DIRE : SEED (The Dire Saga Book 2) (18 page)

I leaned down over her, brought the armor down and half-crouched, bringing the eyes of my mask level to her visor.

“YOU WILL TRY TO STOP DIRE, AGAIN AND AGAIN. AND YOU WILL FAIL, AGAIN AND AGAIN. THIS IS NOT A THREAT. THIS IS NOT INTIMIDATION. THIS IS SIMPLY HOW IT WILL BE. IN TIME YOU WILL GAIN VICTORIES AGAINST HER, BUT NOT HERE AND NOT SOON, AND NEVER SIGNIFICANT WINS. DIRE WILL NOT STOP. DIRE WILL NOT REST. DIRE WILL NOT CEASE UNTIL THIS UNJUST, CORRUPTED WORLD IS RESTORED TO A PLACE WHERE HUMANS ARE FREE TO LIVE WITHOUT FEAR, AND OUR SPECIES ASCENDS TO ITS FULL POTENTIAL.”

She opened her mouth, shut it again.

“SO FIGHT YOUR HARDEST. BRING YOUR TEAMS, PUSH YOUR POWERS TO THE LIMIT, AND TEST YOURSELVES IN THE CRUCIBLE THAT IS DIRE. ONLY THEN, WILL YOU COME TO BE READY FOR THE INEVITABLE.”

“And what’s the inevitable, hah?” Sparky asked.

I straightened up. “THE TIME WHEN THE REST OF THE WORLD ADMITS THAT DIRE IS RIGHT. THE TIME WHEN HEROES AND VILLAINS AND ORDINARY PEOPLE, ALL OF HUMANITY UNITES UNDER HER BANNER. THE TIME WHEN THE HUMAN RACE PUTS ASIDE PETTY, WASTEFUL CONFLICTS AND GREED AND FEAR AND IGNORANCE, AND GOES FORTH TO CONQUER THE WHOLE DAMN UNIVERSE.”

“Lady,” Mags said. “Don’t hold your breath.”

“YOU WILL SEE.” I said, turning my back on her. “IN ANY CASE, DIRE IS DONE WITH BANTER. SPARKY, DO YOU HAVE SUSAN’S LAST NAME?”

“I do.” He confirmed. “But I ain’t too sure I should be givin’ it to you.”

“SHE’LL COME TO NO HARM.”

He tapped his fingers on the arm of his wheelchair, and his face was as calm as a still pond. “I believe you believe that. But when villains go lookin’ for people, sometimes they bring trouble with’em. Even if they don’t mean to.”

I had to admit, he had a point. Come to think of it, that time traveler was a perfect example of the truth of that statement.

Truth. Perhaps that was the most effective tool, here.

“IT’S MINNA,” I confessed. “SHE’S DISAPPEARED.”

“What?” He looked surprised. “She didn’t get settled with the rest of the camp?”

“Nah, man,” Martin said. “Dunno where she got to. I think Susan got Anya, was taking care of her. But no sign of Minna.”

“That ain’t good. No way Minna’d go off and leave Anya with someone else this long.” He pulled on his beard. “Yeah. Alright. Her last name’s Donner.”

“SUSAN DONNER.” I nodded. With my backdoors and the supercomputer, that was enough to start with. “THANK YOU.”

“Jus’ don’t go givin’ her no trouble, alright? You do that for me, Dire lady?”

“THAT SHE CAN PROMISE. AH— ONE MORE THING.”

Mags tensed, and I saw Sparky raise a hand casually, too casually, to the back of his neck. He didn’t trust me, and it damn near broke my heart.

“RELAX. IT’S JUST A NAME. VECTOR. EVER HEAR OF A COSTUME WHO USES THAT AS HIS ALIAS?”

Sparky shook his head. “Ain’t heard ’a that one.”

But Mags twitched. “Vector? Of course!”

“YOU KNOW HIM?”

