New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance (33 page)

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

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

Armageddon Girl indeed.

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I see.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is the prognosis?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Titan Base has been attacked.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes?”

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

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

She still felt guilty about it.

Jupiter’s Orbit, February 7, 2014

Space warfare was, disappointingly, nothing like
Star Wars
.

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

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

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

The second wave consisted of a swarm of drones that had deployed well ahead of the ships, each containing a thermonuclear bomb. These bombs were designed to power a brief beam in the x-ray and gamma-ray ranges, delivering most of the explosion’s energy in a coherent blast of pure destructive power. The weapons had been inspired by the Humanity Foundation’s doomsday device; said device was actually out there, and was one of the first to fire. A whole new set of distant lightning flashes broke out. Christine held her breath. Those weapons were their best bet; a direct hit with the super-laser beams would fry even John or Janus. The Genocide couldn’t just shrug off something like that, could he?

A hundred drones self-immolated to shoot their deadly beams as soon as the Genocide came into range. Most of them missed the rapidly-approaching alien. Thirty-seven scored partial hits, meaning the beam passed within fifty yards of the target, plenty close to deliver enormous loads of energy even in vacuum. Eight were right on target. Computer simulations had determined that the toughest Neo on the planet, the Dragon Emperor his own self, could only survive five such strikes.

There was a moment of silence as the fleet’s sensor systems pierced through the mess of radiation the energy barrage had created.

“Target remains. Repeat, target remains.”

Christine closed her eyes. Another couple of trillion dollars’ worth of WMDs hadn’t stopped the alien. The Genocide must be hurting, but hurting was meaningless when the endless power of the Source was at hand to repair any damage the alien had suffered. Maybe if they’d had three hundred or a thousand graser or x-laser cannon it would have been enough, but they hadn’t had time to build any more of them.

The
Liberty Ship
moved to engage.

It was Neo-fighting time.

One of the many weird facts about Neolympians was that Neo attacks inflicted far more damage on other Neos than they should. In other words, a one-kilowatt laser beam created by a Neo would hurt another Neo far more than a conventional one-kilowatt laser. Nobody was sure why, but Neolympian powers neutralized Neolympian defenses to some degree.

What that meant was that the third wave would be very different from the previous two: the FLS
Liberty Ship
would sail forth alone, close the distance and then release two hundred Neos capable of maneuvering in space, even as another hundred Neos inside the ship used their powers to fire their own volleys of energy at the Genocide. The only reason they were only deploying two hundred of them was that too many attackers would end up getting in each other’s way.

Numbly, Christine headed for her battle station, an electromagnetic launcher that would throw her toward the Genocide like yet another missile, alongside John and Janus and Hyperia and dozens of others.

If they failed, First Fleet would engage; their shipboard weapons were less destructive than that storm of missiles and artillery drones, but there were many more of them, and they were far more accurate. The hope was that their volume of fire would accomplish what the other attacks hadn’t. The odds weren’t good, however. There were another three hundred Neos with First Fleet, but their overall power level was lower than the
Liberty Ship
’s compliment. If First Fleet failed, Second Fleet would do the same thing. It would have been nice if both fleets could attack at the same time, but it was simply impossible to concentrate all that firepower on a target slightly larger than a human being. That was their main problem: the starship’s firepower was relatively diffuse; Neos, being smaller, could deliver higher density attacks, but even there you ran into problems. Too many cooks would spoil the soup, as it were.

If the Neos in the third wave failed, the chances of the two fleets were pretty dismal.

She wished she could reach John telepathically, but even with her restored psychic powers she hadn’t forged a link between them like she had with Mark. You didn’t do that kind of thing on a whim; she’d only done it the first time because Mark had been dying.

And she hadn’t been able to reach Mark since Christmas Eve. She was on her way to a fight to the death, with nobody in her head but her.

Just like everyone else since the dawn of time
, her brain chided her.

Okay, then.

