"No. Not now that I've been here. Not with everything we know, and Michael in intensive. Not after the zombies. Not after what Magellan said. That's enough to make me want to destroy everything in sight."
"Yeah, me too," the troll said, though it was sad that he
should feel such a thing. "What say we shake on it, chummer."
They did, and Serrin regretted it. Tom was given to firm handshakes, which was fine if you were a troll. Otherwise, it felt like his hand was being squeezed by a metal clamp with infinite crushing potential. Then they shouldered their arms and headed into the darkness.
Niall was incredulous. The barrier was impossible to break. Even using everything he had, he couldn't invade Lutair's space. Trying to enter the building in astral form left him so drained that he'd fled, panicking. Once outside again, he felt his own power return to him. He re-entered his body and jerked into life, looking at the manifested spirit protecting his physical form.
"That isn't possible," he said. This was something he simply hadn't even considered.
"It is," the spirit replied. "If he knows your name. If he has something of you. If he has enchanted a barrier specifically against you. Then you cannot penetrate it."
"How could he possibly amp; " His voice trailed off. "The Family. They have given him something. They must be working with him, actively. That must be it."
He sat with his head in his hands, despairing. His masking was so powerful that Lutair could not have detected him, but he was utterly impotent.
"No spirit or elemental I raise can enter either," he said desperately.
"Quite so," Mathanas agreed.
"Then everything is lost. I can hardly walk up with a pistol in my hands and wave it at the gates."
The spirit, distracted from its protective duty, looked around and smiled at him.
"Niall, perhaps someone else has exactly that idea in mind. Let us wait and see what happens."
Luther was still unaware of anything around him, so totally absorbed was he in putting the finishing touches on his preparations, when the gates of the monastery simply evaporated into thin air. Incredulous, Martin sat and stared at the few monitor screens that were still giving
him anything more than static. He tried to activate the gateguns and realized they were useless. The elf had lied. He must have been a spy, an infiltrator. He'd babbled about three of them, an elf mage and a troll and some girl or other. But there was a whole damn army out there somewhere.
He didn't know what to do whether to get the remaining pawns out into the open to deal with whoever was trying to storm the place or to keep them back for defense and attrition. He keyed in a message for relay to Luther's trid screen and sealed off the laboratory complex.
Machine-gun fire poured from the turret atop the monastery's east wing, lacing the forest with fire and a hail of metal. Not wasting time comparing the merits of various targets, Gunther had the launcher embedded in the moist soil of the forest floor and was sending the second missile on its way.
In a brilliant, deafening display of pyrotechnics, the entire front of the east wing was demolished. Glass and stone screamed into the air and rained down around the building. The samurai heading for the gates, or where the gates had once been, narrowly managed to avoid being crushed by what was left of the walls.
Tom was already heading in after them, assault cannon leveled at the main doors to the building. He raced past the remains of the gate guards, almost tripping in a slippery smear that turned out to be what was left of a guard dog. The combination of barking and gunshots from his left told him that any remaining canines were rapidly becoming extinct. Peeling off to the right, he took aim. Gunther, abandoning the launcher, had had the same idea on the other flank. The two shots hit the doors simultaneously, the wood and metal disappearing in a firestorm. It was impossible, in the mayhem, to see whether anyone was inside. The ork squad heading for the doors paused and lobbed in a couple of concussion grenades just in case, then quickly ducked down and covered their heads.
Continuous machine-gun fire from the HKs was streaming into the smoke-filled hall when the ground itself seemed to tremble. As Serrin watched, the second ork
squad raced away from the west side of the building, but they didn't quite make it to complete safety before the out-building collapsed in on itself.
Frag me, he thought. Those guys may not have had any experience with explosives, but that went off pretty well. He continued to survey the scene, looking for enemies the raging orks wouldn't see, anything emerging from the shadows. He hadn't cast a single spell in anger, knowing he had to hold on to every ounce of power he had.
Far below them, Luther saw Martin's message. He reacted slowly, drawing himself up out of his focusing, and then he saw the images Martin was relaying to him, the destruction of the buildings above him, orks storming the hall, in through the doors now. Two of them were mown down by the remotes covering the hall, but when the screens went blank, he realized they must be using explosives or grenades to blast their way through now. The fury and destruction of it snapped him into a cold, controlled rage.
Luther began his spellcasting. He'd been ready for something like this for a long time. The relay focuses were in place. It wouldn't ruin the barrier; no other mage could cast even the most trivial spell inside it.
Tom felt a chill of intuition flicker through his body. He screamed to Serrin to get inside the building, his voice slightly distorted through the respirator he'd donned. The elf hesitated, unsure; the orks who had gone in were lying riddled with lead from the automatic guns inside. Tom grabbed the elf and forcibly dragged him inside as the corpses erupted from out of the ground.
When one of the orks blasted the ragged, rotting figures lurching toward him with his shotgun, the thing exploded in a brilliant ball of fire, drenching the screaming ork in fire and acid. His fellow, ten yards behind, gawked in disbelief until he discovered that these things didn't have to be shot up. They exploded of their own accord. He went down as a charred, blistered, reeking corpse. And then he rose up again, still on fire.
About a half dozen of the raiders were inside the monastery. They knew anyone outside was dead or as good as
dead, and the things now trapping them in here would surely come in after them. There wasn't going to be any escape.
Torn emptied a clip from his Panther assault cannon down the hallway. "Frag everything and ask questions afterward!" he screamed. Serrin saw blood on the troll's broad shoulders. He prayed it was only a superficial wound, or better yet, not even the troll's blood at all.
"Where the frag are we going?" Serrin shouted above the cacophony. With everyone wearing respirators, it would have been hard enough to communicate even without the hellish din.
"Frag knows. Just blow everything away." Tom wasn't really listening. He was berserking, Serrin realized.
Gunther was muttering something about a flamethrower being really useful as his clip emptied into an amorphous body of men ahead of them. Tom still had rounds in the Panther, and he used one. The shock wave nearly blew them backward, but whatever had been on the business end of the shot certainly wasn't like the corpses outside. The figures lay in a broken, shattered heap after the hit.
"Behind us," Kristen yelled as the first of the things from outside lumbered in after them.
"Don't shoot!" Serrin screamed to her, having seen what had happened when the outside orks had tried it. "Just keep moving!"
Tom switched to his H amp;K, hefting the machine gun and ripping an arc of bullets into the distance as they ran forward. From behind them came an appalling scream. Serrin turned in time to see one of the few remaining ork samurai staggering backward, his throat a brilliant red scar from ear to ear. The grinning dead thing with the garrote around his neck pulled harder and harder. Serrin hadn't the time to take in the concealed doorway the thing had appeared from before he drilled it through the forehead with a precision shot. Sometimes you just get lucky, he thought.