The Indestructibles (Book 4): Like A Comet (9 page)

Chapter
13:

Insignificant

When he and Dude left Earth, Billy
thought the journey would be an adventure, flying past planets, dodging meteors,
swooping in to check out comets as they passed by.

      Turns out, outer space is a vacuum
and there's not a lot to see. They almost wiped out a news network's satellite,
sure, and Dude had, reluctantly, let Billy take a low-altitude flyby across the
surface of the moon, but after that, Billy thought, there wasn't much more than
darkness and stars.

      It didn't help that Dude's powers
kept Billy entirely insulated, too. Not that he was complaining—he'd have died
instantly, of course—but he didn't feel any differently than he did on Earth,
surrounded by the pale protective shielding that guarded him from injury
planetside.

      On the more exciting front, Dude
was able to help them move far faster outside of Earth's atmosphere than he was
within it. He explained it to Billy, or at least attempted to, but Billy tuned
him out and just kept asking if he could call it hyperspace.

      It's just so empty out here, Dude,
Billy thought.

     
That's why your people call it
space, and not stuff,
Dude said.

      Did you just sass me? Billy
thought.

     
It's annoying when someone else
does it, isn't it,
Dude said.

      Billy's disappointment at not
seeing Mars—he had asked Dude specifically to find a way for them to fly by the
red planet, and the alien refused—was only matched by finding out the Solar
System's asteroid belt was mostly empty.

      Let me know when we're getting
close to the asteroid belt, Billy asked. I'll take out my iPhone and snap a few
pictures.

     
We're already in it,
Dude
said.
We're passing through right now.

      There are no asteroids, Billy
thought.

     
It's mostly empty. Your Earth
fiction paints an inaccurate—   

      We've flown out past Mars, Billy
said. We're further than any human being has ever flown before. And you're
telling me there's no asteroids in the asteroid belt?

     
Perhaps you should listen to
Emily more,
Dude said
. We're not far from Ceres if you'd like to see the
biggest object in the belt…

      No, never mind, Billy thought.
This whole trip is ruined for me.

      Although if Billy were being
honest, the trip itself was ruining the journey for him. Infinitely far from
home and helpless, he wondered if this was what drowning felt like.

      I ever tell you about the time I
almost drowned? Billy thought.

     
Several times,
Dude said.

      Billy's family didn't get to the
ocean much. They worked too often, spent too much time hammering out an existence
to get to the shore. But once, when he was young, they packed up the family car
and headed to the beach. Billy, with the bravery that teeters on stupidity all
children have, dove into the water, unaware and unfamiliar with how dangerous
an undertow can be. He resurfaced far from where he should have been, his back
to the shoreline, looking out into the blue and black emptiness of the sea.

      And for a split second, he felt
completely adrift. Nothing but sky and ocean and the feeling of currents
hovering around his ankles. Young Billy Case at the end of the world.

      His dad found him, scooped him up
in strong arms and carried him to shore, scolding him for wandering off,
repeating the word undertow over and over again. Billy kept looking over his
father's shoulder, though, at the void, the emptiness beyond him, as if he
might tip forward and disappear forever.

      Space travel, Billy thought, more
to himself than to Dude, is a thousand times worse than that.

      His journey with Dude became a
cycle of talking too much—asking questions about astronomy and space travel or
just recycling old stories Dude had already heard a thousand times before—and
long periods of silence, where human and alien said nothing at all, flying into
the black, the infinite sensation of emptiness overwhelming and cold. Time felt
out of sorts, something Dude explained had to do with moving as fast as they
were.

      Y'know, Dude, Billy thought,
finally. The least we can do is slow down long enough to let me see one planet.
I may not survive this. Think it'd be okay if I get a look at one of 'em before
it's all over?

      The stars stopped moving, and
Billy felt that eerie forward momentum he'd been experiencing cease. Suddenly
he was adrift in space, weightless, directionless, staring out into a blanket
of stars.

      He turned his head, and Saturn
rose to great him.

      The gas giant overwhelmed his
vision, a vast circle of cream and gold. The plant's infamous rings were like
grooves on the surface of a vinyl record, hypnotic lines spinning soundlessly
before them. Dude had brought them to a stop close to the moon Titan, which
hung in space like a lonely globe, cast in silhouette by the Sun.

      Billy felt his throat swell. His
heart skipped a beat.

      This is the most amazing thing I'll
ever see in my entire life, Billy thought.

     
You'd be surprised how many
amazing things you'll see, Billy Case,
Dude said.

