Attack the Geek (10 page)

Nods all around.

Chandra spoke up. “We’d cleared out about half of what was outside when we dragged you two inside, but there was still one of the croc things, and about a dozen gnomes. It sounds like there are more now.”

“So we start with AoE from the door. Joe, that’s all you.”

The older man didn’t so much nod as bob up and down, rocking back and forth slightly.

He won’t last another fight,
Ree thought. But she’d thought that last time, too.

“Joe, you stay inside. We can toss out some pain from the door, but there’s no need for everyone to dive out there if we don’t need to. Plus, someone has to be able to signal Drake and Grognard if things break bad. Sound good?”

Uncle Joe’s relief was palatable. He shrugged off twenty pounds of worry, his face brightening. “I can do that.”

“Talon, you’ll need to be anchor, keep them out of the door and at arm’s length whenever possible. They can’t be allowed to swarm us when we’re trying to fight ranged.”

Talon spun the haft of her
naginata
. “Got it. Just like the Bridge Battle at Pennsic.”

“I’ll take your word on that,” Ree said with a smile. She’d never been, herself, but hoped that Talon would keep delivering.

“Chandra, I say you use that rifle until it gives up the ghost. Follow up Joe’s AoE with some suppressive fire as we get out into the tunnel, then mow them down. Let us know when the gun’s dry.”

Ree turned to Eastwood. “Eastwood, Smash.” That got chuckles all around. She didn’t need to tell him what to do. To hear him tell the tales, he’d been living the life since Ree was in grade school. He fought like a man possessed. Dude would be fine.

“Everybody good?” Ree asked. She scanned the group, looking for questions, but mostly, for doubt. Doubt in her, the plan, or whatever.

Somewhere along the way, I became the leader,
Ree realized. That’s what she got for being Grognard’s right hand, the Ivanova to his Sinclair (he was too stoic to be Captain Chuckles).

“Let’s go,” Ree said, and turned to the door, doing her best to tap into Ivanova’s confidence and epic badassery, even if she didn’t have the time to do it for real. But magic or no, Ivanova was a role model, and today, Ree would try to do both her and Grognard proud.

Ree hauled the door open about a foot, and then braced her shoulder to keep it from busting open.

She saw Uncle Joe tossing cards, and for another moment, he was a hero, a latter-day Gambit raining playing-card Hell on his enemies. She heard a firecracker rumble of several explosions, tortured screams from gnomes and other less-human voices.

After ten seconds of furious card-flopping, Uncle Joe stepped back and Chandra took his place, unloading with the pulse rifle.

“You like that, you sons of bitches! Woooh!” Chandra’s eyes grew wide with fury as she unloaded into the crowd.

That should be all the opening we need.
Ree pulled open the door and let it swing past her.

“Close this behind us, and listen!” she told Joe in a stage bellow, taking up her lightsaber and pushing forward with Eastwood and Talon.

Several mounds of dead gnomes and other creatures were smoldering in the sewer, not yet popped to ichor. But there were plenty of bogies left in the neighborhood. More gnomes rushed forward, and Ree flipped her lightsaber on to spear through two of them mid-jump. Ree stepped to the side and the creatures fell in two pieces behind her. She kicked another gnome, then brought the lightsaber back through two more as they rushed in to overwhelm her.

The weapon wouldn’t last long, since it’d been used heavily and there hadn’t been much time for it to recharge, maybe an hour in total. So she had to cause maximum damage in minimum time. She spun through the creatures, blade always moving, a flowing techno-trance dance of death and dismemberment.

It was awesome. She’d reached that place beyond exhaustion, that place she found sometimes at work, sometimes out dancing, and all too often in her crazy adventures. That place where the conscious mind had buggered off to sleep and all that was left was pure instinct and muscle memory, action driven by necessity. She’d fight and win, or she’d die.

So she fought.

Keeping her dance Cuisinart going, she turned and Greater Cleave-d her way back to the others, where Eastwood was dancing his own Pwntentantz. Where Ree was fighting with her best Ataru-esque form, melding her Taekwondo and other martial arts experience into an all-speed-all-the-time fight, Eastwood was kicking it old-school, reminiscent of Obi-Wan Kenobi. He stood his ground, the enemy moved around him, and then fell still. When he did move, it was in fits and bursts, deceptively fast.

