Warbound: Book Three of the Grimnoir Chronicles (50 page)

The Torches on the damage-control team were easy to pick out. They were the ones not coming to kill her. They were concentrating on the explosion, trying to keep the fire in check while the other armored cells sealed themselves off. Everybody else was charging at her, but you can’t hardly tackle a Traveler. Faye simply dropped the empty bazooka, stepped through space, and let all those tough guys dogpile each other. Then she lifted her .45, shot one Torch in the throat, turned and shot the other right between the shoulder blades. Then she Traveled back to her bag of guns, because the oncoming wall of fire would take care of the rest.

An alarm began to sound. Why had it taken them so darn long? But then she realized that she’d only been aboard for one minute and fifteen seconds. She could sense the Peace Ray recharging, but the ship was listing a bit to the side. She’d certainly upset their aim, but they could still get themselves corrected, and that simply wouldn’t do. She had to take this big battleship
down
. There would be other Torches on a ship this big, and they’d all be concentrating on controlling the fires she had started, which meant it was time to switch tactics. She had to find other things to blow up.

She went back to her bag and pulled out the two really big Russian stick grenades. She could barely lift them and couldn’t imagine how some poor sucker was expected to throw these further than the blast radius. Lance had said these things could blow up a tank!

Her boots landed on a narrow catwalk. She was out in the open. The blue ocean was visible through the grating. The hangar was filled with biplanes. They were suspended by hooks and chains, dangling over the open floor. Airplanes were filled with gas, but more importantly, they could be loaded with bombs, and if she was a bomb, where would she be kept?

There.

There was a big armored door in the side of the hangar. The bombs were fed down a mechanized chute. She followed the chute up with her head map . . . And landed in an armored room absolutely filled with deadly steel ovals, thousands of them, each one weighing hundreds of pounds. Faye grinned. This was perfect. The armor was supposed to keep explosions out, but it was going to have a heck of a time holding this one in . . . She struggled to pull the massive cotter pin out of the Russian grenade, but she managed. Then she dropped it and hurried out of there. She didn’t want to be anywhere near that thing when it went off.

She landed on the far end of the ship, and good thing she did, because the bottom middle section came apart five seconds later. Not counting Tesla devices, it was the biggest explosion Faye had ever seen. Debris, people, even whole airplanes got launched out by the blast and went spinning toward the ocean. Her head map told her it was actually hundreds of smaller blasts all piled on top of each other, but nobody else would be able to tell that.

The bottom hull’s hydrogen was burning. The explosion must have killed several of their damage-control Torches, because they weren’t doing nearly as good a job stopping this fire.

Somebody must have had the good sense to try to steer this thing. Faye had to hand it to the Imperium Navy, they were very steady under pressure. They’d realized they were crashing, and they were going to try and put it down soft. Faye didn’t think so. Her head map told her which engines were being used to power the compressors on the remaining bags which would enable them to control their descent, and she still had one of the big stick grenades left.

This room was filled with roaring turbines, big as trucks, and pumping pistons as big around as trees. The alarm was blaring. The lights were flashing. Men were scrambling. They’d all been rocked by the big explosion and they were scared.

Faye grabbed hold of the pin, but it didn’t want to budge. She pulled, straining, hard as she could. The darn thing was stuck.

There was an Iron Guard in this room. A big, terrifying man, and Faye could sense the magic roiling off of him. He was moving quickly, bounding between the machines. She could tell what he was because he had made himself so very light. He was a Heavy, like Mr. Sullivan. And he’d been pursuing her futilely through the ship. She could respect the effort, but she wasn’t planning on sticking around.

The grenade’s pin wouldn’t come out. As long as this
Kaga
was in the air, then the
Traveler
was in danger. Faye tugged and pulled, but the pin was stuck, and she had cow-milking hands, so it wasn’t like she was weak.
Stupid Soviet junk!

Gravity intensified. She could feel it building on top of her. The Heavy was hurling Imperium engineers out of his way. He drew his sword. Her head map screamed as the weight of ten worlds tried to squish her flat.

This stupid bomb was stuck and she wasn’t strong enough to free it. Her body wasn’t strong enough to shrug off all the extra gravity, and in a couple of seconds, some of her internal organs were going to pop. She needed to be stronger.

