Shadow Ops: Fortress Frontier-ARC (pdf conv.) (15 page)

“And we’re going to stay that way. We’re going to stay together, and we’re going to take care of one another. Because together we have a better chance of keeping ourselves safe if the SOC comes for us, and we all know they will never stop trying. Together, we beat them. Together, we can do it again. That’s what Pyre would have wanted, and that’s the best way we can honor him. We love you, Pyre. Rest in peace.”

“He gave me constant crap,” Downer added, “but he gave me the fire I needed to take down that Render in the sewers. So, I guess that means he saved my life.”

“All of our lives,” Truelove added.

All true, Britton thought. Pyre had been petulant and combative, a banner member of Swift’s recalcitrant No–No Crew, but he had been true to his beliefs. He hadn’t knuckled under to the army, right to the end of his life.

Britton pulled the trigger on the starter, sparking a tiny flicker of flame at its metal tip. Downer Drew and Bound her current, and the tiny flame leapt from the starter’s tip and danced across the frozen ground. She kicked together a pile of drier leaves and twigs, and the fire took on the shape of a tiny flame creature, stubby arms and legs, line of a mouth, determined slits for eyes. It pounced on the pile of tinder and flexed little red-orange muscles, a look of strain on its cartoon face. Britton smiled in spite of himself. The flame turned white-hot, and the tinder caught. Downer added a few more pieces of wood until it was a healthy blaze. The elemental grew and stepped out of the fire, this time in the form of a beautiful woman, robed and hooded. The dancing peaks of fire that were her face were creased in sympathy.

The elemental knelt beside Pyre’s corpse, the frozen ground smoking around her, and gathered him into an embrace. Pyre’s clothing smoldered, then caught, his skin blackening. The elemental’s form remained distinct from the rest of the flame, the cloaked woman embracing him as he burned.

Within minutes, all that remained of Pyre was ash and a line of greasy smoke drifting skyward. Downer rolled her magic back. The elemental raised its hands to the sky and vanished, the flames dying as the cold and wet ground fought against them.

“Thank you, Sarah,” Therese said. “That was beautiful.”

Downer shrugged, embarrassed. “Least I could do for him.”

Britton found himself choked with emotion from the tender display but mastered himself quickly. If they were to catch Scylla, time was a luxury they couldn’t afford. He opened a gate on the outskirts of the FOB. “I’m bringing us in close enough that we should get a good view of the SASS perimeter, but hopefully far enough out that they won’t see us. Stay low. The grass is tall and, with luck, it’ll cover us.”

He opened a gate. After making sure it was clear, he motioned them through, duckwalking and finally going belly down in the dirt beyond.

They emerged in a burned crater, the remnants of a mortar or rocket strike. Mixed corpses, both goblin and human, lay all around them. The smoking remains of a crashed Blackhawk helicopter were a short distance off to their left. The fight had ranged far from the FOB. It must have been one hell of a battle.

Even from this distance, he could see the FOB’s perimeter.

The concrete barricade walls and razor wire were gone, rotted and blown away on the wind. But a tall, thick, earthen wall stood in its place. It sported solid-looking parapets and guard towers, patrolled by black dots Britton assumed were soldiers. SOC Terramancy was breathtaking in its speed and efficiency. Britton marveled at how quickly they’d managed to raise effective defenses. A pair of Apaches spun around the perimeter. Dust rose from the ground as a pair of Abrams tanks followed on the ground.

“I can’t make it out that well without binoculars . . . but it looks . . .”

“It looks locked down.” Downer sounded relieved. “They won the fight and sealed the breach. They’re okay.”

Britton rested his forehead against the ground, letting the waves of relief wash over him. The FOB hadn’t been destroyed.

That much, at least, was off his conscience. But he still had to find Scylla.

“Okay . . .” he said, then stopped as Downer got to her feet.

“Sarah! Get down!”

She shook her head. “I’m going back.”

“You’re what?” Truelove got to his knees and resisted as Britton tried to drag him back to the grass.

“I’m not going after Scylla. Not unless it’s as part of a SOC unit.”

