Demons of Divinity

by Luke R. Mitchell

  “Like a dead man walking, I know.”

  She searched my face, looking like she wanted to say something more, then she finally gave up and leaned over to knock gently on Mara’s door.

  “Go,” she said. “Be with your friends. And don’t even think about missing number seven.”

  I nodded, trying to conjure a reassuring smile. She turned and headed down the hall, moving quickly and not looking back. With a deep breath, I pushed into Mara’s room… and straight into Edwards’ and Mara’s attentive stares.

  For several seconds, none of us seemed quite sure where to start.

  “I’m so sorry,” I finally whispered, the warm weight of tears pressing at my eyes quite suddenly. She looked so broken this close up. It wasn’t right, seeing her like this.

  Edwards was unusually quiet, waiting for Mara to decide how she felt about my apology. And she took her time. I held her gaze, hating every second of it but refusing to shy away from the pain and suffering.

  “Are you going after her?” she finally asked.

  I wasn’t sure whether she was talking about Frosty or Elise, so I started from the beginning of the attack and quickly explained what was about to happen.

  “I’m going to make her pay for this,” I promised at the end.

  Mara considered it all for a little while. I couldn’t help but feel like a criminal on trial. Couldn’t help but wonder what I’d do with myself if she condemned me.

  Instead, she beckoned Edwards closer, saying nothing to me. He stood and leaned over her like a titanic guardian. She murmured soft words to him, wrapping a hand behind his head and pulling him closer, nuzzling into him. I was caught off guard by the tender affections—so much so that I felt like I should step outside. I settled for turning to the window, trying not to watch out of the corner of my eye as they met for one long kiss.

  Then, without a word, Edwards straightened and ushered me out of the room, Mara watching me with those hardsteel eyes every step of the way.

  Out in the hall, when the door was closed behind us, I turned to Edwards, expecting him to send me off with a warning or to chide me for having come here at all. But he just hooked a thumb toward the nearest exit.

  “Let’s go, kid.”

  “You’re coming with me?”

  He frowned down at me. “Of course I’m coming with you. Who the scud else is gonna shove this thing in that Frosty lady’s brainpan?” he asked, sliding a dagger from the back of his belt and giving it a surprisingly dexterous twirl on his massive hand.

  When it stopped spinning, I recognized it as the dagger Mara had used to stab Frosty in the knee.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Good point, I guess.”

  “I’d better go to the barracks to get ready,” Edwards said as we reached the atrium where my Boar Company guard detail was waiting. “You should probably—”

  “Get some rest. I know.”

  He spread his hands in a mountain-sized shrug.

  “Hey Edwards?” I asked, drawing up just short of the Boars. “What did she tell you at the end there, when she was giving me that look? The specter look.”

  “Well,” he said, glancing around furtively, “she told me to give that raknoth bitch a knife in the brain from her. Or a good hard boot up the ass. Whichever came first.”

  “That was it?”

  Edward made a face that almost looked… was it embarrassed?

  “Never mind, man,” I said quickly. “Sorry, I’m prying. I just…”

  “No, no,” he said, shaking his head as he sagely laid a huge hand on my shoulder. “It’s fine. She actually wanted me to tell you.”

  “Tell me…?”

  He scrunched his face up apologetically. “That she promised to personally wreak great—and most likely scrotal-related–pain and mutilation on you if you get her booga b—I mean her man—killed.”

  And with that, he cleared his throat, looked surreptitiously around, then gave me a mighty clap on the back and turned to leave.

  “That’s… That’s a joke, right?” I called after him.

  He just waved over his shoulder, lumbering on without looking back.

  40

  Breached

  The silence that filled the front transport cabin was as tense as it was thick, broken only by the odd whines and occasional coughs of the engines. After the hybrid assault had wrecked a sizable portion of Haven’s fleet, they’d had to bring more than a few hunkers hastily out of retirement. Not that I was going to complain. We had a ride. And I had a team.

  And on the bright side, Edwards had muttered to me during takeoff, we might just crash and die on the way there.

