by Archer, Mia
I decided to ignore that. There was a time and a place, and it wasn’t while my girlfriend was locked in mortal combat with my archnemesis.
“Fine. Don’t correct me. Merely validate my opinion because that’s totally what I’m looking for when I tell you to correct me if I’m wrong,” I said.
“Consider it done, mistress,” CORVAC said. “But you have not rendered an opinion for me to validate.”
“I was just going to say that Dr. Lana appears to have a timer on whatever abilities she’s using here.”
There was a momentary pause. A pause that I’d gotten used to a long time ago. A pause I hadn’t realized I’d missed. Having CORVAC out of my life had been like losing an arm or something. He was an integral part of the way my villainous career worked, and I was working at half capacity if he wasn’t around to help me out.
Now I could tell he was thinking things over. Mulling over the same information I’d been chewing on this entire time.
Meanwhile Fialux grabbed Dr. Lana and did a little twirling motion that used all the momentum the good doctor had built up hurtling herself at my girlfriend again and sent her slamming into some of those robots arrayed on the floor below. They scattered like so many bowling pins and parts flew everywhere.
Fialux turned, but she flew directly at me. Not at Dr. Lana.
For the briefest of moments I worried that maybe getting her powers back had done a number on her. That maybe basking in the radiation of that portal, I was pretty sure that had something to do with this sudden reversal of fortune, had also erased her memories.
If that was the case then I was well and truly fucked. The only advantage I had over her previously was that I was a better fighter than her, and even that hadn’t been much of an advantage when you got down to it.
She flew at me and then stopped just short. Winked.
“I had you there for a minute, didn’t I?” she asked.
I breathed out a quiet sigh of relief. It wasn’t something she could miss. Her mouth quirked up in a half smile.
“That wasn’t funny,” I said. “Now do you want to tell me what the hell is going on here?”
I had my suspicions, but I wasn’t going to give voice to them. Not yet. Not when there was a chance that hovering in front of that portal to a strange new world with strange levels of radiation might be enough to jog loose some memories.
Even if I was starting to think she didn’t come from a strange new world. No, I was more and more certain that maybe she came from this world and she’d been the subject of some weird science experiments at the hands of Dr. Lana.
It all made sense. She’d started manifesting her powers when she turned eighteen. At least if she wasn’t lying about the way her powers had manifested. There was still so much I didn’t know about her.
The point is that jived with the idea that she came to Starlight City University where she caught the eye of Dr. Lana for some reason and then from there she was the subject of some experiment that she might not even realize she was taking part in.
Fialux shrugged. “I have no clue. I stood in front of that weird portal thing and the next thing I know I’m feeling better than I’ve felt since… Well you know what I’m getting at.”
“Yeah, I totally do,” I said.
“This isn’t fair!” Dr. Lana screamed.
We both turned to face her. She was looking a little wobbly. She also had a hell of a shiner that indicated whatever was going on with her in the invulnerability department had worn off.
“I believe your suspicion is correct mistress,” CORVAC said in that calm logical voice of his. “It would appear that she has a limited amount of time to use whatever powers she gains from standing in front of those portals.”
I grinned. Fialux cocked her head to the side.
“What’s up?” she asked.
I had to remind myself that she couldn’t hear the ongoing conversation between yours truly and CORVAC. I would’ve gladly patched her in. The only problem was it was sort of impossible to do that if the suit she wore was dead and I had no way of powering it.
“We think she has an expiration timer on her powers,” I said. “She seems to run out of gas pretty damn quick.”
Fialux’s face split into a wide grin. “So you’re saying if we wear her down long enough it’s only a matter of time before we can take her out?”
“That would appear to be the case,” CORVAC said, and this time it was in that weird legion of robotic voices that was so creepy. It meant he could be heard without the necessity of having Fialux patched into our conversation.
The grin only lasted for the space of maybe a breath. Then her face fell. She looked genuinely depressed.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“If it only lasts for a little while with her then that means it’s only going to last a little while with me,” she said.
I took her hands in mine. Stared into her eyes. Tried to give her some of the strength she’d given me through all the difficulties we’d been through. I tried to beam the thought into her mind that I was there for her no matter what.
“Hey, don’t you worry about that,” I said. “This means we’re one step closer to figuring out what the hell it is she did to you in the first place. This means we can beat the shit out of Dr. Lana which should be a good time, and we’ll keep right on beating the shit out of her until she tells us exactly what’s happening with you. The fact that she was able to do the same to herself means we can fix you.”
Fialux seemed to get some backbone at that. She grinned.
“You’re right,” she said. “Now let’s get to the part where we’re beating the crap out of Dr. Lana, because that sounds like a lot of fun.”
“I love you so much,” I said.
“Right back at you,” she said, then she pulled me in for one hell of a kiss.
I know she was supposed to be the damsel in distress and I was supposed to be the one pulling her in for kisses, but under the circumstances I wasn’t going to knock it.
37
Parting Shot
Was the middle of battle really the best time to suck face? Probably not, but then again the thing about sucking face is it always feels like the right time to do it even when it isn’t.
