DIRE : SEED (The Dire Saga Book 2) (33 page)

Finally he stopped in front of a pair of heavy oak double-doors, encrusted with gothic imagery; all gargoyles, knights, and dragons. “Through here,” he said. “Captain Vasquez has the briefing.”

I took a door in either hand, and threw them open, ignoring the booming noise as they hit the wall, rebounded, bounced off my hands again, and finally swung to a stop. Vasquez, at the head of the table, jerked backward and went for a holstered gun before forcing himself to stop.

Mixed reactions from the rest. I looked down the row of costumed people, and found them wary, but not overly alarmed. None of them were familiar to me.

Vorpal padded in behind me and took a seat next to a short goth girl wearing a plague doctor’s mask, the leather bird’s beak bobbing as she glanced between me and a black-robed man at the head of the table. His face looked to be half-destroyed, slick muscle and torn skin with bloody bone showing in a few spots. If it bothered him he didn’t seem to care. A scythe stuck out over his back. He had to hunch forward so that he fit in the seat, with that weapon harnessed to him.

Beside Black Robes, sat a man clad in burlap sackcloth with a skull mask. He stared at me without moving in the slightest. He wore fingerbones in a necklace around his throat. Across from him was a woman with incredibly white skin, with the occasional blue vein standing out. She wore blue, round sunglasses, black slacks, and a black shirt, with a black duster currently folded over an empty chair to her left. She had a round, flat, wide-brimmed hat on over short-cropped white hair. And at the very end of the table, sat a man in grungy, muddy overalls, wearing a high-peaked hat, with a shovel leaning next to him. He wore no mask, but his face was so dirty that I couldn’t make out anything more than broad features.

“VASQUEZ.” I said. “BRIEF DIRE.”

“Uh. Yeah, okay. We were waiting on you.”

“YOU WASTE TIME WITH THE OBVIOUS.”

The Goth girl’s beak bobbed toward Vorpal. “Jeeze. Vader much?” She whispered. Vorpal shot her a look, and I stifled a giggle.

“Right.” Vasquez said, pulling out a remote mouse, and starting up a series of slides through the overhead projector. “So we went looking on that frequency you told us, and an hour later, we found the tracker.”

A map of Icon City zoomed in to a large, oblong body of water surrounded by woodland. Lake Silence.

“That’s not far from the original ambush,” Vorpal said. I nodded. No wonder the kaiju had been so fast to react after the truck had blown up.

“We narrowed it down to this cluster of cabins here. It looks like someone rented out the entire cluster for a week.” The map tracked down from above, zooming in more to show a group of remote, somewhat grungy cabins surrounded by thick vegetation. A black van sat parked by the side of a gravel road. The nearest neighbors looked to be a couple of miles away. The cabins lurked on a slight hill, with a good view of the surrounding area. The place didn’t seem to have a beach, just a single overgrown dock that had seen better days. Overgrown? Some of those vines looked familiar.

“HOW RECENT IS THIS IMAGE?”

“It’s satellite. A few hours.”

“THERE’S A PLANT KAIJU UNDER THE DOCK.”

Black Robes turned his ruined face to me. “That what we’re up against?” He rasped.

“SEVERAL OF THOSE.”

The white woman steepled her fingers. “Any relation to that thing that went rampaging around the wharf last night?”

“THE SAME CREATURE. SIZE MAY VARY FROM BEAST TO BEAST.”

“How many is several?” Black robes asked.

“UNDETERMINED. AT LEAST TWO, PROBABLY THREE OR MORE.”

Vasquez cleared his throat. “There’s also a humanoid mutant.” He tapped the mouse, and brought up pictures of Chaingang. Amusingly enough they had a shot of him getting tacos from a local Mexican place, looking pleased as he spoke into a cell phone while balancing several large bags of Mexican food.

“I thought he was way too eager to break that phone,” Vorpal muttered. “Should have known he’d have a spare.”

“Capabilities?” Black Robes asked.

“HE’S A DUPLICATOR. SPAWNS COPIES OF HIMSELF THAT CAN SPAWN OTHERS, ALL HOOKED TOGETHER BY SOMETHING LIKE UMBILICAL CORDS. ALSO STRONGER AND TOUGHER THAN A NORMAL HUMAN, BUT IT’S HARD TO SAY HOW MUCH.” He’d given us a rough benchmark, but odds were good he’d been lying there.

“Duplicator,” said Black Robes. What was left of his lips smiled. “Deadweight, we’ll try you on that. Take Whippoorwill just in case. Rest of us’ll help with the giant plant things.”

“Hey! I could try singing to them.” Goth girl said, putting her elbows on the table.

