Perfect. I halted the tank, and started the warm-up cycle on the Lowë’s sonic cannon.
I’d get one shot at this.
Taking a gamble, I popped my head out of the tank, and surveyed the battlefield. Unstoppable had found his way up onto the wall, and I caught him right in the middle of punching Hitler, sending the guy’s forage cap flying. I grinned. Couldn’t happen to a nicer Füehrer. Tesla was off in a corner, quietly electrocuting the remaining Nazis. He squinted at me, and I waved at him frantically. I didn’t get a lightning bolt to the face, so I assumed that he recognized me. He complied with me when I made ‘scoot over there’ motions, moving to the opposite corner, behind some solid cover, and out of the Lowë’s blast radius.
And then, a puff of dust from the castle, as a bare-chested form stalked out of the hole in the wall, staggering, listing from side to side. At one point he stopped and shook his head, clawing at it with his gauntleted fists like he was trying to crack open his skull. But his head held, and I released the breath that I’d been holding. I didn’t want to kill Crusader here. He’d saved the world so many times, that I had no clue what would happen if he died here. I had to be careful, and hope that he was tough, but not too tough.
This was such a long shot.
Behind him, Henri followed, leaning heavily on Timetripper. He looked like a good stiff wind would knock him over.
“Henri!” I shouted, waving him over to Tesla. “Keep him held, and get clear! Go to cover with Tesla!”
Henri looked at me, and even with the distance between us, I saw resolution fill his face. Veins stood out on his forehead, corded in his neck as he raised a trembling hand, and clenched it into a tight fist.
Crusader stopped, six feet away from the armor.
Timetripper shouted something I couldn’t make out, bodily hauled Henri toward the cover—
And a shot rang out.
Henri staggered, and fell. Blood pooled around him, as we stared in horror. Timetripper shrieked, and dropped, desperately rummaging around him, trying to help him.
I whipped my head toward the wall, saw Unstoppable caught in the middle of wrestling with two of the remaining Nazis... and behind him Hitler, disheveled and bruised, leaning heavily on the wall with one hand.
His other hand held a smoking Luger.
Noise from the courtyard, and I felt my eyes go wide as Crusader shook his head, turned... and stared at my empty armor. With one thunderous punch, he knocked it to the ground, and knelt, started to rip it open, tearing into it with both hands.
I slid back into the tank, sealed the hatch, and found the gunner’s stick. A breath, two, then I closed my eyes and pulled the triggers.
BOOM.
The world shook, and my ears exploded in pain. I rode it out, with a scream that I couldn’t hear, as the steel lion I’d commandeered roared defiance at the world. It seemed to go on forever and a day, but when the tank stopped shaking I popped the hatch and climbed up again.
The suit was in pieces.
Crusader lay still in the middle of the courtyard, a smear of red on the ground next to him.
My friends sheltered in the corner, Tesla working feverishly at Henri’s still form. Unstoppable had maintained his position on the wall, arms around Hitler in a chokehold. Too little too late, but at least that loose variable was out of play.
I held my breath, and stared at Crusader. Stared at his bare chest, and when I saw it rise and fall, I let my breath out. He was alive. He was out. We had won.
My breath died in my throat as he twitched, and flopped his arms.
“No,” I whispered.
Another flop, and he fumbled, feeling around him until he dug his fingers into the cobblestones.
“No. No, no, no...”
Then he was levering himself up, sitting up, bleeding freely from the nose and ears, but still moving, still climbing to his feet, and I was pounding the hull of the tank and screaming, denying reality. It wasn’t fair! We’d won! We’d beat him!
But Crusader stood. Unsteady, true. Wavering on his feet, but still with that goddamned blank expression on his face, and the binding throbbing strong over his heart. He turned his head to look over my way, and started toward me, walking in no particular hurry.
He needn’t hurry. The sonic weapon would take three minutes, on average, to recharge. He’d be here in twenty seconds if he took his time. I couldn’t hit him again.
