Shadows of Falling Night (19 page)

For an instant he felt almost limp with relief. Now he was invisible from the outside, and the enemy weren’t willing to just shoot up the vehicle he was in. Probably.

“Now just do it!”

Peter Boase was there; Eric handed off Leon and turned to glare at the flier. He was prepared to get things going at gunpoint if he really had to, and trust to Adrian to clear things up later, but that was insanely risky—if they ended up in detention the other side could walk in and get them. The copilot gave him a long look, a short nod and turned back into the cockpit without further encouragement. Eric blew out a long breath and collapsed into one of the recliners, fumbling at the seatbelt.

“I need a drink,” he croaked, making his right hand relax and unclench on the butt of the coach gun inside his coat.

There was nothing he could do with that now except commit suicide, which was admittedly starting to have a certain abstract appeal. The engines roared as he strapped himself in, and acceleration pushed him
into the softness. The whine rose and then the nose, and then the final bump as they left the tarmac.

“That was like
Call of Duty!
” Leon enthused, bouncing in his seat and calling around Peter’s body where the scientist was strapping him in. “Wow!
Magnifique!
”

“Kid, shut up before I shoot you myself,” Eric said—but sotto voce.

The white-green-dun-brown expanse of the New Mexican countryside turned beneath them as the aircraft banked, climbing. For a moment he could see the toy-tiny shape of the Humvee, now burning with a flicker of yellow flame and drift of black smoke—evidently the sniper had lost his temper and emptied a magazine into it. Eric felt his stomach muscles unclench as they gained altitude; they were over the height a rifle could reach fairly quickly, even that sort of monster-truck model. He unsnapped and stuck his head into the cockpit.

“Any problems?” he said.

The pilot was in his fifties, with a gray-and-brown buzz cut and faded blue eyes. “Nope,” he said. “Tower’s chewing my ass for blowing Dodge in the middle of a quote terrorist incident unquote, but I’d already had clearance so it won’t amount to much.”

“Thanks,” Eric said.

The man shrugged. “Just doing my job.”

Reaction made his hands shake a little as he turned back into the body of the plane. The interior in this one was pale and mostly open, comfortable in an impersonal way, with six recliner-style seats, a table and chairs, a small kitchen nook and a bathroom with a compact shower. Peter caught his eye and mimed wiping sweat off his brow. Cheba was already busy with something; then she shoved a bottle into his hand and he took a swig of the beer—Stone Arrogant Bastard Ale again—and he grinned in sheer relief

It sluiced the gummy dryness out of his mouth a lot better than a suck of tepid rubber-tasting water from a camelback. He’d done a fair impression of a SABA himself, just now, and it had worked. For now. He made himself file the whole thing on the
ongoing psychological damage
memory chip and move on with an effort of will.

Instead he looked around the inside of the aircraft.

Well, this beats the hell out of sitting buttcheek to buttcheek in webbing seats in a Herky Bird on a twelve-hour troop lift full of eau de piss and Red Bull,
he thought.
Not to mention your conventional Misery Special in coach. I wonder if Adrian Brézé needs an ex-cop long-term? Could be worse jobs after this is all over
…

“Were people really shooting at us?” Leila said. “I wasn’t sure.”

“Uhhh…”
It’s usually better to tell kids the truth.
“Yeah, but they weren’t trying to hit you. Just the car. And maybe me and Cheba.”

“Mom and Dad will both be angry at them,” Leila said. “They were shooting
close
to us.”

“And then they’ll be
soooorrrrrreeeeee
,” Leon said.

With that both the children seemed to lose interest, looking around at their transportation instead. Apparently they were much less impressed than he was.

“Mom’s plane is a lot bigger than this. It has a pool,” Leila said, looking up from her tablet. “It’s called
Le Misérable Excès.
”

“It’s an Airbus 380,” Leon said knowledgeably. “Really cool. We have our own bedrooms and there’s this game room where the walls are screens and you can play interactive
Doom
and stuff. Hi, Peter! You look like you’re feeling a lot better than you were before.”

