John hazarded a look down the CCCP lines; everyone’s faces were set, their expressions stony. Bear was chomping at the bit, his fists already glowing with plasma. Untermensch and Molotok traded a glance before settling into fighting stances. Diminutive Fei Li had her exquisite sword an inch out of its scabbard, coolly regarding the scene.
Saviour stood straight up from out of cover. “War?” she shouted back contemptuously. “You bring pipes and chains and call it war?” She spat. “Nasrat. You are less than babushkas at food riot. Comrades, disperse thugs! We are being late for dinner. Davay, davay!” Without another word the Commissar, unbelievably, literally flew straight for the Rebs’ lines, beelining for Rebel Yell. The rest of the CCCP and Bella’s Echo team launched after her. The Rebs, hungry looks pasted on their dirty faces, surged forward, whooping and hollering.
“Why does she always do this?” Molotok groaned.
“Spoilt, foolhardy devushka, comrade!” Unter hit Molotok in the shoulder as they ran, sprinting towards their enemy.
John took several quick, deep breaths; his enhancements keyed up, and he shot forward in a burst of unnatural speed. The world seemed to slow down for him; it wasn’t exactly slow motion, because how he experienced the world didn’t change that much. It was more like the world went on, but…deliberately. As if there were extra seconds between the seconds that were his alone, so that he had all the time he needed to see what had to be done and do it before the world caught up with him again. Instantly, he spotted his targets; a small bundle of four Rebs directly in front of him. One of them was armed with a ratty-looking shotgun, and the others had handheld weapons. Piece of cake. He met the line of Rebs at the same time as the Commissar; another half look revealed that she had a wolfish grin on her face, her fist already cocked and burning with malevolent energies.
John calculated that in order to pull his weight in this fight, he’d have to take out at least eight of the Rebs. Probably more, just to be on the safe side. With the rest of his comrades just getting into the thick of it, he couldn’t very well lose control and just fry all of the Rebs in a wave of plasma. This fight would take a little bit more controlled fury, some awful and deadly precision. John juked to his left, right before he reached his selected targets, hoping to throw them off. He chose the shotgun-wielding Reb for his first; a single too-hot beam of plasma shot through him, decapitating the thug. John swung around, ducking low and bringing his trailing leg out to sweep two of his would-be ambushers. They both tumbled to the ground facefirst, impacting with the sickening meat-packing thud that the human body makes when it hits something too hard. He immediately engulfed both of them with plumes of fire from his hands. Switching his attention back to the furthest Reb, John leapt from his crouch, jumping higher than the biker expected. He raised his fist up, bringing it down with sickening force into the Reb’s face; John felt cartilage and bone break, watching as blood instantly erupted from the ruins.
The rest of the CCCP were being equally efficient in removing the opposition, with few exceptions. The Commissar was simultaneously fighting five Rebs, striking at them with energy-charged fists, kicking off of one Reb only to launch herself in a lunge for another. The twin pair of Sirin and Alkonost were working together; Alkonost was dazing her targets with her ear-piercing shrieks, while Sirin erupted the ground beneath them with subsonic rumbles. Untermensch and Molotok were fighting as a pair as well, working over a dozen Rebs with a flurry of incredible hand-to-hand strikes. Perun was electrocuting three Rebs, walking purposefully forward as he assaulted them with strike after strike of his metahuman-generated lightning. Bear was the center of a melee, chortling and shouting insults about how their mothers were kulaks as he blasted Rebs with alternate bursts of his concussive plasma and submachine-gun fire; sparks skittered off of his titanium body as several shots from a Reb ricocheted, hitting another biker.
