DIRE : HELL (The Dire Saga Book 6) Read online

  DIRE: HELL

  By Andrew Seiple

  Edited by Beth Lyons

  Cover by Andrew Halbrooks

  Text copyright © Andrew Seiple 2018

  All Rights Reserved

  With thanks to Stuart Slade, for writing the Salvation War

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1: SKYJACKING 5

  CHAPTER 2: INTERNAL AFFAIRS 13

  CHAPTER 3: FIRST CONTACT 23

  CHAPTER 4: SATAN’S GAME 33

  CHAPTER 5: THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING 45

  CHAPTER 6: THE FALL OF CAYM 53

  CHAPTER 7: MASKS AND MALICE 61

  CHAPTER 8: DELAYED REACTIONS 71

  CHAPTER 9: DEPARTURES AND DESCENT 80

  CHAPTER 10: HONOR THE DEAD 90

  CHAPTER 11: OLD FRIENDS 100

  CHAPTER 12: A DIVINE TRAGEDY 107

  CHAPTER 13: FROM WORMS TO WYRMS 115

  CHAPTER 14: FROM FRYING PAN TO FIRE 125

  CHAPTER 15: HELL HATH NO FURY 134

  CHAPTER 16: UNDERGROUND RESISTANCE 141

  CHAPTER 17: WRATH FADES, ENVY FESTERS 151

  CHAPTER 18: THE IRON CITY 165

  CHAPTER 19: WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD 176

  CHAPTER 20: FEAR IN A HANDFUL OF DUST 188

  AUTHOR’S NOTE 195

  CHAPTER 1: SKYJACKING

  “And lo! did the bringer of the one true game arrive in the Inferno. And finding the ground offensive to tread upon, she lifted her gaze to the skies...”

  --Excerpt from the first chapter of the first book of the Chronicles of the Shared Lie

  I’d heard once that the road to Hell was paved with good intentions. But now that I was looking down on it, my spectroanalyzer confirmed that it was pretty much just bricks.

  The specialized visual mode was the only way I could even make it out at the minute. I hovered within the grinding fury of a fiery sandstorm, one of the many that churned and writhed above the barren landscape that we’d been transported to a few days ago. In lieu of white, puffy clouds, it had these things, all gravel and ash and howling hot winds. The grit was doing a number on my armor’s outer layers, and I winced to register each scrape and scratch that flickered across my heads-up display. I’d need some serious downtime with a buffer after this was done.

  But I didn’t have a buffer. I didn’t have much beyond what I’d brought with me during my unplanned trip to Hell. I had access to plenty of raw materials, but I needed shelter to build the tools to build the other tools to finally build the tools I needed to refine materials and repair my armor.

  Hopefully, if this plan worked, I’d have all that and more before too long. The alternative was a slow, grinding death as my devices wore out. And my friends too, for that matter.

  “We have movement,” one of those friends spoke through the crude radio comm I’d rigged up. Alpha. My first true minion, a captured software entity, now trapped in the shell of an android. He’d proved his loyalty and competence many times over.

  “Which direction?” I radioed back.

  “From your position? Seven o’clock.”

  I turned, switching to voltaic vision, tracking electricity, ignoring the static frizz and fuss of the storm...

  ...and there it was. Vast, monstrous, something like a cross between a manta ray and a bird. I measured its bulk, and smiled. I’d seen aircraft carriers smaller than this monstrosity. It was one of many that traveled the skies here, occasionally swooping down to feed.

  I’d mentioned the “aircraft carrier” comparison earlier to another of my friends, and it had triggered a wild, thoroughly insane idea that had been too bizarre to pass up. From that seed of an idea had sprung an even more bizarre plan, that lead to my current state of sandblasted stealth.

  “Confirming the vector,” I said, sliding to the side as the unthinkable bulk of it shuddered past. It spread wings wide to catch the thermals, vast pores on its side pulsing open and wheezing to adjust the air within it, spraying its surroundings with the equivalent of organic jets.

  A lesser pilot would have been blasted away by the gusts of foul wind.

