Any illusions he’d had of recreating his blissful life with Linda had died a quick death. Christine was her own person; she was more affectionate and sweeter than Linda had ever been, but her ideals and opinions were from a different time and place. She was more comfortable doing things on the computer or her e-tablet than sitting in front of the TV with him, for example. Sexually, she was more adventurous, always wanting to try new things. John was beginning to worry he might be too stodgy and set in his ways for her.
“… like to see another?” the sales clerk was saying. John nodded and pointed to a slightly less-extravagant ring.
He knew he was being foolish. They hadn’t even talked about moving in together, although she spent most nights at his place. The idea of cohabiting without benefit of marriage bothered him, though; his attitude towards such things had become set in stone in the 1930s, and some things were harder to change than others. John felt he was taking advantage of Christine by not making an honest woman out of her. Yes, he understood that’s not how she saw things, but he couldn’t help how he felt about it. At least if they got engaged, living together wouldn’t feel so wrong.
Except he’d be jumping the gun if he proposed now. She might even say no.
In the end, he bought her a nice gold and diamond pendant and headed to her apartment.
She smiled at him when she opened her door and saw who it was. “John! Hey, I wasn’t expecting you to drop by. Uh, sorry about the mess,” she added as she let him in.
The apartment she’d gotten from Legion Housing, after she’d refused to keep her old place, was small and plain, although she’d added color and some personal touches: art prints hung from the walls, including a beautiful James Bama portrait of Doc Slaughter, and assorted other knickknacks gave the place a feminine touch. She’d started adding a few things to John’s own apartment, stuff like throw pillows and a new set of curtains, which, given that she spent so much time over there, was fair enough.
Her place was indeed a bit messy, especially for John’s tastes; he lived by the old axiom ‘a place for everything and everything in its place.’ Piles of books lay haphazardly on the coffee table and the floor of the living room, along with two laptop computers and some discarded soda cans. There was a pile of dirty dishes in the sink, and several pizza boxes on the kitchen counter. He’d noticed that she often became so focused on whatever she was reading or studying she forgot about cleaning up after herself.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I just wanted to see you.”
“Sounds good,” she said while she picked up books and tried to pile them up in a slightly more orderly fashion. “I’ve got watch duty in about two hours, but we could grab some dinner before that. I was going to order some pizza, but we could go somewhere instead.”
“Sure. I wanted to give you something first, though.” He took the box with his present out of his pocket. The brief flash of panic he saw in her eyes, before she saw the size of the box and realized it was too big for a ring, told him he’d been right all along; it was much too soon to propose.
Her face lit up when she saw the pendant. “Wow. That’s beautiful!” She hugged and kissed him. “You’re a pretty amazing boyfriend, you know.”
“I try.”
Maybe living in sin wouldn’t be so bad.
The Twisted Twosome
New York City, New York, December 9, 2013
“This isn’t working out,” Melanie Bauer said over lunch at Spago NYC.
Kyle Carmichael finished the bite he’d just taken before speaking. “What isn’t working? My tenure at the Guardians? This fine if somewhat overpriced meal?” He paused. “Us?”
“The Guardians. What’s that corporate lingo expression? ‘You’re not a good fit.’”
“Figured as much,” he said. He took another bite of his steak before continuing. “I agreed to stick it out for a year; I’m halfway there, give or take. As long as I don’t beat up anybody, at least not outside the sparring ring, I should be okay.”
“Christine’s mommy has started following me.”
“Has she really?” Patricia Dark, a.k.a. Justice Princess, wasn’t Christine’s mother, not exactly. She was this universe’s version of the Patricia Dark who’d given birth to Christine in her own alternate Earth. This world’s Ms. Dark had never been a mother and had found the whole situation rather irksome, to the point that she’d refused to speak to Christine at all. Their first meeting hadn’t gone very well, and things hadn’t improved since.
Kyle had worked with the Justice Princess in the past, but now that he’d spent several months in her company, he found it hard to believe that someone like Patricia Dark could have raised someone like Christine. There must have been some major divergence in that other world, because this world’s Patricia was a humorless, bitter, perpetually outraged woman who lived only to find reasons to be offended. She’d been furious about the blanket pardon issued over the actions of Christine and her companions, and even more displeased about Condor’s joining the Empire State Guardians, mere weeks after helping kick said Guardians’ collective asses. From the start, Justice Princess had devoted herself to proving Kyle wasn’t worthy to be in the Guardians. Following Melanie was just par for the course.
“Did you take her somewhere interesting?”
“Oh, I led her to an underground dungeon I used to work in. The only way she could go in after me was to rent a room for an hour, and she didn’t like the masked gimp that showed up to attend to her every need. Then I walked in and offered her my services, free of charge.”
“And..?”
“She turned me down. Found the whole thing rather egregious, the poor dear.”
“Too bad,” Kyle mused. If anybody needed some sort of sexual outlet, the elder Ms. Dark was it.
