Ascendance (28 page)

‘Because of you, Hooper. You put down a Hunn, right? A blood-drunk BattleMaster? And Sliveen are sect allies of the Hunn. They’re all Horde nestlings in the end. I put down a Thresher, but mine was from the Qwm Sect. The other Threshers I killed, they’d been thinking deeply on the matter. Or rather Guyuk’s Scolari had. As far as the scrolls say anything, and they don’t say much, it seems the first calfling with the
gurikh
, the warrior spirit, to take down a sect warrior is chosen to lead the champions. Twelve sects. Twelve champions.’

She smiled at Hooper.

‘That’s what Heath was talking about when he said he had other assets in play. He has other champions, like us. And one Dave to rule them all.’

The Osprey droned on for a few moments, bucking in slight turbulence. They had left the New York area behind and seemed to be flying over water. Dave had done enough of that to recognise the signs, even at night. He could see the lights of individual ships and boats, small jewels on the endless black sea.

‘Damn,’ he said, when nobody else seemed to have anything left to add.

‘Oh there’s more,’ said Karen. ‘Your enchanted hammer? My katana? They’re not unique either. Sheriff Sheila May Robertson blew the head off of what sounds like a Hunn dominant, but almost certainly wasn’t, down by . . . Buttecracke County.’

She smirked at the name.

‘It’s Beau-cray,’ Dave and Zach both said at once.

‘Whatever. The good lady sheriff is helping your authorities with their inquiries, and one of the things they’re inquiring into is why her Remington now blows giant holes in anyone who tries to pick it up. Anyone but her.’

Zach looked down at his own weapon, a compact submachine gun with a long banana-shaped clip.

‘So, you’re saying . . .’ Igor ventured, ‘If I can tag me a brand-new kind of orc, I get an upgrade? My rifle too?’

The long-barrelled, big bore sniper rifle he’d used back in Nebraska was secured with the rest of his kit a little ways up the cabin. ‘Because those zombies I took down, I don’t recall anybody bagging one of them before. So where’s my awesome zombie powers?’

Zach snorted at him.

‘Tümorum aren’t pure sect,’ Dave said, earning a nod, possibly even some cred from Karen. ‘To the Horde they’re just a disease. Like foot and mouth running wild through cattle herds. Djinn use them as a weapon. But they’re not part of their sect either. The Djinn are both the sect and a clan in their . . . demesne?’

He looked to Karen for confirmation of the term and she nodded.

‘Their allied clans are more like, I dunno, what’s the word?’

‘Vassals,’ Karen supplied. ‘If you’d nailed a Djinn warrior, or a Sumateem scout a little earlier, I think you’d have secured your upgrade, Chief. But you were too late. That army chaplain, she took the head off a Sumateem which stuck its nose in where it wasn’t wanted.’

‘Jesus, a chaplain?’ said Igor.

‘Igor,’ Karen beamed. ‘How very PC of you not to say “a woman” like it was totally unbelievable. But yes, a chaplain.’

‘How?’ Zach asked.

‘With a chainsaw.’

She let that fall at their feet like a hand grenade, before jumping on it.

‘She wasn’t even part of the deployment on the river. She was in town for some interfaith talking shop. Like I said, the report’s pretty thin, but it seems she was at a childcare centre when the panic hit Omaha. They went into lockdown. An inquisitive orc stuck its head in and she cut it off.’

‘So this preacher woman’s rockin’ a magic chainsaw now?’ Dave said.

‘Yes. Ashbury’s report didn’t say so, but I’ll bet things got messy before they figured out not to touch it. And I’ll bet she hasn’t figured out to name it yet, either. Unless it’s just going by Husqvarna or Stihl or something.’

‘Sweet Jesus,’ Zach breathed. ‘The kids? In childcare?’

Karen turned her palms upward, showing him she had no information about them.

‘I’d suggest the two of you start paying attention as well,’ she said, addressing the SEALs directly. ‘Ask questions. Don’t just take everything on faith because your one-legged sugar daddy says so.’

