Birthright-The Technomage Archive (31 page)

The other golems were beginning to notice him now. He ran toward the left wall and pushed himself away from it, using his body as a projectile. He slammed into an oncoming Annuban's chest. Again, the impact was not enough to knock it down, but it didn't matter. He had shoved the giant robot close enough to the Horrith's crackling staff that arcs of energy ran up and down its body, frying whatever was inside.

That’s one
, Damien thought. The lifeless Annuban toppled forward onto the Horrith that held the staff. The dead weight of the robot forced the electric staff into contact with the Horrith’s falcon-like head. Apparently, only its hands and arms had been designed to withstand the current from its weapon in anything. When the staff pressed into its body, arcs of current spread through the golem, and killed it.
You'd think we’d have thought of that
, Damien mused.

He took a mere second to admire his handiwork. The two golems lay on the ground unmoving, the glow in their eyes gone.
Two down
, he thought and looked toward the remaining six.

His skin tingled as he refocused his anger. The nanites responded well to intense emotion, and he could feel them as they readied themselves for use. Damien looked ahead. He had been right; there were six more golems ready to cut him down. Three Annubans and three Horriths. That meant three more stone halberds and three more electric staves trying to slice, stab, and bludgeon him.

The first two he had taken down had been simple enough, if taxing. He hoped the remaining six would be equally simple. The constructs noticed him exactly when he thought they would. Their eyes flashed in unison and maintained the glow that indicated they were focused on their next target. Damien swallowed and stood firmly in place. He hoped he hadn't lost his touch for Conjuring in a fight. He willed the machines out of his body; he needed insulation against the electricity more than anything. He figured he could avoid the axes more easily than arcs of energy.

He figured.

Still, a lash or two with the staff was all it would take to cripple or kill him, so he had to be careful. Once he felt the Conjured machines harden over his skin, he charged directly at the closest Horrith construct.

He dodged the Annuban’s axe to his left, but as he did so, two other Horrith guards spotlighted him with their staves. Blue-white energy surged into his body. If he hadn't insulated himself, he would have died, and barring that, he would have been scorched into immobility where death would quickly follow. The nanites absorbed most of the energy, and he quickly refocused that energy toward the nearest Annuban. He held his hand out and unleashed the blue-white energy from his palm, burning the construct's face beyond recognition.

The construct’s body kept swinging the halberd but without any means of directing it. Damien considered himself safe. If he were lucky, the faceless Annuban would strike one of its peers. Damien dodged the wildly flailing axe as it did just that. The great stone weapon dug itself deep into the gut of another Annuban, locking the two constructs together and severely limiting their mobility. They weren’t going to be as much of a threat for a while. The nearest Horrith shot an arc of energy at him, so Damien sidestepped.

Directly into the path of another Horrith's bolt.

He hadn’t prepared for the shock, and wasn’t able to redirect its energy as he had before. His legs wobbled, and he fell. He lay on his back as he saw a stone blade descend toward his head.

It did not take long for Damien to realize that he had made a mistake. He had lain still for too long, and he paid the price. He tried to roll to his right, but the weapon caught his left arm as he moved. Pain erupted in his side, and he lost feeling from the whole appendage. The nanite exoskeleton had protected the arm from being cut off, but it was still a heavy blow from a heavy weapon. Damien focused his fear of losing his arm into the nanites he sent to the injured arm to get it working again. He hated spending the energy on healing, but it was better than the alternative.

He got back to his feet. The Annuban who struck him was winding up for another blow, and the old man was not sure he could move in time. A sizzle came from his right as another arc of blue-white energy crackled and blackened the floor beside him. The Annuban swung, another arc of lightning came, and the old man dove forward putting himself dead center of the remaining four mobile constructs.

He crouched and swept his gaze around him. One Annuban and three Horrith's surrounded him. The only saving grace he could see in the situation was that the golems’ power and size, while formidable in combat, did not allow them to orchestrate graceful maneuvers and repositioning. Even though he was a large man, he was diminutive in comparison to the golems. His size was about the only advantage he had in this situation. As they were turning to face him, he was already Conjuring.

