Alex’s eyes rolled up into his head and he slumped over.
Chapter Two:
Ignition
Mercedes Lackey, Steve Libby, Cody Martin, Dennis Lee
Such an ordinary day. All over the world, literally, people who would never have reason to know each other, much less end up as tight as we were, were going about their lives, some of them on opposite sides of the law. Then at eleven-thirty Eastern Standard Time, the world as we knew it changed forever.
Las Vegas, Nevada, USA: Callsign Belladonna Blue
The station had been blessedly quiet for hours. Most of the guys were in front of the tube, watching the pre-pre-pregame shows for the All-Star game. Her cell phone went off. She glanced at it. Mom. Huh, odd, this was the time their shift started. Usually she and Dad were hot on some project at Alienville at this point in the day. She answered it. “Hi Mom, what—”
The sounds coming over the phone stopped her heart. Screaming. Explosions. Someone—it sounded like Dad—yelling. “In the shelter! Now! Go, go, go!”
And her Mom’s voice, shaking, saying only “Red alert. Lockdown.”
Then the phone went dead.
Then the Klaxons in the station went off.
All hell broke loose right outside.
Inside the fire station, no one paid any attention to the frantic mustering Klaxons signaling the callout of all possible personnel. It didn’t matter. They couldn’t have gotten there anyway. Bella crouched in the door that had opened automatically for the engines to move out, and stared in horror.
There were nine-foot-tall suits of chrome-plated armor, hosing down the street outside with the energy cannons built into their arms.
It looked like there were about twenty of them; one of them was all black, but the rest of them gleamed in the harsh Vegas sunlight like something right out of one of the city’s stage shows. Except that things out of stage shows didn’t explode cars and chase screaming civvies and—
Oh hell no—
Those cannons were swiveling to point at the station!
Just as that fact registered on her brain, she felt someone grab her shoulder and fling her backwards, just out of the path of the first swath of energy pulses. She scrambled the rest of the way out under her own power as the blue-white light engulfed the front of the engines. She followed the others out the back and down into the dry wash behind the station, just as the station itself went up in a fireball. She ducked her head and the wash of superheated air scorched over her.
Instinctively she looked up as soon as it had passed and did a headcount.
Shit. Three short. Gadgets, LongJohn and the other rookie. Shitshitshit—
“Incoming!” screamed the captain before she could more than register the fact that there were probably three men down in what was left of the station, and she ducked her head in automatic response to the roar from behind—
The sonic boom was enough to flatten her into the desert sand, yet somehow she looked up, dazed, just in time to see the entire line of armored monstrosities swept off their feet and engulfed in rocket-fueled explosions so white-hot it was like looking into the sun—
—as the Air Force Thunderbird team pulled up and out and rolled over and came back for a second sweep, traveling at mach one at the very least.
She and the others were on their feet, cheering, even though they couldn’t hear themselves cheer, pumping their fists in the air, as the aerobatic team came back on their second pass and raked the war machines with another set of wing-fired rockets. Despite the similar paint job, these weren’t their display planes, oh no. These were specialized warbirds. The Thunderbird pilots were the elite of the Air Force elite, and like anyone else really in the know, Bella knew that part of what went on at Groom Lake was that once a week, the show team made the hour flight out and practiced live-fire exercises, exercises with weapons and skills designed to take out rogue metahumans. Just to keep their hands in. Because the Boy Scouts weren’t the only group whose motto was “Be prepared.”
Whatever those powered suits had been built to withstand, it wasn’t what was in the rockets fired by these fighter jets. They were down. And they weren’t moving.
The Thunderbirds pulled around for a third pass, but it wasn’t needed. The suits were down, and stayed down. The Thunderbird team didn’t slow down; they peeled off and headed east, where more smoke and fire and the flash of an energy cannon betrayed another point of attack.
Bella staggered up out of the wash before the jets had cleared the area. Three men missing…Screaming told her there were civvies hurt. If there was anything left of her kit in the station—people needed her. Even without the kit, she had her touch-healing, she could hold them stable until—
“Incoming!” the captain screamed again, and she hit the ground as something roared in overhead, and she heard—
Her comm unit made a noise she’d never heard it make before, a kind of warble, just as the thing overhead, too small to be a jet but moving at least that fast, did a kind of wingover and plunged straight down towards her and blasted to a landing, backpack jet unit whining as it ramped down.
A meta—
A hand in powered armor reached down and hauled her effortlessly to her feet.
The other hand pulled up the visor of a red, white and blue helmet, and a pair of absurdly young eyes stared at her.
A meta—one on our side—
“Bella Dawn Parker?” asked a voice amplified into a hollow audibility that cut through the ringing of her ears.
She nodded numbly, half of her mind still on the remains of the station, the injured civvies, the missing members of her own crew.
“You’re activated. This is a full Code Red emergency. I am directed to take you—”
That part registered, and she stared at him in outrage. “Take me? You’re taking me nowhere, mister! My job is here! I don—”
“Parker!” the young man barked with surprising authority. “You’re activated. Groom Lake’s being hit this second and we’re assembling a meta team to go in—”
That was when it hit her with the force of a blow to the gut.
