by Mercedes Lackey; Cody Martin; Dennis Lee; Veronica Giguere
Shaking, he connected with the wall. Yelping as if he’d been stung, the surprise drove him forward. Tripping, he and Bella heard a click as his knee triggered something in the floor.
She didn’t even have a chance to react as the roof came down on them. No—not down on them, behind them. Reacting instinctively they all drove forward; Bulwark’s shields were all ramped up facing forward, there was next to nothing in the back.
“Reposition to the rear,” Bull ordered, and Harmony dropped her hand. They let the others run past and continued behind them after the force field flared up again.
“Wait, that’s . . . stop!” Red yelled, driving his arms to the side as he skidded to a halt. They collided into him, bowling him over as they fell to the ground. Ahead, with an audible whirling and clanking of gears, the floors retracted into the walls, revealing a deep pit. Red hopped up to assess the situation. They had stopped in time. Well, almost all of them.
Scope had been looking back in concern for Bulwark. She hadn’t noticed Red’s warning until it was too late. Tripping over Bella, she sailed into the pit.
Acrobat, racing towards them from the rear, reacted immediately. He dodged over Red, somersaulting with ease, and let fly a thin sturdy trip line from his gauntlet. The end, affixed to an odd, supple putty, made hard contact with the ceiling. He dove, catching Scope in midfall. The line drew tight and they bounced, jerked into a soft pendulum motion. It all happened in so little time that Bella could only watch with her mouth open.
And a voice, soft and relieved, from within the pit . . . “Nice catch, Bruno.”
“Thanks,” Acrobat replied. He was still shaking.
“Fortify,” Bulwark growled as he came skidding to a stop behind Bella. She looked back, and witnessed an awesome sight. Arms wide, Bull had braced himself for impact. In a desperate move, Harmony had simply wrapped herself around him. The force field was brilliant in its defiance. Immovable. The falling ceiling caught up to them, and with a tremendous crash bounced back, heavy pistons buckling under themselves as the revealed stonework of heavy ceiling tiles cracked and shattered to rubble. The shock wave echoed back, rippling like an earthquake through the walls and floor of the tunnel, demolishing everything in its wake.
When it was over, there was still the sound of bits of stone cracking off and falling down into the rubble. And an odd whirring noise. They turned to the pit, noting the glint of what appeared to be some very nasty spikes at the bottom. The whirring sound was Acrobat retracting his line, as he and Scope zoomed up into view.
Bella swallowed hard, and coughed out a lot of dust. “Um. Nothing like the classics, I guess,” she said, trying hard for something like humor.
Bulwark let out a soft breath and turned. “Report.”
“Pit trap, sir,” Scope answered. “The falling ceiling drove us to it. I . . . I messed up, fell in.” Her jaw tightened in anger. “Lucky for me, Acrobat kept his head.”
Bull gave Acrobat a curt nod. “Nice moves, son.”
“Just like the training room,” Acrobat gulped. “Just like—”
“This shouldn’t be here,” Red muttered. They turned to see him glaring at the pit, as if offended by its presence.
“So that’s what a squiggle bisecting a circle with a V-shape underneath it means.” That was Vickie, her voice sounding strained even over the radio link. “How nice. If there were more of those on this map, I might be more useful. Oh, and the next time I call up his ghost for a little séance, I’ll be sure to tell Goldman you disapprove of his design, Djinni.”
* * *
They took a moment to regroup. Bella was checking over Scope and Acrobat, making sure the fall hadn’t left any injuries masked by the surge of adrenaline. Harmony had begun to sob uncontrollably, and Bulwark had taken her aside and was speaking quietly with her. She was shaking but she nodded along with Bull’s reassuring words. Bella made as if to touch her, and she shied back violently. Then, immediately, shook her head. “S-s-sorry,” she said. “It’s not you. It’s—telepaths.”
Bella nodded with a wry expression. “Don’t worry about it. It’s pretty common even in Echo. Not too many people like the idea of someone rummaging around in their mental dirty laundry.”
