Behind the Bitmask Read online

  In the present, I noticed that Terminal was staring intently at my pockets as my engineers worked to set up an interim shelter.

  “You want one of these titan batteries?” I asked as I pulled one out, guessing that he could make far more effective use of their raw power than most.

  “Really? Okay, send one over here,” he responded. I handed one off to him, and he grinned maniacally.

  “Oh, crap baskets. What are you going to do with it?”

  “I’m going to overvolt it when we get to the fabrication plant. It’s a bomb now!”

  That...probably was a decent idea, all things considered.

  The muffled roar of an engine suggested that we now had a power source. People began to congregate near the generator to top off their devices, and I figured now would be a good time to brief everyone more intensively on my plan.

  “We only have so long before one of Hyperion’s minions notices we’re out here, so what we’re going to do is blitz the dam, kill the defenders, and make it our staging point for the rest of the mission,” I explained. I didn’t get much of a response. Everyone (with the possible exception of Terminal) seemed more concerned that they were here in the first place than any specifics in my plan. But we were stuck here, so I figured our best chance of getting out alive was to give the task at hand our all and do as good a job of it as possible. All I had to do was convey this to my underlings, and they would surely understand that it was in their best interests, right?

  “I need parties at the front and rear to watch for threats. Load up any scripts that might be useful for reconnaissance, and don’t worry about stealth because there’s no way all of us can stay concealed in the open terrain we need to cross,” I continued. Sarah got noticeably paler when I gave the order. I didn’t exactly like throwing stealth to the wind myself, but even if I had a better idea, I think Sigmar would’ve denounced me as a coward. Still, my subordinates managed to appoint two groups of five each to serve as our front and rear guards. I liked that; it saved me the trouble of having to do it myself, and they probably had a better idea of who would do a good job than I did.

  We moved out shortly after, covering most of the distance to the dam in a brisk, but not overly challenging 25 minutes. We took cover behind a huge wall of rock that allowed us to hide from the gaze of any of the dam personnel who might be keeping watch. In order to seize the dam, we had to take over a control center located near the wall of the dam. More important than the controls were the dam’s generators located in the same building, but you couldn’t take one without also getting the other.

  “I’ve got a report on the outer defenses of the dam, Mistress,” said someone whom, after a moment, I recognized as the Alexander who had helped us birth our daemonic librarian. I wonder how he’d managed to get involved with the recon teams? Anyways, it didn’t matter; I gestured for him to continue.

  “We’ve found no signs of static weaponry on the outer wall. However, we haven’t been able to rule out the possibility that there are concealed defenses that will activate as we approach. Currently, there are about a dozen guards patrolling the perimeter of the building, mostly chthons. We may be able to take out some of them silently before they raise an alarm. We have yet to acquire any information on the interior personnel,” Alexander explained. I didn’t go into this with strong expectations about what we’d have to deal with in order to capture the dam, but it sounded like something we could easily handle with few, if any, casualties.

  “The last bits of terrain are bad for concealment, so make sure everyone’s armored up before we attack,” Terminal suggested when I went back to our (now mobile) command center. We didn’t really have the resources to carry physical body armor with us, so in order to armor everyone up, we’d have to stick to head protection and nothing, and depending on what kind of weaponry Hyperion’s guards actually had, this could turn out to be a pointless gesture. A helmet might protect you from a human army’s bullets and fragmentation grenades, but from what I’d read in recent weeks, titans tended to equip their soldiers (assuming that they did so at all) with more varied weapons that could easily negate our attempts to anticipate what we’d be up against. Even if a stealth mission was out of the question, we had to disrupt the enemy’s intelligence and chain of command somehow.

  “We don’t have the resources to armor up enough people to matter,” I retorted. “Any other ideas on how to reduce the effectiveness of their defenses?”

  “We could knock out their weapons if we knew where they were,” responded Terminal. “Any chance the recon folk can figure that out?”

  “Nope, not without starting the attack. Maybe we could lob some sort of smoke bomb into their compound to buy us some time?” I sure hoped Terminal’s nasty grin meant that he liked this.

  “I’ve got a script for that.” Terminal pulled out a Gameboy Advance of all things, and inserted a blank cartridge.

  “I stole this from some kid I had to kill a while back. You’d be surprised what you can do with these things!” he explained. Terminal seemed to have enough disposable income to experiment with any sort of handheld device he was interested in. I vaguely remembered him ranting about dedicated coprocessors in game consoles and how useful they could be for certain types of spellscripts. He activated the Gameboy; after the Nintendo logo swirled in, he started twiddling with the buttons. Nothing appeared to happen for about a minute, and I was beginning to feel quite surprised by the lack of patrols that could possibly out us. Hyperion clearly wasn’t expecting us. Then, the Gameboy played a shrill sequence of notes. Terminal grinned at me as a cloud of noxious smoke poured out of the seams in the plastic.

  “It’s my signature smoke daemon. Just wait, and it’ll get huge,” he explained. “We’ll send it into the control center to wreak havoc. I sure hope their HVAC system isn’t up to par.” I gestured for my commanders to step back so they didn’t choke on the smoke daemon.

