Elite: A Hunter novel (39 page)

For a moment, I totally sympathized with Jessie. People I knew were
dead
, and while that wasn’t a new thing for me, it never eased the hit when it happened. I let that part hit me and had a bit of a cry for Retro. I longed for the option to just run away from all this, run far, back home, back to the Monastery. Because, sure, we’d just come up with a way to even the odds against us in what had gone from simple defense to a repeat of the Diseray, but that didn’t mean we’d win. It didn’t mean we’d come out slightly ahead or even achieve a draw. And even if we
did
win this time…there would be a next time. How many more “next times” would there be?

Kent was right. Something had changed.

Now we were at war.

“THAT’S…ODD.” I LOOKED UP at the sound of Kent’s voice, to see what he was looking at. I was in the armory, which, for the past three days, was where I
always
was if I wasn’t eating or sleeping. Practicing, mostly—not with the Hounds but just to make sure that my targeting was at the peak of perfection and I could get off my spells without needing to think, automatically and without hesitation. Every tiny bit of magical energy we used had to count, so I was practicing everything I knew to make sure it was going to hit what I needed it to hit and do what I needed it to do. The only break had been when we’d hung the pictures on the wall of the bar and toasted the dead and I’d gone to my room to have another, longer, more heartfelt cry. Seeing Retro’s grinning face in that picture had hit me in ways I hadn’t anticipated.

The others had their own way of dealing with the waiting; I felt better if I was practicing. For me, doing something was better than pretending everything was fine or trying to lose myself in a vid or a game, or…well, whatever else people were doing in the privacy of their rooms. No one got drunk, though, or left HQ, because we all knew that when the call came, we couldn’t afford to waste minutes getting to the attack site. Whatever else we were, we were still Hunters. I heard that the army had dug up a couple of their Healing Mages to work on Steel, which was a good thing, if true. They could compress a couple weeks of healing into a couple days.

Did the Cits realize the danger they were in? Since I hadn’t watched any of the vid channels, I didn’t know.
Some
people certainly did; high-ranking officials, surely, and I was pretty sure they had sent their families out on fast trains, maybe had gone themselves. Premier Rayne had left the Premier’s Mansion. Officially, he was vacationing, but we all knew that he’d deserted the City, and there was unvoiced contempt for his cowardice.

Not Uncle, though.
“I’m not leaving while there’s a single Cit or building left to defend,”
he’d said in a little speech he’d made in the hangar for all of us. I didn’t even bother to argue with him; truth to tell, that pronouncement had won over a lot of Hunters, who up until then had just taken him for another bureaucrat.

I’d been cleaning the weapons I’d been using at my last practice session when Kent had spoken out loud. So now I looked up to see what had caught the armorer’s attention. “That’s…very odd.” He was looking at the vid-screen, which had been tuned to the weather radar. I felt my eyes widen. Because what was on there was not “odd”; it was right off the scale for “shouldn’t be there.” A storm was heading for us, moving stupidly fast, arrowhead shaped, and increasing in size with every passing second. A storm that had not been there ten minutes ago.

And I knew what that was. I’d heard about this from the Masters back home.

“Kent! That’s the attack!” I said urgently, pointing at the storm. “
They’ve brought in Thunderbirds!
They’re coming in under the cover of the storm, and they’re going to use Thunderbirds to short out a pylon!”

Kent cursed and slammed his hand down on the alert button he now wore strapped to his wrist beside his Perscom. I went over the counter into the armory proper and began grabbing my chosen weapons and ammo, too impatient to wait for the assistants. When I had what I needed, I rolled back over the counter and grabbed a headset from the wall, sprinted out the door, and made for the landing pad. All the choppers were being kept out there, to minimize delays in deploying—including a couple old models we didn’t use much anymore. I dove into one of those older choppers at the same time the pilot reached it, throwing myself into the seat farthest from the door and strapping down even as the motor whined and the blades over my head started to move. This was an oddball ten-seater with no door gunner, so that would be the size of our team. The minute my butt hit the seat, I was registered on that chopper and no other; the same would go for everyone else piling in.
One-Nine-Alpha.

The first Hunter bar me threw himself into the chopper and strapped down next to me. I didn’t know him, but I did know the next two, Tobor and Trev. And the next three, Cielle, Hammer, and Steel; Steel had lightweight casts on his leg and arm, but otherwise he looked about a hundred times better than the last time I’d seen him. Then came three more I didn’t know, and the chopper lifted off, angling sharply into the east. I concentrated on the orders that the armorer was rattling off, assigning leaders to teams depending on who had piled into a particular chopper together. Finally he got to us.
“Chopper One-Niner-Alpha. I see your crew as Hammer, Steel, Cielle, Tobor, Trev, Denali, Trooper, Hudson, Souxie, and Joy.”

“I’ve seen Thunderbirds, sir. I can go lead on this.” I almost didn’t believe the words I was saying, but…it was true. No one else on that chopper had the experience I did.

“Roger that, confirming team lead and assignment on the Thunderbirds; Joy’s right, she’s seen them before and should be the one dealing with them. I want to be having drumsticks and wings for dinner when this is over. Do you copy?”

“Roger, Armorer. Copy,” I said, my throat tight. Hammer gave me a thumbs-up, and Steel a wink.

“Brief your team, Elite Joy.”
Then Kent was on to the next chopper. All eyes were on me. I took a shuddering breath and held up three fingers, then two, to signify what channel we’d be on. I was pretty sure no one had grabbed thirty-two yet, and when we all tuned in to it, it showed green. I locked it to our team.

