathering spots," the Asian added. "The drones are pretty ineffectual."
Kyle looked around at them. "Gathering spots?"
The trooper looked uncomfortable, as did Ravenheart, though he could see some of the anger and coldness had returned to her eyes. "It would seem that human, or human-appearing, agents of the insect spirits, maybe insect shamans, are gathering people into groups."
"What the frag for?"
"We know the bug spirits are kidnapping people for the new hives," Ravenheart explained. "But they've got to be careful about the rate they grab host-bodies since the nests can only convert a finite number at a time."
"So they're herding people into holding areas," said Vathoss, looking up again. "That way they're all ready and waiting when it comes time to take them to the nest."
Kyle was shocked. "Spirits! How are they managing that? How can they control the people? Force?"
"Food," said Ravenheart. "Some of the fragging things, like the ants, can secrete an edible substance. They lure the refugees in with promises of food, give it to them, and then keep them there. Naturally, the sites are safe since it's the bugs themselves that control them."
"Jesus fragging Christ,"
She nodded. "We've disrupted six of these sites already, and we think we have leads on two more. If we can't handle it we pass word over the barricades and let the army send in choppers."
Kyle shook his head. It was all monstrous. And somewhere out there, maybe even in one of those sites, were Beth and Natalie. Kyle reached into his pocket and pulled out the holopix of the two that he'd been showing among the refugees. The troopers passed them around.
"Do you remember either of them at any of the sites you broke up?" he asked.
They all shook their heads.
"Even if we did," Ravenheart put in, "we probably wouldn't remember. We weren't paying that much attention to human faces."
"Have you tried any conjuring?" Kyle asked her.
"Just minor stuff, a couple of watchers," she said. "I haven't had the time or the materials to try anything bigger. We did hear about a shaman who got himself torn to pieces while trying to summon up a nature spirit. Apparently the bugs are particularly sensitive to that."
"Makes sense," Kyle said. "Seeks-the-Moon indicated that they were very sensitive to him as well. He's been walking around physical and masked the whole time."
"Bet that thrills him."
Kyle grinned. "Yeah, I bet it does." He was about to ask her if she knew of any specific spells or magical techniques to which the bug spirits were vulnerable when one of the piles of gear in front of him began to emit a series of loud electronic beeps.
"Son of a bitch!" said the Asian trooper as he kneeled down in front of it He opened the casing, and Kyle saw that it was a compact field communication unit. Its three liquid crystal displays were active, showing data that he couldn't read and three-dimensional wave and field matrices that he didn't understand. "Mr. Cryptographer strikes again," the trooper said with a smile.
"What's the ident code?" Ravenheart asked.
"Operations HQ. This one's from the top of the drek chain. The box is verifying the codes." He leaned in and reread the data display, then turned to Ravenheart. "It's 'eyes only'," he said. "Yours."
"Can we reply?" she asked him.
"No. It's a hyperburst transmission, and it looks like UCAS has already changed their jamming algorithms." He shook his head. "I for one would never have believed they'd have anything we couldn't breach."
This time Kyle grinned. "What? You don't think that's been a priority at the National Security Agency for at least thirty years?"
"Point taken," the trooper said, then stood up and gestured to the communications rig. "It's all yours, Captain."
"Thanks," Ravenheart squatted down next to it, shifting it slightly for a better view. As she did, Kyle spotted the lightweight optical cable attached to its back. His eyes followed it through the pile of gear, up a support column, and out the room through a perfectly round hole in the ceiling. He guessed the hole was recent, and that the cable led to a field satellite dish on the roof.
Ravenheart typed in her personal ident code, and then pulled a small cupped device from a panel on the side of the case. Another optical cable led from it into the case. She placed it against her right eye and held it there for a few moments until the communication rig beeped its approval. It began verifying her retinal pattern.
"Doesn't Ares have any satellites with laser downlink capability?" he asked. "That would eliminate the jamming problem."
Ravenheart sighed and shook her head. "Sure we do, but we're not getting any replies on the linkup. I don't know if it's us or them."
The machine beeped again, and Kyle saw the data display change, and a couple of words on it began to flash.
"Tox," Ravenheart said, her eyes widening slightly. "The message is cyber-encoded." She reached down and pulled out the retinal scanner unit, but detached the optical cable from it. From the same compartment she removed a small adapter plug with a round swivel-pad attached. She connected it to the end of the optical cable and then slotted the entire attachment into a jack behind her right ear, from which it hung. That done, the displays on the communication
rig changed, and Ravenheart's eyes became unfocused. Her jaw, though, suddenly clenched.
