“Sounds like a great idea,” Gabriel said, then raised his hands defensively when Greyblade turned his head again. “But okay,” he went on, “you just came up with it over dinner and it’s better than nothing. Maybe. If we’re really looking at killing a Henchthing of Nnal and preventing this world from tearing the heart of the Pinian empire apart.”
“I’m fairly sure the jump will burn out the field generator, and if proximal mass issues are severe it will spectacularly burn out the field generator,” Greyblade said, “but we only need it for one brief jump. And it will hurt Karl,” he looked back and forth between the Dragon and the Archangel. “Karl is going to be an integral part of our generator, like I said.”
Gabriel and the Drake sat and absorbed this for a moment. The Archangel reached out to grab the wine bottle, and a quiet chime sounded from the Drake’s dirty-grey toga. The Drake lowered her head and spoke into a neat little communicator button woven into the material, then stood abruptly.
“Time to leave,” she said.
SCRUTINY
“What’s going on?” Greyblade asked, rising to his feet and checking his helmet peripherals. There was no sign of anything untoward, although he still had his limits set and the armour wasn’t omniscient.
“It is a raid,” the Drake said, ushering them out into the drab corridor. Now Greyblade caught some sounds filtering down from above, but they were noticeable more for what they weren’t – the music had stopped, and the shouting and laughter of the levels above had been replaced with a muted mumble of speech. “It is not uncommon. They check the upper levels, and some random rooms down here. Come,” she opened the elevator door with a rattle and allowed her guests to board ahead of her. “I recommend you take one of the side tunnels.”
“What if they check the room that’s actually this elevator?” Gabriel asked as they descended.
“Then the Drake collapses the shaft,” Greyblade said.
“He’s right,” the Drake said. “The main tunnels and accesses are fitted to detonate,” she smiled. “I can dig them open again quite easily.”
They disembarked.
“What is a raid, specifically?” Greyblade asked. “Inspection from the Sprawling Adelbairn authorities?”
“Basically,” Gabriel said. “There’s a few different branches of law enforcement – police, drugs and arms, trade and commerce inspection, border control … and half of the inspections have the off-the-books secondary purpose of identifying troublemakers and justifying crackdowns.”
“Troublemakers,” Greyblade said. There was a tinkling crash far above, detectable as a vibration along the open shaft struts. Neither the Drake nor Gabriel looked up.
“Any alien who might put up too much of a fight against human pushiness,” Gabriel growled.
“I will wait here,” the Drake told them. “Take the southern passage from the lower gallery,” she pointed away into a deeper curve of the cavern. “You will come to the surface in a utilities chamber under Clapham Street.”
There were no more noises from upstairs as they descended through to the passage the Drake had indicated, and Greyblade was beginning to think the raid had ended.
“This happens sometimes,” Gabriel echoed the Drake’s response. They entered the great rounded tunnel, the Archangel shuffling a little uncertainly. It would be darker, to his eyes. “In their defence, there are actually some pretty shady characters that it’s good to get help with–”
“Stop,” Greyblade said, putting one gauntlet to the cave wall and another to the Archangel’s barrel chest. “I’m detecting – back!”
He was surprised at the ancient creature’s speed and strength. Gabriel seized him unceremoniously under the arms and swept both of them back into the main cavern even as the Drake was stepping forward and opening her mouth to shout. The Dragon saw they were clear, and raised a hand. With a distant rumble, the Clapham Street end of the tunnel imploded.
“A team had found the access hatch and were preparing to breach,” the Drake said, and Greyblade nodded. His sensors had informed him of a deep telemetric scan and the arming of charges at the far end, but he couldn’t have said that data had arrived before the Drake’s own actions had become clear. His sensors and instincts were so intertwined it was impossible to say where one ended and the other began. “They may not have gotten past the surface-level detours or found the sub-entrance, but it is not worth risking. I will monitor the rest of the access points. This may be a larger-scale raid than it originally seemed,” the Dragon continued, turning and heading towards the gallery where her trove awaited, “or they may be two different operations. I am collapsing the tunnels and the elevator shaft either way,” she pointed. “Take the Vanning tunnel and I will collapse it behind you from this end. If you encounter an incursion team that has reached the lower levels–”
“We’ll take care of it,” Greyblade said.
