New Olympus Saga (Book 1): Armageddon Girl (27 page)

Hunters and Hunted

Chicago, Illinois, March 14, 2013

Vladimir Vladimirovich roared laughter as
the vaunted Neo bastards fell under the power of his gang’s special weapons.
The fucking things worked! Then his delight turned into anger when one of the
Neos, the girl he had not been able to identify, flew up, smashed through the
roof of the warehouse, and disappeared from sight. Not good.

The other Neos were down, but they had
dropped almost every one of his men. His good humor vanished, and he cursed
loudly while he, Grisha and Josef – the only ones still on their feet – checked
on his people. Four men were unconscious but alive. Boris was getting to his
feet, his face a mask of blood. With a grunt, the big man reached for his
dislocated jaw and snapped it back into place so it could heal properly.
Everyone else was dead. Without the special weapons, the entire team would have
been wiped out.

“Grisha!” Vladimir’s shout stopped his
second in command, who was about to plunge a knife into Condor’s face. “I said
to take them alive!” Grisha stepped away from the Neo and shrugged. “Go help
the men! Boris, stop fucking around. You and Josef, bring the cars here. We
need to go before that flying bitch comes back with reinforcements!”

The survivors were shaken up by the
deaths of their comrades, but they did as were told. Soon everyone, including
the unresisting Lester Harris, were inside their vehicles. Before leaving,
Vladimir marked the position of the still invisible Condor Jet. The fucking
thing had taken a few blaster shots but it was still in working order. He would
have to come back for it later, after he got Condor to tell him how to work it.

Vladimir flipped open his wrist-comm and
called his contact to report as his team sped off. Once again, Archangel did
not answer. He tried one of Archangel's henchmen, and was curtly told the boss
wasn't available. What the fuck was going on? The man in white was a fellow
Russian, a strange bastard who dressed like a faggot to be sure, but a powerful
Neo who knew how to get things done. Vladimir had a few ideas on how to
proceed, but he was hoping for some guidance from his higher-ups. You didn’t
want to stick out your neck too much in this business. If you didn’t cover your
ass and something went wrong, you would be the one getting the chop. Vladimir
was fond of an American expression: shit rolls downhill. It was all too true.
He tried Archangel’s number again. Once again, it went to voice mail.

He was about to hang up when the comm
screen turned dark. Vladimir frowned at the damn thing; was it dying on him? That’d be
all he needed. The screen flickered back to life after a few seconds, revealing
a slender man with graying black hair and dark glasses. Vladimir’s eyes widened
in shock. He knew the man. Mr. Night, Archangel’s liaison with their American
partners. He had met the man with the dark glasses twice, and each time
Vladimir had gone away feeling angry, frustrated and, though he would never
admit it to anybody, scared. The strange little man always seemed to know too
much, and the way he moved and talked always seemed wrong somehow. It made
Vladimir think of an actor who didn’t quite have the talent to stay in character.
It was as if Mr. Night couldn’t pretend to be human very well.

“I believe you have something to report,
Vladimir Vladimirovich,” Mr. Night said in flawless Russian. “It seems that
Archangel is currently occupied, so I took the liberty to contact you and hear
any news you might have.”

There was nothing left to do but to
comply and report. “We got Harris,” Vladimir said. “He was in the company of
four Neos. We captured three of them.”

“You were supposed to follow Harris, not
capture him,” Mr. Night said. The image on the screen dissolved in a burst of
static for a second, and Vladimir felt certain it was the man’s doing. “My
dear, dear Vladimir. Why would you disobey your instructions? We wanted to
locate the Lurker and strike him in a manner and time of our choosing. Now he
will come to you, looking for his friend. You’re quite unlikely to have a
pleasant time when making his acquaintance.”

“We have the special weapons. If he comes
to us, we’ll take him down,” Vladimir replied confidently. “We’ll be ready for
him.”

“We will see. Or rather, you will,” the
man said. His smile was a hideous lopsided thing that did not express humor or
any other human emotion. “The other Neolympians. Please describe them, if you
don’t mind.”

Vladimir did so. There was another burst
of static. When Mr. Night’s visage came back, the smile hadn’t changed, but
something about the man had. “The girl. Did you capture the girl?” There was a
sense of urgency in his voice that Vladimir had never heard before. It worried
him.

“She’s the one who got away,” Vladimir
admitted, suddenly getting the creeping feeling that he had fucked up.

Another burst of static, and when the
image came back the little man looked – distorted. As if the image had been
stretched, except the backdrop didn’t change, just his face. “The girl must be
found.”

“She flew away. How are we to do this?”

