DIRE : SEED (The Dire Saga Book 2) (25 page)

“That’s alright,” I said. “Sheee... shoot, no problem at all. “D... heard worse. Haha.”

She narrowed her eyes a bit. “Well, no worry. I’m sure this will be over in no time at all. In the meantime, it looks like you’re stuck in here with us for this lockdown. Is there anything we can get you?”

The door next to me slammed open, and a fully-armored security guard emerged, took up point next to the door, and tapped his comm. “Sublevel one. Room is secure!”

“Copy!” Came the voice over his comm.

He didn’t see it coming.

I waited until he was glancing away, whipped my taser from the small of my back, and shocked him into unconsciousness. The entire room stood, shocked, as I took his comm, his badge, and his gun.

“No thank you,” I told the short woman, who was now staring at me with a dawning look of horror. “Got everything she needs right now.”

Before she could respond, I ran the guard’s badge through the stairwell access panel, and slipped through the door, closing it behind me.

It would have been smarter to stun or shoot them all. There were only perhaps ten people in the room, and each one of them I left conscious was one more to call for help, or alert guards to my presence. But hey, I’d sworn to limit collateral damage to civilians, hadn’t I? This entire caper with the flowers had caused enough chaos for my conscience. So instead of taking the ruthless but certain path, I pulled out my universal remote, and took a few precious moments to shut down their workstations and phones, one by one. Not a moment too soon, either; the last one I shut down was dialing nine-one-one.

I descended the stairs to sub-level three, got a text from Vorpal on the way down.

SECURITY ROOM GOT RDY FOR DOORS OPEN

I grinned. We’d pinpointed the location of the main security floor from the building’s own floor directory. Which was why we’d gotten Vorpal into position in marketing, the next floor up. She’d used her energy blade powers to cut through the floor, drop in on the main security room, and disable the guards before taking it over. It was a pity that they’d managed to get an alarm off before she was done, but no help for it. I texted back as fast as I could, cursing the tiny keys of the phone.

YES. UNLOCK FLOOR 14, SUBLEVEL 1, AND PENTHOUSE 1

3 LOC?

Y

FML

DO IT OR ALLS FOR NOUGAT

WHAT?

STUPID AUTOCORRECT. NOUGHT! NAUGHT! JUST DO IT!

LOL

Ahead of me, the light from the door at the bottom of the stairwell clicked from red to green, and without slowing down I threw it open, tased the man stationed there as he looked up in shock, and pointed my taser at the unarmored guard behind the checkpoint.

“How many guards on this floor?” I yelled.

“I, uh...”

I tased him, plucked his badge from his chest, and ran it through the panel behind him. The next door hummed and opened...

...revealing a wide, mostly-empty room. Ultraviolet lights and grow lamps hung from the ceiling, and several rows of tables held hydroponic misters, set over frames square-cut to hold plastic trays. Plastic trays the size of the ones currently in the cargo boxes I’d liberated. This had to be the lab where they’d grown the flowers.

But every table was bare. There were spaces for a few hundred trays, but not a single space was filled. A cloying odor mixed with chemicals, and the drains in the floor looked moist from recent usage.

Nothing left. They must have disposed of any other plants in this facility, or shipped them to alternate locations. I took a few precious minutes to search in a few outlying chambers which seemed to have been used as offices, and testing rooms. There were spaces for servers and workstations, even a few hard-wired network drops, but not a single computer. I growled in frustration, as every network drop I tested with my remote turned out to be inactive. They’d scrubbed this place thoroughly, and there was nothing to be had here. No wonder they’d only had two guards on it.

I made my way back up the stairwell, dropping the guard’s comm at the door to sublevel one as I went. The comm wasn’t a benefit, too easily traced. Sooner or later they’d try to take the security room back, and Vorpal would be forced to escape. Once they’d done that, they’d start looking for things out of place, and a comm wandering through the building was a textbook example of a security breach.

Right. On to floor thirty— cautiously, though. Charging in there would probably get me killed. A more sneaky approach was called for.

UNLOCK ELEVATORS
I texted, then slipped into the service elevator on floor one. Nobody stopped me as I moved through the employees only section... everyone was locked down in their rooms, and they evidently hadn’t seen a reason to put guards on locked-down elevators.

