Demons of Divinity

by Luke R. Mitchell

  “Uh… This is gonna sound weird, but um… if I were to ask you to get me some flowers…”

  I trailed off at the expression on her face and was about to stammer a never mind and close the door when I realized she hadn’t even heard me. It was something she must’ve been hearing on her earpiece that had her eyes widening. I looked down the hallway and saw similar expressions on half a dozen legionnaire faces, then I glanced at my own palmlight.

  Nothing.

  I looked back to my hall monitor. “What’s going on out—”

  A distant alarm split the night.

  I waited, tense, holding my hesitant guard’s gaze and praying—as I’m sure she was too—that it had been a mistake. Five long seconds of silence. Then the alarm blared again. And again.

  “I’m getting my gear,” I said, turning back into the room.

  She didn’t argue, but probably only because I didn’t add the part where I was going to Therese’s lab to secure Elise and the others whether my guard detail liked it or not. The fourth blare of the alarm left me little choice in the matter.

  Because Haven was under attack.

  33

  Code Black

  “Hear the call, Haven,” the speaker in the corner of the bedroom boomed as I frantically pulled on dark clothes over my armor skin and retrieved my helmet from the closet. “Code Black. Repeat, Code Black.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” I growled at the wall.

  “Raknoth forces have breached the perimeter,” the voice boomed, making me regret my words. “Repeat, raknoth forces have entered the base. Arm yourselves and proceed to your designated defense zones immediately. This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill.”

  The voice went on like that as I reached for my daggers and the wall display came to life with a live stream of relevant details and updates. I scanned the lines and paused to make sure I’d seen what I thought I’d seen.

  Only a hundred estimated hostiles?

  My breathing eased a little. A hundred hybrids rampaging through Haven in the middle of the night was no laughing matter. Far from it. People were groggy, mistakes could well be made, and the hybrids could do some serious damage. If they’d made it past the perimeter guards, they probably already had.

  But still, a hundred hybrids weren’t going to take Haven on their own. There were over five thousand legionnaires on base, and they weren’t going to be scudding themselves with surprise and fear as many had understandably done when the hybrids had made their debut in razing Sanctuary.

  So why send such a small force at all?

  I had a dark mental image of Alton Parker watching this all from a high-flying skimmer, waiting to unleash some devastating surprise in the midst of this seemingly ill-conceived attack, and what little ease I’d felt quickly dissipated.

  I needed to find Elise and the others. From there, we’d see.

  My guards were pounding on the door when I made it back to the entryway.

  “My fireteam has been ordered to remain in the room with you, sir,” the one I’d spoken to earlier said. Or at least started to say. The words sort of died off at the end as she took in my battle garb.

  “You can post up wherever you’d like, Talia,” I said, reading her name on my helmet display, “but if you’re interested in watching my back, it’s headed to engineering.”

  I wasn’t overly surprised when she didn’t step aside and tell me to carry on. Or when one of the legionnaires behind her started speaking quietly with one hand to his ear—probably telling the ordo I was getting ready to bolt.

  For a second, I considered doing just that. But I couldn’t deny how much nicer it would be to have a squad’s-worth of friendly eyes and weapons checking corners with me out there rather than hunting me down and trying to drag me back.

  So when Talia started to tell me, “We can’t allow that, sir,” I picked her and the two legionnaires at her flanks all up with telekinesis and scooted them neatly aside, at once clearing my path and, hopefully, making my point clear.

  The legionnaires who still had their feet on the ground jerked back at the display, and tensed when I turned my hard gaze on them. I started walking before their shock could wear off.

  “Tell your ordo I’m going to engineering,” I called, not looking back. “And that I wouldn’t say no to some cover.”

  I heard their urgent whispers behind me. Felt one of the closer ones tug the stun rod from his vest. Just to make my point as clear as possible, I grabbed the weapon with telekinesis, still not looking, and ripped it from his hand. I probably shouldn’t have smiled at the resultant thunk of rod striking carpet, or the collection of hissed curses that followed, but at least none of them tried to shoot me in the back.