  But I am lesser at nothing. I am Dire, and I stood resolute as the clouds of ash whirled and howled anew around me. My gravitic thrusters were able to compensate, and for three solid minutes I watched the thing cruise by, using my voltaic sight mode to trace the vast nerves in it, and the organic electricity running throughout its scaly body. Oddly enough, some of the big patches of bio-electricity seemed to be shifting around physically inside its body. Moving organs?

  “...what did you say?” a voice came over the radio, educated, dry, and wavering with stress.

  “Huh?” I reviewed my last words, about confirming the vector. “Oh. No, she wasn’t talking to you, Vector. Just referring to the vector of approach.” The static rose and flared as I explained, and my words were evidently lost.

  “Come again?” Professor Vector asked. “Can you repeat that?”

  I sighed. Radio was such a clunky medium, especially here. What passed as an ionosphere was different; the storms were hell on the waves, and it gave out at the weirdest times. But given what we had on hand, it was the best solution for the least resources.

  “The target’s coming down for a look-see!” Delta broke into the conversation.

  “Recon. Call it a recon run,” Gamma sighed.

  “Does it really matter?” Beta added. “The end result is the same.”

  “It’s hard to read an expression, but it seems nonplussed by the empty spike.” Epsilon reported.

  My Greek Chorus. Four androids, spawned of Alpha’s code. Like their progenitor they were powered by mighty remote servers, normally. Due to current circumstances they were dependent upon backup arrays within my armor to function while in this dimension.

  Which made the next stage of the plan all the more tricky. If I mistimed it, if the armor took too much damage, then they’d cease functioning. And five of our best assets would be rendered into empty shells.

  They wouldn’t be dead. Technically, hopefully, their cores were still intact back on Earth, taking care of business and getting the hell out of London. But still, losing their help at this juncture would be troublesome, and it would be hard on them as well. Ideally they’d make it back intact to sync up with their other selves.

  I shook aside my worries and stared down, easing toward the edge of the storm.

  Below me, the sky leviathan was coming down to feed.

  The plain we were on was a volcanic, barren waste with steel spires poking up from blackened stone. Each spire had ‘branches’ covered with steel spikes.

  And each branch bore screaming fruit.

  Men and women of all ethnicity and ages. They hung impaled by the spikes, writhing as their blood flowed down gutters in the spires and gathered at the ground below before running through channels carved by erosion in the stone into a vast bloody river.

  A road ran along it, meandering on its banks, going from spire to spire.

  But today something was different.

  Today, the great sky beast found that the first spire it came to had been stripped of food.

  It didn’t like that. The creature snorted through several of its mouths, a rumble like a thunderclap that shook the storm around me. The thing’s heads writhed on its body as its wings beat, pulling up as it looked around.

  We’d taken days, stripped the tormented souls bodily from two of the spires, leaving only one bearing its gory fruit. All in preparation for this moment.

  So naturally, the damned thing turned in the wrong direction.

  “Fuck!” I shouted through the radio. We needed it by the spire, or this was all for naught.

  Fortunate
ly, I am a super-genius. And I’d foreseen this sort of stupidity.

  “Khalid!” I yelled, “Plan H!” A big burst of static interrupted my transmission, and I tried repeating it, but the storm’s interference twisted and stole my words. If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have none at all.

  I was tempted to jump directly to the endgame, but no, no, I trusted my friends. I had to, or we were all screwed. So instead of giving in to my instincts, instead of rushing down there and taking matters into my own gauntlets, I stayed above it all and hoped. They were smart, those two. Even without my command, they should be able to figure it out.

  And they did.

  Light burst in the sky above, crackling and green as the chemical flare rose and dropped near a full steel spire a little ways off. The beast paused mid-turn, wings beating as it came about in slow motion, heads transfixed by the glare. It lumbered through the sky, until the flare guttered and went out half a minute later.

  “Come on you stupid bird-thing, come on...” I whispered, holding my breath as it paused.

  It moved toward the spire full of prey again, and my breath eased in a sigh. Almost there. Almost to phase two.

