As it turned out, circumstances rendered her plans moot.
Mere minutes after she had downloaded the last files into her wrist-comp, planted a few Easter Eggs into the computer systems, just in case, and resigned herself to spending the next several hours performing the ordinary and menial duties of the woman she’d impersonated, alarms started howling throughout the complex. All non-combat personnel was instructed to move into the nearest shelter. Chastity joined the throng of office workers, technicians and janitors moving towards their designated rally points.
At least, she did so at first. As she walked, a sudden impulse made her try a door along the corridor; it was unlocked, and she let herself in. Some of the workers walking alongside called out to her, but the flow of the crowd forced them to keep going, and nobody cared enough to follow her. The room was a supply closet; she crouched behind a shelf filled with reams of paper, ink cartridges and boxes of pens, and activated other systems in her wrist-comp while she waited for the evacuation to be completed.
The building shook as if in the throes of an earthquake. The tremor was too brief and sudden to be natural, however. Whatever had triggered the alarms was still ongoing, and she was certain it involved the two American prisoners. Her choices were simple: she could join the rest of the facility’s non-combat personnel in their shelters, or she could try to help the prisoners escape.
Chastity stepped out of the closet. A pair of guards were walking down the corridor, blaster rifles at port arms. “What are you doing, woman?” one of them snapped at her.
“I’m sorry,” she said in a plaintive tone, and stumbled towards them. “I… something...”
“What is it?” the guard said, but he and his companion let her get within arm’s length of them. Chastity took one more clumsy step towards the soldiers and fell down on one knee. Chivalry overcame training; both men stepped closer together as they reached for her, just close enough for her fists to strike their groins simultaneously with precisely-measured strength. The soldiers abruptly bent forward, and she grabbed their heads and brought them together with a loud clang as their helmets collided.
Movies to the contrary, hitting someone in the head is not guaranteed to cause unconsciousness, unless the impact is fatal. The soldiers didn’t pass out, but were incapacitated by the blows to their groins and heads long enough for her to disarm them, remove two sets of plastic zip ties from their belt pouches and immobilize them by the simple expedient of using one zip tie to bind their necks together, and another to join them at one ankle. She left their feebly-struggling bodies behind and rushed down the corridor towards the sounds of battle.
Her actions had been observed through the ubiquitous cameras in the facility, but Chastity was equipped with an arsenal of infiltration devices, requisitioned from the Legion before she deserted, or acquired through her less-than-legal contacts. She spoke one word into her wrist-comp, activating its built-in stealth suite, and disappeared from sight and all sensor systems from one step to the next. The stealth field would run out of power after fifteen minutes of continuous use, but she suspected matters would be concluded one way or another long before that.
She made it to the restricted section of the facility just as the biggest explosion yet knocked her to the ground. The lights went out and dust and pieces of the ceiling rained down on her. A load-bearing section of ferroconcrete fell on her, and she grunted at the multi-ton impact. Even a month ago, she would have been severely injured if not killed outright by the collapsing structure, but now she only had the wind knocked out of her for a few moments. She strained against the pillar and with some effort managed to lift the weight off her. A few moments later, she was free from the wreckage and moving forward.
The fight had moved to the building’s exterior. Chastity used her wrist-comp to access the Dominion security network to find out what was going on. A general alert had been raised. The facility had an organic armored company, thirteen T-120 grav-tanks, each with the firepower to take out anything less powerful than a Type Three Neolympian. Two platoons, six tanks in all, were already airborne even as the remaining vehicles were being frantically readied for action.
Chastity sent fake orders to the backup units, reassigning them to the other end of the facility, but there was nothing she could do about the units en route. She could release all the Easter Eggs she’d left in the computer system, and did so: conflicting orders declaring all kinds of fake emergencies flooded the Dominion’s communication channels, adding to the chaos.
She’d done what she could in cyberspace. Time to see what she could do in the physical world.
It took some more heavy lifting, but she made her way through the ruins of the building and emerged into the middle of a fight, still hidden by her stealth field. Several Iron Guards, along with dozens of human soldiers, were strewn about in various states of unconsciousness, injury, or death. For the time being, the Ukrainian Neos seemed content to watch as the grav-tanks hammered the two Americans with a steady barrage of hyper-velocity rounds and blaster fire. The fact that neither prisoner was dead made it clear they were Type Threes, and high-level Type Threes at that.
Chastity started working on a plan to help them.
Christine Dark
Kiev, Dominion of the Ukraine, March 29, 2013
Mark had joined the fight.
Christine sensed his rage and determination, and also the enormous amounts of power he’d drawn into himself, so much power that it was consuming him from the inside. She didn’t think he could survive that energy infusion for long, but nothing about the situation looked very survivable for anybody concerned.
She had to do something. She still couldn’t move her right arm or leg, couldn’t see out of her right eye, couldn’t even feel much on that entire half of her body. Dreading what she would see, she turned her gaze from the spectacle of Mark beating on the Iron Tsar while other Ukrainian Neos beat on him, and forced herself to turn her head so she could look at herself.
