Chapter 24:
The minute Strudel announced her august guest, Finn immediately motioned for Lollipop to cut the audience short. He had a bad feeling about what Dr. Bacon was going to say. The princesses weren't happy about that, but the big man put them off with a promise to get back to them with what he learned. With the decision made, Bonnie immediately moved to run interference, stepping out into the crowd to cajole her fellows into moving along. With Simone at his side, Finn walked through the door behind the throne, beckoning for Strudel and her guest to follow.
"Big news, Finn," said Strudel. Finn motioned for her to wait. They were too close to the throne room, and there were other matters on his mind just now. Turning to Lollipop, the big man said, "send word to the castle and get Blargetha here pronto. Round up Nadia, Shoko, and Sarah." "Shall I get Bill," asked the skinny girl. "No," Finn replied. "I need to assess things first." He wanted to figure out how bad the problem was before he started sending his family into harms way. Decisively, Simone said, "send Blargetha to the situation room. She can conference in from there."
Taking her husband by the arm, the Ice Queen stepped off. The day she'd dreaded had finally arrived. She feared that this was the darkness that Maja had seen. The Sky Witch had foretold an event that would shock Ooo to its foundations and change the course of their history forever. Simone shivered, her mind going to her children and grandchildren. Men lived for their legacy. Simone's life was her children. She'd never wanted them involved in Finn's deadly game. She'd been too late to save her husband, but she'd always tried to steer their kids away from the path Finn was on. Now she feared what this would mean for William, Fionna, and Star.
Finn moved to the head of the table when they reached the private meeting room, and Simone immediately occupied the chair at his right hand in a move that made Strudel want to bite. She didn't 'lord it' over the rest of them, but Simone made it pretty fucking clear what the pecking order was. Finn made Strudel wait until the conference was all put together. Shoko appeared. She'd been in town visiting her brother. Fionna dialed in, and, moments later, Nadia did the same. Bonnie arrived, with Hurletta at her side. And, finally, Blargetha's image sprang to life over one of the chairs to be joined by Sarah's in the next chair over.
"Ok," said Finn. "What did you find?" Dr. Bacon started off wrong, lapsing into a stream of gibberish that all present at the table knew was a little too much for even New Finn to manage. It was Bonnie who actually cut that stream of verbal diarrhea short. Cutting the doctor off with a wave of her hand, she said, "layman's terms, Doctor. Speak Common." Flushing in humiliation, Dr. Bacon explained, "I found a large object moving towards Ooo from the mid-range portion of the solar system." Finn's hard eyes focused in on the doctor's face. "How big," he rumbled? The doctor looked, for a moment, as if he were going to launch into another round of gibberish. Course-correcting, he offered, "it's hard to say. I believe it to be at least twenty miles in length. Maybe four miles in width. Give or take."
That was vast. Finn tensed. Simone's hand on his urged calm. "It's not... like a comet," Finn rumbled. He was familiar with comets. After Orgalorg's attack on the Comet of Change, Bonnie had spent hours talking to him about comets. He'd only understood half of what she was saying at the time, but he knew there were many comets out there in the darkness. "No, sire," Dr. Bacon replied. "It's... It's hard to explain, but it isn't moving like a celestial body should move. Comets have..." "Orbits," Simone muttered. "How fast is this thing making a bee-line towards us?" "It will make closest approach to Ooo in three weeks," the Doctor replied.
A ship. A ship headed towards them at what Finn guessed was very high speed for something in the darkness outside of Ooo.
Turning to Bonnie, the King asked, "how fast can the saucer fly?" She knew exactly what he was thinking, and she had to choke down her terror, cloaking it in a bland expression. Every woman in the room wore identical looks of worry. Keeping her face placid, Bonnie announced, "the saucer could intercept the ship in a week and a half's time..." "Halfway," Finn muttered. Not much margin. Turning to Lollipop, Finn asked, "where are we with the flying army?" "We have forty ships ready," she replied, "not tested, but ready for testing." Shoko announced, "integration with the control console is completed. We can control both types of machine at one time." It was good, but not good enough. Forty ships against something as big as a mountain range.
