The Indestructibles (Book 4): Like A Comet (2 page)

Chapter
1:

The
Tower

Long ago, a young Doc Silence and his
friends found a space ship in the desert.

No one could tell how long it had been
there buried in the sand. Years, decades, centuries, it didn't matter. It was a
ghost ship, a derelict craft long forgotten, buried deep in a lifeless place.

      Doc and his friends excavated it.
They opened the ship up. And when they made their way inside, they found a
living, breathing craft, a great and mighty machine, waiting to fly once again.
But the world wasn't ready for alien starships then, not yet, and so they built
a skyscraper, a tall and vapid structure, and one night, under the cover of
darkness, they landed their found ship on the roof, like the world's ugliest
cake topper. It became part of the building, part of this "Tower,"
and for many years it stayed there, home base of operations for more than one
team of superheroes, a hidden starship in the City's downtown.

      While living within its walls,
they came to realize something: this ship was not a weapon of war, but rather a
mobile hospital, a refugee ship, a rescue vessel. Someone on another world, in
another time, built it to house the sick, to save the imperiled, to keep safe
those who needed it. Part life raft, part floating medical facility.

      They never learned how the ghost
ship came to be buried there, devoid of life. Not even the corpses of its
former passengers could tell its tale. After a time, it simply became "home."

      Doc Silence sat in a room in the
Tower's medical bay, looking at the unconscious alien laying in stasis,
watching the creature's scaled skin rise and fall in shallow breaths.

      The alien had crash-landed on
Earth a few days before, apparently inhabited by a Luminae, the same species of
symbiotic pure-energy being as Billy's companion Dude. Another Luminae, another
hero from a different world, come here to warn them that an invasion was
imminent. Jane, Billy, and Emily had found him there, half-dead, rasping out
his final words of warning.

      Doc had known Dude, through 
multiple hosts, for a long time. He'd worked with Billy's predecessor, and he'd
known Straylight's partner, another Luminae-human pairing named Horizon.
Horizon quit Earth entirely when Dude's former partner was killed. The aliens
and their human hosts never explained why there were two of them here, though
they'd hinted that having a pair of Luminae on Earth was an unusual precedent,
that there were many inhabited worlds out there among the stars with only one
to watch over them.

      To watch over them. That was a
very specific term, Doc thought. To watch over the world, just in case
something terrible came from the stars. Well, here we are. Something terrible
is coming from the stars.

      "Neal?" Doc said out
loud, invoking the attention of the disembodied Artificial Intelligence who
controlled the Tower. Neal was with the ship when they'd found it, but he had
been clearly a newer modification, something Earth-born. Neal was a late
addition to the ship's arsenal, and he'd never revealed how he got there
either. Maybe he came from the future. That was Annie's theory, that Neal had
been created further along the time stream and installed like a software
improvement.

      And we still don't know anything
about who did that, Doc thought.

      "Yes, Designation: Doc
Silence," Neal's gentle voice said. Neal wasn't the ship itself, so to
speak, but the AI was everywhere, living within the walls and computers and
electrical currents. The ship was his body in many ways.

      "Neal, do we know what
species this alien is? We know he's a host to a Luminae, but I'm wondering
about the host-body itself," Doc said.

      There was a pause as Neal searched
his extensive library of knowledge.

      "Records show he is most
likely an Ank-tar," Neal said. "A species from a planet approximately
23 light years away. Relatively nearby."

      "Relatively nearby," Doc
said, laughing a little. It was strange, confronting the cosmic like this. Doc had
spent his entire life amid the arcane and magical, seeing things impossible and
mind-bending, but when it came to science, it was as foreign to him as it might
be explaining elemental magic to an engineer. "What do we know about his
species?"   

      "We have moderate biological
knowledge based upon old data from previous patients, Designation: Doc Silence,"
Neal said.

      Doc nodded.

      "See what we can do to help
him. I don't want this guy dying on us, Neal."    

      "I will do what I can."

      "You always do," Doc
said.

      Doc left the med bay and headed
toward the command center, meeting the returning trio of Jane, Billy, and Emily
on the way.

      "What have you three been up
to?" Doc asked.

      "Watching
Firefly
,"
Emily said.

      "Trying to figure out our next
move," Jane said, leading the way toward the control center. The door
hissed open, allowing everyone to enter.

      "I'll head out soon,"
Billy said. "Scout things out."

      Doc put a hand on Billy's shoulder
as the younger man headed for his designated seat at the table.

      "You're going to be careful
up there," Doc said.

      "Oh you don't have to tell me
twice," Billy said. "Momma Case didn't raise no daredevil."

      Jane sat down wearily in her own
seat and looked up at the bank of computer monitors behind her.

      "Has anyone recalled Kate and
Titus yet?" Jane said.

