Revolution: Book Three of the Secret World Chronicle

by Mercedes Lackey

  The ceremony was well under way. By now it was obvious that the guests weren’t going to make it in time. Verd improvised something . . . wait . . .

  Vickie used a camera just behind Verdigris to zoom in on Verd’s PDA. It was meticulously outlining a second-by-second set of notes.

  That wasn’t improvising! It was right there in his notes. Regret that delays hit honored guests. Promise access later.

  The hell? He was behind it! But why?

  Before she could signal Bulwark, Bella, or Ramona, the situation blew up in her face.

  One of her monitors showed all the security camera feeds from every car in the train. It had been pathetically easy to tap into. The bulk of Bull’s team appeared clustered in the fifth car, the rest were milling about confused with the guests of honor on cars six and seven. Bull himself was rushing for the door to the fourth car. The PA system on the train came to tinny life. “I wouldn’t do that, Mister Echo Man! There’s an awful lot of boom rigged to blow on the last two cars, and guess who’s got her finger right over the boom button? We’re the Rebs, and we’ll be your hosts during this hostage crisis. Don’t try to leave your cars, don’t try to use your powers or . . . poof. End of hostage crisis, and we wouldn’t want to end the fun early, would we? So . . . yeah . . . we got us some demands . . .”

  “Rebs my ass,” Vickie muttered, and paid no attention to the list of “demands” that were being read off, because at that moment her standalone “Magic 8 Ball” computer began flashing the full alert screen and sounding an alarm.

  MARTA Hijacking: Current. Primal Cause: Dominic Verdigris. Probability: 100%.

  Vickie swore in Russian, but her hands were already moving. “Overwatch: Command: open Red Saviour, Gamayun, Bella, Pride private. People, we have a hostage situation on the MARTA. Repeat, a hostage situation on the MARTA. Verd’s taken the old-timers hostage. His people, probably Blacksnake, posing as Rebs. Armed and dangerous. Commissar, the train is still in motion and is not slowing down.” She repeated the demands that the phony Reb leader had made. “Those are probably code or trigger IDs for something else; maybe to tell Verd what stage they’re at. CCCP, you guys are the wild card; Verd won’t be planning on you doing anything. So . . . whatever you do, it’ll screw him over. Patching you all in full Overwatch group mode now. Those of you with the new rig, use it!”

  * * *

  John was in the break room with Pavel when the call came. Bear was expounding on the merits of Roseanne as a teaching tool for family dynamics; John had been doing his best for the past hour and a half to just nod and sip his beer without really listening. Unfortunately, he was just about out of beer; since he was technically on call, he couldn’t leave the HQ for at least another four hours. The sacrifices I make for my comrades . . . to protect them from my comrades.

  Just as John had finished the last of his beer, an alarm came to life briefly, followed by a burst of static on the intercom.

  “Attention, attention; all hands. Situation on the MARTA line; Echo hostages have been taken. All on-duty personnel are to report to the briefing room immediately in full gear.” That was Gamayun; she repeated the instructions in rapid-fire Russian. Then the alarm came back on. At the same time, his Overwatch rig came to life. “People, we have a hostage situation on the MARTA. Repeat, a hostage situation on the MARTA . . .” Vickie repeated the list of phony “demands”—weapons, money, about half of Georgia to be ceded to them and renamed “State of Rebellion.” “Patching you all in full Overwatch group mode now. Those of you with the new rig, use it!”

  John set the empty beer bottle down, slapping one of Pavel’s metal knees with his free hand. “Time to go to work, old timer. An’ not a moment too soon.”

  He was already up and jogging away when Bear stood up, shouting, “But I was about to be getting to my treatise on John Goodman’s approach to fatherhood!”

  Five minutes later, John was running towards the briefing room while still zipping up his vest. Some of the CCCP had nanoweave gear, mixed and matched with what was already on hand; it was lucky that CCCP uniform colors were predominantly black, since nanoweave didn’t take dyes. John rounded the last corner and trotted into the briefing room, followed seconds later by the rest of the on-duty comrades. The usual suspects—Georgi, Pavel, and Mamona—all shared shifts more often than not, with the duty roster rotating so that they all switched patrol partners some of the time. Georgi was John’s usual motorcycle patrol partner; they worked well together. The Commissar was already suited up and waiting for them. I wonder if she sleeps in the damned patrol uniform; she’s always first one here, even with no warning, an’ always suited up. She was grinning, her face down and eyes examining each of them as the team fell in.

