Black Madonna

15

Streak had only been able to recruit two samurai, but they looked as if there were six of them. The ork, Juan, had shoulders that would have put a troll to shame. His skin gleamed. Looking him over, Michael guessed that he had dermal sheathing, which would explain his relatively light body armor The ork’s matching cyberarms, one with a gyromount installed in it, must have cost a fortune. Juan couldn’t have gotten it without being very, very good and very successful somewhere along the line. And probably more than once. But his cybereyes were dark and cold, and Michael noted how Kristen in particular gave him a very wide berth. He did, truly, look to be more machine than meat.

His human colleague was equally imposing. Xavier Came clad in full body armor, and moved with the strange and unnatural lightness, which, when it accompanied excessive size and weight, screamed “wired reflexes.” Michael sensed, though, that there was something more. The samurai had an occasional twitchiness in his muscles, around the eyes, that suggested the wiring was deeper and more powerful than usual. Streak has some over-powered friends, he thought.

“So you want to take a captive,” Juan said in a deep voice, richer in tone than the inhumanity of his appearance. He seemed almost disappointed.

“We need someone to interrogate,” Streak said. “That’s essential. That’s the mission goal.”

“What about corollary damage?” Xavier asked, in much better English than Michael would have expected.

“Irrelevant,” Streak said with relish.

“Wait a minute-” Geraint started.

“Look,” Streak said exasperatedly, “you want a prisoner or not? You say you’ve got five days. Now if you want someone to talk to, we do it our way. How many tactical raids have you mounted on reinforced installations packed with samurai and mages?”

“Okay, all right,” Geraint said testily. “But in this country, I can’t get us bailed out if we get into big-time trouble.”

“Which is why we’re not going to ponce around like a bunch of pansies,” Streak asserted. “And we’re going to use disabling approaches.”

“Pity,” Xavier said thoughtfully. “I’ve got some Byelorussian fire gel that could immolate the entire place inside five seconds. Wonderful stuff. Burns like crazy for that time and then, wham! The shrapnel cakes go ape and spray the firezone. It could take out a wizworm, honest. Well, with a depleted uranium boost it could, and I’ve got some of that too.”

“We said disablement?” Geraint said incredulously.

“Yeah, right,” Streak said. “Okay, terms, you know the deal here. You also know what their strengths are likely to be. How’s that Matrix work coming along, Mikey?”

“Nothing difficult,” Michael told him. “I can disable the system exactly when you want it done.”

“And you, brother?” Streak said to Serrin, who grimaced a little at the overfamiliarity.

“I’ve prepared us as I can,” Serrin told him with a shrug. There was little point in going into detail on the spell locks he carried, the rituals he’d prepared, the barriers he’d primed as best he could. They would hold for a while, but that wouldn’t be long. To hide his irritation he made for the kitchen. After a moment Kristen padded after him on bare feet.

Streak and the other samurai pored over the map spread before them. “We come in from the south, I think,” the elf said. “Divide up. Juan and I will go in first. Michael and Geraint can cover us. Xavier, you’re gonna hang back and use the ranged stuff, and cover Serrin here as well. Yeah?”

“I want to be on elevated terrain to be able to provide auxiliary cover if you need it,” Xavier said. “Not to mention that I don’t want to do everything with IR and laser sighting. You’ve been up there in the daylight. Where’s the best spot?”

“You want to be up high, with cover as well?” Streak grinned. “Don’t we always want everything? Here”-he stabbed a finger into the map-“looks about best to my way of thinking. Should be enough green drek to cover your arse. And you’ve got some magical camouflage from Serrin.”

Serrin was arguing with Kristen in the kitchen, their voices growing increasingly audible.

Streak chuckled. “I think the girlie doesn’t want to stay barefoot in the kitchen.”

“I’ve seen her shoot a guy in the head and save someone’s life,” Geraint informed him. “So not so much of the ‘girlie’, please. She can look after herself. She wouldn’t be here if she wasn’t a member of the team.”

“Keep her back with Serrin and Xavier then.” Streak was serious now. “She may have guts, but she ain’t got no smartgun link and she shouldn’t be up with the professionals.”

“Fair enough,” Geraint said. “Time to get that body armor on, Michael. Are you sure you want in on this?”

“I’ve done enough night work with firearms.” Michael said. “Hell, I live in the Rotten Apple. It’s the second thing you do when you arrive.”

“What’s the first?” Streak asked.

