A Creature of War, Book 3, CH10 (Patreon)

When they moved, El staggered the units again. They encountered more machines, but they were different, smaller, and seemed more independent. They did prove easier to take down.

It was slow going, and the sun set before they reached the building, although Milton claimed they were only a few blocks away. He argued for them to keep going, eager to see how it was made.

For once, he didn’t argue when El vetoed the idea. They were all tired, and traveling at night wasn’t a good idea, and there might not be any lights in the building. Even with the Anthros, who had better night vision, it would be easy for the enemy to catch them by surprise.

He divided the unit, so no one had to be on watch more than two hours, and they settled in for the night. He slept well, partially waking anytime gunfire erupted, but when no yells of panic followed, he fell back to sleep.

He chose to take the last watch, and they only had to shoot down three encroaching machines. Still, he had something of a shock when they did an inventory over breakfast. They were down to a clip and a half per soldier.

Under normal conditions, they’d resupply off fallen enemies if they couldn’t get back to their own stocks, but here the enemy didn’t have guns. Everyone would have to be careful not to waste ammo. He had to hope they wouldn’t encounter many enemies before they reached the generator.

So some of then would have an alternative, he asked Milton to build some firearms, and the professor had been happy to do so. Thirty minutes later, he had half a dozen of them.

He gave a demonstration; the weapons fired actual fire, hot enough to melt steel. The man insisted on training those who would use them. The training consisted of him saying; “Point, aim, press the trigger, watch the metal melt.” The soldiers did their best not to show their annoyance at him.

Then they were on the move.

The building both Milton and Stevenson agreed was their target was large. Easily a couple of blocks wide, and before the upper stories were destroyed, it might have been a hundred stories tall. El couldn’t know, but that was the sense he got from standing at the foot of it, with only six floors left.

Freya caught his attention and motioned for him to come with her.

“We have a problem,” the bat said as she guided him to the small group of soldiers holding Milton’s firearms.

One of them, a gray-furred horse, raised his. “This thing doesn’t work.” His tone was a mix of annoyance and anger. The others nodded in agreement. “The team I was with almost got taken down by one of those malformed machines we’ve been encountering this morning. When I tried to burn it, nothing happened.” He aimed at a jagged piece of concrete and pressed the trigger.

A tongue of flame hit the target and reduced it to a white mess with glowing pools of melted metal among it. The horse looked at the weapon in confusion.

“I swear, Sir. It wasn’t working.”

The others tried theirs, with similar results and stunned expressions.

El looked around and found Milton talking with Stevenson a hundred feet away. “I believe you.”

The statement stunned them as much as their firearm working. They looked at him expectantly.

El considered what he’d learned about Crazies. They could make incredible things. Things that looked like they defied what he knew of the laws of physics. Milton’s shoulder harness that let him lift a concrete wall that should have snapped his legs under its weight. Stevenson’s earbuds that not only kept sound from entering his ear, but created a bubble of silence around him. Both these things were impossible.

El, too, could do things that defied the laws of physics, but he had limits. His were in the hundreds of kilometers of distance, but there was a point where he could no longer affect the elements.

Were the Crazies more like him than he’d thought? Were their machines just a manifestation of their abilities? It would certainly explain how they could make items to things they were never designed to do, but it would mean they had a range, and by what these soldiers said, Milton’s range didn’t extend over a few hundred meters.

“You’re with me for the rest of the mission. Be careful with those when you use them again.

“Is that wise, Sir? What if they fail again?”

“Stay close and I don’t expect they will.” El sounded more confident than he felt. He wished there was someone he could ask about his theories before they were proved wrong in the middle of a battle

He reconfigured the teams and assigned most of them to take positions inside the entrances around the building. His team went through the opening where double doors had been when the building was intact. They followed the central corridor ever deeper, following Professor Milton’s impression of where the generator would be.

The space where they found it had once been multiple rooms, the extra walls hadn’t been destroyed, they had been removed, and carefully at that. Same with the ceiling. He could see three floors up. Looking around El thought the space was a large cube with the machine on the floor in its center.

“Professor, Stevenson, I need something to destroy it.”

The older man seemed put off by the order. “Do we really have to destroy it?”

“Yes.”

“But I haven’t studied it yet.”

“Can you study it once it’s destroyed?”

“Yes,” Stevenson answered. He wasn’t looking at them, he was looking at the generator.

“No!” Milton threw the other man a look of betrayal. “I need to be able to see it intact to make out the more subtle designs.

