Note to reader:  This particular story is set between the Infinity: Earth Saga and its follow-up, Infinity: Prime during the period of time I am calling Infinity: Transition. 

It is, at this point in time, a simple stand-alone story.  This is not an excerpt from Loki's Sin or any of the Infinity: Earth novels.

April, 2051

McKenzie Pass, Oregon

Another Earth

The young Captain watched the chopper go down with a sick feeling in his gut.  He wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand.  “That’s the last of them.  We’re on our own,” he muttered.

Sgt. Jonas Ash, his second-in-command, nodded gloomily, coal black face next best thing to expressionless.  “We can make it, sir.”

Captain Justice Breed, United Earth Forces, grunted.  “Three hundred odd miles through enemy occupied territory?  It’s gonna take a fucking miracle, even for us.”  He sighed.  “Have the night-crew carriers secured.  We’re staying here until they wake up.  I’m going to send the ‘thropes out on a perimeter check—I want to know if the enemy’s been within five miles of here.”

“Yes, sir.”  Ash didn’t bother to salute.  He knew better.  Captain Breed had taken to military etiquette like a fish to the Sahara.  Which was to say—not at all.  If not for his undeniable talents and singular heritage, they would’ve thrown him out his first day in Basic.  No one knew freaks as well as Justice Breed.

The night-crew carriers, hyper-extenuated quad runners with coffin like boxes attached to the back, were parked together beneath a stand of Douglas Firs.  After casting a disgusted look at the overcast sky, Ash checked the fuel gauges.  Half-mast.  He blew out a long breath, calculating.

Their ethanol reserved were gone and they had no materials to brew more.  The carriers’ ethanol/electric hybrid engines got incredible mileage, but, in this rough country, it wouldn’t be enough.  If the skies cleared they could set out a solar array and run for several miles on electric charge alone, but it didn’t look as though the weather was going to cooperate.  I wonder if Piper can do anything about that, he mused.

He found the bespectacled mage sitting astride a hollowed out log, trying to coax something out from inside with a block of dried cheese.  Ash didn’t ask.  He honestly didn’t want to know.

He explained his idea to Piper, who listened earnestly before shaking his head.  “Messing with the weather is really bad juju, Ash.  I mean, really bad juju.  Ever hear of the ‘butterfly effect?’”

“Isn’t that a classic movie?” he asked with a grin.

“You and me have different definitions of the word ‘classic,’ Sergeant,” Piper said with a grimace.  “The butterfly effect refers to the notion that a butterfly flapping its wings in China could cause a hurricane in the South Pacific.

“Ridiculous, on the face of it, but it was an example they used back at the Academy to show how any magic-induced change in weather patterns in one place might have catastrophic effects somewhere else.”

“Crap.  Thanks anyway.”  Ash wandered off, a feeling of despair beginning to settle in the pit of his stomach.  He tracked down Breed and told him the news.

The Captain smiled grimly.   “Fuel’s the least of our worries, Sergeant.  Chavez just came back from patrol.  He picked up the scent of ant-soldiers less than a mile from here.  They’re camped out in the next valley over.

The despair that had settled in his gut jumped up and smashed him full in the chest.  Ash swore, though not loudly.  Of all the enemy’s bio-engineered troops, the ants were the most formidable.  Pure infantry, but the kind of infantry humans couldn’t hope to match.  “What are we going to do?”

Breed didn’t like the note of hopelessness he heard in his sergeant’s voice.  The last thing they could afford at this point was pessimism.  “We’re going to sit tight until it gets dark, then the night crew is going to have a look-see,” he replied.  “I have a feeling they’ve got a ‘gate over there.  If so, we’re going to initiate Plan Omega.”

“Captain—there are only eighteen of us.  A regiment of ant soldiers is two thousand strong.  How in the hell do you expect us to fight our way through to the ‘gate?”

“We’re going to kick some bug butt,” Breed replied, affixing him with a cold granite stare.  “You’re thinking like regular army again, Ash.  We may number only eighteen troops, but that includes four lycanthropes, four vampires, a mage, and several meta-humans.  The ants are tough, but they’re just infantry.  If we can’t scramble them enough to get a nuke through the ‘gate, the Earth is fucked anyway.”

