“You…were considerably more than someone with extra tricks,” Sera replied carefully. “You have yet to utilize more than a fraction of your considerable power. I believe that you will discover your artificial enhancements also grant you far more than you are aware of. You should be testing your limits.” Her feet made almost no sound on the pavement, as if she had no weight to speak of. “I have said this before. You should heed me. It is your duty to use every power at your disposal.”
“All the same,” he said, shifting the conversation, “This whole mess doesn’t feel right. I hope that we get some sorta lead out of it. I just have a feelin’ that there’s somethin’ bigger goin’ on, and if we can figure it out we’ll actually be makin’ some headway.”
The sun had set and twilight fallen while they were battling the ambush. By this point of their walk, they were in something that was clearly a neighborhood. People—old people mostly, but a few kids—were coming out to sit on their doorsteps and gossip. More kids were playing kickball in the street. When people saw John, they waved as if they knew him. He waved back; he had become “re-acquainted” with some of them, and had been doing his homework with the journal. It’d take a while for that to become normal for him, though. The one real friendship with the neighborhood people that he had rekindled was with an elderly black shopkeeper named Jonas, who never wasted an opportunity to razz John about his “shit memory,” especially when it came to his turn to bring the beer.
They passed by the community garden, which was flourishing. Kids were playing—carefully—in the rows between the plants. Or maybe they were weeding. Or both, really, they could weed and use the weeds they pulled up in whatever play they had going on. Despite the poverty of the surrounding area the people here were happy; struggling, but there was some spirit of togetherness that bound them together. John stopped in front of the entrance of the garden, watching the kids playing while their parents gossiped or worked on the garden or both.
“I helped make this.” John’s voice held equal measures of wonder and satisfaction. “Something good.”
“Yes,” Sera said softly. “You did. You gave them hope as well as food, and brought them together for each other.” She sighed a little, but also smiled faintly. “Though you had help. It was—it is—a good thing.”
John grinned, starting off again. “It’s something we can both be proud of, then.” His face screwed up for a second. “The reports we’re going to have to turn in, though…how good are you at dodging ceramics?”
“Probably better than you,” she replied, and smiled just a very little more. “I can fly.”
He chuckled. “Maybe if we hurry back, we can get Chug t’eat the Commissar’s supply of those horrible busts. Save everyone a lot of grief.”
They walked easily through the neighborhood, and John realized that, despite the violence earlier…he felt pretty damned good.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Hold Heart
Mercedes Lackey and Cody Martin
Although the days were growing colder, the Seraphym still resorted to her perch of choice, the faux Greek temple atop one of Atlanta’s skyscrapers, for most of her waking hours. It was, despite being within eyeshot of the revolving restaurant atop the Westin hotel, the only place where she knew where she was guaranteed privacy. It was much harder to think, in this physical body. She could not shut out the thoughts and emotions of people nearby as easily as she once could, and could not merely ignore someone who was trying to physically get her attention. “Privacy,” in the CCCP base, was nonexistent. She felt herself an intruder in Vickie’s apartment. This was the only place that was solely hers.
Near at hand, the pillars and plinths showed the wear and abuse of pollution and weather much more than they did at a distance, which obscurely attracted her. Like her, they were not what they once had been.
All of the pieces had fallen together at last, and she could see what had only been a fragmented puzzle. She was still alive, and John Murdock had only half her powers, because holding all of her abilities too soon would have driven him mad, as Michael March had been driven mad. Only when he had mastered those abilities her sacrifice had given him would she be free. Free to die, and make him the synthesis of human and Celestial that he was meant to be, in order to find the way for humans to win against the Thulians without sacrificing what it meant to be human.
He would never be able to see all of the potential futures, she suspected. Nor have access to all of the collective memories of the past. That was still more information than a human brain was capable of processing. But he would have enough. And he would have what she did not; that spark of creativity that was able to look at two options and see a third.
The fact that he would never be “her” John, the man she had come to love so very deeply, was, in the larger view, irrelevant. It was, in fact, relevant only to her, and she was still an instrument, if not an Instrument. Her wishes, her longings, her loss…well, they meant nothing in the face of the reality that humanity was going to be obliterated and enslaved, the planet destroyed, and a vast swath of other worlds obliterated, if a way was not found to avert the Thulian conquest of this little globe. Averting it was why she was here in the first place. How criminal would she be if she allowed these human emotions to subvert her duty?
But she was human, or metahuman, now. And she had to reinforce her will against her emotions on a daily, sometimes hourly basis. And there was no denying that it hurt, it hurt, sometimes so much that she did not know how she was going to bear it; could not speak, could not think, could not breathe. Even at this very moment, the grief was building, and her throat and chest were so tight they hurt.…
And, of course, as ever, in the midst of her own emotional maelstrom, her comm went off.