“After I got rid of her, I went by the dead drop and found this,” Melanie said. She handed Kyle a data stick. “Lady Shi’s alive and well, and was back in the city just long enough to drop this little care package. I guess she didn’t have time to play.”
“Well, she wouldn’t walk into Guardian Tower of her own free will,” Kyle said. Lady Shi had no criminal record but she was a suspect in several murders in and around New York. In any case, it was better for everybody if she kept her distance; things had gotten a little too messed up with her around. All of that was by the by, of course. The Japanese assassin had been trying to find Mr. Night, using both her criminal contacts and her subtle but fairly powerful telepathic ‘sniffer’ abilities. She was sure the Outsider minion had survived the big fight over the city. The data stick might contain important information.
Kyle used his wrist-comp to access the heavily encrypted data stick. Information started streaming right into his retinas a few moments later. Most of the data consisted of video streams hacked from people’s personal Tru-Vision Goggles and similar portable devices, in violation of several privacy laws. Now that a sizable percentage of the population was recording everything they saw and heard during their waking hours, a host of legislation protecting that data from being accessed without the recorder’s consent had been enacted around the world. Lady Shi must have hired some top-notch computer criminals to get access to all those recordings. The rest of the footage came from government and private security cameras, also obtained illegally.
He stopped worrying about the data’s provenance when he saw what the footage depicted. “Fuck,” he said. “Jesus fuck.” He didn’t realize he’d raised his voice until he noticed the silence and the stares from the other diners at the restaurant. One didn’t use profanity out loud at Spago.
“What is it?” Melanie asked. He showed her the video. She went pale.
“We need to call Christine right away.”
Christine Dark
New York City, New York, December 9, 2013
It took her fifteen minutes to fly from Freedom Island to New York; she could beat the Legion’s orbital shuttles’ flight time pretty handily by now. Christine had been in a hurry; Condor
had looked and sounded very upset during the brief call.
She slowed down to a mere fifty miles an hour once she was over the city proper. You didn’t want to risk running into a chopper or another flying super. She spotted a couple of the latter as she made her final approach to Guardian Tower. One of the colorful figures was Star Eagle, who’d been the first flying man she’d seen; the other was none other than Justice Princess, her mother from another planet.
Both Guardians pointedly ignored Christine as they flew past her. Harsh. By now it was clear that she was never going to be friends with the local Patricia Dark. Her pseudo-mom had even sicced a lawyer on her over her use of the name Justice in her code-name. Christine’d thought she was doing an homage of sorts to her quasi-relative, and instead it’d turned into yet another bone of contention between them. Christine, in a surprising attack of the stubborns, had chosen to stick to Justice Dark and the courts had thrown out the case. If the Princess didn’t like it, she could suck it. The woman had been so horrible to her that she deserved the aggravation.
Just one more little bit of heartbreak, to go with all the other crap. Oh well, in a few weeks none of that would matter, one way or another.
Condor and Kestrel were waiting for her at the Perch. She hadn’t seen much of them since her catastrophic run-in with the Source and the loss of her empathy powers. Now that she was mind-blind, they seemed normal enough. She no longer could sense the mess of psychological trauma, twisted sexuality and unhealthy fixation with one another that lay within them. Even so, they didn’t look very happy or content. Kestrel didn’t even toss one of her innuendo-laden comments, which meant she was just as upset as her better half.
“You’d better sit down for this,” Condor said. “Would you like something to drink?”
She sat, beginning to dread whatever they had in store for her. “I’m good, thank you. What’s the deal, Kyle?”
“First of all, the information I’m going to show you came from illegal sources. If you hand it over to the Legion, it could get us in trouble. At the very least, it will get Lady Shi in trouble, and I’d rather we didn’t do that. We all owe her, for saving our lives and for the information she’s turned over to us.”
“I won’t narc on her, or you, okay? What is it?”
“This,” he said, and one of the big screens on the living room lit up. It showed a crowded city somewhere in Asia by the looks of it. A nondescript man in a business suit emerged from a narrow alley and joined the throng of people on the streets. The screen’s point of view changed several times – footage from several different devices, all showing the man in the suit for a few seconds at a time, as he briefly crossed the path of someone with a camcorder on. The combined clips followed the man to a back alley near a bad part of town. From then on an overhead camera recorded the scene. “This was taken in Macau, five days ago,” Condor explained. “The security camera’s footage came from a nearby illegal gambling house. They’d just installed the camera, which is why the people who set up meeting didn’t know about it.”
As he spoke, the man in the suit met with a group of tough-looking guys sporting some colorful tattoos and a variety of weapons; a couple of them carried submachine guns. They talked, and the gangbangers started getting pretty angry. When one of them looked like he was about to get violent, the face of the man in the suit changed.
For a couple of seconds, it became the blank slate she knew only too well.
“Mark?”
A second later, it changed into something else, an old man’s face stretched over a skull too wide for its narrow features, a face marred with a lopsided smile.
Mr. Night.
“Christine?”
