New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet (30 page)

Holy crap, it had gotten pretty quiet for quite a while.

Mark didn’t said anything, just looked at her, and she felt the moment pass. He’d seen the panic in her face and had tacitly rescinded his offer. No L-word for you, Pissy Chrissy. Bummer, but also phew! But bummer so badly. She’d hurt him, she could feel that, but it could have been worse.

The silence was getting pretty bad, though

Say something!

“Hey, did I tell you about my two disastrous boyfriend experiences?”

Say something else! Stupid, stupid!

“No; not in any detail, that is,” he said, and leaned back on the chair. “I think we’ve earned a little break before we go help Condor, so tell me about them. The a-hole and the d-bag, right?”

He still remembered their conversation that first night. So sweet. And he wanted to hear about her exes. So weird.

You brought them up, weirdo. All you had to do was say you should go check on Condor and the disruptor thingy. Idiot.

This time, she agreed with her brain. She really was an idiot.

“Okay. I really didn’t date much in high school. The first serious thing with a boy happened during freshman year at MU. His name was Dean. Dean Crenshaw. He was cute, funny, played the guitar. He even looked a little bit like Dean Winchester, which was cool even though I’m more of a Sammy kind of gal. Sorry, talking about a TV show in my universe. Anyway, he was my first.” First time: scary and messy and painful, and it had been over just as it was beginning to feel good. After that things had been a little better but she’d always felt like she was missing out on something; if that was what sex was like, what was all the fuss about? “I caught him cheating on me. It was pretty bad.” Go into the gory details? In for a penny, in for a pound. “He tried to make it my fault. Didn’t quite come out and say it, but he sort of implied that if I’d been any good in bed he wouldn’t have had to go somewhere else.” And she’d bought it too, that was the worst part. He’d made her feel ugly and worthless. It’d gotten so bad she’d thought about dropping out of school. Thank God Mom and Sophie talked her out of it.

“The other guy was Jerry Bordeaux. He was French-Canadian and very pretentious. He had an opinion on everything, and if you didn’t agree with him he was great at figuring out ways to put you down and make you feel stupid. He was smart, but not half as smart as he thought he was. And when he lost at anything, an argument, or Trivial Pursuit, anything, he got mean. But he wasn’t all that bad at first.” He’d made her feel pretty, for one, which had been a godsend after the self-confidence tailspin she’d been in after Dean. And the sex had been oodles better; Jerry had always been proud of his ‘She comes first’ policy. Thanks to Jerry Christine finally realized that Dean had been the one that sucked at sex, not her. “It got worse later, though, because he needed to be right all the effing time. He was always putting me down for liking computer games and ‘genre fiction.’ Said I wasn’t serious enough.” And when he broke up with her, he’d said he’d never found her all that attractive in the first place. Nice parting shot, d-bag. “That ended like six months ago.”

“Dean and Jerry do sound like a couple of clowns,” Mark said. “Although it would have been funny if their last names had been Martin and Lewis.” She didn’t know what he was talking about, but she let it go; he didn’t know what she was talking about a lot of the time, so turnabout was fair play.

And why did I tell him about them? As a plea for him not to be an a-hole?
Or maybe she was just letting him know she was an effing doormat, so he might as well wipe his boots on her on his way out of her life.

“My first time also didn’t go so well,” he added. She picked up another emotional spike from him, one she recognized from the shopping trip earlier in the day.

“So tell me.”

He did.

She almost wished he hadn’t. Way to make her feel stupid for whining about her First World problems. Let’s see. Her boyfriends were kinda douchy to her. His girlfriend ended up dead of a heroin overdose. Her life was
Hannah Montana
, his life was
The Wire
and never the twain shall meet. Except hurt was hurt, fear was fear, and at least now they’d shared the things that had hurt and scared them. She didn’t want to be used and put down, and he didn’t want to be abandoned and betrayed. Maybe sharing their bad experiences would help them avoid repeating them.

She sat on his lap and rested her head on his chest while he told his story, and held him tightly and kissed him when he finished. They spent a few quiet minutes together, and for a little while things were okay. If he played the L-word card now, she’d probably say it back and mean it.

