by Archer, Mia
“The problem is we have to get down to the central control room if we’re going to trip my special surprise,” she said, grinding her teeth and giggling at the same time. “I didn’t count on a giant irradiated lizard being tossed into the control room when I invented that surprise.”
Yeah, totally a split personality kind of moment. If I wasn’t invulnerable I’d be seriously worried about my safety right about now. Even with my invulnerability I found myself worrying about my safety just a little.
“Do you want to maybe talk about something Sabine?” I asked, almost afraid of the answer.
“The only thing I want to talk is how you’re going to get me to my control room,” she said. “I’m going to need you to fly me over the rest of the lava flow, because I’m not going to have enough power to fly and keep my shields running strong enough to keep me from getting fried internally from the convection currents.”
“I know, right?” I said. “Everyone acts as though touching lava is the big problem, and they never seem to care about the heat coming off of it.”
“I can definitely tell you were dating Natalie,” Sabine said.
“How do you figure?” I asked.
“Because that was something she loved to gripe about,” Sabine said. “And you’re saying it close enough to how she used to gripe that I can tell you watched Dante’s Peak with her.”
“Also that Tommy Lee Jones movie,” I said. “Though that one seemed even more ridiculous than the one with the chick from Terminator.”
“The chick from Terminator and James Bond,” Sabine said. “A double dose of bad ass. And that’s exactly what we’re going to need to get to the control room.”
I shrugged. “Then I suppose we should stop wasting time chatting about ‘90s disaster cinema and get down there.”
29
Trap
“This isn’t going to be…”
I stopped in the process of saying this wasn’t going to be pretty. We were careening down the hallway leading to the central chamber, and I’d been convinced we were going to burst through and see the giant radioactive lizard in the middle of the room taking a lava bath.
Only when we got in there nothing of the sort was happening. It looked like some lava had sloshed over the edge of the shield walls, but there was no sign of the giant radioactive lizard even though there’d been steady earthquakes hitting.
I found myself reflecting on how imprecise that language was. After all, we weren’t on earth so it’s not like there could be earthquakes. I at least had the good sense not to allow myself to get distracted by that particular internal language debate for too long.
“Where the hell did that lizard go?” Sabine asked, putting her hands on her hips and looking around.
“I have no idea,” I said.
“I was sure from all the lava that was coming towards us that…”
Whatever she was about to say was cut short by a roar followed by more lava sloshing over the edge from up above. It looked like there was a wave that had hit the edge of her control room. The only direction it could go from there was down, and it was only me slamming into Sabine and moving her out of the way that kept that wave of fast-moving lava from testing the limits of her shield technology.
Sabine floated up and dusted herself off, though of course it wasn’t likely there’d be much dust hanging around in this room what with the superheated air.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Don’t mention it,” I said. “Saving people is sort of what I do.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” she said.
She looked up at the edge of her control room. I wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but it was clear from her irritated look that she wasn’t happy about what she saw there.
“I knew that was going to come back and bite me in the ass someday,” Sabine growled.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“The design for my volcano lair,” Sabine said. “The whole control room is a cylinder with the top cut off that’s been plopped down in the middle of the caldera. I designed it so the edges of the cylinder always floated just below the surface level of the lava so it naturally created that cool effect where the lava flowed down around the edges inside the shields. It looked pretty damn cool as long as the shields were still functioning to direct the lava, but…”
“But the whole thing sort of falls apart when your shields fail because of, say, a giant irradiated lizard up there stomping around?” I asked.
“Something like that,” she said. “It looks like the shields are still in place. I just didn’t put them high enough to stop giant waves of lava being kicked up, because who thinks of something like that?”
“That design seems impractical and asking for trouble even without taking a giant irradiated lizard into consideration,” I said.
“Oh I totally thought of that over the years,” Sabine said.
“And?” I asked.
“And I decided that the totally kick ass aesthetic I achieved with the lava walls were worth this maybe happening someday,” she said.
I rolled my eyes. “You’re crazy.”
“Crazy, maybe,” she said. “But you’re about to see just how crazy things can get.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. She had that crazed look again. She’d gone from pissed off to giggling and now excited.
“You’ve been planning something this whole time, haven’t you?” I asked.
“Do you have any idea what it feels like to be surrounded by that bitch?” she asked.
The giggling was gone. She looked totally serious. Like she’d just watched her best friend die right in front of her or something. She went from that nervous energy to staring into an unpleasant past she’d rather not remember.
“It wasn’t too long after I came to this world,” she said.
“Listen Sabine,” I said. “Whatever you’re planning…”
“I think the hive mind eventually realized it wasn’t going to be able to take me over through the usual methods that allowed it to conquer this city,” she said. “That’s when she decided to get unconventional. To trap me.”