Dusk.  Breed stood alone on an outcropping, staring down into the valley below.  Somewhere down there were at least two thousand ant soldiers, the most dangerous front line fighters ever conceived.  They had one major advantage now, in that ant-soldiers weren’t particularly good at night fighting in the first place.  Pit them against vampires and ‘thropes—who definitely were—and the odds were a bit more even.

The first of his night-crew seemed to materialize at his side, his arrival completely silent.  “Captain.”  He pushed his black cowboy hat back on his head and gazed at him through green eyes so bright they were almost reflective.

“Raven.”  Breed matched his bored tone perfectly.  He ran through the situation report in the same tone, watching with something akin to amusement as the vampire’s face reflected a mild grin.

“Too bad they’re not warm bloods down there,” Raven remarked.  “We could use some extra sustenance.”

“You never know—you might luck out.  The Cen know as well as we do that the ants aren’t worth a shit after dark.  They might have some mammalian support troops in place.”

“That would be good.  Our canned supplies are running low, but that’s not our biggest concern at this point.  It’s much harder to resist the Thirst if we don’t get fresh every now and then.”

Breed nodded thoughtfully.  He knew as much about vamps as anyone who wasn’t one.  One of his mother’s best friends was Renee Fontaine, the so-called ‘Vampire Queen.’  He’d practically been raised in the Paranormal Affairs Committee’s Thorne Academy.  What he didn’t know about vampires, lycanthropes, and magic would fill a small book indeed.  “Well, we can’t have that.  If nothing else, I’ll donate some of my blood to the cause.”

Raven had the grace to look slightly discomfited by the suggestion.  He knew all too well how potent Breed’s blood would be.  He was a very old friend of the family and was aware of things few other people were privy to.  “If it comes to that,” he said reluctantly, “we’ll have little choice but to accept.”

Raven found himself wondering how Breed’s blood would taste, and what its lasting effects would be.  He cut off that line of thinking before he ended up hoping they did have to feed from the young Captain.  If nothing else, his parents would be pissed.  Having Nemesis Breed mad at him would be bad enough, but just the idea of Deryk Shea having a bone to pick gave him the willies, pure and simple.

Anyone a vampire would be afraid of was a damned dangerous enemy to make.  Raven had once incidentally witnessed an assassination attempt on the man—he’d taken a 50 mm shell straight in the chest.  The impact alone had thrown him completely through a brick-faced building.

It was far better that the Cen had placed a few warm blood amongst the ant soldiers, he decided.  Far better.

Justice Breed was no telepath, but he’d inherited enough of his parents’ combined talent for reading faces and body language that he could guess what was going through the vampire’s mind.  At least until Raven adopted that amazingly effective ‘I’m dead, therefore I have no facial expression or body language’ thing vampires were so damned good at.  Downright spooky, he thought.

“So what do you think are the chances the ‘gate opens up into the Cen home universe?” Raven asked, after a long moment of silence.

“Damn slim.  I’ll settle for dropping the tac-nuke onto one of their many crèche worlds, especially one of the ones where they breed the goddam ant soldiers.  If we can halt, or at least slow down, their production of their top infantry troops, we’ll come out ahead no matter how you look at it.”

“Amen to that, Brother Breed.”

“That’s Captain Brother Breed to you, dead boy,” Breed replied with a sidelong grin.  “C’mon, let’s get this show on the road.”

“They’re shacked up for the night,” said Cohen, one of the ‘thropes.  Her animus was that of a jaguar, so she was particularly good at the long range nocturnal recon.  In human shape she was a lithe, pretty blond with close-cropped hair.  She’d rubbed mud in it to avoid attracting notice, Breed realized.  Smart girl, he thought approvingly.  “You were right about them having night guards.  I didn’t see them, but they smell like cat.  I’m guessing black leopard hybrids.”

“Makes sense.  How many?”

“I’m guessing…ten?”

