Avalanche: Book Five in the Secret World Chronicle

by Lackey, Mercedes

  “I think we must speak to it first, and reassure it. It is…complicated.” She smiled faintly at him. “It has been a very long time alone. I think that what will come most easily will be impressions.”

  “Right. Talk to the alien spacecraft,” he deadpanned. John took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. He was still connected to the ship’s…mind?…through Sera. It felt like it was searching for anything to latch on to; desperately seeking connection.

  That’s right, John replied, putting as much reassurance into the connection as he could. You’re not alone. I’m John Murdock. You already know my wife, Sera. He paused. Thank you for helping us, earlier.

  Ahhhhh. As Sera had said, what he got was more impressions than it was words. He got a glimpse of something it had been, so long ago it made his head swim to think about—when it had been a young ship, flying the vastness of space with its partner symbiotes. Then the Masters had come, destroyed its partners, boarded it, and took it over, forcing it to serve them, grafting it onto their own, much larger ship. The creature, which had never known pain or unhappiness or loneliness, now was filled with all three. In the eons since, the ship had been forced to grow to its immense size, spreading through the Masters’ vessel. Its life had been unnaturally extended as it was twisted and butchered in its enslavement to the Masters. But now, finally, it was starting to die…painfully. Its greatest fear was that the Masters would find more of its kind when they were done with it, and create another abomination like it.

  The shields, Sera prompted gently. We can beat them, but you must take down the shields.

  A violent shudder ran through the ship’s mind.

  Can’t. Not allowed. No control. Only feed shields.

  A dizzying flood of images shot through John’s mind—schematics, equations, maps, images of the shield emitters—and all of them leading back to the ship’s brain, or what passed for one.

  “The Masters,” John gasped, pulling back from the connection slightly and opening his eyes to look at Sera. “They’re feeding the shields from this creature. He can’t stop it, can’t turn it off.” He cursed to himself. “Darlin’…I only see one way out of this. We can’t turn the shields off; only the Masters can do that. But we can take away the power source.”

  “And we can end this poor creature’s pain,” she said steadily. She turned to the bulkhead and conveyed all that, wordlessly. Death is but a door, she told it. And we shall be here to help you to the other side, where there is peace and rest.

  Yes. John felt a surge of hope and defiance from the ship. Yes! I help! The ship replied eagerly.

  There was a building energy deep within it, something stirring which hadn’t been used in a very long time. Figure that’s it gettin’ ready.

  “You know what it means if we do this. We have to be here, an’ there won’t be time to get away.”

  “I am sorry you will not have your steak, my love,” Sera said, laying her hand along his cheek. “But we knew this might be the outcome. And we will be together.”

  He leaned over, kissing her gently for several long moments before pulling back. “I’ve got no doubt about that, darlin’. Let’s do this last thing right. Together.”

  John could hear the ship’s “voice”; the disparate strings of whispering were all unified now.

  I help!

  The energy in the room continued to build. From the door, John’s enhanced hearing picked up the clomp of metal-shod boots. Thulians. Guess the guys at the helm figured out somethin’ was wrong. Too late, assholes. The door shook; they were trying to batter it down. John double-checked his HUD; none of the other infiltration teams were anywhere near them. They’d be safe from what he and Sera were about to do.

  He took her in his arms, and they merged—seamlessly, effortlessly, their thoughts and very souls becoming one. Together they reached for the Celestial fire, and gathered it to them, and for the first time he understood exactly what it had felt like to be the Seraphym, at the height of her power. Endless strength. Precise control. Boundless compassion. A compassion that even extended to the Thulians who were about to be immolated along with the mind of the ship.

  It started as a spark, a tiny sphere of Celestial fire no larger than a firefly, perfect and contained. John reached for it with his mind, extending the limitless power to the spark, feeding it. He felt like he was holding a live wire as the sphere grew. Then he felt Sera’s control take over, and the sensation turned from something painful to peaceful. And the more power he spun into the sphere, the greater the peace became. He sensed her containing it, shaping it, holding it lovingly. They were almost at the tipping point; through his battle-sense and Sera’s own guidance, he knew that they would have to let go soon, release all of that pent-up power. As strong as they were together, they still were nowhere near the control and strength they would have to be to survive what they were about to release. And that didn’t matter. Not anymore.

