by Mercedes Lackey; Cody Martin; Dennis Lee; Veronica Giguere
Fear lanced through her. It was the Red Djinni. Of all people, it was Djinni. How? Why?
Were they calling the raid off? Hope and despair battered her at the thought. Hope that they might have, and she’d have a little more time to get herself together—despair that they might have, and they’d never get another chance. She jabbed at the microphone switch.
“Djinni,” she croaked, her voice a harsh rasp. Crying did that. She hadn’t screamed, not even when she fell. She never screamed anymore. “What?”
“You sound terrible,” he said, his voice clear over the intercom. “Open up, Victrix. Let’s talk.”
She didn’t want to let him in. She didn’t like letting anyone into her space, but she didn’t want to let him in, especially. Not at any time, particularly not now.
“I’m . . . kinda sick,” she said. “Look, I’m in no shape to . . . just tell me what you want. Is the op canceled?” That was safe enough to ask. They were Echo. It could be any op.
“No,” he replied, his head turning to appraise the hallway. It was quiet. They seemed to be alone, but who could take chances? They had come too far. “Let me in, maybe we can talk face to face, y’know, for a change.”
“I’m sick,” she repeated, and then had to grab for a waste basket, because she was. Great. Just great. “Trust me, you don’t want to be in here right . . .” urp “. . . now.” And the heaving just made her whole chest and shoulders and stomach wail with pain.
“I can take it,” he began. “I’ve seen—”
“No!” she cried as her teeth clamped shut, fighting to keep her breathing steady and unlabored. Steady breathing. Hyperventilating only made the panic attack worse. “Please, just . . . I’ll be all right, I just have to . . . I need to get . . .”
Djinni swore and counted to ten. Patience, he told himself. She doesn’t want you to come in, fine. You don’t need to go in there, but she sure as hell needs to come out.
“Look, this op—” It was a clumsy way to go about it, arguing with strained words to avoid being overheard by the wrong sort of people, the sort who might go running to Echo’s new boss. And through a microphone when she was just feet away, on the other side of the door. He wasn’t as good when he couldn’t see the mark in question. He needed body language, facial cues and . . .
She’s not a mark, he sighed. Stop thinking of her as a mark. You used to have friends, y’know. Not everyone is a mark. Wait . . . since when? Gah. Just talk to her, show some empathy for once in your godforsaken existence.
He started again. “This op, it . . . it needs . . .”
Damn it, girl, he’s a teammate. He might even be a friend. You used to have friends, you know. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I . . . I’ll be ready. Really I will. My word on it. I just . . . need time to . . .” She paused. “I need about an hour. Get this thing under control. Got to have that, can’t afford to medicate on this one . . .”
“It’s not that,” he interrupted. “Okay, it’s sorta that. It’s about you being ready. But not in there. Out here.”
“Wha and huh?”
“Out here,” he repeated. “We were cut off last time. You’ve done the research, we’re prepped, and there’s precious little you’re going to be able to do to help stuck in there this time. I want you out here, with us, when we go in.”
“I can’t run Overwatch from out there!” she yelped.
“We don’t need Overwatch, not this time. Think! Think where . . .” He paused. “Think where this op is! You have tried to probe it, you said so. You can’t. There’s nothing down there you can hack. And you hit a wall with remote magic. It’ll be a black hole for you, except for our feeds. No more mediums, Victrix. I know what I said, but I’m not willing to mess with your magic when there’s a simpler option! You’re not channelling through me again, you hear me? We need you there. You. And . . .”
He paused. “And you need this too.”
Her vision misted over gray. She tried to say something, but all that came out of her mouth was a wail of pure panic. She couldn’t even shape it into words.
The door next to Djinni slammed open, and he was shouldered aside by a dripping wet blue girl wearing only a towel. She had a key ring in her hand and was methodically opening every other lock.
“You fricking moron, what the hell is wrong with you?” Bella snarled. “Are you trying to push every panic button she has?”
She got the door open, squeezed through it, and slammed it in his face.
