The Indestructibles (Book 4): Like A Comet (31 page)

      "You'll forgive me if I steal
this one from you," she said. She crushed the pendant in her hand, feeling
the opal in the center of it split and sever.

      The mother-ship chamber glowed
blue and white for a moment.

      And where Jane once stood, nothing
remained.

* * *

      Jane reappeared outside the
Labyrinth in a flash of light, the air smelled like strange particles of space,
nausea and confusion settled in her belly like motion sickness. She fell down
onto one knee, resting, more shaken by Doc's teleportation spell than by what
transpired on the alien ship.    

      "Oh, Doc, why didn't you warn
me it would feel like this," Jane said, shaking. She touched the earpiece
she wore and spoke. "Indestructibles. I'm back. Mission failure. They're
not stopping, and they're closer than we thought."

      "Jane?" Billy's voice
said, sounding strained. "We know they're close—they're already here."

      "What?" Jane said. But
she looked out to the horizon and saw parts of the City smoking and on fire. "No."

      "We're getting this first
wave under control," Billy said. "They sent some sort of attack
ship—oh, no."

      "What, Billy?" Jane
said, already heading for the city.

      "Look up."

      She turned her eyes to the sky. It
resembled a painting, something abstract crafted on a plane of blue, but there,
pale and ghostly in the sky, the first view of the Nemesis fleet had become
visible, a small shape beyond the daylight moon.

      "The whole fleet is here,"
Jane said.

      Kate's voice chimed in next,
sounding winded and strained.

      "We've got this. Get the
flyers ready. Do what you have to do, Jane."

      Jane nodded, knowing no one would
see her. Somehow the gesture felt comforting.

      "I'm on my way," Jane
said. "We'll head up together."

Chapter
57:

The
Battle of the City

Kate watched the attack ship hover in
the air above the City's downtown. It fired red bursts of light at the
buildings and sent shards of glass and powdered concrete raining down onto the
streets below. The ship hung low, perhaps three stories up, a lump of shiny,
beetle-like armor.

      She got closer and saw a hatch
opening up in the flying insect's guts. Shapes formed there, living creatures,
and soon they leapt to the ground. Hulking things, varied in shape and form, with
the only thing in common the omnipresent parasite latched onto their chests.

      The aliens split up and headed in
all directions, leaving their vessel to continue their destructive path. Two of
them marched right for her. Kate tapped a button on her belt and the Distribution
suit hummed to life.

      The first creature, a four-legged
thing with a face shaped like a bay leaf, reached her first. Though the beast
had no eyes, it knew exactly where she was, and galloped toward her like some
sort of nightmarish centaur. Kate jumped, sent a knee into what she assumed was
its guts. The shot had no effect—his "chest," or whatever the thickly
padded surface was she had just kicked, had almost no give to it. Before she could
strike again, the alien backhanded Kate sending her sprawling across the street.
The blow rattled her teeth.

      The Distribution suit whirred
louder. Kate smiled viciously and ran back towards the alien, her ears still
ringing from his initial blow. He punched again, but this time she let it graze
her, allowing the suit to pick up more kinetic energy. Before he took another
swing, Kate hit him with a full body, from-her-feet haymaker. The suit fed the
punch, sending a kinetic burst through her tungsten-tipped gauntlet when it
connected with the parasite on the alien's chest. Host and symbiote lurched
backward from the force of the blow, then tumbled, crashing hard and loud into
a parked car.

      Kate instantly smelled gasoline.
She covered her eyes just before the car blew up, engulfing the alien in a
feeble cry.

      Please tell me the car was empty,
Kate thought, tell me there wasn't anyone in it.

      The second alien arrived next and smashed
Kate's back with two arm-like appendages. The suit absorbed the energy, but she
felt the punch all across her ribs, her heart pounding at the sudden pain
zapping across her body. She punched the bear-shaped creature in what she
thought looked like a kneecap. She'd guessed right, and the monster toppled
over awkwardly as its leg gave way to pain.

      "What was that?" Titus
said through Kate's earpiece.

      "Blew up a car," Kate
said.

      "I thought we were gonna keep
collateral damage to a—"

      "—Better than knocking him
into a convenience store, Titus," she said. "That was a BMW, in case
you're wondering."

      "Wasn't wondering," he said.
"You okay?"

