Invasion: Book One of the Secret World Chronicle-ARC

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Visor primary, knee joint secondary target. And keep your head down, you don’t look like you’ve got enough armor to stop a pea-shooter. Next.”

  That was her. “Blues, LVFD Paramedic, psychic healing.” Her jump bag was at her feet. Bag, not box. She wanted her box. Every paramedic had his or her own box, and his or her own way of organizing it. But her box was somewhere back in the ruins of the station, and this was what they had given her.

  “Stay down, like you would on a SWAT assist. Next?”

  “Sparky. Electrical arcs.” That was Violet, one of Bella’s best friends, engaged to Fred. “I’m guessing nothing short of a lightning bolt is going to get past the armor?”

  “You’d be guessing right. Stay out of range and try and screw up their knees.” He looked around at the rest in the group. “That goes for all of you. The armor can take a direct hit from a Stinger missile. If you can’t punch through something like that, don’t try. SWAT team fire has taken out knee joints so go for those, or try and hit them with large, heavy objects.” He resumed his roll call. Bella again took inventory of her bag. She had to know where everything was, be able to put her hand on what she needed without looking.

  This was going to be hell.

  Within seconds of their first engagement, when Top Gun was shot right out of the air to fall headless at her feet, she knew it was going to be worse than that.

  * * *

  Heal and patch up. Heal and patch up. Forget even looking at minor injuries, this was combat triage—

  Her supplies were long gone, and she was working off what she found in the emergency medical kits that were bolted to the wall of each room. Working for the Vegas FD inured you to a lot of things, but not to having someone decapitated in front of you.

  They were about halfway through the underground complex, which didn’t bode well, seeing as they’d already taken three casualties. Top Gun, Fred, and Vi. The energy cannons were devastatingly effective. Vi had gone into hysterics when Fred went down, and arced her useless bolts of electricity at the Nazis, only to be hit by three cannons at once. There wasn’t enough left of them now to fill a single casket.

  Bella could feel hysterics of her own boiling just under the surface. If she survived this, her breakdown was going to be spectacular.

  There was something else building inside her too; it felt like pressure, like a migraine or the way some people could feel a seizure coming.

  She had scant time to think about what that could mean though, not with people dropping and the fire from energy cannons taking divots out of floor, walls, and ceiling.

  Half the lights were out, and they were fighting from room to room in a crazy quilt of fluorescent brightness and shadow, crawling through holes where doors used to be. The complex had been built to Cold War standards, meant to take direct hits from nuke-armed ICBMs, so what was load-bearing was still standing, but the cinder-block and Sheetrock internal walls were no match for what had invaded.

  And the noise…the whine of weapons powering up, explosions, the howl of the alarm system—screams—

  There were bodies, some dead, some still alive, everywhere. Mostly bodies in military uniform; some few in suits and lab coats, a couple in coveralls. She stopped to check each one, which tended to drop her behind the rest. That was where most of her supplies had gone: to the injured and unconscious here in the complex.

  Because members of her team didn’t need her supplies. They needed her psychic ability to push cells into replicating and healing so fast you could see the wounds closing. Nothing less would do, because anything less wouldn’t get them back in the fight.

  You didn’t get something for nothing, not even with a psychic power. The energy for that came from her; she burned herself up to heal them. In the ambulance she gulped pure glucose. Here…

  Here she was on her own.

  “Blues!” Another shout from up ahead and she hurried to catch up, scrambling over a tumble of cinder blocks and across the wrecked desk, coughing on the smoke from something on fire at the other end of the room. Even as she coughed, the sprinkler system went off, and she swept wet hair back as she scuttled around another cubicle wall to where she “felt” someone in agony. A guy calling himself “Turbine.” Speedrunner; not all that useful until about six rooms ago he’d figured out he could spin like a top and knock the suits over. When they were knocked on their asses, they couldn’t shoot at anyone.

  Except someone must have gotten off a shot at him, indirect or he wouldn’t be alive. Maiden America, one of the war vets, was holding him. Bella put her bare hands against his bare flesh, and immersed herself.

