Assault or Attrition (13 page)

Her words
snapped me out of my daze.

Peyton,
Valentina and Mac. They were on their way here. Right now.

“I can see the
gears moving,” she said calmly. “It is written all over your face.
Do you leave your family and friends out in the world, exposed, and
hope they can hide from us? Maybe, but I do not think so. You are
calculated and require control. You want them here where you can
watch them, protect them...but you cannot open the doors without
letting us in. And if the jet is close enough, we have a
solution.”

With those
words, her second guards – a tall bearded man who looked more or
less like his counterpart – stepped forward. He removed his glove,
revealing a white-hot glowing palm. He extended it towards a
towering pine tree in the distance and fired, slicing it in half
with a plasma bolt.

“Not enough to
break down your castle,” she said, “but a powerful enough to
destroy an incoming jet, perhaps.”

I turned and
walked away, triggering the massive blast doors to slide shut
behind me.

Valeriya
shouted a few final words as I left. She wished me luck, and that I
was going to need it. And she let me know that it was just a matter
of time before she found her way inside. By assault or attrition,
she promised that this siege was going to end – and that the body
count was going to start piling up.

I didn’t reply.
I wanted her to think that she’d defeated me, crushed my spirits –
so it was important to give her the last word. Without knowing it
she’d given me just a little too much information. I had my next
move planned before the doors rumbled closed.

Peyton said I
was the same person after leaving The Arena, but that couldn’t be
further from the truth. I’d seen death. I’d experienced suffering.
And when Cameron Frost threatened my friends, backing me into a
corner, I learned something about who I am: that I’ll do a hell of
a lot more to protect the people I love than I will to protect
myself.

Gary’s death
gutted me out. It destroyed a small part of me to watch the man my
sister dedicated her life to, and the father of the two most
amazing kids in the world, die so needlessly.

His death was
going to mean something. I would make sure of it.

“
Swing
around to the north end,”
I shouted into my wrist-com.

“Copy that,”
Mac replied, his voice trembling. Valeriya’s henchmen had already
opened fire, pocking the fuselage of the jet with a handful of
bullets. A slug cracked the cockpit window and I heard Peyton
scream.

The jet circled
around the fortress, hovering low into the tree line.

The gunmen were
standing on the runway, blocking the main hangar. As far as they
knew it was the only place to dock an aircraft, so I’m sure they
were surprised when the G12 passed overhead, and prepared to land
in a small secondary hangar that was embedded into the side of the
fortress, inaccessible by foot.

They scrambled
to reload their weapons as the doors cracked open. Only a narrow
thicket separated the jet and the shooters, and the ice-covered
pines weren’t providing much cover.

The hangar
doors opened at a glacial pace, drifting apart as a hail of bullets
pounded the side of the hovering aircraft.

“Think you can
open these doors any slower?” Mac screamed. “I’m getting hammered
out here!” The aircraft was bullet resistant, but it wasn’t
designed for combat; it certainly couldn’t take much more of the
punishment that two military-grade machine guns were dishing out,
unloading their clips in rapid succession.

“Something’s
wrong,” I replied frantically. “They
should
be opening
faster. I think the gears are frozen.”

“We’re
aborting,” Mac announced, pulling the jet out of position.

“Do it,” I
shouted. My eyes were glued to the monitor, and I watched as the
craft ascended and cleared the tree line. “Get to safety and we’ll
make a new plan.”

It was a second
too late.

Valeriya’s
superhuman had fired a beam of energy from his hand, slicing off
the jet’s right engine in a fiery blaze, along with the wing. The
aircraft fell into a flat spin.

As the remains
spiralled towards the ground a secondary explosion detonated,
littering the forest floor with fragments of charred metal.

Welcome back,
TheRealMox! You have ... one ... new message in your Private
Hive.

P!nkM0nst3r:
How was that?

TheRealMox:
great, if they were listening in i’m sure they
bought it

P!nkM0nst3r:
I thought the scream was a nice touch. :)

TheRealMox:
very realistic. Mac could use some acting
lessons though

P!nkM0nst3r:
How long is this tunnel? We’ve been walking for
ten minutes.

TheRealMox:
i’m coming down to meet you

Valeriya was
brilliant, but you can’t fight biology – she was still just a
kid.
She was impulsive, and couldn’t resist the urge to show
off her henchman’s superpower, taunting me like a child wielding
her father’s gun.

Valeriya knew
my private jet was on its way back, and that I wouldn’t turn it
away. She was right: I wanted my friends here. I wanted them safe,
inside Fortress 23 where I could protect them. She was desperate to
take out the aircraft in mid-flight, twisting yet another knife
into my gut. Hurting the people I care about was her most effective
weapon, and unlike Cameron Frost – who in retrospect, had a shred
of humanity – she had no qualms about pulling the trigger.

Not to mention
that destroying my shiny new G12, a symbol of decadence for the
ultra-privileged, would undoubtedly make a bold statement to her
followers. I was, after all, not
just
‘The God Slayer’; ever
since winning the Arena Mode tournament I was one of the elite. I
represented everything the poor and the middle-class
despised...everything that
I
despised, to be honest. I
hadn’t even been wealthy long enough for the irony to sink in.

