The Indestructibles (Book 4): Like A Comet

Like
A Comet:

The
Indestructibles Book 4

by

Matthew
Phillion

Like A Comet: The Indestructibles Book 4

PFP, INC

[email protected]

PO Box 829

Byfield, MA 01922

May 2016

Printed in the United States of America

© 2016 Matthew Phillion

First PFP edition © 2016

ISBN-10:0-9970248-6-0

ISBN-13:978-0-9970248-6-9

(also available in print format)

Front cover design:

© Christian Sterling Hegg featuring
art by Matthew Phillion

http://www.christiansterlinghegg.com/

Back cover author photo:

© Joe Williams - JWLenswerk

Other
Books By Matthew Phillion

The
Indestructibles

The
Indestructibles: Breakout

The
Entropy of Everything: the Indestructibles Book 3

"Gifted:
An Indestructibles Christmas Story"

"The
Soloist"

Praise for Matthew
Phillion's Work

It's
refreshing to have the book's one truly indestructible hero be female . . . But
there's plenty that you haven't seen before . . . Phillion ramps up the action
often enough to keep things moving . . . in the end, it's the heroes'
well-drawn personalities that make
The Indestructibles
fly . . . And
[he] doesn't give the villains short shrift either . . . It's the rare young
superhero fan who won't find him—or herself plowing through
The
Indestructibles
in as few sittings as possible—and the rare older fan who
won't want to scoop it up as soon as junior finishes."

—Peter
Chianca
Gatehouse Media

* * *

 "Three
cheers for Solar, Dancer, Fury, Straylight, and Entropy: the five brightest
stars in the sky . . .a young woman with Supergirl-like strength and abilities;
Kate Miller, who wasn't really a superhero at all; a teenage werewolf; a kid
with an alien super symbiote living in his brain; and a girl who could control
gravity . . .In other words, the superteam was filled with a disparate mix of
monsters and freaks. Or, we suppose, they could simply be called Dr. Strange
and the Furious Five . . .[an] indefatigably entertaining novel."

—Eric
Searleman - Superheronovels.com

* * *

"Like
the first installment, [in
Breakout
] superhero fans of all ages are
likely to appreciate the plot's action-packed twists and turns, the pop culture
references, the revolving door of special guest heroes and villains and above
all the humor, which comes both from well-placed one-liners and the characters'
well-drawn personalities . . . Phillion juggles the multi-pronged plotlines
well, even managing to fit in a burgeoning subplot involving the resurgence of
the generation of heroes that preceded the current crop. And the action is
impeccably choreographed, no small achievement when you don't have panels full
of artwork to fall back on . . .But the novel's strength is no doubt its
characters: the superheroes of
Breakout
are people first, Spandex-clad
adventurers second. Add in the particular depth of Phillion's female characters—heroes
and villains both—and you've got a superhero saga that really does deserve to
break out"

—Peter
Chianca,
Gatehouse Media

* * *

"Superheroes
are famous for being perfectionists. Bruce Wayne, Big Barda, Natasha Romanova,
Matt Murdock—they all trained diligently to reach their utmost physical and
mental potential. And so it is with Kate Miller too ("The Soloist").
In two excellent novels Miller fought evildoers as a member of a superhero team
called the Indestructibles. But she was the only member of her crew who wasn't
bit by a spider, hit by lightning, or cursed by Galactus. She had to work hard
to be a badass. They called her Dancer because she moved like a ballerina and
hit like a mixed martial artists fighter. Now, in a prequel to the first
Indestructibles
novel, we get an insight into Miller's motivation. As it turns out, being a
ballerina is excellent training for being a crimefighting vigilante. You never
know when a perfectly executed grande jeté will come in handy. Coda: the author
recommends listening to Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings" while
reading his story.

—Eric
Searleman - Superheronovels.com

Acknowledgments

      For the record, this isn’t the
last of the Indestructibles.

      It feels a bit like an ending,
though, because this story—Indestructibles… in… space!—is the last of a series
of stories I already had plotted out and waiting to be told when I first
started writing about Jane, Kate, Billy, Titus, and Entropy Emily, and to know
that that original quartet of stories has actually seen print is amazing to me.

      And it only happened because of
you.

      Yeah, you.

      And I want to acknowledge you
first. The readers. Because without all of you, we never get to meet Plague and
visit the Labyrinth, we never travel into a dystopian future, and we most
certainly never get to see Indestructibles… in… space! (Sorry, it’s just so
much fun to type. Blame the Muppets.)

