Please Don't Tell My Parents I've Got Henchmen

by Richard Roberts

  Ruth gave her a searching, sidelong look. “Can you keep yourself under control?” Yeah, she'd heard about Marcia.

  “I'll have to.”

  For Rachel, apparently that was enough. She transformed. Her shirtsleeves split as her muscles swelled up. Red fur covered everything visible. Her face elongated into a muzzle. Her feet stretched, kinked, until she stood digitigrade, and through all that fire engine red fur, the silvery tattoos still gleamed.

  She raced off on all fours towards Buszilla, passing an infected bicycle speeding to join the conglomerate killer robot. Without even pausing, she switched to a two-legged run, grabbed the bike, ripped it into pieces, and threw those in multiple directions.

  She reached Buszilla as it lumbered onto our street, climbed it in a series of quick jumps to its head, yanked off the hood, and reached inside. Buszilla went still as she pulled the engine out. White mechanical arms flailed around the detached motor.

  She howled, holding the motor high, as Buszilla slowly, creakingly, collapsed to the ground.

  Ruth and Marcia were already gone, a purple hairy were-thing and a dark-haired girl charging side by side through the broken front doors of Upper High.

  That was how professionals did it.

  Behind them flowed a pool of shadow. Asked for or not, Sue was following Marcia.

  That was how friends did it.

  That left the remains of my team. “Laverne, help Rocky get out of here. Be careful, you're almost as susceptible as he is to these things. Olga, block anything that tries to chase people out of Northeast West Hollywood Middle. I don't think these monsters can infect your web, but if they do, run. We'll get it back later.”

  None of them argued. I turned to Jacky and Barbara, the former's gooey arm around the latter's shoulders. “You two coordinate any other supers that show up, and if you have the strength, help the injured. Cassie. Guard Rage's back. Will… where is Will?”

  “Playing kissyface with an inorganic catgirl. Not that there's anything wrong with that.” Cassie winked, saluted, and charged off after her older sister's… well, heterosexual life partner, I guess.

  “Teddy. Beaddown.” The two people who could fight. “Harass any robots on the street, and keep them off of civilians.”

  The little elementalist pumped his fist. “Wicked!”

  Beaddown held up her hand, and they high-fived.

  Celebration at getting the cool jobs over, Beaddown summoned up her whirling cloud of weapons, and charged out into the middle of the road. Teddy followed, trailing fire.

  That left me, Ray, and Claire. The latter had a hold on the former's upper arm, but he was definitely standing on his own. I threw my arms over their shoulders. “Huddle.”

  They leaned in, bumping their heads against mine. Claire asked, “Giant self-replicating killer robots?”

  “I did warn you.”

  Claire grinned, not stung at all. “Which is why we made plans. You watch. An hour from now, you'll see this as one of your greatest successes.”

  “We just have to get to the console to take control.”

  Claire looked up out of the huddle at the high school, and hesitated for a moment before returning. “Okay, I see your point. There might be a teeny tiny army of giant killer robots in our way. Still very small.”

  Ray spoke up. “If we don't hurry, they'll be a large army of giant killer robots. They're spreading out into the city. Have been since before we knew about the problem.”

  I looked at him. His glasses were missing, and he did not look coherent, but that hadn't sounded too bad. “How are you holding up, Reviled?”

  “You'll have to do the thinking, but I can handle thug duty.”

  “Which brings us back to reaching the console.”

  Ray took a peek at the carnage. “Over, around, or through?”

  “Around will be easy. We dodge a few robots and get to the lair entrance. They won't care about us,” said Claire.

  “They'll care about your cell phone, and the main entrance is ground zero. It'll be plugged with monster machines. Like a bio-machine infestation that has looped around and gone full machine again.”

  We all considered this image. Being a supervillain was so cool sometimes.

  “So our fearless leader suggests…?” pressed Claire.

  “I'd like to try under.”

  have a good sense of direction and a GPS. This is about as close as we're going to get. I hope those stories were true.”

