DIRE : SEED (The Dire Saga Book 2) (13 page)

She flushed, lifted her hand again— and Mentot reached up, grabbed her elbow, gave it a pat before she turned to me.

“Mr. Carson told us about you,”

“SHE DOES NOT KNOW THAT NAME.”

Mentot tilted her head. “No? He was one of the first people you met, if you were telling the truth. On the beach, I mean.”

“AH.” Well, if she was willing to be civil, I saw no reason to be rude. “MOST PEOPLE IN THE CAMP USED NICKNAMES OR FIRST NAMES. DIRE HAD LITTLE OPPORTUNITY TO LEARN LAST NAMES.”

“Leon Carson. You called him Sparky?”

Ah, right. Martin had mentioned that Sparky had gone on to mentor the Torchbearers. Well now!

The clever little girl was trying to stall me, doubtless, but the bait was too much for my curiosity.

“WELL!” I let a pleased tone seep into my modulator. As much as I could, anyway. “THAT’S RIGHT, HE’S ONE OF YOUR TEACHERS NOW! HOW IS HE DOING THESE DAYS?”

“He’s good. Really good. He told us about you. I mean as much as he could, the MRB sealed some of the details. Of you and of the Black Bloods, and all that.”

I hadn’t known that. Made sense, in a depressing way. This nation’s government is paranoid when it comes to sharing information, even when it would be helpful. I’d suspected this was the reason that the truth of Great Clown Pagliacci never hit the news. Good to have it confirmed.

A tap on my flesh-and-blood shoulder, and I started. Distant shouting, until I removed my earbud. Martin? Yes.

“Dire! We gotta go, get in the van!” I cut back to half a screen, clambering in the van as Vorpal finished loading crates. Once inside and belted up, I turned my attention back to my armor’s conversation.

“DIRE IMAGINES HE HAS SOME GOOD STORIES,” I said. “WELL, NOW YOU HAVE ONE TO SHARE WITH HIM. GIVE HIM DIRE’S REGARDS WHEN YOU SEE HIM, YES?”

“You can tell him yourself,” said Mags. “Plenty of time for him to visit you when you’re in prison. Seriously, what the hell happened? You could have been a hero!”

Mentot frowned at her, and Mags looked chagrined. Talking telepathically? I couldn’t tell.

“THE MORE DIRE SEES OF HEROES, THE LESS SHE IS IMPRESSED,” I said, removing the warm tone from the modulator. “CASE IN POINT.”

“We were good enough to take you down,” Mags grinned.

“INCORRECT, THOUGH YOU FOUGHT WELL ENOUGH. DIRE REFERS NOT TO THE FIGHT, BUT THE REASON YOU’RE HERE IN THE FIRST PLACE. YOU ARE BEING USED.”

“How so?” Mentot asked.

“WAS IT COINCIDENCE THAT YOU WERE PATROLLING THIS AREA AT THIS TIME? FOUR OF YOU?”

They shared another look.

“Anonymous tip,” Mags said. Her stance loosened a bit, and she put her hands on her hips. “You think this was a setup? What was in that truck that you needed to destroy it?”

“NOTHING. NOT EVEN A DRIVER. THE TRUCK WAS EMPTY SAVE FOR REMOTELY-TRIGGERED EXPLOSIVES.”

“Yeah, like I believe that.”

I turned my cameras to the truck. “GO AND LOOK FOR BODIES IN THE WATER, DIRE WILL WAIT—”

I stopped cold, as I saw what was going on back at the site of the explosion. Vines were crawling out of the water, leafy vines that were flexing and contracting like tendrils, inching along and poking through the smoldering wreckage of the truck.

“OKAY. THAT’S A NEW ONE.”

Mags looked confused. “What’s a new one?”

But Mentot was staring at the water, eyes growing wide. “Oh shit.”

“Language,” Mags cautioned. “Don’t need any more demerits with— Oh holy fuck!”

“INTERESTING.” I didn’t know any plant controllers. None had shown up when I’d done my research on Icon’s heroes and villains. Didn’t mean there weren’t any, though.

“Is this like that hentai stuff I’m not allowed to watch?” Mentot asked.

“Jesus I hope not,” Mags muttered. “Whoa. Whoa whoops, that’s bad.” Several of the tendrils slunk out of the water on our side of the inlet.

