She concentrated, and a mini-electrical storm bounced off her shield in a pretty spectacular shower of sparklies. And this time she didn’t neglect her backside, so when sneaky Mark hit her from behind with another volley, she deflected that, too.
‘Happy now?” she yelled at him. He was sitting in a control booth behind armored glass, chillin’ like a villain while she tried not to get mowed down.
“You’re doing better, but you still get distracted too easily. Stop thinking and learn to trust your instincts.”
Stop thinking? Yeah, that was going to happen sometime after they held the Winter Olympics in the Sixth Circle of Hell. Christine blocked another shower of lightning bolts and absorbed a jet of napalm that hit her from her left. She was so busy looking for a follow-up attack from above or behind her that she didn’t notice the trapdoor opening under her feet until she fell into it. Her concentration slipped and her shields wavered, so when she landed on a metal grid that sent a few thousand volts into her, she got zapped hard enough to black out.
She regained consciousness and found Mark looking down at her. “You okay?” he asked her.
“Yeah, I’m effing awesome.” The broken arm had finally healed, but the soles of her feet had gotten burned right through her boots. Her hair felt pretty frizzy, too, and she was pretty sure the hair wasn’t going to regenerate back into its former shape and body, not when hair was made of dead cells; she hoped there was a straightener somewhere in the Condor Lair.
“Sorry for being a dick,” he said when she just glared at him for a couple of seconds. “But when it’s for real, the assholes aren’t going to hurt your feelings. They are going to try to kill you. And I really don’t want that to happen.”
“I know.”
“And the only way to train your reflexes is to practice getting hit a lot. You really shouldn’t be going out into combat until you have at least a few weeks or a month’s worth of training under your belt, but I’d rather have you around than alone in the Lair. So if you’re going out into the field, you need to be prepared.”
“I know. And combat already came to me, remember? I didn’t do that badly when the Chicago Sentinels tried to arrest me.”
“You did great,” he admitted, making her smile a little. “You held your own against experienced Neos, one on one. As soon as they coordinated their attacks, you were dead meat, of course.”
She nodded. When the Chicago Sentinels finally got their crap together, things hadn’t gone too well for her. And she had ended up hurting a lot worse than she was now. Mark’s tough love approach to training was annoying, but he was being a d-bag because he cared. And she had picked up a flash of worry from him when she woke up. Maybe a gentle soft-spoken approach didn’t work when you were training for kill or be killed situations.
“Can we switch to hitting things for a bit?” she asked.
“Good idea. Your best defense is to put the assholes down before they can hit you.” She sensed a mental smile. “I’ll even let you hit me.”
Hit him? She didn’t want to hurt Mark. Then again, he might not have wanted to hurt her, but she had a recently-healed broken arm and some badly damaged hair thanks to him. As long as she didn’t hurt him too much, it might even be fun, by Kestrel’s definition of fun.
Mark headed for a clear section of the chamber and she followed him. He stopped and had her take a position about fifty feet away from him. “Okay, Armageddon Girl. Shoot me.”
She gestured with her hand and sent a low-power blast his way. He sidestepped it. “Hey!”
“Those hand gestures you make, I know they help you aim where the blasts are going to go, but they tell me where they’re going to go, too. Not all Neos are going to be dumb enough to let themselves get hit just to show how tough they…” She blasted him in mid-sentence. This time she aimed with her eyes, visualized the beam mentally, and didn’t move her hands. And this time she knocked him on his ass after bouncing him a few dozen feet on the floor.
“Like that?” she asked him as he got to his feet.
“Just like that,” he said, and though her blast had hurt him pretty good, he was smiling on the inside. He might also be bleeding on the inside, though. Yikes. Her blasts were getting stronger.
“Do it again.” She did – but he was moving now, running and somersaulting, and she kept missing him. He ducked and weaved and closed the distance between them, and she only got him once, with a glancing blast that staggered but didn’t stop him. She raised a shield as he bull-rushed her, and he bounced off, landed on his hands and delivered a kick with both feet that knocked her back a pace even with her shield on. Christine tried to blast him again but he rolled under it and scissored her legs out from under her. She landed on her butt and next thing she knew he kicked her in the face.
Okay, not quite. He stopped the kick an inch away from her nose. “Your protective aura would have absorbed the kick,” he said. “But I’m not going to kick my girlfriend in the face.”
“Yeah, that would be considered abusive in some quarters,” she replied dryly, getting to her feet. And I guess we’re official and stuff, too. Well, if she wasn’t his girlfriend, she was his friend-with-great-benefits, which as a term she liked even less than girlfriend. ‘Lover’ sounded a little better, especially if she got him to make a face with long flowing hair and soulful eyes…
He tried to punch her in the face. She instinctively blocked the blow with a shield and blasted him away. “Hey!”
“You were daydreaming,” he told her as he got to his feet, fifty feet from where he’d been a moment before; he was hurting worse than the last time she’d hit him. That blast had been pretty hard.
I was daydreaming about you, d-bag. Granted, that was probably not the smartest thing to do while training for combat.
