Control Point (51 page)

Britton felt a hammerblow to his thigh and collapsed, clapping his hands to his leg. He didn’t see where the round had originated, but someone had shot him. He rolled on the ground, biting back the pain and trying to see how bad it was. It was
impossible. If he released pressure on the wound, he might bleed out in moments.

A shadow fell across him and he looked up to see Wavesign standing over him, wreathed in a halo of spinning frost. He grinned. “Hurts? Maybe I’ll numb it for you.”

He raised his hands, runnels of water snaking down his arms to ball around his fists, where they spun, violent and sharp-looking, tiny waves tipped with icy razors. Therese stepped between them. “No way, Ted,” she snarled.

Wavesign’s face twisted. “Move,” he husked. “I’m not going to hurt you, and you’re not going to hurt me.”

“Wrong,” she said, and laid her palm across his face.

The Hydromancer shrieked as his head wobbled and stretched, losing shape and running down his shoulders. His scalp unfolded, taking patches of the skull with it, opening like a blossoming flower. Gray matter churned beneath. Ice exploded from him, and Britton could see Therese’s skin turning blue under its impact. Her beautiful hair crumbled away in chunks, snapping off with the sound of breaking twigs. She pushed Wavesign away to collapse in the dirt, and turned to Britton, her magic already repairing the damage to her face, the skin losing its pale, frostbitten color. She placed her hands over his thigh, and he felt the magic warm him, the bullet sliding forward and popping out the rear of his leg to lie in the moss.

Soldiers raced toward them, leveling their carbines, then shrieked and doubled over, their hair crumbling and skin flaking onto the plaza as one of the SASS enrollees advanced, snarling. She extended her hands, drawing the water out of them until they were nothing but piles of blowing dust.

Then she staggered backward, a fireball exploding into her chest and sending her sprawling, shrieking and beating at the flames. A Pyromancer advanced past his fallen soldiers. Britton recognized his perfect black hair and smug smile from the raid that first took down Sarah Downer. At his side shambled two dead Goblins and a soldier, his head mostly severed, and attached to his body only by a scrap of flesh. Truelove came behind them, arms extended and brow furrowed with concentration. Around him, dead Goblins tangled with their living fellows, stabbing with broken spear shafts or kicking and punching with mute resolve.

And then Britton looked up and all hope died.

A huge gate opened again, LSA Portcullis’s bay a black maw behind it. With a whine and belching of diesel fumes, an armored personnel carrier rolled through behind the SOC forces. Atop the turret, a gunner hunched behind a fifty-caliber machine gun, the muzzle already blazing as rounds spit in the combatants’ direction.

The fire was withering. The huge bullets churned the earth, tore chunks from the smooth thrones, spun Goblin and human alike, leaving them in bloody heaps. All around them, the Goblins fell back. A few of the white-painted sorcerers weren’t even bothering to fight, and instead herded their folk away from the plaza, making for the gate on the far side of the palisade wall. Britton had no time to make a count, but many of the remaining enrollees lay sprawled in the dirt. One of Richards’s Whispered wolves lay dead beside him. Peapod lay facedown in the dirt, smoke rising from her back.

We can’t win this,
Britton thought.
Not anymore. I have to get us out of here.

Guilt rocked him.
They thought I was helping them, and I’ve only led them to their deaths.

Therese screamed at the Pyromancer and rose to meet him, then fell away as a bullet clipped her shoulder and sent her stumbling backward. She clapped her hand to the wound, her brow furrowing as the magic worked.

Britton could hear Tsunami screaming and thought he caught a flash of the Hydromancer crouching behind one of the stone chairs, bullets whining around her.

Swift fell from the sky, hitting the plaza hard enough to bounce in front of where another enrollee knelt, cradling his face. Fitzy stood over him, blood streaming from his fist.

Fitzy motioned at the SOC force, and they began to fall back around the APC and its giant, smoking gun. With the SASS enrollees and Marty’s tribe battered and pinned down by the stream of fire, there was no need to risk his men in close quarters.

Harlequin landed beside the Pyromancer, suppressed Britton’s magic, and smiled. Behind him, the line of SOC soldiers advanced into the square in front of the APC. The Goblins had
fled. Those of the enrollees who remained ducked behind the stone chairs.

