Did it hurt? Of course it hurt! Hello! I tore my face off! My face! Off! It always hurts! Under normal circumstances, I like to grow a new face slowly, usually takes about a day. It’s relatively painless and I can start and stop as I choose to slough off the old look and get the base foundation going, followed up by attention to fine details. In emergencies I can grow a new look within a few minutes, but I have to start from scratch and build it up. I’m incapacitated during this time, forced to stare as my blood-soaked, skinless face regenerates epidermal layers in a mirror. It takes a lot of concentration. It’s a struggle to keep a careful watch on where and how the new layers are forming and to not vomit at the same time. Also, there’s the screaming. It takes a lot to keep from screaming.
The face was just about done, a young man’s face with dumpy features, when I started pulling on an imitation Echo uniform from one of my mish kits. The suit was made of a tough polyester double-knit blend, and wouldn’t fool the guards up close. From a distance, however, it would pass for nanoweave. I selected a trim blond wig from the dozen in the kit, stripped the plastic seal from it, tore off the wax paper on the glue pads, donned it, then went to work pasting on the eyebrows. While I could regenerate skin quickly enough, hair was another matter. Keeping a shaved scalp helped. Wigs were easy enough to switch out.
Jon returned. She was still breathing heavily, and was now sporting a disgusted scowl.
“We’ve got a potential problem,” Jon reported. “I saw an Echo bike pull up to the bank.”
“For the other robbery?” Jack asked.
“Don’t think so; he didn’t have the usual backup. Maybe he’s just here by chance?”
“Lot of that happening today,” I muttered, pulling on my visor. “We might have to deal with a meta now. This change anything?”
“No,” Jack said. “We proceed as planned. If we do this right, we might not even see him. If he shows, perforate him. Use everything you have. We’ve got one shot at this, with just one thing going for us—no one’s ever tried this before.”
“No one’s been stupid enough,” I grunted, pulling on my boots.
“Yup. But that gives us the element of surprise. We’ve done jobs with less. Let’s go; we’re losing our window.”
As the others got into position, I started a deliberate march to the guardhouses, my hands behind me, my fingers starting to elongate into pointed claws. More than anything, I didn’t want to be here. After the initial strike, my disguises would be worthless. This wasn’t artful infiltration, it was intentional slaughter. And for the first time, right when the rush should have been kicking in, I hated my job. This wasn’t what I did. Jon got off on killing; I’m a different kind of pro. Killing is the last resort. The very last resort. Not that I hadn’t done it, but not often. And not like this.
“Hey, you’re not an Echo Op…!”
I had tried to look relaxed, difficult when your entire body was a coiled spring. The guard’s cry was the signal. I tackled the desk guard, thrust up his chin with one hand and drove my claws into his throat with the other. He wouldn’t be able to trigger the main alarm. I felt dirty.
Jack started the clock, and in the corner of my visor I watched the heads-up display come on and the first countdown begin. With one guard down we had given ourselves a ten-second window to eliminate the other two.
Shattered glass and gurgling told me Jon had sniped the man in the other guardhouse. Jack moved in with silenced pistols, and a stream of lead slammed into the last, the roving sentry, with the muffled chuffs characteristic of silencers. We hauled the bodies from sight while Duff pulled up in the sedan.
Checkpoint One was clear. But this exterior guard post, like the bank front, was largely a façade. The real obstacle was inside, and the numerous cameras painting the area had surely alerted Checkpoint Two of our presence.
On his mark, Jack and I both hit the synched release buttons in the two guardhouses, and while the tunnel doors opened, we all dove into the car. From above, at street level, we heard a tremendous explosion, then more explosions in the distance. We didn’t really have time to consider what this meant. If anything, we were thankful for whatever diversion that other robbery was bringing to the mix. Jack reset the clock.
Twenty seconds.
