New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance
Page 36
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Mark pushing through the onslaught, getting closer to Mr. Night with every step. He was beginning to burn once again. It was happening just like the last time, and in many ways it was her fault. She’d given her more power than he could safely handle, and combined with his rage, he was headed for destruction.
Mark knew all of this, and he didn’t care, just like he hadn’t cared during the battle over the Hudson. He would risk everything, as long as he got his hands around Mr. Night’s throat. Killing the creepy old man was worth his life and soul as far as he was concerned. His only regret would be losing Christine, and he gave her a brief glance as he kept going.
Mr. Night’s expression never changed, but she felt his gleeful certainty begin to waver as Mark came closer. He shifted his energies away from Christine to deal with the more immediate threat, and he managed to check Mark’s advance. Which gave her just enough of a breather to act.
She had a plan. There hadn’t been enough time to put it to work before, and she wasn’t sure if she had enough time now, or even if it would work, but it was better than watching Mark kill himself. She couldn’t go through that a second time. Christine put her shields on autopilot, spending just enough power to keep the waves of darkness from touching her, and she reached out with her will. She took the Word of Power and used it as a conduit to reach the Source from the Genocide’s home world, the now-untapped Source that had nobody to empower and nowhere to go, fresh from cleansing the taint from its last charge, and eager to do more.
As soon as she touched it she was struck with a wave of sorrow and loneliness: Sources were meant to be in constant communion with the life forms they had been created to guide and uplift; unable to fulfill the reason for its existence, it would die soon. Christine’s touch provided only a temporary reprieve. It couldn’t work with a human host, not for long; the mental and spiritual wiring were all wrong.
Christine didn’t need to remain in touch with it for long, however, just long enough to give it a final target, a temporary host for all its power, and another Outsider infection to burn clean off the face of the universe. She coaxed the alien Source gently and sent it forth towards Mr. Night.
It manifested in Dreamland like a bolt of pure white lightning that smote the Outsider servitor like the Wrath of God. Mr. Night had been able to keep his otherworldly essence apart from the Source’s primal energies while inhabiting Medved and then Mark; he’d skillfully kept the incongruous forces apart while making use of them both. He couldn’t handle the full power of a disconnected Source that had nowhere else to do than to search out and obliterate the Outsider stuff that made up what passed for his soul. It was worse than what happened to the Genocide: unlike the alien, Mr. Night was utterly in the thrall of the Outside. That made him the perfect target for the Source’s rage.
The waves of darkness stopped, and Mark stumbled to his knees, a few feet away from his goal. For a moment Mr. Night stood motionless, his lopsided smile still on his face. His mouth opened, wider and wider, well beyond what normal human jaws could extend.
A torrent of light speckled with flecks of blackness came rushing out, like a visual scream.
His eyes exploded and more light burst out from them, like a Jack-o’-Lantern stuffed with a magnesium flare. Mr. Night threw his head up; his body began to convulse and burn.
Christine reached out and dragged Mark toward her, away from the Source energies that might target him next.
A lot of work.
Mr. Night was going to be consumed in a very energetic reaction in a matter of seconds. How energetic? Probably enough to create a fireball a couple or three astronomical units in radius, which would be bad news for everyone in the vicinity. Even worse, if Mr. Night went up while still inhabiting Mark’s body, Mark would be toast, although all things considered that’d be somewhat irrelevant given the aforementioned multi astronomical unit-wide fireball, which in scientific terms translated to a whole lot of toast.
Solution: take the essence of one Mr. Night, remove it from its current host, gift-wrap it and deliver it via express mail to the other side of the Gate where his Masters waited. Sort of a big Fuck You present. Of course, doing it was a little bit tricky.
Unstapling Mr. Night from Mark’s body was the worst part. She had to go in there, forge a link with Mr. Night almost as intimate as the one she had with Mark, and start cutting stuff off, which was sort of like peeling wallpaper with your fingernails, if wallpaper could bleed and scream as you peeled it off, while also burning the skin off your fingers.
