Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty...

"Why didn't-"

"This was the fastest way to do it," she said, her voice soft. "It'd have taken me three days to convince you I wasn't lying when I wanted to go to the Apocalypse Tower. Three days. It'd take me one day to seduce you, knock you out for ten hours, and then activate the Apocalypse Tower without anyone noticing."

"I..." I opened my mouth, then closed it. "You lied to me-"

She flinched as if I had smacked her.

"You lied to me to shave two days off your plan?" I asked, sounding appalled. "What is wrong with you?"

"Because those days matter!" She looked up at me, her face and her mask wet with tears. "I can calculate down to the last child how many people die every single day from polluted waters. Indirect kills, too, from disrupted food chains and ecological damage. Three hundred and sixty two people -- mostly the elderly and the young." Her voice broke. "G-Goddamn it, I know their names. It's not that hard to find that information, to absorb it, to cataloge and analyze it. Do you know what it is like, Xander? To have a voice in your head, telling you every single second of the day not only who you could have saved, but their lives? Their possible futures?"

Before I could speak, Maddie continued.

"There's never enough time." She sniffed. "I could have ended that stupid war the last administration got us into with fifty years of reconstruction. But that war killed five thousand people every year, more or less as the fighting got worse. Got better." She shook her head. "So, I bought time. The death ray?" she snorted, wetly. "Temporal displacement ray. Jalidanistan is coming back in a hundred years. A century to figure out how to fix it..." She shook her head.

I bit my lip. "And the Liberty Bot?"

Maddie sniffed again, then laughed. "C-Come on, Xander. I may have been a supervillain and impeached. But I was still popular enough with thirty percent of the country to start a civil war, no matter what I said. I had to do something to make me hated. I can vaporize a whole nation of non-Americans and my voter base wouldn't blink."

I sighed. "So, you put hypnotic suggestions in their brains, attacked New York with Liberty Bot..."

She nodded. "And it worked. Least popular President in history." she sniffed again.

I leaned forward, then wrapped my arms around her, hugging her tightly. "For a smart person, you're weirdly dumb," I mumbled.

She punched my side gently.

I kissed her forehead. "You could have just told me. I'd have believed you."

"Nu-huh!" She sniffled.

I smiled. "Well, you tell me that story, I'd have believed you. Because I do believe you, Maddie."

Maddie blushed as she rubbed her face against my chest. She was getting some tears and snot over my uniform, but I didn't care. I just wanted to keep holding her.

"Nu-huhhhh," she mumbled.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Cause I wouldn't have told you that story, dummy," she said, drawing back, wiping her nose with her sleeve. "If I hadn't fallen in- uh, lets, get to work!" she spun on her heel and started away. I grabbed her cape. Jerked her back around into the circle of my arms. Maddie looked as red as the red spot of Jupiter. And far more beautiful. I could compare the two, I had flown to Jupiter once. She didn't look into my eyes.

I leaned forward. "I love you, Madeline Deinhardt."

She turned even brighter red. Squeaked.

"D-Didn't predict that..." she whispered.

We kissed.

Her hand dipped down and touched a few switches and buttons on the console of the Apocalypse Tower. The tower started to shudder. A slow pulse of subsonic sound thrummed through it as my tongue and hers darted together. Then I pulled back, tapping my ear -- indicating I wanted a comlink opened up with Project Aegis to my Altaran support groups.

"This is Archive," I said. "I'll report more later, but do not open fire on the Apocalypse Tower beside Hawaii. Keep monitoring plastic levels in the oceans."

"Understood, Archive," a tired sounding female operator respodned.

Maddie clapped her hands, jumping up and down as she looked at the read outs that flickered along the bizarre control interface of the Apocalypse Tower. She beamed at me and I beamed back.

"Plastic levels are dropping. We're also filtering out the nuclear waste and some alien nanites, no idea how those got there," Maddie said, bumping her hip against mine. I grinned at her, ruffling her hair, then leaning forward to kiss her.

It felt so perfect, that moment. That contact. That moment of lips to lips, heart heart.

"How romantic."

Maddie and I leaped apart.

"What the-" I spluttered. But the statue in the side of the room had started to stand. It wasn't a statue. It wasn't a statue at all. My heart froze as the statue cracked its knuckles and then rolled its arms as if it wanted to loosen them up.

"I have waited thirty years to get out of this place," Kalakill rumbled.

Kalakill. Darkthornn's favorite son. The man indirectly responsible for the deaths of five million people in California when he led his invasion army. He had personally ripped five hundred thousand people apart. With his bare hands. He shimmered with dark energy as he stepped away from where he had been sitting. Waiting. Trapped by Project Aegis killsats. Everyone had thought he had died when California was retaken after Darkthornn's dead.

Seemed everyone thought wrong.

"And you have given me a great opportunity," Kalakill said, grinning.

He leaped forward. But not at me. At Maddie.

I sprang forward.

His fist plunged through my chest. I staggered backwards, gritting my teeth against the pain. Maddie flew backwards and smashed into the wall behind me with a groan. I looked back, my eyes wide in shock. But his fist had gone through my chest. It had still had enough energy to send Maddie flying backwards. She lay on the ground, her face covered by her hair. I saw red. My fists clasped together and I brought them smashing down on Kalakill's head as hard as I could. He descended into the floor with an ear-piercing shriek of buckling metal as sonic boom filled the room. The crashing sounds of Kalakill plunging through metal and bone and ceramics filled the air for several moments, ending with a loud splash.

