Hard Magic (51 page)

Madi walked across the red-lit command center. The captain did not speak. Technically the naval officer was in charge, but when the First Iron Guard was on deck, everyone addressed him instead. Madi listened for a moment, his magically augmented hearing discerning that the aft antiair batteries had opened up on something. They only had a handful of weapon stations up and running so far and those had been hastily installed with equipment brought over from the
Kaga
.

“Battle stations,” he ordered. The alarm klaxon sounded. “Tell the
Kaga
to nail them with their Death Ray.”

The radio operator chimed in. “
Kaga
reports no clear shot. They’re hiding behind us.” There was a slight tremor as an explosive shell struck their vessel. It was like an ant biting a horse.

“Tell them that’s what the fucking rudder is for and move until they can get one!” he bellowed. “Captain, you have the bridge. Kill these assholes.”

Madi moved quickly down the long hallway. He got into the elevator and cranked the down lever. He could still hear what was going on topside. One rear gun stopped, and then the next. The smaller machine gun positions on the outer hull were firing now. He picked up the vibration of an explosion and small arms-fire. “We’ve been boarded,” he muttered.

He stepped out of the elevator into the engineering section, which was midway down the center of the craft, sandwiched between the first and second hull. He walked down the wide metal catwalk with two heaving gas bags the size of buildings on either side. This section’s Torch saluted him as he passed. There were nine of that type of Active on the
Tokugawa’
s crew, three for each hull, so that there would always be at least one working each hull, twenty-four hours a day. It might seem like overkill, but Torches were one of the most common Actives, and no expense was too great to assure the Chairman’s security.

The Unit 731 weirdos were clustered in the main workshop, fiddling around with the Tesla device. It had all been screwed together, and he recognized most of it, since he’d been the one to personally secure the pieces. The blueprints he’d snapped Wild Bill Jones’s neck for were tacked to the wall. The bottom piece had come from Christiansen’s cabin after Yutaka’s Bull King had torn his guts out. The center came from that Traveling Portagee after he’d shot him with the Beast. One section was shiny and new, produced by the Cogs to make up for the small part that damn Traveling brat had kept. Only the top bit was unfamiliar, a round globe made of an unknown substance, crackling with purple electricity. The whole thing was only a foot long, which really wasn’t very impressive considering it could blow up whole countries.

“How much longer?” he barked.

The Cog leader, Shiro Ishii, bent his neck in submission. “We will need another twenty minutes. The design is extremely complex.”

“Well, we’ve been boarded by somebody, so get your shit together.” He moved to the phone and pulled up the mouthpiece. It took the switchboard a minute to connect him to the marine command. “This is Iron Guard Madi. I want a squad protecting the Cogs in engineering and whatever Iron Guard are available. Now.” He put the horn back in the cradle and folded his arms. He’d stick around here until the Marines showed up. Protecting the device came first. Then he’d go find those boarders and stomp the life out of them. The Chairman was more than capable of looking after himself.

He felt a prickling of his scalp. Madi wasn’t sure it had something to do with the extra sensitivity granted to him by his kanji, or maybe because they shared the same type of magic, or maybe it was just because they were of the same blood, but he just
knew
.

It was impossible. He was dead. He’d beaten him to a bloody pulp and left him to be cooked by the Peace Ray. The Chairman had promoted him to First for having the will to kill his own brother in service to the Imperium. His very existence was an insult, a mockery, a
dishonor
. He didn’t know how that little bastard had lived, but somehow he had, and he was here, on the
Tokugawa
, just to piss him off.

Jake was here.

***

The
Tempest
hit the top of the Imperium flagship so hard that they broke one of the landing skids. They bounced, the entire dirigible creaking as the skeleton bent, and then hit again. The top of the
Tokugawa
was mostly flat, like the deck of a traditional ship, with glass and aluminum superstructure rising all along the center. The shattered bubble of the UBF prototype skidded to a halt next to a two-story structure covered in antennas, some sort of rear control area for the back of the flagship. One of their wings crashed into the structure’s pylons and snapped.

