World Divided: Book Two of the Secret World Chronicle-ARC

by Mercedes Lackey; Steve Libby; Cody Martin

  While they sorted through their finds, she got something. “Uh…sir? I’ve been doing some scouting of a sort. This isn’t the only vault. There’s something…nasty down there. Four hundred ninety-three point four meters south.”

  “Define ‘nasty,’ Overwatch.”

  “I’m pinging an extremely large storage area with a lot of tech in it. A lot of the same metal as in the armor.”

  “So perhaps they’re samples in another area of the Catacombs,” Bulwark said. “How much of it?”

  “Ballpark?”

  “Sure.”

  “About what hit Atlanta.”

  Bella whistled. “That’s no ‘sample.’ We heading in, bossman?”

  Bulwark nodded, slipping his scanner back into his belt. “We’re done in this room, might as well check it out.”

  “Have you gone right around the bend?” Red objected. “Didn’t you hear what she said? There’s enough of that crap in there to build a small army.”

  “And?”

  “Have you considered the possibility it is a small army? We got the primary objective, we should book.”

  “We had three directives: to see if infiltrating the Catacombs was possible, to obtain Goldman’s research notes, and to get a sample of the material in question. We are in striking distance of all three. We should move on.”

  “Within the realms of reconnaissance, Bull! There’s no telling what’s in there!”

  “Then we investigate. Really, Djinni, this labyrinth was sealed in the sixties. Do you really expect there to be the fully armed troops and weaponry we faced during the Invasion?”

  Red looked like he was ready with an angry retort, but instead turned his back on Bulwark and marched away.

  “What’s up his grill?” Scope asked.

  Bulwark watched Djinni storm off, his face pensive. The trainees relaxed. They knew that look. Bull was sizing the situation up, and would have an answer soon. They waited patiently. Bella looked from one to the other, wondering what the hell was going on. But Vickie already had an idea, and she was right.

  “We’re walking into the unknown,” Bull said finally. “This is as far as the Djinni’s gone.”

  ***

  “Backing up all intel and locations now, Team Leader,” Vickie said very formally. “Sending backups to Echo database…now.”

  What she hadn’t said was obvious to anyone who knew her: if the team was lost, the data was still safe.

  As they continued, Vickie switched to Bulwark’s private channel. “Sir, I’m not sure this is a good idea, from the perspective of me, outside, safe. Relatively.”

  “Understood, Overwatch. You realize this puts us in a very bad situation. We’ll have to look to you more than ever.”

  “Yessir.” She cut back over to Djinni’s private freq. “Djinni…there’s probably a pattern here. I think you may be better at spotting it than me; I’ve never gone treasure-hunting and I don’t know jack about modern traps other than trying to scan for crap in the walls, and we saw how well that worked. Ideas? Hints? Buy a vowel?”

  “I have no frickin’ clue,” Red muttered. “You’re asking me to think like a man who, despite his high profile, managed to escape capture after the war and still managed to build a monstrosity like this in the heart of America without being discovered.”

  “Well, he had to have assumed there were going to be metas on both sides of the law coming down here. And normals.”

  Red stopped. “Right, so he would have realized he had any number of possible abilities to overcome. Time to think this through.” He turned to the others. “Okay, so if you needed to keep your goodies safe in a maze from anyone in a world filled with metas, what would you need to do? Who would you need to overcome?”

  “Hounds,” Bella piped up. “Metas who can find the path.”

  “Right,” Djinni nodded. “So assuming there are those who can circumvent the maze, like we have with Overwatch, you would need to line the most direct route with hazards that, in combination, would take down anyone.”

  “I’m running a quick search on abilities that we know metas had by the time Goldman died.” Vickie’s hand flew over her keyboard, calling up multiple screens that flashed streaming hits before her. “Invulnerability—well, call it ‘really hard to kill’—that’s top on the list. Followed by flyers, so your traps would not have to count on people stepping on things to trigger them. TK/TP, samey same.”

  “What about those powerful enough to simply kick in the door and storm their way to the target?” Bulwark asked. “Surely Goldman would have prepped for them.”