Vorpal came through, and I took a ride up to the Security floor. When the door hissed open I dove out, taser and stolen pistol at the ready. But no one was there to stop me, and as I clambered to my feet, my nose filled with the scent of chemicals, heavy enough to make me woozy.
I pulled out one of my janitor’s rags, held it over my nose, and proceeded through the antechamber. Fallen guards were strewn all around me, unconscious but still breathing. Some sort of gas? Smelled like it. Vorpal must have activated an emergency measure, hosed the rest of the entire floor.

I found Vorpal in the central room, back to me, sitting in a swivel chair watching a bank of monitors. About ten security guards were laying there, some bloody, some unconscious, some armored, some not. In the center of the room, a large plug made of roofing material, flooring tile, and several feet of thick armor plate lay on the floor, with a smoking hole above it showing where Vorpal had dropped down.

“Dire. Good.” She said, without moving.

“Blood? Dire gave you a perfectly good taser. Why—” She turned, and I broke off. “Oh.”

One of her hands clutched a fire axe, white-knuckled and locked around it with a death grip. The other hand grasped her side, where large burn marks surrounded a charred hole in the blouse, and a horrific black-red burn on the flesh beneath.

“They had these laser things,” Vorpal said, nodding at the floor, and the bodies strewn about. “Quicker with them then I thought.”

“The taser didn’t help?”

“I dropped down in the middle of most of them. Tased a few, but for the rest, it was not fast enough.” There were a fair amount of bodies here. “I had to use the the axe, with a lightning aura. It wasn’t good...”

She trailed off, stared at the far wall for a second, head drooping.

“Vorpal.”

Her head snapped up. “Uh?”

“You’re done. Need to get you out of here.”

“No! I can still—” She struggled to her feet, swayed against the chair, hissing as her hand clamped on her burn again.

“You need to get to Martin and have him patch you up. Stop arguing, and sit down. She’s calling in the armor.” I popped my phone open, called the number I’d set up in advance, and snapped it shut. It would take a minute for my suit to boot up and get here. In the meantime, I studied the monitors. Two spots left where I could possibly find the information I needed. The eighteenth floor in the middle of the building, and the Penthouse at the top of it.

I busied myself while I waited, settling down in front of an unlocked terminal, and hacking into the video system. It didn’t take much. The central security room was the hub of the building, and they assumed that if you were in here, you were authorized to view pretty much everything.

But I couldn’t view the Penthouse level. No cameras up there, it seemed. I growled in frustration, and switched over to the eighteenth floor.

Most of the floor was devoted to a machine shop, with people scurrying around and working furiously. In the middle of it stood four racks, each one holding three metal suits of armor. They were dull green in color, much bulkier than my own suit, and I recognized servos, pistons, and heavy-duty armatures. Heavy duty stuff. They’d be in my strength range, maybe better depending on the materials and tolerances. Half of them were armed with large-caliber weapons. Machine guns, by the look of it. Most had jetpacks.

And the guards buckling into them definitely didn’t look happy. Technicians hovered around, running them through diagnostics and startup procedures. I had no doubts as to why they were being activated now.

“Mein gott...” Vorpal whispered from behind me.

“Yep.” I didn’t know what she’d just said, but it was probably safe to agree with the sentiment.

“They are going to come up here and kick our asses, yah?”

I curled my hands into fists. “They’ll try.”

WHAM!

She started. I smiled.

WHAM!

“What is...”

“The cavalry.”

CRASH!

The wall caved in, sending monitors sparking and popping, as Vorpal shrieked.

And as the dust settled, my mask loomed out of the cloud, the rest of the dull gray armor stomping forward, heavy feet crunching on the debris that its entry had kicked into the room.

I walked forward to meet it, put my hand on its mask. “The King in Yellow has much to answer for,” I muttered. The armor stopped at the sound of the preset command words. With a hiss, the mask unsealed and I pulled it free, returning it to its rightful place on my face. Blackness for a second then shimmering, as the room faded in around me, and once again I wore my rightful visage.

“MUCH BETTER.”

“How does this help?”

“IT DOESN’T. GET IN THE ARMOR.”

“What? No, I—”

“YOU CAN BARELY STAND. IT WILL TAKE YOU TO THE RENDEZVOUS POINT AND RETURN. DIRE WILL HOLD THEM OFF WITHOUT IT UNTIL THEN.”

“They have power armor. You cannot seriously think to prevail without your own.”

