Villains Don't Do Time! (Night Terror Book 6)

by Mia Archer

  I could appreciate that. The guy might be on the take from both sides, but he knew how to live below his means to avoid attracting too much attention. There were too many people out there who got caught because they got a little too ostentatious with their lawbreaking.

  He held out a hand as we stood on his doorstep. I took it and we shook, a new respect obvious between us.

  “Thank you,” he said. “If you ever need anything…”

  “Oh I will,” I said. “And I always call in my favors. For now have fun with the family though.”

  My grin was meant to be reassuring, but from the way he started polishing his glasses the moment I stepped back I don’t think he took it that way. Oh well.

  I stepped back and hit a button to dematerialize. It was time to get back to my precious lab and have a look at what made this Sabine girl who may or may not be an ex-girlfriend of mine tick.

  I materialized in the middle of my lab and let out a relieved sigh.

  "Damn does it feel good to be home CORVAC," I said.

  "And it is good to have you home mistress," he said. “The lab has been lonely without you.”

  "Lonely my ass," I said. "What kind of army have you been fabricating for me?"

  "Well it is interesting that you would ask, mistress," he said. "Because…"

  I waved a hand. "Don't worry about all of that right now," I said. "What I'm more interested in is this Sabine girl. Where are we keeping her?"

  "In one of the isolation chambers down on level 42,” CORVAC said.

  It wasn't actually the 42nd level below the ground like one might think from the numbering scheme. It was more of a superstition type thing. There were entire cultures that avoided having a thirteenth floor, for example. If you went to Japan you’d have hard time finding a fourth floor since whatever genius developed their language decided that using the same word for “four” and “death” was a good idea and there was a collective cultural dislike of that number as a result.

  Mine was sort of the same way, only my cockamamie floor naming scheme was meant to bring good luck rather than ward off bad luck.

  Show me a geek out there that doesn't have a reference to Hitchhikers Guide and I'll show you someone who is a poser who thinks they’re a geek because they like Star Wars or Marvel movies. As though liking mass entertainment that everyone in the culture worships makes someone a geek just because it had geeky origins.

  Not the time or the place to rant about that though. Besides, thinking about outfits like Marvel only pisses me off thinking about how they kept ignoring my cease and desist letters about stealing some of my best stuff.

  It turns out the only thing more powerful than the most powerful supervillain in the world was the mouse’s legal team.

  “Were you planning on visiting the isolation chamber, mistress?” CORVAC asked.

  "Be there in a moment," I said.

  A moment later I materialized in front of a massive window. It wasn't even a two way mirror or anything like that. No, the moment I materialized she could see me. Her eyes narrowed into a scowl.

  "Natalie," she said.

  "I'm afraid you still have me at a disadvantage," I said. "You seem to remember me, but I have no idea who the hell you are aside from the recent world domination stuff.”

  If anything her glare only intensified. I tried to put myself in her place. After all, how would I feel if I was marooned on a strange planet for years thinking of Selena and when I finally got back to earth she didn’t remember me?

  Though recent events were pretty close to that scenario. Close enough that I had no sympathy for this bitch. Especially since I was pretty sure she was a big part of the reason why Selena was acting the way she was.

  "You bitch," she hissed. "Everything that happened between us, and you honestly want me to believe you don't remember any of it?"

  I shrugged. "I'm sorry, but…"

  "You don't remember that night in my dorm room? When you told me how you felt?"

  "Big blank," I said.

  "What about all those times we made out in the corners of the Applied Sciences building? Or that evening we took advantage of the experimental zero gravity room for a little fun?”

  "Sounds like something that would be an interesting memory, you’re hot and everything, but still a huge zero for me."

  “What about the night Dr. Lana used the biometric screening to figure out what we were doing in her precious building based on our heart rates?"

  "Still nothing," I said. “Kudos to Dr. Lana for coming up with an interesting way to ferret out students getting up to a little hanky panky in her building though. I do remember how much she hated it when the cleaning bots found some DNA spread around the place.”

  Seeing her getting pissed off about finding DNA traces from students getting frisky had been amusing. Less amusing had been when she implemented a genetic sampling requirement to get into the building so she could track down who was getting frisky. Not that that sort of testing would’ve been a problem if I was fooling around with a girl, but still. It was ridiculous and exactly the sort of bullshit Dr. Lana would pull.

  Sabine sighed, then went on to echo my thoughts of a moment ago. "You have no idea how this feels. To hold out hope for someone while stranded on another world, only to find out when you get back that they've changed completely and don’t remember you.”

  I cocked my head to the side and both of my eyebrows shot up so fast it was a wonder they didn't go into orbit.

  "Seriously?" I said. "Are you being deliberately idiotic, or are you really that unaware of what's going on around you?"

  She at least had the good grace to blush. Which wasn't saying much, but it was something.

  “What happened to Fialux wasn't my fault," she said. “I did what I had to do to set things right on that fucked up planet. You don't understand what it was like on that world. It was ruled by…"

  "A bunch of parasitic worms who used cats to mind control the world?" I asked. "I totally know all about that."

  Something suddenly occurred to me. I tapped out a couple of commands to CORVAC. That was one scan I needed him to run without telling her what was going on.

