by Mia Archer
I wasn’t sure what was worse than the traffickers I’d come across. The thought of running into them without my powers sent a shiver running through me.
“Natalie wouldn’t do that,” I said.
“Yeah?” the girl asked. “I’ve got a whole bunch of us who’ve lost our powers who would say…”
The girl stopped in the middle of whatever she was about to say and let out a shriek that sounded horrible. Both because it was the sort of pained shriek I never wanted ot hear from any living creature, and because it was a pained shriek I recognized all too well.
Mostly because it was the kind of pained shriek I would let out. I’d know that sound anywhere, even if it was coming from someone else and not from inside my head which is where I usually heard it.
Not that I usually heard a pained shriek all that often, come to think of it. Being invulnerable sort of meant it didn’t happen much, but there’d been a few times since Dr. Lana stole my powers.
The girl in front of me fell to the ground. I turned to see Natalie pointing a new wrist blaster at the girl, and she was firing another one of those pink rays that was meant to take my powers.
Which made no fucking sense. As far as I knew there was only one person that weird gun should work on, and that was me.
A thought struck me and I leaned down. I had to know who was behind that mask. Sure I figured I might see something I didn’t like. Sort of like the obligatory reveal in a Friday the 13th movie where you saw all the ugliness that’d been rotting under the hockey mask since the last movie, but there was a sense of morbid curiosity that was compelling me to do this even as there was a part of my body that was screaming at me that it was a terrible fucking idea and I should keep my hand to myself.
That hand tingled as it moved into that pink ray. Though it wasn’t a painful tingle that had me screaming like this woman. I pulled her mask up, the little plastic band holding it in place snapped as I pulled, and stared in astonishment.
I was looking into a mirror. If I’d been wearing a Halloween costume cheerleader outfit in that mirror and not some tattered green blood and crap stained clothes I’d picked up from a campus bookstore.
"What the hell are you?" I breathed.
She stared up at me through gritted teeth. It was clear she was still in a hell of a lot of pain, for all that the only feeling I got from having my hand in that strange pink light was the sensation that I needed to move my hand just a little bit because it’d fallen asleep.
"Right," I said. “Take care of this first, then ask questions."
"Why aren't you losing your powers?" Night Terror shouted.
She turned the pink ray on me. The tingling ran all over my body. Let me tell you, having the sensation of my entire body falling asleep at once wasn't exactly fun. I'd had something like that happen from sitting in a computer chair the wrong way from time to time, it turns out the one thing that could affect my otherwise invulnerable body was my own body getting contorted into weird positions, but even the odd sensation of having my ass and other nether regions fall asleep was nothing like the even odder sensation of having my whole body tingling with pinpricks.
"Would you stop it!" I shouted. “That’s really fucking annoying!”
"No!" Night Terror shouted. "You need to go down! You're not going to cause any more trouble, damn it, and I’m not leaving one of the strong ones free to cause trouble!”
I was next to her before I realized what was happening. Anger surged through me.
Usually I was calm and collected in these fights. It was easy to be calm and collected when I knew there was no way anything out there could harm me. Only here was Night Terror doing her best to hurt me, and there was something about the thought that she might actually be able to do something to me, coupled with the odd sensation of looking into a mirror image of myself that was getting hurt, that had me good and pissed off.
My hand slammed down on her wrist computer. The screen spiderwebbed, and then the thing exploded into a bunch of different pieces that clattered all along the flying saucer.
"Fucking stop it!" I shouted. "Why are you doing this to me? To us?"
Night Terror cradled her arm as she glared at me with a level of hatred I hadn't seen even when we were at each other's throats the first time around.
"Because you're a menace to my city," she said. "Because one of you, once upon a time, made all of this happen. And now I'm going to clean up the mess I helped make by ever thinking I could let something dangerous like you run free.”
I had no idea what she was talking about, but it had me good and pissed off. That seemed to be happening to me a lot lately, and I wasn’t sure I liked it even as I knew there wasn’t much I could do about it.
"I don't remember anything you're talking about,” I said. "But I want to know. I want to help! Help me help you!"
Her eyes rolled.
"That's rich. I'm getting sick and fucking tired of hearing that from you. You all need to get the fuck out of this city for good!”
Then something happened. One moment I had my hand on that wrist she was cradling, and the next moment there was a slight tingle. I realized she was teleporting, but for some reason it didn't work on me. There was more tingling where the teleporter was going off, a flash of light, and then she wasn't there anymore.
I looked down at the spot where my hand had been resting on her shattered wrist computer. Then looked around the flying saucer. It looked like the battle had been a pretty short one. All around there were women in green either dead, or on their way to dead.
Someone had been doing quick work on those doppelgangers, though I’d only seen Night Terror using the pink raygun thingy. Once those copies didn't have their powers it would appear they didn't have anything.
I thought back to all the training I’d done with Natalie. All the times she’d taught me exactly what to do in a situation where I didn't have my powers. It looked like these other versions of me, wherever the hell they came from, were versions of me that hadn't had those lessons.