“Prepare for deployment on ten. Nine. Eight…”

Christine readied her shields. Her protective aura allowed her to function in full vacuum without having to worry about being freeze-dried or irradiated. All she had to worry about was being squashed like a bug by the current holder of the Destroyer of Worlds title.

“One.”

And she was off, launched from the ship at a few hundred miles an hour. She quickly took control over her flight and accelerated to much greater speeds. Vector lines and other useful pieces of information were projected directly into her eyeballs by her implants, giving her a virtual heads-up display that showed her where First Fleet and her fellow Neos were and, more importantly, where the Genocide was. The alien was flying their way at a downright sedate thousand miles an hour; he’d slowed down so he could play with them. Awfully nice of him.

Two hundred Neos from all around the world flew towards the Genocide, Legionnaires and Celestial Warriors and many others. Those with ranged powers started shooting as they closed into range, guided by their implants, their powers able to reach much farther in the vacuum of space than they could in an atmosphere. Christine let fly with kinetic blasts, wide and somewhat diffuse for greater accuracy at the expense of damage. The attacks produced a fraction of the energy the drone cannon had, but between their greater accuracy and the Neo armor-piercing effect, they would be much more effective. The highlighted target on her virtual HUD started glowing in multiple colors as he was hit by a kaleidoscope of various energies. They must be hurting him.

Hurt or not, the Genocide started shooting back.

Off to Christine’s left, Hyperia screamed as she was engulfed by blue energy. Her comm went silent and she drifted away and was quickly left behind. Dead or unconscious? Chrisinte’s empathy told her Hyperia was alive, but in agony and likely out of the fight for at least a few minutes. Above her, someone else turned into a cloud of expanding gasses. A severed arm flew past her face, traveling at hypersonic speeds. Whoever that had been wasn’t unconscious; whoever that had been wasn’t anything anymore.

Just as she had that morbid thought, she got hit. There was a flash of blue light, then darkness.

I’m blue, da ba dee, da ba die
.

The nonsensical lyrics from an old song her mom used to like ran through Christine’s mind as she woke up. She blinked and found herself tumbling through endless space. Her face was one big second-degree burn, mercifully healing fast, but still hurting like a bastard. She was certain that her eyebrows and much of her hair were gone, but she was still alive. Up ahead, more light flashes showed the other Neos had reached the Genocide. Her HUD was still working, which meant her implants (including the built-in suicide switch she’d had Uncle Adam put in her head) were still intact. Good to know. Maybe going off to do battle with a bomb inside her skull hadn’t been the smartest idea, but it was the only way to make sure she didn’t follow in the Genocide’s footsteps.

Christine gritted her teeth against the pain and resumed her flight. As she closed the distance, she got her first look at the Genocide. He kinda looked like a centaur crossed with a humanoid cuttlefish. She saw John land a few good punches before a kick from the alien’s hind legs sent him soaring off into space, alive but pretty banged up. Christine blasted the alien, a thin spike-like beam this time, and was rewarded with the sight of a puff of vaporized blood; she’d punched through his shields and hit flesh. She was also rewarded with another blue energy blast, but she managed to duck away. Even the near miss gave her a nasty sunburn. Yikes.

A moment later, Operation Sponge went off. A dozen Neos with power-leeching abilities attacked as a group, led by the Warden and the Black Hole, the two most powerful energy suckers in the planet, a hero and a villain, respectively, mortal enemies in the past, but brought together for this desperate attempt to take down the alien. They and ten other less-powerful leeches dogpiled the Genocide, weakened his shields, and turned his flight path into an uncontrolled spiral. Some of the Leeches had other powers that allowed them to use the stolen energies against the Genocide. The Black Hole led the way, crushing the alien with deadly gravity waves. The attackers hammered at the evil E.T. like the wrath of God, and for several seconds, she dared to hope, even as she added her beams to the fray.

The Genocide’s aura flared up.

All twelve men and women exploded, even the Type Threes, even the Warden and the Black Hole, unable to contain the massive forces they’d absorbed.

Red mist and gruesome bits and pieces were all that was left of them, and even those soon disintegrated in the alien’s blue corona.