New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet (11 page)

“You
have
grown up. Okay, Christine, I’ll play nice. You know, now that you have me all helpless, maybe you’d like to have your way with me.” She thrust her hips towards Christine, as much as the telekinesis allowed, which turned out to be quite a bit. “Play with me while I can’t move. Bite my…”

“Unbelievable.” Christine let Kestrel go with an exasperated sigh.

“Sorry.” For a second Kestrel looked contrite for real. “Can’t help myself sometimes. Okay, let’s be friends.” She extended her hand, and Christine warily shook it. “Call me Melanie. I’ll lay off you and Face, a little bit at least.”

That was probably the best deal Christine was going to get. “Okay, Melanie.”

“Good. Believe it or no, I’m happy that Face is hooking up with someone who isn’t a stripper or a skank.”
Pot, kettle
, Christine thought but diplomatically kept to herself. “Just be careful with him; he’s a romantic under all the bullshit.” Her expression and emotions changed again, became a little sad. “I know I hurt him, even if he’ll never admit it, even to himself.  And he just lost Cassandra. If you hurt him, it’s going to be bad for him.” Her expression changed, became cold and threatening. “And I’ll stop playing nice with you.”

Holy crap, I just got the whole ‘Hurt my ex and I’ll hurt you’ bit from a super-powered uber-slut.
“Okay, got the message.”

“Good.” Kestrel – Melanie – headed downstairs, probably to whip up something for breakfast, pun definitely intended. Christine looked after her for a second, and shook her head. Well, at least she had stood up for herself, instead of just freezing up and withdrawing like she normally did. She was either growing up as a human being or getting ornery in her old age.

She went back to the bedroom. Mark was sitting up. “There you are,” he said. Either he hadn’t heard her and Kestrel going at it or was pretending he hadn’t. Either possibility suited Christine just fine. She didn’t want to discuss Kestrel with Mark.

“Missed me already?” she said lightly as she got in bed with him.

“Missed this,” he said, making a face and kissing her. No morning breath from him, either, since the face was all nice and new.

Her doubting second-guessing bitchy brain went away for a while.

Janus

Star System 9183, Milky Way Galaxy, Year Fifteen (Personal Frame of Reference)

Cassius hovered over the desolate ruins and despaired.

The second planet of Star System 9183 was a gas giant in close proximity to a red dwarf star. It had a large moon only slightly smaller than Cassius’ home planet, and it was there that life had arisen, evolved and given birth to a sentient species. That species had learned and built and grown in power, until an unimaginable disaster had rendered it extinct.

The sight below was enough to reawaken the hopelessness he had temporarily banished after his stay with the people of SS-9182. For a while, he had dared to nurse the hope that death was not everywhere, that oblivion was not the inevitable fate of sapient life. After exploring a dozen dead worlds, he’d finally found a green-and-blue planet teeming with life, and encountered intelligent, tool-using being. The natives had been utterly alien in shape and thought, but after several false starts, Cassius found a group that had greeted him with cautious hospitality. He had spent several months in their company, learned to communicate with them to some degree, and departed feeling better about his quest than he’d had in a decade and a half.

And yet, once again, he found himself confronted with the ruins of an advanced civilization. So far, every species that had progressed beyond the Iron Age had died out. Was the development of technology a death sentence?

Technology, or something else. In seven of the dead worlds, he’d found signs of battle between super-powerful individuals. He didn’t want to contemplate what that meant, not yet.

A few thousand feet below him lay what had been an enormous city, a megalopolis that ran uninterrupted over an area greater than the continental US. A crater the size of Rhode Island, long since filled with water, was the first obvious sign that something terrible had happened. The lack of any active power sources merely confirmed that nothing lived there. He had seen all too similar scenes in thirteen worlds.

One thing was different, however. The disaster that had befallen the inhabitants of SS-9183 had happened in the recent past. The other ruins he had observed had lain undisturbed for millennia or more. In many cases it had taken a great deal of scrutiny to determine those worlds had once held intelligent life in the first place, as their buildings and monuments had withered away until only a hint of regular outlines here or there indicated where they once had stood. Here, artificial satellites still floated above the planet, their orbits not having decayed into oblivion. Huge clouds of space debris indicated many other installations had been destroyed, the skies about the planet had been busy before its downfall. Cassius had explored it a large space station, discovering found hundreds of freeze-dried corpses and even some powered-up systems. Whatever had happened here had occurred a few decades ago or less. He might be able to learn something new here.

