New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet

by C. J. Carella

  Closer still, he could see more details. A grid arrangement much like those in a human city delineated the relatively unscathed parts of the city, broken here or there by collapsing structures but still easy to discern. Vehicles littered the orderly streets; most of them did not have wheels or any obvious forms of locomotion, and Cassius deduced they had hovered over the ground when functional. Most intersections were clogged with epic traffic jams, complete with the signs of multiple collisions. Survivors of the initial explosion trying to flee, he guessed. He was now close enough to see the remains of the vehicles’ drivers as well.

  The inhabitants of SS-9183 had been tall, slender hexapods, with two rear limbs used solely for traveling, two long intermediate limbs that could be used as both legs and crude gripping or climbing manipulators, and an upper pair of smaller, almost dainty arms terminating in six slender, multi-joined fingers. Their bodies were topped by a long neck and elongated head. From the frozen remains he had examined at the space station, the natives’ skin had been a light lavender hue, with patches of body hair around the head, sides and back that came in diverse colors.

  The corpses below had been mostly reduced to skeletons clad in scraps of clothing. Thousands upon thousands, the corpses lay where they had fallen, most of them in the process of running away. Here or there, clumps of skeletons faced in the direction of the crater and held items that looked very much like weapons. Soldiers or police, trying to protect the fleeing civilians? That seemed likely. Cassius silently saluted their sacrifice as he moved on.

  He walked down one street, carefully stepping around the skeletons. Many of the bodies had been trampled by other fleeing civilians. Others had been torn apart by energy discharges of some sort, and on one city block he found over a thousand bodies that had been beheaded at the same time. The sight sent cold dread surging through his soul. That was the sort of casual carnage a powerful Neolympian gone rogue would inflict on innocent victims.

  A Neo had destroyed this city.

  The power evidenced by the devastation of the city was godlike, but Cassius had seen similar sights before, if not quite at this scale. He had done nearly as much himself. When he had reduced the island fortress of Iwo Jima, he had blasted open its bunkers and tunnel systems and hollowed out the island in a series of massive explosions that had killed all twenty-two thousand defenders. It had taken him less than an hour to reduce the island, and it would have taken even less time if he had not been asked to spare the island’s three airfields so they could be used by the US as a staging area to attack Japan. As it turned out, the airfields had not mattered overmuch; a few weeks later Janus had secured the surrender of the Empire of Japan.

  The end of the Pacific War had been anticlimactic. Janus paused for a moment, remembering. He had walked towards the air-raid shelter in the Imperial Residence where the Emperor hid, swatting aside his guards like so many gnats. The last of the Japan’s Kami Warriors made his last stand there. Kenshi had been a boy no older than nineteen, terrified but determined, wielding twin katanas charged with electrical power. Janus tried to spare his life, but Kenshi kept rising to his feet despite his terrible injuries and launched new attacks, attacks that did little damage but could not be ignored. Finally, Cassius gave the boy the heroic death he had craved. After that, he reached His Majesty the Emperor and greeted him formally in perfect Japanese; a gift for languages had been one of his lesser-known talents.

  “Further resistance will only lead to untold destruction,” Cassius said. “Only an honorable surrender will spare your people and your nation.”

  “Many officers in the Army will not accept this,” said one of the Emperor’s advisors.

  “I will deal with them if necessary,” he replied. The Emperor nodded his acquiescence. Later that day the last Japanese Army diehards had tried to seize the Emperor. Janus had dealt with them.

  If Japan had not surrendered, Cassius had been prepared to unleash untold devastation on the island. He could – and would – have matched the atrocities he now saw all around the dead city. The understanding that someone very much like him was responsible for all this left him feeling cold and hollow inside.

  Oppenheimer had been right after all. Neolympian powers had been the Gifts of Shiva, ultimately doomed to destroy all they touched.

  The light provided by the red dwarf and the gas giant that dominated the planet’s skies gave everything an orange hue. Behind Cassius, a bright blue-white light flared up, drowning the dominant colors with its sudden brilliance. He turned and saw a glowing figure floating in the air. The stranger was one of the hexapods native to the planet, but he was much larger, at least twice the size of any of the bodies Cassius had seen, and it was surrounded by a coruscating aura of bright blue energy.

  A mental probe touched Cassius’ mind.

  ???

  The raw interrogative was painfully intense. Cassius concentrated on his mental defenses as he tried to send a conciliatory mental message. Although he had no inherent telepathic powers, the Legion had trained him in several techniques to both facilitate and repel mental contacts.

  ???

  Cassius sent forth a mental picture of his arrival to the creature’s home world. He tried to project a psychic signature expressing his peaceful intentions, and his identity as a traveler seeking knowledge and nothing more.

  STRANGER.

  The mental voice was piercing, nearly drowning out Cassius’ own thoughts. The single word echoed through his mind, and the harshness and finality lacing it were agonizingly grating. The psychic pulse was full of hostility, hatred and fear. He realized peaceful discourse was not an option.

  The creature attacked.

