Cypher (The Dragon's Bidding Book 2) (28 page)

___________

A series of explosions
ripped through the warehouse, swaying the floor beneath Cypher’s feet. The
groan of a dying leviathan ended in a crash that blew what remained of the door
into the warehouse down the hallway, riding a wave of flame. The Tzraka’s
chittering grew increasingly frantic.

“I’m sorry, Old Friend,
but it’s time to end this now.” Tritico’s smile didn’t look the least bit
sorrowful.

“I’m not your old
friend,” Cypher shouted. “Just some flunky whose life you stole so you could
wage your stupid little war. It isn’t my fucking battle.”

“You were a nothing,
only a coward of questionable moral judgment,” Tritico said. “But I needed your
weakness to off-set his strength. The amalgam of those two personalities formed
the being you so aptly named Cypher, and gave me just enough control to force
you to do my bidding. You should be happy. For a few days you were given a
taste of ultimate superiority, a chance to live an existence few men could
imagine. The weakling you were created from could never have dreamed of such
power. You should thank me for giving you a glimpse of godhood.”

The iciness inside
Cypher’s skull boiled away in a flash of anger. In its place, a darkness roiled
with a tightly-controlled rage that felt familiar.

Dammit, it’s about time
you showed up.

One by one, all his
augmentations began to shut down. Sounds receded, and his multi-spectrum vision
disappeared, plunging him into a dim red-lit room clotted with smoke. The
inhead display flickered and vanished, leaving him feeling Normal and naked.

“You sure the hell
ain’t no god, asshole. Maybe I can’t kill you, but he can.” Cypher reached up,
pulled the spike out of the back of his head.

And ceased to exist.

__________

“That bastard ain’t dead
yet?”
Jumper squalled.

“Let’s move it,
people.” Fitz herded everyone into the stairwell and followed, slapping the
controls on the door. Nothing happened. No power. To the left of the opening,
the cover for the manual override controls hung open, probably how the workmen
were getting in and out. She pumped the handle, but the hydraulics responded
sluggishly, moving the door only a centimeter at a time.

The creature turned its
ruined face toward her, regarding her with its remaining green eye. Gone was its
blinding speed; it moved like an arthritic old dog, placing each foot
carefully. One lower arm hung useless at its side, but both blades flicked out
as it lurched toward her.

Fitz tried to force the
handle to move faster, but knew that if she pushed too hard with her enhanced
strength, she ran the risk of breaking the lever and then they’d all be
screwed. As the Destroyer squeezed its bulk through the outer door, she fired
several shots with the slug thrower, hoping to at least slow it down. It
twitched with each impact, but little more. The kill shot just below the second
set of arms didn’t seem to work with this creature. Where was its vulnerable
spot? Did it even have one?

The door crept the last
few centimeters and closed, but without power there was no way to lock it. Fitz
rammed her foot into it full force in hopes of jamming the mechanism, and raced
after the others. Several landings below her, she could see the bobbing light
of Bartonelli leading her party downward. “Don’t go beyond level one,” she
called after them, then switched to her comm. “Lizzy, we’re coming out hard and
fast; get those lobby doors open for us.”

“And how am I supposed
to do that, Colonel? The main computers controlling the building’s security
aren’t functioning.”

Fitz grumbled. Not very
imaginative for someone who was so gung ho to use her weapons a few minutes
ago. “A Sagaris small diameter missile should work nicely.”

“Oh, of course,
Colonel.” An explosion rattled the building before the ship finished speaking.
“There, the way is open. I’m beginning to derive a great deal of satisfaction
from blowing things up.”

No shit, Lizzy.

Ari waited for her at
the next landing. “What was that explosion?”

“Just opening the front
door.”

A crash from back up
the stairwell warned Fitz that the Destroyer had made it past her makeshift
lock. To her enhanced hearing, its breathing sounded ragged, its steps
faltering and grinding like rusty hinges, but it kept coming, driven by a need
to kill, by a hatred bred into its very cells.

“Why doesn’t that thing
give up and die?” Ari asked.

“It can’t, not until
it’s killed you.”

“Sorry, but I won’t
oblige it there.”

Squeals broke out
overhead, and a frantic thrashing. Red light reflected from chitin and blades
as the creature tumbled down the stairs toward them, fighting to regain its
balance. Fitz hooked Ari’s arm and pulled her along at a speed just short of
HK. Bartonelli and Pike waited in front of a door displaying a large number
one.

“It’s locked,” the
sergeant said.

