“Miss…Victrix, right?”
“Technically Nagy. Call me Vickie, or Vix,” she said absently, using her PDA to access media files for the “Adventures of John Murdock” sequence.
“Right. Vickie. How the hell did I get mixed up in all of this? I mean,” he shook his head, sighing, “last I remember, Nazis didn’t run around blowing up things all that much, and aliens weren’t exactly taken seriously as terrorists.”
She ran a hand through her hair; she wasn’t quite as prone to panic attacks as she used to be, but she could feel her nerves doing the jitterbug, and her hair was damp at the roots. This wasn’t her room, her chair, her safe place. But this was Johnny, and they had done all those ops together with her as Overwatch. But…it wasn’t. Dammit. “Look…watch the documentary first. What I am going to show you about yourself won’t make any sense until you see what happened. OK?”
“Alright, ma’am. Do y’have any coffee or tea, since this seems like it’ll take awhile?”
Tea. “Uh…it’ll take a minute, the Russkis live on tea, but it’s all black samovar tea, not green, and it doubles as paint-remover.” Was it worth the effort to apport some from her kitchen?
* * *
John looked at her hard for a moment before turning his attention back to the laptop. How did she know that I prefer green tea? This whole “being out of the loop” bit is getting old, fast. This tiny woman…like a little blond pixie…she was making all of his internal alarms go off. Her body language said she was on the ragged edge of a panic—he could almost smell it on her—and yet her voice was steady, everything she said made sense, and she acted like an old friend. She wasn’t faking it; this person knew him. It was disconcerting. All of his instincts told him to run; get distance, asses the situation, figure out what to do. He was fighting in the dark at the moment, however; he had been thrust into a world that seemed to have turned itself upside down. He was a metahuman, the world had been devastated, and now he was working with commies. It all seemed like too much to process. The only smart move he had to make, for now, was to wait and see. Learn what he could; these people seemed to want to help him, not play him, but he was still wary.
Then she said something that actually made no sense at all. “Um. Since I guess you’ve never seen real magic before, this might freak you. So, uh, you being special ops military and all, and military reactions tending to be a tad strong, uh—”
“Hold up, ma’am. Y’said ‘magic,’ right? We talkin’ rabbits coming out of hats, sleight of hand, an’ all of that?” He had heard the blue woman, Bella, and the commie leader, say that this Victrix was a magician before. He knew he hadn’t misheard, but he hadn’t exactly been ready to believe, either.
She sucked in her lower lip. “Uh, no. Magic. Real magic. Like…oh hell. Just don’t freak.”
“Metahumans exist. Broadcast energy exists; that much, ECHO shit, I remember. Apparently, Nazis in power armor exist, along with aliens. But…magic, ma’am? Color me an unbeliever; is this just a schtick for your powers or somethin’?” He looked utterly unimpressed.
“Just don’t freak,” she repeated. “Don’t karate chop me, or grab a scalpel, or…just don’t freak.”
She licked her finger, drew a circle in spit on the top of the table, then drew inside the circle, and muttered…something. Her eyes flicked back and forth in rapid fire while closed; she was obviously concentrating extremely hard on something. There was a little bumpf of displaced air. And where she’d drawn the circle, the empty table now had…
A little stone figure inside it. No larger than an original G.I. Joe action figure…but it was moving. The figure was lumpy and prehistoric-looking. One “hand” clutched an electric teakettle. The other held a wad of teabags to its chest.
John did his very best to keep his jaw from hitting the table; he managed it, barely. After a few stupefied seconds, he regained his words. “Ma’am…what is that?” He pointed at the stone figure. This has gotta be some kinda trick.
“Oh, this’s Herb.” She turned her attention back to the animate rock. “Thanks sweets, you remembered the kettle, you are a lifesaver,” she said to the statue. Which squeaked, and moved, holding the teabags up to her.
John felt ill again. “This isn’t a trick, is it? You’re really doing this.”
“It’s my job,” she said, dryly, taking the kettle, filling it from water in the medbay sink, and plugging it in. “I’m a technoshaman. I do cybermancy. My traditional magic is Earth magic, primarily. Herb is an Earth Elemental.”
