by Mercedes Lackey; Cody Martin; Dennis Lee; Veronica Giguere
The Krieger pounded a metal fist into the stone barrier that Vickie had thrown up around the walk-in freezer. There was another crack and pop of electricity as the diner sign blew out and the freezer hum through Ramona’s headpiece went dead.
“That’s not a good sign,” said Bella. “Silence bad.” She bit her lip and felt the blood drain from her face as she saw the Sphere bearing down on the wreck of the diner.
Then Ramona reported, “We’ve lost power in here. Advise?”
To his credit, Yankee Pride answered in a calm and collected drawl. “Sit tight, ma’am. Keep the boss safe, and we’ll get you out.”
Yankee Pride had spent the better part of his time following the Invasion behind a desk or in front of a podium, part strategist and part figurehead. During the actual hits on Echo, he’d been charged to take care of Tesla as a sort of bodyguard, someone for Spin Doctor to put in front of a camera to show the public that the metahumans of Echo were invincible in the face of this new threat. “Too valuable” to be on fighting teams, they said. Now he knew what Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shephard had felt like when they were sidelined for the same specious reason.
Leaders didn’t sit behind desks and throw other people at a problem without regard for health and safety. Or if they did send folks into harm’s way, they did it from the front lines, like that Commissar over in the slums. He was really beginning to like that woman. Alex Tesla could have taken a page from her little red command book, that was certain.
“What next?” Scope hoisted the grenade launcher and nodded in the direction of the diner. The Krieger stood with its metal hands clasped in a giant fist, and it brought them down upon the rock fortress with the force of a pile driver.
“They’re in a commercial freezer, it’s hardened as a safe room, and it’s full of rock hard food,” Bella said, as if she was thinking aloud. “It’ll be a cold battery for a while . . .”
“Ain’t nothin’ going to actually burn with all that dirt and rock on top of it, and heat tends to go up rather than down,” Vickie pointed out in their ears. “At least, I don’t think that Zmey’s Supra-Sovietski Molotov formula is going to burn rock.”
Bella turned to Pride. “Boss, you need to make a decision and make it fast, because the Molotov juice might not get through rock, but that Death Sphere can.”
He held up a hand. “Noted, Parker. Acrobat, you keep doing what you’ve been doing, and concentrate on the bigger of the uglies. I’d like to think that if we take that down, the other might turn tail. And Parker, you and Miss Upyr work on keeping Bruno from getting caught too quickly.” Pride assessed the space between them and the diner. “Miss Scope and Miss Blaze, you stay here and wait for my signal. We’ll move on my mark.”
“Bruno, hold still a minute,” Bella said, and put a hand on either shoulder, closing her eyes for a moment. She wilted a little; Bruno’s eyes widened.
“What did you just do?” he exclaimed.
“Cleaned all the fatigue poisons out. You should be feeling like you just got out of bed after a good night’s sleep.” She pulled her hands away. “I don’t do that often, it’s usually a waste of energy I would need to fix wounds, but you’ll need the edge.”
Bruno grinned and watched Pride expectantly; if he’d had a tail, it would have been wagging a mile a minute. “We go now?”
Pride waited for the next downswing from the Krieger. “Now! If you trap that Sphere, get a shot on it, understood?”
Acrobat was off like a shot, with the other three racing after him. Pride moved toward the Krieger, gauntlets glowing. Bella followed him, unable to keep up with the rest of the squad. When he was on the edge of the debris field, he knelt to the asphalt and brought one fist up. At the same moment that the Krieger’s fists slammed into the rock surrounding the freezer, Pride’s fist hit the asphalt. The parking lot split with the impact, but nothing else moved. Again, he hit the pavement in time with the trooper’s steady assault, weakening the foundation and causing more of the debris to slide. The fifth and sixth hits allowed the rock to crumble enough that the Krieger paused mid-swing—
—and looked directly at Pride.
It paused, the massive metal head focused on the mound of rock that covered Tesla’s hiding spot. With a whine and whir of gears, it moved purposefully toward the meta whose fists continued to glow. Each step the Krieger took scattered rock and debris. Yankee Pride’s likeness covered billboards in Atlanta, the image of Echo for the new millennium designed to instill hope and make metahumans relevant to the younger generations. Tesla was a figurehead, but this man with the glowing fists in red, white, and blue was a symbol of everything that needed to be broken and cleansed in this miserable city.
