The Indestructibles (Book 4): Like A Comet (13 page)

Chapter
18:

Dogfight

Billy felt Dude kick up the speed as
three Nemesis fighters chased him just outside Saturn's atmosphere.

Running had seemed like the smart option
at the beginning, but the ships were fast, almost as fast as Straylight could
fly, and with three pursuers, dodging was getting more and more difficult.

      The ships behind him were silent
and swift, chitin-like armor gleaming in the light of stars. So far they hadn't
fired at him, but Billy knew it was just a matter of time.

      Then something flew past him, a
pellet the size of a human head.

      What was that, Billy thought.

     
Projectile,
Dude said.
An
oversized bullet.

      They can use bullets in space?
Billy thought, dodging another sphere.

     
No friction
, Dude said.
If
they launch it hard enough, it'll just keep going until it hits something…

      Billy soared down closer to the
planet, tugged by its gravity, the vastness of the gas giant feeling like the
deepest water he'd ever seen. Another bullet swung past him and disappeared,
and he found himself suddenly angry.

     
What are you doing, Billy Case?
Dude said.

      Billy didn't answer, banking up
away from the planet's atmosphere, creating a dramatic arc of light, using his
greater speed to advantage. Suddenly above the three alien fighters, he held
out his hands toward the center ship and fired duel blasts of blue-white light
into its shell. To his surprise, the blasts tore right through the surface of
the ship, red-black fuel spilling out of the gaping hole he'd created. He fired
again with both hands, and the fighter seemed to be cut adrift, tilting and
falling slowly toward Saturn.

      Well that worked, Billy thought.

     
There was a reason I didn't
want to fight them
, Dude said.
Don't get cocky.

      Before Billy could demand follow-up
information from that statement, the two remaining fighters turned toward him,
amped up their speed, and took evasive action to dodge Billy's light-blasts.

      Okay, okay, bad move, Billy
thought, returning to his escape plan, kicking up his own velocity to avoid the
two ships.  

      He aimed for Saturn's glowing
rings, hearing Dude's voice yelling at him not to fly through the ice and dust
that made up the rings. Billy banked left rather than fly through the rings
themselves, skirted the fast-moving debris and hoped the fighters wouldn't be
able to maneuver, and be forced to crash into the dust storm. Instead, they
kept up with his moves and, spinning skillfully, maintained their sights on
him, flying in a complex pattern to limit his options for escaping.

      Then an alarmingly familiar
reddish bolt of light hummed past him, terrifyingly close.

      Tell me that wasn't a null gun!
Billy thought, thinking of the weapon he'd encountered twice now that had been
designed to kick Luminae like Dude out of their host body temporarily.

      The weapon was deadly effective on
Earth where it could be used to cut off Billy's connection to Dude when he was
in danger, or even when flying. Here in space, Billy assumed he'd be dead in
seconds without Dude's powers protecting him from the vacuum.

     
I told you there was a reason I
wanted us to run,
Dude said, calmly enough to make Billy mad at him.

      Next time, lead with 'they have
null guns,' Billy thought. That should be your first fricken' comment.

     
Who do you think invented the
null gun?
Dude said as together they evaded another blast. Now both
fighters were firing null guns at them, intuitively trying to fire where Billy
would be rather than where he was, cutting off all of his escape routes.

      History lesson later, Billy said.
New plan.

     
No
, Dude said, reading
Billy's mind and clearly disagreeing with his plan.

      Got a better one? Billy thought,
feeling another null gun blast sizzle past his ear.

     
No
, Dude repeated, and
Billy felt the alien relent in his argument.

      If this doesn't work, Billy said,
steeling himself to perform one of the stupider actions he'd ever done, I had a
lot of fun being your partner.

     
Stop talking and do it,
Dude said.

      Billy smiled in spite of the
danger and hit the virtual breaks, coming to a dead stop. The lack of motion
seemed to confuse both of the fighters, whose next shots were very far off the
mark.

      Billy turned and flew full speed
at the nose of one fighter. The ship balked a bit, as if unsure how to react to
the suicidal move by its target. Billy could see the reddish light of the null
gun warming but not firing. Somewhere inside that ship, the pilot or gunner
didn't know how to respond to its target flying straight toward it.

