You’d better turn around. You’ll live longer if you do, her evil twin sent her way.
That’s okay. I’d rather put an end to this now, win or lose. I’m tired, and I’m becoming an uncaring bitch. Just like you.
Good, her counterpart said. Means you’re growing up.
Did it? Was not giving a crap about anything part of growing up? Giving up? Stop trying? She couldn’t accept that. If there was a point to being alive, it had to be to continue striving towards some goal: create a work of art, look after your family, try to improve the world in whatever way was in your power . Otherwise humanity was just a pack of rats in a maze, running around meaninglessly until they dropped.
It all means nothing, Dark Christine insisted.
Maybe it did. But pretending it did was a better choice than accepting a nihilistic outlook of reality, Christine decided. Maybe if you pretended long enough, you could create meaning out of nothing. The Cosmic Nerds certainly acted as if their actions and decisions were something greater than random fluctuations of matter and energy.
Those losers? They are dead meat. The Masters will get them, and their little bitches too.
We’ll see about that.
Cassius was propelling them faster than their quarry. Dark Christine’s evil aura was growing brighter and more distinct. They were catching up to them.
Only thing was, it wasn’t going to happen soon enough.
Plan B took every iota of power she could summon. Adam noticed the sudden release, but said nothing. Mark felt her pain and exhaustion.
Christine tried to respond, but she couldn’t keep her eyes open. She was sinking, everything was going dark.
She passed out, convinced she was going to die in her sleep.
Face-Off
Edge of the Universe, Time: Irrelevant
We popped out into cold, hard vacuum, the most powerful member of our gang sleeping like a baby in my arms. Great way to start a fight.
Vanilla humans would have been freeze-dried toast in short order. Neos of our power level weren’t bothered. We didn’t need oxygen, our defensive auras kept all our insides in the inside, and our only problem was that we couldn’t talk to each other except through our comm systems, which translated the vibrations on our jaw bones into audible messages. Adam didn’t even have that problem, encased in his Brass Man armor.
No, vacuum wasn’t a problem.
The planet-sized swarm of things out in the distance was the problem.
“So that is what a nest of Outsiders looks like,” Adam said, sounding much too calm. He must have lost his mind, the poor bastard.
I had no words. It took everything I had not to soil my costume.
They were at least as far as the moon was from the Earth, and each of them was twice as big as the moon, long shapes made of shadows darker than the solid black background behind them. I looked around. There were a few scattered pinpricks of light in the background, and I didn’t think those were stars, but actual galaxies, maybe galactic clusters. The little spots of light were only on one side. The other side was empty. This was the end of the line, the furthest point the wave of expansion that began with the Big Bang had gotten in the past fourteen billion years, assuming astrophysicists had been right about anything, which I was beginning to doubt.
I looked into the abyss of the lightless side. It wasn’t merely empty darkness. There was something else in there, and if I looked at it long enough…
Fuck. I turned back to the more immediate threat, the serpentine things out there. If they were as far as I thought they were, they were fucking huge. There was no way I could guess accurately, though. Maybe they were only two hundred feet away and were the size of plush stuffed toys. My gut told me my initial guess was correct, though.
Christine could have told me, but she was unconscious. Janus was on his last legs, too.
And Dark Christine was just ahead, about a quarter of a mile away, still carrying big, handsome and stupid in her arms. She’d popped up into real space short of her goal, or maybe the Outsiders didn’t like visitors just dropping on their laps and she’d wisely decided to fly the rest of the way. Either way, we had a chance.
“Watch her,” I told Janus, and launched myself towards Dark Christine, I had to get her before she reached her bosses. Adam followed me a moment later.
The evil witch no longer looked like my Christine. She’d lost all her hair, every last bit of color on her skin, and a good twenty pounds. Half her face was hidden behind a mask. She looked like shit. Not that I would have hesitated to put her down if she looked like a million bucks. It was time to end this. End her.
She sensed us coming and let go of Ultimate to deal with us. A storm of Outsider energy exploded out of her hands, eyes and mouth, corkscrewing their way towards us like a convention of squids on a feeding frenzy.
I had one of Condor’s fancy protective devices, but the battering it took drained its power in a few seconds, and then the purple-black torrent hit me. I’d learned there was only one way to deal with it; feed more power into my body, try to drown out the disruptive poisons under a flood of clean energy. Problem was, beyond a certain threshold, I would start burning from the inside out, and it would become a race to determine what would kill me first, the Source or the Outsider poison.
It hurt, but you can ignore pain. You can even ignore death, for a bit, if you concentrate on the important things. When all it mattered was putting an end to the assholes responsible for so much misery and pain, you could keep going, dead on your feet but still moving. For a while. Sometimes, for just long enough.
Off to my left, Adam’s Brass Man armor sputtered and died. Parts of the suit exploded noiselessly, spewing gases and sparks into the vacuum.
I kept going. My costume, every layer of my skin, and a good inch of the flesh beneath boiled away. I poured more juice into myself, and the destroyed tissue grew back, triggering an overwhelming itching sensation as destroyed nerve clusters were reborn, died, and were reborn again. And I kept going.
Turn around! Go back to your girl and die with her, you stupid asshole!
I’m going to kill you, I thought at her.
Not if I kill you first.