Their Echo allies were putting up more of a fight than John thought they would. Bella was directing Chug; the rocky creature, frightening as he was to look at, was surprisingly gentle and didn’t like to hurt anything. At Bella’s direction, he would rush Rebs that had tried to dig in under cover; when they found their bullets spattering against his hide and saw him still coming, they would panic and scatter. He would bellow, panicking them further, leaving them open to his comrades. Then Bella would find another knot and send him after them. Corbie had struggled to lift up Dolly, the perfect marksman, onto a nearby rooftop to shoot at the Rebs from elevation. Granny Aiken, the Echo team’s psychokineticist, was dueling with her opposite on the Rebs’ side; they were throwing monstrously huge pieces of rubble at each other, mentally swatting them aside at the last moment or redirecting them at each other. Leader of the Pack was situated behind one of the ever-present ruined and abandoned cars; he fired his Echo sidearm while directing his dogs to knock down Rebs, rushing their legs at the knees.
While they were all holding their own for the most part, some of the metahumans were having trouble. Zmey and Upyr had been rushed by what appeared to be a berserker pair of Rebs; they were screaming, and didn’t seem to feel pain from the shotgun blasts from Upyr nor the fire from Zmey’s helmet. They bowled into the two CCCPers, trying to split them up. Stribog, gifted with the power to create huge gusts of wind, was being plagued by a Reb that could teleport short distances. Every time that Stribog attempted to power a gust at the Reb, he would teleport behind the Russian meta, slamming a rusty pipe into him.
Seemingly out of nowhere, tiny Fei Li leaped into a crowd of Rebs, her sword flashing between them. Heads rolled and limbs were separated from their owners with such ease that if John had any time to ponder it, it would’ve probably made him sick to his stomach. Snapping his right hand up, he hit a running biker with a huge jet of fire, sending the man sprawling to the ground. One had tried to sneak up behind him, but John’s hearing had recovered since Rebel Yell’s initial shout; he spun around to catch the Reb by the wrist. He was holding a knife that he would’ve skewered John with; twisting the man’s arm behind his back, he planted it in the Reb’s own back before throwing him to the ground and stomping on his throat once as hard as his enhanced strength would allow. Satisfied that he didn’t have any threats immediately near him, he surveyed the scene. Nearly all of the Rebs were dead or incapacitated; the only one left standing was Rebel Yell himself, squaring off with the Commissar.
“You just wait, commie. You ain’t seen nothing yet.” The Reb leader inhaled, readying himself to loose another sonic barrage.
“Da, svinya.” In one cool motion, the Commissar unholstered a pistol from her hip and shot Rebel Yell in the throat. Surprise shocked through his face as blood gurgled from his mouth and the new hole in his throat. He teetered for a moment before falling backwards, clawing at his wound. Red Saviour walked up to him, her face expressionless as she sent a blast into his body that would have crumpled a car. It crushed the life out of him, ending the career of Rebel Yell messily among the wreckage of Atlanta. “And I am seeing nothing now.”
All of their comms came to life again. “INCOMING! Six o’clock high!” screamed a female voice. Those who understood were just looking up, startled, when the rooftop where Dolly had been firing from exploded into a cloud of rubble and actinic energy. No. No, no, nonono. There was only one group that had weapons capable of producing energy beams like that, so far as John knew. Nazis. From the smoking rubble—all that was left of where the Echo Op Dolly had been positioned—three Nazi war machines floated into view, propelled by their awful orange energy. Each was bristling with ten Nazi armored troopers. John could make out what looked like a man standing on top of the center war machine.
He was huge, big even for a meta, and although he was armored, this was clearly not the outsized “suit” the troopers used, powered by hydraulics and who knew what kind of servomotors. No, whatever was inside that armor was all muscle, bone and sinew. His golden helmet had been made in the shape of an eagle’s head, an extremely stylized, art deco sort of eagle’s he
ad, with two equally stylized wings sweeping back from either side. The eagle theme was carried out on the breastplate, where another eagle was incised into the metal, a double lightning-bolt “SS” in one claw, a stylized skull in the other. Waffen SS. And you could see all this clearly because the man was so damned big.
He lifted one gauntleted hand to the helmet, and raised the beak-visor, revealing a face that looked like it had been taken straight off of an old Third Reich statue. He pointed a sword straight down at Saviour.
