It didn’t matter. Dead was dead, like Mark said.
She hoped she would learn to live with the things she’d done.
Eventually, she fell asleep.
And soon regretted it.
* * *
In the dream, she wasn’t her, but the other one: Dark Christine Dark in all her evil redundancy.
Her mind had snapped back into her body after Good Christine had blasted her in Dreamland. She was pissed off, but also somewhat satisfied, because she was sure she’d figured out how to travel between worlds physically, just the way Daddy used to do it. Which meant she could go chasing after Pissy Chrissy and make her pay for daring to invade her realm and kill poor Mister Night.
Her satisfaction was soon obliterated by the certainty that something was terribly wrong.
Waves of sheer terror washed over her. It wasn’t coming from her, but from the few million slaves left on the planet. It was so intense even her dulled empathic senses picked it up. Whatever was getting her pets so excited had to do with the sky, so she walked to the nearest balcony in her palace and took a peek.
There were two suns up there, and the new arrival was getting bigger right before her eyes.
In the course of that terrible first glance, Dark Christine understood the new sun was a vessel of sorts, and it was headed for Earth. The Cosmic Nerds had come to town. Earth was Tainted by the Outsider energies flowing freely through most of its lifeless surface, preparing the way for the entities that called themselves the Survivors to manifest themselves. The process would take millions of years, however, and the Cosmic Nerds had arrived a little too soon to the party.
Chrissy had tattled on her, the little narc snitch bitch.
The new sun grew larger, and she felt the temperature begin to rise. Her slaves and servants screamed and prayed – mostly to her – for deliverance, but there was none to give.
She managed to escape the universe just as the burning disk filled half the sky and the Earth’s atmosphere ignited, turning the blue planet into a fireball.
* * *
Christine was eating breakfast alone in the Sanctuary’s kitchen when Cassius Jones walked in.
“What’s wrong?” he asked her as soon as he got a good look at her face.
“Bad dream.”
“Ah.” If anyone was familiar with the concept, the tall, dark and handsome hero would be it. He’d been through even more nightmarish times than Christine had.
“Yeah,” she said, looking mostly at the bowl of Cheerios in front of her, and wishing it was something more appetizing. The Sanctuary had every modern convenience, but the stuff in the pantry wasn’t terribly tasty or good. It didn’t bother John, who cared little about food, or Cassius, who had cured himself of the eating habit in preparation for his personal star trek, but she still liked stuffing her face. Next time she stayed there, she’d go grocery shopping first.
Not that she was feeling particularly hungry at the moment.
“Want to talk about it?”
Strangely enough, she did. At her nod, he sat down beside her, a kind expression on his face. He was getting back to normal, thank God, and knowing she’d played a big part in his recovery made her feel a little better.
“It was more than a dream,” she said after she finished recounting the horrible nightmare. “I think I caught a real memory from the other me. I saw what happened when the Cosmic Nerds answered the call I sent.”
“I imagine the same would have happened to the Genocide’s world if someone had alerted them. I wish I’d known how to do so.”
“It wasn’t pretty, that’s for sure.”
“You did all those people a favor,” he added.
“Everyone keeps telling me that.”
“I know. While I was the Genocide’s captive, it regaled me with stories of what it did to the inhabitants of its home planet. The lucky millions who were killed outright were spared years of suffering and terror. People afflicted with the Taint soon become dedicated sadists. You saw firsthand what was happening to that alternate Earth; it had already become a world of victims and tormentors. It was only going to get worse as the so-called Goddess grew bored and more jaded.”
“I wish I could have saved them,” she said. “Even a few of them. The kid who tried to help me, his name was Robb, for one. Or the healer who saved my life. Anybody.”
“I spent decades wallowing, so I’m not one to judge,” Cassius said. “But I regret the years I wasted in self-pity.”
“So you don’t recommend the wallow option.”
“No.”
“I’ll try to stop, then.”
He smiled at her. “Glad to hear it.”
“Glad to hear what?” John Clarke said, joining them in the kitchen. He was wearing a plain shirt and shorts, and looked more like a high school assistant coach than the All-American Hero. His greeting smile looked forced, though, and his emotional state was still pretty shaky. She’d cleaned a good ninety-three percent of his aura, but he was still pretty messed up.
“That I’m not going to spend years going ‘Oh, woe is me,’” Christine said.
“Yes, that never seems to do much good. Not that it’s stopped any of us from indulging in that vice.”
“True enough,” Cassius said.
She pushed away her half-full bowl. “Well, I’m done with breakfast. You guys ready for some aura cleansing exercises?”
They were.
The Freedom Legion
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.
Hunters and Hunted
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 skul
l, 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.
New Olympus Saga (Book 4): The Ragnarok Alternative Page 20