The Far Shores (The Central Series) (59 page)

“Defensive formation!”
Mitsuru barked, drawing both pistols from the holsters on her back, and
spinning around in a circle, scanning the surrounding decrepit warehouses with
a downloaded thermal-imaging protocol. It was as Haley said – behind corroding
walls of aluminum and rusted steel were swarms of signatures, some vaguely
human in stature, some lupine, and more than a few monstrous. “Find your
partner.”

Mitsuru understood the
enemy’s decision to choose the spot for an ambush – their position seemingly
couldn’t have been worse. The roadway was wide and exposed, with half-toppled
chain-link fences bordering the strip of asphalt on either side. There were a
total of three buildings nearby, one enormous structure to the southeast, and
two to the northwest, ranging from about five meters to about fifteen meters
distant, all with multiple points of egress, thanks to a wealth of open doors
and broken windows. The only available cover was a pair of concrete barriers
pushed to the edge of the roadway to allow traffic, along with the weathered
remains of a Zaporozhets subcompact, rolled on its side and stripped of
anything worth salvaging.

Alice...we have
company.

Activating the Etheric
uplink, Mitsuru requested a real-time survey of the area from the remote
viewers, looking for numbers and potential avenues for movement under fire. At
the same time, she activated a ballistics protocol – recently upgraded to mesh
with the thermal-imaging input, to provide superimposed silhouettes over the
heat signatures of her restless opponents, analyzing Etheric and thermal
information to give her estimates of force strength, probable armaments, and
likely points of attack.

The numbers were grim.
The protocol identified in excess of fifty signatures in the immediate area,
with a ninety-plus-percentile estimation of more in concealment. According to
the protocol, they were mostly Ghouls, with a liberal scattering of Weir.
Mitsuru uploaded the information to the Etheric Network, for dissemination
among the Auditors.

We got you, Mitzi.
Karim is moving into position to suppress to the southeast. Prepare your forces
to engage hostiles to the northwest. Once the southeast is clear, you will
retreat in that direction, while Karim provides cover fire. We are moving to
flank.

She turned her attention
to the northwest, trusting in Karim’s ability to neutralize the enemies to her
rear. Mitsuru approved of Alice Gallow’s choice – the ruined car and one
concrete block gave her forces decent firing positions, and left them facing
the smaller end of the force arrayed against them.

Alex, Katya, take
position behind that car. You’re with me, Min-jun, behind that concrete block.
We need a barrier. Haley, hold back until I identify a target. Engage on my
command.

For once, there was no
argument, hesitation, or questions. The students were not Auditors – not yet –
but they had spent enough time in the field, under fire, to understand the
value of following orders rapidly. Alex shifted his rifle from his shoulder to
his hands, using the sling to brace and improve his grip, and then moved to the
looted carcass of the rusting subcompact in a crouch. Katya followed him
closely, a readied grenade in one hand, needles glittering in the other.

Mitsuru moved for the
concrete barrier with Min-jun tagging along just behind her, her ears popping
with the change in air pressure as his barrier flickered to life. She slid in
behind the broken concrete block, and Min-jun crouched beside her. One end of
the block had been fractured, probably when it was shoved aside by heavy machinery
to clear the road, and nothing was left besides the twisted protrusion of the
steel rebar.
The concrete was hardly sufficient to stop a bullet to
begin with, much less so in such poor condition, but Min-jun’s protocol would
be sufficient to protect them from most small arms fire. Mitsuru did not expect
too much in the way of gunfire from their enemies, in any case – Ghouls’
subhuman intelligence prevented them from using any tool more complicated than
a blunt instrument, and the Weir lacked opposable thumbs after they
transformed. The most likely strategy would be a human-wave attack, in the
style pioneered by the PLA during the conflict in North Korea. If Ghouls were
good at anything, then it was absorbing fire. Mitsuru ran her eyes across her
squad, receiving nods from each of them. Only Alex looked nervous, but she
noted with a certain amount of pride in her student that his hands were steady
as he thumbed the fire selector switch on his rifle to burst.

