“You are working for the Outsiders.”
“We came to an arrangement, okay? I had to learn to manipulate their energies, the purple stuff. I thought that was the only way to beat them. Daedalus Smith and the Iron Tsar made the same mistake. Amazing how stupid a couple of geniuses can be, but as it turns out, nobody can be as dumb as smart people. And I shouldn’t talk, I was just as stupid. As stupid as Dad, who did the exact same thing. The stuff doesn’t go away after you let it in. And eventually, either the Outsiders win and everything goes poof, or the Cosmic Nerds send some of their enforcers after me, and I go poof. But eventually is probably millions of years from now, so meanwhile I get to enjoy myself and party like it’s 2099. I got plenty of time and a few million people to play with. Should keep me busy. I never cared much for sandbox games but that’s what I got.”
“And now we have your other self,” Mr. Night said. “I can think of many fascinating games we could play with our brave, albeit naïve heroine.” He licked his lips.
“Tempting. A little PVP, then a little torture – you could say some of Kestrel rubbed off on me before I rubbed her out – and rinse and repeat till little Chrissy starts to get boring. Could be fun.” Dark Christine thought about it, then shook her head. “Too risky, Nighty-boy. She can access the Source as well as I can, and if we give her enough time she could manage to gain control over it. You do remember that my arrangement with the Outsiders is something the Source doesn’t like one bit, don’t you?”
“Of course, my darling. I apologize.”
“You just like causing mischief, because you’re a dick and because you won’t be happy until everyone on Earth is dead, including me. But that’s okay, I like dicks, as long as they know their place.”
Mr. Night bowed graciously.
“Sorry, Chrissy, but you’re too dangerous to have around. As they used to say in the interwebbies, ‘kay, thanks, bye.”
“So how about giving me some hints and letting me go, then?” Christine asked. “Pretty please?”
“I guess I might as well. I’ve decided I am going to try to kill you, though, although chances are the First will yank you back when I do, like he did me. He needs you back so he can find out what you saw. And he’s not gonna like what he finds out, either.” She thought about it for a moment. “I’ll give you a couple of portents, all old-school Oracle of Delphi-style. Do you know why?”
“Because you don’t think they’ll help me at all. Because you’re sure that I’ll end up fulfilling my fate by trying to avoid it, like in all those Greek stories we hated.” She hated Greek mythology when it came to that kind of thing. She couldn’t really understand that kind of mindset. If you were doomed to make the mistakes you were warned about, what was the point of living, of doing anything?
“Boy, you are almost as smart as me. The Greeks had it right after all, though. You see, time is like a river. You may know where it’s going, but good luck trying to change its course. So here goes. Let’s start with the First. He’s going to try and kill you and then steal the Codex. That’s what the Red Cube of Doom is called, by the way. And he’s going to sell you out to the Dominion as soon as he reads your mind and sees what the future holds. See, his plan was to lure you to his lair and send you to the closest possible future timeline. If the future looked good, then he would train you and help you unlock your potential. If it didn’t, he’d take you out.”
Crap. “Okay, I’ll watch my back. What else?”
“Mark’s going to die on you. It’s gonna be all noble and heroic as crap, and you’re not going to be able to say goodbye to him, either.”
“Fuck you,” Christine said. “Fuck you for saying that.”
“These hips don’t lie, baby. Not to worry, in this game death is not inevitable. You might save Mark, except for one itty bitty little caveat.”
“The Outsider energy.”
“Bingo. Love of your life or your immortal soul. Guess which one I chose.”
“It looks like you lost both. You didn’t save Mark, ‘cause that a-hole over there isn’t Mark.”
“Well, the choices were all kinda suboptimal. Betcha you make the same ones I did, though.”
“I’m not a total bitch like you, so I probably won’t.”
“Pot to kettle, bitch. Same mind, same soul, same choices. You really think you’re going to do any better?”
“I’m going to try.”
“You’re going to fail. Now, in the words of our favorite Buffy character, Bored Now.”