  On a hunch I turned back to her. Smiled a cruel and evil grin. I had a feeling she wasn't going to like what I was about to say.

  “You looked surprised," I said. “Thing is, a bunch of those worms hitched a ride on one of the giant irradiated lizards that made their way to this world thanks to Dr. Lana. I squashed each and every one of them. Aliens don't invade this world without running into the wrath of Night Terror. That’s something your blue buddies who look like Star Wars Legends rejects are going to learn the hard way very soon."

  She didn’t seem all that upset about the fact that I’d squashed all of her wormy little friends. No, she seemed more confused than anything.

  “What the hell is Star Wars Legends?” she asked, sounding genuinely perplexed and reminding me that she’d been off planet for some very big changes in geek culture.

  “Huh. Well you see when Disney bought Star Wars,” I started, but didn’t get very far.

  “Disney did what?”

  “Yeah, it’s totally a thing now. Anyway, they declared all the Expanded Universe stuff to be non-canon which means all that stuff is unofficial now,” I said.

  She let loose with a screech that was positively inhuman. Then she ran forward and slammed her fist against the window repeatedly. Over and over again that fist landed, and she was actually starting to splinter the glass.

  Oh lovely. She didn’t get upset when I told her I’d destroyed a bunch of her wormy buddies, but she did get pissy when she found out Disney had been fucking with the Wars? She truly was a geek at heart, and that gave me some ideas.

  Also? Her ability to splinter the transparent material between us was pretty impressive. It wasn't actually glass. It was more like transparent aluminum. The stuff wasn't even supposed to be able to splinter like that, and yet she was doing it.

  Not t
hat it was much of a worry. I wouldn't have a quarantine room like that without multiple redundancies in place.

  "Shields up," I said.

  32

  Goodbye Lab

  The shields shimmered in front of her. I might have trouble generating a full body shield while maintaining all of my other toys on my suit, but I had no problem generating shields here in my lab where everything was connected to the bigger reactors that could power Starlight City for the better part of a couple of years based on what they put out in just a couple of seconds.

  I’d even offered the tech to the government. Free of charge. It turns out that a combination of suspicion of any gifts Night Terror offered coupled with an oil lobby who was way more interested in throwing money at politicians than I was kept that off the market, but what the fuck ever.

  If they wanted to keep giving me a competitive advantage in the power generation arena that was fine by me.

  "Is there something wrong?" I asked. "You're taking the death of a bunch of stupid parasitic worms awfully personally.”

  I had a hunch she was upset about more than discovering Grand Admiral Thrawn had been consigned to the dustbin of the ’80s Marvel comics in terms of series canon, but I had to play this just right to get her to give something away in true villainous confession fashion.

  "I mean, honestly. I don't know that I've ever seen anyone outside of helminthologists getting that upset about discovering the death of a new species of the wriggly parasitic little fuckers.”

  "Scan has come back positive mistress," CORVAC said. "There is a worm that has worked its way into her mind and appears to be tickling several of her neurons at once in a fashion that will make it very difficult to remove.”

  I shook my head. I might not be a huge fan of this girl considering everything she'd done recently, but I could also have a little bit of sympathy. Especially if some of her more nasty megalomaniacal impulses had been the result of being possessed by an alien worm.

  Not to mention discovering a cure for what ailed her would also bring me a step closer to finding a cure for what had made Fialux go off the villainous deep end.

  "So how much of what you're doing is you, and how much of it is the worm telling you what to do?" I asked.

  The rage subsided. It was like a switch flipped in her mind. She stood straight. Gazed at me through cool and imperious eyes. An imperious stare that she totally didn't deserve considering I was the one in control here.

  "That's not going to work," I said. "I've seen just about every villain glare in the book. I’ve pulled them myself, and acting like you're in charge of the situation isn't going to faze me."

  The corner of her mouth quirked up in a half smile. "Are you so sure?"

  "CORVAC, is there any way for us to get rid of that worm that's controlling her mind?" I asked.

  Her eyes narrowed. "You can't."

  "You sure about that?" I asked.

  I activated a screen on the wall in her room. I’d discovered long ago that it was useful to have the things in the quarantine rooms. It showed multiple rows of jars filled with various alien worms that’d been killed in various nasty ways after I'd yanked them out of the poor unsuspecting house cats they'd hitched rides in.

  "That's what happened to the last set of parasitic worms who made their way to this world,” I said. "And I don't remember you, so it's not like you're going to get a special dispensation or anything. I’ll kill the worm inside you the same as I smash the worm at the bottom of my tequila.”

  That was boasting on my part. I couldn’t stand tequila after one fateful night drinking in the dorms on my nineteenth birthday. Even thinking about that night now was enough to turn my stomach.

  It seemed like the kind of hard ass boast that would really get through to someone currently possessed by a worm though.

  "Is that supposed to intimidate me or something?" she asked.

  I arched an eyebrow. Okay then. Maybe hard ass boasting wasn’t going to impress her after all. Damn. If she was this cool all the time then I was starting to understand why I’d been so intrigued by this hottie once upon a time.

