New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance (5 page)

Staten Island, New York, March 28, 2013

“We are going to die soon,” the Lurker said. Kenneth Slaughter nodded in agreement.

They’d found it was easier to communicate with each other by creating a mental construct, in this case an illusionary combination of the Lurker’s old lair beneath Central Park and Kenneth’s workshop on Freedom Island. Bit and pieces of both locales mingled liberally inside the construct, providing an environment that was both familiar and oddly disturbing. Given their situation, ‘oddly disturbing’ might as well be a constant descriptor for their new normalcy.

“At least our Neolympian abilities seem to be resurfacing,” Kenneth said. As they slept, their shared body had fully recovered from its post-decanting weakened state. The body was still gaunt, but the consumption of several pounds of food would deal with that problem. Brunch would be served in twenty minutes, and they’d be able to start working on it.

“Our minds, however, are not improving,” Damon Trent replied. “I’ve started to ‘remember’ things that never happened to me. My father, for example, was never murdered over some mining dispute in South America. Nor did I win the Orteig Prize in 1925 by flying from New York to Paris; in 1925 I was in Asia. Having two sets of memories for the same stretch of time is maddening.”

“Yes, I am having the same problem,” Kenneth said. His new memories were far more troubling, however. The Lurker had been a stone-cold killer, very much unlike Kenneth, who had long labored to use non-lethal means to subdue evildoers. The delight with which Damon Trent had dispatched his targets was painful to experience, and they were becoming part of his own memories, inspiring feelings of guilt over things he’d never done. “Our minds may be melding into one.”

“I’m a fragment of a whole,” Damon mused. “Your mind, on the other hand, is complete. It will probably end up subsuming mine.” He laughed bitterly. “You’ll have precious little joy from my memories, I promise you that.”

“I don’t think either of our personalities will survive the merging intact. We’ll become something else. Somebody else,” Kenneth concluded. It appeared he hadn’t truly escaped death after all.

“We’ll see. It would have been nice to have a good night’s rest, but I trust the noise from the other guest bedroom bothered you as much as it did me.”

Kenneth nodded. “I never expected Condor to have such… extreme tastes.”

“The boy has a great deal of pent-up rage, and his woman is worse. Better they try to work it off in the bedroom than out on the streets. I wish they’d been quieter, though.”

“In any case, I hope they are up for this undertaking.”

“They will be. We all have to be. We have to assist my daughter and stop Daedalus Smith. The fool thinks he is saving the world, you know.”

“Yes. He committed all sorts of crimes out of the best of intentions. And now I will have to betray the Legion and put my trust in one of its deadliest enemies, and an unexpectedly perverted gang of vigilantes, for much the same reasons. What’s the difference, then, between us?”

“Intentions mean nothing, Man of Brass. In the end, only results matter.”

* * *

Brunch was prepared and served by a pair of robot servants. The automatons could pass for human at first glance, if one didn’t look closely at their rubber skins or engage them in conversation for more than minute or so; they subroutines were rather limited.

The Lurker-Slaughter clone glared at him from the other side of the table. Kyle dipped his head in silent apology. They had gotten much too loud last night; he and Melanie and Lady Shi. There’d been a bit too much violence in their sex, and even in the large house, the noises they’d made had probably bothered everyone else. Kyle should have insisted in spending the night back at his mansion in the Catskills, but in the end everyone had decided to stick together at one location, for security’s sake.

Neither Melanie nor Lady Shi looked at all apologetic. Everybody should count himself lucky to have only heard and not seen the things those two had done to each other, or the damage they’d inflicted on the guest room. Kyle was going to have to write a rather large check to replace the furniture they’d wrecked. He felt bad, but he’d been too wired after the long night of planning to do anything else. He’d needed to burn off the pent up energy.

In any case, nobody complained out loud about it. Instead, talk turned to more important things.

“I’ve been monitoring the Dominion’s military and security channels,” Hades 2.0 reported. “Several Border Guard detachments were sent to the Pripet Marshes over the last couple of days, but they have been reassigned to an unnamed facility on the outskirts of Kiev. They are being very circumspect, and their encryption is almost as good as they think it is, but I was able to crack it. They have captured someone of great importance, and are taking strong measures to keep said captive secure.”

