by John Jr. Yeo
DeathTek took another step towards me, but he hadn’t fired yet. Was he playing with me? On my side was a critically injured man with a bag full of tricks, and a barely conscious woman whose mind control powers were crippled because her mouth was frozen shut. The odds were not, by any stretch of the imagination, good.
I wasn’t about to go out without a fight, but I wasn’t sure if I had the firepower to take out DeathTek again. Chidike was critically injured, and Cass wasn’t doing much better. But perhaps if I could fry as much of the cloning equipment with my fire, hopefully to the point that he could never grow another clone, it would give other heroes the time to come in and finish the job.
I knew now that DeathTek was routinely replaced with new donors. I had always assumed that there had been a man underneath that armor, but now I knew that the only flesh beneath the steel was a human brain. Whatever brain was running the machine now had been installed less than a day ago, so maybe he was unsteady at the wheel. Maybe it would take him a bit longer to acclimate to his new reality. It might give me a chance to do a lot of damage before I died a heroic death.
Besides DeathTek, the two guards with the machine guns were the nearest threat. I figured if I could take them out first, it would give me enough time to sabotage enough of the alien’s set-up to ruin his whole plan. Just a few fire bursts should be enough to get the job done.
Over the cacophony of noise and explosions, it was a wonder that his followers could hear the orders of their master. But his people scrambled with a precision I almost had to admire. Two of the guards escorted Dr. Progeriat away into one of the tunnels, which gave me a few less people to worry about now.
“Were you listening to me,” the alien repeated angrily. “Shoot her in the head!”
DeathTek began to move at last. The lights on his shoulder mounted weapons array began to blink. He was powering up to attack, and there wasn’t any doubt he would go after me. I prepared to dodge.
Then he swung his arms wildly, and smacked Sens’r in the head!
My mouth was still open when the alien was sent toppling into the array of television monitors. He fell over, just as surprised as I was.
I didn’t know what had happened, but I intended to take advantage of the situation. There was no reason for precision, no need for accuracy, and no patience for restraint. I poured everything that I had into the attack. The louder I screamed, the hotter the fires raged. From my fingertips, I channeled a twin set of volcanic funnels that scorched the air and caused me to immediately break out into a sweat. The fiery beams were so intense that you couldn’t even see through them, they were like dense tornados constructed entirely of fire and heat and rage. The scorching flames that radiated out of my arms actually made the bullet wound sting that much worse, but I couldn’t let it stop me. It wouldn’t.
I am Andromeda. At least, today I am.
The guards closest to me were lifted off the ground and mercilessly consumed by the fire. They weren’t even moving when they finally landed on the ground, near the rear wall. I obliterated them in my fire before turning my attention towards the cloning chambers they were standing next to. My fire blew the doors off the machines, and turned the tubes and mechanics surrounding it into melted slag. Perhaps it was possible to repair them, but not without several days of work.
Arctic Annie remained, and I focused a beam of intense heat directly at her head. She dodged it. Which I had hoped she would. It sliced through a pipe behind her, and the burst of steam knocked her into the wall. She landed hard on the ground, knocking the icy breath out of her lungs. For a few minutes, she wasn’t my problem anymore.
I could melt all of these cloning tubes down. It would give the others enough time to track down this lunatic and put him in a very dark hole for what he’d done today.
I took a brief look at the others to gauge the current situation. Sens’r was screaming at DeathTek to follow his orders, but the cyborg was helping me destroy the cloning tanks. He was firing his rockets and bullets into the machinery.
Motivated now, I continued pouring fire towards the equipment, but I could tell I wasn’t sending out the same output of destruction as I did the first time. DeathTek’s weapons were having more effect, turning half the cloning tanks into shredded explosions of shrapnel, glass and useless fragments.
“You were programmed to obey my orders,” screamed Sens’r.
“Oy, sorry about that,” replied the android in his mechanized voice. “But I think I just banjaxed up your toy collection, ya fecking gobshite!”
