Crossover Earth '98
Christopher Shea
The windows rattled in their frames and a glass vibrated off the nightstand, toppling to the floor with a crash, as the soldiers in their powered armor blasted overhead. Dennis untangled the pillow from around his head, cursing, and threw it across the room. Sweeping the covers off, he stalked to the window, nearly stepping on a piece of glass, and pulled up the blinds. The glowing yellow contrails left by the armored men's jetpacks were clearly visible against the night sky, streaking up toward the dark bulk of the spaceship that squatted over Nagasaki. Abruptly, the contrails blossomed into a ball of flame. Dennis let the blind fall and turned away, shaking his head. It hadn't worked the last three times they'd tried it, either. Did they still have kamikazes in the Japanese military or what?
The room started vibrating again as he was pulling on his pants. By now, he could identify that particular kind of vibration as coming from a column of tanks passing in the street below. Then, from farther down the street, came the high-pitched vreeping of alien weapons fire, answered by the hollow boom of the tanks' guns. Dennis didn't bother to go to the window to see who was getting the better of it. Who cared? He yanked on a T-shirt, then opened the bedroom door and stalked out into the apartment's small front room.
Chung Ku looked up. Both of him. They were seated side by side on the couch, and had apparently been deep in conversation before Dennis entered. He could tell which one was the original, though, since that one still wore the shining copper bracelet that he had taken from Wing Foo Chang's temple. The other's wrist was bare. The bracelet, like Dennis's dimension lance, could not be copied by anything so simple as manipulation of space.
"Yes?" Chung One asked, raising an eyebrow in a manner that suggested that he expected the interruption to be worth his time.
"It's time -- " Dennis began, and then broke off. "Put yourself back together, dammit. I'm talking to you here."
"Why? We are both Chung Ku," Chung Two said. "Our attention is undivided, and it is not as if we can have secrets from each other. You should know that."
"Yeah, but ... " Dennis had been enduring this ever since Chung had discovered how to use the bracelet's space-warping powers to be in two places at once, in the way Dennis himself often did. Now the old martial artist spent all his time talking to himself. Dennis could almost understand -- when he'd first mastered the ability himself, he'd spent almost all his time split, hanging out with his newly created "brothers." But after the first flush of excitement, he'd come to realize that none of them ever had much interesting to say. Plus they were all argumentative, pushy bastards. Dennis would be the first to admit he sometimes wasn't easy to get along with, but those jerks were something else. It finally ended when a few of them got into an argument that turned into a fistfight, which was just too goddam weird. So now Dennis only duplicated himself when he needed to.
It really burned him to see the Chungs sitting there like a couple geezers passing the day on a park bench, gabbling away about nothing while the aliens burned the city down around them -- and leaving it up to him to figure a way out of it, as usual. His patience with Chung's passivity was rapidly eroding. If the old man hadn't been a genuine master of the martial arts, and if there hadn't still been more for Dennis to learn from him, he'd have dumped the guy, or killed him, long ago. As it was, he was just about ready to cut loose. He was sick of China and Japan, sick of Asian faces and Asian voices and Asian food, sick of the crap they called music here and having people who'd never seen red hair in their lives stare at him and giggle as he passed in the street. He wanted to get back to America and start showing certain people who was boss -- but Chung still hadn't taught him anything really great yet, and Dennis didn't want to have gone through this whole stupid trip just for a couple pocketfuls of jewels and a few new techniques.
"We're moving," Dennis said.
"Why?" Chung One asked.
Dennis took a breath. "If you ever took your heads out of each other's asses and looked outside, you'd notice that our friends have found us again and are tearing up the city hunting for us. And that the Japanese are doing a piss-poor job of stopping them. Which means eventually they'll find us. Which means we got to move on. You following this?"
"If you say so. Where do we go?" Chung Two asked.
"Somewhere bigger. Tokyo, Yokohama. Some city where there're enough supers and military to put up a real fight against the aliens. Maybe then you'll have enough time to figure out how to stop that damn bracelet from sending up a signal flare every time you use it. Which would make a lot more sense than using it to talk over childhood memories with yourself, wouldn't it?"
The Chungs acted as if they hadn't heard the pointed suggestion. "Are you sure that's the best solution?" Chung One asked.
Dennis's frustration boiled over. "You got any better ideas? You got any ideas at all? No? Didn't think so! Then we do this my way!"
