Like A Comet: The Indestructibles Book 4

by Matthew Phillion

  Seng made a soft clicking noise.

  Dude told Billy that the noise was equivalent to a sigh.

  "Maybe this is just another world that deserves to be ended," Seng said.

  "You believe that?" Billy said.

  Seng turned his eyes to the door of his room and looked out into the hallway.

  "I have met your allies," Seng said.

  "They're a little odd," Billy said.

  "But they are… you have something we lacked," Seng said.

  "Crazy people in costumes?"

  "Heroes," Seng said. "My brother and I stood alone against the fleet. We did our best. But my people weren't ready. We had no heroes."

  Billy thought about Jane's question. If the Nemesis fleet could be reasoned with. The hero who wanted peace. He felt a gnawing in his stomach, acid roiled inside. Poor Jane, he thought. Someday I want her to be right. Someday I'd like her to discover that finer world she's always searching for. It won't be this time, will it Dude?

  Thousands of years, Billy Case, Dude said. We have tried. I promise you. We have tried.

  "Well, heroes we got," Billy said. "You think we should fight?"

  "I think you should," Seng said. "And I will join you."

  Billy almost smiled, but then realized he needed one more answer.

  "What happened to your brother, Seng?" he asked.

  "He gave his life to buy me time," Seng said. "So that I could find the next world, and give them a chance."

  "He must've been pretty brave," Billy said.

  "The bravest ever known," Seng said. "I'll battle with you, but I fight for him."

  Chapter 37:

  A part of the machine

  The chieftain walked slowly through a long corridor—a vein in the mothership of the fleet—down dark, fibrous walls lit from within by a naturally occurring, pale red glow. For some reason the weight of the parasite on his chest felt heavier today. Perhaps his body was finally breaking down, the end was in sight and this farce of a life was almost over.

  That parasite connected him to the fleet and so he felt the movement of the other ships around them. The fighter craft, like wasps, almost able to think for themselves, acted as living drones to guard the mind-ship. The silent seed-ships moved at the behest and command of the mothership, where the Council of Thought resided. The chieftain had seen the council a few times, withered bodies halfway between tree trunk and corpse, stood suspended in the dark, manipulating the fleet from afar. He'd never witnessed one of the council move, though he'd watched others of their kind. The final stage of the species' evolution constituted a life cycle that took them from immobile plant thing to mummified telepathic god, shuffling around in the dark, commandeering their vessels of war.

  The chieftain used to wonder how these creatures functioned, how they progressed from birth to death. They didn't seem to die, he noted. Just remained part of the machine, part of the monster, always hungry, consistently moving forward. He used to care. Not anymore. The hum of the ship's heartbeat numbed and hypnotized him—if not literally at least figuratively—and made the passage of time rhythmic and droning, on and on as the catapulted into the endless black.

  The strange creatures also saddled with the multi-legged parasites once made him anxious. They made no sense, their alien biology illogical and endlessly weird. The creatures with two faces, the asymmetrical ones who seemed to go in three directions at once, the winged beasts who had, when first brought onboard, seemed so constricted, so panicked to be without an open sky.

  Such was life here on the brain-ship, the central nervous system of the fleet. The fleet itself loomed as one beast. The brain-ship its head, the seed-ships its hands that would reach down and tear open this new world with hungry fingers, the warships acting as mighty legs thundering forward toward their next victim, and the buzzing outriders like little sharp teeth and claws for gutting their enemies.

  He could almost respect it, if not for what it did to him, to his people, to the world he never appreciated until it was gone. His world was for conquering, the chieftain thought. Fighting petty wars—stupid mortal barbarians killing each other—over a rock in space. But it was all we knew, and everything we had, and we were too selfish and violent to realize we were wasting what little time remained. There was no defeating this fleet. Seed-ships plunged into the soil of his home world like a knife into sand, changing and tormenting everything they touched, dark sorcery about to bring the apocalypse. He could not regret losing that war. There is always someone stronger than you are, faster, willing to commit atrocities you are not.