Francis rose from where he’d been flung behind the captain’s seat. Not twenty feet away through what had once been the control room bubble, there were two Imperium men looking at him from a wide window in the building, apparently shocked by the sudden appearance of an American airship landing right on top of them. Francis waved, and one of them hesitantly waved back. He used his Power to slam their glass. It crashed in a sheet, which he then whipped up into a tornado of slicing bits, and blood splattered their walls.
Don’t mess with a Mover.

“Everyone okay?” Francis shouted. There was coughing and some movement as the crew staggered up. Lance got out of the captain’s chair, dusting broken glass from his beard. “Crew! Keep her running. We’ll be back as fast as we can,” Francis shouted, picking up an Enfield rifle and heading for the ramp.

The
Tempest’
s
boarding party had already debarked ahead of them. Francis came running down the ramp, but there wasn’t much to see. They’d landed on the very tail end of the
Tokugawa,
and he had to run around his own ship to see where they were going. He slipped and tumbled, since everything was slick with pounding rain, but he made it back up, and kept running.

Heinrich was in the lead. He’d picked up one of those new Solothurn 8mm attack rifles with the big curved magazine sticking out the side. It had a rate of fire so intense that it sounded like ripping cloth. Ahead of the Fade was the length of the
Tokugawa’
s
top deck. It seemed to go on forever. The
Tempest
was absolutely tiny by comparison.

The UBF Brute had kicked in the door to the structure they’d crashed next to, and Francis followed him in. Except for the lacerated bodies from the men he’d telekinetically killed in the main room, the structure was clear. There was a ladder that led downward into the bowels of the ship between the three great hulls.

“If they need a workshop for that Tesla device, they’ll be in engineering. It is in the center of the ship.” Francis looked over and was surprised to see that the accountant, Mr. Chandler, had followed him and was holding a Thompson. “What? I was in the war, Canadian Army, Gordon Highlanders . . . UBF built this thing. I know how much every part of it cost
and
I took the tour.”

Heinrich appeared, walking right through the wall as he changed the magazine in his Solothurn. The barrel was white hot. “There are more coming. There’s little time.”

They had to find this thing and find it fast. “One team up. One team down.”

***

Faye was jumping around like a madwoman. She figured the best thing she could do was just keep moving, causing trouble, and besides, the longer she stayed in one place, the more likely she was to get shot. It was harder to aim at something that wasn’t there by the time you pulled the trigger.

Other Actives worried about running out of Power, but she didn’t. It just seemed to be there, the same as always. She appeared behind a soldier in a brown uniform, stuck her shotgun in his spine and pulled the trigger. She was Traveling so fast now that by the time the action cycled, the spent shell ejected two hundred yards away as she landed right in front of another soldier and tripped him so he fell down a ladder and broke his neck.

Her head map was filled with information. There were hundreds of people moving. Thousands of bullets. She had to stay in motion.

One second she was in the flagship inside a room filled with dirt and windows like they were gonna try and grow crops and then she was outside in the rain where she hit a man in the head with her shotgun butt and watched him flip over the railing and then she was in a narrow little room filled with red light and shooting steam and there was one man in a black uniform using his Power to keep the hydrogen from catching on fire so she just shot him in the neck and then she was up in a room with a bunch of radios so she shot all of those folks too and then she shot the radios for good measure until her shotgun was empty.

Whew . . .
She paused to catch her breath as she pulled more buckshot off her bandoleer. Her Power might not run out, but she was getting tired and this was about the fifth time she’d emptied the stubby shotgun. The Browning was smoking hot and her shoulder was going to have a really nasty bruise. Faye brushed an errant strand of hair away from her eye. She still hadn’t seen anything that looked like her Grandpa’s Tesla device, but as soon as she did, she was gonna smash it real good. She couldn’t find it on her head map, because everything here was so filled with complicated mechanical devices that everything looked kind of the same.

Her head map warned her to move, so she did, not even knowing why, and a sword cleaved through the air where she’d been standing. There was a woman in front of her where there hadn’t been anybody a second ago. She was dressed all in tight black, had red hair spilling over her shoulders, and was way prettier than Faye, and strangest of all, she had grey eyes too! “Hey, you’re just like me!” she exclaimed.

