Collision: Book Four in the Secret World Chronicle - eARC

by Mercedes Lackey

  A water fountain on the far side of the hallway from Flins exploded, breaking his concentration and causing him to open his eyes. The water, which had started spraying towards the ceiling…coalesced, gathering in on itself. In the space of a breath, the water launched itself towards Flins; it slammed into his chest, propelling the thin and tall Russian off of his feet and against the wall, pinning his back to it. The water flowed over his mouth and nose, a firehose blast still being continuously slammed into his chest. Natalya saw emotion in his eyes, for the first time; fear and hatred. Those eyes locked onto her again.

  “Not this time, you bastard!” With a shout, she gathered energy to her free hand, and flung it with all of her might and will towards Flins. It hit his body squarely, and the entire hallway rumbled as the energy discharged. The water abruptly stopped. She could see scorch marks against the dripping wall, and an unmistakable smear of red. Further down the hallway was Flins’ body, crumpled. There’s only one person here that can manipulate water. I won’t be caught unaware again. Natalya collected energy to both of her fists, first holstering her Makarov.

  “Rusalka! Come out!”

  “They were going to kill you, Commissar.” Rusalka walked out from behind an alcove, her hands at her sides and her head hanging, her entire posture one of defeat and grief. “I couldn’t let them. I was supposed to watch, supposed to keep an eye on you. When I failed, they were sent to keep me in line.”

  Natalya shook her head, uncomprehending. The other Russian woman was openly weeping now. “Worker’s Champion…Boryets…he said it was to be for the greater good. That you were too dangerous to leave to your own devices, in Atlanta. That he trusted me. We had fought together for so long…” She looked up, her eyes red and brimming with tears. “How could I have known? What he would do?”

  Natalya allowed the energy surrounding her fists to dissipate into the air. She opened her mouth to speak, even going so far as to reach for Rusalka…but held back. I do not have time for this. I need to keep moving, to help Moji. She did her best to keep her voice even, speaking in Russian, as Rusalka had. “Evacuate civilians. We will deal with you back in Atlanta. If you wish to redeem yourself and your shame, you will not be giving me reasons to regret allowing you to live.” Without waiting for a response, Natalya turned and dashed down the hallway in the direction that Worker’s Champion and Molotok had been going. All this time…he had been a traitor, and had left more traitors in my midst. How many people have died because of their treason? How many more will die now? Natalya clenched her teeth hard enough that she began to taste blood as she ran; she felt as if her rage would consume her and the world. Let it destroy Boryets first, before he can do more harm. It did not take her as long as she thought it would before she had caught up to her targets.

  She stumbled over a shallow step and emerged into an open space; a landing of sorts, a cantilevered launch pad for the Metis craft. Natalya had arrived on one such port, but it had been far different from this. This one…was littered with bodies. Over a dozen Supernauts, all dead, covered nearly every inch of space on the launch pad and the ramp leading up to it. Most of them had been messily torn apart; arms, legs, heads all lain strewn about. She noticed one mostly intact Supernaut soldier with a bayonet handle sticking out of an eye slit; the body was still quivering on the ground. Natalya, hardened by her time as a detective and then a soldier in the war against the Kriegers, still felt her gorge rise at the scene of carnage in front of her. The structure itself had taken tremendous damage; it looked as if two titans had done battle here, the environment taking the punishment of their wrath.

  There is so much blood.

  It all stood in stark contrast to the white marble of the Metisian surroundings. Even against the red and black armor of the Supernauts, the blood was thick and shiny, catching the light of the setting sun.

  At the very end of the landing stood Worker’s Champion. Kneeling before him was Molotok. Natalya had known him since they were children; the most injured she had ever seen him was when he had had a bloody nose after having an entire factory collapsed on him by demolition explosives. Now…his face was pulped. His uniform was ripped in dozens of places, exposing the bruised and bleeding skin beneath. Her bolshoi brat, arms limp at his sides, allowed his head to loll to the side, his gaze falling upon her. Both eyes were blackened and hideously swollen, barely visible through the slits of his eyelids. Those pale blue dots bored into her, and she thought that she saw the barest hint of a smile creep onto his ruined lips, the red blood marring his white teeth.

