But before she could demand that Thea and Untermensch leave her with the children and go back to help Red, the top floor of the dilapidated building exploded.
The kids screamed and tried to shelter themselves as debris pelted down on them. But Vickie could only stare, paralyzed, as something—a disk that looked as if it was the middle sliced out of a Thulian Death Sphere—rocketed up to about fifteen hundred feet, paused, and accelerated away, fading into literal invisibility as it did.
And she knew, she knew, Red was in there. Doppelgaenger’s prisoner. And all she could do was stare, as her heart iced over.
* * *
Doppelgaenger piloted her Fledermaus skillfully; most Thulian ships needed a full crew, but she could handle this one by herself. After the total disaster the last attempt to take the Djinni had been, she had elected to leave her troops behind and run this op solo. And a wise decision that had been, stupid, replicated apes that they were.
It was relaxing to be in this form, although she knew she would have to go back to Doppelgaenger’s male shape before she landed. Females held no respect among the Thulians. Not even Valkyria. The bitch wasn’t aware of how she was spoken of behind her back.
She glanced over at the Djinni, strapped down in the seat beside her, breathing mask for the Stille Nacht gas covering his entire face, so unconscious he didn’t even twitch. “Don’t worry, lover,” she crooned. “I’ll soon have you where you need to be. Then we’ll play a while, and when I am done, you’ll forget all about that neurotic Hungarian witch. We’ll be together forever, and you’ll never, ever leave me—”
Movement in one of the screens set into the control panel caught her eye. Something very small…and stealthed. Flying away from the chaos of the Georgia Dome, but not toward the ECHO campus. She frowned.
She ordered the Fledermaus to scan it. Carbon fiber and a great deal of stealth modification. Trading speed for near invisibility. One occupant. Could it be someone we are interested in?
She ordered a deeper scan, this one reading oh so many biometric indicators from a distance, as Fledermaus cruised along, shadowing the tiny craft. Thulian technology gave her ship true invisibility—which she traded for offensive capabilities, but after all, offense was not what Fledermaus was for. She waited while the ship’s computers ran what the sensors read through an analysis, and with a cheerful ping! the answer came up on the readout: DOMINIC VERDIGRIS, 82.435% POSITIV.
Doppelgaenger’s mouth stretched into a wide grin. “And the universe will provide…” she chuckled. “Oh, my Red, here I was concerned the Masters might want you for themselves—and up pops a tasty little morsel they will enjoy ever so much more than you!”
She toggled open the cargo hatch on the bottom of Fledermaus, lined the ship up, and swooped down on her prize like a falcon on a pigeon. Before her prey had any idea she was there, she had swallowed him up and snapped the hatch closed, triggering the antigravity in the hold to make sure he could not escape. Since he wasn’t used to it, he’d probably be violently sick all over himself and the inside of his craft. That alone would keep him busy for the time it would take her to reach the nearest Forward Base.
“A fine day,” she laughed. “A happy day, for this child of destiny.”
She began to sing.
“Und dann die Hände zum Himmel, komm lasst uns fröhlich sein, wir klatschen zusammen, und keiner ist allein—”
* * *
Jack and Khanjar stared at the enhanced radar screen on his Thulian equivalent of a shuttlecraft—or maybe a “Captain’s Launch”—as a large, stealthed Thulian vessel engulfed the small stealthed runabout they were tracking, then sped off, presumably with it inside.
Jack rubbed the back of his head with his hand. “Well, that went south in a big damn hurry,” he said, sounding more annoyed than angry.
Khanjar was more…eloquent, cursing in Hindi, switching to Bengali, and finishing up in Urdu. “Now what do we do?” she asked—not Jack, but mostly Karma and Fate. “When I told him that ECHO was on his trail and he should make a run for it in his runabout, we were supposed to snatch him at the airstrip, not see him grabbed out of the sky in front of us like a pigeon by a hawk!”
“Calm down, darlin’,” Jack said meditatively. “He’s where we really want him, right? In fact, this might just be better. Less song and dance for me to do in front of the bosses. I just have to make sure I know where they put him after they get him, and we’ll all have what we want.”
