Avalanche: Book Five in the Secret World Chronicle

by Lackey, Mercedes

  And there were flashes, brief flashes, of Gladys Hestlewithe, who had had a similar desperate life, except she had not been married and she had lost herself in fantasy books and movies and television shows…but Amphitrite ruthlessly buried those flashes, for she was a goddess, and what was a goddess if not someone who could bury a past she did not care for?

  Bill—she knew his name now, although she did not care for it—looked at her with his mouth agape. But—he thought at her, for he had learned the trick of speaking by thought to her now, as the whales and dolphins did. Then he stopped, and blinked. He closed his mouth. Raised a finger as if to contradict her. Lowered it again. Can I think about that? Before I answer you?

  Of course you can, she replied knowing in that moment that in her battle with the Melancholia, she was winning. Before, the Melancholia had not let him think, nor did it allow him to want to.

  Soon, she exalted in the privacy of her guarded thoughts, I will teach him to be the god he is. And from that moment, neither of us will ever be lonely again.

  One thing was certain. He was a kind and considerate creature. He would be a much better god than Poseidon.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  * * *

  Going out Strange

  Cody Martin and Mercedes Lackey

  If it hadn’t been for Johnny and Sera…I don’t think any of us would be here right now.

  The entire world had gone to hell, or close enough to it to not make much of a difference. Everything inside of John wanted him to drop what he and Sera had been doing, and just search for whoever the hell “Zach Marlowe” was. But they couldn’t. There was far too much that needed to be done, and not nearly enough time—or warm bodies—to do it. The world was reeling from the latest wave of Thulian attacks. With the fall of Metis, something had fundamentally changed, and not for the better. Instead of the “pop-up” attacks by virtual suicide squads of Thulians, which had become almost routine for everyday citizens, the current strikes were far more frequent. And effective. Before, the small-scale and usually short attacks seemed to be about inciting terror as much as the damage inflicted. The destruction, as horrible as it was, had always been localized. Now, the attacks were swift, brutal, and terribly catastrophic. The Thulians were striking seemingly at random, and more often than not several different locations at once. The targets were seldom guarded, or if they were, the Thulians made sure to mount a large enough force to completely overwhelm any defenders. The effect was that any places that were attacked were virtually wiped off the map, and the Thulians usually retreated before any retaliation could be exacted by security forces.

  The various governments had not reacted well to the constant barrage of attacks. In many countries, martial law, curfews, and resource rationing had been put back into effect. It was the only meaningful response that the world governments seemed able to provide; before, Thulian attacks were repelled, with at least some of the invaders being killed. Now, only the bodies of the innocent were left when an attack ended. People, if they hadn’t been already, sure as hell were scared now. Even with that, the reaction from normal people surprised John. There wasn’t widespread looting and rioting in most countries, like there had been after the First Invasion. Communities had learned how to deal with that sort of thing early on, and had come together in the face of the latest atrocities instead of coming apart. As proud as it made John to see that, it just wasn’t enough. We need to stop these bastards, not just clean up the mess after they’re through.

  Unfortunately, that’s all that John had been doing, at least for the last few weeks. He and Sera were called up and sent out at the first sign of attacks within range of Atlanta, along with ECHO, CCCP, and conventional military forces. Everyone was stretched thin, with most of the heavier assets—both metahuman and front line security forces—being assigned to strategic targets. The Thulians had been avoiding anywhere that had a significant metahuman presence, though they hadn’t been as reluctant to attack regular military units if they were small enough. The chain of command was hesitant to release any of those forces to pursue the Thulians or come to the aid of places that were under attack, for fear that they were diversions to open up the more “important” targets. Naturally, centers of government were protected. But world leaders had been very careful to guard power distribution centers, main arteries of transportation, ports, and other less obvious targets that were still incredibly vital to keeping the world functioning.

