“We’re heading back to the Island for now. There’s a chance we may head for the Dominion in the next day or two, however.”
John’s words sent a chill down her back. “To talk or to fight?”
“Talk. The Tsar has agreed to meet with us, and he specifically named you in the invitation. It appears you impressed him quite a bit during your last encounter. You are the second person to ever survive his Dread Gaze, for one.”
“What an honor,” she said. John had been the other survivor; he and the Tsar had fought an inconclusive duel shortly after the end of World War Two. That fight had made the history books and the comic books; she had a hardcover signed copy of the Frazetta painted edition, and if the fight had been half as impressive as depicted in that graphic novel, it’d been a heck of a lot tougher than the one she’d muddled through. Of course, the comic book version of her own fight with the Tsar – lovingly drawn by George Perez, who’d talked her into posing for him – had also looked impressive as heck. In real life things were quicker and messier, and didn’t flow smoothly from one panel to the next.
Artemis – Olivia – joined them, smiling faintly, but her eyes looked sad and weary. Neos didn’t get physically tired, but nobody could escape emotional exhaustion. “Fifteen dead, and hundreds of injuries, dozens of them critical,” she reported. Christine knew what those calm words meant – people burned horribly, corpses tightly curled up in the classic ‘boxing’ posture caused by the flames contracting their muscles and ligaments; pain and terror and loss. Christine hugged her, and Olivia hugged her back tightly.
“We’re doing what we can,” John said behind her. He wasn’t much for hugs and PDAs, but his kind words often helped just as much. “In fact, it looks like the riots are dying down everywhere, in no small part thanks to the Legion’s help.”
“Good,” Christine said. “Now that we’ve stopped people from killing each other, we can get back to the work of stopping the Genocide from killing everyone. Just awesome, isn’t it?”
Korczowa, Poland, December 7, 2014
Christine and the rest of First Squad waited for the Dominion delegation on a snow-covered field outside a prosperous little town in the Polish side of the Poland-Ukraine border. She was a bit worried. First Squad had enough firepower to take over most countries on the planet, but the Dominion wasn’t one of those countries. If the Iron Tsar decided to play dirty, this piece of Poland – and probably much of the rest of the surrounding countryside – was going to get thoroughly rearranged.
That was just one of several reasons for her anxiety. Christine wasn’t eager to meet her former captors-slash-torturers. For one, a big part of her wanted nothing more than to extract some payback from them. For another, she was sure the feeling was mutual, and the Dominion thugs were not big on impulse control, not when they could do pretty much as they pleased in their crappy country.
“It’s going to be all right,” John said, touching her shoulder. She reached out for his hand and squeezed it.
“Am I that obvious?”
“No. You actually look perfectly calm. But I can pick up your heart rate, and that tells a different story.”
Her boyfriend could sense her moods a lot better than she could sense his. Bummer. “Well, the important thing is that I can fake it till I make it. Don’t want to let the Dominion minions see me sweat.”
“They won’t. With any luck, they’ll be doing the sweating.”
“I’m picking up several massive power signatures from the other side of the border,” Uncle Adam reported from inside his brand-new Brass Man armor. “I believe a full squadron of Dreadnoughts have deployed to within striking range.” Dreadnoughts looked a bit like massive blimps, but in reality were a cross between a flying battleship and a flying aircraft carrier, or, to put it another way, a smaller-scale version of the Death Star. They were very much like the ship that had bombed Freedom Island not too long ago, as a matter of fact. A squadron consisted of four to six Dreadnoughts. The Dominion’s Imperial Fleet fielded a total of four squadrons, which meant twenty-five percent of the country’s air force was massed just a few miles away, ready to deliver the destructive equivalent of a few dozen ICBMs from her world.
Amusingly enough, if she talked about ICBMs in these parts, she’d get as many blank stares as when she talked about Coldplay. They’d never developed strategic nukes in this reality, except for the occasional mad scientist super-weapon like the one that had almost wrecked New York last spring. Funny how her superhero-less reality had developed more weapons of mass destruction than this land of super-duper men and women in tights.
