C.J. Carella's Website

Apocalypse Dance Sample

Prologue

Chicago, Illinois, March 20, 2014

The morgue was overcrowded.

The bodies of some fifteen dead Russian mobsters were still there. Only three corpses had been positively identified, autopsied and turned over to their relatives. The rest had been dismembered so thoroughly it was going to take a while to put them back together, or even determine their respective causes of death (a coroner had joked that they should put down a dozen possibilities on a list and write ‘all of the above’ at the bottom).

One of the bodies in cold storage had once belonged to a Type One Neolympian by the name of Boris Ivanovich Severov. Boris had been taken apart rather thoroughly by the Lurker. He’d died hard, but died he had. His killing had been an intimate affair: the Lurker had used one of his Words – Rend – and exerted tidal forces that had torn bone and tissue apart as if they’d been made of toilet paper. In the process, a link of sorts had been forged between killer and victim. From this, much would occur.

That night, unnoticed by the morgue workers, the corpse opened its eyes and laughed softly in the dark. Its body was whole again, although it no longer looked like Boris Severov. It now looked like a taller and heavily tattooed version of Damon Trent, except for its eyes, which were solid pits of blackness. The process had been arduous, but it was done. Damon Trent walked the Earth once again, a Damon Trent who embraced the darkness and all it represented.

It wielded the powers of the Outside and the Source, and it remembered and could speak seven Words: Dim and Jump, Rend and See, Heal, Connect, and Empower. It lived only to destroy.

Dead but still deadly, Damon-That-Wasn’t laughed once more and vanished from his metal tomb.

Chapter One

Christine Dark

Kiev, Dominion of the Ukraine, March 25, 2013

She opened her eyes.

They’d put her in something like a high-tech coffin. Straps held her down and the only source of light was a small glass-covered viewing slit at head level. Through it she could see the curved ceiling of some sort of vehicle. An airplane or a helicopter, she thought. She could feel a slight vibration that suggested movement; they were probably flying her to Big Bad Central in Kiev.

Christine had never liked dark enclosed spaces, or being held down. She tried to move her arms and sudden agony flared from every spot where the metallic straps touched her body. It was the shadow energy from the Outsiders; she could feel its hatred for all of existence flowing through the straps. The whole thing was like being caught in the jaws of a wolf who would bite down on her if she squirmed. Cold terror ran down her spine and blossomed in her chest, and she almost started screaming at the top of her lungs.

Be strong. Her father’s words.

I’ll try, Dad.

Okay, screaming was probably not going to do much good. She decided to use her breathing exercises; they’d always helped her panic attacks, back when things like exams and presentations in front of the class made her anxious enough to trigger them. After a while, she actually felt herself relaxing.

Awesome. I’ll be all chillaxed and stuff when they start pulling out fingernails, or whatever it is they do for kicks in the Ukraine.

She’d just gotten her breathing under control when she felt the craft touch down. It landed straight down like a helicopter or the Condor Jet, no runway needed. She heard people moving all around her; military baggage handlers, she supposed, and she was just more baggage to handle. Sure enough, soldiers in menacing helmets with face masks and body armor walked by, close enough to be seen through the viewing slit, lethal presences in gray and black uniforms. They stood her coffin up, and now she could see the interior of the craft, metal walls with small windows on the sides, benches and straps on the walls.

Another coffin was standing in front of her, and through its viewing slit she saw a man without a face. Mark.

Her empathy wasn’t working right; she couldn’t feel the emotions of the men around her, or much of anything else. But when she saw Mark, she caught an emotional flash from him: rage and sorrow and shame. And when he saw her, she sensed something else, something that came through despite the Outsider energy disruptors surrounding her. The surge of love-joy-relief he felt when he lay eyes on her was like a shot of hard liquor that burned through her chest and made her eyes mist up a little.

I love you, Mark.

<Love you too.> The response shocked Christine. Mark’s thoughts came through in a psychic wavelength she’d never experienced before.

<Hey, I can hear your thoughts!> Now that she knew the connection existed, she could use it to communicate with him. It was telepathy, but on a deeper level than the other types of mental instant-messaging she’d experienced before. It was as if Mark and her had their own psionic intranet.

<Just another nifty trick from Armageddon Girl, I guess,> Mark said/thought.

<Okay.>

Neither of them was in the mood to play the ‘No, you hang up first’ game. Christine considered the situation; thinking about stuff was better than wondering where the Ukrainian Storm Troopers were wheeling her off to. Whatever link she had forged with Mark during the resurrection spell and the power level thingy was still working, despite the disruptor shackles they had on her. Which meant the Outsider energy did not completely shut down her powers. Which meant she wasn’t as helpless as she’d thought she was.

More importantly, she wasn’t as helpless as they thought she was.

Bide your time until you see a chance. More words of wisdom from Daddy Lurkiest. Her father had been a legendary vigilante that had kicked hundreds, possibly thousands of asses. Her mother didn’t have a body count to her name, but she’d never backed down or taken crap from anybody. Christine was going to live up to the Dark and Trent names, and she was going to make those rat bastards pay for everything they had done.

In the –somewhat paraphrased – immortal words of a fictional hero who would have fit right alongside her father and her boyfriend: you think I’m trapped in here with you, but actually, you’re trapped in here with me. Okay, maybe it wasn’t perfectly appropriate to the situation, but close enough.

The Great Escape

Staten Island, New York, March 25, 2013

A couple of street-level vigilantes, one of the five most powerful beings on the planet, a renowned arch-villain, two Golden Age heroes sharing one body, and a Japanese assassin walk into a bar. It was a hell of a joke opener.

The bar in question was in the basement of an unassuming house in Staten Island. Calling it a basement was a bit of a misnomer, though: it was more of an underground complex, comprising more square footage than the house above. Besides the bar, the complex had a laboratory-workshop that put the Condor Lair’s facilities to shame, an armory chock full of goodies, and a central computer that was a bit outdated, being almost two decades old, but was still better than anything you could find outside the NSA, Freedom Island or Kiev.

In short, it was an ideal locale for planning their mission: to break out Ultimate the Invincible Man from Freedom Island.

Kyle Carmichael (code name Condor) took another sip of his Bloody Mary and considered the gathering of heroes and antiheroes around him.

Their host was supposed to be dead, was in fact a clone of the dead original, a clone that allegedly had renounced his progenitor’s villainous ways. Hiram Hades had been one of the best-known and least-loved villains of the New Heroic Age, a genius inventor who had nearly destroyed New York City in no less than twenty-three documented events; he’d also turned Rhodesia into an abattoir, burned Kingston, Jamaica to the ground, unleashed an army of cyber-zombies onto the streets of Paris, and made his last stand in the Peruvian Andes, where he’d built a sunlight amplification system that had nearly turned the city of Lima into a volcanic caldera. And those were just a few highlights of a long and checkered career. The tall, clean-shaven man in the crew cut had – or at least, his creator had – fought the Freedom Legion to a standstill half a dozen times, killed no less than three dozen Neolympians of various power levels, and generally been designated a clear and present danger and an absolute pain in the ass. At the moment, the clone looked somewhat subdued; he’d remained silent while the gathering listened to Janus’ story.

Janus, the tall black man currently holding the floor during their impromptu cocktail party, was just about as well-known as Hiram Hades, except he was the beloved idol of billions rather than an object of fear and hatred. Lauded as the first African-American superhero – which Kyle knew was untrue; the first known Neo of color had been a Great War vet by the name of Collins, but why let facts get in the way of a living legend? – Cassius Jones had played a crucial role in the Second World War, had been a founding member of the Freedom Legion, and had saved a hundred times more lives than Hiram Hades had taken. Janus’ eyes were haunted as he finished recounting his story. It had been one doozy of a tale, involving a twenty-year trip into outer space, where he’d found little more than death everywhere he looked, a brutal battle with the Freedom Legion triggered by the treachery of another founding member, and finally a brief but intense duel with another foe, the mysterious Mr. Night.

While Janus wrapped up his story, the love of Kyle’s life was mostly glaring at the Hades clone. Melanie Bauer, a.k.a. Kestrel, had a history with Hiram Hades, a history Kyle knew nothing about. That didn’t particularly bother him: they’d exchanged much of their life stories alongside assorted bodily fluids, but there were still more tales to be told. Part of it was due to their long lives. Kyle would be celebrating his seventy-third birthday that coming July, and he knew Kestrel was at least a decade older; she’d told him about her remembrances of VE-Day, 1945, when Kyle had been still learning his ABCs. They’d known each other professionally for about a decade, but they’d only been together for a few, very intense months. He trusted her implicitly – you had to, if you were into such games as the Ecstasy of the Thousand Cuts, played with razor-sharp blades while being restrained by padded titanium handcuffs. Kyle had been on both ends of that game, and hundreds more like it. He trusted her, but he still didn’t know all about her, and vice versa. The striking woman – her features were perhaps too severe to be called beautiful, although Kyle wouldn’t describe her as anything but gorgeous – absently ran a hair over her jet-black hair as she alternately turned her brown eyes from Hiram Hades to Kyle. When her glance met his, she grinned at him; her smile promised much. She also tipped her head to the other woman in the gathering while she smiled, and Kyle felt a thrill at the implicit promise in the gesture.

The woman in question was Lady Shi, a Japanese assassin who until very recently had been working for the sinister conspiracy they were currently trying to unmask. Her petite, porcelain doll-like face and lithe body concealed an array of deadly Neolympian powers and an even deadlier mind. She had agreed to cast her lot with her former foes. At some point, Lady Shi and Kestrel had held a whispered conversation and come to some sort of arrangement. Later tonight, the three of them would withdraw to their bedroom and do wild things to each other. Having Lady Shi would be akin to clutching a viper to one’s bosom, one that would sooner or later bite. The prospect excited him a great deal.