Damien knew he had to be careful. His left arm was devastatingly injured, and the only reason he was able to move it because he filled it full of nanites that took over his involuntary body functions—muscle control, moving his fingers, not holding his arm as dead weight at his side, that sort of thing.

If he took too long to Conjure his next attack, he'd be dead. If he did not Conjure it with enough power, he'd be dead. If he did not Conjure the right attack, he'd be dead. Conjuring was an art, one that Damien had begun teaching millennia ago as he and his colleagues first found the connection between human emotion and nanotechnology.

But Conjuring took practice and concentration, neither of which Damien had in droves at that moment. He had always been excellent at the big Conjures. Ennd's itself was testament to that, but he had only succeeded in Conjuring that because he had tapped into the pocket of energy, and it had been years since he had done anything of that magnitude. And while he was still technically near that same hotspot, the energy was being channeled away from its concentrated source and utilized all throughout the facility. Damien knew the Instance within the main tower of the building was where the majority of the energy was, but it was blocked off from him. He had introduced safeguards to prevent just this type of incursion. However, he had never expected that he would be the one trying to access it.

Without the energy reservoir from the site, Damien had to make do with the energy his own emotions created. He was still angry at the brutal nature of the copper-haired girl's death, and he was scared. After being alive for so long, he had heard word of many of his colleagues taking their own lives when they could not die naturally.

They were braver men than he was. He had always been afraid of the oblivion that he expected to come. Now, kneeling between four security constructs that had once protected him, he was scared that he might die and find out if his thousands of years of atheism had been the right path. He thought it was, but if these were his final moments, a part of him hoped that even one of the gods was real, that science was not the only truth.

If his Conjuring failed, he would find out shortly.

Damien knew that his abilities were not at their full power, and the best bet he had was to make an escape. He ducked as low to the ground as he could, feeling the
whoosh
of an Annuban's halberd sweep just above him. Energy crackled as the Horrith guards turned their bird-like heads to focus on him. He
needed
at least one of them to strike him, to pour at least as much energy into the nanites coating his body as he had used to maim the Annuban moments before. He hoped, though, that only a single strike would hit him while he prepared the Conjuring. He could probably—
probably
—withstand two strikes at once, but if he got a triple dose, his nanites would be too busy attempting to protect him from the attacks that they couldn’t do what he needed them to do.

When it came, the shock hit him like nothing he had ever felt. Maybe it was the close range. Maybe he was already expending too much energy keeping his arm from being a liability. Or maybe it was just that the Horrith stopped pulling its punches.

The reasons why didn’t matter when Damien felt the arc of electricity strike his back. As the energy began to burn into the nanites, he knew that he had one chance, one shot, one opportunity to live through this and find out who broke into his house and wanted him dead. For a brief second, he was thankful he had been able to Conjure himself invisible that night at his house. If he had been confronted with a situation like this as he first reintegrated his nanites, he would have been a dead man.

He saw the halberd crushing his left arm. He saw the two golems crashing into one another and convulsing as they died. And he saw Ceril's face as it was the last time Damien had seen him. When he had just been Gramps, and the world had finally been a simple place, at least for a little while.

He held onto that. He felt that sense of loss, of happiness, of anger and regret. He grabbed it, focused it into his nanites, and pushed outward. He redirected the energy from the Horrith staff weapon outward in all directions. The current kept coming in, and he felt the nanites in his back start to give way as the energy became too much for them to take. When he unleashed it, he felt that the force would never destroy his attackers. He was not strong enough yet.
I’m sorry, Ceril
, he thought. The pain from his failure, all his regret and anger, was picked up by his nanites. The tiny machines fed on his emotion, and Damien found himself surrounded in an arcing dome of purple-green energy that deflected all of the Horrith’s lightning and the Annuban’s axes.

