Item three was a biggie. It involved one certain red cube weighing down her tasteful fanny pack – er, utility pouch – on the belt of her brand-spanking new costume, a fairly tasteful and not skintight fuchsia and white bodysuit with sensible boots – i.e. no five-inch heels or other idiocies – and a matching headband to keep her hair off her face while she kicked butt. Her agent had been aghast at her costume choice; her suggestions for alternative outfits had made Christine aghast, and she’d politely told the woman that she wasn’t interested in being whack-off material for teenage boys. The agent had muttered darkly about missing millions in merchandizing opportunities, but given in eventually. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was the Codex in said fanny pack.
She hadn’t done anything with it.
Oh, she’d had plenty of excuses. First, she’d had to sort out the fallout (some of it literal) of her adventures. Then, she’d figured she should actually train in the use of her powers rather than making things up as she went along, which admittedly had worked out an amazing amount of the time, but clearly wasn’t the right way to go about things. And now that she was getting the hang of things, she’d discovered the stark truth under all the excuses.
She was scared as eff to try again.
Her ‘uncle’ hadn’t been much help so far, because he’d also had been dealing with a bunch of issues. He was getting his crap together faster than she was, though. She figured that sometime this week, or next week at the latest, he’d start prodding her to get back to work. He’d already dropped a few hints in that direction over dinner a couple of nights ago, and hadn’t pushed things only because Mark, who’d been drinking a bit too much, started getting ornery about it. The evening had turned awkwardly tense; Uncle Adam had left early and Mark had retreated into a book and not said much the rest of the night. They’d ended up in bed, cuddling but without making love, which was happening much too often lately.
“You’re veering left again, Dark.”
“Oops. Sorry.” Okay, thinking deep thoughts wasn’t conducive to good aerial maneuvering, and she needed to get it right. In a week she was going to go through a series of qualifying exams, after which she’d get her diploma or whatever they gave you and would become a full-fledged Legionnaire, complete with an official code name, which wasn’t going to be Armageddon Girl. Nossir. She’d applied for Dark Justice: some dude in the 1980s had taken that name, donned a silly ninja outfit, and after a couple of adventures had run into a Neo pyromancer who’d burned him to a cinder, so thoroughly that the masked vigilante, who might not even have been a Neo, remained unidentified to this day. Legal had said she could use the name, but after hearing the story behind it she wasn’t sure she wanted to. Maybe Justice Dark, instead. She’d be the first of that name.
“And a sharp left now!” Everybody made a ninety-degree left turn, canceling their forward momentum and turning and reorienting in one smooth motion. Everybody except her. The command caught her by surprise; she stopped in mid-air, and got slammed by Olufemi Oni, a Nigerian student who could turn his skin into solid iron. He bounced off her shield, and the other students behind him barely avoided more collisions. The graceful formation shattered.
“Sorry!”
“Dark! Fall out and report to Instructor Bronte for beginner flying practice!”
Yep. Life is great.
* * *
“So now you can fly? And better than me, I bet,” Christine said to Mark as she walked into their apartment, a nice two-bedroom place off in a residential annex some nine blocks away from Freedom Hall
While she’d been enduring the shame of going through basic flight again, she’d caught sight of Mark soaring through the air with another beginner class. His lessons had ended before hers, so she’d had to wait for an hour before she could talk to him about it. She could have used their mental link, but she’d been worried about getting distracted and screwing up.
Mark was chilling on one of the comfy armchairs that had come with the apartment, and watching a Seinfeld rerun. The show was a lot like the one on Earth Prime, except here Jerry Seinfeld had super powers very much like Ultimate’s, although at much lower scale; the idea of Jerry Seinfeld being a Neo still scared Christine a little bit. “Hey,” he said. “I was just about to order a pizza. Broccoli on your half, or do you want something else?”