Depending on how good those suits were, I might not be able to do it even with my own. But that fact wouldn’t get her out of here any faster. “NON-NEGOTIABLE,” I said. “GET ABOARD AND GET GOING. THE SOONER YOU REACH THE RENDEZVOUS, THE SOONER IT CAN RETURN AND BACK DIRE UP.”

She stared at me for a long moment.

“GO!”

She moved around, and the suit grabbed her. She squealed in pain as the rough metal pressed against her laser burn.

“PEEL,” I commanded, and it was gone as fast as it had come, engines accelerating to full as it charged out the holes it had made on the way in. No way to avoid being seen on the exit, but I’d pre-programmed it with some twisty courses to the dropoff point before this whole affair started. Couldn’t guarantee it would get away clean. But I doubted there was much in the city that could stop it right now, if anyone tried to get in its way.

And then I was alone in the main security room, staring at the armored suits on the monitors, as the first of them finished booting up, and marched off of their stands, readying weapons and tromping toward the elevator shafts and stairwells up.

“ALRIGHT, YOU TIN SOLDIERS.” I sorted through the bodies and unconscious guards scattered around the room, and came up with a laser rifle. Then I started hacking for all I was worth.

“LET’S SEE WHAT YOU’RE REALLY MADE OF.”

CHAPTER 15: THE MAN IN CHARGE

“Perhaps it's old-fashioned of me, but I find that most problems are best addressed with a spring in your step, a handkerchief in your pocket, and a sturdy cane in your hand.”

--Aegon Morgenstern, during his 1994 interview on the long-running Tycoon Talk show.

I have to admit, a part of me was eager. It is one thing to menace civilians, and hurt security guards who are just doing their jobs. It is entirely another thing to see a troop of high-tech soldiers equipped with cutting edge power armor coming for my hide. It was more fair, somehow. The others hadn’t had a chance to really get clear or do anything but be neutralized. But these guys? They were a threat. They knew what they were doing. And until my armor returned, I was very much the underdog.

For once, I didn’t have to hold back.

I locked doors to slow down the ones on the stairwells, then shifted my attention to the primary elevator shaft. Once four of them started flying up it, I dropped an elevator car on them from the top floor. Probably wouldn’t kill them, but it would slow them down. Either way, I couldn’t stick around to confirm it; I had to evade the rest of them until my armor returned, or it was game over. They’d be shooting to kill, after what we’d done.

So I pulled over the nearest chair, clambered up on it, and wormed my way up through the hole in the ceiling.

It was almost the end of me. A shot rang out as my head broke above the surface of the hole, and I ducked as a bullet ricocheted away. Of
course
they’d put guards on the hole.

I flipped to thermal vision, peered through the thin tiles between the floor and the layer of armor I’d just crawled under, until I found human-shaped signatures stationed around the room.

Well. Time to try out my new laser rifle.

After the fourth shot through their cover without exposing myself to fire, they broke and ran. I hauled myself over the edge, muscles straining. A whining, mechanical sound caught the edge of my hearing... approaching jetpack armor. I ran for a stairwell, pushed the door open, and backed the hell off as bullets rained upward from below, machine guns barking as the ones in the stairs opened up on me. They’d come too far, the guards on this floor had done their job and slowed me down.

I whipped around, ran back out of the stairwell, searching for a janitor’s closet, opened it with my janitorial pass. I grabbed a climbing belt and gloves, struggled into them as I ran back out, and made my way to the main elevator, breath burning in my lungs as I heaved, and cinched up the last few buckles.

From three halls away, I heard the stairwell door blow open. I was about out of time.

I jerked out the universal remote, flipped through it until I had the elevator’s commands on my HUD, and opened it. It was the work of thirty hurried seconds to clip my harness on to the cable, and slide down toward the ruins of the fallen car below. A click of the remote, and the door shut behind me. Wouldn’t hold them long, but it didn’t have to. I tucked the remote safely away, and slid down floor by floor, thanking the boorish supervisor who had assigned me an elevator maintenance task and briefed me on the equipment involved. Without his malice, I wouldn’t have had this escape route handy.

You escape Dire’s vengeance for now, Curtis. This makes us even.

I almost giggled, and knew I was riding an adrenaline rush. Once it was over, I’d be hurting.

