by Mia Archer
“What do you want me to do?” I asked. “If I fire at them I risk damaging the plane!”
I got close enough that one of the cats launched itself at me. Unfortunately either its aim was off or it didn’t have much practice launching itself through the air when it was on the underbelly of a jet.
The practical upshot is the cat failed to take into account that the jet was moving through the air at hundreds of miles per hour. I had antigrav tech on my suit that allowed me to travel even faster than the jet and shielding technology that allowed me to breathe and not get my ass kicked by the wind kicked up by flying at these speeds.
The cat had none of those things going for it, and so the moment it let go it went flying back. I fired an anti-Newtonian bubble at the thing and caught it before it could fall too far, but that wasn’t going to help it considering the cat would probably die of anoxia if the eventual fall didn’t kill it when that bubble wore off.
“CORVAC,” I said.
“Yes mistress.”
“I don’t want that cat landing on the countryside below and potentially spreading the alien worm to cats in the flyover. Could you send more of your drones up here to gather that one and any others I manage to catch?”
“Are you certain that is the only reason why you are having me gather those cats?” CORVAC asked. “I imagine a fall from this altitude would be enough to neutralize the worm in the cat.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. That damned computer always had a way of cutting to the source of whatever I was trying to do.
Also? Squeezing my eyes shut was a terrible idea. No sooner had I done it than something slammed into me with enough force that it would’ve hurt if I didn’t have my shields up.
Then again that was the story of my career. One of the reasons why I’d invented technology that told the laws of physics to take a hike was that those laws did their best to kill me so very often.
I opened my eyes. Reached down and plucked the cat off of me. I was surprised these fuckers were able to operate this long considering the lack of oxygen this high. Maybe something about the alien symbiont relationship gave them the power to hold their breath in addition to all the other wonderful new superfeline abilities they were exhibiting.
“Fine,” I said, dropping the cat and firing an anti-Newtonian bubble so it didn’t splat on the ground. “You’ve got me.”
“You are trying to save the cats, correct?”
“Yes I’m trying to save the cats,” I said. “Now would you get those drones up here and…”
Another cat launched itself at me. I wasn’t particularly worried at this point. They were punching above their weight, but that still didn’t hold a candle to the kind of power I was putting out. This was an unfair fight even if there were many of them and one of me.
Only before the thing could latch onto me or go tumbling through the air a drone appeared and grabbed the cat by the scruff of its neck. All the fight went out of the thing and it hung limp in the drone’s metallic arm.
“Good job CORVAC,” I said. “Use those cat instincts against these fuckers.”
“That is the idea mistress,” he said.
More drones from CORVAC’s secret science project swarmed around us and started plucking cats off of the plane. I glanced at my readouts and saw exactly why it was the things were able to breathe. We’d reached breathable atmosphere. I’d been so preoccupied with fighting off or saving the cats coming at me that I hadn’t noticed.
It also looked like Starlight City was ahead of us rather than behind us. Huh. I guess those assholes in the cockpit finally decided they were going to listen to me. They’d probably blame me for the depressurization too, and not their stupid asses for not listening to me in the first place.
“Looks like we’re heading back to the city,” I said. “Plenty of time to round up the rest of these feline fuckers and figure out which one of them I want to question first.”
“Mistress,” CORVAC said, his voice sharp.
“What?” I said, suddenly on alert but not seeing any obvious danger.
“There is something on the wing!”
11
Something On the Wing
Okay, so I knew this was totally a serious situation, that lives were at stake, but I couldn't help but have a little bit of fun considering CORVAC’s word choice.
"Could I get you to dial that back just a little bit?" I asked.
"Dial what back?" CORVAC asked.
"I need you to repeat what you just told me," I said.
"But mistress," he said. "This is a very serious situation and…"
"I'm also going to need you to go ahead and put it through a voice modifier," I said.
"A voice modifier?" CORVAC asked, sounding more and more incredulous.
Almost as though he was more worried about the gravity of this situation than I was. Though considering I was the one hanging up here at however many thousand feet with a bunch of cats trying to kill me and the only thing keeping me from a nasty fall was the antigravity tech I'd invented…
Well I’d like to think I was very conscious of the gravity of the situation.
“Humor me," I said. "I need you to go ahead and say that again, but this time when you say it I want you to sound like Shatner. Early Shatner. Think the first season of Star Trek. Not late-model Shatner."
"I do not understand how this is going to help the current situation, but if it is what it takes to get you to act then…"
There was a brief pause. So brief that anyone who wasn’t intimately familiar with CORVAC wouldn't have noticed the pause. But I'd been working with him long enough that I knew exactly when he was stopping to think about something. Then a moment later he did it.
"There is something on the wing!"
I devolved into a fit of giggles. I couldn't help myself. It was a spot on Shatner.
