Like A Comet: The Indestructibles Book 4 Read online

  Doc had known Dude, through multiple hosts, for a long time. He'd worked with Billy's predecessor, and he'd known Straylight's partner, another Luminae-human pairing named Horizon. Horizon quit Earth entirely when Dude's former partner was killed. The aliens and their human hosts never explained why there were two of them here, though they'd hinted that having a pair of Luminae on Earth was an unusual precedent, that there were many inhabited worlds out there among the stars with only one to watch over them.

  To watch over them. That was a very specific term, Doc thought. To watch over the world, just in case something terrible came from the stars. Well, here we are. Something terrible is coming from the stars.

  "Neal?" Doc said out loud, invoking the attention of the disembodied Artificial Intelligence who controlled the Tower. Neal was with the ship when they'd found it, but he had been clearly a newer modification, something Earth-born. Neal was a late addition to the ship's arsenal, and he'd never revealed how he got there either. Maybe he came from the future. That was Annie's theory, that Neal had been created further along the time stream and installed like a software improvement.

  And we still don't know anything about who did that, Doc thought.

  "Yes, Designation: Doc Silence," Neal's gentle voice said. Neal wasn't the ship itself, so to speak, but the AI was everywhere, living within the walls and computers and electrical currents. The ship was his body in many ways.

  "Neal, do we know what species this alien is? We know he's a host to a Luminae, but I'm wondering about the host-body itself," Doc said.

  There was a pause as Neal searched his extensive library of knowledge.

  "Records show he is most likely an Ank-tar," Neal said. "A species from a planet approximately 23 light years away. Relatively nearby."

  "Relatively nearby," Doc said, laughing a little. It was strange, confronting the cosmic like this. Doc had spent his entire life amid the arcane and magical, seeing things impossible and mind-bending, but when it came to science, it was as foreign to him as it might be explaining elemental magic to an engineer. "What do we know about his species?"

  "We have moderate biological knowledge based upon old data from previous patients, Designation: Doc Silence," Neal said.

  Doc nodded.

  "See what we can do to help him. I don't want this guy dying on us, Neal."

  "I will do what I can."

  "You always do," Doc said.

  Doc left the med bay and headed toward the command center, meeting the returning trio of Jane, Billy, and Emily on the way.

  "What have you three been up to?" Doc asked.

  "Watching Firefly," Emily said.

  "Trying to figure out our next move," Jane said, leading the way toward the control center. The door hissed open, allowing everyone to enter.

  "I'll head out soon," Billy said. "Scout things out."

  Doc put a hand on Billy's shoulder as the younger man headed for his designated seat at the table.

  "You're going to be careful up there," Doc said.

  "Oh you don't have to tell me twice," Billy said. "Momma Case didn't raise no daredevil."

  Jane sat down wearily in her own seat and looked up at the bank of computer monitors behind her.

  "Has anyone recalled Kate and Titus yet?" Jane said.

  "I didn't," Billy said. "I figured we don't really know what we're doing yet, so why disturb them before we have to. I mean, 'hey, your vacation's over, world is ending.'"

  Emily hopped into her chair and sat on the back, feet where her bum should be, balancing precariously.

  "No offense to either one of them, but why do we need them to come back yet?" Emily said. "I mean, they're good at what they do but who brings a werewolf to a spaceship fight?"

  Doc rested his arms on the back of his chair and leaned forward tiredly.

  "Because while Billy is scouting out the incoming invasion, we're going to try to figure out what we can do to get ourselves ready here," Doc said. "There's a good chance if these… invaders, whatever they are, have picked out Earth to attack, they already have people here spying on us. We should try to find out what they know."

  "And we need Assassin Barbie and Cujo for that?" Emily said.

  "You're being obtuse, Em," Billy said.

  "I'm trying to buy the love birds a few more days vacation," Em said. "I know why you're bringing them back. They are our detectives."

  Doc shot a wide, bright smile at Emily.

