Invasion: Book One of the Secret World Chronicle-ARC

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Hello there, gorgeous,” he said. “I’m here for your boss, Red Saviour.” The man drew a card and held it out to be viewed. “Ross Hensel, Hensel and Hewitt Builders.”

  Natalya snatched the card from the man before he could pull back. “Why do you think Commissar Red Saviour should talk to you?”

  Hensel narrowed his eyes. “That’s between me and the Commissioner, little lady. As much as I’d enjoy talking to ya, your boss needs work done and my company is the one to do it.”

  “I think I am beginning to understand. You want to bid on renovation work on CCCP headquarters, da?”

  “You got it. Russian, are ya? They sure grow ’em pretty there, I can see. I can tell why old Red keeps you around. You ain’t hard on the eyes.” He grinned, genuinely thinking he was being complimentary, and cast his eyes around the room. “Got any coffee? I take mine black, two lumps.”

  Natalya stood. Hensel came up to her chin. “This logo here, is union logo?” She flipped the card at him.

  “AFL-CIO, Building and Construction Trades,” he said. “Member since 1974.”

  “Horosho. Since you are fellow worker, and member of labor union, I give you another chance.” The man frowned at her words. “You are perhaps accustomed to sexist hiring practices in capitalist country. Is understandable.” She stepped out from the desk. “I am Natalya Nikolaevna Shostokovich, known in Russia as Krasnaya Spasskaya.”

  “Kras—” He lost the rest of the syllables.

  “Red Saviour. Commissar Red Saviour, Comrade Hensel.”

  “Well, hell,” he said, turning red. “My apologies. Sitting at that desk you looked like…never mind. It’s a pleasure, Ms.…”

  She shook his hand. “Commissar will do.”

  “Commissar. Your man Dzha…Dzhavak…” He fumbled again.

  “Dzhavakhishvili,” she said.

  “Thanks. He indicated that the bidding process had been reopened, and that you expressed interest in our bid.”

  “I said no such thing. He oversteps his bounds, but now that you are here, let us talk about your bid.” She gestured him to follow. “We will speak in cafeteria, where there are more chairs. Today is being moving day.”

  “I can see that. Who’re you using?”

  She pointed. “Him.” Chug rounded the corner with the last desk propped up on his shoulder.

  “I’ll be damned,” Hensel said under his breath. Chug favored them both with a stony smile.

  “I’m doing gud, Commissar Savyur,” Chug said. “I only got lost twice. I learn fast!”

  “Horosho,” she said. “Carry on.”

  The stony creature giggled his way past them.

  “His English is improving. I would not have thought anything would get through that boulder of a head.”

  She brushed off a space for them to sit, using a discarded rag. “Phew,” Natalya said. “Filthy. I don’t need this much space for comrades’ dinner. We will rarely be off duty all at once.”

  Hensel settled onto the bench with the care of a heavyset man. “You folks plan to keep busy, eh?”

  “Television and McDonald’s has made your Amerikanski metahumans lazy…and fat,” she said with a pointed look. “They seek fame like moths attracted to flame, but they take no care to avoid being burned. In Russia, metahumans are champions of proletariat.”

  Hensel frowned. “Don’t think we have proletariats here.”

  Natalya pointed at him, and then at his clipboard with the union logo. “Proletariat is you, Comrade Hensel. Is workers your union represents, and workers you unite with to battle against capitalist owners.”

  “Yeah, well,” he began, searching for words. “I gotta tell ya, Miss Saviour, the unions got over that talk early last century. We’re about as capitalist as you get. We work hard for a day’s wage. And, no offense, but the final product is a damn sight higher quality than your forced labor.”

  Natalya blew air out her lips. The Cold War ended years ago with perestroika, but Marxist thought still found a chilly reception in the country that believed it had “won” by outspending the Soviets. Not until the American proletariat truly suffered under the yoke of oppression would the tenets of Marx and Engels gain any ground with them. I am just planting seeds, she reminded herself.

  Reigning in her temper, she forced herself to smile at the man. “Well, is pleasant bantering about politics with so sturdy a worker as yourself, but let us move on to matter at hand.” She indicated the clipboard. He spun it around for her to view.