Finn turned to the hologram of Blargetha. "You have two days to provide a sketch of the weapon you proposed to me," he said. When an alarmed Bonnie might have piped up, Finn waved her to silence. "I don't need an intricate design," Finn said. "I just need enough detail to sell the Council on building it." "You'll have it," Blargetha replied. Turning to the astronomer, she asked, "do you have any guesses on chemical composition?" The astronomer began to spout a stream of the same unintelligible gibberish as before. When Finn might have interrupted, Bonnie stopped him. What Blargetha was asking was very important.
"Nickel-Iron," the candy-monarch rumbled. "That's a problem." "Why," Finn asked? "Very hard, Finn," Blargetha explained. "It's a very hard, dense material. The center of Ooo is nickel iron so tightly compressed it's both liquid and solid at the same time. The entire mass of the planet is pressing down on it." The big man made the leap ahead to the obvious question. "Can you build something big enough...," he asked? "To knock it down," Blargetha finished? "Maybe. I have to study it." "We have to study it," Sarah put in. "We'll have an answer tomorrow, Finn," she added.
That left one question on the table, and it might well be a bigger question than the others. "What're we telling them," Hurletta asked? They had to tell the Privy Council something. "We tell them that an alien ship is headed this way," Finn replied. "We tell them that we're preparing the castle for its first mission. We tell them that we have the flying robots prepared." He had said nothing at all about the size of their newest problem. He was going to lie by omission, letting them think that it was another ship of the size Martin had brought. Bonnie thought of protesting but quickly thought better of it. The last thing they needed was panic. Terror would get in the way of actually accomplishing anything.
"I will take charge of production operations," she said. "No," Finn said. "I need you at my side more than ever. Lollipop will continue to manage the factory. Please go and announce the news to the Privy Council. That's all I need for now, everyone. Keep this inside the family for the moment." After hearing assurances that they would keep the secret, Finn moved on. "All of you can go," he said. "I'd like to talk to Simone alone." Strudel grimaced, but she went along to get along. Taking Dr. Bacon with her, the youngest breakfast-cutie headed out. Sarah and Blargetha were next, with Bonnie being the last to go. Finn was left alone with his wife–his first wife.
Simone knew what he was going to say before he said it. "I wasn't proud of you in that moment," she said. "I talked to 'Letta, and I understand why you did what you did, but I didn't like the sneaking around and the rest of it." Nodding, Finn said, "I'm... kind of a lot confused sometimes on where the boundaries are. Baby, I don't like the life I'm leading, and I worry sometimes about what all of this is doing to you." The pale wizardess flushed, and silence reigned for a long, painful moment.
The cards were on the table. Primly, Simone declared, "I'm too busy to be with my husband, Finn. We're all too busy. You're often alone." Finn flushed, thinking of the night of Billy's wedding to Nieve. He'd been thinking the same thing that night. He'd been in a room filled with women he was married to alongside a couple 'mistresses'. And he'd been utterly alone. He still often felt alone–like he was carrying the weight of the world.
Getting up, Simone sat her self in his lap–a shocking move for the moment. Laying her head on his shoulder, "I helped walk us into this, Finn. I've wished a time or two that I hadn't volunteered to work on daddy's campaign for Grand Master. I'm sure mom has wished a time or two that she hadn't egged him on to do it. Trouble is that wishes can't take us back to where we were, honey. I can't wish us to be back in the Treehouse, and no matter how hard I've tried, I can't break myself free of the burden of Wizard City." No more than Finn had broken free of the title of King.
"You used to say that the only way to go was forward," she said. "I'm going forward into the future where someday we're going to have literally dozens of beautiful children to help us build this world into something we'll be proud of." The Ice Queen turned and gave him a heated kiss, saying, "just remember. I'm first-wife. I get first-dibs." With an evil grin, she jerked down her bodice and flashed those mega-knockers of hers at him, just before bouncing out of his lap. The big man stared at that saucily wiggling ass as she strode up the length of the room and out the door, adjusting her dress as she went. It was down to who got dibs. He was 'dibs'.