Impossible, that was my first thought. Utterly impossible. It couldn’t be who I thought it was. But no one else I knew talked like that.
Dr. Progeriat did keep a collection of donor brains in the lab as replacement organs for the many times that DeathTek found himself short circuited, destroyed or otherwise incapacitated. And it would explain that off the wall speech he was making a few minutes ago. He was trying to wake up a latent memory. He was trying to turn his stupid error in judgement into a fighting chance to win.
“Eamon?”
Utter chaos was breaking out. From the corner of my eye, I saw a dark shadow bounce across the room towards one of the major consoles that was starting to catch fire. He was bleeding, he was hurt, and he must have been feeling a sort of pain I couldn’t even imagine. But Chidike had pulled himself free from the ice that had pinned him to one of the chambers. He was using Eamon’s assault to his advantage by limping towards a specific piece of machinery. It was about the size of a toaster, and it looked like a car part. I had almost forgotten what we had come after in the first place.
When he got his hands on the device and disconnected it from its wires, the remaining cloning tanks that hadn’t been destroyed suddenly went dark. And the way Sens’r reacted to its removal told me the truth. He had removed the Chronal Dampening Array. Without it, Sens’r wouldn’t be able to grow the Ambassador clones into adult soldiers overnight.
Chidike slid the accelerator on the floor towards me, and signaled me to escape.
“Eamon, shoot that blue bastard,” I screamed, picking up the array. “He’s gonna kill all of the world’s heroes!”
He aimed his wrist gauntlet at Sens’r, but the alien was already fumbling with a gadget when I shouted my words. By the time I’d finished my sentence, he had pushed the button and caused something in the cyborg’s neck to explode. His body collapsed, and the scorched remains of his helmet rolled towards me like a bowling ball.
“Get out of here, you foolish girl,” screamed Chidike. He was grappling with Sens’r now, fighting him hand to hand, trying to prevent the alien from getting to me. I had the array in my hand, which made me the target. I should have flown away as quickly as possible, but I was still dealing with the shock of seeing Eamon returned and taken away from me again within the space of a few seconds.
The lights flashing on the helmet was starting to fade, and fluids were leaking out of the cracked, damaged parts. My instinct was to tear open the helmet and see my friend’s face one last time, but I fought the urge. I knew there was only a disembodied brain inside the helmet.
“I’m creamed out of it, darling,” sputtered a voice from the helmet. It was his unmistakable Irish accent, regurgitated through the mechanized synthesizers of the speakers in his helmet.
“I’ll try to save you, Eamon,” I promised him. “Maybe Major Baltrin can…”
“Don’t be a eejit, old girl,” he responded. “Just do me a favor and make sure that fuckhole gets what’s coming to him. Just like you always do…”
His final words came out as a barely audible recording, like a badly scratched record from the seventies. When the lights that flickered on his helmet finally faded off and the constant hum of his audio filters finally went silent, I knew he was gone for good now.
To my left, Chidike had Sens’r on the ground now, trying to prevent him from getting to his feet. To my right, Cass was finally on her feet, looking dizzy and injured. Our best escape would b
e to return to the tunnel we had arrived from. The opposite tunnel, where Dr. Progeriat had been carried off to, would lead to a reinforcement of gun toting goons. They were probably heading back here right now. Sparks and leaking oil were leading to small explosions and intense fire within the chamber. It was getting too dangerous to stay.
“Time to fly, girl,” I told her as authoritatively as I could, moving towards her. “On your feet!”
A loud noise, unmistakably the sound of a small handgun discharging, exploded close to us. When I looked in Sens’r direction, he had fired it twice more. Chidike stumbled backwards, clutching his chest, before finally collapsing into the burning wreckage of one of the cloning chambers I had incinerated.
If Cass could have screamed, she would have. Even I felt a numbing sense of loss after seeing him shot like that. I tossed a ball of fire at the alien, knocking the gun out of his hand. The next one, I swore, would set his head on fire.