The Heavy roared a battle cry and threw himself at her.

She’d met the Chairman briefly. She’d seen how he’d changed his Powers back and forth, tapping whatever part of the Power he needed to. Faye hadn’t understood it then, heck, she barely understood it now, but the Power wasn’t that much different than Lady Origami’s folded animals. Every type of magic had a shape, and that shape touched other shapes, and all those shapes together made up the world. Your type of magic just determined which part of the world you could tweak. If you reshaped your own connection, you could steer it to a different part of the Power and call on a whole new form of magic.

She’d changed this before, instinctually calling on Whisper’s fire magic while inside the belly of the God of Demons. Faye felt for the connection to the Power she’d just stolen from the Brute on the bridge, found it, studied the complex geometry . . .

And in the half a second it took for the Heavy to cover the distance, Faye figured out how to make herself
strong.

Faye easily shrugged off all of the extra gravity like it wasn’t even there. The pin came right out of the grenade. The Heavy’s sword was coming right for her head, but it seemed
so slow.
Faye simply moved her body out of the way.

The grenade and the Heavy hit the floor at the same time.
So this must be how Delilah felt.
The Heavy swung the sword at her ankles, but she just hopped over it like she was playing jump rope. She kicked him in the ribs, and the big man flew back and crashed hard into a pylon.
That big old razor sword could come in handy.
She crossed the distance in a blur, reached down, grabbed him by the arm, not even that hard, mind you, and his bones snapped like brittle twigs. Faye had surprised herself. The Heavy bellowed.

Fun as that was, that big Russian grenade was about to go off, so Faye focused, realized that she couldn’t Travel because she was currently a Brute, let her Power spring back to its comfortable state, and stepped outside.

She was whistling through the sky. The Pacific Ocean was bright blue and pretty. It was a beautiful day.

Faye realized she still had the Heavy by the arm. He began screaming his head off as he realized where they were, so Faye just let go of him and he went flailing off to the side. That fancy Iron Guard sword of his was flipping through the air, so Faye timed it just right, reached out, and snagged it by the handle. From what she’d seen, those things were so darned sharp that if she’d missed she probably would’ve left fingers behind.

As she fell toward Earth, another giant explosion rocked the battleship. Her grenade had ignited something else vital. The entire left side of the ship came apart. The bags were consumed in three rapid fireballs, and then the entire sky above her was one big spreading cloud of red and black as one of the most advanced warships in history was blown to kingdom come. Hundreds died instantly and a thousand more would ride the flaming wreckage into the ocean.

Faye had been on board the Imperium battleship a grand total of three minutes and forty-seven seconds.

UBF Traveler

“Captain says
we’re almost ready to open the cargo bay!” Chris Schirmer shouted from across the hold. The Cogs were still scrambling, banging away on the delicate machine with desperation achievable only by men who knew they only had one shot at getting something right and lives were on the line.

Sullivan waited next to the ramp, still as a statue, every inch of him clad in bulletproof steel. Browning’s enchanted BAR was lashed to his back, and there were magazine pouches all over his body. The magical .45 was on his hip. He had grenades, knives, and no doubt that his metal fist to the mouth would ruin just about anybody’s day. The weight on his shoulders and the narrowed field of view through the helmet felt familiar. Trade the fancy new suit for a rusted-out pot-metal piece of shit and the bullpup BAR for an old Lewis and it would almost feel like being back in the Great War, waiting for the whistle to sound so he could launch himself out of the trenches.

Almost . . . He flexed his Power, testing it ever so gently. It felt like there was enough filling his chest to crush the whole world flat.

Yeah. This was just like the trenches. Take the ground. Hold that ground. Kill anybody who gets in your fucking way. That’s what Faye was probably doing right now. He’d be doing the same in a few minutes. The only added complication this time was that he was going to
talk
to the enemy first. Then he’d kill them.

Schirmer was the most practical of the geniuses in the hold. “Get those helmets on and make sure the seals are tight.” It was a good thing he did, because it wouldn’t have been surprising if a few of them had been too distracted working on their machine and ended up forgetting. “Check your hoses and make sure the oxygen flow is good. Then everyone check your buddy. Fuller, go make sure Sullivan’s sealed up.”