      That hesitation lasted until Billy
smashed straight through the nose of the ship, a hammer through a piñata, Dude's
protective energy shield acting as armor against the impact. Together they
gutted the fighter, which all but exploded on impact.

      Billy whooped silently.

      We did it! Told you that would
work, he thought.

      But shaking off the impact had
half-blinded him, caught up in the muck and debris of the torn-apart ship. As
his vision cleared, the worse possible sight faced him. The third and final
fighter waited like an aimed pistol, null gun warming to fire, with Billy dead
to rights in front of it.

      I've made a mistake, Billy said.

     
Yes, we have,
Dude said.

      Billy tensed, hoping he could
blast the fighter before the null gun went off, more than certain he wouldn't
be fast enough, and found himself thinking in strange, fleeting thoughts, at
least I made arrangements for the dog…

      And then the third fighter
exploded, a powerful blast of blue-white light not unlike Billy's own energy
signature tearing through it like a spear.

      Billy startled at the explosion
like he'd been electrocuted.

      What the hell was that! Billy
said. He felt waves of emotion coming from Dude, in the way they shared each
others' moods. Dude gave off a sense of unexpected happiness and relief.

     
That was help,
Dude said.

      The source of the explosion flew
at them, his energy signature also that same white-blue glow Straylight gave
off. The man himself couldn't have been more different, though—older, a stark
white beard, his male pattern baldness awkwardly long and unkempt and stark white
as well. His eyes glowed the same way Billy's did when exerting significant
power from Dude.

      The man spoke to Billy, but in the
vacuum of space, he couldn't hear the words. It wasn't hard to lip read though:
"get in the ship," the man said.

      "What ship?" Billy said,
knowing his own words wouldn't carry.

      The man sneered at him and grabbed
Billy's arm. He pointed just past him at a ship, maybe twice as long as a city
bus and twice as wide as well, materializing in front of him, parts of the ship
fading from invisible to visible.

      "You have a cloaked space
ship?" Billy mouthed, incredulous.

      The man didn't answer, but instead
shoved Billy into an airlock forcibly and slammed the door behind him. Billy
felt the room's makeup change, oxygen filling it, the vacuum of space being
replaced by a metallic but welcome familiar breathability.

      "Ship, re-engage cloak,"
the man said.

      Billy's mouth hung open, his ears
ringing after listening to the first human words he'd heard in so much time.

      The newcomer rolled his eyes. "Close
your mouth. What were you doing engaging them?"

      "What I'm usually doing.
Trying not to die," Billy said.

      The man tugged on his beard,
agitated. Then, threw up his hands. "I'm too old for this. I'm too old to
deal with this," he said.

      "There's a good age to deal
with an alien invasion?" Billy said. "Because I was thinking I'm
probably too young to deal with it, myself."

      The older man paused, squinting at
Billy, still agitated, but de-escalating.

      "I'm Billy, by the way.
Thanks for saving my life." He extended a hand.

      The older man took it. "You're
him, aren't you?" he said. "The new Straylight."

      Billy squinted back at the older
man in almost an identical expression.

      "Yeah…" he said, drawing
out the syllable. "And you are…"

      "I'm Suresh," the man
said, putting a hand on his chest. "But we—my Luminae and I—we're… we're
Horizon."

     
I knew it was him,
Dude
said in Billy's head. Again, waves of happiness flooded his mind.

      "Dude said he knew it was
you," Billy said. "We thought you died."

      "You call the Straylight
Dude," the man said, not phrasing it as a question.     

      Billy looked at his feet, suddenly
embarrassed.

      "It's an informal thing. He
hates it."

      The older man burst into a raspy,
powerful laugh, so hard he bent at the waist, one hand on his knee, the other
holding his belly.

      "You call him Dude,"
Suresh said, tears running down his face. "Oh it's almost worth finding
you out here just to learn that. Oh, thank you, you strange little boy. I haven't
laughed in years."

      "Well," Billy said,
starting to chuckle himself as the man's infectious laughter continued. "What
did my predecessor call him?"

