His wife, Lauren, had suggested a call to Omega. She had written code for the airline decades before, and watched them construct a hardened, underground, computer reservations and operations facility using government funding. The entire system operated on copper landlines, which hadn’t been updated to fiber optic cable or satellite feeds. The advantages of such a primitive system were obvious: the facility was still online while the rest of the country struggled to reconnect the internet trunks that the Nazis had destroyed while tearing through outlying regions on their way to attack urban areas. One further advantage of old tech: people simply forgot it was there and went after what was more shiny.
Scanned and cleared, the tech led them through a pair of blast doors and down a corridor where the giant springs that supported the installation and protected it from shock waves of earthquake magnitude were visible through painted metal grills. The Cold War paranoia invoked by the precautions did not seem so outlandish today.
The control room had been modernized and decorated with faded Omega destination posters: Greece, Rio de Janeiro, Rome. They made Alex want to talk to every single one of the fifty Echo facilities in the world. He settled into a desk and opened his laptop as his companions powered theirs up. The Omega tech handed out Ethernet cables like they were Halloween treats.
“Let’s see what we have,” Alex said.
Ihsan typed code into his command line interface at machine-gun speed. “Connecting now. Two mainframes left in Atlanta.”
“Infected mainframes,” snapped Jules.
“I’ll be careful.”
The Omega tech eyed the programmers with trepidation. “I, ah, gave you all direct lines to the trunk. You won’t be able to access the Omega reservation database.”
“We could if we wanted to,” Lauren said, not taking her eyes from her screen.
“Behave, chérie,” Jules said. “Make nice.”
“Désolé,” she muttered.
Jules offered the tech a wink and began to hook the portable RAID to a hub for all the laptops to access. They hoped to scrape the data out of the network before Lebensraum wiped it clean.
A silence descended on the room, punctuated by keyboard taps and whirring hard drives. Ihsan sucked air through his teeth. After the third time, Alex shot him an inquiring glance.
“Whoever coded Lebensraum is an evil genius. It’s clawing at my firewall right now.” He shook his head. “The port should be closed…damn it…” With a fast movement, Ihsan popped the battery out of his laptop, shutting it off instantly. His dusky face had gone pale.
“That fast?” Lauren said. Ihsan nodded.
Alex did not like the fear and confusion in his crew’s faces. “Try Chicago. Try L.A. Hell, try Paris. The virus can’t be that aggressive.” The statement felt foolish as he completed it. “I mean…Okay, I know geography isn’t the same to us as it is to code. Just…just try.”
Shahkti set a phone on his desk with a sheet of paper covered numbers. “We’re ready. Dial nine to reach an outside line.”
Where to start? “You call Europe. I’ll call the US. When you’re done, start at the end of the list.”
The Indian meta took her seat and two phones in her hands. Her free hands danced across a laptop keyboard, stopping only to dial a new number.
The news was grim from every facility. Albuquerque: twenty metas dead, two missing. Amarillo: no survivors. Baltimore, major damage, and virtually all metas killed in an ambush. Boston: demolished, fifty metas dead. Anchorage, with its station of two OpTwos was the sole bright spot, though what Alex was told made no sense—that two angels and three hitherto unknown OpThree metas had virtually cleared the area of invaders, even bringing down their Death Sphere fundamentally intact. Well, I suppose if I were being defended by a pair of OpTwos, and three OpThrees showed up out of nowhere, I’d be seeing angels too. He made a note to collect that sphere as soon as there was time.
The voices on the line were dull with anguish, as if they were just waiting for the day to end. Alex kept the discussions short, issuing crisp orders for able-bodied personnel to assist local law enforcement and patrol for lingering Nazi units. Yet the reports were the same: massive loss of life, no sign of the troopers.
And from a remote medical facility: “We lost Matthew March.”
“The autistic clairvoyant, right?” Alex said. “He was bedridden. Did his heart give out?”
“No. Suicide. He set himself on fire.”
