“Just lie down on the table and relax,” Condor said in his best public servant voice. “The scans will only take a couple of minutes.”
“Okey-dokey,” Christine said dubiously. She tried to smile but couldn’t quite pull it off. “I’m not big on doctor visits and stuff like that. I’m glad I get to keep my clothes on, at least.”
“Nothing to worry about,” Condor replied. “The scans are non-intrusive. You’ll be safe as houses.”
“I’ll be right here,” I added, trying to sound reassuring. I suck at being reassuring; I’m much better at being intimidating and threatening. She managed to smile at me, so I guess I did well enough.
Christine lay on the examination table. An assortment of scanners and cameras loomed over it. Condor gently lowered a brain-scan helmet over her head and adjusted it. I stayed close by for moral support, and Christine grabbed my hand and squeezed it. I gave her a gentle squeeze back and she relaxed a bit.
“So what sort of scanners do you use?” Christine asked. “MRI’s? Thermal Imaging? Sound waves?”
“All of those, sure, and a couple others,” Condor said. “Okay, we’re all set. We’re going to go into the other room and run the tests, okay?”
She let go of my hand. “Do I get a lollypop afterward?” she asked. “Just kidding. Actually, a lollypop would be nice.”
Condor chuckled.
We stepped into the monitoring room. We could watch Christine through a glass partition on the wall. She lay back and started doing her breathing exercises.
“Interesting girl,” Condor commented as he started the scanning runs. Half a dozen monitors came to life. One of them displayed a thermal image of Christine, another her heart rate, body temperature and assorted other vitals, and so on. Condor had the best equipment money could buy, and some stuff he had invented himself and couldn’t be found anywhere else at any price.
“You don’t know the half of it,” I said. “According to Cassandra, she is very important. She is also not from this world.”
“She isn’t? She looks pretty ordinary at first glance. Pretty enough, just a bit on the plain side for my taste.”
“She’s not plain,” I blurted out. Condor grinned at me much like Father Alex had. What the hell was wrong with everyone today?
“Well, we’ll know more about her in a minute,” Condor said, watching the monitors. “Her metabolic rate is Neolympian all right. Resting heartbeat is at 35 bpm, which is typical for a Neo; its picking up a little, but that’s probably just anxiety. I’ll have her brain activity in a few.”
“Good. So when did you and Kestrel team up?” I asked Condor while he worked the scanners, trying to sound casual. That pairing could not end well, but I wasn’t close enough to Condor to just come out and say it. Luckily, Kestrel had excused herself quickly and left us alone. Having her hanging around while trying to test Christine would have been a pain in the ass; Kestrel didn’t get along with other women, not one bit.
“Oh, about three, four months,” Condor replied, equally casual. “Not too long after the last time I saw you. She’s… well, you know. We get along. Nobody’s getting a ring on their finger, and we don’t ask many questions about what we do on our own time. And – hey, check out Christine’s brain activity. She’s definitely a Genius type.”
“Sounds about right,” I said.
“Aura scan is coming online… Damn, it’s maxed out.” On another screen, we could see Christine’s psychic aura. It glowed blindingly bright, all yellow and white. “That’s a high Type Two, or maybe Type Three. My scanners are only up to measuring a 2.7 or so. We’ve got to be very careful doing the stress tests. My facilities are not really up to handling a Type Three.”
I nodded. Type Twos – 2.0 to 2.9 in the Parahuman Ability Scale – were full-fledged superhumans. Type Threes were powerhouses, the kind that can take over a country – or destroy it. There were about five thousand Neos in the planet, but only a couple dozen or so known Type Threes. The planet probably couldn’t handle many more than that; there was some question as to whether it could handle the ones already there.
“My first choice would have been to turn her over to the Guardians or even the Legion,” I said. “But Cassandra insisted we do this on the QT for now.”
“No problem. Cassandra’s always right. Besides, those sanctimonious assholes would probably lock her up first and ask questions later.”
“Yeah, especially if she’s a Type Three.”
