Elite: A Hunter novel (16 page)

As I was talking, his normally stoic expression was going through a bunch of changes: relief that I was not going to take any persuading, some surprise that I wasn’t trying to talk him out of this, maybe a little confusion too, since I wasn’t giving him a cross-examination about his motives, or a lecture about how dangerous being Elite was, or another lecture about how he shouldn’t be doing it for such a selfish motive.

What did his motives matter anyway, when the end result was going to be that we’d get another Elite? “That’s exactly what I want your help with,” Knight said, the expression on his face resolving itself into relief again. I ate. He was about to make as long a speech as he ever did—not long, by speech standards—and that would give me a chance to put my calories away before they got cold. “The things Archer said about you and magic, that made sense. I need your help to get my head shut of the idea that what I have is all I’m gonna get. Once I’m Elite, I can bring Jessie here, maybe get her set up in her own room until we have a chance to find a preacher and get properly married, and then I’ll be allowed to have bigger quarters and—” He actually started babbling about his girl and hopes and dreams and all that at that point, and I just tuned him out a little, until he wrapped up with “But I can’t figure out how to get something useful for combat-magic; I’ve tried, and nothing happens.”

I was pretty much finished then, so I ate my last bite of buttered toast and pointed my fork at him. “The first thing you do is, you go pull up the vids of other Trials,” I told him. “Hammer and Steel—Steel, anyway—have essentially the same thing you do, and they passed the Trials. Shields can be used in combat. I’m sure there are others who’ve gotten just as creative. You go see what others have done, we’ll figure out how to amp up what you can already do, and that will give you the headspace to try new things.”

When I said that, he perked right up. “All right!” he exclaimed.

I grinned. “And I want to see you ruin some Hunting outfits, Mark Knight,” I said with mock severity. “You’re big and strong, but in the hand-to-hand, they’ll put you up against someone bigger and stronger. So push yourself. Don’t walk when you can trot, don’t trot when you can run, don’t go around stuff when you can jump it. If you think something’s gone to ground, dig it out. Climb those blasted tumbledown buildings to see what’s roosting, and don’t rely on your Hounds to flush things out for you. The more ground you cover during a patrol, the better.” I didn’t mention that if he did that and his head count started to soar, he probably wouldn’t need to try out for Elite after all.

He nodded, then graced me with a bashful smile. “Thanks for not trying to discourage me, Joy. You’re the best.”

He took off before I could say anything else. I guess he’d already eaten. I headed for the armory; I’d either need to get a load-out for another prowl through the storm sewers, or get grabbed for a team.

When I got there, the armorer was looking at a vid-screen up near the ceiling. I followed his gaze; it was the report about the volcanic eruption, in more detail. The ash plume was definitely coming our way, which meant most aircraft were going to be grounded for a while, except for the helichoppers specially fitted with ash filters. Those eruptions weren’t entirely disastrous; they were the reason we had snowpack up in my home mountains in the first place. If it wasn’t for the occasional eruptions darkening the sky and keeping things cooler, the warming caused by all those greenhouse gases pre-Diseray would be
really
bad, like desert or tropical bad. That was the good part. But sunlight-blocking meant solar arrays weren’t as efficient, and plants had a harder time growing, and of course breathing in ash isn’t good for anything—man, critter, or machine—so good news, bad news, and all that. “This will make the Othersiders bolder,” he said, without turning around. “It always does. They know the only close-in air support we’ll get during ashfall is the choppers.” He brooded a while. “The big storm will have made them hungrier too. We aren’t the only ones who have to hole up during a storm that size—they do too. The difference between us is, we get feast and they get famine.”

“Double whammy. So should I stay close for a bit and wait on going out to the Hub?” I asked.

He nodded. “If nothing’s happened in an hour or so, go out. If something does happen, we’ll either need several teams or one really big one. I’ve got a bad feeling about today.”

“Yessir,” I replied, and just at that point, the others on dayshift started to trickle into the armory, as if summoned. I guess they were getting a bad feeling about today too. Then again, that was their level of experience telling them what to do; they had way more of it than I did, enough to guess by the reports what might be cooking.

