New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance

by Carella, C. J.

  “Somebody fucked up,” Melanie said, standing guard over him. They were in a service tunnel under Freedom Hall. Gaining entry had required a combination of computer hacking and a daring raid into a security communications node. “I bet it was Lady Shi,” she continued; Lady Shi had been sent on her own to break the final layers of Legion security; the camera systems couldn’t be hacked from the outside.

  “She got us here; without her, the alarm would have gone off at least five minutes ago, and you’d already be fighting off the Legion while I finished setting up,” Kyle countered as he inserted a final component into place. The Hades-Slaughter Anti-Spacetime-Anchoring Device looked a bit like a modern art sculpture made with discarded electronic components. “It’s finished! Now all we have to do is wait until…”

  The sound of multiple sets of rapid footsteps silenced him. Security was on the move. Fifty feet from their position, a helmeted head risked a quick peek around the corner. Kestrel nearly took the soldier’s head off with a flick of her whip. “No killing,” Kyle hissed warningly at her.

  “It was just a warning lash,” she said. “Those soldiers are supposed to be very well trained. Just wanted to see how fast their reflexes are.”

  “No killing.”

  “I know, darling. I’ll work off my frustrations during our next session with Lady Shi.”

  Kyle doubted they’d be enjoying another threesome with the Japanese assassin. She’d only agreed to go along as a fairly obvious ploy to gain their trust. Now that things had come to a head, she probably wouldn’t play with them again, unless she wanted something, or was trying to kill them. It wouldn’t be a good idea to repeat that experience. On the other hand, playing BDSM games with someone willing to kill and die added a great deal of spice to their evening…

  Three people stepped into view, interrupting his lascivious train of thought. Kestrel’s whip lashed out – and was vaporized in a burst of fire. Uh-oh.

  Meteor, the Faerie Godfather, and Sun Knight had arrived. Any one of those three could have overpowered him and Melanie, even with all the extra gadgets they’d brought for this mission. This was going to get interesting.

  “You have till the count of five to lay down your weapons and surrender,” Meteor said; his eyes were glowing like the heart of a blast furnace. “THREE!”

  “Shit,” Kyle said, standing side by side with Melanie.

  “FOUR!”

  The Hades-Slaughter thingamajig needed fifteen seconds to go online. It had about six seconds to go.

  “FIVE!”

  Kyle struck just as Meteor finished the count. His gauntlets fired off bursts of electrons and projected an electro-magnetic force field at the same time. He’d taken the blueprints and prototypes from a former Legionnaire by the name of Cyber-Nought and put them to good use.

  He needn’t have bothered. The Faerie Godfather deflected the electric blasts with his own energy shield, and Meteor overloaded the defensive force field with a single plasma blast. Elapsed time: three seconds.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Meteor said.

  “Stand aside, Meteor,” Janus said as he appeared in a burst of golden light. Sometimes the cavalry did arrive on time.

  “You fucking traitor,” Meteor growled. “I’ll…” He froze when another figure teleported in. “Who the hell are you supposed to be?” the British Legionnaire asked the newcomer, who was wearing a full black-and-bronze bodysuit that covered him from head to toe.

  “Call me Adam. Adam Slaughter-Trent,” the masked man said. “Stand aside, Andrew,” he told Meteor. “You too, Jake. Are you going to fight your old training instructor, Harry?” he said to the Faerie Godfather. “Do you remember when you got caught going AWOL and I let you go with an unofficial verbal reprimand?”

  “Doc?” the Godfather said. “I saw you die!”

  “I have Doc Slaughter’s memories inside my head, among other things,” Adam said. “I’m here to set Ultimate free, and to tell you that you’ve all been duped by a traitor inside the Legion. The entire incident in Nevada was staged by Daedalus Smith to further his secret agenda.”

  “You’re all under arrest,” Meteor said. “I don’t care who you think you are. You can tell us all about your secret agendas from inside a cell.”

  “Is that your final answer?”

