New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl (14 page)

Face-Off

New York City, New York, March 13, 2013

“Just lie down on the table and relax,”
Condor said in his best public servant voice. “The scans will only take a
couple of minutes.”

“Okey-dokey,” Christine said dubiously.
She tried to smile but couldn’t quite pull it off. “I’m not big on doctor
visits and stuff like that. I’m glad I get to keep my clothes on, at least.”

“Nothing to worry about,” Condor replied.
“The scans are non-intrusive. You’ll be safe as houses.”

“I’ll be right here,” I added, trying to
sound reassuring. I suck at being reassuring; I’m much better at being
intimidating and threatening. She managed to smile at me, so I guess I did well
enough.

Christine lay on the examination table.
An assortment of scanners and cameras loomed over it. Condor gently lowered a
brain-scan helmet over her head and adjusted it. I stayed close by for moral
support, and Christine grabbed my hand and squeezed it. I gave her a gentle
squeeze back and she relaxed a bit.

“So what sort of scanners do you use?”
Christine asked. “MRI’s? Thermal Imaging? Sound waves?”

“All of those, sure, and a couple
others,” Condor said. “Okay, we’re all set. We’re going to go into the other
room and run the tests, okay?”

She let go of my hand. “Do I get a
lollypop afterward?” she asked. “Just kidding. Actually, a lollypop would be
nice.”

Condor chuckled.

We stepped into the monitoring room. We
could watch Christine through a glass partition on the wall. She lay back and
started doing her breathing exercises.

“Interesting girl,” Condor commented as
he started the scanning runs. Half a dozen monitors came to life. One of them
displayed a thermal image of Christine, another her heart rate, body
temperature and assorted other vitals, and so on. Condor had the best equipment
money could buy, and some stuff he had invented himself and couldn’t be found
anywhere else at any price.

“You don’t know the half of it,” I said.
“According to Cassandra, she is very important. She is also not from this
world.”

“She isn’t? She looks pretty ordinary at
first glance. Pretty enough, just a bit on the plain side for my taste.”

“She’s not plain,” I blurted out. Condor
grinned at me much like Father Alex had. What the hell was wrong with everyone
today?

“Well, we’ll know more about her in a
minute,” Condor said, watching the monitors. “Her metabolic rate is Neolympian
all right. Resting heartbeat is at 35 bpm, which is typical for a Neo; its
picking up a little, but that’s probably just anxiety. I’ll have her brain
activity in a few.”

“Good. So when did you and Kestrel team
up?” I asked Condor while he worked the scanners, trying to sound casual. That
pairing could not end well, but I wasn’t close enough to Condor to just come
out and say it. Luckily, Kestrel had excused herself quickly and left us alone.
Having her hanging around while trying to test Christine would have been a pain
in the ass; Kestrel didn’t get along with other women, not one bit.

“Oh, about three, four months,” Condor
replied, equally casual. “Not too long after the last time I saw you. She’s…
well, you know. We get along. Nobody’s getting a ring on their finger, and we
don’t ask many questions about what we do on our own time. And – hey, check out
Christine’s brain activity. She’s definitely a Genius type.”

“Sounds about right,” I said.

“Aura scan is coming online… Damn, it’s
maxed out.” On another screen, we could see Christine’s psychic aura. It glowed
blindingly bright, all yellow and white. “That’s a high Type Two, or maybe Type
Three. My scanners are only up to measuring a 2.7 or so. We’ve got to be very
careful doing the stress tests. My facilities are not really up to handling a
Type Three.”

I nodded. Type Twos – 2.0 to 2.9 in the
Parahuman Ability Scale – were full-fledged superhumans. Type Threes were
powerhouses, the kind that can take over a country – or destroy it. There were
about five thousand Neos in the planet, but only a couple dozen or so known
Type Threes. The planet probably couldn’t handle many more than that; there was
some question as to whether it could handle the ones already there.

“My first choice would have been to turn
her over to the Guardians or even the Legion,” I said. “But Cassandra insisted
we do this on the QT for now.”

“No problem. Cassandra’s always right.
Besides, those sanctimonious assholes would probably lock her up first and ask
questions later.”

