She told me all about it. It was quite a story.
It helped pass the time while we waited for the torment to start.
The Freedom Legion
FOB Spearpoint, Guanxi Province, China, March 27, 2013
If you live long enough, you get the feeling that history, even if it doesn’t quite repeat itself, often rhymes.
Olivia O’Brien, code name Artemis, looked at the Forward Operating Base with a detached feeling of deja vu. Some forty-six years before, she’d held her first command in a hill not too far away from this one, during the First Asian War. And here she was, ready to battle the Empire not for the second but the third time. The wheel kept on turning. Maybe ten or twenty years from now she’d be back in China, fighting yet another futile war that achieved nothing but churning out a new generation of casualties, orphans and widows.
Oh, the technology was different. The American unit deployed on the base consisted of elements of the 12th Marine Mobile Infantry, soldiers in power armor suits supporting fast-moving hover-tanks that fired hyper-velocity rounds from their magnetic railguns, rounds that would kill most Imperial Celestial Warriors with a direct hit. Even the allied forces in-theater were much better armed and equipped than the hapless human soldiers from the First Asian War. The Vietnamese contingent was equipped with blaster rifles purchased from the Dominion, for example. The Chinese Republican Guard regiment’s TOE included laser weapon platoons and multi-stage heavy rocket batteries most Neolympians couldn’t withstand. Humanity had grown more dangerous in the ensuing years.
It still wasn’t enough.
Olivia knew just how quickly a band of Celestial Warriors could rampage through an encampment such as this. A tumen of ten Imperial Neos could kill most people in the base before the defenders even realized they were under attack. Even now, the best defense against Neos was to send other Neos against them.
Which was where she and her fellow Legionnaires came in.
“They’d have to be crazy to attack,” Larry Graham, code name Swift, said. Her husband and fellow superhero looked just like comic books and magazines portrayed him, his boyish good looks still as sharp and fresh as they’d been when he started, seventy years and half a dozen wars ago. His smile grew a little less certain as she silently looked at him. “Well, they’d have to be. Crazy, I mean. We have thirteen clairvoyants, precogs and telepaths covering this sector. No amount of stealth is going to get through that. We have enough conventional firepower to fry entire Celestial tumens as soon as they peek over the Wall. Not even the Imps are deranged enough to go through this gauntlet. And even if they do, we’ve got three full Neo teams ready to welcome them.”
“You’re right, Larry,” Olivia said, and his smile firmed up. They’d both been working hard at keeping their marriage together, even as they dealt with the international crisis. While she lay in her hospital bed, after the disastrous raid in Hong Kong, Larry had finally confessed everything: the infidelities, the cover-ups, everything. Olivia had confessed her own complicity; she’d known for a good while, suspected long before then, and done nothing about it. Honesty had been a good first step, just as the massive force deployment along the border had been a good first step in dealing with the crisis.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t sure either step was going to be enough.
“They’d have to be crazy to attack, even now, when most of the reinforcements from the US and our allies are still in transit. We have deployed enough force to contain any kind of attack they can conceivably launch, although the casualties would be horrendous on both sides. But this whole situation has been insane from the beginning! Why start a conflict when they know they can’t win it?”
“You’re still thinking it’s a setup,” Larry replied. “Even with all the evidence piling up against the Imps.”
“Either it’s a setup, or the Emperor knows something we don’t. Maybe they have stockpiles of disruptors like the ones used to kill Chasca in Hong Kong.”
“They almost killed you, too,” Larry said. “Even so, now that we know about them, they aren’t exactly decisive weapons. Their range is limited, for one, and Neos have a lot of trouble wielding them, for another, so their operators are human, which makes them pretty vulnerable.”
“That is true, if those small arms are all they’ve got. What if they have the equivalent of artillery or heavy bombs?”
“You’re a ray of sunshine tonight, sweetheart,” Larry said. “Daedalus has studied the weapons; he even used a copy of them to take down John, and he’s assured us the devices are almost impossible to scale up. So is that the only thing bothering you?”
