Hive III (4 page)

Azina

My eyes peel open and it takes a minute to drink in my surroundings. Above me is a wall of
earth-toned threads, arranged in neat rows. It’s a mechanism of some sort and it takes another second before I realize its purpose. I’m in a textile factory, where they make tunics – not that there are any customers left to buy them. Slowly, Sneak comes into focus. She’s bent over me, like an old mother hen, and I try and shoo her away, but she won’t have any of it. My clothes are folded in a neat pile on a chair next to me. Sneak has made a bed out of tunics. I glance down at my naked body and shudder. I’m still tightly muscled, except the skin around those muscles is dark and as coarse as tree bark. White bandages cover my abdomen, wrist and collarbone, where that Keeper prick riddled me with bullets. No sooner does the thought register than I spot the guard with the broken nose. Sneak must have heard me call out for mercy as she turned his comrades into mounds of useless flesh.

He had tried to save a stranger, eve
n after Bron bent his nose at an odd angle. Not a common quality, for sure.

Sneak’s signing slowly, like I was shot in the head and turned into some kinda halfwit.

“I’m fine,” I say, and mean it, in spite of the skeptical look on her face.

“I was sure you were a gonner,” she signs, and I couldn’t agree more.

“That makes two of us. How long was I out for?”

“A few hours.” But this time it’s the Keeper guard who answers instead of Sneak.

“His name is Klaus,” she signs with perhaps a little too much enthusiasm. “He went and found bandages for you. Can we keep him?”

I laugh and sign back. “He isn’t a puppy, Sneak. You know how I feel about sightseers and tourists.
”

Sneak nods and her eyes drop to the bandages covering my stomach.

“I’ll think about it,” I reply out loud and catch Klaus looking on, like he doesn’t have a clue what we’re talking about. Only hearing one side of the conversation he probably doesn’t. I peel away the corner of the bandage covering my abdomen and stop when I see something strange.

“What
is it?” Sneak signs.

R
ipping the bandage off completely, I reveal three Keeper slugs, lying against the flesh of my abdomen. The holes they tore through my skin are gone, along with any sign I’d even been shot in the first place.

Klaus sees this and his blue eyes keep flickering between
me and what was once a gaping wound. “What are you?” he whispers.

“If I had a single USC for every time I’ve been a
sked that question, I’d be somewhere far, far away, I can promise you that.”

I listen for Skuld, seeing if the crusty bastard’s
trying to knock around inside my head again, and settle down when I realize he isn’t there. But then again, I don’t feel any of the Zees and suddenly understand why. The poor sods in Sotercity have probably all been wiped out by that mob of pissy Grinders. The rest are likely too far out of range, which can only mean one thing: Skuld and his Zee army are moving on the capital. I jump up with a burst of renewed energy, tearing the remaining bandages from my shoulder and wrist. Rubbing the hardened flesh around the wounds makes it clear there isn’t even a scar.

Then I see Klaus scanning me up and down
; I feel a breeze and become acutely aware that I don’t have a stitch of clothing on. Sneak hands me my clothes and puts a hand over his eyes. I wanna say that men are pigs, but I think even a pig wouldn’t want anything to do with me, looking the way I do.

I’m nearly dressed when Sneak’s fingers start fluttering through
the air. “The ancient Keepers had tried to erase death.”

She’s talking about the documents we found
, underneath the keep, back when we were racing to stop Skuld from mutating himself into a super Zee. She’s referring to my wounds and how they’ve healed on their own. I can still recall, clear as day, the first Zee we came upon in the complex and how the flesh around his severed legs had slowly begun fusing together. But that must have taken several days and even then the changes were almost imperceptible. Whatever part of me was doing the healing, it was working faster than anything we’d seen before.

I sign to Sneak that it’s time to go.

“Where?” she replies back.

“The capital
. Where else?”

But she wasn’t being dense. I can see she really wants to ask about Ret, Bron and the others, but stops herself.
That wasn’t anything more than a fight between siblings,
she’s probably thinking.
Happens all the time. Why not just tell them you’re sorry and make up?
Sounds great in theory, doesn’t it? But here’s what she’s forgetting: I tried to kill them. Doesn’t matter that Skuld was the one pulling the strings. It happened twice and, frankly, they should have blown me away after the first time. Course I can’t help feeling weighed down by the whole thing. Our little group of misfits was the only family Sneak’s ever known and now it’s been fractured in a way she may never be able to accept. Sure, the thought tears me up inside, but it doesn’t change the fact that Skuld’s about to sack the capital, kill the Zee Queen and turn whatever’s left of the world into his own private paradise. Which is to say, a hell on Earth.