Igor finally bristled at the provocation.

‘And we should take orders from you? Just because you’re like him?’ He threw a scathing glance at Dave. ‘You’re better than us? Last time I checked you were a spy, lady. You’re a liar. A killer. At least Hooper’s just a fucking moron.’

‘Hey! I have an engineering degree you know.’

‘Oh it’s true, Dave,’ Karen teased. ‘You know you’re a moron.’

She grew serious though when she turned back to Igor.

‘Heath doesn’t tell you everything. He didn’t tell you about the other assets. The champions.’

‘He’s my commanding officer,’ Igor said. ‘He doesn’t have to. Does Putin call you for a catch-up every time he decides to shoot down an airplane or invade Ukraine?’

‘No,’ she said, not raising to the bait. ‘But there are things you’re better off knowing.’

‘Such as?’ Dave asked. Unlike Zach and Igor he wasn’t part of any chain of command. And he was all too used to being bullshitted.

‘Heath thinks you’ve lost already,’ Karen said.

The SEALs reacted, each in his own way; Igor cursing, and Zach folding his arms, as if to shield himself. ‘No way. I’ve never known the captain to give up,’ he said.

Dave said nothing. He watched the Russian closely.

‘Oh he’s not giving up,’ she said. ‘He’s getting ready for the next stage.’

‘Which is what?’ Zach asked, sounding entirely unconvinced.

‘Collapse,’ Dave said, surprising them. ‘Retreat. Consolidation. Counter-attack. That’s why you’re flying out of the fighting right now. We’re not going north to rescue my kids,’ he added sombrely as the realisation came to him. ‘Heath’s pretty sure they’re dead already.’

Dave felt as though a couple of quarts of blood had just rushed away from his skin, but Karen was smiling at him, giving him a slow clap.

‘And so you finally begin to wake up.’

‘But my kids . . .’

‘Oh he’s probably wrong, Dave. I’m sure we’ll get there just in time. But it doesn’t change his thinking. And, you’re right. He thinks we can’t possibly hold everything. He thinks that Compt’n is smart enough to do real damage. Not just to stage a few mass casualty attacks, or even to defeat a modern military force. Your army, mine, even the Chinese who are throwing nukes around like firecrackers. But he’s not going to do that.’

‘No,’ Dave said, not so much seeing it now as admitting what he had been able to see for a while.

‘Compt’n’s going to collapse the support system for that military. The civilisation which created it. That’s what Heath thinks. That’s why he sent us up here. To preserve his assets.’

‘Bullshit,’ said Igor.

‘Really?’ Dave asked. ‘You know where the rest of your teams are, Chief? I doubt they’re back in Omaha, mopping up. National Guard units could do that.’

Igor shifted uncomfortably in his seat, looking to Zach for help, but he had nothing.

‘Your other teams are out looking for the rest of the Super Friends,’ said Karen, tag-teaming with Dave. ‘Trying to put them in the bag before it’s too late. Before everything falls apart. Or before Trinder gets them.’

‘That asshole?’ said Dave. ‘What’s he got to do with this?’

‘He tried to kill us because he judged he couldn’t control you anymore, Hooper. Trinder and Heath are of one mind, I suspect. I’ll admit I’m guessing at Trinder because I haven’t had a chance to read him since everything went south. But I know what Heath thinks of him. Or at least what Heath feels about him. There is a difference, I’ll concede.’

She took a sip from her water bottle, giving the others a chance to speak up. Instead, all three men just waited on her as the plane bounced around in another patch of bad air.

‘Go on, Dave. Think it through. Dazzle me,’ she said.

‘We’re not just fighting the Horde,’ he said, slowly. ‘We’re fighting all twelve sects. But the Horde are the key, because they’ve got Compt’n. And this Grymm Lord too. He’s been smart enough to know he can’t win a battle he doesn’t even begin to understand. The other sects will take some time to come to that. Some of them may never do so.’