  They followed, and I could faintly hear one of them muttering quick updates to their ordo. Talia drew up beside me, showed me a stern frown, and patched me into their battle channel.

  Nothing like a good crisis to stir up some reluctant camaraderie, I guess. That, or the fear of demonic powers.

  “Dillard told me you were a royal pain in the ass,” came a wry female voice in my earpiece—Ordo Grotski of the 122nd Wolf Company, according to my palmlight.

  “My apologies, Ordo,” was all I could think to say, busy as I was swiping messages to Elise to stay put and to Johnny to let him know where I was headed. He’d either be with Glenbark or reporting to a defense area. Either way, he was probably safe enough. Scud, if it was truly only a hundred hybrids, neither one of us should probably even see any fighting.

  “What’s in engineering?” Ordo Grotski was asking.

  “A whole bunch of important resources, sir.”

  Beside me, Talia shot me a look that almost made me wonder if it wasn’t actually her voice in my head when Grotski said, “One of those resources happen to be your mate, Citizen?”

  “I promise you,” I said, approaching the barracks doors, “we don’t wanna lose what’s in that lab.”

  “All right, then,” Grotski said as Talia palmed the access panel to the right.

  The night air wrapped me in a muggy embrace as I stepped through the barracks doors… and my extended senses screamed in alarm.

  I yanked a barrier into existence around me, not having time to resolve what was incoming or from where. No sooner had my foot touched down outside than I felt a rapid string of concussions on my barrier and found myself looking at a small flock of stunner bolts hovering in front of me. Friendly stunner bolts, I realized.

  To complete the betrayal, another Wolf made a lunge with his stun rod from behind, and yet another one actually dropped down on me from some handhold above the barracks doors. I shoved the one behind me back into Talia’s fireteam, redirected—if not quite tossed—the falling Wolf, and rounded on Talia just as she was yanking her own stun rod free.

  We froze like that—me tensed to run, solidifying my telekinetic shield, and Talia and Alpha knew how many other Wolves out there trying to decide whether or not to rush me with even more stunners.

  In the corner of my mind, I noted that something about the sporadic gunfire reporting from a dozen directions around Haven sounded wrong—far too staccato and scattered for well-organized squads gunning down wild hybrids.

  “At ease, Wolves,” someone called, stepping forward from the shadows. Ordo Grotski, I took it from the voice and the command. She tugged the Wolf who’d tried to take me from above back to his feet before turning to me with an unabashed shrug. “We had to at least try to get you back to safety.”

  “Does that mean you’re done?”

  “Well, I’d still prefer you’d turn around, but…” Reluctantly, she nodded.

  I swallowed, preparing to run. “Is that why you still have half a dozen Wolves waiting to take their shots?”

  Her genteel expression flickered with surprise, but that was only part of what had my heart racing. The gunfire was definitely wrong out there, waxing and waning with the give-and-take rhythm of armed combatants trading bursts of softstee
l.

  I needed to move.

  “I can feel them out there,” I said, taking a few steps forward with my barriers held tight. “You can’t lie to me. Now, I’m going to engineering. It’s up to you whether you—”

  “Get down!” someone shouted from the shadows—just as the barracks courtyard lit up with gunfire.

  Blood sprayed from Ordo Grotski’s throat. She fell dead before I could so much as twitch, an expression of shock frozen across her weathered face. Someone crashed into my right flank—Talia, I realized, shoving at my barrier with fierce conviction.

  “Take cover!” she growled, pushing us toward the permacrete abutment at the edge of the walkway to our left.

  I regained my senses and stopped fighting. Around us, the courtyard was coming alive with return fire as we dropped into cover. Slugs thwacked into the permacrete just behind us, spewing specks of debris against my faceplate and cutting down one of the Wolves who’d been tight on our backs.

  I shifted my barrier, trying to cover the other two rushing to join us, and peered out from cover, drawing my sidearm. I traced the muzzle flashes to the rooftop across the courtyard, and there they were, silhouetted in the flood of Haven’s lights—four hybrids, fully armored, but recognizable by the soft crimson glow of their eyes through their helmet faceplates.

