New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl (15 page)

Thanks to Condor, at least a dozen Neos
who might have ended up as hardened criminals had gotten their shit together
instead and now were out there doing good deeds, or living normal lives if that
was their choice. Three of them had gone fully legit, and one of those three was
a member in good standing of the Freedom Legion, which is about as legit as you
can get.

I looked at Christine as she took it all
in.

“I got the butterflies in the stomach
thing all of a sudden,” she said. “And the dry mouth and the palpitation
thingies, too.”

“It’s going to be okay,” I said with a
lot more confidence than I felt. None of the people Condor had helped had been
a Type Three, although there had been a couple of high Twos.

It was going to get interesting.

The Freedom Legion

Near the Dragon Wall, East Kazakhstan,
March 13, 2013

Chastity Baal crawled to the top of the
rocky hill slowly and carefully. The human eye could notice motion at
surprising distances and although this remote part of the Empire of China was
sparsely guarded, all it took was a bit of bad luck – an enterprising junior
officer deciding to patrol vigorously along the Wall, for example – to unravel
the best-laid plans. Upon reaching the bare promontory, she uncased her
binoculars and looked down on the scene below.

The Imperial border with East Kazakhstan
was protected mainly by mountains that channeled would-be travelers into a few
easily-defended passes. One such pass lay below her: the Dragon Wall blocked it
quite thoroughly. Even without her binoculars, the hundred-foot tall construct
a mile and a half from her position was clearly visible, a glowing featureless
expanse that appeared to be made of red glass but wasn’t. Even from a mile
away, Chastity felt the wall’s crimson energy pulsating with a rhythm not
dissimilar to a heartbeat. Some said the Dragon Wall was a living thing, or an
extension of the Dragon Emperor’s mind or soul. Chastity remained agnostic on
the subject. It certainly was an awe-inspiring sight, a mute testament of the
godlike power of its creator.

Nobody on this side of the Wall knew much
about it. It had sprung all along the frontier of the Empire back in 1948, when
the Freedom Legion and the Republic of China’s Ten Thousand Immortals – a lofty
name for the two dozen Neolympians comprising said Immortals – had chased the
Emperor and his minions into the Chinese hinterland. It was an energy
construct, impenetrable to all but the most powerful conventional weapons, and
self-repairing in a matter of minutes even when breached. Travel and commerce
were nearly impossible except where and when the Emperor wished. Winston
Churchill had called it ‘a fiery curtain that shall mar Asia for generations.’

“That is a pretty sight,” Celsius said
from below. He was watching her binoculars’ input through his wrist-comp. “They
say you can see the Dragon Wall from space. But didn’t they say the same about
the old wall, too?”

Chastity ignored her partner’s prattle
and continued her examination of the area. This remote area of Kazakhstan was
thinly populated and had no paved roads. Her team had been inserted via a
stealth helicopter flying from a ship disguised as a cargo vessel sailing in
the Caspian Sea, hundreds of miles away. It was a complex and costly operation,
but it had gotten them to the back door of the Empire, where the local garrison
was small and fairly inattentive. Said garrison would consist mainly of people
being punished for some infraction or another; the border with Kazakhstan was
nobody’s idea of a vacation spot. Such guards would likely be lax in pursuing
their duties.

Kazakhstan had wrestled its independence
from the Soviet Union in 1951, following one of the many brutal revolts
instigated by the Dominion of the Ukraine during World War Two. Thousands of
ethnic Russians had been massacred and many more thrown out of the country,
along with other minorities. The new country had quickly descended into chaos
and civil war and ended up as something of a chess board where the Dominion of
the Ukraine and the Dragon Empire played their little games against each other,
helping this warlord or that and ensuring nobody held onto power for long.

Most of Kazakhstan’s border with Imperial
China had become a sort of no man’s land, lightly populated and without even the
corrupt oppression that passed for law and order in the rest of the country.
Imperial patrols often operated on the Kazakh side of the Wall, but did so
sporadically and mostly along the more populated areas of the border. Thus,
this locale was ideal for extracting an important defector, if said defector
could make it past the Wall. And if the extraction team did a proper job.