“Yeah, especially if she’s a Type Three.”

“Spectrographs are back – she’s flesh and
blood, no abnormal organs or cell formations. Decent healing factor, fast
metabolism, none of them at unusually high levels. Bone density is pretty good;
she could bounce a .45 caliber bullet off her skull, but she wouldn’t enjoy the
experience.”

“Yeah, I usually don’t,” I said dryly.

“Me either, that’s why I wear a
titanium-Kevlar helmet. Other than her aura, nothing in her readings screams
Type Three. Why don’t you go get her and meet me at the gym? I’ll set up and
take some precautions so she doesn’t bring the whole complex down if she loses
control.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

I went back to the room and helped
Christine off the table. “So how freakish did I turn out to be?” she asked.

“So far, your bones are tough enough to
resist bullets, you can heal damage very fast, and you are somewhat stronger
than a normal human – we’ll find out how much stronger when we do the stress
tests. Plus you have a very strong aura, so that means you may have some very
powerful abilities. We’ll try to discover them during the stress tests, too.”

“Wow. Er, how stressful are the stress
tests? Is it like a Danger Room kinda dealio? I don’t handle confrontations all
that well. As in, I tend to panic and go all deer-in-headlights and spazz out.”

“No problem. We’ll take it easy,” I said
as I walked her through the high-tech complex. The walls had sensor and weapon
pods on every corner. Like I said, Condor had spared no expense.

“So your friend Condor is like
super-rich,” Christine commented, glancing around.

“You could say that. His father was a
major industrialist, and he inherited a controlling interest in a dozen
mega-corporations. “

“So why did he decide to become a
superhero? Did someone shoot his parents when he was a child or something?”

“Not quite. When he was sixteen or
seventeen, a terrorist gang kidnapped him and tortured him for several days.
Condor’s powers manifested themselves while one of those assholes was trying to
carve an anarchy sign on his chest. Things got pretty bad for the kidnappers
after that. Since then he’s been doing the vigilante thing, just like me.”

“Uh-huh. How about his ‘sidekick’
Kestrel?”

We got on an elevator and started going
deeper underground. “Kestrel is… I guess you could call her a bit eccentric.
She used to call herself the Kinky Kestrel; besides fighting crime she also
runs her own, uh, dungeon.”

“Dungeon? Like a lair with monsters and
hidden treasure?”

“Well… monsters yeah, I guess. And if you
consider whips and chains treasure, then that too.”

“Oh. That kind of dungeon. You’re saying
she is a super-dominatrix, aren’t you?”

“Technically, she’s a switch. She’ll be
happy to beat you until you squeal, but she’ll also let you beat her up, whip
her with a real cat o’nine tails if she feels like it – she will heal the
damage almost right away – and if you can afford her hourly rate. Of course, if
she says her safe word and you don’t stop right away, she’ll mess you up. Bad.”

“Holy crap. Yuck. I mean, I guess it’s
okay as long as it’s consensual, whatever floats people’s boats and all that.”
Christine gave me a look. “You, ah…”

I chuckled and shook my head. “Not my
kind of thing. When I first met her, I thought she was just another vigilante.
I learned about her extracurricular interests later. Here is the thing...” I
trailed off and considered what else to say.

It had happened early in my career,
shortly before meeting Cassandra. I had been just another vigilante looking for
trouble, and I had found it in spades. Some mad scientist type – a former high
school chemistry teacher of all things – had developed a designer drug (street
name Ultimate Drops, U-Drops for short) that temporarily boosted normal humans
and gave them Neo-level strength and agility, along with PCP-like immunity to
pain and meth-like short temperedness. U-Drops became very popular with the
local gangs.

Of course, there were drawbacks. The
super-strong users could easily break every bone in their bodies by pushing
themselves past human limits, and that was if you didn’t keel over from a heart
attack or stroke. Other possible side effects included liver and kidney
failure, catatonia, permanent insanity and anal leaking.

