New Olympus Saga (Book 2): Doomsday Duet (35 page)

That made Daedalus either crazy or a fanatic. He’d long ago given up on wondering which one.

“I’ll save my megalomaniacal speech for later, Johnny. I was hoping you’d share a few things with me instead. The girl’s location, for one. You have no idea how dangerous she is. If she’s left unsupervised for too long, she might go and do something catastrophic.”

He didn’t expect John would volunteer the information, but the question might make him think about the answer, and the dozen or so psychic probes attached to Ultimate’s comatose brain might be able to ferret out those thoughts. It was a long shot, even with the shadow-energy augments Daedalus had built into the probes, but it was worth a try.

John didn’t say anything. He was determinedly thinking about childhood memories, or old war stories, or anything other than the little redhead bitch. He knew all the tricks for avoiding telepathic probes. Oh, well. “No worries,” he told Ultimate. “We’ll find her the old-fashioned way. If she gets hurt along the way, that’s too bad.”

The Invincible Man remained silent. He’d already announced what he would do to Daedalus if he got the chance, and the big lug didn’t go for rants and bluster. Daedalus was somewhat disappointed. To his surprise, he found that he did want to explain himself after all. If he could show John what was at stake, make him understand why he’d had to do all of this…

A warbling sound in the real world announced a call he couldn’t ignore and stopped him before he could launch into a bona fide villain monologue.
Saved by the bell
, he thought. That would have been so dreadfully pedestrian, not to mention useless: Johnny-Boy would never understand. He might as well die without ever knowing why.

He severed the connection to Ultimate’s brain without saying goodbye. Only five people in the planet had his private, heavily encrypted and protected number. That was one call he had to take.

“Smith here,” he subvocalized into his implant. The calls were audio only, to make them easier to conceal.

“The Central Park facility has been compromised, sir.” Daedalus recognized the voice; Bert Tuttle, a Type One Neo with a good deal of talent and a notorious lack of scruples. The man was a bit of a punctilious prick, and had a deplorable tendency to go into ‘on the one hand and on the other hand’ tirades, but he did good work.

Bert described the situation in a few terse sentences. Daedalus had already heard about Janus and the girl joining forces in New York; they had spanked the Empire States Guardians and escaped, which was plenty bad enough. And now they had done just as Daedalus feared they would, and gone after the Source holding facility.
“Mr. Night disappeared while fighting Janus,” Bert continued. “The self-destruct protocols were initiated, but the targets managed to escape. On the other hand, the self-destruct went off properly; nobody will find any trace of the facility.”

Daedalus ran a cursory check of the newsfeeds through his implants; images, video and headlines were projected directly into his retina. Yep, a 4.6 earthquake centered on the Park was the top news everywhere. “This is just fucking great,” he muttered. About two hundred million bucks in parts and labor, sucked into an Outsider energy implosion. He’d managed to build a literal money pit.

“There is more, sir. Lady Shi helped the targets escape. She remained behind after we evacuated the base and used the alternate portal to the Met to transport the invaders away before the self-destruct process was completed.”

“That is… regrettable,” Daedalus said in a controlled tone. No sense in going berserk in front of the help. It was all Mr. Night’s fault, of course. The little Japanese assassin had always done a fine job, along with her Russian boy-toy, as long as you didn’t mind large incidental body counts. The loss of her teddy bear must have shaken her up more than he’d expected. Even psychopaths could give a shit over their lovers, apparently. Once Medved had become a meat puppet for the creepy Outsider-ling, the sensible thing to do would have been to terminate Lady Shi with extreme prejudice. Instead, Mr. Night had let her live, probably because he was having too much fun watching her squirm. And she’d done what anybody would do if you fucked with them enough; she’d fucked them right back.

