“Motherfucker!” Condor screamed, sending a plasma blast towards the attacker and getting a good look at him for the first time.
Tall, chalk-white skin, rows of spikes protruding from his hairless skull, grotesque black leather costume. The monster took the point-blank discharge without attempting to dodge; a purple-black aura absorbed it. He responded by sending two streams of toxic energy towards Condor.
He let his protective field deal with them, ignoring the death cries coming from the human cops and his fellow Guardians as he closed the distance, shock baton in one hand, retractable glove claws in the other. The world narrowed down to a flurry of feints and strikes, his weapons, fists and elbows against black talons that sprang from the leather freak’s fingertips. He sank his claws into the bastard’s midsection, twelve inches of sharpened titanium alloy punching through leather and flesh, and had the satisfaction of making the freak scream in pain before a handful of black talons ripped through his armor.
Pain. Weakness. Condor barely managed to leap away before another slash cut through the transparent sapphire screen protecting his face. Momentum carried him through another wall; he landed on the open ground between the cabins, and found himself in the middle of a desperate battle.
The occupants of the larger cabin had turned out to be a pack of monstrous Neos. A werewolf was wrestling with Hercules-8, tearing into the Guardian with long, purple-glowing fangs. The Yankee was using his baseball bat on a tall, lumbering man dressed like Frankenstein’s monster, the two combatants trading blows that would shatter a tank. A bat-winged figure brought Star Eagle crashing to the ground.
And more monsters were pouring out. A murderous clown wielding a cleaver in each hand. A hockey-mask wearing freak. A grotesque giantess made of multiple bodies crudely stitched together.
Someone outside the perimeter of the camp put a 20mm round through the chest of the clown, sending him to the ground in a burst of black ichor. A moment later, an FBI agent screamed his final agony. One of the freaks was out there, picking off the snipers.
All this information flashed through his mind in the time it took the spike-headed freak to follow him outside and hit him again with streams of Outsider energy.
The readings in his helmet alerted him that the e/m field was draining faster than expected. His five minutes were turning into thirty seconds. Make that twenty.
Think fast or die.
He cut loose with a volley of micro-missiles from a shoulder launcher. The shaped-charge warheads detonated on contact with the purple-black aura surrounding the spike-headed freak and shattered it. One leather-clad arm went flying away, trailing dark ooze in its wake. The toxic energy beams vanished as the monster howled and staggered back.
Condor’s shock baton smashed through the spikes and stove in the skull beneath.
One down. He staggered away from the twitching corpse. The clown was also dead, which made two. Star Eagle had turned the bat-winged creature into a flaming scarecrow; three down. Hercules-8 and the werewolf had torn each other apart; the shifter’s spine had been shattered, but Hercules was lying next to the monster he’d slain, dead or unconscious. Fires had broken out throughout the facility, turning the battle into a scene from hell, shades of black, orange and red.
Somewhere out in the woods, Cat Lady was screeching in defiance. And up in the air…
He desperately tried to line up a shot on one of the two struggling figures above him. Justice Princess was firing bolts of pinkish energy at her attacker, but the slight black-clad woman clinging to her was too close, and she was glowing with the deadly power of the Outsiders. A silver mask obscured half of her face, and her red hair had been shaved off, but Condor recognized her before he heard her familiar yet distorted voice.
“Goodnight, Mommy!” Dark Christine shouted in bestial glee.
No. He took the shot, knowing he was too late.
The cackling madwoman ripped Patricia Dark’s head off her shoulders in one savage motion, a moment before a barrage of plasma knocked her away from her victim. The blasts didn’t penetrate her obsidian aura.
“Tell them I’m coming, Kyle!” she shouted at him, blocking his attacks with contemptuous ease. “Tell them the bitch is back in black!”
She vanished in a cloud of darkness. So did the surviving freaks, leaving four corpses behind, along with the bodies of half of the Guardians and, Condor would soon learn, a third of the cops and feds outside.
Christine Dark
Upstate New York, New York, August 2, 2014
“You don’t have to do this,” Mark told her for third or fourth time.
“I do. I’m going to see her.”
A makeshift morgue had been erected next to the site of the massacre, sealed tents large enough to fit dozens of bodies. A forensic tech led her to one of the many covered tables.
“We haven’t… We’re still doing preliminary…”
“I just want to see her.”
Patricia Dark’s disembodied head was lying on its side, hair drawn back, uncovering the ghastly sight of torn flesh and vertebrae below her neck. The sight should have made Christine sick, but all she felt was a spreading coldness running down her spine, along with a sinking, spinning sensation that almost made her drop.
It’s not your mother.
Close enough.
The face brought back memories of her early childhood; it was smoother, younger-looking than any version of Patricia Dark Christine could remember. The laugh and worry lines, the signs of a life of hard work, of the burden of caring for a child on her own, none of those features were there. They didn’t belong in the face of an immortal being who hadn’t aged a day since her gift had manifested, two decades ago. But that face was still too familiar. Even worse, it was set in a horrible rictus that clearly showed how badly she’d suffered in her final seconds.