“Sarah,” Britton hissed, “get down before they spot us! You’re not going back.”

“You saved my life, and I owe you for that. But I’m not a fucking turncoat. I never stopped being army.”

“Sarah, please,” Therese said. “You were never army.”

“She’s right,” Britton added. “You were a contractor like me.

You’re a Probe, and you’ll always be a Probe. You can never be one of them. Sarah, they put a bomb in my chest. They were they were going to murder Marty just for following his own customs.

They forced people, you included, to join the military. That’s what you’re going back to.

“You want to belong to something? Belong to us. We belonged to each other on those missions. We can do that again.”

“They never forced me to join,” Downer said without much conviction. “I had a choice.”

“What choice did you
really
have?” Britton asked.

Truelove caught her elbow. “Sarah, stay.”

She froze. “Stay with me,” he said again.

Downer sank to her knees, her eyes on the grass beneath her.

When she looked up, tears streaked down her cheeks. Her voice was that of the young girl she was, all military professionalism leeched away. “Where am I supposed to go? Back to my religious nutjob mom? She thinks I’m dead and would hate me for being a Probe anyway. After we get Scylla, then what? You want me to live on the run, hiding in the sewer system under New York City? Like it or not, there’s only one place in the world where I can be alive legitimately and legally”—she pointed at the Terramantic earthwork that sealed the perimeter beach—“and it’s behind that wall. You blew that option. I can still go back.”

She hitched back a sob. “I don’t have anywhere else.”

Therese wrapped her arms around her. “Yes, you do. You’ve got us.”

Truelove put his hand on her shoulder. “Sarah, you’re like a gun to the army. As soon as they’re done with you, they kill you, or experiment on you. You saw what they did to that goblin village. What they did to Oscar.”

“What they did to Billy and what they were going to do to Scylla,” Britton added. “They were going to carve up her brain to make her compliant. That’s exactly what they’ll do if they capture her now, and all of her power will be at their disposal.

And you know they won’t stop until they do capture her.

“That’s why we’ve got to get to her first. And you’ve got one thing she can’t rot, elemental magic. Fire doesn’t rot, Sarah. Neither does wind. We need your help to make this right.”

Downer mastered herself, pushing back from Therese’s embrace. “I’m tired of all this running and fighting. I just want . . .”
to go home
. Britton finished for her in his mind.

“I know you are,” Britton said. “But there’s no home for you behind those walls, not the kind you want, anyway. I just need you to dig a little bit deeper and hold on a little bit longer. First, we fix this . . . thing I did. I know it’s on me, but I need your help to set it right. Then, we link up with Swift and make the kind of home we all need. A way we can be safe and free, all the time, without having to look over our shoulders. If you still decide that you want to go back to them, you can say I captured you, forced you. And you can bring them the news that they no longer have Scylla to worry about, that you took her down. That should count for something.”

“He’s right, sweetheart,” Therese said. “Can you do that?”

Downer nodded, sniffling, and lowered herself into the grass again. The others followed suit.

“What are we going to do with Scylla when we find her?”

Truelove asked. “I mean, we have to kill her, right?”

“No,” Therese said. “She deserves a chance at least. I’ve done some bad things in my time—”

“You did what you had to in order to defend yourself,” Britton cut her off. “That’s nothing anyone would ever be ashamed of.”

Therese paused. “I agree we can’t let the SOC take her back, but we need to give her a chance to join us when we link up with Swift.”

“That’s crazy,” Britton said. “You saw what she did to the FOB, Therese. That woman is insane.”

“Still”—color rose in Therese’s cheeks—“ you just want to keep on adding to the body count, Oscar? Don’t you think you’ve done enough?”

Britton swore under his breath. He couldn’t get into this now.

He would deal with her misgivings when they caught up to Scylla. For now, he had to keep the group together. He pointed over their backs, away from the FOB. “Last time I saw her, she went that way. If there’s a trail to follow, that’s where we’re going to find it.”

“You know how to track?” Downer asked. “They never taught me that in Shadow Coven.”

Britton shook his head. “Me neither, but we have to try.”

“And what if there’s no trail?” Downer asked.

