The question was not 'to be or not to be,' but where the frak to land? If Christine went downtown, she was going to end up on YouTube by the time she hit the ground, and if those Russians were looking for her that would be un-good. Staying up in the air would also get her noticed sooner or later, though; she needed to land, hopefully somewhere not too public. She angled for somewhere a bit off the beaten path. Smaller buildings, less traffic. She went sideways and up and down as often as she flew forward, but she more or less zigzagged her way there.
Christine ended up somewhere off to the south of the city. A few people lounging outside some not-so-nice looking buildings looked at her as she descended. Well, tried to descend and ended up shooting upwards for a hundred feet, over-corrected and darted down much faster than she’d intended to. She clipped a street light and tumbled into an alley behind a bodega. Or, to be more accurate, she tumbled right into the dumpsters in said alley. Luckily, the dumpsters were locked shut – apparently people would steal your garbage around those parts – so when she hit one of them she made a Christine-shaped dent on it but did not end up swimming in garbage. Neat. Not.
Christine bounced off the dumpster and ended up on the ground. If she had to pick a superhero name, she might try and see if Captain Banana Heels was taken. Amazingly, neither her close encounter with the street light nor her crash into the dumpster had hurt much. No damage, even to her clothes, as long as she didn’t count her dignity. Her defensive shield and energy field or whatever were keeping her safe. Maybe she would have been able to survive hitting the earth at terminal velocity. She still didn’t want to try it unless she had to. Oh, well, at least she was back on the ground.
An angry Asian guy came out of the back door of the bodega wielding a baseball bat and screeched something at her in his native tongue, whatever it might be. He seemed to have a vested interest in the well-being of the dumpster, so he was probably the owner of the bodega, which probably wasn’t called a bodega but the Unidentified Asian Language equivalent.
“I’m sorry,” she said as she got to her feet – no more flying until she got the hang of it, she decided. She was lucky she hadn’t flown into a building and killed a roomful of kitties and puppies.
“You get out now!” The Asian bodega owner replied, making poking motions with the baseball bat. Christine backed away, more scared of accidentally hurting him than anything else. She was clearly in a bad part of town and the locals had little tolerance for tomfoolery or hijinks. The poor man must not have seen her fly in, or he wouldn’t be so confrontational. If she were a mean person, she’d take to the air for a few seconds just to show him who he was messing with, but she wasn’t a mean person, and she'd decided there'd be no more flying for now.
“Okay, I’m going. Peace!”
The angry store owner half-chased her down the alley and onto the street, but after she had left his home ground he contented himself with shaking a fist at her and unleashing another torrent of Unidentified Asian Language at her. Christine made it to the sidewalk in one piece.
Um. Bad part of town. You could tell from the potholes and the boarded up buildings and the graffiti and the littering. On one corner a group of clearly disaffected minority youths were playing loud music on a boom box and loitering. The music wasn’t hip hop, but some weird form of… jazz? Kind of like if you took jazz and mixed in angry vocals in between the instrumental bits. Whatever that music was, she was sure plenty of middle-class parents around the country were bitching about their kids listening to it.
She would have liked to listen to it for a while, or to any music in general; one of her most missed possessions was her I-Phone with all her playlists. Oh, Florence and the Machine, I miss you so. No Tegan, no Sara. The butterflies had gotten them all. Christine hadn’t really had time to do a thorough Hyperpedia search on the state of music in this brave new world, but the little she had done had made it clear the musical divergence was pretty steep. The Beatles were still touring (her mom would have loved to hear that), and so was Elvis Presley, but that was all Grandpa music; actually Grandpa was more of a Bruce Springsteen kind of guy, so more like great-grandpa stuff. She’d gone through Condor’s playlist, and most of his jams were some folk-country-rock mix that reminded her of Mumford and Sons. None of the bands of the last decade existed here, or at least the bunch she’d Googled didn’t, except for, of all things, The Dropkick Murphy. Bizarro Sunnydale was Bizarro.