  “Autodestruct.” Vickie’s answer was prompt and confident. “Ubermensch the first could probably have gotten away with that, so it looks like Goldman took that into account—one of the reasons it’s so hard to read this place. Every time you turn around my magic is going ‘Don’t touch that!’ You know, Goldman must have been willing to let people get to his goodies if they were able to meet his challenges. There’s a cold, psychotic logic to this. From the scraps of blueprints we have, to a brief feel of the ley lines of this place, it all points to what appears to be a massive power source deeper in the complex. Best guess, the whole place is set to blow if anything comes in not willing to play by the rules of the labyrinth.”

  “Can you estimate the power level?” Bulwark said.

  “On the scale of Hiroshima.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Do you hear a rim shot? This guy was playing for keeps and quite prepared to take out the neighborhood for spite.”

  Red looked them over. Even their breathing had grown cautious. They were afraid to move, perhaps even to think. They were so close now to their objective. Five hundred yards. Still, a lot could happen in five hundred yards…

  “Okay,” he said, urging them to keep thinking. “Goldman’s tried to crush us, then gas, melt and electrocute us. What’s left?”

  “Vacuum?” Vickie suggested. “Flood? Hordes of ROUSes?”

  Red shook his head, it didn’t sound right. “No, seems he’s already covered his bases with the brute squads.”

  “You are the brute squad,” Bella muttered. No one laughed.

  “Beam us into space? Could he have had that tech?” Vickie answered her own question. “No, or he’d have built this out there. Djinni, do you think we should just feel our way along? I’m concerned there might also be timers on some of this shite. Timers would fit the parameters of a ‘keep moving’ rule.”

  Red shared a look with Bulwark.

  “Your call, Bull,” he said finally.

  “Slowly,” Bulwark said. “Everyone around me, tight as you can, I can only extend protection so far without running into the walls. Harmony, I need you to ramp up Scope. We’re going to need her eyes. Overwatch, can you keep the light source ahead of us, at least a hundred feet?”

  “Can do,” Vickie replied. The light crept slowly forward, a few inches at a time, and they began to advance. “So what other powers did Goldman know about? Motion sensors to get flyers and TKers? How would he stop a TPer, other than limit line of sight?”

  “The labyrinth itself would have taken care of that,” Djinni said. “Nothing’s line of sight here for more than forty feet.”

  Scope had finally started sweating. Her eyes were everywhere. Her gaze flickered from side to side, floor to ceiling and back so fast the telemetry could barely keep track of it.

  “Okay, what about flyers and TKers? You know, the floaty kind.”

  “If the first ceiling didn’t cave them in, they would have been strangled, oozed and fried by the second. No, we’re definitely missing something.”

  Of them all, Bull was a rock…and, if he wasn’t futzing her reads, Djinni was surprisingly cool. Of course given how much he could control his body, no telling what was going on in his head. Harmony was tighter than a banjo string at this point; Vickie suspected that only the constant physical contact with Bull kept her focused.

  “What could a sonic power do to get t
hrough that you guys can’t? Something a sonic might trigger. Uh, someone with sonar, so they wouldn’t need light at all?”

  “We’re miles beneath the surface,” Djinni said. “Anything physical or mechanical in nature is going to get picked up here. There’s almost no background to compensate for, Overwatch. Be it sound, light, he could have filtered out earth tremors…what’s left?”

  “Boy bands? Drive you crazy with perfect hair?” Vickie was running out of ideas. “A pheromone weapon to make you all strip naked and have an orgy?”

  What was left? Of course.

  “The one thing that the Thulians are missing is they don’t seem to recognize that magic works,” Vickie said, thinking aloud herself. “But…wait…that wasn’t true of the early pre-Na—”

  Too late.