  When everyone was settled, she leaned forward, placing her hands on the worn table in front of her. That same smile, which would have seemed conspiratorial on anyone else but was disquieting when worn by the Commissar, was still there.

  “Today, comrades,” she said, drawing out the words as if to savor them, “it is, how they say here, ‘open season’ on mercenaries. And there will be nyet anything ‘sublethal’ about it.”

  * * *

  “Overwatch: Command: Mark Two Overwatch. Open Corbie, Knight, Leader, Sammies, Ramona, Bella, Pride, Bulwark, Djinni, Shakti, public, public group link. Add Saviour, Soviette, Unter, JM, public, public group link.” Vickie’s hands flew over the keyboard. “Heads up, this is Overwatch. CCCP dispatched. Saviour is ground command CCCP, since she’s free to move and Pride’s not. Camera feeds on your HUD from the train. All of you with the new rig are linked up now. You can access folks with the old rig with the command Open Overwatch Mark One and their name, or let me handle it.” People with the old rig were getting a recorded repeat of her original alert now, and responses were coming in as she linked them in group mode. At the ceremony, things were proceeding as if the hostage situation wasn’t occurring at all. Of course they were. This was all being orchestrated by Verd, and he’d pull the reveal only when he was good and ready. She listened with half an ear while the others began coordinating with each other. After a few—surprisingly few—moments of confusion, that was exactly what they did. The past few weeks of working out the internal rebellion had done . . . wonders.

  “Nat, Bull, I’m ceding strat as well as command to you,” Yankee Pride muttered, unbearable tension and frustration clear in his voice. “Verd’s actin’ like nothing’s happening. If I break away, he’ll know we’ve copped onto it and we’re reactin’—wait, somethin’s goin’ on.”

  Well that was clear enough. Verdigris had put one hand to an ear, frowning, then muttered something into a lapel mic. The “something” was fully audible to Vickie, using Pride and Bella’s enhanced pickups. “Right. Dispatch Response Teams Gamma, Victor and Sigma. It’s only Rebs; how hard can it be to put them down? No, don’t bother scrambling Echo Medical, these are metas, after all, even if they are retired. They won’t get hurt. This is no more than a publicity stunt and an annoyance.” Then he returned his attention to the audience, continuing his speech as though nothing had happened.

  “Patch me through to Echo Med,” Bella ordered, turning her face away from Verd and Khanjar, her voice a thread of a whisper. Vickie complied, putting Bella not only on the Med comms, but the Med PA system. Bella’s voice might be inaudible to anyone next to her, but Vickie made sure it was at a good volume going out. “Echo Med: this is Belladonna Blue. Red alert, full scramble. The MARTA with the retirees has been hijacked. I need the full response team up and moving. Ignore all other orders but mine. Dispatch to MARTA Five Points terminal and set up, but be prepared to move on the instant. Suit up in nanoweave. And go armed, if you don’t have offensive powers. If you have the new comms, use them. Do you copy?”

  Even if they weren’t wired with Overwatch rigs, the past several weeks of Bella as their CMO had instilled a firm confidence in her in every member of Echo Med. And by this point, most of Echo Med was on Overwatch Mark One. Including the
DCO with Bull’s teams on the train—Gilead, who Vickie could see looking up at the camera from car seven and nodding slightly. Good.

  The response was immediate. “Panacea here, lead DCO. We copy, CMO. Pacifist protocol off. Moving now. Out.”

  “I take it we scramble as ordered?” That was Corbie coming in. His team was one of the three Verd had ordered out. Probably to be cannon fodder.

  “Yes,” said Bulwark, very quietly. Clearly he too was avoiding being overheard. “Then ignore anything that doesn’t come from me or Red Saviour.”

  “They could be to ignorink you, too, Comrade Bulwark,” Saviour sniped. “I see you beink pinned down, I believe I am beink true free agent.”

  “Bull, how do you want me to handle the ones that aren’t on Overwatch?” Vickie asked.

