Ascendance (20 page)

‘Karen,’ Dave said. ‘Come here.’

She reversed a few yards, watching for the appearance of the ambush she’d just assured him they hadn’t walked into. Dave wasn’t sure whether she was being careful or reckless.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘This bolt,’ said Dave. ‘It’s not from a Horde crossbow. Not Sliveen or Grymm.’ He placed a boot on the man’s chest and grimaced as he pulled the bolt
free of the body with a wet, tearing sound.

‘My Thresher wouldn’t know one
arrakh
from another,’ she said. ‘So, the little monster voice inside your head is telling you we’ve got new friends to play with?’

He frowned as he examined the bloody shaft and the design of the arrowhead.

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘This looks like it’s come out of the Savat
arrakh
-works. See, it’s longer than a Sliveen bolt, and the arrowhead is wulfin bone, not iron-tipped or Drakon-glass.’ It was a relief of sorts not to have to translate everything he’d just said.

‘Qwm Sect,’ Karen said. ‘Well that’s just super.’

‘Yeah.’

Dave tossed the shaft aside.

‘Urgon didn’t think much of the Qwm,’ he said.

‘Neither do I,’ Karen said, and started back toward the far end of the tunnel, moving through the field of the dead as quickly as she could. Lucille hummed in Dave’s hands, but she was no more or less roused to her usual blood madness by the find. The Threshrend was still near, he thought. He was pretty sure he could sense the eagerness of his girl to be cracking that particular head open. But she gave no sense of being aroused by the promise of imminent slaughter on a much grander scale, as she normally did when they drew close to
dar ienamic
. As they passed out of the tunnel on the other side of the Helmsley, even that died away.

‘I think we could warp again,’ Dave said.

‘I think so, too,’ Karen agreed. ‘That Thresher’s out of range. I can feel it.’

20

A
Talon of Hunn had infested the Grand Central Station. Four cohorts, more than a hundred of the big-ass dominants, led by a BattleMaster ur Hunn. They had no Threshrend in support, however, and so Dave and Karen came upon them as a divine wind, a wave of mutilation, or some other metaphor Dave couldn’t quite put his finger on. He’d dozed through high school English, and barely passed Writing for Engineers at college. He had a T-shirt once upon a time that he loved dearly.

Once I couldn’t spell engineer
, it said.
Now I are one
.

Annie made him stop wearing that, of course. ‘It makes you look like a moron, Dave,’ she said, before adding that he didn’t need any assistance on that front.

‘Hey, Super Dave . . . a little help?’

Karen’s voice broke into his reverie. He’d recalled Annie teasing him – and that’s all it was back then, just teasing – with surprising fondness.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Off with the pixies.’

‘Well how about giving me some help here with the man-eating daemons.’

‘On it,’ he said, and swung Lucille’s splitting wedge at the skull of the nearest Hunn warrior. It came apart with a satisfying detonation of bone and flesh. Destroying the Talon was not much of a challenge, not like clearing the apartment tower and fighting through the ambush had been, even though these Hunn were full dominants, named and scarred, inked with the legends of all the battles they had fought. There were Grymm and Sliveen here as well. They first put down the Sliveen ranged around the upper concourse, before killing the four lieutenants, one for each cohort, Dave presumed.

The rest of it was what his old man would have called a job of work. Not that his old man had much experience with actual jobs or work of any sort. Each cohort had dispersed to a different quarter of the station where they were about the business of murder and destruction when Dave and Karen came calling. His control of the warp field was such now that the encounter was less a fight than an execution. They went from one daemon to the next, Dave smashing heads with Lucille, who was singing a giddy, trilling song of delight he’d never heard before, while Karen lopped off heads with
Ushi
, or drove the chisel point of the magic sword up into the nasal cavities of those she could more easily reach.

‘I’m getting bored of jumping up and down,’ she said at one point, leaving Dave for a few minutes before returning with two pistols and reloads she’d taken from the bodies of some transit cops. For the next five minutes, Grand Central rang with the metronomic reports of Karin Varatchevsky double-tapping a couple of dozen Hunn dominants.

‘Damn, it’s like grubbing out my backyard,’ Dave grumbled, as he methodically cracked skulls, although he hadn’t owned a back yard since Annie had split, and he hadn’t been all that diligent about keeping it tidy anyway.

The reduction of the Talon took up the better part of a quarter of an hour, at least as experienced by Dave and Karen. To the surviving witnesses, to the handful of cops and a small squad of soldiers still holding out against the attack from behind the ticket windows, it would appear as though that wave of mutilation, invisible but unsparing, swept over the monsters while they drew half a ragged breath.

‘Hey,’ said Dave, as a thought occurred to him. ‘Gimme a second, would you?’