“Techno-what? Your church give out pamphlets or have y’all shave heads or anything like that? I have no clue what you just said.”
She sighed. “Now do you see what I mean by stuff not making sense until you watch the film? So watch the film.”
He nodded obediently, keeping his eyes on Herb for a few more moments before turning to the laptop. When all of the BBC recaps and internet clips were over, he felt as if he was waking up naked and disoriented all over again. Jesus…eight years. I’ve been out of it for eight years. How did I get like this? John’s head swam, and he felt sick to his stomach. He had to focus; he had to figure out what to do. If what these people were telling him was true—-it seemed to be, so far—his troops were dead. He was out of the Army, and a metahuman. And the world had been set on fire. What could he do?
She had been typing away madly at some smaller device while he had been watching, taking time out only to gulp tea herself. Now she looked up. “OK. Sixty-four dollar question. Do you want to know how you got into the CCCP first, or…or what you’ve been doing for the last eight years first?”
“If they’re exclusive, I’d like t’hear where the hell I’ve been the last eight years. Ma’am.”
She didn’t answer him. She turned to the little stone creature. “Herb, remember the file cabinet in my Overwatch room? The file folder with the Solomon’s Seal lock on it?”
The thing squeaked and nodded. She handed it a ring she took off her finger. “Unlock it with the ring and grab what you find in there, hold onto it and tell Grey to ping my PDA when you have it. Make sure you have every scrap of paper in that folder, ’kay?”
It squeaked and nodded more vigorously. She repeated the actions that had fetched the stone “Elemental,” tea, kettle and all, drawing a new circle around the thing. Then she clapped her hands, and it…vanished.
“Good help is priceless,” she said to no one in particular, a bead of sweat running down her face. “This’ll take a little bit. Tea?”
John shook himself out of a daze. “Um, yes please, ma’am.” Magic was too weird. Even with strangeness such as metahumans and techno wonders that would boggle the mind, John figured that he had a fairly good handle on the world. Magic was different; it felt wrong to him. For some reason that sensation sparked something in him, like there was something he was forgetting that he ought not be. He dismissed it, staring at the laptop as Vickie made more tea, dumped what seemed like about a quarter cup of sugar in hers, and drank it down. He stared. That was a lot of sugar. “Uh…it’s your body but…”
“Right. I explained all this to you before, but…yeah. Uh, magic is like physics. No free lunch. Energy to move stuff has to come from somewhere, usually me. So figure I’ve been running up and down five flights of stairs to do this. A lot.” She mopped her brow with a paper towel. “So while Herb gets what I need, I’m drinking sugar and I am taking a rest, here. But that’s why I became a technoshaman in the first place, I need a lot less energy to do stuff with computer assist. Like—well, keeping track of you, which was mostly my job. Is my job. Your techno-wizardry eye over your shoulder, called Overwatch.” She blinked. “Huh. I wonder.”
He leaned back in his seat. “That tone doesn’t sound like somethin’ I’ll like, ma’am.”
“Let me borrow that a second.” She gestured to the laptop. When he handed it to her, she began typing furiously.
A moment later…a HUD appeared in front of him, seemingly about six inches i
n front of his eye. He swatted the air furiously for a moment before realizing that it was a projection. “How did you do that?”
“In-eye implanted camera and projector, part magic, part mechanical. Also a subvocal pickup mic and a speaker in your ear. Still working…which proves that you are you, anyway.” The other device made a chirping sound. She put the laptop down, took a deep, weary-sounding breath, and did her little ritual all over again. This time when the air displaced, the stone man was holding a fat file folder.
“Good job, Herb,” she said with approval, and took it, then handed it to John. “This is your CCCP stuff, plus everything I have on you, as well as in regard to working with them. Read it. Then start asking questions.” She was a little—no, a lot—pale. “I need to lie down and suck on some more sugar.”
John hefted the folder; it was heavy. “What is it?”
“Your missing eight years. Part of it, anyway,” she said, lying down on the examination table, and sticking a lollipop in her mouth. “I’m still working on the video files to verify for you, but I need a break.” Curiouser and curiouser. I think I need to wake up, or somethin’. He opened the file, and began to read.
