The Indestructibles (Book 4): Like A Comet (43 page)

      "Oh come on now, your partner's
always had a soft touch. I knew him before you were born, after all."

      "So I don't have to go?"
Billy said.

      "You are not a Lost One,
Straylight," Daybreak said. "You still have a world to care for. It
would go against everything we've ever accomplished to take you away."

      A wave of relief and regret poured
over Billy. Relief to be here, with his friends, but also…

      "It'd be nice to see Saturn a
second time, though," he said.

      Suresh slung an arm around his
shoulder, hugging him with comedic aggression. "I knew it," he said.

      "Hey!" Emily said. "You're
not taking my best friend with you and leaving me here. I want to see Saturn
too."

      She pointed at Bedlam with one
fierce, ramrod straight arm.

      "And the cyborg comes too.
She's never been off the planet. She's earned it."

      Bedlam threw up her arms in
surprise.

      "Whoa! Whoa! I'm making no
demands here! You're the aliens, you do your alien things and I'm totally cool
with that!" Bedlam said.

      Doc and Jane looked at each other.
Both grinned wildly.

      "I think we can spare the
three of you for a few weeks," Doc said.

      Emily grabbed Bedlams wrist and
forced her to perform a high-five.

      "Yes! Outer space!"
Emily said.

      "You're not flying us out
there in a giant robot," Bedlam said.

      "Hey Sam?" Emily said.

      The agent shook his head. "Uh-uh,
I'm not coming with you," he said.

      "Party pooper," Emily
said. "But that's not what I'm asking."

      Sam threw his arms up in the air
in almost the same motion as Bedlam had a moment before.

      "I don't know if I should be
relieved or offended," he said.

      "What I want to know is, did
our frenemy Prevention leave that little submarine-looking space ship behind?"
Emily said.

      A huge smile broke out on Sam's
face.

      "As a matter of fact, she
left it when she dropped off Henry," Sam said. "Who, by the way, says
he'd like a sabbatical from the Department. Something about visiting an island
and drinking fruity drinks."

      Emily whipped around to punch
Billy in the arm again.

      "That settles it," she
said. "We're coming with you to help build your little glowing alien space
station thing on Titan."

      "Do you hear me arguing?"
Billy said. He looked at Bedlam who seemed resigned to be going on their field
trip.

      "I'm naming the ship,"
Emily said.

      "Okay," Billy said.

      "This is the voyage of the
Starship Entropy, to boldly go where no Emilies have gone before…" Emily
said. "Space, the best frontier."

      Gonna be a hell of a trip, isn't
it, Dude, Billy thought.

     
As it should be,
Dude said.
As it should be.

Epilogue:

Indestructible
like us

Jane felt more powerful under the desert
sun than other places. The light that fueled her was more pure, more direct
here. She flew over the sandy landscape toward a dark patch ahead, a random
thatch of clouds locked in place in the distance.

      Days before, she'd received a call
from Jon Broadstreet. Usually she knew the purpose of his calls, but this time,
out of the blue, he caught her off-guard. It had been a quiet yet busy few
days, while the Luminae prepared to set out for Titan. Now homeless and out of
sorts, the Indestructibles had to figure out what to do with themselves.

      "I know you guys haven't been
as organized as usual, so I thought you should know about something I heard
through the wire," Broadstreet said.

      "Tell me we're not being
invaded again," Jane said. "We haven't finished cleaning up the last
mess."

      "I don't think so,"
Broadstreet said. "But there's rumors of another unexplained UFO crash you
may want to investigate. People are saying it's just a hoax, but—" 

      "—We still have things
falling from the sky after the battle," Jane thought. "Thanks,
Broadstreet. I owe you one."

      "You owe me lots," he said.
"I'll put it on my tab."

      Jane recruited Valerie to help her
scour the desert where the crash was rumored to take place. The two of them
could cover a great deal of ground together, while Emily was too slow and Billy
too distracted. Jane figured she'd have to call them in if things turned ugly.

      She also brought along poor
Neal—still in his ridiculously small robot body—in case they needed some sort
of analysis of the space debris performed. Flying too fast to have a
conversation with him, and feeling absolutely terrible for the AI, she tucked
him under her arm like a cask. We need to get him a bigger body, she thought.
Maybe there's something kicking around in the warehouse of stuff that
Prevention returned to the Department that we could use for an upgrade. The
beleaguered artificial intelligence had been downgraded from a massive space
ship for a body to little more than a trash can in the past few days. That had
to sting.

      Valerie found the crash site
first, and when she told Jane what she saw the solar-powered girl raced through
the desert sky.

      "Don't tell anyone yet,"
Jane said. "I'll be right there."

      She contacted Doc privately on her
earpiece and asked him to meet her. When she told him what Val had discovered,
Jane wasn't surprised that he wasted no time in getting there. Doc appeared out
of thin air just as she landed. Val drifted out of the sky to stand beside Jane,
leaving wet footprints in her wake.

      The burned and battered wreckage
of the Tower lay half-buried in the sand.

      "Is it your home?" Val
said. "I've only been there a few times, I couldn't tell for sure…"

      Jane's face split into a huge
smile. Broken, cracked and split, still it was the Tower, here on Earth.

      Doc smiled and placed a hand on
Jane's shoulder.

      "I should've checked,"
he said. "There must be something about this place. This isn't far from
where the Tower was found originally. Buried underground."

      "So she came home to die?"
Jane said.

      "Elephant graveyard,"
Doc said. "But she might not be dead. Neal?"

