Collision: Book Four in the Secret World Chronicle - eARC

by Mercedes Lackey

  Bear was no longer cursing or laughing, only firing his PPSh in short bursts or throwing a grenade. Molotok was similarly grim. Their advance had stalled. And there were more and more Kriegers piling in to take their lives.

  “Khanjar. Molotok. Get your teams in under the spot I’ve highlighted. Move, now!” The “spot” Vix had highlighted was a building that had had its front facade blown off, but was otherwise intact. It actually looked as if the front had been a facade; the sides and the roof were massive, but the rubble in front showed the wall now gone had been a quarter of the thickness of the rest.

  “Murdock, Bear; smoke.” Molotok let his rifle hang by his side as he fished around in one of the pouches of his vest, retrieving a smoke grenade; John and Pavel did the same. “Murdock, northern side of the street. Bear, you and I towards the other group of fascista.” Nodding, John pulled the pin on his grenade. He leaned out around the corner of their cover only long enough to throw the grenade. As he watched it arc through the air, it started to deploy dense white smoke before it landed in front of the group of Kriegers coming from the center of the city. Blue streaks shot through the growing cloud as it thickened. Some unarmored Kriegers, growing bold, tried to dash through the smoke; John dropped all three with quick bursts from his rifle.

  “Khanjar, we have deployed a screen. When it has set, we will be moving to the rally point. Cover us, we will cover you.”

  “Understood.”

  Once the smoke had completely blocked any sight of the attacking Kriegers, Molotok signaled for the team to move out. As Mamona gaped in shock, Sera picked up Unter in her arms, as if he weighed nothing, and began her run at Molotok’s signal. They kept their spacing, making sure no one on the team was closer than five paces; actinic bolts of energy sliced through the air around them, scorching the street and surrounding buildings in narrow misses. After doing a quick visual check to make sure his team had made it, Molotok contacted Khanjar.

  “We are being in place. Be bringing the wounded.”

  “Moji,” Sera said, as she laid Unter down gently. “I can bring one, perhaps more.” She looked around…and John saw that her eyes blazed that featureless gold. “I know where they are.”

  “Go, and quickly.” Molotok turned from her, raising his rifle in the direction of the enemy. “Khanjar, we have angel coming to assist you with transporting casualties. Hold fire, repeat, hold fire.”

  Sera spread her wings, and was gone before John could say anything. Red Team started firing steadily into the smoke at either end of the street, making sure that the Kriegers were keeping their heads down. No more than thirty seconds later, and she was back, with a Blacksnake merc cradled in her arms. John was already waiting; she transferred the young man to John and was away again, back with a second in the time it took him to put his burden down towards the back of the room. A second transfer, and she was away for the third time just as the first of Khanjar’s men came stumbling into their cover. She managed two more by the time all of the mercs had joined them.

  She was panting at this point, winded, but smiled a little at John. “They were foolish enough to use their…their heat-seeing? When the smoke came up. They will be quite blinded for a little while longer.”

  Her eyes had gone back to blue, with that gold flickering in the depths.

  “Overwatch,” Molotok said. “We are in position, those of us still alive. Please advise.”

  “John. Hand on ground. Chop chop.” John complied immediately, stripping off a glove and pressing his palm to the floor.

  “Everybody else stand away from the front. And three. Two. One.”

  It was not unlike an earthquake. The pavement split as the rock of the mountains erupted in a ragged, but climbable, slope, shaking everyone who happened to be standing right off his or her feet, and filling in the front of the building where the wall had once been. Vickie didn’t quite send it all the way to the roof; there were still firing-ports, or places that could be used as firing-ports. But the Thulians were going to have the devil’s own time getting at them.

  “Oh…kay.” There was no doubt Vickie was exhausted. “Overwatch to all teams. That’s all the magic you get today.”

  “Thanks for the Alamo, Vic. Let’s hope it turns out better this time around.” John glanced around. They had perhaps thirty people, all together, Blacksnake and CCCP. Almost everyone was wounded in some way, ranging from the minor to the severe. One bit of good news was that Unter was starting to come around; his face was still covered in blood, but the underlying wounds were mostly gone.

