“Shit, Vic, we’re not up to speed yet. This might be me solo, again.” John glanced at Sera, and saw that she shared his expression; they were both worried as all hell.
“Do what you gotta. Don’t burn down the docks. If you go nuclear, do it over the ocean.”
“Roger. I’m en route.” He turned to Sera. “Darlin’—”
“One more try. I will make a backpack of myself and fold my wings around us both.” Before he could object, she stood behind him, clasped him in her arms and wrapped her wings around them to form a sort of open cylinder.
“Loosen up on my throat a bit, but keep holdin’ on tight. When this gets started, you’re gonna get a helluva lotta acceleration. If’n somethin’ goes wrong or you can’t handle it, peel off and be safe. I’ll hold on until y’get there, okay?” He felt her nod and her assent through their connection. “One last thing; kiss for luck, ’cause we’re gonna need it.” He turned his head, and she pecked him on the cheek. “Let’s rock.”
John took a deep breath, then concentrated for a moment. Fire sprang up around his ankles, then traveled down to the soles of his boots. It built there…and just as suddenly they were airborne. For a half second Sera’s arms slipped up on John’s throat, and he was choking. He slowed down just enough for Sera to change her grip, and then sped back up.
Goin’ to lay on the speed now, love. Get ready.
Wait—take long enough to parse the Futures—we may find something that will work there.
He assented wordlessly, and the two of them dropped into that waking “trance” that allowed them to see a fraction of what she alone had once sorted through. Rapidly sifting through the few options, they found the one that worked: John extending his fiery “shield” to cover them both. With a sense of eureka! from him and a touch of chagrin that they had not tried this in the first place from her, he let his fires spread out over both of them, “skinning” along the shape of her wings and making them a single unit. And then he poured on the speed.
With a jolt, they lurched forward, still a unit. She even relaxed her grip the tiniest bit, as the fires seemed to act as a sort of glue to hold them together. So long as they maintained contact, the Celestial fire would be shared between them; John understood this intuitively, now, through their connection and from the future path they had witnessed. He arced towards land, confident that they would stick together; moments later, they broke the sound barrier, no doubt frightening the wildlife in the forest that was blurring underneath them.
Slowly, a little bit at a time, she relaxed her wings, allowing them to uncurl, and then to spread. Not to their full extent, but as much as a diving falcon’s, enough to work as a steering mechanism, taking some of that effort off of John. Alone, John was a rocket, propelled through sheer force. Now, with Sera’s wings and their connection, there was so much more control. This was really flying, and John felt a mutual thrill run through both of them.
Together, they reached the target area ahead of even Vickie’s adjusted ETA. The Kriegers had just begun their work, and were not ready for what followed. As John and Sera came screaming down through the cloud cover like a meteor from the heavens, John felt a surge of shock and disbelief coming from the ranks of the invaders. And damn if it didn’t feel good.
CHAPTER EIGHT
* * *
Get out Alive
Mercedes Lackey and Cody Martin
I fretted that I didn’t have the time to help find Johnny’s mystery boy. I needn’t have worried. As I was to come to realize, I had a righteous right hand now.
John and Sera had been looking for weeks and weeks, and they still weren’t any closer to finding Zach Marlowe, whoever and wherever he was.
John could feel the pressure increasing on him, like a vice that someone was slowly tightening over his chest. Sera was more hopeful, but the same fear that he had was in the back of her mind, an ever-present cloud on their thoughts. They just had the name, and an idea: That if they—the collected might of the world’s metahumans and governments—failed in stopping the Thulians, this Zach guy would be able to succeed someday; be able to mount a resistance that would free the world from the Thulians’ rule. It wasn’t a comforting thought, but it was better than the alternative; the Thulians win, the world is enslaved and burned, and then they spread to the stars and beyond.
