Invasion: Book One of the Secret World Chronicle-ARC

by Mercedes Lackey

  Ramona debated whether or not to announce herself. This was essentially his home. Would he resent her intrusion?

  She resumed walking. The tunnel floor had been smooth before the bend. Here she began to see stones and boulders of increasing size; the light faded rapidly. Ramona fingered her lighter but resisted pulling it out until absolutely necessary. She put a hand out to guide her along the wall. She felt it curve away from her; had she entered a chamber?

  Suddenly, boulders blocked her way. The smallest was five feet tall. She clambered onto it and flicked her lighter. A rockslide of some sort had blocked off the tunnel.

  “Oh, damn. Damn, damn, damn.” Tears welled up in her eyes. All that effort, and the poor bastard had been buried in his own home.

  She had failed them all.

  The lighter sputtered and went out. Ramona sat on the boulder and let the dam break. Sobs wracked her body. Never before had she felt so worthless.

  The boulder moved.

  Only a few inches, but it jarred Ramona as though an earthquake had struck. She held her breath and waited for it to happen again.

  It did.

  And then the boulder lifted her into the air. The tunnel reverberated with the sound of rock grating against rock. Ramona worked her lighter until the flint caught. The tiny flame cast enough light to illuminate the cavern.

  What she had believed was a rockslide formed itself into a head, shoulders and arm. The head tilted, ever so slowly, to reveal a grotesquely massive face, fifteen feet from chin to brow.

  Eyes that glowed like a volcano regarded her. When the Mountain blinked, it sounded like a car backing out of a gravel driveway.

  He extended the finger on which she stood and studied her as if she were a butterfly.

  Ramona’s heart pounded. The Mountain could have killed her with a casual gesture; in fact, he might do it accidentally. She fought down the urge to run.

  “Hello there,” she said. Her voice sounded tiny. She took a deep breath. “Hello there!” she shouted.

  The Mountain’s mouth opened. A blast of superheated air washed over her. A sound like a sonic boom shook the tunnel. She covered her ears.

  Then she realized he had said “hello.”

  “Can you speak softer?” she said as loudly as she could.

  The head tilted. “I can,” the voice said, this time without the deafening volume, though she felt like she was having a conversation with a thunderstorm. “Who are you?”

  “Echo Detective Ramona Ferrari. I take it you’re the Mountain?”

  The giant shook, rocks falling from the cave walls. He was chuckling.

  “Okay, that was a stupid question. Listen, there’s an emergency. Echo needs you.”

  The Mountain stared at her without speaking.

  “We’re under attack. Nazis…I know, it sounds crazy, but there are hundreds of them. They’re big—I mean, not as big as you, but eight feet tall and heavily armored. Bullets won’t hurt them.”

  She waited for him to respond. After an awkward silence, she said: “They’re killing us out there. And they’re on the Perimeter, Tesla says, so civilians are dying too. It’s a war. All-out war…” Ramona took a breath. The Mountain said nothing. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” he rumbled.

  “I feel like I’m babbling. Does this make any sense to you?”

  “I like it.”

  Ramona blinked. “What?”

  The giant looked around the tunnel before resting his eyes on Ramona again. “First person…to talk to me…in a year.”

  “Really?”

  “I like your voice.”

  “Oh.” She cleared her throat. “But did you understand what I said? About the Nazis?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, good. Then you’ll come back to Echo with me.”

  “No.”

  Ramona gaped at him. “No? People are dying.”

  “Don’t care.”

  “You…don’t…care?” Her face flushed. “What kind of monster are you?”

  The giant’s glowing eyes stared at her. His silence spoke volumes.

  “Ah. Right. A giant rock monster.” She remembered what she’d told Tesla about cajoling the reclusive OpFour. “I’m sorry. You have to understand, I’ve just come from a war zone. It’s a miracle I’m still alive. If it weren’t for my friends, I wouldn’t be here at all. But you have a right not to care. You’re safe here.”

  “Alone.”

