Shadow Ops: Fortress Frontier-ARC (pdf conv.) (16 page)

Britton froze as he heard helicopter rotors in the distance.

He snapped open a gate back to the bowl of frozen rose moss and ushered the group through, the corpses dropping once Truelove’s magic left them, lying hidden in the tall grass. Britton and his group waited in the frozen bowl on the Home Plane.

After fifteen minutes, Britton opened a pinhole of a gate, looked, listened and determined that the danger had passed. They moved back through the gate and took up the march again. The corpses were tugged to their feet by Truelove’s magic, trudging along behind them, silent save for the dragging shuffle of their feet.

Britton kept his eyes forward and tried not to think about it.

A cold breeze picked up, and Britton turned to Downer.

“Sarah? Best to be ready.” He nodded to Truelove’s corpses.

“Let’s get something up and running.”

Downer nodded, and a small column of whirling funnels of air appeared. They shimmered, visible mostly by dint of the leaves, pebbles and clods of earth transiting their spinning cores.

Britton had faced similar things when he’d fought Downer before he’d come up Latent.

Air elementals.

They forged on. Truelove and Downer lagged behind a few paces, talking softly. Britton turned to Therese. “Looks like they’re searching for Scylla, all right.”

No answer.

“Maybe they’re just doing a patrol, not searching for her. Who knows why they’re out?”

Still no answer.

Britton sighed. “Therese, please. I did what I had to. I got us out safe. They would have killed Marty. They would have experimented on those of us who didn’t play ball.”

Therese’s eyes stayed fixed on the horizon. “Are you talking to me or to yourself?”

“I don’t know. Both?”

“It’s between you and God, Oscar. It’s not for me to judge you.”

“I feel judged.”

“What do you want me to say? You let Scylla out. She butchered half the FOB. You killed Fitzy. You didn’t lift a finger to save Harlequin. You left me to do that.”

“Therese, that’s not fair.”

“Fair doesn’t enter into it, Oscar. You made choices. You are responsible for them.” She choked on her next words. “God, Oscar! I had to Rend! I swore I’d never do it again!”

“I know, but would you rather Marty be dead? Would you rather all of us still be prisoners? You helped me, Therese, you . . .”

“You tricked me, Oscar. Or, at least, you influenced me. I didn’t know what was happening. I was trying to save you.”

“And I was trying to save you! To save all of us.”

“And you did that, at the price of Lord knows how many hundreds of others.”

“Therese, please. I’m alone in all of this. I need some . . .”

“Some what?” she asked.

Some support. I’ve lost everything.

“I need some help. I can’t do this by myself. Didn’t we have something back there? Weren’t we headed somewhere?” he asked.

“Maybe, Oscar. But that was before . . . all this. I’m here, aren’t I? Besides, what is it exactly you’re trying to do?”

“Take care of us.”

“Nobody asked you to do that.”

“We both know that nobody else is going to.”

“God will, Oscar. He already is. You should try prayer. Maybe he’ll find a way to forgive you, and maybe I will, too. But not now, Oscar. Not now.”

Britton thought of his father, the only other religious person he’d ever been close to. Stanley Britton had advised his son to pray as well.

But Britton didn’t try.

He thought of his mother, eyes wide and accusing. He thought of Billy’s mother, screaming as her son’s brains spattered her floral print dress. He thought of hundreds of soldiers, curdling to piles of purple slime under the baleful tides of Scylla’s rotting magic.

How could he pray? Even if there was a God, there was no way he would listen.

Not to him. Not now.

He choked down hot anger. “I thought you Christians were supposed to believe in forgiveness, to actually imitate your God.

When I was a kid, I almost bought that.

“I did what I had to, for all of us. It’s not my fault it worked out the way it did, just as it’s not your fault that you had to Rend your dad’s friend for putting his hands on you. You want to show a little of that supposed Christian forgiveness?

“You can start with yourself. Then you can forgive me. Because you’re not the only one who’s alone out here, or the only one who’s trying, and I could use some goddamn support.”

“Oscar, I . . .” she began, then broke off as he dropped to one knee, raising a fist. The rest of the group followed suit, Truelove’s column of corpses joining them. The Necromancer drew his pistol, holding it in a two-handed grip, muzzle pointing at the ground. The zombies imitated him, hands clasped together around an imaginary gun handle.

