Collision: Book Four in the Secret World Chronicle - eARC Read online

  And then they tumbled, nauseous to the point of vomiting, and disoriented, onto the floor of—

  Another room.

  This one was round. There was an enormous, complicated diagram inlaid into the floor in what looked like semi-precious gems and several different kinds of stone. The ceiling overhead was a dome, inlaid with yet more diagrams, this time in many different kinds of wood. The dome matched the walls. The only illumination came from a chandelier full of candles that hung from the center of the dome, and four free-standing torches placed at equal intervals around the room.

  Even Sera had been affected; she lay half on her side, panting with exertion. John was not in terribly good shape himself; it felt as if he had been running a marathon, all uphill. He was utterly drained as well as nauseous.

  A door opened in the wall, a door he hadn’t even seen for all the carvings and diagrams. There was brighter light out there, so he could see only that the person who had opened the door was female.

  “What…the hell, Victrix…” John was able to choke down enough air to keep his gorge from rising. Everyone else was recovering, slowly, as well. “A little warning next time might be nice.”

  For a moment, all he could hear in his ear was harsh panting. “Sorry. This shit has to be timed to the nanosecond. I could explain, or I could juggle nitroglycerine. Pick one.”

  Untermensch lifted himself off the floor, coming up to a knee. “Where in the name of Lenin’s ghost are we?”

  “Sorry, tovarisch,” the woman who had entered the room said, brusquely. “That’s on a need-to-know basis, and you don’t need to know. In the US, eastern seaboard. That’s all you get. Take this.” She held out four pills on her hand. “Helps with the nausea.”

  Another person—a man this time—came in with four incongruously ordinary bottles of water—liter bottles. He handed one to each of them.

  John downed the pill and half of the bottle of water. After spending a few more moments regulating his breathing, he had started to feel somewhat better. “Did we just get fuckin’ teleported? Like, across the goddamn world?”

  “You would not believe the number of favors Victrix called in and now owes for that, but yes, except we call it apporting when it’s done by magic.” The woman held out her hand to John, clearly to assist him to his feet.

  “You’re all mages?” He took her hand, which was surprisingly strong, and lifted himself up to standing. Then he helped Sera up.

  The woman, iron-eyed and iron-haired, cracked just a little bit of a smile. “Since this is Victrix’s first school, that would be a logical assumption, yes. And in the interest of saving the world, at least half our instructors are prostrate with nosebleeds and migraines right now.”

  Molotok stood up, unassisted, and only swayed for a moment before finding his feet. “And witches do this, zipping across the globe in blink of eye?”

  “Actually, no. Rarely, and never with a group; the last time we tried retrieving more than one person at a time, Tunguska suffered a…critical failure.” The entire team turned pale. She shrugged, then smiled a little more. “But, you are all here, you are all in one piece, no body parts have been mixed up, Victrix’s math worked, and everyone survived at both ends with no explosions. Well done, us.”

  “Headmistress,” the man said, clearly unable to contain himself any longer. “We really must publish this in Apportation Quarterly. It’s a major breakthrough! Why you and I could easily get tenured positions out of it!” The two moved away from the team, talking excitedly with each other.

  John chose that moment to lean against Sera and ignore the two mages. “Vickie, how do we get home? I think I’ve had just ’bout as much magic as I can stomach for one day.”

  “That’s all the magic you get, stud. Blacked-out van, so you don’t see where you’re going, as far as a little private airport. Private plane to Hartsfield Atlanta. People’s Transport to your bunk.”

  “Roger that. Murdock out; we’ll see you on the flipside. Give Nat the heads-up that the mission was a success…and that we have a lot of talkin’ to do.” With that John spoke the commands to key off the comm and Overwatch.

  Sera took off her headset and stowed it in its pouch on her belt. “Well,” she said, finally. “That was…a new thing.”

  “Lot of that goin’ around lately, it seems.” He wrapped his arm around her. “I think we deserve a break, quite honestly. Gimme some boring old normal things.”