  “Most of those figures concern reinforcement of your roof there,” he said. “You’re gonna want I-beams at six-point-five-foot intervals—er, about two meters. Doubling the load-bearing capacity, you know. Roofs ain’t made for supporting the weight of anything besides a bit of snow.” Hensel’s discomfort at his earlier blunder had disappeared in a sea of shoptalk. He was in his element now.

  “You are charging for extra load-bearing columns on all floors. We only need underneath helipad.”

  He leaned forward. She smelled cigarettes on his breath and craved one for herself. “That’s where you’d be wrong, Commissioner. Where’s the pressure going after you shunt it through the third-floor supports? To the second floor, where you got nothing. Takes longer to cause damage, but once you’re sagging, you’re looking at replacing the whole damn roof.” He grinned, satisfied with his explanation. “I bet your low-ballers didn’t tell you that.”

  “Nyet. Horosho point you make.”

  “Say again?”

  “Horosho…is good, is good point you are making.” She put her palm on the tabletop and pushed. “Weight doesn’t disappear altogether. Is distributed to weak spots in structure.”

  “You got it.” His eyes strayed to her chest, lingered, and snapped back up. “I can see why they put you in charge.”

  She looked down her nose at the man. “Svinya. Now, tell me…”

  “Come again?”

  “Svinya. Means…it means ‘fellow worker,’ ” she lied. “You have charges here for refurbishing this room.”

  Hensel swept a hand in a semicircle. “It’s a good space. I just figured since you got a virtual army living here, and you got a mess hall, you’d be using it. No sense in letting it go to waste.”

  “I was going to store equipment in here. We do not need all this space for dining.”

  He produced a red pen and scratched a line through the columns relating to the cafeteria. “Too bad. You could open a little Russian restaurant or something. Feed the workers.”

  Natalya’s eyes went wide. “Feed the…” She imagined the tables full of proletarians, eating and talking…or listening. “Not restaurant,” she said. “What is place for poor people called?”

  “The poor house?”

  She shook her head. “Nyet, nyet. Where exploited workers and disenfranchised come to eat.”

  “McDonald’s?”

  “Nyet!”

  His eyes roved the room. “A soup kitchen?”

  Natalya slapped the table, sending up puffs of dust. “Da! Soup kitchen, where we feed comrades for free.”

  “There’s one down the street,” he said, inclining his head west. “Saint Francis, I think.”

  “Then there is room for another. But will be for Saint Karl!” She stood and spread her arms out. “We serve good sturdy food: borscht, potatoes, stew. Workers can eat for free, as long as they listen to lecture.” She made a fist. “Thus we endear ourselves to proletariat and plant seeds for worker’s revolution in America.”

  Hensel grimaced as if she had broken wind. “Um, I think they call that sedition, lady. You can’t preach the overthrow of the government here. It’s a free country.”

  “Da! Is free country, with free speech laws. You might not like to hear it but is perfectly legal. If they want to eat, they have to listen to us explain to them why they are hungry in first place.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, Russia’s our ally now, but this is like the bad old days of…” He stopped a
s she initialed his estimate on renovating the cafeteria. “Of…well, I guess we can accommodate you.”

  “Horosho.” She grinned in triumph, still awash in the vision of delivering a rousing lecture on ideology to the American poor, who stared in slack-jawed realization of their plight. She would budget for inexpensive, student editions of the Communist Manifesto, to be handed out for further reading. A whiteboard…

  “I want whiteboard, too.”

  “Sure thing,” he said, jotting it down. “Commissioner, while we’re on the topic, I took the liberty of preparing an estimate for the living quarters for your people.” Hensel pulled a sheaf of papers from his briefcase. “I think you’ll find this fits right into your budget.”

  “Excuse me,” a soft feminine voice said. They turned towards the source of the interruption: Fei Li, the People’s Blade, in a muddy T-shirt and jeans. She held a trowel in one tiny hand. “Please forgive me, but I believed you would want to be notified. A gang of street hoodlums is attacking a local grocery, according to the local police band, and aid is called for. They are understaffed in this neighborhood, it appears.”

  “Our first operation!” Red Saviour exclaimed. “Excellent! How many svinyas?”