“Whatever the hive mind did to you back then, we can make her pay. But you have to tell me what you’re planning,” I said. “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what you’re planning.”
“Do you have any idea how long I was in there?” she asked. “Knowing that the only thing in between me and those worms suffocating me for good was my shields? Wondering if they were going to give out since they were never all that reliable to begin with?”
I didn’t say anything. What could I say to that? The only time I’d been surrounded by those worms I’d been blowing through them to try and kill the things.
“I was in there for a week,” she said. “At least I’m pretty sure it was a week. Breathing stale air that was starting to really go bad towards the end as the recirculator starting to give out…”
“How did you get out?” I asked, licking my lips.
She turned to me and smiled. A thin secretive smile. A very unsettling smile, when you got down to it. A smile that said there were some secrets she was going to keep. Whether I liked it or not.
Whatever non-answer I was about to get from her, and non-answers seemed to be something that was happening with a disturbing amount of regularity every time I asked her a question, was interrupted by a deep and profoundly unsettling rumbling.
“What the heck is that?” I asked.
Whatever it was, it was intense. Like I’d read stories about what the big one in San Francisco back in 1906 had felt like. I’d watched the YouTube videos of the big earthquake in Japan that caused that giant tsunami a few years back. I even remembered being taught about a fault out in the Midwest that had made the Mississippi River run backwards on a couple of occasions which seemed like a big accomplishment.
Whatever was happening around us, I suddenly got the feeling that I was in a quake that was on that level. We’re talki
ng the ground was shaking with such fury that it actually bounced up and lava splashed against my feet even though I was hovering a good ten feet above the ground.
“You might want to move up just a little,” I shouted.
When I turned to look Sabine had already moved up. It’s almost as though she was expecting this giant quake.
“If there’s something you’ve been waiting to tell me then now would be a good time for you to do it!” I shouted.
“Sorry about this,” Sabine said. “But you have to understand that I had to have you believing completely and totally that we were in danger for this to work. The hive mind is scary good at detecting lies. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve had so much trouble taking her on in a fair fight, and one of the reasons why you made such an excellent secret weapon in that fight. Aside from all the super powers stuff which has also been great on the whole secret weapon front.”
A chill went through me. She was talking like a real villain. More specifically she was talking like a villain whose plan was finally coming together, and while it seemed good that a plan was coming together that would result in the hive mind’s ultimate demise, on the other hand I didn’t care for being part of a plan that I’d not consented to in the first place.
As with so many things, moderately villainous plans included, consent was always the magic ingredient.
“Would you just tell me what’s happening?” I asked as the volcano continued to shake around us. As though the whole thing was getting ready to blow. “Might I remind you that if this thing blows up with you inside it that’s probably it for you?”
If there was one thing I’d learned not underestimate since becoming a hero, it was my ability to judge whether or not a situation was going to result in a villain’s untimely demise.
They were like cockroaches. They always came back. Even when you thought you’d defeated them. There was only one time when I’d been happy to see a villain come back from a beating, and even then it was only because I’d ultimately started dating her.
I wasn’t interested in dating anything I’d found on this world.
“What’s happening is blowing up this volcano has always been the plan!” she shouted.
“Are you insane?” I asked.
“Maybe,” she said. “But at this point insane is what it’s going to take to take out this hive mind bitch!”
The rumbling and trembling reached a crescendo. It was enough to make me wonder if she’d deliberately planned it that way, or if it was merely a coincidence. Either way, it was pretty cool. At least it was cool right up to the moment a bunch of alien worms spilled over the edge of the control room.
Lots of them were charred, flinging themselves right into the lava without a concern for their individual well-being, but the charred ones were creating a path over the lava for the non-charred worms that were coming for us in a disgusting wriggling and living wave.
We were in trouble.
“Where is she coming up with more worms to throw at us?” I shouted.
“That’s the problem,” Sabine said. “There are always more worms than there are cats. They breed constantly. They create huge populations under the city. She’s always ready to throw them at an enemy as a last resort, and judging by what she’s throwing at us now she’s decided we’re the biggest threat she’s faced since I first arrived!”
“It’s so nice to be noticed,” I said.
“Yeah, isn’t it?” Sabine asked. “The last time she noticed me like this was when I spent that aforementioned week knee-deep in wriggling worms who were trying their best to get inside my brain cavity.”
I arched an eyebrow at that. “How do you know they didn’t get into your brain cavity?”
She pointed to the worms and gave me a look at that seemed to say “are you fucking kidding me?” It was a look at that I was very used to getting from Natalie. There were times when it felt like, aside from the old bedroom eyes, that was the most common look I got from her.
“I think the fact that she’s trying so hard to kill me speaks for itself,” she said.
I shrugged. There was an elegance to that simple logic. “I suppose you’re right. So the real question is, what are we going to do about this?”
