They both blushed despite themselves, and then burst out laughing regardless. “Forty-five minutes,” Primus sighed, then shook his finger at me. “I’ll have you know I am a very important man now, Dynamo!”

I just rolled my eyes. “Oh please, like you weren’t before. Primus the Planetary Protector, looked up to by the whole world. Tell me you got Russia back on the right track.”

“I did indeed,” answered Callie for him, winking at me, and Primus just smiled thinly. “It is still a very different world from our own. Oh, and he is the father of fourteen!” She elbowed her man sharply, and he put on a big beaming smile as her dark brown hair caressed one cheek while she kissed him on the other.

I flashed them two thumbs, and even Sersi murmured, “Oh, how marvelous!”

“So good that there were two of me,” Callie admitted with another wink. “Oh, we wanted to know if you wanted to be involved in a very big fight.”

“The Badoon still decided to come?” I asked fatalistically.

“Yes, the fleet is on the way now. We expect hostilities to start within the hour.”

“Sure. Give me a chronal lock.” It bleeped up instantly, and I just nodded and cut off the cross-time coms, walking over to the time machine.

It was my first time using one as myself, although Tatyana had used them many times before, so the experience was totally as expected, with my Cosmic Awareness assuring me that I was staying on course, veering off only slightly into the new timeline which, since I was associated with the sources of the diversion, was no strain.

---

I materialized on an identical floor pad in a side room of their private mansion in the foothills of the Urals, a place almost unknown to most of the world, judging by its temporal signature and lack of general awareness.

Fourteen kids! Their echoes played over the wood and stone of the building, the sprawling rooms and the grounds beyond. Rich families often did not have many kids, as it diluted the family wealth, but Callie and Primus had done this to enjoy the experience of raising a family, and so that’s what they had built. Wealth had obviously not been a concern.

A very attractive raven-haired woman with the telltale posture, physique, and atmosphere of someone who had undergone Black Widow training was waiting for me. I noted the Specs coronet she was wearing, giving her the effortlessly distinct air of a princess.

“Miss Dynamo?” she asked pleasantly, holding out her hand, and I shook it promptly, grinning at her.

“Which number are you?” I asked instantly, and she rolled her eyes and sighed.

“Nine,” she admitted, smiling slightly. “Tatalia Callisova,” Her grip closed, and my eyebrows rose. This woman was extremely strong. “My appellation is The Godspear. I inherited mother’s Mimic abilities, but they only work on gods.” She indicated the way out, and I fell in beside her.

“I am almost afraid to ask who,” I flinched in exaggeration.

“Hercules, Thor, Perrun, Hermes, and Hebe,” she admitted with only a little hesitation.

I found my eyebrows lifting. “Hebe?” I asked leadingly.

“I am married to Hercules.” Her chin rose proudly. “Hebe is my middle name,” she said quietly, and there was a fluttering about her Aura of a true Divine presence.

“Two thousand years before he was willing to touch his half-sister wife,” I nodded at her. “Well done!”

“Sneaking up to Olympus to get her out of there was the hardest part,” she admitted quietly. “Her parents have barely noticed she is not available, and certainly not looked for her much.”

“The Goddess of Marital Faithfulness and Virtue. No, no, she couldn’t have possibly been looking for a way to be with her husband for all these years?” I asked the sky.

“And fight at his side!” they exclaimed proudly, raising her fist. The air trembled with restrained divine strength. “Although we cannot use her sorcery, lest Zeus and Hera notice,” they grumbled.

“You’ll just have to be satisfied with being the strongest goddess alive!”

Her smile was so pure I could imagine Hercules almost falling down when seeing it. “We are!” they confirmed.

“Where do Primus and Callie need me?”

They gave me an odd look. “You address my father by Title and my mother by name?”

“Oh, do you know of their origins?” I asked them.

They nodded. “They said they came from another alternity...”

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“Your mother had no public appellation. She was the Mimic, the person who could covertly sub for any member of the High Guard there. She was ‘just’ a Black Widow helping run LaGrange, so everyone called her Callie. Does she use another name here?”

“Prima!”

“Tell me she didn’t call her first daughter Donna.”

They flashed three fingers and wiggled them. “Donna inherited the Voice of Thunder, so it was appropriate...” She tried to keep her face straight, but we both ended up laughing regardless. “Yes, Donna Primasova is an old joke in the family...”

“I can send you off if it’s a long way, and myself, too. Am I to be partnered with you?” I asked calmly.

“With the speed of Hermes and the strength of the other gods, I can serve as a living missile,” she agreed. We had come to the main floor, and we were walking through the rooms. I knew there were over a dozen second-generation children still living here, but they were all outside looking up at the sky at present. “I was told that would be your primary attack method?”

“It can be, but, well, I have many other options.” I watched her Ultra Specs assume a battle-helm form, and Specs promptly went full Mask on me.