  Hensel’s brow beetled at the word he thought he knew in a different context.

  “Twenty,” the Chinese woman said. “Apparently there is a metahuman presence, which causes the local constabulary some concern. This particular gang is known as the Rebs.”

  “Oh, damn, the Rebs,” Hensel said. “Bad news. If you’re going after them, you ladies better bring that rocky guy.”

  Red Saviour turned on him. Such disrespect was intolerable! She opened her mouth to excoriate the man, at last.

  “Natalya.” Fei Li had read her mind.

  Fei Li’s voice had not risen, but it deflated Natalya’s anger. Her former teacher could command a legion with a single upraised eyebrow.

  “Fine. Then, Comrade Hensel, you will be my guest. Bring your papers; we will discuss your plan for our barracks.”

  “Your g-guest?” Hensel said. “I thought you were going to tackle a street gang.”

  Natalya gave him a wolfish grin. “You’re coming with us.” She held up a hand to stifle his protest. “If you want contract, that is.”

  * * *

  Natalya and Fei Li went for their uniforms and dressed while Hensel waited in the lobby. Feeling a little guilty at the look of fear on the man’s face, Natalya had Soviette fetch the man a bulletproof vest they kept as a reserve. It could not stretch to fit his bulk, leaving three inches unprotected. His protest went unheeded.

  “Pistols tend to stray to the left. You will be fine,” she said. The lie didn’t reassure him.

  Natalya tugged at her white-banded gloves. She had chosen her favorite uniform, a tribute to her father. The outfit had the added benefit of being a fine nanoweave that could stop a medium caliber bullet. It might break a bone, but she would survive the wound.

  Her red headguard protected the sides of her head from impact trauma and held her wild raven hair in check. Some metahumans preferred to go masked, but she had to issue orders, and she could not do that hidden behind fabric.

  “I ain’t so sure about this,” Hensel said.

  “Why?” she said. “Because is just People’s Blade and I?”

  “Yeah, that, among other things.”

  “We will give you good show,” she said. “Now, tell me about barracks.”

  “Right.” He unfolded his proposal from his pocket. “You got eight rooms for a predicted fourteen people. That’s getting cramped, unless you’re a freshman in college.”

  “I have my own room, as does comrade Soviette and Fei Li.”

  “Knocks you down to five rooms to sleep eleven people.”

  Fei Li jogged into the room. “Forgive me for being so slow. Let us not tarry any further.” She adjusted her cloth belt around a loose-fitting tunic, into which she had tucked the metal sheath of the fabled blade, Jade Emperor’s Whisper. Red Kevlar-paneled tights, at Natalya’s insistence, gave her legs some bullet protection.

  “Keep talking, Comrade Hensel.”

  They oriented themselves on the street. “Four blocks,” Fei Li said, pointing west, past a row of ragged tenements.

  “We’ll race,” Natalya said. She thrust her arms under Hensel’s from behind. “Comrade, don’t drop anything.”

  With a confident smile, Fei Li pushed off the sidewalk as if she were a swimmer at the bottom of a pool. At once she had leaped twenty feet into the air, tapping a telephone pole for additional footing.

  “Holy crap,” Hensel said in a stage whisper.

  “Bah,” Red Saviour said. “Is nothing. Hold tight.”

  Directing the energies under her feet, she and Hensel floated into the air. After a brief lull, the energies exploded under her in a white flash, propelling them forward at the speed of a motorcycle.

  Hensel howled in fear.

  “Close your eyes. You will get bugs in them.” She adjusted her grip on the big man. He weighed less than the desk.

  Bystanders craned their necks as Red Saviour and Hensel blasted by them. She let the energies burst out, making light and noise. Ahead of them, somehow, People’s Blade sprang off a window ledge.

  The blocks flashed by. Red Saviour stayed behind People’s Blade, knowing that she would draw fire from their civilian observer.

  “Tell me about five rooms, comrade.” She dodged a power line.

  “Five rooms,” he said. “Not-not to mention limited bathroom facilities. The room with the drain can be converted—”

  “Is for interrogations. Not negotiable.”

  “Interrogations? You can do that?”

