“The Outsiders.” Just saying those words made Christine a little sick to the stomach. She’d never forget the sheer hatred and wrongness she had seen when she’d looked at Mr. Night, the thing masquerading as a human being. “That’s their plan, kill us off before we’re evolved enough to join the Cosmic Nerds.”
“If that’s the case, their plan is working only too well: we’re just about the last survivors in this part of the galaxy,” Janus said grimly. He was a normally cheerful man who had spent the last few years mired in near absolute despair; that was Christine’s empathy diagnosis. Talking to John had given him a glimmer of hope; until then he’d thought all the death and destruction he’d seen had been self-inflicted, sentient species committing suicide as soon as they learned a little too much for their own good, or as soon as they developed Neo powers. Which she was sure had happened to at least a few of them – ecosystems could get effed up past the point of no return by overgrown children putting too much crud in the air or the water or what have you, without any need to blame unspeakable entities dwelling in non-Euclidean dark corners of the universe. But the fact was, there were unspeakable entities yadda yadda. Of course, the good news that most of those poor species hadn’t committed suicide but been murdered instead didn’t exactly warrant celebration, either.
“And the Big Bads we’re about to visit serve the Outsiders,” she warned them.
“And you learned all of this from an object your father made?”
She nodded. “Made, or found, not sure which.”
“May I see it?”
Wow, she hadn’t even thought about the Red Cube of Doom since Mark had told her he’d palmed it on his way out of Lurker Island. Way to go, Dark.
“You still have it, Mark, right?” Oh, God, what if he had dropped it in all the fighting?
“Yeah. I left it here before we went out. Was worried it might get lost in the shuffle. I’ll be right back.” He walked out.
“You trusted him with the object?” Janus asked, somewhat dubiously in tone and definitely dubious emotionally.
“I trust Mark with my life,” she said simply, and meant it, and didn’t care that she’d used his real name instead of his stupid street name. “And I was worried I might accidentally activate it, so I didn’t want it in my pocket where it could pull some stupid Mr. Underhill stunt on me.” Neither Janus nor Kestrel got the LOTR reference. Mark would have.
Her faceless boyfriend came back, the red cube with the creepy markings in his hand. “Here it is.” He started to hand it to Christine but stopped when she pulled away.
“Not sure if I want to touch it right now,” she said.
“Gotcha.” Mark offered the cube to Janus, who gingerly took it and examined it.
“I’ve seen this writing before,” he said, his eyes widening in surprise. “In three different planets. Not the same symbols in each planet, that’s why I didn’t realize they were all in the same alphabet.”
“The Cosmic Nerds get around.”
Janus handed the cube back to Mark. He put it in his pocket, muttering “Just call me Sam,” under his breath and making Christine love him just a little more. In the not-so immortal words of Deep Blue Something, that’s the one thing we’ve got.
If she ended up getting killed in the next hour or so, at least she’d die in good company.
Face-Off
New York, New York, March 17, 2013
We went in loaded for bear.
After Condor got us our anti-disruptor thingies – I’d never called anything a ‘thingy’ in my life until Christine started rubbing off on me – we geared up for war. I traded my regular nine-millimeter pistol for one of the Ukrainian blasters we had liberated from the Chicago Russians. My friends were also bringing in some heavy artillery; in addition to her whip Kestrel was toting a huge multi-barreled rifle, three weapon systems in one. The smallest one was a .50 caliber auto-rifle firing depleted-uranium machine-gun bullets; the next one up was a 40mm grenade launcher fed from a rotary drum magazine, and the big’un was a particle beam projector guaranteed to penetrate 300 millimeters of hardened steel. The whole thing weighed over a hundred pounds, the kind of crazy gun only a Neo would be strong and deranged enough to use. Condor was wearing heavy armor with weapon mounts on both shoulders and forearms, an experimental prototype that still had a few kinks to work out, but which under the circumstances was worth the trouble. Only Janus and Christine weren’t packing any extra hardware, not that they were likely to need it.
