Now it was Damon’s turn to be surprised. The little man spoke of things he had no earthly way of knowing. Their host wasn’t a confidence man, then, but another like Damon himself, capable of things that could not be explained by reason or science. A part of him felt relief. He had spent much of the last six months wasting his time with charlatans and deluded fools who had not provided any enlightenment. Here he might find answers. Apprehension warred with relief, however. Mr. Night’s disturbing demeanor made it likely Damon would not like the answers provided here.
“All of you are members of a grand new elite,” Mr. Night continued. “You few, you happy few, have been chosen by a greater power for a great destiny, and I mean that quite literally, let me assure you. And you five in particular have a unique chance to play a pivotal role in the shaping of the future. I have called you here to ask you to accept that role.”
“You speak much and say little,” Cushko said. “I did not come here to waste my time. I have a war to fight. The Poles and the Bolsheviks are circling my motherland like so many wolves, and I must return there soon.”
The world should have had its fill of war, Damon thought, and yet there were still plenty of fools like Cushko, eager to lead other fools into new charnel houses. There truly was no hope for humanity, was there? What could whatever paltry miracles he and his companions wielded possibly accomplish in a world where murder had become another industry?
“You will work miracles, my friends,” Mr. Night said, as if reading Damon’s thoughts, or perhaps literally reading those thoughts. “And they will not be paltry things. It is within your power to become king-makers or actual kings, and to reshape history.”
“That’s bully, old man,” Daedalus Smith said, obviously not impressed by Mr. Night’s lofty pronouncements. “Would you mind telling us some specifics? I may not have wars to fight, but I could be doing better things on my week-end than cooling my heels and listening to vague speeches about great power and lofty destinies.”
Mr. Night bowed towards Daedalus. “As you wish,” he said. “And so, without further ado…” The strange man made a broad gesture with both arms and a glowing object appeared in mid-air in front of him.
At first, Damon thought he was watching a dark flame hovering in the air, but the thing coalesced into an intricate design made of radiant darkness, black with purple highlights. It shone intensely but darkly, and every instinct in Damon’s body warned him the thing was dangerous, not merely dangerous but wrong, something that did not belong to this world. A few steps away, Cassandra recoiled from the sight as if she had been dealt a physical blow. The Chinaman raised his hands in a fighting stance. Cushko roared a challenge in his native language, and a shield of flame appeared in front of him. Daedalus did not move; he stared intently at the dark apparition, trying to understand its workings.
“Observe, my friends,” Mr. Night said. “Observe, and learn.”
Damon tried to look away from the darkly glowing design and discovered he could not tear his gaze from it. The thing started to move, to change its pattern with a sinuous, hypnotic rhythm. He looked into the glowing darkness and, in looking, was lost.
* * *
He walked alone through blood-spattered walls. The Secret Service Special Neo Unit and their human counterparts had made their last stand by the entrance to the secret bunker beneath the White House. They had perished to the last man. A part of him, the vanishingly small bit of humanity left within the darkness, felt a pang of regret over their deaths. They had fought well, doing their duty. But duty, courage and honor were things of the past. Only power mattered.
One solid metal wall stood between him and his target. He could have ripped it off its hinges, or melted the steel with but a glance, or otherwise dealt with the puny obstacle in a myriad other ways. On a whim, he simply teleported to the other side, where a pale man in a rumpled suit awaited him. Killing the last President of the United States was a largely symbolic gesture, since the country was already in ruins. Washington D.C. had burned to the ground; elsewhere, millions were dead and millions more slowly starved in the deserts he had created; the President had been hiding in the dark like a scared child for quite some time now, ruling nothing.
He finished it quickly, almost mercifully, although mercy was no longer within his understanding. A moment later, he appeared behind a podium overlooking a plaza filled with tens of thousands of his supporters. He raised the President’s severed head for everyone to see, and the crowd cheered him wildly. Those worshipping men and women formed the core of his army and followed him as he went forth conquering, and to conquer.
