Ascendance (30 page)

‘This time we all go together.’

‘We’ll take the Growler,’ Zach said, as Dave let himself be led back toward the vehicle.

Igor climbed into the rear, manning the machine gun. Dave saw now that there were two different mounts, one of them a grenade thrower. He hopped into the back of the little jeep, finding a place to sit on an ammo box. Zach and Karen took the front seats.

‘Try to call your wife,’ she said. ‘Do it now.’

The composure Dave had felt frayed a little, just a stitch or two.

‘Why? What’s up?’

29

T
he iPhone was useless. Not even a bar of coverage and no time to go looking for WiFi as they drove away from the town centre. The Iridium unit picked up a clear signal without a problem, but when he tried to connect to old Pat’s landline, and then Annie’s cell phone, he hit the wall. No service on either. He felt dread like cold, black water in the pit of his stomach as Zack steered left, taking them around the headwaters of the harbour.

‘No,’ said Karen as he tried to warp away. He could feel her shutting him down without even laying hands on him this time.

‘I don’t know what you did before, Hooper,’ she said, ‘but it wasn’t normal. You drained yourself, and me, worse than a couple of minutes warping should have.’

They passed the small park sloping down to the bay where dozens of yachts and billionaire boats were tied up. Dave had no doubt that if the owners of those vessels had been in town, most of them would have put to sea to escape the Horde.

He wondered if there were sea monsters out there, and asking the question, answered it. Yes. Yes there were. His mind, not wanting to contemplate what might be wrong at the O’Halloran place, was sliding around on its ass like a fat kid on a skating rink. ‘Stop acting like a redneck
ebanashka.
Whatever
you did before. Don’t.’

Dave didn’t know what she meant by
ebanashka
– it wasn’t Olde Tongue, so it was probably some Russian insult – and he didn’t know what she meant by ‘before’. Or rather, he half did. She meant when he’d pushed his warp drive to its limits and felt himself pressing up hard against something mysterious and immaterial. Or immaterial in this reality at least. But he didn’t know how he’d done that or what it meant. He no more understood what had happened than Karen did.

Zach stomped on the gas as they swung on to High Street, which doubled as Route 1 heading northeast out of town. It would follow the coast for miles, through heavily wooded New England forests, but they were only travelling for a few minutes, looking for Shermans Point Road. Dave calmed down somewhat as it became obvious that there was no damage on this side of town. The power was out but more than a few places ran generators, a must-have item in the winter months when blizzards could take down the grid for days at a time. He saw lights on in lounge rooms, and even the flicker of TV sets through windows in every second or third house. Some people stood out on their front porches, all of them seeming to be armed with hunting rifles of one type or another. Igor waved to them as they roared past.

‘Colonel Varatchevsky?’ Zach said as he overtook a northbound Volvo loaded high with camping gear and suitcases. He had to speak loudly over the rush of the wind and the noise of the Growler’s engine.

Karen’s voice betrayed a hint of wariness. The SEALs had been studiously ignoring her actual status since they’d met. ‘Yes, Chief?’

‘You mind if I ask you something?’

‘As long as you don’t mind if I tell you to fuck off should I not feel like answering.’

‘Fair enough. Can I ask why you’re doing this, helping us, when you could have just disappeared? Gone home even. The Horde and the other monster clans, they’re in Russia too, right?’


‘They are,’ she said, not bothering to correct his use of the term ‘clans’. ‘Not as many as there seem to be here, but it is early days.’

‘So why are you here? Seriously. That Trinder guy has a hard-on for you and, to be fair, you are a spy. From a really hostile foreign power.’

‘I hope you don’t think less of me for that?’

Her tone was teasing, amused.

‘A little,’ Zach admitted. ‘Although I guess I’d be more pissed at you if I’d known you before. You know, when you were undercover.’


They swept past a side street that Dave recognised as home to Jack and Toby’s best friends, a couple of boys from their school, and another street just one block from Shermans Point Road. There were fewer houses out here and they were set further back into the trees. The night grew closer. Karen seemed to consider Zach’s question, but Dave could tell she was also scanning for monster signals.

‘I’m here because I’m here,’ she said. ‘This is where the threat is. So this is where my mission is.’