Karen nodded and went on with her last few executions. She wasn’t tiring, but she did look like she was glad to be nearly done with it. Dave checked around for any stragglers he might have missed, found none, and ran upstairs to the Apple Store. A couple of genius types in blue T-shirts crouched behind their genius bar, giving rise to the valid question of just how smart they were if they hadn’t bugged out yet. He was curious to see the effect of the warp field on the screens of the laptops and iMacs which were still powered on. They all looked as though they’d frozen in the middle of a screen refresh which, he supposed, they had. Leaning his magical sledgehammer against one of the blonde wood display tables, he laid his hands on the keyboard of one of the larger MacBooks. It came to life.

‘Oh, fucking sweet.’

But his simple joy at the discovery soured when he found he couldn’t access anything online. All the files and apps on the computer’s drive were available. The internet was not.

‘What the fuck, Hooper? Are you that much of a fan boy?’

Karen had followed him upstairs after finishing off the last of her cohort. Her katana blade was dark with daemon fluids. She was frowning at him, but he could see she’d figured out what he was trying to do. Or she’d just read his mind again.

‘I thought I’d see if we could get net access inside the bubble. I wanted to watch that Compton video you told me about. Dumb idea, I suppose.’

She shrugged, conceding his point.

‘No. It was worth a look. So the laptop worked when you tried to use it, but only the laptop?’

‘Yeah. I can’t get anything external.’

He shut the lid, frowned, and opened it up again. Angling the screen just so it lined up with the other two on the bench. He was hoping to find an iPhone at the set-up table, but there was only an iPad in its box. Still wrapped.

‘I want to get a phone,’ he said, almost apologising.

Karen surprised him.

‘Good idea. You can get me one too. Mine’s compromised.’

She took out her BlackBerry, removed it from the thick protective case and used the butt of her sword hilt to smash it to pieces on the nearest bench.

‘I should have done that earlier,’ she said.

‘I think they keep all their stock out the back,’ mused Dave, irrationally pleased to be getting a new phone. His old one, which he’d lost back on the Longreach, was only halfway through contract. ‘Might take a while to find. And set up. I think we should ask the geniuses.’

‘Fine,’ said Karen. ‘But make it quick. And don’t get the ones that bend.’

*

Dougie, the senior genius, was at first shocked to find Super Dave had popped into existence, right in front of him. Shock became relief upon finding out he probably wasn’t going to get eaten tonight. Relief morphed into concern that he might get in trouble if he just gave away a couple of brand-new phones without taking a credit card number or even a driver’s license.

‘Jesus Christ, Dougie,’ said the junior genius, Carlos, ‘just give them the fucking phones, man, and let’s get out of here.’

‘We need them set up,’ said Karen.

‘Who’s this?’ asked Dougie.

‘Agent Romanoff,’ said Dave. ‘And she needs a phone too. Hers got hacked by Hydra.’

The set-up was faster than Dave expected. A few minutes compared to the usual half hour. While he waited for Dougie and Carlos to work their particular brand of magic, Karen ran back down to the concourse to talk with the soldiers and cops they’d seen holed up in the ticket booths.

‘There you go,’ said Dougie, handing a couple of the latest iPhones to Dave. Carlos threw in a pair of Lifeproof cases.

‘Thanks fellas,’ said Dave. ‘Stay frosty, okay? And I wouldn’t be headed uptown if I was you. It’s a fucking mess.’

‘But where can we go?’ Dougie asked. All the competence and calm he’d displayed while rushing the phone activation was gone.

‘Seriously? If they have gun stores in Manhattan, I’d make my way there tonight. Or if you have a secure space out back, just lock yourselves in until dawn. Things’ll get better when the sun comes up.’

They were thanking him when he winked out of existence in front of them.

*

They made better time on the southern side of Grand Central. The crowds were still ferocious, but they weren’t massing as badly as they had been uptown. At least not on Park Avenue. They were turning on each other though. Fighting for the buses still running. Looting food stores and diners and even high-end restaurants.

Dave and Karen were free running again, saving energy. Dave could tell he’d drained himself maintaining that warp field. He was comfortable at the pace they were running – felt like he could keep it up for hours – but he worried that if they ran into real trouble he didn’t have enough gas left in the tank or dilithium crystals or whatever he needed for the warp core. Not for taking on a hundred-plus Hunn at once.

He wanted to stop and eat, but he was starting to wonder where he could do so. Every second food outlet they passed seemed to be under siege or had already been cleared out. For the first time it occurred to him that hunger could be as much of a threat to him as the blade of a BattleMaster.

‘Cops confirmed the Horde are hitting transport and communication,’ Karen shouted over the noise of the mob. ‘Emergency services infrastructure. Hospitals. Fire stations. But not cop stations. They sound like Hunn and Grymm too. Main-force infantry deploying in Talon order. And they’re avoiding counter-force operations.’

