Revolution: Book Three of the Secret World Chronicle Read online

  “I know, mate, I’m on top of it.”

  “No, a bigger problem.” He canted his head to the side. “I can hear it.”

  Leader’s head bobbed up, then his eyes grew wide. “He’s right. The dogs smell it, too.” Corbie stood up and scanned; one of the mutts, a bloodhound mix, was barking frantically at a large duffel bag. He ran over, shooing the mutt away as he unzipped it.

  “Oh. Shit.”

  The duffel was filled with explosives. All of them were wired with blasting caps or some sort of electrical trigger; bombs weren’t Corbie’s area of expertise. He didn’t have to be an expert, however, to recognize the little red LED countdown timer, with barely thirty seconds left on it. “It’s a bomb! Bastards must’ve triggered it when they saw they were screwed. We’ve got less than thirty before it goes!”

  “There’s not sufficient time to get the civilians out of here, much less Matai.” Knight examined the duffel. “With that quantity of explosive compounds, a significant section of the Underground will be destroyed, with attendant damage to the aboveground sections.”

  “We’ve gotta get as many people clear as we can!” Leader was marshaling the dogs, sending them to start picking up civilians.

  “No time!” Without another thought, Corbie zipped the bag up and grabbed the carrying handle. He started running for the entrance, then kicked off with a leap into flight. He pumped his wings as hard as he could, sailing up through the ruined entrance to the Underground, his teammates cursing and calling after him. In an instant, he was awash in daylight and police sirens. For a split second he saw the remains of the SWAT van, the SWAT commander’s car, the ambulances and emergency personnel, even Bella running as fast as she could with Echo Med right behind her. No time, no time! He flew straight up, straining against the weight of the duffel bag. He had to get high, as high as he could. How much time was left? He’d been mentally counting down, but had lost the count somewhere near the entrance. He was close to six hundred feet in the air when he judged that everyone else was safe. He did a pivot in the air, swinging around to his left with the duffel in his outstretched hands. With a final grunt of effort, he flung the bag as hard and high into the air as he could, using the momentum to send it further. Then he folded his wings, dropping like a stone. Was I fast enough?

  Three seconds later, the bomb went off, and Corbie was swatted with the pressure wave. He went tumbling in the air, completely dazed. I’m going to die. At least I got the bomb clear. He mentally chuckled to himself, loopy from the blast. What a way to go; asphalt pancake. Road pizza. New coat of red paint on some guy’s car.

  There was a string of curses in his ear. At least, he thought they were curses; he didn’t recognize any of the words. But as he somersaulted end over end, heading down towards a construction site, he was pretty sure he was hallucinating as well, because—well, because what looked like a sandworm out of Dune seemed to be reaching for him, coming up to swallow him.

  Then he hit it. And instead of dying, he yelped with pain. Not the worst pain he’d ever felt though, just one of his wings getting twisted the wrong way, and his plummet turned into a kind of end-over-end roll down a long, steep slope, an angle that deepened and smoothed the closer he got to the ground until he came to rest in a pile of sand as fine and powdery as talcum.

  Groggily, he tried to lift his head up before letting it fall back in a puff of dust. “Am I dead? It’d be a downer if I am.”

  “You’re not dead. Bella might kill you for that stunt, but you’re not dead yet. Don’t move. Panacea and Gilead are hopping the fence to get to you.”

  His head cleared some, and he painfully tried to sit up. “What about the others? The people on the ground? Matai? Is everyone all right? What about the civilians?” The questions poured out of him as fast as he could say them. His heart was racing again.

  “They’re fine. Or they will be. Lots of shattered windows, a pissed-off SWAT commander, half of downtown has ringing ears, and we’ve scrambled CCCP Med as well as Echo. Shut up.”

  “Average day at work then, right, love?”

  “Pretty much. Now shut up.”

  “I recall someone saying a little something about beer being on her, after this gig. Make it a case, love.”

  “You got it.”

