New Olympus Saga (Book 4): The Ragnarok Alternative (25 page)

Sanctuary, Arctic Circle, August 2, 2014

“We weren’t expecting you until tomorrow,” John told Christine as she walked through the door.

“We had a quiet couple of days, no major emergencies, and the Buck Comics people cancelled on me at the last minute, the d-bags. So I figured I might as well finish the job.”

“Best news I’ve heard,” Cassius said. Christine had finally cleansed the last traces of contamination from his aura; he was just waiting for a final checkup before being released from his self-imposed exile. John was glad for his friend, and more than a little envious, but his own healing process was also progressing nicely. Two or three more sessions with Christine would take care of him.

“Well, let’s take a look at you first,” Christine told Cassius. She walked around him, eyes narrowed. “Nothing. Not a trace of the Outsider stuff left in you. That’s pretty amazing.”

“Am I free to go, then?”

“Well, how about we give it one more day? Just to be safe? But you can start packing, ‘cause by this time tomorrow you’ll be in Rio, partying like it’s 2099.”

“Sounds wonderful. Well, I’ll let you get on with it,” Cassius said, and left them in the treatment room.

John settled on the dentist-style chair and leaned back on it.

“All righty, let’s get inside your aura and get crackin’,” Christine said. As usual, she chattered away as she worked. “You’re almost fully clear yourself, John. Just the stickiest, most stubborn bits are left. They are the worst ones, though, the ones you let in when, well, when you crossed the line.”

He didn’t say anything, suppressing a brief flare of annoyance. They’d gone over that enough times.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to irk you. Me and my marathon-man mouth. It’s just funny how there seems to be an actual moral dimension to the physical realm.”

“Religious people have believed that for millennia.”

“Yeah, but they were right for all the wrong reasons. It’s more like God exists because life eventually evolves into something approaching God, which allows them to transcend time and space, which means there’s always been a God. It’s pretty confusing. And annoying. Kinda pisses me off, actually.”

“Why?”

“Because if for some reason you’re cut off from the Good, if you cross enough lines, there’s no turning back. You’re totally fucked, er, frakked. You can actually damn yourself out of reality.”

“But it’s a choice.”

“It’s choices plural, stacked on top each other, but you can make each one in haste, or without enough information, or in a fit of anger or despair. And once you go far enough, it’s all over.”

“I’d like to think there’s always some chance of redemption,” John said. He was feeling an intense tingling sensation beneath his skin, something he hadn’t experienced in previous sessions. He wondered what that was all about.

“Yeah, that’d be nice. I just don’t think that’s the case.”

The tingling got more intense.

“This feels different,” he said.

“Yeah. I’ve gone pretty deep into your aura. Got you by the short and curlies, you could say. Only way I can get to the sticky bits. Now hush for a second and let me work.”

He did. The tingling grew to painful levels, but he forced himself to remain still. A moment later, he didn’t need to exert himself anymore; his limbs were numb, deadened. Paralyzed.

“I can’t move.”

“That’s just how I like my men. Big, strong, and helpless.”

“What..?” His mouth stopped working next.

Christine moved so she was facing him. She changed before his eyes, and only the fact his voice box was paralyzed kept him from shouting in shock. The left side of her face sagged, seemed to sink into itself, and twisted into an involuntary scowl. Her skin acquired the greenish-white pallor of a drowned corpse even as her hair disappeared, leaving behind a bald, hideous mockery of her former self. The right side of her mouth rose in a lopsided smirk, the result as hideous as the paralyzed left side.

“Feels good to let my hair down,” she said. “Do you know how much energy I had to spend just to look like my old self?”

He wanted to scream, but couldn’t.

“That’s the problem with trust, Johnny-boy. You’ve been too trusting. You trusted me enough to put your wee-wee inside me, and I gave you a literal STD from hell. And now you trusted me enough to let me past all your Neo psychic defenses, which I couldn’t have hammered through in a million years, and the first thing I did was take over the bits connecting your mind to the rest of your body. So now you’re a vegetable. I’m running your voluntary motor responses, and most of the involuntary ones as well. Sucks to be you, in other words.”