Black Robes shook his head. “Plants don’t have ears.”

“Maybe it’s like corn monsters! Then they’d be nothing but ears!” She protested. “Didn’t think of that, did you, smarty robe?”

“Walked right into that one, didn’t I?” He sighed, turned to me. “Ignore her. Anything else.”

“THAT WE KNOW OF? JUST PROFESSOR VECTOR HIMSELF. VASQUEZ?”

He clicked the mouse, and the display changed to reveal a reedy, brown-haired man with a slightly-old-fashioned haircut, and a pair of thick spectacles, sitting in a cubicle. He looked nervous, and he was clutching a handful of vials in one hand, and a printout in the other.

“Professor Vector, also known as Raymond Mapplethorn. Genius-level intellect, with a power focused on biological development.”

“He done any work on himself?” The muddy one asked.

“Not that we know of. Not much of a combatant, as far as we can tell. Depends on his creations for defense. However, we know that he’s engineered at least two plagues. He created them with perhaps fifty dollars of biological materials, a bathtub, and some insect larvae. Assume that he can have both airborne and bloodborne bioagents.”

“This is going to involve hazard pay,” black robes said. “Is the client willing to cover this?”

Vasquez nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Don’t call me that, I work for a living,” Black Robes snarked. “All right. So what do we have in the way of forces on this one?”

Vasquez spoke up. “Your team. Nine troopers in power armor. I’ll be one of them. Four of them have working jetpacks, the rest of us will be ground insertion. You’ll also have Vorpal and Dire.”

“DOCTOR DIRE.” I clarified. “AND WHO ARE YOU ALL?”

Black Robes turned to me. “Not a local? That doesn’t match from what I’ve heard.”

“IT’S A LONG STORY. ENLIGHTEN HER WITH YOUR IDENTITY.”

“I’m Grim. I lead the Graveyard Gang.”

“AH. SHE HAS HEARD OF YOU.”

“Good.” He grinned. “Here I was thinking we were going to have to fire our PR guy.”

“We have one of those?” Goth girl asked.

“No, shut up. Anyway, she’s Whippoorwill. That’s Gravedigger over there, and the pale lady is Epitaph.” She nodded, tipped her hat to me. “Last and sure as hell not least, you’ve got Deadweight.”

“A PLEASURE. WHAT CAN YOU DO?” I asked Grim.

“I can’t die. Can’t regenerate fully, but I can’t die. I can also fly, slowly, and this scythe is pretty damn sharp. That usually means I’m the field leader in situations like this. Got a fair amount of experience with that.” I nodded. Only sensible. And a leader who couldn’t be killed had a definite edge, there.

He continued. “Whippoorwill’s song can manipulate emotions, which is why we’re putting her up against human-shaped things and not plants. It also hits friendlies, so keep a distance if you can, or wear earplugs. Gravedigger’s an earth controller. Can’t do rock, but he can do gravel, mud, sand, all that sort of thing. If you’re standing on the dirt, he can tell where you are from a mile away.”

The muddy guy grinned. “Good vibrations, you dig?”

Groans around the table showed me that wasn’t the first time he’d cracked that joke. Grim went on. “Epitaph’s a Powerhouse. Skin like stone, fists like really strong stone. Deadweight’s a zombie animator. Pretty much any corpse in his range he can raise and control.”

“It has to have muscles, though,” Deadweight said, in a voice like he was talking through marbles. “Can’t do skeletons.”

“So that’s us. Your turn.”

“DIRE IS A SUPERGENIUS, WITH A FOCUS ON ROBOTICS AND COMMON SENSE.” Snorts around the table, but Grim merely nodded. “HER POWERED ARMOR CAN THROW CARS, FLY AT FIFTY MILES PER HOUR, WITHSTAND OBSCENE AMOUNTS OF PUNISHMENT, AND HAS PARTICLE CANNONS THAT COULD HOLE A BATTLESHIP.” Given time and a couple of shots, anyway. “ALSO A FEW ALTERNATIVE WEAPONS. A PHLOGISTON PROJECTOR THAT CAN SET ANYTHING BURNABLE ON FIRE, MICROMISSILES OF A WIDE VARIETY, AND INBUILT TASERS FOR NONLETHAL TAKEDOWNS.”

Silence for a minute. “Jesus.” Grim summed it up. “Any sensory enhancements?”

“THERMAL. ZOOM-ENHANCEMENT FOR DISTANCE. SOME AUDIO ADJUSTMENTS POSSIBLE IF NECESSARY. AND A GEIGER COUNTER FOR TRACKING THE PAYLOAD.”

“Okay, that’s going to be handy. We’ll have you on that, then, if you’re amenable to it.”

