New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl (24 page)

Chapter Twelve

The Freedom Legion

Atlantic Headquarters, March 14, 2013

He looks so guilty.

Olivia O’Brien tried to look her husband
in the eye, but Larry pretended to concentrate on the report on his e-tablet.
She sighed and looked out the window of the passenger jet as it prepared for
takeoff. They were bound for the Legion’s Pacific Headquarters in the Marshall
Islands. The hypersonic orbital plane would get them there in a few hours,
faster than she could fly on her own, or than Larry could run. Larry would have
probably preferred to make the run on his own nonetheless. Anything other than
face her. To make matters worse, one of Larry’s floozies was sharing the flight
with them. Chastity Baal was sitting near the cockpit, busy reviewing the
intelligence briefings they had gotten from the Imperial defector. Olivia
couldn’t even muster the energy to be angry at her. Larry was the man who had
betrayed her. And Olivia herself had, by her silence, tacitly condoned his
betrayal.

They had barely talked since her rescue,
partly because as soon as she was free from the debris Olivia had rushed to
take charge of the situation. It was only to be expected, since she was a
member of the Council and Larry wasn’t, hadn’t been since 1988, when he lost
his seat to General Xu. Busy as they were, however, they should have been able
to find some time to spend together. All of Larry's breaks had happened to take
place during times Olivia had duties she could not be spared from. He was
clearly avoiding her.

Men – no, let’s be fair, she scolded
herself, people – clung to their illusions with near Neolympian tenacity.
Larry, for example, clearly believed his philandering had gone on unnoticed.
Olivia had known for years. She even knew that Larry’s latest fling with that Dawn
girl was turning into something more serious than his previous affairs.

She had known for years about his infidelity,
but pretended not to. In the end, she had preferred to live a lie than to
publicly acknowledge the truth.

There were many reasons for her inaction,
so many good reasons. The scandal would affect the Legion and provide fodder
for tabloids and blogs everywhere. Artemis was a living symbol, a role model
for women and especially women of color around the world. Pride was at work as
well: she could not tolerate being perceived as weak, pathetic, a victim. Part
of it was simple denial. If she pretended it was not so, maybe it would not be
so.

And part of it, much as it disgusted her,
was the fact that she still loved Larry. Even now, she felt sorry for him. His
guilt for being away cheating on her while missiles were flying towards her
office made her sad and furious at the same time. Worse yet, it also made her
afraid that Larry was considering confessing to his infidelities. She had no
idea what she would do if he did come out with the truth. Pretend to be
surprised, and repay his lying with her own dishonesty? Admit she knew, and
reveal her own complicity in their sham of a marriage? Maybe it would be best
if Larry kept his secrets to himself and they marched on for another decade or
three. Better to do as he was pretending to and concentrate on real world problems,
the kind that could be met openly with force.

Olivia checked her own e-tablet. Daedalus
Smith had uploaded the latest data on the carrier vessel. It was an Imperial
Chinese model, just as he had said. A recently decommissioned one, with all
three ships of its class supposedly dismantled and broken up for parts half a
decade ago. Their contragravity drives alone were worth billions of dollars and
should have been sold off or installed on new vessels. How had their attackers
gotten hold of an entire ship? Even the notoriously corrupt Imperials wouldn’t
have allowed an entire warship to disappear, no matter how many palms were
greased along the way. The penalty for such a crime would be unspeakable: the
Dragon Emperor prided himself in the skill of his torturers. To steal the ship and
smuggle it out of the country should have been impossible.

And yet, according to the defector they
had interrogated, and who was now sitting sullenly a few seats behind Olivia,
that was exactly what had happened. The theft – the word didn’t do justice to
the seizure of something worth close to a quarter of a trillion dollars – had
supposedly happened slowly and in carefully planned stages. Key components had
been taken from the disassembled vessels and smuggled to a yet unknown location
where some third party had used them to build their own ship. Someone had
managed to accomplish the impossible, which was not surprising in the Parahuman
Era. Neolympians did impossible things on a regular basis.