      "I didn't," Billy said. "I
figured we don't really know what we're doing yet, so why disturb them before
we have to. I mean, 'hey, your vacation's over, world is ending.'"

      Emily hopped into her chair and
sat on the back, feet where her bum should be, balancing precariously.

      "No offense to either one of
them, but why do we need them to come back yet?" Emily said. "I mean,
they're good at what they do but who brings a werewolf to a spaceship fight?"

      Doc rested his arms on the back of
his chair and leaned forward tiredly.

      "Because while Billy is
scouting out the incoming invasion, we're going to try to figure out what we
can do to get ourselves ready here," Doc said. "There's a good chance
if these… invaders, whatever they are, have picked out Earth to attack, they
already have people here spying on us. We should try to find out what they
know."    

      "And we need Assassin Barbie
and Cujo for that?" Emily said.

      "You're being obtuse, Em,"
Billy said.

      "I'm trying to buy the love
birds a few more days vacation," Em said. "I know why you're bringing
them back. They are our detectives."

      Doc shot a wide, bright smile at
Emily.

      "Exactly. And we have some
detective work to do," Doc said. "That includes you, by the way. I
have some research for that big old science brain of yours to dig into that I
don't understand."

      "Did you just stay I'm
smarter than you?" Emily said.

      "In this case, you might
actually know more than I do about certain things," Doc said.

      Emily held out her hand for a high
five from Billy.

      He just stared at her.

      "Come on, Billy Case. Give a
girl a victory high five," Emily said.

      "What else can we do,"
Jane said. "We can't start building warships. Whatever's coming at us is…
what's the word I'm looking for? More advanced than Earth? We're not ready for
this."

      "But we can be," Doc
said, rubbing his eyes behind his red-lensed glasses.

      "All right," Jane said. "So
we just have to figure out how to stop an alien invasion. I mean, we've time
traveled. This should be easy by comparison."

      "If I throw up in space, does
it float?" Billy said, as if he'd tuned out of the conversation
completely.

      "In space, nobody can hear
you puke," Emily said. She put her hand to her mouth and made a motion
like the inner jaws of the xenomorph from the Sigourney Weaver
Alien
movies at Billy. "Hiss. Rawr."

      "Jane," Doc said, "Get
Titus and Kate on the line. Fill them in. And then we have one more thing I
think we need to do before we start moving."     

      "Last meal?" Billy said.

      "Ask George R. R. Martin if
we can get a peek at the end of
Game of Thrones
in case the world gets
invaded before he finishes?" Emily said.

      "No," Doc said, turning
to Billy. "I think Straylight should tell us a story."

      "'There are those who
believe… that life here began out there, far across the universe…'" said
Emily.

      "Not the opening narration to
Battlestar Galactica
, Em," Doc said. "I think Dude is going to
tell us about where he came from." 

      Everyone looked at Billy. His eyes
went slightly blank, the way they did when he listened most intently to Dude's
voice inside his head.

      "Yeah," Billy said. "Dude
says we should tell you the whole story. But just once. Let's get Titus and the
scariest vigilante on the planet on the monitor so they can hear. He says the
explanation is overdue. And he's sorry."

Chapter
2:

Breakfast
of champions

Kate would like to say she wasn't sure
how she ended up with a man pinned to the counter of a diner bending his arm
almost to the breaking point, but she'd be lying. She knew exactly how she got
here.

      The real question was whether or
not Kate, better known to the world as the vigilante Dancer, was actually going
to break his arm.

      The night had started off innocently
enough. She and her teammate and sort-of-but-nobody-said-it boyfriend, the
werewolf Titus Whispering, had been training with some of his mentors at a camp
near the Canadian border. The two older werewolves, laconic Gabriel and chatty
Finnigan, had been excellent teachers, showing both Kate and Titus new
techniques for hand to hand combat they'd never used before, and the werewolf
couple had proven to be enjoyable company as well, full of stories about their
heritage and their travels.

      But the camp proved isolated and
lonely, and Kate had never really lived outside a city before. The quiet had
begun to affect her. That and the lack of action. She'd been fighting crime on
her own before she was old enough to drive. Training out in the woods was all
well and good, but this was the longest she'd gone without hitting someone in
years.

      So she and Titus drove into the
nearby town, little more than a single main street, with Gabriel and Finnigan
in tow, and the quartet hit up the local diner for breakfast-as-dinner.

      In retrospect, perhaps they should
have re-acclimated Kate to being around regular people a little more slowly.
She remained anti-social even on her best days.

      They ordered their meals, and
while Finnigan attempted to convince the waitress into adding white and black
pudding on the menu in the future and Titus devoured a stack of silver-dollar
pancakes, Kate went to the restroom. Kate disliked public bathrooms. They made
her uncomfortable. Forcing her to become vulnerable in an unfamiliar environment,
she found them disconcerting as well as unsanitary.

