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 Doomsday Duet Sample Chapters

Prologue

The Lurker’s Tale

New York City, New York, December 12, 1919

Damon Trent turned up the collar of his overcoat against the chill winds rushing through Times Square and ignored the revelries around him. Happy partygoers were wandering the streets even at this late hour; it was a Friday night on the last month before Prohibition went into effect, and the good people of New York were enjoying their spirits while they still could. Damon paid no attention to the men and women going to and fro in celebration. Once he would have been one of them, but that had been before the trenches, the rattle of machineguns and the lazy clouds of gas drifting through no-man’s land. His days of celebration were behind him.

Tonight’s destination lay straight ahead. The building was old, one of the few structures that had not been torn down or remodeled to fit into the ever-growing theater district. It was a throwback to earlier times, a place that could have hosted an illegal gambling establishment or served as a house of ill repute.

Damon put a hand in one of his coat’s pockets, where a Mauser Broomhandle pistol was hidden in a carefully tailored holster; the weight of the powerful handgun provided a small measure of comfort. As he looked at the building’s entrance, he wondered once more if he had lost his mind. After a moment of hesitation, he shrugged and walked to the door. If his path led to madness, so be it. He had wandered too far down that road, and it was too late to turn back.

He knocked on the door. After a few moments, it opened, revealing a darkened corridor leading into the building. A man blocked the entrance, a hulking brute with pale skin and flat, emotionless eyes. There was something wrong about the man, something that made Damon think of death and decay. The guard gestured at Damon, who produced the engraved invitation that had arrived to his mailbox two days before. After a cursory glance at the document, the strange man stepped aside to let Damon pass.

The inside of the building had seen better days. Damon walked down the dark corridor towards a pool of light cast from a room to his left. The large room was largely empty except for a table with an assortment of refreshments and three men and one woman standing around it, glasses in their hands, making small talk. Damon recognized one of them on sight – Daedalus Smith, scion of the notorious Smith-Rockefeller family, and heir apparent to its industrial and financial empire. Damon was part of the same social circles – the Trents were not quite as wealthy, granted – but he had only met young Smith on a few occasions. Damon had been an undergraduate at Yale, while Smith was a Harvard man.

What the devil is Smith doing here? Damon thought suspiciously. Was this meeting some confidence game meant to separate the gullible from their money?

Smith was talking to the lone woman at the gathering. Her back was to Damon, but she struck him as beautiful even before he could see her face. Despite her small size – she was over a foot shorter than Smith – she carried herself with confidence and poise. She was wearing unusual clothes: a white peasant blouse over a long red skirt, with a belt made of golden links cinched at the waist. As Damon entered the room she turned towards him. Her eyes were bright and brown, intelligent and piercing. When her penetrating gaze met Damon’s he felt a shiver run down his back, and he was immediately convinced the woman could see his true self with but a glance. There was power behind those bright eyes.

She was like him, then. That likely meant Smith was likely different as well. Damon was still unsure about the nature of his strange abilities. He’d accepted the invitation to this place in the hopes he could learn more.

The other two men were enjoying cigars along with their drinks. As Damon forced himself to turn away from the striking woman and examine the rest of the gathering, one of them took an unlighted cigar and held out his index finger. A tiny flame sprung from the finger, and he used it as a match, puffing on the cigar until it caught. The man with the fiery gift was not much older than Damon himself, who had turned twenty-three the month before. He was tall and well-formed, with strong Slavic features framed by a mop of thick black hair, longer than current fashion allowed for, and a thick, well-waxed moustache.

The other smoker was a Chinaman, a surprising sight among Westerners. This particular Asiatic gentleman was wearing a fine suit straight out of Saville Row. The man’s poise and demeanor seemed as refined as that of any white; he made the fiery-fingered Slav he was speaking with seem coarse and crass by comparison.

“Trent! Damon Trent!” That was Smith, who had spotted Damon. He and the striking woman walked up to him.

“Daedalus. How do you do?” Damon said as the two men shook hands. Daedalus Smith was the taller man – Damon barely topped five foot six, a fact that contributed to his pugnacious demeanor, while Smith was six feet tall – and had the physique of a footballer. His handsome face was adorned with a thin moustache, and his smile seemed genuine enough. Damon was clean-shaven, his red hair trimmed down to a military cut, just slightly longer than the nearly-shaved head he had sported in the service, the better to keep lice away. They were both athletic and powerful; Damon was a nine-tenths scale model of the larger man.

“This is Cassandra,” Smith continued, introducing the woman. She smiled and allowed Damon to briefly hold her hand. Her touch was as electric as her gaze. “She is a true-blood Gypsy seer. She’s the straight goods, old boy. In a few minutes she has already amazed me half a dozen times.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Trent,” Cassandra said in response to Damon’s greeting. Her dazzling smile had wavered after touching Damon’s hand, but it reaffirmed itself as she continued. “It is an honor to meet one of the future’s movers and shakers.”

Daedalus laughed. “Did you hear that, old boy? Tell me if she isn’t the cat’s meow. You’re destined to be a mover and shaker! Moi aussi, or so Cassandra tells me. So is the Ukrainian fellow over there, and the worthy oriental gentleman in his company. Why, twenty years from now we’ll be the life of the party!”

“It will take longer than twenty years,” Cassandra said with subdued certainty. “But I speak the truth.”

“Anything you say, my dear lady,” Smith said agreeably. He turned to Damon. “I hadn’t expected to see you here, Trent. To be honest, I hadn’t the faintest idea what to expect. I take it you’ve been experiencing some unusual things as of late.”

Damon nodded. For a second his mind took him back to the trenches. The night raid that had awakened him, the charging storm troopers surrounding him, bayonets drawn and the promise of death etched in their desperate expressions. The things Damon had done to them. “You could say that, Smith. You could say that indeed.”

“Come, have a drink while you still can; the Volstead Act is close at hand, you know,” Smith said, ignoring or dismissing the way Damon’s expression had hardened. Unlike Damon, Smith hadn’t served during the war. “Our host should be here shortly, or so I’m told.”

“You were told correctly,” a thin, wavering voice cut in, silencing everyone in the room. Damon turned towards the speaker and saw a slight wisp of a man in a black suit, a man with graying hair and, strangely enough, dark eyeglasses obscuring most of his face. His lips were curved upwards in a simper that Damon immediately disliked. Something about the old fellow spelled trouble and worse. Unprepossessing as he looked, there was an aura of menace around him that made Damon’s war-honed instincts long for the feel of a gun in his hand.

“Greetings and salutations,” the newcomer said genially. “I welcome you all to my little gathering.”

The smile widened slightly. “My name is Mr. Night, and I am here to help you.”

Chapter One

Christine Dark

Lake of the Woods, Ontario, March 15, 2013

She saw dead people. Lots of them.

The corpses stood in a circle around her, looking accusingly at her. She spun around in place, looking for a way out, but she was surrounded by the living dead. There were three women and a man, wearing medical scrubs, with bleeding gunshot wounds on their chests and heads. Next to them, several rough-looking men leered at her, even the ones missing important organs and body parts. She recognized a few of them: the nurses and orderlies who’d been murdered when she’d been abducted from a hospital. Mobsters, Italian and Russian varieties, killed along the way. One angry guy, glaring at her with his one remaining good eye, had to be the mob dude that her friend Face-Off had thrown off a building: the right side of his skull was hideously flattened. And, of course, she knew exactly who the pale man in the white suit was, the man holding his grinning severed head in his hands. His name was – had been – Archangel. She’d helped chop off his head just a short while ago.

There were many others. The ghost of deaths past, present and future. The future dead were the most numerous. Thousands, millions, maybe billions of them.

The walking corpses surrounded her. All of them were dead or were going to die because of her.

She wanted to apologize to them, but she didn’t know what to say. That it wasn’t her fault, maybe. That she hadn’t asked for any of this. That she’d been a normal – well, a bit of a geek, but otherwise quite ordinary – person until just a few days ago, and she’d never expected to be dragged into a comic-book world where people died very frakking realistically when hit by assorted super-powers. She would have said those things, but she was sure the dead were in no mood to hear her excuses.

They moved closer, tightening the circle around her.

“Go away!” she shouted at them, and they actually hesitated and stepped back a couple of paces. “You may be dead because of me, and I’m sorry about it, but if you come any closer, I’ll kill you again!” The dead vanished back into the shadows, and she was alone once again.

No, not alone. Something  bad was behind her, something worse than the restless dead. She knew who it was. Something dead and deadly, wearing the face of her father. She really didn’t want to see it again. “Go away,” she repeated, refusing to turn around.

“Christine.”

“Go away, I said.”

“Christine?”

Christine Dark opened her eyes and found herself looking at a man with no face.

She gasped for a second, but managed not to scream. It took her a second to blink away the last lingering bits of the dream and remember where she was. She was in the Condor Jet, curled up in a passenger seat. The faceless man was Mark Martinez, and even though he had no facial features and thus no facial expressions, Christine knew that he was worried about her. Other than the no-face bit (and also no ears or hair), he looked perfectly normal, a medium-size guy in a leather jacket, t-shirt and jeans. His street name (Christine had never met someone with a street name before) was Face-Off, which went to show that people who came up with street names could use better writers. The jacket and t-shirt sported several scorched holes, where a Big Bad had punctured him with a frakking light saber. Mark shouldn’t have survived the puncturing, but Christine had helped put him back together.

“Hey,” she said, trying to sound calm, for all that her heart was racing as if she’d run up a few flights of stairs.

“Hey yourself,” Mark said. “We’re here.”

“Here being…”

“Condor’s Canadian time-share. We just landed, sort of.”

Christine looked around the cabin as she stood up. She spotted a slumped figure lying on the rear seats, a big tall someone, all manly man, muscles over muscles but not in a gross steroid abuser way, a big guy that made her a little weak in the knees when she looked at him for too long. Earlier that night she had saved his butt and developed a bit of a schoolgirl crush on him, which was embarrassing as frak since she was a bit too long in the tooth to have schoolgirl crushes on people, even super-powered demigod types who probably had 1.2 billion Facebook friends.

John Clarke – a.k.a Ultimate the Invincible Man – wasn’t doing all too great at the moment, though. His silver, red and gold costume had been ripped at the mid-section – revealing some amazingly washboard abs – where a big bearded guy had nearly torn him in half. The Invincible Man was still unconscious. He was dreaming, too; she could pick up a complex stew of emotions coming off him like radio waves. One of the first things Christine had discovered upon waking up in this alternate reality where superheroes were real was that one of her kewl powerz was super-empathy. Knowing what people were feeling around her was turning out to be a major complication in her life, a life which was rapidly accumulating enough complications for an entire season of Downton Abbey.

Her home was Earth Prime, a world where superheroes existed only in comic books and overpriced FX-laden movies, the place where Christine had lived a relatively normal life until a few fairly eventful days ago. She was in another world, which she’d dubbed Earth Alpha, where comic books chronicled the adventures of real men and women with godlike powers and ridiculous costumes. She was quickly discovering that having super powers caused as many problems as it solved.

Mark walked over to the back seats and slung John over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. It made for a funny image, since John was a good half a foot taller than Mark and much wider at the shoulders: it looked like as if a child was carrying an adult. Mark could lift over ten tons without straining himself, though, so toting around an unconscious All-American Hero was no big deal. Her faceless friend headed for the exit. He was feeling somewhat amused about John’s unconscious state, which was a bit petty of him. Christine shook her head and followed him out.

Another day, another remote island: the last island she’d been in had blown up, which she hoped wasn’t the start of a pattern. Maybe this wasn’t an island, though; she could really only see a shoreline of sorts, a thin clear strip by the water; thick woods blocked the view everywhere else, except for a structure some distance inland, partially hidden by the trees. Condor had set his aircraft down on the water, because his cabin in the woods didn’t spot a landing pad. Mark waded through the shallow water before making it to shore. Christine didn’t feel like getting her second-hand sneakers wet, so she flew onto dry land. Well, she tried to. She’d discovered she could kinda sorta fly, but she still hadn’t mastered such fine points as steering and controlling her speed. Instead of gracefully floating to the shore, she catapulted herself forward, barely missing Mark and smashing into a poor defenseless tree. The impact hurt the tree a lot more than it hurt her.

“You’ll get the hang of it,” Mark told her as she picked herself up and brushed pine cones and bark off of her hair.

“It would have been nice if I’d gotten some flying lessons back at the Condor Lair,” Christine replied, trying not to let her bad mood show in her voice. She was feeling rumpled and hard done by. Only a few hours ago, she had discovered her father was totally insane and probably didn’t really love her, and then he’d gone and – almost certainly – died on her. That little crap sandwich had been accompanied by a peek into the Truths of the Universe (cue ominous organ music), which mighty have driven her as crazy as her father if some guy with a light saber hadn’t shown up and tried to chop her to bits. Throw in another half dozen or so narrow escapes in the previous twenty-four hours (she had lost count early in the day) and it all added up to a textbook case of a really bad day.

“Give it time, Christine,” Mark said. “Even Ultimate started out by jumping around before he figured out how to fly.”

The last two people out of the Condor Jet were Condor his own self and his uber-skank girlfriend the Kinky Kestrel. Condor was another manly man in thighs, something like 0.92 of a John, a bit shorter but just as imposing. Apparently Neos – short for Neolympians, which was short for New Olympians which was long for supers – all tended towards good looks, like jocks on hyperdrive. Mark had gotten the short end of the stick, pun kinda intended, being a mere five ten or so. Condor was taller, more ripped and cuter, although Christine didn’t find him all that attractive. The magnificent man with the flying machine looked pretty imposing in his black-and-silver costume and condor-head helmet, but Christine could sense the emotions under the good looks, and they didn’t paint a pretty picture.

