“Okay. But I don’t think it’s going to be that easy. I really don’t,” Christine said, growing more agitated as she spoke. “Yeah, there’s no telling what I can do once I figure out how to do all that stuff. Dad spent a lot of time and effort making me into whatever it is I am. Maye I’ll gain some uber-cosmic power. So sure, yeah, going to see the First might solve all our problems. Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah, Zip-a-Dee-Day, I go max level, beat the bad guys, save the world, win a trip to Aruba and the board game version of Wheel of Fortune. Or I blow up the planet and kill us all. Either or. Might as well take the chance, flip a coin and find out, I mean, what’s the worst that can happen, right? Oh, yeah, I blow up the planet and kill us all.” Her voice got pretty shrill towards the end of her rant, and she realized she was hyperventilating.
The brief talk with Janus kept coming back to her. She was sure that the crazy alien Janus had named the Genocide had gotten control over the local Source, and maybe that’s what had driven him bat-shit crazy, although the alien had also been infected with Outsider energy, so the jury was still out. Still, ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’ was a pretty good rule of thumb. She didn’t want absolute power. She wanted to go home and play computer games, where her epic fails would only hurt pixelated imaginary characters.
“Hey,” Mark said. He took her hand and helped calm her down just by being there for her. “We don’t have to decide anything tonight, okay? Why don’t we sleep on it and talk about it in the morning?”
“How about John?” Christine said, hating herself for arguing the point. Taking a break would be awesome, but people were in danger. “How long does he have?”
“Even if Ultimate is found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, a trial’s going to take some time,” Condor answered. “The whole thing is going to take at least a couple of weeks, most likely three or four.”
“And if they wanted to play a ley de fuga game, it would have happened already,” Mark added in a grim tone.
“Lei de whazit?”
“Basically Spanish for ‘shot while trying to escape.’ I don’t think Smith can do that, not while Ultimate is being watched by the Legion twenty-four seven. He can’t make that kind of move until he’s reached the end-game. Besides, he doesn’t need to do anything but wait a little while, and Ultimate will be found guilty and executed without him lifting a finger. So we have a little time.”
A little time before being thrown back unto the breach. Before deciding if the only way to save herself and her friends was to risk becoming a destroyer of worlds. Eat, drink and be merry, because tomorrow we’ll be SOL. Yay.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m taking the rest of the night off.”
* * *
Later, she lay in Mark’s arms as their emotional-physical afterglow slowly ebbed away. “I’m scared, Mark.”
He caressed her hair. “You too? I’m about ready to shit myself whenever I think about the mess we’re in.”
“Do you really think going to the Dominion is a good idea? Don’t those places have secret police everywhere and all kinds of oppressive and repressive and depressing social controls?”
“Well, we wouldn’t go directly there, for one. Travel to and from the Dominion is highly restricted: anybody applying for a visa has to subject himself to a background check and mental examination, both going in and going out, so that’s not going to work for us. I’d have to work out the details with Father Aleksander, but my guess is we’d go to Russia or Belarus first. Anything goes in those countries – smuggling, drugs, prostitution, pretty much every racket you can think of. Russia and Belarus act as the middlemen between the Ukraine and the rest of the world, and the Doms can’t shut off trade without hurting themselves, so there are ways to get in and out, if one knows the right people and has the cash to flash. We’ll have both.”
“I guess I’ll have to give you back my almost sixty thousand bucks from when we robbed those Russians,” she said without a trace of regret. Money was about as important to her right now as the final scores of March Madness.
“Nah. Condor will bankroll us. I normally wouldn’t take money from him, but this is for a good cause, so I’ll squeeze Richie Rich for all he’s worth.”
“So, do you think going to the Ukraine is the thing to do or not?”
“It’s up to you, Christine, but yeah, I do. I think it could be a solution to all our problems. You can’t use your dad’s red cube without risking being found by that creepy fuck Mr. Night. This First guy seems to have escaped detection by the Dominion for a long time, so maybe you can use the cube around him. If he can help you get control over your powers and access the Source, without the assholes finding out, I’d say let’s go for it.”