  A column of smoke rose from a storefront ahead. Men in white outfits waved Molotov cocktails, baseball bats, and pistols. She estimated over a dozen targets.

  “Put me down here,” he said. “Keep me away from those nutcases.”

  “Too far. I will not be able to hear you. Aha!” Shifting their weight, she skimmed the sidewalk, then twisted abruptly to halt behind a parked SUV with shot-out windows. Hensel let out a lungful of air.

  “Stopping’s worse than starting,” he said, hunkering down behind the car.

  The Rebs stuck to their theme: white jeans and shirts, with Confederate flag armbands, resembling a streamlined, modern-day Ku Klux Klan. Hooting and hollering, they reveled in the fear of their Korean victims and onlookers. Molotovs had ignited the produce cart in front of the small market. More smoke billowed out from the broken plate-glass window.

  “Jesus,” Hensel said, peeking around the bumper. “That’s a lot of guys. You sure you don’t want backup?”

  “Comrade, give us credit, da? I did not become Russia’s bestest hero by calling for help.” She looked up through the broken windows of the SUV. “Besides, Blade Shuai has decided to make her move. Just watch.”

  “That slip of a girl? Unless that sword of hers—”

  “You are shutting up and watching.” Natalya grinned, getting excited. “By the way, I like large mirrors in bathroom. We will need sauna, also.”

  Fei Li dropped from the sky, sun at her back. She hit the ground and rolled through the open doors of the store, right between the legs of a Reb gangster. Silent and swift, she was inside before the gang members had a clue what the tiny blur was.

  A cry arose from the grocery, then a yell of pain.

  A single, bare-chested Reb flew out the front window, spinning like a toy, and landed on the street. Blood seeped out of the figure 8 carved into his chest.

  “Eight inside,” Red Saviour said with satisfaction. She shrugged at Hensel’s look of horror. “Will be easier when we install radio network.” Her fists began to glow. “Now, stay put. This will take moments.”

  “Metas!” cried the Rebs. Weapons were brandished, and all heads turned towards the store.

  “Svinyas,” Red Saviour said, stepping out into the street. The Rebs spun at the sound of her challenge. “I
s time to give up your decadent, exploitative lifestyle and get good factory jobs. You now face real proletarian warriors.”

  “What Bond movie is she from?” one of the Rebs said. Another snickered.

  In response, she blasted the joker with a streak of blue energy. He skidded across the concrete.

  “Well damn! That ain’t right! Get ’er! Get ’er done!” The Rebs swarmed on her with their chains and bats. Red Saviour waited for them to come within arm’s reach, then she stepped under the downswing of the nearest bat-wielding gangster. She wrenched his arms, seized the bat, and jabbed him in the stomach. She swung it up to clip his chin and followed through to parry a bike chain with the bat.

  Her foot lashed out and shattered the Reb’s rib cage. Another tried to strangle her with a noose and received an elbow in the throat for his efforts.

  “Bathrooms!” she shouted.

  Hensel realized he was being addressed. “What?”

  “Bathrooms are in tatters. Can you work on plumbings?”

  He ducked as a two-foot splinter of broken bat flew past his head. “I got a guy for that.”

  “Horosho. Add”—she backhanded a Reb—“to”—then flipped over the head of a fat one and kicked him in the spine—“list!”

  “Got it,” he called back.

  People’s Blade stepped out of the storefront, wiping her blade on a Stars and Bars bandanna. Groans resounded from the storefront, but no one moved.

  A heavyset, bearded Reb in a denim vest approached her. She leveled her swordpoint at him.

  “I suggest you stand down,” she said in a quiet tone that brooked no dissent.

  “I can’t hear you,” the man boomed. “Why don’t you…SPEAK UP?” In an instant, his voice rose to the roar of a hurricane. The force he generated blasted the car in front of the store—and People’s Blade—through the façade with a terrific crash. There was no dodging the sonic assault.

  Red Saviour had instinctively covered her ears. A Reb scored a hit with his baseball bat; her cheek reddened and blood spurted from her broken nose. She shook her head to clear the fuzz while the Rebs hooted around her. A boot caught her in the stomach and her muscles tensed to absorb the blow.