“While you wait for Mr. Night to return, liaise with whoever is left in the Russian mob, and our own assets, and keep looking for the girl. While you do that, start evacuating all our other facilities in New York City. If you haven’t found the girl within seventy-two hours, you and everyone who’s left in the city need to get the hell out.” Without the girl, and with the main facility gone, New York was no longer useful. The Humanity Foundation was planning to destroy the city, hoping to take out the Source along with it. That plot wasn’t going to work the way the anti-Neo idiots expected, but the city was getting destroyed nonetheless. As far as Daedalus was concerned, those pathetic bigots were welcome to turn New York into a smoking hole on the ground. The whole place had gone to shit since the Demoncrats took over, way back when. Let the Big Apple burn.

“Understood,” Bert said. He would do what he was told, and he wouldn’t play games, unlike most Neos. Type Ones made the best henchmen, if they were smart enough to understand their limitations; the more powerful freaks just never quite got the idea the rules applied to them, too. Daedalus shut off the connection and considered the situation.

Mr. Night had decided to test-drive his new Cossack body by going up against Janus. Daedalus hoped those two had killed each other. The big bad black man had go before he could throw a monkey wrench in the works, and Mr. Night would have to go sooner or later: their respective plans were fairly incompatible, given that the creepy little guy was working to eradicate all life on Earth and Daedalus wanted to save the world from that very fate. At this stage, their inevitable confrontation was drawing near. If Janus could take down the old man, Daedalus would be duly grateful. Not grateful enough to spare Janus, mind you, but grateful enough to say a kind word over the Colored Champion’s grave.

Too many Byzantine plots and counterplots; that was what had led to this dog’s breakfast. Daedalus wondered if he wouldn’t have been better off derailing all the conspiracies he’d uncovered, rather than trying to co-opt them. The problem was, he wasn’t sure he could have won every fight. The Humanity Foundation, sure, he could have crushed that pack of idiots easily enough: a gang of over-privileged vanilla humans could only be a threat if he let them. The Iron Tsar was a different kettle of fish, though. Helmet-head and his empire made better partners than enemies. And Mr. Night was a whole other kettle of krakens. The old guy’s capabilities were a big unknown. Daedalus had tried to have the little fucker killed a couple of times, using rather circumspect methods and agents. He’d failed every time, and in his more paranoid moments he suspected Mr. Night knew he was responsible, and didn’t care.

Daedalus pulled a Cuban cigar out of a fancy humidor, a gift from one the Batistas, either the second or third dictator of that illustrious lineage, and absently lit up, ignoring as usual the no-smoking signs posted on every building in Freedom Island. Smoking helped him think, and if people didn’t like it, they could go fuck themselves. The smoke-Nazis were just another symptom of how fucked-up the world had become. Lung cancer was a solved problem; so was emphysema and pretty much every other health issue related to smoking, except for bad breath, but the sanctimonious reconstructed Puritans of the world were still battling to eliminate the now-harmless vice. They wanted everything to be nice and pure and squeaky-clean; worse still, they were utterly unwilling to pay the price to get what they wanted. They thought whining about problems would solve them, and never accepted the fact that you couldn’t make an omelet without cracking a few eggs.

To save the world would require making a massive figurative omelet, requiring a commensurate quantity of broken eggs. He’d done the math and even run some of his initial findings past Doc Slaughter, who hadn’t been able to dispute them but had still rejected Daedalus’ proposed solutions. That self-righteous blond bastard would rather let everyone die, as long as his conscience wasn’t stained with a few – okay, more than a few – necessary sacrifices. Well, that was too bad; now Doc and his conscience were scattered all over the Nevada desert.

Doc and his scruples were the least of his problems, unfortunately. Once again, the girl and her gang of protectors had thwarted him. What irked him the most was that, with the exception of Janus, it was a pretty pathetic gang: Condor, a second-rate Genius-Type with delusions of adequacy; Face-Off, a vigilante so inconsequential Daedalus had to run a Google search just to find out who the hell he was; and Kestrel, whom he’d only known because of one – admittedly memorable – private session he’d had with her a few years back. Their only saving grace had been their illegal status; if they’d been plugged into the system like eighty percent of Neos in the US, Daedalus would have found them and the girl in zip time. He was shocked that they’d had the balls to come gunning for him at the very facility where he’d planned to take the girl apart and put her back together as a good pliable tool.