Condor’s girlfriend was also great looking, with all the T-and-A a horny teenage boy could want, all of which she proudly put on display, courtesy of a painted-on black latex catsuit and thigh-high high-heeled boots that would absolutely require super-powers to run on; her face was partially covered by a bird-head helmet not too different from Condor’s, with just a bit of her jet-black hair showing. Her dark brown eyes were always bright with mirth, lust, or just plain meanness. Christine’s problem with Kestrel wasn’t her costume choice, but the fact that she was a BDSM freak (pitcher and catcher) who seemed ready and willing to shag any bipedal life form that crossed her path, probably up to and including kangaroos and ostriches. Before becoming Condor’s sidekick-with-benefits, Kestrel had been with Mark for a while, a relationship that hadn’t ended on a happy note. Christine wasn’t sure if that made her feel jealous or threatened; she was sure it pissed her off, though. Kestrel’s dressing up like the dominatrix she was during her free time was just a minor irritant on top of everything.

Cosplay in this universe wasn’t play at all, but a way of life for Neos. Christine’s costume so far consisted of non-skinny jeans, a plain white t-shirt under a pink sweater, and sneakers. Her own T-and-A were underwhelming in her humble – much too humble, some of her friends insisted – opinion, and she had no intention of wearing any sort of painted-on garments, although she had committed similar transgressions against taste and common decency at a few sci-fi conventions back on Earth Prime. But that was at conventions, weekends where she wasn’t being herself for a couple days. To do that every day, in front of everybody (and thanks to YouTube, which existed in this world, everybody meant a lot of everybodies)… No effing way.

Condor was carrying a couple hundred pounds’ worth of metal cases without even breaking a sweat; he had proudly told Christine he could deadlift fifteen tons. All Neos were stronger than humans. Christine herself could bench press over a thousand pounds; back in her pre-Neo days, she probably couldn’t have lifted a thousand ounces. “Computers and other useful equipment," Condor explained when he noticed Christine looking at him and all the boxes he was toting.

“This way,” Condor continued, and led them to the lodge itself, a pretty big house that should have enough bedrooms for a basketball team, let alone the Fellowship of the Crap Storm, as Christine had unofficially dubbed her little gang. The lodge – more of a rustic manor – was well off the beaten path. A dirt road led away from it, and while Christine had seen plenty of lights on the far end of the lake, indicating a nearby town, this side was empty except for the local critters. It was March, so maybe hunting and fishing season didn’t start for a while. She had no idea, since her version of hunting and fishing began and ended at the Whole Foods’ fresh produce section.

The lodge’s front door looked all quaint and antique-y, but it had a retina scanner lock and probably hidden machineguns and lasers to deal with anybody who didn’t have the right eyeballs to gain admittance to the premises. Condor’s eyeballs passed muster and the door opened, leading to a living room. It was a big living room, with plenty of sitting space, a fireplace big enough to accommodate 2.3 Santas, and walls covered with trophies featuring animal heads from all over the world. Apparently, Condor’s idea of hunting had been conventional and old-fashioned: travel to exotic places, find exotic and probably endangered critters, and kill them to death. Not very enlightened of him, but Condor was old-fashioned, mostly because he was old; dude was pushing seventy, if her math was right. Neos didn’t age, although many of them died young, due mostly to poor lifestyle choices.

Christine’s father had been even older, possibly over a hundred years young, which made him like eighty when he knocked up her mother, which was uber-creepy. She used to love reading vampire romances where two-hundred year old men hit on teenage girls, but now the idea turned her stomach. And yet, here she was, getting all aflutter around John Clarke, who was also pushing the century mark. How Lolita of her, not to mention hypocritical. Just like the teenage girls that fell for two-hundred year old vampires, the creepy bits didn’t sink in because the dirty old men looked young enough not to trip any creep-o-meters. Given that, maybe Dad and Mom’s dalliance wasn’t all that creepy.

Of course, Dad’s not likely to get any older anymore, her brain helpfully threw in. Her brain loved to make her feel like crap sometimes.

The last time she’d seen her father, he’d been doing battle with a thing that looked like a man but wasn’t, a thing that hadn’t been human in a very long time. It had been very Gandalf at Moria-like, with an explosion that had felt nuclear-like in intensity as a parting gift; it had nearly knocked the Condor Jet into the lake even from a mile or two away. The explosion had turned the island where they had left Dad behind into a short-lived giant hole in the water. Maybe Dad had teleported away – she’d seen him do that, as well as produce the creepiest laugh she’d ever heard, along with a bevy of other abilities – before the earth-shattering ka-boom. It’d make for a trite plot device if this was a movie, but it would be really, really nice if he wasn’t dead. She still hadn’t cried over him, either because she didn’t believe he was dead or because a bunch of bad things had happened at once and she still hadn’t begun to deal with half of them.

“How are you doing?” Mark asked her, breaking her midnight train of thought. He’d plopped John down on an expensive-looking couch before turning his attention to her.

“Like I could use a hot bath, a fifteen hour nap, and waking up to find out all of this was just a really bad dream.”

“I hear you,” he said. He’d lost his best friend that night, and he probably also wished he could wake up and find things back to normal. Of course, her normal was worrying if she had chosen the right major in college, and his normal involved finding criminals and putting them in jail – or the morgue. Amusingly enough, they were both out of their element. Saving the world from cosmic menaces was a bit out of both their comfort zones.

“Come on,” Mark said, trying to sound cheerful. “Condor said the kitchen’s got food; nothing fresh, mostly canned crap and frozen concentrated shit, but I promised you pancakes and I’m going to make some fucking pancakes.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Neos didn’t need to eat or breathe, but they got hungry anyway. Mark’s mention of food reminded her she was starving. Even better, she could pig out and not gain a pound as long as she kept her food intake somewhere under 20,000 calories a day or so. She was looking forward to burying her feelings under copious amounts of sugars and fats. They went to the kitchen, which was big enough to service a small restaurant. Mark rustled up pancake ingredients for their meal – it was two in the morning, so this would be somewhere between dinner and breakfast.

She and Mark made pancakes and hot chocolate for everyone. While they cooked, Christine told Mark some of the stuff she’d picked up from her dad’s Cube of Cosmic Wisdom – it had been his gift to her, or, to be precise, she had been born to wield it. During the brief time she had held the Cube, Christine had learned a few cosmic truths. It was funny, talking about the origins of the universe while making pancakes, but it kind of relaxed her.

By the time they got back to the living room, Condor had set up a miniature version of NASA’s control center, complete with multiple screens and terminals and a central computer-slash-server in the middle. The high-tech stuff clashed pretty badly with the lodge’s décor.

They sat down and ate while watching the boob-tubes. Kestrel headed upstairs as soon as she’d scarfed a plate of pancakes, to take a shower or break in a new vibrator or whatever; Christine didn’t want to know. John was still sleeping. Christine checked on him, using her special senses to monitor his health. He was fully healed – the nasty Outsider-energy that had poisoned him was finally gone from his system, and he would probably wake up on his own soon. She decided to let him rest and sat back to not-really-enjoy the show.

News reports were on all the screens. There was lots of stuff about Christine’s little run-in with the Chicago Sentinels. All that mess had started because she wouldn’t let one of the Sentinels arrest her. In retrospect, it had been the right thing; the handcuffs he’d wanted to use on her were designed to interfere with Neo powers, and without her powers she would have been helpless like a kitten when John came after her. Well, not John, but a bad guy who called himself the Dreamer and who had been possessing John’s body. The whole thing was more complicated than the last season of Lost.

Other news bulletins were talking about the freak explosion in Lake Michigan. The blast had broken windows in a two-mile radius, and created mini-tsunamis that caused a lot of property damage and killed half a dozen people. Knowing she had been involved even indirectly in people’s deaths made the pancakes roil in her stomach. She didn’t want to deal with any of it; the danger was bad enough, but the effing responsibility of knowing that if you messed up a lot of people could die was the worst. People had died because she hadn’t prevented Dad and the thing he’d been fighting from blowing up the island.

“Hey.” That was Mark again. He was no empath but the guy picked up on facial cues pretty well for someone who didn’t have a face of his own. He squeezed her shoulder. “That wasn’t us. It wasn’t even your dad.”

“I guess you’re right,” she admitted.

“Had to happen eventually,” he said in a deadpan tone and she snorted. She felt a little better. Not happy or anything, just slightly less crappy.

There were plenty more news. Apparently it had been a pretty eventful day for a lot of other people too. Two days before, someone had attacked one of the main bases of the world’s greatest superhero group, the Freedom Legion; John was a charter member. The attackers had blown up buildings and lured a bunch of heroes to a flying fortress ship that had turned out to have a nuclear booby-trap. While Christine and her pals had been doing their stuff, the Legionnaires investigating the attack had gotten into a running fight over the streets of Hong Kong, leaving one of them dead. A lot of news pundits were speculating that the Chinese Empire might have been involved.

Earth Alpha had two Chinas like in her world, but instead of Taiwan and the People’s Republic they had the Republic of China and the Empire of China, a.k.a. the Dragon Empire. The Republic was like Taiwan on steroids; the Empire was like North Korea on steroids, except its Supreme Leader was a Neolympian with godlike powers. There had already been two wars with the Empire. The news people were speculating that a third one might be coming up.

And of course, everybody and their brother were worrying about the possibility that Ultimate the Invincible Man might have gone rogue. That seemed to be even more terrifying than a land war in Asia, which everybody knew was a bad idea.

Christine glanced at John again. He was dreaming, and whatever he was dreaming about was stirring some serious emotions: anger followed by… utter terror? What the frak could scare a guy who could survive nuclear explosions?

Things were going to get interesting again, and she had barely survived all the interesting things that happened yesterday.

Face-Off

Lake of the Woods, Ontario, March 15, 2013

Last week, my world had made sense.

I protected mostly low-income New Yorkers from assorted psychos and predators by regularly stomping on said psychos and predators for fun and profit. The profit was mostly limited to lifting whatever cash they had on them after I was done subduing or disassembling them. The fun was the joy I felt when I pounded on any truly evil assholes that crossed my path until they were dead, dead, dead. I had few friends and my free time was spent reading books and watching movies, mostly by myself, except when I was – for the most part briefly – hooking up with assorted not very nice women. Was it a great life? Perhaps not. I would often walk away from a midnight burial wishing for something different.

I guess wishes can come true.

If someone had told me I’d be sitting in a fancy hunting lodge in Canada alongside Ultimate the Invincible Motherfucking Man (who was still sleeping like a baby, the prick), my old buddy Condor, who was now banging my ex-fuck buddy Kestrel, also present, and a short redheaded girl by the unlikely name of Christine Dark, a girl who happened to be the key to the planet’s salvation from an as of yet pretty vague threat, well, if someone had told me that, I’d have made a face just so I could laugh my ass off. If that someone had also mentioned that along the way I’d get nearly electrocuted by a former Tonton Macoute, have my powers disrupted by some new fancy gizmo, watch my ex-fuck buddy get tortured half to death with a blowtorch, and then gotten my insides rearranged courtesy of an evil mime with an energy sword, followed by being brought back from the brink of death by the aforementioned redheaded savior of the world, I’d tossed in a few smacks to go with the derisive laughter.

My best friend and mentor, the blind psychic with the too-on-the-nose name of Cassandra, had laid down her life to get me to this point. A lot of people had gotten killed along the way, several of them at my hands. And for what? A rational person would have excused himself, asked Condor to drop him off in Chicago, and gotten a Greyhound ticket back to New York City, where he belonged. A rational, or mildly smart person would have realized that a middle-weight Neo had no business sticking his nose in world-ending affairs, where he might as well be a bug charging the windshield of a speeding car. And yet, here I was, which made me the dumbest fucker in the room.

I was even dumber than that. Cassandra had told me my job was to help out Christine Dark, and along the way I’d grown pretty damn fond of her. Downright protective and possessive and attracted to her, surprisingly so since the first time I’d laid eyes on her had been a whole seventy-something hours ago, when I had unwrapped her from half a mile of duct tape like an overdue Christmas present. Christine was as endearing as a box of kittens, which normally would have been a total turn-off for me. I don’t do endearing. I like my women with lots of sharp edges, a nasty sense of humor and a deep appreciation for the darker things in life. I’d sworn off nice girls a long time ago.

And yet, here I was, making notional googly eyes at a nice girl, a nice girl who, to make matters worse, could tell exactly what I was feeling. That should have bothered me a great deal. I’d gotten used to people not having a clue what was going on behind my blank exterior. It makes me a killer poker player, among many other things. Christine could see through my permanent mask. She’d done more than that. When I was dying on a cold cavern floor with a giant steaming hole where my lower torso used to be, she had reached out and dragged me back from the abyss. It had been the most fucking painful, intense, intimate experience of my life. I still didn’t know what to make of it.

Christine caught me looking at her. Her pale blue-gray eyes regarded my blank face, and she gave me a weak smile. I wasn’t sure what she made of my current emotional state. Neither did I, to be honest. My normal emotional state comes in two flavors: neutral and murderous.

“What a mess, eh?” she said.

“The messiest,” I replied.

