June 10th 2013, 4:58 PM
First District Palace
“Come on, Mercy,” said Junia over the phone. “You owe me one.”
“I owe you one half,” corrected Mercy.
“One-half twice. You owe me. Come to the meeting, hear the pitch, pass it on to Prudence and the debt is settled.”
“All right, all right, I’m coming.” Mercy closed the phone, and it vanished into thin air.
She was halfway out the door before she realized that her purse, with its cosmetics and power core, was upstairs. Eh. She had everything she actually needed with her, and she could just summon the phone out of hammerspace the next time she had to talk to somebody.
- - -
Darkness had fallen by the time Mercy took off. She didn’t have her mother’s keys, so she just put on a tinker jetpack from her hammerspace inventory and drank the raindrops in.
It was a pretty long flight from the first county to the eighth, and the entire city was quiet. Everyone could see that once the Tyrant was dead there was no reason for the figurative storm not to break. The literal storm, meanwhile, had already broken, and Mercy was soaking it up into storage. The first drops had started falling within an hour of his death, and, in a quote that seemed to fit, ‘the heavens mourned the death of a king.’ It was a pouring, depressing, soaking rain and maybe that was why there was total silence even in the most desolate streets; ordinarily street vendors would raise umbrellas or retreat into vehicles, but in the face of the rain today there were no vehicles to be found.
The only spots of activity were the Counts’ troops, keeping close to palaces, securing their armories and bridges and whatever other important spots there might be, Mercy didn’t know, she’d never been much of a fighter. The palace warehouses that held the royal army had been unlocked and there was a constant stream of robots out from under the palace, the steel soldiers who had won the war with Ilderia. She passed the wall that enclosed the Seventh District, swerving a bit to avoid going over directly; Livia’s sentries stood sentinel in fortified towers by it and watched her pass, rifles and machine guns at the ready.
As she approached Steelstorm’s palace, an alarm droned onwards to warn everyone to stay safely indoors. His fortress of a palace looked even more fortified than usual. Turrets with wide angles of fire swept the skies and ground for anyone who wasn’t on their side; the skies themselves were full of flocks of flying war drones, and dozens or maybe even hundreds of Paladin-class sentinels escorted by the more common Levies walked the walls and grounds and corridors, force projectors and rifles at the ready, two of which provided her with an escort to the war room. Steelstorm’s knights stood guard outside, as heavily armed and armored as you’d expect.
Despite it being his home, Steelstorm wasn’t in the war room, though the rest of the group was; Junia and Catherine’s brother the prince were looking at a tactical map projected on the TV screen they were using as a table, she wearing what looked like blue-and-silver samurai armor (the one Mercy had helped her buy, with the velocity-redirection field built in) and studying the map, while he, (no, that was a remote body) quietly talked with his soldiers. Proteus, also looking at the table from somewhat more of a distance, wore his brown-and-purple supervillain outfit, but by the way he moved it had armored plates too.
Mercy was dressed normally, which meant fashionably. Fashions were not currently trending towards the military.
“Um,” she said.
“We will need to be ready to act as soon as possible,” Julius’s double was explaining to Proteus. “Soldiers are being mobilized within the individual districts, but we can expect my sister to attack tonight, probably after token attempts to convince you and Michael and my knights to surrender or defect.”
Junia kissed Julius’s robot on the head and strolled up to Mercy, waving greetings.
“Mercy! Good to see you.” She paused. “You’re not armored up.”
“You didn’t tell me there was going to be a fight.”
“Yeah, we’ve got eight hours, plus, before anything starts,” Junia said. “Lizzy’s got to track down all of her street gangs, plus the troops of anyone dumb enough to support her. Me and Julius wanted you to take a look at our defenses, so you could tell your mom.”
“They didn’t look bad,” said Mercy.
“We have ninety Paladins on-site. They’re elites - Class IV invulnerability, with shoulder lightning cannons and cutting torches and forcefield projectors that mean they can cause serious harm to anyone with invulnerability above class III. That’s just about everyone but Lizzy.”
“They can’t fry Lizzy,” Mercy pointed out. Prudently. Ugh, she hated being prudent; that was her mother’s job.