      The AI started scanning the
wreckage, sensors spinned and whirred softly.

      "This may take some time,
Designation: Solar," Neal said.

      "That's okay," Jane
said. She winked at Doc, who nodded back to her, then sat down in the sand. Doc
and Valerie joined her, forming a semi-circle around Neal as he worked. "Do
what you have to do, Neal. We've got all the time in the world."

* * *

      By the time Neal finished his
analysis, the sun hung low in the sky, bathing the desert in red and gold.
Anyone else would have been baked to a crisp by now, but Jane felt full of
life, and Valerie passed the hours creating tiny clouds from nothing, and
causing drizzling misty rain to fall onto the sand.

      Neal spun a sensor around to look
at Jane. She tapped her earpiece.

      "Doc, bring them through,"
she said.

      The air beside her shimmered and
opened, like a heat mirage. Instantly, a half-circle of purplish light created
an arc in the air, and within it she saw her friends waiting in a room
somewhere in the City. Jane motioned for them to pass through. Emily charged
out first, her replacement Doctor scarf finally complete and wrapped around her
head to protect her from the sun. Billy followed, in street clothes, hands in pockets,
Bedlam, a couple of steps behind, wore a long skirt and tunic-styled shirt.

      "No way," Billy said, spying
the wreckage.

      "It can't be…" Bedlam
said.

      "That's our baby," Emily
said, grinning like a madwoman.

      Titus and Kate entered next, the
werewolf used his enchanted spear like a walking stick, his strength not fully
returned. He'd pulled a brand new red hooded sweatshirt up over his head to
shade against the glare. Bandages covered one hand and were also visible just
beneath the collar of his tee shirt, where his burns were still healing.

      Kate, uncharacteristically out of
uniform, in jeans and a dark cowl-necked top, walked in wearing a pair of
unexpectedly stylish boots. Her eyes hid behind a pair of sunglasses, but her
lips quirked into a half-smile.

      Doc Silence brought up the rear,
leaving the portal open with a flick of his wrist.

      "This ship should be drifting
off into space right now," Kate said.

      "Doc has a theory," Jane
said. "That it has a landing beacon or something left here. Maybe the last
action the ship performed was to send itself home."

      "I don't care how it
happened," Billy said. "Will she ever fly again?"

      Neal spun around so that the "front"
end of his temporary robot body faced them.

      "I am unsure, Designation:
Straylight," Neal said. "Currently eighty-six percent of the ship's
functions are offline."

      "Only eighty-six percent? We can
work with that," Titus said.

      "How much of that is
irreparable, Neal," Kate asked.

      "It will take some time to
fully assess, Designation: Dancer," Neal said. "I suspect with the
right tools we could restore the Tower to a minimum of fifty percent functionality."  

      "Half is better than nothing?"
Bedlam said, trying to be optimistic.

      "Really depends on which half
we get running," Titus said. "Big difference if the kitchen works and
the communications suite doesn't."

      "Can I recommend starting
with the lavatory?" Emily said.

      "You and your tiny bladder,"
Billy said.

      "Do you want to be flying
down to Apollo's Coffee every time you need to pee? I don't," Emily said.

      "Still," Titus said. "Even
half."

      "I don't care if it just ends
up an inert shell," Doc said. "This was our home. I'd rather find it
here not functioning than let it disappear into space forever."

      Jane smiled. Sometimes it was easy
to forget how long Doc lived in the Tower. And how much of that time he'd been
there alone, wishing his old allies would reappear, or waiting for the next
generation to arrive.

      "So what are we going to do?"
Titus said. "Fix it here?"

      "We should bring it somewhere
secure," Billy said.

      "There's dozens of unused
airfields, maybe hundreds in the U.S. alone," Kate said. "One of them
must be available."

      "Maybe we take it to the one
where Emily and I fought the first few Nemesis parasites," Jane said. "Not
like there's much going on there now."

      Kate nodded. "As good an idea
as any," she said. "Question is how do we get it there."

      Suddenly the earth rumbled,
shaking beneath their feet. Billy and Jane instantly lit up with power, ready
to fight. The air turned a little cooler when Valerie reacted as well. Doc's
hands shot up in gestures he employed to prepare defensive spells, while Titus's
eyes glowed yellow as he began to transform into his monstrous form next to
Kate, who stood up on the balls of her feet.

      And Emily stretched her arm toward
the wreckage of the Tower, lifting the entire thing in a single, massive bubble
of float.

      "Emily!" Jane yelled.

      Entropy Emily turned back to her
friends, a wild look of giddy playfulness on her face.

      "What?" she said.

      Billy laughed, hard enough to
start wheezing, and it infected the group, all the tension from the past few
months appeared to burn away. Even Titus joined in, kneeling down to hold a
hand against his ribs. Kate, silently chuckling, locked eyes with Jane and
grinned.

      "Never mind," Jane said.
"You want to carry her home?"

      "You got it, boss,"
Emily said. "Look at that ship. Little dusty, but she's as indestructible
as we are, isn't she?"

      Jane started to argue, looking at
the demolished and cracked hull of their former home. But they'd all made it
back. They were all standing. Maybe we are indestructible after all, she
thought.

      Science experiments and
solar-powered girls and werewolves and aliens; wizards and weird gravitational
anomalies, and a dancer whose only superpower was that she never, ever gave up.
Together, it seemed, nothing could stop them.

      "Yeah, Em," Jane said.
As indestructible as we are."