“As far as we can tell, no. We were lucky to spot their arrival. One of them teleported into a back alley about a block away from the building, an alley we just happened to be monitoring at the time while investigating a murder that occurred in the area. The teleport time coincides exactly with the time your suspects disappeared from New York. We used the Monitors to follow the unsub to the building, and noted several other unusual-looking individuals, three in total, arriving within a minute of his entrance.”
A couple of screens provided us with playbacks. The freakish guys and gals matched the descriptions Condor and the feebs had provided us. Their arrivals happened during the wee hours of the night, so nobody had seen the freaks, other than the Sentinels’ super surveillance device.
“The good news is, now that they’re inside the building, they can’t teleport away,” Christine said.
“How come?”
“Well, if they could teleport in and out of the wards around the building, they wouldn’t have had to pop up outside and then walk the rest of the way,” she explained.
“In any case, we’ve emplaced several space-time reinforcing devices all around the block,” the Captain said. “Nobody is going to be able to teleport out of there.”
“Good.”
We had them. We had her.
“The scanners have detected twelve people inside the building, all of them on the top three floors. No Neolympian energy signatures.”
“Same as in the compound in New York. They don’t run as hot as Neos, but they have Neo-equivalent powers,” Christine said. “We have to assume all twelve people inside are at least as tough as a Type Two. Their leader should be considered the equal of a Type Three. And she sort of looks like me, although she’s undergone a massive Goth makeover, from what Condor said.”
They’d all been briefed about Dark Christine. They all nodded sympathetically.
“And this could be a trap.”
“We are sure we found them by accident,” the Crimson Fletcher protested.
“I’m not,” Christine said. “Mister Night must have teleported all over the place, and you guys had no clue he was around. “And now you conveniently pick up one of them? You can’t be too paranoid when dealing with Evil Me. We need to make sure the Tower is heavily guarded, just in case she’s planning something, and we need to go in with overwhelming force. She miscalculated last time, but we can’t count on that happening twice.”
“We’ve got three Freedom Squads on their way, plus the Sentinels, and the feds are mobilizing Papa Force, if we want to wait an hour or so,” I said.
Christine shook her head. “The longer we wait, the higher the chance they’ll do something we won’t like.”
“Agreed,” Adam said from inside his Brass Man armor, entering the Monitoring Room, a couple dozen Legionnaires behind him. The gang was all there: three squads of heavy hitters. We had the freak army outnumbered and outgunned. “We have to strike now.”
“We’re all set,” Captain Lightning said. “The Tower can surround the area with a Type Three force field; even Ultimate would need to hammer at it for a good hour ten minutes or so to break through it.” He took a look at the gathered Legionnaires. “I take it he’s not coming to this shindig, is he?”
“He’s still on leave,” Adam said diplomatically. Truth was, we hadn’t even informed him or Janus of the current situation. We couldn’t risk them showing up and being turned or mind-controlled or whatever else the Outsider shit could do to them. Christine had just given Janus a clean bill of health, pending a final examination, but we’d decided it was better to be safe and leave them be.
“No matter, I suppose,” the Sentinel said. “We’re ready when you are.”
“Christine?” Adam said, letting her take the lead. She didn’t miss a beat, or get flustered or nervous; she was past that kind of bullshit.
“Freedom Squads One and Three for the entry. We go in from every direction, hit them hard and fast. No hostages to worry about; as far as we can tell, Dark Christine’s gang took over a while back, so it’s all hostiles in there. Squad Two and the Sentinels to remain in the Tower and make sure the evil bitch isn’t trying something sneaky. That’s my plan.”
“Endorsed and approved.”
* * *
The plan went off without a hitch, at least at first.
As soon as the force fields were in place, isolating the building from the rest of the city, we charged in from above, below and the sides, blasting or crashing through walls and engaging the pack of freaks inside.
I came in through a window and found myself in what had been a cubicle farm, more recently converted into a sacrificial chamber. Corpses had been stacked up against a wall and left to rot. I didn’t know if the Outsiders demanded those deaths as payment for power, or if it was just a way to bond the group to their Goddess. The gang that commits atrocities together stays together.
Two freaks charged me: something that looked like a sculpture made of rubber and wires with an oversized head and two sets of chompers, and a guy I recognized as one of the Russian mobsters who ambushed us in Chicago not that long ago, except he’d gotten an extra four hundred pounds of muscle and sinew grafted onto his body. Their Outsider-powered attacks hurt, but I just channeled more energy through my body and burned through the pain.
I actually felt bad for them. Whatever their motives for joining in, nobody deserved what Dark Christine had done to them. She didn’t have to turn them into inhuman monstrosities to empower them; she’d done that out of sheer malice. And if she’d promised to make them a match for Neolympians, she’d been lying through her teeth. The poor bastards would have given me a hard time back when I was a middle-weight vigilante, but even then they wouldn’t have lasted long, unless they got lucky. In my current condition, one punch each was all it took to turn them into crumpled, lifeless forms. The look the Russian gave me just before he took his last breath could have been gratitude.