Cassius descended towards the dead city, using his far slower and less efficient flight power in order to examine the ruins as he approached them. Away from the edge of the crater, buildings still stood; they were tall and spindly things, their delicate architecture made possible by this world’s lighter gravity; some of them were thousands of feet in height. Even the structures that remained upright had been wrecked: their exterior walls, or at least the ones facing the crater, had been stripped away. The explosion that had struck the megalopolis had been devastating.

Closer still, he could see more details. A grid arrangement much like those in a human city delineated the relatively unscathed parts of the city, broken here or there by collapsing structures but still easy to discern. Vehicles littered the orderly streets; most of them did not have wheels or any obvious forms of locomotion, and Cassius deduced they had hovered over the ground when functional. Most intersections were clogged with epic traffic jams, complete with the signs of multiple collisions. Survivors of the initial explosion trying to flee, he guessed. He was now close enough to see the remains of the vehicles’ drivers as well.

The inhabitants of SS-9183 had been tall, slender hexapods, with two rear limbs used solely for traveling, two long intermediate limbs that could be used as both legs and crude gripping or climbing manipulators, and an upper pair of smaller, almost dainty arms terminating in six slender, multi-joined fingers. Their bodies were topped by a long neck and elongated head. From the frozen remains he had examined at the space station, the natives’ skin had been a light lavender hue, with patches of body hair around the head, sides and back that came in diverse colors.

The corpses below had been mostly reduced to skeletons clad in scraps of clothing. Thousands upon thousands, the corpses lay where they had fallen, most of them in the process of running away. Here or there, clumps of skeletons faced in the direction of the crater and held items that looked very much like weapons. Soldiers or police, trying to protect the fleeing civilians? That seemed likely. Cassius silently saluted their sacrifice as he moved on.

He walked down one street, carefully stepping around the skeletons. Many of the bodies had been trampled by other fleeing civilians. Others had been torn apart by energy discharges of some sort, and on one city block he found over a thousand bodies that had been
beheaded
at the same time. The sight sent cold dread surging through his soul. That was the sort of casual carnage a powerful Neolympian gone rogue would inflict on innocent victims.

A Neo had destroyed this city.

The power evidenced by the devastation of the city was godlike, but Cassius had seen similar sights before, if not quite at this scale. He had done nearly as much himself. When he had reduced the island fortress of Iwo Jima, he had blasted open its bunkers and tunnel systems and hollowed out the island in a series of massive explosions that had killed all twenty-two thousand defenders. It had taken him less than an hour to reduce the island, and it would have taken even less time if he had not been asked to spare the island’s three airfields so they could be used by the US as a staging area to attack Japan. As it turned out, the airfields had not mattered overmuch; a few weeks later Janus had secured the surrender of the Empire of Japan.

The end of the Pacific War had been anticlimactic. Janus paused for a moment, remembering. He had walked towards the air-raid shelter in the Imperial Residence where the Emperor hid, swatting aside his guards like so many gnats. The last of the Japan’s Kami Warriors made his last stand there. Kenshi had been a boy no older than nineteen, terrified but determined, wielding twin katanas charged with electrical power. Janus tried to spare his life, but Kenshi kept rising to his feet despite his terrible injuries and launched new attacks, attacks that did little damage but could not be ignored. Finally, Cassius gave the boy the heroic death he had craved. After that, he reached His Majesty the Emperor and greeted him formally in perfect Japanese; a gift for languages had been one of his lesser-known talents.

“Further resistance will only lead to untold destruction,” Cassius said. “Only an honorable surrender will spare your people and your nation.”

“Many officers in the Army will not accept this,” said one of the Emperor’s advisors.

“I will deal with them if necessary,” he replied. The Emperor nodded his acquiescence. Later that day the last Japanese Army diehards had tried to seize the Emperor. Janus had dealt with them.

