Echo One: Stories from the Secret World Chronicles

By Mercedes Lackey, Cody Martin, Dennis K. Lee and Veronica Giguere

“Stirring action, appealing character growth, and shocking, vivid violence. . . . Series readers will be pleased with this return to the Secret World.” —Publishers Weekly
 
In the late 1930s something fell from the sky and landed in an area of the Atlantic not yet known as the Bermuda Triangle. After that event, part of the world irrevocably changed . . . and the mysteries began. Something else would change as well—seemingly ordinary men and women on both sides of the Allied/Axis war suddenly began to manifest uncanny powers. Super powers. The advent of the age of metahumans had begun. And hidden in the heart of the ocean, the masterminds sat back to watch. This collection contains stories of that time, as metahumans enter and change the Second World War forever. From the streets of Paris to the beach at Dunkirk, from the Battle of Britain to the Atlantic Deeps, metahumans meet and clash, while all around them rage the battles of ordinary men and women.
 
“[C]omes together seamlessly . . . an awesome and lightning-paced story: read it on a day when you will not have to put it down.” —San Francisco Book Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781680570731

Mercedes Lackey

Mercedes entered this world on June 24, 1950, in Chicago, had a normal childhood and graduated from Purdue University in 1972. During the late 70's she worked as an artist's model and then went into the computer programming field, ending up with American Airlines in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In addition to her fantasy writing, she has written lyrics for and recorded nearly fifty songs for Firebird Arts & Music, a small recording company specializing in science fiction folk music. Also known as Misty Lackey.

Book preview

Echo One

Tales from the Secret World Chronicles

In the late 1930s something fell from the sky and landed in an area of the Atlantic not yet known as the Bermuda Triangle. After that event, part of the world irrevocably changed … and the mysteries began.

Something else would change as well—seemingly ordinary men and women on both sides of the Allied/Axis war suddenly began to manifest uncanny powers. Super-powers. The advent of the age of metahumans had begun.

And hidden in the heart of the ocean, the masterminds sat back to watch.

This collection contains stories of that time, as metahumans enter and change the Second World War forever. From the streets of Paris to the beach at Dunkirk, from the Battle of Britain to the Atlantic Deeps, metahumans meet and clash, while all around them rage the battles of ordinary men and women.

These 16 stories are woven in and around the Secret World Chronicles, the five-book mega-series written by Mercedes Lackey, Dennis K. Lee, Cody Martin, Veronica Giguere, and Steve Libby.

Praise for Mercedes Lackey

The project feels like a throwback to the glorious days of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, when creativity was king, and having inspired ideas was more important than how famous you were.

—SF Site Nathan Brazil

[C]omes together seamlessly … an awesome and lightning-paced story: read it on a day when you will not have to put it down.

—San Francisco Book Review

With [Mercedes Lackey], suspense never lags …

—Kliatt

Echo One

Stories from the Secret World Chronicles

Mercedes Lackey Cody Martin Dennis K. Lee Veronica Giguere

WordFire Press

ECHO One: Tales from the Secret World Chronicles

Copyright © 2020 WordFire Press

Additional copyright information included at the end

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

The ebook edition of this book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. The ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share the ebook edition with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

EBook ISBN: 978-1-68057-073-1

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-68057-072-4

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-68057-074-8

Cover design by Larry Dixon and Janet McDonald

Cover artwork images by Larry Dixon

Kevin J. Anderson, Art Director

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Published by

WordFire Press, LLC

PO Box 1840

Monument CO 80132

Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

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Printed in the USA

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Contents

Preface

Mercedes Lackey

Rise

Mercedes Lackey

Sgian Dubh

Mercedes Lackey

White Bird

Mercedes Lackey

Valse Triste

Veronica Giguere

Retrieval

Mercedes Lackey

Exemplar

Mercedes Lackey

Into the Night

Mercedes Lackey

Save a Prayer

Mercedes Lackey

The Longest Night

Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon

The Heir Apparent

Mercedes Lackey

Strike a Pose

Mercedes Lackey and Dennis Lee

For Those About to Rock

Mercedes Lackey and Cody Martin

Waiting On

Veronica Giguere

Further on Up the Road

Dennis Lee and Mercedes Lackey

All Mine

Mercedes Lackey and Dennis Lee

Runnin’

About the Authors

If You Liked ...