She started to respond, but the sleeping Invincible Man groaned loudly and she turned towards him with a worried expression. She could tell what the big lug was feeling too, and he didn’t seem to be feeling anything good, which was worrisome, considering the guy could knock down buildings with his fists. If he started sleep-walking, it’d be about as much fun as having a Category Five tornado show up in your living room.

What worried me most, though, was the fact that I cared more about the way she looked at him than about anything else.

Chapter Two

The Invincible Man

Berlin, Germany, March 27, 1945

The Sky God struck with all his might.

John Clarke had been on the receiving end of lightning bolts before. He had survived them, along with laser beams, death rays and plasma discharges. None of those had prepared him for Donner’s wrath.

The first blast caught him in mid-air, a twisting ribbon of blue-white energy that set ablaze every nerve ending in his body, paralyzing him. Blinded and overwhelmed with agony, he only distantly felt the second bolt of lightning boring into his flesh as he fell. When he opened his eyes, he was in the ruins of a house, well over a mile away from where he had been hit.

His landing had shattered the house as thoroughly as a one-thousand pound bomb would have. It had also slaughtered the family huddled in the basement beneath. A hand, too small to belong to an adult male, lay half buried under rubble, terribly still. John looked at it for a second. He’d seen plenty of similar sights, but he hadn’t grown used to them. A part of him dreaded the idea that he might grow used to them.

No time to waste, he told himself, and struggled free from the debris.

Up in the sky, Donner found him and threw another lightning spear.

John flew away, barely avoiding the missile as it destroyed the remains of the house and the closely spaced homes on either side of it. More dead children. He darted towards the German Aesir, the last of Hitler’s new gods. Time to put an end to this.

Friedhelm Kastner, better known as Donner, was a giant of a man. According to the files John had read, the Teutonic Knight had been six and a half feet tall before his Neolympian powers manifested, and had grown another foot in height after that. Unlike the mythical god, Kastner had black hair and brown eyes, but the Reich’s designers had made him wear a helmet with a built-in red wig to make his appearance match his mythical namesake’s appearance. Donner was not wearing his wig today; he had eschewed his ornate costume as well. The man traversing the skies over Berlin wore a simple Wehrmacht uniform with no insignias or medals. The nimbus of light surrounding him and his inhuman size left no doubts as to who he was, though. John noted those details as he closed the distance between them at a speed that should have left him no time to notice anything. Of late, he’d found himself able to process information in the span of milliseconds. He even had time to wonder what these changes meant before he reached his target.

Donner conjured more lightning, but John hit the German before he could cast it. The impact would have shattered windows all over the city, had there been any glass left to shatter in Berlin; months of relentless bombardment had seen to that. Donner was flung higher into the sky by the devastating collision. John followed him relentlessly, pounding the Aesir with his fists, feeling bones break under the blows. The German did not give up, however: a flash of lightning knocked John away. The strike was painful but not disabling, however. Donner was weakening.

John sidestepped a second blast and crashed into Donner. Both combatants plummeted toward the ground. John directed the course of the fall carefully, and they crashed into the city’s famed Victory Column across from the Reichstag, smashing the monument to pieces.

He rose to his feet. Donner was on his hands and knees, trying to get up despite his broken bones and torn flesh. “Surrender,” John said, and repeated the order in rote-memorized German. The Aesir’s response was to call forth another lightning spear. John struck before his foe could use it.

The coup de grace was a hammer blow to the back of Donner’s head, delivered with all the strength John could muster. The lightning spear vanished in a harmless shower of sparks as the German’s headless body collapsed, not far from the fallen statue of Victoria.

The fall of the last Aesir had been followed less than an hour later by the death of Himmler at the hands of his own men as he tried to flee his bunker. The next day, the highest-ranking German military officer left, a Navy man of all things, had offered the Reich’s unconditional surrender. That was the story featured in the New York Times and the special unnumbered V-Day Issue of Action Tales, the story found in textbooks, the story John remembered.

Something else had happened that day, however. Something he had forgotten for seven decades.

For several seconds, he had stood over Donner’s corpse. The fight had left him exhausted, although he knew from experience he would recover in a few minutes. He could just rest there for a bit, and then…

John Clarke.

The whispered name had sent chills down his back. He turned towards the speaker, certain of his location even though he hadn’t heard the words with his ears.

A thin emaciated form stood amidst the ruins of the Victory Monument, even though the shockwaves generated by the fight should have been lethal to any human caught in the open. The near-skeletal apparition was clad in a striped concentration camp uniform, and his head was shaved. John had seen pictures of similarly clad prisoners. This man was an inmate of one such camp. What was he doing in Berlin?

John Clarke.

The man’s lips didn’t move, but the words were coming from him.  Except for his dark staring eyes, he could have been dead. His motionless posture was corpselike, unnatural. He didn’t breathe or blink.

John had fought hordes of reanimated corpses in the battlefields of France and Germany, the creations of the dread Teutonic Knight known as Totenkopf. At first, he thought that was what he was facing. The walking dead the Nazi Aesir had thrown at the Allies had been mindless creatures, however. The eyes staring at him were bright with intelligence and hatred.

It is time, John Clarke.

He started to react but he wasn’t fast enough. Something like a shadow darted from the figure in the death camp uniform. John had barely enough time to notice the skeletal body had started to collapse before the shadow reached him. He felt something push liquidly through his protective aura, a cold grasping force that gripped his insides, his mind, his soul. Icy talons ripped at him from within.

You will be ours, John Clarke.

The fight was brutal, the more so because it wasn’t physical. The entity trying to destroy his will had picked its time well, striking when John was at his lowest ebb. Incredulity gave way to fear. Fear became terror. He was helpless in the face of the entity, helpless like a child. John felt himself letting go, surrendering to the black pressure besetting him. Giving up would be so easy. It would mean an end to the terror. He could let it be over, and go gently into oblivion. It would be easy, so easy…

In the end, her eyes had dragged him back from the abyss. Her blue eyes, looking at him as they said their goodbyes in Paris before he went off on the last campaign of the war, the answer to his hesitant question ringing in his ears like sweet music. To surrender to the darkness was to renounce that mutual promise.

Linda Lamar saved John’s life that day.

Resistance became rage, became a searing light that thrust back the force trying to overcome him, shredding its essence. An inhuman shriek of rage and agony hammered at the insides of his skull for one unbearable moment before fading away.

Ours, it said again as it vanished without a trace, taking even the memories of the battle with it.

John shook his head, his eyes blinking furiously. How long had he been standing there? He noticed a group of children in uniform, their helmets looking comically oversized on their heads. The child soldiers had emerged from a nearby trench and were deploying an anti-tank launcher across the remains of the plaza. Hitler Youths, too young to understand there was nothing left to do, nothing worth dying for. He let them fire their Panzerfaust at him, let them run away in terror when the smoke dissipated and they saw him stand unscathed after the explosion.

He utterly forgot the shadow entity’s attack. For seven decades, he forgot.

Lake of the Woods, Ontario, March 15, 2013

John woke up with a start. Habits as deeply ingrained as his childhood’s toilet training kept his strength down to human levels, so his sudden trashing did not smash the couch he was lying on – or the house he was in. The sudden movement made everyone in the spacious living room start in surprise. John gasped for breath, his eyes wild, looking for all the world like a terrified child.

He remembered everything, and it scared him like nothing ever had.

“It’s okay,” Christine said, standing over him. The blue eyes, so much like Linda’s, looked at him with concern. “Just a dream, John. It was just a dream.”

“More than that,” he muttered, embarrassed and mortified beyond words. He’d unmanned himself in front of everyone. Showing weakness in front of Christine alone wouldn’t have been so bad, but debasing himself for his current audience of vigilantes left him seething with self-loathing and rage.

Christine’s expression changed in synch with his emotions. “Take it easy, okay?” she said. She might be afraid, but her voice remained calm and steady. “We’re all on the same side here.”

John forced himself to calm down. He sat up, trying to clear his head. Echoes of the agony he’d felt when the hairy giant had torn him apart were fading away, but he now realized he’d been poisoned with the same energy that had been used against him in Berlin. The same energy had infected the tainted cochlear implants the Lurker had removed from his head that very night. It had taken the near-lethal attack to bring back those suppressed memories, and John now knew he was facing a force that had been at work at least as far back as World War Two – and that it was a force that could overcome him more easily than anything else he’d ever faced. He saw Christine’s eyes widen at his sudden spike of fear, and forced himself to clamp down on his emotions, for both their sakes.

In the comic books, the writers, trying desperately to create dramatic tension while telling stories about a man who couldn’t be hurt, had come up with a fictitious Achilles’ Heel, a radioactive alloy of silver known as Sylverite. For decades, half of the plots in Action Tales had involved Ultimate using his wits to overcome Sylverite-wielding foes. Unfortunately for his real foes, Sylverite was a myth. Until now. The dark power he’d faced was as deadly as the fabulous metal. That realization scared him like nothing before.

One could learn to control fear. John hadn’t had to do so for a long time. Too few things could frighten him nowadays. The old techniques came back to him, thankfully, and he regained his composure, even if it was too late to save him from embarrassment.

“Hot chocolate?” Christine said, offering him a steaming cup. He took it gratefully and sipped the sweet liquid, mostly to give himself time to assimilate the situation. Among other things, he marveled at the ease with which the girl could read his emotions. He was nearly impervious to both empathy and telepathy.

“Glad to see you back, Ultimate,” Condor said, acting as if he hadn’t seen John act like a frightened schoolgirl a moment ago. Kestrel said nothing, but the smirk on her face spoke volumes. Face-Off also remained silent, but John could guess what was going on behind the blank façade.

Who gives a good goddamn what they think about you? John told himself, and set the unworthy thoughts aside. There were plenty of things at stake that actually mattered. “How long was I out?”

“A bit over an hour,” Condor said. “By the way, I’m pretty sure the big guy that attacked you was none other than Medved, former Hero of the Revolution. I got a good look at him while he was trying to take my head off, and the resemblance to the old newsreels and newspaper pictures was pretty conclusive.” Medved. Another name from the Second World War. The man had spent the last several decades allegedly working as a mercenary of sorts; there had been precious few confirmed sightings of him, until now.

“What happened?” John asked. The last thing he remembered was being attacked in the bizarre cave the Lurker had led them to. There had been at least three or four attackers, including the giant who had torn John apart. The fact that everyone was alive and well – except for the Lurker, who wasn’t there – meant his allies had prevailed in the end. He suppressed another surge of shame at the fact that three vigilantes and an inexperienced girl had survived the forces that had laid him low – This isn’t about you, he reminded himself  – and heard their story.

The fight at the Lurker’s cave had ended up in a stalemate of sorts. One of the attackers had been killed, and Medved had escaped with one other. John figured he would have to do better the next time he crossed paths with the giant. A lot better. The Lurker and the fourth intruder had been left behind on the island, which had exploded as a result of their conflict. The Lurker – Christine’s father, he reminded himself – was missing and presumed dead.

“Excuse me,” he said after the story was done. “I’m going to step outside for a moment.” Condor and Christine nodded. Face-Off shrugged. Kestrel leered at him. “If you feel like company, hero, just let me know,” she said. John ignored the comment and walked off into the night.

He needed time to think.

What was he going to do?

Hunters and Hunted

Chicago, Illinois, March 15, 2013

Dietrich Muller looked nervously out the window of the cheap apartment. It wasn’t much of a dwelling, but there was no paper trail linking the rental property to Doctor Martin Cohen or any of the other aliases Dietrich normally used. It would probably make no difference if Ultimate came back looking for him, but he could only hope the Invincible Man would be occupied elsewhere. Dietrich had done his best to cast the onus of suspicion over the verdammt superhero, and the police and the Chicago Sentinels were watching Doctor Cohen’s residence in case Ultimate showed up there. For all that, being elsewhere seemed like the prudent thing to do.

Failure was not something he was used to. As a young man, an immigrant from defeated and humiliated Germany in the wake of the Great War, Dietrich had done what he needed to in order to get ahead, and his failures had been minor and few. When he had discovered his talents, the ability to sense people’s emotions and manipulate them, and later the power to control and alter their dreams, his fortunes had soared. As the Dreamer, he had stolen mostly from criminals, since they were less likely to go to the authorities, and had found himself being toasted as a hero, even immortalized in cheap adventure magazines. Life had been good then. He had wanted more, however, and found himself working for another so-called mystery man, one whose enormous wealth and influence were matched only by his grandiose plans. Dietrich and the Dreamer had disappeared and gone underground. For decades, he had served his master willingly and well, until now.

The operation had been ruined by the girl. If only Dietrich’s handler hadn’t insisted on using Ultimate to capture her… Years of patient effort to slip past the Invincible Man’s formidable psychic defenses had been wasted in a few hours; he still couldn’t understand how the little bitch had managed to enter Ultimate’s mind-scape, let alone help the cursed Ami break free from Dietrich’s controls. She was young and inexperienced, but her raw power was more than enough to compensate for her shortcomings. He should have killed her, and damn the consequences.

Mr. Night knocked on the door.

Dietrich knew who it was the second he heard the knock. His empathic senses should have detected any living being approaching the dwelling, but Mr. Night had always been undetectable unless he wished otherwise. The man, Dietrich suspected, was neither human nor Neolympian, but something else altogether. When the strange little man knocked on the door, his presence became apparent and unmistakable. The door had been locked but Mr. Night let himself in before Dietrich could answer the knock.

