New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet (28 page)

“Watch out!” she called out as she finally saw the guy behind the killer fastballs, just as he pitched one at Mark. He leaped away from the now-handcuffed Electric Dude and barely avoided getting perforated through and through, which would have made it the second time for him this week. Super-heroing was
dangerous
!

The ball-thrower was wearing an effing baseball player uniform, of all things. A New York Yankees uniform, as a matter of fact. “Get behind me,” she told Mark, and he ducked behind her protective shield as two more balls bounced off it. The impacts were bitching hard. “Who’s that guy?” she asked Mark.

“That’s the Yankee.” Well, duh. There probably was an interesting story there, but now wasn’t the time to ask about it.

The Yankee pitched three more balls her way while Mark spoke, so quickly that they all arrived in the space of a second or so. She felt her shield crack under the impacts, and the last ball punched through and hit her right on the chest, hard enough to stagger her and nearly crack a rib. Mark fired his gun over her shoulder, and she discovered that she hated having a loud gun going off next to her ear. The shots didn’t seem to bother the Yankee at all, either. “Cut it out, Mark!”

“Just trying to help, honey,” he said. “You shoot him, then.”

“Okay.” She swung an imaginary mallet over the guy’s head and drove him all the way through the floor with one solid smack. She tried to think of a funny quip.
Uh, Strike One, you’re out?
Nothing sounded good, so she said nothing. Baseball wasn’t her thing anyway. Nothing with the word ‘ball’ on it was her thing, come to think of it, except maybe
Dragonball Z
.

They went to check on Condor, who was sprawled on the ground and barely breathing. The Yankee’s fastball had cracked his skull as well as his helmet, and blood was pouring from a nasty scalp wound. “Oh, God,” she gasped, and turned on her Christine-vision to check on him. His multi-color aura-thingy looked weak, but he wasn’t dying, she discovered after a quick scan. His healing powers were putting him together, and it looked like he’d be okay in a while. Since her vision-thingy was up she also checked on Kestrel. She was semi-conscious but in fairly good health, and she also was… horny as hell is what she was. Kestrel had
loved
being electrocuted. The kink was strong in that one. Christine turned off her super-vision with a shudder.

Something big cast a shadow over her and she heard a strangled grunt. She looked up and saw a guy in a lion-skin cape and helmet looming over her. He was built much like Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, except much bigger, and he had grabbed Mark by the neck with one hand. Mark didn’t need a mouth to speak but he still needed an un-constricted windpipe to do so, and right now his windpipe was being severely constricted. The giant lifted Mark over his head, ignoring his kicks and punches, and used him as a bludgeon. On her.

She started to raise a shield, but the sudden realization Mark would get smashed against it made her hesitate and she got hit directly, only her protective aura saving her from about two hundred broken bones. It still hurt like hell. Mark grunted in pain; he didn’t have a protective aura, and she heard several of
his
bones breaking. The giant smashed Mark against her one more time; this time the floor gave way under her and she dropped into empty space, too stunned to do anything before the ground floor broke her fall.

The lower floor of the warehouse looked like a battle zone. There were bodies everywhere, mostly clustered around a staircase going up. Christine had landed on an open space near the front entrance. Not too far away, the Yankee was getting to his feet. Above her, the guy with the lion headgear looked down through the hole she’d made on her way down and jumped in after her, still holding Mark like a rag doll. The steroid freak tried to land on her, but she managed to roll away and his size twenty-something combat boots ended up busting up some linoleum and concrete. That guy was a total d-bag.

She’d barely managed to stand up when Muscles and the Yankee charged her. The Yankee had – what else – a baseball bat in his hands. Muscles was still using Mark as a weapon, and Mark wasn’t even fighting back anymore. Christine put up a shield, dreading what it would do to Mark, but she had no choice; she was pretty battered herself. The two d-bags pummeled her so fast and hard she had to concentrate solely on keeping her shield up. The big guy kept hitting her with Mark, who was covered in blood and unconscious. Tough as he was, he wasn’t going to survive that kind of treatment for long. And to top it all, a giant black cat dropped in through the hole upstairs and joined in the fun. Christine had gotten zerg-rushed before, and knew how that was going to end.