And then, the icy cold bitch I had almost forgotten about dropped from the sky, landing between Cass and myself. She made a deft movement, and the sound of a knife slicing through the air filled my ears. The next sound I heard was a heavy metallic object hitting the floor by my feet. At first, I thought I might have kicked the DeathTek helmet in my surprise, but it was several feet away. I then realized that I had dropped the Chronal Dampening Array, which made sense because I couldn’t feel it in my fingers anymore. In fact, I couldn’t feel my fingers either. I lifted my hands, and saw a spray of blood covering from my forearm.
She was leering at me with an empty, humorless grin. Her hand was holding an axe created entirely from ice, and it looked sharp enough to cut down a tree.
There were flecks of blood on the edge of her weapon, already frozen into crimson crystals. I didn’t have to guess where they had come from.
The frigid cunt had cut off my hand!
I couldn’t feel the injury yet, it was such a clean cut and her powers had somehow cauterized the injury by freezing the wound shut. But my hand had been sliced right off. I fell to my knees as the shock of what had just happened began to paralyze my entire system. I knew she was standing in front of me, rearing her axe back to strike my throat, but I couldn’t even think straight.
She was going to kill me. I couldn’t even form the words to beg for mercy. All I could do was look at the bizarre, unsettling sight of my hand lying a few feet away from me.
I heard a bone-jarring clank of metal, and then I saw Arctic Annie’s eyes roll back into her head. Slightly dazed, she twirled around, where Cass was standing. Cass thrust her head forward, slamming the icy shell surrounding her chin on Annie’s forehead. It shattered the ice off of her mouth, and sent Annie falling backwards in an immobile heap.
Cass’s chin and lips were still blue from the icy gag she had been stuck with, but now she could talk again. Her words were trembling and shaky, but you could still feel that glimmer of attitude and confidence behind the voice.
“He died to give you a chance to escape with this,” Cass reminded me angrily, gripping the array in her hand. “Don’t make his sacrifice meaningless.”
“My hand….”
“Time to fly, girl,” she barked. “On your feet!”
By now, more reinforcements had begun to arrive behind Sens’r. They were all carrying machine guns, all ready to mow us down in order to get the array back. Against his better judgment, one of them charged ahead and tried to shoot us both. He made two mistakes when he attacked. His first was to get close enough for Cass to make eye contact with him. His second was to stop firing his gun long enough for her to open her mouth.
“Point that gun at Sens’r and try to shoot him!”
Essentially, she had just ordered the unfortunate sap’s death. He opened fire on Sens’r, but his other minions responded with enough bullets to reduce him into shredded meat. By then, we were already moving down the corridor away from them.
I tried to fly, but the pain made the unnatural act of leaving gravity behind too impossible to attempt. So I ran, just a few feet behind Cass, down through the tunnels and back towards the stairway where we hoped Eric was still waiting with our transportation out of here.
The footsteps of the alien’s small army were behind us. But if I could hear them, then that meant they could probably shoot us. I stopped running for a moment and tried to hurl a ball of fire in the direction of our pursuers. It sputtered out with a fraction of the intensity I had hoped, but it managed to ignite a small patch of oil that was on the ground. It wasn’t a large fire, it could certainly be easily moved around, but anything to slow them down was going to be helpful.
We continued running. It was only a few more yards to the access stairs where we entered from.
As we continued moving, our pace halted for a moment when we saw someone leaning against the wall. Despite my pain, I raised my good hand to defend myself if I had to. But as we got closer, I could see that he had been dead for some time. His throat had been ripped open, and he had bled out against the stone wall. It was then I realized that this was the guard we had left to entertain Sens’r, back when we still thought he was Ubaidullah Zahr.
"Looks like it was a lovers' quarrel," Cass quipped, picking up her pace once again and pulling on my arm. "Keep moving, honey."
We reached the stairway, but the thought of climbing those stairs felt like a herculean task. I was already exhausted when I arrived. Lying down and dying seemed much easier. I put one hand on the bottom step and knelt, trying to catch my breath. The pain in what remained of my left hand was starting to overwhelm my senses. The more I sweated, the faster the icy cap to my wound was beginning to melt. And I was sweating profusely.
