Chapter 10: Horror and Brockton Bay
The Ship of Fools again appeared in deep space with the momentary flash of the wormhole the only nearby source of light. The pattern of stars made it clear that they were deep within one of the galactic arms, with the starfield more visibly dense in the direction of the galactic core.
"We're about five lightyears out from Earth," said O'Brien after checking their position. The bridge was again filled with the full crew, each of them anxious to see how effective they had been at finding Ripley's home universe.
"It seems like there are differences in our position relative to the rest of the galaxy when we jump realities," said Daniel.
"Well, right before we picked up Ellen," added Dresden, "we jumped from a wreck which was basically outside of the galaxy to right next to the planet where her ship was located. That seems like a fairly sizable difference, even to somebody as technologically inept as me."
The ship's computer generated a new jump that would take them close to Earth based upon their current position, only without changing universe. Ellen, Miles and Daniel all double-checked the calculations before triggering the new jump. This time, the ship appeared where they expected. Harry, Taylor, Peter and Jimmy all stood quietly and stared at the magnificent sight of the bands of Jupiter's atmosphere. Two of the planet's moons were visible, one of which appeared to be Io, while the other was further away and harder to identify with the naked eye.
Ellen looked at the four pre-spaceflight members of their group with a soft smile. "It is pretty impressive, isn't it? I've been many lightyears from Earth, and Jupiter and Saturn are still two of the most spectacular planets I've seen," she told them.
Jimmy replied, "Honestly, seeing this makes this situation seem almost worth it."
"Totally," agreed Xander. "If I knew we could get home, I would be cool with this."
"To that end," interrupted Miles, "I have some good news and some bad news."
Daniel rolled his eyes a little, and could hear his inner Jack say, 'Cliché!'
"Really, they're kind of the same news," said O'Brien. "I've scanned the bodies around Jupiter. The quantum signature here is almost exactly the same as Ellen's. We just need to figure out what's causing the variance."
"Let's get closer to Earth and see if we can tell how close this universe is to my own," suggested Ripley. She was slightly disappointed, but not surprised. It would have been very lucky to hit their target on their first try after figuring out the wormhole drive's underlying mathematics.
Another wormhole jump dropped them outside of Earth's lunar orbit, on the opposite side of the planet from the satellite in question. They didn't want to get too close, as Ripley's Earth had plenty of eyes in the inner solar system.
"We're picking up transmissions from Earth...it sounds a little chaotic," said Daniel as he listened to an earpiece tied into the communications array.
"Can we see and hear it?" asked Ripley.
Daniel piped the transmissions to a display screen. The first broadcast was audio only. It seemed to be an emergency broadcast signal giving instructions on some type of quarantine. Daniel switched channels, and this time picked up a news broadcast where a slightly hysterical newscaster was talking about quarantine breach on the south side of Atlanta. She mentioned an estimated death toll in the hundreds. A third channel showed pictures of a firefight somewhere in what looked like a Latin or South American city. Soldiers were firing at indistinct black shapes moving through the shadows of buildings.
"Those are xenomorphs..." said Ripley softly.
The horrific images kept coming. One image was of a quiet street with the bodies of at least a dozen people lying in the sun. Another audio-only broadcast featured a man ranting about how the government was scanning for infected people and summarily executing any they found. The next video was of an autopsy of a body that had a gruesome hole in the torso, as if something had pushed its way out. The audio accompanying it was in Russian.
"He's saying...the creature gestates inside the body of a living host, then tears its way out through the chest cavity in a way that inevitably kills the infected," translated Daniel.
Ripley looked at Miles. "You said that this ISN'T my Earth?" she asked him bluntly.
He shook his head and said, "No, the quantum signature isn't right. It's close, but not the same."
Upon hearing that, Ripley turned without a word and left the bridge.
"Isn't there something we can do?" asked Peter, his horror at what he was seeing plain in his voice.
"In my world," said Harry, "I might be able to do something. I know some of the heavy hitters of the supernatural world, and most of them have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Here...I don't think that's an option. Humanity is pretty much on its own against whatever is out there."
Miles added, "There's evidence that people are still evacuating the surface. There are ships heading up to what Ripley called Gateway station."
"Humanity also has multiple colonies scattered around the galaxy, so there is the chance that they can rally and take back Earth," contributed Daniel.
"But there are people dying down there now," said Peter.
"That's why we always fought so hard against the bad guys," said Xander. "Apocalypses are a lot easier to stop before they've started. Don't get me wrong...if we had screwed up and let the Hellmouth open, we would have fought to the end, but none of us thought that that would be anything more than a last stand."
"It shouldn't have been left up to a bunch of teenagers to stop things like this," said Harry.
Xander just shrugged his shoulders. He wasn't going to argue the point. That's just the way it was.
"I think the best we can do," suggested Jimmy, "is try and make sure that Ripley gets home in time to warn people before this happens to her world."