  “Shit’s gonna break loose any minute. I just needed to get you guys under cover until it does.”

  “Kutte ki olad,” Khanjar swore, her eyes huge at the sight of the earthen barrier. “I do not wish to know where in the many hells or heavens you people recruit.”

  “I should say our friend is very good at miracles,” Sera said, mildly, as she helped one of the Blacksnake mercs bandage another. “And I know you have seen this—” she waved her hand at the earth-and-rock barrier “—before.”

  “How did you—” Khanjar cut off what she was going to say. “Never mind. I should know better than to question a Deva. It is one thing to see such a thing. It is another to be knocked off the feet by it.”

  They ran out of time to discuss it any further. The smoke had begun to clear, and the Kriegers were advancing. The next few minutes were filled with gunfire, explosions, shouted orders and…occasionally screams. John was startled while changing his magazine for his rifle when Unter thumped against the barrier next to him; most of the blood had been cleaned off of his face, but he still looked like ten miles of bad road.

  Georgi grunted, spitting into the dirt. “No time for napping when there are still fascista to kill.”

  John pulled back on the charging handle for his rifle, chambering a round. “You have your pick of ’em, old man. More than enough to go around.”

  Blue Team: Generator Tower

  Silent Knight heaved, and pulled Red up to safety on what was left of the stairway. Red peered down the open shaft, but the smoke continued to rise around them, obscuring their vision. He screamed down to Mel again, but she didn’t answer.

  “You’re hurt,” Knight said.

  Red glanced at the armored man. His open chestplate was now a mess of loose wires. Red nodded in understanding. Knight had disconnected his power source. It had stopped the malfunctioning armor from spasming, allowing Knight to regain his footing, but had rendered it useless in the process. Without power running to the mechanized chassis, Silent Knight had not only lost his sonic abilities, but was now burdened with about seventy pounds of clunky steel.

  “You’re one to talk,” Red scoffed, and winced as his scorched legs continued to burn in pain. “Don’t worry about me, the heat cauterized the wounds. I’m healing up as we speak. You’re the one who’s leaking. Here, take this.”

  Red reached up and unwrapped the scarf around his head. Silent Knight shuddered. Well, the Djinni couldn’t blame him; he knew that his face was smooth, hairless, alien, lacking anything even remotely human except for a thin slit for a mouth, a pair of nostrils at the end of brief stub for a nose, and lidless eyes.

  “Is that… is that your real face?”

  “Of course not,” Red replied, binding his scarf around Knight’s injured shoulder. “You’re looking at my base foundation, don’t have time for anything more right now. Try not to think about it. Think of something else, like how we’re going to get down there and get Mel.”

  “Djinni, we’ve got minutes left to get out of here before Scope blows the place. Do you really think we have time to…?”

  “Yeah, minutes,” Red interrupted. “So I’m not going to waste time arguing with you. I’m not leaving without her. You can stay and help, or you can go. Make up your mind, right now.”

  Knight stared at him for a brief moment, then sighed with a reluctant shake of his head. He reached inside his chest plate and tugged at a latch. His armor fell apa
rt, the pieces dropping to the parapet with a clatter. Underneath, he was clad in nanoweave, his only concession to the standard ECHO uniform a bright yellow and red crest emblazoned on his shoulder. It depicted a lionized coat of arms under a simple fist pulsing within concentric circles of power, perhaps a keepsake from his previous time as an independent street vigilante. Knight removed his helmet and let it fall with the rest of his armor. Red had never seen him out of the armor. He looked…normal. Average height, with a slightly athletic build; he wasn’t as ripped and wolf-lean as Murdock, or as buff as Bulwark. His skin was paler than it should have been, too; a byproduct of spending so much time in his armor, probably. A boyish, if plain, face; messy blond hair and brown eyes. The only thing unusual about him were his cheekbones; they looked as if they belonged on a Grecian statue. He looked young, but the eyes told a different story. Those were a pair of eyes that had seen—too much.

