Collision: Book Four in the Secret World Chronicle - eARC

by Mercedes Lackey

  “All right, that’s just the part the government knows about,” she continued, and now shoved his journal over to him across the table. “This covers the years you were on the run, until now.”

  He looked at her queerly, but accepted the journal and started leafing through it. “This…looks like my writing, that’s for sure. An’ y’said that this covers everything? From where my memory ‘stops’ up until that big raid?”

  “I don’t know about everything. It’s your journal, for sure, I just don’t know how much you wrote about. And it covers the time from when you had a breathing space after you went on the run, up until just before you woke up naked on the floor of the CCCP break-room. Just before, because, the last time I saw you, you were clearly dying and probably not in any shape to be jotting anything down.” She shrugged. “Something happened that didn’t get written down, but it’s easy enough to intuit from what is in there.” The words he had set down about the Seraphym’s offer were heart-rending, terrified, and brutally honest. She felt as if they had been burned into her brain. This certainly explained the strong resonance of Celestial magic she’d felt baked into the walls of the squat. I couldn’t have written a sweeter and more heartbreaking romance if I had a hundred years to try. “And after that…happened…you woke up au natural for the benefit of The Bear.”

  John nodded, standing up with the journal and the file folder in his hand. He looked a little more steady; the booze didn’t seem to have even touched him. “I’ll read over this back at HQ. I’ve got the feeling it’s going to take me a while to chew through it all.” He started to leave, but turned back at the last second. “Vickie…thanks for this. I mean that.”

  “Hmm. Got something else for you.” She pulled the 1911 out from the hiding place under the coffee table.

  He looked at the pistol wearily. “I swear, ma’am, I didn’t sleep with your husband. Or the cat.”

  She’d added a holster she happened to have around that fit tolerably well. “No husband, and Grey doesn’t swing your way. No, this was yours, evidently. I found it where you’ve been living, where the journal was. It’s had some custom work done to it, so I assumed it had some value to the old you.”

  John took the pistol, unloaded it, and did a quick function check. He cocked an eyebrow before reloading it and returning it to the holster, nodding approvingly. Apparently he was impressed. “This is much better’n the ol’ Makarovs and such that the Commissar has issued.” He looked at her soberly. “Now I owe you even more. This is gettin’ to be an ugly habit, since I’m of a mind to always pay back my debts.”

  “You don’t owe me a thing. You’re a mystery. I hate mysteries. Mysteries have this habit of turning bad and biting you in the ass,” she said, lightly. “And for the record, I loathe surprise parties, and I always read spoilers.”

  He grinned, lop-sidedly as always. “I’ll keep that in mind, ma’am. Thanks again for the brews and the whiskey. We’ll have to do this again sometime, better circumstances an’ such.” With that he left, closing the door softly behind him.

  For once, she expended the energy to throw the locks on the door magically rather than physically, and slumped back on the couch. She didn’t envy him, not one bit. And yet, she wondered how he was going to take this all in, because for all intents and purposes, this had happened to a stranger. He had no memories of this. No memories of the girl in the Program, of incinerating up to a thousand people as he struggled to keep from being murdered. No memories of his life on the run. No memories of the Invasion.

  No memories of…falling in love again. With an angel. Of being taken to…what did they call it? The Infinite. No memories of the Seraphym in love with him.…

  He’d been remarkably delicate in what he had said. There was the makings of a real writer in that John Murdock. Each word had clearly been carefully chosen, and the whole was what she would have called a prose-poem. Beautiful. Tragic. Less prose, more a song…

  Her kind didn’t meddle with angels, and angels had very little to do with mages. She was sure, though, that there had been a greater motive to why the Seraphym had offered to sacrifice so much for John’s rebirth than merely that she, personally, was in love with him. Angels were practically formed out of Duty and Responsibility, so there had to be something about John that made him important enough that the Seraphym even be allowed to make the offer.