“Broccoli’s fine.” After a few weeks of living together, they’d learned a few of their likes and dislikes. She liked broccoli on her pizza as much as he hated it, for example. Playing house had been equal parts fun and un-fun, as they discovered each other’s bad habits. He didn’t believe in folding clothes, for example, and liked to just stuff them in his chest’s drawers any which way. On the other hand, he hated it when the dishes didn’t get washed right away, while she preferred to wait until there were enough dirty items to fill the dishwasher, so he ended up doing the dishes about ninety percent of the time. Overall, though, they got along great; he never left the toilet seat up, for example, which put him ahead of a goodly percentage of the male gender.
“And yeah, they figured I could fly during my last physical,” he said after he placed the call to their favorite pizza place – there were only four pizza places in Liberty City, including a Pizza Hut, so it wasn’t great pizza, just the best available.
“Makes sense. Your super-strength is partially telekinetic, so if you can lift weights with your mind you can lift yourself, and if you can lift you can thrust, and so on.”
“Are you talking dirty to me?” Mark said with a bright mental smile.
She grinned back. “I wasn’t, but I’d be happy to.” They’d have to wait until after the pizza, or the delivery guy might end up interrupting them, but now they had some nice after-dinner plans. He flashed a quick image of what he had in mind, and her smile widened. “Okay, stop it, or I won’t be able to wait until after the pizza gets here. And anyways, congrats.”
“And no, I can’t fly better than you,” he said. “Right now I can either float around at a snail’s pace, or fly in a straight line; if I try to make a turn I usually end up crashing into the nearest surface. I saw you back there, and you are kicking ass.”
“Sure, except the reason you saw me back there was that they sent me back to the kiddie pool after I ruined a group maneuver.”
“Let me guess, you were thinking about something other than flying.”
She shrugged. “I can’t help it. I think; it’s what I do.”
“Descartes couldn’t have put it better himself.”
“Well, he kinda did.”
“In any case, that’s one bad habit you need to unlearn, Christine. You know I like to brood and turn things around in my head myself, but when it’s time for action, you have to stop telling stories to yourself and just be. Otherwise you’re going to be running a fraction of a second or more behind the other guy, and in a fight for your life that’s plenty enough time to get killed. Yeah, you’re almost invulnerable, you took a direct hit from the Iron Tsar and lived to tell about it, but you probably wouldn’t have been able to take two hits in a row. You want to avoid taking any hits, and save your shields for the times when nothing you do will avoid taking a hit.”
“You’re right. The meditation classes are supposed to help, but I still get my brain whispering to me, especially when I know it’s not real.”
“That’s probably it. You’re not taking the training seriously enough. Another bad habit. Still, I’m not going to nag you about it. Your instincts when the shit does hit the fan are pretty good.”
“Thank you.” He meant it, too; he wasn’t just blowing smoke up her butt to try to make her feel good, and that made her feel damn good.
“Anyways, what were you thinking about when you shoulda been concentrating on flying?”
“You know what. The Crimson Cube O’ Doom.”
“I figured as much. I knew your ‘uncle’ was starting to nag you, the other night, which is why I got pissed off at him. He’s not very good at being tactful,
and that’s coming from me, Mr. Tact his own fucking self. From what I hear, that comes from both sides of his ‘family.’ Doc Slaughter was always a cold fish, and your Dad wasn’t big on talking to people even before he went cuckoo for cocoa puffs, as you like to put it, whatever that means.”
“Just a phrase from the Auld Country, me foine bucko me lad,” she said in an atrocious attempt at an Irish accent, and he chuckled. She decided to lay her cards on the table. “I was also worried about how irritated you’ve been getting these last couple of weeks.”
Mark’s posture slumped a little. “I know, and I’m sorry. At first, it wasn’t so bad. Turns out I had a lot more to learn than I expected, and I’m fine with that. But a lot of the Legion bullshit is just, well, bullshit. Sanctimonious crap, optics over results, trying get the whole world to love us when the best we can hope for is being tolerated by fifty-one percent and feared by the rest, and maybe even that’s too much to hope for. And a couple of the local dickheads still think I got a sweetheart deal I didn’t deserve. There’s this Chilean prick, code name Diamond Drill. The other day, I try some of my Spanish on him, and he acts like he doesn’t understand me, then talks to me in English, real slow, as if I’m mentally deficient. You know, the kind of petty shit that usually gets people smacked around a few times until they grow out of it, except here I can’t smack him around, because then I’ll prove to them I’m some ghetto piece of shit.” He took a breath. “Damn, I didn’t know I had that much verbiage stuck up my ass.”
