“In layman’s terms, you saved New York City just in the nick of time,” I said. “That’s how the papers and the funnies are going to put it.”
“Call it the micro-nick of time.”
“You’ll probably get the key to the city.”
“You helped, so you’re going to share the key with me, bubba. And shake the mayor’s hand.”
“That whiny bastard? I didn’t even vote for him.”
“And you’re going to be nice to the mayor. I’m hoping for a pardon, or at least the dropping of all charges, and you’re not going to spoil everything by dropping f-bombs in front of VIPs. Do you feel me, homie?”
“Sheesh. Okay. No f-bombs, bossy.”
“And don’t call me bossy; that’s effing offensive.”
“Okay, dear.”
Various, March 29-April 3, 2013
In the comics, they rarely bother with the after-action stuff.
After our friends cleaned up the radioactive material we’d unceremoniously scattered all over Third Avenue, we had to deal with the joys of being debriefed by local, state and federal officials. I kept hoping the New Lurker would teleport us to a nice undisclosed location, but apparently too much Doc Slaughter had stuck on him, because he meekly agreed to surrender himself and advised us to do the same. The Legion did spring for a small army of lawyers who sat beside us every step of the way. We weren’t arrested, handcuffed or mistreated. We just had to answer a lot of questions, over and over, for the rest of the night and well into the wee hours of the morning.
They separated Christine and me very early in the process, but we stayed in touch, thanks to our new bond, which even their tame telepaths couldn’t detect. Too bad for them. When things got boring we made disparaging comments about our interrogators, which got a bit awkward at one point when Christine burst into laughter for no apparent reason. Luckily the lawyers managed to smooth things over.
Not everything turned out well, though. I was an illegal, and I had admitted to using my powers in a variety of ways. There were a few ways around that, although I liked none of them. After consulting with my lawyers, and talking things over with Christine, I made a decision I was pretty sure I was going to regret.
I joined the Fucking Freedom Legion.
* * *
“Repeat after me: I, Marco Martinez.”
“I, Marco Martinez...”
“Solemnly swear to honor and uphold the Freedom Legion bylaws, and the laws and statutes of any and all host countries…”
“… to protect the innocent and seek out the guilty…”
“So help me God; you may enter the deity of your choice, or By My Honor I So Swear, instead.”
“So help me Great Pumpkin…”
Janus did the honors, with Ultimate and Chastity Baal acting as witnesses and co-sponsors. Adam’s membership was in question, so he had to be sworn in as well. So did Christine. The oath cut through several Gordian knots: it exempted us from any previous violations of the Parahuman Registration Act, although we would all have to register; it also pretty much rendered us judgment-proof from any lawsuits related to our little misadventures, although there would be hearings to determine that we weren’t culpable in any of the incidents where we’d folded, spindled and mutilated assorted superheroes, as well as inflicted a good deal of property damage. Above all, the US government would leave us alone, provided we behaved from then on.
Condor declined the honor, along with Kestrel, but he had his own lawyer army, and between that and a good word from the Legion, he was going to skate on all charges. His identity would become public, though, and he’d have to register. I figured he would be okay. If he played his cards right, he would probably join the Empire State Guardians. Hell, he’d probably end up running that outfit.
Lady Shi took a powder shortly after the bomb kind of went off. Condor stayed in touch with her. She got paid and apparently became a semi-permanent guest of his and Kestrel’s. I didn’t ask for details, but what I gleaned about their new relationship made me shudder.
Hiram Hades vanished as well. I couldn’t blame him; deciding whether or not a clone could be held responsible for the deeds of his creator would be one for the legal books, but I wouldn’t have wanted to sit still for the process. Condor had put some of his lawyers to work on Hades’ case, and the legal team had announced the clone would show himself once a determination about his culpability had been made by the courts. That would probably take years.
We were lucky: it only took a week or so to sort things out for Christine and me. We stayed at the Plaza while we waited, and when we weren’t jumping through hoops we ordered lots of room service, made love, read books and watched the news.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Humanity Foundation members were exposed and arrested, at least the ones in countries that held to such niceties; any members in the Dominion (and its puppet countries) or the Empire just disappeared or came down with various cases of death. Some were even allegedly via natural causes, although how one Russian industrialist managed to consume almost a pound of highly radioactive material was never explained. The scandals rocked ‘public opinion,’ which was evenly divided between fanboys grateful for Neos’ saving the world yet again, and those who thought the Great Neo Conspiracy had just claimed dozens of new victims. Most people didn’t give much of a shit, as long as the lights stayed on and you could get a pizza delivered in under thirty minutes.
Daedalus Smith and Mr. Night remained at large, location unknown. Sometimes, late at night, I lay next to Christine, unable to sleep, and worried about them. I like my enemies’ locations known, preferably somewhere six feet under, somewhere I can visit and take a piss on.