So far they’d tried every course of action they could think of. John and Sera had been searching the Futures at every opportunity, whenever they weren’t busy on a mission or on patrol, or helping out in the neighborhood or around CCCP HQ. Besides telling Eight-Ball what they were looking for, Sera had confided their vision to a troubled Vickie, and had requested that she recruit her parents—or anyone else she could think might help—to the search. Vickie was scouring the internet and every database that she had access to—including more than a few that she shouldn’t have had access to—with zero results.
It was beginning to seem like Zach Marlowe didn’t exist anywhere but in John and Sera’s minds. That simply couldn’t be true; they couldn’t afford for it to be true. John had managed to hang onto his sanity—with Sera’s help—so far. He didn’t think that he and Sera had slipped off the rails with this vision; the Futures were always changing, sure, but this seemed as much of a sure thing as there was. We fail, he picks up the slack. Maybe this meant that they had done something that was putting them on the course to win the war, and they just didn’t know it yet? Then again, the inverse was also true; they could have done something to irrevocably screw the planet, and ensure that not even this Marlowe person could save it one day.
Thinking about it was goddamned maddening, when you got right down to it.
Sera was feeling the strain as well, but seemed to be doing far better than she had been before John had talked her through her crisis of conscience. That had been a rough night for both of them, and John was thankful that they were past it. He had owed her a dozen times over for pulling him back from the edge of going power-mad; it seemed like a small enough favor to help her get perspective on what they were doing.
At that moment, John and Sera were busy in the CCCP’s armory. John needed to take his mind out of the endless loop it had spun itself into, and he found that working on guns helped him to do that more often than not. He was a detail-oriented sort of man, and he had grown up around guns. Combined with his time in the military, he had learned that weapons maintenance could have a distinctly meditative quality to it. It helped to have a second set of hands in Sera; she sat quietly beside him and aided or handed him what he needed almost before he knew he needed the help. He could tell that she just didn’t grasp why working on items of violence would be meditative for him, but she accepted that it was. Some men gardened, or made models of wooden ships in glass bottles. John field-stripped AKs and M4s.
John had hooked up a beat-to-shit boombox up in the corner so that it functioned—most of the time, at least. Right now it was playing a Tom Waits tape that he had bartered for at one of the neighborhood markets.
“Hey, darlin’?” John said as he pulled the pins on the upper receiver for his personal M4, deftly separating it from the lower receiver and then removing the charging handle and bolt carrier group in precise, efficient movements.
She cocked her head to the side, and blinked slowly, as she was inclined to do when she was not sure of a social interaction. “Yes?” she said finally. “Is there something you require that I am not supplying?”
“Naw, nothin’ like that. Only so much CLP and Hoppe’s that I need handed to me at any one time,” he said, grinning. “No, I was gonna ask you somethin’.” He set down the pieces of the bolt carrier group on the rubber mat in front of him, looking up into Sera’s eyes. “Y’ever wonder what we’re gonna do after this is all over? The war, the Thulians, all of it?”
“I…truly had not thought of it. I have not thought past”—she waved her hands widely—“all this. I told you, the Siblings are not competent at creation, because we have not Free Will to see past
what is and what probably will be. It is difficult for me to imagine anything.”
“I’ve been thinkin’ ’bout it, from time to time. This war can’t last forever. One way or another.” He frowned, biting his lip for a split second, before picking up the lower receiver of his rifle. “I’m focusin’ on the best possible scenario, though. We win, kick the hell outta the Thulians, get our world back. What would you an’ I do?”
Her brows creased, as if this was difficult thinking for her. Maybe it was, if what she’d said was true, and the Siblings just plainly were not able to create. She wasn’t technically a Sibling anymore, but John could appreciate how hard old habits could be to break. “Be…together?” she said tentatively. “I suppose now we shall have similar life spans?”
“Well, yeah. You an’ I are together until the end, darlin’. Nothin’ can stop that.” He leaned over the table between them, pecking her lightly on the lips before settling back on his stool. “As far as our life spans go, we are both metahuman, so we’ve probably got a few more years than the average bear. But…then we have our own deal goin’, too, with the Celestial stuff. I honestly don’t have the slightest idea how that’ll affect us, beyond what we’ve already seen. That’s more in your wheelhouse, or maybe Vickie’s.”