“Then we head back, link up with Swift. But we’re not giving up until we’ve searched long and hard. Scylla was alone, without any gear or food. She can’t have gone far. And while we weren’t trained to track, she wasn’t trained to hide either.

“We’re going to low crawl in that direction for a bit; and then we can walk at a crouch. I think the FOB has its hands full cleaning up close to the perimeter, but we need to stay frosty. It won’t be long before they’ve got some kind of helo patrol out after Scylla.”

They turned, positioning their elbows and knees to carry them forward. He looked over at Truelove, gesturing to the corpses around him.

“Can you, uh, get these mobile? Have ’em stay down and crawl after us?”

Truelove frowned. “Now?”

“If we run into her, an army of corpses to soak up her magic are exactly what we’ll need, and this is best stockpile of them we’re likely to run into. Once we get out there”—he pointed to at the lightening horizon—“ we don’t know what we’ll find.”

Britton felt the tide of Truelove’s magic coalesce and flow outward. The grasses around them stirred as wolf, human and goblin corpses flipped over and low crawled into a cluster behind them. A dead man in an air force uniform crouched over to them and deposited four scavenged pistols before returning to the hastily assembled brigade of dead. “Thought we might need these,” Truelove said, taking one. Britton followed suit. Therese and Downer wrinkled their noses and took theirs as well.

“Nasty,” Downer muttered.

“War usually is,” Britton said. “Stay low.” He crawled forward.

The group followed, and the army of corpses slithered along behind them, silent and determined, leaving only the gently swaying grass to mark their passage.

After only an hour of searching, they picked up her trail.

Scylla had made no effort to hide her passage. Where dense clumps of grass or rock formations impeded her, she’d simply Drawn her magic and decayed them until they could be bypassed, not even bothering to take a step out of her way.

By the time Britton deemed they had gone far enough from the FOB to stand up, he smelled the sulfur stink of putrefaction.

A few steps onward, the ground opened up. A gray-black dusting of powdered rock was strewn across bare soil. To either side, the grass was sheened with gray-black slime, the stinking remains of vegetation. In the center of the trail was a purple smear that might have once been a bird.

“Jesus,” he breathed. Beside him, Therese crossed herself.

Truelove brought a hand to his mouth, trying to filter the rising stink through his fingers. Behind him, the shambling line of zombies silently imitated his movement.

You did this,
Britton thought.
You let her go.
The moment he’d freed her, Scylla had murdered hundreds, breaching the FOB’s perimeter and inviting a massive goblin attack. In the resulting battle, Therese had been forced to break her vow never to use her healing magic offensively, tearing flesh instead of knitting it. Britton knew she still blamed him for that.

“Well,” Downer said, “I guess we don’t have to worry about tracking her.”

Britton took a knee and gathered them around. “All right, we’re on her, apparently. We need to be ready in case we find her. Remember, she’s just one Sorcerer, and we’re four. We do this by the numbers. I’ll run Suppression. Truelove and Downer should swamp her with elementals and zombies, and Therese will run defense.

“Honestly, Therese, I’m not sure how your healing will match up against her . . . rotting. If I can’t keep her properly Suppressed, then hopefully you can restore our flesh quicker than she can strip it down. Nobody will ask you to Rend, but if there’s not need for your magic, there’s no reason you can’t walk over punch her in the face, right?”

Therese smirked. “Got it.”

“Everybody cool with that?” Britton asked. “Am I missing anything?”

“Sounds about right,” Truelove said.

“It’s four on one,” Downer added. “What could go wrong?”

“Don’t,” Therese said. “You’ll jinx it.”

Britton grunted, and they pushed on. A pack of demon horses sniffed them out after the first few hours. Britton had encountered them before; they were blind and vicious, a weird combination between horse and hyena, with an unsettling ability to mimic any sound they heard, including human voices. He wasted no time, sending a gate sliding horizontally through them, cutting three in half and sending the rest fleeing, mimicking the wet slicing sound the micron-thin edge of the portal made. The ground rose as the sun dipped in the sky, fat and clearer than the one on the Home Plane, going from soft yellow to brilliant orange.