I knew she was going to say that, too, Christine thought as Dark Christine unleashed a torrent of energy at her. She put up a shield but the fire – it was fire, not kinetic energy, pure plasma like the heart of a star – burned her anyway. She felt her skin blister and peel away and she screamed.
Pain. Darkness.
Chapter Nineteen
The Twisted Twosome
Staten Island, New York, March 25, 2013
Melanie was in motion as soon as she saw who was outside. Kyle was barely fast enough to block her lunge with his body. They ended up sprawled outside the van.
“Wait!”
Hiram Hades had stepped back. He watched the struggle with a solemn expression.
“Wait,” Kyle repeated. He had to hold her down; she kept trying to charge the super-villain. Which was a stupid idea. Hiram Hades wouldn’t have shown up unless he was prepared to deal with the two of them. Even if all of this was some sort of con, attacking him now was the equivalent of exposing your king at the beginning of a chess game.
“He’s supposed to be dead,” Melanie hissed, trying to push Kyle aside. She was enraged. Melanie never got angry. “He needs to die.” This was obviously personal. Melanie had never mentioned knowing Hiram Hades, but she clearly did.
“Miss Bauer,” Hiram said, and she stopped. Only a handful of people knew Melanie’s las name. “Please. I’m not the man you knew.”
“You’re supposed to be dead. I told you I would kill you if I ever saw you again.”
“The Hiram Hades who hurt you is dead, Miss Bauer. I beg you, hear me out. Both of you.”
“Mel,” Kyle whispered in her ear when she started struggling again. “I’ll help you kill him if you still want you, but let’s listen to what he has to say first, okay?”
“Goddammit!” Melanie cursed but stopped moving. Kyle cautiously let her go and got to his feet. She kept glaring at Hiram but didn’t go after him again. That was very much for the best; even though Hiram Hades looked unthreatening, Kyle had spotted a slight shimmer around his outline that betrayed the presence of a force field generator. Melanie would have likely broken her knuckles on that force field without inflicting any significant damage on the mad inventor.
“Sorry, boss!” Tony Tonka called from inside the van. “I didn’t tell them nothin’, I swear!”
Hades ignored his henchman and remained still, waiting to see what Melanie would do.
Kyle noticed a car nearby; it hadn’t been there when they’d driven into the junkyard to have their chat with Tony Tonka. There was somebody in the car’s passenger seat, apparently trying to get out and having some trouble with it. “There’s somebody you need to see,” the super-villain said.
A stooped figure, leaning on a cane, managed to struggle out of the car and limped slowly towards them.
“What is this?” Kyle blurted out when the newcomer stepped into one of the pools of light cast by the junkyard’s overhead lamps. The limping man was another Hiram Hades, a skinnier version whose face was partially covered by long curly hair and a beard, and who was wearing ill-fitting medical scrubs, but who still looked like a twin to the man in the tracksuit. A somewhat emaciated twin who seemed to have trouble walking, but a twin nonetheless.
“Clones,” Kyle answered himself, thinking he understood. “Hades was always trying to make Neolympian clones.” Trying, and failing. Cloning human beings was trivially easy, but clones of Neos always lacked their powers, being nothing but inferior vanilla cop
ies of the original.
“Clone, yes, but more than that,” the clone in the tracksuit said. “I believe you know the two men inhabiting that body.”
The other Hiram Hades spoke. The voice was nearly identical, but it had a raspy undertone that was eerily familiar. “It’s good to see you again, Condor. Even if it is with a different set of eyes.” He laughed. “Who sees the darkness in all men’s souls?”
“The Lurker does,” Melanie said softly.
“And he is not alone in here,” the stooping clone said; as before, the voice was the same but the intonation was very different. “It’s also good to see you, Condor. I believe the last time we conversed was in 2009, during the giant monster attack on New York City. I gave you a couple of pointers on the Condor Jet’s defensive systems.”
“Doc Slaughter? We’d heard you were dead!”
“I was. We both were. Apparently, it didn’t take.”
“All right, Hades,” Melanie said heavily. “I’ll hear you out, and let you keep your skin and all your teeth. For now.”
