by Smith, Maren
“He said that we see you,” announced a metallic, disembodied voice.
That was when the robots materialized.
The battle that followed didn’t, Susan thought even as it occurred, really qualify for the word battle. It mostly involved four flying robots per CPE super subduing Captain Wonder, Nightprince, Zap, Tigerwoman, and even Megadon. The shiny things each had two appendages that resembled arms, but otherwise they bore no resemblance to humanoid form: at the end of each arm-thing they had manacles, and they put them around the limbs of the supers or around each other’s arm-things to hog-tie every CPE hero within three seconds, as Ultragirl watched, on guard and waiting for her own set of robots to attack.
The robots clearly knew how to counter every power the CPE supers could call upon, and perhaps they would have been able to take Susan captive too, if her Zaxian instincts had not made her go utterly still—not invisible, though she realized she could do that if she chose, but rather still at a molecular level, and undetectable to anyone whose mind she didn’t specifically allow to see her.
She looked at her daddy, at Nightprince, hog-tied on the floor of the strange medical chamber that had turned into a trap more effective than any Captain Wonder could have anticipated. She let him see her, and when his eyes went wide as if at the realization that the robots had ignored her, he mouthed the words, “Stay there.”
Susan nodded. She looked at Captain Wonder, whose armor should have been able to burst any material short of ultra-rare adamantium, helpless in the grip of the LOT robots. The leader of CPE narrowed her eyes at Ultragirl, and Susan thought she perceived in the look precisely the same order Bob had given her. She held her place, a non-entity from the point of view of detectable matter, and waited, all the while reaching out with her molecular senses to try to determine what the robots had done to counter the supers’ abilities.
The swinging metal double doors of the clinic of evil—Susan had just automatically started to think of it that way, she supposed—banged open, and the leader of the League of Terror, Doctor Dread, entered. Even Susan, who had never really steeped herself in the adventures of the CPE, could recognize him from the hideous metal mask he wore, which legend said hid a face even more hideous beneath. He wore a scarlet doctor’s lab coat that streamed out menacingly behind him, and beneath it a jet-black coat and tie, including the shirt and the pants, like a pediatrician from hell.
Behind him, the supervillains swinging the doors open so that they crashed against the stone walls were Charlatan and General Greystain, if Susan remembered correctly, completing the From Hell ensemble: Charlatan as biker from hell and Greystain as military officer from Hell, complete with blood red epaulettes. Ultragirl had no need to make herself undetectable to any senses the supervillains might have that worked according to the laws of physics—the effort lay in the other direction, of sending an impression of herself to those she wanted to see her. From the League of Terror’s perspective, as from that of their robot minions, Susan just wasn’t there.
Doctor Dread spoke, and his metallic voice—the one that had come from the speakers a moment ago but no less like a wire cable hit with a hammer now, in person—evoked the psychological process that would have led to Susan’s skin crawling, if she had currently had real skin.
“Ah, Jane. It’s so good to see you. And to see you’ve brought so many nice friends.”
“Call me Captain Wonder, you piece of dirt,” she replied from the floor, keeping things G-rated as always.
“I’ll call you Captain Wonder when I’m deep in your cunt, Wonderslut,” said Charlatan, never one, Susan knew from the more adult accounts of the war between CPE and LOT, to let a family-friendly atmosphere remain.
“Boring,” pronounced Doctor Dread. “Ready them.”
This command had been directed at the robots, clearly, for they responded by lifting the four less dense CPE supers each onto one of the undestroyed empty hospital beds, and securing their limbs with webbing straps like those binding Virtueman. The robots had more trouble with Megadon, but despite his best efforts—rock movements that might have brought down a skyscraper—they got him on his back, with a different robot restraining each of his stony arms and legs.
“With whom should we begin?” said the Researcher of Ruin (as Susan remembered the doctor occasionally liked to be called). She remembered, too, that his harsh voice came not from a human larynx, since he had cut his own throat in the course of one of his nefarious experiments, but from a metal replacement.
