New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl (18 page)

Face-Off

New York City, New York, March 13, 2013

“So what’s the verdict, professor?” I
asked Condor. We had taken a dinner break. Christine was washing up and we were
having a drink while we waited for dinner. Kestrel had briefly returned during
the tests but Condor had sent her off on a Chinese food run. We were sitting in
his informal dining room, the one that only seats eight or ten people. He was
having wine, something expensive and French. I was drinking beer straight from
the bottle. Imported beer, just to be fancy.

“I think we haven’t even begun to see
what she’s capable of,” he said. “For starters, she has strong empathic
abilities and some sort of multi-spectrum vision. Her physical powers are
pretty impressive. Her force field and kinetic attack are at least in 2.6 or
2.7 range, possibly higher. She’s scared of her abilities and isn’t really
pushing them. That isn’t unusual, especially when we’re dealing with someone
who didn’t even know Neos existed. Going from her aura readings, I think she’s
got the potential to be a Type Three, and sooner rather than later.”

Some Neos started out at low power
levels, but developed them over time. The more they used their abilities, the
more powerful they got. Others never improved from their starting point.
Everybody had an opinion about why that was the case, and nobody knew anything
for sure.

It had been a long but interesting
afternoon. Christine’s control over her force fields and kinetic blasts had
improved surprisingly quickly. By the end of the session she was knocking
baseballs out of the air with bolts of pure energy. Her defenses had gotten
stronger as well. In addition to the force shields she had a secondary
protective field around her that had appeared when Condor switched to heavy
attacks. Protective fields were the most common powers among heavy hitters;
that’s how they could survive massive explosions or military grade heavy
weapons. Below a certain threshold, damage was shed without making any
impression, not even budging the target. Past that threshold, a fraction of the
damage got through the shield, enough to hurt or kill, depending on how tough
the Neo was. Nobody knew how either form of protection worked, except that they
appeared to violate several physical laws.

“I hope your psychic guide figures out
your next step quickly, before whoever is looking for her gets their act
together,” Condor added. “Anybody trying to use a potential Type Three has to
have some serious muscle backing them up.”

“That’s something I’ve been thinking
about,” I said. “The snatch team consisted of a pack of Mob buffoons. Okay,
they had a Neo along for the ride, but the whole thing felt like an improvised
play to me. Like they didn’t expect her to pop up in Central Park and end up in
a hospital.”

“Sure. If someone or something dragged
her from her world to ours, I’d imagine they wanted her to arrive somewhere
under their control. A properly staffed and outfitted secret base, for example.
She must have gotten away somehow.”

“Yep. Something went wrong. They figure
out where she is, and they try to grab her quickly, using the local Mafia as subcontractors;
that move goes tits up, too.”

“Thanks to you and Cassandra,” Condor
pointed out.

“True. If Cassandra hadn’t sent me to get
her, Christine might have ended up right where her abductors wanted her. Their
move may have been improvised, but it almost worked. My worry is that their
next move is not going to be improvised, not if they have any brains. They’ll
come after her with all the muscle they can put together.”

“Hopefully by then we’ll be out of town,”
Condor said. “I’m perfectly willing to go along, mind you. I just happen to
love this city, and it’s already taken too much damage lately.”

I nodded. Neos didn't go on rampages very
often, but when they did the results were spectacular. New York had a very high
parahuman population, so it ended up getting wrecked more often than most
places.

“Epic battles are a lot more epic when
they don’t generate massive collateral damage,” Condor went on. “Ideally
somewhere with wide open spaces and nobody around.”

“Do you guys get a lot of epic battles?” Christine
asked as she came into the dining room. She was wearing the generic black and
silver costume Condor provided for his students. She clearly wasn’t comfortable
wearing tight spandex and knee-high boots – she had sensibly picked a pair
without high heels – but I thought she looked great.

Down, boy. You’re her bodyguard, not her
boyfriend.