At the base of the one-hundred-foot tunnel and flanking the heavy blast door, twin-mounted Mini guns encased within swiveling metal spheres provided the main defense for this checkpoint. Able to deliver over a thousand rounds a minute, these guns packed enough punch to bring down anything from an armored car to a light tank, either of which could handily fit in the tunnel. The Minis made this a well-fortified choke point, enough to hold off any major offensive. However, the ball turrets weren’t remote-controlled, and they weren’t kept manned. These guys had a union, and a turret chair made a lousy duty station. So we figured twenty seconds was what they needed to man the guns and secure the blast door.
We had run a few simulations in case this would happen. Jack wasn’t wrong about the element of surprise. We had gone over the schematics of this place until we saw the layout in our sleep. While the Vault looked impenetrable on paper, it had never been battle-tested. They ran drills, we were sure of that, but a real assault is a scary thing. We were banking it all on their inexperience, in hopes of a few moments of hesitation.
Duff hit the accelerator and we flew down the tunnel. Jon and Jack took a moment to switch their guns with the rifles that lay on the rear seats. The large blast door was closing and two figures appeared, one in each turret. Dammit. We had underestimated them. There was no hesitation on their part. As we hit the lower fringe of the ramp, they opened fire.
We were saved by momentum. The stream of bullets disintegrated the front grill and bit into the engine. The force was enough to slow us down, but not quite enough. Jack had run the numbers to prove that, so far as it could be proved. Our acceleration should have been just enough to clear the closing blast door. But numbers were one thing, reality another. Now, fighting against the stopping power of the Minis, we were just shy of a photo finish.
“Down!” Jack yelled. We all pressed ourselves as low as we could and braced for impact.
The base of the blast door slammed into the windshield, shearing the top off the car above our heads, and our momentum did the rest. As the blast door dropped down into its slot behind us, we continued through and smashed into the far wall of the admitting bay.
We had done it. It was less than perfect, but we were in. No strict need for timers now, but we still had to move fast.
“Wait for it,” Duff hissed as he chucked two volleys of grenades in opposite directions. We covered our eyes and, over the startled shouts of guards, heard the telltale phoomph of the flash bombs, followed momentarily by explosions.
Duff Sanction’s signature Blind Man, Exploding Man maneuver. Despite the god-awful name, it was a ploy the rest of us had come to respect. There was more shouting, accompanied by screams of pain.
Jon was up next. She rose from the back seat, a warrior goddess, and began laying down cover fire. The two guards manning the turrets were wide open. The turrets may have had superior shielding to the tunnel, but here on the inside, the gunmen were sitting ducks. They fell quickly enough to Jon’s attack. The rest of the guards, the ones that were still breathing, were scrambling for cover and returning fire in wild bursts.
Jack emerged, now toting his own rifle, and with his back to Jon’s they scoured the room with a rain of bullets. Taking position behind them, Duff watched as the guards, clearly on the defensive, took cover behind whatever they could find. He targeted them, signaled us to drop back into the car, and lobbed grenades their way. We like grenades. We always carry lots of grenades. Lots. Dropping down, Jack and Jon reloaded, waited for the blast, then were right back up and firing. Deafening, blinding, disorienting and deadly. After a few repetitions of that maneuver, Jack called for a cease-fire.
“Thirteen down,” he reported. “One unaccounted for. If he’s alive, Pla
n A is still a go.”
Duff was looking around furiously, wildly scanning the admitting bay. “Well, where the hell is he then? If you don’t see him, I’m setting up to blast our way in right now.”
“Quiet!” I hissed. “Be still!”
Standing up, I tore away my Echo costume to expose my arms and torso. I felt the radial awareness return. Hopping out of the car, I took a few steps and closed my eyes to get the lay of the room. I sensed the others behind me, the heat signatures of the Minis, and of the numerous bodies, and a few body parts, that were strewn about.
One heat signature was shaking. Contact.
I scrambled over a massive desk and tackled the last guard, who was crouched and hidden in fear. First raking him across the face with my claws, I closed in. He dropped his gun, whimpering, and began to plead for his life. I tore his armored vest away and as I drove my claws into his stomach, I watched his eyes widen, then bulge in anguish. He started to scream. For a moment, everything stopped.
He was just a boy.
He couldn’t have been older than twenty. A new recruit then—I would have bet this was his first assignment out of training. Sure, why not. Show him the ropes at the Vault. Nothing ever happens at the Vault.