“I’m glad you told me. I agree, I hate that sort of high school bull crap.”
“Heh. I shouldn’t let it get to me. I’m not used to getting dissed is all; been too long someone’s dissed me without losing teeth over it. It’ll get better when are inducted as full members, or at least it will be less overt. I take it you haven’t changed your mind about using Armageddon Girl?” he asked with a smile.
“Come on! For one, the full story about my terrible fate isn’t public knowledge, so what am I supposed to tell people when they ask me why I chose Armageddon as part of my title? For another, you know how I feel about the stupid name.”
He walked over, made a face and kissed her. “And you know how I love to tease you about it.”
“Jerk,” she said with a smile.
The pizza got there soon afterwards, but they didn’t eat it until long after it’d gotten cold.
Chapter Twelve
The Freedom Legion
Freedom Island, Caribbean Sea, May 21, 2013
“We’re all agreed, then. A special election for the entire Council slate will be held on June first,” Olivia O’Brien said. Not everyone agreed, although nobody disagreed out loud – the election would be a referendum on how badly the Council had screwed up. She doubted half of the current membership – the ones who weren’t dead, half-dead or fugitives from the law, that was – would be re-elected. None of them, herself included, had done very well at all.
The current Council included her husband Larry Graham, replacing Chasca, a choice she’d made in haste and regretted later; a white male taking the place of a woman of color made for terrible optics; Ali Fiori, also temporarily filling in, in her case for Doc Slaughter, who was still officially dead even though there was a man walking around with his memories and much of his personality; General Xu, the unofficial spokesman for the Republic of China; Hana Kwon, code name Darkling; Andrew Whitmore, a.k.a. Meteor; and lastly one Olivia O’Brien. No replacement had been named for Daedalus Smith, the traitor, and John was still off the Council until the charges against him were cleared up, a process that was likely to take months. An investigation of all of Daedalus’ friends and associates was underway, trying to find out how deep the rot had spread. So far all that had come of it was a lot of acrimony and paranoia, and not one bit of evidence.
“With that settled, we have plenty of other things to deal with,” she went on. “There is the matter of dealing with all Daedalus Smith holdings that are in any way linked to the Legion. As you know, while Smith had signed over much of his personal fortune and patents over to us, there are plenty of…”
“That’s something for the solicitors and the financiers to haggle about,” Meteor cut her off. “Nobody gives a toss about that. I want to talk about the decision of inducting three vigilantes, criminals, really, into the Legion. That decision should wait until we have a real Council in place, not our current collection of replacements. We hardly have a quorum!”
“You are referring to Adam Slaughter-Trent, Christine Dark and Mark Martinez, I take it,” Olivia said.
Meteor nodded curtly. “The Lurker, a bloke that’s killed hundreds, is walking around in the clone body of Hiram Hades with all of Doc Slaughter’s memories. There’s no telling what mischief he’s capable of. The Dark girl, she seems all right; don’t have many objections to her, other than the company she keeps. And that Martinez bloke, he’s as bad as the Lurker, if not worse. We’ve already helped him avoid prosecution on multiple charges, which is bad enough, but now we’re about to give him the full powers and privileges of the Legion. That is mad, and a real Council would see that.”
“This is a real fucking council, Andrew,” Ali Fiori said. “Larry and I may be temps, but temps are allowed by the bylaws. So shut the fuck up about it.”
“Hear, hear,” Larry joined in.
“Even though I voted for the affirmative when the motion came to the floor, I do think the matter is serious enough that it might warrant waiting for a full gathering of the Council,” General Xu said. “I second Meteor’s motion.”