Christine’s attempt to appreciate the local street music didn’t last. For one, the disaffected youths were staring at her, and not in a friendly hugs and kisses way, unless the hugs and kisses were on the nonconsensual side. This group hadn’t seen her fly down, since she had come from the other side of the block, so as far as they were concerned she was a normal girl in the wrong part of town. She looked around. Not a cop to be seen, and the only other people she could see were an older couple looking out a window and showing no interest in coming out and a couple of skinny teenage girls in skimpy clothes standing by another corner under the careful watch of a guy in a fur coat sitting in a car. Christine didn’t think they were selling Girl Scout cookies. She hadn’t felt this out of place since Sophie had accidentally driven them to a bad area of Detroit during freshman year.
Not as big of a biggie, sure, since worst case she could fly away, not to mention she had enough kewl powerz to take out the entire cast of a Quentin Tarentino movie. But she still felt very uncomfortable. The skinny girls were ignoring her and concentrating on the occasional slow-driving car. The disaffected youths were looking at her and making jokes she couldn’t make out over the music. Their laughter was loud enough to hear, though, and it didn’t sound very nice.
Okay, walking away now. Moving away from the corner with the youths and their intriguing music. She went past the bodega and caught the owner giving her the evil eye. Okay, not waving goodbye to him. Christine walked down the street and tried to look like she knew where she was going. That would take some acting skill, since she had no clue where she was, where to go or what to do. Mark and Condor had been nice as hell, but they kind of had forgotten to give her some, you know, money or a wrist-phone thingy. And even if she got someone to lend her a phone she didn’t know who the eff to call! The big dumb macho guys hadn’t even considered the possibility they might get separated. She was going to have some pointed words about that with them. If she saw them again. If they were all right. Please be all right, big dumb macho men. And Kestrel, too, I guess.
She turned a corner and ran into two heavily tattooed white men wearing red leather jackets and wraparound mirror shades, also red, with their heads shaved except for three stripes running front to back, dyed red as well. Bikers? Earth Alpha’s version of skinheads? She didn’t get to find out. One of them grabbed her by the waist and pressed her against his body. He was either packing a gun or was glad to see her. “Where you goin’, mama?” The urban slang sounded different, but the misogynistic elements seemed to be pretty much the same.
Non-consensual hugging, check. For a second, she froze in terror. The man spun her so her back was against a wall. Assault, check. “You lost, mama? Need some guidance? You lookin’ for the Tower of Power?” Huggie’s pal laughed at that.
“Please let me go,” Christine said in a firm tone. The fear was still there, but there was something else welling up behind it, and it wasn’t fear at all.
The man grinned down at her, displaying a mouthful of gold teeth with dollar signs carved on them. “Oh, mama, we’s gonna have fun.”
Christine put a hand on the man’s chest and pushed him off her. The look on his face when he went sailing all the way onto the street was hilarious. “I said please,” she told the crumpled form on the pavement. He seemed to be mostly okay besides some bumps and scrapes. Hopefully that would be the end of it.
The fear was gone, and she felt great. Nobody puts Baby in a corner, or Baby’s gonna get medieval on your ass!
“Fuckin’ cunt!” Huggie-man’s friend yelled. He was reaching
for something in his back pocket, and she didn’t think he was going to pull out anything nice and/or cuddly. And he’d used the c-word, which she hated with a passion. She stepped towards him just as he pulled out a gun – Holy Crap – and delivered a high roundhouse kick to his face that sent him spinning off in a spray of blood and teeth, gold and regular. The man landed limply on the sidewalk. She had no idea how she’d managed that kick. Maybe all Neolympians knew Kung Fu instinctively, kinda like Vampire Slayers.
The guy she’d kicked was twitching feebly but otherwise wasn’t moving much. “OMG!” She hadn’t meant to hit him so hard. Christine knelt by the man and rolled him over. His jaw clearly was off its proper place, and his eyes were rolling in his head, but he was breathing. Holy crap, she had really hurt him. She felt terrible – but she also felt like laughing and clapping her hands. Guilt and joy made for a crazy weird mix. “Sorry for pwning you,” she heard herself say.
