It should have worked, if she had not completely underestimated the sheer power the alien Master had at his disposal.
It hit her like a tsunami, a wave of hate and malice that simply washed over her. A directed strike, like a piledriver, she might have handled, her own considerable talents able to guide and shape the emotion back at him. But there was too much raw psychic energy to manipulate, too much to redirect. It slammed into her, almost shattered her defenses, and Bella was forced to let Bull go as she staggered back. For a moment, her thoughts were a confused muddle, as fear chilled her to the bone, paralyzing her.
She gasped for air and staggered back a few more steps, pulling herself together. Glancing up, she saw Bulwark striding towards her, his muscles relaxed, casual, as if he were merely taking a peaceful moonlight stroll, though his face still looked stricken. It made the words that spilled forth from between his clenched teeth all the more chilling.
“You are simply adorable, blue girl,” Gero rasped. “Such fire, such determination—it has been most entertaining. But every good show must come to an end. It is time for the—how do you Earth vermin say it?—oh yes, it is time for the obese female to vocalize melodically. Do not fret. I will make your death a swift one…payment, if you like, for such a fine performance.” Bull glanced over at the other Masters, who were still rushing into their escape ship in a mad frenzy. “Well, that and the fact that I must attend to my pathetic flock. I really must harden them up before our next harvesting cycle. Barron is more than sufficient to deal with any confrontation, but really, it almost shames me to say our kind has grown rather complacent over the past millennium.”
“You’re counting on Barron?” Bella put on a smirk. “Too bad Barron’s dead. Oh, and your supersecret special surprise package has been deactivated too. Maybe you should have followed your ‘pathetic flock’ while you had the chance.” If I can get him to run…I’ll get the chance to call in an all-out air strike. Sure, she and Bull might be in the blast radius too, but there would probably be just enough time to sprint out of the kill zone as long as they could count on Bull’s shields to take on shrapnel and explosive debris.
If she could count on Bull…
She wavered as the emotions played out on Bull’s face. Moments before, he had seemed anguished, betraying the inner conflict between the big man and Gero for control. Now, there seemed nothing left of Bulwark. There was still anguish, but a different sort. He seemed shocked, and behind those clear blue eyes, she saw a rage building as he charged towards her, screaming in fury.
So much for Gero rabbiting, she thought. I think I just made him really mad. I think I just made it that much easier for him to control Bull. I think I’m in real trouble here.
She scrambled backwards up a hill of debris and her hand brushed the grip of her nine-mil, its clip loaded with the ECHO special incendiary and explosive charges. In his fury, Gero wasn’t bothering with any of Bull’s meta-talents. Even without his shields, if Bull was able to get his hands on her, he could probably tear her apart. Of course, without Bull’s shields, all it would take was a solid shot to his temple to end the threat. She pulled out the gun, dodging out of the way of Bull’s charge, and continued to dance around him as she fought another, internal struggle.
Her hand shook each time she leveled the gun at Bull’s head.
I have to do this!
And each time, she hesitated, and continued to dodge the big man’s clumsy attempts to grab her.
I can’t! I can’t, it’s…I love him…!
It was the uneven terrain that betrayed her, and Bella yelped as she tripped and fell with a crash to the ground. Instinctively, she rolled onto her back and aimed her gun high, and found Bull dead in her sights as he leapt down on her, his arms raised back to deliver a crushing blow.
It was a split-second decision. Shoot him between the eyes, end the threat, take the fight to Gero and finish this. Or don’t…and die knowing that once Gero and his Masters got away, they were still going to be a menace to Earth—forever. Or at least as long as the Earth lasted.
There really was no choice at all.
“Oh God, I’m sorry,” she whispered, and pulled the trigger.
The bullet skimmed past Bulwark’s head, cutting a bloody line across his scalp. “Dammit!” she screamed, and aimed again, half-blinded with tears. With a triumphant shout Bulwark knocked the gun from her hands with a heavy fist and reared back to deliver a final blow.
