Angel Of Solace (24 page)

There were at least two more of them out there, he knew, not counting however many of them had slipped past and gone after Damien and Sariel. With luck, she would regain consciousness before their pursuers caught up. Perhaps the Incubus could even help her with it. If not, then all Avrick’s efforts had been for nothing, and he was going to die as a failure in addition to being a fool.

He leaned back around the wall as his attackers shifted their aim, now trying to blow out this section of his increasingly dubious cover. Three other bodies rested within a few meters of him, mercenaries who had come from the south hoping to aid their comrades here. They had expected a mostly empty base full of sleeping Asurans and one docile Chosen, and they had been mostly right.

He brought a hand up to his face and once more wiped the blood from his eyes and nose. He could still feel Marivean inside him, his voice and thoughts like a boiling pressure inside Avrick’s skull. But the Angel hadn’t managed to take control again, at least not yet. He had underestimated the will of a Chosen. It was a fitting way to spoil his plans.

It didn’t change the fact that Avrick was going to die, but he had accepted that. If the men trying to shoot him weren’t enough, whatever Marivean was doing inside his head was flaying his mind. He could feel it growing worse the longer he resisted—his hearing had started to fade, and it was getting harder and harder to see. Even his breathing had become irregular. He imagined soon his heart would shut down, or perhaps just burst inside his chest. It didn’t really matter. He had only minutes to live, and no matter what else might happen, he was going to make them worthwhile.

With a frenzied growl he leapt out from his cover and lumbered deeper into the compound towards the dormitory section on the northern end. There would almost certainly be more of these mercenaries there, and he might be able to take them out and rescue anyone they had managed to subdue. He continued on, rifle pointed forward, his vision little more than a blood-soaked haze.

“At least two more of them outside!” a muffled voice called from up ahead, barely audible amidst the weapons fire.

“Control says we have police copters in the sky,” another put in. “We have to get the hell out of here.”

Avrick pressed himself against a wall and leaned around the corner. There were three mercenaries in total, standing over the remains of some empty bunks. They periodically fired out into the alleys against an unseen opponent

Other Asurans coming to defend the base? Possibly. It didn’t really make a difference. Avrick’s time was waning, and it was now or never.

The Chosen swung his rifle around the corner and fired. His first shot hit the lead mercenary in the back, dropping him before he even knew what was happening. His second was slower, catching one of the others in the torso as the man desperately tried to sweep around to the newcomer flanking them. His third shot never came. As he tracked the final target, his opponent was already spraying the corridor.

Avrick felt his body buckle beneath the assault, and was surprised at the complete lack of pain. He couldn’t move, and the red haze over his eyes had deepened to an opaque crimson blanket, but he felt noting—only a cool breeze blowing across his face and an omnipotent blackness that soon swallowed him whole.

***

Shyrah and Kronn were outnumbered, and she had expected that much. But being pinned like this was costing them time they didn’t have. If this took much longer, they were going to be spending the rest of their lives in a prison cell.

“I’ll circle around to the left,” Kronn said between labored breaths. The brick outcropping they were using as cover wasn’t going to last much longer anyway.

“It won’t help—they have even better cover from that side,” she told him, firing another blind shot up into the compound. “You should really tell your ESI buddies to carry around grenades. We could use a few right now.”

She didn’t get a chance to see his expression. A burst of fire clipped the brick a half meter over her head and sprayed her with hot dust. She clenched her jaw and growled, preparing to take a stupid risk and just flip out and fire straight at these bastards. Corin was still in there and needed her help—or he was dead, and she was about to flay every one of these fuckers alive…

Shyrah stopped herself mid turn at the sound of another gun, this one coming from inside the facility. She caught the shrieks of men taking hits, and Kronn leaned up and started to pour fire more freely into the compound. Only one gun was responding to his now.

She grimaced and decided to take a risk, throwing herself over the brick wall. The hole in this side of the base was huge now, probably almost ten meters across, and she caught a flicker of movement as a mercenary leaned around to track her movement. She dove forward, knowing her own wild shots had no chance of hitting anything, and felt heat against her legs as the man’s weapon shattered the wall she had just left. A moment later Kronn’s rifle fired again, and she heard the satisfying half-scream as her attacker took a hit and crumpled over.