‘That’s right,’ Karen confirmed. ‘They’re still rolling up in the same old way, deploying in squares on the open field. We nuked one outside of Kiev a few hours ago.’

Dave frowned. ‘How do you know that?’

‘It was in Ashbury’s report. That you did not bother to read.’

Dave nodded, slowly. ‘Okay. So the Qwm arrowhead we found in New York? How’s that fit in? They weren’t sitting in a field somewhere.’

‘They could have a couple of regiments drawn up in some cow paddock in New Jersey somewhere. But, even if they don’t, Compt’n will let them take the brunt of the fighting in the cities. Urban warfare is a meat grinder. And you are the little sausage if all you bring to the fight is a bad attitude and a spiked club.’

‘Still not really getting it,’ Dave said. He understood the argument she was making. A dragon was dead meat on the barbecue when it met a heat-seeking missile. A Hunn dominant could rage and roar like a grizzly bear with a scorching case of cock rot, but one bullet placed carefully was putting him down. A Regiment Select of Grymm drawn up in formal battle order outside the gates of your city was a Regiment Select of Grymm sitting in the kill box of a B-52 or a cruise missile swarm.

But all of those things – heat-seeking missiles, jet fighters and bombers, firearms – were the products of super-evolved, highly complex human societies. Collapse the society, and the magicks went away.

But that wasn’t exactly what Karen meant. She was talking about purely military tactics and strategy.

Zach answered for him, sounding tired.

‘I think she’s saying that Compton will use the other hordes as cannon fodder,’ he explained. ‘Weakening them and weakening us.’

Neither Dave nor Karen corrected his use of the term ‘Hordes’.

‘He might even do what we cattle do,’ Karen went on. ‘Seek allies and mercenaries among the natives. Aligning, at least initially, with any human forces he can convince to support him against the threat of the other sects. Or the rest of the UnderRealms.’

‘The rest?’ Zach frowned.

‘Sure,’ said Dave, getting scared, but getting angry with it. ‘The orcs aren’t the only things down there. You’ve already seen dragons and zombies and necromancers. Compt’n is right in a way. At least the sects are organised evil. They keep the rest of the daemon realm in check.’

‘Oh fuck this. I call bullshit,’ said Igor, sounding thoroughly pissed off.

‘Whatever,’ Karen replied, without rancour. ‘Believe what you will. But just remember we had this conversation. And as for you, Super Dave . . .’

‘Yeah?’

‘We go get your kids. Your ex-wife if you really want.’

‘Yeah, my boys. Toby and Jack. Does Heath really think . . . you know . . .’

‘Heath is a realist,’ Karen replied. ‘If he’s right, and it’s too late for your kids, I’m sorry. If he’s not and we get them, you have to decide what you’re doing next. The party’s over.’

27

‘I
t’s gonna be close, people. Finish your drinks, put your tray tables up. Some prayers might help too.’

The pilot’s voice crackled off the intercom and they were left in the dim, red-lit cabin, dropping down through rough air. Dave clenched his teeth and his butt cheeks, wondering if they’d have enough fuel to land safely. Wondering if he’d miraculously heal after being torn apart and burned to cinder in a chopper crash. Probably not, he thought. Zach hadn’t been exaggerating about the fuel. The Osprey wasn’t going anywhere once it was down. Not until the crew found some more avgas, or Heath organised a supply drop.

Would Heath be able to do that? He was probably being swarmed right now. And in spite of Karen’s confidence that Dave’s superhero club had really taken off, he hadn’t seen any evidence that the Chainsaw Chaplain or Sheriff Shotgun would be helping out.

And if Heath didn’t get them a refuel, would it lend credence to Karen’s theory that he’d sent them up here to preserve his assets?

