by Mia Archer
“Damn,” I muttered. “Those robots are playing for keeps today.”
“What are you talking about?” Selena asked.
Something that looked very much like the giant radio tower that sat on top of the iconic Thomas building came flying through the air. Well, I guess it was the giant radio tower that used to sit on top of the iconic Thomas building now.
It would have landed right on top of us, but I held my wrist blaster up and disintegrated the damn thing.
It was big enough that it didn’t go in one shot either. No, the end that hit my disintegrator went first, and momentum carried the rest of the tower right into that ray so it was constantly disappearing as though it was flying into a teleporter or something.
Hey, I’d always said if you were going to do this job then you should do it with some style.
I was more concerned with what the robots were doing down below than I was worried about random bits of scrap metal getting through, but the way Selena cried out in obvious terror pulled my attention back to the real world.
“Someone’s throwing things at us!” she said.
I gave her an odd look. “I can remember a time not so long ago when that wouldn’t have freaked you out nearly as much as it just did.”
“Yeah, well you’re the one who’s been going on about how I should make peace with the fact I don’t have my powers anymore, so don’t complain when I act like I don’t have my powers anymore.”
I shrugged. The woman made a good point. I couldn’t exactly complain about her finally recognizing a reality I’d been hoping she’d come to deal with. I figured reacting with terror at the loss of her powers rather than depression was a step in the right direction.
Even if she might not see it the same way.
Something went screeching through the air. I watched on the overhead display from one of my drones as what could only be a missile from some jet screaming through the air several hundred miles away came tearing into the city. It ricocheted off of a building at the last moment, but the resulting explosion did hit one of the robots with a glancing blow. Not enough to destroy the thing considering how tough they’d been when we…
I frowned. And threw myself over Selena as the concussion from the robot going up rocked our part of the city. It shook and rattled windows all around us, but we were high enough that it didn’t hurt us other than rattling the building under us which was scary enough.
“What the hell was that?” she breathed, and then I realized we were in a bit of a precarious situation because I’d reacted to save her without thinking.
That meant I’d landed right on top of her. She was breathing heavily, and I couldn’t tell whether that was because I was on top of her or because she’d just been saved from certain doom.
I certainly knew why I was breathing heavily, and it had nothing to do with fighting off giant robots which, to be perfectly honest, was more or less another day at the office for me. Even if they had been more difficult to take out lately.
Being on top of Fialux like this though…
Let’s just say it was something I’d been looking forward to and missing for some time now.
“Um… So…”
I hated this. I try to save a girl and then suddenly I find myself on top of her feeling as awkward as I had at middle school dances years ago. But what a good awkward feeling it was.
And for a surprise she leaned up and kissed me again.
“I know you’re trying to show me the perfect date night here,” she said. “And being here with you like this is incredible, but…”
“I get the feeling you’re about to tell me there’s something else I need to do,” I said. “Something heroic.”
I hated heroic. Heroic was the antithesis of everything I stood for in my professional career.
“You’re a smart girl,” she said. “I knew there was a reason you’re the number one villain in the world. Even if you’re right and you’re going to have to do something heroic here tonight.”
Now it was my turn to lean down and give her a kiss. A thorough kiss that had both of us distracted from the city-destroying robots rampaging.
“Flattery will get you everywhere. So what did you have in mind?” I said.
It was weird. I was more than happy to draw this conversation out for as long as possible if it meant being near her. On her.
It’d been awhile. So sue me.
“I think you know what you need to do,” she said. “Go out there and be the hero I know you can be. The hero I can’t be right now.”
I sighed. “I was afraid you were going to say something like that.”
She grinned. “You know what you need to do to impress the girl, so what are you waiting for?”
I got up. Looked at the drone feedback and the satellite picture. I frowned. The satellite I’d been using had passed over Starlight City while I was busy canoodling with Fialux.
I keep saying this, but CORVAC would’ve known to switch to another satellite without asking. Now here I was having to do it the old fashioned way myself.
Luckily the government kept multiple satellites over Starlight City so they could monitor all the superpowered shenanigans that always went on here. If there’s a wasp in the room you want to keep an eye on it, and if there was a city that was oddly predisposed to super powered throwdowns the government wanted to make sure they had eyes in the sky and on the ground even if traditionally they’d washed their hands of the place at the federal level.
“I count four robots still out there,” I said.
Something came screaming into the city again. Moving fast enough that I could barely see it as a shining point of light on the satellite feed, and it was too fast for the drones. Thankfully there was radar to keep an eye on things that moved that fast.
I frowned. Missiles shouldn’t look like shining points of light. Not that bright. There should be a small infrared signature from the exhaust trail, but that’s it.
And this thing, well, it was moving like one of my antigrav missiles.