      Suresh started to speak but the
words caught in his throat. He coughed and choked, and this somehow seemed to
make him laugh even harder.  

     
Tell him not to tell you,
Dude said.

      "Dude says not to tell me,"
Billy said.

      The man roared again.

      "He called him Moneypenny!"
Suresh said, barely able to contain himself.

      "Moneypenny?" Billy
said, visibly entertained.

     
I don't want to talk about it,
Dude
said.

      Suresh pulled himself together,
wiping his eyes. His expression grew more serious when he looked Billy over as
if really seeing him for the first time.

      "We have to talk, Billy,"
Suresh said. "We have a lot to discuss and there's not much time. We've got
a stupid little world to save."

      "We do," Billy said.

      "Then let's speak quickly,"
Suresh said.

Chapter
19:

A
complete and utter failure

Agent Black sat in a run-down bar in
Montreal and waited for his contact to arrive. He liked this city, liked its
energy. The older he got, the more he wished that the weirdness of his visible
cybernetic implants didn't make going out casually to have a drink in the city virtually
impossible. For the past few decades, he'd seen most beautiful and entertaining
cities from the gutter up and it wore on him sometimes. He understood why some
of his peers, particularly the ones with less human-looking cyborg alterations,
spent their entire lives on the battlefield. In a warzone, nobody stares at you
because your eye glows red in the dark, or your arm is made of silvery metal.

      A woman, wearing sunglasses and a
decorative scarf, walked in alone. She moved with the confidence of a trained
warrior. Black instantly knew this was his contact. He raised a hand, holding up
two fingers. She joined him at his booth. He'd ordered a pitcher of beer when
he'd arrived, and poured her a glass, sliding it across the table.

      She took off her sunglasses, and
Black had to fight back laughter.

      "Rumor had it you were dead,"
Black said.

      The former Department agent and
mercenary operative known as Prevention set her glasses down on the table
between them and took a sip of her beer. She looked tanned, healthy, not like
someone who had failed an unnamed employer and whom the mercenary community
believed had been marked for death. That was the word on the street, anyway—she'd
been paid for years to infiltrate the Department, to change it from the inside,
and when she'd failed to contain the Indestructibles not too long ago she'd
disappeared entirely. There were rumors who her benefactors had been, but
nothing substantive, and usually when an agent blows an operation that
significant and that long in the making, it spells a death warrant.

      Instead, here she was, staring
back at him and smiling.

      "That's the rumor I had hoped
for; I'm glad to hear it," she said.

      "If you're looking for help
getting away from whoever you were working for, I'm not it," Black said. "I
won't tell anyone I saw you, but I don't want any trouble."

      The operative laughed at Black's
words.

      He found himself confused, and
suddenly irritated with her.

      "Didn't anyone ever wonder
why I wasn't assigned to kill the Indestructibles?" she asked. "I
reined in three of their most powerful members. Tried to manipulate them. But didn't
kill any of them."

      "My sidekick tells me you
stripped one of powers and tried to kill the vigilante," Black said.

      "Temporarily depowered the alien,
yes, but that was to assist me in manipulating the other two," she said. "And
the original plan wasn't to kill the Dancer, but she got on my nerves. It's
true, I may have been a little overzealous toward the end there. She's
incredibly irritating."

      Black nodded slightly. The Dancer had
an ability to get a rise out of the wrong people.

      "So what are you saying? Your
gig was to hire them?" Black said.

      "My job was to get the
Department ready for something big," she said. "I was never fully
briefed. They wanted an insider to take the assets of the Department and make
the organization as ruthless and war-ready as possible. And when Doc Silence
went and recruited a number of children who were capable of operating on
massive power scale, they became assets I was to acquire as well. I was coercive,
but never put them in danger."

      "I heard the stories,
Prevention," Black said. "Don't kid yourself. There was a lot of
danger involved."

      "Did anyone tell you it was
that little blue-haired lunatic who released a bunch of our prisoners?"
she said. "And please, skip the code names. Call me Laura. What
is
your first name, anyway?"