“Not as many as they do in the movies or
the comics, thankfully,” Condor said. “The ones we do get are bad enough.”

“I can imagine. Having fights between
people who can throw cars around has to be bad for the environment,” she said
as she sat down next to me.

“Can I get you something to drink?”
Condor offered. “I have a nice wine selection, and even a good assortment of
beers for my more proletarian friends,” he said, looking at me.

“I’ll just have a diet soda, please. I’m
done with alcohol for a while. Oh, can Neos get drunk? I figure the
regeneration thingy would flush alcohol out of our systems pretty quickly,
wouldn’t it?”

“That’s correct,” Condor said, giving her
an ‘I really like you’ look. “It’s almost impossible for most Neos to get drunk
on wine or beer,” he continued, handing her a glass filled with Diet Coke and
ice. “Hard liquor will do it, but we don’t stay drunk very long, and we never
get hangovers.”

“Wow. That’s pretty neat, except for the
huge bar tabs,” Christine noted before taking a sip of her soda. She looked at
her glass. “This doesn’t taste like diet at all.”

“Why should it taste differently?” Condor
asked. “Some people pretend they can tell the difference between diet and
regular, but they are full of it.”

“In my world diet and regular sodas don’t
taste anything alike. More Neo super-science at work, I guess.”

“The original formulae were developed by
a Neo scientist, yes. Diet foods are mostly made of ‘mirror molecules’ that
fool your taste buds but have no nutritional value.”

“Which can cause problems sometimes,” I
added. “Between the diet sodas and diet foods, there’ve been cases of people
literally starving to death even while eating like pigs. That’s why there’s
huge warning labels on all the diet shit, to make sure morons don’t kill
themselves.”

“Now that’s pretty amazing. If I brought
the formula or recipe or whatever back to my world, I’d become mega-rich, like
buy and sell Oprah and J.K. Rowling rich. Funny thing is, I like the way diet
soda tastes, even though I know the stuff is terrible for you. This stuff
actually tastes too sweet for me. Weird. I don’t really gain weight easily
anyway – hmm, can we get fat? I figure the super-metabolism and healing must
burn calories like crazy.”

“Well, it’s a complicated situation,”
Condor said, and I sat back, slurped my beer, and resigned myself to a lecture
on Neo biology. “First of all, no amount of food intake would allow for the
energy usage even a Type One Neolympian displays. The weakest Neos can recover
from near-fatal injuries in a matter of days or even hours, for example. Our
bodies get energy from an extra-biological source. Nobody’s sure exactly what
it is.”

“Einstein went crazy trying to figure it
out,” I said, just to be part of the conversation. I wasn’t crazy about the way
Christine was looking at Condor. He normally has that effect on women, but in
her case it was clearly his brains she found attractive. “He called the source
of Neo powers ‘spooky energy’ and spent the last few years of his life trying
to find out where it came from.”

“In any case, our energy consumption is
supplied by that ‘spooky’ source of energy. Our digestive system is like a car
battery hooked up to a nuclear power plant. It’s basically redundant.”

“Wait – that means we don’t really need
to eat,” Christine said. “We don’t really need to breathe, either, I guess.”

“In theory, yes,” Condor said, and he
looked just like a professor who’d just found his new favorite pupil. “In
practice, you will feel hunger pangs if you don’t eat, and lack of oxygen will
cause temporary unconsciousness, but not death.”

“Holy mother of crap. So we can’t get
fat, then.”

“It’s not impossible – excess calories
above our metabolic base rate will still create fat cells. But it takes
something on the order of nine, ten thousand calories a day for an average-size
Neo to start putting on weight. If I ate that much and led a sedentary life,
I’d probably gain a couple of pounds a month. So if you ever see an obese Neo,
and there are a few out there, they must be eating ten or twenty times as much
as a normal person over a period of years or decades.”

“That’s cool. The not needing to breathe
thingy is cooler, though.”

