The Secret World Chronicles

  The Secret World Chronicles

  Copyright Information:

  Published by Humble Bundle Inc.

  Copyright © 2012 Mercedes Lackey.

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN

  9781939230140

  eBook production by Tobias S. Buckell.

  The Secret World Chronicles

  Invasion

  Children of The Night

  Aces and Eights

  For Those About To Rock

  Haunt You

  The Secret World Chronicles

  Created by Mercedes Lackey and Steve Libbey

  Book One: Invasion

  Written by Mercedes Lackey

  with Steve Libbey,

  Cody Martin, Dennis Lee

  PART ONE: INVASION

  Introduction

  The blue-skinned, blue-haired woman known by the callsign "Belladonna Blue" stuck her head around the corner of the oval hatch into the captain's cubby. She was already suited up in her full-body nano-armor, with only her head exposed. She carried her helmet under her arm.

  "You got about two hours, Vic. Make the most of it."

  Victoria Victrix nodded. She just hoped someone was going to be around to read it when all this was over.

  "And so it begins....Welcome to our nightmare..."

  Chapter One: Before The Storm

  Mercedes Lackey, Steve Libbey, Cody Martin and Dennis Lee

  Atlanta, Georgia, USA: Callsign Eisenfaust

  I Minus 24:00:00 And Counting

  Eisenfaust hunkered in the shadows of an alleyway outside a bar. At the end of the block a white wall terminated the nighttime darkness like a false horizon, with a brightly lit tower with windows as slender as a man's arm: the Echo Security Facility, one of the most heavily guarded buildings in the United States of America.

  He had survived the plane crash – as Germany's greatest pilot, he knew how to ditch a plane – but he hadn't counted on the flimsiness of twenty-first century craft. His broken arm throbbed at the memory of slamming the plane into a swamp on the outskirts of the American city Atlanta.

  Better than the fate his pursuers had encountered in the Andes. He almost wished he was back in the jungle stronghold, just long enough to mock the Commandant who had stolen his beautiful Valkyria from him.

  Ah, Effi. Your betrayal cut deeper than the caricature of our ideals put forth by those madmen.

  He would not fall prey to the foolishness they preached. Eisenfaust had fought for the Fatherland, for his fellow Deutschlander, for the freedom his people deserved. But this... this was madness.

  And in keeping with his nom de guerre, he'd crush it under his fist. But he needed allies, and he needed time to plan.

  It was likely that he had fractured his ankle, but he refused to limp like a weakling. Slowly, he made his way down the dim street to the white wall of the Echo compound. These American ubermenschen would surely be surprised by the identity of their uninvited guest.

  The guard at the gate eyed him. "The campus is closed, sir."

  "I wish to speak to your commanding officer," Eisenfaust said. "Fetch him at once."

  "Ah... right. You'll have to come back tomorrow. We open at nine AM."

  "I have no intention of waiting." Eisenfaust scowled at the enlisted man. "Your commander – bring him."

  A second guard stepped out of the booth, wary of the increasing tension in the air. "We can't do that, sir. Please step away from the gate."

  Eisenfaust cursed under his breath. Even the Allied Aces had shown him more deference than these flunkies. He pointed at the Security Tower. "That is my destination. If you cannot assist me, step aside."

  Both guards reached for their sidearms. Moving with the inhuman speed that made him Germany's greatest aerial ace, he swatted the guns out of their hands before they could level them in his direction. The two men gasped.

  With his good arm, he flattened the first guard with a blow to the chin. "I will find him myself!" he exclaimed furiously. The second guard knelt to seize his gun; Eisenfaust booted the man in the side, hurling him back into the booth.

  With a contemptuous sniff, he kicked the guns aside and walked to the door of the detention facility.

  Another guard snapped to alertness at his approach. This time he skipped the parlay entirely. He seized the surprised man and dashed him against the wall. He opened the glass doors, noting with approval the weight of the doors; the bulletproof glass was two inches thick and obscured the lobby. In wartime, Eisenfaust would never have been so careless, but his goal was not to defeat these men.

