The second wave consisted of a swarm of drones that had deployed well ahead of the ships, each containing a thermonuclear bomb. These bombs were designed to power a brief beam in the x-ray and gamma-ray ranges, delivering most of the explosion’s energy in a coherent blast of pure destructive power. The weapons had been inspired by the Humanity Foundation’s doomsday device; said device was actually out there, and was one of the first to fire. A whole new set of distant lightning flashes broke out. Christine held her breath. Those weapons were their best bet; a direct hit with the super-laser beams would fry even John or Janus. The Genocide couldn’t just shrug off something like that, could he?
A hundred drones self-immolated to shoot their deadly beams as soon as the Genocide came into range. Most of them missed the rapidly-approaching alien. Thirty-seven scored partial hits, meaning the beam passed within fifty yards of the target, plenty close to deliver enormous loads of energy even in vacuum. Eight were right on target. Computer simulations had determined that the toughest Neo on the planet, the Dragon Emperor his own self, could only survive five such strikes.
There was a moment of silence as the fleet’s sensor systems pierced through the mess of radiation the energy barrage had created.
“Target remains. Repeat, target remains.”
Christine closed her eyes. Another couple of trillion dollars’ worth of WMDs hadn’t stopped the alien. The Genocide must be hurting, but hurting was meaningless when the endless power of the Source was at hand to repair any damage the alien had suffered. Maybe if they’d had three hundred or a thousand graser or x-laser cannon it would have been enough, but they hadn’t had time to build any more of them.
The Liberty Ship moved to engage.
It was Neo-fighting time.
One of the many weird facts about Neolympians was that Neo attacks inflicted far more damage on other Neos than they should. In other words, a one-kilowatt laser beam created by a Neo would hurt another Neo far more than a conventional one-kilowatt laser. Nobody was sure why, but Neolympian powers neutralized Neolympian defenses to some degree.
What that meant was that the third wave would be very different from the previous two: the FLS Liberty Ship would sail forth alone, close the distance and then release two hundred Neos capable of maneuvering in space, even as another hundred Neos inside the ship used their powers to fire their own volleys of energy at the Genocide. The only reason they were only deploying two hundred of them was that too many attackers would end up getting in each other’s way.
Numbly, Christine headed for her battle station, an electromagnetic launcher that would throw her toward the Genocide like yet another missile, alongside John and Janus and Hyperia and dozens of others.
If they failed, First Fleet would engage; their shipboard weapons were less destructive than that storm of missiles and artillery drones, but there were many more of them, and they were far more accurate. The hope was that their volume of fire would accomplish what the other attacks hadn’t. The odds weren’t good, however. There were another three hundred Neos with First Fleet, but their overall power level was lower than the Liberty Ship’s compliment. If First Fleet failed, Second Fleet would do the same thing. It would have been nice if both fleets could attack at the same time, but it was simply impossible to concentrate all that firepower on a target slightly larger than a human being. That was their main problem: the starship’s firepower was relatively diffuse; Neos, being smaller, could deliver higher density attacks, but even there you ran into problems. Too many cooks would spoil the soup, as it were.
If the Neos in the third wave failed, the chances of the two fleets were pretty dismal.
She wished she could reach John telepathically, but even with her restored psychic powers she hadn’t forged a link between them like she had with Mark. You didn’t do that kind of thing on a whim; she’d only done it the first time because Mark had been dying.
And she hadn’t been able to reach Mark since Christmas Eve. She was on her way to a fight to the death, with nobody in her head but her.
Just like everyone else since the dawn of time, her brain chided her.
Okay, then.
“Prepare for deployment on ten. Nine. Eight…”
Christine readied her shields. Her protective aura allowed her to function in full vacuum without having to worry about being freeze-dried or irradiated. All she had to worry about was being squashed like a bug by the current holder of the Destroyer of Worlds title.
“One.”