Kyle turned toward the Asian trooper. "Induction link?" he asked.
The trooper nodded. "Easier to interface with helmet gear I and the like."
Kyle nodded and then leaned in toward the man, extending his hand. "Kyle Teller," he said.
The trooper shook Kyle's hand. "Corporal David Lim."
While Ravenheart stared into nowhere, Kyle exchanged introductions with the rest of the troopers present. Vathoss merely gave him a grim smile when Kyle came to him. "Yes, I suppose we do already know each other," Kyle said, turning away just as Ravenheart yanked the cable out and stood up quickly. Her body was tense, and her eyes hard. She looked around at the other troopers, and then at Kyle. "I need to talk with my team," she told him tersely. "Why don't you go get your friend?"
Kyle nodded and turned to leave the room. "Soaring Owl did get out," he just barely heard Ravenheart say. "The message was from him. He sends his condolences that we survived."
27
Seeks-the-Moon was waiting on Beth's porch when Kyle finally returned. The sight of the spirit standing there in the slowly growing morning light somehow reminded him of his father. Stern and silent, conveying everything with a glance and a tilt of the head, expecting everyone to understand him implicitly. The spirit said nothing as Kyle climbed the short stair and began describing what he'd seen and where he'd been.
"But you don't trust them," the spirit said as soon as he'd finished.
Kyle sighed. "No . . . I . . ." He looked away, seeing nothing. "I just don't know. I'm beginning to think that their mysterious behavior was them trying to conceal the fact that they were hunting the insect nest."
"Why would they do that?"
Kyle shrugged. "I don't know. They're a megacorp—who knows why the frag they do anything? When I was with the FBI it baffled the drek out of us half the time. We rarely had enough information to evaluate their actions, so a lot of it seemed to come from nowhere. It will be interesting to see whether or not Ravenheart tells us what the message from her boss was."
* * * *
Just over an hour later, Kyle and Seeks-the-Moon reached the Knight Errant safehouse. This time Kyle knocked.
When they entered, and Kyle began introducing the spirit around, he noticed a decided tension in the group and a remoteness in Ravenheart. The watch shift had changed and there were two new troopers there he hadn't met before. One was an ork, Trooper Allen Douglas, and the other a black elf woman, Trooper Deena Reaves. Kyle also noticed that some of the heavier weapons, most of which he recognized by type rather than name, were being field-stripped or serviced.
Once the introductions were over, Ravenheart wandered up alongside him and said in a low voice, "We need to talk."
Kyle nodded, and followed her into a small office in the rear of the storage area. From the looks of things, she apparently claimed it as her own. "Soykaf?" she asked, stepping up to the maker and dispensing a cup.
"No, thanks."
Blowing on the hot liquid, she sat down, not behind the desk as he'd have expected, but on a metal folding chair near the far corner. She placed the steaming cup on an adjacent file cabinet, then pulled a pill dispenser from a vest pocket, shaking two small round green ones into her hand. She popped them in her mouth and saw Kyle looking at her. "You don't want to know," she said, then took a slug of soykaf to wash them down.
"What's going on?" he asked her.
Ravenheart held her hand up for him to wait a second, and took another drink of the hot liquid. "I wasn't sure what would happen when the soykaf and those pills hit my stomach together. They're only supposed to be taken with water. But frag it."
Kyle meanwhile had pulled up another folding chair alongside her and settled into it.
Finally, after a few moments of silence, she said, "According to Soaring Owl, the government is paralyzed. Everyone is advising something different.”
"Disease Control in Charlottesville has given the go-ahead to start bringing refugees through the line, but the Army says its people think that would be suicide for the rest of the country. Amazingly, there's been enough disinformation spread about that the public still doesn't have an accurate or truthful picture of what's going on here. The National Security Agency's worried about the long-term social impact of the truth that the government can't handle a magical threat of this nature."
"Great," said Kyle. "So nothing's been decided, and in the meantime more people die and the hive gets stronger."
"Wait," she said. "It gets worse."
Kyle stiffened. Anne Ravenheart was staring straight at him without the slightest trace of emotion in her eyes. He could hear some in her voice, but it was as if she'd put it there purely for his benefit
“Two days ago,” she continued, "a joint delegation from the elven nations of Tir Tairngire, led by Prince Ehran the Scribe, and Tir Na Nog, led by Caoimhe O'Dunn, daughter of the High Steward, had a private audience with President Steele that lasted six hours."
"I suppose Ares has a transcript."