She lay flat in the rubble for a long moment, waiting for someone else to fire, before finally deciding they were clear and moving up to the hole. The bodies of three mercenaries lined the area, and she fired a shot into each to make sure they were out of the fight. Not far away, half-covered in charred plaster and dust, was the young Chosen man.

“Avrick,” Kronn whispered.  

“That makes no sense,” she muttered. “Why the hell would he help us if he’s the one who lead them here?”

Kronn shook his head. “I don’t know, but there’s nothing else we can do. We have to go.”

“What about the others?” she asked.

“They’re not here, so either they made it out on their own or they’re already dead.” He wiped a bit of dust from his face. “Hopefully they run into Stanson’s group. Come on.”

She grimaced, but as the rush of adrenaline started to fade she knew he was right. She had been hoping Corin and the others would still be here near their beds, but they didn’t have the time or the firepower to sweep the rest of the compound. There wasn’t a damn thing they could do now.

Shyrah bounced to her feet and hopped out of the building, Kronn closely in tow. They made it all of fifteen meters before she heard the unmistakable rumbling hum of hover engines in the sky. She glanced up to the trio of police choppers sweeping in towards the buildings, their spotlights flashing over the entire area.

“Come on,” she beckoned, holstering her weapon and breaking into a full sprint.

This time they didn’t even make it a few steps before the ground in front of her exploded. The force of the blast hurled her to the side, and she screeched as she landed in a pile of jagged rock. By the time her vision cleared, she glanced up to see a half a dozen black-armored soldiers repelling down from the now stationary choppers. Off to her left, a small squad of pistol-bearing, lightly armored troops was already bearing down on top of her. It was over.

It was all over.

Chapter Fifteen

Men who lived on the fringes of society—dissidents, criminals, or iconoclasts—were all people whose ancestors probably didn’t deserve to survive the Reckoning. But those who worked as the so-called “muscle” in groups like Beren’s slaver gang may have even been more disreputable. They were little more than sleazy, simple-minded buffoons who were paid to be murderers, rapists, or thugs, and from the first time Zanek had been given this mission in Solace, he dreaded having to rely on such scum.

But he had also recognized their necessity. The Covenant simply couldn’t afford to commit many official resources into Solace, not with their political situation as tenuous as it was. Elassians were a proud and independent people, and the Word of God was not going to be carried across the mainland by brute force. Not this time. It was going to be a long and arduous process of conversion, and in the meantime he had known he would have to make do with what he had available.

Still, it did nothing to temper his fury at their rather impressive failure tonight. A dozen well-armed mercenaries, many of whom actually had real military combat experience, and they somehow managed to let a whore escape with the only thing that mattered in the entire mission.

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t understand how you could fail so completely,” Zanek said coldly, glaring down the only two mercenaries who had managed to survive or avoid capture by Elassian Security. “I was told you knew how to aim those things and maybe even hit something on occasion.”

“Have a care, little man,” one of the mercs sneered. He was still winded from his escape, apparently, and the middle of his armor bore a rather wicked scorch mark. “Don’t make me feed this to you.”

“Oh, please,” Zanek grunted. “You couldn’t manage to track an unarmed prostitute carrying an unconscious woman around. I’d be surprised if you could hit this tower from the parking lot.”

“Fuck you!” the second merc growled, pulling out her sidearm and thrusting it in his face. “You know, I’m getting real sick of your Covenant bullshit. Boss says for us to hit an empty base to capture some bitch you lost, so we do it. He didn’t say anything about a god damn platoon inside.”

“Platoon?” Zanek laughed bitterly and leaned against the desk behind him. “The base was all but empty. There was one man inside—
one man
—and he managed to hold off a dozen of you?”

The male merc shook his head. “There was more than one gun in that base, and they had reinforcements come from the north. Lie about this shit all you want, but you set us up. Boss is gonna be pissed when he—”

“You’re wasting your time with them,” Marivean said coolly as he stepped into the room. They were on the ground floor of their new tower inside what had once been the makeshift barracks for their thug army. Now it was essentially empty. “We should have known they weren’t reliable.”