“Oh…” Khanjar said, suddenly realizing that the short man was right. “Well…in that case, I suppose at this point the best move I can make is go become useful to ECHO.” She licked her lips thoughtfully. “I would like to be sure Bulwark is not inclined to bear a grudge.”
“You do that,” Jack replied, turning his eyes to the rest of the controls for a moment. He eyed their other two companions thoughtfully. “But before you do that cool thing where you leap out of a speeding aircraft, I need to run something by you. By all of you.” He directed his thumb behind him, where Harmony sat sprawled across a passenger bench, embracing Scope, who could have been taken for a statue, she was so quiet and lifeless. “I think we’re going to need to bring her into the game a little ahead of schedule.”
Khanjar scowled. “I suppose it could be worse,” she said after a moment. “You could be talking about that psychotic, thankfully dead, Chinese woman.”
Harmony regarded them both enigmatically, and then blew Khanjar a kiss.
“I love you too, poodle,” she said flirtatiously. “We should get our nails done together some time.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
* * *
You Always Hurt the One You Love
Mercedes Lackey and Dennis Lee
The disadvantage of not being human is I cannot “lose myself in work.” No matter how busy I am, whatever I would like to avoid is still always there, and if only I knew what to do, I would have plenty of processing power to do it. In this, I envy you.
Vickie came to lying on a gurney, a stabbing pain in her chest, her head pounding, with Bella’s hand just below her collarbone, firmly holding her down. “Hold still,” Bella ordered, her mouth set in a grim line.
“But—”
“Hold still. You’ve got a punctured lung from trying to run. You’ve got a concussion. And the ribs that aren’t splintered into your lung are cracked. I don’t want to put you out, but I will if I have to. Hold still.”
She held still, closing her eyes, tears leaking out of them. “Mel was Doppelgaenger. We—”
Waves of healing passed through her, easing the pain, setting things right, healing—healing everything but the heart, which ached more than Vickie had thought possible. “I know.” Bella replied. “Eight recorded it all and played it back for me while you were on the way here. We’ve got people on initial damage control, directing Eight. Eight’s dragging out every archived Overwatch log that has her on it and scanning them to see what she got her claws on. He’s already done all her records. He’s also checking all her computer logs and mine in case she figured out my passcode and is looking to see what was accessed when and syncing that up with the tapes of me to make sure no one got in on those passwords that wasn’t me. And he’s scanning every byte that ECHO has for bugs, worms, or Trojans. You done good with him, Vix, he’s a treasure. Hold still.”
A pause. “There’s something you ought to know, Vix. I should have scanned you back when I figured out how to tell who had the meta factor, but I didn’t until just now. You’re a metahuman. You probably triggered a long time ago. That might be why you can work with tech and no other mage can.”
Irrelevant. Her brain pushed the words aside in favor of action. “I can—”
“Do more magically when you’re fit to move. I know. First you have to be fit to move.”
The words escaped her before she could stop them, along with the tears. “He said he loves me. I love him. And she took him.”
The pulsing waves of healing energies faltered for a moment. “
I know,” Bella said in a whisper; an empathic caress like a kiss rested above Vickie’s weeping heart for just a moment, then the healing began again. “I think maybe you should sleep and let me do my work.”
Against her will, she fell into darkness again.
* * *
From the outside, Barron’s secret base at the tip of Florida looked unchanged from the abandoned missile test facility it had been until recently. What was it about abandoned missile bases that so attracted the Masters when it came to making bases out of them? Was it the remoteness? Was it the irony of using something humans had built to make into their own? Or was it some reason that Doppelgaenger could never understand?
The four corrugated-metal-and-concrete buildings on the property had managed to survive the hurricane called Andrew mostly intact. Barron had preserved the appearance on the outside down to the graffiti, but had gutted the insides, then created a hidden structure within each building that served as a compact Forward Base and hangars. It was supremely ironic that right beneath the one used as the main hangar was the missile silo itself, still holding the experimental Aerojet missile.
Doppelgaenger left Fledermaus on a cracked concrete pad inside the corrugated metal hangar next to Barron’s main building, a blocky beige concrete creation covered in graffiti. Very few non-Thulians had ever been allowed to see what was inside that building. Barron waited just outside a doorless entry, Thulian flunkies in power armor standing motionless on either side of her.
