The Indestructibles (Book 4): Like A Comet (32 page)

      Still, the monster remained in charge,
and the monster had no mercy. With blinding speed, the werewolf leapt at the
wounded alien, not attacking the creature's body, but at the parasite
controlling it, slashing downward with all of his claws, gutting the bug-plant
hybrid, two swipes down, two across, delivering death.

      The bat creature fell forward,
landing in the werewolf's arms. Monster to monster, they locked eyes. The beast
within the wolf recognized only fallen prey, while Titus, watching, witnessing,
saw something else. He saw relief. He saw a feral warrior ready to die.

      And then it died, another victim
of the Nemesis fleet, another tool discarded.

      Titus roared, his voice echoing in
the emptying streets of the City, and he raged on, looking for another battle.

Chapter
58:

President
some day

You could see the fleet from Earth.

If I don't die, Jon Broadstreet thought,
looking up at the blue sky above the City, watching strange shapes, pale and
uncomfortably close, hanging there like the moon, this will be my lead in the
story.

      Nearby, smoke rose. He heard the
terrified rumble of humanity  and saw the humped back of the aircraft that had
crept out of the sky and into their midst, a shelled slug of a thing, created fear
wherever it turned.

      Broadstreet held his laptop in
front of him and watched the screen as Jane's recorded message went live. When
she told him that he'd know, that she wouldn't have to tell him it was time to
release the recording, he believed her, but he'd no idea she meant it would be
this obvious. The City, under attack, suffered a direct assault. Why here,
Broadstreet wondered, scanning the Internet and his professional resources for
news of attacks in New York or London, Paris or Beijing. Nothing, though, just
here, in the City, a single, calculated strike. Monsters at the gates.

      Broadstreet had prepped the file
to release immediately, on multiple video-sharing sites, and through his own
publication's pages. His professional conscience stood at odds with his moral
compass—he realized it represented the scoop to end all scoops, the sort of
first report that made careers and saved newspapers, but he believed he should
have shared it with everyone immediately. No, he thought, it'll be okay—it's
the information age, you've put it online, every one of your colleagues and
competitors will share it within seconds. It will be ubiquitous. Everyone will
see it. Everyone has to.

      It took half a second for the
video to go live on the paper's website before his editor called him.
Broadstreet's phone buzzed in his pocket.

      "How long have you had this
video?" his editor, a beleaguered and underpaid battering ram of a
journalist with the unfortunate name of Butch Dancy, sounded more bewildered
than angry.

      "Just got it,"
Broadstreet lied.

      "Next time you want to lie, don't
show me a video from an overcast day and tell me you just shot it when the sun
is out," Butch said. "I'm sometimes smarter than you are."

      "I know," Broadstreet
said.  

      "Doesn't matter. Where are
you?" Butch said.

      "On the roof of my building.
I can see the smoke downtown," Broadstreet said. For once he was actually
happy to live so far on the outskirts of the City. He could make out the
destruction and see the smoke, yet he felt like he was watching a movie.

      "Can you get downtown,"
Butch said.

      Tempted—at least momentarily—to
tell his boss to get lost, Broadstreet then thought about the
Indestructibles—maybe Jane, maybe just her friends, but people younger than he
was were risking their lives without a second thought for their own safety.

      "I can try," Broadstreet
said.

      "You know the players. Get
the rest of the story," Butch said. "And don't get yourself killed."

      "OK. I'll try not to boss."

      "And Broadstreet," Butch
said.

      "Yeah?"

      "Good job with the video. Did
you wordsmith her at all?"

      "That would be unethical,"
Broadstreet said. "That's all her."

      "This kid could be president
some day," Butch said.

      "Yeah," Broadstreet
said, looking at the black smoke continue to rise up from the City's center. "We
have to make sure we still have a world left after this before we can start
cracking jokes like that."

      "Well," his boss said,
sounding tired and more than a little afraid. "Let's hope we do."

      Broadstreet hung up, then put his
hands in his pockets. He pensively gazed at the City, where he'd been born,
where he'd grown up, where he'd wanted to become a storyteller and newsman. We
all play our parts, I guess, he thought.