His extrasensory perceptions told Dietrich Mr. Night had entered his apartment, but the little man in the dark suit had been replaced by a hairy giant in a trench coat. Dietrich recognized him: it was Medved, the renegade Hero of the Revolution, who had ended up in the service of Daedalus Smith, Dietrich’s master. They had worked together on several occasions over the decades. Dietrich considered Medved to be a dullard, an unthinking brute with no manners or subtlety. His empathic senses told a different story, however. So did his eyes after a second look. The lopsided smile on Medved’s face did not belong there; it had been placed there by the entity now inhabiting the Russian’s body.

“Ah, there you are, my dear Dietrich,” the giant spoke. The gruff, almost-growling voice of the man Dietrich had known had been replaced by a thin, reedy one, unmistakably belonging to Mr. Night. “The man of the hour,” Mr. Night, continued. “Look at you, trying to hide your light under a bushel. How modest and unbecoming of you.”

“I needed to get away,” Dietrich protested weakly. “Ultimate…”

“Yes, the Invincible Man slipped from your grasp. You managed to lose him, the girl, your composure and your dignity, all in one fell swoop. Failure that complete is something of an achievement.”

“I… the girl! It was the girl’s fault! How could I know she was a telepath? More than that, she entered Ultimate’s mind as if she had been mind-walking all her life!”

“She is a talented young lady,” Mr. Night admitted. “I must admit it was a tad imprudent of me, asking you to capture her while you were busy riding the Invincible Man like a prize horse. I saw an opportunity and acted in haste. For that, you have my most abject apologies.”

Dietrich exhaled in relief; he had been holding his breath and been quite unaware of it. “I will do anything you ask,” he assured Mr. Night. “I can overpower Ultimate again.”

“Such a propitious event is sadly not in the cards at the moment,” Mr. Night said. “The device that allowed you to breach dear Ultimate’s rather impressive mental defenses has been destroyed by my adversary. There may be an opportunity to remedy the situation later, but for now we have other matters to attend.”

“You have new instructions from our superiors, then?”

“Yes. We have new directives. The first one, I’m sorry to say, concerns the demise of dear Doctor Cohen.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m going to create a compelling crime scene for the benefit of the authorities, my dear Dreamer. It will be rather unpleasant, but necessary.”

Dietrich started to speak but sudden agony wracked his body. He fell to the floor, convulsing. He screamed as he felt things tear inside of him.

“Hush, little Dreamer. Mr. Night is working.” Dietrich’s vocal cords died and took his voice with them. He flopped silently on the apartment’s floor as he felt blood being drawn out of every opening and pore in his body. “Let me paint you a heartbreaking tableau, Dietrich. A horrible crime has been committed. Ultimate, the patient you so selflessly tried to help, tracked you to this place and murdered you in a most brutal fashion. Struck you with such violence that he liquefied your body, leaving behind only blood and a few solid bits here and there, mostly teeth and bone and brain fragments, which I’m afraid I’m going to have to excise from you. The authorities will also find a few hairs and some tiny flecks of skin belonging to your alleged killer. They will easily identify your murderer; after all, Ultimate’s DNA is in several government databases, thanks to the Parahuman Registration Act.”

Dietrich watched his tormentor in mute agony as he was mutilated alive. The tooth pulling was the worst of it. “Do not fret, there’s a good boy,” Mr. Night said as he worked. Blood and still living tissue flew through the air in a complex pattern, splattering the walls and floor of the apartment like a gruesome abstract painting. “The procedure is quite painful, but you will –barely – survive the experience. Unfortunately, your self-healing abilities are not quite up to the task of keeping you alive, so you will be spending the next few nights under medical care. We all must make sacrifices, don’t you agree?”

A full gallon of Dietrich’s blood splashed on the walls in an explosive pattern. “There we go. Beautiful work, if I say so myself.”  

Mr. Night picked up Dietrich’s limp body and slung it over his shoulder. With his free hand, he ripped the front door off its hinges. “That would be the point of entry for our murderer,” Mr. Night explained. He rushed an outside wall and smashed through it as if it was made of tissue paper; with one bound the giant leapt over a city block and landed on a building roof. “And that was the exit point. Poor dear Ultimate is now the chief suspect in a brutal homicide.”

Mr. Night patted the barely-conscious Dietrich on the back. “Don’t you worry. Soon you will be up and about, doing great things.

“Just keep in mind that another failure will have drastic consequences. We are too close to the end game.” 

Face-Off

Lake of the Woods, Ontario, March 15, 2013

I watched Christine as she watched the news. She didn’t look like the harbinger of the apocalypse. In fact, she looked like what she had been a couple of days ago, an ordinary college student, a pretty redhead who talked a little too much and too fast when she got nervous. She was a nice person who didn’t deserve to be involved with killers and monsters, two categories to which I belonged. But thanks to her father, she was Armageddon Girl. I had it on good authority that she could end up saving or destroying the world. I was supposed to watch her back, and I would, even though I still wasn’t sure if I was up to the job.

A ‘Breaking News’ sign appeared on one of the big news channels. The remains of a well-known Chicago psychiatrist had been found, and unconfirmed reports claimed the dead man had been treating Ultimate for some sort of mental disorder. Christine’s eyes widened in recognition when the dead shrink’s picture showed up on the screen. “That’s the Dreamer!” she said. “And John didn’t kill him. Okay, we beat the crap out of him, but that was in Dreamland. He was alive and well when he ran like a little b-word!”

“So the assholes have framed Ultimate for murder,” I said. It would be nice if we knew who the assholes were, of course.

“We need to tell John,” Christine added. Ultimate had gone outside to have a little sulk after waking up. Maybe he was still sore after one of the assholes ripped him to shreds back at the Lurker’s cave. The asshole in question had managed to escape, which worried me quite a bit. “I’ll be right back.” She got up and went out after Ultimate.

I almost said something, but stopped myself when I realized how stupid that would be. What was I going to say? That I didn’t want her to go comfort big bad Ultimate? That I didn’t like the way she looked at him? That I wanted her to look at me that way? Fucking hell. Even worse, even though I didn’t say anything she gave a look on the way out that pretty much said she’d gotten the message anyway. Just great. I set aside the romance novel crap. We had work to do.

I turned to Condor, who was raptly watching the news. “We should start thinking about what to do next,” I told him. We’d hoped to get a good night’s sleep before planning our next step, but things were happening too fast. Neos need sleep, but we can do without for a good while before we start getting ornery and insane. Maybe this was a good time to skip sleep and keep on moving.

“Yep,” he replied, muting the sound on the screens. “Your girlfriend’s a wanted woman now, and so is Ultimate. Federal agencies are going to be on the lookout for them, all over the US.”

“Not my girlfriend,” I quibbled.

“Too bad; you two’d make a cute couple. Moving on. We’re dealing with some major players here. They were running an op designed to take over Ultimate’s mind, and have infiltrated the Freedom Legion. They have enough influence to put a frame on Ultimate, too. Are you with me so far?”

“I’m all ears, Gramps,” I said.

“Thanks, kid,” Condor replied with a grin. “The same players were after the Lurker, who seems to have discovered the origin of Neo powers. Christine was groomed by the Lurker to do something about the Source. That’s what I got from his crazy ramblings, at least. My guess is, our adversaries want her for the same purpose. In conclusion, we’re facing a massive conspiracy that includes the Iron Tsar and one or more traitors within the Freedom Legion, and probably a lot more. Am I missing anything?”

“Sounds about right. Christine told me some of what she saw when her father made her look in that cube he had made. She couldn’t remember all of it, but there is some sort of cosmic war. From the looks of it, we got our powers from one of the gangs in that turf war, and the other one’s bankrolling the assholes.”

“And the assholes include one guy who took down Ultimate,” Condor added musingly. “Took him down twice, come to think of it; once via mental attack, the other by beating the hell out of him. I’m beginning to feel like we’re way in over our heads here.”

“Yeah, we’re probably not the right people for this kind of job,” I agreed. “But we’re what’s on tap. I’m not planning on running.”

“I never said I was going to run,” Condor said, sounding a bit miffed. “Just thinking out loud.”

“Okay, sorry. I know you’re not a runner, man. Look at it this way. If these guys can take Ultimate down, nobody’s is qualified to deal with them. Which means we’re just as qualified as anyone else.”

“Point. Not sure if it’s a good point, mind you, but point.”

“Since nobody’s followed us here, I think we’re still protected from Neo snoops. Christine has some ability that spoofs those powers, or someone would have tracked her down long before now. Cassandra said as much,” I added, wincing inwardly. That had been our last face to face conversation. “Which is one reason she’s not going to use that cube, at least for now; it must have made neutralized that power, and allowed the assholes to track her down.”

“Makes sense. If the opposition shows up again, we won’t have the Lurker to provide a suicidal rear guard while we run away.”

“Right now we need more information. You’re the crime-fighting masked detective, bird-head. Where can we get more information?”

“Well, unless the Lurker killed every Russian mobster in Chicago, there must be somebody left in charge. We could interrogate assorted Mafyia soldiers and move up the ladder until we bump into somebody important. Or,” he added reluctantly, “we could hit the Russians in New York instead. That’s where Christine showed up in the first place. I don’t think she appeared there by accident.”

“Yeah. New York is where crazy Neo shit happens most often. Why should this be any different?”

Condor nodded. “I think Christine was able to escape from their base somehow, but she didn’t get very far. I’d expect them to be somewhere in the city or at least near it.”

“Sounds like a place to start. Tracking down Russian mobsters and beating them to a pulp is right up my alley.”

“Mine, too,” Condor admitted. “I don’t like the idea of stirring up trouble in my town, but I guess trouble is already there. We might as well try to do something about it. Why don’t you call Lester and see how much he can tell us about the Russians in Chicago? I’ll work on the New York angle and we can line up a list of possible targets. Figure we can stay here for a day or two while we prep for our next move.”

It felt like old times, getting ready to kick ass and take names. I grabbed my comm and called Lester Harris, one of the Lurker’s sidekicks, who had bailed on us earlier in the night. Smart of him; he was a vanilla human and way in over his head. He probably wouldn’t be happy to hear from me, but he would help out.

I even managed not to think about Christine and Ultimate for a while.

Chapter Three

The Freedom Legion

Atlantic Headquarters, March 15, 2013

Kenneth Slaughter worked on his armor and fought a rising tide of despair.

The workshop was empty except for him. He always did his best work by himself, unencumbered by the need to interact with people. Relating to the rest of humanity had long felt like a chore. He would much rather be alone with his thoughts, free to let his mind consider possibilities, alternatives, and new developments in a hundred different fields. Having others around all too often led to their looking uncomprehendingly at him, or worse, requesting or even demanding explanations their brains were seldom able to grasp. It annoyed him to have to muster the effort to simplify and translate his ideas so lesser minds could begin to understand them.

Face it, Doc. You’re a snob. An intellectual elitist who is nowhere near as smart as he thinks.

It was a fair assessment. Daedalus Smith had flung those words in his face at an informal gathering back in 1941, mere weeks before Pearl Harbor had dragged the Freedom Legion into a war that Kenneth had worked hard – and failed miserably – to prevent. For all his genius, he had accomplished precious little in the things that mattered. Most of his energy had been spent playing policeman or social worker, dealing with emergencies while letting the world’s larger problems fester. He had cured innumerable diseases, helped end world hunger and provide cheap energy for billions of people, but solutions to the fundamental problems of humanity eluded him. Many of his friends and colleagues chided him for even considering solving those problems. Given his failure to come up with any cure that wasn’t worse than the disease, they were likely right.

Kenneth ran a multi-spectrum sensor wand over the surface of the latest iteration of the Brass Man battlesuit. He’d been working on the new armor for almost a year, on and off, whenever he could spare the time. The project had served as a welcome break from his regular duties; since he had a mandatory eight hours off, he’d chosen to spend them at his workshop. It wasn’t something urgent: although his regular suit had been destroyed in the nuclear explosion that had nearly killed him, he had spare ready.

Painful, unwanted memories resurfaced – his flesh burning, the brutal impact of the shockwave swatting him out of the sky, waking up in utter agony when his nearly carbonized body had been plucked from the ocean. He’d been over a mile away from ground zero, but he had barely survived.

We are not immortal. He’d said as much several times to his more powerful comrades, lest their power corrupted their judgment. As the years passed, a sort of complacency set in, however. Reminders such as this were necessary. Kenneth shrugged off the memories and kept on working.

The sensor’s readings were satisfactory. The shiny surface of the suit was flawless, down to the atomic level. Underneath lay a complex sandwich of metallic, crystalline and fluid structures designed to dissipate and reflect energy. The new alloy and its integral force field would likely allow the suit to remain functional even in the face of a nuclear explosion like the one that had brought down the previous model. The suit’s weapon systems wielded five times the firepower of the previous model, perhaps more if one took into account the new x-ray laser’s penetrating characteristics. The Brass Man Mark IX was almost ready for action.

Almost, but not not quite. He would have to take the field in another Mark VIII like the one he’d nearly died in. And if he faced his best friend in battle, only luck would keep him alive.

Kenneth tried to set that thought aside as he continued making adjustments. Some of the systems he’d been tinkering with had not been completed, and he’d been forced to replace them with spare parts left over from the Mark VIII. It would be functional sooner that way, though, and that was all that mattered. The best was the enemy of the good enough, as George Patton had been fond to say. Kenneth’s mouth twisted slightly as he remembered the irascible general, a brilliant tactician whose drive to Berlin during World War Two had been as magnificent as it had been unnecessary, as Berlin had fallen while the Allied forces were still miles away. Patton had never forgiven the Legion for stealing his moment of glory; the general’s failed Presidential bid in 1952 (when he lost the GOP nomination to fellow veteran Eisenhower) had been rich in virulently anti-Neolympian rhetoric.  He’d been yet another talented human who had grown to hate and resent Kenneth and his kind.

