New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance (10 page)

Kiev, Dominion of the Ukraine, March 29, 2013

Mark had joined the fight.

Christine sensed his rage and determination, and also the enormous amounts of power he’d drawn into himself, so much power that it was consuming him from the inside. She didn’t think he could survive that energy infusion for long, but nothing about the situation looked very survivable for anybody concerned.

She had to do something. She still couldn’t move her right arm or leg, couldn’t see out of her right eye, couldn’t even feel much on that entire half of her body. Dreading what she would see, she turned her gaze from the spectacle of Mark beating on the Iron Tsar while other Ukrainian Neos beat on him, and forced herself to turn her head so she could look at herself.

Her right arm… it wasn’t gone, but it was shrunken and black; she could see places where her flesh had been stripped off, down to the bone. She’d used her right hand to channel her shield when the Iron Tsar blasted her, and had sort of turned her right side towards him, too; this was the result.

The numb part of her face probably looked like Gus from
Breaking Bad
at the end of Season Four. Nobody should be alive after something like that, but she’d seen Mark move even after most of his insides had been torn apart and burned off. Neos could cling to life and casually violate the laws of biology as much as they did the laws of physics. When it came down to it, parahumans really were nothing but energy constructs tied to a physical shell, and the shell’s biological functions served a psychological purpose more than anything else. There were limits, however. Christine felt like she was teetering on the edge of those limits. If she relaxed, if she exhaled a little bit too long, she would fade away. She was so tired; why not just let go, and rest?

Well, there was Mark, who was going to get killed without her. There were the rat bastards who wanted her dead; she didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of getting their way.
Eff this
. Christine called upon the Power to heal herself.

It only took about three seconds, but they were among the worst three seconds of her life.

At some point pain becomes its own reality, and nothing else matters, or even seems to exist. After the first second, when Christine brought her obliterated nerve endings back to life just so they could kindly tell her exactly how much being burned to the bone really felt like, the world disappeared in a flash of agony. Only the fact that she’d gone through something very much like this once before kept her going, or she would have been overcome by sheer shock, let go, and died.

The next second only lasted, oh, maybe three or four months of subjective time as she grew muscle and skin and bone tissue and bone marrow and all the things she needed to be alive, at speeds that were simply impossible. A distant part of her mind considered the possibility she was playing with time somehow, short-circuiting processes that would take years even if they were possible at all, and fast-forwarding them. She had time to wonder about that, and also to experience a new kind of agony as new cells sprang up like mushrooms and made her whole again.

Second number three. The memories from the first two seconds were mercifully fading away, but new exciting experiences were waiting for her as skin stretched over her new flesh and her eyeball inflated like a balloon. The energy expenditure was huge even for her, and the last stage of the process almost killed her yet again, which would have left behind a perfectly healthy corpse. It took one final step to make it through, a commitment to get back to the world and face whatever awaited her there, good and bad, leavened with the certainty that there’d be plenty of servings of pure bad stuff. She did it, feeling she had somehow struck some sort of bargain with a higher power, and that there would be consequences she wouldn’t like down the line.

Christine blinked. She could see out of both eyes again, and most of what they saw was definitely un-good.

Freaking flying tanks had shown up sometime during the last three seconds, and they were shelling Mark like he was Godzilla and they were the Japanese Defense Force. As she watched, he struggled to his feet; something bounced off him in a burst of flames; the glowing ball of molten metal rose high in the air and disappeared in a parabolic arc; Christine hoped it wouldn’t land on some innocent Ukrainian peasant or something; she wished it would hit somebody who deserved it.

Even worse, three more tanks were heading her way. Christine poured power into her shields just in time: those thing were accurate as heck, and two very hard and dense objects moving more than fast enough to go into orbit slammed into the shield – and ricocheted away, becoming burning and still very dangerous missiles flying off in random directions. Those impacts had delivered millions of joules of energy each, tens of millions of joules, and she’d batted them away! Holy mother of crap!

