The Indestructibles (Book 4): Like A Comet (34 page)

      "Three of them, three of us,"
Emily said. "Sounds like a party."

      Without waiting for her orders,
she picked one of the missile-like seed ships and used a bubble of float to
throw herself at it.

      "Cowabunga, dude," she said,
having more fun than she'd ever experienced in her entire life.

Chapter
62:

Child
of the sun

Jane dodged another enemy fighter,
punching it as they crossed paths and sending it spiraling out of control. Another
flew directly at her, laser-like energy blasts fired away, but she backed up
and kicked the nose of the craft when they met, shattering its bug-like armor.

      She stole a look at Emily and her
giant robot, hoping they'd all survive this just so she could ask her where on
Earth that machine came from. The robot moved in a hilarious parody of Kate's
martial arts, and at one point awkwardly kicked a warship like a football. The
more it moved, the more it seemed to imitate Emily, her loose shoulders, her
restless legs.

      Another alien ship shook Jane out
of her thoughts and she dowsed it in flames shot from her hands.

      She felt powerful here above the
Earth's atmosphere. Jane had flown close to the edge before, had sensed the
power of the sun's rays sink into her cells even more aggressively than they
did when she was closer to the ground. But here, without the stratosphere to
filter light, the solar energy hit her like a direct feed as though plugged
right into the outlet.

      She was grateful for the extra
burst though because Jane needed to utilize every trick, every power, every
ability she possessed simply to keep ahead of the fleet.

      She ploughed through another ship,
let herself glow red-hot and cut through its armor. She exploded out the other
side, her flame-powers melting the blackish gunk that came with her, turning it
into ash. Jane looked towards the brain-ship situated in the middle of the
fleet. Shaped like a whale shark in the front, but more squid-like in the back,
it appeared to be a nightmarish spectacle out of a horror movie.

      Worse, though, was watching the
seed ships, the things that would turn Earth into a dead zone, breaking away
from that lead starship and pick up speed, heading for the planet.

      "We've got to get those seed
ships," Jane said.

      "I shall destroy them all!
For Aramaias!" Korthos yelled so loudly Jane almost tossed her earpiece
aside.

      "Hang on, big guy," Jane
said. She attempted to assess the size of the ships—difficult with nothing to
reference for scale—and unsure of the best course of action. Emily, still
nearest the planet, swatted fighters out of the sky before they could break
atmosphere. Billy and Seng flew in tandem mid-battlefield, turning space into a
dogfight. Korthos, furthest out, made a mess everywhere he ventured, raining
destruction down on the fleet in a whirlwind of magic and axe blows.

      Doc was still nowhere to be found.
 

      Jane would have to deal with that later.

      "New plan," Jane said,
aiming at the lead seed ship when it pulled ahead of the pack. "Emily, hit
the seed ship to your left."

      At another time, the sight of
Emily's giant robot arm pointing at something with one metal finger would have
been hilarious, but Jane, too worried to be amused, added it to the list of
things she'd like to laugh about later.

      "That one?" Emily said.

      "You got it," Jane said.
"How durable is that suit?"

      Henry Winter chimed in
unexpectedly. Jane hadn't realized he shared the same frequency.

      "It'll hold up even if we're
forced to ram it," Winter said. "Emily, you'll want to use a bubble
of float to launch us."

      "Good to hear your voice,
Henry," Jane said, relieved that Emily was not alone in the mechanized
suit.

      "You too," Winter said.
The giant robot sped toward its target, arms whacking little wasp-like fighters
out of the way as it flew.

      "Billy, you and Seng take the
one furthest away? You've got the best chance to reach it in time," Jane
said.

      "On it," Billy said, his
tone uncharacteristically focused. Jane watched the two bright white streaks
lance across space in the direction of the falling seed ship.

      And that leaves me, Jane thought.

      Ignoring the smaller ships running
interference to her approach, she weaved her way with increasing speed toward
the seed ship, her focus entirely on the big craft. A larger warship got in the
way, but Jane's momentum allowed her to shoot through the ship like an arrow. The
collision split the organic spaceship into pieces.

      She tried this same method on the
seed ship, but the armor, she discovered, was harder—she did crack the surface,
but her whole body became rattled by the impact. The strike shook in her bones
and teeth.