He sighed and placed the sensor wand back in its charging slot. His work wasn’t done, but he was done for the night, and he didn’t feel any better. The Legion had been decimated and remained divided, with its most famous and revered member on the run and suspected of assorted crimes, even as the prospect of war in China loomed larger by the hour. Once again, circumstances had caught him by surprise and reduced him to merely reacting to events, rather than making things happen.

The gleaming Brass Man suit seemed to mock him from its cradle. His greatest creation, good only to destroy. Kenneth lashed out without thought, surprising himself by his own outburst of rage. His fist struck the featureless bronzed helmet, shattering several knuckles. The pain only enraged him more. A few seconds later, Kenneth stood amidst the wreckage of his laboratory, bleeding from several self-inflicted wounds. The Brass Man suit was unharmed, of course. He might be stronger than any human, but he was too weak to damage the armor that defined him as much as all his other achievements combined.

“Kenneth?”

He whirled toward the sound of the voice. His rage vanished, replaced by deep, nearly overwhelming waves of embarrassment and shame.

Alessandra ‘Ali’ Fiori, code name Hyperia, looked as embarrassed as Kenneth felt. The Legionnaire had let herself in while Kenneth was in the middle of his rampage. He had no idea how long she had stood there and watched the current leader of the Legion behave like a child throwing a tantrum.

“Hyperia,” he said, trying to think of something appropriate to say. Nothing came to mind.

“Hey, Kenneth. Guess you needed to let off some steam,” she said, and smiled. The grin made her look like a teenage girl in a too-revealing bodysuit rather than the formidable fifty-year old woman she was. “Next time, give me a call and we can go a few rounds on the ring. You can break knuckles on my face and spare the expensive equipment.”

“Hyperia… Alessandra. I…”

“I know you love to pretend you don’t have any feelings, Ken. It’s okay. We’re all under a lot of stress at the moment. You had to let it out, and you didn’t break anything that can’t be replaced. So relax, I’m not going to judge you, or tell anybody, okay?”

Kenneth nodded and forced himself to breathe. He knew dozens of meditation techniques: one of the simpler methods sufficed to bring balance back into his body and mind. “I’m sorry,” he said in a low voice.

“Sorry for what? We all lose our cool at some point. As long as we don’t lose our shit…” Her grin vanished. “I came in with more bad news.”

“I expected as much. Don’t worry, Alessandra. I won’t lose my shit, or even my cool. Is this about John?”

She nodded. “They found the remains of Doctor Cohen in Chicago. He’s been murdered by someone with superhuman strength. Chi-Town’s Police Commissioner is going to name John as a suspect first thing in the morning.”

Kenneth looked down. He’d known Martin Cohen for decades. The two men hadn’t been friends – Kenneth had precious few of those – but he respected the therapist’s insights, had read his publications with great interest, and had consulted with him several times over the years. If John had been truly responsible for the murder, Kenneth had signed Cohen’s death warrant when he’d asked the physician to look into his friend’s case.

Hyperia knew him well enough to read his seemingly impassive expression. “Are you done blaming yourself, Kenneth? You aren’t omniscient, even if you try to be. There’s no way you could know any of this would happen. And I still don’t believe John is responsible for any of this. I think he’s being set up. I think it’s no coincidence our most powerful member got sidelined just after we got hit by the worst attack on Freedom Island since the Giant Robot Swarm of ’87, and with a possible war with the Empire on our hands. That kind of cluster-fuck feels like something planned, not just happenstance. The whole thing stinks, and if you weren’t busy blaming yourself you’d see it too.”

He nodded. “I have my suspicions as well, Alessandra.  If they are correct, our enemies have infiltrated the Legion itself. Which means someone in the Legion, someone we trust implicitly, has betrayed us.”

“So you have thought it through. It shouldn’t surprise me, coming from the guy described as ‘as brilliant as Sherlock Holmes, as strong as Hercules, and as charitable as Abraham Lincoln.’”

Kenneth smiled wryly upon hearing the old quote. “Words nobody can live up to, unfortunately, or I’d have solved this particular conundrum already.”

“So, my wise old friend, what do we do?”

“We carry on. We prepare to face Ultimate, should he in fact be out of his mind or otherwise impaired. And we watch everybody, and trust no one.”

“Including each other?”

“No. Trusting nobody is as bad as trusting everybody. I’m certain you aren’t the traitor,” Kenneth said, meaning every word. He’d gone carefully over Ali’s schedule over the last few years; she was simply too busy living her life to be part of a clandestine plot. “Keep your eyes open and watch your back. The traitor is someone seemingly above reproach; it could be anybody.”

Hyperia grimaced. “Cheerful thought, Kenneth. Do you have any suspects?”

“Three people come to mind. Meteor: he has been very unhappy about the Legion’s policies for quite some time. Daedalus Smith: he certainly has had the means and opportunity, although I can’t fathom what he would be hoping to accomplish. And General Xu: he’s always felt he was denied the power and privilege he deserves, in China and the world at large.”

“Jesus. I hope you’re wrong.”

“So do I. If anything happens to me, you’re going to have to take over and find out the truth. With John gone, you will sit on the Council until the next election. I have also designated you as the second in command on the Atlantic theater of operations. I was going to tell you tomorrow, but since you are here...”

“So you do trust me. Is it because you think I’m too much of a dumb blonde to be the traitor?”

Kenneth grinned wryly. “I guess us dumb blondes need to stick together. Then again, I believe your original hair color is brown.”

“You say the nicest things,” Ali said. Her smile was replaced with a solemn expression. “Please be careful, Kenneth.” Left unsaid was the simple fact that, unlike her, he was a weakling among Neos, and easy to kill.

Many had thought he would be easy to kill over the years, and they had all been wrong. He would have to prove the traitor wrong as well.

The Lurker’s Tale

New York City, New York, December 12, 1919

Mr. Night’s laugh was unnerving and devoid of mirth or any human emotion. Damon Trent had never thought laughter could be used as a tool of intimidation, not until this moment.

“My friends,” the strange man with the dark glasses said. His voice was thin but carried surprisingly well. “My dear, dear friends. Damon Trent and Daedalus Smith from New York. Konstantin Cushko, formerly from Kiev. Cassandra Camlo, from many places and from nowhere in particular. And the inscrutable Mr. Qiao, from Ikh Khüree in far-off Mongolia, and of late a fixture in some of the shadier sections of the City of London.”

The Chinaman’s face remained impassive, except for a slight narrowing of his eyes, which Damon took as a sign of surprise. The Russian looked angry at the mention of his name. Neither reaction seemed to make any impact on Mr. Night’s dark cheerfulness. “Never fear, my friends. Your secret peccadilloes are safe within these walls. Your activities with the Ukrainian Galician Army are of no concern to this company, Mr. Cushko. Neither are your commercial enterprises in England and elsewhere, Mr. Qiao. Nor Mr. Smith’s hedonistic pursuits, Miss Camlo’s checkered history, or Mr. Trent’s somewhat questionable conduct during the Great War. Your past is of little concern to me.”

Now it was Damon’s turn to be surprised. The little man spoke of things he had no earthly way of knowing. Their host wasn’t a confidence man, then, but another like Damon himself, capable of things that could not be explained by reason or science.  A part of him felt relief. He had spent much of the last six months wasting his time with charlatans and deluded fools who had not provided any enlightenment. Here he might find answers. Apprehension warred with relief, however. Mr. Night’s disturbing demeanor made it likely Damon would not like the answers provided here.

“All of you are members of a grand new elite,” Mr. Night continued. “You few, you happy few, have been chosen by a greater power for a great destiny, and I mean that quite literally, let me assure you. And you five in particular have a unique chance to play a pivotal role in the shaping of the future. I have called you here to ask you to accept that role.”

“You speak much and say little,” Cushko said. “I did not come here to waste my time. I have a war to fight. The Poles and the Bolsheviks are circling my motherland like so many wolves, and I must return there soon.”

The world should have had its fill of war, Damon thought, and yet there were still plenty of fools like Cushko, eager to lead other fools into new charnel houses. There truly was no hope for humanity, was there? What could whatever paltry miracles he and his companions wielded possibly accomplish in a world where murder had become another industry?

“You will work miracles, my friends,” Mr. Night said, as if reading Damon’s thoughts, or perhaps literally reading those thoughts. “And they will not be paltry things. It is within your power to become king-makers or actual kings, and to reshape history.”

“That’s bully, old man,” Daedalus Smith said, obviously not impressed by Mr. Night’s lofty pronouncements. “Would you mind telling us some specifics? I may not have wars to fight, but I could be doing better things on my week-end than cooling my heels and listening to vague speeches about great power and lofty destinies.”

Mr. Night bowed towards Daedalus. “As you wish,” he said. “And so, without further ado…” The strange man made a broad gesture with both arms and a glowing object appeared in mid-air in front of him.

At first, Damon thought he was watching a dark flame hovering in the air, but the thing coalesced into an intricate design made of radiant darkness, black with purple highlights. It shone intensely but darkly, and every instinct in Damon’s body warned him the thing was dangerous, not merely dangerous but wrong, something that did not belong to this world. A few steps away, Cassandra recoiled from the sight as if she had been dealt a physical blow. The Chinaman raised his hands in a fighting stance. Cushko roared a challenge in his native language, and a shield of flame appeared in front of him. Daedalus did not move; he stared intently at the dark apparition, trying to understand its workings.

“Observe, my friends,” Mr. Night said. “Observe, and learn.”

Damon tried to look away from the darkly glowing design and discovered he could not tear his gaze from it. The thing started to move, to change its pattern with a sinuous, hypnotic rhythm. He looked into the glowing darkness and, in looking, was lost.

* * *

He walked alone through blood-spattered walls. The Secret Service Special Neo Unit and their human counterparts had made their last stand by the entrance to the secret bunker beneath the White House. They had perished to the last man. A part of him, the vanishingly small bit of humanity left within the darkness, felt a pang of regret over their deaths. They had fought well, doing their duty. But duty, courage and honor were things of the past. Only power mattered.

One solid metal wall stood between him and his target. He could have ripped it off its hinges, or melted the steel with but a glance, or otherwise dealt with the puny obstacle in a myriad other ways. On a whim, he simply teleported to the other side, where a pale man in a rumpled suit awaited him. Killing the last President of the United States was a largely symbolic gesture, since the country was already in ruins. Washington D.C. had burned to the ground; elsewhere, millions were dead and millions more slowly starved in the deserts he had created; the President had been hiding in the dark like a scared child for quite some time now, ruling nothing.

He finished it quickly, almost mercifully, although mercy was no longer within his understanding. A moment later, he appeared behind a podium overlooking a plaza filled with tens of thousands of his supporters. He raised the President’s severed head for everyone to see, and the crowd cheered him wildly. Those worshipping men and women formed the core of his army and followed him as he went forth conquering, and to conquer.

In the end, only three remained, three rulers and destroyers. They met in a molten cauldron that he vaguely recognized as the city of Paris, and there they strove against each other. Their battle made continents shudder and heave. And when it was over, he stood alone, ruler of the planet. He would remake the world as he saw fit, for there was no one left to challenge him.

His laughter was a terrible thing.

* * *

Damon recoiled from the vision. The promise of immense power remained, however. It was tantalizingly close, his for the taking. His new gifts were but a hint of the things he would be able to do if he accepted the vision’s implicit offer.

No.

The negation was irrevocable. He felt the promised power slipping away, leaving him with nothing but regret and fear. He became aware of similar decisions made by others in the room. Cassandra screamed as her eyes were seared off by things no human was meant to see. Daedalus Smith turned away from dreams where the world was a simple, ordered place, a clockwork universe run by New Men, perfectible and eventually perfect. Konstantin Cushko tried to negotiate a better deal, and only succeeded in damning himself. Qiao’s denial was followed by an oath to achieve ultimate power on his own, to protect the world against the threat he had seen in his visions.

Damon came to himself somewhere outdoors, stumbling blindly into the night. The city streets were almost deserted; a look at his pocket watch revealed it was nearly dawn. Even as he wondered about the lost time, he realized that all his memories from that night were dissipating, leaving him groping for images and concepts that had been clear to him moments before, but which quickly became dreamlike before being gone altogether. It was a terrible feeling, having knowledge ripped out of his mind. He knew he had been made to forget something, something vitally important, and that knowledge remained, if nothing else.

He staggered down the streets, trying to make sense of it all. The invitation, he remembered, and responding to it, but he could no longer recall the address. There had been others there, but their identities were lost to him. And he had seen things that left him feeling a sense of urgency and overwhelming terror.

There had been laughter, too. Dark, terrible laughter. He remembered that well.

The Invincible Man

Lake of the Woods, Ontario, March 15, 2013

John Clarke stared into the night, seeing nothing.

The wounds had healed and the pain was gone, but the torn-up his costume remained as a reminder of his humiliating defeat. Normally he would have changed uniforms as soon as he was back in Freedom Island, or at his Artic Sanctuary. He couldn’t go to either place. For the time being, he had no home.

John angrily shook his head. He was wallowing in self-pity instead of thinking of a course of action. His self-confidence was shot. He’d been hurt badly many times before, but rarely like this. He’d been beaten, at the mercy of his enemies. Only the intervention of a handful of vigilantes had saved him. A handful of vigilantes, and Christine Dark, of course.