“Weak scion of Red Saviour,” the voice boomed in accentless, sterile-sounding English. “The heir to Ubermensch greets you with death.” Without another word, the man actually jumped from the death machine, impacting with the ground in a crouch hard enough to pulverize the rubble beneath him. As he landed, all of the troopers attached to the death machines detached, crunching down behind him.
The remaining Rebs that hadn’t been taken out had used the opportunity provided by the shock of the new arrivals to regroup. But without a leader, they milled about for a moment, uncertain. Saviour had not lost a milligram of her confidence, at least outwardly.
“Squad Dva, Echo, on the Rebs! Squad Odin, Tre, to me! Davay, davay, davay!” With the Echo team, the numbers were almost matched, save for the remaining Rebs. The thing that was going to kill them were the death machines; with their cannons and mechanical tentacles, coupled with the ability to fly, they were almost untouchable for most of the CCCPers. Molotok gestured to Zmey and John. “You two! You are firebombs; weaken their armor for us!” Zmey, looking somewhat shaken, managed to nod; he began adjusting the controls on his helmet. John could see several of the LED gauges redline as the meta ran after his squad commander. The Commissar had already engaged the leader, Ubermensch, flying around him and relentlessly blasting him with energy; the Nazi didn’t seem to notice any of it. His armor wasn’t deflecting it like the troopers’. It seemed as if he was actually taking all of the punishment that Saviour could dish out…and wasn’t being fazed by it.
All of the troopers had finally coordinated after their rough landing. Arm cannons began to track targets as the CCCPers and Echo personnel peppered them with small-arms fire and ran to engage. Zmey, on the other hand, had run at a slant to the Nazis, flanking them and lining himself up with their formation. He inhaled sharply, static sounding over the comm as he did so; in the next second, he exhaled. His helmet was of his own unique design, and granted him the capability to turn his exhalation into massive amounts of fire. Now John knew why he had tuned his helmet to perform at the height of its power; a truly gigantic cloud of flame billowed forth from his helmet’s emitter, belching out and engulfing the Nazi troopers. It looked as if someone had called in an air strike to drop napalm. His attack didn’t escape the Nazis’ notice; several bolts of blue energy arced towards him, sending him flying as the ground around him exploded. But their armor was glowing a faint, dull orange, the signal that it had overheated. The Nazis’ armor, weakened by fire, was now vulnerable to the rest of his comrades. They raced forward, fighting by squad; those without powers that couldn’t compete with the armor used their rifles to blast at the armored joints, crippling several of the troopers so that other CCCPers could dispatch them. Chug, in particular, seemed to have gone mad. Maybe he recognized the creatures that had killed so many of his friends. He hurled enormous chunks of rubble at them, tears streaming down his rocky cheeks.
John knew what he had to target; his fires might be able to take out the death machines, if he concentrated them enough and was able to keep the attack sustained on one spot for long enough. He wouldn’t be able to move and do that, however; it’d almost certainly result in him getting targeted and killed, blasted to death by whichever two machines he wasn’t firing at. Perun ran up to where John had positioned himself behind cover, a highway divider that had somehow gotten hurled or brought to this part of the city. “Murdock! You are able to use your fire to produce plasma, nyet?” John nodded curtly, not taking his eyes off of the death machines, which were quickly closing into range. “I see your targets. We will combine efforts to strike them. I will support you, tovarisch.” John glanced back to his squad leader; Perun knew that what he was agreeing to would probably be the death of them both, but he didn’t care. His comrades were in imminent danger, and that’s all that mattered.
