New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet (31 page)

“You sure it’s a good idea to mess with that thing?” I asked her.

“No. But the other entrances are guarded. There is one somewhere in the Met, and another in Park Avenue, and if we get near either of them they’ll know it. And both of them are also powered by Outsider energy anyway.” She bit her lip for a second. “I’m going in.”

She closed her eyes again, and nothing happened for a while. I looked at the rest of our merry band. Condor was looking around, being his professional self, and Kestrel was mostly looking at Condor. Janus was watching Christine intently, and he wasn’t just curious: the big guy looked worried, maybe even scared. That worried me. Scared people are unpredictable, and when an upper-range Type Three becomes unpredictable, fun things start happening, like cities going up in smoke.

“Okay, step right through,” Christine announced. “I’ll hold it open for you and go last.”

“Sounds good. After me,” I said, and walked into the black pool.

It felt pretty much like teleporting with the Lurker and Janus: there was the same weird temporal displacement and the sensation of being in a bad neighborhood. There was more to it, though, a big serving of nastiness along the way. I felt it sliding greasily all over me, inside and out. My worst thoughts and memories woke up, became vivid and immediate. The asshole in the kitchen, beating me to death. Faye lying dead in the hotel room. The pedo from Hoboken who’d killed his last few victims – and what I’d done when I caught him. And more, things I’d half-forgotten, things I wish I’d forgotten. I went on a brief tour of things I’d seen – and things I’d done – all of them designed to make me angry and hateful.

I came out the other side understanding a great deal more about the Outsiders than I ever wanted to.

They hated. First and foremost, they hated everything in our existence with an intensity I could barely comprehend, and I thought I was an expert in the emotion. If I ever became infected by that energy… I remembered Christine looking at her father and Mr. Night, overcome with horror and disgust. What would she see in me if I ever became something like them? Something worse than them, I figured. I would be absolutely great at hating everything.

I found myself in a cave almost identical to the Lurker’s little island retreat in Lake Michigan, so similar that I would have thought we’d ended back there if not for the fact that the island had blown up rather spectacularly a few days before. I was standing in the middle of a circle covered with inscriptions very much like the ones I’d seen on the island. I avoided looking at them for too long as I took a few steps into the cavern to make room for the others.

Condor was next. There was a flash of black light and he appeared out of thin air. He shook his head as he joined me. “Fun, wasn’t it?” he said sarcastically. The haunted look in his eyes belied the calm words. Whatever he’d seen on his way in hadn’t been fun at all.

“One Hell of a ride,” I agreed.

Kestrel popped in. She didn’t say anything, just held Condor’s hand as if trying to draw strength from him. I hoped it worked. She would be a holy terror if the Outsiders ever took hold of her.

Janus came in with his protective aura flaring like a bonfire, its golden light almost too bright to look at. His eyes looked about wildly. I could tell he was about to go into fight-or-flight mode – and I knew how bad it would be if an energy projector lost it in an enclosed space like this.

“Hey,” I called out to him. His eyes focused on me. “That was some crazy shit, wasn’t it?” I said in a casual voice.

Having to come up with an answer helped steady him. He nodded and even managed a grin. “That was a trip down Memory Lane I really didn’t need,” he said.

“I hear you.”

“That really sucked,” Christine said, looking as pale as she had before she threw up earlier that night. I walked over her and she gave me a brief hug. “Ugh. That stuff is
nasty
.” She looked around, looking each of us up and down. “Okay, none of that crap got stuck on us, thank God. I didn’t think it would. It’s actually pretty darn hard for the Outsider energy to infect a living creature, or there’d be a lot more Mr. Nights running around. Our souls are like anti-matter to it, we burn it off just by existing. So we should be safe, as long as we don’t willingly invite it in.”

“Thank God,” Janus replied in a soft voice. “I’ve seen what even a minor infection will do to someone’s soul,” he continued. “It’s insanity and worse than insanity.”

“Cancer and leprosy and a partridge and a pear tree,” Kestrel said, and laughed shrilly.

“And on that note, let’s get going,” I said, hoping to get down to business again.

