Revolution: Book Three of the Secret World Chronicle
Page 63
“So, what’re you waiting for? Labor Day?”
“May Day, bonehead. Hush. I’m downloadin’ as fast as the connection’ll let me. Silly me, I didn’t have you pack a T-1 line.” In spite of everything going on, he almost grinned. Put her in her safe spot and damn if she didn’t have moxie.
Once the team was done, Bulwark gave them the signal to get ready to move. Bulwark unstrapped his backpack; it was his mission-specific loadout, and one that he was going to particularly enjoy getting rid of. Not because it was heavy, but because of what it would do. He plugged it in place of the eye. “Operative Victrix; be ready to initiate the infestation, once we’re safely away. On your word, we’ll activate the package.”
“Roger. I’m giving them a dose of their own worm, and I think I can get it outside this complex.”
“Let’s be a nuisance. Double-time, everyone.” The team jogged out of the command room, running down the hallways that Vickie told them to. They managed to avoid any Thulians, but that wouldn’t last.
“Fly my little virii, fly!” The lights began to flicker almost instantly. The vibration in the floors and walls took on a ragged edge. Then both lights and vibration cut out.
“Murdock, this is Bulwark. Light the match.” With that, Bulwark pressed a button on his belt controller.
* * *
The lights flickered, then cut out. “Murdock, this is Bulwark,” came the voice in his ear. “Light the match.” There was a muted whump, and the floor shook slightly. The HUD flipped over to night-vision mode, triggered, no doubt, by Vickie. The team had IR illuminators on their shoulders, to make up for the lack of any ambient light.
John looked over to Untermensch, the Russian gleaming dully in the green glow of NV. “I’ve been waiting all day to do this.” He flipped the safety cover off of the detonator, and depressed the button. A half-dozen similar explosions shook the entire base. The floor, walls, ceiling all began to damn near hum with the vibration of something deep inside of the base going very wrong. The team was in what John thought was the biggest room he had ever seen indoors. It was impossibly big, given the dimensions of the mountain and how deep they were supposed to be. The boys at Echo are gonna be really interested in tryin’ to figure out what this means.
Situated on a gangwalk, they had something like a hangar or storage area combined with barracks, containing the entire massed Thulian army below them. It appeared that the Thulians weren’t very conscious of the importance of interior layout; thousands of trooper suits were lined up, mixed in with the open-air living quarters.
“Ranger isn’t gonna like this, Yogi. You gonna steal their pickanick baskets?”
“Somethin’ like that, Vic.” Emergency lighting came to life, and loud, warbling Klaxons sounded. “That’s our cue.” The Thulians below had begun to scramble, readying weapons, getting into suits, and generally panicking.
“Why is it that people never, ever look up?”
John slung his rifle over his shoulder, readying himself. “Everyone, stay behind me. Vic, kill the NVGs. We won’t need ’em in a second.”
The HUD went to standard. Vickie switched to Russian. “Ja ne mogu perezagruzit’ eto! Vi nadeli svoi shlemi? On sobiraetsja sam vse obstrelivat’.” And for Mamona’s benefit “I can’t flare-screen with these things. You guys got face shields on? He’s gonna do a one-man Arc Light.” The rest of the team exchanged a look, and snapped down their face-shields, forgotten until now. John breathed once, deeply, closing his eyes, trying to relax and focus. Visualized what he needed to do. He was going to try something he had never tried before, and wasn’t quite sure what would happen. He felt the fires, and they came freely. It started along his arms, racing down his hands. He breathed again, and opened his eyes.
And for the first time that he could remember, he let go.
The fires rippled outwards from his arms, covering the distance to the closest Nazis in an instant, mushrooming out from the center point that was himself. The entire room, as big as several stadiums, filled with flames in seconds, billowing and animate clouds of fire seeking victims. The firestorm rocketed across the floor; every unsuited Thulian was instantly burned alive, screaming. Explosions rang out; exposed and storaged munitions cooking off. John felt the fire feeding off of him, bleeding him dry. But he had to keep it going, had to take out as many of them as possible, had to make it count.