      Kate didn't answer. She stole a
glance at the car—no human bodies inside, just the burned up corpse of the
alien. Kate intentionally let the bear-like creature hit her a few times,
blocking the blows with her forearms, absorbing more kinetic energy. She ducked
under another swing, punched what seemed to be an elbow—again a good guess—and
felt connective tissue and bone crumple under her up-swinging fist. Finally,
she head-butted the creature in the nose, hoping to stun him.

      Instead, she stunned
herself
.
Her brain rang at the impact. The alien brushed its nose, now streaming with
clear fluid. It grabbed hold of her, preventing Kate from getting in a good
punch, then knocked her to the ground, before dragging her by her ankle toward
its toothy mouth.

      Something sharp grazed her hip.
She looked down and saw a piece of twisted metal from the car wreck laying on
the pavement, long and almost flat, like a sword without a hilt. She snatched
it up in her gloved hands, and when the alien pulled her close enough, she
stabbed downward—not at the alien itself, but into the parasite, plunging the
makeshift weapon inside the crablike creature's body. The parasite shuddered
and squealed, a high-pitched whine of pain, then blackish blood poured out from
where she'd injured it.

      A few seconds later, the parasite's
shiny, spider-like limbs loosened, and the creature slid off the chest of its
host alien. The bear-shaped creature watched this all unfold, its attack on
Kate over, and when the parasite hit the ground, a dead lump of plant-like
flesh, it the fell to one knee.

      Kate scurried to her feet,
prepared to fight, but the alien was finished. It simply looked at its chest
where the parasite had just been. Its skin looked burned and infected, raw and
painful. The alien placed one squat hand on the wound, and then turned to look
at Kate, who readied herself to throw another punch.

      With no human features, the
creature's face bore no resemblance to anything that might display emotion. Yet
Kate saw in its expression something. Relief? Maybe gratefulness? Definitely a
flicker of serenity. It reached out to her with its other hand, slowly, almost
thoughtfully, then fell to the ground, unconscious or dead. Kate couldn't tell.

      She stood over the unmoving body
for a moment, the sounds of terror and destruction all around her suddenly
absent. And then, sure the alien would not stand up again, she ran down the
street, looking for her next opponent.

* * *

      Bedlam understood what she was.

      Somewhere deep in the parts of her
brain that had never been human, the commands were all there. The code. The
instructions. The Children of the Elder Star had created her to be a weapon of
mass destruction. She was designed with pure malicious intent, to be dropped
into an urban environment and to cause pure, unadulterated chaos. Her name was Bedlam
for a reason. She possessed the tools to cause untold mayhem, especially in an
enclosed, heavily populated environment.

      That was what I was made to be,
Bedlam thought, but that's not who I am.

      She ran down a major street in the
City's downtown, faster than a car, her cyborg legs carrying her with the grace
and speed of a hurdler, her feet thudding against pavement, cracking and
tearing it.

      She saw one of the creatures the
attack ship had dropped on them, a hunched beast with spines along its back and
huge, glowing red eyes—fifteen feet of rage with a parasite clinging to its
collarbone. It turned to face her, and she ran faster. The alien, seeing her
challenge, plodded directly forward, ready to meet the cyborg head-on.

      I'm not a weapon, Bedlam thought,
seeing her next move. The targeting computer in her brain identified what she
needed—something to strike this charging monster with.

      She slammed on the breaks, metal
heels digging into the asphalt, and then reached down to grab hold of a parked
car.

      Without stopping or losing
momentum, Bedlam lifted it off the street, and hoped the frame of the car would
hold together while she spun it.

      The huge alien upon her, Bedlam
completed the twisting arc of her attack and swung the entire car like a baseball
bat. The back end slammed into the alien's face, knocking the massive creature flat.
It hung there for a moment, limbs loose, head thrown backward, before slamming
into the street.

      "Home run, Bedlam," she
said, admiring her handiwork.

      The alien coughed and started
climbing back to its feet.

      "Dammit!" she said,
hefting the car and slamming it down on the creature once more for good
measure. The bumper fell off in her hands, and Bedlam watched the car roll off
the alien and, oddly, land back on its wheels. She made a mental note to look
into the brand. Clearly it deserved a high crash test rating.

      The alien sat up, still taller
than Bedlam even while sitting on its haunches. She looked once more at the
bumper in her hands and then reared back, taking aim at the parasite on the
being's chest. She swung.