Bella froze, staring him in the eyes. For a moment, time stood still, and the clear blue of his eyes softened as he gazed back at her. His hands fell to his sides as a weak grin lit up his face.
“Bull?”
Bull nodded, and laid a trembling hand on her cheek.
“How…?”
“He tried to force me to kill you,” Bull croaked. “To kill my love. Now that’s insane.”
Then for one terrifying moment, Bull’s face changed again, the eyes narrowing, the mouth twisting into a snarl. “Fine!” he spat.
Then his eyes went blank, and he collapsed on top of her.
Only the fact that they were on a pile of shifting debris kept him from flattening and smothering her. With an adrenaline-fueled shove, she rolled Bull’s body off and downhill a little, and paused just long enough to touch his face before leaping to her feet. If she’d been angry before, it was nothing compared to this.
I’ve got to take that bastard out. He’s so strong, can I even do this?
She glanced down at Bull, his still body lay sprawled on the ground, only the rise and fall of his chest showing he was still alive, and felt her resolve harden. She picked up her gun and raced towards the escape ship, towards the remaining Masters…
And towards Gero.
* * *
Red had made Vickie stop long enough to get her armor back on. He had probably been hoping it would take her a lot longer than it did. At this point in her life, she could wiggle into it in under sixty seconds. The boots took a little longer, but not much.
Unfortunately, things were unfolding on Bella’s side of the ship a lot faster than she’d thought they would. Even with Red impatiently scooping her up and carrying her like a football, there was no way they would reach her in time. Red must have come to the same conclusion at the same time; he suddenly skidded to a halt as soon as they hit the surface, and put her down. “What can we do from here?” he grated. “What can you do? Can you open up the ground underneath him?”
“It’s not ground,” she panted, trying to hold off desperation so she could think. “Can’t do earth magic on what’s not earth.” She closed her eyes. “Bella’s drained. I wish I could send her juice the way Sera could. She might be able to face him head on if I could just give her more psi power. How the hell can I… Dammit, if Bella had magic and not psi, I could boost her. Or if Sera was here, she could, and…”
“And magic works like psi, sorta,” he reminded her. “You said that back in the Vault. Remember?”
It hit her. Maybe. “And…I think I’ve got something.” The belt full of storage crystals was mostly still full. This was going to depend on playing fast and loose with the Laws of Similarity and Contagion, but it was all she had left. “Eight, get ready for some more number-crunching.”
She was barely aware of Red supporting her as she ran through equations, made corrections based on Eight’s input, and formulated a…result of sorts. It wasn’t anywhere near as elegant as Eight or Overwatch or anything else that she’d done with advanced mathemagic. It was crude. It depended on some of the oldest, most primitive magical laws on Earth.
And on an unquantifiable X.
Love.
Red, Bull, and, yes, Vickie loved and were loved by Bella. She was important to them, they were important to her. Messy, crazy, insane love. Vickie was going to link them all, and pour their combined strength into her friend, plus whatever was left in the storage crystals. Or at least, that was what she hoped she was about to do.
“Here goes nothing,” she mut
tered, and fired off the equation. Link us all and back her up.
“Fiat!” she cried.
* * *
“Face me, you miserable worm!” Bella screamed and projected that across the fifty yards or so that separated her and Gero. As he slowly turned, she kept running, narrowing the distance between them. And when she got to about fifty feet, it suddenly felt as if she had run into a wall of Jell-O.
He can’t get into my head to control me, she realized, as she continued to struggle forward, leaning into the slow-motion run as if she was running against a hurricane wind. Mental shields, makes my mind too slippery. But he’s still putting up a hell of a fight. It’s all I can do to keep moving forward…
There was some sort of expression on Gero’s face; she couldn’t read it and she wasn’t about to drop her shields to read him empathically, but she thought it was a smirk. She’d narrowed the gap between them to twenty feet, though, And she was still inching forward.
