“I see. Who’s leading the defense?”
“Ioana and Lily. They’re working on shoring up defenses as well as probing at the attackers.
“Some of the Telemedics are taking it on themselves to snag wounded enemy combatants. They’re being dropped off with… with Andrea’s guests.”
“Guests?” Felix asked, turning his head to Andrea.
“My Death Others. They all came in today. We’re going to reabsorb them back into ourselves. Welcome them home. They’ve been gone a long while. Some died, but most lived.”
“Death Others,” Kit said, not really understanding.
“I had to fill an Other up with all of our deaths. And then send them out into the world. So many deaths piled up hurt us. We had to do it more frequently when we worked.”
“Right. I take it your Death Others greet these wounded enemies with smiles and cookies?” Felix asked.
“They’re… questioning them. Ask them to sign an Indentured contract. Then feed them into the sausage machine if they decline. Alive.”
“Oh. They sound like they’d be great to have a game of Risk with. Let’s go have a chat with them when this is over.”
“When this is over?” Kit inquired.
“It’s not like we didn’t plan for this.” Felix tapped the communication button on his display next to his chair. Then he hit the dropdown list and selected the R&D lab. “Mr. White, Felicia. I need the Wardens.”
“Sending them up as soon as we’re able. We put them through a series of trials earlier and they’re still charging,” came back the response. He wasn’t sure who it was, but it didn’t matter.
Felix held in a sigh. He didn’t need the Wardens right now, but he wanted to use them.
“Wardens?” Miu asked from directly behind him.
“Wardens. I’d… tell you what they are, but why spoil the surprise?
“You were welcome to come with me when I was doing the department goal setting and those damned individual development plans the other week. This all came up then.”
“I had enough of those tasks when we went through my own department.” Miu had been nonplussed with the corporate mandates he kept laying out.
“Andrea?”
“Mmm?” asked the Beastkin, turning her head to him.
“I could really go for some pancakes. Did you get that tiny kitchen set up in here?”
“Pancakes!” shouted the Beastkin, who scampered off to a corner.
“You spoil her,” Kit muttered.
“That I do.”
Chapter 24 - Escalation -
The smell of pancakes cooking filled the room as everyone watched the screens.
His people held the security hall as it was intended to be used. A narrow choke point with overlapping fields of fire.
The enemy had taken the lobby and were attempting to do the same thing further in. Except that there was no cover, and there were murder holes from reinforced security boxes that lined the lobby.
It left their would-be attackers just barely inside the lobby, and his own people at the end of the security hall, and in the kill rooms.
Occasionally, one side or the other would put some lead down the security hallway or through the lobby.
“They’ve already lost twenty or so people. Most of those were in the initial push,” said one of the techs at a terminal. “We’ve got about forty wounded.
“All satellite locations have reported in and are in their bunkers. Everyone is accounted for.”
“Outstanding,” Felix said around a grin. Leaning forward over his display, he pulled up the overhead map and centered it over the security hall.
“They’ve disabled all the cameras they can reach, so we’ve got nothing on the outside. Initial reports are that there is only minor damage outside of the lobby, though.” The tech who was speaking fed an overlay to the map Felix was looking at, marking off broken cameras, problems, and assumed positions.
“That was where the bombs went off? The lobby?” Felix looked up to the monitors on the wall. The lobby was charred, smoking, and full of fragments of people and objects.
“Both of them. Yes, sir.” The tech dropped the conversation and turned to the tech closest to him and started up a different conversation.
Something blurred across the video feed in the lobby. That same blur burst down the security hall.
Then stopped dead in its tracks in the center of the staging area at the end of the security hall.
It was a man in a dark spandex suit. He’d been picked up off the ground and was suspended in midair.
He rotated slowly in one direction as his legs pumped furiously at the air.
One of Felicia’s tricks, he guessed. He wasn’t sure what it was set up for, but it seemed as if its goal was to take whoever stepped on it and hold them in the air for a time.
One of the ceiling tiles shifted and a two-inch-long rod stuck out from the crack. It segmented itself and then extended rapidly, plunging a circular tip into the man’s back.
Electricity crackled from the end of it, discharging straight into the man.
His mouth sprang open soundlessly as the room flickered and flashed.
“Do you want the audio feed, sir?” asked one of the techs.
“To what, hear him scream? No thanks, I’m not that twisted.”
The electrical current cut off as abruptly as it started. The man hung limply, the only sign of life his eyes rolling around wildly in his head.
Retracting into itself, the segmented electric rod disappeared.
The floor rippled now, a number of floor plates sliding around. Then the man fell. He vanished into the open ground and was no more.
“I kinda feel like a Bond villain. I just need a cat sitting in my lap. I could scratch their ears while I chuckle at the fact that a superhero just fell into a damn pit trap.
“This is so cliché, it hurts,” Felix said, shaking his head.
“Clichés tend to be founded in reality.” Kit sighed and opened up a different screen on one of the unused monitors. “I believe Miu told you this previously, did she not?”
On that monitor was the appropriately named sausage room. It was only accessible by the main elevator, and it was rather deep down. If he had to guess, Felicia had put it roughly a hundred floors below.
Surprised he didn’t go splat when he reached the bottom.
The man who had fallen through the floor was being strung up by his arms and legs by darkly dressed Andreas.
The Death Others.
They worked efficiently, coldly. A man in a chair was being questioned, while a different woman was sitting in front of a desk with what could only be an Indentured contract in front of her.
A cart was brought in by a normal Other, dressed in the standard Legion uniform the Others had adopted.
Moving quickly to the sausage machine, she started pulling down the long ropes of what used to be a human.
Once the cart was loaded up, she happily waved at the Death Others, and left.
The woman at the table signed the form and then laid her head down on the desk and started crying.
“Lovely. Yep, Bond villain.”
Andrea happily dropped a plate of pancakes into his lap and handed him a fork. “Pancakes!”
Tanker appeared in the lobby, running dreadfully slow.
“Looks like the speedster was the one who was supposed to soften things up.” Kit tapped at her tablet and focused one of the cameras on Tanker.
He trundled along as bullets slammed into him continuously. Even Tanker couldn’t take that kind of punishment without injury. His arms came up to protect his face as he stomped along.
Bouncing off a wall, he stumbled into the security hall and kept moving. When he came out into the open area that the speedster had been trapped in, Tanker veered off to the left blindly.