An elevator door dinged open six floors below me, and I immediately used my heels to jerk myself to a stop, losing boot leather in the process. A power-armored head leaned in, looked up at me, and caught a laser beam in the faceplate as I fired one-handed. Pretty sure I didn’t penetrate the armor, but he pulled his head back in a hurry. I fumbled for the remote, ended up dropping the rifle down the shaft, but there was no time to curse it. I found the remote, clicked open the door next to me, and swung over as the armored trooper swung back in and sprayed bullets up the shaft. I felt wind against my back as a round missed by millimeters, but I couldn’t spare time to think about it, so I dove through the doors, jerked the pistol I’d liberated from the guard out of my coverall pocket, and shot the lines holding me to the cable. Then I crawled, bit by bit, pulling my legs out of the shaft and the wild spray of bullets—

—and looked up to find four guards staring down at me, shotguns leveled at my face.

For a long moment, there was silence.

“Hands up!” One of them yelled.

I put my hands up.

One of them tapped his comm. “Floor seven, we’ve got her. Security to—”

WHAM!

“HAHAHAHAHHHAHAHA!” I had to laugh. I knew what was coming.

“Down on the ground!” A second one howled, putting his boot on my back and pushing down. My mask hit the ground, saving my head from one hell of a knock.

WHAM!

The building shook.

“HUH, MUST HAVE HIT A SUPPORT THERE. IF SHE WERE YOU, SHE’D BE RUNNING BY NOW.”

“Shut up!” The guard on me yelled, chambering a shell. “Whatever you’re doing, stop it or—”

CRASH!

Dust sprayed from the walls, as my armor burst through, assessed the situation in microseconds, and reacted according to its programming for such a situation.

In this case, the proper response was particle beams.

After the barrage was done and my assailants were sprawled groaning on the floor of the hallway, I picked myself up. “OPEN SESAME!” I commanded, and it knelt down, the vapor hissing free as the back opened, ready to receive me.

And not a moment too soon. I heard doors to the west, north, and south slam open one by one, and the crunching of heavy metal on tile. But then I was inside my shell of steel, and the mask was sealing into its proper place, as the HUD flickered and reset to its full functionality.

The armor had knelt, hollow. It rose full, and at last, I felt complete again.

“ROUND TWO.” I boomed. “FIGHT!”

Damned if they didn’t take me up on it. Bullets raked through the northern wall, and I dodged, spurring to the side and kicking on the gravitics to hover a foot above the ground. But it was a feint, as two dull green figures took the far corner of the west hall, and opened fire with M2 Browning machine guns, the kind you normally see mounted on jeeps or tanks. My forcefield flared and lost charge, and I jetted toward the visible attacker, particle beams blasting. I took bullets, didn’t care, and blew him head over heels. But he recovered quickly, rolling to his feet, and reorienting his gun as his partner backed up.

My foot caught his helmet in a flying kick, and I ran him through the concrete western stairwell wall at fifty miles per hour. He stopped struggling. His partner went full auto and started hosing me down with fifty-caliber shells. I hit him point blank with both particle beams, knocked him back and down. He wasn’t as nimble as his friend, and as he struggled to rise I amped up the particle beams by twenty percent, and hit him with both at point blank range. He flew back, rolling, armor smoking and sparking, the chestplate cracked and ruined.

I spared a glance for my forcefield’s charge. Fifty-two percent.

Crunching noise from my left, and I whirled to see the power armor trooper I’d slammed into the wall, rising from the concrete. He tossed aside his gun and charged me, catching me in the midsection and ramming
me
through the opposite wall, the next section of office cubicles, and a glass divider. I felt the back plates of my suit take the worst of it, grinding on the ceramic layer below.

I wasn’t idle as he rushed me through the walls. He wasn’t doing that much damage, and I took the opportunity to feel his back, looking for the components that I knew had to be there. I’d noticed that they didn’t have any core vents, no way to shed excess heat from a contained power source, which meant that they most likely didn’t
have
one. They were probably running off of the power grid, which meant a collector antenna or a Bryson cage. More likely a cage, something built into the armor, flat, and not obvious.

All these thoughts passed in microseconds. Finding the grid itself, under what felt like a slightly-elevated plate, took seconds.

WHAM!

My world shook, as we finally fetched up against the concrete wall on the other side of the floor, and rebounded. He didn’t expect the rebound, and it threw him backward, tumbling. “Get the bitch!” He barked.

I snapped a shot into his back after he came to rest, frying the bryson cage. A storm of electricity boiled upward, scorching papers, blowing computer monitors, and sending chunks of cubicle everywhere. Had I killed him? Hard to tell. Forty-four percent left on the force field. He’d done some damage before he went down. They’d get me through sheer weight of numbers if I wasn’t careful.