The battlefeed came in promptly. Our markers popped up, and the desired deployment of them.

“Mother says you are fast,” she smiled.

“Oh ho, half a god of speed wants to see if she can keep up with the otherworld interloper who can outrace her mom?” Her eyes went a little wide. “Sure, sure.” I took her hand, and before she could protest, I took off.

She was totally and unreasonably strong, even if she had only half the strength of each individual god she Mimicked, so there was no possibility of me hurting her.

Of course, I was also unreasonably strong, and despite herself, she shouted as I blew through the atmosphere with impossible smoothness and speed, right up into orbit in only a couple seconds, and then really kicked it in for the far side of the moon, arriving there in just a breath, clearly not straining myself.

I let her go as I looked around, painting the positions of the cloaked defensive satellites around into my own Awareness, and then rushing it out to the rest of the system calmly.

Whoof, that was a big fleet coming... “It’s like they are expecting trouble or something.”

“What are you seeing?” Tatalia asked over coms, and I promptly painted the incoming fleet arriving through hyperspace into the overall battle display.

There was a moment of incredulity at the addition, and then I heard Callie’s laugh in my ear. “Steve, that’s the helper we brought in.”

“How did you get such details so fast, Dynamo?” Captain America’s tag promptly asked in my ears.

“Cosmic Awareness, sir,” I replied politely.

He digested that. “How fast can you input ship specs?”

Brrrrp! “Uploaded, sir.” The HUD updated with ship types to go with the specs.

“Can I marry this woman?” a familiar narcissist’s voice broke in.

“I can see Pepper’s beacon right there, Stark,” I replied to him, shocking him to silence. Rescue was with the rescue teams, of course. “If you’d like to get your arse back to working on the opening missile volleys hitting them the second they emerge from hyperspace...”

“Right, right...” Loads of code began spinning out into the launchers. “Uh, do you happen to know the exact spot they’ll be coming out at?”

“I can get it within a light-second, hyperspace being what it is.” I concentrated on the immediate future, and began to paint overlapping probability zones into place in the HUD. Even traveling together in hyperspace, there’d be some randomness in exiting, although not enough to wind up crashing into one another.

“Happy Birthday to Earth!” Stark promptly crowed, and the blizzard of coding and reassignment of deploying railgun missile launchers intensified.

I glanced at Tatalia, who shrugged, and we both flashed to the nearest launchers, pushing them into new positions for when the Badoon exited hyperspace. Callie was also reworking deployments on the fly, and our new positions were at the back end of the fleet... as was a certain ram-drawn godly chariot that soon hurtled by, towing a bunch of satellites and dropping them off one by one.

Tatalia zipped over to join her husband for a short ride through space, enjoying more of his company before the true fighting actually started.

“Dynamo, can you identify the command vessel for the fleet?” Callie asked me over coms. “It’ll be well-defended, so we want Hercules to go in and take it out from inside.”

“You want the command vessel, or where the commander actually is?” I asked calmly.

Only the slightest pause. “Both?” she wheedled with a vocal smile.

I picked them out for her, and more orders went flowing, as the dreadnought and the carrier were very different targets.

The Badoon were going to be spread in an arc around the planet half a million miles long. They intended to overwhelm any orbital defenses, occupy the high orbitals, bomb the crap out of the major cities and military bases, easily picking off any launched missiles, and then land their infantry to claim the ground and begin the enslavement process.

They’d naturally gotten intelligence on the technology upgrades this Earth had experienced, but the fact remained they were still several generations of technology ahead of us. The planet’s living defenders were actually more worrisome at this point... but then, they hadn’t had Reed Richards and Tony Stark in mind, nor Primus coming in to give Earth a few generations head start on this stuff.

It was a galactic power, coming in to mess with one little planet. The population of Badoon outnumbered humanity a hundred times over. There was simply no way we could truly deal with a galactic empire like this making a serious effort to go at us.

But this wasn’t a truly serious effort. This was a casual effort by one faction of Badoon seeking a billion or so slaves from a lower-tech race to work its mines and do menial labor. The fact we had upgraded our tech so quickly meant it was better if we were cut off at the knees now instead of later, or we might really become a threat.

Not much different than where I had come from, except Primus had been able to use the knowledge of what Briggs had done to accomplish much the same, and had another thirty years to work things up.

I didn’t know the whole situation here, but there was also an Xandaran presence being kept quiet, and those were the symbols of ten Nova Corps ships being moved into position. Just a flicker of my Awareness, and yeah, I confirmed the arcologies of Xandar were gone... although it looked like the central one had actually survived and been moved to a new system, forming the anchor for a much more aggressive Xandaran resurgence in alliance with Earth... and the Zen-Whoberis, among others.

Gamora was a famous Nova Centurion here!

Well, the galaxy was going to find out a lot of stuff today. The ominous timeline endings on a dozen Badoon colony worlds only made me wince for a moment.

They had it coming.