  Cassius’ first impulse was to gate away. He had no interest in battling the insane creature. To his shocked surprise, he found he could not. The alien’s will was like a super-dense atmosphere, pressing down on him and making it impossible to open a gate. Only a handful of individuals on Earth had been able to suppress his teleportation powers, and none had done it so easily. The shock slowed down his reflexes, allowing the alien to close the distance between them and strike the first blow.

  The genocidal being smashed into him, lashing out with his middle limbs; only Cassius’ defensive aura allowed him to survive the devastating impacts, and enough kinetic energy bled through it to send him flying into a building. Cassius crashed came to half several city blocks. The alien’s malicious presence was nearby, shining like a baleful beacon. The creature was at least as strong as Ultimate, if not stronger. Cassius wiped blood off his face and took flight, seeking altitude.

  A glimpse of movement above him alerted him in time to alter his path and avoid another lunge. The alien crashed into a statue on a pedestal atop one of the skyscrapers, shattering it into a thousand pieces of bronze and stone. As it whirled around, Cassius struck back. He called forth the golden energy he had learned to use as a weapon, a mixture of elementary particles accelerated to the speed of light. He did not restrain himself; the golden bolt that struck the alien was vastly more powerful than the one he had used to send the Japanese battleship Yamato to the bottom of the sea. The alien vanished in an apocalyptic explosion that turned the skyscraper and the area around it into a deep crater. The surrounding structures collapsed over it, burying the alien under thousands of tons of masonry and molten rock and metal.

  It was not enough. Cassius could still sense the malignant mind somewhere below the ground, bewildered and in surprised pain, but alive and able to fight. He flew away as fast as he could. If he could put enough distance between them he might be able to create a gate and flee this mad thing’s planet.

  A wave of overpressure shook him in mid-air. He looked back and saw a mushroom cloud rising behind him. The creature had blasted free by unleashing enough power to tear out the heart of a city. It emerged from the devastation and flew after Cassius, accelerating to supersonic speeds in under a second. He would be overtaken in moments. Flight was impossible.

  Cassius faced his t
ormentor and unleashed more energy blasts, using all the power he could muster. He could not sustain such attacks for long, but his only hope was to kill or disable the entity. His pursuer flew through the storm of fire, unrelenting and unstoppable. He had never encountered such power before, not even during his battles with the Dragon Emperor. The alien – the monster – countered with energy discharges of his own, bursts of pure kinetic force that battered Cassius even through his protective aura. The strikes stunned and slowed him down. A few seconds later he was being crushed by the alien in a four-limbed grasp.

  ???

  The piercing interrogative seared his mind. Consciousness vanished in a sea of torment.

  The Lurker’s Tale

  U-Tsang Province, Tibet, July 19, 1924

  Damon Trent walked up the dirt road towards Milarepa’s Cave

  The weather was a balmy sixty degrees, fairly hot for the region. Mountains loomed all around him, creating a majestic landscape that no longer impressed him. He had been in the region for three years, seeing and learning much, and growing used to both the altitude and the people of the area. It had taken a great deal of work before the monks in the region opened up to a Westerner; most places had refused to have anything to do with him. He persisted, however, and some temples had allowed him to stay, as long as he didn’t mind spending months performing menial chores in return for their lessons. The meditation techniques he had learned had made the trip worthwhile; through them he had developed and refined his abilities.

  He was seeking more, however. The stories of a man who might have developed special powers hundreds of years ago had led him to this place.

  Jetsun Milarepa had been a notable and notorious figure in the region’s history. Eight hundred years ago, the yogui of that name had allegedly developed several magical abilities, including the ability to control the weather and travel at inhuman speeds. Although the holy man was best known for his wisdom, Damon was mostly interested in the powers the man had been reputed to display. While ordinarily he would have dismissed those tales as just one meaningless legend among many others, something about them had driven Damon to seek out this place, the mythical cave where Milarepa had dwelled and taught.

  Five years after embarking on his voyages across the world, Damon had learned to trust his instincts. He knew he was something other than human, and that he was given to premonitions and impulses that on hindsight always proved to be right. Among those impulses was the almost desperate need to learn more about his new nature. He still couldn’t remember the events in New York that had prompted his journeys of discovery, but it didn’t matter. Something drove him to learn all he could about his powers and what they signified.

  So far, he had found little. He was no longer hopeful, but couldn’t bring himself to stop.

  He walked up a steep brush-covered slope towards the unimpressive opening on a rocky hillside. Nobody was around: he locals had fled when they noticed his approach. Stories about the crazy wandering Westerner –and the fate of a gang of bandits who had tried to waylay him – had spread widely. Images of the brutal fight a few weeks ago flashed through his mind as he approached the cave. Waking up in the dark as figures rushed him from all sides. The gleam of naked blades in the moonlight. His fingers tearing a man’s throat, the spray of blood and the bandit’s dying gurgle, drowned out by the roar of the first gunshot. The torn and bloodied clothes he’d worn that night had been left behind, along with the corpses of nine bandits and the body of the young native guide who had died alongside them. The legend of the Flame-Haired Demon would live on long after he left the region.

