Ascendance (9 page)

‘We don’t need a plan,’ said Dave, feeling his impatience getting the better of him. ‘We go in, we kick ass.’ He tried to get up only to find Karen’s hand on his arm. She reached inside his head and pushed his thoughts aside again. Pushed him back down.

‘Hooper, your stupidity is wearing me out,’ she said. ‘Just sit your ass down for a second.’

Suddenly feeling numb and extra stupid from her touch, he did indeed fall back on his ass, just as she had ordered. He wanted to tell her to fuck off, to get out of his head, but he couldn’t even manage that. It was like she’d stupefied him by laying one hand on his arm and
pushing
him somehow. Pushing what she wanted into his head.

He stared dumbly at the two cops she’d pushed a minute earlier. They were still gazing after her with the dopey expressions of contented milk cows – exactly how he felt now. He fought to throw it off as Varatchevsky ran to the firefighters. It was hard, like trying to wake up after a night on the tiles, but he concentrated and felt at least some of the fog clearing. She covered the distance to the fire tender as fast as a big cat chasing down its prey. The officer in charge over there, a woman Dave saw, jumped, startled by her arrival.

Dave felt a tightness in his stomach, wondering if Karen was going to push them too. But she didn’t appear to. He finally forced himself all the way out of the stupor. It was not pleasant, nor easy. The fighting continued around him, the gunfire picking up as a Hunn warrior leaped from a first-floor window, nuts out, landing on the roof of an abandoned sedan, snarling and whirling a heavy mace above its head. The car crumpled under the impact and the beast, immature but still massive and dangerous, jumped toward the median strip. A heavy volley of fire caught it midair, spinning it around, punching out fist-sized lumps of hairy meat. It landed in a tangle of limbs and jangling armour amidst the shrubbery dividing Park Avenue. An automatic weapon opened up, and then another, the harsh industrial chatter of machine-gun fire throwing off showers of sparks as the bullets chewed into chain mail and armour plate. The Hunn didn’t get up again.

Maybe it’ll get a line in a song, Dave thought. An epic ballad of a Hunn with big balls and no brains, killed by its own dinner.

He located Karen again, surrounded by firefighters who seemed to be in furious agreement with whatever she was saying, but not because she’d pushed them to it. They didn’t look like they’d taken a big hit off her wonder bong. A few nods, a fist bump and drivers mounted their trucks of their own volition. Dave heard them gun engines, and start to edge the big tenders closer to the police barricade. A few bolts pinged and thumped into the shiny red panels of the trucks, but didn’t slow them. The rate of return fire from the police increased sharply in reply.

Water cannon, much like the ones Dave knew from the fire boats out at the rigs, swivelled to bear on the building. Firefighters hopped down on the lee-side of their trucks, carrying a collection of axes and other cutting tools. They looked grim but resolved. Dave was beginning to get a really bad feeling about this. It started somewhere near the base of his nut sack, and climbed up into his body.

He dialled in on their conversation with Varatchevsky. Her voice was all corn-fed Midwestern goodness, of course. Not a trace of the steppes in it.

‘We are not unstoppable or invincible,’ Karen told them. ‘Contrary to what that dumbass might have told everyone.’ She jerked a thumb in Dave’s direction. ‘There is something in there, some sort of creature, and it’s stopping us from going in as hard as we might. But it’s not stopping you. It’s not even affecting you. Just us. We can’t do what we have to until you take it down. You have to get in ahead of us and kill it. It’s not a warrior daemon, it’s not even very dangerous, not to you. Just us. Once you’ve killed it though,’ she paused and scanned the entire group, making eye contact with all of them. ‘Once
you
have killed it, we will go in and slaughter every motherfucking monster in the house.’

They cheered and roared.

‘Fuck yeah!’

That came from one of the firemen, a man-mountain toting two axes like a baton twirler. Warat’s speech and the big man’s emphatic endorsement carried all of the others along, even the smaller, unflappable-looking woman in charge.

‘Chief Gomes?’ Karen said.

‘Yes, ma’am?’ She did not appear to be suffering from the push, or whatever it was.

‘I want a steady stream of water spraying across the third floor,’ Warat said. ‘If anything sticks a head out, I want you to hose them down, drive them back. Is that possible?’

‘It’ll make a hell of a mess inside,’ said Gomes. ‘But I suppose that’s not an issue, is it?’

‘No, it’s not.’


Dave was fully recovered, or at least he felt close to it. The paramedic tried to examine him again, but he gently pushed her away. Very gently. ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’m good. But if you’ve got anything to eat, I’ll take that. It’ll help. Seriously.’