I wasn’t sure what else I was packing under the hood after Christine had conducted her little experiment on me. We’d all find out soon enough.
Janus’ teleportation was just as unpleasant as the Lurker’s version, and I once again was left with the uncomfortable feeling that we were uninvited guests in somebody’s home during the transition period. Luckily, no one objected and we returned to the world unscathed, somewhere in Central Park.
“We’re close,” Christine said. “There’s an entrance nearby, one that they don’t use. Nobody has used it in a long time.” She closed her eyes and concentrated for several seconds. I looked around in case some late night joggers spotted us, but there was very little activity around. News of the Neo rumble in Brooklyn must be out by now, and people in the city know better than to be outdoors when those things happen. A Neo fight can start in Brooklyn and end in the Upper West Side in a matter of seconds. Best to stay home and pray no angry demigod comes crashing through your front door.
“Oh, crap.”
I looked back. Christine was staring at what seemed like a perfectly ordinary patch of grass. Slowly, so slowly that I first I thought I was imagining it, something started taking shape in front of her. It grew and spread out into elliptical surface that looked like a still pool of black water standing on its side. The color and the nauseated feeling that I got just by looking at it were all-too familiar by now.
“It’s an Outsider energy construct,” Christine said, confirming my fears. “My father figured out a way to access it, and then he sorta locked it, that’s why the Big Bads haven’t used it in years. I think I can unlock it.”
“You sure it’s a good idea to mess with that thing?” I asked her.
“No. But the other entrances are guarded. There is one somewhere in the Met, and another in Park Avenue, and if we get near either of them they’ll know it. And both of them are also powered by Outsider energy anyway.” She bit her lip for a second. “I’m going in.”
She closed her eyes again, and nothing happened for a while. I looked at the rest of our merry band. Condor was looking around, being his professional self, and Kestrel was mostly looking at Condor. Janus was watching Christine intently, and he wasn’t just curious: the big guy looked worried, maybe even scared. That worried me. Scared people are unpredictable, and when an upper-range Type Three becomes unpredictable, fun things start happening, like cities going up in smoke.
“Okay, step right through,” Christine announced. “I’ll hold it open for you and go last.”
“Sounds good. After me,” I said, and walked into the black pool.
It felt pretty much like teleporting with the Lurker and Janus: there was the same weird temporal displacement and the sensation of being in a bad neighborhood. There was more to it, though, a big serving of nastiness along the way. I felt it sliding greasily all over me, inside and out. My worst thoughts and memories woke up, became vivid and immediate. The asshole in the kitchen, beating me to death. Faye lying dead in the hotel room. The pedo from Hoboken who’d killed his last few victims – and what I’d done when I caught him. And more, things I’d half-forgotten, things I wish I’d forgotten. I went on a brief tour of things I’d seen – and things I’d done – all of them designed to make me angry and hateful.
I came out the other side understanding a great deal more about the Outsiders than I ever wanted to.
They hated. First and foremost, they hated everything in our existence with an intensity I could barely comprehend, an
d I thought I was an expert in the emotion. If I ever became infected by that energy… I remembered Christine looking at her father and Mr. Night, overcome with horror and disgust. What would she see in me if I ever became something like them? Something worse than them, I figured. I would be absolutely great at hating everything.
I found myself in a cave almost identical to the Lurker’s little island retreat in Lake Michigan, so similar that I would have thought we’d ended back there if not for the fact that the island had blown up rather spectacularly a few days before. I was standing in the middle of a circle covered with inscriptions very much like the ones I’d seen on the island. I avoided looking at them for too long as I took a few steps into the cavern to make room for the others.
Condor was next. There was a flash of black light and he appeared out of thin air. He shook his head as he joined me. “Fun, wasn’t it?” he said sarcastically. The haunted look in his eyes belied the calm words. Whatever he’d seen on his way in hadn’t been fun at all.
“One Hell of a ride,” I agreed.