  Boryets picked Molotok up by the neck. He regarded his fellow Russian curiously, cocking his head to the side, his face still a stony mask. Then he punched. Aimed for the center of Moji’s chest. The first blow was a deep thud. The second was a splintering crack. The third, and final punch, was a much more wet-sounding rip. This time, when Worker’s Champion pulled back his fist, it was covered in gore. Unceremoniously, he dropped Moji at his feet. The younger meta landed on his knees, and stayed slumped there for a moment, before falling forward in a grotesque, boneless sort of way. When Moji’s head hit the ground, his eyes were fixed upon Natalya again, sightless.

  For a moment, Natalya couldn’t move; she was shaking so terribly that she was vibrating in place, torn simultaneously by grief so terrible she wanted to scream it to the universe, rage so all-encompassing that she was literally seeing everything through a red haze, and guilt so deep she could not see the bottom of it. His eyes…his EYES! A sound began down in her chest; it started as a sob, but grew and grew until it burst out of her chest in a wordless howl, the cry of someone utterly betrayed, whose world has been destroyed before her eyes by the one she trusted most, leaving nothing but ashes. Now there was nothing. Nothing!

  Nothing but revenge.

  Natalya launched herself at Worker’s Champion. Her vision had gone red, and dark around the edges. All she saw was a man she had once worshipped, now her most hated enemy, standing over the body of one that she had loved dearly as a brother. She met him, her body fully extended in flight, her fists charged with all of the energy she could muster. She dove straight for his center, wishing to drive through his cancerous and traitorous heart, to do to him what he had done to her bolshoi brat. The explosion almost blinded her, sending her flipping through the air with the concussion at the last second. Boryets was staggered, for a moment, almost unbelieving, it seemed, that she would dare approach him, much less attack. She refused to recoil, however; Natalya renewed her attack, charging her fists and pummeling every joint, every pressure point of her opponent with blows that would have leveled houses.

  Boryets stood statue-still, taking all of the hits impassively. With inhuman calm, he reached out, grabbing Natalya by the shoulder. She continued to pound on him, charging her fists with enough energy to destroy entire buildings. She discharged all of this energy, fruitlessly, against Worker’s Champion’s shoulders, chest, neck, and head, until she was utterly spent. Finally, she just beat her fists against him, unpowered, weeping and shouting hoarsely in Russian.

  “Why! Why, uncle! Why would you betray us, everyone and everything you loved? Why, you bastard!”

  Boryet’s face remained utterly devoid of emotion. He set her down, gently, and then shoved her with two fingers. It was enough to send her flying back, tumbling over the bodies of the dead Supernauts.

  He picked up the boxes, covered in the blood of one of the dead Supernaut soldiers. “You wouldn’t understand, ignorant child.” Natalya thought she almost heard a tinge of sadness in his words. Marshalling all of her remaining strength, she raised her head off of the platform. She spat at him, baring her teeth. It was all she could do. She was too exhausted to even raise a fist to shake at him.

  “Traitor! Betrayer! Murdering fucking bastard! I will kill you, and you will die screaming! Know this! Have no rest, because you will die alone, in pain, begging for mercy, you fucking coward!”

  Finally, Boryets showed some emotion. His countenance darkened
, his lips turning down into a grim frown. Before he could speak, however, a Thulian Death Sphere rose behind him, huge against the backdrop of the city. A portal opened seamlessly on its side, bathing him in baleful orange light.

  Boryets opened his mouth to speak—but was stopped short. “Hinein mit du! Gerade jetzt!” Harsh shouting in German sounded from inside of the Death Sphere. He looked over his shoulder, then back to Natalya. With a final sneer, he turned on his heel and stalked into the open portal, shrouded in that horrible orange light. The entrance into the Death Sphere closed behind him. With a bone-rattling hum, the Death Sphere rose into the sky, streaking away from the doomed city.

  Natalya did her best to summon energy to her fists, to strike out at her traitorous uncle. All she could do was raise her fists uselessly, a plaintive cry escaping her lips before she fell unconscious in a pool of the blood of her enemies.

  * * *

  “Where’s Nat?” Ramona shouted via Overwatch.