We are in place,
Alice. The natives are restless, but they haven’t made a move yet. Waiting on
your order.

Beside her, Min-jun
checked the illuminated sight atop his Daewoo assault rifle and fiddled with the
electronic fire-control unit, which controlled the fuse perimeters for the grenade
launcher mounted beneath the rifle barrel. The dual-purpose rifle made Mitsuru nervous,
due to both complexity and dependence on electronic components, but Min-jun had
insisted on the usefulness of a single weapon providing both standard fire and
air-burst grenade capabilities.

Karim is in position.
Begin your attack as soon as he hits.

Mitsuru switched her
ballistics protocol over to automatic targeting in dual-pistol mode and slowed
her breathing, purging her mind of extraneous worries. The implant in her mind
hummed as she cued another downloaded protocol, readying it for immediate use. Min-jun
took a prone position, the front grip of his rifle resting on the top of the
concrete barrier. Alex rested the back of his head against the rusting
underside of the Zaporozhets and looked vaguely ill. Katya smiled at him and
toyed with the fuse on her Chinese-manufactured fragmentation grenade.

The warehouse behind
them exploded, accompanied by the shrill whistling sound and smoke trail of an AT-4
projectile. Mitsuru knew from the briefing that there were actually two separate
munitions in the anti-structure explosive – an armor-piercing charge designed
to breach walls, and a timed high-explosive charge that detonated within the
building – but the deafening noise made differentiating impossible. She flinched
at the explosion, feeling the heat of the blast on her face as metal debris
clattered to the ground around them. An influx of Etheric Signatures drew her
attention to the northwest, where Ghouls poured out of every conceivable exit
from a pair of decaying warehouses, swarming their position in a grotesque wave
of desiccated flesh and rotting teeth.

Mitsuru spent a fraction
of a second digesting the flood of information that her ballistics protocol fed
directly into her mind through the conduit of her implant, and then quickly
made a decision. The tactical implications were fairly evident. And yet...

She delayed, and
wrestled with the appeal of her Black Protocol, the temptation to activate it
and then handle the Ghouls herself, a perfectly ghastly surrogate to absorb her
unfocused rage. It was foolish, and she never truly considered following up on
the desire. It was a snare for her thoughts, though, and she lingered over it
longer than she intended, her reverie broken by gunfire and a panicked
telepathic signal from Haley. Mitsuru swore and pushed through her bizarre
inaction, delivering the orders that should have come moments before.

Fire at will! Haley, on
my signal.

There was no response
from Alice, no question or censure. Mitsuru wondered if she could allow herself
to hope that the Chief Auditor hadn’t noticed.

Min-jun’s barrier might
not have been as powerful or resilient as some others, but its unique
characteristics more than compensated for that. Mitsuru felt the heavy thud of
the discharge from the rifle-mounted grenade launcher in the pit of her
stomach, the projectiles passing effortlessly through the visual distortion of
the barrier, while enemy fire ricocheted harmlessly off of it. He had set the
grenades to air-burst directly overhead of the oncoming swarm of ghouls, to
devastating effect, as the shockwave and fragmentation tore into their front
line.

The first wave of Ghouls
was torn to pieces, but those behind were not deterred. Even those badly
injured by the grenades dragged themselves forward on whatever limbs they still
possessed, heedless of pain or death. Their brown-and-grey mottled skin reminded
Mitsuru of the peel of an avocado and was as tough as cured leather. They loped
along like apes on long wiry limbs with their fingers scraping the ground, their
eyes milk-white and blind. Their wounds bled thick and green, a product of the
fungal infection that created the monstrosities. Mitsuru could not hear them
howl as they charged, half-deaf from the explosions, but she could see rows of
rotting brown teeth and bloated tongues inside their wide-open mouths.

The ground shook with
another explosion as Katya’s grenade detonated underfoot, sending a crowd of
Ghouls flying in all directions. Mitsuru’s ballistics protocol struggled to
update the count of their enemies as more emerged, charging over the writhing bodies
of the wounded, trampling them into the dirt.

