DIRE : SEED (The Dire Saga Book 2) (19 page)

BURBLE. SQUELCH.

Squishing noise echoed throughout the warehouse, drowning out the cries and sobs of the wounded. But not the screams, as those who could cry out through the coughing raised their voices and howled their lungs out in fear. Pure, primal fear.

I turned on my mask’s thermal vision, and looked towards the main room.

Something
was there. Oozing out of the grate in the floor that I’d sealed over when I moved in, shuffling an impossible bulk through the tiny space, more and more of it spreading out and expanding like an airbag from a crashing car. It couldn’t have bones, it shouldn’t have bones, with a structure like that.

Appendages that I dearly, dearly hoped were tentacles whipped around from the top, groping around the warehouse, and I watched the thermal images of the gangers I’d beaten up try to drag themselves away, or fend off the thing’s boneless grasp, to no avail. I watched in horrified fascination as the thing sorted through them meticulously, picking them up and ignoring their frantic, wheezing attempts to escape, bringing them in close and... licking them? It was hard to tell through the thermal vision. But after licking them, it placed them back on the ground.

Perhaps twenty feet of it was out of the grate now. I measured it, nodded. This had been the thing in the power station. This was the kaiju we’d avoided yesterday.

Suddenly, it tensed and the tentacles shot out. One of the gangers screamed, as the creature brought it up to an orifice, and devoured him in a single convulsive motion.

A suspicion tickled my mind, and I checked his number on the tac-net. My fear was confirmed. He was one of the gangers who had reported finding the flowers. The thing was here for the cargo, and had a way of tracking the pollen. Probably a sensitivity to the radiation.

My gaze fell upon the cargo containers at my feet. And the glittering specks of pollen that now adorned them.

The thing snorted and glass shattered as I snapped my view up to see it drive tentacles through the windows of the living quarters. Panting, eager moans reverberated through the structure, as the thing shuffled and flowed over the factory floor, seeking the scent that had drawn it hither.

I pointed an arm skyward, and set the gauntlet’s particle beam to a wide spread. The roof above me disintegrated with one shot, and I hiked the bundle of crates onto my back as I pushed upward.

But not fast enough.

Tentacles whipped and ripped through the drywall toward me, seeking the noise, seeking the pollen.

Very well, then.

Leaving the particle beam at a wide spread, I amped up the force, and opened up on the thing. At this setting, the intervening walls disintegrated, parting like paper to a broadsword, before striking the creature full on.

It didn’t seem to like that one bit. The answering roar shook the air around me, and windows burst in the nearby buildings.

As I jetted upward, I peered over my shoulder, switching from thermal sight to nightvision. The thing was still moving! Not only that, but it was pouring through the hole I’d made, hurtling itself like some sort of mass of... vines?

It seemed to be a knotted mass of vines, with fruit-like eyes hanging around the central mass of it. A large charred hole in the center of it marked where my beam had cored it, but the hole was already closing, black, charred plant-like fibers and oozing sap squeezing out by the bucketload, as it sealed the wound. Tentacles— no, the appendages I’d thought of as tentacles were twisted vines, studded with leaves and thorns.

I recognized those vines. They were the same sort of vines that had come out of the water, back when I’d had my little standoff with the Torchbearers.

I didn’t like the implications of that. Not one bit. But I didn’t have time to think about it. I needed to lose the thing, and fast.

I sped away over the rooftops, over the cordon of police cars set up at the end of the street, calling a warning as I went. Say this for the police in Icon, they were well trained for this sort of weirdness. They wasted no time in scattering as the plant kaiju squelched upward in a mighty bound, hit the street, and scrabbled through their cordon throwing cars into the buildings on either side as it pounded after me, vines moving like hundreds of little legs. It was faster than it had any right to be, big as two city buses put together, and slimy.

Aquatic? Yes. Couldn’t count on escaping into the ocean. Couldn’t outrun it, not at my speed. Couldn’t lose it, it had some sort of radiation sense that let it smell the pollen... the pollen. If I could get the pollen off the crates, then I could possibly lose it.

How? Burn it? I had the phlogiston projector, but at this range, that would melt the crates and destroy the flowers. The thing was a little
too
powerful.

But I didn’t need to shoot the crates directly now, did I? Not when there were so many other flammable things nearby.

I hurtled through the streets, and the thing crunched after me. Impossibly, it was gaining, no matter the obstacles I threw in its path. I glanced back, and saw that several of its vines had twisted together, to form leglike appendages the size of tree trunks. It moved with less scuttling and more bounding now, crushing cars and sending people screaming off the sidewalks, trying to escape the botanical abomination.

I’d have one shot at this. I turned my attention back to my escape, and set my sensors looking for just the right sort of car...

And a few seconds later I found what I needed.

An old hydrogen-celled truck, parked in front of a movie theater. I darted low, and opened up with the phlogiston projector, bathing the car with a crimson, pulsing ray as as I slowed, hovering over it.

BOOM!

The hydrogen explosion flared against my forcefield and I rolled with it, let it drive me up and higher as I held the crates out, bathing them in the worst of the inferno as I went. Behind me the beast screamed as the flames caught the edge of it, and I glanced back to see it hesitate, whipping flaming vines about. Didn’t like fire, huh?

The flames withdrew and I looked the crates over. Charred, but not cracked. And as planned, I didn’t see a single speck of glittering pollen. Pollen’s highly flammable after all. No way the creature could track me now.

Heat sensors on my back flared, and I realized my cape was on fire. Crap. I made a mental note to get something that didn’t burn so easily, next time. With regrets I hit the quick-release, sending it fluttering to the ground below. I’d
liked
that cape.