I spun around and knelt by Maddie. She groaned, her head rolling to the side, blood dripping from her temple.

"Archive, emergency teleport at this location," I said into my comlink. "Kalakill is still alive -- I need backup!"

"Understood, Archive!"

Maddie's body vanished with a crack of displaced air.

Then Kalakill burst through the floor at my feet. His thick, meaty hand closed around my neck and he squeezed me, then spun and flung me hard. My force field narrowed to a point, allowing me to penetrate through the tower's wall as I flew backwards, tumbling head over heels. I soared through the air for a few moments before righting myself. I winced at a dull ache burning through my body.

"Damage report?" I asked.

We've sustained twenty percent nanite loss, the Combat Speaker said. Look out!

The entire Apocalypse Tower flew towards me. The whole thing, lifted from its moorings and tossed at me with the force of a furious demigod. If I let it miss me, it'd land on Hawaii. Tens of thousands would die. If I destroyed it, it would just smash into the ocean. Ecological disaster. So, instead, I grabbed it with one hand, spun, and loosed. It flew upwards, soaring towards the heavens. It vanished with a wink and a twinkle.

I spun around.

And Kalakill slammed into me, feet first. I flew backwards and he laughed as I tumbled. I righted myself, then shot forward. Kalakill could fly as well -- his body buoyed up by a pair of feathered wings covered with eyes. He spread his arms as I came back into range.

"You fight with one hand behind your back, hero!" he chuckled.

"You're barely worth the effort," I sneered. "So, you know, your Dad's dead, right?"

This produced a flurry of violence so intense that I could barely comprehend it. My fist and his met, producing a shockwave pulse through the air. His leg snapped out. I parried. His head smashed into mine. I staggered back in the air, snapped out my cloak, wrapped it around his face and punched him in the nose. His wings flared and each eye-ball fired a beam of laser light that smashed into me. We flew apart, both bleeding and smoking. It had all taken less than a nanosecond, our bodies moving so quickly that just the motion of a punch produced a loud crack. We floated about ten meters away from one another.

Kalakill panted. "You lie!"

"The footage of it is on youtube," I said, grinning fiercely at him.

It was true.

Most famous two minutes of footage on the planet.

Kalakill screeched in fury and drove straight at me.

And slammed into a wall of pure glittering diamond. He rebounded backwards with a loud klung. Then a sphere of diamond shimmered into existence around him. Kalakill, too confused to really know what was going on, punched at the air around him. His fists rebounded off the crystal with an unmusical sound. I sagged slightly as the cavalry floated into view.

Dr. Quantum smiled genially at me. His shimmering blue skin provided a gentle counterpoint to the searing white light of his wife on her Cosmo Rider. Connie Cosmic twirled her baton and fired a stream of silver-white light into the sphere of diamonds, smashing Kalakill against the wall. He groaned and fell face forward. I sagged in relief, letting every ache and bruise on my body throb for a few moments.

"Hey Xander," Connie said, bringing her Cosmo Rider to a stop beside me. She winced. "You look like hell."

I grinned at her.

"Hey," I said. "What can I say? I'm real bad at this vacation stuff." I paused. "Good place for that, by the way."

Connie looked down. It was a true, the Cosmo Rider -- despite being designed by ancient gods as the tool of those chosen by the Cosmic Font to be their steed -- did look exactly like a surf board. Connie laughed and shook her head.

"I always wipe out when I surf on water. Using super-strings is much easier. Lance, honey, can you get him to Anchorage?"

"What?" Dr. Quantum looked down from the sky. "Sorry, I just noticed a new supernovae. Yes, dear." He nodded. And then, with all the ceremony of a soap bubble popping, Dr. Quantum and his prisoner vanished.

I smiled at Connie, then winced. "Can I go to a hospital?"

###

The school bell rang just as I stumbled into my math class. It was the first class of the first day of the senior year and I was already late. I waved a small permission slip from Project Aegis at my teacher before he could raise a stint. His brow furrowed as he looked at it, then frowned at me.

"Giant spiders?" he asked.

"And their allies, the magma men from the Earth's core," I said, my voice tired. I plopped my butt down on my seat and groaned. I was still recovering -- nanites weren't easy to rebuild, and the recovery operations in Hawaii had been a pain in the butt. But...there was a bigger pain. I looked down at my desk and Radi sounded sympathetic.

You argued as eloquently as you could, she said.

"We're sorry, Xander," Connie had said. "But you know Ozymandias. She can't be trusted -- and until we've done a full psyche profile on you, we don't know if you can be trusted about her. So, if you want to stay on the Project's good side, don't visit her. Don't write to her. Just...give us time to determine what exactly is going on. It'll take a while. She is a class 16 intelligence, after all." She had chuckled. "They tend to be tricky."

I closed my eyes. Tears threatened to well in my eyes.

I...

I missed her.

"Man, if I knew you were a crybaby, I think I'd have gone to hang out with Lightning Flash."

I jerked my head up, blinking away the tears. Sitting in the seat next to me, looking as casual as a cucumber, was Maddie. She wore her glasses, a pair of poofy jeans...

And a T-shirt I recognized.

It had been taken from my closet.

She bit into an apple, looking the picture of smug. And she had never been more beautiful. Chewing, she looked at me and said, around the apple: "So, need any help with trig?"

THE END