Fallen Stars (The Demon Accords) (37 page)

They all froze, frightened senseless at the look in her eyes. Or maybe in mine.  Or possibly in the lava-red gaze of the wolf between us, looking at them.

The library lady had moxie.  She licked her lips, took a breath, and began to speak.

Chapter 40

“The floor below is a series of different test zones," the librarian lady said.  "Kinda like movie sets.  Different types of spaces. An apartment, city street, a mini-forest, like that.  Most of our hunter-killers are aerial, similar to the small recon drones that infantry currently carry only with a small charge of C-4 in them.  One is a multi-fan hover drone with mounted weapons.  None of those will work below.  So we have Spiders, Tanks, and Wasps.”

“Spiders, Tanks, and Wasps. Oh my!” I said automatically.  Tanya gave me a funny glance, then turned back to the nervous scientist, making a
go on
gesture with one hand.

“Spiders are nine-legged crawlers that can attach to almost any surface.  About the size of a kitten.  Each is armed with three stacked-munition barrels.”
 

“Stacked what?” Tanya asked.

“Stacked-munitions.  Chemically propelled ballistic rounds that are fired electronically.  No moving parts, fastest rate of fire possible.  We stole the tech from a company called Metal Storm.  Each spider has thirty shots.  There wasn’t time to make many rounds with silver or depleted uranium, so each only has ten of those, alternating.” She drew a breath, pushed her glasses back up on her nose, and continued, her voice taking a lecturing tone.

“The Spiders are fairly fast, but they have four legs to a side. The ninth leg is on the end and acts as a brace for when they fire their guns.  It has to be locked down or the recoil sends them flying.  Tanks are mini-tracked vehicles like little remote-controlled toy tanks.  They are slower, but tough, as they have armor of a sort.  They also carry thirty rounds, but the caliber is larger, more powerful.  Wasps are shaped like their namesakes and have needles that usually deliver a neurotoxin.  Since those don’t affect you, these are filled with silver nitrate.  We didn’t have any spare DU to suspend in a solution, so the Wasps won’t have much chance of hurting
you
,” she said with a nod in my direction.  “We think the presence of DU in the bullets in their guns will stop you from affecting the Spiders and Tanks with your particle emissions.”

I must have looked puzzled at the last part.  “She means your aura,” Tanya said.

“There are nine Tanks, ten Spiders and maybe twenty of the Wasps,” she said.

“Twenty-two Wasps,” a ginger headed nerd with a big nose interjected.  He immediately looked like he wished he hadn’t said anything.

“We are going to leave our friend up here with you,” Tanya said, patting 'Sos on the head.  “If you’ve lied to us, he will kill you all.”  Under her hand, the wolfy head became ursine and three times larger as he changed to Kodiak mode.  A second scientist pissed his pants at the transformation.

Tanya turned and studied the room, then moved to a pair of modern-looking computer chairs.  They each had a red padded seat and a back rest formed from aluminum that had holes like Swiss cheese.  She ripped the steel uprights that held the backrests off the chairs and flattened out the curved holey aluminum with her foot.  Then she picked them up and held the steel uprights, swiping them through the air like swords or… fly swatters.  After watching her improvise her new weapons, I went to the steel table and cut it in half with one mono-edged hand, giving me two smaller, more wieldy ballistic shields rather than one bulky one.

“The original design had a staircase on either side of the silo, but Director Hasta had them chopped up a year ago.  So to get to another floor, you have to cross the full length of each floor, back and forth.  It’s a pain in the ass to get anywhere if you’re walking.  There is an elevator, but Hasta and Guillotine took it to the bottom.”

“Okay, what’s with all the spear and blade nicknames?” I asked.

The scientists all looked at each other and shrugged.  “It’s their thing—agents in rebus.”

“If you get past the drones… er…
when
you get past the drones, the next floor down is where we keep the Kongs and Bulks.”

We just looked at her.  The ginger guy spoke up.  “Kongs are modified gorillas—enhanced with human stem cells and controlled by an implanted behavior chip.  Bulks are, or
were
, humans that have been modified.”  He got nervous and looked at the lead scientist for help. 

