Fallen Stars (The Demon Accords) (35 page)

“Doesn’t seem real.  I mean, those suits are the bomb!  How’s some unarmed dude gonna fuck them up?”

“That’s the whole point of this clusterfuck.  Get him and get his secrets.  Now shut the fuck up and let’s stay frosty.”

They moved on, the odd dog ignoring the humans and concentrating on the forest scents and sounds.  On the far side of the perimeter, another team was working along a similar path.  Grim formed a plan and explained it to the big wolf in short, clipped words.  Then he/I climbed a tree and started hopping across the canopy, tree trunk to tree trunk, till we were in a big oak above the patrol trail.  The tree had widespread limbs that overshadowed a big section of potential paths the next patrol might take.  In fact, from up in its limbs, it was easy to see the disturbed leaf litter from multiple passes by the two teams.

Ten minutes later,  another pair of men with a mutant dog approached the tree.  They kept quiet, staying sharp and alert.  Never looked up, though.  People just don’t look up that much. The dog didn’t, either.  And I/me/Grim had done all our moving up high, so we hadn’t left a scent trail for the dog.

Their path under the tree wasn’t perfect, but it was close enough.  A sudden memory of me in an aluminum air duct, watching two bearded men with assault rifles who were surrounded by hundreds of scared kids flashed through my head.  Then I was falling, faster than gravity alone could propel me. 

The first guard died when my boot broke his neck.  But his body crumpling under mine forced me to recompose my position.  I rolled and came up just as the second soldier started to turn, his nasty-looking rifle muzzle moving my way.  The dog was faster, already headed for me with jaws open. 

Part of me was outraged.  Dogs aren’t supposed to bite me; that’s my unspoken agreement with them.  But another part of me recognized that this wasn’t an average dog.  It was much bigger, with a much smaller skull and a collar that was as much computer as it was neck restraint.  I don’t like hurting dogs, but Grim has no such qualms.  If it’s a threat to me or mine, it’s dead.

Turns out, it wasn’t my dilemma.  A massive, pony-sized black-and-tan beast slammed the dog away at the same time my hand grabbed the fore-end of the gun and my other hand palm-heeled the dog handler in the chest.  The stubby gun shuddered with a soft ripping noise, the tree behind me exploding bark and wood chips in a cloud.  My right hand struck again, a short, sharp knife-hand strike to his throat, which in the movies is guaranteed to knock a man unconscious.  Grim is not a movie aficionado, more of a field-manual-and-hands-on kinda guy.  His karate chop snapped the spine, crushed the larynx, and split most of the neck muscles. 

Head flopping on a spaghetti neck, the body collapsed to the ground.  I got the guy's finger off the gun and looked it over while noting that the mutant devil dog’s corpse was drumming out its death dance under Awasos’s jaws.

The gun had few moving parts, a battery pack in the pistol grip, and a tiny muzzle opening—like two millimeters or something.

I found a latch, and the whole top of the gun hinged upward in the same way as the breech of a belt-fed machine gun.  Underneath was a hopper of sorts that appeared to be stacked with hundreds of tiny flechettes, miniature metal arrows, which alternated silver and dull gray in color. 

Another memory intruded.  Black-clad soldiers with boxy rifles that shot hypersonic rounds using magnets.  Gauss guns. This one was much more refined and elegant than the ones in my flashback.  I left the gun alone, not knowing its secrets, tucking it into the oak tree alongside their bodies, which hung from various tree limbs.  I did take their sidearms, a Kimber .45 and a Berretta .40.  Guns seemed like a good idea, and my Grim side approved.  I also grabbed the tablet I found tethered to broke-neck’s belt.  It had a display showing a map of the area.  The perimeter line was marked with several buildings, a runway, and a heliport in the center.  The runway ran east and west, like an old-fashioned thermometer lying on its side, the bulb of mercury the helipad.  The buildings were clustered at the west end, as was the helipad.  A big square building marked
hangar
was tucked on the south edge of the heliport, and another structure marked
cabin
was to the north.