“A shuttle is on its way here,” Uncle Adam announced. Time to find out if the Dominion could play fair.
The ‘shuttle’ turned out to be a slightly-less weaponized version of the flying tanks Mark and her had fought during their great escape. It was built along the same lines, except it didn’t have the big-ass central cannon on its nose, just the four slightly less big-assed blasters. It was also a bit roomier on the inside; when it landed on the field it disgorged half a dozen peeps, some of them pretty biggie-sized.
The Tsar was there, along with Baby-Baba Gaga-Yaga, God help them all. Also present: the Mind, the big-headed, small-hearted German mad scientist d-bag Christine had come to know and loathe on short acquaintance. A tall regal-looking woman Christine had last seen riding a dragon, a medieval knight type, and a blonde dude surrounded by a bright aura completed the entourage. They were part of the Ukrainian Iron Guard, there mostly for swag, since Mark had kicked their collective ass all by himself, which meant they didn’t add a lot of weight to the bad guys’ side if it came to a fight. The ones to worry about were the Iron Tsar and Lady Yaga, and of course the squadron of mini-Death Stars a few seconds away.
The Dominion delegation came to a half about twenty feet away, kinda far for a meet and greet, but knife-fighting distance for Neos. The Iron Tsar’s metal bucket of a head turned towards Christine. “We meet again, Christine Dark.”
“Howdy-doody, Mr. Spear and Magic Helmet,” she greeted him back. Probably not the most diplomatic form of address, but at this point she didn’t care.
“I see American irreverence is the same in both universes,” the Tsar observed dryly.
“What can I say? We both got Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and fart jokes.” John put a warning hand on her shoulder, but she shook it off. “I’m not here to be polite to you, Bucket-Face. The world is about to get blown to smithereens in two months, and that includes your Evil Empire, so let’s get real, shall we? Even worse, I shut off the Source’s superhero-making factory, just like you wanted, so we aren’t getting any new Neos to join in the war effort. That means if we don’t all work together, we’re going to burn together.”
There was a long pause. Apparently people didn’t talk that way to His Imperial Tsar-ness back in the Auld Sod. Baby Yaga was positively fuming; Christine could tell, even now that she was empathy-blind.
“I am sorry for your loss,” the Tsar finally said. Trust him to find a polite way to twist the proverbial knife. “Your man was strong and brave, and his presence will be sorely missed in the struggle to come.”
“Thank you,” Christine said. The reminder still hurt, but she was learning to take the condolences in good grace, even when they weren’t meant kindly.
“Now we should get down to business,” the Tsar continued. He turned to Artemis, who was the current Legion leader and whom he should have been addressing from the beginning. “What are your terms for ensuring a mutually beneficial cooperation agreement?”
“Free passage of Dominion vehicles and personnel throughout all signatory countries, including international space beyond Earth’s atmosphere.” The Dominion was excluded from outer space, except for some carefully-inspected weather and communication satellites, following a deplorable incident featuring mind-control orbital devices back in 1983. The offer meant the Doms would be allowed to move their fully space-capable Dreadnoughts up into orbit and bey
ond for the first time in decades. It had taken a small space war to impose the current earthbound exile on the Dominion, so that was a big concession. “In exchange, we need your word that once the hostilities have ended, you will retreat back to the boundaries determined by the Warsaw Treaty of 1985.”
“In other words, I am to offer my people and myself as cannon fodder in the coming conflict, and as our reward receive nothing but a return to the status quo. Unacceptable.”
“What do you propose in return?” Olivia replied.
“Basing rights for the Moon and Mars. Mining concessions on the asteroid belt. Double our current orbital allotment. The end of the trade embargo from the US and Western Europe. The abandonment of any pending legal charges from the International Crime Court, the US government, and all other UN signatories, against myself and any and all members of my regime. A lifting of all other sanctions by the United Nations, World Trade Organization, and any other international agencies: that list is too tiresomely long to recite in its totality. Once all those terms have been confirmed and executed, I will mobilize my forces in support of operations related to containing and destroying the so-called Genocide, ideally well away from our biosphere. What do you say?”