  “Can you patch into the Echo freqs without Verdigris finding out about it?” he asked.

  She ran through some mathemagical calculations in her mind. “Maybe. Fifty-fifty.”

  “Who’s Echo Dispatch today?” he wanted to know.

  “Dean Colt.” She knew him by voice; he had been on the list of those they wanted to approach, but she hadn’t gotten around to her usual grueling background check yet.

  “Good man. I’ll take the chance he’s not on Verdigris’ payroll. Contact him directly and do it through him.”

  Vickie’s hands were flying again, while she issued more commands. “Overwatch: Command: open direct line Echo Dispatch op.” Meanwhile she directed her rig to scan for Blacksnake comm. They were using one, of course, how could they not be? You couldn’t pull something like this off without comm. Probably scrambled, but Blacksnake was a big organization, and the thing about big organizations was that they got lazy. There was a high probability that they were reusing an old code or an old protocol to scramble, and Overwatch had every old one that Vickie had ever been able to find.

  “Operative Colt,” she said as soon as the link was established.

  “Ma’am, whoever you are, this is Echo Dispatch and—”

  “This is Operative Nagy, callsign VickieVee, Echo Project Overwatch,” she said, interrupting him. The Colt brothers, Sam and Dean, shared split shifts on dispatch duty, and they were polite Southern boys. It was almost painfully easy to run right over the top of them if you were female.

  “Overwatch? But—”

  “No, Overwatch is not the DNA storage project.” She patched in Yankee Pride. “I have Echo Dispatch. Authorize me, Pride.”

  In the monitor she watched Pride turn his head away as if scanning the crowd. “This is Yankee Pride, Colt. You are authorized to give Overwatch any damn thing she wants.”

  Vickie blinked, It was odd to hear Pride say anything stronger than “darn,” a testament to how much frustration he must be enduring.

  “Y-yes sir!” Colt stammered. Vickie began explaining the situation to him in crisp, concise detail, pausing only when the search program reported it had found a presumed Blacksnake freq, and again when it reported that, as she had expected, it was using an old scrambling protocol and began relaying the little chatter there was through one of the auxiliary speakers.

  “Patching you through to Operative Bulwark, who has on-site command at the train,” she said when she was done, and turned her attention to the Blacksnake chatter.

  “Colt,” Bulwark said, sounding ridiculously calm. “I assume you’ve been briefed.”

  “Sir, yes sir!” Colt responded, and added heatedly. “When we round up Verdigris—”

  “We’ll deal with him later,” Bulwark said sternly. “We do not tip our hand. The only way we’ll get him is if he is unaware that we know what the true situation is. Now, this is what I want you to do . . .”

  * * *

  Natalya clearly hated every moment of the ride in the van. She kept threatening Mamona with excoriation if she didn’t go faster; given the state of the van and the Atlanta streets between the HQ and the terminal, it was amazing that they hadn’t crashed a dozen times over. More testament to Mamona’s reflexes and knowledge of the city than anything else, but it still wasn’t enough for the Commissar. Untermensch knew what she was thinking. Is proper tactics to seal off the terminal, seal off the Blacksnake dogs’ route of escape . . . But he knew there was still the not-so-little voice clawing at the back of her mind, urging her forward to take the fight to the enemy.

  Untermensch had been watching the Commissar from his seat on the left side of the van as he and the rest of the squad were doing final checks on their gear and weapons; merely habit and redundancy, since everything had been checked over rapidly right before they left. After having worked with Natalya Nikolaevna Shostakovich over the years, he had become a very good judge of her moods. Since before the van had screeched out of the CCCP garage, the Commissar had been chain smoking—far more heavily than was usual for her. She had just thrown her last cigarette out of the window and crumpled the empty pack with disgust, her knee bouncing frantic energy, when he decided to speak up.

  “Commissar?” She waved a hand over her shoulder, indicating that she was listening. “Are you . . . all right?”

  She whirled around in her seat so fast and viciously that for a moment Untermensch thought that the Commissar was going to strike him for daring to ask such an impertinent question. For half a second her face was cast with a crazed, manic mask. Just as quickly, however, she regained her composure; she looked like Natalya again, and not some crazed animal. Well, perhaps not as crazed.