Impressive. What’s more impressive is, they’re going to keep sending more express care packages your way until one of them gets through and purees you!

Even as her brain delivered that snarky statement, three more rounds hit her, along with several energy blasts that felt almost ephemeral by comparison but which still drained her shields. Each impact was an explosion, fire and kinetic energy and overpressure, and each ate away a little more power. She had to fight back.

Christine sent a telekinetic spike toward one of the tanks. There was a loud CLANG! It was louder than the sound of the tank guns firing; a chunk of the tank’s front end, which looked like a pyramid with the pointy end aimed at her, broke into pieces. The flying tank spun in the air a couple of times before crashing into a luckless building. There was no fireball, which didn’t surprise her; tanks were designed
not
to burst into flames, not even when they were destroyed.

Explosion or not, she’d probably killed everyone inside the tank. How big a crew could it have?

She didn’t have time to consider that. The other two tanks were spreading out, firing as they moved. BAM! BAM! Each impact made her teeth and bones vibrate painfully.
God forgive me.
CLANG! This time her kinetic spear got a tank on its side and it burst apart in a shower of debris, and even though it was hundreds of feet away she was sure some of that debris was people-shaped. Had used to be people. BAM! Something burning and heavy punched through the shield and whizzed past her head, setting her hair on fire. Christine screamed and lashed out. CLANG! She struck from above her target this time, and the tank crashed straight down into the ground and this time it did explode into a fireball.

Her hair was still on fire. She willed the fire away, and it went out. Her scalp stung for a second, and was healed.

She turned her attention on the tanks attacking Mark just in time to see him take one of them out.

He’d jumped onto the tank – or had he flown there? Could Mark fly now? As she watched, he ripped chunks off it with his bare hands until something or other stopped working and it went down. He leaped clear but the other two tanks hit him in mid-air and knocked him down.

“Mark!” Two more clangs. Two more dead tank crews. She rushed toward him.

Things got slightly quieter as she reached Mark, who was getting up. His hospital gown had been shredded off, so he was stark raving nekkid, but other than that he was more or less unhurt. As in, his broken bones and burst internal organs were putting themselves together in a matter of seconds. She ran up to him and they hugged behind a spherical shell she put around them, just in case the d-bags hit them in the middle of their PDA.

Nobody attacked them while they hugged. They were probably trying to regroup after the massive ass-kicking they’d taken, rather than out of kindness, but Christine didn’t care. All she wanted to do was kiss him and have him tell her everything was okay, but her grown-up self knew everything wasn’t okay, and that she didn’t have time to be comforted.

“We made it out,” he said. “And we’re never going back in.”

“Damn right.”

Movement up and to her left caught her attention. Four flying figures were spread out: the Tsar, a woman flying a giant dragon, which would have been wicked cool under any other circumstances, and two other dudes in fancy costumes. Behind them, more flying tanks and some much bigger flying thingies were rushing to catch up.

“All right, motherfuckers,” Mark snarled. “Time to dance.”

“Watch out for the Tsar’s high beam or whatevs; it’s worse than those tank guns.”

“Yeah.”

For a few moments, nothing happened. Nobody was eager to start the fight, apparently, Christine least of all. Maybe running away would be a good idea, but they would get blasted once they were out in the open. There didn’t seem to be any good choices available.

“This is a cosmic version of a knife fight,” Mark commented. “Loser ends up in the morgue, but the winner ends up in the emergency room, or maybe the morgue as well.”

“If you can fly, I could get us out of here,” somebody said from a few feet away.

Christine almost sent a blast in the direction of the voice, but barely managed to restrain herself.

“Who the fuck is there?” Mark said.

“My name is Chastity Baal. I’m with the Freedom Legion. Again, can you fly?”

“I can,” Christine said. “I can fly us all away.”