“No pardon for you this time, Oscar,” he said. “I’m afraid you’re all out of chances.” His voice grew sad as he drew closer. “A shame, really. I had high hopes for your redemption. You might have been able to make at least some of your crap right. Now we’ll never know.”

And then he was reeling sideways as Therese charged him, shrieking. Britton felt his magic return as Harlequin transferred his current to Suppressing her.

“Never say never,” Britton shouted, and dove forward, spreading his arms. One caught Harlequin about the waist, checking his flight. The other caught the Pyromancer around the neck. A gate snapped open behind them. Britton knocked both men through and onto the top of flight observation tower back at his old base at the 158th. The structure loomed nearly two hundred feet above the flight line, its hexagonal roof barely eight feet across and covered with slick tile. He threw himself backward as the Pyromancer screamed, tumbling over the edge, his shriek abruptly cut short by a wet thud. Harlequin somersaulted in the air, landing on top of an adjacent water tower beside the flight-line fire station. Britton turned the gate and slid it sideways after him, but Harlequin stretched out his arms, and the gate vanished as the Suppression canceled Britton’s magic.

He grinned, muttering into the microphone clipped to his lapel, too low for Britton to hear.

“You blew it, pal,” he shouted across the distance to Britton. “Unless you’ve learned how to fly, that is. You can just cool your heels up there while my crew mops up the rest of your pals.”

“Screw you!” Britton shouted at him, circling around. The top of the tower offered no way down, with only the huge drop to the concrete flight line below. There was no hatch through the roof. Harlequin was right. Unless he’d learned to fly, there was no way down. “Go ahead and keep me Suppressed! So long as you do, you can’t come after me. We’re going to just sit here until we get old?”

Harlequin laughed. “Nope. Got plans for you, pal.”

The rotary whine of helicopter blades sliced the air. The
sound was deeper than a Kiowa, and Britton recognized the low pitch as one of the larger Blackhawks. They were usually on practice flights or patrols around the base. It wouldn’t have taken the pilot more than a few seconds to respond to Harlequin’s call and divert to his position. Britton could see the minigun barrels pointing out the sides of the helo as it drove toward him.

It made no effort to go broadside as it approached at high speed, no effort to bring the guns to bear.

Then Britton noted that Harlequin’s pistol was still in the drop holster strapped to his thigh. He stood with a clear shot and all the time in the world to aim, but instead had his arms crossed, waiting.

He wants to capture me again. Maybe he was willing to kill me if he had to, but I still have value to these people.

Hope blossomed in his chest.

Britton turned and sprinted for the edge of the tower, putting a mad look of fear on his face.

Harlequin cried out and leapt off his perch, dropping the Suppression and flying to intercept Britton’s fall.

At the edge of the tower, Britton dug in his heels, abruptly reversing direction and throwing himself back onto the tower roof. He spun to face the Blackhawk.

A gate opened right before its nose.

Directly on the other side stood the APC, its gun silent for the moment. Fitzy and the bulk of the SOC force gathered around it.

Britton could see the pilot through the helo’s windscreen, hauling on the cyclic controls, but it was far too late to pull up. The Blackhawk passed neatly through the gate, the ends of the rotors shearing off and spinning over the flight line below. A grinding boom sounded from beyond the portal.

Britton closed the gate and leapt off the tower as Harlequin screamed, tackling the Aeromancer in midair and opening a gate beneath him just before the stone chairs.

Harlequin’s body cushioned his fall, but both men still hit the ground hard enough to jar them apart, just as the explosion of the crashing helicopter caught them. The blast drove them against the base of the great tree as the Blackhawk slammed into the SOC force, turning over and catching fire as it spun
among their ranks, its half rotors ripping themselves to fragments on the ground and tearing the soldiers apart. The shock wave struck Britton like a massive hand, forcing him up against the tree trunk and singeing his eyebrows. His head fetched up against the hard trunk, and he saw stars. His whole ear filled with a ringing buzz, and the angry wound on the other side of his head wept blood and rang in agony.

He sat against the tree trunk, all strength gone from him, shaking his head. As his sight cleared and the ringing began to fade, he noticed something strange.

Silence.