There was also something else interesting happening. All the other villains were getting the hell out of Dodge as fast as their legs, powers of flight, super tech, or ability to jump really high could carry them. There were also a couple that were getting picked up by drones that looked like Natalie's handiwork, though those drones were being blasted by the aliens.
Those villains trying to escape still wasn't the weirdest thing. I looked down at my hand that had tingled as she activated her teleporter. That teleporter had worked on me before, but I hadn’t had advance notice the one time it’d worked on me. Or I hadn’t had my powers so she could have her way with me when it came to teleporting.
Not so now, that was for sure. This would mark the first time she’d tried to teleport when I had my powers and knew what it felt like when the teleporter started working on you. I’d done something to stop it from happening. I didn’t know how I did it any more than I knew how I managed to fly. Just that it’d happened.
It was like trying to explain how somebody made their arm move. It was something that happened when I willed my brain to do it, and somehow I stopped her from teleporting me by using something that felt similar to what I did when I wanted to fly.
Though even that wasn't the most fucked up thing on the list of fucked up things I was seeing.
No, easily the top thing on the top five list of fucked up things I was dealing with in the last five to ten minutes were all the aliens all around me. They’d all turned on me now that they’d cleared out everyone fighting them, and they were saluting. As though this was a three-way fight where I was leading one of the factions, and I hadn’t known it!
"What the hell is going on here?" I shouted.
One of the aliens stepped forward. It took off its helmet, revealing a blue face that reminded me of Grand Admiral Thrawn from the Timothy Zahn’s classics that were so much better than any of the new Star Wars movies the mouse was churning out these days.
Which, o
f course, begged the question of how the hell I even knew who Timothy Zahn was. I’d seen the new Star Wars movies with Natalie, of course, and that seemed like knowledge that was mine. But knowing who Timothy Zahn was and comparing those new movies to the stuff he'd written in the early ‘90s definitely wasn't my brain doing the talking.
The fuck?
“Ma’am?" the alien asked.
"I don't speak your strange alien language," I said.
"Strange alien language?" he said with a chuckle.
Oh. He'd been calling me ma'am, which meant he was speaking English. I just wasn't expecting it so we’d had a lost in translation moment where I wasn’t as lost as I thought I was.
Whoops.
"Right," I said. “Maybe we need to begin at the beginning. Who the hell are you?"
The alien glanced around at his compatriots. I wasn't sure if alien body language was the same as the body language we used here on earth, but I was pretty sure the guy was confused.
And, on a whim, I decided to see just how far their desire to please me went. Hey, it looked like I was the one in charge here, so I figured I might as well act the part, right?
"That was an order soldier!”
A little over the top? Maybe, but it worked so I wasn’t going to knock it too much.
The alien stiffened. His face went emotionless. At least it was emotionless for a human. For all I knew that was how these aliens telegraphed that they were happy.
"I'm a member of the 42nd expeditionary force assigned to Starlight City and the earth invasion ma'am! Following orders of Supreme Commanderettes Fialux and Sabine!"
I reeled. I'd thought I couldn't possibly find anything that would top the list of fucked up shit I was already dealing with, but here we were.
I wasn’t even surprised at this point.
10
Supreme Commanderette
"Supreme Commanderette?” I asked.
Again there was an uncomfortable look exchanged with some of the other aliens all around. As though he wasn't quite sure how to deal with this.
"Well yes," he said. "Apparently it was quite important to Sabine that something she called "gender appropriate" for your titles be found before we invaded, and…"
"Hold up," I said, holding up a hand that silenced him. "What do you mean invaded? Where did we invade from?"
"Why from our world ma'am," he said. "You freed us from the alien hive mind that had taken us over, and then you helped us to conquer the rest of our world!"
Okay then. Saving an alien species from a hive mind that had conquered their world did sound like the kind of thing I’d do. Though that next bit about conquering the alien world didn't sound like something I’d do. I also had no idea who the hell this Sabine woman was they kept talking about.
"I'm going to need a minute to process all of this," I said.
"Of course ma'am," he said.
"Not around here," I said.
"Are you sure ma’am?” the alien asked. "Because if the fugitive Night Terror attacks us again, it would be really nice to have you here. We've missed having you around. Do you know anything about the whereabouts of Sabine?”
It was all too much coming at me too fast. These guys talking to me like I was their supreme commander, or commanderette, whatever the fuck that was. It sounded like something from Spaceballs, which I could add to the list of movies I’d never seen before but somehow I seemed to have an intimate knowledge of.
That and this whole world conquering thing. I didn’t conquer worlds. I saved worlds from the people who would try to conquer them. Even if the person trying to do the conquering was my girlfriend, and the way I tried to stop her from conquering it was by relentlessly distracting her with making out.
"And the imposters,” he continued, as though I wasn’t reeling and my whole world wasn’t crashing down around me. "It's been difficult to determine which is the real you. We will obviously have to run some tests on you to verify before…"
Yeah, this was definitely too much for me. I shot up. The flying saucer was thrown off balance by me flying up and some of those aliens were stumbling around, but I didn't care. They could take care of themselves.