“Holy CRAP!” Almost as quickly as the fires had erupted, a thin sheet of rock fragments cascaded down from the ceiling, and in a few moments, had melded together to make a shield between the rest of the team and the fires. “Warn a girl next time!”
Before John could reply to her, a stabbing pain shot through his chest and his vision flared white from the trauma.
John’s fires abruptly gave out, and he coughed up a gout of blood, falling to his knees. Mamona bent down to help him, but he waved her off, snatching his rifle from his back. “Take out the suits, before they figure out what happened.” John was pale, sweating and shaking, but he managed to raise his rifle. “Weapons free; take ’em down.”
* * *
Vickie stared in horrified fascination at the carnage under the walkway. She’d expected something big. What John had unleashed was . . . epic. Fire and brimstone raining down, apocalypse on a small scale, if a cavern the size of five football fields could be considered small. The backblast alone would have taken down the team if she hadn’t shielded them. She could magically “feel” the barrier shake with the impact of the superheated air coming from the firestorm.
This is it. This is going to kill him. It’s killing him now. They have to get out.
She dropped her control on the shield; the steaming fragments fell apart, and rained off the walkway. John was the first to open fire, prone on the walkway. The rest of the team soon followed suit, with Bear firing off plasma blasts next to his PPSh. The remaining troopers, their numbers drastically reduced, were cut to ribbons; not a one had time to return fire, and those that were out of range were still busy recovering.
“All right, people, go go go! Otlichno, poshli, poshli, poshli! Ne obiazatel’no atakovat’ etix, oni pokoiniki! You don’t need to finish this bunch off, they’re toast!” When they hesitated, she added, “What? Zshdesh vodki e ikri? Ja skazala idi! Are you waiting for the caviar and vodka to go with the toast? I said GO!” Untermensch and Mamona helped John to his feet, after which he shook them off. The team ran for the exit, rifles at the ready.
* * *
Just because you’re paranoid, that doesn’t mean that they are not out to get you. If Vickie had a motto by which she lived her life, that was it.
So besides everything else, she had sensor balls peppered all over the edges of the battlefield, looking for anything . . . weird. And she was not particularly surprised when ten of them went off at once, all in a far corner, where there wasn’t supposed to be a hangar door.
Well, it wasn’t a hangar door.
It was bigger, much bigger, than a hangar door, even by Thulian standards.
She zoomed in cameras as the enormous sheet of rock slid up.
“Oh no,” she whispered. “Oh no. Oh hell no.”
It was an orb. But it wasn’t like any orb that had ever been seen before. There were no tentacle ports, no weapons ports, just a single slit that bisected the entire thing. A slit that began to glow a deep and ominous, sickly yellow-green.
“Overwatch: Command: speed-dial Mom.” she snapped, her hands flying over the keys. “Command, speed-dial School.”
Just because you’re paranoid . . . you need to have contingencies.
“Grey, packets.”
Both phones were answered on the first ring, almost simultaneously. “It’s bad.”
“Roger,” said Moira Nagy crisply, and “We have your back, honey,” drawled the head of the De Danaan School for Talented Teens.
“Grey, plug in Mom and Charlotte.” The familiar pawed through th
e boxes, then delicately extracted two. He picked them up one at a time with raccoonlike hands, and plugged them into USB slots on a hub at his own eye level.
“Command: phone, disconnect.” She cut the calls off. This was her backup. There was no way she would have enough strength all by herself to even dent a regular orb, much less that thing. And . . . paranoid meant prepared, so she had contacted her old school and her mother to put together—well, call them magical power supplies. Two circles of magicians, one headed by her mother in Washington and one at the end of Hudson Bay in Canada at the school, stood ready to feed her magic power. She was connected by blood to her mother’s, and by four years of living and working there to the school’s—and most of the teachers there would be in that circle. Thirty seconds had passed and the glow at that slit was increasing as it rose out of the bay.
She panned the cameras, looking for the nearest person she had a packet for. It happened to be someone who was already flat on the field, bleeding into the soil. Good enough. “Grey, I need Gavotte.”
