Final Empire

by Blake Northcott

  McGarrity, who was sitting next to me, reached over and tried to unlatch one of the locks. “Yeah, screw that – I wanna see inside.”

  I smacked his hand and he jerked it back. He massaged it as he shrunk into his seat.

  “Okay,” I began, shifting uneasily from one running shoe to the other. “So I’m going to give you all a speech. I’m notorious for sticking my feet into my mouth more than I am for my rousing addresses, but we’re short on time and this is going to have to do. Kenneth is coming. Sooner than later. It could be next week, or tomorrow, or in the next fifteen minutes. I don’t know. And when he gets here, we’re all dead. And there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  Winston Churchill would have been proud.

  I’d gotten everyone’s attention, though at what cost I don’t know. McGarrity, Peyton, Brynja, Karin and Gavin stared at me wide-eyed, and in the pregnant pause they were undoubtedly awaiting a ‘but’.

  “But,” I added, “if we set up a trap right now, we can gain the upper hand. He’ll show up on our terms and our timeline. We can ambush him and lock him into my cryogenics chamber.”

  “We know,” Gavin said. “Peyton told me all about the plan. ‘Keep Kenneth biologically alive’ and all that. But we still don’t have a way to get him into the box.”

  I unlatched the case and flipped it open. Inside was vial the size of a soda can, filled with blood. Kenneth Livitiski’s blood.

  Brynja stood. “Is that…”

  “It’s his,” I nodded. “And now it’s yours. This is what you’ve been missing – why you’ve felt so empty and directionless. It’s the missing piece of your puzzle.”

  “I’ll be able to ghost again?” she asked, though she didn’t sound wildly enthusiastic about the prospect. She’d read my mind before I could say the words.

  “Yes, but…I think it’s more than that. Teach Weaving said that—”

  “The Nightmare?” Peyton interrupted. “You’re consulting with the superhuman hit woman who tried to murder you back in Fortress 23?”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that,” I explained. “She told me Kenneth’s greatest fear was his blood being harvested and exploited, but was a little fuzzy on the details. And then there was the issue of being able to actually get my hands on some of it. I didn’t take him for a charity blood drive kind of guy, so I had to go with a hunch I had.

  “When I was following him using the microtracers in his blood, I could track exactly where he was all over the world. I was keeping a close eye on him. But then something strange happened: the trackers died months before they should have. When I realized it wasn’t a technical malfunction it hit me that he’d have to have had them removed, which meant a blood transfusion.”

  McGarrity leaned closer, marveling at the container. “O-M-G-F. What an idiot.”

  “Well, I’m sure when he hired Doctor Conor McGrady and instructed him to filter and dispose of the blood sample, he assumed the good doctor would do just that. But this,” I held the container higher, letting the overhead light gleam through the transparent tubing at the top, “is a thousand times more valuable than gold. There is no way someone is going to throw an Omega-level superhuman’s blood in the trash when they know it’s worth a fortune to the right buyer, or even good for a Nobel Prize or two if they worked on it themselves. Tracers or not.”

  “So now what?” Peyton asked. “We just pump it into Brynja and see what happens?”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” she said, holding her hands out. “I’m not some lab test bunny. We don’t know what’s going to happen if I get that inside me. My head could fall off or my nipples could explode, or I could start crapping blue electricity for all you know.”

  Peyton scrunched up her face. “Wow, that was graphic.”

  “It’s a gamble,” I admitted, “but so is everything. Every time I stepped into the casino it was a risk: would someone know I was counting cards? Would I even pick up a decent hand in the first place? And would someone put a bullet in my back if I cleaned out their life savings at a game of Texas Hold ‘Em? You can’t guarantee a win, ever. Life just doesn’t work that way, and things are dangerous and scary as hell. But you can tilt the odds in your favor.”

  She took the metal and glass vial from my hands and inspected it, staring at the crimson blood that was decidedly antithetical to whatever the blue liquid was that currently ran through her veins.

  “And you think this is it?” she asked, not averting her eyes from the container. “You’re confident that this is your royal flush or whatever?”