“Can if we take out her armor. Aaaand we’ve got air control, Juggernauts, Levies, and another three armies that’ll show up tonight once she hits. This is a fight that’s going to go one way,” Junia said happily.
“Right,” said Mercy. “And you want me to go and tell my mother that you have a solution for everything - oh, except for Bloody Lizzy, thanks, can she go provide that? Because she probably could, you know.”
“We can take Lizzy if we can pay the butcher’s bill. Steelstorm has some special death rays he thinks can get past her armor, or we might just be able to feed it too much power to handle so it explodes.” She shrugged. “And she’s not an Idealist; heatstroke might do it.”
“Those are all a stretch,” said Mercy uncomfortably. “Look. This really isn’t my business. You can have your war, but I have my own stuff to do. I’ll tell Mom, OK?”
“And what about Catherine?” Junia asked.
“What about her? She’s out of this.”
“Julius has told me a… little of what Lizzy did, back when they were kids.” She looked surprisingly somber, herself. “She’s psycho, Mercy. If she’s queen, and she thinks Catherine’s a threat, she’s dead. We’re friends, but you and her are like sisters. But Lizzy isn’t sisters with her sisters.”
Mercy rubbed her eyes. War wasn’t her life. Her life was ignoring advice to be paranoid, and sister Impatience, and looking very, very good indeed, and letting her mother make the political decisions. She knew Junia, but Junia wasn’t normally serious. She was now.
“You’re saying that either you win, or Lizzy kills Catherine.”
“Or she runs. But it’d be a lot easier if she didn’t have to run.”
“Right, well, you’re missing something,” Mercy said. “You’re going to win anyway, right? You’ve got ways to kill Lizzy and enough strength to take out her army, so why should Mom do anything?”
“She might have something we haven’t thought of,” Junia admitted. “Your mom’s crazy smart and smart crazy and the best poisoner in Novapest.”
“Right, right. But if Lizzy can take out you and all your stuff, she can probably take out Mom, too.” She raised a hand to shield herself from Junia’s accusing gaze. “Hey! I’m not saying what she ought to do, I’m saying what the ‘prudent’ thing for her to do would be, and has she ever done anything else?”
It was around this time that Steelstorm arrived, wearing grease-stained half-armor covered with small lasers that appeared to be attached to it with duct tape, gauntlets and greaves and helm and breastplate all separate pieces, but with only a little protection for the legs or arms aside from the suit beneath it.
“I’ve got all the latest lots off the assembly line automatically linked into the main network,” he explained to Julius. “They should be coming on in a few seconds.”
“Already have,” said Steelmind, steepling his fingers. “I’m routing them to houses and warehouses within easy striking distance of your palace so they can ambush her more effectively.”
“You’re the boss,” said Steelstorm. “Hey -”
The lights went out. Steelmind (Steelmind’s remote body) froze, then toppled over with a crash. The computers and projectors on the table hissed angrily, but didn’t actively explode as they shut down, then Steelstorm was wrenching his helmet off as it screamed static across the room and into his ears.
The emergency lights went on, casting chemical shadows on the corpse of the war room and showing unconscious robots, two counts and two teenagers.
“That’s all the tech in the place dead!” Steelstorm said, his tone the same as if he were spitting profanity. “Everything!”
“Oh, shit,” said Mercy. Junia glanced at the remote body double, apparently having the same un-identification of it with Julius that Mercy had had, then looked at the others.
Proteus spoke first.
“It’s not happening tonight. The attack is now.” This was punctuated by distant explosions and crashes.
The doors were forced open as Steelstorm’s knights streamed in. Each wore full or half- armor, and yet most of them had pulled off their helmets or couldn’t lift their arms.
“My air force!” Steelstorm screamed at the sky. “It’s cut off! That bitch pulled an EMP out of her ass!”
Proteus looked at Steelstorm. “Mike!” he said urgently. “Are they all just paperweights?”
“Not all of them,” Steelstorm said, falling back into calculating mode. “The Juggernauts and the Paladins ought to reboot pretty fast, they’re tough. But they’ll be on their default settings until Julius’s networks go back up and he can get control of them again. Stun ‘em all, no tactics.”