There was plenty of evidence to convict the Iron Tsar in an international court of law, and zero interest in fighting a war to bring him to justice. There was plenty of posturing, of course. Some drooling imbecile of a judge in Spain issued an arrest warrant for the Tsar; a day later the judge disappeared without a trace, which made the rest of the internationalist crowd a lot less eager to stick their oar in. I fantasized about dropping by Kiev at some point and seeing if I could open that tin can over his shoulders to find out what was underneath, but now that I was a respectable Legionnaire, that was probably never going to happen.
It was a crazy few days. Good crazy, overall, even if there were times I just wanted to disappear. I managed to do so a couple of times, by the simple expedient of putting on a face and sneaking out of the hotel. I even spent a fun afternoon pretending to be Regis Philbin and showing up on the Tonight Show, just for shits and giggles. I knew I hit the big time when a couple of agents, a pitch team from Buck Comics, and a few Hollywood producers showed up at my hotel room around day five or six. I signed a couple of deals and got my first check the day before we were cleared of all charges and were free to go, as long as we went to Freedom Island, that is.
Life would never be the same.
Freedom Island, Caribbean Sea, April 12, 2013
Ultimate waited for me in the sparring ring.
“Oh, Mark, I really don’t like this,” Christine told me for the umpteenth time.
“We’re just going to spar for a bit,” I said casually. “No big deal. It’s all for science. Best way to measure my power level is to have me practice against a heavy-hitter.”
“You two have issues, though.”
“If we do, this is a good way to work them out.”
“I don’t have all day,” Ultimate called out from the ring. He was just as eager for this as I was.
“Okay, go be macho. I hope you know that the whole thing seems rather homoerotic to me. And kinda hot.”
“That’s nice, honey,” I said as I stepped into the ring.
It wasn’t much like a boxing ring. The Legion sparring site was a hundred-yard wide circle with a big energy dome on top, located on a little atoll a few miles away from Freedom Island proper. In short, it was a great place for two super-strong Type Threes to pound on each other without damagin
g any valuable real state. It was just Ultimate, Christine, Adam and me on the atoll, but there were cameras all around and I figured the little match would end up on a lot of screens. I hadn’t been able to place a bet on myself, because I hadn’t found the local bookies yet. Too bad; I figured I was a big underdog.
Ultimate was grinning, not a big shit-eating smile but a confident, friendly, All-American grin. I copied his face and grinned back at him for a moment before dropping it and returning to my usual blankness. I walked up to him and we bumped fists before returning to our corners. Adam rang the bell for us, and it was on.
I went at him fast, and he waited for me, arms raised in a boxer’s pose. I tried a couple of kicks, but his reaction time was at least as good as mine, and he almost managed to grab one of my legs, which would have pretty much ended the fight right then and there. Kicking isn’t a good idea unless you’re much faster than the other guy or he’s already on the ground. Next I went with a couple of jabs, which he parried easily, slapping my fists away, and in that first contact I knew he was still way stronger than me.
So I kicked him in the balls.
It wasn’t easy, because he was expecting just that kind of dirty trick. I had to feint and dance around a bit before I found an opening, and in the process I blocked a few punches from him, catching them on my arms and shoulders, and even those glancing blows bruised me pretty good. He was a heavyweight, I was maybe a light-heavyweight, or more likely a super-middleweight, and it was probably a good thing I hadn’t found a bookie and put money on myself.
As I tried to get into position I caught a fist to the guts that almost finished the fight right then and there, but I exaggerated the effect, pretended to collapse, and then sprung up and drove my foot into his crotch at supersonic speeds, just as he was cocking his arm to finish me off.
Even invulnerable Neos don’t like to have their family jewels rearranged like that. Ultie’s grin went away, along with much of his grace and mobility, and I went to town on him. Body punches, a couple of nice right and left hooks to his big square jaw that delivered enough kinetic energy to turn a battleship into scrap metal, and he went down. I got to kick his prone form for a while. I was looking forward to knocking him unconscious, which seemed to be his default state whenever he was around us.
I had it all my way for about fifteen seconds. I delivered as much pain and suffering as I’d handed out to the Iron Tsar. Then he reared up and caught me with an uppercut that overwhelmed my anchoring power and sent me crashing against the dome’s walls, and as I bounced back from the wall, he clotheslined me and everything went dark.
* * *
“Happy now?”
Christine had waited until we were alone in our new apartment to speak up. Before that, she’d been unusually quiet after I woke up, Adam certified Ultimate as the winner, and we went home.
“I’m ecstatic,” I grumbled. I don’t like losing, in no small part because, in my old line of business, losing is usually synonymous with dying, and if that fight had been for all the marbles, Ultie would have put me six feet under. Now, maybe I could have tried drawing in more power from the Source, pushed myself past my limits, but Christine had warned me very sternly that each time I did that I was playing Russian roulette with myself; she was working on improving my ability to contain more power within my body, but the process turned out to be long and very painful. Winning a sparring match wasn’t worth risking a literal burnout. Still, getting knocked out on the first round pissed me off to no end.