  I shrugged. “It kind of has to be. So many horrible things have happened that it’s almost a statistical impossibility that this will be a dud, too.”

  She snorted. “Not exactly instilling me with confidence.”

  “Look, do what you need to do,” I told her. “But if you can ghost again, you can drop a sedative inside him, the same way you dropped an acid-filled bullet into Sergei Taktarov’s skull. We drag him into the cryo-chamber and he’s a popsicle. We win.”

  She stood. “Let’s do it,” she said, steeling her resolve. “We could use a win.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Fortress 18’s infirmary was white and metallic and sterile, with the same hermetically sealed look and feel as every other room in this bland, paper-white stronghold. Brynja was surprisingly calm. She sat perfectly still on a gurney with an IV in her forearm, held in place with a small length of surgical tape. Only I’d accompanied her. Everyone else waited in the conference room.

  The nurse had transferred Kenneth’s blood into a rubbery bag that hung from a hook on the wall, and he was about to begin the drip. He tugged down his light blue procedure mask and smiled brightly, offsetting the otherwise somber mood in the room.

  “Everyone set?” he beamed.

  “Do me a favor,” Brynja said. “Dial it back about nine thousand percent.”

  “Absolutely,” he said with an enthusiastic thumbs up, smile widening.

  She shook her head.

  The nurse (whose tiny silver nametag read ‘Wu’) reached for the nozzle on the IV’s hose line, index finger primed to flip the switch and begin the drip. Brynja lunged out and snatched his hand.

  “Wait.” She stared at me for a long second. I reached out and took her hand. Then she asked me something telepathically. I was sure it wasn’t a voice inside my own head because her eyes conveyed the same energy as I gazed into them; I was reading subtitles and listening to the audio at the same time in perfect sync.

  I leaned in and kissed her twice. Once on the cheek, and again on the forehead. When I drew back her eyes were closed.

  “You already know the answer,” I whispered.

  Nurse Wu coughed, loud and obvious, bringing a fist to his mouth. “Um, I don’t wanna rush you two, but my shift is kinda already over, and I heard Aletta was making Purple Zebras downstairs. So if we could just move this along…”

  “OH MY GOD CAN WE HAVE A MOMENT?” Brynja shouted, causing Wu to leap back a step. After a loud groan she reached out and grabbed the hose line, flicked the nozzle, and released the drip. “He’s right,” she sighed. “Might as well get this show on the road.”

  It took a moment for the drip to begin.

  The nurse glanced at his com. “Now that we’re technically done here…” he said, pointing towards the door.

  “Yes, please go.” I said, not looking in his direction. I was staring at the river of red filling the transparent hose, inching down towards Brynja’s vein.

  “Are you sure?” I heard him ask.

  “YES. GO.”

  “Everyone is so shouty today,” I heard Wu mutter as he left.

  The infirmary door whooshed closed. For whatever reason I’d chosen that exact moment to turn my head, watching the door latch into place.

  When I turned back, Brynja was gone.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “Brynja?” I shouted, racing around the infirmary. It was small – just three crisply laundered hosp
ital beds, some cabinets filled with supplies and a small computer terminal with a VR rig. I actually didn’t even know where I was looking. Had she ghosted already? Disappeared and fallen through the floor? Or did she blink out of existence all together? Fuck, what had I done? I’d just injected her with blood I’d bought from a doctor who had broken several ethics laws in obtaining and selling it. Okay, I had verified it as superhuman, and I was ninety-nine point nine percent sure it was Kenneth’s – but what if it wasn’t? Fuck shit damn fuck, what had I done?!

  “Language, language,” I heard a voice call out in my head. “Are your thoughts always this vulgar?”

  I looked up at the buzzing fluorescent lights, eyes trailing along the exposed piping that had been painted white with exposed red daisy wheel valves jutting from them. Where was that voice coming from? It sounded like…

  “You’re not hallucinating, if that’s what you’re thinking,” the voice echoed.

  Then she appeared. Not with a blast of light or energy or lightning or fanfare of any kind. It was just a blip. One second, nothing. The next moment, silently, there she was.

