by C. G. Hatton
He’d effectively signed NG’s death warrant.
Hil nudged the mug again and picked up his own. “There are small pockets of resistance throughout the city,” he said. “Across the planet, apparently. They’re trying to figure out if they can evacuate. They’re down to maybe two or three thousand that can still fight. Total.”
Out of the entire population of Earth.
“Not counting the suckers that think they can side with the Bennies and survive it.” Hil raised his mug and paused, looking over its rim. “You should know that people here don’t like what we are.”
“I could have guessed that.” He didn’t know if Hilyer meant Thieves’ Guild or infected mutants, but it made no difference.
“We’re not going to give you up to Anya,” Hil said, laying down a card. “Elliott went to get help. He should be back any day but we can’t wait. So what do we do?”
“We go get NG.” LC flipped one of his cards over, random, and threw it down. “Get me a shaman staff.”
Hilyer put down another card, shaking his head. “That’s not going to happen. These people tried taking on a shaman, lost a dozen of their own just getting within ten yards.” He rearranged the cards in his hand. “Why does Anya want to kill NG? I know she always hated him but that’s not…”
“Mendhel wasn’t Anya’s father.” He kept his voice low, felt bad just saying it, as if he was letting Mendhel down somehow. “He adopted her when he married her mother.”
Hil looked puzzled. “So who? NG? No way.”
“Not NG,” LC said. “Sebastian.”
“Holy shit. Why the hell do you think that?”
“He is. I know he is. I heard him tell Pen, taunt him with it, when we were on the command ship. Anya didn’t know. She took it straight out of my head when she had me on Winter. I couldn’t stop her.” He reached for the mug. “I can’t fight her. Not if she can do half what Sebastian can. And if that’s how she’s wrapping the Bhenykhn around her little finger, they have no chance. NG has no chance. I don’t know why we didn’t see it sooner.” He looked up, couldn’t keep the fatigue and desperation from his voice. “Get me a shaman staff…”
“So you can what? Wipe out all the Bhenykhn? In case you’ve forgotten, you died the last time you did it. Try it here, it’ll kill you for good.”
LC took a sip of the tea. It hadn’t cooled at all, way hotter than he was expecting, and more potent as if Hil had thrown another shot of liquor in for good measure.
“I can’t sit back and do nothing,” he said quietly. “C’mon, we’re Thieves’ Guild. There must be a way in.” He took another sip, that turned into half the mugful. “Get me in there and get me near a shaman staff. I’ll deal with the Bhenykhn then you’ll just have to deal with the human scum that are screwing us over.”
He said that out loud and paused, almost biting back the words. Neither of them sitting at that rickety table in a tunnel rat run under the occupied city was truly human anymore.
Hil put down the cards and looked at him, saying cautiously, “It’s not us versus them.”
“It might as well be.” He had his left hand wrapped around the mug, wanting to down the rest of it, knowing how stupidly petulant he sounded but he couldn’t help flashing to the facility at Zang’s fortress, shutting it down as fast as the pain from the memory surfaced. Drake had quite cheerfully handed him over to the Bhenykhn with no regard for what they would do to him. At least Anya wanted him alive and to herself. Whether that meant intact or not, he had no idea. “What else can we do? Tell Anya we’ll do it? She’ll kill him anyway. We need to take out the shamans.”
“Did you not hear me, LC? They lost a lot of people trying to get near those bastards.”
“They might not have been able to, but I can. And I can use a staff now, I swear. It won’t be the same as last time.”
“No.”
“I’m fine. They have to be using the shamans to block NG, the same way they were blocking me. Get him away from them, away from her, and we’ll have NG and Sebastian. That will give us the best chance we’ll ever have to fight them. Like on Erica, on the command ship.”
Hil just stared at him.
LC pushed his chair away from the table. He was done wasting time. And he was done feeling like a trapped rat. Hil knew Anya as well as he did. She’d played them off each other as kids for long enough.
“What if…” Hil started and stopped as voices echoed, getting closer.
