Dragon's Teeth (62 page)

Haunt You

Mercedes Lackey and Cody Martin

This might have been the best motel John had ever stayed in in his entire life.

Vickie had guided him to it, after having him leave the beater rental van, pick up a newer rental van, and visit a mega-mart. It wasn’t just a room, it was a whole two-story suite, one of those “extended stay” places. Three bedrooms and a bath up, one bedroom and bath, a living-room-thing and a real kitchen down. The fridge even came stocked. With beer. And other things, but the beer was what interested John most after that little adventure in the missile silo. He’d been listening to the radio on the way back to KC, and the explosion had made the news, which meant that John had been very eager to not make himself available in the immediate area. Someone might have noticed an athletically built fellow with some interesting bags and a beater van in that no-tell motel.
Can you say “terrorist profile”? I knew you could.
So now he was an athletically built fellow in newish clean athletic gear, athletic bags and a name-brand rental van, with the story that he was waiting for his sports team—sport unspecified—to arrive, and they were all going to be living here in a fancy suite motel. Now someone just had to think of a sport that would have a lot of Russians on the team. Pavel might be part of it. He didn’t think Pavel was going to go unnoticed.

John closed the door behind him, noted that Vickie had gotten a suite that was as secure as a motel could be, and let his guard down, a little. He chose the downstairs bedroom, which had a king-sized bed, dropping his bags on the floor. “Nice digs. Still with me, blondie?”

“Five by five, tall, dark and waterproof.” The voice in his ear sounded relaxed, almost cheerful. “It’s easier to hack their stuff than the Roach Hotel, oddly enough. I’m on channel 99.”

“A-ffirmative.” John retrieved a cold beer from the fridge—local swill, but he wasn’t about to complain—and plopped down on his bed with the remote in hand. A smart-remote, so this TV was equipped to surf, which meant he could treat it like a computer of sorts. “An’ we’re up. Start feedin’ me whatcha got.”

“Tesla and Marconi got me a translation program, so all that stuff we downloaded is cooking at a rapid rate. There definitely is a big staging area somewhere there in KC. Saviour is sending you a team, hence, the suite.”

“How big are we talkin’ ’bout here?” He took a long draught from the beer, looking up to the TV.

“Well, this is where the trucks are coming from for this area. So big enough to load the trucks. More staff than the silo. Staff to repair the armor and maybe the Robo-Wolves and Robo-Eagles. Didn’t seem to have anything for Death Machines.”

John had read briefings on the mechanical horrors that the Thulians fielded, but he never had had the unpleasant opportunity to fight against them. “Nasty customers, their Robo-whatsits?”

“Pretty damn. Uh, look, I can do something called ‘retro-scrying’ if I have a piece of stuff that came from where I want to look. I was gonna call up the fight that the Misfits had down in the Catacombs after I lost their feed and before I got it back. I could do that now and you could watch it while I burn it to memory. Want?”

“Certainly.” He retrieved a fresh beer while Vickie did whatever mumbo-jumbo she did to make this stuff happen. “Got any relevant AARs an’ dossiers I could browse in a sidebar?”

“Yep, got the analysis ECHO did on the downed eagles from the Slycke caper. Use the scroll-down and page-down buttons on your remote, this hotel rig is set up for reading email.” The screen split into two windows, one with text popping up and the other with some . . . interesting patterns at the moment.

“You’re a peach.”

“I can’t do a lot in the field, Johnny. I kinda gotta make it up with what I can do in here.” She was muttering something too quietly for him to hear, but it didn’t sound like English, so he didn’t pay a lot of attention to it. “Did I ever tell you that magic on the computer level is basically math and physics?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “All that high-level physics stuff running around these days says that pretty much everything in time and space is connected, you just have to bend things around the connections and you’re looking at what you want to.”

“Y’know, this all sounds like it’s a helluva lot higher than my pay grade. Hey, I’m still gettin’ paid in things other than beer, right?”

She chuckled. “Right now you’re getting one meeeeeeellion Polish zlotys a day.”

“By my math, I might be able to buy a few popsicles with that. If I find someone that’s nearsighted.”

