by Maren Smith
Sally had already gone for the hatch of the jet. She gave Bob a quizzical look.
“Alien DNA memory or something,” he said, with the slightest of shrugs. “I’m pretty sure she’s telling the truth.”
“Daddy!” That made Sally turn to look, her eyes amused now, and Bob could tell just from the way Susan held her chin that she had just turned off a blush. As she went through the hatch, she turned back to him, her adorable little mouth twisted off to the side. “It just popped out,” she said, suddenly both little girl and superhero at the same time.
“Get in, princess,” he said, giving her a quick kiss on her sweet lips. “Let’s save the world.”
Jane’s coordinates lay 5,000 feet deep in the Pacific Ocean. Bob let the autopilot take the electrojet briefly up over the skyscrapers of San Felipe and then straight out to sea in a parabolic trajectory that had them screaming towards the surface of the ocean in a matter of thirty seconds.
“If I rearrange the molecules in the water ahead of us,” Susan called from the back of the jet, “we can go in hot.”
Bob saw Sally turn first to Ultragirl and then to him, her look saying that she would rather watch a demonstration of Ultragirl’s molecular-level powers before potentially slamming their ride into water as hard, practically speaking, as concrete. Bob called back, “You sure?”
“Yes, sir,” Susan said, a little grimly, clearly trying to keep from sounding resentful that her daddy had questioned her ability.
He didn’t hesitate. Just as the autopilot would have slowed their descent to feather the jet into the ocean before accelerating again through the water and probably costing them at least ten minutes of travel-time, Nightprince took over and kept the dive at its screaming velocity.
Sally turned around to look at the adorable blonde alien sitting in the back. “You’d better know what you’re doing, little girl,” she said, and then they all watched the sea’s surface rush up to meet them.
Their entry into it was a non-event. Susan must have dealt with the air molecules, too, because it felt, frankly, like a dream, where motion occurs without effort or evidence of passage. Suddenly they were in the water, traveling just as quickly as they had through the air, and five thousand feet of water took three seconds to cross. Bob decelerated the jet, now a submarine, next to Captain Wonder’s own.
The two vehicles settled next to each other automatically, setting up a pressure equalizing seal and then merging into a single vehicle quietly holding its depth and position. Bob, Sally, and Susan joined Jane in her jet just as both submersibles rocked, their engines laboring to keep them in place.
“That’s Megadon,” Captain Wonder said.
Sure enough, out the glasteel window Bob saw the enormous amphibious monster-turned-hero from the lava-beds under the Pacific abyss plowing through the water towards them, streaming superheated steam bubbles in his wake. Despite looking neither aerodynamic nor hydrodynamic, Megadon held the title of fastest super through water—at least until today, Bob thought with a bit of pride, since Susan seemed likely to take it from him.
“Megadon,” Jane said, tapping a switch on her shiny helmet, “do you read?”
Over the jet’s speaker, across the comm link from the microphone Megadon had consented to have drilled into his rock carapace, came the deep voice, speaking in the broken English of a lava-monster doing his best to communicate with creatures he liked but did not really understand very well.
“Megadon hear Captain.”
“Oh, my Gods,” Susan whispered, sitting next to Bob. “He’s… he’s amazing.”
Unexpectedly, Megadon spoke again. “Who in boat with Captain? New girl. Not from Earth. Megadon sense.”
Jane looked at Susan. “Ultragirl,” she asked icily, “how is he sensing you?”
Bob realized that he could see on Susan’s face when she had just turned off a blush, though he felt sure no one else could do the same.
“It’s… I think it’s a passive thing? Quantum something, maybe? There’s a kind of affinity between our… molecules. That’s the best I can do.”
Captain Wonder, with an annoyed expression on her face, touched the switch on her helmet again. “Megadon, is the new girl bothering you?”
A harsh, distorted sound came over the speakers. Susan reached out for Bob’s hand, and he gave hers a squeeze, noting that Jane had seen the contact and, apparently, filed it away in her steel cabinet of an administrator’s brain.
Bob bent to speak in his supergirl’s ear. “He’s laughing,” he told her.
