Ascendance

by John Birmingham

  ‘We might have to get off Park,’ he shouted as they pounded up a relatively clear length of the median strip. The monster corpse he’d seen hours ago, while racing in the other direction, was still acting as a potent talisman, clearing a space around it.

  ‘Won’t need to,’ Karen shouted back.

  He followed her gaze forward and almost stumbled again. Something was happening ahead. Something awful and vast. He could not say what, but he could see the pressure wave that travelled through the tightly packed masses. They convulsed with it, visibly flowing away from the older building in front of the MetLife, although Dave was certain that ‘flowing’ was too gentle a word for whatever was happening five or six blocks ahead of them. He knew that hundreds of people would be dying up there, crushed and trampled underfoot. The howling uproar reached them half a second later, a wall of sound, as tens of thousands of voices cried out in shock and fear. Dave almost groaned at the sudden pain of it, as though someone had jammed chopsticks in his ears.

  Then it was gone, muted as though he’d turned on a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. Good ones, like he used to wear to watch the game when his boys were noisy toddlers. Karen said nothing. She didn’t have to. She was in his head again. Doing something to shield him from the noise. She didn’t look back, didn’t ask permission or forgiveness. She hurtled onwards, less sure of her course through the bedlam, occasionally using her speed and strength to shoulder aside anyone who got in her way.

  ‘Try to orb,’ she called back over her shoulder without turning around. ‘We have to get up there. Something big is happening.’ A man in a suit with one arm torn at the shoulder flew bodily through the air as she elbowed him out of her way.

  Dave braced himself for the trauma of failure and pain if there should be a Threshrend nearby, but there was none, and instantly they passed from the insensate madness of the riot and into near perfect stillness. The man Karen had sent flying was arrested in midair, his face an absurd caricature of surprise. Whatever Karen had been doing to protect Hooper from the ear-shredding volume, she stopped, and Dave immediately noted that the mysterious dreamland of warp was not as quiet as usual. The low background rumble was louder.

  They stopped sprinting. Whatever the Horde was up to, it would not be able to advance its cause as long as Dave maintained the warp field. He unwrapped the last of the cheese from the penthouse and broke off a hunk for Karen.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘The noise was putting the zap on my head.’

  ‘I know.’ She took the offered food. ‘You’re going to have to learn to control that.’

  ‘Yeah. Sure. I’ll get to that in my downtime. So what the fuck’s happening up there?’

  Karen turned back toward the two buildings that sat across Park Avenue, the ugly modernist tower of the MetLife dwarfing the old world charm of the Helmsley Building in front of it. Karen angled her head a little to the side as though she might be able to see around it.

  ‘I’m not sure, but I think the problem might be in Grand Central.’

  They started to move again, and Dave was struck by the unpleasant image of forcing a path through a human jungle. The heat was ferocious, coming off so many bodies, so closely pressed in on each other, running wild on what was already a warm evening. The stench was worse, bad enough to make eating the last of the cheese difficult. Dave forced it down anyway. They would need all of their reserves of energy.

  ‘Why Grand Central?’ he asked.

  ‘Tactics,’ she said. ‘I think having delivered the shock and awe, they’ll target transport and communications nodes now. I think this Compt’n thing means to collapse the city, Hooper. And if it works here he’ll do the same everywhere. If it works here it’ll be easier everywhere else.’

  They were forced to thread their way through the traffic for half a block. The leading edge of the human pressure wave had reached this far up and further compacted the crowds. After finding their path blocked, Karen climbed on to the bonnet of a taxi and from there they made better progress, only returning to the median strip or the avenue proper when it proved impossible to jump from one platform to another. Sometimes the crowds had flowed right over the top of the traffic. Sometimes the energy of so many people all moving in one direction had served to tip over a vehicle. Dave couldn’t look at their faces. They seemed more animal than human. He did marvel at the spectacle of a minibus wreathed in unmoving flames when he first saw it. The fire looked like an especially brilliant hologram, but the heat coming off the flames was real, as was the horror of the people trapped inside.

