Powder And Shot

  Powder And Shot

  Purgatory Wars: Book Five

  Dragon Cobolt

  Uruk Press

  Uruk Press

  Great Britain

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  Powder And Shot © Dragon Cobolt 2018

  All rights reserved.

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Cover by Remy Malara.

  Also from Dragon Cobolt

  Purgatory Wars

  The Murder Stroke

  Riposte

  The Cross Guard

  The Blood Groove

  Powder And Shot

  "Statues And Suitors" in Sex & Sorcery 4

  Worldshard

  Cadet

  Cadre

  Champion

  Other works

  A Fetch Job

  "The Last Mage" in Sex & Sorcery 3

  Furicana

  Devil May Care

  Also from Dragon Cobolt

  Powder And Shot

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Epilogue

  Also from Dragon Cobolt

  Valkyrie Vs Valkyrie

  Worldshard

  Powder And Shot

  Prologue

  The last time that Simone had eaten pancakes this uniquely terrible, she had been in her home town’s iHop, five days before the health inspectors closed it down. She looked at the flat and faded cakes, slathered in cheap butter and bacon grease, and wondered if it was a good idea to go through a stargate on an empty stomach.

  She had been making Stargate references all month, and not a single other person in the staff had laughed. Every egghead, jarhead and brass-balled motherfucker who she had made a crack about ‘Goa’Uld’ with had looked at her with a completely blank expression. She stabbed her fork into the pancake and forced another bite down the hole. Across from her, Technical Sergeant Bobby Martins was cramming the pancakes away while flipping through the specifications on his RPAS-98B. It was a few scales up from a Predator and a few steps below the Starship Enterprise.

  “Hey, LT,” Martins said, looking up at her. “Can I ask you something before we go?”

  Simone nodded. She knew some under officers – especially those with their Westpoint rings still shiny and new – who would have fainted at the idea of even an NCO asking them any kind of private question. But Simone had dragged her ass through years of hell with the triple targets of being Asian, a woman, and queer as fuck as a common soldier. But here she was, just shy of thirty, and she wasn’t just a Ranger (one of the first female Rangers, to boot) and wasn’t just an officer.

  She was also one of the first Americans – military, civilian, or otherwise – who was going to set foot somewhere that wasn't Earth since 1972.

  That didn’t mean that she wasn’t going to deck Martins if he asked the same stupid-ass question she had been getting since she stepped out of Fort Benning.

  Instead of stupid-ass, Martins just went right to the second question she was hoping not to get asked: “Is it true you punched the ex-President in the face?”

  “No,” she said, simply.

  She had been fielding that question for the better part of a year and was godallmighty sick of it.

  Martins nodded, then shook his head as he flipped the technical manual shut.

  “Hey, I didn’t vote for ‘em.”

  Simone stuck her fork into her pancakes and decided that she’d rather spend her last morning on Earth making sure that it wasn’t her last morning period. She picked up her plate, gave it to one of the cooks who worked in the mess, then started down the corridors of the corner of Fort Flashpoint. Set up in the wild deserts of Arizona, near the still faintly glowing craters from the atomic bomb tests of the 50s and 60s , Flashpoint was made to be two things.

  The first was hard to spot. It had the best counter-orbital surveillance technology that the United States could throw at it. It was mostly underground but it had mesh netting, radar reflective paint and a conventional base built about fifty clicks away to draw attention, everything.

  The second was totally secure. This was demonstrated by the fuck-off machine guns that had been positioned behind curved metal plating and bulletproof glass windows. Bored looking enlisted men sat behind them, ready to turn everything in the corridor past them into red hamburger. They came to attention and saluted as Simone walked by. She nodded to them and let them slip back into the mind-numbing tedium of watch. The first intersection split – one way went to the laboratories that had been set up and prepped once the mission went underway. The other went to the armory. There, the twelve soldiers who had been selected, each from a different branch and specialization in a halfway point between bureaucratic dick waggling (“Leave my marines out? Like hell you will!”) and logical extrapolation of the requirements of the mission.

  Simone found that she hadn’t been the only one to think of this – and was a bit relieved. Each soldier in the armory had years, if not decades, of experience in being the best men (or women) in the worst places the world could throw at them. They were all lucky on the genetic throw of the dice. None of them had been sick for years, each of them were the top of their physical health. Other than a few minor disorders that were compensated by a level of skill and by a cold blooded risk evaluation, they were all the best that the United States could find.

  That included the eggheads. Though Simone sometimes broke out in a cold sweat at thinking about Dr. Cole. She was the best geologist in the field, had the required minimal family attachments, security clearance, basic physical health, and basic level competence in firearms (actually, she was a high sight better than several other members of the science team, being from rural Nebraska.)

  The thing that made Simone nervous was that Dr. Cole was diabetic. One of the new, top of the line implanted artificial pancreas sat in her gut. But if that got damaged (and they were more fragile than the organic kind), then Dr. Cole would starve to death surrounded by rations.