He tried to breathe slowly, wrapping his hands around Lucille’s smooth hardwood handle, hoping she might calm his nerves some. Karen and the SEALs had tooled up in their own way, ready for a hot landing. She wore Sushi the magical samurai sword on a strap across her back again, but like Zach and Igor, Karen cradled a machine gun in her lap. Her tactical vest carried spare magazines and dangled hand grenades like dark Christmas ornaments. A protein bar poked out of one pocket, but she mostly seemed to be carrying weapons and ammo. They’d eaten plenty.

The intercom hissed and popped and the pilot’s voice returned.

‘Be aware we have flames near the LZ. Looks like three separate spot fires in the town centre. Muzzle flashes evident. No comm links to the local authorities. One minute to set down.’

Zach did something to his weapon, taking the safety off Dave assumed, and a second later Igor followed. Even craning around in his seat, it was impossible to get a clear view of the town ahead of them. Impossible and frustrating. He could just make out a few lights but they appeared to be scattered in the darkness on the edge of town. Their approach vector put Camden Harbor directly ahead of them. There was little to be seen out of the cabin windows. Dave’s imagination filled in the blanks. Terrible images of his boys arose, unbidden. Toby and Jack screaming, torn apart like Dave’s workmates on the Longreach. Annie cursing his name as she went down trying to protect them. He tried to blink away the visions but they persisted.

‘Chill,’ said Karen, her hand suddenly on the side of his face. The fingers cool. Her voice in his head. Deep inside. This time he didn’t flinch, letting the balm of her will wash away his fears. Calming him down. Chilling him out.

‘You’ve done this before,’ she said. ‘You’re just bringing it home now.’

‘Hooper.’

It was Igor, still grim-faced and fearsome, but no longer directing that animus toward Dave. ‘Your boys will be fine,’ he said. ‘We’ll get them, and we’ll put down anything tries to stop us.’

‘Yeah. There are no rules of engagement tonight, Dave,’ said Zach, patting his assault rifle. ‘We just kill ’em all.’

The anxiety Dave had been feeling, a restless fear that had threatened to turn into panic, ebbed away. It would have been nice to think it was the support of these men he wanted to call friends, even if the course of his friendship with Igor had not run exactly true, but he knew it was more than that. Karen removed her hand from his face, leaving behind little more than a tingling sensation on his skin and a mild tension in his gut. She had reached right inside him again and changed something. For once, he was glad of it.

Everyone braced as the Osprey flared and decelerated. Dropping toward the landing zone, Dave’s stomach tried to climb up out of his mouth, but he was used to that. He’d done a lot of time in choppers over the years, flown into some pretty hairy situations. The Osprey was larger, louder, unimaginably more powerful than a civilian helicopter, but the sensation wasn’t all that different from the descent onto the deck of the Longreach when all of this started. Dave closed his eyes and tried to relax, waiting for the touchdown. When it came, it was a much harder jolt than he’d expected. The pilot cut power to the engines. The uproar died away and the blades slowed.

‘Okay. I’m cool,’ he said to himself. ‘I’m good. Let’s roll.’

The loadmaster signalled them to stand as he dropped the big-ass hatch at the rear of the aircraft. Aircrew manned the heavy, mounted machine gun. Once the hatch thumped down on the ground, the SEALs stepped out into the night.

‘Dave,’ Karen said beside him. ‘This is the bit where you stay calm.’

Drawing in a deep breath, he took his bearings. He could smell the smoke. Not clean wood smoke, but the chemical reek of burning plastics, cars, houses. He put it aside with a mental shove. This was Annie’s home town, not his, but he had a working map of the place in his memory thanks to a couple of access visits with the boys. He knew, as soon as he’d exited the back of the hybrid aircraft, that the pilot had put down on the baseball diamond in back of the local school. He’d brought Toby and Jack here to throw them a few pitches the last time he’d visited. He knew the Public Safety Building was only a couple of blocks from here. Roads radiated out of the town centre down on the waterfront like broken spokes from a bicycle wheel.