“OF COURSE.”

“That just leaves you.” He turned to Vorpal, who smiled.

“Vorpal. I cut things.” She gestured to her rapier. “Can summon energy around my blade; fire, electricity, some sort of cryogenic aura. And something that cuts through anything.”

“Ohmygawd!” Whippoorwill shrieked, and bounced. “Can we call the plant things jobberwhackies? Please? Please can we call them that? Then Vorpal’s sword can snacker snick them!”

“I don’t think that’s the actual name of the things in the poem...” Gravedigger offered.

“Sure, fuck it, they’re Jobberwhackies,” Grim said.

“Yay!” Whippoorwill shot two thumbs up.

“Right,” said Vasquez. “So here’s what we’re thinking. The armor goes in as a straight-on assault. We’ll lure out the... Jobberwhackies... and keep them suppressed while the rest of you—”

“NO.”

He frowned. “Excuse me?”

“YOUR TEAM IS MAINLY ARMED WITH HEAVY CONVENTIONAL WEAPONS, YES?”

“Yeah.”

“THE ONLY THING YOU HAVE THAT MIGHT SLOW THEM DOWN IS THAT REPEATING RPG.”

“Okay, we can check out multiples of those. We’ve also got heavier stuff in the armory.”

“HEAVIER IS A START AND WE’LL WANT TO LOOK AT THOSE, BUT IT STILL WON’T BE ENOUGH FOR A HEAD-ON ASSAULT. YOU MIGHT WOUND ONE BEFORE IT RIPS YOU TO SHREDS. YOU WON’T SURVIVE AGAINST MULTIPLES ALL AT ONCE.”

He puffed his cheeks out, blew air from his lips. “Alright. You have another plan?”

“AS IT TURNS OUT, SHE DOES...”

CHAPTER 19: VERSUS VECTOR

“Forty percent of winning most costumed fights that involve groups are figuring out how to match up your powers against theirs so you come out on top. Twenty percent's your skills. Ten percent's using the environment to your advantage. Five percent's your attitude. The other twenty-five percent? Sheer goddamn luck. Because things NEVER go to plan.”

--Grim, leader of the Graveyard Gang supervillain group

Our little strike force moved in at midday, carried by black vans to our destination, ten miles away from the cabins on the other side of some fairly thick woods. We were on the only hill higher than Vector’s elevation anywhere near the place. I used the transit time on the trip to make some phone calls. The first one was to Martin, and he picked up immediately.

“Hello?”

“Martin,” I spoke from the privacy of my helmet, “this is Dire. You have Bunny?”

“Yeah. What the fuck happened? I got back to the power station, and it was MRB central. Fuckers followed me for a few blocks, but I lost’em on the highway.”

“Long story. Turns out Morgenstern came through with a payday, and an armor fix, but in return we have to destroy the flowers.”

“Huh. How do I know Morgenstern ain’t got a gun to your head right now, makin’ you say this stuff?”

I snorted. “First off, he wouldn’t care about you one way or the other. You don’t have any evidence worth a crap against him, and you’re on the run anyway.”

“Okay, okay, Jesus. It’s you, all right. But yeah, I got Bunny. She’s here, she’s pissed.”

“All right. Going to need your help. Can you get over to the east of the city, near the ambush spot?”

“Sure, what do you got in mind?”

“Morgenstern’s man didn’t say anything about the escape plan after we’re done. Leads Dire to suspect that it’s going to be an every-costume-for-themselves situation. She needs backup to get out of here. You’ve pulled her metal hoop out of the fire often enough. Up for one more time?”

He laughed. “I’m there. Bunny says to save some for her. She really wants to shoot somebody right now.”

I laughed, and hung up as the van ground to a halt. I floated outside, followed by Vorpal. Around me, five of the armored troopers were filing out of the van, and the Graveyard Gang piled out of a couple of grungy, beat-up pickup trucks with tarps stretched over the backs. Tarps that twitched and writhed as Gravedigger activated his power, and about twenty groaning corpses pulled themselves free of the blue plastic, and started to file into formation.

Vorpal took a half step back, and muttered something. I shook my head, and looked through the trees, toward Vector’s hideout. I zoomed in to maximum range, examined the area. The van was still in place. Two of the cabins were shuttered. The last three were covered with vines, and a quick swap over to thermal sight confirmed what I’d already guessed.

“THREE KAIJU IN THE CABINS,” I rumbled, as softly as my modulator would allow. Then I panned my vision down through the wilderness preserve, looking for more signatures. It took some time, especially in the full heat of July, and I had to swap back and forth between thermal sight and the zoom enhancements. “SOME HIKERS, A FEW DEER. NOTHING ELSE THAT LOOKS LIKE A MUTANT.”