Course, Klaus is standing there
, blinking like a moron, probably trying to picture me naked again.

I gather my weapons and head for the door, thinking about how I can keep Skuld from sensing me as we approach. There is a chance that my temporary coma took me offline from
Zee central just long enough for Skuld to assume I had bitten the big one. Sneak and Klaus are following me to the door and I can tell she wants to ask about the plan. I’ve always got one and usually the thing’s half decent. There’s a kernel of an idea, germinating in my head, but it’s too early to tell if it has a hope in hell of working. Without the rest of our crew, I’m scared to admit that we don’t stand a chance. I turn to the Keeper guard and say: “If you wanted an opportunity to head back to your family, this is it.”

Klaus tries to straighten his nose and winces. “What family? I was an orphan, raised by Keepers. There’s nothing in Sotercity now
, besides streets filled with the dead.”

He isn’t the only orphan around. My parents were Grinders who drowned in the sewers beneath the city and Sneak never
talks about the parents who gave her up.

Happy homes breed horrible Mercs
. I might have just made that up, but I can’t help seeing a pattern.

This time I turn to Sneak. “You wanted a new pet. Now you got one. Just remember, he’s your responsibility.”

Sneak taps her leg for Klaus to follow and, when he does, I want to burst out laughing. I would, too, if the thought of where we were heading wasn’t tying my insides into knots.

Ret

“Ret, you sure this is the place?” Bron asks with a tinge of uncharacteristic doubt.

I turn to Dhal
, who nods, and I have to admit, White Rock doesn’t look at all like I thought it would. First off, it isn’t white. It’s more of a dusty gray, without a scrap of vegetation above or below. A twenty foot high steel door, recessed into the base of the mountain, appears to be the only way inside, but without Jinx and his wonderful bag of tricks, I’m not at all sure how we’re gonna get inside. Not surprisingly, Bron doesn’t look fazed in the least. We back away a good distance and he tilts his arm into the air, at forty five degrees, and lobs in a handful of grenades. We duck for cover behind a nearby boulder. A series of explosions and concussion waves hit us in quick succession. When the dust settles, I peek up and see the door riddled with dents and black powder splatter marks from the detonations but, even from our position, it’s clear the barrier’s been breached.

Bron winks at me. “Stick around awhile
, Ret, and I’ll teach you a thing or two.”

“Hey Dhal,” I say. “
I’ll pay you a thousand USC if you reattach those spatulas?”

The kid
giggles and so does Bron, in a rare moment of self-deprecation.

Oleg’s the only one who doesn’t even crack a smile. His weathered features are still smeared with soot from the
workshop fire. The loss of Azina and Sneak is a major setback and the old man’s silence lets me know that’s all he’s been thinking about since it happened. I shoulder my shotgun as we approach the entrance to White Rock, trying desperately not to let it get me down. Truth be told, a large part of me is thankful I was tossed over that workbench and knocked unconscious because I don’t think I could have shot Azina. I’d never whisper a word of that to anyone, especially Bron, but it’s true. He only sees the Zee in her now. She’s changed more in the last week than in all the time I’ve known her, there’s no denying that, but I know the old Azina is still in there, lurking beneath all that hardened flesh. And I’d be willing to bet what’s really stinging Bron is that she got the better of him. We know each other so well that the battle could have gone either way. If Azina hadn’t dropped Bron with a shot to his nuts, she surely would have died.

We approach the entrance and find a gap where the metal is bent and Bron slides his fingers in and begins exerting force to pull the two ends apart. The strength in these new arms is something special. Back in the day, the big galoot woulda popped a vein trying to move something this heavy. Now, he makes short work of it. Soon there’s enough space to enter and I catch a smug look on his face. I didn’t think his overinflated ego could get any bigger. Clearly I was wrong.

The air inside is cool and smells of grease. A long corridor descends at a slight angle. It’s wide enough for all of us to walk side by side. Air ducts and piping hug the walls like lengths of human entrails, stretched end to end.

“When did the Keepers build this place?” I ask.

“They didn’t,” Oleg says. “They found it, the way they find most everything. Prospectors. We believe it was a bunker, built by Dusters before the fall.”

“S
o they could hide from Zees,” Bron adds with disgust.

