Shadow Ops 3: Breach Zone (38 page)

‘Let’s do this thing!’ he shouted to Swift. The Aeromancer nodded and ran to the building’s edge. Two members of the gang joined him, leaping skyward as the rest of them raced through one of Britton’s gates. Harlequin recognized one of the Aeromancers at Swift’s side as Spur, a former NBA basketball player who’d vanished after Manifesting a few years ago. Downer had reported he was with Houston Street when she was being questioned.

Harlequin watched the ground below as the gate flashed open again, the Houston Street Gang moving out around an overturned dump truck. With them came dozens of others, the patchwork ranks of the Latent who’d trusted Britton’s word and answered the call. Harlequin saw their hopeful glances cast Britton’s way, the uncomfortable distance between them and the uniformed service members around them. He felt their disciplined currents, brought under control by the Dampener, indistinguishable from the few SOC Novices and LE operators in the ranks. He shook his head in amazement as dozens of radios crackled into life, relaying his orders.

Britton opened a gate that spanned the street, and Harlequin’s force moved behind it as the Fornax trainees moved to join the Houston Street Gang. The enemy charged forward as they retreated, eagerly taking the ground they yielded up. Downer’s elementals, flame creatures evoked from the fires burning across the battlefield, threw themselves into their mass. They spread themselves across the line of the intersection, burning hot, doing their best to slow the enemy advance. The soldiers cursed as they fought the few sprinters who made it through.

Harlequin watched as Iseult turned and extended a hand toward a giant who pummeled the roof of an NYPD mobile command center, ignoring the light-caliber bullets the cops behind it were pouring into him. His eyes rolled up in his head and he began to dance, scratching himself madly. He collapsed, shaking, his skin first peeling like ancient bark and finally blowing away in the wind as all the water in his body misted the air above him, condensing into a tiny rain cloud that showered his desiccated corpse.

A
Gahe
moved smoothly around him, swiping at Flicker. The Selfer Pyromancer dove backward, shooting a burst of flame over the
Gahe
’s shoulder.

A sharp crack sounded from the steeple of Trinity Church and a round punched through the
Gahe
’s neck. The freezing black smoke billowed out of its holed throat, sending the Selfers scrambling as a burst of crackling electricity arced across its torso, burning fresh wounds with each lightning kiss. A sniper with one of Bookbinder’s magic rounds. The monster fell forward, its freezing blood misting out around it, clearing the ground of human, goblin, and giant alike.

Shivering, Flicker moved behind the overturned dump truck, sweeping his arms over his head. The flames from the truck and the buses alike danced to the movement of his arms, swirling and funneling before jetting forward across the intersection, blasting down into the broad junction of the streets. One of the Fornax Pyromancers and a SOC LE officer added their flames to the burn. Harlequin could see the enemy clearing back, Scylla’s Selfers moving up to counter the blast with summoned wind or water.

‘Stack the burn,’ he called into the radio. ‘Go.’

Mortars sounded from the steeple over the church, dull whistles followed by thumps as the incendiary rounds impacted in the intersection. The flames whooshed into the air, the roar of the fire loud as any artillery round. Downer’s elementals moved into the center of the blast, shivering as they burned white-hot. The flames leapt higher, the defenders backing away from the intersection as the heat reached its peak, so intense that Harlequin could feel its edges from his vantage point, the square disappearing from view beneath a shimmering haze.

The enemy backed farther down Broadway. Harlequin could see water bubbling up out of manhole covers in the distance, as Scylla’s Hydromancers tried to call up a flood to drown the flames.

Flicker and the other Pyromancers extended their arms and pointed south. The fire whirled, bent, and howled down the corridor made by the tall buildings. The enemy screamed and fled as Broadway became a burning tunnel. In one instant, there was a tide of goblins and giants, dotted with
Gahe
and enemy Selfers. The next, there was blackened rubble, carpeted with gently smoldering ash. The intersection was clear, a smoking wasteland. The fire had scoured the area so thoroughly that there was barely any odor, only a faint brimstone stink, blown on a gentle wind. The buildings to either side burned brightly, all the way south to the turning that would take them outside Federal Hall and to the Breach.