“I know of him. He—” She shut her mouth, glanced at me. “Y’know, I think I’ll let you find that out on your own.”

“HE’S IN THE CITY AND CAUSING TROUBLE. ANY INFORMATION YOU SHARE WILL HINDER HIM.”

“Yeah. But I don’t have to tell you squat. Fight your own battles, Dorktor.”

“A TRADE, THEN?”

“You’ve got nothing I want.”

“DIRE KNOWS WHAT HE’S AFTER.”

She scowled. “And how do I know you’d tell the truth?”

“WHAT GUARANTEE DOES DIRE HAVE OF YOUR VERACITY?”

“Huh?”

“DIRE DOESN’T KNOW IF YOU’LL LIE EITHER. BUT SHE’S WILLING TO TRUST YOU. SPARKY WOULDN’T TEACH YOU TO LIE, AFTER ALL.”

Like hell he wouldn’t. Back in the day the man had gotten me here under a pretense and tricked me into a vulnerable position. Almost killed me, too. It had all been a misunderstanding, mind you, but the old geezer was devious in his own way.

But I figured I could guilt the brat into talking. Heavens knew she hadn’t shown much restraint there earlier in this conversation.

She gnawed her lip. “Alright. You first.”

“FLOWERS. THREE BIG CRATES FULL OF PINK AND WHITE FLOWERS.”

“That doesn’t tell me much.”

“THEY PUT OUT A LOT OF POLLEN, THAT HAS SOME SORT OF HORRIBLE EFFECT.”

“Yeah, that would be up his alley. Still not telling me much.”

I shrugged. “THEN RECIPROCATE WITH AN AMOUNT OF INFORMATION THAT YOU FEEL IS FAIR.”

“Well, I guess I could save you some Grid searching, that’d be fair. He was a doctor in a bad part of Africa. Working with the World Peace Corps, or something like that? Anyway, he got fed up with the hunger and starvation that he saw there. And either he had powers or got them there, because he started trying to fix it.”

“COMMENDABLE.”

“Uh, not so much. His idea of fixing things was letting loose plagues that changed people’s digestion, to make it more effective and let them eat weird things for nutrients.”

“HM.”

“Oh crap, please don’t go getting ideas!” She honestly looked concerned.

“NOT HOW DIRE DOES BUSINESS.”

“Yeah, that’s good, because the plagues killed a bunch of people. And a lot of the survivors were— well, the pictures are out there. They got messed up pretty bad. Like they had to be mercy-killed bad.”

Well. There went the notion of trying to sell the flowers to Vector. No wonder the client had been scared of the suggestion.

“SO WHY IS HE NOT IMPRISONED?”

Mags leaned on Sparky’s chair. “It turned out he wasn’t limited to plagues. He had made some mutant beasts and stuff. Which is why when you mentioned him it made sense to me, because those freaky vines we saw? Totally something he’d do.”

“HE’S GOT SOMETHING BIGGER, TOO. A SMALL KAIJU.”

“Jesus fucking Christ—”

“Hey!” Sparky bonked her helmet. “Language, young missy.”

Martin chuckled, and she flushed. “Sorry. Wow. Uh, that’s bad. Wait...”

She pointed at me. “These flowers you mentioned... where are they now?”

I smiled under my mask. “WELL, OUR BUSINESS IS DONE. READY TO GO, MARTIN?”

“Sure am.”

Mags took a few steps forward. “Hey! Look, this is serious, if—”

“GOODNIGHT SPARKY. BE WELL.”

“G’night Dire. Good luck. You’ll need it.”

“No, stop! If there’s anything you—”

I half wondered if she’d try to stop me, when I grabbed Martin and lifted off.

She didn’t, and we got back to the van unmolested.

“Well, that kid was pretty pissed.” He remarked. “Teenagers, amirite?”

“IT WAS A BIT OF A PLEASURE TO LEAVE HER HANGING.” I grinned under the mask.