Damien stood up. He was completely protected inside the dome of energy. Somehow, his rage, his fear—all of his emotions—were replaced by tranquility and calm. He held his hands out to his sides, palms up, and the purple-green shield pulsed once and expanded outward from the elderly technomage.

It was enough. When he had seared the Annuban's face off, it had been a directed strike, focused. Now, it was an omni-directional power play, and it was just enough to knock the constructs out of his way. The Horrith who had struck him got caught in a feedback loop and dropped its staff. The lone Annuban in the group stumbled backward as its axe buried itself deep inside its chest.

The other two Horrith sentries’ eyes crackled with electricity; Damien had given them matching scorches across the face, hindering their vision, if not completely blinding them. Electricity arced randomly around him as he ran past his attackers.

Smaller arcs of electricity fell from his feet as the nanites coating his body attempted to ground whatever residual current was in his system. He knew the golems would follow him, and he knew that he might run into more.

But he had survived—barely. The old man felt young again; he had not fought like that in quite some time. His feet carried him down the left-hand corridor from which the constructs had come earlier, toward—he hoped—the Library and Headmaster Squalt.

He heard heavy footsteps behind him; the security drones were coming after him. They had recovered. He knew that his attack wouldn’t kill them, but he marveled at the speed of their recovery. Damien could not tell how far back they were or how long it would be until they caught up with him. He never looked back to see, either.

Chapter twenty-Two

Swinton Marelotov hadn’t thought carrying another person’s supply pack would be that tough. It really hadn’t been at first, but the rocky, always-uphill terrain was having its way with him, and Swinton was getting tired.

He blamed it all on Harlo’s bag.

He couldn’t just leave it behind, either. She was the only medic they had, and if those angels hadn’t killed her yet, she would need her supplies to patch up any of them who got injured. From the way the past twenty-four hours or so had been going, there was likely to be quite a bit of patching going on before they were done.

A screech echoed all around him.

Swinton dropped to one knee as soon as he heard the sound. He ducked under an outcropping and tossed both bags on the ground at his feet. He peered around, doing his best to remain hidden, but saw nothing.

A second screech.

Another wonderful downside to being in the mountains was that everything echoed. If a single rock fell from a cliff, it sounded like an avalanche. Because of the echo and amplification, Swinton assumed there was just one angel screeching, but he couldn’t be sure. He also couldn’t tell where it was. He just knew that it was nearby. The rocky terrain echoed too much for him to locate its source.

It hadn’t even been an hour since Harlo had been taken, and he was already about to run into another freaking angel. He cowered under the minimal shelter he had found, and re-secured the packs he had to carry. If he waited just a little more, there was a good chance the screecher would go somewhere else and leave him alone.

Dust trickled down in front of his face from the edge of the overhang. He heard flapping, then a dull thud above him. Something landed on the rock he was using for shelter.

He heard another shriek.

Swinton closed his eyes and breathed deeply. He was shaking, and he felt like he needed to vomit. He thought back to his training with Bryt. What was it that Bryt always told him?

“
You have to calm down at some point, Swinton.”

Calm down, sure. Like he could be calm when he had watched the other four members of his team get kidnapped. Like he could be calm when he was the only one left.

But he had to be.

Bryt’s voice filled his mind. “If you’re spastic in a fight, you’re no good to anyone except your enemy. Take a second, calm yourself down, and look at your options. Most of the time, there are more than appear at first glance.”

Okay, he had stopped shaking. That was good. Not shaking meant calm. Next, options. What options did he have? He had his gun, his nanite sleeve, and his packs of supplies.

More dust fell in front of him. He heard scraping above him. He figured it was one of the big, purple men shuffling around up there looking for him.

As another screech sounded, he started shaking again, and had to take a few more breaths to calm himself before it became a problem. It was only going to be a matter of time before the screecher found him. The thing probably already knew he was there, anyway. Why else would it have landed directly on top of him? Swinton understood how low the odds were that it was a coincidence.