Ascendance

by John Birmingham

  He could hear the difficulty Heath had getting those words out, and it spiked his own need to take back the apology he hadn’t actually offered. His jaw was still clenched with an almost biological need to spit a lot of angry words back down the phone. But as long as Rational Dave knew he hadn’t apologised, he supposed he could put up with other people believing Contrite Dave had, especially if it cleared the air. That’s what being a grown-up was all about, as he’d explained to his boys more than once, ‘Sometimes your mom is just plain wrong, but it’s easier to say sorry and pretend she’s right.’

  And easier still not to say sorry and pretend that you had.

  ‘So,’ he said, exhaling a stale, beery breath. ‘What’s up? You know, besides orcs eating New York, and zombies in LA?’

  ‘Just that,’ said Heath. ‘Everything that’s happening. It’s following a playbook. A playbook written by Compton about how to collapse a whole society. Or a civilisation.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ Dave said. ‘Well that sucks.’

  Shit, he thought. Were they gonna blame him for this too?

  17

  ‘No, we’re not blaming you, Dave.’

  Heath’s voice was level, but Hooper had come to recognise that precisely measured delivery as a sure sign that Captain Michael Heath was not being pathologically honest anymore.

  As a jet roared low overhead, Karen returned from another hurried trip to the kitchen with two blocks of cling-wrapped food. Cheese and something that wasn’t cheese.

  ‘Pâté,’ she said. Her lips moved, but he heard the word inside his head.

  He grimaced and indicated he’d prefer the cheese. It wasn’t American cheese. It didn’t glow in the dark. But it looked less likely to make him gag than the small brick of creamed liver she quickly inhaled. Dave put the block of cheese in a pocket, trusting the cling wrap to keep it clean. He would eat it as soon as he could, but he couldn’t talk to Heath with a mouthful of cheddar. At least he hoped it was cheddar and not some bullshit imported hippo cheese or something. The sort of people who lived in big white boxes like this, they’d eat artisanal hippo cheese for sure.

  ‘We don’t know how they got the information from Compton,’ said Heath. ‘We don’t think he’s collaborating with them. We think he’s dead, Dave. But they probably tortured him first.’

  ‘Well that’s all right then,’ Dave said. ‘Wait. That didn’t come out right.’

  ‘I know what they’re doing,’ said Karen, loud enough for Heath to hear. ‘Or what they did.’ She’d downed that disgusting shit brick of raw offal as fast as Dave would neck a beer after a day’s work.

  ‘Is that Varatchevsky?’ Heath asked. ‘The Russian?’ he added.

  ‘Yeah, it’s her,’ said Dave. ‘And, yes, she’s a bitch. But she’s a useful bitch. You’d like her Heath. She’s all about sacrifice.’

  Especially other people’s.

  ‘We can discuss her later,’ Heath said, but Karen took the phone from Dave, who was happy enough to give it up. He didn’t want to get caught in this crossfire.

  ‘No, we can discuss it now, Captain,’ said Karen, leaving Dave to wonder if she’d heard what Heath said on the phone, or in his head. ‘You know where we are, what’s been happening. If you broke in on this phone, you can track it. You’re also capable of turning on a cable news channel. So do not dissemble, Captain. You are aware of our situation. Hooper and I just put down a large cohort and survived a reasonably sophisticated two-stage ambush that resembled nothing so much as one of your vertical envelopment exercises.’

  She thumbed on the BlackBerry’s speaker and Dave heard Heath reply.

  ‘Colonel Varatchevsky, I have no interest in you or –’

  ‘Well I have an interest in you, my Captain,’ she shot back, cutting him off. ‘Agent Trinder is coming for me, and he will come heavy. That’s not an insurmountable problem, but it is a problem, or rather a distraction I don’t need. Hooper is with me by his own choice, and in Trinder’s view that makes him compromised. So unless you want to lose your asset I suggest you race Trinder up the chain of command until you find someone who can shut him down. Go all the way if you have to. We’re leaving now. We have monsters to kill and this apartment will soon be full of Clearance agents or, more likely, Hellfire missiles. Call us back when you have something.’