A subsonic whine filled the air as the cannon rose to target Yankee Pride. “Wait for it,” Vickie muttered, even though she knew that Jamaican Blaze couldn’t hear her. Scope could, though, and Scope had Blaze in sight. She gave Blaze the “hold it” hand signal. The younger woman nodded once to show she understood.
“Good one, Sure Shot. Boss, say when. Fresh fries on your call.”
Pride stood calmly, the gold aura around his gauntlets glowing brighter as the cannon ramped up. There was a soft pulse as it prepared to fire, and Scope could hear it even as Pride called the mark. A CCCP special-issue grenade impacted on the muzzle of the arm cannon, the charge lodged dead-center.
“That’s how it’s done!” Scope crowed before spinning and ducking behind the rocky barrier. “I hope this one’s a dud; otherwise, this is gonna be spectacular.”
“And by spectacular, you mean shrapnel everywhere.” Pride motioned to Blaze to have her move forward. “Let’s heat this up a bit, if you’d be so kind.”
She nodded once, her hands coming up to her waist as she pulled the heat from the still-smoldering debris to form a brilliant fire. At first, orange-yellow flames licked the concrete and dirt. In moments, the flames darkened and grew light again, white-blue as they leapt to life and concentrated around the legs and knees of the Krieger. The soldier smashed the side of the arm cannon against the rubble in frustration, trying to dislodge the grenade. As he did so, the casing broke and Zmey’s custom cocktail leaked out all over his right arm and side. The flames leapt higher, igniting the stuff so that one half of the Krieger was enveloped in red and blue flame.
Pride crouched, one hand splayed on the ground as he gave the count. “Drop it in three, two, one—” With a muffled pop of air, the fires rushed back into the debris and left the Krieger glowing white-hot. Yankee Pride charged, gauntlets a brilliant gold as he readied his punch. The fiery compound dripped down from the soldier onto Pride’s own Echo armor, leaving holes where it cut through the armor and found the nanoweave underlayer. The meta let out a yell as he slammed one fist in the back of the Krieger’s weakened knee.
A weak wave of dust enveloped Pride. It was enough to smother the fire on him. He coughed and followed with a left uppercut to the inside of the leg joint, moving the hip from the socket. The Krieger tottered dangerously, liquid fire still leaking out the arm cannon. Pride swung both hands around in a two-fisted punch to the other leg, the impact into superheated metal leaving some of the molten residue on his own gauntlets. As he staggered back, the Krieger toppled to the rubble.
“Bring those fires back up and take cover!” Holding his left hand, Pride ran for where Scope had hidden herself. Blaze moved up as far as she could in order to see her handiwork, and the flames roared around the Krieger to ensure that it was finally down.
Bella sprinted for the same spot as Scope and Pride, diving into cover between them. Since the only part of Pride that wasn’t covered in armor was his face, she slapped her bare hand over his mouth and concentrated on healing the burns. “Stop squirming!” she ordered. “Burns keep burning unless you do something about them right away!” That wasn’t exactly what happened, but it was close enough for a layman.
She had her eyes closed, so she missed the slag-down of the Krieger. She did, however, hear Blaze slam
to the ground next to Scope and the muffled warning before the crack and boom of exploding metal filled the air. As Pride and Scope had predicted, shrapnel went flying in all directions, and the massive arm cannon rocketed over their heads and through the car that had held Tesla’s janitor. The heat and pressure from the exploding sedan whipped back at the four, bits of rock and glass catching any bit of skin that wasn’t immediately covered.
Scope lifted her face from her arm; blood dripped from several gashes behind her ears and along her neck. “It might be uncharitable of me to say so, but good damn riddance. Asshole.”
Bella clamped her free hand on Scope’s neck; the bleeding stopped and the gashes started to close visibly. “Amen.”