El considered this man. If he got angry, just how much damage could he do before anyone took him down? He didn’t have anything that was visibly a weapon, but what did he have in his pockets? How quickly could he make something? How deadly would that be?

He searched for Leech and Vee. They were on the other side, setting up defenses. They weren’t looking at them.

“I can give you an hour to study it. After that, I want it destroyed.”

Milton ran.

“Stevenson, can you make the thing you did to blow up the assembly line yesterday?”

“That won’t work here.” Stevenson pointed toward the generator and El turned.

Milton was on his back, rubbing his face. He had a bloody nose. He stood and placed a hand before him and pushed. He didn’t move.

El joined him, as did some of the soldiers.

“There’s nothing there,” one of them said, her shoulder against that nothing and pushing as hard as she could.

“Another forcefield?” Leech asked.

“Of course not,” Milton replied, indignant. “It generated the one around the city.”

“And is there any reason it can’t generate a second one here?” the lion snapped.

Milton opened his mouth, then closed it. He looked thoughtful. “Well, I suppose it’s possible they might have built a second function that let it create a smaller reflection of the one around the—what are you doing?” he asked Stevenson, who was placing a device at the of the forcefield.”

El didn’t wait for an answer. “Everyone outside the room, Now!” He grabbed Milton and followed everyone outside.

In the corridor, he hunkered down and hoped this was far enough. Stevenson leisurely stepped out of the room and leaned against the wall.

The explosion was quieter than El had expected. There was no smell of dust or of an accelerant, making him wonder, yet again, just how the Crazies’ creations worked.

He looked in the room. There was no dust in the air. He went in and where Stevenson’s bomb had been, there was a hole in the floor, but only on their side of the field.

“Well, that’s disappointing,” the man said, standing next to him.

They both approached the hole. It was just over three meters in diameter along the length of the forcefield, so El estimated it to be an eighth of the circumference of the field.

The hole had a perfect edge, as if it had been cut, not blown apart. El tested the edge, and it felt solid. He still ordered everyone away from the edge.

“This is interesting.” Stevenson was on his stomach, looking down the hole. “The forcefield is a sphere.”

El looked in and he could see where Stevenson’s bomb had destroyed part of the floor beneath them, and showing where the forcefield intersected it there.

“Of course it’s a sphere,” Milton said. His nose wasn’t bleeding anymore, but he hadn’t bothered wiping it away. “Do you have any idea how difficult it would be to generate a field in only one direction?”

Stevenson shook his head as he stood. “Do you?”

“Of course not! I haven’t studied the generator yet.”

Stevenson tapped the place where their progress was blocked. There was no sound from the impact.

“It might be solidified air,” the man mused.

“It isn’t,” El replied. “I’d be able to tell if it was. In fact.” He sent a blast of air at the forcefield and dust on the other side few away. “It lets air through.”

Milton rolled his eyes. “Of course it does. We’d be dead otherwise. You think there’s enough air inside this dome to let the troupes in here breathe for all these months we’ve been camping around it?”

“All they’d have to do was drop a section every few days to replenish the air. It isn’t like we would have noticed.” Stevenson’s tone was borderline mocking.

“My machine would have detected it.”

“Sure it would.” Now it was fully mocking.

“They didn’t have to do that because it lets the air through.”

“But why?” El asked.

“So they wouldn’t have to shut it down!” Milton’s tone was victorious. He turned and walked away.

“Idiot,” Stevenson grumbled, eyes fixed on the machine at the center of the room. He crossed his arms over his chest and his eyes moved left and right.

El studied him. “What are you seeing?”

“Something quite impressive.”

El couldn’t shake the sense the man wasn’t talking about the exterior of the machine. He paused in the process of asking when he heard gunfire coming from outside.

“You can tell how that thing works from here, can’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Then why does Milton insist on getting close to it?”

Stevenson snorted. “If that man needs to touch something to know how it works, then he’s even stupider than I gave him credit for.”

“Okay, so you can see how it works. Is there any way to turn it off?”

“There are four control panels on the machine’s surface. Each needs to have a code entered at the same time to shut it down.”

“Do you know what the codes are?”

Stevenson narrowed his eyes, seemed to search the machine, then crouched and wrote four strings of eight digits in the dust.

El looked at the machine. He couldn’t make out one detail from another. “How are the control panels set up? Physical keypads or touch screens?”

“Touch screens.” Stevenson was silent for a moment. “Why?”

“I might have been able to focus a jet of air tightly enough to press keys and enter the codes.” He looked at the machine again. “I wonder if I can generate a strong enough wind to topple it over.”