  "Usually your wormy friends were a little more upset when I showed off their dead comrades," I said.

  She shrugged. "So the Silvani Collective sent over some stragglers on the backs of one of those lizards. It's a clever gambit, to be sure, but obviously it didn't work. That’s the big difference between me and the Silvani. My plans work. The fact that all of them are dead back home is proof enough of that.”

  I growled. "What are you talking about? I killed all of your friends!"

  Though the way she was talking was pretty much the answer to my unspoken question. I was getting the sneaking suspicion the worms who’d come through on the back of that giant irradiated lizard weren’t her friends. The fact that her worm could possess a humanoid and not a fluffy creature fond of licking its own ass should’ve been my first tip off.

  Sabine threw her head back and let out a good old-fashioned villainous cackle. I hated it when someone else was letting out villainous cackles.

  That was supposed to be my purview alone when I was interrogating someone like this, damn it.

  "Seriously?" Sabine asked. "As far as I'm concerned you just took out all the serious competition on this side and saved me some trouble. So thank you for that.”

  I bristled. "Implying that I'm not serious competition?"

  "Well no offense…”

  "You know in my experience no good sentence ever starts with the phrase "well no offense.”

  "You're probably right," she said. "So I guess I shouldn't bother acting like I care if this offends you. The bottom line is you haven't even managed to take over a city, let alone a planet. I've already conquered one world and I’m well on my way to conquering this one. Why should I be worried about you stopping me?"

  "Because that's exactly what I'm going to do," I growled.

  "Keep telling yourself that," Sabine said.

  "I am!" I said, stomping my foot down.

  It occurred to me that the moment I was stomping my foot in indignation like a toddler who wasn't getting her way was probably the moment I'd lost control of the situation. How had she managed to turn this around on me?

  "Whatever," I said. "We're going to run some scans on you and figure out how to get that worm out of you, and then I'll have a chat with the real Sabine and see what there is to see."

  "I don't think so," Sabine said.

  I hated that I was about to ask this question. It was a question that was an open invitation for a villainous type to show some secret weapon that was going to turn the tide in their favor. Still, knowing the rules didn’t mean I could break them.

  "Why isn't that going to happen?” said in a bored monotone.

  Right on time something reverberated through my lab. At first I thought it was an earthquake, but that was impossible. My entire lab, the whole damn complex, was set up on massive shock absorbers. We're talking the kind of things they used on nuclear silo facilities but on steroids, so I shouldn't be feeling any earthquake.

  "I'm pretty sure that's why," Sabine said.

  A moment later something came crashing through the ceiling. Not on my side, thank goodness, but into Sabine's side. I caught a flash of green. Blonde hair. A body that wouldn't quit in a miniskirt that was downright scandalous, but God I loved how it scandalous it was. Like I wanted her to fly up just so I could look up and see something that’d been missing from my life ever since she was shoved through a portal.

  Which, of course, brought to mind what’d happened to her on the other side of that portal. Right. This wasn’t my Fialux any longer. This was an angry Fialux who had an axe to grind against yours truly as she made like a genetically modified lab mouse and tried to take over the world.

  Fialux stared at me, her nose and chin held high. Then she turned to Sabine. Gave her a hug that had me feeling both pissed off and jealous at the same time.

  That was my girl! Though the real bit
ch was I wasn't sure which one of them I was thinking about when that thought flitted across my mind. I almost thought I could remember times when Sabine had hugged me like that, but then it was gone.

  The jealousy was still there though. Do you have any idea how fucked up it is to feel jealousy about someone getting with a girl you can’t even remember?

  Damn Dr. Lana and her mind control. Damn her to hell!

  "Um, mistress?" CORVAC asked. "Would you like to maybe do something about the super powered being who just showed up in your lab?"

  “Hush,” I said. “Mama’s working.”

  That seemed to satisfy CORVAC for the moment, but the truth was I had no fucking clue what I was going to do to fix this. I’d had Selena in my lab plenty of times before, of course, but she’d always been on my side.

  I should’ve spent more time figuring out a fucking way to deal with her if she went rogue. Sure I’d started working out plans for if a breakup went south, but mostly that involved teleporting her out of the place as fast as I could and to the other side of the city, or the world, where she wouldn’t be able to find me again while I hid out and waited for things to cool down.

  I’d never conceived of a scenario where I’d do something stupid like bring a girl who was being possessed by a parasitic hive mind homing beacon into my lap which might as well be the same as giving Fialux my coordinated marked on a GPS.

  "So, Natalie dear?" Sabine asked. "I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this question, but are you planning on joining us or will we need to kill you now?"

  My mind reeled. Fialux never actually got to my lab without being teleported in, and there was only the one time I’d teleported her above the lab. Even then she’d been certain I’d done a little sleight of hand and I hadn’t disabused her of that notion.

  I thought of how the worms worked. How they'd been connected to a hive mind of some sort. How they were able to communicate with each other even if they didn't have access to a host.

  Clearly there was something like that going on here. As far as I could tell there were only the two girls who were possessed this time around, and the possession was direct rather than using a feline intermediary, but I figured the same operating principles had to apply to these two as applied to the creatures that had so recently taken over the city's cat population.