Angel Of Solace (28 page)

Shyrah glanced down at her hands, her brain catching up with what had just happened. She couldn’t explain how she had done those things; they had just happened. This time she felt the faint stirring of the alien inside her and she belatedly noticed that her skin was glowing with a bright, silvery radiance—the same thing she had seen with Sariel several times before.

“Holy shit,” she breathed. A second later, Kronn let out another visceral scream from down the hallway as if to remind her she didn’t have a lot of time to wallow in her newfound omnipotence. She quickly hopped through the rubble-strewn hole and grabbed one of the men’s pulse rifles. Just in case.

She turned and glanced down the corridor behind her. Kronn’s screaming had come from that direction, and it was time to see just what else this alien could do.

***

“He’s resisting,” the scrubber said, his eyes narrowed into thin slits as he pressed his hands against Kronn’s head.

Portis grunted. “Of course he’s resisting. The entire reason he’s here is because he wasn’t willing to cooperate.”

“I mean more than normal,” the man replied. “He has a disciplined mind; it’s slowing down the work, and there won’t be anything left when I’m done.”

“That’s not really my concern.”

Kronn tried to say something, but he knew it came out as little more than gibberish. It felt like hours since he had lost the ability to talk, though it had probably only been minutes. His head throbbed as if it had been bashed in with a pipe, and his scalp burned like someone had lit it on fire. Every time the scrubber touched him it got worse, and he knew sooner or later he would lose consciousness…and likely never regain it.

“Fine,” the scrubber muttered. “I’ll try something less subtle.”

Without warning, the entire building seemed to rumble as if an earthquake had just struck. Kronn thought it was just in his mind, but then he realized the sensation was real.

The scrubber paused a centimeter from Kronn’s head. “What the hell was that?”

“I’m not sure,” Portis said. “Let me—”

In the distance came the whine of pulse fire and the screams of men taking hits, and Portis swore under his breath. Kronn could hear him fumbling for his communicator.

“What’s going on?” the scrubber repeated. His self-assured tone had disintegrated in a matter of moments; it was clear he had probably never seen an actual firefight before. Not that it was surprising—Kronn doubted ESI would ever risk its Demon pets in battle if it could be avoided.

“We’re under attack,” Portis said softly, moving over to stand next to Kronn. “How did she know you were here? How did she know where to find us?”

Kronn tried to reply, but again it came out as little more than babble.

“His speech is gone. You think it’s the Angel?”

As if on cue, the building shook again, and Portis swore more forcefully.

“Who the hell else would it be?” Portis snapped, turning away and moving to the door.

“Well, that’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“Not like this,” the man muttered.

The sounds of battle intensified; whatever ESI soldiers were in the base must have gathered to try and hold off whoever was outside. As much as Kronn wanted to believe otherwise, it couldn’t have been Sariel. She had no way of knowing where he had been taken. Even Corin’s technical wizardry wasn’t going to find an ESI compound that quickly.

Another rumble shook the room, this one much closer than the others. After a few more seconds of pulse fire, the shots stopped completely. The only sounds in the room were Portis’s steady breathing and the scrubber’s much more panicked version. Kronn did his best to lean upwards despite the restraints.

The door blew open as if a great monster had just ripped it free of its hinges and hurled it aside. Portis leaned out to fire with his sidearm, but before he could pull the trigger his overweight body lurched upwards and soared across the room like a ragdoll. He was pinned by an invisible force against the far wall, cursing madly.

And a second later a familiar blonde-haired woman with a pulse rifle stepped around the corner. She was covered in dust and bits of debris, but her entire body was glowing from within.

The scrubber lowered his own weapon to fire, but he was too slow. Shyrah blasted him squarely in the chest, and the man crumpled next to the table.

“Don’t worry—I’m told a stun blast won’t harm the Demon inside,” she murmured.

“You,” Portis hissed, his voice and breathing labored.

“Makes you wish you gave me a better offer, doesn’t it?”

“How…how is this possible?”

