New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance

by Carella, C. J.

  “Would you care to dance?”

  The band was playing something slow and sweet and old-fashioned, which made sense, given that the average age of the attendants was like fifty-two or thereabouts, and the trend-setters were pushing seventy or eighty. Golden Oldies for the Golden Agers. She took his hand and let him lead her to the dance floor, and dance they did, his hand on her waist, his solid presence making her feel warm and secure, which she’d missed since she’d decided that to see him would be cheating on Mark. And thinking of Mark, who would be celebrating Christmas in Hell, drove a spike of agony into her chest.

  John noticed her tears. He stopped dancing and held her. She hugged him tightly and sobbed against his chest.

  “I’m sorry,” she heard him say.

  “I’m sorry too,” she said. But John wasn’t the only one who deserved an apology.

  she called out with her mind. She hadn’t been able to reach him since the horrible encounter with Mr. Night. For all she knew, he was dead. Still, she called out to him, not really expecting an answer.

  She should have known better.

  < Christine?>

  The connection was weak and full of the psychic equivalent of static – random thoughts that belonged to neither of them, phantom memories flittering about like moths around a flame – but she could hear him, feel him. He was alive, if not quite well; he was tired and tense and angry, and she sensed that it’d been a bad day for him.

  John felt her draw away from him and let her go. She stood alone on the dance floor, unmoving, eyes closed, concentrating on keeping open her mental channel between Mark and her. She could sense how upset John was, but she had her hands full staying in touch with her other love of her life.

  she asked him.

  She felt a shrug coming off him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  Mark said, and he didn’t sound angry, but he was sad.

  She wanted to curl up somewhere, but she wasn’t going to collapse on the dance floor, so she forced herself to remain standing, to ignore the new tears forming behind her closed eyes, and said what she had to.

  That’s all he said, at first.

  What else could she say? More sorries and explanations? He’d always known about her crush on John. She’d done exactly what he’d expected she would do.

  he said again.

 

 

  Actually, he waited almost too long, she didn’t say.

  She could feel just how much she’d hurt him; he was trying to hide it from her, just like she’d tried to hide her guilt, but the pain was still there, still apparent behind his empathy blocks.

 

 

  she said.

 

 

 

  And that just hurt too much. She couldn’t keep up the mental link, and it broke before she could reply to his words, and all she could do after that was to take off running, and look for somewhere to hide and sob in private.

  John let her go, his own pain and anger flaring up behind her like a bonfire.

  Armageddon Girl indeed.

  * * *

  She checked her wrist-comp and found out that Chastity Baal was on the island but had chosen not to attend the party, which made her way smarter than Christine.

  She found the Legion super-spy in her tiny undecorated apartment. Chastity was wearing a short silk robe when she answered the door. Her expression remained calm and impassive but Christine could sense the woman was in no mood for company. That was okay. She wasn’t there to hang out. She was there to pay back a debt, and try something that might help Mark down the line.

  “Drink?” Chastity offered while she walked behind the small bar by the kitchen.

  “I’ll take a double shot of vodka,” Christine said, which elicited a raised eyebrow from her host. For a change, she could use a drink; a little liquid courage might help her get through what was coming.

  Chastity fixed the drinks and they sat down. Christine downed hers with a couple of gulps, and managed not to cough and sputter. That had been some very smooth vodka. She’d have to ask her what brand it was; Mark would definitely appreciate…

  Moving on. “I’m here to fix your magic dagger problem,” she said, getting right to the point.

  “I see.”

  “I’m doing much better now. Still not getting very far with the Codex, and I’m not touching the Source anytime soon, but my Christine-vision is back to almost one hundred percent. I know I can do this.”

  Chastity regarded her in silence for a few moments. “Are you sure?” she finally said.

  “Listen, this has been the worst Christmas of my life. I think giving somebody a nice present would help me cope with the holidays, and you deserve to get rid of Daedalus’ present from Hell. I can do it. Okay, I can try to do it. If I fail, no harm, no foul.”

  “The dagger is dangerous. If you fail, there’s a good chance of harm.”

  “Worst case, I turn evil and the little anti-matter mines inside my head go boom, and you’ll probably never get that mess off the upholstery, but what can you do?” She grinned, and she knew it was the kind of grin Mark would appreciate, a mean grin with plenty of teeth and nothing nice about it.

  Apparently it was Chastity’s kind of smile too, because she returned it in kind. “Very well.” She got the dagger and gave it to Christine. “Have at it, and good luck.”