  But hey, geologist wasn’t mission critical, and Dr. Cole had agreed to the dangers, so…

  She went through the stargate.

  Simone focused on her chief NCO. Even on a team this small, someone had made sure to cobble together the basic command structure of the military. Her second in command, Sergeant First Class Baker, was the man in charge of turning her orders into nitty gritty ‘you go here’, ‘you do this’ minutia for the rest of the troops. He had been pulled from the SEALs and seemed to think that she, as a Ranger (and possibly all the other uncomplimentary things that Simone was used to dealing with), was barely worth breathing his air. But like any good NCO, he was able to conceal that under a flat affect. Though, Simone thought, it was possible that he had that affect no matter how he felt about his CO.

  If that was the case, then she was just being a deeply cynical woman.

  She nodded slightly to him – he caught her meaning and looked to the rest of the team. “All right, everyone. Let's start humping the kit to the operations room.”

  Within five minutes, the military branch of the operation had gotten their rifles, their ammo, their drones, their rations, their tents. Everything.

  Within thirty minutes, the science team had gotten their gear together. Their physicist, their biologist, their surgeon, their sociologist, their geologist, their astrophysicist, all of them with their own idea of what had been absolutely required. The initial lists had been five times as long, and the months of preparation had weaned them slow
ly down to just a preposterous amount of gear. Simone looked at the pile with an emotion that had once been dread.

  But now it was just resignation.

  Dr. Cole stepped up to Simone and smiled. “Shall we go over any final notes, Miss, uh, Lieutenant Fong?”

  Simone nodded. “All right,” she said, turning to face her men. They were standing at ease – rifles slung around their shoulders, packs on their backs. “We’re going to be heading through first to secure the landing site. Remember, the gate has a divergent landing pattern. Since we’re going through with a one second delay between individuals, the eggheads say that we shouldn’t have more than a fifteen mile difference between landing points. If you can’t check in...” She held up her point to point radio. “Then fire off a flare only if you are in immediate danger. We don’t know what natives we’re going to be running into. We don’t know what their technology is, what their culture, what their language is. All we know is that an American citizen is on the other side. We’re going to bring him home and we’re going to make a great big leap for science.” She grinned. “And if you see any weird snake things. Shoot em.”

  “Weird snake things, LT?” Corporal Tanye North asked, her hand going to her rifle.

  “It’s just a general piece of good advice, Corporal,” Simone said, rolling her shoulders as she started towards the gate.

  The gate itself was not impressive. It hadn’t been impressive when Simone had first seen it, several months ago. Time hadn’t made it seem more intimidating. Take a ring of magnets, wrapped in copper cable like the dynamo of some kludged together electrical engine. Blow it up to be the size of a garage door and connect it to what seemed like every power cable in the world. The complexity was, according to Dr. Fairchild, the team’s astrophysicist, came in the application of energies.

  However it worked, Simone knew the basic upshot.

  Exotic particles were created and smashed together, creating a rapidly spinning whatsamajiggit that punched a hole through the fabric of space time and would let humans bridge almost four times ten to the ninth power kilometers in a matter of seconds. Faster than light travel to alien planets. It was everything Simone had ever dreamed about when she had been ten.

  A warning siren rang out.

  “All right, everyone,” Simon called out. “Goggles on.”

  She quickly snapped some goggles over her face. The thick, misted lenses made the world seem slightly denatured, as if someone had leached just a tiny bit of color from them. The gate started to whirr. Power cables sparked. Steam hissed from heat-sinks as water boiled while in contact with conductors ramping from room temperature to white hot in a matter of seconds. The whole gate shook with the effort as a whining sound that screeched along the back of Simon’s hearing burned through her brain.

  Finally, the gate reached its climax.

  Shutters mounted along the interior of the ring snapped open. Exotic particles smashed together in the exact center of the gate. The goggles filtered the blinding colors out of Simon’s vision, leaving only the visual effect of the storm of energy. A pale blue-white sphere exploded out with a sound not unlike a cracking whip, a sound that made her want to flinch and duck for cover. She schooled her expression to remain perfectly still as the swirling sphere flexed and bobbed and rippled with tiny perturbations. She wasn’t sure what they were, but she was sure that Dr. Fairchild would have some kind of long-winded explanation that had too many syllables and jargon for her to follow.

  A green light – so similar to the light used to signal the beginning of a paradrop that it almost made her feel comfort rather than terror – flicked on and Simone stepped forward.

  First in.

  She walked forward, her jaw so taut that she could feel her teeth aching.

  And then…

  She was ripped to pieces.

  One

  The docks of Babylon – the largest city in Purgatory – thrummed with activity, day or night. Pickpockets stole through alleyways, cutting purses and filching coins or crinkly paper money from unwary traders and merchants. Prostitutes, many of them daubed with the shining blue face-paint of the Guild of Venus, walked the street.

  And, of course, conspirators muttered and whispered.