The slight sharp-featured blond man was a little older than Eric, but…

Looks younger,
Eric thought.
No, not younger when you look in his eyes.
He spent
years
on Rancho Sangre as Adrienne Brézé’s bloodbank and fucktoy and tame researcher knowing that anything he found out would help
them.
He’s pulled his tours too, and he managed to turn it around on her, which was outstanding.

Another advantage of this arrangement was that you didn’t sit waiting for eight other aircraft to take off; they were climbing to thirty thousand feet within seconds.

Peter Boase grinned when Eric mentioned it.

“Do you think the Council of Shadows was in charge of setting up the deregulated civil aviation system?” he said, his voice still carrying a trace of the flat Upper Midwestern vowels; he was from Minnesota originally. “To make us all suffer?”

“Nah, just feels like it,” Eric said.

The men laughed; Cheba looked at them blankly for a moment. Peter produced a paper sack from the refrigerator.

“Here’s lunch. Take-out from La Casa Sena.”

“They do take-out?” Eric asked, going over to the kitchenette and looking in the fridge. “Damn, real Mexican Coca-Cola with cane sugar, not that corn syrup crap the Iowans make us drink.”

La Casa Sena was a place on Palace Avenue, just up from what had been the residence of the Spanish, Mexican and American governors, and was now a museum. The restaurant had been the fortified home place of a rich landowner once, back when the Apache raided all over New Mexico and far south of Sonora. It was a big two-story 18th-century adobe built around a courtyard, with a wine store and some fancy clothing shops as well as the eatery. He’d been there exactly twice; once when he was still trying to make it up with Julia, and once on police business, the investigation that had gotten his partner killed and himself disappeared into the world of the Council-Brotherhood war.

It wasn’t the most expensive place in town by a long shot, but you could blow a couple of C-notes on dinner there and if you started hitting the wine list the sky was the limit. There was an old joke that Santa Fe was a city where ten thousand people could buy the state and fifty thousand couldn’t afford lunch. Some people got nauseated after an adrenaline rush; Eric had always found it made him ravenous. At least he could do something besides stuff an MRE in his face this time.

Peter grinned: “Hey, it pays to have connections; there’s takeout for
us
. Maybe we’ll all die horribly, but we’ll do it in style.”

Eric nodded. “Beats maybe dying horribly while you’re eating crap. Beats it all to hell.”

“Right. And you wouldn’t
believe
how nice it is to just say you need lab equipment and it appears. No meetings, no budget reports, no root-canal work, it’s just
there.
”

“What’ve you got?”

“Well, we’ve got a Bose-Einstein condensate particle…oh, you mean the
food
.” Peter looked at a menu from the bag: “You want the grilled local organic chicken with basil pesto,
poblano rajas
, grilled onions, asadero cheese, heirloom tomatoes, and chipotle mayo on focaccia or the BBQ pork po’-boy, with jicama–cabbage slaw, rattlesnake bean–sweet corn salad, on a multigrain hoagie?”

Eric took the po’-boy and bit into it. Cheba took one, chewed thoughtfully, swallowed:

“This…
es como una buena torta de barbacoa
,” she said, then went back to English: “Not bad…what did it cost?”

She’d been thinking of opening a shop to sell Mexican handicrafts when this was all over, assuming they survived, or possibly a restaurant. Adrian Brézé had agreed to get her a green card and start-up money as her price for helping with the raid on the great house at Rancho Sangre
in California. Peter read it off; the young woman swallowed wrong and started to cough, so Eric pounded her helpfully on the back.

“Only problem with this trip is what’s at the end,” he said. “Going up against people with precognition and telepathy and all that good shit just makes me nervous.”

It also makes me likely to die, but hey, goes with the territory,
he thought to himself, keeping it silent because the others were more-or-less civilians.