“Spectrographs are back – she’s flesh and blood, no abnormal organs or cell formations. Decent healing factor, fast metabolism, none of them at unusually high levels. Bone density is pretty good; she could bounce a .45 caliber bullet off her skull, but she wouldn’t enjoy the experience.”
“Yeah, I usually don’t,” I said dryly.
“Me either, that’s why I wear a titanium-Kevlar helmet. Other than her aura, nothing in her readings screams Type Three. Why don’t you go get her and meet me at the gym? I’ll set up and take some precautions so she doesn’t bring the whole complex down if she loses control.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
I went back to the room and helped Christine off the table. “So how freakish did I turn out to be?” she asked.
“So far, your bones are tough enough to resist bullets, you can heal damage very fast, and you are somewhat stronger than a normal human – we’ll find out how much stronger when we do the stress tests. Plus you have a very strong aura, so that means you may have some very powerful abilities. We’ll try to discover them during the stress tests, too.”
“Wow. Er, how stressful are the stress tests? Is it like a Danger Room kinda dealio? I don’t handle confrontations all that well. As in, I tend to panic and go all deer-in-headlights and spazz out.”
“No problem. We’ll take it easy,” I said as I walked her through the high-tech complex. The walls had sensor and weapon pods on every corner. Like I said, Condor had spared no expense.
“So your friend Condor is like super-rich,” Christine commented, glancing around.
“You could say that. His father was a major industrialist, and he inherited a controlling interest in a dozen mega-corporations. “
“So why did he decide to become a superhero? Did someone shoot his parents when he was a child or something?”
“Not quite. When he was sixteen or seventeen, a terrorist gang kidnapped him and tortured him for several days. Condor’s powers manifested themselves while one of those assholes was trying to carve an anarchy sign on his chest. Things got pretty bad for the kidnappers after that. Since then he’s been doing the vigilante thing, just like me.”
“Uh-huh. How about his ‘sidekick’ Kestrel?”
We got on an elevator and started going deeper underground. “Kestrel is… I guess you could call her a bit eccentric. She used to call herself the Kinky Kestrel; besides fighting crime she also runs her own, uh, dungeon.”
“Dungeon? Like a lair with monsters and hidden treasure?”
“Well… monsters yeah, I guess. And if you consider whips and chains treasure, then that too.”
“Oh. That kind of dungeon. You’re saying she is a super-dominatrix, aren’t you?”
“Technically, she’s a switch. She’ll be happy to beat you until you squeal, but she’ll also let you beat her up, whip her with a real cat o’nine tails if she feels like it – she will heal the damage almost right away – and if you can afford her hourly rate. Of course, if she says her safe word and you don’t stop right away, she’ll mess you up. Bad.”
“Holy crap. Yuck. I mean, I guess it’s okay as long as it’s consensual, whatever floats people’s boats and all that.” Christine gave me a look. “You, ah…”
I chuckled and shook my head. “Not my kind of thing. When I first met her, I thought she was just another vigilante. I learned about her extracurricular interests later. Here is the thing...” I trailed off and considered what else to say.
It had happened early in my career, shortly before
meeting Cassandra. I had been just another vigilante looking for trouble, and I had found it in spades. Some mad scientist type – a former high school chemistry teacher of all things – had developed a designer drug (street name Ultimate Drops, U-Drops for short) that temporarily boosted normal humans and gave them Neo-level strength and agility, along with PCP-like immunity to pain and meth-like short temperedness. U-Drops became very popular with the local gangs.
Of course, there were drawbacks. The super-strong users could easily break every bone in their bodies by pushing themselves past human limits, and that was if you didn’t keel over from a heart attack or stroke. Other possible side effects included liver and kidney failure, catatonia, permanent insanity and anal leaking.
The Empire State Guardians eventually busted the asshole who’d invented the drug, and luckily the drug was an Artifact, not a Gadget, which meant only the original creator could make it, and it couldn’t be mass-produced like an ordinary drug. Every once in a while someone came out with worthless knock-offs that claimed to be the real thing, but so far all of them had turned to provide few or none of the benefits while keeping all the side effects.
