World Divided: Book Two of the Secret World Chronicle-ARC

by Mercedes Lackey; Steve Libby; Cody Martin

  “Use the new feed, Gamayun. Give it to me in Russian, I’ll translate. Murdock, Target is still on Whistler. Whistler intersects with a feeder road to the interstate in about half a mile and it’s a good bet he’ll take it. You can take a short cut. Next left, 100 feet, right right.” John cut onto the path that Vickie described, dodging what little debris there was left.

  “What’s the opposition like?”

  There was some Russian. “Gamayun says we have six perps crammed in that can, all loaded with semiautos. One is a meta, described at the scene as having put everyone to sleep.”

  “Damn it. All right, anything further? Running out of time before I come up on ’em.”

  “You’re ahead of them. Next left puts you on the feeder in front of them. I’ll see what I can do about the meta.”

  “Time till I intercept?”

  “Thirty seconds on my mark.” A pause. “Mark.” She began counting down. John slowed the Ural a few miles per hour. He wanted to come out just behind them; too soon, and they might decide to just make a grease spot out of him with their car.

  “This section coming up, what’s the population like?”

  “Industrial. Shift change in one hour, more or less.” More Russian. “Gamayun says there are some trucks…ah…three on the feeder road. Not many cams, so I can’t see much. But you have high chain-link and razor-wire fences on both sides of the street most of the way to the interstate.”

  “Copy. Gonna have to stop them before they get to the interstate. En route.” John saw the intersection. His timing, with Vickie’s assistance, was good; he got there less than a second after the green car went speeding past. His tires skidded as he performed a suicide slide through the turn, speeding after them. One of the thugs must’ve been paying attention; John saw a lot of activity in the car, what looked like waving and moving around excitedly. Two thugs leaned out of the windows, one on each side. Each of them was holding a gun. “Shit!” John swerved to his left just as gunfire stitched the pavement and the air where he had just been.

  “Cut right, side street parallels the feeder road—it’s really an industrial alley.” John forced the Ural to turn; a few of the rounds from the thugs found him, though. The Ural took the brunt of the assault, but John felt a sharp impact in his upper chest.

  “Okay, that’s three metas in there. No way anyone can fire from a moving car with that kind of accuracy without being meta. You okay?”

  He coughed hard; it hurt like hell, but he was too amped up on adrenaline to care too much at the moment. “Fine. Patch me through to Control.”

  “She already hears you. Shared freq.”

  “Roger. Control, this is Unit Troika. Got multiple suspects using deadly force in suspect vehicle. One confirmed metahuman, two potentials. Advise on ROE.” The engine for the Ural was beginning to smoke; he knew that one of the rounds had pierced the gas tank, but luckily not low enough to be an immediate concern.

  He heard Vickie giving a rapid fire translation into Russian. He heard Gamayun talking, then her voice, stronger, in halting English. “Lethal force authorized, Commissar’s orders.”

  “Sec,” Vickie said. He heard mumbling. “Lethal force authorized from APD and Echo. Clear to roll, Murdock. One of the sleepers back at the scene isn’t going to be waking up.”

  “Roger.” John coaxed as much speed as he could from the damaged Ural. Something clanked hard, and an intense squealing, screeching noise came from the engine. “Cut the shared freq with Control, Vickie.”

  “On private.”

  “I’m out in front of the suspects, right?”

  “Roger. About 200 yards ahead. Any of these side streets brings you back to the feeder.”

  John hit the brakes, sliding to a stop before rocketing back onto the main feeder again. He could see the car; they’d slowed down, thinking that John had been persuaded not to follow them anymore. “Don’t tell the Commissar, but we’re gonna have to put in another form for a new Ural.” John accelerated the protesting Ural, aiming straight for the green car.

  “Yah, I don’t think that sound is anything good anyway.” A pause. “Shit. You’re playing chicken.”

