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Part 12
Three hundred yards away, Sergeant Aston’s C-4 explosives tore through the lead ranks of the demons with as much destructive fury as any spell. But even as fire and shrapnel savaged scores of them, the gaps were filled with new troops.Hunter swore as she saw the enemy step through the dense cloud of smoke and dust. She lowered her binoculars and turned to the strike team, all of whom were now toting the M16 assault rifles that had been left at the C.Z. for just such a contingency.
“Everybody check your fire selector switches. Single-shot only, people. Let’s try to stretch this ammo out a little bit,” she said. “We’ll form our line on the crest of the ridge, give ourselves some buffer between us and the beacon and provide a little terrain advantage, for whatever good it’ll do.”
She glanced at her watch. “We’ve got seven minutes until that portal opens. You guys buy me that much time, I think you’re going to see some nice fat bonuses this year.”
Rodriguez came next under her gaze. “Joe, how much ammo do we have?”
“We’ve got the full two-hundred rounds apiece for the M16s, but after our withdrawal from Pandemonium we’re down to only a hundred fifty total for the MP5s. We’ve also got whatever’s in our sidearms, and Hudson’s got that shotgun of his.”
Hunter sighed. “Next time, Joe, remind me to bring a damned tank. Okay. Take your positions everyone. It’s time for the show to start, and I don’t want to miss the previews.”
A blood-red globe of magical fire arced up from the ranks marching steadily toward them. It hung almost lazily in the air, then began its downward trajectory.
“Incoming!” yelled Hunter.
The sphere impacted amid the encampment with a roar and a shower of shattered rock, sending the defenders diving for cover. When everyone was standing again, Hunter turned angrily to one of the commandos. “God damn it, Parks! Why weren’t the disjunction generators on-line? Get ’em cranked up. Now!”
Parks, looking pale, said, “Yes, ma’am. I’m on it.”
He dashed away toward several pieces of hardware designed to generate the same sort of magical waveforms that a disjunction spell would create. In theory, they would disrupt the sort of magical bombardment that had so very nearly cost them lives.
Hunter kicked a broken piece of stone with genuine anger. “Damn it to hell. Rodriguez, check the damned beacon. Make sure that attack didn’t kick the guts out of it. Everyone else, take your positions and do what the hell I tell you to do from now on!”
* * *
“Oh my God. We’ve lost the beacon,” said the technician, watching in horror as the multi-dimensional topology plot on the computer screen suddenly changed configuration.
“What do you mean we’ve lost the beacon? How could we lose the beacon?” asked Willow, a sudden fear in her voice.
She moved over to the tech, looking from the transforming image on the screen to the Romanovsky Gate.
The technician said, “I don’t know. We had a lock, the initialization sequence was on track at the five minute mark, then we just lost the carrier wave.”
The graphic on the screen stopped morphing for an instant, and the word “Lock” appeared at the top of the display. Then, just as quickly, the graphic began to shift again and “Lock” changed to “Seek”.
“Did you see that?” asked Willow.
The tech nodded.
“So the beacon’s not gone. The signal’s just been degraded somehow. Damage maybe. There’s still a chance, but we have to hurry. If they’ve destroyed the Threshold, they’ve probably got half of Hell after them right now,” said Willow.
“But if we can’t keep a coherent lock on the beacon, we could lose them on Crossover. The integrity of the manifold would fail, and if they were in the vortex at the time, they’d end up in null space,” said the tech.
Willow nodded. “So what we have to do is make sure the Gate can get a solid lock. We need to boost its sensitivity somehow.”
“Easier said than done. As much research as we’ve done, there are a lot of unanswered questions about how these artifacts do what they do.”
“Let me think for a minute,” said Willow. The beginning of an idea was forming somewhere in the back of her mind. If she could just get a handle on it, figure it out …
“I saw a liquid nitrogen tank outside the building,” she said suddenly.
The tech nodded. “Yes, we need it for supercooling certain components and processes.”
Willow’s gaze went to the Romanovsky Gate. “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do …”
* * *
“Oh, hell. Flyers,” said Elisa as a dozen dark shapes rose from the enemy ranks on leathery wings.
She left her position on the ridge and said to one of her men, “Hudson, what’s that shotgun of yours loaded with?”
“Silver and iron buckshot, ma’am. The usual.”
“Well, I sure hope you’ve been spending some time at the skeet range, because you just got promoted to air defense.”
