Ascendance (16 page)

She said something in her own language.

‘I really don’t think we need the star wipe.’

Did she speak to Compt’n ur Threshrend of magicks, or dread technology? They both seemed intent on the small iron box with human magicks contained within.

‘
But I love the star wipe
,’ Compt’n said, seemingly in protest, leaning so closely over the creature’s shoulder that the lord commander wondered how he contained the urge to bite off her head and have at the sweetmeats inside. Indeed, the Threshrend’s tiny half-formed loins were engorged and trembling with the very prospect.

‘Attend me, Superiorae,’ Guyuk growled, slowly.

Polly ur Farr’l looked away from her magick box, her comput’r, and regarded the lord commander with equanimity.

‘
I think your boss wants you
,’ she said.

‘
He’s not the boss of me
,’ Compt’n ur Threshrend declared.

‘Threshrend!’

‘Coming, boss!’

The female returned to her labours, some arcane series of devotions made to the magick box, which reminded Guyuk of the ritual gestures the Diwan had performed over her seer stones earlier. The Farr’l was not in the leastways intimidated. Guyuk glowered at the Threshrend Majorae, squatting quietly, concentrating its thoughts on her. Was it necessary to imbue her with such confidence that she had not even the slightest terror of his presence?

The Threshrend inclined its eyestalks in the direction of the Superiorae, as though that explained everything.

‘Is she nearly done?’ Guyuk asked. ‘I am wont to press on.’

The Threshrend seemed distracted, his attention divided between his lord commander and his prisoner.

‘Do you hunger for her, Superiorae?’ Guyuk asked.

It was as though he had caught the empath in some illicit observation of Her Majesty’s own thoughts. His eyestalks went rigid with surprise, possibly even fright, and he appeared to become aware of his loins for the first time.

‘No!’ he said, not at all convincingly.

‘We have plenty of prisoners in the dungeons. Get yourself something to eat down there if your appetite distracts you.’

‘Appetite?’ the tiny Threshrend said, as though Guyuk had spoken in some foreign tongue and the translation had been especially difficult. ‘Oh, right. Yeah. She totally embiggens old Threshy’s appetite, boss. For, like, eating her and stuff. Yeah . . .’ his thoughts seemed to wander off again as he contemplated their captive. ‘Yeah, old Threshy would love a piece of that. I would just . . . eat . . . her . . . up.’

‘Your treachery is admirable,’ Guyuk rumbled quietly, ‘but ill timed. You yourself have explained we need this female to deliver our message and vouchsafe our honour and trustworthiness until such a time as we might be positioned to strike at the unwary calflings. Her path does not lead to the blood pot, not yet.’

That caught his attention at last. Lord Guyuk even imagined that the Superiorae was alarmed by the idea of his prisoner going into a regimental stew. Good. It was his idea, after all, to spare her for other uses.

‘You’re right! You’re like totally right, G-Man. No blood pot for Fred . . . I mean, Farr’l. My bad. My mistake. If I confused you when I said Fred. Because I meant Farr’l. The wretched calfling Farr’l. Yeah. Fuck her.’

Guyuk had little to no sense of what his pro-consul meant, but that was not unusual. Not for the first time did Guyuk have cause to regret the choice of the first human soul the Scolari had given his Threshrend advisor to consume.

‘I wish to return to the Above as soon as you are finished stitching together this cloak of lies,’ Guyuk said, inclining his furrowed brow toward the calfling woman. She busied herself at the thin iron box of magicks. Really, it was more akin to two lids hinged together than a box with a lid.

‘Sure,’ Compt’n ur Threshrend said. ‘She’s just wrapping now. We can make it back to the Big App with her in five, I reckon.’

‘We shall not return to . . . Manhatt’n,’ Guyuk advised him. ‘Not with the captive woman. If she is the adept you think her, she will have no need of a sizeable thrall to escort her to the Above. The two lieutenants currently assigned her watch will suffice.’

The Threshrend’s eyestalks actually drooped in reply.

‘Oh, okay then, but they’re not gonna eat her when she’s done are they? Because that’s not part of the plan and –’

Guyuk struck him with the back of his fist. A light flick, but quick enough to snap the creature’s head to one side and induce a whip-crack motion in all of its eyestalks.

‘Gather your wits about you, Threshrend. It was you who determined that this female should go under our protection. My lieutenants are tasked to ensure nothing eats her. Or has your hunger robbed you of memory along with your wits?’

The empath was staring at him as though he had never been struck by a higher daemon. Lord Guyuk admonished himself, not for the loss of control, but for not having thought to strike the creature earlier. Superiorae and Pro-Consul adeptus he might be, but Compt’n ur Threshrend still answered to his lord commander.