“We probably should go check on Condor,” was what he ended up saying. The L-word ship had sailed for the time being.
Let’s call that a phew-moment and move on
.

She got up, feeling a little guilty. They’d wasted quite a bit of time on fairy tale stuff, hadn’t they? But they could be dead in a few hours, so maybe they hadn’t exactly been wasting time.

“Let’s go.”

* * *

Good news for a change! W00t!

Behind a glass wall, the disruptor thingy had been set on a mount so it could be fired remotely. Condor had discovered that when a Neo fired the darn thing, he got hurt just by being close to it.  The disruptor spewed its nauseating purple-black energy stream at a practice target – and the energy dissipated a couple of feet away.

“How did you do it?” Christine asked.

“As it turns out, an electro-magnetic field will stop the disruptor stream,” Condor explained. “The protection is temporary, however; the beam will eventually push through the field. I got the idea from something Janus said, about his encounter with an alien who had been infected with the same kind of energy. I think I can cobble together a portable generator that will give us a good twenty, thirty seconds of protection.”

“That’s not a long time,” she said, her enthusiasm deflating.

“For a Neo, that’s a long time,” Mark replied. “Think about how much damage you or I can do in thirty seconds.”

“Okay, good point.”

“I can have five generators done in another hour,” Condor said. “Sure, the cops may come a-knocking, but my security systems will give us a heads up if that happens. I think it’s worth the risk.” Nobody disagreed. “All right, go take a break while I work.”

Kestrel led them out of the lab and into the lair’s rec room, which had fond memories for Christine. That was where she and Mark had first gotten to know each other, the day she’d woken up and found herself on Earth Alpha. Everybody got drinks and sat down.

Janus was looking at her a lot. Not in an ‘I wanna do you’ way, not at all, but he was definitely interested in her.

“John spoke very highly of you,” he said when she looked back at him.

“He was nice.” And incredibly hot, she didn’t say out loud. “I really hope he’s okay.”

“After we deal with this situation, I’m going to rescue him and deal with Daedalus.”

“I’ll come along for that,” Christine said, pretty forcefully.

“And I’ll be right behind you, Armageddon Girl,” Mark added.

“Armageddon Girl?” Kestrel said.

“Mark wants me to use that as my code name. I think it’s a little too much.”

Kestrel’s little fuck-me smile made a triumphant return. “I like it.”

Why am I not surprised?
“I don’t know if it fits me. And I don’t like the ‘Girl’ part, either.” Of course, Armageddon Woman sounded worse. Armageddon Lass? Yech.

“The way John spoke about you, it just might,” Janus commented. “Your story matches what I saw during my travels outside the solar system.” He briefly described his encounter with a crazy evil alien, the only survivor of an advanced civilization he’d found; his description of the dark thing in its aura made it pretty clear who’d been responsible for all the insanity and genocide and stuff.

“The Outsiders.” Just saying those words made Christine a little sick to the stomach. She’d never forget the sheer hatred and
wrongness
she had seen when she’d looked at Mr. Night, the thing masquerading as a human being. “That’s their plan, kill us off before we’re evolved enough to join the Cosmic Nerds.”

“If that’s the case, their plan is working only too well: we’re just about the last survivors in this part of the galaxy,” Janus said grimly. He was a normally cheerful man who had spent the last few years mired in near absolute despair; that was Christine’s empathy diagnosis. Talking to John had given him a glimmer of hope; until then he’d thought all the death and destruction he’d seen had been self-inflicted, sentient species committing suicide as soon as they learned a little too much for their own good, or as soon as they developed Neo powers. Which she was sure had happened to at least a few of them – ecosystems could get effed up past the point of no return by overgrown children putting too much crud in the air or the water or what have you, without any need to blame unspeakable entities dwelling in non-Euclidean dark corners of the universe.  But the fact was, there
were
unspeakable entities yadda yadda. Of course, the good news that most of those poor species hadn’t committed suicide but been murdered instead didn’t exactly warrant celebration, either.

“And the Big Bads we’re about to visit serve the Outsiders,” she warned them.

“And you learned all of this from an object your father made?”

