The Queen of Disks (Villainess Book 5)

by Alana Melos

  Vines and branches wound their way around the edge of the new hole, holding it open. A patch of gently swaying vegetation grew, covering the ground. Just as soon as the hole was opened and reinforced, the rest of the crew moved through to engage the metahuman guards converging upon the area. It wasn’t just a patrol or two, but a full two dozen. I told you they’d really stepped up their game since last I’d been here.

  I clicked on my music, drew my sword, and went to work. Burning Tiger stepped through the hole with the plants caressing his bare feet. Once he cleared the vegetation, he burst into bright red flames and lunged at the first person he saw. The guard shot. The bullets struck in quick succession, but they didn’t slow the massive tiger man down. The security guy didn’t stand a chance. Though he dodged Tiger’s first massive paw-swipe, the second one caught him and ripped off half his face. His screams drowned out the sound of sizzling flesh as he crumpled to the ground.

  Going in right behind Burning Tiger, I pointed to the building with my sword and moved to intercept one of our enemies. As Waterloo danced in my head, I slashed, parried, dodged, and attacked. Fortunately, most of the metahumans here seemed to be of low power. You know the type… maybe they had better than normal reflexes, or had immunity to fire but nothing else. That sort of thing. A couple of them looked to be heavier hitters though. I went for the biggest of them, and threw up a telekinetic shield. The bullets bounced off of it as I closed the distance. When I reached him, I let go of the shield and swung. He sidestepped out of the way. I lashed out with my sword once more, imagining a horizontal line on the other side of him waist high and razor thin. The guard stepped right into it. Even though he jerked away at the first signal of pain, his momentum carried a quarter of his body through the telekinetic microfilament blade. Shrieking with pain, he jumped back, clutching his side. Another sword stroke and he lay on the ground, still.

  “Can’t dodge what you can’t see,” I said, stepping over his corpse.

  Even though my telepathic ability was out of commission (only temporarily, I hoped), Gerard and I had been refining my teke to make it deadlier with less effort. This was my first outing using these new techniques, and it worked better than I’d hoped so far. Now clear of my first opponent, I sought out the next. Out here in the courtyard, we had plenty of room to pick and choose. There were more than enough opponents to go round. The next one I selected was only a few yards away. Just as I reached him, his head exploded, spraying me with blood and brain matter.

  I wiped the goop from my mask. “Thanks, Lethal,” I muttered into the com.

  “Watching your luscious ass, like I was paid to do,” he said. I heard the smarmy smirk in his voice and knew he’d waited until I’d closed to pop the man’s head like a water balloon with his rifle. He was such a dick at times.

  Everyone else had come inside the grassy courtyard and dispatched most of the first responders. The smart ones of the security team had turned and fled to regroup inside. Out here, we had the advantage. Inside, they would. “To the wall,” I said, pointing again with my sword to the main building. Wolf stayed behind, but Fearful and Next Jenna were right on my tail as I flew to the building. The rest couldn’t fly and so had to content themselves to run while Lethal watched their backs.

  Once we reached the main building, I upnodded to Fearful. She floated in front of me and put her armored hands out. With a single, small gesture, the side of the building collapsed. I looked at her aghast, thinking that kind of power could kill in an instant. Yet right on the heels of that, I noticed the armor shook and vibrated, then made a bad metal on metal screeching. She lowered herself to the ground, hands still outstretched as she made the hole wide, exposing more of the interior of the building. One scientist stood revealed, the expression on his face plastered with shock tinged with awe, probably mirroring mine behind the mask.

  Her robotic voice came to us after a few seconds while her armor translated whatever language she spoke. “I will guard the entrance,” she said. “My power is nearly depleted, and I need time to recharge.”

  Good to know she can’t do that without limit, I thought as I nodded to her. By this time, the rest of our merry band of raiders had joined us.

  “Mein Gott,” the Siren whispered, looking at the hole. She clapped the armored woman on the shoulder, “You would be an excellent shock trooper!”

