Ascendance (22 page)

‘Yes,’ Karen added. ‘That attack vector has been closed down.’

She seemed more at home with all this than Dave, and for their part Heath and his guys seemed cool with that. Had everyone forgotten she was a Russian spy?

‘I had a squad down there,’ Colonel Gries
said. ‘They reported that back to me. Said it was like the entire enemy force blew apart like magic.’

‘Only the magic of American steel,’ Dave said, holding up Lucille, but getting no booyahs in return.

‘The squad leader was very grateful,’ the colonel went on. ‘Asked me to pass on his thanks. He said he didn’t get a chance to say thank you properly before you left.’

‘Tell him
dasvidaniya
,’ Karen said.

‘So what are we gonna do?’ Dave asked. ‘There’s hours until dawn. And the Horde aren’t the only sect here. We found some Savat arrows on the way over.’

Heath closed his eyes.

‘Savat? You’ve never told us about them.’

Dave’s patience threatened to fail him.

‘You know how that works, Heath. Until I saw them, I didn’t know. Now I do and so do you. Savat are like Sliveen. They’re just part of a different sect. The Qwm.’

Igor snorted.

‘The Qwm Sect,’ Dave rounded on him. ‘Not the Cum Sect.’

Igor came off the wall where he’d been leaning,
bringing his sniper rifle up like a crude club.

‘The fuck you . . .’

‘Chief!’ barked Heath. ‘Outside if you can’t keep it together.’

‘Sorry,’ Dave said. Holding his hands up. ‘Let’s just get to the fucking bit where Dave’s sorry and we all agree he’s an asshole and then we move on.’

Karen’s smile curled up one corner of her mouth ‘I don’t think we need to
get
there, Hooper. You,’ she said to Igor. ‘You’re the
pedik
he’s been obsessing about, right?’

‘What the hell do you mean obsessing?’ Dave snapped.

Igor moved toward Karen and Hooper with deadly intent.

‘The fuck you just call me?

‘Stand down,’ Heath barked. But it was too late, the anarchy they’d fought through to get here was loosed upon the room, with angry voices climbing on top of each other. Zach tried to hold Igor back. Emmeline buried her head in shaking hands, and actually seemed more scared than despairing, which only served to fan the heat of Dave’s shame spiral.

‘Shut up. All of you,’ shouted Karen and she
pushed
. Hard. Everyone gasped, even Dave. It was as though she’d slapped them all into silence.

‘Because of his brother, this one,’ she said pointing at Dave when she finally had the floor, ‘is a festering mess of guilt and remorse. He could make a Dostoyevsky character seem like the world’s happiest Lululemon shop girl.’

‘No, Karen,’ Dave said, his heart seeming to lurch to a halt, but he could no more stop her speaking than he could quell the nausea which suddenly roiled in his lower gut. It left him feeling hot and cold all at once, his skin tingling with a low-grade electric shock, and dizziness threatening to tip him off his feet. She’d been inside his head. She knew what he was thinking, even when he tried to hide it from himself. He dropped Lucille, the steel head hitting the floor with a bang.

Igor had fallen back to the wall, the sniper rifle scraping against the hard stone surface. Zach looked shocked, as though Karen had reached inside him and squeezed, which she had. Even Heath, who’d appeared sanguine about her presence and her true status, was staring at the Russian woman like she was a land mine he’d just stepped on.

‘You haven’t told them, Hooper, because you’re ashamed. You think you’re ashamed of your brother, but you’re ashamed of yourself.’

She didn’t lash him with the words. She sounded almost as though she felt his pain and gave something approaching a fuck. It eased the pain not at all.

Dave said ‘No,’ again, but it was only a small sound, lost under the background buzz of a thousand voices and the thudding of a helicopter hovering nearby.

‘Sit down,’ she said, putting a hand on his shoulder. The will to stand up to her, to stand up at all, left him in a rush and his butt crashed down onto the table. The room swirled around him, lost all cohesion and he blinked away the first tears as they came. It was as though she had stripped him of a lifetime’s emotional armour, exposing the raw and seeping wounds beneath.