She shrugged. “Like you said, the only difference between Angels and Demons is how far the parasite is willing to push. Well, I think you pissed him off.”

“You don’t understand what this means, do you?” the man growled. “Do you know what kind of threat you’re talking about unleashing? We’re not prepared to handle this!”

“No,” she said flatly. “You aren’t.”

She flicked the power setting on the rifle and fired. What was left of Portis slid down the wall and smoldered on the floor.

“Come on, let’s get you out of here,” she said, stepping forward. Without her even touching anything, the restraints on the table popped and then burst apart. “I took out everyone that was here, but I’m sure I tripped about fifty alarms on the way. They’ll have backup coming soon.”

He leaned up and offered her a garbled, nonsensical response.

She frowned at him, then glanced to the scrubber on the floor… “Ah, shit. Hold on.”

Shyrah touched his head. After a moment the throbbing dulled and the fire in his mind cooled to a just a few flickering embers. “How is that?”

“I…” he murmured. “Better, I think.”

“I can’t fix it all,” she told him softly. “There’s some memory and nerve damage…but it’s not too bad, all things considered.”

“How can you do this?”

“It’s a great question, and I wish I knew. I guess this thing inside me finally woke up. Anyway, we can talk about it later.”

He nodded as she helped him off the table. Fortunately his legs seemed to work just fine. “I’m surprised you came back for me.”

“Yeah, well, so am I,” she muttered. “Look, at some point you’re going to have to tell all of us what’s really been going on here, but for now I want to believe you’ll do the right thing. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.”

He locked eyes with her. “We find Marivean, and we make him tell us everything he knows.”

She nodded, and a thin smile formed at her lips. “Sounds about right. Now come on—let’s get the hell out of here.”

Chapter Eighteen

For a moment, Sariel could almost pretend they weren’t in the middle of a war for their survival, and that there weren’t a pair of aliens inside her slowly tearing her apart. Instead she was simply a woman, and Damien was a man, and that was all that mattered. It almost seemed like it could last forever.

But it couldn’t, and really she was amazed it hadn’t ended sooner. Someone could have stopped by in the early morning—or even the middle of the night—with important messages for her. They probably would have known what was going on the moment they came into the building. Neither of them had been particularly restrained during their first bout.

Or their second or third, for that matter. By the time daylight had started to work its way through the cracks of the building, she had woken up and wished she had at least closed the damn door—and then she had, before leaping back and starting round four.

Finally she decided to get up and let go of the fantasy. They might have gotten lucky and had one night alone together, but that wouldn’t last. The war was still going on, and people’s lives were at stake. And she still had to figure out a way to stop Marivean.

“I wonder if Corin ever got to sleep,” Damien commented as he threw his clothes back on.

She smiled wryly. “I hope so. He’d probably be too embarrassed to tell us we kept him up all night.”

“Did anyone manage to get the water on here?”

“Probably, it’s generally one of the top priorities.”

“I’m going to change and grab a shower, then.”

She nodded and decided it would be a good idea to do the same. Fortunately, she had been right—Stanson or one of the others had managed to get the water on. She didn’t understand the logistics of half the stuff they managed, but she was going to need to learn. Or maybe it wasn’t even worth it.

She scowled at the thought as she ran shampoo through her hair. For a night, she had managed to forget everything, and now it was going to hurt even more when it came back to her. If she did nothing, she was going to go insane and die. If she went after Marivean, she was most likely just going to die. Did it really matter how much she knew about their day-to-day operations?

Twenty minutes and a few hundred doubts later, she was downstairs in Corin’s new computer hub. If the man had heard them last night, he hadn’t made any comments about it. He did, however, have a very odd look on his face, and so did Damien sitting next to him.

“Problem?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” Corin admitted. “A couple of oddities. One of my sifter programs found something last night—a series of transmissions being sent out to some of the slaver contacts we keep an eye on.”

“Do you know what they say?”

“Not yet, but I should soon. The encryption isn’t very impressive, but I’m pretty sure it’s Covenant.”

She studied him for a few seconds. “So what’s bothering you about it?”

