New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance (34 page)

Da ba dee, da ba die
.

There were tears in Christine’s eyes, but she blinked them away and kept blasting at the alien. The critter had been weakened; for almost a minute it didn’t fight, just dodged away while healing from the terrible injuries it’d suffered. That’s when the follow-up to Operation Sponge went into effect. Operation Forlorn hope involved a good fifty Neos whose powers could not be safely controlled; most of them were high Type Twos, but their unrestrained abilities were much more powerful than their PAS number indicated. They bombarded the Genocide, many of them killing themselves in the process, and the weakened alien couldn’t dodge all of those attacks, and they drained his reserves even more, slowing him down. Which led to a third, and hopefully final maneuver.

“Operation Maximum Overdrive: Activate.” That message went to Christine and the rest of a select group of heavy hitters. Even as the fifty – now thirty-one – members of Operation Forlorn Hope exhausted their power, the most powerful Neos on the planet launched a coordinated attack, hoping to drive a final nail on the Genocide’s coffin. The Dragon Emperor and the Iron Tsar, Janus and Nebiru, and half a dozen other high-level Type Threes struck as one, trying to take advantage of the opening given to them by Operations Sponge and Forlorn Hope.

If vacuum could boil and bubble, it would have. Drained by the previous two assaults, the Genocide couldn’t duck most of the attacks, and soon enough he couldn’t duck any of them, as he was effectively surrounded by overlapping energy discharges coming from a dozen different directions. For a handful of seconds, it writhed under the combined attacks. The Tsar’s Dread Gaze outshined everything except for the Emperor’s Elemental Bolts. In space, where all those Neos could cut loose without fear of consequences, they released multiple zettajoules of killing power, power that bypassed many of the Genocide’s defenses.

It was almost enough.

Christine felt the alien was near death, and redoubled her efforts, pushing herself until her vision narrowed down to a tunnel and her head pounded with agony. The Genocide’s body was burning; two of his six limbs had been torn off, and one other was nothing but charred bone, hanging on by a thread of connective tissue. To her super-senses, it looked like a race, a race between the powerful Neos’ outpour of destruction and the alien’s capacity to endure and heal. The
Liberty Ship
added its considerable firepower to the onslaught, as well as all other Neos still in range. For a few brief moments, the good guys almost won that race. The alien almost died, and was but a heartbeat away from oblivion.

Almost.

Then came a tipping point. The alien’s energy budget grew until it matched that of his combined attackers, and then surpassed it, allowing him to survive. As his enemies exhausted their reserves and were unable to sustain their attacks, the Genocide struck back once again.

The Dragon Emperor went flying into space, a vaguely man-shaped fire missile. He wasn’t dead, but he had to use all of his power just to survive; later she heard the Dragon Wall came down for several hours after he was struck. The Iron Tsar went on the defensive, his Dread Gaze exhausted, and he retreated from the fight before the Genocide could hit him, or, in other words, ran away like a coward. Others weren’t so lucky. One by one, they became short-lived stars and were snuffed out, dead or so badly hurt they couldn’t fight anymore.

The survivors from all the different Operations, and everyone else still alive, kept pouring it on – John came back and pummeled the alien like a super-jackhammer – but Christine could see their target was healing faster than they were hurting it. The awful mathematics of the battle became painfully clear to her. They just didn’t have the firepower to overcome his defenses and healing abilities. If First Fleet could concentrate all of its weapons on him while every Neo attacked him at the same time, it would have been enough, but there was no way to do so, not against a human-sized target that moved at those speeds, not without the attackers killing each other in the crossfire. Only a fraction of their collective energies could hit the alien at any given time, and even the largest possible fraction they’d been able to muster hadn’t been enough. Now that the Genocide had killed so many Neos, they had even less power available than before, less than what had already been shown to be insufficient.

Janus launched a desperate attack on the alien, to no avail. The Genocide shrugged off the torrent of golden energy and captured the Legionnaire in a cocoon of some weird substance, saving him for later; a moment later, it killed another Type Three, an Indian hero named after the elephant god Ganesh. Ganesh’s mutilated body flew past Christine; he’d been the strongest Neo in Asia, and now he was dead.

They were going to lose.