  She cut the connection and hit warp.

  ‘We have to get out. Now,’ she said.

  Dave picked up Lucille and juggled the cheese block while he peeled off the cling wrap.

  ‘Seriously? Missiles?’ he said. ‘Trinder’ll be pissed at me, sure. And he’ll always be pissed at you, but . . .’

  Karen pointed out the tall windows at the tracer fire ribboning up into a sky painted with flashes of bomb bursts and explosions. Infernos great and small engulfed skyscrapers and neighbourhoods alike. The violence seemed not just sweeping, but universal, as though it was eating the city whole.

  ‘You think anybody is going to notice one more explosion?’ Karen said. ‘Come on. Move.’

  Dave didn’t think Trinder would blow him up just to get to Varatchevsky, but the cheese was really hitting the spot, so he had no excuse for sitting around anymore. Besides, she was right about one thing. If Trinder couldn’t get over his hard-on for Karen he was going to be a distraction at the very moment they couldn’t afford it. Heath might be able to help with that.

  Then again, Dave had signed that consultancy contract back in LA. Trinder might not fire a rocket up his ass, but he might narc him out to the IRS. Not a first-order issue right now, granted. But those guys were as bad as daemonic carnivores and he really didn’t want to give them any more reasons to get on his case.

  Would Karen object to him giving his lawyer a quick call? If Boylan hadn’t been eaten by Tümorum zombies or some stray Fangr he’d know what to do.

  ‘Hey, can I use your phone again?’ he asked.

  ‘We will call Heath when we’re clear of the building,’ she said, heading out the front door.

  ‘No, I want to call my lawyer. Or agent really. He’s more of an agent . . .’

  Dave trailed off at the glare she shot him.

  ‘Maybe later,’ he said.

  Damn. It was like he didn’t even have these superpowers, the number of people telling him what he couldn’t do. He had really thought that getting free of his wife meant getting free. Not so much, it turned out.

  Bloody footprints marred the carpeted hallway outside the penthouse, but it was otherwise unmarked and undamaged. The battle hadn’t reached this floor. The elevator doors were closed, and wouldn’t open again until they dropped back into normal time, but that didn’t matter. Taking the elevator would be a dumb-ass move.

  ‘Stairs,’ she said.

  Trinder’s Clearance agents were four flights down and seemed to be withdrawing.

  ‘They’re covering a tactical retreat,’ Karen said as they carefully threaded their way through the living mannequins. They were dressed for the office. Dark suits and ties instead of combat coveralls. They didn’t even wear body armour. Dave recognised the little Asian chick. Agent Nguyen.

  ‘There’ll be another team in the stairwell on the far side of the building,’ Karen said. ‘And more covering the elevators and any external fire escapes. They want us in that apartment, Hooper. A fixed target.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ he said, but without conviction.

  ‘They’re going down, not up. This one made us, while you were yapping on the phone.’

  She had stopped in front of Agent Nguyen and, before Dave could stop her, reached out, placed a finger on her tattooed forehead and closed her eyes, murmuring something.

  Hooper slapped her hand away.

  ‘Whatever you’re doing, don’t. I thought we discussed this. It’s really uncool.’

  ‘It’s insurance,’ Karen replied, as uncaring as ever about his opinion. ‘She’ll be fine.’

  Dave frowned and switched Lucille from one shoulder to the other.

  ‘You m
ake it very hard to like you, Karin.’

  ‘As hard as this will be for you to hear, Super Dave, getting you to like me has never been a life goal. But getting out of this building is. And the cheese. I’ll take some of that too.’

  He broke the remaining block in half and tried to give her the smaller piece as they threaded carefully down through the knot of agents. She took the larger portion. If this was a date, it would be their only one.

  Dave expected to see the other agents he knew by name, Comeau and the Madigan woman, but, apart from Nguyen, the agents here were just anonymous off-the-rack suits.

  Three flights down, Karen announced she was going to drop out of warp.

  ‘But I need you to pick it up, straight away.’