“John?”

Speak of the devil.

John turned to face the girl. Her hair and eye coloring were so much like Linda Lamar’s that it hurt a little bit just to look at her. The similarities to his wife ended there, however. Linda had been strong-willed and short-tempered (‘I’m a pushy broad, and you’d better remember it,’ she’d unapologetically announced early in their relationship); Christine was shy and kindly. And yet, something about her brought back feelings he’d thought buried forever. Seeing her made her set aside his doubts and fears. It was time to start behaving like the Invincible Man once again.

“Hey,” Christine continued. “Sorry to disturb you. There’s been some more bad news. I know, what else is new, right?”

“That’s all right. What’s the bad news?”

“They found the mind-trip guy, the Dreamer. Dead. They made it look like you did it.”

That made sense, in its own twisted way. A living Doctor Cohen could have been confronted and questioned. As a murder victim, his accusations became unimpeachable. Christine could corroborate John’s version of events, but in the eyes of the law she was a criminal who had assaulted a number of law-enforcement Neos. Her credibility would be minimal.

“If we turn ourselves in, can they, I don’t know, do a mind-reading or something and show that we’re telling the truth?”

“Telepathic testimony is not admissible as evidence in court,” John explained. “It was deemed to be a violation of the Fifth Amendment. At best, it can be used as probably cause for search warrants and the like.”

“That sucks. Well, protecting the Fifth Amendment doesn’t suck, but you not being able to prove your innocence does.”

“The truth will come out in the end,” he said with a confidence he didn’t really feel. He probably shouldn’t be trying to mollycoddle the girl, but he felt an urge to do so nonetheless.

“They even planted DNA evidence implicating you,” Christine went on. “This is so effed up it’s not even funny. After we kicked the Dreamer’s ass I thought things might turn out all right Then Dad showed up and it’s been all epic fail all the time since then.”

“The Lurker was – is, for all I know – a good man,” John said. “Even if he wasn’t in his right mind, from what you said he tried to protect you even at the cost of his own life.”

“None of that would have happened if he hadn’t made me look at the Red Cube of Doom. Now it’s as useful to me as a broken Palantir; if I try to use it to learn more, those wannabe Nazgul may pop in for a little visit again.”

John vaguely understood the references. Tolkien’s fantasies, he thought. He’d never read the books, and he’d only seen one of the movies back in the seventies, at Linda’s insistence; it hadn’t been bad, just not his cup of tea. He’d never found much use for fantasy and speculative fiction; reality had enough wonders and mysteries as far as he was concerned, and he saw no need to read about fictional ones. He got the gist of what Christine was saying.

“Yes, waiting until we know it’s safe would be a good idea,” he said, and involuntarily ran a hand over the rents in his costume.

“I still can’t believe one of the giant beardo took you down like that,” she said, noticing the gesture. “But I think he got a boost from the Outsiders, and they don’t play by the rules, even the rules in super-duper universe.”

“So you did learn something before we were attacked.” The long-suppressed memories about the shadow-entity in Berlin stirred at the mention of the Outsiders.

“Something. Not much. There is a war. Cosmic Nerds versus the Outsiders.  Not exactly good and evil, but close enough for us mere humans, I guess. The Nerds live in the center of galaxies and use black holes like we use triple-A batteries, don’t ask me how, I’m a physics major and I was like a Mayan priest trying to understand what a nuclear power plant does, let alone how it does it. The Outsider thingies were, duh, outside the universe when the Big Bang happened, and got dragged into it. They want to make the universe go away so they can get back home. They don’t like us. I caught glimpses of lots of dead worlds where the Outsiders managed to eradicate all life. They aren’t nice at all.”

John nodded. “I think I encountered one of their creatures once before.” He told her about the 1945 incident. For a wonder, Christine listened quietly until he was done.

“That’s gotta be one of them,” she said when he was done. “Which means they’ve been trying to get into your head for a while. Trying and failing. The Outsiders don’t do too well in places with a lot of matter and energy, so they mostly hang out in deep space and send their agents to do their dirty work, to try and twist the Cosmic Nerd’s gifts and use it against us, against all sentient beings, basically.”

“And the, ah, Cosmic Nerds gave us our powers so we could join the fight against the Outsiders?”

“I didn’t get all the details, but I think that’s their plan; the powers were meant to prep us for the conflict. A quickie upgrade so we could contribute to the war effort. Which makes us a bunch of primitive natives getting some shiny new guns so we can go fight for our new overlords. Don’t know if I like that.”

“I’m not sure I like it either, but it answers the question of the century,” John said. “People have been wracking their minds for decades trying to figure out where the Source came from.”

“The Source? That’s what you call the Spooky Energy thingy?”

“One of my colleagues came up with the name. It has a nicer ring than Einstein’s Spooky Energy or Oppenheimer’s Gifts of Shiva.” John had met Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer a few times, but the unbridled hostility both human geniuses felt towards Neolympians had cast a pall on those meetings. Daedalus Smith had coined the more neutral term.

“Yeah, it sounds better,” Christine said. “Anyways, the Source came from the Cosmic Nerds. And the super-writing, that was the next step of the process; when we were ready, we would figure out how to use it, and that would give us, our entire species, a leg up, a full uplift thingy, so we could go join the local Elder Races in their giant tree house at the center of the galaxy. That’s where they live. By the way, one thing I learned up was pretty neat: once you are in the tree house you can communicate with the other tree houses in all the galaxies, even those beyond our current particle horizon, eighty billion light years away and more. It’s like a Cosmic Internet that spans the entire universe. I have no clue how they don’t violate causality and a gazillion laws of physics along the way, but again, Mayan priest, meet nuclear power plant. Good luck making sense of it. I might manage one of these days, though.” She smiled at the thought.

Christine’s enthusiastic rant reminded John of Kenneth Slaughter when he got carried away about something or other, except Kenneth hid his excitement a little better. He smiled back at her, and quietly prayed that Kenneth was innocent of any wrongdoing.

Much like Kenneth when he was on a roll, Christine wasn’t done. “Anyway, the Outsiders don’t want us to join the Elder Races, so they are trying to mess with the process. I think people touched by the Outside end up hating reality, just like the Outsiders hate reality, and that would make them pretty evil from our perspective. They have been destroying populated worlds all over the universe, and we’re on their to-do list.”

“For over seventy years, we haven’t detected any signs of intelligent life in the universe. The Outsiders must be the reason,” John said. “One of my friends actually went on a twenty-year trip to explore the galaxy and seek other civilizations.”

“Wow. Did he find anything?”

“He wouldn’t talk about what he found, actually. That’s the thing, whatever he saw was so terrible he doesn’t want to share it with us. He’s been back for over a year, and all he’s done since then is drink himself into a stupor. We were worried about him. If it wasn’t for my own problems, I’d have tried harder to talk to him.” Kenneth Slaughter’s words came back to John. ‘Cassius… yes, he also worries us all.’ What had Cassius Jones found out there? “I really should talk to him.”

“Umm. Can’t that wait until after you clear your name and stuff?”

“I think he can help. My friend’s name is Cassius Jones; he goes by the code name Janus. Now that I know what he must have seen, I think I can get him to listen to me. More importantly, he hasn’t been an active Legion member in decades, so he can’t be the traitor. If I can convince him of my innocence, his support would be invaluable.” If I can secure his support, he and I can take on the rest of the Legion and probably win, if it comes to that, he though. It probably wouldn’t come to that, but having Cassius at his side could give him the leverage to unmask the traitor or traitors within. The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. He didn’t fit with the likes of Condor and Face-Off. Cassius would help, if he could get him to snap out of his funk.

 “Janus is the guy who won the Pacific campaign in WWII pretty much by himself, isn’t he?” Christine said. “And you’ve already decided to go see him. I can tell.”

“McArthur and Halsey would have disagreed fairly strongly, but yes, Janus did win the Pacific War for us, and yes, I’m going to go see him. I think that’s my best option. It’s better than confronting the Legion by myself. If I manage to convince the Legion of my innocence and ferret out the traitor, everything will be all right.”

“Big if, though.”

“Things would be out in the open, and we wouldn’t have to run from the authorities.” He looked at her intently. “Come with me. We can convince Janus together, and after we reveal the truth to the rest of my friends, we’ll be home free. You’ll be under the protection of the Legion.”

Christine considered it. “I would, but Cassandra warned us not to go to the authorities. What if the traitor has more tricks up his or her sleeve? Then I’ll be handing myself over to the Big Bads. They want to use me the same way Dad wanted to use me. Or kill me so I can’t do it for anybody else.”

“I can protect you,” John said, but the words sounded hollow to him. He hadn’t been able to protect her in the cave, had he? “No, scratch that. How about this? I’ll go speak to Janus myself. If everything goes well, and once I clear my name, I’ll contact Condor and let you all know it’s safe. Since you seem to able to avoid detection, you should be safe here.”

“Okay, that sounds like a plan. Be careful, John, okay?”

“You too. I’m not happy about leaving you in the care of a pack of vigilantes and killers, but…”

“Hey, those are my friends, even if I’m not one hundred percent behind their life choices, okay? So don’t be dissing them. We’ll be all right. They’re all good people, even Kestrel, in her own perverted way.”

“If you can, stay put until I get in touch with you.”

“I wouldn’t mind chilling out at the lodge for a few days, but I don’t think we can just wait for you for long. What if things don’t go so well on your end?”

“I don’t know what you and your friends can accomplish other than risking your capture,” John said.

“We’ll work it out. We’ve done okay so far.”

“Tell the others to be careful. I’ll be in touch.”

“You’re not going to say goodbye?”

“They’d probably try to talk me out of doing this, and arguing with them would just waste time. I have to do this. We can’t afford to be on the run from the Legion and the US authorities, in addition to our shadowy enemy. I have to set things right, before they get completely out of hand.”

“Okay, okay. Go be uber-macho and stuff. Stay alive.”

“I will. Scout’s honor.”

She smiled at him. It made him feel warm as he flew away.

Chapter Four

Hunters and Hunted

New York City, New York, May 15, 2013

He is dead, dead and gone, nothing left to do. The thought ran through her mind with every breath, with every step. She repeated those words to herself even now, as she sprang from the shadows onto the unsuspecting group of armed men gathering at a warehouse.

He is dead.

Instincts honed for two decades of wetwork took over. She flung her arms out and a dozen energy stars flashed towards the startled men. Flesh burned and exploded; the stars tore through their bodies, leaving behind broken twitching meat where living beings had stood moments before.

Dead and gone.

Before all of this, she would have laughed in delight at the carnage and savored the screams of terror as the few survivors of her initial onslaught realized what was happening. Now she went about her business with cold dispassion. Some men ran, and her energy stars struck them from behind and sent their smoldering corpses tumbling to the ground. A couple, braver than the rest or simply too stupid to know they were doomed, drew weapons and tried to fight back. Most of their shots went wide or high. One bullet struck her forehead, right above her right eye. The impact, and the flare of pain as the spent round bounced off her skull, would normally have made her snarl in anger, and she would have given special consideration to the unlucky shooter’s final demise. Now, she merely finished him off as all the others, with as much passion as a farmer slaughtering his livestock.

Dead and gone.

The screams faded away one by one. The last man, his legs severed at the knees, kept on crawling away, praying all the while in a high-pitched voice. “God, please God, please, oh, God.” She caught up to him and finished him off with a stomping kick to the back of his neck. The crunching sound cut off the prayer with sharp finality.  Her assignment was complete.

“Well done, Lady Shi.”

He must have shown up at some point while she was distracted by the slaughter. She turned towards the hated voice, and saw the massive form of her lover standing a few feet away. She was intimately aware of everything about the body looming in front of her, his hardiness and relentless strength, and the surprising tenderness it was capable of, when the time was right. The mind and soul that had once dwelt within that body were gone now, however.

He is dead.

“I came to fetch you, my Lady, but saw I was a bit early and contented myself with watching your work,” Mr. Night said through her dead lover’s lips. “Always a pleasure to see a professional in action, although, dare I say it, you seem to be lacking your customary joie de vivre, my dear.”

She said nothing. The only thing she wanted was to tear that hideous smile off her lover’s face, to kill Mr. Night in the most gruesome manner she could conceive. She was a connoisseur of torture and dismemberment, and she could imagine a hundred ways to make the little monster pay for his actions. She wanted to kill him – but she was too afraid to try.

“Your restraint is wise, my sweet Lady.”

The words mocked her and reminded her of their confrontation on the lakeside beach earlier that night. Upon realizing what had happened, how her Bear had been violated and destroyed, she had attacked. Her Bear was stronger than she, but even his tough hide was not immune to her fiery blades. She should have been able to tear his lover’s body apart, crying as she did it, but knowing it was the only way to avenge him.

Before she could strike, Mr. Night had smiled, and spoken a word in some outlandish language she had never heard before. Upon hearing the word, Lady Shi had disappeared, had turned back into the nameless child in a Shanghai brothel that catered to a very special kind of customer. There is no fear like what a helpless, uncomprehending child feels in the face of utter brutality. She had fallen to her knees, broken and helpless, and Mr. Night had laughed at her.

That humiliation stayed her hand now. There was nothing she could do other than follow orders, bide her time, and wait for an opportunity. From the mocking glint in Mr. Night’s stolen eyes, he knew what she was thinking and was confident that there would never be an opportunity for revenge.

Nothing left to do.

