Author: Benedict Jacka
Category: Science
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“Ground floor clear,” one of the men said.
“First floor clear,” came a minute or two later.
If there were anything alive in the house, Anne would have seen it, but there was no point taking chances. “Secure the basement.”
The farmhouse felt abandoned, with that particular sense a place has when it hasn’t been lived in for a long while. Traces of dust rested on the furniture. I took the stairs down to the basement while Little gave orders for one of the men, Lisowski, to stay in the entrance hall and watch our backs. If trouble came from outside, we’d be counting on him to sound the alarm.
The facility entrance was behind a wooden wall. Pulling out a hidden dowel allowed the wall to swing back, exposing a circular steel door. I stepped up and got to work. The basement was cramped with fourteen of us, but no one spoke—they’d all done this before and they knew I needed quiet. Diviners are good at breaking through security: when you can see the consequences of your actions, it’s easy to avoid most kinds of alarms or traps. In this case the builders had opted to go with a technological approach rather than a magical one, using a simple access code. There are types of locks that divination doesn’t help with—a fingerprint or retinal scan, for instance—but this wasn’t one. (If it had been, Vari would have just melted the door to slag. Like I said, a team like this can handle most problems.)
The door clicked and I pulled on the lever. It swung open with a creak, revealing stairs down into darkness. No breeze came out, but I thought that I could smell a faint scent in the air, something unpleasant and stale.
Variam lifted a hand and light bloomed, flames that gave no heat. They flew away down the stairs, illuminating them in orange-red. In their glow I could see steps going down for maybe sixty feet before finishing in a landing.
“Light switch,” Ilmarin noted, nodding to a small panel just inside the door.
“Doesn’t work,” I said absently. I was following the paths in which I ran down the stairs, looking to see what would happen. “No power anywhere in the facility that I can see.”
“So?” Variam said after another half minute.
“I’m not picking up anything,” I said. “Lights are off, doors are shut. Doesn’t mean it’s safe, but it’s definitely not in active use.”
“No Crystal?”
“We weren’t really expecting to get that lucky.”
Wars between mages are very different from wars between countries. When countries fight, if they want to attack into enemy territory, they have to go through the other army to do it. Mages don’t. Gate magic lets strike teams appear anywhere at any time, attacking and then disappearing back to the other side of the world. You never see mages fighting to take control of a bridge or a mountain pass, because holding those kinds of places doesn’t accomplish anything. When mages engage in combat, it’s for one of two reasons: either they’re fighting over something valuable, or one side is attacking the other’s base of operations. Otherwise, if one side doesn’t want to fight, they can just leave.
When it came to bases of operations, Richard’s side had the advantage. The Council operates out of various facilities spread throughout Britain. They’re well fortified, but there are a lot of them, and they’re valuable, public, and, most of all, stationary targets. The Council couldn’t abandon them, which meant a massive commitment of men and resources to defend them all. By contrast, Richard’s side had no facilities left in Britain, or at least none that anyone knew about. The mansions of Richard and his supporters had all been attacked by Council forces in the first months of the war, and rather than stand and fight, the Dark mages had abandoned their homes and withdrawn, hiding away in shadow realms or far-distant corners of the world. And shadow realms are much harder to attack than mansions. The Council was currently working to locate Richard’s centre of operations, but if he had one, they hadn’t found it.
But it’s not practical to put everything in a shadow realm. For one thing, shadow realms are limited in quantity, with demand exceeding supply. For another, there are some things that shadow realms are bad at. You can’t run modern communications, nor anything that requires a lot of external resources or utilities. And there are certain types of magical research that can’t be done in shadow realms, or can only be done in a specific type of shadow realm that the mage might not have access to. So if one of the mages on Richard’s team wanted to do some R & D, they’d often have to hide it in a place like this.
There was a reason I was taking a special interest in this particular facility. Our source had claimed that it was being run by Crystal, a renegade Light mage who’d fled Britain years ago under sentence of death. This was the first time her name had been linked to Richard, but I had my own reasons for suspecting that there might be a connection between the two of them. And on top of that, I knew that she wanted Anne. Crystal was in possession of a flawed immortality ritual, and she believed Anne was the missing ingredient that would make it work. I didn’t know whether she was right or wrong, and given that Anne wouldn’t survive the process, I didn’t particularly care. Crystal had made several attempts on Anne’s life, and if I had the chance, I was going to kill her. The fact that she happened to be working for Richard was just a convenient excuse.
“We’ll sweep the facility,” I said. “Search room by room, make sure it’s clear. Try not to damage anything you don’t have to. Assuming we don’t find anyone to question—which we probably won’t—we’re going to be combing through everything we find. Documents, computers, research. Anything that might give us a lead on where to go next.”
“Don’t break the toys, we get it,” Little said. “You taking point again?”
I nodded. “Follow my lead.”
* * *
The facility was dark and silent, empty corridors and abandoned rooms. With no airflow or connection to the outside, it was hard to tell how long it had stood unused: it could have been weeks or only hours. There was an unpleasant metallic scent to the air that made me think of blood.