The Chungs looked at each other for a moment. Then Chung One said, "I suppose it will do. How do you intend for us to exit the city without attracting the aliens' attention?"
"I intend for us to kick the ass of any alien patrol we come across," Dennis snapped. "You remember what it was like in the ship. Those guys can't fight for crap. All we have to do is pop close to them, so they don't have an advantage 'cause of their guns. Think you can handle that, or am I supposed to do all the fighting too now?"
The Chungs studied him for what seemed like forever. At last Chung One said, "I will do what I can."
"Then get packed, and put yourself together, for God's sake. This will be easier if we don't do it in a troop."
The air around the couch rippled as if something had grabbed a handful of it and twisted, and then there was only one Chung where the two had been sitting. He held up a hand, displaying the copper bracelet. "This is all I need. Shall we go?"
"Yeah, well, some of us have to think about more ordinary things," Dennis said, backing toward the bedroom again. "Give me a few minutes."
"Certainly. I will wait." Space bent again, and as Dennis crossed back into the bedroom, he heard the voices of the two old men start up again.
* * *
Early in the fighting, Dennis had barricaded the front door of the apartment on both sides with enough junk to make it completely impassable. Not that it would have stopped a determined alien warband, but it did cut down on visits from panicked Japanese seeking shelter. Of course, it was no barrier to Dennis or Chung, as they simply warped themselves straight from the apartment to the rooftop of the neighboring building. There, Chung stood in the shadow of a ventilator, staring up at the spaceship, while Dennis moved to the edge and studied the cityscape. The night wind tasted of smoke.
One glance at the waterfront was enough to tell him that there was no way out of the city there. Row upon row of warehouses were burning, throwing up a mountain of smoke, red-lit from within. The waters were greasy and clogged with the wreckage of ships, a maze of shattered metal. Even if there were any seaworthy vessels left there, the crew would have to be insane to stick around -- and neither Dennis nor Chung knew how to handle a boat. And the air was out too -- as the power-armor idiots had just demonstrated, the aliens swatted down anyone who got above a certain height. That left overland as the only way out.
Below was an impassable junkyard of cars and rubble, dotted with sprawled and blackening corpses and huge scorch marks. The burned-out hulk of an armored personnel carrier was overturned in the middle of the street, one side torn open to display a nest of charred bones and carbonized flesh. Dennis looked along the roofs, seeing how the alien ship threw down spears and pillars of destructive light here, there, everywhere, crushing entire city blocks with each blast. Burning buildings illuminated its underside, and tangled cairns of concrete and rebar showed where its wrath had landed. Dennis turned slightly, getting his bearings, facing what he thought was northeastward.
"That one there," he told Chung, pointing to a still-intact apartment building a couple of blocks away. "Go now." And he blinked out without waiting to see if Chung followed.
But Chung was already on the rooftop when Dennis blinked back in, peering over the low retaining wall around the roof. The street was a river of barely controlled energy, lashing back and forth, as a squad of powered-armor soldiers traded blasts with a troop of aliens. A minivan was hoisted and thrown, caught in midair by a trio of green beams, and reduced to a handful of dust. An armored soldier leaped into the air, gauntlets blazing, and then an energy blast streaked by and took his head with it. The building Dennis and Chung were on shook as stray bolts slammed into it, and creaked ominously. "Get moving!" Dennis said, sighting on the next building and jabbing a finger at it, following his own directions immediately.
Chung was there before him again, hands on his hips as he frowned up at the alien starship. Dennis didn't bother saying anything this time, just pointed at the next building and teleported.
He arrived to find Chung squatting at the edge of the roof, looking downward. Curiosity got the better of Dennis, and he looked down too, into a scene out of Dante.
The aliens had flushed a cache of civilians from the basement of a restaurant. Hollow-eyed men and women and crying children were being forced into a ragged line by gun-welding reptilian grunts, then propelled toward the landing craft that squatted darkly at the intersection of two streets. After the last few civilians were herded out, one of the grunts threw something down the steps. There was a whump and tongues of flame shot from every basement window around the building's perimeter. A second later, a burning man ran up the steps, shrieking in a high, inhuman voice. The aliens watched him zigzag down the street, not bothering to shoot him.
Dennis straightened up and looked around, picking out the next building. "Okay, that one there," he said.
"No," Chung replied without looking up.
"What do you mean, no?"