Christine led the way as we walked down the tunnel. We quickly reached another circular chamber with more magic squiggles carved all over, some rusting metal cages, and a desk and several bookcases off to one side. “Those are my father’s,” Christine said. I glanced at the book titles: most of them were too moldy and worn out to identify, but a few leather-bound copies were still in one piece. There were a few fiction books – Melville and Poe and other classics; lots of Lovecraft, which didn’t surprise me one bit – and a complete set of the
Encyclopedia Britannica
. Other books were academic tomes on forensic science and criminology, the kind of stuff any well-rounded Golden Age mystery man should have on tap. This must have been the original Lurker’s Lair, back when he was haunting the streets of New York.

“I bet there’s all kinds of useful information in there,” Christine said, walking over to the desk.

“I doubt it,” I replied. “Look at all the dust. It doesn’t look like anybody’s been here in decades. Do you think the Lurker would have left anything important behind when he abandoned this place?”

Christine’s shoulders slumped. “Well, fudge. Might as well look, though.” We spent a few minutes rummaging through the desk and bookcases. I found some loose 7.63mm Mauser rounds in one drawer, and that was all. No special notes, no magical talismans. Life can be disappointing like that.

Even more disappointingly, the chamber was the end of the line. “I thought this was the way to the secret underground facility,” I commented.

“So did I,” Christine said in a miffed tone of voice. “Hold on.” She closed her eyes and did her psychic thing. “Okay,” she said after about a minute, plenty of time for me to worry and start to fidget. “There used to be a connecting tunnel on that end of this room, but Dad sealed it off. The bad guys’ base is on the other side. And the Source; it is over there too. The Source is in their secret base!”

“The object that gives us all our powers is buried underneath Central Park,” Condor said musingly. “No wonder the Big Apple has the biggest concentrations of Neos in the world.”

“And that’s why they tried to bring you there,” I said to Christine. “They want you to show them how to control it.” The idea that the device, construct or whatever that had given thousands of human beings superhuman powers was nearby should have impressed me more than it did, but it didn’t feel real somehow.

“Well, I guess I should give them a show, after all the trouble they went through,” she said, her eyes bright with anger. “It’s not going to be the show they expected, though.”

“I would offer to transport us to the base,” Janus said. “But something is interfering with my abilities. I cannot teleport into the area ahead of us.”

“Yeah, this whole place has… I guess wards is the proper term. They block teleportation, telepathy, clairvoyance, pretty much anything and everything. I can see the Source through the wards, but it’s like looking through a dark shower curtain.”

“That’s the work of a Master Artificer,” Condor said. “Only a handful of places in the world are protected like that. The New Forbidden Palace, the White House, the Golden Spire of Kiev, a couple others – Freedom and Liberty Islands, of course. And guess who did the work on those last two and the White House.”

“Daedalus Smith,” Janus said.

“The guy’s good, I’ll give him that. I tried to copy some of his anti-teleport architecture for the Condor Lair, and I only managed to reverse-engineer some basic stuff. Obviously not enough to keep you out, Janus.”

“I supposed this isn’t a good time to cite you for patent infringement,” Janus replied dryly.

Condor chuckled.

“It’s all right, you guys. It doesn’t matter if we can’t teleport. I can reopen the tunnel, but I think the bad guys will notice when I do.”

“Well, I hate to drop by unannounced, so it’s just as well,” Condor replied.

“I don’t care either way. I’m in an ass-kicking mood, so let’s get in there,” was my witty addition to the repartee.

Christine nodded and concentrated once more. Glowing symbols appeared on one of chamber walls, and a few seconds later the solid rock flowed away like water, creating a new tunnel. There was a rumbling round further out, and I saw light at the other end – mundane electrical light.

We went down the tunnel and reached a narrow low-ceiling corridor illuminated by bright neon overheads. A section of the corridor had crumbled away when Christine opened the tunnel, and we had to step over chunks of reinforced concrete as we went in.

Just we made it to the base, an alarm siren started blaring. “Follow me!” Christine shouted and took off running down the corridor. We rushed after her.