  “Let’s get going,” I said and landed, entering the building on the ground floor. All the really good stuff was in the sub-basements below. Though they’d beefed up their security, there wasn’t any way they could change the entire layout of the building in a mere few months. If anything, they would have moved it to another building on their complex, but why? Too much effort to move such big machinery and delicate experiments. I was hoped was the case anyway.

  I recognized the hallway from my first two break ins, and navigated us towards the central elevator. As we turned the first corner, I bumped right into a security team. Six, this time. My sword flashed out and bounced on armor. Feeling the Siren shift by me rather than seeing her, she shadowstepped and appeared behind them, snapping the last one’s neck with ease. Next Jenna blinked, her mouth a perfect O of surprise. She giggled when the closest one tased her with what looked like a cattle prod from hell.

  “That’s not a shock,” she said, Paul Hogan’s voice coming from her delicate lips. She grasped the baton of electricity and power surged through her, making my hair rise up with the residual static in the air. The man screamed, then collapsed, his body smoking as the smell of freshly cooked meat wafted through the air. “That’s a shock.”

  One of them in the middle screamed, “Open fire!”

  I would say ‘all hell broke loose’ except it really didn’t. With the warning, I threw up a shield around me and squeezed close to the wall. Next Jenna stood there, blinking as the bullets struck her cybernetic body. She looked confused more than anything else, and certainly not concerned. Adira shadowstepped to join the Siren, and the two of them cut off the lines of retreat while Burning Tiger bullied his way past Next Jenna and I. What he did… it wasn’t pretty, but damn if it wasn’t effective. The monstrous meta left behind shredded, mutilated, and burned corpses within a matter of moments. His fire protected him from the bullets, but he did get shocked a few times with the batons they carried. Though it left scorch marks in his red fur, it didn’t seem to affect him all that much.

  Pride surged through me. I had chosen really fucking well for this mission. “Central elevator’s this way,” I said, pointing as I stepped over the carnage.

  We encountered no more resistance on our way to the first objective. At the elevator, Next Jenna held up a hand, signalling for us to stop. I gestured for Tiger to rip his way through the elevator doors which were, of course, coded with the genescan ident pad I’d mentioned earlier. As soon as he touched it, he yelped as electricity arced through his body. The massive meta backed up, growling low and dangerous in his throat.

  “Told you to hit pause, meatbags,” Next Jenna snorted. “Haxxoring now.”

  “Hazzor…?” the Siren said.

  “Hacking, breaking into the computer,” I supplied, keeping watch down one corridor. Adira had the other. Tiger waved his hands in the air, giving me a dirty look which I ignored. How was I supposed to know it had been electrified? I’m sure alarms were blaring somewhere, but inside there were no lights, no noise at all to announce our presence.

  “Haxxor complete,” Next Jenna said. She glanced around, then focused on Burning Tiger. “Biotech medlabs sub level five. Mechanical sub level four.”

  He grunted and hesitated, not wanting to touch the elevator door again. When she gestured impatiently, he reached his clawed fingers forward and brushed the metal door. No shock erupted, so he ripped them open with the brutal efficiency he demonstrated in the hallway.

  “Siren, hold the elevator,” I ordered. The song had changed sometime during the break in and it was now playing, appropriately enough, Disco Inferno. Tiger stepped into the
elevator and started busting a hole in the floor of the lift. “Adira, go with Tiger. Make sure he hits the rendezvous and help him carry the stuff he wants. Next Jenna and I will hit the level with the nanotech.” I checked my mental watch. Though I wasn’t singing the songs like Hudson Hawk, I kept time with the music. For me, it was just easier than checking a watch. “Five minutes, no more. ICPD will be here fast.” We might be going through the unprepared security here like a chainsaw through a leg, but the Imperial City Police Department would bring with them heroes.

  The Siren snapped me a salute off the brim of her captain’s hat and stepped into the shadows. Tiger lowered himself through the burning hole he’d made. From the sounds erupting from beneath the elevator, he must have grabbed onto the wall, bending and twisting the metal as he climbed down. Adira shadowstepped, disappearing from view. I wasn’t sure, but I thought they floated or were weightless or something when vamps did that. Next Jenna and I floated through the wide rent in the floor and simply lowered ourselves down the wide shaft.