  Ignoring the protests from both Vickie and the Ural, John continued straight ahead. The driver had recognized that it was John by this time, and sped up to the ratty car’s top speed. Seconds from impact, John released the handlebars and kicked off of the bike, sailing to the right. He curled up, protecting his head and sides with his arms as he crashed bodily into the chainlink fence. It acted as a sort of heavy-duty net, absorbing enough of his momentum before the poles snapped that the impact only bruised him. Of course, if he’d been a regular human, it would have killed him anyway.

  The green car and the Ural, however, didn’t fare so well. The driver didn’t see what was happening until it was too late, with no time to swerve out of the way. The Ural slammed into the Honda and what didn’t end up halfway into the radiator rolled over the hood and into the windshield, and what was still left after that somersaulted over the top.

  The Honda driver tried to correct, taking it into a short spin. Now top-heavy from its motorcycle addition, the car flipped, rolling—

  —until it came to a sudden halt, slamming into an upthrust of dirt and asphalt that hadn’t been there before.

  To John, whose head was just beginning to clear, the pillar of earth looked strikingly like a middle finger. He dusted himself off, swayed for a moment, and then stalked towards the stopped car. John wrenched a car door open single-handedly, almost tearing it off of the frame. All of the men in the car were battered and bloody, and in no shape to put up a fight.

  “I think this is the part where you’re all under arrest. And you owe me a new bike.” John hauled each of them out of the car amidst groans and cries, secured them with zip ties, and sorted their weapons into a pile. “Cut me back to Control again, Vic.”

  “Roger. By the way, I can’t usually do that on this kind of remote. But you’re about six blocks from my place on a road I know. I’ll be able to do some more of that sort of thing once I have your sample and if you are in ground contact. You’re live, go for report.”

  He nodded, surveying the destruction. “Control, this is Unit Troika. I need a bus for the injured and a pickup. All suspects apprehended. And, uh, the Commissar needs to buy a new bike. Murdock, out.” John switched off his comm before Natalya—who was no doubt listening in—could offer her input. “Vic?”

  “Roger, you’re private and Saviour’s having a cow.”

  “Consider yourself hired.”

  She laughed. “Like you had a choice? It’s me, or no field trips.”

  John chuckled, wiping a trickle of blood that had come from a cut on his scalp. “Time to look forward to more paperwork, excoriation, and the Commissar asking for my head.” Just another day on the beat.

  CHAPTER TEN

  She Blinded Me with Science

  Dennis Lee and Mercedes Lackey

  Overwatch was a success with everyone except Red Djinni. Tesla loved it—well, when you could pry him out of his depressive sinkhole long enough for him to express approval for anything. I guess I should be grateful in retrospect about that depression, at least in this case, since Overwatch was still very much a closed secret used only by Bulwark and his Misfits. That was going to prove vital later. I knew why, too, and I leaked it to Red Saviour; I’d gotten the contents of the Ides of March. I wasn’t impressed, to tell the truth. Not because the Ides were inaccurate—because so far, they were quite accurate. But because as any magician or precog will tell you, looking into the future is like being one of the blind men with the elephant. You can only see the part of it that you already know something about. There was nothing in the Ides about CCCP—only Echo. Nothing about the Seraphym. Nothing about the mysterious Nazi-free zone in Alaska.

  And as any precog or magician will tell you, the future is not immutable. March had seen a future. Maybe the most probable. But it was not inevitable.

  Rig
ht at this point, though, Red Djinni was making my life too miserable for me to worry about Alex Tesla’s problems.

  Every once in a while the intrepid detectives of Echo hit a wall. It didn’t happen very often. They had access to an incredible wealth of information, to the very best in forensic support, and not in the least, to their own considerable deductive talents. During the chaotic period after the Invasion, they found themselves on the receiving end of a flood of more-than-urgent directives, and had to accomplish them with a staff cut in half by virtue of casualties.

  Top priority was: “Where in hell did these Nazis come from?”

  Not far below that was: “What the hell was their armor made of?”

  The Echo research labs were slag and rubble. The Echo database was only now recovering from the Nazi worm. Sources were silent or dead or had defected.