“We need to run,” Mercy said urgently. “We need to get somewhere safer and regroup. Lizzy’s coming.” She did not then question that she might not have had to be part of we.
Junia stared at her. “Why should we run? If she’s coming to us, then let her! You’ve got a satellite phone in hammerspace, right, Mercy?”
“More than one.”
“Right. We call the other knights and tell them to come as soon as possible, and then all we have to do is stall Lizzy until they show up and trap her, and we’re fine! Even without the robots, it’s three counts to one!” Junia seemed to grow larger as she looked around the room. Steelstorm opening a cabinet up with a screwdriver; his knights standing around shocked, all their supplemental tinkertech broken; Proteus cold and calm, Mercy on the verge of panic - “Steelstorm, get your anti-Lizzy weaponry running. She isn’t immune to the pulse, so that’ll buy us some time before she arrives herself. Mercy, give Proteus a phone, Proteus, start making calls!” To one of Steelstorm’s knights: “Get in touch with the other garrisons! Lizzy could be next door and we’d never know it.”
Mercy was the only one who moved, plucking her cell phone from thin air and offering it to Proteus, who ignored it.
“Where did you get the idea you were in charge?” Proteus asked.
He stretched his hands, cracked his knuckles, placed his fingertips on the wall and floor. “Let your elders handle this. Mike?”
Steelstorm opened a security cabinet, picked up a mallet, smacked his helmet twice and his armor four times in carefully-chosen places and put them back on. The lasers swiveled to point at what he was staring at.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
“Armor’s operational,” he said. “For now.” He looked at his knights. “Form up!”
They did, smoothly and professionally, readying weapons and powers.
“We have fast-moving knights in the corridors,” said Proteus. “Coming in hard and aggressive, taking out any Paladins they pass. Lighter troops approaching behind them,” he said.
He paused.
“Lighter troops being destroyed. Knights appear to be capable of punching through steel.”
“Try not to wreck my base, Fred.”
“You can afford a new floor, Mike.”
Junia stood still, frozen. There was a cold expression on her face. She shook her head, and two swords manifested in her hands - not katana and wakizashi, but a pair of sabers.
“Run if you like, Mercy. I’m not going anywhere.”
“You’re at least backing off,” said Mercy. “Or I’m telling your mother that you died begging her forgiveness.”
Something snapped in Junia, and for a moment the cold expression turned to a savage fury and then she broke into laughter. “Fine, whatever.”
Steelstorm raised a hand. “Fred, you’ve got this?”
“I’ve got it.”
“Right. Men, protect Proteus. Obey his orders as my own. Girls, you’re with me. I’ve got a backup transmitter that ought to put the ‘bots in contact with Steelmind, but I could use some protection.”
He gave Mercy a dubious look. “And change into combat clothes, girl.”
It took Mercy a quarter-second to summoned her unpowered armor, interlooped padding forming over her skin and over it durable synthetic scales towards the upper volume limit of what she could absorb, the kevlar behind them intertwining as each scale formed into the next, her clothes vanishing as the armor manifested. In a moment her face was invisible behind a visor. “Done.”
“They’re splitting up,” said Proteus. “Capable of punching through steel, but not… heh.”
He smirked.
“The Hawk of Dawn’s old Serum Soldiers, half a dozen in the first group. Someone’s been reading her history.”
Steelstorm matched his expression. “Just like the old days. See you tomorrow, Fred.”
“Give my boys my regrets, Mike,” was all Proteus said. “Six. Five. Four. Two. Zero. Next group… six.”
Then the three of them ran. The last time Mercy saw Proteus, he was counting under his breath. Counting down.
Then they were running down the industrial corridors, chemical lights illuminating the complex. When she started to get tired at the breakneck pace - the pace that neither the armored tinker nor the Idealist were having trouble keeping - Mercy pulled out her jetpack, set it going, and coasted along.
“You meant it about the transmitter?” she asked, when she finally had breath to speak.