  As one, the hybrids roared, and as quick as they’d drawn a line on the hybrids, four of the Wolves turned and opened fire on their own squad. I dialed my cloak out as far as I could, cutting them off from the hybrids, but not before two more legionnaires had fallen.

  Above, the hybrids had already vanished into the night, leaving the remaining Wolves gaping at each other in pale, wide-eyed shock.

  “What the scud was that?” one of them cried, his shaky voice echoing the dread in my own gut. Because it wasn’t just a hundred hybrids Haven was facing. It was a hundred gun-toting telepathic super soldiers. Maybe more. And they’d apparently seen fit to properly armor themselves this time.

  “You have to get back inside,” Talia said, looking warily from me to the legionnaires tending to Grotski and their other fallen brethren.

  “I can’t,” I said, realizing just how true it was as I said it. Talia started to argue, but I cut her off. “We can’t. Those things could be coming back with reinforcements. We need to get the wounded to a defense zone and keep moving.”

  I didn’t add that I had a sinking feeling it might be me they’d been looking for—and that they seemed to have known where to start—but Talia seemed to come to a similar conclusion on her own. I half-expected her to curse me or at least point out that this was a scud assignment, but she just stood and started calling orders to lock it down and get the wounded ready to move. But Ordo Grotski and four of the fallen were already dead, and the fifth legionnaire who’d taken a hit was already stimmed and back on his feet, refusing to be carried or even helped.

  “Keep them close to me if you’re coming,” I told Talia quietly. “I can keep the hybrids from gropping with their heads.”

  She relayed the orders, not bothering to ask what the scud I meant by any of it, and fell in beside me as I oriented myself and headed for the courtyard exit, morosely thinking that my first visit to Therese’s lab was really shaping up to be one miserable bitch of a scudstorm.

  34

  Wanted

  As we pushed on, I saw that Haven was rousing to life and pulling its defenses together every bit as quickly as I’d hoped. Knowing what was loose on base, though, I was still worried it wouldn’t be enough.

  Dark shapes seemed to move in every shadow. Some leapt from rooftop to rooftop, gunning down a legionnaire here, or forcing a few bursts of friendly fire there. Other beasts darted across the permacrete, their red eyes burning behind their faceplates as they cut down whatever stragglers they came across with fang and claw.

  Were there really only a hundred?

  There was no way to tell, and nothing to be done about it but to press on. I kept my cloak extended as we went, periodically clicking it off completely to scout for enemies farther ahead, and otherwise lending what telepathic protection I could to the Wolves and to what legionnaires we passed. But it wasn’t even close to enough.

  Soon, the battle channels were filling with reports of friendly fire and heavy losses. We saw a full squad open fire on two hybrids only for the hybrids to gun down a few, rip apart a few more, and vanish to the rooftops with inhuman speed. I was torn—desperately wanting to go join the fight and help, even more desperately needing to get to Therese’s lab and make sure everyone was safe there.

  We pressed on, Talia, who knew Haven far better than me, moving to shortcut us through a mess hall. We were approaching the exit on the far side when the doors burst open and three legionnaires flew in like a pack of feral haga beasts was at their heels. One whirled, raising his rifle, just as the first of two hybrids came lunging through the door.

  I caught it in the air with telekinesis. “Shoot it!” I roared, telekinetically ripping its helmet off as it began bucking against my hold with exceptional strength.

  The soldier who’d turned quickly complied, the Wolves and his allies joining him. The hybrid’s skull took more of a beating than seemed possible, but when I released my telekinetic hold, it crumpled to the floor, dead. I cast my senses out, preparing for the next hybrid, but it had backed away from the door.

  “Raishman,” came a harsh, throaty voice from outside. Then again, at a half-roar. “Raishman!”

  The legionnaires turned wide eyes my way. I reached out, intending to immobilize it so they could step out and take it down, but it had already bounded out of my cloaking field.