“Yes, ma’am. Looking forward to it,” said Hudson, smiling broadly as he racked the slide on the twelve-gauge Browning riot gun.
“The rest of you, look alive. If those things get in among us, be careful of wild fire. Let’s not be our own worst enemies. Summers, if it comes down to close quarters, it’ll be our kind of knife fight. You up to it?”
Buffy nodded. “I owe this place a kiss good-bye it won’t forget for a few thousand years.”
“Good. Come with me. I’ve got some sharp objects you might like to borrow.”
* * *
“I don’t understand,” complained the tech as he coupled the next piece of insulated hose to the previous one in the growing chain that led back to the liquid nitrogen nozzle in the lab.
“What happens when you supercool a radio’s receiving elements?” asked Willow.
Comprehension dawned on the tech and he looked squarely at her. “Noise drops off. Sensitivity increases. Yes, of course. I should’ve thought of it myself.”
“That’s why I get paid the big bucks,” said Willow, smiling as she fastened the next hose.
“I hope you’re right about this.”
“I’d better be, because after this I have to admit I’m pretty much out of ideas,” said Willow. She looked around the lab. “We need ten more feet of hose and an insulated hazard suit, like maybe something for fighting very high-temperature fires. Any idea where we might find those things?”
* * *
Hudson had a clean shot at the first winged demon that reached the ridge, and he made the most of it, putting a twelve-gauge hole in its chest that dropped it like a sack of wet cement. It flopped around aggressively for several seconds, then was still.
The others in the demonic flock saw the lead flyer fall, and pulled up before getting into range of the shotgun, ascending higher and higher until they were just specks against the cold gray sky.
“What are they up to now?” asked Buffy.
“I’m not …” began Elisa, who was trying to train her binoculars on them. Then she said suddenly, “Oh, shit. They’re diving, like hawks.”
She turned to her people, abandoning the binoculars in favor of her M16 as she did so. “Everyone take cover! They’re diving on us! Hudson, stay sharp, I’ll cover you. I think you pissed them off.”
“I sure hope so,” said Hudson, his eyes scanning the sky behind reflective aviator lenses.
It was a strange, suspended few seconds that passed for the ridge’s defenders. An expectant silence fell over them as they watched the cluster of dark dots plunge downward and resolve themselves into winged horrors, while the combined weight of nearly two regiments, almost seven hundred demons, steadily drew toward them on the ground below.
Hudson’s shotgun cracked against the silence and the wing of another flier was shredded, the bone snapping like a twig. It tumbled to the ground and Elisa methodically pumped rounds into it until it stopped moving.
Two came in tandem next, and the shotgun sounded again, killing one in mid-air. The other got past, raking its talons at Hudson’s head, but the commando rolled away at the last minute, giving Elisa a clear shot with the rifle.
Now they came in force, five at once, with Hudson lying on his back and firing as quickly as he could work the gun’s action and draw aim on a target. Then the magazine ran dry and he resorted to using the weapon as a club.
One of the creatures swooped for Buffy and she instinctively went on the attack with the sword the Dark Hunter had given her. The pain in her leg receded into an infinite distance, and her mind once more became cold and calculating, as it had so many times before.
In the next instant, seven of the creatures were on the ground among the humans, and it became a close-quarters fight to the death.
* * *
Willow chewed her lower lip as the engineer in the reflective silver insulation suit applied the liquid nitrogen to the bas-relief sculpture that was the Romanovsky Gate. The suit was for fire, not frost, but it served the purpose well enough.
“Can we continue the initialization sequence without a lock on the phase beacon?” she asked the tech, who was back to monitoring the Gate controls.
He nodded. “The only thing we can’t do is actually open the portal on-target.”
“Good. Resume the sequence. We’ll hold on Crossover minus ten seconds until we get a firm lock. Then we’ll go for it. I mean, I know I sound like I’m trying to tell you your job and everything, which I guess I sort of am, but right now I think you should really do this, okay?
“Works for me,” said the tech, releasing the hold on the countdown.
Willow watched the nitrogen steam billowing around the Gate and crossed her fingers.
* * *
Buffy’s sword found its opening, and a third and final demon died. Exhausted, she kicked the thrashing creature off the end of her blade and tried to catch her breath.