      He started to close his laptop,
but paused, and pressed play on Solar's video one more time.

      His own face appeared first, the
impromptu opening made him feel self-conscious and unprofessional and amateur.

      Broadstreet watched as he stepped
away, remembering how he'd crossed behind the camera to zoom in, framing the
shot around Solar's head and shoulders. The clouds on the day they'd met made
her open-flame colored hair seem brighter, more supernatural.

      "My name is Solar, of the
Indestructibles," she said. "I apologize for the cryptic nature of
this message, but I ask that everyone watching this listen carefully."

      On screen, Solar did not
immediately brim with confidence. She looked exactly like what she was—a young
woman with far more responsibility thrown onto her shoulders than any one
person deserved, facing things nobody could be prepared for, whether they had superpowers
or not.

      "We deal with impossible
things all the time, and today is one of those days when one such impossible
thing is about to happen. It sounds ridiculous to say it, believe me. But we
will soon find ourselves under attack by an invading force. There's no better
phrasing to make it less strange."

      Solar sighed on screen, brushed
her hair from her eyes.

      "An alien fleet is coming
here. To Earth. And its mission is not one of good intentions."

      Solar took a beat, looking into
the camera. Broadstreet cringed at his camerawork—he had adjusted the lens and
zoomed in closer to focus more on her eyes. She noticed the camera moving and
fixed her gaze.

      "I know. I know. It's
impossible to believe. But it's my hope that you'll never have to see this
message, and we'll stop them before they ever arrive. No matter what, we're
here for you. We'll be your first line of defense. Those of us who are able
will fly into space to fight for you. The others will be here on the ground
waiting to protect you. This is our promise."

      Solar looked beyond the camera.
Broadstreet remembered that moment, when she broke character, gazing at him as
if to ask: have I said enough? Have I covered everything? He found himself
doing the same thing now as he had when Solar stood right in front of him. He
shook his head, regretting that there was nothing at all he could do to make
this easier for her.

      "We may not make it back. But
that comes with the job. And we need to ask something from you. When and if
this comes to a head, and the battle comes to our planet, we need you to be
good to each other. Help your neighbors. Be kind to those who need someone to
lean on. There will be dark days ahead, and only you can make them less so.
They're coming to take our world—let's show them that we think this is a place worth
holding onto."

      Solar exhaled deeply.

      "So for now, this is Solar,
signing off for the Indestructibles. I hope to see you tomorrow, safe and
sound."

      The video played out and the
screen went dark. Broadstreet closed the laptop and headed downstairs. In the apartment
hallways, he heard rushed conversations, the sounds of people packing, the
voices of fear. Would they listen? Broadstreet couldn't be sure. When we needed
each other most, humanity had a tendency to turn on itself. Maybe not this time,
he thought. He headed out into the street in the direction of trouble instead
of fleeing from it. He held his camera and notepad firmly in hand.

      Maybe not this time.

Chapter
59:

To
scar the armada

Doc Silence had been to space before.

All of them had, really, to varying
degrees. Some took the journey in stride. Others hated it. In their younger
days when they left Earth Doc hadn't been a fan. Traveling between dimensions
felt natural to him. Space, however, seemed more like science, and science was
too logical to play well with the finger paint style of magic Doc employed.

      Sitting cross-legged in the vacuum
of space, his old, lightly armored hero uniform fit clingy and tight. Doc gazed
out into the darkness, Earth behind him, or below him—that's the thing, he
thought, there's no up and down here—and watched the approaching alien fleet
growing large and monstrous before him, moving quickly toward his home.

      "How you doin' out there,
Doc?" Billy's voice said in his ear.

      "I hate space," Doc
said.

      "You should see Saturn. It'll
change your opinion of things," he said.

      Doc smiled. Billy's sojourn into
the beyond seemed to have given him some perspective. He was curious to see how
the young hero evolved after all of this, provided they survived the onslaught.

      "I always liked Pluto better,"
Doc said.

      "You would." Billy said.