  He fell backwards, another cloud of dust going up. “Now I’ll shut up.”

  * * *

  Verdigris watched in utter disbelief as his beautifully constructed plan fell completely apart. None of the important targets were dead, only some of the minor players, and not nearly enough of those! That damned blue medic had been dispatched with a competent team and somehow CCCP had gotten wind of the situation and showed up with a team of their own; all but a few of the SupportOps at the cafe would live. Worse yet, the contracted mercenaries had failed to die themselves; a handful had been taken into custody by Corbie and his team.

  This was an utter disaster. And not the sort that Verdigris had wanted to see.

  Khanjar folded her arms across her chest, grinning. “Is there a third act? That one was rather one-sided and boring, if you ask me, Dom.”

  He turned abruptly to glare at her, and what she must have seen in his eyes made the grin vanish. She had never seen him this way, that much he was quite sure of. How could she? In all the time she had known him, she had never seen him fail. Not once. Not ever. There had been speed bumps and unexpected events with some of his plans, but he had always had another pawn to bring into play. But this was an outright failure. It wasn’t something that Dominic Verdigris III could abide.

  He turned back to the monitors, cold hatred in his heart. This wasn’t the doing of that incompetent blue bimbo; she didn’t have the smarts to send in, not just a whole team, but exactly the right team. She wouldn’t have been able to call CCCP. And she wouldn’t have gotten the intel on the Underground that had allowed Corbie and his crew to move in smoothly, avoiding the traps his trained mercs had set up.

  “Who could have done that magic with the earth?” Khanjar wondered aloud. “Echo doesn’t have anyone like that onsite.”

  Verdigris spared her a single look of disdain at the mention of magic before turning back to the monitors. His fingers were already flying over his keyboard, punching in commands. “Insignificant. Probably some random meta triggering. What’s more important is, who coordinated that operation? There. Her.” He tapped the display twice, bringing a log up in full screen. “She’s the one that called in Belladonna and the med team, and also had some discreet calls, probably to Corbie’s team. Ramona Ferrari. Look at all of those comm calls, hmm? Very busy for a nosy little detective.” He tapped on the keyboard a few more times, bringing up dozens of records; case logs, phone conversations, times when she had entered and left the Echo campus, and countless other details all centered on Ramona. He smiled grimly. “Well, this isn’t a complete disaster, after all. At least now I know who’s playing the other side of the chess board. It seems I underestimated her.”

  “So do you want me to do something about her?” Khanjar asked. “It would not be difficult to arrange an accident. Although it might be difficult to keep her from calling for help if she is as clever as you say. She might even have some sort of bio-sign monitor in her person just in case of such a thing.”

  He turned to face Khanjar again, this time smiling broadly. “Not just yet. Killing a spy is never as useful as insulating them and having them work against their own purpose. This was . . . a bad day. But . . . there’s always a silver lining to every cloud, my dear.” There must have been something off about his smile, however; cracks beneath the surface of the mask that he was wearing. It obviously disquieted Khanjar even more than his brief flare of fury had. Well, good. It was time his little bodyguard saw the iron under the harlequin glove. “When the time comes, however, I’ll want to put a personal touch on removing Ms. Ferrari from this world.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Resolution

  MERCEDES LACKEY

  Something that cam
e into play later . . . after Red almost ended up as Doppelgaenger’s chew-toy, I decided I was never going to be without fast transport again. Ever. A little more hack-liberation and there was an Echo-jet backpack in my closet. I may not be bright sometimes, but at least I learn from my mistakes.

  Overwatch was good, but it was a kludge. I knew it, even if no one else did. Hot news flash to you, dear reader, in case you have not been paying attention. Yes, I really am that paranoid. Yes, I really do second-guess myself that much.

  Even if my parents and Hosteen were all over making a copy of it for Department 39. In the back of my mind, I’d been letting the math simmer ever since Mark One was up and running.

  And eventually, as these things go, it was soup.