“Christine and Face, and I guess Father Alex as well” Kyle said. “It’s got to be them.” Face-Off had been sending brief heavily-encrypted messages every day, reporting their progress. His last message had been well over twenty-four hours ago, claiming they were still wandering the Pripet Marshes. He’d been overdue for a new message, and Kyle had feared the worst. “The Dominion has them, then.”

“I believe so, yes,” Hades said. “Does this change anything?”

“Rescuing my daughter is essential,” the Lurker said through the other Hades’ lips. “But we will need help.”

“Which means breaking out Ultimate,” Kyle concluded. “This just makes getting him out soon all the more important.”

“Given that we have Doc Slaughter’s memories and knowledge of the Legion’s security dispositions, along with our collective capabilities, I’m confident we can save the Greatest American Hero,” Hades 2.0 said with a wry smile. “My progenitor must be rolling over in his grave at the very thought of my helping rescue his nemesis. I find that oddly comforting.”

“I have outlined a tentative plan,” Doc Slaughter said. “We can launch the breakout in twenty-four hours.” He went on to explain his plan. Kyle and Hades both had some useful suggestions, and by the time brunch was over they had a plan.

Soon they’d get to find how good it really was.

Kiev, Dominion of the Ukraine, March 27-March 28, 2014

There was an earth-shattering kaboom, and then things got really intense.

Christine was vaguely aware that Baba Yaga had been thrown off her lap and into the nearest wall. Her perspective shifted wildly; she was no longer strapped to a wheelchair in a lab. Even the massive burst of pain as the disruptor collar let her have it was something distant and unimportant. Her consciousness had stepped away from her body, and she was inside the Codex, a search engine whose database was the universe itself.

Holy crap, it’s full of stars!

Not just stars; the little dots of light swirling around her were galaxies, untold number of galaxies, and as she looked at them they changed and spiraled towards a central point as if someone had flushed a cosmic toilet bowl and finally coalesced into the Monoblock. She’d seen this before, the first time she’d held the Codex, but this time the movie was running backwards, and for one instant she was able to catch a glimpse of the moments before the Big Bang, and in it she saw – perceived, actually, as her eyes were simply not built to see that kind of thing – the Mono-Mind. God, one might say, although the term was woefully incomplete. There was a Word for She-He-They-It That Came Before, a Word that also meant She-He-They-It That Was Born At the End, and she realized that the Universal Timeline was not a straight line but a circle; the End begat the Beginning, and vice-freaking-versa. The sentient species of the universe became God, and God in return created the universe and all the sentient species within it.

The circle was seemingly foreordained and inevitable, but in reality was fragile and contingent. It could be cut; it could be derailed. The Outsiders were nibbling at it, like that big snake of Norse mythology gnawing at the roots of the World Tree. The circle could be broken, and everything within it could vanish like a popped bubble, never having existed.

It was too big, too much. She could spend lifetimes just examining the ramifications of what she had gleaned, and meanwhile things were going to hell in the real world, which might just be a miniscule part of the whole but in its own way just as important as the whole. All for one, one for all, a whole in one and don’t be an a-hole.

Last time she’d done the cosmic awareness thingy, she’d been so engrossed by it she’d missed a guy with a light saber about to chop her up. This time she was able to pull back. Out in the real world, several soldiers were hosing her down with disruptor streams, adding their power to the disruptor collar – and, to her shock, she was standing up to the punishment. Her shield was back, and it was keeping the disruptors at bay, even the one around her neck. They were like garden hoses trying to douse a five-alarm fire. In the immortal words of the sheriff dude in
Jaws
, they were going to need a bigger boat.

In her mind’s eye, she saw a search bar, and two buttons: Google Search and I’m Feeling Lucky. She didn’t have a lot of time before they shut her down, so she typed one word:

POWER.

That turned out to be something of a mistake.