The two-member team was a study in
contrasts. Chastity Baal was five feet nine inches tall, athletic and slender,
her dirty-blonde hair tied back in a severe ponytail under a desert-pattern
camo hat, her hazel eyes currently peering intently through her binoculars.
Celsius – nee Howard Kowalski – was two inches shorter, a squat, heavily
muscled man with coarse brown hair and neatly trimmed beard. Chastity was cool
and distant in her dealings with him, as she always was to people she found
lacking in any interesting qualities.

Celsius had started out their partnership
with a barely polite come-on attempt, and followed that with thinly-veiled
resentment at having to follow her orders. He was a Type Two Neo, after all – a
2.4, he had proudly told her within minutes of making their acquaintance – and
Chastity was a mere 1.1, only slightly more formidable than a normal human, and
female to boot. His lack of respect for her was but one of Celsius’ many
failings.

Patience was a paramount virtue when
conducting covert operations, a virtue Celsius simply did not have. The man was
a reasonably competent Legionnaire for missions involving dash and panache
while gallivanting around in colorful costumes, but a complete failure as a
covert operative. He had been assigned to this mission to provide backup should
something go wrong. Chastity had reluctantly and against her better judgment
allowed him to join the operation. She had quickly regretted her acquiescence.

Celsius had been angry about trading his
resplendent red and white costume for a set of camo fatigues much like the ones
Chastity was wearing. He had adamantly refused to carry a gun, despite
Chastity’s attempts to explain to him than an unarmed man in the wilds of
Kazakhstan would be viewed as a target, which might lead to trouble if some
enterprising bandit gang took a swipe at them. Working with someone for the
first time wasn’t easy in the best of circumstances. Working with a rank
amateur who refused to learn was a recipe for disaster.

She preferred to work alone. Tommy Leary,
the one person she’d trusted without reservations, had died of old age in 1992,
tending bar at the little Boston pub he had purchased shortly before his
retirement from a colorful life of crime. Chastity missed Tommy with all her
heart, but she had been alone before him and had soldiered on after his passing.

Chastity had thought she herself would
have retired peacefully decades ago after a long and eventful life, starting
with her experiences as a Caucasian orphan surviving in the rough and tumble
streets of Macau. Said orphan grew up into a rather successful international
criminal and eventually a reformed do-gooder and occasional freelance consultant
for Interpol. The discovery that she was one of the vaunted Neolympians had
come as a shock to her, although both her friends and enemies had nodded
knowingly upon hearing the news.

Even before realizing she was not aging
physically, Chastity had come to the conclusion retirement was not for the likes
of her. Immortal or not, living an ordinary life just didn’t have any appeal to
her, and even if it had, trouble always had a way of finding her even when she
did not actively seek it out.

In the ensuing decades, Chastity became
involved with the international paragons of the Freedom Legion. She would not
don some garish costume and perform heroic deeds in the public eye, but she was
quite capable of performing discreet if perhaps dastardly deeds in the service
of the greater good. Her membership in the Legion was a secret, which allowed
her to continue to use her reputation as semi-retired criminal and her
connections with the international underworld for assorted ends. The current
assignment, to assist in the defection of a disgruntled Imperial Mandarin, was
the kind of operation she excelled at, even if she had been saddled with a
partner with little understanding of the way things were done.

“They should’ve scrapped this mission,”
Celsius complained after a few blessed minutes of silence. “Someone’s nuked the
Legion, for fuck’s sake! We should be doing something about that, instead of
sitting here at the arse end of nowhere.”

The report of the attack had come in just
as they were getting ready to leave the helicopter. Chastity had filed the
information away and moved on. Celsius hadn’t. “It may not have occurred to you
that the Empire is a very likely suspect in the attack on the Legion, and that
an important defector could have vital information on that regard,” Chastity
said. “It almost certainly has occurred to our superiors.”

