New Olympus Saga (Book 4): The Ragnarok Alternative (22 page)

Freedom Island, Caribbean Sea, July 27, 2014

Another day, another Council meeting.

If Ali had known just how much bureaucratic crap went into being a Councilor, she’d have declined the honor. Well, she probably wouldn’t have, under the circumstances, but she’d have been a lot grumpier about it.

“Next item: the Intelligence Sector has uncovered elevated levels of chatter among human supremacist groups, following the New York City incident,” Adam said. “There seem to be an increased effort to recruit new members, concentrated mainly in North America. Even more worrisome is the news that three federal undercover agents are missing and presumed dead, apparently after their true identities were discovered. Legion assistance has been unofficially requested.”

“Sounds like a job for Chastity Baal,” Ali said.

“It so happens Miss Baal is on the Island on leave, after helping Interpol deal with Count Sangre in Bucharest.”

Everyone grimaced at that. That particular situation had been gruesome and had resulted in a black eye for both the Legion and Interpol. Chastity had ended up solving that case mostly on her own, against near-impossible odds. Her usual kind of caper, in other words.

“I hate to cut her leave short, but she’s very good at ferreting out conspiracies.”

“I’m meeting with her for lunch after this meeting,” Adam said. “I’ll broach the subject to her. Unless anyone has an objection.”

Nobody did.

“Moving on. There was Neo emergence in Argentina, a possible Type Four with uncontrollable powers. The event happened in a cattle ranch and ended with the unfortunate Neolympian destroying himself in a massive energy release. Luckily, most there were no fatalities beyond the parahuman himself and several hundred heads of cattle.”

“Poor bastard,” Ali said.

“Poor us,” Fox Ghost said. “If that had happened in a city…”

He had a point. Ali glanced at the power level estimations on one of the wall screens in the meeting room. Yeah, something in the order of a ten kilotons, mostly focused on a narrow beam that had blasted upwards into empty space. If that much power had been released in an actual explosion…

“Dodged a big bullet there,” she said.

“Too many bullets to dodge,” General Xu added. “We’re averaging one major emergence a month, many of them uncontrolled. Sooner or later, we are going to lose a major population center. As it is, over five thousand casualties have been linked to these new parahumans.”

“I assure you, General, that we are working on preventing the Source from continuing to empower people at random.”

“Christine Dark is spending most of her time tending to Janus and Ultimate,” the Chinese hero countered. “I hardly call that ‘working on it.’”

“She is working on both situations,” Adam said. Ali marveled at the guy’s even-temperedness. That’s why he was the Executive Officer more often than not. “The danger posed by an out-of-control Ultimate, or Janus, or even worse, both of them, is at least as great as any uncontrolled superpower manifestation, is it not?”

Even Xu couldn’t disagree with that.

The rest of the meeting was relatively uneventful. As in mind-numbingly boring. At the end, Ali waited to talk to Adam.

“Mind if I join you and Chastity?”

She really wanted Ms. Baal on the case, and maybe she could help talk her into it.

* * *

She looks like shit
.

That was Ali’s first impression as she and the good doctor sat down with the secret agent at their reserved table at La Casa Del Rey. From the way Chastity was neatly but steadily working through the bread basket on the table, she was still a few meals behind. As a Type One Neo – recently demoted in power level – Chastity still gained some actual nourishment from food consumption, and her recent ordeal, which had taken her from the meaner streets of Bucharest to a harrowing battle in a remote region of the Carpathians, had taken a toll on her. The secret agent was downright skinny, and her healing factor had clearly been overloaded.

But her physical appearance only told part of the story. The haunted look on Chastity’s eyes as she greeted them indicated something was bothering her very badly. By all accounts the Bucharest caper was over, the villain vanquished, all victims rescued or at least avenged. Something else was going on.

The ex-criminal didn’t waste much time. As soon as the waiter had taken their order, she got right down to business.

“I killed Daedalus Smith five months ago.”

“Daedalus? The same guy we just took down last week?” Ali said.

Chastity nodded. “Which is why I’m concerned. I can only think of one way he could have cheated death.”

“The Munnin Device,” Adam said, a shocked expression in his face. “Or more properly, the Hades-Slaughter Resurrection Engine. But let’s not jump to conclusions. Let’s start with the facts. Why didn’t you report Smith’s death, Ms. Baal?”

“Because the Legion does not generally condone assassinations.”

“I see,” Adam said.

