ONSET (Book 4): Stay of Execution Read online

  ONSET: Stay of Execution

  Glynn Stewart

  ONSET: Stay of Execution © 2018 Glynn Stewart

  Illustration © 2018 Shen Fei

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Other Books by Glynn Stewart

  1

  The advantage of literally superhuman hearing was that Commander David White could hear his phone ringing even on a firing range with full safety gear. Given the degree of control the stocky cop-turned-supernatural-SWAT-commander had over his hearing, he probably didn’t even need the ear protection.

  As a team commander, though, he had to set the example. His people’s supernatural powers allowed them to ignore a lot of standard precautions if they needed to, but getting into that habit was just stupid.

  He fired his last two shots downrange, emptying the magazine of the heavy fifty-caliber pistol he was shooting. He quickly ejected the magazine, cleared the chamber and safed the weapon before returning it to the holster on his hip.

  The firing range was underground in the center of the Campus, the fortified headquarters of the United States of America’s Office for the National Supernatural Enforcement Teams. He didn’t need to be carrying a loaded firearm, and again, it was a good example.

  He left his team continuing their training and stepped out of the range. The heavy sound-sealing door closed behind him and he removed his ear protection—and his phone started ringing again.

  That was probably not a good sign. It had been a bad few weeks for David. For ONSET. For the USA.

  A lot of people had died when North America’s Vampire Familias had thrown a last-ditch assault at their own breeding creche to stop the US government from controlling their future. The vampires had failed, and the remainder of that grotesque parahuman subspecies had come to a compromise.

  Thousands of people had died along the way, many of them at the hands of the vampires themselves. Many more at the hands of David White and his people.

  He answered the phone.

  “Commander White.”

  “David, it’s Warner,” Major Traci Warner snapped at him. The Mage was ONSET’s second-in-command and the woman who ran the Campus. “Are you near a TV?”

  He glanced around.

  “I think there’s one in the range waiting room; why?”

  “We got five fucking minutes’ warning that we were about to be fucked,” the Major told him. “Get to a TV and turn it on. CNN, BBC, doesn’t matter. The idiots are being carried live across the planet.”

  David stepped out into the plain waiting room and found the remote for the TV. Flipping to CNN, he found himself staring at a relatively standard press conference in front of a seemingly familiar symbol of a stylized eye.

  A dark-haired Indian woman was speaking, and the banner under her told him what the problem was.

  Dr. Elizabeth Gupta was one of the monitoring seismologists for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization. The people who used seismic tracking to identify nukes.

  “Dr. Gupta!” a reporter shouted. “Is it true that your team has been investigating the Crater Lake explosion?”

  David shivered. On the phone, Warner dissolved into repeated cursing.

  “We were,” she responded in softly accented English. “We have contacted the United States government for clarification, but given the number of questions and the lack of said clarification, we have called this press conference.”

  “Do you have a statement?” another reporter demanded.

  “If you will allow me to get to it,” Gupta said dryly.

  The reporters slowly quieted.

  “In the aftermath of the Crater Lake Incident, many questions have been asked over what kind of weapon was detonated by the terrorists there,” she told the reporters and David sighed. “Our American friends have told us that a conventional bunker-buster weapon was stolen and detonated when the plane carrying it was shot down by the US Air Force.”

  David’s phone was silent now. He wasn’t sure if Warner had hung up on him or just stopped swearing, but he was fixated on the screen. The CTBTO received most of its funding and resources from the USA. They couldn’t possibly be…

  “Our analysis suggests that if this was a conventional weapon, it was of a type and force that the US military had never confessed to existing,” Gupta noted. “Fallout and other scans suggest a conventional weapon, yes, agreeing with the official announcement.

  “But the seismic data does not.”

  “What do you mean?” one of the reporters demanded.

  “The seismic data shows that the explosion at Crater Lake was equivalent to sixty thousand tons of conventional TNT,” Gupta said precisely. “In common parlance, a sixty-kiloton nuclear bomb. We are unaware of any conventional weapon capable of that magnitude of force that could be carried on a single plane.

  “The CTBTO has no choice but to conclude that the United States has developed—and either deployed or had stolen—a new form of clean nuclear weapon. We have asked for clarification on this point but it has not been provided.”

  The reporters exploded in questions and David turned off the TV.

  “Major?” he asked.

  “I’m here,” she said flatly.

  “What happens now?”