  He felt her touch on his mind. I will always love you, she whispered. It is time.

  And just before he released his hold over the Celestial fire, he felt…something…from the ship.

  And then there was light.

  * * *

  Bull held his rifle at the ready as he followed Bella and the glowing ball of light weaving through a maze of dimly lit corridors. On occasion, he had to sling the weapon over his shoulder as they made their nervous way up narrow chutes that he barely fit into, his fingers tight on the rungs of slippery ladders. He was on edge—there was no point in denying it. They had no plan, no protocol to follow, just another fire that needed to be put out with no idea how to do it. This wasn’t anything new, of course. In the back of his mind, Bull wondered just when, exactly, he had grown accustomed to the chaos of it all. Sudden life-and-death situations, things never going to plan, and a complete reliance on faith that they would see it through to the end. He had never really doubted it. Oh, he supposed he always knew there would be a heavy cost, losses and sacrifices to be made, but he had always truly believed that at the end, they would stand victorious over their enemies. How could he not? He had virtually died and had been brought back. To lose his faith now would have been unthinkable.

  Except, for the first time, he found himself doubting.

  And it wasn’t this crazy scheme to infiltrate the Masters’ Mothership, which was, he had to admit, something of a long shot to base all their hopes upon. It wasn’t how circumstances had required that the infiltration force, even as small as it was, had been forced to split up.

  It was Bella.

  For the first time, he couldn’t read her at all. She moved with focus, with confidence, but he couldn’t tell if any of that stemmed from the determination she had fostered from these long months thrust into her newfound role as Chief Commander of ECHO…

  …or if it was simply a mask that she had forged and polished, hiding an indecisiveness, a hesitation to act, a fatal unreadiness to do what was hardest at the moment it most needed to be done. Before the end, she would have to face that, he was certain of it. And he would do whatever he could to stand by her, to protect her if needed, to be her bulwark…but he knew, at the end, she would have to stand alone and make a choice and deliver it. She would have to carry the weight of it. And while he had no doubts about whether she could, he had felt her self-doubt growing for the past few months now. And he had felt helpless to do anything about it.

  It hit him like a slug to the gut, distracted as he was, and he nearly doubled over from it.

  “What…?”

  It was a sense of…loss. Something had happened. He winced in pain and looked up to see Bella doubled over, too. She turned back to him, and for a moment he could read her again. Yes, it was loss, that much was clear from her quivering lips, the hand held firmly to her stomach.

  “You felt it too?” she asked.

  “I did,” he rumbled. “What was that?”

  “John and Sera,” Bella said, and her eyes glistened with tears she would not shed. “They’re gone
.”

  “You mean they’re…”

  “I don’t know,” Bella said, shaking her head. “They’re just…gone.”

  They just looked at each for a moment, when the Klaxons began to blare. “John Murdock is offline,” Eight said, as if to confirm what they both had felt. And the walls and the floor of the corridor they were in began to vibrate unevenly, roughly in time to the dull and distant thuds of impact.

  Bella hastily wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, straightened up, sniffed, and motioned Bull forward.

  “They did it. Shield’s down. Game on,” she muttered and quickened her pace to catch up with the glowing ball. “We can cry later.”

  Bull stood at attention and watched her hurry away. He hesitated. With a grunt, he tightened his grip on his rifle and trotted after her.

  * * *

  Vickie’s HUD led her up two levels, then directed her to kick out a panel. All well and good…but from the ongoing cacophony of alarms, there was no telling what was going to be in the corridor on the other side of that panel—and her earth magic was of no damned use at all in this place. It was time to call on some less-practiced skills.