“Any of those hikers could be Chaingang,” Vasquez said, his own modulator scrambling his voice. “The more we evade the better.”

I gave out distances and locations. “MIGHT NOT BE ALL OF THEM. THERE’S ENOUGH TREES THAT DIRE CAN’T SEE EVERYTHING ALONG THE WAY.”

Grim nodded. “Your Geiger counter got any range to it?”

“PRACTICALLY NOTHING. A FEW HUNDRED FEET.”

“All right. Everyone got their headsets?” That had been my idea, and insistence. Morgenstern’s techs supplied all of the Gang and Vorpal with their own tacnet. They weren’t trained with it, but I was tapped in and running overwatch through my HUD, and I’d gotten a fair amount of practice from playing with Die Kriegers’ setup. This would let us coordinate a bit better. It was certainly an improvement on Vasquez’ original plan.

Everyone checked in, save for Whippoorwill. For our own safety we had her muted. Shouldn’t be a problem between Deadweight partnered with her, and me watching her through the tacnet.

I looked around at the hilltop. An old ranger station, long vacant. A few houses, on the other side of the hill. “SET UP THE JAMMER,” I told Vasquez. He nodded, and fired up the bundle of scrap that I’d cobbled together before we launched the operation. Nothing fancy, just enough to prevent the houses on the other side from calling the authorities too early. Our own communications were strong enough that they’d be unhindered.

While he set that up, his squad was busy with the missile batteries. No micromissiles here, these were military hardware, each of them enough to turn a cabin into chunks of wood and scrap. We only had about ten shots, that was every warhead in the armory, but it would be enough to get in a good opening strike.

“We’re moving,” Grim told me. I nodded. They’d be hiking most of the way. We’d given them two hours to get into position. He assured me his team could handle it without powers. I knew I couldn’t make it without exhaustion, and had my doubts about Whippoorwill, but he knew his people better than I did.

Vorpal went with them, clad in her costume, with a few machetes strapped to her sides. Her powers were blade dependent, so breakage was a possible problem.

“ALPHA TEAM, ARE YOU IN POSITION?”

“Hicks here. We’re good.” That was the lady Vorpal had been talking with, I thought. She and the rest of the jetpack-equipped Troopers were across the lake from the Professor’s lair. Sadly, that part of the shore wasn’t as remote; there was a quite full picnic area in use right now. But their black vans were parked in a parking lot, with tinted windows hiding the contents therein. When the time came, they’d burst out and be gone before anyone could panic.

As for me, my part was yet to come. I’d have to wait for about an hour, give or take.

The waiting was the worst of it. I distracted myself by keeping surveillance on the cabins. Time passed, and little changed as I checked through the Graveyard Gang’s cameras, and watched them jog through the trees. They were doing pretty well, actually. I couldn’t have kept up that pace. They’d probably be in position early. I adjusted my plans for their average rate.

Then my channel to Grim opened up. Private, two-way between us only. “Doc? Got a second?”

“Doctor Dire or Dire, and yes, she does.”

“Aces. Look, something you should know here; I want Vector to survive.”

“Why is that?”

“Let’s just say I might need a favor from a mad scientist who’s good at biology and leave it at that. Our real objective here is the flowers, yeah? It’s just Morgenstern who wants him dead, right?”

“The client wants him dead, yes.”

“Come on now, we both know it’s Morgenstern. But anyway, he left that to Sanchez, not us. Probably because we charge more for wetwork, but that gives me some wiggle room... if you’re on board with me.”

I considered it. “Vector’s killed. He’s a walking plague risk.”

“For noble reasons, as I hear it.”

“The project he was working on was anything but noble.” I wondered, though. He’d bailed out of that, sabotaged the flowers. I’d gotten a snootful of them, and noticed no changes. Not yet, anyway. What did they do?

Grim chuckled. “Yeah, but Morgenstern’s no paragon himself. So they say, anyway, never met the man personally. Look, just... think it over. We’ll take out the flowers, fight the monsters, and if it comes down to it and Vector escapes I’ll ask no questions and owe you a favor.”

“Dire makes no promises.” I said. Good lord, dealing with supervillains was complicated. At least back when I was killing gangers, that was pretty black and white.

“Not asking you to. Guess we’ll see how it shakes out. Break a leg, Dire.”

“Hopefully not,” I replied, but I was talking to a closed channel.

Well. Time for me to get moving.

“SHE’S GOING,” I told Vasquez. He nodded, and I took to the sky.