Last but far from least was yet another Hades clone, distinguished from the first by his thinner, sickly physique as well as his long curly hair and beard, far more in keeping with the grooming of the original. Inside that body resided the minds and memories of not one but two of the most notorious heroes of the Pulp era. Doc Slaughter was another founding member of the Freedom Legion, a prolific inventor who rivaled Hiram Hades in terms of scientific breakthroughs and far surpassed him in overall accomplishments. Doc Slaughter had helped cure all forms of cancer and the common cold, eradicated hunger in most of the Third World, and provided cheap clean energy to billions of people, and those were just things he’d done on his spare time; his day job had involved protecting the world from hundreds of threats, Neolympian, human and natural. Doc had been murdered by the traitor within the Legion, and come back thanks to one of his own inventions.

The other resurrected hero within the villain’s clone body was Christine Dark’s father, the vigilante known as the Lurker, one of the oldest if not the best-known and certainly not the most beloved Neos of the Golden Age. The Lurker had been fighting their adversaries for most of his long life. He’d revealed that both the Iron Tsar and the Dragon Emperor, as well as Daedalus Smith, had met Mr. Night nearly a century ago, and they had all been tainted somehow by the experience. The Lurker’s tale had explained much of the nature and purposes of their enemies, but Kyle was certain he hadn’t revealed all or even most of what he knew.

“… and after contacting Condor, I made my way here,” Janus concluded. “Since this facility, and Condor’s mansion, are protected against electronic and parahuman detection, I felt confident my presence wouldn’t betray either location.”

“We’ll still have to deal with the transponders in your cochlear implants,” Kyle said.

“That’ll be a trivial exercise,” Hades replied just as his clone brother, speaking in Doc Slaughter’s cadences said: “That’s a simple matter.” The two geniuses looked at each other.

“After you, Doctor,” Doc said.

“No, Doctor,” Hades retorted. “Your knowledge of Legion technology is certainly greater than mine.”

While Doc went on about what they needed to do to neutralize the transponders and Hades jumped in to assure him he had the tools to do so, Kestrel muttered, “We’re one Stooge short of a Doctor, Doctor skit.” Kyle grinned, although, for the first time in his life, he felt outclassed in the brains department. He was sure he’d be able to make a contribution, though.

They would need everybody to do their utmost to win against the odds facing them.

Hunters and Hunted

Freedom Island, Caribbean Sea, March 26, 2013

Daedalus Smith was a confirmed atheist. The closest thing to God in the universe were the damnable aliens that had seen fit to hand out superpowers like Halloween candy, and they clearly were either abysmally stupid, not playing with a full deck, or their thought processes were so inhuman they might as well be crazy or drooling idiots.

Sometimes, however, it was tempting to believe in an overarching intelligence that ruled the universe – and loved nothing more than to fuck with one Daedalus Smith, Squire, for no good reason at all.

The call had come in the middle of a morning meeting with the Freedom Legion Council. It’d been a busy meeting. The three-ring circus of Ultimate’s trial was due to start the next day, the Chimps were getting downright frisky around the Dragon Wall, Janus was still at large, and the little Legionnaires wanted to bitch and bawl about all of it. The meeting had been filled with whining, Monday morning quarterbacking and nothing of any value whatsoever.

When Daedalus felt the cold psychic alarm go off deep inside his head, where no snoop or spook could detect it, he’d felt a nigh-overwhelming urge to loudly announce: “Sorry, boys and girls, but Uncle Daedalus has an important call from his partner in crime, the Iron Tsar his own goddamn self.” The look on their sanctimonious faces would have been so priceless, it might have been worth the hassle of having to shoot his way out of the island.

Alas, rationality had prevailed. He’d ignored the call and gone about business as usual. Sorry, Hyperia, Ultimate still hasn’t woken up, blah, blah, blah. Sorry, Artemis, nobody’s come up with a reason why the Empire has gone apeshit, blah. Two sentences’ worth of actual meaning had stretched into two hours of empty twaddle, with such luminaries as General Xu pounding on the table and demanding people notice how important he was, or Hyperia asking the same question three times in a row and expecting a different answer each time, while making her suspicions of Daedalus – her perfectly accurate suspicions, to be honest – pretty obvious along the way. He was surrounded by morons, and not even the knowledge that he’d soon get to kill them all was enough to lighten his mood.

Finally, the meeting had adjourned and he’d been free to retire to his suite for some mandatory down time. As soon as he was there, he activated the telepathic implants in his head, implants designed specifically to slip under the Island’s sensors unnoticed so he could hold the occasional tete a tete with Tsar of all Russias, or at least of any Russia he felt like Tsaring over. The luxury room vanished and he found himself in a cold, dark dungeon, its only furnishings two stone chairs around a table with a chess board on it. He and the Tsar traditionally started their meetings by making a move on the board.

Daedalus examined the arrangement as he sat down. It was his move, but no matter what he did, it was going to end in mate in six, four if he didn’t feel like drawing things out. The Tsar was a better player. Sighing, Daedalus tipped over his king. “Your game. Congrats, Cushko.”

The man in the iron mask – the man with the iron head, probably; nobody was sure – grumbled wordlessly. He really liked to be addressed by his formal title, His Highness or His Honor or the Great Pumpkin or what have you. Daedalus liked to think the Tsar found his insolence a refreshing change from all the groveling he got day in and day out. If not, he could put on his big girl panties and suck it. “So, what brings us here today?” Nothing good, Daedalus imagined.

“We have the girl,” the Tsar said smugly.

Daedalus heart skipped a beat. “Are you sure?”

“She and her protector, the man with no face, along with a treacherous former Iron Guard, were caught trespassing in the Pripet Marshes. They are being held in a special facility near the capital.” He didn’t volunteer the name and location of the facility, of course, but Daedalus knew exactly which one it was, also of course. When they weren’t playing over chessmen, Daedalus was usually three or four moves ahead of the Ukrainian warlord.

Until now, that is.

What the fuck was the girl doing in the Ukraine? Had she lost her mind? Daedalus forced himself to set aside the irrelevant questions. He chose his next words very carefully. “You’ve got to be very cautious with her, mein Zar. Perhaps it might be best to terminate her.” Having Ms. Dark dead was better than giving Cushko a chance to take control over the Source and become the most powerful man on Earth, a position that should rightfully be Daedalus’.

The Iron Tsar shook his head. “Dead, she is of no use at all. And we subdued her easily enough. I doubt she will be much trouble.”

“So what do you plan to do with her?”

“Standard submission techniques. Psychological pressure first, to determine the best avenues of approach. After that, the usual methods of coercion until her will is broken. We are keeping her bodyguard alive, as there appears to be an emotional bond between them. My lady has taken a personal interest in the matter.”

Christ. Baba Yaga, the Tsar’s consort, was the craziest bitch Daedalus’d had the displeasure of knowing, which was saying a lot in a world full of crazy bitches. The gentler gender had gone to hell since they’d gotten the vote. On the other hand, there was a good chance Babs would kill Christine Dark before they could get anything useful out of her. It was a thin silver lining, but something to hope for.

Still, no sense in taking chances. Daedalus tried another gambit. “I’d advise you to wait until I can get there.”

The man in the iron helmet tilted his head to one side. “I fail to see what you can do that my own team of experts cannot. Of course, I will share any discoveries we make with you, just as you would have, had you managed to hold onto the girl.” They had established dozens of elaborate fail-safes designed to ensure cooperation between the two of them, and a dozen-and-a-half workarounds to ensure they would cheat each other at the first opportunity. Possession of the girl wasn’t just nine points of the law, it was the whole fucking ball of wax.

Daedalus smirked. “Come on, Cushko. You’re smart enough to figure I held a few things back.”

“Such as?”

“I learned a few more Words from the Lurker than I let on, and between them and a few tricks I got from Mr. Night, I am ninety percent sure I can give us – both of us – full access to the Source. Whatever plan you’ve got, assuming your experts aren’t lying to your face, doesn’t have more than, say, a sixty, sixty-five percent chance of success.”

“Geistesblitz is certain we have a seventy-five chance of success if we get the girl’s full compliance, seventy percent if we have to remove her brain and spinal tissue and work them into an automated device.”

“So even if your tame Kraut isn’t full of shit, there’s a better than one-in-four chance the whole thing blows up in your face. Very likely literally, which might well crack the Earth like an eggshell under a hammer, or at the very least turn your little kingdom and much of Eastern and Central Europe into a lava-filled crater. That’s worse odds than Russian roulette, pal. If we do it my way, we’ve got nine-to-one odds. Yeah, we’ll both have to learn how to share the spoils, but I figure the planet is big enough for the two of us. What do you say?”

“I say, how soon can you arrive here?”

Daedalus made some quick calculations. He’d planned for this sort of eventuality, but getting all the pieces into place would take a little time. “Seventy-two hours, give or take, not counting the seven-hour time differential.” He could be there in a day and a half, but he doubled the estimate, knowing how the Tsar’s mind worked.

“I am prepared to wait forty-eight hours before initiating direct subdual methods.”

Just as he’d expected. “All right,” he replied, sounding like he was making a painful concession. “I guess I can shoot for forty-eight hours, at the risk I’ll be found out.”

“If we succeed in this matter, that risk is irrelevant.”

“You’ve got a point, pal. See you in two days.”

“We will be eagerly waiting for you, my friend. Shall we start a new game?”

“Sure, why not.”

They set up the pieces, and the Tsar opened up with a traditional Queen’s pawn gambit. Daedalus went for an Albin counter rather than try for something special. His heart wasn’t on the game.

Chances were they’d never finish it. One way or another, the game that mattered was going to end in mate in two.

The only question was which king would fall.

Chapter Two

Face-Off

Kiev, Dominion of the Ukraine, March 26, 2013

They say you can get used to hanging, if you hang long enough.

Father Alex told me that one, back in the good old days, when my only worries were such things as not getting caught with the corpse of a serial killer in the trunk of my latest stolen car. The good old days, when Father Alex and my psychic pal Cassandra were alive and well.

A lot had changed over the last couple of weeks.