  She let go of the ladder with one hand, and her fingers fluttered in the darkness. The darkness lightened for a moment as one of the storage crystals in her belt pouches gave up its arcane energies. She fished a rather morbid little artifact out of another pouch—a scrap of Thulian skin—and muttered, “Revelabitur!” And with that, the map in her HUD swarmed with red dots. With a few muttered commands, she zoomed in to just the section where she was.

  Empty.

  Tucking the bit of skin back where it belonged, she put her back to the ladder, hung on with both hands, and kicked forcefully with both feet. The panel popped out of its seal and slammed into the opposite wall of the corridor and she dove through the opening.

  By what could only be good luck, she’d come out in what looked like a service tunnel. Half metal, half organic, it also didn’t look to be in very good repair. That’ll do. Invisibility would have been nice…she’d have to make do with stealth. She’d be able to see Thulians on her HUD…but not human servitors, and not Masters like Barron. But hopefully, the Masters wouldn’t be caught dead in a service corridor, and according to Jack, the human servants stuck to the part of the ship where the Nazi metahumans were quartered.

  She stopped only once, when…

  …the universe rang like a bell. It had done that once before, when the Seraphym had ceased to be an angel and John Murdock had been brought back from the near dead. But this time, rather than the world filling, for a moment, with unbearable sorrow, it filled with unbearable absence. And Vickie did not need Eight saying “John Murdock is offline” to know what had happened.

  Particularly not when, a moment later, the ship came alive with the sounds of different alarms, and the walls of the corridor she was in vibrated irregularly, exactly as if the ship was under bombardment. Because, of course, it was.

  There was no time to mourn. And she wasn’t sure that she should. After all, wherever they were now, they were indisputably together, which was more than she and Red had.

  “Eight?” she subvocalized.

  “Still here, Vickie.”

  “How are the others doing?”

  There was a very, very long pause. “I am no longer receiving John Murdock’s implants.”

  She’d expected that—but it still came with a stab of pain, a pain she ruthlessly set aside. “Bells and Bull?”

  “Proceeding to the objective.”

  Time to move and take advantage of the distraction Jack and company were giving her.

  Three times she ducked into hiding to avoid Thulians pounding through the ship in their heavy armor. Once, the only place to go was up, and she wound up concealed among a group of those faintly pulsing, fleshy tubes that…must have been some sort of veins or arteries for the organic part of the ship, running along the ceiling corridor. They were disconcertingly warm, and rubbery. But at least they didn’t react to her. But then, dismayingly, Eight’s guidance ran out. “I am sorry, Vickie, but…I only had one corridor here,” Eight apologized. There was not one corridor here, there were three, intersecting in a star shape.

  And then, just as suddenly, salvation appeared in the form of a ball of glowing light. “Brumby?” she whispered.

  The light bobbed.

  “Can you take me to Doppelgaenger?”

  The light bobbed even faster.

  She took a firm grip on her sword, clenched her jaw and inhaled deeply. “Right, mate,” she said. “Lead on.”

  Brumby did not lead her down any of the corridors. Instead, he zigged aside, bobbed against a spot on the wall that didn’t look any different to Vickie than the rest of the wall, and then bobbed at her hand. She slapped her hand against the indicated spot, and a panel slid aside, revealing…

  “More Jefferies tubes,” she said aloud, with grim satisfaction as the ball of light whisked inside. “My day is made.” She climbed inside, and shut the panel behind her, leaving the only light in these access tubes that of the ghost leading her. Then, just to be sure, she triggered a silencing spell on herself. Chainmail did have a tendency to jingle, and although the inside of this tube was rubbery, there was no telling what coatings others might have. Inside one of her belt pouches, another storage crystal flared to life and died.

  “Vickie, I am tracing your path,” said Eight.

  The light ahead of her bobbed impatiently, and she dug her fingers into the rubbery surface of the tube and kept crawling.

  Eventually, after more turnings and excursions than she could count, the light dimmed itself down to almost nothing…and there were two sources of light in the tube. Brumby, and a grating in the wall ahead. At some point, Brumby had gotten her out of the access tubes and into the ventilation system. The light bobbed in front of the grate, and she crawled forward to look through it.