He heard gunshots, a crackling volley, but not the automatic fire he was getting used to whenever the military opened up. Dave started to run toward the sound of battle, toward his boys, but Igor ran in front of him, a lot faster than Dave thought possible. ‘Hey! We do this together.’


‘Fine,’ Dave said. ‘Then keep up. I’m going to get my kids.’

Karen caught up with him. Clinking and jangling with all of the heavy metal she was hauling. ‘Hooper, you can’t charge off on your own.’

‘Yeah, just chill the fuck out while we scope this,’ Igor said, scanning the roofline of the school for Sliveen. Zach swept the high ground, too, even as the sound of more gunfire reached them. Was Dave the only one paying attention? Even the aircrew back on the Osprey ignored the reports of battle, busying themselves unloading the Growler.

‘Sorry, but I don’t have time to play soldiers.’

Dave stepped around Igor, who dropped the muzzle of his weapon.

‘Hooper,’ he said, ‘I will put a slug right through your fucking femur if I have to. We know you’ll get better. So don’t tempt me. This is our job. Let us do it.’

Dave took a deep breath and forced himself to stop moving away from the chopper.

‘My boys are close, and keeping them safe is my job,’ he said, maintaining a tight rein on his desire to get the fuck gone, right now. ‘Karen and I can warp there in a fraction of a second. Annie’s old man lived on the far side of the village. It’s a five-minute drive – in the direction of all that gunfire.’

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, toward the flickering dome of light which hung over the treeline. Camden was a small village, but heavily wooded and they couldn’t see much beyond the small forests which marked the boundaries of the school grounds.

‘I don’t have time for you and Zach to work through the SEAL Handbook,’ Dave said.

Karen stepped up to him, grenades swinging from her tactical vest, but she made no move to lay hands on him or push him in any way. Gunfire and the sound of crashing glass reminded him of the apartment fight back in New York, but when he dialled in on the audio he didn’t hear as much helpless screaming here. A lot of shouting, mainly men and women yelling at each other to concentrate fire. But not as much screaming.

‘Hooper,’ said Karen. ‘Don’t be an ass.’

‘No,’ he said firmly, ignoring the sounds of the struggle. ‘I am going to get my boys, the quickest way I know how. Follow or not, fuck off or not. It’s all the same to me. There are monsters here,’ he said, fixing his eyes on each of them in turn. ‘Remember them? Fucking monsters. In the town where my boys live? Where Compt’n
knows
they live.’

‘Yeah,’ said Igor. ‘So what does that tell you is probably waiting for you?’

‘My boys,’ Dave said again. ‘They’re waiting for me.’

He was about to hit the accelerator when Zach spoke up.

‘Dave’s right,’ he said. ‘He should go, we’ll only be a few minutes behind in the Growler, and we’ll come heavy.’

A leaden ball that had been sitting in his gut lifted and floated away like a child’s balloon.

‘Thank you, Zach,’ he said. ‘I appreciate it.’

‘Not a –’ Zach started, but Dave had already warped.

First thing he noticed was that he could warp. There were no Threshers around to stop him. The air was warm and still perfumed with a hint of night jasmine under the burning chemical reek of smoke and fire. The stars, so infinitely far away, seemed cold in the sky. They would stare down impassively on whatever happened here.

Dave stepped around Igor and took off, not really caring if Karen followed him. He had to get to his kids. It was a physical need. He accelerated from a run to a flat out sprint, blowing through the school’s parking lot, past empty bicycle racks and a couple of haphazardly parked cars, one with the driver’s door left wide open, but no sign of the occupant. To his right the town’s school bus was a yellow blur. He was stunned. He had never moved this quickly before. He could feel himself pressing against an envelope of sorts, some invisible membrane that lay just below the surface of reality. He could feel it threatening to give way, to tear under the stress of his impossible velocity. But he pressed on anyway.