The grin turned to horror, as red messages flickered across my HUD.

“GET IN THE VAN. DRIVE!”

“What—”

“THE LAIR’S UNDER ASSAULT! GO! DIRE WILL MEET YOU THERE!”

“Hey, don’t leave—”

I didn’t hear the rest of his sentence, as I dropped him and kicked the gravitics in from hovering to full thrust, launching myself south.

And as I flew, hot panic turned to smoldering anger.

Someone was going to pay for this.

CHAPTER 11: MOVING ON DOWN

“Doctor Dire? Oh yeah, we know that bitch. Time comes, we're going to pay her back for what she did...”

--Excerpt from a wiretapped conversation with Kiefer, leader of Die Kriegers, the East Coast's largest human supremacist organization

My armor was not built for speed. The best I could do was around fifty miles per hour, and that was with a good tailwind behind me. This gave me plenty of time to read each damage report thoroughly as it came in, and fume over the loss.

The worst part was the lack of visual feed. They’d been smart enough to take out the outside cameras first, and the inside feed didn’t have much more than a shadowed figure rushing in through the side door, catching a taser dart from the grid and dropping. Someone dragged him back, then a few more came in more cautiously with weapons out, and got dropped by a directional screamer. Then there were billowing clouds of smoke everywhere. I hadn’t put smoke in any of my defenses, so that was something the invaders had brought. Not good. That would interfere with some of the defenses.

I wove through the skyscrapers of downtown, well under the airships in their set flight paths above me. It was dark and I had no light on me, but there were people on the streets below even at this hour, and some of them doubtless saw me. I didn’t care. I had too much invested in my lair, I’d spent months building the damn thing up, and now I’d have to move the irreplaceable components.

If there was one silver lining to this, it was that Tomorrow Force and Crusader were both out of town. They were some of the main sky watchers for the city, and they would have been on me in a heartbeat if they’d been around.

I winced as a red wall of damage reports rolled up my HUD. Something had taken out the networks in the Lair’s west wall. Something that caused a lot of massive damage, all at once. The kaiju? I ground my teeth. I didn’t want to face the thing now, not on my own turf. Giant monsters and collateral damage went together like heroes and self-righteousness.

As the central part of Whaler’s Wharf passed underneath me and my neighborhood came into view, I surveyed the plume of smoke rising up into the sky from my property and groaned. No, there was no way to hide this. It’d be a hurried salvage and reclamation for sure.

But that would come later. For now? Vengeance.

I brought myself to a stop, cape swirling in the downdraft as I circled around the front of the building, and...

Okay, that was not what I expected. A motley mix of muscle cars, trucks, and SUV’s were pulled up in a half-circle around the rear of the Lair. Most of them were green, or had green as a primary color, and about thirty bald people wearing camo or some variation of it were crouched around the facility, watching it burn. Most of the western wall was rubble, and part of the smoke rising up was actually dust, thrown up by what looked to be the aftermath of several good-sized explosions. What the heck?

I started scanning through them, and soon found my answer. Several of those bastards were packing rocket launchers.

That was a concern. My force field could tank two or three, maybe. What the hell was going on?

I settled on a rooftop to the side, back from their pickets, and started using the universal remote to sniff around. Sure enough, I found a tactical net. They were using linked headsets with cameras to direct their people, real military-grade equipment. And like most military-grade equipment, encryption was a secondary concern. I slipped into their networks and listened, reading texts and gridmails with grim irritation.

In a matter of minutes I had two things; answers, and an urge to pound my fist through my mask to knock the stupid out of my brain.

This had all been my fault. I’d set up shop near one of their main safehouses without noticing them at first beyond an ‘oh hey, gangers’ reaction. I’d figured that I would be quiet enough that they wouldn’t really mess with me much, and so they hadn’t...

...until I’d started grabbing vehicles and moving them inside. Then different vehicles came out. They noticed that sort of thing. They had people around the neighborhood watching for that sort of thing. And it didn’t take too long to figure out where their stolen van had gotten to.