Red was crouching off to the side, watching them.
“What did you mean by ‘this shouldn’t be here’?” Vickie asked him. The dead air behind her voice told him it was on private channel. He grimaced.
“Nothing,” he muttered. “Who the hell builds a pit trap after a collapsing ceiling? Goddamn overkill.”
“Uh-huh. Seems to me if that trap was disabled in the first place, you wouldn’t have even known the pit was there. Something someone who’s been here before wouldn’t have expected, if that someone had someone else who was disabling traps ahead of them. Yes? No? Rice cakes?”
He told her what to do with her rice cakes.
“Wouldn’t fit,” she snapped back. “And don’t you think it’s time you started being a little more proactive? Like it or not, you’re stuck down there with everyone else, and what happens to them is gonna happen to you.”
He didn’t answer. It was all going to hell. He had never expected to be here again. It was always the game, the prep work, the thrill of running the gauntlet. Each job a wild ride, Red and his crew always beat the odds. But then, they always knew they would. They had checked everything, planned down to the second how things would go. They had trained for each test. And they had gone in knowing the risks, the calculated risks. What was it this time? Why had he let them come down here? This wasn’t what he did. Just in the door, and they had almost died. There was no planning, no calculated risks, no calculation at all.
A part of him loved it. Dungeon delving, relying on wits and luck and gambling it all with nothing but the thrill of imminent danger. It was the ultimate escape that he craved yet never let himself experience. Ever. All those years he had been holding back. It was the one line he couldn’t cross. It was the line that ultimately got people like himself killed. Of course, everyone crossed it eventually. Whether from a moment of weakness or finding that one last, great challenge, every pro crossed it. And died. Or retired after one too many close calls; he heard that it did happen on occasion. Had it come to this? Was everything gone, anything that mattered in the least to him? Was nothing left except that one last, uncertain moment?
Perhaps.
He watched them. In turn, the team watched back. The hall had gone silent as their eyes came to rest on him. They were demanding answers now. His flip attitude, his confidence and his damned reputation had brought them to this. Bulwark had called his bluff. Only now, Red realized he didn’t know everything about this place. They might have a brief map, and his denied-but-real experience here, but there were blind spots now. He didn’t know what was going to happen anymore. Acrobat had been right. These were the Catacombs. Uncertainty here meant death. Their deaths. This wasn’t his old team; they were amateurs in uniform. He almost laughed. They were his new team.
And if he didn’t smarten up, he was going to get them killed.
And again, her voice. That nagging voice, telling him what was right, and that rebellious jerk inside of him just had to lash back at it. He hated her for that. What was it with Victorias that they just couldn’t let things alone, they had to keep digging until they uncovered . . .
. . . the truth.
“You know if I could be down there I would. We both know I’m a liability in the field. This is all I have, all I can do. But I’m trying, you rat bastard. If you would let me, I’d be dumping every magical hoo-ha I have down there right now. As it is, I poured every red cent I had of my own cash into this rig. If I didn’t have the paycheck from Echo, the lights literally wouldn’t be on right now. And I know it’s not enough, but at least it’s something, and right now, we’re in a fight we’re gonna lose unless everyone brings everything he’s got. I brought mine. You gonna bring yours?” The voice sounded very tight. Not with anger, with something else.
“Say what?” The bewilderment alerted him to the fact that he’d been snarling at the living and a ghost, both.
“Nothing, wrong number,” he muttered, standing up. He nodded towards Bulwark. “Harmony all pepped up now? We should get going.”
Bull nodded and they gathered together.
“Overwatch?” Red said finally.
“Djinni?”
“Magic is a go.”
Bulwark looked at him oddly, then said, “Confirmed, Overwatch.”
“Roger that.” No sound of triumph or “I told you so.” Maybe relief, but that was it.
Somehow that didn’t make him feel any better.
* * *
Vickie didn’t feel as if she had won anything . . . just relief, relief that she could finally do her whole job. Maybe a little gratitude that Djinni had bent his rules. Mind, she still didn’t know why he had a pinecone up his butt about magic but . . . well, he did, and he’d made a compromise.