“Sure,” he said. “You thought I lied just to save Prudence’s daughter and my godson’s girlfriend?”
“I suspected it, yeah,” said Mercy. “People tend to take my mom’s promises of fivefold vengeance seriously.”
“It’s Lizzy who’ll need to worry about that, girl. I’d kill to see the expression on her face -”
They rounded a corridor. The man they almost ran into had dirty clothes, spiky hair, and a look of manic vigor on his thin face. His feet left dents in the floor as he moved, accelerating at speeds that would have broken a normal man’s neck.
Steelstorm’s lasers pointed at him, but Mercy tapped him on the shoulder before he could fire.
“Let Junia handle this one, won’t you?”
He moved like a racecar and Junia’s swords looked very small as she charged out in front of the others. At the last moment, her swords disappeared, replaced by a boar spear - a leaf-shaped blade with a crosspiece behind it, the tip half an inch from the serum soldier’s chest.
She danced aside as the momentum of his dying rush tore the spear from her hands, and it disintegrated, leaving nothing but a corpse behind. She rolled her neck, and the swords were back in her hands.
“Serum soldier?” Mercy asked Steelstorm.
“Serum #24,” he said. “The Hawk of Dawn’s tinker - I forget his name - made it for him because we outnumbered him. Twenty-four hours of mid-ranked brick powers, then an agonizing death.”
“He didn’t fight like a mid-ranked brick.” He fought like a child.
“You got powers you’d know how to use, survivor-girl. I trained with my armor for years.” Steelstorm looked at the corpse. “He had an hour.”
And then the run (or, in Mercy’s case, the flight) continued. They could hear the sounds of more fighting, but Steelstorm led them around it as best he could, despite Junia’s hungry looks. Someone had a lot of anger to take out.
It could have been worse. Her mother had told horror stories of how badly idealizing could work out, ending up as crazy as Catherine’s bodyguard Elgolian or one of the pseudo-Draculas, or a fanatic for a crazy cause like Livia. Sometimes Mercy suspected that Junia was fanatically devoted to offending her mother, but Livia might actually have approved of the way she’d torn through a stronger but less intelligent opponent.
And that is not something I’m going to tell her.
- - -
The walls closed inwards, crushing a pair of hapless henchmen between them, before springing back out to their former shape. A mesh of blades rose and fell from the ceiling, dicing more of Lizzy’s minions.
She didn’t stop moving. When walls tried to crush her, she stopped them. When spikes rose in front of her, she smashed them. She didn’t bother with walls after very long; instead she took the straightforward path, clearing the way with laser and railgun, and let her super-soldiers fall behind. She didn’t need them. Soon there were no more walls, simply one long hallway carved by Proteus, a clear tunnel that he could see through to better target his attacks. There were still three knights by him, all of them opening fire with various high-end weapons.
Lizzy was alone, which meant it was four on one. None of them bothered speaking. She just charged. The ground shifted into chest-height spears; she kicked through it. He vented acidic chemicals towards her armor; the drops of the spray bounced off the armor’s force field. A fast-firing grenade launcher opened fire on her, unleashing a useless barrage; she bounced the projectiles back at the launcher, and Proteus desperately made a wall between them. The grenades exploded in a spray of napalm which she hurled away, and she burst through the wall, gunned down the three remaining knights with the Girardoni’s accelerated rifle, and smirked.
Proteus backed away, fingers against the walls, summoning iron spikes from them to shatter against her armor.
“Really? That’s the best you can do?”
She continued smirking.
“I should’ve started with you instead of bothering with your knights. Shows what I know, huh?”
He lunged for her, and she took him by the throat to crush the life from him, and in the process brushed her gauntlets against his skin.
The Girardoni was the third Durendal Mark VII created by the Titanium Tyrant. Into it was incorporated the greatest work of Pemmer and a dozen other tinkers, and it bore the most advanced weaponry any tinker in the Tyrant’s service could provide, and now it crumbled, every shard of it unwoven from every other shard at Count Proteus’s lightless touch.
She repelled its momentum outwards in a ripple that killed him instantly. Then she stood, clad only in light padding, in a ruin that had once been Steelstorm’s palace, staring at her unprotected hands.
