Over the next month, Cecil reached out to me several more times.
Since he still hadn’t gotten his teleporter, the old man had to use less extraordinary means of communication.
A couple of times he tried to lure me to the Pentagon, promising that my visit would remain a secret from Nolan and everyone else.
I always refused.
Then Stedman either had to fly to a prearranged meeting place by helicopter, like the first time, or, if a personal meeting wasn’t necessary, use normal means of communication.
Lately, he’d been calling me so often, it felt like I’d made a new online friend.
A very strange feeling.
I knew I was being groomed and slowly recruited, but still.
Very strange.
Stedman tried to use me to find out about possible weaknesses of the Viltrumites that humans could use against Nolan if he went on a rampage, or if my father’s warlike kinsmen showed up.
Though in the latter case, Earth probably couldn’t be helped anyway.
Just imagine a whole galactic civilization of aggressively expansionist Viltrumites.
Even if our race doesn’t breed as actively as humans, and there’s no evidence of that, we’re talking at least many billions.
What could Earth oppose to such power, when even a single Viltrumite can single-handedly defeat the strongest team of Guardians?
Not to mention the ineffectiveness of conventional weapons, even nuclear, and armies.
Earth would be nothing before such power.
The whole galaxy had already bent the knee.
Well, almost the whole galaxy.
Thanks to my brief acquaintance with Allen the Alien, I knew that there was a force in the galaxy resisting Viltrumite expansion.
The Coalition of Planets, united by the threat of Viltrumite invasion.
Their very existence was encouraging.
If they somehow managed to hold off the conquerors, then Earth had a chance too.
We could join that alliance.
Besides, Allen’s very job, checking the combat effectiveness of defenders on remote worlds, was nothing less than gathering information about potential recruits for the war with Viltrum.
But unfortunately, I had almost no reliable information about the Coalition.
How many worlds were in it, what forces it had, how exactly it resisted the Viltrumites, nothing.
But they had guys like Allen, and he hit hard.
He could have subdued me when we first met.
That’s something.
***
Anyway, I didn’t have much faith that Stedman could come up with anything effective besides keeping the Guardians and a couple of other powerful fighters on standby.
But better that than nothing.
Last time, I was in a really bad way.
Besides the Immortal, whom my father casually killed a second time, no one helped me in the fight with Omni-Man.
Well, “fight.” Honestly, Dad just beat me within an inch of my life, incidentally killing many thousands of ordinary people who just happened to be nearby.
The greatest benefit of knowing the head of the intelligence service was getting first-hand information about where they were sending my father and how serious they thought the threat was.
Combined with the fact that Nolan himself was increasingly convinced that I would remain an ordinary human forever, and was less and less attentive to me, this made my life significantly easier.
I could safely go to the opposite side of the Earth from my father and train there, or even get into small adventures.
Cecil had already started offering me tasks that were within my reach.
Of course, he immediately wanted to install the same in-ear communicator in me as my father had, so he could always stay in contact.
But the prospect of being listened to and tracked 24/7 didn’t appeal to me at all.
That’s even worse than bugs in the bedroom.
Then one day, a couple of months after I’d met Cecil, I found a moment to make my first foray into space.
I’d been wanting to do this for a long time, but before I’d been held back by the risk of being spotted by intelligence services or scientists.
Now I knew that it was all pointless.
They’d been watching me from the very beginning.
Only my immense speed, which no sensors or drones could keep up with, gave me some privacy.
For example, they lost me so badly when I decided to help Eve with her family.
Everything would have been much simpler if Cecil’s intelligence hadn’t lost sight of me and reported the chaos that one of the Agency’s leaders had caused to their boss.
Since neither my father nor my mother, Debbie had gone to get a manicure with her friend, which would take at least four hours, was home, and there was no longer any need to hide from the intelligence services, I allowed myself to be a little careless and took off right from our backyard.
Even if someone had looked at the sky at that moment, they would have seen nothing but a thin red streak.
The takeoff was too fast.
Besides, people rarely look up.
My father constantly flies in the window in his costume, and I did the same in my past life, and over all that time, the neighbors never figured us out.
Rising into the stratosphere and beyond was no more difficult for me than flying to Walmart for groceries.
The first time, I almost accidentally fell into the sky, as absurd as that sounds.
It’s all about the nature of our flight.
We not only create a powerful driving force, but we also completely ignore gravity.
***
Space greeted me with deafening silence, cold, and an abyss of distant stars.
It was dark, starry, and there was nothing to breathe.
Only the lack of a hundred atmospheres desperately squeezing the oxygen stored in my alveoli, and the predatory creatures deformed by pressure, cold, and chronic starvation, so eager to break their rotten teeth on me.
Although, if you searched hard, you could find someone to cross swords with here too.
But I had other plans for today.
First, I listened to my feelings.
There was something.
I’d noticed it before, during my deep dives.
It was related to my ability to navigate in space.
Before, I could only appreciate it on a continental scale.
But now I realized it was something much bigger than topography.
I seemed to vaguely sense space itself and its distortions.
Earth was the nearest anomaly in space, a gravity well in which I’d spent my entire life, so I was used to its effects and always took them for granted.
But now, I felt like I was adapting to a new level of stimulation, much more subtle than before.
Like someone who’s first entered darkness.
Although I was still too close to Earth, its existence loomed over me like granite, drowning out the background.
But I thought I understood.
Space.
You could feel it.
Its vibrations, fluctuations, and especially the distortions caused by massive objects.
Even with my eyes closed, just by sensing these distortions, I could easily navigate.
There was the moon, a well within a well.
Over there, distant but huge, the Sun, a real chasm in the fabric of spacetime.
Its distortion is so enormous, it’s like a background in which all other anomalies are located.