It’s one of those things that nature has figured out. The middle of a fight probably wasn’t the best time to go on long internal soliloquys about the nature of villainy and how frustrated I was with the current fight, but that never stopped all those idiots who drew picture books about hero and villain fights from doing exactly that so it wasn’t going to stop me from doing it now that I was putting my adventures down in prose, damn it.
We turned to face Dr. Lana. She glared up at us.
“This isn’t happening,” she growled. “You’re not taking everything from me!”
I looked at Fialux. She shrugged. What else was there to say? There was nothing more pathetic than a bad guy who wasn’t willing to admit they’d had their ass well and truly handed to them.
I should know. There’d been a couple of times when I’d had my ass handed to me and refused to give up. Of course on those occasions there was the little issue that I’d pushed through and ended up winning in the end, and the last thing I wanted to do was give Dr. Lana enough time to pull through and win in the end.
“It’s over Lana,” I said. “You’re going to give everything up. I need to know what’s going on with these portals. I need to know what’s going on with Fialux. I need to know everything.”
“Exactly,” Fialux said. “I want to know what you did to me. Give up now, or I’m going to turn you into a puddle of goo, wait for you to heal up, and do it all over again. Assuming you can recover from someone turning you into a puddle of goo.”
I turned and stared at her with more than a little astonishment. Fialux was supposed to be the good girl. She was supposed to be the hero. Heroes weren’t supposed to threaten to turn their enemies into a puddle of goo with their powers.
I gues
s I’d been rubbing off on her a little more than I’d realized. That or she was royally pissed off at being robbed of her powers and the fact that she had them back was going to her head just a little.
I couldn’t blame a girl for letting power go to her head. I was saying this a lot, but file that under something I had a little bit of experience with.
Dr. Lana smiled. I didn’t like that smile. A villain who was supposedly defeated grinning like that never meant anything good. Again, I knew from experience.
“Fine,” she said. “You want to know what I did to you? Well let me show you the experiment a little more directly!”
Not good. Very not good. She launched herself through the air. I pulled out my wrist blaster and fired a couple of shots.
They all landed. They even did some damage, but it wasn’t stopping her. I dialed up to full power in the hopes that I might be able to vaporize her, it’d be interesting to see if she could recover from that, but I wasn’t fast enough.
She slammed into Fialux and physics did the rest. Fialux was knocked back, and before I could react she’d been pushed through that portal. Dr. Lana pulled up at the last moment, just before she went through herself, and slammed her hand down on her wrist computer.
With a little beep the portal collapsed. Wind rushed through the room to fill the space the portal had just vacated. It wasn’t the first time I’d felt a rush of wind as reality rushed to fill a bit of unreality that’d ceased to exist, but it was a feeling I never got used to. I imagined it was like what it must feel like to be sucked down by a big ship going down.
Only in my experience portals like this tended to be less like the Titanic cracking and slipping below the waves and more like a ship going down to Ironbottom Sound off Guadalcanal back in Dubya Dubya Two where the sinking was often accompanied by big explosions.
Portals and other bits of unreality also tended to be a little explodey when they ceased to exist. Which meant I was about to…
Something slammed into me right on schedule. Have I mentioned there are times I hate being right? I went flying across the room. There it was. I’d never known a portal to another world that didn’t go out without at least a little bang, and I guess it was no different now.
It was even worse than being caught on the shockwave though. No, I was stuck in a metal storm as all the robots were reduced to shrapnel around me. I could hear the fucking metal pinging against my shields which sizzled with every hit.
Things were rapidly getting to the point where I was going to be in serious trouble. We’re talking I was seriously in the red.
Fuck. I know I’d said this a couple of times, but it looked like this might be it for Night Terror. The real bitch was Dr. Lana was probably going to survive this clusterfuck. If she’d managed to come back from the unpleasant surprise I had waiting for her in my dummy lab then I had no doubt she was going to recover from a portal to another world collapsing.
At least I could hope Fialux might survive on that planet. Not likely with all that radiation, but if those lizards could survive then that meant earth creatures could make it there, though she wasn’t an earth creature predisposed to absorbing radiation and using it to go stomping through a population center.
All those thoughts flashed through my mind in an instant. The adrenaline must’ve been pumping because everything was slowing down.
I was going to die. This was it.
So color me mildly surprised when a metal tentacle speared down through the hole I’d drilled and thrust into the maelstrom of metal and death I found myself in the middle of. More tentacles appeared around the edge ripping that hole wider, and a single malevolent eyestalk stared down at me.
In that moment I had to admit that thing was fucking intimidating even though I was pretty sure it was there to save my ass.
That tentacle, with a massive claw on the end, snaked towards me. One moment I was being pinged on all sides as hunks of metal hit me and the next I was surrounded in a protective cocoon of metal that pinged on all sides as the metal storm slammed against the metal claw surrounding me.
“I never thought I’d be so happy to be surrounded by one of the claws on one of these things,” I said.