What do you want?

“Yeah, you can think at me, and I can hear you. As to what I want?” The half-grin widened. “I would like, if I may, to take you on a strange journey. How strange? So strange they should make a movie out of it.”

Liquid shadows formed around her, around both of them, the prelude to teleportation.

“We’re off to see the Masters. The Wonderful Masters of Oz.”

She caressed his cheek. Her touch burned his skin.

“It’s going to be a hell of a trip.”

Sanctuary, Arctic Circle/Elsewhere, August 2, 2014

Adam took us there in a shadowy flash.

We found Janus in his room, packing his stuff, having no clue anything was wrong.

Ultimate was gone.

“There’s traces of Outsider crap in the treatment room, but that’s it,” Christine said. Bleak hopelessness came off her in waves. “She took him. It’s over.”

“The fuck it’s over,” I said.

“What? What can we do?”

“You’ve got a guy who can teleport between star systems. You have your ultra-duper-super-senses. You’ve got Adam, who knows more Words than you do. And you’ve got me, who’ll kill every last motherfucker who gets in our way. What more do you fucking need?”

“Mark…”

Silence for a moment. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and concentrated.

“Janus, Uncle Adam,” she said, reaching out to them. They all held hands for a moment.

Next thing I knew, the four of us were in the pitch-black space between spaces. Never was a fan of the place.

“You were right,” Christine told me. Her eyes were closed, brows twisted in desperate concentration. “I can sense John’s aura. And hers. She can’t use the Words anymore, can’t hide from me. They are here, still in transit. I can point the way.”

“Let’s do it.”

She squeezed Janus’ hand, and I felt a subtle shift in the darkness. We were moving, sort of. It was kind of like being in an elevator, or on a plane as the cabin pressure changed. We were teleporting somewhere so removed from our starting point it was going to take a while to get there. Assuming we didn’t run out of juice and ended up stranded in the dark.

‘I can tell where we’re going,” Janus said. “That’s where Mister Night took me, the night we fought. The night I was infected.”

He was scared shitless. Come to think of it, so was I.

“Last time you were alone, Cassius,” Adam said. “This time we will stand with you.”

Janus smiled ruefully. “True. This time I will die and be damned in good company.”

“Fuck that,” I said. “We’re going to kill the witch, save the dude in distress, and live happily ever after. Or until the next episode of
As My Stomach Turns
, whichever comes first.”

That earned me a chuckle from Janus. He turned to Adam. “You know, I always had a crush on Doc Slaughter.”

“I knew,” Adam said. “I just didn’t know how to respond.”

“I don’t expect you to. Just wanted you to know.”

“I’m flattered.”

That was all very touching, I thought. Maybe they’d become a couple. I’d have to e-mail a suggestion to the editors of
The Uncanny Legionnaires
.

The thought kept me entertained for a bit. Enough that it took my mind away from the fact we were headed towards our almost certain deaths.

The Space In-Between/Somewhere in the Trans-Galactic Boondocks

The chase was on. The game was afoot. The crap had hit the fan.

Dark Christine’s plan was simplicity itself. She was dragging John for an impromptu meeting with the Outsiders, which would shatter his mind, possibly for good. He’d be turned into another Mister Night, one inside the body of one of the most powerful Neos that ever lived. The evil Goddess would make her triumphant return to Earth with someone who could draw enough power from the Source to become a new Genocide. She’d also be fully recharged with even more Outsider energy, more powerful than Mister Night had even been. The ensuing battle would leave Earth Alpha in ruins. Win, win for Dark Christine, no matter what.

At least, that’s how Christine would do it, if she ever turned effing evil. Which pretty much guaranteed that was exactly how it was going down.

Maybe they would catch up to her before she and John reached their destination. She hoped so. But if they didn’t, she’d better start working on Plan B.

Cassius Jones was putting everything he had into the impossible jaunt, a teleport covering such vastness that putting it into parsecs would still have way too many zeroes. It was taking too much time, which wasn’t good. There were things in this lightless place, and while they weren’t Outsiders, they weren’t particularly friendly. The longer they spent there, the more likely those entities would decide to take a bite out of them.