From my left and right, two armored figures rushed me. I flew up and away, hovering up by the drop ceiling, taking a lazy circle while I examined them. One of the troopers raised what appeared to be a drum-fed RPG, and I pulled to an instant stop, reversed direction as it spat fire, blasting holes in the drywall to the west and throwing papers into the air with the shockwave. I dove down out of his line of fire and into the cubicles, and the other trooper charged after me, pulled a clunky looking sword from his back. A sword? Really? Then he twisted it, and the blade whined to life, vibrating and blurring as I watched it go. Ah, a vibroblade. Under normal circumstances, in the hands of an average human, it could damage my armor. With hydraulic strength behind it, it could cut my armor to shreds.

But it was a weapon that depended on high-speed motion, and I had a motion activated forcefield.

“YOU DON’T WANT TO DO THAT.” I advised him, raising a hand, palm outstretched.

He gripped the hilt two handed, charged at me, and cut at my hand, and my forcefield flared as the blade exploded in a shower of metal shrapnel, going every way. He staggered back, shrapnel embedded in his helmet, one of his gauntlets a smoking ruin where the mechanism had been housed.

I darted forward, grabbed his shoulder with one hand, and pounded his helmet once, twice, thrice. On the third one the visor buckled, and he went limp. Faking? Hard to say. I hoisted him two handed, threw him over the cubicles.

Foomp!

I looked down to see a grenade bank off a printer, break through a water cooler tank, and roll, cooler and all, over to my feet.

Well, shit.

After the explosion, I lay still for a second where it had blown me, and checked my charge. Twenty-seven percent. Yeah, they were going to get me through numbers if I kept this up. I’d taken down three and they had nine more. They were on their home turf, and I was the intruder. I’d have to find another way to win.

I flat-palmed my gauntlets to either side of me, and blew a hole in the floor below, dropping into a new floor.

From above, the chattering of machine-gun fire, blasting through the ceiling, seeking me. They had thermal vision, or some sort of tracking? Well, that was fine. I took a few hits on the forcefield, ignored them, and used the Phlogiston projector to set a few cubicles on fire. Then I dove into it, let it heat my shell as the bullets sprayed wildly around me, resisted the urge to react when a few found me. Then when I was well and truly camouflaged, my temperature close to the fire, I darted for the nearest stairwell. But instinct told me to hesitate, and I’m glad I did.

I took a second to scan it... and saw the thin wires criss-crossing the space just beyond the doors. They’d taken the time to trap it.

Rounds spattered off my force field as the bullet fire walked past me, then started walking back. Chips blew out of the concrete wall, and I watched the last of my charge dwindle and drain. Combined with the beating I’d taken, I wouldn’t last long if I had to survive by the armor alone. I knew that staying here was a fool’s game. But tripping those wires was a worse game. Any other exit involved more conflict.

So I made a new one. Particle beams at full, angled diagonally outward and upward to miss the surrounding skyscrapers, I blew another hole in the building and flew through it, bursting out into the daylight, speeding up the Morgenstern tower.

This was one of the reasons I hadn’t focused on engineering speed into my armor. I’d made it to operate in urban environments, and when you can fly, fifty miles per hour is plenty. My goal was in sight, Penthouse level one. I arced around to get a little distance, then rammed straight through the twenty-foot tall glass window, spraying shards all over a very nice plush carpet, as I hovered there, surveying the room around me. Opulent, but tasteful. Dark wood paneling along the walls, wide, tall windows that showed the glorious skyline of tall buildings around the tower, and classical statues and paintings adorned the edges of the room. A pair of sabers hung over a battered triangular shield on one wall. A wooden mask studded with nails adorned another as it glared out at the room. A liquor cabinet the size of a small storefront took up most of the right-hand wall.

And in the center of this space, a sturdy oaken desk sat atop the deep shag carpet, with a computer terminal open and displaying flickering text messages. Progress reports, from the part I saw. Mostly about me, and the destruction I’d wrought in the last few minutes.

“Well well well...” Said a rich, deep voice to my side, and I whipped around to see a part of the paneled wall slide open. It revealed the side of a two-foot thick armored vault door, and a portly figure standing just inside it what had to be a safe room. Various weapons hung on racks within, and monitors along the back flickered and flared.