Alex tried to remember March’s dossier. “He could move?”
“Evidently he could move and write. He left a note, barely legible. It will take time to decipher.”
“Save it. I need to deal with the threat at hand first. Then I’ll be ready for further predictions of doom.”
Alex concluded the call and sat back in his chair. A sigh escaped him. Anchorage had provided the first piece of good news today, but it came with a mystery attached—one that would have to wait for an answer.
Shahkti slid over a list of casualties from Europe. Across the board, hundreds of metas had been lost, hundreds more nonpowered personnel, and the civilian casualty estimates mounted every hour as more bodies were found. The Thule Society had wielded their shock troops like a scalpel, slicing deep into the infrastructure of every target country, in addition to all kinds of inexplicable targets like restaurants and warehouses. The news wire reported attacks in remote locations like the Congo and Tibet; yet the bulk of enemy forces had assailed major cities in the richest nations of the world—with the exception of Germany. The birthplace of National Socialism was untouched. The German government had scrambled to issue a statement condemning the attacks before the smoke had cleared; their parliament was meeting at this very moment to send aid to the affected developing countries. Yet their offers of peacekeeping forces went unheeded. The world watched their every action with suspicion.
“Call the rest of the American bases,” he told Shahkti. “I need to think.”
Shahkti laid a spare hand on his shoulder. “You need to rest, sir. An exhausted leader makes hasty decisions.” The Indian woman spoke without recrimination, but her serious tone overcame matters of rank.
“I know, I know. But it’s important that they hear—”
She cut him off. “They will hear from you, in time. Echo facilities were designed to act autonomously in times of crisis. This is such a time. Our comfort is of minor importance. What matters is the actions Echo takes next.”
“Finding the Nazis,” he said.
“Yes, sir, but that is a job for Echo metahumans.” Shahkti’s voice hardened. “We’re eager for a rematch, believe it. But you, yourself, are the face of Echo to the world. Right now that face is too haggard to win the public’s trust.”
“I don’t follow you,” he said. “We protect the public.”
“All they see are two metahuman forces waging war against each other. Most take our side, but some will question why they have been caught in the crossfire.” She raised a finger to still his tongue. “Regardless of who instigated it.”
“Blame the victim,” he said with bitterness.
“Do not fall into such thinking. Warriors can never be victims. We have accepted the risks.” She sounded to Alex as though she had had this argument before. “You have a new war on your hands. Keep us in the people’s hearts.”
Alex took a deep breath. Shahkti was right, and he should have recognized this problem twelve hours ago. In the modern world of instant communication, you cannot wait to explain your position, lest you find your enemies have explained it for you. The most casual observer of presidential elections knew this maxim.
He could see the ramifications now. The President would probably invoke the War Powers act—but against what? An enemy that vanished, with no country to make war on? Congress would flail about trying to enact antiterrorist legislation, but these weren’t terrorists…in fact, as news wires came online, there were reports, and plenty of them, of terrorist training camps reduced to smoking holes in the
ground. The Thulians didn’t want any guerilla opposition—and didn’t want anyone else taking credit for their Blitzkrieg, he reckoned.
But they had to get this under some kind of control before Echo got hobbled. He scribbled a number on the list. “Call this number and ask for the Spin Doctor. Tell him Alex is calling in that favor.”
“Right away.” The woman flashed him a rare smile that was momentarily dazzling. “Now you will get some sleep, yes?”
“Not quite yet.” Hope, as dangerous as it was intoxicating, bubbled through Alex. He would control this situation; he would not be beaten. “Ihsan, report. Have you gotten through yet?”
The Turkish programmer groaned. “Lebensraum has brutalized the network unhindered, thanks to the outside attack.” His voice betrayed the pain his leg was causing him. “Anyone who could have thrown up a defense was killed or running for their lives.”
“No matter. Zero out the trash it left behind. Wipe it clean for reuse. I have a solution.” The programmers perked up. He fished out an unlabeled CD-ROM from his laptop case. “This software may do the trick.”