  “Should we start the attack when you send your magic smoke to the command center?” I asked him. It did seem like a pretty good signal.

  “Sure, go ahead. I’m sure it’ll go splendidly,” he responded. It sounded like he needed his concentration for the task at hand, so I let him be while he (presumably) burnt through his toy’s circuitry and conjured an ever larger cloud of smoke.

  I busied myself by updating the coven on the latest step in the plan. “Watch for the black dragon” has a nice poetic ring to it, even if it isn’t quite the description we’re looking for. Sure enough, Terminal eventually commanded the smoke daemon to enter the control center, and after too much waiting, we finally began the assault. Some of the more enthusiastic occultists screamed war cries and obscenities as they covered the distance. They were fools, and while I couldn’t afford them dead from their berserk rage, I also couldn’t help but think they were about to get what they deserved and that they were good distractions from my own, more important charge.

  As I suspected, even with the smoke dragon wreaking havoc, someone was able to activate the dam’s defenses; one of the walls opened up to reveal an enormous cannon. This clearly wasn’t an anti-personnel weapon like the dam owners needed, but if one of its shells exploded even a few dozen feet away from you, it would tear you to shreds. Several of the coven members had already passed its apparent dead zone, but I was certain I was in the cannon’s effective range, so I put on as much speed as I could.

  “Destroy the cannon!” I shouted at the people in front of me. Someone cast a spell to electrify the insides of the barrel. I didn’t think it was actually going to do anything, but the cannon failed to fire, so maybe it’d worked?

  I was now at the main entrance to the control center; it was a nice glass door that gave me a view of the center’s lobby. I’m not sure what had possessed Hyperion to put such public features on what was presumably her own private hydroelectric dam, but maybe she was planning to sell excess power and other services to some of the
other titans? I could see a human inside at a receptionist’s desk, clearly paralyzed with fear and had no idea what to do.

  “Door’s locked, Mistress. Should we break it down?” asked yet another unknown underling, in the process of loading a shotgun.

  “Yes, do that. Just be careful; this could be bulletproof glass,” I responded. The shotgunner gestured for everyone to stand back before she fired at the door. It wasn’t bulletproof – it collapsed in a nasty pile of shrapnel. The shot continued on and embedded itself in the wall about an inch from where the bystander was sitting. He screamed and dove behind the desk.

  “Take hostages if you can – we might need these guys to operate machinery or serve as sacrifices,” I said to the coven members, gesturing for them to enter the building. They stormed inside, and I followed soon after, taking extra care to avoid injuring myself on the broken glass. When I reached the desk, I grabbed Hyperion’s cowering receptionist by the back of the neck. The odds of me being able to pull, much less lift him were low (in other words, I needed to hit the gym more), but it was good enough that he thought I was going to do something terrible to him.

  “Alright, boy, do you have any redeeming skills whatsoever, or am I free to kill you and use your blood for rituals?” It was corny, but even the stupidest lines can sound menacing to a coward. The receptionist just whimpered.

  “I’m serious! If you can do anything even remotely valuable to a coven and you’re willing to pledge loyalty, you might get out of this alive,” I continued. Still no response. I was beginning to feel uncomfortably like a playground bully.

  “I mean, no guarantees, but you have to value your life enough to use your words, right?” I could vaguely sense that my ability to intimidate this guy was quickly faltering, so I whistled for someone to take over and process our new prisoner. Of all the people who could’ve done so, it was yet again Sarah who reported for duty.

  “See if you can get this boy to talk,” I said to her. “If not, feel free to sacrifice him.”

  I suddenly noticed the receptionist wasn’t whimpering anymore, or making any other fretful, discontented noises of any other sort. He slowly turned to face us, and I realized that he hadn’t actually shed a single tear.

  “You are an idiot! Ha ha ha ha-” he began chanting. Then, something punted me back at least twenty feet. I had the strangest feeling that Sarah had somehow tossed me back to the entrance, but it was a few seconds before I could stand up and see what was happening.

  Giant impaling spikes of doom burst out of the receptionist’s body. Two of them pierced clean through Sarah’s abdomen, leaving her suspended a few inches off the ground. In theory, she could probably work her way off the spikes just by pushing a little, but if she did, her guts would probably fall out of her body, and then she might just instantly fall apart and die. On the other hand, not doing so would condemn her to a much slower and more agonizing death…and now that I think about it, why in Sigmar’s name am I just standing here and trying to analyze the situation?

  “Already on it,” said someone behind me. I turned to see what, from the hurried gallop and awkward mixture of medical tools, what was probably an aspiring paramedic. This snapped me out of my reverie. I’m no battlefield medic, and I couldn’t just stand and gape when I had a control center to conquer.

  After the incident with the receptionist, we encountered surprisingly little resistance from the rest of Hyperion’s dam staff. I’d traversed the rooms of the complex expecting ever more elaborate and dangerous booby traps, but not only were the rest of Hyperion’s underlings quick to surrender, they also valued their own survival so much that they were quick to cooperate, whether by identifying their skills, helping us disable the dam’s various security features, or quietly waiting for the time when we would need to harvest their magical essence.