  Then again, Red reflected, at this point, they probably all had eyes like that.

  Now he was left only with the implanted tech/magic hybrid equipment Vickie had given him. Not an in-ear speaker but a direct implant to his auditory nerve, modified so that he could turn it on and off. And not one but two, one in each ear. Silent Knight was deaf, which was the only reason why he could operate that suit of his, which would have made a normal person deaf within moments. Thanks to Overwatch 2, he could hear again.

  “It was a good suit,” he said, his voice having that odd, flat cast to it that the speech of the deaf (or formerly deaf) tended to have. “It lasted longer than my previous upgrades, but it’s toast now. Be able to move faster without it.” Knight reached down to retrieve his sidearm and gunbelt from the suit, and strapped them in place. “So what’s your plan?”

  Red Djinni peered down the shaft again but the rising smoke was, if anything, even thicker now. He hissed as the smoke and soot struck his eyes, making them water, and took a second to grow some eyelids.

  “We need some rope,” he said.

  “Don’t have any.”

  “Seriously?” Red scoffed. “What kind of armored adventuring hero doesn’t carry rope, a grappling hook and a ten foot pole with him?” He gave their surroundings a quick once over. There was nothing in sight, nothing they could use to lower themselves down to Mel.

  “You’d think anal-retentive Nazis would have some sense of safety regulations,” Knight said. “Rolled up fire hoses at regular intervals in the walls or something like that.”

  “You see the size of this city?” Red asked, still looking about desperately for anything resembling rope. “You gotta figure they ran out of funds somewhere. Probably blew their wad on Heroic Monuments, or…” He paused.

  “You just thought of something, didn’t you?”

  “I did,” the Djinni said, biting his lip.

  “From the look on your face, I’m not going to like it, am I?”

  “It’s a little weird, and I’ve never tried it before,” the Djinni admitted. He took a breath to calm himself and extended his left hand out to Silent Knight. “Just go with it.”

  Red grew a new set of claws, and Knight took a step back in apprehension as they slowly flowed out towards him, razor-tips first.

  “I don’t see how jabbing me in the face with your finger knives is going to help,” Knight stammered.

  “Wait for it,” Red seethed, and grunted as the claws suddenly went limp and dangled from his fingertips. They continued to grow and Knight, seizing on the idea, grasped them gingerly. He wound them around the exposed railing and anchored the growing rope around his waist.

  “Flesh rope,” Knight said, and chuckled. “Brilliant. And… eww.”

  “Yeah,” Red agreed, and looked over the side again. “You got me?”

  Knight pressed himself back to the wall and nodded. “Go. But are you sure this will hold?”

  “Like I said, first time. Say a prayer, will you?”

  Knight nodded, and Red rolled off the exposed stairway. He swung in place for a moment, testing the tensile strength of his skin. He was putting it through tremendous strain, no doubt about it. He relaxed, willed it to be thicker, tougher, and after another calming breath, willed it to grow.

  He started to descend, surprised at how easy it was, and gambled with a few fast growth spurts. The skin held, and soon Red was rappelling down the shaft, screaming Mel’s name again. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath just before piercing the heart of the smoke. While his eyes were useless here, he concentrated with his other senses, especially his radial awareness. He swung about, probing around him for any movement, anything that suggested Mel was trapped there in the billowing heat. And the heat was intense, coupled with the rising soot, it was like navigating through a sauna in a blackout. He could barely “see” more than a foot in any direction. It only got worse as he descended closer to the flames, the blaze was masking more and more of his surroundings. He was getting too close, it was getting too hot, and he didn’t dare open his mouth to scream out to Mel again. He needed to find her soon, before he ran out of breath, before he fell too far into the flames to pull himself out, before he taxed his rope of skin beyond itself, where the heat and tension would eventually singe and tear away his lifeline.