We had less than twenty minutes before the drones went up.  It would be very hard to hide from the electronic and optical sensors of a modern UAV, even a small one, and I did not want us out in the open when they launched.  Grim
knew
we could knock a drone down, even if I didn’t know how, but all element of surprise would be gone.  They were expecting me, just not yet.  Probably had people observing the Murray hotel and thinking that I was with Tanya and her crew as they headed this way.

We moved inside the perimeter, travelling fast.  The tablet display updated automatically with information from various sensors spread around the woods.  Apparently, the tablet talked to the sensor and caused it to disregard the tablet’s presence.  Sweet.  Like a passkey through the zone alarms.

The woods ended at a large clearing that was completely surrounded by a ten-foot chain-link fence.  Inside was the short, private airstrip, the hangar building and a log cabin.  The hangar was a big square, maybe fifty feet by fifty feet, and had a hunter’s blind of sorts, centered on the highest point of the roof. My vampire-virus-assisted eyesight showed me two sniper types hunkered inside it.  With Barrett .50 caliber rifles and a clear line of sight in all directions.

That was the bad news.  The good news was that the hangar was the closest building to the edge of the forest.  Toni must have gotten scared at that moment—more scared—as a sudden image of her in a concrete room with bars intruded.  The pull was downward, below my feet.  Of course it couldn’t be easy.  Of course she couldn’t be in the log cabin—no, she had to be under it somewhere.

We moved closer to the hangar till we were just inside the woods directly opposite the hangar and the sniper blind.  The two snipers were facing opposite directions, each scanning a field of fire that took in half of the clearing.  Although the closest place a person could hide was the exact spot we were crouched in, they didn’t so much as glance our way.  Me… I’d be watching that danger zone something fierce.  Then I spotted the white plastic housing of a motion detector mounted on the top of the chain-link fence facing our way.  Anything stepping into the clearing would trigger an alarm, giving the snipers plenty of time to trigger .50 caliber death.  The fence was ten yards from the forest, the hangar fifty yards from the fence.  The side of the blind that faced us was armored with an angled plate of steel that would give the two behind it cover from anyone attempting to snipe them.  Clever.

It seemed like a pretty good setup to me, and I wondered what Grim could do to get past it.  He sent a silent mental snort my way, unimpressed.  My right hand came up, and a focused burst of aura blasted across the thirty feet between me and the motion detector. The blinking red light on its face went dead, and we were running—fast. 'Sos loped beside me as I leaped once into the clearing and once again, completely over the fence and the now-defunct detector.

I jumped onto the hangar roof while 'Sos ran around to the front of the hangar.  One sniper glanced my way in time to catch my index finger through his temple.  I memory flashed on a female assassin in running gear dying the same way.

The other sniper never even registered my presence, his eye staying glued to the massive scope on his rifle.  Grim went for a neck choke but squeezed my arm muscles too hard.  The man’s spine separated inside his neck, the vertebrae popping apart like cheap costume pearls on a toy necklace.  High in the sky to the southwest, I heard the drone of a small plane, but it seemed to be travelling north and not directly near this installation.  I watched it nonetheless.  Something about it captured my attention for a moment, a familiar pull in its direction.  Glancing at the helipad, something else caught my eye.  Two giant rectangular outlines carved into the concrete.  Doors—giant concrete doors that opened to the sky.

A trapdoor on the floor of the blind led inside the hangar ceiling, bringing me to a catwalk and then a ladder down.  I just jumped off the catwalk, landing as quietly as possible.  A short woof told me my landing had been heard, but by friendly ears.  Moving around the Bell 406 helicopter that took up most of the hangar floor, I found a man wearing mechanic’s coveralls dead in a pool of blood, his throat gone, head hanging by a thread.  Another man, this one wearing a pilot jumpsuit, was backed up against the side of the copter, frozen in fear. 

Massive jaws a foot from his throat kept him from making big movements, but his body shook with involuntary twitches of terror. 'Sos had taken a prisoner.

The pull from the single engine plane’s last location grew stronger, rapidly increasing in strength till my head turned itself away from the shivering pilot and toward the front of the open hangar.