  “No,” she blurted out. “I am nyet fine.” The Commissar clumsily scrambled out of her seat and into the back of her van, her feet kicking towards the windshield and in front of Mamona’s face as she climbed over the seat, causing the car to swerve several times on the road.

  “Hey!—I mean, uh, Commissar. Almost lost a bit’ve control there.” Mamona fixed her eyes front and grip tight enough to turn her knuckles white on the steering wheel, weaving in and out of traffic and down side roads in order to beat the MARTA train.

  “Georgi, we are to be leaving the van now.” The Commissar turned in her seat to face John. “Murdock, you are in charge of evacuating and securing the station until I rejoin you there; no mistakes, understood? None of these svinya are getting away from us, not today.”

  John shrugged. “Roger that, Commissar; it’ll get done.” He racked the charging handle on his M4, chambering a round to punctuate his sentence.

  “Horosho.” She turned back to Untermensch. “Come. Will explain plan on the way.” The Commissar opened the side door of the van, the wind and humidity rushing in. “Time for us to get a horse in this fight.”

  “Dog,” Mamona corrected automatically. “Dog in this fight.”

  “Nyet,” Bear piped up, “is being correct Americanski saying about pig—”

  “Da, da, what it ever is being! Davay!” Natalya threw an arm under Georgi’s arms, and kicked out of the van on a plume of energy, causing the van to rock perilously from side to side as Mamona swore and tried to correct. The van quickly dwindled away below the pair as the rush of the wind in his ears grew louder. He saw that the Commissar was making a beeline for the MARTA line.

  “Commissar!” Unter had to shout several times to get her attention; he’d hardly ever seen her fly this fast before. Finally he was able to gain her attention; she looked down at him, annoyed. “What are we doing?”

  “Getting you to be on train! Echo is needing all the help it can get!” She outlined the rest of the plan to him by the time they had the train in sight; with perfect timing and more luck than Unter thought existed in the world, the plan just might work.

  Good. I was needing a workout.

  * * *

  “Overwatch to Bulwark. Sitrep update. Teams that Verd scrambled diverted to clear Five Points station of civilians. Echo Med staging at Five Points. MARTA authorities contacted and all trains being halted or cleared out of the station. CCCP moving to rendezvous with Echo at Five Points. Red Saviour and Untermensch are leaving main force and heading your way b
y air. Your DCO in car seven is briefed.”

  “Understood, Overwatch,” Bull said. “Dean, am I patched through?”

  “Sir, yes sir.”

  “This is Operative Bulwark, coming across multiple Overwatch, Echo and CCCP channels. If you’re hearing this, you’re either already aware of our underground movement opposing Verdigris or we’re sure we can trust you to join us. For the latter, we had planned to approach you in time but Verdigris has forced our hand early. He has staged a force of what we believe to be Blacksnake operatives posing as Rebs on the MARTA train escorting the Echo veterans and has taken the train hostage. We will advise on his motives when we have determined them. For now, if you are not already en route to the Five Points station, please proceed there ASAP. The train has been rigged with explosives, so our goal is to commandeer the train before it proceeds into the downtown core. This will likely be messy; expect casualties and well-trained foes. Bulwark out.”

  “Yankee Pride, verifying Operative Bulwark.”

  “Belladonna Blue, verifying Operative Bulwark. Echo Med, rendezvous with Panacea on the plaza level outside the MARTA police station.”

  Bull turned to his crew. “All right, give me the lay of the land.”

  “They’ve got us by the balls, Bull,” Frankentrain said, jerking his thumb towards the front of the train. “That Tammy girl is now in the next car. Her thumb’s not moving from what looks like a remote detonator.”

  “You’re sure?” Bull asked.

  Frankentrain nodded. “She’s making a point of letting us see it.”

  “She’s got about twenty with her in that car, sir,” Rider added. “From what I remember, she’s got another thirty in the other cars, not counting the lead car which is closed off. We’re going to need a distraction, and somehow get out and over to it without them knowing.”

  Bull nodded. “We’ve got a couple of reinforcements from CCCP coming in. They’ll head for the lead car. Rider, when I give the signal, you take Team two outside and join them. How are our captors for weaponry?”