“Of course, I can always end a fight by doing this,” Christine announced, and used the same trick she’d pulled on Kestrel back at the hunting lodge. She picked Mark up and pushed him against a wall. He strained under the kinetic pressure and managed to push an arm forward until Christine poured more power and slammed it back against the wall. “I did that to Kestrel yesterday, and that seemed to make her chill out for a bit.”
“That’s pretty impressive,” he admitted. “No wonder Kestrel has toned down her attitude.”
“Well, she actually kind of enjoyed it, too.”
“Yeah, she would.”
How about you? She didn’t ask that out loud. It was a bit too early to start exploring kinky scenarios, she thought. He wasn’t angry about being overpowered by her, but he didn’t seem to be all that turned on by it, either.
“It’s a neat trick,” he admitted. “But watch this.” He did something with his mind, and Christine felt her hold on him begin to slip away. Suddenly, he wasn’t stuck to the wall anymore and he was running and jumping towards her. She tried to push him back but it didn’t work. Trying to grab ahold of him was like squeezing a bar of wet soap; he kept sliding off her grasp. Before he reached her she put a shield between them, and that finally stopped him.
“How did you do that?”
“Another trick Condor taught me,” he explained. “It doesn’t work on quick, direct attacks, but any Neos who know their business can actively resist any power that tries to control them, physically or mentally. You can break free from control or restraint powers, or at least try to. I barely managed to do it this time; you’re damn strong. But the point is, if you know what you’re doing you don’t match your strength against your opponent’s; you find weaknesses and push against those.”
“Darn. I thought I’d found a foolproof way to deal with Neos without ranged powers. I figured I could just lift them a few inches off the floor and let them flail at empty air until they got tired.”
“It might work with an inexperienced Neo, but even they might be able to resist it just by not wanting to be held by your teke. Our powers are very responsive to our desires, even subconscious ones.”
“I’ve got a lot to lear
n, don’t I?” Christine said. She suddenly realized that Kestrel could probably have resisted being pinned to the wall earlier that morning. She had let Christine immobilize her for her own reasons. Just playing games or testing her in some way? She had no idea.
“Okay, I think we can take a break,” he said. “And since we have the night off, we can stop being professional for a bit.”
“For real, right? Because if you try to punch me or put me in a headlock when I’m trying to kiss you, I’m going to accelerate you to twenty thousand feet per second. See if you can resist that before you become a hole in a wall.”
He made a face and kissed her, which was answer enough.
It turned out a lot of the devices in the training room could be used for entertainment purposes.
The Freedom Legion
Inside the Muninn Device, Staten Island, March 16, 2013
“Darn it, Doc, you’ve done it again!”
The words were meant to express equal parts admiration and rueful envy. He knew them well, had heard them many times before. Who had spoken them? For some reason, it was important he remember.
Brian ‘Champ’ Champion, that’s who; one of the Fantastic Five, Doc Slaughter’s loyal friends and assistants. The name emerged from the thick mist obscuring his thoughts. The amateur boxer, stunt pilot and explosives expert had used that phrase whenever Kenneth had solved one of the many puzzles and enigmas he had encountered during his career. ‘Champ’ and the other Fantastic Five had been extraordinary but poignantly all-too human men who had fought the good fight until violence, misfortune or the mere passage of time had brought them low one by one.
Brian Champion had died in 1943 at the age of fifty-one, shot down over Berlin while flying one of Doc Slaughter’s experimental Brass Fighters. His killer had been none other than the infamous Red Baron. Death had been everywhere during that handful of years; its cold hand had plucked all too many of Slaughter’s friends. He had mourned and lived on.
Until now.
There had been a flash inside his head, too sudden and final to feel any pain. For one shocking moment he’d found himself looking down at his headless body, and then his perspective receded away with dizzying speed, leaving behind the world, leaving behind reality itself. Darkness awaited.
SYSTEM OPERATIONAL. RECORDING COMPLETE. MUNINN PROTOCOLS ACTIVATED.
He was Kenneth Caesar Slaughter, born in the Year of Our Lord 1900. He was dead, and yet his consciousness had not dissolved into oblivion. For several moments he did not know why. The answer, like Champion’s name, emerged without warning, filling him with sudden understanding. The Muninn Device. One of his many projects. One of his few failures. The device had been gathering dust in a storage room in the White Sanctum for years. Kenneth had given up on it over a decade ago, utterly frustrated by the lack of positive results. How could this be?
“You failed because you refused to consider the metaphysics involved. That was always your problem, Doctor: your inability to consider the limitations of your understanding of reality.”
The gravelly voice was unnervingly familiar. Kenneth’s disembodied awareness shifted, and he began receiving sensory input of a sort. He was standing on a featureless plain of indeterminate size, wearing his old safari outfit, the one the pulp magazines had loved to use in their covers. Facing him was another pulp hero, a man in a black suit and a cloak, his face hidden behind a gas mask.
The Lurker’s creepy laughter echoed throughout the empty plain.
“What is this place?” Kenneth asked.
“It’s a mental construct. We are creatures of our senses; it’s a lot easier to communicate in a simulacrum that gives us something to see and hear.”