  It was a gestalt sort of thing, somehow she “knew” where to send her psychic energy, what to heal first—

  First off, block off consciousness. He didn’t need to be here for this. He stopped screaming and she didn’t have to look at him to know his eyes were closed.

  —tear in the pericardium—

  She sent the heart cells into a frenzy of replication, being “in there” was like being in a mosh pit, except that she had a modicum of control in there.

  —broken ribs—

  Bones were harder, they didn’t heal as fast. She bolstered them with cartilage as she lifted the pieces into place, gluing the bits together with the flexible stuff, better for her purposes than bone, really.

  Finally—chest muscles—

  Turbine’s chest looked like hamburger, but that didn’t matter. Beneath her hands, rivers of cells flowed into place, the muscles were rebuilt, strand by strand, fiber by fiber. Veins and arteries, nerves rejoined. And the last step, the easiest, skin crept across the muscles that had once been open wounds.

  Then a jolt to his head, to bring him out of it. He came awake all at once, his mouth opened to scream when he suddenly realized he wasn’t in pain. Maiden America heaved him up. “Get back with the others, and be more careful,” she growled, as the kid—younger than Bella for sure—felt his chest.

  She felt him turn, felt the thanks welling up in him, but she was already gone, following the next thread of agony, the next call of “Blues!”

  They were dropping faster now, and she felt lives ebb away before she could even get to them.

  She was crying, crying now, and she couldn’t stop. And she ran out of energy just as Iron Hawk went down. She put both her hands on him and tried to squeeze out something, anything, but there wasn’t anything left to give.

  She lifted her head, about to howl with anger and grief, and looked straight up into the visor of a Nazi.

  And something inside her snapped.

  She did what she had sworn never to do, from the moment she knew she was telempathic. Ruthlessly, coldly, she reached inside his head—

  Brain scrambled, he went down, twitching. Two of the team fell on him, and cut arms and legs off at the joints. The occupant of the suit didn’t even register the pain as his life bled out and Bella did nothing to stop it.

  Still holding the lifeless body of Iron Hawk, feeling like a bundle of sticks in her arms, she sent out her mind three more times, invading the minds of the Nazis, to paralyze one with fear, throw the second into a mire of confusion, and the third—oh, the third—him she gifted with his own paranoia, a fear that all of those around him were traitors and would kill him, and made that fear real. The best-armed of the lot, he began strafing his own men until, finally, one of them brought him down.

  And then her rage ran out, leaving her holding onto the verge of consciousness with the tips of her fingernails.

  But it was enough. That turned the tide. And as soon as she knew they didn’t need her anymore, she let go of consciousness and slid down into a place where, for a little while, there were no tears, no grief.

  And no guilt.

  At least, for now.

  Atlanta, Georgia, USA: Callsign Victoria Victrix

  The gunman behind her sent another volley of automatic fire past her, into the fray. This time the barrage took out the elbow joint of the first metatrooper
target. The bottom half of the arm, the half with the energy cannon in it, flailed uselessly.

  Vickie backed up, one slow step at a time, until she fell in with the line of Atlanta SWAT cops that the armored vehicle had disgorged. By the time she reached them, she and they had fallen into rhythm. Where they missed the joints, bullets pinged and whined away, but where they hit the joints…that was the vulnerable spot. Vickie kept the active Nazis off their feet, while the SWAT team concentrated on rendering one Nazi helpless at a time.

  When one went down for good, all four limbs rendered useless, she buried him. That might not kill them, but maybe they’d bleed to death, or their oxygen would give out, or an OpTwo or Three would show up to give them the coup de grace.

  “This is…” she panted, “…frickin’ brilliant…”

  One of the snipers next to her grunted. “Lost six SWAT teams workin’ it out.”

  Six? Six? Atlanta PD didn’t lose more than one SWAT member over the course of a year, and they’d lost six teams? Atlanta SWAT had Echo OpOnes on it…

  How many of these things were there?