‘Don’t . . .’ he said. The dull thud of the chopper blades faded away, but if she heard him, it meant nothing to her.

‘No,’ Karen said in a quiet voice. ‘I’ve been putting up with this since we met. You’ve been putting up with it most of your life. It’s time we both unburdened ourselves of it.’

Everybody was watching him. Emmeline through her fingers, her hands still shaking. Colonel Gries, with one raised eyebrow at the insult done to his antique desk. Heath was Sphinx-like, measuring and almost certainly judging, but giving none of it away. Zach, true to his nature, looked almost as though he felt sorry for Dave. Igor did not, but he was no longer restraining his need to let fly. Hooper wiped the tears from his eyes with the back of one hand. It was crusty with blood and served only to smear the mess over his face.

‘Dave hasn’t told you about his brother,’ said Karen, ‘or not the whole story anyway.’

‘Don’t. Please.’

‘He’s even used him as an excuse for why he has such an aversion to all things military. Did you ever wonder about that, Captain?’ she asked Heath. ‘Why someone like Hooper seemed to regard the glorious armed forces of your proud republic as little better than a war machine devoted to enriching the board of Halliburton and, say, the petrol company which pays his rent? It seems a little out of character, don’t you think? For such a good old boy?’

‘His brother gave up his life,’ Heath started to say, his voice leaden with disapproval.

‘Yes, his brother. The fallen hero.’

‘Colonel Varatchevsky,’
Heath said, and there was no missing the warning tone in his voice. ‘If you’re going somewhere, best get there now.’

She laid a hand on Dave’s shoulder again and he flinched away.

‘It’s better this way, Dave,’ she said. ‘Trust me.
Vot gde sobáka zarýta.
This is where the dog is buried.’

She addressed everyone then, but concentrated on Igor.

‘Corporal Andrew Galloway, nee Hooper, was gay. Just like you, sweetheart,’ she smiled at the SEAL. ‘Super Dave here, when he was just plain Dave, couldn’t handle that. It’s not all his fault. If you’d ever met his father, there was a bigot for the ages. So unmanned by his son the cocksucker that he walks out. Dave, now the man of the house, blamed Andy for breaking up the family. Ma, bless her apple pie, loves both her boys and just wants everyone to get along. She was a saint, that woman. But Dave here gives his gay brother hell. “You’ll never be a real man, why can’t you just man the fuck up, bro.” That sort of thing. Andy, who loved his brother, proves him wrong by signing up for the most manly job there is. Pulling a trigger. Four years later this family tragedy reaches its dramatic high point when Corporal Andrew Galloway, nee Hooper, is shot to pieces and blown to Hell by Sunni insurgents in beautiful downtown Baghdad.’

She playfully ruffled Dave’s hair while he wept silently into his hands.

‘So, Igor, don’t be hating on your redneck friend here. He doesn’t hate you because you are
petookh opooscheny
. He hates that he found out you’re gay before he could pack up all of his nasty feelings and jam them away in the corner of his tiny tortured mind where he keeps his dead brother.’

22

D
ave didn’t know he had retreated into numb stillness until Karen spoke up and he realised her voice, her breathing, was all he could hear. That and the background rumble of a world caught on the cusp of some inexplicable quantum shift between what was and what might be.

He’d warped.

‘What?’ she said. ‘Too harsh?’

Dave let his hands fall and blinked away the blurriness that cut him off from the world. A world he had stilled without even noticing. He sat on the conference table in the cramped briefing room, deep inside the armoury. Karin stood over him, her arms crossed, head tilted a little to one side, considering him. The others were all looking at him, frozen, their expressions a mix of concern and even sympathy. Igor’s face was unreadable.

Dave sniffed and wiped at his nose. He coughed, not trusting himself to speak yet.

A deep, shuddering breath leaked out slowly.