From the sounds
drifting down the stairwell, the creature had regained its footing, and was
coming closer by the second. No time to pry off the manual override’s cover. A
more direct method would have to do. She pulled a grenade from her belt pouch
and adjusted the settings. It had to be powerful enough to blow the door
without pulverizing them in this enclosed space. If it managed to wipe out
their Tzraka friend at the same time, so much the better. She set the timer.

“Go down a couple of
landings. Try to find some cover.”

“But you said not to go
below this point,” Pike said, his pupils huge and dilated with fear and
darkness.

“Unless you’d rather go
up and join that bug. Now run.”

Pike took off down the
stairs, Faydra cradled against his chest while Jumper clung to his back,
plexisteel claws sunk into his armor. Fitz followed. Bartonelli and Ari were
two landings down, huddled in a corner. She tackled the lieutenant, ignoring
Jumper’s protests. They landed on the pile of bodies as the explosion blew down
the stairs and shrapnel clattered around them. Light flooded into the darkness,
streaming in from the lobby through the now open door.

Ears ringing, Fitz
struggled up fighting a wave of vertigo. How much more of this could the little
girl inside her take? Before, she’d always fought for herself, her mission. Now
there was someone depending on her, a life more important than her own. A new
life that had to survive.

“Up, everyone. We may
have only seconds to make it to that door before the creature does.”

An angular shadow
eclipsed the light, destroying their hopes. The bug had reached the ground
floor landing and stood between them and freedom. Nowhere to go now but farther
down, down into the dead zone of the suppression field.

“Move,” she yelled,
herding them back. “All the way to the cell area. We’ll make our stand there.”
She snapped off a few shots, then turned and raced after the others.

A cave is a grave. A
cave is a grave.

The litany ran through
her mind as she rushed downward. A flicker of her inhead was all the warning
she received before her augs powered down. She felt like she’d run face first
into a wall and fell to her knees. Ari dragged her back up, supporting her as
they both ran.

“No power anyplace else
in the whole damn building, but down here. Typical DIS,” the Emperor said. “Must
be an auxiliary energy source somewhere. Think we could find it and shut it
down?”

“Knowing Tritico, it
won’t be close. He couldn’t risk the prisoners getting to it.” Fitz glanced
over her shoulder, found the Destroyer only a few meters behind them. “Besides,
I don’t think we’re going to have time for a look around.”

They followed the
others through the first open door they found, and into a room a duplicate of
the one where she’d met Von Drager—same Spartan décor and vulgar graffiti, same
bleak cell beyond the wide window. Fitz skidded to a stop and threw her weight
against the heavy metal door, but the creature crashed into it, knocking her
back. Without her augs, she couldn’t hope to match the bug in strength or
speed.

She retreated to the
center of the room, dragging Ari with her. A check of the ammo counter on the
slug thrower showed the magazine almost empty, but there was no time to reload.
She pulled the sword from over her shoulder.

“Can you use this
thing, Bartonelli?”

“You betcha, Chima.”
The sergeant caught the sword and rotated it in a tight figure eight.

“Give me something,”
Ari said.

“No. Get into the
cell.”

“I’m not cowering in
there while you die for me.”

“Dying for you is our
job. Now get in there. Pike, if she doesn’t go, drag her.”

The lieutenant put down
the cat and reached for Ari’s arm, but her cold glare stopped him. The panic in
his face reflected his fear at being caught between the wills of his commanding
officer and his Emperor.

Jumper hurried to
Faydra’s limp form and pulled her into a back corner. He sat protectively next
to her, his plexisteel claws tapping against the floor. His telepathy
suppressed, he could only growl, but his willingness to defend his mate showed
in his bristling fur and dilated pupils.

The creature staggered
through the door, wavering on its feet. A pink ichor oozed from dozens of
wounds, but the single green eye remained fixed on Ari.

Snatching up a metal
chair, the Emperor took her place in the line of defenders next to Fitz. “Save
your breath, Colonel,” she said. “You don’t think any of us are getting out of
here alive, do you?” She rolled her shoulders. “Besides, I was fighting Tzraka
before any of you were born.”

The creature attacked,
going straight for Ari, its bladed arms slashing down in savage overhand
attacks. Ari blocked the blows with the chair, but each strike sheared off
pieces of metal. Fitz, picking her targets carefully, fired single shots to
conserve her ammunition, but nothing seemed to have an effect on the creature.
Driven by hatred and pain, and its single-minded need to destroy its prey, the
thing refused to die until it had completed its mission.

Fitz ducked back as a
blade sliced past her, smashed into the chair Ari brandished, and jammed in the
metal. The creature jerked back, pulling the woman off balance. The other blade
swung in from the right. Bartonelli lunged, trying to get her sword in position
to parry the blow, but wasn’t fast enough. The edge of the blade caught Ari at
the base of the thumb and sliced diagonally across her palm, and shearing off
all but her little finger.

