by Mercedes Lackey; Cody Martin; Dennis Lee; Veronica Giguere
And then, just as suddenly, before she could say or do anything, it seemed to be over. There was no sound at all.
Red’s litle dot wasn’t moving.
She started to type in commands, and—
Wait. Wait. She had signal out on him. And suddenly, camera too. A stunning view of a tangle of metal that he seemed to be hugging.
Of course she had him live. Of all of them, it would have to be him. Maybe it was the fact that he had grown skin over his mic, earpiece and camera that had protected them. She screamed into the mic. “Red! Red! Wake up, you miserable rat-bastard S.O.B.! Wake up, you’re the only one I can talk to! If you’re dead I swear to Hades I will resurrect you so I can kill you all over again! Wake up!” She unloaded all the invective she knew in the eight languages she was fluent in. The Russian was particularly choice. Russians really knew how to cuss. If only he could appreciate it.
And then . . . “Pri tom, shto rot tseluyu tvoyu mat?”
She froze. Her heart leapt. “You’re alive! Oh, thank the gods, Red! You’re the only one I have feed on, that surge blew out half my system. Are you all right?”
“I’ve been better,” came the pained reply. “I feel like I’ve been stripped naked, had my finger bones broken and been electrocuted for good measure. Oh wait, I have . . .”
She briefly cursed in Hungarian. “I don’t heal; damn it, Red, I’m sorry. There’s some stimulant patches in a belt . . . Wait, you’re naked?”
“Focus, Overwatch. How are the others?”
“Moving. That’s all I can tell. I haven’t gotten sound or camera feed or telltales back on them yet, and I’m afraid if I reboot again I’ll lose you too. I have the feeling that if you hadn’t skinned over your camera button I wouldn’t have that either.”
Red reached over, picked up his discarded scarf, and pulled himself up. “It’s quiet,” he said. “Fighting must have stopped. Are they all moving?”
“Acrobat and Bull are together, moving slowly. Harmony, Scope and Bella are together and moving faster. They’re about two hundred yards left of you.” She paused as his camera feed and dot showed him waddling off. “Your other left.”
“Cut me some slack,” he muttered. “I got a little fried. Only reason I’m still alive is about fifty pounds of extra skin insulation. My brain’s still waking up.”
She blinked. The writer in the back of her mind wanted to ask him several dozen questions about how that all worked. She clamped her teeth shut on those questions. “If you keep going in a straight line you’ll meet them about the same time as they meet each other. You might think about finding pants, or you’ll make Harm’s head explode.”
“No worries; I’m hardly my usual svelte self at the moment. It’d take a lot of exploration to even find Big Red right now.”
“Right. I’ll just call you ‘Ken.’” A strange whining sound seemed to be coming from the area just past the others. “What’s that sound?”
Red stopped, and realized he had been squinting. The fight had apparently singed most of the skin on his face. He was, so it seemed, without most of his eyelids. He followed the sound and looked up. He gasped as the harsh light of the room hit his eyes.
The camera view flared with bright light. He must have planted the button cam right in the middle of his forehead when he skinned it over. “What happened? What’s going on?” she asked, in renewed panic.
“Sorry,” he apologized. “Light caught me off-guard. I think . . .”
He stopped, as a heavy rumbling noise grew in the distance.
“Aw hell . . .” he sighed. “That can’t be good.”
“You took the words right out of my mouth.”
Red broke into a run, and nearly tripped over himself. His impromptu armor of skin and tissue hung awkwardly, interrupting his stride and playing havoc with his sense of balance. He swore as he was forced to stop and will the excess flesh away.
“What’s wrong?” Vickie asked, “Are you okay? Did you break something?”
“Just give me a moment,” Red snarled. “There’s a little too much of me right now, and . . .”
He doubled over, surrounded by steaming piles of his own discarded skin, and retched.
“Those were puking sounds!” Vickie said. “You’re puking! What is it? Poison? Nerve gas?”
Red steadied his breath, and wiped at his mouth. “No, I just . . . I’ve just never gotten used to the smell of myself after . . . doing that.”