  Unwrapping the Machine, I told Claire, “It hardly matters. If Lab Rat was telling the truth, some of the corridors of this base have hidden doors into the other base. If he wasn't, they're still so close together we're bound to break through.”

  I stuffed the Machine against the wall, and ordered, “Eat. Make a tunnel.”

  It got started, but since it started out small, it always took time to grow a big enough mouth to eat fast. We got to eye the corridor that hopefully, maybe, would lead from my old base into my new base.

  The outlying corridors of the magic base were all well-lit, in the same crumbly dungeon theme. The farthest tunnels of the tech base were a lot more shabby. This one petered out into bare cement walls, floor, and ceiling, and a dead end. The only light was Claire's phone.

  An idea occurred to me. “Head for the nearest source of chlorophyll that isn't up.” The dungeons were all mossy, right?

  The Machine crunched and chewed. It grew shiny silicate jaws, and plates of metal on its back. No two were the same color. I was rapidly learning that cement was made of all kinds of things.

  Pay dirt. Pay non-dirt, but still pay. The Machine, the size of a large dog now, broke through into an empty space.

  I just about choked on the dust that kicked up. Fortunately, and that stretched the definition of the word, most of it was wet and clung to the walls as muck. It all stank of rot. We'd opened up a little bitty tunnel, an empty room less than ten feet long. The wall on the other end was brick-shaped rough stones, like in the magic base.

  “Machine! Eat through that wall, now.”

  “I think I can hurry that up,” offered Ray.

  “Are you sure?” I squinted at him. He still looked pretty bleary.

  “Physically, I am fine. It is just hard to remind myself that the voices I hear now are real,” he said, successfully making me much less reassured than I was a minute ago.

  But, I had to let him at least try, although if he fell down in that muck… eeewww.

  He passed the shuffling Machine, which seemed to want to eat its way through the filth, and kicked the wall. Not much happened. He kicked it again, and again, rearing up and slamming the sole of his foot into it.

  A stone moved. A couple more kicks, and it popped out. After that, at least one stone came out per kick.

  We had a door into the back corridors of my new lair, at least a little bit faster than the Machine could have provided. It was still eating the bricks Ray knocked out.

  Claire walked through the path the Machine had cleared of slime, and when she stepped inside let out a sigh. “I was so worried we'd break into the garden and damage it.”

  “Your sense of direction had better be as good as you say, because I have no idea where we are.”

  The secret door had been at the corner of a tunnel, where it took a right hand bend. Claire looked up each side, then pointed. “Those are the old living quarters. We go that way, and turn left into the workroom areas. We're pretty close.”

  The first doorway we passed proved her right, although that was hardly a comfort. I'd destroyed everything with upholstery, but a lamp, bulky eighties stereo, and cubical television were all turned on, and all had bits of white robot infection sticking out. The TV was picking up a Spanish speaking broadcast station, and just for a moment, I was impressed. None of those items had been functional, but that wasn't the issue. That old cathode ray tube box could not have been digital compatible before the universal repair bot got to it. Hardcore mad science tech, right there.

  As
we passed, the television fell face-first onto the floor. Its knobs came out of the frame, and started dragging it towards us. The sound of shattering glass hailed it shutting off when it hit, but after a few seconds, the Spanish news chatter started up again, and light peeked out from underneath.

  I was starting to wish I'd built that universal repair device. Or at least that I hadn't been dumb enough to combine it into a mere doomsday machine. What a waste.

  We left the TV chasing us. It just couldn't chase us fast.

  The good news: we reached the summoning chamber without any more delays. Yes, all the machines we passed were infected, but none were in our way.

  The bad news: the control console was infected. Big time. Some of my other toys had tried to combine with it into a killer robot, and turned it into a giant ball of wires and struts.

  Something inside that ball yelled, in a human voice.

  We crowded up to the web, and I tried to keep an eye out in case any of its bits reached for my toys, or worse, my cell phone. I did not want to explain to Dad if I had to replace it again.

  The whole mass seemed oddly quiescent. I found a gap and peeked inside.