I looked to Tesla, who shook his head. I looked to Unstoppable, whose face was a rictus of horror.
And I looked to Timetripper, cowering in the corner.
I closed my eyes. I had one last card, and I didn’t want to play it. I really, really didn’t want to play it.
When I opened my eyes again, Crusader was flying, picking up speed as he came toward me.
Now or never. I reached down to the holster on my leg, pulled the Luger I’d borrowed from Mitternacht free, and aimed carefully.
The shot rang out—
—and Hitler jerked, as the bullet took him in the face.
Everything shattered. The air went still, the walls of the castle slid away round me, and the sky grew cracks. Everyone was frozen, except the fragments of the sky and the walls around me seemed to crack loose, and flake away in different directions... some of which I couldn’t quite parse. Everything had gone crazy, and my brain struggled to make sense of it with senses that were in no way equipped to handle the situation.
Paradox my flickering thoughts told me. This is what a temporal paradox looks like, up close and personal.
Images and scenes sleeted past me, warping and shifting the scenery and myself as they went, flickering so fast that I could barely make sense of them. I tried to ride it out, kept my teeth clenched and held on for dear life, even when some of the fragments that broke loose included chunks of me. There was no pain, just a grand sense of disorientation, and finally it was too much for me. I shut my eyes.
When I opened them again, Timetripper was sitting on the tank next to me. I was reasonably intact. I took a breath, relieved to have lungs again, and slumped down in the hatch. Roughly about five feet from us, Crusader stood frozen in the middle of the air, hands outstretched and aimed towards my throat.
It was very cold, here, in the middle of stopped time. Almost seemed to be getting colder by the second.
“Dude. I’m back!” Timetripper grinned, and drummed his heels on the hull of the tank. The thumping was muted, the sound not quite working right in this space that wasn’t.
“So you are.” I pulled myself free of the hatch, sat down next to him. “You know we’re not done, right?”
“Yeah. Be shitty to leave everyone like this, y’know?” He sighed, as he looked at Crusader. “Plus I’m pretty sure if we leave this guy mindscrewed, he’s gonna like win the war for Hitler or something.”
“Didn’t we just kill Hitler? Won’t that untangle the paradox?”
“Nah. The timestream takes the path of least resistance to untangle paradoxes. Since I fucked up so much earlier, Hitler’s gotta live regardless. So it’ll turn out that this guy was actually like a body double or something and the real dude’s somewhere else.”
I blew air over my lips. Really wanted to kill that guy. Tempting to stick around a little longer and try to punch him out myself.
But... well...
I looked over to Unstoppable, caught in comical shock, staring at Hitler’s brains all over his coveralls. Then down to Tesla, cradling Henri, with a look of deep sorrow on his angular face.
This was their time. These were the heroes, them and Dottie and hundreds of thousands like them. The soldiers, the metahumans, the resistance fighters, the Jews who lived despite everything that these fascist monsters tried...
They were heroes, at the end of the day. I wasn’t. I was a villain, when all was said and done.
Just a better one than any of the scum I’d had to kill, these last few days.
“Well. Going to ask you this. You can pretty much do anything with t
ime that you can envision, right?”
“Kind of.” He scratched his head. “Thing is, if I’m not careful about it, it fucks up in the worst possible way. Then I have to go and fix shit. You have no idea how much time I spend fixing shit, all the fucking time man.” He sighed.
“Can you restore the armor over there to the exact state it was when it entered this time?” I pointed at my shattered shell.
“Well, yeah. That shouldn’t fuck anything up. But what’s the point? You already lost against him once with it.”
“Just trust her.”
“Alright man. You’re the supergenius.”
He walked out of the time bubble, hopped down from the tank and moved easily through the timefrozen landscape. Once to the armor he bent over and grabbed a hold of a piece, brought it back to the tank.
“Here goes something.” He stepped back, pointed—
—and my suit was intact again.
I stared at the knuckles of the left gauntlet, and smiled. Carefully, oh so carefully, I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket and mopped the small red smear free of the armor.