“Damn you!” she screamed, kicking at the dead count’s head. “That was my armor! My father made it for me! It was MINE!”
She looked around. A spill of acidic chemicals releasing fumes she was no longer immune to, still-smouldering napalm that would burn her if she got too near it, a roof that if it collapsed the wrong way could leave her trapped to choke or starve…
Bloody Lizzy hissed, then turned and walked away. Her troops could finish them off.
- - -
“My backup armory,” Steelstorm explained. “Deep inside the palace. I beefed up security after that criminal attacked…”
He twisted the key in the lock, the door clicked open.
“Hiya, suckers,” said Adamant, and pulled the trigger.
The moment was frozen in Mercy’s mind. The flying woman, wearing an eyepatch and non-boiler armor and carrying a really huge tinker rocket launcher, flanked by another two knights and six serum soldiers. There was a huge hole in one of the walls - had they dug that by hand? The other walls were covered in ransacked weapons. There might have been a transmitter in one of them, but she couldn’t recognize it.
The rocket was still moving slowly when it hit Count Steelstorm in his armored chest, propelling him back down the corridors before exploding in a lethal storm of napalm and shrapnel. Adamant slammed the door back in their faces, leaving Mercy and Junia trapped in a corridor with a storm of shrapnel as Mercy tackled Junia to the ground and sucked all the grenade-bits into hammerspace.
Junia shoved her off, got to her feet. The walls were scarred and marked with bits of explosives, Steelstorm was dead, and they were outnumbered nine to two.
“Run!” Mercy said, and picked up Junia and fired her jetpack full-speed past the unrecognizable corpse of Steelstorm. Mercy could hear the door open behind her; she returned all the bits of shrapnel that had been pointing in that direction, plus a few hundred of the (millions of) bullets she’d stored, without looking which way she was going.
Twenty seconds and two turns later Junia slammed her left hand into the air, and a wall of spikes appeared behind her, reaching from the top to the bottom of the hallway, at the same time as a sword appeared in her right.
She took a careful grip on it, looked around. More rooms, more hallways. “You have a map on your phone, Mercy?”
“Yup,” Mercy said, her phone now in her hand. “Not just GPS, y’know, an actual paranoia map-map…” She dismissed the missed call and checked the map, then pointed.
“The exit is that way.”
The two went back to their flight. Behind them, Mercy could hear the loud bangs of the serum soldiers’ boots on the ground, then the crashes as Adamant’s crew decided that it made more sense to go through a wall than around it. More bangs. Patrols - probably coming up after them. Before long there was a junction and troops ahead and beside and they rolled past the third and there was a locked door and the men pounding after them - Junia cut the door open -
Troops coming up on two sides. They tried to go a third direction and ran into a locked door. Junia tried to cut it open.
A squad of guards approaching - professionals with grenade launchers and lasers, a serum soldier bouncing on his heels in front of them. Junia was facing the wrong direction.
Mercy killed them all. It wasn’t hard.
Her mother had told her once that a velocity-redirection field spreads out the force of the impact, makes a bullet hit you like the recoil hitting the shooter instead of like a single point through your flesh.
Doesn’t really matter when it’s a thousand bullets. A wall of lead ran the length of the corridor, made up of one bullet for every inch of space in her range that was large enough for a bullet to fit, all pointed the right direction.
Then another two walls of lead. That still left the serum soldier active and charging her; she hit him with a few capsules of high-potency sulfuric acid fired at bullet velocities, and that did it.
The door fell and Junia glanced behind her.
“Mercy?’
“Yeah?”
“Good job.”
Mercy smiled wearily. “Thanks.”
After about fifteen seconds they were out of the eighth district’s county palace. From the outside, the building looked normal enough. The only hint that something was wrong was that none of Steelstorm’s defenders were there any more.
Oh, and all the guns pointed at them. A cordon around the building. Of course Lizzy had one. And of course they’d walked right into it - right into a lot of guns, and not always the kind Mercy could do anything about. Stun-bolts don’t have mass, and then they can walk over and cut your throat... They stood on a sort of porch, with stairs descending down to the street that passed it and now the street was blocked off, with barriers and more troops.
