The Academy (3 page)

“Hey…”

Alex cursed his lameness. Unfortunately, his second attempt was no better.

“Hey, what the fuck?”

She rolled her eyes at him, and Alex immediately regretted saying anything. Which he had to admit was basically par for the course.

She came up to his shoulder, making her the shortest person he had ever found intimidating. She was lithe and compact, underneath a denim jacket heavily splattered with mud, and what Alex could only assume was werewolf blood. Despite the situation, Alex found himself wondering how old she was.

Then he noticed her eyes. They were startling – impossibly brilliant red irises set in grotesquely bloodshot eyes.

“That was really amazing…”

He tried for any sort of facial expression, but didn’t feel that he accomplished much.

She shook her head at him and sighed, ejecting the clips from both of her pistols directly on to the mud. She pulled two new clips from the side pocket of her jacket and slotted them both in place, all without seeming to pay much attention to the process. Her eyes stayed on his face for a moment, and he thought for sure he was going to get yelled at – but then she turned her back to him, and faced out into the park again.

“The Weir aren’t dead, boy,” she said, her voice flat, lacking all inflection. “Stay close to me if you want to live.”

Alex followed her gaze and saw she was right. The four wolves she hadn’t shot were fanned out in front of them, about fifty feet away, and advancing cautiously. Behind them, another group appeared to be descending from the scrub into the park proper, moving in their direction.

“Oh fuck,” Alex said softly, realizing that he had assumed, with no basis whatsoever, that he was saved the moment the woman had showed up, guns blazing.

Stupid. He had no good reason to be hopeful.

“Um, can’t you just, you know, shoot them?”

Alex heard the hysteria in his voice, and he hated it. Sweat poured down his back, and when the wind hit, he was abruptly very cold. He gritted his teeth, and attempted to stop shivering. When that didn’t work, all he could do was try and convince himself that he was shaking from the cold.

“I did,” she said, over her shoulder, in the same flat voice. “Those aren’t wolves, boy. They won’t die or run away because they’ve been shot a few times. And I don’t have enough bullets or time to kill all of them.”

Alex took a tentative step toward her back, and then, when she didn’t lash out at him, another. The part of his mind that seemed totally unconcerned with his impending death wondered how long her hair was when she didn’t have it tied back, and what it would feel like if he touched it. He shook his head, trying to clear it of the suicidal triviality.

“Um, well, can I, that is… can I help you?” Alex said nervously, his voice squeaking when she glanced coolly over her shoulder at him. He waited a moment for her to respond, and then continued on in a panic when she didn’t.

“I mean, I’ve never shot a gun or anything, but maybe I could…” Alex trailed off, and struggled to find a suitable way to complete the sentence. “I dunno, distract them or something? I mean, they’re here for me, right? So, if I run off that way, they’ll follow me – maybe you could get out of here and, um, go for help…”

For a moment, he was sure that she would laugh. He almost wanted to laugh himself. She had run through the park shooting at wolves with both hands, without needing to aim. Who could possibly help her? And had he really offered himself as bait?

“No.”

Her voice was flat, and the answer came without a moment’s hesitation. Alex looked down in shame, his face burning. What had he been thinking? Obviously, he was dead weight in this scenario. He wished he had simply shut up, and let himself be rescued.

When he looked up, he was surprised to see her glance at him over her shoulder, the pistols in her hands autonomously tracking the circling wolves. For the first time when she looked at him, she didn’t seem angry. As angry, anyway.

“That’s more than I expected from you,” she said in a softer voice, turning back to the advancing pack. “But, we cannot hope to run, not now.”

“Then what…”

Alex started to speak, and then trailed off, not even sure what he was going to ask. Despite the advancing wolves, what she said hit him right in the chest, and he felt a mad urge to rush out, to put himself between this stranger and the wolves, solely to prove her right, that he had something to offer. He could only marvel at his ability to think about such things in the face of impending doom.

“I will buy us time,” the woman said, not looking back. “Stay behind me.”

She pointed both of her guns straight ahead, at the closest of the grey shapes, but the sound when she fired was much less dramatic than what Alex had expected, and he felt inexplicably disappointed.

Twenty bullets
. Two minutes, five seconds. At least six Weir currently visible, and more movement in the brush at the park’s edge. One trembling teenager, trying not to cry, standing right behind her.

These numbers defined the current parameters of Mitsuru’s world.

The firearm protocol she’d downloaded was still active, running an auto-targeting subroutine that saved her the trouble of aiming. Her vision was layered with rose-tinted boxes and text, ballistics data and distances, potential threats, angles of attack. With it activated, she knew with a steely confidence that she could fire all twenty remaining rounds, and expect to hit every time.

Mitsuru didn’t need a protocol to know that the situation was hopeless. She had enough bullets to stop the first two Weir as they came at her, probably. She could handle one more in close combat, possibly. She had been reckless to engage the Weir alone, and she had badly underestimated their numbers. Two minutes had become an impossible number.

If they ran, the Weir would overtake them in the mud before they even made it to the path, never mind getting out of the park. She didn’t have the firepower to kill all of them, and fighting Weir hand-to-hand was just short of suicide. They were vastly stronger than humans and inhumanly resistant to injury. She had another two or three protocols she could activate in her current state, but their combat value was negligible.