      I'm some kid from the City who
never even saw stars properly until last week, Billy thought. And now I'm
looking at Saturn and it feels so close I could almost reach out and touch it.

     
Are you alright?
Dude
asked.

      Not even a little bit, Billy said.
I am not okay at all. I feel…

     
Insignificant
, Dude
suggested.

      I feel really tiny and meaningless,
Billy thought.

     
That's what… never mind,
Dude said.
You are not meaningless. You are going to save your world.

      Yeah, Billy thought. We'll see how
that goes.

      Billy could sense a change in Dude's
demeanor as well. Maybe he was feeling the same sense of astonishment. Maybe he
was feeling nostalgic. Billy knew now that Dude had come from the stars, and
that he'd been on Earth a long time. Maybe he used to see things like this all
the time. Perhaps, under the shadow of all those big, pointless buildings, Dude
had forgotten what it was like to be here, looking out onto something too
mighty to feel real.

      And then both human and alien
jerked out of their melancholic reveries as they saw a shadow creep along the
far edge of the planet.

      Dude, is that . . . ? Billy
thought.

     
Be cautious, Billy Case,
Dude said.

      They flew in closer, using the
shadow of Titan to hide their blue-white energy signature. Billy felt his
vision sharpen in that superhuman way his Straylight powers allowed. This wasn't
a single shadow they'd seen moving past Saturn. These were many shadows. Ships.
Long, ugly ships, casting irregular silhouettes, barbed and crooked and
irrational in their forms.

      Billy let himself drift away from
the moon, not flying so much as floating on his own momentum, watching the
armada. And that was truly what it was, a fleet of warships, aggressive
machines, moving surely toward Earth.

      They don't look like metal, Dude,
Billy thought. They look like muscle and shell. They look alive.

     
The Nemesis fleet is alive, Billy
Case,
Dude said.
Their ships are their weapons of war, and they are
their children. Their armada is a living, moving hive.

      Billy tried to count the ships,
but the darkness and the tight formation they traveled in made it impossible.
They were different sizes—huge warships and little scouts, big-bellied carriers
and others that didn't look like ships at all.

      We have to do something, Dude,
Billy thought.

      We will. We'll get home and
prepare. There is nothing you can do alone here. Not against the entire fleet.

      Billy felt a rage building up
inside him, and fear. He knew Dude was right.

      Okay, Billy thought. How can we do
this without being spotted?

     
I'm plotting a trajectory now,
Dude
said.
If we use the sun to mask our escape…

      With horrific silence, one of the
small, jet fighter-like appendages of the fleet turned slowly toward them.

      Don't see us don't see us don't
see us, Billy started chanting in his head.

      The craft started moving toward
them. Two others peeled off the fleet as well, like wasps.

      What do we do, Dude? Billy
thought, panic rising in his interior dialogue.

     
We run
, Dude said.

Chapter
14:

The
angriest flowers

in
the world

Titus hated flying.

He'd always hated flying, and the fact
that the Indestructibles home base was, basically, a floating block of
non-aerodynamic flying saucer didn't help with things. Neither did the frequent
trips they took on the Tower's collection of hover-bikes, open-aired flying
machines he and Kate had to use to get around when Emily wasn't there to
transport them up to the floating headquarters.

      So when Kate showed him the
vehicle she and Emily found that would get them to California and back without
help from one of their more aerial teammates, Titus felt waves of nausea crash
over him.

      "I'm not flying in that,"
he said.

      "Yes, you are," Kate
said, tapping a button and opening the craft up. It was about the size of a
large car, and looked like something out of an old sci-fi pulp fiction
story—silver metal, not quite streamlined enough to look like it should fly, a
bubbled cockpit with seating for two side by side, and a third fold-down seat
behind those. The domed glass over the cockpit rose up on hinges facing forward
to allow them to climb inside onto oddly out-of-date cream-colored pleather
seats.

      Kate slid comfortably behind what
was clearly the pilot's seat. In full Dancer uniform, she wore a pair of
sun-canceling goggles she explained would cut down on glare as they flew.

      "Do you know how to fly this
thing?" Titus said.

      "Just get in," Kate
said.

      Titus sat down in the copilot's
seat, buckled himself in, and took a deep breath as the canopy closed.

      "You're not going to keep
your eyes closed the entire flight, are you?" Kate said.

      "Maybe," the werewolf
replied.

* * *

      Kate never told anyone, but she
loved to fly.