Which makes sense, since it contains almost one hundred percent of the mass of our system.
Before, I hadn’t even noticed this.
I just flew on instinct, not even thinking about how I navigated so well in space.
Though I’d never had to fly farther than the moon.
To think, I’d had so much free time and opportunity, and I’d stayed on the ground, not even raising my head to the stars.
Preventing some minor robbery, getting into a fight, was more interesting to me than looking through the dense atmosphere of Venus, which still hides the secrets of that planet from our scientists.
Yes, that definitely wasn’t from Mark Grayson.
This delight, this awe.
I could fly to any planet, any asteroid in the system, descend to their surface, bathe in the oceans of Europa and Enceladus.
How could I have remained so indifferent to that?
If it weren’t for my father and his relatives.
Damn conquerors.
Alright, let’s get to work.
***
I took my camera, checked that it survived the space exposure, it worked, Eve had done a great job, turned on the recording.
First I caught the moon in the lens, then Earth, beautiful.
I shifted focus into the darkness where a red dot flickered.
Let’s ride.
I “pushed off” from the vacuum and raced like a cosmic projectile toward the red planet.
And I was much faster here than on Earth.
If I’d been relying only on my human senses, I might not have noticed the trick.
There were no visual cues comparable to my scale, no environmental resistance.
Even moving close to the speed of light, the Sun, the most visible landmark in the system, wouldn’t grow that fast.
It would take twelve minutes for it to go from a ball you could hide with a coin to a star blotting out the entire cosmos.
That is, your mind understands that even a tiny change in the size and position of such a distant object in your field of vision indicates covering a huge distance.
But human perception, evolved for different scales and categories, easily deceives itself.
But I had a completely different perception of my own speed and space, unrelated to what my eyes saw.
And that perception told me that within seconds, I’d reached a speed surpassing anything Red Rush had ever shown, who had seemed unattainably fast on Earth.
What was this?
Was it really easier for me to fly outside Earth’s gravitational field, though I’d just boasted that I could completely ignore it without any effort?
Or was I holding myself back, instinctively understanding that such speeds were unacceptable in an atmosphere?
They threatened not only the surroundings but also myself.
And this, I felt, was not the limit.
I could go faster, much faster.
I suddenly felt scared.
What would happen if I reached the speed of light?
Even my current speed should already slow my time relative to an observer on Earth.
I would simply evaporate, wouldn’t I?
Fortunately, the more time I spent outside Earth’s familiar gravitational field, the sharper my sense of space became, and the more confident I grew in my ability to travel through space.
This was in our blood.
We Viltrumites were literally made for this.
For space.
For traveling vast distances.
For navigating what, to others, is empty space.
Yes, with such abilities, I was completely confident that my father, having left Earth, hadn’t committed suicide or anything.
He’d simply flown away, perfectly understanding that even without a ship or supplies, he could find another habitable planet.
When Mars had grown large enough that it was comparable in size to Earth just after I’d left it, my camera timer showed thirty-two minutes.
Considering that acceleration and deceleration took only seconds, and I’d moved at a constant speed the rest of the time, knowing the distance between the planets, it worked out that I’d accelerated to about three-tenths the speed of light.
Holy shit.
And I wasn’t even tired.
How the hell did that work?
Accelerating and decelerating should have taken…
at that speed, you could roughly calculate the energy using the classic formula of mass times velocity squared divided by two.
The error wouldn’t be too big.
My sixty teenage kilos times approximately one hundred million meters per second gives something around three hundred petajoules of energy.
Add a few dozen due to approaching relativistic speeds.
That’s just for acceleration.
Another that much needed to be spent on deceleration.
And I did it in seconds, completely untired.
Fucking hell.
That just can’t be.
There can’t be that much energy in me.
And I could have gone faster, I was just afraid to accelerate further.
But then the energy costs would go to infinity.
I clearly didn’t understand something about how my own powers worked.
Or all of physics was wrong, and there was no problem of high speeds and energies at all.
I’d think about that later.
***
Right now, I needed to find the rover.
It was working in Gale Crater.
It wasn’t so easy to distinguish one region from another.
Fortunately, I’d studied the map of the region and the planet well.
It would be stupid to fly to Mars and not know exactly where the rover I needed was.
I adjusted the camera’s light sensitivity to capture the material properly and made a fairly slow, compared to what I’d just been doing, flyby of the red planet.
Yeah, there’s the right plateau.
I descended into the planet’s atmosphere and flew to the crater where my expedition’s hero should be working.
I found the poor guy on the western edge of the crater.
Why poor?
Because for four months now, the whole world had been watching his attempts to get out of the crack his rover’s wheels had gotten stuck in.
Funny that in that world where I was an ordinary cosmonaut, this rover didn’t have such problems.
I even wondered if it was the Martians’ doing, but apparently not.
The little guy, which was actually the size of a car, had simply gotten its wheel stuck in a crevice.
Just a regular navigation glitch or something.
One light movement of my hand, and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars invested in this research mission were saved.
And a photo for the memory.
***
After that, I flew around a bit more with my camera over the surface of Mars, filming material for my documentary.
I still hadn’t decided where to put all this naturalistic video.
Half an hour later, leaving Mars’s rarefied atmosphere behind, I headed for its moons and made quick flybys of Phobos and Deimos, again for the video.
By the way, I didn’t notice this right away, shocked by my own speed estimates and the theoretical energy costs of acceleration and deceleration, but Mars felt different from Earth in my perception.
Something was missing.
Probably the magnetic field.
Mars doesn’t have one.
So I’d been closer to the truth than I thought when I compared my ability to orient in space to bird navigation by magnetic fields.
Though I felt this difference, my sensitivity wasn’t tied to the mandatory presence of a magnetic field.
I still felt the planet’s mass pressing down on space.