The human shook his head. “It’s anchored in the floor.” He crouched and drew an upside-down hand with claws. “And as you can see, it can’t be pulled out. Unless you can pull the entire floor out with it.”

El couldn’t do that. Could he open a chasm to swallow the building? Would that even work? Or would the generator just stay up, held in place by its own field? There were no fires in there for him to melt it. Not enough water in the air to do anything with it.

“How narrow can you make your air jets?” Stevenson asked, pulling El out of his thoughts.

“About a centimeter and a half.”

“How much volume can you move?”

El shrugged. “However I have available. I created a tornado a kilometer wide back at the Freak Lab.”

Stevenson was pensive. “I think I have a way.” He made a face of disgust. “Milton! I’m going to need your help to build something.”

El followed Stevenson as he and Milton met halfway.

“We need to build a machine that will focus his air down to a few micron so we can create an air knife.”

Milton gasped. “You want to destroy the machine! I told you I need to stu—”

Stevenson’s sigh cut the older man off. When he spoke Stevenson was calm, conciliatory. “With a knife, we can cut power conduits. Without power, it shuts down and you can go touch it.”

El watched Stevenson. He had never heard him this agreeable toward the older man.

Milton was thoughtful. “Yes, I suppose that would work.” His gaze became even more distant. He smiled and began bouncing on his feet. “Yes, yes, I know how we can do it.”

Stevenson waited for a moment, but the other man didn’t add anything. “Milton, I left my mind reading machine in my other pants. Draw what you’re thinking.”

“Right.” Milton crouched and traced lines in the dust. They meant nothing to El, but Stevenson crouched, and after a moment, nodded.

“I see where you’re going with this.” He added lines and in short order what they were drawing spread over two square meters.

He left them to go check on the soldiers.

“How are they?” He asked Leech.

“Nervous, excited. Freya went and took a look outside. She said that it’s actual soldiers doing the fighting now.” The lion grinned. “Living people mean I finally get to be useful.”

El chuckled and patted his shoulder. “You’re more than your power.”

The lion snorted. “Without it, I’m just like the bunch of them. One soldier among many.”

El put a hand on the back of the lion’s neck and pulled him close. “Hey, don’t talk like that. Power or not, you’re nothing like them. You’re my friend and our brother, remember that.” He kissed the lion.

Leech sighed. “I am so going to need some sort of release in not too long.”

“Then it’s a good thing the fighting is getting closer. By the sound of it, you won’t have too long to wait. Combat is a good replacement for sex.”

Leech made a face. “It’s a decent replacement, at best.”

El smiled. “You still get your release. Where’s Vee?”

“Other side.”

El walked around the room, talking to the soldiers, offering encouragement. He also kept an eye on Stevenson and Milton, who were now accumulating part for their machine.

He found the bull walking back and forth behind the line of nervous soldiers there, speaking softly to one or another.

El caressed the bull’s shoulder.

Vee turned and smiled. “Hey.” They shared a quick kiss. “How are the Crazies holding up?”

“Stevenson has managed to get Milton to work on a project with him.”

“He what?” the bull looked beyond El. The two humans were now assembling components.

“What are they making?”

“Something that will take down the forcefield, or so Stevenson said.”

“And you think they can pull it off?”

“Considering what each is capable of doing individually, I have no doubt they can build something really amazing together. Something that could probably level this city. That’s my worry, how much collateral damage are they going to cause and how close to us will it land. But if it means shutting down the forcefield, I’ll deal with that when it happens.”

El pressed himself against the bull and took comfort in the hug. He allowed himself to forget that soon they would be fighting for their lives and simply enjoy the moment.

When he pushed away, he looked up into the bull’s eyes. “I need you to position yourself someplace you can keep an eye on me. I’m going to have to provide the air for their machine and I think Milton might become a problem. If it gets to that I need you to take him out.”

“How permanently?”

“Just unconscious. He’s still an ally, if an unstable one.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll keep watch.” The bull bent down and kissed him again. This time the kiss was full of passion, and El gripped Vee’s neck as he kissed him back. When they broke apart, they looked into each other eyes and those looks promised a night to match the passion the kiss they’d just shared.

El would have taken that night right now, not caring if there was an audience, but he was conscious of the message it would send to the other soldiers. He was the leader. It was his responsibility to set an example, even if that meant not taking comfort under his lover’s body right now.

“When this is over,” Vee whispered the promise and El nodded. He’d have to be satisfied with that for the moment.