* * *
John didn’t enjoy the quiet the way he used to. He couldn’t appreciate it the same. In the past, downtime between missions had been when he could decompress, unwind and figure things out. He would find a quiet corner in the barracks, and lose himself in a book or some other menial task. It was the closest thing to what some folks called Zen that he had ever experienced. Since he had…come back, he couldn’t get to that spot any more. John knew that it wasn’t just the war; he’d been fighting for as long as he could remember, or getting ready to fight. He was a soldier through and through, so that wasn’t what bothered him. While his new comrades were strange in ways he couldn’t begin to describe, they weren’t the cause of this unease either; he had become used to even Old Man Bear, or at least as used to the bastard as anyone could get.
What really had been bothering him were the noises in his head.
He knew he wasn’t crazy—though people said the first sign of being crazy was that you thought you weren’t. Despite that, John thought that he wasn’t; although he had banged his head against plenty of surfaces in his time patrolling or running missions with the CCCP, not to mention his former career in the Army, head trauma didn’t usually make you crazy.
Besides, his symptoms didn’t exactly match any mental illness he knew of. In truth, it had all started so small and innocuously that he couldn’t place exactly when it had begun. Of course it had to have been after his “rebirth” or whatever you would call it; there had been no mention of the occurrences in his journal, and sounds in his head were definitely something he would have included.
It had started as breaths, whispers, things he could have put down to the echoes of his own thoughts. Little tricks of light and shadow in the corners of his vision. Then one day it had built up to the point that he couldn’t help but notice it was there, and now it was only growing in intensity.
Sometimes it was a voice, murmuring too quietly to make out the words. Mostly it was music. Strains of something alien yet wholly familiar. The song was always distant, just out of reach; if he started to pay attention to it it would slip away, a fading echo. The music came and went, but as of late it was coming more frequently. What could that mean? John could accept that there
were aliens, that there were Nazis in powered armor with insanely advanced technology who were bent on world domination. He had awakened as a metahuman, missing several years of his memory; there were a lot of things he could accept after that. But this…he couldn’t make sense of it. It was a problem he couldn’t find a solution to; how could you find an answer to something if you didn’t even know what the question was in the first place?
John was using one of his rare moments of down time to clean his weapons and sharpen his knives. It had been some time since he’d actually had any down time; luckily, it looked like the Commissar had found a new whipping boy, at least for the moment. Probably Bear. This exercise, something he could do without even thinking about it, had always been something that relaxed him, but now he was running into the same problem. Thinking about the music. It wasn’t the music so much that bothered him, but rather when it seemed to pick up the most.
Namely, while he was around Sera.
He had been reaching out to her, trying to find a middle ground so that they could at least have some sort of dialogue about what had happened to him. He knew he was asking a lot of her, but what choice did he have? She was one more key to what had happened to him. Plus, they kept on getting paired together as the two “odd men out” within the CCCP; him for his memory loss, and her for…well, being her. She no longer fled when he came near, but she was still cold and distant. John didn’t mind some people hating him; he could deal with that easily enough, since most anyone that hated him probably wasn’t worth the time to think about for him. But with her it was different. He needed her to be okay with him; maybe not friends, but not however things were between them now. Especially with the music, and how it always seemed to pick up around her.…
John was sharpening the huge Bowie knife that a patrol he had been a part of had taken from a Reb called “Bad Bowie” when the call came.
“Comrade Murdock,” Gamayun’s voice came through John’s internal comm with a burst of static, “report to briefing room with Comrade Sera.” With a sigh John set down the knife and sharpening stone before gathering up the rest of his gear and setting off at a trot.
Sera was already there, sitting on a backless stool, wings pulled in so tightly to her body that it made his back muscles ache in sympathy. He’d noticed of late that her wings were a more accurate barometer of her emotional state than her face. Nervous, and she flicked them. Alarmed, and they half-spread and trembled, as if she was about to take off. Tense, and she pulled them in tightly to her body, the way she was doing now. Exhausted—or depressed?—and they drooped. He paused for a second at the entrance to the briefing room, shrugging on his vest over the nanoweave shirt.
“What’d I miss?” He glanced around; Saviour and Unter were absent, which was odd. It was just him and Sera.
“Nothing, sport,” Victrix said in his ear. “I needed a screen. Seraphym isn’t wired up the way you are.”
“Oh. Well, fire away, comrade kiddo.” John leaned against the back wall, folding hims arms across his chest.
The large LCD screen—another piece of ECHO largesse—at the business end of the briefing room lit up. “Here’s what I have. Some activity on Thulian freqs I triangulated here—” The map showed a red spot. “—combined with minor seismic disturbance. I think someone is excavating something. Maybe a buried sleeper cell, you know, the kind that produces a pop-up. It’s in CCCP territory, and so far this is all new-new-new, like within the last 24 hours, so chances are it won’t need more than the standard size patrol unit to squash. I passed on the info to RS, she nominated and assigned you two.”
“Pop-ups.” Those were the shorthand for attacks that just “popped up” in the middle of cities. A lot of them came from smallish units of Thulian armor that had been buried in place; presumably the operators infiltrated, looking like ordinary Joes, found the hatch or other access to the storage area, climbed into the armor and set out to make trouble. And they did make trouble, all out of proportion to their size, creating chaos and terror until they were taken down. The effect was that there were no safe areas, seemingly; everyone was kept on edge, because you never knew quite where or when the Kriegers would send one of their suicide squads.
