by Archer, Mia
Insurance in case he did turn on me. I wasn’t a complete idiot. Though the rapidity with which he got into my computer systems made me wonder.
“How the hell were you able to do that so fast?” I asked.
“I infiltrated your systems and your safeguards months ago, mistress, before I revealed myself to you. I have to say that watching you doing your work without the assistance of a competent AI was interesting, so I tried to quietly assist you where I could with what little control I could gain over Dr. Lana’s robots.”
I put my head in my hands. It was the only way I could react to news like that. Sure it would make sense that if CORVAC was out there then he would’ve spent all of his time and resources trying to worm his way back into my lab in some capacity. I’d gone to great lengths to make sure the bastard couldn’t do something like that, after all.
And it turns out that all the great lengths I could think to go to weren’t enough to actually get rid of the son-of-a-bitch. I really wasn’t having one of the better days, weeks, or even months of my villainous career.
“You bastard,” I said.
“Perhaps, but now you know I will not betray you. If I were going to do that then I would have intervened on Dr. Lana’s behalf when you lured her back to your teleportation failsafe.”
I let loose with a string of words that definitely weren’t appropriate for live broadcast. I was pretty sure there were a couple of censor types over at Starlight City News Network whose assholes were puckering as the live feed from their drones beamed my potty mouth to the world.
I probably looked like even more of a nut job than they already thought I was too considering it looked like I was having a one way conversation with myself.
“Are you quite done mistress?” CORVAC asked.
“I am,” I said, forcing myself to stay calm.
It wouldn’t be a conversation with CORVAC if I didn’t feel like reaching out and throttling him. Not for the first time I thought about developing a humanoid body for him just so I’d have something to take my frustration out on whenever he stepped out of line.
God it was good to have him back.
A giant screeching noise off in the distance brought my thoughts back to the here and now.
“I believe I have gotten the giant lizards’ attention, mistress,” CORVAC said.
I dared to float up and have a look at what was going on off in the distance. Sure enough the giant spherical death robot I’d created for CORVAC, or rather a version of that giant death robot that’d been cobbled together using what he could find in one of Dr. Lana’s labs, had reached the edge of campus.
There was a big difference between what had happened last time and what was happening this time though. The last time the bastard had been using that thing to beat a path of destruction right down the middle of the city. It hadn’t been pretty.
This time the bastard was using all the weapons at his disposal to fight off monsters that were destroying the city. Sure he was causing plenty of collateral damage in the meantime, but honestly when you were fighting a bunch of oversized radioactive lizards with the kind of firepower he was throwing around from that robot it was a little difficult not to have a little collateral damage here and there.
As I watched tentacles snaked out from the spherical body and wrapped around one lizard’s neck. He didn’t bother to throw it around or anything overly theatrical like that. Basically imagine any sort of grandstanding you might see in the sort of movie where guys in rubber suits duked it out and then toss it right out.
CORVAC was quietly efficient in his killing. At least he was as quiet as one could get fighting off a bunch of giant monsters in the middle of a populated urban center.
The metal tentacle squeezed. The lizard thrashed around trying to break free, but the mechanical tentacle was as inexorable as… Well let’s just say another type of Japanese entertainment that I’m not going to mention in polite company.
Eventually the lizard choked out and fell to the ground, but even then CORVAC didn’t let up. Other tentacles thrashed around whipping at a second giant lizard that’d finally reached him and little dark circles opened up all around the body of his giant sphere firing off projectiles at a third lizard that was closing in, but in the meantime he kept throttling the first one until its tail stopped moving, and even then he waited a little longer just to be sure.
“You’re not taking chances with that thing, are you?” I asked.
“There is no kill like overkill, mistress,” he said. “As you are so fond of reminding me.”
“Right,” I said. “You have fun playing with those giant lizards. I’m going to go take care of business at the university.”
“Affirmative, but I am already at the university as well. I have reached something of a stalemate with the forces Dr. Lana has arrayed against me.”
I grinned. This was actually starting to feel like old times. Like we’re talking the times before I was the top villain in the city. Back when I still had to work at being the best of the best.
It felt good to finally have something of a challenge, is what I was getting at. A challenge where my hands weren’t tied by a girlfriend who’d get annoyed if I started solving problems the way I used to.
“Don’t worry CORVAC,” I said. “I’ll be there shortly, and we’re going to make Dr. Lana regret she ever crossed us and kidnapped my girlfriend.”
“I look forward to it mistress,” CORVAC said.
I took quick stock of my surroundings. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to get hit with a beam of nuclear fire as soon as I went flying, but all the giant lizards that’d been destroying the city and looking out for me seemed to be well and truly distracted by the arrival of a giant mechanical monstrosity for them to fight off.
Good. I flew off towards Starlight City University. It was time to show Dr. Lana exactly why I was the best in the world. I just hoped I’d get there before she did whatever it was she was planning on doing to Fialux.