I felt my stomach heave. This was all wrong. I should have been trading jokes with this kid, getting to know him the way I had gotten to know Walter and using him, not erasing him. I should have been a ghost in his life, not his butcher.
“Red!” Jack barked. “Get the codes!”
This boy, this pup, wasn’t a fighter. Not yet, anyway. He was…new. And he was dying. My claws had gone deep and were slowly tearing the life out of him. The smell of cordite and the metallic tinge of blood hung heavy in the air, bombarding my senses, bombarding my skin. It was something I had trained myself to ignore. Now, I couldn’t block it out.
Jack, Jon and Duff were now screaming in unison. “RED!”
I felt myself tighten up. Right. The job. Through clenched teeth I hissed at the trembling boy, hating myself.
“Give us the codes, and I’ll end it.” Closing my eyes, I forced my claws to spread wider.
He gave us the codes. No, he screamed us the codes. Jack punched them feverishly into the console. A second set of blast doors opened, to the inner sanctum. With a quick slash, I withdrew my claws, and slit the kid’s throat.
Jon couldn’t keep her eyes off me. I didn’t look at her, I couldn’t. It all seemed different now. I could taste the boy’s blood on my hands. I shed the claws away, grimacing from the pain of it. It wasn’t enough, everything still tasted like ashes; this was not what I was supposed to be. As we hustled to the short, wide corridor that led to the main Vault room, I paused only to reach into the destroyed sedan to pull out my scarf. The mask I was wearing, a simple generic face I had picked up over the years, didn’t seem to suffice. Trotting down the corridor with the others, I wrapped the scarf around my head. It was only cloth, but for the years when I had problems controlling my skin, it had kept the world out. It had felt like armor. It still did, like a security blanket made of Kevlar.
“Security cameras weren’t picking up any movement in the building above,” Duff reported as we entered the massive vault room. “We should be alone now.”
“Bank heist upstairs must have cleared people out,” Jack muttered.
“How long before reinforcements show?” Jon asked.
“Hard to say,” Jack said. “Estimate ten to twenty minutes. We should have enough time, but it’ll be metas.”
That was good enough to convince me to rush it. I wanted this job done, I wanted to get out of this place, to just get out, get the goods to Tonda and leave town. The fact that we’d be forced to flee into hiding no longer mattered. I wanted it. Forget the training, I was on the verge of panic. I heard this happened to a lot of professionals, that it was inevitable. I had never considered the possibility that it could happen to me.
“I really don’t feel like dancing with metas today,” I muttered. “Hard part’s done, let’s just get the damned thing and go.”
Most buildings like this might have held a parking garage beneath it. Here, the basement levels were taken up by one huge room, three stories tall with massive columns of concrete and steel. Here, you could find all manner of high-tech goodies. We passed by racks of weapons, tall caches of ammunition and rows of armor before we came to a storage dome with a circular vault door. Jack and Duff immediately went to work, and in five minutes we scrambled for cover as Duff blew the lock. A staccato of small explosions, and we heard the clatter of pins as the door’s seal was broken. In my haste, I rushed the dome and sped inside. The shelves were lined with odd devices. Some looked to be guns, others were shaped like futuristic jet packs, and others…well, I couldn’t say. A few objects were so exotic in their design they could have been high-tech sex toys for all I knew. The one thing everything in this dome shared was that each object was unique, a prototype.
Our mark for this job was a modern marvel, a testament of man’s ingenuity to make really big explosions come in really small packages. Don’t ask me for the technical babble about this bomb, but it was enough to make men like Duff soil their shorts and drool just thinking about it. In short, some genius out there had devised a way to condense an explosive’s critical mass. Another genius had taken it a step further and had separated the explosive into stable components, which exponentially increased the bang you got for your buck. Yet another genius had invented a novel carrier system, which used capillary action engraved into small computer chips to directly mix these components. The result? You could carry a small device the size of a wallet, and with a simple timer attachment, obliterate an area the size of a football field. The initial explosion would be enough to pulverize everything in the blast radius, but a second incendiary effect would raze the area with white-hot plasma. A bomb, a very high-tech and special bomb, named the Inferno.