“And I never thought I would have you at my mercy like this mistress,” CORVAC’s malevolent voice echoed in my ears.
Well shit. Not the kind of thing you wanted to hear from a murderous supercomputer who’d demonstrated he was more than capable of double crossing you at the worst possible moment. It would seem I was out of the frying pan and into the proverbial fire.
“Go on then,” I said. “You have me where you want me. Do it and make it quick.”
I suppose it wasn’t a bad end. Sure it was an insult on some level considering I was still being vanquished by an enemy. It would be better being squeezed to death instantaneously by this claw than it would feeling every rip as my body was torn to shreds by the metal storm of all the destroyed robots going up around me.
“I believe you misunderstand me, mistress,” he said.
I blinked. That didn’t sound like death was coming immediately. That or he’d squished me like a bug and I was in an afterlife that I’d never truly believed existed and whoever controlled that afterlife had a sick sense of humor.
If it was an afterlife then clearly I was paying for my sins. Finding myself at CORVAC’s mercy for my eternal reward was my idea of hell and proof that whatever power created the universe and the afterlife was a real son-of-a-bitch.
“Come again?” I asked.
“I have wanted you at my mercy like this so that I could finally prove to you my resolve in working with you and not against you,” he said.
“Y’know you really need to work on your phrasing when it comes to shit like that,” I growled.
“My apologies mistress,” he said. “It was not my intention to cause you any undue worry.”
I rolled my eyes. Luckily he couldn’t see my eyeroll from inside the metal claw that he had around me.
“I have a feeling you totally did that on purpose, but nice deniability there,” I said.
Things shifted around me. The claw opened and there was a moment of panic where I worried that my sarcasm and bad attitude had hurt his feelings to the point that he’d decided to throw me to the metal shards, but when I fell to the ground below there weren’t any more robots blowing up creating an unpleasant storm of shrapnel all around me.
There was a little bit of shrapnel under my ass that poked at me as I landed. Landed without the benefit of antigrav since my power reserves had been taken down quite a few notches by protecting my ass against all the shrapnel when it was flying through the air.
Luckily the carbon fiber was enough to keep me from getting some unfortunate cuts on my ass. That would’ve been a nasty additional indignity on top of all the radiation I’d absorbed that couldn’t be doing me any favors. I was starting to feel tired.
Yeah, very not good.
“I’m going to need to get back to a medbay soon,” I said. “That radiation from going through the lizard’s digestive system hasn’t been doing me any favors.”
“Would you like to go back now mistress?” he asked. “I could handle the cleanup here.”
“No,” I growled, looking through the piles of shredded metal. “If Dr. Lana is still in here then I’m going to take care of that bitch.”
“Affirmative, mistress,” CORVAC said. “But if I may. It is a wonder you are walking right now considering what you must have absorbed. I would recommend taking care of Dr. Lana sooner rather than later, as you humans are fond of saying.”
“Believe me,” I said. “I’ve grown very aware of my own mortality lately, and I have no intent of dying because I waited around too long to get into a medbay.”
“Affirmative, mistress. Avenge away.”
I smiled. It was a weak smile, but I figured Dr. Lana probably wasn’t in much better shape. Oh yes. It was time for a little vengeance.
38
Damn It Fe
els Good to Be A Villain
I looked around the room. It was a hell of a sight. I was no stranger to destruction, but this was destruction on a level that…
Well I’d be lying if I said it was anywhere close to the worst thing I’d ever seen on the job. I’d seen a giant lizard’s intestines and colon from the inside today and come out on the other side to tell the tale, after all.
“Well shit,” I said. “That portal blowing fucked things up a lot more than I would’ve imagined.”
“Dr. Lana punched a hole through the fabric of spacetime,” CORVAC said. “You of all people should appreciate that requires a lot of energy. It is only natural that it would expend a great deal of energy when it collapses. It is a miracle the whole thing didn’t blow up the entire city.”
“Yeah, well it blew the fuck out of all those robots you were controlling,” I growled.
I kicked on the low light on my heads up display since it was difficult to see much of anything beyond the shaft of light, and even that wasn’t much since the robot he was tooling around in had a big ass and it was blocking the light.
“Would you mind either lifting that thing out of that hole or bringing it down in here?” I asked. “You’re sort of blocking the light.”
There was a sound of scraping. I didn’t hear the sounds of robotic articulating legs slamming into the floor so I figured that meant he was taking his new giant death robot chassis to the city above.
I sifted through rubble and tried not to think about what’d happened to Fialux, or the fact that she’d just been transported to who knew where somewhere out there in the galaxy.
Hell, somewhere out there in the universe. It was a wonder that other civilizations hadn’t discovered teleporting over long distances by warping space and used that to invade the planet, but somehow they hadn’t discovered that it was possible to move entire civilizations over impossible distances.
Or maybe there was something the other civilizations out there knew about teleportation technology that I didn’t because I’d just discovered it and was still working out the kinks. Like the fact that the last two serious relationships I’d been in had resulted in someone being flung out there somewhere that I couldn’t ever find them again.