Finn sat there in that empty room for a long, long while after she'd gone. There were other things to get said, but this wasn't the right time to say them. The moment felt a lot like the night he'd decided on what he was going to do about the Lich. He'd kept the whole thing to himself, telling no-one what the real plan was. But we can't do that again, he decided. He wouldn't do that again. He'd have to tell them. But now wasn't really the time. Shaking his head and muttering curses, the King got up and headed out himself. He had to grab his bag of grubby clothes and get on his way. There was a promise to keep.
The following day, Drusilla Princess-Mertens rose from bed to the unhappy rumbling of her stomach. After taking care of the problem, the worried and disturbed doctor headed down to the infirmary to look in on her patient of the hour. Her mind was on the hard reality facing the world. It was doubles or nothing again, with the world under just as much of a threat as it had been when the Lich was running around. The King's doctor was worried about his mental health. She knew very well the sort of things a crisis of this magnitude drove a man to do. She'd seen it first hand when Finn tried to suicide-bomb the Lich. The signs were all there, just as they'd been the night she'd last seen him before the showdown on the Ice Island, only now she saw them clearly when she'd been blinded to them before.
Arriving at the infirmary, she checked in with the guards and the small staff of nurses she had to work with here. Moving onwards, she got into some scrubs and a labcoat and headed in to see 'Kara'. She'd been managing that little problem the last few days because Finn was just too busy. She'd been doing her best to figure out what was going on with the stranger who had been Susan Strong, even enlisting the Wolf's help. The witch-doctor had confirmed and reconfirmed it. Kara was Susan Strong. It stood to reason. Finn had said it himself. Susan had been basically a wreck of a person when he found her. She sounded like an amnesiac. So what did they do with Kara? Drew had no idea.
"Well," said the doctor, as she took in the sight of her patient doing one-armed pushups on the floor of her room, "it looks like you're doing a lot better." Kara grunted something unfriendly. She wanted out. She'd been making noises about being out of here. Drew had put her off, best she could. "Well, since you're working out," said the doctor, "I'm going to wire you up and see how your heart is doing..." Kara groaned. She should have finished before the nosey doctor showed up.
Drew put her through her paces, making her do situps and more pushups and then dragging her across the infirmary to the treadmill. All the while the doctor listened to her heart and checked her over. Kara went along more because she wasn't sure where to go from here. The mission was a bust. She'd cracked her head during the crash and basically lost a few decades. What was really the point of continuing? More to the point, where the fuck was she going to go? She didn't have a way to leave here and wasn't sure where to go anyway. Part of her had been thinking of maybe just seeing what these people were going to do and maybe just slipping back into whatever passed for society here. She was a survivor. She was a descendent of survivors. Making do was what she did.
As the doctor worked, it slowly became clear to Kara that she was distracted. Something was bothering her. She would get halfway through a test, realize she'd screwed up, and then have to do it again–much to Kara's chagrin as the testee. "Sooo," said Kara, as the doctor pulled the thermometer from her mouth the second time, "what's bugging you?" Drew looked up in a panic, her face going red-hot. Caught! Glancing away, she said, "a little family trouble..." "Your guy doing dumb shit," Kara asked? "Hardly," Drew snorted. Finn was a very good husband. "I fear he's about to do something rashly heroic," the doctor muttered.
"What," Kara asked? "More undead?" "Aliens," muttered Drew. "There's something that looks like an alien ship headed towards Ooo. We think the same people who were holding you may have somehow contacted it." She knew as soon as she'd said it that she'd said too much. That was supposed to be carefully guarded information, and she'd just blabbed it like it was palace gossip. Shaking that off, she said, "nothing to worry about. Finn's been working on precautions." "Yeah," agreed Kara. "I'm sure this will turn out to be nothing. Who ever heard of aliens hitting the planet after all?" Drew chuckled. This woman had been underground too long. She'd missed one of the biggest events in Ooo's history! As the big woman stared, the doctor told her all about how Martin Mertens had come to Ooo with an alien battleship and tried to free the monster in Ooo's heart–and how his heroic son had stopped the villain and sent him to the Night-O-Sphere to face judgment.