“We will?” Gabriel murmured.
“Go,” the Drake urged. “This is not the first time the humans have sniffed around the doorways to my domain. I will contact you.”
They headed into the tunnels at a trot, Gabriel now moving with the ease of familiarity. Occasionally he leaned in and added a push of his gnarled knuckles to the ground for added speed.
“This is some retirement project you’ve set yourself,” the Archangel said as they jogged through the clinker-lined cave. “Don’t you think it would be easier to quietly pay a visit to Capital Mind and talk to Ildar or Mygon about it? Are you that certain they’d respond by destroying Earth?”
“That avenue is closed,” Greyblade said. “And besides, any official action taken by the Firstmades, if it’s not to destroy Earth and leave Karl basically unharmed, will escalate this to the level of Divine war. And whether or not Jalah could squash Karl without breaking a sweat, it wouldn’t end there. There’s a reason more powerful Gods don’t destroy lesser ones willy-nilly.”
“And destroying Earth and sending Karl back to the Dark Realms with a smirk on His face isn’t what I suppose you’d call an optimal solution,” Gabriel guessed.
“No,” Greyblade said. “In fact, having the Master Races Alliance and the remaining Lapgods huffing and puffing about how the Brotherhood killed Karl the Bloody-Handed, and Jalah smirking and saying Karl let Himself get killed by a bunch of mortal Pinian-worshippers for trespassing – that sounds pretty optimal to me.”
“I’m pretty sure you just want to be the one who kills Karl the Bloody-Handed,” Gabriel accused.
“That wouldn’t upset me,” Greyblade admitted. Gabriel grunted in amusement. “You know,” Greyblade went on after a few moments, “if the Pinians had ordered me to dismantle this world, I’d’ve been at the command pulpit of the Ladyhawk, ready to arc up the big metal bitch’s mass-collider guns.”
“Instead here you are,” Gabriel grinned, “on the run from the authorities deep under the red dirt of Old Meganesia, with the Archangel Gabriel.”
Greyblade pulled up short, reaching out to pat Gabriel’s arm. “We passed the implosion charges,” he pointed. “I guess another couple of hundred metres will get us out of the danger zone and the Drake will be able to blow the tunnel.”
“So what have we stopped for?” Gabriel demanded.
Greyblade laughed, and they resumed jogging.
“Run from the authorities through here very often?” Greyblade asked.
Gabriel didn’t answer that, just loped and knuckled along steadily by Greyblade’s side with his wings swishing and occasionally brushing the walls and floor. After the way the Archangel had lifted him out of the first tunnel they’d taken, Greyblade was acutely aware that Gabriel was going slowly for his sake.
“It’s all very well making this ‘not about Karl right up until it is’,” Gabriel said eventually, “but you’re probably going to have to make this ‘not about moving the Earth right up until it is’, too. They’ll never let–”
There was a deep rumble from behind them, and Greyblade slowed again.
“What–” Gabriel said in a tense murmur, then Greyblade’s visual feed showed the Archangel’s deep-set amber eyes gleaming. “We’ve got company.”
Greyblade nodded slowly.
They proceeded as silently as the hard, uneven tunnel floor permitted. Greyblade wasn’t built for stealth, and he was impressed at Gabriel’s near-inaudible padding movement. It wasn’t long before the ambient output from the equipment of the humans up ahead resolved into comms, lights, and conventional weapons signatures – as well as the leaden sensor-silence of another of the big bronze guns. Probably hanging on the leader’s utility belt.
And probably loaded with the soul of the leader’s predecessor, Greyblade thought with a snarl, or some poor educationally topiaried bastard from the Aganéa farms.