  "Stop right there, mister." The speaker was a fine example of American manhood: tall, wide shouldered, a face with mongrel features, topped with a swath of light brown hair. His black Echo uniform sported epaulets decorated with the Stars and Stripes. A thick metal gauntlet on his right hand glowed with plasma energy – and was directed at Eisenfaust.

  "Guten nacht, my friend. I am told you have rooms for rent."

  A score of Echo guards with rifles lined up behind the meta. "We have plenty of room for punks who smack our people around. Don't make me use force."

  "Good. I was hoping to speak to someone with authority." He drew himself up into a salute. "I wish to turn myself in."

  "Now that was easy." The meta motioned the guards forward, who circled Eisenfaust. "Take him in, boys. Watch those hands."

  Eisenfaust gestured to his broken arm. "You have nothing to fear from me, young man. I am a colleague of your father's." A guard handcuffed his wrists, eliciting a wince of pain.

  "I doubt that. Pop died over twenty years ago, and I don't think he ever managed to buddy up to a German after the war."

  A tinge of doubt crossed Eisenfaust's mind. "I... I am sorry to hear this. He was a fine warrior, the best I ever faced."

  "Huh?" The metahuman looked at him closely. "Now you're messing with me. You can't be a day over thirty."

  "You are correct, in a sense." The shackles clanked as he offered his hand. "I am Oberst Heinrich Eisenhauer of the Uberluftwaffe of the Third Reich." He paused, enjoying the look on the young man's face. "Your father, Yankee Doodle, knew me as Eisenfaust."

  The meta looked from the hand to Eisenfaust's grin. "Bull," he said at last. "He died fighting the Allied Aces. In 1945."

  "Then your father told you about me. Clearly you carry on his legacy."

  A succession of expressions passed over the American's face so quickly that anyone lacking Eisenfaust's metahuman perceptions would not have registered anything but a frown: first surprise, then reflection, then the cold, strategic calculation of a man used to secrets. His bluff bravado returned in less than a heartbeat.

  "As Yankee Pride, yeah. And we're a little too savvy to let some Nazi fetishist with minor powers get his rocks off by pretending to be a dead Nazi war criminal. Did you leave Hitler's brain in your Panzer tank out front?" Yankee Pride backed off as Echo guards seized Eisenfaust's arms, wrenching his broken arm. "Put him in a holding cell under suicide watch until we can ID this wingnut."

  The guards began to drag Eisenfaust down the hallway towards the cell block. He called out: "Ask your mother! Or Liberty Torch! Or Worker's Champion! They knew me. They feared me!"

  "Save it for the shrink, Fritz." Yankee Pride stifled a yawn. He tapped at controls on his gauntlet, gesturing oddly at Eisenfaust for a moment.

  Eisenfaust calmed himself. He should have assumed the Americans would be suspicious of a man claiming to be one of their country's greatest foes. He would overcome their doubts.

  "You're taking me to a cell?" he asked a guard. "Is it secure?"

  "No one's ever gotten out of Echo," the man said with a sneer.

  "That's admirable." Eisenfaust gave the man a prophetic smile. "But it's who will try to get in that concerns me."

  Las Vegas, Nevada, USA: Callsign Belladonna Blue

  I Minus 6:37:22 And Counting

  The name on the ID badge said "Bella Dawn Parker," but Dr. and Dr. Parker's little girl Bella existed now only in scrapbooks and photo-albums and the Bonanza High School Yearbooks, where Bella's blue hair and skin were unusual, but by no means extraordinary.

  Metahumans didn't stand out in a city like Lost Wages, where you could stand waiting for the bus next to a Russian acrobat, a seven-foot-tall transvestite in Cleopatra drag, a guy with an albino anaconda wrapped around his shoulders, and five Elvii, and all anyone wanted to talk about was the football scores. It was a good city for a meta like her to grow up in, where blue hair and blue skin and the ability to heal with a touch were cool and assets and not cause for stares or preachers to condemn you from the pulpit. . . .

