New Olympus Saga (Book 4): The Ragnarok Alternative Read online

  The Ragnarok Alternative

  Book Four of the New Olympus Saga

  By C.J. Carella

  Published by Fey Dreams Productions, LLC

  Copyright @ 2015 Fey Dreams Productions, LLC. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced, displayed, modified or distributed without the express prior written permission of the copyright holder. For permission, contact [email protected]

  This is a work of fiction. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Chapter One

  Christine Dark

  New York City, New York, July 4, 2014

  Her day started out okay, but it quickly devolved into chaos, mayhem and a fight to the death.

  Christine Dark – a.k.a. Dark Justice, a.k.a. Armageddon Girl when her boyfriend wanted to give her a hard time – struck a heroic pose for the cameras. She did it just the way her publicists taught her: hands on her waist, chin and boobs thrust forward, looking at nothing in particular, a friendly but not too friendly smile on her face. Cheering crowds and roving paparazzo took in the view and recorded it for posterity and Imago4All, this world’s version of Instagram. As usual, she found it hard to do that kind of crapola without breaking out in giggles, but practice was beginning to make perfect.

  Luckily, she wasn’t the only cos-player on display, but part of an entire delegation of some of the best-known super-peeps on Earth Alpha. The Freedom Legion were there, best and brightest of them all, according to their press releases, sharing a huge silver platform in Central Park with the city mayor, assorted non-costumed bigwigs, and the local supers, the Empire State Guardians, who were also looking heroic when they weren’t casting furtive glares in the direction of their semi-friendly rivals.

  The whole thing still felt rather ludicrous and embarrassing to her. She’d never liked crowds or public speaking. In a few minutes, she was going to step up to the podium and give a ninety-second speech, a piece of ghost-written pap about celebrating life in all its myriad forms and some stuff about recycling. Not her favorite kind of thing.

  It wasn’t all bad, though. There were plenty of good reasons to celebrate this particular Independence Day, including the fact that there was a planet Earth around to celebrate on. A few months ago, Vegas odds were very much against that, what with a big angry alien with more power than the combined superhero population of said planet headed their way, intent on killing every last living thing on it. It’d taken a lot of effort and sacrifice, and more than a little bit of luck, to stop the Genocide from turning the Earth into a lifeless ball of cooling lava. A lot of friends and acquaintances had died in the ensuing super-fight, and unlike the comics, those dead peeps weren’t coming back in a couple of years. Dead was dead, even if the International Parahuman Code Name Registry would sooner or later recycle the nicknames of the fallen.

  The survivors hadn’t made it out unscathed, either.

  Christine glanced at the speaker who’d just stepped up to the podium after the Mayor’s speech (which rated about 0.1 out of 10 in the Gettysburg Address Scale, in her personal opinion). It was the one and only Ultimate, the greatest American hero, idol of literal billions, looking all handsome-macho in his silver and scarlet costume with the big stylized U that generated millions of dollars of revenue in T-shirt licensing royalties alone. His gentle smile and aw-shucks demeanor were lovingly immortalized by thousands of video-recording devices, professional and amateur, as he went on about civic service and helping the less fortunate. Everything about him looked great, which was a great relief to humanity at large, since not too long ago he’d been accused of losing his mind and turning into a murderer, both of which were pretty worrisome considering the big guy could quite literally depopulate an entire country if he was so inclined. In a world where gods were real and very, very powerful, you wanted said gods to be nice, pleasant and humble. The alternative was just too horrible to contemplate. Christine, who had contemplated said alternative, wholly agreed with the sentiment.

  Problem was, the nice, pleasant, humble façade was a façade. Not a hundred percent phony, thank God, but not a hundred percent real, either. John ‘Ultimate’ Clarke hadn’t fully bounced back from the many trials and tribulations of the past year or so.

  And she was at least partly to blame for that.