In the end, only three remained, three rulers and destroyers. They met in a molten cauldron that he vaguely recognized as the city of Paris, and there they strove against each other. Their battle made continents shudder and heave. And when it was over, he stood alone, ruler of the planet. He would remake the world as he saw fit, for there was no one left to challenge him.
His laughter was a terrible thing.
* * *
Damon recoiled from the vision; he understood he had glimpsed a possible future, one where he had accepted what Mr. Night offered. That offer remained on the table. Absolute power lay tantalizingly close, his for the taking. His new gifts were but a hint of the things he would be able to do if he accepted the vision’s implicit offer.
No.
The negation was irrevocable. He felt the promised power slipping away, leaving him with nothing but regret and fear. He became aware of similar decisions made by others in the room. Cassandra screamed as her eyes were seared off by things no human was meant to see. Daedalus Smith turned away from dreams where the world was a simple, ordered place, a clockwork universe run by New Men, perfectible and eventually perfect. Konstantin Cushko tried to negotiate a better deal, and only succeeded in damning himself. Qiao’s denial was followed by an oath to achieve ultimate power on his own, to protect the world against the threat he had seen in his visions.
Damon came to himself somewhere outdoors, stumbling blindly into the night. The city streets were almost deserted; a look at his pocket watch revealed it was nearly dawn. Even as he wondered about the lost time, he realized that all his memories from that night were dissipating, leaving him groping for images and concepts that had been clear to him moments before, but which quickly became dreamlike before being gone altogether. It was a terrible feeling, having knowledge ripped out of his mind. He knew he had been made to forget something, something vitally important, and that knowledge remained, if nothing else.
He staggered down the streets, trying to make sense of it all. The invitation, he remembered, and responding to it, but he could no longer recall the address. There had been others there, but their identities were lost to him. And he had seen things that left him feeling a sense of urgency and overwhelming terror.
There had been laughter, too. Dark, terrible laughter. He remembered that well.
The Invincible Man
Lake of the Woods, Ontario, March 15, 2013
John Clarke stared into the night, seeing nothing.
The wounds had healed and the pain was gone, but the torn-up costume remained as a reminder of his humiliating defeat. Normally he would have changed uniforms as soon as he was back in Freedom Island, or at his White Sanctum in the Artic. He couldn’t go to either place. For the time being, he had no home.
John angrily shook his head. He was wallowing in self-pity instead of thinking of a course of action. His self-confidence was shot. He’d been hurt badly many times before, but rarely like this. He’d been beaten, at the mercy of his enemies. Only the intervention of a handful of vigilantes had saved him. A handful of vigilantes, and Christine Dark, of course.
“John?”
Speak of the devil.
John turned to face the girl. Her hair and eye coloring were so much like Linda Lamar’s that it hurt a little bit just to look at her. The similarities to his wife ended there, however. Linda had been strong-willed and short-tempered
(‘I’m a pushy broad, and you’d better remember it,’ she’d unapologetically announced early in their relationship); Christine was shy and kindly. And yet, something about her brought back feelings he’d thought buried forever. Seeing her made him set aside his doubts and fears. It was time to start behaving like the Invincible Man once again.
“Hey,” Christine continued. “Sorry to disturb you. There’s been some more bad news. I know, what else is new, right?”
“That’s all right. What’s the bad news?”
“They found the mind-trip guy, the Dreamer. Dead. They made it look like you did it.”
That made sense, in its own twisted way. A living Doctor Cohen could have been confronted and questioned. As a murder victim, his accusations became unimpeachable. Christine could corroborate John’s version of events, but in the eyes of the law she was a criminal who had assaulted a number of law-enforcement Neos. Her credibility would be minimal.
“If we turn ourselves in, can they, I don’t know, do a mind-reading or something and show that we’re telling the truth?”