"Are you going to tell me what the meaning of this is?" CORVAC asked. "And if you tell me it has something to do with some ridiculous pop culture reference…"
"That's exactly what it has to do with," I said.
I could feel the eye roll. Which he was completely and utterly incapable of doing considering he didn't have eyes to roll.
"Sometimes you are impossible mistress," CORVAC said.
"Can you do it again, but this time make your voice sound like John Lithgow?"
"I am not doing another thing for you unless it has to do with defeating these alien adversaries and attempting to save this flight!"
"Party pooper," I said.
"I am the most advanced artificial intelligence known to human civilization. I will not be used as a parlor trick," he said.
"Fine," I said. "If you're going to get snippy about it…"
I turned back to look at a cat that, sure enough, was up on the wing. It seemed to be having a hell of a time actually getting out to its target, which I was pretty sure was one of the two engines on this side of the massive intercontinental airliner.
The alien controlled cat was fighting for every inch of wing it covered. The thing crawled painstakingly with its claws digging into the metal body fighting the wind whipping around it.
We might be on an emergency course heading back to Starlight City, but that didn't mean the pilots were holding back in the power department.
Luckily for me I didn't have to painstakingly carry myself across that damn wing. No, the technology I had at my disposal was more than capable of taking on the wind keeping this hunk of metal up in the air.
I adjusted the localized gravity in my boots so down had a little more force than usual so I could walk across the wing without worrying about getting tossed.
It looked a little more awkward than walking normally, it was sort of jerky having my antigravity around the rest of my body fighting the effects of the wind while trying to take normal steps with heightened gravity down by my feet, but I like to think the overall impression was a hell of a lot more impressive than a cat trying to claw its way across the wing to do who knows wha
t to the engine.
Though I had a few pretty good ideas exactly what its intentions were, and I couldn't believe any of them were good.
As soon as my foot hit the wing the cat realized it had company. Heck, even with the deafening wind it would’ve been hard to miss with the way the whole thing reverberated under my foot. It was a side effect of the increased gravity I was using which was starting to feel like more trouble than it was worth.
The cat turned and its eyes went wide. It even did something that might have been a hiss, but it was difficult to tell considering I couldn't hear a damned thing with all the wind whipping around us.
Though for me that wind was more of a muted buzz. My earpieces were filtering out most of the noise.
I glanced over my shoulder. Saw people pointing and holding up their phones to the viewports.
I rolled my eyes. I was never going to understand the impulse people had to take a picture of the life-threatening situations they found themselves in rather than trying to hide like a sensible person.
Then again it's not like there was going to be any hiding from this situation. Either they were in the air or they weren’t. Maybe they were hoping to get a few good pictures on the off chance they survived.
Heck. They might not even realize they were in any danger considering the only thing they saw was Night Terror trying to rescue a cat that was inexplicably crawling across the wing.
Most people would look at something like that and realize it was impossible for a cat to do what this cat was doing, but the flight was probably full of your average person. And if I'd learned anything in my long villainous career it was that your average person was a complete fucking idiot when it came to what should and shouldn't be.
Particularly when you're talking your average idiot in Starlight City.
I turned back to the cat. “Give it up already!"
The cat turned its head and hissed at me again.
"You have nowhere to go," I said.
I paused to relish the moment. It had been so long since I said anything outright villainous like that. It felt good.
Of course I was well aware that saying something villainous like that usually came right before a villain found themselves being confounded by a hero, but in this case I wasn't sure that either of us were particularly heroic. Which meant I didn’t have to worry about genre tropes biting me in the ass.
"My drones have captured your friends," I said. "If you give up now I promise I won't hurt you much."
"Mistress," CORVAC said, a warning tone to his voice. "We've been working on that. You are not supposed to tell them you are not going to hurt them much. You are supposed to tell them you are not going to hurt them at all and then reveal you were lying once they are in your clutches.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head.
"Right. These guys have annoyed me so much I keep forgetting that part."
That little slip up seemed to be enough to decide my feline adversary’s course of action. It reached down into that thick fur and pulled out a small metallic object. Something that looked like a cross between a ray gun and a sonic screwdriver.
"Shit," I said. "You don't think it's going to try to…"
Only instead of turning the maybe weapon on me the thing pointed down. Towards the nearest engine. It fired a shot and a bolt of something lashed out and slammed into the engine. I felt the jetliner shifting underneath me as the power output changed by about one engine’s worth of thrust.
Well then. That definitely wasn’t one of those mysterious business as usual thunks or bumps that felt like it was something that was about to make a jet fall out of the skies.
Not that this particular intercontinental jetliner was in any danger of falling out of the skies. Not when there were still three other engines. But then a crackling arc of electricity shot out to the other engine on this side. The thing was surrounded and a moment later it was as dead as disco.
