Firestarter Read online

  "Also consider this: The more of our troops are in the hunting grounds when the permanent gateway forms, the easier it will be for me to hold both sides of it. Which will profit all of us. Understood?"

  "Yes, Your Majesty!" all six princes said, prostrating themselves before him.

  King Sladd smiled. "Now, be about my work!" he said, dismissing them. He was curious as to what his spies would be reporting to him as all six discussed the execution that had taken place today.

  Entangled

  Sean sat at his desk looking at the reports. A week from now, the real fight would start: the main gateway would open somewhere out there. In these last few months, it was getting to be more than he could deal with. He'd thought he'd made his life easier back when he'd pushed all the business paperwork off onto Deidre, but running a war was a lot more work than he could have ever predicted. Even with all the logistics decisions being funneled through the staff General Baker had left him.

  Even with Chad, Maitland, and now Jack, Bill, Roloff, and Claudia helping him by taking the lead on most of the strategic and tactical planning.

  Because he was the one at the top, the one in charge. He was the final authority. The one who had to approve everything. Everyone deferred to him, even the regular military officers now. At times he hated it, hated that at the ripe old age of twenty-two, he was the ultimate authority. That he was always expected to have the answer when no one else knew what to do. The one who had to get up in front of everyone, damn near all the time now, and show them they could in fact do their jobs without him around to hold their hands.

  About the only people who didn't defer to him were the mid-level bureaucrats who worked for the city. The mayor at least did what she could to help with that; she wasn't an idiot, she saw the money and the power that he controlled, and knew staying on his good side would mean something when the next election came around. Sean also got the impression she cared more about the people she represented than those who'd been appointed to their jobs or risen to their level of incompetence, but who now couldn't be fired because they were civil servants and it took an act of god to get one of them fired.

  He also missed being able to just ask the First for a solution whenever he wasn't sure what to do. He'd had to make so many snap decisions in the last month, he knew he had to have gotten some of them wrong, but apparently the saying was true: Better a bad decision now than no decision at all.

  But like it or not, he was the one who'd gotten them this far, and he sure as hell knew better than to give it all over to someone else. He was the one they knew, the one they trusted, the one who had gotten them all to this point. He couldn't walk away; he owned it, all of it, whether he wanted it or not.

  "Time for the staff meeting, Sean," Peg said, sticking her head into his office. Somehow she'd decided, or they'd decided—they didn't consult with him when they made those kinds of decisions—they'd decided she was going to be the one playing roadblock, or secretary. Sometime about when they'd decided he couldn't use his workshop as an office anymore, and he couldn't go back to sharing with Deidre.

  "I'm coming." He sighed, grabbing his now ever-present notebook as he got up and headed for the door.

  "Did we keep you up too late last night?" Peg teased as he stopped to give her a kiss before continuing on.

  "It's not that," Sean said with a shake of his head. "It's just," he shook his head again, "look at me. I'm buried in paperwork, plans, requests, all this stuff I need to approve. Everyone wants my guidance, my approval. I'm twenty-two, Peg. I spent most of my life struggling to barely get by, and now I'm the one with all the answers."

  "You're the victim of your own success," Peg said with a grin and hugged him back. "You may be young, but you're not stupid, and so far you've managed to handle everything that's been thrown at you. People like a proven winner, and right now, you're the only one they've got."

  "Yeah, but what happens when I lose?" Sean said, looking at her a little worried.

  "Same thing that happened all the other times you lost," she said and gave him a smack on the butt. "You'll try again. Now stop frowning, it'll make people wonder what's wrong."

  "I'll just tell them you wouldn't give me a quickie before the meeting," Sean said with a smirk.

  "Oh, like they'd believe that!" Peg laughed.

  Shaking his head, Sean put an arm around her and headed off to the conference room. At least he was smiling now.

  "We really need to have someone sit in your office with you; you start to brood too much when you're alone these days," Peg said, looking thoughtful. "I'll talk to Rox and Dae about it."