The demons had come at the Slayer and the Dark Hunter in force, sensing the most dangerous of the defenders and determined to see them dead. But they hadn’t come for them alone. Buffy looked around the ridge and found Giles and Angel unharmed. She breathed a sigh of relief. But she also saw Hudson applying pressure to a deep gash on his upper arm, saw Corporal O’Brien dead, half his skull sheared off. And she saw Elisa, her demon-bloodied sword in her hand, kneeling next to the body of Corporal Rodriguez. Elisa scrubbed away tears when saw Buffy watching her and rose to her feet, a cold look coming into her eyes as she became the Dark Hunter once more.
As she stalked past, Buffy grabbed her by the arm.
“It’s okay to feel,” she said.
Elisa turned to look at her, and behind the hard mask, Buffy could see a deep pain.
“There’ll be time that later. Right now, I have demons to kill. So do you. Take your position in the line. It’s time we taught these sons of bitches a little bit about mankind’s talent for killing,” she said quietly.
Buffy nodded. As she moved off to pick up her rifle and take her firing position on the ridge, she saw Elisa look worriedly at her watch.
“Where the hell is that portal?” Buffy heard Hunter ask herself.
* * *
“Signal strength is coming up!” exclaimed the tech with as close to genuine emotion as Willow had yet seen from him.
“Come on, come on,” said Willow under her breath as she watched the signal strength bar graph on the computer screen crawl up through the red region of the scale toward the green.
The vault looked like a scene from a bad science fiction movie, with nitrogen fog billowing forth along the floor and through the vault door to shroud the lab’s Linoleum tiles in white mist.
But it was working. Slowly.
Suddenly, the depiction of the Gate’s multidimensional topology shifted dramatically, the bar graph edged into the green, and the word “Lock” flashed on the display. At the moment, Willow thought it was the most welcome word in the English language.
The tech looked expectantly at her, but she waited a few additional seconds to be certain the Gate’s fix on the phase beacon held steady.
Finally, she said, “Release the hold on the sequence. Let’s bring the Dark Angels home.”
* * *
Nine modern semi-automatic rifles, positioned with overlapping fields of fire, could do a significant amount of damage, Buffy thought as she methodically aimed and fired. She’d had a modest amount firearms training — Giles didn’t like them very much but he also had never denied that they were ruthlessly effective in certain situations — but she’d never seen their coordinated use by a highly trained team like Elisa’s Dark Angels.
It was a sobering and frightening thing to behold. Less than a hundred yards away lay a force of demons that a thousand years before could have laid waste to a continent. And against nine people armed with modern weapons and a disjunction generator, their advance had stalled.
Buffy decided she wanted a disjunction generator for Christmas. So far, no spell the demons had thrown at the defenders had survived the destructive magic of the DH Group’s new toy. The demons, however, had no corresponding defense against the barrage of silver, soft iron alloy, and conventional bullets that pummeled their lead ranks mercilessly.
If only Elisa’s people had unlimited ammunition, thought Buffy, they might actually be able to win. But demons were a tough, resilient lot. She found she could empty half a magazine’s worth of ammunition into some of the bigger ones before they were stopped. The defenders were burning through their supplies at a terrific rate, one that simply wasn’t sustainable. They would run out of bullets long before the enemy ran out of demons.
Simple math could be very cruel.
If the portal didn’t open, and very soon, this desolate ridge was going to turn into their own private Alamo.
“Crossover event!” announced Sergeant Aston.
The Dark Angels, perfectly disciplined, never interrupted their fire to look back. But Elisa did, watching as the thin bar of light that heralded the imminent formation of the vortex appeared in the center of the encampment.
As it began to expand and stabilize, turning from a thin line to a broad, shimmering circle, she yelled down the firing line, “Everyone, fall back to the gate. Maintain mutual fire support. Anything sticks its head over the top of the ridge, kill it.”
Almost as one body, the Dark Angels were on their feet and backing in a half-crouch toward the Gate, their weapons still trained on the crest of the ridge.
Buffy, Giles, and Angel did their best to emulate the professionals, falling back with a measured, deliberate pace toward their window of escape. Buffy was impressed with the cohesiveness of the commandos. If there was one thing being the Slayer had taught her, it was that the most dangerous thing was often not the enemy, but panic or hasty action.
They were all within fifteen feet of home when the vortex collapsed and the Gate began to contract back to a single, blazing point in space.