  It was time to look elsewhere for answers—and help.

  Two detectives were tasked with pooling whatever information they could on the Nazis of yore. No level of detail was to be overlooked. “There is no such thing as useless information,” they were told. All data was to be collected, filed and assimilated. Such a task might have proved daunting to most. The sheer volume of information would have taken even the most learned of scholars, the quickest of speed-readers, years to absorb.

  Instead, the Pennyworth Twins had merely shrugged and assured Alex Tesla they would have the job done in three months.

  No one really knew how they did it. They were metas, to be sure, but no one had ever seen them do much more than sit quietly together, sip their tea, and stare out into space. Or at computer monitors. Whatever it was that made them into something frighteningly close to a human supercomputer wasn’t obvious even to the Echo psychics. Not that the psychics hadn’t tried. Once. The overwhelming rush of information had driven the talent in question into an instant state of catatonia that didn’t lift for weeks.

  When asked later what she could remember of the incident, she likened the event to being at ground zero of a 30-megaton information bomb—then she jabbed telekinetically on the controls to her morphine drip.

  Today, surrounded by distinguished members of Echo’s senior staff, the Twins stood at attention. They were ready to give their answer.

  Everyone waited expectantly as the Twins’ unfocused gaze came to rest on Alex Tesla.

  “We are ready to answer your queries,” they said together.

  Tesla, who had been waiting impatiently for this moment for months, did not hesitate.

  “Where did the invaders come from?”

  The Twins closed their eyes and seemed to tense up. Their eyelids fluttered.

  “No clue,” they said after a moment.

  The room echoed with audible groans and angry muttering.

  “Great,” Tesla said, his palms pressed hard against his face. “What can you boys tell us?”

  Speaking alternately, they began an infodump of everything Nazi related, from the most obscure occult societies to the philosophical foundations of the SS. It had a mesmerizing effect. Eyes began to glaze over.

  “Enough!” Tesla shouted. “That’s…quite enough, thank you.”

  Yankee Pride nudged Ramona. “I didn’t know Hitler sucked his thumb.”

  “Or that he believed in self-administered enemas to treat genital warts,” Ramona answered absently.

  “Everyone shut it!” Tesla ordered through clenched teeth. He put both his hands on the table to keep them from shaking. “All right then, the armor. Can you tell us what that blasted armor of theirs is made of?”

  “On that, there are numerous possibilities. It could be from Atlantis, the result of Doctor John Dee’s alchemical experiments, some completely new alloy from aliens, originating from mined asteroids, derived from demonic conjurations…”

  “Well,” Tesla sighed, giving up. “That was a productive three months spent, boys.”

  “…or the completion of initial documented experiments on a novel alloy by Doctor Judah S. Goldman, military munitions inventor and chief scientist of the Third Reich.”

  “Goldman?” The muttering started again; Goldman was the infamous Nazi scientist who had vanished before the Fall of Berlin, and he was almost certainly dead by now. The only real “survival,” if you could call it that, was the legend of the Goldman Catacombs, a storehouse of impossible riches where allegedly most of the missing loot of the Third Reich had been stashed. Of course, no one knew where the Catacombs were, and by this time (and after two Geraldo specials) no one really believed in their existence.

  “We assumed there would be skepticism,” one of the twins said, without any inflection. “We enlisted a previously unused source. As a result, we have a probable location of the Goldman Catacombs—Nevada, reasonably near Las Vegas. We also have what appear to be early blueprints.”

  There was stunned silence. Finally, someone in the back asked, “Who was this source? If it was Geraldo—”

  “As it turns out, Mr. Rivera missed the mark the second time by only five miles. The source in question is a new recruit to Echo. Her name is Victoria Victrix.”

  Tesla started a little. The woman had already shocked and impressed him with her Overwatch program, but that could have been a fluke. On the other hand…she’d brought in a handful of magicians already, and seemed to have far more than her share of—

  —damn it, he didn’t like magic. He didn’t believe in it. It had to be some sort of previously unknown psionic ability. Right?