      "Might I inquire, are we discussing
a pantheon or planets in this discussion?" Korthos's rumbling voice said.
He didn't sound right; Doc suspected the immortal had put the earpiece in
backward, something he had been prone to do in their youth.

      "Planets, big guy," Doc
said. "You ready for your part?"

      "I shall rain destruction
down upon—"

      "You're ready," Doc
said.

      And so am I, Doc thought, running
through the patterns and manipulations he'd need to perform to make this spell
work. It was war magic, hard magic, creating something out of almost nothing. Doc
wasn't looking forward to it, but, he thought, if it worked, he could at least
push their enemies back on their heels a bit before they got to Earth.

      He turned his burning purple eyes
toward the fleet and held out his hands, muttering inside his mask—sealed by
both science and magic to let Doc speak in the vacuum of space—the words to the
spell he needed to cast. This was war poetry he spoke, evoking old gods and
warriors of myth and song. It was a poem of fire and blood, of fury and
revenge, of death, pure mortality, a weapon intended to leave a bloody, ragged
scar across an entire army.

      The space in front of the fleet
lit up into a razor-straight line of bright golden glow as wide as a horizon, becoming
a tripwire of light and heat.

      The fleet passed across that line
like a foot crossing a threshold, and the trap was sprung.

      A crisscrossed barrier of radiant
netting leapt into existence, directly in front of the fleet, its ships moving
too quickly to avoid passing through it. It resembled a fisherman's net, but
the ships were not trapped so much as severed, their hulls splitting like
cheese through a metal wire, no, through an infinite number of wires, crumbling
and splintering, exploding in fire and whatever bloodlike fuel the ships used
to sustain themselves.

      Immediately, the rest of the
armada took evasive action, banking up and above or down and below the barrier
where Doc's limitations prevented him from making the trap any larger. He
sensed the fear and panic as the fleet felt the loss of its numbers, the spell
triggering feedback into his mind, letting him know exactly how much death he'd
caused. This is the price of war magic, he thought, and why its practitioners
are the way they are. You either need to have no conscience at all, or the
ability to sacrifice yourself to the greater cause, to experience such horror
over and over again. He hated it. Nauseous, his skin began to crawl and tears
welled up in his eyes even as he knew these enemies were the ones bent on
destroying his world.

      Doc fought off these gruesome
feelings and prepared another spell. He unfolded his legs from lotus position
and moved his arms in a smooth, slow arc, speaking the phrases of another war
spell, one of pain and destruction, not a poem now but a war cry, one that
demanded the death of enemies. He felt oily and awful saying the words, greasy
thoughts poured across his lips like a bad meal, but the spell worked as a red
whip of light formed from his hand, and also, in the distance, a remote
representation of that weapon he'd conjured in his palm. He lashed out with the
whip, and the distant version, a massive thing, moved as if wielded by a giant,
carving a swath through the fleet, splitting warships in two, scattering
fighters. A dreadnaught positioned itself to become a martyr for one of the
spear-like seed ships, and crumbled under the cracking scourge.

      Once again, the cries of pain
echoed from spell to caster, traveling down Doc's arm like a heart attack. His
fingers grew cold, his pulse spiked, and his body reacted in cataclysm to the
violence it caused.

      Doc reached into his mind,
searching for another spell, trying to find more to give, something else he
could throw at the oncoming alien fleet. But his thoughts, like lightning bugs,
danced in the dark, without pattern and completely beyond his control.

      "That's it," Doc said,
his voice cracked and rough.

      "What. The hell. Was that?"
Billy said.

      "A mighty strike, my old
friend," Korthos said, his voice ridiculously energized by the display of
destruction.

      And then, Jane. "Are you
okay, Doc?"

      "I'll be fine," he said.
"Go get them. I'll join you in a minute."

      Doc's chest spasmed. Not a heart
attack, but an electric jolt of pain as his body rejected the dark magic's
feedback. He bit back the hurt, realizing his microphone was live.

      "We could see that from the
ground," Kate said. 

      "Good," Doc said, his
breathing ragged. "That means it worked."

      His consciousness faded and he
fought to remain awake and an unexpected question rose up from his cloudy mind:
Where was Emily?