Sabine sighed. She floated over to a control panel thrust up out of the lava. I was surprised there was anything in this control center that was still functioning considering there was lava all around, presumably a giant irradiated monster causing a series of quakes wherever it was in the volcano’s cone, and a bunch of giant worms moving in to kill the ever loving crap out of us as quickly as they could.
“That’s simple,” Sabine said, her tone grim. “We’re about to do what I’ve never been able to do before because I could never piss her off to the point of luring her out of the city and into my death trap.”
30
Trapped
Worms kept pouring in. It felt like the entire planet’s population of parasitic worm creatures were moving in and they were trying their best to suffocate us.
“Okay, so are you going to do this?” I asked.
“In a minute,” Sabine said, waving a hand that was clearly meant to shush me.
“What do you mean in a minute?” I asked, anger and irritation creeping into my voice. “In a minute this whole place is going to be filled to the brim with alien worms looking to kill us!”
Sabine grinned. As with most of her grins it wasn’t a particularly pleasant grin. Not that I was surprised that her grins weren’t particularly pleasant.
Come to think of it I don’t think I’d seen a single grin since I arrived on this world that I’d describe as “pleasant” coming from her. Rapacious was the word that described her grins. Hungry. Scheming.
“Just give it another moment,” she said.
Only I didn’t have another moment. The worms had reached my feet and they were doing their best to surround me. I felt them crawling up and I was reminded again of that unfortunate cartoon of Japanese origin I’d been forced to witness because that geeky asshole hadn’t bothered to check what he’d left playing before he connected to the projector.
I was about to find myself on the business end of something very unpleasant, and I can’t say I was looking forward to being buried in a bunch of parasitic alien worms trying to find their way to my cerebellum so they could take me over and have me dance on invisible puppet strings the same as they’d done to those poor giant irradiated lizards.
“Sabine!” I shouted. “Do something!”
She was eyeing the worms moving through her lair. She didn’t look nearly as ticked off as I would’ve figured considering her lair was being destroyed. She’d been pissier than this when I tossed that lizard into her volcano.
I flew just a little bit higher. I figured it’d be good to remind this hive mind queen, wherever she was, that I wasn’t to be messed with. I would’ve figured the whole fire tornado thing I used to kill a good chunk of the worms that made up her hive mind would’ve been enough to teach her that, but she didn’t seem to be one for taking hints today.
“Sabine?” I growled.
“Almost there,” she said. “Just wait for it… And go!”
She slammed her hand down on a big red button. I smiled as I thought of Natalie. She was a fan of big red buttons too, though the button Sabine used didn’t have a friendly click as she hit the thing.
Sabine shot up towards the volcano entrance, and the rumbling got even more nasty and pronounced. She stopped and looked down, and I could see her distinctly rolling her eyes.
I couldn’t see the actual eye roll from this distance, but I knew the body language of an eye roll when I saw it, and that was definitely a woman who was rolling her eyes at me.
“Would you get the hell out of here before the whole thing blows?” she shouted down at me.
There was no need to shout. I still had the earpieces in and she was still patched in. Which had the effect of making her shout so loud that it would’ve hurt me if it weren’t
for my ears being impervious to loud sounds just as much as the rest of my body was impervious to just about any harm that might come my way.
It didn’t make it any less pleasant to be shouted at, though.
“Coming,” I groused.
We flew up and out of the volcano, and as we did I noticed some definite changes in the place. She’d clearly set off a chain reaction of some sort, because the volcano went from bubbling but otherwise not causing trouble to suddenly shooting great globs of lava into the air as though the place was suddenly doing its best impression of a white bricked castle inhabited by a giant dragon with a penchant for kidnapping pink-clad princesses who preferred the company of plumbers.
“What the…”
“This is the end!” Sabine shouted. “Enjoy the fireworks!”
“It was all part of a plan,” I said, staring down at the worm holocaust.
Only it wasn’t just a worm holocaust. There was also the giant irradiated lizard that’d been taken over by the worms at some point. It thrashed around in the lava and looked like it wasn’t exactly having a great time.
Though at the same time it’s not like the lava looked like it was hurting the lizard all that much. At least it didn’t seem like it was hurting the lizard all that much right up to the moment that there was a massive explosion followed by a hell of a pyroclastic flow moving up and out with the lizard hitching a ride on the thing.
“Damn,” I said. “What did you do down there?”
“It’s your classic Godzilla 1985 gambit,” Sabine said, looking at me with one of those expectant looks that said she expected me to totally get whatever obscure rubber lizard movie she was referencing.
“Pretend for a moment that I know in a general sense who Godzilla is but have no idea what he was doing in 1985 or what it has to do with our current situation,” I said.
Sabine rolled her eyes and made a disgusted noise that was so close to some of the disgusted noises Natalie used to that it was eerie.