Around him the architecture of Camden Harbor, a quaint diorama of steep-roofed New England cottages, new-built clapboard shops and converted harbourfront warehouses stretched and twisted. Dave flew over a small stone bridge and banked around the tree-lined corner of Knowlton and into Mechanic Street. The road was wider there, dropping down slightly toward the centre of town.

He slowed, dialling back the warp drive, killing the eerie, disturbing effect of moving at what seemed to be near super-liminal speed. He had no idea where that had come from, but guessed it was probably something like a normal person finding the strength to flip a car off their kid.

The town remained trapped in stasis. Fall’s shimmering coat of oranges, browns and yellows had not touched the green trees, but that day was coming. In any other year, summer folks would soon switch out for those who wanted to sail the bay aboard one of the windjammers to view the Fall foliage. Dave had tried once, early in his marriage, to talk Annie into taking the boys out on one. Her father’s life had been the sea, but it had also swallowed one of her cousins, leaving her with a lifelong trepidation of the water. As far as he knew, the boys had never been out on the harbour, let alone the sea.

Warping down Mechanic Street, into the heart of the little tourist village, Dave leaped over a seven-car pile-up, jumping high into the air to survey the town centre. It was as he remembered it, and yet utterly transformed. There was the familiar patchwork of streets with little cottages and grander New England homes, some of them burning, some of them dark. The shops and bars were all closed. Fire, frozen into eerie ghost forms by the magical physics of warp, poured in torrents from the upper floor of a two-storey house at the intersection of Mechanic and Free Street. A jaunty red fire hydrant seemed to glow an even brighter red in the flames, but no hoses ran from it, no tenders rushed to the blaze.

While he was airborne and without being aware he was doing so, Dave counted the seven cars, six of them pick-ups and SUVs, parked neatly in the slots on either side of Mechanic. And he counted, without realising, the thirteen vehicles abandoned or crashed, higgledy-piggledy up and down the main route into town. A little hatchback had smashed into a power pole outside the tall, barn-like edifice of the Smokestack Grill, gift-wrapping the pole with its engine block. The windscreen was shattered and a thick blood trail led away into the dark. Downed power lines fizzed and snapped, shooting sparks. Or they would have, in real time. Here, where nothing moved, bright white fountains of electrical sparks hung frozen in space.

Still in midair, Dave quickly scanned the high ground, as Zach and Igor had back at the school.

No Sliveen waited on steeply pitched rooftops, no Threshers tried to knock him out of warp.

Shit!
he thought. What would happen if they did when he was a hundred feet in the air?

Looking down the gentle slope of Mechanic Street, he saw a cohort of Hunn concentrated outside the single-storey brick bunker that was the Camden Public Safety Building. Burning police cars and an ambulance cast their long frozen shadows down the street, all the way back to the corner of Mechanic and Washington, where a handful of blood-drunk Hunn ran amok in The Owl and Turtle Bookshop. Annie liked to go to readings there. Dozens of books hung over Mechanic Street in arrested trajectories, flapping toward a growing pile, already ablaze. The orcs must have had a real Eve-Of-Destruction hard-on to have set a fire like that. They didn’t normally dig on naked flames. Too much chance of setting themselves alight.

Dave reached the zenith of his leap and started to drop down. He bounced once on the far side of the pile-up, vaulting into a second jump, but not as high as the first. As he rose past the first floor of The Owl and Turtle he saw, suspended amongst the dozens of titles that floated before him, a copy of
Green Eggs and Ham
by Dr Seuss. Dave plucked it from the air and turned the pages, both curious and full of dread. Jack had once borrowed this book from the library and smeared peanut butter handprints onto a torn page.

Annie had given Dave the money to pay for the damage and sent him off to make things right. Instead, he’d made the repairs himself before sneaking the book back on the shelf and spending the cash on a sixer. Of course, this copy of
Green Eggs and Ham
from the bookstore was unmarked by peanut butter or Dave Hooper’s running repairs. It was new. He wondered if, like him, the library’s old and battered one had been replaced.