  The light in the tunnel came from Next Jenna’s body. She crackled with electricity as she floated. Her eyes were bright, solid orbs of electric blue focused downward. The shaft was pretty typical, and I saw that I was right in my assessment of Tiger’s descent. He simply put his fingers into the stone or metal to make a hand hold for himself and climbed down without grace.

  When we reached the second sub basement, my head spun. I looked up at the elevator, then down towards the basement. Confusion whirled through my head, and I felt light, almost nauseous. My mind couldn’t put this together in a way that made sense. The only thing I could think was that I couldn’t be hungry since I’d just eaten prior to the raid.

  I yelped, my concentration on my flying wavering as a painful shock hit my shoulder. My head whipped around and I saw Next Jenna touching me. “Foreign substance detected,” she said, her voice light and melodic. “Modded difluoromethylphosphine oxide,” she said. I shook my head, and she groaned. “You’ve been gassed, man!” She gripped my shoulders, sending the shock through my system again briefly before she let me go. “Gassed!”

  “Chemical weapons are outl…” I started, then bit off my words as nausea rolled through me harder than before. I choked on bile. I turned off my teke and dropped. That didn’t help my nausea one bit, even prepared for the sudden fall. Catching myself at the bottom, I used my teke to rip the doors open. Next Jenna landed behind me, the building shaking with her weight at that velocity striking the ground. She slipped through the crack as the doors creaked and groaned, but I had no time. I had to get out of here, and now. My body shuddered. This time food came up, but I bit it back as I stepped through the opening and let the doors slam shut behind me.

  I ripped off my mask and let spew. Ugh. Being a villain wasn’t easy work, and that was just a low damn trick to poison us. Chemical weapons had been outlawed in the United States for much longer than I was alive, since the Geneva Protocol sometimes in the seventies of the last century. Of course, this was a private company, and they obeyed their own rules. If the people robbing them just disappeared, who could say they used a weapon which would get their CEO convicted of, oh, I don’t know, mass murder and treason? Plus, we were crooks. We weren’t likely to report it ourselves even if we did live through it.

  Unlike so many other metas, I didn’t have any immunities or faster healing. Hence, I’d inhaled a lot of this substance without knowing it, and it affected me, fast. The puking sapped my strength, but I couldn’t stop. When my stomach was empty in a matter of seconds, I dry heaved. My entire digestive system rebelled on me. Cramps seized my body. I slipped down to my knees, unable to stand a moment longer.

  Pain lanced through me as Next Jenna laid her delicate fingers on the back of my neck. “God…” I started to say, but stopped as I convulsed, helpless in the grasp of the toxic gas. Fuck, this would be a stupid way to die. I hadn’t even thought they’d use something like this… it hadn’t even been on the radar. I wasn’t afraid to die, but this chemical gripped me in an unbreakable grasp. How could you fight against something you couldn’t see or touch? Maybe that’s what the mindblind felt like around telepaths.

  Dry heaves wracked me. I broke out in sweat. A great heat rushed through me, and I sweltered, suffocating in its grip. The heat passed just as quick as it had appeared, and I shuddered. When I wiped my face as the pain eased, my gloved hand came away with a clear substance much thicker than sweat, almost like oil. I wiped it off on my pants and groaned, but the pain inside subsided. Hollowed out, I panted as I sat down hard on the ground, trying to catch my breath as Next Jenna lifted her hand. With that, all pain stopped and I sighed.

  “What did you do?” I asked. My mouth was dry and there was a bad taste in it from all the vomiting.

  “System reboot, derp a derps,” she said, sounding annoyed that I couldn’t keep up with her. “Poison purge?” The cyborg cocked her head to the side, but her short pink hair didn’t move at all. “No upgrades?” Her voice turned from annoyed to confused.

  I wiped at my face, ignoring her. I really didn’t want to know how she purged my system. I was just going to go with it and be thankful I wasn’t dead. “Are you OK?” the Siren chirped through the com.

  “Yeah,” I replied and replaced the mask. Next Jenna kept staring at me, then shrugged her thin shoulders. “Let’s go.”