At the moment, I was hanging from my wrists in a high tech dungeon, harsh neon lights illuminating an almost medical setting, except for the high-tech restraints, the big metal grill covering the drain in the center of the sloping tile floor, and the power tools that had few medical applications, but several uses when it came to slowly but surely taking somebody apart, piece by piece.

I was in one piece so far. The Ukrainian assholes had shackled me to a wall and left me to stew by myself. I guess they figured my imagination would do a good job of messing with my mind before they even got started on me.

They figured wrong. At the moment, the last thing I was thinking of was the upcoming torture sessions. Considering the circumstances, I was feeling rather chipper. Because of Christine.

I could still feel her presence in my head. The link we’d established hadn’t gone away. I even had some idea where she was. Two hundred, two hundred and fifty feet away, and two stories above me. Less than a football field’s length. Not very far at all, and if I had to pave every step of the way with the corpses of the assholes who’d taken her away, I’d do it with a notional smile in my no-face.

So I hung out and waited for her to communicate with me, or for any sign they were hurting her, at which point I would break free even if I had to chew off my arms and legs to do so. For the time being, I didn’t feel any strong emotions coming from her, which was surprising. She should be terrified, but she was keeping a tight lid on it if she was. I’d known plenty of tough guys who’d be streaming bodily secretions from every hole in their body just about now. My respect for her grew even more.

Time passed. I tuned out my surroundings and thought good thoughts.

Finally: <Mark?>

<Hey.>

<Hey. Listen, I think we’re safe from eavesdropping, more or less. Our link is in a very specific frequency, one most telepaths can’t access. I don’t think anybody who hasn’t shared a near-death experience and a full aura meld with both of us can even sense it.>

<Good to know.> That gave us a pretty nice leg up on the assholes. <How are they treating you so far?>

A mental shrug, but underneath it was a bit of fear and humiliation. <Well, they untied me but kept a collar around my neck. It’s full of Outsider energy, so if I try to use any active powers I get myself knocked out with pain. I know because I tried a couple of times.>

<That’s ‘cause I blocked you before I tried. I didn’t want to worry you.>

<Fuck.>

<Ouch! Okay, you need to block your emotions from me, Mark. That outburst of anger you just felt hurt. Like a lot. This connection is pretty intimate, and your anger is painful, so try to keep it down, all right?>

<So I have to hear about you being hurt but I can’t get pissed off because it will hurt you even more?> The universe had a nasty sense of humor.

What followed was one of the weirdest experiences of my life, or that week. It was as if she got behind the wheel of my brain and drove it for me for a while, and in the process she taught me how to build a wall of sorts around my emotions, so I could only let her hear and feel what I wanted her to. <Okay, I think I got it,> I told her.

<Good. So anyways, besides the collar, they had me change into this hospital gown, at least one that laces off to one side rather than the back, so my butt isn’t hanging out, but that’s all I’m wearing. That sucks, but so far they haven’t done anything else. I’m in a plain white room, got a tiny toilet and a very thin mattress on the floor, and that’s about it. How about you?>

<About the same,> I lied, just to see if I could do it while using the emotion blocks.

<Okay,> was all she said, which meant I could lie to her through the mental link. It didn’t make me feel good at all, but I figured there was no point in her knowing I was hanging by my wrists, which was rather painful. I didn’t think I could pull the wool over her eyes if we were talking face to face, though. <So what happens next, Mark?>

<Okay, that makes sense. And then?>

Jesus H. Christ. I was going to have to share all my torture expertise with her. I wasn’t much of an expert, not really, since Cassandra had fed me most of the information I needed, but I’d had to do my share of forceful interrogation over the years, times when Cassandra’s visions weren’t clear enough and I’d had to do my own digging. Most people talked when offered the simple choice between talking and getting beaten to a pulp, but there’d been exceptions.

There’d been the pedophile in Hoboken. He hadn’t wanted to tell me where he’d stashed a six year old, and he had held out for a good while, for reasons I hadn’t cared to delve into. I’d gotten pretty creative towards the end, and I’d found the kid, still alive. Then I’d come back and finished off the asshole. The promise of a quick death if I found the child had been the reason he’d finally given it up.

<Mark?>

Fuck. Okay, emotion block, do your thing. <Yeah. All right, I don’t know what these fuckers’ playbook is like, but everybody uses a similar playbook. They’ll probably try intimidation first. As it turns out, people handle pain better than you’d expect, so the smart players don’t start with pain, unless they’re in a hurry. So they’ll show you stuff they can do to you, and then they’ll try to make you do stuff, to establish dominance over you. When you refuse, and they’re going to push you until you refuse, they’ll hurt you. The goal is to break your spirit, to make you do whatever they tell you to.>

I kept a tight lid on my emotions so I wouldn’t upset her more. <I know. It’s going to be bad, Christine. I’ll be with you every step of the way, all right? One thing is, we Neos can handle a lot of punishment, so unless they’re complete fuckups, you’ll be able to heal from anything they do to you.> I didn’t know how I was going to handle being inside her head while she was being tortured, only that I was going to have to. <Also, they’ll probably try good cop, bad cop first. One of the interrogators will be sympathetic, maybe even nice to you. Watch out for him, he’s going to try to trick you into doing stuff.>

<Okay. I just thought of something else. When I was being kidnapped by the Mob, Cassandra took my mind to Dreamland, and I didn’t have to experience most of what was happening to me in the real world. Maybe I can do that with you?>

<Anyways, worrying about torture isn’t going to get us anywhere. We need to start thinking about escaping.>

<They canceled me out pretty fucking good in Chicago> I replied. One blast of that twisting black energy and every nerve in my body had exploded with agony; my strength had deserted me and I’d gone down for the count.

<Yes. I mean, when they took me down, there were like twenty of them, shooting disruptors at me, all at the same time. I think I could have handled a smaller number, at least long enough to fight back, or run, or something.>

Interesting. Very, very interesting.

<Zero, actually. Baba Yaga sort of mauled me half to death.>

<Yikes.>

Some of what I felt seeped through, because I caught a burst of sorrow from her. <Oh. I’m so sorry about him, Mark.>

<But, Mark. You should have been able to detect her.>

<How?>

<Mark. You don’t have eyes, remember?>

Fucking hell. Fuck it all to hell. I’d gotten so used to having no facial features the knowledge was just background noise.

I’d lost the fight because I hadn’t thought things through. I’d thought I couldn’t feel any worse, and once again I’d been proven wrong.

<Ouch. Mark, stop beating yourself up! There’s no point. There were also a bunch of Ukrainians with disruptors in the area. Even if you’d beaten the Bitch of Pinsk, they’d have mowed you down.>

<Okay, I hear you. Next time, I just might have a little surprise for her.>

Now that was an interesting question. Christine’s theory had given me hope; before hearing it I’d been pretty much convinced we were shit out of luck. I was half-tempted to start fighting the shackles right away, to let all my anger and frustration come out and play. I’d felt my power increasing even over the few frenzied seconds I’d been fighting Baba Yaga. I might just be able to bust out.

Only problem was, when I increased my strength and speed, I’d also started to burn up from the inside out. In the middle of the fight, it hadn’t seemed all that important, but I worried that my Type Two Neo body might not be able to handle the amount of energy I was pouring into it. What happens if you put a jet engine into a regular car? Nothing good, I figured. If push came to shove, though, I’d have to go for it, and hope I didn’t burn out before I did what I had to.

More importantly, when we made our move, it would be for all the marbles, and we’d only have one shot to get it right. I was pretty sure the Ukrainians weren’t going to let me survive once they figured they couldn’t keep me contained. Even worse, that might also apply to Christine. They’d been willing to kill her once already. Win or die. I was probably being chickenshit, but I wasn’t quite ready to roll the dice. I said after a few moments of thought. <We’re only going to get once chance to escape.>

<You’re thinking if we try and fail, they’ll kill us.>

<Yes. Neos that are too dangerous to contain don’t get reprieves. Not in the US, and certainly not in the Ukraine. We either break out or we die.>

<Okay, then. We wait. I’ll play along with them, try to avoid the torture stuff. My Dad told me to bide my time. He probably knew what he was talking about?>

<Yep. It wasn’t quite Lurker the White making his triumphant return from Moira, but it was pretty good. My dreaming life is almost as eventful as my real life.>

She told me all about it. It was quite a story.

It helped pass the time while we waited for the torment to start.

The Freedom Legion

FOB Spearpoint, Guanxi Province, China, March 27, 2013

If you live long enough, you get the feeling that history, even if it doesn’t quite repeat itself, often rhymes.

Olivia O’Brien, code name Artemis, looked at the Forward Operating Base with a detached feeling of deja vu. Some forty-six years before, she’d held her first command in a hill not too far away from this one, during the First Asian War. And here she was, ready to battle the Empire not for the second but the third time. The wheel kept on turning. Maybe ten or twenty years from now she’d be back in China, fighting yet another futile war that achieved nothing but churning out a new generation of casualties, orphans and widows.

Oh, the technology was different. The American unit deployed on the base consisted of elements of the 12^th Marine Mobile Infantry, soldiers in power armor suits supporting fast-moving hover-tanks that fired hyper-velocity rounds from their magnetic railguns, rounds that would kill most Imperial Celestial Warriors with a direct hit. Even the allied forces in-theater were much better armed and equipped than the hapless human soldiers from the First Asian War. The Vietnamese contingent was equipped with blaster rifles purchased from the Dominion, for example. The Chinese Republican Guard regiment’s TOE included laser weapon platoons and multi-stage heavy rocket batteries most Neolympians couldn’t withstand. Humanity had grown more dangerous in the ensuing years.

It still wasn’t enough.

Olivia knew just how quickly the Celestial Warriors could rampage even through a heavily armed encampment such as this. In a matter of seconds, a tumen of ten superbeings could kill most people in the base before the human defenders realized they were under attack. Even now, the best defense against Neos was to send other Neos against them.

Which was where she and her fellow Legionnaires came in.