“What do you mean??”
“You know that Dawn Zhang is being redeployed to the Pacific theater, right?”
Olivia nodded, not trusting herself to speak. Dawn had been Larry’s last lover, and their relationship had become far more serious than his previous flings.
“I ended it,” Larry said. “I ended it before I spoke to you, the day after the Hong Kong raid. She understands. We’ll stay out of each other’s way, so that’s that. But that’s not the only thing, is it? It’s also about John.”
Larry was right. Olivia still hadn’t fully processed the events surrounding the fall of John Clarke: Ultimate, the best of them all, now branded a traitor and a murderer. Not even the fate of Doc Slaughter, allegedly dead at John’s hands, had been a worse shock. John had been like a father to her, later evolving into an elder brother as she grew in experience and confidence. She still refused to believe he could have lost his mind so thoroughly as to commit murder.
“His trial starts today,” she said. “And he still hasn’t regained consciousness.”
Her husband nodded, his own sorrow etched in his face. He and John had been close friends as well. “Daedalus thinks the disruptor hits and Hyperia’s coup de grace may have been more than even John could handle. He thinks the shock to his system might have resulted in brain death, and that he may never wake up.”
“That’s downright preposterous,” Olivia protested. Sure, there’d been cases where Neos had suffered massive injuries and ended up comatose even after their wounds had healed. In some cases they had recovered years or even decades later, so any such sufferers were kept under observation. A few days ago, the Polish Legionnaire code-named Celsius had fallen into one such coma while on assignment near the Chinese border, the result of a near-lethal fight with a Celestial Warrior. The fact remained, however, that no Type Three had ever ended up in a vegetative state; they always recovered from unconsciousness in a matter of hours, or a couple of days at the most.
“Yeah, it sounds like bull to me too, sweetheart, but John is still down and out. Hyperia is fit to be tied. She is keeping all the eggheads in the Atlantic headquarters busy trying to figure out a way to wake John up. If anybody can do it, she can. Or Daedalus. He’s still spending his time overseeing the team working on John.”
“I wish I could be there when he wakes up,” Olivia said.
“You and me both. But the Imps are throwing a war, and that still takes precedence. Speaking of which, we have a meeting at 0800 hours.”
Olivia nodded unhappily. Under the grief and the shock, there was a nagging feeling that she was missing something, something vital. But Larry was right.
They had a war to fight.
Lutsk, Dominion of the Ukraine, March 27, 2013
There were a handful of transshipment points where direct trade between the Dominion and West flowed through. The city of Lutsk was one of them, a place where trains laden with Ukrainian grain, industrial machinery and cheap vehicles rolled into Poland and came back with luxury goods, consumer electronics and overprized German cars, among other things.
On that day, those other things included a woman hidden inside a cargo container.
Chastity Baal had arrived to the Dominion.
As she patiently lay in her dark hiding place, acutely aware that a misstep in her plans would lead to her capture or death, she considered the tortu
rous trail that had led her there.
A number of clues had pointed her in the direction of the Ukraine. They had seemed small at first, insignificant even, the product of coincidence or a desperate attempt to make sense of something that couldn’t be explained. Her superiors in the Freedom Legion had ordered her to abandon her investigation and report for duty in China, where she’d been assigned to a scouting unit.
Chastity had gone AWOL instead. While the punishment for such actions was nowhere near as severe as in the military, she would certainly be suspended, and very likely expelled from the Legion, unless her investigation bore fruit, and possibly even if it did. She smiled and shook her head. She wasn’t particularly worried about that.
What worried her was the accumulating evidence indicating that somebody in the Legion had been complicit in the attack on Freedom Island.