LC opened his mouth and clamped it shut, the back of his neck prickling, every ounce of intuition and sense of danger screaming at him to move.
Hilyer must have felt it at the same time, standing and grabbing his arm as he turned, checking out the tunnel before pulling him along.
He didn’t fight, scanning ahead as innocuously as he could manage, and picking up a wave of anger, hostility, fear, and overriding it all, an immense resentment.
Hilyer was swearing as he pushed a gun into LC’s hand, the JU woman running up behind them, asking what the hell was going on.
He didn’t want a gun, didn’t understand where this hate was coming from and almost faltered.
Hilyer didn’t let up. “We’ve been betrayed,” he hissed. “Some stupid bastard has sold us out.”
Chapter 35
Sebastian checked the rifle, feeling its weight, its balance, this hybrid of alien and human technology that was so far advanced from anything the human race itself had ever managed to develop. “The Bhenykhn only take the best,” he murmured. That one tiny Aries-built component had changed the dynamics of the entire weapon.
“One miniscule change,” the Man said, “one drop in an ocean, can be enough to create a tidal wave. A hive mind has no capacity for lies and deceit. Yet the Bhenykhn thirst for more. More power? Heightened emotions? It’s what they breed, live and die for. They strive constantly to find a more worthy foe, a challenger worth fighting, an enemy that will give them the game, the hunt they so desperately crave. Where could we find such a foe, Sebastian?”
•
They turned a corner and came face to face with the damned bounty hunter who threw his arms in the air as Hilyer snapped up his gun.
“It wasn’t me,” the guy yelled, throwing up his hands. “For fuck’s sake, I was coming to warn you.”
LC backed away, muttering, “He was,” easy enough to read without having to go too far into the guy’s head. “How do we get out?”
The bounty hunter shook his head and gestured behind him. “Not this way. It’s a category one raid. It’s like the death squads know you’re right here.”
He could feel the attention of the Bhenykhn hive closer than it had been in a long time. He hadn’t screwed up. He was absolutely certain he’d done nothing that would have hit their radar.
“The sewers,” Hil said, “we go out through the sewers,” and pushed him along, fist bunched in his shirt, swearing, muttering under his breath and occasionally pausing to check round and breathe.
LC kept the gun in his left hand low down by his thigh. “What’s category one?”
Hil turned to answer, still glancing around as they moved fast down dark tunnels, and froze for a split second before he cursed and bundled into him, shielding him and driving him down to the floor. The shockwave hit hard, debris billowing, hot air rushing over them and chunks of ceiling tiles and pipes crashing down.
“Tanks with bunker busters is what category one is,” Hil said, spitting out dust and shouldering off the crap that had fallen onto them. “When they don’t give a shit who’s down here.” He hauled LC to his feet. “Or when they’ve decided the collateral damage is worth the result. You okay?”
He wasn’t sure but he nodded.
They ended up running, gunfire echoing close behind, shouts and screams, pops of void, a barrage of them so bad he ended up on the floor, poleaxed before he even knew it had hit him. Hil dragged him up, muttering in his ear, “Block it, for fuck’s sake.”
He couldn’t. Out of everything he’d lear
ned, practised, downright fought to nail and get to grips with in all this, he’d never managed to deal with that dark hit of void that punched through into the centre of his soul. Every time.
He was shaking. “Can’t help it.” He managed a few more steps then pulled up. “Wait. We’re going to get cut off.” He could feel them moving in up ahead.
Bhenykhn heavy infantry in the streets above. Five merc units already in the tunnels.
And something was nagging at the edge of his mind. Not Bhenykhn. He kept the barriers up. Inert. Shielded.
When she hit him, she hit hard.
He fell to his knees, choking back a scream, curled up, hands on his head. He had to force himself to breathe. He felt someone crouch beside him, a hand on his shoulder, heard Hilyer shout like he was miles away, “What’s wrong?”
Anya tore her way into his mind as ruthlessly as she used to grab his attention in a bar whenever she’d seen him talking to other girls.