  I’d reached what appeared to be the dam’s control center and called for anyone with military talent to join me. It didn’t escape my notice that Terminal had tagged along (for what seemed to be the thousandth time), but the whole smoke daemon thing had apparently psyched out Hyperion’s underlings, so yet again I was willing to give him a shot. The other people in the room... Well, if they distinguished themselves, I’d have to tell Sarah to promote them, assuming she lived.

  “Okay, we’ve taken over the damned dam. How do we continue from here?” I asked the crowd.

  “I’ve still got that titan battery you gave me,” Terminal responded before anyone else could contribute. “You want me to blow a gaping hole in this dam?”

  Maybe it was because of what had just happened to Sarah, but where I usually would’ve shrugged off such a dangerous and stupid idea, I found myself suddenly over the edge.

  “Are you out of your mind?” I shouted at Terminal. “If we blow up the dam, we’ll not only destroy the semiconductor plant, but we’ll also wreck everything in the valley below us for miles to come, end up with every chthon on the planet out for our blood, and won’t even live long enough to regret it when Sigmar kills us for being so irresponsible!”

  “Nonsense, Charlotte! You guys might die, but I’ll certainly live to kill another day.”

  I just couldn’t respond intelligibly to that.

  “Okay, any real ideas? I was thinking we just shut off the generators, because maybe we can lure Hyperion out without having to fight through and possibly damage the semiconductor plant.” A few nods of approval.

  “Hyperion might have backup generators for that purpose,” said one of the general staff. He’d picked up on my skill with names, as he quickly introduced himself as Clarence.

  “I would’ve seen those on the plans-” I began.

  “Maybe they’re off-site. Besides, we shouldn’t stop generating electricity, especially since we might need it ourselves.”

  That was a very good point that I’d forgotten about in the stress of invading the dam.

  “So we’ll keep the power running. I still want someone to see if we can cut off the fabrication plant’s electricity, though. Find some wires to cut, or a switch, or something.” Another general staffer saluted (nominating herself – I like that) and promptly exited the room.

  “Have you considered directly challenging Hyperion to personal combat?” Terminal said, apparently hoping to test my patience yet again. “From what Sigmar says, she’s apparently an enthusiastic dueler. If she’s fool enough to accept a challenge, we won’t need much else in the way of subterfuge.”

  “She can’t be that stupid, can she?” I responded.

  “You never know. Most of these titans are stuck in the past. I wouldn’t be surprised if Hyperion cared about her honor above all else.”

  “Well, how do we contact Hyperion?”

  “Have you tried the hotline?” Terminal gestured to a bright red phone on the wall; a sign on it read “Emergency Calls Only.” How in hell had I missed that? I think seeing Sarah get impaled was melting my brain. I needed to finish the mission quickly, while I still had some shreds of brain power left.

  “If we can lure Hyperion out, preferably without the help of her soldiers, it will substantially improve our chances of killing her,” Clarence said to Terminal. “I highly doubt that she would simply leave the fabrication plant for a challenge alone, however.”

  “You might as well try it, anyways. Nothing to lose, and we can always try more drastic measures afterwards,” Terminal responded.

  “Sounds reasonable. Charlotte, do you think it matters who places the call?”

  I sighed. Clarence and Terminal almost sounded like they were having a calm, reasoned dialogue about how best to continue the invasion. Why couldn’t Terminal give me the same level of respect? Heck, perhaps more, since Clarence is one of my underlings, and you can’t just go messing with the social hierarchy if you value your life as an occultist. But I digress. I told them it didn’t actually matter, so Clarence then picked up the phone and dialed Hyperi
on. A moment later, he tore the handset away from his face and winced. We heard loud, distorted, low pitched noises coming from the phone’s speaker.

  “Does she speak normally? All I’m getting is harsh growling,” he said.

  “Don’t worry about it. Hyperion can speak human languages if and when she pleases; she just thinks you’re unworthy of anything coherent,” responded Terminal. “Tell her that if she doesn’t come out, we’ll start killing her hostages and draining their blood into our batteries.” Clarence dutifully conveyed the message, further cementing Terminal’s insubordination. I wanted to object, but we did need the magical power, and the hostages were less likely (barring necromancy) to give us trouble once they’d been properly sacrificed.

  “You can’t be serious! Taking hostages, much less killing them, is a supremely dishonorable act!” shouted a voice from the phone. We were getting somewhere.

  “Terminal, could you get us one of the chthons we captured? I hear a pure chthon’s blood is easily weaponized,” I said, just loud enough that if the receiver was properly set up, Hyperion would be able to barely hear me. To his credit, Terminal didn’t give me a hard time. He just left and returned about a minute later with some underlings dragging in a particularly reptilian and disgruntled-looking chthon, a dark green plastic tub, and an imposing, if slightly rusty ceremonial knife. The chthon seemed resigned to its fate, although when one of my underlings passed me the knife, it growled at me in a way strikingly reminiscent of how Hyperion had first communicated with Clarence. I then gestured for Clarence to bring over the phone so I could directly address Hyperion.

  “If you shed so much as a drop of my minions’ blood, I will torture you for the rest of your unnaturally short life, human!” Hyperion snarled over the phone.