  “That’s it,” Siren said from where she peering out over the pilots’ shoulders. They both turned to her with irritated expressions, but neither of the men managed to hold up against her charms for long, even distracted as she was. One found himself murmuring thanks while the other gave her a healthily lecherous thrice-over.

  “Take a seat, Siren,” Dillard said. If he was affected by her looks or presence, it didn’t show. Then again, he also had two transports full of legionnaires to worry about, and one of my newly-fashioned cloaking pendants at his breast.

  Siren didn’t pout or argue—just sat down beside me and Johnny. She’d been uncharacteristically cooperative and obedient since I’d agreed to let her come. It would’ve made me nervous if I hadn’t understood the root cause. But I’d been in her head. I’d seen how desperately she burned to find Smirks—or Garrett, rather. Much as I’d tried to avoid delving into anything but the raw facts in her head, it had been hard to avoid. In some strange way, I was pretty sure she loved him.

  That had actually been the hardest part for me to swallow—the part that’d nearly made me lose control when I’d dove into her mind back at Haven. Because, much as I wanted to hate Siren for what she’d done, I couldn’t ignore the nagging voice that reminded me I would’ve done the same, and maybe worse, to get to Elise.

  It didn’t matter now.

  Freed from their unintended distraction, the pilots brought the ship low, skimming right over the treetops as we descended into the lush valley at the southern extremity of the Auborean Mountains, headed toward the uppermost flight of the Red River, and the rust-tinged superstructure of the archaic hydroelectric facility that was our target.

  Had I not been ready to scud myself with apprehension, I might have admired the sight of the structure, partially cantilevered over the roaring waters, with the river-facing side incorporating several long, curved sections of duraglass to permit a view of the river below and the rising, heavily-forested bank on the far side of the valley.

  Beside me, Johnny glanced at his palmlight for maybe the hundredth time, equally unenthused by the sight ahead. I felt his worry in my own chest, amplified by yet another wave of guilt. The assault on Oasis would be starting soon, if it hadn’t already.

  But I couldn’t worry about that now. I’d made my choice, and the Legion was… well, the Legion. The cloaking packs would protect their minds. The rest was up to them.

  It felt scuddy even thinking it, but the mournful groan of age-kissed engines and the tug of deceleration firmly reminded me that that was a moral conundrum to wrestle with later. We had our own assault to worry about.

  “Place looks dead, sir,” one of the pilots said.

  “Yeah, but at least it’s not creepy as all scud,” Johnny muttered beside me, craning his neck to look down at the dilapidated facility.

  “I doubt the whole hybrid company I rode in with just vanished overnight,” Siren said.

  Dillard frowned at her then looked to me. I nodded, confirming that I’d seen the same in her memories.

  “Guess we’ll find out,” he said. “We stick to the plan. Hard and fast. Let’s get below.”

  It spoke volumes about the gravity of the situation that neither Siren nor Johnny gave so much as an amused smirk at that. In the main cabin, surrounded by the most loyal of legionnaires and hovering half a mile from Alpha knew
what terrors, Dillard kept his words simple.

  “You all know the plan. You all know what might be waiting for us down there. Get in, do your jobs, and watch each other’s backs.” He looked around the cabin, taking in the sea of determined faces. “Get your asses back to Haven alive, and I might even tell you I’m proud to serve with each and every one of you.”

  “Scud, Ordo,” someone called, “you’re gonna make us cry.”

  That started the chuckles, which quickly led to the chest-thumping and back-clapping and name-calling that quickly grew through the cabin like a rising tide until the legionnaires were half crazed with war lust.

  “Lock it down, Hounds,” Dillard cried, and they all snapped to like a cracking whip, finely-tuned death machines that were ready to bleed and fight and die until Dillard said otherwise.

  I prayed to Alpha they wouldn’t have to.

  “Take us in, pilot,” Dillard said to his palmlight. “Hard.”