If a parahuman was involved, however, why
had the attack been conducted by mere humans? If any Neolympians had been on
the vessel, they had left no remains, not that there was much left to uncover.
A daring daylight raid against the bastion of Neolympian power was the kind of
thing super-villains dreamed about. If the attackers had deployed even a small
number of parahumans alongside their swarm of drones and missiles, they could
have inflicted far more damage. That they hadn’t implied this was a primarily –
maybe even solely – human affair.

Anti-Neolympian hate groups were as old
as Neolympian themselves. Almost eighty years ago, Aldous Huxley had written a
brilliant and vitriolic novel about a dystopian future where humans were the
slaves and pets of a superhuman aristocracy. The future described in
Prospero’s
Playthings
had not happened, but the fear it had engendered was all too
real. A number of organizations had become obsessed with combating Neolympians.
Even the Ku Klux Klan, after being targeted by Janus during the civil rights
struggles of the 1960s, had switched its focus from minorities to parahumans.
The US government itself was notoriously schizophrenic about its ‘heroes,’
doing its best to recruit Neos into military and federal agencies while
demanding registration and monitoring powers over the rest, not to mention
quietly researching ways to destroy them should they become impossible to
control.

And now someone with enormous resources
had engineered an attack in which a human crew willing to sacrifice their lives
had inflicted severe damage on the most powerful parahuman organization on
Earth. Was this a harbinger of something worse?

Confronting a threat to all Neolympians
took precedence over her personal problems. It was also easier to deal with
emotionally. Larry and his guilt would have to wait.

Olivia shifted in her seat, turning away
from her husband, and got back to work.

Hunters and Hunted

New York City, New York, March 14, 2013

One by one, all possible tomorrows winked
out of existence until only one remained. A dead world, no longer blue, spun
quietly around an uncaring sun.

Most choices led down to that final fate.
Cassandra would not give in to despair, however. She fought on, seeking an
alternative.

Among the myriad powers bestowed over the
blessed – and cursed – few, precognition was one of the least common. Not many
were given the ability to peer into the unformed chaos of what yet was not and
come back with coherent visions. Of those few, fewer still managed to retain
their grasp on reality when confronted with near infinite possibilities. The
temptation to stay and watch all the things that might be often proved
overwhelming. Most precognitive talents fell into comas and never returned to
the here and now. Cassandra had barely escaped that fate herself, and only by
deliberately limiting her visions.

She had often tried to explain to Marco
how she chose what to see. “It’s like fishing,” she had told him. “I cast my
lure into a vast ocean, and try to reel in one vision at a time. Sometimes it’s
a big fish, and we can stop great disasters from happening. Other times it’s a
small fish, and we save a handful of lives, or even a single one.”

It had been a weak explanation, but it
had served for the time being. In other conversations, she had explained how
the mere act of observing the future could alter it, and how she often had to
look again and again, hunting for unintended consequences before she could
recommend a course of action. And why at some point she had to stop looking,
lest she become lost in the vastness of all possible futures.

This time, she had caught a very big
fish. Her biggest catch would also be her last.

The long struggle finally paid off. There
were tiny temporal streams that led to alternate outcomes, rivulets set against
the torrent aimed towards an inevitable doom. Cassandra ignored the pain
growing out of the base of her skull and forced herself to look further and
delve into those hopeful futures. After some time, she saw, and understood. She
had felt from the beginning that some ultimate price would be required on her
part, but she had hoped there might be an alternative if she looked hard
enough. Those hopes had been slim even before she sent Marco away; her last
vision dashed them altogether. 

She didn’t want to die, but every future
where she ran away and lived through this day led to that dead, lifeless world.
She might as well make the most out of her inevitable demise.

Cassandra sighed as she waited for her
executioners. After a few seconds, she picked up her old Stradivarius and
started playing. She began with a few desultory arpeggios before settling on
Chausson’s
Poème
. It
had taken her a long time to master the E flat minor scale on that piece, and
she was justifiably proud of the result. The melancholy notes fit her mood and
would provide a fitting accompaniment to what was to come. The music helped
ease her mind and accept her chosen fate.

