New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance (26 page)

“And then what?”

I can’t make a face anymore, but I can grin: an inhuman mouth opens up, twisted up in a smile that’s impossibly long and wide, and both Wanda and Medved recoil from it. “We’re going to wipe them out, we’re going to rescue everyone else, and then we’re going to figure out how to get the fuck out of here.”

Marko’s eyes gleam in the gray light. “Tell me more of this.”

Manchester, United Kingdom, December 6, 2013

Christine’s eyes stung, but she held back the tears. Must keep a stiff upper lip and all that.

Suppressing a riot without killing anybody took some doing. She’d gently scooped up screaming men and women by the dozen, ignoring the volleys of thrown bricks and Molotov cocktails, and dropped the rioters off near the waiting police, who’d zip-tied and stuffed them into paddy wagons (that was probably an insensitive term to use in the UK, she reminded herself) and driven them off. After she’d done that a handful of times, most of the rioters in her sector had decided to call it a day and head back home. You can’t fight City Hall, and you sure can’t fight a Type Three Legionnaire.

A lot of damage had been done already, though. The rampaging mob had targeted small businesses owned by immigrant families, mostly Pakistanis who’d fled the extinction of their country and the ensuing ethnic unrest in India back in the 1980s. She’d entered a burning store, trying to save the people inside, and had only found blackened corpses. Some of the bodies had been very, very small.

It was so stupid! People were scared, downright terrified after the Shout, and they were taking out their fears on the nearest scapegoat. Yoda had been right, for all that his father had disliked the
Star Wars
quote. Fear, anger, hatred, suffering. The sequence was taking place right before her eyes.

For a moment, her own anger had almost taken over. Those racist bastards running around burning stores and houses deserved whatever they got. She could… Christine shook her head. Yeah, she could do a lot of things. Horrible things. And she’d be just another awesome person doing awesome stuff, just like those d-bags down below, except with more kewl powerz.

She scooped up another couple dozen of the leftover crazies, and the rest finally gave up and joined in the retreat. She dropped them off with the police, and she kinda miscalculated and dropped them a couple of feet off the ground, resulting in a lot of sprains and a couple of broken bones, and that was a bummer, wasn’t it? As soon as she committed that bit of super-police brutality she felt bad, but not as bad as she should.
I’m turning mean
, she thought.

“Dark Justice here,” she reported dutifully. “My sector is clear. Over.”

“The situation is contained,” Artemis answered. “Rendezvous at our landing area for reassignment. Over.”

Done and Donner. For now. On their way to the UK, she’d heard about similar riots in Paris, Warsaw, Cairo… Other supers were handling those, but if they got out of control she and the rest of First Squad might end up having to join in the fun, instead of getting ready for the arrival of the Genocide.

At least they finally had an estimated time of arrival, kinda like an apocalyptic version of a Netflix DVD delivery date. Eight weeks, give or take a day or twhree. The Legion’s psychics, and the US MK-Ultra fortune tellers, all agreed on the estimate. The world had eight weeks to face a critter with the entire power of its home world’s Source behind it, plus whatever its Outsider taint brought to the table. Most of the visions of the future showed the Earth getting sterilized down to the last microorganisms in thermal vents on the ocean floor. That little prognosis had been kept from the public, but some version of it had leaked anyway, which helped spur the current wave of riots.

Not everybody was running around like the proverbial beheaded chicken. Some were getting the eff out of Dodge. A group of asteroid miners had turned their habitat into a spaceship of sorts and lit off for greener pastures, and there were stories of a few others working on ways to follow suit. If any of them were successful, maybe humanity wouldn’t get completely wiped out. She wished the crew of the
Starship Exodus
good luck: from the reports, there were about two hundred of the renegade miners, six of them Neos, and at 1 G of constant acceleration they’d get pretty far and be moving pretty fast by the time the alien showed up. Their escape would provide little comfort for the eight billion or so peeps who couldn’t run, though.

Christine flew down nimbly, reducing her speed and landing gracefully on her feet, just like in the comics, no fuss no muss. John was there, looking just like in the comics as well, standing tall, hands on his hips in a pose that looked staged but was just as unconscious as breathing for him.