  It made John sick to his stomach when he and Sera had arrived at the first attack that they had responded to. They had been too late, and there were no survivors. They had been told that it used to be a county hospital; when they arrived, it was nothing more than a pile of smoking wreckage on blackened concrete. The second attack made John absolutely furious. It was the wood-to-electricity plant that he had helped defend, back before the attack on the North American Thulian HQ in the Superstition Mountain Range. With ECHO’s help, and that of a beleaguered pair of National Guard squads, they had prevented a pop-up attack from cutting off power to twenty-seven thousand homes. In a sick twist of irony, the plant was already scheduled to close down when it was destroyed; it was part of the reason why it had been undefended for the second attack. But since it had still been producing, it had been manned, and everyone in the plant had died.

  He still remembered the name of the soldier that had died, in the first attack. Fieldhouse. Sergeant Fieldhouse. Another name to add to the list of those lost. John was tired of losing people, and he aimed to do something about it. The problem was…the Thulians had anticipated that. They knew the response times of defenders, and made sure to keep their distance. By the time John and Sera knew about an attack, even close ones, it was already too late.

  They were at Victoria’s flat on guard duty when the latest call came in. John had been lounging on the couch, napping, while Sera was flipping through a dog-eared copy of Super Summer: A Metahuman Romance by Victoria Nagy, sitting in the well-used overstuffed chair next to him. A particularly loud Klaxon sounded off for a full second before going quiet; John jumped and almost rolled off of the couch at the sound, jarred from sleep. Sera, bemused, calmly set her book down and stood up. “There is an alarm,” she said, and vanished into the Overwatch room. “Hurry!” Her voice came through the open door.

  John practically leapt off of the couch, running as soon as he was on his feet and pulling on his nanoweave jacket. “Vic, what’s the sitch?” Vickie was sitting at her computer, her eyes flitting between the array of monitors, constantly going back to the one that was dedicated to Eight-Ball. Her fingers never stopped moving, flying over the keyboard or switching to one of three mice. The entire workspace had scattered cups, crumpled up aluminum cans for meal replacement drinks, and other detritus that gave testament to how long Vickie had been awake and working. With all of the attacks, she was burning the candle at both ends and in the middle trying to keep on top of it all and keep everyone fed with up-to-date intelligence.

  “Eight-Ball’s predicting an—there it goes.” A map popped up on her main screen, showing the area just east and a little north of Atlanta. A red dot marked “Riverside Military Academy” and a wedge of six of the little orange diamonds that Vickie used to designate Death Spheres descending on it. “Shit. That’s basically a private high school for troubled youth…”

  John shook his head. “It fits their pattern of going after soft targets. We knew they’d get nasty sooner rather than later.” He leaned in, pushing aside a Gamma Bar wrapper to place his hand on the desk. “What’s the distance?”

  “Fifty-four miles.”

  “Dammit. That’s just at the envelope of our operating range.” John cussed again under his breath, leaning back from the station suddenly. “Is there a quick reaction force in range?” He already knew the answer, but forced himself to ask it out of habit.

  “Based upon the latest pattern, no. They’re going to hit the school and fade away before anyone arrives. They know our response time. Even if jets get diver
ted—we don’t have any that aren’t down for maintenance or already putting out another fire—they wouldn’t reach the target in time to do anything but harry the Thulians before the bastards retreat and melt away. Dammit,” Vickie swore, taking two fistfuls of her short hair, and pulling. “If only there was a way to put rockets on you two!”

  John almost swore himself—but stopped short when goosebumps rose on his arms and the back of his neck. He had been watching all of the footage from the First Invasion the last few weeks; trying to parse out the differences in the tactics that the Thulians were using now versus then, and how to combat them. It occurred to him that he’d been paying attention to the wrong part. He wasn’t a master strategist. He was a trigger-puller at heart, a door kicker, the man on the ground. He didn’t need to be thinking about the larger picture; he needed to focus on what he knew, what he was strongest at. Who he was strongest with: Sera. He whirled to his left, putting his hands on Sera’s shoulders and turning her to face him.