“Oh,” Susan whispered back, a smile coming to her lips.
“Megadon like new girl. New girl feel like part of Megadon. New girl ride Megadon to fight?”
Jane clicked the switch off and glared at Susan and Bob. “What the Hell is going on?” she demanded.
Sally spoke up, then. “We’ve never known where Megadon’s people actually came from. We only assumed they were from Earth.”
“Wait,” Susan said, apparently too full of an answer to practice the kind of tact required to deal with Captain Wonder, “I’ve got a memory of stone-men from way back in Zaxian history.”
To his surprise, Bob saw her turn off another blush, as she appeared to recover more of the memory.
“Zaxian warrior women… liked them. A lot.”
Jane’s glare grew very fierce. “Do you mean that your species mated with Megadon’s?”
Suddenly Bob had to keep himself from bestowing a suspicious look of his own on Susan, who gazed back at him with uncertain eyes before she turned to Captain Wonder and gave a quick nod.
“I have enough to deal with,” Jane said shortly, “without worrying about this.” She hit the switch to talk to Megadon again. “Megadon, I’m afraid we don’t have time to adjust the plan right now. We need to attack. Clearstream has the coordinates and he’s going to send you a ping to follow when I tell him to. I want you to smash through the rock there, into the fortress that lies underneath. We’ll follow. Virtueman should be right on the other side of the breach point, and we’ll grab him first.”
Bob squeezed Susan’s hand again, and she looked at him. The expression on her face—wide eyes and flared nostrils—made him raise his eyebrows. “You okay?” he mouthed.
She gave him a quick nod, but he could tell that the brief exchange with Megadon had affected her in some deep way. Bob winced inwardly at that, as he thought it: deep, definitely. A vision of Zaxian warrior women riding Megadon’s ancestors into battle in a way even Bob found, well, very naughty, filled his mind’s eye. Very, very deep, maybe.
“Are you listening, Nightprince?” Jane said sharply, making him realize he hadn’t heard the previous instruction she had apparently issued.
“Sorry, Cap,” he said. “I am now.”
“Your team is going to stay outside the breach and wait for my orders. Zap and I will take our jet right in after Megadon breaches the wall. If things are going well, you’ll come in as soon as we ascertain that it’s safe.”
Susan squeezed his hand, then, and when Bob glanced down at her he saw the troubled look replaced by a fierce, even aggressive one. She inclined her head towards him and widened her eyes slightly, then jerked her head towards Jane. Bob thought he knew exactly what she wanted, and he decided he might as well give it to her.
“Captain, I think Ultragirl should go in right behind Megadon.”
“Nightprince,” Jane said, “we don’t have time for this.”
“Captain,” Susan blurted out. “I can create a dry force-barrier as soon as he breaches the wall, so that you don’t even have to worry about water. What if Virtueman is unconscious?”
Jane gave Bob a look that seemed to say that she wouldn’t care if Susan could teleport Vic straight to her electrojet—she was the senior commander of CPE and she would have obedience. Then she looked at Susan, and said, “You have one shot at this. If anything goes wrong, and I tell you to get out of my way, you will return to Nightprince, if you’re not already dea
d, and he will deal with you. Do you understand, Ultragirl?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Susan said in a subdued voice. She looked at Bob with a bit of triumph in her eyes.
But Jane said, “Alright, get going,” then, and Bob’s supergirl let go of his hand, turned around, and headed towards the airlock set into the jet’s rear door. Captain Wonder sighed, and added, “Fine. Ride the big guy if you both think it’s a good idea.”
She hit the switch on her helmet as Susan entered the tiny chamber, with a last, uncertain smile to her super daddy.
“Megadon, Ultragirl is coming out to you.”
The air-lock filled with water in less than a second, and then the outer hatch had opened, and Susan, Bob’s alien, mind-bogglingly powerful, little girl had vanished into the dark water.
Chapter 13
The Zaxian part of her mind kept telling her she would simply know how to get atop Megadon and find every Zaxian warrior woman’s favorite part of her stone-man companion. The Iowan part of her kept saying that no self-respecting young woman would ever ride a lava-monster that way—let alone the way another memory had started showing her, where a male Zaxian warrior participated, too.