A scraping of metal from below, and I glanced around just in time to duck the car as it flew past me, hurtling into the night before impacting a Slappy Pizza billboard and crashing to the street below.

Oh. Right. The monster could still see me. I should probably do something about that.

I darted over a Fastee-Mart, and the creature went through the building, thin drywall, plexiglass and weathered girders collapsing under its bulk and sinewy vines. Screams from inside, and I winced as I turned, speeding along the street instead of continuing across the city block as planned. Damn it! I sped west, keeping to the streets. At least there the thing wouldn’t cause as much collateral— though I didn’t envy the drivers, right about now.

Couldn’t dive into the ocean to lose it; the thing was aquatic. Couldn’t outrun it, my armor just didn’t have the speed. Particle beams? Too soft. Anything that would hurt it would blow through, and cause collateral damage behind the thing. And that would only slow it down for a bit anyway. It didn’t like fire. Could I use that? Maybe.

Cars honked horns behind me as I fled, and blended with crashing, galloping, wanton destruction as the thing trampled after me. It wasn’t crushing all of them, it was actually fairly loosely put together, and the legs were thin. But they had terrible strength behind them, so when they came down, whatever was between them and the asphalt was pretty well smashed.

I tried to aim for the less-occupied streets. It was post-midnight so the traffic was light, thankfully, but it couldn’t stay this way forever.

Maybe I could go up? That seemed good. I started angling upward, and for a few seconds, I thought I’d escaped it.

I turned and looked, and a hurled car missed me by a matter of meters.

The thing was keeping pace under me, and as I watched, it scooped up a mini-van as it went, and started to wind up. I kept going up, and another car shot toward me, dropped out of sight.

And then, to my left, a flicker of light caught my eye to the west.

Speedlines. Fast approaching the creature.

I whirled in broad circles, keeping the kaiju moving below me, moving quickly so that it couldn’t draw a good bead with its hurled cars. I kept its attention focused on me, right up until the point that the speedlines blurred out a few hundred feet from the thing. The Torchbearers were here, and as I watched, the thing flinched and roared, as someone tore up a lightpost, ran down the street, and started beating the hell out of it with the long metal pole. Serpent Tina most likely. I was glad she hadn’t gotten her hands around me for more than a few moments.

I watched for a minute, debated blasting it, but decided against it. At this range I couldn’t rule out friendly fire against the heroes, and besides, the kaiju was no longer my priority. Now that the heroes were here to beat the thing, and minimize further property damage and risk to civilians, I had no further stake in fighting it.

I flew east, glancing behind me as I went. The creature’s attention seemed fully occupied by the junior heroes, and no speed lines pursued, so I figured I was clear.

Four minutes later, I dropped down into the parking lot behind Slappy Pizza, to find Martin waiting with the van. We loaded the crates, and I slid out of the armor. I had a layer of sweat on me, and fatigue filled every portion of my body. Now that the adrenaline was gone, I had nothing left to run on. I pulled myself into the front seat of the van, pulled my mask off, and let the back of my head hit the seat with an audible ‘thump’.

“Dire?”

“There’s more than one kaiju.” I replied.

“Uh. What?”

“The vines at the lake when we Chaingang and the armor hit the decoy convoy, those were part of a kaiju. It just kept the bulk of itself below the water, that’s all. And it was too close to when we arrived at the rendezvous point, to find the thing occupying the power station. So there are at least two of them, probably more.”

“How many you think are out there?”

“Don’t know. It’s amorphous so it can fit in hard-to-find places, and looks like a mass of plant material to the unwary. But there have to be several out there. It was tracking the radiation from the crates, and the crates were only open a matter of minutes. So the one Dire fought tonight had to be fairly close.” I rubbed my eyes. “Vector. Professor Vector has to be their master. He’s seeded these things through the city.”

“Hold up. The crates got opened?”

“Kriegers. They’re taken care of.”

“You kill them?”

“No. The cops have probably found them in the lair by now, rendered helpless by their own teargas and all the beating that Dire could give them before she had to depart. The kaiju killed a few.”

“Alright, that ain’t so bad. But, uh... where are we gonna go now?”

I tried to clear my mind, to think. But I was just so tired. We needed some place that could be secured with a minimum of effort, something out of the way, with a decent security system. Some place Professor Vector wouldn’t look.

“The power station. The planned site of the rendezvous.”

Martin considered it, as he pulled onto the highway. “You’re thinking he won’t look there, since he already looked there once.”

“The cameras on the warehouses around it are easily hacked. We can use them to watch the place. And the facility on the end rarely sees use. We can slip the van in there, for a day or two anyway.”

“And if he’s still got a kaiju waiting there?”

I shrugged. “Dire’s still got thermal sight. The thing will show up if it’s still there. If it is, we go get a cheap hotel room somewhere.”

Martin nodded. “Sounds legit.”

I shut my eyes, and sagged back into the seat. Didn’t realize I’d fallen asleep, until Martin was shaking me awake.

“Dire? We got a situation.”

I opened my eyes, blinked the fog away. The power station was ahead of us, and there, illuminated by the headlights, was Vorpal. She was wearing the same clothes I’d loaned her when Timetripper nabbed her, and looked no worse the wear for her jaunt. She was standing next to the open gate to the station, gesturing us in.

I slid my mask on, and activated her channel on the sub-vocal network. I’d never deactivated the thing, after the job was done, and now I was glad of it.

“Vorpal?”

“Yah. You coming in or not?”

“What the hell happened?”

“Complicated. Look, there’s someone here you need to meet.”

I frowned, and paranoia stirred within me. Her words struck me as ominous.

“Who?”

“Timetripper.”

I snorted. “And she should do this why?”

“A different Timetripper from a different time. Less-inclined to murder you. Says he needs to talk with you.”