Hive III (9 page)

Perhaps against my better judgement, I spill the beans about what happened to Skuld, that the Queen turned the crusty old bastard into some kind of love slave before twisting his head off.

Dhal’s splicing a set of red and green wires with effortless skill. “That old gal doesn’t waste any time, does she?”

The sound of crashing metal rings in our ears and we look over to see the weakened barricade has given way and Zees are streaming in. Dhal looks up from his work on the jamming device with panic in his eyes. He’s probably wondering if there’s enough time to hop back into the Titan, but I can already see there isn’t. Klaus is the first one firing and the young Keeper hits three headshots in a row. All that manages to do is ignite Bron’s competitive streak. The big man plants his feet and opens up. The first Zee to eat a 20mm shell is a palace guard, recently turned. These guys are the Patriarch’s last line of defense, sworn to lay down their lives to protect him. If they’ve been infected, there’s little hope the crusty old bastard is still in one piece. Soon, everyone but Dhal is firing, although even as he tinkers feverishly on his device, he must know we can’t keep this up forever. Bron’s heavy guns have managed to push them back to the entrance and now he’s firing straight through, lobbing the occasional grenade. Bits and pieces of Zee guts fill the air in all directions. I’m about to tell Dhal to forget the jammer, that we’re hi-tailing it out of here, when we hear the sound of a battle horn. We hold our fire. Even the Zees have stopped charging in. A second later there’s a second horn blast, followed closely by a third.

“The hell is going on?” Ret asks, staring up into the darkened warehouse rafters as though
trying to peer through the very walls.

“
Keeper battle horns,” Oleg exclaims in a reverent hush and all of us stare, dumbfounded.

“The
y haven’t sounded since the Zee wars, over two hundred years ago.”

“What does it mean
?” Klaus asks.

“It means
the Keepers are launching a counter attack.”

The Zees aren’t trying to get into the warehouse at all anymore and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why. Sneak, Ret and I scale a ladder to the roof, leaving Dhal to finish his jammer and the others to watch over him. Heat from the mid-afternoon sun warms my darkened flesh. Sneak rushes to the edge. From there she can see over the wall and she waves us over in a hurry. I’m not nearly prepared for what I see when I get there. A savage battle is raging outside the capital. On one side are a veritable ocean of Zees, rushing relentlessly forward. On the other is what looks like Keepers, from every corner of the ten territories. Impressive a sight as that is, it isn’t the carnage below that shocks me. It’s the strange machines the Keepers are fighting with. Mechanical pods on two bent legs, operated by men firing heavy machine guns. Others look like metallic elephants, sweeping aside dozens of Zees at once with their massive trunks. Ret’s beside me, watching all this through a set of binoculars.

“Commander Tind
,” he says, as though the name’s supposed to mean something. Doesn’t take long for him to catch the blank expressions on our faces.

He points to a figure
, barking out orders, staying cool in the heat of battle. Tind motions to a machine that looks a lot like the one Dhal was using in the courtyard earlier and sends it into a pack of approaching Zees. Even from a distance, the commander’s presence is impressive, but already it’s becoming clear that none of it will make a lick of difference, since he’s outnumbered fifty to one. Machines or no machines, they won’t stand a chance.

“We’ve got to help them,” Ret cries. “Attack the Zees from behind and relieve the pressure on
Tind’s center line.”

Even Sneak’s shaking her head
at what a bad idea it is and she’s right.

“The only chance any of us have,” I tell him, “is if we can get close enough to the Queen to use Dhal’s jamming gizmo.”

Ret isn’t convinced. “But that’s assuming he’s able to build it in time or that it even works.”

“And if we rush out there like
fools,” I shoot back. “We doom the human race to extinction.” The full weight of my statement hits me as I watch Ret’s gaze reel back to the battle below. What hits me isn’t so much the extinction part, but more about including myself as a member of the human race. I’m not human anymore. The minute I was bitten, in the bowels of that underground shopping complex, I became something distinctly unhuman. If the Zees were about building up their own society instead of tearing down the ones around them, then I’d be the first to fight for co-existence. But, the truth is, they’re an infestation and they need to be wiped off the face of the Earth.