Her face betrayed no sign she'd heard the jibe. "Sometime during the meeting the White House received a call from the great dragon Lofwyr. What I've been told is that the joint delegation, and Lofwyr recommended to Steele that the area inside the Containment Zone be saturated with ANVAR-TFM, Saeder-Krupp's most powerful pesticide, which will turn the area into a toxic waste zone for centuries."
Kyle froze. "But the people . . ."
"Dead," she said. "Like most pesticides, ANVAR-TFM is a nerve agent, except this one will kill most living things within a few seconds, and the rest within a few minutes. People, I'm told, take two to six minutes."
"But . . . that's absurd," Kyle sputtered. "How the frag can they believe that pesticides, fraggin' chemicals, will kill an insect spirit."
"As below, so above," came a voice from the shadows.
Both Kyle and Ravenheart jumped up and pulled their pistols, aiming in the direction of the voice. Standing in a darkened corner, Seeks-the-Moon stared back at them. Kyle immediately flipped his line of fire away from the spirit but Ravenheart kept hers trained on him. The small subdued lights on the side of the combat pistol told him it was armed and ready to fire. Her hand shook slightly, and Kyle gently reached out to grasp her wrist. That motion alone, even before his hand actually touched hers, was apparently enough to break her out of whatever fugue state she'd entered.
Cursing, she snapped her hands and the pistol away, pointing it at the ceiling. Kyle expected her to say something, but she just glared at the spirit. He noticed, though, that her weapon's status lights indicated that the firing mechanism had been disarmed. Kyle holstered his own weapon.
"What did you just say?" he asked, as calmly as he could.
"I believe I was paraphrasing an axiom of magical theory you once taught me," the spirit replied. "These creatures look like insects native to this plane, yet they are from somewhere else. Fire elementals are vulnerable to water, as natural fire is, so maybe these spirits are vulnerable to the things that natural insects are."
Barely listening to what Seeks-the-Moon was saying, Ravenheart holstered her weapon, dropped back into the chair, and ran one hand through her dark hair. She was running the razor's edge and completely exhausted. Kyle squatted down next to her. He knew she needed to rest and that he probably shouldn't press her, but he also knew that time was running out for Beth and Natalie.
"What time frame did they suggest?" he asked her.
She looked at him, now bleary-eyed and tired. He was glad to see some real emotion in her eyes. "The nerve agent is already being shipped to the area," she said, "so it can be used as soon as Steele decides to do so. The elves and the dragon told him that it wasn't used within seventy-two hours, the new cocoons would hatch."
"Does that sound right?" he asked her.
She nodded. "Based on what we know, yes. The process of investing the host with an insect spirit larva takes a
couple of weeks, and more, depending on the power of the spirit in question. If they started a new 'crop' right away, the weak spirits could be ready to leave the cocoons any day now."
Kyle slowly sat back down in his chair. "Then we've got less than forty-eight hours."
"Probably closer to thirty-six," she said.
"We must find the main nest again," Seeks-the-Moon said. "Quickly."
Kyle shook his head. "They'd be stupid to re-form another main nest. If they were smart they'd create dozens of smaller nests to keep Knight Errant or anyone else from finding them all before the cocoons are ready."
"You'd be right," Ravenheart said, "except they don't trust each other."
Kyle looked at her. "What do you mean?"
"We've been tracking insect hives for about four years now. The first ones were nearly always single-type hives or nests. There was very little intermingling of insect types. In fact, it seemed that for the most part the different types didn't get along. Half the time the only reason we were able to find new nests was because interhive fighting broke out. The ants or the wasps usually start it.
"Then we learned about the Universal Brotherhood."
Kyle nodded. The same organization of which his sister-in-law Ellen had been a member and the one Dave Strevich at the FBI had refused to give him any information about He glanced at Seeks-the-Moon, but the spirit was standing quietly in the corner, listening.
"The frightening thing," Ravenheart said, "the thing that defied everything we thought we knew about the slotting bugs, was that the UB was a collective, a cooperation of a bunch of different types of insect spirits. Somewhere along the line some of the bug queens must have realized it was stupid for them to fight each other.
"Anyway, the Chicago hive we attacked north of the Core was, we now think, the primary Brotherhood hive in North America. We'd already dusted what we thought was the main hive in the Rocky Mountains a few months ago, after the Project Hope fiasco almost blew the lid off the whole thing."
"Project Hope?" Kyle echoed. He didn't remember hearing the name before.
She waved away his question. "Doesn't matter, long story. The point is that the UCAS government knew about the Brotherhood, and what they really were. That meant we had to work quickly, about eight months ahead of our plan, to deal with them."