Peter smiled. This time it wasn’t just pleasant; there was something of a shark’s grin in it as he tapped what looked like a tablet.

“We’ve been working on that prescience-blocking field.”

“We?”

“Well, Dr. Duquesne and me. The Brotherhood moved us from the place in Sweden to their big base in Ecuador…they wanted us to camouflage it for them. Which we did. They’ve got lots of engineers and technicians, but not many real scientists for some reason. It’s odd—if I had the Power, I would
so
have been using it experimentally.”

“What’s it like, the base?”

“It’s in the crater of a semi-extinct volcano, burrowed into these amazing natural caves…there’s even a monorail.”

“Do they have their own nuclear reactor?” Eric said.

Peter frowned. “No, a geothermal unit…why?”

“I watched a
lot
of old movies on my phone while I was doing stakeouts. You would not believe how boring being a detective is. Anyway, what’s that?”

“It’s the
new
prescience-blocking generator. The first one, the one that Harvey, uh—”

“Stole.”

“Stole. That was a test bed, jury-rigged. This is the production model
for small-scale concealment. We put in a big one for the base; they had protective Wreakings, but they’re much happier now.”

He grimaced slightly. “Though I think some of them thought it was…cheating.”

“What were they like?” Eric asked curiously. “I haven’t seen any of their bigwigs, and the grunts were all in-and-out, real concentrated on business.”

Peter frowned. “They seemed like people trying very hard to be good, but it doesn’t come naturally to them.”

Eric shrugged. “That’s me, sometimes. Whatever works.”

“And they were really concerned with being able to hide. I don’t think things have been going well for them lately.”

“Sort of a defensive crouch, yeah, I got that impression too. Not a good thing.”

Cheba looked at the tablet. “It isn’t one of those little computers?”

“We used the case from commercial tablets. It makes it inconspicuous.”

“So, this is a machine that can do what the
brujos
do?”

There was a carnivorous eagerness to the question. Peter shook his head.

“I wish. No. No, that needs a lot of…”

He paused. “I can’t explain without math.”

“But hey, you’ll give it a try, right?” Eric said patiently.

Peter flung up his hands: “The experiments I did at the Rancho…They need
modulation
, a control system as…as subtle as a human brain. One that worked
like
the human brain, or really like the Shadowspawn brain, on a quantum level. It’s…it’s like the difference between being able to play the violin and being able to make a loud noise.”

“But,” he went on, “we
can
make a really loud noise.”

He tapped the screen. Leila and Leon were walking back from the cockpit as he did so; they stopped abruptly, their dark brows knotting.

“You’re not there any more!” Leon said.

“I can see you, but you’re
not there
!” Leila said. And added: “I don’t like it!”

Peter stuck his hands protectively in front of the little machine as she pointed at it. “No! Don’t hurt it!”

Cheba shook a warning finger. “You two be good!
¡Comportanse!
”

“C’mon, Leila, let’s play some Angry Rodents,” her brother said.

“This is going to be complicated,” Eric said thoughtfully as the children put on their earbuds and VR glasses. “How many of those things do you have?”

“Fair number. At least one each, but don’t lose them…or get them fried. We checked, and Wreakings
can
fry them, they just can’t be very precise because the Power can’t sense them. There are some attachments here; this is the underwater model, for example. Dive-rated. Rechargers, testing monitors…we’ve got some nice kit here. They have their limitations, but they sure do make it easier to
surprise
the other side, though.”

“
Bueno,
” Cheba said. She looked at the baggage rack, where her fashionista backpack with the built-in silvered machete rested. “There are some people, they
should
be surprised, you know?”

Dmitri’s hands moved on the massive sniper rifle without requiring conscious direction; the three of them were lying in a little rocky declivity, with the barrel through the roots of a chamisos and Dale lying next to him with a little fiber-optic periscope peeping out to produce a picture on his tablet.