‘You’re a bitch,’ he said, without feeling. He was all out of feelings. Like he’d just made a bonfire of them all and the only thing he felt now was burned.

‘Yeah, but I’m the bitch who’ll get you through this. And you’re the bitch who will help all of these good people through, and as many as we can save outside the walls of this place.’

‘All of the things you just said. They were all . . .’

‘They were all true, Hooper. You can’t hide that from me. I wish you could. You’re a lousy date.’

He stared at her, too wrung out to be appalled. One of the things he always detested about Annie was her ability to see through his bullshit. She didn’t need to be a mind-reader, all she had to do was spend enough time around him to read his patterns and that had been bad enough. Karen did it in a second.

‘You know it all? Everything?’

‘I’m afraid I do, and I wish I didn’t. Being inside of your head? It’s like getting jammed into a bag full of unwashed shorts. With great power comes skidmarks. If it makes you feel any better about the mind fucking, I was trained to read people on first contact long before I unlocked my new achievements. I’m just quicker at it now, and a little more accurate.’

He snorted the briefest of laughs at that, the sad little chuckle sounding wet and throaty. Another shuddering breath; slowly sucked in, this time.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘He followed me around, like all little brothers do. I drove him off because . . . well . . . I was an asshole. I couldn’t help it.’

He had to shut up, before he fell apart again.

‘Yes, you were,’ Karen said, not letting him escape responsibility. ‘And you’ve been an asshole ever since. You’ve forced a lot of people to pay for your mistakes, Hooper. It has to stop.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and for one of the few times in his life he managed to say it without sounding resentful or sullen. She wasn’t nearly as impressed with that as she should have been.

‘Make your apologies, but make them count. You want to be forgiven, you have to earn it, starting now. We can’t stay in here.’ A sweeping hand gesture encompassed the infinite scope of the warp bubble. Or the orb, as she called it.

Karen picked up on his thought without him having to express it.

‘I don’t understand it any more than you do, Hooper. But we both know it drains you. It drains us both. And the more you rely on it, the worse it gets.’

‘But I feel like I’m finally getting some real control over it,’ he said, frowning. ‘And I don’t know that I want to go up against the orcs without it.’

‘Neither of us graduated Dux of Hogwarts. But the same way I know all about you and your brother, and all your other skanky little secrets by the way, I know that whatever power or energy leakage you suffer when you orb is growing. Something is changing. Don’t argue with me about it, don’t even ask me about it. Just trust me.’

‘The rest of them,’ he waved a hand at the others, caught in stasis around them. ‘Can you read them, like me?’

She smiled. A genuine smile.

‘Not as easily. You’re more of an open book to me. A comic book.’

‘But you can read them?’

‘Within limits, yes. I don’t get a transcript of their thoughts, like I do with you.’ She looked around the crowded office. ‘Your crippled captain there is worried everything is coming apart. He’s even more worried, terrified actually, that we might be the only ones who can stop that from happening. He has doubts about you, Hooper. Less about me. I’m a known unknown, as we say in my business. But you? You’re the key, but you’re a key he doesn’t know how to turn. He blames himself for Omaha, and worries that Trinder will either waste your abilities, or . . .’
she smiled again, a wintry stony-hearted expression, ‘or he’ll waste you.’

She made a trigger-pulling gesture, just in case he didn’t get it.

‘Your boyfriend over there . . .’ she nodded at Igor, ‘is feeling gravely disappointed in you because you are, let’s face it, a bigoted asshole.’

‘But I’m not really! I’m not even very conservative.’

‘Hooper? Please. Psychic powers here? Anyway, a sincere apology would patch it up with him. Fess up that you didn’t handle your brother at all well. Blame your old man if you want. He’ll totally relate to that and it’s not untrue.
As for this poor bitch . . .’

Karen’s smile turned unpleasantly feral as she considered Emmeline.

‘She’s almost passing out trying not to fellate you. It’s another thing you’re going to have to learn to control. She deserves better. We all do.’

‘But I can’t control it,’ he protested. ‘They all want to suck my dick . . .’