“You two are like bull deer during mating season,” Christine said. “And guess what: I’m not going off with the winner, because I’m no effing prize for you two to fight over, okay?”
“That’s not what that was about,” I said. “Not really. I just wanted to take him down a peg or two.”
“Why? He’s been through enough already. Do you think he liked having to get rescued not once, not twice, but three times in the last few weeks? He’s still in a pretty bad state, okay? You seem to forget John was on the verge of losing his mind not very long ago, and he’s not used to being a dude in distress. He’s recovering from some pretty bad trauma, and I’m worried the recovery is only superficial, and that he still has problems beyond the induced insanity thingy. Come to think of it,” she added, “Winning this fight might actually make him feel better.”
“Well, there you go. I helped make Ultimate feel better by beating the shit out of me.” My mood wasn’t getting better. I made a face, Ultimate’s face, and leered at her. “There, do you want to kiss him?”
Even as I said the words I knew I’d fucked up big time.
Her eyes had never been that cold before. I dropped the face. “Don’t. Ever. Do. That. Again.”
I’d hurt her. I knew she liked the big guy, and I’d used that against her. “I’m sorry.”
“I know you are, but you’re also still angry at him, and at me.” For a moment, neither of us said anything, and that silence hurt even more.
Finally, she hugged me, and I felt a huge weight being lifted off me. I hadn’t completely fucked up. This time. “We’ll have to work on it.”
“I will,” I promised.
We went to bed, just to sleep.
Christine Dark
Freedom Island, Caribbean Sea, May 11, 2013
She was flying. Oh, great googly moogly, she was flying!
“You’re veering off to the left, Dark,” her instructor told her through her cochlear implants. “Try to keep station and not bump into your flight mates, if you don’t mind.”
“Roger. Sorry.” She corrected her flight vector, veered a little too far to the right, and corrected that, just in time to avoid smacking into the graceful winged figure of the Golden Angel, and finally managed to stay in formation with the other five students. Not bad, considering they were flying at a good three hundred miles an hour and doing all kinds of tricky maneuvers. She was in control, more or less. She controlled the horizontal, she controlled the vertical, and she was getting the hang of port and starside, no, starboard, that’s the ticket.
Flying, as it turned out, was fun.
If only the rest of her life could be so much fun and, more importantly, uncomplicated.
Well, you could still be running for your life. That was pretty uncomplicated, pure animal fight or flight. I don’t recall you enjoying it much.
Shut up, you.
Her brain was right, though. She’d spent a whole month without anybody trying to kill her (except for training purposes, and without actual danger of injury), without having to abandon all her possessions (and now she owned more stuff than she’d ever bad back on Earth Prime, and her bank account had a lot more zeroes than she would ever have accumulated there, even after graduating and working for a couple decades, not counting student loans to pay off), and without losing Mark. Her new set of problems weren’t even First World, they were pure One-Percenter problems. She’d better check her Neo privilege and stop whining.
Except not all her troubles were trivial. A couple of them were heart-wrenching, and one could be literally world-wrenching.
Item one: she was homesick. Yeah, you could never go home again, blah, blah, doubly and triply true when you hadn’t just changed, you’d become an entirely different species and moved to a new universe. Uncle Adam had apparently lost the ability to jump between worlds at some point between his death and semi-resurrection, so she was going to have to figure how to do it herself, or find someone else, like the mysterious Magister and his magical Porta-Potty, who so far had refused to be found, the d-bag. She wanted to go back to Earth Prime, let her mother know she was okay… and maybe figure out where she wanted to live.
Item two: Mark wasn’t handling the transition to the Legion very well, and it was putting some strain on their relationship. His instincts were all down-and-dirty. Case in point: he and John had gotten into a sparring match, and it had been a mess. John was stronger and tougher – after testing, Mark had scored a 3.4 versus John’s 3.6 – so
even after Mark pulled some dirty tricks on him, John still beat him handily. Those two were never going to be besties, for sure. And there’d been more incidents with other Legionnaires: some people didn’t care to have a vigilante in their midst, and acted as if someone had dropped a doody in their punch bowl. At some point there was going to be a non-training ass-kicking involving Mark and some snooty d-bag. On top of that, Mark’s mood swings were beginning to wear her out. His rage hadn’t come bubbling to the surface, but it was still there, and it bothered her.
It would help if he’d tried to make more friends, but he was downright antisocial. He was relying solely on her for companionship, and that was wearing her out as well. She’d managed to make some friends – Artemis/Olivia, for example, who was a great teacher and mentor; and, much to Mark’s chagrin, John Clarke, who’d turned out to be pretty nice and charming, now that he was back to being the hero of the ages, and wasn’t all depressed and going insane and stuff. John was still not a hundred percent well, though, and she was trying to help him even as he helped her. Sometimes, she suspected she saw him as a project, a prospective fixer-upper. She didn’t know quite what to do about that.
New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance Page 16