  "Un-huh." Sean nodded to the guard standing by the door to the conference room. Cali and Estrella had decided that the days of lax security were over a month ago when someone had killed a bonde found sneaking around by itself a couple miles away.

  "Morning, everyone," Sean said as he walked around the table. Coming to the head of it, he sat down. "So, what's the analysis on both yesterday's and last Sunday's gates?"

  "They're trying to wear us down for a big push when the main gate opens," Jack said.

  Chad nodded in agreement. "It's like dropping an artillery barrage on the opposing side just before you attack."

  "Isn't that kind of tipping their hand?" Sean asked. Up until last Sunday's gate, all the small gates had been pretty much left unused by the djevels. Only the large gates had been seeing action.

  "We already know they're coming, Nephew," Maitland pointed out.

  Sean looked around the table. "Suggestions?"

  "I don't think we're going to see any more large gates," Deidre said.

  "Oh?"

  "I've been running a statistical analysis on the gates, and with only two left before we enter the main gate cycle, the odds are heavily against it."

  "Also," Chad picked up, "if the enemy thought there was another large gate in the mix this close to the next cycle, they'd be saving their strength for that instead."

  "So we have a gate cycle starting Friday, followed by another on the first, which is Monday," Sean said, looking over at the chart on the east wall with the big gateway sequence calendar.

  "What are we going to do about them? If they're planning a big push come the fourth, the last thing we want is to still be licking our wounds when they show up."

  "Tac-nukes?" Jack suggested.

  Chad immediately shook his head. "I'd like to hold off on letting them in on that particular surprise until the main gate opens."

  "They already know about them," Jack said with a shrug. "They've been here for years; I don't think there's any weapon in the inventory they don't know about."

  Sean smiled. "He's got you there, you know."

  "They may know about them, but I doubt they think we're going to be willing to use them on our own soil. Not yet at least. Besides, how are we going to get one? Do you think the president is just going to hand you one?"

  "Good point." Jack sighed.

  "That reminds me," Sean said with a sigh, pulling out a pencil and making a note in his notebook.

  "About what?" Roxy asked looking over his shoulder.

  "I need to ask the president for a bunch of nukes."

  "Seriously?"

  "Sooner or later we're going to need them. If I don't ask now, when we do need them it'll take far too long to get one."

  "What about the 'divine wrath of the lions'?" Claudia asked.

  "That's a lot trickier to deal with than you realize," Sean said with a heavy sigh.

  "Also, it's something they don't know about," Roxy pointed out to everyone there. "So it's best if we save it for when we really need it."

  "But you already hit them with it once, didn't you?"

  "They don't know that," Estrella piped up. "They think it was some sort of magical attack."

  "Why don't you just continue to use artillery on them?" Bill asked.

  Maitland shook his head. "Eventually they're going figure out they can use shield spells to deflect them, so unt
il we've handled that…"

  "Plus," Chad added, "I'd like to hold off on the arty until the main gate. That stuff isn't unlimited, so I'd rather they spent the next week prepping for the big fight."

  "What about all them tanks ya' got sitting out to the south of the city?" Daelyn asked.

  "We don't know how well they'll do," Chad replied. "We're still working out how to best employ them."

  "Well, maybe it's time we started learnin?"

  "Daelyn has a point," Roloff said, getting Sean's interest. Roloff didn't tend to get too involved in these meetings, as the dwarves hadn't taken too big of a role in the fighting yet. Mostly they'd send a unit or two out to get experience. In the general scheme of things, the dwarves weren't as mobile as lycans were, so they were being set up to play defense. Once they had a fixed battle space, that is. Right now Reno was surrounded by a hell of a lot of very well dug in dwarves.

  Chad pondered that, then looked up at Sean.

  "What are you looking at me for?" Sean asked with a sigh.