  On the other hand, you saved the planet almost single-handedly, her brain, always pragmatic as heck, reminded her. So you deserve a chance to be happy rather than play the traditional nurturing female role for the benefit of the big guy.

  Something to that, yeah. If she hadn’t been around during the big fight with the Genocide, Earth would have been toast. John had flown around and kicked some butt, but hadn’t accomplished much of anything. In the end, the fate of the world had been decided by hers truly, with a fairly big assist from the guy she’d picked over the All-American Hero. The guy who was standing a few feet off to the side, and who would be giving his own speech several minutes after her.

  Mark Martinez, better known as Face-Off, liked giving speeches even less than she did, especially since his normal speech patterns included enough f-bombs for a Tarantino movie. Mark didn’t like people in general, and the feeling was mutual. He was among the least-admired Legionnaires out there, just above Squidhead the Marine Warrior, who looked like a cross between a male mermaid and a D&D Mind Flayer, the poor guy, and also had a powerful fishy smell that no amount of deodorant and cologne could overcome. Mark had no face, which tended to be off-putting at the best of times, and his abrasive ‘tude and inability to suffer fools gladly didn’t help. She loved him with all her heart, but she understood why his comic book had been cancelled for the second time and his merchandising income was less than one tenth of hers.

  Christine herself was popular enough to be speaking right after Ultimate. People loved her, something that she still found surprising and more than a little disconcerting. Back when she’d been plain Christine Dark of Princeton Junction, New Jersey, geek girl non-extraordinaire and denizen of Earth Prime, where superheroes only existed in fiction, she’d had twenty-three Facebook friends and about one quarter as many real ones, including her mom and grandfather. Now that she was on Earth Alpha, where super-powers were much too real, her Twitter account had forty million followers, despite the fact that she only posted a couple times a week, about half the posts consisting of cute kitty pics. It was crazy.

  Not everybody loved her, though.

  There was John, who had been cool and distant since she’d picked Mark over him, for example. He hadn’t been mean to her, had been nothing but cordial and what old-school diplomats would describe as correct. But there was something beneath the cordiality, something that worried her. One of her superpowers was the ability to sense other people’s emotions, but John had taken measures to shut her out. She didn’t know how he felt about her, but she could guess it wasn’t anything warm and fuzzy.

  And then there was the woman glaring at her from the Empire State Guardian’s side of the dais. Justice Princess, whose real name was Patricia Dark, the alternate-universe counterpart of the Patricia Dark who’d given birth to Christine. On Earth Prime, Patricia Dark was a total uber-mom, understanding, friendly, maybe a bit too hippy-dippy at times, but someone who took no crap from anybody when the chips were down. She’d raised Christine mostly by herself, with some help from Grandpa Dark, but mostly by herself, and she’d done a darn good job. Her mother’s lessons had kept Christine sane in the face of more super-drama than the entire Chris Claremont run of the X-Men. Unfortunately, the Patricia Dark of this universe didn’t care f
or Christine, and had made her feelings abundantly clear. It shouldn’t have bothered her all that much, but it did.

  Another thing that bothered her a great deal was someone who wasn’t there to give out speeches. Her fellow Legionnaire, Cassius ‘Janus’ Jones, was currently living in self-imposed exile in John Clarke’s Sanctuary out by the Arctic. Cassius had been infected by the evil energies of the Outsiders, the Big Bads who’d been behind most of Christine’s problems since her arrival to Earth Alpha. So far her efforts to find a cure for him hadn’t panned out. She really should be spending more of her time and energy working on said cure rather than making speeches or posing for magazine pictorials.

  Her chief ally in that endeavor was Uncle Adam, a.k.a. Brass Man, currently standing perfectly still in his gleaming suit of armor. Uncle Adam was family, sort of, being the clone-scion of Christine’s actual father and the smartest man on the planet, Doctor Kenneth Slaughter. Her uncle had two dads, one of whom was her dad, which made him less of an uncle than a half-brother, but the whole thing was too weird if you thought about it for too long, so Uncle Adam it was. He wasn’t very effusive, much like her father had been, but he meant well, and was one of the few people who could have a major uber-nerd technical conversation with her. Between the two of them, they were working on assorted things. One of their side projects, a desalination system she’d cribbed from a sci-fi novel from Earth Prime, was likely going to get them a Nobel Prize next year and fill the potable water needs of a couple billion peeps.