And she was off, launched from the ship at a few hundred miles an hour. She quickly took control over her flight and accelerated to much greater speeds. Vector lines and other useful pieces of information were projected directly into her eyeballs by her implants, giving her a virtual heads-up display that showed her where First Fleet and her fellow Neos were and, more importantly, where the Genocide was. The alien was flying their way at a downright sedate thousand miles an hour; he’d slowed down so he could play with them. Awfully nice of him.
Two hundred Neos from all around the world flew towards the Genocide, Legionnaires and Celestial Warriors and many others. Those with ranged powers started shooting as they closed into range, guided by their implants, their powers able to reach much farther in the vacuum of space than they could in an atmosphere. Christine let fly with kinetic blasts, wide and somewhat diffuse for greater accuracy at the expense of damage. The attacks produced a fraction of the energy the drone cannon had, but between their greater accuracy and the Neo armor-piercing effect, they would be much more effective. The highlighted target on her virtual HUD started glowing in multiple colors as he was hit by a kaleidoscope of various energies. They must be hurting him.
Hurt or not, the Genocide started shooting back.
Off to Christine’s left, Hyperia screamed as she was engulfed by blue energy. Her comm went silent and she drifted away and was quickly left behind. Dead or unconscious? Chrisinte’s empathy told her Hyperia was alive, but in agony and likely out of the fight for at least a few minutes. Above her, someone else turned into a cloud of expanding gasses. A severed arm flew past her face, traveling at hypersonic speeds. Whoever that had been wasn’t unconscious; whoever that had been wasn’t anything anymore.
Just as she had that morbid thought, she got hit. There was a flash of blue light, then darkness.
I’m blue, da ba dee, da ba die.
The nonsensical lyrics from an old song her mom used to like ran through Christine’s mind as she woke up. She blinked and found herself tumbling through endless space. Her face was one big second-degree burn, mercifully healing fast, but still hurting like a bastard. She was certain that her eyebrows and much of her hair were gone, but she was still alive. Up ahead, more light flashes showed the other Neos had reached the Genocide. Her HUD was still working, which meant her implants (including the built-in suicide switch she’d had Uncle Adam put in her head) were still intact. Good to know. Maybe going off to do battle with a bomb inside her skull hadn’t been the smartest idea, but it was the only way to make sure she didn’t follow in the Genocide’s footsteps.
Christine gritted her teeth against the pain and resumed her flight. As she closed the distance, she got her first look at the Genocide. He kinda looked like a centaur crossed with a humanoid cuttlefish. She saw John land a few good punches before a kick from the alien’s hind legs sent him soaring off into space, alive but pretty banged up. Christine blasted the alien, a thin spike-like beam this time, and was rewarded with the sight of a puff of vaporized blood; she’d punched through his shields and hit flesh. She was also rewarded with another blue energy blast, but she managed to duck away. Even the near miss gave her a nasty sunburn. Yikes.
A moment later, Operation Sponge went off. A dozen Neos with power-leeching abilities attacked as a group, led by the Warden and the Black Hole, the two most powerful energy suckers in the planet, a hero and a villain, respectively, mortal enemies in the past, but brought together for this desperate attempt to take down the alien
. They and ten other less-powerful leeches dogpiled the Genocide, weakened his shields, and turned his flight path into an uncontrolled spiral. Some of the Leeches had other powers that allowed them to use the stolen energies against the Genocide. The Black Hole led the way, crushing the alien with deadly gravity waves. The attackers hammered at the evil E.T. like the wrath of God, and for several seconds, she dared to hope, even as she added her beams to the fray.
The Genocide’s aura flared up.
All twelve men and women exploded, even the Type Threes, even the Warden and the Black Hole, unable to contain the massive forces they’d absorbed.
Red mist and gruesome bits and pieces were all that was left of them, and even those soon disintegrated in the alien’s blue corona.
Da ba dee, da ba die.