“I’d like to start with Nightprince,” proposed General Greystain. “Virtueman here seems to think he won’t tell us the access codes for CPE headquarters. I’d like to watch you prove him wrong.”
“I didn’t…” Virtueman pleaded weakly. “I didn’t say that.”
“Relax, Vic,” Susan’s daddy said. Oh, gods, why did she have to keep thinking of him that way? Something about seeing him restrained on the hospital bed, at the mercy of whatever horrible thing Doctor Dread meant to do, made her worry not about the fate of Earth, as she should have done, but about her wonderful kind daddy, with whom she had only had a few hours. “I know you didn’t, because you know I don’t even know the access codes, and neither does anyone else they’ve got tied up here.”
The general laughed. “That’s quite lame even for you, Nightprince. Doctor, shall I call my medics?”
“By all means,” said the doctor, the metallic fabric around his mouth moving like a gaping wound. “Tell them to bring the tools of truth.”
Chapter 14
General Greystain’s “medical” corps had as sinister a reputation as his “special ops division.” Bob had no idea what precisely they had done to Virtueman, or what they intended to do to him and the other CPE supers, but he felt reasonably certain it didn’t involve following the Hippocratic Oath. As the five men in white lab coats entered and conferred with their commander for a moment, Bob watched Susan move quickly around the lab, not knowing what she had in mind but hopeful that his supergirl had a plan. He wished he could communicate with her somehow, but at least she apparently had the ability to go completely unnoticed, and that was something at least.
It hardly seemed necessary, since Ultragirl appeared to stand in no danger of being detected, but old habits die hard and Bob found himself trying to distract Doctor Dread with the usual wisecracks.
“So, Doctor, you really think you caught CPE’s main strike-force?”
The hideous supervillain spared Nightprince a glance. The supple metal in his horrible mask sneered.
“Oh, I know I have. Subtlety is not Captain Wonder’s strong suit. As soon as I knew I had the counter for every CPE ability, the rest was absurdly simple. I know Clearstream is around here somewhere—perhaps he’s the one who kept this lab from filling with seawater, somehow—but a so-called hero who can do nothing but become invisible isn’t much of a threat to my plans, and it won’t be long until we crush Swiftarrow and Steelhammer at your headquarters.”
As he spoke, Doctor Dread had moved to stand over Bob, and General Greystain’s medics had joined him, surrounding the bed. Bob moved his eyes around, pretending to take all his prospective tormentors in but really looking for Susan. He saw her, looking at him from behind and between two of the white-coated henchmen. She seemed to try to communicate something to him, but all he got, from her expression, was that she wanted to tell him something. Her brow furrowed in frustration, and then, suddenly, she had darted away towards the doors, gliding through them as if they didn’t exist and vanishing from the room.
The next ten minutes or so had the charm at least of feeling very old school. Bob’s toenails had some very unpleasant things done to them, and Jane gave an impassioned plea for the medics to try that on her, too, as much as they wanted. It had the kind of sexist, even rather sexy vibe, you got from old-timers’ accounts of what super-heroing had been like in the 1950’s.
Zap tried to electrocute the henchman bending over him, but his current short-circuited
and he was the one who said, “Ow!” after the bzzt sound and the odor of ozone. Megadon struggled in silence except for the creaking of the robots who held him down, though even that didn’t rise very high in volume, since it seemed Doctor Dread’s antidote to the lava-man’s power had cut his strength down to not much more than standard human. Sally’s only contribution was a single “Shit” when she realized she couldn’t even get her tiger claws out of her fingers.
The real low point was when Doctor Dread said, “Ah, Matt Hawkins, nice of you to join us,” as two robots snared Clearstream out of the air and turned him visible in an instant. Matt had presumably snuck in from the ocean through Bob’s electrojet, maybe hoping to find some sort of super instant-win button, Bob supposed bitterly. He was in too much pain at that moment, however, to come up with a clever quip intended to suggest that maybe Clearstream should have gone back to CPE headquarters, or even stayed outside to guide Steelhammer in.
