The Indestructibles (Book 4): Like A Comet Read online

  Billy whooped silently.

  We did it! Told you that would work, he thought.

  But shaking off the impact had half-blinded him, caught up in the muck and debris of the torn-apart ship. As his vision cleared, the worse possible sight faced him. The third and final fighter waited like an aimed pistol, null gun warming to fire, with Billy dead to rights in front of it.

  I've made a mistake, Billy said.

  Yes, we have, Dude said.

  Billy tensed, hoping he could blast the fighter before the null gun went off, more than certain he wouldn't be fast enough, and found himself thinking in strange, fleeting thoughts, at least I made arrangements for the dog…

  And then the third fighter exploded, a powerful blast of blue-white light not unlike Billy's own energy signature tearing through it like a spear.

  Billy startled at the explosion like he'd been electrocuted.

  What the hell was that! Billy said. He felt waves of emotion coming from Dude, in the way they shared each others' moods. Dude gave off a sense of unexpected happiness and relief.

  That was help, Dude said.

  The source of the explosion flew at them, his energy signature also that same white-blue glow Straylight gave off. The man himself couldn't have been more different, though—older, a stark white beard, his male pattern baldness awkwardly long and unkempt and stark white as well. His eyes glowed the same way Billy's did when exerting significant power from Dude.

  The man spoke to Billy, but in the vacuum of space, he couldn't hear the words. It wasn't hard to lip read though: "get in the ship," the man said.

  "What ship?" Billy said, knowing his own words wouldn't carry.

  The man sneered at him and grabbed Billy's arm. He pointed just past him at a ship, maybe twice as long as a city bus and twice as wide as well, materializing in front of him, parts of the ship fading from invisible to visible.

  "You have a cloaked space ship?" Billy mouthed, incredulous.

  The man didn't answer, but instead shoved Billy into an airlock forcibly and slammed the door behind him. Billy felt the room's makeup change, oxygen filling it, the vacuum of space being replaced by a metallic but welcome familiar breathability.

  "Ship, re-engage cloak," the man said.

  Billy's mouth hung open, his ears ringing after listening to the first human words he'd heard in so much time.

  The newcomer rolled his eyes. "Close your mouth. What were you doing engaging them?"

  "What I'm usually doing. Trying not to die," Billy said.

  The man tugged on his beard, agitated. Then, threw up his hands. "I'm too old for this. I'm too old to deal with this," he said.

  "There's a good age to deal with an alien invasion?" Billy said. "Because I was thinking I'm probably too young to deal with it, myself."

  The older man paused, squinting at Billy, still agitated, but de-escalating.

  "I'm Billy, by the way. Thanks for saving my life." He extended a hand.

  The older man took it. "You're him, aren't you?" he said. "The new Straylight."

  Billy squinted back at the older man in almost an identical expression.

  "Yeah…" he said, drawing out the syllable. "And you are…"

  "I'm Suresh," the man said, putting a hand on his chest. "But we—my Luminae and I—we're… we're Horizon."

  I knew it was him, Dude said in Billy's head. Again, waves of happiness flooded his mind.

  "Dude said he knew it was you," Billy said. "We thought you died."

  "You call the Straylight Dude," the man said, not phrasing it as a question.

  Billy looked at his feet, suddenly embarrassed.

  "It's an informal thing. He hates it."

  The older man burst into a raspy, powerful laugh, so hard he bent at the waist, one hand on his knee, the other holding his belly.

  "You call him Dude," Suresh said, tears running down his face. "Oh it's almost worth finding you out here just to learn that. Oh, thank you, you strange little boy. I haven't laughed in years."

  "Well," Billy said, starting to chuckle himself as the man's infectious laughter continued. "What did my predecessor call him?"

  Suresh started to speak but the words caught in his throat. He coughed and choked, and this somehow seemed to make him laugh even harder.

  Tell him not to tell you, Dude said.

  "Dude says not to tell me," Billy said.