The facility in question was gone, in a futile attempt to remove the girl from the board. He wasn’t sure whether he was glad or disappointed she’d escaped. If she was dead, he could just carry on with his alternative strategies. Alive, she was a wild card, and he didn’t like those one bit. He was a chess player; there were no wild cards in chess.

Daedalus savagely ground the cigar on his desk, marring the expensive wood finish. He hated having to wait for the opposition to make a move, but his chances of finding the girl were low to non-existent. He could only hope they’d try to break out Ultimate, or do something equally stupid. Mr. Night would probably come up with something, assuming he survived his little trip with Janus.

Meanwhile, it was time to get Plan B rolling, just in case. It would result in some twenty million deaths, for starters, but that was the price of doing business.

Christine Dark

Catskill Mountains, New York, March 17, 2013

“Does anybody live there? Cleaning maids, or a butler?” Christine asked Condor as they walked through the tunnel linking the underground hangar where they’d parked the Condor Jet to the big-ass mansion she’d noticed on their final approach.

He shook his head. “The whole thing is automated. A crew of gardeners takes care of the grounds a couple times a week, but nobody goes into the house. As far as the world knows, it’s owned by a Chinese billionaire who doesn’t use it very often. I only come here when I’m on vacation, a whole two, three times a year.”

That’s good
, Christine thought as Condor let them all in; no residents meant no witnesses to their abduction-in-progress. Christine had caught a nasty burst of fear from Lady Shi when she woke up shortly before their arrival; she briefly fought her restraints and then became calm again. The fear was replaced by resignation. As they landed, Mark had taken the prisoner’s gag off and most of the straps, but kept the Type Four restraints and the blindfold on her. “Sorry for the rough treatment,” he told her. “I’ll take the blindfold off when we’re indoors.” Christine picked up an emotional shrug from the assassin, as if she hadn’t expected any better from them. The whole thing felt pretty skeevy to Christine, but she guessed it made sense to not let their prisoner know where they were.

At least they had somewhere to go, she considered as they made it to the manor, what with the Condor Lair being raided and all. That had sucked big time, not least because she’d left all her clothes back there, from the secondhand jeans and sweater to all the stuff she’d picked up the day before. She’d bought three designer tote bags, but since superheroes didn’t carry purses, she hadn’t taken any of them along on their ill-fated raid. All her crap was probably getting stuffed into evidence bags by the FBI, and all she had left was the stupid gray-and-black Condor groupie outfit she was wearing and the few toiletries she’d packed in the utility belt which had come with the outfit. The world truly sucked some days. She’d really liked that purple-and-white print dress.

The tunnel – she was getting mighty tired of tunnels by now – led to a secret door to the library, which was big enough to be named after a US president. She tried to enjoy the sights as they walked through the new Condor Crib. The opulence of the manor, complete with marble floors under rich carpets, expensive portraits and lots of stuff likely made of fine Corinthian leather, did nothing to dispel her crappy mood, unfortunately. “Nice house,” she said perfunctorily.

Thirty minutes and a shower later, she was feeling slightly better, but still fairly bummed out. Too much bad stuff had happened in the last twenty-four hours: fighting her alternate history mother, almost getting killed, Janus going missing, getting to the bad guys’ lair without achieving any sort of victory, resolution or closure, not to mention the possibility Condor and Kestrel were about to go all Gitmo on their prisoner… Not good at all.

Christine sank into a very comfy armchair in one of the manor’s rec rooms, a cup of hot chocolate in her hand. She was wearing silk pajamas under a plush bathrobe. Being rich was kinda nice, she had to admit. Still, not even the delicious hot chocolate improved the way she was feeling, mostly because Condor had the news on, and the news sucked ass.

Her picture was everywhere on the screen, shots from her adventures in Chicago and new pics from some sort of helmet-cam one of the Guardians must have been wearing, showing her new black hairdo. She was wanted for a long list of crimes, local, state and federal. Condor and Kestrel’s pictures were there, too, although in their case their faces were obscured by their helmets, so at least they couldn’t be identified as easily. Even Mark had his faceless mug plastered all over the news, which was pretty idiotic, considering. They were international fugitives now.