The desire to activate
her Black Protocol was like a steady hum in the back of her skull now, a
creeping anticipation that Mitsuru did not believe herself capable of
containing. Instead of satisfying her perverse desire to activate her protocol,
her actions in Kiev had instead seemingly made the longing keener. The knife on
her belt had become weighty, and the scars on her inner arms ached, while all
the while an entire colony of black bees made the interior of her mind a home.
The omnipresent buzz made her teeth hurt.

She forced it down,
asserted a self-control that she knew was crumbling.

Mitsuru trusted Min-jun’s
barrier to protect her from the sporadic but accurate fire from within the
warehouse, and focused on the downloaded Shining Cloud Protocol.

When she opened her
hands, she released a bloom of nanometer blades, carried along by a gentle
telekinetic push, swirling and flowing like pollen in the wind.

It was nowhere near
enough for her.

***

Haley floated invisibly overhead,
watching the battle unfold below. Remaining on the ground was not a requirement
when she activated her Astral Protocol, and normally she enjoyed the
perspective.

At the moment, however,
there was very little to enjoy. Instead, she felt overriding concern and
anxiety for her friends and fellow Auditors, and a certain amount of shame at
her own safety during their time of vulnerability. All she could do was
facilitate their telepathic link, relay information to and from Central and
Analytics, and wait for Mitsuru to give her a cue.

She flinched at the
explosions, even though the fragments thrown in her direction passed through
her insubstantial form harmlessly. Her body was safely lying back at the field
headquarters, after all. Haley was nothing more than a concentrated
manifestation of her thoughts and awareness, projected to a point ten meters
above the battle, suspended in the chilly morning air.

Haley’s vision was the
compound product of the limited visual information her Astral form perceived,
fused with an acute awareness of the Ether. At the moment, this awareness was
primarily focused on the Etheric Signatures of the Auditors and their
adversaries. In the distance, from the top of a nearby apartment building, she
could see Karim’s signature as he squinted into the scope of his sniper rifle,
the discarded tube of the AT-4 rocket launcher still radiating heat beside him.
Chike stood nearby, watching the scene with a sniper scope and relaying
spotting information and reading the wind.

In the ruins of the
warehouse Karim had destroyed, the majority of the surviving Ghouls and Weir
thrashed and struggled, pinned by debris or injured in the explosion, blind and
deaf from the blast. Those that were not trapped or disabled were disoriented,
struggling to find exits to the collapsed building to join the attack. Their
slow progress made them easy prey for Karim, and the sniper dispatched them as
soon as they cleared the building and set foot on the road with lethal
efficiency.

On the other side,
Mitsuru and the other students from the Program were locked in combat with a
varied force of Ghouls, Weir, and rogue Operators. The initial charge had been
composed of dozens of Ghouls, largely serving as living shields to absorb the
grenades and gunfire of the Auditors, and to provide cover under which the Weir
and Operators either advanced or took a concealed firing position. Haley
counted five Operators under cover within the two buildings; they used an array
of high-powered and automatic rifles to pin the Auditors down behind their
cover and limit the effectiveness of their attacks.

The swirling Etheric
discharge of the Shining Cloud Protocol was almost beautiful, if Haley put
aside the reality of what she was watching, the miniscule blades imbued with
the Etheric energy of the telekinesis that directed their movements, blossoming
like a flower from Mitsuru’s outstretched hands and then streaming through the
air in an illuminated and deadly fog. Their contact with flesh, however, was
anything but beautiful. It decimated the first wave of Ghouls, reducing their
hideous bodies to little more than puddles of shredded tissue, dismembering
them on a cellular level with a multitude of cuts so fine that they were
impossible to perceive. The remnants of the protocol were no kinder to the
second wave, made up of equal parts Ghoul and Weir, severing limbs and cutting
arteries with clinical precision, infusing the air they breathed and then
eviscerating the creatures from the inside out, so they died coughing out the
liquefied remains of their own lungs. Despite herself, Haley felt a slight
relief as the protocol petered out. It seemed a particularly hideous way to
die, even for such inhuman and savage enemies.