  The man roared again.

  "He called him Moneypenny!" Suresh said, barely able to contain himself.

  "Moneypenny?" Billy said, visibly entertained.

  I don't want to talk about it, Dude said.

  Suresh pulled himself together, wiping his eyes. His expression grew more serious when he looked Billy over as if really seeing him for the first time.

  "We have to talk, Billy," Suresh said. "We have a lot to discuss and there's not much time. We've got a stupid little world to save."

  "We do," Billy said.

  "Then let's speak quickly," Suresh said.

  Chapter 19:

  A complete and utter failure

  Agent Black sat in a run-down bar in Montreal and waited for his contact to arrive. He liked this city, liked its energy. The older he got, the more he wished that the weirdness of his visible cybernetic implants didn't make going out casually to have a drink in the city virtually impossible. For the past few decades, he'd seen most beautiful and entertaining cities from the gutter up and it wore on him sometimes. He understood why some of his peers, particularly the ones with less human-looking cyborg alterations, spent their entire lives on the battlefield. In a warzone, nobody stares at you because your eye glows red in the dark, or your arm is made of silvery metal.

  A woman, wearing sunglasses and a decorative scarf, walked in alone. She moved with the confidence of a trained warrior. Black instantly knew this was his contact. He raised a hand, holding up two fingers. She joined him at his booth. He'd ordered a pitcher of beer when he'd arrived, and poured her a glass, sliding it across the table.

  She took off her sunglasses, and Black had to fight back laughter.

  "Rumor had it you were dead," Black said.

  The former Department agent and mercenary operative known as Prevention set her glasses down on the table between them and took a sip of her beer. She looked tanned, healthy, not like someone who had failed an unnamed employer and whom the mercenary community believed had been marked for death. That was the word on the street, anyway—she'd been paid for years to infiltrate the Department, to change it from the inside, and when she'd failed to contain the Indestructibles not too long ago she'd disappeared entirely. There were rumors who her benefactors had been, but nothing substantive, and usually when an agent blows an operation that significant and that long in the making, it spells a death warrant.

  Instead, here she was, staring back at him and smiling.

  "That's the rumor I had hoped for; I'm glad to hear it," she said.

  "If you're looking for help getting away from whoever you were working for, I'm not it," Black said. "I won't tell anyone I saw you, but I don't want any trouble."

  The operative laughed at Black's words.

  He found himself confused, and suddenly irritated with her.

  "Didn't anyone ever wonder why I wasn't assigned to kill the Indestructibles?" she asked. "I reined in three of their most powerful members. Tried to manipulate them. But didn't kill any of them."

  "My sidekick tells me you stripped one of powers and tried to kill the vigilante," Black said.

  "Temporarily depowered the alien, yes, but that was to assist me in manipulating the other two," she said. "And the original plan wasn't to kill the Dancer, but she got on my nerves. It's true, I may have been a little overzealous toward the end there. She's incredibly irritating."

  Black nodded slightly. The Dancer had an ability to get a rise out of the wrong people.

  "So what are you saying? Your gig was to hire them?" Black said.

  "My job was to get the Department ready fo
r something big," she said. "I was never fully briefed. They wanted an insider to take the assets of the Department and make the organization as ruthless and war-ready as possible. And when Doc Silence went and recruited a number of children who were capable of operating on massive power scale, they became assets I was to acquire as well. I was coercive, but never put them in danger."

  "I heard the stories, Prevention," Black said. "Don't kid yourself. There was a lot of danger involved."

  "Did anyone tell you it was that little blue-haired lunatic who released a bunch of our prisoners?" she said. "And please, skip the code names. Call me Laura. What is your first name, anyway?"

  "Agent," Black said.

  "Very funny," the woman said, taking another sip of her beer.

  "So that whole thing. Kidnapping three super-powered kids, nearly losing the Labyrinth—thanks for that, by the way, there's about twenty guys locked up in there who want to kill me, so I appreciate you almost having a complete prison break—and then having an all-out battle in the prison was on purpose?" Black said.