“Well, they were definitely working on something,” Variam said. The two of us were in some kind of testing chamber, with workbenches and an open space at the far end. “Question is what.”
“Not sure.” I was leafing through some notes that had been left on one of the benches, reading by the orange-red light of Variam’s magic. “But my guess is that it had combat applications.”
“That what it says?”
“No, this is nothing but numbers.” I pointed at the open part of the room. “But see the marks on the floor and against the wall? They look like the kind you’d use for target mounts.”
“We sure it was Crystal running things?”
“Can’t see her name, but she’s not exactly going to be signing timesheets. Hopefully once we’ve cleared this place out we can call in a time mage.”
Variam snorted. “Good luck. They have a waiting list a mile long these days.”
My communicator pinged and a voice spoke into my ear. “Ilmarin to Verus.”
I put the notes down. “Go ahead.”
“West wing is clear,” Ilmarin said. “There are some living quarters and a kitchen; apparently this place was fitted for long-term use. All deserted, but Mage Walker believes she’s found something.”
“What kind of something?”
“There’s another vault door at the end of the wing. Airtight. Apparently there’s someone or something inside.”
“We’re on our way.”
The vault door that Ilmarin and Anne had found looked similar to the one at the entrance. It was at the end of a corridor; security men were waiting at the intersections, the torches on their weapons casting white beams that left their faces in shadow. I walked to the front, moving from darkness to light to darkness again. “What have we got?”
“There’s someone on the other side,” Anne said. Like Ilmarin, she didn’t wear armour; unlike Ilmarin,
she didn’t have a shield. Her clothes were reinforced, but not heavily; it was an argument I’d had with her many times and one that I was yet to win. “A boy, early twenties. He’s awake but he’s not moving.”
“Only one?” Variam asked.
“I think so.”
“Human?” I asked. Given the sorts of things we’d found in Richard’s other research facilities, it was a very relevant question.
Anne hesitated. “Probably.”
“What do you mean ‘probably’?” Variam said.
“I can’t sense anything abnormal in his pattern,” Anne said. “No injuries, no signs of deprivation. He seems in perfect health.”
“Okay?” I said.
“So why is he in perfect health?” Anne asked. “The facility’s power is out. And from the look of it, he’s locked in. Either they only just left and he’s been in there a few hours at most, or . . .”
“Or what?”
“I don’t know, but something doesn’t feel right.”
I thought about it for a second, then nodded. “We’ll assume he’s an enemy until proven otherwise. Give him a chance to come peacefully, but if he doesn’t, weapons free. Little, have your men behind us. Cover all angles.”
“Understood.”
“Looks like I’m not getting this one open,” I said. The door was equipped with a retinal scanner. In theory Anne might be able to trick it, but those kinds of changes aren’t her speciality and I didn’t want to waste time. “Vari, you’re up.”
A blade of searing red ignited at Variam’s hand as everyone else stepped well back. Variam pushed the blade of fire into the door, leaning into it. The metal turned red, then yellow, then white. An unpleasant smell filled the air, something like burnt oil, along with an acrid vapour that stung the throat.
Variam made a long curving cut along the left side, and a short one to the right where the lock was. By the time he was finished, the air in the corridor was hot and I was sweating in my armour. The gashes in the metal glowed red, slowly cooling. “That should be the hinges,” Variam said, stepping back.
Ilmarin took his place. The air mage waited for Variam to get clear, then raised a hand. My hair fluttered as a breeze swept down the corridor, coalesced, then struck the vault door like a sledgehammer. With a screech of tortured metal, the door fell out of its frame, hitting the floor with a boom.
Mage lights flew into the room, orange-red from Vari, silver-grey from Ilmarin. They illuminated a wide circular chamber, stairs running up to inset rooms on the left and right. The black screens of display monitors hung on the walls, but the only movement was the back-and-forth flicker of the lights.
“Can’t see him,” Variam said. He was cooling off the door, spreading the heat out of the metal so that it would be safe to walk on, watching the room out of the corner of his eye.
“No movement,” Ilmarin said.
“He’s there,” Anne said. She pointed through the doorway towards the shadows to the right. “And he knows we’re here.”
I walked into the room. In the light of the spells, I could see a table in one corner, chairs overturned and papers scattered on the floor. Variam and Ilmarin followed me through. Something made a soft scrape as I stepped on it, and I paused and crouched down. It was an empty cartridge.
“Sarge,” one of the security men said quietly from behind me.
“I see it,” Little said. “Verus?”
I looked at where Little was pointing. Ilmarin had moved one of his floating lights over next to the right wall, and in the greyish glow I could see bullet marks. “Interesting,” Ilmarin said. “So those would have been made by . . . who? Facility security?”
“Which raises the question of what they were firing at,” I said.
“I’m going to take a wild guess and say it’s got something to do with the thing that may or may not be human,” Variam said.
Anne spoke. “He’s moving.”
Our eyes turned to the darkness at the top of the right staircase. A figure appeared, still hidden in the shadows. We could make out its shape, but no more.