It had all started while she helped analyze the data one Kuo Wei-Fang, a Chinese industrialist (and secret Celestial Warrior), had left behind after his daring escape from the Legion and the ROC authorities. While she wasn’t a forensic accountant, she had a personal contact who was (well, he actually was a money launderer, but the skill sets were close enough). Her old friend had pierced through multiple layers of corporate obfuscation, and a couple of pieces of data had popped up along the way.
The first one had raised her suspicions immediately. It appeared that Mr. Kuo had been doing business with the Dominion of the Ukraine. In fact, a few purchase orders showed that some of the components needed to build the flying fortress that had attacked Freedom Island might have come from the Dominion, and not the Empire. The connection was weak, but her instincts told her it was real.
The Smithy had also shown up in the investigation. That link was even more tenuous, so much so that her friend had discovered it mostly through a couple of lucky accidents. The privately-held corporation was a former subsidiary of Smith Industries that had been spun away and become an independent organization. The Smithy had, through several intermediaries, delivered some expensive and rare materials to companies owned or otherwise controlled by Kuo. Somebody had flubbed a couple of transactions along the way, and the company’s name had come to light.
The Smithy’s sole shareholder was its founder, one Daedalus Smith.
Smith. Thinking about her fellow Legionnaire and former lover reminded Chastity of the dagger hidden in a boot sheath. The dagger had been a gift from him; it had allowed her to kill a Celestial Warrior far more powerful than she was. The weapon was powered by a form of dark energy. It was much too similar to the disruptors Kuo’s agents had used to kill a Legionnaire and severely injure another. Chastity had watched the after-action video of the brief but deadly battle over Hong Kong, and the resemblance was undeniable.
She’d stumbled into something inconceivable. Something monstrous.
After giving the matter some thought, she’d decided to follow the Ukrainian angle. If she could uncover evidence Daedalus and the Dominion were working together, she’d have something solid to use against the traitor. The lying, deceitful, goddamned traitor.
She felt the train come to a halt, and spent several tense minutes waiting as its cargo, including the container that had served as her home for the last couple of days, was unloaded unto waiting trailer trucks. She relaxed minutely once her container was in motion again. The Ukrainian Border Guards, had they been alerted to her presence, would have opened the metal box immediately and dealt with her as they saw fit. Movement meant she was still on the smuggling pipeline, and thus relatively safe.
An hour later, she heard the container door being opened. She recognized the man who walked in: Yevheniy Tyshchenko, an old smuggler, part of the Akula gang. Back in the good old days, Chastity had done business with Yevheniy’s father, and had watched the now dead man’s child grow into a teenager, one who had quickly developed a crush on the adventuress, and, eventually, a middle-aged man who still professed a good deal of affection for her. Normally, Yevheniy would smile widely as soon as he set eyes on her. Today, the smile was nowhere to be seen, replaced instead by a frowning, worried expression.
“What’s wrong, Yev?” she asked right away. A glance past the man showed her they were in one of the smuggler’s many warehouses, on the outskirts of Lutsk. Normally, the place would be crowded by men, busily unloading the mostly illegal products hidden in the containers. At the moment, however, she could see nobody besides Yevheniy; the building was dark and deserted.
“Trouble, Miss Baal. Much trouble.”
Trouble could mean failure and death. It could also mean an opportunity.
Chastity took Yev’s hand and exited the container to find out which kind of trouble it was.
Chapter Three
Hunters and Hunted
New York City, New York/Chicago, Illinois, March 27, 2013
Mr. Night wasn’t a happy camper.
His lopsided smile didn’t waver, of course. That was a fixed part of his face, even the borrowed face of the hairy Cossack he’d possessed after losing his original body, and did no more reflect his mood than the shape of his body displayed what he’d become, what he truly was.
He stumbled from the doorway between places and collapsed face down on a deserted alley, the first place he’d been able to reach after his unfortunate excursion into the realms of deep space. “It burns,” he said. “It burns.”