I remembered what I’d seen—but mostly, I remembered Uncle’s story. “Thunderbirds are about the size of a fighter jet,” I said. “According to everything I know, they’re generating the storm. Their weapon is electrical in nature, pretty much identical to lightning. They come down slowly, in a descending spiral, with their wings spread. And as they come, lightning will strike from out of their eyes and their mouths. I’m pretty sure that they are the ones that are going to be going for a pylon. The Othersiders tried brute force last time, and it didn’t work; what they’ll probably aim to do is short out the innards of the pylon rather than taking it down.”

“Plus this time their offense will be in the air, less vulnerable to attack,”
Tobor pointed out. I nodded.

“So who has offensive distance spells besides me?” I asked. “Once the storm hits, the choppers won’t be able to stay in the air, so it’s all going to be us and anything the army or Psimons can bring to back us up. Sound off clockwise, starting with Tobor.”

My team began calling out what they were bringing to the party. Everyone but Hammer and Steel had
something
that worked at a distance. Cielle had something like a fire bolt, but ice instead of fire. And that gave me an idea.

“All right, this is the basic strat,” I said. “Hammer and Steel, you’ll shield us, same as last time. I’ll need you to drop the shield three times so we can cut down some ranks and generate manna for the Hounds. Once the Hounds are ready to feed us, you keep that shield up, and Tobor, Trev, and Denali, you concentrate fire on the ranks around us to keep that manna coming. The rest of us will work on the Thunderbirds. You guys on the birds, hit them as hard as you can. I’m going to work with Cielle to try and ice their wings and tails.”

Cielle got it first. I could see from the sudden widening of her eyes.
“Oh! You’re going to try and bring them down! Like an airplane in an ice storm!”

“Exactly,” I replied. “Once we get one down and finished, hold your fire. I’m going to try something else. It worked once for my people. It might work again, and if it does, the Othersiders are going to lose the cover of the storm
and
their Thunderbirds.”

“And if it doesn’t?”
asked Steel.

“Then we go back to the original strat,” I told them. “Using Thunderbirds was a good idea. The storm they generate is going to limit our backup to ground support. The Psimons might not be able to get a lock on their heads. And they’re pure murder in the air. But their fundamental weakness is that if you bring them down, they’re helpless.”

“Let’s bring ’em down, then,”
said Hudson, with a feral grin.
“You heard the boss. He wants drumsticks and wings.”

I’d never heard from
anyone
that Thunderbirds had Shields of any sort, and why should they? Normally they flew out of the range of most weapons, conventional or magical. The thing about lightning as a weapon was that once you got it started toward your target, the target itself, especially if it was metal, like the pylons, would generate a current that would “reach” for the bolt and connect the circuit for you. Obviously the pylons were built to withstand a few lightning strikes. But this wouldn’t be a “few” lightning strikes. This would be a barrage of lightning calculated to melt the lightning rods that protected them, overwhelm surge protectors, and fuse every component in the pylon. And the Thunderbirds would just circle the pylon, plastering it with lightning until eventually it failed, using the rain to cover their movements and staying high enough that they’d be harder to hit.

We just had to make sure that didn’t happen.

The chopper bucked and yawed, and we all clutched at our seats and safety harnesses; that would be us hitting the winds generated by the storm. I just hoped that we could all get over the Barrier and in place before the
real
storm hit, because trying to channel our teams through one or two doors in the bases of pylons would be fatal.

Just as I thought that, the chopper pitched over sideways and began a rapid descent. When it stopped moving, we popped the buckles on our harnesses and piled out into what looked like acres and acres of grazing field or maybe hay. It was all long grass, anyway. The chopper fled, and I didn’t blame the pilot at all because the tempest that was speeding toward us was seven kinds of ugly.

It wasn’t as big or as bad as the storm that had locked everyone in Apex inside their buildings for three days, but it was bad enough. I didn’t know enough to know whether the Thunderbirds had caused that first storm, but now that I knew they were in the picture, I would be willing to bet they’d steered it away from its natural course and straight for the city. The attack on Bensonville hadn’t been timed that way because the Othersiders had been hungry; it had been timed that way because it had followed the first blow of the new offensive, meant to soften us up. We just hadn’t known that.

Black clouds raced toward us, covering most of the eastern horizon with a phalanx of black dots in the front, riding on the wind. There was lightning, but it was minimal. The Thunderbirds wouldn’t want to waste a single electron that could go toward breaking the pylon. “Stay down,” I cautioned. The pilot had set us down near the base of the pylon they seemed to be making for, but I didn’t want the Thunderbirds to spot us and change their target.
At least Steel isn’t going to have to move on that leg.
“Get your Hounds here, but stay low—”

“I’ve got something for that,” Souxie said with a feral grin. “Let’s get the doggies here, and you’ll see.”

We overlapped Glyphs; experimentation had proved that we could do that to minimize the amount of space we took up, and Hounds could come through just fine. In moments, the area around us was full of Hounds. “Put up those Shields, boys,” said Souxie, screwing up her face and beginning to trace Glyphs in the air with both hands. “We’re about to give them a surprise.”

She finished with a showy handclap…and I didn’t see anything. But then I did a check on our position with one of the cams on the pylon, and even though I zoomed in on us, there was
nothing
where we were supposed to be. “Nice trick!” I said with admiration.

Souxie shrugged but looked pleased. “Light bending, instead of illusion. That way it fools everything, from monsters that can see through illusion to cams. If you look really hard, you can tell there’s something here, but I figure the big chickens aren’t going to be looking all that hard when there’s so much else to worry about.” Souxie was right about the “so much else” part, for sure; the chopper pilots were coming in hot all around us and dropping their teams, concentrating on the three likeliest pylons to be attacked. “Kent, tell the pilots to back off my pylon a little, but not too much,” I said into the comm on Kent’s frequency. “If they back off too much, it’ll look like a trap. I just want it to look attractively weak.”