She had to access the Source.

Except the First probably had more booby traps waiting for her.

There is another Source in play
, her brain reminded her.  

So there was.

She turned her Christine-vision all the way up, much as it hurt her to do so. Through it she saw the Genocide in all its hideous, warped and tainted brilliance. The Word of Power grew brightly in her mind; she used it as a stepping stone and reached out with her will. Christine found the link between the alien and its distant Source, and made contact with it.

The Source was dozens of light years away, but distance didn’t reduce its power very much. That was the first thing she discovered. The alien could count on something like eighty percent of the Source’s full power even from that distance, and all the Neos on Earth combined could harness no more than thirty, maybe forty percent of Earth’s Source. Both Sources were roughly equivalent in power, so eighty percent of x beat forty percent of x, a hundred percent of the time. They’d been doomed from the start.

The Genocide sent John spinning off into space once again after he hit him with a swing that broke every bone in her boyfriend’s body. The alien then grappled briefly with the Lord Immortal, the most powerful Neo from the Republic of China, and with a sudden pull of his now-restored four arms ripped the man apart into three bleeding pieces. Through her Christine-vision, she saw the poor Neo die, his soul speeding off towards wherever the dead went. She saw the alien Source pump more energy into the Genocide to replenish the expenditure required to destroy his last victim. The alien’s power bandwidth was enormous; the amounts of energy he could almost instantly tap into boggled her mind.

The Source wasn’t the only shiny thing inside the murderous horsey calamari, of course. The pulsating, black-rotten-evil energy of the Outsiders was also flowing through him, separated from the Source much like oil and water remained separated.

The Source and the Outsider Taint hated each other. Sooner or later, they would turn against each other, destroying the Genocide in the process.

Christine decided to make it sooner.

Janus had pulled off a similar trick when he’d escaped from the mad super-alien, breaking the containment field around the Outsider energy. The resultant conflict had driven the alien even crazier than he’d already been, but he’d eventually managed to keep the two forces separate once again.

Christine needed to do better. And she had just the thing to pull it off, an Artifact powered by both the Source and the Outside. She took Daedalus’ dagger from the pouch on her belt where she’d kept it all along and touched it with her mind. It only took her a few seconds to activate it, but those were some terrible few seconds.

The Genocide didn’t notice what she was doing; he was too busy killing one Neo after another, exulting in the slaughter. Ninety-three bottles of beer on the wall became ninety-two, ninety-one, eighty, sixty. Meteor took a direct hit and became yet another cloud of vaporized flesh and bone, his flames extinguished forever. Swift, moving faster than he ever had, smashed into the alien like a living missile. The Genocide survived the terrible impact; Swift didn’t. People she knew and people she liked died before her, while she worked her magic; they died because she wasn’t fast enough.

The dagger came alive in her hand, eager and hungry. It wanted her to slash at the alien, or anybody else, so it could forge a link between her and anything it cut, and use that link to feed, to satisfy its endless craving for life and power. That wasn’t her plan, though. She sent the weapon flying at the alien, and the dagger pierced his defenses and sank into flesh, where it reached the pool of Outsider energy inside the Genocide.

As soon as it struck, Christine created a link between the weapon and the alien Source. The weapon became a bridge, a circuit between the two antagonistic forces dwelling inside the alien and the dagger itself. Through it, she forced them to meet, to confront each other.

The Genocide roared when he felt his own power being turned against him.

YOU CANNOT DO THIS.

The mental scream was ‘heard’ for several light minutes in every direction.

THIS CANNOT HAPPEN.

He was the most powerful critter in two planets, but he went through the stages of grief like anybody else, the poor thing. He tried to pull the dagger out, but couldn’t. Somehow, he sensed her mind as it kept the connection between the dagger and the Source going. He turned towards her.

Nebiru interposed himself between them.

Christine didn’t see what happened; she was too busy controlling the dagger. She heard about the terrible battle later, the magnificent contest between raw power and masterful skill. The Iraqi mystic deflected blue energy torrents that should have instantly vaporized him, fooled the alien into wasting time and power on illusions, used a kind of magical jujitsu that turned the Genocide’s strength against himself. Nebiru bought her time, time enough for a handful other heroes to join in.