Nobody really had anything to say after that, and it wasn't long before Daniel shut off the broadcasts from this dying Earth.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Taylor was sitting in the dining room, picking at a plate of lasagna. Having a replicator at least meant never having to complain about the food. It was a hell of a lot better than the food they served at Winslow for lunch. She just found it difficult to have any appetite after witnessing the destruction of an alternate Earth. She morbidly wondered if her own Earth was heading down that path. The Endbringers were slowly destroying civilization. They had already shut down space travel and most of the ocean-going trade. Cities were either destroyed or quarantined one-by-one. Psychopaths like the Slaughterhouse Nine roamed the country, wiping out whole towns. The heroes seemed more concerned with protecting their image than they were with fixing things, and the villains were treated with kid gloves so that they could help fight the Endbringers.
Jimmy Olsen came into the room and asked, "Do you mind if I join you?"
She simply gestured to a seat in the universal silent sign for, "be my guest." He went to the replicator and ordered a cheeseburger before sitting down at the table. Taylor watched him as he came to sit down. He was older than her, but he had a softer face covered in freckles. Somehow, he managed to avoid the tired eyes that most of their crew had at least occasionally.
"So, you come from a world with capes like Peter and me?" she asked him, eager to stop thinking about dead and dying versions of Earth.
He smiled at her. "I like that term, 'capes,' for supers. I'm going to use that when I get back home in one of my articles. In my world, a lot of them really do wear capes. There's even one in Gotham City known as, 'the Caped Crusader.'"
"Gotham City?" she asked curiously.
"Yeah, Gotham City, New Jersey. It's the crime capital of the United States," explained Jimmy.
"Is that where you're from?"
"No," he answered. "I live in Metropolis, in Delaware."
"Delaware?," she said with some surprise. "In my world, there aren't any big cities in Delaware. The largest city there is the capital, Dover."
"Weird," he said. "In my world, Metropolis is one of the biggest cities in the world, with more than eleven million people. Where are you from?"
"I was born and lived my whole life in Brockton Bay, New Hampshire," she replied.
"Huh, never heard of it. I don't think there's any such city where I'm from," he said. "Strange how different the cities are between our worlds."
"Peter had never heard of it, either. He said he was from New York, which does exist in my world," she said with a slight shake of her head.
"Oh, New York City exists in my world too, but it isn't as big as Metropolis," he said, smiling.
She stared at him for a minute, wondering if he was pulling her leg. "That seems like a lot of big cities in a really small area...although I guess California in my world has three major cities along the coast by itself."
"What's Brockton Bay like?" Jimmy asked.
She shrugged her shoulders. "It's home. It used to be a big port, but there was a dockworkers strike that blocked the bay with a sunken tanker ship. Then the Endbringers showed up and trade started to die off. Now, it's mostly famous as the city with the largest number of capes per capita of any city in North America. Unfortunately, most of them are in criminal gangs."
"It actually sounds a lot like Gotham," suggested Olsen. "There are a lot of criminal gangs there led by super-villains...Joker, Penguin, Two-Face, etc."
That startled a small giggle out of Taylor. "You have a super-villain named Penguin? Does he have super waddling powers?"
This time Jimmy chuckled. "He's mostly a crime lord who has a penchant for tuxedos and umbrellas. I'm not even sure he has any powers."
"It would be hard to be a non-powered criminal in a city full of cape gangs, although there is one in Brockton Bay named Coil...nobody seems to know if he has any powers or not. Mostly, his men are mercenaries armed with tinker tech." She had explained to the rest of the crew about tinkers. Both Peter and Jimmy had inventors in their world that were so far ahead of everybody else that they may as well have been tinkers. Miles had had the funniest reaction. He seemed almost offended that there were engineers who could build advanced technology that could neither be explained nor duplicated.
They ate in silence for a few minutes before Jimmy spoke again. "Can I ask you a personal question?"
She eyed him warily. "Sure, but I reserve the right to not answer."
"Fair enough," he agreed. "You said you wanted to be a hero originally, but the leader of the local heroes screwed you over. Would you still want to be a hero if things were different?"
She stared at him for a second before responding. "Of COURSE I would. I never wanted to use my powers to hurt people, Jimmy. If I hadn't tried to infiltrate the Undersiders, I never would have..." She paused when she realized what she was about to say.
He raised an eyebrow at her. "You never would have what?"
She sighed and looked down at her suddenly unappetizing food, again. "Right before Leviathan attacked, I found out that the last job we did, robbing a bank, was a diversion for a kidnapping. Our boss, the guy paying our paychecks, had kidnapped a little girl who has powers. I never would have agreed to take part in the robbery if I had known what was going to happen."
"But you didn't know," said Jimmy. At her look, he clarified, "you said you joined your gang to try and bring them down from the inside, and you had no way of knowing what was going to happen while you robbed that bank. Even if you hadn't been there, your gang probably would have robbed the bank and the girl would have been kidnapped. The difference is that you probably wouldn't know anything about it, and you wouldn't be able to try and do anything to help."
"You think it's better that I helped them rob a bank?" she asked incredulously.
He shook his head. "I'm not saying that. I'm saying that you had good intentions, and that you've got intelligence now that you wouldn't have had otherwise. It's not all negative. What matters is what you do going forward."
"It isn't that easy," she said. "In my world, the whole heroes and villains thing tends to be pretty black-and-white. It isn't easy to change sides. Once you get a reputation as a villain, you're pretty much stuck in that role. It may not be fair...actually, it really sucks...but it is what it is."