Groom Lake.
Mom and Dad—
New York, New York, USA: Callsign John Murdock
John had what he wanted, though probably not enough of it to make much difference. He was nursing the bottle to make it last, to justify his occupation of a bar stool. The stuff smelled like diesel, but it didn’t matter. To the past, he thought, upending the shot glass—
—and about the same time that the booze hit his stomach, the front of the pub exploded inwards.
It felt, and it sounded, like the end of the world. The pressure wave from the blast hit him about the same time as what felt like half the contents of the front of the place and he somersaulted over the bar. He slammed into the backbar and the entire contents of that came down on top of him. Glass, wood, and concrete blasted into the bar patrons like grapeshot, shrapnel tearing into flesh and ancient tabletops with equal indifference. Pain lanced through John’s back as the world went white.
A final impact meant he’d landed. He knew he was on the floor, so he tried to stand up, and with a surge of panic, discovered he couldn’t. His vision cleared a moment later, and he found himself behind the counter, wedged between the aged marble slab of the top of the backbar, which was now tilting crazily against the wall, and a busted cabinet; and as if that wasn’t bad enough, he was upside down on broken glass.
Incongruously, he was peripherally aware that he was cold—the alcohol he’d been drenched with evaporating away—and that he smelled like an alkie’s idea of heaven.
John toppled over, coming down on his right side on more debris and glass. His head was swimming, his sensitive ears ringing, and he could barely make out the shrieks and crying of the other people trapped in here with him. Terrorist bomb? Gas line exploding? His head cleared as he pushed himself upright, resting his back against the shattered cabinet he’d been thrown into by the blast. What was le
ft of the barkeep was embedded in the wall where a bar-length mirror had been. What the hell—What kind of an explosion did that?
Swaying slightly, he stood up. As soon as his frame cleared the top of the ruined counter, he felt the immense heat of the fire engulfing the front of the building, which was starting to spread into the main room. Through eyes that were still trying to focus, he frantically surveyed the rest of the pub. He was the only one standing. People had been tossed around the interior, still lying where they’d landed, broken and bleeding, most of them thrown against the back wall. A lot of them were tangled with furniture and—his stomach churned—body parts. A shocking number of the victims that appeared mostly intact were moving. If they didn’t get out of there soon, they wouldn’t be moving for long.
The sprinkler system went off, misting down the room and dropping the temperature. It wasn’t doing much about the fire, but it was going to buy him some time. He coughed through the smoke, which was starting to get thicker near the ceiling. Flashover was a real possibility here, especially with so much alcohol vapor.
Once again, training warred with survival, but this time the training won.
“Everyone still able to move, we need to get everybody out of here!” he shouted, using his “command” voice. A few folks were trying to stand up, looking about dazedly or staring in shock at their own wounds. Through a gap in the smoke, John spotted the hallway that led to the bathrooms, with an exit sign at the very end of it. Stumbling, he started hustling people into the hallway, even carrying a few until they moved on their own. Those that were ambulatory, whether they wanted it or not, found themselves with a victim draped over their shoulders. John was the first through the rear entrance, kicking it open as more alarms wailed from buildings all around, burdened by an elderly man with a huge gash on his forehead. Another fire alarm went off as soon as the door bar was shoved down. John had done a good bit more than just shove—it was bowed in the middle.
It took a few minutes, and a hell of a lot of shouting and acting like a drill sergeant on steroids, but after two more trips into a room that was looking more and more like a blast furnace, he was satisfied that the pub was cleared of anyone still living.
Hunched over in the alleyway, he took inventory of his own wounds. Blood trickled down his arms from his back. He had plenty of lacerations, puncture wounds, and scrapes. His shirt was sopping wet, torn in several places, and was more red than white now.
“What the hell happened? Was it a bomb?” shouted someone. John looked to his right; it was the man from the couple that the late barkeep had been talking with. He was holding his right arm; the wrist was bent at an odd angle, in addition to minor cuts and bruises.
“Stay here; wait for the cops or the paramedics to get here. Don’t move unless the fire spreads out here.” John stood up gingerly, not wanting to hurt his back more than it was already.
Not a chance They could have found him, was there? Dammit, would They take out a whole pub full of innocent bystanders to get him?
He already knew the answer, of course. It was “yes.” Either way, he wasn’t ready to stick around for the police or anyone else to show up; he’d done more than his fair share already.
Smoke billowed out of the emergency exit, bringing with it a rank taste of burning plastic, so that way was out. He sprinted for the end of the alley, dodging and vaulting dumpsters, aiming for the patch of light shining off a bright red car parked across the street from the end.
That is, he was aiming for that bright red car…until it vanished in a wash of actinic energy.
What the hell? He focused, and could hear the clomp of metal on asphalt. He immediately flattened himself against the alley wall to his left, trying to cut down on his profile to whatever was coming up the street. He edged his way to the corner, peering slowly around the wall. What he saw nearly took his breath away.
He’d seen more than his share of metas before, but the suits marching down the street looked like Art Deco illustrations of some future master race. Which was not so farfetched a concept, considering what was enameled on their upper arms where a regimental patch would have been.