“Can you four handle them?”  He dragged his gaze across the assembled lycanthropes.  “A little worse than two to one odds.”

“You’re kidding, right?”  The token werewolf of the group, a redheaded would-be Tom Sawyer type, grimaced painfully.  “We could take ‘em out even if there were fifty of them.”

Might sound like bragging, Breed mused, but it’s probably true.  Even in human form ‘thropes were hideously strong, with muscle tissue and bone so dense it could stop even a high velocity round from penetrating more than half an inch.  Their only vulnerability was the same as the vampires’, though for a different reason.  The multi-functional, cooperative cells that made up a vampire’s body would separate in front of a bullet, rushing in behind to seal up the wound.  Lycanthropes simply stopped the bullet cold.  Both preternatural types were, in fact, vulnerable only to brain and central nervous system damage.  A bullet through the eye would kill either of the preternatural types.

And not a hell of a lot else.  Of course, vampires were also vulnerable to sunlight, but that would be in short supply here in the Oregon Cascades at an hour before midnight.

Lycanthropes, as a group, represented pure animal passion and power.  The Cen, and their troops, rightfully feared their prowess.  But they all loathed vampires.  Even the foe’s most formidable soldiers—such as the ants—would hesitate before committing themselves to a close quarters brawl with one of the undead.

That was why Justice appointed Raven to carry the backpack nuke, and the other vampires to act as an honor guard.  If one of the ‘thropes screwed up and the camp was alerted, the fact that there were vampires amongst them would lock them up long enough for Raven to get the job done.

Raven didn’t mind.  He was only too happy to be the one to take the fight to the enemy.  He was one of the few UEF soldiers who’d actually seen what the Cen had done to the cities on the East Coast—to New York, D.C., and so many others.  Only the quick thinking of Justice’s father and the Paranormal Affairs Commission’s Magical Activities Division had prevented the same thing from happening on the West Coast.

The Cen didn’t use nukes.  Not only did they want the infrastructure left intact, they also didn’t want the expense and bother of cleaning up the radiation.  So they used what the UEF had dubbed ‘viral bombs.’

There simply hadn’t been enough mages on the East Coast when it happened.  Raven blamed the politicians for that.  Magic made them nervous.  More than nervous.  Magic, vampires, lycanthropes, metahumans, the Fey, Abyssians—all of these things contributed to the fear some of the more religious among them had that the end of the world was coming.  In their opinion, allying themselves with these ‘denizens of darkness’ would have been tantamount to swearing allegiance to Satan himself.

They were right in one sense.  Armageddon was coming.  And their theology placed them smack dab on the wrong side of the line.  He knew that could be laid at the feet of the enemy as well.  They understood religion, even though they had nothing like it themselves.  They considered themselves to be Gods, after all.

They had visited—and conquered—literally hundreds of alternate Earths.  They had been manipulating human beliefs for thousands of years.  They’d seeded this Earth with prejudice, fear, and hatred against the paranormal…as they had so many others before it.  But this universe—this Earth—was different.

Roughly twenty-five thousand years before, the Cen had destroyed the whole population of a world that had fought back a little too hard.  Angered beyond reason, the Cen struck out viciously, exploding a massive viral bomb in the upper atmosphere.  Sixteen billion lives snuffed out within hours.  Except for the tiniest fraction of the population that not only survived the viral attack, but were transformed by it.

They became immortal, practically indestructible.  They fled their dead Earth and found another—using a ship outfitted with world-jumping technology stolen from the invaders.  This was the Earth they came to.

Raven didn’t really know their history here.  Nor did he want to.  He knew that it had been the immortal Loki who’d created the first vampire, who’d returned the art of magic to a people who’d had it stolen from them centuries earlier.  He’d done all this in conscious violation of the laws of his own people—the laws set up by the immortals not long after their arrival.

Loki’s sin had been the Earth’s salvation.

The Cen counterstroke had been pure genius.  They’d created immortals of their own and given them great, white feathered wings, faces of pure beauty, and voices so powerful they could crumble stone walls with their shouts.