  “Who's in there?” I asked, out of politeness, but I already knew. The tech thief was practically fused to the console by the wires of her gloves and backpack that had broken loose to join the machine mass.

  She'd pulled her head free of her helmet, and she didn't look like a kid with super powers. Just a regular teenager, maybe sixteen, on the thin side, with dirty blond hair, ragged clothes, and a ponytail. It wasn't crazy long, but her hair was crazy thick, and the ponytail failed to keep big chunks of bang hanging down all around the front and sides. She'd gone in for the 'multiple earrings' thing, too.

  “I'm Ampexia, and you're the dirty scabs who stole what's rightfully mine, aren't you?” She thumped the bars of her cage with a bare fist. Her gloves sure weren't going anywhere.

  “You mean the sonic liquefier?” Claire asked, because hey, why not confirm all of Ampexia's worst suspicions?

  That did make Ampexia blow up, but not in the direction I expected. She reared up in the seat, yelling, “It makes arable soil out of rocky waste, you fight-happy runts! How dare you pervert it into a weapon, and how dare you steal it in the first place?!”

  My eye roamed to her badly infected mad science gloves and backpack. “You made it?”

  “No, but I know who did, and he hasn't left his apartment since it was stolen. He just lies on his couch and cries. Give it back to me, or I'll… figure out how to make this worse!” She gave the control console a thump.

  “Trade. You can have the liquefier, if you'll help us turn off the machine plague.”

  Claire let out an outraged squeak, leaning up over the top of the webbed over chair to glare at me. “Hey! That's not yours to give away!”

  I stared at her, until she sank back down, grumbling, “Okay, okay.” She diverted her pout by asking Ampexia, “How did you get in here, anyway?”

  “It's the last day of school. What better time for you stinky little crab apples to try something? Sure enough, I saw the Akk girl sneak into a hole in the courtyard. When she left, I snuck in to get what's mine. When I couldn't find it, I tried to set your robot thing to rampaging to teach you a lesson, and then this happened.”

  I kept my voice calm, since I was going to have to be the reasonable one here. “Well, now we have a deal. There should be a shutoff or self-destruct option. The menu-”

  Ampexia banged a fist on the keyboard in front of her, and she groaned in frustration, “Do you think I'd be trapped in here if I had any control over anything? The keys don't work! Nothing works!”

  Criminy. That was not good news. I tried to get a look at the screen. I found a gap big enough for me to see the main monitor. It was showing… shadows, the inside of a cabinet, or something. It was still hooked up to the original robot.

  “Nothing? Try-”

  She barked over me, “I've been here for half an hour, scab. I'm telling you, nothing works. It started up, I got it out into the hall, and the controls stopped responding.”

  “Have you tried unplugging it and plugging it back in?” Claire asked. We all glared at her. Even Ray. “What? It's worth trying, right?”

  “The power system is three of those purple super battery crystals. It doesn't have a plug,” I told her, slowly and patiently. Why was the biggest computer geek in the room throwing this stuff at me?

  Claire was not shamed. She just shrugged. “Whatever the problem is, it's the same one we had last time I tried to control your robot. The console only wants to work for you. Break in, and find the shutdown yourself.”

  Now, that was a good idea. “Ray, open a gap for me, would you?”

  After a worrisome couple of seconds spent staring into space, he snapped into focus, bowed, and forced his fingers into the mesh of wires and strips of metal. He heaved, and they bent a few finger widths out of the way. He paused, taking a couple of breaths, and climbed up on top of the cage to get a better grip on that gap. More straining, some squeaking metal, and he got it a few inches farther open. Shaking his head, he said, “I'm strong, but I'm not that strong, and there's no leverage. Let me find a better spot, or a lever, some kind of tool.”

  Now I grinned. “We have the greatest tool ever invented. Machine? Come eat this open, if you please?”

  My Machine sat in the doorway, a waist high pillbug of various minerals, obediently awaiting its mistress's wishes. Upon my command, it began to hump its way into the room.

  Its tail end had almost crossed the threshold when the crawling television caught up, and jabbed its dials between a couple of back plates.