She cleared her throat. “We have a vampire captive and a werewolf captive down on the lowest level, where your goddaughter is.  We’ve been harvesting virus and blood plasma from them both, killing the virus and injecting a pair of volunteers with repeated doses.  It’s like the pills we give the regular soldiers but they get at least two shots a day, plus we removed some were stem cells and forced them to replicate, then used 3D printing to create additional muscle, which has been grafted to them.  They’re… big.”

“Sounds like a boss fight,” I commented.  One of the nerds nodded vigorously.   “Yeah, like every video game since Duke Nukem.”

“Never mind that. Are you ready?” Tanya asked.

I looped a makeshift shield over each arm and held a reloaded pistol in each hand.  I nodded.

“Let’s do it!” she said.

The single span of stairs led to a fire door.  Tanya grasped the handle and found it unlocked.  She glanced at me, then yanked the door.  I bolted through, senses alert, 3D picture immediately starting to form of the room.  I led with my left hand shield up—which was a good thing, as it immediately took fire from a black, multi-legged nightmare hanging on a doorframe and a squatty little tracked thing that looked like a military version of a nerd’s battle bot.  The Kimber .45 in my right hand spoke three times fast.  The Spider disappeared in a spray of metal, but the bot on the floor just shrugged off the two heavy slugs that slammed into it.  The black metal spike that suddenly speared it was a different story.  Tanya’s throw was strong enough to pin the little killer to the floor long enough for me to smash it with a table shield.  Four quick smacks and it was extinct, and my table was a little bent.

After that, we got busy.  The early action drew most of the other drones our way.  We separated but stayed linked.  Our actions meshed as we drew on each other’s senses and skills.  I shot Spiders while Tanya killed Tanks with spikes and spearing thrusts from her tungsten swords.  Two separate swarms of glittering, insectile, flying mini-drones attacked from opposite sides.  I killed one whole swarm with a burst of aura, and Tanya used one of her flyswatters to spatter most of the other swarm.  Two got through and stung her.  I crushed them with my fingers, then sliced open her arm and shoulder with a knife borrowed from her.  Squeezing each bite, I forced most of the silver fluid out of her, then dribbled my own blood onto the wounds, which immediately healed over.

“Better?”

“Yeah, still a little in me, but not enough to matter.”

We cleared the floor, rooting out another tank and four more Spiders that had not come to attack but instead hung back in ambush.  At the far side, before I could open the stairway door, Tanya’s phone buzzed.  She looked at it, texted a reply, and turned to me.

“The others are here.  They cleaned up the last roving patrol and are following down.  I told them to grab the geeks upstairs.” 

Taking another moment, I checked over my guns.  The Kimber had one seven-round mag left and the 9mms were both empty.  I still had the .40 Beretta with one additional mag.  Tanya had recovered three spikes, the others too badly bent or mangled to be useful.  Her swords looked pristine.

The door to the sixth level was different—thicker, more massive.  It had a big electronic lock on it that controlled four giant bolts of steel.  It was locked.  I unlocked it by slicing off the bolts one at a time with a mono-edged finger.  The door swung open, ponderous with mass, and clanged to a halt against the stairway wall.  The revealed room was decked with diamond-pattern steel plates, and the walls were plated a poisonous dull gray that immediately sapped my strength.  Where the fuck had these guys gotten this much depleted uranium?

Nothing happened, so we stepped further into the room.  Four big sections of the plating slid noiselessly aside on two different walls.  Black, empty space.  Then there was movement in one and a huge figure filled the doorway.  Black-knuckled hands like twenty-pound hams silently pressed on the floor as the big male silverback gorilla shuffled out, peering at us with black eyes.  There was movement in the doorway next to it as another ape appeared.  This one studied the first for a second before turning his eyes our way.  On the other wall, a pale form bent over to clear the doorway, and a wall of white flesh stepped out.  Seven-and-a-half-feet tall; four or five hundred pounds of naked muscle turned to look at us.  Bald, with grotesquely mishapen feet and hands, but massively muscled.  He was so heavily built that he had no neck, just trapezius muscles like bridge abutments.  Another figure stepped out, this one a foot shorter and two feet wider.  Also bald and overbuilt, wearing a look of absolute hatred and rage across his features.