  "Exactly. And we have some detective work to do," Doc said. "That includes you, by the way. I have some research for that big old science brain of yours to dig into that I don't understand."

  "Did you just stay I'm smarter than you?" Emily said.

  "In this case, you might actually know more than I do about certain things," Doc said.

  Emily held out her hand for a high five from Billy.

  He just stared at her.

  "Come on, Billy Case. Give a girl a victory high five," Emily said.

  "What else can we do," Jane said. "We can't start building warships. Whatever's coming at us is… what's the word I'm looking for? More advanced than Earth? We're not ready for this."

  "But we can be," Doc said, rubbing his eyes behind his red-lensed glasses.

  "All right," Jane said. "So we just have to figure out how to stop an alien invasion. I mean, we've time traveled. This should be easy by comparison."

  "If I throw up in space, does it float?" Billy said, as if he'd tuned out of the conversation completely.

  "In space, nobody can hear you puke," Emily said. She put her hand to her mouth and made a motion like the inner jaws of the xenomorph from the Sigourney Weaver Alien movies at Billy. "Hiss. Rawr."

  "Jane," Doc said, "Get Titus and Kate on the line. Fill them in. And then we have one more thing I think we need to do before we start moving."

  "Last meal?" Billy said.

  "Ask George R. R. Martin if we can get a peek at the end of Game of Thrones in case the world gets invaded before he finishes?" Emily said.

  "No," Doc said, turning to Billy. "I think Straylight should tell us a story."

  "'There are those who believe… that life here began out there, far across the universe…'" said Emily.

  "Not the opening narration to Battlestar Galactica, Em," Doc said. "I think Dude is going to tell us about where he came from."

  Everyone looked at Billy. His eyes went slightly blank, the way they did when he listened most intently to Dude's voice inside his head.

  "Yeah," Billy said. "Dude says we should tell you the whole story. But just once. Let's get Titus and the scariest vigilante on the planet on the monitor so they can hear. He says the explanation is overdue. And he's sorry."

  Chapter 2:

  Breakfast of champions

  Kate would like to say she wasn't sure how she ended up with a man pinned to the counter of a diner bending his arm almost to the breaking point, but she'd be lying. She knew exactly how she got here.

  The real question was whether or not Kate, better known to the world as the vigilante Dancer, was actually going to break his arm.

  The night had started off innocently enough. She and her teammate and sort-of-but-nobody-said-it boyfriend, the werewolf Titus Whispering, had been training with some of his mentors at a camp near the Canadian border. The two older werewolves, laconic Gabriel and chatty Finnigan, had been excellent teachers, showing both Kate and Titus new techniques for hand to hand combat they'd never used before, and the werewolf couple had proven to be enjoyable company as well, full of stories about their heritage and their travels.

  But the camp proved isolated and lonely, and Kate had never really lived outside a city before. The quiet had begun to affect her. That and the lack of action. She'd been fighting crime on her own before she was old enough to drive. Training out in the woods was all well and good, but this was the longest she'd gone without hitting someone in years.

  So she and Titus drove into the nearby town, little more than a single main street, with G
abriel and Finnigan in tow, and the quartet hit up the local diner for breakfast-as-dinner.

  In retrospect, perhaps they should have re-acclimated Kate to being around regular people a little more slowly. She remained anti-social even on her best days.

  They ordered their meals, and while Finnigan attempted to convince the waitress into adding white and black pudding on the menu in the future and Titus devoured a stack of silver-dollar pancakes, Kate went to the restroom. Kate disliked public bathrooms. They made her uncomfortable. Forcing her to become vulnerable in an unfamiliar environment, she found them disconcerting as well as unsanitary.

  When she returned she discovered that Titus had left their table, though Gabriel and Finnigan, their backs to her, still sat munching away. Kate wondered where Titus had gone and, at the same time, pondered why you can never really get your hands completely dry using a public bathroom. At that moment, she felt a hand paw at her unexpectedly.