“
Even before that,” Oleg amends. “Back when the planet was governed by nations threatening to destroy each other with Atomic weapons. This isn’t the only one in existence, only the closest to Sotercity.”

“And the Keepers turned it into a hiding place for all the cutting edge technology they wanted to
withhold from the bumbling masses.”

Oleg doesn’t look happy with my comment. “Technology that the masses w
eren’t ready for,” he says. “I’ll be the first to admit that the Keepers have made mistakes but, without them, we’d all either be dead or living in caves.”

“Yeah,” Bron says. “Like White Rock.”

Oleg’s got a soft spot for the Keepers that may never go away. What’s that famous Duster expression? You can’t teach an old dog new tricks? It doesn’t seem to matter to him that the Keepers were the ones responsible for starting this whole Zee mess in the first place. Giving the Keepers the respect they’re due is just a bunch of hogwash, but there isn’t any sense debating the point, especially here.

We come to an area where the hallway splits in two directions. Dhal’s scratching his head, trying to remember which way to go
, and the group looks to me. I freeze for a moment. These kinds of decisions were always made by Azina. I’m so used to following her into hell and back that the notion of choosing feels like a monumental task.

“I guess we’ll go right.”

“You guess?” Bron barks. “Is it right or left?”

“How the hell should I know? This whole thing was Dhal’s idea.”

The air inside is getting cooler and cooler, but I can see beads of sweat rolling down Dhal’s cheeks. “Right,” I say. “We go right.”

Bron sighs and I can’t help but feel like the world’s most incompetent leader. I know non
e of them could do any better, but the thought doesn’t do much to settle my nerves. We head right and enter a room big enough to contain two entire districts of Sotercity, one on top of another. Weak lighting spills out of brass fixtures strung along the walls, casting thick shadows along the floor and making the ceiling look like a starless night sky. 

But
, as impressive as all this is, it’s nothing compared to the two copper figures up against the far wall, surrounded by scaffolding. They’re nearly twice the height of Goliath, but not nearly as sleek looking.

A voice in the distance tells us to halt. That’s when we first become aware that the room isn’t empty at all. Men in white lab coats
, swallowed in the enormity of the chamber, are perched over tables, working on bits of wires and metal piping.

Whoever the guard is, he’s coming toward us from an entrance at the far end, his weapon
at the ready. Bron walks ahead, waving an arm. “Don’t mind us, we’re just here to take these,” he shouts, pointing at the prototypes. A shot rings out and ricochets off Bron’s arm. The big guy turns around with a look of disbelief. “That stupid sonofabitch tried to shoot me.”

So much for Bron’s attempts at diplomacy.

The shot sends the men in white coats running for safety. An alarm sounds, echoing through the colossal chamber. Before us. the floor is dotted with rows of tables and shelves, packed with cogs and gears and every tool an engineer could want. From across the massive hall, I catch the sound of stomping boots and men barking orders. Dhal had said this place would be heavily guarded, but he also said these guys had been cut off from the rest of the world. As far as they know, things topside haven’t changed one bit.

We scurry for safety right as
a hail of bullets fills the air. Sparks explode all around us. A ricochet whizzes past my face and disappears into the darkness. They aren’t just trying to kill us, they’re trying to keep us pinned down, so they can finish us up close and personal. Dhal’s lying on the ground with his head between his hands. Oleg’s down beside him, not fairing much better. 

My shotgun is all I
have and the men blasting away at us are far beyond its effective range. I fire a few rounds in the air to keep their heads down, but it’s starting to look like we’re sitting ducks.

Bron’s got his back against the table beside me. The look on his face tells me he’s about to raise hell.

“We have to talk to them,” I shout over the whizzing bullets.

“I tried and they nearly took my
new arm off.” He cradles it like an injured cat.

A round clangs against a piece of metal pipe lying on the table and sends it spinning into the back of Bron’s head. It makes a wet sound as it connects and Bron touches the back of his skull, his fingers
running over the lump that’s starting to form.

“That’s it, if you’re not
gonna do something Ret, I will.” He pulls back the bolts on each arm, stands, and opens up with an ear shattering roar of fire. The new shells Dhal gave him might be smaller, but they’re louder and far more destructive than anything the big man had before. Tracers go stinging off into the distance. One round splinters a work table, another catches two soldiers lined up and cuts their bodies in two. Tools and bits of metal go flying into the air. If their heads weren’t down before, they are now. Perhaps just to drive the point home, Bron’s right arm jerks as he lobs a handful of grenades. I plug my fingers into my ears as they go off. The shockwave from the blasts hits a second later, like five slaps across the back of the head. I peek over the upturned table to see a cloud of swirling dust and debris where the soldiers had stood.