The woman didn’t respond, she just whipped the sword around to take Faye’s head off, but Faye was too quick for that. The sword snaked chips from the wall and Faye appeared behind her. “Oh, so that’s how it is?” Faye said as she pulled up the shotgun. But the woman was just as quick as she was and the buckshot blew twelve holes in the wall instead of meat. Faye instinctively ducked as the sword stabbed over her shoulder.

She appeared in an empty access tunnel two stories below, put her back to the wall, and kept loading the shotgun.
Could the redhead follow her?
Faye had never tried to use her head map to keep track of another Traveler before, so she wasn’t sure. She realized her shirt was torn and blood was welling from her shoulder. The blade had been so sharp she hadn’t even felt the cut, but she sure did now.

The woman appeared at the other end of the tunnel. “You’re a slippery one,” she said, “but no one escapes Toshiko of the Shadow Guard.”

“Well, I’m Faye of the Grimnoir knights, and I wasn’t trying to escape,” Faye answered bravely. “I was just waiting for your slow ass to catch up.”

The woman screamed, raised her sword, and charged. Faye lifted the shotgun and fired as the woman Traveled, appearing just behind the passing buckshot, and swung, but only raised sparks off the grating as Faye disappeared.

Faye landed at the opposite end of the tunnel. The woman was too fast, but maybe she was like everybody else and her Power had to run out sometime, just like Delilah had taught her. “Hey, Toshiko! That ninja suit makes you look like a fat cow.”

The ninja raised her sword. Red light reflected down the razor steel.

It would be just like playing tag. “Catch me if you can, fat cow!” Faye taunted before Traveling as far as her map would take her.

***

Sullivan swung the barrel of the BAR around the corner and caught the lead crewman in the face. Cheek bone shattered, he stumbled back into his companions, and Sullivan followed, using his Power to tumble them down the hall into the far wall. These were in navy uniforms, so maybe they knew their way around this giant maze. He dropped the rifle, knowing the sling would catch it and hold it against his chest, as he drew his .45 and walked forward. He put one bullet into each head, but stopped at the last one. He grabbed the soldier by the throat with his left hand and picked him off the ground and slammed him against the wall.

He didn’t know if the Jap spoke English, so he kept it simple. Wherever his brother was, that’s where the Tesla device would be. “Where’s Madi?” The sailor started to jabber something. Sullivan lowered the .45 and shot him in the knee. The sailor screamed. “English! Do you speak it?”

“Madi! Madi!” The man pointed down, said a bunch of other words, but Madi was in there, and he kept pointing in a downward direction. That would do. Sullivan slammed the sailor’s skull into the metal bulkhead then dropped him. There was an interior stairwell around the next corner so he started down.

He paused at the next level, but then snapped back as a subgun barked, hitting the corner of the wall. Someone bellowed from behind the gun. “More ninjas!”

English?
“Grimnoir?” he shouted.

“Sullivan? That you?”

“Yeah, don’t shoot,” he answered, coming around the corner. He’d forgotten about the black mask and goggles. He pulled them off and shoved them into his coat. Sure enough, it was the Grimnoir. Dan Garrett was in the lead, followed by Heinrich Koenig, a dark-haired stranger, and more people were coming up behind them out of the darkened passageway.

“One of yours?” the man with the Thompson asked.

“Proud to say yes on that one,” Dan answered. “Sullivan, have you seen Jane?” When Sullivan shook his head, Dan lowered his. “Damn it. I’ve got to find her.”

“Engineering is this way, I think,” said the man with the Thompson. “Come on.”

Heinrich grabbed Sullivan by his coat. “Listen to me, friend. There is something I must tell you. Something—”

“It can wait, Heinrich,” Sullivan answered.

“No, it can’t.” The woman’s voice came from the darkness of the hallway. She stepped forward into the dim light.

Sullivan blinked hard. “De-Delilah?” It couldn’t be, but he recognized her shape in the shadows, but something was different, something was
wrong
. “How?” Had the Healing magic worked after all? But why wasn’t she coming closer? He started to go to her, but Heinrich held on with all his might.