Abominations (49 page)

      The weapon in her hand had just stopped working when the last man came at her with a knife he'd pulled from his waist band. He seemed to know how to use it, but made a common knife fighters mistake. People, being afraid of knives, tend to freeze when attacked with one, but Gwen still held what amounted to a stick, a superior weapon to a knife. Not as lethal, but it gave her reach. A few repeated blows to the head swinging like she held a baseball bat, caused the knife to drop to the floor, the man followed it a few seconds later.

      She didn't wait for the man to recover, trading her empty weapon for the less empty one she'd propped up against the wall earlier. She shot the man with it, to make sure he didn't get back up. She hadn't been told to try and get prisoners, so didn't make an effort to. Her job here would be to stay alive. Making the others not move did that. She didn't actually know if the men were really dead as far as that went. She hoped that if they weren't, it would be at least a while before they started struggling again, because she couldn't control this many at once, not if they eventually got over the idea that they were fighting with a girl or whatever their problem was.

      She'd played enough computer games that she half expected the men to disappear or respawn, which worked in her favor when the next man tried to crawl through the window. She hit him squarely with a shot. Then two shots. He kept coming at her. The man carried a sword, a curved scimitar-like thing, which seemed to glow softly and cut the beams of light somehow as they hit the blade. Nothing touched him if the sword was in the way.

      So she tried to shoot him in the legs, which dropped him to the floor, his sword moving down, even though he didn't drop it. Then she hit him with a beam to the head. That worked, so she took the sword, which she understood how to use as a normal blade at least, and cleared all the other weapons she could find away from the fallen, making a pile near the wall, away from where the men lay sprawled on the floor.

      Darrick came back a few minutes later, blood running down the side of his head, not seeming to notice it. He looked at her and stopped, then nodded, and went to check on the prisoner.

      “It should be clear. We have reinforcements coming, they'll be teletransporting into this room, so try not to kill any of them. I'll be right back.”

      Gwen took another of the strange stick-like weapons and knelt on the floor, pointing it at the windows, holding it in her right hand and the sword she'd picked up in her left. A few minutes later, small popping noises came from behind her, sounding a bit like someone popping their fingers, rather than a gun going off. When she looked over her shoulder several people stood in heavy looking armor. Giant metallic creatures that only barely looked human. They pointed strange things at her, that looked like lances only shorter, about four feet long.

      “Special Service, drop the weapons! Drop them now! Drop them!” One of them yelled at her, she couldn't tell which one. Without turning she dropped both weapons and held her hands up so that they could see she wasn't armed, hoping these were the back-up Darrick had called in and not the next wave of attackers. Given their armor, she didn't think that anything she could do would do much to them anyway. Maybe throws would work? Some joint locks if she could figure out which directions the armor allowed movement in fast enough to be effective. Kicking wouldn't do much, she knew, maybe knock them back a little and punching would be foolish, might as well punch the wall for all it would probably do to them.

      Still pointing weapons at her, one of the armored forms asked if she was a Westmorland.

      “No, I'm the assistant to Bethany Westmorland. My name's Gwen Farris... She should be around here somewhere.”

      Darrick came out then, calling out who he was and that he held no weapons.

      “Darrick!” One of the armored forms, a smaller one Gwen noticed, with a female sounding voice called out. “What's the situation? I'm counting nearly twenty down here, they look to be Saracen mercenaries. Who do you have back there?”

      Darrick called everyone out, but only Bethany and the younger man, Kelvin, came. Beth looked at Gwen and frowned, shaking her head.

      “They got a single operative into the room with her, for about three seconds, then they both teletransported out. They could be halfway across the world by now. I didn't even see the man, but for a moment from the corner of my eye...”

      The other Westmorland, the data collector recounted the events perfectly. His description of the man that came into the room, while incredibly precise, down to a few ounces in weight and loose threads on the left sleeve, pretty much described all the other men that attacked as well. Gwen worried that she'd let someone slip by her but Darrick admitted that the man had run past his position in the back while he'd engaged about five others.

      “I could say that no one could expect to do any better, but Miss Farris here managed well enough, no one got past her...” The armored people took up positions around the building while they spoke, the smallest of them walked over finally and took the helmet of the armor off, a dull gray metal that reminded Gwen of the sphere that she had to focus on to power the stove in color.

      A woman's head appeared from the armor, the whole thing looking suddenly out of proportion, now that something as normal as a human head stuck out of it. Sweat beaded her forehead, but she didn't wipe at it, probably because the only thing she had to work with would be the back of her metal glove at the moment.

      Darrick recounted the story for the woman, without waiting to be prompted. Then Beth and Kelvin chimed in with what happened from their perspective. When they finished everyone turned to her expectantly, so she tried to fill in everything as precisely as possible, since everyone else had too.

      She left in everything, including how she didn't know how to use the weapons at first, thinking that these obviously hardened combat troops might get a laugh out of it, even if they waited until later to do it. At the moment, if anyone even smiled at her story, they did it with their helmets still on, because she didn't see anything.