She might have a point. It was no longer a question of the Source killing me. I was running out of power. I was too far away from the Source. Instead of the torrent of power I could normally call upon, I was only getting a trickle. She was running out too, but more slowly, probably because her Masters were so much closer. I kept moving towards her, but my speed slowed down to a crawl, or maybe time was slowing down. Soon I would be frozen like a fly in amber, and then she’d squash me like a grape.
Told ya.
I tried to think of something witty to say. I had nothing.
I could barely see anymore, so I didn’t notice Ultimate coming up behind Dark Christine. Neither did the evil bitch.
The torrent of Outsider energy stopped as suddenly if someone had turned off a hose. Ultimate had grabbed her neck with both hands. He didn’t say anything. I heard a mental squawk from Dark Christine. That was it.
He took her out, the only way you can with someone at our power levels. It wasn’t pretty. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person.
I looked back.
Armageddon Girl was glowing like a humanoid star. I felt a fresh surge of power running through my body, healing me back to full health.
I followed her gesture and realized newer, brighter points of light had appeared, and were growing larger with every passing second. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of them.
And they were getting closer, very fast. So fast that they seemed to jump forward and leave a trail of after-images behind them, as if they were moving faster than the light coming out of them. Or maybe my mind was beginning to shut down. Whatever was going to happen was not for the likes of us.
I flew towards Adam and grabbed him before I followed Christine and Ultimate. We rejoined Janus at flank speed.
“I think we should get the fuck out of here,” I subvocalized
“Yeppers. Time to go home.”
“Home,” Janus said. “Yes.”
I took one last look behind me. The gargantuan serpent shapes were turning to the fleet of living suns, shadowy tendrils raised in challenge. Or maybe they were pleading for mercy. I doubted that, though. There was no mercy to be had there.
We fled.
Epilogue
Freedom Island, August 5, 2014
“Done and Donner!”
She closed the file, e-mailed it to every recipient, and leaned back on her office chair. All her paperwork was finished, finally.
It doesn’t matter how fast you can fly; if you don’t want to smash through a dozen walls, it still will take you a good five, ten minutes to make it from your office to your home. Mark was waiting patiently, paper plates and plastic utensils at the ready. The two pizza pies smelled great.
A kiss and a hug, and some good eating followed. Sometimes life could be good.
“So everything’s squared away?” Mark asked her. He sounded nonchalant, but there was something else going on with him. She hoped it was nothing.
“Pretty much,” she said. “They wanted chapter and verse on the Outsiders, and the Cosmic Nerds, and everything else I could, might or will remember. So nosy.”
“And?”
“Well, I tried my best. I ended up making up a lot of crap. There’s stuff I can’t explain, mainly because I can’t grasp it myself. I think a lot of what we saw at the end was more like metaphors than anything real.”
“But we did kill her, right?”
“That was tots real. And I don’t think her soul can get back from there to here, either. And Chastity Baal found the Hades-Slaughter Resurrection Engine they were using. Empty. Looks she couldn’t figure out how to make a new clone and prep the device, not without Daedalus Smith. Who’s also officially dead.”
“So that’s that,” Mark said around a mouthful of pizza.
“Hopefully. Not going to stop worrying about it, though.”
“Paranoia is an occupational hazard in this line of work. It’s also good common sense.”
“Guess so.”
“How’s Ultimate? Not that I give a shit, but I’m curious.”
“John is recovering just fine. Got the last bits of Outsider stuff out of him this morning, just before I went to tackle the final report. He’s transferring to the Pacific headquarters, just like he promised.”
“And he still feels..?”
“I got a good empathy read off him while I finished the procedure. I guess his experience with my evil twin kinda ruined his feelings for me. Killing her didn’t help, although he’s happy he actually accomplished something, even if I did help him break out from under her mind control.”
“So he doesn’t love you anymore?”
“Not even a little bit. Every time he sees my face he gets flashbacks of me turning into her. Let’s just say he, uh, he isn’t feeling it anymore when it comes to me.”
She actually felt a bit miffed about that, which was cray, but that’s how she rolled.
“I can sympathize,” Mark said. “I only got one good look at her, and that was enough. She looked like shit.”
“That’s not a very nice thing to say.”
“And her outfit made her look fat.”
“Now you’re just making up crap.”
They laughed together. Kind of a horrible thing to laugh about, a dead woman, but in their line of work you had to laugh at that sort of thing, or lose your ever-loving mind. She didn’t know if she was turning into a horrible person, but the guilt was beginning to fade away. A little. She would never forget the things she’d done. But she thought she might forgive herself. A little.
“Feel like dessert?” Mark asked her.
“Always.”
“How about this?”
An emotional spike from him warned her something was up, but it only became clear when he got down on one knee. Surprise achieved.
“Oh, Mark…”
“I love you. Will you marry me? Binary solution set: yes or no?”
The speech kinda sucked. The waves of emotion washing over her most certainly did not.
Her eyes stung. She went down on her knees and hugged him.
“Yes. Conditionally.”
A wave of relief and joy from him. “Anything.”
“I want to go home first. I want to see my mother. My live, real mother.”
“Then we’ll do that first.”
And that led to a happy ending, in several senses of the word.
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THE END
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Epilogue
New Olympus Saga (Book 4): The Ragnarok Alternative Page 24