‘I would have thought you had gorged yourself to point of utter satiation in the Above, Superiorae,’ he said, applying the balm of his proper title. ‘But it seems you are possessed of a hunger every bit as demanding as your . . .
personality
.’ He made the effort to draw out the human term Compt’n had taught him. ‘Order sustenance from the regimental kitchens before we take leave. I would not have you distracted during our audience with Her Majesty.’

If Guyuk expected the empath to be surprised or even perturbed by the news of their summons to the palace, it was not to be. Still rubbing his skull where the lord commander had cuffed him but lightly, the Superiorae did not even react to the summons. Instead he asked, ‘So, the lieutenants, they’ll get her safe home? Polly, I mean.’

Guyuk frowned at the unusual phrasing, but put it down to all the personalities at war within the Threshrend’s thinkings.

‘They are tasked to deliver her wherever she demands or desires. They will die in her thrall, if needs be.’

‘Okay,’ said Compt’n ur Threshrend. ‘I can live with that.’

‘Oh, Threshrend,’ Guyuk rumbled, ‘You cannot imagine how my hearts flutter with relief to hear that.’

Compt’n ur Threshrend regarded his lord commander with cautious reserve.

‘Your sarcasm’s coming along real nice, boss. A little more work and it’ll sting nearly as much as your bitchslap.’

16

A
nother explosion, a series of them, like a string of lethal Chinese firecrackers, burst over the Grymm struggling through the breach in the apartment wall. Gunfire ripped into those warriors who had cleared the opening and closed most of the distance to Dave and Karen. Armour-piercing and tracer rounds.

For illuminating targets and destroying personnel
, Dave recalled from another reality. The SEALs had chanted that, like a children’s poem.

When?

Once upon a time, he thought.

Some of the Grymm caught fire at the touch of the incendiary rounds, consumed by the same strange blue-green flame that had torched the bodies of the unnamed Hunn below.

‘The fuck?’ Dave muttered as more dark figures poured into the room. They wore body armour, helmets and night vision goggles and it might once have given them an intimidating, otherworldly aspect, but now it marked them as members of his tribe. His Clan.

They were men.

And, you know, maybe a hot monster-killing babe or two. He wasn’t sure whether equal opportunity laws covered special operations teams.

Dave wondered if Karen was okay, but he was too far gone to check. He closed his eyes and drifted off to the sweet, sweet sound of human gunfire.

Guns, he’d decided, weren’t so bad after all.

*

The penthouse didn’t look like a normal apartment. It looked like the big white box an apartment came in. A big white box with a white leather couch. These guys obviously didn’t have kids. For a long time after he woke up, Dave just lay there, looking at the drip someone had hooked up for him.

He felt as if he was bleeding out, but of course that wasn’t possible. The fluid was going in. All of his wounds were either healed, or healing in fresh pink swatches and ridges of scar tissue which would fade away over the next hour.

He found a few energy gels in pockets he didn’t even know he had. He could feel his body burning the calories as soon as he sucked down the warm, sweet-tasting jelly. Like throwing drops of gas onto a roaring bonfire.

The power was back, the penthouse clean and brightly lit. No sign of the SWAT team or ESU or whoever had saved their asses. No sign of the medics who’d plugged this drip into him.

‘Eat this,’ Karen said, and he jumped a little as she emerged from the kitchen.

‘What is it?’ he asked, as his head fell back on the padded arm of the white leather couch. He’d painted this fine piece of furniture with so much of his own blood and sour sweat it seemed a shame not to finish the job. Warat, or Varatchevsky, was carrying something which looked heavy, although the weight did not bother her. She looked as though she’d been awake for a while longer than him. Her leathers were filthy and torn here and there, but her face and her hands were clean, freshly scrubbed. He could smell the soap.

‘It’s a ham,’ she said. ‘I would have made eggs for the protein, but there was no power until two minutes ago.’

Dave waved a hand around in the warm glow of electric light.

‘Well, power’s back now. So where’s my eggs, woman?’

It was a tired shot at lifting the mood. She took neither offence nor amusement from it. Instead, she used her katana to carve a massive hunk of cold meat
sheathed in fat from the leg of ham, a whole leg including the hoof too, with only a few slices missing.

‘Jesus Christ, Karen. I just watched you stick that all the way into a monster’s ass.’

‘I cleaned it off,’ she said. ‘No cooties. See?’

She sliced off a huge chunk of pink meat and took a fist-sized bite of it.

The streets far below throbbed with the red and blue lights of the emergency services. Sirens rose and fell, but there were so many sirens all over the city it was impossible to say which were headed toward them. A lot, Dave guessed. A lot of ambulances anyway. Did they put dead people in ambulances? Would they bother, when the dead were piling up all over the city?