  Ahead of them, Vickie’s light source came to a sudden stop and flashed as it completed the mystic circuit. Too late she saw the Nordic sigils flare as they were fed with her power, and something else. A collapsed hole of energy, contained and tethered to a small point in space by a thin ley line. As her magic probe brushed the point of contact, the tether sparked and collapsed, igniting the arcane trap. A massive cell of raw energy erupted, was grounded, and channeled itself into the nearest mystical matrix—Vickie’s light spell. It was a lot like having the sun go off in your face. Blinding light followed by pain so intense it wasn’t even pain anymore, but a primal force.

  ***

  Bella had been looking back the other way in case there was something sneaking up on them. She caught the flash as reflection down the tunnel and instinctively closed and covered her eyes. “Stop!” she shrieked. “Nobody move!”

  She opened her eyes again.

  It was dark. Cave dark. Scope was sobbing. “Who’s hurt?” Bella snapped, turning and groping for them.

  “My eyes! They’re burning! I can’t see!” Scope cried, sounding as if everything she owned in the world had been taken from her. Which, of course, since her power was in her eyes…

  “Honey, none of us can see.” Bella found Scope’s elbow, followed the arm up to the woman’s face, and clapped a hand over Scope’s eyes, ruthlessly opening herself up to everything. This psychic healing thing…you had to let go of everything you knew and let what felt like pure instinct tell you what was going on—at least, you did when it wasn’t something obvious like a gaping wound. Which was hard for a control freak like Bella. Getting easier though, with the angel’s help.…

  “You’ll be okay. Not right now, but the optic nerve’s intact…” She let the cells tell her what was going on. “Retinal damage, it’ll heal. Corneas are fine. Lens too. Lens is where your power is. Scope, you’ll have it all back in a couple days, faster if I or Sovie or another Healer can concentrate on you.” She gave Scope a quick burst just so she could start seeing something (at least, once they had a light again), to let her know that Bella wasn’t blowing smoke to make her feel better. She felt for her flashlight and turned it on.

  The others were blinking and rubbing their eyes, but they seemed to be recovering.

  “I knew it,” Red spat, turning on his own flashlight. “I knew it. Magic, of course, it’s always magic…” He paused to run the light over the length of the hall. “Overwatch? We’re in the dark here. Anything stirring around us?”

  He was met with silence.

  “Victrix? Report.”

  More silence, and a very faint hiss in their earpieces.

  “Terrific.”

  “Well, shit,” Bella said sourly. “Keep going or bail? We’ve got the notes. Is it worth going on without Overwatch on the basis of what we think might be out there?”

  She rested one hand on Scope’s shoulder and gave the woman another dose of healing. It was working, actually. She felt it making the undamaged cells replicate, the ones that were not too damaged…were they regenerating? Hard to tell.…“Scope, you’re currently the weakest link. Can you go on?”

  Scope shot her a dirty look and stood up. With a flourish she drew out her pistols and came to attention next to Bull. She was still squinting.

  “Just tell me which blurry thing to shoot.”

  Bulwark motioned them forward. “Let’s go.”

  Acrobat hesitated. “Sir, we’ve lost tactical, Scope’s vision is in question and Djinni’s got no clue what’s ahead. Are you sure that’s wise?”

  Bull shone his flashlight down the hall. “Son, what we have are some notes on what may very well be the key to handling everything the Kriegs can dish out—but it might not. Around that corner is a cache of the stuff in question, or better yet, prototypes. We get our hands on those, and the boys back in the lab might be able to piece together enough data to crack open a Krieg death trooper and take him down in seconds. That sound worth it to you?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Then what say we head down there and finish this?”

  ***

  Slowly sight came back; consciousness had come first, and it had taken all of her discipline to stay where she was when she came to and couldn’t see.

  Vickie had trained herself a long time ago to be aware of where she was as soon as she was awake; the zero-gravity chair kept her upright and in one place even unconscious. And fortunately for her, sight started coming back pretty quickly.

  The first thing that jump-started was the realization that she’d almost had the right answer when the answer blew up in her face. These Thulians didn’t know magic, but Goldman had; he’d been around when Himmler was messing about with his SS-elite magic society. So he’d trapped the place against magicians.