  Yankee Pride answered. “She went after Worker’s Champion—he took Tesla and Marconi! We need—”

  “No he didn’t,” Mercurye interrupted. “Those were just projection cubes—”

  “Well if you know where they are, get them!” Bella interrupted. “Vix says the city is going down! We need to evac everyone five minutes ago!”

  “I’ve got your transport,” Vickie appended. “Get the ghosts!”

  That was all Rick needed. Mercurye flew down the hallway, a hand tight around Ramona’s forearm. She kept chirping directions based upon the information that appeared in the heads-up display, directing him down one corridor and another. The structure shook, each explosion threatening to cave in a possible escape route. Ramona yelped as one of the walls buckled; she stumbled forward as Merc pulled her through one of the sheer gel curtains and into a small closet-sized space.

  “Mr. Tesla? Mr. Marconi?” Mercurye called into the darkness. “We need to hurry, please!”

  “Your urgency is noted, young man.” Tesla’s voice resonated from the floor, the walls crackling with the familiar blue wireframes. “Enrico and I share your concerns. Ms. Ferrari, I trust that you have coordinated transportation?”

  “Already done. Your ticket out is warming up the saucer.” Victrix barked in her ears. “But you need to—”

  A violent explosion tore a hole in the ceiling of the closet and drowned out the rest of Overwatch’s instructions. The tang of ozone mixed with a sulfuric odor seeped into the space. Ramona started to gag. Merc wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her back through the blue gel curtain. The smooth composite floor had buckled, and the blue currents of consciousness raced over the broken edges frantically.

  “Vic?” Ramona coughed and spat out a thin aluminum-tasting wad of gunk.

  “The systems are going down. The Metisan infrastructure keeps breaking off in pieces. We’re losing whole sections of the city every second.” More information flashed in the corner of Ramona’s right eye; parts of the Metisan map dimmed and faded from blue to yellow to black in a flickering pattern of destruction.

  “You will have to find a containment unit, Signorina!” Marconi’s usually calm voice had risen to a frantic pitch. “Without some means of transport, you won’t be able to bring us with you.”

  “Enrico is correct,” Tesla’s voice chimed in, more angry than frantic. “There should be a way to create something suitable from the composite tiles that remain.”

  “There’s no time, Nikola,” Marconi wailed. “We never planned for something of this magnitude, especially in such a short amount of time! In all of our years here, we never established any kind of protocol for this kind of evacuation!”

  “Calm down. You have two minutes, which is ninety seconds more than we can afford.” Victrix rasped, hoarse from shouting orders over the cacophony of screams and explosions. “We need another option, and more than that, we don’t have the time to find a way to carry the gents in any containers. Gents, the only secure way to get you out is inside Ramona and Rick. Soul-transfer, just like we did to unlock the charter. Ramona, I’m going to transmit you some sigils. I need you to trace them exactly. Right hand blue, left hand yellow. Both hands green. A one means index finger, a two means index and middle finger. Zero means your thumb.” She paused, and an intricate design not unlike a Kandinsky painting appeared in Ramona’s left eye.

  The blue currents along the walls crackled and flared as if in protest. Mercurye didn’t appear much happier with the solution.

  Ramona didn’t blame them.

  “We have no choice. The Thulians are looking for people carrying Metisian objects; they have Worker’s Champion and Vickie is pretty sure they know what Boryets stole is bogus. They are shooting to kill anyone holding anything, and recovering what they held from the body. We can’t protect you the way you are.”

  Ramona added. “We can’t lose you. We don’t want to lose you. This is the best that we’ve got, and, well… if you’ve got to ride somebody out of this place, wouldn’t you rather it be the two of us? At least you, uh, know what you’re getting into.”

  The walls crackled azure again. Merc laughed nervously.

  “I’ve already done this with you once, that means all I am doing is a remote repeat of an established protocol. That makes it much easier. I’m setting things up so I take all the risk. If it doesn’t work, it backfires on me and you stay where you are. And…you find some other ‘containment,’ I’ll try and get you lot into what you guys have that passes for a fallout shelter and we hope there is a possibility of rescue.” Vickie didn’t sound all that confident about the “possibility of rescue.” But knowing Vickie as she did, Ramona had the distinct impression that what she was about to try was nothing like as easy as she was trying to make it out to be.