Harlequin knew it wouldn’t last long, that the enemy was regrouping even now outside the rotting portal to the Source. But for the moment, the way was clear.

‘Let’s go!’ he shouted, and leapt into the air.

On the ground, Guinevere and other Hydromancers swept their arms into the air, calling up a torrent of water that pulsed out of the sewer gratings and popped off manhole covers, streaming along the ground and raising a cloud of steam that the soldiers now advanced through at a quick trot, moving south down Broadway toward the Breach. With them came Swift and the Houston Street Gang, sloshing through the water that cooled the surface of the street even as the Pyromancers dialed their flames back, making it clear for the force to pass, moving into the mist and disappearing from sight.

Harlequin descended just above the cloud and joined Swift in summoning a wind that swept it aside, giving the defenders a clear view as they turned down Wall Street.

The shouts of encouragement slackened, then petered off into silence.

Heaps of enemy dead were slowly struggling to their feet. Many were charred beyond recognition, some burned so badly they lacked limbs to rise, their smoking remains shuffling and rolling along the pitted avenue to join the formation of more solid corpses behind them. Harlequin could hear the calls of sergeants, yelling at the police and guardsmen to hold their fire. A few rounds rang out regardless, harmlessly holing the ranks of dead moving forward to join Harlequin’s troops. Truelove had wisely kept himself a couple of ranks back, but emerged now, grim-faced and sweating, the white-painted side of his body streaked with black trails of ash.

Harlequin’s troops swallowed their revulsion, moving like a single organism to keep to Wall Street’s north side, away from the horde of dead that now marched alongside them. Together, they turned onto Wall Street and moved east, the Breach shimmering ahead of them, taller than Federal Hall, the edges still peeling, the fetid stink of decay overwhelming the smoke of the fires behind them.

Scylla’s forces fell back to defend the portal. The street thronged with enemy so thick they spilled onto north- and south-running streets. The air was black with rocs, with more emerging from the Breach’s upper edge, circling away as the Blackhawks opened up with their miniguns. Bursts of answering lightning and fire silenced the guns a moment later, and Harlequin saw enemy Selfers taking cover on the roofs above.

The tight confines of the buildings turned Wall Street into a shooting gallery. Both sides flattened themselves to the ground, crouched behind cover hastily raised by Terramancers, the street flowing up into makeshift barriers with slits for gun barrels. Bullets and blasts of magic roared down, a funnel of ordnance that made it impossible for anything to survive.

But Truelove’s force was already dead.

The zombies shuffled forward, ignoring the torrent of fire, burning, freezing, soaking up ammunition until their bodies collapsed. Still they advanced. At last, the dead reached the enemy, began clawing their way into their ranks. The
Gahe
flashed among them, but the corpses ignored the cold of their touch. The goblins and giants clubbed and stabbed, but the corpses shrugged off the wounds, mutely striking back.

The dead fought, and the living came behind them, pushing deeper into the plaza.

SOC and Selfer, fighting side by side to defend the nation. History was unfolding before his eyes. The world was changing.
And you helped change it.
He thought of Scylla, in this same city, all those years ago.

His troops were a motley of different uniforms, police and military members from all branches. They were dotted with civilians, answering a call for help. They marshaled their magic to push the enemy back. A few of them fired guns, possibly not even Latent, New Yorkers taking advantage of the chaos to join the fight, indistinguishable from the Selfers beside them. When FOB Frontier had fallen, it had been on him to help save an army. Now an army saved him.

Wolves and sheep, saving the sheepdog’s ass.

Not wolves. Not sheep.

People.

He dove toward the fight, saw a gate flash here and there as Britton brought more troops into the plaza, often behind Scylla’s forces. Bookbinder was somewhere in the press, ensorcelling rounds as quickly as they were expended, keeping the troops in ammunition that could affect the
Gahe
. The enemy, taken from all sides, began to bunch around the Breach, forced back into it.

Harlequin’s smile became a grin.

A cop ran out in front of the rest of the force, firing a shot-gun at point-blank range. The shells were Bookbinder-specials, flashing gouts of flame as they sprayed into the enemy ranks. A
Gahe
twisted aside from him, bleeding freezing smoke where the massed shot peppered its side. A goblin covered its face, burning, falling back against its fellows.