  The only thing that had saved them all was that she hadn’t been physically present, and all she was using was a simple, low-level light spell. The trap had been designed to take whatever magic touched it, amp it up exponentially, and blow it back in the caster’s face. If she had been there, it would have charred her inside and out, and the gods only knew what it would have done to the rest of the team. But the caster wasn’t there. Just her computer—

  Computers! She didn’t hear the noises of her Overwatch suite! No fans, no pings, no…nothing. That jolted her into full consciousness, and she flailed in her chair. And that awoke more pain than she’d been in since she’d been in burn rehab. Her skin seemed to have tightened all over where there were scars, hardening up, and hurting.

  For a moment that put her into pure panic mode. Then a particularly gut-wrenching spasm brought tears of pain into her eyes, and that cleared them. She blinked and saw all her computer screens dark, and got the mental flash of her team down in the Catacombs just as blind as she was.

  ***

  There were no more traps. Before Vickie had gotten knocked offline, she’d downloaded the latest iteration of their sketchy map to Bull’s PDA, with “where you’ve been” and most importantly, “where you’re going” marked on it. It had been updating regularly all along, so he could only assume that she had that function automated.

  That meant that, since they were almost line of sight to what Overwatch thought was their goal…it was within reach.

  “Halt,” he said quietly.

  His team, huddled nervously about him, came to an immediate stop. Bull shone his light ahead of them.

  “We turn right, and we’re there,” he whispered. “End of the line.”

  “Overwatch able to give you any details before she fizzled out?” Red asked.

  “Just some rough dimensions,” Bull said.

  “And?”

  “It’s…big. Roughly the size of the Echo main hangar.”

  “You mean that hangar bay with the supersonics?”

  “No, the entire hangar.”

  “Jeebus,” Bella muttered. “What’s he got down here? The Neue Graf Spee? Hitler’s Escape Rocket? Walt Disney?”

  “If we’re lucky, Operative Blue, perhaps some hard evidence that his experiments worked.”

  Bull motioned them close and nodded to Harmony. Again, she laid a tentative hand on his back and the force field intensified arou
nd them. He jerked his head at the bend in the path, and they inched forward.

  They came to a portal. Big, massive, and circular, much like an old-fashioned bank vault door. The door was reinforced, and as importantly, the frame was just as heavy. No blowing this thing off its hinges.

  Red handed Bella his flashlight and motioned her to hold the beam steady. They watched as he knelt next to the door, in front of an ancient access panel. After a moment, his claws flashed out again.

  “More hack-and-slash disabling?” Bella asked.

  “Not this time,” Red muttered as he slipped his claws beneath the panel casing. With a grunt, he pried the cover off and examined the mess of wires and circuitry beneath. “If this place is as big as Bull says it is, we might need to do more than open the door. We might need light.”

  He fell silent as he gracefully snipped some nondescript wires apart. He shed his claws again and his nimble, unencumbered hands reached in and brushed a few wires together. There was a crackle as sparks flared and a low hum crescendoed all around them. Darkness fled as fluorescent bulbs lining the path flickered to life. A few continued to flicker.

  “Are you insane?” Acrobat demanded. “You just turned on…what if you set off another trap?”

  Bella decided to try something. The kid was ramping up again. She more or less shoved calm at him, all the while keeping her voice soft and soothing. “Anything down here doesn’t need light to get us. But we need light to see it coming.”

  Red nodded, still focused on the panel. “And if this chamber is as big as Bull says it is, no way our flashlights will be enough. Ah, here we are…”

  He reached in and withdrew a large circuit board still tethered to the panel by ropes of wires. The circuits were printed in gold. The transistors on it were vintage 1960s—about as big as grains of corn rather than the head of a pin.

  “Wow…that is brilliant work.” Bella’s eyes were like dinner plates. “Vic’d kill to see this. Have you got any idea how much that would be worth to a museu—”

  “No idea,” Djinni said, and proceeded to smash the board against the wall. There was a mighty crash as the glass-walled transistors shattered. The silence that followed was interrupted by a steely hiss as the portal slid open.