“Mark Knight wants to go Elite,” I said to Kent quietly as the others began making weapon selections with one eye on the vid-screen.

“His inclinations and talents are better suited to Elite than solo,” Kent observed. “You encouraging him?”

“I’m not
dis
couraging him,” I replied. “I told him I’d help him get ready.”

Kent just nodded—approvingly, I thought. I slowly put together my usual load-out, then went and sat down on a bench to see what was going to happen.

Now, this was very different from any other morning. This was the first time I’d come in here when every single one of the Elites was here, and lingering. Some of them had taken seats on one of the benches, and some were just standing around with their arms crossed. All of them were watching the vid-screen, which had divided up into stuff I didn’t recognize, except that there were some windows of what looked like radar feeds, some scrolling text, some cams, some I had no idea what was being shown. I’m guessing Kent had windowed up the screen, or maybe he’d set it to reflect what they were seeing in Control. They all seemed to be waiting for something, expecting something, and at a guess I’d have to say they had completely forgotten that I didn’t know what they were waiting for. But there was a tense feeling about them. Like home, when we know a big storm is coming. Even Retro was keeping his eyes on the screen and not trying to make me laugh or asking for a date, and that was practically out of character for him.

Then three of the windows lit up bright red. One was a cam feed, one was radar, and the last was a piece of map with a pulsing dot on it. The alert callout sounded not only in the room, but from all our Perscoms, signaling a full-team deployment. “There it is,” Kent said, as if this was exactly what he’d expected. “Portal opened up outside Bensonville. Three choppers inbound now to load us up. Joy, you’ll be with me, Hammer, Steel, and Archer. The rest of you take your usual fives. Bounce!”

I was loaded for my usual prowl in the storm sewers, so I paused just long enough to swap my shotgun and ammo for an assault rifle and ammo. Then I bounced, following Archer on the run, down the halls to the chopper pads where the first of the three was setting down.

The sky was a slightly odd color, and the sunlight seemed a little dimmer; that would be the effect of the ash plume that had been carried on high-altitude winds as fast as a jet. As I got to the chopper, Archer reached for me without actually looking at me, picked me up, and threw me in the door, then jumped in afterward. That was to clear the way for Hammer, Steel, and the armorer, who were all big men. I knew the layout of the smaller choppers; this one was bigger, and it carried rocket pods on the outside. There was only one door, rather than two. I got myself to the seat next to Archer and strapped in.

Kent was the last one on and banged the side of the chopper as soon as both of his feet were inside the door. The pilot took off immediately, leaving Kent to get to his seat and strap in as best he could while the chopper made a steep bank and a shallow ascent. We would be doing the next thing to ground skimming, I reckoned, to avoid the ash in the upper air.

These choppers were
fast
. Faster than the train. Faster than anything I had ever been on before. Once again, I got that weird feeling of
really
not belonging here. How could I, when the fastest thing I knew was a galloping horse? I decided that looking out the open door was a bad idea, since it was making me dizzy, and looked around the interior of the thing instead.

It was
incredibly
noisy. The smaller choppers I’d been in had been loud, but this was unbelievable. No way we were sneaking up on anyone in these things. There were eight seats, so we could have fit everyone into two of them, but I didn’t know enough to know why we were taking three birds instead of two. Archer tapped my arm, then tapped his ear. I put in my earbuds and adjusted the little boom mic; I could use both even inside the gas mask if I needed to put it on. The noise level dropped to nothing, and I watched Kent monitoring his Perscom. Finally, he nodded and started speaking.

“Objective is Bensonville, population twenty-three thousand and some change. Portals formed on the west side and began discharging what looks like a takeover assault. We know of a Gog and a Magog for sure, the usual hordes of foot troops, Harpies, a flock of Wyverns. Given what happened the last couple days, we should expect something new, or maybe some of those
Nagas.
We’ll have support from artillery, some foot troops, and army Mages.”

I got a sinking feeling when he said that. Was one of those Mages Ace?