“That’ll do. Any way to keep Crusader slowed, but everything else sped up?”
“Shit Doc, that’s easy.” He grinned. “Well sort of. Dude’s so strong he can break time fields. So I can do it for a little while, but then he’s gonna be free.”
I glared at him. “That makes absolutely no goddamn sense.”
Timetripper spread his hands. “Powers and shit.”
“Well, just do it.”
He sucked on his teeth. “Okay. I hope you got a plan.”
“So does she.”
Heat returned to the world, along with sound. The klaxon was still going off, but I paid it no heed.
Crusader’s eyes shifted to follow me as I stood, and knelt down on the hull of the tank, stretching out an arm towards his chest. I could just touch, if I held onto the radio antenna and leaned out a bit.
The air seemed to crackle, but I ignored it, took the handkerchief, and mopped his blood over the binding sigil.
“Blood from when you were unbound. When you will be unbound, anyway,” I murmured. “Should count, she thinks.”
The sigil wiped away like writing on a whiteboard, and his eyes went wide. I kept at it until the rune was entirely gone then stepped back, tucking the bloody handkerchief back into one pocket. “All right. Set him free.”
“You sure, Doc?”
“Might as well find out now.”
Crusader quivered, then dropped to the ground. He knelt there, staring at the ground.
“Oh shit.” I slid down the hull, crouched next to him. “Are you all right?”
He didn’t answer, and I put my hand on his shoulder, tried to shake him. It was like trying to move a mountain. “Hey. Did it work? Are you you again?”
He closed his eyes, and tears seeped from them. He shook and a thin sob tore from his throat.
“Oh. Ah, uh... here. Here, just...” I knelt next to him, put my arm around his shoulder. “It’s all right, you couldn’t help it, they—”
Crusader seized me before I could move, and the strongest man in the world howled like a child, as he hugged me to him and bawled like a baby into my neck.
With my free arm, I patted his back. This was worse than Anya when she was feeling clingy. Then again, I supposed it was understandable.
“Hey... It’s okay...”
He bawled louder. I murmured comforting words at him, and tried to rock him. It didn’t work, but after the third try he must have got the message, because his grip slackened. I pulled back, stood, wiping the blood from his nosebleed and the snot and the tears from my collar as best I could. He rose, snuffling, and mopping his face with one forearm.
“I killed so many. I killed so many people,” he choked out. On the fourth or fifth wipe, he stopped, stared at the eagle-and-swastika on the back of his gauntlet, and ripped it off with a curse. He turned and hurled it into the sky.
“It wasn’t you.”
“It was. I remember everything. Every skull crushed. Every scream, every plea for mercy. It was like a nightmare, but it was real.” He tensed, and put out an arm, grabbing ahold of the Lowë for support. Metal shrieked as he dug his fingers in. “I killed cities. Whole cities.” He looked back to me, his eyes a study of horror. “How do I... I used to be a monk. For centuries. I was a monk. I lived in peace, I hurt no one, I atoned for my sins. I was righteous once. But this... God cannot forgive me for this. No one can forgive me for this.”
Oh boy. I wasn’t strong on religion. Or crises of faith. I'm the last person in the world qualified to advise people on spiritual affairs. I'd just committed war crimes not ten minutes ago, gassing Nazis with gay abandon. I wasn't a good person.
But I was the one who was here, and the wrong word could do untold harm to one of the greatest heroes that the world ever would have. He needed answers. I needed a Crusader who was the goodiest goody-two-shoe in existence, if I wanted my timeline intact.
I closed my eyes, and I thought of my friends. And the answers came.
“Then atone.”
“How!” Metal shrieked, and he tore a piece from the tank, unnoticed. “What can make up for... Millions! I’m sure it was millions I killed!”
“You said you’ve lived centuries?”
“Yes. I do not age. I do not think I can die that way.”
“Then you have time to try to atone. To do enough good to cancel out the evil they made you do.”