Then the cop doubled over, dropping his weapon. His eyes rolled up in his head, turned black, then liquid, pouring down his face. He vomited, slick chunks of his innards sluicing down his chin. Behind him, a lane of Harlequin’s forces five wide did the same, clutching their stomachs, dropping to the ground. Their weapons and gear bloomed rust, the plastic parts flaking paint and falling to pieces. Their clothing thinned with rot, then flapped away. Their skin followed, their flesh and bones. Within moments, a swath of Harlequin’s troops had been reduced to purplish smears, man-shaped outlines that stank of sulfur, slowly soaking into the pitted cobblestones of Wall Street. The zombies among them didn’t scream or writhe, they simply lost form, pooling into liquid and finally puddling on the street beneath them.

Scylla.

He’d known the fight for the Breach would bring her out. Harlequin frantically felt for her current. He needn’t have bothered. She stood fearlessly at Federal Hall’s peak, a hand pointing below, surrounded by
Gahe
and Selfers. Helos banked sharply toward her. She pointed at them without turning to look, and they spun earthward, rusting and cracking as they went, until they crashed into the packed troops below, their fuel rendered into inert chemicals.

The zombies collapsed as a single body, the magic that animated them cut off. Truelove must have gone down.

The advance ground to a halt.

‘The roof! The roof! Hit the roof!’ Harlequin shouted into his radio, descending toward Scylla. But the crackling that came back to him through his earbud told him what he already knew. The counterattack had thrown his troops into confusion. They scrambled for cover that would do them no good, the less-disciplined Selfers turning and running. The enemy could retreat into the open space on the other side of the Breach, but Harlequin’s forces were hemmed in by the tight confines of the street. They jostled against one another as they tried to move back from the sudden new threat.

Selfers stood to either side of Scylla, one male and one female, both kitted out in tactical gear, body armor and helmets, pistols on their thighs. Harlequin recognized them from the video where Scylla had issued her demands. The man felt Harlequin’s current and turned toward him just as the Aeromancer released a burst of lightning. The female dragged Scylla aside, Harlequin’s blast burning a sizeable hole in the roof. The male cursed as the lightning burst burned his legs, but extended his hands even as he dropped to his knees.

Harlequin felt his magical current roll back. The momentum carried him forward a few feet before he dropped out of the sky.

He tried to pitch his weight forward, to connect with the much closer roof, but his arms and legs pinwheeled uselessly. The rotten sludge that had once been his troops raced toward him.

A shoulder collided sharply with his back. Harlequin spun in the air long enough to see Swift arcing away from him, chased by a razor-sharp shard of ice.

The momentum carried him forward, his own shoulder colliding with the roof. Pain rocked him, his breath escaped in a rush. He flopped to a stop, gasping, back and shoulders numb, magical tide still interdicted. He rolled onto his side, fumbling for his pistol, fiery pins and needles surging through his shoulder and arm as he fumbled the catch on the holster. His fingers were useless, dead things, unable to find purchase. His vision narrowed to a gray tunnel as he desperately sought to suck in air. Through that tunnel, he saw Scylla, struggling against the grip of her Selfer bodyguard, trying to drag her away from the roof’s edge as rounds tore into the shingle and stone, sending splinters spraying.

Scylla’s bodyguard threw them both flat as a funnel of lightning shot over their heads, engulfing a
Gahe
that stutterflashed toward Harlequin, claws outstretched. The creature screamed, billowing icy black smoke. Harlequin pressed down hard on the holster catch, dragging the pistol out with numb hands, his body moving but the nerves not reporting, as if he were his own puppeteer, yanking dead limbs upward on invisible strings. He fired into the cloud of black smoke, toward where he thought the Selfer stood.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Swift dancing along the roof’s edge, funneling lightning over it. Spur hovered beside him. A Blackhawk was turning broadside, the gunner reloading.

Swift, who blamed him for the death of his girlfriend and child, who’d sworn he’d kill him.

But he had saved him, and now fought to keep him alive.

Harlequin squeezed the trigger again, hearing the dry click as his pistol’s bolt locked to the rear, the last round expended. The black smoke of the
Gahe
’s death throes settled, riming the shattered roof with gray ice.