A loud metallic bang made her jump. She turned and saw Huggie pointing a gun at her. He shot at her again – and missed her again.
“What are you, a Storm Trooper?” she taunted him. Huggie screamed and emptied the gun in a blaze of semiautomatic fire. Her shield flared when two of the dozen or so bullets he fired came close enough to hurt her, and she felt the bits of lead bounce off it. Huggie screamed again, this time in terror, flung the empty gun at her – it missed her by several feet; dude seriously needed some Lasik or at least prescription glasses – and took off running.
“Oh no you didn’t!” she yelled at him. She reached out with one hand and felt energy gathering around it. One little blast and…
And you’ll put a hole the size of a basketball hoop all the way through him!
Oh, God, no. Christine checked herself before she wrecked herself – and more importantly, before she wrecked the crap out of Huggie. She let him go.
That was the first time she had raised her hand in anger, or even annoyance. Huggie’s friend was going to need an ambulance and thousands of dollars’ worth of dental care. Even worse, people were staring at her. Some of them had those goggle-cams. YouTube, here we go. Way to draw aggro, Christine. She’d better get out of there before she made the news.
She started running.
Thaddeus Twist
Washington, DC, March 14, 2013
The man who would save the world closed his eyes and thought about Faustian bargains and the cost of doing business.
The conference room was rather Spartan as such places went, especially given the rank of the men and women who would be joining him momentarily. The chairs were comfortable but unremarkable, the mahogany table with its inlaid computer screens stoically functional, the paneled walls plain and unadorned. One of his staffers had put a framed copy of his Time magazine’s Man of the Year cover on a wall but Thaddeus had it taken down. Such displays were silly and unproductive, and did not help cultivate the image he wanted to project among his associates, that of being first among equals, not their absolute leader. The best way to lead people who were used to holding the reins of power was to make them think they were partners instead of followers. Lies and illusions were the strings to use with this particular assortment of puppets.
Of course, at this level nobody knew who the puppet was and who pulled the strings, not until the end of the performance. Perhaps not even then.
Thaddeus Twist knew that at least two of the men about to sit at this table thought they were the puppet masters. They were certainly deluded in that respect, and they didn’t worry him at all. The one person who worried him would not be attending the meeting. If his putative peers even suspected that Thaddeus had made a deal with his secret partner, they would tear him apart with their bare hands. This was, after all, a meeting of the secret leaders of the Humanity Foundation. Its goal was to cleanse the Earth of the Neolympian plague.
Thaddeus’s silent partner was Daedalus Smith, one of the world’s best known Neolympians. Smith doubtlessly believed that Thaddeus was his dupe, a tool to be used to further his goals. Thaddeus believed the exact same thing in reverse. Only time would tell who was right.
News reports about the Freedom Legion attack droned on from one of the computer screens on the table. The new Global News Network anchorman’s voice annoyed Thaddeus. It was too bad he no longer involved himself on the day to day operations of the network, or he would have quietly had the man replaced. To add to Thaddeus’s dislike of the anchorman, the news he was delivering did little to cheer him up. The damage to the Legion had been substantial, but far less than what he had hoped for. Billions of dollars, irreplaceable assets and several dedicated men and women had been lost, and they had done their enemy a small injury at best. None of the major players had been destroyed; the icons of the Legion still lived. Ideally the carrier vessel would have reached the island itself before detonating its built-in nuclear device, but the initial attack to disable the local defenses had elicited a faster reaction than expected. The plan allowed for this, of course, but he had wanted to do more, to show the world that human ingenuity and courage could match the monstrous powers of the false gods seeking to rule humanity.