He sighed and leaned back in his chair. “It’s just…too obvious. I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth—I mean we could certainly use a break at this point—but it just feels
wrong
.”

“Something they wanted us to find,” Damien reasoned, “and probably a trap.”

“Well, I’ll still want to read it when you finish with the decryption,” she said.

Corin nodded. “I know, it’ll probably only take a few hours.”

“So what’s the other thing?”

He tapped a few keys and brought up a display on his monitor. It was, as far as Sariel was concerned, absolute gibberish.

“You’ll have to translate that for me,” she told him.

“Signal traffic from local police,” he explained. “Kronn has always had us monitoring them as much as we can, and it’s never really been that difficult for basic stuff. But this is something pretty important—triple volume even compared to a busy day.”

“I checked the local news, and they weren’t reporting anything,” Damien added.

“So the police are making a fuss about something, but it hasn’t gone public,” Sariel reasoned. “Any ideas?”

“I’ve listened in a bit,” he said. “Sounds like a big attack on the north side, just past the Kefel industrial complex. From some of the other data I’m getting, I think ESI might be involved now.”

She ran a hand idly through her still-damp hair. Understanding the basic logistical issues of how the Asurans managed themselves was one thing, and she could learn that fast enough. But the world Corin lived in just seemed absolutely foreign to her, and she always felt like a fool asking anything. Still, the alternative—saying nothing—would spare her some embarrassment, but it might also cost them valuable information.

“Any way you can use any of this to track down our friends?” she asked.

“I doubt it,” he admitted softly. “I just wonder if they were involved is all.”

She nodded idly and looked to Damien. He was focused intently on the series of screens. He didn’t know any more about this stuff than she did, but he was at least making a good show of it. Or maybe he was just thinking about something else.

It was bizarre not to know exactly how he was feeling, like she was missing a part of herself. After only one night together, she had grown used to his feelings mixing with hers. Even while they had slept, their skin had been together and even their dreams had swirled together. It was like being a single person, and now, sitting here by herself, it was…uncomfortable.

She took a deep breath and wondered if that would sound as pathetic aloud as it did to her own mind. She had still only known this man a week, and yet she knew him better than she had anyone else in her entire life. And all she wanted to do was touch him again, be connected to him again…and making love didn’t sound like such a bad idea either.

Hey, Princess.

Sariel blinked as the words floated through her mind. Those weren’t his thoughts, and they weren’t Corin’s, either. So whose…?

I’m sure you can hear this, and you probably have way more control than I do.

Sariel felt a smile tug at her lips.
Shyrah
?

Congratulations
, her mental voice almost as tart as her real one.
Look, Kronn and I need a pickup. We’re stuffed in an alley on…Koresk and 78th.

“Shyrah,” she whispered.

The two men turned to look at her and spoke nearly in unison. “What?”

“She’s out there,” Sariel told them, her smile widening. “With Kronn. They escaped somehow, and they need us to pick them up.”

Corin shook his head. “Huh? Where? How?”

She reached out and grabbed his hand. “Get a hold of Stanson. Tell him we need a vehicle.

***

What Shyrah’s explanation lacked in nuance it made up for in clarity—and brevity. Less than ten minutes after the two of them arrived, she had already laid it all out on the table. Well, most of it. She had left out the part where Kronn was actually an ESI agent and focused mostly on their capture and escape. The rest, he imagined, was up to him, and there really wasn’t much point in delaying the inevitable.

“Could you teach the rest of us?” Stanson asked. “To communicate with our Demon, I mean?”

Shyrah sighed and flopped down in a chair. Their group—nearly ten now—were all huddled inside the lobby of the old apartment building Kronn had never seen. He actually smiled inwardly at the performance of his people during this crisis; they had kept their heads, and really he shouldn’t have expected differently. They were good people.

“Honestly, I can’t really explain it,” she said, rubbing at her temples. “I mean it’s been with me my whole life as far as I know, and I’ve been in some pretty bad situations. It’s never done anything before.”