* * *
John finished reading the thick folder some time later, standing up and walking to where Vickie was lying down. “All of this is legit?” He didn’t look very impressed.
She cracked one eye open and looked at him sardonically. “Why in hell would I bother to fake up that much photoshopped material just to fool one guy? In case you hadn’t noticed, hotshot, there’s a war on, and I already need three of me just to keep up.”
“Lady, I wake up and everyone is telling me the world is on fire, Nazi aliens exist, and that I’m eight years behind on all of my car payments. I’m not really takin’ much for granted, ’kay?” He tapped the file. “According to this, I wandered in here, injured by some Blacksnake operatives that were trying to recruit me ‘cause I’m a metahuman. I then became an operator for the CCCP, patrollin’ this area of Atlanta and goin’ out to blow Nazi stuff up regularly. Right?”
“When you weren’t blowing up CCCP Urals, yeah, pretty much.” She closed her eye.
“And you were part of my support crew. Just seems like stuff that, I dunno, I’d remember. How the hell did I lose my memory?”
“Wish I knew. You’ll note at the end of your file that you were dying. As in, days to live. At the end of the last op, which was roughly yesterday, of which all I have at this moment is the recordings I made during it, not my notes, you had hours to live. Now you’re bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and you don’t remember eight years worth of living on the run, not to mention our last altercation with Hitler’s stepchildren.” Her eyes were still closed. “All I know is there was a big old mystical bang, and you turned up in the CCCP break-room without either your clothing or your memory.”
There was something about the set of her jaw, even with her eyes closed, that warned him she was not going to let things remain this uncertain.
“Alright. I’ll bite for now.” He turned to start reading the files again, but looked back to Vickie before he sat down. “Who was that red-haired gal with the wings that ran outta here so fast? ECHO, like you and the smurf?”
Now she opened her eyes and sat up. “Now that is a very interesting question indeed. She used to be an angel. I mean that literally. Fiery sword, wings, celestial powers, appearing and vanishing at will, speaking cryptically, the whole nine yards. I am not making this up, an angel.”
John arched an eyebrow skeptically. “Ma’am, I wasn’t much of a believer back before this craziness. I’m still not much of one now. An angel?”
“Verified by every magical and mystical authority that I trust.” She shrugged. “And she seemed very attracted to you for some reason.”
He paused for a few beats. “I’m not wholly sold on magic. But I’m not entirely unconvinced, either; I’ve never seen stuff like what you did earlier, an’ I got the impression that it was all small-fry stuff. Nothin’ metahuman I’ve heard of can do that, unless you’re playin’ with my head. But—angels?”
“Well, currently the most interesting thing is that she picked you up off the battlefield, coughing blood, and all my med-readouts said you had hours to live. None of our our people were able to heal or fix what was wrong with you. Then there was that mystical nuke going off, somewhere nearby, and now here you are—and there she is, just a metahuman. Or…hmm I’ll say mostly a metahuman. Certainly mortal. I figure it’s gotta be connected.” She shook her head. “Anyway, let’s bring you up to speed on you, first. You were a fire-chucker. So…make with the fire.”
“Got a lighter or a couple of twigs? I’ll get right on it.”
“OK smartass…” she muttered. He saw her fingers twitch a moment.
He felt the movement; instincts kicked in. Something big behind him. John whirled around, the dropping feeling in the pit of his stomach telling him that it was going to be bad. He scanned it instantly, and everything seemed to move much slower than it should have. After reading the file Vickie gave him, and watching the recorded BBC broadcasts and CCCP archival footage, he instantly knew what he was looking at; one of the Nazi troopers, in full power armor.
There weren’t any weapons nearby, beyond makeshift bludgeons and a few useless surgical implements; John had scanned the room the instant he’d been awake enough to be aware of his surroundings. He was as good as naked. Vickie was just some young gal, and worn out from whatever her magic was; he had to do something, give her time to get away, anything. He lunged towards the Nazi, thrusting his right hand forward—
—a large spat of flame blasted against the trooper, and it instantly disappeared.