  "If we roll the tanks out there, they're going to take a pasting, I'm sure."

  "Yeah, but we haven't been using them, so if there's anything we can afford to lose right now, it's those tanks, and you know it."

  "Yeah, I know it," Chad sighed, "I just hate being the one to have to make those decisions."

  Sean nodded. "Yeah, it's tough at the top. Welcome to the big leagues, right?"

  Chad shook his head while giving Sean a lopsided grin. "You got that right. Okay, we'll move all the tanks up, along with all the Strykers and the Abrams we have. Roloff, I want you to take command of their deployments and work with their commanders on tactics."

  "You want me?" Roloff said, looking surprised.

  "Yeah, I need a sneaky bastard with an understanding of armor, and you've already got your guys dug in. I was hoping you'd appreciate the challenge."

  Roloff nodded and smiled. "Iffen that's what you want, I think I can find the time."

  "Great," Sean said. "I'll leave that to the rest of you to figure out. Next point of business: the main gate. It should open sometime after midnight on the fourth."

  "It doesn't follow the random cycle of the previous gates?" Claudia asked.

  Sean shook his head. "No, it will open within hours of midnight. It'll start out as a small gate, then over the next ninety days it'll grow to full size."

  "We still get the small gates, correct?" Maitland asked, looking at his notes.

  "Yes, every three days, but every nine cycles we get a period with no gates."

  "That's twenty-seven days?"

  "Yup. Then after nine months, we enter a six-month period where the small gates become medium gates. After about eight of those, the permanent gate opens."

  "That's the one we have to worry about," Estrella said.

  "Yeah. That's the one we have to worry about. We're not exactly clear on how it works, but if it stays open more than forty-eight hours, we're fairly certain the main gateway collapses and this new one becomes permanent."

  "What aren't you clear on?" Claudia asked.

  "Well, we believe both it and the main gateway will stay open for twenty-four hours, no matter what the djevels have accomplished. But," Sean sighed and shook his head, looking over at her, "we don't know if the main gateway will collapse before the second twenty-four hours are up if the conditions for permanence are met."

  Estrella spoke up, "You have to understand, the permanent gateway has never become permanent before. Well, not here at least. There are gateways out there between other realms that are permanent, but we're not exactly sure how they happened. So no one really knows exactly when during that forty-eight-hour period the 'conditions' for the gateway to become permanent must be met…"

  "…or if there's any warning we'll get beforehand so we'll know we're in trouble and need to take action before the test for those conditions takes place," Sean finished.

  "Well, that doesn't sound good." Claudia sighed.

  "No, but it's what we're up against."

  They spent the next hour going over preparations for the main gateway opening. Deidre had been running a statistical analysis of the gateway locations and, using information some of the lions had passed on, had projected a likely area for the gateway to open. If that worked out, it would definitely put them in a far better position than they normally were when a gateway opened.

  "Next topic," Sean said once they got that one finished, "is Germany."

  Everyone around the table flinched.

  "I guess I'll start off," Estrella said. "Munich is still holding on. The mages guild there has managed to put up a strong enough ward that it has encouraged the djevels to look elsewhere—for now. My brother Raban is there now, and he's got almost a thousand lycans with him, the mayor has given full amnesty to any and all lycans, not that I think anyone would enforce that law.

  "All of the United States Army units from Stuttgart have fallen back towards Heidelberg. They're trying to form a line down to the French border, and points further south. The lycans who fled to France and Switzerland have moved up to their borders. There's been a great deal of support from the magical community there, as well as the elves and the dwarves.

  "To the north of Heidelberg, they've formed a defensive line back towards Bonn and Cologne. Refugees are still fleeing west in great numbers. Belgium and the Netherlands are trying to shore up their borders with what they have along the west. Oland, Prague, and Austria are attempting to do the same to the east."

  "Maitland?" Sean asked.