From behind I heard quiet movements as the security men readied their weapons. They weren’t pointing them at the figure . . . yet. I raised my voice, speaking clearly and loudly. “I am Mage Alex Verus of the Junior Council. If you are an enemy of Mage Drakh, Mage Crystal, or the other Dark mages who operated this facility, we will assist you. If you side with them and against the Council, you will not be harmed should you come peacefully. Step into the light and make yourself known.”
Silence. Seconds ticked away. Then the figure stepped forward.
It was a boy in his twenties, as Anne said. He looked quite ordinary, but my hackles rose the instant I saw him. There was an aura around his form; it was faint and hard to see, but the shadows were clinging to him a little more than they should, hinting at something larger and darker behind. I recognised that pattern and I knew what it meant, and all of a sudden I wasn’t interested in talking anymore. “All units,” I said quietly into my communicator. “Defensive formation. Prepare for enemy summons.”
The boy swept his gaze over us, looking down from the top of the stairs. Futures flickered as he made his decision, but I didn’t need to scan them to know what was going to happen. “Why do you all keep coming?” he said to no one in particular. His voice sounded wrong, older than it should have been.
“Fire,” I said into the communicator.
Variam didn’t hesitate. A pillar of flame erupted on top of the gantry, casting the room in hellish light. From behind, the submachine guns stuttered out three-round bursts.
The fire receded to reveal the boy standing unharmed. A translucent black shield was flickering around him: bullets were still hitting it, their impacts marked by flashes of black. He spread his arms wide.
“Hold fire, hold fire!” I called. “Cease fire on the primary target, watch the sides, we have summons. Four on the left, two on the right.”
The darkness at the sides of the room seemed to writhe, figures stepping out of the shadows. They were man-sized, thin and spindly with arms too long for their bodies, and they darted forward along the walls. They were hard to see, the eye wanting to shift away, but unlike the boy, they didn’t have shields. The nearest one fell as bullets tore into it; the one behind staggered into cover.
From past experience I knew that the things killed with their claws: as long as the men could hold them at range, they should be safe. Little was already directing his men into a defensive box, overlapping fields of fire holding the creatures at arm’s length. Two were down, and the remainder were pinned, unable to advance. Something new showed itself in the futures and I turned.
The boy was still holding off Variam’s attacks, but he was focusing on Little’s men. He raised one hand and a dark sphere soared high into the air, arcing down towards us.
A shield of air appeared just as the spell was starting its descent, and it detonated in a silent black flash, wind ruffling my hair. Variam growled. Another pillar of flame exploded around the boy; this time Variam followed it up with a bolt of fire that flew out like a rocket. The black shield soaked it up without a ripple. “Fuck!” Variam shouted. “How is he stopping these?”
“Okay.” I’d been carrying a shortsword sheathed at my hip; it came out with the sound of metal on leather. “Let’s try it up close and personal.”
Variam glanced at me, then nodded. He took a step, his hand coming down to stretch out behind him, but before he could cast his spell, I sensed something new. Without pause, I spun and dashed back towards the security men. “Little!” I shouted. “Behind!”
I saw Sergeant Little look up, startled; as he did the shadows behind his squad moved and one of the creatures stepped out of the wall and ripped a man open in a spray of blood. He went down with a scream and the security men whirled, their formation breaking.
Then Anne was there, running through their ranks. The shadow creature raised its claws and hesitated. Anne didn’t. Her fingers brushed its body and it collapsed, the life seeming to go out of it. Anne was already kneeling by the injured man, working to staunch the flow of blood.
I didn’t have time to watch; that creature hadn’t been the only one to come out of nowhere. Another materialised out of the darkness right next to where I was standing. Or where I’d chosen to stand. I rammed my shortsword through its torso, twisted the blade, ripped it out. The weapon was a low-level focus imbued with a dispelling effect, designed to penetrate shields. The thing staggered and fell. One of the security men ran up next to me and emptied his magazine into it.
Looking around, I could see that the battle had turned messy fast. The formation of Little’s men was disorganised; now instead of keeping the things pinned down, they were backing towards each other, guns sweeping from left to right as they tried to figure out if one would appear behind them. Anne, I called through the dreamstone. Keep the men alive. I’m going to take out the summoner.
Got it.
Ilmarin and Variam had pushed the boy back to the far side of the room. He was standing at the end of the gantry, face set in an expression of concentration, fighting with needle-thin wires of black energy that stabbed and struck. Variam was pressing him, fire blazing from one hand and a flaming sword in the other, trying to get close enough for a killing strike, while Ilmarin hovered in the air.
I sprinted around towards the gantry. It was about ten feet off the floor, and there was no stairway from the angle I was approaching. “Ilmarin,” I called through the communicator. “Need a lift!”
Ilmarin didn’t need to be asked twice. A roaring wind picked me up as I ran, throwing me into the air in an arc aimed precisely down and behind where the boy was standing.
The boy sensed me, turned. Whip-like strands of energy lashed out, trying to cut me in half. In the instant before they struck, I found the futures I needed and twisted; one strand brushed my hair, the other glanced off my leg armour. The impact threw me off-balance and I landed awkwardly, my shortsword bouncing off the boy’s shield.