“Nice shootin’, Tex.”
Where the trooper had been was a thin rock, tall as the trooper, and now flame-scorched and partly melted.
“What the hell just happened?” John was still in a half-crouch, scanning the room for threats.
“You were a smart-ass, so I dropped a live-fire exercise on you.” Vickie looked at her hands for a moment; they were shaking. “Think I can wait a little before I put that rock back out in the garden. I gave you a target with an illusion instead of just an illusion because I didn’t want you to blast a hole in Sovie’s medbay. You’re already down three Urals to the Commissar as it is.”
He looked unbelieving at his hands. “I could actually blast through the wall? Am I that powerful?” He glanced at her. “What are the ratings that metas use again? What am I?”
“You’re an OpThree at least. Not a Four…yet. But a definite high Three. One of the few people that has anything that can actually get through the Krieger power armor.” She gestured at the file folder. “There’s recordings in there of you duking it out with one of their big shots, not once, but twice. Ubermensch II. Or you can wait for my director’s cut version.”
John snapped his fingers, producing a lighter-size flame. “Fire weakens them, right? The suits. Makes ’em easier to take out?”
“That’s it, in a nutshell. However, you can do more than produce fire, you can ramp up to plasma and cut through them. Even the Death Spheres, at full-on power.” Again, she gestured at the folder. “I’d say go sit yourself down at a computer and watch my stuff. I’ve got all the feeds from the ops I was Overwatch for you in there, including the last one. Eyes-only stuff, please. Don’t want it showing up on the internet.”
“Uh, roger, ma’am.” He closed his hand over the flame, extinguishing it.
“Oh, also? You have implants. Aside from mine, that is. Some sort of “Super-Sekrit” implants. You wouldn’t talk about them. At least not to me, probably not to Bell, and definitely not to Saviour. So if things seem to go all special-effects for you when you’re ramped up, well, that’s probably why.”
“Everything is…enhanced. Things are too loud an’ too bright sometimes, an’ they got…’special-effects,’ as y’said, when I shot that rock. Is that the ‘implants’?”
“Probably. You wer
e faster than you should have been, and stronger, and a helluva lot harder to kill. Any human and most metahumans would have died from the gut-stab you had when you showed up here, long before you made it to the door.” She watched him through narrowed eyes, face giving away nothing. He felt like he was going to throw up again, though he was trying very hard to hide it.
But her hands were still shaking.
* * *
This was a gamble, a very high-stakes gamble. She was gambling that if he had the mindset of the Delta soldier that she thought he had been those eight years ago—after working with all the ex-Forces guys that turned up in the FBI, she was pretty good at pegging people—he’d respond to her putting on the “command persona.” Not someone in command of him, just someone who was used to calling some shots. It seemed to be working. It was giving her a chance to do a lot of fast observations.
This version of John was a lot less hardened, a lot less cynical, a lot kinder than the old one. He moved warily, as a combat-soldier should, but without the paranoia. The old JM would have reduced her rock to a melted puddle if she had startled him that way; no hesitation, straight for the kill. Then he’d have yelled at her for pulling the stunt in the first place. This JM waited just that fraction of a second to ascertain threat, then responded with what should have worked to make that threat pause a moment. Not straight for the kill.
And when he wasn’t under threat, he moved…easily. Without the tension Johnny carried around with him, always, like it was wired into him with the implants. There was a relaxed-but-ready air about him the Johnny she knew didn’t have. The Johnny she knew was always ready, but it was the always-ready of someone who expects to lay down an arc-light attack at any moment with no survivors.
Then there was the fire.…
It was different. It smelled of celestial. Like the Seraphym’s fire. She was beginning, she thought, to get the shape of this, and it made her itch to find out the details.
And last of all…this Johnny did not have that burden of sorrow and guilt that weighed the old John down, darkened his eyes, shadowed his features, as if the ghosts of a thousand victims walked behind him at all times. If she had to put a name to the difference, it would have been a name that both the old and new Johns would probably laugh at.
Collision: Book Four in the Secret World Chronicle - eARC Page 3