“That seems to be everyone’s Plan A: get me to control the Source. Starting with my father.” And her father had been crazier than a loon. What did that make his plans, then? The delusions of a nutjob?
“If you can do it, control the Source, that completely changes things in our favor,” Mark went on. “Look at what you’ve been able to do on your own already. You brought me back from near-death, and I was so fucked up that very few Healers would have been able to fix me. You raised my power level after a few minutes of tinkering with my aura. Sure, your flying skills could improve,” he continued, and Christine snorted and punched him lightly on one shoulder. “But your ability to manipulate Neo powers is already beyond anybody I can think of. The Iron Tsar and the Dragon Emperor may have more raw power, but you can pull off things nobody has even heard of. If you link with the Source, I think you could shut off any Neo’s powers at will.” He was going off in the kind of rant she usually favored; she reminded herself he’d been a Neolympian nerd back in the day. “I think that’s what those disruptors do, interfere with the flow of power between us and the Source. If you can do that, then you can turn the Iron Tsar into a vanilla dictator just by thinking about it. Or shut off Smith’s Myrmidon armor with a glance. Game over, we win.”
“If I learn how to use the Source, we win, sure,” she said. “Unless I go crazy. Janus was worried that could happen. What happens if I turn all evil crazy bitch?” Game over. We lose. That’s what happens.
He thought about it for a bit before answering. “If that happens, if you lose yourself completely… I’ll kill you, I guess,” Mark said. She felt his heart breaking even as he said the words, but she also felt that his heart wouldn’t stop him from doing what he had to. “Now that you’ve turned me into a Type Three, I can probably do the job, too, if I go all in, if I don’t hesitate. If you turn evil or crazy, I think I know you well enough by now to figure it out, and I won’t hesitate. So you have nothing to worry about, see?”
“Thank you.” Strangely enough, the plain statement made her feel better. Can I trust my boyfriend to kill me if I go over to the Dark Side? That’s one entry you’d never find in a Cosmo Quiz. And would Mark get the chance to do it, even with his increased power? If she went evil, she’d probably dispose of him right away, wouldn’t she? Or would her feelings for him make her hesitate just long enough for him to do what was necessary? One way or another, it wasn’t going to be a feel-good ending. But he would do it, or die trying. That was as much as she could ask from him. “I mean it. Thank you.”
“De nada. I’m a killer, after all.” More heartbreak, and underneath it an undercurrent of regret.
“Stop it. If that’s all you were, I wouldn’t be here with you.”
“Okay. Sorry for the whining.” He made what Christine now called his sexy-times face and kissed her deeply. “I’ll do whatever it takes. Because I love you.”
And there it was.
“I love you too, Mark.”
And there it was.
Chapter Sixteen
Face-Off
Catskills Mountains, New York, March 18, 2013
“I’ll be going with you, of course.”
“Father Alex…” I began to say, but he cut me off.
“Listen to me, my friend. You don’t know the langu
age, the customs, or the lay of the land. Most of my contacts will not trust a stranger. They will only speak with me. You will need me. So, I will be going with you.”
I sighed mentally. I was really hoping that at least one of my friends would live long enough to file his taxes this year, but nobody was making it easy for me. Cassandra was gone, Condor’s life had been fucked up as badly as could be, and now I was dragging Father Alex into this mess. “Okay,” I relented, afraid I was going to deeply regret it. “We haven’t decided on anything yet, but if we go with that plan, you can be our native guide. Feel free to start calling me Bwana.”
Father Aleksander came up with several colorful alternatives to Bwana, in English, Ukrainian and a couple of other languages before hanging up. He was good people. I’d better not get him killed.
I walked into the kitchen. “Father Alex is in,” I told Christine, who was having a big bowl of milk and cereal for breakfast. Comfort food; we could all use a big bowl of comfort just about now. “He’s going to tag along if we end up going to the Ukraine.”