  They’d done everything in their power to conceal that a nuclear bomb had been detonated. They’d used magic to contain the radiation, focus the fireball. They hadn’t even thought about the seismic monitoring systems.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “But three new Code Reds just flashed up on the map, and we’ve run out of active-duty teams.

  “Get your people suited up, Commander. We may not know what’s coming, but I guarantee you that demons popping up in urban areas is a bigger immediate problem!”

  David put the ear protection on for long enough to enter the range and hit the buzzer that flashed a brilliant light and noise to declare “range safe.” His people laid down their weapons and turned toward him.

  Theoretically, an ONSET strike team was made up of six supernaturals rated as “combat-capable” by ONSET’s analysts. In practice, the largest ONSET Thirteen had ever been under his command was four, and it was currently only three.

  Including him.

  His two subordinates doffed their hearing protectors and turned to f
ace him. Shevon McCreery was a lanky woman with a shaven head, an Empowered with superhuman vision and kinesthetic sense. She was the team’s helicopter pilot. Chris “Stone” Johnston shared McCreery’s height—both towered six inches above their Commander—and David’s bulk, making the big man the largest member of the trio by far. He was also Empowered, stronger and tougher than a human normally and able to convert portions of his body to granite to absorb impacts or attacks. He was the team’s gunner.

  Given that Stone also shaved his head, David was the odd man out on the team to still have hair at all.

  “What’s up, boss?” Stone asked. His voice was oddly pitched, a strangely high sound coming from so massive a man: the legacy of a long-ago throat wound.

  “Short-term, we’ve got more Code Reds popping up,” David told them. “We’re being called out to deal with one.”

  A Code Red was a major supernatural incident, a demon-summoning portal or something big and nasty waking up. Before David had joined ONSET, a Code Red had been a once-a-month occurrence.

  “With what’s up on the board now, we’re on seven in the last week,” he continued grimly. “The teams on active duty are swamped, so we’re being called back to the fray earlier than anyone would like.”

  “Are we getting any kind of backup?” McCreery asked. “I mean, the three of us will take on the damn world if we need to, but…three Empowered against a Code Red?”

  “My impression is that Kate is getting called up, same as us,” David replied. Kate Mason was the commander of ONSET Fifteen, the other team that had been sent on leave after Crater Lake.

  The third team that had been at Crater Lake, well…they weren’t in a state to be deployed again yet.

  “Once I’ve had the target confirmed, I’ll see what I can coordinate with local resources,” he concluded grimly. “We’ll need at least a Mage, if we can find one.”

  Local resources were, if they were lucky, the already-deputized Elfin Warrior paramilitaries. If they were unlucky…he could end up drafting a local civilian Mage or, worse, vampire assistance.

  “We’ll find out before we’re in the air,” he promised them. “But we need to get moving fast.

  “If we’ve already got a Code Red on the board, people are likely to start dying—and it’s our job to make sure that doesn’t happen!”

  2

  “Talk to me, Cynthia,” David ordered as he strode across the concrete toward the helicopter. Clad in his full combat gear as he was, the sound-muffling on his helmet allowed him to speak despite the sound of the Pendragon gunship spinning up her engines.

  “The good news is that the Red Zone is in a functionally abandoned chunk of Detroit’s old suburbs,” the ex-CIA analyst who worked as ONSET Thirteen’s mission control told him. “Officially, no one is living within a mile or so of the place.”

  “I hear a but coming,” the Commander noted as he slotted his M4-Omicron carbine into a rack on the inside of the aircraft, nodding to Stone as the other Agent settled into his own seat. A quick thumbs-up from Stone told him his subordinate was also on the channel.

  “You get into these regions of Detroit and the records aren’t reliable,” Cynthia Leitz warned him. “There’s no functioning city services. No power, no water, nothing. So, no one is keeping track of where anybody is—and the people that are here don’t want to be found.”

  “Which means we don’t actually know the area is abandoned,” he said grimly. “And local authorities aren’t going to evac for us.”

  “Local authorities don’t go here,” she agreed. “Worse, I think I have found something at the center of the Zone.”

  David sighed, closing his eyes as the helicopter lifted off.

  “How bad?” he asked.

  “Interfaith charity clinic and safe injection site,” Leitz said quietly. “Whatever is going down is hitting some of the most vulnerable people in the United States.”

  “Damn,” he replied. “Do we have a clue what’s going on yet?”