Christine knew just how painful the Outsider energy felt when it touched you: a whole-body toothache combined with a horrible draining feeling, worse than bleeding out, more like having your very soul sucked out of you. She knew exactly what Patricia Dark had felt when someone sharing half of her genes, someone who should have felt some measure of kinship and respect for her, had instead murdered her in cold blood.
Mark put a hand on her shoulder. “All right, you’ve seen her.”
She shrugged off his touch. “Yes. I have.”
She turned away, but didn’t hug Mark the way he wanted her to. She felt too numb for human contact, even from him.
Chastity Baal walked into the morgue. Her left arm was in a sling, and probably would remain there for several days. Wounds inflicted by Outsider energy didn’t heal quickly, no matter how good your regeneration powers were. The sorrow and shame coming from the secret agent almost managed to pierce Christine’s numbness. Almost.
“I’m sorry, Christine,” Chastity said.
“Sorry is for losers,” she replied, pushing past her and going outside, not caring if Mark followed her or not. Not caring about anything.
She walked to another tent. Might as well get some work done.
Adam was inside, examining the bodies of Dark Christine’s minions. One of them was little more than a pile of ashes, but the rest were more or less in one piece, give or take a couple of pieces.
“None of these individuals were Neolympian,” Adam said.
“Yeah. She did something like this back on Earth FUBAR. She gave people a few super-powers. Not sure if she used Codex Words, or Outsider energy. I’m guessing both.”
She looked at the bodies. Clown; kinda cliché, but everybody hates a clown. Werewolf, ditto. Frankenstein monster, Lon Chaney Jr. version; at least the locals would get that pop culture reference. The guy with the head spikes was from those old horror movies Christine had hated as a child, which made a perverted sort of sense.
“Not very sturdy, were they?” she said. The Frankenstein monster looked like he’d been put through a trash compactor. Somebody had shot the clown dead. From the size of the gaping wou
nd it must have been a cannon of some sort; she could put her fist through it without touching the edges. Spike-head had been clubbed to death. Ash-pile’s cause-of-death was pretty obvious.
“No,” Adam agreed. “Perhaps as resilient as a Type One or low-physical Type Two. Little in the way of recuperative abilities as well.”
“Wounds didn’t heal, and after a few shots they all fell down.”
Adam nodded.
“But they were chock full of Outsider goodness.”
“That’s what made them so dangerous. Their powers cut right through defensive auras. That’s why the Guardians’ losses were devastating. Even the electromagnetic fields designed to protect against disruptors were quickly overwhelmed.”
“Yeah.” Besides her mother, Hercules-8 and Vance Voltage were gone. Star Eagle and Cat Lady were in critical condition. Condor was among the walking wounded, along with the Yankee. Nobody had made it unscathed, which was very unusual for a Neo fight. They usually were up and around within five minutes of a super-fight, or a few hours tops. Not this time.
She’d only met them all in passing – one short but brutal fight, and mostly public appearances and conventions afterwards – but she should be mourning them, shouldn’t she? They’d been her mother’s friends and colleagues.
She couldn’t seem to care.
“Where are the prisoners?”
“The federal authorities are holding them in one of the transports outside. They will take them to a detention facility in…”
Christine turned around and walked out while Adam was still talking. She found the transport easily enough; there were plenty of negative emotions emanating from it: rage, fear, frustration. The human thugs probably had no useful information, or the evil bitch wouldn’t have left them behind, at least not alive. But you never knew.
A couple of men in combat armor and helmets were standing guard outside the transport. They barred her way. That wasn’t going to end well for them.
Christine told Mark.
The numbness was fading, and she knew that what was waiting for her when it did would be unbearable.
He didn’t reply, just let his feelings for her do the talking. They didn’t make the hurt, anger and guilt go away, but they helped her live with them.
She wasn’t alone, and that made all the difference in the world.
* * *
“They don’t know anything,” she said, stepping away from the last prisoner. “About half of them are wannabe freedom fighters she recruited as cannon fodder, and the rest are criminals that signed on for the money. I’ve got a bunch of addresses and phone numbers, but they are all old. No way she’s going to use any of them again.”
“True, but we can have forensic teams go over those places, collect evidence, and possibly identify more terrorists. The more leads we have, the more likely we are to find something actionable.”
“I’ll write it all down and e-mail it to you, Kyle.”
The interrogation didn’t require any torture or even much intimidation. Confronted with someone who looked so much like their leader, the HF flunkies sang like canaries, and all she had to do was user her empathy to make sure they were telling the truth. She didn’t have to rough up anybody. She didn’t want to rough them up; they were a pathetic bunch of losers. A couple of them had become Tainted, and she was going to have to clean them up at some point. But that could wait.