Could Nightprince do that? Could my daddy do that, the way the Zaxian men did?
To her annoyance she had to focus a good deal of attention on turning off the stupid blushes from moment to moment.
She swam to Megadon, though her actual motion didn’t involve what a human would have called swimming at all. It looked, she imagined, a good deal more like flying through water, since she accomplished the movement by means of adjacent-molecular displacement, replacing the water molecules just in front of her with the matter of her body in a continuous flow that came to her Zaxian instincts a good deal more easily than the management of her facial capillaries.
Also: really, really fun. As she neared the massive stony form of the stone-man and she saw the special place on his back where a warrior woman belonged—not unlike a natural saddle, really—the rush of living up to her alien heritage took hold in He’Vopra’Mertuq’s tribal memory. Susan found herself settling onto Megadon’s back a bit like a little girl playing piggyback with a grown-up, but the naughty secret of a stone-man’s special knob, perfectly placed to stimulate a Zaxian woman’s clit, made the moment a good deal more adult than that.
The DNA memory, as precise and—to Susan—embarrassing as it might be, didn’t prepare her for what it felt like, though. Even through her supersuit she could feel the thrumming of the stone body between her legs, the subatomic vibrations Zaxian women had called hanfar, which made her instantly wet down there despite the water tightness of the fabric and the molecule-thin layer of oxygen Susan had wrapped around her whole body for warmth.
Hello, Megadon, she sent to the monster-hero with her thoughts, along the age-old psychic bond between Zaxians and stone-men. I’m He’Vopra’Mertuq.
Pussy feel good, He? Megadon inquired, utterly innocent, she knew, of what a human would call “dirty thoughts,” but still making Susan fend off yet another blush.
Yes. What’s your real name, Megadon?
The response filled her mind like an avalanche, while at the same time the enormous creature started to move downward, while she instinctively feathered the water in front of him so that they moved through the ocean faster than the swiftest fish could have done.
Go’lo’pan.
She heard his pleasure in his mental voice, and it made her squeeze her thighs tighter onto his back and ride him the way the Iowan inside said only a bad girl would do, her hips moving lewdly to milk the pleasure of her mount’s stone saddle. She thought of her dark daddy and his big cock, and the Susan Corday part of her felt a little guilty that she hadn’t had time to explain what might look a little like cheating with another super. Go’lo’pan would only make her want Bob more, though, and soon maybe they could do the naughtiest, best thing of all—the three of them together, just the way the warrior women had, half the galaxy away.
He’Vopra’Mertuq felt her power continually replenished by the pleasure she found on Megadon’s back. When they reached the point where Clearstream waited, hovering just outside a point on the seafloor that Susan immediately sensed hid a human structure beneath it, she was ready to help her stone-man break through.
With her molecular senses she found a microscopic fissure in the bedrock into which the League of Terror had tunneled to create a lair they probably thought impregnable from this direction. If Susan understood Captain Wonder’s plan correctly, the trap LOT had undoubtedly set at another, more vulnerable spot, would get bypassed entirely, and the heroes of CPE would be able to destroy their enemies from a flanking position.
In any case, she was happy just to do as the woman in the shiny armor told her. She blew the bedrock wide open, and at the same time told the water not to enter the breach she had just made. Megadon smashed through, providing a brute force that cost him nothing but would have required a good deal of power from Ultragirl.
It took less than a second, and then Megadon was standing—well, crouching, actually, because the hewn chamber in which the heroes found themselves only had about an eight-foot ceiling—with Susan still in her special naughty saddle, in a dry, well-lit room. Behind them, Susan’s force barrier still kept the ocean at bay, and a glance in that direction told her that Captain Wonder’s electrojet was about to come through for whatever kind of landing it could manage in the available space.
The room in front of them seemed at first glance some kind of clinic. They had come through its ceiling into a bay that had two empty beds, and Susan could see another bay to her right, and two more across the room ahead of her. Of the eight beds, only one was occupied, by a big man thirty feet or so away from her and Megadon.