The Empire State Guardians eventually
busted the asshole who’d invented the drug, and luckily the drug was an
Artifact, not a Gadget, which meant only the original creator could make it,
and it couldn’t be mass-produced like an ordinary drug. Every once in a while
someone came out with worthless knock-offs that claimed to be the real thing,
but so far all of them had turned to provide few or none of the benefits while
keeping all the side effects.

That night, it was just my luck that I
tried to bust a dozen bangers hopped to their eyeballs on U-Drops. One of them
hit me over the head with a fire hydrant he had ripped right off the sidewalk.
He ended up in a wheelchair for his troubles, but I went down for a couple of
seconds and his buddies proceeded to stomp me into the pavement with assorted
blunt and sharp objects. I might or might not have bounced back and fought them
off – all modesty aside, I’m pretty damn tough – but I didn’t have to. Kestrel
had been passing by and joined in the fun. She kept the bangers off me long
enough to recover, and between the two of us we put nine of them in the
hospital and three in the graveyard.

Here’s one of the not so secret facts
about Neolympians: we are adrenaline junkies. Being in dangerous situations
gives us a huge rush. Winning a tough fight is like an aphrodisiac. Winning a
tough fight with a hot chick fighting alongside you is… well, let’s just say I
was ready to go by the time we were done. Kestrel and I mopped up the last gang
bangers, and then we scrambled up to a rooftop and did some private banging of
our own. As a first date, it was great.

We hung out on and off a few times after
that and eventually gave the couple thing a try. The sex was damn good, but we
didn’t have a lot in common besides the obvious stuff, and her kinky side
turned me off pretty quickly. I like hurting people, but I don’t like hurting
people I like. Our personality flaws didn’t mesh well, either: she was pushy
and abrasive, and I was stubborn and sullen. Cassandra didn’t like her one bit,
which didn’t help one bit; my relationship with Kestrel was one of our main bones
of contention when my psychic pal took me under her wing.

After a while we avoided each other’s
company unless we were kicking the shit out of somebody or fucking like
bunnies. Over the course of a couple of years, the avoidance times got longer
and longer, and eventually became a permanent thing. I hadn’t seen her in
years. 

I wasn’t sure how much of that I wanted
to share with someone I’d barely known for a couple hours. A part of me weirdly
wanted to share the whole thing with her.

Christine waited quietly a whole six
seconds for me to say something, which had to be some kind of record. “Okay, I
know it’s none of my business,” she finally said. “Sorry. It just sounded like
you two had a history.”

“We did, a few years back. It didn’t end
well. Irreconcilable differences I think is the legal term.” There. Three
sentences to encapsulate twenty-six months of heaven, hell and lots of
purgatory.

“And now she’s with Condor,” she said. She
didn’t say anything else, but I could read between the lines. Yeah, she didn't
think that was going to end well, either.

“Condor sounds like he knows the score.
He should be okay,” I said. I wasn’t going to say anything against my friend,
especially not to someone I‘d just met, no matter how comfortable I felt around
her.

“You don’t sound all that sure.”

I wasn’t, but it was none of my business.
“Consenting adults. They’ll work it out one way or another. Worst case, Condor
is just as tough as me, so she probably won’t do any lasting physical damage.
Mental damage… Neos are all a bit crazy anyways. Who knows, maybe they are made
for each other. I'm not a couple's counselor, or an expert in relationships.”

I left it at that and didn’t share the
fact that my last girlfriend had been a stripper with a heart of plutonium and
a temper like well-aged dynamite; she'd never even known my real identity, and
thought she had hooked up with some local tough guy. That hadn't ended well,
either.

The elevator doors opened into a very
large chamber. Heavy battleship-grade metal plates covered the walls and
ceiling. Dozens of devices stood off in clusters along the walls: a few of them
looked like implements of torture, and under the right – or wrong – conditions
could be exactly that. I knew them all well; Condor had helped me learn my
limits and train my abilities years ago. He did it informally for many
‘illegals,’ Neos who for one reason or another didn’t want to go through normal
channels and get their doggie licenses. In my case, it was because the first
thing I’d done with my powers was knock my stepfather through a brick wall.
Step Dad hadn’t survived the experience and if I’d stayed and taken my
medicine, the best I could have hoped for was several years in Neo Juvie.