At any rate, whatever universal anti-super hack Doctor Dread had found worked equally well on Clearstream: Matt ended up restrained on the remaining empty hospital bed, fully visible. The medic minions went back to torturing Bob while Charlatan amused himself singing Clearstream’s eyebrows off.
CPE heroes who had sensitive information like the access codes through the defenses at CPE had a mental trigger that would more or less lock their brains. The chances of recovering full mental capacity after activating it were slim: of the three supers who had had to administer the suicide lock, as it was called, to themselves, only one of them, Xomorph, had been much like his old self.
Xomorph’s brain-chemistry also operated via seven dimensions, and that had probably had a role as well; the other two, their synapses firing like Bob’s in four dimensions (space plus time), had ended up comatose more or less, as Bob undoubtedly would. Nonetheless, Nightprince had never bothered wasting time with regret, and Bob was about to administer the trigger to himself, knowing he couldn’t take the whole fingernail thing for much longer, when Susan popped back into his field of vision, her finger to her lips and a smile on her face.
The pain had taken him to a rather different kind of mental place than Bob had been in when his supergirl had darted out of what he now thought of as the pain-clinic. At first, he thought he had probably hallucinated Ultragirl’s pretty face, reassuring him that even though he had to fry his brain, she would still love him.
He started to give his brain the code that would almost certainly destroy his mind, feeling oddly grateful for the vision.
Then the robots attacked the supervillains and the henchmen. Again, however, that could well have been because his mind had started to disintegrate. As final battles between the forces of good and the forces of evil went, it wasn’t especially cinematic, Bob supposed, and he felt disappointed in himself, if he were the one hallucinating it, but it still brought reasonable satisfaction, since the right people seemed to be coming out on top.
Doctor Dread shouted things like “Robots, to me!” and “Deactivate code X795!” from time to time, but whatever Susan had done to the metal arm-things’ programming seemed more than a match for their creator’s commands. Captain Wonder elected to restrain the bad guys in her electrojet rather than on their own hospital beds, though at that point Bob had the urge to protest.
He thought he managed his first good line in a while—something about their own medicine, he remembered hazily after, though maybe he had only imagined speaking at that moment. His fingernails seemed to hurt worse as time went on, rather than starting to feel better, which seemed strange if it were a hallucination caused by the mind-lock. When that part finally ended, though, his fading consciousness thought he knew why it would imagine that pain ceasing: his supergirl had blocked his pain-receptors.
Such a good girl for Daddy.
As he faded out for good, he thought he saw Susan’s face above him, and that was the best part of all.
* * *
“Daddy?” Susan was saying. “Daddy, are you awake?”
Bob opened his eyes, wondering why he wasn’t in the back of the electrojet with his head on his supergirl’s lap, looking up into her eyes, wet with tears. Susan was still there, but she sat on the edge of his bed, in his quarters at CPE, and she wasn’t in her supersuit but in jeans and a cute pink top. He—well he was naked, somewhat to his surprise, and, even more to his surprise, pretty literally horny under the light sheet.
“Princess?” he tried to say, but it came out as a croak. His hands lay underneath the sheet, he found as he looked down, and he kind of didn’t want to pull them out: they hadn’t looked great the last time he had laid eyes on them.
“Oh, Daddy,” Susan said, tears once again filling her eyes and making Bob remember what she had looked like on the jet a few minutes—no, probably not a few minutes, actually—before. “You almost destroyed your brain. We weren’t sure you hadn’t.”
Then he forgot about the possibility that his hands still were the destroyed, pulpy messes General Greystain’s medics had made of them, and he reached up to touch Susan’s face and draw it down to his. To his amazement and joy, his fingers were all there, and even the fingernails looked fine—manicured, even.
Ultragirl saw where his eyes had gone, and a bright-eyed smile filled her face just before she kissed Bob softly. He thought he could see something in her eyes—a little girl’s pride. After a few more kisses, he held her face a little away from his, and asked, “Did you fix my hands, princess?”