Along the way, she learned more about Mr. Night than she’d ever wanted to.
Once, he’d been a man. He had been seeking immortality by dabbling in the occult, which for the most part was nothing but superstitious nonsense. Unfortunately for him, there were bits and pieces of twisted wisdom among the nonsense, and he’d made contact with the vast alien intelligences lurking in deep space. The results were what anybody who’d read even the lamest Lovecraft pastiche would have guessed. There were still little fragments of Michael Engelbert Night floating in there, screaming in endless terror and pain. They were part of the package, unfortunately, and Christine sent them off along with the rest. Maybe those human bits would find peace after this was over, although she very much doubted it.
She held on to the Hell construct he’d created, along with the thousands of souls he’d trapped there, hoping that Mark’s plan would work and she could save them.
Doing all of that had a cost, of course. She was burning out, much like Mark had done, tapping more power than she could safely handle. There were going to be consequences, and she probably wouldn’t know what they were until they bit her in the ass. And there was still more to do.
First things first. She visualized Mr. Night and all his works, and the ticking time-bomb-supernova, as one big colorful beach ball wrapped in pink ribbon with a bow at one end, and she fired it off. Sensors from Liberty Ship captured the scene: a gigantic beach ball wrapped up in pink ribbon with a bow at one end erupted from the ruins of the Chung Cheng and flew towards the Outsider anomaly, incinerating several thousand shadow entities along the way before disappearing into the pool of darkness. Two seconds later, there was a flash of light; the anomaly and all the Outsider creatures disappeared a fraction of a second later.
She wasn’t aware of any of that. There was Mark to deal with first. Cutting Mr. Night and the Outsider taint off Mark had meant cutting off bits of his soul as well and she had to fix the damage she’d inflicted or he’d end up insane, dead, or worse. Christine had hacked right into Mark’s soul, still beautiful to behold despite everything he’d gone through. This time, however, she had full sysop privileges; she could literally rewrite his source code as she saw fit.
She could change him any way she wanted.
It was so tempting, to reshape him as if he was made of wet clay. Take his anger away, once and for all. Smooth all those rough and sharp edges that often cut those who got too close to him. Relieve him of his pain, dull the bad memories, make him gentler, kinder, better. She could do all that and more.
And what would that make me?
You know what, her brain replied. A brief memory of Dark Christine and her living toys flashed before her eyes.
Eff that. She was after one thing, and one thing only: the Outsider taint. She cut those bits off, poured Source energy into them as if it was bleach, and burned them away. It was tough, and some of Mark’s soul got damaged along the way; she felt his agony as parts of him were burned off, but she did what she could and did what she had to, and hoped the price wouldn’t be too high.
Eventually, she was done. The evil pollution was gone. Another mental presence touched her: Mesmer’s ghost joined them in Dreamland. The disembodied psychic had been standing by, inside the body of a brave woman aboard the Liberty Ship. He would shepherd the lost souls out o
f the fading mindscape Mr. Night had created, and lead them into the weird psychic realm known as Comatown, or at least he would try to. She would help…
Something broke inside of her.
It didn’t hurt, but it felt like something had exploded in her head. She was back in space, floating among the remains of the Chinese spaceship. Her vision narrowed to a tunnel, to a pinpoint of light.
This is where I pay the piper, she thought idly. She’d done too much, pushed too much, and something had given, something had finally stopped working.
Darkness.
Face-Off
Freedom Island, Caribbean Sea, March 1, 2014
Adam said nothing. He didn’t bother shaking his head.
There was no need for him to say anything. I knew, just by looking at the small form lying on the hospital bed. My connection to Christine was still there, but it led to a white void. It was a coma of sorts; her mind was adrift somewhere, and her body was being kept alive by machines. There wasn’t enough left of her to even empower her Neo healing abilities.
It’d been almost a month, and she hadn’t come back.