As a consequence, she sent in her “feelers” with extreme care, more so than she did with Murdock and the CCCP. There was “wrongness” ahead of them, in the tunnel that both her map and her scrying said to take. If there was a pattern to the tunnels and traps, this was it. So far, there had never been anything that was line of sight for more than forty feet, and so far, all the traps had included corners or bends.
“Team, disclosure here. I have a piece of what we are looking for and I’m using that as a kind of compass—it’s a scrap of paper with some of Goldman’s original calculations on it. The compass says take the next left. But the magic sensors say there is something bad waiting for you there. You guys ought to stop at the turning and see if you can get anything. . . .”
“We’re already getting something,” Bella replied. “Smells like dead things.”
“Oh God!” Harmony shrieked. “Looks like dead things!”
“Somebody point your cam in there, please?” There was some shuffling and she lit up the darkened tunnel with magic. Carefully. Gradually. So the horror was revealed slowly.
The camera views flared to life, and she scanned her screens to get a clear view. She noticed Scope’s view was the steadiest. Acrobat’s shook uncontrollably, and Harmony’s wasn’t even pointed in the right direction. It looked actually like she was going to . . .
She did. Vickie managed to switch views to the tunnel before she lost her own lunch. Strange how a mass of bodies didn’t affect her nearly as badly as someone hurling.
“That’s an impressive sight.”
“What you got, Overwatch?” Bulwark asked.
“Incomplete.” She let out more magical feelers. The walls were brick, stone, and earth. The things in them were not. She picked up a planchette with a pencil stuck in it and let her hand trace what she sensed. Slowly her drawing formed on one of the monitors. “I’m doing something, call it scanning. The designs look like the walls house . . .”
What the hell were those things? They looked like . . . hoses?
“House what?” Acrobat shouted.
“Easy, son,” Bulwark said. “We’re not going to move until we get confirmation. Djinni? Anything?”
Red knelt down to examine the corpses. “Doesn’t seem to be any visible flesh wounds, Bull. No apparent damage. It’s like they just . . . fell and died.”
“It’s something complicated,” Vickie was talking more to keep them in the loop than anything. “What I’m doing is kind of like a scanning electron microscope. I’m getting the picture bit by—”
Harmony stood up just in time for her camera to point back down the way they had come. Just in time for a hint of movement but not enough time for Vickie to warn them before a wall dropped down behind them, sealing them in.
Damn it! She took a chance and “glued” Acrobat’s feet to the floor before he could jump and trigger something else. Then, frantically, she scribbled more design, more design—
Water pipes?
No, the feeds to the side, she recognized the housing.
“Guns!” Vickie yelled, her hands clenching in panic, then she lurched for the keyboard and sent her warm, flat Coke and her cat flying. Could she crunch the guns in the walls? Jam the feeds?
They jumped as the darkness broke. Panels of lights lining the hall blared to life, each punctuated by the staccato of adjoining turrets that sprang from the walls. A low humming rose as they powered up.
Vickie went for the guns, willing the earth around them to close in on them, jam the mechanisms, crush them. Sweat poured down the back of her neck. Her arms burned, the muscles screaming with exertion, as if she was doing this with her own two hands. Which she was . . .
It wasn’t enough. The guns were too heavy, too tough. She wasn’t making a dent in them without bringing the walls down too, and the humming continued to rise to a deafening pitch. They continued to ramp up, the barrels were spinning, they were going to fire!
“Get in close and behind me,” Bulwark said calmly. “Harmony, boost me.”
They leapt to him as Harmony reached out with both hands. His field flared into existence, barely shielding them all as he braced himself for the bullet storm.
And . . . nothing happened. The barrels stopped spinning. The humming subsided.
“What?”
They relaxed, confused.
“Weapons malfunction?”
“Then what killed these people?”
“Did you do that, Overwatch?”
“No idea what—”
“They don’t even look like they’ve been shot—”
“Shut up!” Red barked. Everyone froze, and in the sudden silence they heard the buzzing.