She shook her head. “We are a new thing. I know not, and cannot predict.” She bit her lip; she was starting to pick up human habits and facial expressions more easily. It was endearing to John. “I suppose we cannot reside in your…squat…forever. Someone will come for the building and make us leave. Where should we go?”
John shrugged. “That’s a fair question. I’ve always gone where the work was, so to speak. When I was enlisted, I was either on base housing or got an allotment for off-base housing. Still, I was wherever I was deployed or stationed. It’s kinda the same for us now; we’re here with the CCCP, so Atlanta is our port of call. Once this is all over…I guess it’s still determined by what we’re actually doin’. Y’know what I mean?”
“Well, we still have what we can do. I suppose we will do what ECHO did before the war? Do you think CCCP will be here still?”
John thought for a moment, picking up a worn double-sided toothbrush to use on the bolt carrier. “I guess that all depends on Moscow, an’ how the situation will change there. My impression is that the Commissar is sorta exiled here in the States, unless somethin’ drastic happens with the folks back in the Motherland. An’ those sumbitches have long memories.”
“I often do not agree with the Commissar and her methods,” Sera replied, a little sadly. “Do you think she will change? If she does not…I am not certain I wish to remain with CCCP.”
“She already has changed. Hell, we all have, darlin’. We’ve had to.” He continued cleaning the individual parts of the bolt carrier group as he talked, inspecting them, lubricating them, and then reassembling them. “Now, will she be in a place where we still want to work with her, outside of a war footin’? That’s somethin’ I couldn’t tell ya. I’ve disagreed with Nat myself; she’s pretty hard not to have a fight with ’bout somethin’ at some point. But her heart is in the right place, mostly, I figure. We wouldn’t have stuck with her this long if it wasn’t.”
“Even so…” Sera sighed. “If we find she reverts, or will not change, or goes home again. What would we do? Join with Belladonna and become a part of ECHO?”
“That would be an option, I suppose. I love the blueberry to death, for everythin’ that she’s done for both of us an’ everythin’ she’s doin’ to keep the fight goin’…but ECHO in general just gives me a bad taste in my mouth. A lotta red tape for anythin’, an’ way more government than I’m happy with. The CCCP is in this happy little place where we’ve got governmental backin’, but we’re still left hands off, for the most part. Paperwork in triplicate notwithstandin’. Not so with ECHO, or at least how it was before the war.” He thought for a few moments, still working on the rifle. “I had a run-in with one of their ‘recruiters,’ ’round the same time that Blacksnake came knockin’. It didn’t leave me with the best impression of how some of that organization does business.”
She blinked at him, this time in surprise. “Why? What happened?” she asked curiously.
“A busybody, some midlevel guy, came ’round the ’hood not too long after the Invasion. Apparently, word had gotten out ’bout what I was doin’; I was a little less than discreet, for whatever idiot reason. ECHO was hurtin’ bad for bodies, so they were scroungin’ for unregistered metas…like me. I didn’t cotton to the idea of gettin’ pressed into service, an’ I was happy enough doin’ things the way I had been doin’ them. My way, to be precise. After a little bit of measurin’ anatomy an’ some pretty heavy pressure from the ’hood, the flunkie backed down. Bigger fish to fry without needin’ to get fried himself. I know, logically, that it was rough times back then an’ everyone was desperate, but still…not the best impression.”
“But with Bella in charge, and Yankee Pride? Would things not be different?” She flipped her wings a little, a sign of restiveness. Or maybe that she didn’t quite agree with him?
John looked around for a moment, seemingly lost, before Sera proffered a beer to him. He nodded, smiling, as he took it and had a tug from it. “Well, you’re right in that regard. It may have been a different organization back then, ’fore Bella an’ Pride had the reins. Still…I’m not sure. Seems like the sorta thing where, once they have their hooks in ya, you’re in it an’ that’s it. Not sure how comfortable I am with that.”