“Unacceptable,” Artemis said. Christine resisted a sudden urge to roll her eyes as the Legion’s top bossette and the second most powerful dictator on the planet started haggling with each other like a couple of horse-traders. She ignored the exchange for the most part; she figured they’d work things out. Like she’d said, the Tsar wasn’t going to risk his domain just to be a d-bag, so he’d come to terms and send out his merry gang of thugs and his wonderful flying machines, which hopefully would make a difference when the Genocide showed up.
Of course, what would make even more of a difference would be Christine’s accessing the Source and bringing all its power to bear on the alien invader. She’d kept trying, but her ESP was gone, dead, and those special senses were what had allowed her to touch the Source and pick up stuff from the Codex. Thanks to the First’s trap, she’d gotten those mental circuits burned right off her brain, possibly for good. Last night, she’d taken another run at her single Word, and all she’d ended up with was yet another migraine. Not good. She doubted she was going to make much progress in eight weeks. Maybe if they had eight months.
All she’d achieved was shutting off the creation of new Neos, just when they were going to need all the Neos they could get. Talk about an epic fail.
She might have saved herself from becoming Dark Christine, at the cost of dooming the world.
Chapter Eighteen
The Freedom Legion
Freedom Island, Caribbean Sea, December 7, 2013
“The Dragon Emperor has agreed to the terms of our last proposal, with a few minor caveats,” General Xu reported. “He claims he can provide us with seven hundred Celestial Warriors, all with a PAS of 2.6 or higher in offensive and defensive powers, in addition to his considerable conventional and semi-conventional forces.” The Council member looked vaguely appalled at the size of the forces the Empire was volunteering; he probably was considering how bloody the thankfully-avoided Third Asian War would have been.
“Of course, a lot of those forces are going to be useless in the primary theater of operations,” Swift groused. “The Imps have never done much in space; sure, their flying fortresses are vacuum-rated, but their speed isn’t quite up to snuff for in-system ops; we’re going to have to tow them into position, and a lot of their weapon systems are too slow or inaccurate to fight Neos.”
“We’ll take whatever we can get,” Cassius said, trying to keep up an optimistic façade. “The Empire’s earth-bound forces may play a crucial role if the battle reaches Earth’s atmosphere.” If that eventuality happened, he didn’t add, the death and destruction that would follow would be unprecedented, and very likely catastrophic; even in victory, the world would very likely be damaged beyond recovery.
“If we lose in space, we’re toast,” Swift replied.
“We’re developing a defense in depth,” Adam said. “We’ll engage the Genocide in Jupiter’s orbit. If we fail there, we’ll make a stand from the Moon and the satellite belt, before allowing the fight to move into Earth’s atmosphere. We’re seeding space buoys loaded with teleport and FTL inhibitors; they will prevent the Genocide from bypassing our defenses. In any case, we believe he will seek to destroy our forces before attacking the planet, so he will fight us in places of our choosing.”
“It,” Cassius corrected crossly. “It does not have a gender as our language defines such things. It is neither male nor female, even before it transcended the limits of its biology.”
“I take it you didn’t get the memo,” Hyperia said with a bitter grin. “The UN Sexual Identity Committee agreed that the Genocide, given his aggressive and violent behavior, would be referred to as male in all communications henceforth.”
“And I don’t give a shit if we put ‘im in a dress and call ‘im Sally Mae,” Swift said in a faux-Southern accent that made Cassius grit his teeth. “We can figure what to call him, it, or she-it when we’re putting up his gravestone,” he went on. “The question is, now that the Empire has joined the Coalition of the Willing and Able, do we have enough firepower to put him down like the mad dog he is?”
“We’ll find out during the first week of February, when the alien bastard is supposed to arrive,” Hyperia said. “We’re building every weapon system we can think of in the time we’ve got. We’re even reconfiguring that giant thermonuclear device the Humanity Foundation was planning to use on New York. Well, not us, the US government is.”
