Out of the Black - Lee Doty [164]
Another surge of power burst over her, Kaspari staggered, and she exploded forward, feeling just a whisper of hope.
Kaspari dodged the tendril of force that lashed out of his own Cast. The kid had actually been able to infiltrate his Cast so deeply that his counterattack came from the energy Issak had reclaimed. The tendril was inside his defenses, but he could still deal with it. He pulled his shields across the distance between Alex's attack and his interface with the Loom. He was again protected, but he wasn't the target. Alex's Cast instead struck at the terminals of three of his major power feeds. The resulting explosion tore down perhaps half of his prepared Casts and scattered nearly all of the Templates he kept ready.
Things were looking worse up in the Overworld, though. As he staggered under Mr. Ahmed's quite unexpected effectiveness, the Cop with Roy's blade was struggling back to his feet and looking assertive. The woman with Dek's power was arcing toward him like a more determined version of lightening. To add insult to injury, the cop standing by Ivo's protégé was hurling a warped pistol fairly accurately at his head. With the eyes of the Loom, Issak could see the Cast around her, guiding her actions, linking mind and body. There was something else in the patterns around her. It was like guide wires for perception, instructing the eye in how and where to look to see her. Fascinating... what could the purpose of those be?
With an effort, he forced his curious mind away from the Forge emanating from the woman's necklace. He needed to focus on the problems at hand. At last he saw how these upstarts had managed to take Shiva down. She'd been the third-ranked Savant in Asado... the veritable cream of the crap.
No more games.
Alex struck again, and another swath of Kaspari's ready Casts went dark. He knew this couldn't last, but that wasn't the plan. Though his Cast was still wreaking havoc just outside Kaspari's interface with the Loom, Alex's focus was now on arming the bomb he was constructing inside the largest remaining power conduit at Kaspari's interface. He knew that Kaspari would evict him within milliseconds, but he hoped the bomb would go off after Kaspari had expanded his shields to again encompass the conduit.
The texture of the Underworld changed. It took a few ticks of the atomic clock for Alex to realize what had changed: his shields were gone. There was an incision through them that he hadn't seen or felt. Through the incision, Kaspari's power had come. Now Alex was completely defenseless. He tried to put the finishing touches on his bomb before the end. He knew it was already too late for him.
Anne left the ground for her final leap, but didn't go the right direction. The disturbances she felt around her resolved into a resonant harmony, like the inside of a very large engine or perhaps a dragon's growl, heard from within its belly.
She moved backwards halfway between floor and ceiling, equidistant from both walls. Unseen forces pressed in on her, locking her limbs in place. She had no other struggle to make, so she satisfied herself with futile resistance to the crushing power of the engine all around her.
Roy's sword came out, but a fraction of a second later Ping took Rae's thrown pistol in the forehead. It didn't knock him down, but it did knock him out- then gravity knocked him down.
Rae never saw Anne's altered flight plan. One instant Anne was racing Rae's pistol toward Kaspari and the next there was a flash of light as Anne slammed into her, knocking her off her feet. They both fell in a heap on the floor a couple of meters back. Anne landed on top.
Kaspari's Cast was all around him. It was moving so fast that even the speed of the Loom couldn't resolve its blur into individual actions. Alex had lost track of the bomb he had been arming. Now he was completely on the defensive, if you could call it that. All his energy and focus was consumed with token resistance to the decimation that Kaspari wrought on his interface