“Then let’s do it.” A woman appeared out of thin air, on the other side from where her voice had come from. Neat trick, throwing her voice out like that, and smart of her, given how close Christine had come to just blasting away. She was wearing a Dominion uniform, had blonde hair and brown eyes, and looked tough and competent. Her emotional aura was also tough and competent, although there was something mixed in it that felt slightly off to Christine.

Beggars couldn’t be choosers, though. She let the newcomer join them in a group hug even as she felt a surge of energy coming from the Tsar and his merry men. “Flying now!”

She launched herself into the air in her typical breakneck shot-from-a-cannon fashion as the spot they’d just vacated became a swirling fireball of near-nuclear intensity. Something enveloped them, a shield of sorts, but one that blocked sight and radar and sonar and much everything else. Neato. If the power or gizmo Chastity was using on them worked the way her Christine-senses indicated, they might be able to survive their trip through Dominion airspace.

Christine paused some thirty thousand feet up in the air, looked for the sun to give her a sense of direction, and launched herself and her companions towards what she thought was the West, keeping them safely wrapped in a shield of her own.

It wasn’t really flying: her steering consisted of stopping after catapulting herself a few dozen miles at a time, getting her bearings as they began to drop, and repeating the process.

“Sorry for the bumpy ride!”

And a bumpy ride it was.

Kiev, Dominion of the Ukraine, March 29, 2013

When a burning chunk of depleted uranium, traveling at a good ten thousand feet per second, hit the hood of his limo, Daedalus realized something had gone terribly wrong.

Before that somewhat apocalyptic moment, things had seemed to be going, if not swimmingly, at least well enough that he really couldn’t complain. The night before, after ‘fixing’ the Hungarian reactor, Daedalus had claimed he needed to examine the defective pieces in peace and quiet, locked himself up in a room, and had Mr. Night-Medved teleport in and transport them to the Ukrainian border. Easy Peasy Japanesey, as they used to say back in the day. Since they couldn’t well teleport into a Dominion facility without ruffling some feathers, they’d been driven towards it in the comfort of an armored limo with tinted windows and a well-stocked bar, along with a military escort.

Daedalus had spent the three-hour drive sampling the bar and enjoying the unaccustomed silence; Mr. Night was playing the role of Medved to the hilt, and Medved mostly only spoke when spoken to, and never in complete sentences when a grunted phrase or two would do. Daedalus had no clue what that treacherous Jap had ever seen in the Russian strongman. Well, it didn’t matter. Medved was gone, his body appropriated by Mr. Night, and Lady Shi would be hunted and put down like any other bitch that bit the hand that fed her.

None of that mattered. Soon he would reach the base and finally crack the mysteries of the Source, even if he had to pull the information out of the melting brain of one Miss Christine Dark. He was looking forward to finally making her acquaintance. He figured he could spend a little time in purely recreational coercive measures, just to repay her for all the trouble she had caused

All in all, Daedalus had been feeling pretty good about things when the uranium bouncer hit the limo and delivered enough energy to turn the vehicle and a good chunk of the surrounding countryside into a smoking crater.

One moment, they’d been driving along, less than a mile away from their destination. The next, the world had become a thing of sudden movement, breaking glass and all-encompassing fire before disappearing altogether. Some time after that, Daedalus had found himself lying amidst burning wreckage. Blood was seeping out of his ears, mouth and nose, and probably his asshole for all he knew. His skin was covered in second-degree burns, despite the protective force-field medallion he never left home without. He was seeing double, his head ached with the all-too familiar feeling of a massive concussion, and he had several contusions, a broken arm and, from the way everything from the knees down felt, two broken legs as well.

Daedalus spat out a mouthful of blood. “Those stupid motherfuckers,” he growled.

“Ah, there you are,” Mr. Night said. He lifted a twisted metal axle off Daedalus. “You probably shouldn’t move.”

“No shit, Sherlock. Get my briefcase, willya?”