The camera caught a few frames of the discarded skin and her mouth dropped open. It was one thing to know about his ability in the abstract, quite another to get such a graphic demonstration. “Uh . . . yeah,” was all she could manage. “I can’t think of anything to help,” she finally said, humbly.
“Just another moment,” he repeated, wrapping the scarf around his head. “I’m raw at the moment, too tired for anything fancy, the skin’ll heal on its own.”
“If you know where you left your stuff, there’s glucose pills in the Echo belt pouch, and a stimulant patch.”
“Forget ’em, the others might need—”
And right on cue, there came the sound of gunfire, terrible crashing sounds, and the screams of his teammates.
Red ran a hand quickly over his scarf. It was secure. He broke into a run and flew over anything in his way, over fallen pieces of armor and debris from the battle. He leapt over the fallen Hunters, a smoky and entwined mess of metal, noting the destroyed orbs that served as their eyes. He filed that away for future reference. Everything had a weakness. Everything.
“I want to be you,” Vic whispered mournfully, engrossed in the incredible first-person view of a Le Parkour master’s headlong rush across impossible obstacles, and painfully aware she would never move like that again. She wasn’t even aware she had said it aloud. “Oh, I wish I was you.”
“You’d be the first,” Red muttered. “You’d be the . . .”
He skidded to a halt, and screamed.
“Oh . . . oh . . . fuck!”
Vickie gasped as she took in what he was seeing. It was so beyond not good that there weren’t any words for how bad it was. Her mind went around in circles, frantically looking through her arsenal for an answer. The last time she’d been faced with one of these things it had been up close and personal, yes, but an angel and an entire team of Atlanta SWAT had come to her rescue. The Seraphym was nowhere around, and SWAT was a long way away. And her team, oh God, her team looked so broken. They huddled together around Bulwark, under a dim and fluctuating force field, and towering over them, magnificent in the harsh light of the vault, was a Death Sphere.
The Sphere hovered and hummed in place, its arms thrashing wildly. Two of them ended in broken stumps, crackling wildly with exposed energy.
The cameras, Vickie thought wildly. Scope shot out the cameras! Oh, good girl!
But it hadn’t been enough. The Sphere was “feeling” about, bringing its tentacles down in mighty blows. Armor flew through the air, until finally a tentacle bounced off Bulwark’s shield. The Sphere paused, then brought all its remaining arms down, down, and struck to destroy the huddled group of metas.
Bulwark stood, defiant, but even from Red’s distant vantage point, Vickie could tell he was hurt. Harmony, wrapped frantically around him, screamed and recoiled from every blow, her cries mingled with pain and terror. Bella was tending to Scope, who lay motionless, blood flowing freely from her eyes. Acrobat bounced in agitation, seemingly trapped beneath the very shield that was saving his life.
How the hell did they ever get a Death Sphere down here in the first place? Vickie wondered. Where did they hide it?
“The dome,” Red growled. “It came from the dome . . . the Hunters and wolves were just the advance sentries. This is the vault’s real guardian. Overwatch! We need . . .”
“What?” Vickie screamed.
“I have no frickin’ clue!!” Red screamed back.
“It’s in the air, I can’t reach it with magic! I don’t have . . .”
“Well, what would you suggest?” Vickie shouted, now as angry as she was terrified. “I can’t short out its systems, I don’t know what they are! I can’t hack it, I don’t have a port or a wireless link to it! Echo’s got no backup for you down there! Magic is all I’ve got—”
Then the answer came to her in a burst of icy clarity. It was time. Time to call in that favor; one she had earned so long ago she had almost forgotten it, a favor from another time, another place . . . another Vickie. A favor, strangely enough, born of simple friendship. Back then, she’d never thought she’d ever have reason to use it.
“Red,” she said, her voice surprisingly calm and steady. “Please hold very still. I need your skin contact on the ground.”
“For what?”
“You need to be my channel. I’m calling an Earth elemental.”
“You need me to what and huh?”
“I need you to hold that position, and be very still! I’m going to . . .”