I was on semi-permanent leave from the Freedom Legion, and had basically moved into the medical wing where they’d warehoused her. Might as well, since I’d lost my apartment after I’d been declared dead. Not that I was going to spend any time anywhere else. Not that I gave a shit about anything other than the girl on the bed. I spent my days mostly staring at Christine and trying to use our mental connection to wake her up.
John Clarke had been there pretty much nonstop, too.
You’d think his presence would bother me, but it hadn’t. John wasn’t a bad guy: a bit of a smug self-righteous prick, sure, but not a bad guy. If she had to end up with someone else, she could do a lot worse.
If she woke up, I’d fucking throw rice at their wedding and not give a shit. If she woke up. If she ever fucking woke up.
“Anything?” John asked me. The big guy had never developed a psychic connection with her, and it killed him, not being able to know what was going on inside her head. I felt bad for him.
“Still drawing a blank,” I said. “But she’s not dead. I’d know if she was.” We had this exact same conversation at least once a week, before we turned away and proceeded to ignore each other. I picked up my e-tablet and tried to get back into the latest G.R.R. Martin novel. I usually managed to read for fifteen, even twenty minutes before I turned back to Christine and called out to her with what passed for my mind.
Maybe I’d give Mesmer a holler to see if he could give it another try. The dead telepath had been a huge help. He’d managed to rescue most of Mr. Night’s victims. Most. Jeffrey and Chen hadn’t made it through, along with a few others, most of them innocents who hadn’t been able to survive the telepathic odyssey. The ones who’d made it were living happily in Comatown along with a pack of hepsters and assorted other disembodied souls. I’d volunteered to connect to the network of living minds that anchored Comatown to the real world, which meant I could call Mesmer at will. I wasn’t doing it very often anymore. The guy had tried his best, but his telepathic powers hadn’t been any more effective than my connection to her.
I couldn’t get into the novel, so I absently checked the news. The new ‘era of cooperation and harmony’ that assorted talking heads had assured us would follow the impromptu alliance against the Genocide hadn’t materialized. Instead, the Iron Tsar and the Dragon Emperor had made a bunch of unreasonable demands as a reward for their help. Considering neither of those assholes had deigned to keep fighting the Genocide as soon as things got tough, that took a lot of balls. The rest of the world told them to take a flying fucking leap, although in somewhat kinder terms. There’d been border clashes, new trade embargoes, and plenty of unpleasantness to go around afterwards.
Other than that, things were relatively quiet. There were reports of new Neos showing up, however, which meant that Christine’s shutdown of the Source hadn’t lasted. One crazy Type Three in Australia had trashed Sidney; it had taken the entire Pacific contingent of the Legion to put him down, and they’d almost called me and John back into active duty. We both would have gone, of course, if they’d really needed us.
That’s what Christine would have wanted.
By the time I was done with the news and the comic strips, it was lunch time. I went to grab something from the vending machines. Today’s menu consisted of three bags of potato chips and a dozen candy bars; some of the vending machines actually had some fairly edible self-heating dishes, but I’d gotten bored with them and gone back to junk food. As I was punching numbers and daring the machine to leave one of my selections hanging – the one time that’d happened I’d ended up paying for a new machine after I worked off my frustrations on the old one – the long-awaited moment finally happened.
The potato chip bags dropped to the floor. I reached out with every bit of mental strength I could muster, and the world shifted. I was in Dreamland yet again: this particular version was a big expanse of mist-filled whiteness.
And there she was.
Something let go inside my chest. I must admit, I came dangerously close to bursting into tears, even without eyes.
Except that the smile I saw in her face froze me cold.
That, and the way she was dressed. She was wearing this barely-there outfit that I recognized as the costume of a Chicago Guardian named Annie Arclight. Christine wouldn’t be caught dead wearing that.
“Fuck.”
“Heya, Mark. How’s it hanging, baby?” Dark Christine said.