He had to get over there, had to stop Warat before she sent these poor bastards in ahead of them. What the fuck was she thinking? They were going to die. All of them.

The medic shook her head. She had no food to offer, but Sergeant Mahoney produced half a pretzel from one of his pockets. It was wrapped in greaseproof paper. He shrugged, a sort of apology. ‘I was halfway done when all the shit came down.’

‘Carbs and salt,’ Dave said. ‘Two of my favourite food groups. Thanks.’
He took the loop of salty bread, still warm from the policeman’s pocket, and stuffed it into his mouth, wishing for a cold beer, and feeling a little guilty for doing so. He chewed and swallowed as quickly as he could without choking, watching the tides of fire flow back and forth, the iron rain of bolts and war shots coming down, hot lead and tracer rounds going back up, raking the building facade. He watched Karen Warat whip a dozen men into a killing frenzy. Or, more likely, into a madness for their own doom.

‘Stay here,’ he said and took off as quickly as he could without hitting warp.

09

D
ave exploded from the stone portico into the free-fire zone. The whole world seemed scoured by bullets and archaic missiles. There was none of the luxury of sweeping through in a slow-motion ballet dance. Dave moved as quickly as Karen, but crossbow shots and bullets still blurred past at supersonic velocities. He was aware of bolts and even war shots zeroing in on him. Iron barbs bit into concrete, throwing sparks. War shot punched deep into the soil of the gardens along the median strip. He had no doubt that if one of those big-ass Sliveen harpoons ran through his chest it would tear out his heart and lungs. He’d seen it happen more than once already, and he doubted a Snickers bar and a nap would do much good. Lucille keened a high, crazed hymn which helped to keep him focused on the end run.

Karen could see him coming now, they all could. The expression on the faces of the men, and those few women, huddled behind the protective bulk of the fire tender were aghast and open-mouthed, even though they had seen Warat move just as quickly a few minutes ago.

He charged in through the last of the arrows he’d called down on his head, struggling to pull up before running into anyone and knocking them clear across the street, or into the side of the fire truck. Dodging around the guy with the twin axes at the very last moment, Dave put his own shoulder into the truck with a bang that rocked it back on its axles.

His audience was stunned and mute.

‘Never gets old, does it?’ Dave grinned.

He expected to hear Karen, complaining about all the fire he’d drawn on them, but instead someone else, a man, shouted over the staccato uproar of gunfire.

‘Who gave the order to move these trucks in?’

It was the incident commander, the guy in the black polo Sergeant Mahoney had pointed out. He’d run in at the same time as Dave. Slower of course, and from another direction, but he’d timed it well, using the distraction to lessen his chance of being targeted. He was red-faced from the sprint, but even more so from his rage. He was shouting, almost spluttering with it.

‘You cannot redeploy assets without –’

Karen reached out, and tapped him on the forehead with one finger. He stopped ranting and his eyes went blank, fixed on her with vacant but profound absorption.

A few of the firemen stepped back, as if on instinct. The commander looked at Karen as if she might give up the meaning to everything that had happened here. But if she didn’t, that would be cool too. As long as he could just look at her. Forever.

‘What the hell did you do to him?’ Dave said. ‘Is this what you did to Trenoweth? To me. Fix it, now!’

‘No, I will not,’ said Karen in a voice free of any regret. ‘I had to push him a lot harder because we don’t have time for this. People, your people, are dying in that building, Hooper.’ She addressed the group which had gathered around them. ‘Who’s the ranking officer here?’

A cop in sergeant’s stripes looked from the lobotomised incident commander to Karen and back again. ‘Yeah, uh, yes, ma’am?’

‘Sergeant, once the water cannon are going, you need to go in with your shooters. Support Chief Gomes and her volunteers.’

Gomes hefted her axe and nodded to a dozen men and women in helmets with their own axes. ‘We’re good.’

Dave said, ‘No, seriously you’re not.’ He didn’t know whether the sergeant, or even Gomes for that matter, were truly acting on their own, but they paid him no heed at all. Everyone was locked in on Varatchevsky. He was starting to understand why all of the sects kept their pet threshers on call.

The sergeant keyed his radio. ‘All units, covering fire on my mark.’

‘Karen, come on,’ Dave pleaded, hating the weak sound of his voice. He knew what she was doing, the effect she had on them, because Urgon knew. She was ur Threshrendum, and the role of the empath daemon was to channel the warrior spirit, the
gurikh
of the Horde’s fighters before battle. To amplify the fears of the enemy, and the bloodlust of its own sect.