“I’ll see if that janitor has any family,” Vickie said in their ears. “If he does, I’ll report he died heroically trying to rescue Alex. If he doesn’t, I’ll let his bosses figure out what happened. But we still have that Death Sphere to deal with—”
Belatedly Bella remembered Pride couldn’t talk with her hand still clamped over his mouth, and let go.
“Thank you, Miss Parker.” He coughed and flexed the fingers of his left hand. “Bruno, how’re you holding up over there?”
Acrobat was panting and gulping air. “It’s getting sticky, sir. It really wants to get back to find Mr. Tesla.” There was a crash from the other side of the parking lot, followed by a yelp from Bruno over the comm. “Like, really-really.”
“Noted. Miss Scope, how many of those commie rounds do you have left?”
“Four, sir.” Scope paused. “So we have good odds of one right.”
Upyr’s voice came through the channel. “Is not being so simple. Zmey has twenty-eight of them, we were to be having five. Could all be, as you say, duds.”
Pride got to his feet and motioned for the rest to follow him. “To be fair, math was never my best subject. I was more of a history and literature sort of man. Let’s work with the assumption that they’re all duds and we’ll have to do something extra to break the casings. Understood?”
Any bit of assent was lost in the explosion of the last neon sign on the block bursting into a shower of glass and metal. Vickie broke in. “I’ve run out of flashes to blind the eyes. Bruno, make with the traveling music.”
Acrobat scrambled to what remained of a bus stop and launched himself to the top of the one wall left standing from the three-story building. On the ground, Upyr darted toward the smoldering wreckage of the janitor’s car, positioning herself directly across from the rest of the Echo team. From where they were, they could see one of the Sphere’s tentacles smash the remaining wall; Bruno went flying forward, managing to tuck into a roll as his hands and feet met the pavement. He landed a few feet from Scope and gave her a wide grin, in spite of the lacerations on his arms and face. Bella grabbed him and went to work. “Jeebus, people, give a gal a chance to breathe, why don’t you,” she muttered.
“That was awesome, wasn’t it?” Bruno was saying to Scope. “You’ve gotta tell Bull about that one, it was totally choice.”
She shook her head and turned to Pride. “All right, boss. Where do we move?”
“What kind of ground do you want?” Vickie asked. “I’m out of juice but I have great sat-maps.”
The Sphere, however, had other plans. Acrobat was out of the picture, and it zeroed in on the mound of rubble and dirt that hid the freezer where Tesla and Ramona were hidden. And nothing was going to keep it away.
There was only one functioning energy cannon on it, but the cannon was bigger than both of the arm cannons that the trooper had sported. As soon as it got within range, it started blasting away at the mound.
That was the bad part. But the good part—it was having trouble “seeing,” missing at least half its shots. It moved in close enough to be right on top of the mound and the blazing, melting Krieger trooper.
That was the good part. The bad part was that in order for any heat to reach up where it hovered, Jamaican Blaze was going to have to stoke those fires very high indeed.
* * *
Ramona shoved boxes of frozen vegetables and ground meat to the far side of the freezer, building a strange sort of igloo out of them. She used the tubes of hamburger like logs to make walls, reinforcing them with bags of frozen peas and corn, and stacking the boxes around the outside. A metal shelf made the roof, with more bags of frozen stuff—berries and other fruit this time—on top of it. Her boss sat on the floor, still muttering to himself. She had dismissed him as useless the moment that Vickie had enveloped the freezer in earth and stone, and she hoped that he wasn’t going to do something stupid that would endanger them both. She pushed the last of the cases of frozen tater tots to the wall and shed the down jacket. “That’s the last of what we’ve got in here. Looks like we missed delivery day.”
“It’s gonna get very hot in there, Ferrari,” said a worried Vickie in her ear. “I know that heat goes up, but Jamaican Blaze is going to have to stoke the fire above you to the point where the brick is vitrifying if we’re going to weaken the Sphere. Some of that is going to go down. Is there anything else you can use for insulation?”
The detective looked around the small room. “That’s a negative. I’ve stacked all that I can against the wall, and it looks like they used the freezer just for food.”
“Okay. Get in under it, and yell if it feels like you’re edging past ‘sauna’ and into ‘oven’ territory.”