  ‘We have to save them,’ he said, more as a reflex.

  Karen didn’t even bother with a second glance.

  ‘We can’t. The fire will burn us just as surely as them. Maybe we’d live. But we’d be hours recovering, and a lot more people would die. It’s a war, Hooper. Get used to it.’

  He might have argued with her, even as recently as a few hours earlier. Now he turned away and tried not to think about it. When he popped the bubble those people would die screaming and there was no way to save them without losing many more.

  *

  A Threshrend reached out and touched them in front of the Helmsley Building, throwing them back out of warp. The stampede had mostly cleared the ground at the intersection of Park and E46th Street. Mostly. The steady, straight line progress of Park Avenue disappeared into a viaduct in the base of the Helmsley and hundreds of bodies lay scattered there. Many still moved and twitched in their death throes. Many more were completely still. Some had been trampled to a bloody gruel. A child tottered about, screaming for her parents. An old man hugged himself and rocked back and forth over the body of somebody who hadn’t survived the terrified rout.

  Karen dived to the left as soon as they fell out of warp. Dave dodged in the other direction, half blinded for a few seconds by the pixelated smear of his migraine aura. He swore as he tripped and rolled. The headache was already huge and pressing against his skull. It took a few seconds to clear after he popped the warp bubble. He cringed and made himself as small as possible against the side of a delivery van, waiting for the rain of Drakon-stone-tipped war shots and iron bolts.

  None came.

  ‘We’re clear,’ Karen yelled from her cover, crouched down low beneath the chassis of a garbage truck.

  Dave looked back up the avenue. The wide, double carriageway was still packed with crowds of terrified, fleeing New Yorkers. Road and foot traffic had merged entirely, creating a perfectly solid gridlock of stationary metal and heaving humanity. The crowd roar was still enormous, but this far removed from the worst of it he was not pained by the volume. Paradoxically, things looked much worse here, where he could see individual bodies and the ruins of burning vehicles.

  He pushed himself up and followed Karin Varatchevsky into the dark stone maw of the twin tunnels running under the Helmsley Building. She had drawn her katana and pistol and advanced cautiously into the pooling shadows, no more handicapped by the dark than he was.

  ‘Is this a good idea?’ Dave asked. ‘I’m no expert, but isn’t this a great place for an ambush? Cut us off in here? Without warp?’

  ‘It’s an excellent spot for an ambush, Hooper. I commend your steep learning curve. But there are no monstrs here. I would sense them.’

  ‘Like you did with that last Thresher you totally didn’t sense back at the apartment?’

  She ignored him.

  The way she said ‘monstrs’, he definitely heard the original Russian in her voice. Hundreds of corpses lay in a thick carpet on the roadway that ran under the Helmsley, all of them trampled.

  No.

  Not all of them.

  A few he saw had been cut down by edged weapons. Some were feathered with arrakh-mi bolts. The ground around those bodies was clear.

  ‘The Horde was here,’ Karen said. ‘Not long ago either. The Threshrend is somewhere close, however . . .’

  She trailed off as if feeling for something more.

  Dave stopped
and knelt by one of the victims of the daemonum warriors. A man in casual office clothes, now soaked in blood and gore from the slash that had opened up his torso. A single dart protruded from one of his shoulders and Dave figured he’d been hit a short distance away and had then run until he was caught and cut down. Or rather, Urgon Htoth ur Hunn surmised as much, for he was the more knowledgeable in such matters. It was likewise Urgon who recognised the dart as not being of Sliveen origin. He wasn’t even a voice in Dave’s head. Not like Lucille. But he was there. Always.

  ‘Karen,’ Dave said. ‘Come here.’

  She reversed a few yards, watching for the appearance of the ambush she’d just assured him they hadn’t walked into. Dave wasn’t sure whether she was being careful or reckless.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘This bolt,’ said Dave. ‘It’s not from a Horde crossbow. Not Sliveen or Grymm.’ He placed a boot on the man’s chest and grimaced as he pulled the bolt free of the body with a wet, tearing sound.