He hesitated.

‘That fellate word you used means dick sucking, right?’

She laughed at him.

‘Do us all a favour, Hooper, and turn off the porno show in your head. God knows you’d be helping me out.’

Dave shifted uncomfortably on the edge of the desk. ‘But you said it doesn’t affect you.’

‘I said you have no effect on me. It doesn’t mean you don’t disgust me. You just don’t cause my ovaries to explode like you do with her and all the other woman you meet.’

She paused, considering something.

‘Except for those who are pregnant, have been through menopause, or are menstruating.’

‘Gross!’

‘Oh grow up.’

Karen frowned but not just at him.

‘Let’s think this through. Apart from lucky old me, you present as an overpowering sexual totem any for woman who can bear you children. But this is a tenth order issue,’ Karen said, coming out of her reverie. ‘One you can deal with later. Right now we’re going back to the real world, where you are going to make your apologies and we will figure out how to pull this back from the edge.’


‘Okay,’ he agreed with some reluctance. She was right. He needed to get back on side with these guys. In large part he’d signed up with Trinder to spite them, not just because of the sweet deal Boylan had cut.

He worried about Boylan too, with things not looking so great on the west coast.

‘Before we go back,’ he said. ‘Where were we? I lost my place.’

‘You were about to apologise to the world’s most dangerous gay man.’

*

‘Look, I’m sorry,’ said Dave, wishing that he’d had the ability to stop time, or to step outside of it or whatever, when he’d been married. A lot of his fights with Annie had spiralled out of control because he didn’t have time to stop and think before he let his mouth run off. If he could have hit pause and figured out exactly the right thing to say to defuse the ticking time bomb, maybe they’d still be married. Then again, if they were still married, there was no way Jennifer Aniston or Paris Hilton would be looking to throw a leg over him.

– Dave!

He jumped a little. That was Karen’s voice. Inside his head. And Karen’s heavy motorcycle boot grinding down on his toes.

‘Excuse me,’ muttered Emmeline, pushing herself up out of her chair and hurrying from the room.

Heath sent Zach after her with a flick of his eyes.

‘Igor,’ Dave said. ‘I’m sorry about Omaha. I’m sorry I was such a jerk about you being a . . . gay guy. I learned my . . .’

He stopped and paused. Initially for effect. It seemed like something a good actor would do. But thinking about what he had to say next actually made him think about what he had to say next.

Dave sighed. Igor’s stony face did not move.

‘Look. My ma was a good lady. She raised me and my brother right. Or tried to. She did fine with Andy. He turned out good. But me, I was always my old man’s son, and my old man was an asshole. Not that there’s anything wrong with assholes, I don’t mean to be, you know, homophobic about them. But my dad, he was a cunt . . . Sorry, Karen.’

Karen was too busy face-palming to reply.

‘Anyway, all I wanted to do was say sorry, Igor. I know I’m not a good man, but I’d . . . I want to be. I was a shit husband, a terrible fucking father, every bit as bad as my own. I was a bad son and the sort of brother my brother did not deserve. The hell of it is, I can’t do anything about what’s done. All those people who meant something to me, I’ve lost them all. But if you let me, and I know you got zero reason to, but if you let me, I’d at least like to try make things right with you . . .’

He almost added ‘. . .
and your people
,’ but thought better of it at the last moment. Instead, he said, ‘Andy, my brother, he woulda liked that. He’d think better of me for it . . . And he’d probably think you were hot.’


Igor snorted a laugh. Not much of a laugh, but it was better than a punch in the face.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ the big SEAL said. ‘I won’t shoot you in the head first chance I get. We’ll see how that works out. Take it from there.’

‘Sounds fair enough.’


Colonel Gries spoke up over the top of them.

‘This is very touching I’m sure, gentlemen. My congratulations on your betrothal, but we still have the issue at hand. The fucking end of civilisation as we know it.’

Heath was also impatient to move on.

‘The video,’ he said. ‘The creature calling itself Compton.’