      So this book is for you. Everyone
who read the series. Every time you told a friend, or picked up an extra copy
to share. Some of you dropped off postcards at your local comic book shops. (I
got chills seeing the cards on a counter next to the latest releases, you
know.) Some of you cosplayed Kate or Emily or Doc Silence or Straylight or even
Agent Black, and I want to let you in on a secret—there’s a saying among writers
that you really haven’t made it until someone cosplays your character. That’s
when Pinocchio turns into a real boy.

      Thank you for your sketches of the
heroes, or naming your video game avatars after the Lady, for stopping by at
conventions just to say hello and talk about the next book. Thank you for
inviting me to your wedding (congratulations, Ben and Megan!). Thanks for all
of it. Because writing the Indestructibles has been the best thing I’ve ever
been a part of, and I don’t get to keep doing it without you.

      But before the books ever hit the
shelves, there’s a lot of people who do a whole lot of saving me from myself
during the writing and editing process, and I should thank you as well.

      Stephanie Buck has the great
misfortune of actually hearing me talk to myself as I’m channeling Entropy
Emily, when I get ridiculously excited about researching Saturn or time travel
theories, and for those months when nothing goes on in my head except these
characters. Thanks for letting me test my jokes on you. I’m sorry for the ones
that bomb.

      Peter Sarno, publisher with PFP
Publishing—thanks once again for all your efforts, and I can’t say it often
enough… thanks for taking a chance on a first-time author writing a prose comic
book about super-powered kids. We wouldn’t have come this far this fast without
you.

      Colin Carlton, Christian Sterling
Hegg, and Jen Howland—my Geek Sounding Board. Thank you for letting me ping
ideas off you all day while I’m writing to make sure I’m staying true to this
genre we love. And for on more than one occasion inspiring some of the
one-liners inside. Double thank-you to Christian, who heads up Sterling Arts
& Design, for another great cover.

      Rebecca Gianotti, thank you for
being one of my first readers through the whole series. You make me a better
writer with your questions.

      Christine Geiger and Jay Kumar,
you’ve both worked incredibly hard during the series to be the last sets of
eyes on the books. Your editorial expertise has always been appreciated. (And I
owe you both beer.)

      And of course my family—you were
supportive through every crazy endeavor getting here, and you’ve been more than
supportive as the series continued and the world of superheroes and nerdiness
took over my adult life the past few years. Thanks for letting me be your
artsy, geeky son and brother (and nephew and cousin too). And for giving me the
chance to be the uncle who shows up with the superhero swag whenever he can. I
don’t plan on stopping, by the way. Ever.

For my family, both the one I was born
into and the one I found.

I could never do this without you.

And especially for Adelyn. Welcome to
the world, little star

Prologue:

Big
sky

Billy Case landed in a field outside the
City, an old playground gone to seed where his parents used to bring him on
those rare days when they both could get away from work. Rusted swings creaked
softly in the light breeze, the entire field cast in a dark pink light as the
sun set, turning the City's skyline into shadowy spires.

      Billy, the superhero known to the
world as Straylight, looked up at the sky, deep blue darkened to indigo and
black, stars so faint as to be almost invisible. A city sky, the sort where the
ambient light devours the glimmer of stars and turns the night into a
neon-bathed eternal day.

      "I didn't really notice stars
'til that time Jane took us to her parents' farm," Billy said, as if to no
one. But he wasn't alone. Billy Case was never alone, not with the symbiotic
alien sharing his body acting as his constant companion, his conscience, his
Jiminy Cricket.

     
This is something you
Earthlings do far too infrequently,
the alien Billy had dubbed Dude, much
to the creature's annoyance, said.
I've been on your planet a long time, and
I've never understood why you look up so rarely.

      "We get busy," Billy
said. "Distracted. And then, I guess… then, before you know it, it's too
late. The stars pass us by."

      They had only recently returned
from a trek into an alternate future, Billy and Dude and the rest of the
Indestructibles team. None of them had come back the same. Billy, in
particular, felt more pensive, more inclined to melancholy. But then again, he'd
suffered a unique trauma there, sharing memories with his future self,
witnessing his own death in that timeline. Things just seemed a little less
funny now, though he did his best to keep those worries to himself when he was
with the others.

      And—just a few days ago—after
returning to their home timeline, an alien had crash-landed on Earth, one
sharing Billy's powers, with a symbiote just like Dude living inside him. The
alien traveler had been more than half-dead, desperate to find his counterpart
here, to warn him. An invasion was coming. Another species, and not the
friendly and charming kind like Dude. Headed for Earth-fall. Dude called them
the Nemesis fleet.

      Billy spent a lot of time during the
past few days looking up at the sky.