As always, when facing one of the Masters, Doppelgaenger was confronted by the question, how on earth did one classify them? Not untermenschen, surely. But not an ubermensch either. Not a mensch at all, actually. It would have made a pretty philosophical problem for the likes of Goebbels, Heidegger, and Hitler himself to have debated over meals of homely kraut and bratwurst at the Eagle’s Nest.
They were, considered purely as aesthetic creatures, rather attractive. Around eight or nine feet tall, thin, delicate, they were bipeds that boasted eight functional arms. The main two, and the ones that corresponded most closely to human arms, were much larger than the others and ended in pincers. The rest were generally kept close to the body until needed, and ended in specialized appendages. The entire creature—at least what Doppelgaenger could see of it beneath armor that was strictly decorative—was covered in tiny purple feathers. The head was surmounted by a crest of very long, silky feathers of a darker purple hue that gave the impression of a showgirl’s headdress, and the head beneath the crest was actually heart-shaped, with a pair of huge, childlike, slanted eyes colored a rich emerald-green with no whites to them, a tiny, tip-tilted nose, and an unobtrusive slit for a mouth.
The mouth opened, and perfectly accented Bavarian German words in a rich, feminine contralto emerged from it.
“I trust your task went well, my friend?”
“Well enough, dear Barron,” Doppelgaenger said with a bow. “Please convey my gratitude to Supreme Oberfuhrer Gero for his patience in this task. He will soon have another formidable weapon to add to his already impressive arsenal. Nothing, perhaps, on your level, of course. Still, I would be most surprised if he were not pleased with my results.”
“You are ever so amusing, Doppelgaenger,” Barron purred. “Some—certainly your fellow ubermenschen—might see your ambition as troublesome, even insulting in how you seek to rise above your station. But you never cease to entertain. That is perhaps why he dotes on you so. You further the game, you always have. And you are always a favorite in the ratings.” She paused as the cargo doors opened with a steely hiss on Fledermaus and a group of workers rushed forward to unload a large casket onto the awaiting transport.
“And you plan to conduct your unseemly experiments here?” Barron asked with a slight grimace. “It took an age to sanitize the chambers after the last incident.”
“Not at all,” Doppelgaenger laughed. “My prize is still on board. This is, I think, something of a bonus. The universe provides, Commander.”
“Yes, so you have said, on many an occasion.” Barron cocked her head, curious. “Oh, but I do enjoy puzzles. Will you have me guess?”
“Please do, Commander,” Doppelgaenger invited. “I enjoy matching wits with you.”
“Well, so many choices! It must be on our list of desired acquisitions, which narrows things down somewhat.” One of Barron’s lesser appendages tapped out a rhythm on her left pincer. “By the way, I see you have taken on a female persona to match your actual sex. May I say I approve?”
Doppelgaenger shrugged. “It was required for the task. When I return to the Mothership, alas, I will have to revert to the male form. Tedious, but necessary.”
Barron gave a churr of irritation. “Unfortunate. I do not approve of hiding what and who you are.”
Doppelgaenger made a gesture with her hands that the Masters accepted as a sign of conciliation. “Alas, I do not have your advantages. No one offers disrespect to one of the Masters, male or female. Humanity, for all their talk of equality and justice, still consider the lack of a penis as a birth defect. I grew tired of gender bias ages ago, and chose to do something about it. But, please, let us leave this topic and return to the more delightful one of which of your chosen targets I have acquired. I will give you a hint. Although I am wearing an ECHO uniform, it is not a member of ECHO.”
“Ah,” Barron said, nodding. “My first guess would have been the Victrix woman. She was your preliminary target, was she not? She would have been a high prize indeed.”
“I regret to say she was more difficult to capture than I anticipated,” Doppelgaenger said smoothly. “If it is any consolation, I left her in great, lingering pain. And considerable emotional distress, perhaps enough to render her useless to ECHO for the foreseeable future.” She made a motion that the Masters interpreted as “contempt for one’s enemy” and continued. “These ECHO metas are as vulnerable to emotional manipulation as any normal human. Rest assured, she will soon be ours.”