  A regular person might have become instantly surprised, or frightened, or simply confused. But instead, as someone who'd been in a state of battle-readiness for years, she relied on her instincts. Blindingly quick, Kate battered the hand away, grabbed the person's wrist and bent it back, dragging the offender—a twenty-something man in a red baseball hat and a poor excuse for a beard—to the counter.

  "What the hell!" the man yelled, his surprised shot cut off when his face bounced off the countertop.

  "Who sent you?" Kate growled in the man's ear.

  "What?" he whined.

  "Where'd you come from?"

  "Lady, he didn't mean anything," another man, bigger, maybe a year or two older, said, hands up and palms out. "Just let him go. Nobody has to get hurt."

  "You're crazy!" the man on the countertop said.

  Kate twisted his wrist a millimeter more.

  "Call me crazy one more time," she said. "And you'll never have full use of this arm again."

  "What?" the man said, his face turning bright red.

  The diner door opened and closed again, and Titus's familiar voice cut through the air.

  "I was only gone for three minutes!" Titus said. Faster than should have been possible, he stood by her side, carefully positioning himself between Kate and the pinned man's friend.

  "Tell your lunatic girlfriend to let him go," the friend said.

  Kate glanced back at their table to see where the older werewolves were. Finnigan sat there, nibbling a piece of bacon with one hand, watching the altercation with glee, while his other rested on Gabriel's shoulder to keep his partner from intervening.

  The friend reached for Kate's arm, but Titus grabbed his wrist. In his human form, Titus was a solid sixty pounds lighter than the other man, but his grip stopped him dead in his tracks. Kate watched as the friend tried to pull his arm free, but Titus held him perfectly still.

  "I like to think of myself as a pacifist," Titus said, "but if you try to lay a hand on either one of us again my lesser angels will take over and you won't like that at all."

  "Crazy tourists," the friend said, shaking his head.

  "You have no idea," Titus said and then turned to Kate, "We good?"

  "He grabbed me," she said, applying just a little more pressure on her captive's fingers.

  "You did?" Titus said. "Man, you're lucky to have any teeth left right now. Very lucky."

  "Look, I'm sorry! I wouldn't have touched you if I knew you were a ninja!" the first man said.

  "Would you have accosted me if you knew I wasn't dangerous?" Kate said.

  "Can I just apologize?" the man said.

  Titus exchanged a long look with Kate before shrugging his shoulders at her.

  "I want to break a finger," Kate said.

  "Maybe not," Titus said.

  "Just the pinky then," Kate said.

  "If you have to," Titus said.

  On the other side of the restaurant, Finnigan guffawed.

  Kate released the man and pushed him away.

  He began to flex and rub his arm, then glared at her.

  The waitress behind the counter stared at Kate with wide eyes.

  "I should have taken that outside. I'm sorry," Kate said.

  "That's okay. I've wanted to do that to him for at least six months," the waitress said.

  * * *

  Outside, as the quartet walked away, Finnigan couldn't contain himself. "I just want to break one finger!" he said. "Titus, lad, I just love this girl."

  "I actually just loved your response—not apologizing for almost breaking the guy's arm. You apologized for not dragging him outside to break his arm," Titus said.

  Gabriel shook his head.

  "Where did you go, anyway?" Kate said.

  Titus rubbed his eyes in a very Doc-like manner, then gnawed on a fingernail anxiously.

  "Tower called. They need us back," he said. He looked to Gabriel and Finnigan. "Sorry, guys."

  "Off to save the world again?" Finnigan said.

  "I don't actually know," Titus said. "Jane wouldn't give me any specifics. Said it was too much to explain over the phone and that we should both be there to get the whole story."

  "Back to the City for ye then," Finnigan said.

  "Let us know if you need any help," Gabriel said.

  "Thanks to you both," Titus said. "We'll head back to camp, get our stuff and hit the road. You okay with this, Kate?"