One right turn, one left, and about a hundred feet later, she stopped in front of a massive metal door, the kind of thing you’d find on a bank vault. She concentrated and the door buckled under a massive kinetic impact; tortured metal rang like a gargantuan gong. Christine hit it again, deforming the door some more, but she was trying to push it in and the door was meant to swing out.

I walked past her as she was concentrating on a third strike. “Let me try,” I said as I grabbed hold of the metal plates where they had bent enough to give me a grip, and started pulling it in.

“Doh,” she said when she realized she’d been going about it the wrong way.

My fingers sank into the metal as if it was clay, and the door groaned some more as I braced a foot against the frame and pulled. Metal tumblers thicker than an elephant’s legs twisted and snapped, and reinforced concrete broke apart. I ripped the whole thing open without even working up a sweat.

“Jesus, Face!” Condor said.

“I’ve been working out,” I joked, trying not to let on how shocked I was. The door was six feet thick. I wouldn’t have been able to even budge it before Christine had her way with me. Some Neos could charge-up another Neo’s power levels, but not to this level.

What the hell was I going to do with all that power?

The corridor behind the door was wider and taller, a round tunnel large enough to accommodate vehicles. As I went into it, two humanoid metallic figures opened fire on me from alcoves on each side of the entrance.

I recognized the robots just before I ate two large servings of piping-hot plasma. I’d seen them on the news and in historical movies. Their design hadn’t changed in seventy-odd years; they looked the same as when they had terrorized both Nazis and Soviets, although their weapon systems had gotten nastier over the decades. They were crude, boxy humanoids made of riveted plates and hydraulic pistons, eight feet tall, topped by cylindrical heads with a single optic sensor instead of eyes, flanked by shoulder-mounted plasma guns; they moved with inhuman, insectile precision.

Dominion automatons, fighting robots forged and given a semblance of life and volition by the hand of the Iron Tsar himself. They bathed me in streams of plasma capable of reducing a modern battle tank into a molten lump of metal.

Behind me, Christine put up a shield, which probably saved Condor and Kestrel’s lives, since the area around the door became a pretty good simulacrum of Hell. She tried to extend it far enough to cover me, but all she managed to do was nudge me forward into the line of fire. I felt my skin burning. Of course, I shouldn’t have felt anything: I should have been vaporized before I had a chance to scream.

It hurt, but I lived. I charged one of the robots through the plasma stream, instinctively sidestepped a hammer blow that tore through the tunnel’s concrete floor, and punched its armored chest. The alloyed plate burst under the impact and I drove my arm up to the elbow into the machine’s guts. I shoved my other arm in the opening and pried open its chest cavity, ripping stuff out. It managed to club me once over the head as I tore it apart; the blow made as little impact on me as when a normal human hit me with his fists, back when I’d been merely superhuman.

It took me a bit to disentangle myself from the mangled robot remains, and by the time I was done, so was the second automaton. Christine and Janus had double-tapped it and turned it into harmless chunks of metal.

“Holy crap,” Christine said. Everyone was staring at me.

“What?”

“Two things, actually,” Condor said. “First of all, what the fuck, Face?”

“Long story. Will tell you later.”

“Second of all, you need new pants.”

I looked down. My jeans were mostly gone, burned clean off except for some bits around the tighter spots. My defensive aura really was skin-tight. If I’d been wearing boxers instead of briefs, I’d be naked from the waist down; as it was, I was glad I’d been wearing clean tighty whities before we headed out. I was going to have to run around in a fucking bodysuit like all the costumed pricks. Or I guess I could switch to bicycle shorts. Or Speedos, God help me.

Something to look forward to, later. “Where to?” I asked Christine.

“There.” She walked to a point where the tunnel split in two and pointed to the left branch. “It’s there. I can hear it even from here.”

“The Source is talking to you?”

“I think so. Something is calling to me, and it’s coming from the same direction as the Source. There is more concentrated power over there than anything I’ve seen. It makes the Tower of Power in Chicago look like a gerbil-powered generator.”

She started to walk down the tunnel – and Janus stepped in her way.

“What do you intend to do with it?” he asked her.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Nothing much for now, that’s for sure. But I think whoever is in charge is going to be near it.”