  Still. It was also clear that at least one of her motives in doing so was love. And it was clear that she had counted on regaining that love when the great transformation was complete. After all, great sacrifice is supposed to be rewarded…right?

  Except that it hadn’t been.

  It made Vickie want to weep for a year for her sake. Maybe for both of them.

  She’d sensed it, when she’d offered the Seraphym the shelter of her home. They were alike, far more than Vickie had ever realized until she read that journal. They were both in love with people who were hardly aware that they existed…and the odds of that changing for Vickie, at least, were worse than winning MegaBall. For the Seraphym?

  I don’t know. She put her head down in her hands, aching for herself and the Seraphym both, but knowing that if she was going to be forced into a choice of who would be the MegaBall winner—she’d choose the Seraphym over herself. No one who knew all the angel had sacrificed could choose otherwise and still call herself human. And damned be the consequences. Heaven can go screw itself.

  * * *

  John’s fingers were itching to tear open the journal for the entire jog back to the CCCP’s HQ. Every time he thought that he had this new life figured out, the ground got taken out from right under him. Nothing made much sense, anymore. Even running, like he was now, was different; he didn’t get tired or winded like he used to, despite being able to go much faster. Part of it was being a metahuman; something his old self had eight years to get used to, but he was still learning about. Part of it was the…other stuff. The things that had been done to him in the Program. John had kept it together when he read about his troop being slaughtered; he remembered the lead-up to that mission, but nothing about the actual op. In his mind, all of those guys were still alive when he had woken up. Men he had trained with, been trained by, lived with, fought with. He’d come up with a number of them through the Ranger Regiment. He had attended their weddings, been there for their divorces, and gone to the funerals with the rest of them when one of the team died. They were all what the public popularly called “Delta Force”; the best of the best in the special operations community. When you’re that good, you’re not just a unit; you’re a family.

  Now all of them were dead; even him, in a way.

  Now he was surrounded by strangers, all of whom looked at him imploringly, asking him to remember. Remember things that seemed impossible to him. Remember things that couldn’t possibly have happened to him. Things he didn’t want to know had happened…especially not to him.

  His parents were dead; he had learned that early on, while he was reading and watching reports about the Invasion. He still imagined his father fighting through crowds, trying to get to his mother as a destruction corridor crunched towards them, Kriegers marching and destroying everything before finally rolling over them. That had hit him hard; the feeling that he hadn’t been there to protect them. Hell, if he had been on the run, he doubted that they even knew he was alive. Logically, he knew that was for their own safety; if the people after him were as bad as everything had read, then not contacting them only made sense. But it didn’t help him feeling like he had failed his parents as their son.

  He was also out of the Army. He had loved being a soldier; it had been his calling in life, and he had been good at it. After reading what had happened to his troop, and what had gone on in the Program…he was done with government work. You always read about black bag projects and operations, government conspiracies and shady dealings that would always get the tinfoil hat crowd going on tears. He’d never believed any of it; being a government employee, he had a prett
y decent idea of how inept and bumbling the government could be. But there, in this folder the witch-gal had given him, was proof. Pictures of him, what they’d done to him, pictures taken during the surgery, the healing. Pictures of him training with the new abilities. Detailed, clinical reports. Too much to reasonably fake; anyway, why would the gal? There was no reason for her to that he could ascertain. He wondered if there was video, too, and if she could get it…then rebuked himself. There probably was and why should he sit through hours of it, the way he’d sat through hours of Invasion footage? Punish himself for a decision he didn’t remember?