  “And let us welcome the savior of the planet, New Jersey native via alternate reality, and the darling of humanity: please put your hands together for Dark Justice!”

  Oh, crap. As usual, she’d lost herself in thought and missed her cue. She recovered quickly enough and made her way to the podium without embarrassing herself. She even remembered to wave and smile as she walked. They’d made her wear high heel boots with her costume this time, and she was pretty sure her bodysuit was a little tighter than it should be, but she hadn’t made a fuss about it. At least she wasn’t wearing a thong, like too many female superheroes in the biz.

  She waited for the applause and cheering to die down. “Mr. Mayor, ladies and gentlemen, my esteemed colleagues,” she began. Thanks to her photographic memory, forgetting her lines wasn’t an issue. “Today, we celebrate…”

  The earth shook beneath her.

  “Holy crap,” she blurted out into the microphone bouquet in front of her. At least she didn’t use any foul language. A tremor in New York couldn’t mean anything but…

  “Neo rampage in progress,” she heard through her cochlear implant. “Several fatalities likely.”

  “Holy crap,” she repeated. A moment later, she was airborne, along with every Legionnaire who could fly. The Guardians also took to the air. The crowd’s cheering abated fairly quickly. They’d all felt the ground shaking, and knew what that meant: a Neolympian of great power was on the loose, one who either didn’t know better or was actually acting out with evil intent. When gods lost their crap, the consequences were dire.

  As she flew several hundred feet above the celebration, her implants gave her a vector. Brooklyn. From this height, she could see a pillar of smoke out in the distance. Crap.

  “Legion, deploy!” Ultimate said. It wasn’t as cool as “Avengers Assemble” but it would do.

  Christine darted forward, surrounded by her friends and colleagues, hoping to stop whoever was on the rampage before more people died.

  Face-Off

  New York City, New York, July 4, 2014

  I hadn’t been looking forward to giving a speech, but I wasn’t looking forward to a tussle with some batshit crazy Neo, either.

  That kind of thing doesn’t happen every day, or even every month. If crazy super-assholes rearranged chunks of real estate that often, most cities would be smoking ruins in short order. But it does happen, and it’s always bad when it does.

  I’d been busy going over the lines of my speech, crafted by a team of writers who’d figured out how to make me sound more or less natural rather than a stammering idiot. It was going to be short and to the point. I was going to honor the dead, the eight thousand or so men and women who’d given their lives in the vacuum of outer space, trying to keep the Genocide away from Earth. I was going to mention the names of five normal humans as examples: three women, two men, each from a different country and a different ethnic background. As speeches went, it wasn’t all that bad, and I could say the words and mean them, even though I’d only known a few of the dead. While the Earth had been prepping to fight the Genocide, I’d been enjoying an all-expense paid trip to Hell, so I hadn’t spent much time with the people involved. But I knew plenty about loss; in the past year I’d lost half of my friends.

  Now it looked like nobody would hear my speech on account of some crazy asshole rampaging through Brooklyn. Just as well; the network news dickheads would probably have cut to commercial as soon as I started.

  “We have fires breaking out. First responders are mobilizing; ETA three minutes. Artemis, Faerie Godfather, assist with the evacuation. Brass Man: containment. Hyperia, Face-Off, Dark Justice and I will engage. The Guardians will act as a mobile reserve at their discretion.”

  The officious bastard giving the orders was the leader of Freedom Squad One, Ultimate. Everybody replied with a chorus of ‘Rogers,’ myself included. When the shit hits the fan, you want to have only one leader and zero arguments. I’d learned that lesson over the past few months and it hadn’t been easy. Most of my career, I’d fought alone. It still felt unnatural to have people on my side.