If Japan had not surrendered, Cassius had been prepared to unleash untold devastation on the island. He could – and would – have matched the atrocities he now saw all around the dead city. The understanding that someone very much like him was responsible for all this left him feeling cold and hollow inside.

Oppenheimer had been right after all. Neolympian powers had been the Gifts of Shiva, ultimately doomed to destroy all they touched.

The light provided by the red dwarf and the gas giant that dominated the planet’s skies gave everything an orange hue. Behind Cassius, a bright blue-white light flared up, drowning the dominant colors with its sudden brilliance. He turned and saw a glowing figure floating in the air. The stranger was one of the hexapods native to the planet, but he was much larger, at least twice the size of any of the bodies Cassius had seen, and it was surrounded by a coruscating aura of bright blue energy.

A mental probe touched Cassius’ mind.

???

The raw interrogative was painfully intense. Cassius concentrated on his mental defenses as he tried to send a conciliatory mental message. Although he had no inherent telepathic powers, the Legion had trained him in several techniques to both facilitate and repel mental contacts.

???

Cassius sent forth a mental picture of his arrival to the creature’s home world. He tried to project a psychic signature expressing his peaceful intentions, and his identity as a traveler seeking knowledge and nothing more.

STRANGER.

The mental voice was piercing, nearly drowning out Cassius’ own thoughts. The single word echoed through his mind, and the harshness and finality lacing it were agonizingly grating. The psychic pulse was full of hostility, hatred and fear. He realized peaceful discourse was not an option.

The creature attacked.

Cassius’ first impulse was to gate away. He had no interest in battling the insane creature. To his shocked surprise, he found he could not. The alien’s will was like a super-dense atmosphere, pressing down on him and making it impossible to open a gate. Only a handful of individuals on Earth had been able to suppress his teleportation powers, and none had done it so easily. The shock slowed down his reflexes, allowing the alien to close the distance between them and strike the first blow.

The genocidal being smashed into him, lashing out with his middle limbs; only Cassius’ defensive aura allowed him to survive the devastating impacts, and enough kinetic energy bled through it to send him flying into a building. Cassius crashed came to half several city blocks. The alien’s malicious presence was nearby, shining like a baleful beacon. The creature was at least as strong as Ultimate, if not stronger. Cassius wiped blood off his face and took flight, seeking altitude.

A glimpse of movement above him alerted him in time to alter his path and avoid another lunge. The alien crashed into a statue on a pedestal atop one of the skyscrapers, shattering it into a thousand pieces of bronze and stone. As it whirled around, Cassius struck back. He called forth the golden energy he had learned to use as a weapon, a mixture of elementary particles accelerated to the speed of light. He did not restrain himself; the golden bolt that struck the alien was vastly more powerful than the one he had used to send the Japanese battleship
Yamato
to the bottom of the sea. The alien vanished in an apocalyptic explosion that turned the skyscraper and the area around it into a deep crater. The surrounding structures collapsed over it, burying the alien under thousands of tons of masonry and molten rock and metal.

It was not enough. Cassius could still sense the malignant mind somewhere below the ground, bewildered and in surprised pain, but alive and able to fight. He flew away as fast as he could. If he could put enough distance between them he might be able to create a gate and flee this mad thing’s planet.

A wave of overpressure shook him in mid-air. He looked back and saw a mushroom cloud rising behind him. The creature had blasted free by unleashing enough power to tear out the heart of a city. It emerged from the devastation and flew after Cassius, accelerating to supersonic speeds in under a second. He would be overtaken in moments. Flight was impossible.

Cassius faced his tormentor and unleashed more energy blasts, using all the power he could muster. He could not sustain such attacks for long, but his only hope was to kill or disable the entity. His pursuer flew through the storm of fire, unrelenting and unstoppable. He had never encountered such power before, not even during his battles with the Dragon Emperor. The alien – the monster – countered with energy discharges of his own, bursts of pure kinetic force that battered Cassius even through his protective aura. The strikes stunned and slowed him down. A few seconds later he was being crushed by the alien in a four-limbed grasp.