There was thunder in the storm, now, and lightning illuminating the troops, and rain blowing sideways.
Overseeing the troops was a guy in a boiler-suit covered with arcane gimmickry and another one in a costume that emphasized a red-rimmed visor over his eyes.
“Throw down your weapons!” the boiler blared.
And he had laser weapons on his suit. Joy. And her not wearing her powered armor.
She meaninglessly raised her hands to demonstrate that she didn’t have any weapons. Junia grimaced as she (equally meaninglessly) threw down her sword.
Mercy ran through possibilities in her head. If Junia’s powers let her create a dome around herself, she might be able to shoot the boiler… but all she could make were weapons and shields. If Lizzy was taking prisoners, they might be able to escape later, that would be the simplest option.
She heard the sound of a car engine. Distant, but coming closer fast.
The man in the visor turned to look. “Who the hell -”
A flash of lightning blinded him and thunder immediately rolled. Well-placed railgun shots blew the traffic barriers to shreds, immediately followed by another shot hitting the boiler. His armor held together and so the shot blasted him back down the street, leaving his lasers to fire uselessly into the air. The armored car - an armored car painted in the royal colors - seemed to blur as it tore through every obstacle. The man in the visor dove for safety sideways, and so the car didn’t cut through him. Instead, the driver brained him with the door while the car started to slow. That meant the henchmen were distracted, and that meant Mercy could pluck a bullet out of hammerspace that was headed in the right direction when she stored it and do it a thousand times more and let them run. Junia sprouted a bow, and sent a rain of arrows at all the ones out of Mercy’s line of fire.
The car skidded to a stop. Someone had managed to squeeze a Durendal into the front seat, and whoever was wearing the armor had a railgun out the window trained on the boiler.
Elgolian was driving.
“Stay down!” roared Catherine. A roll of thunder punctuated her words. Then: “Mercy! I thought you and your friend might need a ride!”
- - -
Bloody Lizzy let her bodyguard Hatcheteer drive while she listened. On a phone, not the Girardoni‘s comms. She needed a new armor, fast.
“- We’re just finishing cleanup,” said Count Fear. “The kill on Steelstorm is confirmed, and we’ve got all of his knights, though Junia and Mercy got away. We’ve got teams going for the knights’ families and sledgehammer crews going over the ‘bots.”
“Good,” said Lizzy. She’d left him in charge of cleanup; her convoy was transporting her and her surviving guardsmen back to the palace of the Third. She hadn’t thought Catherine had had the guts.
“His armory’s secured, and we’ve got some armors recovered you might want to take a look at,” said her Count.
“I’ll take care of them later,” she said, and turned to her impromptu captain, Ceraunia, who was in back. Also in black.
“Have you heard back from any of our hunting teams?”
“Six of them. All reports negative. Your brother’s dug a hole and pulled himself into it.”
“Yeah,” said Lizzy. “That’s one thing he’s good at.”
It had still been a good first move. Both of the Counts foolish enough to support him were dead. Junia’s authority came from Steelmind, and he was a coward for all the world to see. And Mercy was alive, which meant she hadn’t just picked a fight with Prudence.
Her sister, though…
“I hadn’t thought she had the guts,” she murmured.
“Who?”
“My sister. Sneaking little coward.” She’d always backed down, before, even when it came to her friends. What had changed?
Ceraunia made vague approving noises. The girl had no real loyalty. Even a bit of a conscience. Instead, Lizzy flipped on the radio and joked with her victorious troops until they arrived, pulling in through the automatically-controlled palace gates.
The rainwater pooled on the ground, and she made a mental note to discipline whoever was supposed to clean the gutters, then opened up the car door and vaulted out.
Then there was pain, more pain than she’d felt since her almost-lethal brush with Ilderia, as only her father might have known how many volts of electricity blasted through the water, through the garden sprinklers, from electric cannons on distant, hovering drones and redirected power lines. Her feet were already in the water; she couldn’t dodge.
And then there was only pain and darkness as Bloody Lizzy Balog realized she had lost the war.