Kyle nodded in agreement.
* * *
“It all started, inasmuch as this sort of things have a starting point, with a Doctor Slaughter project: the Muninn Device.”
After releasing the relieved and apologetic Tony Tonka, she and Kyle had followed the two Hades clones to a house on a hill, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, large but otherwise unremarkable. They were now all sitting in a spacious living room. The Hades in the tracksuit had offered them drinks. They’d both refused, Kyle a lot more politely than she had. Kestrel wasn’t about to accept anything from Hiram Hades or his bastard copies. She would listen to him, but she wasn’t going to ever forgive him.
She could never forgive him for what happened in Rhodesia.
“… heard about it,” Kyle was saying. “A mind upload system, if I remember correctly. I read a couple of papers Doc wrote about the project.”
The weak Hades, the one who supposedly contained the minds of the Lurker and Doc Slaughter, nodded. The nod was odd: one side of his head dipped more deeply than the other. He looked like someone who’d had a stroke. “Apparently, so did Hiram Hades. Through a combination of bribery, blackmail and plain theft, he managed to acquire enough information and components to build a copy of the Muninn Device.”
“My gene-father figured out that the device could not only store memories, but could be used as a way to transfer those memories into a clone body,” the hale Hades said. “He grew two ‘backups’ and kept them in storage in two hidden facilities. A few years later, he confronted Ultimate for the last time and was murdered in cold blood by the All-American Hero.”
“Good,” Kestrel said. “You deserved death, and worse.” In fact, she’d often fantasized about what she would do if she ever had a chance to play with the Evil Mastermind.
The Hades clone lowered his head. “I won’t argue the point. I know exactly how much evil my creator caused. In any case, the Muninn Device only works if the original body and mind are destroyed, for reasons that elude me. When the original Hiram Hades died, I woke up. The Device worked, but not the way my gene-father expected. I acquired all of Hades’ memories, but somehow they didn’t feel as… intimate, I suppose, as they should have. I was able to examine them from an objective viewpoint, to judge them dispassionately, because on some level I understood they weren’t my own. That’s when I realized my creator had been an unhinged, petty narcissist whose actions led to tens of thousands of deaths, including his own. I renounced him and all his works, and contented myself with a quiet life here in Staten Island. I am not Hiram Hades; my name is Hiram Horowitz, the name my gene-father was born with, the name he eschewed when he turned to a life of crime. I’m utterly uninterested in amassing power or implementing any grandiose schemes.”
Or you’re biding your time, Kestrel thought coldly. The Hiram she’d known had always been impatient, however, which was the main reason his plots had always failed. Spending two decades doing nothing was not in his nature. Maybe the clone was telling the truth. A part of her still wanted, longed to have him at her mercy. She glanced at Kyle, who was listening raptly, and forced herself to dismiss those fantasies.
“So are you a Neo, or just a human clone?” Kyle asked.
“Until the memory transfer took place, both clone bodies were human. My body developed Neolympian abilities, identical to my gene-father’s, some fifty hours after my awakening. I believe the same will happen to the secondary body.”
“It will be fascinating to see what happens to this body, with two Neolympian minds and their associated sets of powers sharing it,” Doc Slaughter said.
A second later, his expression wavered. “Fascinating, maybe, but definitely unpleasant,” the Lurker interjected. “We’re having plenty of trouble just walking; if our powers return, things are going to get messy.”
Doc came back. “I believe we’ll quickly learn how to relinquish total control to one of us at a time, until we can find a way to decouple from this body.”
“I take it there aren’t any more blank bodies lying around,” Condor said, looking at the Hades clone.
He shook his head. “When I woke up, I located the other body – it was in storage in a secret facility in Indonesia – and brought it here. I couldn’t bring myself to destroy it, even though keeping it alive in its nutrient vat was hideously expensive. Now, its neural map has been thoroughly rewritten by not one but two different minds. Even if I hooked it up to the Muninn device once again, it would no longer accept my mind in the event of my death. And, of course, cloning a body is illegal. I’ve tried to steer away from crime since my rebirth.”
