Part VI The Daemon

Tasìa relaxed the 50 Split against her hip. She kept an eye on the balcony below them. Fiona Caza lay prone, bleeding to death. Mel was questioning the skate punks who had dropped their weapons and held their hands over their heads.

Eyeing Mel's set-up with an admiring nod, Tasìa appraised that she needed to add a blunderbuss to her collection. Those guns could be very persuasive.

In the periphery of Tasìa's vision, Annebél worked at her PA.

"Have you found a route yet?" she asked Annebél.

The redhead was working at the matter like a deep puzzle, as the path of platforms and bridges between the balconies was not entirely evident.

She finally broke her concentration with a shrug.

The redhead chortled, "Yeah, but the locusts have not been cleared. They aren't scattering back to feed on the detritus pools as expected; right now, they are covering a rail and walkway grouping that we will have no choice but to cross."

Tasìa shook her head cynically.

"When has the Quadra ever played nice?"

As Annebél sighed and had a reply at the ready to answer her, Tasìa spotted movement.

It was Fiona. The double agent's head suddenly jerked in motion as if to execute a plan. Tasìa had the 50 Split in position pressed against her shoulder near instantaneously.

She popped off a shot where she estimated Fiona's head would be but cursed under her breath as she knew right away the mistake she had made.

She didn't switch out the tracers for the FMJ magazine that she specifically brought with her for human-sized targets. The anti-material AE rounds that were the bulk of her supply, Tasìa brought instead for the dragon in the caverns below if it proved necessary.

The tracer round's bullet head, made of very lightweight material, was purposely manufactured to minimize surface impact and hazard. It was not designed as a precision high-velocity round.

In flight, the bullet arced low and smacked against Fiona's polymer breastplate armor at the sternum guard.

Already lit in flight, on impact the round broke up into many pieces, releasing a dozen or more live sparklies into Fiona's face. That knocked her head back and made her stumble and fall.

But Tasìa caught sight of the grenade in Fiona's hand, and the double agent still held the oblong—easy to identify as an EMP—grenade in the direction she intended to throw.

The only way Tasìa was going to stop this was to shoot the grenade in mid-flight to force a malfunction. She needed to call upon the Modality to increase her speed and accuracy and slow down her perception of time.

Tasìa tensed her diaphragm to set it in motion, but the Modality did not answer her call.

Goosebumps spread across her arms and chest.

How can that be? But in spite of her denial, the taunting words of Geminiäs, the Black-Eyed One, came back to her.

—That voice in your head is the shit that mars your soul that I spoke of needing to be cleansed out of you.

So, the Black-Eyed Ones were serious. They were creatures of dream; it was all too easy to dismiss their relevancy.

In spite of her inner turmoil and self-loathing tirade, she did not stop for even an instant.

With not enough time to switch out loads, Tasìa slid the 50 Split down her left leg as not to damage the valuable tactical rifle while she grabbed the .357 Colt Clastic out of her boot with her right hand.

Tasìa steadied back up in stance above the balcony rail.

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Her best option now was to unload a spray fire aimed at the wall behind Fiona as it lined up in array with the grenade's path. The impact on the tin would avoid the kind of ricochet that could injure or kill the skate punks much better than if the rounds smacked against the gridded steel of the floorboards. The latter would occur if she lined up the shots at knee level instead.

Regardless of the choice, it was too late, even still, as the grenade popped off in midair just as it spun off of Fiona's fingertips, severing the middle and index fingers upon release.

Tasìa was flabbergasted. In her experience, that was not how the EMP grenades functioned.

It should have been delayed six seconds after being primed! She protested as a blue-tinted gas burst forth and sizzled the air.

Tasìa sprayed six rounds into the area where Fiona last stood as the gas severely obscured any possible visualization she had of her target.

Fiona gasped loudly at the sound of a thunking .357 round while the skater punks surrendered once again with desperate screams.

Determined they were to not be mistaken for active combatants.

Tasìa ignored the superfluous noise to evaluate her success. None. None whatsoever. Her effort was still not sufficient to prevent a tragic outcome from occurring.