Before the oncoming group got into visual range, he’d extended a combat pulse towards them and shorted out their sensor-logging and external comms. It was surprisingly easy.
“Headset feed just went dead, control do you read?” he heard a moment later, and then, “contact!”
Not bothering with his sword, Greyblade launched himself forwards into the swinging light-beams with a roar.
He went directly for the leader, who was the greatest threat and the hub of the isolated little command structure. Plus, she had that goddamned gun. Greyblade hammered her solidly between the eyes with a gauntleted fist, rattling her brain soundly and yanking the gun from her grasp even as it spat a stream of nasty semi-molten projectiles across the wall and ceiling. The guns, he knew, were each as unique as the souls that powered them. They fired, essentially, the sort of ordnance their wielders wanted them to fire. When the energy at your command was functionally unlimited, the only restrictions were in its effective conversion into heat and matter. And even those weren’t so much restrictions, as they were options.
While the leader was still tumbling unconscious to the tunnel floor, and with conventional projectiles and beams glancing off his armour, Greyblade punched three more soldiers, whacked two more with the heavy butt of the gun, picked up a sixth man and used him to knock out two more, then grabbed the final two by the throats and bore them to the glassy ground as he went to one knee. He bashed them judiciously against the rock, then stood and examined the aftermath. Aside from one who’d been hit by his own teammate’s flechette round and was bleeding profusely from a leg wound as well as being unconscious, they were all stable. Greyblade knelt again and administered a quick-and-dirty cauterisation and patch-up. He turned his visor towards Gabriel, who was standing on the edge of the battlefield with his long arms folded.
“Not bad for a museum piece,” Gabriel congratulated him.
Greyblade had to admit he was surprised as well. He’d gotten used to being outmoded, but right from his initial disruption pulse it had been obvious these humans were out of their league. Their training had been lacklustre, their weapons poorly-maintained, and their dependence on technology – and Greyblade was well aware of his own cybernetic status as he made this judgement – appalling.
“Hope you didn’t strain yourself,” he said, standing back up as Gabriel picked his way through the human wreckage.
“I was ready to mop up,” Gabriel protested.
“One does not mop up after a Burning Knight.”
Gabriel chuckled, then looked around admiringly at the unconscious figures. “I assume they’ll all make a full recovery.”
“I came here to help save humans, not kill them.”
Gabriel nodded, then extended his hand for the gun. Greyblade hesitated. He looked down at the short, heavy muzzle for the first time. It was only slightly warm despite the fiery death it had been spitting moments before. The bright bronze-coloured metal was darkened at a couple of the joins with some sort of oxidation, and a greenish filigree of a different tarnish surrounded the wide mouth of the barrel.
“If you’re here to save humans, you’re here to save all of them,” the Archangel gently interrupted his reflection. “Not just the ones that are alive.”
“I thought there were severe repercussions for interference with this tech,” Greyblade said, but handed the gun over butt-first. “It’s already going to be hard enough to pass off the collapsed tunnels and the knocked-out security team as anything but a secret network circumventing the alien quarter borders.”
“These idiots won’t remember us,” Gabriel grunted, deftly dismantling the gun. “I had a bit of a lean on them before you knocked them out. Might have even put their responsiveness in the toilet, not to deride your skill in battle … ah,” he withdrew the innocuous grey cartridge that held the power cell, and slipped it into his robe. Before Greyblade could say anything, the Archangel drew out what looked like the same cartridge but Greyblade assumed to be a different but identical one, slipped it back into the gun, reassembled the barrel and then tossed the verdigris-veined weapon to the tunnel floor near its owner’s curled fingers. “We got lucky. Not all of them have the replaceable cells,” he explained. “Some of them are crafted for a single soul, and when it goes they need to re-forge the entire gun.”
“What was that – a fake?” Greyblade asked, as they resumed their jog for the tunnel entrance. Time was even more of the essence now, since he had no idea how long it would take for the authorities of Sprawling Adelbairn to scramble a response to their team going dark.