  “No. This is.” The British Legionnaire sent a ball of hyper-dense plasma soaring in their direction. So perfect was his control of flame that the fire missile would turn all of them into piles of ash without releasing enough residual heat to singe the paint on the walls.

  Janus’ shield flared into life, but Adam stepped in front of everyone and intercepted the plasma blast with an outstretched hand. A shapeless blob of shadow emerged from the hand and ate the fireball. Adam laughed, a mirthless, sinister laugh that was eerily familiar.

  “Take them down!” Meteor roared.

  A fight between heavy hitters in an enclosed space was simply not survivable by small fry. Kyle and Melanie ducked around a corner and he set up another force field behind them as they ran. All the walls in Freedom Hall were grossly over-engineered, made of materials far stronger than normal, heavily reinforced, and with integral force fields of their own, which was the main reason the building had survived largely unscathed during the attack on the island.

  The fight tore through those walls as if they were Japanese paper partitions. Kyle and Melanie survived only because the battle didn’t last long. His energy shield failed when something came crashing through two sets of walls and collapsed at their feet. It was Meteor, still moving feebly. Melanie grinned at the sight and shot the British hero in the head with a pistol-size version of her big game gun. Kyle shrugged and joined in, and soon Meteor was officially down for the count.

  After that, things got very quiet. Kyle decided to chance it and headed back to where the fight had started. The other two Legionnaires were also down. The Faerie Godfather looked as if someone had thrown him feet first into a wood chipper. Sun Knight was in one piece but wasn’t even twitching. Janus and Adam looked a bit worn around the edges, but there was no doubt as to who had won that fight.

  It was the kind of thing Face-Off would have appreciated.

  I hope your girlfriend won’t get you killed, Face, Kyle thought. It would be nice to see his fellow vigilante again, now that they’d been drafted into the big leagues. If nothing else, Face’s undisguised contempt for high-profile heroes would be a welcome change from all the ponderous posturing Kyle had been exposed to in the last few days. Both Hades and Slaughter had turned out to be major bores when talking about anything not involving grandiose schemes or new inventions. Janus had been cold and distant as well.

  At one point, he’d tried to get the Slaughter-Trent hybrid to talk about his adventures, but between Doc Slaughter’s reluctance to say much about himself, and the Lurker’s reluctance to talk about anything, it’d been a pretty crappy conversation. Hades had been just as bad; the original villain had loved to go on tirades about how the world had wronged him, but the clone despised that kind of histrionics and was just as modest as Slaughter. Even with a few drinks in them, none of those guys were the life of any party.

  Oh, well, he thought as they made a beeline for Ultimate’s holding area. They weren’t here for fun, they were here to save the world.

  He spared one last thought for his friend, and got back to work.

  Chapter Nine

  Face-Off

  Assorted, March 29, 2014

  “Oh, no! Which pole is it this time?”

  Chastity Baal checked on her GPS. “North Pole. You’re still veering off course, but not as badly as before.”

  Christine had two speeds, unfortunately. She could hover in place, more or less, if by hovering you meant enduring a trembling up-and-down motion as she constantly overcorrected. And she could move in short bursts of motion that ended up inflicting a lot of punishment on her passengers and featured non-existent steering.

  After Chastity Baal’s st
ealth device got us out of the Ukraine, Christine had tried to go on a steady course west, at speeds that averaged something like fifteen thousand miles an hour, according to Chastity Baal’s calculations. Unfortunately, we’d moved more or less at random. We’d ended up somewhere over the South Pole after a particularly bad left turn, and now we were on the other side of the planet, but still with a lot of ice beneath us.

  “Okay, let me hover for a bit and get our bearings.”

  As flights went, it had been a lot less comfortable than our initial trip to Eurasia. Christine was holding me with one arm, Chastity Baal with the other, and that’s how we’d spent the last several hours. The woman who’d spared us from being blasted to bits by Ukraine’s air defenses had also been able to give us directions, thanks to her wrist-comp. Our wrist-comps, along with our clothes and everything we’d taken along for the trip, were somewhere in the Dominion, and we weren’t planning on coming back for them. Christine was only wearing some scraps of a hospital gown that only covered about half of her body. I wasn’t wearing even that much. We’d better land somewhere unpopulated or we’d get ticketed for indecent exposure.