The penthouse afforded views far to the north and west and it seemed as though hundreds of fires burned out of control. He twice saw military aircraft swoop down from the night sky, unloading high explosive weaponry, rockets and bombs, on less built-up areas. It looked like a news report out of Gaza or Syria. Except that those rockets were falling on an American city. On
the
American city. Hours ago he would have run to the windows, gaped in horror. But he’d had his fill of more intimate horrors. Instead he collapsed on the white leather couch and fed on little tubes of energy gel until he no longer felt like he might fade out of existence.

‘How long . . . ?’ He trailed off, not even sure where to begin.

‘Not long,’ she said. ‘You’ve been out of it less than half an hour. ESU took down the last Thresher at the same time they rescued us.’

He stared at her like she was a puzzle he couldn’t quite figure out.

‘But we killed that one. You stuck it in the ass.’

She shook her head.

‘There was a third. On the floor above. Remember? You were just asking me about it when the Grymm set off that satchel charge.’

‘They what?’

He felt even dumber than he just had, as though he’d woken from a nightmare, but was unsure whether he was actually awake, or still dreaming.

‘The Grymm set off a charge, blew a hole through the wall,’ she explained as she carved off more ham. ‘It’s a proven technique in house to house fighting. Your forces used it a lot in Iraq and Afghanistan.’

‘Where’d they get a bomb?’ he asked, and then waved his own question away. ‘Forget it. It wouldn’t be that hard, would it?’

‘No, it wouldn’t, if you knew what to look for, and they did. They’re learning. The ambush was simple, an old tactic. They let us spring the first stage and when we survived they launched the second attack. The real one.’

‘Jesus, that first one felt pretty fucking real to me.’

Karen gave him the ham bone, keeping the heavy flank of pink meat she’d cut off for herself. He took the offering with a hand that was scabbed and scarred and held together with fresh pink skin that itched ferociously as it healed.

‘The last Thresher was old,’ she said. ‘Cunning. He did something. Shielded his mind, but also mine. That’s why I couldn’t feel him or the Grymm.’

‘Or the Sliveen,’ Dave added.

‘No, nor them,’ she conceded.

‘So, Karen,’ Dave said, resolved to press on. ‘Do you see you were wrong?’

She looked at him, her head tilted just a little to the side.

‘I was not wrong,’ she said, without bothering to ask what he meant. ‘The tactic worked.’

‘But you didn’t need to push those guys into beating the bushes for us. We could have found those Threshers without sacrificing so many people. And if we’d lost more of them, we’d have been fucked, wouldn’t we? There’d have been nobody to help us when the Grymm ambushed us. You should think on that next time.’

She stared at him, not offended. She appeared to be giving the question her honest consideration.

‘No, you are wrong, Hooper,’ she said at last. ‘If we had done it my way, we would not have needed our asses pulled out of the fire. We would have probed for the Threshers, located them, and killed them. Your squeamishness nearly got us killed. But you are not a soldier, are you?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not. But even soldiers are people, Karen. Their lives aren’t forfeit just because they signed up.’

‘Their lives are forfeit the minute they sign up.’

‘How very Russian,’ he said sarcastically. He wanted to eat. Needed to. Saliva was shooting into his mouth, but he swallowed it and pressed on. He needed to say this. ‘Nobody signed up for your militia tonight. You pushed them. Don’t do that again. Not here. What you do when you go home, that’s your business. But if you want Americans to die for you, at least have the decency to ask them. They might surprise you.’

There was no heat to the exchange. He was exhausted and all he wanted was for her to understand. She did not push back.

The ham joint was still cold from the refrigerator, in spite of the power failure. More saliva shot into his mouth as he bit into it, disgusting him a little bit and undercutting all his noble feelings about putting Varatchevsky in her place. He couldn’t separate the memory of so much torn human flesh from the clean, smoked meat between his teeth. His empty stomach cramped, but he kept chewing and swallowing and trying not to remember. There was no joy in the mere consumption of fat and protein, but it was necessary. With each mouthful he could feel himself healing. His strength was not yet returning. It wouldn’t until he was at least halfway recovered from the damage of combat.

They spoke while they rested up, but their conversation was flat. An exchange of information. Nothing more. Tallies of the dead, casualty counts on both sides.

Thirty-seven cops.

Nineteen firefighters.

The civilian death toll, still unknown, but high. Very high.

Dave ate and recovered his strength. Karen too. There was no alternative. They were spent.