“What’s a boss fight?” Tanya asked, eyeing the enemy.

“In every first person shooter video game, there always a stage or stages where the player has to fight an almost invincible opponent or two.”

“Oh,” she said.  The first gorilla roared and charged, his companion thundering behind him.  The Bulks just stood and watched, animal cunning glinting in their eyes.  Tanya and I flipped over the apes, landing in the middle of the room.  The apes slammed to a halt by the stairway door and spun around.  The two Bulks split apart and just like that, we were right in the middle of them.

When fighting multiple opponents, the best idea is to use terrain or your own mobility to make them come at you one at a time.  That looked like it would be a problem up until a giant black-and-tan bear paw came through the stairway door and hooked four-inch claws into one of the gorillas.  The big ape had to weigh six hundred pounds, but he simply flew backward through the door into the darkness, where a roar that shook the building greeted him.

I took Awasos’s distraction as an opportunity to jump to the ceiling and Cling crawl over the shorter Bulk.  His beady eyes tracked me and he squatted, tensing giant leg muscles.  When he jumped, I moved, and his head slammed into the ceiling.  While it was there for a moment, I emptied the Kimber into its skull.  It fell back with a thud, then amazingly sat up, shaking the shattered wreck of its head.  I dropped behind it and emptied the Beretta into its back, about where it should house its heart.  Then I changed mags and walked the last fourteen rounds up its back, busting every vertebrae along the way.  He decided to call it quits at that point and timbered over onto the steel decking.

I looked over at my vampire in time to see her cleave the tall one’s head from his shoulders.  It fell down and landed near both already severed arms.  Bulks zero, heroes two.

The last ape looked confused, unable to decide who to attack or what to do. 'Sos took the decision out of its massive hands by barreling through the door and slamming it to the ground with a pile-driver paw strike.  The ape bounced up, but its five hundred pounds was tiny compared to the more than half-ton bear.  I have no doubt that a regular Kodiak would have killed it, but my supernatural one simply destroyed it.  Three blurring fast paw strikes, and every bone in its body was shattered.

Tanya looked at me as she wiped her swords off on the Bulk’s body.  “Boss fights are kind of a letdown.”

“Gimme a break. They’re video games.”

Chapter 41

The lock on the door to the next level was plated with DU.  “Chrisproof,” I said.  Tanya smirked.

“Not meproof, though,” she said, then she yelled at the lock.  Well not exactly, but I don’t know quite how to explain it.  She leaned close and pursed her lips and made a noise.  Not a scream or a whistle or a word.  A burst of sound.  Some sort of focused and tuned packet of sound.  Whatever.  The result was a pinging noise and a neat, nickel-sized hole through the armored lock.  The door swung open, and we headed down.

The space we entered was unfinished and larger than any of the others.  The original steel framework of the missile’s cradle was visible.  Gargantuan metal springs suspended the entire superstructure to cushion it from bomb blasts up to and including nuclear.  The room was twice the height of the others above it.  We looked down on the open space below and could see it was partially finished with cinderblock and concrete rooms.  The main corridor drove straight to the back of the room where the elevator shaft was visible.  Another corridor jutting off at a ninety degree angle.  Tanya headed toward the back of the room while I took the right-hand path.  A locked metal door blocked off the corridor, and I put my ear to it.

“-don’t look at her, Toni. Look at me.  Hey, have I told you about Chuck Norris?” a male voice said.

There was a sniffle and a voice that cut through me like a laser spoke.  “Only like a hundred times.”

“Did I tell you about the time Chuck Norris fought Superman?  The loser had to wear his underwear on the outside of his clothes,” the male said. 

“That’s stupid!” another voice, a young female one, opined.

I tore the door out of its frame and flung it behind me.  Moving at full speed, I was in and across the room immediately.  A floor-to-ceiling barrier of heavy metal bars blocked me from Toni, who was standing with two teenage kids. The body of a female in a black AIR uniform lay on the ground behind the teens.  The woman’s hands were blackened with burns, and her head was twisted almost completely around. A strange, triangular-bladed knife lay by her right hand.