They looked like angels.   They were anything but angelic.  By whispering in the ears of receptive religious and political leaders, they’d nearly precipitated a war between human and superhuman.  Only the fact that the Cen grew impatient that saved us from that, Raven thought.

They dropped their first viral bomb on New York City at eight am on a Monday morning.  A few minutes later another hit D.C.  Then came Philadelphia, then Boston, then down the eastern seaboard, hitting every major city all the way to Miami.

It had taken two hours for an estimated hundred and eighty million people to die.  The cause?  Hemorrhagic fever.  They literally bled to death…through their skin and out every orifice in their body.

In the meantime they tried to strike at the West Coast, but every time they opened a ‘gate to drop the bomb, a MAD squad was there.  They’d intercept the device, hold the ‘gate open, throw it back through, then slam the ‘gate shut.

That very night Raven had traveled the mage road—the network of magical transit tubes stretching across the world—to view the carnage back east.  He’d stood on a rooftop, staring down through the windshield of a car on the street below.  A woman—a mother—sat in the front seat, cradling a very young child in her arms.  Jellified blood pooled in the seat beneath them and their flesh crawled with the bodies of thousands of flies.

It was at that moment the vampire Raven declared war on the Cen.  It took thirty-six hours for the rest of the world to do the same.  Four hours later, the United Earth Forces were born.

 The rest of the world had survived almost unscathed, thanks to the early warning of the PAC and MAD.  Europe had the StarFire Alliance—a loose confederation of metas, mages, and preternaturals.  China had the Dragon Society.  In Russia they had the Rasputin Club.

Paranormals from around the world had acted in concert to save civilization.  It wasn’t something the ordinary mortals would soon forget.  Or so it was said.

Raven had his doubts about that.  But it hardly mattered.  He had one goal now.  To take the fight to the Cen.  One way or another.

Raven ghosted through the trees, barely conscious of the weight of the pack slung over his shoulder.  At his side were Jesse and Aaron Carter, two sibling vamps close enough in looks that they might’ve been identical twins rather than male and female fraternal twins.  Ahead some fifty yards ranged Bishop.  He was an enigma, that one.  They said his psi quotient was nearly as high as Renee’s.  Since she was the progenitor of them all, just about everyone found that significant.

Raven, personally, had filed it under his who gives a shit unless it helps us kill more of the enemy category.

He caught movement out of the corner of his eye and flicked his attention that way.  A massively muscled black leopard hybrid launched itself out of the trees at them, wielding, of all things, a short spear.  Jesse passed something to Aaron and they moved to intercept.

Mortal eyes couldn’t have tracked.  Less than a second later they were standing together some ten yards beyond the cat hybrid.  A length of some sort of cable stretched between them, barely visible in the dim moonlight briefly let through by the clouds.  A dark spot marked the center of the cable, but the darkness gleamed wetly.

The spear tumbled from suddenly nerveless fingers and the hybrid raised both hands toward its throat.  Then its head tumbled slowly from atop its shoulders, falling to the ground at its feet.  The rest of its body collapsed slowly on top of it.

He didn’t interrupted as the two younger vamps fed from the corpse.  What he’d told Justice had been entirely correct—they needed fresh blood badly.  He waited for them to finish then glanced back up the trail.

Where’s Bishop? he asked himself.  As if conjured by the thought—impossible, since Raven was psychically dead, even to Renee herself—the point man reappeared some distance ahead, hand raised in a cautionary gesture.  Carefully, he said in battle sign.  There are mines.

He’d apparently already passed this information along to the Carters by psionic means.  He carefully followed their path as they continued single file, pausing beside them once they’d broken the tree-line to stare out at the camp laid out before them.

Like usual, everything the ants built was in perfect formation.  It looked like they’d erected a small town of tents in this mountain meadow, laid out in straight lines from one end of the field to the other.  Which?  he signed to Bishop, who pointed toward a slightly larger tent pretty much in the center of the formation.

With a swift nod and a glance at the Carters, Raven sprinted toward it.  He skidded to a halt in front of the entrance flap an eye-blink later.  After hesitating a moment, he ducked inside.