  The creature got in position, hovering fifty feet above the spire, as its wings beat to hold it steady. Definitely some sort of lifting agent in there, probably gas like Vector’s autopsies had suggested. Given time and a machine shop we could have used that, but we didn’t have either, so here we were.

  “Aw man, here come the tentacles,” Alpha radioed. “This is like the worst sort of hentai.”

  From my angle I couldn’t see the countless feeder tendrils slurping out of the thing’s belly, sliding down toward the spire and the twitching forms that it craved. But from previous observation I knew what would happen. Each tendril would find a person, tug them free, and pull them up into its digestive system.

  Over the radio I heard the damned souls scream as a fate worse than eternal impalement came for them, meter after meter of ropy tendrils and slavering maws.

  I’d asked Khalid if these things were like flying shoggoths. He’d told me no, shoggoths were far worse and to please avoid tempting fate any further.

  “We’re going!” Alpha called, and I knew what was happening, knew that even now, they were doing something any observer would consider mad.

  Each of my friends, android or flesh, was leaping out from the bodies they were hiding amongst, grabbing tendrils, and riding up to be devoured alive by something that made that sand maw from Star Wars look like chump change.

  And damn it all, the creature noticed.

  I watched its wings beat faster, watched as long necks craned and heads peered down below it as a low rumble shook its writhing flesh.

  “Going in early!” I radioed, and I twisted my lips against my skull, peeled them back into a grin.

  Finally!

  I burst from the clouds of ash and gravel, arrowed down toward the thing so quickly that the air boomed in my wake, shuddering across the plains...

  ...and drew the creature’s attention as all of its heads snapped towards me.

  “CRETINOUS CREATURE! HORRIFIC HARPY!” I roared, my voice booming out in a screeching howl that rivaled its own sullen croaks. “FACE DIRE AND FALL!”

  It accepted my invitation, sliding around as it turned to bring its front half to bear. I pulled up short, cape snapping in the wind as the sonic boom rolled past me and over its bulk. Must have shaken the poor bastards on the spire below something fierce.

  “We are in!” Khalid called.

  “Right, disabling the crushy bits... now!” Delta confirmed.

  “There’s a lot of them,” Beta observed, with the unnatural calm that he normally exhibited. “We may need repairs after this.”

  “Why the hell am I doing this, this is crazy!” Vector sobbed.

  “Inject it already!” Gamma snapped. “Focus! Find the veins or whatever and get that stuff in its blood stream!”

  “Technically it doesn’t have blood—” Pedantry pulled Vector from his panic.

  “Give it here,” Epsilon said. “Doctor, I’ve injected the agent into its circulatory system.”

  And then I had to tune out the radio, as the beast breathed fire at me, and I got busy dodging.

  Fire! I hadn’t known it could do that. We’d never gotten this close to a live one before. “So. Fire-breathing, you guys,” I spoke into the radio as I dropped from the sky for a few seconds before restoring the thrust, gripping my controls, and spiraling up at an angle. “Literal dragon-style plumes of fire.”

  “We are a little busy,” Khalid called. “Fortunately my salve is proof against its digestive acid!”

  Khalid was also known as the Last Janissary, an immortal alchemist and hunter of the supernatural whose career spanned centuries. Also, he was very upset that he’d ended up in Hell, even through such a non-traditional method. It really didn’t sit well with his religious beliefs.

  I didn’t blame him. I didn’t like the place either, and religion had nothing to do with it. Big bird-tentacle-monster things with fucking fire breath had more to do with my dislike.

  Tendrils snapped out to meet me, and I twisted to avoid them. Sluggish, slow, used to dealing with prey that couldn’t do more than squirm, they were ill-suited to oppose me. On the flip side, damn were there a lot of them.

  “—need to get into the lift bladders!” I heard Vector shout through the radio. I wished them luck with that. My part in this plan was to be a distraction, on the other end of the creature. And so I played keep-away, slapping back the occasional tentacle that got lucky.

  Unfortunately, my own luck wasn’t so good.