He looked aside. “It won’t be enough. Returning to the monastery will not be enough for this!”
“Then don't! Stay active, use your powers for good! Take a hand in the world, don't hide from it! Well maybe stay out of Germany for a few years so they don't bind you again, but she means...” I leaned into him. “There are a lot of good people out there. Mothers, daughters, young men who had bad luck with life. People who think they’re villains because they’re running from their past. And soldiers who left parts of themselves back in a war they never should’ve been in.” I glanced over to Tesla, who’d removed his jacket, and was covering Henri with it. Damn. My voice wavered, as I went on. “There are old friends on the adventure of their lives, and revolutionaries trying to change the world, and simple men who’ve lost their wives. And they’re all just trying to do the right thing, in a nasty, brutal, and hard world.”
I reached out to him, grasped his shoulder, and my eyes burned as I caught his gaze. Pain in there, but deep in those soft brown orbs, I thought I saw a spark of hope. “They could do with a very strong friend to help them. To save them, when they get over their heads. They could do with a crusader. Not one who kills, because there’s no good in that, not really. But one who fights to save people, who can—” the tears were coming now, and my throat wobbled and closed up. I choked a bit, and kept on going as I sobbed. “—save lives, not take them. Never take them, because even in the bad ones there’s always some good, and oh she’s a mess, hold on.”
This time his arms were much softer as he hugged me, and I was the one who cried into his neck. Henri was dead, and there was nothing to be done about that. And here I was telling a good man to be better than I ever could.
“It’s been a long time, since anyone called me Crusader,” he mumbled into my ear. “It’s not a title I’m proud of.”
“Well, you’re atoning anyway, right? So redeem it,” I choked out.
He snorted laughter. “You sound like an old friend of mine.”
“Gil?”
“You know him?”
“No, she saw a picture.”
He let go of me, and beamed. “Good. They didn’t destroy it.” He snuffled again, mopped his face one last time. “Thank you.”
Feet hit the ground with the crack of bone snapping, and I turned my head to see Unstoppable pick himself up off the courtyard. “Heya Doc. Should I be jealous?”
I laughed, and then I was in his arms, kissing him and he was kissing me back. After awhile, he pulled fr
ee, and mussed my hair. “Good answer.”
“She doesn’t want to let you go.”
“What? Well, okay, but we’re still in Nazi central with a ton of Jews to get out of here before the rest of the army arrives, so—”
“You don’t understand. She’s done. She has to go back.”
He stiffened, and his grin faded. “Whoa. Hold on there.”
“Yes. Horrible paradoxes if she stays.” I looked around. “She’d be too tempted to meddle. More than she has already, anyway.”
“So what was that earlier? A one-night stand?” He frowned. “Not sure I like that.”
I slapped him. “Idiot. You don’t age, right? You don’t die, that’s your schtick, yes?”
He blinked. “You saying what I think you’re saying?”
“She’ll look for you when she gets back to her time.”
“I could look for you.”
“Ah... little awkward there. Reasons. Trust her in this.”
“You’re the boss, I guess.” He sighed. “You uh... geeze, I don’t want to sound like a jerk, but... well, you mind if I date other people?”
I snorted. “Now who’s doing the one-night stand thing?”
“Hey, I’m not a guy for deathless love, y’know?” He shrugged. “I’d like to say I’d wait, but... well, I don’t want to lie. People change. You might not be too interested in who I am in a few decades.” He scratched his head.
I chuckled. “Small chance of that. More risk of the opposite.”
“What’s that supposed to mean.”
“Never mind. Yes, date other people. If you’re free when she finds you, we’ll talk. If not then we’ll talk anyway, and just catch up on old times.”
“You got a deal, Doc.” He kissed me, this time, and things were good.
Then I glanced over to Tesla and Henri, and the good feeling faded.
Tesla didn’t look up as I approached. “He was a good man.”
“I knew him for only a short time. That seems a correct assessment.”
DIRE : TIME (The Dire Saga Book 3) Page 34