“Telepathic testimony is not admissible as evidence in court,” John explained. “It was deemed to be a violation of the Fifth Amendment. At best, it can be used as probable cause for search warrants and the like.”
“That sucks. Well, protecting the Fifth Amendment doesn’t suck, but you not being able to prove your innocence does.”
“The truth will come out in the end,” he said with a confidence he didn’t really feel. He probably shouldn’t be trying to mollycoddle the girl, but he felt an urge to do so nonetheless.
“They even planted DNA evidence implicating you,” Christine went on. “This is so effed up it’s not even funny. After we kicked the Dreamer’s ass I thought things might turn out all right Then Dad showed up and it’s been all epic fail all the time since then.”
“The Lurker was – is, for all I know – a good man,” John said. “Even if he wasn’t in his right mind, from what you said he tried to protect you even at the cost of his own life.”
“None of that would have happened if he hadn’t made me look at the Red Cube of Doom. Now it’s as useful to me as a broken Palantir; if I try to use it to learn more, those wannabe Nazgul may pop in for a little visit again.”
John vaguely understood the references. Tolkien’s fantasies, he thought. He’d never read the books, and he’d only seen one of the movies back in the seventies, at Linda’s insistence; it hadn’t been bad, just not his cup of tea. He’d never found much use for fantasy and speculative fiction; reality had enough wonders and mysteries as far as he was concerned, and he saw no need to read about fictional ones. He got the gist of what Christine was saying, though.
“Yes, waiting until we know it’s safe would be a good idea,” he said, and involuntarily ran a hand over the rents in his costume.
“I still can’t believe the giant beardo took you down like that,” she said, noticing the gesture. “But I think he got a boost from the Outsiders, and they don’t play by the rules, even the rules in super-duper universe.”
“So you did learn something before we were attacked.” The long-suppressed memories about the shadow-entity in Berlin stirred at the mention of the Outsiders.
“Something. Not much. There is a war. Cosmic Nerds versus the Outsiders. Not exactly good and evil, but close enough for us mere humans, I guess. The Nerds live in the center of galaxies and use black holes like we use triple-A batteries, don’t ask me how, I’m a physics major and I was like a Mayan priest trying to understand what a nuclear power plant does, let alone how it does it. The Outsider thingies were, duh, outside the universe when the Big Bang happened, and got dragged into it. They want to make the universe go away so they can get back home. They don’t like us. I caught glimpses of lots of dead worlds where the Outsiders managed to eradicate all life. They aren’t nice at all.”
John nodded. “I think I encountered one of their creatures once before.” He told her about the 1945 incident. For a wonder, Christine listened quietly until he was done.
“That’s gotta be one of them,” she said when he was done. “Which means they’ve been trying to get into your head for a while. Trying and failing. The Outsiders don’t do too well in places with a lot of matter and energy, so they mostly hang out in deep space and send their agents to do their dirty work, to try and twist the Cosmic Nerd’s gifts and use it against us, against all sentient beings, basically.”
“And the, ah, Cosmic Nerds gave us our powers so we could join the fight against the Outsiders?”
“I didn’t get all the details, but I think that’s their plan; the powers were meant to prep us for the conflict. A quickie upgrade so we could contribute to the war effort. Which makes us a bunch of primitive natives getting some shiny new guns so we can go fight for our new overlords. Don’t know if I like that.”
“I’m not sure I like it either, but it answers the question of the century,” John said. “People have been wracking their minds for decades trying to figure out where the Source came from.”
“The Source? That’s what you call the Spooky Energy thingy?”
“One of my colleagues came up with the name. It has a nicer ring than Einstein’s Spooky Energy or Oppenheimer’s Gifts of Shiva.” John had met Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer a few times, but the unbridled hostility both human geniuses felt towards Neolympians had cast a pall on those meetings. Daedalus Smith had coined the more neutral term.