  One appendage got in under my guard, snaked around an ankle, and twisted at exactly the wrong moment. A turn that was supposed to bring me up around the edge of the creature instead arrowed inward—

  —straight into the mass of tendrils around one of its feeder maws. My viewscreen filled with squirming snake-like tongues, and even as I tore handfuls away they levered me straight into a mouth the size of a garage door.

  CRUNCH!

  I lay still for a second, checked my HUD. Watched green lights flicker... and fade.

  And I laughed.

  The crunch hadn’t been my shell, my eight-times-forged fortress of ceramic-steel, titanium, impact gel, and circuitry. It hadn’t been the crumpling of my armor, or the shredding of the vulnerable body beneath.

  The crunch had been the splintering of countless shark-like teeth, as for the first time in their enameled existence they encountered something that wasn’t made of flesh and bone.

  I turned to watch blackened, stained fragments falling to the ground below, and wondered how stupid this thing was. Could it feel pain from that?

  Evidently not, as more tendrils sought me out, drew me further in, and the mouth smacked down five more times, shattering teeth, bruising flesh, and carving open wounds into its gelatinous flesh.

  “ENOUGH OF THAT,” I admonished it, as I ripped free from its tongues and caught the upper palate before it could close again. “CEASE YOUR MASTICATION OR LOSE YOUR MAW, YOU MALODOROUS MISANTHROPE!”

  It paused. I have no idea if it understood what I was shouting, or if it was starting to feel the pain from the abattoir I’d made of its mouth, but for whatever reason it evidently found its mouthful of villain to be unpalatable.

  The walls of its maw contracted, and I knew it would next try to spit me out. “NOPE!” I declared, digging my hands full on into the roof of its mouth. I hated to damage it, we were trying to take it intact, but this thing had a lot of mouths. I figured it could do with one less. Or Vector could fix it. Probably.

  As it turned out, I was half-right. The thing did try to spit, but from the back of its gullet came a horrific spew of half-digested people...

  ...and acid.

  The wall of greenish juice slammed into me, flowed past me and out, and chemical warnings started to flicker on my HUD. Whatever it was, the substance was doing a number on my outer, s
teel layer.

  Good.

  I tracked the rate of damage, checked the spectroanalyzer, grinned to myself, and started counting. “Five. Four. Three. Two...”

  FOOSH!

  A few days ago, back on Earth, I’d had to tussle with acid-spitting mutants. I’d armored myself against them, with a reactive base layer. When exposed to acid, it would burn away slowly, emitting a cloud that violently neutralized any acid it came into contact with.

  Instantly the thing’s mouth filled with fizzing, roiling clouds of white goo, like Elka-Seltzer hitting Roja-Cola. I felt the entire creature shudder as what had been a casual spew of vomit turned into a rocket going the other way. The chemical reaction shuddered and juddered back into its body...

  ...and I went with it, abandoning my hold to go full thrust with the gravitics. Switching through my sight modes while my base layer burned away, I searched for my friends—

  —and found them.

  It was smooth sailing most of the way, through a mostly-empty stomach-like sack, past a few fleshy valves, and through a few thin walls of connective tissues. All the while the thing screeched and roared around me, twisting and writhing at the weird sensation I’d unleashed upon it. Oh, that wouldn’t kill it, I was pretty sure. Not enough reactant to neutralize all the acid in its body or cause an explosion. Just enough to tickle something this size and keep me safe while I traversed its inner tubes.

  With a final, slurping rip I burst through the last barrier, into a pinkish corridor, open and whistling with air, lined with feathery material and honeycombed with quivering strands of connective tissue, each as thick as my arm. And there in the emptied space, looking wild-eyed and holding up glow-lights at the sudden intrusion, stood the boarding party.

  They took in the sight of me, dripping with juices, cape lost back there somewhere, tarnished by acid and pulling myself free of the rent and bloody wall.

  “Uh, hey,” Alpha said, waving.

  “HEY.” I waved back, then gave one final shove, twisting free. Minor damage to the outer shell, no systems damaged according to my HUD. Good.