      Her father had been a hobbyist
pilot, renting time in small aircraft on the weekends. On those rare days when
she wasn't practicing or rehearsing, he'd take her flying with him, letting her
take control of the craft for a little while, teaching her about all the
instruments. The older she got, the harder it became to recall her father's
voice, but she remembered his hands on hers as they drifted over the landscape
and the sense of freedom and joy her father felt when they left the ground.

      She missed him. That kind of
sadness rarely weighed her down—Kate was nothing if not talented at pushing
emotions to the back of her mind—but here, in this cockpit, watching clouds
drift lazily below them, she missed her father, and her mother. She longed for
the times of doing joyful things.

      The Tower was full of old gadgets
and machinery none of which the Indestructibles fully understood. Many of these
devices were left ignored for the most part—better to not push buttons on alien
technology if you don't know what that button did—but Kate and Emily had
stumbled across this vehicle months before in storage in the hanger bay the
team made frequent us of, under a dusty gold tarp.

      Late at night, Kate had talked with
Neal, asking the AI, what he knew about it, how it worked, what it was fueled
by, and whether she could use it. The AI was a fount of background information,
explaining how it had been acquired by one of Doc's teammates early on and used
sporadically over the years. With no weapon systems and only room for a few
riders, the old team hadn't needed it much, but Henry Winter stored it away
carefully just in case.  

      So Kate took it out for test
flights when no one was in the Tower. The only one who ever caught her was
Emily, who seemed, the way Emily always does, to understand what Kate was
doing. She kept this all to herself, though she did insist to Kate that they
name the aircraft the Indestructicar. Emily found this profoundly funny. Kate
never got the joke.

      Faster than a conventional
airplane, the miniature jet carried Kate and a very stressed out werewolf
across the country in a few hours, technology that hadn't been invented yet in
this timeline allowing the craft to remain invisible to radar. Kate leaned
back, enjoying the sense of weightlessness, the quiet hiss of the machine's
propulsion systems, and wished her companion simply could do the same.

      "You know, if you fell out of
the sky, you'd still heal," Kate said.

      Titus looked at her, visibly
confused.

      "I'm not worried about
hitting the ground, I'm worried about the fall itself. That's a lot of time to
think about everything," Titus said.

      Kate's mouth quirked into a small
smile. You and I, she thought, don't need a fall from the sky in order to think
about things too much.

      She looked over the latest
incarnation of Titus's outfit. He's finally outgrown the hooded sweatshirt he
had relied on for so long, though the new look—an army green jacket with a
soft, oversized hood, a baggy tank top beneath it revealing his too-thin
collarbone and chest, loose-fitting cargo pants that would stretch to fit over
his werewolf form if he needed to transform—still didn't look particularly
heroic.

      "You look like a hobo,"
Kate said.

      "You look like a ninja,"
Titus said. "Are you sure you should take your eyes off the sky?"

      "What am I going to crash
into?" Kate said, knowing full well it would upset him.

      It was hard to miss the Research
Institute for Extra-Terrestrial Information from the sky. The headquarters itself
was relatively non-descript, a small brick and glass building the likes of
which you see at every office park in the country. But the field of satellite
dishes behind the building, including one wider in diameter than the building
itself, was a site to be seen. Kate thought they looked like a field of the
angriest flowers in the world.

      She landed the aircraft, which
could set down vertically like a helicopter, in a pair of empty parking spaces
in the RIETI lot. Titus sighed heavily when the landing gear connected with the
pavement.

      "I don't understand you,"
Kate said. "We've already traveled through time. This, on the other hand,
is just flying."

      "You're lecturing me about
neuroses?" Titus said.

      Kate shot him the dirtiest look
she'd ever given him.

      Titus blanched. "Sorry. I'm
snippy. It's the anxiety. Sorry."

      She popped the cockpit and stepped
outside. Titus followed, trying to catch up.

      They entered the lobby and the
receptionist, a strangely photogenic young man wearing a checkered shirt, knit tie
and dark glasses, looked up.

      "Are you kidding me?" he
said.

      "We're here to see Lester
Rice-Bell," Kate said.

      "We have an appointment,"
Titus said. Kate glanced at him. Titus shrugged. "We do."

      The receptionist checked a
calendar on his desk and shook his head in surprise.

      "I… you do. Okay," he
said. "Take the elevator to the third floor. I'll let him know you're on
the way up."

      Titus and Kate stepped on the
elevator, the same way normal people who are not dressed for superhero combat
do. Titus hit the button for the third floor. They looked at each other again.

      "When did normal stuff get
weirder than weird stuff?" Titus asked.