She didn’t need to touch any of them. She’d tuned them all like a fucking radio. He could even feel her will pushing at his, trying to shape it, but he threw off the effect with a grimace. It felt awkward and difficult, like heaving a weighted bar off his chest in the gym. The sergeant issued a string of orders, none of which Dave could decipher beyond guessing he was building some kind of assault formation. The firefighters hefted their axes and even a couple of chainsaws like a Hunn war band brandishing maces and swords.

‘Open fire!’

The world cracked open with the full-throated roar of metal on metal hammering away against stone and marble. Water cannon opened up, forcing Sliveen archers back from the windows. Here and there Hunn and Fangr still threw bodies out the windows from further back. A grandmother here, a stockbroker bitten in two there. A baby went out, followed by a small boy, both of them alive and screaming until they hit the sidewalk. If the orcs had intended to terrorise the human cattle, it was an ill-advised tactic. It served only to enrage them. Somewhere under his skin, Dave could feel Karin Varatchevsky channelling that rage into a killing frenzy. In his fists, Lucille sang her approval.

The already monstrous roar of gunfire grew. An explosion halfway up the building face blew out windows and rained broken glass into the avenue.

Gas line, Dave thought.

Fire broke out higher up in the block, but the water cannon did not lift their aim from the lower floors where they proved useful at suppressing the Horde’s archers.

Another pumper truck powered up its cannon and sprayed solid jets of water across the avenue, into the ground floor windows and doors, sweeping away a few Hunn and Fangr which had been waiting to receive the charge.

Dave shook off the last of his fugue and placed his hand firmly on Karen’s shoulder. He spoke in the Olde Tongue without realising what he was doing.

‘These are not warrior dominants. We dare not . . .’

Karen casually took his wrist and twisted, snapping it downward. It broke with a sound like a dry twig underfoot. Pain flared, followed by the dizzying heatwave of accelerated healing. It distracted him long enough for her to order the attack.

‘GO, GO, GO!’

Karen swung out of cover and took aim at the building, a pistol in one hand and the stubby little submachine gun in the other. It barked and strobed, but she squeezed off single shots from the pistol with such rapidity it was hard to believe she wasn’t firing a second machine gun. She dropped back into cover when the SWAT teams made it across. As Dave rubbed at his wrist, something huge and heavy crashed to Park Avenue in front of the apartments. He felt the impact through the soles of his feet.

A dead Hunn, a big one, leaking thick daemon ichor from a dozen gunshot wounds, all precisely targeted at the face, throat and the thinner mantle of bone beneath its shield arm.

Dave stood, dazed and unsure of what to do. A war shot, huge and impossibly fast, slashed past his head and exploded as it struck the gutter, spraying him with splinters of Drakon-glass. That focused his attention. He felt the little cuts and scratches on his face healing immediately, stinging and burning as they closed up.

He had to get in there – they both had to get in there – or every one of those men and women was going to die screaming. And for what? Why was Karen doing this? He knew Trinder would smirk and tell him, ‘She is what she is, Hooper.’

Under the maelstrom of modern firepower three teams of eight men followed behind black shields. The shields looked to be bulletproof but Dave presumed the plexiglas ones probably weren’t. He had no idea whether they’d provide any protection from
arrakh
. They reached the front door and pushed in behind the flash and crump of stun grenades. Gomes and her firefighters crowded in behind them, all racing for the same double doors. Dave thought they’d be cut down in the street, but Karen had one thing right. The water from the fire cannon created an effective screen and, along with the massed firepower, shielded them until they forced their way inside.

With the monsters.

‘Fuck this,’ he said. She might be a stone killer from the KGB but he’d be damned if he was going to let her use these people as her personal peasant militia.

Gunshots and screams echoed back across the street, amplified by the acoustics of the marble and granite foyer.

He tested his wrist, slapping Lucille against the palm of his injured hand. Aside from a slight twinge, it was healed.

‘You said we don’t have time for this,’ Dave shouted over the gunfire. ‘So we’d better go, right? No point letting them have all the fun?’

He grabbed her upper arm again as if to drag her along should it prove necessary. He was ready to jam the hammerhead into her face if she tried anything, but this time, Warat did not stop him.

‘Now we go,’ she agreed, but without any sense of urgency to catch up with all the men and women she’d just sent to their deaths. Even so, she did not hesitate. When they took off, they ran across Park Avenue, leaping bodies and cars, soaked by blowback from the pumper sprays still hammering the lower floors.