“They’d have to be crazy to attack,” Larry Graham, code name Swift, said. Her husband and fellow superhero looked just like comic books and magazines portrayed him, his boyish good looks still as sharp and fresh as they’d been when he started, seventy years and half a dozen wars ago. His smile grew a little less certain as she silently looked at him. “Well, they’d have to be. Crazy, I mean. We have thirteen clairvoyants, precogs and telepaths covering this sector. No amount of stealth is going to get through that. We have enough conventional firepower to fry entire Celestial tumens as soon as they peek over the Wall. Not even the Imps are deranged enough to go through this gauntlet. And even if they do, we’ve got three full Neo teams ready to welcome them.”

“You’re right, Larry,” Olivia said, and his smile firmed up. They’d both been working hard at keeping their marriage together even as they dealt with an international crisis of monumental proportions. While she lay in her hospital bed, after the disastrous raid in Hong Kong, Larry had finally confessed everything: the infidelities, the cover-ups, everything. Olivia had confessed her own complicity; she’d known for a good while, suspected long before then, and done nothing about it. Honesty had been a good first step, just as the massive force deployment along the border had been a good first step in dealing with the crisis.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t sure either step was going to be enough.

“They’d have to be crazy to attack, even now, when most of the reinforcements from the US and UN are still in transit. We have deployed enough force to contain any kind of attack they can conceivably launch, although the casualties would be horrendous on both sides. But this whole situation has been insane from the beginning! Why start a conflict when they know they can’t win it?”

“You’re still thinking it’s a setup,” Larry replied. “Even with all the evidence piling up against the Imps.”

“Either it’s a setup, or the Emperor knows something we don’t. I fear it could be those disruptors they used to kill Chasca in Hong Kong.”

“And almost killed you,” Larry said. “Even so, now that we know about them, they aren’t exactly decisive weapons. Their range is limited, for one, and Neos don’t seem to be able to wield them, for another, so their operators are human, which makes them pretty vulnerable.”

“That is true, if those small arms are all they’ve got. What if they have the equivalent of artillery or heavy bombs using that energy?”

“You’re a ray of sunshine tonight, sweetheart,” Larry said. “Daedalus has studied the weapons; he even used a copy of them to take down John, and he’s assured us the devices are almost impossible to scale up. So that’s not what’s really bothering you.”

“Is that so?”

“This is not about the Imps, and not even about me,” he went on, ignoring the growing anger in her voice. He lowered his eyes for a moment. “Just as a quick aside, you know that Aurora Zhang is being redeployed to the Pacific theater, right?”

Olivia nodded, not trusting herself to speak. Aurora had been Larry’s last lover, and their relationship had become far more serious than his previous flings.

“I ended it,” Larry said. “I ended it before I spoke to you, the day after the Hong Kong raid. She understands. We’ll stay out of each other’s way, so that’s that. In any case, this isn’t about us. It’s about John.”

Larry was right. Olivia still hadn’t fully processed the events surrounding the fall of John Clarke: Ultimate, the best of them all, now branded a traitor and a murderer. Not even the fate of Doc Slaughter, allegedly dead at John’s hands, had been a worse shock. John had been like a father to her, later evolving into an elder brother as she grew in experience and confidence. She still refused to believe he could have lost his mind so thoroughly as to commit murder.

“His trial starts today,” she said. “And he still hasn’t regained consciousness.”

Her husband nodded, his own sorrow etched in his face. He and John had been close friends as well. “Daedalus thinks the disruptor hits and Hyperia’s coup the grace may have been more than even John could handle. He thinks the shock to his system might have resulted in brain death, and that he may never wake up.”

“That’s downright preposterous,” Olivia protested. Sure, there’d been cases where Neos had suffered massive injuries and ended up comatose even after their wounds had healed. In some cases they had recovered years or even decades later, so any such sufferer was kept under observation. A few days ago, the Polish Legionnaire code-named Celsius had fallen into one such coma while on assignment near the Chinese border, the result of a near-lethal fight with a Celestial Warrior. The fact remained, however, that no Type Three had ever ended up in a vegetative state; they always recovered from unconsciousness in a matter of hours, or a couple of days at the most.

“Yeah, it sounds like bull to me too, sweetheart, but John is still down and out. Hyperia is fit to be tied. She is keeping all the eggheads in the Atlantic headquarters busy trying to figure out a way to wake John up. If anybody can do it, she can. Or Daedalus. He’s still spending his time overseeing the team working on John.”

“I wish I could be there when he wakes up,” Olivia said.

“You and me both. But the Imps are throwing a war, and that still takes precedence. Speaking of which, we have a meeting at 0800 hours.”

Olivia nodded unhappily. Under the grief and the shock, there was a nagging feeling that she was missing something, something vital. But Larry was right.

They had a war to fight.

Lutsk, Dominion of the Ukraine, March 27, 2013

There were a handful of transshipment points where the Dominion’s restricted commerce with the West flowed through. The city of Lutsk (population 600,000) was one of them, a place where trains laden with Ukrainian grain, industrial machinery and cheap vehicles rolled into Poland and came back with luxury goods, consumer electronics and overprized German cars, among other things.

On that day, those other things included a woman hidden inside a cargo container.

Chastity Baal had arrived to the Dominion.

As she patiently lay in the darkness, acutely aware that a misstep in her plans would lead to the container being opened not by her smuggler contacts, but by the far less friendly Dominion Border Guards, she considered the torturous trail that had led her there.

A number of clues had pointed her in the direction of the Ukraine. They had seemed small at first, insignificant even, the product of coincidence or a desperate attempt to make sense of something that couldn’t be explained. Her superiors in the Freedom Legion had ordered her to abandon her investigation and report for duty in China, where she’d been assigned to a scouting unit.

Chastity had gone AWOL instead. While the punishment for such actions was nowhere near as severe as in the military, she would certainly be suspended, and very likely expelled from the Legion, unless her investigations bore fruit, and possibly even if they did. She smiled wryly at herself and shook her head. She wasn’t particularly worried about that.

What worried her was the accumulating evidence somebody in the Legion had been complicit in the attack on Freedom Island.

It had all started while she helped analyze the data one Kuo Wei-Fang, a Chinese industrialist (and secret Celestial Warrior), had left behind after his daring escape from the Legion and the ROC authorities. While she wasn’t a forensic accountant, she had a personal contact who was (well, he actually was a money launderer, but the skill sets were close enough). Her old friend had pierced through multiple layers of corporate obfuscation, and a couple of pieces of data had popped up along the way.

The first one had raised her suspicions immediately. It appeared that Mr. Kuo had been doing business with the Dominion of the Ukraine. In fact, a few purchase orders showed that some of the components needed to build the flying fortress that had attacked Freedom Island might have come from the Dominion, and not the Empire. The connection was weak, consisting only of a few dates and places, but her instincts told her it was real.

Smithy Industries Inc. had also shown up in the investigation. That link was even more tenuous, but it was there. The multinational corporation had, through several intermediaries, delivered some expensive materials to holdings owned or otherwise controlled by Kuo. And The Smithy’s chief shareholder was its founder, one Daedalus Smith.

Smith. Thinking about her fellow Legionnaire and former lover reminded Chastity of the dagger hidden in a boot sheath. The dagger had been a gift from him; it had allowed her to kill a Celestial Warrior far more powerful than she was. The weapon was powered by a form of dark energy. It was much too similar to the disruptors Kuo’s agents had used to kill a Legionnaire and severely injure another. Chastity had watched the after-action video of the brief but deadly battle over Hong Kong, and the resemblance was undeniable.

She’d stumbled into something inconceivable. Something monstrous.

After giving the matter some thought, she’d decided to follow the Ukrainian angle. If she could uncover evidence Daedalus and the Dominion were working together, she’d have something solid to use against the traitor. The lying, deceitful, goddamned traitor.

She felt the train come to a halt, and spent several tense minutes waiting as its cargo, including the container that had served as her home for the last couple of days, was unloaded unto waiting trailer trucks. She relaxed minutely once her container was in motion again. The Ukrainian Border Guards, had they been alerted to her presence, would have opened the metal box immediately and either shot or arrested her, depending on their mood. Movement meant she was still on the smuggling pipeline.

An hour later, she heard the container door being opened. She recognized the man who walked in: Yevheniy Tyshchenko, an old smuggler, part of the Akula gang. Back in the good old days, Chastity had done business with Yevheniy’s father, and had watched the now dead man’s child grow into a teenager, one who had quickly developed a crush on the adventuress, and, eventually, a middle-aged man who still professed a good deal of affection for her. Normally, Yevheniy would smile widely as soon as he set eyes on her. Today, the smile was nowhere to be seen, replaced instead by a frowning, worried expression.

“What’s wrong, Yev?” she asked right away. A glance past the man showed her they were in one of the smuggler’s many warehouses, on the outskirts of Lutsk. Normally, the place would be crowded by men, busily unloading the mostly illegal products hidden in the containers. At the moment, she could see nobody besides Yevheniy; the building was dark and deserted.

“Trouble, Miss Baal. Much trouble.”

Trouble could mean failure and death. It could also mean an opportunity.

Chastity took Yev’s hand and exited the container to find out which kind of trouble it was.

Chapter Three

Hunters and Hunted

New York City, New York/Chicago, Illinois, March 27, 2013

Mr. Night wasn’t a happy camper.

His lopsided smile didn’t waver, of course. That was a fixed part of his face, even the borrowed face of the hairy Cossack he’d possessed after losing his original body, and did no more reflect his mood than the shape of his body displayed what he’d become, what he truly was.

He stumbled from the doorway between places and collapsed face down on a deserted alley, the first place he’d been able to reach after his unfortunate excursion into the realms of deep space. “It burns,” he said. “It burns, it burns so very much.”

Janus had done that to him. The black man had burned through Mr. Night’s defenses, despite his prodigious energy expenditures to prevent such unfortunate occurrence, and the ensuing damage had been too much to endure. He thought he might have held Janus long enough for his masters to reach the powerful hero, reach and infect him, much as Mr. Night had once been infected, but he wasn’t sure. That bothered him almost as much as the agony that coursed through his body, as the nasty fires of Creation seared his flesh and the congealed shadows and hatred that now served as his soul. Mr. Night prided himself on his certainties. Even when he was wrong, he was always certain about how to go on and correct his mistakes.