Other WordFire Press Titles

Additional Copyright Information

Preface

The Secret World Chronicles is a five book superhero series. It’s set in the present day, and begins with an invasion of alien Nazis delivered by express mail trucks … but if you are reading this anthology you probably already know that.

But we’ve been doing backstory and bits and pieces of in between things that never made it into the books, on and off for the entire time the series has been in production.

The backstory is that super-powered heroes and villains began appearing during the early years of World War II. And we wrote about a few of them. Here they are. Including the first, never before seen, of what was really going on inside the Secret World in 1935.

Rise

Mercedes Lackey

January 5, 1935

The primitive world known to its inhabitants as Earth was exactly what the Masters were looking for. Its technology level was just barely pre-Atomic, and it was ass-deep in a global conflict. Yet it had nothing that could detect even the craft roaming its skies, much less the Masters’ World-Ship.

So it settled into the deep waters far off the coast of the United States, and once it was settled, it unfolded, and when their stealth technology fully deployed, it would literally take bumping into it for any of these creatures to become aware that it was there.

And before any of the humans got that close, the Masters would have them. Whatever craft bumbled into their waters would be seized in tractor beams and hauled in to be captured. The radio, if any, would be silenced and they would become subjects of experiment. Said craft would become just another missing mystery of the ocean.

After deployment, a few specimens were taken at random from remote areas of the coast, and a few lunar cycles later, drones deployed to spread the Masters’ nanotech mutagen far and wide over the planet. This atomized powder was designed to trigger metapowers in each species the Masters’ machines encountered. Humans had been a bit trickier than most—the genetics for metahuman powers involved transposons, the so-called jumping genes, DNA sequences that moved from one location on the genome to another, and not simple mutations. But the Masters’ machines were clever, and with few exceptions, they could almost always find ways to trigger metapowers. They had only failed with their current servant-race, the Klathans—but those had been easy to conquer, and easier still for the legacy printing chambers to copy and program. That had been fortuitous rather than otherwise. Really, they were the best servants the Masters had ever had, all things considered.

The Masters were going to pay a little extra-special attention to the part of the world known as Germany. That particular country had some interesting attitudes that should make the triggering of metahumans there particularly delightful.

With the drones away, all the Masters had to do was deploy viewing equipment and wait for the entertainment to begin. It might take a little longer for metapowers to trigger with this species, but anticipation and uncertainty added to the entertainment value.

September 9, 1940

Lt. Commander Nigel Patterson of the RAF was having a very bad day.

Then again, everyone in the RAF was having a bad day—and every day had been bad since the beginning of July. The bloody Huns were throwing every damn plane they had at Britain in the hopes of breaking the back of the Allies, and he and his mates were the only thing standing between Old Blighty and Nazi flags over Buckingham Palace.

And it didn’t help that besides some of the best planes and pilots Nige had ever seen, the bloody Huns had—Them. Metahumans, the science-johnnies were calling ’em. Bloody damned supers with superpowers like in the Yank comic books.

Predictably, the Nazis called them "Übermenschen." Vaterland and Hitlerjugend had been the first, and truth to tell, Nige hadn’t been impressed when he’d seen them in the newsreels and winning every Gold Medal in the Berlin Olympics. He’d figured they were some sort of freaks or cheats.

Then the fighting had started. And those two mowed down Frenchies like a couple of Yank harvesters rolling across fields of wheat.

But worse than that, more of the blighters started showing up. Valkyria. Übermensch himself. The Panzer-triplets. And …

Nigel cursed and put his Spitfire into a diving roll, and avoided being cut down out of the sky by mere inches.

… the Black Baron.

Nige’s coveralls clung to him, drenched in sweat; every muscle cried out in protest, as punished as his Spitfire was. The stick shuddered in his hand, and the plane shuddered around him, and he would have sworn he could hear rivets popping. He pulled up out of a suicidal dive, clenching his entire body to keep from blacking out, and did a wingover just as she was about to stall, dropping into another dive.

The Black Baron had inhuman reflexes, bullets literally bounced off him, and he scarcely needed a plane at all, just a frame with an excuse for a skin, a whacking big engine, a couple of wings, and a tail. Oh, and guns. Two of them. And both of them were stitching the sky behind Nige. He pulled up again, this time making a tight right-hand turn, then a left, then another right. Bullets traced the sky in front of him and he dove again.