My plan was
simple enough: have Mac fly in low beneath the tree line, and hover
to a stop a few kilometers south of the fortress. It was a location
by a small frozen river at the edge of the forest – right at the
entrance of the South Tunnel.

It turns out
that the long underground pathway I had discovered, which was
protected by a circular steel door, led to the mouth of a narrow
cave. London had been very helpful in uncovering its mysteries. The
entrance to the South Tunnel, on the far wall of the cavern, just
appeared to be stone from the outside. But with a few
voice-activated keywords the hidden door rumbled open, revealing
the long narrow path back to the fortress. Like the castle escapes
of medieval times, Frost had included a similar feature here in
Fortress 23, so in case of emergency you could get to safety on
foot, escaping into a remote part of the forest completely
undetected. We were just using the tunnel in reverse.

Getting Mac,
Valentina and Peyton to safety was phase one, and it was the
easiest part of the plan. The second part relied on our wrist-com
conversation – the one that continued as the jet was being flown
directly into the line of fire. Valeriya was leaving nothing to
chance, which meant that she was almost certainly monitoring all
incoming and outgoing transmissions. I’d bet the house on it. And
if she
was
listening in, I had to give her a realistic
enough reason to have the jet hover just a few hundred feet from
her gunmen, giving them a nice big target to shoot at.

Remote piloting
the jet from the South Tunnel, Mac was able to move it into
position, and the only thing left was the voice acting (I wasn’t
expecting Shakespeare, but even under the circumstances I thought
he was phoning it in.)

Letting her
superhuman lackey slice the jet down with a plasma bolt was the
final phase of the plan. I knew that it would be a spectacular
wreck, but the secondary explosion was just a happy coincidence.
With that much damage, it would take days to sift through the
remains, if they even bothered to do so. They wouldn’t locate any
bodies at the disaster site, but after crash like that I don’t know
if they’d expect to.

Either way, my
friends were safe, and I’d bought a little time. At least enough
for the authorities to arrive and arrest Valeriya and her
mercenaries.

I took the main
elevator down to Sub Level 7 with Chandler in tow. We circled the
stark white hallways until we reached the entrance to the tunnel
where Valentina, Mac and Peyton had just emerged, pushing the heavy
vault door closed behind them.

Peyton rushed
towards me and threw her arms around my neck, burying her face in
my shoulder. The smell of her skin, the wave of pink hair brushing
my face as we embraced – it was a time machine. I closed my eyes
and I was back in The Fringe, walking through the front door of
Excelsior Retro Comics with the bright morning sunlight streaming
in behind me. She would always run to greet me, even if she was in
mid-sentence chatting with a customer. For a second I could almost
smell the burnt orange carpeting; the ragged eyesore that we all
begged Gavin to replace, but he never did. It reminded him of a
simpler time. If there was anything I could relate to it was the
powerful allure of nostalgia; how an object, even something that
was seemingly trivial, could take you back to someplace special.
Someplace that you wished could be preserved forever in a pristine
collector case, shiny and new; never to age, or change, or be
ravaged by time. But now, that special place exists only in your
memory. I’d always used my comic collection for that very same
purpose, though I’d never experienced it while holding onto a
person.

She drew back
and wiped a wayward tear from her cheek, quickly and discreetly, as
if I’d be too distracted to notice. “I’m
so
sorry,” she
said, clearing her voice. “I never knew things were this bad.
What’s happening in New York, it’s—”

"You’re here,
you’re safe. That’s all that matters now." I squeezed her arms
gently and rubbed them for warmth. She was wearing only a thin
black sweater, sorely unprepared for the brutal weather she’d
encounter in Northern Canada. “And we’re going to get Gavin here,
too. Everything will work out.”

She smiled, and
a fresh pair of teardrops rolled down her cheeks. I almost broke
down myself. Watching Gary lose his life was agonizing, and the
thought of losing someone else, especially Peyton, would have
pushed me past the breaking point. I was doing everything in my
power to keep myself together.

“I feel like
such a bitch,” she said, laughing through her tears. “I practically
kicked you out of my life when you said you were in danger, and now
the world is falling apart.”

“Maybe we both
needed space.” I replied with a shrug. “Absence makes the heart
grow fonder and all that bullshit.”

“Maybe,” she
said softly. “You must have been so lonely here the last few
months, with just your staff to keep you company.”

Chandler was
escorting Mac and Valentina to the infirmary for a routine
post-mission checkup (they didn’t sustain so much as a scratch, but
it was procedure – something that Chandler rarely deviated from)
and I hadn’t noticed Brynja approach from behind, standing at a
distance. I also wasn’t aware that she was still in one of her
cosplay outfits, dressed head-to-toe like Wonder Woman. She’d
printed every accessory; boots, gauntlets, a tiara, as well as the
gold Lasso of Truth that dangled from her belt.

I didn’t spin
around to see the blue-haired Amazonian until Peyton cupped a hand
over her mouth, her face reddening. “Oh, I didn’t... know that you
had company. Before all this happened did you hire
some...entertainment?”