“Coolio, as long as we can keep him safe.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
“Are Condor and Kestrel going to be okay without us? I mean, without me around can’t they get tracked down by psychics and whatnot?”
“Condor’s bag of tricks includes a lot of countermeasures against snoops. He’s been planning for the day he’d have to go underground for a good while. He’ll be fine. And they’ll keep an eye on Lady Shi.”
“Okay,” Christine said, looking slightly relieved. “I really feel like crap for what’s happened to him. To you. To Kestrel, even.”
I shrugged. “You don’t get into this business without being ready to accept the consequences. Shit happens. We’re still alive. In no small part thanks to you, by the way.”
“Aw. You’re so sweet.”
I chuckled. “Sure. If I had my own comic book series, every issue would start with me gazing longingly at the moon from a rooftop, reciting poetry and being all sensitive and mournful, petting bunny rabbits and shit.”
She snorted. “Whatever. But you really are sweet.”
“For you, sure.” I almost threw an ‘I love you’ in after that, but restrained myself. For one, I didn’t want to overuse the phrase and get all syrupy on her. For another, I didn’t have to say it out loud; she’d pick it up with her empathy. Knowing she could tell what I was feeling comforted me. I could be myself around her because I couldn’t help being myself around her, and I was glad.
Maybe I would end up reciting poetry from a rooftop and petting bunny rabbits before this was over.
“Where is our host?” I asked her, changing the subject.
“He and Melanie are in the local version of the Situation Room.”
“Does it have a sex swing in it?”
“OMG, that’s what that was? Back at the base? I couldn’t figure out what the hell that thing was. Oh, that’s so effing gross. Who knows where else they did it? I sat on those chairs!”
“Yeah, if we’d shined a UV light on that room, we’d probably wouldn’t have wanted to sit anywhere.”
“Thanks for the mental image.” She looked around and shuddered. “I probably wouldn’t want to check anything in here with a UV light, either.”
“Definitely not our room,” I said. “Not after last night.”
“Mark!”
“If I remember correctly, you were there too.”
“Funny guy.” She was smiling and blushing at the same time. “I guess I’m the prude in this party.”
“If I remember correctly, no you ain’t. Discreet, maybe, but not a prude.”
“Okay, discreet sounds about right. I just don’t like oversharing is all.”
“No arguments here. Anyways, let’s go find the Twisted Twosome. I’ll knock loudly on the door first, just in case they aren’t decent.”
“Decent is too much to ask, but I’ll settle for ‘fully clothed.’”
* * *
“Ultimate will be held at Freedom Island for the duration of the trial,” Condor said. He and Kestrel had their clothes on when we walked in. This Situation Room didn’t even have a sex swing. I was pleasantly surprised.
“Great. It’s just the most secure spot on the Western Hemisphere,” I grumbled. There’d been a faint chance the authorities would move the big guy to the US for the trial, but I guessed nobody wanted to be responsible for the security that little shindig would require.
“No place is impregnable,” Condor said. “And the island got thoroughly bombed just a few days ago. They can’t be back to one hundred percent readiness, and they’ve moved a lot of their personnel to China, thanks to the Chimps getting frisky.”
I hadn’t forgotten about that, but the Third Asian War had taken a back seat to all the more immediate problems.
“Do you think you two can rescue John?” Christine asked.
“Probably not, not even if we have Lady Shi tagging along, but we can at least do some research and try to come up with a plan. I know a couple of people who had run-ins with the Legion and lived to tell about it. They might help us for, the right price.”
Christine looked dubious. “You’re talking about working with super-villains, aren’t you?”
“Not quite. They aren’t upstanding citizens, though. One of them used to work for Hiram Hades, Ultimate’s old archenemy. The other was a Legion member who went rogue a few years back. They mostly do small-time stuff nowadays, sell specialty items and generally stay away from hard-core stuff. If they were hurting people, I’d have taken care of them already, or let the Guardians or the Legion know where to find them.”