Almost radio silence in his ears, but he stayed off the frequency. No point in begging for help; help wasn’t coming. The Black Baron had Nige in his sights, and the best he could do right now was to try and keep the bastard engaged for as many minutes as he could and allow his squad-mates to try and take some of the Baron’s fighter-bombers out of the sky before they could unload their deadly cargoes. If he was lucky—unlikely, but it was possible—he’d be able to bail out before he augured in. And then he’d have to hope the damned Huns didn’t shoot him as he dangled helplessly from his ’chute.

He probably should have been making his peace with God.

Instead … he was in a red rage, his eyes hazing over, and not just with the g-forces he was pushing. I’d give bloody anything, anything, to take this bastard on one-on—

And that was when he felt the screaming bullets finally stitch their way across his fuselage. And hit his fuel tank. Fire erupted all around him, although, strangely, he felt nothing yet. But he would. It would be terrible. And flaming red rage was still all he felt, knowing he was about to die.

Except … he didn’t.

The plane exploded, and he was on fire. Literally on fire. In vain he looked to the sky, strained for it, flames all around him, reached for it the way a drowning man reaches for air he’ll never breathe again.

But—he wasn’t falling.…

With a jolt of shock he realized he was flying! Still afire, still feeling nothing but, perhaps, a tingling, as if his skin was electrified. Climbing straight up into the sky, out of the flaming, falling wreckage of his plane, himself still on fire like a bloody phoenix! How?

Dunno. Don’t care. If this was a dying hallucination, so be it. He was going to enjoy it and act as if it wasn’t. There was a Stuka in his path, and he was going to do something about it.

The something was to stretch out his body, fists forward, and punch a hole through the right wing, flip in midair like a falcon, and come back down through the left wing. Then for good measure, come back up again and rip the top of the tail clean off.

As that plane heeled over and headed for the ground, he hovered in midair a moment, flames wreathing around him, caught sight of a second, and went for it.

He’d managed to punch his way through every plane in the formation when the Black Baron finished off another of his mates, looked around, and realized what he’d just done. And what he was sharing the sky with.

And the blackguard made a run for it.

Oh, now there’s another super-man to tangle with you, you aren’t so brave, are you, tosser?

Setting the air on fire with his curses, Nige went after him.

He caught the bastard just above the Dover coast after a tail-chase that had him painting flames across the sky of London. He managed to land on the airframe, and without even thinking, crawled his way hand over hand to the cockpit, his eyes so fogged with red that he barely saw the Baron’s terrified face before he punched the man’s nose halfway back into his head.

Then he reached down, ripped out the control cables with his bare hands, and stepped off the falling plane, and watched it drop out of the sky and hit the ground at full speed.

Leisurely—but still on fire, he followed it down.

There wasn’t much left of it. Just a blackened crater in the earth. And while the Baron survived bullets, it was clear that he hadn’t been able to survive that kind of impact.

He looked up at the sky. His mates were tail-chasing the Huns home. And as the fires surrounding him slowly died away, his ability to think beyond the next blow returned.

And it came to him with a sense of wonder and awe what he’d just done. What he’d just become.

Guess I’d better pick a name for myself, he thought, as he heard the engines of motorcars racing towards him across the green meadow where he and the Baron’s plane had ended up. Before they pick something for me.…

He looked up again at his mates, disappearing little dots in the clouds.

Spitfire …

The Masters were exceedingly pleased. Finally, in the presence of death and his metahuman counterpart, the first of the metahumans of the Allies had triggered. While it had been amusing to watch the Axis metas trample the air and ground unimpeded for a while, such one-sided combat grew boring quickly.

Now things were going to proceed on an even basis.

Let the Games begin.

Sgian Dubh

Mercedes Lackey

Not for the first time, Roddy MacSgian wished he hadn’t been born a bloody metahuman.

It wasn’t that he was unhappy with being dragooned into MI6 … the good gods knew that every man jack and plenty of woman jills were needed in this war. The bloody damned Nazis had run over everything in their path and had eaten most of France by now. About the time they took all of the Netherlands, they had started bombing the hell out of London … not just the damned Luftwaffe but the Luftwaffe Übermenschen too. The Superior Men, like Eisenfaust and his squad. Blitzkrieg, they called it, and it looked like a lightning storm every night. Not that Roddy had seen it when it first started; no, he’d been where the Auld Woman said he belonged, right on the farm, tending the shaggy, sleepy-eyed cattle, like his father, and his father’s father, and so on back to the first of his line to hold that particular piece of Highland land. Not that he wouldn’t have volunteered if the Auld Woman hadn’t strictly forbidden it, on account of his being the only male left of his clan, the oddly named clan Son of the Knife. But even so, they wouldn’t have taken him. Not on account of being the only male left of his clan, but on account of his size. He knew jockeys that were taller than he was. The Auld Woman said it was the Pharisee blood in him; once he’d gotten his marching orders, the learned fellows at MI6 looked interested and said that it might well be he was almost pure Pictish. Whatever the case was, it was a fact that Roddy topped out at four feet tall, and they didn’t make uniforms in his size, nor boots, nor rifles that weren’t taller than he was.