‘And in English that would mean?’

‘They’re refusing battle with cops and military units in the city. They’re even withdrawing in the face of half-organised civilian resistance. Gun clubs, gang bangers, anyone with enough firepower, they just won’t engage. The city’s big enough that there’s plenty of other targets.’

‘There were cops and soldiers back at Grand Central,’ Dave shouted.

‘Not many and not well organised yet. They would have been chopped to pieces if we hadn’t turned up.’

They were moving quickly, but not as fast as they had earlier. The median strip which had provided a highway through the middle of the crush was now as crowded as the pavement and roadway. Car horns blared and sirens howled. Dave heard gunshots and occasionally automatic weapons fire, but it sounded distant. They veered left at E37th, a cross street with slightly less congestion, and Karen led them over to Lexington. The going here was easier and they made good time until the mobs thickened up again near their destination.

The crowd here moved with a sense of purpose tinged with fear, responding to police guidance to stay off the streets and proceed to the armoury. Casualty checkpoints protected by street cops, detectives and ESU officers triaged people in a methodical manner. Street vendors sold their wares while food carts fed people under the watch of heavily armed police officers.

Dave stopped for souvlaki, and Karen did not object. She was also becoming worried about how much energy they had burned through. A uniformed cop with an assault rifle made sure they were fed when he recognised Dave. Getting away, they still had to warp momentarily when the crowd surged around them.

On E31st Street they found a quartet of Hummers with a motley collection of bikers on Harleys, all armed, moving down the street toward the river.

Karen nodded her approval. ‘Someone made a good call, arming them.’

‘This is America, nobody had to arm them,’ Dave said. God knows his brother alone could have armed a whole chapter of the Hells Angels.

Overhead they could hear the hammering blades of helicopters and other aircraft mixed in with the sound of jets roaring over the city. He tracked a steady stream of helicopters a few blocks off to his left.

More troops, he hoped, or an effort to get people out.

They covered the last five blocks in a flash.

‘Whoa,’ said Dave, pulling up a few hundred yards short of 25th Street. ‘Might be time to hit pause.’

The hulking Armoury of the 69th Regiment was besieged, but not by the Horde. Thousands of civilians crowded the streets around the dark stone flanks of the massive fortress.

The crowds were so dense there was no easy avenue of approach to the main entrance. A platoon of infantrymen, with rifles unslung and bayonets fixed, held the gaps between half a dozen Humvees parked in a loose half-circle to secure the entryway, a double-height stone arch deep enough that it formed a tunnel of sorts into the stronghold. Occasionally the soldiers would part just far enough to allow a few civilians through. The press of the crowd was so great those lucky enough to be permitted entry had to be dragged from the crush by squads of troopers while other soldiers and some cops reinforced the blockade. Whenever this happened the screeching, caterwauling protests of the mob were amplified into a white squall. The noise sounded less like human cries than a force of nature. Dave put an end to it, imposing stillness on the world.

‘Jesus, what a mess.’

‘It’ll be happening all over,’ Karen said. ‘People are trying to go anywhere they might feel safe.’

‘How we gonna get through that mob?’ Dave asked, not at all certain that she wouldn’t do something very Russian like cutting a path through with Sushi the magical sword.

‘I don’t know,’ Karen said. ‘But let’s find out.’

They were able to get within two hundred yards of the barricade before further movement became impossible. There were no vehicles to use as stepping stones and they were too far from the clear area behind the semicircle of Humvees to make it in one prodigious leap. Not without taking the chance of landing on someone and probably killing them. The exploding rear window of the bus he’d jumped on to was a recent memory.

‘You ever crowd surf?’ Karen asked.

‘Er, maybe. When I was drunk but . . .’

That was all she needed. The one-time gymnast backed up a few yards, measured her run and before Dave could protest she’d launched herself at the crowd, reminding him in her last three strides of an Olympic athlete attacking a raised balance beam. He half expected her to perform some double reverse overhead twist, but she merely bounded into the air, landing on the shoulders of a big, thick-necked man, with an agility that should not have surprised him. What did surprise him was the way the man didn’t flinch or buckle, but then why would he? He was only experiencing the transfer of energy for a fraction of a second.

Karen did not pause or look back. Like a fire walker moving across a glowing coal bed, she hurried over the crowd. Dave had done something similar, he supposed, back in New Orleans, when he was only just unwrapping his brand-new gifts for the first time. He’d leaped and climbed onto the high, steeply pitched roof of a church to go after a Sliveen archer which had been using the steeple as a sniper’s nest. In that first rush of wonder at the changes which had so transformed him, he hadn’t doubted for a second that he could do such a thing. He’d seen it was possible and he’d gone for it. Watching Karen disappear across the heads of the crowd he could see this was possible too.