  "Oh no, it was a complete and utter failure," Laura said. "A catastrophic screw up. I thought I was dead the minute I left the premises. I sat in a hotel room for a week and waited to die."

  Now Black was curious. He'd had some failures himself, but he'd always made sure he was never the singular go-to field agent. He was muscle, not planning, because he didn't want to be in the position where, if everything went wrong, it all fell back on him.

  "Clearly you didn't die," Black said.

  "I told you, my employers wanted the Department ready for something huge," Laura said. "And while my original mission parameters went pear-shaped, the incident did net what my employers desired."

  "A more active, battle-ready Department and a team of super-powered individuals on high alert for trouble," Black said.

  "Exactly. My employers wanted them under their control, but if they couldn't be controlled, they were at least primed to react to what we knew was coming," Laura said.

  "Are you going to tell me what your employers were so worried about that they hired you to try to commandeer an entire government agency and super-team?" Black asked.

  The agent previously known as Prevention pointed up into the sky.

  "Several years ago, my employers learned of a potential alien invasion," she said. "And while they are not… as you might suspect… entirely altruistic in what they do, it is beneficial for them to have a world that has not been invaded by aliens."

  "Hard to run a profitable business if your planet is a smoking husk, I suppose," Black said.

  "You're taking news of a pending alien invasion with particular calm, Agent Black."

  He shrugged dismissively.

  "You and I come from the same place," Black said. "The things we've seen… War is war. We're all going to die in violence some day. Whether that's by stupid, bigoted countries throwing nuclear warheads at each other or goblins from outer space, it's all the same."

  "It's not my intention to die in violence," Laura said. "And I also don't intend to botch two contracts in a row."

  "Oh really," Black said. He refilled her glass. "So what exactly do you need me for, call-me-Laura?"

  "How'd you like to work on the side of the angels for once," she said.

  "I don't want Bedlam involved," Black said. "I don't want her on your employer's radar, whoever they are."

  "She's already involved," Laura said. "I have eyes on the Indestructibles, and they tell me she was seen with them yesterday."

  Black sighed and sipped his beer, feigning irritation. Part of him, some strange little place where fatherly pride might have lived in another lifetime, fluttered with unexpected happiness. He'd hoped, all along, that somehow Bedlam could avoid simply becoming a younger version of himself, but he had no idea how to prevent that—she couldn't live a normal life, couldn't just walk into society and be treated with ordinary kindness, and he knew that she'd been built as a weapon of war. For her every path involved violence, and he had wondered, and hoped, she might find a way to turn out better than he had. Maybe time with those strange kids in their floating Tower would help her figure that out.

  Something else flickered inside him as well. Sadness. He wanted much more for Bedlam, but he knew anywhere better would be far away from him. Maybe that's why she hadn't told him yet. He felt no anger, but something else instead, a sense of loneliness he'd never had need or use for before.

  He eyed the woman across from him again.

  "So what are you asking me to do?" he said.

  "Those kids are going to be the world's first line of defense, for better or for worse," Laura said. "And that means they're going to need help."

  "And how do you propose a couple of aging mercenaries do that?" he asked.

  "How would you feel about helping me liberate an entire arsenal of alien technology?" Laura said.

  Black raised his beer, and she joined him. They clinked glasses.

  "No one will ever say we lived dull lives, will they?" Black said.

  "You're lucky," Laura said. "I can sense you hope she never follows in your footsteps, but at least you've got someone who'll remember you when you're gone."

  Black downed his beer in one long sip and set the glass down.

  "That's assuming we're victorious," he said. "Let's go help these kids win a war."

  Chapter 20:

  What happened to you?