Memory supplied exactly what she needed, as she remembered Sera touching her shoulder when she first healed John, and supplying her with so much power it was like trying to drink from a firehose. Maybe there was still some tenuous connection to the Infinite there.
Dig…down…deep. She pulled further on her own reserves, got a little more, narrowed the gap again to ten feet.
And there, she was stopped. Just out of reach. And the battle to reach him married with a battle against despair. His eyes flashed. With triumph? Not even rage could supply what she needed.
And then, suddenly, out of nowhere, power flooded into her. For a moment, she thought she heard a near-infinite chorus of voices in her head. Now it was her turn to feel a swell of triumph and incredulous joy as she lunged forward and grabbed what passed for his arms.
* * *
The belt around Vickie’s waist lit up like the crystals inside it were on fire as they discharged all their stored magic power at once…
…shit…
This was…big. This was bigger than she’d thought. This was…
Bloody hell—
Then she was lost in a chorus of wordless voices. Dozens. Hundreds. Thousands? She had based her calculations on only a handful of people—herself, Red and Bull—and loosely on the extent of their love for Bella. How did one quantify love anyway? It made for some fairly exotic, even vague algorithms, to say the least. It had been a long shot, as these things always were, and she had known there were bound to be some unforeseen side effects. She could feel so many of them! How was this possible? Had she somehow crossed time and space, found alternate versions of themselves to boost Bella’s reserves? Sure, let’s start with the least likely explanation. But what else could they be? Were these echoes then, an odd reverberation of their collective thoughts amplified to a roaring din? They certainly made it hard to think. The only constant was a vast feeling of love. There was so much of it. The thought struck her again. How did one quantify love? She had gathered them up, by proximity, and…
Vickie paused, stunned.
She had gathered them all.
A part of everyone who loved, or was loved by Bella. Everyone who was important to her. Everyone she was important to. Everyone. It was…it was like the little tiny bit of Sera’s Song of the Infinite she had once experienced. It was the Song of ECHO, like being the center of a universe of voices. For a brief moment, she even thought she felt the echo of John and Sera…
And one of the presences was just a little annoyed.
“Oh, for the luva…”
“Red?” she said in response. “How is this possible?”
He formed up next to her, out of nothing. And he looked, not like the thing he’d been since she’d found him alive again, but like the old Red. He was there, if a bit hazy, blurring out of reality at times, but there. He moved with his usual grace, but with an odd ebb that quickened and slowed with the pace of breathing. On the level of instinct, not of math, she understood that time was on hold for a moment. No, not on hold. That’s impossible. Slowed, to a bare fraction of normal time, but that’s not possible either. You don’t mess with time. But if time hasn’t changed…
“A mindscape,” Red snarled. “Another goddamn mindscape!” He paused, looking around. “This one’s really big though…”
“Time didn’t slow down,” she murmured, understanding. “We’ve sped up. We’re moving at the speed of thought, in a place bursting with psychic power. Holy freaking balls, what the hell? I didn’t—I just thought I was gonna boost Bell the way Sera could, using you and me and Bull, and…I think I phrased it mathemagically as ‘everyone who’s important,’ and…everyone is important. Still, this shouldn’t be possible; I don’t have this kind of juice…”
“What did you do, Egon?” Red asked. “Seriously. Forget what you intended. Cross your eyes, wiggle your nose and look at the math. You see magic as math, right? So instead of trying to think what you might have done, look at what’s actually there. What did you do?”
“I…” She looked around her, with the inner eye. The equations didn’t lie. Bella was tethered by love and something not unlike devotion to everyone in ECHO and a lot of people beyond. Her best guess? Everyone who fulfilled those parameters within a ten-mile radius, Vickie had somehow connected them. And the moment Bella touched Gero, that linked them all and had pulled Vickie and Red at least into this mindscape. With her. And the moment she realized that, she also felt it—as if she was the only one holding the thousands of strings controlling one of those gigantic competition kites. The tension centered in her chest was almost unbearable.