“Right,” Celsius said in a slightly
chastened tone. “I’m not used to this, all this waiting doing nothing,” he
added, the closest thing to an apology Chastity was going to get.

“Nine parts boredom to one part abject
terror. That‘s how this type of operation goes,” she explained to him. “If
we’re lucky, we’ll be spared that last part.”

“Too bad,” he replied. “I wouldn’t have
minded having a go at one of the Celestials. That would be something, wouldn’t
it?”

Celsius was a young man, not yet thirty,
blessed with more raw power than common sense. He would make a perfect
front-line soldier, or better still the rampaging warrior type you sent out
first to soak up bullets that might otherwise hit someone useful. Here and now
he was a disaster waiting to happen. “If it comes to that, Celsius, we’ll
probably not face just one Celestial. And our objective is to rescue a
defector, not finding out just how great and powerful you are.”

Sullen silence was his only response. “
Jhew
lun dou
,” Chastity muttered to herself. The Cantonese curse didn’t do much
to alleviate her mood. The little pig-genitals idiot behind her didn’t speak
the language, so the insult went unnoticed. After the operation was over she
might just have to translate it for him.

The late afternoon started slipping into
dusk when she spotted movement at the wall. An opening appeared on the glowing
surface and a black sedan – a Fujian Motors model imported from the Empire’s
hated rival and main trade partner, the Republic of China – emerged from the
opening and started down the poorly-maintained dirt road that led into
Kazakhstan. “He’s coming,” she told Celsius, who had settled down for some
sleep.

“About bloody time,” the Neo grumbled but
headed towards their vehicle and started the engine. The defector’s car would
not last long on those roads; the trip to the waiting helicopter would be made
in their modified Jeep Seven. Chastity slowly backed down the slope and joined
Celsius. The two vehicles met a quarter of a mile from the Dragon Wall, masked
by the rising mountains in between. The sedan veered off and came to a stop as
the Jeep approached. Its driver got out and greeted them.

Bao Xia Ming was an unprepossessing man
of middle stature. His expensive Hong Kong suit was exquisitely tailored, and
he displayed his wealth openly through gaudy rings around almost every finger
and a bejeweled gold-cased wrist-comm. One of the rings had the dragon sigil of
the Emperor: its wearer could open doors into the Dragon Wall at will, although
they unfortunately were attuned only to the person for whom they had been
designed. The man’s demeanor showed he was someone used to wielding great power
and who found the experience of having to drive himself anywhere profoundly
demeaning.

Bao stepped forward and shook hands with
Celsius, ignoring Chastity completely. Imperial attitudes towards women were
rather unenlightened. “Thank you for here being,” he said in accented English.
“Got to get out, by goddamn. We go now?”

“We go now,” Celsius replied sardonically.
While they spoke, Chastity had been using one of the many devices in her rather
unique wrist-comp to scan the defector for tracking devices. She found three of
them; his ornate wrist-comm and two rings.

“You have to leave these items behind,”
Chastity said in perfect Mandarin, pointing at the jewelry. Bao couldn’t have
looked more astonished if she had sprouted wings and taken flight. “They all
have electronic tracers,” she continued. “You must dispose of the Dragon Ring
as well; it might also be used to find your location. By now they will know you
have crossed the Wall. We must hurry.”

“What’s going on?” Celsius asked. He
spoke only Polish, English and a smattering of Russian, mostly swear words.

Chastity explained while Bao, muttering
angrily under his breath, got rid of the expensive jewelry. Bao next demanded
his luggage be transferred to the Jeep. Celsius grabbed the three heavy
suitcases and carried them effortlessly to the waiting vehicle. “Come on, let’s
go!” he yelled at the dignitary. The Jeep finally got underway.

They drove deeper into Kazakhstan.
Ideally they would drive all the way to where their helicopter lay in wait.
Flying even a stealth vehicle too close to the Dragon Wall was a risky
proposition. With any luck, they would reach the landing site and be on their
way in under an hour.

Luck was not with them, unfortunately.