  He was getting dizzy. His lungs began to burn, he needed to take a breath. And it wasn’t just his lungs. His feet felt like they were now dancing just inches above the flames. He was swimming in grit, and every pore in his skin was screaming, clogged with grime and burnt ashes. It was playing havoc with his radial awareness. Pretty soon, it would impossible to sense anything around him. He hadn’t considered that before, trusting in his senses to make his way through the smoke. He had simply jumped in, to save the girl, to be the hero.

  To be the hero. I’m really doing this again, the hero thing. Guess I have been, for a while now. Guess it’s time to stop denying it. Maybe it’ll stick this time. Maybe I want it to. Maybe I should get my head out of my ass, get Mel, and get out of here before I die.

  He was honest enough with himself to admit he was starting to panic. He tried to tell himself it was perfectly reasonable to panic, seeing as he was suffocating in extreme heat over a bonfire while swinging on a fragile rope made from his own epidermis, but it didn’t seem to help. Instead, it was the final push, and just as he prepared to swing up and start climbing up himself back to Silent Knight, he felt a hand grasp his and then thin, shaking legs wrap themselves around his waist.

  It was Mel. Without opening his eyes, without saying a word, he knew it was her, just the touch of her.

  There wasn’t time for anything that would have done that moment justice. The relief of knowing she was alive, the sheer joy of feeling her against him, they didn’t have the luxury of words or even a simple kiss. So he stole a moment, just a moment, to give her a quick squeeze before motioning her up. She seemed to understand, and began climbing up his rope. He felt her feet release from his shoulders, and he began to climb up after her. There was a strange and growing disconnect in his mind, which Red understood to be one of the final stages of asphyxiation before losing consciousness. He was on the verge of blacking out when he realized the heat wasn’t as alarming, the smoke wasn’t as dense or tenacious, and he drew in a sudden desperate breath. Opening his eyes, he saw Mel climbing above him and he felt a surge in his arms, a need to be next to her, that drove him forwards. They dragged themselves onto the broken stairway, hauled up by Silent Knight, and took a few moments to cough uncontrollably, lying precariously close to the edge.

  “I’m sure you two could use a breather,” Silent Knight said, “but really, I think we’re pressing our luck with that…”

  “Bomb!” Mel screamed, nodding in agreement. She coughed again and sprang to her feet. “How much time?”

  “A minute, maybe less…” Red croaked. “I think this would be…”

  “Less talking, more running!” Mel screamed and darted up the stairs. Red and Silent Knight ran after her. There was no grace in their flight, just the certainty that if
they stumbled and fell, they were lost. There was some concern in the planning stages, Red remembered, that the explosives were too small. No matter what the engineers said, no one could quite grasp how the slim charges could possibly deliver the punch they needed to take out a power generator, much less the safety margin of an entire building.

  Red recalled how he had examined one of the charges, had thoughtfully turned it over in his hands, and the only question he had asked the technicians.

  “What’s this bomb called again?”

  “The Inferno II,” one of the technicians had answered. “We lost the first prototype, and it’s specs, during the Invasion. We were able to reverse engineer this model. It’s not as compact as the first, and you’ll need to place multiple charges, but our simulations suggest an equal payload as the first, assuming you get the detonator sequence sync right.”

  Red had nodded, feigning only a passing interest in the device.

  “Good name,” was all he had said, before handing it carefully back.

  So they ran, and while Mel and Silent Knight probably didn’t realize the extent of the Inferno’s blast radius, Red didn’t think it was something he was ever likely to forget. He urged them on, and as they arrived at the top landing, they heard a shrill alarm ring out beneath them.

  “Go!” Red shouted. “Countdown’s started!”

  They barreled through the portal, through the connecting hall, and skidded to a stop by the outer door. Red slammed into the portal lock and was rewarded with a steely hiss as the round portal slowly rolled open. He ushered Mel and Knight out first, and they ran back out onto the streets of Ultima Thule, right through the surprised ranks of the assembled Thulians stationed outside.