  * * *

  In Vickie’s experience, although work might not be a cure for heartsickness, if it was technical enough, it was at least a distraction. It had been a very long time since Vickie had undertaken any truly major techno-magical projects. Overwatch as it existed wasn’t one; it was a kludge, a lot of things she knew how to do fudged together. They all worked, but they did not compose the seamless integration she would have been proud to show off.

  Overwatch also had two big problems. It wasn’t nearly as secure as she wanted, and it couldn’t self-repair.

  A couple of mornings after the rescue of Djinni, her alarm had woken her with something a lot different from her usual musical selection; at the time she hadn’t thought much of it since it seemed to be out of the Djinni’s playlist, a song by VnV Nation. And the first verse had just seemed to play into her general depression . . . but then the lyrics, and especially the chorus, had taken an abrupt shift, and she couldn’t get it out of her head. It had been like a shot of double espresso, and by the time she sat down at the keyboard and ran the usual trouble-shooting and coordination of the day, she was no longer content with what she had—and she had her much-needed distraction.

  She set to work that night, when the action cooled down a little. The Thulians were into their predictable cooldown after a defeat, the Rebs were back to pettier crime, and Verdigris . . . was Verdigris. If there would ever be a good time to work on a revamp, it would be now. And if she ever needed a distraction, it was now.

  As always, the math came first. The computer end of Overwatch was all right; some new programming and some tweaking would probably be needed, but the computer hardware was solid and most of the software just as good. So, begin at the beginning, the human end. What could she have . . . and what did she need? What would give them something that was bulletproof, or at least as close to ninety-nine point nine percent as Murphy and Schrödinger would ever allow?

  She worked at it in a red-hot fever until she ran out of brain juice, went to sleep with diagrams and equations dancing in her head, got up, and in between jobs as the eye in the sky, kept at it. It took three days. And on the afternoon of the third day, with all of the glyphs and equations, the diagrams and signs, the interface parameters and her probability calculator, all floating in the air, in a full circle around her, she put the final variable into place.

  As she sketched it in, everything snapped together in probability space, a full globe of flows and math and magic, coming together seamlessly with the sound of an ethereal chime, not unlike the pure note struck from a perfect bell of crystal.

  Every mage knew that could happen, when you created something that was, well, perfect. She’d even been a witness to it three times in her life. But it had never happened to her, until now.

  The air in her workroom reverberated with it, and she held her breath, awestruck at the wonder of the thing she had just made—in theory, at least, and in mathemagic, theory was most of the way to reality. She might have stood there forever if she hadn’t been snapped out of her trance by the sound of tiny stone hands clapping together and tiny stone feet jumping up and down. She looked to the door to see Grey and Herb standing there. Herb was jumping up and down in glee, still clapping. Grey’s eyes were as big as plates.

  Grey said, all his usual sarcasm vanished,

  She felt a smile of sheer joy spreading over her face. “Yes,” she said, simply. “Yes it is.” Then she gathered up the design with a sweep of her hand, balled it up, and tucked it into Storage Space. “And now we make it happen in realspace instead of just theory.”

  * * *

  When the design was complete, Vickie invoked the spirit of Nikola Tesla via the quantator with a request for the design of some very specific items. As it happened, these items were so small they required their own manufacturing process. Fortunately, it was a process that Echo already used in the medical department for nanosurgery bots (and probably was the same military process that had created John Murdock’s implants, although no one was talking about that) and with one tiny adaptation, the nanotech churned out a hundred and fifty each of three devices. They were each about the size of a micromemory chip, and to keep from mixing them up, Vickie’d had them made in red, blue and green, respectively. Tesla had been very curious, and very puzzled, by what the empty socket was for. “Crystals” was all she would tell him. “Just add that to the design for the bot-maker. I’ll supply the crystals.”

  “But what are they for?” Tesla wondered.

  “If I tell you, I’ll have to kill you,” she replied, only half facetiously.

  Bella had been just as puzzled by the bowl of silvery “sand” that had come with the meticulous manufacturing protocol, but she trusted that Vickie knew what she was doing—and asking for.