“If you’re done with them, I’ll let the feds take them away,” Condor said.
“All done.”
She and Mark walked out of the transport.
“One piece of good news is that nobody mentioned seeing Daedalus Smith,” Mark said. “Probably means he’s finally out of the picture.”
“Maybe. Or maybe he’s in some underground lab cooking up some doomsday device or whatevs.”
“I’m supposed to be the pessimist in this team.”
“Well, let’s hope you’re right. Maybe…”
A Legion priority call interrupted her. It was Adam.
“We have a possible sighting of Outsider-powered parahumans in Chicago. Local and federal authorities have requested the Legion’s assistance. Freedom Squad One is to report to Chicago as soon as possible.”
Time to find out if she was being pessimistic or realistic.
One thing first, though. Before leaving, Christine found Chastity Baal in the impromptu infirmary.
“I’m sorry for being a dick to you,” she said. Chastity nodded.
Just in case. She didn’t want to die with things left unsaid.
Face-Off
Chicago, Illinois, August 2, 2014
“Why Chicago?” I wondered after we landed on the Tower of Power. The rest of the team wouldn’t be there for a few minutes, so we had some time to chat.
“Both my father and Mister Night had their home offices here,” Christine said. “Dad’s lair got blown up, but nobody ever found Mister Night’s place. God only knows what kind of stuff he had in there.
“Makes sense.”
“And there’s also this,” she added, swinging her arms wide to encompass the cherry-red skyscraper we’d just entered. “This place is plugged into the Source like nobody’s business. There’s all sorts of mayhem you could cause if you managed to infect it.”
“That’d take some major cojones, though.”
“My evil twin is many things, but cowardly isn’t one of them.”
A couple of Chicago Sentinels showed up to meet us at the landing pad. Orange Crusher looked like a fireplug with legs, if fireplugs came in a shade almost identical to the soft drink for which he’d briefly done commercials. Next to him was the equally colorful Crimson Fletcher. If either Sentinel harbored ill-will toward Christine – she’d run roughshod over the entire team during her first public outing, with a little help from a mind-controlled Ultimate – they didn’t give any signs of it.
“Welcome to Chicago,” the Fletcher said. “We can wait for the rest of the team in the Monitoring Room.”
We followed them through a series of anonymous corridors. Everything was metallic red, just like the outside. If I had to spend most of my time in this place, I’d end up banging my head against the walls just to paint them a slightly different shade of red. The Sentinels didn’t seem to mind, though, and from what I heard the place had tons of amenities you wouldn’t find anywhere else in the world, not including the fact it was just about indestructible: Ultimate had tried demolishing the place and failed.
If Dark Christine managed to get her claws into the Tower, we were fucked.
The Monitoring Room had a couple hundred screens, each with a different view of Chicago, ranging from hundreds of feet high to down on the streets. That was one of the Tower’s best-known features. The Monitoring Room could observe any place in the city, without the need for cameras, microphones or devices of any kind. The input from the screens came from some sort of clairvoyance ability that could only be defeated by the best kinds of Neo anti-scrying powers or devices. The Sentinels allegedly only watched public areas unless they were granted a search warrant. It was still unnerving, although I mostly felt envy. If Condor and I had had access to that kind of surveillance… Well, we probably would have abused it. Maybe it was for the
best that it was in the hands of a bunch of goody-two-shoes, if it was in anyone’s hands at all.
The rest of the Sentinels were there. Annie Arclight, in the tiny golden costume that always got on Christine’s nerves whenever she saw it; Azure, a fairly powerful energy manipulator who dressed more demurely; Devolution Man, a squat hairy man who could turn into assorted Chimeric shapes; and the team leader, Captain Lightning, the only member who hadn’t had his ass kicked by Christine, by virtue of being away at the time. The good captain was a Golden Ager, one of the original masked men and women who’d fought the Nazis along with the likes of Ultimate, the Patriot and Lady Libertas. He looked pretty spry for his age, of course. With the hood of his costume thrown back, he looked more like a blonde surfer college senior than a living legend. He was no powerhouse but had a good rep as a tactician, and a bigger one as a Genius-Type inventor and gadgeteer who’d made the most out of the Tower of Power.
After a round of greet and meet, we got down to business.
“There’s been no change in the target since the last sitrep,” Captain Lightning said. “Nobody else has gone in or out.”
The target was an office building in a second-rate commercial area of the city, the kind of place designed for people who couldn’t afford the high costs of the Loop. The eight-story structure looked run down, with graffiti on its back wall and chipping paint everywhere else. Hard to believe it was teeming with Outsider energy, but I was used to deceiving appearances; I had an entire power set based on that concept.
“The building is completely warded against parahuman observation,” the Sentinel leader went on. “We’re watching it through infrared scanners, and know where everybody is.”
“And they still don’t know they’ve been tagged?”
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