“Better,” Gabriel grinned, “an empty.”
The human wielders of the soul weapons were not particularly well-versed, Gabriel explained as they trotted along the slowly-ascending path. You didn’t need to be, with weapons as powerful and intuitive as the living guns. And so it wasn’t unusual for one of them to discharge and ground itself.
When the soul vented, Gabriel told him, the machine purged it whole – or as close to whole as the unhappy thing was ever going to get again. Letting it leak or overload, after all, was a good way to turn a city into a hole clean through the world. In theory. In practice, the guns were made in such a way that it wasn’t even possible to intentionally burn them out, let alone accidentally.
“So your empty cell will make it look like she screwed up her gun?” Greyblade asked.
“Basically,” Gabriel agreed. “When a gun vents, the soul tends to thrash around a bit before finding its way to unreality or wherever broken souls go. It can try to possess the people nearby, or try to spontaneously reincarnate, or cause a few other spooky effects. Visions, psychotic breaks … even if these guys do remember seeing us, it’s going to be easy to dismiss it. We’re not exactly normal aliens. Anyway, when it comes to a gun fault, being knocked out and suffering localised amnesia counts as getting off lightly.”
“And they’ll actually believe that’s what happened?” Greyblade asked. “Quite a convenient coincidence, isn’t it?”
“We don’t exactly have much choice,” Gabriel pointed out. “I’ve gotten through a couple of run-ins this way.”
Greyblade considered pointing out that this might have been because Gabriel was naturally capable of smudging himself out of the broader psychosensory picture, whereas Greyblade was very much on the official tourist register. But he didn’t exactly have much choice but to trust the Archangel. “Have you ever tried to vent one on location?” he asked instead.
“Sure,” Gabriel said, and grinned again in the dark. “Once.”
“She’ll probably get in trouble with her superiors.”
“Plenty more cells out there,” Gabriel said, “poor deluded idiots. She’ll be back in business by this time next week.”
“What about negligence, poor weapon care, endangering her team?” Greyblade asked. “Disciplinary action?”
Gabriel shrugged. “Every time I think about that,” he said, “I think about – just for example – that line of slag she carved in the wall of this tunnel, and how she fully intended it to cut both of us in half. And it would have,” he growled, a low and shockingly bestial sound. �
��Every human has a choice,” he said. “Sometimes other people reduce those humans’ choices to a handful of shitty options, but once you reach the point where you’re strapping on one of those guns…”
Greyblade shrugged. “We’ve all known humans long enough to know this is the sort of trouble they make for themselves.”
“Just as well you’re here to save them then.”
Gabriel seemed to have been rendered grumpier than usual by their encounter. Greyblade couldn’t say he blamed him. “So what do you do with that full cell?” he asked.
The Archangel accelerated a little, his expression set.
“The place we’re going will be able to deal with it,” he said quietly.
VANNING
The tunnel ascended still further, before coming to an abrupt rounded end ten kilometres or so from the point where they’d run into the incursion party.
“They got pretty deep,” Greyblade remarked. “The soldiers. They were closer to Sprawling Adelbairn than they were to Vanning. Are you sure they wouldn’t have recognised this as a Dragon cave?”
“Oh, they would have recognised it,” Gabriel said. “They collapsed most of the Bahere nest tunnels under Vanning, and confiscated the trove. But they’re still finding tunnels. Mainly because the Drake is still making them.”
“And they haven’t stopped to think that there might be a new Dragon making tunnels?”
Gabriel shook his head. “Dragons are proud,” he said, “and extremely conspicuous. It’s hard to picture one hiding out of the way, digging tunnels, for twenty-odd years without busting out and yelling a lot. It’s hard for me to believe, and I know her. The Drake is far from your typical Dragon,” he spread his hands. “Still, every incident brings us closer to the point where they realise something’s going on down here. Hopefully this one was worth it.”
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