by Archer, Mia
Not to mention my systems had been working overtime through all of these fights to keep me up and fighting rather than a shivering mess on the ground somewhere out on the university campus puking and shitting everything I’d eaten that day.
Modern technology. It was a wonder.
“Go ahead,” Dr. Lana said. “Make my day.”
I rolled my eyes. It was a natural reaction to a line like that, but apparently it was a natural reaction that someone like Dr. Lana couldn’t appreciate.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” she asked.
I regretted that she’d managed to get her breath back. I’d liked her a lot better a moment ago when Fialux had her on the ropes. I pined for the halcyon days of just five minutes ago when I’d been flying at her and she couldn’t talk and I didn’t have a bunch of robots pointing their guns at me while I was slowly succumbing to high doses of radiation.
“Why did you do that?” she snapped.
“Do what?” I asked. “Launch myself across the room at you? I’d think that’d be obvious. You were incapacitated and I figured I’d take my shot.”
She let out a growl. “That’s not what I’m talking about. Why did you roll your eyes? Why are you always rolling your eyes at me? What the hell is your problem?”
I blinked a couple of times. Of all the things for her to get pissed off over in the middle of a fight that was the last thing I figured she’d pick up on, but if she wanted to go there…
“Um, probably because I don’t respect a single thing you’ve managed to achieve as a villain. I think everything that passes your lips is such a storm of cliches that it sounds like you’ve plagiarized all of your speeches in addition to plagiarizing some of the best ideas better villains than you have come up with.”
“Stop saying that!” she shrieked. “I did not plagiarize anyone’s ideas! I will not have you talking about me like that!”
Oh boy. She was getting furious. Furious could be good. Furious could mean she was on the verge of making a mistake.
Then again furious could also mean she was on the verge of having her robot army reduce me to so much ash which would be bad, but I was going to take any chance I could get.
Besides, I figured I at least stood a chance of fighting off the robot army. I wasn’t quite so sure about doing the same with this crazy bitch.
I might be able to monologue her into doing something stupid though.
“Let’s face it Dr. Lana,” I continued. “You’re the B-movie that plays after John Wayne saved the day. You’re the Go Bots to my Transformers. You’re the Filmation Ghostbusters to my Real Ghostbusters that disappoints kids because the TV Guide doesn’t know the difference. You’re the RoseArt to my Crayola. You’re the…”
“Enough!” she shrieked.
She flew forward just a bit and backhanded me. Which was a hell of a mistake, I might add, because when she flew forward she left Fialux hanging there in midair totally free and clear.
Huh. That was odd.
Granted I was a little distracted from Fialux because I was flying through the air feeling just a touch of pain considering my inertial compensators were reaching the point that they could no longer compensate for hits like that. We’re talking that bitch was hitting as hard as Fialux used to hit.
I would’ve given a pretty penny and a good chunk of the illegitimate funding I used to pay for all my wonderful toys to figure out how she pulled that one off.
Still, that pain wasn’t enough to stop me from wondering exactly how Fialux was floating in the air when she didn’t have any power going to her suit. I’d been certain the thing had been incapacitated. I’d checked and double checked and there hadn’t been any signs of life from that suit which meant she shouldn’t be able to fly under her own power or do anything to save herself if she got in trouble.
And yet there she was floating in the air as sure as a zeppelin. Though maybe that wasn’t the best example considering zeppelins had a bad habit of blowing up spectacularly and she didn’t look like she was about to do anything of the sort. She did look a touch surprised that she was floating though.
Huh. Interesting. Though I did have more pressing matters to worry about at the moment than why my girlfriend was floating when she shouldn’t have anything approaching that sort of ability.
I managed to right myself just before I hit some of the robots. That would’ve really hurt with some of the licks I’d already taken. It would’ve been touch and go even if I had my shields and inertial compensators working at full tilt which they most definitely weren’t at this point in the fight.
No, this was the point in the narrative where I was down for the count and on the verge of having my ass handed to me. Where it seemed certain that the villain had the upper hand.
I always hated this part of the fight. Not because I was ever truly worried I was going to lose, but mostly because it always hurt like a motherfucker.
Though as I looked at the robot army gathered around me and up to Dr. Lana who seemed ready to kill me I had a hard time coming up with a way that I was going to make it out of this fight alive.
Crap.
35
Hostage Situation
“Go ahead,” I coughed, pulling myself up. “Do your worst bitch.”
I knew I was scraping the bottom of the barrel if the best I could come up with was swearing at her. It always brought to mind Mrs. Murphy back in eighth grade English. A strict witch of an old woman who said swearing was the last resort of a weak mind.
My mind wasn’t weak, but the rest of me sure as hell was. I was really starting to feel everything I’d done this afternoon. It was just about time for the gloating hero to lay the smack down on the villain, and things weren’t looking good for me.
That was the real rub though. Which one of us was the villain and which of us was the hero?