  She nodded. “I’m sure. You don’t exactly roll out the red carpet for guests. Does Echo even look in on you?”

  “By helicopter.”

  “Sure. That makes sense, since there’s no way to get up here otherwise.” She made a show of inspecting the chamber. “Nice place you have here. Cozy. How’s the TV reception?”

  The finger shifted, knocking her off balance. “Mocking me,” the Mountain said.

  “You’re goddamn right I am. You’re worse than a teenager, moping in your room!” She pointed towards the mouth of the cave. “I just told you people are dying as we speak, and you don’t care because you’re lonely. How the hell should I take that?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Honey, no one understands what it’s like to be a walking office building but you. That’s a given. Now, what are you going to do about it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I see that now.” Ramona judged the fall from his finger to be ten feet. “Put me down.”

  The Mountain lowered his finger. She clambered off. “I need to get back to HQ. You’re of no use to anyone, not even yourself.”

  Ramona turned her back on the giant and walked toward the light. She heard him shift behind her.

  “Divorced.”

  She stopped but didn’t reply.

  “Wife divorced me. After this.”

  Ramona began to walk again. She heard more movement, like a dozen sidewalks buckling.

  “Lost everything.”

  “You’re still alive,” she said over her shoulder. “That’s more than a lot of people can say for themselves today.”

  “Wait.”

  “I can’t talk anymore. I have to figure out a way down this mountain.” Ramona walked to the lip of the hole.

  The Mountain crawled behind her. The sound of so much mass in motion elicited a primal fight or flight response from her, like a deer fleeing an avalanche.

  Stone Mountain looked out upon the city. Atlanta burned; smoke rose from a dozen conflagrations. One of them was Echo, she realized.

  The giant groaned when he came into the opening. “Fire,” he said.

  “Brilliant observation,” Ramona said. “Are you going to help me down, or do I have to turn into a mountain goat?”

  He had not taken his eyes from the view. “Long way,” he said.

  “Long way down,” she agreed.

  “Long way to Atlanta,” the giant said firmly. There was a hardness in his voice that was not present before. Ramona turned to face him.

  “You know, the best cure for the blues is to work out your frustration,” she said, jerking her thumb at the city. “I bet you have a lot of rage to vent.”

  “I do.” The giant laid his palm down on the cave floor. Ramona mounted it. The Mountain brought his hand up so that she could safely climb onto his shoulder.

  The Mountain lowered himself from his den. His first step towards Atlanta covered twenty yards and nearly crushed a parked SUV. Looking out over the forest and the highway beyond, Ramona realized she had a whole new problem: how to get a ten-story stone giant through an urban area without killing anyone.

  “Watch your step,” Ramona yelled up to his ear. “We have a lot of distance to cover.”

  * * *

  If the city wasn’t under attack by Nazis, Ramona thought, they’d be mobilizing the National Guard against us right now.

  The Mountain took long strides—long meaning he covered nearly fifty feet a step. From her perch on his shoulder, she got the distinct impression that she
had been drafted for a Godzilla movie.

  Every step the giant took jeopardized something: a house, a car, trees, a swimming pool. He left five-foot-deep indentations in the ground as he passed. The damages incurred by his stroll would cost the city millions of dollars and give insurance companies epileptic fits. People screamed and ran at the sight of him.

  “Watch out for the houses,” she called to him. “Oh, crap! Dog at twelve o’clock! Um…damn.” She sighed as she spotted a flattened German shepherd in a bus-sized footprint. “Mountain! Hey, damn it, slow down!”

  “Thought it was war,” he said, but he stopped. Atlantans gathered at a respectable distance and clutched each other in fear.

  “Not on them.” She pointed at the crowds. “You have to be more careful. Echo prevents civilian deaths, not causes them.”

  “Hard,” he said. She understood what he meant. As they had left the park, Atlanta’s urban sprawl took over. There was literally nowhere he could step without crushing something.

  The All-Star game had jammed the highways to bursting, so those were out.

  “Go back.” He sounded like a despondent foghorn.

  “No, no! Let me think.” What she needed was a megaphone to warn people in their path.

