Chapter 47 – Positive ID

  “She was right in front of me,” said Besson. “She didn’t drop back. Don’t know where she could have gone.”

  “She didn’t come up past me,” said Howie. “She must be able to turn invisible or some shit.”

  Cole frowned. If it was that simple, he didn’t think it would be such a tightly guarded secret. Maybe that was one element to it, but that wasn’t all there was to it. “Alright. No one mention it to our friends. We keep moving.”

  The tunnels in that area seemed to have been dug and compacted by some sort of creature—lacking any form of man-made shoring or supports. At times, it intersected with natural stone caverns. Suddenly, all of Cole’s hair stood on end. Guall stopped ahead of him.

  “We just passed under the crystal barrier,” he announced. “We’re close to the Vaelian front."

  Despite Cole’s misgivings, they reached another dug-out section of old, unused trench where Roxy helped Guall shift a massive weight that had been placed against the tunnel entrance. It led to a store room of rations so foul even the rats—or rather, the little four-legged vermin that passed for rats on Vael—had refused to keep eating them.

  “We hold here,” said Guall. “Vak will lay eye upon the hero.”

  “I’ll go too,” said Cole.

  “No,” said Guall.

  “I wasn’t asking,” said Cole.

  Guall growled, stepping into Cole’s personal space. Cole stared up at the sneering mouth in the middle of the brine-star mass of seething tentacles. The big demon sniffed through its neck-nostrils and pushed past. “Do as you will, human. It matters not, to me.”

  The overwhelming smell of battery acid drew close. Cole heard a hissing whisper from the roof of the cave just above him. “We go, human.”

  Cole looked up, finally getting his first look at the scuttling, furtive demon with the yellow eyes. It had a coiling, insectile body, like an armored centipede. But instead of dozens of legs, it had sickly, pallid, human arms. Dozens of them. It crawled across the ceiling and disappeared out the mouth of the tunnel. Cole shuddered and followed. He hated centipedes.

  Outside, they were directly under the dark shroud of the gasses belching forth from the Scar. The trench ran a dozen meters in both directions. They followed it through several corners and switchbacks for nearly half a kilometer before hitting a corner on one side and a collapse of the trench wall on the other. Vak slithered toward the collapse and crawled its way up onto the ground above. Cole followed, entering the expanse of ruined terrain in the shadow of the fortifications. Above, cannons on the wall sounded at regular intervals, while a tall tower with a glass orb above it swept unseen enemy positions with a scouring beam. Small arms cracked from the ground level on the far side as infantry engaged the approaching demonic invaders with primitive firearms.

  The backside of the fortress sat about a kilometer to his west. As promised, it was open to air so that it could never be used by the Scarred Ones if seized. The Vaelians must have worked hard to reclaim this area and weren’t keen on giving it up. Further east, he could see reserve trenches and structures, and activity as supplies and personnel were moved. Though if what Guall said was true, the monstrous flooded mire made the area beyond this fort of little interest to both sides. A low-action zone perfect for training up a budding hero. A glowing star arced out from the demon side of no-man’s-land and broke against a glowing half-dome of energy, spilling multi-colored fire along the barrier. Well, low risk didn’t mean no risk. A fourteen year-old kid had no business in this hell.

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  Cole stayed low, crawling along the dirt and gravel in the shadow of a shallow berm toward the back of the fortress. Vak hissed at him in a stuttering way that Cole had to assume was laughter.

  “I always thought humans to be too far above crawling like the beasts and vermin of the land, but you Earth kin are a different breed altogether.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” muttered Cole. “We do what needs done.”

  The path butted up against a rusted barbed-wire fence, sagging from disuse. One section of it had sunk all the way to the ground, and the pair low-crawled until they reached a crater in the ground, rolling into the shallow puddle at the bottom and pushing up to the lip.

  “We must get closer if we’re to determine the Hero’s position,” hissed Vak. “It will be risky. You may be spotted. I should go alone.”

  “No need,” said Cole. He rested his rifle on the edge of the crater and flipped up his NODS so that he could peer through the scope, twisting the throw lever to max magnification. The battlements of the fortress came into view.

  “What is that?”

  “It lets me see the fortress as though it were six times closer,” muttered Cole. “Let me see…”

  He centered his crosshairs on the cannon team, looking at the men as they worked to reposition the guns for each shot. It took five of them in a tight team, ordered by a sergeant. Behind them, a robed figure with glowing hands chanted over each shell, infusing some sort of spell to each shot. There were three more cannon teams sending ordnance at the enemy. In the courtyard below, a dozen men waited, bored and whiling the time. Business as usual, for them.

  “What do you see?”

  “Nothing yet.. wait,” said Cole. In one corner of the battlements, a small group of three looked out at the Scar. A squat man in armor with a long spear, a tall, lithe woman in hooded robes, and a scrawny fellow who clutched a sheathed sword before him as though he were frightened of it. “C’mon…” said Cole.

  After a few moments, the kid turned in profile to say something to the tall woman, and Cole got a look at his face. It was the same face as Moriarty’s briefing: Leon Jacobs.

  “Shiiiiit,” Cole swore. He’d been hoping Nona’s intel was wrong, but the woman was right on the money. Moriarty’s whole plan hedged on intercepting Leo on the way to the front, but he was already here surrounded by dozens of soldiers. Still, his squad of six guardians was split and the kid was still vulnerable.

  “What is it? What do you see? Tell me now!”

  “He’s there, all right. Sitting pretty at the top of the—gah!”

  White hot pain lanced through Cole’s leg, and he looked down to see the centipede demon’s mandibles sinking into his thigh. Before he could even pull back, Vak surged forward, wrapping Cole and clamping two of his hands over Cole’s mouth as the others worked to restrain him. His left arm was pinned against his body, and two more hands wrapped around his right.

  “Shhh, human. Favor me by dying quietly.”

  The coils drew tighter, squeezing tight against his plate carrier. Cole wrenched his neck, just for a moment breaking the grip over his mouth and drew in a gasping, ragged breath, before even more hands clamped down on his face. His leg burned. Individually, the arms were weaker than his own—but Vak had dozens working to restrain him while Cole only had one arm and one leg not pinned by the demon’s body. He reached up, trying to tear the hands over his mouth away. When that didn’t work, he reached down and pulled out his spear. Rather than extending it, he left it short and drove it into the joints between Vak’s armored sections, lodging it deep in the fleshy area at the base of one of the demon’s legs. Hot blood splashed on his face, and he could see a bark-like infection start to spread from the wound.

  Vak shrieked in his ear and flinched, allowing Cole another breath before the insectile creature tightened up more, and together they tumbled down into the muddy puddle at the bottom of the crater. Vak was beginning to petrify, but it still held on tightly even as the infection spread, freezing several of his joints. Cole pushed with his free leg, rolling them over the extended limbs, dislocating them against the edge of the demon’s carapace.

  The centipede demon shrieked again and spasmed. “Die, already, you filth!” it said—starting to sound more like a plead than a command. It shifted more of its body up, wrapping additional coils around Cole’s torso. Extra hands began pulling at his face and helmet, trying to expose his neck as it coiled to sink in its mandibles for another dose of venom. Big mistake. In shifting up, it had freed his hip holster. Cole reached down and drew his service pistol.

  It wasn’t suppressed, and at this distance they might hear it from the fort. If they came down and found him tangling with some overgrown bug, there would go their shot at pulling out Leo—let alone making it out alive.

  Fuck it, and fuck this stupid, backstabbing piece of demon shit.

  Cole pressed the muzzle of his pistol to the underside of the carapace and began to fire.