  "Well, the northern Faerie in Denmark and the other Nordic countries have been moving south into northern Germany. They haven't encountered any djevels yet. Those in the UK and Eastern Europe have finally agreed to join the fight, so that's northern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Those who live to the west of Poland in those northern states are coming, but it will be weeks before they'll be able to join the fight."

  "Jack, what have your contacts in the Pentagon told you?"

  "Well, first off, they're finally going to send us an intelligence officer, who will have direct access to the data we've been asking for. But the general gist of it seems to be that they have packs of demons,"

  "Djevels," Cali corrected.

  "Whatever. They have packs of them roaming an area from Munich all the way up to Hanover. They haven't come too far west yet, but no one is sure how long the major western cities up around Dortmund can be protected. Berlin, however, is a complete write-off. The army units there were able to fight their way out and are on their way to Hamburg. Once they got past the city limits, the enemy stopped following them. Oddly enough, Dresden and Leipzig have been totally ignored."

  "Do they have any kind of estimate on the number of djevels there?" Sean asked.

  "Well, they're pretty sure there's thousands of them in Berlin. Possibly as many as ten thousand. The rest of the country? It's probably only a thousand at most. It's just the lack of anyone able to stand up to them has given them free reign over the countryside."

  Estrella picked it back up. "There've been twenty-seven small roaming gates that opened in random areas of Germany as of last Tuesday. It wasn't until the middle of April that anyone even knew we had a problem there. If the djevels were able to put, say, two hundred through each gate, that would give them at least five thousand in the country."

  "Why do you think there's so many of them in Berlin?" Claudia asked.

  "We're pretty sure a fair deal of the government was compromised," Estrella said with a sigh. "They had a lot of control and power over the city, and that's a lot of free food just waiting to be claimed. The First and the others think the djevels will use the power they gain from consuming the population to build a stronghold there and eventually breed more."

  "Which would indicate that the ones roaming the countryside are there more to create a barrier between Berlin and the military forces that could attack them," Chad suggested.

  "If that's the case, there would have
to be some high-ranking djevels in Berlin now," Cali said.

  "Obviously," Estrella agreed. "I've discussed this with the First and the others. They've been thinking along the same lines."

  "How's the fight going down in South America?" Bill asked.

  "They've got it well under control," Sean said. "I spoke to the lion in charge last night. Things are still playing out as they're used to down there. They don't expect much of a push until the main gateway opens, and the elves have been showing up in force the last month. They've turned out a large portion of their fighters for this."

  "So what do we do about Germany?" Oak asked.

  "Nothing," Sean said with a shake of his head. "Our job is right here in front of us. In a few more days, I suspect we're going to be way too busy to worry about anything else."

  Everyone nodded, agreeing quietly.

  "Well, I think that's it for today," Sean said, standing up. "Meeting adjourned."

  "Now what?" Estrella asked as Sean checked his notes.

  "Now I get to fly into Reno and meet with the mayor, the chief of police, and all the rest of them," Sean grumbled. He really was beginning to hate these bi-weekly meetings with the mayor and the city's different department heads. Getting them to do anything was like pulling teeth.

  "Bill, you coming with me, or Claudia?"

  "I want to discuss a few things with her," Bill said. "I'll ride in with her."

  Sean nodded. "Cali, Dae, once Travis' team calls it clear, we'll be heading out."

  "Can I come along?" Estrella asked.

  Sean smiled. "Of course you can, Stell. I need to check on some things; I'll meet you on the helipad in a few."

  Heading back to his office, Sean strapped on his pistol, checked to make sure he had a couple of wands, checked his email and other messages, put on a nice jacket to help conceal the gun, then dropped his notebook on the desk. Last thing he wanted was to forget that at the mayor's office; they'd probably have a field day with the information inside, he'd written way too many nasty comments about some of the people there in it.

  "You ready, Peg?" Sean asked. He always brought her along so no one would be able to make any recordings or eavesdrop on the meeting.