  “Well, I say if that’s what you were thinking, but really, what kind of mind-reader would I be if I was guessing, right?”

  Her porcelain skin, glowing blue eyes and matching hair were intact, but as for the rest of her…the word ‘surreal’ didn’t even cover it.

  Her armor was translucent, continually shifting flecks of purple as if it was being shot through with sunlight. I couldn’t tell if it was made of metal or glass. Sharp spires jutted angrily from her shoulders and from the toes of her boots, and her gauntlets were layered with the same otherworldly material. She was shrouded in an ankle-length cloak that flapped regally behind her, blown by a wind that didn’t exist. It revealed an inner lining that crackled with electrical impulses.

  At her side was a snarling blue manticore. His white mane billowed with the same non-existent wind, his ragged dragon wings folded to his back, and his scorpion tail swayed threateningly, the stinger dripping with a single glob of venom. He was the size of a stallion.

  She absently stroked Melvin’s mane and his snarling subsided. He came to heel like a lapdog.

  “I’m not a ghost anymore,” she said. “I’m an architect.”

  Whatever she’d become (or ascended to?) was unlike anything I could have imagined. She could bend reality to her will, just like Kenneth; creating clothing and armor and even a living creature. And she was glorious.

  “Your inner monologue is like a Harlequin Romance novel right now,” she chuckled. “I’m not gonna lie, I’m a little embarrassed for you.”

  “Sorry, I’m just…wow.” I goggled at her. I couldn’t help it.

  “Don’t let your girlfriend come in here and catch you perving on me.”

  “NO, I mean…it’s just…” her breasts were nearly exposed, covered perilously by just the edges of her cloak, and the rest of the armor revealed a very liberal amount of thigh and midriff. It was hard not to ogle.

  “It’s no big deal,” she sighed. “Get over it.”

  “I know, you’re European. You sunbathe topless.”

  Brynja walked towards me with Melvin in tow, her metal (or glass?) boots rapping thunderously across the durasteel floor.

  She smiled. “Damn right I do.” Her palm sprang open and a glowing purple rod appeared, topped with a basketball-sized head. It was a mace – a blunt medieval weapon used for flattening whatever it collided with (not the most elegant of instruments, but an effective one for anyone powerful enough to wield it). Spikes appeared from the round head, telescoping outward as if they were growing organically.

  I marveled at the weapon, but my mind was still stuck on her wardrobe.

  “Now are we gonna stand here and talk about my tits all afternoon, or are we going to stuff Kenneth into a freezer?”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Cameron Frost’s naming conventions aside, Fortress 18’s design presented strategic difficulties when setting up a military defense.

  It was built into a mountain range; seven rocky fingers that reached out of the South China Sea, each topped with part of the compound (some were stubby and compact, just eighty feet high at their peak, and some were long and gangly, stretching five times that height). The fingertips were all topped with platforms. There was a pair of runways serving dozens of aircraft, although most had vertical take-off capabilities. The rest were mounted with multi-layered bronze domes, designed like serrated sea shells, which served as entranceways to the hollowed-out interiors of the mountains. But none were designed for combat. This was a research and development facility, nothing more. It was cloaked with the most state-of-the-art scrambling equipment ever designed, and was invisible to all types of radar and satellite (and, apparently, even superhuman detection). When no one can find you, there isn’t much need for heavy artillery. In retrospect, it couldn’t have hurt.

  I stood on the primary platform: a wide tarmac that could have housed three aircraft carriers sitting end-to-end. I walked to the edge, glancing ten stories down. The water reflected the sharp yellow sun, and was as placid as a lake. Typically the ocean waves would slam into the base of the barnacled mountain where the rock face met the waterline, spraying the edge of the tarmac with a salty mist. Not today. There was an eerie, ominous stillness all around. The air, the water…it was the calm before the proverbial storm, and everyone could feel it.

  I lifted my wrist to my mouth. “Helmet,” I commanded, and my swarm robotics obeyed. A moment later I was wearing a full helmet with a dark tinted visor, blocking out the blinding glare of the South Pacific sun.