  Doc and Bedlam sat in the control room, waiting for the others to return, their silence strangely comfortable. Doc let the cyborg be within herself, glancing over once in a while to watch her eyes flicking around the room processing. He liked her, enjoyed her confidence, but was also worried—she'd experienced a very different trauma from those the Indestructibles had suffered in their early experiences, and he was curious how she processed it all. She was certainly a different character than the one they met on that small island a year or so ago. Despite her foul mouth and intense attitude, there was a maturity to her, an adult level of self-awareness his team was still developing. In some ways she reminded Doc of Kate. Hardened by the world, long before she should have to be so tough.

  "This is messed up, Doc," she said, finally.

  "It is," he said.

  "I accepted a long time ago that how this all came about was screwed up. Even made some peace with it," Bedlam said. "I mean I wasn't going to live after—it was an accident—"

  "—That cost you your arms and legs," Doc said quietly.

  "Yeah. It was a stupid… it doesn't matter. An accident. I was a lump of meat in a hospital bed. Gone. You know that? I knew I was gone. Knew I was dead," Bedlam said.

  "Did you see the other side?" Doc asked.

  He wasn't mocking her. He'd been to the other side of death, as a tourist, as an explorer. Not everyone goes to the same place, but there were, he had learned, more than one thing humanity sees when life ends. Sometimes it is oblivion, and sometimes, it is something else.

  "I'm not sure," Bedlam said. "But I do know what it's like to feel yourself go cold. I know that much."

  "And then you didn't die," Doc said.

  "New and improved me," Bedlam said. "And I've spent a lot of time thinking about that, reflecting on what these idiots did to me, and after a while I thought—hey, I'm still here, right? I'm still me. Not the off the shelf version of me, but whatever they had planned the end result was I'm still here. So I thought—I can forgive them for that. Doctor Frankenstein was a heel too, but that doesn't diminish the humanity of the monster he made."

  "That's a powerful analogy there, Bedlam," Doc said.

  The cyborg and the magician locked eyes for a long moment, his face peaceful and welcoming, hers hard and taut.

  "You want me to say I'm not a monster," she asked him. "Too bad. I am."

  Doc shook his head.

  "We all are," Doc said. "Someday I'll tell you why my eyes glow and you'll know—we're all monsters in some way or another. It's what you do with what comes next th
at counts. "

  The young cyborg almost smiled. Doc settled for the slight loosening of the lines around her mouth as a sign he'd said something right. She looked back down at the table.

  "Now I have to try to make peace with the idea they were going to install an alien in my body," she said. "Grr. That doctor in front of your name wouldn't happen to indicate you're a psychotherapist, would it?"

  "I didn't even finish college," Doc said.

  Bedlam looked at him to try to figure out if he was kidding or not and then, finally, burst into laughter.

  "You didn't, did you?" she said.

  "Nope," Doc said, just as the other two pairs of heroes converged at the door, nearly simultaneously, everyone looking like they'd had a very bad day. Worst of the lot was Titus, covered in scratches and bruises and wearing different clothes than he'd left in, and Emily, sporting a huge black eye and split lip, along with a bump on her forehead that looked angry and painful.

  "What happened to you?" Titus and Emily asked each other.

  "Got thrown out a third-story window," Titus said.

  "Punched in the face by a twelve foot tall alien," Emily said.

  Kate and Jane followed them in, Kate looking roughed up but otherwise well, Jane with the last remnants of her torn cape flapping off one shoulder. They looked at each other without saying a word and sat down, Kate placed a dark plastic bag on the floor beside her.

  "I just thought of something," Titus said, gingerly sitting down. "Emily, have you ever been hit the entire time we've been doing this?"

  "Hit by what," Emily said.

  "A fist. A laser. A falling rock. Anything," Titus said.

  Emily pondered this for a minute.

  "Nope," she said.

  "Wait," Jane said, leaning forward in her chair. "You really haven't, have you?"

  "I got hit with some sort of decorative office supplies when rescuing Billy in the Labyrinth," Emily said. "I think I got concussed one time. That's about it."

  "I've lost enough blood to stock a Red Cross drive and Emily's been concussed once," Titus said.