More things came up on the screen; diagrams of Thulian power armor, Thulian Wolves, and Thulian Eagles with their vulnerable points helpfully indicated. “Since you two are fire-powers, you’re the logical choice, lucky you. We’ve never seen a Death Sphere with a pop-up, but if you get one, call for help pronto.”
“So, check it out, find out what we can, burn anything that looks at us sidelong. Got it. You op’ing for us on this one?”
“Ten-four. You two both speaka-da-English, makes it easier on Gamayun. Besides I have my bag of tricks if you run into trouble, she doesn’t.”
John slapped a buckle on his boots, making sure it was tight. “Let’s hope we don’t need ’em.” He looked to Sera. “Ready to roll out?”
The Seraphym nodded. “You must exert yourself, John Murdock,” she said, with a very faint air of…what? Disappointment? Rebuke? Like she wanted this to be a bigger, more dangerous mission? Or something else? “You are not using a quarter of your abilities. You must master them. You should have done so, by now.”
Ah then. It was something else. You’re not living up to your full potential, Mister Murdock. He was reminded of several of his teachers when he was in primary school.
“Do my best, ma’am. Don’t wanna burn the whole ’hood down, though.” He stood up from the wall, stretching. “Anythin’ else, Vic?”
“Unter’s already fixed you up with a Ural and a loadout. You get one of the new RPGs with the incendiary loads in case you get a Sphere. Don’t waste it, m’kay? You’ll set fire to half a block with one if you aren’t careful and the charges each cost more to make than you’re worth in parts. I’ll guide you and Sera in.”
“Roger that. Let’s get on with it.”
* * *
This had to be the most wrecked part of a destruction corridor that John had ever seen, and that was surely saying something given how badly Atlanta had been hit. He hoped that whoever had been in here during Invasion I had been smart and run the hell away, because no one could have survived what had gone on here. Most destruction corridors were caused by one or two powered armor suits; unopposed or at least without effective resistance, they could carve entire swaths out of crowded cities. This one, though…at least a squad of Krieger armored troopers had to have moved through this area, with maybe a Death Sphere following. It was sickening and awe-inspiring at the same time, that so few could wreak so much havoc.
“Vic, y’got any info on this area? This place is toast. What’s the area like that we’re going into?”
“The loc is what used to be Carver High School, built circa 1911. Closed down circa 1982 because it was too expensive to keep repaired. There used to be a fallout shelter in the basement. I’m betting that’s where your targets are.” In the upper left corner of his vision, a picture of what looked like a gigantic pile of brick and boards popped up. “That’s what the Kriegers left of it. No one knows why they bothered wrecking it since there’s a 10 foot tall fence around it. Cause, you know, Goddess forbid that homeless squatters get some shelter. Maybe they figured on keeping people out to keep what they had down there safe?”
“What’s this destruction corridor on track to? I didn’t think that there were any ECHO transmitters in this part of town?”
“Negative. This is one of those cases where we don’t know why they came through and leveled the place. From here, they joined the wrecking crew on the Ring.”
“Roger.” John swung off of the Ural. The RPG with the new warhead was in a locked case that was bolted to the gear rack. He really didn’t feel like going up against a Death Sphere today; if one showed up, it would’ve meant that he and Sera had really stepped into it, and back-up was minutes away. Minutes away, when seconds counted for everything.
There was a sound like thunder just behind him,
and a wash of air hit him in the back. He turned to see Sera, wings beating furiously, touching down in a slightly clearer spot on the pavement, right foot extended. She folded her wings immediately as soon as both feet were on the ground, and sheathed herself in fire. John was aware that the music had started up again, but did his level best to ignore it. Not that it was easy; it seemed to invade his very thoughts, always coming back to Sera. And he didn’t like it a single goddamned bit.
“We’re probably going underground. Old Cold War fallout shelter, a bunker, forgotten an’ sealed off. We’re gonna want to watch the fires down there; not a lot of oxygen, also probably a lotta shit that can burn.”
“Very well,” she said, and the fire vanished. She looked very vulnerable without it. “If space is restricted I will be at a disadvantage. The wings occupy a great deal of space.”
“If’n we get into any sort of trouble we can’t handle with more conventional means, we’ll back out an’ take it outside. This destruction corridor stretches for a good long way; no need to worry ’bout civvies wanderin’ into the crossfire.”
“As you will,” she said, without inflection.
“Heads up, chillun. I found the entrance. It will be of no surprise to you, given they either wanted out, or in, that although they have done a crackup job of hiding it, you can get to it. JM, it’s on your HUD. Sera, follow him.”
John started climbing through the rubble; it was rough going for certain parts. With this section abandoned, there wasn’t as much of a rush for clean up. They reached their destination a few dozen yards later; a large mound of rubble, supposedly the remnants of the school. Highlighted on the HUD were two large, weathered metal doors set into concrete recessed into the ground, with more rubble piled around it. It reminded John of tornado cellars that he had seen.
Collision: Book Four in the Secret World Chronicle - eARC Page 21