“Miles!” Elizabeth scolded me.
“I know, I know,” I sighed. “It’s just hard to feel bad for some rich asshole who decided to party on a yacht after the Maniac just declared war on the city.”
“I’m sure they were already on the yacht before all of that happened,” my superpowered girlfriend said. “They can’t help it if they had bad timing.”
“Maybe,” I said with a shrug. “Either way, I don’t think we have much of a choice but to help them. The Maniac clearly wants us to, and since we really need some more information, I’m willing to play along with him for now.”
“You don’t think he’s actually on the yacht, do you?” Norma asked.
“That seems a little too obvious, right?”
“No, the Maniac will want to draw this out for as long as possible,” I said. “But even though he’s not on the yacht, I’m pretty goddamn sure that it’s still a trap. Actually, it’s probably an ambush.”
“That makes sense,” Penumbra said with a nod. “If the Maniac has been behind all the coordinated supervillain attacks lately, then he could have some villains on the yacht who are just waiting for us.”
“Well, someone had to take everybody on the yacht hostage, that’s for sure,” I said. “So we should definitely be prepared for a fight.”
“At the very least, we should be able to take out a bunch of supervillains,” Elizabeth said, “but even if we just save those people, it’ll be worth it.”
I wanted to tell her that I was pretty sure all of the kidnapped people were probably dead, but there was no way to know that for sure, and I hated to crush her hopes before we even got started. I wished that we knew who the supervillains on the yacht were, just so we could be better prepared to face them, but there was also a good chance that it might just be a bomb or something that didn’t require any actual bodies… other than our own, of course.
“So what’s the plan?” Penumbra asked. “Do you want me to float you all over to the lake, and then--”
“Not this time,” I interrupted. “I think we’ll need to move a little faster to get there, and I definitely want to be able to get away as fast as we need to, so I don’t want you to have to carry all of us and then try to really pick up speed.”
“Oh, that makes sense,” Penumbra said.
“Do I get to fly the new plane?” Norma whispered and then pushed her oversized glasses up her nose. “I know we haven’t gotten a chance to really take it for a test run yet, but--”
“The plane has no offensive capabilities,” Aileen cut her off.
“Hey, I can fly that thing well enough to keep us out of danger,” my mousy assistant said. “I think I can, anyway, and isn’t the best offense supposed to be a good defense?”
“Not when it comes to a fight against unknown supervillains,” I laughed, “but a good defense won’t hurt. Besides, we’ve gotta test the plane out at some point, so we might as well do it now.”
“And we all fit?” Penumbra asked.
“It’ll be a little snug, but yeah,” I said. “And we better go ahead and leave now to get to the yacht. Otherwise, the Maniac might get impatient and make us jump through another hoop.”
“Alright, so what do we need?” Elizabeth asked.
“Exactly the same shit we brought to our other two fights today,” I said. “We’ve already got our suits on, so we’ll just wear them and take our weapons and our helmets with us.”
“Shall I come with you this time, Creator?” Aileen asked as she fluttered her long eyelashes at me in such a precise move that it almost seemed human.
“No, I want you to stay here, Aileen,” I said. “Norma will pilot the plane on the way there, but you’ll be able to pilot the plane remotely, so after we drop down onto the yacht, I want you to take it away so it won’t get damaged in the fight. Then when we need to leave, you can pilot it right back to the yacht and get us out of there.”
“I understand,” my robotic assistant said, “but I would much rather go with you.”
“Of course, you would,” I snickered. “You want to be part of the action, but I promise you will be. Just not today.”
“As you wish, Creator,” Aileen said and then made a sound that almost seemed like a sigh.
“While we’re gone, I also want you to keep an eye on the rest of the city through all of Grayville’s security cameras,” I said. “See if there’s any
sign of the Maniac or what he’s up to, and watch for any other supervillain activity.”
“I am already monitoring Grayville’s cameras,” Aileen said, “but I will continue to do so.”
“Good,” I said. “Then let’s go fly a fucking plane.”
Once we had gathered up all our gear, we left Aileen in the living room and headed out to the massive garage of our mansion. No one except for my AI system had actually seen the four-man plane that I’d made from the Shadow Knight’s scraps, so as soon as it came into view, all three women gasped over how badass it looked.
It was some of my finer work.
Because I needed to keep the agility of Norma’s small glider-plane, I hadn’t wanted to make it bulky like most planes that size would be. So instead of having one central cockpit with four seats, I had put them in a row in a semi-reclined position. The wings themselves were much longer than the glider’s wings to account for the extra seats, and I had added extra thrusters and propellers just to make sure that everything stayed airborne.
“Oh, my god, Miles,” Elizabeth said as she hurried over to the plane.
“This is unbelievable.”
“I can’t wait to fly it,” Norma said and bit her lip. “It’s even prettier than the glider, and I definitely didn’t think that was possible for you to top.”
“I think Miles can top anything he sets his mind to,” Penumbra said.
“Well, obviously that’s true,” Elizabeth said as she folded her arms over her chest. “So is the plan just to fly over the yacht, drop down, fuck up any villains on board, save the hostages, and then get out of there?”