God, she smells good, Djinni thought. He thought of knocking again. He even raised his hand to rap on the door. And then what? Give his god-given talent at making things worse a go, while trying hard to ignore the surge in his blood every time he even got in mild proximity of that hot smurf? And that was assuming he could even get in the door.
Man down, and we haven’t even started.
* * *
“Breathe,” Bella commanded, her wet hair dripping all over the couch. Vickie obeyed. Meanwhile the healer was doing that “laying on of hands” thing and the pain was . . . ebbing. Not gone, never gone, but it felt like she could move again without sobbing. “Long slow breaths, like I showed you. What the hell happened? Before Red showed up.”
“Fell,” Vickie said, unclenching her teeth. “Le Parkour course. Up the wall halfway.”
Bella nodded, her face a mask of concentration. “Gotcha. Look, he’s—”
“Right,” Vickie interrupted, fighting the wave of panic again. “He’s right. But I can’t, not today.” Maybe not ever, she added to herself. “Just . . . can you get me working?”
Bella snorted. “Baby, I can ‘get you working’ in my sleep. Sera gave me a jolt of angel juice. Good God, if I could bottle that, I could make half of Atlanta metahuman and we’d roll over the Kriegers without even stopping to notice. Close your eyes and breathe.”
“Don’t be mad at him,” Vickie said quietly. “He just tried to do what a good tactician would.”
Bella just snorted again. “Breathe.”
* * *
They were in. It had been easy. Pride had done exactly what he said he would. His supplied codes had worked and they sped through various access points with no need for on-the-spot jamming. The guard schedule had shown a brief window of thirty minutes when a skeleton crew worked before the next major shift rotation. Victrix, sounding as if that wail of panic had never crossed her lips, examined the video cameras via Red’s feed and read him back the instructions on hacking them with the electronic doodads that Mel had in her pack, putting them on a loop of an empty corridor. The one time they’d encountered a lone guard on his way out of the bathroom, Mel had stepped forward and met the guard’s gaze. He saw a group of black-clad and masked mercenaries rush him, and in the lead, Mel charged, hidden beneath a carefully constructed illusion of the renegade Blacksnake head, Jack. The guard shrank back in fear. And from beneath her illusion, Mel struck, knocking his legs out from under him while Pride descended and knocked him out. Bella made sure he was going to stay out . . . and that there was no permanent damage. They left him in a stall, sitting on a stool, door locked.
They were in. They were undetected and most importantly, they had planted an image of their patsy. Their plan, up to this point, was going well.
I’ve said it on many occasions, Djinni thought. The best job is an inside job.
“What is this place anyway?” Bella asked, frowning. “You’d think Echo would be using all this office space. Or whatever it is.”
“They were until two days ago,” Vickie replied. “Verd cleared it out and hasn’t moved his own peeps in yet. Even Verdigris can’t get a bureaucracy moving, not even when it’s his own.”
“’Specially not when Miz Ferrari is runnin’ the bureaucracy,” Yankee Pride chuckled.
“Shut up, Pr . . . prick!” Ramona hissed. She pointed at her head, then Pride’s and made a harsh gesture with her hands. Pride nodded in apology.
Right, use the code names, he thought, admonishing himself for hi
s stupidity. Can’t be too careful.
“Check for an audio pickup?” said Vickie, with a touch of urgency. “Anything, might be something in a phone. Fifty feet around you ought to do it. Gadgeteer has the bug detector.”
“We’ve been clean since we got through the last checkpoint,” Mel answered, pointing to a small device on her wrist. Various lights representing meters flickered across the surface, bobbing up and down in slow and steady waves. “And once more, for the record, I want to remind you all that I hate my code name.”
“I wish Appollonius wasn’t so literal,” Vickie fretted.
“Whatsa Appledorius?” Mel wanted to know.
“Appollonius of Tyana. He was a blind seer, mystic and mage,” Vickie said absently. “I hate doing this thing blind. Though Appollonius was also one of the greatest magicians of his time. He was—”
“Knock it off,” Red said, pointing his camera to the Vault door. “We’re here. Picking up on this, Appollonius?”