“But what are we to do if we do not join ECHO and cannot remain with CCCP?” she asked. “I—how would we know who to help? The Infinite no longer guides me. We have extraordinary abilities…how can we not use them?”
“We could always take our act on the road. It’s not like we need an RV, exactly.” Sera handed John a cleaning rod, patch already threaded on it, and he applied some CLP to it before threading the rod through the rifle’s barrel. “It’d probably ruffle more than a few feathers, though. So to speak,” he said, nodding towards her wings with an impish waggle of his eyebrows. “Folks didn’t like unregistered metas doin’ their thing before the Invasion. Can’t imagine much will change afterwards, no matter how much good we do durin’ the war.”
“And would we not face pressure on many fronts—ECHO wishing to have us, the military wishing to have us, clandestine organizations wishing to have us, and criminals wishing to eliminate us?” she replied. “ECHO might leave us be, with Bella in charge, but the others would not!”
“You’re right on that count, darlin’. I’m fairly certain we could take any an’ all comers…but why deal with the headaches if we don’t have to? Not sayin’ that bein’ with the CCCP or ECHO wouldn’t have headaches of their own…maybe even a lotta the ones you just listed.” John changed out patches on the cleaning rod, running the implement down the barrel and changing out the patches again methodically as he thought. “Y’know, there’s another option.”
“There is?” She bit her lip again. “I hope you will not tell me that we must pretend to be someone else and never use our powers at all.” She shook her wings. “How could I even do that, with these? They are somewhat obvious! Unless you think I should pretend I am the—what is it—cosplayer?” She shook her head. “How should I shop for the grocery items?”
“The obvious answer is ‘carefully.’ But, as to whether we ought to quit? Hell, no! Not pretend to be someone else, not exactly. But…there’s no reason why we ought to be full-time with this, if things shake out well with the war. We’ve got the Futures to see when we’d be most needed; I don’t imagine how we could shut that off, even if we wanted to. Still…I wouldn’t mind focusin’ on us, for once. Hell, maybe even startin’ a litter.”
“Could we…retire?” she asked doubtfully. “I do not know if children are even possible, for us.”
John set down the tools and pieces of rifle that he was handling. He leaned across the table again, setting his hands on top of Sera’s. “Darl
in’, there’s only one way to find out.” He sent all of the warmth and love that he had for Sera through their connection; he knew that she would understand how fully and truly that he loved her, and how it almost brought him to tears just to think about.
Her eyes widened, and a tentative smile ghosted across her face. Then he felt the same deep and abiding passion returned to him. She put a free hand atop his, and for a moment, the two of them were lost in each other.
And, of course, the moment was shattered by a ping from Vickie in his ear. Sera blinked, then shook her head and laughed a little. “Is this what they call ‘birth control’?” she asked.
“Near enough, darlin’.” John sighed, cocking his head to the side. “Vickie, Murdock here. Go ahead.”
“Eight-Ball wants you, on the double,” she replied. “He’s all spun up. Just keeps repeating your names.”
“Copy, we’re on our way. Dial back the caffeine or electrons or whatever y’feed him. Murdock out.” John set down the pieces of rifle and cleaning tools. “Duty calls, darlin’. Shall we?”
“Perhaps—perhaps it is something about—” she began, then shook her head. “No, I will not hope; I will wait until I know. Let us go!”
* * *
Vickie had the window open as usual when she called for them, although John privately thought a key to the door on the roof would have been a lot more handy. Once they were in her Overwatch room though, it was clear that she hadn’t been exaggerating about Eight-Ball. The screen was scrolling their names, almost faster than he could read.
“Vic, what’s goin’ on? What’s the deal with Eight-Ball?” John and Sera took up position behind the chair as Vickie slid into it, her fingers dancing across the keyboard.
Avalanche: Book Five in the Secret World Chronicle Page 14