“And you call yourself a Marxist!”

“Not in the slightest, cupcake.” He leaned back, propping his head up with a pillow so he could still drink and watch the television. “Anyways, keep goin.’”

“I do have something of interest for you besides your wallet and the intel. KC is a beef-packing town. There’s some very nice T-bones in the meat drawer if you can cook. Aha.” The patterns on the screen resolved into a static image. “And here we go. Connection between now and then, my rig and the Catacombs established. And rolling.”

At first, there wasn’t much of interest to see—except for the rank upon rank of power-armor down in that enormous vault, and the Misfits wandering around among the silent giants like kids in a museum. He was getting an overhead view, which was interesting, and probably better than the original camera feed would have been. “So, why are they called the Misfits again?”

“We,” she corrected. “I’m part of the team.” She sighed. “No one else will have us but Bulwark. He makes a habit of trying to save people. Particularly the ones no one else believes in.”

“Huh. Kind’ve a raggedy-looking bunch. And y’all have that Djinni guy with you?” John had heard about “the” Red Djinni during his time on the run; the criminal element and people like John seemed to intermingle regularly.

“Red . . . has his moments.”

“Don’t we all—” John was cut off when the doors in the Vault slammed shut. A structure smack dab in the middle of the room seemed to change, and very quickly the Misfits were fighting Robo-Wolves and Robo-Eagles. They got split up immediately; the three girls, Bella, Harmony, and Scope, were under attack by the birds, while one wolf chased Djinni and one chased Acrobat. “Jesus, those things are mean. Besides blowin’ them to hell an’ softenin’ them up with fire, what weaknesses do they have?” John was already looking for joints, ammunition magazines, power cells, anything that could be exploited. It was becoming increasingly hard with the flurry of action on the screen.

“There’s a pretty good AI in there, and we think that the wolves had an uplink somewhere. The wolves are fangs and claws, the eagles are beak, claws and an energy gun in their mouth that uses a different mechanism from the arm-cannon. They’ve got IR and UV vision, night vision of course, the usual ability to camera-zoom in tight on a target. Bella found out that if you shoot that area in the eagle’s mouth where the gun is, you have a good chance at making whatever they use as ammo explode the head. The eagles DON’T seem to have radar; when Scope shoots out their eyes later, they collide.”

“All the sensors located in the head? Whatever they use for a processor?”

“From the wreckage, the processor is buried deep inside the body, the sensors are all in the head.”

“Well, that’s a pain. But, y’knock out the head, ought to be easier to pry the bastard apart.”

Right about then, Bulwark, who had raised his force-field, was driven to his knees with a grunt as the wolf on him pounded the outside of the field. “Yeah, that looks harsh. Bull’s power isn’t like a sci-fi field; energy applied outside gets some transferred inside.”

“Jesus! Any casualties on this op? I hate surprises.”

“Thanks to the powers that watch over fools, no. Bull was pretty messed up with a lot of internal injury, Scope nearly ruptured her eyes, and Bell was drained down to just about nothing. And Djinni looked like one of those carcasses hanging on a hook over in the stockyards. But everybody lived. Oh, watch this, this is how Djinni takes out his wolf.” Red was looking a little worse for wear—and naked—but certainly not as bad as Vickie had made out to be. John saw how he ended up matching her description. The meta paused, measuring up the Robo-Wolf, and then pounced on its neck. His hands dug into a seam that had formed where the contraption had taken a beating, and then his hands seemed to distend and harden into grotesque claws, while his body somehow grew a kind of encasement that was part insect carapace and part rhino hide. The wolf did
not
like this turn of events, and started to buck and turn to try to dislodge Djinni. It was vicious and fast, but finally a shower of sparks erupted from the seam, and the wolf slumped to the floor.

“Well, I’ve gotta say, I’ve seen some eight-second rodeo riders that would’ve had a helluva time stayin’ on for that ride.”

There was silence for a moment on the other end. Then, “Holy Jeebus Cluny Frog on a pogo stick. I—wow. Uh, OK, this is where I got the feed back.”