  And if this was what was tearing up a blue-collar neighborhood, what was going after the important targets?

  What was going after Echo HQ?

  Suddenly a shadow fell over them, and one of the SWAT guys in the process of reloading looked up.

  “Mary, frickin’ Mother of God…”

  Vickie whirled.

  All that came out of her throat was a whimper.

  It was one of the spheres, bristling with tentacles, bearing down on them with horrible slowness. Half the SWAT team turned and started firing on it, but there were no vulnerable places on this thing, not to bullets, anyway.

  They were dead.

  She heard energy cannon behind her start to ramp up. She saw ports for more cannon open on the side of the sphere.

  And then—

  “I bring you Fire and the Sword!”

  The voice was a trumpet call from above, a clarion cry that both elated and terrified, filled the ears and the soul, and suddenly the sky was awash with flames.

  Vickie had seen metas before. OpThrees and even once, at a distance when she was with her parents, one of the near-legendary OpFours, Amphitrite, who might or might not have been the real, genuine goddess, the wife of Neptune of myth.

  This was no metahuman.

  She hovered in the midst of fire, was clothed in fire, bore a flaming sword in one hand and a flaming spear in the other. Her hair was living flames, and her wings, easily thirty feet across, blazed like those of the phoenix.

  There was a reason why, in the truly old texts, the first thing out of an angel’s mouth when it manifested were the words, “Fear not.” It was because the first sight of an angel should turn your knees to jelly and your guts to water, and throw you down onto your face with sheer Glory-induced terror.

  Half the SWAT team did fall down; Vickie would have, but terror locked all her limbs and she couldn’t have moved now. All she could do was look. Look on the face of a creature that lived to look fearlessly into the face of God.

  The angelic warrior darted straight up, avoiding all the grasping tentacles as easily as if they were waving blades of grass. She alighted on the top of the sphere, paused for a heartbeat, then drove the spearpoint home, slamming the spear down until her fist hit the top of the sphere with a hollow boom.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Then the sphere started to wobble, then kite sideways. The tentacles thrashed, entangling, two hanging limply.

  The angel leapt off, landing on one knee on the ground before Vickie, as the sphere struggled to rise, but canted over, reeling drunkenly over the housetops until it was obscured by trees—

  —the angel engaged the first of the two remaining Nazis, flinging up her hand as she passed it. A wash of flame engulfed the visor—

  —she spun in an impossible backward move, slashing that blade of fire through both knee joints of the second without even looking at what she was doing, ending up on the other knee, head bowed—

  Both Nazis crumpled and fell over backwards, into the mounds of dirt and rocks and torn-up asphalt left by Vickie’s magic.

  A crystalline sphere of silence surrounded them. Outside that sphere, sirens and car alarms wailing, distant screaming, the sounds of gunfire, rockets, energy weapons and explosions.

  Inside that sphere—the sound of a single rock clattering down the mound echoed like an avalanche.

  The angel looked up. Her eyes were a solid blaze of gold.

  She Looked into Vickie’s eyes. Saw everything. Vickie felt it. Every mistake and fear, every fault and hope, every secret, the smallest memory, were all laid bare in one white-hot instant.

  There was a flash of unbearable pain across the angel’s face. It was there for only an instant, and then it was gone again, leaving no trace behind—

  —or was there?

  One tear slid down the perfect cheek, across the serene and glorious, unhuman face.

  The angel opened her lips.

  “Run,” she said.

  One word that filled Vickie’s ears and heart and soul and left no room for anything else. Her body reacted while her mind still reeled, stunned.

  She ran.

  She did not stop running until she reached Coldwater Apartments, somehow untouched. Her apartment was as she had left it. She snatched up Grey and locked them both in the closet. She shook and cried and curled into a fetal ball and did not come out again until the last of the noise of combat was over and the night was heavy with cordite and smoke and utter, utter silence.