‘What are you doing, LC? Did you not get my message?’
She flashed him a brief, fraction of a second sense of NG. Just a feeling. No image. A cold, dire threat that punched deep, fast.
‘I know now exactly who he is, and I know exactly who I am, have no fear of that. And, miya luchik, you are mine. More than ever…’ She swirled his senses into a spin. ‘Give yourself up to me or he dies. Zachary dies. Angel dies. Sean dies. They all die, LC. And you will be mine anyway. Your choice…’
She let go and he fell back.
Hil was holding him, about to pound on his chest from the feel of it. He sucked in a breath and heard Hil curse as he let him go and eased him to the floor.
He lay there and let his head process the brief glimpse he’d had into Anya’s mind, realising, heart sinking, the position they had NG in.
Hil hauled him upright. “What the hell was that?”
“Anya,” LC breathed. “She just made a mistake. I know where NG is. We go in cold. Stone cold. I can do it.” Nowhere near as sure as he sounded that he could pull it off. “Straight to him. Just you and me.”
Hilyer nodded. “Where is he?”
“In the processing plant. I must have been right next to him. We don’t need to get away, we need to get back in there.”
“If we go, we go now. Are you ready?”
LC took one slow, deep breath and shut down. There was no focus to it, he just went inert. Totally and utterly inert.
They changed direction, Hil leading him fast through narrowing tunnels and stopping at a cubbyhole. “Can you climb?”
“I’m good.”
“Good. Because you need to climb this.”
LC looked up. It was a sheer shaft, three feet wide, a rope hanging down its centre. His stomach turned.
He tucked the gun into the small of his back, reached up to grab the rope and climbed.
He had to hug it with his right arm, making his left do all the work, half assed and swearing, frustration burning deep at every slip and struggle, but he made it, scanned ahead to make sure they were clear then clambered out to roll away and sprawl, muscles screaming.
Hil was right behind.
He felt the gun digging into his back. He rolled, pulled it free as he pushed to his feet, and handed it to Hilyer with a quiet, “I don’t need it.”
Hil didn’t argue, taking it with a nod and a look in his eye that said everything, and in that small gesture it somehow seemed like the clock had been reset.
LC shook out the muscles of his arms. He felt free. No body armour or uniform, no heavy rifle or pouches of ammunition he didn’t want to use. No Senson, or wristband monitoring his every move. He felt like himself for the first time in as long as he could remember.
He just wanted to get NG, get back to Sean and figure it out from there.
“You ready?” Hil said, a hint of a smile on his face.
LC nodded.
They walked through wide tunnels, all crowded with people who stared as they went past, families, kids sitting in blankets on the floor, using ammo boxes as tables, the smell of sweat, urine and fear wafting through, a heavy scent of incense as if they were trying to burn away the presence of the Bhenykhn.
Half the lamps strung overhead were broken, the rest flickering, god knows where they were scrounging power from but it was intermittent. Hil led the way, edging past wide-eyed youngsters that knew better than to say anything. LC walked on auto, keeping a lid on his emotions, reading as little as he could manage. It felt like the tunnels beneath Kheris, beneath the city on Hanover, time and space merging into the same nightmare. There was a horrible sense of dread hanging in the air, as if they all knew who he was and what he’d brought to their doorstep.
They ended up at a doorway guarded by two guys with guns who saw Hilyer and stood aside to let them through. It went to a basement stacked with boxes.
Hil pulled up a hatch in the floor and gestured him to go ahead, steep steps leading down to the lower temple tunnels. They must have gone two or three miles before they climbed back up into tunnels that pulsed and glowed, the walls covered with alien organisms, and shimmied back into the Bhenykhn processing plant. Then they took their time, easing through gaps in the walls and worming their way through narrow conduits, hearing grunts and clangs at times, keeping their distance from anything that was moving.
He froze at one point, the hair on the back of his neck prickling, pulled his hand back from a mesh wall he was about to touch, signalled to Hil, and they backtracked to find another way round.