Downer’s elementals fanned out in front, ripping up the grass in small patches.

Britton pointed around a tuft of grass. The edge of a log palisade, much like the village they’d just left jutted out. “Stay here,” he whispered. “I’m going to take a look.”

They nodded, and he opened a gate, jumping back to the rose moss bowl and back out to low crawl into the rough grass farther to his left, where he had a better view of the palisade.

It was some kind of goblin FOB, much smaller than Marty’s village. The logs looked hastily sharpened and assembled, with crude, peaked huts beyond. A pole leaned drunkenly beside the gate, a red-and-orange-striped bird skull affixed to the top.

Britton paused, listening. Nothing. The place seemed deserted. The wind suddenly changed.

The smell hit him like a wall.

The goblin FOB stank somewhere south of gangrene. He gagged, eyes watering. Drawing his pistol, he got to one knee, bringing more of the encampment into view. One whole side of it was simply gone. The palisade walked along the hard ground, then vanished into scattered black dust and glistening purplish slime that Britton had come to associate with Scylla’s dark magic.

He walked forward at a crouch, keeping his pistol ready, and advanced on the encampment. By the time he was level with the decayed opening in the palisade wall, he was breathing only through his mouth. After a moment, even that wasn’t enough, and he lifted the front flap of his shirt over his mouth and nose.

It didn’t help.

This must have been an outpost established by the Defender clans to supply larger groups of goblins reconnoitering and attacking FOB Frontier. Britton thought he could see the remains of a cistern and a corral for the fat, bleating creatures the goblins herded. The remaining buildings were puckered in on themselves, the wood wet-looking and sagging like overripe fruit, edges gone to powder or dripping slime. The frozen ground was plastered with purple and yellow stains, slick and viscous, here and there chunky with the remains of the goblins Scylla had worked her power over. There was the upper part of a skull, the eye still staring unseeing off into the distance beside a long, pointed ear. Here was an arm, the fist still gripping a spear shaft coated in the mucal ruin that had once been its owner. There had been sorcerers here as well, the scraps left of them painted chalky white in goblin fashion. Beyond the silent remains, the place was deserted. The trail of withered grass led off beyond the gap in the palisade wall.

Britton doubled over, retching. When he’d finally gotten control of himself, he jogged out through the front gate and called to the others. “It’s clear.”

They rose, but he waved them back. “You don’t want to go in there.”

“Why not?” Therese asked.

“Looks like Scylla got there first. It’s . . . messy. There’s nothing to salvage. No one left alive.”

“No one left alive?” Downer asked. “Who was . . .”

“It was a goblin outpost,” Britton said, “for the Defender clans attacking the base. They must have not given her a very warm welcome when she came through.”

Therese took a step forward, and Britton put a hand on her shoulder. She shrugged it off immediately. “Therese,” he said, “it stinks so bad, I practically puked. I swear, if there was anything you could do, I would tell you.”

She relaxed. “Can you tell which way she went?”

“The trail continues on beyond the encampment.” He looked up at the waning light. “I don’t want to be traveling by night out here. It’s safer if we spend the night in the forest back on the Home Plane. It’s getting dark there, too.

“The . . . remains of the goblins. They’re still . . . fresh.” He shuddered. “She can’t have come through here too long ago.”

“We should press on,” Downer said. “Maybe if we haul ass, we can catch her.”

Britton shook his head. “No way. I’ve flown on night-vision equipment, and it’s hard enough with that. With just flashlights? We’d just wind up breaking our ankles or running into something unhappy to see us.”

“Or worse, happy to see us,” Truelove added.

Britton nodded. “Scylla can’t see in the dark either. She’s got to be as exhausted as we are. She needs rest. So do we. Remember, we can’t just catch her, we have to be able to beat her. We can’t do that blind and at the limit of our reserves. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Let’s do this right.”

Truelove didn’t look convinced at all. Therese looked uncertain.

Only Downer appeared confident.

Britton knew the cost fear could have on combat effectiveness.