  My Machine stopped moving. It quivered. White spikes stuck out of a couple of joints.

  Oh, no. No no no. Forget the giant robots, nobody was taking my Machine. Until now, I would have sworn I could drop it into the sun, and it would eat its way out eventually. Nothing could damage it. Absolutely nothing.

  But 'invading' was not the same as 'damage.'

  “Eat the infestation! Eat the thing trying to get into you! Eat it! Eat it now!” I shrieked, giving the only order I could think of.

  What happened next was… odd. My Machine bounced and flopped, rolling and twisting to bite at the white wires growing out of it. Plates popped open, and the mechanisms inside twisted. It rearranged its bits into new mouths, inside itself. The whole thing writhed, consuming itself as the web tried to grow. It looked like a metal version of the blobby nightmare that had guarded my cursed statue.

  “We are out of time. We work with what we have!” I shouted, at no one at everyone, and mostly at myself. Climbing up on one of the lower coils of wire out of the base of the chair, I shoved my arm through the gap Ray opened and groped around. The tips of my fingers found something that felt like a joystick.

  “You're making the left arm move,” Ampexia reported. I heard keys click. “It's still doing a great big bupkiss for me.”

  “Maybe we can get you a stick?” Claire suggested.

  I shook my head. I still wouldn't be able to see what I was doing. “The console won't respond. Last time it stopped responding when…”

  “You poured cursed pennies into the robot, marking it as yours,” supplied Ray.

  He had noticed the same thing I had. Well, he'd been there, paying better attention than me, every time I'd used my pennies to take over Puppeteer goo out in space. We were flying blind on this, but my Machine, my baby, was fighting for its life. Here was hoping Ray and I understood the problem.

  I slipped a couple of pennies out of my pocket, and pushed my hand through the gap. “Put one of these on the dashboard. Hold the other in your hand while you work the controls. It might make you a little stupid.”

  Her already sly voice reached new levels of sarcasm. “I think I feel about as stupid as I ever will right now, thanks.”

  But she took the pennies. I heard clicks and clatters, and Ampexia cried out, “It works! I have to click it w
ith the stupid penny, but it works!”

  I pressed my glasses to the arm hole, which gave me a pretty good view of the screen. “Okay, I don't know exactly where the self-destruct is-”

  Ampexia sneered. “Yeah, yeah. Listen, mad scienceling, I make a lot of money customizing sound tech. If you don't know how it works, I can figure it out without you, thanks.”

  From what I could see, she was as good as Claire, Ray, or I could ever be. She rolled menus around. She flicked screens. She did something that hadn't occurred to me at all – she flipped over one of the keyboards. Like it usually did, the flipped over side had a new configuration, and Ampexia jabbed a button triumphantly. “System utilities! Self-destruct, right- wait. That will kill my bass cannon, right? No way.”

  My Machine was devouring itself behind me, and she wanted to argue? But that was exactly why I had sympathy for her position.

  While I debated, Ampexia kept jabbing buttons. “Network signals. Shut down! Sent! Is anything happening?”

  Something did happen. A grinding noise got quieter, and then stopped. The Machine flopped around for a couple more seconds, and then settled back into pillbug shape, with one shiny new plate of white plastic.

  Next to it, the dials pulled into the television. It lay there on the floor, looking as good as new.

  From inside the cage, Ampexia crowed, “My gloves came loose! Hey, the screen back light is fixed. Sweetness!”

  Limb by limb and wire by wire, the chair, the console, and Ampexia's backpack disentangled. She jammed her hair back into her helmet, and fixed her glasses back on.

  We peeked out into the hallway. Everything seemed quiet.

  Ampexia jabbed me with a gloved finger. “My soil converter. Now.”

  I looked back at Claire. “Where did you put it?”

  “The main workshop by the entrance hall. I was hoping you could upgrade it into a real weapon.”

  Teeth bared, the lanky teenager slapped her hand over her face. “You mean I passed it on the way in? Okay, fine. Take me to it, and no tricks.”