So they’d sent a few guys to kick in my door and tell me about their displeasure. They’d hit the automated defenses, panicked, and came back with every available guy in the area and all the hardware they had lying around... which was, quite frankly, a lot. The smoke I’d seen through the cameras was the result of smoke grenades. They’d been destroying broadcast collectors and generators to knock out the defenses, and there wasn’t much left at this point. The bombardment of the western wall had been the last straw, and they had people moving in now, looking for me.

They didn’t know it was
me
precisely, but they figured some ‘costume freak’ was behind all of this, and they aimed to kill him.

Police sirens screamed in the distance as I finished my review of their actions, and I growled as I saw the orders come down their tac-net from their boss. They were to search the place for whatever they could grab, and get out of there.

I contemplated killing every last one of them. At this range, from stealth, I could amp up the particle beams to maximum penetration and mow them down before they figured out my position.

But the more I thought about it, the more the idea rankled. It would be a slaughter, and the last thing I needed was more kills on my record. Moreover, they hadn’t damaged anything I wasn’t prepared to lose, yet. Slaying them would be a disproportionate response. The final nail in the coffin, however, was the fact that I was dealing with bigoted fanatics. If I went bloodthirsty here, they’d take the loss and use it as recruitment propaganda. That was how these sort of groups work... they drum up fear and offer a solution. And the world has no shortage of gullible cowards, or ignorant fools. Killing thirty now would just give them ninety in a year. Martyrs are currency.

Leaders, on the other hand, never even got in the field of fire. The boss calling the shots was piping his orders in from elsewhere in the city. I noted that his grid profile seemed to be calling in from a good part of town.

So. I couldn’t kill them. How should I hurt them?

A few seconds later my grin stretched wide under my mask, as I set my plan into motion.

The first step: communications. I remembered the Black Bloods fight. They had the advantage of communications, and I’d damn near lost because of it. No sense in giving the Kriegers the same advantage.

I hacked into their leader’s connection, and started lowering the quality, filling it with static and distorting his voice. Once it was bad enough, I quietly locked him out. He’d hear nothing until I was done here, not from his tac-net or any of the phones that I’d flagged during my examination of their network. Meanwhile, I quietly stole his credentials and fused them to a hastily-created false profile. Now when I spoke into the tac-net, it would seem to be coming from their leader. A little voice modulation to deepen my tones, and it’d sound like the broken voice that my prior interference had arranged.

“Everyone inside, report!” I barked.

A chorus of replies chattered through, and I nodded in satisfaction. They’d explored the western end. There were still a couple of defenses active on the eastern end so they were having to avoid those, and only a few of them had made it up the stairs to the living area. They’d grabbed my desktop computer, but hadn’t found the super-computer... nor would they, unless they started tearing the walls apart. Well, more than they had, anyway.

I studied their loadouts, when I saw them cross the visual feed. Bandannas over their lower faces to cut the smoke and dust, headsets and eyepieces, assorted weapons, and flashlights. An odd mix of improvised and professional.

Then one of them spoke up, and my blood ran cold. “Found some crates in a cargo container. They looked important, but there’s nothing in them except flowers.”

Shit. Shit, shit, shit. Whatever that pollen was, they’d dosed themselves with it. Well, no time to cry about it. First step was to pull their teeth.

“Leave it and get out,” I said. “Close those crates, then set charges and blow the place.”

“Uh, boss? We don’t have any explosives can drop this place. We’re almost out of rockets—”

I reviewed what I’d heard of the leader’s speech patterns. Vulgarity was called for. “Fucking improvise!” I roared. “You need someone to hold your dick when you piss?”

“Sorry Kiefer, sorry, sorry, we got this. It’ll drop, no problem.”

The guys outside dug in their vehicles, and started pulling out various bags of explosive goodies, handing them off to the guys inside. Looked like small-grade stuff, from what I could see.