Janus had done that to him. The black man had burned through Mr. Night’s defenses, despite his prodigious energy expenditures to prevent that unfortunate occurrence, and the ensuing damage had been too much to endure. He thought he might have held Janus long enough for his masters to reach the powerful hero and infect him, much as Mr. Night had once been infected, but he wasn’t sure. That bothered him almost as much as the agony that coursed through his body, as the nasty fires of Creation seared his flesh and the congealed shadows and hatred that now served as his soul.
Mr. Night prided himself on his certainties. Even when he was wrong, he was always certain about how to go on and correct his mistakes.
Not this time. He’d gambled, chosen poorly, and possibly failed.
He should have gone for the girl, instead of leaving her behind to die (And had she died? He also didn’t know that). But her inner light was so bright, so fierce, so much so that he’d been afraid to touch her, and Janus had literally thrown himself at him. The black man’s power rivaled Ultimate’s, and if Mr. Night could take over that power, if he could replace Medved’s rapidly-failing body with that of the living god of doorways, he would be in an unassailable position.
Instead, he was alone in an alley in New York, vomiting blood, his hair falling off in clumps. His new body was dying. He’d pushed it too much; the Outsiders were stingy with their energies, and he’d used more than his share, and now his inner contradictions were eating him alive.
“Burns…”
The pain faded somewhat. It wasn’t gone completely, and would be with him until he gave up Medved’s body, but Mr. Night found he could function once again. He stood up, dusted himself off, traveled to Chicago and after a short walk made it to his office. His dead but dedicated receptionist was at her desk. Wanda was getting definitely ripe and her skin had acquired an unsightly gray pallor; undeath was hard on a girl’s complexion. She still dutifully reported that Mr. Night had received no less than six calls from his putative employers. Mr. Night thanked her and walked into his private office.
The sigils in the office provided some refreshment. He let his master’s energies flow into him, healing his flesh. The damage to his borrowed body slowed down. His time within Medved’s meaty frame was still limited, but it would last for some weeks, maybe even months, not hours as he’d feared. There was much he could do in that time. He thanked his Masters for their blessings.
The fools of this universe called them Outsiders, implying they were unwelcome invaders. His Masters called themselves Survivors, however. Their universe had been torn asunder to make place for this one, and they simply wanted
to return the favor.
Time to get back to work. Mr. Night checked his messages. Daedalus Smith’s voice mails had become increasingly shrill, especially after he discovered the girl had been captured in the Ukraine. That was rather unfortunate, since the Tsar had no love for Mr. Night and would most certainly not welcome him there. Still, it wouldn’t be the first time or place Mr. Night had shown up uninvited. It might behoove him to assist Mr. Smith in his endeavors, to ensure the most propitious results. The other messages reported that Lady Shi had betrayed them, and accused Mr. Night of being responsible, which was somewhat accurate. He probably shouldn’t have indulged in his urge to inflict pain for its own sake. Oh, bother.
Two messages were from one Thaddeus Twist, multibillionaire leader of the Humanity Foundation, a secret conspiracy dedicated to the elimination of the Neolympian menace. Twist needed the definite location of the Source in New York City. Mr. Night called back, went straight to voice mail – Twist was either too busy to answer the call, or being petty – and left a message confirming the Source was beneath New York City, a mere hundred feet under Central Park. He provided precise coordinates. At this point, Twist’s plan provided a fail-safe of sorts. If everything else failed, the Humanity Foundation’s bomb plot would do a fair bit of damage and help put the planet on its proper path towards extinction.
Moving on. He made another call. Daedalus Smith answered in person. “Where the hell were you, Night?”
“I was occupied dealing with Janus. I fear he may have eluded me, but now I’m back and ready to do my duty, Mr. Smith, sir.”
“Cut the crap. You got my messages. You fucked up, and now the girl is with the Iron Tsar. I’m going to have to go the Ukraine and try to fix this mess.”
“If you allow it, I would like to accompany you, sir. I believe I can be of some use in this endeavor.”
“Nice try, chump. The Tsar will have you shot on sight.”
New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance Page 3