He smiled again. "Maybe that's usually the case, but most folks don't get pulled into a multi-universe adventure with such an unusual group of people. You might be surprised at the options you have once all is said and done."
"You're quite the optimist," she told him. The look in her eye was still skeptical.
As Jimmy put his now empty dish and silverware back in the replicator, he said, "I've just had some good role models. If we get a chance in my universe, I'll introduce you to Superman. He's pretty much everything a superhero is supposed to be."
"We've got a guy like that, too," she said knowingly. "His name's Legend. From what I've read about him, he's legitimately a great guy and a great hero. He also single-handedly advanced gay rights by decades by coming out."
Jimmy gave a startled laugh that he quickly suppressed. As he left the dining hall, he said over his shoulder, "Oh, I'm definitely introducing you to Superman."
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The ship was floating in deep space between solar systems while the group debated on where to go next.
"To be completely honest," said Ellen, "I'm not sure I could take another universe where Earth is falling to chaos because of xenomorphs. I'm willing to try for one of your realities instead for the next attempt."
"I'm gonna say we not pick mine as the next try," said Xander slightly reluctantly. "My world has direct connections to a lot of really unpleasant dimensions. What works for horseshoes and hand grenades might end up dumping us somewhere we can't easily escape."
Harry considered that for a moment. "My world might fall into that category as well. I could probably get us back into the real world if we ended up in the Nevernever or someplace like it, but we could end up attracting a tremendous amount of unfortunate attention."
"I know for a fact that there are a ton of parallel worlds very similar to mine," said Peter. "I've actually been to a couple of them. I was able to get back to my world, although it required some pretty advanced technology to do so."
Dresden raised his hand to interrupt. "Actually, Pete, based on some of the comics back home, we might want to avoid your neck of the multiverse. Some of those alternates involve things like zombie apocalypses with superheros and super-villains becoming flesh-eating zombies...and keeping their powers."
"The same goes for Jimmy's world," said Xander. "In one universe I remember, the Joker manipulated Superman into killing Lois Lane and destroying Metropolis. Superman executed the Joker and took over the world to force his vision of order on everyone."
Jimmy's mouth dropped open in shock. "I'm having a hard time imagining the man I know doing something like that!"
Xander explained, "At the time, Superman and Lois were married and she was carrying his unborn child."
Jimmy closed his mouth, unsure how to respond to that.
"The parallel universe I'm most familiar with to my world isn't a very nice place," said O'Brien. "The Federation never formed there. Instead, humanity created the Terran Empire and subjugated most of the surrounding species. It's not someplace I would want to be trapped."
"Wait," said Harry, "you mean there really is a mirror universe where Mister Spock had a beard?"
O'Brien had read the reports on the original Constitution-class Enterprise's transporter accident after what happened on Deep Space 9, so he was familiar with the incident. "I'm not sure how you know that particular detail, but yes. It exists, and there is a history of contact between the two universes up until what for me is the present day."
"The two alternate versions of my universe that I've visited both had Earth being attacked and subjugated by the Goa'uld. The second was only able to fight them off with help from my universe and the Asgard," said Daniel.
Everybody turned to look at Taylor, the only one who hadn't spoken.
"The...only alternate I know of to my world is Earth Aleph," she answered the unspoken question, "and it actually is probably nicer than my world. They have fewer heroes and villains, and the Endbringers don't exist there. I mean, people have said that there certainly are other worlds, so I suppose there could be one where...I don't know, Scion is a horrible villain out to destroy the world?"
"Well," said Harry, "if there isn't anything recommending one of our realities over the other, we might as well pick the one that we don't know for sure has an evil twin with a goatee."
"Not everyone's duplicate in that universe had a goatee," said Miles irritably.
"Did yours?" asked Xander with a grin.
Miles grimaced and replied, "No, he didn't." More quietly, but still loud enough to be heard, he said, "He had a nickname..."
"That said," interjected Daniel, "is anybody opposed to making Taylor's world the next target to try and reach?"
Nobody had any opposition to the idea, so the motion carried.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
After another transition, they made it to a universe that looked identical down to the first significant digit to Taylor's quantum signature. Setting the ship well away from the Earth to avoid any chance of drawing the attention of the Simurgh, they monitored broadcast traffic in an attempt to compare it to what Taylor knew. They were able to confirm the existence of a lot of things Taylor knew, including the Protectorate, the Guild and the Birdcage. There was also mention of Scion and the Triumvirate.
For safety's sake, they withdrew to the outer solar system to decide what to do. The jump to the orbit of Neptune resulted in the wormhole drive giving off some odd readings, which made everyone slightly nervous. Eventually, the decision was made to land in Brockton Bay. Taylor would go and try to verify that she was in her own universe, and Miles would work to check the drive system and make sure it wasn't malfunctioning. It looked all right, but nobody argued with the idea that it was better to be safe than sorry.
Interestingly enough, while they were debating far from Earth, they happened to miss a series of broadcasts about Taylor's hometown, and how an enormous lizard in a hardhat was clearing the ship blocking the bay.