“It makes breath control games so much
safer,” Kestrel said, entering the dining room. She was wearing civvies: tight
red leggings, an even tighter black tank-top and high heels that accentuated
her long legs. Her dark black hair was done differently than the last time I
had seen her without a mask, cut short in a pixie-like fashion. The sharp facial
features were the same, with a nose that was a bit large for her face but which
in combination with her high cheekbones created a striking if not quite
beautiful whole. She kissed Condor and sat on his lap. “I can let Condor choke
me until the lights go out. It’s pretty intense.” Kestrel smiled at Christine.
“You should try it sometime.”

Christine didn't say anything.

“Ease up, Kestrel,” I said. “Not everyone
is a preevert.”

“There aren’t any perverts. There are
people who dare to try new stuff, and people who don’t,” Kestrel replied
playfully. Condor looked embarrassed but didn’t say anything, and I realized
his new sidekick had gotten her hooks into him real good. The couple of times
Kestrel had gotten me to go along with her S&M games it’d quickly become
obvious I wasn’t into them. From the look in Condor’s eyes, I was pretty sure
he’d discovered things about himself he hadn’t expected. What a mess.

“Let’s play nice,” Condor finally said.
He was actually blushing a bit. “Dinner is in the kitchen, right?” he asked
Kestrel.

She nodded. “I brought dinner and heard some
rumors,” she said. “Looks like every Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian gang in
the city has gotten new marching orders; they are looking for a pale girl with
red hair. There’s even a picture of her making the rounds.” Kestrel tossed a
flier on the table. There was no text on the flier, just a picture of
Christine, taken while she was lying on a hospital bed.

“First the Eye-talians, now the
Russkies,” Condor wondered.

“Or maybe it was the Russians all along,”
I said. “They don’t do that well outside their little enclaves. They might have
subcontracted the grab at the hospital.”

“Yay. Find me, win valuable prizes,”
Christine said in a low voice. She didn’t look very happy at all.

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “Condor’s lair
is very well protected. Nobody’s going to find you here.” Of course, sooner or
later we’d have to leave, and things would get interesting.

My comm started vibrating. It was
Cassandra, finally.

Her call wasn’t as helpful as I hoped.

Chapter Nine

Christine Dark

New York City, New York, March 13, 2013

The food was good – even in Bizarro
universe, you could find good Chinese takeout in New York City – but Christine
only picked desultorily at her General Tso’s chicken. She was on the verge of
an anxiety attack, and she desperately did not want to lose it. Not in front of
Face-Off. And certainly not in front of Kestrel and Condor. She might be immune
to asphyxiation, but not to embarrassment.

So how do I worry thee
, she told herself.
Let me count the ways.

For starters, the whole super-power bit
was beginning to scare the ever living pee out of her.

Christine had never been all that much
into superhero comics, except for a brief love affair with
The X-Men
when she was a child. She had been crazy for all the movies (well, until the
third movie, when they butchered most everyone), and for a while it had been
all about graphic novels and Anna Paquin posters. For the most part, though,
she’d been more into fantasy, both sword and sorcery and contemporary dark
modes. Dragons and vampires were her thing, not men in tights fighting crime.

The idea of running around in a
painted-on costume – the little spandex model Condor had made her wear didn't
show too much skin, but it was pretty snug and made her feel like the star of a
fetish porn production – didn’t exactly thrill her. The idea of fighting crime,
or even things like pollution, global warming or offshore drilling sent the
butterflies in her stomach into a fluttering frenzy. Christine was perfectly
comfortable fighting giant monsters in an online game, but real life
confrontations turned her into a wet noodle. No effing way she was going to go
around beating on people in a world where cosplay wasn’t play at all.