He wasn’t moving at warp, but he still travelled impossibly fast, sprinting, leaping, dodging one way and another, just like he had in high school football. Except for the magical sledgehammer and the crazy, hot Russian killer and all the daemons of Hell, of course. In other circumstances he might even have enjoyed the experience of his reclaimed physical prowess, had it not been for the carnage through which he had to pass.

Approaching the front of the building he could see, without having to count, all the cops from an earlier response effort, dead, splattered and gutted in the road save for one of them. The survivor was screaming, run through with the long lance from a Sliveen war bow. It had pinned him to a car, a little hatchback which had rear-ended a grocery truck. His back was to the building and Dave just knew that he’d been shot while trying to help the occupants of the car escape. They were mostly gone, except for the driver. She was hunched over the wheel, her head draped in the shroud of a deflated airbag while her would-be saviour spasmed and jigged on a skewer, screeching. The avenue was thick with the dead, mostly human, but leavened here and there with some grotesquerie from the UnderRealms. The Sliveen Karen had shot down. A couple of Fangr, chewed up by shotguns blasts. A headless Hunn, perhaps their leash holder. Human blood ran freely, pooling and drying in great lakes on the tarmac and sidewalk. Daemon ichor flowed thicker and slower, but still it flowed. Dave leaped and rolled as Karen did something to the submachine gun that ejected the empty mag with a flick of her wrists.

The volleys of the daemon archers on the upper levels of 530 had fallen away, but not completely. As though emboldened by Karen’s example, the rate of fire from the cops seemed to pick up. It sounded heavier too. As though new weapons had been added to the arsenal. Dave saw more men in body armour and tactical gear pushing into the contested space with them, using fire and movement to advance. They carried long arms, assault rifles firing three round bursts that sounded like trip hammers. They ran through the rainbow spray from the fire trucks. The shouts of the police, which had earlier been ragged and confused, became gradually more orderly and directed.

Dave knew that it was not just their training and their bravery. It was the human Threshrend running at his side. He could feel it coming off her. Waves of heat that got into his own blood and drove him on with the same power as Lucille’s battle hymn. He wondered if she was just as able to put the fear on the Horde.

If they had any fear, of course.

A small flurry of iron bolts fell behind them, triggering another torrent of gunshots from Karen. She ran, aimed and loosed fire all at once, a fluid blur of lethal intent. No daemon crashed to the ground this time, but she looked satisfied with her work, and Dave had reason to be glad, again, that she hadn’t opened up on him with a gun back at the consulate. No more bolts or javelins hit the road near his feet. They had timed the run perfectly, unless you were some poor bastard getting torn apart inside, Dave thought. Waiting for us to drag asses to the fight.

Karen squeezed off another of those concise bullet storms as they neared the foyer, and this time he saw the result through a window: a Hunn and two Fangr, edged weapons drawn, dancing like spastic marionettes. For one mad, distracted moment Dave was seized of a memory; Annie scolding him for using the word ‘spastic’. It was cruel, she said. Not as cruel as this bitch, Dave thought, when Karen cut the three daemonum down before they could carve into a group of shooters hiding behind their plexiglas shields. The orcs had probably drawn blades as soon as they caught sight of the strange, transparent shields: more of a provocation than a defence.

As Dave and Karen made the ruined entryway, the once beautiful frontage of 530 Park Avenue disintegrated under the destructive fire aimed against it. High windows shattered and spilled long fangs of glass into the street. Lumps of broken stonework rained down on him, some of them hot and smoking. Dave kept his head down and ran, his legs pumping with machined speed, his knuckles white where he gripped Lucille. He grimaced as he sidestepped a messy pile of body parts and gore. No clothing, he noted, in a flat internal voice that sounded a lot like a recording of madness. Probably somebody who’d been hauled out of their bed or the bath. The pile of meat and bone looked too big to have been a kid. But the remains of children defiled the street behind him. He shut his mind to them with an effort of will such as he’d never had to exercise before. In doing that, he also felt the amplifying effect of Karen on his
gurikh
fade away. No biggie. He didn’t need her encouragement to kick these hairy fuckers to actual pieces.

The ruin he would make of the creatures which had done these things would not avenge the atrocity. Dave knew that.

But he was going to ruin them anyway. Hooper recognised the swelling chorus in his head as he charged into the building. Something Lucille had learned from him, or his memories. Something she seemed to have chosen just for this moment, to carry Dave along with her.