A brilliant flash of golden light went off somewhere behind her, and she was pretty sure it wasn’t the paparazzi. Even as she tried to see what was going on without turning her back on her attackers, a blast of that same golden light hit Muscles and sent him flying off. The two remaining Guardians started moving in different directions to make it harder for whoever it was to hit them. The Yankee flung a ball at the new arrival. An instant later another golden bolt struck him and put him down for the count. That left the giant kitty, and now that she wasn’t being attacked anymore Christine took it down with a big blast of her own. She turned around to see who had rescued her.

The newcomer was African-American and at least six and a half feet tall. He was wearing a two-tone yellow and purple bodysuit and half-mask, and was built like a cross between a boxer and a basketball player. She’d seen lots of pictures of him while reading about World War Two, not to mention the 1980 presidential election.

“Janus?”

He nodded. “You must be Christine.” His voice was deep and rich, James Earl Jones with a splash of Edward James Olmos rasp thrown in. “I think we should go now.”

“Sure, as soon as we collect all my friends,” she said, and he nodded again. She checked on Mark, who was unconscious but alive; he wasn’t in great shape but should recover eventually. She picked him up and slung him over one shoulder; not exactly the stuff romance covers were made of, but she was grateful she was strong enough to carry him off. “Condor and Kestrel are upstairs,” she told Janus, pointing at the hole in the ceiling. Janus took her hand and teleported them there. It was the third time she’d teleported, and it was just like before, a brief trip to a creepy place of utter darkness before making it to their destination. She was pretty sure that kind of travel took you to some sort of alien realm, hyperspace or inside a wormhole or some techno-babbly thing like that. Something to think about later.

They reappeared on the upper floor. Kestrel was finally up and about; she was helping Condor get up. He looked pretty addled, which was understandable after getting a fractured skull, but he was ambulatory, which was good. 

“Where would you like to go next?” Janus asked Christine.
Guess I’m team leader now
, she thought. All the alpha males were semi-comatose and, let’s face it, she knew where they needed to go and she was the highest-level character in the party, except for the new guy. “The police has surrounded the building and their Parahuman Tactical Team is about to come in, so we should hurry,” he continued. Nothing like a little pressure to help concentrate the mind.

“I know where the bad guys’ base is,” she explained. “At least, I kinda know it’s somewhere in Central Park. But we should go to the Condor Lair first.”

Janus nodded. “I will need some help getting there.”

Condor was still pretty out of it. “Kestrel?”

Melanie didn’t look thrilled about inviting a Freedom Legionnaire into Condor’s super-crib, but she reluctantly nodded. “What do you need?”

“Take my hand and visualize the location. I will do the rest.” Kestrel did as she was told without playing any games or anything. She must be growing up, or maybe seeing Condor get messed up had subdued her a bit.

They went on another trip into the dark realm. Christine wished she could have said goodbye to her almost-mother, but she was too busy saving the world. Not that she’d saved much of anything yet.

Face-Off

New York, New York, March 17, 2013

I managed to stagger off the infirmary bed to see what was going on. Good thing I have a healthy ego or I might develop a complex. I was getting tired of getting my ass kicked.

Condor was also getting back on his feet. We looked at each other as we left the infirmary. “We’re batting a thousand,” I told him.

“I don’t want to hear about baseball,” he replied, rubbing his head where the Yankee’s hardball had nearly brained him for good.

“It hasn’t been a good night, and it’s a long while before dawn,” I commented, and we headed out to see what the rest of the gang was doing. I vaguely remembered none other than Janus teleporting us to the Condor’s base. Janus, who had been MIA since before I became a vigilante and had been back on planet Earth for less than a year; he was a figure of legend, in some ways even more so than Ultimate. I was really getting up in the world, I guessed, rubbing shoulders with the Neo crème de la crème. It didn’t quite make up for all the beatings I was taking, though.

Christine, Kestrel and Janus were in Condor’s Situation Room, a big chamber filled with screens, maps and a handful of comfortable work chairs. This was where Condor usually spent most of his time, monitoring the city and playing computer games while he waited for something to happen. Of course, the last time I’d been in the Situation Room, a sex swing hadn’t been part of the decor; the swing was located strategically so its users would be able to watch the monitors while having their fun. I guessed Condor wasn’t playing many computer games anymore.

