“Ready?”
“Breaching.”
I kicked off the wall while Katrine used her enhanced strength to rip the lift doors apart, we swung in and landed, catching the surprise of two guards, who didn’t manage to get a shot off before we were on them. With the distractions and the element of surprise, we had the time to leave them unconscious. Argus had killed enough today.
“This way, then on the left.”
“Copy.” she didn’t look at me as I activated the second of her batteries, keeping her eyes only forward.
“We couldn’t have saved him, Argus.”
“You saved me. We saved you.” She kept to one wall as she spoke, keeping her voice low. Stealth was out of the question, if people were looking for us we couldn’t reasonably hide, but so long as we kept in formation, we were nigh unkillable.
“That was different. We had The Component there, I can’t make things like that on the fly.”
“You could have tried.”
“And waste time?”
“Fine.” She didn’t say anything after that, and we progressed in silence. There weren’t many guards on this level, most had been diverted. I checked my mental map for where they might be, relative to Orpheus’ incursion and Guthrie’s operations. Either they were already there, which was unlikely given how quickly we’d been moving, or they were arming themselves. I checked the location of the armoury. There were three, the main one was up in the MI6 building proper, but there were two auxiliary rooms. One of which was in front of the only door that led to the records room. I froze.
“Stray?”
“Enemies. Lots of them, probably, very close.”
“What does very close mean?”
“In the direction we’re heading. With lots and lots of weapons.”
Argus sighed. “How many?”
“Probably about fifteen.”
“That’s too many”
“They’re in an enclosed space and we have the advantage, we might be able to make it.”
“No, Stray,” she looked at me through her visor, “I’m not killing fifteen people.”
“Katrine we’d be-”
“Saving hundreds and hundreds of lives, for the greater good. I’ve heard it before. I’m not killing fifteen people.”
I slapped her. Through the metal. It hurt me and she wouldn’t have felt it, but it was the symbolism of the act that mattered.
“When we’re back at the base you can have every existential crisis in the world, but right here? Right now?” I stared at my own reflection, where her eyes would have been, “You killed that man. And you’re going to accept that you’ll need to do it again, because you can’t afford to regret it.” She wrapped a hand around my wrist, “This is a war. We do shit things to shit people, because that’s what we do. Reasonable casualties.”
In the corner of my eye, a horde of figures rounded the corner, guns at the ready. Argus tried to turn, “we surrend-”
Before she could finish the sentence I sent the guards flying towards us, so many of them pulled me into her and both of us in the air, but I teleported behind them and found my feet. The altered battery on her belt unmade them with a wave of force that dissipated too close to me, but Argus’ armour held, and when she was knocked into the wall the force dampening circuit held. She was covered, and when I looked back she was kneeling in blood, trying to gain her bearings. I’d activated all of her batteries for her, she’d last another hour and a half. I could come back for her, and she could take care of herself, but for the moment she was a liability. I sprinted in the direction, and behind me, I heard a wail.
I burst in on a room of unprepared soldiers and wasted no time. In the time it took to raise their weapons I was behind the closest one with a gun to her head. She was a woman in her thirties with bright blue hair and skin like pink leather.
“Weapons down, now!” I tried to alter my voice, to make it deeper, more imposing. But the way they moved, like I was a ticking bomb, I imagined I was frightening enough. A demon with a face of slate that teleported and left viscera in her wake. They’d heard of me, I was known. They obeyed with only a little hesitation, and I pulled my hostage in the direction of the door to the records room, hissed “open it.” and slipped inside.
I had no grenades. my guns were light. I could charge up one teleport, but I was feeling woozy from the exertion and needed to save it for pulling. There was commotion from without, as they scrabbled for weapons and body armour. I’d hoped my reputation was enough to send them running, but these people had been hardened by war and loss, it had been a gamble that they wouldn’t shoot through the hostage to get me. A mess of files behind me were bursting out of cabinets and ancient computers. They were older than the USB port, so that wasn’t an option. I took the sapperbug out of my pouch, one of the legs bent into an odd angle, and put it on the cabinet. I sensed a lot of magic dry up in a brief instant, and pulled it back into my pocket. I barely registered the woman coming at me, pulling her off-balance instinctually and dropping her with an elbow to the jaw. That still left nothing but a door between me and a small army. I couldn’t teleport without putting myself into a fugue state and the moment I opened those doors I was dead, so I went for the next best thing. It was an idea that worked perfectly in the Otherworld, but I’d only attempted once since. Trying my hardest not to think about the last time it had happened, I grasped the woman’s hand, and pulled magic from her.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
Pain.
So much pain.
The fabric of my existence unknitting itself, pulling itself apart to make space for something new, something that burned with an indignation that my conscious mind could not reconcile. But it was enough, just enough, and as soon as I had the thought I burned it off, and the world shifted around me.
The hardest part of teleportation wasn’t the translation in space, it was the orientation. The shifting in your ears when, as if by magic, you were no longer facing the direction you were before, but somewhere entirely new. I countered that movement on instinct, readying myself for the momentum to carry me around, but there was none, and I fell into a wall.