  The plan was set. In the TT-100 Karin hovered invisibly in the cloudless sky several miles off-coast. When the time was right she’d land, and the cryogenics unit that was magnetically latched to the underbelly would be open, ready for its new occupant. Now we just needed Kenneth unconscious – or sedated enough to jam him inside.

  Brynja and McGarrity emerged from the fortress’ main entrance at my back. She had reverted to her normal clothing: the cropped tank top, ripped jean shorts and spiked combat boots that I’d seen her wearing when we’d first met. She constructed the outfit with a simple thought, and like magic it had appeared. Melvin was of course out of sight (precisely where, I didn’t know, but Brynja assured me he’d materialize ‘at the right moment’, whenever that was). If she was an architect she was theoretically powerful enough to match Kenneth punch for punch, blow for blow, construct for construct, but I didn’t want it to come to that. I’d hoped she could phase into him and administer the sedative concealed in her palm before he’d had a chance to fight back.

  McGarrity was in his jeans and t-shirt, as per usual, and was taking a selfie with his wrist com.

  Brynja slapped his shoulder. “Dude, really?”

  “This is for my new book jacket,” he said, swatting her away as he continued to snap pictures. “This is going to be the most epic battle of all time – maybe even epic-er than Fortress 23. If I don’t record this for posterity, who will?”

  “London,” I barked into my com. “Shut down all cloaking on Fortress 18.”

  “Oh, are you sure?” a friendly Scottish voice replied; the ever-buoyant octogenarian who was programmed as my AI, and she sounded concerned. “If we do that, Mister Moxon, then people will know where we are. Bad people.”

  “I’m aware,” I said firmly. “Shut it down. Now.”

  “Yes sir! I can detect by your vocal change in tone and pitch that you’ve been angered. I would never dare to question your genius, or disobey a command. I was merely suggesting that given the current state of affairs with—”

  “Duly noted,” I said with even less patience. “Just do it.”

  And like that the cloak came down.

  I looked skyward and waited, and like watching water boil, it was taking forever. Brynja paced, McGarrity continued to snap photos of himself. Surely Kenneth had been monitoring the globe; at this point he could feel a disr
uption, and sense when our cloaking went offline. Brynja assured me that he’d ‘feel’ a band of energy snapping off when I cut the cloaking, and I believed her.

  Another moment drifted by. And then another. I spoke to Peyton and Gavin on my com; they were armored and armed to the teeth, sitting securely in the TT-100’s passenger bay, and they were monitoring the skies from two different sat-cams (I’d sent the rest of the staff back to their respective homes, hoping that after this was all said and done, they’d still have hometowns left).

  “Incoming,” Gavin suddenly shouted, and that’s all he had time to say.

  The next few moments unfolded in a blur, like they had in Switzerland. The first part of the offensive barrage was one I’d fully expected: it was a silver projectile the shape of a bullet but the size of an eighteen-wheel truck, spiraling overhead. We didn’t have time to move. Steve, Brynja and I gawked, staring upward as it draped us in shadow, continued out over the ocean, and dropped. It sunk harmlessly into the water and bellowed, like the sound I’d imagine a whale might make when being impaled by a harpoon. The device sent out an EMP, crippling every mechanical device in the immediate area. It was necessary for Kenneth to know his powers would be functional when he arrived, and it was why I’d sent Karin miles offshore with the TT-100, leaving it unaffected and out of range.

  A heartbeat later and The Living Eye was standing a hundred feet away in full costume: cape, cowl, and his eye logo emblazoning his chest, glowing with a brilliance that rivaled even the tropical sun.

  “Brynja,” he called out, spreading his hands wide. “I’ve finally caught up with you. Have you reconsidered my offer?” His tone was breezy, lips curled softly at the edges.

  “Your offer?” she blurted out a caustic little laugh that instantly caused his face to crumble. “To what, join you and your cult?”

  “To come home,” he said firmly.

  “I already have a home.” Her voice was growing bolder, words dripping with venom – her petulance was mirroring his.