Got. Grey plugged in another packet. She flew a stealthed ball over to the thing and set it down on the top and hoped they wouldn’t notice. It had been forty-five seconds since the hangar door opened. “Command: open, Hammer Freq, command, Ping Hammer.”
She spared a glance for the Angel Flight countdown and cursed. They were too close for an abort, but she warned them anyway. “Angels, Birds, Danger. Big Bad Bogie on the ground.”
The response from Space Command came gratifyingly quickly. “Roger, Overwatch? Got a sitch?”
She fed her cam to Air Force Space Command just as Angel Flight came over. A sheet of energy sliced out of the slit and started angling up to the sky, disintegrating everything on the way as the Thulians tried to target the fighters. She nearly sobbed with relief as they managed to pull straight up and out of range. The response from Space Command was unprintable.
The orb rotated down again; the glow dimmed. Evidently this thing had a warm-up and cool-down. But a turret on the bottom popped out, and something like a dish scanned the field.
There was an Echo meta—Cyber-something; he was a multiple amputee, one of the Echo OpTwos pulled out of the wreckage after the Invasion, that had been fitted with a prototype prosthesis, some kind of powered armor. He was at the very outskirts of the fighting, taking on five troopers by himself. The orb’s dish centered on him, and a nearly invisible, sickly-yellow beam shot out from it, connecting with the meta’s back. Vickie recognized what had happened almost as soon as the beam connected; selective EMP weapon, the color must just have been ambient bleed-over into the visible. The armor pretty much froze in place; the meta’s head jerked around frantically, his body no longer moving at all. He didn’t have time to scream, being torn apart by several Thulian energy cannons in the next instant.
She swallowed down her nausea. Bastards. Focus, girl, focus. More people will die if you don’t. “I’m about to open the ground under them. I want you to hit them and keep hitting them until you run out of rocks.” She sent them the exact grid GPS coordinates she was getting from her little probe. She didn’t dare paint a laser dot on it; they might notice.
“Roger that.”
“Five from my mark, fire for effect. Mark.”
Absently she heard the countdown start. She took her hands off her controls and narrowed her concentration. This was going to take everything she had, and then some.
She gathered magical energy to her: from the earth, from her storage crystals, from the two circles, from herself. She muttered under her breath, an archaic Celtic chant she had learned from her mother, while in her mind, ever-changing strings of numbers, formulas, and diagrams glowed. But most of all, it was will, the will of an expertly trained mage, imposing itself on the world. Not just willpower; this was the ability to focus, in the way that a laser piercing a diamond is focused, and to hold that focus for as long as it took to get the job done. The energies gathered until she felt she would burst, trying to hold it all inside of herself. And as the count reached zero, she wrenched at the earth beneath the sphere.
It didn’t happen immediately; the earth groaned and shook, for she had never done anything this big before. Stationary cameras shook with the rumble of the localized earthquake, and in some places the combat ground to a halt as people fought for footing. Sweat streamed down her face; magic was like telekinesis in a way, it worked best on small things. Big things like this . . . it felt as if she was trying to tear the earth apart with her bare hands—
Now people had noticed the new sphere. The Thulians took heart from its appearance and renewed their already effective attacks, while her freqs hummed with curses in English and Russian and a few other languages. She ignored them all. This had to work.
The earth split with a groan and a rumble, in a crevasse big enough to swallow the sphere.
A fraction of a second later, the Hammer came down. Huge clouds of earth and rock shot up into the air from the first two strikes; the aiming system wasn’t perfect, and had a harder time with small moving objects. The third, however, hit the orb directly.
It didn’t even dent it; a force field flared around it, absorbing the damage.
But not all the kinetic energy. The Hammer pounded the sphere into the bottom of her crevasse.
She opened it again, deeper. Just in time for another Hammer.
And again. And again.
Her entire world narrowed to that spot of earth’s crust and the orb being pounded into it, buried by the near strikes, pounded deeper by the direct ones. The entire area shook from the impacts; they were only using their intermediate projectiles, comparable to heavy artillery. Dust choked through the battlefield, cutting visibility down; she could still see muzzle flashes and energy cannons, and muted explosions. Sweat soaked her clothing, her hands clenched the arms of her chair and there was a roaring in her ears.