“We need to give him a boost,” she said. She could see Janus had tapped as much power as he could get from the Source, which was a sizable percentage of its total output. He needed more, though.

Adam nodded. He concentrated for a few seconds and called up a Word.

Power.

She followed suit. Her vocal chords strained and nearly broke as she spoke it out loud, and its conceptual echoes sent ripples through the darkness. Those echoes acted like a form of radar for her; she caught the outlines of something huge and full of teeth darting past their position. She really, really wished she hadn’t seen - well, echolocated – that. Bad for the sanity and stuff.

The Words worked, though, and that was the important thing. Raw energy poured into Janus. He started to sweat profusely as his core body temperature rose, but kept pushing on, even as waves of waste heat began to radiate from him. It was kind of like being in a sauna, if a sauna was hot enough to soften steel. If they had been human, they would all have been roasted in a matter of minutes. Luckily for them, they were Neos, hard as nails and with a melting temperature you wouldn’t believe.

We’re coming for you. We’re going to get you
.

You and what Spanish Armada, Chrissy?

Crap. So much for the element of surprise.

You’d better turn around. You’ll live longer if you do
, her evil twin sent her way.

That’s okay. I’d rather put an end to this now, win or lose. I’m tired, and I’m becoming an uncaring bitch. Just like you
.

Good
, her counterpart said.
Means you’re growing up
.

Did it? Was not giving a crap about anything part of growing up? Giving up? Stop trying? She couldn’t accept that. If there was a point to being alive, it had to be to continue striving towards some goal: create a work of art, look after your family, try to improve the world in whatever way was in your power . Otherwise humanity was just a pack of rats in a maze, running around meaninglessly until they dropped.

It all means nothing
, Dark Christine insisted.

Maybe it did. But pretending it did was a better choice than accepting a nihilistic outlook of reality, Christine decided. Maybe if you pretended long enough, you could create meaning out of nothing. The Cosmic Nerds certainly acted as if their actions and decisions were something greater than random fluctuations of matter and energy.

Those losers? They are dead meat. The Masters will get them, and their little bitches too
.

We’ll see about that.

Cassius was propelling them faster than their quarry. Dark Christine’s evil aura was growing brighter and more distinct. They were catching up to them.

Only thing was, it wasn’t going to happen soon enough.

Plan B took every iota of power she could summon. Adam noticed the sudden release, but said nothing. Mark felt her pain and exhaustion.

Christine tried to respond, but she couldn’t keep her eyes open. She was sinking, everything was going dark.

She passed out, convinced she was going to die in her sleep.

Edge of the Universe, Time: Irrelevant

We popped out into cold, hard vacuum, the most powerful member of our gang sleeping like a baby in my arms. Great way to start a fight.

Vanilla humans would have been freeze-dried toast in short order. Neos of our power level weren’t bothered. We didn’t need oxygen, our defensive auras kept all our insides in the inside, and our only problem was that we couldn’t talk to each other except through our comm systems, which translated the vibrations on our jaw bones into audible messages. Adam didn’t even have that problem, encased in his Brass Man armor.

No, vacuum wasn’t a problem.

The planet-sized swarm of things out in the distance was the problem.

“So that is what a nest of Outsiders looks like,” Adam said, sounding much too calm. He must have lost his mind, the poor bastard.

I had no words. It took everything I had not to soil my costume.

They were at least as far as the moon was from the Earth, and each of them was twice as big as the moon, long shapes made of shadows darker than the solid black background behind them. I looked around. There were a few scattered pinpricks of light in the background, and I didn’t think those were stars, but actual galaxies, maybe galactic clusters. The little spots of light were only on one side. The other side was empty. This was the end of the line, the furthest point the wave of expansion that began with the Big Bang had gotten in the past fourteen billion years, assuming astrophysicists had been right about anything, which I was beginning to doubt.

I looked into the abyss of the lightless side. It wasn’t merely empty darkness. There was something else in there, and if I looked at it long enough…

Fuck. I turned back to the more immediate threat, the serpentine things out there. If they were as far as I thought they were, they were fucking huge. There was no way I could guess accurately, though. Maybe they were only two hundred feet away and were the size of plush stuffed toys. My gut told me my initial guess was correct, though.