In the middle, Talon swung the
naginata
around like it weighed nothing. She speared one of the bull-crocs through the jaw, then raised the haft of the
naginata
to block the swings of several skeletal creatures who fought with rusty machetes. She pulled out a hammer that Ree hadn’t even seen and smashed in one skeleton’s skull. Then kicked the other one right into the swing of Ree’s lightsaber.

If we keep this up, we might just get out of here
. The enemy’s ranks were thinning. She could pick a way through the gnomes on both sides of the tunnel.

Famous last words.

Just as she started to wonder which way they’d need to go to track down Lucretia, she heard the sound of a steam engine.

“What’s that?” Talon asked.

“Good question.” Ree cut through several more gnomes, then dodged to the side as another skeleton hacked down with a rusty blade. She slid her leg between the construct’s, then leaned in, knocking the creature off its balance and sending it toppling into the sewage. That bought her the time to jump off the ledge, stomp the skeleton’s skull in, then take another gnome out at the waist.

And then, as a whistle echoed down the hall, her lightsaber gave up the Force ghost, the weapon growing light and still, back to being just a high-end prop.

The gnomes wasted no time. Two jumped at her in concert, using their temporary height advantage to make for her face. She ducked and dodged left, reaching out with a jabbing punch to hit one in the gut. The other landed on her side, digging in as it climbed on her with all four limbs like a homicidal beast.

Ree spun with the extra weight, and reached over to pull the creature off her shoulder. Its claws bit in again as she pulled it off and slammed it into the concrete ledge. The gnome she’d punched came again. Facing only one this time, she reached around its spindly arm and yanked, sending the creature off course and tumbling to the ground at her side.

That move she’d picked up from an aikido instructor. It was also a babysitting hack, a way for dealing with aggressive kids without hurting them. The gnomes made those kids look like little cherubs.

There was another whistle, and Ree turned to see a ramshackle cart rolling its way toward them, one wheel each on the ledges that lined the tunnels. It had a mini-ballista of a crossbow mounted to the front, and held a trio of green-brown-skinned goblins. The goblins had wide, pointed ears and the large eyes of the Pathfinder RPG versions, which meant that they were just smart enough to be stupidly dangerous. Though that didn’t explain where they’d picked up the
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
war machine.

“Incoming!” Ree shouted. She pulled out her phaser, which was probably also running close to empty. She fired on the contraption, clipping one of the goblins. The creature dropped out of view, but not before a goblin with aviator-style goggles fired the mini-ballista. A baseball-bat-size bolt shot at her, and the only way for Ree to dodge was down.

She took a deep gulp and dropped prone, into the still muck and ichor of the fallen monsters.

Ewewewewewewewew,
Ree thought, then pulled herself out of the muck, fighting the sticky suction.
Well, at least I was wearing goggles,
she admitted, wiping the sewage off the lenses as she rushed forward to get onto or under the contraption before it could fire again. If she’d gotten some of that in her eye, it’d take an hour in a medical shower and a fifth of tequila to wash it off.

She fired the phaser at the ballista, but the movement threw off her aim, and she just caught a wooden box to the side, which was either some kind of support or a step for the diminutive drivers.

The two remaining goblins were cranking the ballista back into a ready position, but they were only ten paces out. Ree fired again with the phaser and hit a goblin square in the chest, but the beam cut off as soon as it hit, the weapon going dead. Five paces out, she drew the switchblade from her soaked apron and flipped it open as she jumped up to the ledge on her left, then jumped for the goggled goblin, leading with her knife. The creature ducked, cursing in a language that sounded like a mix of
Mars Attacks!
Martian and Gaelic.

Ree overshot the goblin, but landed on the rickety cart. She grabbed onto the cart with her free hand and tried to flip back around to face the goblin. The creature was on her as she turned, and she found herself grappling with a bitey-scratchy-dirty thing for at least the tenth time that night. But even her average strength let her overpower the goblin, and her knife struck home.