Kenneth silently considered the situation for several moments. He hadn’t seen or spoken to the Lurker in many decades, not since he’d gone off to found the Freedom Legion. The masked vigilante had remained a creature of New York’s underworld, and refused Kenneth’s offer to join the Legion; he’d later moved on to Chicago, becoming even further removed from Kenneth’s attention. His presence here made no sense, which bothered him. He couldn’t solve this puzzle: he clearly didn’t have all its pieces. “Would you care to elaborate?”
The Lurker laughed again. “Your consciousness has migrated to your so-called Muninn Device. I was already inside it, but it appears there is enough room there for both of us.”
“How is that possible? The device never functioned properly.” The Muninn Project had been one of his most ambitious undertakings, a highly complex machine that mapped Kenneth’s brain and nervous system in minute detail, designed to act as a storage system for all his memories. If the project had been successful, all his thoughts and mental processes could have been recorded in it. The device should have worked, but even with the help of several psychics, Kenneth had never been able to successfully upload information into it. Something kept resetting the system and deleting all the stored memories. After years of failed attempts, Kenneth had set it aside and moved on.
“Death was the key,” the Lurker said, answering Kenneth’s thoughts as if he had spoken them out loud. “Mind-Soul patterns cannot be copied. They can’t be in two places at once, you see. For the most part, they can be transferred only if the original anchor point is destroyed, namely the human body. There are ways around that limitation; the Mind-Soul is a holographic construct, and a fragment can retain much of the information of the original, but, again, that can only happen after the death of one’s physical incarnation. You persisted in seeing the mind as just a collection of chemically-stored information, and thus failed to understand it.”
The idea that his mind was a metaphysical construct that couldn’t be duplicated offended Kenneth’s sensibilities. He’d always been a good materialist, utterly convinced that even the mysteries of Parahumanity had perfectly mundane explanations that someone – hopefully he himself – would eventually discover. He told himself that even if the Lurker’s words were true, there could still be a materialistic explanation to the phenomenon. In any case, it appeared his demise had led to a mental transfer to the Muninn Device, which meant his mind was trapped inside an untested machine in the Sanctum.
The White Sanctum had been a joint project, something he and John Clarke had spent years building, a secret place where they could retreat from the world for a time. They had come up with it together, when they realized the Freedom Legion was to become an ongoing project that would consume their entire lives, even though at the time neither of them had realized how long those lives would be. They had built the Sanctum in the frozen wastes of the Artic with no outside help, and hidden the facility deep beneath a perennial block of ice. The retreat had served both of them well, providing a place to meditate, relax and replenish their energies. For the most part, they had scheduled their visits so they could each be alone there.
“How did you find the device?” Kenneth asked the Lurker. “And how were you able to access it?”
“When my consciousness fragmented after death, one of its pieces found the Muninn Device. Unfortunately, it was attuned to a specific mind, and I found myself an unwelcome guest. I was about to depart when your own demise changed things.”
“You are dead as well, then,” Kenneth said. He found he did not like to play the role of ignorant interlocutor, and felt a twinge of sympathy for the friends and associates he’d forced to ask leading questions and wait expectantly for his explanations. Even as he made the statements, memories of his last talk with John resurfaced. John had mentioned the Lurker was presumed to have died, hadn’t he?
“Yes, for about thirty-five hours. Death was something of a relief, to be honest. I was quite mad at the time, and the destruction of my body broke up my Mind-Soul into several pieces. One of those pieces remains infected with the Taint that was afflicting me; I fear it will prove to be a nuisance in the near future. This version of myself feels much cleaner, much saner. I haven’t felt so well since before the Great War.”
“I still don’
t understand how we managed to upload our consciousness into the device. As far as I know, the machine has been deactivated for years and is gathering dust in a facility in the Artic.”
The Lurker laughed again, setting Kenneth’s teeth on edge. He had to fight a sudden urge to lunge at the man in the gas mask and beat him into submission.
“You keep making assumptions, Brass Man. I don’t know where the original device is, but the one we accessed is active. It’s a copy of your creation, meant for somebody else. Fortunately, your original matrix was not completely erased when the machine was repurposed for its current owner, and it called your Mind-Soul into it, as it was first meant to do. Still, you wouldn’t have been able to upload your consciousness without my help. I know a few tricks, some of which came in handy here. We can’t stay here long, however. We have to transfer ourselves onto the blank clone body connected to the device.”
A clone body? “The use of clone bodies is illegal,” Kenneth said.
“True. Which means the device is in the hands of a criminal. But if you want to avoid dissolution, you are going to have to join me and take over that clone, Doctor. It’s going to be tricky, sharing a body with two minds, let alone a body that is not meant to host either of us. I’m willing to do so, because the stakes are very high indeed. How about you?”
“I must.” As the Lurker said, too much was at stake. Kenneth would have to deal with any ethical issues later. “What do we do?”
“This will mostly be an exercise of will. We are going to have to change the neural wiring in our new body’s brain. The process is going to be very unpleasant.”
New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet Page 15