Not this time. He’d gambled, chosen poorly, and possibly failed.

He should have gone for the girl, instead of leaving her behind to die (And had she died? He also didn’t know that). But her inner light was so bright, so fierce that he’d been afraid to touch her, and Janus had literally thrown himself at him. The black man’s power rivalled Ultimate’s, and if Mr. Night could take over that power, if he could replace Medved’s rapidly-failing body with that of the living god of doorways, he would be in an unassailable position.

Instead, he was alone in an alley in New York, puking up blood, his hair falling off in clumps. His new body was dying. He’d pushed it too much; the Outsiders were stingy with their energies, and he’d used more than his share, and now his inner contradictions were eating him alive. He wasn’t long for this world. That prospect didn’t particularly bother him; he despised the world, despised the universe itself, and longed for its destruction. But dying without completing his masters’ directives bothered him a great deal, not least because there would be consequences for that failure.

“Burns…”

The pain faded somewhat. It wasn’t gone completely, and would be with him until he gave up Medved’s body, but Mr. Night found he could function once again. He stood up, dusted himself off, traveled to Chicago and after a short walk made it to his office. His dead but dedicated receptionist was at her desk. Wanda was getting definitely ripe and her skin had acquired an unsightly gray pallor; undeath was hard on a girl’s complexion. She still dutifully reported Mr. Night had received no less than six calls from his putative employers. Mr. Night thanked her and walked into his private office.

The sigils in the office provided some refreshment. He let his master’s energies flow into him, healing his flesh. The damage to his borrowed body slowed down. His time within Medved’s meaty frame was still limited, but it would last for some weeks, maybe months, not hours as he’d feared, as long as he didn’t exert himself overmuch. There was much he could do in that time. He thanked his masters for their blessings.

The fools of this universe called them Outsiders, implying they were unwelcome invaders. His masters called themselves Survivors, however. Their universe had been torn asunder to make place for this one, and they simply wanted to return the favor.

Time to get back to work. Mr. Night checked his messages. Daedalus Smith’s voice mails had become increasingly shrill, especially after he discovered the girl had been captured in the Ukraine. That was rather unfortunate, since the Tsar had no love for Mr. Night and would most certainly not welcome him there. Still, it wouldn’t be the first time or place Mr. Night had shown up uninvited. It might behoove him to assist Mr. Smith in his endeavors, to ensure the most propitious results. The other messages reported that Lady Shi had betrayed them, and accused Mr. Night of being responsible, which was somewhat accurate. He probably shouldn’t have indulged in his urge to inflict pain for its own sake. Oh, bother.

Two messages were from one Thaddeus Twist, multibillionaire leader of the Humanity Foundation, a secret conspiracy dedicated to the elimination of the Neolympian menace. Twist needed the definite location of the Source in New York City. Mr. Night called back, went straight to voice mail – Twist was either too busy to answer the call, or being petty – and left a message confirming the Source was beneath New York City, a mere hundred feet under Central Park. He provided precise – and utterly useless – coordinates. At this point, Twist’s plan was mostly irrelevant, but the death and destruction that would result from its implementation would help spread chaos and disorder, which were their own reward.

Moving on. He made another call. Daedalus Smith answered in person. “Where the hell were you, Night?”

“I was occupied dealing with Janus. I fear he may have eluded me, but now I’m back and ready to do my duty, Mr. Smith, sir.”

“Cut the crap. You got my messages. You fucked up, and now the girl is with the Iron Tsar. I’m going to have to go the Ukraine and try to fix this mess.”

“If you allow it, I would like to accompany you, sir. I believe I can be of some use in this endeavor.”

“Nice try, chump. The Tsar will have you shot on sight.”

“I’ve no doubt he would do so, were you to introduce me as your loyal friend Mr. Night. But if you bring along the former Hero of the Revolution Medved as your bodyguard, he might be more welcoming.”

There was a pause at the other end before Daedalus replied. “Do you think you can pull that off? You normally reek of dark energy.”

“It will take some effort, but I can hide my true self under the aura of our dearly departed Bear. I can even use some of his memories to produce a passable simile of his normal demeanor and vocal patterns.”

“If you screw up, we’ll have to fight our way out of the Dominion. There are anti-teleport wards all over the damn country, so good luck trying to gate out. We’ll have to walk out. Chances are we won’t.”

“To quote a wise man: ‘He fears his fate too much, or his deserts are small…’”

“Yeah, yeah, put fate to the touch, blah blah. Nice sentiment, until it’s your balls on the wall, win or lose it all. Bah. All right, Night, it’s on. We leave in less than forty-eight hours. Will be in touch.” He hung up.

Things were going to get very interesting.

Christine Dark

Kiev, Dominion of the Ukraine, March 27, 2013

Her empathy was still at a very low ebb, so she heard the guards coming before she sensed them. <Mark, they’re here.>

Four armed men in gray and black uniforms walked in. Three of them were armed with disruptors; they aimed them at her and gestured towards the wall farthest from the entrance. She stood on the spot they indicated, and a man and a woman entered the cell.

The man was, well, rotund, a pretty big guy, and probably had been body-shamed for it. His head was oversized, and his face was, well, deformed, uh, otherwise-shaped. His eyes were different colors, one green, one solid red, the red one being about four times bigger than the other and a good inch or two lower in the face. The side with the red eye looked like melted wax. He regarded Christine with curiosity and more than a little lust, her empathy reported. Yikes.

The woman was very beautiful, and appeared to be in her late teens, with long jet-black hair and deep blue eyes, prettier than her roommate Sophie’s and certainly prettier than Christine’s own washed-out pale gray-blue peepers. She was wearing a gorgeous lavender gown and matching slippers, and had an amazeballs pearl and rubies necklace, among assorted other fine bling. She looked like a fairy-tale princess, ready to star in her own Disney animated feature.

Except for her aura. Her aura definitely wasn’t Disney feature material. It belonged in a David Cronenberg-Rob Zombie collaboration. Oh, so ugly. It was worse than Kestrel’s, worse than Lady Shi’s even, and she’d been a murderous sociopath with a heart of stone. Only Mr. Night’s aura had been worse than this.

<Okay. Stay cool. And don’t call her Baby Yaga, or Babaloo, or Babs. I don’t think she’d appreciate it.>

One more guard walked in, pushing a wheelchair. A wheelchair with strategically-placed straps for wrists, legs, chest and neck.

The guy with the mismatched eyes spoke. “She will sit on the chair now.” Between the funky German accent and his referring to her in the third person, Christine didn’t realize he was talking to her at first, and she didn’t do anything for a second or two, which was too long to suit him. He gestured to one of the guards, and he shot her in the leg.

The pain was immediate and crippling. She ended up on her hands and knees, blinking tears out of her eyes.

<Christine!>

She tried to block Mark from her feelings, but some of the agony must have seeped through. <I’m okay,> she lied.

“She will sit now!”

She sat down, and the guards tightened the straps on her. The one around her neck, right on top the disruptor collar, made it hard to breathe. To keep herself from having a panic attack, Christine described to Mark what they were doing, trying to sound cool and detached.

The cool and detached stuff came to an abrupt halt when weird-eye stepped over and slapped her face, hard. One, two, three slaps. Her face stung and she had to fight not to start crying.

“She will obey all commands, and she will not hesitate. Is that understood?”

“Yes.” She was humiliated, terrified, mortified, and sooo very pissed off. Slappy was going to regret laying hands on her.

<That’s Geistesblitz, or the Mind, although the actual translation is more like Brainstorm than the Mind,> Mark said when she described the guy.

A brief burst of rage followed that, but Mark clamped it down so it didn’t hurt her much. <Fucker. It’s all part of the process, Christine. Pain, humiliation. Don’t let it get to you.>

<Um, ‘kay.>

While she’d been having her mental conversation, the psychopathic fairy princess had been talking in Ukrainian with Slappy Bad-Eye. He turned back to her. “The Lady says you are comely, for an American; they are usually too fat for her taste. She adds that if you are cooperative, she may let you share her bed with the Iron Tsar.”

“Uh, thanks?”

<Great, I think Baby Yaga just asked me out on a threesome.>

Bi-Clops barked an order in Ukrainian, and they all walked out, except Christine, who was wheeled out. The whole place looked like a hospital, clean and institutional-like, with white walls and tiled floors. There were drains every few feet, though, and she didn’t think they were there in case the roof started leaking. She kept sending an ongoing report to Mark, which she found helped relax her. Forcing herself to pay attention to her surroundings was a lot better than wondering what they were going to do to her.

Mark said. <Right now you’re almost on top of my cell.>

<Yeah, I’ve got your location, too. That will really come in handy if one of us manages to break out.>

<That’s right. And we will, soon.>

The Ukrainian Welcoming Committee took her to a large lab room. The Red Cube of Doom was there, the thing her father had called the Codex. The symbol-covered rock was floating in the air, suspended in a force field. Several guys in lab coats over green uniforms were aiming assorted devices at it.

Christine felt a surprising burst of anger at the sight. Hey! That’s my cube! Leggo my Codex, d-bags!

<Mark, they’ve got the Codex!>

<It’s okay. According to your father, they can’t use it unless you let them right?>

<Jeez, you actually used ‘piss off’ in a sentence. Such language.>

“Why is she smiling?” Crazy Eye said, and Christine realized she’d grinned in real life. Not good.

“Just glad to see the Codex is in one piece,” she replied.

“So she knows what it is.”

“Yes.”

“She will tell us what it is.”

It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose; I get it, Mr. Psycho A-hole. Out loud: “The Codex is, uh, a repository of knowledge, like the Encyclopedia Britannica, only bigger.”

“Where does it come from?”

“I don’t know for sure. I think it’s a gift from the same aliens who gave us our super-powers.”