Just then
, Bron pokes his head through the hatch, showing off his discolored teeth and I know Dhal’s got something he thinks is gonna work. I don’t get a more than a single step toward him when something in the sky streaks overhead, casting a long, eerie shadow over us. A low flying bird is my first thought, but it’s far too big and the wingspan… Bron must have seen it too ‘cause he scrambles up and bolts in our direction.

“What kind of a
bird was that?” His ears catch the sounds of men and monster below us, tearing each other apart, wild gunfire, and for the first time he sees what’s underway. But the strange machines, smashing handfuls of Zees at a time, hardly seem to faze him. That giant bird is back overhead and now I can see it isn’t an animal. It’s the Queen’s new son.

The realization hits us all at once and Bron’s cannons stab the air and fill it with lead. The creature folds its wings and dives directly at us and I understand I’m witnessing the birth of a new breed of Zee. As if they weren’t formidable enough already. Now there isn’t any question; the Queen must be stopped or she’ll continue to pump out these flying killing machines. He’s in my head right away, scrambling my thoughts and trying to bring me to his will. He’s a tough son of a bitch, especially given he’s been around for all of ten minutes. In a flash I see the birth. The Queen, squatting over a trench dug in the ground, a tear splitting open between her legs and a set of claws sliding through. With almost practiced ease, its fingers grip the edges of the orifice and pull the rest of itself out. Her insides are being torn apart, but she knows she’ll heal. She also knows Prior Skuld has provided her with everything she needs to fertilize thousands of flying monsters. But this is her first born and she gives it a name: Volg. To the Keepers they were Volgorath. Was the choice of name a display of irony, the final threads of the Queen’s fading humanity?

The flash vision
ends with just enough time to see Volg spread his wings at the last second and swing his legs out before him. Bron barely has enough time to react before Volg’s clawed feet connect with his chest, throwing him back a dozen feet. The last I see of Bron is his body flying over the edge. Ret’s right there with his shotgun and nearly gets a shot off before the flying Zee flicks it from his grasp like a child’s toy. He’s about to skewer him, right before our eyes, unless I can do something quick. The Katana is out with a flick of my wrist and cutting through the air a second later. But no sooner does the move materialize in my brain than he can see it too. The bones along the edges of his wings are hard as steel and he parries each and every one of my attacks. Ret’s got his boomstick again but can’t get a clear shot. That doesn’t stop Sneak from jumping in, head first. All I see are blurs of motion and sparks as the two of them face off. She’s small and easily underestimated, but her clearest advantage is that he can’t read her mind. That’s when I see a hand grab the edge of the rooftop. It’s Bron; in an unheard of display of quick thinking, he used his grappling hook to keep from falling to a certain death. The steel cable’s still coiling back into his arm when he charges Volg at a full run, the veins in his neck, nearly bursting with rage. The blades in his palms eject and now he’s twirling them viciously before him. Bron’s almost on top of Volg when the Zee prince parries one of Sneak’s overhand strikes and spins his body, sweeping Bron’s legs out from under him. I throw everything I’ve got against him, knowing I don’t have a chance of breaking through. But even he has his weaknesses and when he overextends, in an attempt to bring the sharpened point at the end of his wings down on Sneak’s head, she’s ready for him and slashes him across the face, opening his left eye like a ripe grape. He recoils at once and flaps his wings, hitting her with a burst of air that sends her skidding back. Two more thrusts and he’s back in the air, trying to escape to a place where he can heal up. Ret’s shotgun is bucking in his arms as he tries in vain to bring him down. I’m about to swing my repeater out when I catch sight of the grappling hook from Bron’s arm cut through the air and bury itself in the thigh muscle of Volg’s leg.