Ali nodded in understanding. Dangerous Neos were often killed on sight unless they surrendered in an obvious, unquestionable way, and sometimes even if they did, especially when they were somewhere out of sight. When you dealt with people who had killed thousands or even millions of victims, and were very difficult to keep confined for even short periods of time, there was only one way to ensure they couldn’t endanger more innocent lives. If Ali had come across Daedalus Smith, in or out of his Myrmidon armor, she would probably have put him down like the mad dog he was. But there would have been consequences. John Clark had done the same to Hiram Hades, killing the mad scientists after he no longer posed an immediate threat, and that had almost gotten him expelled from the Legion. Ali could understand why Chastity had hidden her actions from the Legion.

“And you are sure the man you terminated was Daedalus Smith and not some impostor or decoy?”

“I ran all the pertinent DNA tests myself.” She took a breath before continuing. “I still have his head in cold storage. I kept it in case the world needed to know he was truly dead.”

“That… That will be helpful to determine what happened, I suppose,” Adam said. “I can’t say I approve of your actions, but, well, I would like to say that I approve of your actions, except for the secrecy part. You do realize we’ve spent a great deal of time and money chasing after a dead man.”

“Except he wasn’t dead after all,” Ali pointed out.

“In any case, if Daedalus was cloned and had his memories downloaded, we might be able to spot some telltale markers in his remains.”

There hadn’t been much left of Daedalus; a couple of pounds’ worth of tissue and bone had been fished out of the water and used to positively identify him. Nobody had bothered to test for signs of cloning, but that could be easily remedied – the speeded up growth process involved in cloning an adult copy of the original left some identifiable biological footprints.

“I only heard about Daedalus’ death when I returned to civilization the day before yesterday,” Chastity continued. “Which is why I came here as soon as I could. If Daedalus came back from the dead once, he could do it again. And worse…”

“So could the other Christine Dark. The one who seduced John and nearly turned him into a monster.”

“Yes. Either of them represents a major threat.”

“This is the kind of thing Buck Comics will eat up,” Ali commented. In the real world, Neos didn’t generally come back from the dead.

“Except, unlike the comics, a happy ending is far from guaranteed,” Adam said.

Chicago, Illinois, July 29, 2014

Grigorij ‘Grisha’ Veselov tried not to get his hopes up.

Not too long ago, he had enjoyed the life of a high-status boss in the Russian Mafiya, a murderous criminal network that engaged in a number of illegal activities and also provided services for the hated and feared Dominion of the Ukraine. Grisha’s life of crime had been enjoyable enough: there’d been plenty of money, women, and, more importantly, power. People feared him, and those foolish or ignorant enough to cross him came to bad ends. Under the leadership of the Neolympian known simply as Vladimir, Grisha had been someone important, with a name those in the know respected.

Everything had collapsed during a disastrous attempt at capturing the Chicago vigilante known as the Lurker. At the end of that mess, Grisha’s boss, and most of his friends and associates, had ended up in the morgue, many of them so thoroughly dismembered that identifying their corpses had proven rather difficult. Grisha had spent several months on the run, losing most of his money and all his power along the way. The Mafiya had been all but destroyed, both in Chicago and New York. Elsewhere, neither Russians, Ukrainians or even Belarussians wanted to have anything to do with him, except to add his name to the list of the dead. The stink of failure clung to him, and he’d narrowly escaped two assassination attempts already. He’d once watched a Japanese movie about the
ronin
, masterless warriors who had nowhere to go. Well, he was
ronin
now, and every man’s hand was turned against him.

But now someone was gathering men such as himself. The rumors among his few remaining underworld contacts were incredible: a new organization was being formed, and it promised not only money, but power, power like only Neolympians enjoyed.

Such things were not impossible. In Imperial China, normal men were granted superpowers by its ruler, or so it was said. The Chinese certainly had more than their share of Neos. Maybe this new gang was a front for the Chimps. Grisha doubted that, however: the Chinese hated all other races.

He didn’t care who it was. At this point, Grisha would work for anybody who would have him, even the Devil himself.

It had taken him most of his money to bribe his way into this meeting, held in an underground tunnel that looked like it hadn’t seen use in quite some time, connected to the surface through an abandoned factory. Despite the directions he had been given, it took him a good while to find the entrance and be confronted by its single guardian.

Neo
, he thought when he got a good look at the tall figure that stepped out of the shadows to confront him. It had to be. The pale man, clad in a tight leather uniform that appeared to be embedded into his skin in some places, had paper-white skin, whiter even than the feared Ukrainian agent known as Archangel. His clean-shaved head was studded with rows of sharp metal points, each of them about the size of an icepick. They were embedded in the freak’s skull, running all the way from the back of his head to his cheeks and nose. Nothing human could have survived that cosmetic procedure.

“Abandon all hope,” the spike-headed apparition said in a deep, threatening voice.

“What?”