  “It’s gone,” I told them.

  We pushed on with three new allies and a collective feeling of unnerving dread at where and why that hybrid might’ve fled. Outside, the sounds of fighting seemed to be slowing marginally. There were still bursts of distant gunfire every half minute or so, too-often accompanied by hair-raising screams and inhuman shrieks, but the sounds seemed to be spreading, hunter and hunted both becoming more cautious—though I wasn’t entirely sure which was which at this point.

  We were only a few minutes from Therese’s lab when we came across the bloody aftermath of a fight between twenty-some legionnaires and two hybrids. All dead.

  I stared down at the two monsters who’d claimed the lives of an entire squad, trying to hold onto my stomach’s scant contents. Under Haven’s bright floodlights, I noticed inky lines spanning the hybrids’ exposed hides like dark spiderwebs. My mind flashed back to the raknoth sickness I’d briefly glimpsed in Al’Kundesha’s memories when we’d tangled back in Sanctuary. Was that what I was seeing now?

  A groan from the lake of bodies reminded me that now wasn’t the time to worry about anything but surviving. Two of our party hurried toward the sound and pulled a wounded soldier out from under one of the dead. Somewhere off in the darkness above, I thought I heard a low growl.

  “We should keep moving,” said Talia, apparently having heard it too.

  Once they got him on his feet, the wounded legionnaire seemed capable of moving with only light support, so we pushed on. For the last couple minutes of our trek, the sounds of fighting continued to grow more distant and sporadic, mostly focused toward Haven’s center. We also didn’t pass anyone, which wasn’t overly odd since we were moving into a less-populated corner of Haven.

  But I couldn’t shake the feeling we were being followed.

  At first, I attributed it to battle nerves. As the building that housed Therese’s lab came into view, though, I finally caught it at the edge of my senses on one of my quick, uncloaked sweeps—a hybrid, prowling after us from the shadows a couple rooftops back. It seemed to feel me noticing, because when I looked back, there was nothing. I watched the shadows uneasily. Finally, two dots of crimson fire appeared in the darkness, watching right back. Waiting.

  Suddenly, I had the horrible feeling our presence might be more a danger than a boon to Elise and the others
. But it was too late to turn back. Almost as soon as the one hybrid made itself known, another appeared behind us in my extended senses, and another off to the far right.

  They were boxing us in. Like intelligent predators.

  “We need to get inside,” I said quietly to Talia and the others, dialing my cloak in and hoping the hybrids’ senses weren’t sharp enough to catch my words. “We have company closing in around us.”

  They perked up and acknowledged my words silently.

  I gripped my sidearm and led the way across the mostly open lot in front of the lab building, feeling horribly exposed. For the first several steps, I allowed myself to hope. Then I toggled my cloak for another quick sweep and brushed against three more hybrid minds lurking on top of the lab building, and I had to swallow the truth.

  We weren’t going anywhere without a fight.

  I motioned us to a halt next to a few bulky cargo transports that were the best thing for cover anywhere nearby, drew one of Carlisle’s daggers, and readied myself. The legionnaires fell in around me, doing the same. The closest enemy was still over fifty yards away, but for hybrids leaping from rooftops, that might not mean more than a few seconds’ warning. I made one last mental sweep, then dialed my cloak in to keep us protected from telepathic attack.

  There were at least ten hybrids around us now, their minds abuzz with nearly as much telepathic power as I’d felt from any of the Seekers. Together, I had no doubt they could break my mind. It might only take a few of them.

  “Raishman.”

  Skin crawling, I leaned around the large skimmer and followed the guttural voice up to the several pairs of red eyes looking down from the shadows of Therese’s rooftop.

  “Master sends for you,” came another voice from the building behind, more airy than the first.

  “Weapons down and we spare men,” called a third voice from somewhere off to the right.

  Their timing was that of one mind speaking through three mouths. It was creepy. I glanced around at the Wolves. Talia gave a curt shake of her head. They were with me.