“That’s your objective, Badger.”
“I should never have told you that story,” he muttered. “Or let you pick the code names.”
“Payback, she is a bitch.”
“Yeah, yeah. So we’re in position, give me readings.”
As Mel stepped forward and gave the Vault a scan, Vickie felt a stab of guilt. The others might not have heard the accusation in Red’s tone, but she had. She should be there, she should have been standing next to Mel, feeling about for any sign of arcane traps or locks. There shouldn’t be any; Echo didn’t believe in magic. But that was what they had thought about the Goldman Catacombs, and besides, there was a new boss in town. It had been a major topic of contention during the planning stages. Try as she might, Vickie couldn’t penetrate this Vault at a distance, it had been properly shielded against any and all of her scrying efforts. There might be more overlap between magic and psionics than she had thought; certainly the place was buzzing with psionic white-noise generators; Bella said it was like having a bee in your head. Or it might just be that there was nothing in the way of natural materials there for her to get an anchor on.
Inevitably, someone had brought up the idea of her tagging along, of dealing with any mystical protection of the Vault on-site. Ramona’s question was met with a moment of terrified blankness from Vickie, a warning look from Bella and an impatient shrug from Red Djinni. The compromise came from a surprising source, though reluctantly, from the Djinni himself. Victrix didn’t need to come along, she could use a medium, preferably someone she had operated through before. Of them all, curiously, the easiest link was made through Red.
Mel stepped back, and shook her head. “I’m not reading any unusual cavities in the surrounding walls or unexpected readings from the door itself, electrical or otherwise. I think you can blow it.”
Red didn’t move, as he was busy fighting his own demons. Just days ago, he had silenced the fruitless arguing and had suggested acting as Victrix’s medium. They were running low on options, and time, and he had put it out there to get them back on track. He hadn’t really let it sink in, until today, what he was agreeing to.
This never ends well . . . this never ends well . . .
And just hours before, hadn’t he tried to talk Victrix into leaving her nest, the safety of her home? But had he done this because she needed to be brave, because it made the most sense to have her with them? Or was he simply afraid? Afraid of giving up control, of letting someone else surge through him with chaotic forces? It hadn’t been the first time. And no, it never did seem to end well.
Did I cave for her or for me? For her strength or my weakness?
Finally, he drew a deep breath and stepped forward. Grimacing, he laid his hands on the door. “You set, Appollonius?”
“Yes sir,” Vickie replied. “I’ll make this as unobtrusive as possible.”
“Gee, thanks,” he muttered. “Hit it.”
Back in her room, she stirred a little, winced as her abused muscles whimpered, her skin pulled and rippled with sharp pains. She took deep breaths, waiting for the hurt to subside, then narrowed her concentration and whispered the words of the mnemonic.
This was actually the opposite of the spell that had called Herb; that one was going out, this one was to allow things to come in. Her hand moved the planchette-mouse on the drawing board, the mouse drew—
Nothing, except—“There’s nothing on the door,” she reported. “But the Vault has something surrounding the inside. ‘Something’ is as close as I can get. It’s like an energy field? Or an internal skin . . .”
“A giant dry cleaning bag,” Mel suggested.
“That’s not a bad analogy.” Vickie said.
“What’s it do?” Red asked between clenched teeth. He fought panic and a terrible desire to simply wrench his hands free and leave. Instead, he leaned in and pressed against the barrier, his arms trembling with the effort.
“Keeps things out. Like the psionic jammer except it’s a field. So it’s keeping magic out too. I don’t think that’s on purpose, but I’m not sure.” She sighed. “The difference that makes no difference is no difference. It’s sealed for someone’s protection.”
“Can I blow this door or not?” Red grated.
“Yes,” Mel and Vickie said simultaneously.
“There is nothing on the door,” Vickie added.
Red withdrew his hands immediately from the barrier.
“Then get out of me,” he snarled.
Vickie cut the connection abruptly. “Right, sorry,” she stammered.