Slappy translated her words for the benefit of Lady Yaga. Christine found herself mildly miffed that one of the Big Bads didn’t speak English, then reproached herself for her parochialism. Cultural supremacist much? None of that was important now, of course.

<Everything okay?> Mark asked her.

The Mind turned back to her. “We have tried to access the Codex, and failed. The object stubbornly resistant to any form of analysis and probing remains. Even our industrial lasers cut into it cannot. Its composition cannot be determined. She will make it available for study.”

“Okay, I’ll try.”

“No try. She will do.”

Eff you, Yoda. “Okay. I need to touch it, though.”

That request sparked another discussion in Ukrainian. <They want me to open the Codex for them. I don’t even know if I can open it, or make it accessible, or whatever.>

<Shit. Got nothing, other than don’t let them get control over it.>

Before she could come up with an answer, Baba Yaga walked up to her wheelchair and sat on Christine’s lap. She was very heavy for a woman her size and body type; her weight pressed down uncomfortably on Christine’s thighs. The Bitch of Pinsk put her arms around her and leaned close, way close, until their noses were almost touching. Very invasive of her personal space. At least her breath was minty-fresh.

<Oh, God, she’s right in my face.>

<Intimidation. Just play along.>

Baba Yaga wagged a finger in Christine’s face. The finger changed in between wags, becoming longer and thicker. The nail on its end grew into a black talon, at least three inches long. It moved towards her face. Oh, no, no. She tried to move her head, but the straps held her in place.

It hurt. It wasn’t a deep cut, but the pain as the talon sliced into the skin of her left cheek, right below her eye, was sharp and agonizing.

<She cut my face!> Blood was dripping down her cheek, her blood, mixing in with the tears she couldn’t help shedding.

<It will heal. You won’t even have a scar. Don’t dwell on it or it will hurt worse.> Mark sounded cool and dispassionate, and somehow the seemingly unsympathetic words helped her keep control over herself.

“The Lady will closely watch during the process. Any attempt to use the Codex in an unapproved manner punished will be.”

Christine blinked away the tears and looked past the grinning bitch sitting on her lap; out of the corner of her eye she saw Baba Yaga licking the blood off her mutant finger. Oh, God. “I get it. I won’t try anything, okay?”

“That is good.” More orders, and one of the flunkies in the lab coats turned off the force field and picked up the red cube.

“Open the left hand.” She did, and the flunky put the Codex in it. She clutched at it.

What if nothing happens? What will they do to me if nothing happens?

She shouldn’t have worried.

Something happened, all right.

The Freedom Legion

Freedom Island, Caribbean Sea, March 27, 2013

The trial was a farce pretty much from the start. Alessandra Fiori, code name Hyperia, watched the proceedings until the temptation to just barge in there and start bouncing people off the walls grew dangerously strong, after which she switched off the screen and took a break.

They were going to railroad John into a quickie execution, and there was nothing she could do about it.

John’s defense team, the senior partners of Dent, Nelson, and Walters, Attorneys at Law, had done their best. They’d asked for a continuance on the grounds that John was still unable to assist in his own defense, and been denied. Another continuance request to extend the discovery process had also been shot down by the Honorable Judge Cora Melendez from the Fourth Circuit Court. This wasn’t the first US trial held in Freedom Island; the US Embassy on the island had its own courtroom just for this kind of situation. Some Neos were deemed too dangerous to be held even in the Pyramid, the Arizona maximum security prison where most parahumans being tried on federal charges usually spent their time before their trials. The Pyramid’s warden had declared he couldn’t guarantee his facility could contain Ultimate, so the trial would take place in Freedom Island.

They’d probably carry out the sentence on the island as well. Ali had been told the US Executioner General was on his way already, which spoke volumes about the expected outcome of the trial.

Things were going crazy all over the world. There were demonstrations and vigils happening in most cities in the US and in several places elsewhere, about two-thirds of them in support of Ultimate and the rest against, and there’d been plenty of nasty tussles between the two groups. Freedom Island, ironically enough, did not allow demonstrations anywhere except on specially designated Public Gathering Zones, a ways away from the tourists attractions and main buildings. People trying to start trouble elsewhere had been quickly subdued and kicked off the island.

They probably should shut down travel for the duration. They had done so for about a week after the attack that had started this mess, but the Council had decided to reopen the tourist trade just a couple of days before the trial started. That had been one contentious chat: Ali had argued strongly against the idea, but she’d been shut down by the others. General Xu had pointedly reminded her she was there only as Acting Councilor because Doc Slaughter had seen fit to nominate her as his temporary successor, and her opinions simply didn’t carry as much weight as that of actually elected Council members. The consensus had been to reopen Freedom Island, mostly as a show of confidence to the world. Only Ali and Daedalus Smith had voted against.

Daedalus. He’d been monitoring John’s condition closely. Monitoring, or controlling? She couldn’t voice her suspicions, though, not without risking ending up like Doc or John. If someone was truly behind this mess, they could get to anybody. If she couldn’t even trust what she’d seen with her own eyes – John tearing Doc’s suit apart after beheading the man inside – she couldn’t trust anybody or anything.

The worst part was, she didn’t have any close friends in the Island. Laura Herschel, her manager and confidant, had been murdered in 2010; she’d gotten a new manager, but a new best friend wasn’t so easily replaced. Under her gregarious personality, Ali rarely got close to other people. She’d happily drink and hang out with her fellow Legionnaires, and her reputation as the life of the party was well-deserved, but she rarely shared anything important with them. The one person she’d let all the way in, Jason Merrill, a.k.a. Mesmer, was also dead, killed during the attack on the Island, and they’d been estranged long before that.

She didn’t know what to do, only that she had to do something.

Her wrist-comp rang, the designated ring-tone indicating the call was coming from her personal number. Ali frowned. Only two people had that number. The two dead people she’d just been thinking about, as a matter of fact. Had Jason’s widow decided to dial every number in his directory? If so, that was going to be one awful call. Reluctantly, Ali answered.

The woman that appeared on the screen looked nothing like Mrs. Merrill, who could have run for Miss Sweden; the caller was in her mid-forties, rail thin, with a long, horsey face framed by a pixie cut. She looked scared. “Miss Hyperia?”

“That’s me. How did you get this number?”

“Uh, it’s a long story. I’m on the Island and I need to see you, but, uh, nobody’s supposed to see us together.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He’s telling me to say this: ‘Sandy: On our first date, I swore to you I’d keep the bullshit down to a minimum; and on our last day together, you told me that we don’t turn on our own.’”

Ali froze. The woman on the other end was saying things only Jason Merrill could have known.

“He’s inside my head,” the woman said. “Well, he’s inside Comatown.”

Comatown was a collective mental construct created almost fifty years ago when several people had become linked in a psychic gestalt, courtesy of a Neo-developed drug named Dreamtime. Jason had been monitoring Comatown on and off for decades. Had he managed to transfer his mind there after he was killed? The woman’s words seemed like damn good proof of it.

“When and where?’ Ali asked.

“He says meet us at your old favorite spot, the one the cameras don’t cover.”

Ali knew exactly what the woman was talking about. “I’ll be there.”

* * *

The Old Archives were six floors underground, beneath the former Administration Building, built back in the early Fifties. The building was now an office annex, and the archive rooms had fallen into disuse. The contents of their dust-covered file cabinets had long been transferred into electronic formats, but bureaucratic inertia had kept the room intact. Nobody was eager to work so deep underground, so nobody came there. The place was locked, but its security door only had an old-school keypad and hadn’t been upgraded with biometric recognition systems. That explained how the woman was already waiting there for Ali. If she was in contact with Jason, she would have been able to enter his ID code; the code wouldn’t be good for much longer now that he was dead, but deactivating the IDs of deceased personnel was way down the list of things that needed doing in the aftermath of the attack.

The woman had turned on the lights, revealing seemingly endless rows of file cabinets. The sight brought back fond memories for Ali. At first, dating Jason had been against the rules: she’d been a probationary member at the time, and fraternization between full members and probies was strictly forbidden. They’d had to sneak around for a couple of years until she became a full member, and had enjoyed it so much they’d kept sneaking around for a while later. Getting it on between the dusty file cabinets and bookshelves had felt like doing it in a library, adding spice to their lovemaking. The vaguely moldy smell brought back pleasant images mixed in with a burst of painful nostalgia for those simpler times. Things had changed a great deal since then.

“Very well, lady,” Ali told the stranger. “You got me here. Time to explain yourself.”

“My name is Kiera Henderson. I took Dreamtime back in ‘71,” the woman explained. “I was fifteen, trying to be hip. I got off lightly; no major side effects, except for the occasional flashback, until forty years later, when I turned Neo. Late bloomer, that’s me. I guess I’m going to look fifty-five for the rest of my life.”

“You look a good ten years younger than that, if that’s any consolation,” Ali said.

“Thanks. Anyway, I’d been linked to Comatown all this time; basically the mental construct runs on the minds of everyone who ever took Dreamtime, and apparently their children as well. But when I got my powers I discovered I could interact with it; that’s my Neo power, the ability to communicate with a mental gestalt controlled by a handful of crazy hepsters. Truly awesome. Anyway, Jason’s mind just joined their little collective, and he was insistent I travel to Freedom Island, at my own expense no less, and get in touch with you.”

“I’ll be happy to reimburse you for your expenses,” Ali replied. “Is there any way I can talk directly to Jason?”

“He says I can let your mind enter Comatown, because you’ve been there before.” That had been one insane mind-trip, courtesy of a murderous Neo, during the rather eventful HeroiCon of 2010. Ali wasn’t eager to go back there, but this had to be important. She was sure Jason wasn’t doing all of this just so Ali would update his Facebook page for him.

“All right, let’s do it.”

“Very well. Just lay down and I’ll do the rest.”

Ali did as instructed and Kiera knelt behind her head. Her hands touched Ali’s temples, and she felt a slight tingling sensation; a few seconds later, she was elsewhere, or at least her mind was.