“Very well. We have a motion to rescind our previous decision and wait until after the elections. All in favor?” Meteor and General Xu raised their hands. Xu looked pointedly at Darkling, but the Korean hero glared back at him and kept her arms resolutely crossed in front of her. “All against?” She, Larry and Ali raised their hands. Darkling abstained, which was good enough. “Motion failed. The induction will take place tomorrow, as planned.”
Meteor was almost literally fuming, but he didn’t say anything else. It was clear that he and General Xu had expected Darkling to vote with them, which would have resulted in a tie and forced Olivia to postpone the induction. The British hero’s animosity toward the new members was shared by many others. Olivia thought that only Darkling’s respect for her had caused her to waver.
Not for the first time, Olivia wondered if she was doing the right thing. The three new members represented a great opportunity for the Legion, but also posed a potential threat.
She would be seeing them tonight, at a small dinner gathering she and Larry were hosting. It promised to be as interesting evening.
* * *
Adam Slaughter-Trent tried to mingle and be normal.
Dinner had been pleasant enough. Olivia and Larry were excellent hosts, and had carefully steered the table-side conversations away from business. They’d talked about Christine’s world, about the progress the new Legionnaires were making, and exchanged stories about old adventures. Adam’s memories of similar social events were comforting, which helped calm his Damon-self.
After the meal, the gathering moved to the living room, and talk turned to more serious matters. Adam had been quiet for most of the evening, but now it was time for him to speak. Both of his progenitors’ personas hadn’t been much for small talk, but they could make portentous announcements well enough. “You have waited long enough, Christine.”
“I know,” she said. “Will you help me?”
Adam nodded. “We will start with the Words I still remember, and take it from there.” He turned to Olivia and Larry. “We will need a week, possibly two, and a secure location where we will not be disturbed.”
“We can take care of that easily enough,” Olivia said. “Say, a couple of days after the induction ceremony? We’ll put you on detached duty for as long as you need it.”
“That’s soon enough,” Adam said. His Damon-self was still uncomfortable about the number of people who knew th
e secrets he’d labored so long to protect: in addition to those directly involved in Christine’s ordeal, the Council at large had been made privy to everything, and he knew for a fact that at least two of its members could not be trusted to keep the secret. Meteor would most assuredly talk to his own circle of friends, and General Xu had long been suspected of reporting directly to the Republic of China. Too many people knew that Christine could potentially strip all Neos of their power, or grant more power to those she chose. And too many of those people would eventually reach the same conclusion as to what to do about her.
“Are we going through the whole swearing-in ceremony again?” Face-Off asked.
“Yes. This time it will be conducted in public, so be prepared to have your picture taken a lot,” Larry replied. “After that’s over, you’ll all have to do a ton of interviews for the news and the late shows. It’s customary.”
“Hope they remember to film my good side,” the vigilante said in his typically deadpan voice. “You know, maybe I’ll fly off to New York after the ceremony and do the interviews in person. It’ll give me a chance to visit Condor before I get put on duty and I’m too busy beating up perps in Guatemala or wherever.”
“Sounds good,” Olivia said. “Talk to Public Relations tomorrow morning and they’ll set things up for you. You were already scheduled to make an appearance in the Late Show via remote; I’m sure Dave will be happy to have you drop by in person. As long as you don’t impersonate anybody without their knowledge this time,” she concluded with a smile.
“I’ll behave myself,” the ex-vigilante promised.
“The ceremony will feel like a baptism of sorts to me,” Adam said. “It will reaffirm my commitment to the Legion and the world.” His Kenneth-self was very much looking forward to having access to his labs and workshops once again. He’d been quietly consulting with his research teams in an unofficial capacity, but he needed a hands-on approach to better produce results. More importantly, he wanted to put to use his knowledge of the Words his Damon-self had passed on to him. He’d already drawn initial plans for a defensive harness using applications of the Heal Word, which could be used by normal humans and would likely save countless lives once he figured out how to mass-produce the devices.
New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance Page 17