      New approach, she thought.

      Spines and bubbles covered the
surface of the vessel. The spines appeared to be some sort of hook or drilling
mechanism, allowing the ship to dig into the planet's surface when it hit. Chemicals
and spores filled the bubbles. Jane presumed these would change the Earth's
atmosphere to be more in line with what the Nemesis fleet required to survive.
Jane's fists burst into flames and punched one of the glassy bubbles, sending greenish
fluid drifting out into the vacuum of space.

      She surveyed the surface of the
ship. Hundreds of bubbles, maybe thousands. Too many to destroy by hand, with
no guarantee doing so would stop the terraforming device from working. Perhaps
the surface bubbles represented just the first of its planet-changing weaponry.

      Jane turned her attention down—is
it down? she thought, disoriented by the dimensions of space—and saw the
rapidly approaching glow of her blue planet. She struck the ship's armor again,
both hands on fire, and watched it crumble like charred meat off the grill.

      She realized what she had to do
and hoped she was strong enough to pull it off.

      "Neal, patch me into Kate,
private line," Jane said.

      "Right away, Designation:
Dancer," Neal said.

      "Kate?" Jane said,
picking up speed to reach the nose of the seed ship.

      "Little busy right now."
Kate's voice sounded strained. Jane heard her breathing, the sounds of combat
rattling the microphone. "What's wrong?"

      "I've got a plan to take out
one of the seed ships," she said. "The others might need you up here
soon."

      Kate grunted and punched something
on the other end of the line.

      "Not sure how much help I can
be up there," Kate said. "Why are you telling me this?"

      "Just in case," Jane
said. "They're going to need your strategic brain to finish this."

      "
They
? Not we? What
are you going to do, Jane?"

      "Hopefully stop this ship
from breaking atmosphere," she said. "Be safe, Kate."

      All Jane heard was Kate's
breathing.

      "I'll be there soon,"
Kate said. "Don't do anything stupid."

      "When do I ever do anything
stupid?" Jane said, smiling. She reached the nose of the seed ship and
positioned herself so that her hands were pushing back against it, her feet
aimed at the planet below.

      "There's a first time for
everything. Luck, Solar." 

      The sounds of Kate's battles below
went silent in Jane's ear. Now or never, she thought, feeling the Earth getting
closer and closer. The space around her glowed from the reflection of the sun
off the planet's surface.

      Jane dug her fingers into the
insect-like armor of the seed ship's nose and split the hard but brittle
surface. As soon as she got a good grip, she let her hands burn.

      The ship's armor crumbled, but as
it changed consistency, Jane kept altering her grip, causing the fire—fire she
knew shouldn't exist in space, flames that only could happen this close to the
sun, where Jane was most powerful—consume the ship's hull. She pushed with more
intensity, her whole body igniting, a candlewick in the darkness.

      The ship moved forward, and Jane
fought right back. She felt every inch of her skin burst into flames, her hair
becoming a campfire. Soon all she saw was golden light and the crumbling
surface of the ship. Above her, the ship began to glow internally, overheated
by Jane's powers, engulfed from the inside out. Jane gritted her teeth, every
cell in her body burned hot, emptying out the solar batteries that made up her
body. She continued to pour all that heat, all that energy, into setting the
seed ship on fire.

      The ship broke apart. Blackened
ashes glowed red-hot and sputtered, the aftermath of a huge fire. The long vessel
splintered and crumbled to inert dust, deteriorating into a dead thing, useless
and benign. 

      Jane drifted in the emptiness of
space, feeling empty. Suddenly too weak to move, almost too spent to think, she
gazed out at the stars and watched her friends in battle, wondering if she'd
have the strength to join them.

Chapter
63:

The
Valkyrie

In the months since her transformation,
Valerie Snow struggled to understand her place in the world. Was she a human being
imprisoned and sharing a body with a storm? Was she a storm trapped in the body
of a human? Was she dangerous? Was she a monster?

      And so, at first, she hid. She
wandered the skies over the ocean, retreating from humanity, avoiding the sight
of people, terrified that one move might end a ship full of lives, one lapse in
judgment could flood a coastline.