“Under the circumstances, everyone is part of ‘us,’” Artemis said.
“And the good old USA is contributing the most money and materiel, of course. About three hundred Neos of varying power levels, a fleet of almost a hundred military spaceships, including a bunch who were listed in the books as research vessels, wink, wink, and full use of all American space installationds, government-owned and private, the latter having been nationalized for the duration of the emergency. We’re going all-in.”
“That we are,” Darkling agreed. “Speaking of which, how is Operation Forlorn Hope going?”
“About as well as we could expect,” Adam replied. Forlorn Hope was a campaign to recruit Neos with uncontrollable abilities who hadn’t quite been deemed dangerous enough to execute out of hand. “A surprising number of the inmates in our Allocation Facilities have agreed to help. We’re offering them the chance to colonize Titan once the war is over.”
“In other words, we’re offering them a brand-new form of exile, except they’ll get to play in an ice ball out on the edge of the Solar System instead of their current island resorts,” Hyperia said.
“Let’s not rehash the old arguments, Ali,” Artemis replied. “All those inmates are both very powerful and unable to control their abilities. Most of them understand the danger they represent to everyone around them.”
“And we’re going to use them as cannon fodder against the Genocide. Let’s not mince words. We’ll be solving two problems at once. Victory or defeat, most of those poor bastards aren’t going to live through this.”
“There’s no telling how many of us, if any, are going to survive,” Swift said. “It’s going to be raining shit and hellfire, and everyone’s gonna get a good heaping helping of both.”
“You’re turning into a goddamn poet in your old age, Larry Graham,” Hyperia said. “All right, I’m sorry, just wanted my comments on the record. The fact that we haven’t figured out a way to deal with those sixty-two Neos we’ve got warehoused away is shameful.”
“We can all agree on that,” Cassius said, more sincerely than anybody knew. He hadn’t told his friends and colleagues about the Taint that had infected him. The darkness was there, whispering at him, but he figured it wouldn’t change anything before the Genocide arrived.
He didn’t intend to survive that battle.
* * *
John Clarke looked at the rings on the display case and pictured them on Christine’s finger.
I know it’s too soon, he told himself for the tenth time this morning. But it doesn’t hurt to look.
The shop was a very exclusive establishment that catered to Freedom Island’s wealthier residents. Besides having the same inventory you’d find in one of New York’s finer jewelry stores, it was a very private place where Legion members could do their shopping in peace and quiet. The days when John could stroll into a regular store in peace and quiet had ended back during the Great Depression, not that he would have been able to afford jewelry back then. He hadn’t become wealthy until after the war. Things had changed a great deal since then; even though he gave away most of his yearly income, he was still a multimillionaire. He could afford buying an extravagant ring. Unfortunately, doing so would be wrong.
He knew it was much too soon to be looking at engagement rings, but he was looking anyway, and he knew it was because he wasn’t satisfied with their current arrangement. His time with Christine had made him happier than he’d been since Linda Lamar’s passing – and, to be honest, since years before then – but it’d also left him off-balance and confused. Life was never simple, something that had proven to be a constant source of disappointment and regret.
“Let me see that one,” he told the salesgirl, a very pleasant youngster in her late twenties who’d been too professional to act like a star-struck teenager around him, but whose quickening pulse betrayed her slight nervousness. She quickly showed him the piece in question, a platinum ring with a 9-carat rock and a half-dozen lesser diamonds set around it. It was a damn sight better than the ring he’d bought for Linda back in 1945. Just one more difference among many.
Christine was nothing like Linda, he realized now. He’d first become smitten with her because of her physical similarities with the dead love of his life, but he’d quickly discovered they had precious little in common beyond their hair and eye color. Oh, they were both strong people, but they expressed their strength in different ways. Linda had been brash, bold and impudent, but under that bluster lurked a measure of insecurity and vulnerability. Christine, on the other hand, was easygoing and shy, but once she was convinced of taking a course of action, nothing could move her.
New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance Page 26
