by Archer, Mia
The lizard thrashed around, the radiation gathering as a bright point where its maw opened, and then at the last moment I shoved it down and pointed its mouth directly at the armored bottom of the basketball arena just as it fired off.
There was a blinding flash of light as the lizard blew and I flew off the bastard like a bat out of hell. The lizard unleashed the fury of its beam which immediately hit the reflective armored surface Dr. Lana had put up over her lair and bounced back instantaneously. The beam went through the roof of the lizard’s mouth and then the top of its head frying what little brains it had.
The lizard twitched a couple of times. I figured the beam it was firing off would’ve disappeared the moment it lost a good chunk of its head, but no. I guess that scrambled something in the nuclear regulatory commission that kept it alive despite absorbing the kind of radiation dose that would kill anything but the hardiest of microscopic extremophiles.
There was another blinding flash. Almost on the level of an atomic bomb going off. That must’ve been the one I saw when my eyes were squeezed shut. Then the drone went black as presumably the radiation hitting it was too much for a civilian drone that wasn’t hardened against that sort of thing.
Damn. I must’ve taken a hell of a dose of radiation when that hit above and beyond what I took on my not-so-fantastic voyage through the last lizard. My shields would protect me from some of it, of course, but they didn’t make me invulnerable.
I was a dead woman walking, and the only thing that was going to save me was getting back to a medbay. But not before I took care of Fialux and made sure she was safe, damn it.
SCNN cut back to the anchors. They still stared with their mouths hanging open.
“I don’t care what you said earlier Walt,” the younger girl said. “That was fucking amazing.”
It was a show of how amazed they were that none of the network censors bothered to bleep that. She didn’t even seem to realize that she’d swore on air.
The girl looked familiar. Familiar and far too young to be an anchor on the biggest cable news network in Starlight City which meant the biggest cable news network in the world since so many newsworthy things were always going down around these here parts.
She must’ve been from one of my classes. My students seemed to be rising through the ranks faster than other people in the journalism industry in this city through their ability to survive longer than other journalists.
“Right, Laura,” Walt said. “But do we have any idea what Night Terror is planning on doing? Does she have a particular hatred of the SCU Atoms?”
“I’m not sure what her plan is, but I can guarantee you if she’s down there fighting one of those lizards over the smoldering ruins of the basketball arena then she has a good reason. Besides, the Atoms were never good enough to deserve an arena that expensive.”
I smiled. It was nice to have someone in that newsroom who had my back for a change. That was a departure from that asshole Rex Roth.
And she was right. If I was blowing up sports complexes I did have a damn good reason, and I needed to get back to that reason now rather than focusing on what cable news was saying about me.
I mean honestly. What kind of dumbass spends more time watching cable news and worrying about what they have to say than actually doing their job?
I looked down at the gaping hole in the floor of what’d been an expensive multimillion dollar basketball arena until very recently. That overpowered lizard’s nuclear fire had been enough to blow a hole through the armor.
There was no way they were going to be able to fix that thing short of rebuilding the whole damn thing, but that wasn’t my problem.
Laura the anchor who might’ve been my student was right. The Atoms sucked and didn’t deserve half the budget the university threw at them.
I flew down towards that hole, activating my night vision as I went. It was time for Night Terror to confront the greatest enemy she’d ever faced, if you’ll excuse a little dramatic third person narration.
33
Final Boss
I wasn’t sure what to expect as I made my way down through the hole that led to Dr. Lana’s lair. At least I hoped the hole led to Dr. Lana’s lair.
It’d be really awkward if I was flying down to, say, a buried wastewater treatment facility or something equally ridiculous.
Only the farther down I went the more I felt like I was getting close to shit that had nothing to do with what you’d see in a wastewater facility. I finally broke through into a room that would’ve looked impressive were it not for the giant hole through the ceiling and floor.
The thing was massive and shaped like an egg that’d been flattened at the bottom to allow people to walk around. Though in this case it wasn’t people so much as it was an army of humanoid robots that spread out for as far as the eye could see.
Which really was impressive considering she’d built this entire complex right under Starlight City University without anyone noticing. Or if they did notice then she’d managed to bullshit some higher up administrator in the university bureaucracy that she was creating this room under the expensive basketball arena as part of some research that needed to be done.
Either way it was an impressive accomplishment.
Even more worrying was the giant pinkish/purplish portal on the other side of the room. Dr. Lana floated in front of the thing, and she held Fialux up by the scruff of her neck. Fialux was struggling and trying to get free, but either the augments on her suit had been knocked out or Dr. Lana was operating with some of the super strength she’d exhibited earlier.
I really wished I could figure out how she’d managed to do that. If she could do it to herself that meant I could do it to Fialux and get her back in action.
I checked the readout from Fialux’s suit. I figured after our last fight it’d be a good idea for me to have a remote way to keep an eye on what she was doing. Maybe even a remote way to take command of her suit if I really needed to and remove her from danger before said danger could hurt her.