Jason was waiting for her in their old apartment in Legion Hall, back when they’d been a couple. The living room looked just like it had in the 1990s, cozy mismatched furniture and haphazard decorations – neither of them had been gifted with any skill at interior design. A Dizzy Gillespie poster on a wall clashed badly with a traditional Thai sculpture in front of it. Jason also looked the same, a tall slender man with a mop of unruly dirty-blonde hair over his head, his eyes hidden behind thick goggles designed to keep his telepathic probes from violating the minds of anyone he happened to look at. His grin when he saw her was also the same, and it elicited a burst of regret that made her eyes mist over.

“Hello, Sandy.” Jason had been the only person who called her Sandy instead of Ali or Alessandra.

“Jase. I’m so sorry.”

“I appreciate the sentiment, but there’s no time for that right now. The attack on the Island wasn’t what killed me, Sandy. I was murdered. My cochlear implants blew up; that’s what tore my head off. I know all of this because my disembodied soul got a good look at myself before I started to head towards the afterlife, or oblivion or whatever happens to us when we die. Luckily I remembered Comatown and barely managed to make it there. Mouse and the merry gang of hepsters that run the place weren’t thrilled to have me, even after all these years, but they let me stay. The point is…”

“Somebody booby-trapped your implants,” Ali finished for him. “And you can’t be the only one.”

“Sandy, I think everybody’s implants have bombs in them. Including yours, which is why I wanted to meet you discreetly. If whoever did this twigs that you’re onto him, your head will blow up too.”

“I don’t think they could have snuck up a large enough charge inside my head to kill me,” Ali replied.

“Do you want to find out the hard way?”

She shook her head. “It’s got to be Daedalus. I don’t remember who was in charge of the last cochlear implant upgrade back in ‘03, but I’m sure it was either Daedalus or Doc Slaughter, and Doc Slaughter is…”

“Dead,” Jason said. “Kiera told me Doc’s head got torn off by John – but maybe it blew up instead.”

“Oh my God. Daedalus killed Doc. Framed John. Must have behind the attack on Freedom Island. But why?”

“No idea. The smirking bastard must have his reasons, but do they even matter right now? We have to stop him.”

Ali finally had some answers. What she didn’t have was a clue of what to do next.

Chapter Four

The Great Escape

Staten Island, New York, March 27, 2013

“We are going to die soon,” the Lurker said. Kenneth Slaughter nodded in agreement.

They’d found it was easier to communicate with each other by creating a mental construct, in this case an illusionary mash-up of the Lurker’s old lair beneath Central Park and Kenneth’s workshop in Freedom Island. Bit and pieces of both locales mingled liberally inside the construct, providing an environment that was both familiar and oddly disturbing. Given their situation, ‘oddly disturbing’ might as well be the descriptor for their new normalcy.

“At least our Neolympian abilities seem to be resurfacing,” Kenneth said. As they slept, their shared body had fully recovered from its post-decanting weakened state. The body was still gaunt, but the consumption of several pounds of food would deal with that problem. Brunch would be served in twenty minutes, so that wouldn’t be a problem for much longer.

“Our minds, however, are not improving,” Damon Trent replied. “I’ve started to ‘remember’ things that never happened to me. My father, for example, was never murdered over some mining dispute in South America. Nor did I win the Orteig Prize in 1925 by flying from New York to Paris; in 1925 I was in Asia. Having two sets of memories for the same stretch of time is maddening.”

“Yes, I am having the same problem,” Kenneth said. His new memories were far more troubling, however. The Lurker had been a stone-cold killer, very much unlike Kenneth, who had long labored to use non-lethal means to subdue evildoers. The delight with which Damon Trent had dispatched his targets was painful to experience, and they were becoming part of his memories, inspiring feelings of guilt over things he’d never done. “Our minds may be melding into one.”

“I’m a fragment of a whole,” Damon mused. “Your mind, on the other hand, is complete. You will probably end up subsuming mine.” He laughed bitterly. “You’ll have precious little joy from my memories, I promise you that.”

“I don’t think either of our personalities will survive the merging intact. We’ll become something else. Somebody else,” Kenneth concluded. It appeared he hadn’t truly escaped death after all.

“We’ll see. It would have been nice to have a good night’s rest, but I trust the noise from the other guest bedroom bothered you as much as it did me.”

Kenneth nodded. “I never expected Condor to have such… extreme tastes.”

“The boy has a great deal of pent-up rage, and his woman is worse. Better they try to work it off in the bedroom than out in the streets. I wish they’d been quieter, though.”

“In any case, I hope they are up for this undertaking.”

“They will be. We all have to be. We have to assist my daughter and stop Daedalus Smith. The fool thinks he is saving the world, you know.”

“Yes. He committed all sorts of crimes out of the best of intentions. And now I will have to betray the Legion and put my trust in one of its deadliest enemies, and an unexpectedly perverted gang of vigilantes, for much the same reasons. What’s the difference, then, between us?”

“Intentions mean nothing, Man of Brass. In the end, only results matter.”

* * *

Brunch was prepared and served by a pair of robot servants. The automatons could pass for human at first glance, if one didn’t look closely at their rubber skins or engage them in conversation for more than minute or so; they subroutines were rather limited.

The Lurker-Slaughter clone glared at Kyle from the other side of the table. He dipped his head in silent apology. They had gotten much too loud last night; he and Melanie and Lady Shi. There’d been a bit too much violence in their sex, and even in the large house the noises they’d made had probably bothered everyone else. Kyle should have insisted in spending the night back at his mansion in the Catskills, but in the end everyone had decided to stick together at one location, for security’s sake.

Neither Melanie nor Lady Shi looked at all apologetic. Everybody should count himself lucky to have only heard and not seen the things those two had done to each other, or the damage they’d inflicted on the guest room. Kyle was going to have to write a rather large check to replace the furniture they’d wrecked. He felt bad, but he’d been too wired after the long night of planning to do anything else. He’d needed to burn off the pent up energy.

In any case, nobody complained out loud about it. Instead, talk turned to more important things.

“I’ve been monitoring the Dominion’s military and security channels,” Hades 2.0 reported. “Several Border Guard detachments were sent to the Pripet Marshes yesterday, but they have been reassigned to an unnamed facility on the outskirts of Kiev. They are being very circumspect, and their encryption is almost as good as they think it is, but I was able to crack it. They have captured someone of great importance, and are taking strong measures to keep their new captives secure.”

“Christine and Face, and I guess Father Alex as well” Kyle said. “It’s got to be them.” Face-Off had been sending brief heavily-encrypted messages every day, reporting their progress. His last message had been well over twenty-four hours ago, claiming they were still wandering the Pripet Marshes. He’d been overdue for a new message, and Kyle had feared the worst. “The Dominion has them, then.”

“I believe so, yes,” Hades said. “Does this change anything?”

“Rescuing my daughter is essential,” the Lurker said through the other Hades’ lips. “But we will need help.”

“Which means breaking out Ultimate,” Kyle concluded. “This just makes getting him out soon all the more important.”

“Given that we have Doc Slaughter’s memories and knowledge of the Legion’s security dispositions, along with our collective capabilities, I’m confident we can save the Greatest American Hero,” Hades 2.0 said with a wry smile. “My progenitor must be rolling over in his grave at the very thought of my helping rescue his nemesis. I find that oddly comforting.”

“I have outlined a tentative plan,” Doc Slaughter said. “We can launch the breakout in twenty-four hours.” He went on to explain his plan. Kyle and Hades both had some useful suggestions, and by the time brunch was over they had a plan.

Soon they’d get to find how good it really was.

Christine Dark

Kiev, Dominion of the Ukraine, March 27, 2014

There was an earth-shattering kaboom, and then things got really intense.

Christine was vaguely aware that Baba Yaga had been thrown off her lap and into the nearest wall. Her perspective shifted wildly; she was no longer strapped to a wheelchair in a lab. Even the massive burst of pain as the disruptor collar let her have it was something distant and unimportant. Her consciousness had stepped away from her body, and she was inside the Codex, a search engine whose database was the universe itself.

Holy crap, it’s full of stars!

Not just stars; the little dots of light swirling around her were galaxies, untold number of galaxies, and as she looked at them they changed and spiraled towards a central point as if someone had flushed a cosmic toilet bowl and finally coalesced into the Monoblock. She’d seen this before, the first time she’d held the Codex, but this time the movie was running backwards, and for one instant she was able to catch a glimpse of the moments before the Big Bang, and in it she saw – perceived, actually, as her eyes were simply not built to see that kind of thing – the Mono-Mind. God, one might say, although the term was woefully incomplete. There was a Word for She-He-They-It That Came Before, a Word that also meant She-He-It That Was Born At the End, and she realized that the Universal Timeline was not a straight line but a circle; the End Begat the Beginning, and vice-freaking-versa. The sentient species of the universe became God, and God in return created the universe and all the sentient species within it.

The circle was seemingly foreordained and inevitable, but in reality was fragile and contingent. It could be cut; it could be derailed. The Outsiders were nibbling at it, like that big snake of Norse mythology nibbling at the roots of the World Tree. The circle could be broken, and everything within it could vanish like a popped bubble, never having existed.

It was too big, too much. She could spend lifetimes just examining the ramifications of what she had gleaned, and meanwhile things were going to hell in the real world, which might just be a miniscule part of the whole but in its own way just as important as the whole. All for one, one for all, a whole in one and don’t be an a-hole.

Last time she’d done the cosmic awareness thingy, she’d been so engrossed by it she’d missed a guy with a light saber about to chop her up. This time she was able to pull back. Out in the real world, several soldiers were hosing her down with disruptor streams, adding their power to the disruptor collar – and she was standing up to the punishment. Her shield was back, and it was keeping the disruptors at bay, even the one around her neck. They were like garden hoses trying to douse a five-alarm fire. In the immortal words of the sheriff dude in Jaws, they were going to need a bigger boat.

In her mind’s eye, she saw a search bar, and two buttons: Google Search and I’m Feeling Lucky. She didn’t have a lot of time before they shut her down, so she typed one word:

POWER.

