FREE PREVIEW! Read the introduction by Mercedes Lackey.

Oh, I know there are people who claim they saw giant space-ships hovering over all the cities of the world, but these are the same people who put tinfoil hats on their heads to stop the FBI from taking over their minds when everyone in the know will tell you that the tinfoil hats only amplify the thought-controlling waves—

I kid, I kid.

But not about the invasion coming via delivery truck. That’s a fact. It’s also a fact that the foundations were laid back around 1935. That was when the first metahumans—what most folks now call “super-heroes and super-villains”—first started showing up.

The Nazis had them first. Ubermenschen, they called them. “Vaterland” was the very first, and his sidekick, “Hitlerjungend.” We all assumed it was some sort of Nazi super-science at work. And honestly, nobody thought they were anything but propaganda blow-ups until the Blitzkrieg started pounding across Europe. And there were more of these “Ubermenschen,” and all by themselves they were entire battalions and tank-corps. For a while they had it all their own way, too—until Spitfire.

It was during the Battle of Britain, and the waves of fighter-bombers were being led by a guy who had reflexes like nobody’s business and hardly needed a plane at all. The Black Baron. Bullets literally bounced off this guy. His “plane” was a frame with machine guns and an engine, and all the armoring was around the engine. He could pull maneuvers that would have sent anyone else into full blackout. He was, like all the Ubermenschen, a one-man fighter-squadron. And he was cutting the RAF down at the coastline.

Including Lt-Commander Nigel Patterson, whose plane disintegrated around him and burst into flames.

Except “Nige” didn’t die. Something happened to him in the instant he should have. Out of the ball of flame burst a streak of flame, a man on fire, a flying man on fire, who proceeded to punch holes in every fighter-bomber in that formation with his body, then land on the airframe of the Black Baron’s plane, rip the control-cables and fuel-line out, and punch the Baron in the nose for good measure. The Baron’s plane went down; maybe he could survive bullets, but he couldn’t survive a fall from a height that turned him into a red smear on the ground.

And Spitfire, the first of the Allied metahumans, was born.

Time after time, again and again, it happened during the War. Nazi, Italian Fascist and Japanese metas would show up and kick butt for a while, and then something would happen on the battlefield and suddenly they were facing someone that could take them. The supers battled it out one-on-one, leaving conventional forces to win or lose the battles. And after the war was over, the super-villains just moved on to crime. Which was where Echo came in. Echo organized the old meta-heroes from former WWII vets and recruited new ones, bundling them all into a single organization, complete with uniforms, for the lower ranks, anyway, and funded by the eccentric but charismatic son of Nikola Tesla, one Andro Tesla who actually made his father’s dream of broadcast energy work. And for a while, well, things in the world looked a lot like the comic-book writers used to picture them. Every city had its Echo HQ, and you’d see the occasional meta-villain pulling off something extreme and your local Echo Mach Two or Three would take him out, either alone or with a team. And you tried not to be under the falling debris. People got used to it, couldn’t remember a time without metas, actually. Metas got legislated, with the Extreme Force laws (forbidding powered heroes from operating against unpowered criminals except in cases of life-or-death) and the Control Officer mandate that required every meta-team operating in a public place to have one meta whose only job was to protect and save the civilians and to an extent, their property. Echo built special containment prisons for meta-villains, and really, it was a lot less scary than the threat of the A-bomb and then the H-bomb.

And then…the invasion.

Echo’s main HQ was in Atlanta. Why Atlanta? Because Yankee Doodle and Dixie Belle got married right after the end of WWII and settled there, and they were the pride of the US Meta-human Corps. Simple enough. Atlanta was pretty central, pretty modern, and had access to about anything, but was not Washington DC or NYC, and Alex Tesla wanted to keep Echo away from the US centers of politics. Atlanta seemed like the best option since Yankee and Belle didn’t want to move.

And the day of the invasion was like any other day, except in Atlanta, where the All-Star game had turned the city into one big traffic jam. Just like every other year.

Until cargo containers and semi-trailers all over the city suddenly began bursting open, disgorging Swastika-painted meta-troops in powered armor and Nazi War Machines and they began mowing civilians down like a John Deere harvester going through a wheat field. Same thing was happening all over the world, but it was especially horrendous in Atlanta.

When the screaming and dying stopped, there was a mountain of dead, civilians and heroes alike. The world probably lost about two thirds of the existing meta-humans that day, maybe more. Most of the dead and dying Nazi troupers got scooped up by some sort of flying retrieval vehicles.

But there were some bodies that didn’t get retrieved. And when people started examining those Nazi bodies, they got a shock.

Some of them weren’t human. Not even meta-human.

We had been invaded. And Echo’s war to save the world suddenly got a whole lot grimmer.

And that’s where my part of the story comes in.

Who am I? Victoria Victrix Nagy at your service, call-sign VickieVee. Magician, meta-human, romance writer, and daughter of metahuman FBI agents Alexander and Moira Nagy.

And at the time of the invasion, what you might call, severely damaged goods.

And this is how, from my perspective, it all began.