She really wanted to go home. Yes, her
life on Earth Prime kinda sucked, but it was a suckitude she could handle.
Going to school and dealing with Sophie and worrying she’d graduate with a
six-figure student loan and a job at Starbucks, she could handle. Sitting in
some underground secret base while a guy with no face who apparently killed
people whenever they annoyed him discussed strategy with a genuine All-American
Superhero, she couldn’t handle all that well. Especially when the All-American
Superhero’s girlfriend was a crazy S&M skank who every few minutes looked
at Christine much the way a cat would look at a particularly tasty tiny
critter. Whatever Kestrel was thinking about Christine, she was sure it
involved lots of adult toys and not-so-erotic asphyxiation. Even worse, Kestrel
and Condor had exchanged a couple of glances that seemed to include Christine.
She was afraid that if Face-Off wasn’t around the words
ménage a trois
might rear their ugly French heads. Or, since Kestrel wasn’t exactly shy, by
the time dessert came around the words
ménage a quatre
might pop up.

The worst part was, no matter how scared
and desperate to go home she was, she was stuck here. There was the whole
question of who had brought her here, and why. Since whoever it was had sent a
bunch of mobsters to pick her up at the hospital, she was pretty sure their
plans for her did not include a pony, tiara and all-expense paid vacation to
Disney World (did they have Disney World in Earth Alpha?
Not now, brain
!).
She wanted to go home, but they, whoever they were, had found her there.
Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

Christine forced herself to bite into a
piece of chicken while fighting off her incipient panic attack. Blubbering and
demanding to go home wasn’t going to help. Let’s try some damned Vulcan logic.
Something had plucked her from her home, and might well do it again. At least
here she had some allies, and she might even be able to protect herself. From
the tests Condor had put her through she had more firepower and defenses than
your average 25-man raid. She wasn’t going to run around in a cape and mask,
but she might be able to deal with this situation, hopefully without too much
violence, and then go home.

While Christine confronted her anxieties,
her new pals continued to discuss the call Face-Off got from Cassandra.
Christine had wanted to say hi to her – it would have been nice to talk to her
outside dreamland – but the call had been short and abrupt, and her marching
orders had left Face-Off angry and bewildered.

Do not contact the authorities. Find the
Lurker. Do not contact me again.
That had
been it. If she had been Face-Off, she would have been peeved off, too. Who the
eff was the Lurker?

“All I can tell you is that he hasn’t
been in New York in decades,” Condor told Face-Off. “The Lurker’s been working
out of Chicago since the Seventies. We teamed up a few times, but the last time
was back in ’08 or ‘09. We hunted down a Neo serial killer, a really nasty
bastard who liked to travel around. I have no idea where the Lurker is now.
He’s been off the radar for a while. That’s been his M.O. for a while.
Disappears for a year or two, makes a quick kill or two, then disappears
again.”

“And you have no idea where he goes when
he disappears?” Face-Off asked.

“Well, he is the Lurker. He doesn’t
exactly show off for the press. He might have been in Chicago all along, or
walking the earth. Who knows?”

Kestrel spoke in a deep, gravelly voice.
“Who sees the darkness in all men’s souls? The Lurker does!” She was clearly
quoting something.

“The Lurker was one of the first mystery
men in the late 1920s and early ‘30s,” Condor explained to Christine. “He even
got a radio show very loosely based on his adventures. That was the show’s
signature catch phrase.”

“A radio show and dozens of novels, not
to mention a few movie serials, and a really lousy motion picture in the ‘90s”
Face-Off said. “He was my favorite mystery man when I was growing up.”

“Yeah, he suits you. You both like to
work in the shadows and shoot people,” Kestrel commented. “I wonder what else
he likes to do in the shadows.”

“He’s not your type, Kestrel,” Condor
said. If he was bothered about his girlfriend-sidekick showing interest in
other men of mystery, he didn’t show it. “The Lurker is all work and no play.
The guy’s straight like a Mormon and pretty creepy to boot. He’s a strange
little man. He never took off that gas mask he always wears, even when we were
kicking up our heels after the job was done. Doesn’t drink, doesn’t joke around.
And you don’t want to ever, ever quote that ‘darkness in all men’s souls’ line
to him. He really doesn’t like it.”