“That’s the plan,” I said, “and we’ll just have to adapt to any surprises that the Maniac throws our way.”
“Well, if anybody can adapt to surprises, it’s Miles,” Norma said before she flushed a dark shade of pink.
I smiled at my nerdy assistant but didn’t tease her like I normally would have. She was about to pilot us into the middle of some trap set by the Maniac, so I didn’t want to throw her off. Still, I wanted to tell her that a little bit of color looked good on her cheeks, just like her body looked anything but average in the super suit that I had designed for her.
Norma already seemed so much more confident in herself whenever she wore my suit, and recently, I had noticed that her confidence boost started to wear off later and later, so it was only a matter of time before she didn’t need the suit at all to feel completely sure of her own abilities.
Norma took the front-most seat with me right behind her, and Penumbra and Elizabeth each behind me respectively. My mousy assistant took a deep breath, cranked the ignition, and then started to roll out of the garage and down our long driveway.
“Aileen can take control if I mess up, right?” Norma murmured.
“You’re not gonna mess up,” I said. “You designed a guillotine as part of our home defense system, remember? And you took out the Shadow Knight’s AI-operated vehicles. I wouldn’t have picked you to be my assistant if I didn’t think you could fly a plane, Norma.”
“Yeah,” she said as she took a deep breath.
“Think you are an average ace fighter jet pilot,” I cleared my throat as I looked at my gloves. I didn’t want to beat her over the head with my theories, because she tended to dumb my genius down.
“Right,” Norma said as she raised her gaze to the driveway in front of us. “I’ve got this.”
I glanced at Penumbra and Elizabeth on both sides, but the blonde heroine gave me a thumbs up, and my black-haired girlfriend just nodded and then looked ahea
d again. We were as ready as we could be, and I would figure out anything else when I needed to.
“Average ace pilot. Here we go.” Norma took the plane up into the air without any problems, and as she started in the direction of the lake, I smiled to myself. She might have all the skills of an average run-of-the-mill pilot, but she also had all the skills of an average fighter pilot, so she flew us like a fucking expert all the way to Grayville’s lake.
As the water came into view, I peered out the cockpit window for any signs of the kidnapped yacht. Slade’s island was right there in the middle of the lake, of course, but I knew that even if the Maniac was aware of the location of the Shadow Knight’s secret lair, he certainly didn’t have the ability to break into it like I had, mostly because he didn’t have Aileen.
We passed over the island itself, but it seemed as undisturbed as when we had left it. One day, it would make a great base of operations for Beacon, and I imagined that Julien would be able to help him reprogram all the entrances and secret codes, so that the former apprentice to the Shadow Knight could finally make the lair all his own.
“There it is,” Norma said with a nod to the waters on the other side of the island.
“Alright, Aileen,” I said, “get ready to take over for Norma, since we’re about to jump out of here, okay?”
“I am always ready,” my robotic assistant replied.
“Then everybody get ready to jump,” I said.
“Jump?” Norma swallowed.
“But like… how?” Penumbra said through the comms.
“Well, you can just float out of here,” I laughed, “but the rest of us will jump down to the yacht. As long as we get close enough, our boots will absorb the shock, so don’t worry about that.”
“But how will we--” Elizabeth started.
“Oh, right,” I said. “There’s a door underneath your seat, so once you unbuckle your seatbelt, I’ll pull the lever, the door will open, and the bottom of your seat will slide down with the door.”
“So basically, we’ll just… fall out?” Norma asked.
“Yep,” I said. “So just make sure you bring us down close enough to the yacht that we can make the jump, and then Aileen will take it from there.”
Norma brought us closer to the yacht, but no one fired at us or even appeared on the deck of the massive three-story ship. It looked like someone had driven it out into the middle of the lake and then just abandoned it, but then again, if it really was an ambush, it wasn’t like it would be obvious.
Once we were close enough to make the jump, Aileen took over the plane, and all four of us unbuckled our seatbelts to prepare. I waited until all three women told me that they were ready, and then I deployed all four of our doors.
The doors dropped out from underneath us, along with the seats themselves, so we immediately tumbled out of the plane and crashed down toward the upper yacht deck. I instantly activated the thrusters in my boots, so I shot up a little higher, and then I was able to slowly ease up on the pressure until I floated damn near as gracefully as Penumbra down to the deck.
Elizabeth’s boots just slammed into the deck as she dropped into a crouch, and there was so much force behind her crash that it was a small miracle that she didn’t just rip right through the deck and land somewhere on the second floor.
Norma did a few acrobatic flips in the air and then landed softly on her feet beside me, so then all four of us straightened and looked around the upper yacht deck.
Music was playing from somewhere on the ship, some wordless tune with the bass cranked up all the way, but it was faint enough that it had to be from a deck below us. Other than that, the ship was deadly fucking quiet, and that immediately put me on edge.
There were a few news choppers off in the distance, but none of them had come very close, probably because they were afraid that the kidnappers might shoot them down. That suited me just fine, since I would prefer as few distractions as possible from whatever we were about to encounter.