      "About two years ago,"
Kate said. The elevator dinged and they stepped off to find Lester Rice-Bell,
president of RIETI, waiting for them at the door.

      "I have to admit, I never
thought I'd have two superheroes show up at my door," the man said. He had
a round, friendly face, a body that wasn't so much overweight as soft from
inactivity, fair hair cut expensively to hide its thinness on the top of his
scalp. He shook Kate's hand first, then Titus's.

      Rice-Bell led them into a
pleasantly furnished but inexpensive office. Everything about it said well-used
and well-loved. Kate soaked in the details. The furniture looked second-hand,
or brought from home. The books on the shelves were not just decorative, but
read, multiple times. A bookshelf along one wall had framed pictures of what
appeared to be historical members of the RIETI staff.

      Rice-Bell caught her looking at
the photos.

      "Some of my predecessors,"
he said. "We're sentimental. The world's become so strange since they
founded RIETI back in the 1950's. I sometimes envy their innocence."

      He invited them to sit down. Titus
accepted, but Kate continued to wander the office, reading the spines on books
and picking up photos to examine them in closer detail.

      "Thanks for meeting with us,"
Titus said. "We're looking into, um, unusual signals being sent into
space."

      Rice-Bell raised an eyebrow.

      "You can't just say something
like that to someone who has spent his entire career trying to talk with aliens
and then not give me a little bit of detail," he said.

      Titus fidgeted a bit in his chair,
crossing and uncrossing his legs as if trying to figure out how an adult sits.

      "Later? After we've had a
chance to follow up on all our leads," Titus said. "This may seem
like a strange question but… well we know you've been sending out… friendly
messages to space for a long time."

      "Since right after World War
II, yes," Rice-Bell said. "I know. We sound like quacks. But our
philosophy is: it's a really self-centered belief to think we're the only ones
out there isn't it? There has to be someone else out there, staring up at the
sky, wondering if they're alone in the universe."

      "So you send out radio
signals," Titus said.

      "Radio's the wrong term, but
yes," Rice-Bell said. "We send out information about ourselves. Our
biology. What we breathe. How we think. We send music. Literature. Images. We
like to send classical paintings."

      "Why bother?" Kate said
from across the room. "All these years. Why keep doing it?"

      "Because maybe in my lifetime
we'll make contact," he said.

      "And what if you don't like
who answers back?" Kate said.

      Rice-Bell's face darkened.

      "Why do you say that,"
he said. "Is there something…"

      "I'm just speaking
hypothetically," Kate said. "What's the point in sending out all this
information if at best they may ignore it, or at worse they may use it against
us?"

      Titus ran a hand nervously through
his hair. "Mr. Rice-Bell," he said.

      "Please. Just Lester."

      "Lester, has anything strange
been happening here lately?" Titus said.

      "You're in a building
dedicated to finding extra-terrestrial life, son," Rice-Bell said. "Everything
we do is strange."

      Titus shrugged, silently agreeing.

      "Nothing out of the ordinary,
though? No misuse of your equipment, unexpected test results?" Titus said.

      Rice-Bell laughed.

      "Believe me, if something
weird happened, we'd not only know it, we'd be celebrating. We spend our lives
looking up waiting for someone to say hello. If we heard something, we'd be
ecstatic."

      "What about unauthorized
access of your equipment, though?" Titus said.

      Kate crossed the room to look out
the window, where the field of satellite dishes were plainly visible, like the
strangest crop ever grown.

      "That equipment is the reason
we exist," Rice-Bell said, suddenly very serious. "No one touches it,
fixes it, adjusts it, or looks at it too long without us knowing about it. We
can't afford to make a mistake, and we don't have the operating budget to
repair it if someone were to tamper with it."

      "I assume you've got it under
guard at night," Kate said.

      "And day," Rice-Bell
said. He stood up and joined Kate at the window, pointing out the fencing and
cameras along the perimeter. "You might imagine, we're a temptation for
pranksters. I'm almost ashamed to tell you how much of our budget goes into
security, but people want to see us fail. They think we're just crazy old
loonies out in the hills playing science fiction."

      "Sorry to hear that, sir,"
Titus said.

      Rice-Bell turned to smile at both
of them.

      "But we carry on. There are
worse jobs than safeguarding a field of postcards from Planet Earth, right?"
he said. "Is there anything else I can do for you?"

      Titus pulled a plastic card from
the pocket of his oversized pants and placed it on the desk.

      "If you ever feel like
something is amiss—or if you feel threatened in any way—the number on that card
will connect you with our team," Titus said.