I waited for any sort of telltale shift in the plane’s momentum that would tell me the engines on the other side were still working perfectly, but that telltale shift never came.
The plane was gliding so I still felt and heard the wind whipping around me, but the thrum of the engines wasn’t vibrating up through my feet any longer.
Damn. Whatever had taken out the engines on this side must’ve done the same to the other side. Either there was a cat over there, or whatever the thing had fired at the engines on this end had done a number on everything.
Assholes. Once it became clear I was winning they decided they were going to run the whole thing into the ground.
I put my hands on my hips. Shook my head as I looked down at the cat. The only problem with that plan was apparently these alien worm fuckers had never heard of Bernoulli’s principle.
"You really don't know anything about this planet, do you?" I asked. "What is it? The dominant species on your planet discovered antigrav? Is that what's going on?"
That was the one problem with antigrav. If your antigrav engine went out and you didn’t have a backup that meant you went from floating in the air without a care in the world to plummeting to your certain doom.
That wasn’t the case with planes. They could glide along happy as could be provided they were in a situation where they could trade some altitude for time.
The cat hissed again. It even reached out and acted like it was going to try and claw me, but it seemed to think better when it removed one paw from the wing and almost went flying off.
I rolled my eyes and continued walking towards the cat. Sure it probably would've been faster to float over to it, and maybe I could have avoided letting it get that shot off if I hadn’t insisted on walking and being all theatrical, but whatever.
This plane was still close enough to Starlight City that its glide path would take it well within range of a…
The cat surprised me again by raising its paw. It did a little wave that was surprisingly anthropomorphic for a furry little ball of death. And then it let go. Went flying back as the wind carried its tiny body away.
I followed it with my eyes, wondering what the hell it was doing, and that's when the explosion hit.
12
Heroic Rescue
My first indication that something had gone terribly wrong was when I found myself flat against a window looking at some very confused tourist types snapping pictures with their phones.
Idiots. The plane just literally exploded and they were taking pictures?
I peeled myself off of the window and looked at the wing. Or rather I looked at where the wing had been. At this point it was more of a gaping hole that was quickly becoming a huge gaping hole as the wind moved through the thing and ripped more pieces away.
“Fuck,” I said.
A drone flew over the hole. Clearly CORVAC was getting a look at things, and from the noises he was making over the comm line it didn’t sound like things looked good.
“No chance of saving it?” I asked.
“Signs point to no, mistress,” he said.
I looked back at the window. Some of the people in there were starting to realize that maybe they were more fucked than they’d imagined.
Maybe my face pressed up against the window had blocked the view of certain death.
"Now that's quite the conundrum," I said.
"What is that mistress?" CORVAC asked.
"If I let this plane go down with all hands then I don't have to worry about any of those embarrassing photos of me with my face up against the window getting out onto the Internet," I said. "That's almost worth letting this thing go down."
That and those idiot pilots. If they'd listened to me then none of this would have happened. I could’ve rounded up the cats safely on the ground once they landed.
But no. They decided they weren’t going to listen to me. They decided they were going to laugh at me. And now look at what was happening!
I know. I was totally doing the “they laughed at me” internal villain monologue,
but if there was ever a time when that monologue was justified then it was now!
"You know you are not going to do that mistress," CORVAC said.
"Really?" I asked. "Why not?"
"For the simple fact that there is always the risk someone on that flight will be able to upload the picture through the plane’s Wi-Fi. If the world finds out you were on this plane, particularly if you were outside the plane on a wing that blew up under mysterious circumstances, and it goes down then naturally the blame is going to fall on you."
I frowned. "I forgot about in-flight Wi-Fi."
"And I am certain the people on that plane would not mind paying the exorbitant fees that are involved in getting that Wi-Fi if they think their end is nigh and they will never have to pay the bill."
"Damn you CORVAC,” I muttered.
"I aim to please, mistress," he said.
"Well I'm not very pleased now."
"On the bright side, I have managed to acquire the cat that used the device. Unfortunately it appears that it dropped whatever it used to blow up the engines so we will be unable to determine where they are procuring their technology.”
"Well damn," I said.
I floated over for a closer inspection of the damage. I wasn't all that experienced with flying fixed wing aircraft.
Still. It didn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out there was something seriously wrong with this plane’s wing. Even as I watched the hole grew wide enough that a big chunk of the wing tore away and went floating off into the distance.
"Damn," I said. "This plane doesn't have long."
As though to confirm and mock me at the same time the rest of the wing chose that moment to rip off completely. I hit the chunks with an anti-Newtonian field since we were over the city now. I didn’t want that hitting anyone down there.
"I concur mistress," CORVAC said with his usual gift for understatement.
“Okay then,” I said. “We just went from a bad situation to shit getting real pretty fucking fast. How are we going to do this?”