Thaddeus had reached his epiphany in 1964, a few months after his father’s death in a hunting accident had left him in charge of the family’s small network of southern radio stations. Thaddeus had been twenty-two, forced to drop out of Harvard during his senior year to take over the family business. Young Thaddeus was a staunch – some might say fanatical – supporter of J.F. Kennedy. The man was the embodiment of the hopes of a new generation: a human war hero, a champion of the new ideals desperately needed by a world still recovering from global war and destruction. The hopes for a new Camelot had been dashed that year, however. Tainted by a sex scandal and painted as an idealistic incompetent, JFK had been cast down by one of the very New Olympians whose influence he had tried to curb. As he heard Kennedy’s concession speech on one of his own radio stations, Thaddeus had realized humans no longer ruled the planet. They had become playthings, flies for wanton boys to kill for their sport.
Kennedy had left the White House a broken, bitter man. The dream had been crushed. The ex-President had written books few read and retreated into seclusion, plagued by ill-health and regrets until his premature death. His son had barely won the 2012 Democratic primaries, only to suffer an ignominious loss in the general election to yet another Neolympian. The destruction of the Kennedy dream had spurred Thaddeus to craft a new vision for the future.
If something was not done, a miniscule aristocracy of ubermenschen would take over. The process was less than a century old, and already close to a fifth of the world’s heads of state were Neolympians, including the current US President. Neos dominated the world’s militaries, media and technology. This very conference room, its plain exterior concealing the most advanced security systems money could buy, was a product of Neolympian minds. Thaddeus had turned his family’s small network of radio stations into an international media conglomerate and become one of the world’s richest men, and yet his power and influence paled in comparison to freaks of nature who had gained their exalted status through a mere accident of birth. That could not be allowed to stand.
The others started coming in, individually or in small groups. The need for this meeting’s secrecy could not be overstated. Many of the people sitting down around the table would lose their positions, their freedom or even their lives if their involvement in the Humanity Foundation became known. It had taken exquisite care to ‘coincidentally’ schedule conferences on half a dozen different matters that would explain his partners’ presence here. Fortunately Washington DC was a natural focal point for the wealthy and powerful. Gathering them all in one place and time had been a logistical nightmare, but for this business long-distance communications would not do. The risks of interception might have been small, but at this stage even small chances were too risky.
After a few minutes, nine men and three women sat around the table, with Thaddeus at its head. No assistants were
allowed, and their absence was a clear source of discomfort to most of the gathered VIPs. Too bad, Thaddeus reflected. They would have to take their own mental notes, and make decisions without some flunky whispering in their ears. If they weren’t prepared to participate in this meeting on their own, they had no business being there.
Thaddeus waited for a couple of minutes while his guests exchanged pleasantries or, in one or two cases, angry glares. He loudly cleared his throat and all conversation ceased. “The operation has begun successfully,” he said to open the meeting.
“Somewhat so,” Mitsuo Fuchida said. He was the oldest man at the meeting, and at one hundred and ten years old, one of the oldest humans on the planet. Fuchida claimed his longevity was due to God’s grace; others suspected Neolympian intervention, but nobody could deny the man’s dedication to the cause. Thaddeus thought Fuchida was something of a Jesus freak but he was one of the most influential people of the impoverished and bitter Empire of Japan, and a true believer in the war against Neo-humanity. Fuchida’s epiphany had taken place on a lifeboat from the doomed aircraft carrier Akagi, sunk along with most of its crew by the Neolympian Janus. “The attack failed to do more than thirty percent of the anticipated damage, did it not? Only a handful Legionnaires perished, and none of the greater ones.”
“The damage is beside the point,” Boris Chernenko answered before Thaddeus could do so. Chernenko was the son of the last General Secretary of the Soviet Union, and he had managed to parlay his family’s fading influence into control of Russia’s burgeoning oil and gas industries as the Russian Soviet Republic became the plain Russian Republic. His wealth and influence existed only on the sufferance of the Dominion of the Ukraine, however, since the Iron Tsar’s empire controlled the pipelines that transported said oil and gas to Russia’s European customers. Chernenko has seen his country and his own interests suffer at the hands of Neolympians. He had been instrumental in providing the Humanity Foundation with technology and intelligence. He also had a Russian’s love for chess and the mindset the game developed. “This was an opening gambit, and its success was never contingent on the damage it inflicted.”
New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl Page 26