She tried to respond, but things went all blurry and she slumped in her seat for several seconds.
“Are you all right?”
Christine leaned over and was violently sick.
* * *
“Do you want more water?”
What she wanted was to curl up somewhere dark and die. What she wanted was to sob and scream and smash things. “I’ll have another water, thank you.” The universe didn’t care what she wanted.
Is all the bad stuff I saw going to happen? God, how do I stop this?
Condor and Kestrel looked almost as upset as she felt. Seeing Mark’s body being possessed by Mr. Night must have shaken them up pretty badly. The idea that Mark had not just been killed but had been… violated like that made her sick with horror and anger. Are you still in there, Mark? The thought made her want to throw up again.
“There is more,” Condor said as she drank her water, which led to the drink going down the wrong pipe, and more coughing and sputtering. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay, I’m not thirsty anymore.” And I don’t think I can take any more bad news, she didn’t say. It was better to know than to let stuff bite her in the ass without warning.
“The meeting in the video involved the leaders of several local criminal gangs. It was an attempt by Mr. Night to steal information from several major Chinese military contractors, specifically about construction projects earmarked for Project Aegis.”
Project Aegis was the code name for the international effort aimed at confronting the Genocide. “He’s trying to help the alien,” Christine said, putting two and two together. “He’s going to try and sabotage our plans to make sure the Genocide wins and blows up the planet.” That would be a change from the future where she became Dark Christine Dark, but not much of an improvement over it. Even so, the idea of a doomsday scenario that had nothing to do with her… It actually made her feel a bit better. Maybe it’s not all foreordained. Maybe there is a possible future where the Genocide doesn’t win, and Mr. Night doesn’t win, and I don’t lose.
And maybe monkeys will fly out of my butt.
Freedom Island, Caribbean Sea, December 10, 2013
Chastity Baal had been in the Freedom Legion for a good two or three decades, but her apartment was tiny compared to Christine’s – both her current one and the one she’d shared with Mark – let alone to John’s huge one in Freedom Hall, which was bigger than all of those combined. Somebody got shafted, and it wasn’t me, Christine thought guiltily as she looked around. It was a one-bedroom like hers, but if the bedroom was anything like the living room, it’d be the size of a walk-in closet. The place wasn’t just small, it was scarcely decorated at all. It looked as impersonal as a hotel room.
“I don’t spend a lot of time here,” Chastity explained, noticing the way Christine was looking at her crib. “I have a number of houses around the world, and they are a lot more like a home. I only come here for official business. Would you like anything to drink?”
“No, that’s okay.” Christine was in no mood to hurl or choke on her drink, and with her luck both would happen. She’d had no appetite at all since her trip to New York. John had been concerned the moment he got a good look at her, but she hadn’t told him about Condor’s discovery. She hadn’t told anybody in the Legion, not yet. Chastity would be the first, and only because she wasn’t a conventional Legionnaire. The crappy apartment, the kind of lodgings fit for a noob with no experience, not a veteran hero, was just further proof that the superspy was in the Legion, but not of the Legion. Christine needed an outsider’s help, and she’d found one.
Chastity made herself a drink and sat down in the Spartan living room. She didn’t ask what had led to Christine’s visit, but merely waited, content to be silent.
“I have some video footage indicating Mr. Night is still around,” Christine said. She explained the whole deelio; Chastity listened mostly in silence, except for a couple of pertinent questions here and there. “I can’t turn the info over to the Legion without getting people in trouble,” she finished. “I was hoping you could help.”
Chastity nodded. “I can use the video footage as a starting point, and develop alternate sources of information, now that I know there is something to discover, as well as where and when it happened. I might even learn some
thing new along the way,” she said. “The truth will come out, and your sources won’t be compromised.”
“Thank you! That’s just what I was hoping for.” Christine went from elated to guilty in a couple of seconds. “I only wish I could help you with your problem.” She’d meant to do something about it, but something else always came up, and then she’d lost her psychic powers. Heck of a way to thank someone who’d saver her life.
Chastity shrugged, her eyes on the dagger carefully propped on the center of the coffee table. “I’ve consulted with a number of Legion psychics. Even the ghost of Mesmer tried to lend a hand,” she said. “The weapon is a reservoir of Outsider energy. It is also deeply linked to me. Attempts to destroy it have resulted in dangerous levels of psychic feedback.” Which was a cool and dispassionate way of saying she’d almost died when the dagger had been harmed. “The only good news is that I am still free of any Outsider contagion. Unfortunately the dreams and false memories continue to bother me.” There was a bleakness in her voice that broke Christine’s heart. Chastity Baal’s mind was being corroded from the inside out.
Christine wanted to help her. She needed to help her. “Can I see the dagger?”
“I don’t want you risking being contaminated.”
“Risk, schmisk. You risked plenty in the Ukraine. And I’m not really risking a heck of a lot. I’m still psychically blind, a total burn-out. Chances are I’m not going to get anything useful out of the dagger. But I’d like to try.”
New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance Page 27