The smile broadened, and Susan nodded quickly. “Mm-hmm. How do they feel, Daddy?”
Bob smiled back, and suddenly felt mischievous and, well, still very horny.
“Well, maybe I should touch something worth feeling, and see.”
Susan frowned for a moment as if trying to understand what he meant. Then she bit her lip, and a blush overspread her face.
It was Bob’s turn to frown. “Are you out of power, sweetheart?”
That made her giggle. “No! I just… well, do you think my daddy should always see my blushes, at least when we’re alone? And… well, if my daddy catches me hiding them, then…”
Bob laughed. “Then I’ll have to teach you a lesson, of course.”
She bit her lip, then whispered, “Over your knee, Daddy?”
He nodded gravely. “Of course. Where else should an alien princess learn her lesson?”
Susan shook her head just as seriously, her wavy blonde locks shaking adorably too. “Nowhere. Unless…”
Bob pretended he didn’t quite understand. “Unless what, Susan?”
The blush grew deeper—and more extensive than Bob thought it might have, if she were just thinking of, say, being bent over his desk for discipline and sex.
“Daddy… do you remember Megadon?”
That made Bob laugh. “I’ve known him for longer than you have, princess.”
“Well,” she said, her smile changing to a theatrical sort of pout, “that’s not completely true. I have DNA memory that says that I’ve known him for eons. The stone-men evolved together with the Zaxians, and Megadon has the same kind of memories I do, so I kind of know him and he kind of knows me…” Her voice trailed off, and her eyes shifted away, the red in her face getting even deeper.
Bob felt thoroughly mystified now.
“Knows?” he asked gently, suspecting that the verb might mean something different in this context from what it usually meant.
“Well…” Susan bit her lip. She turned her eyes back to his at last, and then she looked away again, but this time down his body, to where his cock refused to stop tenting the sheet that provided a good deal less modesty than it might have, had his masculine need not shown itself so very prominently. Bob watched her eyes go wide, and then he saw a sly look come into them. “Daddy!” she said, a little theatrically. “Is that your penis?”
He snorted, but managed to keep from bursting into laughter at his supergirl’s performance as a naughty midwestern young lady.
“Yes, princess. That’s D
addy’s penis. But we were talking—”
She interrupted him, though, obviously hoping his physical condition would let her distract him—a hope Bob thought not at all likely to be in vain. “Do I have to suck it?”
He smiled. “You may suck Daddy’s cock, sweetheart, if you get out of all your clothes, and you tell me while you make me feel good what’s going on with Megadon.”
She gave him a final hesitant look, but then she seemed to make up her mind. She smiled into his face, and then she looked down modestly as she started to skin her jeans and her panties down off her slim hips. The smile remained however, even as she obeyed her daddy’s command.
Hopefully, letting her take her time with whatever naughty revelation she had to give and letting her feel the special sense of control a little girl knows when her daddy lets her learn at her own pace how to please him with her lips and tongue, would help her tell him whatever she so clearly needed to tell her daddy. If he could judge from the giggly squirming in which Susan engaged when he put his hand on her sweet little bottom, it had already started to work when, her pink top removed as well, she pulled the sheet off his massive erection and bent down to give her daddy’s hardness a respectful kiss.
Chapter 15
Susan felt so grateful that her daddy had told her she had to suck his penis. She didn’t want to tell him the truth about Megadon, even though really she did. Well, she wanted him to know, but she didn’t want to tell him. Or… well, she just felt grateful that she could concentrate on making her poor wounded daddy feel so good, for a little while, and think about Megadon later.
But that feeling only lasted a few moments, because when she opened her mouth and took Nightprince’s massive penis, so very hard and so very long and so very wide, into her mouth, and she felt his huge but gentle fingers in her hair, it made her think of the stone-man. It made her think of how kind Megadon was despite his size, just as her daddy was so kind even when he held her head and thrust his hips so that his big cock rose up and went deep into her mouth. Daddy did that because his supergirl princess made him feel so good he couldn’t help it, after all: Susan knew that.