  * * *

  “Nat. Nat. Wake up, Nat. Nat. Wake up. Wake up, Nat. Come on, you need to wake up. Now. Nat.”

  There was nothing that Natalya wanted to do more than sleep, at that moment. It seemed…easier. She deserved some rest, nyet? Why did everyone keep bothering her, trying to wake her up? Hadn’t she done enough?

  “Nat! Come on, Nat, I can see your brainwaves stirring. Which is a terrible analogy. Wake up before I make a worse one!”

  “Go away, Daughter of Rasputin. Am sleeping.” She wanted to keep her eyes closed. She wouldn’t have to see her dear Moji dead, to see all of the blood and death any more. She could just sleep, to finally rest. She had failed everyone else already; Moji, her comrades, herself. Why shouldn’t she sleep, accept what was to come?

  “Are you going to lie there until someone comes along and kills you? You think that’s going to make up for Moji’s murder, you dumb bitch? Okay, go ahead, die. And the rest of CCCP is going to die shortly after that.”

  That woke Natalya from her stupor. She lifted her head from the pavement, tasting acid and blood in her mouth. She started cursing, lifting herself bodily off of the ground. “When I find you, witch girl, you’ll never being—”

  Victrix interrupted her. “Good. You’re alive and ready to fight. Goddamnit Nat, we need you now. Get your commie ass moving!”

  “Plot me a course. We will be dealing with how I beat you to death for insults later.”

  “Everyone else is heading for Trina’s saucer. I think it’s here. The city’s going down, Nat, the best we can do is get people out of it.”

  She started running, following the blinking directions on her HUD. “Going down? What of the defenses? These technocratic bastards were able to decimate Kriegers? Why are they being steamrolled?”

  “Because they caught Metis with the shields down and the defenses unmanned. Because the idiot Metisians figured we’d won, and no one paid any attention when I pointed out that there was some concerted evac, and to have an evacuation, you have to have a place to evacuate to. And because these don’t seem to be the same Kriegers.”

  “Pizdets,” she swore. She ran; everywhere she went, she saw more death and destruction. Metisians were fleeing, with ma
ny bodies littering the walkways and corridors. Whenever she reached an open area, with a view to the skyline of the city, she saw Thulian ships, creeping ever forward towards the city center. From beneath each of them was an unbreaking stream of thermite, bathing the city below in white-hot flames. Where those flames didn’t touch, actinic blazes from energy cannons streamed outwards. The Kriegers didn’t wish to take this city; they wanted to utterly destroy it, to raze and incinerate it and have it forgotten forever. There would be no prisoners, no surrender; this was genocide.

  Natalya ran into the remainder of the Atlanta contingent—literally—wholly by accident. She rounded a corner, and suddenly she was face-first with Rusalka, and missed crashing into her by dint only of sheer luck. Everyone stopped for a moment, their powers keying up until they realized that they were on the same side.

  “We need to evacuate. The city is falling. Moji—Molotok is dead. Worker’s Champion, the traitorous dog, killed him.” The Commissar did her best to choke back her emotions as she spoke her dead friend’s name. Rusalka kept her eyes cast to the ground.

  “Jesus, Nat—” Bella shoved through the group of Metisians at the front of the group, and hugged her impulsively, ignoring the blood covering the Commissar…

  Except that a moment later, as a flood of strength and reassurance poured into her, and a whispered voice in the back of her mind said :Hold it together, Nat. You don’t get to have a breakdown until we’re out of here,: she realized it was anything but impulsive. Bella was a projective and receptive empath at distance, but only a touch-telepath. :Yes, I felt it all. Hang in there.: Bella pulled back from her, staring into Natalya’s eyes for a moment. The Commissar took in a deep breath, then let it out, nodding. There will be time to grieve later. Now, I am needed. If revenge is to be mine, I will need to live to exact it.

  With Bella were Bulwark, Yankee Pride, and a scattering of military leaders as well as the Metisians. Everyone looked as if they had seen some fighting; many were bloodied, even the Metisians with their white uniforms covered in dirt, blood, and burns.