‘You operating under orders right now?’ Igor asked from the back, shouting over the wind that tried to whip his words away.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am to assess the threat and advise my superiors on tactics and strategy.’

‘So when you’re done with that, you’re done with us?’ Dave asked. He was surprised at how put out he sounded.

‘We are all doing what we have to, Hooper,’ she said, turning around to face him. The wind of their passage whipped at her hair, lashing her face with the long, filthy blonde strands. Zach slowed as they reach the turn-off.

‘But you told me you thought we were past all of that shit,’ Dave protested. ‘Trinder and Heath and people fighting each other instead of the Horde.’

‘We are, for now,’ she said, breaking off for a moment to scan whatever frequencies she found the Threshers and orcs on. ‘But I don’t see you volunteering to defend my family or my country. For now, I serve them here, Hooper. But only for now.’

There were a couple of properties at the intersection of Route 1 and Shermans Point Road, but they were dark. Dave recalled them as being summer rentals, empty for most of the year. There was no reason why they should be occupied now. Away from the highway, full darkness fell upon them again, pierced only by the headlights of the little jeep. Igor charged the machine gun with a metallic ratcheting sound.

‘Let her be, Hooper,’ he said. ‘She’s a soldier. Like us. She doesn’t get choices. She gets orders.’

Chastened by the rebuke, Dave let it go. He’d been diverted anyway by Karen’s mention of family. She’d never said anything about them before, and as far as he knew from the briefing by Trinder she had none in America. In fact she’d been here so long as a deep cover agent that she probably had nobody other than older relatives back in Russia. Did they even know where she was, what she was doing? Karen had turned back to the front, probably scanning the airwaves again. They roared down a long straight stretch of road and Dave was tempted to warp just for a second, to see if he could. He didn’t think Karen was blocking him anymore, trusting that he would do as he’d promised. It would be a quick and dirty way to check for Threshers, but he caught himself before the thought could go further. Zach was driving. They were all in the jeep. It would probably keep going at this speed and fly off the road.

Karen turned around again and gave him a firm shake of the head.

She knew what he’d been thinking.

That was a hell of a thing, having anyone inside his head like that. But someone like her, a spy and . . .

She interrupted his train of thought.

‘I’m right here you know,
zasranec
.’

‘Sorry.’

She returned to scanning ahead.

‘At least you’re not staring at my ass anymore.’

Further chastened, Dave tried to keep his mind from wandering again. They were getting close.

Igor grinned at him.

‘Busted.’

*

Pat O’Halloran had done well from the fishing trade. He still owned a share of the small fleet of trawlers he’d built up, although it had been ten years since he’d been out on the water for a living. He was probably the richest man Dave had known before moving down to Texas to work in the oil industry, and he had reason to resent him for that. As careful as the old trawler man had been to raise his daughter right, Annie was still his only daughter, and he’d spoiled her rotten, at least as far as her ex-husband was concerned. To Dave’s way of thinking, a good deal of the trouble in their marriage had been less about realities than expectations, primarily the expectation of one Annie O’Halloran that her husband would be able to keep her in the style to which her old man had accustomed her.

The Growler swept around the long looping curve that would deliver them to Pat’s place and Dave found himself wondering less about monster infestations – it did seem pretty quiet this far from town – and more about how Annie was coping shut away up here. It made sense she’d moved in with her dad. They hadn’t owned the townhouse they’d lived in in Houston. That was a company condo, so she hadn’t been able to shake him down for it. Alimony took a big bite out of Dave’s ass, of course, but Annie had always been one of those women for whom equality meant busting his balls to work two jobs. One on the rigs or at the office, and a second when he was at home with the boys. He almost grinned at the idea of her brow beating old Cap’n Pat into school runs and homework supervision, but the grin faded. O’Halloran had probably done it willingly, and of course there was Vietch to call on as well. Her lawyer and boyfriend.

Dave hoped Boylan had made a mess of Vietch like he’d promised.

Pat’s house was comfortable, but no mansion. A solid red brick cottage in the Colonial Revival style, notable mostly for its easy access to the outer beaches of the point. It was a long way from the big city restaurants and galleries that Annie had a taste for. Hell, it was a long way from downtown Camden if you weren’t driving. The walk up to Route 1 alone was a good quarter hour.

Still, he had to admit, it had one abiding advantage, didn’t it?