Kestrel popped in. She didn’t say anything, just held Condor’s hand as if trying to draw strength from him. I hoped it worked. She would be a holy terror if the Outsiders ever took hold of her.
Janus came in with his protective aura flaring like a bonfire, its golden light almost too bright to look at. His eyes looked about wildly. I could tell he was about to go into fight-or-flight mode – and I knew how bad it would be if an energy projector lost it in an enclosed space like this.
“Hey,” I called out to him. His eyes focused on me. “That was some crazy shit, wasn’t it?” I said in a casual voice.
Having to come up with an answer helped steady him. He nodded and even managed a grin. “That was a trip down Memory Lane I really didn’t need,” he said.
“I hear you.”
“That really sucked,” Christine said, looking as pale as she had before she threw up earlier that night. I walked over her and she gave me a brief hug. “Ugh. That stuff is nasty.” She looked around, looking each of us up and down. “Okay, none of that crap got stuck on us, thank God. I didn’t think it would. It’s actually pretty darn hard for the Outsider energy to infect a living creature, or there’d be a lot more Mr. Nights running around. Our souls are like anti-matter to it, we burn it off just by existing. So we should be safe, as long as we don’t willingly invite it in.”
“Thank God,” Janus replied in a soft voice. “I’ve seen what even a minor infection will do to someone’s soul,” he continued. “It’s insanity and worse than insanity.”
“Cancer and leprosy and a partridge and a pear tree,” Kestrel said, and laughed shrilly.
“And on that note, let’s get going,” I said, hoping to get down to business again.
Christine led the way as we walked down the tunnel. We quickly reached another circular chamber with more magic squiggles carved all over, some rusting metal cages, and a desk and several bookcases off to one side. “Those are my father’s,” Christine said. I glanced at the book titles: most of them were too moldy and worn out to identify, but a few leather-bound copies were still in one piece. There were a few fiction books – Melville and Poe and other classics; lots of Lovecraft, which didn’t surprise me one bit – and a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Other books were academic tomes on forensic science and criminology, the kind of stuff any well-rounded Golden Age mystery man should have on tap. This must have been the original Lurker’s Lair, back when he was haunting the streets of New York.
“I bet there’s all kinds of useful information in there,” Christine said, walking over to the desk.
“I doubt it,” I replied. “Look at all the dust. It doesn’t look like anybody’s been here in decades. Do you think the Lurker would have left anything important behind when he abandoned this place?”
Christine’s shoulders slumped. “Well, fudge. Might as well look, though.” We spent a few minutes rummaging through the desk and bookcases. I found some loose 7.63mm Mauser rounds in one drawer, and that was all. No special notes, no magical talismans. Life can be disappointing like that.
Even more disappointingly, the chamber was the end of the line. “I thought this was the way to the secret underground facility,” I commented.
“So did I,” Christine said in a miffed tone of voice. “Hold on.” She closed her eyes and did her psychic thing. “Okay,” she said after about a minute, plenty of time for me to worry and start to fidget. “There used to be a connecting tunnel on that end of this room, but Dad sealed it off. The bad guys’ base is on the other side. And the Source; it is over there too. The Source is in their secret base!”
“The object that gives us all our powers is buried underneath Central Park,” Condor said musingly. “No wonder the Big Apple has the biggest concentrations of Neos in the world.”
“And that’s why they tried to bring you there,” I said to Christine. “They want you to show them how to control it.” The idea that the device, construct or whatever that had given thousands of human beings superhuman powers was nearby should have impressed me more than it did, but it didn’t feel real somehow.
“Well, I guess I should give them a show, after all the trouble they went through,” she said, her eyes bright with anger. “It’s not going to be the show they expected, though.”
“I would offer to transport us to the base,” Janus said. “But something is interfering with my abilities. I cannot teleport into the area ahead of us.”
“Yeah, this whole place has… I guess wards is the proper term. They block teleportation, telepathy, clairvoyance, pretty much anything and everything. I can see the Source through the wards, but it’s like looking through a dark shower curtain.”