  “Just an ugly spike on the thaumic scanners so far,” she told him. “We’ll have overhead about twenty minutes before you arrive.”

  “Local support?”

  The channel was silent.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  “Nothing I’ve been able to confirm,” she said quietly. “The Elfin chapter in the region doesn’t have a Warrior detachment, and we don’t have any solid links with the local supernaturals.”

  “Understood. Keep your ear to the ground and keep me in the loop. We’re on our way.”

  A Pendragon was faster than any helicopter had a right to be, but it was a long way from the mountains above Colorado Springs to Detroit. If there’d been anyone closer, they would have been sent.

  More and more David worried for the future of both the organization he served and the country he was sworn to protect. If they were so desperate that a half-strength team had to be pulled from their leave and sent across the half the country…

  He didn’t want to finish that thought. The overhead now coming in from the satellite over Detroit was creating more questions than answers.

  The Red Zone was an unkempt street, pavement cracked with overgrown weeds and abandoned houses slowly slumping their way toward collapse. This wasn’t one of the parts of Detroit the city was trying to salvage.

  This was part of Detroit that everybody had written off—except, apparently, for a few desperate holdouts and some very determined nurses and doctors who insisted that no one would go entirely without care.

  The charity had taken over the largest, probably most intact house on the street, cleaned off its exterior, replaced the windows, and set up a clinic. Presumably, they were running a generator of some kind, as there was no power here at all, but the clinic looked clean and functional, a sharp contrast to the abandoned street around it.

  But the building was still. The door hung half-open, shifting slightly in the breeze with no one coming to close it.

  “We’re fifteen minutes out,” McCreery reported.

  “It looks like a cemetery in a ghost town,” Stone replied. “It stinks.”

  “Thaumic readings are off the damn scale in the clinic,” Leitz told them. “There’s a single point source overwhelming everything, but it’s rippling out across the entire neighborhood. Something is in there, and it’s big enough its signature could hide almost anything else.”

  “Right. Any sign of civilians in the building?” David asked.

  “Thermals are all over the place,” the analyst replied, and David tapped a command to bring up that data from the satellite.

  By all over the place, Leitz apparently meant completely nonsensical. There were no signatures that suggested people. Just…blotches of heat that were too big to be individual humans. Entire rooms that looked to be warmer than body temperature.

  “Have we run a self-check on the infrared imagers?” he asked.”

  “Already done, yeah,” Leitz replied. “I suggest McCreery uses the Pendragon’s thermal cameras as well; from close up you’ll get a better view than the satellite can, but…”

  “It doesn’t look good,” David concluded. He gripped the sword he wore at his waist. “If we can’t confirm a lack of civilians, I can’t justify blowing the house apart from the sky.

  “McCreery, you’ll drop Stone and I off two hundred feet up the road as quietly as you can and go to overwatch. We’ll recon on the ground. If I give the word, I want you to turn that entire clinic into silver-laced ash, clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then let’s make this happen.”

  The Pendragon was just as much quieter than it should be as it was faster. It had begun life as a design for a supersonic tilt-rotor aircraft before being canceled as too expensive and impractical.

  Picked up by the Omicron Branch of the US government, the design had been completed—and then parts wrapped with magic and enchantment before final assembly. No ordinary helicopter could do what a Pendragon could—but the Pendragon wa
s no ordinary helicopter.

  Even having just stepped off the helicopter, David’s enhanced senses had difficulty locating it as it lifted back into the sky. He and Stone could have been completely alone in the quiet street.

  “Let’s move,” he ordered quietly.

  Both men were wearing formfitting black bodysuits laced with armor plating and sleek fitted helmets. The combat gear wasn’t impenetrable, but most conventional weapons would have trouble with it—and it also protected the delicate electronics of their augmented reality systems.

  “IR cameras are showing the same mess as the overhead,” McCreery reported. “Entire rooms are superheated. If there’s anyone alive in there…well, they’re going to be in need of medical attention.”

  “Understood. Do we have any OSPI medical teams nearby?” he asked. The Office of Supernatural Policing and Investigation provided the local emergency and police services for abnormal situations. They’d call in ONSET teams for heavy lifting—and ONSET would call them in turn for medical help and dealing with civilians.

  “You’re flagged for top priority as soon as one is free,” Leitz interjected into the conversation. “That…could be three or four hours after travel time.”

  “Understood,” he repeated. “Any progress on that backup?”

  “You’re not going to like it,” the analyst replied.

  “Cynthia.”