A black crook-armed cross on a white circle on a red field. The Nazi swastika.
Three of them were marching abreast down the street, sweeping anything and anyone in their path with some sort of energy cannon mounted to their arms. Cars, people, buildings—they were destroying everything around them almost effortlessly.
John didn’t waste another moment. He turned in place and sprinted with everything he had back to the group of pub survivors. He crossed the distance in seconds. Panic tinged his voice as he shouted at the crowd. “We’re movin’, now! Everyone up, let’s go! Go, go, go!”
“But you said to wait for help—”
“Help ain’t comin’! We need to get the hell outta here, now!” The survivors were frightened and startled by the fear in his voice, and started to respond, albeit sluggishly. John dragged people to their feet, forcing others to help those who couldn’t move on their own. The sounds of explosions, about a million car alarms and fire alarms going off, and people screaming were starting to get close; those…things couldn’t be too far off. John started off at a trot, leading the way for his band of burned and lacerated survivors. He tried his best to keep off of the streets and heading away from the Nazis, or whatever they were. After a few minutes that seemed to stretch into hours, he turned a corner only to come up short in an open street. People were milling about, coming outdoors to see what was happening. The armored supersoldiers hadn’t made it this far, yet. John looked about wildly, hoping for some refuge.
Then he saw it. Sanctuary. In the form of a subway entrance. That armor was too tall for the entrance; chances were the Nazis would stick to the streets for now. He immediately started shoving people towards it. “Everyone, down into the subway! Get outta the streets! Move!” The explosions were getting closer, with smoke obscuring the sky behind him. The citizens on the street started moving; some ran for the subway entrance, but most of them went back into the buildings that they had first ventured out of. Dammit, stone or brick walls won’t stop these things!
But it was impossible to save everybody. He just had to try and save as many as he could. He was going to have a hard enough time keeping himself alive, much less any of the clueless wandering around him. Even with his advantages, there was precious little he could do against something that had the power of a damned tank. Still…
He could…
No. He couldn’t. Not even now would he…not after…
Screw it. He would do the best he could, get as many people as safe as he could. Then he would get the hell out of Dodge if he had to steal a car to do it.
Atlanta, Georgia, USA: Callsign Victoria Victrix
Vickie had moved to Atlanta in the first place to join Echo, except after what had happened to her, she couldn’t. Her crippling panic attacks kept her from doing more than getting the registration papers from Echo. She’d filled them out, but after being unable even to do the interview, she had been rejected. After all, what good was a metahuman sorceress who couldn’t even stop shaking long enough to crumble a pebble? Never mind she was trained to a fare-thee-well as a warrior Geomancer. Never mind that those in the know were aware she was that rarest of birds, a techno-shaman. Echo needed people they could count on.
It had, indeed, taken her two hours to wind herself up enough to open the car door onto the people-populated outside world. She stared at the asphalt, and goaded herself with the memory of a mostly empty bag of cat food and what Grey would do to revenge himself on her if she got back in the car and went back home. And she was just about to put her weight on her feet when—
A tremendous metallic crash made her freeze. Maybe most people would have leapt in startlement and whacked their heads against the door frame, but the panic attacks made her freeze whenever anything unexpected happened. And then she looked up in the direction of the noise.
The five tractor-traile
rs had come apart at the seams. That was the sound she’d heard, the trailer walls falling to either side and crashing down onto the pavement. And now she stared at—
At first her mind registered only metas.
Then she saw the swastikas. And the guns. And the five, spheroid, war machines rising up into the air with a hum that made the fillings in her teeth ache. They were larger in all dimensions than the trailers they’d been hidden inside, expanding from an unfolding array that looked for all the world like the insides of a toaster, but inside those rails, space seemed bent. And now, Vickie’s anxiety panic attack was replaced by panic of another sort altogether.
* * *
She didn’t remember getting out of the car. She didn’t remember running, or screaming. But she must have done both, because when she came to herself again, she was cowering behind a dumpster outside an apartment block, dripping with sweat, throat raw.
What did I do? Whatever it was, she’d gotten out of the grocery store lot—without her car.
Her teeth began to ache again, and she glanced up reflexively, to see one of those shining spheroids floating easily above the level of the rooftops about a block away. It was dotted with baleful orange windows or ports, and the bottom tenth or so glowed the same angry orange. Except for the humming, it looked innocent enough—
A heavy chuff-chuff-chuff from behind her made her crouch further down and glance to the rear, as a Blackhawk chopper in National Guard colors moved purposefully towards the sphere. The sight would have reassured a normal civilian…
But Vickie was not a normal civilian, and the sight of a National Guard chopper heading towards what was clearly a metahuman-guided supercraft made her want to stand up, wave her arms and scream at them to retreat as fast as they could.
But of course, she didn’t do that; she just crouched there like a scared rat, cowering and shaking as it passed overhead. Not that anyone was going to be looking down, or would pay attention to one lone woman screaming and waving at them if they did. And there was nothing overtly threatening in that serenely floating chromed sphere…
Invasion: Book One of the Secret World Chronicle-ARC Page 5