  I tightened my grip on the support ring overhead. The transport lurched forward with an indignant whine of strained engines, the pilots shedding what little altitude we had and bringing us around for a lightning-fast deployment. The hatch was already half open by the time we stopped rotating, and half the Hounds were on the ground and fanning out before we’d stabilized into a steady hover.

  A kind of nauseated exhilaration gripped me as I moved into the exit stream and jumped with Johnny, Siren, and Edwards. As many fights and training drills as I’d been through, this somehow still felt new. And terrifying.

  The pilots didn’t bother landing. The instant Dillard’s boots hit the permacrete behind us, the transport was pulling off, sweeping around to watch the facility for activity and keep ready for a hasty pickup anywhere it might be needed.

  Behind us, the other transport was disgorging the second half of our forces with similar efficiency, but I was already busy sweeping the landing area with my senses. Nothing in the immediate vicinity. I dialed my cloak off completely to extend my scan to the larger field of our squad’s cloaking pack and found myself caught in a pocket between our pack and the one I’d crafted for Second Squad.

  Prowling forward, I found the edge of the pocket and felt the world in front of me pop back into existence in my senses. It was disorienting, but not as much as the lack of raging hybrids storming our location. I felt nothing but legionnaires and subtle thrum of some of the facilities subsystems running ahead.

  The leading edge of First Squad was already across the series of metal walkways ahead, breaching the main entrance and sweeping in with military precision. Double checking I hadn’t lost Johnny, Siren, and Edwards, I hurried along to catch up.

  Inside, the signs of abandonment continued. The main floor appeared just as it had in Siren’s memories of last night—the entrance atrium empty but for a few overturned pieces of furniture gathering dust just like the rest of the chic metallic floors and the duraglass walls that separated the atrium from what might’ve once been meeting rooms. The nuts and bolts of the hydroelectric plant, when it had been running, had likely been housed in the floors below, where I knew from Siren’s scouting there were now at least several dozen hybrid breeding chambers.

  I reached down to the few I could sense through the floor within the boundary of First Squad’s cloaking pack. They felt full, but didn’t seem to be drawing much power. And there was something else, too. I saw my own uncertainty mirrored on Siren’s tense face as Dillard drew up beside us, glancing warily around the atrium.

  “You got anything?”

  “No live hostiles yet,” I told him. “There are definitely breeding chambers down there, but… something’s wrong.”

  “An ambush?” he asked. Then, with a slightly hopeful expression, “Are they empty?”

  “Not empty,” Siren said.

  “No,” I agreed, focusing in on a single hybrid floating inside its chamber, deep in… No. Not hibernation. “They’re… I think they’re dead.”

  “They weren’t like that last night,” Siren said, looking worried.

  She didn’t need to tell me. I’d seen in her memories.

  Something was wrong.

  Dillard was frowning, opening his mouth to ask something, when something else caught his attention. He put his hand to his ear to indicate he had reports incoming.

  “Main floor’s all clear,” he said a few seconds later. “Dead hybrids? What about Elise?”

  I shook my head, trying to control the building panic.

  If they’d figured out Siren had been here… if they’d put the pieces together and decided to scrap the facility and move on…

  “She had her pendant on,” Siren reminded me.

  But it was scarcely a comfort, seeing as I didn’t feel Frosty or Garrett or any other living hybrids down there.

  “We keep moving,” Dillard said. “Let me know the moment either of you feels anything.”

  “They’re still here,” Siren told me quietly as Dillard marched off, but I could hear the note of desperate prayer in her voice.

  I clenched my jaw, resisting the urge to snap at her. If Elise was gone… then, I could explode on Siren. Until we’d swept this entire facility, though, it was a waste of time to worry about anything else.

  We lined up tight with First Squad and funneled down a dark stairwell that was much more utilitarian than the stylish atrium above. The room we filed into at the bottom was much more expansive than the floor above, an open, high-ceilinged space that had probably once been home to a host of generators and energy cells and transmission equipment.

  Now, it was filled with hybrid chambers wall to wall—or at least as far as we could see in the feeble glow of the few dim lights and the weak daylight that filtered in through some windows above.