Christine could have told me, but she was unconscious. Janus was on his last legs, too.

And Dark Christine was just ahead, about a quarter of a mile away, still carrying big, handsome and stupid in her arms. She’d popped up into real space short of her goal, or maybe the Outsiders didn’t like visitors just dropping on their laps and she’d wisely decided to fly the rest of the way. Either way, we had a chance.

“Watch her,” I told Janus, and launched myself towards Dark Christine, I had to get her before she reached her bosses. Adam followed me a moment later.

The evil witch no longer looked like my Christine. She’d lost all her hair, every last bit of color on her skin, and a good twenty pounds. Half her face was hidden behind a mask. She looked like shit. Not that I would have hesitated to put her down if she looked like a million bucks. It was time to end this. End her.

She sensed us coming and let go of Ultimate to deal with us. A storm of Outsider energy exploded out of her hands, eyes and mouth, corkscrewing their way towards us like a convention of squids on a feeding frenzy.

I had one of Condor’s fancy protective devices, but the battering it took drained its power in a few seconds, and then the purple-black torrent hit me. I’d learned there was only one way to deal with it; feed more power into my body, try to drown out the disruptive poisons under a flood of clean energy. Problem was, beyond a certain threshold, I would start burning from the inside out, and it would become a race to determine what would kill me first, the Source or the Outsider poison.

It hurt, but you can ignore pain. You can even ignore death, for a bit, if you concentrate on the important things. When all it mattered was putting an end to the assholes responsible for so much misery and pain, you could keep going, dead on your feet but still moving. For a while. Sometimes, for just long enough.

Off to my left, Adam’s Brass Man armor sputtered and died. Parts of the suit exploded noiselessly, spewing gases and sparks into the vacuum.

I kept going. My costume, every layer of my skin, and a good inch of the flesh beneath boiled away. I poured more juice into myself, and the destroyed tissue grew back, triggering an overwhelming itching sensation as destroyed nerve clusters were reborn, died, and were reborn again. And I kept going.

Turn around! Go back to your girl and die with her, you stupid asshole!

I’m going to kill you,
I thought at her
.

Not if I kill you first
.

She might have a point. It was no longer a question of the Source killing me. I was running out of power. I was too far away from the Source. Instead of the torrent of power I could normally call upon, I was only getting a trickle. She was running out too, but more slowly, probably because her Masters were so much closer. I kept moving towards her, but my speed slowed down to a crawl, or maybe time was slowing down. Soon I would be frozen like a fly in amber, and then she’d squash me like a grape.

Told ya
.

I tried to think of something witty to say. I had nothing.

I sent out. There was no answer.

I could barely see anymore, so I didn’t notice Ultimate coming up behind Dark Christine. Neither did the evil bitch.

The torrent of Outsider energy stopped as suddenly if someone had turned off a hose. Ultimate had grabbed her neck with both hands. He didn’t say anything. I heard a mental squawk from Dark Christine. That was it.

He took her out, the only way you can with someone at our power levels. It wasn’t pretty. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person.

I looked back.

Armageddon Girl was glowing like a humanoid star. I felt a fresh surge of power running through my body, healing me back to full health.

she said pointing off to the lighted side of the universe.

I followed her gesture and realized newer, brighter points of light had appeared, and were growing larger with every passing second. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of them.

And they were getting closer, very fast. So fast that they seemed to jump forward and leave a trail of after-images behind them, as if they were moving faster than the light coming out of them. Or maybe my mind was beginning to shut down. Whatever was going to happen was not for the likes of us.

I flew towards Adam and grabbed him before I followed Christine and Ultimate. We rejoined Janus at flank speed.

“I think we should get the fuck out of here,” I subvocalized

“Yeppers. Time to go home.”

“Home,” Janus said. “Yes.”

I took one last look behind me. The gargantuan serpent shapes were turning to the fleet of living suns, shadowy tendrils raised in challenge. Or maybe they were pleading for mercy. I doubted that, though. There was no mercy to be had there.

We fled.