“I must admit, the capabilities of my new host body have been unexpected,” Mr. Night commented. “Taking possession of Medved’s body was an act of desperation, you see. My poor mortal shell did not survive my encounter with the Lurker, and a mind unfettered cannot survive for very long in this vale of tears. It needs a home, a place to hang its proverbial hat, if you will. I had opened a conduit into Medved earlier in the evening, and it was a case of any port in a storm, as the saying goes. As it turns out, the range and amplitude of both my personal gifts and the Bear’s own powers seems to have grown through some wondrous synergy. I fear such boons do come at a price, however. Medved’s body is not long for this world. The brightest candle burns out fastest.”

She remained silent.

“Do not fret so, my darling Lady Shi. Your Bear is not gone. His essence no longer dwells here, yes, but it’s not utterly gone. He is in another realm, a little place I’ve made for my many devotees, although I doubt he’s enjoying the experience. If you are a good little girl, I might even let you see him again.”

Hope was a trap. He is dead, dead and gone. Her only hope was for revenge. Still, she let herself look hopeful, to let Mr. Night think he had fooled her. She bowed to him as a loyal follower would to her rightful leader.

“That’s better. You did a good job here, my dear. Those mobsters were getting ready to strike back at our Russian allies, and we can’t have them distracted while they continue to search for the girl. This little incident should make the remaining members of the Cosa Nostra a bit more prudent, and that’s all to the good.”

She bowed again in acknowledgement of the compliment, quietly fantasizing about ripping out his throat, as he continued speaking. “Finding the girl continues to be a challenge, even with the remnants of Archangel’s organization acting as our hounds. If she tries to access the Primer, I will have another chance to find her, but if she doesn’t…” Mr. Night trailed off for several seconds, lost in thought. “It occurs to me that there is a small chance our lost bird and her friends will try to strike back. Come with me, my dear.” He extended his hand to her, and she reluctantly took it. She repressed a shiver as darkness surrounded them.

“We shall prepare a fitting welcome for them, should they decide to grace us with their presence.”

Christine Dark

Lake of the Woods, Ontario, March 15, 2013

The big guy flew away. Bummer maximus. She’d hoped they could chat for a while longer. Truth to tell, a part of her wanted to do way more than chat. After the whole mess at the island, a part of her wanted to do something primal and life-affirming, preferably with somebody else. Not quite anybody, but with somebody she liked. John had been her first choice, but he’d decided to be a big macho man. It might also have turned out badly, for assorted reasons, so maybe his leaving was for the best. But there was somebody else on the island or peninsula or whatever, somebody who she knew was more than a little interested in her.

Such a bad idea in so many ways, though. Starting with, it’s not fair to him. Continuing with, he’s your unofficial bodyguard/sidekick, and getting involved with him could mess things up, bad. And ending with the fact that I don’t really approve of lots of his life choices, like killing people at the drop of a hat.

Yeah, it’d be best to set her near-death-experience-induced rush of hormones aside, and concentrate on the business at hand, she told herself firmly. Concentrate on saving the world, and herself for that matter. She resolutely tabled the matter and headed back to the cabin, all businesslike and stuff.

Kestrel was back downstairs, sitting on Condor’s lap, about as businesslike as a stripper at a bachelor party, which come to think of it was businesslike in its own way. For the second time since Christine had met her, Kestrel wasn’t wearing her trademark painted-on latex outfit, having changed into a slightly less slutty pair of shorts and a t-shirt, sort of a Sporty Skank casual wear thingy. Kestrel’s vibes had changed, too. She’d gone from her usual twisted nympho ways to a mixture of fear and concern. It wasn’t fear for her own safety; Kestrel did not care if she lived or died, something that made Christine feel slightly nauseated when she picked it up with her empathic senses. Kestrel was afraid Condor was going to die on her. It was shocking that she actually felt something, other than wanting to stage crossover productions of the Kama Sutra and Fifty Shades of Gray.

Christine caught that burst of emotion despite the fact she kept her empathy senses turned all the way down when looking at Condor and Kestrel. Even the surface stuff coming off them was disturbing enough, a toxic stew of lust, guilt, shame and pain, marinated in assorted bodily fluids. It wasn’t quite as bad as looking at her father’s tainted aura had been, but it was nothing she really wanted in her head, either. A deeper look into their psyches might just drive her over the edge. Mark had been worried about Condor hooking up with Kestrel. He’d been so right it wasn’t funny.

“Where is the new boyfriend?” Kestrel asked Christine as she came in. Kestrel and Christine weren’t going to start a Sisterhood of the Travelling Tights anytime soon. The super-skank didn’t care for Christine, or maybe she was one of those women who didn’t like other women. A female misogynist. Lovely.

“If you mean John, he’s gone off to talk to Janus.”

“Janus?” Condor said, looking up from the computer. “Whatever for?”

Christine gave them all a quick rundown of her conversation with John. Her empathy-thingy picked up that Condor was dubious and worried about John’s actions, Kestrel didn’t give a crap, and Mark was just glad that John was out of his figurative hair for a while. “Anyways,” she concluded. “Are we doing anything else tonight or can I go get some sleep?”

“We’ll stay put,” Condor said. “We are thinking about going back to New York to find some Russian mobsters to interrogate, but not until tomorrow or the day after, at the earliest. It might be a good idea to rest up for a day or so.”

“Or until the Legion beats Ultimate into telling them where we are,” Mark said, being his usual downer self.

“I’ll keep monitoring all multimedia traffic,” Condor said. “If Ultimate is captured, there’s going to be some chatter about it. We should have some warning, so I think we’ll be safe here for now.”

“I’m off to bed, then,” Christine said and headed up to her designated bedroom. Someone had left a pair of sweatpants and a shirt for her on the bed, both of them a couple sizes too big but better than nothing. Probably Mark’s doing; he was kind of a sweet guy when he wasn’t being a sour-no-puss or a psycho-killer. She changed, brushed her teeth and got under the covers.

Almost an hour later, she was still tossing and turning. She was tired but too wired to sleep: her brain kept insisting on running laps around a gazillion fun questions, ranging from ‘Is Daddy really dead?’ to ‘What happens next?’ That wasn’t the worst part, though. Now that she was alone in the dark, she couldn’t help thinking about the magical cube. Nothing will keep you up like finding out about a multi-billion year old cosmic struggle and that you’ve been born – not just born, effing bred – to play a part in it. No pressure or anything.

She’d asked Mark to hold on to the cube for now. No sense risking it getting activated by her being in close proximity to it, or worse, it deciding to crawl towards her while she slept. Now that was a nice and creepy thought. Doing her damnedest not to think about any of it, she curled up under the covers and tried to sleep.

No luck. She was exhausted, but she couldn’t sleep. Christine distantly heard Condor’s voice as he and Kestrel went into their bedroom. The place was big enough so she probably wouldn’t hear them if they decided to have a little romp or three, but the thought didn’t help with her sleeping problem. Try to think about something else, she told herself. How about home, back on good old Earth Prime?

What did people see when she disappeared? Christine knew she’d had a bit of an audience when she was puking her guts out on the lawn of the Phi Beta Gecko frat house, on that fateful night when she was dragged kicking and screaming into Earth Alpha. March 11, a whole four days ago. She was sure at least a couple of d-bags had been videoing her on their smarty-pants phones. What had they recorded when she went poof? Would people think she had disintegrated, or been abducted by aliens? Which she had been, kind of. Abducted by aliens, that is, not disintegrated. Would the videos end up in a bunch of conspiracy-theory websites?

OMG, Mom. What about Mom? Christine had been missing for almost four days now. Her mother must be going through hell. With Dad out of the picture, it had always been Christine and Patricia against the world. She loved her mother with all her heart, even when Mom drove her insane. Going to college and leaving the nest had been awesome, but Christine still went back to New Jersey whenever she could, and called her mother at least a couple of times a week. Mom must be going out of her freaking mind. And there was nothing Christine could do, unless Dad wasn’t dead and agreed to help send her back.

Was there something she could do? There were a few other Neos with the power to travel between worlds, from what Mark had told her. One of them, the Magister, sounded like her best option, even if his dimension-hopping machine was disguised as a Porta-Potty that was a lot bigger on the inside than on the outside; instead of a sonic screwdriver he probably had a laser plumber, or something like that. Of course, she had no effing idea how the hell to find Porta-Potty Man. Even if she did, she couldn’t leave until she and her band of broheims dealt with the a-holes who had abducted her in the first place. So, no Mom, not for a while. That almost made her cry.

Well, thinking about home hadn’t really done anything to help her sleep.

Christine realized she hadn’t heard Mark come up. He must be having his own insomnia problems.

Misery could use some company. She got up, put on her fuzzy slippers and headed downstairs. And yeah, she knew that what she was doing might lead to something that was a bad idea.

And yeah, part of her didn’t care.

Face-Off

Lake of the Woods, Ontario, March 15, 2013

I looked at the silent woods surrounding us from the lodge’s front porch. No cars driving by, no subways chugging along beneath the surface, none of the faint background noise of the city that was always there even in the wee hours of the morning. It was too quiet, too peaceful. It only served to remind me I was out of my element. Things would be better when we went back to New York. Even if I got killed in the city, at least it would happen on my stomping rounds while I was doing my usual schtick.

Going after the guys chasing us wasn’t as horrible a plan as it sounded. If we found them first, we’d have the initiative for a change. If you want to fuck someone up, you don’t challenge him to a duel. You find out where he sleeps, you sneak in and you smash his skull before he wakes up, before he knows he’s in a fight. Not nice, but it works, and your chances of being the one walking away in one piece are a lot better. If we could find the fuckers before they found us, we might have a chance. Of course, they could find us first, or set up a nice reception for us. No guarantees in this life. Used to be I had a psychic pal who really helped stack the odds in my favor, but she’d gotten herself killed while holding off the assholes looking for Christine. Cassandra had thought her sacrifice was worth it, and I wasn’t going to second-guess her decision. But dammit, I missed her, and not because of her precognition.

I had finally reached Father Aleksander on my comm to tell him the news. He and Cassandra hadn’t hung out much, except for a few special occasions – there’d been a couple Thanksgiving dinners, two Christmases, and a few surprise birthday parties, until I made it clear I really hated surprise birthday parties. I knew they liked and respected each other, though. They were outwardly very different – a blind psychic of possibly Gypsy extraction and an Orthodox priest from the Ukraine – but they both were better people than me, and had tried to help me be better than I was.

Father Alex had been distraught at hearing about her death, and very concerned about how I was doing. I wished we could meet at his church and drink to Cassandra’s memory. He promised we would, soon. I hoped he was right. After I hung up, I sat on one of the chairs on the porch and looked at the unfamiliar woods and the stars above them.

Christine stepped out onto the porch. She was wearing the sweatpants and shirt I’d found for her in one of the lodge’s closets. There hadn’t been a lot of spare clothing to choose from. Most of the women’s items in said closets had been lingerie of assorted colors and sizes, and I figured Christine wouldn’t have wanted to sleep in one of those outfits. I nodded to her as she sat down next to me.

“Hey,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Me either.”

We stood on the porch quietly for a few minutes. Christine kept looking at the sky. Finally she spoke. “All those moving lights out there – are they all satellites? They move kinda slowly to be aircraft.”

I nodded. “Some of the bigger comm satellites, and the space stations.”

“Stations? How many space stations do they have up there?”

I’d been a big space nerd back when I was a kid, and I still paid attention to space news. I’d wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. “About a dozen or so in low Earth orbit, another four or five in geostationary orbit, twenty-odd thousand miles up, plus three Moon Bases; one station over Mars, and one over Venus, besides the ground bases. And a few more, further out, one is out over Titan, off Saturn. Oh, there’s also the asteroid mining facilities, there’s a bunch of those.”

“Holy crap. How..? Ah, Neos, that’s how.”

I nodded again. “There’s about fifteen or twenty people who can put stuff into orbit, and three or four that can put stuff pretty much anywhere in the Solar System. Ultimate himself usually does at least four or five deliveries every week – used to, at least; now that he’s a wanted man that’s going to make a mess of launch schedules.”

“Wow.” She started to say something else, but quieted down and instead watched the International Space Station float on by. I appreciated the sight as well. It’s hard to get a good look at it in New York; too much glare from the city lights makes it hard to see even the big stations. On a clear night you can still spot it, the biggest structure in low Earth orbit, housing over two thousand people and a thousand-plus visitors on any given day. It’s big enough you can sort of make out its shape, the enormous cylinder and its even bigger solar arrays, rather than just a moving spot of light. I’d always wanted to go up there.

“So is it mostly Neos being used as launch vehicles?” Christine asked. “Rocket science must have taken a hit. Why bother spending money on propulsion research when you can hire a flying dude to get your stuff up there at a fraction of the cost?”

“Well, there’s always more stuff they need to send up than Neos available to send it. Plus you can’t rely on just Neos; they often have other stuff to do. SpaceX alone does dozens of launches a month. There’s plenty of space systems: old-style rockets have mostly been replaced with contra-gravity vehicles. Those are Neo Artifacts, but there’s a lot of them. There’s also fission-pulse drives, but they’re mostly used for outer space travel; they aren’t safe to use inside the atmosphere.” Christine snorted at that, which meant she knew that ‘fission-pulse drive’ was a nice euphemism for ‘nuclear-explosions.’ “Fusion drives are the new thing; they’ve been getting better and better over the last few years.”

“It’s pretty amazing. I hadn’t even noticed all the space stuff before. I was too busy getting amazed by stuff on the ground. I so wish I could play tourist for a while.”