“Yeah, you’ve only told the story a
million times,” Face-Off said.

“Uh, I haven’t heard it yet,” Christine said
tentatively.

“Condor tried to be a smartass, and the
Lurker punched him through a wall. The end,” Face-Off said in a deadpan tone.
“There, I saved you a good ten minutes of your life.”

“You have no storytelling skills, Face,”
Condor said.

“I’m just fucking frustrated. Cassandra
can be cryptic sometimes, but this one takes the cake. There’s probably better
instructions in the fortune cookies that came with dinner.” As he spoke,
Face-Off cracked open a cookie and read the little paper strip inside. “Here we
go: ‘Hard work you enjoy is not hard work at all.’ That’s only slightly less
helpful than ‘Find a superannuated mystery man.’ And why him? He’s one of the
oldest Neos around, sure, but why can he help instead of the Freedom Legion or
someone with more juice?”

“We just don’t know,” Condor said.
“Besides, the Legion has problems of its own. I know you’ve both been too busy
to follow the news, but someone nuked them earlier today.”

“Nuked?” Christine gasped.

“Yeah. It’s pretty bad. I’ve been
checking updates in between the tests. They haven’t released a casualty report
yet, but it’s got to be bad. They are going to be pretty busy dealing with
that. Anyway, maybe that’s why the Legion can’t help. Or maybe it’s because
they don’t know anything about Christine, and somehow the Lurker does.”

“The Lurker does!” Kestrel said in her
fake Lurker voice. Christine got the feeling that when Kestrel found something
funny, she kept picking at it long past its expiration date.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Face-Off
said. “I was a fan of the guy but he’s never been a major player. About my
league, maybe, and that ain’t the majors, that’s for sure,” he concluded
bitterly.

“He’s a strange guy,” Condor mused. “And
I only saw what he wanted me to see, but he’s learned quite a few tricks over
the years. Invisibility. Some sort of darkness powers. I think even
teleportation, although how much is sleight of hand and how much actual Neo
powers I don’t know. He might be a lot more capable than we think.”

“Cassandra has never steered me wrong
before, so I’m not going to start second-guessing her,” Face-Off said
resignedly. “Just wish she’d just told us why we have to go see Mr. Creepy.”

Christine had a sudden nasty thought. “I
have one more theory,” she said. “Maybe he’s my father.”

Condor looked at her. “I really hope
that’s not the case.” The expression in his face made Christine shudder. Her
dad had been a bit weird and creepy, though. It kinda fit, even if the idea
scared her.

“Could be. If he's learned so many new
tricks, maybe he can hop to other universes, too. Wish Cassie would just tell
us,” Face-Off said. “I guess we’ll find out when we meet him. We’re going to
have to go look for the Lurker in Chicago. Got any ideas, Gramps?”

“I have a couple of contacts in Chi-Town
that might help,” Condor said. “And don’t call me Gramps, it’s disrespectful.”

“Sorry, Gramps. Any ideas on how to get
there?”

“I guess I’m going to have to dust off
the old Condor Jet.”

“No way,” Christine said. She hated
flying with a passion. She'd actually made her mother and grandfather drive her
and her stuff from New Jersey to Michigan rather than get on a freaking plane
when she went off to college, and the two round-trip flights she'd taken home
since then had been among the worst experiences in her life, up until the last
couple of days, of course.

“It’s fast, it’s stealthy, it’s VTOL, and
it seats twelve,” Condor said. “It’s a perfectly serviceable aircraft.”

“No freaking way,” Christine said, for
all the good she knew it would do. They were going to make her fly, her father
was probably a creep who walked around wearing a gas mask, and she was going to
cosplay whether she wanted to or not. She didn't think things could suck any
worse, but she had a feeling she'd be proven wrong about that, too.