Otherwise, the teleport was silent, the woman was knocked out and likely twice as sick as me, and the clamour of soldiers, now behind a wall and facing away from me, preparing for breach masked my movements. When they did, they would find an unconscious woman in a puddle of her own sick and nothing else, I was a ghost. Leaving them to their discovery, I skulked down the hallway, now empty. By the time I heard the shouts that meant they’d lost me, it was too late.
“Alpha team this is Stray. Argus is compromised, I need a rendezvous.”
“Define compromised, Stray.” Came Orpheus’ voice, steely calm with anger
“I had to leave her behind. She’s safe though.”
“Her location.”
“Negative, Orpheus,” Panzer said, bristling to life, “maintain your position. We can’t afford them on our tails.”
“Stray.”
He was trying to sound dangerous, and he probably was, but some part of me hated Katrine being alone.
“fourth floor. South of the lift. Can’t miss it.”
“Thank you.” he said, and then clicked off his earpiece, manually.
“Stray, rendezvous is on the top floor, there’s an open maintenance shaft leading to Guthrie’s position.”
The top floor? That was strange, we’d left them on the third. I shelved that thought and found my way back to the lift shaft, clicked in-
And dropped, as the lift shuddered to life and plunged downwards.
I grabbed onto the rope and yelped, but after the initial shudder, I matched its trajectory and found myself being lowered in much the same way as I had been only a few minutes ago. One doorway passed, then another. I needed to get up and over the lift, I could climb up the shaft and find Jodie. I gave myself more rope and dropped myself down further, grabbing onto the doors. At the moment before the lift hit my shoulders, I wrenched the doors open just wide enough to slip through, not thinking enough to care about who was on the other end,
For some reason, they’d elected to paint this floor and this floor only red. Partially red walls, red ceilings, and shiny red tiling you could see your reflection in. and someone had been through here before. Bodies. Tens of them, piled up on each other. Some complete, some dismembered, some entirely unmade. My feet went cold as it soaked through the soles of my shoes. Not paint. Panzer.
I broke into a sprint, following the trail of bodies. Some of them must still have been alive, as groans and wordless pleas filled the air. Salt and iron burned in my nose, Panzer hadn’t stopped to explore, she knew her target. I was in the heart of Anvil, judging by the servers and wires. I ran the numbers, the servers were old, at least half a decade, but this many would still support something gargantuan. A spider with a web that spanned the entire city. The wires started to cross the hall, but they’d been shorn in half by Panzer and lay sparking at anything metal and close. Some still remained, a canopy, where the blood thinned out and eventually left only footsteps. The air grew hotter as I got closer, cooling systems having likely failed at Argus’ hand long ago. I passed the last body, fingers bloody and nails shattered as an upper half lay pinned under a fire door. I gritted my teeth, and slid my fingers in the space between the door and the ground, afforded to me by the corpse, and groaning with effort, pulled the door free.
The server room looked like something from an old movie. Consoles, decades old and patched with modern tech, covered every available room. Images bled between high-definition monitors and wheezing CRT screens. Wires, thin as webbing and thick as rope, bridged the gap between every connector port imaginable. It was a marvel of recycling and a horror of inefficiency. Corpses in shirts and trousers were still in office chairs, not having been goven time to react, and in the center, radiating magical not-heat at the giant pillar of technology that was the heart of Anvil, was Panzer, strapping the fifth magbomb to the core of the building.
“Panzer.” I called, when she didn’t notice me I repeated myself, “What is this.” She looked up, her face gaunt from magical exertion, and smiled.
“This, Stray, is what we’ve been fighting for.” She spread her arms, “The fall of the RWHS.”
“That many bombs would-”
“Topple the building. Reduce it to rubble, and everyone inside.”
I stepped into the room, wary. She noticed. “Don’t worry, it’s on a timer. We have time to escape and reach somewhere safe.”
That wasn’t my issue. My issue was that she hadn’t told us. Her face dropped and faster than I could react she raised her rifle and planted two shots, one over each of my shoulders, into the heads of the RWHS agents that had been about to kill me. Her rifle clicked, revealing a possible third, and I spun around, gun ready to meet them. Gun jammed in their gut, I cracked them in the face with my forehead and they fell to their knees.
“Good. now kill her and help me tie this last one on.” I looked down. She was harrowed, terrified, blood both foreign on her clothes and her own streaming from her nose, but I recognised her, and looking up at me, despite my mask, The Hunter recognised me.
I looked at Panzer, manic in her work, and ran the numbers. A bomb like that would vaporise anyone in the building, likely at least five hundred people, and the causalties wouldn’t stop there. Hundreds of people flowed through the arteries and capillaries of the city, they would be at risk. And by the rumbling at my feet I knew that the people stuck in the tubes were gone as well. Fatalities could exceed a thousand. I’d made the wrong choice before, it had nearly killed me and Jodie. It was a war, people like us had to make the hard choices. One innocent corpse for every two people who could use magic, an entirely reasonable trade. Reasonable casualties. The right calculation. The calculation that meant saving the most people. What monster was I to be able to make such a calculation? I pulled the trigger, and the hopes of thousands died.
And with them, Brigitte Grabowski dropped to the floor.