“Goddamn Dr. Lana and her goddamn motherfucking Applied Sciences Department!” I screamed, but the scream was lost in the noise and destruction as the antigrav missile slammed into one of the robots and it exploded spectacularly, though it wasn’t enough to take it out of the running like the other one.
I frowned. What the hell was going on here?
“Correction,” I said. “We have three and a half bogeys out there now. Uncle Sam just got a hit on one, but it didn’t take it out.”
Selena looked up in the sky.
“Uncle Sam? But I don’t see any jets or tanks or anything out there.”
I grimaced. “It’s a common misconception people have from watching too many Japanese giant monster movies where fighter jets fly within arm or tail length of a monster. It looks impressive in the movies, but that’s not how air-to-monster combat works.”
“It isn’t?” she asked. “But these are robots, not giant monsters. I was really looking forward to seeing my first giant lizard, too. Those things are awesome!”
“Lizard, robot. It’s all the same if there’s a big something raising hell and lowering property values,” I said.
I reminded myself she hadn’t been doing the hero thing long enough to tangle with Uncle Sam directly. Like the bad plot to one of the many comic books and movies that were always ripping off my adventures, it seemed like there was always a point when the US government, or whatever local government happened to have jurisdiction over the particular hero or villain in question, got a wild hair up their ass and decided they were going to try and bring their heroes and villains in line.
The problem being it was very difficult for somebody to bring in a living God, or somebody who could do a reasonable simulation of having the powers of a living God thanks to technical ingenuity, with little toys like fighter jets and atomic weapons.
The end result of all that fighting had been a truce between the government and the superpowered elements of Starli
ght City in recent years. An unspoken truce, of course.
Things didn’t spill out of Starlight City, it was basically a playground and preserve for the superpowered, and the government didn’t try to get involved too much and do anything ill-advised like, say, creating another idiotic registry for superpowered individuals or wasting resources they could be spending inventing new ways to blow people up on ridiculous projects like pumping high fructose corn syrup full of some magical mumbo-jumbo that was supposed to get rid of superpowers.
They’d tried all of the above. None of them ever worked for long considering the healthy blend of people with latent superpowers and people with powers they invented for themselves.
It would appear that fragile détente was over now. If they were firing weapons into the middle of Starlight City again, particularly weapons that looked like they were cribbed from my designs which made me certain Dr. Lana had something to do with this, then it meant Uncle Sam was flexing his muscles.
There were always a few guys in the Pentagon with more boards on their shoulders and ribbons on their chest than sense between their ears who were champing at the bit to get out here and tangle with Starlight City again.
Particularly with yours truly.
Great.
“So what do they do?” she asked.
“Jets can fire on a target from hundreds of miles away and hit it with almost pinpoint precision these days. What’s the point of flying within arm’s length of a giant death robot or irradiated lizard if you can hit it from hundreds of miles away from the comfort of your padded air conditioned cockpit? There’s no question that’s well out of these thing’s reach.”
Which again begged the question as to why these things didn’t have more advanced weaponry that would allow them to fire on the distant objects that would inevitably pester them.
Was Dr. Lana deliberately setting up a turkey shoot? She had been annoyed when I interrupted her last “demonstration,” so maybe there was something to that.
When I sent CORVAC out in that giant spherical monstrosity he’d been armed to the teeth. He would’ve been the belle of the maniacal death robot ball if it weren’t for the fact that Fialux and I had come along to ruin his fun.
Maybe Dr. Lana deliberately avoided that because she wanted to let the military types think whatever she’d ripped off from me and sold them was way more effective than it actually was. It was a clever gambit, I’d give her that.
I was also going to give her the business end of a disintegrator ray the next time I saw her for using the city as a practical demonstration in her advanced weapons sales pitch.
The disintegrator was too good for that woman. I was going to figure out all sorts of fun ways to test out my weaponry on her and figure out the limits of her miraculous healing. I was going to…
I was interrupted by a clanging. That couldn’t be good. Then a familiar someone swooped out over the building and grinned down at us.
“Why Night Terror!” Dr. Lana cackled. “And Selena, but of course you’d be with your new friend wouldn’t you?”
Selena looked at me and then up to Dr. Lana. She tensed as though she was about to do something stupid like rely on powers she didn’t have to try and take a flying leap at the good doctor, but I put a hand on her arm.
She turned to me and I shook my head. She didn’t have anything to help her right now. Sure I could transport her suit around her, but I didn’t want Dr. Lana to know she was using a suit to fly around these days.
“Don’t worry dear,” Dr. Lana said. “Your secret is safe with me, but I will be needing to take you back to my lab to figure out why my favorite invention didn’t work on you. I’m just glad I happened to notice the signature of someone wearing a teleporter and now here I find the two of you! What a happy surprise!”
It took me a moment to realize what she was talking about. Her favorite invention. That gun. She had to be talking about that gun. And it was back at her lab.