Her right arm… it wasn’t gone, but it was shrunken and black; she could see places where her flesh had been stripped off, down to the bone. She’d used her right hand to channel her shield when the Iron Tsar blasted her, and had sort of turned her right side towards him, too; this was the result.
The numb part of her face probably looked like Gus from Breaking Bad at the end of Season Four. Nobody should be alive after something like that, but she’d seen Mark move even after most of his insides had been torn apart and burned off. Neos could cling to life and casually violate the laws of biology as much as they did the laws of physics. When it came down to it, parahumans really were nothing but energy constructs tied to a physical shell, and the shell’s biological functions served a psychological purpose more than anything else. There were limits, however. Christine felt like she was teetering on the edge of those limits. If she relaxed, if she exhaled a little bit too long, she would fade away. She was so tired; why not just let go, and rest?
Well, there was Mark, who was going to get killed without her. There were the rat bastards who wanted her dead; she didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of getting their way. Eff this. Christine called upon the Power to heal herself.
It only took about three seconds, but they were among the worst three seconds of her life.
At some point pain becomes its own reality, and nothing else matters, or even seems to exist. After the first second, when Christine brought her obliterated nerve endings back to life just so they could kindly tell her exactly how much being burned to the bone really felt like, the world disappeared in a flash of agony. Only the fact that she’d gone through something very much like this once before kept her going, or she would have been overcome by sheer shock, let go, and died.
The next second only lasted, oh, maybe three or four months of subjective time as she grew muscle and skin and bone tissue and bone marrow and all the things she needed to be alive, at speeds that were simply impossible. A distant part of her mind considered the possibility sh
e was playing with time somehow, short-circuiting processes that would take years even if they were possible at all, and fast-forwarding them. She had time to wonder about that, and also to experience a new kind of agony as new cells sprang up like mushrooms and made her whole again.
Second number three. The memories from the first two seconds were mercifully fading away, but new exciting experiences were waiting for her as skin stretched over her new flesh and her eyeball inflated like a balloon. The energy expenditure was huge even for her, and the last stage of the process almost killed her yet again, which would have left behind a perfectly healthy corpse. It took one final step to make it through, a commitment to get back to the world and face whatever awaited her there, good and bad, leavened with the certainty that there’d be plenty of servings of pure bad stuff. She did it, feeling she had somehow struck some sort of bargain with a higher power, and that there would be consequences she wouldn’t like down the line.
Christine blinked. She could see out of both eyes again, and most of what they saw was definitely un-good.
Freaking flying tanks had shown up sometime during the last three seconds, and they were shelling Mark like he was Godzilla and they were the Japanese Defense Force. As she watched, he struggled to his feet; something bounced off him in a burst of flames; the glowing ball of molten metal rose high in the air and disappeared in a parabolic arc; Christine hoped it wouldn’t land on some innocent Ukrainian peasant or something; she wished it would hit somebody who deserved it.
Even worse, three more tanks were heading her way. Christine poured power into her shields just in time: those thing were accurate as heck, and two very hard and dense objects moving more than fast enough to go into orbit slammed into the shield – and ricocheted away, becoming burning and still very dangerous missiles flying off in random directions. Those impacts had delivered millions of joules of energy each, tens of millions of joules, and she’d batted them away! Holy mother of crap!
Impressive. What’s more impressive is, they’re going to keep sending more express care packages your way until one of them gets through and purees you!
Even as her brain delivered that snarky statement, three more rounds hit her, along with several energy blasts that felt almost ephemeral by comparison but which still drained her shields. Each impact was an explosion, fire and kinetic energy and overpressure, and each ate away a little more power. She had to fight back.
Christine sent a telekinetic spike toward one of the tanks. There was a loud CLANG! It was louder than the sound of the tank guns firing; a chunk of the tank’s front end, which looked like a pyramid with the pointy end aimed at her, broke into pieces. The flying tank spun in the air a couple of times before crashing into a luckless building. There was no fireball, which didn’t surprise her; tanks were designed not to burst into flames, not even when they were destroyed.
Explosion or not, she’d probably killed everyone inside the tank. How big a crew could it have?
She didn’t have time to consider that. The other two tanks were spreading out, firing as they moved. BAM! BAM! Each impact made her teeth and bones vibrate painfully. God forgive me. CLANG! This time her kinetic spear got a tank on its side and it burst apart in a shower of debris, and even though it was hundreds of feet away she was sure some of that debris was people-shaped. Had used to be people. BAM! Something burning and heavy punched through the shield and whizzed past her head, setting her hair on fire. Christine screamed and lashed out. CLANG! She struck from above her target this time, and the tank crashed straight down into the ground and this time it did explode into a fireball.
Her hair was still on fire. She willed the fire away, and it went out. Her scalp stung for a second, and was healed.
She turned her attention on the tanks attacking Mark just in time to see him take one of them out.
He’d jumped onto the tank – or had he flown there? Could Mark fly now? As she watched, he ripped chunks off it with his bare hands until something or other stopped working and it went down. He leaped clear but the other two tanks hit him in mid-air and knocked him down.