“Practice shooting in daylight,” Michael told him.

Streak laughed, then hefted his LMG and pack. “Let’s get this show on the road. We’ve got an hour in the car to go through every step. They’re going to be crying in the chapel tonight.”

Michael looked puzzled.

“It’s an old, old song,” Streak told him. “You want to get some culture, term.”

“When I hear the word culture-” Xavier burst out laughing.

“Yeah, I know. But you don’t need to hear that word, you psychopathic fragger, you just love reachin’ for your gun anyway.” Streak threw back his head and laughed along with him.

They parked the cars a couple of kilometers out. They had a time persuading Serrin to risk any assensing, but he found no trace of either watchers or other similar precautions at this range and it looked as if the Priory mages weren’t expecting them back.

“I can’t risk it when we get closer,” he said. “We’ll have to trust that the barriers work.”

“Then we’ll have to move fast,” Streak said. “Can’t risk getting any closer in the cars. They’ll be detected too easily.”

They crept along the uncomfortable path with its stones and undergrowth straying on to the walkway, the cloudy night giving them no helpful moonlight to see by. They were halfway to the hill when the sound of a heavy engine began to approach from the south. They were well away from the roadway, and Streak dived off into the night to see what was coming.

They were nearing the hill when the elf returned. In the dark, the alarm on the elf’s blackened face wasn’t entirely obvious. When he spoke, though, his concern was all too tangible.

“I don’t want to worry you,” he whispered, “but there’s one seriously big fragger of a truck riding up to the hill. Looks like a twenty-tonner. Black as sin and completely sealed. I could hardly even see the thing. Can’t get any scan on what’s inside it.”

“Reinforcements?” Michael said, fretting.

“What for? Frag it, you could get the entire fraggin’ Inquisition into the back of-”

The elf’s voice trailed away into the eerily quiet night.

“Nah. Don’t be silly,” he said hurriedly. “Just a figure of speech. Let’s move it.”

They were thirty meters further along, within fifty more of their planned forward positions, when the truck rolled into view and stopped. Black figures appeared from the back of it like chitinous insects swarming out of a disturbed nest.

The first shell hit the building atop the hill two seconds later, lighting up the night like Times Square. Only Streak and Juan, with their flare-compensating cybereyes. didn’t have to turn away in pain and blindness.

“We got gate-crashers,” Xavier grunted. Juan swiveled and his laser designator focused on its target.

For what had been planned as an extraction operation, the ork was carrying some mighty potent weaponry. The shell screamed through the night at the truck, and rammed straight into the side of the massive vehicle. It should have ripped a hole right through it. Instead, it seemed to bounce off and disappear in a vast fireball somewhere to their right.

“Madre de dios!” the ork exclaimed in fury. “What the hell kind of fraggin’ armor has that fragger get on it?”

Geraint had kept his attention focused on the chapel building. At first it seemed little damaged despite being struck by a shell, then suddenly a wave of fire began to form around it, seeming to immolate the chapel even as he watched. Then, the fire-ring coalesced into a pillar and rolled down the hill toward the truck. The Priory mages aren’t taking this lying down, he thought. By God, I’m glad that thing isn’t coming our way.

The elemental swept to within thirty meters of the truck before it was snuffed out like a smoker’s match dropped in the rain. The chatter of automatic weapons began to fill the night, almost mundane in comparison. Dwarfing it, a fireball burst above the chapel and began to expand even as Geraint looked on, mushrooming until it encountered an invisible hemispheric bather. It cascaded down the sides of the barrier, spluttered, and died.

And they’ve got their defenses readied too, Geraint thought.

“Hey, you want me to frag the truck or frag the chapel?” Juan yelled at him. It was a pretty fair question under the circumstances. Geraint was still considering how to reply when the arriving mages, unseen in the back of the huge truck but very evident by their handiwork, pulled the stunt they’d been waiting for.

A vast pair of spectral hands, clasped together as if in prayer, appeared like some nightmare borealis above the chapel. They hovered thirty meters above it, suspended in the air, shimmering with magical power, and from the tip of an index finger a bolt of lighting crackled down and struck the hermetic barrier. When the irresistible force met the immovable object, the gates of hell were flung open-then slammed shut again.