"They're getting closer," Cass reminded me. "Get up!"
"Just another minute," I begged.
"Emily, we don't have another minute. We have to get this device as far from him as we can!"
From the corner of my eye, I could see someone new descending down the stairway. We were cornered by his thugs. If they had come from where Eric landed, they'd probably destroyed our ride. My only hope now was to destroy the array. With enough fire, maybe I could render it completely unusable before I blacked out for good. Then that blue freak could do whatever he wanted with me. I wouldn't be awake enough to notice anymore.
"Holy shit, tell me you got something for this," I heard Cass say to the new arrival.
"Yeah, I got a little something something," he replied with a smile.
A rush of relief flooded my spirits as he brought out something large and cylindrical and green, and mounted it on his shoulder. With a press of a button, something quick and loud fired out of the tube, barreling towards the direction of our pursuers. It brought down cement and pipes and debris, effectively creating a wall that would take them hours to dig through.
Eric put his arms underneath my hips and knees, and lifted me up over his shoulders. It was nearly a dozen flights of stairs to the top, but God bless the man, he never stopped moving until I was in the helicopter.
We had escaped, and we had the one device that Sens'r needed to enact his insane plan.
When we lifted into the air, I finally succumbed to sleep as Cass sat by me, softly rubbing my hair. I would not wake up for another twelve hours.
26
The Twist We Weren’t Expecting
Monday, June 3 – 6:00 p.m.
When I opened my eyes, I felt even more exhausted than I had before I fell asleep in Cassiopeia’s lap.
I was in the medical bay of the Dome, an area that I had seen far too often for my taste. Where my left hand once rested, there was now a cheap plastic hand attached to the stump. The gunshot wound in my arm had been cleaned, stitched and bandaged. There was also a delightful absence of pain, from what I had to assume was a generous donation of morphine into my system.
The clock on the wall told me I’d been asleep for half a day. If Cass hadn’t been gently rocking my shoulder, I probably would have easily slept away the rest of it. I wanted to reward
her intrusion with a kick to the face, but she looked as if she’d been through enough already. She was sporting a badly swollen eye and a split lip from the beating she took at the alien’s hands.
“Hey girl,” she said with a strained smile once she realized I was starting to wake up. “You need to play dead, okay?”
“I was already doing a pretty good job of that. Why’d you wake me up?”
“No, I mean don’t tell anyone that you’re Andromeda,” she explained. “The world thinks the Infinite League is dead, and Major Baltrin doesn’t want to explain to all those people out there what’s been going on here for the last several years.”
“All those people?” I wasn’t sure whom she was talking about, as everyone in the base was presumably aware of how a rotating cast of replacements had been impersonating the League for the last seven years.
“I’ll explain more when we get to the war room,” she promised, tossing me a small bag of clothes.
I noticed that she was now wearing oddly unassuming civilian clothes. She had a drab, baggy sweater over a pair of worn jeans, and her long hair was pinned back into a tight bun. The pair of glasses she was wearing made her seem like an entirely different person altogether, someone ordinary and boring. It’s amazing how a pair of glasses can really make such a great disguise.
I was a little worried that they were going to make me wear the orange prison jumpsuit that I had to sport when talking to my family. But instead, I found a long-sleeved black sweater that would obscure the leather gauntlets on my forearms, and a yellow pair of capris that didn’t look like it would do anything to flatter my butt.
“You want me to wear this?”
“Like, five minutes ago,” she said impatiently, snapping her fingers and guarding the door from unexpected visitors. “We’re against the clock here.”
After changing into the ugliest outfit I’d ever seen, I accompanied Cass out into the corridors. It looked as if the compound had gone under a complete military siege. There were dozens of new uniformed soldiers briskly walking through the hallways of the facility, none of whom I recognized. Most of them were carrying boxes, or computers, or large crates filled with hastily packed equipment. It seemed very clear that the government had officially made their decision, and it was time to clear out the offices.