There were tears in Christine’s eyes, but she blinked them away and kept blasting at the alien. The critter had been weakened; for almost a minute it didn’t fight, just dodged away while healing from the terrible injuries it’d suffered. That’s when the follow-up to Operation Sponge went into effect. Operation Forlorn hope involved a good fifty Neos whose powers could not be safely controlled; most of them were high Type Twos, but their unrestrained abilities were much more powerful than their PAS number indicated. They bombarded the Genocide, many of them killing themselves in the process, and the weakened alien couldn’t dodge all of those attacks, and they drained his reserves even more, slowing him down. Which led to a third, and hopefully final maneuver.
“Operation Maximum Overdrive: Activate.” That message went to Christine and the rest of a select group of heavy hitters. Even as the fifty – now thirty-one – members of Operation Forlorn Hope exhausted their power, the most powerful Neos on the planet launched a coordinated attack, hoping to drive a final nail on the Genocide’s coffin. The Dragon Emperor and the Iron Tsar, Janus and Nebiru, and half a dozen other high-level Type Threes struck as one, trying to take advantage of the opening given to them by Operations Sponge and Forlorn Hope.
If vacuum could boil and bubble, it would have. Drained by the previous two assaults, the Genocide couldn’t duck most of the attacks, and soon enough he couldn’t duck any of them, as he was effectively surrounded by overlapping energy discharges coming from a dozen different directions. For a handful of seconds, it writhed under the combined attacks. The Tsar’s Dread Gaze outshined everything except for the Emperor’s Elemental Bolts. In space, where all those Neos could cut loose without fear of consequences, they released multiple zettajoules of killing power, power that bypassed many of the Genocide’s defenses.
It was almost enough.
Christine felt the alien was near death, and redoubled her efforts, pushing herself until her vision narrowed down to a tunnel and her head pounded with agony. The Genocide’s body was burning; two of his six limbs had been torn off, and one other was nothing but charred bone, hanging on by a thread of connective tissue. To her super-senses, it looked like a race, a race between the powerful Neos’ outpour of destruction and the alien’s capacity to endure and heal. The Liberty Ship added its considerable firepower to the onslaught, as well as all other Neos still in range. For a few brief moments, the good guys almost won that race. The alien almost died, and was but a heartbeat away from oblivion.
Almost.
Then came a tipping point. The alien’s energy budget grew until it matched that of his combined attackers, and then surpassed it, allowing him to survive. As his enemies exhausted their reserves and were unable to sustain their attacks, the Genocide struck back once again.
The Dragon Emperor went flying into space, a vaguely man-shaped fire missile. He wasn’t dead, but he had to use all of his power just to survive; later she heard the Dragon Wall came down for several hours after he was struck. The Iron Tsar went on the defensive, his Dread Gaze exhausted, and he retreated from the fight before the Genocide could hit him, or, in other words, ran away like a coward. Others weren’t so lucky. One by one, they became short-lived stars and were snuffed out, dead or so badly hurt they couldn’t fight anymore.
The survivors from all the different Operations, and everyone else still alive, kept pouring it on – John came back and pummeled the alien like a super-jackhammer – but Christine could see their target was healing faster than they were hurting it. The awful mathematics of the battle became painfully clear to her. They just didn’t have the firepower to overcome his defenses and healing abilities. If First Fleet could concentrate all of its weapons on him while every Neo attacked him at the same time, it would have been enough, but there was no way to do so, not against a human-sized target that moved at those speeds, not without the attackers killing each other in the crossfire. Only a fraction of their collective energies could hit the alien at any given time, and even the largest possible fraction they’d been able to muster hadn’t been enough. Now that the Genocide had killed so many Neos, they had even less power available than before, less than what had already been shown to be insufficient.
Janus launched a desperate attack on the alien, to no avail. The Genocide shrugged off the torrent of golden energy and captured the Legionnaire in a cocoon of some weird substance, saving him for later; a moment later, it killed another Type Three, an Indian hero named after the elephant god Ganesh. Ganesh’s mutilated body flew past Christine; he’d been the strongest Neo in Asia, and now he was dead.
They were going to lose.
She had to access the Source.
Except the First probably had more booby traps waiting for her.
There is another Source in play, her brain reminded her.
So there was.