“Bull!” Red shouted. “Shield down!”
“Are you insane?”
“Just do it!”
Red detached himself from the group and sprouted his claws. Bella watched in shock as pointed flesh tore through the tips of Red’s gloves. Bulwark nodded to Harmony, who removed her hands from his shoulders, freeing him to relax his power. As the shield fell away, Red lunged forward and dove into the floor, which was paneled with embossed metal. Grunting, he ripped open the paneling and tore into a mesh of wires and circuit boards. The grid screeched blue fire and hissed in protest as the tunnel was plunged back into darkness.
“Can I help?” Vickie asked urgently, for Djinni’s ears only.
“You hear that buzzing anymore?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then I’m done.”
“Lights up,” she said on the common channel, and again, slowly caused the rock of the ceiling to glow.
Red turned to the others and stifled an involuntary laugh. The trainees were huddled around Bulwark, locked in transparent confusion and wide-eyed fright. Bella’s eyes were squeezed tightly shut. And Bulwark . . . well, he was Bulwark. Nothing ever seemed to faze him.
“What did I miss?” Vickie asked. Humbly.
“Another diversionary trap,” Red answered. “When the guns didn’t go, I felt the humming ramping up in the floor, like pins and needles on my soles. They were coming from”—he pointed to the mess of wires and broken circuitry in the floor—“here.”
“What were they for?”
“Here,” Scope answered. She beckoned them to the walls. “Holes in the walls, they weren’t there before. Must’ve opened up when the guns came out. Djinni’s right; the guns were a diversion.”
Bella knelt close to examine them. “You’ve got good eyes, Scope. I can barely see them.”
“That’s what I do,” Scope replied. “Up there too, you can see little stopcock valves in the ceiling now. Really little ones, like miniature fire sprinklers.”
“And here,” Red called out, his head submerged in the now exposed floor panel. “Got conduits running the length of the floor down here. Electrical trap.” He rose, shed his claws and ran an exposed finger along the holes in the wall. “Sarin gas.” And on the ceiling. “Acid, concentr
ated sulfuric.”
“Those are the most stable over time,” Bella said flatly.
“The shield should have been enough to handle the acid,” Bulwark said. “Maybe the gas, but the electrical would have cut us down.”
“Magic wouldn’t have worked fast enough to see all that,” Vickie admitted. “Not before it triggered.” She sighed, then muttered, “I need something more . . . tech.” She muted the mic so they couldn’t hear her, pounded her fist into the table and swore at herself. It wasn’t enough, damn it. Not even her best was enough.
But it was all she had, and they were on the clock.
Punish yourself later. Help now.
“Come on,” Djinni said, beckoning them on. “I think I see our objective.”
He led them forward, his step a bit more confident. He stopped at a widened portion of the hall and ran his fingers over one section. He grimaced as his hand passed over a section. Rearing back, he grew his claws out again and plunged his hand into the wall. There was a crunch, followed by a brief pop and some smoke. He withdrew from the fried circuitry, and slid a panel aside. A secret door, and beyond, darkness.
“Remind me to call you next time I’m locked out of my car,” said Bella.
“Not sure your insurance would pay for the collateral damage,” Vickie murmured.
“I usually go for finesse,” Djinni said. “Right now, I’m just not in the mood. Give us some light here, Overwatch.”
Vickie obliged and lit up the hidden room. It looked a little like a storage room at the Smithsonian. Lots of crates. Lots of shiny things on shelves. Lots of really big shiny things, too big for shelves or crates. She recognized a lot of artifacts, or at least the styles, but there was a lot of art and some techie stuff too. And—were those wall panels of carved amber?
“Fan out,” Bulwark ordered. “We’re looking for documents, but keep your eyes open for dark metals or sample casings.”
They worked the room over, bringing back anything that looked promising. Bulwark grunted as he broke envelope seals and ran a pocket scanner over the documents.
“Reading e-copies and resending,” Vickie reported.