  The inside of the cave was narrow and unimpressive; a cramped space with only a few decorative statues and lit candles to show this was a holy place. For several minutes, Damon stood there, waiting for something, anything, to happen: a surge of understanding, perhaps, or a moment of insight. It was more than foolishness, it was sheer insanity to expect this place had anything to offer, but his instincts had led him there as unerringly as a migratory bird’s. He waited for a sign, however subtle it might be.

  When it came, it wasn’t subtle at all.

  It started as a shimmer in the air. Damon blinked, and it grew in size, a multi-hued light that resolved into a vaguely elliptical fissure in the air, an opening tear into reality itself. It beckoned to him and he unthinkingly stepped through it.

  There was a long, disturbing moment of discontinuity, a sequence of time where he remained aware but was otherwise disconnected from his senses in a way far deeper than sleep or unconsciousness. He feared that this was what death felt like.

  However long it lasted, it lasted too long for his liking, but eventually it was over. He could see again, and he was elsewhere; the cave had been replaced by a larger chamber. Its walls were glass-smooth surfaces with intricate carvings that resolved into a diamond-shaped space that was both a dwelling of sorts and a work of art, like being inside an intricately worked jewel. Reddish light that hurt his eyes filled the room. In its center lay a slender green-skinned figure, hairless and naked. It was human, or at least had once been human, but some manner of unnatural stress had reshaped it somehow, changing the shape of its head, enlarging it and also stretching its limbs. Its oversized eyes were closed, and it was unmoving, dead or in slumber. Next to the creature’s outstretched right hand was a red cube, covered by strange symbols. The object was glowing faintly, and Damon felt drawn to it.

  He approached the body carefully, a hand hovering near weapons on his belt. His other hand reached for the cube. As his fingers closed on the cold stone, something burst behind his eyes and he fell back to the ground.

  Information flowed into him, too much for him to understand it all. The little he was able to assimilate was overwhelming enough. The first thing he learned was that the body was a hybrid of sorts, not born by created when an entity beyond our world and a human seeking wisdom melded their minds and bodies together. The entity was a scout, seeking new species among the vastness of the universe.

  Damon caught glimpses of the alien civilization the dead scout had served – a conglomerate of civilizations, thousands of beings who had risen in power over untold eons, living together in the center of the galaxy. The civilization’s desire, or so Damon was given to understand by the object he was holding, was to empower lesser species, to serve as potential allies.

  The civilization needed allies, for it was at war. Its enemies were vast intelligences dwelling in the shadows of deep space, unbound by natural laws and driven by an abiding hatred of everything in reality, from the smallest atom to the largest star. Most of that implacable hatred was aimed towards all thinking entities in the universe. Merely contemplating the psychic echoes of that hatred was agonizing. But the worst part was that they were somehow familiar to him. He’d been exposed to those entities before.

  That realization triggered an epiphany of sort. Repressed memories came back. The meeting in New York, the abominable Mr. Night, and his offer of absolute power. He remembered it all. The vision of his future self bringing death and destruction to the entire world was the worst part of it. Damon screamed in terror and rage. He realized that he had been contaminated with the hateful energies of the Enemy on that night, and if left unchecked that taint would grow and consume him sooner or later. There was hope, however, thanks to the object he had taken from the dead entity.

  The red cube was called the Codex. Just by holding it, he gleaned a great deal of information from it. It was a repository of knowledge and a teaching tool, although at need it could also be used as a weapon. If he could learn to use the Codex, he might be able to cleanse himself from the taint of the Enemy.

  Seconds after reaching that conclusion, he noticed that the corpse of the creature had begun to glow; its brightness quickly became blinding. Damon blinked to clear his eyes and found himself back in Milarepa’s Cave. The ground began to shake violently moments later. Through the Codex in his hand, he understood some of what was happening: the corpse – not quite
a corpse, he suddenly realized – was destroying itself and its place of rest, now that the Codex had been passed on. He stumbled out into the open and heard the cave collapsing behind him. Damon managed to run a dozen yards before some unseen force pushed him down and sent him sprawling onto the ground. His body grew unnaturally heavier; the invisible force pushed down on him, straining his bones and internal organs nearly to their breaking point. The odd and painful sensation didn’t last long, thankfully. The tremors subsided along with the inexplicable pressure; after a few seconds, he stood up and looked around.

  The cave was gone, buried under rocky debris. There were strange indentations all over the ground, as if a large creature had left gigantic footprints on the ground, or perhaps as if some invisible force had pulled portions the earth downwards. He was left with a feeling the scout’s destruction had involved the manipulation of gravity, and that the chamber he’d visited was now gone, obliterated so thoroughly no one, not even the agents of the Enemy, would ever be able to find it.

  Damon watched the devastation around him, trying to make sense of it all. The Codex was still in his clenched hand. In the daylight, it looked like an ordinary piece of rock, but he still heard it whispering inside his mind, in a language he couldn’t yet understand.

  He had come to this place seeking knowledge, and he had found it in spades. He had much to learn.

  Chapter Six

  The Invincible Man

  Charlotte, North Carolina, March 15, 2013