New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance (37 page)

This is where I pay the piper
, she thought idly. She’d done too much, pushed too much, and something had given, something had finally stopped working.

Mark called out for her; he was floating in front of her, wearing the scraps of a Chinese astronaut’s uniform, but his voice was fading away fast.

Darkness.

Freedom Island, Caribbean Sea, March 1, 2014

Adam said nothing. He didn’t bother shaking his head.

There was no need for him to say anything. I knew, just by looking at the small form lying on the hospital bed. My connection to Christine was still there, but it led to a white void. It was a coma of sorts; her mind was adrift somewhere, and her body was being kept alive by machines. There wasn’t enough left of her to even empower her Neo healing abilities.

It’d been almost a month, and she hadn’t come back.

I was on semi-permanent leave from the Freedom Legion, and had basically moved into the medical wing where they’d warehoused her. Might as well, since I’d lost my apartment after I’d been declared dead. Not that I was going to spend any time anywhere else. Not that I gave a shit about anything other than the girl on the bed. I spent my days mostly staring at Christine and trying to use our mental connection to wake her up.

John Clarke had been there pretty much nonstop, too.

You’d think his presence would bother me, but it hadn’t. John wasn’t a bad guy: a bit of a smug self-righteous prick, sure, but not a bad guy. If she had to end up with someone else, she could do a lot worse.

If she woke up, I’d fucking throw rice at their wedding and not give a shit. If she woke up. If she ever fucking woke up.

“Anything?” John asked me. The big guy had never developed a psychic connection with her, and it killed him, not being able to know what was going on inside her head. I felt bad for him.

“Still drawing a blank,” I said. “But she’s not dead. I’d know if she was.” We had this exact same conversation at least once a week, before we turned away and proceeded to ignore each other. I picked up my e-tablet and tried to get back into the latest G.R.R. Martin novel. I usually managed to read for fifteen, even twenty minutes before I turned back to Christine and called out to her with what passed for my mind.

Maybe I’d give Mesmer a holler to see if he could give it another try. The dead telepath had been a huge help. He’d managed to rescue most of Mr. Night’s victims. Most. Jeffrey and Chen hadn’t made it through, along with a few others, most of them innocents who hadn’t been able to survive the telepathic odyssey. The ones who’d made it were living happily in Comatown along with a pack of hepsters and assorted other disembodied souls. I’d volunteered to connect to the network of living minds that anchored Comatown to the real world, which meant I could call Mesmer at will. I wasn’t doing it very often anymore. The guy had tried his best, but his telepathic powers hadn’t been any more effective than my connection to her.

I couldn’t get into the novel, so I absently checked the news. The new ‘era of cooperation and harmony’ that assorted talking heads had assured us would follow the impromptu alliance against the Genocide hadn’t materialized. Instead, the Iron Tsar and the Dragon Emperor had made a bunch of unreasonable demands as a reward for their help. Considering neither of those assholes had deigned to keep fighting the Genocide as soon as things got tough, that took a lot of balls. The rest of the world told them to take a flying fucking leap, although in somewhat kinder terms. There’d been border clashes, new trade embargoes, and plenty of unpleasantness to go around afterwards.

Other than that, things were relatively quiet. There were reports of new Neos showing up, however, which meant that Christine’s shutdown of the Source hadn’t lasted. One crazy Type Three in Australia had trashed Sidney; it had taken the entire Pacific contingent of the Legion to put him down, and they’d almost called me and John back into active duty. We both would have gone, of course, if they’d really needed us.

That’s what Christine would have wanted.

By the time I was done with the news and the comic strips, it was lunch time. I went to grab something from the vending machines. Today’s menu consisted of three bags of potato chips and a dozen candy bars; some of the vending machines actually had some fairly edible self-heating dishes, but I’d gotten bored with them and gone back to junk food. As I was punching numbers and daring the machine to leave one of my selections hanging – the one time that’d happened I’d ended up paying for a new machine after I worked off my frustrations on the old one – the long-awaited moment finally happened.

The potato chip bags dropped to the floor. I reached out with every bit of mental strength I could muster, and the world shifted. I was in Dreamland yet again: this particular version was a big expanse of mist-filled whiteness.

And there she was.

Something let go inside my chest. I must admit, I came dangerously close to bursting into tears, even without eyes.

Except that the smile I saw in her face froze me cold.