The interior of the tent was bathed in a blue glow.  In the center stood an archway, filled with a radiant cobalt glow.  The worldgate.  Other than that, the tent was empty.

This is going to be easier than I thought, he chuckled inwardly, setting the backpack on the ground  between his legs and squatting down to open it.  All he had to do was enter the code sequence and throw it through the ‘gate and…

A flash from the ‘gate was his only warning.  He glanced up to see something squeezing its way through the arch, visible only as a silhouette.  It stepped free and spread its wings, tips tinged with azure, and he felt a chill shoot up his spine.  Its inhuman, androgynous beauty told him what it was, even if the wings weren’t a giveaway.

He shoved the pack through his legs and leaped at it, every fiber of his preternatural body focused into his initial attack.

Vampires are quick.  But so are immortals, and none so more than the valkyrie.  That’s what the immortals had dubbed these gorgeous monsters.

He nearly succeeded.  His fingers, strong as steel, were just closing around its throat when it hammered him dead center chest with its fist.  The force of the blow sent him hurtling backward to sprawl on the dusty floor.  Had he been mortal the blow would’ve killed him.

“Vampire,” it sang, the melody of its voice so pure, so perfect, that he nearly found himself crying.  He felt his resolve weakening.  How can I fight this thing?  Nevertheless he pulled his feet beneath him and readied himself to spring again.

The tent flap behind him opened and Justice strode in.  His field jacket had been torn and there was blood on the sleeve, but he looked okay enough otherwise.  The barest hint of a bruise appeared on his cheek.  He stepped forward and raised a hand, pointing at the valkyrie.  “Die,” he said, and the power of his voice was such that Raven felt it pass through his skin, his flesh, and into his bones.  Had he been mortal, that would’ve killed him.  But he was already dead, so it was all right.

The valkyrie stood as though stunned, eyes like circles, mouth slack with a line of drool falling down its chin.  Something dimmed, faded, and went out behind those eyes.  It was dead.  It just didn’t know it yet.

“Feed your Thirst,” Justice told Raven.  “Now is the time.”

Raven didn’t need to be invited twice.  He fell upon the creature, tore its throat with one slash of his fangs, and drank.  The blood was ambrosia, ecstasy, rapture, nirvana in liquid form.  He felt it run like fire through his own veins and nearly cried out in the throes of frenzy as he let the body fall.

He stepped back, looking up to see Justice in front of the ‘gate, the backpack thrown over his shoulder.  “What are you doing?”

“The ‘gate’s trapped.  They were expecting this gambit.  Anything inert that goes through not carried by a living being will be shunted directly to Tacoma.  In one fell swoop they would take out Athena, Loki, my father—their most dangerous enemies.  If this is going to work, it has to be carried through and set off there.  It’s the only way.”

“How do you know that?”

Justice shrugged.  “I just do.”  He didn’t seem willing to offer any other explanation.

“I could do it.”

“You’re not alive, Raven.  It would just take you and the bomb to Tacoma.  Besides—I’m the commander of this little band of misfits.  If anyone’s going to do it, it’s going to be me.”

“We can just arm it, set the timer, then you can run through with a minute to spare and dash back—“

“—No.  Once I go through you’re going to destroy the ‘gate module.  There’s no way to know how they’ve got the other side rigged up.  I can’t take the chance of someone getting it away from me and throwing it through the shunt to Tacoma.”

“Oh, hell.  Justice, what am I supposed to tell your mother?”

“Tell her I did what a soldier is supposed to do.  Take the troops home, Raven.  Don’t fuck this up.  Make them understand we can’t institute Plan Alpha again under any circumstances.  Tell Ash I said goodbye, and that you were in charge.”  Without another word he turned and stepped through the ‘gate.

Raven didn’t hesitate, as much as he wanted to.  He slammed his foot into the tiny black box mounted to the outside of the arch, kicking it repeatedly until it exploded in a shower of sparks.  The ‘gate fluxed once, then died.

End