  She held him tight, and said, sadly, “If only I could, beloved. If only I could.…”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Penny Black

  Mercedes Lackey and Dennis Lee

  Carefully, Penny shook Lacey’s shoulder. This wasn’t the first time that Penny had tried to wake the woman, but it was the first time Penny had actually touched her, other than to feed her. It was almost suppertime, by the feeling in her tummy, and Lacey’s Guy had suggested that whatever the Dark Man was giving Lacey to make her sleep, it might be wearing off about that time.

  “Miss,” Penny said, quietly, while the other children watched her covertly, waiting to see what might happen to her if she woke the crazy lady. “Miss. Miss. Miss. You gotta wake up, Miss. There’s a guy here, Miss. He wants to talk to you.”

  The woman batted at Penny’s hand, and moaned. Penny noticed that she’d lost the tip of her little finger on that hand without any surprise. The Devil took bits of the children. Sometimes he would cut off some hair, other times he would jab a large needle into the belly and take something from inside. And sometimes, he took bits of finger, usually the tip. No one knew why. “Miss,” she persisted, shaking gently. “The guy wants to talk to you, Miss.”

  Lacey muttered something. Penny thought she might be asking, “Who is it? What do you want?” Penny looked to the ghost. He shrugged, as if he couldn’t figure out what she’d said, either.

  “Miss Lacey,” Penny said, “You’ve got to wake up.”

  “Her name isn’t Lacey.”

  Penny blinked in surprise and turned her head again to look at the ghost. “Well, what is it then?” she demanded.

  To her surprise, the ghost looked unhappy at first, and then screwed up his face in concentration. He sat that way for some time, before sagging in defeat. “I don’t remember,” he said, sadly.

  That didn’t make any sense! “How can you not remember if you know her?” Penny demanded, loudly enough that the other kids gave her one of those looks.

  The ghost looked so sad that Penny felt horrible for asking the question. “When you die,” he said, quietly, and with deep unhappiness, “The first thing you start to forget is names. First people you only ever heard about, then people you sort of know…then friends…then family…then…” He shrugged. “Then you forget your own name.”

  Penny’s mouth dropped open in astonishment. “But…but…how can you forget your own name? Why would you?”

  “Someone told me…I don’t remember her name either. She was a magician, or at least she said she was. She said names were power. When you know someone’s name, you have power over them, she said.” He looked down at his hands, curled like petals over his knees. “Maybe we forget names so no one can call us back.”

  “Huh.” She glanced over at Lacey-who-wasn’t-Lacey, who had dropped back into oblivion.

  “After a while, you forget more than your name,” the ghost continued. “You forget who people were, or that you ever knew them. The only thing that anchors you is anger, hate, all the bad stuff. You start to fade, and you start to go to pieces. It makes you crazy. That’s why all those other ghosts I chased away were crazy.”

  Penny felt her eyes widening. “But I thought…I thought when you died, you went to the good place, or the bad place,” she whispered.

  “I dunno.” The ghost shrugged. “When I still remembered my name, I talked to another one that wasn’t crazy yet, who said most people go…somewhere else. But some of us get stuck. He said there were three kinds that got stuck. Some were scared to move on. S
ome were stuck because of something they still needed to do. And some were stuck because someone needed them.” His shoulders heaved a little, as if he had sighed. “I don’t remember which kind I am.”

  He looked so sad again that Penny wanted to hug him. “I bet,” she said, instead, “It’s ’cause Lacey needs you. I bet once you help her, you’ll go where you’re s’posed to.”

  “You think?” he looked a little more cheerful at that.

  “I bet!” Penny repeated, firmly.

  He managed a smile. “I bet you’re right, then,” he agreed. “And the sooner we can wake her up and get her head fixed, the better.”