I guess it was all a matter of perspective. For Fialux I was probably the hero come to rescue her against all odds. For Dr. Lana I was obviously the villain come to thwart her evil plan, whatever the hell it was.
As I righted myself I knew exactly what I was though. I was Night Terror. I was a fucking villain. I was the best of the best, and I was going to show this bitch how to dance.
A flash of green seen just out of the corner of my eye told me everything I needed to know about how the next thirty seconds or so was going to work out. I was probably still going to die given how bad things looked, but at least I’d die standing. Floating. Whatever.
I floated up and forced myself to show some backbone even though I could feel my body protesting and refusing to work properly.
Fuck. I needed to get to a medbay soon or there might not be anything left in my body for the damned thing to repair.
“Damn it!” Dr. Lana shouted, spittle flying from her mouth. “Why won’t you stay down?”
I stopped to reflect on the inevitable arc of somebody on their villainous career. It always started with villains on top of the world. Thinking they were going to take on every hero and villain who ever came at them and ruin their days.
Then there was the wall of reality that all villains inevitably hit. It was only a matter of time. With me that moment had come when I ran into Fialux.
With Dr. Lana it’d obviously come at this moment when she’d realized maybe I wasn’t going to be as easy to defeat as she thought. Sure she still looked supremely confident, but when I stood that clearly said I thought there was still a chance I could snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
“What are you going to do about it?” I asked.
Not because I was curious about what she was going to do about me refusing to stay down so much as because it was part of the script and I wanted to keep her talking for just a little longer.
“No more bullshit,” Dr. Lana said. “I’m going to kill you, and I’m going to do it right away. I tried to best you with your technology and it didn’t work. I tried to best you with your former computer friend and it didn’t work. I tried to
use my research into enhancement to defeat you and that’s obviously not working. I tried to defeat you with giant lizards and what do you do when one of them tries to chow down on you? You come out the other end looking for all the world like that giant lizard ate some bad Chinese food down at…”
I tuned her out. The memories of what I’d experience inside that lizard were traumatizing enough without Dr. Lana reminding me of how traumatizing it’d been.
No, instead I looked around to the robot army that was arrayed as though they were getting ready for an invasion. If Dr. Lana had bothered to look down at the things she might’ve noticed that something had changed about their eyes. That there was a strange eerie green glow coming off of all of them.
A glow that matched the ancient green monochrome of an Apple IIe or an old 8088 IBM Compatible.
The kind of green glow that showed CORVAC had been putting his time to good use while I was busy trying to distract the good doctor. Damn we made a good team. I’d forgotten just how good we were together, and boy did it feel good to be working with him again.
Well if Dr. Lana was going to be too stupid to realize that she’d just edged closer to losing then I wasn’t going to be stupid enough to point that out.
Hey, what can I say? One of the reasons I’d lasted this long, even though I had been getting my ass handed to me on the regular lately, was I knew when to shut up and kill someone.
“Um…”
“What?” she screamed. “What now? What are you going to tell me? Because I’m sick and tired of…”
She trailed off. The green glow was so pervasive that it was impossible to miss now. She’d have to be blind to miss it, and while she was blind to a great many things, she couldn’t miss CORVAC’s handiwork. She looked stared in astonishment.
“I can’t believe you were controlling them with a signal disguised as campus WiFi,” I said. “I mean come on. That’s like amateur hour stuff right there.”
“Come on!” she shouted. “This isn’t fair! I was just about to tell you to kill her!”
“There is one problem with that,” CORVAC said, his voice doing a really weird hive mind thing now that he was using thousands of robot voices speaking at once. “You never had control of this robot army to order them to kill the mistress in the first place.”
“CORVAC,” I said with a smile. “If you would do the honors?”
“Gladly, mistress,” he said.
For once I was glad to hear that smartass tone. Unfortunately it was an instance of the two of us doing a victory dance before we’d crossed the finish line, and what do they say about celebrating victory prematurely?
Yeah, the problem with that is there’s always the chance your enemies are going to come along and help you snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
In this case Dr. Lana was particularly crafty. She knew we were about to fire on her sorry ass, and so rather than sitting around and taking it like a villain she decided that she was going to do the last resort of assholes everywhere and try one last thing to spite her enemies on her way out.
She threw herself at Fialux who was still floating in the air taking everything in.
Huh. I guess she’d decided with the kind of firepower Dr. Lana was throwing around it’d be a better idea for her to stay the hell out of whatever fight we were in the middle of. Only now the fight was coming back for her, and it was coming back with a vengeance.
Dr. Lana slammed into her and I could see the surprise on her face. They whirled around in midair and the crazed woman stared down at us with a look that was so close to triumph that it made me want to kill the bitch.
“Seriously?” I growled. “You’re going to try and take a hostage?”
“I’m going to do what I need to do!” Dr. Lana said. “Whatever it takes to make you regret the day you ever came to the Applied Sciences Department and tried to show me up. Whatever it takes to stop you from seducing my science experiment! Whatever it takes to make sure you’re not the top villain in this world! I’m going to do whatever it takes to make sure you’re miserable for the rest of your natural life, which isn’t going to be very long if I have anything to say about it!”