  “I got it. Mountain…wait, calling you that sounds stupid. We’re co-workers. What’s your real name?”

  The giant tilted his head. “Bill,” he said.

  “Okay, Bill, remember when you nearly deafened me for life in that cave? Now’s the time to make use of those lungs…or whatever it is you have in there.”

  “What do I say?”

  “Anything. We just want to clear a path.”

  “Hrm.”

  Ramona edged away from his mouth and covered her ears. “Ready!” she said. She felt the giant’s chest expand.

  “COMING THROUGH!” he announced with the force of a rocket engine. Despite being behind the sound wave, Ramona’s ears rang.

  The Mountain looked down upon his fellow citizens as they ran in a panic. He huffed, and Ramona recognized his geologic-sized chuckle.

  He took a careful first step in an abandoned front lawn. “STAY IN YOUR HOMES,” he said. It made sense: a house was easier to avoid than a tiny dot of a human.

  “Watch out for dogs!” Ramona said.

  “I like dogs.” The Mountain hunched over—carefully, so as not to dislodge his passenger—and studied the ground as he chose his steps.

  Thus they made steady—and loud—progress through the Atlanta suburbs. When they reached Tucker, on the cusp of I-285, they got a glimpse of the white-hot thermite fires being sprayed by the spheroid war machines. The hellish orange glow of the war machines’ antigravity propulsion systems—a technology Ramona had not believed possible—lit the highway under the vast ceiling of smoke like a vision of hell. The Mountain paused.

  “Fight them?” he asked.

  Ramona bit her lip. “Keep going. If we can free up the Echo campus, every goddamn meta in the city can give those bastards the fight of their lives.” Assuming there’s anyone left alive at headquarters, she thought, but didn’t mention. She prayed she was right about the rationale for sending him into the city proper.

  “Come back,” he said and began his careful walk again, punctuated by bellowed warnings. They moved south, avoiding the Perimeter until they had to cross it. Inside the Perimeter, houses were packed too closely together for the Mountain to traverse safely.

  Three war machines peeled away from the highway and approached them. Ramona remembered what they had done to the Echo administration building. “Bill! Bogeys at five o’clock! Do you have eye beams or something?”

  The Mountain plucked Ramona off his shoulder and concealed her in his palm. With his other hand, he swatted at the war machine closest. It exploded into flames and debris. The other two veered away and kept a respectable distance.

  “Good enough!” She had to shout at the top of her lungs now that she was so far from his ear. “We’re close! Keep going!”

  The Mountain gave each of the war machines a dirty look and resumed walking towards a central column of smoke in the distance: Echo headquarters. The Mountain began to take larger steps, using city streets as a pathway. He shouted his warning repeatedly. Ramona put fingers in her ears and grinned like a tank commander homing in on enemy troops. Someone as big as the Mountain didn’t need the element of surprise. Right about now, she figured, those chrome bastards should be wondering what all that noise is.

  They came into visual range of the Echo campus. A dozen war machines hovered in the sky above. Blue beams launched into the sky at a handful of flying metas. Fires from the colossal explosion had spread to the security building and the hangars.

  “ECHO OPFOUR, THE MOUNTAIN, REPORTING FOR DUTY!” the giant roared, making his first step onto the grounds of the Echo campus into one that crushed a dozen Nazi troopers. Ramona laughed out loud.

  She stopped laughing as the Nazis turned their beams from human-sized targets and aimed for the walking mountain that approached them. Each beam tore a chunk the size of her head out of the giant’s stony hide. A few beams struck the hand she crouched in.

  The giant sank to his knees. She held on to his thumb, horrified that she had overestimated his resistance to pain. He was a walking target.

  “Oh, no, Bill,” she said.

  But the giant merely laid his hand flat on the ground furthest from the Nazis and opened it to let her disembark. Now she understood: he wanted two hands for fighting.

  She waved a fist at him. “Sic ’em, buddy!”