“Glad you made it, sweetheart,” he said, and they hugged. He kissed the top of her head – since he was a foot taller than her, it was a common target of his affection – and they smiled at each other. His warm presence made her feel a little better.

“How were things in London?” she asked him.

“Not too bad, after we showed up. No fatalities, thankfully.”

“I wish I’d been so lucky,” she said.

“I heard. Nothing you could have done. The killings happened before we deployed.”

She shrugged. “It still sucks.”

“That it does.”

They stood by each other in companionable silence while the rest of First Squad arrived. It’d been overkill, sending the most powerful group in the Legion to help suppress riots led by normal peeps, but most of the rank-and-file were already committed in other spots, so they’d been what was on tap. It’d been a calculated risk, sending the last of the reserves, but they’d probably saved hundreds of lives, not to mention showed the world the Legion cared about everyone. In the last few months, Christine had learned how much of the Legion’s work revolved around public relations. They were like super-powered Disneyworld employees, all forced smiles that had to look perfectly natural, all tasked with projecting just the right image to the good folk of planet Earth. She had given up trying to decide if it was a good or a bad thing. It was just a thing.

“What next?” she said. Artemis was coming down from the sky, wreathed in flames as usual. She’d been playing firefighter, using her powers to help put out several blazes around the UK.

“We’re heading back to the Island for now. There’s a chance we may head for the Dominion in the next day or two, however.”

John’s words sent a chill down her back. “To talk or to fight?”

“Talk. The Tsar has agreed to meet with us, and he specifically named you in the invitation. It appears you impressed him quite a bit during your last encounter. You are the second person to ever survive his Dread Gaze, for one.”

“What an honor,” she said. John had been the other survivor; he and the Tsar had fought an inconclusive duel shortly after the end of World War Two. That fight had made the history books and the comic books; she had a hardcover signed copy of the Frazetta painted edition, and if the fight had been half as impressive as depicted in that graphic novel, it’d been a heck of a lot tougher than the one she’d muddled through. Of course, the comic book version of her own fight with the Tsar – lovingly drawn by George Perez, who’d talked her into posing for him – had also looked impressive as heck. In real life things were quicker and messier, and didn’t flow smoothly from one panel to the next.

Artemis – Olivia – joined them, smiling faintly, but her eyes looked sad and weary. Neos didn’t get physically tired, but nobody could escape emotional exhaustion. “Fifteen dead, and hundreds of injuries, dozens of them critical,” she reported. Christine knew what those calm words meant – people burned horribly, corpses tightly curled up in the classic ‘boxing’ posture caused by the flames contracting their muscles and ligaments; pain and terror and loss. Christine hugged her, and Olivia hugged her back tightly.

“We’re doing what we can,” John said behind her. He wasn’t much for hugs and PDAs, but his kind words often helped just as much. “In fact, it looks like the riots are dying down everywhere, in no small part thanks to the Legion’s help.”

“Good,” Christine said. “Now that we’ve stopped people from killing each other, we can get back to the work of stopping the Genocide from killing everyone. Just awesome, isn’t it?”

Korczowa, Poland, December 7, 2014

Christine and the rest of First Squad waited for the Dominion delegation on a snow-covered field outside a prosperous little town in the Polish side of the Poland-Ukraine border. She was a bit worried. First Squad had enough firepower to take over most countries on the planet, but the Dominion wasn’t one of those countries. If the Iron Tsar decided to play dirty, this piece of Poland – and probably much of the rest of the surrounding countryside – was going to get thoroughly rearranged.

That was just one of several reasons for her anxiety. Christine wasn’t eager to meet her former captors-slash-torturers. For one, a big part of her wanted nothing more than to extract some payback from them. For another, she was sure the feeling was mutual, and the Dominion thugs were not big on impulse control, not when they could do pretty much as they pleased in their crappy country.

“It’s going to be all right,” John said, touching her shoulder. She reached out for his hand and squeezed it.

“Am I that obvious?”