  There were also pictures of a woman. Jessica; her name had been Jessica. The reports didn’t state it, but he could infer enough from the impersonal and cold notes that he had fallen in love with her. She had found out something, and they had killed her for it. Then they tried to kill him once he exploded into open rebellion. John, even back when he had been just a man, hadn’t been easy to kill, what with the Ranger training and being a Delta operator. After what they had done to him, what they had unlocked from inside of him…He had slaughtered all of them; guilty, innocent, it didn’t matter. He had let go; that was something else he had learned about his fires. It took concentration to keep them in check, once they had started; he had been practicing igniting his fires after Pavel had startled him on his way back from the HQ’s laundry. Luckily, Bear’s collection of politically incorrect t-shirts and a little paint from his chassis were the only casualties. But the power was there; it was terrible and vast and he was the only one that could control it. That time, in the Program, he hadn’t.

  That was all that he had gleaned from the file that Vickie had supplied him with. He would, without a doubt, go over it again and again, searching out each and every little detail until he memorized it. These were things he should have known; learning about them now, he knew he should never forget them again. There was still the journal. What horrors would that hold? What had he done while he was on the run?

  What had he done since falling in with these Communists?

  That was, oddly, a lot less of a worry for him. He had always been pretty good at reading people. Despite the dogma and rhetoric, the entire “Communism” bit seemed almost affected; caricatures from his father’s era. They seemed like a good enough bunch; they were anachronistically hard-line in their ideology sometimes, but they were doing something about the Kriegers. The victory at the Thulian North American HQ seemed to be the first and real big victory against the enemy; but it was turning into a Pyrrhic one. While the United States military had participated, along with ECHO and the CCCP, the public and world governments seemed to be losing focus. The Thulians were clearly not done. In his opinion, at the very best interpretation, they were regrouping. That was their pattern in the past; hit or get hit, fall back, regroup, come back again. It was probably sheer dumb luck that the combined forces had managed to hit the North American HQ while the Thulians were actually still in the process of regrouping from the hit on their staging posts and Command and Control center in Kansas. He’d seen pictures of that massive Death Sphere that had gotten pounded into the ground like a tent peg. If that thing had been turned loose on a populated area—or come after a big strategic North American target—there would have been no way that the orbital launch platform for those projectiles could have gotten into position in time to take it out.

  And yet, the public and the world governments were all acting as if it was all over. Stupid. “It’s all better now, let’s focus on rebuilding, not getting ready for another, bigger assault.” All they were doing was providing more targets for the Kriegers when they came back. CCCP and ECHO seemed to be the only organizations that understood that. He didn’t have the full picture, of course; stuff could be going on in the background, and almost certainly was. But he didn’t like how it seemed to trickle down into the public consciousness. Everyone was relaxing.

  Despite his reservations, staying with the CCCP was his best move for right now. To keep in the fight, to be doing something productive. And, of course, to find out who the hell he had become over the past eight years. He sure couldn’t go back to the US Government now and ask politely, “I seem to be missing eight years, can you fill me in?” And despite interacting a bit with the ECHO head, that blue medic, Bella, he wasn’t sure he trusted them not to turn him in. ECHO had always had a friendly relationship with the government, what with so many of their registered metas having law enforcement or military backgrounds at some point. CCCP was his best bet right now to find out who he’d been and what he’d done.

  …which led to another problem. When he did discover that—what if he didn’t like that John Murdock? Sure, other people seemed to like the guy, fine, but…that didn’t mean he would. And he was the one living inside this skin.

  And then what? He was not that guy. He likely never would be that guy. He’d be a guy who knew what had happened to that guy, but it would just be information, not…the guy who had lived through all of that. Experience changed you, and he wasn’t the one that had had those experiences.

  All of this was flashing through his mind as he ran to CCCP HQ. He hadn’t even broken a sweat, hardly; it wasn’t just the cool weather, either. Curiouser and curiouser, as that one gal said. He was through the security door and about to jog to the barracks when Unter called after him from the front desk. “Another break in generator room. Duty roster is having you and…” He scanned down the list in front of him. “Bear. Tools are already there, tovarisch.”