I hadn’t told her about that little addition to her suit, of course. She’d be livid if she ever figured that one out. It was a last resort kind of thing.
That little built in safety allowed me to get a good look at the current status of her suit, and the current status wasn’t good. Either Dr. Lana had knocked something critical loose during the fight, or she’d used some of the work she’d done reverse engineering my own suit to figure out how to disable them.
I’d have to proceed with caution. If it was raw strength she might pull that when she was fighting me. If it was the latter then it meant she could use my systems against me. Either way I’d be well and truly fucked in a fight, and not in the good way.
“I’m in her lair CORVAC,” I said.
“Affirmative, mistress. It would seem that she is preparing an invasion of some sort,” CORVAC said.
“Yup,” I replied. “Looks like someone is planning on taking over the city the old fashioned way. I have to give her credit. A robot army might be cliche, but there’s a reason people keep going back to the old standards.”
“Night Terror,” Dr. Lana said, her voice booming across the massive room. “So we meet again, though it would seem that this time around I finally have the upper hand in our little rivalry!”
I kept my mouth shut. If she wanted to gloat then she could gloat to her heart’s content. I had work to do.
I ran a scan for the signal she had to be using to control all these bots. That was the thing about working with robot armies like this. Sure it was possible to load the bots with firmware that gave them autonomy while they were out there destroying your enemies, but it could be dangerous to give a robot army autonomy.
Things carrying weapons that had the ability to think for themselves could always decide they wanted to turn those weapons against their creators, after all. There were more than a few villains who’d learned that lesson the hard way when their attempted rise of the machines ended up rising against them in
stead.
No, it was much easier to have a centralized control structure for the robots that allowed whoever was sending them out to control them more directly. Sure that led to its own host of problems like the fact that heroes could simply destroy the centralized control area to disable the army, but it was better than having a bunch of freethinking robotic death commandos coming after your ass.
“I always knew we would come to this moment, Night Terror,” she said. “I always knew there would come a day when the two great titans of Starlight City would face off against one another in mortal combat. Once you’re gone I can ascend to my place as the city’s greatest villain and hero! No one will realize I am the one sending the very things I save them from and they will love me!”
This bitch was crazy, but I wasn’t going to acknowledge it. She could go on about how we were destined to face off against one another in a game of Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition for all I cared. As long as she was talking I could continue working.
The only problem was I was scanning on all frequencies and the only thing I found was the campus wifi signal. A wifi signal, I might add, that was ridiculously strong for being all the way down here in a combo underground bunker slash villainous lair.
Someone in the campus IT department really deserved a bonus for creating a network that could penetrate this deep into the ground.
There had to be something. A radio signal. Anything.
“This makes no sense,” I muttered.
“What is the problem, mistress?” CORVAC asked.
“She has to have some signal she’s using to control these things,” I said. “Surely she wouldn’t be stupid enough to give each of these bots autonomy.”
Then again there’d been numerous times that I’d underestimated exactly how stupid Dr. Lana’s plans could get. She had a surprising and dangerous combination of being just savvy enough with technology and innovation to surprise me while at the same time being just stupid enough that she never managed to take full advantage of her ability to surprise me.
There was something to that. She did things that surprised me, but she did it in the stupidest possible way so there was always some glaring weakness that could be used to defeat her. Which was pretty standard practice for most villains in Starlight City, to be honest.
I wasn’t ashamed to admit that even I’d fallen victim to that trap a time or two.
“She always does something I don’t expect, but then she turns around and makes a mistake that I’d totally expect,” I muttered. “Every time we’ve gone up against each other that’s what happened.”
“Mistress?” CORVAC asked.
“Dr. Lana. She’s always coming up with new things that surprise me, but then she’s always making sloppy mistakes in the execution that end up being her undoing. It’s your classic villain behavior. She’s so convinced of her own superiority that she can’t admit that maybe it’s her own hubris that defeats her every time.”
“I cannot imagine living life like that,” CORVAC said in a tone that left no doubt in my mind who he was talking about.
“Stuff it, CORVAC,” I growled.
“Of course mistress, but if I might offer some advice?”
“Of course,” I said. “What grand advice do you have for me that’s going to blow this whole situation wide open?”
“…are two grand titans duking it out for the soul of the city!” Dr. Lana raved on in the background, her voice rising. “Only I’ve found something grander than simply being the ruler of this city alone! No, I am destined for so much more!”
I tuned her out again. All I cared about was that she was going on with her monologue. The particulars of a monologue never mattered as much as the fact that it was still happening which still gave me ample opportunity to figure out a way to defeat her.
It’d happened to me often enough in my early days, after all. Back before I’d learned the value of shutting the fuck up and shooting at a hero rather than explaining in great detail how I was going to shoot them before I got around to it.
“You mention that her mistake is always obvious,” CORVAC said.