  Whatever. She was able to get jobs done. When he didn’t put her in the field—even when he did—

  And she clearly had access to information that was off the standard databases.

  He spoke up before he had a chance to second-guess himself. “All right. It’s the only lead, pursue it.”

  Yankee Pride shook his head. “Sir, assuming that this isn’t some wild goose we’re chasing, the Catacombs are supposed to be impossible to get into. And if you do get in, it’s one deathtrap after another. We’d need at least a dozen metas and a couple of trap squads just to try, and we don’t have them.”

  “No,” Ramona disagreed. “If half the stories about the place are true, we’ll need a smaller group anyway. This is strictly recon, and large numbers in there would just complicate things. And they should be volunteers. People who know the odds of them coming out are not good. The only ethical way to handle this is with volunteers and who have we got that we could spare? No one. Right?”

  Yankee Pride gave Ramona an appraising look, then turned to gaze at the man seated behind him. Jenson met his look, and sighed.

  “You want to ask him to volunteer?” Jenson said.

  “That’s right,” Pride said. “No orders, just asking.”

  “And what makes you think he will?”

  “He will,” Pride replied firmly. “You know he will.”

  He tapped gently on his comm unit. “Alison, would you please have Operative Bulwark come up to Control?”

  ***

  Bella was angry.

  No, that was a magnitude below what she was feeling. She was furious.

  Knowing that Vickie subsisted on tea, coffee and whatever freezer-burned microwave meals she could chip out of the frost, she’d picked up something at the soul food restaurant. She’d come in full of relative cheer to find the sorceress in a compacted ball of tears and misery.

  Vickie had tried to cover it up, but Bella had the cause out of her. And now Bella was going to take it out of the cause’s hide.

  The fact that she’d just gotten a directive assigning her to the cause’s team only put the froth on the cappuccino.

  Bella reported to the ready room (yet another temporary portable building on the Echo campus), looked right past the team leader and everyone else and focused on her target.

  Red Djinni.

  It looked as if he had just arrived there himself, since he was still standing. Good. That would make this easier.

  “Bella Parker?” asked the team leader, Bulwark. Some
where in the back of her mind a little fangirl let out a squee, because he was a lot handsomer in real life than he was in his file photo, but she ignored it and let the anger take over. She nodded and headed for the Djinni. Being both a tomboy and a paramedic had taught her not to telegraph her punches. She just walked up to him and let him have it with her best uppercut to the chin. No sissy slaps for her—

  “Ow! Sweet mother o’—!”

  Her hand went numb. What was his chin made of—concrete?

  At least he went down. Like most metahumans, she was a lot stronger than she looked.

  She stood over him, shaking her hand, and glaring. “That is what you get for making a cripple cry, you rat bastard,” she snarled. She shook her tingling hand some more. “Frick.”

  “Christ,” Red groaned. He came slowly to his feet, massaging his jaw. “If I knew Acrobat had a mommy with a strong arm, I wouldn’t have…and to be fair, he’s not a cripple. He just needs a bit of backbone.”

  “Not Acrobat, you moron. Vickie. My neighbor. My patient, you frickin’ sadist.” At this point she was about ready to clock him again, sore hand or not. “She can hardly move without pain and you have to go and make fun of her on the Le Parkour course and tell Tesla that…” She couldn’t go on. She’d kill him. Twice.

  “That what? That I don’t need her over my damn shoulder twenty-four, seven? Grow up…”

  “Ms. Parker,” Bull supplied helpfully.

  “…Ms. Parker!” Red shouted. “Maybe you should let your precious patient fight her own battles instead of sending in her pet Smurf!”

  “Very clever, asshat. She didn’t send me in the first place, and in the second…” She couldn’t finish. Instead, she popped him again. Left hook, this time. Red fell to one knee, cursing.

  “Ow,” Bella grimaced. “Worth it.”

  Bull nodded in appreciation, and glanced down at his handheld tablet. “They neglected to mention your prowess with fisticuffs, Ms. Parker.” He scribbled a few notes down.