The only thing on the upper deck aside from us was a large bar area, but Penumbra floated over to check it out and then just shook her head when she turned back around.
“Penumbra and Dynamo, you go down to the first floor,” I said.
“Norma and I will take the second floor, so just tell us if you find anything.
Or anyone.”
My gorgeous girlfriend nodded, so she and Penumbra hurried toward the stairwell, while Norma and I followed right behind them. There were no signs of life or even of a struggle on the stairs, but when Norma and I started to make our way across the second-story deck, I began to get a bad feeling.
There were one or two broken bottles on the floor, but there were also drops of blood scattered across the wood. None of the blood spatters were big enough to suggest that someone had died, but there was a chance that someone had limped away from here to die somewhere else.
Norma and I stayed quiet as we moved past the bar area on the second deck and toward the built-in pool. The pool chairs looked like they had been tossed around a little, and there was more pool water on the deck than I would have guessed, but I still didn’t see any signs of supervillains or hostages.
“Miles,” Norma suddenly hissed. “The pool.”
I followed her gaze to the bottom of the pool and realized that something was moving underneath all the water. It was translucent, but there was a definite human-shaped ripple in the pool.
I raised my arm so that the taser in my elbow would face forward, but as soon as I braced myself for whatever was about to come out of the water, I detected movement from either side of the yacht’s deck.
“We’ve got enemies incoming,” I growled into the comms, so Penumbra and Elizabeth would be prepared. “Watch the sides of the ship.”
Three men hopped over the sides of the ship and raced toward us at the same time the translucent figure in the pool flew to the surface. One of the men was airborne, another one had flippers that turned into feet as he ran, and the third villain dropped a grappling hook and rope that he must have used to scale the yacht from somewhere below.
Norma pulled out a whip that she had hidden somewhere in her suit and then advanced toward the airborne supervillain, while I focused my concentration on the translucent figure. The pool-boy looked like he was made of nothing but water, so I held myself steady until he was a little closer, and then I fired my taser right at the center of his see-through chest.
The electric current rippled through his whole body until he exploded in a spray of chlorine that coated the entire pool deck. Even as I moved toward the flippered villain, I glanced down to see that the remnants of the pool-boy had already started to scrape themselves back together, so the electric shock must have only injured him but not actually finished him off.
It looked like I would have to deal with that again later.
“Do you need help?” Dynamo answered over the comms.
“Not yet,” I said and then fired my palm blasters at the flippered villain.
He dodged them easily, but I glanced over to see that Norma had managed to lash her whip around the ankle of the airborne villain, and she had just yanked him down to the deck with a sickening crunch of his shoulder on the boards.
“Nice,” I said, and then I raised my forearm to block a punch from the grappling-hook asshole.
The moment that his fist landed on my forearm, I thought that it might be a good idea to install blades all along my forearms that would trigger at the force of a punch. If I had them now, then this fucker’s punch would have been met with a handful of blades that might have cut right through his knuckles down to the bone.
And that would have been hilarious.
As I blocked one blow after another from the grappling-hook villain, I deployed the taser in my other elbow to stop the flippered fucker as he tried to sneak up behind me. He yelped and fell to the ground, and even though he didn’t dissolve into a puddle of chlorine, he did wet himself as the electric current finished coursing thr
ough him.
“Dynamo, look for any clues that the Maniac left behind,” I said and then ducked when the grappling-hook asshole pulled out a gun. “There’s gotta be something down where you are since I don’t see anything up here.”
“We’re looking!” Penumbra said. “Tell us if you need help!”
The asshole in front of me tried to shoot, but I rolled to the side, so he just ended up blowing a hole in the deck. When he tried to shoot again, I was ready for him, so at the same time I dodged, I triggered the palm blaster in my left hand, and it tore a goddamn crater out of his thigh.
There was so much blood that it didn’t spurt so much as it just poured out of his leg, so I immediately fired the blaster in my right palm to finish the job. It ripped through the rest of his thick flesh and straight through the bone itself, so his whole leg just flopped to the floor, and then a second later, he flopped down with it.
“We found something!” Penumbra said. “You’ll definitely want to see this.”
“Be there in a minute,” I grunted, as I watched the man’s blood spill out into the chlorine of the translucent man.
The pool-boy had only managed to get his head and torso back together so far, but the other supervillain’s blood seemed to have slowed down his progress, so I was able to look over at Norma and see how she and the other two villains were doing.
My mousy but bloodthirsty assistant had just chopped off the airborne villain’s head with one of her machetes, and she had instantly started toward the grappling-hook asshole that I had tasered. She stood above him now with one machete in each hand, and she brought them both down in a cross-slash across his throat, so she didn’t quite sever his head but instead just cut clean through his windpipe.
“Nice work, Norma,” I said with a grin. “Now let’s go see what they found before the pool-boy comes back to life.”
“We make a pretty good team,” Norma said as she wiped the blood from her machetes off on the villain’s shirt.
“I had no idea that you had quite such an appetite for violence when I hired you,” I laughed, “but I’m glad you really seem to be coming into your own.”
Evil Genius 5 Page 5