I’d have to pay her a visit, but it obviously wasn’t going to be today. No, I had bigger problems than trying to figure out how she used that gun to rob Fialux of her powers.
I wasn’t even all that curious as to how she knew Selena’s real name. The lady worked for the university and Selena was a student there. It didn’t take a huge stretch of the imagination to figure out how she’d figured that out, even if it did grate that she just dropped a bomb like that when it took me weeks of research with CORVAC’s assistance.
What I was curious about was all that nonsense about tracking a teleporter. Sure I had a small unit attached to me, never leave home without it, but that was something I’d miniaturized well after I left the Applied Sciences Department.
How did she have that? How could she track it? Not that I had much time to think about that before a giant metal hand appeared over the building’s edge.
The hand slammed down on the beautiful metal fence that had kept people from accidentally plunging to their deaths, though there were a few ghost tours that spoke of people who still haunted the Skyhigh because that fence wasn’t nearly tall enough to stop someone who was determined.
Given the clientele that fence had seen a lot of action back in the late twenties on a certain Tuesday that had a lot of rich people who suddenly found themselves not-so-rich practicing their swan dive.
The robot reached out and grabbed at Selena, and of course she didn’t give any resistance because what could she do? She didn’t have her suit on. I should’ve teleported the damn thing on her. Better she had a way to get away from that thing than be stuck in the clutches of Dr. Lana and one of her robots.
Selena’s eyes went wide as she realized what was going on. Her mouth opened and she let out a shriek that was very unheroic, but given the change in her circumstances I could hardly fault her for it.
“Natalie! Save me!”
Then the robot was gone. Its head moved down and its hand pulled Selena along with like a giant robotic King Kong, only the asshole was stealing my girl. Dr. Lana gave me a little wave and a smile and then she was gone too.
I sprinted to the edge and watched the robot climbing down the building. It wasn’t doing it with any sense of finesse or style either. No, it was just shoving its hands into the building to get a handhold or foothold as it moved down. The thing didn’t even bother using the holes it’d already created.
I should’ve known Dr. Lana knew we were here. Why else would the robots target this building in particular? I didn’t know how she’d figured it out, but I was going to have to figure that out.
Right after I saved my girl.
“Damn it Selena! Villains don’t save heroes!” I growled.
Only that’s exactly what I was about to do. I held up my wrist blaster and gave it a little kiss for good luck. It was going to get a good workout by the time this was all done.
Circumstances might keep forcing me to be the hero, but I was going to do it in my own unique villainous way.
44
Rescue
I flew into the air and got my bearings. I had to get my bearings, because of course I didn’t have an egotistical megalomaniacal supercomputer feeding me information. I’ve complained about that often enough in my inner monologue that even I’m getting sick of hearing it.
It took a little getting used to sorting all the feeds in my heads-up display, but I managed to do it. Besides, I needed to do it fast if I was going to save Selena’s ass. I could see the robot that had abducted her booking it, and it wasn’t going for the tallest building in the city like you might expect from a giant creature that just snatched a pretty young thing.
I grinned despite the imminent danger. This actually felt kind of good. It felt like the old days. When I was first coming up and making a name for myself. Back before I discovered CORVAC and started using him as a major crutch in my villainous arsenal.
Those days had been fun. Me against the world.
Only now I was doing the exact opposite of what I’d been up to in those days. Now
I was out trying to save the girl, and maybe incidentally the city in the process, rather than trying to take it over.
Oh how the tables had turned.
I tracked four robots moving through the city. Three and a half if you count that hit that the one took, but I couldn’t be certain how damaged it was.
The first one that took that missile hit had blown up a little too easily. Especially for a glancing blow. That made me think this whole thing was part of Dr. Lana’s attempt to market the weapons she stole from me to the military. This whole thing was a turkey shoot to show them how awesome those weapons were.
The fact that Fialux and Night Terror weren’t able to defeat them easily was probably another selling point for her, for all that she’d bitched about us ruining her demonstration the last time around.
I swooped down low. Low would keep me off of any pesky radar trying to track me. If I were Dr. Lana I’d be using radar to track me.
Any radar she tried wouldn’t be much use down in the concrete canyons that made up downtown Starlight City. Everything would bounce off of buildings and make it impossible to see anything.
Though there was always a chance she’d come up with some new tracking system that overcame what should’ve been a physical impossibility. As the sort of person who regularly defied the laws of physics I was well aware that you never banked on somebody else obeying those laws of physics.
Not if you wanted to survive in this business.
I rounded a corner with my wrist blaster out. I found myself confronted with one of the robots, not the one carrying Fialux, but it wasn’t a surprise. I had cameras on multiple buildings down here in addition to the drones and satellite feed that gave me a full three-dimensional picture of everything happening downtown in real time.