In the real world, that Google search produced 900 million results: that knowledge appeared in her mind, along with many, many other things. In the Codex, the first entry was the Word for Power. It was a vast concept that contained multitudes, too vast for her to grasp in the short time she had. A shock of pure
meaning
flooded into her mind, and it was like trying to have a drink by putting her mouth to an open fire hydrant; her connection with the Source became overwhelmed, and she had to shut it down before she drowned in it.

She snapped back to the real world. At some point her wheelchair had fallen on her side, and the pain as multiple disruptor streams finally broke through her defenses and hit her was overwhelming. It was worse than when she’d healed Mark.

Mark shouted.

Yes! She pushed through the pain, and after a horrible moment where she almost slipped and collapsed under the constant agony, Christine leaped away from reality once again. It was still there, the whole-body toothache hadn’t gone away completely, but it was distant, muted, and very much more bearable. She wasn’t in the lab room where the disruptors were burning every nerve ending in her body, she was in her old room at her mother’s house, the room with the Sailor Moon poster and the ancient desktop computer on her desk.

Mark was there as well.

His face was on.

It was the face of the sixteen year old kid whose Neo powers had manifested while being beaten to death. He looked young and vulnerable, but his eyes were older, worn with age and experience; his eyes hadn’t been sixteen for a long time. It was a beautiful face, but also sad, giving her a glimpse of the person he could have been if all the bad things in his life hadn’t happened. She fell in love with that face.

He glanced around with interest before sitting on the bed next to her. “Nice digs,” he said. “I didn’t realize you were partial to pajamas,” he added, and she realized she was wearing her Hello Kitty bedtime outfit yet again. Embarrassing.

“Not really,” she said. “Not anymore. I…” A new type of agony flared up, silencing her. She felt her right eye
break
, and the pain was like a spike driving through her head, and even in Dreamland, it was intense enough she screamed.

Mark was holding her. “Mark, I think, she, she put out my eye!” Out in the real world, blood and other stuff was running down her cheek, where talons had torn into her face. She was being kicked and punched as well, but those aches were nothing compared to what’d happened to her eye.

“Guess it’s time to break out, then,” he said.

“Wait!” It was hard to think with the horrible pain in her eye, but she forced herself to do it. The beating had stopped; despite the waves of agony coursing through her, she forced herself to pay attention. Baba Yaga was arguing with the Mind; if she only could understand what they were saying…

The Codex in her hand twitched. “… stand aside or die beside her,” Baba Yaga said, and Christine understood the words perfectly. Good going, Codex.

“She has been subdued,” the Mind replied, only a slight wavering in his voice betraying how scared he was. “Our lord and master is on his way here. Do you think he will approve of your killing the girl now?”

“You told him? You little German cockroach, I should crush you where you stand!”

“I did my duty. You will do yours. The girl has been punished. We will double the guard detail and the number of disruptor restraints. Our instruments were able to capture some of the input from the Codex, and we’ve obtained an incredible amount of data. That alone made this experiment a worthwhile one.”

“She must die. She’s too dangerous, and unpredictable, and I want her to die. I want to finish ripping her face off.”

“I’m sure you’ll get your chance, my Lady. But it won’t be today.”

Christine pulled away and returned to Dreamland. Mark was holding her, and she could feel he was about ready to break free or die trying. “It’s okay,” she said. “They’re not going to kill me. Not right now, at least. Baby Yaga just cut me a little and took out an eye. Guess my Armageddon Girl costume will need a matching eye-patch.” She tried to grin but couldn’t stifle a sob instead.

“Your eye will grow back,” Mark said. “Eyes heal very fast even in normal humans, let alone Neos; your average Neo can grow an eyeball in a matter of days. You’ll probably get it back in a few hours, provided they don’t keep zapping you with disruptors. It’s going to hurt like blazes, though, or so I’m told.”

“Oh, thank God. Not about the hurting part, but…”

“I know. I love your eyes, too. But I’d love you with an eye-patch or no eyes at all.”

“You say the sweetest things, Marky.”

“In dismemberment and in health and all that.”

“You’d better not be proposing. Not in Dreamland and not while I’m wearing Hello Kitty pajamas.”

Mark grinned and shook his head. “That’d be a little premature, not to mention inappropriate. We need to get out before you find out exactly how many body parts you can grow back.”

“Again, sweetest things.”