“Never mind. I’ll deal with this myself,”
the man said, and Vladimir felt shameful relief coursing through him. The
little man had to be a Neo of some sort, and one of the strangest ones he had
met. Getting on his bad side could not be good for one’s health. Mr. Night
switched back to English; he appeared to be talking to himself at first. “Oh,
dear. Things are getting complicated. Our cherubim seems to be indisposed, and
now the girl is in Chicago. But never mind that, Vladimir. Carry on with your
plans. Expect the Lurker to try something soon. I strongly doubt you will enjoy
the experience.” The screen went blank.

Vladimir shut off the wrist-comm. Nobody
had said anything about a girl. How the fuck was he supposed to know she was
important? Unfortunately, if you got blamed for something in this business, it
didn’t matter if you were guilty or innocent. You’d get fucked no matter what.
Shit always rolled downhill.

He’d better take down the Lurker, or
things would not go well for him.

Christine Dark

Chicago, Illinois, March 14, 2013

Her hair kept getting into her eyes, and
she was spinning and tumbling in the air, falling and flailing her arms and
legs. And screaming. Screaming more loudly than she ever had.

For once, her brain did something useful.
You got yourself up here, Dumbo. You can fly. I believe I can fly!

R. Kelly lyrics? Thanks a lot, brain!

But her brain was right. She had
catapulted herself God only knew how many thousands of feet in the air. And if
she didn’t do something she would hit the ground a lot sooner than she would
like. She’d studied aerodynamics in school, lift and thrust and drag and all
that jazz. She needed to provide some thrust to stop the good old thirty-two
and a bit feet per second squared stuff from doing its thing on her. She didn’t
know if she could survive a fall from this altitude and she really, really
didn’t want to find out the answer the hard way. Since Neos were denser than
humans, they had a higher terminal velocity, too, so the fall would hurt pretty
badly. She could figure out how badly by doing some off-the cuff calculations –
figure out her drag coefficient, plug it into the terminal velocity equations,
run the numbers and she’d have the answer before she hit the ground, she was
sure. Or she could spend her time learning how to fly.
Yeah, let’s try that
instead.

Her power allowed her to accelerate
objects, and clearly she could accelerate herself, so all she had to do was
concentrate…

Hmm, still falling
.

Concentrate a bit harder. Fear is the
mind frakker. Push, pull, whatever.

It kind of worked. She stopped falling
and instead moved suddenly at an angle, up and to one side, very fast. The
sudden reversal in direction gave her a severe case of whiplash, the kind of
thing that would have put her in a neck brace if she wasn’t all super and
stuff. It still hurt like heck. Unfortunately, the sudden burst of speed ended
after just a moment or two, and she started falling again.

Epic failing so badly.

Okay, I can provide thrust, just need to
figure out how to make it constant and steady. No problemo.

It took several tries, darting up and
down, side by side, and pretty much in every possible angle and direction. She
bounced back and forth like she was a tennis ball at a Venus versus Serena
match. Her body felt like she’d been used as a punching bag after some quality
time at a torture rack. By the time she figured out how to push herself just
enough to sort of float without moving, she’d lost enough altitude to see
Chicago once again, including the rather noticeable Tower of Power. She was
somewhere off to – check the sun – the east of the city proper. There was water
directly below her, which should be Lake Michigan. And she’d been jumping all
over the sky, thankfully not in the path of any passing airliners, and now she
had no effing clue where her friends were. And they probably weren’t there
anymore. The bad guys had been winning when she ran away like a scared little b-word.

They could be dead.

Grip, acquire.
She couldn’t afford to think like that. First things first. She
needed to get down to earth, quite literally. After that little achievement was
unlocked, she’d figure something out.

Christine felt and heard a major
disturbance in the air above her. She looked up and saw a jumbo jet not two
hundred feet over her, soaring by. Yeah, definitely get down to the ground.
Well, she’d figured out how to stand still. Now how about a little push?

The words ‘little push’ weren’t in her
vocabulary, apparently. The weakest one moved her a few hundred feet in an
indecently short span of time, and the direction always seemed to be somewhere
random. She really could use some flying lessons. Of course, neither Condor nor
Mark had even mentioned the possibility that she could fly. In retrospect, that
little oversight was peeving her off pretty badly.

She looked longingly at Chicago. Getting
there wasn’t going to be fun.

The Freedom Legion

Chicago, Illinois, March 14, 2013

“Whatever does not kill you, makes you
stronger,” Doctor Cohen quoted. “I’m sure you have heard that cliché many times.”

John nodded. Confession had turned out to
be good for the soul, something his Lutheran upbringing had not taught him.
Unburdening himself to Cohen left him feeling more relaxed than he had been in
a long time. He knew this was probably only a momentary relief, but he welcomed
it. At least all the cards were on the table. No more denials or attempts to
avoid his problems. He had always preferred to face his enemies head on.
Telling the therapist everything he could remember about the fugues and his
other problems had taken a good while, but it had been worth it.