I let them go to it for a second, and called Martin. “Hey. Got Kriegers swarming the place.”

“Mother
fucker
.”

“Not as bad as it sounds. Dire’s got a plan. You know the Slappy Pizza down Cuttle Street?”

“Yeah. Shitty pizza.”

“Shitty pizza, big, dark parking lot in back. Park back there, get ready to load what Dire brings you. Oh, ignore the explosions.”

“What—”

I had to hang up and cut him off. They’d finished piling things up, and were heading inside.

An incoming call from their leader’s location rang one of his lieutenant’s phones. I squelched it before the ganger could pick up, marked the phone he was calling, and blocked that, too.

The second step was to have them dig their own graves. Well, so to speak. If I did this right, they wouldn’t have a single martyr for their cause.

I tapped back into their tac-net. “Hold on, movement! We’ve got movement inside!”

It was satisfying watching them flee out of the building, running from nothing in particular. “Use tear gas!” I yelled. “Throw everything we have in there, flush the fucker out!”

Got to admit, that one was a gamble. If they didn’t have tear gas, then they might start getting suspicious. But bless their little zealot hearts, they dug out drum-style grenade launchers, loaded them up, and started launching grenades into the warehouse. Gas billowed into the air, joining the smoke and dust already present.

One of the lieutenants tapped into the net. “Boss? Cops are gonna be here in five.”

“Shut up.”

On to the third step; herding them. I blocked another incoming call from their probably-frantic leader, and sealed another lieutenant’s phone. Then with an evil snicker, I pulled out the universal remote, and started checking their cars.

On the third one I hit paydirt. It was remote-enabled. I started it up, and started it rolling forward as Kriegers yelled and pointed. One gave chase, and I had it stop, reverse, and slam into him trunkfirst. He bounced a good twenty feet, rolling and scrambling away from it, limping on a busted leg.

And then I started up every other remote-enabled car I found, a good seven of the fifteen vehicles there.

“Shit! He’s hacked your cars!” I yelled into the link. “Get to cover! Get inside the warehouse!”

That wasn’t too popular an idea. But they were stuck outside, and all the explosives that could have done any real damage to the cars were on the inside. I saw one of the Kriegers jog backwards, fumbling with a rocket launcher until one of his smarter buddies grabbed him and took it away. At this range, the rockets would kill their own people, too.

A few of them tried shots anyway, and they did a little damage before I had the cars chase them around. A few more tried to jump the fence and get away, and the first and fastest managed it, but with a little careful positioning and some vehicular assault, two tons of SUV managed to discourage the rest of them.

In the end, they had no option but to retreat into the warehouse. The warehouse that they’d just filled with tear gas.

I howled with laughter, watching them go, switching to my thermal sight to watch them choke and stay low, trying to avoid the worst of it. If they’d brought masks, they hadn’t thought to wear them. Or they were back in the cars.

And now for the final step in this little orchestra of absurdity.

I positioned the cars to block the exits, jetted into the air, and brought myself crashing through the warehouse roof. Yells and shouts of alarm filled the tac-net... before I silenced it.

“TREMBLE BEFORE DIRE!” I roared, and descended into the clouds of choking gas.

It wasn’t a contest. It was more of a mercy. Two minutes later I was the only thing capable of moving in that factory without puking, whimpering, or screaming.

I didn’t want to kill them, true, but I was under no obligation to be gentle with them. It took only a few moments to retrieve the flower crates, close them, and wrap them with cable for easy transportation. With a grunt of satisfaction, I flew up to the living space, removed the super-computer from its hiding spot, and threw it in a loose crate. I’d had the thing ruggedized for just such an occasion.

As I was throwing scoops of packing material in with it, the warehouse shuddered. I paused, and eyed the gaping hole where the western wall used to be. Had they hit a support beam?

Another shudder.

SQUELCH.

That came from the factory floor. What the hell?