      "Agent," Black said.

      "Very funny," the woman
said, taking another sip of her beer.

      "So that whole thing.
Kidnapping three super-powered kids, nearly losing the Labyrinth—thanks for
that, by the way, there's about twenty guys locked up in there who want to kill
me, so I appreciate you almost having a complete prison break—and then having
an all-out battle in the prison was on purpose?" Black said.

      "Oh no, it was a complete and
utter failure," Laura said. "A catastrophic screw up. I thought I was
dead the minute I left the premises. I sat in a hotel room for a week and
waited to die."

      Now Black was curious. He'd had
some failures himself, but he'd always made sure he was never the singular
go-to field agent. He was muscle, not planning, because he didn't want to be in
the position where, if everything went wrong, it all fell back on him.

      "Clearly you didn't die,"
Black said.

      "I told you, my employers
wanted the Department ready for something huge," Laura said. "And
while my original mission parameters went pear-shaped, the incident did net
what my employers desired."   

      "A more active, battle-ready
Department and a team of super-powered individuals on high alert for trouble,"
Black said.

      "Exactly. My employers wanted
them under their control, but if they couldn't be controlled, they were at
least primed to react to what we knew was coming," Laura said.

      "Are you going to tell me
what your employers were so worried about that they hired you to try to
commandeer an entire government agency and super-team?" Black asked.

      The agent previously known as
Prevention pointed up into the sky.

      "Several years ago, my
employers learned of a potential alien invasion," she said. "And
while they are not… as you might suspect… entirely altruistic in what they do,
it is beneficial for them to have a world that has not been invaded by aliens."

      "Hard to run a profitable
business if your planet is a smoking husk, I suppose," Black said.

      "You're taking news of a
pending alien invasion with particular calm, Agent Black."

      He shrugged dismissively.

      "You and I come from the same
place," Black said. "The things we've seen… War is war. We're all
going to die in violence some day. Whether that's by stupid, bigoted countries
throwing nuclear warheads at each other or goblins from outer space, it's all
the same."

      "It's not my intention to die
in violence," Laura said. "And I also don't intend to botch two
contracts in a row."

      "Oh really," Black said.
He refilled her glass. "So what exactly do you need me for, call-me-Laura?"

      "How'd you like to work on
the side of the angels for once," she said.

      "I don't want Bedlam
involved," Black said. "I don't want her on your employer's radar,
whoever they are."

      "She's already involved,"
Laura said. "I have eyes on the Indestructibles, and they tell me she was
seen with them yesterday."

      Black sighed and sipped his beer,
feigning irritation. Part of him, some strange little place where fatherly
pride might have lived in another lifetime, fluttered with unexpected
happiness. He'd hoped, all along, that somehow Bedlam could avoid simply
becoming a younger version of himself, but he had no idea how to prevent
that—she couldn't live a normal life, couldn't just walk into society and be
treated with ordinary kindness, and he knew that she'd been built as a weapon
of war. For her every path involved violence, and he had wondered, and hoped,
she might find a way to turn out better than he had. Maybe time with those
strange kids in their floating Tower would help her figure that out.

      Something else flickered inside
him as well. Sadness. He wanted much more for Bedlam, but he knew anywhere
better would be far away from him. Maybe that's why she hadn't told him yet. He
felt no anger, but something else instead, a sense of loneliness he'd never had
need or use for before.

      He eyed the woman across from him
again.

      "So what are you asking me to
do?" he said.

      "Those kids are going to be
the world's first line of defense, for better or for worse," Laura said. "And
that means they're going to need help."

      "And how do you propose a
couple of aging mercenaries do that?" he asked.

      "How would you feel about
helping me liberate an entire arsenal of alien technology?" Laura said.

      Black raised his beer, and she
joined him. They clinked glasses.

      "No one will ever say we
lived dull lives, will they?" Black said.

      "You're lucky," Laura
said. "I can sense you hope she never follows in your footsteps, but at
least you've got someone who'll remember you when you're gone."

      Black downed his beer in one long
sip and set the glass down.

      "That's assuming we're
victorious," he said. "Let's go help these kids win a war."