"I have seen enough. I can tolerate this no longer. It is time to act."
Dennis looked at the old man with a scowl. "It's a little late for you to start playing superhero."
"I do not expect you to understand."
"What's there to understand? You had me kill a lot of people and rip off Wing Foo Chang for you -- and you've probably done a lot worse yourself. Where do you get off talking like one of the Guardians?"
"As I said, you do not understand. Among family, some things may be tolerated. But the same things, when done by foreign invaders, must be punished. That is a principle I have lived by all my life: we take care of our own. In this situation, the definition of what 'my own' is has broadened, and I am shamed to admit that it has taken me this long to realize it."
"Bullshit." Dennis was getting mad now. "This is one of your tests, isn't it? You want to see if I'm stupid enough to jump into the fight just because you -- "
"You may do what you want." With a twisting of the night, two Chungs once more stood before him. The one with the bracelet gestured to the one without. "He will complete your training; I have work to attend to." And so saying, Chung One vanished.
"What the hell -- " Dennis began, rushing to the edge of the roof and leaning over, hoping to catch some sight of Chung in the street.
"He is not there," Chung Two said. "I cannot be certain, of course, but I believe he intended to enter the ship. At least, that is what I was thinking before we divided."
"Aw, great." Dennis looked up at the ship. "When I said they couldn't fight, I didn't mean he should take them all on at once!"
"I do not think that is what he intended. Shall we go?" And Chung Two vanished. Dennis cursed and went after him.
They hopped from building to building for several minutes more before Dennis became aware something had changed. "Hold up," he ordered.
"What is it?"
"I don't know ... " Then it struck Dennis. The night was still loud with the sounds of burning and combat, but the loudest of its noises was gone. The alien ship had not fired on the city in several minutes. He looked up, and to his astonishment, he saw flames gushing from one of the docking bays on the ship's perimeter. "I'll be damned. He actually hurt 'em."
"What did you expect?" Chung Two said imperturbably. "When I say I will do something, I do it."
A line of yellow light reached up toward the black circle of the alien ship from the city, several miles north of Dennis and Chung. Reached, and struck; the tiny flares of the armored soldier's blasts, and the explosions that followed them, were clearly visible against the great dark shape. Immediately yellow contrails rose from all over Nagasaki, jabbing at the alien ship like picadores' spears embedding themselves in the black hide of a bull. The ship was helpless to defend itself as it was cut and cut again, chunks of metal falling to the empty streets below. Red and yellow explosion flowers bloomed all along its underside.
"All right!" Dennis yelled before he remembered Chung Two, standing silently at his side. No need to give the old bastard any more reason to be insufferable. "I could've done it, though."
"But you did not." Chung Two gestured off to their left. "That building next?" And without waiting for confirmation, he vanished.
As they moved on through the city, Dennis kept snatching looks at the crippled craft above. The end came just as they reached the outskirts of the city. The alien ship, flames pouring from half a dozen rents in its hull and racked by internal blasts that ran one into another like firecrackers on the Chinese New Year, began to wobble. Something big blew up inside, spraying debris from both top and bottom, and the craft sagged, sliding down an awkward arc to slam edge-first into Nagasaki harbor. Waves swamped the docks. Wedged upright in the silt of the bottom, it stood like a coin that had landed on edge, the part out of the water still burning merrily.
"Sloppy," Chung Two said. "I would have done it without crashing the ship."
"Yeah, whatever. Do we wait here for your duplicate to catch up with us or what?"
"How should I know? My plans did not go that far," Chung Two said.
"What -- " Dennis stared at the toppling craft in horror. "You -- you just went down in that? With the bracelet? You couldn't have kept the bracelet with us and sent a duplicate instead?"
"You were the one who feared that the bracelet was leading the aliens to us," the duplicate Chung -- the remaining Chung -- said mildly. "Without it, I think we can move much more safely."
"Yeah, but -- " Dennis left the words unsaid. There was a feeling growing in his stomach that said You've Been Had. With the bracelet, the real Chung could have popped out of the ship and gone off on his own. Maybe. Or maybe he'd meant what he said, really wanted to play hero. Dennis stared at the duplicate Chung, but the old Chinese man's bland face offered no clues. "Yeah, well, I better start seeing some benefits from this shit soon," he growled. "Now come on. Let's get a car or something, down there." In the split second before he vanished, he wondered if Chung would be on the street when he rematerialized.