That, and the way she was dressed. She was wearing this barely-there outfit that I recognized as the costume of a Chicago Guardian named Annie Arclight. Christine wouldn’t be caught dead wearing that.

“Fuck.”

“Heya, Mark. How’s it hanging, baby?” Dark Christine said.

“What the fuck is this?” I said, my initial burst of happiness fading into a cold rage with more than a little terror mixed in.

“What, no welcome home speech? No hugs, no kisses? No fuckee-suckee?” Christine punctuated the words with a few pelvic thrusts. 

“You’re not her.”

“Are you sure? Maybe all the stress pushed me over the edge and I went Dark Side. Oh, the humanity, I’m so eeeevil now. Saving the world was just too much, oh woe is me, yadda yadda.”

“You’re the bitch from that alternate universe,” I said, sounding a lot more sure than I felt. Either way, in about five seconds I was going to do my level best to kill her.

“You’re not as dumb as you look, Marky-Mark. And before you try to get all medieval on my ass, consider that fighting me in Dreamland isn’t the best idea. You’d lose pretty damn badly.”

“Better dead than listening to a crazy bitch,” I said. “Trust me, I’m done shopping at the crazy bitch department.”

“Does your Christine know you use such demeaning words to refer to women? Very misogynistic, Marky.”

“What the fuck do you want?”

“Chrissy and I had a little disagreement while she was on her mental walkabout. I decided to cut her off at the pass, so to speak, and maybe borrow her body and see how the other half lives. My reality has gotten way boring lately. I figure she and my Mark can have some fun while I have some fun with you. Reality swapping, as it were.”

“You’ll have to go through me to get to her.”

“Not a problem. After I get rid of you, I’ll convince Dear John Clarke that his beloved is back, and he should be a lot easier to fool than you. Might make for a nice change of pace, actually; in my world, I never fucked him, I just killed him, unlike your Christine, who got to ride Ultimate’s dick while you were being tortured in Hell. Don’t you feel the teeniest bit betrayed by that?”

Wow. A gleefully evil chatterbox. And I’d thought Hell had been bad.

I didn’t reply. I was too busy getting ready for a likely futile last stand.

“Get away from him, YOU BITCH!”

Dark Christine had time to look surprised before she popped out of existence like a punctured balloon.

She was replaced by a girl in a pink sweater and jeans and a sweet cheerful smile.

I woke up. I was lying on the floor next to the vending machines, surrounded by discarded junk food. I rushed to her room.

She was awake, hugging it out with John Clarke, both of them sobbing uncontrollably.

What the hell. I joined them in the hugging, and the crying, too glad to see her again to worry about the future.

Johannesburg, South Africa, March 2, 2014

The big news of the day was Christine Dark’s awakening. The good people of Johannesburg were tossing a city-wide party in celebration. The simpering little bitch was surprising popular worldwide, despite her steadfast refusal to show skin. There was no accounting for taste, Daedalus Smith thought as he walked towards the meeting place.

Coming back had been insanely risky, but the crew of the intrepid ship
Puta Madre
had essentially mutinied before they’d cleared the Oort Cloud. News of the Genocide’s defeat had reached them much too soon. He cursed his inability to get his FTL engine to work. Unfortunately, the prototype he’d managed to build had a few glitches. It would move objects at superluminal speeds, but whenever said objects reentered normal space, a significant percentage of their mass was converted into energy. That made for a nifty weapon system but not a viable mode of transportation. He’d work out the kinks eventually, but for the time being his ship had been crawling away at a mere half a percent of c when the good news arrived.

The crew insisted on coming back for one final supply run. He couldn’t blame them: the
Puta Madre
had sailed off with a minimum of cargo, just enough to keep the humans on board alive for the estimated nineteen-month cruise; Daedalus and the rest of the Neos on the ship would end up sucking vacuum for eight of those months, which was survivable but nobody’s idea of fun. So after a nasty argument where he’d almost lost control of the ship, Daedalus had agreed to return to Earth and properly outfit the vessel. He’d even agreed to let a handful of crewmembers, who’d decided the trip was no longer a good idea, come back with him. Said crewmembers were now buried in concrete under the foundation of a new building in the city; he wasn’t going to leave behind anybody who could blab about his plans.

He’d left the
Madre
out in the asteroid belt, hidden behind some nifty stealth systems, and headed back in an ordinary shuttle that had attracted little attention; space traffic was heavier than ever, between the rebuilding and the new construction following the Genocide War. The Wannabe Genocide War, that is, Daedalus thought sourly. The big alien threat had turned out to be a fizzle. His fucking precogs had fumbled the ball. All because of the girl, of course. She was the eternal wild card. Well, she was welcome to this planet.

