Nemesis (14 page)

Something was definitely up with her. But now wasn’t the place to talk. We had to do something about these dreyverns.

“You’re not hurt, are you?”

She shook her head. “I’m fine. Really. You’re bleeding.”

Huh? Oh. Dreyvern blood stained my knife arm to the elbow. “It’s not mine.” Wait. Blood dripped down my other arm, too. “Hmm. Might have run into one of their knives.” I pushed up the left sleeve. No, it was just dreyvern blood.

“Might have? Do you not feel pain?” Ada stared at me.

“Hmm? I can’t feel pain around the scars.” Thanks to a certain wyvern’s claws damaging the nerves in my left arm. I turned the dreyvern’s ugly blade over in my hand. I didn’t particularly want to hang onto it, but leaving it lying in the Passages wasn’t an option. I glanced back at the others, and saw Carl in the process of crushing another of the dreyverns’ weapons beneath the heel of his boot. Looked like the best idea to me, so I did the same. Ada wiped her own Alliance-issued dagger on her jacket, still wearing a slightly dazed expression.

“Are you two all right?” asked Carl. “I’m asking my team to clear this lot out, but you can go through to Central. Ada, you can go back if you like. Kay, I’m taking a wild guess that’s your communicator on the floor over there.”

Oh, crap. Must have fallen out of my pocket. “Tell me I didn’t break it.”

“Not this time. You should go.”

“Right.” I glanced at Ada, who still seemed out of it. My communicator lay a few feet away, but it was still in one piece.

And the door nearby was still open a crack. I frowned, stepping closer. It led to somewhere on Valeria.
Shit.
Some of the ravegens–or worse, the dreyverns–might have got through.

“Hey,” I called to Carl. “We should check on this. The door was left open.”

“Damn,” he said. “Okay. Raj, Amanda, you two go with Kay. If they’re invisible, tracking them will be difficult, but not impossible. They have a tendency to make a spectacle of themselves.”

“Okay,” said Raj. “Kay, you know Neo Greyle, right?”

Oh, for crying out loud.
And Ada had disappeared.

“I’ve dealt with goblins here before,” I said. “They took hover bikes last time.”

Amanda, a tall blond woman I recognised as one of the staff at the training complex, joined Raj by the door, pushing it fully open.

“Looks like that’s an accessible entrance, too.”

He was right. Most of their Passages opened into the sky, but this one was in the back of an alleyway. Still, the hover cars and the soaring skyscrapers were familiar enough for there to be no doubt.

Damn it all to hell.

So, with the other two on my heels, I walked through the door to Valeria.

KAY

The alleyway dead-ended against a high fence, but the other way led out onto a road. I quickly fired up offworld maps on my communicator. A registered, unguarded doorway was unusual for Valeria, but not unheard of given that they freely let people come and go as they pleased. They weren’t as open to offworlders, but the area of the Passages we’d been in was far away from anyone who might want to use the door.

Except those ravegens. This was getting out of hand.

“This is ridiculous,” said Raj, staring out at the multi-layered skyways, which made the M25 look like a deserted country lane. “Place is a maze. What was Carl thinking?”

He had a point. Neo Greyle was a warren of almost-identical skyscrapers and four-lane roads, nigh on impossible to navigate without a map. While most locals were wired to the Valerian network via navigational eyeglasses–which I assumed also had a feature to stop users walking into one another, because no one seemed to actually be looking where they were going–the rest of us had to deal with wandering at random until we found something familiar. Even without the invisibility, the ravegens would have long since been swallowed up by the crowds in the time it took for us to wait to cross the road.

“If nothing else, we’ll have to inform the guards at the main door.” I checked the map as we reached an island in the middle of the road and the hover-traffic started moving again. “I know where that is. We can’t risk them being taken unawares. Those ravegens were up to something.”

“Like a diversion,” said Amanda. “That might have been their plan, but they don’t generally work together.”