So when the whole bleeding War started, and the Nazis began wrapping up other countries and taking them home, and Tommies started joining the Frogs at the border of Lorraine, well, the Auld Woman wanted him to stay. He saw no reason not to; the Army had no bleeding use for him.

That was true through the months and weeks that followed, right up to the point where three things happened. The Blitz began, and Spitfire, and then the rest of Wing Alpha suddenly proved that the Nazis weren’t the only ones that could spawn what the authorities decided primly to call metahumans. The Yanks didn’t sit around on their hands the way some people had predicted, as newsreel footage of the Übermenschen in action was enough to convince even a pacifist that the Germans weren’t going to stop at the Channel.

And he, Roderick MacSgian, woke up to find himself in a bed that was not his own.

The lady already in the bed, Deidre of the grass-green eyes and flaming hair, of the tiny foot and the winsome smile, of the breasts of a goddess and skin like newly skimmed cream, who he had in fact been dreaming about before he woke up, was not anyone he’d have had a ghost of a chance with by all rights. She proved it by screaming her fiery head off when she too awoke and found him beside her.

And Roddy, panicked, did … something.

And found himself back in his own bedroom, though he missed his bed by about a foot and landed on his arse on the cold stone floor.

It was that bruising that convinced him he hadn’t been dreaming.

Now, even the Auld Woman would admit that Roddy had a knack for thinking quickly, especially when things went badly wrong, and the first thing that flashed into his head was that he had better be able to prove he was in his cottage and not in Deidre MacFarland’s bed ten miles away, which meant he’d better get himself one or more sober witnesses to this at some point in the next five minutes.

He pulled on a pair of pants with naught on beneath, because he slept with naught on, shoved his feet into boots, and ran out into the street. Didja hear that? he shouted to his neighbor, who was just feeding his hutch of rabbits, doing his best to look wild-eyed.

Roddy, ye wee bastard, I heerd nowt! the neighbor laughed. Ye bin dreamin’ again.

Then the neighbor sobered, for it was known that the Old Blood was thick in the MacSgian family, and although the Auld Woman swore that not a bit of the magic had made its way into him, there was always the chance it was late in coming. The neighbor knew this, because it was his wife that stood for the East in the Auld Woman’s monthly Gathers. It wasna that sort of dream, now?

Roddy shook his head, rubbed the back of his neck, and looked sheepish. Och, nay, he said, and forbore to say what kind of a dream it was.

Now Deidre MacFarland was a canny lass, and before she went accusing a man of being where no man should have been at six in the morning, and especially not a man she did not know, and did not care to know, she made certain inquiries in that man’s neighborhood. And not wanting to be made a fool of, when she found witnesses that he’d been standing in his own back garden at six-oh-one, she kept her mouth tight shut.

And being no fool, and a month later, sober reflection on Roddy’s ability to keep his own mouth shut, and a good memory telling her that not everything about Roddy MacSgian was less than a proper man’s size, when a general, no less, came and took him up by special draft, Miss Deidre MacFarland gave him a proper patriotic farewell which bade fair to match that dream. And even at this moment, his ability to be ten miles (or more) awa’ in seconds was known only to her, him, and MI6.

By the time the general came for him, the village and most of the district knew of his other talent, for it had manifested in front of most of them.

Roddy could turn invisible.

He’d done it in full view, in a young host of people, in the middle of market-day, when he was in the public house, when he was supposed to be making rabbit hutches for the Auld Woman.