Red bolted upright. “Are you completely out of your mind? Do you know how unstable an elemental summoning is? Once you lose control, you can’t get it back!”
And just how the hell does he know THAT?
“Can you take on that thing alone?” she demanded harshly.
He didn’t answer. In the distance, they watched as a half-dozen tentacles crashed down on the failing shield. Harmony fell away from Bulwark as he dropped to one knee. She collapsed on the floor, and didn’t move.
“We don’t have time for this,” Vickie said, and for a brief moment she felt that old Vickie come alive. The soldier. The commander. “Now shut the hell up and plant your hand on the floor!”
Red uttered a few choice oaths, and slammed his palms down on the ground.
“Hold still.” Most spells were complicated. This one . . . wasn’t. As simple as the friendship that bound her and the elemental she affectionately called “Herbert.”
She took a deep, deep breath, reached inside for the memory. Pulled energy from the Earth Her Mother, channeled that same energy through the Earth Her Mother to the Djinni, and called one of Her Children. “Herbert, honey, Bad Things have happened. I need help, I need you, please.” Never forget the “please.” It was the difference between her and . . . well, other people, who would try to coerce the elemental kind.
Mom would murder me if I even thought about coercing an elemental. There was always, always that little voice in the back of her head commenting on everything. But she wasn’t listening right now. Because now—
She saw the camera view shuddering as the ground shook, as if with an earthquake. Well, there was an earthquake going on, a very local one. Red’s head, and view, snapped to the right as an avalanche of small stones—relatively small, compared to what was emerging—cascaded down the rock face of the vault, bouncing off the topped armor there. With agonizing slowness, something roughly the shape of a man separated itself from the wall, leaving behind the Herbert-shaped hole that was almost the height of the interior of the vault. The head turned blindly in Red’s direction, and the creature made a sound like the earth groaning an unintelligible question.
“Pull off your earpiece! Point it at him!”
For once, Red didn’t argue. The camera showed his hand shoving something in the direction of the elemental.
“There!” Vickie screamed through the earphone, amplifying it with magic. “Herb, there! They hurt Mother to make monsters! They hurt Vickie! They hurt my friends!” One thing that she could do with her magic against that sphere—she could light it up like a Christmas decoration for Herb. And she did.
The elemental turned its shapeless head towards the Death Sphere, and made another sound. If you could describe the sound of a volcano as “angry,” this was that sound.
“Get it, Herb! Get it!” Vickie screamed.
It strode across the expanse of floor, each step crunching into armor and flattening it. Vickie had not seen the Mountain at work, but she had the feeling it had looked a lot like this. With another roar, Herb wrapped his stony arms around the Sphere, and the fight was on.
“Hold on! Pull off its arms! Hurt it!”
The Sphere didn’t need cameras now; the target was grappling with it. The energy cannons on that side whined as they charged up, and blasts of actinic light pounded the elemental’s torso and legs. Huge chunks blasted free, pulverized into powder that filled the air, along with the smoke of overheated rock.
In moments, Herb was half himself.
The elemental was made of sterner stuff than the Kriegs could ever have anticipated, though; as the cannon powered down to recharge, he reached into the floor at his feet and pulled up huge slabs of the marble flooring and the ground underneath it to replenish himself. In moments, he was back to his original bulk. He tried to rip a tentacle out, and couldn’t, tried again and made a whining, frustrated sound.
“Herb!” Vickie shouted, realizing the Krieg metal was too strong. “Herb, get a pointy thing! Hit it with the pointy thing!”
The head shape swiveled ponderously; Vickie lit up one of the giant “swords” from the armor lying near Red—one with an arm still attached. Herb didn’t go after the sword, however. He reached down, picked up an entire suit of armor near his feet and, using the whole suit like the hilt of a tool, began to hack away at the tentacle.
“Good boy! That’s right! Good boy! Keep hitting!”
The tentacle separated with a shriek of hot metal. Herb tossed it aside and grabbed another. Whatever was in charge of the Sphere registered the fact that it was in trouble; the Sphere tried to escape. Herb wasn’t having any.
“Hold onto it!” Vickie screamed. “Hit it! Hit it!”