      Now he saw the others approaching,
Jane flying through the evening air like a ball of fire, Entropy Emily far less
gracefully drifting behind her in one of her "bubbles of float." Billy
knew they were looking for him. They needed to figure out what to do. How to
stop this invasion. If they
could
stop this invasion. He sat down on a
rusted swing, hoping it would hold his weight, and let himself rock back and
forth, taking unexpected comfort in the soft squeaking of the chains as he
moved. Jane landed nearby, then Emily. Together the girls approached him. Jane
stopped in front of him and folded her arms across her chest, her hair moving
and dancing like open flame. Emily plopped down on the swing next to him and
began to swing for real, legs kicking to stay in motion.

      "You know I'm going to have
to go up there and scout things out," Billy said to Jane.

      Her mouth formed a tight line of
worry across her face.

      "I can go with you,"
Jane said. "You shouldn't travel into space alone."

      "Can you believe we're having
a conversation about this?" Emily said. "Heading into space? I mean,
seriously. Eighteen months ago I was getting in trouble for jaywalking and now
we're talking about interstellar travel. Space. The final frontier."

      Emily began whistling the theme
song to
Doctor Who
softly. When Billy gave her a dirty look, she immediately
switched gears to "Binary Sunset" from
Star Wars.

      "What?" Emily said. "Tell
me that's not apropos."

      Billy smiled then turned back to
Jane.

      "No, I have to go alone,"
Billy said. "You're the big gun. Everyone will need you here if I don't
come back."    

      "I think we're both the big
guns on this team, Billy," Jane said. "Especially after what happened
to you in that other timeline."

      She had a point. They had always
been the two most powerful members of the Indestructibles, and Jane seemed to
get stronger every day as her solar-powered abilities built up over time. But
Billy had absorbed some of the strength of his future self while they were in
that other timeline, and it seemed to be permanent. He could do things he hadn't
been able to before. It had changed him physically, too; his eyes glowed
blue-white all the time now, the way their mentor Doc Silence's glowed violet.
They both, Billy and Doc, had scars from trying to take on too much power now.
Billy wondered if he should get some signature sunglasses like the ones Doc
wore.

      "I'll be fine on my own,
Jane," Billy said. "I won't engage them. I'm just going to put some
eyeballs on whatever is headed our way and then come right back."

      "Maybe the alien will wake up
and give us that answer," Jane said, referring to the Straylight-like
creature who had come to warn them of the pending invasion. The other being
remained unconscious at the Tower. Dude told Billy his counterpart inhabiting
the traveler would try to heal its host, but for now, both were in stasis, and
thus unable to tell them anything else about what was headed in their direction.

      Billy said nothing, listened
intently to the creaking of Emily's swing, and rocked his own to create a call
and answer between the two.
Creak swing, creak swing, creak swing.

      "The two of you," Jane
said, smirking. "You can't even stop yourself from doing stuff like that when
you're together."

      "We're a team, yo,"
Emily said.

      Billy leaned back and gazed into
the night sky again. It felt so overwhelming. Like it went on forever.

      It makes me feel insignificant,
Dude, Billy thought.

     
It makes us all feel
insignificant, Billy Case,
Dude said.
And it should. If outer space
doesn't make you feel small, I would be worried about your ego.

      You already worry about my ego,
Billy thought.

     
True enough,
Dude said.

      "It's amazing how big it is,
isn't it?" Billy said.

      "What," Emily said.

      "The sky."

      "That's kind of what it is. 'Big'
is its defining characteristic," Emily said.

      "I know what you mean,"
Jane said. "On my parents' farm I used to lay on my back, look up and be
amazed at how it felt so endless. Only stars and blackness."

      "I was born in the City,"
Billy said. "I grew up there. The sky was just that sliver of blue you saw
between buildings on those rare occasions you looked up. We didn't have stars.
Didn't have big sky."

      "This is known," Emily
said. "Seriously, the first time I went somewhere without ambient urban
light I thought I was struck blind."

      "If you want, I can scout and
you can stay here," Jane said. From anyone else it would have felt like a
taunt. From Jane it was simply an honest offer to take away some of a friend's
pain and fear.

      "No," Billy said. "This
one's my job."

      "Okay," Jane said.

      Billy and Emily continued their
rhythmic swinging while the sun crept closer to the horizon.

      "You're not leaving right
now, are you?" Emily said.

      "No," he said. "Got
a few things I should do first."

      "Like write a will?"
Emily said.

      "Emily!" Jane said.

      Billy laughed.

      "As if I have anything to leave
behind," he said.

      "You do," Emily said. "I,
William Byron Case, bequeath to Entropy Emily
sole custody
of our dog
Watson in the event I die tragically in a battle in outer space."

      "It's all about the dog with
you, isn't it, Em?" Billy said.

      "Don't get me wrong. I'd
rather you come home," she said. "But you better make sure the dog
stays with me if you don't."