They both ran, breaking from cover. John found what he was looking for: a slightly elevated pile of rubble that would cover most of his lower body from view. It wouldn’t do much to stop an energy beam, but hopefully it would conceal him and Perun from the troopers long enough so that they’d be able to take out a couple of the death machines. John took a few deep breaths, readying himself as Perun came bounding to his side. “Attack them, tovarisch!” He released his concentration, letting his fires well up and spring to his hands. Vaguely, he felt Perun’s hand rest on his shoulder. John thrust an arm out, pointing it directly at the rightmost death machine. A solid, intense shaft of plasma flew directly towards the Nazi craft, connecting with its viewports almost instantly. A breath later, Perun had somehow used his powers to electrify the beam; it was startlingly beautiful, and awesomely destructive. Plasma was extremely conductive; what this meant was that John’s fire was able to transmit all of the energy from Perun’s lightning directly into the Nazi death machine. They had become an arc welder on a continental scale. The Nazi vessel lurched to the side as the plasma jet shot straight through it. It hung there, looking as if it was perfectly suspended before it exploded brilliantly, shearing into two fiery halves.
The blast was dazzling; those closest to the blast were pushed to the ground by the pressure wave, which was strong enough to knock even the Nazi troopers down to their knees. Recovering his composure and seizing the moment, Ubermensch hefted a huge fist, slamming it into the building that he and the Commissar had been fighting next to. John could see the glazed-over look in his eyes, the gleam of insanity and zeal. Fei Li, dragging herself to her feet and sword still in hand, cried out. “Sestra!” With a triumphant laugh, the Nazi leader sliced his sword—its blade was covered in an rainbow pattern of energy—through the weakened corner support of that building; the energy seemed to carry itself all the way through the building along the arc he had cut. Natalya, who was still on her back from the blast, didn’t have time to react. Red Saviour was crushed underneath the falling building, not even given the dignity of seeing what had killed her.
Almost everyone was nearly stunned into inaction. Red Saviour II, Natalya Shostakovich and Commissar of the CCCP, was dead.
The fighting resumed almost immediately; several of the CCCPers had flown into rages, attacking the troopers with renewed ferocity. John knew that, even if they took out all of the troopers, it would be for naught unless those death machines were out of the picture. He looked to make sure that Perun was still in the fight; the WWII veteran had blood streaming from his mouth and his eyes, and he was breathing very raggedly. “Are you hit?” John shouted to him.
His squad leader punched him in the shoulder, pointing to two remaining Nazi vessels. “Finish the fight!” John turned back, taking aim at the center craft. Once more his fires leapt out, blazing towards their target. Perun screamed, electrifying the plasma stream once more. The lance of fire destroyed its target, sending it careening wildly to the left. It crashed into its sister craft, sending sparks and shards of metal flying. The disabled death machine plummeted to the ground, bursting into flames before its engines detonated. The third vessel limped away, clearly out of the fight. We’ve done it! We’ve got a chance! John, grinning broadly, spun to face Perun; his smile evaporated just as quickly as it had appeared, though. Perun was dead at his feet, his eyes wide and fixed in the direction of the enemy. John crouched down and checked for a pulse out of habit bred in training; he knew that there was nothing before he even reached down. Suddenly he felt very, very old. Get back in the game; you can worry about funerals later, idiot. John stood up again, looking for a target he could safely engage without hu
rting a friend.
He was so preoccupied with the death of Perun that he almost missed completely the droning sound that had slowly been filling the air for the past few seconds, slowly climbing over the din of the fighting. In a flash of metal and smoke, something shot out of an alley to the west. It was huge, and looked like some sort of car from a hell tailored specifically for vehicles. John bathed his hands in fire, ready to light up whatever this new menace was, until he saw it run over two Nazis, crushing them under wickedly spiked treads that looked more like chainsaws than they did as a means of traction. The vehicle wove through the melee, narrowly missing several of John’s comrades, before skidding to a halt next to him. The treads melded into the machine, and were replaced by very thick tires. The vehicle, upon closer inspection, resembled a Mad Max, junkyard version of a salt-flat racer. A very familiar face that John couldn’t place peeked out over the edge of it. “Echo OpOne, Speed Fiend, reporting for action! A mutual friend told me you could use a hand out here.”
World Divided: Book Two of the Secret World Chronicle-ARC Page 30