He’d stayed out of the Cog’s way. The plan depended on the device doing what it was supposed to. Sullivan was a distraction. He was the sideshow. This device was the key. But he was still glad when Buckminster Fuller came over to check his oxygen tank.

The pressure suits had come from United Blimp and Freight’s testing division. The Cog was wearing a big, clear glass bubble on his head. The neck of the leather and rubber suit he was wearing was threaded for the fishbowl to screw on. Fuller’s voice came out funny, emanating from a brass box with holes in it mounted on his neck. He took a moment to check Sullivan’s air tank. “Considering your protective system’s respiration mechanisms were designed in anticipation of surviving poison gas rather than high altitude operations—”

“Is it good?”

“Yes. It’s good . . . I must say, Mr. Sullivan, I am worried about you and the young Ms. Vierra.”

“Faye will be fine,” he assured Fuller. She’d better be, or else they’d all be getting vaporized by a Peace Ray any second now, so no use dwelling on it.

“Of course. She is very forceful for a Cog. I would say—”

“Hold on . . .” For a second Sullivan thought that Fuller’s voice box machine had malfunctioned. “Faye’s not a Cog.”

Fuller tried to shake his head, but it turned out that was impossible inside the neck gasket of the bubble helmet. He gave up. “No. I could see it rather clearly. As you are aware, my own Power enables me to see magical connections. She is perhaps the most complicated and capable specimen I’ve yet encountered, and I so wish I had not been so occupied with this current project, because I simply must speak with her. Ms. Vierra is very clearly a Cog, and a potent one at that.”

“Faye’s a Traveler. You sure you’re not seeing that Spellbound curse that’s on her?”

“Oh no, of course not. I can make that out rather clearly. It is vast, terrible, and thus completely unmistakable. She was clearly born a Cog. That connection was there first. The exceedingly complex magical construct which is bound to her is in addition to that.”

The idea clicked. Sullivan whistled and it made an odd echo inside the helmet. “Can you tell what kind of Cog somebody is by looking at their Power? Like Browning makes weapons, or Ira’s medical stuff, or you and your . . . domes.”

“Partly. I hesitate to form a hypothesis, but my considerable instinct in this manner would point toward her adaptive magical genius being related to physics, spatial matters, and relativity.”

“So she’s a genius about how stuff works? How the world fits together?”

“Fundamentally, yes . . . I was not aware that this was a new fact to you. I would have assumed that anyone could very clearly see that Ms. Vierra is a Cog.”

And all this time they’d just thought she was odd because she was a Traveler . . .

That was why the Power had picked Faye to be the Spellbound when Sivaram died!
She’d been born brilliant, all Cogs were, and her specific genius just happened to fall into the area most useful for battling the Enemy. She became a Traveler because Sivaram had been a Traveler. It had dragged his magic along with the curse. Of course, she was absurdly capable as a Traveler, but it wasn’t because of how much Power she had, but rather because of how damned scary
fast
her brain worked.

“Holy shit, the Power is smarter than we gave it credit for.” Sullivan patted Fuller on the shoulder, and the steel gauntlet nearly knocked the man over. “Thanks, Doc. You better get back to your gizmo. It’s almost show time.”

“We will make it work, Mr. Sullivan. No matter what.”

“You’re starting to sound like a Grimnoir knight there, Fuller.”

The bubble helmet bobbed back and forth as Fuller tried to nod. “I would not have thought that was such a compliment before embarking on this journey. Now however? Thank you.” Then the Cog scurried back to his device.

Schirmer was watching the instrumentation on the machine. “Congratulations, we have now achieved a greater altitude than any other men in history.” The UBF Cogs cheered. “Now, make sure your suit is tethered to the safety line.” Good idea. It wouldn’t do to suck their Cogs out the door.

Sullivan didn’t strap in. He couldn’t afford to wait for Faye. He was so engrossed in thinking about this new revelation into the world’s most powerful wizard and staring at the waiting ramp that he hadn’t heard her approach. There was a hard metallic thump on his arm. He wouldn’t have felt anything less. He turned the helmet to see Lady Origami there, wearing one of the UBF suits and clear fishbowl helmets. Safety ropes had been run through the harness she was wearing. She put the wrench she’d used to hit him back into a pouch on her belt.