  “I read about you,” I told Chastity Baal while she looked up our coordinates. Christine’s flying speeds sort of messed up the readings. We hadn’t gotten much of a chance to talk during most of the trip. “I read the Madeleine Brent novels that came out in the Sixties and Seventies,” I continued. “Were the stories made up, or the real thing?”

  Chastity nodded without looking up from the wrist comp’s screen. “They were highly embellished accounts, but, yes, they were based somewhat on real stories. And Madeleine Brent was actually a rather nice British gentleman I met while living in England, who preferred to write under a pseudonym.”

  “Sweet. Those were fun books. I wished the movies didn’t suck so badly.”

  “Thank you. I enjoyed the novels myself. But Hollywood didn’t care for them; there was never much interest in the deeds of a low-power Neo,” she said before getting back to business. “Very well, I have our position. Not too badly off course, actually. We’re near the Canadian border, so we’ve reached the right continent, at least.”

  “I’m sorry,” Christine replied. “I’ve got exactly zero flying lessons, okay? Not to mention fear of heights and of flying in general, which at least I’m cured of by now.”

  “The hovering’s gotten a lot better,” I told her. “We’re hardly jumping around anymore.”

  “Thanks, sweetie. Now, where should we go? The mansion in the Catskills, maybe?”

  “I’d say yes, except Condor hasn’t answered the phone since we escaped,” I said. We’d had Chastity try him after we’d gotten far enough away, to no avail.

  “I’m getting a general alert from the Legion,” Chastity announced. “There’s been an attack on Freedom Island.”

  “Again?”

  “A different type of attack. Rogue parahumans, including Janus, as well as Condor and Kestrel.”

  “They’re breaking John out!” Christine said. “And Janus is back? That’s awesome.”

  “It’s awesome if they get out alive,” I replied.

  “Hey, we got out, didn’t we? Start being positive or I’ll drop you off at the North Pole and you can get all gloomy with Santa and the elves and the penguins and the bears.”

  “Okay, okay.” She had a point. Condor wouldn’t have joined in the fun without a good plan. Ultimate was as good as free.

  “So, do we go there and see if we can help out?”

  “If it’s going down now, I don’t think we can help much,” I said. “Chastity?”

  “The reports are confused right now. The alarm was raised five minutes ago. In theory we could get there in a few minutes…”

  “But it’s going to be more like an hour while we bounce back and forth,” I finished for her, earning a little glare from my gal pal. “Hey, just being realistic, sweetie-pie.”

  “In any case, my stealth field is no longer operational. The Legion sensors will spot us and their defenses will not react positively to an inbound object moving at ballistic speeds. They will assume we’re hostile and engage us.”

  “Okay, that sounds bad,” Christine said. “I guess we can go to the Catskills and wait and see what happens.”

  “I could contact the Legion and try to explain things,” Chastity added. “My main worry is that Daedalus will have a counter ready for that eventuality. He is famous for anticipating his opponents’ moves. Among other things, he put an explosive device inside my communication implants, and I don’t think I was the only one to get that surprise gift.”

  “Oh my God, you have a bomb inside your head?”

  “Not anymore. I had the implant removed when I struck out on my own. The device exploded shortly afterwards, severely injuring an old friend who had performed the operation. He will recover, fortunately, being a Neo himself, but that adds another mark to Daedalus’ tally. There will be a reckoning.”

  “John’s implant was contaminated with Outsider energy,” Christine said. “Maybe there was a bomb inside it too, and Dad didn’t bother telling us when he took it apart.”

  “Well, your father was a bit batshit crazy at the time, so that’s entirely possible.”

  “I know. So maybe letting the Legion know what’s happening might not be a good idea. If Daedalus finds out…”

  “About two hundred Neo heads go up in smoke,” I finished for her.

  “How the heck does someone get bombs into everybody’s skull implants?”