  But not taking advantage of the time we had, the chieftain thought, that is what I regret. Because we believed we had all the time in the world. Until our world disappeared.

  He continued to walk aimlessly through the veins of the brain-ship, restless and lonely. He dreamed of home, of the dead, of everything he loved and would never see again.

  Chapter 38:

  A chamber full of the dead

  This feels terribly familiar," Titus said softly over Kate's shoulder. They looked at the low-slung building in front of them, surrounded by electrified fences and barbed wire. The structure itself wasn't enormous, but they knew from past experience that any one they needed to break into had a decent chance of being bigger on the inside.

  It didn't appear well-guarded. Armed men patrolled, but compared to super-powered symbiotic aliens, humans with guns didn't seem like quite as much of a barrier.

  "Do we knock on the front door?" Bedlam said.

  Hunkered down in a wooded area just beyond the fence, a twenty-five foot clearing stood between the trio and the fence itself. The one gate they'd spotted had the most security: four guards and too much light for stealth.

  "I can make that jump," Titus said.

  "That's a fifteen foot fence," Kate said. "You sure?"

  Titus grinned. It pained Kate to realize that the best adjective for his smile at that moment was, in fact, wolfish. Emily would gloat about that.

  "We've cleared higher," he said. "I can do it with you on my back."

  Bedlam raised an eyebrow.

  Kate shot her a dirty look.

  "Not saying a thing," Bedlam said. "I can clear that height too, though. I just need a running start."

  "We'll go over first and knock out the patrol coming around," Kate said. "Then you follow."

  Bedlam nodded and shimmied to the edge of the clearing. Titus exhaled and smoothly transformed from human to werewolf, his silvery fur luminous in the dark. He looked at Kate with those strange yellow eyes. She always wondered how close to the surface he was when he transformed, and how much the monster was in control. Titus crouched down so Kate could hop onto his back. Gripping his torso with her legs, she threw one arm over his shoulder, leaving her other hand free in case she needed it.

  With surprising grace, Titus ran forward, his loping gait covered the distance of the clearing in a two or three strides. She felt his entire core tighten as he leapt into the air, easily soaring over the electrified fence. They landed without a sound on the other side, just the soft crush of claws through dirt and a feint 'huff' as the werewolf exhaled. Like a flawless machine, Kate and Titus went to work, Kate slid from his back and ran into the dark so she could sneak up behind the patrol they knew would soon pass by. Titus jumped again, this time batting at a tall light, bathing the area in shadows when the bulb softly broke.

  Kate rushed up behind the two guards on patrol as they came around the edge of the building, both of them tensed when they saw the light had been extinguished. Kate punched him with one of her taser-knuckle devices and the first man had no idea what hit him. She pounced on the second man and wrapped an arm around his neck before pulling him to the ground until he passed out. Both men subdued, Titus appeared beside her and together they dragged the guards along the ground and further into the shadows.

  A less graceful thump trembled though the dirt.

  Kate saw Bedlam on one knee, looking over at her sheepish
ly. Sparks flew from the section of the fence she jumped over.

  "I tripped," she said, her eyes full of wild energy.

  Kate shook her head and pointed toward the main building inside the compound. All three ran toward it. Titus and Bedlam made clear moves to kick in the closest door, but Kate waved them off, and quickly examined the digital lock on the door. She produced a security key card she'd taken from the guard she'd knocked out.

  "Kicking it in would've been more fun," Bedlam said.

  Kate shrugged and zipped the card through the scanner. The door unlocked with a metallic clunk. Bedlam pushed it open.

  Inside, the building consisted of a wide-open space, bathed in soft blue-green light. Large crates obscured their view of the main area. Titus leapt up on top of the crates, as always moving with deceptive grace. Kate walked left into the dark, Bedlam right. Kate slid along the crates until she found a spot where she could slip between them easily to see what might be waiting.

  What she found nearly made her heart stop.