She would miss the boy most of all. Marco
had been a friend and ally for only a few years, but he had been a source of
great comfort to her. As her partner, he had been able to do a great deal of
good, averting many a vision of tragedy and death. Cassandra liked to think she
had helped channel the boy’s bloodthirsty rage towards largely positive ends.
How would he fare without her?

The answer to that question remained
elusive. Marco’s fate was now intertwined with that of the girl from another
world. Cassandra’s gift could only catch scattered glimpses of Christine’s
future. The ultimate fate of the world depended on the decisions she would make
in the next few days. If those decisions were wrong, the lifeless future would
come to pass. Marco would be a great help to Christine, but his most likely
reward would be pain or even death. Cassandra had hoped the boy would earn some
measure of happiness for all the good he had done, but she knew better than to
expect justice or fairness in this world.

Justice and fairness exist only to the
extent we create them, she told herself, and sent forth her mind to create a
psychic lure even as she played on. She would lead the hunters to her. She
would fight them.

And she would lose.

The Freedom Legion

Chicago, Illinois, March 14, 2013

“It is an honor, Mr. Clarke,” Doctor
Cohen said, shaking John’s hand. The therapist was a tall, slender man, nearly matching
John’s six foot three. A fringed beard and short black hair surrounded a narrow
face dominated by large, kind eyes that regarded his new patient with friendly
interest. Beneath his calm demeanor, however, John could sense nervousness. His
enhanced hearing could pick up the doctor’s quickening pulse. While that
reaction could be simple jitters from dealing with a prominent figure, John
felt a twinge of suspicion.

“Please have a seat,” Doctor Cohen
continued after the usual pleasantries had been exchanged, indicating a
comfortable sofa; there was no traditional reclining couch in his office. John
did so, casually looking around. In addition to the usual diplomas and
credentials that sprouted like mushrooms in all physicians’ offices, there was
a rather unusual collection of African and Asian artifacts, all of them
seemingly genuine, along with several old black and white pictures showing the
doctor in assorted exotic locales.

“Mementos of my misspent youth.” Cohen
said. “I went on safari quite regularly back in the Thirties. I used to have
several trophies on the walls, but they disturbed some of my patients and I had
them removed.”

John also noticed some portraits of Cohen
wearing a US Army uniform. The good doctor had done more than go on safari;
during the 1940s, his traveling had been arranged by Uncle Sam and his
adventures had been provided by the Wehrmacht. Knowing that his therapist had
seen the elephant comforted John somewhat.

Doctor Cohen noticed John looking at his
service pictures. “Yes, I was with the 29
^th
Infantry at Omaha
beach,” he said. “A bad day. It would have been much worse if you hadn’t been
there, of course.”

John nodded –

He was a near-indestructible object,
moving faster than a bullet. Smashing through a concrete bunker barely slowed
him down. Human beings were killed by the mere wind of his passage, their limbs
torn off, their lungs shredded, their very skin ripped off along with their
clothes. When they were directly in his path, they splashed away like bags of
red liquid hit by a cannonball. He veered up for a few seconds and looked down
at the carnage he’d inflicted on the fortifications overlooking the beaches.
Tracer fire and artillery shells reached for him, the impacts from direct hits
as bothersome as mosquito bites. He swooped down again and reaped another
hundred men in a handful of seconds. It was so easy…

- and realized he’d gone into a daydream
again.

“You just underwent one of your fugue
states,” Doctor Cohen said. “This one lasted twenty seconds or so.”

“They are getting worse,” John replied.
Being out of control terrified him. He knew how much damage he could inflict in
twenty seconds. Combined with his increasingly shorter temper, the fugues made
him a walking time bomb. He had come much too close to killing that idiotic
blogger over a stupid question. To make matters worse, the blogger had been
murdered by pro-Neo fanatics upon his return to the US; John had learned the
news just before leaving for Chicago. The backlash from that death was yet to
be felt, but it made regaining control of himself even more important.

“Tell me everything you can about the
blackouts and the other symptoms you’ve been experiencing.”

John looked into the man's eyes for some
moments. He still felt some distrust for the therapist, kind eyes or not. He
had no choice, however. He began talking.