Again. And again.
Each time the Hammer fell, it drove the orb deeper into the earth. Each time she opened the earth further, she felt strength pouring out of her. But she couldn’t, daren’t, stop now.
She could hardly see, scarcely breathe, when faintly, through the roaring, she heard Space Command say, “Hammer terminated. It’s burned out; we’re inoperative. Good luck, Overwatch. Space Command out.”
Using the very last of her strength, she brought the sides of the half-mile-deep hole crashing inward. Then she passed out.
* * *
Bella’s jaw dropped, as she watched the feed from the cams. How the hell is she—
Somehow, Vickie and Hammer were pounding that mega-orb into the ground like a tent peg. She heard Space Command sign out; there was a last shaking that dropped some of the combatants to their knees, and a huge plume of dirt and dust erupted from the hole.
Before Bella could react, even to call Vickie, she heard a pounding on the bulletproof glass door to the balcony outside her office. She looked up; it was Sera, and she instantly knew that Vickie was down and needed them. She slapped the door control and vaulted over her desk, reaching the door just as it opened, Sera seized her in arms that were a hundred times stronger than they looked (if not more) and shot up into the sky in a plume of fire.
The angel flew like a missile: straight up, and straight down. They landed on the roof of the apartment building, and Bella wrenched open the access door and raced down the stairs four at a time. She already had Vickie’s keys in her hand, but the Seraphym, speeding behind her, gestured, and the door flew open just as she got there. So did the door to Vickie’s Overwatch room.
Take over for her. I will tend her. That was not Bella’s first instinct, but she obeyed the Seraphym without an argument, flinging herself into the chair. Things were already going south for the Infil teams.
* * *
Echo One was well behind cover when Natalya gave the order. “Fire, sections one, two, three; fire, fire, fire.” The Nazis, being pressed with a large number of missiles and grenades, had taken up the only defensible cover positi
ons from their direction of approach. With the planning that had gone on prior to this operation, the Commissar had seen to it that every spot was properly “accommodating” for the fashista. Claymore mines, modern oversized flame fougasses, and antitank mines—all daisy-chained together—went up in fantastic explosions, with waves of flame and shrapnel sweeping through the Nazi ranks.
“Weapons free, all squads. Commence firing!” Even more rockets and grenades streaked towards the troopers and Nazi death machines. The first few waves of troopers were torn to shreds, blown to pieces by the planted explosives or launched munitions. Those from her squads with the capability used their powers from a distance, with varying levels of effectiveness.
The Nazis renewed their ranks; with hundreds of the hulking monsters trudging towards the Echo and CCCP positions, there were plenty of bodies to soak up the punishment.
Saviour had a fleeting recollection of little Fei Li “dancing” among the troopers in Red Square, her sword flashing, reflecting the light from the fires, with an uncanny resemblance to a miniature lightning bolt. Secretly her heart ached, and she wished that her old friend were here beside her; just as quickly as the thoughts had come, she swept them away.
“Commence Lei Gong bombardment,” she said, bitterly, reciting the code name she had personally chosen. The Commissar heard the dull thwump of mortars being fired. She kept her eyes fixed on the Thulian positions; they had begun firing their energy cannons, destroying at least two of the southern ridge rocket positions. She bit her lip and concentrated, pushing back the anguish at seeing even more comrades dying. This is war, now. A real war. The mortars exploded, detonating two dozen meters above the Thulians. Hundreds of thousands of what looked like white, shiny streamers covered the battlefield. The streamers, only as thick as a ribbon, adhered to the troopers and the landscape around them. “Trigger Tian Mu. Mark.” As per the plan, they had set up several very, very expensive and increasingly rare Echo broadcast energy generators in the valley. They were used, primarily, to power localized defensive shields and some of the weapons that the Commissar had commissioned for this operation. Now, the output for the broadcasters ramped up. This was one of Tesla’s gifts, an experimental weapon in short supply. Let’s see how the fashista like this.