INTRODUCTION
Victoria Victrix paused for a moment, checked her watch, double-checked her watch against the time on her laptop. Hard to believe she still had almost an hour.
But there was a lot of story to get through before…
Better get back on it.
Her fingers flew over the keyboard.
Still with me, my unknown audience? By this time you’ve read how it all started for us, how the Invasion arrived all over the world concealed in delivery trucks that disgorged horrors right out of a Hollywood science fiction film. How we learned that the enemy was an old one—because he wore the swastika and was led by Nazi metahumans everyone had thought long dead. How we also learned that not all of our enemies were human.
How Echo, the organization that until now hadn’t needed to worry about anything more organized than a few gangs of four or five metahuman criminals, suddenly found itself facing an army and losing. And how, eventually, the seeds of real organization against the Society of Ultima Thule came to Atlanta, where in Echo’s ruined headquarters the repercussions were only just starting to shake out.
And among all those players converging on that southern city, there were a handful that would make a difference. A handful that could save the world. But first—first, we had to save ourselves.
And there were going to be some we were going to lose. Battles…and people. That’s the nature of war.
For this was—is—a war. Make no mistake about it. Even though the enemy had evaporated into nowhere, anyone who had any brains knew that the Thulians would be back.