  Now she was the Rookie in Station 7 of the Los Vegas Fire Department, Alternate Driver of Rescue 2, Paramedic Parker, EMT-4, the highest rank there was, and not so incidentally a registered OpOne with Echo Rescue, nicknamed "Blues."

  Gramma and Grampa had worked for Oppie—Robert Oppenheimer—out at the Nevada test site, on the first atomic bombs; their son Robert had gone to work at Groom Lake—what most people called "Area 51"— and he'd continued the tradition of finding romance at work by meeting and marrying Bella's mother. Gramma said once that while seeing her daughter-in-law giving birth to a bouncing blue baby had been a little disconcerting, it hadn't exactly been unexpected—the number of "unusual" kids at Bonanza who had parents working at Groom was pretty high.

  There'd been a huge dump fire earlier that had taken hours to put out and had occasioned a th
ree-station roll-out, so everyone was starving. They all rolled back about 2 AM, Oh-Dark-Hundred, and it was her turn to cook, which meant they were getting spaghetti. Spaghetti and chili were staples at most FDs, in no small part because they could be reheated. Rarely did anyone in a firehouse get to finish a meal.

  She lounged back and watched the guys trundle in, mostly still wet from showers. They still stank a little of burning rubber.

  "Hey Blues?" One of the other rookies looked over at her as he was dishing himself out red sauce. "How'd you get to be EMT-4 so fast? You're only what, 19? 20?"

  "I slept with the instructor," she smirked. "Naw, it's actually a lot less dirty than that. I started taking the EMT courses while I was still in school. They needed me at games and stuff, and they wanted me legal. I got the jumpstart ‘cause Echo Rescue tapped me for the touch-healing when I was twelve."

  "Damn, there goes my bet—"

  New York, New York, US: Callsign John Murdock

  I Minus 6:22:17 And Counting

  There were days when John Murdock wondered why he had ever been born. They were happening a lot more often lately, and this was one of them.

  He sat on a bench in an out-of-the-way corner of Central Park with his face buried in his hands, laden down with a feeling that could only be described as "soul-weary," assuming there were such things as souls. Since he'd found this spot, he'd never seen anyone else use it. Possibly the fact that it was under a low-hanging tree limb, making it a frequent target for pigeons had something to do with that. With his eyes closed he tried to shut out the sounds of kids running and playing, radios blaring, the general happy ruckus of ordinary folks having a cheap good time.

  In the middle distance, he could hear a street preacher sounding off. And then, from somewhere behind him, the sirens of three cop cars wailed as they gave chase. He'd stopped looking for somewhere to hide whenever he heard sirens about a year ago, but the sound still made his nerves twitch and his stomach tense.

  Whoever they were chasing wasn't giving up without a fight.

  Probably there was no one in this park that could hear what he was picking up; the sounds of gunshots under the sirens. Single shots, all semi-auto. Handguns, then. Gang-bangers most likely, driving a 'jacked car.

  Then he picked up something else. Micro-jets, tearing through the concrete canyons, on a vector that would converge with that of the sirens.

  Echo jet-pack. Whatever the perps had done, it had to be bad to earn them metahuman attention. Tough luck, chumps. Cavalry is comin'. He leaned back, sighing heavily. Like you're one to talk, callin' others 'chump', chump. Every time he heard something like this, ten years of training to protect the innocent warred with five years of paranoia, but as ever, survival-instinct won, and so did the paranoia. The sounds ended with no way of telling the outcome—other than that the meta had clearly won.

  He shook his head, trying ineffectually to erase his own morbid train of thought. Things, little things, really hit home for him when it was bright and sunny out, like it was today. And "never been born" all too easily morphed into "better off dead." And he was close, close to that point of no return, but he'd kept on living so far and damned if he was going to give up now. Sheer stubbornness maybe, or just the revenge of outliving the bastards that had put him in this position in the first place.

  He stood up, tired of doing nothing and feeling sorry for himself. His feet carried him away from the park, skirting on the periphery of the tree line. He kept walking for several blocks, letting his mind go blank. Funny how people thought of New York as a terribly dangerous place to live, calling it a "concrete jungle." In fact, it was more like a series of vertical villages. Maybe it was the way immigrants tended to cluster here, but people knew each other, went to the same little snack-shops, bought milk at the same bodegas. It made the gloom wrap around his soul even tighter.