  It wasn’t bad, as a matter of fact. I could get used to it, eventually, once the nagging feeling something this good couldn’t last went away.

  We made it to Brooklyn in about the time we got our marching orders. We could have made it sooner than that, but when dealing with an unknown foe, it’s best to have a plan. Go in half-cocked and you’re likely to do more harm than good, or even to get killed, although at our power levels that’s not often an issue.

  We soon could see the scene: an entire city block had been turned into a smoking crater.

  Getting killed might actually be an issue.

  My implanted comm system generated a virtual overlay over the wreckage, showing me what had been there before the unsub had blasted the place apart. I knew the area, but the map helped jog my memory. A bunch of auto mechanic places, including two I knew were chop shops; a pawn store, and a storage rental facility. Estimated population, twenty to thirty people.

  Estimated survivors, zero.

  A glowing humanoid figure stood alone amidst the smoldering ruins. About eight feet tall, his skin shining with the hue of molten iron. I’d never seen him before. A newbie who’d woken up with the power of a god and lost his motherfucking mind. Great.

  We went after him, hard. No negotiations, no attempts to get him to surrender. Every second this fucker was allowed to live could mean another twenty to thirty deaths. If he got to a residential area, it could mean another twenty to thirty thousand deaths.

  Christine smashed him between two blocks of solid force moving at supersonic speeds; Ultimate hit him like a missile a fraction of a second later, and then it was my turn. I landed a solid punch on the still-standing figure, unleashing enough kinetic energy to turn a battleship into so much scrap.

  And bounced off of him, just like Ultimate had. Just as Hyperia did right after me. Fuck.

  We recovered quickly, landed on our feet, and moved to re-engage. As we did, Brass Man surrounded the area with a dome of glowing energy that just might be powerful enough to contain the damage. I didn’t like the odds, though; the fact the glowing asshole had survived shots from four of the most powerful beings on the planet was pretty worrisome.

  The bruisers in our team surrounded the unsub while Christine nailed him at range, this time using a slender spear of pure force that should have driven a hole right through him but only managed to scratch his finish. Fuc
k. Then it was up to us three, moving as one, the constant drills paying off. Ultimate went for his head; Hyperia delivered a hypervelocity kick to his gonads. I grabbed one of his arms, shrugging off surface temperatures in the hundreds of degrees, and tried to tear it off as I landed a kick to his ribs.

  He felt the multiple blows. We made him roar in pain, and I felt his shoulder break. But he didn’t die. Any of us would have at least been disabled if not killed outright by that triple play. He wasn’t.

  His counterattacks were clumsy, untrained; he was moving very fast but swinging wildly, and that’s why we didn’t lose anybody during that close-quarters exchange. If he’d known what he was doing, he’d have put at least one of us in the ground for good.

  I caught a haymaker with my forearms, felt one of them break under the impact, and got thrown against Brass Man’s force field. The world dissolved into a red haze for a moment. I heard more impacts, as loud as cannon fire and far more powerful than any cannon ever built, even the big suckers some countries used to shoot satellites into orbit.

  When I could see out of my notional eyes again, Hyperia was down, blood spurting out of her ears and nose. Ultimate was still trading punches with the asshole, each blow making the ground shake and the rubble bounce.

  I joined in the fun.

  Christine Dark

  New York City, New York, July 4, 2014

  In comic books, battle noises are described by simple onomatopoeia, your basic BANG! POW! KA-BOOM!

  It’s very different when it’s happening for real.

  It’s more like a constant rolling rumble of thunder interspaced with sudden explosive outbursts, mixed with the sound of your own heartbeat drumming through you. Fire and smoke everywhere as you run or fly through sheer chaos, trying to find you target before your target finds you. Knowing that at any second you may get hit, and knowing from hard-earned experience just how much it’s going to hurt.