“Just keeping an eye on the ball.”

She actually laughed at that, despite the pain. “You dick!”

“Sorry, couldn’t resist.” There was pain behind the gallows humor, seeping past his emotion blocks. Her suffering was hurting him almost as much as her.

“The Iron Tsar himself is coming down to see me, by the way.”

“Don’t forget to curtsy and call him His Highness, then.”

“I also learned a couple more things from the Codex, including conversational Ukrainian. I think they might help us escape.”

“Whenever you think you’re ready, say the word and we’ll make our move.”

Christine almost suggested they did it right now, but quickly reconsidered. The disruptors had done a number on her, she was blind in one eye and the Iron Tsar, who had once fought Ultimate to a standstill, was heading her way. It was about the worst time to do anything.

“Not now, but soon,” she said.

Mark nodded. “Soon.” He made the word sound like a death sentence.

She hoped it wouldn’t be their own.

* * *

Christine couldn’t stay in Dreamland forever, much as she wanted to. For one, the Big Bads might notice she wasn’t all there, and for another she sensed that if she spent too much time away from reality, her body would start to deteriorate. She’d almost died once before, courtesy of a mind-trip alongside a miserable little d-bag who called himself the First.

So, she’d said see-ya-later to Mark and returned to the Real Crappy World.

The pain in her gouged eye was a dull throb by now, but under it was a steady itching that made her want to claw at her eye socket. Luckily for her, she didn’t have to resist the urge, because she couldn’t reach anything with her hands. At some point while she was astral-traveling, they had strapped her to an x-shaped contraption. Her arms and legs were extended up and shackled with multiple disruptor restraints, their Outsider energy crackling and making the skin around her wrists and ankles tingle painfully just by their proximity. The rest of her body was bruised and battered. Back when she’d been human, Christine had bruised like a peach; she couldn’t imagine what colors she’d be turning about now.

She’d never been in this much pain and discomfort, even counting her time as a sorta-superhero. So far, her stay on Earth Alpha had consisted on lots of ups and downs, with the downs outnumbering the ups by a considerable margin. Would things get better or would she just die in torment?

Worrying about it is just going to add to the torment
, her brain whispered in her head, surprisingly helpfully for a change.

Mark said, also in her head; it was getting pretty crowded in there.

She didn’t get a chance to explain. The door to her cell slid open and the Iron Tsar his own darn self walked in. He came in alone, no guards or anything, although she was sure a reaction squad was waiting nearby in case she decided to get fresh with their king.

The ruler of the Dominion was tall, about as tall as John Clarke, and similar in build, broad of shoulder, narrow of hip, filling out his green-and-gold military uniform quite nicely. His head was covered by a metal helmet, a medieval-looking thing with a narrow viewing slit which was glowing with an internal source of light.

There’s no head inside that helmet
, Christine realized.
His head is made of pure energy! How the eff did that happen?

She figured it would be rude to ask, so she stayed quiet while the Iron Tsar walked over to her. He moved a bit like a tiger, relaxed but clearly able to pounce at a moment’s notice. It was obvious this was one tough, scary dude, the kind of guy even Mark would regard with wary respect. But what really disturbed her was that she couldn’t get a good emotional read from him. His emotions were muted, hidden under multiple layers of energy and psychic defenses, some natural, others generated by a collection of miniature devices sewn into his uniform or implanted under his skin. Some of the protections came from Words inscribed into his body, Words like the ones her father had used, like the one Word she’d picked up less than an hour ago. If things got nasty, this could become the Spelling Bee competition from Hell.

“Christine Dark,” the Iron Tsar said. His voice sounded strangely normal, coming from a guy with no head, but then again, so did Mark’s. His English had a faint accent but was otherwise flawless. “Age twenty-two. Daughter of Damon Trent, better-known as the Lurker, and Patricia Dark. Born on an alternate reality, one where superhuman powers never developed. You have proven to be an elusive quarry, but you are finally here, where you belong.”

She tried to think of something witty to say but came up with zip, so she stayed quiet.

“You have greatly angered my consort,” he went on. “She wishes to finish what she started, to take the rest of your face and then your life.”