  Two long horizontal rows of glass tubes, each large enough to hold an adult human, were lined up down the center of the building. Each was hooked up to dozens of monitors. The machines presented no immediate indication what purpose they served. Lights blinked in red, green, and blue. Lit from within by ghostly blue light, the tubes themselves were filled with dense fluid, thicker than water. A human body floated still and unmoving in each. Most had been modified in some way, limbs or eyes or hands, some sort of robotic addition or, in even stranger cases, inhuman parts seemingly surgically attached where ordinary limbs or organs once resided.

  Kate stepped out from behind the crates and walked up to the nearest tube. A young man, eyes open, stared blankly ahead. She watched his chest and saw no movement, no hint of breathing.

  "I'm going to kill them," Bedlam said softly as she, too, emerged from the shadows.

  Kate glanced up at the rafters and looked for Titus in the dark, but she couldn't see him. "You know what this is?" she said.

  "I should," Bedlam said. "I was in one for six months."

  Kate locked eyes with Bedlam.

  The cyborg turned away and walked up to one of the glass chambers in the other row, this one containing a teen-aged girl.

  "This is how they stored me, while they were grafting on all these parts," Bedlam said. "It felt like a dream."

  She looked back over her shoulder at Kate.

  "I didn't know if it was a hallucination or a nightmare," she said. "The light, the cold… it's so cold inside there."

  "Does this mean these kids are alive?" Kate said. She examined the machinery attached to the cylinders, trying to find any indication of vital signs or status.

  "They're not breathing," Bedlam said. She placed one cyborg hand against the glass, her metal fingers clinking as they touched it. "I remember breathing. It's like… breathing Jell-O. Too thick, slow moving, it fills up your lungs. I remember…"

  "And I remember you," a voice said from the darkness.

  Kate stepped back, took shelter behind one of the tubes, hoping to find the source of the voice.

  A man emerged from the darkness, well-kept, dressed in a dark suit, his collar loosened. He stood standing on a landing at the top of a flight of stairs. Too far way for Kate to reach, out of range of her throwing weapons. He looked tired, feverish. "You were the one who survived. Our great success."

  "Who the hell are you?" Bedlam said, standing her ground in the middle of the warehouse-like chamber.

  The man shot them a pristine white smile.

  "I am… Well, I suppose I was one of the Children of the Elder Star," the man said. He was leaning on something, Kate saw. A cane? She couldn't make it out in the shadows.

  "Past-tense?" Kate yelled from her hiding spot. "We heard about some dissention in the ranks."

  "There's always been dissention. That's what the Children are, con artists pretending to be a billion-dollar enterprise pretending to be cultists," he said. "Liars. All of them. Except me and my brothers. We were the true believers."

  "You believed something was coming from the stars," Kate said.

  "We knew," the man said. "Do you know how difficult it was to play along with all their petty earthly scheming when we realized the world was coming to an end? Who cares about money and influence when your planet's demise is set to an egg timer?"

  "You made us," Bedlam said.

  "Made you?" the man said. Kate stole a glance at him. He hadn't moved from his perch, but he also appeared alone. No backup, and no parasite on his chest. Somehow that made it worse, Kate thought—the others they'd fought had been enslaved by the parasitic creatures. This man seemed to be betraying their planet entirely voluntarily.

  "You know, we had nothing to do with you at first," he said. "One of the others thought building weapons out of half-dead teenagers posed as a good investment. They thought we'd get better PR if we had doomsday weapons."

  "But you wanted us to be…" Bedlam began.

  "Oh, we'd still like you to be host bodies," the man said. "But beggars can't be choosers. If the ones who lived couldn't be controlled, well…"

  He made a grand gesture towards the rows of seemingly dead people in their tubes.

  "After you escaped we realized that we could enhance cadavers just as easily," he said. "More so, because they wouldn't think for themselves and escape. So we took our leftover dead and turned them into a little squadron of hosts for our loving gods when they arrive."

  "You what?" Bedlam said.

  "Bargaining chips," the man said. "Do you know what they do to worlds? The only way to survive is to make yourself useful in anticipation of their arrival. To sell your soul to them. Otherwise you're just food in the machine."