  “Darlin’, I need you to think back. To when the Kriegers first showed up an’ you an’ the Siblings started kickin’ ass. How y’all got around.”

  She nodded. “But we moved by folding space…you and I cannot do that, not even together, I don’t…” Her brows furrowed. “Hmm…”

  “I’m not talkin’ ’bout how y’all showed up at places. I’m talkin’ ’bout how y’all got around once you were on site.”

  “We protected ourselves with a sheath of power, and it…made us slippery. We could go as fast as we willed.”

  John grinned lopsidedly. “Worth a shot, ain’t it? Better than showin’ up late to the party.”

  “We must do something,” she agreed. “And we must do it now!”

  John started towards Vickie’s balcony, calling over his shoulder as he half-jogged. “Vic, make sure the civvies are evac’d if you haven’t already. We’re tryin’ somethin’ new.” The couple stood shoulder to shoulder on the balcony railing; it was their customary launching and landing spot for Vickie’s flat. John looked over to Sera, shrugging. “Only one way to find out if this is goin’ to work,” he said. With a thought, his boots became sheathed in Celestial fire. He let the fire build for a moment, directing it downwards, and then he lifted off from the balcony. After a few scorched curtains and singed carpets, John had learned to take off gently and get into the air before turning on the “afterburners.” Meanwhile, Vickie had put up metal shutters instead of curtains on that window. It occurred to John that she must have an unusually tolerant landlord.

  Sera merely gathered herself and leapt onto the wind, snapping her wings wide at the top of her arc and joining him with a pair of powerful wingbeats.

  Alright, darlin’. This is my first time with this sort of thing. You’ll have to walk me through it. He could have used the Overwatch system to talk with her, even over the screaming wind, but for nonmission-critical communication, it was faster and easier for him to speak with her over their connection. It just had more…nuance than regular speech did. And this time it would probably not have been possible to verbally describe what it was she wanted him to do. She had to show him, but also had to allow him to experience how the process felt. It was one part instinct, one part visceral, and one part verbal. John had realized some time ago that this was more like how the Siblings themselves communicated with their Song, though the way they spoke mind to mind, soul to soul, was still unique to Sera and himself.

  Sera began to “explain” how it was done…and it felt like remembering and learning at the same time. Something he was experiencing for the first time and coming back to like an old hand. There was memory; not John’s, but Sera’s. His ability to fly with the fire was but a small part of it that he had discovered on his own, through desperation and his love for Sera, to save her when she had been kidnapped. This was an expansion of that power. The realization of it. It happened suddenly. One moment, John was abreast with Sera, concentrating on what she was helping him to learn. He focused the energy in front of himself, and then let it flow over him like magma in a perfect sheath that covered him from head to toe. Then he fed more Celestial energy into the sheath—

  —and he rocketed up and away, accelerating like something launched out of the Cape. Within moments he had left Sera behind.

  “Holy SHIT!” He didn’t feel the wind on his face anymore; normally it would have pulled the skin back from his skull and pressed the goggles deep into his eye sockets, but now it was nonexistent. He felt a moment of vertigo and nausea as he watched the countryside below streak by almost at a blur; he wasn’t very high, only about a thousand feet off the ground, so everything was passing very quickly.

  Do not falter and do not wait for me, beloved! Go, go, go!

  John didn’t hesitate. He immediately poured more energy into the fires. The sheath of Celestial fire around him shimmered for a moment, and he realized that he had broken the sound barrier as a vapor cloud formed and was quickly left in his wake. There was an upper limit to how fast he could go; even with the Celestial energy, he was only a metahuman, and wasn’t made of the sterner stuff that the Siblings were. Still, he pushed as far as he could, willing himself to go faster.

  Wouldn’t want to be anyone with windows down there.

  It took John’s HUD a couple of seconds to recalibrate to the speed he was traveling at.

  Vickie got it first. “Holy freaking shit, Johnny!”

  “That’s what I said,” he responded.

  “You’re—congrats. You just broke the sound barrier. We’ll be paying for windows…”

  “Time for trophies and lawsuits later. ETA for the attack site?”