Elsewhere, the King was sitting down with his team to figure out where they were and what the plan would be going forward. Blargetha and Sarah were both present, having driven down overnight. A newcomer was Princess Sakura. The Truth Field Projection Princess had been visiting with Nadia and flown in to participate at Bonnie's request. The gathering was a very somber one. Sitting down at the head of the table, the King signaled for Bonnie to begin the meeting.
It was Sakura who started things, announcing, "my Royal Astronomers have confirmed Dr. Bacon's data. The object in question appears to be self-propelled. It's definitely moving under its own power." "How do you know," Finn asked? "It's accelerating," Bonnie burbled. That sounded like very bad news. "How long now," Finn asked? "Still three weeks," Sakura replied. "It's moving quickly, but it's not moving at faster than light spee... uh... it's not moving as fast as we feared." The gathering relaxed. All but the King.
Finn turned to his weapon-designer. He was ambivalent about Blargetha and angry at what she had been attempting to do. At the same time, this was what he had, and he needed all hands on deck with what they were facing. On her side, Blargetha could see that he still seethed with anger at her. She'd gotten caught. She'd tried to manipulate him and gotten caught at it. He could kill her for that alone, and she had no child to shield her. But this was what she had. The strange little partnership between them was what she had.
"Conferring with Bonnibel and Sarah, I have developed a concept for a weapon that may give us a chance to knock down the enemy ship," she announced. "Ok," said Finn, "how long would it take us to build it?" "Six weeks," she replied. "I need six weeks to build it and test..." Shooting to his feet, Finn snapped, "I don't have six weeks!" Nodding, she said, "nevertheless, it's dangerous to take on whatever this is with a weapon that's slapped together. If we get it wrong, the gun is as likely to blow up as take down that ship. Our collective pants are down, Finn. It is what it is..."
Finn sat himself. What was he going to do? Wring her neck for telling him the truth? He was looking at a crisis as existential as the battle with the undead. It could be every bit as bad as the war with the Lich. Depending on what Bandit Princess had summoned, it could be as bad as the Lich, the Undead, and the aliens all at once. Clearing her throat, Hurletta said, "we need you, Finn. Don't lose hope on us now." Finn's face snapped up to hers. Glancing at her sister, she asked, "how much time does it need, Blargetha?" When her sister would have opened her mouth to speak, Slime-Princess softly said, "not what you'd want, sister. What do you need?"
Flushing, Blargetha said, "I need two weeks, 'Letta. Anything less could see the emplacement blow itself to hell along with everyone standing near it. I need at least another week to test with the mirror satellite. That's assuming Sarah or Shoko helping me..." "I can work on the mirror satellite," murmured Nadia. Finn glanced up, and his face showed concern. The tall princess gave him a bitter smile. "It's just as you said," she told him. "This... it's existential." Glancing at the table, Finn said, "that cuts us down to two weeks, and we've burned up a lot of time already..."
The King got up and began to pace. Expressions of worry blossomed on every face in the room, Billy's included. Dr. Princess wasn't the only one who remembered Finn's actions at the end of the Lich War. Though he'd been doing all he could to pick up some of the slack from his famous father, Billy wasn't ready to be King. He didn't want to carry this weight, and he felt nakedly, painfully ill-prepared for the job. "Ready the saucer," Finn commanded. When Bonnie would have objected, Finn shut her down. "Fact-finding," he said. "I'll take Sarah with me. We'll sneak up and take a look at this thing... see just what it is we're facing." Several faces there grimaced, and Simone's face suggested he was lying. Nobody said a word. "Ok," Bonnie murmured. "You may all be dismissed," the King announced.
Gee, that's an awful big ship that's coming. Whatever is Finn going to do about this?