“On the bright side, this could be a helluva victory barbecue if it works,” Ramona muttered, pulling Tesla with her. She jammed the coats into the spaces above them and sat with her back to a box of tater tots.
“I can’t think of a quip,” Vickie replied. Her voice sounded exhausted. “Stay safe in there.”
* * *
The dead Krieger was white-hot now, and to Bella’s fascinated horror, the bricks of what had been the diner were actually burning. She’d read about that—how during the Dresden firebombing in WWII the brick buildings had burned long after anything conventionally flammable was gone—but reading it and seeing it were two different things. Visible heat made the air ripple all the way up to the Sphere, which was now clawing at the rubble with a couple of tentacles as well as trying to shoot its way in.
“Bella, darlin’,” Pride said, the tense sound of his voice at odds with his gentle drawl. “There any way ya can juice Scope like Harmony can?”
“I can sure give it the old college try,” she replied, and put both hands on Scope’s shoulders, willing steadiness and energy into her.
“It’s not Harm, but it’s helping, Blue,” Scope said, sighting along the bazooka. “Keep it up.”
No one said the obvious; that they had one chance to make this shot. Scope had already spent three of the four “special loads.” It wasn’t that she had missed, it was that the damn things had bounced off rather than lodging, where Scope could have shot at them with armor-piercing rounds to vent the casing, or exploding the way they were supposed to. This was it. There hadn’t been a murmur from inside the freezer. Bella had been afraid to say anything, for fear that there wouldn’t be an answer if she called out to Ramona.
“If you can give me a hair more . . .You’re boosting my vision, Blue. I think there’s a spot I can make this thing wedge into.”
Bella closed her eyes and concentrated with every fiber. She sagged, and Pride moved to brace her. Scope’s back tensed, but her arms relaxed, her lip curling into a sneer as she found the sweet spot along the top of the Sphere, right where one of the tentacles seemed to have jammed at an odd angle. The bazooka went off with a satisfying whump, the hot gasses blowing right past Pride’s shoulder and ear. He didn’t turn a hair.
The grenade hit; it exploded quite as if it was unaware it could have been a dud. Runnels of fire trickled down the top of the Sphere. From here, it looked like nothing, mere driblets. There was no way to tell that the stuff was so hot that right now it was eating its way into every crack and crevice it could find, weakening the Sphere—cr
itically, they hoped. . . .
“One of four,” Upyr remarked calmly. “Was good odds.”
“Let’s bring those fires up on top, if you’d be so kind,” Pride drawled, one arm holding Bella up. Jamaican Blaze nodded, sweat running down her face and arms as she moved to control both the fires in the diner and the smoldering metal atop the Sphere. “Miss Scope, you do what you do best.”
Scope tossed the bazooka aside and picked up the sniper rifle, loading it with incendiary and armor-piercing rounds. “Way ahead of you, boss.”
Upyr put one hand up to an ear. “I will to return,” she said, stripped off her gloves, and dashed off. A moment later, she did return. She looked strangely—pink. She clamped one bare hand on Bella and one on Scope. Bella felt a rush of strangely frenetic energy—apparently Scope did too. “Daughter of Rasputin is to being find me looters,” she said with satisfaction. “They are to being need to sit down now.”
“You should bottle that,” said Scope absently, and began firing steadily into the top of the Sphere. The weakened outer shell showed signs of damage, the rounds cutting through the outer casing. She cut a methodical pattern through the top of the Sphere, allowing Blaze’s flames to cut a path that circumscribed the topmost piece. The fires beneath shifted and rose on one side, and the Sphere began to cant over sideways. The tentacles waved wildly. Scope switched to stitching a line across the now-exposed and glowing belly of the thing. It started to split open along the line like a melon under pressure.
Then everything went south for it. With a hideous howl, it actually turned turtle, inverting. Bella thought that the pilot might have mistaken his direction—but the propulsion unit underneath suddenly gave a blat and it accelerated straight down. It crashed into the mound of burning brick less than a foot away from where Vickie had buried the freezer. The impact of the Sphere could be heard through the channels, and Tesla’s frantic screaming filled their ears. The feed abruptly ceased, soon replaced by a soft buzz.