“Unless they have a common cause.” I tapped a foot impatiently, waiting for the lights to change. “Like the ones I stopped last time. They were delivering contraband offworld technology parts.” The unlucky ravegen I’d cornered had confessed to having business with someone, but apparently they hadn’t deigned to share their name. The Campbells’ headquarters had shut down and the surviving members were imprisoned, but they were bound to have other contacts. “Were you there at the start of the fight? I only came in at the end. I didn’t see how it kicked off.”

“We were ambushed,” said Amanda. “Our patrol, and we called for backup, too. You weren’t patrolling, right?”

“Raj and I were coming back from Aglaia,” I said. “Got caught in the middle of it. Did you see the door open?”

“It was already open,” said Amanda.

Damn. They’d got us, all right.

The lights changed. We crossed to the other side and were almost instantly swept up in a crowd. This was near the main city square, an area the size of a football pitch and surrounded by sculptures representative of the various worlds that had made their mark on Valeria’s capital. Even Cethrax was represented in the shape of a vox-sized statue.

Raj stopped to stare at it. “They did check it wasn’t moving before putting it in a public place, didn’t they?”

“Hope so.” Amanda shook her head. “Only Valeria would make a monument to a monster.”

“No goblins,” I pointed out. “Living or otherwise. But last time they took hover bikes–don’t suppose either of you know how to operate one?”

I knew the theory now, as I’d actually read up on it this time. Plus, I’d replaced my own car, which had got clawed up by a wyvern, with an actual Earth motorcycle. Someone here in Neo Greyle had tried to sell me an enhancement to make it hover. As tempting as the idea was, I wasn’t
that
interested in experimenting with gravity on Earth, where magi-tech tended to unpredictably explode.

Amanda shook her head. “I’m pretty sure that’s illegal, isn’t it?”

“Surprisingly not,” I said. “We’re authorised to be here, seeing as Carl’s senior. That gives us leeway. We’ll report first, though.” I used my GPS to lead the way, cursing the crowds swarming the square for slowing us down.

“Right. Report first, steal transport later,” Raj muttered. “If we get arrested, it’s on you.”

“Yeah, speaking of, where’s an Enforcement Office when we need one?” I checked the map again. “Okay, we’re gonna have to shortcut through here.”

We headed into a busy shopping arcade, further slowed by the relentless crowd. Valeria was obsessed with shiny tech, obvious from the number of stores devoted to the latest gadgets. Valeria had been linked up to other universes for so much of its history that its native cultures were long gone, and the city-continent of Neo Greyle dominated half the globe. For centuries, it had sent people out to other worlds to bring back anything new to adapt for their own use. Since there were hundreds of doorways offworld in Neo Greyle alone, it had had far more success than other worlds which had tried to do the same, making it one of the most advanced worlds–by its own admission. Loud, discordant Valerian rock music pounded from loudspeakers overhead, with the general sound effect of a train crash.

And then came the sound of what, for a moment, I thought was an
actual
train crash. The glass front of the arcade, barely metres away, shattered, and I leaped back, arms raised to shield my face. Shards cut the back of my hands but I ignored the stinging pain and focused on the source of the explosion–a hover bike had driven right through the glass front doors.

“Shit!” Raj yelled, as the bike turned in our direction.

Cursing, I dropped to the ground, the others following suit, and the screams of shoppers and tourists mingled with the crashing music. The bike itself, being magic-driven, made no sound aside from a faint whirring, and there didn’t appear to be anyone driving it, either.

“Damn.” I pushed to my feet and picked splinters of glass out of each hand. “I think we have our ravegen.”

The bike had already been swept up in the rush outside the doors.

“Son of a bitch,” said Raj. “How are we supposed to catch that thing?” He picked slivers of glass from his own hands, wincing.

Law Enforcement Officers had arrived on the scene, clad in shell-like suits.
Crap.
We could either stay and explain the situation and risk our target getting away… or take off after the goblin.