  New York, New York, USA: Callsign John Murdock

  John was in the middle of helping a mother and her child over to the subway entrance when the bottom of the world fell out. A short brick wall back in the direction he had fled from came tumbling down. Through the dust, he could make out the silhouette of one of the armored troopers; it had already started scanning for targets of opportunity. He wasn’t more than fifty feet away from the trooper, by far one of the closest people. Those that were still out on the streets finally recognized that there was imminent danger, and predictably panicked. The armored monstrosity stepped through the brick rubble, raising its arm cannons to fire.

  It took John a few moments, but he remembered that he still had a gun on him: a battered 1911 .45, GI issue. Practically an antique, but he’d bought it cheap and under the table from a shady gun dealer. He felt an all-too-familiar twinge, an urge to do something…drastic. No, no powers. The normal gun, on a normal man: nothing else was safe. Five years on the run had proved that.

  John unholstered the pistol in a smooth motion from the holdout holster in the small of his back, taking aim at the trooper’s center of mass. He squeezed off four shots in rapid succession; the .45 had some kick to it, but he hardly felt it. The heavy slugs pinged off of the trooper’s chest plate. John had placed the rounds in a tight group, but there wasn’t even a dent in the armor. He advanced, taking up an aggressive stance as he set his sights on the front grill in the armor’s blast helmet. Four more shots, all direct hits save for one that merely glanced off of an antenna. This last bullet got the trooper’s attention; his cannons relaxed at his sides as he stomped up to John. One man with a pistol wasn’t a threat to such an unholy terror.

  John performed a tactical reload with a fresh pistol magazine, letting the spent magazine fall to the ground. He slowly backpedaled, firing in measured intervals at his opponent. A flash of red to the left of John’s peripheral vision caught his attention; a red-headed and freckled teenager was standing on a stoop, frozen in place.

  “Kid, run! Go!”

  The teen just stood there, eyes fixed wide with terror at the oncoming figure. John gritted his teeth, reloading his last magazine.

  The trooper decided that it was time to quit fooling around; it took two large steps towards John, who was still firing at its head, putting him within reach of its massive arms. John finished off the last of his ammunition; the N
azi hadn’t even paused, not after being shot a total of twenty-two times. Well, now what? he thought, dropping his pistol onto the asphalt. The skull helmet of the trooper’s armor canted downward, malicious red eyes staring holes into John. Tinny speech came through a grill in the helmet—it sounded German—followed by a guttural laugh. Lacking a meaningful response, John flipped the trooper off. The Nazi raised his arm cannon, leveling it at John’s head. An ultrasonic whine—audible to him, but probably too high a frequency for anyone else to hear—issued from the raygun as it powered up, about to turn him into a smoldering corpse. John’s only thought before the explosion was of concern for his parents; he really hoped that this wasn’t going on where they were.

  Again the twinge, the—automatic reaction—do it!

  No. Not here. He couldn’t take the chance—

  Better he die than—

  John’s thoughts ground to a halt, violently interrupted. There was a flash and heat, and the next thing John knew, he was crumpled in the gutter on the other side of the street. Stars exploded in front of his eyes as he sat up gingerly; his ribs creaked in protest. I’m really getting tired of things exploding. He felt warm, as if the temperature outside had risen 20 degrees when he wasn’t paying attention.

  Where he had been standing was the Nazi—only its entire right side lay unevenly melted, the suit locked upright despite the fact that the right arm, torso, and part of the head were missing. John’s head swam. Weapon backfire? What—?

  It didn’t make any sense, though. Asphalt, brick, metal railings on the stoops: they were all melting and combusting. It took John a few moments to notice a human figure in the flames, and that’s when it clicked—the red-headed kid.

  The teen, his features completely obscured by the fires that seemed to now comprise his form, walked past the gruesome statue that the Nazi had become.

  He paused, and through the veil of plasmatic fire, John watched as he raised his hands and bent his head to look at them, marveling at his arms and body.

  A voice came out of the fires, curiously, still the voice of a kid.

  “Oh my god—dude! I’m a meta!” John didn’t respond, but the kid didn’t seem to be talking to anyone but himself.