Lauren stood and took the CD. “What is it? Black Ice? Something illegal?”
Alex thought fast. The CD contained a simple, unbranded gateway protocol—into the Metis computers, deep under the Andes, where Uncle Tesla and Enrico Fermi’s electrical intelligence matrices lorded over the system like kings. Every byte of Echo data had been secretly duplicated in their vast banks of the secret science city’s holographic storage devices, under cover of a simple periodic heuristic virus-check routine that sent copies—literally mirrored, thanks to a light-beam linkage—of any changed files through one of Alex’s hidden rooms. If anything could resist Lebensraum’s destructive rampage, it would be living computer programs derived from the brain patterns of the greatest scientific minds in the history of the world. They didn’t have ice and defense programs, they had immune systems.
Revealing that secret to the uninitiated, however, was another matter.
“Something from Homeland Security,” he said.
Jules blew a raspberry. “Those amateurs?”
“Hey, give ’em some credit. Trust me, this is powerful stuff.”
“I’m sure it’ll do a heckuva job,” he muttered as his wife ran the install on her machine. “Threat Level Ochre Paisley, America, run in circles and panic.”
Alex frowned a moment and rubbed his hands together. He’d solved two problems, for now at least. What next?
Shahkti’s arched eyebrow answered that question: sleep.
“Two hours,” he promised. “Wake me up then. It’s going to be a long, long night.”
Moscow, Russia: Callsign Red Saviour
The woman known to Russia as Red Saviour jerked awake from a fitful half nap haunted by dreams of daggers and swastikas. Sitting up so abruptly caused her bruised and fractured ribs to howl in protest. When she had finally permitted the paramedics to examine her after the Saviour’s Gate Massacre—so the world media had already labeled it—they wanted to send her to the hospital at once. Her strenuous objections intimidated them enough that they settled for binding her torso in stiff bandages and rubbing salve into her burns. The ribs had already knitted themselves together.
Natalya sat stiffly at the edge of her cot—she couldn’t bend over without aggravating her wounds—and massaged her temples. The clock on her laptop read 4:15 p.m., an hour after she dropped down to close her eyes for a moment. Something had registered subconsciously to rouse her from what could have been a deep sleep.
“Commissar Saviour.” The soldier’s voice was timid. “You have a visitor.”
“He can wait, comrade,” she said. She knew she shouldn’t sleep while the Nazi invaders were still on the loose somewhere in the countryside, but she could enjoy a moment of solitude for a few more minutes.
The tent flap opened. A short, balding man with an air of entitlement stepped inside, his features lost in the glare of the harsh northwestern Okrug summer sun. His silhouetted form wore a windbreaker over a suit and tie, as if he’d come from a board meeting. Two hulking forms stood behind him.
“Out,” she snarled, “whoever you are—unless you have news of the fashistas.”
“That’s just what I was going to ask you, Natalya Nikolaevna.” The man stepped forward so that the lamp illuminated the face associated with the familiar voice.
She struggled to her feet. “President Batov,” she blurted. “Izvinit…I didn’t mean…”
Batov held up his hands. “No, please, don’t get up.” He moved forward to clasp her hand and guide her back down to the cot. “They warned me you were badly injured. Give yourself a rest.” Smiling warmly, he sat down on the cot next to her to force her to sit. She blushed and found a comfortable posture that put the least amount of strain on her ribs.
“Spasibo, sir,” she said.
“I have looked forward to meeting you for a long time. I regret that it could not be under more relaxed circumstances.” The bags under his eyes told her that he hadn’t slept much since the attack either. “The major general provided me with a detailed briefing, but I want to hear your perspective of the events.”
“They are the same, I am sure,” she said, uncomfortable at his unblinking gaze. “The terrorists traveled packed in delivery trucks to the Square. They attacked the protesting crowd”—bearing signs against her—“and killed most of my comrades before we fought them off.”