  Eventually, he found a bar; a real Irish pub, neighborhood joint that must have been there for a century, the sort of place that firefighters and steel workers went to after putting in their shifts. Alcohol wasn't really a cure, but it sure worked wonders for the short term. Six AM might be early to start drinking by most people's standards but nobody in this bar was keeping track.

  But he wasn't going to get any trouble here as long as he didn't start any himself, which he wouldn't. At six feet even and 200 lbs., he wasn't huge, not by the standards nowadays, where you saw Echo metas that were the size of park statues, but he wasn't a pip-squeak either.

  Mostly it was the way he moved and held himself that made trouble avoid him. Predators recognized another killer. Inside the door, he looked up; it was an earthy room, a patina of hard use and age on everything, with a few people relaxing after coming off the night shift. He strode up to the bar, spying a whiteboard listing the drink prices. Cheap booze. It was the first bit of good news he'd had all day. Money was running out. It went fast in this town, even when you were sleeping rough and making do with the showers at the Salvation Army. Be time to find a job soon, under the counter pay, shady construction work, janitor...he hoped he wouldn't have to go on the gray side of the law. Still, he figured that he had enough to get drunk with, and maybe even some money left over for half of a decent meal. Or one full meal at a soup kitchen and a real bed at a flophouse. He could put up with a preacher long enough to eat, but on the whole, he preferred the company of winos and junkies to waking up to the morning hymn.

  John sat down hard on the wooden stool, resting his elbows on the worn counter in front of him. The barkeep was busy having a conversation with a middle-aged couple occupying a pair of stools at the right end of the bar. John knew what the barkeep saw; a customer maybe, but one that wasn't going to spend a lot of money, even by the standards of this place. Clothing nondescript. Jean jacket, white shirt, and cargo pants; clean, but they had seen too many hard wearings and washings. Brown hair just a little too long and a bit uneven told the tale of a man who was his own barber. Compact muscles and expressionless grey-green eyes, like two cold pebbles, said he might also be trouble, as did the callused knuckles. Fingerless gloves. Fist-fighters tended to wear those. John rapped his knuckles against the counter a few times until the bartender tore himself away; he was an older man, with shock-white hair and a day old stubble shading his chin. "What'll it be, mac?" he asked, his tone shaded with impatience as well as wariness.

  John looked up wearily, meeting the bartender's eyes. "Whatever's the house special."

  "House rye, dollar a shot, coming up." the barkeep really was in a hurry to get back to the conversation. He shoved a half-full bottle—John's eagle eye measured the contents as just about ten shots-worth—and a shot glass across the counter at John, and turned back to the couple. He began to resume his banter, stopping short to eye John up. "We'll be having you pay as you go, too."

  Echo Headquarters Atlanta, Georgia, USA: Callsign Eisenfaust

  I Minus 02:32:15 And Counting

  By day, the Echo detention facility hummed with repressed energy. Metahuman prisoners could not be afforded the same liberties as conventional convicts: no exercise yard, no recreation room, no library. Even the classic prison pose, leaning against the bars with hands useless and dangling, was denied them. The reinforced steel doors contained grills that afforded a limited view of the corridor.

  Some deemed it cruel. Most considered it necessary due to the unique nature of the metahumans; ordinary criminals could be disarmed, metas couldn't. Metapowers were, by law, a lethal weapon that had to be registered with local law enforcement and the government.

  Eisenfaust paced his cell. After his death-defying escape from the clutches of the Thule Society, confinement was maddening. He imagined he could hear his broken bones reknitting themselves under the plaster cast. These men and women were scum, plain and simple. To be interred with them, even by choice, grated on his nerves.

  The grill at the foot of his door slid open to admit a tray with his lunch. "Guard," he said. "I have waited for your commanders to speak to me for far too long. Where is Yankee Pride?"