“YES, IT IS. THAT THING’S LOOKING FOR CARGO THAT ISN’T THERE. SO IT’S GOING TO KEEP SEARCHING... AND YOU’VE GOT TWO UNCONSCIOUS TEAMMATES NOT TOO FAR FROM IT, DON’T YOU?”

“Crap. Get Speedbump,” Mag told Mentot.

The shorter hero flapped her arms. “Muscle problems, remember? No go!”

“So use your telekinesis!”

“It’s too weak! I could, like, lift his legs, but not all of him! Can you drag him by his belt buckle, like you did that one time?”

“Yeah, but—” She shot me a look, and I finished her sentence.

“BUT YOU’RE USING YOUR FULL POWER TO RESTRAIN DIRE. QUITE THE QUANDARY, HM?”

“How about the MRB? Are they almost here?” Mags asked Mentot.

“They said they’d be about ten minutes, it’s been like four!”

“YOU KNOW THE SOLUTION TO THIS.”

I watched Mags mouth pull into a frown, as she glanced back and forth from me, to the encroaching vines. Finally Mags jogged over to Speedbump, grabbed his arms, and pulled him back. She was moving slow, and I could see sweat rolling down the exposed part of her face. Physical activity, plus the effort of maintaining her powers, was taking a toll.

The vines kept coming.

“YOU KNOW WHAT HAS TO HAPPEN HERE,” I said with a sigh. “WHY DO YOU DELAY?”

“She’s right,” Mentot said. “If that thing had a brain, I could do something, but once again I’m totally flipping useless. And you can’t drag Tina like that, so you have to let Dire go—”

“Hush!” Mags barked, dropping Speedbump, putting her hands on her knees and heaving. “Maybe the vines won’t...”

There were a lot of vines. And in a few of them, I was seeing thorns under the leaves. Slowly, they crept toward Serpent Tina’s prone form, questing and coiling.

“WELL. YOU HAD YOUR CHANCE,” I said. “TYPICAL HERO.”

Servos shrieked, and the armor’s motors ground, as I
wrenched
with terrible force, and in a cacophony of sparks and shrapnel, I tore the ceramic structure of the arm free of the steel of the armor. Mags shrieked, and Mentot dove for cover as I swept the glowing palm of my gauntlet across them—

—And aimed it at the vines.

Three shots at wide dispersal, and the vines were torn to shreds, along with the nearby foliage, the remnants of the truck, the trees on the opposite bank, and most of the underbrush on the other side.

“Holy Christ,” I heard Mags whisper.

We watched the water for a second. The vines didn’t come out again.

“You, ah, you could have done that any time, yeah?” Mentot asked.

“YES.”

“You didn’t.”

“DIRE WISHED TO SEE WHAT YOU WOULD DO. THOUGH THIS FARCE DOES BEGIN TO BORE HER.”

The force around my armor dissipated, and the armor fell to the ground. I managed to turn it into a three-point landing, falling with some modicum of grace.

I straightened the suit up and had it turn, looming over the two standing Torchbearers, eight feet of battered armor and intimidation. I folded my arms. “ARE WE DONE HERE?”

“Okay. I’m not dumb,” Mags said. “There’s something going on here, and it looks like I need more facts. And you just proved I can’t hold you here, so I guess truce and we both back off?”

Yeah, that worked. Except... wait, there was an opportunity, here. They were in contact with Sparky. There was one matter he could help me with, one that I needed to solve as soon as I could.

“THERE IS ONE MORE THING.”

“What?”

“TELL SPARKY THAT DIRE NEEDS TO KNOW SUSAN’S LAST NAME. SHE MAY BE IN DANGER.”

“Susan?”

“THE ONE MINNA SAVED. HE CAN FIND OUT HER NAME IF HE DOESN’T KNOW IT. DIRE WILL MEET WITH HIM ALONE AT MIDNIGHT TONIGHT IN THE PLACE WHERE HE ALMOST KILLED DIRE. PASS THIS ON.”

“Yeah, I don’t know if he’ll go for that.”

“HE WILL.”

She sighed. “Fine. We’ll pass along the message.”

Without another word I launched into the air, moving at half speed, and heading south, low over the treetops. I set the armor on autopilot. It would evade for a while, move randomly and as stealthily as it could, before ending up in an old quarry that I’d scouted beforehand. Come nightfall I could get it back to the outskirts of town and fly it out to a pickup point.