“You know what?” the female scoffed. “I’m not putting up with this shit. I think we’ll just tell him you got yourselves killed trying to fuck us over.” She turned her sidearm towards the Angel and fired.

A nearby chair flew up into the air and intercepted the blast, exploding into a fiery burst and splintering across the room. Marivean cocked an eyebrow at her.  

“What the…?” she muttered.

“Since we can’t rely upon your testimony to be accurate, it’s time to go to the source,” the Angel said coolly, as if nothing had happened. A moment later he opened his palm, and the woman suddenly lurched across the room. She stopped a half meter in front of him, suspended just off the ground, her entire body twitching as if she were being electrocuted. Marivean leaned forward and placed a hand upon her face.

“Oh, fuck!” the man snapped, raising his rifle. This time, however, no shot was forthcoming. His entire body went rigid, and he managed a single, gurgled shriek before his neck snapped backwards and he crumpled over.

“I share your disgust, but the fault lies with me,” Marivean said softly. The woman continued to twitch in his invisible telekinetic grip, and his hand clamped over her face. “Avrick’s mind was not nearly as malleable as I had hoped. Even one more day and our new Chosen would have been able to handle the situation.”

“There’s no way you could have known that, my lord,” Zanek assured him. “He was so young, and it seemed—”

“I neither need nor desire your platitudes,” the Angel told him flatly. “And unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as though she has any idea where our quarry might have fled. They gave up the chase even more quickly than they let on.”

Zanek nodded, noting the blood now frothing out of the woman’s eyes and nostrils. An Angel could be quite gentle when he wanted to, but when he simply burrowed for information like this…well, there wouldn’t be much left when he was done. Not that there was much inside her to begin with.

“With Elassian Security on their tails, they may bury themselves more deeply than ever,” he said with a resigned sigh.

“For a time, perhaps,” Marivean replied, opening his palm and releasing the mercenary. She fell to the ground, twitching wildly, a stream of crimson tears running down her cheeks. “But eventually they’ll realize that I am their only option.”

“We could bait them. Leak our new locations to them and hope they attempt some foolish offensive.”

“That may be our only choice. The Betrayer will have inspired loyalty in those around her. They will undoubtedly sacrifice themselves in her defense if it comes down to that.”

“They won’t be a match for our Chosen. Unless they involve the authorities.”

“They won’t,” Marivean assured him. “They can’t—the police are as much our enemies as theirs. Let them come, and I will be ready for them.”

“As you command, my lord,” Zanek said with a half bow. “I will inform the Chosen when they arrive tomorrow, and I’ll figure out a way to leak our location to the Asurans.”

“Very well. I require meditation.” The Angel turned and headed back for the lift.

Zanek glanced down to the still-twitching woman on the ground. He should probably dispose of the body, but planting information for the Asurans to find wasn’t going to be an easy task. It would need to be subtle, and they couldn’t afford to have something like that slip into the hands of Elassian Security. Besides, labor was a job for Chosen, and they would be here tomorrow. She might even still be alive by then. Insofar as a flopping mass was alive, anyway.  Hell could stand to wait a few hours for another soul.

He headed off towards the lift to get to work.

***

Damien woke to the sound of increasingly insistent voices, and as his eyes blinked open, he tried to remember when exactly he had fallen asleep. He had carried Sariel for what felt like kilometers through Solace, and perhaps it had been. Just as he had been about to pass out, she had finally come to. They had made their way to the closest Asuran safe house she knew about and gotten a hold of the others…

“Look, no one knows what happened, exactly,” Stanson said firmly to the other three Asurans in the room. “All I know is that Kronn saw it coming at the last moment, and it was definitely ESI that made the final move.”

Damien groaned and propped himself up on an elbow. Sariel sat next to him and placed a comforting hand on his shirt. This particular safe-house wasn’t really a house at all—it was the storage room behind an abandoned one-story business. Damien was on the only cot, and the other Asurans were all standing or leaning against the walls.

“So you’re certain ESI has them?” Sariel asked.

Stanson nodded. “Absolutely. The attack is all over the local news now, too. I think they brought in half the cops in the city. Right now they’re claiming they broke up a terrorist cell, but they haven’t released details. As far as we know, though, they cleaned up most of the Covenant trash too.”