  The breeding chambers were laid out in tight, neat rows—more than I could quickly count—and separated into clusters that obscured the view of the far walls and made the room feel like some kind of demented maze. And it was demented.

  After sensing the dead hybrid, I’d expected things might not be pretty down here. But it was far worse than I’d imagined.

  The duraglass panels on most of the chambers I could see had been shattered. The permacrete floor was littered with the debris and slick with untold gallons of the ambiguous green fluid that had spilled from the destroyed chambers. Most of the tanks still held floating hybrids in their discolored fluid. Some of the creatures almost looked at rest. Others looked as if they’d died trying to claw their way out, the panels of their tanks smeared with crimson blood and some darker ichor I could only guess at.

  Worse was the unmistakable smell of death—sickly and sweet and laced with a stomach-turning undertone of decay and…

  Blood.

  I nearly retched when we emerged from a row of tanks and saw the morose display. Siren did.

  Bodies. More than I could count—most piled high in the center of the room, but plenty more scattered messily about the space. The majority were too torn and blood-soaked to make out much of anything, but on some, I saw the clear marks of fangs and claws.

  “You always bring us to the nicest places, kid,” Edwards grumbled, looking a bit green himself.

  “Gropping scudbuckets,” Johnny growled. “Did they get tired of dealing with blood racks, or is this just some sick side project?”

  “What the scud happened here?” Dillard’s voice crackled in my helmet earpiece before I could even try to guess. Around us, several Hounds were asking each other similar questions in hushed tones.

  “I don’t know,” I told Dillard. “Maybe Frosty lost it here last night. Or maybe the older hybrids got smart enough to rebel after they hit Haven.”

  “Somehow, neither of those strikes me as good news.”

  “No.”

  “Heads on a swivel, people,” Dillard said to the entire company battle channel this time. “Demo, get those charges planted. Everyone else, fan out and keep looking.”

  Wiping her mouth, Siren straightened and turned for the far e
nd of the next tank cluster. “They took her this way last night.”

  Johnny and Edwards swept ahead of her, weapons at the ready. I followed after them, and was almost caught up when Johnny shot a closed-hand signal to freeze over his shoulder.

  I complied, throwing my senses out ahead, suddenly scared to even breathe. But I felt no hybrids. No Frosty.

  “Grop, that’s creepy,” Johnny murmured at the tank ahead, shaking his head and turning back to us. “Hal, it’s…” He made an inarticulate gesture, then shook his head some more. “Scud, just come see, I guess.”

  I stepped carefully around the chamber and immediately felt my insides go cold.

  There on the floor, written in what had to be blood, was a single word.

  Raish.

  A long, crimson trail stretched from my name, as if the body that’d donated the blood to write my name had been dragged off that way. Only it wasn’t a body that waited at the end of the blood-smeared trail. It was a crude arrow, formed of severed human limbs.

  It pointed down the next corridor.

  “That’s…” Siren whispered.

  “The way they took her last night,” I said. “I know.”

  I keyed my palmlight. “Dillard, I think we found our path.”

  It took the ordo less than a minute to reach us, and even less than that to make up his mind about the macabre directions. “All teams on my position, now,” he sent over the battle channel. “Let’s move it, Hounds. We’re closing in on—”

  He paused, staring hard at his palmlight, hand clamped to his ear. “Say again. Repeat, come in. Can you—Damnit!

  “Sir?” I asked.

  “The transports,” he growled. “They’re under attack out there. Sounds like Frosty.”

  As one, we all turned from the corridor and the mutilated arrow back to the stairs we’d come from, all of us caught in a silent moment of indecision.

  Dillard opened his mouth—

  A fearsome roar shook the putrid air before he could say a word. I tracked the sound to somewhere above just as a choir of unholy calls joined it.

  There, in the windows above, pair after pair of crimson eyes were lining up, staring down at us. They’d circled around somehow, I realized. Slipped out of the facility as we’d landed and come around to flank us. Maybe they’d been waiting out in the woods the whole time, expecting us.