The detonation flung everyone into the air, and then heavily back down onto the rocky ground. Michael groaned as his weak back was flung against a particularly unforgiving mass of rock, and he rolled over, yelping with pain. Even Juan was flung off his feet, though the immensity of the ork had seemed capable of defying gravity. Streak alone stayed on his feet, and managed to keep his Ingram leveled at the figures suddenly advancing on them. Two of the dark shapes fell before his arc of fire even as tracer rounds screamed through the night and, unbelievably, the howling of dogs came from the vicinity of the chapel. It was utter mayhem.

Fifty meters away from them the Priory mages and their unseen assailants were engaged in a titanic struggle of will and power, and Serrin suddenly switched his focus. He had to add to the spell lock and cover his friends, and the barrier Came up just in time to save them. Streak would have been carrying half his own body weight in flaming lead from the advancing samurai if he hadn’t. The elf gawked a little as he didn’t die in the field of fire, then emptied his clip just as Xavier pumped the first of the gas grenades into the samurai threatening to take him apart.

“The bastards have respirators,” he growled. “Come on, you stinking fraggers, lets see how you take stun.” Another grenade hot-fired, landing just behind their front line, and more were being frantically slammed into the launcher.

“How do you like this, you fraggers!” Xavier laughed as the first grenade landed right on target and blew the dark samurai backward. Streak hadn’t even bothered to slam another clip in. He just switched weapons and scythed down a few more of the previously advancing samurai. A fortunate shot from Geraint finished off one of those he’d wounded, Juan had learned his lesson from his previous assault on the truck, and started launching at the chapel, but Geraint told him to stop and concentrate on the unknown assailants beginning to fall back to their vehicle. The ork grinned and fired a canister grenade at them. The effect was horrifying: the shell burst in midair and a great web of sticky strands covered them, setting them alight on contact, the corrosive acid of the strands burning through armor and flesh as surely as the flame it generated. The screams of the dying were appalling to hear.

The hands in the air moved. The fingers were now pointing at the four men, and no longer at the chapel. Serrin saw it before the others did, and he knew they hadn’t a chance against the power of the mages. He’d known this would come some time, and had just enough time to grab Kristen’s arm and shout a few words to her.

“Cover me,” he said. “I’m not going to be up to much after this.”

She nodded once, grim and determined, and hefted her pistol, sliding the top of the barrel back to slip a round into the chamber.

Serrin had dutifully learned a lot about barriers and wards in the previous few months. He had enough anxieties about highly powerful mages with an interest in him, and a naturally paranoid nature to match. He’d spent more time practicing the centering rituals than he cared to think, and now he was going to find out if he’d gotten it right. If he hadn’t, the drain was going to kill him. It was either him or his companions. No contest.

He clutched the focus in a white-knuckled grasp and began the incantation.

The finger seemed to dip just a little. The four men were scattering. Even the monstrous ork samurai knew that whatever those hands were going to deliver in the way of chastisement, his samurai’s killing weaponry was going to be about as useful as papier mache armor.

The blue arc of energy left the fingertip. Serrin spoke the last words and fell back into Kristen’s arms. Xavier only had time to launch a frag grenade to discourage anyone from getting too close to him before be looked around to take in what had to be the mass funeral to his left.

The power struck the barrier and arced around and across it, great ripples of force thrashing at the invisible ward like breakers against a rock cliff. And the barrier held.

For a moment.

Then there was a deafening, nerve-shredding screech, like a thousand fingernails being dragged down a hundred blackboards, and the power bolt grounded itself-fifty meters away, to the left of its target.

Michael didn’t remember much after that. This time, his head landed where his back had the first time, and he was lucky to get away with concussion and mild amnesia. After a few moments, Geraint was also blasted off his feet, then managed to pull himself up onto all fours. In his swimming, hopelessly unfocused vision, he saw shells bursting into the chapel and, this time, disintegrating stone and thatch, smashing at the fabric of the building. Towering above him, an ork tottered around with his gyromount arm swinging relentlessly around to its designated target.

Not the chapel, bonehead, Geraint prayed. Don’t let him waste energy on that. Please.

The shell smashed into the truck. This time it did a lot more damage than the first. The side of the vehicle ripped open like a tearing flap of skin, and a rain of bodies was flung into the night, screaming and groaning. A second later, Xavier’s frag grenade changed that to silence.

Unbelievably, the truck’s engine groaned into life and, unsteadily, the vehicle turned itself around. Juan was staggering around, trying to focus his senses on a last shot to send the truck and its surviving occupants to final oblivion. Then, of all things, a monstrous black dog sped across the terrain toward him, its eyes afire in the flame-streaked night.