With dogged determination, Herb held onto two tentacles in one hand, as the rest frantically retracted into the body of the ship. He shifted his attentions to the Sphere itself, hacking at it with the armor and sword with all the enthusiasm of Sweeney Todd making meat pies.
Not even a Death Sphere could hold up under a battering like that. The Sphere dented, dented more, then started to split. Sparks showered out of it, and it spun on the tethered ends of its tentacles. Herb kept hacking.
Vickie expected the thing to explode. It didn’t. It just emitted a metallic scream and dropped to the floor. Herb stood there for a moment, as if waiting for it to come back to life.
When it didn’t—he flung the battered and unrecognizable armor aside, and clapped his hands gleefully, pebbles showering down from each smack. The pebbles bounced off Bulwark’s weakening shield.
“Herb!” Vickie called. “Careful! You’ll hurt—”
Herb’s head swiveled again, and he caught sight of the team, still huddling together, still protected by Bull’s force field. More enemies! He wouldn’t let his friend down. Herbert was strong! Herbert never failed Vickie! Caught in the rush of battle, he roared and picked up another suit of armor. Brandishing it, he headed for the half dome of the shield.
“No!” Red screamed, his voice lost in the cacophony of Herb’s charge. The elemental reared back, and brought his weapon down. The sword caught the shield on a strange angle, and Herbert uttered a confused rumbling yelp as it bounced awkwardly off to the side. And beneath him, Red watched as Bulwark staggered to his feet, one arm outstretched in defiance, his other arm hanging uselessly at his side. And Red was struck with a moment of horror, as Bull’s legs shook and buckled beneath him.
Bull crumpled, and fell.
“This!” Red roared, again in a dead sprint towards the stone behemoth. “This is what magic gets you!”
Herb glanced up, watched Red tumble towards him, and then looked down again. The shield was tough. He knew he was tougher. He could beat it.
“No!” Red screamed as he flew over more armor. “Goddamn . . .”
Herb raised his weapon again.
“. . . stinking . . .”
Herb’s face shifted, grimaced, as he leaned back fo
r the killing blow.
“. . . MAGIC!”
Red hurled the earpiece at the elemental in a futile gesture—maybe hoping to attract its attention. But this was exactly what Vickie wanted. She shoved her own magic energy into it, powering it with magic instead of Red’s body heat and kinetic energy.
“HERB!” she shrieked, using magic to multiply the sound of her voice a hundredfold, and letting her fear and hysteria come through. “NO! FRIENDS! DO NOT TOUCH!”
The earpiece fell to the ground, rolling end over end, and came to a stop at Herb’s feet.
It was the sound of a friend that stopped him. His friend. His only friend. Through the ages, countless attempts had been made to harness the raw power of elementals. They had been chained, both literally and figuratively, bent and broken and forced to do the will of their masters. But never for long. The consensus after far too many documented cases of mages destroyed by their futile efforts, driven by their lust for power, was that elemental control was simply impossible for any appreciable length of time. It never occurred to any of them to befriend one. At least, not until Vickie gave it a try.
The behemoth paused, tilting its head towards the tiny device on the floor.
“No hurt. Friends to Vickie. Friends to Herb. Friends to Mother.” Her voice broke for a moment on a strangled sob of relief that he was listening. She spoke soothingly, one old friend to another; Earth elementals were slow to anger and slow to cool. When enraged, they reverted to the temper and understanding of a four-year-old. “Calm down, baby. It’s okay now, you saved Vickie’s friends. They’ll want to be your friends now, too.”
The creature made an inquiring sound. Herbert had always been one of the easier Earth elementals to work with. He was definitely quicker on the uptake than most. As she watched him, she could tell when the anger petered out and his intelligence started to come back.
“My friends came here to find out what the Bad People were doing, and the Bad People sent metal monsters to hurt them. They’re hurt bad. I couldn’t help them. That’s why I called you, sweetie. You did a great job.”
She cleared her throat. “Bulwark? Drop the shield? Say hi to Herb? He’s interpreting the shield as offensive.”