That night, it was just my luck that I tried to bust a dozen bangers hopped to their eyeballs on U-Drops. One of them hit me over the head with a fire hydrant he had ripped right off the sidewalk. He ended up in a wheelchair for his troubles, but I went down for a couple of seconds and his buddies proceeded to stomp me into the pavement with assorted blunt and sharp objects. I might or might not have bounced back and fought them off – all modesty aside, I’m pretty damn tough – but I didn’t have to. Kestrel had been passing by and joined in the fun. She kept the bangers off me long enough to recover, and between the two of us we put nine of them in the hospital and three in the graveyard.
Here’s one of the not so secret facts about Neolympians: we are adrenaline junkies. Being in dangerous situations gives us a huge rush. Winning a tough fight is like an aphrodisiac. Winning a tough fight with a hot chick fighting alongside you is… well, let’s just say I was ready to go by the time we were done. Kestrel and I mopped up the last gang bangers, and then we scrambled up to a rooftop and did some private banging of our own. As a first date, it was great.
We hung out on and off a few times after that and eventually gave the couple thing a try. The sex was damn good, but we didn’t have a lot in common besides the obvious stuff, and her kinky side turned me off pretty quickly. I like hurting people, but I don’t like hurting people I like. Our personality flaws didn’t mesh well, either: she was pushy and abrasive, and I was stubborn and sullen. Cassandra didn’t like her one bit, which didn’t help one bit; my relationship with Kestrel was one of our main bones of contention when my psychic pal took me under her wing.
After a while we avoided each other’s company unless we were kicking the shit out of somebody or fucking like bunnies. Over the course of a couple of years, the avoidance times got longer and longer, and eventually became a permanent thing. I hadn’t seen her in years.
I wasn’t sure how much of that I wanted to share with someone I’d barely known for a couple hours. A part of me weirdly wanted to share the whole thing with her.
Christine waited quietly a whole six seconds for me to say something, which had to be some kind of record. “Okay, I know it’s none of my business,” she finally said. “Sorry. It just sounded like you two had a history.”
“We did, a few years back. It didn’t end well. Irreconcilable differences I think is the legal term.” There. Three sentences to encapsulate twenty-six months of heaven, hell and lots of purgatory.
“And now she’s with Condor,” she said. She didn’t say anything else, but I could read between the lines. Yeah, she didn't think that was going to end well, either.
“Condor sounds like he knows the score. He should be okay,” I said. I wasn’t going to say anything against my friend, especially not to someone I‘d just met, no matter how comfortable I felt around her.
“You don’t sound all that sure.”
I wasn’t, but it was none of my business. “Consenting adults. They’ll work it out one way or another. Worst case, Condor is just as tough as me, so she probably won’t do any lasting physical damage. Mental damage… Neos are all a bit crazy anyways. Who knows, maybe they are made for each other. I'm not a couple's counselor, or an expert in relationships.”
I left it at that and didn’t share the fact that my last girlfriend had been a stripper with a heart of plutonium and a temper like well-aged dynamite; she'd never even known my real identity, and thought she had hooked up with some local tough guy. That hadn't ended well, either.
The elevator doors opened into a very large chamber. Heavy battleship-grade metal plates covered the walls and ceiling. Dozens of devices stood off in clusters along the walls: a few of them looked like implements of torture, and under the right – or wrong – conditions could be exactly that. I knew them all well; Condor had helped me learn my limits and train my abilities years ago. He did it informally for many ‘illegals,’ Neos who for one reason or another didn’t want to go through normal channels and get their doggie licenses. In my case, it was because the first thing I’d done with my powers was knock my stepfather through a brick wall. Step Dad hadn’t survived the experience and if I’d stayed and taken my medicine, the best I could have hoped for was several years in Neo Juvie.
Thanks to Condor, at least a dozen Neos who might have ended up as hardened criminals had gotten their shit together instead and now were out there doing good deeds, or living normal lives if that was their choice. Three of them had gone fully legit, and one of those three was a member in good standing of the Freedom Legion, which is about as legit as you can get.
I looked at Christine as she took it all in.