  She put the weapon on the coffee table and turned on her special vision. Her head started to hurt immediately, but she kept going; she hoped the headaches weren’t going to be a permanent side effect, but if they were, she’d have to learn to live with them.

  The knife glowed with two drastically different forces. Keeping the Outsider stuff inside the dagger without messing with the So
urce energies that did most of the work had required a truly delicate touch. Daedalus Smith was a d-bag, but he was a talented d-bag. Luckily for all concerned, she didn’t have to be anywhere near as good as him to separate the magical dagger from Chastity. She just had to be strong and stubborn.

  Christine started cutting into a web of energy tendrils only she could see, using her mind like a scalpel, or like pruning shears. Snip, snip. Each time she made a cut, Chastity’s body shivered; the super-spy went pale. The process was painful for everybody involved, but Chastity never complained out loud.

  It took a few minutes, and toward the end Christine was drenched in sweat and her head was throbbing like a giant exposed nerve, but eventually the last of the tendrils linking Chastity to the dagger were sheared off. “Done,” she said, and Chastity sagged a little on her chair, exhaling for the first time since the process had begun.

  “I think we could both use another drink,” she said, and Christine nodded gratefully.

  A few gulps of vodka later, she felt a little better. “That was fun. Not.”

  “What is the prognosis?”

  “Well, from the looks of it your aura is still pockmarked with stolen memories,” Christine said after taking a good look at her. “But they are already beginning to fade away, because the mind of the poor man is trapped in the dagger and you’re no longer linked to it. My guess is they’ll disappear completely in a few days. Your power level seems to be fluctuating a bit; you may lose some strength, but not very much. The process permanently increased your access to the Source. Other than that, you’re going to be fine.”

  “Thank you.” The words were calm and cool; the emotions behind them were far more intense.

  “Least I could do, after all you’ve done for me. For us. Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas, Christine.” The superspy wasn’t given to emotional outbursts, but there was a little sheen over her eyes as she nodded gratefully at her. “What are you going to do with it?” Chastity went on, looking at the dagger.

  “I’m going to hold on to it. I have a feeling it’s going to come in handy pretty soon.”

  It’s also likely to kill me pretty soon, but let’s try to be positive.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The Freedom Legion

  Forward Operating Base Democracy, Asteroid Belt, February 4, 2014

  “Titan Base has been attacked.”

  Adam Slaughter-Trent felt a twinge of regret. Earth Defense Command had decided that fortifying the space installations in Titan and the Saturn region was not practical, given the time and resources available. The facilities had been abandoned, except for a volunteer skeleton crew on Titan Base, in the hopes that their presence wouldn’t be noticed by the Genocide. Those hopes had turned out to be wrong.

  The distress call appeared on the main screen. The forty-minute old message showed a figure wrapped in bright blue light, flying against Titan’s brownish-orange sky as the mayday call resonated on the background. The image shook violently for a moment and was replaced by meaningless static, a hissing obituary for the eleven men and women on Titan Base.

  “Commence Defense Plan Epsilon,” Adam said in a steady voice. A stream of messages exploded from the Democracy, a titanic communications and weapons platform carved from a large asteroid and placed in orbit around Jupiter. This was the first line of defense, and hopefully also the last. The messages were aimed at First and Second Fleet, the most powerful battle formations ever fielded by humanity. Each fleet centered on a Star Defender, a half-mile long cylinder powered by anti-gravity drives that gave it amazing acceleration and maneuverability, armed with a formidable array of weapons designed specifically to engage and destroy human-sized targets moving a near-relativistic speeds. Each Star Defender was accompanied by dozens of lesser ships, ranging from modified Dominion dreadnoughts to ‘fighters’ that were little more than hover tanks modified for space combat.

  “Operation Ferryman is underway,” another comm officer reported. All the long-distance teleports on the planet – a whole half a dozen of them – were transporting hundreds of Neos to their prepositioned ships. As soon as the operation was over, tens of thousands of space buoys would generate anti-teleportation fields, joining the thousands other devices already making FTL travel impossible in the outer reaches of the solar system. The Genocide would be restricted to flying the rest of the way, which meant he could be detected and engaged a long way from Earth.

  “The Outer System sensors have picked up the target, sir. He is headed towards us.”

  Adam nodded. They’d all hoped the Genocide would choose to give battle rather than lead them on a chase around the Solar System. In the latter case, the alien might have been able to evade the forces arrayed against him, or picked them off piecemeal; either tactic would have likely doomed the defense effort. Janus had been all but certain his old tormentor would consider such tricks to be beneath him, however. It appeared Janus had been correct. The Genocide would offer battle openly, following a tradition any warrior culture would have recognized.