  “About three minutes.”

  “…holy shit. Again.” He paused for a moment. “Sera’s trailing behind me by a good bit. I’m solo on this, dammit.”

  “I’ll try and spot for you.”

  “What’s the situation on the civvies?”

  “Basement. No time for them to go anywhere else. I’ve got verbal confirmation that no one’s missing anyway, because, kids.”

  “Standard protocol, spot ’em out for me. Goin’ to try to put myself between ’em and the Spheres. Any sightin’s of ground armor? Wolves, troopers?”

  “I think this is strictly a Blitzkrieg op. All air.”

  “Good. Not my specialty, though.” He really wished Sera was there with him. Everything had happened so fast, he hadn’t had the time to figure out how to bring her along with him. That was how their connection worked: information dump, instantly shared and understood. Normally it was a blessing, but he desperately wanted her by his side right now. Something felt off.

  It is the battle-sense. We are too far apart. You must dance alone, beloved. And memories of Sera’s “dance” above a small Georgia town flooded through him.

  …she danced, and the first ship that she danced with came at her with newly hardened tentacles reaching with inhuman speed, and energy cannon seeking to lock onto her…she landed, a cascade of fire waterfalled from her down the sides of the ship—a white-hot waterfall that fused the portals for the weapons shut, and blinded the ship, a torrent of plasma that was so hot and fierce that it did so and dissipated without cooking the crew inside…her fire-wings buffeted the next ship, destroying the sensors an instant after blinding the crew…

  There wasn’t enough time. John was already over the campus. Everything on the western half of the grounds had been leveled, completely. There were two lines of Death Spheres; the first used mechanical tentacles and energy cannons to rip apart and raze buildings. The second line bathed the ruins in showers of thermite, to make sure that any survivors were dead. Through his HUD overlay, he saw that the students and faculty had moved to the easternmost buildings, fleeing the Death Spheres. There were basements on that side; some of them converted into Civil Defense shelters, others just storage rooms or engineering rooms for the HVAC systems. The advancing line of Thulians had almost reached the buildings where the civilians were hiding.

  John did the
only thing he could think to do. He flew straight down, interposing himself in front of the lead Death Sphere, just as Sera had back then. The speeds he flew at were dizzying, but his enhancements—already ramped up—helped his reaction time. That, combined with the energy sheath, protected him from the sudden deceleration and prevented him from slamming into the ground. He hovered there for a moment, appraising the attackers. The two lines of Thulians came to a halt in the air, brought up short. They clearly hadn’t been expecting metahuman resistance.

  I wonder if these bastards know about me and Sera? Did they take footage of their own at Ultima Thule? Were they there? A sudden hateful glee rose in his chest. Are they pissing themselves, right now? These sons of bitches who would attack children?

  After another moment of hesitation, the muzzles for the energy cannons on the front line of Death Spheres swung toward John. He tried to reach through the Futures, and realized with sickening clarity that he couldn’t; Sera was still too far away. He was back to his own powers now; his enhancements, and the Celestial fire, without the benefit of being able to predict where the enemy would strike.

  Dance, beloved! Dance!

  “Watch your HUD, JM! Eight-Ball’s sending you predictive trajectories!”

  Holographic lines sprung into vision, emitting from the energy cannons of the Death Spheres. John did a flip in midair, diving and coming back up in a flash of fire too fast for the human eye to track as dozens of actinic energy beams screamed through the air. Vickie’s Overwatch system and his reaction speed had saved him from being torn to bits, obliterated in the sky. Sera was still miles away, flying as fast as she could to reach him and help him. John felt something building inside, however. He had been watching the Thulians decimate people he was supposed to protect for the last few weeks. Watching them go unopposed, dancing just out of range of any meaningful response to their terror attacks. He resented them, despised them for being unwilling to stay for a stand-up fight. That resentment built itself into anger, and then into rage. Incredulousness. How dare they not face him? That feeling morphed into something…else.