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.
Alistair!
She cried his name out, her mind breaking the barrier of Central’s halo like glass.
Mitzi?How did you -
There’s no time for that. How long until backup arrives?
Less than a minute. We are moving as fast as we can, Mitzi.
She ran options, scenarios, and probabilities. One stood out.
Barrier Protocol. Now.
She could feel Alistair hesitate.
Mitzi, there is no time to complete the download. It takes more than thirty seconds…
Alistair, I don’t have time for this right now. Trust me. Start the download.
There was another brief hesitation, perhaps Alistair consulting the analytical pool, then confirmation.
Alright, Mitzi. Your call. Download commencing.
She didn’t wait for the download to start. Mitsuru had already begun to return to her body, moving along the red string, so fast it felt like freefall. She crashed into her body with a sickening sensation, and then the protocol hit her, and she felt like screaming, raw logic structures descending on her mind, displacing, enlightening. It was a migraine headache, a cluster of migraines localized in her forebrain. A wave of unutterable brilliance passed through her, illuminating, making her vision warp and blur.
She didn’t have time for that. Mitsuru dropped her guns and dug a short knife from her belt sheath. She heard the Weir howl and knew that they had started to move, even without confirmation from the acoustic analysis of the half-forgotten firearms protocol. She slashed one palm with the knife, deeper than she’d meant to, and then the other, and then dropped it. There was no pain, only blood spilling out of the wound, propelled by her frantically beating heart.
Mitsuru slumped to her knees beside boy, and then planted both of her hands palms down into the already bloody mud on either side of his head. The pain of the rapidly downloading protocol was intense, but it flared even brighter when she forced it to activate, ripping away her vision and replacing it with a field of ruby-tinted darkness. Her palms ached, and she could barely feel her fingers, as they sank into the viscous mud. There was fantastic pressure in her sinuses, a tingling sensation throughout her body, and then her eyes rolled back in her head.
The energy bled out of her, through the wounds in her palms, and her hands burned where they touched the mud. Every nerve sang as Mitsuru forced power through her hands, through the blood-born nanochains, through the mud and then up, into a dome she visualized, a thin red transparency that surrounded her and the boy, perfectly round and perhaps a meter across. Her head was filled only with the migraine now, as the incomplete protocol sputtered and whined. The power she forced into the protocol struggled to find an outlet, attempting to discharge to relieve the unbelievable pressure. Submerged in the cold mud, her hands burned. She held the structure of the protocol in her mind, aligning and maintaining the energies by force of will.
The first Weir to hit the barrier crumpled, going down in a tangle of teeth and paws, bones cracking against the translucent field. Mitsuru screamed as it hit, screamed as power flared through the incomplete protocol, but she was unaware of it. The whole of her consciousness was focused on channeling power into the damaged structure of the protocol. Whatever the source, the mysterious power seemed inexhaustible, and she made herself into a conduit for it, a preferential pathway for the available energy.
One half-human paw on the back of its damaged head, the silver Weir rose to his feet and paused, staring at Mitsuru in the mud a few yards away, her body wracked with effort and pain, sprawled across the boy, and the translucent red shield over them.
“Little one,” it said, walking toward them, his voice a repulsive parody of human speech. “Little one, you cannot hold that barrier for long. It is tearing you apart, I can see it.”
If it expected a response, it didn’t get one. It studied the shivers that racked Mitsuru’s body. Her nose poured blood unheeded, her face pale and her eyes screwed shut.
“It will fail, girl, it will fail without me even touching it. And when it does,” it said, lolling its long black tongue over its tangled teeth, “we will hurt you. First we’re going to tear that boy apart. Then you…”
It leaned down closer then, almost touching the barrier, its breath foul and hot on the back of Mitsuru’s neck.
“We’ll take our time with you. You’ll wish you were dead long before we let you die. There isn’t anything you can do about it. Think about that, behind your dissolving barrier.”
The thing’s tongue extended out several inches, black and viscous, caressing the barrier obscenely, leaving a trail of mucus and spittle behind.
Mitsuru’s fingers dug into the mud. Her nosebleed had become a stream now, the blood flowing steadily onto the boy, onto the ground around him. The shield flickered, not due to lack of power, but rather because the incomplete protocol had begun to disintegrate.
“Enough.”
Mitsuru felt, rather than saw, the arc of blue-white flame that struck the silver Weir, igniting his fur and hurling him, bones cracking, back toward the scrub and brush. The shield around them flickered and then dissolved as Mitsuru allowed the protocol to dissipate, and then rolled herself off the boy and onto her back. Lying on the mud, she forced her eyes open and saw the Operator standing over her through the veil of the migraine.
She didn’t recognize him. He was middle-aged, Caucasian, with a serious, plain face and dark hair. He wore an overcoat, damp and heavy for the season, and an expensive-looking brown suit beneath. In his right hand, he held something that looked very much like a metal umbrella handle, a blue-white stream of flame running out of the elongated end, dripping to the ground and pooling there, beside his immaculately polished shoes.
The barrier protocol diminished to fragments and half-remembered images, but Mitsuru’s headache remained blinding and her nose continued to gush. She managed to force herself up to her knees, though it took both hands and a concerted effort. She put two fingers against the wrist of the fallen boy, too tired even to summon a probe.
“Relax, Operator Aoki,” the man said crisply, his expression unreadable. “I will finish this. Do you have the strength to contact Central for retrieval? They’ve prepped an extraction for you.”
Mitsuru stared at her wounded hand, wondering. She realized that somehow she did, and managed a nod.
“Then go,” the man said curtly, raising the bar over his head, the liquid fire trailing behind him in a continuous wave; like a long whip, or more accurately, like the line of a fly-fisherman, extending out yards behind him in elaborate coils, a sinuous and lazy exaggeration of his movements.
Mitsuru reached through the Ether as the line struck the first of the Weir, snapping forward with a terrifying, unavoidable momentum. Wherever it touched, the line scorched, reducing the wolves to ash and smoking meat, sending up gouts of steam from the hissing mud. He drew the line back over his head in a high, slow arc, and then brought it whipping back in a wide sweep, parallel with the ground, and whatever it touched, burned.
Already, the park was devastated, and filled with howling, terrified Weir. It was the single most flagrant display of the Salamander Protocol that Mitsuru had ever witnessed, and even through the pain of the broken protocol, she felt a profound envy.
Then she hit the white of Central, and a moment later, both she and the boy were gone, into concerned voices, soft light and hospital sounds.