“Of course, sir.”

While Mr. Night went looking for his briefcase, which should have survived the explosion but had probably been tossed who knew where, Daedalus had nothing to do but try to assess the situation. From the screaming and the roar of flames around him, the convoy had been decimated by the impact. There were more explosions in the distance. He recognized the roar of tank guns; 150mm hypervelocity cannon made a very distinctive sound. He saw something like a shooting star flash by overhead, and he understood what had happened. Somebody had started shooting depleted-uranium penetrators at an invulnerable Neo, and a bouncing round or a piece of a round had hit his car. The odds of a randomly-falling ricochet taking out his limo were astronomical, but probability always got a bit funky around Neos of a certain power level. All of that, and the chaos and mayhem he could hear in the distance, meant only one thing: the fucking girl had managed to break out and was kicking ass and taking names. Or, if she had managed to access the Source, was about to eat everyone’s lunch, including Daedalus’.

If the worst had happened, there was nothing he could do about it, of course. He, along with the rest of the planet, would be at the mercy of some little redhead who until very recently had been a hapless coed in a world without superpowers, which made her the least qualified Queen of the Whole Fucking Enchilada ever to receive the title. If she still hadn’t managed to pull that off – and there were no guarantees she’d ever be able to pull it off – then something might be salvaged from this mess.

Mr. Night was back. He handed Daedalus his briefcase without further comment, which was just as well, or Daedalus might have just tried to find out if anything in his bag of tricks could take out the Outsider meat puppet right then and there. Instead, he opened the case, which as expected had ridden out the explosion intact, pulled out an injector full of Doc Slaughter’s healing serum, and gave himself a double-shot. The stuff would bring him back to full health in a few minutes.

“Take me back to Hungary,” he ordered Mr. Night. Meeting with the Tsar was no longer a good idea. Either the metal-headed dictator would manage to put down the little bitch – taking her alive was no longer an option – or she would run away, and in either case Daedalus would be of no use to the Dominion. On top of that, his Bucket-Headedness would likely be unhappy at the failure of Daedalus’ disruptors to rein in the captives.

Dark’s escape proved that they just didn’t have enough disruptors to bring her down. Outsider energy didn’t grow on trees. Daedalus had managed to build one, count it, one production plant, right there in the Dominion, and it had produced a whole sixty-odd canisters of the stuff in the nine months or so it had been in operation. A dozen had been sent to the US in the ill-fated attempt to take out the Lurker, where they were all destroyed or missing in action. Another six had been sent to Hong Kong, and they’d been put to good use before being destroyed in turn. The rest were in the facility and most of them had probably been taken out as well. Without the disruptors, the best they could hope for was to kill the girl, and he wasn’t expecting that, not by a long shot.

Pushing through the nearby anti-teleport wards wasn’t easy, but Mr. Night managed, although by doing so the Dominion would know who Daedalus had brought into its borders, which would just about put a final nail on the coffin of their special relationship. He forced himself to endure the disturbing process as Mr. Night took him back to the workshop in Hungary. It was time for plan B.

The Humanity Foundation would blow up New York and disrupt the Source. Their bomb, big as it was, wouldn’t destroy the Source; the power requirements for such a feat were immense. The bomb plot’s device was off the mark by at least three orders of magnitude. The massive radiation dose would short out Neo powers worldwide, however, hopefully just as the Third Asian War had started. His calculations indicated that close to a thousand Neos would be killed outright; even a temporary suspension of their powers would turn their bodies into death traps. Then, as a little capper to the festivities, he’d push a notional kill button and cause two hundred little Legionnaire heads to explode like some many firecrackers. The ensuing chaos and mayhem would give him some breathing room, and plenty of free time to take another run at the Source and hopefully get it right this time.

He gritted his teeth as he let the serum repair his damaged body. So be it. He’d tried to things the easy way, and failed. Now, the world would burn, and it would serve the world right.