  Bella had just surreptitiously delivered the results—not hard since all of them would have fit in a cereal bowl with room to spare. Now the real work was going to begin.

  When she was done, she would have her Masterpiece. An Overwatch net that couldn’t be spied on, couldn’t be hacked, and wouldn’t be bothered by a couple miles, or a couple million miles of earth and stone between Vickie and her teams. An Overwatch net that would fix itself. One she could replicate anywhere, anytime. One in which the components could never be taken and used by anyone else. One which . . . eventually . . . she might even be able to interface with a counterpart for the computer end that was pure magical energy. But that was down the road. This was now.

  After the initial three castings to separate out the defective units, then the units that, for one reason or another, wouldn’t interface with magic properly, she had a hundred full sets of three components each. More than enough for now, which would give her the window to make more later without running short now, as she brought people into the net that were not yet part of their pocket rebellion.

  Initially she picked out three sets, one each for her, Bella, and Sovie. Herself, because she damn well wasn’t going to subject anyone else to something she wouldn’t use, and Bella and Sovie because, as healers, if something was going to trigger rejection in the user, they’d pick up on it, and they’d be able to save themselves from any ill effects.

  With the first test run a complete success (and Sovie full of enhancement ideas specifically for the medical corps she wanted Vickie to add), she brought in Red Saviour and introduced her to the New and Improved Overwatch. Within an hour, the Commissar was ready to declare her a Hero of the People . . . which was kind of a nice change from being called a “Daughter of Rasputin.” Of course, the fact that Vickie fudged a little and pretended that it was all tech and very little magic might have had something to do with that.

  So . . . now the hardest sell of all. And . . . the biggest risk.

  “Overwatch: Command: open private Red Djinni,” she said, as she brought out the tiny box that contained the set of three devices that had been tuned to Red, and Red only, just as the other sets had been tuned to their respective recipients. Overwatch obligingly opened up Red’s private freq. “Red, you busy?”

  “Nothing I can’t break off.” There was a grunt, and a yelp of pain. Not Red’s. “There. Broken. Damn, I hate dealers. Lemme deliver him to the cops, darlin’. You n
eed me for something?”

  “Yep. At my apartment.”

  A long pause. Most probably since this was the first time she had actually invited him here. The last time . . . well, he’d come in the window, and it hadn’t been by invitation. I wonder whatever happened to my letter . . . She’d never found it after she woke up, alone, in her bed. Grey had probably gotten rid of it. He was good at things like that.

  “Roger,” he answered. “On the way over.”

  “Take the roof. I’ll leave the window open.” She didn’t want Bella coming in on this, so while she waited, she went to the door and turned all ten locks. Doing the implants took a lot of concentration, and if that concentration was broken, she might have to retune and recast them all over again. Then she went and got Red’s chosen tipple, Redbreast whiskey, out of the liquor box. She wasn’t quite sure how he was going to react to this. She left the bottle on the coffee table and poured a double shot into a sour glass, and waited.

  He did come in the window . . . cautiously, this time; eased himself to the floor, and stood there, looking oddly uncertain. She walked over to him and handed him the drink. He took it. Looked at it. Sniffed it.

  “Are you seducing me, or bribing me, Vix?” he asked, finally.

  She tried not to wince, and succeeded. “Bribing you,” she replied. “Come sit. I have a lot of ’splainin’ to do.”

  Gingerly, he took a seat in the chair across from the sofa. She sat on the sofa, and held the little box in her hand. The plastic warmed to her touch.

  “Overwatch isn’t perfect,” she said, finally. “It’s rather far from perfect. It’s not the rig here, it’s the interface with you folks. I’m using a kludge to keep track of you, another to futz the radio freqs so they’re less likely to be read or hacked, the headsets are subject to being lost, broken, taken away . . . the list goes on.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s a helluva lot better tha—” He stopped, and his eyes narrowed above his scarf. “You’ve improved it?”