“It’s largely bullshit, I’m afraid,” Doctor
Cohen continued, drawing a startled laugh from John. “Whatever does not kill
you mostly just leaves you fucked up beyond all recognition.”

“Unless you are parahuman,” John replied.

“Not even then, unfortunately. We can
recover from almost any form of damage physically, but trauma still leaves some
marks in our minds. Even when we are physically unscathed, how can we witness
the things we have and pretend we are unaffected?”

No kidding
, John thought but did not say out loud. Yes, he had seen more
death and desolation than any hundred normal humans. Eighty years, five major
wars and a few dozen minor ones, not to mention thousands of crime scenes:
those experiences were going to make an impression on anybody who wasn’t a
complete sociopath. But he needed to know why it was affecting him so much, and
at this particular time.

Some of his feelings must have shown on
his face, or Doctor Cohen was empathic enough to sense them. The therapist
chuckled ruefully. “Sorry. That sounds like an empty platitude, doesn’t it? And
in fact the Neolympian psyche is remarkably resilient. Our experiences affect
us, but not as badly as they would a normal human, which is fortunate or our
subspecies’ mental health issues would be even worse than they already are. We
recover from mental trauma very rapidly, not least because of the way our
memory works. We forget pain more quickly than normal humans, you see.”

“Do we?”

“You know the old joke, mothers don’t
really remember the pain of childbirth, otherwise the human race would have
died out a long time ago? Well, Neolympians generally distance themselves from
traumatic memories faster than most humans. We suffer and grieve, and we remember
the experiences that caused that sort of mental trauma, but the impact of such
trauma lessens rapidly, often in a mere matter of weeks or months, or in some
cases days.”

“Except that is not happening to me,”
John replied.
Not happening to me
now, he realized. Before, he had
recovered from even Linda’s death, although not as quickly as Doctor Cohen had
suggested. He had grieved, and he had never felt truly happy since her passing,
but he had learned to live with the loss. It was easy when most of your life
was spent going from one crisis to another, of course, and John had never
believed that wallowing in your misery did anything useful for you, Of late he
was wallowing whether he wanted to or not, however.

“That is correct,” Doctor Cohen agreed.
“Something is making your mind relive painful and traumatic memories, and doing
so vividly enough to cause a disconnection from reality. I have a couple of
ideas as to what is causing this.”

Finally. John forced himself to stay
quiet and not play Socratic Dialogue second fiddle with the doctor.

“One possibility is that this is a factor
of old age. Memory problems are common in humans as they senesce. Perhaps
Neolympians are not immune to this. However,” he continued quickly as John’s
eyes widened in alarm. “I don’t think it’s likely in your case. Alzheimer's
disease and other forms of dementia have a physiological component, and
Parahumans are able to repair any damage, including brain damage, rather
thoroughly. My suspicion is that the flashback episodes are being deliberately
induced.”

John felt his entire body tense with
anger. Knowing someone was responsible for his state of mind had him on the
verge of screaming with rage. It took all of his self-control to remain sitting
down. His emotions were getting frayed beyond what he could control.

“The induced memories are the most likely
cause of all the other symptoms,” Doctor Cohen went on. “You are being forced
to relieve moments of pain and anger, and that is keeping your emotions in
turmoil. Unless we find a way to stop this, you will become a danger to
everyone around you.”

The blunt assessment was sobering. “How
is it even possible? Mind control…”

“…is nearly impossible even with normal
humans, let alone Neolympians, especially against someone as highly resistant
to psychic attacks as yourself, yes,” the doctor jumped in. “But ‘nearly
impossible’ is a slippery term when dealing with our kind, wouldn’t you agree?”

“So how can we deal with this?” John
said. What he wanted was to find the culprit and deal with him, and once again
he was surprised by the depth of his anger. He’d been less worked up about
people trying to kill his loved ones.

“I would like to try some relaxation
techniques on you. I’ve been able to get some surface empathic readings off you
during our conversation, and I might be able to monitor your fugues if we can
induce one of them right here and now.”

That was more than John had bargained
for. But if he could finally come to grips with this… condition? Madness? Yes,
this madness that was plaguing him. It was worth the risk, he decided. Hell,
he’d already gone into a fugue state during this session. What harm would there
be in going through another one? He looked intently at Doctor Cohen. That hint
of nervousness was back, barely perceptible to his enhanced senses, but still
there. It could be perfectly innocent, of course. If John lost control during
this experiment, the results could be deadly, and that would make anybody
nervous. John had to trust someone. Reluctantly, he nodded.

“Let’s do this.”