      The storm inside her, the other,
the living, breathing hurricane that had taken up residence in her body during
that horrible experiment performed by the Children of the Elder Star, raged for
a long time. Like a feral animal, it slammed against the cages of Valerie's
body, feeling cornered and alone.

      But as time went on, they came to
understand each other. The storm needed freedom. It—she, the storm was a she,
Val knew instinctually—wanted to be huge, to pour rain down on vast, open
spaces, to stretch its arms in spiraling clouds. And so they did, finding
places where the storm would do less harm, unleashing an elemental fury to
satiate the needs of the caged sentient hurricane.

      And when those rages subsided, Val
would be more in control, would bring their shared consciousness more into
itself, to contain the storm in the altered body that had once been simply a
girl, like any other.

      But Valerie Snow still didn't
understand her place in the world. Should she be among people? She could not
bring herself to speak with her parents, though she visited them, watching from
afar. They sensed she lived somehow, though they still had not spoken. Valerie
feared what they'd think of her. The Indestructibles would meet with her, to
keep her company from time to time, but they were not ordinary people, and Val
did not fear being near them—because of their powers, she couldn't harm them,
not really, not in the same way she could hurt an ordinary person.

      And so she lived outside the
world, the girl in the sky, looking down with sad eyes the color of a cloudless
day.

      She'd learned to control her
powers—it used to be that everywhere she went was a stormy day, but she knew
now how to pull that energy inward, to the point where she could actually enter
a building sometimes. But when she watched the alien warship working its way through
the City like a giant slug, she felt her control slipping. The skies, just
moments ago so blue—she was always proud of blue skies, because they hinted at
her control, they were a sign that she was in charge and not the storm—turned
dark gray, thunderclouds rolled in, rumbling and angry.

      This wasn't her city, she knew.
She grew up in Florida, with sunnier days and stronger storms. But this was her
world. And these aliens came to destroy it. The storm inside her raged as well.
Elemental, intrinsically part of that world, a function, a moving apparatus of
change, the storm could live nowhere else. Only in this world, this place,
could the sentient storm exist, and the storm seemed to fully grasp everything
Valerie observed. A threat to their world. Monsters here to take their
playground away from them. The end of all things.

      The skies opened up, heavy rain
like a cascading waterfall poured down from above. Winds kicked up, whistled
between the buildings and scattered debris on the ground. The clouds nearly
black, flashed with blue and purple lightning.

      Valerie Snow, Project Valkyrie,
discovered her purpose. She found her anger and her moment to be a hero. She
flew in closer, locking in on that alien ship. She raised her hand in the air
and lightning struck her palm. All around her, windows and street lights
exploded and shattered. Valerie, Valkyrie, suddenly transformed as well, her
skin became the roiling black and gray of the clouds above, matching them in
tone and color, her insides flashing and glowing with lighting.

      She pointed at the warship with
one finger.

      A single, massive bolt of
lightning struck the hand she still held above her, and poured back out through
the fingertip she aimed at the ship. The electrical bolt exploded into the ship's
skin, sparking, splintering it. Smoke and ozone filled the air, and the ship's
armor squealed and split like melting plastic.

      The spaceship tipped forward,
groaning as it banked drunkenly off-course, tearing the façade off an office
building and tumbling to the ground. When it landed, digging up pavement with
its weight, it crushed a half-dozen cars, but its guns fell silent, the entire
ship becoming inert, empty, quiet, dead.

      Below her, she saw a man with a
camera and a beard that had not grown in properly yet. He seemed familiar somehow.
The man fired away with his camera, at the dead starship, at Val herself. She
felt a flash of anger at the violation of having her image captured, but then a
calmness washed over her.

      She stared at the cameraman, who
took a few photos of her while she hung in the air, thirty feet off the ground,
rain still pouring down in sheets. Her eyes glowed with webs of lightning.

      The little earpiece Jane had given
her to wear buzzed. The Dancer's voice spoke up.

      "Valerie, whatever you just
did worked," she said. "We're going to face incoming fighters. Can
you do that again?"

      "As often as I need to,"
Valerie said, feeling the power of her sentient storm companion rushing into
her limbs, making her heart beat faster.

      "Then the sky is yours,"
Dancer said.

      Valerie Snow smiled.

      "Yes," she said,
glancing up at the black and gray clouds she'd created, the sea of weather. "The
sky is mine."