Red motioned for Mel to hand him her backpack, rummaged quickly through it for the battery-sized explosives and the detonator, and went to work.
He didn’t say another word.
* * *
The door supports had snapped with muffled pops as the suppressors on the encased explosives muffled the blast. The barrier started to fall, and was deftly caught by Pride who struggled under the weight. He was soon joined by the others. Slowly, they eased the door aside and cautiously entered the Vault. Beyond the portal was a large room, everything in it stored haphazardly, as if people had just shoved things in here they knew vaguely were valuable without knowing quite what anything was, or did. They saw the expected cache of weapons, sealed file cabinets, a couple of racks of armor, bottles and jars and boxes that could have come out of ancient tombs or been teleported from the future.
And there, finally, they saw Alex Tesla’s sleek, futuristic desk. It had been dumped off to the side and shoved up against a wall, like a thing of no importance. Obviously the only reason it was here was because—
Ramona walked up to it and rattled a drawer. Or tried, the drawer was pretty solid. “Locked,” she said. “Not something easily jimmied. That’s probably why it got sent here. V—no one wanted to take the chance that it might have something important in it, but since no one took dynamite to it, they just don’t know whether there is something important or just pencils, staplers and a bottle of acid reflux pills.”
“Appollonius,” Pride said. “Are you able to read this room now that the door has been blown? More importantly, can you do something to circumvent the lock?”
“No,” Vickie answered in frustration, her hand extended in front of her as she pushed on the distant barrier. “That field is still keeping me out. I haven’t found a way to crack through it yet. Which tells me it’s psionic, and keeping me out is secondary. I don’t know enough about psi to get leverage on this thing. It’s like wrestling with a wet snake.”
“Goddamn it,” Bella muttered, shaking her head as if something was in her ears. “She’s right, it’s psi, it’s like having a high-pitched whine in my head . . . getting louder . . .” Suddenly she froze. “Oh, shit— Everybody out!”
Too late.
An alarm sounded as a secondary barrier slammed down out of the ceiling, covering the hole where the Vault door had been. The air vents gushed clouds of pale white vapor. Pride’s head snapped up, his eyes widening as he realized he was right
under one of the ceiling vents. He got a faceful, and went down as if he’d been poleaxed.
Vickie slammed her hands down on her desk, her eyes frantically scanning all the feeds as one by one, her team fell limp, like a bunch of rag dolls. The telemetry said they weren’t dead—of course not, this was an Echo vault, and Verd hadn’t had a chance to go lethal with countermeasures. They were all down. All of them. Except . . .
Of course.
Djinni.
“Don’t you breathe?” she screeched, her eyes fixed to his camera feed. He was darting about the room, his hands running along the walls. Meanwhile she was running a fast search through the Echo protocols for what the hell they might have as knockout gas in a vault.
“It’s Urmayan—!” she shouted.
“It’s Urmayan gas, yeah.” Red grunted. “I’m somewhat resistant to it.”
“You’re resistant to . . . ?” she stopped, for once, totally without words. “Okay, look, there’s stuff in Bella’s medic pack that should wake them all up. Vials are coded red, premeasured doses in single-use hypos—”
“That’s great,” Red gasped, “but someone should have a talk with the techs who set this up. The dosage is too high! I’m starting to get a massive headache, and our friends here will have brain damage if they’re exposed for much longer! I need to get this damned door open!”
Vickie swiveled in her chair to face a side monitor, which displayed a rapidly scrolling page of schematics.
“Left, about three feet!” she yelled. “Square metal control panel!”
Red leapt and tackled a stack of crates away from the wall, revealing the panel in question. He reached under his jacket and removed a sturdy blade. He jammed it behind the panel plate and threw his shoulder against the hilt. Slowly, the plate was dislodged and, finding a grip with his fingers, he wrenched it free. He stumbled back. He was getting groggy. He struck himself in the face, hard, and reeling forward, he speared his entire hand into the newly formed hole and closed his fist around a mess of wires.
No time to get fancy. . . .