This version was one-sided; John couldn’t hear what Vickie was probably saying, but as the weird protection sloughed off, leaving the Djinni raw and bruised but looking reasonably like a human again, if a skinned one, Red said something in Russian.

“OK rewind. I’ll show you Bull and Acrobat taking out theirs.” This was a little more straightforward. Acrobat teased the wolf into chasing him, returned on Bulwark’s signal, and the two of them working together got the wolf impaled on the gigantic sword of one of the more primitive suits of toppled armor.

“Those damned things were carrying swords? I never really thought I’d dislike Nazis more than I already did, but I’m learnin’ new things every day.”

“We are pretty sure that’s something like Version 1.5. They hadn’t figured out how to make energy cannon yet, or maybe how to get the stuff small enough to fit in an arm. So since these things were supposed to be terror weapons, they just gave them honking big swords to mow people down like a John Deere harvester.”

John shook his head and finished his beer. “If they had come out with those things a couple of decades earlier, they could’ve still done some nasty damage.”

“Rewind to Scope taking out the two birds with a couple good shots.”

This was even more straightforward. Despite being under fire, despite a lot of hysterical screaming and shouting, and with Bella finally pouring enough of herself into Scope that she went the color of skim milk and passed out, Scope managed to take out the “eyes” of both birds in mid-dive. Unable to see or correct, they crashed into each other.

“So. Dat’s dat. More shit went down with a Death Sphere that was probably operating on AI, but you already know how to take those out, and I have the camera feed on on that. I’m not looking forward to when they figure out what we’re doing and make improvements.”

“Tough customers. Remind me never to play ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ with you, though.”

“Trust me, this was
not
my idea, nor would I have sent in one small team.” The second window closed, leaving John with the report on the downed eagle from outside Atlanta. “On one level, I am glad Alex Tesla is gone. He made some piss-poor decisions.” Her voice sounded curiously hard, even a little angry. “I know they say not to bad-mouth the dead, but those were my teammates he put on a suicide mission down there.”

“Ain’t this grand adventure we’re all on just one big potential suicide mission, though? We all gotta die sometime, kiddo. An’ sometimes . . . we gotta let some folks die to save others.” John looked away from the TV, finishing his beer in a long draught.

“And I don’t have to like it, and I aim to prevent it where and when I can.”

“Y’know somethin’ that just struck me ’bout those damned Eagles and Wolves? They aren’t nearly as effective as the rest of Thulian arsenal, ’cept for one task.”

“Bet I can guess, but tell me.”

“Terror weapons. Power armor suits, flying death orbs an’ whatnot are frightenin’ enough. But those robots are just goddamned scary on a primordial, primitive level.” He shook his head, taking another swig of his beer. “Imagine a pack or a flight of those things bearin’ down on ya.”

“That was my thought when I saw them. And think of the intimidation factor in a parade, or standing bodyguard over a leader.” He could hear Vickie typing over the link. A second later, in a little window, was a photoshopped image of Hitler with a wolf at either hand and an eagle above him.

Got to hand it to the Kriegers, they know ’bout presentation.

Another window opened and dossiers of CCCP members appeared in tabs across the top. “Your team. Saviour has you on command on this one.”

“Oh? She couldn’t have been too happy ’bout that one. You an’ Blue blackmail ’er or somethin’?”

“Unter pointed out how no one else could pass as a Murkan. So I hear.”

“Giorgi must be goin’ soft in his old age. I’ll get caught up on all of ’em in a bit. I’d offer ya a beer, ’cept I don’t think y’can work teleportation—wait, can you?”

“Yes, within reason. Only in my case there’s no ‘tele’ about it. It’s magic and not psionic, it’s called ‘apporting’ and I need a landing strip. In other words, I need a prepared area where I’m sending things or they tend to end up as a smear on the floor. I can bring stuff
to
me safely enough, it’s sending them off that’s hard.” She chuckled. “But I don’t need your beer, thanks. Sorry about the generic brand, it was all I could get the hotel to stock. But I found a package store that makes deliveries, so say when you want one and I’ll have ’em bring up a case of Guinness and some wodka for the comrades later.”