      When she returned she discovered
that Titus had left their table, though Gabriel and Finnigan, their backs to
her, still sat munching away. Kate wondered where Titus had gone and, at the
same time, pondered why you can never really get your hands completely dry
using a public bathroom. At that moment, she felt a hand paw at her
unexpectedly.

      A regular person might have become
instantly surprised, or frightened, or simply confused. But instead, as someone
who'd been in a state of battle-readiness for years, she relied on her instincts.
Blindingly quick, Kate battered the hand away, grabbed the person's wrist and
bent it back, dragging the offender—a twenty-something man in a red baseball hat
and a poor excuse for a beard—to the counter.

      "What the hell!" the man
yelled, his surprised shot cut off when his face bounced off the countertop.

      "Who sent you?" Kate
growled in the man's ear.

      "What?" he whined.

      "Where'd you come from?"

      "Lady, he didn't mean
anything," another man, bigger, maybe a year or two older, said, hands up
and palms out. "Just let him go. Nobody has to get hurt."

      "You're crazy!" the man
on the countertop said. 

      Kate twisted his wrist a
millimeter more.

      "Call me crazy one more time,"
she said. "And you'll never have full use of this arm again."

      "What?" the man said,
his face turning bright red.

      The diner door opened and closed
again, and Titus's familiar voice cut through the air.

      "I was only gone for three
minutes!" Titus said. Faster than should have been possible, he stood by
her side, carefully positioning himself between Kate and the pinned man's
friend.

      "Tell your lunatic girlfriend
to let him go," the friend said.

      Kate glanced back at their table
to see where the older werewolves were. Finnigan sat there, nibbling a piece of
bacon with one hand, watching the altercation with glee, while his other rested
on Gabriel's shoulder to keep his partner from intervening.

      The friend reached for Kate's arm,
but Titus grabbed his wrist. In his human form, Titus was a solid sixty pounds
lighter than the other man, but his grip stopped him dead in his tracks. Kate
watched as the friend tried to pull his arm free, but Titus held him perfectly
still.

      "I like to think of myself as
a pacifist," Titus said, "but if you try to lay a hand on either one
of us again my lesser angels will take over and you won't like that at all."

      "Crazy tourists," the
friend said, shaking his head.

      "You have no idea,"
Titus said and then turned to Kate, "We good?" 

      "He grabbed me," she said,
applying just a little more pressure on her captive's fingers.

      "You did?" Titus said. "Man,
you're lucky to have any teeth left right now. Very lucky."

      "Look, I'm sorry! I wouldn't
have touched you if I knew you were a ninja!" the first man said.

      "Would you have accosted me
if you knew I wasn't dangerous?" Kate said.

      "Can I just apologize?"
the man said.

      Titus exchanged a long look with
Kate before shrugging his shoulders at her.

      "I want to break a finger,"
Kate said.

      "Maybe not," Titus said.

      "Just the pinky then,"
Kate said.

      "If you have to," Titus
said.

      On the other side of the
restaurant, Finnigan guffawed.

      Kate released the man and pushed
him away.

      He began to flex and rub his arm, then
glared at her.

      The waitress behind the counter
stared at Kate with wide eyes.

      "I should have taken that
outside. I'm sorry," Kate said.

      "That's okay. I've wanted to
do that to him for at least six months," the waitress said.

* * *

      Outside, as the quartet walked
away, Finnigan couldn't contain himself. "I just want to break one finger!"
he said. "Titus, lad, I just love this girl."

      "I actually just loved your
response—not apologizing for almost breaking the guy's arm. You apologized for
not dragging him
outside
to break his arm," Titus said.

      Gabriel shook his head.

      "Where did you go, anyway?"
Kate said.

      Titus rubbed his eyes in a very
Doc-like manner, then gnawed on a fingernail anxiously.

      "Tower called. They need us
back," he said. He looked to Gabriel and Finnigan. "Sorry, guys."

      "Off to save the world again?"
Finnigan said.

      "I don't actually know,"
Titus said. "Jane wouldn't give me any specifics. Said it was too much to
explain over the phone and that we should both be there to get the whole story."

      "Back to the City for ye then,"
Finnigan said.

      "Let us know if you need any
help," Gabriel said.

      "Thanks to you both,"
Titus said. "We'll head back to camp, get our stuff and hit the road. You
okay with this, Kate?"

      Anticipation bubbling up inside
her, Kate—somewhere between anxiety and joy—grabbed Titus by both shoulders. "I
hope they've found us somebody to punch. I can't wait to get home."

      She let go of him and walked away,
leading the walk back to the campsite, a lightness that might almost be
mistaken for happiness evident in her step.