  “Right!” Penny said, as cheerfully as she could, and went back to shaking Lacey’s shoulder. “Miss! Miss! You gotta wake up now, Miss!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Ice Cold

  Mercedes Lackey and Veronica Giguere

  Bella listened to Red Saviour describe her worst nightmare. She felt her temper boiling, as Natalya all but crowed over her team’s uncovering of the main Thulian headquarters. And the only thing that kept it from exploding was the chilling effect of the videos of that headquarters: not a building, not a hollowed-out mountain. A city. A city of millions. And not a city of millions of civilians mixed in with a much smaller population of fighters. This was a city designed and planned to support a vast army, equipped with the latest of Thulian technology, which very likely was worse than anything they had already thrown at the rest of the world. The mere fact that every technological and magic trick in the world’s arsenal had been deployed to find this city, and had failed, proved that.

  “And your team killed one Thulian, and alerted the rest to their portals being opened off-schedule,” she said, flatly, interrupting Saviour’s glee.

  “Shto?” the Commissar replied, frowning. “They were not detected.”

  “But something was,” Bella pointed out sharply. “One of their personnel has gone missing. Someone opened and closed their doors. These are Kriegers, Red Saviour! The mindset of the German technician attached to a society with the goal of world conquest! If they haven’t yet leapt to the conclusion that we found them, they very soon will deduce that conclusion, which is exactly the scenario I didn’t want to have happen!” She realized she had gotten to her feet and was shouting those last words only when she had hit the desk with the flat of her hand. She took a deep breath, and sat down, slowly.

  Natalya watched her, eyes narrowed, but said nothing.

  Bella wanted badly to…hit her. Throw things. Scream and rage. All of which would accomplish nothing, and the clock, started by the actions of Red Saviour, was ticking.

  “Overwatch,” she ordered. “Priority Command. Contact all on War List. Call emergency meeting. Override all other priorities.”

  She saw, with grim satisfaction, Red Saviour’s head snap up as the extremely unpleasant tone of the War List alert rang through her skull at a volume intended to wake anyone even out of a drunken or drugged stupor. While Saviour was still reacting, she stepped from behind her desk and past Saviour, right out the door, headed for the conference room. Overwatch would be informing the Commissar of where that room was about now…and yes, this was a calculated insult, which Bella hoped would put Red Saviour in her place and make her understand that she and the CCCP were no more than one part of a vast machine which was now, thanks to her, lurching into unbalanced motion.

  Bella could only pray that the Thulians were denser, or more self-confident, than she feared. Lurching was not the way to win a war.

  * * *

  The meeting was still going on, but despite all the recriminations, chest-thumping, arguments about who was to blame and who was to take precedence over someone else, the conclusion was foregone. Bella excused herself, ceding the chair to Yankee Pride gratefully. Pride was better at negotiating than she was, anyway. She wanted to get to the Quantator without Saviour around, and right now, Saviour was up to her eyeballs in recriminations and self-defense. If she tried one of her patented “storm out in a cream-colored huff” exits, she’d probably be arrested at the door by the agents of three global military powers, ECHO, and a Supernaut.

  Time was of the essence, and rank hath its privileges. Bella ordered a jetpack brought to the nearest entrance (“Now, please.”) and someone from Quartermaster Corps was waiting right there with it. He helped her don it, and she was moving while fastening the last buckle. Minutes later, rather than the half to three-quarters of an hour it would have taken by ground, she touched down at CCCP HQ.

  The guard on duty was Untermensch, who clearly had realized by this point that CCCP in general and Red Saviour in particular had screwed the pooch. He ducked his head slightly, then shrugged, and waved her in.

  She marched straight to the door of the Quantator room with barely a nod at Chug. “Overwatch: Open Ramona,” she ordered, and as soon as the slight carrier wave sound told her Ramona was live, began speaking even as she was powering up the Quantator. “Ramona, we have a shitstorm here. Get yourself and Merc on the main line, pronto. I need you to sell icebergs to Eskimos, and I need it yesterday.”

  * * *

  The image faded, the bits of color disappearing from the screen. Ramona passed her hand over her forehead and scratched at a small flake of metal. “Well, that changes things. Not everything, just the general timetable.”