The goblin stopped struggling, and she dropped it from her blade and then tried to figure out how to stop the cart. There were levers, switches, and gauges all over, none of them labeled. And the only lighting was from the dim lights in the roof of the tunnel.

For lack of a better option, she tried to repeat what had happened to Grognard’s cart just a month earlier. She rocked back and forth, moving the cart with her. Then she jumped straight up, grabbed the cart as it rocked to the right, and pulled that direction with all her weight. The cart lurched, then pitched and rolled down into the central muck. The wooden cart cracked, and spindled itself into a wreck as the engine of the cart tried to keep moving.

Well, that’s done,
Ree thought, sighing from the muck. A wall of fatigue hit her with the sigh, and she had to force herself forward, sloshing back toward the door and her compatriots . . . whom she had left on their own when she’d spotted the cart.

Eastwood’s glow sticks still shone yellow, refracting through the mulch to illuminate the twenty feet of tunnel around the door to Grognard’s shop.

Eastwood, Talon, and Chandra were backed against the door by a cloud of animated weapons. Axes, swords, knives, maces, and more flew around one another, slashing and hacking at the group, moving on their own.

Huh.
Don’t see that every day,
Ree thought, flashing back to magic swords that flew around and fought on their own in
D&D
. But she’d never seen that many all at once, a golem of animated blades.

And all she had was a knife. Talon was parrying with insane skill, warding off three of the weapons at any given time. Eastwood’s lightsaber was out of sight, and he fought with a long German dagger. Chandra shuffled to the side, but a longsword arced out from the center of the cloud, cutting into her path and forcing her back.

But why hasn’t it gone in for the kill?
Ree asked herself.

Using her meager momentum, Ree jumped over to the opposite side of the tunnel, and came in to flank the weapon cloud, for all the good that would do. When she got close enough, the longsword spun around and sliced out at her, the rest of the cloud following.

“Get back inside!” Ree said, backpedaling to try and outrun the flying tsunami of weaponry.

“What about you?” Talon asked.

Ree’s knife more of a liability than a defense—parrying wasn’t an option. It was all-dodge, all-the-time. And she was already tired. Every juke and duck required her to dig deeper, and she didn’t know how much she had left before the shovel of her determination would hit the hard slate of burnout. “It’ll be easier for you to sneak me inside once you’re inside, right? Get a shield to ward this thing off.”

Ree ducked, hopped, and jogged out of the way of the weapon cloud as Chandra and Talon made their way back inside. Eastwood tried to bait the cloud himself, hacking at blades and hafts with his long knife. But the cloud had apparently decided on going after the muck-soaked skinny chick instead of the merely ambiently stinky scruffy-looking guy.

“Hey! Oy! Come at me, gorramit!” Eastwood said, laying into the far side of the weapon cloud as Ree huffed, keeping a quarter step ahead of the whirling blades.

The blades turned, and pressed in at Eastwood, backing him against the wall by the door. Ree’s lungs threatened to collapse in on themselves and lock the alveoli shut, so she stumbled as she moved forward to help Eastwood.

Through the cloud of weapons, she saw several plumes of blood and a tattooed arm. Then Eastwood disappeared.

Leaving her alone in the tunnel with the cloud of weapons, on the wrong side of the tunnel from any backup, and completely unable to breathe.

Fuck
.

Chapter Eight

The Right Hand of Vengeance

As her mind raced to figure out a way to get past the cloud of whirling weapons, Ree heard a voice from inside.

“Talon coming out!”

The door opened just enough for the warrior woman to slide out, leading with the huge scutum. The shield was big enough to cover both women . . . assuming Ree could get to her without becoming a pincushion.

“I’m running on fumes here,” Ree said, hyperventilating just to try to get her lungs to bellow. She knew it was the exact opposite of the best thing to do, but desperation and exhaustion had teamed up on discipline and were winning handily.

Talon shield-bashed the cloud of weapons, then shuffled to the side and hustled over to Ree. The big woman hauled Ree’s arm over her shoulder, then pulled her along as the cloud of weapons hacked, stabbed, and hammered away at the scutum.