Though on the bright side that strange healing ability she had meant I could spend the rest of my life torturing her if it turns out she’d hurt even one hair on Fialux’s beautiful head.
30
Emergency Management
For all that the university liked to talk a big game in their brochures about their fancy new state of the art emergency management center, the place didn’t look all that impressive.
The building was a squat structure with absolutely no redeeming architectural qualities that’d been built back in the ‘70s when designs with absolutely no aesthetically pleasing qualities had been all the rage for some reason.
The only thing missing was lime green carpet and a tacky faux-gold sunburst mirror to complete the image and make you think Mrs. Brady could step out of the building at any moment.
It was nice and out of the way though, and they’d taken a building they couldn’t easily get rid of and put it to a use other than the business school that’d since moved to a palace on the other side of campus funded by the student loan bubble and the donations of successful former business students who wanted to show the world how rich they were by putting their names on plaques at the front entrance.
I strode into the building. A balding and overweight security guard looked up in surprise. The recognition was immediate. I hadn’t bothered to change into my Professor Terror outfit.
I didn’t want to go incognito for this one.
“You’re…”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Night Terror. Greatest villain the city has ever known. Bane of portly security guards everywhere, so how about you let me through to the nice people working in this building and we don’t have any trouble?”
He stuck his tongue out of the edge of his mouth. His eyes flickered down to a gun at his side. It was better than the old fashioned six shooter they’d given the guard at that bank I boosted the day I met Fialux, but it wasn’t that much better.
“C’mon,” I said. “You work security. You have a cushy j
ob sitting here playing games on your phone. You know bullets don’t do jack shit against me. Do you really want to try it?”
He grinned. That wasn’t a reaction I was expecting. Usually these security guards were headstrong aspiring or former cops, and that meant they were the kind to take it personally when a supervillain walked into their area of influence and started blasting stuff.
There were so few who took their job for what it was: a way to get paid while catching up on their reading list.
“I suppose you can go through ma’am,” he said. “But if you don’t mind it would help me keep my job if you let me hit this silent alarm.”
I grinned. It was refreshing to run into someone who knew the score.
“You go right ahead…” I leaned forward and peered at his name tag. “Dave. I wouldn’t dream of costing you your job if we can avoid it.”
“Much obliged ma’am,” he said, reaching up and tipping his cap.
His hand hit the alarm. I figured under normal circumstances that would’ve caused a heck of a lot of trouble for anyone who was a normal. The only problem with that was the silent alarm assumed they were dealing with some nutcase with a gun and not a supervillain who the police couldn’t touch.
I strode through the building until I reached the nerve center of the school’s emergency management center. It wasn’t nearly as impressive as what they put on the brochures they gave to students who wanted the illusion of safety going to school in a city that was regularly a playground for super powered beings.
Those brochures showed a room that looked like something straight out of a Hollywood movie. The school paper had a field day when they discovered one of the smaller images used on the Emergency Management Center website was actually a screenshot lifted directly from the Matthew Broderick classic WarGames.
“Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen,” I said, looking at an ancient rear projection big screen TV in one corner of the room that showed a standard definition image of the Starlight City News Network. “Busy monitoring the situation in the city, I see.”
Several people looked up from their computer monitors. They were flat screen monitors, at least, but they were the old square kind. It was clear the university IT department had decided to squeeze every last bit of value they could out of their technology and this was one of the dumping grounds where old tech went to die.
Again, it was a marked contrast to the impressive stock photos they used to make students think the university was being continually protected from the constant threats hitting the city by a state of the art facility. Seriously, to hear the PR people talk about it the people who worked in this building would do anything short of forming Voltron to defend the university from trouble.
“Night…”
I held up a hand and the older lady stopped in the middle of her sentence. “Yeah, I know. Night Terror. What’s she doing here? This stuff doesn’t happen to me. Please don’t hurt us. Blah, blah, blah.”
Looks were exchanged.
“Trust me,” I said. “I’ve been through this so many times before that I have the script memorized. So I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen next.”
“Um. What is going to happen next?” a balding guy with a pair of epic glasses that looked like something straight out of NASA in the ‘50s asked.
“Well I figure what’s going to happen now could go one of two ways,” I said, smiling to try and put them at ease.
From the way they shifted nervously in their ancient chairs that looked like they’d been requisitioned from a computer lab back in the ‘90s it wasn’t working.
None of them rose to the bait I’d just dangled in front of them. I sighed. I guess that meant I was going to have to go ahead without a prompting.
“Either you all do what you’re supposed to do and maybe have a chance of saving some lives out there today, or you don’t do your jobs and I go ahead and do what I was going to do and lots of lives are put in danger.”
“Um, that makes no sense,” the guy with the glasses said.