“Our goal is to keep them out of the town. If they get in, we clean them out. Shiloh, your chopper will drop your team in the east, near the Wyverns, where the army Mages are. My team will work with the artillery. Tank, I want your team to street-sweep; get any Cits in the open to safety, then join up with Shiloh’s team. The situation is very fluid, so as usual, we’ll be making it up as we go along.”

Someone in one of the other two choppers laughed and said,
“So what else is new? I assume we leave the big baddaboom to the artillery?”

“That’s what they’re here for, and our good luck they’re in the neighborhood.”
Kent pointed at me, then at Hammer and Steel, indicating I was to stay with them. I nodded. He mimed pumping a shotgun and raised an eyebrow. I pulled up the AR enough for him to see I’d swapped out my original weapon, and he nodded with satisfaction.

My gut was all clenched up. This wasn’t the first full-team deployment I’d been on, but it
was
the first time I’d be going up against an Othersider assault on an entire town, and it was the first time it was so far from Apex. I wanted badly to be on the ground with my Hounds all around me. I was acutely aware that the metal shell that was hurtling toward the enemy was extremely fragile in its own way and was a very big target. The whole chopper vibrated, bucked, and tilted as the pilot ran a random evasive course to keep the Othersiders from targeting us.

Kent suddenly clapped one hand to the side of his head and frowned. Then his voice rang through my ears.
“New deployment. We’re facing three Folk Mages. Mei, you stay on the Wyverns. Tank, I want your team with me and Archer on the Folk Mages. Hammer, you and Steel and Joy handle the Gog and Magog with support from the artillery; they’ll tear the town apart otherwise. Then you head into town to clean up. Heads up, people, we’re about to hit the landing zones. Team HSJ will drop first. Get to the door and get ready.”

Was this normal? I’d never been in on an “Incident” before. Did the Othersiders just open Portals at random and pour minions in without any sort of tactics or planning?

Hammer popped his harness; his brother did the same a second later. I unclipped mine, grabbed the cargo net draping the interior of the chopper, and got in line behind Steel. We were wrenched back and forth for a few seconds, and I hung on for dear life, the rope of the net digging into my fingers, and I dearly wished for Hammer’s mass as I got thrown around like a rag doll. Then the chopper slowed and stopped, hovering about three feet off the ground, and we three jumped out and down into a grain field. The chopper banked and sped off as soon as we were clear, blasting us with the backwash of its rotors and making us squint and shade our eyes against debris.

Like the fields nearer Apex, this one was planted in strips of different grains. I was too busy looking for the Gog and Magog to try to identify what was in them; all I could see was waving bands of greens and green-golds spreading out in front of me, the grain stalks rippling in the wind. But once I turned around and looked behind me, there was the town, in the middle of the field; it was a bigger town than back home, with a couple of three-story-tall buildings, a lot of two-story ones, and tons of houses. Wind generators of all sizes were everywhere, and the roofs were covered in solar panels. The railroad went through it, and right on the edge of town, at the railroad tracks, there were the Gog and Magog, side by side, methodically tearing apart grain silos.

I was grateful that was all they were doing; they eat people, and they are always hungry. If I’d had time to think, I’d have been scared. But the situation wasn’t giving me any time to think.

They looked fundamentally alike: giants, about three stories tall, with sallow skin that was smeared with filth. They were clothed…sort of…in crude mud-colored tunics with ragged hems. Both were bald. They looked like a chunky caricature of a human, with thick arms, thick legs, and a torso with no discernable waist or chest.

The way to tell the Gog from the Magog is that the Gog has one eye, the Magog has two. Everyone back home assumed that Gogs and Magogs were mated pairs; you certainly never saw one without the other. It seemed about as reasonable an idea as any other you could have about them, and truth to tell, I really just did not want to imagine
how
something like that could mate and give birth. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe they just budded off a new little monster whenever they felt like it.

The artillery didn’t dare fire on them because they were right on the edge of town. The Bensonville Cits were almost certainly cowering in the cellars of those houses nearby, and the army would need someone close enough to paint the giants with lasers to guarantee every shell and rocket was a direct hit.