With a sigh of relief, I closed the link, and pulled my mask off, returning my attention to my own body. Working remotely without the control harness was tricky.

But it had mostly worked out in the end.

“Everything go okay?” Martin asked.

“Mostly.  Everything good here?”

“Yeah. We got off the highway ’fore the cops showed up. Vorpal’s a ways back on her bike making sure we ain’t followed. Gonna be a few minutes to the swap point. Transfer the cargo, ditch the van, go to the rendezvous. Simple. Easy.”

“Maybe not,” I mused. “Turns out there’s someone else in this mess.”

“Oh?” Vorpal asked over the subvocal channel.

I told them about the exploding truck, the Torchbearers, and the strange vines.

Midway through, Vorpal started cursing, a steady stream of foul language. I understood about half of it, before she finished. “Never easy, never simple. Great. Just great.”

“So there’s another player in the game,” Martin mused. “Now this adds a fourth possibility; A fake out.”

I nodded. “Not a trap, or a distraction, or office politics. Unless the office plants are rebelling against their masters.”

“Fear the ficus,” Martin muttered. “No, my guess is that was a fake out. Make whoever was controlling the plants think that the cargo got destroyed.”

I nodded. That made sense, and raised even more questions. Who was the new player? How did they know of the shipment? What
is
in those boxes?

I turned and considered them. “Such a fuss over these crates. Tempting to open one and see—”

“Hell fucking no,” Martin said. “Our luck it’d be plant zombie virus bullshit. Turn us all into kudzu or something.”

“—which is why Dire’s going to wait until we’ve got a secure environment and some hazmat suits before we look inside,” I finished. “Have a little faith, Martin.”

Vorpal’s channel clicked open again. “I have a question.”

“Yes?” I asked.

“How did the plant controller know where we were going to ambush the convoy?”

I opened my mouth, and shut it again. “The controller may have known the route... but the vines showed up within minutes. That is oddly specific.”

“Maybe he knew ’cause someone told him.” Said Martin.

I narrowed my eyes. Betrayal? I’d been stung once by it, twice if you counted a druggie who’d murdered one of my best friends.

I didn’t like traitors.

Neither did Vorpal, from the venom in her voice. “Chaingang,” she snarled.

“We don’t know for certain.” Martin said.

“True,” she said. “There were no plant creatures on the highway during our assault.”

“But that could simply mean they’ll be waiting at the rendezvous point.” I finished the thought, and settled back in the seat. Adrenaline was fading, but a cold anger was growing. I was tired, and had a few bruises from my bouncy force field ride. This made me even more exhausted. I puffed my cheeks out, blew a raspberry.

“Say again?” Vorpal asked.

That must have sounded pretty weird over the channel. “Just commenting on the tragedy of existence. All right, so here’s what we’ll do...”

Ten minutes later, we were pulling up five blocks away from the rendezvous point in a stolen pickup, with a camper shell on the back. The van had been ditched and sterilized with bleach, and the license plates stripped. For good measure I’d swapped out the ones on the pickup with some generic fakes. As long as no cop ran them, we’d be fine. Which meant that I’d be the one driving. Even in a city as tolerant as Icon, we were still on the north side, the local cops were still mostly corrupt assholes, and Martin was still black.

Vorpal was covering us from a few streets down, with the stolen laser rifle. We’d convinced her to ditch it after we were done here. I’d disabled the obvious tracker, but if the rifle had something like the trojan they’d tried to slip us through the memory sticks, then it would send up a signal later at the worst possible time.

The rendezvous point was an old power station, next to a few warehouses. It had been stripped of most of its copper long ago, and there was nothing left to steal. It was in former Black Blood territory, and squatters still feared to shelter in places like this.

But it wasn’t the power station I cared about. Some of the warehouses around it were still in use, and their security systems were just what I needed. I adjusted the universal remote to maximum range, and started searching through the networks of the area.

And soon enough, I found what I needed. “Got it! Active camera system.”

“Can you see it?” Martin asked.

“Give her a second.”

I piped the camera feed to my contacts, and adjusted the camera angles until the power station came into sight.

“Not seeing much—” I panned around, considered it from several angles. “Wait.”