“Mark!” Two more clangs. Two more dead tank crews. She rushed toward him.
Things got slightly quieter as she reached Mark, who was getting up. His hospital gown had been shredded off, so he was stark raving nekkid, but other than that he was more or less unhurt. As in, his broken bones and burst internal organs were putting themselves together in a matter of seconds. She ran up to him and they hugged behind a spherical shell she put around them, just in case the d-bags hit them in the middle of their PDA.
Nobody attacked them while they hugged. They were probably trying to regroup after the massive ass-kicking they’d taken, rather than out of kindness, but Christine didn’t care. All she wanted to do was kiss him and have him tell her everything was okay, but her grown-up self knew everything wasn’t okay, and that she didn’t have time to be comforted.
“We made it out,” he said. “And we’re never going back in.”
“Damn right.”
Movement up and to her left caught her attention. Four flying figures were spread out: the Tsar, a woman flying a giant dragon, which would have been wicked cool under any other circumstances, and two other dudes in fancy costumes. Behind them, more flying tanks and some much bigger flying thingies were rushing to catch up.
“All right, motherfuckers,” Mark snarled. “Time to dance.”
“Watch out for the Tsar’s high beam or whatevs; it’s worse than those tank guns.”
“Yeah.”
For a few moments, nothing happened. Nobody was eager to start the fight, apparently, Christine least of all. Maybe running away would be a good idea, but they would get blasted once they were out in the open. There didn’t seem to be any good choices available.
“This is a cosmic version of a knife fight,” Mark commented. “Loser ends up in the morgue, but the winner ends up in the emergency room, or maybe the morgue as well.”
“If you can fly, I could get us out of here,” somebody said from a few feet away.
Christine almost sent a blast in the direction of the voice, but barely managed to restrain herself.
“Who the fuck is there?” Mark said.
“My name is Chastity Baal. I’m with the Freedom Legion. Again, can you fly?”
“I can,” Christine said. “I can fly us all away.”
“Then let’s do it.” A woman appeared out of thin air, on the other side from where her voice had come from. Neat trick, throwing her voice out like that, and smart of her, given how close Christine had come to just blasting away. She was wearing a Dominion uniform, had blonde hair and brown eyes, and looked tough and competent. Her emotional aura was also tough and competent, although there was something mixed in it that felt slightly off to Christine.
Beggars couldn’t be choosers, though. She let the newcomer join them in a group hug even as she felt a surge of energy coming from the Tsar and his merry men. “Flying now!”
She launched herself into the air in her typical breakneck shot-from-a-cannon fashion as the spot they’d just vacated became a swirling fireball of near-nuclear intensity. Something enveloped them, a shield of sorts, but one that blocked sight and radar and sonar and much everything else. Neato. If the power or gizmo Chastity was using on them worked the way her Christine-senses indicated, they might be able to survive their trip through Dominion airspace.
Christine paused some thirty thousand feet up in the air, looked for the sun to give her a sense of direction, and launched herself and her companions towards what she thought was the West, keeping them safely wrapped in a shield of her own.
It wasn’t really flying: her steering consisted of stopping after catapulting herself a few dozen miles at a time, getting her bearings as they began to drop, and repeating the process.
“Sorry for the bumpy ride!”
And a bumpy ride it was.
Chapter Eight
Hunters and Hunted
Kiev, Dominion
of the Ukraine, March 29, 2013
When a burning chunk of depleted uranium, traveling at a good ten thousand feet per second, hit the hood of his limo, Daedalus realized something had gone terribly wrong.
Before that somewhat apocalyptic moment, things had seemed to be going, if not swimmingly, at least well enough that he really couldn’t complain. The night before, after ‘fixing’ the Hungarian reactor, Daedalus had claimed he needed to examine the defective pieces in peace and quiet, locked himself up in a room, and had Mr. Night-Medved teleport in and transport them to the Ukrainian border. Easy Peasy Japanesey, as they used to say back in the day. Since they couldn’t well teleport into a Dominion facility without ruffling some feathers, they’d been driven towards it in the comfort of an armored limo with tinted windows and a well-stocked bar, along with a military escort.
Daedalus had spent the three-hour drive sampling the bar and enjoying the unaccustomed silence; Mr. Night was playing the role of Medved to the hilt, and Medved mostly only spoke when spoken to, and never in complete sentences when a grunted phrase or two would do. Daedalus had no clue what that treacherous Jap had ever seen in the Russian strongman. Well, it didn’t matter. Medved was gone, his body appropriated by Mr. Night, and Lady Shi would be hunted and put down like any other bitch that bit the hand that fed her.
None of that mattered. Soon he would reach the base and finally crack the mysteries of the Source, even if he had to pull the information out of the melting brain of one Miss Christine Dark. He was looking forward to finally making her acquaintance. He figured he could spend a little time in purely recreational coercive measures, just to repay her for all the trouble she had caused
All in all, Daedalus had been feeling pretty good about things when the uranium bouncer hit the limo and delivered enough energy to turn the vehicle and a good chunk of the surrounding countryside into a smoking crater.
New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance Page 10