  “If you’re a Neo genius, and you’re one of the head honchos of your organization, you’ll find a way,” I said. “Although maybe he didn’t put bombs inside everyone’s heads. For one, that raises the chance of an accidental detonation. Maybe he just did it to a few people. But we don’t know, so assuming everyone in the Legion is a walking armed grenade is the safe thing to do.”

  “Okay. Well, I guess it’s off to the Catskills, then.”

  “There’s one more problem,” I said, and from the look in Chastity’s face, I wasn’t the only one who’d figured that out. “We don’t have a stealth field anymore, so US air defenses are going to spot us jumping all over the Eastern Seaboard on our way there.”

  “Oh, crap. Where can we go, then? Land somewhere else and take a cab to the Catskills? With two us pretty much naked? Why don’t people in comic books ever have this kind of problem?”

  “Because in comic books you can fix things from one panel to the next. Okay, how about swimming in? We hit the water, and then we can just skip along the surface until we hit land. Any thoughts, Chastity?”

  “Yes, I think that will work.”

  We got to the mansion eventually. It took a nice long soak in cold Atlantic water, a store break-in where a couple of sets of clothing went missing, one incident of grand theft auto, and a tense drive, but we got there.

  * * *

  We took turns showering and getting dressed, with one of us constantly monitoring Chastity’s wrist-comp in case Condor called back. We all ended up wearing the grey-and-black Condor Team uniforms he had in storage; Condor Team was the informal name of the illegal Neos my pal took under his wing, trained, and eventually released into the world, where most of them had done good and done well. The outfits were skin-tight but surprisingly comfortable, as well as tough and durable. I made hot chocolate, Chastity brewed herself some gourmet coffee and we sat down and compared notes while we waited to hear from our friends.

  Chastity’s tale was pretty wild. At the end of it, she let us take a good look at her dagger. It looked like a nice fighting knife to me, not like a magical device that could suck a Neo’s powers and memories and pass them on to its wielder, but I was the resident ignoramus, so my opinion didn’t really count.

  Christine was looking the weapon over, an intent expression on her face. “Ugh. That’s what I picked up when I saw your aura. That thing is lousy with Outsider energy, but it’s also imbued with Source juice. It’s a hybrid of the two,
which is amazing, since the two forces are opposed to each other both physically and spiritually.”

  “Has the contagion spread into me?” Chastity asked, and even though she looked outwardly calm I noticed a few tell-tale signs of tension in her; a narrowing of her eyes, a tightening of her lips. Even without my girlfriend’s empathy powers, I could tell she was very upset.

  Christine shook her head. “No. It’s hard for the Outside to get into you, thank God, or we’d be totally effed up by now. Your aura is pretty messed up – you’ve got all these bits and pieces from the dead guy mixed in with your own stuff, and he wasn’t very nice at all – but I think you’ll be okay, for some values of okay, if I can figure out a way to break the link between it and you.”

  “I’ll keep it until then,” Chastity said, and took the dagger back. I wasn’t crazy about the idea of having anything linked to the Outsiders near us, but I figured I was outvoted and kept my mouth shut.

  “I’m sure things will work out. After this is over, I’ll take a much closer look at it,” Christine said before turning to me. “Come on, Mark, help me with the dishes.”

  “Are you trying to domesticate me?” I replied glibly, but went along. It would give us a chance to have some alone time. We both could use it.

  She obviously needed it. As soon as we’d set down the cups on the restaurant-sized kitchen sink, she hugged me tightly. “Oh, God, Mark!” She shuddered in my arms; she’d kept all her feelings pent up inside, during the breakout and the tense flight home, and they were finally pouring out of her. I undid my mental blocks and let myself share in her pain.

  It was bad. Christine had almost died when the Iron Tsar turned the full power of his Dread Gaze on her. She’d managed to bring herself back, much like she’d done with me, and the process had been just as traumatic. The sweet, cheerful girl she’d been was getting tougher, growing a layer of callous and scar tissue with each wound she suffered.