  This looked like someone’s private cabin, but it was a big one. There was a door in the far wall and another in the right-hand wall. The door on the right was closed shut. The door in the far wall showed a corner of a bunk.

  And it was pretty obvious whose private cabin this was. Most of this room was taken up with a huge command center that looked, oddly enough, like sixties NASA tech and Thulian super-science had spawned a bastard love child. There were several monitors inlaid in the wall, and a console below them. Altogether, it wasn’t all that dissimilar in layout to Vickie’s Overwatch suite.

  Seated at the console was an enormous, far-too-familiar figure. Bald, more overly and overtly muscled than a professional bodybuilder, and bigger than Vickie remembered, even from the back it was obvious that this was Doppelgaenger. It was wearing its male form, and its enormous but nimble fingers sped over the interface.

  The grate was just above floor-level, and Brumby was bumping gently against the wall next to it. Once again, Vickie palmed the spot, and the grate slid soundlessly aside. She slithered into the room without so much as a whisper of chainmail on metal, thanks to that silencing spell. Either Doppelgaenger hadn’t gotten Red’s spatial awareness, wasn’t using it, or was so absorbed in what it was doing that it wasn’t paying attention to anything else, because it didn’t notice the warm, breathing presence that had suddenly appeared right behind it. Then again, who would dare attack Doppelgaenger in its own quarters?

  She took a long, silent breath, unsheathed her sword and dagger, and burned through the activation equations in her head. Not just the spell on the sword, but an enhancement of every sense she had, including the magical. Gods only knew what abilities the thing had picked up from Red. So she needed all the mage-senses working now, too. It all put her right on the edge of sensory overload. But she’d fought this way before, back in the day. She could do it again now. It was a stroke of luck, she still hadn’t been detected. She had not expected to catch Doppelgaenger with its guard down, but if she couldn’t end it with one blow…then she was in for a serious fight. She’d ne
ed all the abilities she could muster if she was going to go toe to toe with this monster.

  Doppelgaenger was still utterly immersed in whatever it was doing.

  Vickie moved with painful slowness. While a berserk rush might have seemed the optimal strategy, Doppelgaenger was still vastly taller, heavier, and stronger than she was. And while she was apparently invisible to it, her best tactic was to sneak up on it until she was so close she could not fail to deliver a killing blow. She was not going to lose her one chance to end this monster quickly by being impatient. Rage was her tool; she was not the tool of her rage.

  The monitors in the wall all showed various external views…views of hell raining down on the now-unprotected ship. Alien forests were on fire; buildings in the bowl-shaped structure had already been battered into rubble. And Thulian troops and their robotic adjuncts streamed towards a point out of range of the cameras, but presumably heading for the boarding point of the combined forces, conventional and metahuman, of all of Earth.

  All but one of monitors, that is—a monitor full of text. And one familiar handle caught her attention as nothing else could have.

  @YourPalEight: Go ahead.

  And the reply, @oracle4thewin, followed by that familiar cloud address where Jack—or she thought it had been Jack—had been storing everything he’d been sending to her.

  The sword fell from her nerveless fingers, embedding itself up to the hilt in the floor. “Jack?” she gasped.

  It couldn’t be Jack. And it couldn’t be Harm either. Because Jack and his mad band were fighting off a horde of mindless Thulians. Besides, now she knew he hadn’t sent her more than half of the intel she’d been getting. If that.

  Doppelgaenger whirled in its chair, and stared at her, its face a mask of astonishment. She stared at its eyes.

  No.

  Not Doppelgaenger’s eyes.

  “Red?”

  * * *

  Mel normally wasn’t the sort to advocate for recruiting kids to serve in combat situations, but she had to admit that Penny had nerves of steel. After the brief bit of reassurance on the submarine, the preteen had performed her duties without so much as a whimper. Now, she waited for the all-clear to take Penny back onto the sub. The sterile corridors hummed with a strange electric pulse. Mel resisted the urge to clench her jaw, although the vibrations moved through her entire body and made her teeth itch.