“Other than selling assorted parts to the underworld through middlemen like Tony Tonka,” Kyle replied.
The clone shrugged. “I needed the money, and I sold largely harmless items, mostly medical paraphernalia. Tony never suspected who his provider was until I had to ask him for the kind of assistance he would only give to Hiram Hades himself. I revealed my identity to him and asked for his help. He thought it was just like old times.”
“Help you do what?”
“Well, after my clone-brother woke up and its ‘guests’ told me their story, I realized I could no longer stand by the sidelines. I started getting ready for war, gathering as many of my inventions as I could. Tony proved himself invaluable in that regard. When a tracking device in his cyberwear alerted me to your presence, I counted myself lucky, as I was trying to figure out a way to contact you. Daedalus Smith, that talentless hack, cannot be allowed to carry out his plans.”
“You want to join us, then.”
The Hades clone nodded. “I hope my actions here will make up for some of my creator’s misdeeds.”
“We could certainly use your help,” Kyle said, looking at Kestrel for confirmation. She reluctantly nodded after a few seconds. Hiram Hades was a badass, as Face-Off would say, just the kind of ally they needed. Revenge could wait.
“Ultimate’s trial is set to begin in two days; he is reputedly still in a coma, but if he doesn’t regain consciousness the trial will go on regardless. Figure it will take all of four, five days before a guilty verdict is rendered; all appeals will be dealt with in seventy-two hours or so. That means we have about a week to…” Kyle’s wrist-comm chirped, interrupting him. He looked at the screen, smiled, did some fast typing, and leaned back on his chair.
“Who..?” Doc Slaughter started to ask when a flash of light silenced him and startled the Hades clone into spilling his drink.
Janus stood in the living room, looking a bit worn around the edges, but alive and well.
“I believe we now have a quorum,” Kyle said drily.
Things were going to get interesting.
Face-Off
Pripet Marshes, Dominion of the Ukraine, March 25, 2013
I looked at my wrist-comp for the tenth or twelfth time. I’d lost count. The readout showed it’d been a whole fifteen minutes since the last time I’d checked the ti
me. Fucking hell.
The wall of mist hadn’t moved, despite the fact the wind had shifted a couple of times since its arrival. The unnatural sight didn’t help my mood one bit, or my traveling companions’, for that matter. Vasyl kept crossing himself Orthodox-style and muttering under his breath. Father Aleksander looked intently into the mist and said nothing; if he was praying, he was doing it quietly inside his head.
I forced myself not to pace or do anything counterproductive like knocking trees down, or pawing at the ground like a rabid bear. Or worse, rushing out into the mist. I had no idea how wide an area it covered. I could wander around blindly for who knows how long without ever finding Christine. I knew I was being an idiot. I might not be in control of how I felt, but I sure as hell could control what I did. So I pointedly didn’t look at my wrist-comp, walked to my tent and grabbed a couple of power bars. Compulsive eating wouldn’t help, either, but at least it didn’t hurt anybody.
Father Aleksander joined me. “She will be all right, I think,” he said.
Several unkind responses came to mind. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about” was the nicest one. “You keep telling yourself that, Judge” was also on the tip of my tongue. But I kept my peace. Whatever he’d done in the past, Father Alex was one of the good guys now. If things went to shit, I didn’t want my last words to be something hurtful. So I shrugged and choked down a power bar. Chocolate. One of the kinds Christine hated the least. I’d be nice to Father Alex, for her sake, and for mine.
Fuck. I was getting sensitive in my old age. Who’d have thunk it?
“I hope so,” I finally said.
Father Alex nodded and left it at that.
More time passed. I managed to wait almost thirty minutes before sneaking another glance at the time display. It didn’t help that I was freezing my balls off. I’d tried my warm-up trick while I waited, just to help pass the time, and I’d had to shut it off before I burst into flames. Christine had completely wrecked my inner thermostat. I’d probably have to spend a few weeks learning how to regulate the ability again. Small price to pay for turning into Ultimate Junior, I supposed.
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