“I got myself
a big one,” Bron shouts and for a moment he looks like one of those old pictures of fishermen on the high seas. I can hear a whirring sound as the grappling hook starts to reel him in. But the flying Zee isn’t gonna go down without a fight and he flaps his wings, dragging Bron toward the edge of the roof. I grab hold of the big man at once, all of us do, and we’re trying to prevent him from falling to his death for real this time.

“Cut the line,” I shout.

But Bron’s pretending not to hear me. The stubborn bastard is on a suicide mission and I know nothing I say will change his mind. He’s even firing his 20mm and I see a handful of tracers whiz by Volg as he tries desperately to escape. One round goes clear through his right shoulder and suddenly the wing on that side stops flapping.

That’s when Bron rotates his wrist twice, getting a good solid hold on the steel wire
, and yanks it with everything he’s got. Volg is jerked back like a faltering kite being pulled from the sky. Bron’s pulled so hard the creature’s about to come crashing into him, but that’s exactly what the big man wants and when it happens, both of Bron’s twelve inch blades are waiting for him. The first tears a six inch gash in the creature’s chest and the second goes clean through its skull. The light in Volg’s eyes, fixed firmly on Bron, begins to fade at once. The blades retract and the Zee slumps to the ground.

“This
isn’t Bron’s day to die,” the big man says.

He might be right, but
the day isn’t over yet.

Back in the warehouse, Dhal’s tongue is sticking out as he puts the finishing touches on his jamming device. Ret’s bent over, leaning on one knee, trying to catch his breath. Bron, on the other hand, has got his chest puffed out and I’m sure he’s about to launch into a bad fish catching joke.

Across from me, Oleg’s handing bits of metal panelling to Dhal, staring on rather helplessly. Engineering isn’t the old man’s area of expertise and the control freak in him is having a hard time dealing with it. And I can’t entirely blame him
, either. Last we saw, those Keepers outside were slowly being flanked by a fresh group of Zees from the south and it won’t be long before the human army is completely surrounded and destroyed.

Bron makes his way to the now mangled warehouse barricade and peers out. A quick hand signal reveals no Zees in sight. Not that
it’s much of a surprise. The Queen’s pulling all available resources in order to wipe Commander Tind’s troops from the battlefield.

A few agonizing minutes later, Dhal looks up with a beaming smile and that goofy look of his tells me one thing.

The jammer is ready.

There’s a second, smaller device in his hand with a faded red button on top. The whole thing looks cobbled together from bits of junk
, which shouldn’t be a surprise since that’s exactly how it was made.

Bron
hardly looks impressed. “Couldn’t you just turn all this crap into a big bomb and blow her Zee ass away?”

“If I had more time
, I prolly could,” Dhal replies and even I can tell that isn’t just his teenage arrogance talking.

He
raises the device in the air. “This button activates the jammer,” he explains.

I point to a similar looking button on the jammer itself.

“If you wanna get that close, be my guest, but I think our only shot of making this work is to toss it in and jam her remotely.”

The corner of Ret’s mouth twitches
in a show of doubt. “But we still need to find someone dumb enough to walk right up to her.”

Bron’s metal hand is in the air
, volunteering before Ret even finishes. Not a bit surprising, but I know that’s not gonna work.

“We need your heavy guns to keep the Zees off of us,” I tell him. “It’ll have to be someone else.”

I can see that Ret’s about to step up, in spite of his ‘dumb’ comment from before, when Dhal beats him to it. “I can use the Titan to get closer than anyone. When that metal cockpit is closed and sealed, nothing can touch me. Once it’s in place, I’ll activate it from inside.”

He turns to me. “After that
, the rest is up to you, Azina.”

Yeah, no shit it is. “Check your weapons
,” I bark. “I don’t want anyone running dry or jamming when we’re in the thick of it.” There’s a mounting weight creeping over my shoulders, in part because I’m still not entirely sure what to do in the narrow window of time the Zee’s are under my control. When I find myself in difficult situations, I’ve always preferred to think on my feet. Never have been much of a planner, but now the future of mankind is hanging in the balance, all I can hope is that I won’t choke.