  These particular conspirators met in a beerhall that sat in the seediest part of the dock district. A thin, leaky tile roof that had been perfectly sufficient when Babylon had been a desert city was now supplemented by buckets set out to catch the sluicing, magically generated rain that poured down onto the city’s massive farms (the city itself was struck more by accident than anything else.) The only barmaid was a lilin who served any who tossed her a coin but hissed whenever someone asked for something more. She stepped past the table and the robed and cloaked figures, setting down several more mugs of ale.

  Then she was off again, leaving the conspirators to their quiet muttering.

  “Another five hundred,” one said – his voice was soft and raspy. It was as if, at some point in his life, he had screamed and screamed and screamed until his voice had shattered like a dropped vase. It still hadn’t recovered. “They’re in the Babylonian Navy, with fancy uniforms and walk as if their shit don’t stink. As if the whole war hadn’t happened.”

  The other hooded heads bobbed.

  “How do we act, though? That lizard bitch has everything sewn up tight. Remember the sniper?”

  Each of them paused, contemplating.

  “I do remember the sniper,” the third man from the right said. His hand – a circular pockmark graced the space between two of his knuckles. Despite the best healing the city had offered, his middle finger and ring finger refused to quite work properly. His knuckle clicked as he drew his hand into a fist. “His mistake was he tried taking out the Free Lord when he was in the city.”

  “But when will he leave?” Another conspirator – this one, a woman – hissed.

  The door to the beerhall swung inwards. The sound of the rain ratcheted up several notches and the members of the conspiracy all swung. As if expecting the Cross Guard to come tumbling in with pistols and swords drawn, the conspirators tensed to spring up and flee. But rather than heavily armed and armored members of the Babylonian army, the only person who came in was a robed woman. Her tail dragged along the ground – as red as the lilin bartender’s.

  She sat down, then leaned forward.

  “We have an opportunity,” she whispered.

  “What news do you bring?”

  They didn’t use names.

  The woman fished out a parchment, then slapped it down. It was torn from a larger scroll. The printing press that had stamped it out had used cheap ink, and so a few droplets of the rain had pushed and smeared out the lettering. But it was clear enough.

  The conspirators read.

  And one by one, they began to grin.

  ***

  Sunchaser sprawled in his hammock, his wings spread to catch the warmth that filtered through the ceramic walls of his watch station, and tried to not feel smug as he looked down on the storm hammering Babylon. The clouds looked like geometric patterns and when viewed from above, it was clear to see the magical lines of blue light that transcribed their formations. The worst of the storms were located in the farmland surrounding the city – well, best, if you looked at it from the point of view of a plant.

  Plants were desperately thirsty.

  The door to the watch station opened with a rattle and rasp. It, like everything else, was made of ceramics and carved magical runes. The hinges were glazed ceramics, fitted together and greased to make them easy to turn, while the actual structure of the door was layered plates, interlocking to cover every single possible chink or hole.

  Opening it let in the almost unfiltered sunlight beyond the watch station and made Sunchaser throw up an arm to shield his eyes. Then the door closed and his partner started to take off her protective helmet. Smoked glass, crystal, ceramic plates attached to flexible cotton, all of it covered in heat resistant runes and temperature con
trol. Sky Cutter had both refused to change her name when the tribe had integrated with Babylon and refused to bow to anything like ‘practicality’ in the face of her style.

  Hence why every time she put her gear on, she had to wind up almost two feet of blonde hair up and crammed it into her helmet.

  But the upside was that she looked uniquely lovely as she tossed her head and let her wild mane of glittering blond tresses cascade down her shoulders as she folded her wings behind her.

  “Sunchaser!” Cutter snapped.

  “What?” Sunchaser blinked, then sat up. He grabbed his dog-eared copy of The Villainous Conquests of Grand Admiral Thrawn and his Heir to the Empire of the Galaxy by Timothy Zhan, translated by Kapes the Scribe, and jammed it underneath his hammock. As the hammock was made of laced together rope, this proved to be a less than perfect hiding place. He spread his left wing as Cutter tilted her head to the side to try and get a better view of the cover.

  “Are you reading?” she asked.

  “No!” Sunchaser squeaked.

  “We’re on duty!” Cutter snapped.

  “We’re on stormwatch duty,” Sunchaser said, his cheeks flushing. He was defending himself, but his gut and his heart knew he should feel guilty. He squirmed as Cutter – still half armored – stomped forward.

  “What if one of the vortexes overloads! An entire quadrant of our farmland could be drowned!” Cutter slapped the top of his head. As both were valkyrie, she didn’t bother to pull her strength. The blow sent Sunchaser sprawling to the ground, his face mashed against the bottom of the watch station. The whole structure – suspended in microgravity and rooted in place via a complex webwork of spells – wobbled slightly.

  Sunchaser groaned and pushed himself to his feet. He looked out the window, his expression sullen. Then he brightened. “Ah! See?”