      “Wait...” The armored woman in front of her held up a gloved hand. “You noticed that the Saracen's focus sword, something you'd never even heard of before, cut the beam, so you immediately shot him in the legs?”

      Gwen shook her head. “Not immediately, no, it took two or three shots to realize what was happening.” Then she continued through to the part where the others had come into the room and she'd been hoping they were the backup. “Because that armor looks tough. I don't think I could take any of you... Especially unarmed.”

      The whole room had turned to look at her, then at the bodies on the floor. No one said anything, they just collected information it seemed. It turned out that everyone but her in the room and one other man, in a greenish silver armor was a Westmorland. Most of the people that could power the armor well enough for combat either didn't want to serve with them or didn't want to enlist at all. There was more money in being a high powered mage it seemed. That their six person team had even one non-Westmorland made them special, an exception, Beth and Darrick both let her know.

      It seemed to Gwen that someone had wanted the doctor pretty badly, to put together a team of mercenaries to try and liberate her from them. They may not have known who all would be there, but they'd come loaded for bear, she told the room.

      They knew what bears were, but had no clue what had been loaded. She let it go instead of trying to explain, restating it.

      “They came prepared to fight more than what we actually had ready to face them with, I mean, all to get the doctor away. Why? How much would a team like that cost to hire and who could afford it? Were they already in the country, waiting to go or were they brought in? I guess I don't even have to say such things out loud here, you know what to ask better than I do. I must be tired. Sorry...”

      The armored woman, obviously someone special, the team leader possibly, waived her apology away and told her to go on. Kelvin had gone into a blank looking state, similar to the one Beth had worn the first few times she'd seen her. Gwen listed off every question she could think of for the man. When she ran out of sensible questions she went silent and waited.

      “Given all current information, there is a seventy-three percent chance that the Duke of Aubry directly ordered this action. A twelve percent chance that someone in his immediate organization did it for him, believing it would protect him from harm or harassment. A nine percent chance that Doctor Debussey contracted them herself as a contingency plan, if so, she most likely traded services for the insurance toward a future date, the monetary cost being too high for her known income, though unknown income is a possibility. The remaining six percent is taken up by a series of less and less likely scenarios. Including happenstance and incorrect targeting on the part of the mercenaries.”

      Seeing that Kelvin had run through the calculation, Darrick asked him to return to A-state. Which apparently got him back to normal.

      They talked for a while about what to do next. They couldn't pursue a Duke directly, the King simply wouldn't allow it. Even the huge likelihood of this having been him wouldn't be enough to go after the man. They clearly felt like this obstacle would be insurmountable.

      “Well, then, why go after him at all? We had Debussey and know that someone was afraid enough of what she'd say that they did all this. Is she protected, even if she's with a Duke? And if a Duke's hiding her, doesn't that point enough of a finger at him for a real investigation? Even if we can't take him down, if enough eyes turn on him, it may keep him from trying to reorganize this... cult or whatever it was that keeps trying to sacrifice people, right?”

      Even though they all nodded at her, no one really looked like they had a lot of confidence in that plan. Short of killing the guy, and they didn't know he'd even really done anything, just been a part of the group at some point maybe, if that wasn't a trick, what else could they do?

      Darrick smiled at her grimly and mentioned that it would be best not to even hint at assassination around this group, being that they made up a portion of the royal protection unit, though he did appreciate that she'd been speaking against the idea, at least for now. The armored woman's head bobbed in agreement with the older man's advice.

      It turned out to be Beth that explained the situation to her clearly enough for her to understand. “You see, Gwen, here, as long as a duke doesn't directly threaten the life or power of the King, they can do about anything they want. Oh, best to not cause too much of a stir, keep things out of the public eye, but ultimately? The duke could very well have ordered this and not even have to pay a fine for it. Aubry is a large power in the kingdom too, so we won't just get a sanction from the king, like we did with Baron Richter Mathews.”

      Gwen blinked.

      “I thought his first name was just Baron.” Well, that could be complicated then, she wondered what the special service would do about it, tensing slightly.

      Darrick, wiping at the blood with a handkerchief smiled grimly.

      “Landless Baron. Still, we had to put in the paperwork and the king signed off on it personally. Otherwise he'd have been protected too. At least after the fact. The idea of someone sacrificing people to raise some kind of ancient “god library” isn't something that thrills the king, thankfully.”

      Beth shook herself and kept speaking, this time looking at Darrick and the woman in armor.

      “Something I picked up from Debussey though... She doesn't intend to simply raise enough power to call these old gods up and ask them a few questions for academic purposes, she intends to bring them back and be well rewarded for her efforts. If the duke can be shown to know about that, then the king might find this worth an investigation. After all, the destruction of the world with a madwoman put in power of the ruins is probably enough of a threat to the king to count, yes?”