  “Roger that,” John sighed. The journal would have to wait until later; duty and Bear’s off-color jokes were the order of the hour.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Hurricane: Storm Warning

  Mercedes Lackey and Dennis Lee

  Bella felt a headache coming on at the back of her skull. Of course, the cause of the headache was sitting—or rather, slouching—on a seat across from her. Not across from her desk; Bella was trying to keep her identities of Bella Dawn Parker, Acting Head of ECHO, and Belladonna Blue, ECHO Healer, separate. This exercise in futility was taking place in an exam room. Scope was sitting, slouched aggressively, on the exam table. Bella was in a chair whose hardness was only matched by Scope’s scowl.

  Bella put the chart down on her lap. It didn’t matter if Scope could read it, it read the same as last time. “I can’t clear you for duty when I know you aren’t ready for it,” she said, biting off the words a bit more than she had intended to. The last thing she wanted to project to a patient, especially this one, was aggression or aggravation of her own.

  But there was a limit to the number of pointless appointments she wanted to keep when there was so much else that needed doing.

  “If we weren’t so deep in the kim-chee, Scope, I would recommend retiring you and cashiering you out,” she continued, flipping through the most recent reports. “Another week and I’m going to need a file cabinet just for you. Here’s a nice one. It isn’t even from your superior officers, it’s from the bunkhouse staff. ‘Erratic behavior.’ Not the sort of thing that bodes well in a meta.” She waited for a response, but Scope only sniffed and shrugged.

  “You aren’t leaving here until you at least talk to me,” Bella warned.

  Scope sighed. “Yeah, I’m a little off, what of it?”

  “The report continues that you stank of booze.”

  “What I do off duty is my own business,” Scope growled.

  “It seems to have flown under your radar, but this is a war. We’re always on call. We’re always on duty,” Bella growled back. “Hey, I’m not about depriving people a little something to calm their nerves or blow off steam. God knows we can all use it. But from all reports you aren’t just having a few to relax. You’re drinking until you stagger out, barely able to walk. You’re destroying yourself, girl. The Scope I would certify as ready for duty—the one who actually wanted to be certified as ready for duty—would know that and act accordingly.” She leafed through another. “This is from your training exerci
ses only yesterday. Failing scores.”

  “Yeah? Which ones?” She sounded indifferent.

  “All of them,” Bella said flatly.

  “Bug going around, must’ve caught it.”

  “And that same ‘bug’ made you attempt to strike a superior officer?” Bella continued in a voice heavy with disbelief.

  “He was being a shit!” Scope exploded. “Hell, I used to train him! Now the know-it-all bastard thinks he’s got the goods when he still doesn’t know a rope ladder from his own ass, just ’cause you all painted another stupid chevron on his arm!”

  Bella took a long deep breath and reminded herself that she was the grown-up here. “Judging by the scores here—” she flapped the papers in one hand “—you’re the one that doesn’t have the goods. And as you should know, having been one, it’s the job of a training officer to be a shit. From the attitude, I’d say someone’s been hanging around the Djinni too much, but we both know it’s something else, don’t we?” She paged down to the next report, and sighed. “You’ve been asking for more meds.”

  Scope glared at her, defiantly, but averted her eyes at the last. For a moment, Bella thought she looked tired, defeated. This might be the opening she needed, and Bella took it. “Scope, the meds we can give metas that are even remotely effective are also damned dangerous. It’s not just that they’re addictive. It’s that the longer you take them, the more unpredictable the side effects are.”

  Scope bared her teeth in a grimace. “Whatever, I can handle them…”

  “Does that count going permanently blind?” As Scope’s head finally came up, eyes wary, Bella pounced. “Look, Scope, I’m trying to work with you here. I’m not the bad guy. If it were anyone but you, you’d be gone, no matter how badly we need bodies. But it isn’t a stranger, it’s you, one of the Misfits. I know you’re better than this. I want to give you a chance here.” Bella hesitated. “Look, I know you’ve turned it down before, but frankly I don’t see much choice here. Will you consider a psychic link? You know it’s done a lot for others, for…”