“No one needs to get hurt,” Bron says, although I’m not quite sure he understands there may not be anyone alive over there to hear him anymore. The shooting has stopped completely. I’m up on my feet now, shotgun pointing into the shadows where those initial shots had come from. I’m about to wave us forward when I feel a jolt of pain fire through every nerve ending in my body. I hear Bron cry out beside me, before both of us collapse to the ground. It feels like the time I decided to go toe to toe with a Merc named Gor, a six foot seven bruiser who smelled of turnips and got a kick out of picking on anyone he thought he could beat. I won’t lie and say I beat Gor, but the feeling I had when I woke up was a lot like this.

A group of soldiers surrounds us
and I see exactly how they did it. Distracted us with a feigned attack while the bulk of them circled around from behind. Smart. I’m still on the ground, getting a great view of their boots, when I’m yanked to my feet. My jaw feels like it’s been wired shut. Even Bron’s a mess and it takes five men to lift him.

Their commander looks like one mean sonofabitch. He’s glaring at me through a pair of ink black eyes, his face a moonscape of scars and craters only partially masked by a dark, wiry beard that reaches down to his chest. The men on either side of him all have beards, and what surprises me most is none of them look anything like Keepers. Oleg’s beside me, with his red robes and shortly cropped white hair, looking just as stunned. The contrast couldn’t be any clearer. Compared to this motley crew, Keepers aren’t much more than a bunch of clean cut librarians.

Two of the men are holding strange looking rifles I’ve never seen before. They send out some kind of electrical pulse, like the stun guns Dusters used on one another. Which is another unlikely feature for a group this rough around the edges, until I realize why. They wanted to capture us alive
for one simple reason. The dead don’t talk.

All four of us are led past
the gleaming bronze Titans, standing to attention on our right. Scattered around are the men Bron killed, or at least what’s left of them. A few bearded faces stare up at us with unmoving eyes as we hurry through.

The commander salutes the corpses as we go by. “They died a good death,” he says in a gruff, but reverent tone.

The comment seems to resonate with Bron. A thousand years ago, these two would have been sailing Viking warships up rivers, sacking anyone and anything in their way. I guess Oleg isn’t the only one who knows his history.

We’re brought to the mouth of the chamber where a row of chairs has been set up, all bolted to the ground. The guards bind us to the seats with heavy rope. No doubt this is where they intend to question us, one fingernail at a time, to find out why we’ve come. I knew it was a bad idea for Bron to open fire. Killing their comrades won’t have made this any easier.

A dirty looking man with a heavy limp and a dusty beard says: “This here’s Commander Tind. He hates liars and scoundrels and
, above all, he hates Mercs. In a minute, he’s gonna ask you a few simple questions and, for your own sakes, I hope you answer ‘em truthfully.”

I’ll never let it show on my face, but the fear’s starting to settle in for the first time. Not just fear that we’re all about to die horrible deaths
, or that Skuld is about to turn the world into a Zee playground. But fear that we failed to do anything about it. I can’t help but wish that Azina were here. She’s was the only one who knows a goddamn thing about diplomacy. Oleg’s too cranky. Bron’s too blunt and my sarcasm will more likely get us killed than anything.

Commander Tind folds his hands behind his back and stands before us, glaring with noticeable contempt. “You’ve broken into a top secret Keeper facility and killed my men. Tell me why I s
houldn’t just slit all your throats and throw your bodies into the pits.”

A
visible knot catches in Oleg’s throat and he swallows it down, hard, with an audible gulp. He may be an old sonofabitch, but he’s certainly not in a hurry to die. What I’m really worried about is Bron and that big ass mouth of his. There’s a smile on the oaf’s face and I just know he’s about to make things worse. I’m about to cut him off when I hear someone else speak and it takes me a second for the voice to register.

“We’ve come for the
Titans,” Dhal says, his teenage voice quivering with fear.

Dhal’s answer produces a burst of wild laughter from Commander Tind
’s men. “And for what purpose?” he asks and right there I get a sense of what we’re up against. These guys aren’t just trigger happy. They’re completely out of the loop. Oleg had mentioned they were largely cut off from the rest of the world, but now I know he wasn’t exaggerating. I’m about to feed him a whopper of a story when inspiration suddenly strikes. “We need them to kill Prior Skuld.”