A blue blur flashed from above but made only the smallest of sounds as it hit the ground in the form of a crouched person.  A female person, one I knew the identity of without looking.  But I was looking… straight into a pair of the bluest eyes ever made.  Her stretchy body suit was a lighter blue, a sky blue. 

Standing upright, Tanya pulled off the matching blue helmet and shook her thick black hair free.  Then she blurred and was in front of me, inspecting me from head to toe.

“You’re a mess,” she said simply, smiling at my appearance.  Looking down, I could see why.  My clothes were torn and stained.  Food on my shirt and right jeans leg, blood—other peoples’—on my hands, mud and vegetation stuck to my boots.

“What’s that?  Blood?” she asked, suspicious of a red stain on my tee shirt.

“Ziti,” I answered in my own voice.  The transitions between Grim’s control and mine seemed smoother, more natural.

“Who is that?” she asked, nodding toward the pilot who watched us, his twitches of fear even greater now.

“The pilot that snagged Toni from Owls Head Park.”

She flashed across the hangar floor, a blue blur.  He jumped involuntarily at her appearance right up in his face.  Her humor was gone, replaced by a predator’s focused stare.  Despite her physical attractiveness, he couldn’t meet her gaze.

“What is this place?” she asked, her voice deceptively soft.

“Decommissioned missile silo.  Old Atlas F facility.  The doors there in the helipad are for a single missile magazine,” he said, looking away from her, then back.

“So it belongs to the government?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Sold to private owners years ago.  They tried to renovate it into an end-of–the-world, apocalypse-type place, but ran out of money. 
Agents in rebus
bought it from them through a shell company.”

“And my goddaughter is down there?” she asked in a deadly voice.  If he was frightened before, his was pissing-pants terrified now.

“Y-yes.  It’s a t-trap for him.  But you’re not supposed to be here yet.  They thought they would have to leave out some clues or something.”

“How do we get in?”

“The entrance is inside the cabin.  There’s also an escape hatch behind it that comes up in the little shed, but that’s bolted shut from inside,” he said, the very picture of cooperation.

“Guards?”

“Four or five in the cabin.  That’s their barracks.  Another three or four in the control room under the cabin.  Tunnel leads to the silo. Little girl’s at the bottom level.”

“What are the traps?”

“I-I don’t know.  The guards aren’t really expected to slow him down.  You down.  But there’s stuff down there I don’t know much about.  A couple of labs and animals and things.  This base is really a research facility.  The trap part came recently. Under the cabin is a two-story command center.  It has a tunnel leading to the silo, which is about a hundred eighty feet deep and maybe fifty feet in diameter.  There are seven levels.”

She pressed him for more details while I pulled the mechanic’s 9mm Smith & Wesson from his belt, along with a couple of mags.  Tanya handed me the pilot’s gun without looking away from him.  It was another 9mm, a Springfield Armory XD.  I now had four guns and at least one mag extra for each. 

The pilot had exhausted his knowledge, having spewed virtually every useful bit of information that he had.  He looked a bit confused at the last of it, like he couldn’t understand why he was divulging as much as he was.  Poor bastard didn’t realize he couldn’t lie to her if he wanted, not with the
voice
she was using.  I would have felt sorry for him except he had played a major role in kidnapping Toni, so the part of me that felt anything got over it.  Grim didn’t have any qualms.

And Tanya—Tanya felt like icy rage through the conduit we shared.

Finished with her questioning, she gave him one final command.  “Die,” she said, her tone queerly pitched.  He obeyed. Brain aneurysm, heart failure; I’m not sure.  His eyes simply rolled up in his head and his body collapsed on the floor of the hangar.  My ears told me his heart wasn’t pumping blood anymore.  Great!  It was gonna be tough to win any arguments with a girlfriend who could scream
drop dead
and have it pack a real punch.  I hoped Stacia didn’t get into any arguments with her.  Tanya glanced at me as I thought that. “Wouldn’t work on her.  Too stubborn.  Works on weak-willed people who are already terrified.  Sadly, it would just bounce off your bitch girl.”

She turned away and began to strip off the somewhat baggy blue skydiver suit she wore.  Her special swords were strapped to her back underneath.