“Right.”
“And you mentioned that the only signal you are picking up in her buried underground bunker is the campus WiFi which, if it is operating under the standard physics of broadcast signals, should not be able to penetrate this deep under campus.”
And there it was.
“CORVAC, you’re a fucking genius,” I said.
“I do try, mistress,” he said.
I tapped into the campus WiFi. Surely it couldn’t be this simple. Surely she couldn’t be using the campus wifi network to control her robot army. Surely she wouldn’t be stupid enough to put that control out over a network that could be shut down by a grumpy overpaid sysadmin who didn’t like the idea of someone hijacking his network bandwidth to control an army of robot soldiers hellbent on overthrowing the city.
“Scan that network CORVAC,” I said. “I’m patching the signal through to you now.”
“I appreciate it, mistress,” he said. “And it would appear that it is not the campus network. She is merely using a name similar to the campus network in order to hide what she is doing.”
“Security through obfuscation,” I muttered. “That is something I’d expect from her.”
“Might I point out that it almost worked, mistress?”
“You might point it out if you want me to vaporize all of your critical components,” I growled.
“Might I point out that a threat like that assumes your ability to discover where my critical components are housed which, if past performance is any indication, has been difficult for you?”
I sighed. I hated to admit that the bastard had a point, but the bastard had a point.
“And so I present to you something that you’ve never managed to do before! My grand robot army that will march and set me up as the supreme ruler of a world!”
I turned back to Dr. Lana and arched an eyebrow. I wasn’t sure what she was on about. What I was sure of was it was time to disabuse her of a few delusions of grandeur she’d picked up.
“Are you fucking serious?” I asked, heaping those four words with as much scorn as I could muster.
It was time to interrupt her monologue and show her who was boss in this city.
34
Ass Kicked
Dr. Lana stopped. She floated down from the portal behind her just a bit. She actually looked deflated. Just a little.
It was a look I could totally understand and sympathize with. After all, it was a look I’d worn myself on more than a few occasions. There was something about having a hero come along and poke holes in your plan that just plain sucked.
Not that I was a hero. Far from it. I was a villain. Acting like a hero got my girlfriend robbed of her powers and kidnapped on a couple of occasions.
It was time for me to be who I was. I’d worry about whether or not that might rob me of my girlfriend later. I figured I was definitely losing her if she kept getting kidnapped and nearly killed, whereas I was only maybe losing her if I ended up doing the whole villain thing again and it turns out she didn’t approve.
“Robots? Seriously?” I asked. “That’s your problem. You’re never able to think of an idea that hasn’t occurred to someone else a hundred times before.”
“Big words from a woman who hasn’t managed to harness the very powers of a goddess!” she screamed.
The woman had a point there. I didn’t like that she had a point. That made me want to go old school and start stabbing rather than firing plasma blasts at her. I kept a couple of sharp knives hidden in the old pattern buffer.
The only thing that stopped me was I figured sharp objects would do about as much good as the plasma blast in her current state.
She held Fialux up as she said it. Like Fialux was a prize of some sort, and from the way she glowered at Dr. Lana she wasn’t all that happy about being the damsel in distress.
Then again the whole d
amsel in distress routine had never suited her all that well to begin with. She proved that when she started thrashing around and throwing elbows, and one of them actually landed.
I didn’t think that hit would do any good considering Dr. Lana’s boast about harnessing the power of a goddess, but the hit actually seemed to knock the wind out of Dr. Lana. I wasn’t sure how that was possible, if Fialux’s suit was dead then she shouldn’t be able to do something like that, but if there was an opportunity then I was going to take it without questioning my sudden good fortune too much.
So I used the momentary distraction to throw myself across the room.
I got right to Dr. Lana before she held up a hand and pointed down. I stopped immediately. If there was one thing I’d learned in my long and storied career it was that when a villain starts pointing at things it’s a good idea to stop and at least have a look at what they’re pointing at.
Sure pointing at the big old nothing behind an opponent to try and distract them was the oldest trick in the book, but I’d also backed that trick up with actually having something behind my opponent often enough that I figured it was at least worth some consideration if someone else was doing it to me.
I turned and saw that all the robots in the room had pointed their weapons at me. I was about to be on the business end of a point blank series of blasts from a hundred cybernetic soldiers, and it wasn’t going to be pretty.
Let’s be honest. I wasn’t exactly operating at one hundred percent for all that I’d managed to somehow pull wins out of the jaws of defeat a couple of times this afternoon. Pulling those victories had involved taking a not-so-fantastic voyage through the large colon of a lizard putting out the kind of radiation that made Chernobyl look like background radiation in comparison.
The point is I’d been absorbing a hell of a lot of nasty shit, and while I didn’t have any helpful bars that told me how close my cells were to calling it quits and reducing me to a shivering nothing that couldn’t control my bodily functions on either end, I knew it was only a matter of time before the radiation did its work.