  “This is why I wear a gas mask,” she said. “It’s more useful than you would think!”

  Shaking my head and ignoring the advice from the former Reich citizen, I glanced around at our surroundings. We stood in a hallway which I remembered from the previous break in with Harry, but instead of windows and doors, everything was shuttered. The end result looked like a huge square metal pipe with a tee junction up ahead.

  “Crap,” I muttered under my breath, straining to remember the exact twists and turns of this insane building. I knew why they’d changed it. It would take much longer to get through these security measures than just busting down a door, and the stuff they had down here was the cream of their crop. It was also likely cheaper and faster to install metal shielding than restructure the whole place or try to drag all of their industrial equipment out.

  “This way,” I said, gesturing.

  As I climbed to my feet, I found my legs shakier than I wanted them to be. My whole body was. I might not have been in the throes of pain anymore, but my body was weak from the experience. Taking the surest steps I could, I walked down the hallway, ignoring Next Jenna’s chittering and chirping from behind me, urging me to hurry up. Excitement ran through her metallic voice. She was close to the promised tech, and her prods to move faster irritated me. Through the comlink, I heard Tiger and Adira fight another security team. Grunts and focused battle cries came through the link, loud and clear. A minute later, they reported they were in the biotech lab and had commenced with plundering. The Siren was much quieter as she kept watch on our escape route.

  At the first juncture, I heard heavy footsteps. When I peeked around the corner, a fully armed and armored strike force was heading our way… and by “armored” I meant power armor, like Fearful’s except angular and bulky. They weren’t fucking around anymore.

  I ducked back around the corner as the tromping grew louder, then looked to Next Jenna. “We got trouble.”

  She twitched and made a high pitched sound which hurt my ears as she looked around the corner. “Covercharge,” she said, her blue orbs sparking, then stepped out just as they were arriving. “Overclocking!”

  As she took a few steps forward, I stepped out behind her, using her as a shield. The cyborg raised her arms. Electricity pulsed from her in a forward circle, much like it had upstairs. This pulse crackled with more power than it had upstairs. I covered my eyes as bright blue, pink, and purple electricity filled the hallway in front of her. She cackled madly as the team raised their weapons and fired, but it was too late. They got off a few rounds which punched through her slight body like tissue paper. One of the b
ullets grazed the top of my shoulder and I ducked away from it. It didn’t stop her, nor did it stop the wave of electric death which crashed over them, toppling them over one by one. When the lights cleared, they were all on the ground. While the people inside the suits were still alive, the armor powered down, their circuitry burned out by the surge of electricity.

  Next Jenna slumped against the wall. The holes in her body closed, but without as much speed as before I wondered again how human she really was. I picked my way around the fallen guards and heard their muffled words from inside their thick helmets. They all carried fancy looking rifles, which reminded me of giant robots. I picked one up and inspected it. Just like all guns, it had a trigger, which was all I really needed to know. Unlike some martial arts snobs, I wasn’t above using a gun when I needed to. Even just a graze from this weapon had hurt like hell.

  On the other side of the fallen squad, I stopped and glanced behind me. Jenna looked paler than normal and inched her way forward. “Come on,” I hissed through my teeth. “Let’s get going.”

  “Juice…” she said. Her blue eyes were dim, looking more like marbles than the electric lights they’d been before. Whatever she’d done had taken a lot out of her, but we only had a limited amount of time before we’d have to flee.

  I abandoned her and scouted ahead, looking for the room which had held Sadowski. That was where we needed to be. Though the hallways all looked the same, I knew the layout. All of the rooms had been plated over, but I found the one which led to the tank room. There was no keypad, no eye scanner, no handprint scanner… nothing to open the door. It was flat, grey metal. I took out an energy bar from my inside jacket and ate it slowly as I considered. My stomach protested at the food intake, but I had to have something in the tank. Idly, my thoughts flicked to medicine of some kind, maybe I could use adrenalin shots instead of food to give me a burst. A bolt of inspiration struck me like the lightning Next Jenna had used earlier. There might be something better than adrenalin tucked away in a dusty corner somewhere. I made a mental note to follow up on that idea on the morrow.