* * *
“Damn! We’re losing it again,” snapped the tech.
Willow glanced at the temperature readout. It had crept upwards several degrees.
“The spell energy must have raised the Gate’s temperature,” she said after thinking about it for a second. “Let’s not panic here. Just give it a few seconds and keep applying the nitrogen. The temperature should come back down and we should be fine.”
She was surprised at how calm she sounded. Surprised, too at how confident she was that this was going to work. She hoped desperately that she wasn’t just deluding herself.
* * *
“Parks, shut down the disjunction generator,” said Elisa coolly.
“Ma’am?” asked Parks.
“Shut it down. Ammo’s almost gone, we can’t hold them off anymore. But I can slow them down with some of the Dark Hunter’s spells for a little while. Long enough, maybe, for our people to get the Gate stabilized and for the team to make it back.”
Parks swallowed hard. “Yes, ma’am.”
He dashed off to execute the order. Elisa took Giles aside as rifle fire cracked around them, the Dark Angels using their last few rounds to pick off several demonic skirmishers that had finally made it to the top of the ridge.
She glanced over at Buffy, who was busy with her own rifle. When she turned back to Giles, it was with a resigned sadness.
“Get her out of here, Giles. She’s your only hope now. You know that,” she said.
Giles nodded numbly. “Yes, I suppose so.”
She put a hand on his shoulder. “You take good care of her. And take good care of yourself.”
The Dark Hunter started to move off, but Giles brought her up short.
“Elisa, I was wrong about you,” he said.
She didn’t turn around, only nodded and said, “Even Dark Hunters can be wrong about people. On rare occasions, anyway. You’re one of the last of the good guys. You do right by her, okay? Because I’ll be back, and I’ll be making sure of it.”
And with that, she drew her .45 and her sword, and strode toward the edge of the rocky ridge and the army waiting for her there.
* * *
Elisa Hunter never broke her stride. Demons came over the ridge, and she shot them, or her men shot them, or she ran them through with her sword with ruthless efficiency. But she never stopped, never looked back.
A few feet before the edge, she halted and looked down upon the face of Hell. The demons swarmed up the slope, mindless and savage, a plague of rage and hate and insanity given shape and direction. Hundreds still. Too many.
Calmly, deliberately, she recited the Latin phrases. As the mystical energy gathered within her and took form, Elisa felt a profound sense of completeness, as if all the strange paths of her life had all along been destined to wind their way to this one spot at this time, for this purpose.
The magic built to a crescendo, and time seemed for one infinite moment suspended. And in that endless instant, she understood something that had eluded her until then. None of it had ever been about the Eternal War between limitless light and unfathomable darkness. It hadn’t been about the forces of good and evil, or the machinations of ancient powers, or even about saving the lives of billions.
It was about giving one tragically cursed young woman a last chance at life before it was too late for her.
Sometimes, thought Elisa, the universe really was that simple.
The magic cohered and took life as a wall of scouring fire that extended the full length of the ridge. She backed away and watched the dance of the flames, watched the demons come and die, and others come after, the madness of Hell cresting like a black wave to smother the Hunter’s final act as Elisa McKenna.
And then they were through, clawing over and past the lifeless, charred husks of their fallen.
Elisa raised her sword and embraced Destiny.
* * *
“No!” yelled Buffy as she started forward toward Elisa.
Angel grabbed her. “Don’t. It’s too late.”
“Let go!”
“Stop it! You’ll get yourself killed and then this is all meaningless,” snapped Aston, his face hard but his eyes betraying emotion he couldn’t possibly hide.
Buffy could see it happening as if it were all unfolding in slow motion. The surviving demons emerging wraithlike from the fire, descending on Elisa. Elisa standing calmly and raising her sword, the blade catching the light of the flames along its burnished surface. The deadly poetry of steel as she parried and killed, Elisa for a brief, shining moment transcendent and invincible.
And she saw, too, the inevitable end, the lone unparried blade as it slipped through the Hunter’s guard, the gleaming steel of the demon’s sword emerging crimson from just under her ribcage. And still Elisa fought on until another weapon found its mark, and a third. Then she was gone, lost under the surging tide, while the silver fire of the Gate expanded behind Buffy into a swirling blue-gray vortex.
Dimly, she was aware of Angel saying, “It’s time.”
The approaching demons blurred behind hot tears, and Buffy Summers turned her back on Hell and went home.