Mitsuru’s mind had been reengineered as a logic processing engine, a web of equations and calculated assumptions, permeated with Etheric tools and machinery, capable of rapid analysis and projection based on probability measurement. She was, in many ways, an Etheric computer – not an Analyst, obviously, but rather a field strategist. She was a node on an wide-ranging and invisible Etheric network; a precision device, capable of thinking or killing her way out of almost any situation, sifting through the probability fields for the most desirable outcome, adapting to her surroundings with rapidly evolving mathematics and an overriding drive for survival.

The only favorable outcome she could foresee to this situation was her backup arriving early, almost immediately. She gave them no more than a minute, optimistically, and in most of the scenarios she ran, less than thirty seconds.

Mitsuru let all of it go with one long, slow exhale, and then leveled her guns at the closest Weir. She fired off a couple of rounds to slow it down, as a warning, shattering its front forepaw and sending it tumbling into the mud. The Weir didn’t know she was running out of ammunition, and while they wouldn’t be afraid even if she were wearing a half-dozen bandoliers, it might slow them down a bit while they jockeyed for the best attack position. Getting shot hurts, after all, even for a werewolf.

Older Operators said that silver Weir were particularly cunning and long-lived. Certainly, the one who flanked them fit the description. It was powerful enough to conceal its Etheric signature until it was almost on top of them, and smart enough to use the lake as cover, bursting out of the waters and charging up the short at them. She spun to face him, and then grimly readjusted her projections negatively, diving for the boy and firing with her free hand.

She was too late, and she knew it already.

The silver beast was a huge, vile thing, teeth protruding from a long, blunt snout, ears shredded to nubs, and a matted and patchy coat. He was close enough that Mitsuru could smell him, the musk and embedded odors of blood and decay. He was old and fast, moving in the halfway form that some Weir could assume, a bipedal wolf-thing, knuckles dragging like an ape, fingers tipped with cruel talons. He came up out of the stinking water of the lake at a run, making no noise other than the heavy slap of his back paws against the muddy banks.

The boy heard him and he flinched, barely enough to keep the first lunge from tearing him to pieces. The Weir struck with his claws, raking the boy down his back, along the spine. The boy fell forward with a sort of whimpering sound, the gout of blood from his back splashing Mitsuru’s face and clothes in a thin stream as he fell, and the Weir followed him down, clutching and tearing.

Mitsuru moved, knowing that she would be too slow, that there was no chance she could get there before the boy was mauled. She felt neither hope nor despair. Her calculations were definitive and implacable.

And, for the first time that she could remember, utterly wrong.

She moved as fast as she could, covering the few feet between them in a split second, the Weir’s jaw clamped onto the weakly struggling boy’s forearm. It was toying with him, she knew. It could have simply torn the arm to shreds, but it liked the way he cried and screamed. The overlay of the ballistics protocol burned like rose-tinted magnesium in her vision the closer she got. She didn’t have time to wonder about it.

Mitsuru leapt over the hulking hindquarter of the Weir, landing on the far side with bent knees, dropping into a crouch, twisting her upper body so that the muzzles of her guns were planted securely behind the Weir’s left ear. The wolf meant to turn, she could see the muscles in his neck and legs tense as he prepared to throw himself off the boy and onto her. But all he had time to do was whine and twitch, as she fired both pistols twice and felt a thick wetness coat her arms and the front of her chest. The Weir’s innards smelled awful, copper and rotten meat.

Kicking the limp Weir aside, she bent down next to the now silent boy, one gun tracking the cautiously advancing pack, the other reaching down for his chest, an Etheric probe extending invisibly from her palm, designed to immediately relay his vitals. If the boy was dead, or certain to die, then there was a chance that she could withdraw and live.

The Etheric probe activated as soon as it brushed the boys chest, with an intensity Mitsuru had never experienced. It immediately grew white-hot, a glowing thread between her hand and his sternum, burning with data and power. The part of Mitsuru’s mind that was still human reeled.

Power? This couldn’t be. The probe wasn’t meant to relay energy; it should have been a purely analytic operation. And moreover, where was the power coming from in the first place? And so much of it! But the part of Mitsuru’s mind that never stopped analyzing didn’t worry about niceties like that.

The boy would not die if he received medical attention in the next hour; the probability thread was very vivid. Whatever was happening, the boy was not a target of opportunity, he was an
asset
, and he represented enough potential to merit the attentions of an entire pack of Weir. And if someone else wanted him dead this badly, then Central needed this boy even more. Somewhere deep in the surgically altered spaces of her brain, tissue embedded with Etheric machinery executed instructions, determined parameters and threaded probabilities, then offered up a suggestion.

Mitsuru called home.

Contacting Central through the Ether wasn’t difficult, but it did take a few moments of concentration, and she briefly lost both awareness and control of her body. Normally.

She was fully aware of herself at the park, the bleeding boy half-embedded in the mud, the howls of the wolves as they gingerly closed the distance between them. But another part of her mind raced through the currents of the Ether, normally so suffocating and oppressive, running along the red string toward the dim lights of Central so fast it took her breath away. She had never, even under ideal circumstances, even on her very best day, been able to thread the Ether like that. Part of her was terrified, but another part exulted.