  The giant took advantage of his proximity to the ground to sweep up an armful of Nazi troopers and send them sprawling, then pound them into the dirt like a child torturing ants. More accurately, pound some of them deeper than the water mains.

  With the aid of the Mountain, the battle quickly swung in Echo’s favor. The Nazis could not ignore the hundred-foot stone giant stomping on them with gusto, leaving the remaining Echo personnel to take aim for vulnerable knee and arm joints.

  Three of the Four Winds led the final charge against the Nazis. Southwind, in particular, blasted at them with desperate brutality, screaming as he did. The sight of the towering alienlike beings cutting invisible swaths through the troopers was terrible to behold.

  Ramona did find Tesla again. He crouched behind a toppled wall and picked off troopers with his tiny raygun. The beam it emitted heated their armor to a red-hot glow until the metal melted. The men inside the armor were doomed.

  He exchanged a wave with her and kept firing.

  A figure approached Ramona out of the smoke. She carried two rifles.

  “Midori!” Ramona hugged the woman fiercely.

  Midori laughed with delight. “You did it, you did it!”

  “He’s the one doing it. I just guilt-tripped him into beating up some jerks.”

  “The perfect boyfriend,” Midori said, handing her a rifle.

  “Oh, the stories I could tell you.” Ramona scanned the sky for a running figure. “What’s this for?”

  “Atlanta SWAT stopped by with a tip. Shoot for the knees. They used these rifles for ‘antimateriel’ work.”

  Mercurye darted across the sky, stopping above Tesla’s head and leaning in for a quick consultation. For a brief moment, he met Ramona’s gaze before zooming away.

  Ramona loaded the rifle that Midori had given her and took aim at a retreating Nazi trooper. Her first bullet caught him right behind the kneecap. He staggered and fell.

  A warm feeling of vindictiveness spread from her belly to her grin. The day was improving, after all.

  Moscow, Russia: Callsign Red Saviour

  Chug had gone berserk. His fists crushed body armor, helmets, and energy rifles in a flurry of rage. The troopers pounded on him and shot him point-blank, yet he only roared and threw them into the flames.

  “Push them back to the trucks!” Red Saviour doubted her commands could be heard over the cacophony. She drove a glowing fist into the chest
of a trooper as his arm cannon spewed energy at her feet. He collapsed, gasping for air, and she let the concussive force of the blast add to her own airborne propulsion. From her vantage point, she saw Supernaut, Svetoch and Firebird grimly advancing, sweat pouring down their exposed skin. Supernaut stood partly in the flames as if he were a demon in Hell.

  The fiery trio paid no heed to their surroundings, so focused were they on maintaining the wall of fire’s onerous crawl. Only Red Saviour saw the squad of a half-dozen troopers charge from the flames at the right flank of her flamethrowers.

  She took off towards them, throwing a ball of energy to divert their attention. It burst in their path, staggering two who bore the brunt for their comrades. The other four trained their weapons on her friends and cut loose.

  The beams tore into Svetoch and Firebird with lethal precision. Strangely, the troopers’ beams had missed the giant Supernaut. He looked around wildly as two thirds of the flame wall dissipated.

  “Vassily,” she shouted, her voice hoarse with sobbing, “we need more fire!”

  “You will have it, sestra!” Supernaut bulled forward, adjusting controls on his armor. The squad turned their weapons on him; she swooped down to collide with the frontmost trooper, unleashing her energy to knock him back into the others. She and the Nazis collapsed into a pile of armored—and unarmored—limbs. The heated armor seared her skin through her bloody uniform.

  Red Saviour struggled to her feet first, avoiding grasping hands, in time to be blown over by a massive, fiery explosion erupting from Supernaut’s vicinity. The Delex trucks bowled over and their trailers detonated, striking the second wave of Nazis and their war machines. Everyone on Red Square was dashed to the ground; those in the heart of the firestorm, the remaining Nazi troopers, dropped their weapons as they became living bonfires. Natalya heard them screaming through the helmet radio of the nearest trooper.

  “Oh, Vassily,” she said. “You crazy bastard.”