“Yeah, it sounds better,” Christine said. “Anyways, the Source came from the Cosmic Nerds. And the super-writing, that was the next step of the process; when we were ready, we would figure out how to use it, and that would give us, our entire species, a leg up, a full uplift thingy, so we could go join the local Elder Races in their giant tree house at the center of the galaxy. That’s where they live. By the way, one thing I learned up was pretty neat: once you are in the tree house you can communicate with the other tree houses in all the galaxies, even those beyond our current particle horizon, eighty billion light years away and more. It’s like a Cosmic Internet that spans the entire universe. I have no clue how they don’t violate causality and a gazillion laws of physics along the way, but again, Mayan priest, meet nuclear power plant. Good luck making sense of it. I might manage one of these days, though.” She smiled at the thought.
Christine’s enthusiastic rant reminded John of Kenneth Slaughter when he got carried away about something or other, except Kenneth hid his excitement a little better. He smiled back at her, and quietly prayed that Kenneth was innocent of any wrongdoing.
Much like Kenneth when he was on a roll, Christine wasn’t done. “Anyway, the Outsiders don’t want us to join the Elder Races, so they are trying to mess with the process. I think people touched by the Outside end up hating reality, just like the Outsiders hate reality, and that would make them pretty evil from our perspective. They have been destroying populated worlds all over the universe, and we’re on their to-do list.”
“For over seventy years, we haven’t detected any signs of intelligent life in the universe. The Outsiders must be the reason,” John said. “One of my friends actually went on a twenty-year trip to explore the galaxy and seek other civilizations.”
“Wow. Did he find anything?”
“He wouldn’t talk about what he found, actually. That’s the thing, whatever he saw was so terrible he doesn’t want to share it with us. He’s been back for over a year, and all he’s done since then is drink himself into a stupor. We were worried about him. If it wasn’t for my own problems, I’d have tried harder to talk to him.” Kenneth Slaughter’s words came back to John. ‘Cassius… yes, he also worries us all.’ What had Cassius Jones found out there? “I really should talk to him.”
“Umm. Can’t that wait until after you clear your name and stuff?”
“I think he can help. My friend’s name is Cassius Jones; he goes by the code name Janus. Now that I know what he must have seen, I think I can get him to listen
to me. More importantly, he hasn’t been an active Legion member in decades, so he can’t be the traitor. If I can convince him of my innocence, his support would be invaluable.” If I can secure his support, he and I can take on the rest of the Legion and probably win, should it come to that, he though. It probably wouldn’t come to that, but having Cassius at his side could give him the leverage to unmask the traitor or traitors within. The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. He didn’t fit in with the likes of Condor and Face-Off. Cassius would help, if he could get him to snap out of his funk.
“Janus is the guy who won the Pacific campaign in WWII pretty much by himself, isn’t he?” Christine said. “And you’ve already decided to go see him. I can tell.”
“McArthur and Halsey would have disagreed fairly strongly, but yes, Janus did win the Pacific War for us, and yes, I’m going to go see him. I think that’s my best option. It’s better than confronting the Legion by myself. With him by my side, my chances are much higher. If can convince the Legion of my innocence and ferret out the traitor, everything will be all right.”
“Big if, though.”
“Things would be out in the open, and we wouldn’t have to run from the authorities.” He looked at her intently. “Come with me. We can convince Janus together, and after we reveal the truth to the rest of my friends, we’ll be home free. You’ll be under the protection of the Legion.”
Christine considered it. “I would, but Cassandra warned us not to go to the authorities. What if the traitor has more tricks up his or her sleeve? Then I’ll be handing myself over to the Big Bads. They want to use me the same way Dad wanted to use me. Or kill me so I can’t do it for anybody else.”
“I can protect you,” John said, but the words sounded hollow to his own ears. He hadn’t been able to protect her in the cave, had he? “No, scratch that. You’re right. How about this? I’ll go speak to Janus myself. If everything goes well, once I clear my name, I’ll contact Condor and let you all know it’s safe. You should be all right here for now.”
New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet Page 5