The figure in the hospital bed grew swiftly closer as the stone-man narrowed the gap between them, moving fast to give the electrojet behind them space to settle with the help of its magnetic fields. Susan looked back to see the vehicle lower itself onto the two beds in the bay Susan and Megadon had first entered, crushing them beneath its mass with a spectacular noise whose soundwaves Ultragirl casually stopped from propagating in the air a foot out from the bending metal and the shattering plastic.
In less than a second, she and Megadon were looking down at the face of Virtueman, whose limbs were secured to the bed frame with webbing straps. Susan felt immediate and considerable puzzlement as to two things: how Virtueman, Strongest of Mortals, could be held by the straps; and why he had a look of panic on his face.
Susan jumped down from Megadon’s back and put her hand on the buckle that fastened a strap holding Virtueman’s neck down to the bed.
“They…” Vic started to say, his voice sounding just as frightened as the look on his face. What had happened to him?
“Shh,” Susan told him. “We’re going to—”
“They see you!” Virtueman said.
Captain Wonder arrived at that moment. As she looked down at Virtueman, Susan saw the nose of the second electrojet—the one piloted by Nightprince, her daddy—come through the force barrier into the now very crowded room. Even before the jet had come to a stop, resting atop Captain Wonder’s jet, the pilot’s door had started to open, and Susan’s dark daddy had started to emerge.
“What did he say?” Captain Wonder asked sharply.
“He said that we see you,” announced a metallic, disembodied voice.
That was when the robots materialized.
The battle that followed didn’t, Susan thought even as it occurred, really qualify for the word battle. It mostly involved four flying robots per CPE super subduing Captain Wonder, Nightprince, Zap, Tigerwoman, and even Megadon. The shiny things each had two appendages that resembled arms, but otherwise they bore no resemblance to humanoid form: at the end of each arm-thing they had manacles, and they put them around the limbs of the supers or around each other’s arm-things to hog-tie every CPE hero within three seconds, as Ultragirl watched, on guard and waiting for
her own set of robots to attack.
The robots clearly knew how to counter every power the CPE supers could call upon, and perhaps they would have been able to take Susan captive too, if her Zaxian instincts had not made her go utterly still—not invisible, though she realized she could do that if she chose, but rather still at a molecular level, and undetectable to anyone whose mind she didn’t specifically allow to see her.
She looked at her daddy, at Nightprince, hog-tied on the floor of the strange medical chamber that had turned into a trap more effective than any Captain Wonder could have anticipated. She let him see her, and when his eyes went wide as if at the realization that the robots had ignored her, he mouthed the words, “Stay there.”
Susan nodded. She looked at Captain Wonder, whose armor should have been able to burst any material short of ultra-rare adamantium, helpless in the grip of the LOT robots. The leader of CPE narrowed her eyes at Ultragirl, and Susan thought she perceived in the look precisely the same order Bob had given her. She held her place, a non-entity from the point of view of detectable matter, and waited, all the while reaching out with her molecular senses to try to determine what the robots had done to counter the supers’ abilities.
The swinging metal double doors of the clinic of evil—Susan had just automatically started to think of it that way, she supposed—banged open, and the leader of the League of Terror, Doctor Dread, entered. Even Susan, who had never really steeped herself in the adventures of the CPE, could recognize him from the hideous metal mask he wore, which legend said hid a face even more hideous beneath. He wore a scarlet doctor’s lab coat that streamed out menacingly behind him, and beneath it a jet-black coat and tie, including the shirt and the pants, like a pediatrician from hell.
Behind him, the supervillains swinging the doors open so that they crashed against the stone walls were Charlatan and General Greystain, if Susan remembered correctly, completing the From Hell ensemble: Charlatan as biker from hell and Greystain as military officer from Hell, complete with blood red epaulettes. Ultragirl had no need to make herself undetectable to any senses the supervillains might have that worked according to the laws of physics—the effort lay in the other direction, of sending an impression of herself to those she wanted to see her. From the League of Terror’s perspective, as from that of their robot minions, Susan just wasn’t there.