As far as villainous speeches went it was pretty standard stuff, really. Like we’re talking the kind of uninventive crap you’d find in those stupid comic books that were always being put out aping the misadventures of real heroes and villains.
Where she made up for it was in the execution. We’re talking literally she made up for it with an execution. She twisted her hands. It was a quick motion. A motion I’d used myself a couple of times before I realized that snapping someone’s neck wasn’t always the clean end for someone they made it out to be in the movies.
It was one of the many ways that the way things happened in the movies failed to be anywhere close to reality. I’d learned those lessons the hard way on a couple of occasions.
There was just one caveat to the whole neck snapping thing. It only really worked if you were far more powerful than the creature whose neck you were snapping. I’d busted it out as a finishing move for a couple of enemies who I felt deserved a more intimate touch to their demise considering the good run they’d given me, but it was always in situations where my strength augments gave me the advantage.
And such was the case with Dr. Lana and her crazy strength. The same strength Fialux had. I held my hand out as though that was going to stop her, but I knew it was too late even as I reached up and had my wrist blaster humming.
Because she was pushing out enough power that the twist she did was going to snap Fialux’s neck. It was a certainty. I cried out, but I knew I was too late to save the woman I loved.
Though maybe not too late to avenge her. Oh hell yes was I going to avenge her.
36
Vengeance
There was just one problem with the whole plan to avenge my dead girlfriend. I had to have a dead girlfriend to avenge in the first place.
Fortunately as I screamed it became obvious that I didn’t have a dead girlfriend. An annoyed girlfriend? Sure. A pissed off girlfriend? Most indubitably. A girlfriend who was about to lay down some serious ass kicking?
Oh hell to the yes.
It was like watching every bit of training I’d done with Fialux over the past couple of months suddenly kick into high gear, and on top of that it was kicking into high gear with a Fialux who seemed to be throwing around a hell of a lot more power than she had any business throwing around wearing one of my suits.
Especially considering the suit she wore had been completely powered down.
Dr. Lana’s hands moved, but rather than twisting Fialux’s head to the side and snapping her spine her hands moved but Fialux’s head stayed in place.
Damn. I’d seen the power she was throwing around, and to say that this was a perplexing development would be one hell of an understatement. It was a welcome development, to be sure, but puzzling to say the least.
“What the…”
Fialux looked over her shoulder ever so slightly, and then she elbowed Dr. Lana in the gut. It was a classic defensive move that was meant to throw an attacker off balance, but in this case it did a hell of a lot more than throw Dr. Lana off balance.
No, it threw the bitch clear across the room. Dr. Lana slammed against the wall and made a dent. Like we’re talking it was seriously the kind of Dr. Lana shaped dent that you usually only saw from coyotes trying to chase down road runners. She picked herself up and shook herself off, but clearly she was just as surprised as I was.
“Not now!” she growled.
Huh. Okay then. Maybe she was expecting something like this. The surprises just kept coming.
Fialux looked just as astonished as I felt. She looked down at her elbow as though she was expecting it to start to glow or something, but it’s not like she’d just been through the colon of a giant radioactive lizard so she did’t have a particularly compelling reason to be glowing.
What she did do almost brought a tear to my eye
. She held her hands out in a classic Keanu pose and motioned for Dr. Lana to come at her.
“Fuck yes,” I whispered.
“What is happening mistress?” CORVAC asked.
“It looks like Fialux might’ve just gotten her powers back,” I said.
“That would be a fortunate development,” he said.
“That’s not why I’m so excited,” I said.
“Why are you so excited, mistress?” he asked.
“I’m excited because she has her powers back and she’s still remembering to fight defensively. This is beautiful.”
Sure enough she wasn’t throwing herself into the fight despite the fact that it very much looked like she was now firing on all cylinders where her powers were concerned. Dr. Lana flew at her and her face was contorted in rage.
“Should I do something about this?” CORVAC asked.
“Nah,” I said. “It looks like she has some issues she’s working through with this fight. Besides, it’ll be good for her to have a sparring match with someone who isn’t me.”
“I have seen those sparring matches you had with her in the flight gym,” CORVAC said. “She has come a long way.”
Dr. Lana pulled her fist back and it seemed that she was preparing for one hell of a right hook. The only problem with that plan was Fialux dodged to the side which sent Dr. Lana cartwheeling through the air which was pretty damn funny if you asked me.
No one in the room had asked me, but whatever.
Dr. Lana flew to the other end of the room and made yet another Dr. Lana shaped hole in the wall. This time it took her a little longer to pick herself up, and I thought about the pattern I’d seen earlier while fighting.
“CORVAC,” I said. “Correct me if I’m wrong here.”
“I have never had a problem correcting you on the many occasions you have been wrong, mistress,” he said.