“No. You actually look perfectly calm. But I can pick up your heart rate, and that tells a different story.”

Her boyfriend could sense her moods a lot better than she could sense his. Bummer. “Well, the important thing is that I can fake it till I make it. Don’t want to let the Dominion minions see me sweat.”

“They won’t. With any luck, they’ll be doing the sweating.”

“I’m picking up several massive power signatures from the other side of the border,” Uncle Adam reported from inside his brand-new Brass Man armor. “I believe a full squadron of Dreadnoughts have deployed to within striking range.” Dreadnoughts looked a bit like massive blimps, but in reality were a cross between a flying battleship and a flying aircraft carrier, or, to put it another way, a smaller-scale version of the Death Star. They were very much like the ship that had bombed Freedom Island not too long ago, as a matter of fact. A squadron consisted of four to six Dreadnoughts. The Dominion’s Imperial Fleet fielded a total of four squadrons, which meant twenty-five percent of the country’s air force was massed just a few miles away, ready to deliver the destructive equivalent of a few dozen ICBMs from her world.

Amusingly enough, if she talked about ICBMs in these parts, she’d get as many blank stares as when she talked about Coldplay. They’d never developed strategic nukes in this reality, except for the occasional mad scientist super-weapon like the one that had almost wrecked New York last spring. Funny how her superhero-less reality had developed more weapons of mass destruction than this land of super-duper men and women in tights.

“A shuttle is on its way here,” Uncle Adam announced. Time to find out if the Dominion could play fair.

The ‘shuttle’ turned out to be a slightly-less weaponized version of the flying tanks Mark and her had fought during their great escape. It was built along the same lines, except it didn’t have the big-ass central cannon on its nose, just the four slightly less big-assed blasters. It was also a bit roomier on the inside; when it landed on the field it disgorged half a dozen peeps, some of them pretty biggie-sized.

The Tsar was there, along with Baby-Baba Gaga-Yaga, God help them all. Also present: the Mind, the big-headed, small-hearted German mad scientist d-bag Christine had come to know and loathe on short acquaintance. A tall regal-looking woman Christine had last seen riding a dragon, a medieval knight type, and a blonde dude surrounded by a bright aura completed the entourage. They were part of the Ukrainian Iron Guard, there mostly for swag, since Mark had kicked their collective ass all by himself, which meant they didn’t add a lot of weight to the bad guys’ side if it came to a fight. The ones to worry about were the Iron Tsar and Lady Yaga, and of course the squadron of mini-Death Stars a few seconds away.

The Dominion delegation came to a half about twenty feet away, kinda far for a meet and greet, but knife-fighting distance for Neos. The Iron Tsar’s metal bucket of a head turned towards Christine. “We meet again, Christine Dark.”

“Howdy-doody, Mr. Spear and Magic Helmet,” she greeted him back. Probably not the most diplomatic form of address, but at this point she didn’t care.

“I see American irreverence is the same in both universes,” the Tsar observed dryly.

“What can I say? We both got Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and fart jokes.” John put a warning hand on her shoulder, but she shook it off. “I’m not here to be polite to you, Bucket-Face. The world is about to get blown to smithereens in two months, and that includes your Evil Empire, so let’s get real, shall we? Even worse, I shut off the Source’s superhero-making factory, just like you wanted, so we aren’t getting any new Neos to join in the war effort. That means if we don’t all work together, we’re going to burn together.”

There was a long pause. Apparently people didn’t talk that way to His Imperial Tsar-ness back in the Auld Sod. Baby Yaga was positively fuming; Christine could tell, even now that she was empathy-blind.

“I am sorry for your loss,” the Tsar finally said. Trust him to find a polite way to twist the proverbial knife. “Your man was strong and brave, and his presence will be sorely missed in the struggle to come.”

“Thank you,” Christine said. The reminder still hurt, but she was learning to take the condolences in good grace, even when they weren’t meant kindly.

“Now we should get down to business,” the Tsar continued. He turned to Artemis, who was the current Legion leader and whom he should have been addressing from the beginning. “What are your terms for ensuring a mutually beneficial cooperation agreement?”