Batov pressed his lips together. The silence stretched until she thought she’d burst. At last he said: “Have you been following the news?”
“Da, sir. Attacks worldwide with the same Blitzkrieg tactics—”
He shook his head slowly as though she were a child. “That is not the news I mean. Russian news. Pravda.” He released her hand. “They have a name for the incident.”
“The Saviour’s Gate Massacre.”
“No.” Batov’s gaze was steady. “Another name. Red Saviour’s Massacre.”
Her chest constricted. “Who…? Why? I don’t understand.”
“Critics have seized upon the attack as an opportunity to criticize the government. You led the civilians into battle. You are a convenient target.”
Her fists clenched. “That is unacceptable! Now is a time for Russians to pull together, not bicker…you must silence them!”
Batov laughed coldly. “Oh? By sending them to the gulag? It is the twenty-first century, not 1950. You think like a dinosaur.”
“I think Nazis in powered armor is the problem! Excuse me for saying, comrade President”—her words stumbled out before she could correct her form of address—“but we’re camped in the shadow of Polyarnyye Zori, a nuclear reactor! We have eyewitnesses that saw the Nazi warships pass directly overhead—over our nuclear facility, over Murmansk and the nuclear subs! Unhindered!” Natalya’s face burned. “I think that is a more serious security threat than what some nattering kulaks in the press say about me!”
Batov backed away from the cot. She hadn’t realized how much anger she was projecting. His bodyguards dropped their hands to their belts.
“Forgive me, sir,” she said. “I’m very tired and frustrated. Our satellites have been destroyed. NATO’s are gone, even weather satellites are down or offline. The Nazis disappeared off ground-based radar minutes after the attack, and we haven’t picked up their trail yet. This is at the forefront of my mind.”
“And so it should be,” Batov said cautiously. “Just as the perception of the government is my priority.” He let the sentence hang.
“We’ll find them, sir. We’ll find them and hang them for what they did.” To my team, she added to herself. To the innocents in the Square.
“Thirty-six hours and you’ve turned up nothing.” The President spoke with care. “The trail is cold, but I think our friends in America have a lead for you.” Without prompting, one of his guards produced a folder for her. “How is your English?”
“Is beink flawless with no accents,” she replied in
English. The folder contained a printout of a communiqué and a pair of photographs—and a dossier reproduced from Great Patriotic War records. “Eisenfaust,” she read from the photo’s caption.
“Your father’s old enemy.”
She glanced at the dossier. “His deceased enemy. This is sixty years old. What do I care about dead Nazis? I’m hunting live ones.”
Batov smiled thinly. “Eisenfaust turned himself in to Echo the day before the invasion—alive and well. Until—” he pointed at the second photograph.
Natalya fished it out and winced. The graininess tipped her off that it was a capture from a spy satellite feed—probably the last picture the satellite ever took. The same face—young, proud, square-jawed—had been smashed to a pulp and was now framed in a body bag’s shroud. The time stamp on the photo dated it the day of the invasion.
“Nasrat,” she breathed. A caption in Russian read: Killed by intruders during siege of Echo campus.
“It is puzzling—and thus a clue to our puzzle. Read the first message from Mr. Tesla.”
The stationery bore the alchemical symbol for air: Echo’s logo, jagged from the low-quality fax. It was dated the day before the attack.
We have a guest at our facility who claims to be none other than Eisenfaust, the war criminal lost at sea at the end of World War II. Death appears to have treated him well. He hasn’t aged a day. This man says that he has important information to impart. His story is dubious, but he insists that we confirm his identity with someone who knows him—and most of the names he gave us are of WWII metas long dead from old age. However, there are two still alive: Worker’s Champion and Red Saviour. May we fly them to Atlanta to meet with this man? All expenses paid, of course. If it turns out to be a hoax, I’d be honored to treat them to a night on the town and pay their consultation fee.
Thank you for your time and consideration, Mr. President.
Invasion: Book One of the Secret World Chronicle-ARC Page 17