“Clear,” I announced through the comm. The same call came from the rest of Squads. We’d wiped them out in a few seconds. But what about..?
“She’s not here,” Christine said. “Those people we just slaughtered were nothing but bait.”
“Brass Man to Tower task force. What’s your status?”
“Everything’s nominal here,” Captain Lightning said. “No sign of hostiles.”
I found Christine in another set of offices. Two bodies were at her feet. Something that looked like several bodies stitched together, and a Bela Lugosi’s Dracula impersonator. She was worried.
“They wanted us here,” she said. “Sleight of hand. But…”
She froze.
“What’s wrong?”
Christine ignored me. I heard her trying to call the Arctic Sanctuary.
“All links are currently busy. Please try again.”
She turned to me, eyes wide. “John and Cassius.”
Chapter Eleven
The Invincible Man
Sanctuary, Arctic Circle, August 2, 2014
“We weren’t expecting you until tomorrow,” John told Christine as she walked through the door.
“We had a quiet couple of days, no major emergencies, and the Buck Comics people cancelled on me at the last minute, the d-bags. So I figured I might as well finish the job.”
“Best news I’ve heard,” Cassius said. Christine had finally cleansed the last traces of contamination from his aura; he was just waiting for a final checkup before being released from his self-imposed exile. John was glad for his friend, and more than a little envious, but his own healing process was also progressing nicely. Two or three more sessions with Christine would take care of him.
“Well, let’s take a look at you first,” Christine told Cassius. She walked around him, eyes narrowed. “Nothing. Not a trace of the Outsider stuff left in you. That’s pretty amazing.”
“Am I free to go, then?”
“Well, how about we give it one more day? Just to be safe? But you can start packing,
‘cause by this time tomorrow you’ll be in Rio, partying like it’s 2099.”
“Sounds wonderful. Well, I’ll let you get on with it,” Cassius said, and left them in the treatment room.
John settled on the dentist-style chair and leaned back on it.
“All righty, let’s get inside your aura and get crackin’,” Christine said. As usual, she chattered away as she worked. “You’re almost fully clear yourself, John. Just the stickiest, most stubborn bits are left. They are the worst ones, though, the ones you let in when, well, when you crossed the line.”
He didn’t say anything, suppressing a brief flare of annoyance. They’d gone over that enough times.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to irk you. Me and my marathon-man mouth. It’s just funny how there seems to be an actual moral dimension to the physical realm.”
“Religious people have believed that for millennia.”
“Yeah, but they were right for all the wrong reasons. It’s more like God exists because life eventually evolves into something approaching God, which allows them to transcend time and space, which means there’s always been a God. It’s pretty confusing. And annoying. Kinda pisses me off, actually.”
“Why?”
“Because if for some reason you’re cut off from the Good, if you cross enough lines, there’s no turning back. You’re totally fucked, er, frakked. You can actually damn yourself out of reality.”
“But it’s a choice.”
“It’s choices plural, stacked on top each other, but you can make each one in haste, or without enough information, or in a fit of anger or despair. And once you go far enough, it’s all over.”
“I’d like to think there’s always some chance of redemption,” John said. He was feeling an intense tingling sensation beneath his skin, something he hadn’t experienced in previous sessions. He wondered what that was all about.
“Yeah, that’d be nice. I just don’t think that’s the case.”
The tingling got more intense.
“This feels different,” he said.
“Yeah. I’ve gone pretty deep into your aura. Got you by the short and curlies, you could say. Only way I can get to the sticky bits. Now hush for a second and let me work.”
He did. The tingling grew to painful levels, but he forced himself to remain still. A moment later, he didn’t need to exert himself anymore; his limbs were numb, deadened. Paralyzed.
“I can’t move.”
“That’s just how I like my men. Big, strong, and helpless.”
“What..?” His mouth stopped working next.
Christine moved so she was facing him. She changed before his eyes, and only the fact his voice box was paralyzed kept him from shouting in shock. The left side of her face sagged, seemed to sink into itself, and twisted into an involuntary scowl. Her skin acquired the greenish-white pallor of a drowned corpse even as her hair disappeared, leaving behind a bald, hideous mockery of her former self. The right side of her mouth rose in a lopsided smirk, the result as hideous as the paralyzed left side.
“Feels good to let my hair down,” she said. “Do you know how much energy I had to spend just to look like my old self?”
He wanted to scream, but couldn’t.
“That’s the problem with trust, Johnny-boy. You’ve been too trusting. You trusted me enough to put your wee-wee inside me, and I gave you a literal STD from hell. And now you trusted me enough to let me past all your Neo psychic defenses, which I couldn’t have hammered through in a million years, and the first thing I did was take over the bits connecting your mind to the rest of your body. So now you’re a vegetable. I’m running your voluntary motor responses, and most of the involuntary ones as well. Sucks to be you, in other words.”
What do you want?
“Yeah, you can think at me, and I can hear you. As to what I want?” The half-grin widened. “I would like, if I may, to take you on a strange journey. How strange? So strange they should make a movie out of it.”
Liquid shadows formed around her, around both of them, the prelude to teleportation.