  ‘Why?’ Dave asked. ‘I mean, why don’t you just do whatever you’re doing, daisy-chaining it off me or whatever. I can’t stop you. I don’t even know how you’re doing it. Fuck, I don’t even know how I do it.’

  ‘I need you to take over because it burns energy too fast when I drive. It’s inefficient. So I’m going to hand off to you. Pick it up quick. We want them to think we’re still upstairs.’

  Dave didn’t object, but he did shake his head.

  ‘I can see why Trinder wanted to take you out,’ he said. ‘He just couldn’t have you in the game, his game and yours, could he?’

  She stopped at the turn between the seventh and eighth floors. The stairwell was pocked by bullet marks and a few splatters of daemon ichor. The fluorescent light was harsh, making the lines of her face seem longer and harder, her cheeks hollow and her eyes sunk deeply into her skull.

  ‘But we’re not in that game anymore, are we, Dave? We have our own game now, right?’

  Karen’s voice seemed empty of all human feeling. Dave was sure that if she didn’t get the answer she wanted, one of them would not be leaving this stairwell. He was also sure there could be no lying to her. He could feel her, inside his head.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I was just saying, is all. But yeah, that’s his game, not ours.’

  Her eyes searched his face, and deeper than that.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, satisfied at last. The moment passed.

  He held up Lucille and Karen tapped the blade of her katana against the steel head of the splitting maul. It rang like a chime and he felt a shiver run up his arms.

  ‘You feel that?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know what it means. Do you?’

  ‘No.’

  They swapped responsibility for maintaining the warp field and hurried down the remaining floors, stopping briefly to check on survivors. Chief Gomes was still there, supervising the care of her men and women. Dave was pleased to see Sergeant Mahoney had made it through as well. The cop was on the fourth floor with that paramedic who’d tried to treat Dave earlier. They were suspended in time over the body of a civilian, a middle-aged man. Mahoney looked on as the woman applied CPR.

  ‘That thing you did to me, earlier,’ he said to Karen. ‘You know, speeding up the healing process . . .’

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘I can’t. Not for them. They’re not like us.’

  She almost sounded sad.

  *

  The penthouse exploded as they stepped out onto the street.

  Dave had dropped out of warp just before they re-entered the foyer. The bodies there had all been removed, although he had no idea where. Hysterical women and children, and a few hysterical men, huddled together out of the way of the emergency services. Paramedics had the floor now. Everyone deferred to their orders and requirements. An intact ESU SWAT team stood watch over the triage process. Their commander nodded to Dave and Karen when they emerged from the stairwell, but otherwise made no move toward them. The last of the fighting at 530 Park Avenue had concluded half an hour earlier. This was mopping up.

  Dave saw the rockets. He’d looked up as soon as they walked out onto the street. A reflex action, which allowed him to spot the hot, bright smoking trail of two missiles as they streaked into their target.

  The roar of detonation was shockingly loud and uncomfortably close. It lit up the streets around the condo for three blocks. Karen’s instincts, or training, served her better than Dave’s unthinking reaction, which was simply to flinch and watch the enormous bloom of orange and yellow fire that erupted from the top floors. She dived back under cover in the foyer, yelling at him to move his ass. He could see debris spiralling down through the concrete canyons, the first shards of glass arriving before he’d even thought to step on the accelerator again.

  The world stopped.

  ‘Don’t waste your energy,’ Warat yelled out. ‘You’ll need it.’

  But he needed it now. He could see a young boy in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle shirt and tighty-whities caught out in the open, staring up, paralysed by the spectacle. Hooper ran out, remembered to bring himself to a full stop before gently picking up the boy, who looked to be about Toby’s age. He checked the descending debris field and the other potential victims caught under it. They were all moving to safety. They’d be fine. He decided he had time to walk the kid back inside the foyer, where he stood him in front of the ruined concierge station, like a small statue.

  ‘Did it occur to you that you could have killed the kid, accelerating him like that?’ Karen said, unimpressed with his public service.

  ‘Nah,’ Dave shrugged. ‘It doesn’t work like that. I’m pretty sure, anyway I piggy-backed Heath before and he didn’t die.’