Ari screamed.

___________

Without cyber-systems
running, Wolf felt little disoriented when he slammed back into his body. He
had time to see Jan’s eyes widen before he put two slugs between them. He hadn’t
even thought about it, only a reflex.

His old friend had
known who he faced in that last second, known their battle of wills had ended,
and he had lost.

Odd that he felt no
pleasure now, no sense of satisfaction that it was over, or that he’d won their
decades long conflict. The woman he loved would never again have to worry about
a shot from the darkness, or face one of Jan’s assassins. Their unborn child
would never know that smiling boogieman. He should have felt relief, if nothing
else.

And yet all he felt was
sadness, all he remembered were the good times. Glasses of vilaprim shared, the
time they snuck a pair of neubeasts into the astrogation lab. They’d laughed
for hours over that. He’d liked his friend’s toothy smile then.

“I’m sorry, Jan.”

In the hallway, part of
the ceiling collapsed in a shower of sparks. If he wanted to live to see Fitz
again, to watch that little girl of theirs grow up, he had to get out of here,
and fast. He slammed his spike back in, swaying as he brought all his systems up
in an electronic rush.

Did we win?
asked Cypher. He noticed the crumpled body at their feet.
Ah, I guess we
did. Is he dead?

Flames licked up the
walls, turning the hall into an inferno. Thick black smoke boiled across the
ceiling, lowering with every second.

“If not now, he will be
in a couple of seconds, and so will we if we don’t get out of here.”

Yeah, but how?

Wolf pointed toward the
end of the hall. “That hatch to the roof is the only way I know. Do you have a
better idea?”

No. Can we survive going
through that?

“Only one way to find
out.”

He backed up for a
running start, and launched into hyperkinetic speed. He was running flat out by
the time he reached the doorway, and plunged into the fiery maelstrom.

Ari let out an inhuman
howl, a mixture of pain and horror that chilled Fitz to her soul. Bile burned
her throat at the memory of Nick Costos’ death. She’d failed him, and hadn’t
been able to save Ari either—her liege, her friend. Nothing remained but
revenge.

The creature rolled
onto its back, its legs twitching against its abdomen like a crushed spider as though
it had played out its destiny, killed its target, and now it could give in to
its pain and die. Not good enough for Fitz; she needed to kill it. She
screamed, jammed the barrel of the slug thrower into that single, all-too-human
green eye, and held the firing stud down until the weapon clicked on empty. The
Destroyer would not rise again.

Bartonelli and Pike
fought to hold Ari down. Angry red streaks boiled up her arm, already to her
elbow, as the Tzraka poison claimed her body.

“Would there be time to
do something?”
Fitz had asked Ski the night this
madness began.

If she was quick
enough.

“Get her up,” she
yelled. “Hold her arm out.”

“What?” Confusion
washed across the sergeant’s dark face.

“Just do it.” Fitz
snatched up the sword Bartonelli had dropped.

The sergeant’s eyes
widened as she realized what Fitz planned, and pulled Ari to her feet,
tightening her grip on the woman’s arm. Without augmentations, this would take
all of Fitz’s strength. She brought the blade down below the shoulder, a dozen
centimeters above the elbow, well ahead of the red tracks. The sound of steel
severing bone made her stomach lurch. Ari gave a single shrill wail, then went
silent, unconscious.

“We need to stop the
bleeding. I don’t know how quickly the symbiont can handle a wound this
severe.” Fitz pulled a med kit from her belt and opened it. Bartonelli snatched
the tourniquet, applying it with an efficiency learned from years on
battlefields. Fitz emptied the entire can of wound-seal on the stub. From here,
it was in the symbiont’s hands.

Bartonelli felt for a
pulse. “She’s alive. Barely.”

Fitz brushed a strand
of hair from Ari’s face and laid her palm against the cool, sweaty skin. “I
don’t hear the symbiont singing.” She met the sergeant’s troubled gaze.

“What does that mean?”
asked Bartonelli.

“I’m not the right one
to ask. I don’t know much more about this thing than you do. Hopefully she’s in
a symbiont-induced coma. We need to get her to Doc Ski, and quickly.”

Fitz noticed the
confusion in Pike’s eyes. Apparently Bartonelli hadn’t shared any information
about her newfound invulnerability with him, but now wasn’t the time. Later,
he’d need to be brought in on this. And offered his chance. She didn’t want to lose
another good officer because of her inaction.