      Not a pretty sight, but a perfect
swing—the bumper connected with and caught the parasite, hooking into the
mindless thing's shell-like carapace. Bedlam's inhuman strength kept the bumper
moving forward, and suddenly the parasite was disconnecting from the host body,
tearing away, its limbs ripping off like a bug's. The body bounced down the
street, pouring black fluid as is rolled, legs fell away, looking disturbing,
like something you might eat at a seafood restaurant.

      The light went out in the host
creature's eyes, its long, powerful limbs spasmed, before falling onto its back
and shuddering into unconsciousness.

      "Got one," Bedlam said
into her earpiece. "How many did we say we saw?"

      "Neal spotted about twenty,"
Titus said.

      Bedlam sighed, tossing the bumper
aside.

      "Back to work then, I guess,"
she said, once again sprinting toward the action.

* * *

      Titus let the fleeing residents
run past him. He walked through them, almost invisible, bumping shoulders with
strangers, helping an older man up as he staggered to his knees, catching a
woman running with her child before she fell. A few blocks away, the ship rained
destruction down on the streets, and below it, monstrous foot soldiers pursued
the citizens like predators, striking them down as they went.

      Titus started moving faster. The
crowd pushing into him was relentless, as scared men and women screamed and
looked for an escape. Drowning, he couldn't get through them. He heard
explosions in the distance, some sort of enormous bang from the direction
Bedlam was headed. Too many people, too much noise, he couldn't see…

      The monster inside him told him
what to do. And, as Titus was often afraid to admit, the monster was right.

      He threw his hooded sweatshirt on
the ground and willed himself to transform. It hurt, it would always hurt, this
violent shifting of cells and molecules, no matter how good he got at it, no
matter how smooth he made it seem. He fell to one knee, letting the pain subside.
Suddenly he smelled the skin and sweat of aliens, of every single City dweller
around him. He listened to heartbeats and distant screaming.

      And the people around him began to
scream as well, terrified when a three hundred pound werewolf suddenly took
shape beside them. The crowds ran even faster away from him, but Titus charged
toward the oncoming aliens. One looked like a crocodile on long limbs, another
like a hairless bat. Both had controlling parasites attached to them, turning
them into biological weapons.

      Titus broke free from the throng
of humanity and roared at the aliens, who stared him down with deadly silence.
The three monsters—alligator, bat, werewolf—circled each other, sizing each
other up.

      The bat-like alien moved first,
lunging at Titus with bony, oversized arms. Titus bounced back, out of reach,
but heard the reptilian creature make its move to attack him. The werewolf
lashed out with a clawed foot. Talons sank deeply into the creature's parasitic
partner and drew gobs of blood. The alligator-alien gasped and hissed before taking
a quick step back, clutching the parasite as if to hold in the pouring blood.

      The bat-thing attacked again.
Claws pierced the muscle of Titus's shoulder. The werewolf roared in pain and
surprise, and the alligator-thing took advantage of his distraction to snap with
massive, toothy jaws, catching Titus's forearm.

      The hurt shoved a nail into Titus'
brain, making him angry, to feel out of control. The bat-creature piled on,
bony limbs bruised Titus's body as the creature flailed. Titus felt his control
slipping and his fear building. His heart thundered, a wet beat in his ears.
And then the beast took over.

      He barely registered what happened
next. Jaws clamped down on the bat-thing's neck, dragging him away, the attack
caused the alien to forget its assault and to instead focus on staying alive.
Titus shook him like a dog toy and the bat-alien cried out in agony.

      The alligator-alien opened its
mouth and adjusted its toothy grip on Titus's flesh. The momentary release was
all Titus needed to turn his attention on that creature, raking his claws up
its belly and sinking them into the softer meat of the parasite's body. Titus
dug in his long talons like a child tears into clay, squeezing and ripping. The
reptilian alien grew limp and started to convulse, and then the werewolf shoved
him away.

      The bat-creature clutched its
throat, limped towards him, not willing to give up, ready to fight to the
death. Somewhere in the back of Titus's mind, his human side felt pity and
regret for this warrior from another world. He realized it was hopeless, that
all of these creatures ended up destroyed by their melding with the parasites,
but still, to have journeyed across galaxies only to perish on the streets of a
faraway city…