They discussed fighting styles. A leashed Fangr was, in many ways, easier to deal with than one unleashed by the death of its master. They tended to run berserk when freed. Unnamed Hunn were invariably savage, but stupid. Sliveen were vicious and cunning. The Grymm, when faced outside warp, were horrifying. Dave had no doubt that were it not for Karen, they’d have killed him; and Karen for her part conceded she could not have survived the encounter without him throwing a fridge at them.

‘I didn’t really throw it,’ he shrugged. ‘Used it more like a battering ram.’

They swapped details of the effects of different types of human weaponry. They ate. Dave eventually got up and found beer in the fridge, but Karen made him drink water.

‘To hydrate.’

She led him through a tactical discussion of how best to deal with empath daemons in future.

‘If you are unwilling to risk a few pawns, we will need a ranged option,’ she said. ‘Snipers, air support or even artillery in the open. Infantry or
spetsnaz
or
Zaslon
operators, to clear urban environments like this.’

Dave had no idea what a
Zaslon
operator was. He could hear again the ghost of a Russian accent in her voice when she used those Russian words.

He was too exhausted to say what he really thought, that she was worse than anything Trinder had said of her. But he didn’t have to. She would already know. With Karin Varatchevsky, just thinking something was enough. She would know. She’d also know he thought Trinder was full of shit.

Dave didn’t even bother cataloguing his injuries. He just ate his ham,
and finally found himself enjoying the calorie-dense fat with a particular relish. He waited for the furnace inside him to burn the fat away. The windows of the penthouse rattled with the force of an explosion going off within a mile or so. They ignored it. When he’d finished a gallon of tap water, Karen let him have that beer. She drank from a large porcelain jug while reclining in the single-seater across from him, her boots up on the coffee table. Or what he assumed to be a coffee table. It was a machined block of stainless steel weighing a ton and had probably cost its own weight in gold.

Lucille lay on top it. Karen had fetched the maul up from the site of their death struggle with the Grymm and laid it out next to a bowl of nuts.

‘What are you drinking?’ Dave asked, mildly interested. ‘A milkshake?’

He wouldn’t mind a milkshake. There was only the one beer.

‘Raw eggs, protein powder, creatine and cocoa.’

‘Okay then. Enjoy that.’

He ingested mouthfuls of pink pig meat, wondered at the lives of the people who’d lived in this penthouse and what the hell was happening across the city beyond it.

A phone rang. Not the apartment landline, as he first thought. A cell. Karen frowned, her eyebrows knitting to form a single furrow between them. If she’d done Botox, Dave thought numbly, she couldn’t do that frowny thing. So she hadn’t done any Botox. Good for her. He ate some more ham, tearing the meat from the bone with his teeth as though ripping into a giant drumstick. Karen put the revolting protein shake down on the stainless steel slab, leaving a ring. A phone in a ruggedised case appeared from deep inside her gore-stiffened biker jacket.

‘Wow. Is that a BlackBerry?’ Dave said. ‘Did the KGB pick ’em up cheap on eBay or some –’

‘Shut up . . . Yes?’

The first comment she directed at him, the second at whoever had called her. Dave had half-expected her to say hello in Russian.
Dasvidaniya Tovaritsch
, or
Stolichnaya Ivan
or something like that. But he supposed it could just as easily have been a call from her made-up life. Her cover. Except she probably wouldn’t bother answering that anymore, would she?

The crease between her eyebrows grew deeper, and the line of her mouth thin and tightly pressed.

‘Sure,’ she said, almost spitting the word out. She passed the handset across the stainless steel table. For a second he didn’t know what she meant him to do.

‘It’s for you.’


From her expression, she was as surprised as he, and pissed off with it. Although Dave was pretty pissed off that he had to lever himself up from where he’d been lying, exhausted, stretched out on the couch eating his ham and drinking his beer. Fuelling up. Totally fuelling up, not being a lazy, irresponsible slug while the city died around him.

‘Super Dave,’ he said when he had the phone – yep, a BlackBerry – up to his ear.

‘Hello, Dave. It’s Emmeline.’

. . .

What the fuck?

‘Uh. Hi . . . Doc,’ he said. Each word more uncertain than the one before it. ‘How are you? Besides, you know, alive,’ he said, recovering a little. ‘After I rescued you and stuff.’

His confusion was as deeply felt as his astonishment. They had not parted on the best of terms. The only thing that could have surprised him more was big gay Igor commando-roping in to give him a kiss.

‘Yes. I’m alive, thank you,’ said Ashbury.

Dave’s bewilderment was mirrored in Karen’s face. Or rather, Karin. He assumed from her furious expression that this cell phone really was a Russian government unit. Probably specced out the wazoo with all sorts of security that Ashbury had just poked through to say hello.