  “Timetable?” Mercurye shook his head, still stunned by the report from Bella. He hadn’t known her ever to swear so profusely or vehemently. “Timetable for what?”

  “For getting your amazing and remarkably absent benefactors into the game and onto the winning side. I thought we’d have a week or two, given how slowly they like to move and what you’ve told me about their tendencies to vote on everything.” She offered him a rueful smile. “We can now blame the Russians and their illustrious ‘Saviour’ for compressing a few weeks of coordination into little more than a day, and months of prep into a week or so.”

  That assessment brought Merc to his feet. He waved both hands in front of him, blond surfer locks swaying back and forth with his protest. “No. No, I don’t think you understand, Ramona. They won’t. They can’t, it goes against their idea of a true democracy. The arguments and counter-arguments in the primary debate alone would take three days, and that’s without breaks.” He thought back to his initial requests for television shows and blue-box macaroni and cheese dinners; the latter had taken six days because someone’s concern about the sodium content had sparked a secondary discussion. “You won’t be able to rush them.”Ramona pushed herself up from the white microfiber sofa. She was every bit the person he remembered from their conversations via the quantator and their admittedly brief time together before he had arrived in Metis. She met his ‘no’ with a frown and folded her arms across her chest. “Not if their inaction could be what ultimately brings them down? If their desire for this pure ‘democracy’ is what winds up eradicating every last bit of freedom and humanity that they’ve loved to watch like some primetime sitcom for decades?”

  “Well, when you put it that way…”

  “That’s what it’s going to be, Rick. Bella’s not one for exaggeration. She knows the difference between ‘not so bad’ and ‘holy shit, fire’ when it comes to situations, and right now, the Thulians are ready to burn everything that we know to the ground if we don’t act.” Ramona started to pace, movement that Rick found more soothing than unnerving.

  As she went from one wall to another and circled the sofa, he padded to his favorite spot on the white carpet and sat cross-legged. Palms resting lightly on his knees, Rick closed his eyes. “Asking permission isn’t going to get us anywhere. You might be able to clue in Marconi as to what needs to be done, but Tesla won’t go along with it.”

  “Because,” she prompted. Her tone said that she suspected the answer, but she wanted him to acknowledge it before she put it out in the open.

  “Because he’s Tesla? Because he wants proof?”

  “Because he’s scared.” Tha
t statement surprised Mercurye; he opened his eyes to find Ramona leaning over the sofa, watching him. Slowly, her eyes lit up and one corner of her mouth stretched back into a sly smile. “Think about it. This is all he’s known for how long? He and Marconi, if this goes, then they’re gone. If they don’t get canned in some huge data wipe, then they’d be held hostage by the Thulians.”

  “Maybe two in a series. Like a battery of captured geniuses, locked up to power something bigger.” The idea awed Mercurye for a split second before the horror of his suggestion caught up to him. “Wait, you don’t think they could actually do that, do you?”

  “Gigantic floating spheres, enormous armored aliens, and I’m bleeding out metal. I’ve got a pretty big imagination these days.” Ramona licked her lips and glanced to the door. “Do these guys have any kind of schedule for their proceedings? Is there a good time or a bad time to bring up these kinds of things in committees or whatever they use?”

  Mercurye thought for a moment, trying to remember what Trina had told him during their conversations and the questions that he had asked. “Well, they don’t like surprises. Everything has to go through the proper committees, and nothing is ever brought directly to the Assembly. Like, you couldn’t just walk in there and bring it up.”

  “Perfect.” With a speed that he didn’t think Ramona possessed, she grabbed his wrist and pulled him up to a standing position. “Let’s call Trina and figure out how to get there. Nothing like the element of surprise, right?”

  For his part, Mercurye was too stunned to answer. The new Ramona was remarkably strong.

  * * *

  Trina agreed to go as far as the antechamber to the room that housed the Metisan Assembly. She led Mercurye and Ramona in front of the enormous double doors and offered them a weak smile. “If everything that you’ve said is true, then this is the right choice and I don’t regret it.”