  "And you think you can bargain your life with… these poor kids?" Bedlam said.

  "We wanted a place in the machine," the man said. "They keep the strong ones. The ones they can use. And everything else is just dust and food. You would have been a great gift, Bedlam. You and the others. It's so funny to think how small-minded my colleagues were. You were just a weapon to them. Something to break things. My brothers and I knew you weren't a sledgehammer. You were a gift."

  Kate mulled her arsenal over in her mind. Smoke bombs, throwing tasers, the gauntlets. A grappling hook. Little paralytic darts she could use to take him out if she were able to get close enough. She glanced around the room again, wondering where Titus went to.

  "You did this to me," Bedlam said, fury growing in her voice.

  "Oh come now. You were practically a corpse," the man said. "I've read your file. Did you want to live as half a person? Is that the life you wanted? We made you better!"

  "I should have had a choice," Bedlam said.

  "So ungrateful," the man said. "Then again your file did say you were a headcase."

  Bedlam took a step forward.

  "Uh-uh," The man said. He raised the thing he'd been leaning on—not a cane, Kate realized, a weapon of some kind—and pointed it at Bedlam. "Trust me. We built you. We know what it takes to shut you down."

  Kate made a move, but the man shouted her name.

  "Dancer! We know all about you too," he said. "You might be ruthless enough to let me kill your little robot friend in order to get to me. We've always admired that about you. The cutthroat one in that little group of yours. But I'm willing to take the shot. It's up to you what happens next."

  "It's up to me," Bedlam said.

  Kate heard the control in her tone cracking.

  "I'm tired of other people deciding if I live or die."

  "Too bad," the man said playfully. "Don't worry, this machine will only destroy your brain. You'll be added to the bodies we offer when they arrive."

  The man started to pull the trigger, but he never got to take the shot. Three hundred pounds of werewolf dropped from the rafters onto him, a mass of silver brutality, claws flashed and mouth roared when it tore the weapon from the suited man's grasp.

  "Alive, Titu
s!" Kate yelled, running out from behind her hiding place.

  Titus raised the man into the air, held him by both arms, and growled in his face, fangs as long as knives flashed in the blue light of the chamber.

  Doors on both sides of the room slammed open. Guards poured in. Before anyone could say a word, they opened fire with short, angry machine guns. Kate winced. She saw more than one bullet hit Titus's body, but knew he'd recover. When she watched the explosion of blood tear through the mystery man's body though, she knew he was gone. Stray bullets riddled his frame. Titus roared again, then tossed the limp mystery man aside. He pounced onto the nearest group of guards. Kate couldn't see what happened next in the shadows, but the screams of strangers told her Titus was winning.

  She threw a smoke grenade at the second set of guards, watching as it burst against an armored chest. She closed her eyes and threw another device, a flash bang, blinding them. In seconds she was kicking knees until they bent in the wrong direction, snapping an elbow over her shoulder, feeling a nose crumple beneath her palm.

  And then there was no noise but the hum of machinery and moans of broken men.

  The smoke cleared and Kate let her eyes adjust. Bedlam still stood in the center of the room, arms hanging at her side, her chrome cyborg parts and bright orange hair glowing in the blue light.

  "This could've been me," she said to herself.

  Titus dropped down from the second level, hobbling a bit, blood stained his fur. Kate knew he would wait to transform back. He healed faster as a monster than he did as a human.

  "If I hadn't pulled through. They would've stuck me in one of these jars and just kept me," Bedlam said. "Just in case they needed spare parts."

  Bedlam spun in a slow, deliberate circle, taking in the entire room, looking at each of the tubes one by one.

  "We have to destroy them, don't we?" she said.

  "If they're still alive, we could save them," Kate said.

  Bedlam found a control console between two of the center tubes. She touched a few keys and a screen lit up. Kate joined her at the terminal. Hospital-style monitors showed the vital signs of the bodies. Nothing but temperatures and electrical currents. No signs of life. No heartbeats. No blood pressure.