“We will, hopefully. My offer to be your native guide still stands. And Cassandra said we’d be traveling together. Chances are we won’t be going to any good tourist spots, though.”

We were quiet for a bit after that. For me, it served as a moment of silence for Cassie, wherever she might be now. It felt good to be quiet with somebody else, someone you could be comfortable with.

“Pretty chilly outside,” she commented after a while, rubbing her arms.

I stood up and took off my leather jacket; it had a few holes here and there, spots where that pasty-faced asshole Archangel had hit me with an energy sword earlier that night, but it was still mostly in one piece. “Here.” I draped it over her shoulders; it was way too big for her, and seeing her in it made me smile on the inside.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome.”

“Aren’t you going to get cold now? Or are you too tough and macho for the weather to bother you?”

“Actually, Condor taught me how to raise my core temperature at will. I can stand naked in the Artic without feeling chilly. The jacket’s more of a fashion statement, and a way to conceal some body armor.”

“That’s a neat trick,” Christine said. “Can any Neo do it, or is it a unique power?”

“It took me a few weeks to learn it, but any Neo can do it, I think. At least any Type Twos and higher.”

“Awesomesauce.” She looked at me silently for several seconds. “I think I got it.” It’d taken me a couple of months to learn that trick, and she’d figured it out after just looking at me? Color me impressed, assuming she wasn’t talking out of her ass. She closed her eyes, and after a couple of moments I felt heat emanating from her. Color me impressed.

Except she was generating a little too much heat. “Watch it,” I told her. “You’re over…”

Her shirt started to smolder.

“…doing it!” I said just before the shirt burst into flames.

“Holy crap!”

“Fuck!” I pulled my – luckily fire-resistant – leather jacket off her as she ripped off the flaming t-shirt and flung it away. She was wearing nothing else underneath. I handed the jacket back to her, pointedly not looking her way, and stomped on the burning t-shirt until it went out. Only you can prevent forest fires.

I looked at Christine. She looked at me.

We burst out laughing.

“Flame-Freaking-On!” Christine blurted out in between giggles.

“Nice going, Zippo,” I said, and laughed some more.

“I did my Christine-vision thingy,” she explained as the laughter died down. “I saw how you were accessing power to warm yourself up, and tried to copy it.”

“Well, it worked, sort of,” I said. “You ever hear the saying, ‘build a man a fire and he’ll be warm for a day…’”

“’But set a man on fire and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life!’” Christine finished the quote, and we both started laughing again. “You have Terry Pratchett here too?” I nodded. “That’s awesome.”

“Any second now, Condor’s going to lean out a window and tell us kids to keep the noise down,” I whispered to her, and she giggled some more.

“I think he’s too busy playing Pin the Ball-Gag on the Donkey with Kestrel,” she replied, which set me off again.

“Where do you get the oxygen to laugh without a nose and mouth?” Christine wondered. She looked at me intently again with her ‘Christine-vision thingy.’ “Okay, got that.”

“So how do I do it?” I asked her, sobering up a little bit. I hadn’t laughed that long and hard since… Never, really.

“You draw air in through your pores, straight into your lungs. All exo-biological, it’s some form of telekinesis.”

“Okay, but don’t try to imitate it or you’ll blow yourself up like a balloon or something.”

Christine giggled a little bit at that, but the laugh attack had finally subsided. That was a pity; it had been fun while it lasted, and the way her face flushed while she laughed had been… interesting. I thought about saying or doing something, but mentally shrugged and let it be. We’d had a nice moment there; no sense spoiling it.

“I’m done trying to imitate neat tricks for now,” she said. “Nobody said I could become my own personal fire hazard.”

“At least you were able to project the excess heat out of your body, instead of cooking your insides. Rough on your shirt, but better for your insides. Speaking of shirts, come on; let’s get you a new one before you accidentally flash the wildlife.” I opened the door for her. We went upstairs and rummaged through one of the closets near the guest rooms.

“I see Condor likes his Victoria’s Secret catalog stuff,” Christine commented as she looked through the available wardrobe. Most of it was strictly recreational.

“There’s a few t-shirts, too, if you look hard enough.” I said, stepping away and turning around while she changed.

“Here you go,” Christine said, and handed my jacket back to me. She was wearing an official Condor t-shirt with his stylized logo on the front. “Sorry I almost set your jacket on fire.”

“That’s okay. It’s fire-resistant, and it was already a bit crispy around the edges, thanks to that pale-faced freak we killed at the cave. Even if you had burned it into ash, it was worth it.” The memory of us laughing together warmed me again.

She smiled. “Yeah, I needed that.” She went quiet and looked at me for several seconds, her pale blue eyes bright. “Mark.”

“Yeah?”

“Make a face.”

“Why?”

“Because you want to kiss me, and I want to kiss you back.”

A brief burst of some emotion I couldn’t quite recognize ran through me. “Any requests?” I asked her, sounding more calmly than I felt. “I can do Nicholas Cage if you want.”

“Uh, no. I like Nicholas Cage, but I don’t want to kiss him. I want to kiss you.”

My old face had made a comeback twice the day before, both times when I was in pretty bad shape, my powers stripped away or while at death’s door. I tried to bring it back. Nothing happened. I wasn’t surprised; I hadn’t been able to bring it back in over a decade. “Can’t do my face, sorry. Guess I can only get it back if I’m half-dead.”

“It’s okay. How about the one you used when you took me to Times Square on our way to Condor’s?”

That I could do. Our lips met. It was a sweet kiss. That first kiss wasn’t hungry or even particularly lustful. It was the kiss of two people who’ve shared a laugh and a cry and seen each other hurt and tried to make each other feel better. I pulled back after a bit and looked at her; she was smiling. That weird emotion rushed out from my chest again. I thought it might be joy. Might as well savor it, since I had it on good authority it would not last.

“Let’s go to your room,” I said. She nodded. I held her hand while we walked there.

Janus

Charlotte, North Carolina, March 15, 2013

Cassius Jones got out of bed carefully so as to not awaken Javier, who was sleeping soundly next to him. They’d had a very entertaining evening. Javier was flighty and a bit of a flake, but they didn’t call him the Swish Army Knife for nothing. It had been fun, but the lovemaking, the alcohol and the small mountain of Bolivian Marching Powder they had snorted had not been enough to satisfy him. Nothing was enough anymore. The drugs and the booze had worn off, and once again he had been alone with his memories.

Couldn’t have that. He padded softly along the carpeted bedroom floor and quietly made it into the living room of the penthouse apartment. After finding a full bottle of Southern Comfort in the well-stocked liquor cabinet, he stepped out onto the balcony and watched nighttime Charlotte as he took swigs straight from the bottle. For a moment he thought about waking up Javier and actually trying to talk to him. Cassius grinned bitterly and shook his head. Javier was fun, but he was only interested in talking about Javier. That suited Cassius fine, for the most part. A less self-centered partner might have tried to pry things from him, and Cassius had no desire to share. Talking wouldn’t help. Nothing would. He’d better accept it and enjoy the ride, for as long as it lasted.

It’d be nice if he could sleep, though.

Sleep had eluded him ever since his return to Earth. Too many nightmares hovered on the edge of his subconscious, ready to take their toll. Only drinking himself into a stupor brought any measure of relief, and that only temporarily. He chugged down the entire bottle and let the hard liquor warm his insides. Another bottle or two might do him, and then he might be able to steal a couple of hours of sleep. This was turning out to be a bad night. He blamed it on the call he’d gotten a couple of hours ago.

Doc Slaughter’s importunate call had come at a most inconvenient time, but Cassius had disentangled himself from Javier’s arms and answered it anyway. Decades of ingrained duty had made it impossible to refuse a priority call from the Legion.  The news had been troublesome enough: Ultimate, gone rogue, and on top of that, the real possibility of a new war with the Dragon Empire. Cassius had watched the attack on Freedom Island on live TV a couple of days before. The old Cassius would have sprung into action immediately upon hearing the news. The new, not very improved Cassius had listened to the report while polishing off a bottle of bourbon he’d grabbed off the nightstand. The worry apparent in Kenneth Slaughter’s face as he described the new disasters should have moved Cassius. It didn’t.

He’d thanked Doc Slaughter, said he would rejoin the Legion if his help was urgently needed – he emphasized the word ‘urgently’ – and gone back to Javier. The new Cassius found it hard to get excited about anything anymore. Even another war with China made little difference to him. He’d fought two of those already, and in the end neither one had mattered. In the end nothing amounted to a hill of beans. The only things he cared about now were sex, drinking to excess, and otherwise being merry and extracting as much enjoyment from this wretched existence as he could.

Cassius had seen Earth’s future in the stars. Knowing that, nothing much mattered. He would go through the motions, if only because he couldn’t think of anything else to do, but he couldn’t make himself care very much.

For the better part of a century, all he had done was care. As a colored school teacher in 1930s North Carolina, he had done his best to help his pupils while living in a hostile, oppressive reality. Long before wearing a mask, he’d been used to leading a double life – no, a triple life. The life whites expected from coloreds, and the life his people expected of a man. He’d learned to hide his true self early in life. Then he had changed, become a living myth, and his cares and obligations had expanded to include all of America, and eventually all the world. Through wars, disasters and other times of crisis, he’d always managed to feel concern and sympathy for those around him. He had looked out for the well-being of humanity, so fragile and exposed by the rise of Neo-humanity.

He still vividly recalled an angry black man who had confronted him at a rally, many years ago. ‘Black man, white man, yellow man; as long as you Neos are around, we humans are all darkies.’ Cassius had forgotten the man’s name – his surname had been deceptively deprecating: Small, perhaps, or Little – but those words had haunted him for years. He had done his best to avoid exploiting or oppressing humans, but if his mere existence exploited and oppressed them, what could he do to redress their grievances?

Now he realized how petty those concerns had been. Black man, white man, yellow man, Neolympian. The only thing that awaited them all was oblivion.

Cassius looked up. He sensed the fast-approaching figure seconds before it landed on the balcony next to him. He stood up and faced Ultimate – John Clarke, his old friend and colleague.

“Cassius…” John began to say.

“Not here,” Cassius replied curtly. They might wake up Javier, and Javier might throw a tantrum. “Rooftop.” He vanished as soon as the word was spoken.

Teleportation remained an unsettling sensation even after thousands, tens of thousands of jumps over the years. In his mind, he created a gateway between two points; that mental image had prompted him to choose the name of the Roman god of doorways and transitions as his nickname. He moved through the gateway from one point to another. The process was instantaneous – more than that, actually. Careful measuring had shown the arrival point appeared a tiny fraction of a second before he created the departure point, something which had caused a great deal of controversy among the physics community. And yet, from his viewpoint, a noticeable amount of time passed between the moment he entered the gate and when he emerged on the other side. During that time he was elsewhere, a dark place outside reality itself. His experiences in that in-between realm had not been altogether pleasant.

He reappeared on the roof of his building; Ultimate joined him an instant later. The two men looked at each other in silence for a few moments. They looked nothing alike, except for their general athletic builds. Cassius was a couple of inches taller, and a tad narrower at the shoulders; he had a neatly-trimmed beard, while John was clean-shaven. And of course Cassius’ skin was a deep mahogany color, while John’s was pale and pink, befitting his English-Dutch extraction. Cassius noticed Ultimate’s costume was torn in several places. His curiosity was mildly piqued, but not enough to inquire or comment about what he saw. John Clarke would no doubt tell him all about it.

“I see I’m not the only one who spends his nights in contemplation,” John commented idly.

Cassius decided to cut to the chase. He’d get rid of his fellow hero, and see if there were two full bottles of Southern Comfort left in the penthouse; if not, he was sure he could find something else. Anything would do at this point. “What are you doing here, John? Kenneth called me earlier. You’re in some trouble, or so he says.”

“You don’t know the half of it, Cassius. Neither does Kenneth. At least, I hope he doesn’t.”

“You’d best go talk to him and explain yourself, then,” Cassius replied.

“I wanted to talk to you first. Not about my problems, not right now. I wanted to talk to you about your trip.”

“There’s nothing to tell, John. Nothing you or anybody would want to hear, anyway.”

“You found dead worlds,” John said, shocking him. “Not lifeless, but dead. Killed. Civilizations that were destroyed by something. And you figured we’re next on the chopping block. That’s why you’ve kept mum and wasted your time since you came back here, doing nothing but getting drunk and laid. Fiddling away because you figured Rome’s going to burn no matter what you do. Am I right?”

Cassius’ eyes widened. “How..?”

“Long story. I’ll get to it. How many, Cassius? Your original itinerary was going to cover a volume of four thousand cubic parsecs. How many dead worlds did you see before you turned back?”

“I explored over four hundred star systems,” Cassius said slowly, reluctantly. Even talking about it was forcing him to relive horrors he desperately wanted to forget. “I found dozens of planets with habitable atmospheres and simple life forms. Sixteen stars had planets where intelligent life had risen. Of those, fourteen held only ruins and bones. One was inhabited by a primitive species, living in the equivalent of our Paleolithic era. The other held a single survivor.”

“I think I know what killed all those species, Cassius,” John said. “I think I know why you wouldn’t talk about what you saw.”

“You know nothing,” Cassius replied coldly. He didn’t want to talk about his journey, didn’t want to even think about it, but he now realized he had no choice. “But if you really want to know, I’ll tell you.”

His expression hardened and his eyes brightened with anger. “I’ll tell you. But damn you, John, damn you for making me tell you. You won’t thank me for it.”

 

Copyright @2013 Fey Dreams Productions LLC. All rights reserved.

Fiction