“That’s the work of a Master Artificer,” Condor said. “Only a handful of places in the world are protected like that. The New Forbidden Palace, the White House, the Golden Spire of Kiev, a couple others – Freedom and Liberty Islands, of course. And guess who did the work on those last two and the White House.”
“Daedalus Smith,” Janus said.
“The guy’s good, I’ll give him that. I tried to copy some of his anti-teleport architecture for the Condor Lair, and I only managed to reverse-engineer some basic stuff. Obviously not enough to keep you out, Janus.”
“I supposed this isn’t a good time to cite you for patent infringement,” Janus replied dryly.
Condor chuckled.
“It’s all right, you guys. It doesn’t matter if we can’t teleport. I can reopen the tunnel, but I think the bad guys will notice when I do.”
“Well, I hate to drop by unannounced, so it’s just as well,” Condor replied.
“I don’t care either way. I’m in an ass-kicking mood, so let’s get in there,” was my witty addition to the repartee.
Christine nodded and concentrated once more. Glowing symbols appeared on one of chamber walls, and a few seconds later the solid rock flowed away like water, creating a new tunnel. There was a rumbling round further out, and I saw light at the other end – mundane electrical light.
We went down the tunnel and reached a narrow low-ceiling corridor illuminated by bright neon overheads. A section of the corridor had crumbled away when Christine opened the tunnel, and we had to step over chunks of reinforced concrete as we went in.
Just we made it to the base, an alarm siren started blaring. “Follow me!” Christine shouted and took off running down the corridor. We rushed after her.
One right turn, one left, and about a hundred feet later, she stopped in front of a massive metal door, the kind of thing you’d find on a bank vault. She concentrated and the door buckled under a massive kinetic impact; tortured metal rang like a gargantuan gong. Christine hit it again, deforming the door some more, but she was trying to push it in and the door was meant to swing out.
I walked past her as she was concentrating on a third strike. “Let me try,” I said as I grabbed hold of the metal plates where they had bent enough to give me a g
rip, and started pulling it in.
“Doh,” she said when she realized she’d been going about it the wrong way.
My fingers sank into the metal as if it was clay, and the door groaned some more as I braced a foot against the frame and pulled. Metal tumblers thicker than an elephant’s legs twisted and snapped, and reinforced concrete broke apart. I ripped the whole thing open without even working up a sweat.
“Jesus, Face!” Condor said.
“I’ve been working out,” I joked, trying not to let on how shocked I was. The door was six feet thick. I wouldn’t have been able to even budge it before Christine had her way with me. Some Neos could charge-up another Neo’s power levels, but not to this level.
What the hell was I going to do with all that power?
The corridor behind the door was wider and taller, a round tunnel large enough to accommodate vehicles. As I went into it, two humanoid metallic figures opened fire on me from alcoves on each side of the entrance.
I recognized the robots just before I ate two large servings of piping-hot plasma. I’d seen them on the news and in historical movies. Their design hadn’t changed in seventy-odd years; they looked the same as when they had terrorized both Nazis and Soviets, although their weapon systems had gotten nastier over the decades. They were crude, boxy humanoids made of riveted plates and hydraulic pistons, eight feet tall, topped by cylindrical heads with a single optic sensor instead of eyes, flanked by shoulder-mounted plasma guns; they moved with inhuman, insectile precision.
Dominion automatons, fighting robots forged and given a semblance of life and volition by the hand of the Iron Tsar himself. They bathed me in streams of plasma capable of reducing a modern battle tank into a molten lump of metal.
Behind me, Christine put up a shield, which probably saved Condor and Kestrel’s lives, since the area around the door became a pretty good simulacrum of Hell. She tried to extend it far enough to cover me, but all she managed to do was nudge me forward into the line of fire. I felt my skin burning. Of course, I shouldn’t have felt anything: I should have been vaporized before I had a chance to scream.
New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet Page 24