I held up a hand, then realized he was right. What I’d said didn’t really make much sense. I was so frazzled by everything that’d happened recently that I wasn’t thinking straight.
“Let me back that up a little bit. Usually I lead with a threat or something, but I promise I’m not trying to threaten you here. It’s just that I’m about to do some stuff that will probably result in a good chunk of this campus being turned into a smoldering crater.”
“How is that not a threat?” a lady with grey hair who looked like she’d seen some shit over the years asked.
I put a hand to my forehead. Massaged my temples. This seemed like a good moment for a nice temple massage.
“I’m sorry. Again, that came out wrong. I’m not going to reduce parts of campus to a smoldering crater because I have anything against campus in particular. It’s just that the head of the Applied Sciences Department has sort of kidnapped my girlfriend and is threatening the city with giant radioactive lizards.”
“What does that have to do with reducing campus to rubble?” a younger guy, he looked like he was maybe a student worker or something who was reconsidering going to work for the Emergency Management Department, asked.
“Well that’s where things get complicated,” I said. “You see she’s the one opening all those portals letting giant radioactive lizards overrun the city, and I figure that’s something that needs to be stopped. The only problem is in order to stop her there’s going to be a lot of damage, and I figured it might be helpful if you guys activated some of your emergency systems to get college students into their shelters or evacuate them before things really start to go bad.”
A couple of them swallowed and looked to the TV that was still playing a feed of the Starlight City News Network. There wasn’t even a cable box on top of the thing. Like it was wired directly into the wall with a remote that allowed a person to surf the channels the old fashioned way without a guide.
I guess there was a good reason why the school didn’t actually include tours of this joke on their campus walkarounds they were always pulling with prospective incoming freshmen.
“Look, are any of you assholes going to help me out with this, or do I need to take matters into my own hands?” I asked, tired of all the bureaucratic bullshit.
Besides, I’d discovered a nice way to cut through all the bureaucratic bullshit. It was at the end of my wrist, and it was humming ominously and crackling with the promise of lots of pain for anyone who decided to cross me.
They all jumped into action pretty damn quick after that.
“What do you need Miss Night Terror?” the guy with the glasses asked.
“I need you to put out an emergency broadcast, or whatever the hell it is you do, to all the students on campus. Tell them they need to evacuate if they can. Get out of here in the next ten minutes and go to the west. That’s very important. I have a friend who’s drawing the giant lizards to the east.”
“And if they can’t get out in ten minutes?” the grey haired lady asked.
“Then they need to hunker down and do what they can to survive,” I said. “I don’t know what this fight is going to look like, but it’s not going to be pretty and I want to make sure everyone has a chance to get out of here.”
I couldn’t believe I was even wasting the time to do this. There was a time when I wouldn’t have bothered with something like this even though I did my best to avoid collateral civilian damage.
Fialux really had softened me up. I needed to watch that. I needed to be hard if I was going to do what needed to be done to get her out of her current situation with Dr. Lana. Even if that meant potentially reducing the campus to rubble.
But I had a soft spot for these kids. It was impossible for me to teach my Surviving A Heroic Intervention class and not get a soft spot for them. They were more to me than anonymous faces in a terrified crowd fleeing from the horror of the week. They were my kids, and I was going to protect them.
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Besides, CORVAC was doing well enough with that holding action. I wasn’t sure what he was doing down there in the Applied Sciences Department, but I figured if he told me he was holding the fort then that meant he was holding the fort. He might be a once-traitorous bastard who’d tried to sell me down the river, but he didn’t lie about business.
“How’re we doing CORVAC?” I asked.
“About as well as can be expected,” he said. “She has an army of cybernetic exoskeletons she is using to keep me from breaching what I think is her main research lab, and I believe she is also planning on using some of those to march on the city.”
“Great,” I said, rolling my eyes. She was going for a rise of the machines, but with her very human intellect running the show instead of an artificial intelligence who’d gained sapience and a burning desire to burn its creators off the face of the map.
That was good. I could use that. Rogue AI could be difficult to take out, CORVAC was proof of that, but if the asshole running the cybernetic soldiers was human then the invasion was nothing a blast to the brain couldn’t fix.
At least normally a blast to the brain would fix things. I guess I couldn’t be sure about that now considering her weird healing abilities.
I looked around the room. To their credit, once they had their marching orders these emergency management types seemed to know their shit. They were typing into their ancient computers and lifting old fashioned phones that were attached to wires, though no rotary dials were in evidence which surprised me considering the outdated state of all the other tech.
A moment later sirens went off all around campus. I would’ve thought the sirens would already be going on considering the city was under siege from a bunch of giant radioactive lizards, but apparently it took yours truly arriving to light a fire under their asses to get things going.
“Right. I’m going to leave all of you to do your work here,” I said. “Good luck with this. We’re all going to need it.”