That turned out to be something of a mistake.

In the real world, that Google search produced 900 million results: that knowledge appeared in her mind, along with many, many other things. In the Codex, the first entry was the Word for Power. It was a vast concept that contained multitudes, too vast for her to grasp in the short time she had. A shock of pure meaning flooded into her mind, and it was like trying to have a drink by putting her mouth to an open fire hydrant; her connection with the Source became overwhelmed, and she had to shut it down before she drowned in it.

She was back in the real world. At some point her wheelchair had fallen on her side, and the pain as multiple disruptor streams broke through her defenses and hit her was overwhelming. It was worse than when she’d healed Mark.

<Christine!> Mark shouted.

<Dreamland! Meet me in Dreamland!>

Yes! She pushed through the pain, and after a horrible moment where she almost slipped and collapsed under the agony, Christine leaped away from reality once again. It was still there, the whole-body toothache hadn’t gone away completely, but it was distant, muted, and very much more bearable. She wasn’t in the lab room where the disruptors were burning every nerve ending in her body, she was in her old room at her mother’s house, the room with the Sailor Moon poster and the ancient desktop computer on her desk.

Mark was there as well.

His face was on.

It was the face of the sixteen year old kid whose Neo powers had manifested while being beaten to death. He looked young and vulnerable, but his eyes were older, worn with age and experience; his eyes hadn’t been sixteen for a long time. It was a beautiful face, but also sad, giving her a glimpse of the person he could have been if all the bad things in his life hadn’t happened. She fell in love with that face.

He glanced around with interest before sitting on the bed next to her. “Nice digs,” he said. “I didn’t realize you were partial to pajamas,” he added, and she realized she was wearing her Hello Kitty bedtime outfit yet again. Embarrassing.

“Not really,” she said. “Not anymore. I…” A new type of agony flared up, silencing her. She felt her right eye break, and the pain was like a spike driving through her head, and even in Dreamland, it was intense enough she screamed.

Mark was holding her. “Mark, I think, she, she put out my eye!” Out in the real world, blood and other stuff was running down her cheek, where talons had torn into her face. She was being kicked and punched as well, but those aches were nothing compared to what’d happened to her eye.

“Guess it’s time to break out, then,” he said.

“Wait!” It was hard to think with the horrible pain in her eye, but she forced herself to do it. The beating had stopped; despite the waves of agony coursing through her, she forced herself to pay attention. Baba Yaga was arguing with the Mind; if she only could understand what they were saying…

“… stand aside or die beside her,” Baba Yaga said, and Christine understood the words perfectly. It had to be the Codex’s work, she decided.

“She has been subdued,” the Mind replied, only a slight wavering in his voice betraying how scared he was. “Our lord and master is on his way here. Do you think he will approve of your killing the girl now?”

“You told him? You little German cockroach, I should crush you where you stand!”

“I did my duty. You will do yours. The girl has been punished. We will double the guard detail and the number of disruptor restraints. Our instruments were able to capture some of the input from the Codex, and we’ve obtained an incredible amount of data. That alone made this experiment a worthwhile one.”

“She must die. She’s too dangerous, and unpredictable, and I want her to die. I want to finish ripping her face off.”

“I’m sure you’ll get your chance, my Lady. But it won’t be today.”

Christine pulled away and returned to Dreamland. Mark was holding her, and she could feel he was about ready to break free or die trying. “It’s okay,” she said. “They’re not going to kill me. Not right now, at least. Baby Yaga just cut me a little and took out an eye. Guess my Armageddon Girl costume will need a matching eye-patch.” She tried to grin but couldn’t stifle a sob instead.

“Your eye will grow back,” Mark said. “Eyes heal very fast even in normal humans, let alone Neos; your average Neo can grow an eyeball in a matter of days. You’ll probably get it back in a few hours, provided they don’t keep zapping you with disruptors. It’s going to hurt like blazes, though, or so I’m told.”

“Oh, thank God. Not about the hurting part, but…”

“I know. I love your eyes, too. But I’d love you with an eye-patch or no eyes at all.”

“You say the sweetest things, Marky.”

“In dismemberment and in health and all that.”

“You’d better not be proposing. Not in Dreamland and not while I’m wearing Hello Kitty pajamas.”

Mark grinned and shook his head. “That’d be a little premature, not to mention inappropriate. We need to get out before you find out exactly how many body parts you can grow back.”

“Again, sweetest things.”

“Just keeping an eye on the ball.”

She actually laughed at that, despite the pain. “You dick!”

“Sorry, couldn’t resist.” There was pain behind the gallows humor, seeping past his emotion blocks. Her suffering was hurting him almost as much as her.

“The Iron Tsar himself is coming down to see me, by the way.”

“Don’t forget to curtsy and call him His Highness, then.”

“I also learned a couple more things from the Codex, including conversational Ukrainian. I think they might help us escape.”

“Whenever you think you’re ready, say the word and we’ll make our move.”

Christine almost suggested they did it right now, but quickly reconsidered. The disruptors had done a number on her, she was blind in one eye and the Iron Tsar, who had once fought Ultimate to a standstill, was heading her way. It was about the worst time to do anything.

“Not now, but soon,” she said.

Mark nodded. “Soon.” He made the word sound like a death sentence.

She hoped it wouldn’t be their own.

* * *

Christine couldn’t stay in Dreamland forever, much as she wanted to. For one, the Big Bads might notice she wasn’t all there, and for another she sensed that if she spent too much time away from reality, her body would start to deteriorate. She’d almost died once before, courtesy of a mind-trip alongside a miserable little d-bag who called himself the First.

So, she’d said see-ya-later to Mark and returned to the Real Crappy World.

The pain in her gouged eye was a dull throb by now, but under it was a steady itching that made her want to claw at her eye socket. Luckily for her, she didn’t have to resist the urge, because she couldn’t reach anything with her hands. At some point while she was astral-traveling, they had strapped her to an x-shaped contraption. Her arms and legs were extended up and shackled with multiple disruptor restraints, their Outsider energy crackling and making the skin around her wrists and ankles tingle painfully just by their proximity. The rest of her body was bruised and battered. Back when she’d been human, Christine had bruised like a peach; she couldn’t imagine what colors she’d be turning about now.

She’d never been in this much pain and discomfort, even counting her time as a sorta-superhero. So far, her stay on Earth Alpha had consisted on lots of ups and downs, with the downs outnumbering the ups by a considerable margin. Would things get better or would she just die in torment?

Worrying about it is just going to add to the torment, babe, her brain whispered in her head, surprisingly helpfully for a change.

<Don’t know who that is.>

She didn’t get a chance to explain. The door to her cell slid open and the Iron Tsar his own darn self walked in. He came in alone, no guards or anything, although she was sure a reaction squad was waiting nearby in case she decided to get fresh with their king.

The ruler of the Dominion was tall, about as tall as John Clarke, and similar in build, broad of shoulder, narrow of hip, filling out his green-and-gold military uniform quite nicely. His head was covered by a metal helmet, a medieval-looking thing with a narrow viewing slit which was glowing with an internal source of light.

There’s no head inside that helmet, Christine realized. His head is made of pure energy! How the eff did that happen?

She figured it would be rude to ask, so she stayed quiet while the Iron Tsar walked over to her. He moved a bit like a tiger, relaxed but clearly able to pounce at a moment’s notice. It was obvious this was one tough, scary dude, the kind of guy even Mark would regard with wary respect. But what really disturbed her was that she couldn’t get a good emotional read from him. His emotions were muted, hidden under multiple layers of energy and psychic defenses, some natural, other generated by a collection of miniature devices sewn into his uniform or implanted under his skin. Some of the protections came from Words inscribed into his body, Words like the ones her father had used, like the one Word she’d picked up less than an hour ago. If things got nasty, this would turn out to be the Spelling Bee competition from Hell.

“Christine Dark,” the Iron Tsar said. His voice sounded strangely normal, coming from a guy with no head, but then again, so did Mark’s. His English had a faint accent but was otherwise flawless. “Age twenty-two. Daughter of Damon Trent, better-known as the Lurker, and Patricia Dark. Born on an alternate reality, one where humans never developed superhuman powers. You have proven to be an elusive quarry, but you are finally here, where you belong.”

She tried to come up with something witty to say but came up with zip, so she stayed quiet.

“You have greatly angered my consort,” he went on. “She wishes to finish what she started, to take the rest of your face and then your life.”

“I didn’t mean to scare her so much,” Christine said sweetly.

“Scare her? Yes, I believe you did, although I wouldn’t be so bold as to say that to her face. She might react harshly.”

She already reacted pretty effing harshly, Christine thought. Good thing there were no mirrors in the cell. She didn’t want to see what that uber-bitch had done to her face. Only knowing she would heal eventually had prevented her from completely losing it.

The Tsar looked at her quietly for several seconds. Maybe he was expecting her to say something to fill the awkward silence. Sorry, dude, I’m not going to beg or ask questions you aren’t going to answer.

“You may be curious to know what is in store for you,” he finally said. “You obviously can’t be trusted in your current mental state. We will need to change it, make you into a more pliable subject. The methods involved will be severely unpleasant.” He paused again to give her a chance to respond. She spent the quiet time doing some math in her head. “There is an alternative, however.” Another pause.

Fine. “Such as?”

“You could cooperate willingly. We would have to establish certain safeguards. For instance, the moment we suspected you of any deceit or trickery, we would execute your companion. It is my hope, however, that once you understand the stakes involved, you will agree that helping our cause is the best course of action.”

Well, that was different. None of the previous Big Bads had tried to reason with her. She was pretty sure the Iron Tsar was playing Good Cop, just like Mark had warned her, but it couldn’t hurt to hear him out, and it could well hurt a lot to not hear him out. “All right, your imperious majesty Mr. Tsar, sir. I’m listening.”

“Ah. I’m very pleased to hear that, Miss Dark. I will try to be brief.”

Christine opened a channel to her faceless boyfriend and listened to the Tsar’s spiel.

cjcarella@cjcarella.com