“I got the butterflies in the stomach thing all of a sudden,” she said. “And the dry mouth and the palpitation thingies, too.”
“It’s going to be okay,” I said with a lot more confidence than I felt. None of the people Condor had helped had been a Type Three, although there had been a couple of high Twos.
It was going to get interesting.
The Freedom Legion
Near the Dragon Wall, East Kazakhstan, March 13, 2013
Chastity Baal crawled to the top of the rocky hill slowly and carefully. The human eye could notice motion at surprising distances and although this remote part of the Empire of China was sparsely guarded, all it took was a bit of bad luck – an enterprising junior officer deciding to patrol vigorously along the Wall, for example – to unravel the best-laid plans. Upon reaching the bare promontory, she uncased her binoculars and looked down on the scene below.
The Imperial border with East Kazakhstan was protected mainly by mountains that channeled would-be travelers into a few easily-defended passes. One such pass lay below her: the Dragon Wall blocked it quite thoroughly. Even without her binoculars, the hundred-foot tall construct a mile and a half from her position was clearly visible, a glowing featureless expanse that appeared to be made of red glass but wasn’t. Even from a mile away, Chastity felt the wall’s crimson energy pulsating with a rhythm not dissimilar to a heartbeat. Some said the Dragon Wall was a living thing, or an extension of the Dragon Emperor’s mind or soul. Chastity remained agnostic on the subject. It certainly was an awe-inspiring sight, a mute testament of the godlike power of its creator.
Nobody on this side of the Wall knew much about it. It had sprung all along the frontier of the Empire back in 1948, when the Freedom Legion and the Republic of China’s Ten Thousand Immortals – a lofty name for the two dozen Neolympians comprising said Immortals – had chased the Emperor and his minions into the Chinese hinterland. It was an energy construct, impenetrable to all but the most powerful conventional weapons, and self-repairing in a matter of minutes even when breached. Travel and commerce were nearly impossible except where and when the Emperor wished. Winston Churchill had called it ‘a fiery curtain that shall mar Asia for generations.’
>
“That is a pretty sight,” Celsius said from below. He was watching her binoculars’ input through his wrist-comp. “They say you can see the Dragon Wall from space. But didn’t they say the same about the old wall, too?”
Chastity ignored her partner’s prattle and continued her examination of the area. This remote area of Kazakhstan was thinly populated and had no paved roads. Her team had been inserted via a stealth helicopter flying from a ship disguised as a cargo vessel sailing in the Caspian Sea, hundreds of miles away. It was a complex and costly operation, but it had gotten them to the back door of the Empire, where the local garrison was small and fairly inattentive. Said garrison would consist mainly of people being punished for some infraction or another; the border with Kazakhstan was nobody’s idea of a vacation spot. Such guards would likely be lax in pursuing their duties.
Kazakhstan had wrestled its independence from the Soviet Union in 1951, following one of the many brutal revolts instigated by the Dominion of the Ukraine during World War Two. Thousands of ethnic Russians had been massacred and many more thrown out of the country, along with other minorities. The new country had quickly descended into chaos and civil war and ended up as something of a chess board where the Dominion of the Ukraine and the Dragon Empire played their little games against each other, helping this warlord or that and ensuring nobody held onto power for long.
Most of Kazakhstan’s border with Imperial China had become a sort of no man’s land, lightly populated and without even the corrupt oppression that passed for law and order in the rest of the country. Imperial patrols often operated on the Kazakh side of the Wall, but did so sporadically and mostly along the more populated areas of the border. Thus, this locale was ideal for extracting an important defector, if said defector could make it past the Wall. And if the extraction team did a proper job.
The two-member team was a study in contrasts. Chastity Baal was five feet nine inches tall, athletic and slender, her dirty-blonde hair tied back in a severe ponytail under a desert-pattern camo hat, her hazel eyes currently peering intently through her binoculars. Celsius – nee Howard Kowalski – was two inches shorter, a squat, heavily muscled man with coarse brown hair and neatly trimmed beard. Chastity was cool and distant in her dealings with him, as she always was to people she found lacking in any interesting qualities.
New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl Page 13