It was tempting to try to connect with NG but he resisted. If NG knew he was there, he hadn’t made any attempt to get in touch. Which was probably understandable.
He was going purely on memory from what he’d picked up from the alien hive when he’d been in there, and from that briefest glimpse into Anya’s thoughts on where NG was being kept.
They were getting close to the prisoner cages. He could feel the mass of human lives nearby even though he wasn’t scanning openly, pain and distress hammering incessantly against his barriers.
He stopped and listened, bracing himself on a cross beam, high above a wide corridor, watching as a group of hulking figures gathered below conferred, gesturing with machetes and crossbows. There was a shaman there. He could see its staff. It paused as he looked at it, casting its head to the side as if it could sense him. He shrank back into the dark tangle of conduits, moving as slowly as he dared, mind fixed firmly in neutral.
The shaman half raised its head, as if listening, then turned away as a huge black-cloaked warrior shouted and waved them to move out, on routine patrol or hunting for them, it was hard to tell.
LC pulled back and waited, watching the merest glint of Hilyer’s eyes in the darkness beside him, settling his breathing and heart rate, calm and still, for a long moment before venturing out again, half an inch.
It was still there. The damned shaman was still there, lurking, as if it sensed he was close. It spun its staff in a bony hand, end on into the floor, beads and knuckle bones clacking.
It was alone.
LC glanced back at Hil and for a fraction of a second he thought Hil was going to go for it but Hilyer gave a hint of a headshake, and the moment was lost as the shaman moved away.
There’d be another chance.
He braced himself to move but Hil put his finger to his lips.
It was weird to sit there in that dark enclosed space, no comms. Surrounded by Bhenykhn. Who might sense him and turn on them at any moment.
Eventually Hil nudged his shoulder and nodded.
They moved quietly, climbing through twisted writhing knots of living tissue intertwined with wires, pipes and metal beams that hummed between chitinous bulkheads. His head was pounding in time with the rhythm of the pulsing beat within every surface he touched, muscles burning by the time he reached an opening. He stopped, listening. Clangs and screams echoed, the air fizzling with a chemical stench and a tang of energy that was setting his nerves on edge.
They were getting clo
se.
LC threw a hand signal to Hilyer, and they shimmied out onto a walkway overlooking a dark chamber, pulsing knots of living cables and conduits suspending a pod-like structure in its centre. Same as the one he’d escaped from. Only this one was holding NG.
Every inch of his exposed skin was covered in dried blood, dark bruising, new and old wounds, his entire body entwined by those thick twisted alien strands. His left arm was missing from above the elbow, right leg gone above the knee. His eyes were closed, back arched as if he was in agony.
There were five shamans in there, one in each corner, silently watching over him, another standing with its clawed hand gripping his forehead.
The plan to free him and rely on him to get them out suddenly seemed immensely precarious.
LC backed away, looked at Hilyer and mouthed silently, “We are screwed.”
Hil mouthed back, “We’re not leaving NG here.”
LC shook his head. “No sign of Elliott?”
A shake in return.
The shamans had staffs. That was all he could think. Get in there. Get a staff and blast the hell out of the Bhenykhn. Figure out a way to get out from there.
Hil tapped him on the knee, tapped a finger to the side of his head, questioning.
It was worth a shot.
LC held up one finger, wait, closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
The room was dark, candles flickering in sconces around the walls. NG was there in front of him, fully dressed in his usual black combat gear, sleeves rolled up, standing behind a table piled high with electronics, gizmos, wires. He was building something, a screwdriver in one hand, a pair of intricate pliers in the other. No bruises, no blood.
LC raised his right hand and turned it, flexing all four, intact fingers.
This definitely wasn’t real.
Someone or something was hammering on the door behind them.
NG looked up with half a smile. His eyes were dark. “Hey.”
LC didn’t know what to say. Sorry I fucked up so bad you got captured? Sorry it’s taken us six months to find you?