Right now I needed to take care of myself. There was something seriously fucked up going on in Starlight City. Even more fucked up than me and Night Terror fighting it out, or Dr. Lana trying to take over everything, or even those giant irradiated monsters smashing everything in their path.
No, there was an alien invasion going down, and those aliens seemed to think I was on their side. Which totally didn’t seem like the kind of thing I would ever do, but I also had no idea what’d happened while I was out.
If Natalie was around she’d no doubt make some quip about how temporary amnesia was just the sort of annoying thing to happen to someone in Starlight City, but she wasn’t around. She’d teleported away, because apparently she thought I was just as dangerous as everyone else did.
I ran over it again and again as I moved through downtown Starlight City and emerged over the less vertical parts of the city. Though these days even the vertical parts of the city were less vertical and more post-apocalyptic. No doubt thanks to a relentless pounding from those invading aliens who seemed to be working for me.
Before long I was over the suburbs, and there was a giant crater in one of those suburbs. I decided to give that a wide berth. Natalie had never actually told me where her lab was located, but that hole looked like it was right about where she’d teleported me out of her lab once upon a time when we’d just admitted our feelings for one another and had to head out to take on her supercomputer who was trying to take over the world.
I’d always assumed she’d teleported us out over some other part of the city as a bit of misdirection, but I was starting to think I’d been wrong on that score. That the smoking crater was Natalie’s lab, which begged the question of what the hell had happened to the place.
I had the sinking feeling that “what the hell had happened to the place” had a hell of a lot to do with me waking up in the middle of the ruins of the Applied Science Department with no idea what the hell was going on, and a bunch of space aliens trying to tell me that I was their supreme leader.
A flash in my mind. Me descending through a house so fast that the thing splintered around me. I was heading for something. Something I desperately needed to find. Something that called to me and cried out for help in a way nothing had ever cried out to me before. Something that compelled me to help.
Another flash. I was moving through the ground, and then through metal. Heavily reinforced metal. Systems designed to keep someone from doing exactly what I was doing flashed, weapons fired, but I kept going. I was relentless. Nothing could stop me.
Then I came to rest in front of a woman who looked familiar, for all that I’d never seen her before in my life. A woman who was clearly the thing I was going for. A woman who stood next to Natalie, and the only overriding thought I had when I stared at Natalie was she needed to die if she was going to keep me from that woman.
When I blinked again I was over the city, but there was something odd about it. I was lower than before, and the air all around me was exploding.
Huh. That wasn’t the kind of behavior you usually saw in thin air. No, it was…
Something slammed into me. I’d allowed myself to get distracted with whatever the hell it was that’d drawn my attention while I was flying over the remains of Natalie’s lab, and that gave someone on the ground enough time to draw a bead on me and hit me with everything they had.
Right. Antiaircraft fire. That’s what this was. It seemed kind of primitive in a day and age when most planes could fly way higher than the bullets any military could put in the air to try and stop them, but there were also some SAM batteries that were gleefully firing on me.
I looked at the stretch of land where the suburbia on the outskirts of Starlight City started to change to rural land, and I realized someone had been busy out here.
It loo
ked like the entire US fucking military had set up shop around Starlight City. Like I hadn’t seen this much hardware being put out since watching some old footage from World War II in high school history.
It was a hell of a thing to see all that hardware laid out like that. It was also a hell of a thing having all that hardware pointed at me and firing, because the shit they were flinging into the air in modern times was a hell of a lot more accurate than the kind of stuff they had to play with back in Dubya Dubya Two.
“What the fuck is going on here?” I growled.
More SAM batteries turned on me. They fired off their missiles in a coordinated strike that was more annoying than anything.
They exploded around me and shrapnel slammed into me. The shockwave also hit me, but didn’t do much even though I knew it would’ve liquefied the insides of anyone else who got hit with something like that.
Assuming the shrapnel and the explosion and the fire didn’t kill them first.
The batteries stopped firing. Maybe they were reloading. Maybe they’d realized the error of their ways and that it was a stupid fucking idea to fire on someone who was immune to this sort of thing. Either way…
My eyes narrowed. Nope, they were just reloading. More of them were tracking on me, and it looked like they were getting ready to open fire.
I really didn’t have time for this shit, so I shot for the deck. I landed in front of one of the mobile SAM batteries and found myself staring at a very scared looking kid who couldn’t have been into his twenties yet staring at me from the other side of the truck’s cab.
“You might want to get the fuck out of there if you know what’s good for you,” I said.
The guy nodded, and scrambled off the thing. Others must’ve heard me as well, because they were scrambling off the thing and running as fast as their legs would carry them. I waited for a moment, then grabbed the truck and vaulted into the air. A couple of other missile batteries took that opportunity to fire on me, so I tossed the truck even higher and went down to grab another one, though not before waiting for the military types in there to get out.