‘It’s a Threshrend,’ Karen said. ‘Although it’s small to have matured into the adult state.’

‘You killed one, did you not? When Trinder came for you?’

She shrugged off the suggestion.

‘I finished it. Trinder’s people shot the hell out of it first. I grabbed a sword, this sword, and took the top of its head off because it was blocking my exit. That’s when I joined the Justice League.’

‘You didn’t pass out or anything?’ Dave asked.

‘Nope. I felt something happen, as soon as I killed it. I felt myself . . . powering up I suppose. And I used that to get the hell out.’


Heath gnawed at his lip as he thought it through.

‘Dave seems to have inherited the memories or knowledge of the Hunn he killed. What about you, Colonel?’ Heath addressed Karen. ‘Any idea what’s happening here?’

He pointed the remote at the TV screen.

‘Simple explanation? They took your guy to the dungeons and tortured everything they needed out of him. But because it’s a Thresher calling itself Compt’n, it’s more likely they used an empath daemon to extract what they needed.’

‘It still sounds like torture,’ said Colonel Gries.

‘Yeah,’ Karen said. ‘I think they ate his brains.’

There was a slight pause before Heath reacted.

‘They what?’

Igor grimaced, Gries swore and even Dave made a face as he tried but failed not to think about the bit with the chilled monkey brains in one of the Indiana Jones movies. He hadn’t liked Compton much, but that didn’t mean the guy deserved to die as an hors d’oeuvre.

Karen leaned back against the wall, her chin on her chest and her brow furrowed as she thought it through.

‘Yeah, sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m pretty sure they did. Or rather that Thresher calling itself Compt’n did. Both of the Threshers I fought with had been in empathic connection with Compt’n. I suspect all of the Horde Threshrendum in the city have. He’s using them as a surveillance net and a rough command and control channel. I couldn’t tell for sure until I got some face-time with . . . Threshy,’ she grinned. ‘It calls itself Threshy. That’s cute. But yeah, the ones I put down, the others I sensed through them, as far as they’re concerned, Lord Guyuk ur Grymm raised Threshy on high after it . . . “took up” the soul of a calfling called Compton. And some others too, it seems. Some random guys they captured . . . probably in New Orleans, and some . . . calfling dominants, warriors, I’m afraid.’

‘Damn,’ said Heath.

Igor cursed silently.

‘That would be the SEALs they took prisoner in Nebraska,’ Dave said. ‘The ones I got captured.’

‘Stop playing martyr to your conscience, Hooper.’

It was Emmeline, returned with Zach Allen, who looked flushed and uncomfortable.

‘You don’t have a conscience and you’re not very good at pretending,’ Emmeline said.

‘Are you okay?’ Heath asked.

‘I took care of it,’ she said, without elaborating. ‘And while pondering the origin of this Compt’n creature is fascinating, it’s not advancing our cause. It might be important, but it’s not urgent.’

‘I agree,’ said Heath. ‘We’ve confirmed our suspicions are well based. That’s enough for now. We need to move on.’

*

‘National Security Council is in emergency session right now,’ Heath said. ‘We’re scheduled to brief them in about forty-five minutes. Assuming we still have the link.’

He threw an inquiry at Gries with a glance. The army commander nodded.

‘Our comms are good. We can head over there now, if you want. Get you set up.’ Gries pushed his chair away from the desk and climbed to his feet, patting the sidearm on his hip the way Dave sometimes patted the wallet in his back pocket, just to check it was there.

‘Good idea,’ Heath said. ‘I expect civilian comms to be aggressively degraded soon enough, if the Horde stick to the scenarios Compton originally war-gamed. He’s leaving the communications grid intact for now, to spread the virus.’

‘The what?’ Dave asked as they all moved toward the door.

‘Fear,’ Karen said. ‘Fear and uncertainty, escalating with every tweet and Tumblr and Facebook post. Mass media will Astroturf the horror to lock in their audience. The audience will amplify the effect across all the social media channels.’