Nobody was paying attention to the sex swing at the moment. Kestrel was sitting on one of the chairs until she saw Condor. She pounced on him like a hungry cat. Christine and Janus were looking at a digital map on a table, specifically a map of Central Park. Christine was clearly upset.

“Mark!” she called to me as I came in. “Are you okay?”

“Good as new,” I lied. Yeah, physically I was fit to fight again. But a part of you never forgets when you get beaten half to death. That shit lingers in your head, and you never know when it’s going to pop up and ruin your dinner or kill your sex drive. You get used to it, but it’s never fun.

“I’m so sorry! They kept hitting me, I had to put up my shield, and…”

“You did what you had to,” I said. Yeah, hitting that shield had been like being smashed into the side of a battleship, but it’d been necessary. “I’d be yelling at you right now if you hadn’t kept you shield up.” Or we’d both be dead. Either way, I was glad she’d defended herself.

“I guess. It sucked, though. By the way, the traitor is some guy called Daedalus Smith,” she reported. “He’s the one that killed that Doctor Slaughter guy, and he framed John for it!”

Fuck. Daedalus Smith had been another childhood idol of mine, the genius inventor and playboy who also had the coolest suit of armor. I’d enjoyed playing with my beloved Myrmidon action figure until I was twelve, when my asshole stepfather had accidentally-on-purpose stepped on it. Sucks when a hero turns out to be just another asshole.

“I’m sure Ultimate will be all right,” I said, trying to comfort her. She really liked the big, tall and handsome prick, despite knowing him for just a couple hours. Then again, she seemed to like me just fine and she’d known me for just a bit longer. She was more of a people person than I’d ever be, and I could appreciate that. And given our relationship, it’s not as if I could feel jealous of Ultimate; she might like him, but she was sleeping with me.

For now.

There were plenty of better things to worry about. I got down to business after she told me the rest. “Okay. We have an idea where their base is. We probably should hit it as soon as possible. They’re going to hear about the raid on the whorehouse soon enough.” Not to mention the cops would be knocking down Condor’s door sooner or later, now that he was a wanted criminal. His Lair’s location wasn’t public knowledge, but too many people knew the secret, and somebody would blab eventually. Now that they knew Janus was with us, they’d probably wait until the Legion showed up, but that didn’t give us a lot of time.

Everybody nodded, except Condor. “They are probably going to have more disruptors,” he said. “Kestrel captured one of them. If I can study it for a while, I might be able to figure out a way to counter it.”

“How long is a while?” I asked. Those disruptors could fuck up all our plans, but the longer we waited to go after them, the longer they’d have to either prepare a warm reception for us or to simply abandon their base.

“Give me an hour.”

An hour. It’d been about fifteen minutes since we teleported back to the Lair. The snoops had taken off running when the Guardians showed up, and Neos are pretty good at running away. Which meant that the assholes had been warned already.

“We can probably spare an hour,” Christine said. “I mean, they probably already know that we know where they are. If we can’t handle their disruptors, we’ll probably lose anyway.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. She’d worked it all out a bit faster than me. She was both stronger and smarter than me. Good thing I have a healthy ego.

“Good,” Condor said. “Janus, could you come with me? You might be able to help. You too, Christine.”

“Sure. Except, can you give me a few minutes first? I need to talk to Mark for a bit.”

Kestrel smirked but didn’t say anything. I was pretty sure that whatever Christine had in mind didn’t involve anything Kestrel might approve of, though.

“No problem,” Condor said. “Face, show her to the lab when you guys are done.”

They left us alone in the Situation Room. I gave the sex swing a speculative look, but didn’t bring it up. She’d said talk, not play. “What’s up?”

“A couple of things. First, I wanted to see how you were doing,” she said.

“I’m healed up. I’ve been beaten up worse.” Not that many times, though, and the worst time had only happened a couple nights before, when Archangel had pretty much ended me. But she didn’t need to hear that.