“I guess that’s okay, then. If they can help us get John out.”
“So you two can work on that, and Christine and I will head to the Dominion. Father Alex will put us in touch with the Ukrainian underground.”
“We’re off to join the Rebellion. Yay,” Christine commented. “That always works out so well.”
“Calling them ‘rebels’ is pushing it a bit,” I said. “They mostly help dissidents get the hell out of the country, and they collect information and sell it to various government agencies. They know they don’t have a prayer of taking down the Iron Tsar. We’ll talk to a few people, secure passage to the Pripet Marshes, meet with the First, and head out after we’re done.” Hopefully with a fully empowered Christine, which should make getting out a lot easier.
“We’re going to need passports and stuff, and disguises, now that my face is all over the news and Xanaweb.”
“I can take care of that,” Condor said. “This mansion has a full set of fabricators. I’ll get you a disguise kit, and several IDs, US and international.”
“Nice. If we’re going to be criminals, at least we’re going to be high-end criminals.”
“Watch out for Baba Yaga,” Kestrel said. “She’s supposed to be one of the nastiest bitches in the planet. And I know my nasty bitches.”
“I know. I’ve read a ton of stuff about her. It doesn’t matter: we’re not planning on picking fights with the Iron Guard,” I replied. “Maybe if I was bonded and licensed so I could make a few million off the movie and video game rights, but as it is, we’re going to sneak around quietly.”
“I’ve seen you sneak around, killer. You always leave a nice trail of bodies and wreckage behind.”
“Not this time,” I told Kestrel. “Not when I’m on the other side of the planet, traipsing around the second nastiest Neo dictatorship in history.” Not with Christine and Father Alex around, either. I usually worked alone and didn’t have to worry about anybody but myself. That had changed since this caper had started. Would it ever change back? If it did, it would mean Christine and I had parted ways, one way or another. So no, I wasn’t going to go back to my old ways, not if I could help it.
“We’ll figure out how to bust Ultimate out of Freedom Island while you two play tourist around Eurasia,” Condor said. “Maybe Janus will show up; he would certain
ly be a big help. If Christine hasn’t become Queen of Neo-humanity, I guess we can rendezvous here and then launch the breakout. If she has, I guess we won’t have to do anything,” he concluded with a wry grin.
“You are going to wait for us, aren’t you?” I didn’t want Condor’s life to get more fucked up than it already was.
“You bet, bud. I’m not assaulting Freedom Island without my favorite Type Threes. Unless Christine here can boost us like she did you.”
I looked at Christine. “I said I would try,” she said.
The idea of Kestrel running around with Type Three powers worried me a bit. I trusted Condor. Hell, when it came down to it, I trusted Kestrel too, trusted her enough to have her by my side in a fight for my life. We had to take the chance. Four Type Threes might just give us enough muscle to do what we needed to do, and bust Ultimate without having to go to the Dominion. Without having to risk Father Alex.
“Okay,” Christine said. “Let’s try it now.”
Christine Dark
Catskills Mountains, New York, March 18, 2013
Christine hated throwing up with a passion. And she had thrown up more times in the past week than she had in the past ten years.
First, the night of her abduction, when she’d puked her guts out right outside the Phi Beta Gecko house, to the amusement of all and sundry. Her next gut-voiding experience had happened after getting a close look at her father and a thing passing itself off as human being. The third time had been emotion-driven, when she realized how close she’d come to cold-bloodedly murdering a roomful of people. And now here she was again, tears in her eyes and bile burning her throat as she knelt before the porcelain altar and got rid of every last trace of breakfast.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
All the ‘Chosen One’ crapola had gone to her head and drowned out her common sense. Hey, she could become one with the Cosmic Battery and take on all the Neos in the world and in the darkness bind them, sure. So why not try to access Condor and Kestrel’s auras at the same freaking time and try to do the power-boost trick she’d done with Mark? Why not, it would save time, plus she knew it was going to be an intense and very likely unpleasant experience, so she might as well try to get it over with in one swell foop.
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