  ‘My Thresher wouldn’t know one arrakh from another,’ she said. ‘So, the little monster voice inside your head is telling you we’ve got new friends to play with?’

  He frowned as he examined the bloody shaft and the design of the arrowhead.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘This looks like it’s come out of the Savat arrakh-works. See, it’s longer than a Sliveen bolt, and the arrowhead is wulfin bone, not iron-tipped or Drakon-glass.’ It was a relief of sorts not to have to translate everything he’d just said.

  ‘Qwm Sect,’ Karen said. ‘Well that’s just super.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Dave tossed the shaft aside.

  ‘Urgon didn’t think much of the Qwm,’ he said.

  ‘Neither do I,’ Karen said, and started back toward the far end of the tunnel, moving through the field of the dead as quickly as she could. Lucille hummed in Dave’s hands, but she was no more or less roused to her usual blood madness by the find. The Threshrend was still near, he thought. He was pretty sure he could sense the eagerness of his girl to be cracking that particular head open. But she gave no sense of being aroused by the promise of imminent slaughter on a much grander scale, as she normally did when they drew close to dar ienamic. As they passed out of the tunnel on the other side of the Helmsley, even that died away.

  ‘I think we could warp again,’ Dave said.

  ‘I think so, too,’ Karen agreed. ‘That Thresher’s out of range. I can feel it.’

  20

  A Talon of Hunn had infested the Grand Central Station. Four cohorts, more than a hundred of the big-ass dominants, led by a BattleMaster ur Hunn. They had no Threshrend in support, however, and so Dave and Karen came upon them as a divine wind, a wave of mutilation, or some other metaphor Dave couldn’t quite put his finger on. He’d dozed through high school English, and barely passed Writing for Engineers at college. He had a T-shirt once upon a time that he loved dearly.

  Once I couldn’t spell engineer, it said. Now I are one.

  Annie made him stop wearing that, of course. ‘It makes you look like a moron, Dave,’ she said, before adding that he didn’t need any assistance on that front.

  ‘Hey, Super Dave . . . a little help?’

  Karen’s voice broke into his reverie. He’d recalled Annie teasing him – and that’s all it was back then, just teasing – with surprising fondness.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Off with the pixies.’

  ‘Well how about giving me some help here with the man-eating daemons.’

  ‘On it,’ he said, and swung Lucille’s splitting wedge at the skull of the nearest Hunn warrior. It came apart with a satisfying detonation of bone and flesh. Destroying the Talon was not much of a challenge, not like clearing the apartment tower and fighting through the ambush had been, even though these Hunn were full dominants, named and scarred, inked with the legends of all the battles they had fought. There were Grymm and Sliveen here as well. They first put down the Sliveen ranged around the upper concourse, before killing the four lieutenants, one for each cohort, Dave presumed.

  The rest of it was what his old man would have called a job of work. Not that his old man had much experience with actual jobs or work of any sort. Each cohort had dispersed to a different quarter of the station where they were about the business of murder and destruction when Dave and Karen came calling. His control of the warp field was such now that the encounter was less a fight than an execution. They went from one daemon to the next, Dave smashing heads with Lucille, who was singing a giddy, trilling song of delight he’d never heard before, while Karen lopped off heads with Ushi, or drove the chisel point of the magic sword up into the nasal cavities of those she could more easily reach.

  ‘I’m getting bored of jumping up and down,’ she said at one point, leaving Dave for a few minutes before returning with two pistols and reloads she’d taken from the bodies of some transit cops. For the next five minutes, Grand Central rang with the metronomic reports of Karin Varatchevsky double-tapping a couple of dozen Hunn dominants.

  ‘Damn, it’s like grubbing out my backyard,’ Dave grumbled, as he methodically cracked skulls, although he hadn’t owned a back yard since Annie had split, and he hadn’t been all that diligent about keeping it tidy anyway.

  The reduction of the Talon took up the better part of a quarter of an hour, at least as experienced by Dave and Karen. To the surviving witnesses, to the handful of cops and a small squad of soldiers still holding out against the attack from behind the ticket windows, it would appear as though that wave of mutilation, invisible but unsparing, swept over the monsters while they drew half a ragged breath.