  Anticipation bubbling up inside her, Kate—somewhere between anxiety and joy—grabbed Titus by both shoulders. "I hope they've found us somebody to punch. I can't wait to get home."

  She let go of him and walked away, leading the walk back to the campsite, a lightness that might almost be mistaken for happiness evident in her step.

  Chapter 3:

  Parents and children

  Emily sat in the living room in Billy's parents' home, knitting her replacement replica Fourth Doctor's scarf. She found the process a bit Zen, with the repetitive motions, the way it consumed time, but she was also out of practice and she kept screwing up, dropping a stitch here and there and having to undo a lot of her work. She'd given her original scarf to Anachronism Annie when the notorious time traveler went back into the dark, alternate future the Indestuctibles had tried to save a few weeks before, and she'd felt good about that—Emily didn't, by nature, give gifts very often—but had she realized she was going to have to make herself a new one, she might have just as easily given Annie a gift certificate to Apollo's Coffee or something.

  Speaking of not sharing well, Emily also found herself shooting daggers at notorious dog-hogger Billy Case, who had Watson curled up on his lap as he talked with his parents. Ma and Pa Case, or as Emily called them, Al and Lori, looked worried. They tended to appear this way whenever Billy came to visit, because Billy—lacking a certain amount of skill lying to his own parents—came around to visit more often when he thought he might get killed on a mission for the team. It was, in Emily's opinion, the worst, most upsetting, and yet strangely hilarious "tell" she'd ever seen in another human being.

  "So you really can't give us a hint about anything that's going on?" Billy's mother said.

  "Is it classified or something?" his father said.

  "No," Billy said, scratching Watson behind the ear. Emily also noticed that Billy employed the dog as a small child would while hugging a teddy bear, a source of tactile comfort when he worried.

  I can read you like a book, Billy Case, Emily thought, before catching yet another dropped stitch in her scarf and backtracking to undo the mistake.

  "So once again, you've come by with the goal of making us worry like crazy people about you," Lori said.

  "I… pretty much. Yeah, that's accurate," Billy said. "And I have a favor to ask."

  "Whatever you're doing, you can't borrow the car," Al said. Lori shot him a look of motherly worry that was so annoyed Emily had to bite her lip to not laugh at it. "What? It's either crack a joke or start pacing, Lor. I went with the joke to save the finish on the floors."

  "What do you nee
d us to do?" Lori said, turning her full attention to her son.

  "If anything happens, I was hoping we could leave Watson here with you," Billy said.

  "Hey!" Emily said, chiming in. "If you… do a thing… like… and can't keep Watson, I get full custody."

  "And you might be doing some other thing that makes taking care of him really difficult, because you're also a superhero," Billy said.

  "Can't argue with that," Emily said, returning to her knitting.

  "You really think something's going to happen where you won't be able to take care of him?" Lori said.

  "Can I make a joke about how we always knew if we got a dog I'd be the one who had to walk him?" Al said.

  Lori repeated her look of intense exasperation. "You realize this is where he gets the smart mouth thing," Lori said.

  "The ability to offer jokes in the face of adversity and terror is a sign of intelligence, darlin'," Al said. He turned his attention back to his son. "We'll keep an eye on your dog if you need us to, of course."

  "We talked about getting a dog instead of having you when we first got married," Lori said.

  "And you've regretted it ever since," Billy said.

  "Well, you were harder to potty train," Lori said.

  "And he gets those smart mouth traits from me?" Al said.

  Billy rummaged around in his pockets, pulled out a card, and handed it to his mom.

  "And if things get really bad out there, I want you to call that number," Billy said. "That's Sam Barren's direct line at the Department of What."

  "The Department of What," his father said, incredulous.

  "It's a long story," Billy said. "If you need help, he'll send people to come get you. Promise me you'll call if anything happens."

  "Well I'm past the point of fighting off anxiety with humor," Al said. "What's really going on, Billy?"

  Billy threw his hands up in the air. "Hopefully nothing. I'm just being careful because I might not be close enough to come get you myself," he said.