As remote as it was from New York, where Annie would have loved to live, it was even further from the Gulf and the Texas oil towns where Dave had dragged her and the boys, and where he still lived.

Or where he had lived, until last week.

‘Anything?’ he asked Karen.

‘No. I think we’re clear,’ she said. ‘How’s Lucy?’

‘She’s cool.’

‘Up ahead, right?’ Zach asked as he slowed the Growler to about twenty-five miles per hour.

‘Yeah. There’s a track off the end of the surfaced road, leads down to the water. You can follow it all the way. There’s a house with a good turning circle for the driveway. That’s them. They’re the only one this far down on the outer point.’

Igor swept the forest with the muzzle of the machine gun.

‘Residences off to the right, on the inner harbour?’ he said.

‘Yep,’ Dave confirmed. ‘Five of them, as I recall.’

No lights flickered through the trees from that direction. No sound drifted up. Some of the houses were occupied year round, but Dave did not know which ones. He’d never really fitted in here, even when he’d visited in the years before the separation. He twirled Lucille in his hands, trying to feel if she could sense anything.

She hummed in his hands, but that was all. And she’d been doing that for days.

Zach found the track that ran through the scrub down to Pat O’Halloran’s cottage. As always it was meticulously well maintained, the branches and undergrowth cut way back, the hard scrabble surface clear, if a little wet from an earlier shower.

‘Still good,’ Karen informed them as the twin cones of the headlights illuminated the private road.

‘Yeah, think so,’ Dave confirmed. Lucille was quiet.

He was beginning to worry that everything was maybe too quiet, but he had no idea how the orcs would lay an ambush somewhere like this without Lucille being able to sense them. For that matter, Zach and Igor presumably knew all about not driving into ambushes and, as watchful as they were, they didn’t seem to think one was coming. The headland was surrounded on three sides by water. A couple of tiny islets lay just offshore due south, reachable by a hazardous walk across mostly submerged rocks. Nothing would be storming them from there.

It was so quiet Dave was more worried by the lack of any signs of life. The headlamps picked out the cottage at the end of the gravel road. He recognised the large front door, white-panelled and framed by the slender columns of the entry porch. Palladian windows – that’s what Annie always called them when she was pestering him to replace their aluminium frames in Houston. He knew she’d also insisted on the ones at the cottage being ‘authentic’, which to Dave was another way of saying inexpertly made by poorly trained craftsmen. They threw back wavering reflections of the jeep’s headlamps. He saw Pat’s old truck parked by the side of the house, and a couple of bikes chained to the rails of the front porch. He didn’t recognise them but assumed they belonged to the boys.

‘Cutting the lights,’ Zach said as he pulled up.

‘I’m good,’ Igor told him, pulling down night vision goggles.

‘What about you two?’ the younger SEAL asked. ‘How fast does your night vision adjust?’


‘It won’t be a problem,’ Karen said. ‘Just do it. I’ll cover you.’


Another thing Dave hadn’t bothered to find out. How quickly did his night vision kick in?

Instantly, as it turned out. Zach cut the lights and the world resolved itself into crystal clear blues and greys. Karen had known that because she had obviously taken the time to find out at some point. He hadn’t. That was gonna change, first chance he got. First thing tomorrow, in fact, when he had the boys safely away.

Zach fitted his own NVGs and they dismounted, Igor last of all, covering them with the mounted machine gun. Dave carried Lucille in an easy, two-handed grip, ready to start swinging, but she didn’t seem to think it would be necessary. He could hear small waves lapping at the shore, but nothing like the rustle and clink of leather and chain mail, or that rattle of armour plate and edged weapons. But nor could he hear any TV or radio, or see any lights on. He knew Pat kept a generator and a supply of diesel to run it.

‘Think the power’s out?’ he asked nobody in particular. The other three crept forward, sweeping the approach with their weapons.

‘And the phone lines,’ Karen said.

Igor stopped, dropped and covered the way they’d come in with his more compact weapon. The barrel of his sniper rifle poked out a foot over his shoulder.

‘Well,’ said Dave, struggling with his impatience, ‘the orcs aren’t likely to be waiting in the house, are they?’

He strode between the carefully advancing special operators, stomping up the front steps, ready to hammer on the knocker.

The shotgun blast blew a hole in the door directly in front of his face.