To hell with that. I will hold it, because I have to. “This is a mindscape, and it would have to belong to someone with a lot of psychic power to house this much square footage, so to speak,” Vickie said aloud. “I must have linked most of ECHO and brought you and me in here and, to some extent, them to back up Bella. Would this be Gero?”
“It would,” said a female voice. Vickie and Red turned, and watched another pair of figures coalesce into view. It was Bella, her hands around Gero’s throat, his around hers. In this mindscape, she looked frail, and Gero was a monster.
“Then let’s do what we’re here for.” Vickie sensed somewhere her jaw was clenching, and she poured everything—everything—into her friend. Around her, outside this mindscape but linked through her, she felt the chorus of voices join her in triumph. It burst forth like a song, fierce and pure, and at the center of it all, Bella’s tired form straightened up, awash in power.
Gero, for his part, was oblivious to what was going on. His hands gripped Bella’s throat in malicious glee, and he began to gloat, ignorant of her sudden surge of strength. “Now is the moment in all your dramas when the antagonist utters a soliloquy,” he smirked.
“You mean the villain monologues,” Bella snarled. “Fine. Monologue away, you bastard.”
Gero laughed. “You are my creation. All of you. We are the reason you metahumans exist in the first place. We set loose the transmutation nanovirus when we first arrived, just as we do on every planet we choose to manipulate. We gave you power! You should be thanking us!”
“Why?” Bella cried. “What in hell do you get out of this?”
Gero smirked. “Entertainment, little blue girl. Endless hours of entertainment. You are a particularly creative race, and we’ve certainly enjoyed your extensive works of fiction, but nothing quite captures the thrill of watching you fight and struggle against each other in real unscripted time, never knowing that it’s all doomed in the end, that when you cease to amuse, we’ll wipe you out and start anew, elsewhere amongst the stars.” Suddenly he frowned. “Except you have the uncanny ability to contaminate even our own loyal troops. We should never have given shelter to those damned Nazis.” His voice rose in a loud petulant whine. “They managed to infect our underlings with their creed, until we found those who should have been mere slaves were taking matters into their own hands, with their mad desire to conquer you. They intended to make you into a world of slaves to support
their conquest of the galaxy and the spread of their—I suppose you’d have to call it ‘religion’ of the Fourth Reich. We’d chastise and punish them for acting without orders, and as soon as I took my attention off them, they’d attack you again. Yours was to be our masterpiece! The heights you would have reached! So close! If it hadn’t been for them, we would have forged the grand epic to end all others! And now it’s all spoiled and we’ll have to start over!”
The last was uttered in a petulant shout, which fell to a pathetic squeak as Bella tightened her grip. Gero’s eyes widened as he cried out in pain, his hands retreating, struggling in vain to pry Bella’s grip from his throat.
“What…?” Gero gasped. “How…?”
“That can’t be all of it,” Bella snarled. “That’s not all you were doing. Spit it out, you fractard!” She shook him, hard enough to have made his teeth rattle, if he’d had teeth, if this had been reality and not a projection in the mindscape. “Cough it up!”
“Insignificant human…” Gero wheezed. “You cannot hope to…”
“But I can,” Bella said and, with a shocking display of strength, lifted Gero above her by the throat and slammed him down on his back; the impact echoed like a volcanic explosion all through the mindscape. “Whatever you think is happening right now, you might want to take another look around here. Go on, take a second. Look.”
Gero shuddered and became very still. He drew in a sharp breath, his head feathers quivering as he became aware of the song, as he began to look around him. Vickie glared back at him, and felt a multitude of eyes through her doing the same.
“You have our attention.” Bella said between gritted teeth. “So talk. Now.”
“We…” Gero took another breath, and winced. Vickie watched in wonder as a myriad of emotions played across his sharp features. Though he was unreadable in the real world, they could easily see his feelings here. There was confusion, shocked realization, disbelief, and finally, fear. Vickie suspected these were new to him, or at the very least, long forgotten. She almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
Avalanche: Book Five in the Secret World Chronicle Page 77