She turned her Christine-vision all the way up, much as it hurt her to do so. Through it she saw the Genocide in all its hideous, warped and tainted brilliance. The Word of Power grew brightly in her mind; she used it as a stepping stone and reached out with her will. Christine found the link between the alien and its distant Source, and made contact with it.
The Source was dozens of light years away, but distance didn’t reduce its power very much. That was the first thing she discovered. The alien could count on something like eighty percent of the Source’s full power even from that distance, and all the Neos on Earth combined could harness no more than thirty, maybe forty percent of Earth’s Source. Both Sources were roughly equivalent in power, so eighty percent of x beat forty percent of x, a hundred percent of the time. They’d been doomed from the start.
The Genocide sent John spinning off into space once again after he hit him with a swing that broke every bone in her boyfriend’s body. The alien then grappled briefly with the Lord Immortal, the most powerful Neo from the Republic of China, and with a sudden pull of his now-restored four arms ripped the man apart into three bleeding pieces. Through her Christine-vision, she saw the poor Neo die, his soul speeding off towards wherever the dead went. She saw the alien Source pump more energy into the Genocide to replenish the expenditure required to destroy his last victim. The alien’s power bandwidth was enormous; the amounts of energy he could almost instantly tap into boggled her mind.
The Source wasn’t the only shiny thing inside the murderous horsey calamari, of course. The pulsating, black-rotten-evil energy of the Outsiders was also flowing through him, separated from the Source much like oil and water remained separated.
The Source and the Outsider Taint hated each other. Sooner or later, they would turn against each other, destroying the Genocide in the process.
Christine decided to make it sooner.
Janus had pulled off a similar trick when he’d escaped from the mad super-alien, breaking the containment field around the Outsider energy. The resultant conflict had driven the alien even crazier than he’d already been, but he’d eventually managed to keep the two forces separate once again.
Christine needed to do better. And she had just the thing to pull it off, an Artifact powered by both the Source and the Outside. She took Daedalus’ dagger from the pouch on her belt where she’d kept it all along and
touched it with her mind. It only took her a few seconds to activate it, but those were some terrible few seconds.
The Genocide didn’t notice what she was doing; he was too busy killing one Neo after another, exulting in the slaughter. Ninety-three bottles of beer on the wall became ninety-two, ninety-one, eighty, sixty. Meteor took a direct hit and became yet another cloud of vaporized flesh and bone, his flames extinguished forever. Swift, moving faster than he ever had, smashed into the alien like a living missile. The Genocide survived the terrible impact; Swift didn’t. People she knew and people she liked died before her, while she worked her magic; they died because she wasn’t fast enough.
The dagger came alive in her hand, eager and hungry. It wanted her to slash at the alien, or anybody else, so it could forge a link between her and anything it cut, and use that link to feed, to satisfy its endless craving for life and power. That wasn’t her plan, though. She sent the weapon flying at the alien, and the dagger pierced his defenses and sank into flesh, where it reached the pool of Outsider energy inside the Genocide.
As soon as it struck, Christine created a link between the weapon and the alien Source. The weapon became a bridge, a circuit between the two antagonistic forces dwelling inside the alien and the dagger itself. Through it, she forced them to meet, to confront each other.
The Genocide roared when he felt his own power being turned against him.
YOU CANNOT DO THIS.
The mental scream was ‘heard’ for several light minutes in every direction.
THIS CANNOT HAPPEN.
He was the most powerful critter in two planets, but he went through the stages of grief like anybody else, the poor thing. He tried to pull the dagger out, but couldn’t. Somehow, he sensed her mind as it kept the connection between the dagger and the Source going. He turned towards her.
Nebiru interposed himself between them.
Christine didn’t see what happened; she was too busy controlling the dagger. She heard about the terrible battle later, the magnificent contest between raw power and masterful skill. The Iraqi mystic deflected blue energy torrents that should have instantly vaporized him, fooled the alien into wasting time and power on illusions, used a kind of magical jujitsu that turned the Genocide’s strength against himself. Nebiru bought her time, time enough for a handful other heroes to join in.
New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance Page 33