“Until this time, when you spoke with it,” Damien reasoned.

“I guess,” she replied with a shrug. “Look, it’s complicated and crazy. I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. There’s so much we don’t know—how do they choose hosts in the first place? How can they communicate with us? Why don’t they defend themselves if their host is being hurt?”

Damien nodded. “Why are some Demons naturally stronger than others?”

“Exactly. I have no idea how to answer any of that.”

“It’s going to take time and study,” Kronn said, eyeing Shyrah. She looked back at him but remained silent. “But right now, there’s a lot more you all need to know.”

They all looked at him expectantly. The moment he had walked through that door he had been back in charge, and it nearly made him nauseous. He didn’t deserve that respect, and in a few minutes it would be taken away. It was almost merciful, in a way.

“ESI hasn’t found Marivean either,” Shyrah said, her eyes glimmering as they lingered on him for a long moment. “But they’re looking. Now that they know what we do about the nature of Angels and Demons, they’re in a state of panic. They’re worried what will happen if this leaks out to the parliament, let alone the civilian population.”

“I’m not sure ‘riot’ would cover it,” Damien murmured. “I don’t know what the people would do here, exactly, but in Louvette…” he shook his head. “Most people would probably deny it, but there’s a powerful enough underground there that dissent would pick up. The Covenant could play serious damage control, but I’m not sure how well it would work.”

“In the seat of their power, they could probably handle it,” Kronn said, doing his best to keep the strain off his face. Was Shyrah giving him a free pass? Did she not want him to tell them that he was a traitor? “But beyond Louvette, they would have serious troubles. ESI is worried about a full-scale civil war.”

Corin snorted. “I can’t believe anyone would defend the Covenant after hearing about that. I mean this is evidence saying that everything they teach is a lie.”

“Faith isn’t based on evidence,” Sariel reminded him. “To some people—to many people—it doesn’t matter if the Sacra’thar is perfect or not. It hasn’t mattered for thousands of years and hundreds of religions. People need meaning, and the Covenant gives it to them.”

“Besides which, evidence is typically secondary to perception,” Kronn said. “There are a dozen ways they could spin this. In any event, it’s something of an academic point as we don’t have actual evidence, at least not yet.”

“Maybe not, but I bet the Covenant does,” Corin replied, sliding a data stick from his console. “I went over this stuff while you guys were getting picked up. The transmissions are definitely Covenant. Give me a day or two and I bet I can trace it to the source.”

Everyone fell silent for a moment, and Kronn stretched out his back muscles in the chair. Ultimately, the central question hadn’t really changed since even before the base had been attacked. What now?

“It’s still our best shot,” Damien said after a minute. “Find Marivean and make him talk. Drive the Covenant from Solace.”

“I agree,” Stanson said. He turned to Kronn. “You think of any keen ideas while you were in that cell, boss?”

Kronn made eye contact with Shyrah again. She remained silent, and it was clear to him at this point she was going to remain so. The question was why.

“Not really. It’s mostly up to Sara. How are you feeling?”

She shuffled awkwardly, and her eyes flicked to Damien for the briefest of instants. “Good, actually. I haven’t had any more episodes.” She pressed her lips together. “I still have no idea what to do against a man like Marivean.”

“Well, now you have help,” Shyrah told her. “I doubt he can stop both of us.”

The Angel lowered her eyes. “Maybe, maybe not. Your Demon might just decide it has had enough at any point. We don’t really know anything about what’s happening to you.”

“Yeah, well, no offense, but I don’t really know anything about you, either,” Shyrah replied tartly. “And to be honest…after the shit I pulled today, I don’t know what you’ve been doing this whole time. It seems like you could have this city on its knees if you wanted to.”

“I think we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves,” Kronn said. “We still have an absurd amount of questions and precious few answers. Until we can get some, I’m not comfortable doing anything just yet.”

Stanson leaned forward just slightly. “He’ll find us sooner or later. Personally I’d rather be on the offensive for a change.”

“Agreed, enough of this bullshit,” Corin said. “I’m getting sick of running.”