“What the fuck is this?” I said, my initial burst of happiness fading into a cold rage with more than a little terror mixed in.
“What, no welcome home speech? No hugs, no kisses? No fuckee-suckee?” Christine punctuated the words with a few pelvic thrusts.
“You’re not her.”
“Are you sure? Maybe all the stress pushed me over the edge and I went Dark Side. Oh, the humanity, I’m so eeeevil now. Saving the world was just too much, oh woe is me, yadda yadda.”
“You’re the bitch from that alternate universe,” I said, sounding a lot more sure than I felt. Either way, in about five seconds I was going to do my level best to kill her.
“You’re not as dumb as you look, Marky-Mark. And before you try to get all medieval on my ass, consider that fighting me in Dreamland isn’t the best idea. You’d lose pretty damn badly.”
“Better dead than listening to a crazy bitch,” I said. “Trust me, I’m done shopping at the crazy bitch department.”
“Does your Christine know you use such demeaning words to refer to women? Very misogynistic, Marky.”
“What the fuck do you want?”
“Chrissy and I had a little disagreement while she was on her mental walkabout. I decided to cut her off at the pass, so to speak, and maybe borrow her body and see how the other half lives. My reality has gotten way boring lately. I figure she and my Mark can have some fun while I have some fun with you. Reality swapping, as it were.”
“You’ll have to go through me to get to her.”
“Not a problem. After I get rid of you, I’ll convince Dear John Clarke that his beloved is back, and he should be a lot easier to fool than you. Might make for a nice change of pace, actually; in my world, I never fucked him, I just killed him, unlike your Christine, who got to ride Ultimate’s dick while you were being tortured in Hell. Don’t you feel the teeniest bit betrayed by that?”
Wow. A gleefully evil chatterbox. And I’d thought Hell had been bad.
I didn’t reply. I was too busy getting ready for a likely futile last stand.
“Get away from him, YOU BITCH!”
Dark Christine had time to look surprised before she popped out of existence like a punctured balloon.
Sh
e was replaced by a girl in a pink sweater and jeans and a sweet cheerful smile.
I woke up. I was lying on the floor next to the vending machines, surrounded by discarded junk food. I rushed to her room.
She was awake, hugging it out with John Clarke, both of them sobbing uncontrollably.
What the hell. I joined them in the hugging, and the crying, too glad to see her again to worry about the future.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Hunters and Hunted
Johannesburg, South Africa, March 2, 2014
The big news of the day was Christine Dark’s awakening. The good people of Johannesburg were tossing a city-wide party in celebration. The simpering little bitch was surprising popular worldwide, despite her steadfast refusal to show skin. There was no accounting for taste, Daedalus Smith thought as he walked towards the meeting place.
Coming back had been insanely risky, but the crew of the intrepid ship Puta Madre had essentially mutinied before they’d cleared the Oort Cloud. News of the Genocide’s defeat had reached them much too soon. He cursed his inability to get his FTL engine to work. Unfortunately, the prototype he’d managed to build had a few glitches. It would move objects at superluminal speeds, but whenever said objects reentered normal space, a significant percentage of their mass was converted into energy. That made for a nifty weapon system but not a viable mode of transportation. He’d work out the kinks eventually, but for the time being his ship had been crawling away at a mere half a percent of c when the good news arrived.
The crew insisted on coming back for one final supply run. He couldn’t blame them: the Puta Madre had sailed off with a minimum of cargo, just enough to keep the humans on board alive for the estimated nineteen-month cruise; Daedalus and the rest of the Neos on the ship would end up sucking vacuum for eight of those months, which was survivable but nobody’s idea of fun. So after a nasty argument where he’d almost lost control of the ship, Daedalus had agreed to return to Earth and properly outfit the vessel. He’d even agreed to let a handful of crewmembers, who’d decided the trip was no longer a good idea, come back with him. Said crewmembers were now buried in concrete under the foundation of a new building in the city; he wasn’t going to leave behind anybody who could blab about his plans.