She nodded. “Made, or found, not sure which.”

“May I see it?”

Wow, she hadn’t even thought about the Red Cube of Doom since Mark had told her he’d palmed it on his way out of Lurker Island. Way to go, Dark.

“You still have it, Mark, right?” Oh, God, what if he had dropped it in all the fighting?

“Yeah. I left it here before we went out. Was worried it might get lost in the shuffle. I’ll be right back.” He walked out.

“You trusted him with the object?” Janus asked, somewhat dubiously in tone and definitely dubious emotionally.

“I trust Mark with my life,” she said simply, and meant it, and didn’t care that she’d used his real name instead of his stupid street name. “And I was worried I might accidentally activate it, so I didn’t want it in my pocket where it could pull some stupid Mr. Underhill stunt on me.” Neither Janus nor Kestrel got the
LOTR
reference. Mark would have.

Her faceless boyfriend came back, the red cube with the creepy markings in his hand. “Here it is.” He started to hand it to Christine but stopped when she pulled away.

“Not sure if I want to touch it right now,” she said.

“Gotcha.” Mark offered the cube to Janus, who gingerly took it and examined it.

“I’ve seen this writing before,” he said, his eyes widening in surprise. “In three different planets. Not the same symbols in each planet, that’s why I didn’t realize they were all in the same alphabet.”

“The Cosmic Nerds get around.”

Janus handed the cube back to Mark. He put it in his pocket, muttering “Just call me Sam,” under his breath and making Christine love him just a little more. In the not-so immortal words of Deep Blue Something, that’s the one thing we’ve got.

If she ended up getting killed in the next hour or so, at least she’d die in good company.

Face-Off

New York, New York, March 17, 2013

We went in loaded for bear.

After Condor got us our anti-disruptor thingies – I’d never called anything a ‘thingy’ in my life until Christine started rubbing off on me – we geared up for war. I traded my regular nine-millimeter pistol for one of the Ukrainian blasters we had liberated from the Chicago Russians. My friends were also bringing in some heavy artillery; in addition to her whip Kestrel was toting a huge multi-barreled rifle, three weapon systems in one. The smallest one was a .50 caliber auto-rifle firing depleted-uranium machine-gun bullets; the next one up was a 40mm grenade launcher fed from a rotary drum magazine, and the big’un was a particle beam projector guaranteed to penetrate 300 millimeters of hardened steel. The whole thing weighed over a hundred pounds, the kind of crazy gun only a Neo would be strong and deranged enough to use. Condor was wearing heavy armor with weapon mounts on both shoulders and forearms, an experimental prototype that still had a few kinks to work out, but which under the circumstances was worth the trouble. Only Janus and Christine weren’t packing any extra hardware, not that they were likely to need it.

I wasn’t sure what else I was packing under the hood after Christine had conducted her little experiment on me. We’d all find out soon enough.

Janus’ teleportation was just as unpleasant as the Lurker’s version, and I once again was left with the uncomfortable feeling that we were uninvited guests in somebody’s home during the transition period. Luckily, no one objected and we returned to the world unscathed, somewhere in Central Park.

“We’re close,” Christine said. “There’s an entrance nearby, one that they don’t use. Nobody has used it in a long time.” She closed her eyes and concentrated for several seconds. I looked around in case some late night joggers spotted us, but there was very little activity around. News of the Neo rumble in Brooklyn must be out by now, and people in the city know better than to be outdoors when those things happen. A Neo fight can start in Brooklyn and end in the Upper West Side in a matter of seconds. Best to stay home and pray no angry demigod comes crashing through your front door.

“Oh, crap.”

I looked back. Christine was staring at what seemed like a perfectly ordinary patch of grass. Slowly, so slowly that I first I thought I was imagining it, something started taking shape in front of her. It grew and spread out into elliptical surface that looked like a still pool of black water standing on its side. The color and the nauseated feeling that I got just by looking at it were all-too familiar by now.

“It’s an Outsider energy construct,” Christine said, confirming my fears. “My father figured out a way to access it, and then he sorta locked it, that’s why the Big Bads haven’t used it in years. I think I can unlock it.”