A second hover bike made my decision. It shot through the crowd, and as it passed us by, I jumped for the tail end, pulling myself onto the back. Like the other, the bike had no driver–or so it appeared–and it shook and then swerved left without warning, as the driver obviously became aware of their unwanted passenger. Swearing, I inched along the bike, digging my fingers into the headrest to stop myself sliding off, and let go with one hand to grab my stunner.

“Let go, human,” said a hissing voice.

“Not a chance in hell.” I fired the stunner directly into the passenger seat.

The ravegen appeared in a tangle of limbs, screaming. I jumped into the seat and locked my stunner arm around its neck, just enough to incapacitate it while I took a handle with the other hand. Crowds stared as I steered the bike one-handed through a pedestrianized district, but it was too late to turn back and avoid the main road.

“Tell me where you were going!” I yelled into the squealing goblin’s ear, voice muffled by the wind.

“No!” yelped the goblin, and I pushed the deceleration lever, steering around a corner into the main road. The bike slowed enough for me to give the goblin a warning squeeze around the neck. It choked out, arms spasming and making it even more difficult to one-handedly hold the wheel. The traffic stalled at Valeria’s equivalent to a red light–which involved symbols flashing on a screen attached to a post suspended over the road.

I glared at the ravegen. “If you tell me where you were going, I might spare your life.”

With Cethraxians, threats always got through. The goblin screamed several phrases in Cethraxian, and then, in garbled English, “The Campbells, by all the great under-gods, the Campbells!”

“The Campbell family’s residence?” I asked, feeling a plunging sensation that had nothing to do with the hover bike. Ada had been held hostage there. Where I’d first killed. “They’re gone. Jailed.”

“Others are… argh!” His words cut off in a scream as the lights changed and I was forced to accelerate again.

“What do you mean, others?” I yelled over the raging wind. I couldn’t just keep driving, as much of an entertaining show it was proving for the spectators. Damn, they’d be taking photos next, and I had no intention of making Neo Greyle’s Network headlines. As we hit another traffic jam, I twisted in the seat, looking for a stopping point. It was only a matter of time before patrolling Enforcement Squad saw me and demanded to know why I was strangling a goblin.

The goblin just wailed, a mix of Cethraxian and gibberish. I steered the bike off-road to a parking area, and hit the “stop” button. Naturally, the bike didn’t just stop, it skidded to a halt, flipping over in the process. The goblin yowled louder as we slammed into the ground, rolling over in the dust. It wriggled from my grip and ran, but I dived after it. My arm locked around its neck again and I used the leverage to pin it to the ground.

“Nice try.”

“I–beg–you!”

“Stop, there!” demanded an Enforcement Officer. Cursing the Multiverse, I gave the goblin a zap with the stunner, and then dug in my coat for my Alliance ID.

“What is this?” The officer strode over to me, sharp eyes taking in the overturned bike, the limp form of the goblin, my blood-stained hands.

By the time I’d explained the situation, Amanda and Raj had caught up to me. The enforcement officer nodded, not looking too pleased. Two others had joined him and one of them cuffed the now silent goblin. When it had started squealing again, I’d tightened my grip on its neck until it passed out.

“If that’s the case, then I’ll need you to report to our Alliance representative at the gate,” said the officer.

“There are others,” I said. “I’m certain of it. Another bike crashed, too. And this one said it was on the way to the Campbell residence.”

“The Campbell residence is shut down. Cleared out,” said the officer. “I will alert the team, of course.”

The others eyed us with distrust, but the officer dismissed us with a brief “Thank you, Ambassador”. With a glance at my bloody hands.

“Kay, you should get those bandaged,” said Amanda.

“Most of it isn’t my blood. I’ll sort it later.”

“And leave a bloody trail all over Neo Greyle?” Amanda shook her head.

“Hmm.” I wiped some of the blood on my Ambassador’s coat. Red stained the silver cuffs.
That figures,
I thought, resigning myself to taking the damn thing to the dry cleaner’s and scaring the living daylights out of the staff.