He stepped back to address all of them. “I understand what Scylla has done is horrifying. Her magic seems . . . well . . . magical, but it is a scientific reality with limits. Scylla is a Negramancer. That power manipulates decay. It doesn’t make her more powerful than four SOC-trained Sorcerers. Scylla can also manipulate fear. But that’s clever acting and a strong personality, not magic. And it only works if you let it. She’s dangerous enough without scaring the crap out of you. Don’t let her.”

They gated back to the bowl of frozen rose moss, still deserted and now cast in a darkness that rendered the night noises sinister; every frost-snapped twig or windblown leaf transformed into the footfalls of an approaching enemy. Britton wouldn’t permit a fire, but they cooked instant noodles over a covered camp stove and slept in the sleeping bags and tent he’d pilfered from the sporting goods store.

He volunteered to stand the first watch. After Truelove relieved him, he crawled into the tent to find Therese stretched out beside Downer, her body heat lending warmth to the younger girl. Britton zipped into his sleeping bag and lay beside her.

Therese’s hair, uneven and broken from the fight with Wavesign, rested on the camp pillow, filling him with longing. She was so close, so warm.

He sighed quietly, but the action filled his nose with the smell of her hair. Before he knew what he was doing, he reached out a hand tentatively, and let his fingertips slide across it. Even now, in the dark, back to him, she was so beautiful.

She stirred. He jerked his hand back and froze, feeling creepy. But she slid back into him nestling against his bulk, her hair brushing his face and her warmth enveloping him. He didn’t move, terrified she was still sleeping, desperately not wanting to wake her.

She grunted, reaching backward and grabbing his arm, pulling forward until it was draped over her.

“Just to keep warm,” she said softly.

“Yeah,” he answered, his voice thick. “Just to keep warm.”

Despite his exhaustion, Britton barely slept all night, drowning in the smell of Therese’s hair and the closeness of her, almost crying out when Truelove finally nudged her awake and she took her turn at watch.

Neither of them spoke when Britton roused them after eight hours, the sky still dark around them. After they had breakfasted in silence and buried their trash, he opened a gate, putting them back on Scylla’s trail, the withered edges of the grass guiding them on.

Truelove raised his arms, and the entourage of dead shambled into view, their gray skins tinged with frost. Some of them had been nibbled on during the night by the local fauna, but overall, they were whole. Britton still swallowed his gorge at the sight of them, and even Truelove looked uncomfortable at so many in one place. But they were one more thing they had to throw against Scylla should they meet her. Downer called up her air elementals again, the strong breeze providing ample fuel for the spell.

The encroaching winter gave the Source air a crisp, metallic bite that would have been pleasant if it weren’t so cold, but it still carried the curdled-egg stink of the aftermath of Scylla’s passage.

With the sun beginning to brighten the horizon and shroud the unfamiliar constellations of the Source from view, they pushed on.

They came across the helicopter as the sun began to crest, and the day came on in earnest. It was a Blackhawk, nose down in the frozen ground, tail boom crumpled over an accordioned cabin. The cockpit was flattened, the nose practically inverted.

The engine and rotors were gone, the metal simply rusted away to nothing from the cabin upward. Britton pointed. “She rotted off the rotors and let it drop out of the sky.”

Purple stains, still slick, dotted the ground outside the crushed cabin. “And killed the team on board as they crawled from the wreckage. Jesus. Those must have been some hard operators to crawl away from that.”

He moved to the cockpit, then froze. He hung his head. “Oh, hell. Oh, that fucking bitch.”

“What?” Therese asked. “What is it?”

He pointed at the shattered windscreen, the hands still streaked with dried blood trying to pull themselves through it, gone gray with rigor mortis.

“She left the pilots alive. They were crushed in there, probably broke every bone in their body, bleeding out. Maybe choking to death on the smoke. But she left them.”

Therese lifted a hand to her mouth. Britton could feel the current of her magic reach forward, then recoil. Physiomancers could only manipulate living flesh, and there was none of that to be found here.

He turned to her. “Still want to give her a chance to join us?”

Without waiting for an answer, he moved down the trail.

“Bring them,” he called to Truelove, gesturing at the pilots behind the shattered windscreen.

“Are you serious?” Truelove called back.