“Just fuckin’ with ya, hombre. The boss, she expects a particular demeanor from her minions. Best get used to it.”

“She, you say? A woman?”

“No misogynists allowed, either. You got a problem working for a broad? She prefers to be called Mistress, by the way.”

“No. No problems.”

“Good. Then enter freely, and of your own free will, and don’t forget to say hi to the children of the night.” The pale freak cackled loudly and madly as he opened the door. A staircase led down into the darkness.

Grisha hesitated for a moment, but he’d come too far, and he truly had nowhere else to go. If this was damnation, he’d make the most of it.

Down he went, as if into a rabbit hole.

* * *

Grisha walked through what could have been a mining passageway; the remnants of a rail line nearly tripped him as he stepped between them, guided only by a series of weak lightbulbs someone had strung along the walls. He followed the lights as well as the distant noise of mad, maniacal laughter somewhere ahead of him. Only the weight of his Ukrainian holdout blaster in its shoulder holster gave him a measure of comfort.

The laughter grew louder and more distinct as he approached. Without warning, a shriek of agony and terror drowned out all other sounds. Grisha had heard screams like that before; he’d made people scream like that before. Nobody who made those kinds of noises was long for this world.

You could be next.

Nichevo
. He was as good as dead in any case. Maybe in a month, a year at most, his former associates would get him, or the cops, or the fucking Neos. In any case, he had a feeling that if he turned around he wouldn’t make it back to the entrance. He could feel unseen watchers following him, hidden in the shadows. He kept going.

A section of tunnel had been turned into a campsite of sorts, with more lights hung above it, more than enough to show the spectacle awaiting him.

Tables and chairs were arranged in a rough circle in the chamber, surrounding a taller seat that loomed like a throne over the gathering. There were strange symbols painted on the walls and ceilings, bizarre sigils that hurt Grisha’s eyes if he looked at them for more than a few seconds. Ten, maybe fifteen people were sitting around the tables, a few of them standing or capering on top of them. Half a dozen of them weren’t people, though. Like the guardian at the door, they were freaks. Worse than freaks: monsters. In the weak light, the scene reminded him of the work of a Dutch painter, Hieronymus Bosch. Bosch had been fond of depicting scenes from Hell.

There was a man with the head of a wolf and oversized limbs; another made to resemble the Frankenstein monster from the old black-and-white movies. A tall man, his face hidden by a bloody hockey mask, stood grimly to one side of the gathering, a long machete protruding from the stump at the end of his right arm. A grotesquely obese woman smiled at Grisha as he approached, displaying multiple rows of shark-like teeth.

The normal human beings in the chamber had the look of men who’d done hard things to survive. He recognized a few of them: a former button-man from an Italian crime family, a member of one of the nastier Southie gangs, and an Irish thug with a bad reputation even among his fellow criminals.

All those killers looked like scared children in the company of the bogeymen in the gathering. They glanced at him briefly, but most of their attention was on the corpse of one of their own. The dead body had been decapitated.  Did he try to run, or say the wrong thing? Whatever he’d done, he’d paid for it.

Sitting on her throne, a woman presided over the carnival of the damned. She was wearing a black latex bodysuit, and half of her face was hidden behind a silver mask shaped into a wide-eyed, grinning expression. The uncovered half was pale, her single blue-gray eye sparkling with mad humor, her grin a match for the half-mask’s.

“A new contestant has arrived,” the woman said. “Are you here to join us? To check your humanity at the door? To be all that you can be, and a little bit more?”

“Yes,” Grisha said without hesitation. He strongly suspected that the nearby corpse had been less enthusiastic in his response.

A… thing covered in rubbery skin crawled out from beneath the throne. It opened its mouth, and a set of sharp mandibles attached to a tongue-like limb sprang out and snapped at Grisha, spraying him with spittle that burned like battery acid. He forced himself to remain still, ignoring the chemical burns, his eyes fixed on the woman.

“This is Godfrey,” she said, casually petting the monster. “I kinda knocked out his teeth the first time we met, so I made him a new set. He helped me set things up, so he got to be my first experiment as his reward. Didn’t turn out as well as I hoped, but he’s good for a laugh. I promise you I’ve gotten much better at improving my minions. You still in, Russkie?”

He tried to speak, found his throat was too dry, and nodded instead.

“Good. There will be a round of questions, followed by a duel to the death, followed by cake. If you’re alive by the time cake is served, you get to be one of my minions, and will be granted some kewl powerz and other valuable prizes. Sound good?”

“Yes,” he managed to say.

The word sounded like a death sentence.

“Awesome. Welcome to the new and improved Army of Darkness.

“Hail to the Queen, baby!”