  The boy gasped and nearly fainted away as Dave let the warp bubble collapse and the flaming debris rained down outside. Dave held the child up as other people came running in to find shelter.

  ‘Be cool, kid. You can tell all your friends Super Dave saved you.’

  Something landed with a massive boom nearby and, although he hadn’t seen it, Hooper was certain that stupid coffee table had just touched down. His reassuring grin faltered and died as he saw the kid’s face fall.

  ‘My friends are . . . They were upstairs. They’re all gone.’

  ‘Nice work, Super Dave,’ Karen said into his ear. ‘Let’s roll.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said to the boy, but it came out so small and quiet that the child didn’t hear. He simply stood, his eyes awash with tears, his whole body shaking. A few moments ago he’d reminded Dave Hooper of his son, and now he did so again. Little Tobes, six years old, shaking and crying because Dave hadn’t turned up after school the way he’d promised. Toby bullied again, as he had been every day for a month before Annie got the truth of it from him and Dave promised to do something the very next day. Promised to take names and kick ass. Failed to take names and kick ass. Failed to even show up before the little rat bastards had got to his kid again.

  Failed to rein in his anger. With those little cunts. With himself.

  Failed.

  He slammed the memory back down deep where it had lain, unexamined for years. But not before he had to contemplate the shame of what had come next. He had been angry, mostly with himself for letting the boy down again, but of course Bad Dave was having none of that and Bad Dave had roared at his own son about little Tobes bringing this on himself because he hadn’t just hauled off and hit the bully the way his old man had taught him to.

  Karen’s voice cut through his fugue.

  ‘Yeah, you’ve got a lot of atoning to do, shithead. But you can’t do it one little urchin at a time –’

  Had she been reading his mind?

  ‘– there’s a whole world to save first. Starting with this city.’

  Of course she had. He walked away from the kid, muttering an apology. Karen marched over to the SWAT team, which was crouched at a row of broken windows, taking cover while watching the chaos in the street.

  ‘Do you have a cell phone I can borrow, Officer . . . Pombier?’

  She read off the squad leader’s name tag.

  ‘The hell was that?’ Pombier asked, looking up as though he might see through the ceiling. ‘They told me you guys took
care of everything.’

  ‘That was something else,’ Karen said. ‘Can I borrow your phone? It’s important. See if I can stop that from happening again.’

  More flaming wreckage crashed down in the street. Pombier was a heavily built, slab-shouldered man. He wore a black baseball cap instead of the bucket helmets of his comrades. Dave thought the big cat on the logo might have been some sort of unit badge, until he realised the cat was chewing a baseball bat. Pombier was a fan of the Detroit Tigers.

  ‘Damn. Okay.’

  He keyed a pin into an older-looking phone in a hardened case before handing it over.

  ‘Get under cover!’ one of his men yelled into the street.

  ‘Thank you,’ Karen said, ignoring the mayhem outside.

  As best Dave could tell, she hadn’t pushed Pombier. She hit a few buttons on her phone, brought up a number, smiled, and keyed it into the sergeant’s cell.

  ‘NSA doesn’t have all the cool tricks,’ she said, as they waited.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Dave asked, still recovering from his encounter with the boy.

  Karen spoke to whoever picked up at the other end of the call.

  ‘Captain Heath. Yes. It’s Colonel Varatchevsky. We need a time and a place to rendezvous. And you need to get Trinder off our asses. I mean it. He just blew up some very expensive real estate because we were standing in it.’

  Dave couldn’t hear what Heath said in reply, but Karen didn’t take the news well. She didn’t speak for nearly a minute, instead listening and occasionally saying ‘yes’ or simply nodding her head.

  ‘Fine,’ she said at last. ‘Twenty-three hundred hours. The Armoury on Lexington. I can explain then.’

  She handed the phone back to Pombier.

  ‘Thank you, Sergeant.’

  ‘He didn’t want to speak to me?’ Dave asked.

  ‘He didn’t need to speak to you. He’s going to unplug Trinder, or try anyway. And we’re going to meet up at the National Guard Armoury on Lexington Avenue. Until then we have work to do. Your friend Compt’n just released a sex tape.’