  “Target is moving at 1 percent of c, sir. Estimated time to contact, sixty hours.”

  Sixty hours. Time enough to mobilize and maneuver. Fifteen thousand humans and a fifteen hundred Neos would face the Genocide here. A similar number of defenders manned the second line of battle, centered on the Moon. And if that failed, the planet’s conventional armies and surviving Neolympians would make their last stand on Earth itself. If the Genocide reached Earth, the Legion would be no more: all active and reactivated Legionnaires had been deployed to one of the two space formations.

  By the time the Genocide reached Earth, there would be no living beings left in space.

  Christine Dark

  Aboard the FLSS Liberty Ship, Jupiter’s Orbit, February 6, 2014

  Christine had dreamed about being aboard a starship one day, ever since her mom introduced her to her DVD collection of Star Trek: TNG. And now, here she was, watching the stars from a viewing window in the Freedom Legion Starship Liberty Ship, named after the quickie freighters the US had churned out like sausages during WWII. Like said freighters, the Liberty Ship had gone from blueprint to maiden voyage in an indecently short time: three weeks in this case, thanks to a team of Neolympian and human builders who’d busted their collective asses to get it ready for the main event.

  It wasn’t the biggest ship of the scrappy rebel fleet; that honor went to the Star Defenders, followed by the US and Dominion battlewagons or dreadnoughts or what have you, all of which were just huge. Not quite Macross huge, but pretty darn big. The Libby was still pretty darn impressive: two hundred feet long and seventy feet wide, with artificial gravity, twenty-five fusion power plants and enough weapon systems to give an Imperial Star Destroyer a run for its money. It could accelerate to relativistic speeds – 1 percent of c, or eighteen hundred miles per second, give or take, fast enough to distort time for its passengers, making it the fastest ship in the fleet. Its combat cruising speed was a tiny fraction of that, of course, because neither its sensors nor weapon systems could do much at those velocities. Under different circumstances, Christine would have been elated just to wander around the mighty ‘nuclear wessel’ and learn its many secrets.

  Too bad she was too scared and upset to enjoy the trip, or the view.

  “Pretty, isn’t it?” John said behind her.

  “It is,” she admitted. The view from Jupiter’s orbit was pretty darn spectacular, Jupiter itself, of course, plus more stars than she’d ever seen glowing in the dark. Some of the distant points of light weren’t stars, of course, but other spaceships. A few were close enough to see clearly: a squadron of space fighters sailed on by, a few hundred feet away, their boxy outlines clearly visible in the light of their fusion thrusters.

  John wanted to put a hand on her shoulder, and she wanted to lean back against him. They’d snuggled like that dozens of times before. This time, they didn’t.

  She couldn’t stand the awkwardness. “John
…”

  “Yes?”

  “I still don’t feel right about, you know, but how about a kiss? For luck?”

  They kissed, and not like brother and sister, either. Why not? It might be their last chance to kiss anybody.

  She still felt guilty about it.

  Jupiter’s Orbit, February 7, 2014

  Space warfare was, disappointingly, nothing like Star Wars.

  The opening stages of the battle looked more like a distant lightning storm in a clear night than like the glorious mayhem you’d expect if you’d grown up watching space opera flicks. Christine had known better, but it’d still been a bit of a bummer. Those distant flashes of light represented thousands of guided missiles that had flown on intercept courses towards the Genocide and blown up on or near their target. The warheads were nukes in the five hundred-kiloton range, which was impressive except for the fact that explosions in vacuum inflicted only a fraction of the damage they did in an atmosphere. Only a direct hit would have a chance to destroy the alien. The initial reports from the missiles’ built-in sensors showed that the Genocide was exploding the missiles long before they reached him. After the first few explosions, there was too much energy flying around to get accurate readings for a while.

  The alien was getting a nice bath of gamma rays and other fairly lethal forms of radiation, but Neos in general were very resistant to radioactive waves, especially big tough Type Threes. The critter would probably heal off the damage as quickly as it was inflicted. Still, the attack would hopefully decrease his reserves. Every little bit helped, or so everyone hoped. Of course, that little bit had cost something like 2.3 trillion dollars, and had accomplished next to nothing. Not a good start.

  “Target still active,” came the report from the sensor team as the last missile blew up and the Genocide came through, still heading right for the fleet. “Drone platforms engaging.”