Pike pulled the
unconscious woman up, draping her good arm over his shoulder, and Fitz took the
other side. Bartonelli followed, carrying Faydra. As they sidled around the
dead creature into the hallway, Jumper stopped to hiss and rake his plexisteel
claws across the Destroyer’s chitinous face.

“Sergeant, find some
way to secure the door,” Fitz said. “I don’t want anyone in here until Security
has had a chance to sift through that creature’s DNA cell by cell. We need to
know exactly how they made it, just in case we find ourselves facing one of
these things again.”

They struggled back
toward the surface. Fitz’s inhead flickered, then came back up, along with a
jumble of comm traffic. Her augs returned last, allowing her to shift most of
Ari’s dead weight off Pike and onto her.

“Bast’s whiskers, I
don’t know how regular cats can stand it. I have to be able to talk all the
time.
” Jumper’s telepathy functioned once again.

“Yeah, we noticed,” said
Bartonelli.

“Well, and you can just
kiss my fuzzy little rump.”

An explosive release of
tension made the merc’s answering laughter sound too loud in the empty
stairwell.

Spears of light
appeared ahead, lancing through the darkness. Fitz pulled Pike to a stop, her
hand dropping to the grip of the slug thrower, then remembered she hadn’t
reloaded it. “Who’s there?” she yelled.

“Fire and rescue.” The
answer echoed down the shaft.

“We need a stretcher
and a medevac flyer with a stasis box.”

“Ready and waiting,
ma’am,” the voice replied, drawing closer. “Your ship informed us you might
have casualties.”

The medics relieved
them of their burden, stopping only long enough to ensure no one else needed
their attention, then hustled the wounded woman up the stairs. By the time Fitz
exited the lobby, Ari was on the stretcher, a medic tucking a thermal blanket
up under her chin. The young man looked up, startled. “This is the—”

“It’s not who you think
it is,” Fitz interrupted. She didn’t want the rumor of another assassination
attempt spreading around the city just yet.

The EMT eyed her
battered SpecOps armor and swallowed. “Yes, ma’am. I’ll log her in as
unidentified
victim
.”

Bartonelli placed
Faydra on the blanket next to Ari, and Jumper leaped up beside his mate,
resting his head on the pale cat’s flank. Worry colored his mind voice.
“Hang
in there, Sweet Paws. I know a good vet; he’ll fix you right up.”

Fitz hoped Faydra
wouldn’t wake up with plexisteel claws. She wiped her hands across her face,
and they came away smeared with dirt and blood.

“Pike, stay with her.
She goes straight into a stasis box, then to Doc Ski. No place else,
understood?”

He nodded, and followed
the medics to the waiting medevac flyer.

“Sorry we couldn’t get
here sooner,” the remaining med-tech said. “It’s been one of those crazy
mornings. Half the Warren is on fire.”

Fitz turned to look.
Black smoke roiled above the old slum to the south, and she had no doubt that,
beneath that cloud, Wolf was at the center of the conflagration.

___________

The sun glared scarlet
through a brown sky as tankers drifted above the charred skeleton of the
warehouse, sides swollen with flame retardant. A wall collapsed, sending up a
tongue of flame amid a shower of sparks. The aircraft converged on it,
drenching the hotspot with chemical foam and knocking down the flare-up before
moving on to search for another.

As shadows crept across
the ground, Fitz and Bartonelli watched and waited, standing behind the
barricades erected to contain the residents of the Warren, who huddled together
to hear if their homes survived. Fitz hailed a firefighter hurrying past. At
first he ignored her, then noticed the black SpecOps armor and Imperial
Security insignia.

“Sorry, ma’am, I’ve
only got a few seconds. What did you need?”

“Have you found any
bodies in the warehouse?”

He looked away, lips
thinning. “Yes, ma’am, we’ve found a few. A couple of them looked to be your
people. Augies.”

Fitz felt like she’d
been kicked in the chest. “How many?”

He shook his head.
“Can’t tell yet. It’s a mess in there, could be days before we sift through the
debris and know what we’ve got. That’s about all I can tell you now.”

“I understand. Just have
your supervisor see that a complete report gets to Imperial Security as soon as
possible.”

“It’s not him, Chima,”
Bartonelli said as the firefighter rushed away. “You said that Tritico had some
of his augies in there.”

“How can you be so
sure?”

“I know Wolf. Served
with him for almost a decade. I’ve seen the man walk out of situations that no
one else could have survived.”

“I know he’s nearly
indestructible,” Fitz said. “But only nearly. Not totally.”

“He’s as capable as
they come, and smart, plus he has two big reasons to come out of this alive—you,
and that little girl in your belly. You need to have faith.” Bartonelli
enveloped her in a hug.