The Genocide tore them all to pieces, then burned their bodies down to the molecular level. By then it was too late for him, however. Light and Shadow collided and proceeded to annihilate one another.

She became aware of the real world once again, reeling from the mind-wrenching contact with the alien entity and the evil pseudo-sentient dagger, not realizing until later that the drifting clouds of organic vapor around her were all that remained of friends and companions. The Genocide was convulsing, and glowing blindingly bright.

“Get away from him!” Christine shouted through the communicator as she flew away as fast as she could. “He’s going to blow…”

Blow up he did. Shockwaves and heat did not travel well in vacuum, but the death throes of the Genocide were enough to consume another dozen Neos who were just a tad too slow. The dead included three more Legionnaires: Darkling, Berserker and one of Christine’s first instructors, a woman code-named Bronte.

The massive energy release had been the alien Source’s attempt to eradicate the Outsider stuff inside the Genocide. From a safe distance, Christine used her senses to see if anything remained. It took a while for the explosion to dissipate enough to let her see.

The Genocide was dead. His aura, his mind and soul, were gone, hopefully somewhere where he would be judged for his crimes.

The Outsider darkness was still there, however.

“FLS
Liberty Ship
, this is Dark Justice. We have a problem.”

Aboard the ROCSS
Chung Cheng
, Jupiter Orbit, February 7, 2014

Crewed by the living dead, and captained by Mr. Night, the space corvette kept its station among the rest of First Fleet, biding its time.

The Republic of China’s Spaceship
Chung Cheng
boasted some of the strongest psychic shields in the Earth Defense Force. Unfortunately, a subsidiary of Smith Industries had built those shields, and one Daedalus Smith had passed on the information to his erstwhile partner in crime. The
Chung Cheng
’s formidable psionic defenses had been the main reason Mr. Night had chosen it as his vessel; the other was the fact the ship had no Neolympian crewmembers. Once they were in space, he’d murdered the entire crew, their deaths and his own energy signatures safely hidden behind the very shields meant to protect the ship. Nobody had noticed the passing of the seventy-three men aboard; their animate corpses carried on with their duties, driven by Mr. Night’s needs. Their souls were discovering the joys of his private Hell.

The Genocide’s demise had been unfortunate, but not wholly unexpected. The alien had been powerful, but also on the verge of destruction, unable to bear the strains imposed by its dual nature for very long. The girl had merely accelerated the inevitable process. Mr. Night was extremely sympathetic to its plight. His own body was also suffering the consequences of combining the Source and the Outside in the same receptacle. Eventually, it would also break down. Fortunately for Mr. Night, that fate was still months away, and he had every confidence that his mission would be complete within hours.

The Genocide was gone, yes, but he’d been carrying a gift from the Masters, and that gift had survived the alien’s demise. Seeing the black stain on the fabric of the universe, Mr. Night finally understood his purpose and place in the grand scheme of things. He’d hoped for an opportunity like this, and planned to make every possible use of it.

A door had been created, and he had the key and the strength to open it.

Alerted by the damnable girl, First Fleet moved into range and fired upon the spot where the dark seed had been planted, but its very nature rendered it immune to such attacks, for the time being at least. It currently was a pool of anti-nature that interacted so lightly with reality that it could not be damaged. Very soon, that interaction would change, as long as someone provided it with a little push.

Mr. Night was willing and ready to do the honors.

The most wondrous things became possible when the right conditions were met. The conflagration that had ended the Genocide’s existence had left behind a void of sorts, linked to the Outsiders dwelling in the remotest parts of the universe. With the proper impetus, that void could become a gate, and through that gate, one of the Outsiders might make a brief but memorable entrance into this sector of the universe.

The ROCSS
Chung Cheng
’s captain, speaking normally despite his broken neck, volunteered to make a sensor pass near the anomaly. Given the ship’s sophisticated defensive systems, and its relatively low value as a weapons platform, the request was granted. The corvette moved ahead of the fleet, past the FLS
Liberty Ship
, and close to the portion of null-space that was overlain over the fabric of spacetime like an oil slick, waiting to be set ablaze.

Mr. Night’s smile widened as he felt absolute glee for the first time since surrendering his humanity.