All she could do was bear witness as Mel raised inelegantly up off the balcony to avoid the gas cloud, only to suddenly plunge into the depths of the Cistern, twirling innately past the glowing ascospores.

Sachmilli screamed out loud several times the name of the Nightwing over the ruckus he was creating as he mag dumped the seventeen rounds of his Girson Witness 2311.

Powerful 10 mm Magnum rounds shredded into the floorboards of the opposite balcony. The smallest of the skate punks dropped to the grilled boards hard against his knees as he gripped the right side of his ribcage.

Blood-soaked Fiona jumped into the cover of a door. She caught at least another round and was bleeding badly from a notably ruptured indenture beneath the side of her waistband where a bullet struck through her hip and spun out of her abdomen.

The discharge was light pink and oily. Tasìa had shot a .357 round into the woman's fupa.

After all that the traitor put her through, after all, Fiona was the person most responsible for her being captured by the Salvage, Tasìa could not help but smile in spite of her pursuit to be the better person.

Tasìa cut the revelry short when she heard the injured skate punk moaning. The other two were pleading for help.

She had overheard the conversation with Mel, and their culpability wasn't a simple matter.

Tasìa yelled back.

"Hold on! We have medkits. We are coming down."

She had to find a way to get over to the opposite balcony and help them.

In the meantime, Annebél had seized Sachmilli's hand.

"You are being reckless, old man!" She snarled.

He jerked free of her with a glare in his eye, holstered his Turkish 2311, and called for Mel over his com unit.

Annebél closed in on Sachmilli again. His reckless shots evidently pissed her off.

"If Mel survived, it'll be several minutes before his kit can reboot. No distractions. We need to get over there."

Tasìa glanced over to the living glass locust. They covered several yards of the walkway a mere forty-five meters from where the three of them stood.

Their behavior of latching on to that area's walkway and its supports must have been part of a default set of instructions for when the command console failed to deliver to them their instructions so the locust would still remain useful to Fiona's crew as a defensive measure.

Tasìa turned around and took a moment to study the Cistern wall. Both balconies were ensconced in twin buttress sets, all of them joined by ridge rows. It was a doable means of crossing, but she couldn't leave Sachmilli and Annebél to fend off the locusts without her.

Even with the injured yuengling below, she would have to be patient.

There was another, simpler way. Oh, she had the means!

"What are you thinking, mon petit demon? You have a cherub's smile."

Tasìa nodded as she raised the 50 Split.

"The two of you quit it with the arguing. Sachmilli's was an understandable human error given the circumstances, but we need to fix it. Now, fall behind and follow me."

She crouched and crawled forward as she switched out the fire mode. An imploder drone was at the ready. Tasìa sighted the target and set the demolition point six meters above the locusts.

"Make sure your ear protection is secured," she told the two lined up behind her. "They are about to pop."

Annebél readied her Benelli 12-gauge combat shotgun, and Sachmilli his 2311 Girson.

Tasìa let the drone fly. The overwhelming recoil surprised her.

A combo of compressed 1600 PSI CO2 released from the gun itself and the onboard gyrojets that precision-guided the drone together created an angle of thrust she wasn't expecting.

The sudden force smacked hard against her forearms. As she regained control, the living glass locusts swelled up from the bridge boards and ripped away from their railing tether due to the initial implosion. The ones closest to the drone incinerated in the firestorm as the thermite pile inside the drone ignited the immediate air.

The surviving locusts lunged out from the walkway area. Annebél and Sachmilli pounded at them with live fire to keep their sharp-surfaced bodies at bay.

Tasìa popped out two more drones. One on each side of the bridge further up and just behind the locusts to drive them further away from their position at the mouth of the top balcony.

The implosions shredded the walkway rails and undergirders this time. She had to risk unleashing the drones in a tight attack angle to do maximum damage to the locusts.

The risk paid off. Now, the threat was no more.

With a glance over, Tasìa determined that the floorboards remained intact, but she could not be certain of their structural integrity.

Her PalmEx could do a fair guestimation of their viability, but only Mel had the precision equipment to make a professional-grade risk assessment.

Tasìa winced when she thought of the little guy.