It wasn’t hard to guess why Tonda wanted this. He had his own guys, his own geniuses who tinkered with doodads, and having this kind of technology would make his life much simpler. At that moment, I didn’t care what Tonda wanted it for. I just wanted out. I saw something that matched the description, and picking it up I was surprised how heavy the device was. Turning, I was about to pocket the bomb in a belt pouch when I noticed Jack had his pistols trained on me.
“Sorry, Red.” He seemed truly apologetic. “This is Tonda’s call.”
Jon and Duff appeared next to Jack. They didn’t look very happy about this. Careful not to make any sudden gestures, I held up the Inferno, and tossed it to Duff. He caught it deftly and turned away. Jon closed her eyes, and followed him.
Jack and I stared at each other for what felt like minutes. Then I asked the only thing I could.
“Why?”
Jack shrugged. “Tonda can’t trust you. He can’t trust most metas, but especially one that can morph his face. Killing you is part of this job for us. That’s just how it is, that’s just the game.”
Right. The game. The goddamned game.
“See you in the next life,” Jack growled, as he emptied his pistol’s magazines into me.
Echo Headquarters, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Yankee Pride glanced at his watch. “It’s not like Doc to be late.”
“He’s probably berating an OpOne for feelings of inadequacy. Can I smoke in here?” Ramona lit the cigarette before the CO could object. The smoke soothed her nerves. She hated prisons.
In other countries, Echo housed metahuman criminals in state-run facilities, contributing money and know-how to the special issues of detaining metahumans. Only in America was the entire operation farmed out to Echo. She’d heard talk of privatizing the Federal prison system; if it were run as tightly as Echo’s was, it could only be an improvement. She and Yankee Pride had gone through four security checks set up at killpoints with alert snipers concealed behind blast plates. For the sake of convenience, she’d left her sidearm in her locker. They didn’t confiscate Yankee
Pride’s power gauntlets, though.
“This guy’s been dying to meet you, Detective,” the CO said with a smirk. “He thinks you’re going to save him.”
“So he’s having a midlife crisis?”
“Could be.” The CO shrugged. “Or delusions of grandeur.”
“That’s what I’m banking on. Still, it beats being on a stakeout. He just turned himself in?”
The man scowled. “Took out three of our guys first. Hardly turning yourself in.”
“According to the report, he asked to talk to their commanding officer. Maybe he’s just a snob.” She winked at him.
The gate behind them clattered open. Doc Bootstrap bustled through, looking flustered. “You’d think they’d know me by now.” He pushed past them. “Let’s get started. We’re behind schedule thanks to me.”
The CO made a stubbing motion at Ramona. Frowning, she ground the cigarette underfoot. “No skin off my back,” she told the psychiatrist. She brandished the file at him. “Want to read this?”
“No need. I’ll know everything I need to know the moment this loser opens his mouth.”
“I bet you’re missed at Harvard.”
He hesitated. “Harvard?”
“I’m kidding, Doc. After you.”
They accompanied the CO down the corridor. The hubbub began: insults, taunts, catcalls. Ramona tried to ignore them. The CO spoke into his comm unit when they reached Eisenfaust’s cell.
“Let me tell you the drill, Eisenhauer,” the CO said to the prisoner. “No funny business. No sudden moves. We have sonics directed at your head at all times. Any aggressive behavior will result in incapacitation. Be nice to the lady.”
“Oh, he will,” said a coarse voice behind them. “The Kraut been waiting for his girlfriend all day. Maybe he shut up now.”
“Please ignore him, fräulein. His kind lack manners.” Eisenfaust spoke through the grill in his door.
The dark form cackled behind his own grill. “There he go with that Nazi talk again.”
The door slid open. Eisenfaust stood at attention, his broken arm tucked neatly into a sling. “Oberst Heinrich Eisenhauer, at your service.” His ice-blue eyes looked directly into hers.
Invasion: Book One of the Secret World Chronicle-ARC Page 7