“That leaves me with few options,” Barron said. “By all accounts, Tesla and Marconi were destroyed by the destruction of Metis. Surely you can’t have captured the most elusive quarry of all? Am I to understand that this casket carries the one and only…?”
“Dominic Verdigris III,” said a gruff voice. “And before you give whoever this yahoo is too much credit, I’m sure you’ll give me permission to register a complaint.”
They turned, surprised at the interruption, as a short, stocky man marched into the hangar. His face, barely discernible in the dim light, nevertheless radiated a dark fury. He was accompanied by a tall, emaciated man, impeccably dressed in a tailored suit, horn-rimmed glasses and polished shoes, his head down and fingers tapping lightly on a portable tablet.
“Jack,” Barron purred. “Why am I not surprised?” She glanced avidly from Jack to Doppelgaenger and back. “A complaint, you say? Am I to understand by this interruption that perhaps our dear Doppelgaenger’s success in obtaining Verdigris was not entirely due to her own efforts?”
Doppelgaenger throttled down rage. How dared this mud-born normal come tramping in here, claiming to be responsible for her catch?
“Yer damn skippy,” Jack growled. “It was a long, complicated setup. Took months. Had him in my sights, I did, when this cowgirl came swooping out of nowhere and scooped him up. Don’t really appreciate this, Lady Barron. You trying to renege on the deal?”
“I would be careful, human, with your choice of words and your tone,” Barron said, her voice dreadfully quiet. “Or need I remind you of the fact that you still draw breath at our Lord’s whim, and his amusement. You displayed much cheek, seeking us out, even finding us. That granted you audience, and little more. Explain yourself quickly, and bear in mind that his amusement will mean less than nothing if I find one syllable faltering towards disrespect.”
Jack stopped in his tracks, as if considering the weight of her words, and nodded. “No disrespect intended,” he said, holding his hands up in the gesture of conciliation. Dam
n him, Doppelgaenger thought, He’s learned the sign language. “I simply desire some understanding on your part, if not favor, for the lengths I went through to undermine Verd’s plans, to drive him to flight, to expose him, and make him vulnerable.”
Barron’s slit of a mouth curled up at the corners, for the Masters had learned the equivalent of “smiling.” “You had a hand in it, this I know. A masterful bit of sabotage?”
“He actually figured it out,” Jack shrugged. “How to negate metagenes. Took a bit, but yeah, I managed to contaminate his gas reservoir. I’ll admit, I took some pleasure in it. For all he knows, he messed up. He probably thinks he should have tested the formula with a larger population size before going public with that attempt at the Georgia Dome. Amazing what mixing in some simple salts and reducing agents will do. And even now, he’ll never know. Whatever comes next, he’ll just think he made a careless mistake. If nothing else, that will haunt him.” Jack smiled sardonically. “But it goes back further, as you know. That debacle in Atlanta on the anniversary of the Invasion didn’t go too well for him. You might say it started his steady decline, and I’ll admit I had a role to play in that. Since then, Verd’s been dealing with a mess of failures. A little nudge here and there, and his plans have simply fallen apart. It’s made him a little uncomfortable, even reckless.” Jack smirked. “His attempts on that so-called angel were amusing. He’ll never know why John Murdock found his Blacksnake goons in their honeymoon hotel so easily, but Verd’s not one to look back anyway. It’s the results that matter. He never really learned to cope with failure, being so unfamiliar with it. It’s made this last year rather entertaining for me.”
Barron’s crest feathers rose and fell. Doppelgaenger had not yet learned to interpret that. It seemed to be a random reaction, and yet, how could it be?
“I have to say,” Jack continued, “it gives me a warm feeling, screwing over that backstabbing prick. I’ve been there at every turn, guiding things to the point where he would simply have to rabbit right into my waiting arms. So you can imagine my…displeasure…when just moments before delivering the coup de grace, seconds before I picked him up to deliver him here to you, he got picked up by…her.” He stuck a thumb at Doppelgaenger, and gave her a sour look. “Aren’t you supposed to be a dude?”
Avalanche: Book Five in the Secret World Chronicle Page 40