No gunshots. No crackling of arcing electricity or whooshing flame. The field of battle was quiet, with the occasional moan coming from the gory path left by the Blackhawk’s ruined impact. The aircraft was buried halfway through a small two-story hut, which had collapsed over it, the thatching burning brightly. The APC had been knocked over on its side, the turret popped off and smoldering. Sarah Downer scrambled in the wreckage, her enemy forgotten, desperately trying to haul broken beams off the crushed bodies of soldiers.

Britton slewed his head to the right. Harlequin stirred weakly on the ground, blood running from a gash in his head, half-conscious. Behind them, Therese, Swift, Peapod and a few others had begun to stand, their faces streaked with blood and filth, their mouths open in shock.

Harlequin began to prop himself onto this elbows. Britton shot out a bootheel and caught him in the temple, knocking him back into oblivion.

Pyre lay a few feet before him, sprawled on his side. His eyes were open, seeing nothing.

Fitzy. Fucking Fitzy.

Britton launched himself to his feet, running to the wreckage.

He found Fitzy lying on top of two dead soldiers. His wounded arm had been burned to a stump from the elbow down, the wound mostly cauterized, but still leaking blood. Ribs protruded from his ruined side. He groaned, his eyes darting around, his good arm scrabbling in the dirt, searching for a weapon. Truelove was pushing himself to his feet behind him, swaying, blood streaking his shredded uniform. Richards
sprawled beside him, his charred body cut neatly in half by a chunk of the helo’s tail boom.

Britton staggered a few more steps and collapsed on top of the chief warrant officer, his knee slamming into the broken ribs and eliciting a weak moan.

“Kill you,” Fitzy whispered. “Fucking kill you.”

Britton leaned in and whispered back, “You’re done killing.”

Fitzy grinned at Britton’s closeness, then moved his good arm with sudden speed to his belt, hauling out a small knife and lunging for him. Britton twisted aside, and the slim blade found his thigh instead of his side, gouging out a furrow of flesh.

He screamed and head-butted his former instructor, who sprawled in the dirt, spitting blood. He tried to open a gate and found that Fitzy, for all his injuries, could still Suppress him. He looked around for a weapon and settled on a fragment of the helo’s rotors, its jagged edges sharp. He snatched it up as Truelove regained his senses, and their eyes met. They held stares for a moment while Fitzy flailed weakly beneath him.

Finally, the Necromancer nodded and turned away.

Britton raised the rotor fragment over his hand.

“Fuck you,” Fitzy snarled.

“No,” Britton answered. “Fuck you.”

He brought the sharp edge down across Fitzy’s throat, suppressing the instinct to look away as the hot blood washed over him. The magic tide rushed back to him as Fitzy gurgled his last.

A few soldiers began to rise from the ruined swath left by the Blackhawk’s path, but were set upon by Goblins, screaming and dragging them back down to the ground, spears leveled at their throats. One of the Goblins dashed from the crowd, a chunk of stone held high over his head. He moved to one of the soldiers, raising the rock to dash his brains out. Marty barked an order from his position behind the stone chairs. The Goblin paused, looking askance, and Marty repeated himself until the creature reluctantly lowered the stone.

Britton examined the knife wound in his thigh. The gouge was deep, gently oozing blood around the edges, but he wouldn’t bleed out anytime soon. He tried to stand and found
that he could, though his legs shook. Therese could heal him later. For now, he reached out, grabbing Truelove’s arm.

“Stay with me,” he said, as the Goblins converged on the survivors.

He looked for Downer, but was distracted by Harlequin, who had begun to stir against at the base of the tree, pushing himself onto his elbows. Britton took a limping step toward him, savoring the trip.

Somehow, they had won.

Swift reached Harlequin before Britton, leaping over the stone chairs and putting a bootheel on the Sorcerer’s neck. The flames were out, but they had left Swift’s chest badly burned, the swallow tattoo disappearing under charred skin. His black hair had melted to the sides of his face. One eye drooped into a track of burned skin that Britton knew would scar terribly.

Peapod appeared behind him, Marty at her side. Swift winced with each step, the side of his face twitching uncontrollably.

Therese knelt at Pyre’s side, weeping.

The Goblins had rounded up what remained of the soldiers and were dragging them into the plaza. They came without protest, shaking their heads in disbelief that they could have been beaten. One stumbled and was rewarded by a jab from a spear in his buttock that drew blood. Downer stumbled along with them, a Goblin helping her along with thumps of his spear butt.