“That Chosen dog sold us out,” one of the others commented harshly.

“No,” Sariel said firmly but coolly. “Avrick wouldn’t have done that.”

They all looked at her for a moment, and Damien could see the struggle in all of their eyes. On one hand, they had grown to respect this woman in her time here, but on the other they probably had also heard that she had vouched for the man’s presence in the first place—and then, not much more than a day later, the Covenant had shown up in force.

Stanson and the others didn’t know the details of the attack, but Avrick had been the one who had knocked her out in the first place. Of course, then he had also turned and fought off the mercenaries to allow them to escape…Damien still hadn’t worked through that one yet.

“Whether or not he did, it’s not the whole story,” Stanson said, changing the topic. “Elassian Security getting involved makes no sense. They’ve always been content to leave us alone, and I can’t imagine they would risk the political backlash of taking on the Covenant so directly.”

“They can probably pass it off as taking on the gangs and slavers like Beren,” Damien suggested. “I still doubt the public will accept that the Covenant is actually hiring those people.”

Stanson shrugged. “Either way, we’re missing something big, and ESI has Kronn and Shyrah. That has to be our priority at the moment.”

“What do you expect us to do,” another of the Asurans grunted, “try and bust into an ESI facility? There’s no way in hell we’re getting anywhere near something like that.”

“We’re not just leaving them to die,” Corin spoke up from the corner. His hair was even more tattered than normal. He would have been captured with the others if not for Stanson’s group.

 “For the moment, our best bet is to gather whatever data we can,” Sariel said calmly. “Off the Net, off the ground, anything we can find. Corin, start working on that and get whoever you need to help you.”

Damien eyed the woman next to him. The subtle shift in her voice and body language was striking. In a heartbeat she had gone from the typically pensive woman in the corner to a leader—and he could tell from the faces of the others that they had no problem with it. In fact, it seemed like they had been waiting for it.

“Yeah, all right,” Corin replied, nodding. “If it’s on the news there will be a ton of shit to shift through, but I’ll find something.”

“Good.”

“We also need to pack up again,” Stanson suggested. “I’m sure they’ll hold out as long as they can, but eventually ESI will get the base’s location out of them.”

“I’m not convinced these people actually care about us,” Sariel said. “But you’re right that it’s a risk. Unfortunately I don’t think we have anything ready. Can you put a team on it?”

The man nodded. “Yeah, until we have something more to go on we might as well focus on what we can do. Get the men working so they stop thinking about what’s going on so much.” He sighed roughly. “I’d also like to know how the Covenant is responding to all this. By the time we showed up their team had already been cut to ribbons, and ESI gobbled up the rest.”

“They won’t care about the team,” Sariel muttered darkly. “They were there for me, and they failed. They’ll try again as soon as they can.”

Stanson and the others looked at her with a combination of sympathy and dread. As revolutionaries, they were used to being chased, no doubt, but this was something extraordinary. Damien wondered how many of them knew that the Covenant effort here was being driven by an Angel. Probably none of them. He considered correcting that but decided it wasn’t really the time.

“Let’s get to work,” she told them. “Let me know if anything comes up. I have a few of my own techniques I’ll try as well.”

“You heard the lady,” Stanson said to the others. “Let’s get a move on.”

Five minutes later, the two of them were alone, and she had moved over to the far wall to stand and stare idly off in the distance.

“They have no idea what’s really going on, do they?” he asked.

She shook her head slowly. “Not a clue.”

“It’s probably worth changing that,” he suggested. “You know Kronn was going to tell them eventually.”

“Tell them what, that there’s another Angel out there in the city? That if he gets his hands on any of them, he’ll flay their minds apart trying to find me?”

“Tell them that we have a real chance to end this, all of it,” he replied softly. “Tell them that we need to find Marivean and take him down. Tell them he might be able to help you, and then we can expose their lies for what—”

“No!” she snapped. “Absolutely not. This needs to end now.”

He hopped off the cot and moved within a meter of her. “What needs to end?”

“No more deaths, no more prisoners, no more fighting,” she breathed. “No one else gets hurt trying to protect me.”