Geraint leveled his pistol. prayed, and emptied the clip.

The dog rolled over and didn’t get up. The truck made its away down the hill and into the night. Geraint dropped to his knees and tried hard to keep the nausea down; two shock waves had wreaked havoc with his body. A thin stream of blood trickled down his chin from his bitten lip.

Striding jauntily over to him, Streak looked like a walking nightmare. The elf was wide-eyed, his face a manic grin, and both face and body were covered in fresh blood. Horribly, his guts seemed to be spilling out of his abdomen, and he didn’t even seem to care. Geraint stared at him, stupefied.

“Nah, it’s not me,” the elf laughed, looking down, “One of their bloody dogs. Ripped ‘im” he added flourishing his serrated knife with pride. “Always the best way. Nothing like hand-to-hand, I always say.”

“You’re mad,” Geraint said incredulously.

“Barking, mate, fragging barking!” the elf -laughed. “Not like poor old Lassie. He’s barked his last bark. I can tell you.” He looked around at his companions. “Rakk me, this is a mess. Como esta, Juan? Okay?”

The ork grunted. Streak took that as an admission of good, rude health.

“Looks like matey here is a bit fragged,” Streak said, kneeling down over Michael and scanning him. “Pulse okay, bit febrile. Banged his head, though. Ouch! Look at that lump. Patch job should be okay.” He kneeled down closer, and then shrugged his shoulders. “EEG’s okay. More or less. He'll be all right.” The elf took a trauma patch and applied it to the unconscious man’s wrist.

“Not much left up there, by the way,” Streak continued, gesturing to the remains of the chapel. Now that Geraint had recovered most of his wits, he could see that the Inquisition-for it surely must have been them-had, at the last, succeeded in flattening Sauniere’s historic chapel. Anyone inside it would surely be dead. Streak seemed to read his thoughts.

“I wonder who’s in the basement,” the elf said thoughtfully. “Let’s check on-ah, here he comes now.”

“All dead and gone,” Xavier said cheerfully. “I let the survivors have some frag and newt and there’s nothing left now.”

“Newt?” Geraint was unfamiliar with the term.

“Nerve gas. Deadly, but it decays inside five seconds. Absolutely lethal. Packed in a cloth- and armor-dissolving unstable gel base. Squelch. No more Mr. Bad Guy. I’ve scanned, there ain’t nothing and no one left alive, Your Lordship.”

Geraint suddenly realized that the burden the man was carrying was Serrin. His face changed expression.

“Reckon he saved your hides from those hands in the sky,” Xavier told him. “Fainted away. He’ll be okay. Want to scan him. Streak?”

Streak took a few seconds to make his diagnosis and confirm that the unconscious elf was not in any immediate danger.

“We’d better go in,” he said to Geraint. “Xavier, you want to stay and take care of these terms?”

“Fine by me,” the man said cheerfully. “Frag, that was a lot of fun. Thanks for the invitation. Some party!”

“Not bad, eh?” Streak grinned. “All right. Your Lordship, let’s see if the boys at the chapel have learned some better manners. Better put that respirator on, we may need trank gas just in case they’re still a bit lively.”

“I wish Serrin could check it out first,” Geraint said anxiously. “Those mages up there had to be good.”

“Past tense is dead right,” Streak replied. “If they were still up and firing on all cylinders, I don’t think the chapel would be doing a good impression of Dresden right now. Let’s get n before they recover. if there’s anyone left to recover.”

Before they moved off, Geraint went over to the forlorn figure sitting with her gun held loosely between her knees and put his arm around her. Kristen was shaking, but her eyes were dry.

“Don’t worry. He’ll be right as rain in the morning,” Geraint reassured her.

“I know,” she said in a voice stronger than he’d expected. “He told me what he was going to do.”

He hadn’t told anyone else. Geraint tried not to look surprised.

“Stay and look after him,” he said.

“No, Xavier will be with him, and I trust him. He’s okay.”

“What do you want to do then?”

“I’m coming with you. I want to know what’s happening, and you say the answer is up there. Since Serrin isn’t awake to hear, I’ll be able to tell him all about it. Whatever it is.”

Geraint looked askance at her, and then a smile spread across his face. “Good for you. Come on, then. Let’s not keep Streak waiting. You know how impatient he gets when us civilians dawdle.”

She took his arm and they walked up the hill to the ruin.