  ‘Hey,’ said Dave, as a thought occurred to him. ‘Gimme a second, would you?’

  Karen nodded and went on with her last few executions. She wasn’t tiring, but she did look like she was glad to be nearly done with it. Dave checked around for any stragglers he might have missed, found none, and ran upstairs to the Apple Store. A couple of genius types in blue T-shirts crouched behind their genius bar, giving rise to the valid question of just how smart they were if they hadn’t bugged out yet. He was curious to see the effect of the warp field on the screens of the laptops and iMacs which were still powered on. They all looked as though they’d frozen in the middle of a screen refresh which, he supposed, they had. Leaning his magical sledgehammer against one of the blonde wood display tables, he laid his hands on the keyboard of one of the larger MacBooks. It came to life.

  ‘Oh, fucking sweet.’

  But his simple joy at the discovery soured when he found he couldn’t access anything online. All the files and apps on the computer’s drive were available. The internet was not.

  ‘What the fuck, Hooper? Are you that much of a fan boy?’

  Karen had followed him upstairs after finishing off the last of her cohort. Her katana blade was dark with daemon fluids. She was frowning at him, but he could see she’d figured out what he was trying to do. Or she’d just read his mind again.

  ‘I thought I’d see if we could get net access inside the bubble. I wanted to watch that Compton video you told me about. Dumb idea, I suppose.’

  She shrugged, conceding his point.

  ‘No. It was worth a look. So the laptop worked when you tried to use it, but only the laptop?’

  ‘Yeah. I can’t get anything external.’

  He shut the lid, frowned, and opened it up again. Angling the screen just so it lined up with the other two on the bench. He was hoping to find an iPhone at the set-up table, but there was only an iPad in its box. Still wrapped.

  ‘I want to get a phone,’ he said, almost apologising.

  Karen surprised him.

  ‘Good idea. You can get me one too. Mine’s compromised.’

  She took out her BlackBerry, removed it from the thick protective case and used the butt of her sword hilt to smash it to pieces on the nearest bench.

  ‘I should have done that earlier,’ she said.

  ‘I think they keep all their st
ock out the back,’ mused Dave, irrationally pleased to be getting a new phone. His old one, which he’d lost back on the Longreach, was only halfway through contract. ‘Might take a while to find. And set up. I think we should ask the geniuses.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Karen. ‘But make it quick. And don’t get the ones that bend.’

  *

  Dougie, the senior genius, was at first shocked to find Super Dave had popped into existence, right in front of him. Shock became relief upon finding out he probably wasn’t going to get eaten tonight. Relief morphed into concern that he might get in trouble if he just gave away a couple of brand-new phones without taking a credit card number or even a driver’s license.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Dougie,’ said the junior genius, Carlos, ‘just give them the fucking phones, man, and let’s get out of here.’

  ‘We need them set up,’ said Karen.

  ‘Who’s this?’ asked Dougie.

  ‘Agent Romanoff,’ said Dave. ‘And she needs a phone too. Hers got hacked by Hydra.’

  The set-up was faster than Dave expected. A few minutes compared to the usual half hour. While he waited for Dougie and Carlos to work their particular brand of magic, Karen ran back down to the concourse to talk with the soldiers and cops they’d seen holed up in the ticket booths.

  ‘There you go,’ said Dougie, handing a couple of the latest iPhones to Dave. Carlos threw in a pair of Lifeproof cases.

  ‘Thanks fellas,’ said Dave. ‘Stay frosty, okay? And I wouldn’t be headed uptown if I was you. It’s a fucking mess.’

  ‘But where can we go?’ Dougie asked. All the competence and calm he’d displayed while rushing the phone activation was gone.

  ‘Seriously? If they have gun stores in Manhattan, I’d make my way there tonight. Or if you have a secure space out back, just lock yourselves in until dawn. Things’ll get better when the sun comes up.’

  They were thanking him when he winked out of existence in front of them.