Fitz couldn’t hold back
the tears. “If he’s wounded, he’ll hole up someplace and let the symbiont heal
him, but it hurts me to think of him alone and in pain. Silly, isn’t it?
There’s no one better able to take care of himself, and still I worry myself
sick about him.”

Bartonelli pulled back.
“I don’t know about you, but I could use some chow and a long, hot shower. When
Wolf gets back, you don’t want to greet him smelling like you rolled in a dead
gerbat, do you, Chima?”

Fitz wiped her cheeks,
smearing tears into the grime on her face. “What does that name mean?”

“Chima? It’s trader
talk for girlfriend, best bud. What did
you
think?”

“When we first met, I
wasn’t sure you liked me, so I thought maybe it meant dumb ass.”

The sergeant chuckled.
“Believe me, if I wanted to call you a dumb ass, you’d know you’d been called a
dumb ass.”

Leaning on each other,
they stumbled the two blocks to the overgrown empty lot where they’d left Lizzy,
the closest spot the shuttle could put down in the narrow streets of the
Warren. A wisp of melody drifted across Fitz’s thoughts, blending with the song
far back in her mind, then disappeared. She pulled Bartonelli to a halt.

“Did you hear that?”

Confusion flickered
across the sergeant’s face. “What?”

Perhaps she hadn’t
carried the symbiont long enough to be attuned to its ethereal chorus.

“There’s another
Lazzinair nearby.” Fitz turned in a slow circle, scanning the darkened doorways
and broken windows. At first she thought the dark shape at the entrance to the
alley was one of the innumerable pieces of trash that blew around the slum, but
her thermal vision registered it as warm-blooded, alive.

Wolf raised his head
and dragged himself up, hanging onto the wall.

She blurred across the
space to reach him, skidding to a stop close enough to reach out and touch him,
but she didn’t dare. He looked like only the wall at his back kept him on his
feet, like the barest brush of her fingertips would drive him back down. The
fire had burned away his eyebrows and what remained of his hair. Blackened skin
peeled from his face, revealing new pink tissue beneath. His smile might have
been ghoulish, but to her it was the most beautiful sight in the known
universe. He was alive.

Going up on her toes,
she placed her lips against his, soft as a snowflake settling on his mouth, but
that was enough to bring her world to a shattering stop. She could stay like
this forever, touching him, listening to their songs blend together into a concerto
of celebration and love.

Hand shaking, he
tangled his fingers in her hair and guided her head to his shoulder. His voice
sounded harsh and painful, hardly above a whisper. “Are you all right? Is she?”

She slipped her arms
around him and nodded.

“She’s going to be
tough, just like her mother,” he rasped.

Fitz looked up into
those blue eyes, felt the tension finally flow out of her. “And good-looking
like her father.”

“Not so much right
now.” His chuckles started him coughing, but when it passed he asked, “Ari and
Jumper?”

“At the hospital. She
and Faydra were injured, but I think they’ll both be fine.”

Wolf kissed her again,
this time with all the heat the first kiss had lacked, and she returned it with
her own hungry intensity. He lifted his mouth, leaving her lips warm from the
heat of his kiss. “That’s enough,” he said. “You’re enjoying this far too
bloody much.”

“And after I got us out
of that warehouse in one piece?” Cypher asked. “Bringing you back alive should
at least earn me a kiss.”

“I said you could ask
her for a kiss. Not help yourself.”

Fitz pulled back in
confusion, studying his face. There was that roguish glint in his eyes that
she’d seen before. “Cypher?” she asked. “You’re still there?”

“We’ve reached a kind
of reconciliation,” said Wolf.

“He means, I saved our
collective butt in that inferno and he’s too hard-headed to say thank you. How
about another kiss instead, Gray Eyes?”

“No,” Wolf and Fitz
said at the same time.

“And after I helped you
blow away Smiley?” Cypher pantomimed a shot to the head.

“Is that true?” Fitz
asked. “Tritico is dead?”

Wolf nodded.

She touched his hand.
“I’m so sorry, Love.”

“I’m not,” said Cypher.
“That jerk tormented both of us, and he enjoyed every second of it. He deserved
to die; him and his bugs and damn wireheads…ah…sorry, Gray Eyes, augies.”

Wolf took a step and
his knees buckled. Fitz caught him, and Bartonelli supported the other side. “I
hope you ladies have transportation nearby, because if I don’t get something to
eat soon, I’m not going to be awake much longer.”

“Lizzy’s parked just
around the corner. If you don’t mind processor fare, I’ll get you a big bowl of
stew.”