Now the way that came about was this. The Auld Woman was as tightfisted as any six Scots put together, which is saying a fair bit, and the wood and nails she had given Roddy to build those hutches with were all scavenged from every scrap of an abandoned structure that the Auld Woman’s sturdy boots could carry her to. Before he could even use the nails, he had to straighten them, and after having banged his fingers and thumbs to flinders doing so, he reckoned he needed a dram or two or three to take the ache out. As to why the Auld Woman wanted rabbit hutches, well, she and every other person in the village remembered the Great War, and the meat all going to the soldiers, as well it should. That was rationing, and it was understood as something that had to be done. There was War again, and the young men marching off, and there was no doubt the little fellow that looked like Charlie Chaplin and sounded like a madman needed to be put down. Even the Auld Woman, though she would not let Roddy go, said that Hitler was doing some wicked bad things and needed to be put down. But it was a hard thing to be sending the cattle off and getting no meat for yourself.

Ah, but there were plenty alive who remembered the last dustup. And remembered rabbits now … the last time the rabbits had been poached, mostly, but you needed a more reliable system than poaching for a war that looked as black as the inside of a widow’s hat. The last time, no one had been making tinned rabbit, and the chances of rabbit-rationing were pretty slim. So hutches were being put up all over the village, and rabbits, after all, could be fed on hay and grass and cabbage leaves and such-like that was easily come by in the country.

So the Auld Woman was to have her hutches too, and no shilly-shallying about the work, for all that she had given him shite to build with. And he was just lifting his second dram to his lips when he heard someone sitting at the window of the pub exclaim, Ach! ’Tis the Auld Woman a coomin’ this way!

And the men that had been standing shoulder to shoulder with him at the bar cursed, and looked through him, no more did the Auld Woman see him when she poked her head in through the door.

When he went visible again, there was a great old to-do, the Auld Woman boxed his ears and checked him for magic and still found none, and he wasn’t at all surprised when the general turned up looking for him. Likely so, and rightly done. With talents like his, there was a lot even a little fellow could do.

By then, of course, the Auld Woman had cast his Weird, and had summoned him, and looked at him in the way that made him go hot and cold together, and told him soberly that though he hadn’t a smidge of the Old Magic in him, he had something else, and he had best go to use it for to save a great many lives.

So that was why he was in a tiny little fisherman’s smack on the English Channel, one among hundreds, maybe thousands even, of more tiny little boats and not so tiny boats and great huge troopships and all manner of craft, all rushing towards a place called Dunkirk. They were going to evacuate troops off the beaches, the troops of the Allies that had been trapped there by German troops and a tank division, and three Übermenschen—Panzer-Wolf, Panzer-Loewe, and Panzer-Tiger. He was going to save, if he could, the pride of the USA, the first two metahumans to come from the United States to fight at the side of the British and French—Dixie Belle and Yankee Doodle.

And here he was, one lone, little man, crouched in the bottom of one lone, little boat, trying not to be sick, with the weight of the Alliance on his back and the blessing of the Auld Woman on his head. Not Young Roddy anymore. Now he was something else entirely. He was, by fiat of MI6, Sgian Dubh, the little black knife, the last, hidden, and most desperate of the weapons of a Scot.

In the chaos that was the evacuation of the Allied forces from the beachheads up and down the coast of France on either side of the seacoast town of Dunkirk, it was easy for one small man, going the wrong way, to make himself lost without ever going invisible. In fact, going invisible was probably ill-advised; he’d have been trampled.

It was unbelievable, probably horrible, and Roddy was right glad that the darkness hid most of it from him. The fear was so thick you could cut it. The smell of exploding shells and gunsmoke and woodsmoke mingled with the smell of blood and death and the smell of the sea. The men crowded onto the beaches were in despair, seeing escape from the meat grinder that was the Nazi Blitzkrieg, and yet fearing that they would be cut down before reaching safety. The noise was incredible. The beaches were being shelled, and the edges of the evacuation harried by Nazi storm troopers. If there was a hell on earth, this was it.

And yet it was not as bad as it could have been, and he knew why. The tank division had halted far short of here. The commanders on the ground expected it to arrive at any moment and were harrying their men into the hundreds of tiny shallow-drafted boats coming right up to the sand that would take the evacuees out to the larger ships.

The tank division was not going to come. In fact, it would not arrive until the beaches were deserted and every last man that could be got off, had been.

That was the Auld Woman’s doing, her and her Gathering, and Gatherings and Moots and Meets wherever they had been alerted as to the need for a Great Work tonight. Roddy was entirely vague as to what they were doing, but he had no question as to how it was being done.

Magic.

Magic that ran in Roddy’s ancestry, but that he did not share. Not that he was terribly unhappy about this. There were all manner of rules about using magic, and he was pretty sure he would run afoul of