“We’re off to see the Masters. The Wonderful Masters of Oz.”
She caressed his cheek. Her touch burned his skin.
“It’s going to be a hell of a trip.”
Face-Off
Sanctuary, Arctic Circle/Elsewhere, August 2, 2014
Adam took us there in a shadowy flash.
We found Janus in his room, packing his stuff, having no clue anything was wrong.
Ultimate was gone.
“There’s traces of Outsider crap in the treatment room, but that’s it,” Christine said. Bleak hopelessness came off her in waves. “She took him. It’s over.”
“The fuck it’s over,” I said.
“What? What can we do?”
“You’ve got a guy who can teleport between star systems. You have your ultra-duper-super-senses. You’ve got Adam, who knows more Words than you do. And you’ve got me, who’ll kill every last motherfucker who gets in our way. What more do you fucking need?”
“Mark…”
Silence for a moment. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and concentrated.
“Janus, Uncle Adam,” she said, reaching out to them. They all held hands for a moment.
Next thing I knew, the four of us were in the pitch-black space between spaces. Never was a fan of the place.
“You were right,” Christine told me. Her eyes were closed, brows twisted in desperate concentration. “I can sense John’s aura. And hers. She can’t use the Words anymore, can’t hide from me. They are here, still in transit. I can point the way.”
“Let’s do it.”
She squeezed Janus’ hand, and I felt a subtle shift in the darkness. We were moving, sort of. It was kind of like being in an elevator, or on a plane as the cabin pressure changed. We were teleporting somewhere so removed from our starting point it was going to take a while to get there. Assuming we didn’t run out of juice and ended up stranded in the dark.
‘I can tell where we’re going,” Janus said. “That’s where Mister Night took me, the night we fought. The night I was infected.”
He was scared shitless. Come to think of it, so was I.
“Last time you were alone, Cassius,” Adam said. “This time we will stand with you.”
Janus smiled ruefully. “True. This time I will die and be damned in good company.”
“Fuck that,” I said. “We’re going to kill the witch, save the dude in distress, and live happily ever after. Or until the next episode of As My Stomach Turns, whichever comes first.”
That earned me a chuckle from Janus. He turned to Adam. “You know, I always had a crush on Doc Slaughter.”
“I knew,” Adam said. “I just didn’t know how to respond.”
“I don’t expect you to. Just wanted you to know.”
“I’m flattered.”
That was all very touching, I thought. Maybe they’d become a couple. I’d have to e-mail a suggestion to the editors of The Uncanny Legionnaires.
The thought kept me entertained for a bit. Enough that it took my mind away from the fact we were headed towards our almost certain deaths.
Christine Dark
The Space In-Between/Somewhere in the Trans-Galactic Boondocks
The chase was on. The game was afoot. The crap had hit the fan.
Dark Christine’s plan was simplicity itself. She was dragging John for an impromptu meeting with the Outsiders, which would shatter his mind, possibly for good. He’d be turned into another Mister Night, one inside the body of one of the most powerful Neos that ever lived. The evil Goddess would make her triumphant return to Earth with someone who could draw enough power from the Source to become a new Genocide. She’d also be fully recharged with even more Outsider energy, more powerful than Mister Night had even been. The ensuing battle would leave Earth Alpha in ruins. W
in, win for Dark Christine, no matter what.
At least, that’s how Christine would do it, if she ever turned effing evil. Which pretty much guaranteed that was exactly how it was going down.
Maybe they would catch up to her before she and John reached their destination. She hoped so. But if they didn’t, she’d better start working on Plan B.
Cassius Jones was putting everything he had into the impossible jaunt, a teleport covering such vastness that putting it into parsecs would still have way too many zeroes. It was taking too much time, which wasn’t good. There were things in this lightless place, and while they weren’t Outsiders, they weren’t particularly friendly. The longer they spent there, the more likely those entities would decide to take a bite out of them.
“We need to give him a boost,” she said. She could see Janus had tapped as much power as he could get from the Source, which was a sizable percentage of its total output. He needed more, though.
Adam nodded. He concentrated for a few seconds and called up a Word.
Power.
She followed suit. Her vocal chords strained and nearly broke as she spoke it out loud, and its conceptual echoes sent ripples through the darkness. Those echoes acted like a form of radar for her; she caught the outlines of something huge and full of teeth darting past their position. She really, really wished she hadn’t seen - well, echolocated – that. Bad for the sanity and stuff.
The Words worked, though, and that was the important thing. Raw energy poured into Janus. He started to sweat profusely as his core body temperature rose, but kept pushing on, even as waves of waste heat began to radiate from him. It was kind of like being in a sauna, if a sauna was hot enough to soften steel. If they had been human, they would all have been roasted in a matter of minutes. Luckily for them, they were Neos, hard as nails and with a melting temperature you wouldn’t believe.
We’re coming for you. We’re going to get you.
You and what Spanish Armada, Chrissy?
Crap. So much for the element of surprise.
New Olympus Saga (Book 4): The Ragnarok Alternative Page 23