For the last few weeks, he’d been making quiet purchases of assorted consumables in the international black market. This buy would be the last. Daedalus had sent the Dreamer ahead to start off negotiations, and now it was his turn to show up, arrange a quick transfer of funds, load up the shuttle, and blow this Popsicle stand once and for all. He’d thought about taking the time to shut down a couple of contingency plans that were no longer necessary, but he’d spent too much time on Earth already. It was time to get while the getting was good.

He was meeting the Dreamer and the sellers in a nondescript warehouse in one of the iffy parts of Johannesburg. The building was a three-story structure that had seen better days and thus could be rented out and loaded with cargo without anybody asking too many questions. Daedalus let himself in and took the stairs to the second floor.

He opened the door to the office. The smell of death hit him at the same time he saw a pair of unmoving legs protruding from behind the reception desk. That had to be Dietrich, which meant Dietrich was dead, which meant…

Something thin and sharp wrapped itself around his neck, past his amulet’s shields, held by somebody who’d seemingly materialized out of thin air behind him. “Move and you’re dead,” Chastity Baal hissed in his ear.

“Chaz?”

“I told you not to call me Chaz.”

“Are you here to arrest me?” From the wire garrote around his neck, he knew the answer to that question already, but it didn’t hurt to ask.

“You’d get the death penalty, but you’re too slippery and you’ve got too many friends in high places, know about too many skeletons in other people’s closets,” she said. “You might just get away and start trouble all over again. Better that you disappear without a trace. You really should have tried to be the person I knew you could have been, Daedalus. I’m sorry.”

“Listen…” He had to make her understand. Everything he’d done, he’d done for the world. Hell, he’d even helped save it by derailing the Humanity Foundation’s bomb plot. He was one of the good guys! The world needed him!

The pressure around his neck turned into a brutal pull before he could say any of it. He had time to feel the thin wire cutting through flesh and bone.

The world needs
–

Freedom Island, Caribbean Sea, March 3, 2014

She knocked on the door of my new place, pointedly not using our mental connection to say hi, even though I could feel her presence with my mind. I was pretty sure that wasn’t a good sign.

“Come in.”

Christine came into the apartment the dickheads at Legion Housing had assigned me, really more like a glorified walk-in closet converted into a studio apartment. I didn’t care. There was only room for a bed and a desk. I was sitting by the desk. I didn’t get up, didn’t walk up to her, didn’t hold her in my arms.

“Mark..?”

“I know. I can feel it. You’ve made your choice, and now you’re here to let me down easy, right?”

The look on her face and the wrenching pain in her soul confirmed my fears. “Mark…”

“It’s okay. I understand. There’s this old movie, starring Humphrey Bogart. Not sure if you had it in your world,” I started to say.

Christine cut me off. “
Casablanca
? You’re going to quote
Casablanca
to me?”

I nodded. “’You’re the thing that keeps him going,’” I quoted, pushing that Bogart accent hard. “He needs you, swcheetheart.” I took a deep breath and put my cards on the table. “That’s what it boils down to, isn’t it? You can help keep the old guy sane, and the world needs Ultimate more than it needs Face-Off.”

“It’s more than that,” she said. She was tired and wrung out. I felt bad for her, although I felt worse for me.

“Yeah. You like him.”

“I feel for him. I love him, okay? If I turn my back on him, I don’t know what will happen to him,” she said.

“Well, there you go.”

Her eyes were bright with anger now. Maybe she expected me to fight harder for her. “Well,” she said. “There I go.”

She went.

I stared at the walls for a while. It was going to be okay. I’d get over her. You can get over anything. And if I kept telling myself that, I might even believe it one day.

I was so busy wallowing I didn’t hear the door open again, didn’t notice she’d come back until I saw her standing over me, tears running down her face.

“You know what?” she said. “I fucking hated
Casablanca
.”

And now she was holding me, kissing me. I made a face and kissed her back. I couldn’t send her away a second time. Fuck what the world needed. Fuck Ultimate.

“Can’t do it,” she said between kisses. “I’ll talk to John. I can’t lose you again, Mark.”

I didn’t say anything, just held her and kissed her. Tasting her tears felt like coming home.

Happy endings are bullshit.

But this was a damn good start.