One good thing about the jammer I’d assembled: while it only covered a few miles around it on the ground, it went up quite a ways vertically. The airport wasn’t far, but they wouldn’t get me on radar if I stuck to the area the jammer covered. We were well away from the southern flight paths. While there was the possibility that someone might see me, the setting sun to my west gave some protection there against observers from the east. And the population to the west was fairly negligible for miles. Even stuck crawling at fifty miles per hour, I wouldn’t be
too
obvious.

My biggest worry was flying heroes, or those with extra-sensory powers. But nobody disturbed me as I whispered through the skies, the wind whistling about me, and after enough minutes, the clouds were slipping past me cottony bit by cottony bit. Once I was above the day’s cloud cover I relaxed, and when I was ten miles up, I sighed in relief and started slipping south, toward a good approach vector.

A vector to Professor Vector. Heh. I’d tell that to Martin later, he’d love it.

I waited there, clearing my head of thoughts. The plan was ready. Everything was just about in place. If it worked, we’d save the world. If it failed, well, things would get bad somehow. Didn’t know exactly how, but it would probably involve plagues.

I checked back in with Grim. They were about as close as they could safely get, and resting. “Everyone good?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” he whispered. “Easy workout. Walk in the park.” Through his tac-cam I saw a sweating, sitting Whippoorwill flip him off, and I stifled a snort of laughter.

“Ready to move again?”

He looked around, and his team nodded. Vorpal nodded a second later, looking a little winded herself. They’d arrive a bit tired, but it shouldn’t matter.

“Good. Once we begin, head out.”

“Will do.”

I flipped back over to Vasquez’s channel. “Let’s do this.”

From above, the puff of flame and smoke from the missile firing off the battery was almost undetectable. A firework, or a bonfire flaring up before being smothered.

The explosion of the van a few moments later was much easier to see. One second there was a black van parked next to the cabins, the next second it was metal bits and fire as the hydrogen cell went up. Then there was movement, green movement as the woods appeared to shift, and engulf three of the cabins. Those were the kaiju, I knew.

One of the cabins went up in flames as the second missile struck, and the woods boiled away from the fire, pulling back in a wide radius. I grinned.

Even from ten miles up I could hear the inhuman roar, the same loud shriek I’d heard back when I was fleeing down the street away from a plantlike abomination. They were hurt, and they were letting the world know. I zoomed in just in time to see a shirtless man and a white-clad figure burst out of one of the non-kaiju’d cabin, and gesturing toward the other non-kaiju’d cabin.

“Eyes on Vector,” I reported. “Chaingang is with him.”

“Can you snipe?” Vasquez asked. I shook my head. My targeting systems weren't optimized for this range.

“Nope. Going to have to leave him to the Gang. Grim?”

“On our way. Staying low.”

“Good, and— there!”

Chaingang was spawning more of him, sending them running into the empty cabin. The hims were coming out with boxes, carboard boxes full of greenery.

Another kaiju’d cabin went up in fire, and another shriek filled the air.Vector pointed toward the north, toward our missile battery. I watched as the greenery flowed away from the cabin, and headed north. “Kaiju are moving!” I said, grinning. “Repeat, we’ve got a moving grove.” I’d heard that turn of phrase somewhere and thought it was cool. Nobody laughed at it, but eh, that was fine.

“Dire’s beginning her approach!” I called, as I turned, and aimed myself toward the cabins, going from zero to full gravitic thrust. “Chaingang’s evacuating the flowers, staying on sight. Three Kaiju heading to the battery! Vector’s... just gone back inside.” Interesting. Gone to retrieve some weapons, or save some other stuff? I thought he’d just flat out run. That was a surprise. Well, maybe he’d come out again.

Sure enough he was out in a matter of minutes, but I was busy. The last time I’d done something like this, I’d been remotely piloting a drop pod from low Earth orbit. Now I was directly in my armor, a mere few inches of metal and hardened ceramic protecting me from the screaming wind, jetting at full speed and letting gravity throw me down. Forget Apollo in his chariot, I was Daedalus with his wings, laughing and howling my joy as I screamed through the sky!

The keys to the plan were the kaiju, really. They were simple things, based on my experience with them. They were a huge obstacle— fast, strong, and tough, but they weren’t smart. So we used long-range fire to draw them away from our goal. By the time they got to the hill, Vasquez and his squad would have fired all the rest of the missiles at them, packed back up, and driven to the west to block off any potential retreats in that direction, or the north.

A sonic boom ripped out around me as I crested the halfway point, and I saw Chaingang look up. Vector burst out of the cabin with some sort of meaty-looking organic gun thing in his arms, with tubes running to a pack on his back. Was he really going to fight? Didn’t match what I’d known of him.